There has not been one major experience in your life in which you were the aggressor. You have never even invited one. At the bottom of the sea there are said to be organisms against which food must float by the chance of nature if it would be devoured and assimilated—strange and stubborn masochism down in the slime beneath the oceans. Without its counterpart, infinitely more intricate and subtle, here on the crust, infused even into nature’s supreme two-legged achievement, you would have perished long ago.
The Davis affair was her doing. Each crisis in your economic and business life, which means the Carr Corporation, has been so little guided by you that you might as well have been at home asleep. The fact of your not marrying Lucy Crofts was determined by a Cleveland street car which, a little behind its schedule, refused to stop when you waved at it. In all the weary kaleidoscope of your life with Erma there is not a single picture that was composed by your will. With Jane, nothing; Larry, nothing; Dick, also nothing—except that one amazing episode which not only contradicted timidity but indicated also an aggressiveness and a violence of will unique and inexplicable. It fooled Dick and it fooled everyone but you; you were merely bewildered and still are. It is impossible that it could have been you who slapped the Mule in the face, stood up to him and blackened his eye, and got the name of Battling Bill.
It is curious that Dick never mentioned Millicent again, not then or at any subsequent time, not even when it was generally known that Old Prune had spoken to you about her, and some of the other fellows were not so reticent. Can it be that he shared—but that neither he nor she would tell you, and there’s no sense in beating your brain about it. At the time you appreciated his silence and sensitiveness.
It is curious too to reflect that but for your knightly ardor in defending her innocence little Millicent might have gone on indefinitely rolling up your soiled shirts, however wisely and terribly and never have touched you. But it is unlikely and it would be intolerable to believe it. If that was pure chance, sheer accident, then there is no slightest significance in anything and life is nothing but an obscene hocus-pocus.
It was your bruised face though that she first touched, as you reclined in the big armchair, still none too comfortable on account of your ribs, after you had been confined to your room for a week.
“I’m sorry you got hurt,” she said in her thin even monotone.
“Thanks. So am I. And I’m sorry there isn’t any candy for you. The fellows ate it all up the other night.”
She was gently rubbing your still swollen jaw, her fingers firm and sure and alive.
“I don’t care. What was you fighting about?”
“Oh, he called me a liar and then he said he could lick me.”
“Could he?”
You started to grin, but your bruised muscles and bones brought you up.
“Don’t I look like it?”
“Yes. You look pretty bad.”
“Your hand feels very good. You ought to be a nurse when you grow up.”
“No. I hate sick men. That ain’t why my hand feels good.”
You were suddenly aware that you didn’t want her to tell you why. You moved your head a little, and she took her hand away and gave a sharp little sigh.
Thenceforth the course of that business proceeded, slow, insidious, inexorable. The details of its progression are now mostly blurred and vague, more so than other contemporaneous affairs, for instance your friendship with Dick. Where in fact was the evil? To judge not from your own scanty experience, but from what is freely discussed in technical jargon and whispered here and there in the vernacular, life can include a most strange and varied repertory without creating anything more damaging than a mild disquietude. Certainly not dishonor nor damnation. But god knows in this case the evil was there, and if it was not in the suggestive stillness of her little white face, or the constant concentrated expectancy of her dark eyes, or, above all, the somehow irresistibly thrilling movements of her hands and fingers, where was it? Was it after all in you? But where in the name of heaven did it come from? What put it there, and why?
Not to be explained.
Some of the later details are not blurred at all; you have in subsequent years so frequently repeated them in fantasy that you could more precisely describe that sequence of gestures than you could those of dressing yourself. Then, less than two years ago, like being awakened by thunder out of a dream which was caused by it, fantasy again became reality.…
The original awakening, which abruptly terminated the affair, was due merely to the existence of other realities than your own. You were completely unprepared for it, and that sunny morning as you walked across the campus toward the imposing new brick building behind the pine grove, in response to the summons from the dean’s office, you wondered mildly what was up.
Seated at his shiny glass-topped desk was Old Prune himself, appearing uncommonly disturbed, and in a chair facing him was a poorly dressed, tired-looking, but compact and energetic little woman whose face seemed vaguely familiar to you.
“Good morning, Sidney. I suppose you know Mrs. Moran.” Old Prune was brusque with irritation at the unpleasant task. “She has made a complaint about you which she says is based on information she has received from her daughter.”
You were stunned. The woman saved you by breaking in:
“It ain’t exactly a complaint. As I said, if it’s all a story it ain’t Millie’s first. I just want to ask Mr. Sidney about it.”
“I’ll do the asking, Mrs. Moran.” And to you, “Have you been guilty of misconduct with this young girl?”
How fortunate that surprised indignation too is incoherent! You stammered, “No, sir. I—I’ve given her candy, of course. No, sir.”
“It’s you that gave her the candy then,” said Mrs. Moran gloomily. “That mixes it all up again, for she says that the gentleman that gives her the candy is nice and handsome, but wouldn’t do anything his mamma told him not to. She told your name, sir, when I had her by the ear, and she stuck to it, though it was afterwards I noticed it was there on the package on the chair ready to go back to you and it might have come into her mouth that way. But it was in one of the books you gave her.”
“I never gave her any books.” Nor had you, as was evident from your tone.
“You didn’t!” Mrs. Moran sank back discouraged. “Sure, the little devil has mixed it all up.” She sat up again. “Do they call you the Donkey?”
“No. I don’t think there’s anybody called the Donkey. There’s a fellow they call the Mule.”
Afterward you wondered why you had been fool enough to say that.
A few more of Mrs. Moran’s questions and observations made it evident that little Millicent had so confused the issue and more especially the identity that almost anyone might be involved, including two or three members of the faculty. Old Prune was disgusted and became skeptical. He would probably gladly have told Mrs. Moran to go home and mind her own business and lock her brat in the cellar, but there was too much explosive in this material for that, particularly since it appeared that Mrs. Moran had been sent to him from the president’s office, where she had first carried her tale. In the end he arranged with her that he should question Millicent himself, and you were dismissed with what almost amounted to an apology, and with a strict command to speak of the affair to no one.
You were pretty sick, and the vague uneasiness which had been constantly with you for many months was now acute and intolerable; but you did something that was for you rather clever. You calculated that if you had been innocent you would almost certainly not keep still about it, and that therefore if you observed the dean’s imposition of silence it would bear an implication of guilt even with him. So you imparted some of the details, here and there, selecting the recipients with due regard to the requirements, and overnight the morsel was being rolled around on a hundred palates. Unquestionably it would get back underground to Old Prune, whose chief concern then would be to suppress the unseemly tale.
Summoned again to his office a few days later, it was at once obvious that you had nothing to fear. Chiefly he was angry with you for letting the thing out, but he couldn’t prove it and had to accept your comments regarding other possible channels of publicity. The main charge was dismissed with a curt and not enthusiastic apology.
“I have questioned the girl,” he went on, “and discovered a prodigious native talent for mystification and obscurity. It would be beyond any human power to unravel the tangle she has manufactured. I make this explanation because it is due you. The incident is closed, and I hope the gossip also.”
Little Millicent, of course, was no more. You did not again hear on your door that firm low knock which you had grown to await with so sharp an expectancy. You were even compelled to make your own guess among the various rumors regarding her; the one that seemed most likely was that Mrs. Moran had been seen holding tightly to her daughter’s hand as they boarded a westbound train. By inquiry you might have learned more about it, but that was dangerous and not to be thought of; besides, it would have been pointless. She was gone.
That was only a month before your diploma and farewell, the return home, and the subsequent third visit to Dick in Cleveland.
You are not concerned to place blame either on that pale slim child or elsewhere; you would gladly assume it yourself if you could only feel that you are worthy of it. You would be proud to convict yourself of a pursuit and a seizure even of that shameful diminutive prey. But the will was hers, the first gestures were hers, it was her show. Superb spectacle, you! That’s funny; you were the prey.
It was so again with Lucy Crofts in Cleveland.
The very first days at the Cleveland office, before Dick went out to stay at the plant, are too dim for recovery. You were of course introduced to all the heads of departments, but you don’t remember any desk those first few weeks; you were a great deal with Dick. You have never had any trouble understanding what things were about, nor for that matter people either, and it was easy to see that Dick was pleased with your curiosity, your eagerness, and your quick comprehension. It encouraged him to offer you a certain defined authority, with the title of Assistant to the President, before he went away. You didn’t want it.
“I’m too young, Dick.”
“You’re my age.”
“You’re the owner. You’re god by the incontestable right of signed stock certificates.”
Dick didn’t like that quotation from one of your stories; he thought it was socialistic. He retorted:
“Nevertheless I’ve got to live up to it.”
“And nearly everybody here is old enough to be my grandfather. It would make them all my enemies right at the beginning.”
“They’re that already. They’ve been looking forward to me for ten years with dislike and suspicion, and now they find there’s two of me. That’s what it amounts to. A title more or less doesn’t matter. Anyway, I’m not going to the North Pole; I’ll be in at least once a week. But have it your own way. It’s unimportant.”
He was faintly disappointed.
The next day your name, in gold block letters, William B. Sidney, was placed on the door of a room across the hall from Dick’s, but you continued to spend most of your time in the various departments. The distribution of emphasis differed considerably from the present. Then, for instance, the only person concerned with publicity was the man with a moustache, at a desk back in a corner, who spent his mornings at the office of the Simmons agency editing copy which had been prepared for the trade journals. Now there is that elaborate room downtown occupied by the Public Relations Counsel with a salary not less elaborate than the room.
You made yourself a nuisance in the accounting rooms day after day, with eventually a fair grasp of the principles but never quite getting inside the details of cost distribution, depreciation and the like. Nothing was withheld; you learned the intricacies and dubiosities of rebates, territorial agreements, preferred contracts. Those were the days of early exploration in the possibilities of by-products; this you found more exciting and stimulating than anything else, and you missed another chance of action here, for, in spite of your lack of proper training, your intelligent and genuine interest might really have accomplished something. You had the thought, but you funked it.
The export department interested you too, but differently; it aroused your romantic imagination to handle those slips of paper which told of the shipment of thousands of tons of steel for the construction of a railroad bridge in the heart of the Malay jungle; you even wrote a story about it, those lonely evenings in your room, a biography of a bit of iron ore from the time it left the Michigan mine until, become part of a girder, it supported the foot of a hungry and inventive panther who decided to try out the possibilities of ambush in this strange new tree. You thought rather well of it and wanted to show it to Dick, but decided that it would be just as well not to.
Throughout the first months, and even years, you served as an information channel between Dick and the intricate parts of the vast organism he was getting into his fist. For that function you were well fitted and you fulfilled it excellently. Unquestionably, that bewildering mass of facts and movements and personalities was more rapidly and easily assimilated by him, strained through your quick and fresh observation and reaction, than if he had gone himself to the sources. Most important of all, for his purpose, was your intuitive feeling for men and their interrelations, though Dick learned to place reliance on it only after it had been variously and without exception verified by the event.
He would get in from the Carrton plant usually on Friday evening late, and you and he would go to the café on Sheriff Street, because he said he could relax there more easily than at home; an arrangement which suited you, for Erma would often be at home and you found it embarrassing. This was the period when the scene in the garden had apparently slipped her mind and she seemed entirely indifferent to you.
Dick, having ordered a three-inch steak, would gulp a stein of beer without stopping, lick the foam from his lips, settle back in the big leather chair and sigh contentedly.
“Well, how are the old Megatherii of Pearl Street? I’ve had a swell week—twelve hours a day—pretty soon I’m going to make it twenty. Like hell. I’m half dead. I’m going to take three of those ancient furnaces and throw ’em so damn far out in Lake Erie they’ll be nothing but pins in a bathtub. It’s not so much fun now there’s nobody left to fire. Old Skinner is gone, gave him a pension. He and Dad made the first coupling-pin west of the Alleghenies, or something like that.”
He looked far from dead; fresh and vigorous as a young bull. You felt overwhelmed.
By the time the steak arrived you would be reading from sheets of memoranda neatly arranged on the table before you.
“There are nine Class A companies in Utah and Colorado. In 1900 there were six, and three of them were on our books. Now none of them are, but one of them uses a little of our stuff through a Kansas City jobber. We haven’t any of the three new ones, one of which is tied up with Bethlehem. Net loss of two, practically three.”
“Who covers it?”
“It’s handled mostly by Byers from San Francisco, but Harper was in Denver and Salt Lake in 1907.”
“What does Jackson say about it?”
“His usual line; expansion, natural shifting of territory, drop one here and pick up another one somewhere else.”
“Not a thing unless Byers wrote some letters. Jackson never checks up on Byers, I think he’s afraid of him. He talks vaguely about an offer from Farrell he heard of once. We don’t have a thing on it here, not even a list of operations.”
“When did we lose them?”
“The last order from one of them was 1903, the other one 1905.”
It had taken you most of two days to dig all this out; it took only fifteen minutes for Dick to get it. But usually this sort of data was not communicated orally; he would take your memoranda to Carrton and devote his evenings to them. Together you would talk mostly about the men, their attitudes, their capabilities, their energies. You are astonished now to remember how impudently those two youths passed judgment on a generation, and how nearly right they usually were. Your own lack of discretion in those reports to Dick, which seemed bold and spirited but in reality proceeded from your immature disregard of implications and effects, made you many enemies. And a few friends, like Schwartz, who on your recommendation was placed in charge of an export section over the heads of older men.
For months, a year, two years, you found a live and exciting interest in all this. There were not many lonely evenings, for you commonly used four or five of each week digesting and arranging the day’s work, and were with Dick for the remainder. The happiest days of your life? That’s meaningless, but at least the days when you most nearly approached the joy of feeling that between you and life you were more a source than a receptacle. While he was away at Carrton, Dick arranged that one of his cars should be always at your disposal, and the arrangement was continued even after his return permanently to Cleveland, but you seldom took advantage of it. The social side of life he entirely ignored, refusing even to appear at Erma’s Sunday teas, and you were pulled along with him.
“You’ll both die of ingrown dispositions,” Erma would observe indifferently. “Damon and Pythias, victims of the Iron Age—I’ll erect statues of you in the Square.”
“Go on and deposit your dividend checks,” Dick would reply with equal indifference.
Gradually, after Dick’s return to Cleveland, you began to find time on your hands. Erma went to Europe and Dick closed the house and took rooms at the Jayhawker Club. He spent most of his evenings at the office, where you were usually with him, but he soon began to find friends among the young bankers and businessmen, and in this circle you somehow didn’t seem quite to fit, though you were always welcome.
There was the affair out at Courtney’s on the road to Conneaut. You wanted to go, and yet were reluctant.
“Come on, Bill, you’ve got to,” Dick insisted. “It’s my first blow-off in two years. My god, think of it, I haven’t raped a single duchess for two whole years. I don’t suppose you have either. Come along.”
You left town around midnight in two of Dick’s cars and four others. In your car were two young brokers whose names you can’t remember and four or five girls from the show at Wright’s Theatre which you had all attended. You drove, and one of the girls, short and plump, sat with you and kept saying:
“It’s too bad it isn’t moonlight.”
At Courtney’s, when the six cars had all arrived the gate was closed and the place was yours. Couples, already affiliated during the brief ride, began to drift away, only to be immediately reassembled in the main room where a long narrow table was prepared, completely covered with silver, glasses and flowers. The guests were seated, for the most part decorously, but with some confusion, for it appeared that the girls considerably outnumbered the men.
“I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere I wasn’t invited,” said the girl on your left in a loud challenging voice.
“Then you’d better go on home,” said the girl on your right, across the back of your neck.
You had never been drunk except once or twice at parties with Dick at college, and then more sick than drunk. Now you did not want to drink. You made no decision in the matter, you certainly were conscious of no feeling of revulsion or superiority, but you didn’t drink. The girls beside you tried to pour it down your throat, then finally gave it up and emptied your glass themselves. Dick by this time had a red-haired girl on his lap and was feeding her soup with a fork.
The feast dragged along, punctuated by toasts that were not heard, songs, a little dancing which grew more and more uncertain, shouts and screams, a game of leapfrog. Couples again began to drift away, but were called back peremptorily by Dick for what he said was to be the climax of the evening. Meanwhile he was furiously pulling off the stockings of the red-haired girl, who was giggling and squealing and trying to wriggle out of his grasp. She broke away and ran.
“Hey, Bill, catch her!” Dick yelled. “Catch her! Hold her!”
He proceeded to explain indignantly to all who would listen. It appeared that the red-haired girl had agreed to dance naked on the table for the sum of one hundred dollars and was now trying to repudiate her contract.
She called from the corner of the room, not at all drunkenly:
“I’ll do it for two hundred.”
“Hundred an’ fifty.”
“Two hundred.”
Dick started for her like an avalanche. “You little red devil, I’ll tear every stitch off your back!”
She sprang to the other side of the table and yelled at him:
“All right. One-fifty.”
Off came her dress, her petticoats, her corset. Somebody started the piano. Champagne bottles fell off the table as Dick lifted her up. Everybody cheered; someone threw a stick of celery at her. A man who tried to catch her foot as she danced got kicked in the face and went sprawling. Applause.
You stood a little off, alone, furious with yourself for your soberness and detachment. This was fun; this was real fun; what was wrong with you?
Hours later, driving back to Cleveland in the early morning sun, you thought that nothing could be quite as unlovely as the amorphous mass of your cargo, a loose and twisted face showing here and there, and you envied them.
About this time Dick put you in at the Jayhawker Club and suggested that you take a room there. You could easily have afforded it, for your salary had been doubled the first of the year, but it didn’t come off, though you never decided definitely against it. Dick didn’t insist. More and more you began to find time on your hands. You read a great deal, went to a show now and then with someone from the office, usually Schwartz, and would often drive out along the lake shore after dinner, or into the country, mostly alone. There was nothing much in any of this; you felt aimless and dissatisfied.
One evening you looked through the little red memorandum book and found Mrs. Davis’s Cleveland address, placed there six years before from the only letter you had ever received from her.
You supposed that she would probably have moved. In any event you couldn’t very well call, in the evening, when her husband would probably be at home. You thought of the telephone, and from the directory learned that she had moved and got the new address and the phone number. But the phone’s audacious immediacy repelled you—number, please…click, and there you are, after six years and all their content. You would have to write. You did so, on the letterhead of the Carr Corporation with your name engraved in the corner, asking if she would dine or go to the theatre with you.
There was no reply. Two days, three days, four days. The next afternoon you telephoned, and there she was. Her voice, perfectly. You were made aware that you were more deeply interested than you had suspected by the fact that your own voice trembled with excitement. Had she got your letter?
“Yes, oh yes, I got it, it was very sweet of you to send it. It was so nice of you to think of me.”
Would she—that is—how about going out to dinner?
“Well, you see, I’m afraid I can’t. Of course I could manage it I suppose, but there are so many things always to do, and I always eat dinner at home with my husband…”
You idiotically asked after Mr. Davis’s health.
You reflected that chorus girls, though terrifying and meaty in the mass, were not necessarily impossible as individuals; in fact you had seen some that were quite attractive. When Schwartz said it was his turn to treat and suggested a musical comedy, billed for the following week, you declined on some pretext or other and later got a single ticket as near the front as possible. Once there, the seat seemed much too close, the paint and wrinkles were terribly obvious, but there were three or four more than passable who looked young and capable of tender sympathy; you were sure that one of them smiled at you. When the curtain fell for their first intermission you decided that it was time to act. You didn’t leave your seat; the plan was to send a note by an usher, and you had made sure to come equipped with a dozen of your cards, a fountain pen and some small envelopes. But confronted with the moment the difficulties appeared insurmountable. You certainly could not call an usher to you and explain matters in full view of the entire audience. When the curtain went up for the second act you had not even written the note.
At the second intermission you sought an usher in the rear and in the lobby. The first one you found was surrounded by people who would certainly overhear you and smile at you; the second, alone in a corner, looked unapproachably solemn and forbidding. Clutching the note in your hand you went for a drink of water, and downstairs to the men’s room, then resumed the search. But the gusto was gone; you were like a hunter with all his cartridges soaked still watching wistfully and listening for the whirr of the rising bird. After the last curtain you went around and stood by the stage door, desperately summoning your courage, watching dark forms hurriedly emerge, until two men whom you knew suddenly came out with laughing girls on their arms, when you melted away. You thought that you had recognized the girl in front as the one who was to have received your note, but that was probably fancy, it was really too dark to tell.
You perhaps remember that evening so vividly because it was so complete, so neat and so characteristic. Your life in miniature, all in three hours. There have been others, only more extended, like the winter devoted so completely to Lucy Crofts, or like the summer, only four years ago, which you and Erma spent at Larry’s ranch.
It was Erma’s idea, suggested by a rodeo she saw in New York, and impelled of course by her constant restlessness. At the time you were on good terms with her, partly because of your gratitude for the splendid support she had given you in the difficulties at the office. You were a little doubtful of Larry, since the only news he had had from you since going west had been through Jane, but when his reply arrived it was most cordial and urged you to come.
The preparations interested you more than anything had done for years. Erma took seven trunks, one of them containing three saddles and a red bridle with silver studdings and bit set with turquoises.
When you finally arrived, late in June, riding a hundred miles from the nearest railroad station in an old rickety Ford, you were somewhat disconcerted by the bareness of the house and the absence of all accustomed conveniences. Erma thought it was charming. By comparing with the rest of the house the room that had been prepared for you it was easy to see that Larry had been at great pains to arrange for your comfort, and he was obviously pleased at Erma’s delighted appreciation. This same room, with its large double bed, was one of the causes of your discomposure. You and Erma had never slept in the same bed. She accepted it without concern, as one of the necessary hardships of primitive life.
Except for the cook, Maggie, the wife of the rheumatic half-breed who went around fixing corral fences and repairing saddles and harness, there was no woman within thirty miles. Erma thought that was charming too. By the third day she was perfectly at home, out at the branding chute, declaring that the smell of the burning hair was delicious, and coaxing Larry to let her handle the iron.
For you that summer was unique, a blessed piece of life lifted for you out of the general mess and made intimately and peacefully your own. In effect you were alone, with yourself, among the hills, the endless forests and the clear distances, for between you and Larry it was soon evident that there was nothing but the shadow of a bond, not even faintly exigent; and Erma, having got you there, cheerfully forgot your existence. You were content not to remind her. She and Larry seemed to have hit it off; she was given the best house on the place, and usually she was out riding the range with him or off for a day’s fishing if she could persuade him to go. At times you suspected that he was being a bit harried, but you had been chronically suspicious of Erma for so long a period that this was merely the continuation of a basic state of mind and not unduly disturbing.
You were in effect alone, and yet not alone, for Jane, who had been there the preceding summer, had described much of the surroundings so well that you were always recognizing spots that she had made hers. Riding along the narrow trails or exploring on foot a canyon inaccessible to your horse or splashing up the middle of Elk Creek with a fly rod, you were always feeling her presence and imagining her voice. You felt that all this perfectly belonged to her, which was odd, for it was as alien to the facts of her life as it was to yours. It was on Elk Creek one day, after you had eaten your sandwiches and cold coffee and were lying on the grass smoking a cigarette, that you had a peculiar and unnatural experience. You floated off into a fantasy about Millicent, something you had not done for a long time, and suddenly, nearing the climax, became aware that Millicent had gone and it was Jane! You were startled, horrified. You got up and washed your hands and face in the icy water of Elk Creek to get the grease of the sandwiches off your fingers and lips, and when you had got your rod ready and a new fly put on, you angrily observed that you were still trembling a little.
One evening somewhat later at the dinner table you noticed that Larry and Erma scarcely spoke to each other. All you got out of it was a faint amusement and an even fainter irritation, for you had long since grown accustomed to Erma’s talent for creating tensions with almost anyone when she was in certain moods. She was unusually voluble with you, telling of a calf that had fallen down a slide and got caught in a pine tree, where it perched bawling and kicking until it was yanked loose with a rope. Larry, who had done the yanking, remained silent, turning on a grin now and then as a concession to appearances. He went to bed shortly after dinner, and you and Erma soon followed his example.
Sometime in the dead of night you awoke out of a dream, a thing not at all out of the ordinary for you. You pulled the covers a little closer, turned over and recomposed yourself, and in a few moments were again half asleep. Suddenly you became aware that something was wrong, at least there was something you didn’t understand. You opened your eyes to the black night. What was it? You kicked out a foot. Erma wasn’t there.
At once you were wide awake, not at all startled, but awake. You thought she had gone to the bathroom and at the same moment remembered there wasn’t any. You heard a noise somewhere, a faint mumbling trickling through the thin bare walls. You started to call her name but instead lay silently a moment; then, without any clear thought in your mind, you got out of bed and groped your way to the door and softly opened it.
The mumbling instantly became voices, loud enough to be recognized. You tiptoed in your bare feet down the narrow hall, which with no windows was blacker even than the room had been, to the door of Larry’s room. The door was closed, but through its flimsy boards and the cracks between them the voices became words. You stood right against the door, beginning to shiver in the icy air of the mountain night.
“You’re a little fool,” Larry was saying. “My god, can’t you take a hint?”
Then Erma, somewhat louder and much more calmly:
“Come, Larry, you’re the fool. Why do you pretend I’m not attractive to you? Such conceit. Don’t you know that I made you kiss me the first time I decided it was worth the trouble?”
“The first and the last. Erma for god’s sake go. You’ve no sense of decency.”
“It would be nicer to kiss me now—like this.”
“You’re crazy! You must go! Bill might wake up any minute.”
“I’ve told you he won’t. Even if he does he’ll turn over and go to sleep again. Even if he knows—he isn’t like you, Larry—come—come—”
You heard a quick movement, and another. Larry’s voice came, “I tell you to go, I mean it,” and immediately you heard something that you would have given a great deal to see—a loud sharp slap, the smack of a heavy open palm, a quick angry ejaculation from Erma, someone bumping against a chair.…
You tiptoed swiftly back down the hall to your room, now almost freezing. You got into bed shivering and pulled the covers close around you. It seemed but a fraction of a moment before you heard the door open and someone enter. You lay as quietly as possible, trying to breathe evenly, while you felt the covers being pulled down at your side and Erma crawling in.
Here, you told yourself the next day, is the chance to do something with that woman. This is really too much. This is beyond forbearance; uncouth; utterly disgusting and degrading, and even she must feel it, here in the sunlight among the hills. Well, you could tell her that, and she, tortuous, might easily agree, and then what? As a matter of fact there was no point in all the abuse you heaped upon Erma and yourself. If she had no roots in you deep enough to hurt when she tried some transplanting you were under no compulsion to bleed. You have enough authentic grievances against yourself without hauling in pretended ones.
It has never been in her power to inflict on you the kind of suffering that withers the heart, nor the kind that compresses itself dangerously into an explosive. What if it were Erma up there now in that room; imagine yourself here on these stairs, equipped, desperate, with death in your heart! Bah, you wouldn’t even bother to slap her as Larry did that night. Ha, can it be done anyhow? Bitter dilemma. Schwartz’s hot iron. The irresistible necessity, not conceivably to be argued with, and at the same time the hopeless conviction that in all your flesh and bones and blood there is no such glorious violence.…