But Jarrod was already moving away. “You go on to Louise,” he said. “I’ll attend to this.”
Mrs. King watched him go on down the path. Then she turned herself and flung the stained tumbler into an oleander bush and went to the hotel, walking fast, and mounted the stairs. Louise was in her room, dressing. “So you gave Hubert back his ring,” Mrs. King said. “That man will be pleased now. You will have no secret from him now, if the ring ever was a secret. Since you don’t seem to have any private affairs where he is concerned; don’t appear to desire any—”
“Stop,” Louise said. “You can’t talk to me like that.”
“Ah. He would be proud of that, too, to have heard that from his pupil.”
“He wouldn’t let me down. But you let me down. He wouldn’t let me down.” She stood thin and taut, her hands clenched at her sides. Suddenly she began to cry, her face lifted, the tears rolling down her cheeks. “I worry and I worry and I don’t know what to do. And now you let me down, my own mother.”
Mrs. King sat on the bed. Louise stood in her underthings, the garments she had removed scattered here and there, on the bed and on the chairs. On the table beside the bed lay the little metal rabbit; Mrs. King looked at it for a moment. “Don’t you want to marry Hubert?” she said.
“Didn’t I promise him, you and him both? Didn’t I take his ring? But you won’t let me alone. He won’t give me time, a chance. And now you let me down, too. Everybody lets me down except Doctor Jules.”
Mrs. King watched her, cold, immobile. “I believe that fool Lily Cranston is right. I believe that man has some criminal power over you. I just thank God he has not used it for anything except to try to make you kill yourself, make a fool of yourself. Not yet, that is—”
“Stop,” Louise said; “stop!” She continued to say “Stop. Stop,” even when Mrs. King walked up and touched her. “But you let me down! And now Hubert has let me down. He told you about that horse after he had promised me he wouldn’t.”
“I knew that already. That’s why I sent for him. I could do nothing with you. Besides, it’s anybody’s business to keep you from riding it.”
“You can’t keep me. You may keep me locked up in this room to-day, but you can’t always. Because you are older than I am. You’ll have to die first, even if it takes a hundred years. And I’ll come back and ride that horse if it takes a thousand years.”
“Maybe I won’t be here then,” Mrs. King said. “But neither will he. I can outlive him. And I can keep you locked up in this room for one day, anyway.”
Fifteen minutes later the ancient porter knocked at the locked door. Mrs. King went and opened it. “Mr. Jarrod wants to see you downstairs,” the porter said.
She locked the door behind her. Jarrod was in the lobby. It was empty. “Yes?” Mrs. King said. “Yes?”
“He said that if Louise would tell him herself she wants to marry me. Send him a sign.”
“A sign?” They both spoke quietly, a little tensely, though quite calm, quite grave.
“Yes. I showed him the ring, and him sitting there on that bench, in that suit looking like he had been sleeping in it all summer, and his eyes watching me like he didn’t believe she had ever seen the ring. Then he said, ‘Ah. You have the ring. Your proof seems to be in the hands of the wrong party. If you and Louise are engaged, she should have the ring. Or am I just old fashioned?’ And me standing there like a fool and him looking at the ring like it might have come from Woolworth’s. He never even offered to touch it.”
“You showed him the ring? The ring? You fool. What—”
“Yes. I don’t know. It was just the way he sat there, the way he makes her do things, I guess. It was like he was laughing at me, like he knew all the time there was nothing I could do, nothing I could think of doing about it he had not already thought about; that he knew he could always get between us before—in time.…”
“Then what? What kind of a sign did he say?”
“He didn’t say. He just said a sign, from her hand to his. That he could believe, since my having the ring had exploded my proof. And then I caught my hand just before it hit him—and him sitting there. He didn’t move; he just sat there with his eyes closed and the sweat popping out on his face. And then he opened his eyes and said, ‘Now, strike me.’ ”
“Wait,” Mrs. King said. Jarrod had not moved. Mrs. King gazed across the empty lobby, tapping her teeth with her fingernail. “Proof,” she said. “A sign.” She moved. “You wait here.” She went back up the stairs; a heavy woman, moving with that indomitable, locomotivelike celerity. She was not gone long. “Louise is asleep,” she said, for no reason that Jarrod could have discerned, even if he had been listening. She held her closed hand out. “Can you have your car ready in twenty minutes?”
“Yes. But what—?”
“And your bags packed. I’ll see to everything else.”
“And Louise— You mean—”
“You can be married in Meridian; you will be there in an hour.”
“Married? Has Louise—?”
“I have a sign from her that he will believe. You get your things all ready and don’t you tell anyone where you are going, do you hear?”
“Yes. Yes. And Louise has—?”
“Not a soul. Here”—she put something into his hand. “Get your things ready, then take this and give it to him. He may insist on seeing her. But I’ll attend to that. You just be ready. Maybe he’ll just write a note, anyway. You do what I told you.” She turned back toward the stairs, fast, with that controlled swiftness, and disappeared. Then Jarrod opened his hand and looked at the object which she had given him. It was the metal rabbit. It had been gilded once, but that was years ago, and it now lay on his palm in mute and tarnished oxidation. When he left the room he was not exactly running either. But he was going fast.
But when he re-entered the lobby fifteen minutes later, he was running. Mrs. King was waiting for him.
“He wrote the note,” Jarrod said. “One to Louise, and one to leave here for Miss Cranston. He told me I could read the one to Louise.” But Mrs. King had already taken it from his hand and opened it. “He said I could read it,” Jarrod said. He was breathing hard, fast. “He watched me do it, sitting there on that bench; he hadn’t moved even his hands since I was there before, and then he said, ‘Young Mr. Jarrod, you have been conquered by a woman, as I have been. But with this difference: it will be a long time yet before you will realize that you have been slain.’ And I said, ‘If Louise is to do the slaying, I intend to die every day for the rest of my life or hers.’ And he said, ‘Ah; Louise. Were you speaking of Louise?’ And I said, ‘Dead.’ I said, ‘Dead.’ I said, ‘Dead.’ ”
But Mrs. King was not there. She was already half way up the stairs. She entered the room. Louise turned on the bed, her face swollen, with tears or with sleep. Mrs. King handed her the note. “There, honey. What did I tell you? He was just making a fool of you. Just using you to pass the time with.”
The car was going fast when it turned into the highroad. “Hurry,” Louise said. The car increased speed; she looked back once toward the hotel, the park massed with oleander and crepe myrtle, then she crouched still lower in the seat beside Jarrod. “Faster,” she said.
“I say faster, too,” Jarrod said. He glanced down at her; then he looked down at her again. She was crying. “Are you that glad?” he said.
“I’ve lost something,” she said, crying quietly. “Something I’ve had a long time, given to me when I was a child. And now I’ve lost it. I had it just this morning, and now I can’t find it.”
“Lost it?” he said. “Given to you …” His foot lifted; the car began to slow. “Why, you sent …”
“No, no!” Louise said. “Don’t stop! Don’t turn back! Go on!”
The car was coasting now, slowing, the brakes not yet on. “Why, you … She said you were asleep.” He put his foot on the brakes.
“No, no!” Louise cried. She had been sitting forward; she did
not seem to have heard him at all. “Don’t turn back! Go on! Go on!”
“And he knew,” Jarrod thought. “Sitting there on the bench, he knew. When he said what he said that I would not know that I had been slain.”
The car was almost stopped. “Go on!” Louise cried. “Go on!” He was looking down at her. Her eyes looked as if they were blind; her face was pale, white, her mouth open, shaped to an agony of despair and a surrender in particular which, had he been older, he would have realized that he would never see again on any face. Then he watched his hand set the lever back into gear, and his foot come down again on the throttle. “He said it himself,” Jarrod thought: “to be afraid, and yet to do. He said it himself: there’s nothing in the world but being alive, knowing you are alive.”
“Faster!” Louise cried. “Faster!” The car rushed on; the house, the broad veranda where the bright shawls were now sibilant, fell behind.
In that gathering of wide summer dresses, of sucked old breaths and gabbling females staccato, the proprietress stood on the veranda with the second note in her hand. “Married?” she said. “Married?” As if she were someone else, she watched herself open the note and read it again. It did not take long:
Lily:
Don’t worry about me for a while longer. I’ll sit here until supper time. Don’t worry about me.
J. M.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “About me.” She went into the lobby, where the old Negro was pottering with a broom. “And Mr. Jarrod gave you this?”
“Yessum. Give it to me runnin’ and tole me to git his bags into de cyar, and next I know, here Miss Louise and him whoosh! outen de drive and up de big road like a patter-roller.”
“And they went toward Meridian?”
“Yessum. Right past de bench whar Doctor Jules settin’.” “Married,” the proprietress said. “Married.” Still carrying the note, she left the house and followed the path until she came in sight of the bench on which sat a motionless figure in white. She stopped again and re-read the note; again she looked up the path toward the bench which faced the road. Then she returned to the house. The women had now dispersed into chairs, though their voices still filled the veranda, sibilant, inextricable one from another; they ceased suddenly as the proprietress approached and entered the house again. She entered the house, walking fast. That was about an hour to sundown.
Dusk was beginning to fall when she entered the kitchen. The porter was now sitting on a chair beside the stove, talking to the cook. The proprietress stopped in the door. “Uncle Charley,” she said, “Go and tell Doctor Jules supper will be ready soon.”
The porter rose and left the kitchen by the side door. When he passed the veranda, the proprietress stood on the top step. She watched him go on and disappear up the path toward the bench. A woman passed and spoke to her, but she made no reply; it was as though she had not heard, watching the shubbery beyond which the Negro had disappeared. And when he reappeared, the guests on the veranda saw her already in motion, descending the steps before they were even aware that the Negro was running, and they sat suddenly hushed and forward and watched her pass the Negro without stopping, her skirts lifted from her trim, school-mistress ankles and feet, and disappear up the path herself, running too. They were still sitting forward, hushed, when she too reappeared; they watched her come through the dusk and mount the porch, with on her face also a look of having seen something which she knew to be true but which she was not quite yet ready to believe. Perhaps that was why her voice was quite quiet when she addressed one of the guests by name, calling her “honey”:
“Doctor Martino has just died. Will you telephone to town for me?”
Fox Hunt
AN HOUR before daylight three Negro stable-boys approached the stable, carrying a lantern. While one of them unlocked and slid back the door, the bearer of the lantern lifted it and turned the beam into the darkness where a clump of pines shouldered into the paddock fence. Out of this darkness three sets of big, spaced eyes glared mildly for a moment, then vanished. “Heyo,” the Negro called. “Yawl cole?” No reply, no sound came from the darkness; the mule-eyes did not show again. The Negroes entered the barn, murmuring among themselves; a burst of laughter floated back out of the stable, mellow and meaningless and idiotic.
“How many of um you see?” the second Negro said.
“Just three mules,” the lantern-bearer said. “It’s more than that, though. Unc Mose he come in about two o’clock, where he been up with that Jup’ter horse; he say it was already two of um waiting there then. Clay-eaters. Hoo.”
Inside the stalls horses began to whinny and stamp; over the white-washed doors the high, long muzzles moved with tossing, eager shadows; the atmosphere was rich, warm, ammoniac, and clean. The Negroes began to put feed into the patent troughs, moving from stall to stall with the clever agility of monkeys, with short, mellow, meaningless cries, “Hoo. Stand over dar. Ghy ketch dat fox to-day.”
In the darkness where the clump of pines shouldered the paddock fence, eleven men squatted, surrounded by eleven tethered mules. It was November, and the morning was chill, and the men squatted shapeless and motionless, not talking. From the stable came the sound of the eating horses; just before day broke a twelfth man came up on a mule and dismounted and squatted among the others without a word. When day came and the first saddled horse was led out of the stable, the grass was rimed with frost, and the roof of the stable looked like silver in the silver light.
It could be seen then that the squatting men were all white men and all in overalls, and that all of the mules save two were saddleless. They had gathered from one-room, clay-floored cabins about the pine land, and they squatted, decorous, grave, and patient among their gaunt and mud-caked and burr-starred mules, watching the saddled horses, the fine horses with pedigrees longer than Harrison Blair’s, who owned them, being led one by one from a steam-heated stable and up the gravel path to the house, before which a pack of hounds already moiled and yapped, and on the veranda of which men and women in boots and red coats were beginning to gather.
Sloven, unhurried, outwardly scarcely attentive, the men in overalls watched Harrison Blair, who owned the house and the dogs and some of the guests too, perhaps, mount a big, vicious-looking black horse, and they watched another man lift Harrison Blair’s wife onto a chestnut mare and then mount a bay horse in his turn.
One of the men in overalls was chewing tobacco slowly. Beside him stood a youth, in overalls too, gangling, with a soft stubble of beard. They spoke without moving their heads, hardly moving their lips.
“That the one?” the youth said.
The older man spat deliberately, without moving. “The one what?”
“His wife’s one.”
“Whose wife’s one?”
“Blair’s wife’s one.”
The other contemplated the group before the house. He appeared to, that is. His gaze was inscrutable, blank, without haste; none could have said if he were watching the man and woman or not. “Don’t believe anything you hear, and not more than half you see,” he said.
“What do you think about it?” the youth said.
The other spat deliberately and carefully. “Nothing,” he said. “It ain’t none of my wife.” Then he said, without raising his voice and without any change in inflection, though he was now speaking to the head groom who had come up beside him. “That fellow don’t own no horse.”
“Which fellow don’t?” the groom said. The white man indicated the man who was holding the bay horse against the chestnut mare’s flank. “Oh,” the groom said. “Mr. Gawtrey. Pity the horse, if he did.”
“Pity the horse that he owns, too,” the white man said. “Pity anything he owns.”
“You mean Mr. Harrison?” the groom said. “Does these here horses look like they needs your pity?”
“Sho,” the white man said. “That’s right. I reckon that black horse does like to be rode like he rides it.”
“Don’t you be pityin
g no Blair horses,” the groom said.
“Sho,” the white man said. He appeared to contemplate the blooded horses that lived in a steam-heated house, the people in boots and pink coats, and Blair himself sitting the plunging black. “He’s been trying to catch that vixen for three years now,” he said. “Whyn’t he let one of you boys shoot it or pizen it?”
“Shoot it or pizen it?” the groom said. “Don’t you know that ain’t no way to catch a fox?”
“Why ain’t it?”
“It ain’t spo’tin,” the groom said. “You ought to been hanging around um long enough by now to know how gempmuns hunts.”
“Sho,” the white man said. He was not looking at the groom. “Wonder how a man rich as folks says he is”—again he spat, in the action something meager but without intended insult, as if he might have been indicating Blair with a jerked finger—“is got time to hate one little old fox bitch like that. Don’t even want the dogs to catch it. Trying to outride the dogs so he can kill it with a stick like it was a snake. Coming all the way down here every year, bringing all them folks and boarding and sleeping them, to run one little old mangy fox that I could catch in one night with a axe and a possum dog.”
“That’s something else about gempmuns you won’t never know,” the groom said.
“Sho,” the white man said.
The ridge was a long shoal of pine and sand, broken along one flank into gaps through which could be seen a fallow rice field almost a mile wide which ended against a brier-choked dyke. The two men in overalls, the older man and the youth, sat their mules in one of these gaps, looking down into the field. Farther on down the ridge, about a half mile away, the dogs were at fault; the yapping cries came back up the ridge, baffled, ringing, profoundly urgent.
“You’d think he would learn in three years that he ain’t going to catch ere Cal-lina fox with them Yankee city dogs,” the youth said.
“He knows it,” the other said. “He don’t want them dogs to catch it. He can’t even bear for a blooded dog to go in front of him.”
Collected Stories Page 53