Authors: James Gould Cozzens
Virginia's gloved hand caressed one of the great headlights crouched inside the long strong swoop of mudguards slightly dented here and there on the edges. Out of the sides of the formidable hood came fat tubes, like ribbed worms of soiled metal. They passed diagonally astern, ducked out of sight again. Virginia was not sure what they did, but they seemed to imply a power too titanic for any ordinary hood to cover and hold. She moved along the side, glanced into the open driving compartment. The keys were there.
Carefully, unhurried and absorbed still, she passed on, examined the tyres, glanced at the dial on the underslung gas tank behind. Very quietly returning, she opened the door, slid across the much-used leather of the open seat. There she sat a moment, buttoning her jacket, pushing the fur collar close under her chin, tucking her skirt tight under her narrow thighs. She laid a hand on the wheel, reached and turned on the ignition. The headlights snapped up to a mighty glare on the radiators affixed along the back wall.
The motor turned over vainly a moment. It caught then with a shocking thunder and she throttled it down, wincing; opened it up again, jerking the choke. With a wheel-spoke in one hand, the choke held out against possible stalling, she let the clutch engage gingerly, gazed over her shoulder, watching the long stern push out on to the drive. It bent majestically to the right until, looking front, she was pointed for the gate. Letting go the choke, she stamped on the clutch, snapped over the gear lever. Gathering momentum with a great roar, she swept down to pass the house.
Upstairs, a window slammed open, and though she did not bother to look, she heard the sound of Guy's outraged shouts. Glancing hastily right and left, she slid through the gate, turned south in a pool of radiance from a street light at the corner. Down the ghostly sweep of US6W her long-shafted lights poured ahead. She saw a movement among the cars before the post office and jabbed her thumb on the button, sending the shattering blare of her horn down to them. "The red tail-light of one or two, starting to back, stopped, frightened; a single dark figure scurried across the down-flung brilliance. She was into high; and, given the accelerator, the, motor picked up marvellously. She was doing forty-five when she roared, horn rasping out, past the hesitant parked cars; the lighted windows of the store; the glowing glass globes on Weems' gasolene pumps. It was fifty-five when the half-shadowed, half arc-lit shape of St. Matthias's church at the corner hid the bridge road from her. She punched the horn button and took a chance. She was past it then; the star-scattered sky opened like an immense southern dome as she dipped down beneath the last street light and off on the fine straightaway to the river bend.
Lighted like the other dashboard dials from some secret inner source, the shaking hand of the speedometer showed now, now hid, the numeral 6 of 65; and that was certainly fast enough. The air lashed stinging around the low wind-shield, so fiercely cold it scalded like fire blown along her face. She could scarcely breathe; the blast of it drove, chill, right through the leather of the buttoned jacket.
Seeing that sixty-five was fast enough, already a little afraid with only this unfamiliar wheel to direct the great machine moving her, Virginia found that she was going faster. A perverse desire, born half of the awful beauty of speed, half of her fear's delectable pain, tried its edge on her shaky stomach. Not really wishing to, not able not to, she saw a black 7 shaking into sight; a thin line; then, the companion 5. To her right, the gigantic frail grey shape of a tower in the new transmission line went up against snow, dark hill, and at the top, stars. It was gone, and she saw, instead, the long low mound of a tobacco barn. It appeared, telescoped magically, disappeared. Two big elms were levered past the side of her eye.
Now she saw the starlight distantly on the flat snow covering the river bend. With a pain of fear, an anguished faintness, fleetingly on the speedometer she beheld an 8 coming up. At once, its zero joined it. Her far-flung headlights had found the precise low line of the white fence, curving at the bend with the great arc of the curving road. She started to say: "Oh, Jesus . . ." but the solid wind crammed in her parting lips, choked her. With an insane and paralysing fatality she knew that she was going to be killed. She could never get around there at such a speed. She would have to drive through the fence, over the bank, break out a great hole in the snow-covered ice; and everything would be quiet-freezing, starlit on the empty road with no one stirring.
A fear so great as to be more an agony of rage at the folly of killing herself when she did not want to die, for no reason at all, convulsed her. She locked her left hand on a spoke of the wheel, put her right hand on that, ready to bear down. The foot, so senselessly on the accelerator, recoiled; she cried out in surprised minor anguish as the sharp heel of that shoe dug the instep of her other foot, bracing, both of them, on the foot brake. She didn't even think of the emergency brake; she closed her eyes, her lungs bloated in despair; her belly caved in.
Instantly a horrid jolt took out her breath; she drew on the wheel with all her might and her eyes, forced open, saw the white fence leaping towards the headlights. There was a rasp and slurring screech. Pain sank in her armpits as the steering-gear attempted to escape her. The car wobbled right, then left; it hovered in a delicate indecision, poised to overturn. Two wheels fell jouncing back on the concrete; the engine stalled. Her headlights brought up across snow-covered field and boulders and small, rotting apple trees. She was three-quarters of the way round the bend, pointed diagonally across the road.
Virginia lay back in the seat, her hands limp in her lap. The bright stars seemed to quake towards the blackness of the sky as though they were going out. A taste like blood was in her mouth; the wind, gentle, overlaid her face with a killing pain of ice. Brushing her glove distracted against her cheek, the leather came to the dashboard radiance stained dark with sweat. She had one thigh locked over the other, the toe twisted tight around her ankle. Wincing, she realized with a sharp horror of disgust that she had lost control of herself; and at once she began to cry, for, safe and alive or not, that was really too sickening to bear.
Mrs. Cole, boarding the train at Sansbury, had inadvertently picked the steps of the smoking car; but she was out of breath and sat down there anyway.
"You be more comfortable in another car, Mrs. Cole?" the conductor asked.
"Oh, no," she said. "I don't object to smoking. My boy Kenneth smokes the whole time. Tell them not to stop on my account."
He went away then and she was able to settle herself and get her copy of that morning's New York
Mirror
open to the daily true story. She was wearing her old bifocals instead of her new reading-glasses, so the small print occupied her for most of the twenty-five minutes taken by the train to get up to New Winton. Finished, she turned to the serial then and, holding the sheet close, read the synopsis of preceding instalments:
Coral Wright, beautiful and seventeen, is left alone in a little seaside hamlet upon the death of her mother. Hobart Nixon, an unscrupulous and distant relative, has long annoyed' her. Roger Clark, young mining engineer and beau of Coral in her schooldays, is back to sell some property before going West again. He falls in love with Coral and says that some day, when he makes good, he will come back and marry her. Coral thinks it's just a line with him. Maurice Maxwell, millionaire playboy, has built a great summer estate in the
village.
He has met Coral and asked her to his opening house party and she has half promised to come. Nixon, whose wife is deaf, sneaks into Coral's room that night and begins to overpower her. Now continue
—
At this point the conductor opened the door and came down the aisle. Ahead, the locomotive broke into a doleful wail for the crossing on the Cobble road just south of New Winton. The conductor held the top of the next seat and said: "This is your station, Mrs. Cole."
Mrs. Cole objected: "I gave you my ticket, young man."
"Yes, I got it. This is New Winton. This is where you want to get off."
"Is this Bridgeport?"
"No, ma'am. This is —"
"Well, I'm going to Bridgeport. Will you tell me when we're getting in?"
"This train don't go to Bridgeport, Mrs. Cole."
"Why didn't you say so when you took my ticket? Land sakes, where does it go to?"
"You don't live in Bridgeport any more, Mrs. Cole. This is New Winton."
"Well, have the train stop, please. That's where I want to get off." She arose, flurried, and the conductor bent down, recovering her packages. "Those are some little things I bought at the five and ten," she told him. "Thank you very much." She hooked her umbrella over her arm, clasped her handbag tight and poked the newspaper under one elbow. Three or four amazed faces watched her leave the smoking car.
"Will you be kind enough to assist me, young man?" she said to the conductor. "I have all these things."
"Don't you worry, Mrs. Cole. We'll get you off." He opened the door of the other car and shouted perfunctorily, "New Winton, New Winton. . . ."
When the train had moved on, and most of the cars and light trucks waiting for it had either got into motion or shown no immediate sign of doing so, Mrs. Cole judged it safe to cross from the gravel platform of the station to Fell's Meat Market. She looked sharply at the wide closed doors of the station garage to be sure that no motor was going to sally out on her. Continuing, she went briskly by Fell's lighted windows to the corner, where the short street led up to the green, between Upjohn Brothers' store and the bulky building known as Upjohn's Hall across the way. At this point she stopped, made a slight clicking sound with her tongue, turned about and went back to Fell's.
Warner Fell himself, in a dirty apron, was behind the hacked cutting-block. "Good evening, Mrs. Cole," he said.
Mrs. Cole sniffed. "Something don't smell very fresh here," she remarked generally. "Why, Mrs. Cole, I'm sure everything —"
"Well, something isn't. How are your lamb chops?"
Warner Fell pushed up the latch of the big refrigerator doors, produced, dropping on the block, a chunk of bone-backed meat. Mrs. Cole bent down and sniffed it, looked a moment at the faint round government inspection stampings in purple ink. "H'm," she said, "it's a poor cut. Well, I'll take a dozen. Cut them thick."
'Warner Fell drew out a long knife, sliced to the bone, chopped through with a cleaver. When he had done this four times, he said appraisingly, "Don't you guess four would be enough, Mrs. Cole? These are good thick ones."
"Yes. Four's right. That's two for the Doctor, and one for me, and one for Susie."
She added this to her other packages, went out and walked up to the green. Crossing the road, she passed the lighted windows of the library, looked carefully to be certain that the fire truck wasn't on the point of coming out of the adjoining drive-way. In front of Weems' house at the corner, she paused, glancing up and down the deserted road. Then she crossed over and passed along the upper end of the green. When she got beyond the Ordways' house she saw that there was no light at home; the Doctor couldn't have got in yet, and she remembered that she had let Susie go. The Doctor could eat the other chop, or it would do for Susie to-morrow.
Passing through the gap in the lilac hedge, she reached the door. Here on the steps, she had to set down most of her packages in order to find her key and use it. Once inside, she got a light on, went directly to the kitchen where she deposited all her things on the table.
This was hardly done when the telephone rang, for, up at the other end of the green, Helen Webster saw the light. Mrs. Cole came pattering back again and took off the receiver. "No," she said, "I don't know where he is. I just this minute got in. Oh! You say she died? Oh! Now, that's too bad. Please wait a minute until I get something to write with. I'll make a note for him —"
She laid the receiver down and went back to the kitchen, turning over her things on the table in search of a pad and pencil. Not finding them immediately, she paused, perplexed. Out of a page of photographs which her paper, thrown down, had exposed, the nostalgic word
Bridgeport
arrested her. It went on—
Beauty of Maniac's Retribution?
The photograph of a dark, thick-featured girl regarded her.
Revenge hinted in murderous attack on pretty Nita Popolato. Story p.
2. Mrs. Cole made a clicking sound with her tongue and turned to page two.
February
19
th, Bridgeport, Conn. Near death in St. Vincent's Hospital, Nita Popolato, dark-eyed Bridgeport beauty of seventeen, gasped out a tale of primitive vengeance and passion which set police scouring the city for
—
After a while Helen Webster shrugged. Having no facilities for a howler circuit, the most she could do was keep ringing the line. This effected a small, discontented clucking noise, audible a few yards around the unhooked receiver in the hall. Mrs. Cole, who had found her reading-glasses and pulled a chair up to the light in the kitchen, was not disturbed by it.
"Guy, darling!" Mrs. Banning called, "Guy!"
She heard the violent opening of his door and his quick step in the upper hall. "Oh, never mind, dear," she said. "I just thought I heard your car. It was probably one on the road."
"You did hear it," said Guy. His voice was constricted with fury, and Mrs. Banning turned from her dressing-table. "Come in, dear," she said. "Why, what is the trouble?"
Guy pushed the door open. A pattern of half-dry lather, left from his interrupted shaving, decorated his face, he knotted the cord of his dressing-gown hard about him. "Why, Guy," repeated Mrs. Banning, "what on earth has happened?"
"What you heard," Guy said, "was Ginny taking my car out. And I won't have it. I've told her twenty times that it isn't safe for her to drive it. It's not a Ford. If she thinks I'm going to let her smash it up just for fun—the crazy little fool!"