Miss Bell let her reminiscence trail off here, and she watched me from her divan with her penetrating eyes. “Ah,” I said hopefully, “but she learned that day the high and holy importance of integrity, I trust.” Chanda Bell gave me her sign of dismissal, a languid lift of her left hand. “You are the critic,” she said. “I am but the chronicler. Leave me now. You perceive she is not coming.” I rose and bowed. “Perhaps,” I blurted out, “there is no Chanda Bell.” But she had closed her eyes and turned away.
The next day, they took her to the hospital. “I have a panther near my hearth,” she said, the first time they let me call on her. I went to see her twice again, the last time with Charles Vayne, who carried, with polished hopelessness, two bulging briefcases, which the nurse would not permit him to open. Chanda Bell was wandering in a far land, but she contrived a faint smile for each of her visitors. “Dear Rudgate,” she whispered to Vayne, “what will become of meaning, thank God, when you are dead?” He tried in silence to make her grip a fountain pen, but she shook her head and turned to me. “Pretension has no plinth, Dennis,” she said. “Ah, what a dusty answer . . .” Her voice and her heart failed, and the most remarkable woman I have ever known was dead.
That night, I called at her house, in the East Sixties. Hadley let me in. I had suspected him for a long time of being joined in dark conspiracy with Chanda Bell to make an end of me. I wondered, as I glared at the cold eye and then at the warm one, whether he might not be a frustrated writer, a bankrupt publisher, or an editor who had suffered a nervous breakdown. I jumped over the amenities of sorrow. “Her dying request,” I said, “was that I should examine her papers.”
The eyebrow over his twinkling eye lifted. “This evening, sir?” he asked.
“Take me to her desk and open it,” I demanded.
There was a full second’s pause, then “Certainly, sir,” he said, and led the way into the Gray Room. “If I knew what you seek . . .” he began.
I turned on him. “I think you do!” I snapped. “I am looking for proof of whether I am an egregious ass or a uniquely perceptive individual. The line is sometimes thinly drawn between a tranquil old age in this city and exile, say, in Nassau.” He seemed genuinely bewildered.
There was nothing in the desk except a large manila envelope, which bore my name on the cover. I tore it open with shaking hands. Inside was a single sheet of white typewriter paper on which there were three carefully drawn squares, one inside another. “What does it mean?” I asked. “What is it?”
“If you will permit me, sir,” said Hadley, and he took the paper and studied it. “That, sir,” he said, finally, “is what I should describe as a drawing of a plinth.”
I seized him by the shoulder. “You are in on this!” I cried. “What does it mean? What’s behind it? Who are you? What have you two devils been up to all these years? Why should you want to destroy me?”
He took a backward step and gaped. He was honestly frightened, or else he was a superb actor. There was no twinkle in his eye. “I do not understand, sir,” he stammered, or seemed to stammer.
I let go of his shoulder. “My critical reputation is at stake,” I said. “Has she ever written an explanation of her writing—perhaps to be sent to some journal or periodical after her death?”
Hadley appeared to frown. “That, sir, I could not say,” he brought out.
I turned away from him and then whirled back. “What is the carpet?” I shouted.
He put several feet of the shiny floor between us. “I do not know what you mean,” he said nervously.
“Would there be papers anywhere else?” I demanded.
He looked about the room. “Nowhere,” he said hollowly.
I walked over and looked out a window for a long time.
Suddenly, Hadley began to speak. “She had promised to put me in one of her books,” he said in a tone of sadness, or what came to my ears as a tone of sadness. Then his voice brightened. “I was to have been the uncharacter of the non-butler,” he said.
I came back from the window and glared at him.
“Her phrase, sir,” he added hastily.
I lighted a cigarette, inhaled the smoke, and blew it out slowly. “Didn’t you appear in any of her novels?” I asked.
“Oh, but no, sir,” he corrected me proudly. “I did not appear in all of them!”
It was as if Chanda Bell were in the room, her bright, dark eyes taking us both in with a look of veiled amusement. “It must have made you very happy indeed,” I snarled. “Not to appear in any of her books was wonderful enough, but not to appear in all of them—the final accolade, Hadley, the final accolade.” He acknowledged it with a grave bow. “What has become of her manuscripts and her letters?” I demanded.
Hadley put on a sad expression. “She burned them, sir,” he said. “It was her last act in this house.”
I looked for the last time at the Gray Room—the gray desk, the gray chair, the gray Hadley.
“Perhaps a glass of Madeira, Mr. Thurber?” asked the butler. I declined ungraciously and said that I must leave. At the door, with the welcome street so near and desirable, he coughed discreetly. “Do you wish to take this with you, sir?” It was the drawing of the plinth. I took it without a word. “If I may say so, sir,” Hadley went on, “you were the closest of all of them.”
I glared at him, but there was no twinkle. “How close?” I growled.
“Oh, very close, sir,” he said. “Very close indeed.” This time, I thought I detected the ghost of the twinkle, but I could not be sure. I could not be sure of anything.
It has been eight months since I found the plinth in Chanda Bell’s desk. Nothing has happened, but I expect an editor to ring me up any day. “We’ve got a remarkable letter or manuscript here, apparently written by Chanda Bell,” he will say. “Sent to us by her lawyer, in accordance with a request in her will. It isn’t signed, but he says she wrote it, all right. Seems she never signed anything. Sort of laughter from beyond the grave, you might say. The old girl exposes her stuff as the merest junk. Proves her point, too. She takes a hell of a crack at your ‘Note on Chanda Bell.’ Thought you might want to read the thing and reply to it—we’ll print you and her in the same issue. She calls the piece ‘The Carpet,’ for some reason. I’ll shoot it along.”
No such call has come as yet, but I keep a bag packed, ready at a moment’s notice to fly to Zanzibar, or Mozambique, or East Liverpool, Ohio. Meanwhile, I have hit on a new approach to the works of Chanda Bell. I am trying to read them sideways.
*The Neutral Review, October, 1943.
Teacher’s Pet
KELBY had not wanted to go to the Stevensons’ for cocktails. It wasn’t that he was tired out again, as his wife, Elizabeth, was always complaining. To prove this, he had, after making up his mind to go, insisted on walking, instead of driving, to the Stevensons’ house, three blocks down and across the village green. He had wanted to have a quiet dinner at home, unpreceded by alcohol, and to retire to the library afterward and read du Noüy. Elizabeth would have at least three Martinis—he noticed, looking at her across the terrace at the side of the Stevensons’ house, that she was already on her second—and that meant she might want to “go on” after dinner, or perhaps tear up dinner at home and drive to the Belleville Inn for more drinks and dinner there. She might even call up the Blakes from there and really get going.
“No, thanks,” said Kelby as his host approached with the cocktail shaker; then, “Oh, all right, go ahead.” And he held out his glass for his own second drink.
“Do you good,” said Bob Stevenson, pouring. “Pep you up. You look a little gray—anything the matter?”
“No,” said Kelby with the required smile. “No, not at all. I’m fine.”
As a matter of fact, he was not fine. He had had, the day before, something very like a religious experience, of a darkly ominous nature. It had been brought on by his reading a magazine article dealing with the fears and neurotic disturbances of the human male in
middle age. Kelby was three months past fifty, and the article had upset him, particularly in its reference to the sometimes disastrous shock caused by the aging man’s recognition of the fact of death, the inevitability of his perhaps not too distant termination. Women, the article intimated, were better adjusted to the certainty of extinction and rarely gave it a conscious thought, but a man in his fifties or later—often earlier—might be stricken all of a sudden by the realization of impending death, with serious nervous or even mental sequelae.
Kelby had wondered, putting the magazine down, if the dread experience had come to him in his forties, say, and he had forgotten it. He chose to think that it had and that he had weathered it like the contemplative scholar he was. Upon arriving at this comforting decision, he had struck a match to light his pipe, and for no reason at all, since it was a sound match and no breeze was stirring in the library, it had gone out, as swift as a wink, as swift as death. Kelby had recognized the Moment. It seized him by the throat, and he found it difficult to breathe. His heart seemed to skip, and objects in the room began to recede. His pipe fell to the floor, and he held on to himself with a great effort, gripping the arms of his chair. There was sweat on his forehead and his wrists when he came out of his seizure. In a minute, he was his rational self again. It had been nothing more than a senseless panic induced by autosuggestion. He had actually managed a smile and a careless gesture of dismissal.
The incident would not be dismissed so easily, it turned out. It set in train, as all Kelby’s moments of weakness did, discomforting thoughts that took him back as far as his youth. It carried him relentlessly, against his will, to the awful day before the First World War when Zeke Leonard had faced him down, with a crowd of eager kids looking on and expecting a fight. Kelby marvelled that at fifty he still could not get that day out of his consciousness for very long.
The trouble had begun when Leonard, “a typical shotputter,” as Kelby, many years later, had described him to Elizabeth, started teasing him after school (they were in the eighth grade) by calling him “Willber, dear!” in a shrill falsetto, and repeating it at steady intervals all the way to the corner of Franklin Avenue and Pine Street. It was bad enough to be named Willber, with two “l”s, and to have his teacher call him by that silly name every day in class, but it had been unbearable when Miss Lemmert had called him “Willber, dear” one afternoon in the hearing of Zeke and several other kids as school was letting out. She had wanted Willber dear to post a letter for her, or to do some other small errand, a request that branded him at once a teacher’s pet of the worst order. Willber Kelby was the smartest boy at Buchanan School, and from the third grade on his teachers had made no bones about it. Zeke Leonard, who had the brains of a pole vaulter, had hated Willber from the time they were seven for his intelligence, his name, his frail body, and his inability, according to Zeke, to do anything except study.
Kelby had turned on him that day, thirty-seven years before, but the grinning Zeke had pushed him, slapped him, bumped him, and kicked him around, holding one arm behind his back and calling attention to this handicap. Kelby had flailed his shorter arms a few times with ludicrous ineffectiveness, and then he had merely tried to cover his face against Zeke’s pummelling. Finally, he had started to cry. The other boys had laughed and hooted and whistled. “Look—both hands behind me!” Zeke had sneered suddenly, and Willber Kelby had taken to flight, still crying.
“Break it up.” The hearty voice of Bob Stevenson banged into Kelby’s memories. “You having a conference with yourself? Here you go, Will.”
“Thanks,” said Kelby, holding his glass out for another Martini.
“Of course, I simply never get to know you, Mr. Kelby,” babbled a woman, dropping into a chair next to his. “I’ve known Lizzie for simply ages, but you always seem to be inside yourself, as if you didn’t want anyone to trespass on your thoughts. But here I am, a bold woman, determined to find out what you are thinking about, whether you want me to or not. Now, Mr. Kelby, what are you thinking about?”
Kelby fought off a frown and recrossed his legs. He was about to say something to the effect that he had been absorbed in the witty conversation going on about him, and then, perhaps because the gin had touched him, he came out flatly with the truth. “I was thinking about the time a boy named Zeke Leonard beat me up,” he said. “I was a teacher’s pet, and he beat me up.”
“What in the world for?” exclaimed the woman. “What had you done?”
“A teacher’s pet doesn’t have to do anything,” Kelby said. “It is the mere fact of his existence that makes the stupid and the strong want to beat him up. There is a type of man that wants to destroy the weaker, the more sensitive, the more intelligent.” He must have let his gaze drift to his host, who was stirring up more Martinis.
“You mean the Bob Stevenson type?” the woman whispered into his ear in intimate understanding. Then, shifting back into high, “I know just what you mean. We have the most trouble with Elbert that way. He’s so terribly sensitive. The older boys are always torturing him.” She lowered her voice to a whisper again. “Young Bob Stevenson is the worst. He simply loves to badger Elbert. I do wish Elbert would stand up to him some day. It irritates my husband terribly that he won’t take his own part. Do they get over it?”
Kelby’s attention had wandered. “Once a fullback, always a fullback,” he said.
“No, I mean the—well—teacher’s pets,” she explained. “You see, Elbert is really terribly smart—he’s the brightest boy in his school. I wish you could talk to him, Mr. Kelby—it would do him a world of good. We are going to spend the winter here in Woodville, and he’ll go into Junior High. It’s terribly hard changing to a new school.”
Kelby had been thinking while she ran on. Having finished his third drink, he was on the edge of his irritable phase, and the woman’s babbling had not improved his mood. “I know Elbert,” he said thinly. “He’s like all the rest. They grow old, they die, and if they’re lucky, they get buried. They do not change. The best that can be said for them is that they outlive the stupid and the strong. It isn’t much, but it’s something. They can snicker when they read the obituaries of the powerfully built. It is their only physical triumph.”
“But they are not cowards,” said the woman defensively, clipping the last word sharply. “At least, I know Elbert is not a coward.”
Kelby had begun to twirl his glass by its stem. “There are a lot of comforting euphemisms,” he said. “Hypersensitive, nonaggressive, peace-loving, introverted—take your choice.”
The woman was beginning not to like the turn of the discussion. She had started to get up from her chair when from out of the house, letting the widely flung screen door bang behind him, came Robert Stevenson, Jr. He strode toward his mother, apparently oblivious of the guests. “Hey, Mom!” he said. “Geez, how’s about some dinner—it’s late.”
Two of the guests arose at this broad hint, but Sally Stevenson waved them back to their chairs. “Sit down, sit down,” she said. “It’s early. We’re not eating till seven-thirty.”
“Geez, Mom!” said Bob.
“Speak to the guests, Robert,” she commanded. “You know everybody.” He let a scowlish grin trail from chair to chair.
“Got a belly like a moose,” said his father proudly, hovering above Kelby with the shaker. “Can’t think of anything but the nose bag. Healthy, though, God knows. What did they bring you up on, Will—marshmallows?”
“Yes,” said Kelby. “Toasted, mostly.” Stevenson burst into loud laughter. Kelby, who had covered his empty glass with his hand, suddenly held it out.
“Good boy!” chortled Stevenson, filling it.
“Easy does it, Will!” called Elizabeth from across the terrace. The apparently amiable laugh that accompanied her warning fooled everybody except the other women and Kelby.
He raised his glass with a defiant look at his wife. “Here’s to Junior,” he said, “the greatest future fullback in the world!”
; “Make it tackle,” said the boy’s father. “Bob wants to be a tackle.”
“We never call him Junior,” put in Bob’s mother.
“You know that, Will,” said Elizabeth.
“Tackle, then,” said Kelby, and drank half his cocktail.
“Say, I almost forgot,” began Bob Stevenson, Sr., and he proceeded to tell the terrace at large a noisy story about the predicament of a friend of his.
Kelby, not listening, studied young Bob, who had dropped heavily but still gracefully onto the lawn and was moodily chewing a blade of grass and watching his father. The boy was thirteen, the same age Zeke Leonard had been in that faraway year of Kelby’s humiliation. He was not unlike Leonard—big in the shoulders, long in the muscled arms, slender at the waist, restless, easy of movement and posture, and he had the same facile scowl and the sulky lower lip. Kelby hated his guts. He imagined that he was thirteen again, and he pictured himself squaring up to this big, ignorant boy. He spilled some of his drink as he indulged in the pleasurable fantasy of smacking Bob on the point of the jaw and sending him reeling backward to the ground. Kelby shook himself out of it with an effort. He finished his drink and stood up.
“How’s about one for the village green?” asked Stevenson, who was an eager and watchful host.
“No, thanks,” said Kelby. “Got some work to do tonight.” He walked over to the only couple at the party that he liked and shook hands. He snapped a curt salute to the others and bowed to his hostess. Elizabeth could see that he was verging on his nasty state. She said goodbye to everyone hastily and joined him.
“Watch out for the marshmallows!” Stevenson called after him as they started around to the front of the house.
Elizabeth waited until they were out of earshot. “What did he mean—watch out for the marshmallows?” she asked suspiciously.