“… Hildreth returned to the river bank,” Mr. Ellis said. “And when he found that the ice was strong enough to bear his weight, he crawled across. The man came out and watched him trying to get over the fence and didn’t lift a finger to help him. Finally he tumbled over the fence anyway, and crawled into the house and lay down before the fire. He begged for assistance and when the man relented and would have done something for him, his wife prevented it.” Mr. Ellis began searching for his napkin, which had fallen to the floor. Alice restored it to him. He tucked it into his collar again and then said impressively, “The man’s name was Benjamin Russ. His wife’s name is not known, and nobody cares to remember it. They both had to leave the country afterwards, there was so much indignation among the neighbours. Mr. Hildreth always expressed the opinion that they imagined he had a large sum of money on him, and that they could secure it in case of his death. Such hardheartedness was very rare among the early settlers, who were noted like you Southerners”—the old man made a little bow to Nora—“for their hospitality.”
“Grampaw, you’ve told that story at every gathering you’ve been to in the last twenty years,” Bud Ellis said loudly, from the table in the alcove. “Why don’t you keep still for a while and let somebody else talk?”
“All right, all right,” the old man said. “I know I’m a tiresome old fool, but just remember that people can’t help it if they live too long. You may live too long yourself.”
The embarrassment that followed this remark was general. The visitors from Mississippi began talking hurriedly. The Illinois guests were silent and looked down at their plates. No amount of coaxing could make Mr. Ellis finish his story. He sat sulking and feeling sorry for himself until Thelma came to take the plates away and bring the ice cream.
6
After the card-tables had been cleared and put away in the closet under the stairs, Randolph Potter sat down beside Mary Caroline Link and began to tell her about his favourite riding horse, a jumper named Daisy, that had recently gone lame. The young Southerner was so strikingly handsome that he drew the attention of the others in the room to the couple on the sofa. Mary Caroline’s pink linen dress was charming, but she herself was plain, with a receding chin and heavy black eyebrows. She had no easy compliments like the girls Randolph was used to, and her shyness forced him to keep thinking up new subjects for conversation.
Across the room, Nora Potter let her eyes come to rest on her brother.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Bud Ellis said.
“I was thinking,” Nora said, “of the words ‘homely’ and ‘beautiful’—of the terrible importance people attach to whether somebody’s nose is too long or their eyes too close together. How it must puzzle the angels!”
“You’re way over my head,” Bud Ellis said, and got up and joined his grandfather and Mr. Potter at the far end of the living-room.
The sun had gone down but the heat remained on into the long July twilight. The curtains hung limp and still. In the dining-room Thelma moved about, putting away silver and china. The word “nigger”, which was so often on the lips of the Southerners, she did not appear to notice, and the Potters were unaware of any lack of tact on their part, even when Austin King got up quietly and closed the dining-room doors.
Martha King had settled down for the evening beside Dr. Danforth, who was old enough to be her father and whose fondness for her was uncritical and of long standing. Though his infirmity—he was hard of hearing—sometimes made him difficult to talk to, she was utterly at ease and herself with him, knowing as she did that if she were to lean forward and say to him: I think I’ve killed somebody, the expression on his face might change from pleasure to concern, but the concern would be for her, and he would probably say: You did? Well, my dear, I’m sure you had some very good reason for doing it. Can you manage by yourself or do you need my help?
After a while, Mrs. Potter called across the room to her. “Martha, change places with me. You’ve had that delightful man to yourself long enough!”
This move having been accomplished, Mrs. Potter sat fanning herself and smiling around at the company for a moment or two. Then, turning to Dr. Danforth, she said, “Warm, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t catch that?” Dr. Danforth said, and cupped his hand behind his ear.
“I say it’s very warm!”
“Ninety-six in the shade on the east side of the courthouse at two o’clock this afternoon,” Dr. Danforth said.
“If I’d known it was going to be like this up North,” Mrs. Potter said, fanning him as well as herself, “I’d never have had the courage to pack up and come. And in that case, I’d have missed knowing you, Mr. Danverse.”
“Danforth … Dr. Danforth. I’m a veterinary.”
“Well you must just excuse me. I’ve met so many charming people here this evening, and as I get older I have trouble remembering names. My girlhood friend, Clara Huber, from Greenville, Mississippi, has a daughter who married a man named Danforth. I wonder if you could be any kin?”
“My people come from Vermont,” Dr. Danforth said.
“Now isn’t that unusual,” Mrs. Potter said. “You hardly ever meet anyone who comes from Vermont. Not down home, anyway. But I was going to say, if you’re a horse-doctor, you must like horses, so why don’t you come down and visit us? We’ve got a whole stable full of horses you could ride. I tell Mr. Potter he’s fonder of horseflesh than he is of his wife. Just joking, you know … I say just joking.… Yes. But seriously, Mr. Danforth, you ought to come down to Mississippi. You’ve never seen cotton growing, have you? Well, you’ll find it interesting. A field of cotton is a beautiful sight if you can just look at it and not have to worry about the practical side. The menfolks will show you around the plantation. The old slave quarters and the live oaks with moss hanging from them. You don’t have anything like that up North, do you? And the family burial ground. Just drop us a penny post card and let us know when you’re arriving. We’re simple country folks. We don’t put on any dog. But Mr. Potter loves company and so do I, and we’ll show you a good time, you and your very charming wife.”
Mrs. Potter had already asked several other people to come and stay at the plantation and each invitation had started, in the person who received it, a chain of subdued excitement and planning that would take months to exhaust itself. She stopped fanning and called across the room to her son. “Randolph, what is the name of the man Clara Huber’s eldest daughter married? Danforth? Danverse?”
“Tweed,” Randolph said, barely turning his head. “Charlie Tweed.” Mary Caroline was telling him about the high school debating contest that had as its subject: Resolved that Napoleon was defeated, not by the Russians or the English or the Austrians, but by Destiny. Her side had been given the affirmative.
“Charlie Tweed,” Mrs. Potter said to Dr. Danforth. “So he’s probably no relation to you. He’s a cotton broker and lives outside of Columbus, Georgia.”
The conversation of the Southerners was sprinkled with place names that in an Illinois living-room, in 1912, were still romantic—Memphis and Nashville and Natchez and Gulfport and New Orleans—and that conveyed to the people of Draperville a sense of strange vegetation and of an easier, more picturesque life than they themselves were accustomed to. Mr. and Mrs. Potter depended, for the most part, on half a dozen topics: the Delta Country, the plantation, cotton, kinship, their own emphatic likes and dislikes, and the behaviour of various eccentric persons back home. These topics formed a complicated series of tracks and switches, like a railroad yard. Sometimes their separate conversations merged, so that Mr. and Mrs. Potter would be telling the same story simultaneously in different parts of the room. But the next moment they would go steaming off in opposite directions, calling on their son or daughter for confirmation of details, for names and dates momentarily forgotten. They thought out loud, recklessly, and sometimes heard their own remarks with surprise and wonder. They were in the North and among strangers, a situation that was unnatural
to them, and that could only be corrected by making lifetime friends of every person they talked to. It didn’t occur to them that they might bore anyone, and no one was bored by them or less than delighted with their soft Mississippi accent.
Mr. and Mrs. Potter talked about themselves and the people they knew because they had as yet nothing else to talk about, but as they began to feel better acquainted, the direction of their concern sometimes veered, sometimes reversed itself, and the full heat of their charm and interest was applied flatteringly to the listener, while they extracted his likes and dislikes, his hopes, plans, and history. The person taken hold of in this way had the feeling that they would never let go, that he and everything about him would always engage the attention and sympathy of these Southerners. The fact that the Southerners did let go a moment later, and let go completely, was not important. The contact, though brief, had been satisfying.
Randolph Potter left Mary Caroline and went out to the kitchen on some errand which he did not explain, and Mrs. Danforth came and sat down beside her. It was all Mary Caroline could do not to put out her hand and prevent Randolph’s place from being taken. Mrs. Danforth was a very homely woman with a disconcerting habit of twisting her head and looking at the person she was talking to with a parrot-like expression that seemed half-inquiring and half-mocking. Mary Caroline answered Mrs. Danforth’s questions about her mother, who had not been well lately, but her eyes kept straying. Mrs. Danforth saw the direction they took, and then, in her survey of the room, that her husband had said something to Mrs. Potter which made her tap his arm coquettishly with her fan. Pleased that he was enjoying himself, Mrs. Danforth turned back to Mary Caroline and said, “What a pretty dress, my dear. Did you make it yourself?”
In a kind of dream, Abbey King had been passed from one lap to another. Worn out by the excitement, the perfume and cigar smoke, and the effort of trying to follow so many conversations, none of which made the least concession to inexperience, she fingered the silk rose at her mother’s waist.
“When I was nine,” young Mrs. Ellis said to Martha King, “we moved from the part of town where we knew everybody, and I thought I wouldn’t ever again have any friends. I used to sit in my swing in the back yard of the new house and watch the two little girls who lived next door. I envied their curls and their clothes and everything about them. And then one day I caught them using my swing. They were swinging each other and eating liquorice, and they gave me some.… But it took a long time, it took years for me to realize that wherever I went, there would always be someone who——”
“You’ll find people very friendly here,” Martha said, stroking Ab’s hair.
In the evening air outside, the throbbing sound of the locusts rose and ebbed. Austin King left the circle of men and came across the room. What he had to say was for his wife’s ear alone. She nodded twice, and he sat down at the piano and played a series of chords which produced a brief and respectful silence. “We’re going to play a game called Mystic Music,” he said. Mrs. Potter had never heard of this game and, instead of listening to the rules as Austin explained them, she kept going off into descriptions of parlour games that they played in Mississippi. The men were reluctant to leave their closed circle and the subject of Teddy Roosevelt, who out of egotism had split the Republican Party.
Though it was taken so seriously that night in the Kings’ living-room, the split in the Republican Party was as nothing compared to the split between the men and the women. Before dinner and again immediately afterwards, the men gathered at one end of the room near the ebony pier glass and the women at the opposite end, around the empty fireplace. What originally brought the split about, it would be hard to say. Perhaps the women, with their tedious recipes and their preoccupation with the diseases of children drove the men away. Or perhaps the men, knowing how nervous the women became when their husbands’ voices were raised in political argument, withdrew of their own accord in order to carry on, unhampered, the defence of their favourite misconceptions. Both men and women may have decided sadly that after marriage there was no common ground for social intercourse. At all events, the separation had taken place a long time before. In Draperville only the young, ready (like Randolph and Mary Caroline) for courtship, or the old, bent (like Mrs. Potter and Dr. Danforth) on preserving the traditions of gallantry, were willing to talk to one another. They met as ambassadors and kept open the lines of communication between the sexes.
Austin King continued his efforts at the piano until eventually one person at a time relinquished his right to speak and the room was ready for the new game. Young Mrs. Ellis was chosen to be the first victim, and left the room. Austin began to improvise. He played the same mysterious little tune over and over, the end being woven each time into the beginning, until the company arrived at the stunt that Mrs. Ellis must do. She was called back from the study and the music became louder. She changed the direction of her steps and the music diminished. Now louder, now softer, it led her around the living-room on invisible wires until at last, hesitantly, she transferred a vase of white phlox from the table to the mantelpiece and the music stopped altogether.
The next victim, Randolph Potter, had to stand before Mary Caroline Link, bow from the waist, and ask her to dance with him. Under the spell of the music, Alice Beach (whose sister had sung for Geraldine Farrar’s teacher, though she herself, being the younger one, had had no such opportunity) took a copy of Janice Meredith out of the bookcase in the study, returned to the living-room, sat down in the wing chair, and commenced to read aloud.
Since Austin couldn’t see into the study, this required assistance, and so did the next stunt, when Dr. Danforth went all the way upstairs. The piano was moved so that Austin could see into the front hall, and confederates were stationed on the landing and at the head of the stairs. By prearranged signals they conveyed to the pianist whether Dr. Danforth was getting warmer or colder. A false move on his part produced an abrupt fortissimo chord, which was sometimes succeeded by others even louder, because of Dr. Danforth’s infirmity. At last he came down the stairs wearing a white coat of Martha King’s and a black hat with ostrich feathers on it. This feat was regarded by the Mississippi relatives as a triumph of the human mind.
After Dr. Danforth, it was Ab’s turn. She had not expected to have any. But little girls can be seen and not heard and still be the centre of attention. Now, with all eyes upon her, she was obliged to leave the room. She sat with her legs tucked under her in a wicker chair in the study, and listened to the low murmur in the next room. It threatened to become intelligible but didn’t quite, and finally they called to her.
As Ab came into the living-room she saw and started towards her mother. The music stopped her in her tracks. She blushed. She would have liked to escape but the music held her fast. She moved tentatively towards the fireplace. The music grew softer. There were three people confronting her—Mrs. Potter, Dr. Danforth, and Miss Lucy Beach. Ab knew she was supposed to do something to one of them, but which one? And what was it that she was supposed to do? She advanced towards Dr. Danforth. Once when she had an earache, he blew smoke in her ear and the pain went away. The music grew louder, obliterating him.
Through the music her father was saying something to her which she couldn’t understand, but which was nevertheless insistent and left her no choice except the right one. She stepped back and would have walked in the opposite direction but the DEE dum dum dum grew loud and frightening. Lucy Beach sat there smiling at her, but some instinct—what the music was saying seemed clearer to the child now, though it was not yet plain—made her move instead towards her great-aunt from Mississippi. The music grew soft and caressing. The music suggested love to the little girl. She saw an invitation in her great-aunt’s eyes and, forgetting that this was part of a game, leaned towards her and kissed her on the cheek. To Ab’s surprise, the music stopped and the room was full of the sound of clapping.
“You sweet child!” Mrs. Potter exclaimed, and drew Ab into her arms. Whi
le Ab was enjoying her moment of triumph, she heard her mother’s voice announcing that it was way past time for little girls to be in bed. A moment later she was led off, having gone around the circle of the company and said good night to everyone.
The sense of triumph was still with her on the stairs, and it lasted even after she had been tucked in bed. She was pleased with her first excursion into society, and she realized drowsily that the grown people were, beyond all doubt or question, pleased with her. The sudden impulse which had seemed to arise from inside her, the impulse towards love, was, as it turned out, exactly what they had meant for her to feel all along.
7
The sounds of an evening party breaking up are nearly always the same and nearly always beautiful. For over an hour the only excitement on Elm Street had been provided by the insects striking at the arc light. Now it was suddenly replaced by human voices, by the voice of Mrs. Beach saying, “Feel that breeze.… Good night Martha … Austin, good night. Such a nice party.… No, you mustn’t come with us, Mr. Potter. We left a light burning and we’re not afraid.”
The light could not protect Mrs. Beach and her daughters from death by violence, or old age, or from the terrible hold they had on one another, but at least it would enable them to enter their own house without being afraid of the dark, and it is the dark most people fear, anyway—not being murdered or robbed.
Time Will Darken It Page 4