heart, without reservations now, or bitterness, that she would be happy.
Afterward, when the crowd melted away, he felt the necessity of being alone. Still in a sort of trance, he went inside the house again and wandered from room to room, touching the walls, the furniture, the window casements, with almost a caress. He pulled aside curtains and gazed out; he stood for a while in the kitchen and seemed to see the fresh bread and butter on the white boards of the table, and hear the kettle, murmurous on the stove. Then back through the dining room—he remembered planning that the evening light should fall through the window just so—and into the bedroom, where he watched a breeze ruffle the edge of a curtain faintly, as if someone already lived here. He would sleep in this room tonight, he thought. He would buy things for a cold supper from a corner store. He was sorry for everyone who was not an architect, who could not make their own houses; he wished he could have set up every stick and stone with his own hands.
The September dusk fell. Returning from the store, he set out his purchases on the dining-room table—cold roast chicken, bread and jam, and a bottle of milk. He ate lingeringly, then he sat back in his chair and smoked a cigarette, his eyes wandering about the walls. This was home. Llewellyn, brought up by a series of aunts, scarcely remembered ever having had a home before—except, of course, where he had lived with Lucy. Those barren rooms in which they were so miserable together had been, nevertheless, a sort of home. Poor children—he looked back on them both, himself as well as her, from a great distance. Little wonder their love had made a faint, frail effort, a gesture, and then, unprepared for the oppression of those stifling walls, starved quickly to death.
Half an hour passed. Outside, the silence was heavy except for the complaint of some indignant dog far down the street. Llewellyn’s mind, detached by the unfamiliar, almost mystical surroundings, drifted away from the immediate past; he was thinking of the day when he had first met Lucy, a year before. Little Lucy Wharton—how touched he had been by her trust in him, by her confidence that, at twenty, he was experienced in the ways of the world.
He got to his feet and began to walk slowly up and down the room—starting suddenly as the front doorbell pealed through the house for the first time. He opened the door and Mr. Garnett stepped inside.
“Good evening, Llewellyn,” he said. “I came back to see if the king was happy in his castle.”
“Sit down,” said Llewellyn tensely. “I’ve got to ask you something. Why is Lucy marrying this man? I want to know.”
“Why, I think I told you that he’s a good deal older,” answered Garnett quietly. “She feels that he understands.”
“I want to see her!” Llewellyn cried. He leaned miserably against the mantelpiece. “I don’t know what to do. Mr. Garnett, we’re in love with each other, don’t you realize that? Can you stay in this house and not realize it? It’s her house and mine. Why, every room in it is haunted with Lucyl She came in when I was at dinner and sat with me—just now I saw her in front of the mirror in the bedroom, brushing her hair——”
“She’s out on the porch,” interrupted Garnett quietly. “I think she wants to talk to you. In a few months she’s going to have a child.”
For a few minutes Chauncey Garnett moved about the empty room, looking at this feature or that, here and there, until the walls seemed to fade out and melt into the walls of the little house where he had brought his own wife more than forty years ago. It was long gone, that house—the gift of his father-in-law; it would have seemed an atrocity to this generation. Yet on many a forgotten late afternoon when he had turned in at its gate, and the gas had flamed out at him cheerfully from its windows, he had got from it a moment of utter peace that no other house had given him since.
Until this house. The same quiet secret thing was here. Was it that his old mind was confusing the two, or that love had built this out of the tragedy in Llewellyn’s heart? Leaving the question unanswered he found his hat and walked out on the dark porch, scarcely glanced at the single shadow on the porch chair a few yards away.
“You see, I never bothered to get that annulment, after all,” he said as if he were talking to himself. “I thought it over carefully and I saw that you two were good people. And I had an idea that eventually you’d do the right thing. Good people—so often do.”
When he reached the curb he looked back at the house. Again his mind—or his eyes—blurred and it seemed to him that it was that other house of forty years ago. Then, feeling vaguely ineffectual and a little guilty because he had meddled in other people’s affairs, he turned and walked off hastily down the street.
The Dance.
(The Red Book Magazine, June 1926)
All my life I have had a rather curious horror of small towns: not suburbs; they are quite a different matter—but the little lost cities of New Hampshire and Georgia and Kansas, and upper New York. I was born in New York City, and even as a little girl I never had any fear of the streets or the strange foreign faces—but on the occasions when I’ve been in the sort of place I’m referring to. I’ve been oppressed with the consciousness that there was a whole hidden life, a whole series of secret implications, significances and terrors, just below the surface, of which I knew nothing. In the cities everything good or bad eventually comes out, comes out of people’s hearts, I mean. Life moves about, moves on, vanishes. In the small towns—those of between five and twenty-five thousand people—old hatreds, old and unforgotten affairs, ghostly scandals and tragedies, seem unable to die, but live on all tangled up with the natural ebb and flow of outward life.
Nowhere has this sensation come over me more insistently than in the South. Once out of Atlanta and Birmingham and New Orleans, I often have the feeling that I can no longer communicate with the people around me. The men and the girls speak a language wherein courtesy is combined with violence, fanatic morality with corn-drinking recklessness, in a fashion which I can’t understand. In ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Mark Twain described some of those towns perched along the Mississippi River, with their fierce feuds and their equally fierce revivals—and some of them haven’t fundamentally changed beneath their new surface of flivvers and radios. They are deeply uncivilized to this day.
I speak of the South because it was in a small Southern city of this type that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. Then the surface closed again—and when I have gone back there since. I’ve been surprised to find myself as charmed as ever by the magnolia trees and the singing darkies in the street and the sensuous warm nights. I have been charmed, too, by the bountiful hospitality and the languorous easy-going outdoor life and the almost universal good manners. But all too frequently I am the prey of a vivid nightmare that recalls what I experienced in that town five years ago.
Davis—that is not its real name—had a population of about twenty thousand people, one-third of them colored. It is a cotton-mill town, and the workers of that trade, several thousand gaunt and ignorant ‘poor whites’, live together in an ill-reputed section known as ‘Cotton Hollow.’ The population of Davis has varied in its seventy-five years. Once it was under consideration for the capital of the State, and so the older families and their kin form a proud little aristocracy, even when individually they have sunk to destitution.
That winter I’d made the usual round in New York until about April, when I decided I never wanted to see another invitation again. I was tired and I wanted to go to Europe for a rest; but the baby panic of 1921 hit Father’s business, and so it was suggested
