“Hello, Jim,” he said, and I thought there was genuine friendliness in his voice. “Out on a call? They don’t give you doctors much rest, do they?”
His horse was a black stallion, a devil of a beast, and much taller than mine, so that Dan towered over me. He sat his horse well, even nobly, with a light touch on the reins. He had an appearance of strength and easiness, of power and assurance which he did not possess when afoot. His horse pranced a little, restlessly.
“Not much rest, that’s true,” I said ruefully. “Where are you going, yourself? I don’t like the roads tonight, and I’d be glad of your company back, Dan.”
He hesitated for an instant. I looked into his eyes intently, and he looked back, gravely. I don’t know what he read in my eyes, what pleading, but he said jovially: “Fine! I was just going to turn around, myself.”
He swung about adroitly, and we rode side by side towards the town. A quick sense of gladness came over me, and an obscure content. We did not talk for awhile. Then I said involuntarily: “Dan, why don’t I see you anymore? We were friends, once, you know.”
I despised myself for begging for his friendship again, and after he had shown me only too often that he did not want to give it, and I waited for his usual cold evasiveness. But to my surprise, he laughed a little.
“Well, of course we are friends! Don’t act so doleful, Jim. But you know I never was a fellow for running around and visiting. Besides, I haven’t seen you around my house, lately, even though you know where I live.”
“Do you want me to come, Dan?” I asked soberly.
He laughed loudly, and I felt absurd again. But angry, also, that he put me in a light where I appeared a fool. He was always doing that, I said to myself with irritation, always laughing at a situation which everyone thought serious, and becoming grave over something that did not matter at all.
“Certainly I want you to come. How about tomorrow night? You and Livy?”
He made it sound so matter-of-fact; his voice leapt over chasms and events and crises, made them look as absurd as he made me feel.
“We’ll be glad to come,” I said sedately.
He asked me a few casual questions about Livy and my father. I thought at first that his air of health and good temper and well-being was affected, assumed to mislead me. But even against my reason I was finally convinced that this was not so. He was really at ease, really exhilarated. Everything had been tragic and sordid and impossible during the past few months, and everyone had been oppressed by it. But this inscrutable young man did not appear to find it so, did not appear to consider it in the slightest. This annoyed me; I had to break through the shining glass through which he glanced at me.
“You make it appear as though I’ve avoided you, Dan, instead of you avoiding me,” I said. “That’s all nonsense. I never see you. You’re invisible during the day, and at night you take these rides alone, galloping along as though the devil were after you.”
I expected that my directness would make him retreat again, but he did not. He merely chuckled.
“Maybe he was,” he admitted. “I expect everyone tries to outrun his devil.” He was silent a moment. “Yes, there’s always a devil. Man is so damned lonely. He has a feeling that if he is not very careful, he will disintegrate, become a part of static and meaningless objects. When it oppresses him too badly, he runs to drink, or to women, or to ambition. Always trying to retain his identity, to keep himself from dissolving even while he is still alive. He surrounds himself with other people, and finds himself like a house with all the windows and doors wide open and unprotected, and everyone marching through at his own sweet will. Well, that’s why I keep to myself. That’s the only way I can retain my identity. I like to ride at night. No one has any hands on me. I’ve always been afraid of hands,” he added, half to himself.
“No one has tried to be anything but friendly, until you showed us all that you didn’t want to be friendly,” I said with uneasiness. His words had made something cold run down my spine.
“But I don’t want friends!” he exclaimed, almost with violence. “The only way I can hold on to myself is to be alone. No one ever understands that. Friends! I haven’t any, thank God! A man with friends has no identity; he is just a pleasant eating place for a flock of fools, just an open house. Friends steal away your time, your thoughts, yourself. That’s why I don’t want friends.”
I knew he had no intention of affronting me, and so I merely shrugged.
“How do you know that you are worth keeping to ‘yourself’?” I asked. “Perhaps, though, you consider yourself very valuable? But I’m a doctor, and I don’t find anyone or anything very valuable anymore. We’re just a mass of protoplasm, chemical reactions, and automatic movements.”
He shrugged also. “Well, whether I’m valuable or not isn’t the question,” he said. “I don’t want hands on me, that’s all,” he added. “I’m happy now. I’m alone. I’ve always wanted to be alone. Damn it! why can’t fools realize that? Why do they find it incomprehensible that another man doesn’t want them? Oh, call it antisocial, if you want to; what of it? That’s the way I’m made, and I can’t have any peace unless I am rid of the sight of eyes and mouths and faces.”
“If you feel that way—” I began with dignity. He reached across to me and punched me lightly, laughing.
“There are always exceptions, Jim. I’ll expect you and Livy tomorrow night. Bee will be glad to see you.”
Bee will be glad to see you!
As though nothing had happened, as though he were merely an ordinarily married young man, placid and content, as though nothing had passed between him and his wife, and the whole world was his friend! I was dumbfounded.
We parted as we reached the town, and I went on alone, feeling somehow that I had been made a fool of, and outraged that I could not put my finger on the time when this had occurred. I told Livy about it when I reached home, but she merely listened without comment. She consented, however, to go with me tomorrow night. Staring at her quiet face, as she sewed under a lamp, I again had an unreal sensation. Was I again up to my old tricks of making mountains out of molehills? Why couldn’t I accept things at their face value? And then I was filled with fury; Dan knew the truth, but he had deliberately put me into a position where, if I spoke the truth, and showed that I knew it, he would make me look silly. That was his way of keeping me at a distance, I thought bitterly.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When we arrived at Dan’s house, Livy and I, it was brightly lighted. It looked warm and hospitable. The smart young girl led us into the lofty parlor with a fire roaring under the black marble mantel and all the lamps lit. Bee and Dan were waiting for us in deep upholstered chairs near the fire, just as any young and contented married couple would wait for their guests. Dan was bland and utterly at ease. If he were hiding anything, pretending anything, it was not visible. He shook hands affectionately with Livy, and greeted me with the closest approach to effusion he had ever shown. Bee greeted us sweetly and warmly. She was considerably thinner, and the mauve satin she wore seemed to give her face an unhealthly tinge. She looked as though she had been very ill; even her hair was less bright. When she stopped smiling for a moment, her face had a wizened and intense look, and her eyes pointed. As on that day so long ago in the August garden, nothing was said by any of us of anything that had happened, or of the fact that we had not seen each other for a long time. It was as though we had seen each other only yesterday.
Livy conducted herself with kind dignity; she had become plumper and rosier, and beside the too-thin Bee, with her restless, hungry and avid air, she was the very picture of a wholesome young matron. She had acquired an aura of serenity and poise, which I felt nothing very much would shake.
Dan served us all small glasses of wine as we sat around the fire. I glanced about the beautifully furnished room, at the polished walnut, the blazing lamps, the roaring fire, the dark red curtains. And then I had a strange sensation; the room suddenly looked t
oo bright yet bitterly cold and empty. There seemed a glare in it, not the warm and inexplicable light that lives in a room where love is, and kindness. It was a stage room. Even the fire was false; it burned and roared, but it did not warm. There was a chilliness in here that had nothing to do with the seasonable chill. Bee, in that mauve satin, looked like a stage property also, a little rigid, a little too hectic, with her eyes like copper. She was talking to Livy of small matters and laughing somewhat too often. Dan sat opposite, smiling, swinging the foot of his crossed leg and leaning easily back in his chair. Livy’s quiet voice rambled on, unmoved, and I could hear nothing in it.
When people in small towns do not talk of their acquaintances and friends, and the small events that happen daily, there is nothing much to talk about. I tried to interest Dan in the threat of a Spanish-American War, but he was obviously not interested. “Wait a few years, and you’ll see a real war,” he said indifferently.
Bee did mention her mother, regretfully, speaking of Sarah’s apparent physical decay, but that was all. No one mentioned anyone in the town. With a sense of panic, I told Dan of a few of my cases, of the complications I had encountered during a certain confinement, and of the gangrene that had set in in the arm of a boy who had infected his finger. He listened politely. I found myself talking alone in that glaring void of a big room; Livy and Bee were watching me absorbedly as I talked.
I could not get close to Dan, for all his bodily nearness. I could not approach him. I found myself hating to look at Bee; it was like looking at a corpse which yet had acquired a supernatural life, sinister and horrible. The palms of my hands sweated; I felt a terrific urge to run out of that house, dragging Livy with me. What was the matter with me? Why could I not accept things that were given me to accept? Why was I always looking for the something that crawled and writhed under the surface?
The girl brought in a beautiful silver tray of coffee and cake and small sandwiches. I was desperately grateful for the interlude. While cups clinked and sugar wriggled from tongs, and the plates were passed, I could regain possession of myself. Things became almost normal. And then I had the ill luck to glance at Beatrice’s hand as she poured the coffee. It was very thin, almost gaunt, and the diamond on it glittered. But that was not what attracted my attention; the hand was trembling continually, and the knuckles were white. The cake in my mouth became dry and choking. I was conscious of an unreasonable terror. I glanced at Dan; he was eating with apparent good appetite and placid wellbeing.
Something must happen, I thought desperately. It did, and almost immediately, and innocently enough. I turned to Dan.
“Where’s that dog of yours?” I asked. “Haven’t seen him around lately. Did you send him back to the farm?”
There was a short pause, then Dan said casually as he scrutinized another piece of cake: “No, I didn’t send him back. I should have done it, though. He was a funny dog, poor devil. He took violent likes and dislikes, and if he really disliked you he would attack like hell, trying to tear your throat out.” He paused. “He attacked Bee one day; might have killed her. So I had to get rid of him.”
Unwillingly, I looked at Bee, and was startled. Her eyes were glittering. She was still smiling, but the smile had become a grin, almost fiendish. The cords were rising in her throat, and her complexion had become the tint of her dress.
“Yes, it was too bad,” she said gently. “But Dan was so soft about the nasty thing. I knew he couldn’t bear to do anything about it, so one day when he was out I had it poisoned.”
There was an awful silence. Then Livy said “Oh!” very softly. Her face had paled, and her mouth fell open. My eyes dragged themselves to Dan. He was very white, but between his smiling lips his teeth glinted. I did not like his expression. But Bee had shattered the careful glass he had raised to protect himself; husband and wife stared at each for a long while, both smiling intently with hate leaping between them. I stood up involuntarily.
“Yes,” said Dan, without removing his eyes from his wife, “Bee had him poisoned. He had nothing but his teeth to defend himself with. He was helpless. Then, besides, he loved me.”
Livy stood up also; I saw that she grasped the back of her chair, and that she was unbearably shaken. But neither Dan nor Bee noticed us, standing there in terror. They were too intent on each other.
“Loved you?” meditated Bee gently. “Perhaps that’s so. Nothing but a dog could love you. That’s why lots of people prefer beasts; they don’t see into one. Feed them, shelter them, and they’ll accept anything.”
Livy turned to me imploringly. “I think we’d best go, don’t you think, Jim? It’s getting late.”
“Yes,” I said huskily. I turned to go towards the door, but Bee sprang to her feet. She stood rigid, her hands clenched at her sides, her face shining with such evil that I fell back from it.
“So, you got what you came for, didn’t you? That’s what you came for, wasn’t it, to see what was going on here, to gloat over it with your filthy curiosity? Yes! You wanted to see what I was doing with my poor, innocent husband, what I was making him suffer! Yes!” Her voice was shrill, almost impossible to endure. Dan still sat; his face was turned to the fire. She advanced on us with fury; I recoiled from her, but Livy stood her ground, looking at Bee quietly and intensely, as one would look at a wild beast, waiting for the moment of attack. “You wanted to see! Well, see! This is how we live, under the surface. You’ve always been probing under surfaces, haven’t you, Jim? Nothing smooth on top ever contented you. Well, look! Probe! This is how we are, tormenting each other. No!” She exhaled fiercely, “He doesn’t torment me. He hasn’t the brains! He endures, and endures, and keeps his vile silence, torturing me. Do you know why? Because I know everything about him! That’s why! I know what a fool he is, what a rascal—”
“Don’t say that about Dan!” exclaimed Livy softly, as though in great pain. “Bee, you don’t mean it, but even if you don’t I can’t bear to hear you say it.”
The whole concentrated fury of the woman turned from me, like a pillar of fire, and roared upon Livy. She stuck out a pointing hand at my poor wife, threw back her head, and laughed madly.
“You would say that!” she almost screamed. “You’ve always been whining after him! You thought no one knew, except me, but now that fool of a husband of yours shall know now! He’ll know now why you wouldn’t marry him until I got Dan away from you; he’ll know why you had your sicknesses and your sickly faces, why you couldn’t stand coming here, why you avoided me, and shivered so delicately all the time! It’s time he knew how he’s been made a fool of, having his wife whimpering around after a man that wouldn’t look at her!”
A red haze dimmed my eyes; I felt myself preparing to spring on this monster, but the sight of Livy’s face, ghastly pale, her eyes half-closed as though she were about to faint, stopped me. I put my arm about her. Dan was standing also, now, but at a little distance, with a strange, impersonal attitude. Bee turned upon me savagely; there was an exultation in her crazy eyes, a beastlike joy in her ability to rend and tear.
“That’s why he avoided you, you fool! Because he knew your wife was in love with him! But he didn’t love her! You see, he was, and is, in love with my silly mother!”
I saw Dan leap at her then, and strike her full in the face with his clenched fist. It was like a dream, without reality and without substance. Bee fell without sound, headlong, her hair almost touching the gleaming andirons. Stupidly, I noticed the coppery waves of it, unrolling, spreading over the white-tiled hearth. Her body writhed in its sheathe of lavender satin, and then was still. I felt a heavy weight on my arm; Livy had fainted.
Dan turned to me. The jaw bones were rigid under his livid skin, but he was very quiet. I could feel myself trembling, but when he would have helped me with Livy I gestured him off in horror. I was not thinking coherently; I was sweating as though in some horrible nightmare. I don’t know how I pulled Livy’s cloak over her limp arms, how I got into my coat. But I remember
than Dan opened the door for me, and that the cold night wind rushed in on us into the hall as I carried Livy out. He stood by the open door, silent and tall and motionless in his black suit, and as I passed him he looked at me with a removed pity and compassion, a very strange look.
Livy regained consciousness just as I was putting her into the buggy. She assured me faintly that she was well. We drove away into the night. I felt something dissolving in myself, something so full of agony that I could scarcely endure it. We did not speak; I dared not speak.
We were almost home when Livy timidly touched my arm. I did not turn.
“Jim?” she whispered.
“Please, Livy, don’t let’s talk about it,” I said huskily.
She began to cry, and then clutched my arm desperately.
“Jim, you’ve got to listen. It’s true, I—I did care for Dan. All my life. Perhaps if you hadn’t gone away to school, and forgotten to write me after awhile, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But Dan was the only one in town who knew what I was talking about; we seemed to know just what either of us was thinking. Perhaps it was because everyone was so down on him, and all. Oh, I don’t know. I always saw deeper into Dan than anybody did, even you. I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say that the way I cared for him was different from the way I cared for you, and yet I always loved you, too. You were so funny, and so earnest, and so careful and good—Jim, it’s all over now. If it hadn’t been over, I wouldn’t have married you.”
“You mean, Livy,” I said lifelessly, “that it’s hopeless, don’t you? Look, Livy, I think I must have known all the time. Deep down, I knew. I wouldn’t let myself believe it. I always wanted you; there was never anyone else, and I expect we always believe what we want to believe.”
She pressed her face convulsively to my sleeve. “Jim, we’ve got to forget it. I love you, my dear. I’ll always love you. Please believe me.” She cried very bitterly, and I could feel the vibration of her sobs. I put my arm about her, stopped the buggy, and held her close. I was filled with compassion and love and sadness. There were always compromises with life; I would have to compromise, now, knowing everything. But it was almost too much, this hopeless compromise. Livy loved me, I knew. She would always do that. But Dan had taken something from her that I did not have, and I felt grovelling shame that he had not cared about it, had not wanted it. He, too, had his obsession, and was resigned to the knowing he could not have it.
To Look and Pass Page 18
