Stories of Erskine Caldwell (32 page)

“Absolutely.”

“But I feel so — so bare, Professor Eaton.”

“ ’Tis only natural to feel like that,” he said, comforting her. “A young girl who has never before experienced the —”

“Experienced the what?”

“Well — as I was saying —”

“You make me feel so funny, Professor Eaton. And are you sure —”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely.”

“I’ve never felt like this before. It feels like —”

“Just place yourself completely in my hands, my dear young girl, and I promise nothing will —”

Without warning the parlor door was thrown open and Effie’s brother, Burke, came in. Burke was the town marshal.

“Is dinner ready, Effie?” Burke asked, standing in the doorway and trying to accustom his eyes to the near-darkness of the parlor. “It’s a quarter after twelve and —”

Burke stopped in the midst of what he was saying and stared at Effie and Professor Eaton. Effie screamed and pushed Professor Eaton away from her. He got up and stood beside Effie and the sofa, looking first at Burke and then at Effie. He did not know what to do. Effie reached for the things she had thrown aside. Professor Eaton bent down and picked up something and threw it at her.

The room suddenly appeared to Professor Eaton to be as bright as day.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Burke said, coming slowly across the floor. His holster hung from his right hip, and it swung heavily as he swayed from step to step. “I’ll be damned!”

Professor Eaton stood first on one foot and then on the other. He was between Effie and her brother, and he knew of no way by which he could change his position in the room. He wished to get as far away from Effie as he possibly could. Until she had dressed herself, he hoped he would not be forced to look at her.

Burke stepped forward and pushed Professor Eaton aside. He looked at Effie and at the herb doctor, but he gave no indication of what he intended doing.

Professor Eaton shifted the weight of his body to his other foot, and Burke’s hand dropped to the top of the holster, his fingers feeling for the pearl handle that protruded from it.

Effie snapped a safety pin and ran between Burke and Professor Eaton. She was still not completely dressed, but she was fully covered.

“What are you going to do, Burke?” she cried.

“That all depends on what the Professor is going to do,” Burke said, still fingering the pearl handle on the pistol. “What is the Professor going to do?”

“Why, Professor Eaton and I are going to be married, Burke,” she said. “Aren’t we, Professor Eaton?”

“I had not intended making known the announcement of our engagement and forthcoming marriage at this time,” he said, “but since we are to be married very shortly, Effie’s brother should by all means be the first to know of our intentions.”

“Thanks for telling me, Professor,” Burke said. “It had better by a damn sight be forthcoming,”

Effie ran to Professor Eaton and locked her arms around his neck.

“Oh, do you really mean it, Professor Eaton? I’m so happy I don’t know what to do! But why didn’t you tell me sooner that you really wanted to marry me? Do you really and truly mean it, Professor Eaton?”

“Sure,” Burke said; “he means it.”

“I’m the happiest girl in the whole town of Rawley,” Effie cried, pressing her face against Professor Eaton’s celluloid collar. “It was all so unexpected! I had never dreamed of it happening to me so soon!”

Burke backed across the room, one hand still around the pearl handle that protruded from the cowhide holster. He backed across the room and reached for the telephone receiver on the wall. He rang the central office and took the receiver from the hook.

“Hello, Janie,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Ring up Reverend Edwards for me, will you, right away.”

Burke leaned against the wall, looking at Effie and Professor Eaton while Janie at the central office was ringing the Reverend Edwards’s number.

“Just to think that I’m going to marry a traveling herb doctor!” Effie said. “Why! all the girls in town will be so envious of me they won’t speak for a month!”

“Absolutely,” Professor Eaton said, pulling tight the loosened knot in his tie and adjusting it in the opening of his celluloid collar. “Absolutely. Indian Root Tonic has unlimited powers. It is undoubtedly the medical and scientific marvel of the age. Indian Root Tonic has been known to produce the most astounding results in the annals of medical history.”

Effie pinned up a strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead and looked proudly upon Professor Eaton.

(First published in
We Are the Living
)

W
HEN
M
R.
S
EARS
kissed his wife good-by at the trainside in Union Station, he had no more idea of going back on the road than he had of flying around the world in an airplane. Never for a moment in ten years’ time had he regretted his decision to buy a seven-room house, to marry Mrs. Sears, and to accept the offer from the company to make him office manager.

“Good-by, Mr. Sears,” his wife said, drying her eyes with the corners of her handkerchief as he boarded the St. Louis Express. “Don’t sleep in a drafty room, and be sure to ask the hotel to fix up a bottle of hot milk for you to drink before you go to bed.”

For the past ten years his wife had called him Mr. Sears. His name was Henry, but no one ever called him that any longer. Ever since the day he came in off the road and settled down as office manager he had been Mr. Sears. During the fifteen or sixteen years he had spent on the road as sales representative for the company, calling on the trade in the Southwest, people everywhere had called him Henry. Even Mrs. Sears had called him Henry then. But when he left the road and became office manager, she thought it was more dignified to address him in public and in private as Mr. Sears.

“Good-by,” Mr. Sears said, pausing for a moment in the vestibule. “I’ll be back tomorrow evening for dinner. The train gets in at seven-twenty.”

His wife turned her handkerchief around until she found an unused corner, and dried a tear before going back through the station to the street.

Mr. Sears had been called into the president’s office the day before and instructed to run up to St. Louis and attend to an important matter for the company. The home office and plant in Memphis, where Mr. Sears was office manager, were worried over the piling up of orders from the Missouri distributor in St. Louis. The orders for plows, hoes, rakes, pitchforks, cultivators, and miscellaneous farm implements were highly prized, and the company thought it best to send Mr. Sears up and have him explain that the delay in shipping was unavoidable, and that the orders would be filled and shipped by the end of the week.

The president had impressed upon Mr. Sears the importance of the mission, and had urged him to handle the matter with great delicacy and tact. Orders for anything, the president had told him, were worth fighting for during such times, and if their company could not fill them with reasonable promptness, there were dozens of other companies that could. As special representative of the company, Mr. Sears was to exert a calming influence over the St. Louis jobbers and to promise them that the orders would be filled and in transit by the end of the week. Having served the company faithfully for twenty five years, the president said, he knew he could rely upon Mr. Sears to forestall the threatened cancellations and to smooth the way for future orders from Missouri,

It was late in the afternoon when Mr. Sears arrived in St. Louis, and he went directly to his hotel. His appointment was set for ten o’clock the next morning, and he planned to devote the rest of the afternoon and a part of the evening to a study of the papers the president had given him before leaving Memphis. The papers themselves were of little importance; they were merely sheets of data that were to be laid before the St. Louis people to show that sales for the current quarter in the southwestern territory, and in Missouri particularly, were 121/2 per cent greater than were those of the corresponding quarter of the preceding year. Mr. Sears did not know exactly how the figures had been arrived at, as the past three salary cuts had been based on the decline of carloadings, the president had explained at the time, but Mr. Sears was convinced that the figures as they stood were for the good of the company.

When Mr. Sears walked into the hotel, he had expected to see someone whom he knew. For fifteen years he had made St. Louis twice a month, stopping at the same hotel, and he had known everyone connected with the house. But during the ten years he had been off the road, everything had changed. The room clerks were new men, the bellboys were younger, the cashiers were behind grilled walls, and the lobby was filled with palm trees and lounging women. Mr. Sears called for the assistant manager, expecting to see at least one former friend in the strange place, but the new assistant manager bowed stiffly and assigned one of the sleek-haired clerks to place Mr. Sears in an outside tenth-floor room-and-shower. Stiffly, Mr. Sears rode up the elevator and was shown to his room. He tipped the boy a dime and slammed the door. He was glad he was off the road. He could not bear to think how he had been able to spend fifteen years of his life jumping from hotel to hotel, from train to train, with none of the comforts of home, and without the companionship of a wife. He was glad he would be able to get back to Memphis the next evening in time for dinner. Mrs. Sears was expecting him at seven-twenty.

Mr. Sears took off his coat, put it on a hanger in the closet, unbuttoned his vest, and got out his briefcase. He spread the president’s papers on the writing desk and filled his pipe.

After an hour spent in looking out the window, he stood up and put the unread papers back into the case, and got ready to go down to the lobby. He thought he would go down there and sit in a quiet place until dinner. The room was uninviting, and the sooty jungle of chimney pots on the roofs below somehow reminded him of Mrs. Sears’s flower garden. Fifteen years of living in hotel rooms was all he wished of it, he said to himself; a seven-room house, a kind and devoted wife, and comfortable overstuffed furniture soon show a man how empty and tragic life can be for the commercial traveler. He thought that again, it sounded so good. A wife, a seven-room house, and overstuffed furniture! What does the road have to offer now! He chuckled to himself as he washed his hands and dried them on a towel with too much starch in it. He hoped the president would not wish to send him to St. Louis again any time soon. Nor to Dallas, New Orleans, Tulsa, or Kansas City. All of them were like St. Louis now. Once there had been a difference, in his younger days. But a wife and a home make a man realize that to live and work in one place is the best that life has to offer. Let the others travel all they wish to. Let them go to New York, San Francisco, anywhere; but give him Memphis for the rest of his days. Mr. Sears locked the door and went down to the lobby.

After dinner he came back to his room. It was not quite seven o’clock then, but the lobby was filled with a noisy crowd of shoe salesmen and evening-gowned women, and Mr. Sears wished to finish studying the president’s papers before he turned in for a good night’s rest. He did not care to mingle with the crowd downstairs and undoubtedly be mistaken for one of them. He was not a commercial traveler; he was an office manager.

First of all, though, he decided to take a shower. He undressed hurriedly, throwing his clothes over the chairs, and turned on the water. He was busily engaged for a long time tempering the shower to suit his taste. He liked his showers just so — there was a certain temperature that suited him to perfection, and the delay in adjusting the hot and cold streams was worth the time and trouble. The moment when it was ready, he jumped into the spray of water, closing his eyes contentedly, and pretending that he was in his own house, with Mrs. Sears in the kitchen preparing dinner, and trying to forget that there was such a thing as southwestern sales territory.

Suddenly, in the midst of his shower, he heard an insistent knocking on the outside door. He stuck his head out from the spray and listened a moment. The knocking was loud and impatient. Mr. Sears stuck his head back into the spray of water smiling broadly to himself. He remembered how it had been when he was on the road. There had been quick knockings on doors in Dallas, Kansas City, Fort Worth — well, nearly everywhere he went in those days. Now he paid no attention to such a thing. He was not on the road now. He lived in Memphis, and he was married to Mrs. Sears. Drummers were forever making fools of themselves in one way or another, he said to himself. A settled businessman like himself could not afford to take notice of such things.

But the knocking continued. It grew louder; it became so loud that it could not possibly be ignored for any great length of time.

Mr. Sears stuck his head out from the shower to listen again. Someone was rapping angrily on the door — on his door. It was a mistake, he said, just as there had been mistakes in Houston, Shreveport, Kansas City. He had sent for no one, and there was no possible reason why anyone in St. Louis should wish to see him. He knew no one, and he was certain nobody he had previously known would try to look him up. He listened to the knocking on the door, listened with both ears above the spray, wondering how long it would continue.

The rapping on his door kept up, becoming louder and more insistent than ever. Mr. Sears smiled to himself, glancing into the mirror to give himself a sly wink. He didn’t care if he did, he said. He would go and take one little look. No harm could possibly come from that. He wished to see.

Reaching for a towel, Mr. Sears turned off the shower and stepped out on the bath mat. He tied the towel around his waist, pulling it down over his legs as far as it would go.

He unlocked the door and opened it until there was a crack an inch wide he could see through. He took one look and shut the door as quickly as he could. The automatic lock behaved as though it would never bolt the door.

When he was certain that the door was securely locked, Mr. Sears took a deep breath and looked around him wild-eyed. He had not expected to see what he did. There was a young woman standing out there without a coat or cloak of any kind and, besides, she was wearing a slanting little red hat over her left ear. He had not expected that. It was all a mistake, he said to himself. It was a genuine mistake. The woman was knocking on the wrong door. She should go to some other door and knock. She was trying to enter the wrong room.