Part 6

“Jim told me, while he was here, he’s getting a raise at the end of the month. Three hundred a month, and assistant teller. He might even get to be assistant cashier some day. One hundred dollars a week and a private room. He’s a good boy, Jim is.”

“If you’re going to keep on like this,” said Gerty silently to her mother, “I won’t tell you about the failure.”

“And he’s got a flat at One Hundred and Fortieth Street. Two rooms and a kitchen. The landlord will paper the walls any way you’ll want him to. Yes, and a bath tub, too. In the kitchen.”

A few moments before, Harry Widener had been far away, almost imperceptible. Now he came quite near, and looked at Gerty with his nice black eyes, and said: “You’re going to be an actress on One Hundred and Fortieth Street with two rooms and a kitchen. Bath tub in the kitchen. And you’re going to take dictation on the walls he’ll decorate for you because you don’t chew gum.”

She was going crazy. If she wasn’t, her mother was making her. And she looked at her mother and with her eyes said: “I want Harry Widener, and I don’t care who knows it. You or Jim Denby or anybody else. I don’t give a good God damn who knows it.” Like that.

And aloud she said.

“I am going to my room.”

“Better get ready for Jim,” her mother said. “Put on the mauve waist.”

As she shut the door of her room Gerty reflected that she had not told her mother of the loss of her position. She didn’t care. Let her mother worry later. With those dirty tricks. Trying to talk her into marrying Jim. She wouldn’t have him if he were the last man on earth. Not if he had all of the world’s gold. And all the diamonds. Not with a face like that. He’d have to have it made over again.

She sat down on her bed, adjusted her hair, and said:

“If he’ll begin pestering me, I’ll send him to hell, I will.”

Charity. Trying to give her something. Protecting her from the terrible world. She didn’t want protecting. She wanted to be left alone. People shouldn’t interfere into what she did. It was all their fault anyway. If they wouldn’t have interfered, she....

“Shut up,” she said to herself, and began unbuttoning her waist.

“Mauve waist,” she said. “I’ll give him mauve waist. If he’d be a man, he wouldn’t come around me. He’d stop bothering me. Can’t he see I don’t want him and his protecting.”

She walked toward the closet, opened the door, and took off the hook the mauve waist. Absentmindedly she placed her arms through the sleeves and buttoned it. Then she sat on the chair before the mirror and began to powder herself.

She remembered that once, about two months before, a woman friend of Harry Widener had come into the office toward the end of an afternoon, and had waited for him. A woman of his kind. With hair that received the attention of a frisier, face that was massaged, and hands that were manicured every day. She had worn a dark tailor-made suit and a mauve waist with a lace collar cut so low that the upper parts of her white breasts could be seen in the opening. She was stunning, Gerty had admitted that to herself. This was class. And when Harry Widener had come in, she had held out her hand to him, a black kid gloved hand, in a manner that Gerty knew she could never have imitated. The hand had gone right out, accompanied by a smile, in which the teeth were shown, even teeth, and dazzlingly white. And one Saturday afternoon, walking up Fifth Avenue, Gerty had seen a waist like that: mauve, with a white lace collar, cut very low. She had bought it, although the price had been exorbitant and a large part of her salary had been spent in the purchase. She never dared to wear it in the office, it was cut so low, and she had been afraid that Widener would notice the resemblance. And even in the house she wore it only on rare moments. When she wanted to feel equal to him, to do something that she should want him to see her do, she dressed in the mauve waist.

Noticing that the ribbon of her chemise showed in the cut, she untied it and tucked it into her bosom. Her neck now looked similar to the neck of the woman in the office. A white triangle deep into her bosom, with the curve of a breast showing on each side. Her breasts were just as round as the other’s, and just as white. It would be better to show a little more. She tucked aside the collar, and the curve became more pronounced. She sat at the mirror examining her face, fixing her hair. If he were to see her now, he would not be able to resist her. He would look at her with his black eyes, his brows would contract a little, and his nostrils puff out. And his arms would stretch out toward her, would envelop her, and she would lie in them quiet, unafraid.

She closed her eyes, and through the shimmering darkness of her lids she saw Harry Widener. He was looking at her. And she was looking at him. He was saying to her “You are with me now, and you are quiet.” And she answered to him, “Yes, I am quiet.” And they sat there in the darkness, she feeling his odour, and lulled to sleep by it.

She felt a draught of wind, heard the noise of a door opening, and saw Harry Widener tumble into the light. She opened her eyes. Her mother was standing in the doorway.

Mrs. Donovan was talking, but Gerty did not hear what she said. She could not orientate herself. She did not recognize her surroundings, nor the fat woman before her. This was strange to her. She had no place in the room where she was. She belonged somewhere else. In dazzling, flickering sunlight with Harry Widener. And peace.

“You’re a nice one,” her mother was saying. “It’s got to be a stranger that gives me the news about my own child. Why didn’t you tell me you were out of a job?”

Gerty did not answer. She heard somebody talking, felt she was being reproved, but it did not move her. She had been with him a moment before, and she still felt his presence.

Then she heard her mother say:

“Jim’s in the front room. Better go out to him. And you’d better be nice to him. You won’t find a better man.”

Her mother was talking, but Gerty did not understand her words. But she felt that she was commanded to go, so she stood up and walked toward the front room. Her mother not understanding, placed herself out of her way, and let her pass.

She came into the front room, and looked at the figure sitting on the sofa, a figure that rose when she entered, and came toward her. She answered his hello, sat down on the sofa in the spot he had sat in. Felt him sitting down beside her, noticed her mother had not come in with her, and sat.

She tried to gather her thoughts together. Who was it who was sitting beside her on the sofa? It was Jim Denby.

No, it was Harry Widener. It was Harry Widener with eyes that were not so nice, and with a face that tried to be as expressionless as it could. But no, it could not have been Harry Widener. Harry Widener looked at you personal like, and decent. And Jim Denby didn’t. He looked at you as if he wanted to eat you up. He was in love with you. And Harry wasn’t. Why?

Further her mind refused to travel. A black cloud came into her brain and forbade all thought. And she surrendered to the cloud and sat motionless and thoughtless.

Then she heard Jim or Harry talking. He was asking her what she would do. And she did not know how to answer. Because she knew she had to give two different answers. If this were Jim, she’d have to tell him she would look for another job, and if this were Harry she’d have to say.... She could not decide which it was. So she kept quiet.

Then she heard:

“Gerty, I’ve got something to tell you.”

He was speaking. At last he was speaking. This was the moment she had been waiting for. Now he would look at her with his black eyes, and fold her around. And peace.

“Gerty, what’s the use of you looking for a job. You can’t work all your life. You’re not made for work. You’ve got to stay home and be taken care of.”

He stopped, and she waited. Why was he talking? Why didn’t he do it? She felt he was looking at her, but she did not dare to turn her eyes. He was gazing at her. His eyes travelled over the waist, went into the lace collar, and followed its contour to the breasts. Her heart stopped. Would he recognize it? Would he be angry because she imitated his lady friend?

He began speaking again:

“Gerty, let me take care of you. I can do it. I’ll treat you like a queen. There won’t be nothing too good for you. I’ll love you, and I’ll honor you. I’ll be dirt under your feet. You ain’t made for an office. I’ll be good to you. Swear to God, I will.”

What was he waiting for? What did he want? Why didn’t he take her? She was his. She had always been his. Hadn’t she waited for him all this time. Did she have to teach him how to make love?

He was evidently waiting for an answer, and while waiting, his gaze travelled on her breasts. He was looking at them. And involuntarily she wanted to screen them with her hands, but then remembered who he was, and felt ashamed. He could do with her what he wanted. He could take all she had.

She felt his breath on her face, and closed her unseeing eyes. The moment had come, and she was not surprised when she felt his arms around her, enveloping, and his lips on hers.

And she said: “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

And he kissed her again and again, and she was satisfied.

Then she heard steps, and her mother came in. And she heard him say to her mother that he was going to marry her, and then her mother answered:

“Jim, I’m glad to hear it.”

And she looked with her eyes. And she saw it wasn’t Harry. It was Jim! Jim! Jim! Not Harry!

In one bound she jumped up, and rushed to her room. When she had banged the door shut, she threw herself on the bed, and moaned.

“What did I do? What did I do?”

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Copyright, 1925, by Harcourt, Brace, and Co. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

GUARD OF HONOR[4]

By BARRY BENEFIELD

(From _The Pictorial Review_)

Once in Asphodel they had called him Willie when he was a little boy, and then they called him Bill. There came a time when, upon his occasional trips back to his Arkansas home, his old friends ventured a little nervously to call him Will, and the Asphodel _Argus_ printed him as “Mr. William P. Ott, sales-manager and treasurer of the Apollo Clothing Co., of Chicago.”

Somewhere somehow in the flat fields of northern France he lost his richest worldly treasure--that part of his marvelous memory that covered the period between his sixteenth and thirty-second years, that segment of his memory which had known not only all his war experiences up to that moment, but also every garment manufactured by his company down to the last button, every trade route sold by the Apollo travelers, every customer’s rating and idiosyncrasies, every weak and strong point of the goods and the salesmen of his company’s chief competitors.

And so, having come home by way of three or four Government hospitals, he was, after a brief period of lionizing that puzzled the pink-faced, snub-nosed, chubby little man, once again to his friends of Asphodel, and as always to his widowed mother, just Willie.

On that hot June morning Willie left his mother’s house and went down the red hill leading from the higher residential section to the six business streets, completing his habitual morning round by ten o’clock: to the post-office, where he received and read and shook his head over an eagerly solicitous letter from the president of the Apollo Clothing Co.; to Hampton’s Furniture Store and Mortuary Parlor, where he sat awhile in a cane-bottomed chair on the sidewalk, apparently listening to other men of leisure talk, though their words merely buzzed in his ears; to Embree’s Confectionery Store, where he bought a tinfoil package of cigarettes; and finally to his real goal for the morning, Zebedee Smith’s Barber Shop, where he silently submitted to shaving and shoe-shining, and then sat in front of the big plate-glass window, staring, round-eyed, out across the street, through an old brick building that had lost everything in a fire except its side walls, out across the depression in the earth, at the bottom of which Little Sandy River slipped southward on its unquestioning way toward the great gulf that would presently swallow it up.

As he stared and consciously saw nothing in detail, while his mind continued its eternal reaching down for something precious that it could almost but not quite touch, two figures in the street moved across his vision, and he sat up suddenly and studied them. As well as he knew any one he knew Goldie, once the owner of Asphodel’s only candy store and soda-water fountain, and Honey Boy, Asphodel’s best-known individual, the small town’s huge, red-headed, freckle-faced, obscenely dirty, half-witted son.

Goldie’s infinitesimal figure, frail and stooping, was covered with an old and spotted and worn Confederate uniform, the gray coat hanging in a confusion of folds and wrinkles from his narrow shoulders, the trousers turned up at least two inches at the bottom. His black slouch hat made his very thin, old face seem even thinner than it was.

Honey Boy had once owned a donkey, and it was one of the few memories that lived in his cloudy mind. He always carried a stout switch with which he belabored his imaginary mount, while he frequently jumped up and down as if he were being bounced by the donkey that was no more. Now as he pranced along behind Goldie, Honey Boy, between attacks upon his invisible donkey, mimicked as nearly as he could every movement of the little old man who marched along in front of him. Laughter was thrilling to Honey Boy; he was accustomed to that reward for his antics, and he kept opening his wide mouth, filled with yellow stumps of teeth, in a leering grin as he looked from right to left at chance passers-by for applause.

Goldie stopped in front of the red, square, brick county court-house, diagonally across the street from Smith’s Barber Shop. He removed his hat and stood at attention, listening. Southern Arkansas architecture sometimes shows the influence of New Orleans, especially in narrow balconies jutting out under second-story windows. Goldie remained looking up at the empty balcony of the court-house, from which speeches were often delivered. Now and then he clapped his hands, nodding his head approvingly over eloquence that came back across the years only to him.

Everybody called Levi Goldbaum Goldie, almost entirely in affection. For a long time he had kept his candy store open, with occasional closures due to bankruptcies without a taint of fraud. Even in the full flush of his middle-aged manhood he had been a frail, haggard, stooped, feeble-looking, little man, the husband of an abnormally healthy and handsome wife, the father of a brood of unusually vigorous boys and girls, who grew up, married, and moved away from Asphodel, leaving him and his wife alone in their old age.

When Goldie had attended Confederate reunions--and he attended every one he could--or had marched with the diminishing group of old soldiers on great occasions in Asphodel, many people, especially boys and girls wondered if he really could have been a soldier. But there was no doubt in the minds of the comrades who had been with him at Shiloh.

Goldie’s store having closed its doors five years before as the result of two new competitors and inevitably final bankruptcy proceedings, he had sadly retired. He was now over seventy, was considered a trifle queer, and spent most of his time pottering around at home. He owned his house, and his grown children sent him what little money he needed to pay the last penalties of existence.

After standing listening in front of the court-house for some thirty minutes Goldie, drawing himself as straight as he could, proceeded down Walnut Street, turned into Broadway, and marched up that main street, Honey Boy cavorting behind him. And there was that in Goldie’s bearing and in his stride that drew Willie after him, and presently the little soldier with the wounded memory got out in the street and walked along by the side of the little soldier with the wounded mind, keeping step, the dry dust dimming his newly shined shoes and rising in small, lazy clouds around his white-duck trousers.

Goldie’s mind had gone back to other days when Asphodel’s citizens had made much of June 3, Jefferson Davis’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day, and now he was celebrating it in his town alone, for Asphodel, like many another Southern town, had neglected the day for many years.

To most of those who saw the unmartial figure of Goldie and Willie and Honey Boy marching slowly along the dusty street it did not occur that this was the South’s Memorial Day. Goldie’s wearing of his old uniform was not uncommon enough to be striking; many a time-beaten soldier, reduced in circumstances, at last falls back on his most-treasured suit for every-day wear.

But if those who saw Goldie had looked carefully they might have noticed that, however slowly he moved, he proceeded in a straight line, with regularly spaced steps, and they might have suspected that Goldie was at the corner of a company invisible to all except his fading, sunken, black eyes, marching to music unheard except by him. Most people, indeed, gave their attention to Honey Boy, trailing directly behind and mocking the little gray man who labored with difficulty through the deep white sand.

It was eleven o’clock when Goldie and Willie and Honey Boy passed Pinder’s Marble Yard and its group of waiting white angels with downcast eyes. Pinder’s is just beyond the business section of Asphodel, and after that the ground rises to the north and east. The street leading to Highland Cemetery begins there, a long, tedious hill. The sun was unclouded, the wind was still, and Goldie, his coat carefully buttoned to the throat, was panting hard and reeling as he made Pinder’s Marble Yard.

Wilted by the terrific heat and his violent exertions, and no longer encouraged by laughing spectators, Honey Boy now merely followed on behind the staggering figure marching toward Highland Cemetery, a mile away. And Willie stalked along by his side, seeing nothing, as if he were in a dream deeper even than Goldie’s. Now the Memorial Day Parade was coming to the edge of Asphodel, to the section of straggling houses. Belle Foscue, a negro washerwoman, ran to her paling fence and asked the three chance comrades to come in and rest awhile under the shade of her oak tree.

Goldie halted, bringing his feet together bravely. He was moving his lips, but no words that could be heard a foot away issued from them. Belle came out of the gate to the soldier who could not leave his company. She bent her head close to his lips, listened, and then ran to bring him water.

“Thank you,” he said in a whisper. “You’re a good girl.” He waited patiently until she could bring Honey Boy another dipper filled from the well. But when she offered the freshly filled dipper to Willie he seemed not to see, so she turned it upside down, rolled her eyes at him, and went back into her yard.

After a while Goldie braced himself and marched on up the red hill. At this point the red clay beneath the cemetery road shows through the white sand, and rains keep washed out deep and ever-deepening gullies on both sides of it. About half-way up the hill Goldie, stubbornly holding his position at the corner of the invisible company in spite of the fact that the road had narrowed considerably, found himself on the edge of a gully; and presently he lost his balance, and staggered over into it, and rolled down to the bottom of it. Honey Boy crowed and chortled and gurgled, and began frantically beating his unseen donkey with the switch. Willie stood still, staring ahead, waiting.

The fallen soldier, having made two or three desperate attempts to rise, sank back into a crumpled sitting posture, his head bent in shame. After a while Honey Boy got down on his hands and knees in the bed of the gully. “Ride Honey Boy,” he stuttered. “Ride up-hill. Honey Boy strong.”

And Goldie, trying to sit astride the big boy’s broad back, fell forward and clasped his arms around his steed’s red, sweaty neck. Honey Boy crawled out of the gully and slowly climbed the hill with his burden, occasionally bucking like a horse and throwing the little man off on the road. But then he would stand patiently until the fallen soldier could crawl up on his back again.

At the top of the hill Goldie got to his feet once more, and as the roadbed was now level as well as firm he walked awhile and then rode awhile on Honey Boy, and so, riding and walking, he finally marched, with Willie at his side, through the arched gateway of Highland Cemetery as the whistles were blowing for twelve o’clock. Old man Miller, the sexton in charge there, and his two helpers were in a far corner of the graveyard, so that none saw Asphodel’s Memorial Day parade enter to honor the men Lee had loved and led.

The parade proceeded across the graveyard to a clump of oak trees clustering about and almost hiding the grass-grown plot that is called in Asphodel “The Confederate Cemetery.” The town had been headquarters for a rather large body of Confederate troops during the Civil War, and there are in the palinged enclosure nearly two hundred graves of the men in gray who had come to their end far from their homes.

Opening the rotting gate of the paling fence, Goldie stepped inside, Honey Boy and Willie close behind him. Here again Goldie stood in rapt attention, his brown face shining, his head bared, and his eyes lifted, listening to the famous orators his imagination had brought there for this day from out of the endearing past. Honey Boy sprawled on a rickety old iron bench. Willie stood stiffly by Goldie’s side, looking straight ahead.