I
I was near her, for I had lingered behind in order to get the short walk with her from the living room to the front door. That was a lot, for she had flowered suddenly and I, being a man and only a year older, hadn’t flowered at all, had scarcely dared to come near her in the week we’d been home. Nor was I going to say anything in that walk of ten feet, or touch her; but I had a vague hope she’d do something, give a gay little performance of some sort, personal only in so far as we were alone together.
She had bewitchment suddenly in the twinkle of short hairs on her neck, in the sure, clear confidence that at about eighteen begins to deepen and sing in attractive American girls. The lamp light shopped in the yellow strands of her hair.
Already she was sliding into another world—the world of Joe Jelke and Jim Cathcart waiting for us now in the car. In another year she would pass beyond me forever.
As I waited, feeling the others outside in the snowy night, feeling the excitement of Christmas week and the excitement of Ellen here, blooming away, filling the room with “sex appeal”—a wretched phrase to express a quality that isn’t like that at all—a maid came in from the dining room, spoke to Ellen quietly and handed her a note. Ellen read it and her eyes faded down, as when the current grows weak on rural circuits, and smouldered off into space. Then she gave me an odd look—in which I probably didn’t show—and without a word, followed the maid into the dining room and beyond. I sat turning over the pages of a magazine for a quarter of an hour.
Joe Jelke came in, red-faced from the cold, his white silk muffler gleaming at the neck of his fur coat. He was a senior at New Haven, I was a sophomore. He was prominent, a member of Scroll and Keys, and, in my eyes, very distinguished and handsome.
“Isn’t Ellen coming?”
“I don’t know,” I answered discreetly. “She was all ready.”
“Ellen!” he called. “Ellen!”
He had left the front door open behind him and a great cloud of frosty air rolled in from outside. He went halfway up the stairs—he was a familiar in the house—and called again, till Mrs. Baker came to the banister and said that Ellen was below. Then the maid, a little excited, appeared in the dining-room door.
“Mr. Jelke,” she called in a low voice.
Joe’s face fell as he turned toward her, sensing bad news.
“Miss Ellen says for you to go on to the party. She’ll come later.”
“What’s the matter?”
“She can’t come now. She’ll come later.”
He hesitated, confused. It was the last big dance of vacation, and he was mad about Ellen. He had tried to give her a ring for Christmas, and failing that, got her to accept a gold mesh bag that must have cost two hundred dollars. He wasn’t the only one—there were three or four in the same wild condition, and all in the ten days she’d been home—but his chance came first, for he was rich and gracious and at that moment the “desirable” boy of St. Paul. To me it seemed impossible that she could prefer another, but the rumor was she’d described Joe as much too perfect. I suppose he lacked mystery for her, and when a man is up against that with a young girl who isn’t thinking of the practical side of marriage yet—well—.
“She’s in the kitchen,” Joe said angrily.
“No, she’s not.” The maid was defiant and a little scared.
“She is.”
“She went out the back way, Mr. Jelke.”
“I’m going to see.”
I followed him. The Swedish servants washing dishes looked up sideways at our approach and an interested crashing of pans marked our passage through. The storm door, unbolted, was flapping in the wind and as we walked out into the snowy yard we saw the tail light of a car turn the corner at the end of the back alley.
“I’m going after her,” Joe said slowly. “I don’t understand this at all.”
I was too awed by the calamity to argue. We hurried to his car and drove in a fruitless, despairing zigzag all over the residence section, peering into every machine on the streets. It was half an hour before the futility of the affair began to dawn upon him—St. Paul is a city of almost three hundred thousand people—and Jim Cathcart reminded him that we had another girl to stop for. Like a wounded animal he sank into a melancholy mass of fur in the corner, from which position he jerked upright every few minutes and waved himself backward and forward a little in protest and despair.
Jim’s girl was ready and impatient, but after what had happened her impatience didn’t seem important. She looked lovely though. That’s one thing about Christmas vacation—the excitement of growth and change and adventure in foreign parts transforming the people you’ve known all your life. Joe Jelke was polite to her in a daze—he indulged in one burst of short, loud, harsh laughter by way of conversation—and we drove to the hotel.
The chauffeur approached it on the wrong side—the side on which the line of cars was not putting forth guests—and because of that we came suddenly upon Ellen Baker just getting out of a small coupé. Even before we came to a stop, Joe Jelke had jumped excitedly from the car.
Ellen turned toward us, a faintly distracted look—perhaps of surprise, but certainly not of alarm—in her face; in fact, she didn’t seem very aware of us. Joe approached her with a stern, dignified, injured and, I thought, just exactly correct reproof in his expression. I followed.
Seated in the coupé—he had not dismounted to help Ellen out—was a hard thin-faced man of about thirty-five with an air of being scarred, and a slight sinister smile. His eyes were a sort of taunt to the whole human family—they were the eyes of an animal, sleepy and quiescent in the presence of another species. They were helpless yet brutal, unhopeful yet confident. It was as if they felt themselves powerless to originate activity, but infinitely capable of profiting by a single gesture of weakness in another.
Vaguely I placed him as one of the sort of men whom I had been conscious of from my earliest youth as “hanging around”—leaning with one elbow on the counters of tobacco stores, watching, through heaven knows what small chink of the mind, the people who hurried in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops and to the lobbies of theatres—in such places, anyhow, I placed the type, if type it was, that he reminded me of. Sometimes his face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons, and I had always from earliest boyhood thrown a nervous glance toward the dim borderland where he stood, and seen him watching me and despising me. Once, in a dream, he had taken a few steps toward me, jerking his head back and muttering: “Say, kid” in what was intended to be a reassuring voice, and I had broken for the door in terror. This was that sort of man.
Joe and Ellen faced each other silently; she seemed, as I have said, to be in a daze. It was cold, but she didn’t notice that her coat had blown open; Joe reached out and pulled it together, and automatically she clutched it with her hand.
Suddenly the man in the coupé, who had been watching them silently, laughed. It was a bare laugh, done with the breath—just a noisy jerk of the head—but it was an insult if I had ever heard one; definite and not to be passed over. I wasn’t surprised when Joe, who was quick tempered, turned to him angrily and said:
“What’s your trouble?”
The man waited a moment, his eyes shifting and yet staring, and always seeing. Then he laughed again in the same way. Ellen stirred uneasily.
“Who is this—this—” Joe’s voice trembled with annoyance.
“Look out now,” said the man slowly.
Joe turned to me.
“Eddie, take Ellen and Catherine in, will you?” he said quickly. … “Ellen, go with Eddie.”
“Look out now,” the man repeated.
Ellen made a little sound with her tongue and teeth, but she didn’t resist when I took her arm and moved her toward the side door of the hotel. It struck me as odd that she should be so helpless, even to the point of acquiescing by her silence in this imminent trouble.
“Let it go, Joe!” I called back over my shoulder. “Come inside!”
Ellen, pulling against my arm, hurried us on. As we were caught up into the swinging doors I had the impression that the man was getting out of his coupé.
Ten minutes later, as I waited for the girls outside the women’s dressing-room, Joe Jelke and Jim Cathcart stepped out of the elevator. Joe was very white, his eyes were heavy and glazed, there was a trickle of dark blood on his forehead and on his white muffler. Jim had both their hats in his hand.
“He hit Joe with brass knuckles,” Jim said in a low voice. “Joe was out cold for a minute or so. I wish you’d send a bell boy for some witch-hazel and court-plaster.”
It was late and the hall was deserted; brassy fragments of the dance below reached us as if heavy curtains were being blown aside and dropping back into place. When Ellen came out I took her directly downstairs. We avoided the receiving line and went into a dim room set with scraggly hotel palms where couples sometimes sat out during the dance; there I told her what had happened.
“It was Joe’s own fault,” she said, surprisingly. “I told him not to interfere.”
This wasn’t true. She had said nothing, only uttered one curious little click of impatience.
“You ran out the back door and disappeared for almost an hour,” I protested. “Then you turned up with a hard-looking customer who laughed in Joe’s face.”
“A hard-looking customer,” she repeated, as if tasting the sound of the words.
“Well, wasn’t he? Where on earth did you get hold of him, Ellen?”
“On the train,” she answered. Immediately she seemed to regret this admission. “You’d better stay out of things that aren’t your business, Eddie. You see what happened to Joe.”
Literally I gasped. To watch her, seated beside me, immaculately glowing, her body giving off wave after wave of freshness and delicacy—and to hear her talk like that.
“But that man’s a thug!” I cried. “No girl could be safe with him. He used brass knuckles on Joe—brass knuckles!”
“Is that pretty bad?”
She asked this as she might have asked such a question a few years ago. She looked at me at last and really wanted an answer; for a moment it was as if she were trying to recapture an attitude that had almost departed; then she hardened again. I say “hardened,” for I began to notice that when she was concerned with this man her eyelids fell a little, shutting other things—everything else—out of view.
That was a moment I might have said something, I suppose, but in spite of everything, I couldn’t light into her. I was too much under the spell of her beauty and its success. I even began to find excuses for her—perhaps that man wasn’t what he appeared to be; or perhaps—more romantically—she was involved with him against her will to shield someone else. At this point people began to drift into the room and come up to speak to us. We couldn’t talk any more, so we went in and bowed to the chaperones. Then I gave her up to the bright restless sea of the dance, where she moved in an eddy of her own among the pleasant islands of colored favors set out on tables and the south winds from the brasses moaning across the hall. After a while I saw Joe Jelke sitting in a corner with a strip of court-plaster on his forehead watching Ellen as if she herself had struck him down, but I didn’t go up to him. I felt queer myself—like I feel when I wake up after sleeping through an afternoon, strange and portentous, as if something had gone on in the interval that changed the values of everything and that I didn’t see.
The night slipped on through successive phases of cardboard horns, amateur tableaux and flashlights for the morning papers. Then was the grand march and supper, and about two o’clock some of the committee dressed up as revenue agents pinched the party, and a facetious newspaper was distributed, burlesquing the events of the evening. And all the time out of the corner of my eye I watched the shining orchid on Ellen’s shoulder as it moved like Stuart’s plume about the room. I watched it with a definite foreboding until the last sleepy groups had crowded into the elevators, and then, bundled to the eyes in great shapeless fur coats, drifted out into the clear dry Minnesota night.