by Edna Ferber
The man standing on the steps in the sun’s hot glare was thinking, Clint, you better be drifting. Say adios. You’re fixing to get into a sight of trouble. You’re locoed. Suddenly, from within the house, Clio began to sing. A natural mimic, she was imitadng the song of the blackberry woman who passed the house on her rounds, having walked miles from the woods and bayous, her skirts tucked high above her dusty legs, her soft, melancholy voice calling her wares. Now Clio imitated her perfectly and with complete unconsciousness of what she was doing. Artless and lovely the song rose above the fountain’s faint tinkle, above Cupide’s whistle, above the clatter of pans in the kitchen.
Black-ber-ries—fresh an’fine,
Got black-berries, lady, fresh f’om de vine,
Got black-berries, lady, three glass fo’ dime,
I got black-berries, I got black-berries, black-RER-ees!
The man looked back over his shoulder into the cool dim room he had just left. He looked about him. In the sight and the sounds of the mossy courtyard there was something blood-stirring, exhilaradng. The pulse in his powerful throat throbbed. He knew he could not go. He went down the steps, quick and light. The bedroom, the stable, the kitchen. The kitchen. Discord there, he knew. Kakaracou was a powerful ally or an implacable foe. She knew no middle course.
He had spoken to Clio about her. “That mammy of yours, she hates me like poison. Every time I look at her she turns away from me like a horse. I’m just naturally peaceable, but I’m fixing to have a little talk with Kaka.”
“It isn’t you. It’s men. You see, she lived with Mama and Aunt Belle all those years. Men, to her, mean trouble and tears.”
Now he strolled across the courtyard to the kitchen doorway and stood there a moment while the delicious aroma of Kakaracou’s cookery was wafted to him from stove and table. Kaka did not glance up as his broad shoulders shadowed the room. At the French Market she had got hold of some tiny trout, cool and glittering in their bed of green leaves, and these she was broiling delicately. Her workday tignon of plain brilliant blue was wound around her head; she was concentrating on her work or perhaps away from him. Her wattled neck stretched forward, her lower lip protruded, she looked like a particularly haughty cobra.
“You ain’t got one kind thought for me, have you now, Mammy?”
Her swift upward glance at him, jagged and ominous, was like a lightning stroke. He went on, evenly,
“Funny thing. When I meet up with somebody I don’t like, or they don’t like me, why, either I get out or they do, depending on which is doing the hating. I’m staying.”
She eyed him balefully; she began to speak in French, knowing that he comprehended no word of it; taking great satisfaction in spitting out the venomous phrases. “Lout! Common cowboy! Scum of the gutters! Spawn of the devil! I hate you! Je t’Atteste?’’
“My, my!” drawled Maroon. “I don’t parley Frongsay myself, but I sure do admire to hear other people go it. I kind of caught the drift of what you were saying, though, on account of that last word; it’s the same in American as it is in French. So I caught on you weren’t exactly paying me compliments, Mammy.”
Suddenly, swiftly, like a panther, he stood beside her; he caught her meager body up in his two hands. Her own hands he pinned behind her neck, one of his powerful hands held them there, the other grasped her skinny legs at the ankles and thus he held her as if she had been a sack of feathers. A little series of tooting screams issued from her throat like the whisde of a calliope coming down the river on a showboat. But they could not be heard outside, what with Clio’s singing, Cupide’s whistling and swishing and the cries of the hucksters in the street. Kaka’s eyes protruded with hate and fear. Her face had turned a dirty gray.
Clint Maroon looked down at her. Suddenly his eyes were not blue at all, but steel color. When he spoke he was smiling a little and his voice was gentle and drawling, as always.
“Holding you the way I am, Mammy, I could give you a little twist, two ways, would crack your backbone like you split those fish. You’d never talk or walk again and nobody’d know I’d done it.”
Like a snake she twisted her head and tried to sink her teeth into his arms. “Uh-uh. Shucks, I won’t hurt you. I just thought you ought to know. We’re going to be friends, you and me.” The glare she now cast up at him made this statement seem doubtful. “Oh, yes, we are. Miss Clio, she never had any fun—not to say, fun. Two sick old women a-whining and a-bellyaching all the time. Now you and me and maybe Cupide there, all together, maybe we can fix it so’s she’ll be rich and happy. She wants fun and love and somebody to look after her. I don’t aim to do her any harm. I want to help her.”
Suddenly he set her on her feet and gave her a gende spank on her bony posterior cushioned with layers of stiffly starched petticoats. She swayed and put out one hand, gropingly, as though about to fall. Then he curved his arm about her meager shoulders and pressed her to his side a moment and hugged her like a boy. “I love you because you love her,” he said.
Kakaracou looked up at him. “You mean she will be rich? And everything comme il faut. Respectable.”
“Sure respectable. But we got to play careful.”
She looked up at him with the eyes of an old seeress, bright and wicked and wise and compassionate. She ignored his threatened brutality, his mad display of strength as though they never had been used against her.
“How you like pie Saint Honoré for dinner tonight, effen you and Miss Clio going to be home for one time?”
He replied in the wooing dovelike tones he reserved for all females of whatever age, color or class.
“What’s in it, Mammy? Is it something lickin’ good?”
“Uh, puff paste, first thing, and filling of striped vanilla and chocolate cream with liddy dabs of puff paste on top.”
“Yes ma’am!”
She rolled a bawdy old eye at him. “It is good to have a man in the house to cook for. To cook only for women all these years, it make un feu triste.’’’’
“Whatever that is, Mammy.”
“ Un feu triste—oh, it mean a dull fire. To cook for women, cela m’ennuia à la mort. Though she eat well, my little Clio.” She clutched his arm with one clawlike hand. “Only one thing I ask you. Do not call me that.”
“What?”
“This—mammy.” She drew herself up very tall. “It is a thing I hate. Out of the slave days.”
“Why, sure. Name your own name. She calls you—”
“Me, I am Angélique Pluton. If you like you call me Kaka.”
He eyed her with a measuring look that was a blend of amusement and resentment. “They sure ruined you in Paris, nigger.”
Curiously enough, she laughed at this, her high cackling laugh. “Sure nuff, Mr. Clint. But don’t you pay me no never mind. Half time I’m play-acting jess like Miss Clio.”
VII
“Taire du scandale, “ said Clio, as though thinking aloud.
“How’s that?”
“I shall make a scandal. Not a great scandal. Just a little one, enough to cause them some worry.”
“Now just what are you figuring on doing? You fixing up some sorry mischief in that little head of yours?”
The jalousies were three-quarters drawn, they were sitting in the cool dimness of the dining room facing the garden. It was too hot now that May was well on its way to sit at midday in the courtyard. Not even a vagrant breeze stirred the listiess leaves, the air was heavy with moist heat. They had finished their delicate breakfast-lunch of trout and asparagus and pale golden pineapple dashed with kirsch. Clio’s face had a luminous pear-like quality in the gray-green shadow of the sheltered room. She wore one of her lace-frilled white gabrielles; her eyes, her hair seemed blacker, more vital in contrast.
“You put me in mind of a spring I used to come on out on the Great Plains near the Brazos. You’d come on it, unexpected, and there it was, cool-looking and fresh, you’d kneel to touch it and you’d find it was a hot spring, so hot it like to b
urn your fingers.”
She laughed her slow indolent laugh that was so at variance with her real character. “Some day we will go to Texas, Cleent. Before I am settled for life with my rich and respectable husband.”
“Trying to tease me?”
“No. Haven’t I told you from the beginning?”
“Honey, sometimes you talk Frenchified and now and again you talk just as American as I do. Are you putting on, or what?”
She shrugged her shoulders, her smile was mischievous. “Great-Grand’mère Bonnevie was an actress, you know. And if I am the Comtesse de Trenaunay de Chanfret, why then “
“Shucks! I keep forgetting you’re nothing but a little girl dressed up in her ma’s long skirts.”
She sat up briskly. “I am not! I am very grown up. I have planned everything. I am an adventuress like my grandmother and my mother, only I shall be more shrewd. I am going to have a fine time and I am going to fool the world.”
“You don’t say!” he drawled as one would talk to an amusing child.
“Ecoute! There is nothing for us here in New Orleans, for you or for me. To stay, I mean. But I have a plan. Will you listen very carefully?”
“I sure would admire for to hear it. You look downright wicked.”
“Not wicked, Clint. Worldly. They were worldly women—my dear Mama, and Aunt Belle. And Kaka is a witch. And Cupide is a dear little monster. And I have been with these all my life. And so—”
“I love you the way you are. I wouldn’t change a hair of your head.”
“Listen, then. I have sent Cupide out through the town, and Kaka, too, and they have listened and learned. They can find out anything, those two. All the gossip, all the scandal. Well, there is a daughter. Charlotte Thérèse.”
“Daughter?” he repeated, bewildered. “Now, wait a minute. Who? What daughter?”
She explained with the virtuous patience of the unreasonable. “The daughter of my father, Nicolas Dulaine, and his wife. Charlotte Thérèse she is called. My half-sister she is. Isn’t she?”
“We-e-ell—”
“But of course. Now then. She is fifteen, she is Creole— chacalâta—very stiff they are and clannish and everything de rigueur. She is to be introduced into society next winter, at sixteen. All very formal and proper, you see. But not so proper if there pops up an old scandal in the family.”
He had been lolling in his chair, interested but relaxed. Now he sat up, tense. “Hold on! You’re not fixing to try blackmail!”
“Clint! How can you think of such a thing!”
“There’s a look in your eyes, I’ve seen the same look on a wild Spanish mare just before she rares up on her hind legs and throws you.”
“How I should like to see that! The Wild West! Well, perhaps some day. But now we have work to do.”
“What kind of work? What’s going on in that head of yours? Sometimes I’m plumb scairt of you, especially when you look the way you do now, smooth as a pan of cream, but poison underneath if you was to skim it off.”
“But it is nothing wicked! I am only arranging a gay little time for you and for me. Now will you listen—but carefully.”
“Sure, honey. I like to hear your voice, it just goes over me like oil on a blister. I’m a-listening.”
She held herself very quiet; her eyes were not looking straight ahead but were turned a bit toward their corners in the way of a plotter whose scheme is being made orderly.
“When I came back to New Orleans—before I met you, chéri—I was much much younger than I am now. Don’t laugh! It is so. Only a few weeks ago, but it is so. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Like a child I came back to my childhood home. I cleaned this house, repaired it, made it as you see, quite lovely again. I was going to live here and be happy like someone in a storybook. How childish! How silly!”
“What’s silly about it?”
“Because I do not want to stay in this house. I do not even want the house to exist after I have finished with it. But now it is the house in which Nicolas Dulaine was k—died. I am now going to bring that sad accident to life again.”
“Hi, wait a minute!” He sat up with a jerk.
“No. You wait. It is very simple. I shall make New Orleans notice me. I shall go everywhere—to the restaurants, to the races, to the theater if it is not too late now, to the French Market; I shall ride in the Park, I shall wear my most extravagant frocks—and you will go everywhere with me in your great white hat, and your diamond shirt stud and your beautiful boots—”
“But what—”
“No. Wait. All these weeks I have been living quietly, quietly here in this house—I here, you at the St. Charles Hotel, all very proper and prim and decorous.”
A glint in his eye, an edge to his drawling voice. “Well, hold on, now. I wouldn’t say it was all so proper, exactiy.”
“Proper on the surface. And in my eyes because I am so fond of you, Clint. But now we must be different.”
“How d’you mean, different? What you fixing to do?”
“Only what I have said. We will go everywhere, and everywhere we must attract attention. Everything orderly, but bold—dashing— much éclat—everything conspicuous. People will say, ‘Who is that beautiful creature who goes always everywhere with the handsome Texan? Look at her clothes! They must come from Paris. Look at her jewels! See how she rides, so superbly. Who is she?’ Then another will answer, ‘Oh, don’t you know? . . . She is the daughter of Nicolas Dulaine who died. You remember? There was a great scandal—‘ “
“Why, say, Clio, you wouldn’t be as coldblooded as that, now, would you? What do you want to go and do that for? What’s the idea?”
“Because it will revive the old scandal. That would be very inconvenient for a family whose daughter will be of marriageable age next season—a family that is very conventional—in a word—chacalata. And the daughter—this Charlotte Thérèse—she is, I hear, quite plain. And thin. Maigre comme un clou.” Clio smiled a dreamily sweet smile. “She was not made with love.”
“They’ll run you out of town.”
“I’ll go—for a price.”
He stared at her while the meaning of this fully resolved itself in his mind. “You mean to say you came here to New Orleans knowing you could make these people pay—”
“No, Clint! I came because—well, where else could I go? All my life I had heard of nothing but New Orleans, New Orleans. It was home to them. That was because they were exiles. It isn’t home to me. It is nothing to me but a dim blurred copy of the city Mama and Aunt Belle loved.”
“That’s a fine speech, honey. But I’ve got so I’m not more than one jump behind that steel-trap mind of yours. Sometimes I’m even ahead of it. Come on, come on, Clio. I’m not just a big dumb cowboy from Texas. What’s in that head of yours, for all you’re looking so droopy about the dear old days in New Orleans—you little hell-cat, you!”
She looked at him with utter directness. She was no longer a woman and he a man; it was the cold, clear, purposeful look of the indomitable.
“One must be practical. Will you help me?”
“Likely they’ll have us both corraled. I’ll do it—just for the hell of it, and if it’s going to make you happier feeling. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“The idea was mine. The risk is mine, really. We can share the expenses—restaurants, races, theaters—it will not be cheap. Perhaps you should have more than one-third—”
He stood up then, his eyes were steel slots in the blank face, he pushed her roughly away from him so that she staggered backward and would have tripped over the flounced train of her gabrielle if she had not grasped a table for support.
“Why, you no-’count French rat, you! You offering to pay me— like a fast man, like I was a pander.”
“Clint! You a paillard! No! I did not mean—I only meant—we are partners, you and I—”
His slow venomous drawl cut under her passionate denial. “Yes, you’re right. The idea is yours, the r
isk is yours, the whole rotten outfit is yours, your murdering mother and those two freaks out there—”
“Clint! Don’t! Don’t talk like this to me. I only meant—I was only trying to be fair—businesslike and practical—not like Mama and Aunt Belle! Don’t you see?” She went to him, she clung to him, so that the thin white robe, the flowing sleeves, the perfumed lace ruffles hung from his shoulders, covered his face, swirled about his legs.
“Get away from me!”
“No! No! I will give it up. I only thought then we would be free. It was just a little plan—not bad, not wicked. Then we can go together to Saratoga, where it is gay and fresh with pine woods and the little lakes.”
He was listening now, he was holding her against him instead of pushing her away, his anger was less than half-hearted. “I don’t want any part of it.”
“But when you said you would help me I thought we would be partners.”
“Not in this. Maybe up North, if we hit on a scheme. But this here—this is different. This goes way back to—to something else. It ain’t a clean grudge. Maybe they owe you something—you and your ma. I’ll tote you around, like you said. You know I’m crazy about you. But I ain’t that crazy. Any money you get from throwing dirt at them, why, it’s yours to keep. I’ll have no part of it.”
“Clint, you are marvelous, ye t’adore!”
“Listen, honey,” he said, plaintively. “You take things too hard. Why’n’t you just gende down and quit snorting and rarin’ and take it in your stride?”