arrived, the Davis Courier published a hilarious old picture of me on its society page, and I found I was in for another season. On a small scale, of course: there were Saturday-night dances at the little country-club with its nine-hole golf-course, and some informal dinner parties and several attractive and attentive boys. I didn’t have a dull time at all, and when after three weeks I wanted to go home, it wasn’t because I was bored. On the contrary I wanted to go home because I’d allowed myself to get rather interested in a good-looking young man named Charley Kincaid, without realizing that he was engaged to another girl.
We’d been drawn together from the first because he was almost the only boy in town who’d gone North to college, and I was still young enough to think that America revolved around Harvard and Princeton and Yale. He liked me too—I could see that; but when I heard that his engagement to a girl named Marie Bannerman had been announced six months before, there was nothing for me except to go away. The town was too small to avoid people, and though so far there hadn’t been any talk, I was sure that—well, that if we kept meeting, the emotion we were beginning to feel would somehow get into words. I’m not mean enough to take a man away from another girl.
Marie Bannerman was almost a beauty. Perhaps she would have been a beauty if she’d had any clothes, and if she hadn’t used bright pink rouge in two high spots on her cheeks and powdered her nose and chin to a funereal white. Her hair was shining black; her features were lovely; and an affection of one eye kept it always half-closed and gave an air of humorous mischief to her face.
I was leaving on a Monday, and on Saturday night a crowd of us dined at the country-club as usual before the dance. There was Joe Cable, the son of a former governor, a handsome, dissipated and yet somehow charming young man; Catherine Jones, a pretty, sharp-eyed girl with an exquisite figure, who under her rouge might have been any age from eighteen to twenty-five; Marie Bannerman; Charley Kincaid; myself and two or three others.
I loved to listen to the genial flow of bizarre neighborhood anecdote at this kind of party. For instance, one of the girls, together with her entire family, had that afternoon been evicted from her house for nonpayment of rent. She told the story wholly without self-consciousness, merely as something troublesome but amusing. And I loved the banter which presumed every girl to be infinitely beautiful and attractive, and every man to have been secretly and hopelessly in love with every girl present from their respective cradles.
‘We liked to die laughin’ … ‘—said he was fixin’ to shoot him without he stayed away.’ The girls ‘’clared to heaven’; the men ‘took oath’ on inconsequential statements. ‘How come you nearly about forgot to come by for me—’ and the incessant Honey, Honey, Honey, Honey, until the word seemed to roll like a genial liquid from heart to heart.
Outside, the May night was hot, a still night, velvet, soft-pawed, splattered thick with stars. It drifted heavy and sweet into the large room where we sat and where we would later dance, with no sound in it except the occasional long crunch of an arriving car on the drive. Just at that moment I hated to leave Davis as I never had hated to leave a town before—I felt that I wanted to spend my life in this town, drifting and dancing forever through these long, hot, romantic nights.
Yet horror was already hanging over that little party, was waiting tensely among us, an uninvited guest, and telling off the hours until it could show its pale and blinding face. Beneath the chatter and laughter something was going on, something secret and obscure that I didn’t know.
Presently the colored orchestra arrived, followed by the first trickle of the dance crowd. An enormous red-faced man in muddy knee boots and with a revolver strapped around his waist, clumped in and paused for a moment at our table before going upstairs to the locker-room. It was Bill Abercrombie, the Sheriff, the son of Congressman Abercrombie. Some of the boys asked him half-whispered questions, and he replied in an attempt at an undertone.
‘Yes … He’s in the swamp all right; farmer saw him near the crossroads store … Like to have a shot at him myself.’
I asked the boy next to me what was the matter.
“Nigger case,’ he said, ‘over in Kisco, about two miles from here. He’s hiding in the swamp, and they’re going in after him tomorrow.’
‘What’ll they do to him?’
‘Hang him, I guess.’
The notion of the forlorn darky crouching dismally in a desolate bog waiting for dawn and death depressed me for a moment. Then the feeling passed and was forgotten.
After dinner Charley Kincaid and I walked out on the veranda—he had just heard that I was going away. I kept as close to the others as I could, answering his words but not his eyes—something inside me was protesting against leaving him on such a casual note. The temptation was strong to let something flicker up between us here at the end. I wanted him to kiss me—my heart promised that if he kissed me, just once, it would accept with equanimity the idea of never seeing him any more; but my mind knew it wasn’t so.
The other girls began to drift inside and upstairs to the dressing-room to improve their complexions, and with Charley still beside me, I followed. Just at that moment I wanted to cry—perhaps my eyes were already blurred, or perhaps it was my haste lest they should be, but I opened the door of a small card-room by mistake, and with my error the tragic machinery of the night began to function. In the card-room, not five feet from us, stood Marie Bannerman, Charley’s fiancée, and Joe Cable. They were in each other’s arms, absorbed in a passionate and oblivious kiss.
I closed the door quickly, and without glancing at Charley opened the right door and ran upstairs.
A few minutes later Marie Bannerman entered the crowded dressing-room. She saw me and came over, smiling in a sort of mock despair, but she breathed quickly, and the smile trembled a little on her mouth.
‘You won’t say a word, honey, will you?’ she whispered.
‘Of course not.’ I wondered how that could matter, now that Charley Kincaid knew.
‘Who else was it that saw us?’
‘Only Charley Kincaid and I.’
‘Oh!’ She looked a little puzzled; then she added: ‘He didn’t wait to say anything, honey. When we came out, he was just going out the door. I thought he was going to wait and romp all over Joe.’
‘How about his romping all over you?’ I couldn’t help asking.
‘Oh, he’ll do that.’ She laughed wryly. ‘But, honey, I know how to handle him. It’s just when he’s first mad that I’m scared of him—he’s got an awful temper.’ She whistled reminiscently. ‘I know, because this happened once before.’
I wanted to slap her. Turning my back, I walked away on the pretext of borrowing a pin from Katie, the negro maid. Catherine Jones was claiming the latter’s attention with a short gingham garment which needed repair.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Dancing-dress,’ she answered shortly, her mouth full of pins. When she took them out, she added: ‘It’s all come to pieces—I’ve used it so much.’
‘Are you going to dance here tonight?’
‘Going to try.’
Somebody had told me that she wanted to be a dancer—that she had taken lessons in New York.
‘Can
