Authors: James Gould Cozzens
The air he breathed in was raw, but less cold. Clammy, no longer bracing, the bitter, windless dark of the valley suggested a wasteland, a country and climate unfitted to support human life. Getting down to them, the bright infrequent street lights of New Winton shone on desertion that could not have been greater had every house stood cold and empty, had every human being lain long dead.
Awakening Saturday morning, he could see how well sleep had served him, how unreal the thoughts of his desolate home-coming had been. He could see, too, the rain waving in curtains across the hills, the mists hung low. That great disconsolation, that unhappy sense of death and vanity, was doubtless a barometric matter, a mere change in atmospheric pressure.
In the bathtub, George Bull sat in warm water above his waist, soaping impartially his short greying hair, his new shaven face, his big torso. Lying down, he sloshed! about, rinsing. He heaved water up in his hands, getting; the suds off his head.' He wallowed about, grunting and puffing. Sitting up, he spattered water far and wide. It shook gleaming from his shoulders. On his chest and wide arms, the dark hair was spread flat in sleek, bedraggled wisps.
Snorting once more, he regained his voice, cheerful in a mounting sense of his well-being. Below, in the kitchen, Mrs. Cole and Susie Andrews, who were intermittently eating their own breakfasts and preparing his, could hear him begin to sing again, a vibrating bass rumble of
Adeste Fideles.
Triumphant, at the top of his lungs, he handled the awkward English wording with agile malice. It made him think of bitter mornings, Michigan Christmases, maybe fifty years ago; but he was never through being glad that they were over. ". . . Lo! He abhors not the Vir-r-gin's womb. Ver-er-y Gah-hod; begotten, not crea-a-ted. . . ." He snorted and wallowed again; he emerged, standing on his feet, carolling heartily: "O come, let us adore Him! O come, let us . . ."
The whole house felt the distinct faint jar of his stepping on to the mat. Working with a towel, he interrupted or embellished his singing with whoops and hoots. Opening the door to go to his bedroom, he could smell the mixed upfloating odours of sausage and pancakes, wood smoke and coffee. The glimpse of rain on the spoiled snow, of soaked tree branches, gave new comfort to the warmth, a new savour to the fine smell of breakfast. He roared with pleasure; he knew plenty of hymns.
Dressed, coming downstairs, his voice preceded him like a herald:
"Crown Him with many crowns,
The Lamb upon His throne;
Hark! how the heavenly anthem drowns. . ."
He turned back through the hall. His office door was open and in the gloom there he could see Susie dusting, shuffling about in the slippers Mrs. Cole would make her put on instead of her wet shoes as soon as she came in. Susie called thinly: "Morning, Doctor Bull!" and he waved a hand in casual salute. Entering the kitchen, he shouted: "Breakfast! Breakfast! Breakfast! Hello, Aunt Myra! Looking younger every day!"
"Kenneth, where were you last night?"
"He was in Heaven, Aunt Myra. This is Eph's boy, George."
"You've no need to be telling me who you are, shouting around like that! I heard you up in the bathroom. And I'm not so sure Kenneth's in Heaven, much as I hope he may be. Now, sit right down and start your breakfast. Susie doesn't have to go to school to-day and we have all we can do this morning."
A place had been laid on the cleared end of the kitchen table, and she put a hand on his elbow, impelling him towards it. "Drink your orange juice; and here's your porridge. Where did I put that cream? There. Now, I'll start your cakes. Your coffee will be ready directly —and see you eat plenty before you go out on a day like this."
"Who says I'm going out?"
"Oh! Well, now, let's see. Oh, someone died. That little telephone girl, Helen, I think her name is, told me last night. I was going to leave a note for you, but it went right out of my mind. Susie! Did you hear about anyone dying yesterday?"
"I heard Mamie Talbot died, Mrs. Cole."
"Maybe that's it, then."
"Well, I'm damned!" said George Bull. "Died, did she? I thought she'd probably get through. Well, I will have to go out. It's against the law to die around here without a certificate. All we need now's the enabling legislation and we'll live forever."
"George, you stop sitting there blaspheming and scoffing. Here's your cakes and sausage. You eat them. We'll all die in the Lord's good time; and people who go around swearing every other word the way you do will have plenty to answer for, I shouldn't be surprised. There's the syrup, and I'll have some more cakes in a minute —"
She stood still, arrested, cocking her head slightly. No sound could be heard in the house and she called out: "Susie! You just keep out of those books of the Doctor's. First thing you know you'll be getting yourself into bad habits. March right out here and begin on the dishes!"
There was a pause, a succession of slight, furtive sounds, and Susie appeared. "I don't ever touch anything of the Doctor's, Mrs. Cole. I was just dusting the book-cases."
"Hm. That's as it may be. It took you a long time. Now, there's no more batter, George, and I'll not mix more this morning. You'll just have to make out with these. I never did see a man eat as much!"
"Got two hundred and fifteen pounds to keep up, Aunt Myra."
"Well, I expect most of it's whisky fat. There's the door-bell. Go and see who it is, Susie."
Susie turned about and shuffled back. There was a sound of the door opening, the murmur of a voice, and Susie called shrilly, "It's the telephone. A man says, will you please hang up the receiver."
Virginia Banning pushed her cold bare feet into slippers whose high sides were lined with rabbit fur. Over her pyjamas she pulled a flannel bathrobe. Not sitting down, she bent to the dressing-table mirror, tugged the comb twice through her sleep-tangled hair, drove in the single hairpin. Listless, she jabbed her fingers over the end of an open lipstick and transferred the scarlet smear to her upper lip. Deepened by animosity and a sort of contempt, her blue eyes gazed hard back at her from the glass. "I look lousy!" she said aloud.
She leaned a moment, supported by her clenched hand on the dressing-table top, held by this consuming, utterly hopeless abhorrence. She hated the slight hollows under the drawn, thin-looking skin of her cheeks. Her hair, fluffy without being curly, seemed to her the colour of rat's fur. The boy's bathrobe, buttoned across her flat chest, was striped vertically in blue and grey. She had that left from her never-completed fall term at school. It was a regulation garment at Miss Keble's. Severe, Practical, it aborted drastically all individual, too- luxurious developments in negligee. "In one of these," she remembered someone saying, "a girl would be safe even rooming with a Yale man. . . ."
Her thought was deflected, for it had been an item in her credulous and absurd general sophistication of the school that youths from Yale were invariably passionate and dangerous. Like so many of the beliefs that made life dramatic and exciting for other girls, this one was spoiled for Virginia. Although she really knew no Yale men except Guy, that was enough. She could see that Yale men were no more than that—just Guy. "God! I'd tear his eyes out!" she said, forgetting even her hatred of her own face in the momentary hotter one for some hypothetical, essentially Guy-like youth putting purposeful hands on her.
Her glance swept from the mirror, met the endless drenching fall of rain over the bare maples beyond the drive. A dissolving mess of snow clung, the white now grey with water, to the lawns. She jerked round, loathing the dismal day as much as she loathed men, for amounting to no more than they did; and her own white face, for looking—she said it through her teeth— like something the cat brought in.
In the hall, she heard her mother's voice, mild and clear from her sitting-room: "Virginia?"
"Yes, Mother."
"Are you up, darling?"
"I'm not dressed."
"Well, darling, Val telephoned; but please don't plan to go out there. I may want you to go over to the Talbots' with me this morning."
"Oh, Mother! What for?"
"Virginia, I don't see how you can be so heartless."
"I just can't stand Mrs. Talbot and that awful shack —I mean, if it would do any good —"
"I'm sorry, darling; but if it clears up at all, I think we will really have to go. And get your breakfast right away, dear. Mary has a great deal to do this morning."
Val had telephoned to learn about going to Paris, of course; and, of course, too, there wasn't anything about it. This distracting sense of nothing about anything, the length of minutes and hours of nothing—Virginia thought, screwing her eyes closed and gripping the stair rail: "God, I'll have to go to some rotten school again; I just can't stand it here!" At once she thought further: "If I said I'd go to school and try not to get fired, they'd send me. Why couldn't I have the same money to go to Paris with Val?"
In, the dining-room a fire was burning. Guy, clad in a tan camel's-hair sweater, knickerbockers, and an extremely old tweed jacket, was not through breakfast. He ate, as he did everything else, with an unconscious assurance. It might not be fair to say that Guy was pleased with himself, in the sense of taking active pleasure in counting over his own good qualities; but at least he didn't worry about himself. He knew by now that he and his more intimate friends were right; or, at any rate, he could easily see that people who differed conspicuously in dress or behaviour, in ideals or attitudes, were, as far as his college was concerned, wrong. His grey eyes considered all those in error with a level, complete indifference. He did not know them and never expected to. His face, past adolescence, coming into final form, showed the mould of this ruthless lightness. Virginia supposed some people might think he was good-looking. "Hello," she said.
Guy got to his feet, mechanically. "Hoyt girl called you up," he announced.
"I know," Virginia went to the pantry door, pushed it open, and called, "Mary, could I have some coffee?" She came back to the table and sat down.
"Cheerful child," observed Guy. "You ought to —"
"Can't you even let me get some coffee first? And what's there to be cheerful about? Mamie's passing-out party?"
Guy's face showed the delicate, haughty stiffening which indicated outrage. "For heaven's sake, Ginny, doesn't anyone matter to you but yourself?"
"I suppose you mean that you're all broken up about Mamie. I'll bet you don't even have to go over. You'll fool around with your wonderful car all morning."
"At least I have the decency to be sorry."
"That's cheap, I guess. What's it to Mamie? She's dead, isn't she? Who wouldn't rather be dead than living in a hole like New Winton?"
"You sound like a fool!"
"Oh, God, Guy; let me alone, can't you?"
"Well, what have I done?"
"You just go yammering on about what people ought to do and what they ought to feel—who told you? How do you know?"
"Well, what do you want to talk the way you do for?"
"Maybe I don't want to. Maybe you make me. I wish you could hear yourself sometime—'At least I have the decency to be sorry'!"
Guy reddened a little across his firm forehead. He opened his mouth with an icy, drastic animosity, but at the same instant Mary came in and he shut it again. "Morning, Miss Ginny," Mary said. She set down a small silver coffee-pot and a covered dish of toast.
"Now, just let me boil you a couple of nice eggs —"
"I couldn't eat them, Mary. I only want coffee." Guy, the edge gone off his anger, said: "Half your trouble is never eating anything —"
"Mary, please don't fix me any eggs." Her hand shook a little as she lifted the coffee-pot and Guy, observing it, now that the door was closed behind Mary, said: "Look at that! It's just plain starvation. They ought to send you down to Doctor Verney —"
"Guy, for Christ's sake, leave me alone!"
"With pleasure!" He snapped a flame up on a leather-covered lighter, lit a cigarette and got to his feet. "Speaking of hearing yourself, I wish you could hear yourself sometime. You can't open your mouth without swearing. If you think that sort of thing is smart, I can tell you it isn't. You sound exactly like a West Haven chippy. I don't care whether you eat anything. If you want to be a living skeleton —"
He went past her, out into the hall.
Virginia stared straight before her, at the disordered table, the frilling yellow flames up off the orange embers in the fireplace. Her hand was trembling so that she couldn't pour, and she put down the silver pot. She had her teeth locked together and now she clenched her hands; but it was not going to do her any good. The short, strangling gasps of sobs, unwanted, unendurable, strengthened in spite of her. She pressed her palms over her wet eyes; she bent her head down until it lay on the table. Now came the sudden swing of the pantry door, and Mary's startled voice: "Why, Miss Ginny —"
"Oh, leave me alone!" she wailed.
"Leave me alone!"
Mrs. Talbot had been difficult, of course. First, she would not sleep alone in a house with a dead body; then, she seemed to see it as more Mamie and less corpse. She would not leave Mamie all night alone and sleep in May's house. Harry Weems, coming back with a bottle of gin and some oranges, had solved the problem by saying he would stay with Joe. Much as she disliked it, May was free to sleep over at Mrs. Talbot's. Joe didn't care, as long as she got Mrs. Talbot out of his sight as soon as possible.
Again, Harry had been invaluable. May had supper to get. Harry made a drink for Mrs. Talbot. Not too far sunk in her misery to feel that Joe was definitely hostile, Mrs. Talbot couldn't have been managed without Harry. She kept saying: "Don't mind me. Don't go to any trouble —" She addressed Harry, but she said it in Joe's direction, peevish and put-upon. Obviously Joe was unable to go to any trouble, but he might act as though he would like to, if he could. Still protesting that she really didn't want anything and needed no attention, she drank what Harry prepared for her. After that she recovered enough to eat a little. The gin and food joined, mercifully, to stupefy her. She was soon in danger of going to sleep right there, so May cleaned up in a hurry and stacked the dishes. Mrs. Talbot, taken home and helped to bed, was snoring almost at once, leaving everything to May. The place ought to be straightened up a little, since people would certainly be coming in to-morrow, so May applied herself to that. When she had done what she could with the front room, she hesitated a moment. "I mustn't be silly," she said aloud. Turning on the light in the back bedroom, she went in there.