EVEN though one of the windows of the taxi was lowered slightly, she was hot. It was January, but the day was like spring, the early afternoon sun beating down on the glittering ditches along the highway slab and on the green winter pastures. Only the smoky leaflessness of the woods on the ridges to the west defined the season. A beautiful and promising day with a sense of slowly swelling, last-minute repose before the fecund stirring. But it was false. By night the snow might be moving up the broad valley, the flakes hissing at the surface of the river, swarming dryly among the leafless black branches on the ridges. Now, however, it was a bright, perfectly peaceful afternoon, and the taxi whirred evenly up the highway between the pastures. Not another car was in sight.
Sue threw back her coat, and in the act scrutinized again the dark-blue velvet of the dress she wore—blue velvet with a beaded embroidery around the skirt, and an embroidered collar. My God, she commented in her mind, fingering the beads. My God, suppose we had an accident and they picked me up wearing this thing. She looked down at her out-thrust feet, on which were the gold sandals which she had worn the previous evening, stained now from the damp and grease of the pavements down by the river. My, she thought, I look just like a whore.
But Rosemary wasn’t a whore, and it was Rosemary’s dress. It was Rosemary’s Sunday dress. A whore was sure one thing Rosemary would never be. God never meant Rosemary for a whore. Not the way Rosemary was. Rosemary could wear any dress and not look like a whore. She could wear this dress, and above all that beaded junk of the collar the eyes would look at you like there wasn’t anything you could do or say to hurt her or help her, and her face would be pulled and white like it had been washed in alum, and her legs would stick out from under that beaded junk on the skirt, with the braces.
It was Rosemary’s good dress, and Rosemary had made her take it. She began to pick at the beading on the skirt.
She had come, in a taxi, to Rosemary’s rooming house, just before light. The front door had been unlatched, as she had surmised it would be, and she had tiptoed up the dark stairs to Rosemary’s room. She had pushed open the door, gently, and holding it ajar, had peered in at the figure on the bed, which was illuminated by a little light from the street lamp outside.
Rosemary lay on her back, one hand laid across the covers on her breast, her mouth slightly open. She called her name several times, softly, until she opened her eyes and turned. Then she walked in, and closed the door, with her hand lifted to compel silence. She stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at the twisted covers, and said: “I want to stay here tonight. The rest of the night.”
Rosemary, half rising, shoved herself a little to one side, and seemed about to speak, but Sue said: “No, no, I don’t want to lie down. Not now, anyway.” She sat on the side of the bed, aware of Rosemary’s eyes fixed on her from the bedclothes, like the eyes of some small animal surprised in its hole or in the grass, and then looked at the streaks of light the street lamp made in the shredded window shade. She sat there a long time, knowing that Rosemary was watching her, and wondered how long it would take Rosemary to get up the nerve to ask her something. To ask her what was the matter. If anybody came in her room at four or five o’clock in the morning, she’d ask them something all right. But Rosemary didn’t say anything.
“I walked out on Jerry,” Sue said, thinking, I’ve said it, I’ve said it again, and it’s true.
“Oh,” Rosemary uttered sharply, as though struck by a sudden stitch of pain.
“I walked out on him,” Sue affirmed, with a touch of defiance now.
“Oh,” Rosemary breathed.
“He was sitting there, out at the club with a lot of people—God, how I hate those people, that slinky little slit-eyed Morgan girl, I hate her—and I just got up and I—” And she began to tell how it had been. At least, she tried to tell how it had been. The reason was slipping away, as if you tried to grab a handful of quicksilver. The reason—it was heavy and real and shining, but you couldn’t hold it. But the fact was there, and the fact of the horrible way she felt, like they had cut her open and taken something out. She knew she could go back to Jerry and she wouldn’t have to say a word about what had happened. She could just go to his apartment and sit and wait for him to come, and he would come in the door. And he wouldn’t say a word—not a word—and damn him, damn him, he wouldn’t say a word—it would be like nothing had happened, and that was the horrible thing, for something had happened, and he ought to say something, get mad and do something or say something, but he wouldn’t, oh, not Jerry! Oh, he would just act like nothing had happened. Oh, why, why couldn’t it be like nothing had happened? Why couldn’t she be what she had been, why couldn’t you ever be the way you had been?
“Go to him, go to him,” Rosemary was saying, staring at her, “go to him and apologize—”
“Apologize!” Sue echoed, and laughed almost soundlessly with a tight constriction in her throat, and laughing thought, apologize, apologize.
“Yes, yes, go to him and tell him you’re sorry!”
“But I’m not!” Sue burst out, “I’m not sorry. Not that way.”
“You mustn’t say that, you mustn’t,” Rosemary said, rising on her arm so that the bedclothes fell off her bony shoulders. “Not after you’ve been the way you’ve been with him. And he loves you. I know he loves you, and you love him—”
“I don’t love anybody,” Sue said, quietly, and watched with astonishment while Rosemary began to cry.
Rosemary sat up in bed, hunching forward, her shoulders bare except for the straps of the stringy pink nightgown, and the tears ran down her tight cheeks, and she reached out one hand gropingly and imploringly toward Sue. The hand touched her on the arm, seizing the fur of the coat, clenching on to it with those thin, schooled, steely fingers, and drawing her. She allowed herself to be drawn sidewise, leaning, until her head lay in Rosemary’s lap, the crumpled bedclothes against her face and Rosemary’s hands holding her and smoothing her hair and Rosemary’s tears dribbling down on her. She lay there like a stone, submitting herself to the grief which was not hers and which she did not understand, and wondered in self-revulsion why she always had to run to somebody, why she always had to spill her guts. After a while, lying there, she dozed off.
When Rosemary, still sitting up with bare shoulders in the cold room and holding her, shook her to wakefulness, it was daylight.
“I’m sorry,” Rosemary said, “but I’ve got to get up. I’m sorry to have to wake you up, but I’ve got an eight-o’clock class.”
Sue sat up. She scarcely remembered standing up to take off her coat and dress and kick off her shoes before she got into bed. The first shock of the sheet was cold, then she moved over into the patch of warmth which the other girl’s body had left, and let her head sink into the already dented pillow, which smelled faintly of face powder. Before Rosemary was ready to leave, she was sleeping like a baby.
Around noon, Rosemary woke her, saying she didn’t know but she thought maybe she wanted to get up. Yes, Sue said, she wanted to get up. Could she borrow a dress, she asked, anything, just something she could wear that wouldn’t hang out from under her coat like her evening dress, so she could go get a cup of coffee and go home.
“Yes,” Rosemary said. “Yes, if I’ve got anything you—you can wear—you—” She opened the wardrobe creakily, to exhibit the stuff hanging there. She fingered the several limp dresses, looking at them, then at Sue’s face, then back at the dresses. “I don’t know—I don’t know what—” and she hesitated.
“Oh, anything,” Sue said impatiently.
Rosemary took the Sunday dress out of the wardrobe, holding it carefully out from her body, toward Sue. “Will this be all right?” she asked, and with her free hand smoothed delicately the beaded embroidery of the collar.
“Not that,” Sue said, “something old, you know, just something.”
Rosemary, bracing herself against the foot of the bed, moved toward her, holding out the dress. “No,” Rosemary said, a hint of anxious humility in her voice, almost belied by a sternness, almost as of command, which her face showed, “take this one. You better take this one. If—”
“It will be lovely,” Sue said, and took the dress.
When she came back from the bathroom, Rosemary was picking up the evening dress, which had been flung to the floor, and was preparing to hang it in the wardrobe. “Hell,” Sue said, “don’t bother about that thing.”
But Rosemary hung it carefully in the wardrobe.
“I’ve got to go,” Sue said, “before my family gets out the police. If they haven’t done it already. But families don’t like to get out the police. It isn’t good advertisement. They’ll figure I stayed with one of the girls out at the dance, but they won’t like it.”
Then she added: “No, they won’t like it at all.” She turned to the door, and stopped. “Thanks for the dress,” she said, and went out.
She went to the corner restaurant, telephoned her home and told Anse, who answered, to tell her mother that she would be home soon, and got a cup of coffee, and called a taxi.
That was how it had been, and now, while the taxi whirred down the white slab between the sunlit pastures, she sat up very straight and thought, Why do I have to always spill my guts? Her fingers worked methodically, unconsciously, at the beading on the skirt. She got a bead off, and rolled it between forefinger and thumb.
“Turn in here, Miss?” the taxi driver asked, slowing down as they approached the stone pillars of her father’s gate.
“Yes,” she said.
The taxi moved up the winding drive, up the rise. There, flanked by the cedars and the leafless oaks, was the house, isolated, beautiful, the sun glinting on the white pillars, secure, shuttered, perfect. There was no sign of life there except a single wisp of smoke sprigged into the blue sky. She had lived there. She would go into the high hall and see herself in the big mirror.
She would go and change into riding clothes and get her mare and ride. She would ride, by herself, in the sunlight, across the open pastures and up the trail to the east ridge. At least, she could do that. Until night. By herself.
She paid the driver, and went to the door. It was not latched. She stepped into the hall, closing the heavy door softly behind her, and stood to listen. There was not a sound in the house. Then, almost with a sense of unfamiliarity, she moved across the hall to the stairs, and ascended. When she turned into the upstairs hall, she saw that the door of her mother’s sitting room was open. She hesitated. She knew her mother would be in there—she knew as surely as though she saw her lying there on the chaise longue, her pretty ankles crossed before her, her hands whitely clutching an opened book on her lap, her head lying back on the cushion, her eyes closed, or wide and fixed irrelevantly on a corner of the room, and the brow constricted slightly and the flesh of her face tautened, ever so delicately. Then she walked down the hall, approaching the door.
“Sue?” her mother’s voice called from the room.
“Yes,” she said. She stopped at the door, and leaned against the frame.
“Sue,” Dorothy Murdock began, and sat up on the chaise longue.
“Yes,” Sue said.
“Where were you? Why didn’t you—”
“I spent the night with a friend.” She let her coat slip from her shoulders, and stood there, letting it hang across her arm, with an air of patience.
Dorothy Murdock seemed about to speak, then did not, her eyes upon her daughter.
“Go ahead,” Sue said, “ask me who it was. If you don’t trust me. Go ahead and ask me. Father told you to talk to me. I know he did, didn’t he? Just as soon as Anse told you I was coming, you called him up, and he said for you to talk to me. Didn’t he?”
“Your father—” Dorothy Murdock began.
“Well, I’ll tell you and you can tell him. When he comes home. Or go ahead and telephone him. I stayed with a friend.”
Dorothy Murdock did not speak.
“Where do you think I got this dress?” Sue demanded. “Look at it!” She lifted her arms and half turned, like a mannequin. “Where do you think I got it if I didn’t borrow it from a friend? Does it look like one I’d buy? I wouldn’t be caught dead in it,” she affirmed. Then, when her mother still did not speak, but only looked at her, she continued: “Look at it. It doesn’t fit, does it? I’ll tell you why it doesn’t fit. It belongs to a cripple, and I’m not crippled—”
“Oh, Sue, Sue—” her mother said, and moved her hands on her lap.
“I’ll tell you who it was. So you can tell Father. It was Rosemary.”
“Rosemary?”
“Yes. Rosemary Murphy. You saw her. When she was out here that day. And this is her dress. It is her best dress.”
“That crippled girl? That girl who—”
“Yes, that’s the girl. Tell Father. I know he doesn’t like her. But I like her. Even if she is poor and crippled. She’s brave and strong, she’s got nerve—”
“Oh, Sue, Sue—”
“Call her up and ask her if I didn’t stay there last night. Make Father call her up and ask her. I’ll tell you her number—4683W.”
“Oh, it’s not that, Sue. It’s just you didn’t think enough of us to let us know. You didn’t come home and you didn’t call, and I’m your mother—”
“I told Rosemary to call up this morning early,” she lied. “When she went to her eight-o’clock class.”
“And a strange man called up late last night and asked for you. And I was worried. And this morning your father was furious. He didn’t say anything but he was furious. And I was so worried.” Her hands moved on her lap, then subsided. “I would have thought—I would have thought Gerald would be considerate enough to telephone this morning. But he didn’t. I would have thought—”
Sue laughed. “He didn’t know where I was,” she said, and watched the surprise on her mother’s face. “And he won’t know,” she declared, “ever—he won’t know anything about me any more—” and her voice lifted in a kind of echo of the triumph which she suddenly discovered in her bosom, “not ever! Because—” and she watched her mother’s face, carved like alabaster into an expression of pained surprise, beautiful, white, static, commemorative, “I walked out on him. I didn’t say a word. I just got up and walked out.”
“Oh, Sue, you didn’t!”
“I certainly did, and I’m through.” She advanced into the room and stood directly before her mother.
“You didn’t, you can’t. Not now, now everything’s—” she rose from the chaise longue and moved to and fro, her hands laid together before her at the level of her waist, “now everything’s—”
“Nothing, nothing,” Sue said remotely, “nothing at all.”
“Now everything’s—oh, we thought—your father thought—”
“I know what he thought. Oh, I know. You think I don’t know, but I do. I know now. I know right this minute, and I’ll tell you.” Her mother stopped moving, and stood still and looked at her. “Yes, I know—he couldn’t run me—like he runs you, like he runs everybody—and he thought Jerry could, and he runs Jerry—and it’d be the same thing. Oh, yes, they get off in corners and talk. They talk about me. Don’t think I don’t know. You think I’m a fool. Oh, he thinks he can make Jerry run me, like he tries to make you run me—like today—he tries to make you talk to me because he won’t. And he won’t run me. Not if he runs the whole world. Because—” her voice sank, and she paused, intoxicated and bemused by the sudden new thought which surprisingly was in her like a light. “Because—” and her voice sank to a whisper, as though she was not speaking to the woman before her, but to herself, “because I’m going to walk out of this house.”
“Oh, Sue!”
“I’m going to, and I can. I’ve got the money Granny left me, and I can use it now I’m twenty and nobody can stop me. She was your mother but she left what little she had to me. Why—do you know why? Because she hated him—and she knew you’d never have the nerve to use that money for anything. But I have the nerve, and I—”
“Oh, Sue—”
“Oh, Sue, Sue—that’s what you say—oh, Sue, Sue. But you don’t care. Not really. Not any more. You used to, a long time ago, but not any more. You wanted me to marry and get out of this house. You wish everybody would go away. So you could just sit here—oh, I know, I know!”
“Stop!” Dorothy Murdock exclaimed, and lifted her hands imploringly, distractedly, toward her daughter, and moved her head from side to side with a lost motion like a head on a pillow. “Stop, Sue, stop!”
“You thought I didn’t know, but I do. You get up here and drink. That’s what you care about. Just that. Not anything else in the world. You don’t do anything. Why don’t you do something? I’d do anything, something, anything—” She grasped her mother by the arms and shook her, as though to awaken her or compel her. Then, looking into her face, she released her hold, and let her own arms sink with a motion of resignation. “But you won’t,” she said. “You won’t even go. But I’m going!”
She rushed to the door, then turned. “Call up Father and tell him. He can’t get here in time. And even if he did, he couldn’t stop me.”
She ran down the hall to her own room.
She took two suitcases from the closet, flung them open on the floor, and began to throw clothes into them, items seized almost at random from the racks in the closet, and then from the drawers of a chiffonier. She ran to her bathroom, laid a towel on the floor, and piled toilet articles and cosmetics promiscuously into it, and gathered it up by the corners, and returned. She sat on the floor by the suitcases trying to cram the stuff in. When something didn’t fit easily she flung it aside. One big box of talcum came open and spilled into the suitcase. She cast it aside with unnecessary violence. It left a white trail across the deep-blue carpet, and poured the powder out in a heap near the bed.
She glanced up and saw her mother standing in the doorway, silently, as though she had stood there for a long time.
“Telephone him,” Sue ordered. “Go and telephone him.”
Dorothy Murdock did not answer.
“Go ahead. Tell him. If you don’t he’ll be furious. He won’t say anything—oh, no, he won’t say anything—and he won’t beat you—oh, no—but you know how his jaws will be and you can see the white come around his mouth. Call him, call him up, or he’ll be furious.”
Dorothy Murdock’s face was composed and still, her hands hung at her sides, and she watched her daughter. The girl seemed about to speak again, but, caught in that gaze, did not. Her right hand, which held a blouse ready to cram into one of the suitcases, stopped in mid air. She looked at her mother’s face and knew that she had never seen it that way before, never before, unpained, unreproachful, complete in its ritual calm, victorious, the look of having come through something and being on the other side of something. “Mother,” she exclaimed, and thought, Oh, if she were just like that, if I were like that, if things were only like that! “Mother,” she said, and dropped the blouse, and got up, and went across the floor toward her, and seized her by the upper arms, as she had done before.
“Oh, mother,” she said quietly.
She heard a door open and close, distantly, somewhere in the back of the house.
“Mother,” she said, “I lied. I didn’t tell Rosemary to call up.”
Then, as she looked into her mother’s face, she saw it contort itself helplessly and distractedly, and saw the tears start.
“Oh,” Sue burst out, and jerked her hands back from the contact of her mother, “oh, everybody cries! Somebody’s always crying. You—you—” she stared into the contorted face, “you don’t do anything, you just cry!”
She ran back to the suitcases, and slammed them shut, and began to strap them. “Call him up, and tell him,” she ordered, not looking up. “Go on! Do it now.”
She strapped the suitcases, not bothering to latch them, her hands moving with a frantic, jerky violence.
She stood up and seized the handles, and started toward the door.
Her mother stepped back from the door.
She passed through, took a couple of steps down the hall, and turned. “Call him,” she said, and went down the stairs, lungingly, the suitcases straining her slender arms taut and banging against her knees.
She went out the back way, leaving the door open, and into the sunshine, which was blindingly bright after the shadowy house. She hurried across the cropped lawn by the bare rose garden, toward the garage, trying to run but unable to because the suitcases banged her knees and the heels of her sandals sank and turned in the soft turf.
“Miss Sue, Miss Sue!” she heard a voice behind her, but did not turn. Then there were running footsteps behind her, and she felt a hand seize one of the suitcases. “I’m sorry, Miss Sue—I was out back and didn’t hear you ring—” Anse said, and took the other suitcase. “I just didn’t hear you ring—”
“I didn’t ring,” Sue said. She ran ahead, braced herself to lift the garage door to her section, not waiting for Anse, who called after her, and got into her roadster. The motor started almost at the touch of the button. She raced the motor, and jerked the car out of the garage. Anse stood on the running board to open the rumble seat and then began to arrange the first suitcase.
“Oh, just throw them in!” Sue ordered.
The rear wheels ripped into the gravel, with a tearing sound, spraying it back, and the car plunged forward.
Anse jumped back as some of the gravel struck his leg, and then stood to watch the blue car skid and grind around the loop of the drive. The girl’s yellow loose hair, as she leaned forward over the wheel, snatched back glintingly in the rush of air. The car disappeared beyond the house.
Anse Jackson was a well-made, clean, ordinary-looking Negro man, twenty-five years old, of average height, with definitely Negroid features but a skin considerably paler than chocolate and yellow flecks in the pupils of his large eyes. He had a mustache, the hairs in it sparse and individual, and he used a prepared oil on his hair, which, naturally, was kinky. He carried a small comb in his pocket, and in moments of idleness he was accustomed to run the comb carefully and meditatively through his hair, with one hand, while with the other he would pat the hair into place. At such moments, his eyelids tended to droop over the yellow-flecked eyes, and he seemed to surrender himself to the pleasure of that even, rhythmical, clean, tingling sensation across his scalp. Occasionally, a little stain of hair oil could be seen on the collar of his white houseboy’s jacket. Otherwise, he was very neat.
He had been born in a dilapidated cabin not five miles from the spot where he now stood. The cabin still existed, more dilapidated and sagging, propped up on one side by fence rails. But it was still occupied. He had seen children hanging out of the door or squatting on the bare earth before it, staring at him when he passed. He did not know the names of those children.
His father, Old Anse, grizzled and wiry now, illiterate, given to silences, a good hand with horses, now lived on the Murdock place in a two-room, decent, whitewashed board house, with Old Viry, who was fat and sleepy and too feeble to do work out now. Four years back, Anse had moved out of their house to a room over the garage. Without reproach, without words of any kind, they had watched him get his belongings together, put them into an old straw suitcase, and walk away up the hill which was dominated by the mass of the big house against the sky. Many evenings, however, especially in winter, Anse would go to the whitewashed shack and sit with the old people, in the cluttered, lairlike, low interior, unlighted except for the fitfully burning chunks on the hearth. On such occasions they did not talk much. He would sit there with them, listening to the old woman’s difficult respiration, until her head fell on her breast. He would not even think, then, surrendering himself to the rhythm of her wheeze or snore, the deliberate rhythm of his own heart, and the hiss of the burning wood, until drowsiness deliciously overcame him, too, rising insinuatingly about him like an unlapping flood. Then he would force himself to get up, and leave them, and return to his room over the garage, which was lighted by a single, powerful electric bulb hanging from the ceiling and which contained a cot, the straw suitcase under the cot, a chest of drawers with a mirror, a table with a stack of books, and his two suits—once the property of Bogan Murdock, but still good—hanging against the beaver-board wall under the curtain.
Now Anse stood by the garage, looking at the blue car, which was again visible on the sweeping drive down the hill. It was going very fast, dangerously fast. He watched it puzzledly. But he had been puzzled by things teachers said in the classroom. He had been puzzled by things he read in the newspapers, and by things he read in books, which told what people had said and done a long time back and which told how the world used to be. He was puzzled by the way the world was now. He was puzzled by himself, and he did not know what he wanted in the world. But he knew the world was to live in. He knew that.
The car was out of sight now, going off somewhere. He stood there for a moment more, in his somewhat crumpled white jacket, and looked down the hill. Then he glanced down at the ground at his feet. He saw how one of the rear wheels of the car had scarred deeply down into the drive, showing the damp-stained gravel below. With his foot, he scraped the gravel back into smoothness, and tamped it with his heel.
Then he started to walk slowly back to the house, across the grass. As he walked, he took out his comb and ran it through his hair and patted his hair into place. At night he wore a cap to hold his hair in place, a cap made of the top of a woman’s old silk stocking. Now the sunlight, striking on his oiled, patted-down hair, gave it the look of black metal, coarsely cooled and with its rippled puddling preserved in hardness.
As he approached the house, he put his comb back into his vest pocket, where his fountain pen was clipped, a good fountain pen, and unconsciously wiped the slight film of oil on the palms of his hands off on his trousers.
Dorothy Murdock stood in the hall, and watched her daughter rush down the stairs, stumblingly with the heavy suitcases, and pass beyond her range of vision. Then, a moment later, she heard the motor of the car as it swung by the end of the house and down the hill. Then, the house was completely still. There was no one in the house, she knew. The servants would be back in the kitchen and laundry. The old man—the heavy, bearded, dandruff-maned, asthmatic old man who had flecks of food on his beard and who looked at her from his red-rimmed eyes and did not see her—would be down at the stables, sitting there in the ammoniac gloom, alone, or with Old Anse. She was alone, and she stood there, listening intently, one hand held before her at the level of her waist, the other, closed, laid against her breast, just under the soft V-shaped depression between the tendons of the throat. The house was so still she could hear distinctly the ticking of the great clock in the hall below.
She walked down the hall and stopped in front of the telephone by her sitting-room door. She reached out her hand to lift the instrument, and for a moment held it, not quite to her head, hearing the dry buzzing. Then she replaced it on the rack.
She passed by her sitting-room door and entered the door of the bedroom which she shared with Bogan Murdock, whom she had not telephoned. It was a large, beautiful room, with many windows to the south and east, giving over the rolling grass land and toward the smoky east ridge. Her step made no sound on the deep carpet, as she walked irresolutely to the center of the room. The door of Bogan Murdock’s dressing room, to her left, was open and she could see, beyond it, the chest weights on the wall and one end of the rowing machine, and she thought how, on winter afternoons, late, when it was too bad to ride or play golf, Bogan Murdock, after using those machines and bathing, would come out of that door, a Japanese robe of russet silk draped loosely over his square shoulders, and would go to the couch and adjust the sun lamp and lie down, his torso bare and the silk folded across his narrow hips and private parts. He would close his eyes, eyes smoky-blue around the bold, black pupils—they saw everything, you knew they saw everything, they saw everything you did, but he never said a word—and would lay his arms by his sides, relaxed, palms upward, as in humility and resignation, or appeal, under the rays of the lamp. The body was brown, an athlete’s body, not old yet, modeled steelily, almost sparely, over an Egyptian delicacy of bone, the long arms almost too thin, almost painful, with their plaited perfection of muscle laid meticulously on the bone, and the chest plates of muscle knitted tightly to the bone box at the hollows, where the few black hairs sprouted crisply, like curled black wires. She could almost see it as she stood there in broad daylight—like a carved figure on a tomb, or like a dead body laid out ceremonially under that lamp.
She could almost see it now—and sometimes in the past, as the winter evening came on, she had seen, under the glow of the lamp, the closed eyes and humble hands and that brown, glinting body, boyishly thin, modeled by the hard will locked inside it, and she had been struck by a selfless pain, like pure grief. But grief for what, she could not understand. What she herself had lost, she could scarcely remember now.
She went to the door of her own dressing room, to her right, and opened it, and entered. She took off her gray wool dress, and dropped it across a chair, and stepped out of her shoes and pulled off her stockings. She took off her slip, and selected a negligee and mules from the closet, and put them on. She sat down at the dressing table. Looking at her own face in the mirror, she let down her hair. Then she began to brush her hair, inclining her head to one side a little, and slightly forward, as though in submission. All the while, she watched the face in the mirror. Suddenly, she laid the brush down. “Oh,” she said out loud, “I wasn’t like this, I wasn’t like this always!”
She let her head sink forward until her forehead was in contact with the cool glass of the table top. Her hair was loose among the brushes and cosmetic jars. The glass, cool, hard, smooth, against her forehead seemed to mean something to her. But after a little while the heat of her flesh had infected it. When she lifted her head, the flesh clung resistingly to the glass with a slight filmy stickiness.
She went into the bedroom, closed the hall door, and lay down on her bed, on her back, with a comforter pulled up almost to her breast. She thought: It is in the other room.
She lay still, with her eyes closed, and tried to control her breath, drawing it in ever so little, letting it go ever so little, so that her diaphragm scarcely moved at all—she had the trick all right; it had come to her a long time ago, and she had it down pat, all right—and so that everything around her, the mirrors and the chairs and the hills far away out the window, all those things she couldn’t see with her eyes closed but knew were there in their full vindictive certainty, seemed to draw in, too, upon themselves, and be still, like she was. It is in the other room, she thought, and then she had the picture of the girl in her mind.
The girl is wearing a gray dress and it is not a very good dress, and her hair is in a braid which is coming loose. Behind her is a gray house, for the paint is peeling off. There are many trees, and the grass and weed are uncut, though it is early in the season. It is early in the season, because the winged maple seeds are coming down from the old maple by which the girl is standing. There has just been a storm, for the leaves of the maple tree glitter yellow-green with wet in the now clear, but late, sunlight, and the trunks of the trees look black. Great hailstones lie on the grass-grown brick walk, and on the drive, and glitter whitely. The wet grass seems to have its own luminescence. The wings of the wet maple seeds glitter as they flutter down in the remarkable light.
She thought: It is in the other room.
The girl holds a kitten in her apron. The kitten has been caught out in the storm, in the tangled grass, with the hailstones falling. It is cold, its fur is plastered to it, and the girl holds it wrapped in the apron, against her own body, under her breast. But the girl has just lifted her head to look down the drive.
She thought: It is in the other room.
A man comes riding up the drive. He is riding a, black horse; the horse’s shoulders and left haunch gleam richly in the light, the delicate legs lift fastidiously, the man’s body moves, ever so slightly in that same delicious rhythmical compulsion and restraint of power, and the man, who wears no hat, smiles. The teeth are white in the brown face.
She thought: It is in the other room.
The horse stands still now at the edge of the drive, beside the girl, and the man looks down at her, smiling. He says that he has just come by to see how things are after the storm. The girl thanks him.
She thought: It is in the other room.
The man, sitting straight in the saddle, looks down and sees the kitten. Only its nose and eyes and ears are visible from the little wad of cloth which the girl holds below her breast. The man looks down, and says: Poor little thing.
She thought: He said it, he said, Poor little thing. And it died from the cold, and I love it, but he said, Poor little thing.
She clutched the comforter into a wad, just under her breast, as the girl had held the kitten.
She thought: I don’t love anything now.
She opened her eyes and sat up, still clutching the comforter. She thought: It is in the other room. And flung the comforter back, and rose from the bed, and without bothering to put on the mules, went to the door and opened it and looked out into the hall. There was nobody in the hall. She went swiftly into her sitting room, her bare feet making no sound, and to her desk. From the desk she took a bottle, a quart bottle of whisky. She ran her thumb nail under the seal, cutting the paper, and then tried to pull the cap of the cork. It would not come. She grasped the bottle in both hands, lifted it as though to drink, and set her teeth at the crevice just under the cap. Then, with the lips drawn back, with her hands clutching the bottle until the knuckles were white, she began to pull, moving her head a little from side to side to loosen the cork. It came slowly; then, with a slight pop, was free. A little of the liquid spilled over her hands. She let the stopper fall from her teeth, to the floor, then drank from the bottle. She took a deep draught, stopped swallowing, and breathed without taking the bottle from her lips, and drank again. She lowered the bottle, still holding it in both hands, and breathed heavily, closing her eyes. She went to the bathroom, got a glass from a cabinet, poured whisky into it, and added a little water from the tap of the basin. Then she took another drink from the bottle, corked it and put it into the desk, and carrying the glass, returned to the bedroom.
She set the glass on the floor by the bed, and again lay down. She had locked the door.
With her eyes closed, she felt the whisky flower inside her, and then its tentacles reached out delicately into her body. She thought: The light had never been like that before, green-gold light and bright after the storm and you thought it came from the underside of the leaves, too, and from the grass, for it was everywhere, and I held the kitten in my arms and I loved it and I knew it was going to die, but he came and looked down from his horse and said, Poor little thing. She thought: But that was then, not now, and I was that then and I don’t know what I am.
She controlled her breath, as she had before, reducing it to the barest minimum of movement. She thought that she might go to sleep. And if she didn’t go to sleep, she could lie here. She could lie here with her eyes closed and her breath scarcely moving, and that was almost as good.
She thought: When I shut my eyes I am nothing but that burning where the whisky is in me and the rest of me just flowing away, and that is all there is, and if I don’t think of anything I am not anything and nobody else is anything either and the feeling in me is all there is, but the feeling doesn’t remember anything, and if every minute can be just that minute and not remember the minute before and not want the minute that’s coming, then you can be happy like shifting downward in deep water and the water weak-green-silver-streaked-bright but your eyes closed and the water breathes into you like you were a fish and you love it and it is all around you and on you and under you like hands, and that would be all if one minute could not remember the last one and didn’t want the next one, didn’t want anything.
But she did. And she held her lower lip between her small, perfect teeth, and shifted her body under the blue comforter and let her head move weakly from side to side on the pillow.
She thought: I could go to sleep afterwards.
The immediately reality was her body, with its tensions and blind compulsions and aimless appetites, but she felt herself to be apart from it and from them. Yet she was horribly involved, and loathed herself for being thus involved. She was filled with that loathing, and at the same time with a pity, which was almost sweet. She thought: I could go to sleep afterwards.
But she gained a sort of strength, and sat up. “All right,” she said, “all right.”
She stood up, put on her mules, and went to the door, which, with a sense of shame, she unlocked. She went to the telephone by her sitting-room door and dialed a number. When the answer came, she asked for Mr. Porsum. When she heard his voice, she said: “This is Dorothy Murdock, Mr. Porsum. I understand you have a hunter, a three-year-old, for sale?”
Mr. Porsum said that that was true, that at the moment he had for sale several fair walking horses, one Arabian, two-and-a-half years old, and two hunters, both three-year-olds.
“May I drive out and see the hunters?” Dorothy Murdock asked.
Mr. Porsum replied that he would be at the farm all afternoon, and would have the hunters brought up to a paddock if she wanted to see them. They would be on hand by the time she arrived. His voice was deliberate and detached, and on the telephone somewhat more nasal than she had remembered.
She said that she would be there within an hour.
While she took a cold shower and dressed, and even as she drank off the glass of whisky and water, which she spied on the floor by the bed, she experienced a sense of competence, of moral certainty, even of victory, which was entirely new.
Dorothy Hopewell, who married Bogan Murdock, was the only descendant of a family distinguished in Georgia in the Revolutionary period and in later generations in the section across the mountains to which they moved. Her great-great-grandfather was a general in the Revolution, and fought in the Carolinas, at King’s Mountain, and in Virginia. He could have made money by speculation in Continental paper and land grants, but because of a delicate conscience, did not; he grew rich more gradually. When his son went West, he carried with him the Revolutionary boots and sword, fifty-odd slaves, and two heavy money belts. Dorothy Hopewell’s grandfather, a lawyer, owned at one time over three hundred slaves and was a Senator in the Confederate Congress. Her father, a kindly and incompetent man, with no head for business and a mystical streak, bowed to his strong-willed, vindictive wife and pampered his only child, Dorothy, and died a failure. When Dorothy Hopewell, at the age of eighteen, married Bogan Murdock, to whom Mrs. Hopewell condescended somewhat bitterly, the only dowry was a small, heavily encumbered property, the Hopewell name, and the Revolutionary sword, which was to hang, later, on the high wall of Bogan Murdock’s library. The boots of her great-great-grandfather had long since rotted away in a family attic.
Dorothy Murdock, gentle, beautiful, and not very intelligent, inherited something of her father’s temperament, remembered him with affection, was relatively untouched by the snobbery of her mother, who in poverty regarded herself as the vessel of a great tradition, bore Bogan Murdock two healthy children, rejoiced in the early successes of her husband, and enjoyed the luxuries which his increasing prosperity afforded. Looking back she could not put her finger on the moment of change. But she discovered before she was forty that she scarcely loved the children, that her husband was strange to her and self-sufficient, and that she was in the powerful grip of secret, insidious, and suicidal vices, which drained her life of all meaning and the world around her of all reality. She believed in love and wanted to be loved; she could not achieve even bitterness, richness of fantasy, or violence. And there was nobody in the world to whom she could talk.
When, on that bright January afternoon, she conquered herself, threw back the blue comforter, and unlocked the door to her bedroom, she felt that she was discovering something new in herself. She felt clean and strong, like one who gets on a train, with plenty of money in pocket, to take a long trip, to new places. She did not speculate about the source of her new strength. She did not reflect on the earlier events of the day. And she had no specific plans for the future. She was, simply, moving back into the world, and the world was real.