Seven

“OH, LOVE me, Jerry, love me hard,” she would say.

“I do love you.”

“You’ve got to, Jerry, you’ve got to!”

“I do, I told you I do!” he would say, and find, as he seized her by the shoulders, or took her hand, that a defiance, an irritation, had crept into his voice, even as it uttered the protestation.

Perhaps she would slip from his grasp, with that effortless, easy sway of her body, a motion as perfectly timed and controlled as a boxer’s, a kind of fluent sway from the waist and shift of the shoulders that always inflamed him and at the same instant set up in him a ground swell of undefinable unease. She would stand there before him, and his hand would still be outstretched. “You’ve got to,” she would say, soberly.

Or she would, suddenly, be in his arms, with an almost peremptory violence, and he would feel in the midst of her kiss the sharp, small, even edge of her teeth upon his lip. And once or twice, on such occasions, she had burst into tears, clinging to him with a shameless, awkward abandon, like a child. At these moments, seeing the tears spill so innocently from her eyes, a great compassionate tenderness would surprise him, welling up like a flood from an unsuspected depth of sincerity, sustaining him and exhilarating him with its full sweep. “I do love you, I do!” he would exclaim. And he would know that it was true.

But once, even as he spoke, that betraying openness had gone from her face, and with the tears wet and trivially irrelevant upon her cheeks, her expression had sharpened to a probing intensity as, leaning back in his arms, she had gazed at him. Then, detachedly, appraisingly, she had said: “Do you?”

“I do, I do!”

“Oh, Jerry, Jerry,” and she had clutched his upper arms, trying to shake him, “not that way. Different, different! Oh, Jerry, can’t you understand?”

What was there to understand, he would ask himself. But he could not frame the terms of the question for himself. Alone, at night in his apartment high up in the Macaulay Arms, the lights out in the room behind him, he would stare out over the lights of the city to the blackness of the country beyond, and turn the question over and over in his mind. Or he would lie in bed, his eyes on the dark ceiling, trying to define what he knew about her, and about himself. He would think back to the first time he had had her—months ago now—that night in her father’s library, the night before his trip to New York, and wonder what had made her do it. It had been her doing, all right. He sure couldn’t take the credit, he’d admit. Had she been stuck on him all the time? Well, if she had been, she sure had had a funny way of showing it. And before that night he’d never even laid a finger on her. Sure, he’d wanted to, all right, and who wouldn’t, the way she stacked up? But he sure God hadn’t been in love with her. He’d laid a finger on plenty of them he wasn’t stuck on. Yeah, he’d managed right well in this man’s town without having his little heart go pitty-pat. He’d had some pretty good innings, all right. But what had she been up to? If she had been stuck on him, she sure God had had a funny way of showing it. Before and after that night. Why, after he had got back from New York she’d treated him like dirt for weeks. Hell, it had taken him weeks to get to first base again. Not that he had tried, as a matter of fact. And with that thought he would experience a little flicker of satisfaction, of pride. He hadn’t had to take the sort of stuff she was handing out to him. Then, all at once, she had been sweet as pie. He had found her sitting in her car in front of his apartment hotel one evening when he came out on his way to dinner. “Take me to dinner, Jerry,” she had said to him, just like nothing had happened.

And he had. Out to a steak and chicken place, twenty miles from town. They had sure taken a long time to cover that twenty miles back, too. That had started everything again. Oh, that had been her doing again, just like that night in the library. And almost every time when the recollection of that night in the library came back to him, he would think, my God, suppose somebody had come, suppose Bogan Murdock had come! She must have been crazy. And he must have been. He couldn’t understand her, not a damned thing about her. And he couldn’t understand himself. But he had to admit one thing. She sure had him hooked now. She sure did; and always, the question, and its importance, would disappear in some compelling image of her, the way the wind whipped her hair glintingly back and her lips parted with excitement as they galloped their horses side by side across the pasture, or the way her lips would part slightly and her face seem to smooth and unveil itself to receive a kiss. The image superseded and mastered, effortlessly, all speculation. The truth was there, and he could depend on that. That was what he needed to know.

But the speculation might return, fleetingly, to him in broad daylight, or even when he was with her, or more especially, when he took her to her rehearsals at the University and sat back in the empty, dark theater and watched her up there in the formal lighted rectangular area as she walked, gestured, and professed sentiments and passions which were not hers. Or, how much were they hers? That thought, coming to him as he sat far back among the empty seats—and the emptiness of the theater heightened the illusion of the action, and gave him the sense of being a spy, of having caught a naked, privileged glimpse of privacies not decently to be observed—that thought made him feel, on the moment, insufficient and betrayed. It was a rehearsal of the last act of Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea, in which Ellida, discovering that the freedom of decision is her own, is suddenly redeemed from the mysterious power of the sea and of the stranger from the sea and can turn to her husband, crying out: “Oh—after this I will never leave you!” When, turning with that familiar fluent movement from the waist and shift of the shoulder, Sue uttered the words, her voice ringing with a free and pure fulfillment, he thought, that’s it, that’s it! That was what he wanted, and had not had, and now that fellow on the stage, tall, stooping, lumpy-faced, whom he had met but whose name he couldn’t remember, who was playing a part, could make her turn that way and cry out in that voice. Then, in the midst of his sense of inadequacy and betrayal, the thought came: How much of that was really in her, her herself?

“Well,” Sue said, as they stood among the actors and the hangers-on after the rehearsal, “I reckon I’m through with that silly bitch for tonight.” She lighted a cigarette, and as she put her hands to the left side of her waist to jerk her skirt into adjustment over the hip, she let the cigarette droop from her lips and held her head back, with her eyes almost closed, and took a deep, slow drag of the smoke, and let it seep from her nostrils.

“Let’s go eat,” one of the actors said, “let’s go down to the dog-wagon and get some hamburgers.”

“Sure,” Sue said, through the cigarette stuck between her lips and the cloud of smoke that puffed out unevenly with the words, “as soon as I get this skirt so it won’t fall off and leave me like a jay-bird. Damn it, I need a pin, or something. Or maybe somebody’s got a hank of barbed wire.”

They all laughed, easily, standing about, waiting.

“I got a corn plaster,” the tall, stooping, lumpy-faced boy affirmed; “you can plaster it on with a corn plaster.” And he produced a box of corn plasters.

They laughed again, Sue, too.

“I don’t have corns there,” she said. “I don’t have corns anywhere on this fair white flesh—” and she thrust her arms out theatrically.

There she goes, Jerry thought, there she goes, talking like that; she just talks that way around these people.

“—but I’m going to have corns, right between my shoulder blades, if you—” and she addressed the tall, lumpy-faced boy, “don’t quit rubbing the palm of your hand there every time you take Ellida into your protecting, powerful, manly, masculine, tender arms.”

So they all laughed again, their eyes seeking out the face of the tall boy, who flushed a little.

“Oh, don’t discourage him, Sue,” another boy said, “don’t discourage him; Jake’s just trying to branch out; he’s just finding a new interest in life!”

The tall boy was flushing, but his mouth was open in a fixed grin, which showed his extraordinarily white teeth; and above the grin, in the lumpy, arid contours of the face, the eyes were large, pale blue, appealing, fresh, and innocent, like pools discovered surprisingly in a sun-bit waste country.

“Well,” Sue affirmed, “he can find any new interest he wants in life. He can take up crocheting if he wants, but he doesn’t have to give me a Swedish massage.”

“Ibsen was a Swede,” the tall boy said, and laughed very loud, in command of himself now; “I’m just entering into the spirit of the play. I am just sensing the mood—”

Then, as the laughter began, Jerry, not laughing, caught Sue’s glance upon him, and he managed to grin, too, as though it all was amusing him and he was having a good time.

“No, Ibsen was not a Swede,” an even, detached voice said, and Jerry turned to see Slim Sarrett leaning against the wall, there in the shadows. No one, apparently, had seen him come in. “Ibsen was a Norwegian. That is, he was born at Skien, in Norway, though his father was German, Scotch, and Danish by blood, and—”

“Aw, shut up,” Sue commanded. “Lets go eat.”

The group moved to the door, and Sue came up to Jerry. “Drive me down to Rosemary’s place first,” she said. “I promised her I’d pick her up and take her out to have some coffee when we got through rehearsing.” Then she turned toward the group. “See you in a minute,” she said, “at the dog-wagon.”

Jerry followed her out, and they got into his car. Though it was not very dark there—there was a big light on a pole at the other end of the parking area—Sue leaned over and kissed him, slipping her hand under his coat and seizing the relaxed muscle just back of and below his left armpit. She hung there against him for a few seconds, her body twisted over on her left hip, her left leg crooked, and her right leg, pale in the shadow, thrust straight to a point just in front of the right door of the car, under the dashboard.

He heard some voices just beyond the evergreen hedge that bordered the parking area. He lifted up his head. “Somebody’s coming,” he said, and released his embrace.

“To hell with them,” she said, not moving. Then, when he did not lean again, she jerked herself to a sitting position. “All right,” she said, flatly, “let’s go.”

They drove across the campus, and then down a side street along the rows of dingy rooming houses. “Listen,” he said, “let’s shake’em pretty soon—” He was thinking of the place beyond the big stone bridge on the way to her house, the lane that turned off there with the cedars growing close down, “—let’s go early—”

“You,” she said, “can leave any time you want to, but I’ll leave when I’m ready. I can get somebody to take me home.”

“You don’t have to get sore. I just wanted to get you away, I wanted—”

“Sure,” she said, “you just wanted—You heard somebody coming, so your little heart went pitapat, and now you think—Oh, you needn’t try to make it up to me. You needn’t try to apologize—You just wonder, is somebody looking, is somebody saying something. You’re just like a rabbit, sometimes.”

He made no reply, staring sullenly ahead down the street, which was littered with dead leaves along the gutters.

“And you just don’t like my friends, that’s one thing.”

“Sure, I like them.”

“No, you’re just like my father. He doesn’t like them, either.”

“I like ’em all right,” he said. “I just don’t happen to have much to say to ’em.”

“Well, they haven’t got much to say to you, either.”

“Look here, they may be wonderful folks, but I—”

“Sure, they are. Rosemary, now, she’s wonderful. She really is. She’s poor and she’s crippled, but just because she’s poor and crippled, you—”

“That’s entirely unfair—” he began.

“Just because she’s poor and crippled—”

“Look here,” he said, “you know God-damned well I’ve been poor, plenty poor—”

“Oh, you’ll be rich,” she said, softly, “you’ll die rich, Jerry. You’ve got what it takes, Jerry. You’ll die rich, but—”

“Oh, hell,” he said, and slammed on his brake, and skidded the car in to the curb, and got out.

She got out without waiting for him to come around. She stood there, waiting for him, her legs far apart, her hands jammed down into the pockets of her light coat, which was unbuttoned, the rays of the street light falling whitely across her loose hair and across; her face. “But,” she resumed, “you’re a cripple, too. You’re an emotional cripple.”

She went quickly up the steps of the house, and entered its dimly lit doorway. Jerry watched her go, then inspected the house, dingy unpainted wooden gingerbread work on the porch and cornices, soot-streaked brick walls, a faint patch of colored light on each side of the front door, where the little panels of stained glass were. He looked down and saw the wooden sign stuck on a stob, askew in the sparse grass: Rooms. He knew what it would be like in there, and, involuntarily, he said out loud, “God, God.”

The door opened; Sue came out, and behind her, framed against the dim light, one hand clutching the door jamb for support, was the figure of Rosemary Murphy. The girls came down the steps, Rosemary prodding at the steps with her cane. Jerry was sure he could hear the creaking of her braces. He did not know whether to go forward and give her his arm. So he occupied himself opening the door of the car and holding it back, unnecessarily wide. “Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” the girl said, and added, “It was nice of you to come get me.”

“Oh, Jerry wanted to,” Sue said brightly. “He insisted on it. It was really his idea.”

The hell it was, Jerry retorted savagely to himself, and watched Rosemary while she transferred her cane to her left hand, teetering, clattering the cane softly against the metal of the running board, and while her right hand grasped the open door of the car. He could see, even in the light of the street lamp, how the veins stood out blue in her hand across the thin bones, and could sense a kind of desperate, wiry, clawing strength in the hand. And as he watched the hand, and even as he took her arm to assist her and she turned to him and quite naturally thanked him, he was torn by a kind of shame. But even in the midst of the shame, he reasserted to himself, The hell it was my idea to come get you, sister, the hell it was, and took some pleasure in the hardness he felt.

Hell, no, it was Sue’s idea, like so many of her screwy ideas, and sitting beside Sue as he glumly steered the car down the street, hating her, he wondered why in God’s name she had to have somebody like this hanging round. So she could boss them, that was it, he decided, so she could bully them, and try to cover it up in being so God-damned sweet and democratic. Dear Rosemary, sweet Rosemary, oh, so brave, darling Rosemary, he rehearsed to himself, and stole a look at Sue’s calm face, triumphantly thinking that he had her number, that she couldn’t fool him no matter who she fooled. Thinking that she wasn’t going to bully him.

There the others were in the dog-wagon, talking and laughing, sitting on stools along the counter, leaning forward, rattling the knives and forks, shoving each other playfully, laughing. “We ordered for you all,” one of the boys called out, “—hamburgers!”

“Good,” Sue said, and somebody yelled that he had been saving a place for her, and she was absorbed into the group, laughing, saying, “Darling, darling, blessed one,” to the boy who had saved her the stool.

Oh, she was the queen, all right, Jerry thought. Bullying them and saying “Darling, darling, blessed one,” in that phony voice he hated, which wasn’t her voice, which was a voice she never used except when she was with these phonies.

The hamburgers came, the plates clattering down on the counter, and the cups of coffee, the coffee sloshing out into the saucers. But the talking and laughing were unabated. The cook, unoccupied for the moment, leaned at the end of the counter near Jerry, his small eyes staring out of his broad, flat, animal face. A toothpick hung from the corner of his mouth, giving a jaunty cast to his broken nose. His hands lay on the counter, very big, extraordinarily white as though they had been bled, and thickly haired with silky black hair. The cook was staring at the group, dully, unembarrassedly, speculatively.

Slim Sarrett came down to the end where Jerry was, and took the last stool. “Mack,” he said to the cook, “this is Bull’s-eye Calhoun. You remember, don’t you?”

The cook turned his flat gaze upon Jerry, and seemed about to shake his head.

“You remember,” Slim continued, “he was All-American about six or seven years ago.”

“Yeah,” the cook grunted.

“And,” Slim turned to Jerry, “this is Mack Mann. Mack was a fighter once.”

Jerry set his cup down, and put out his hand. The cook took it.

“Yeah,” the cook said, “glad to meetcha.”

“Mack was a pretty good fighter,” Slim continued, evenly. “He had some good fights. He fought Leroy to a ten-round draw, he knocked Butch Haley out in the fourth, he stayed with Merry Morris all the way. He had some good fights.”

“Yeah,” the cook said, “but I wasn’t no good.”

“Mack knew a lot,” Slim continued, “and he has taught me a lot. I’ve won a couple of fights on what Mack taught me. But Mack was slow. He fought as a middleweight, and he was slow for a middleweight. You can sort of tell from his build he’d be slow,” and he eyed the cook, nodding. “He’s put on weight now, of course, but you can see he never had the right build. He had power, but there are a lot of fast boys in the middleweight bracket. Choppers. Mack just had to take a lot of punishment, and he couldn’t follow. It’s a pity, because Mack knew a lot.”

The cook took the toothpick out of his meaty lips, looked at it, then put it back in. “Yeah,” he said, “I knew a little something. But I didn’t know enough to stop.”

“Hamburger,” somebody yelled, and the cook turned away.

Slim nodded after him, saying, “He knew a lot,” and when Jerry did not answer, he continued, in the same voice: “How did you like the play?”

“I liked it all right,” Jerry said.

“The acting is rather good for this period of the rehearsals. Sue was quite good on that last beat. She has a real instinct for drama: I use the word instinct because she does not have an intellectual grasp of the medium. But she can rise to a moment, with a kind of self-abnegation, which means that she can get a pure effect. She doesn’t insist on being Sue Murdock. Whether she’ll ever turn into a really good actress depends, it seems to me, on achieving some sort of intellectual maturity—a capacity for understanding the structural line—” and his thin, long, sinewy forefinger traced an undulating line in the air, and his candid brown eyes then seemed to regard that line. “It is a matter of her intellectual grasp—don’t you think?” And he leaned in polite expectation for Jerry’s answer.

“I reckon so,” Jerry said.

“You don’t know a thing about it,” Sue affirmed pleasantly, “not a thing. And you—” she looked at Slim, “don’t either.”

“It is a simple proposition—” Slim began.

“Yeah,” the lumpy-faced, tall boy broke in, “you know so much about it, why don’t you try it? Why don’t you play Hamlet?”

“I don’t want to play Hamlet,” Slim said, not as a retort, but conversationally, patiently. “It does not interest me—acting, I mean—except in a purely secondary sense. It is a purely secondary and almost parasitic art, in any case. The special discipline is physical in a sense not true of the primary arts. Its discipline, as such, is not superior, I should say to that of a pretty good boxer—take Mack, here—” and he nodded in the direction of the cook. “And I happen to prefer to keep my special physical discipline disjunct from my esthetic discipline—from my poetry.”

“Nuts,” Sue said.

“And boxing,” Slim smiled, his upper lip lifting back evenly and precisely, almost as though at the request of a dentist, “enjoys, as a physical discipline, one distinct advantage over acting: you can observe the direct effect on your opponent.”

“I observed a direct effect on you after that Halleck fight,” the tall boy said. “I observed your left eye was a mouse.”

“Yes,” Slim said, and paused reflectively. “I did not earn better than a draw with Halleck. I did not use my head. If I had pushed him in the fifth—”

“For Christ sake!” the tall boy said, and stood up.

“Let’s go,” Sue said.

“Let’s go up to my studio,” Slim suggested.

The group, rising, hesitated.

“All right,” Sue said.

Damn it, Jerry thought, sullenly. They would go down to the river, to Slim Sarrett’s place and be there half the night, sitting round in that big attic room he called his studio, four flights up to get there, and going up slow, step by step, so they wouldn’t leave Rosemary Murphy, whose breath would be coming hard and whose braces would creak, and they’d sit around, on the floor mostly, and the floor so dirty you left your tail-print on it, with the copper pots and ash trays and greasy sofa pillows, and the parchment-shaded lamps, and the unwashed dishes, and the reproductions of paintings thumbtacked to the crumbling plaster of one wall and photographs of boxers in shorts with their gloves cocked, some of the photographs signed, and the cluster of old boxing gloves hanging above the fireplace, dry, shriveled up, crumpled-looking, dusty, like an enormous bunch of old raisins. Yes, damn it, they’d stay there half the night.

And they did, while Jerry sat propped back against the wall, hearing the excited talking, and occasionally answering some remark addressed to him, thinking how he had to get up early in the morning and how he wished to God at least he had a drink. It looked like they would yammer on forever, drink or no drink. And while they yammered, he looked at them, and they were sure a crummy lot to look at, and he thanked God he’d never got mixed up with any outfit like this when he was in college. And he wouldn’t be mixed up with them now, he thought, if it weren’t for Sue.

Then, late, he drove out of the city, Sue beside him, not talking, his eyes fixed on the empty, glimmeringly white, rushing, powerful sweep of the highway. Just as they crossed the stone bridge, she said: “All right.”

He did not reply, and did not lighten his foot on the throttle.

“All right,” she said again, her voice flat and hard now.

He’d be damned, he thought, not after the way she’d been going on, after what she’d said to him. And he felt a kind of surprising, victorious, clear-sighted ease in his detachment, in his freedom from desire. He had her number. He’d be damned if—

“Did you hear me?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said, “I heard you.” Yes, he’d heard her, and he told her so, and she could make what she wanted to of it. She could boss those others around, but she wasn’t going to boss him. She wasn’t going to boss little Jerry. There’d been a time he hadn’t depended on her for what he got, and by God, he didn’t have to depend on her now. What did she think he was, anyway? What did she think a man wanted? Well, he’d—

Then, suddenly, sitting up straight, she said, quite coldly: “I’ve got to.”

And her words rang in his head, as in a cave. She had to, and he had to, damn it, God damn it, he had to, and he knew he had to, and he knew he would, and damn her—but by God, he wouldn’t. He’d see her in hell first.

He tightened his grip on the wheel, his foot steady on the throttle, his eyes fixed straight on the road.

“Oh, Jerry,” she said, quietly, sitting up straight like a child, folding her hands on her lap and looking, too, down the spinning white highway, “I’m sorry I acted that way. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean what I said. And I didn’t want to stay with those people—I didn’t—I wanted to be with you, Jerry.” And she leaned slowly toward him, sidewise, her hands still folded on her lap, and let her head lie on his shoulder. “Oh, Jerry,” she said, moving her head slightly to and fro, as a sick person does on a pillow, “I don’t know why I act like I do.”

“Hell,” he answered, a little gruffly, the bitterness and, for the moment, the desire supplanted by a cautious happiness, a hopefulness.

“Something just gets into me,” she said.

“Hell,” he said, “forget it.”

“It’s just the Old Scratch gets into me, I reckon,” she said. “Just the Old Scratch,” she whispered, and, after a moment, giggled softly. Then she blew gently into his ear.

The car drifted almost noiselessly to the lane, turned off the pavement, and the big tires bit the gravel with a dry rustling sound, as it moved slowly between the black rows of cedars.

“You’ve got that blanket in the back, haven’t you?” she asked.

He said, yes, he had it in the back.

He blamed that gang she went with at the University. He reckoned there had been people like that around when he was there, there always would be, he reckoned, but he hadn’t ever known any of them. He told Sue he liked them all right. But he didn’t. He blamed them, at least in part. And he was pretty sure that Bogan Murdock blamed them, too, though he never heard him say a word to that effect. “He hates them,” Sue had told him, more than once, and he had replied, conciliatorily: “That isn’t exactly fair; he never says so, does he?”

“Say so!” and she had laughed sharply. “He doesn’t say things. He doesn’t have to. He just doesn’t say a word, and people do what he wants. Look at my mother. The way she is. God, I’d rather be dead, I’d—”

“Now, look here—” he said, and he saw Mrs. Murdock’s face, pale, chiseled, and flawless except for the tiny sharp V-shaped gathering between the eyebrows, the incipient, abstract smile which she would direct from face to face or, indifferently, to some far corner of a room, like the blurred ray of an almost burnt-out flashlight.

“I’d rather be dead,” she affirmed; then, viciously, “but I won’t be. And I won’t be bullied. I don’t care if he is my father. That’s it—”

“Now, look here—”

“—because he made me, he thinks he owns me. He makes something, then he sits back and looks at it. He sits back—just like sending that nigger boy Anse to college last year. And he says he’s going to send him up North, to Columbia or some place, next year. But does he do it now? No, he keeps him here this year, so he can look at him, so he can sit back and look at him. If I were Anse I’d walk out of this house and get drunk and go down to nigger town and get me the blackest, stinkingest nigger girl I could find and lie in the gutter, or cut somebody up with a razor, or something—But I wouldn’t stay here, and listen to him say, ‘Now, Anse, I’ve been thinking—’ Only he calls him Anselm, because Anse asked him to—Anselm, Anselm—” And she stopped, breathless.

Mr. Murdock had never said a word to him on the subject, but Jerry was pretty sure Murdock didn’t like those people from the University. Not that he’d even seen but two of them, Sarrett and that Murphy girl, whom Sue had brought out to her house a couple of times. And not that Jerry had been able to lay his finger on a thing the time when he himself had been present: Mr. Murdock smiling gravely and impeccably, shaking hands with Sarrett, offering the Murphy girl a chair, directing Anse to bring Scotch and soda. And talking pleasantly while the Murphy girl hunched on the edge of a big chair, her ankles in their metal braces crossed stiffly before her, and while Sarrett’s attention wandered from what was being said to the book-lined wall of the library, and while Sue, Who had refused a chair, stood at the window, with her back to the room, and stared out. There was nothing he could put his finger on in Mr. Murdock’s conduct.

That he had been right—yes, he knew he had been right all along, and was filled with a shrewd complacency—he discovered from Mr. Murdock’s own lips, a few days after Sue had agreed to marry him. “Yes,” Mr. Murdock said, “I am glad, Jerry. You are the man for her. You will be able to do—” He lifted his head and turned, his strong chin high, in profile, the line firm from chin tip down to the loose collar where the coarse dark-green tie was knotted, his gaze off through the window to some point on the reddening western horizon. He stopped, then began again, firmly, like a man who has faced a fact and made a resolution: “You will be able to do what I have failed to do. It is a sad thing for a father to say, Jerry, but it is true: I have somehow failed to be a good father to Sue. How, I don’t know. I wish to God I knew. I am not a devout man—no, not even religious in the ordinary sense of the word—but my failure with Sue has brought me more than once to my knees. It has taught me—” and he swung his head, deliberately, to face Jerry, as though he had steeled himself for a confession, “humility.”

The smoky-blue eyes, with the large black pupils, fixed upon Jerry, and Jerry looked into them, thinking how he had known this man a long time now, had known him to be kindly, tolerant, generous, had seen him, day after day, graceful and unaggressive in his quiet confidence of judgment or horsemanship—confidence worn like an old but good coat, without ostentation—had thought of him alone in this room by the window. And he thought how he had never suspected this other dimension, and was almost ashamed that he had not. He felt, suddenly, a warmth toward him such as he had never felt before.

“I have lain awake at night,” Murdock was saying, gravely, the eyes with the large black pupils not wavering, “but—” And he lifted his hands from his knees and let them drop, and smiled. He turned his face again to the window, and was silent for a moment, looking off to the west.

“She was a strange little package when she was a child,” Murdock resumed quietly. “Skinny and big-eyed and her hair loose—” And Jerry saw that face—he had seen it in the old photographs which Sue had showed one evening here in this room, sitting beside him on the couch, fumbling with the pile on her knees with a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth and the smoke curling up from it across her smooth, gold-colored, expressionless face, passing each photograph to him with a quick, contemptuous jerk of the wrist, saying, “God, I must’ve had the hookworm, look!” or, “God, I look like I was Saint Cecilia or somebody. I must’ve been constipated.” Now, on Mr. Murdock’s words, he saw that face as he had seen it in one of the larger photographs—when she was twelve or thirteen, she had said—the pale hair falling down evenly to the shoulders, with an almost carved, metallic look, to frame, narrowly, the face, which was lifted a little, as though in expectation, the eyes wide and candid, the lips parted slightly. Her lower lip, even then, he had noted, had had that slight, provocative fullness, that hint of disturbing, glistening laxness. He had noted, too, the way the white dress, in the picture, lay over the small, flat bosom, and he had felt a wild constriction of the heart, and a surge of tenderness, a sense of loss, and he had said, suddenly, “Sue—” and as she looked at him, he had waited for the words to take shape and come up out of the agitated depth within him. But they had not come.

But now, as Mr. Murdock spoke, he saw the face of the photograph, more real and compelling now, as though he shared the actual memory with the other man, and the constriction seized his heart.

“Yes, a strange little package. Sometimes, I remember, she’d hide out somewhere, in the barns or stables—once she crawled up under one of the tenant houses, and it built almost right on the ground, too, and lay there God knows how long in the damp and the filth—and everybody would be hunting her and holding up dinner. That time she got under the tenant house, we didn’t find her till late, way after dark, and we were frantic. We just happened to find her, because the nigger’s dog happened to get started barking at her up under the shack, and when the barking kept on so long we went back there. Then, of course, she’d have to be punished, some way. Not really, you know, but something to impress it on her mind. She never did do that often, of course, and not at all after she was nine or ten.

“But she never got along with her brother—she’d devil him. It’s comic now to look back on it, she was so cunning about it. And he was always sweet to her. He’s devoted to her now, you know, though he’s an undemonstrative boy.

“She was an affectionate child, too, though she’d go for weeks sometimes not showing it, playing by herself. But then I’d be sitting in here, and the first thing you’d know, she’d be right beside me—she’d just sneak in—and she’d grab hold of me and hug me, or maybe sit on the floor and put her head against my legs, and say, ‘Dockie, Dockie—’ She used to call me Dockie when she was little. She’d say, ‘Dockie, Dockie, I love you so much.’ And I remember a time or two when she woke up late at night and sneaked down, barefoot and in her nightgown, to find me and tell me she loved me. But—” He hesitated, lifted his hands again from his knees, and let them fall back. He looked out the window, then, again, slowly turned his head to Jerry, smiling wryly. “Somehow,” he said, smiling, “somehow something went wrong.” His gaze was sharply, probingly, on Jerry’s face, trying, it seemed to Jerry, to extort some reply from him. But he could think of nothing to say.

“Maybe,” Mr. Murdock said, his voice again even, “we should never have sent her away to school. Up East. But she was so set on going. And she wasn’t doing any good in school here; she seemed to have lost interest in everything, though she had made a lot of brilliant marks, off and on. She just lost interest in everything, it seemed, except riding. And she was so reckless. She’d put a horse to anything.”

“She’s good,” Jerry said. “She’s wonderful.”

“Yes, but it worried me to death. Sometimes, I’d be sitting in my office, and the telephone would ring, and I’d be afraid to pick it up, I’d be so sure—”

“Yes,” Jerry said, and saw her, with her hair flat on the wind, her face raised, her hands precise and close before her, and almost felt the cry forming in his throat as when he had called out desperately, “Sue, Sue!” She had not looked back, and at the very lip of the wash, she had risen in the saddle, as though releasing a great secret force of her own to be incorporated in the surge and lift of the animal’s haunches. She had made it. She had made it, but by a hair. He had seen the turf and dirt shear off from the farther lip of the wash, and the mare’s desperate, almost clawing lurch. He had ridden a little farther down the wash to the crossing, his stomach cold and his hands shaking with fury. He had crossed, and approached her. Her mare was standing quietly, the sides lifting and subsiding with beautiful pulsing, piston-like regularity, like a machine. She had not watched him approach. She had been looking back across the field, her hands lying idly before her, and her face smooth and peaceful with the sunlight striking across it. “God damn it,” he had said, “God damn it, you—” “All right,” she had said, flatly, distantly. “Don’t you ever—” he had begun, and she had turned to him. “And don’t you say a word about it,” she had said. “You’ll kill yourself, you’ll cripple yourself up, you’ll—” he had begun, but she had cut in, “What’s it to you?” “You’ll cripple yourself and that—” “And that’s none of your business. Rosemary’s a cripple—yes, and that’s why you don’t like her, oh, I know—but she gets along all right. Better than most people. Better than me. And—” her voice had subsided, “better than you, Jerry.” God, you couldn’t talk when she was like that. There wasn’t any use talking. They had sat their mounts, side by side, quietly, there in the middle of the field.

“But she was set on going,” Mr. Murdock was saying, “and I let her go. It seemed that she couldn’t get away soon enough. Naturally, a young girl would be excited, but her attitude hurt her mother. The last night, she had some people out here, invited them without telling us anything about it. Just thoughtlessness. But it hurt her mother, who wasn’t well then and couldn’t take her East. And I was too busy then to get away. But that night, after everybody had gone, and everybody was in bed except me—I was sitting here in the library—I heard the door open, and there she was, just like when she was a little girl, barefoot and in her nightgown. ‘Dockie,’ she said, ‘Dockie—’ That was the first time she’d called me that since she was little. And she came and sat on the floor and put her head against my knee.

“She made very good marks at first, and I wrote and told her how we had expected it of her. And I sent her a check, a right nice little check, to get her a new fur coat. But she didn’t get the coat, I found out later. She just frittered the money away. She stayed in Boston with some people named Thornton for Christmas. After Christmas her marks got so bad the school wrote. So I went up there, and she said she was just homesick, and wanted Sissie—that was the mare she had then—and if I would send her Sissie, she would be all right. So I did it, against my better judgment. But her marks got worse and worse, and she got into trouble with the school authorities about her riding or something, disobeying the rules. So she just walked out on them before the year was up. Just like her—she’s got spunk.” He smiled, and then continued, “Then she finished school here, and started to college, and got sick of it, and quit. I wouldn’t send her away again, unless she had put in a year at the University here. But she quit, and then she made her debut. She was awfully excited then for a little while, and happy. But it didn’t last. Right in the middle of the season she said she was not going to any more parties. She said she was sick of it. She’d met some of these theater people over at the University, or at the Drama Club in town or somewhere. And so—” He spread his hands, and looked at his long, brown fingers with the strong nails, which were cut short. He flexed them slowly.

“I don’t like them,” he said. He stopped, and began again: “No, I cannot say that I don’t like them. That would not be fair. I have only met two of them, that boy named Sarrett and the crippled girl. But I don’t think they are good for Sue.” He studied Jerry’s face. “Do you think they are good for her?” he asked.

“No,” Jerry said. “I don’t.” And speaking, he felt triumphant and secure.

“No,” Mr. Murdock said, “I didn’t think you did.” He continued to study Jerry’s face. “You haven’t spoken to Sue about the matter?”

“No.”

“Nor have I. But she accused me of not liking them. She called me—” and he smiled, “a snob. I’m scarcely that. Whatever may be my failings. Take Porsum, for example, one of my best friends. The Private was an ignorant mountain blacksmith, before he went to France, in the War. And now he’s a power in the State. He made his own way, and with what dignity, always. I think that the Emperor Tiberius was right in his reply to the courtiers who remarked on the poor birth of the favorite Rufus: Rufus is his own ancestor. I have always thought that a noble remark. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” Jerry said.

“No, it’s not that I’m a snob. Nor that you are, Jerry. It’s just that I think they are bad for Sue. Just as you think so. But there was nothing I could do. Something had happened, a long time back, and I cannot define it, but—and I must confess it—I have little influence with Sue. But you, Jerry, you will succeed where I failed. You understand her, I’m sure. And you can help her to come to terms with herself. To overcome this restlessness, this unhappiness—this—” he rose from his chair, very erect, his chin lifted, “this recklessness.”

“I don’t know,” Jerry began. I—”

Murdock had stepped to the side of Jerry’s chair. He laid his hand on his shoulder. “My boy,” he said. Jerry could feel the pressure of the fingers closing there, the pressure of each finger firm and distinct. “My boy,” he said quietly, “I know.” He released his grip, and stepped back. “I know that it will be all right,” he said, “for you understand her. And she loves you.” He moved away, toward the door, then stopped, and turned. “I cannot help but feel,” he said, “that underneath it all she still loves me.”

Before Jerry could say anything—he tried to find the words to say—Bogan Murdock had left the room.

Understand her? Maybe not yet, Jerry thought. Not yet, but there would be time. And he could wait. He could wait, and keep his eyes open. You waited, and you kept your eyes open, and you learned. He had done that before. He had waited, and watched, and he had learned things. And the time would come. He felt a little gush of pity for Bogan Murdock, who had said what he had had to say. But Bogan could take it on the chin, all right. You’d have to hand it to Bogan.

Sitting there in the library, which was shadowy now, alone, with his gaze off beyond the lawn and the distant lift of the fields, to the wintry red of the late sky, he felt relaxed, patient, and strong.

“I’ll have to hand it to you,” Duckfoot had said a long time back one day in his office; “they tell me you’re making time with the Infanta.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jerry said, laughing.

“They tell me that’s why Red Sullivan, four-letter man, high-point man in the SIAA Meet in 1923—or was it ’24—how time flies and what strong hand shall hold his swift foot back and the name is writ in water—what they tell me is that Sullivan, manager of our St. Louis branch, has taken to drink. Which, with the head start he had in that direction, means something. And all on account of your superior charm.”

“Nuts,” Jerry said.

“Well, keep at it, boy,” Duckfoot said, waving his long ivory cigarette holder. “But if I were you, before ever the banns get read, I’d make Bogan make a cash settlement on the bride. A nice little dot. Cash, not paper. Not a scrap of Bogan’s paper. Or some day you will be using it in the backhouse. And real property. I’ve got a great respect for real property, unencumbered, well situated, good drainage, good—”

“Nuts,” Jerry said, “I just go riding with the girl. Besides, the old man is going to marry her to the Prince of Wales.”

“So you think you’re not swell enough, huh?”

Then, in the midst of a surge of painful confusion and resentment, as though he had been spied upon, Jerry managed, somewhat bitterly and grudgingly, to say, “All right, if you want to put it that way.” And he lifted his head to stare belligerently into Duckfoot’s pale, candid, slightly satirical eyes.

“Hell,” Duckfoot said agreeably, “you raised the question yourself. I just put it in intelligible terms. Besides, you needn’t think it’s a secret between you and me. Half the town has got money one way or the other on it.”

“The old bitches,” Jerry said, and had a vision of women, of old women in black silk, the black silk tight or baggy over their swollen or thin bosoms, old women leaning over the cards held in beringed fingers and whispering, whispering, and their eyes were all fixed on him. And of young women, in bright dresses, with cocktails in their hands, leaning their slick heads together. The bitches, he thought, stung and savage.

“Oh, don’t you fret,” Duckfoot was saying, and grinning. “You’re got an ace in the hole. Don’t forget old Governor Calhoun. Pal, you come of a distinguished though impoverished family. Hell, don’t you know that a Governor in the family a few generations back when every politician was a Roman statesman and the res publica was untainted is enough to make any outfit a distinguished old family. If you play the cards right. Blood will tell. The Governor is all the straw Bogan needs to make his bricks. Hell, he don’t need any straw. He could cram a horse thief down the throats of the local rusty-butts, and make’em like it. And he’d enjoy doing it. One thing I’ll say for Bogan, he don’t let the old biddies make up his mind for him.”

Jerry felt the eyes of those clustered, leaning, female faces upon him, and hot and squirming, he knew that his face had flushed.

“But don’t you fret,” Duckfoot said soothingly, and waved his cigarette holder. “Just rely on the old Governor. Besides, such gross considerations will never be intruded into what, obviously, will be pure love.”

“I—” Jerry interrupted, getting ready to say he did not know what, ready to assert some hidden strength which he knew was in himself, feeling that he was ready to tell that lanky, spindle-shanked, grinning, pale-faced fool to go to hell and was ready to walk out the door, into the street and never come back into this building where the glass and bronzed gleamed and the elevators surged effortlessly upward and the heel rang on marble or sank richly into the carpet.

“It’s a cinch,” Duckfoot said, “it’s like ham goes with eggs, your black-browed and somber masculinity is the natural concomitant of what the society page will term her delicate blond beauty. Delicate—”

He let the holder hang from the corner of his mouth and held up his hands, the thumb and forefinger of each together, as though he exhibited a fine cord. “Pal,” he said, “did you ever try to clean your teeth with dental floss and find it was piano wire? But—” and he dropped his hands, “I don’t blame you. She is a slice of Eve’s flesh the like of which has rarely swum into my ken to throw a monkey wrench into my parasympathetic nervous system and make this learned old head toss on the midnight pillow. To comment upon one item—” He lifted his right arm and extended his pale, sepulchral forefinger to trace lovingly a light curve vertically in the air; and his eyes fixed intently, abstractedly, upon it. “One little item only,” he continued, “she has that narrow-sided, flat though sweetly molded little arrangement of the rear which is the despair of the corset maker’s art and which makes the palms of my hands feel like somebody had given me a dose of itch powder. It is an arrangement which one rarely encounters, and that, no doubt, is what keeps society on an even keel. I encountered such an arrangement once in my dead youth, and though the associated physiognomy well merited concealment in a pillow slip, the total effect was nigh disastrous for my intellectual career. The arrangement of which I speak is generally, I should surmise on the basis of my limited experience, accompanied by an almost acrobatic lissomeness and enterprise. You are perhaps aware of the special advantages of having the sole of a little foot placed transversely on the outside of each thigh some eight inches above the knee.—Ah, youth!—But, alas, the happy little contour to which I have previously alluded is not often discovered in the marts of trade. By which—” and he leaned back in the swivel chair, which creaked, and wagged his head at Jerry, “I do not mean the Stock Exchange, as you no doubt believed.”

“The hell I did,” Jerry said, and grinned. He could grin now.

“But now that love has come to Gerald Calhoun and brushed his heart with its regenerating wing, I reckon that toward three-thirty A.M. on Sunday mornings after we’ve wound up our poker session, you’ll go no more a-roving with me down toward the river where the player piano tinkles behind drawn shades.”

“Damn it,” Jerry said, “who said I was in love?”

“But you will be,” Duckfoot said, reaching up to scratch, fastidiously, with the little finger of his right hand the pale hair plastered down across his skull, “The setup is too perfect. I do not mean to be cynical. And I envy you. But you are shore-God in for a little restless ecstasy, and love’s sweet pain, for Sue Murdock is something to blow the fuses.”

“Sue’s all right,” Jerry said. “She’s a good girl.”

“Sure, she’s all right, and I envy you, but I ain’t the man to take the punishment. I wish I was. But girls like that Sue skeer me. They disorder my categories. I like everything tidy. It’s my mathematical mind, I guess. Tidy, and in its place. Now, take Ellie May. I know exactly where I stand. I take me five dollars and a bottle of argyrol and a handbag of home brew to give a festive touch and I go to see Ellie May. Once a week. Or in the season when a brighter crimson comes upon the burnished dove, maybe twice a week. Very tidy. No muss, no fuss. You see?”

“Sure, I see.”

“I never maintained that Ellie May would make thrones totter. And she is past her first blush of youth. But I know how I stand. And she’s so comfy. But you know Ellie May.”

Yes, Jerry knew Ellie May, all right. Duckfoot had taken him there, a long time back, to the little shot-gun bungalow set in a narrow yard marked out by scraggly privet, out beyond a warehouse on the north side of town, on the river. It had been raining, and the starlight glistened oilily in a pool of water which stood in one corner of the yard, by the hedge. Decorously, Duckfoot had introduced him to the middle-sized, chunkish but not badly built woman, thirty-odd, perhaps, who wore a baby-blue negligee and white, somewhat stained mules with pompons, and had a mathematically round patch of rouge, like a housewife on Sunday, on each pale but apparently firm cheek, and who smiled honestly with good teeth and round, unspeculative brown eyes. She looked like the negligee and the pompons didn’t belong to her. “This is my cousin Jerry, from the country,” Duckfoot had said, and Ellie May had said, “Glad to meetcha, Jerry,” and the other three girls who stood about in the tight, little sofa-cushioned parlor said, “Glad to meetcha.” Then Duckfoot had sat down and opened his handbag and taken out some bottles. He had passed the brew around, and they had sat around for a while before Duckfoot rose, picked up the bag with the remaining bottles, and went out with Ellie May. He had paused at the door, stooping his narrow head, and had said: “Now, girls, be nice to Cousin Jerry. But don’t try to provoke the cupidity of the flesh. Just talk about the crops. He’s from the country, and he’s keeping himself pure for the vicar’s daughter.” The girls had snickered, and one had said that she knew a poem about a vicar, whatever the hell a vicar was. The girls had agreed that Duckfoot was a card. They had sat among the sofa pillows and fringed-and-tasseled floor lamps, and had finished the brew, and hadn’t talked much. A man had come in and had taken one of the girls out. Another girl, not too bad-looking in a skinny sort of way except for a white scar on her cheek, had sat on Jerry’s lap and had pulled back his coat and with her lipstick pencil had drawn a heart over the pocket of his white shirt, while the other girl, not really a girl at all, but older, had watched distantly and preoccupiedly, like a stranger in a railroad waiting room. Jerry had not been exactly embarrassed, but that other woman kept looking at him that way, and after a while he thought, Oh, hell, and got up and went out with the girl who had the white scar but wasn’t too bad-looking. But he had wished that he had got that other girl the strange man took out.

“Ellie May makes me feel so homey,” Duckfoot had said that night, afterward, walking across the yard, where the pools of water glistened oilily in the starlight; and now, months later, with his feet cocked among the clutter of papers on the desk in his office and his shoulders sunk in his chair and his fingers laid skeletally and mathematically on his breast, like the fingers of a medieval brass on a cathedral floor, and the cigarette holder hanging from his thin mouth, he was saying: “It’s just that Ellie May makes me feel so homey. She don’t skeer me like girls like Sue Murdock. And when you pass the mezzo del cammin di nostra vita and the candle flame begins to shiver on the wick, you begin to appreciate that homey feeling.” Ellie May is the kind of woman I’d marry if I was the marrying kind.”

“I reckon so,” Jerry had said, laughing.

Jerry was to tell Sue, a long time after, what Duckfoot had said. “Duckfoot Blake said that he admires your flat little behind, but that you skeer him,” he told her.

She got up from her chair and put her fingers lightly on her hips, and revolved herself, slowly, before him, swaying a little, like a mannequin. “Do you admire it?” she asked.

“I’ll say,” he said, ungrudgingly.

She circled his chair, coming around behind him, and he turned his head to follow her. She thrust her small, sharp fingers into his hair, while he leaned back and tried to look up at her. “Do I skeer you, Jerry?” she asked.

“No,” he said, and laughed.

She leaned above him, like a mother, caressing his hair, and spoke softly: “Don’t I skeer you, Jerry? Not even a little?”

“No,” he said.

“Not a little bit?” she whispered.

“No,” he said.

“Jerry,” she whispered, and twisted her fingers in his crisp, strong hair, “somebody ought to scare the hell out of you.” And suddenly, she jerked his hair, hard.

He had lied. He had, even, lied to himself sometimes. But not always. Yes, she had scared him, sometimes. She had scared him by that wild jump over the wash in the field. She had scared him, differently, one rainy afternoon when he and she had been sitting in the library with her grandfather, who had a cold and couldn’t go down to the stables, in the wet, to be with the Negroes. They were not talking, just watching the fire and listening to the gusty rain, and the old man was sitting lumpishly in his chair, his swollen, yellow-clayey old hands folded on his paunch, and his big eyes blinking. “Grandpa,” Sue said, breaking the long silence, “tell me something. It’s something I’ve always wanted to know.”

“Hanh?” the old man demanded, swinging his head heavily, creakily, toward her, and blinking.

“Just this,” she continued, “what made you kill that man? You know, the man you killed?”

“Hanh?”

“What made you kill him?” she asked patiently, tenderly. “You know, the man you shot in the stomach, and killed?”

“I shot him, I—” the old man muttered, and heaved his bulk in the chair, and the swollen hands slipped off their perch to fall on the thighs, and the maned head twitched heavily at her. “I—” and he blinked.

“Yes,” she went on patiently, “yes. But why? What made you?”

“Goodpasture—Goodpasture—he said—” and the bulk heaved again.

“Yes, he said something about you in a speech. Yes, I know that. But what made you kill him? What was it really made you? Don’t you remember?”

“Goodpasture—he said—he said—at Essex—” Lem Murdock croaked lustily. “It was a crowd and he said—”

Sue was watching him, and when the croaking stopped and his big yellowish eyes blinked at her, she kept on watching for a moment before she resumed. Then she asked, still patient: “How did it feel, Grandpa? How did it feel to shoot him in the stomach?”

“He said—”

“How did it feel to shoot him in the stomach, Grandpa,” she asked, watching him, “and look at him lying there?”

Then, slowly, while the big, yellow-muddyish eyes blinked—and Jerry watched, fascinated and feeling himself horribly implicated beyond his will—the tears welled up, and one big drop spilled out of each eye and crept down the flesh on each side of the nose.

Jerry had risen abruptly and gone out of the house and stood under the high porch to look out across the fields where the rain fell.

And she had scared him, again differently—and the cold fright would come over him, tenfold in recollection—on those occasions when she had compelled him to take her there in the house, provoking him, wheedling him with a shameless innocence, accusing his love, cajoling him, calling him a hypocrite, impugning his manhood, daring him, until, anger and desire and humiliation mixed in him, feeling himself trapped in a complicated mechanism the meaning of which he could not solve, he would take her. There in the library, on the great couch in the shadowy drawing room, once in the upstairs sitting room, with people in the house, the sound of footsteps in the hallways, with Bogan Murdock in the house. And thinking back, he would feel the sweat break out on his forehead, and he could see how Bogan Murdock’s face would be, white-lipped, stony, deadly, and the black pupils of the eyes fixed malevolently, glitteringly, upon him. God, God, he would breathe to himself, and in the confusion of his fear and his gratitude for deliverance he would feel like making wild vows for the future, God, God, I’ll never, I’ll never, never—

Or that occasion when he and Sue had gone to get Rosemary Murphy and had found her room empty. Somebody had been in the next room. You could hear them moving about in there, through the thin wall. There had been the calsomined, peeling walls, the pine table with the good typewriter on it, the neat piles of papers, the single greasy, overstuffed chair, the shredded window shade and the streaked cretonne curtains, the lumpy bed covered by a splotched pink spread. There had been no latch on the door. “You could hear her coming,” Sue had whispered, “you could hear her coming up the stairs if she came.” And he had thought of the creaking of the braces; he couldn’t get the sound out of his mind, and with a revulsion and nausea, he had felt as though he clasped that other body, small, bony, twisted.

Yes, sometimes she had scared him, all right. He had to admit it to himself, sometimes. Hell, anybody would be scared, the way she acted, acting sometimes like the minute was all there was, like there wasn’t any yesterday and there wasn’t any tomorrow, or like what yesterday was or tomorrow would be didn’t have any connection, not a damned bit, and damn it, a man had to think about those things.