They drove silently along, up a small hill, and came to the edge of
town, going south. Stopping before a house that had evidently been
built since John’s time, Tom sounded his horn.
“Didn’t the fair-ground use to stand about here?” John asked. The
doctor turned and nodded his head.
“Yes, just here,” he said. He kept on sounding his horn, and a man and
woman came out of the house and stood in the road beside the car.
“Let’s get Maud and Alf and all go over to Lylse’s Point,” Tom said.
He had indeed taken John into tow. For a time John wondered if he was
to be introduced. “We got some hooch. Meet John Holden; used to live
here years ago.” At the fair-ground, when John was a lad, Dave Grey,
the livery-man, used to work out his racehorses in the early morning.
Herman, who was a horse enthusiast, who then dreamed of some day
becoming a horseman, came often to John’s house in the early morning,
and the two boys went off to the fair-ground without breakfast. Herman
had got some sandwiches made of slices of bread and cold meat out of
his mother’s pantry. They went ’cross-lots, climbing fences and eating
the sandwiches. In a meadow they had to cross there was heavy dew on
the grass, and the meadow larks flew up before them. Herman had at
least come somewhere near expressing in his life his youthful passion:
he still lived about horses; he owned a dray. With a little inward
qualm John wondered. Perhaps Herman ran a motor truck.
The man and woman got into the car, the woman on the back seat with
John, the husband in front with Tom, and they drove away to another
house. John could not keep track of the streets they passed through.
Occasionally he asked the woman, “What street are we in now?” They were
joined by Maud and Alf, who also crowded into the back seat. Maud was
a slender woman of twenty-eight or thirty, with yellow hair and blue
eyes, and at once she seemed determined to make up to John. “I don’t
take more than an inch of room,” she said, laughing and squeezing
herself in between John and the first woman, whose name he could not
later remember.
He rather liked Maud. When the car had been driven some eighteen
miles along a gravel road, they came to Lylse’s farmhouse, which had
been converted into a roadhouse, and got out. Maud had been silent
most of the way, but she sat very close to John, and as he felt cold
and lonely, he was grateful for the warmth of her slender body.
Occasionally she spoke to him in a half-whisper. “Ain’t the night
swell! Gee! I like it out in the dark this way.”
Lylse’s Point was at a bend of the Samson River, a small stream to
which John as a lad had occasionally gone on fishing excursions with
his father. Later he went out there several times with crowds of young
fellows and their girls. They drove out then in Grey’s old bus, and the
trip out and back took several hours. On the way home at night they
had great fun singing at the top of their voices and waking sleeping
farmers along the road. Occasionally some of the party got out and
walked for a ways. It was a chance for a fellow to kiss his girl when
the others could not see. By hurrying a little, they could later easily
enough catch up with the bus.
A rather heavy-faced Italian named Francisco owned Lylse’s, and it
had a dance hall and dining room. Drinks could be had if you knew
the ropes, and it was evident the doctor and his friends were old
acquaintances. At once they declared John should not buy anything, the
declaration, in fact, being made before he had offered. “You’re our
guest now; don’t you forget that. When we come sometime to your town,
then it will be all right,” Tom said. He laughed. “And that makes me
think. I forgot your change,” he said, handing John a five-dollar bill.
The whiskey got at the drug store had been consumed on the way out, all
except John and Maud drinking heartily. “I don’t like the stuff. Do
you, Mr. Holden?” Maud said and giggled. Twice during the trip out her
fingers had crept over and touched lightly his fingers, and each time
she had apologized. “Oh, do excuse me!” she said. John felt a little as
he had felt earlier in the evening when the woman of the hotel had come
to stand at the door of his room and had seemed reluctant about going
away.
After they got out of the car at Lylse’s, he felt uncomfortably old
and queer. “What am I doing here with these people?” he kept asking
himself. When they had got into the light, he stole a look at his
watch. It was not yet nine o’clock. Several other cars, most of them,
the doctor explained, from Yerington, stood before the door, and when
they had taken several drinks of rather mild Italian red wine, all of
the party except Maud and John went into the dance hall to dance. The
doctor took John aside and whispered to him. “Lay off Maud,” he said.
He explained hurriedly that Alf and Maud had been having a row and that
for several days they had not spoken to each other, although they lived
in the same house, ate at the same table, and slept in the same bed.
“He thinks she gets too gay with men,” Tom explained. “You better look
out a little.”
The woman and man sat on a bench under a tree on the lawn before the
house, and when the others had danced, they came out, bringing more
drinks. Tom had got some more whiskey. “It’s moon, but pretty good
stuff,” he declared. In the clear sky overhead stars were shining, and
when the others were dancing, John turned his head and saw across the
road and between the trees that lined its banks the stars reflected in
the water of the Samson. A light from the house fell on Maud’s face,
a rather strikingly lovely face in that light, but when looked at
closely, rather petulant. “A good deal of the spoiled child in her,”
John thought.
She began asking him about life in the city of New York.
“I was there once, but for only three days. It was when I went to
school in the East. A girl I knew lived there. She married a lawyer
named Trigan, or something like that. You didn’t know him, I guess.”
And now there was a hungry, dissatisfied look on her face.
“God! I’d like to live in a place like that, not in this hole! There
hadn’t no man better tempt me.” When she said that she giggled again.
Once during the evening they walked across the dusty road and stood for
a time by the river’s edge, but got back to the bench before the others
had finished their dance. Maud persistently refused to dance.
At ten-thirty, all of the others having got a little drunk, they drove
back to town, Maud again sitting beside John. On the drive Alf went to
sleep. Maud pressed her slender body against John’s, and after two or
three futile moves to which he made no special response, she boldly put
her hand into his. The second woman and her husband talked with Tom
of people they had seen at Lylse’s. “Do you think there’s anything up
between Fanny and Joe? No; I think she’s on the square.”
They got to John’s hotel at eleven-thirty, and bidding them all good
night, he went upstairs. Alf had awakened. When they were parting, he
leaned out of the car and looked closely at John. “What did you say
your name was?” he asked.
John went up a dark stairway and sat on the bed in his room. Lillian
had lost her looks. She had married, and her husband had divorced her.
Joe was a trouble-shooter. He worked for the International Harvester
Company, a swell mechanic. Herman was a drayman. He had five kids.
Three men in a room next John’s were playing poker. They laughed and
talked, and their voices came clearly to John. “You think so, do
you? Well, I’ll prove you’re wrong.” A mild quarrel began. As it was
summer, the windows of John’s room were open, and he went to one to
stand, looking out. A moon had come up, and he could see down into
an alleyway. Two men came out of a street and stood in the alleyway,
whispering. After they left, two cats crept along a roof and began a
love-making scene. The game in the next room broke up. John could hear
voices in the hallway.
“Now, forget it. I tell you, you’re both wrong.” John thought of his
son at the camp up in Vermont. “I haven’t written him a letter today.”
He felt guilty.
Opening his bag, he took out paper and sat down to write; but after two
or three attempts gave it up and put the paper away again. How fine the
night had been as he sat on the bench beside the woman at Lylse’s! Now
the woman was in bed with her husband. They were not speaking to each
other.
“Could I do it?” John asked himself, and then, for the first time that
evening, a smile came to his lips.
“Why not?” he asked himself.
With his bag in his hand he went down the dark hallway and into the
hotel office and began pounding on a desk. A fat old man with thin red
hair and sleep-heavy eyes appeared from somewhere. John explained.
“I can’t sleep. I think I’ll drive on. I want to get to Pittsburgh and
as I can’t sleep, I might as well be driving.” He paid his bill.
Then he asked the clerk to go and arouse the man in the garage, and
gave him an extra dollar. “If I need gas, is there any place open?”
he asked, but evidently the man did not hear. Perhaps he thought the
question absurd.
He stood in the moonlight on the sidewalk before the door of the hotel
and heard the clerk pounding on a door. Presently voices were heard,
and the headlights of his car shone. The car appeared, driven by a boy.
He seemed very alive and alert.
“I saw you out to Lylse’s,” he said, and, without being asked, went to
look at the tank. “You’re all right; you got ’most eight gallons,” he
assured John as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
How friendly the car, how friendly the night! John was not one who
enjoyed fast driving, but he went out of the town at very high speed.
“You go down two blocks, turn to your right, and go three. There you
hit the cement. Go right straight to the east. You can’t miss it.”
John was taking the turns at racing speed. At the edge of town some one
shouted to him from the darkness, but he did not stop. He hungered to
get into the road going east.
“I’ll let her out,” he thought. “Lord! It will be fun! I’ll let her
out.”