You fool, to stand here on the edge of hell and listen to dead voices, to her dead voice.
You did so stop on those stairs, though, that night in Cleveland many years ago, and Lucy Crofts did call down to you as you stood hesitating whether to bother to go back and turn on the lights of the car:
“Well, aren’t you coming up?”
At that time you would rather hear Lucy’s voice than any other sound in the world.
You decided, after the fiasco that evening at the theatre, that chorus girls were impossible anyway, that the thing to do was to find a nice Cleveland girl and take her for a mistress. While smiling since at that decision of a youth of twenty-five, you have also been puzzled by it. You were conscious of no aversion to marriage, either in theory or as a specific and practical solution. In fact you do not seem consciously to have thought of marriage at all. Can it be that within you was a hope which you did not dare to articulate, that Erma might again change her mind? At that moment she was away on her first visit to Europe; that is certain, because you reflected that you might have met a likely candidate at her house if she had been there. You had received a letter from her.
You went over your scanty list of friends and acquaintances; there was no one.
Of a late afternoon, as you walked from the office in Pearl Street to the Jayhawker Club, where you dined sometimes with Dick but usually alone, the sidewalks were filled with girls. Working girls, high-school girls, fur-coated girls, fat girls, slender girls. In a swift comprehensive glance your eye would note each of them, label them, devour them. Sometimes you would see one that looked a little like Jane, and your heart would be warmed and hungrier than ever. Walking or driving about in the evening after dinner, again they were there, in front of theatres, coming out of restaurants, on the sidewalks.
You knew that three out of five of these girls could be picked up, for Dick had said so.
The easiest way would be with the car. You began to leave the office a little early, get the car and drive around the Square, up and down Euclid Avenue, through the narrow crowded crosstown streets. You had often seen it done; one drove slowly, against the curb, and at just the right moment, with a quick direct glance, one said in a low tone, rapidly but clearly, “Hello, want to ride?”
You never did actually pronounce those words. They never came out, though a thousand times they were on the end of your tongue. Once a grinning toothy woman in a red hat called to you, “Hello, dearie, want a passenger?” You felt yourself blushing clear to your collar as you pretended not to have heard. There were other solicitations, but that sort wasn’t what you were after. You decided that the car was too public and too obvious, and you tried it on foot, with no better results. You did make some attempts, but either you didn’t speak loudly enough or they thought you were talking to yourself; no one seemed to hear you, except the girl in Hahn’s bookstore, who did not reply but looked directly at you with amused disgust, as though you were a monkey scratching itself. You were indignant, and crushed.
Late one rainy afternoon in April, you were driving the car slowly along Cedar Avenue, aimlessly aware of the wet glistening pavements in the gathering dusk, the clanging street cars, the forest of bobbing umbrellas on the sidewalk at your right. Under the dark umbrellas white faces were in sharp contrast, some so close you could almost touch them, eyes glancing momentarily at you with a cold and impenetrable indifference.…
Suddenly there was a sharp cry ahead, and other shouts of alarm as you automatically jammed your foot on the brake and the rear wheels skidded gently to the curb. You jumped out. Almost under your front wheels a girl was being helped to her feet. In an instant you were there beside her, helping another man hold her up. She was half laughing and half crying. A crowd was collecting around you.
“It’s my fault,” the girl was saying. “I’m not hurt. I stepped right in front of the car. Where’s my music?”
A search disclosed a black leather roll lying in a puddle of water against the curb. You picked it up and handed it to her. The other, a big man with a red moustache, was still holding her arm. She pulled herself away.
“Really I’m not a bit hurt. I’m glad you found my music. Heavens, it’s soaked!”
“I’m terribly sorry,” you said. “That’s the first time I ever hit anybody.”
“I don’t think you really hit me, I think I just slipped. Goodness, I’m soaked too. I can’t go like this. I’d better get a cab.”
“There’s a stand just down the street, I’ll get one,” said the man with the moustache, and pushed off through the crowd.
“I’d be glad to take you if you’ll let me,” you offered hurriedly. “I promise to be careful not to kill anyone.”
She looked at your face, and down at her dress. “I suppose I’ll have to go back home. It’s quite a distance.”
You grinned, assured. “Anything this side of Painesville.”
“I’ll get your car all dirty. Look at me.”
You helped her brush the water and mud from her skirt as well as you could, helped her in the car and wrapped a robe around her. The crowd had begun to drift away into the forest of umbrellas. Just as you drove off the man with a moustache arrived in a car, and the girl shouted her thanks at him. Even raised thus above the din of the traffic her voice was clear and young and pleasant.
She gave you the number, far out on Rosedale Avenue, and said that she was afraid it was an imposition.
“I haven’t a thing to do,” you assured her. “I have all the time there is. I was just fooling around watching the rain.”
She gave you a quick glance and sank back into a silence which was scarcely broken during the long ride, except when she directed you to the best route. You wanted to talk but were afraid of making a false step. She was quite young, you guessed not over eighteen, and very pretty. You couldn’t see her now, under her big drooping hat; you were determined to drive carefully. Once she mentioned her music roll and glanced at the rear seat to make sure it was there, and said something about having been on her way to a lesson. You asked her, violin, and she said no, piano. That was about all. A sense of embarrassment; which had not been there at all when you started, seemed unaccountably to develop as you rode through the gathering twilight.
Finally you drew up at the curb in front of a large house set behind a wide lawn. It was still raining.
“My name is Will Sidney,” you said abruptly. “I work downtown. I’m the assistant treasurer of the Carr Corporation. I wonder if you would care to go to the theatre with me sometime?”
She looked directly at you and said promptly and simply: “I’d like to very much.” Suddenly she smiled, “You know I’ve been arguing with myself the last ten minutes whether you’d say something like that to me.”
“I didn’t decide, only I thought you might, and then I didn’t even decide what I would say. I really would like to, only it wouldn’t be easy, because I live here with my uncle and aunt and they are very strict with me. Much more than my father and mother, but then of course a big city is different from the country.”
“You could tell them we met somewhere.”
She frowned. “I don’t know. I could tell them something.”
“We could meet downtown and you could tell them you were going—oh, anywhere. We could have dinner downtown.”
“I couldn’t do that.” She frowned again. “If they ever found out it would be awful. I’ll tell them I met you at Mr. Murray’s. Then you phone someday and then we’ll decide.”
“Couldn’t we decide now?”
No, she thought the other way was better. It was arranged. You wrote down her name, Lucy Crofts, and the telephone number, and the name of her uncle, Thomas M. Barnes. Then you unwrapped the robe and handed her the music roll and helped her out, and she ran through the rain across the sidewalk and up the gravel path.
On your slow way back downtown and through your leisurely dinner your mind played all around her. You pictured her in your arms, you composed in fancy a dozen scenes of capitulation and devotion; or, turning to cool realism, you decided that she was a little country prig and that it would be best to forget her. Underneath all this surface play-acting and intellectualizing there was herself and her genuine impression on you, already faintly manifest, especially the loveliness and the integrity of her voice. You were irritated that this genuineness kept intruding itself into the free play of your fancy.
Next day, at the lunch hour, you went to the Hollenden and got tickets for a play the following week; but you waited four days before telephoning her, as agreed. By that time you were in an agony of expectancy, and inexpressibly relieved when you heard her voice telling you it was all arranged.
“But I changed it a little. I couldn’t say I had met you at Mr. Murray’s, and anyway they might have seen the car out front, and I had to explain why I was such a mess and why I hadn’t had my lesson, so I just told them all about it. I suppose Uncle will want to talk to you, but it’s all right.”
She couldn’t come to dinner; you were to call for her at the house at a quarter to eight. You supposed you were in for an extended interview with an aggressively protective uncle, and were tempted to call it off; but when the evening arrived it proved not to be so at all. You did meet the uncle and aunt, but only for a brief introduction in a dim parlor, and they seemed friendly and unconcerned.
When she took off her hat at the theatre, and patted her hair and looked around at the audience, you realized that she was even better looking than you had thought, and a little nearer maturity. She had a great mass of light brown hair, coiled in braids at the back of her head; she seemed more hair than anything else when you glanced at her with her face turned towards the stage. When she moved her head to direct her frank grey eyes at you the braids became only a subordinate frame for the smooth wide brow, the straight, small positive nose, the not too large mouth with its full red lips. She was excited and interested in the play; she had been to the theatre only three or four times in her life, she said.
On the whole the evening was a disappointment. She didn’t care to go to supper afterwards, and driving home through the spring night she talked mostly of her father’s farm near Dayton, until she learned that you too came from downstate, when she wanted to know all about your father and mother and sisters and brother. She had three brothers, two older than herself, but no sisters. She said that Jane must be very attractive and that she would like to know her; she had often wished she had a sister.
At dinner that evening you had decided that at a minimum you would kiss her goodnight at parting; but as she stepped out of the car at the curb without waiting for you to help her, and held out her hand, nothing seemed more violently improbable. You drove off feeling dignified and aggrieved. You reflected that she certainly was nice, and attractive, you had seen lots of people looking at her in the theatre, but that was nothing in your pocket. She hadn’t even thanked you for taking her; probably she didn’t know she should. “Good lord she spent twenty minutes telling about a calf that some damn cow she called Sapho had down on the damn farm.”
A day or two later, receiving through Dick an invitation to a dance at the Hollenden, you phoned Lucy and asked her to go. That was more like it. She danced well, and so did you; and it was especially satisfying to keep her mostly to yourself against the protests of those smart and assured young men among whom you had felt so inept and insignificant. You looked around at the girls, no less smart and assured, and were amused to see here and there one who had been on the list of candidates you had made up, and rejected. At the time the reasons for some of the rejections had been dubious; now you looked at Lucy and said they could all go to the devil. She was indeed charming, fresh and lovely; if you had not been there she would not have wanted for partners. Dick danced with her once and afterwards observed to you:
“If she needs her shoes shined or anything and you’re too busy let me know.”
On the way home Lucy said:
“They’re pretty silly. I had a wonderful time. This is the latest I’ve ever been out. Of course I’m only nineteen. Mr. Carr dances very well, but not as well as you. You dance much better than I do.”
This time you helped her out of the car and went up the gravel path and unlocked the door for her, and though the kiss seemed as improbable as ever you felt neither dignified nor aggrieved.
You took her to the theatre again, several times, and to another dance or two. On one of those occasions you were invited by Mrs. Barnes to dine with them, and on the appointed day you called for Lucy late in the afternoon at the house on Orchard Avenue where she took her piano lesson, and drove her home. You were no longer inventing fancies about her or imagining easy triumphs; with her the pose of a triumph had become absurd.
Lucy’s Uncle Tom was a shrewd little man with a bald head and pleasant brown eyes. He was in the wholesale grocery business, and was also a director in a small neighborhood bank out on the edge of the city. That evening in the parlor before dinner he said that he didn’t want you to think he was careless about his niece; he had looked you up all right, and had been informed that you were one of the steadiest and most promising of the city’s young businessmen. “Very satisfactory,” he said, “and very typical of the new century. When I was your age I was behind a little grocery counter down in Greenville at four dollars a week.”
There was none of his blood in Lucy. Aunt Martha, who was the sister of Lucy’s father, with all her serene acceptance of this childless household as her authentic anchorage, had a little the air of having sometime or other missed a boat somewhere. You felt pretty sure she didn’t like you, though you were always cordially welcomed by her. Lucy, obviously, she idolized. As you got up from the dinner table that evening she said:
“Seems to me your parties begin about the time they ought to be over. Don’t you dance till you’re all tired out again. You’ll bring her home early, won’t you, Mr. Sidney?”
Uncle Tom and Aunt Martha bored you completely.
Towards the end of May Lucy began to talk of going home for the summer. In three weeks, she said, her music teacher would leave for Europe, and she was going home to the farm to remain until he returned in the fall. Or perhaps she would then go to New York; she supposed that was really the best thing to do, if her father could be persuaded. Just now she wasn’t much concerned about it, what she wanted was to get away from the city, which she never really liked.
“I’ve heard of a place down south of here,” you said. “Down near Cuyahoga Falls. A deep canyon, with walls two hundred feet high, quite wild. Let’s go down there next Sunday. We can drive it in two hours, easy.”
Her aunt and uncle didn’t like the idea, but they knew that a whole generation was against them, and early Sunday morning saw you off with a huge lunch basket and a thermos bottle of coffee. A leisurely two-hour drive through the sunny fields and villages brought you to the crossroads which Schwartz had described, but you had a good deal of trouble finding the canyon, or rather the approach to it. You had to park the car at the edge of a little wood and explore on foot. Finally a narrow path led you to the brink of a precipice, almost sheer, down which a descent apparently had to be made by clinging to roots and saplings. There was evidence of its having been done. At the bottom was a clear rapid stream, with grassy banks and trees, so far down that the tops of even the largest trees were quite a distance below. You stood at the edge and looked doubtfully at the almost perpendicular trail.
“It would be simple if it weren’t for this darned basket,” you observed. “Do you think you could make it?”
“Sure, easy,” she declared. “I’ve slid down haystacks all my life, that’s nothing. Let me take the basket.”
“I expect I’d better go first,” you replied, ignoring the offer, and not at all offended by it, for there was no irony in her. “So if you fall I can catch you. I’ll manage the basket.”
You always shrank from heights, and you were more than a little frightened, but with her grey eyes on you over you went, clinging to a sapling, having first made the basket secure with a belt around your shoulder. Lucy came immediately after, and you scrambled down as fast as possible, with her keeping so close above you that you were every instant afraid she would slide into you and bump you loose. A dead branch came off in your hand and you caught wildly at a projecting rock, and Lucy called to you to be careful not to break the thermos bottle. Suddenly and surprisingly you were at the bottom, upright and unhurt on the soft green grass, with the little stream rushing merrily by, and Lucy was beside you. You looked at her face; it was flushed a little with exertion, and beautiful and friendly.
“I didn’t break the thermos bottle,” you grinned.
“No, wasn’t it fun! This is lovely, I wish we’d come here before. Doesn’t it smell good!”
She bent down to the stream and washed her hands, and took your handkerchief to dry them.
You left the basket under a tree, and together explored the gorge downstream a mile or more, to where it narrowed and the stream became a torrent between two straight cliffs of rock, impassable. You threw twigs into the shallows above and watched them disappear, whirling, into the foam. The sun, now almost directly above you, filled the gorge with a soft golden warmth almost like midsummer.
“I’m hungry,” you observed.
“And lunch a mile away,” said Lucy. “Good heavens, what if someone has taken it!”
You raced back along the bank of the stream, jumping over rocks and fallen branches, arriving laughing and breathless to find the basket still there untouched.
You liked to watch Lucy eat. You had remarked this to yourself before, and now, sitting on a rock in the warm sun, with her in front of you on the grass, you munched sandwiches and looked at her. You remembered how Mrs. Davis used to nibble uncertainly at the thin little sandwiches she would sometimes bring from the pantry, after you and she had got yourselves arranged again and returned to the sitting-room. You remembered Erma’s nervous gestures with her knife and fork, and her habit of always starting to say something just when a bite had been scooped into her spoon or impaled on her fork, leaving the morsel of food cruelly suspended just short of the fulfillment of its destiny. More especially and vividly you remembered Millicent with the candy you gave her, how back and forth from the box to her mouth her slender little fingers would go, deftly, silently, methodically, remorselessly. Now that movement appears to you monstrous and horrible; then you were amused by it. You were at the time enthusiastic about Omar, and you made a parody and recited it to her:
“The Moving Fingers light. And having lit…”
She had no idea what you were talking about.
You liked to watch Lucy. She sat there on the grass with your sweater under her, and the sandwiches and pickles and cake disappeared, and as far as her consciousness was concerned she obviously might as well have been picking wild flowers or sewing on a button. Beyond that was her grace, the leisurely precise movements of her small strong hands, the flash of her white teeth biting out a neat and considerable semi-circle with unaffected conviction.
“It’s funny there aren’t any violets around here,” she said. “Do you suppose we’re too late? It seems just right for them. There’s a hillside down home, not far from the house, that’s always covered, every year.”
“Do you know yet when you’re going?”
“June nineteenth, that’s two weeks from Tuesday. I’ll be glad to go, but I’ll miss you. I’ve been in Cleveland two winters now and everybody’s been very nice, but I’ve never really liked anyone I’ve met there except you.”
You moved from the rock and knelt to pour some coffee from the thermos bottle. She leaned over to hold the cup and there was her face close to you, and you turned a little and kissed her on the mouth. She took the kiss, briefly but completely; then not at all startled she drew away and said quietly:
“You’re spilling the coffee.”
So you were; a thin trickle was running directly into your shoe-top. To set the bottle down and put your arms around her, as you wanted to do, seemed suddenly too complicated. You filled a cup and handed it to her.
“That’s the first time anyone has ever kissed me,” she said, quietly as before.
“Not really!”
“Of course.” Her grave grey eyes shone a little humorously. “I guess it’s the first time anyone ever wanted to.”
“Not your father or brothers?”
“Oh, that. On the cheek maybe.”
“But—you don’t mean—there must have been boys—”
She laughed. “Once a high school boy tried to and I turned away so quickly my hatpin scratched all the way across his cheek. He thought I did it on purpose.”
“Did you like me to kiss you?”
She sipped her coffee without replying.
“Did you like me to kiss you, Lucy?”
“Yes, I liked it.” Then a little hurriedly as you moved to her side and bent over her, “But don’t do it again now. I think probably I would like to be kissed very much. I’ve often wondered if you would kiss me. I know I like you, I know I care for you.”
She took your hand in hers and held it tightly, and before you realized what she was about raised it and pressed it to her lips. Then she sprang up and away, laughing, and dared you to catch her, knowing well you couldn’t. You tried, though, and when you tripped over a fallen limb and fell headlong you gave it up and went back to your cup of coffee, now almost cold.
A week later you drove into the country again, but it rained most of the day, and early in the afternoon you surrendered and returned to a roadhouse just outside the city, wet and chilled and hungry. Lucy didn’t seem to mind it, but you were unduly miserable, and when she asked you what was the matter you observed gloomily that it was only a little more than a week before she would be gone and you would be alone.
“Alone!” she exclaimed. “You have more friends than I ever heard of.”
“I haven’t a real friend, anywhere, except you.”
She was silent. Her eyes were on you with their curious trick of saying nothing and yet offering all their secrets.
“Where are you going this summer?” she asked suddenly.
You replied importantly that you had to work.
“Don’t you get a vacation?”
“Oh, I suppose I’ll go down home for a week. I could get a month, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to do. I might go to New York. I’ve never been there.”
Another silence. Finally she said:
“Would you care to come down to our place? It’s very nice there in the summer. I’ll teach you how to milk and I’ll let you ride Babe.”
This was surprising; it hadn’t occurred to you even in your numerous fancies; but now that she said it, it was so natural and obvious that it almost seemed as if you had deliberately planned it.
“But I couldn’t,” you protested. “Your folks never heard of me. It would seem funny, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, I’ve told them all about you. Anyway it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t. There won’t be anyone there except Father and Mother and Jim. They’d love to have you.”
“I don’t know,” you said doubtfully. “Maybe you could write to your father and make sure it would be all right.”
You knew that of course you were going. It meant nothing to you but that you would be with Lucy, which was enough. You can see clearly now how true that was from the beginning to the end. She was the only person you have ever known who needed no justification beyond herself. What she did and what she said never seemed of the slightest importance as compared with the vital fact of her being. You could not now tell what she wore on any occasion, not even the color; you probably could not have told immediately after leaving her presence, though you do commonly notice women’s dresses and can recall numberless ones, of Erma, of Jane, of Millicent, even some that Mrs. Davis wore twenty-five years ago—especially the changeable silk that you tore one day, and she cried, and then laughed when you pretended to sew it up. What did Lucy wear? She always had on large hats, but so did everyone else. You don’t remember what she wore at dances, You don’t even remember what sort of dress it was she took off, that remarkable afternoon.…
Of course, all this wouldn’t prove anything about Lucy but for the fact that it is you. Take Dick, probably Dick has never observed a woman’s dress in his life, except to notice whether it was easy to unfasten, and not even that unless it was an immediate and practical problem. He has never been interested in meanings or even appearances, nor in the moral or imponderable implications of an act, only in the activity. That summer, when you told him you would like to take a month away from the office, he was completely indifferent to your intentions until their specific probabilities amused him, and not even in that until his own active intentions had been disposed of.
“Sure, I took it for granted,” he said. “But I hope you haven’t anything arranged. Three or four of us are going to the North Woods and let the flies eat us up, and we’re counting on you to go along. Harper and Pete Moreland and maybe Slim Endicott. Leave about the middle of July. I should have told you before. You’ll come, won’t you?”
You were tempted; particularly you were pleased to find that Dick had figured you in as a matter of course; you had suspected that on the whirling disc of his widening regard and interest, with its ever-increasing momentum, you had begun to slip a little away from the secure center towards that edge whose jagged saw-teeth you had more than once already seen in action. You were relieved to feel yourself as safe as ever, but this put you in a dilemma.
“I did have something planned,” you said hesitantly. “I wish I’d known about this, I’d certainly like to go. Now I don’t see how…I was figuring on being away all of July.…”
“Oh, forget it. We’re going to catch all the fish there are north of the Great Lakes. Four canoes and a whole tribe of guides—Harper’s arranging it, he’s been up there before. Come on, we’ll have a regular damn flotilla.”
You seemed undecided; you were tempted, but you knew very well what the answer would be. Dick went on:
“What were you going to do, go down home? You were there Christmas.”
“No. Oh, maybe for a week,” you replied. “I thought I might go to New York, but Lucy Crofts invited me to spend a month down at her home near Dayton.”
Dick’s eyes opened wide. “The hell she did! Why you old Romeo. You’d better watch out, Bill. She’s the kind that gets chronic.”
“Maybe she already is. I’ve told her I’ll come.”
“You’ll go all right. I’m not so sure I wouldn’t pass up the North Woods for that myself, but I’d get sick of it in a week.”
He grinned, and went on:
“You know, she turned me down flat. Out at the Hampton Club, about a month ago, you remember, you brought her of course, I asked her to go to dinner and a show, and she said she couldn’t. I told her to make it any old day she wanted, and she said no, and I asked her what she had against me, and she said nothing at all, she just didn’t want to go. She handed the same package to Charlie Harper.”
So Dick had tried to take her away. And that big bum Harper, that big fathead…well, that was all right. Nor was there any code which warranted the indignation and resentment you felt against Dick, but you felt it.
“It will be all right then for the first of July?” you said.
“God bless you. If you ask me I think you’re hooked. Not that she’d insist on your marrying her, any more than a bottle of wine insists that you get drunk. That’s just the way it works.”
That evening, the eve of her departure, you told Lucy you would come for the entire month of July.
You resented Dick, you resented all of them, you resented anyone knowing anything about Lucy. You were sorry you had ever taken her among them. But Dick particularly. You have never understood where Dick really is within you, he is too deep somewhere. Where would he finally be found if somebody cut you open and sorted out all those entities and personalities that have become imbedded in you? In the gall, perhaps. In the heart, god is there anyone in the heart? Jane, Lucy, Larry—a ghostly hall in which always someone was but no one ever is. “You live in my heart.” What a dirty cheat, that’s where you die! Not that Dick was ever there. You see now that that feeling of resentment has never been absent, not from the first day. Or is it that your present fury, diffused backward over all the years, deceives you?
That’s an amusing fancy, that idea of cutting you up and finding people where they belong. It should be an accepted routine, the result to be read at the funeral. “Ladies and gentlemen, the official autopsy. Heart, empty, except for unrecognizable vestiges. Liver, John Doe and Richard Roe. Gall bladder, the following thirty persons…Stomach, Mrs. Hetty Hill, widow and chief mourner. Reproductive glands, the following seventy-one.…”
Well. Yours wouldn’t be so far off, if you were really as mad as you seem, here now. You go on, you open the door, you kill her, dead, forever dead. Then they kill you. That seems neither real nor possible, and of course it isn’t. You add this exquisite masterpiece to all the other enigmas of conduct you have presented to yourself, what are you doing here?