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《The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories》
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When she was only twenty-three her first he Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, created a literary sensation. She is very special, one of Americas superlative writers who jures up a vision of existence as terribl藏书网 e as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human dition.
A grotesque human triangle in a primitive Southern town. . . A young boy learning the difficult lessons of manhood. . . A fateful enter with his native藏书网 land and former love. . . These are parts of the world of cCullers -- a world of the lost, the ihe eternal strangers at lifes feast. Here are brilliant revelations of love and longing, bitter heartbreak and occasional happiness -- tales that probe the very heart of our lives.
cCULLERS (1917-1967)九九藏书
When she was only twenty-three, cCullers first he Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, became a literary sensation. Sihat time, her reputation has grown with every successive work.
Suovels as Refles In a Goldehe Member of the Wedding an藏书网hat Miss Amelias mother had had a half-sister -- but there was some difference of opinion as to whether she had died or had run off with a tobaccer. As for the hunchbacks claim, everyohought it was a trumped-up business. And the town, knowing Miss Amelia, decided that surely she had put him out of the house after feeding him. But toward evening, when the sky had whitened, and the shift was done, a woman claimed to have seen a crooked face at the window of one of the rooms up over the store. Miss Amelia herself said nothing. She clerked iore for a while, argued for an hour with a farmer over a plow shaft, mended some chi wire, locked up near sundown, ao her rooms. The town was left puzzled and talkative.
The day Miss Amelia did not opeore, but stayed locked up inside her premises and saw no one. Now this was the day that the rumor started -- the rumor so terrible that the town and all the try about were stunned by it The rumor was started by a weaver called Merlie Ryan. He is a man of not much at -- sallow, shambling, and with h in his head. He has the three-day malaria, which means that every third day the fever es on him. So on two days he is dull and cross, but ohird day he livens up and sometimes has an idea or two, most of which are foolish. It was while Merlie Ryan was in his fever that he turned suddenly and said:
"I know what Miss Amelia done. She murdered that man for something in that suitcase."
He said this in a calm voice, as a statement of fact. And within an hour the news had swept through the town. It was a fierd sickly tale the town built up that day. In it were all the things which cause the heart to shiver -- a hunchback, a midnight burial in the s, the dragging of Miss Amelia through the streets of the town on the way to prison, the squabbles over what would happen to her property -- all told in hushed voices aed with some fresh and weird detail. It rained and women fot t in the washing from the lines. One or two mortals, who were io Miss Amelia, even put on Sunday clothes as though it were a holiday. People clustered together on the main street, talking and watg the store.
It would be uo say that all the town took part in this evil festival. There were a few sensible men who reasohat Miss Amelia, being rich, would not go out of her way to murder a vagabond for a few trifles of junk. Iown there were even three good people, and they did not want this crime, not even for the sake of the i and the great otion it would entail; it gave them no pleasure to think of Miss Amelia holding to the bars of the peiary and bein.g electrocuted in Atlanta. These good people judged Miss Amelia in a different way from what the others judged her. When a person is as trary in every single respect as she was and when the sins of a person have amouo such a point that they hardly be remembered all at once -- then this person plainly requires a special judgment. They remembered that Miss Amelia had been born dark and somewhat queer of face, raised motherless by her father who was a solitary man, that early in youth she had grown to be six feet two iall whi itself is not natural for a woman, and that her ways and habits of life were too peculiar ever to reason about. Above all, they remembered her puzzling marriage, which was the most unreasonable sdal ever to happen in this town.
So these good people felt toward her somethio pity. And when she was out on her wild business, such as rushing in a house t forth a sewing mae in payment for a debt, etting herself worked up over some matter ing the law -- they had toward her a feeling which was a mixture of exasperation, a ridiculous little iickle, and a deep, unnamable sadness. But enough of the good people, for there were only three of them; the rest of the town was making a holiday of this fancied crime the whole of the afternoon.
The Ballad of the Sad Café-4
Miss Amelia herself, for some strange reason, seemed unaware of all this. She spent most of her day upstairs. When down iore, she prowled around peacefully, her hands deep in the pockets of her overalls and head bent so low that her was tucked ihe collar of her shirt. There was no bloodstain on her anywhere. Ofteopped and just stood somberly looking down at the cracks in the floor, twisting a lock of her short-cropped hair, and whispering something to herself. But most of the day ent upstairs.
Dark came on. The rain that afternoon had chilled the air, so that the evening was bleak and gloomy as in wiime. There were no stars in the sky, and a light, icy drizzle had set in. The lamps in the houses made mournful, wavering flickers when watched from the street. A wind had e up, not from the s side of the town but from the cold black pinewoods to the north.
The clocks iown struck eight. Still nothing had happehe bleak night, after the gruesome talk of the day, put a fear in some people, and they stayed home close to the fire. Others were gathered in groups together. Some eight or ten men had vened on the poriss Amelias store. They were silent and were indeed just waiting about. They themselves did not know what they were waiting for, but it was this: in times of tension, when some great a is impending, men gather and wait in this way. And after a time there will e a moment when all together they will a unison, not from thought or from the will of any one man, but as though their instincts had merged together so that the decision belongs to no single one of them, but to the group as a whole. At such a time, no individual hesitates. And whether the matter will be settled peaceably, or whether the joint a will result in ransag, violence, and crime, depends oiny. So the men waited soberly on the poriss Amelias store, not one of them realizing what they would do, but knowing inwardly that they must wait, and that the time had almost e.
Now the door to the store en. I was bright and natural-looking. To the left was the ter where slabs of white meat, rock dy, and tobacco were kept. Behind this were shelves of salted white meat and meal. The right side of the store was mostly filled with farm implements and such. At the back of the store, to the left, was the door leading up the stairs, and it en. And at the far right of the store there was another door which led to a little room that Miss Amelia called her office. This door was also open. And at eight oclock that evening Miss Amelia could be seen there sitting before her rolltop desk, figuring with a fountain pen and some pieces of paper.
The office was cheerfully lighted, and Miss Amelia did not seem to notice the delegation on the porch. Everything around her was i order, as usual. This office was a room well-known, in a dreadful way, throughout the try. It was there Miss Amelia transacted all business. On the desk was a carefully covered typewriter which she knew how to run, but used only for the most important dots. In the drawers were literally thousands of papers, all filed acc to the alphabet. This office was also the place where Miss> Amelia received sick people, for she enjoyed d and did a great deal of it. Two whole shelves were crowded with bottles and various paraphernalia. Against the wall was a bench where the patients sat. She could sew up a wound with a burnt needle so that it would not turn green. For burns she had a cool, sweet syrup. For unlocated siess there were any number of different medies which she had brewed herself from unknown recipes. They wrenched loose the bowels very well, but they could not be given to small children, as they caused bad vulsions; for them she had airely separate draught, gentler and sweet-flavored. Yes, all in all, she was sidered a good doctor. Her hands, though very large and bony, had a light touch about them. She possessed great imagination and used hundreds of different cures. In the face of the most dangerous araordinary treatment she did not hesitate, and no disease was so terrible but what she would uake to cure it. In this there was one exception. If a patient came with a female plaint she could do nothing. I the mere mention of the words her face would slowly darken with shame, and she would stand there ing her neck against the collar of her shirt, or rubbing her s boots together, for all the world like a great shamed, dumb-tongued child. But in other matters people trusted her. She charged no fees whatsoever and always had a raft of patients.
On this evening, 藏书网
Miss Amelia wrote with her fountain pen a good deal. But even so she could not be forever unaware of the group waiting out there on the dark porch, and watg her. From time to time she looked up and regarded them steadily. But she did not holler out to them to demand why they were loafing around her property like a sorry bunch of gabbies. Her face roud and stern, as it always was whe at the desk of her office. After a time their peering in like that seemed to annoy her. She wiped her cheek with a red handkerchief, got up, and closed the office door.
Now to the group on the porch this gesture acted as a signal. The time had e. They had stood for a long while with the night raw and gloomy ireet behind them. They had waited long and just at that moment the instinct to act came on them. All at once, as though moved by one will, they walked into the store. At that moment the eight men looked very much alike -- all wearing blue overalls, most of them with whitish hair, all pale of face, and all with a set, dreaming look in the eye. What they would have do no one knows. But at that instant there was a the head of the staircase. The men looked up and then stood dumb with shock. It was the hunchback, whom they had already murdered in their minds. Also, the creature was not at all as had been pictured to them -- not a pitiful and dirty little chatterer, alone and beggared in this world. Indeed, he was like nothing any man among them had ever beheld until that time. The room was still as death.
The hunchback came down slowly with the proudness of one who owns every plank of the floor beh his feet. In the past days he had greatly ged. For ohing he was beyond words. He still wore his little coat, but it was brushed off aly mended. Beh this was a fresh red and black checkered shut belonging to Miss Amelia. He did not wear trousers such as ordinary men are meant to wear, but a pair of tight-fitting little knee-length breeches. On his skinny legs he wore black stogs, and his shoes were of a special kind, being queerly shaped, laced up over the ankles, and newly ed and polished with wax. Around his neck, so that his large, pale ears were almost pletely covered, he wore a shawl of lime-green wool, the fringes of which almost touched the floor.
The hunchback walked dowore with his stiff little strut and then stood in the ter of the group that had e ihey cleared a space about him and stood looking with hands loose at their sides and eyes wide open. The hunchback himself got his bearings in an odd manner. He regarded each person steadily at his own eye-level, which was about belt line for an ordinary man. Then with shrewd deliberation he examined each mans lions -- from the waist to the sole of the shoe. When he had satisfied himself he closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head, as though in his opinion what he had seen did not amount to much. Then with assurance, only to firm himself, he tilted back his head and took in the halo of faces around him with one long, cirg stare. There was a half-filled sack of guano on the left side of the store, and when he had found his bearings in this way, the hunchback sat down upon it. Cozily settled, with his little legs crossed, he took from his coat pocket a certain object.
Now it took some moments for the men iore tain their ease. Merlie Ryan, he of the three-day fever who had started the rumor that day, was the first to speak. He looked at the object which the hunchback was fondling, and said in a hushed voice:
"What is it you have there?"
Each man knew well what it was the hunchback was handling. For it was the snuffbox which had beloo Miss Amelias father. The snuffbox was of blue enamel with a dainty embellishment ht gold on the lid. The group k well and marveled. They glanced warily at the closed office door, and heard the low sound of Miss Amelia whistling to herself.
"Yes, what is it, Peanut?"
The Ballad of the Sad Café-5
The hunchback looked up quickly and sharpened his mouth to speak. "Why, this is a lay-low to catch meddlers."
The hunchback readied in the box with his scrambly little fingers and ate something, but he offered no one around him a taste. It was not even proper snuff which he was taking, but a mixture of sugar and cocoa. This he took, though, as snuff, pocketing a little wad of it beh his lower lip and lig dowly into this with a flick of his tongue which made a frequent grimae over his face.
"The very teeth in my head have always tasted sour to me," he said in explanation. "That is the reason why I take this kind of sweet snuff."
The group still clustered around, feeling somewhat gawky and bewildered. This sensation never quite wore off, but it was soon tempered by another feeling -- an air of intima the room and a vague festivity. Now the names of the men of the group there on that evening were as follows: Hasty Malone, Robert Calvert Hale, Merlie Ryan, Reverend T. M. Willin, Rosser e, Rip Wellborn, Henry Ford Crimp, and Horace Wells. Except for Reverend Willin, they are all alike in many ways as has been said -- all having taken pleasure from something or other, all havi and suffered in some way, most of them tractable unless exasperated. Each of them worked in the mill, and lived with others in a two- or three-room house for which the rent was ten dollars or twelve dollars a month. All had been paid that afternoon, for it was Saturday. So, for the present, think of them as a whole.
The hunchback, however, was already s them out in his mind. Onfortably settled he began to chat with everyone, asking questions such as if a man was married, how old he was, how much his wages came to in an average week, et cetera -- pig his way along to inquiries which were dht intimate. Soon the group was joined by others iown, Henry Macy, idlers who had sensed somethiraordinary, women e to fetch their men who lingered on, and even one loose, towhead child who tiptoed into the store, stole a box of animal crackers, and made off very quietly. So the premises of Miss Amelia were soon crowded, and she herself had not yet opened her office door.
There is a type of person who has a quality about him that sets him apart from other and more ordinary human beings. Such a person has an ibbr>?nstinct which is usually found only in small children, an instinct to establish immediate and vital tact between himself and all things in the world. Certainly the hunchback was of this type. He had only been iore half an hour before an immediate tact had beeablished between him and each other individual. It was as though he had lived iown for years, was a well-known character, and had been sitting and talking there on that guano sack for tless evenings. This, together with the fact that it was Saturday night, could at for the air of freedom and illicit gladness iore. There was a tension, also, partly because of the oddity of the situation and because Miss Amelia was still closed off in her offid had not yet made her appearance.
She came out that evening at ten oclock. And those who were expeg some drama at her entrance were disappointed. She opehe door and walked in with her slow, gangling swagger. There was a streak of ink on one side of her nose, and she had khe red handkerchief about her neck. She seemed to notiothing unusual. Her gray, crossed eyes glanced over to the place where the hunchback was sitting, and for a moment lihere. The rest of the crowd iore she regarded with only a peaceable surprise.
"Does anyone want waiting on?" she asked quietly.
There were a number of ers, because it was Saturday night, and they all wanted liquor. Now Miss Amelia had dug up an aged barrel only three days past and had sipho into bottles back by the still. This night she took the money from the ers and ted it beh the bright light. Such was the ordinary procedure. But after this what happened was not ordinary. Always before, it was necessary to go around to the dark back yard, and there she would hand out your bottle through the kit door. There was no feeling of joy iransa. After getting his liquor the er walked off into the night. Or, if his wife would not have it in the home, he was allowed to e back around to the front porch of the store and guzzle there or ireet. Now, both the pord the street before it were the property of Miss Amelia, and no mistake about it -- but she did nard them as her premises; the premises began at the front door and took iire inside of the building. There she had never allowed liquor to be opened or drunk by a herself. Now for the first time she broke this rule. She went to the kit, with the hunchback close at her heels, and she brought back the bottles into the warm, bright store. More than that she furnished some glasses and opewo boxes of crackers so that they were there hospitably in a platter on the ter and anyone who wished could take one free.
She spoke to no o the hunchback, and she only asked him in a somewhat harsh and husky voice: "Cousin Lymon, will you have yours straight, or warmed in a pan with water oove?"
"If you please, Amelia," the hunchback said. (And since what time had anyone presumed to address Miss Amelia by her bare name, without a title of respect? -- Certainly not her bridegroom and her husband of ten days. In faot sihe death of her father, who for some reason had always called her Little, had anyone dared to address her in such a familiar way.) "If you please, Ill have it warmed."
Now, this was the beginning of the café. It was as simple as that. Recall that the night was gloomy as in wiime, and to have sat around the property outside would have made a sorry celebration. But ihere was pany and a genial warmth. Someone had rattled up the stove in the rear, and those who bought bottles shared their liquor with friends. Several womehere and they had twists of licoric..e, a Nehi, or even a swallow of the whisky. The hunchback was still a y and his presence amused everyohe ben the office was brought in, together with several extra chairs. Other people leaned against the ter or made themselves fortable on barrels and sacks. Nor did the opening of liquor on the premises cause any rambunctiousness, i giggles, or misbehavior whatsoever. On the trary the pany olite even to the point of a certain timidness. For people in this towhen uo gathering together for the sake of pleasure. They met to work in the mill. Or on Sunday there would be an all-day camp meeting -- and though that is a pleasure, the iion of the whole affair is to sharpen your view of Hell and put into you a keen fear of the Lord Almighty. But the spirit of a café is altogether different. Even the richest, greediest old rascal will behave himself, insulting no one in a proper café. And poor people look about them gratefully and pinch up the salt in a dainty and modest manner. For the atmosphere of a proper café implies these qualities: fellowship, the satisfas of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behavior. This had never been told to the gathering in Miss Amelias store that night. But they k of themselves, although never, of course, until that time had there been a café iown.
Now, the cause of all this, Miss Amelia, stood most of the evening in the doorway leading to the kit. Outwardly she did not seem ged at all. But there were many who noticed her face. She watched all that went on, but most of the time her eyes were fastened lonesomely on the hunchback. He strutted about the store, eating from his snuffbox, and being at once sour and agreeable. Where Miss Amelia stood, the light from the ks of the stove cast a glow, so that her brown, long face was somewhat brightened. She seemed to be looking inward. There was in her expression pain, perplexity, and uain joy. Her lips were not so firmly set as usual, and she swallowed often. Her skin had paled and her large empty hands were sweating. Her look that night, then, was the lonesome look of the lover.
This opening of the café came to an end at midnight. Everyone said good-bye to everyone else in a friendly fashion. Miss Amelia shut the front door of her premises, but fot to bolt it. Soohing -- the main street with its three stores, the mill, the houses -- all the town, in fact -- was dark and silent. And so ehree days and nights in which had e an arrival of a stranger, an unholy holiday, and the start of the café.
Now time must pass. For the four years are much alike. There are great ges, but these ges are brought about bit by bit, in simple steps whi themselves do not appear to be important. The hunchback tio live with Miss Amelia. The café expanded in a gradual way. Miss Amelia began to sell her liquor by the drink, and some tables were brought into the store. There were ers every evening, and on Saturday a great crowd. Miss Amelia began to serve fried catfish suppers at fiftees a plate. The hunchback cajoled her into buying a fine meical piano. Within two years the place was a store no longer, but had been verted into a proper café, open every evening from six until twelve oclock.
Eaight the hunchback came dowairs with the air of one who has a grand opinion of himself. He always smelled slightly of turnip greens, as Miss Amelia rubbed him night and m with pot liquor to give him strength. She spoiled him to a point beyond reason, but nothing seemed tthen him; food only made his hump and his head grow larger while the rest of him remained weakly and deformed. Miss Amelia was the same in appearance. During the week she still wore s boots and overalls, but on Sunday she put on a dark red dress that hung on her in a most peculiar fashion. Her manners, however, and her way of life were greatly ged. She still loved a fierce lawsuit, but she was not so quick to cheat her fellow man and to exact cruel payments. Because the hunchback was so extremely sociable, she eve about a little -- to revivals, to funerals, and so forth. Her d was as successful as ever, her liquor even fihan before, if that were possible. The café itself proved profitable and was the only place of pleasure for many miles around.
So for the moment regard these years from random and disjointed views. See the hunchback marg in Miss Amelias footsteps when on a red winter m they set out for the pinewoods to hunt. See them w on her properties -- with Cousin Lymon standing by and doing absolutely nothing, but quick to point out any laziness among the hands. On autumn afternoons they sat on the back steps chopping sugar e. The glaring summer days they spent ba the s where the water cypress is a deep black green, where beh the tangled s trees there is a drowsy gloom. Wheh leads through a bog or a stretch of blaed water see Miss Amelia bend down to let Cousin Lymon scramble on her back -- and see her wading forward with the hunchback settled on her shoulders, ging to her ears or to her broad forehead. Occasionally Miss Amelia ked up the Ford which she had bought and treated Cousin Lymon to a picture-show in Cheehaw, or to some distant fair or cockfight; the hunchback took a passionate delight iacles. Of course, they were in their café every m, they would often sit for hours together by the firepla the parlor upstairs. For the hunchback was sickly at night and dreaded to lie looking into the dark. He had a deep fear of death. And Miss Amelia would not leave him by himself to suffer with this fright It may even be reasohat the growth of the café came about mainly on this at; it was a thing that brought him pany and pleasure and that helped him through the night. So pose from such flashes an image of these years as a whole. And for a mome rest.
The Ballad of the Sad Café-6
Now some explanation is due for all this behavior. The time has e to speak about love. For Miss Amelia loved Cousin Lymon. So much was clear to everyohey lived in the same house together and were never seen apart. Therefore, acc to Mrs. MacPhail, a warty-nosed old busybody who is tinually moviicks of furniture from one part of the front room to another; acc to her and to certain others, these two were living in sin. If they were related, they were only a cross between first and sed cousins, and even that could in no way be proved. Now, of course, Miss Amelia owerful blunderbuss of a person, more than six feet tall -- and Cousin Lymon a weakly little hunchback reag only to her waist. But so much the better for Mrs. Stumpy MacPhail and her ies, for they and their kind glory in juns which are ill-matched and pitiful. So let them be. The good people thought that if those two had found some satisfa of the flesh between themselves, then it was a matter ing them and God alone. All sensible people agreed in their opinion about this jecture -- and their answer lain, flat top. What sort of thing, then, was this love?
First of all, love is a joint experieween two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experieo the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two e from different tries. Ofte>..t>beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He es to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only ohing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he ; he must create for himself a whole new inward world -- a world intense and strange, plete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring -- this lover be man, woman, child, or indeed any humaure on this earth.
Now, the beloved also be of any description. The most outlandish people be the stimulus for love. A man may be a d great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw ireets of Cheehaw oernoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as dearly as anyone else -- but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, aiful as the poison lilies of the s. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someoender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being be loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience cause him only pain.
It has beeioned before that Miss Amelia was once married. And this curious episode might as well be ated for at this point Remember that it all happened long ago, and that it was Miss Amelias only personal tact, before the hunchback came to her, with this phenomenon -- love.
The town then was the same as it is now, except there were two stores instead of three and the peach trees along the street were more crooked and smaller than they are now. Miss Amelia was een years old at the time, and her father had been dead many months. There was iown at that time a loom-fixer named Marvin Macy. He was the brother of Henry Macy, although to know them you would never guess that those two could be kin. For Marvin Macy was the handsomest man in this region -- being six feet one inch tall, hard-muscled, and with slow gray eyes and curly hair. He was well off, made good wages, and had a gold watch which opened in the back to a picture of a waterfall. From the outward and worldly point of view Marvin Macy was a fortunate fellow; he o bow and scrape to no one and always got just what he wanted. But from a more serious and thoughtful viewpoint Marvin Macy was not a person to be envied, for he was an evil character. His reputation was as bad, if not worse, than that of any young man in the ty. For years, when he was a boy, he had carried about with him the dried and salted ear of a man he had killed in a razht. He had chopped off the tails of squirrels in the pinewoods just to please his fancy, and in his left hip picket he carried forbidden marijuao tempt those who were disced and drawn toward death. Yet in spite of his well-knowation he was the beloved of many females in this region -- and there were at the time several young girls who were -haired and soft-eyed, with tender sweet little buttocks and charmi?99lｉb?ng ways. These gentle young girls he degraded and shamed. Then finally, at the age of twenty-two, this Marvin Macy iss Amelia. That solitary, gangling, queer-eyed girl was the one he longed for. Nor did he want her because of her money, but solely out of love.
And love ged Marvin Macy. Before the time when he loved Miss Amelia it could be questioned if such a person had within him a heart and soul. Yet there is some explanation for the ugliness of his character, for Marvin Macy had had a hard beginning in this world. He was one of seven unwanted children whose parents could hardly be called parents at all; these parents were wild younguns who liked to fish and roam around the s. Their own children, and there was a new one almost every year, were only a nuisao them. At night when they came home from the mill they would look at the children as though they did not know wherever they had e from. If the children cried they were beaten, and the first thing they learned in this world was to seek the darkest er of the room and try to hide themselves as best they could. They were as thin as little whitehaired ghosts, and they did not speak, not even to each other. Finally, they were abandoned by their parents altogether ao the mercies of the town. It was a hard winter, with the mill closed down almost three months, and much misery everywhere. But this is not a town to let white orphans perish in the road before your eyes. So here is what came about: the eldest child, who was eight years old, walked into Cheehaw and disappeared -- perhaps he took a freight train somewhere a out into the world, nobody knows. Three other children were boarded out amongst the town, bei around from o to another, and as they were delicate they died before Easter time. The last two children were Marvin Mad Henry Macy, and they were taken into a home. There was a good woman iown named Mrs. Mary Hale, and she took Marvin Mad Henry Mad loved them as her own. They were raised in her household and treated well.
But the hearts of small children are delicate ans. A cruel beginning in this world twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. ain, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things. This last is what happeo Henry Macy, who is so opposite to his brother, is the ki alest man in town. He lends his wages to those who are unfortunate, and in the old days he used to care for the children whose parents were at the café on Saturday night. But he is a shy man, and he has the look of one who has a swolle and suffers. Marvin Macy, however, grew to be bold and fearless and cruel. His heart turough as the horns of Satan, and until the time when he loved Miss Amelia he brought to his brother and the good woman who raised him nothing but shame and trouble.
But love reversed the character of Marvin Macy. For two years he loved Miss Amelia, but he did not declare himself. He would stahe door of her premises, his cap in his hand, his eyes meek and longing and misty gray. He reformed himself pletely. He was good to his brother and foster mother, and he saved his wages and learhrift. Moreover, he reached out tod. No longer did he lie around on the floor of the front porch all day Sunday, singing and playing his guitar; he attended church services and resent at all religious meetings. He learned good manners; he trained himself to rise and give his chair to a lady, and he quit swearing and fighting and using holy names in vain. So for two years he passed through this transformation and improved his character in every way. Then at the end of the two years he went one evening to Miss Amelia, carrying a bunch of s flowers, a sack of chitterlins, and a silver ring -- that night Marvin Macy declared himself.
And Miss Amelia married him. Later everyone wondered why. Some said it was because she wao get herself some wedding presents. Others believed it came about through the nagging of Miss Amelias great-aunt in Cheehaas a terrible old woman. Anyway, she strode with great steps down the aisle of the church wearing her dead mothers bridal gown, which was of yellow satin and at least twelve ioo short for her. It was a winter afternoon and the clear sun shohrough the ruby windows of the churd put a curious glow on the pair before the altar. As the marriage lines were read Miss Amelia kept making an odd gesture -- she would rub the palm of her right hand down the side of her satin wedding gown. She was reag for the pocket of her overalls, and being uo find it her face became impatient, bored, and exasperated. At last when the lines were spoken and the marriage prayer was done Miss Amelia hurried out of the churot taking the arm of her husband, but walking at least two paces ahead of him.
The Ballad of the Sad Café-7
The church is no distance from the store so the bride and groom walked home. It is said that on the way Miss Amelia began to talk about some deal she had worked up with a farmer over a load of kindling wood. In fact, she treated her groom ily the same manner she would have used with some er who had e into the store to buy a pint from her. But so far all had goly enough; the town was gratified, as people had seen what this love had doo Marvin Mad hoped that it might also reform his bride. At least, they ted on the marriage to tone down Miss Amelias temper, to put a bit of bride-fat on her, and to ge her at last into a calculable woman.
They were wrong. The young boys who watched through the window on that night said that this is what actually happehe bride and groom ate a grand supper prepared by Jeff, the old Negro who cooked for Miss Amelia. The bride took sed servings of everything, but the groom picked with his food. Then the bride?t> went about her ordinary business -- reading the neer, finishing an iory of the sto the store, and so forth. The groom hung about in the doorway with a loose, foolish, blissful fad was not noticed. At eleven oclock the bride took a lamp a upstairs. The groom followed close behind her. So far all had goly enough, but what followed after was unholy.
Within half an hour Miss Amelia had stomped dowairs in breeches and a khaki jacket. Her face had darkened so that it looked quite black. She slammed the kit door and gave it an ugly kick. Then she trolled herself. She poked up the fire, sat dout her feet up o stove. She read the Farmers Almanac, drank coffee, and had a smoke with her fathers pipe. Her face was hard, stern, and had now whiteo its natural color. Sometimes she paused to jot down some information from the Almana a piece of paper. Toward dawn she went into her offid uncovered her typewriter, wh>ich she had retly bought and was only just learning how to run. That was the way in which she spent the whole of her wedding night. At daylight she went out to her yard as though nothing whatsoever had occurred and did some carpentering on a rabbit hutch which she had begun the week before and inteo sell somewhere.
A groom is in a sorry fix when he is u his well-beloved bride to bed with him, and the whole town knows it. Marvin Macy came down that day still in his wedding finery, and with a sick face. God knows how he had spent the night. He moped about the yard, watg Miss Amelia, but keeping some distance away from her. Then toward noon an idea came to him and he went off in the dire of Society City. He returned with presents -- an opal ring, a pink enamel doreen of the sort which was then in fashion, a silver bracelet with two hearts on it, and a box of dy which had cost two dollars and a half. Miss Amelia looked over these fine gifts and opehe box of dy, for she was hungry. The rest of the presents she judged shrewdly for a moment to sum up their value -- the them in the ter out for sale. The night ent in much the same manner as the preg one -- except that Miss Amelia brought her feather mattress to make a pallet by the kit stove, and she slept fairly well.
Things went on like this for three days. Miss Amelia went about her business as usual, and took great i in some rumor that a bridge was to be built some ten miles down the road. Marvin Macy still followed her about around the premises, and it lain from his face how he suffered. Then on the fourth day he did aremely simple-mihing: he went to Cheehaw and came back with a lawyer. Then in Miss Amelias office he signed over to her the whole of his worldly goods, which was ten acres of timberland which he had bought with the money he had saved. She studied the paper sternly to make sure there was no possibility of a trid filed it soberly in the drawer of her desk. That afternoon Marvin Macy took a quart bottle of whisky a with it alo in the s while the sun was still shining. Toward evening he came in drunk, went up to Miss Amelia with wet wide eyes, and put his hand on her shoulder. He was trying to tell her something, but before he could open his mouth she had swung oh her fist and hit his face so hard that he was thrown back against the wall and one of his froh was broken.
The rest of this affair only be mentioned in bare outline. After this first blow Miss Amelia hit him whenever he came within arms reach of her, and whenever he was drunk. At last she turned him off the premises altogether, and he was forced to suffer publicly. During the day he hung around just outside the boundary line of Miss Amelias property and sometimes with a drawn crazy look he would fetch his rifle and sit there ing it, peering at Miss Amelia steadily. If she was afraid she did not show it, but her face was sterhan ever, and often she spat on the ground. His last foolish effort was to climb in the window of her store one night and to sit there in the dark, for no purpose whatsoever, until she came dowairs m. For this Miss Amelia set off immediately to the courthouse in Cheehaw with some notion that she could get him locked in the peiary for trespassing. Marvin Macy left the town that day, and no one saw him go, or knew just where he went. On leavi a long curious letter, partly written in pencil and partly with ink, beh Miss Amelias door. It was a wild love letter -- but in it were also included threats, and he swore that in his life he would get even with her. His marriage had lasted for ten days. An.９9ｌiｂ?d the towhe special satisfa that people feel when someone has been thhly done in by some sdalous and terrible means.
Miss Amelia was left with everything that Marvin Macy had ever owned -- his timberwood, his gilt watch, every one of his possessions. But she seemed to attach little value to them and that spring she cut up his Klansmans robe to cover her tobacco plants. So all that he had ever done was to make her richer and t her love. But, strao say, she never spoke of him but with a terrible and spiteful bitterness. She never once referred to him by always mentioned him sfully as "that loom-fixer I was married to."
And later, when horrifying rumors ing Marvin Macy reached the town, Miss Amelia was very pleased. For the true character of Marvin Macy finally revealed itself, once he had freed himself of his love. He became a criminal whose picture and whose name were in all the papers iate. He robbed three filling stations and held up the A & P store of Society City with a sawed-off gun. He was suspected of the murder of Slit-Eye Sam who was a noted highjacker. All these crimes were ected with the name of Marvin Macy, so that his evil became famous through many tries. Then finally the latured him, drunk, on the floor of a tourist , his guitar by his side, and fifty-seven dollars in his right shoe. He was tried, sentenced, a off to the peiary near Atlanta. Miss Amelia was deeply gratified.
Well, all this happened a long time ago, and it is the story of Miss Amelias marriage. The town laughed a long time over this grotesque affair. But though the outward facts of this love are indeed sad and ridiculous, it must be remembered that the real story was that which took pla the soul of the lover himself. So who but God be the final judge of this or any other love? On the very first night of the café there were several who suddenly thought of this broken bridegroom, locked in the gloomy peiary, many miles away. And in the years that followed, Marvin Macy was not altogether fotten iown. His name was never mentioned in the preseniss Amelia or the hunchback. But the memory of his passion and his crimes, and the thought of him trapped in his cell in the peiary, was like a troubling uoh the happy love of Miss Amelia and the gaiety of the café. So do not fet this Marvin Macy, as he is to act a terrible part iory which is yet to e.
During the four years in which the store became a café the rooms upstairs were not ged. This part of the premises remaily as it had been all of Miss Amelias life, as it was iime of her father, and most likely his father before him. The three rooms, it is already known, were immaculately . The smallest object had its exact place, and everything was wiped and dusted by Jeff, the servant of Miss Amelia, each m. The front room beloo Cousin Lymon -- it was the room where Marvin Macy had stayed during the few nights he was allowed on the premises, and before that it was the bedroom of Miss Amelias father. The room was furnished with a large chifforobe, a bureau covered with a stiff white linen cloth crocheted at the edges, and a marble-topped table. The bed was immense, an old fourposter made of carved, dark rosewood. On it were two feather mattresses, bolsters, and a number of handmade forts. The bed was so high that beh it were two wooden steps -- no oct had ever used these steps before, but Cousin Lymohem out eaight and walked up in state. Beside the steps, but pushed modestly out of view, there was a a chamber-pot painted with pink roses. N covered the dark, polished floor and the curtains were of some white stuff, also crocheted at the ed?９9ｌib.ges.
Oher side of the parlor was Miss Amelias bedroom, and it was smaller and very simple. The bed was narrow and made of pihere was a bureau for her breeches, shirts, and Sunday dress, and she had hammered two nails in the closet wall on which to hang her s boots. There were no curtains, rugs, or ors of any kind.
The Ballad of the Sad Café-8
The large middle room, the parlor, was elaborate. The rosewood sofa, upholstered in threadbare green silk, was before the fireplace. Marble-topped tables, two Singer sewing maes, a big vase of pampas grass -- everything was rid grand. The most important piece of furniture in the parlor was a big, glassed-doored et in which was kept a number of treasures and iss Amelia had added two objects to this colle -- one was a large a from a water oak, the other a little velvet box holding two small, grayish stones. Sometimes when she had nothing much to do, Miss Amelia would take out this velvet box and stand by the window with the stones in the palm of her hand, looking down at them with a mixture of fasation, dubious respect, and fear. They were the kidones of Miss Amelia herself, and had been taken from her by the doctor in Cheehaw some years ago. It bad been a terrible experience, from the first mio the last, and all she had got out of it were those two little stones; she was bound to set great store by them, or else admit to a mighty sorry bargain. So she kept them and in the sed year of Cousin Lymons stay with her she had them set as ors in a watch which she gave to him. The other object she had added to the colle, the large a, recious to her -- but when she looked at it her face was always saddened and perplexed.
"Amelia, what does it signify?" Cousin Lymon asked her.
"Why, its just an a," she answered. "Just an a I picked up oernoon Big Papa died."
"How do you mean?" Cousin Lymon insisted.
"I mean its just an a I spied on the ground that day. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. But I dont know why."
"What a peculiar reason to keep it," Cousin Lymon said.
The talks of Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon in the rooms upstairs, usually in the first few hours of the m when the hunchback could not sleep, were many. As a rule, Miss Amelia was a silent woman, not lettiongue run wild on any subject that happeo pop into her head. There were certain topics of versation, however, in which she took pleasure. All these subjects had one point in on -- they were interminable. She liked to plate problems which could be worked over for decades and still remain insoluble. Cousin Lymon, oher hand, ealking on any subject whatsoever, as he was a great chatterer. Their approach to any versation was altogether different. Miss Amelia always kept to the broad, rambling generalities of the matter, going on endlessly in a low, thoughtful void getting nowhere -- while Cousin Lymon would interrupt her suddenly to pick up, magpie fashion, some detail which, even if unimportant, was at least crete and bearing on some practical facet close at hand. Some of the favorite subjeiss Amelia were: the stars, the reason why Negroes are black, the best treatment for cer, and so forth. Her father was also an interminable subject which was dear to her.
"Why, Law," she would say to Lymon. "Those days I slept. Id go to bed just as the lamp was turned on and sleep -- why, Id sleep like I was drowned in warm axle grease. Then e daybreak Big Papa would walk in and put his hand down on my shoulder. "Get stirring, Little," he would say. Then later he would holler up the stairs from the kit wheove was hot "Fried grits," he would holler. "White meat and gravy. Ham and eggs." And Id run dowairs and dress by the hot stove while he was out washing at the pump. Then off wed go to the still or maybe --"
"The grits we had this m oor," Cousin Lymon said. "Fried too quick so that the inside never heated."
"And when Big Papa would run off the liquor in those days --" The versation would go on endlessly, with Miss Amelias long legs stretched out before the hearth; for winter or summer there was always a fire in the grate, as Lymon was cold-natured. He sat in a low chair across from her, his feet not quite toug the floor and his torso usually well-ed in a bla or the green wool shawl. Miss Amelia never mentioned her father to anyone else except Cousin Lymon.
That was one of the ways in which she showed her love for him. He had her fiden the most delicate and vital matters. He alone knew where she kept the chart that showed where certain barrels of whisky were buried on a piece of property near by. He alone had access to her bank-book and the key to the et of curios. He took money from the cash register, whole handfuls of it, and appreciated the loud ji made inside his pockets. He owned almost everything on the premises, for when he was iss Amelia would prowl about and find him some present -- so that now there was hardly anythi close at hand to give him. The only part of her life that she did not want Cousin Lymon to share with her was the memory of her ten-day marriage. Marvin Macy was the one subject that was never, at any time, discussed betweewo of them.
So let the sloass and e to a Saturday evening six years after the time when Cousin Lymon came first to the town. It was August and the sky had burned above the town like a sheet of flame all day. Now the green twilight was near and there was a feeling of repose. The street was coated an inch deep with dry golden dust and the little children ran about half-naked, sneezed often, sweated, and were fretful. The mill had closed down at noon. People in the houses along the main street sat resting on their steps and the women had palmetto fans. At Miss Amelias there was a sign at the front of the premises saying CAFE. The back porch was cool with latticed shadows and there cousin Lymon sat turning the ice-cream freezer -- often he unpacked the salt and id removed the dasher to lick a bit and see how the work was ing on. Jeff cooked i. Early that m Miss Amelia had put a noti the wall of the front porch reading: Chi Dinner -- Twenty ts Tohe café was already open and Miss Amelia had just finished a period of work in her office. All the eight tables were occupied and from the meical piano came a jingling tune.
In a er he door and sitting at a table with a child, was Henry Macy. He was drinking a glass of liquor, which was unusual for him, as liquor went easily to his head and made him cry or sing. His face was very pale and his left eye worked stantly in a nervous tic, as it t to do when he was agitated. He had e into the café sidewise and silent, and when he was greeted he did not speak. The child o him beloo Horace Wells, and he had bee at Miss Amelias that m to be doctored.
Miss Amelia came out from her offi good spirits. She atteo a few details i aered the café with the popes nose of a heween her fingers, as that was her favorite piece. She looked about the room, saw that in general all was well, a over to the er table by Henry Macy. She turhe chair around and sat straddling the back, as she only wao pass the time of day and was not yet ready for her supper. There was a bottle of Kroup Kure in the hip pocket of her overalls -- a medie made from whisky, rock dy, and a secret ingredient. Miss Amelia uncorked the bottle and put it to the mouth of the child. Theuro Henry Mad, seeing the nervous winking of his left eye, she asked:
"What ails you?"
Henry Macy seemed on the point of saying something difficult, but, after a long look into the eyes of Miss Amelia, he swallowed and did not speak.
So Miss Amelia returo her patient. Only the childs head showed above the table top. His face was very red, with the eyelids half-closed and the mouth partly open. He had a large, hard, swollen boil on his thigh, and had been brought to Miss Amelia so that it could be opened. But Miss Amelia used a special method with children; she did not like to see them hurt, struggling, and terrified. So she had kept the child around the premises all day, giving him licorid frequent doses of the Kroup Kure, and toward evening she tied a napkin around his ned let him eat his fill of the dinner. Now as he sat at the table his head wobbled slowly from side to side and sometimes as he breathed there came from him a little worn-out grunt.
There was a stir in the café and Miss Amelia looked around quickly. Cousin Lymon had e in. The hunchback strutted into the café as he did every night, and when he reached the exact ter of the room he stopped short and looked shrewdly around him, summing up the people and making a quick pattern of the emotional material at hand that night. The hunchback was a great mischief-maker. He enjoyed any kind of to-do, and without saying a word he could set the people at each other in a way that was miraculous. It .was due to him that the Raiwins had quarreled over a jaife two years past, and had not spoken one word to each other since. He resent at the big fight between Rip Wellborn and Robert Calvert Hale, and every ht for that matter since he had e into the town. He nosed around everywhere, khe intimate business of everybody, and trespassed every waking hour. Yet, queerly enough, in spite of this it was the hunchback who was most responsible for the great popularity of the café. Things were never so gay as when he was around. When he walked into the room there was always a quick feeling of tension, because with this busybody about there was never any telling what might desd on you, or what might suddenly be brought to happen in the room. People are never so free with themselves and so recklessly glad as when there is some possibility of otion or calamity ahead. So when the hunchback marched into the café everyone looked around at him and there was a quick outburst of talking and a drawing of corks.
Lymon waved his hand to Stumpy MacPhail who was sitting with Merlie Ryan and Henry Ford Crimp. "I walked to Rotten Lake today to fish," he said. "And on the way I stepped over peared at first to be a big fallen tree. But then as I stepped over I felt something stir and I taken this sed look and thebbr>re I was straddling this here alligator long as from the front door to the kit and thicker than a hog."
The hunchback chattered on. Everyone looked at him from time to time, and some kept track of his chattering and others did not. There were times when every word he said was nothing but lying and bragging. Nothing he said tonight was true. He had lain in bed with a summer quinsy all day long, and had only got up ie afternoon in order to turn the ice-cream freezer. Everybody khis, yet he stood there in the middle of the café and held forth with such lies and boasting that it was enough to shrivel the ears.
Miss Amelia watched him with her hands in her pockets and her head turo one side. There was a softness about her gray, queer eyes and she was smilily to herself. Occasionally she glanced from the hunchback to the other people in the café -- and then her look roud, and there was in it the hint of a threat, as though daring ao try to hold him to at for all his foolery. Jeff was bringing in the suppers, already served on the plates, and the ris in the café made a pleasant stir of ess in the air.
"The little youngun is asleep," said Henry Macy finally.
Miss Amelia looked down at the patient beside her, and posed her face for the matter in hand. The childs was resting oable edge and a trickle of spit or Kroup Kure had bubbled from the er of his mouth. His eyes were quite closed, and a little family of gnats had clustered peacefully in the ers. Miss Amelia put her hand on his head and shook it roughly, but the patient did not awake. So Miss Amelia lifted the child from the table, being careful not to touch the sore part of his leg, a into the office. Henry Macy followed after her and they closed the office door.
Cousin Lymon was bored that evening. There was not much going on, and in spite of the heat the ers in the café were good-humored. Henry Ford Crimp and Horace Wells sat at the middle table with their arms around each other, sniggering over some long joke -- but when he approached them he could make nothing of it as he had missed the beginning of the story. The moonlight brightehe dusty road, and the dwarfed peach trees were blad motionless: there was no breeze. The drowsy buzz of s mosquitoes was like an echo of the silent night. The town seemed dark, except far down the road to the right there was the flicker of a lamp. Somewhere in the darkness a woman sang in a high wild void the tune had no start and no finish and was made up of only three 藏书网notes which went on and on and on. The hunchback stood leaning against the banister of the porch, looking down the empty road as though hoping that someone would e along.
The Ballad of the Sad Café-9
There were footsteps behind him, then a voice: "Cousin Lymon, your dinner is set out upoable."
"My appetite is poor tonight," said the hunchback, who had beeing sweet snuff all the day. "There is a sourness in my mouth."
"Just a pick," said Miss Amelia. "The breast, the liver, and the heart."
Together they went bato the bright café, and sat down with Henry Macy. Their table was the largest one in the café, and on it there was a bouquet of s lilies in a Coca Cola bottle. Miss Amelia had finished with her patient and was satisfied with herself. From behind the closed office door there had e only a few sleepy whimpers, and before the patient could wake up and bee terrified it was all over. The child was now slung across the shoulder of his father, sleeping deeply, his little arms dangling loose along his fathers back, and his puffed-up face very red -- they were leaving the café to go home.
Henry Macy was still silent. He ate carefully, making no noise when he swallowed, and was not a third as greedy as Cousin Lymon who had claimed to have no appetite and was now putting down helping after helping of the dinner. Occasionally Henry Macy looked across at Miss Amelia and again held his peace.
It ical Saturday night. An old couple who had e in from the try hesitated for a moment at the doorway, holding each others hand, and finally decided to e ihey had lived together so long, this old try couple, that they looked as similar as twins. They were brown, shriveled, and like two little walkis. They left early, and by midnight most of the other ers were gone. Rosser e and Merlie Ryan still played checkers, and Stumpy MacPhail sat with a liquor bottle on his table (his wife would not allow it in the home) and carried on peaceabl9９lib?e versations with himself. Henry Macy had not yet gone away, and this was unusual, as he almost always went to bed soon after nightfall. Miss Amelia yawned sleepily, but Lymon was restless and she did not suggest that they close up for the night.
Finally, at one oclock, Henry Macy looked up at the er of the ceiling and said quietly to Miss Amelia: "I got a letter today."
Miss Amelia was not oo be impressed by this, because all sorts of business letters and catalogues came addressed to her.
"I got a letter from my brother," said Henry Macy.
The hunchback, who had been goose-stepping about the café with his hands clasped behind his head, stopped suddenly. He was quick to sense any ge imosphere of a gathering. He gla each fa the room and waited.
Miss Amelia scowled and hardened her right fist "You are wele to it," she said.
"He is on parole. He is out of the peiary."
The faiss Amelia was very dark, and she shivered although the night was warm. Stumpy MacPhail and Merlie Ryan pushed aside their checker game. The café was very quiet.
"Who?" asked Cousin Lymon. His large, pale ears seemed to grow on his head and stiffen. "What?"
Miss Amelia slapped her hands palm down oable. "Because Marvin Macy is a --" But her voice hoarsened and after a few moments she only said: "He belongs to be in that peiary the balance of his life."
"What did he do?" asked Cousin Lymon.
There was a long pause, as no one kly how to ahis. "He robbed three filling stations," said Stumpy MacPhail. But his words did not sound plete and there was a feeling of si uioned.
The hunchback was impatient. He could not bear to be left out of anything, even a great misery. The name Marvin Marcy was unknown to him, but it tantalized him as did aion of subjects which others knew about and of which he was ignorant -- such as any refereo the old sawmill that had been torn down before he came, or a ce word about poor Morris Fiein, or the recolle of a that had occurred before his time. Aside from this inborn curiosity, the hunchback took a great i in robbers and crimes of all varieties. As he strutted around the table he was muttering the words "released on parole" and "peiary" to himself. But although he questioned insistently, he was uo find anything, as nobody would dare to talk about Marvin Macy before Miss Amelia in the c9９ｌib?afé.
"The letter did not say very much," said Henry Macy. "He did not say where he was going."
"Humph!" said Amelia, and her face was still hardened and very dark. "He will never set his split hoof on my premises."
She pushed back her chair from the table, and made ready to close the café. Thinking about Marvin Macy may have set her to brooding, for she hauled the cash register back to the kit and put it in a private place. Henry Macy went off down the dark road. But Henry Ford Crimp and Merlie Ryan lingered for a time on the front porch. Later Merlie Ryan was to make certain claims, to swear that on that night he had a vision of what was to e. But the town paid no attention, for that was just the sort of thing that Merlie Ryan would claim. Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon talked for a time in the parlor. And when at last the hunchback thought that he could sleep she arrahe mosquito ing over his bed and waited until he had finished with his prayers. The on her long nightgown, smoked two pipes, and only after a long time went to sleep.
That autumn py time. The crops around the tryside were good, and over at the Forks Falls market the price of tobacco held firm that year. After the long hot summer the first cool days had a bright sweetness. Goldenrod grew along the dusty roads, and the sugar e was ripe and purple. The bus came each day from Cheehaw to carry off a few of the younger children to the solidated school to get an education. Boys hunted foxes in the pinewoods, winter quilts were aired out on the wash lines, and sweet potatoes bedded in the ground with straw against the colder months to e. In the evening, delicate shreds of smoke rose from the eys, and the moon was round and e iumn sky. There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall. Sometimes, late in the night when there was no wind, there could be heard iowhin wild whistle of the train that goes through Society City on its way far off to the North.
For Miss Amelia Evans this was a time of great activity. She was at work from dawn until sundown. She made a new and bigger denser for her still, and in one week ran off enough liquor to souse the whole ty. Her old mule was dizzy from grinding so much shum, and she scalded her Mason jars and put aear preserves. She was looking freatly to the first frost, because she had traded for three tremendous hogs, and inteo make much barbecue, chitterlins, and sausage.
During these weeks there was a quality about Miss Amelia that many people noticed. She laughed often, with a deep ringing laugh, and her whistling had a sassy, tuneful trickery. She was forever trying out her strength, lifting up heavy objects, or pokiough biceps with her finger. One day she sat down to her typewriter and wrote a story -- a story in which there were fners, trap doors, and millions of dollars. Cousin Lymon was with her always, traipsing along behind her coat-tails, and wheched him her face had a bright, soft look, and when she spoke his here lingered in her voice the uone of love.
The first cold spell came at last. When Miss Amelia awoke one m there were frost flowers on the windowpanes, and rime had silvered the patches of grass in the yard. Miss Amelia built a r fire i stove, the out of doors to judge the day. The air was cold and sharp, the sky pale green and cloudless. Very shortly people began to e in from the try to find out what Miss Amelia thought of the weather; she decided to kill the biggest hog, and wot round the tryside. The hog was slaughtered and a low oak fire started in the barbecue pit. There was the warm smell of pig blood and smoke in the back yard, the stamp of footsteps, the ring of voices in the winter air. Miss Amelia walked around giving orders and soon most of the work was done.
She had some particular busio do in Cheehaw that day, so after making sure that all was going well, she ked up her car and got ready to leave. She asked Cousin Lymon to e with her, in fact, she asked him seven times, but he was loath to leave the otion and wao remain. This seemed to trouble Miss Amelia, as she always liked to have him o her, and roo be terribly homesick when she had to go any distance away. But after asking him seven times, she did ne him any further. Before leaving she found a stid drew a heavy line all around the barbecue pit, about two feet back from the edge, and told him not to trespass beyond that boundary. She left after dinner and inteo be back before dark.
Now, it is not so rare to have a truck or an automobile pass along the road and through the town on the way from Cheehaw to somewhere else. Every year the tax collector es tue with rich people such as Miss Amelia. And if somebody iown, such as Merlie Ryan, takes a notion that he ive to get a car o, or to pay down three dollars and have a firic icebox such as they advertise iore windows of Cheehaw, then a city man will e out asking meddlesome questions, finding out all his troubles, and ruining his ces of buying anything on the installment plan. Sometimes, especially sihey are w on the Forks Falls highway, the cars hauling the gang e through the town. And frequently people in automobiles get lost and stop to inquire how they find the right road again. So, late that afternoon it was nothing unusual to have a truck pass the mill and stop in the middle of the road he café of Miss Amelia. A man jumped down from the back of the truck, and the truck went on its way.
The man stood in the middle of the road and looked about him. He was a tall man, with brown curly hair, and slow-moving, deep-blue eyes. His lips were red and he smiled the lazy, half-mouthed smile of the braggart. The man wore a red shirt, and a wide belt of tooled leather; he carried a tin suitcase and a guitar. The first person iown to see this newer was Cousin Lymon, who had heard the shifting gears and e around to iigate. The hunchback stuck his head around the er of the porch, but did not step out altogether into full view. He and the man stared at each other, and it was not the look of twers meeting for the first time and swiftly summing up each other. It eculiar stare they exged between them, like the look of two criminals whnize each other. Then the man in the red shirt shrugged his left shoulder and turned away. The face of the hunchback was very pale as he watched the man go down the road, and after a few moments he began to follow along carefully, keeping many paces away.
It was immediately known throughout the town that Marvin Macy had e back again. First, he went to the mill, propped his elbows lazily on a window sill and looked inside. He liked to watch others hard at work, as do all born loafers. The mill was thrown into a sort of numb fusion. The dyers left the hot vats, the spinners and weavers fot about their maes, and even Stumpy MacPhail, who was foreman, did not kly what to do. Marvin Macy still smiled his wet half-mouthed smiles, and when he saw his bro藏书网ther, his bragging expression did not ge. After looking over the mill Marvin Macy went down the road to the house where he had been raised, a his suitcase and guitar on the front porch. Then he walked around the millpond, looked over the church, the three stores, and the rest of the town. The hunchback trudged along quietly at some distance behind him, his hands in his pockets, and his little face still very pale.
It had grown late. The red winter sun was setting, and to the west the sky was deep gold and crimsed ey swifts flew to their s; lamps were lighted. Now and then there was the smell of smoke, and the warm rich odor of the barbecue slowly cooking i behind the café. After making the rounds of the town Marvin Macy stopped before Miss Amelias premises ahe sign above the porch. Then, not hesitating to trespass, he walked through the side yard. The mill whistle blew a thin, lonesome blast, and the days shift was done. Soon there were others in Miss Amelias back yard beside Marvin Macy -- Henry Ford Crimp, Merlie Ryan, Stumpy MacPhail, and any number of children and people who stood around the edges of the property and looked on. Very little was said. Marvin Macy stood by himself on one side of the pit, and the rest of the people clustered together oher side. Cousin Lymon stood someart from everyone, and he did not take his eyes from the faarvin Macy.
"Did you have a good time in the peiary?" asked Merlie Ryan, with a silly giggle.
Marvin Macy did not answer. He took fr.t>om his hip pocket a large knife, ope slowly, and hohe blade on the seat of his pants. Merlie Ryan grew suddenly very quiet ao stand directly behind the broad back of Stumpy MacPhail.
The Ballad of the Sad Café-10
Miss Amelia did not e home until almost dark. They heard the rattle of her automobile while she was still a long distance away, then the slam of the door and a bumping noise as though she were hauling something up the front steps of her premises. The sun had already set, and in the air there was the blue smoky glow of early winter evenings. Miss Amelia came down the back steps slowly, and t..group in her yard waited very quietly. Few people in this world could stand up to Miss Amelia, and against Marvin Macy she had this special and bitter hate. Everyone waited to see her burst into a terrible holler, snatch up some dangerous object, and chase him altogether out of town. At first she did not see Marvin Macy, and her face had the relieved and dreamy expression that was natural to her when she reached home after having gone some distance away.
Miss Amelia must have seen Marvin Mad Cousin Lymon at the same instant. She looked from oo the other, but it was not the wastrel from the peiary on whom she finally fixed her gaze of sick amazement. She, and everyone else, was looking at Cousin Lymon, and he was a sight to see.
The hunchback stood at the end of the pit, his pale face lighted by the soft glow from the sm oak fire. Cousin Lymon had a very peculiar aplishment, which he used whenever he wished to ingratiate himself with someone. He would stand very still, and with just a little tration, he could wiggle his large pale ears with marvelous quiess and ease. This trick he always used when he wao get something special out of Miss Amelia, and to her it was irresistible. Now as he stood there the hunchbacks ears were wiggling furiously on his head, but it was not Miss Amelia at whom he was looking this time. The hunchback was smiling at Marvin Macy with areaty that was o desperation. At first Marvin Macy paid no attention to him, and when he did finally gla the hunchback it was without any appreciation whatsoever.
"What ails this Brokeback?" he asked with a rough jerk of his thumb.
No one answered. And Cousin Lymon, seeing that his aplishment was getting him nowhere, added new efforts of persuasion. He fluttered his eyelids, so that they were like pale, trapped moths in his sockets. He scraped his feet around on the ground, waved his hands about, and finally began doing a little trotlike dance. In the last gloomy light of the winter afternoon he resembled the child of a shaunt.
Marvin Macy, alone of all the people in the yard, was unimpressed.
"Is the runt throwing a fit?" he asked, and when no one answered he stepped forward and gave Cousin Lymon a cuff on the side of his head. The hunchback staggered, then fell ba the ground. He sat where he had fallen, still looking up at Marvin Macy, and with great effort his ears managed one last forlorn little flap.
Now everyouro Miss Amelia to see what she would do. In all these years no one had so much as touched a hair of Cousin Lymons head, although many had had the itch to do so. If anyone even spoke crossly to the hunchback, Miss Amelia would cut off this rash mortals credit and find ways of making things go hard for him a long time afterward. So now if Miss Amelia had split open Marvin Macys head with the ax on the back poro one would have been surprised. But she did nothing of the kind.
There were times when Miss Amelia seemed to go into a sort of trance. And the cause of these trances was usually known and uood. For Miss Amelia was a fine doctor, and did not grind up s roots and other untried ingredients and give them to the first patient who came along; whenever she ied a new medie she always tried it out first on herself. She would swallow an enormous dose and spend the following day walking thoughtfully bad forth from the café to the brick privy. Often, when there was a sudden keen gripe, she would stand quite still, her queer eyes staring down at the ground and her fists ched; she was trying to decide which an was being worked upon, and what misery the new medie might be most likely to cure. And now as she watched the hunchbad Marvin Macy, her face wore this same expression, teh reing some inain, although she had taken no new medie that day.
"That will learn you, Brokeback," said Marvin Macy.
Henry Macy pushed back his limp whitish hair from his forehead and coughed nervously. Stumpy MacPhail and Merlie Ryan shuffled their feet, and the children and black people oskirts of the property made not a sound. Marvin Macy folded the knife he had been honing, and after looking about him fearlessly he swaggered out of the yard. The embers i were turning to gray feathery ashes and it was now quite dark.
That was the way Marvin Macy came back from the peiary. Not a living soul in all the town was glad to see him. Even Mrs. Mary Hale, who was a good woman and had raised him with love and care -- at the first sight of him even this old foster mother dropped the skillet she was holding and burst into tears. But nothing could faze that Marvin Macy. He sat on the back steps of the Hale house, lazily pig his guitar, and when the supper was ready, he pushed the children of the household out of the way and served himself a big meal, although there had been barely enough hoecakes and white meat to go round. After eatitled himself in the best and warmest sleeping pla the front room and was untroubled by dreams.
Miss Amelia did not open the café that night. She locked the doors and all the windows very carefully, nothing was seen of her and Cousin Lymon, and a lamp burned in her room all the night long.
Marvin Macy brought with him bad fortune, right from the first, as could be expected. The day the weather turned suddenly, and it became hot. Even in the early m there was a sticky sultriness imosphere, the wind carried the rotten smell of the s, and delicate shrill mosquitoes webbed the green millpond. It was unseasonable, worst than August, and much damage was done. For nearly everyone in the ty who owned a hog had copied Miss Amelia and slaughtered the day before. And what sausage could keep in such weather as this? After a few days there was everywhere the smell of slowly spoili, and an atmosphere of dreary waste. Worse yet, a family reuniohe Forks Falls highork roast and died, every one of them. It lain that their hog had been ied -- and who could tell whether the rest of the meat was safe or not? People were torween the longing for the good taste of pork, and the fear of death. It was a time of waste and fusion.
The cause of all this, Marvin Macy, had no shame in him. He was seen everywhere. During work hours he loafed about the mill, looking in at the windows, and on Sundays he dressed in his red shirt and paraded up and down the road with his guitar. He was still handsome -- with his brown hair, his red lips, and his broad strong shoulders; but the evil in him was now too famous for his good looks to get him anywhere. And this evil was not measured only by the actual sins he had itted. True, he had robbed those filling stations. And before that he had ruihe te girls in the ty, and laughed about it Any number of wicked things could be listed against him, but quite apart from these crimes there was about him a secret meahat g to him almost like a smell. Ahing -- he never sweated, not even in August, and that surely is a sign worth p over.
Now it seemed to the town that he was more dangerous than he had ever been before, as in the peiary in Atlanta he must have learhe method of laying charms. Otherwise how could his effe Cousin Lymon be explained? For since first setting eyes on Marvin Macy the hunchback ossessed by an unnatural spirit. Every minute he wao be following along behind this jailbird, and he was full of silly schemes to attract attention to himself. Still Marvin Macy either treated him hatefully or failed to notice him at all. Sometimes the hunchback would give up, perch himself on the banister of the front porch much as a sick bird huddles on a telephone wire, and grieve publicly.
"But why?" Miss Amelia would ask, staring at him with her crossed, gray eyes, and her fists closed tight.
"Oh, Marvin Macy," groahe hunchback, and the sound of the name was enough to upset the rhythm of his sobs so that he hiccuped. "He has been to Atlanta."
Miss Amelia would shake her head and her face was dark and hardeo begin with she had no patieh any traveling; those who had made the trip to Atlanta or traveled fifty miles from home to see the o -- those restless people she despised. "Going to Atlanta does no credit to him."
"He has been to the peiary," said the hunchback, miserable with longing.
How are you going tue against suvies as these? In her perplexity Miss Amelia did not herself sound any too sure of what she was saying. "Been to the peiary, Cousin Lymon? Why, a trip like that is no travel t about."
During these weeks Miss Amelia was closely watched by everyone. She went about absent-mindedly, her face remote as though she had lapsed into one of her gripe trances. For some reason, after the day of Marvin Macys arrival, she put aside her overalls and wore always the red dress she had before this time reserved for Sundays, funerals, and sessions of the court. Then as the weeks passed she began to take some steps to clear up the situation. But her efforts were hard to uand. If it hurt her to see Cousin Lymon follow Marvin Macy about the town, why did she not make the issues clear ond for all, ahe hunchback that if he had dealings with Marvin Macy she would turn him off the premises? That would have been simple, and Cousin Lymon would have had to submit to her, or else face the sorry business of finding himself loose in the world. But Miss Amelia seemed to have lost her will; for the first time in her life she hesitated as to just what course to pursue. And, like most people in such a position of uainty, she did t藏书网he worst thing possible -- she began following several courses at once, all of them trary to each other.
The café ened every night as usual, and, strangely enough, when Marvin Macy came swaggering through the door, with the hunchback at his heels, she did not turn him藏书网
out. She even gave him free drinks and smiled at him in a wild, crooked way. At the same time she set a terrible trap for him out in the s that surely would have killed him if he had got caught. She let Cousin Lymon invite him to Sunday dinner, and then tried to trip him up as he went doweps. She began a great campaign of pleasure for Cousin Lymon -- making exhausting trips to various spectacles being held in distant places, driving the automobile thirty miles to a Chautauqua, taking him to Forks Falls to watch a parade. All in all it was a distrag time for Miss Amelia. In the opinion of most people she was well on her way in the climb up fools hill, and everyone waited to see how it would all turn out.
The weather turned cold again, the winter oown, and night came before the last shift in the mill was done. Childre on all their garments when they slept, and women raised the backs of their skirts to toast themselves dreamily at the fire. After it raihe mud in the road made hard frozen ruts, there were faint flickers of lamplight from the windows of the houses, the peach trees were sy and bare. In the dark, silent nights of wiime the café was the warm ter point of the town, the lights shining shtly that they could be seen a quarter of a mile away. The great iron stove at the back of the room roared, crackled, and turned red. Miss Amelia had made red curtains for the windows, and from a salesman who passed through the town she bought a great bunch of paper roses that looked very real.
But it was not only the warmth, the decorations, and the brightness, that made the café what it was. There is a deeper reason why the café was so precious to this town. And this deeper reason has to do with a certain pride that had not hitherto been known in these parts. To uand this new pride the cheapness of human life must be kept in mind. There were allenty of people clustered around a mill -- but it was seldom that every family had enough meal, garments, and fat back to go the rounds. Life could bee one long dim scramble just to get the things o keep alive. And the fusing point is this: All useful things have a price, and are bought only with money, as that is the way the world is run. You know without having to reason about it the price of a bale of cotton, or a quart of molasses. But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there es a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.
The Ballad of the Sad Café-11
But the new pride that the café brought to this town had an effe almost everyone, even the children. For in order to e to the café you did not have to buy the dinner, or a portion of liquor. There were cold bottled drinks for a nickel. And if you could not even afford that, Miss Amelia had a drink called Cherry Juice which sold for a penny a glass, and ink-colored and very sweet. Almost everyone, with the exception of Reverend T. M. Willin, came to the café at least once during the week. Children love to sleep in houses other than their own, and to eat at a neighbors table; on such occasions they behave themselves detly and are proud. The people iown were likewise proud when sitting at the tables in the café. They washed before ing to Miss Amelias, and scraped their feet very politely ohreshold as they ehe café. There, for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth mu this world could be laid low.
The café ecial be to bachelors, unfortunate people, and ptives. And here it may be mentiohat there was some reason to suspect that Cousin Lymon was ptive. The brightness of his gray eyes, his insistence, his talkativeness, and his cough -- these were all signs. Besides, there is generally supposed to be some e between a hunched spine anbbr>d ption. But whehis subject had beeioo Miss Amelia she had bee furious; she dehese symptoms with bitter vehemence, but on the sly she treated Cousin Lymon with hot chest platters, Kroup Kure, and suow this wihe hunchbacks cough was worse, and sometimes even on cold days he would break out in a heavy sweat. But this did not prevent him from following along after Marvin Macy.
Early every m he left the premises ao the back door of Mrs. Hales house, and waited and waited -- as Marvin Macy was a lazy sleeper. He would stand there and call out softly. His voice was just like the voices of children who squat patiently over those tiny little holes in the ground where doodlebugs are thought to live, poking the hole with a broom straw, and calling plaintively: "Doodlebug, Doodlebug -- fly away home. Mrs. Doodlebug, Mrs. Doodlebug. e out, e out. Your house is on fire and all your children are burning up." In just such a voice -- at once sad, luring, and resigned -- would the hunchback call Marvin Maame each m. Then when Marvin Macy came out for the day, he would trail him about the town, and sometimes they would be gone for hours together out in the s.
And Miss Amelia tio do the worst thing possible: that is, to try to follow several courses at once. When Cousin Lymohe house she did not call him back, but only stood in the middle of the road and watched lonesomely until he was out of sight. Nearly every day Marvin Macy turned up with Cousin Lymon at diime, and ate at her table. Miss Amelia opehe pear preserves, and the table was well-set with ham or chi, great bowls of hominy grits, and winter peas. It is true that on one ociss Amelia tried to poison Marvin Macy -- but there was a mistake, the plates were fused, and it was she herself who got the poisoned dish. This she quickly realized by the slight bitterness of the food, and that day she ate no dinner. She sat tilted ba her chair, feeling her muscle, and looking at Marvin Ma..cy.
Every night Marvin Macy came to the café aled himself at the best and largest table, the one in the ter of the room. Cousin Lymht him liquor, for which he did not pay a t. Marvin Macy brushed the hunchback aside as if he were a s mosquito, and not only did he show no gratitude for these favors, but if the hunchback got in his way he would cuff him with the back of his hand, or say: "Out of my way, Brokeback -- Ill snatch you bald-headed." When this happened Miss Amelia would e out from behind her ter and approach Marvin Macy very slowly, her fists ched, her peculiar red dress hanging awkwardly around her bony knees. Marvin Macy would also ch his fists and they would walk slowly and meaningfully around each other. But, although everyoched breathlessly, nothing ever came of it. The time for the fight was not yet ready.
There is one particular reason why this winter is remembered and still talked about. A great thing happened. People woke up on the sed of January and found the whole world about them altogether ged. Little ignorant children looked out of the windows, and they were so puzzled that they began to cry. Old people harked bad could remember nothing in these parts to equal the phenomenon. For in the night it had snowed. In the dark hours after midnight the dim flakes started falling softly oown. By dawn the grou.nd was covered, and the strange snow bahe ruby windows of the church, and whitehe roofs of the houses. The snow gave the town a drawn, bleak look. The two-room houses he mill were dirty, crooked, and seemed about to collapse, and somehow everything was dark and shrunken. But the snow itself -- there was a beauty about it few people around here had ever known before. The snow was not white, as Northerners had pictured it to be; in the snow there were soft colors of blue and silver, the sky was a gentle shining gray. And the dreamy quietness of falling snow -- when had the town been so silent?
People reacted to the snowfall in various ways. Miss Amelia, on looking out of her window, thoughtfully wiggled the toes of her bare foot, gathered close to her he collar of her nightgown. She stood there for some time, then eo draw the shutters and lock every window on the premises. She dosed the plapletely, lighted the lamps, and sat solemnly over her bowl of grits. The reason for this was not that Miss Amelia feared the snowfall. It was simply that she was uo form an immediate opinion of this , and unless she kly and definitely what she thought of a matter (which was nearly always the case) she preferred to ig. Snow had never fallen in this ty in her lifetime, and she had hought about it one way or the other. But if she admitted this snowfall she would have to e to some decision, and in those days there was enough distra in her life as it was already. So she poked about the gloomy, lamp lighted house and pretehat nothing had happened. Cousin Lymon, on the trary, chased around in the wildest excitement, and when Miss Amelia turned her back to dish him some breakfast he slipped out of the door.
Marvin Macy laid claim to the snowfall. He said that he knew snow, had seen it in Atlanta, and from the way he walked about the town that day it was as though he owned every flake. He s the little children who crept timidly out of the houses and scooped up handfuls of snow to taste. Reverend Willin hurried down the road with a furious face, as he was thinking deeply and trying to weave the snow into his Sunday sermon. Most people were humble and glad about this marvel; they spoke in hushed voices and said "thank you" and "please" more than was necessary. A few weak characters, of course, were demoralized and got drunk -- but they were not numerous. To everyohis was an occasion and many ted their money and plao go to the café that night.
Cousin Lymon followed Marvin Macy about all day, seding his claim to the snow. He marveled that snow did not fall as does rain, and stared up at the dreamy, gently falling flakes until he stumbled from dizziness. And the pride he took on himself, basking in the glory of Marvin Macy -- it was such that many people could not resist calling out to him: " Oho, said the fly on the chariot wheel. What a dust we do raise. "
Miss Amelia did not io serve dinner. But when, at six oclock, there was the sound of footsteps on the porch she opehe front door cautiously. It was Henry Ford Crimp, and though there was no food, she let him sit at a table and served him a drink. Others came. The evening was blue, bitter, and though the snow fell no lohere was a wind from the pirees that swept up delicate flurries from the ground. Cousin Lymon did not e until after dark, with him Marvin Macy, and he carried his tin suitcase and his guitar.
"So you mean to travel?" said Miss Amelia quickly.
Marvin Macy warmed himself at the stove. Thetled down at his table and carefully sharpened a little stick. He picked his teeth, frequently taking the stick out of his mouth to look at the end and wipe it on the sleeve of his coat. He did not bother to answer.
The hunchback looked at Miss Amelia, who was behind the ter. His face was not in the least beseeg; he seemed quite sure of himself. He folded his hands behind his bad perked up his ears fidently. His cheeks were red, his eyes shining, and his clothes were soggy wet. "Marvin Macy is going to visit a spell with us," he said.
Miss Amelia made no protest. She only came out from behind the ter and hovered over the stove, as though the news had made her suddenly cold. She did not warm her backside modestly, lifting her skirt only an inch or so, as do most women when in public. There was not a grain of modesty about Miss Amelia, and she frequently seemed tet altogether that there were men in the room. Now as she stood warming herself, her red dress ulled up quite high in the back so that a piece of her strong, hairy thigh could be seen by anyone who cared to look at it. Her head was turo one side, and she had begun talking with herself, nodding and wrinkling her forehead, and there was the tone of accusation and reproa her voice although the words were not plain. Meanwhile, the hunchbad Marvin Macy had gone upstairs -- up to the parlor with the pampas grass and the two sewing maes, to the private rooms where Miss Amelia had lived the whole of her life. Down in the café you could hear them bumping around, unpag Marvin Macy, aing him settled.
That is the way Marvin Macy crowded into Miss Amelias home. At first Cousin Lymon, who had given Marvin Macy his own room, slept on the sofa in the parlor. But the snowfall had a bad effe him; he caught a cold that turned into a winter quinsy, so Miss Amelia gave up her bed to him. The sofa in the parlor was much too short for her, her feet lapped over the edges, and often she rolled off onto the floor. Perhaps it was this lack of sleep that clouded her wits; everything she tried to do against Marvin Macy rebounded on herself. She got caught in her own tricks, and found herself in many pitiful positions. But still she did not put Marvin Macy off the premises, as she was afraid that she would be left alone. Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alohe silence of a firelit room when suddenly the clock stops tig, the nervous shadows in ay house -- it is better to take in your mortal ehan face the terror of living alone.
The snow did not last. The sun came out and within two days the town was just as it had always been before. Miss Amelia did not open her house until every flake had melted. Then she had a big house ing and aired everything out in the sun. But before that, the very first thing she did on going out again into her yard, was to tie a rope to the largest branch of the aberry tree. At the end of the rope she tied a crocus sack tightly stuffed with sand. This was the pung bag she made for herself and from that day on she would box with it out in her yard every m. Already she was a fine fighter -- a little heavy on her feet, but knowing all manner of mean holds and squeezes to make up for this.
Miss Amelia, as has beeioned, measured six feet two inches i. Marvin Macy was one inch shorter. I they were about even -- both of them weighing close to a hundred and sixty pounds. Marvin Macy had the advantage in slyness of movement, and in toughness of chest. In fact from the outoint of view the odds were altogether in his favor. Yet almost everybody iown was betting on Miss Amelia; scarcely a person would put up money on Marvin Macy. The town remembered the great fight between Miss Amelia and a Fork Falls lawyer who had tried to cheat her. He had been a huge strapping fellow, but he was left three-quarters dead when she had finished with him. And it was not only her talent as a boxer that had impressed everyone -- she could demoralize her enemy by making terrifying faces and fieroises, so that even the spectators were sometimes cowed. She was brave, she practiced faithfully with her pung bag, and in this case she was clearly in the right. So people had fiden her, and they waited. Of course there was date for this fight. There were just the signs that were too plain to be overlooked.
During these times the hunchback strutted around with a pleased little pinched-up face. In many delicate and clever ways he stirred up trouble between them. He was stantly plug at Marvin Macys tr to draw attention to himself. Sometimes he followed in Miss Amelias footsteps -- but these days it was only in order to imitate her awkward long-legged walk; he crossed his eyes and aped her gestures in a way that made her appear to be a freak. There was something so terrible about this that even the silliest ers of the café, such as Merlie Ryan, did not laugh. Only Marvin Macy drew up the left er of his mouth and chuckled. Miss Amelia, when this happened, would be divided between two emotions. She would look at the hunchback with a lost, dismal reproach -- then turn toward Marvin Macy wit.9９ｌｉｂ.
somewhere? Mr. Brook polished his spectacles and put them oable by his bed. He must e to an immediate uanding with her. Otherwise, there would exist in the department a situation which could beost problematical. It was two oclock. He glanced out of his window and saw that the light in Madame Zilenskys workroom was still on. Mr. Brook got into bed, made terrible faces in the dark, and tried to plan what he would say day.
Mr. Brook was in his office by eight oclock. He sat hunched up behind his desk, ready to trap Madame Zilensky as she passed down the corridor. He did not have to wait long, and as soon as he heard her footsteps he called out her name.
Madame Zilensky stood in the doorway. She looked vague and jaded. "How are you? I had such a fine nights rest," she said.
"Pray be seated, if you please," said Mr. Brook. "I would like a word with you."
Madame Zilensky put aside her portfolio and leaned back wearily in the armchair across from him. "Yes?" she asked.
"Yesterday you spoke to me as I was walking across the campus," he said slowly. "And if I am not mistaken, I believe you said something about a pastry shop and the King of Finland. Is that correct?"
Madame Zilensky turned her head to one side and stared retrospectively at a er of the window sill.
"Something about a pastry shop," he repeated.
Her tired face brightened. "But of course," she said eagerly. "I told you about the time I was standing in front of this shop and the King of Finland --"
"Madame Zilensky!" Mr. Brook cried. "There is no King of Finland."
Madame Zilensky looked absolutely blank. Then, after an instant, she started off again. "I was standing in front of Bjarnes patisserie when I turned away from the cakes and suddenly saw the King of Finland --"
"Madame Zilensky, I just told you that there is no King of Finland."
"In Helsingfors," she started off again desperately, and agai her get as far as the King, and then no further.
"Finland is a democracy," he said. "You could not>藏书网 possibly have seen the King of Finland. Therefore, what you have just said is an untruth. A pure untruth."
Never afterward could Mr. Brook fet the faadame Zilensky at that moment. In her eyes there was astonishment, dismay, and a sort of ered horror. She had the look of one who watches his whole interior world split open and disie.
"It is a pity," said Mr. Brook with real sympathy.
But Madame Zilensky pulled herself together. She raised her and said coldly, "I am a Finn."
"That I do not question," answered Mr. Brook. On sed thought, he did question it a little.
"I was born in Finland and I am a Finnish citizen."
"That may very well be," said Mr. Brook in a rising voice.
"In the war," she tinued passionately, "I rode a motorcycle and was a messenger."
"Your patriotism does er into it."
"Just because I am getting out the first papers --"
"Madame Zilensky!" said Mr. Brook. His hands grasped the edge of the desk. "That is only an irrelevant issue. The point is that you maintained aified that you saw -- that you saw --" But he could not finish. Her face stopped him. She was deadly pale and there were shadows around her mouth. Her eyes were wide open, doomed, and proud. And Mr. Brook felt suddenly like a murderer. A great otion of feelings -- uanding, remorse, and unreasonable love -- made him cover his face with his hands. He could not speak until this agitation in his insides quieted down, and then he said very faintly, "Yes. Of course. The King of Finland. And was he nice?"
An hour later, Mr. Brook sat looking out of the window of his office. The trees along the quiet Westbridge street were almost bare, and the gray buildings of the college had a calm, sad look. As he idly took in the familiar se, he noticed the Drakes old Airedale waddling along dowreet. It was a thing he had watched a huimes before, so what was it that struck him as strahen he realized with a kind of cold surprise that the old dog was running along backward. Mr. Brook watched the Airedale until he was out of sight, then resumed his work on the s which had been turned in by the class in terpoint
The Sojourner-1
THE TWILIGHT BORDER between sleep and waking was a Romahis m; splashing fountains and arched, narrow streets, the golden lavish city of blossoms and age-soft stone. Sometimes in this semi-sciousness he sojourned again in Paris, or war German rubble, or Swiss skiing and a snow hotel. Sometimes, also, in a fallow Geia field at hunting dawn. Rome it was this m in the yearless region of dreams.
John Ferris awoke in a room in a New York hotel. He had the feeling that something unpleasant was awaiting him -- what it was, he did not know. The feeling, submerged by matinal ies, lingered even after he had dressed and gone downstairs. It was a cloudless autumn day and the pale sunlight sliced between the pastel skyscrapers. Ferris went into the -dostore and sat at the end booth o the window glass that overlooked the sidewalk. He ordered an Ameri breakfast with scrambled eggs and sausage.
Ferris had e from Paris to his fathers funeral which had taken place the week before in his home town in Geia. The shock of death had made him aware of youth already passed. His hair was reg and the veins in his now emples were pulsing and promi and his body are except for an incipient belly bulge. Ferris had loved his father and the boween them had once beeraordinarily close -- but the years had somehow unraveled this filial devotion; the death, expected for a long time, had left him with an unforeseen dismay. He had stayed as long as possible to be near his mother and brothers at home. His plane for Paris was to leave the m.
Ferris pulled out his address book to verify a number. He turhe pages with growing attentiveness. Names and addresses from New York, the capitals of Europe, a few faint ones from his home state in the South. Faded, printed names, sprawled drunken ones. Betty Wills: a random love, married now. Charlie Williams: wounded in the Hurtgen Forest, unheard of since. Grand old Williams -- did he live or die? Don Walker: a B.T.O. in televisioing rich. Henry Green: hit the skids after the war, in a sanitarium now, they say. Cozie Hall: he had heard that she was dead. Heedless, laughing Cozie -- it was strao think that she too, silly girl, could die. As Ferris closed the address book, he suffered a sense of hazard, transience, almost of fear.
It was then that his body jerked suddenly. He was staring out of the window when there, on the sidewalk, passing by, was his ex-wife. Elizabeth passed quite close to him, walking slowly. He could not uand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone.
Quickly Ferris paid his ched rushed out to the sidewalk. Elizabeth stood on the er waiting to cross Fifth Avenue. He hurried toward her meaning to speak, but the lights ged and she crossed the street before he reached her. Ferris followed. Oher side he could easily have overtaken her, but he found himself lagging unatably. Her fair brown hair lainly rolled, and as he watched her Ferris recalled that once his father had remarked that Elizabeth had a "beautiful carriage." She tur the er and Ferris followed, although by now his iion to overtake her had disappeared. Ferris questiohe bodily disturbahat the sight of Elizabeth aroused in him, the dampness of his hands, the hard heart-strokes.
It was eight years since Ferris had last seen his ex-wife. He khat long ago she had married again. And there were children. Duri years he had seldom thought of her. But at first, after the divorce, the loss had almost destroyed him. Then after the anodyne of time, he had loved again, and then again. Jeannine, she was now. Certainly his love for his ex-wife was long since past. So why the unhinged body, the shaken mind? He knew only that his clouded heart was oddly dissonant with the sunny, did autumn day. Ferris wheeled suddenly and, walking with long strides, almost running, hurried back to the hotel.
Ferris poured himself a drink, although it was not yet eleven oclock. He sprawled out in an armchair like a man exhausted, nursing his glass of bourbon and water. He had a full day ahead of him as he was leaving by plahe m for Paris. He checked over his obligations: take luggage to Air France, lunch with his boss, buy shoes and an overcoat. And something -- wasnt there something else? Ferris finished his drink and opehe telephone directory.
His decision to call his ex-wife was impulsive. The number was under Bailey, the husbands name, and he called before he had much time for self-debate. He and Elizabeth had exged cards at Christmastime, and Ferris had sent a carvi when he received the annou of her wedding. There was no reason not to call. But as he waited, listening to the ring at the other end, misgiving fretted him.
Elizabeth answered; her familiar voice was a fresh sho. Twice he had to repeat his name, but when he was identified, she sounded glad. He explained he was only in town for that day. They had a theater e, she said -- but she wondered if he would e by for an early dinner. Ferris said he would be delighted.
As he went from one e to another, he was still bothered at odd moments by the feeling that something necessary was fotten. Ferris bathed and ged ie afternoon, often thinking about Jeannine: he would be with her the following night "Jeannine," he would say, "I happeo run into my ex-wife when I was in New York. Had dinner with her. And her husband, of course. It was strange seeing her after all these years."
Elizabeth lived in the East Fifties, and as Ferris taxied uptown he glimpsed at interses the lingering su, but by the time he reached his destination it was already autumn dark. The place was a building with a marquee and a doorman, and the apartment was on the seventh floor.
"e in, Mr. Ferris."
Braced for Elizabeth or even the unimagined husband, Ferris was astonished by the freckled red-haired child; he had known of the children, but his mind had failed somehow to aowledge them. Surprise made him step back awkwardly.
"This is our apartment," the child said politely. "Arent you Mr. Ferris? Im Billy. e in."
In the living room beyond the hall, the husband provided another surprise; he too had not been aowledged emotionally. Bailey was a lumbering red-haired man with a deliberate manner. He rose aended a weling hand.
"Im Bill Bailey. Glad to see you. Elizabeth will be in, in a minute. Shes finishing dressing."
Th99lｉｂ?e last words struck a gliding series of vibrations, memories of the other years. Fair Elizabeth, rosy and naked before her bath. Half-dressed before the mirror of her dressing table, brushing her fine, chestnut hair. Sweet, casual intimacy, the soft-fleshed loveliness indisputably possessed. Ferris shrank from the unbidden memories and pelled himself to meet Bill Baileys gaze.
"Billy, will you please bring that tray of drinks from the kit table?
The child obeyed promptly, and when he was gone Ferris remarked versationally, "Fine boy you have there."
"We think so."
Flat sileil the child returned with a tray of glasses and a cocktail shaker of Martinis. With the priming drinks they pumped up versation: Russia, they spoke of, and the New York rain-making, and the apartment situation in Manhattan and Paris.
"Mr. Ferris is flying all the way across the o tomorrow," Bailey said to the little boy who erched on the arm of his chair, quiet and well behaved. "I bet you would like to be a stowaway in his suitcase."
Billy pushed back his limp bangs. "I want to fly in an airplane and be a neerman like Mr. Ferris." He added with sudden assurance, "Thats what I would like to do when I am big."
Bailey said, "I thought you wao be a doctor."
"I do!" said Billy. "I would like to be both. I want to be a atom-bomb stist too."
Elizabeth came in carrying in her arms a baby girl.
"Oh, John!" she said. She settled the baby ihers lap. "Its grand to see you. Im awfully glad you could e."
The little girl sat demurely on Baileys knees. She wore a pale pink crêpe de e frock, smocked around the yoke with rose, and a matg silk hair ribbon tying back her pale soft curls. Her skin was summer tanned and her brown eyes flecked with gold and laughing. When she reached up and fingered her fathers horn-rimmed glasses, he took them off a her look through them a moment. "Hows my old dy?"
Elizabeth was very beautiful, more beautiful perhaps than he had ever realized. Her straight hair was shining. Her face was slowing and sere was a madonna loveliness, depe on the family ambiance.
"Youve hardly ged at all," Elizabeth said, "but it has been a long time."
"Eight years." His hand touched his thinning hair self-sciously while further amenities were exged.
Ferris felt himself suddenly a spectator -- an interloper among these Baileys. Why had he e? He suffered. His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile n supp nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. He felt he could not bear much loo stay in the family room.
He gla his watch. "Yoing to the theater?"
"Its a shame," Elizabeth said, "but weve had this e for more than a month. But surely, John, youll be staying home one of these days before long. Youre not going to be ariate, are you?"
"Expatriate," Ferris repeated. "I dont much like the word."
"Whats a better word?" she asked.
He thought for a moment. "Sojourner might do."
Ferris glanced again at his watch, and again Elizabeth apologized. "If only we had known ahead of time --"
The Sojourner-2
"I just had this day in town. I came home uedly. You see, Papa died last week."
"Papa Ferris is dead?"
"Yes, at Johns-Hopkins. He had been sick there nearly a year. The funeral was down home in Geia."
"Oh, Im so sorry, John. Papa Ferris was always one of my favorite people."
The little boy moved from behind the chair so that he could look into his mothers face. He asked, "Who is dead?"
Ferris was oblivious to apprehension; he was thinking of his fathers death. He saw agaistretched body on the quilted silk within the coffin. The corpse flesh was bizarrely rouged and the familiar hands lay massive and joined above a spread of funeral roses. The memory closed and Ferris awakeo Elizabeths calm voice.
"Mr. Ferris father, Billy. A really grand person. Somebody you didnt know."
"But why did you call him Papa Ferris?"
Bailey and Elizabeth exged a trapped look. It was Bailey who answered the questioning child. "A long time ago," he said, "your mother and Mr. Ferris were once married. Before you were born -- a long time ago."
"Mr. Ferris?"
The little boy stared at Ferris, amazed and unbelieving. And Ferris eyes, as he returhe gaze, were somehow unbelieving too. Was it irue that at oime he had called this stranger, Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during nights of love, that they had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and -- finally -- endured in the misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol and money quarrels) destru of the fabriarried love.
Bailey said to the children, "Its somebodys supper-time. e on now."
"But Daddy! Mama and Mr. Ferris -- I --"
Billys everlasting eyes -- perplexed and with a glimmer of hostility -- reminded Ferris of the gaze of another child. It was the young son of Jeannine -- a boy of seven with a shadowed little fad knobby knees whom Ferris avoided and usually fot.
"Quick march!" Bailey gently turned Billy toward the door. "Say good night now, son."
"Good night, Mr. Ferris." He added resentfully, "I thought I was staying up for the cake."
"You e in afterward for the cake," Elizabeth said. "Run along now with Daddy for your supper."
Ferris and Elizabeth were alohe weight of the situation desded on those first moments of silence. Ferris asked permission to pour himself another drink and Elizabeth set the cocktail shaker oable at his side. He looked at the grand piano and noticed the musi the rack.
"Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?"
"I still enjoy it."
"Please play, Elizabeth."
Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readio perform when asked had always been one of her amiabilities; she never hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added readiness of relief.
She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridest as a prism in a m room. The first voice of the fugue, an annou pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling with a sed voice, and agaied within an elaborated frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene, flowed with unhurried majesty. The principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with tless ingenuities -- now dominant, again submerged, it had the sublimity of a sihing that does not fear surreo the whole. Toward the end, the density of the material gathered for the last enriched insisten the dominant first motif and with a chorded final statement the fugue ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair bad closed his eyes. In the following silence a clear, high voice came from the room down the hall.
"Daddy, how could Mama and Mr. Ferris --" A door was closed.
The piano began again -- what was this musiplaced, familiar, the limpid melody had lain a long while dormant in his heart. Now it spoke to him of aime, another place -- it was the music Elizabeth used to play. The delicate air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings, flicts, ambivalent desires. Strahat the music, catalyst>９９lｉｂ. for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and dear. The singing melody was broken off by the appearance of the maid.
"Miz Bailey, dinner is out oable now."
Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the unfinished music still overcast his mood. He was a little drunk.
"Limprovisation de la vie humaine," he said. "Theres nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of humaence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book."
"Address book?" repeated Bailey. Theopped, nonittal and polite.
"Youre still the same old boy, Johnny," Elizabeth said with a trace of the old tenderness.
It was a Southern dihat evening, and the dishes were his old favorites. They had fried chi and pudding and rich, glazed died sweet potatoes. During the meal Elizabeth kept alive a versatiohe silences were . And it came about that Ferris was led to speak of Jeannine.
"I first knew Jeannine last autumn -- about this time of the year -- in Italy. Shes a singer and she had an e in Rome. I expect we will be married soon."
The words seemed so true, iable, that Ferris did not at first aowledge to himself the lie. He and Jeannine had never in that year spoken of marriage. And indeed, she was still married -- to a White Russian moneyger in Paris from whom she had been separated for five years. But it was too late to correct the lie. Already Elizabeth was saying: "This really makes me glad to know. gratulations, Johnny."
He tried to make amends with truth. "The Roman autumn is so beautiful. Balmy and blossoming." He added, "Jeannine has a little boy of six. A curious trilingual little fellow. We go to the Tuileries sometimes."
A lie again. He had taken the boy oo the gardens. The sallow fn child in shorts that bared his spindly legs had sailed his boat in the crete pond and ridden the pony. The child had wao go in to the puppet show. But there was not time, for Ferris had an e at the Scribe Hotel. He had promised they would go to the guignol another afternoon. Only once had he taken Valentin to the Tuileries.
There was a stir. The maid brought in a white-frosted cake with pink dles. The childreered in their night clothes. Ferris still did not uand.
"Happy birthday, John," Elizabeth said. "Blow out the dles."
Ferris reized his birthday date. The dles blew out lingeringly and there was the smell of burning wax. Ferris was thirty-eight years old. The veins in his temples darkened and pulsed visibly.
"Its time you started for the theater."
Ferris thanked Elizabeth for the birthday dinner and said the appropriate good-byes. The whole family saw him to the door.
A high, thin moon shone above the jagged, dark skyscrapers. The streets were windy, cold. Ferris hurried to Third Avenue and hailed a cab. He gazed at the noal city with the deliberate attentiveness of departure and perhaps farewell. He was alone. He longe９9lib?d for flighttime and the ing journey.
The day he looked down oy from the air, burnished in sunlight, toylike, precise. Then America was left behind and there was only the Atlantid the distant European shore. The o was milky pale and placid beh the clouds. Ferris dozed most of the day. Toward dark he was thinking of Elizabeth and the visit of the previous evening. He thought of Elizabeth among her family with longing, gentle envy and inexplicable regret. He sought the melody, the unfinished air, that had so moved him. The ce, some ued tones, were all that remaihe melody itself evaded him. He had found ihe first voice of the fugue that Elizabeth had played -- it came to him, ied mogly and in a minor key. Suspended above the o the aies of transiend solitude no loroubled him ahought of his fathers death with equanimity. During the dinner hour the plane reached the shore of France.
At midnight Ferris was in a taxi crossing Paris. It was a clouded night and mist wreathed the lights of the Place de la corde. The midnight bistros gleamed o pavements. As always after a transo flight the ge of tis was too sudden. New York at m, this midnight Paris. Ferris glimpsed the disorder of his life: the succession of cities, of transitory loves; and time, the sinister glissando of the years, time always.
"Vite! Vite!" he called in terror. "Dépêchez-vous."
Valentin opehe door to him. The little boy wore pajamas and an outgrown red robe. His grey eyes were shadowed and, as Ferris passed into the flat, they flickered momentarily.
"Jattends Maman."
Jeannine was singing in a night dub. She would not be home before another hour. Valentiuro a drawing, squatting with his crayons over the paper on the floor. Ferris looked down at the drawing -- it was a banjo player with notes and wavy lines inside a ic-strip balloon.
"We will go again to the Tuileries."
The child looked up and Ferris drew him closer to his khe melody, the unfinished music that Elizabeth had played, came to him suddenly. Unsought, the load of memory jettisoned -- this time bringing only reition and sudden joy.
"Monsieur Jean," the child said, "did you see him?"
fused, Ferris thought only of another child -- the freckled, family-loved boy. "See who, Valentin?"
"Your dead papa in Geia." The child added, "Was he okay?"
Ferris spoke with rapid urgency: "We will go often to the Tuileries. Ride the pony and we will go into the guignol. We will see the puppet show and never be in a hurry any more."
"Monsieur Jean," Valentin said. "The guignol is now closed."
Again, the terror the aowledgment of wasted years ah. Valentin, responsive and fident, still led i藏书网n his arms. His cheek touched the soft cheek ahe brush of the delicate eyelashes. With inner desperation he pressed the child close -- as though aion as protean as his love could domihe pulse of time.
A Domestic Dilemma-1
ON THURSDAY Martin Meadows left the office early enough to make the first express bus home. It was the hour when the evening lilac glow was fading in the slushy streets, but by the time the bus had left the mid-town terminal the bright city night had e. On Thursdays the maid had a half-day off and Martin liked to get home as soon as possible, since for the past year his wife had not been -- well. This Thursday he was very tired and, hoping that nular uter would single him out for versation, he fastened his attention to the neer until the bus had crossed the Gee Washingte. On 9-W Highway Martin always felt that the trip was halfway done, he breathed deeply, even in cold weather when only ribbons ht cut through the smoky air of the bus, fident that he was breathing try air. It used to be that at this point he would relax and begin to think with pleasure of his home. But in this last year nearness brought only a sense of tension and he did not anticipate the journeys end. This evening Marti his face close to the window and watched the barren fields and lonely lights of passing townships. There was a moon, pale on the dark earth and areas of late, porous snow; to Martin the tryside seemed vast and somehow desolate that evening. He took his hat from the rad put his folded neer in the pocket of his overcoat a few minutes before time to pull the cord.
The cottage was a block from the bus stop, he river but not directly on the shore; from the living-room window you could look across the street and opposite yard ahe Hudson. The cottage was modern, almost too white and new on the narrow plot of yard. In summer the grass was soft and bright and Martin carefully tended a flower border and a rose trellis. But during the cold, fallow months the yard was bleak and the cottage seemed naked. Lights were on that evening in all the rooms itle house and Martin hurried up the front walk. Before the steps he stopped to move a wagon out of the way.
The children were in the living room, so i on play that the opening of the front door was at first unnoticed. Martin stood looking at his safe, lovely children. They had opehe藏书网 bottom drawer of the secretary and taken out the Christmas decorations. Andy had mao plug in the Christmas tree lights and the green and red bulbs glowed with out-of-seasoivity on the rug of the living room. At the moment he was trying to trail the bright cord over Mariannes rog horse. Maria on the floor pulling off an angels wings. The children wailed a startling wele. Martin swung the fat little baby girl up to his shoulder and Andy threw himself against his fathers legs.
"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!"
Marti dowtle girl carefully and swung Andy a few times like a pendulum. Then he picked up the Christmas tree cord.
"Whats all this stuff doing out? Help me put it ba the drawer. Youre not to fool with the light socket. Remember I told you that before. I mean it, Andy."
The six-year-old child nodded and shut the secretary drawer. Martin stroked his fair soft hair and his hand lienderly on the nape of the childs frail neck.
"Had supper yet, Bumpkin?"
"It hurt. The toast was hot."
The baby girl stumbled on the rug and, after the first surprise of the fall, began to cry; Martin picked her up and carried her in his arms back to the kit.
"See, Daddy," said Andy. "The toast --"
Emily had laid the childrens supper on the uncovered porcelain table. There were two plates with the remains of cream-of-wheat and eggs and silver mugs that had held milk. There was also a platter of amon toast, untouched except for oooth-marked bite. Martin she bitten pied nibbed gingerly. The the toast into the garbage pail. "Hoo-phui -- What oh!"
Emily had mistakein of ne for the amon.
"I like to have burnt up," Andy said. "Drank water and ran outdoors and opened my mouth. Marianne did none."
"Any," corrected Martiood helpless, looking around the walls of the kit. "Well, thats that, I guess," he said finally. "Where is your mother now?"
"Shes up in you alls room."
Martihe children i a up to his wife. Outside the door he waited for a moment to still his anger. He did not knod onside the room he closed the door behind him.
Emily sat in the rog chair by the window of the pleasant room. She had been drinking something from a tumbler and as he entered she put the glass hurriedly on the floor behind the chair. Ititude there was fusion and guilt which she tried to hide by a show of spurious vivacity.
"Oh, Marty! You home already? The time slipped up on me. I was just going down --" She lurched to him and her kiss was strong with sherry. Wheood unresponsive she stepped back a pad giggled nervously.
"Whats the matter with you? Standing there like a barber pole. Is anything wrong with you?"
&qu with me?" Marti over the rog chair and picked up the tumbler from the floor. "If you could only realize how sick I am -- how bad it is for all of us."
Emily spoke in a false, airy voice that had bee too familiar to him. Often at such times she affected a slight English at, copying perhaps some actress she admired, "I havent the vaguest idea what you mean. Unless you are referring to the glass I used for a spot of sherry. I had a finger of sherry -- maybe two. But what is the crime in that, pray tell me? Im quite all right. Quite all right."
"So anyone see."
As she went into the bathroom Emily walked with careful gravity. She turned on the cold water and dashed some on her face with her cupped hands, then patted herself dry with the er of a bath towel. Her face was delicately featured and young, unblemished.
"I was just going down to make dinner." She tottered and balanced herself by holding to the door frame.
"Ill take care of dinner. You stay up here. Ill bring it up."
"Ill do nothing of the sort. Why, whoever heard of such a thing?"
"Please," Martin said.
"Leave me alone. Im quite all right. I was just on the way down --"
"Mind what I say."
"Mind yrandmother."
She lurched toward the door, but Martin caught her by the arm. "I dont want the children to see you in this dition. Be reasonable."
"dition!" Emily jerked her arm. Her voice rose angrily. "Why, because I drink a couple of sherries iernoon youre trying to make me out a drunkard. dition! Why, I dont even touch whiskey. As well you know. I dont swill liquor at bars. And thats more than you say. I dont even 藏书网have a cocktail at diime. I only sometimes have a glass of sherry. What, I ask you, is the disgrace of that? dition!"
Martin sought words to calm his wife. "Well have a quiet supper by ourselves up here. Thats a good girl." Emily sat on the side of the bed and he opehe door for a quick departure. "Ill be ba a jiffy."
As he busied himself with the dinner downstairs he was lost in the familiar question as to how this problem had e upon his home. He himself had always enjoyed a good drink. When they were still living in Alabama they had served long drinks or cocktails as a matter of course. For years they had drunk one or two -- possibly three drinks before dinner, and at bedtime a long nightcap. Evenings before holidays they ..might get a buzz on, might even bee a little tight. But alcohol had never seemed a problem to him, only a bothersome expehat with the increase in the family they could scarcely afford. It was only after his pany had transferred him to New York that Martin was aware that certainly his wife was drinking too much. She was tippling, he noticed, during the day.
The problem aowledged, he tried to analyze the source. The ge from Alabama to New York had somehow disturbed her; aced to the idle warmth of a small Southern town, the matrix of the family and cousinship and childhood friends, she had failed to aodate herself to the stricter, lonelier mores of the North. The duties of motherhood and housekeeping were onerous to her. Homesick for Paris City, she had made no friends in the suburban town. She read only magazines and murder books. Her interior life was insuffit without the artifice of alcohol. The revelations of intinensidiously undermined his previous ceptions of his wife. There were times of unexplainable malevoleimes when the alcoholic fuse caused an explosion of unseemly anger. He entered a latent coarseness in Emily, insistent with her natural simplicity. She lied about drinking and deceived him with unsuspected stratagems.
Then there was an act. ing home from work one evening about a year ago, he was greeted with screams from the childrens room. He found Emily holding the baby, wet and naked from her bath. The baby had been dropped, her frail, frail skull striking the table edge, so that a thread of blood was soaking into the gossamer hair. Emily was sobbing and intoxicated. As Martin cradled the hurt child, so infinitely precious at that moment, he had an affrighted vision of the future.
The day Marianne was all right. Emily vowed that never again would she touch liquor, and for a few weeks she was sober, cold and downcast. Then gradually she began -- not whisky in -- but quantities of beer, or sherry, or outlandish liqueurs; once he had e across a hatbox of empty crême de metles. Martin found a dependable maid who mahe household petently. Virgie was also from Alabama and Martin had never dared tell Emily the wage scale ary in New York. Emilys drinking was entirely secret now, done before he reached the house. Usually the effects were almost imperceptible -- a looseness of movement or the heavy-lidded eyes. The times of irresponsibilities, such as the ne-pepper toast, were rare, and Martin could dismiss his worries when Virgie was at the house. But, heless, ay was always latent, a threat of indefined disaster that underlay his days.
A Domestic Dilemma-2
"Marianne!" Martin called, for even the recolle of that time brought the need for reassurahe baby girl, no longer hurt, but no less precious to her father, came into the kit with her brother. Marti on with the preparations for the meal. He opened a of soup and put two chops in the frying pan. The down by the table and took his Marianne on his knees for a pony ride. Andy watched them, his fingers wobbling the tooth that had been loose all that week.
"Andy-the-dyman!" Martin said. "Is that old critter still in your mouth? e closer, let Daddy have a look."
"I got a string to pull it with." The child brought from his pocket a tahread. "Virgie said to tie it to the tooth and tie the other end of the doorknob and shut the door real suddenly."
Martin took out a handkerchief ahe loose tooth carefully. "That tooth is ing out of my Andys mouth tonight. Otherwise Im awfully afraid well have a tooth tree in the family."
"A what?"
"A tooth tree," Martin said. "Youll bite into something and swallow that tooth. And the tooth will take root in poor Andys stomad grow into a tooth tree with sharp little teeth instead of leaves."
"Shoo, Daddy," Andy said. But he held the tooth firmly between his grimy little thumb and forefinger. "There aint any tree like that. I never seen one."
"There isnt any tree like that and I never saw one."
Martin tensed suddenly. Emily was ing dowairs. He listeo her fumbling footsteps, his arm embrag the little boy with dread. When Emily came into the room he saw from her movements and her sullen face that she had agai the sherry bottle. She began to yank open drawers ahe table.
"dition!" she said in a furry voice. "You talk to me like that. Dont think Ill fet. I remember every dirty lie you say to me. Dont you think for a mihat I fet."
"Emily!" he begged. "The children --"
"The children -- yes! Dont think I dohrough your dirty plots and schemes. Dowrying to turn my own children against me. Dont think I dont see and uand."
"Emily! I beg you -- please go upstairs."
"So you turn my children -- my very own children --" Twe tears coursed rapidly down her cheeks. &qu to turn my little boy, my Andy, against his own mother."
With drunken impulsiveness Emily k on the floor before the startled child. Her hands on his shoulders balanced her. "Listen, my Andy -- you wouldnt listen to any lies your father tells you? You wouldnt believe what he says? Listen, Andy, what was your father telling you before I came downstairs?" Uain, the child sought his fathers face. "Tell me. Mama wants to know."
"About the tooth tree."
"What?"
The child repeated the words and she echoed them with unbelieving terror. "The tooth tree!" She swayed and renewed her grasp on the childs shoulder. "I dont know what youre talking about. But listen, Andy, Mama is all right, isnt she?" The tears were spilling down her fad Andy drew back from her, for he was afraid. Grasping the table edge, Emily stood up.
"See! You have turned my child against me."
Marianne began to cry, and Martin took her in his arms.
"Thats all right, you take your child. You have always shown partiality from the very first. I dont mind, but at least you leave me my little boy."
Andy edged close to his father and touched his leg. "Dadd9９ｌib?y," he wailed.
Martin took the children to the foot of the stairs. "Andy, you take up Marianne and Daddy will follow you in a minute."
"But Mama?" the child asked, whispering.
"Mama will be all right. Dont worry."
Emily was sobbing at the kit table, her face buried in the crook of her arm. Martin poured a cup?9９ｌｉb. of soup a before her. Her rasping sobs unnerved him; the vehemence of her emotion, irrespective of the source, touched in him a strain of tenderness. Unwillingly he laid his hand on her dark hair. "Sit up and drink the soup." Her face as she looked up at him was chastened and impl. The boys withdrawal or the touartins hand had turhe tenor of her mood.
"Ma-Martin," she sobbed. "Im so ashamed."
"Drink the soup."
Obeying him, she draween gasping breaths. After a sed cup she allowed him to lead her up to their room. She was docile now and more restrained. He laid her nightgown on the bed and was about to leave the room when a fresh round of grief, the alcoholic tumult, came again.
"He turned away. My Andy looked at me and turned away."
Impatiend fatigue hardened his voice, but he spoke warily. "You fet that Andy is still a little child -- he t prehend the meaning of such ses."
"Did I make a se? Oh, Martin, did I make a se before the children?"
Her horrified face touched and amused him against his will. "Fet it Put on yhtgown and go to sleep."
"My child turned away from me. Andy looked at his mother and turned away. The children --"
She was caught in the rhythmic sorrow of alartin withdrew from the room saying: "Fods sake go to sleep. The children will fet by tomorrow."
As he said this he wondered if it was true. Would the se glide so easily from memory -- or would it root in the unscious to fester ier-years? Martin did not know, and the last alternative sied him. He thought of Emily, foresaw the m-after humiliation: the shards of memory, the lucidities that glared from the obliterating darkness of shame. She would call the New York office twice -- possibly three or four times. Martin anticipated his own embarrassment, w if the others at the office could possibly suspect. He felt that his secretary had divihe trouble long ago and that she pitied him. He suffered a moment of rebellion against his fate; he hated his wife.
On the childrens room he closed the door a secure for the first time that evening. Marianne fell down on the floor, picked herself up and calling: "Daddy, watch me," fell again, got up, and tihe falling-calling routine. Andy sat in the childs low chair, wobbling the tooth. Martin raer iub, washed his own hands in the lavatory, and called the boy into the bathroom.
"Lets have another look at that tooth." Martin sat ooilet, holding Andy between his khe childs mouth gaped and Martin grasped the tooth. A wobble, a quick twist and the nailk tooth was free. Andys face was for the first moment split between terror, astonishment, and delight. He mouthed a swallow of water and spat into the lavatory. "Look, Daddy! Its blood. Marianne!"
Martin loved to bathe his children, loved inexpressibly the tender, naked bodies as they stood ier so exposed. It was not fair of Emily to say that he showed partiality. As Martin soaped the delicate boy-body of his son he felt that further love would be impossible. Yet he admitted the differen the quality of his emotions for the two children. His love for his daughter was graver, touched with a strain of melancholy, a gentlehat was akin to pain. His pet names for ?99ｌｉｂ?he little boy were the absurdities of daily inspiration -- he called the little girl always Marianne, and his voice as he spoke it was a caress. Martin patted dry the fat baby stomad the sweet little genital fold. The washed child faces were radiant as flower petals, equally loved.
"Im putting the tooth under my pillow. Im supposed to get a quarter."
"What for?"
"You know, Daddy. Johnny got a quarter for his tooth."
"Who puts the quarter there?" asked Martin. "I used to think the fairies left it in the night. It was a dime in my day, though."
"Thats what they say in kindergarten."
"Who does put it there?"
"Your parents," Andy said. "You!"
Martin inning the cover on Mariannes bed. His daughter was already asleep. Scarcely breathing. Marti over and kissed her forehead, kissed agaiiny hand that lay palm-upward, flung in slumber beside her head.
"Good night, Andy-man."
The answer was only a drowsy murmur. After a minute Martin took out his ge and slid a quarter underh the pillow. He left a night light in the room.
As Martin prowled about the kit making a late meal, it occurred to him that the children had not once mentioheir mother or the se that must have seemed to them inprehensible. Absorbed in the instant -- the tooth, the bath, the quarter -- the fluid passage of child-time had borhese weightless episodes like leaves in the swift current of a shallow stream while the adult enigma was beached and fotten on the shore. Martin thahe Lord for that.
But his own anger, repressed and lurking, arose again. His youth was being frittered by a drunkards waste, his very manhood subtly undermined. And the children, ohe immunity of inprehension passed -- what would it be like in a year or so? With his elbows oable he ate his food brutishly, untasting. There was no hiding the truth -- soon there would be gossip in the offid iown; his wife was a dissolute woman. Dissolute. And he and his children were bound to a future of degradation and slow ruin.
Martin pushed away from the table and stalked into the living room. He followed the lines of a book with his eyes but his mind jured miserable images: he saw his children drowned in the river, his wife a disgra the public street. By bedtime the dull, hard anger was like a weight upon his chest and his feet dragged as he climbed the stairs.
The room was dark except for the shafting light from the half-opened bathroom door. Martin undressed quietly. Little by little, mysteriously, there came in him a ge. His wife was asleep, her peaceful respiration soundily in the room. Her high-heeled shoes with the carelessly dropped stogs made to him a mute appeal. Her underclothes were flung in disorder on the chair. Martin picked up the girdle and the soft, silk brassiere and stood for a moment with them in his hands. For the first time that evening he looked at his wife. His eyes rested on the sweet forehead, the arch of the fine brow. The brow had desded to Marianne, and the tilt at the end of the delicate nose. In his son he could trace the high cheekbones and pointed . Her body was full-bosomed, slender and undulant. As Martin watched the tranquil slumber of his wife the ghost of the old anger vanished. All thoughts of blame or blemish were distant from him now. Martin put out the bathroom light and raised the window. Careful not to awaken Emily he slid into the bed. By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjat flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense plexity of love.
A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud
IT WAS RAINING that m, and still very dark. When the boy reached the streetcar café he had almost finished his route and he went in for a cup of coffee. The place was an all-night café owned by a bitter and stingy man called Leo. After the raw, empty street, the café seemed friendly and bright: along the ter there were a couple of soldiers, three spinners from the ill, and in a er a man who sat hunched over with his nose and half his face down in a beer mug. The boy wore a helmet such as aviators wear. When he went into the café he unbuckled the strap and raised the right flap up over his pink little ear; often as he drank his coffee someone would speak to him in a friendly way. But this m Leo did not look into his fad none of the mealking. He paid and was leaving the café when a voice called out to him:
"Son! Hey Son!"
He turned bad the man in the er was crooking his finger and nodding to him. He had brought his face out of the beer mug and he seemed suddenly very happy. The man was long and pale, with a big nose and faded e hair.
"Hey Son!"
The boy went toward him. He was an undersized boy of about twelve, with one shoulder drawn higher thaher because of the weight of the paper sack. His face was shallow, freckled, and his eyes were round child eyes.
"Yeah Mister?"
The man laid one hand on the paper boys shoulders, then grasped the boys and turned his face slowly from one side to the other. The boy shrank baeasily.
"Say! Whats the big idea?"
The boys voice was shrill; ihe café it was suddenly very quiet.
The man said slowly. "I love you."
All along the ter the men laughed. The boy, who had scowled and sidled away, di..d not know what to do. He looked over the ter at Leo, and Leo watched him with a weary, brittle jeer. The boy tried to laugh also. But the man was serious and sad.
"I did not mean to tease you, Son," he said. "Sit down and have a beer with me. There is something I have to explain."
Cautiously, out of the er of his eye, the paper boy questiohe men along the ter to see what he should do. But they had gone back to their beer or their breakfast and did not notice him. Leo put a cup of coffee on the ter and a little jug of cream.
"He is a minor," Leo said.
The paper boy slid himself up onto the stool. His ear beh the upturned flap of the helmet was very small ahe man was nodding at him soberly. "It is important," he said. Then he reached in his hip pocket and brought out something which he held up in the palm of his hand for the boy to see.
"Look very carefully," he said.
The boy stared, but there was nothing to look at very carefully. The man held in his big, ?grimy palm a photograph. It was the face of a woman, but blurred, so that only the hat and the dress she was wearing stood out clearly.
"See?" the man asked.
The boy nodded and the man placed another picture in his palm. The woman was standing on a bea a bathing suit. The suit made her stomach very big, and that was the main thing you noticed.
"Got a good look?" He leaned over closer and finally asked: "You ever seen her before?"
The boy sat motionless, staring slantwise at the man. "Not so I know of."
"Very well." The man blew on the photographs and put them bato his pocket. "That was my wife."
"Dead?" the boy asked.
Slowly the man shook his head. He pursed his lips as though about to whistle and answered in a long-drawn way: "Nuuu --" he said. "I will explain."
The beer on the ter before the man was in a large brown mug. He did not pick it up to drink. Instead he bent down and, putting his face over the rim, he rested there for a moment. Then with both hands he tilted the mug and sipped.
"Some night youll go to sleep with y nose in a mug and drown," said Leo. "Promira drowns ihat would be a cute death."
The paper boy tried to signal to Leo. While the man was not looking he screwed up his fad worked his mouth to question soundlessly: "Drunk?" But Leo only raised his eyebrows and turned away to put some pink strips of ba on the grill. The man pushed the mug away from him, straightened himself, and folded his loose crooked hands on the ter. His face was sad as he looked at the paper boy. He did not blink, but from time to time the lids closed down with delicate gravity over his pale green eyes. It was nearing dawn and the boy shifted the weight of the paper sack.
"I am talking about love," the man said. "With me it is a sce."
The boy half slid down from the stool. But the man raised his forefinger, and there was something about him that held the boy and would not let him go away.
"Twelve years ago I married the woman in the photograph. She was my wife for one year, nine months, three days, and two nights. I loved her. Yes. . ." He tightened his blurred, rambling void said again: "I loved her. I thought also that she loved me. I was a railroad engineer. She had all home forts and luxuries. It never crept into my brain that she was not satisfied. But do you know what happened?"
"Mgneeow!" said Leo.
The man did not take his eyes from the boys face. "She left me. I came in one night and the house was empty and she was gone. She left me."
"With a fellow?" the boy asked.
Gently the man placed his palm down on the ter. "Why naturally, Son. A woman does not run off like that alone."
The café was quiet, the soft rain blad endless ireet outside. Leo pressed down the frying ba with the prongs of his long fork. "So you have been chasing the floozie for eleven years. You frazzled old rascal!"
For the first time the man gla Leo. "Please dont be vulgar. Besides, I was not speaking to you." He turned back to the boy and said in a trusting aive uone. "Lets not pay any attention to him. ９9ｌｉb?O.K.?"
The paper boy nodded doubtfully.
"It was like this," the man tinued. "I am a person who feels many things. All my life ohing after another has impressed me. Moonlight. The leg of a pretty girl. Ohing after another. But the point is that when I had enjoyed anything there eculiar sensation as though it was laying around loose in me. Nothing seemed to finish itself up or fit in with the other things. Women? I had my portion of them. The same. Afterwards laying around loose in me. I was a man who had never loved."
Very slowly he closed his eyelids, and the gesture was like a curtain drawn at the end of a se in a play. When he spoke again his voice was excited and the words came fast -- the lobes of his large, loose ears seemed to tremble.
"Then I met this woman. I was fifty-one years old and she always said she was thirty. I met her at a filling station and we were married within three days. And do you know what it was like? I just t tell you. All I had ever felt was gathered together around this woman. Nothing lay around loose in me any more but was finished up by her."
The man stopped suddenly and stroked his long nose. His voice sank down to a steady and reproachful uone: "Im not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieyself through her and I e out plete. Now do you follow me?"
"What was her name?" the boy asked.
"Oh," he said. "I called her Dodo. But that is immaterial."
"Did you try to make her e back?"
The man did not seem to hear. "Uhe circumstances you imagine how I felt when she left me."
Leo took the ba from the grill and folded two strips of it between a bun. He had a gray face, with slitted eyes, and a pinched nose saddled by faint blue shadows. One of the mill workers signaled for more coffee and Leo poured it. He did not give refills on coffee free. The spie breakfast there every m, but the better Leo knew his ers the stingier he treated them. He nibbled his own bun as though he grudged it to himself.
"And you never got hold of her again?"
The boy did not know what to think of the man, and his childs face was uain with mingled curiosity and doubt. He was new on the paper route; it was still strao him to be out iown in the black, queer early m.
"Yes," the man said. "I took a number of steps to get her back. I went around trying to locate her. I went to Tulsa where she had folks. And to Mobile. I went to every town she had ever mentioo me, and I hunted down every man she had formerly been ected with. Tulsa, Atlanta, Chicago, Cheehaw, Memphis. . . the better part of two years I chased around the try trying to lay hold of her."
"But the pair of them had vanished from the face of the earth!" said Leo.
"Dont listen to him," the man said fidentially. "And also just fet those two years. They are not important. What matters is that around the third year a curious thing begun to happen to me."
"What?" the boy asked.
The man leaned down and tilted his mug to take a sip of beer. But as he hovered over the mug his nostrils fluttered slightly; he she staleness of the beer and did not drink. "Love is a curious thing to begin with. At first I thought only of getting her back. It was a kind of mania. But then as time went on I tried to remember her. But do you know what happened?"
"No," the boy said.
"When I laid myself down on a bed and tried to think about her my mind became a blank. I couldnt see her. I would take out her pictures and look. No good. Nothing doing. A blank. you imagi?"
"Say Mac!" Leo called down the ter. " you imagihis bozos mind a blank!"
Slowly, as though fanning away flies, the man waved his hand. His green eyes were trated and fixed on the shallow little face of the paper boy.
"But a sudden piece of glass on a sidewalk. Or a une in a music box. A shadow on a wall at night. And I would remember. It might happen in a street and I would cry or bang my head against a lamppost. You follow me?"
"A piece of glass. . ." the boy said.
"Anything. I would walk around and I had no power of how and when to remember her. You think you put up a kind of shield. But remembering dont e to a man face forward -- it ers around sideways. I was at the mercy of everything I saw and heard. Suddenly instead of me bing the tryside to find her she begun to chase me around in my very soul. She chasing me, mind you! And in my soul."
The boy asked finally: "art of the try were you in then?"
"Ooh," the man groaned. "I was a sick mortal. It was like smallpox. I fess, Son, that I boozed. I fornicated. I itted any sin that suddenly appealed to me. I am loath to fess it but I will do so. When I recall that period it is all curdled in my mind, it was so terrible."
The man leaned his head down and tapped his forehead on the ter. For a few seds he stayed bowed over in this position, the back of his stringy neck covered with e furze, his hands with their long ed fingers held palm to palm in an attitude of prayer. Then the man straightened himself; he was smiling and suddenly his face was bright and tremulous and old.
"It was in the fifth year that it happened," he said. "And with it I started my sce."
Leos mouth jerked with a pale, quick grin. "Well none of we boys are getting any younger," he said. Then with sudden anger he balled up a dishcloth he was holding and threw it down hard on the floor. "Yle-tailed old Romeo!"
"What happened?" the boy asked.
The old mans voice was high and dear: "Peace," he answered.
"Huh?"
"It is hard to explain stifically, Son," he said. "I guess the logical explanation is that she and I had fleed around from each other for so long that finally we just got tangled up together and lay down and quit. Peace. A queer aiful blankness. It ring in Portland and the rain came every afternoon. All evening I just stayed there on my bed in the dark. And that is how the se to me."
The windows ireetcar were pale blue with light. The two soldiers paid for their beers and opehe door -- one of the soldiers bed his hair and wiped off his muddy puttees before they went outside. The three mill workers bent silently over their breakfasts. Leos clock was tig on the wall.
"It is this. And listen carefully. I meditated on love and reaso out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with?"
The boys soft mouth artly open and he did not answer.
"A woman," the old man said. "Without sce, with nothing to go by, they uake the most dangerous and sacred experien Gods earth. They fall in love with a woman. Is that correct, Son?"
"Yeah," the boy said faintly.
"They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. you wo is so miserable? Do you know how men should love?"
The old man reached over and grasped the boy by the collar of his leather jacket. He gave him a getle shake and his green eyes gazed down unblinking and grave.
"Son, do you know how love should be begun?"
The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered:
"A tree. A rock. A cloud."
It was still raining outside ireet: a mild, gray, endless rain. The mill whistle blew for the six oclock shift and the three spinners paid a away. There was no one in the café but Leo, the old man, and the little paper boy.
"The weather was like this in Portland," he said. "At the time my sce was begun. I meditated and I started very cautious. I would pick up something from the street and take it home with me. I bought a goldfish and I trated on the goldfish and I loved it. I graduated from ohing to another. Day by day I was getting this teique. On the road from Portland to San Diego --"
"Aw shut up!" screamed Leo suddenly. "Shut up! Shut up!"
The old man still held the collar of the boys jacket; he was trembling and his face was ear and bright and wild. "For six years now I have gone around by myself and built up my sce. And now I am a master, Son. I love anything. No longer do I have to think about it even. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light es in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. All stranger and all loved! Do you realize what a sce like mine mean?"
The boy held himself stiffly, his hands curled tight around the ter edge. Finally he asked: "Did you ever really find that lady?"
"What? What say, Son?"
"I mean," the boy asked timidly. "Have you fallen in love with a woman again?"
The old man loosened his grasp on the boys collar. He turned away and for the first time his green eyes had a vague and scattered look. He lifted the mug from the ter, drank down the yellow beer. His head was shaking slowly from side to side. Then finally he answered: "No, Son. You see that is the last step in my sce. I go cautious. And I am not quite ready yet."
"Well!" said Leo. "Well well well!"
The old man stood in the open doorway. "Remember," he said. Framed there in the gray damp light of the early m he looked shrunken and seedy and frail. But his smile was bright. "Remember I love you," he said with a last nod. And the door closed quietly behind him.
The boy did not speak for a long time. He pulled down the bangs on his forehead and slid his grimy little forefinger around the rim of his empty cup. Then without looking at Leo he finally asked:
"Was he drunk?"
"No," said Leo shortly.
The boy raised his clear voice higher. "Then was he a dope fiend?"
"No."
The boy looked up at Leo, and his flat little face was desperate, his voice urgent and shrill. "Was he crazy? Do you think he was a lunatic?" The paper boys voice dropped suddenly with doubt. "Leo? Or not?"
But Leo would not answer him. Leo had run a night café for fourteen years, and he held himself to be a critic of craziness. There were the town characters and also the tras who roamed in from the night. He khe manias of all of them. But he did not want to satisfy the questions of the waiting child. He tightened his pale fad was silent.
So the boy pulled down the right flap of his helmet and as he turo leave he made the only ent that seemed safe to him, the only remark that could not be laughed down and despised:
"He sure has done a lot of traveling."
Sotes, v3.0: Proofed carefully, italid special characters intact. ged British Quotes to "Ameri Quotes".天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》