Afternoon in April

by Philip Wylie

  The man spoke nastily to his chauffeur. "I want you to be back in one hour. One hour consists of sixty minutes. Do you understand that? I don't like to wait five minutes, as I did yesterday, or ten as I did the day before. Now--carry those bathing suits to the dressing rooms!"

  The chauffeur said, "Yes, Mr. Keller."

  Barney said, "Hah!"

  Connie looked at him. "Somebody you know?"

  The couple was approaching us, and we could hear the woman say in a hopeless and plaintive manner, "Really, Rudolph, he does his very best. You make him so jumpy."

  "He doesn't know what 'jumpy' means!"

  Keller saw Barney. The arrogance oozed out of him. His big hands stopped swinging at his sides, his jaw dropped, and his voice was thick.

  "Hello, Colby."

  "Nice day." The words were like two arrows.

  "Yes, isn't it?" The man and his wife walked on behind their hapless chauffeur.

  "Who is it?" Connie asked.

  "A bird I know."

  He fell into silence. Connie eventually became a little nettled and very curious.

  "Just--a bird--you know?" She said it teasingly.

  Barney glanced at her. His smile made of his mouth a straight line which his moustache followed with precision. "You've been saying how sweet I am." He shrugged.

  "Here's a place where I wasn't. His name is Rudolph Keller. He's rich. He's a director of the museum for which I went out on an expedition once. He was in charge of getting an airplane to us down in an especially God-forsaken chunk of tropics. He didn't do it. We were stuck there through the rainy season, and I lost three men with some kind of fever that not even the Rockefeller Foundation knows about yet. It practically shoved their bones through their skin."

  "He looks like that sort of person," she answered.

  "When I got back to New York, he lied about the thing, and I proved he was a liar at a directors' meeting. That threw him off his rocker. He wanted to fight. He'd prayed football and boxed and stroked his crew in college." Here Barney chuckled, but without amusement, and his eyes were seeing other things than those around us. "So I made him a deal: we'd meet barehanded at night in the middle of the George Washington Bridge. It must be two hundred feet down to the river. I suggested that we both write suicide notes, and whoever threw the other over the rail would tear up his own last precious words." He exhaled sharply. "Keller didn't show up!"

  That was all there was to it. But it was enough. I had seen Connie wince toward the end of the recital, and Barney's last triumphant sentence was not shared triumphantly by her. She shut her eyes and looked away. No doubt she had often imagined him facing wild animals--or even bloodthirsty savages--with a kind of proud tranquility. But the idea of this man who she had chosen to take John's place violently challenging another man like himself to be pitched to death was not the same deed. There was bravado in it--

  vainglory. It was in essence childish. It was also--to a civilized person--revolting. I perceived criticism and revolt in her.

  But Connie did not want to think of the man for whom she had given up her former life as childish. She hid her revulsion. No doubt she had imagined all the melodrama in Barney's life as ascetic compensation--a masochistic substitute for herself.

  But the event he had just described certainly fell outside that kind of behavior. It was murderous. It was diabolical. For all that, it was infantile. A man can strike another in self-defense or to protect individuals and ideas, but Barney's lethal challenge for revenge-

  -and the mental picture conjured up of night, the high bridge, the black water, and the notes--

  Her idol had feet of clay, I thought. And so would she if she had dared to be honest with herself.

  Barney saw that she was discomfited and spoke again--cheerfully this time--as if some obscure appetite had been appeased. "That didn't upset you, did it?"

  "No. You have a lot of nerve, haven't you?"

  He laughed. "It wasn't nerve. Just plain rage. Here he comes. I'd still chuck him into the Hudson for a nickel."

  Connie was going to say something, but I thought she had better not, so I asked a question. "Where do you ride around here?"

  "Didn't know you were a horseman." There was in Barney's voice a tinge and no more of condescension.

  Connie said, "Oh, Frankie's a peach of a rider. Been in the saddle ever since he was a kid."

  She didn't say that for many years it had been a special saddle.

  Barney told me the name of the man who ran the White Water Stables, and I went out there alone because they wanted to go to a cocktail party and I didn't.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I found the White Water Stables on the edge of town, and I got to know them well--a circle of one-story adobe buildings around a big corral, where sometimes a dozen head of horses watched with interest the coming and going of smart automobiles, and sometimes a fat millionaire from the East or a motion picture star rode egotistically and awkwardly, in response to the drawled instructions of a cowboy. There was a long bar in one of the buildings, and at night an orchestra played for dancing. Between numbers, bow-legged men, who had punched cattle in Idaho and Nevada and Texas and were now pushing dudes in Palm Springs, slung their hard fingers across the strings of guitars and sang in high voices about The Alamo, about wagon wheels, and Kit Carson, Bowie, the terrible night that comes down on the desert, and the little dogies smoking along toward butte rims. They sang about blood on the saddle and what they wouldn't do for a chaw of tobacco. Parisian evening gowns swept into the place and were danced in wide, exuberant circles by blue jeans, ten-gallon hats, and hand tooled high-heeled boots.

  Sometimes from the White Water Stables, early in the morning, there filed a long procession of the hardier tenderfeet. Horses bearing people, and horses with packs, off for snow fields, dismal canyons, green forests, or rivers piled with raw earth which had been sluiced for gold. Indeed, some of those tenderfeet-debutantes, Hollywood directors, energetic rich men's sons--used their leisure to learn a bit of the hard trade of the cowhand. Their "Ahoos" broke the desert air shrilly-they could snatch their sombreros from the ground at full gallop--they could rope and throw and tie a baby steer in half a minute-some of them even, horse-familiar from Virginia or Westchester, shipped mounts of their own to California and taught the cowboys how to take a five-bar fence.

  It was a fantastic place, where earthy individuals worked for wages and where the rich attempted to recapture that same earth.

  I took a long ride that day--alone. Down washes in which were the bleached bones of dead cattle, and over long dunes where nothing grew and sand blew in the wind like snow from the edges of drifts--until the colors came up to their maximum intensity, blurred blue and purple, and went all together.

  I couldn't figure out how Connie felt. I knew that Barney's story had somewhat annoyed her, but there is in every person much to annoy every other one. I knew she missed her family, but that I had already discounted. She seemed vital as always and perhaps more radiant than ever, but how much of that was due to her feeling for Barney--

  and how much of it to a combination of deliberate acting and the mere flush of health from desert life, I could not determine. . . .

  That night we dressed for dinner, and I met several people--the newly made intimate friends of Barney and my foster mother--people called Jack and Veronica Stokes, the Darlingtons, Lyman Wesley, Harrison McLeod, and Betty Somebody-orOther. They were the sort of people whom Hollywood extras try to imitate on dressy sets-

  -people born to be part of backgrounds, but always of extravagant backgrounds. People who live in big cities but not New York--who spend time in London and Nice but not in English country-sides or Biarritz. People who played Mah Jong when Mah Jong was popular, miniature golf when it was a rage--who were doing "handies" two summers ago-

  -and who played good bridge then and now. People who make the society page everywhere but in New York, who eat raw carrots and refuse desserts to keep from becoming fat, who buy
Schiaparelli and Chanel but not in Paris--who keep in the know more carefully than those about whom they know so much.

  They're fun-but you can never remember their names.

  Of course, Connie let them in on the secret of who I was, and that merely added another nugget to their respective gold mines of private information.

  We ate. We danced. We drove out across the desert to a gambling place and drank champagne and put silver dollars on our favorite numbers at roulette and came home late, playing the radios in our hired limousines and singing to that accompaniment, "Bei Mir Bis Du Schoen."

  It was all gay and glamorous--delightful, I thought, as a vacation from an arduous routine--but, as a way of life to be carried unchanged from Palm Springs to Cape Cod to Sea Island to St. Tropez--futile.

  A day or two later, Connie and Barney and I started out for the stables together for a ride. I had been wondering if I would get a chance during my necessarily short stay to talk with Connie alone, and Barney gave me such a chance that morning. He understood people all right. He was usually generous with them. But I had a feeling that his understanding was often accompanied by contempt or disagreement--that he would not let mere understanding change his own ideas and purposes. He helped Connie mount her horse and started over to aid me, so I jumped up before he got there.

  "I'd sort of like to watch the calf-roping today," he said, "and I know you and Connie would like to get together without me--"

  We protested, but not very much, and then rode away.

  I suppose we'd covered a mile, alternately walking and trotting, before she said anything. I didn't open the conversation because I was so intent upon getting her own reactions unconditioned. What she said at first surprised me, not because it was unnatural but because I had been thinking only of her:

  "Well, Frankie, how do you like him?"

  The answer to that was easy. "I like him fine. Anybody would. He's interesting and he's sensitive. He knows how to play--"

  "What don't you like about him?" I hesitated. "Why, there's nothing I don't like about him, I guess."

  "Yes, there is! Otherwise you wouldn't have listed the things you do like." She turned in her saddle and smiled brightly. I smiled back because Connie's deduction was accurate beyond denial. "I'll tell you myself. The thing you don't like is a certain ruthlessness. You don't like that because it's foreign to your own character. To John's, too, if you wish, and Larry's and Virginia's. I won't add Ivans--because I think Ivan has something very much like it."

  I grinned back at her. "I must say your Barney has run off a few deeds where he was at least--ultra-dashing."

  "He's just a kid, you know. A grown-up kid. Some of the things he has done shock me a little bit--just the way things that children do shock you."

  "They can hurt, too." She thought that over. "Are you trying to sabotage my--love for him, Frankie?"

  "No. I don't think so." I tried to decide exactly what I was attempting to express.

  "You're doing the best you can to be frank."

  "Yes, I am."

  "So I will. This, Connie. I'll be going back to Fort Sheffield after Christmas. I won't tell anybody about this visit. Maybe some day things will change, and I'll be able to tell them, but that time is far off. So I suppose I want to know most whether or not you're happy. Next I want to make the best guess I can about the future of your happiness. And finally I'd like to know as much as possible about your plans--if you've made any."

  "Just vague ones."

  "You're answering my last question?"

  "I guess so. I think that sooner or later it's up to me to go to Reno or some place like that and get a divorce from John."

  "Then you'll marry Barney."

  She spoke quietly, so that I could barely hear her above the sound of the horses'

  hoofs in the sand. "Why, yes. We haven't talked about it much. The present has been too perfect the way it is."

  "And then what?"

  "Why, I don't know. Then I'll be Mrs. Colby. This romantic adventure will be over. I'll be his wife and share his life."

  "Trekking around in jungles? Shooting rifles at wild beasts? Jumping around on ice floes somewhere in the polar regions?"

  It sounded mean, and I didn't intend to be mean. I explained that before I went on.

  "You weren't meant for those things, Connie. If anybody was ever civilized from the standpoint of personal habits, you are. In fact, your psychical comfort stops far short of the reach of good roads--even." The thing was true, almost pathetically true, and I saw that--again--she knew it but wouldn't admit it. So I tried to be light about it. Sometimes kidding is better than all the rhetoric in the world. "What would you do without a shower bath, Connie? A hairdresser? Hot water? A drugstore on the corner? Fresh cream for your coffee in the morning? And a newspaper to read in bed while you drank it? Shops and all the things that are in them? Electric lights? A car to take you from where you are to some fresh spot nearby or far away? Suppose you ran out of lipstick?"

  But it wasn't getting over. She stood up in her stirrups, and that was all her horse needed as a signal to break from a slow shuffle into a trot. When she sat back again and the horse automatically slowed, I gave my gelding a scratch with my heel so that he would pull alongside, and she said rather flatly, "You can't have a very high opinion of my character, Frankie."

  I embarked on a favorite theme of mine: "Hell, Connie. People get thinking that they are their characters. Character is a little mechanism you set on top of what you yourself really are--and as long as things go all right, the mechanism works. But when things jam, your character stops cold, and what you yourself really are begins to function.

  Character is just a bunch of good intentions. And nature isn't good or bad--it is just plain raw intention. I don't know what drove you away from Fort Sheffield--what terrible necessity inside yourself. But I do know that you weren't able to control whatever it was that drove you, any more than you would be able to control your internal feelings in some windswept, rain-soaked, dipped-in-malaria, jungle pesthole. What I mean--"

  Connie interrupted me--and it was time, because I'd already decided my effort was wasted. "What's done," she said, "is done. It's too late."

  We went on a while after that, and I finally said, "How about my first question then, Connie? Are you happy?"

  She was more honest about that. "Not entirely, Frankie.

  But I've learned something in these past months. No matter how happy one is, one is never wholly happy. Life isn't perfect. I can't explain why I left Fort Sheffield to you.

  You're too young. You'd just go on assuming that I was luxury-loving and afraid of growing old, so I ran away to show myself that at nearly forty I was all that I had been at twenty."

  I didn't answer for a while. I knew that all the other Sheffields believed exactly that and no more. I believed more about Connie. I believed that what she had done was the result of two things: one, in giving up a romantic man for a serious one at an early age, Connie had made an incomplete surrender, so that when the romantic figure reappeared she had fallen through a barrier she had never firmly built; and the other, that she was victim of a sort of hysterical psychic myopia--that she regarded part of her nature now as if it were all, that she concentrated every thought and feeling upon a fragment of herself and disclaimed the great, rich portions lying all about--portions which we, with a similar shortness of sight, had always felt to be all of Connie.

  The very fact that Connie had never before defended herself or her actions to any of us was proof enough for me of the correctness of my assumptions, so I let up.

  "Anyway, Connie, I hope that you're happier out here with Barney, and I hope that whatever happiness you have found will increase."

  She answered, "So do I." Then, after a while she said, "See that clump of willows up the draw? Beat you to it!"

  I gave my horse a good thump, picked up the reins, and sat back in the saddle. He was running with his first leap, and we passed Connie before we had c
overed half the distance to the willows. From there we walked again. Both horses were breathing hard, and so were we.

  That's how we came upon Barney without being observed by him.

  He was standing in the middle of the dry water-course, looking intently at something out of our range of view. Every now and then he would pick up a stone and throw it. We stopped our horses and watched him--realizing that he hadn't gone to the corral where the cowboys were chasing calves, and wondering what he was doing. His back was toward us. His shoulders were hunched up. His head was thrust forward. It was a strange and somehow sinister attitude, and presently he shouted. I do not know what there was in his voice--a note of gloating, perhaps, or taunting. Whatever it was, it had a curious effect on me: I wanted to kick my horse forward and tell him to cut it out--

  although I had no idea of what he was doing.

  "So you think you can get away that way!" he called. He threw a stone. "Aha! I thought that would change your mind! And now you're going to try hiding behind that cactus, eh?" He picked up another stone, aimed, and threw again. I saw a cactus branch quiver, and a little dust rose where the rock dropped.

  Barney walked a few steps further forward. "And you can't out-run me, either, my fine friend! Are you getting the idea? Whenever I give the word, it won't be the ground in front of you or the cactus behind you! It'll be you, boy! You, personally, yourself!"

  I glanced at Connie then. If I had been perplexed and horrified, she was much more so. She sat in her saddle, stiff and pale, listening to this grotesque harangue, and I guessed she thought Barney had gone mad, when, with shocking suddenness, we were made to understand the nature of his quarry in his vociferous game of cat and mouse.

  Dry, shrill, and terrifying, came the rattle of a snake. I was still watching Connie, and I saw instant relief come in her features. Barney was only calling to a rattler which he was trying to kill. Boyish, no doubt--but the scene abruptly made sense to her.

  To me it did not. Not the scene upon which we had arrived or what happened afterward. For at that moment I saw the snake. A big one, thirty feet or so beyond the place where Barney stood. It had turned and was coming fast toward the man who had harassed it.