“The exact time is now ten-nineteen.”
The judge, awakening suddenly, turned off the machine and stumbled off to bed. Another day had gone.
There were too many days, Ethel thought. There she was, in that house, in that town. Now her father had become afraid of her. She knew how he felt.
He had brought her back there. He had schemed and saved. Her going away to school, staying away for several years, had cost money. Then, at last this position had come up. She had become the librarian of the town. Did she owe something to him, to the town because of him?
To be respectable... as he was.
“To hell with that.”
She had come back there to where she had lived as a girl, where she had gone to high school. When she had first come home her father had wanted to talk to her. He had even looked forward to her coming, thinking they might be companions.
“He and I pals.” Spirit of Rotary. “I make a pal of my son. I make a pal of my daughter. She and I are pals.” He was angry and resentful. “She is going to make a fool of me,” he thought.
It was because of men. Men were after Ethel. He knew it.
She had begun running about with a mere boy, but that wasn’t all. Since she had come home, another man had been attracted to her.
He was an older man, a man much older than herself and his name was Tom Riddle.
He was a lawyer of the town, a criminal lawyer and he had made money. He was an alert scheming man, a Republican and a politician. He handled Federal patronage in that part of the State. He was no gentleman.
And he had been attracted to Ethel. “Yes,” her father would be thinking, “she would have to go and attract one of that sort.” When she had been in town some weeks he came to see her at the library, coming boldly up to her. There had been none of the shyness of the boy, Red Oliver, in him. “I want to talk with you,” he had said to Ethel, looking directly into her eyes. He was a rather tall man of forty-five with thin hair, turning gray, and with a heavy pock-marked face and small bright eyes. He had been married, but his wife was dead, had been dead for ten years. Although he was said to be tricky and was not respected by some of the outstanding men of town — men like Ethel’s father, who being Georgians were Democrats and gentlemen — he was the most successful lawyer in town.
He was the most successful criminal lawyer in that part of the State. He was alive, sly and clever in the court room and the other lawyers and the judge were both afraid and envious of him. It was said he made money out of the distribution of Federal patronage. “He consorts with niggers and cheap whites,” his enemies said, but Tom Riddle didn’t seem to care. He laughed. Since the coming of prohibition his practice had grown enormously. He owned the best hotel in Langdon and had other property scattered about town.
And this man had become enamored of Ethel. “You suit me,” he said to her. He invited her to go riding with him in his car and she went. It was another way of annoying her father, being seen in public with that man. She did not want that. That wasn’t her purpose. It seemed inevitable.
And there was Blanche. Was she merely malicious? Had she taken some queer perverted kind of fancy to Ethel?
Although she herself seemed to care nothing for clothes, she had a constant interest in Ethel’s clothes. “You are going to be with a man. Do put on the red gown.” A queer look in her eyes... hatred... love. If Judge Long did not know of Ethel’s going about with Tom Riddle, being seen with him in public, Blanche would let him know.
Tom Riddle did not attempt to make love to her. He was patient, shrewd, determined. “Why, I do not expect you to fall in love with me,” he said one evening, when they were riding over the red Georgia roads past a pine forest. The red road ran up and down over low hills. Tom Riddle stopped the car at the edge of the forest. “You wouldn’t expect me to grow sentimental, but I do sometimes,” he said laughing. Beyond the forest the sun was going down. He referred to the loveliness of the evening. It was late on a summer evening, one of the evenings when the library was not open. All of the land in that part of Georgia was red and the sun was setting in a red haze. It was hot. Tom had stopped the car and had got out, to stretch. He was clad in a white suit, somewhat soiled. He lighted a cigar and spat on the ground. “Pretty grand, isn’t it?” he said to Ethel, who was sitting in the car, a sport roadster painted a bright yellow and with the top down. He walked up and down and then came and stood by the car.
He had, from the beginning, a way of saying... without saying, without words.... his eyes said it... his manner said it... “We understand each other... we should understand each other.”
It was tantalizing. It interested Ethel. He began talking of the Southern country, of his love for it. “I guess you know about me,” he said. The man was said to have come from a good Georgia family in a neighboring county. Formerly his people had owned slaves. They had been people of some importance. They had been ruined by the Civil War. By the time Tom had come into the world they had nothing.
He had managed in some way to escape the slavery of the soil in that country and had got himself educated sufficiently to become a lawyer. Now he was a prosperous man. He had been married and his wife had died.
There had been two children, both sons, and they were dead. One had died in infancy and the other, like Ethel’s brother, had been killed in the World War.
“I married when I was a mere boy,” he said to Ethel. It was queer being with him. In spite of a rather rough exterior, something hard-boiled in his attitude toward life, he had a quick sharp trick of intimacy.
He had got it dealing with many people. There was something in his manner that said... “I’m not good, not even honest.. I’m a man like you.
“I do things. I pretty much do as I please.
“Don’t come to me expecting to find any Southern gentleman... like Judge Long... like Clay Barton... like Tom Shaw.” It was a manner he continually used in the court room with juries. Jurymen were, almost always, just common enough, ordinary men. “Well, here we are,” he seemed to be saying to the men he addressed. “There are certain legal formalities to be gone through here but we are men together. Life is so and so. So and so has happened. There is a sensible view to be taken of this matter. We common dubs have to stand together.” A grin. “Here is how I believe men like you and me feel. We are sensible men. We have to take life as it comes.”
He had been married and his wife had died. He told Ethel frankly about it. “I want you for my wife,” he said. “You are, of course, not in love with me. I do not expect it. How could you be?” He told her of his marriage. “To be frank with you, it was a shot-gun marriage.” He laughed. “I was a boy and had gone to Atlanta where I was trying to work my way through school. I met her.
“I guess I was in love with her. I wanted her. The chance came and I took her.”
He knew of the feeling Ethel had got for the young man, Red Oliver. He was the sort of man who would know everything that went on in a town.
He himself had defied the town. He had always done that. “While my wife was alive, I behaved,” he said to Ethel. He had become, in that queer way, without her asking it, without her doing anything to lead him on, intimate with her about his own life without asking anything of the sort of her. When they were together he talked while she sat beside him and listened. He had big shoulders that were slightly stooped. Although she was a tall woman, he was nearly a head taller.
“So I married the woman. I thought I ought to marry her. She was in the family way.” He said it as one might say... “She was a blonde, or a brunette.” He took it for granted she wouldn’t be shocked. She liked that. “I wanted to marry her. I wanted a woman, needed one. Maybe I was in love. I don’t know.” The man Tom Riddle talked to Ethel in that way. He stood beside the car and spat on the ground. He lit a cigar.
He did not try to touch her. He made her comfortable. He made her want to talk.
“I could tell him everything, all the mean low-down things in myself,” she thought
sometimes.
“She was the daughter of a man in whose house I had a room. He was a workingman. He fired the boilers in some sort of a manufacturing plant. She helped her mother take care of the rooms in a rooming house.
“I began to want her. There was something in her eyes. She thought she wanted me.” Again laughter. Was he laughing at himself or the woman he had married?
“My chance came. One night we were alone together in the house and I got her into my room.”
Tom Riddle laughed. He told Ethel as though they had been intimate for a long time. It was odd, amusing... it was nice. After all, in Langdon, Georgia, she was the daughter of her father. It would have been impossible for Ethel’s father ever in his whole life to have talked so frankly to a woman. He would never, even after long years of living with her, have dared talk so frankly to Ethel’s mother or to Blanche, his new wife. It would have been a bit more in the picture of Southern womanhood — after all she was a Southern woman, of a so-called good family — to have been a bit shocked. Ethel wasn’t. Tom Riddle had known she wouldn’t be. How much did he know about her?
It wasn’t as though she wanted him... as a woman is presumed to want a man... the dream... the poetry of existence. To be stirred, aroused, awakened, Ethel could be stirred by the younger man, Red Oliver. She was stirred by him.
Although Tom Riddle took her out in his car a dozen times that summer he never offered to make love to her. He did not attempt to hold her hand or to kiss her. “Why, you are a grown woman. Besides being a woman, you are a person,” he seemed to be saying. It was sure she had no physical impulse toward him. He knew that. “Not yet.” He could be patient. “It’s all right. Perhaps that will come. We’ll see.” He had told her about life with his first wife. “She had no flair,” he said. “She had no flair, no style, there was nothing she could do to my house. She was a good woman, all right. She could not do anything to me or to the children I had by her.
“I began to play about. I have been doing that for a long time. I guess you know I am tired of it.”
There were all sorts of stories running about town. Since Tom Riddle had come to Langdon, as a young man, and had set up a law practice there, he had always been in with the rougher elements of the town. He was in thick with them. They were his friends. His cronies from the beginning of his life in Langdon had been gamblers, young Southern men who had taken to drink, politicians.
Formerly, when there were saloons in the town, he was always in the saloons. Respectable men of the town said he conducted his law office from a saloon. At one time he had taken up with a woman, the wife of a railroad conductor. Her husband was much away from town and she rode openly about in Tom Riddle’s car. The affair had been conducted with startling boldness. When the husband was in town, Tom Riddle went nevertheless to his house. He drove there and went in. The woman had a child and the town said it was Tom Riddle’s child. “It is,” they said. —
“Tom Riddle has bought her husband off.”
It had gone on for a long time, and then, suddenly, the railroad conductor was transferred to another division and he and his wife, with the child, had left town.
So Tom Riddle was that kind of man. Ethel lay in her bed on a hot summer night thinking of him and of things he had said to her. He had made an offer of marriage. “Any time you think well of it, Ο. K.”
A grin. He was tall and stoop-shouldered. He had a queer little trick of occasionally shaking his shoulders — as though to shake off a burden.
“You will not be in love,” he said. “I am not the sort that could inspire romantic love in a woman.
“What, with my pock-marked face, my bald head? “You may get tired of living in that house.” He meant her father’s house. “You may get tired of that woman your father has married.”
Tom Riddle had been frank enough about his reasons for wanting her. “You have style. You would decorate a man’s life. It would be worth while making money for you. I like making money. I like the game of it. If you can make up your mind to come live with me, then afterwards, after we begin living together... Something tells me we are made for each other.” He had wanted to say something about Ethel’s passion for the younger man, Red Oliver, but had been too shrewd to do so. “He is too young for you, my dear. He is too immature. You have a flair for him now but it will pass. —
“If you feel like experimenting with him, go on and do it.” Could he have thought that?
He hadn’t said so. One day he came for Ethel when there was a ball game to be played between the Langdon mill team, the one on which Red Oliver was playing, and a team from a neighboring town. The Langdon team won and it was largely Red’s playing that had made them win. The game was held on one of the long summer evenings and Tom Riddle took Ethel in his car. It wasn’t just his interest in the baseball game. She was sure of that. She had begun to like being with him, although she felt in his presence none of the quick physical longings she felt in Red Oliver’s presence.
On the very evening before the ball game, Red Oliver had been in the library, sitting at a table in there, and he had run his hand through his thick hair. There had been a quick stab of desire in Ethel. She wanted to run her hand through his hair, hold him close. She took a step toward him. It would be so easy to sweep him away. He was young and sex hungry for her. She knew that.
Tom Riddle did not take Ethel to the grounds where the game was played but stopped his car on a nearby hill. She sat beside him wondering. He seemed for the moment quite lost in admiration of the younger man’s playing. Was it a bluff?
It had been a day when Red Oliver had played sensationally. Balls came singing down toward him over the hard clay infield and he fielded them brilliantly. He led his team at bat, once, at a critical moment, knocking out a three base hit, and Tom Riddle squirmed in his car seat. “He’s the best player we ever had in this town,” Tom said. Could he really be like that, wanting Ethel for himself, knowing of her feeling for Red and, at the time, could he be carried away by Red’s playing?
*
HAD he wanted Ethel to experiment? She had done it. On the hot summer night, as she lay, quite naked, on her bed in her room, unable to sleep, nervous and excited, the windows of the room open, hearing from outside the noises of the Southern night, hearing the steady heavy snoring of her father in a neighboring room, herself upset, angry with herself, on that very evening she had carried it through.
She was angry, upset, annoyed. “Why did I do it?” It had been easy enough. There had been the young man, really in her eyes a boy, walking along the street with her. It had been one of the evenings when the library was not officially open but she had gone back there. She was thinking of Tom Riddle and of the proposal he had made to her. Could a woman do that, go to live with a man, lie with him, be his wife... as a sort of bargain? He had seemed to think it would be all right.
“I won’t crowd you.
“After all, beauty in a man cuts little figure to a woman.
“It is a question of living, of everyday living.
“There is a kind of friendship achieved that is something more than a friendship. It is a kind of partnership.
“It grows into something else.”
Tom Riddle talking. It was as though he addressed a jury. He had big lips and his face was heavily pock-marked. Sometimes he leaned toward her, talking earnestly. “A man gets tired going it alone,” he said. He had an idea. He had been married. Ethel did not remember his first wife. The Riddle house was in another part of town. It was a fine house on a poor street. There was a large lawn. Tom Riddle had built his house among the houses of the sort of people with whom he associated. They were certainly not the first families of Langdon.
When the wife was alive she seldom left her own house. She must have been one of the meek mouse-like kind who devote themselves to housekeeping. When Tom Riddle had prospered he had built his house on that street. Once it had been a very respectable neighborhood. There had been an old house that had belonged to one of the
so-called aristocratic families of the old days, before the Civil War. There had been a big yard going down to a small creek that tumbled down into the river below the town. The whole yard had become overgrown with dense bushes he had cleared away. He always had men working about his place. Often he took the cases of poor whites or Negroes who had got into trouble with the law, and if they couldn’t pay him he let them work out the fee on the place.
Tom had said of his first wife, “Well, I married her. I just about had to.” After all, and in spite of the life he had led Tom was still, in his own way, an aristocrat at bottom. He had contempt. He didn’t care for the respectable standards of others and did not go to church. He laughed at churchgoing people like Ethel’s father and when the K.K.K. was strong in Langdon he had laughed at that.
He had got a sense of something that was more Northern than Southern. That was the reason he was a Republican. “There is always some class going to rule,” he said once to Ethel, speaking of his Republicanism. “Of course,” he said, laughing cynically, “I make money by it.”
“Just the same, in our day in America it is money that rules. The big money crowd in the North, in New York, have picked the Republican Party. They are betting on that. I am stringing with them.
“Life is a game,” he said.
“There are the poor whites. To a man they are Democrats.” He laughed. “Do you remember what happened a few years ago?” Ethel remembered. He spoke of a particularly brutal lynching. It had happened in a small town, not far from Langdon. A lot of people from Langdon had gone there to take part in it. It had happened at night and people had gone in cars. The Negro, accused of the rape of a poor white girl, the daughter of a small farmer, was being brought to the county seat by the sheriff. The sheriff had two deputies with him and a string of cars had gone down along the road to meet him. The cars were filled with young men from Langdon, merchants and respectables. There were Fords, filled with poor white employees of the Langdon cotton mills. It had been a kind of circus, a public entertainment, Tom said. “Nice, eh!”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 159