I drove madly over to Dan’s house. I had always detested its pretty elegance, its artificial daintiness. It reeked of Bee. But I burst in, calling for Dan. He was sitting alone eating his breakfast. He did not seem surprised to see me, but neither did he say anything. He merely waited.
Suddenly I felt foolish. We were all, in small-town manner, making a mountain out of a molehill. Dan’s expression seemed questioning, as though he were wondering indifferently why I had come.
“Dan,” I mumbled. “I want to tell you that, as usual, you were right.”
A silence fell. I had had the feeling, before arriving here, that the past years had vanished from between Dan and me, that we were where we had been before. But, as I stood before him now, the years crowded up between us like a glacier, and I felt a complete fool.
Dan smiled slightly. He indicated a chair.
“Sit down and have some coffee,” he said. I listened eagerly for the old friendliness, but it was not there. There was only faint amusement. I sat down awkwardly, cursing myself for coming.
I drank the coffee, almost choking over it. Dan ate calmly. Then he said with indifference:
“About last night? What’s all the excitement about? You act as though I had been accused of murder, and you were rushing over to tell me you were going to stand by me.” He shrugged. “That isn’t the first time Ed Ford’s been knocked down, after all.”
I started to get up. I could feel intense heat in my face. I was about to make a sarcastic comment and leave, when the dining room door opened and Bee came in. In the early morning light she looked strained and pinched, her eyes hard and vicious. All the burnished color, which made her such a startling replica of her mother had gone. Here was just a pale and shrewish woman, venomous and full of hate. She stopped when she saw me, and then put her handkerchief to her eyes and burst into tears. Dan waited indifferently, idly stirring his coffee.
“Oh, Jim!” she sobbed. “I’m so glad you came! It shows me that my friends haven’t deserted me after all! Even after what he did! Making such a fool of himself, alienating everybody, after all the work and effort it took me to make people look at him and treat him like a decent human being! Trying to make everybody forget what he was, coaxing and wheedling everybody to accept him—” She became hysterical.
“Stop making a fool of yourself,” said Dan quietly. “Sit down and eat your breakfast.”
She dashed the handkerchief from her face. Her features were contorted.
“‘Eat your breakfast!’ Just like that, as if you didn’t know or care! After all I’ve done, crawling to idiots, licking their feet, kissing their hands, to make them take you in! All the humiliations, smiling when I wanted to kill them!” She had lost all reason, all restraint, and utterly forgot me in her rage and malignance. “I dragged you up from the gutter, tried to make something of you. Tried to make a gentleman out of you. Hah!” Her voice rose to a shrill scream; she bent over him with clenched fists. “A gentleman! You’ll never be that! You couldn’t be, being what you were! All the money in the world wouldn’t make you human. It can’t change a swine into a man. Look at me, Jim,” she cried, turning to me dramatically. “I haven’t slept a wink since last night when he told me. I sobbed all night. All these months of work, and he throws it all down! Oh, I can’t bear it,” and she went off into hysterics again.
Through all this tirade Dan had eaten his breakfast, as though she had merely been the wind blowing. Now he looked up at her, and his face was white and strained. But he still spoke calmly.
“Well, if you have no shame before him, neither have I. Dragged me up from the gutter, eh? Made a gentleman of me, eh? Well, let me tell you this: I liked my gutter. I’m going back to it. I’m no ‘gentleman.’ No, I’ve got some sense of justice and real decency. Not the kind you talk about. What you’ve done, you’ve done for yourself, wanting to make a place for yourself in this goddamn stinking hole. I’ve been watching for months. It kind of made me laugh, watching them taking me in, because I’ve got some money now. It was better than a show, watching them. Don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself more. And you! Pretending to be the nice sweet little wife! I’ve watched you too, and had my laughs. You see, Bee, I’ve always known what you were. You never fooled me the way you fooled these half-wits here. And recently I’ve had an idea you knew why I married you.”
While he had been speaking, her face had become that of a fury, blotched, hideous. Her hair flew out from its coils about her face, as though a terrible wind had blown it; her features sharpened, became livid, her mouth curling back from her teeth. She laughed wildly.
“Yes, I know! That’s why I married you, too! To make you suffer for it! But since I married you, I thought I would let it go, I would try to forget it. I would make something out of you, give you a place in this town! And now, there’s nothing left, nothing at all, but being married to the town outcast, chained to a fool and an idiot! I tell you, I can’t stand it!” She screamed again. Dimly, in my confusion and sweating urgency to leave, I could see the avid face of the servant appearing and disappearing at the door.
She turned to me with a gust. I recoiled slightly. She stretched out her taut and clutching hands to me. She tried to assume an expression of broken pleading, helpless despair.
“Jim!” she sobbed. “You’ll help me, won’t you? You’ll try to hush this down, won’t you? You’ll help me? You’ll tell your dear mother that we are both sorry, that Dan’s sorry? You’ll tell everyone, beg everyone to forget it, and that Dan just lost his temper for a minute, and that he’s willing to apologize, or anything?”
I could see that she was already terrified at what she had said before me, and giving no one any credit for reticence or kindness, having none herself, she was afraid that I would go out immediately and repeat everything. She even tried to smile cajolingly, touched her hair with her hands, tried to compose herself. She reached out her hand to touch me softly.
I retreated from her. My gorge rose in me; I wanted to strike her in the face.
“All I can say is this,” I said in a thick voice, strange to my own ears. “If you were my wife, I’d choke you. Choke you to death.”
And I fled out of the horrible house without another look.
Chapter Nineteen
I felt sick and trembling for hours afterwards. I had never seen a woman like this, so unrestrained, so beastlike, so monstrous. Even my worst thoughts of Beatrice Faire had been mild in the face of what she really was. I can never forget that morning, that mad mouth, those insane eyes. It was as though a dark door had opened and I had seen into Dan’s life with her. I remembered what Mortimer had said. It was terrible to me, like some ghastly dream. I could hardly believe it. I longed passionately for everything to be swallowed up, for all our lives to be as serene as they had been on the surface, for everything to be forgotten. I could not speak of this even to Livy, but she seemed to know.
I had always had a love for the established and the simple and uncomplicated. It was a shock to me to discover that life was not like that, and that under its daily air of calmness frightful things were about. I felt robbed and sore and cheated. I never wanted to see either Dan or Beatrice again.
I was overcome with shame. I knew, of course, from reading and from other impersonal things which I had seen in hospitals, that life could be horrible and loathsome. But I was outraged when the impersonal became the personal, when actualities actually lifted their heads and grinned at me obscenely. It shattered my whole belief in the orderliness of the average life, in the decency and regularity of things.
Indignation ran high against Dan Hendricks. Bee, with her usual shrewdness, did not appear at all, waiting for the story to become old. I knew her; I knew that she would not relinquish what she had gained. And sometimes with sickness, I wondered what sort of a life Dan was having these days.
Everyone virtuously avoided the Hendricks house. No one saw Sarah either. When women called upon her, the door remained silently closed.
; But eventually South Kenton became bored with its indignation, and by slight signs indicated its willingness to forgive. Bee, who had an uncanny nose for intangibles, reappeared, pale, subdued, eyes always ready to be filled with tears. She conciliated eyeryone, but she did not come near Livy and me. When she had betrayed herself, she made no effort to conciliate the one who knew everything. A general could have learned a lot in strategy from her.
But Dan did not seem to know that he could be forgiven. He did not accept invitations, though God knows what he must have gone through with Bee when he refused. (I was told that Dan was seen in the early mornings riding on his new horse and furiously galloping down the country roads.) When Livy suggested that I go to see him, I shivered. I was sure he hated me for having been a witness to his degradation. I begun to have tentative thoughts about him. What had been his private life with his wife before his indiscretion? I found myself thinking erotic thoughts against my will in connection with them. What had they talked about when they had been alone? Dan had said he had seen into her all the time; how had he endured being married to her? How had he made himself marry her, even in the face of a romantic and secret obsession which would hardly have had weight with even a fool in his right mind? I felt that there was something here I did not understand. I did not know then that men live and die for more tenuous things than that, that even gods can be made or unmade in the dark complexities of the human mind.
Chapter Twenty
The storm that had gone before was nothing to the storm which now took place. It started sordidly enough.
Abe Witherbee’s boy Charlie continued to visit Ed Ford’s saloon, from what I heard. And I suspect from accounts of the boy’s condition that Ed took a malicious delight in loading the boy with drink beyond even Charlie’s capacity to pay. Ed loudly expressed his desire to meet Dan again, and gave lurid descriptions of what he would do to him if he did meet him again.
Two months later the drunken boy had wandered away from the saloon, had lost his way home, and had gone suddenly asleep on the railroad track. When the eastbound thundered into the station, it brought a decapitated body with it.
Because of Dan, the story caused more excitement than it would have done in an ordinary occasion. For the first time indignation was expressed against Ed Ford, and perversely, uneasy public opinion swayed towards Dan Hendricks. Bee took avid and clever advantage of it. She adroitly changed her story a little; Dan must have known this might happen. She was increasingly humble. She and her friends might have been just a little too hard on Dan, after all. Wasn’t it strange that even the best of friends could be just a little blind? South Kenton surged in spirit towards Dan, opened its arms to him. But he did not reappear. Beatrice went about, resolutely smiling, but her face became pinched, and in repose, visibly malignant. Dan was not very well; he was hurt by the treatment his friends had given him; he was so sensitive. She smiled deprecatingly, but with such dovelike eyes that South Kenton almost groveled.
Then two weeks after the tragedy, Abe Witherbee walked simply into Ed’s saloon and shot him as he stood laughing and talking with his customers. He shot him with an ancient rifle, rusty and crooked. But he did a good job. Ed fell without a sound and never spoke again. He died before morning.
Abe Witherbee had walked without haste out of the saloon, for no one had either the courage or the strength to seize him. He went, still without haste, to the constable’s house, woke that worthy, and delivered himself calmly into his hands.
South Kenton went into a prolonged uproar. The sheriff came from Ripley and took Abe into custody, spiriting him out of town because of the open threats of lynching. Abe was lodged in the Ripley jail, and extra armed guards were put about it, for Ed had been well known and liked in Ripley, and that town of some eighteen thousand souls was in scarcely less rage than South Kenton. I would say it was even more incensed and dangerous, because it knew little of the story behind the crime, and cared less.
I might have been amused at the sudden veer against Dan Hendricks again, but I was too miserable with my own thoughts. I listened indifferently to rumors and wild accusations that Dan Hendricks had “put Abe up to it,” and that Dan was the real criminal. I don’t think anyone really thought it in his heart, but it was an excuse to turn on Dan again. However, Dan was still invisible, and for a time Beatrice was also. That intrepid woman seemed for a time to give up in despair. And again I wondered what took place behind closed doors of the new house.
South Kenton was thrown into greater consternation and fury when it was reported that Dan had appeared in Ripley and had gone to see Abe Witherbee in jail. The Ripley Evening Star noted that Mr. Daniel Hendricks of South Kenton, who was interested in the accused, had engaged a famous criminal lawyer from Warburton to defend him. Everyone knew the fees of the lawyer. Dan was indifferently known in Ripley, but he leaped into prominence now. But strange to say the Ripleyites thought it rather gallant of him, and comments in the newspaper were almost friendly. This further infuriated South Kenton. I think bodily damage might have been done Dan had he remained in town, but instead of that he took a room at the Ripley Arms during the trial.
South Kenton seethed. Of course, they all said, Bee would leave him now. She would go home to her mother. But Bee did not go. She took to bed. Friends, cold and denunciatory, visited her. It seemed she was really very ill. But, she declared, even though everyone abandoned her, she would not abandon Dan. She was his loyal wife, his only friend. It was her duty and her place to remain beside him. Everyone urged her to leave Dan, that it was her duty to her friends to leave him, but when she refused to do so, everyone was loud in praises of Bee. South Kenton had never seen such devotion, such loyalty. Beatrice had not defended him at all, it was reported; she had only cried over and over that it was her duty to keep her place beside him. She was more loved than ever. She was held up as an example to the occasionally mutinous young matron of what a wife should be. In a few weeks she was received everywhere with open arms, and made much of. But she never came near Livy and me. Livy, I knew, passed her with averted head on the street, and even when they met among friends Livy did not speak. And the result of this was that opinion was sharp with Livy for being so hard to Bee, because Bee would not leave that reprobate husband of hers!
I wonder how Livy knew? But Livy was always intuitive, and though I had told her nothing, I am sure she knew.
The famous lawyer earned his fee, which was reported to be three thousand dollars. Abe escaped the noose, was declared insane, and was committed to the State Asylum. Dan returned home, became invisible again, but Bee went everywhere.
Chapter Twenty-One
Yes, Bee went everywhere, but Dan went nowhere. “He hides himself for shame, probably,” said unanimous opinion. “He doesn’t dare show his face.”
He was seen at a distance. He rode his horse, it was said, out into the country in all kinds of weather. Like some wild horseman he could be heard galloping past lonely farmhouses in wild storms, when the trees were bent double and roared in colossal torment, and the moon went skipping in terror through rushing clouds. He was seen when the snow flew, crouched over his steaming horse. There was something eerie in it to the townsfolk.
I had not thought of it for years, but his favorite old phrase recalled itself to me: “Look—and pass.” Somehow, I felt that I had never really known him, not even when we had been children. I found myself wondering with a kind of sickness what sort of life he was leading with Bee, for all he was never there when her friends called, and no one heard his voice or saw his comings or goings. I tried to see him, tried to waylay him, but he was as fluid as water, slipping by when I tried to grasp, and as unseen as the wind.
I heard rumors that Sarah saw him, however, that he often went to her little house. When she was asked, she was silent. She was not very well; there was something wrong with her heart. I visited her with Livy a few times, but the old Sarah, gay and loving and in love with life, had gone. She seemed always waiting for something drea
dful; her eyes and mind were fixed on it, and though she talked casually and rationally enough to us, I had that uneasy sense of her waiting for some frightful thing that was inevitable. She would not speak of Dan or Beatrice.
One night in late fall I was jogging wearily along a country road back to South Kenton, after a three-hour battle to save the life of a farmer who had almost cut off his leg while trying to chop down a tree. A livid moon stood heavily in a black sky; by its light I saw the lonely stacks of corn, the colorless countryside, the dark horizon that met the darker heavens. Everything was flooded in a spectral light, so that it glimmered as though unreal, shifting, and drained of life. When the chill wind blew, the leaves ran running before me with a dry and hissing sound; an owl hooted somewhere, and an uneasy dog howled in the distance. I was glad of the companionship of my horse in the ghostly silence, and found myself talking to him.
Then, approaching me, I heard the rapid gallop of a horse. It was still very faint, and when the wind blew in another direction the sound vanished, only to be carried louder to me when the wind shifted again. For one moment I remembered the headless horseman who rode in darkness on lonely roads, and though I laughed I felt uncomfortable. To add to the eerieness, the moon went behind a cloud for awhile, and the battering hoofs sounded almost at my hand. When I could see again, a horseman was rounding the bend, riding furiously. My horse neighed and stopped by himself, and the approaching horse neighed in answer. I breathed easier; it was Dan Hendricks on one of his rides.
He would have gone past me, but I called him, and he reined in beside me. I peered at his face; God knows what I expected to see in it, but I was not prepared for the relaxed and youthful expression on it, the easy smile in his eyes and on his mouth. I suddenly felt absurd. Always the romanticist, I thought.