Authors: Franklin Gregory
THE next morning Sara did not come down for breakfast. Pierre ate alone, sitting at the chaste maple table across from the massive fireplace. In the old days, when Fountain Head was a tavern, the dining room had been the kitchen and the fireplace had a reason for existence. You could walk without stooping into that fireplace, its back wall of firebrick blackened by the smoke of generations. You could sit down on either side of the colossal spit on little stone seats to toast your toes. It was little changed. The old iron crane, supporting the fat iron pot, still swung to one side; the smoke-worn bellows, the se-lection of pokers, the tongs, were still in place. Pierre kept the smoke gate half open for ventilation.
But the rest of the room was not at all what it had been, even in Pierre’s childhood. Angelica had seen to that. They hadn’t been back from their honeymoon a month when her nervous fingers were busy “rearranging,” as she called it. Actually, it amounted to a domestic hurricane. All the old old solid furniture was discarded; there were days Angelica spent combing old attics and basements and antique shops for spindly things she described as “pieces.” And finally, when Pierre returned one night, she was able to display proudly an “authentic restoration.”
Never since had Pierre been exactly comfortable in the room, despite the fact that the fireplace had escaped the storm. But it had not interfered with his appetite. He had left things exactly as they were, even after Angelica went away.
Angelica. . . .
Queer little thing, he thought; always fluttering about like a hummingbird. Always doing, always changing. He had picked up a copy of the Social Register once and, thumbing the pages idly, had come across his name along with the Cadwaladers and the Chews and the Clothiers and the Cromwells, the Curtins and the Curtises—not far behind the Biddles, not far ahead of the Drexels.
The register read:
Camp-d'Avesnes, Pierre de. Fountain Head. Old Trenton Road. Mrs. Absent
.
There had never been a divorce.
Odd, he considered, that he had never missed her very much.
Heinrich’s plump wife, Freda, appeared through the pantry door beside the fireplace. She moved with heavy, purposeful steps to the table. Pierre had never seen her change her stolid German expression. He had never heard her change her abrupt formula:
“The fruit I serve.” A little later, upon her re-entrance, “The scrapple I serve.”
The tone was always the same—mournful.
Pierre ate with relish. There was no trouble in his mind that food could not cure. For he was jovial by nature. Minor depressions leveled off more easily with him than with others. And even the moods of Sara, the child Angelica left behind sixteen years ago, bounced from him like a rubber ball.
She was in one of those states now, or she would have been down to breakfast. He’d had a taste of it when he found her by the fire last night. H’m-m. She’d snap out of it.
He glanced toward the large window with its little square panes set deeply into the two feet of stone wall, starting almost at the floor and ending almost at the ceiling. It framed a landscape of autumnal glory.
In the foreground the oaks blazed crimson. Between their branches wide ribbons of morning sunlight slanted, printing great blocks of gold upon the lane. The lane, once a segment of the old Trenton Post Road, disappeared through the wood, coming up short half a mile beyond on the other side of Mt. Neshaminy.
Through the trees and to the left Pierre could see the foot of the hill, which was all that it was in spite of its pretentious title. If you climbed its grassy slopes and stood at the summit and looked south and west, and if it was a clear day and you used a little imagination plus a pair of binoculars, you could see Valley Forge. If you turned north you could see the gloomy Hexenkopf. And if you made a quarter turn toward the east, you could see the low-lying hills where Washington crossed the Delaware to strike at the Hessians.
Pierre looked at the lane, at the oaks, at the carpet of jeweled leaves upon the ground. It must be hell, he thought, to be blind.
He drank his coffee meditatively. Queer girl, Sara. Hope she marries well. Been seeing quite a bit of young Trent lately. H’m-m, He liked that. Manning and he got on so well. They’ve even torn down the fences between their adjoining grounds.
Let’s see. She’s been out two years now. He’d done it himself, though there was a horde of bothersome aunts who wanted a finger in it. He was proud of his lone achievement. They’d stayed in town that winter with a suite at the Warrick. The introduction had been at a tea dance after the Army- Navy game. Very nice, people were. Every-body had made it a point to stop in after the game. Later there had been a formal dinner at the Bellevue on her birthday.
Well, where was she now? Martyring herself with the little concentrations of the Junior League; doing the things expected of her and hating herself for it.
He drained his cup. She ought to get married. Damned if he wouldn’t marry her himself if he were twenty years younger and she wasn’t his daughter.
The pantry door opened. Freda poked out her stolid face.
“Heinrich the car has ready,” she announced.
Pierre pushed back his chair and got up.
UPSTAIRS in her room, on the other side of the house, Sara sat at her vanity. She sat motionless, her hands in her lap, a scarlet negligee draped about her rounded white shoulders, her long black hair with its blue tints cascading down her back. The reflection in her mirror revealed soft curves half concealed by her lacy slip.
David had kissed her that night. And that night returned to her, each detail sharply delineated upon her memory: the passionate warmth of August, the sough of the wistful breeze through the wood, the prodigal aromas rising, an invisible mist, from field and garden. She had remained a long, long time in his arms. She had been happy. But now she was uncertain, bewildered. The meaningless dissatisfactions and the felt but undeciphered yearnings of her lonely childhood seemed to be returning.
What in the devil was it that she wanted? She must have inherited very much from Pierre. She possessed his sensitive nature. But where he, like a connoisseur, tasted life casually in little pieces—his eyes drinking in the beauty of a landscape; his ears, the loveliness of music; his nostrils, the delicate perfumes of flowers and their essence—she, conscious of the abundance of life, absorbed the whole of it at once through all her senses.
Like Pierre, she leaned to the hours after dark. But where Pierre liked them for the companionship they brought, the theater, the city lights, the new interests arising from the intercourse of man relaxed, she liked them in all their quiet nakedness. A chill October night with the wind sweeping vagabond clouds across the stars; the depth of oak wood, its mystery deepening the farther she penetrated into it; a moonlit winter’s walk along the banks of the Neshaminy, its waters gurgling and splashing over rocks; an early summer night when, sitting rigidly on the long, wide porch, she gazed out into the torrential rains. Night gave her a measure of peace; day left her without ease.
Yet, if these differences between father and daughter were founded on similarities, there were more basic differences. Pierre was kind. She, fundamentally, was cruel. There was the time when, in childish passion, she had beaten a puppy mercilessly with her fists. And when the puppy cringed, she felt glad and beat it all the harder. Punished, she felt not the least sorry. She learned to control herself in time. Custom bade she must. But ever since, each time she saw a dog, she felt she’d met an enemy.
“But why don't you like dogs?” Ann asked once.
“Don’t know. I can’t stand them. Give me the creeps.”
“Afraid of them?”
“Perhaps.”
She reserved another feeling for horses—contempt.
“Curious,” Manning Trent said to Pierre one day when they were cantering along a saddle trail, “that Sara doesn’t ride. You like it so well. And so’d her mother. She’s got such a damned good build for it. too.”
“Better than I have.” Pierre grinned, and touched his paunch. “Never could get her to look at a horse. Says her own legs are good enough for her.”
“Ha. They’re good legs, all right,” Trent admitted. “But every man jack of you, and woman, too, was horsy.”
“I know.”
Pierre did not worry about it. He was tolerant to the point of indifference when it came to interfering with the likes and dislikes of others.
Sara’s contempt for horses deepened to hatred for cattle and sheep and domestic livestock in general. There was the occasion when, visiting a neighboring farm, she’d inadvertently come upon the butchering of a pig. She didn’t turn away as most girls would. Instead, she stood and watched, experiencing a sadistic satisfaction as the animal, blood geysering from a vein, legs beating frantically, squealed in hysterical agony and died.
She accepted cats and placed no faith in them. There was always one about. She knew it for what it was—treacherous, selfish, vicious. She never stroked it; but if it leaped into her bed at night, she permitted it to stay—kneading the pillow, ramming its head against hers in a false display of affection, singing its guttural, monotonous song. It was wild, and she felt cousin to it.
But if the cat were cousin, other wild creatures—more fierce, more cruel—were blood sisters. How eagerly, as a girl, she had watched the lions and tigers at Fairmont Park snatch at their large chunks of raw meat.
Mostly, however, on those visits to the zoo, she had spent time on end in the Reptile House. And there, fascinated, she would stand staring at the slim black cord of cobra as it slithered among its rocks or, its head rising like a rocket from its coil, spitting its venomous white poison at the glass that separated watcher and watched.
She did not think of these things now. Almost beyond consciousness, she heard the station wagon rattling out of the yard and along the lane in the direction of the highway, carrying her father. The sound was lost in the picture of the previous night.
Why were those adolescent longings, buried so long in her new love, re-emerging?
Why should an immaculately attired, slender, lean-faced man with a trick mustache—a man who teetered precariously in his shoes even as he assumed an urbane air, a man lor whom she even felt repulsion—appear to be the spring which released them? What unearthly force could have drawn her to that house—that house which, objective honesty compelled her to admit, had never before entered her experience?
Her left wrist burned where he had touched her. The fingers of her right hand caressed the spot. When she withdrew them, she looked at her wrist—and then, eyes widening, stared. There was a mark on her white flesh; a tiny crescent, seemingly tattooed, seemingly indelible.
DAVID said, with that slow precision that sometimes made his listeners impatient, “But where’d you get the idea the man told fortunes?”
Sara, utterly miserable, said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
David’s big, powerful right hand reached for the lighter on the dashboard and held it to the cigarette drooping from his mouth. More to himself than to- her he said:
“Good thing we got out of that mess. 'Specially for Chick’s sake. If anyone had called the cops. Chick would have been tossed off the team. It was after hours, anyhow, and we need him for Navy.”
“You talk like a rah-rah baby.” Sara replied. “You sound as if football were more important than . . . going to jail. What do you care about football and Penn? You never played. You never went there.”
She bit her lip. She knew, instantly, she’d hurt David. She knew as well as he that he'd never been able to play football and, for the same reason, had never gone to college. David, on his part, lapsed into diplomatic silence.
They had had these quarrels before. Always. before, Sara had been contrite; had anticipated making up. She knew she was usually wrong, that she always wound up by saying something nasty. Now, she found with growing wonder, she didn’t care.
They were driving back from a farm near Easton where David had attended an auction of Ayrshires. Sara was still wondering why she’d gone along; was beginning seriously to question whether she wanted a farmer, even a gentleman farmer, for a husband.
They were winding along a section of the old Canal Road above New Hope, paralleling the new broken-down barge canal whose course, intercepted every few miles by rusty locks, lay between them and the Delaware. Save for the hard surface and an occasional red or green gasoline pump, the road was virtually unchanged from the days of the French and Indian Wars. Here were taverns, red-roofed stone barns, stone houses that were old when the Revolution began. Here were covered bridges of a later period.
Up on the hillsides to the west, sumac spilled its crimson paint. In the gullies the haze of late day gathered along the runs. Out of that blanket of deepening mists great swamp maples raised their scarlet crowns. In the foreground the solid topaz of a poplar stood aloof.
The haze clung, too. to the river on the east. It clung in little patches where the white hunger rocks jutted out of the shallow waters. Beyond the river the wooded Jersey hills burned in yellow and red and fading green.
David, glancing at Sara, asked:
“Where did you get the wrist watch?”
“In Jenkintown this morning. Shopping.”
“Thought,” said David slowly, “you didn't like wrist watches?”
Sara was evasive.
“Oh, I guess they’re nice.”
David was puzzled. He revealed his wonder in. the creases about his pale gray eyes and along his wide forehead. He remembered, just before last Christmas, saying something to the effect that Sara never wore a watch. He didn’t say so, of course, but he was thinking a watch would make a nice gift. But she'd told him then she didn’t like them. Indeed, she liked nothing that bound her—belts, straps, garters, girdles. And. thank her stars, she had a figure that could do without them.
David shrugged, lounged bark into the seat, giving the road his attention. He was a big fellow. When he was a child he'd been afflicted with a spinal ailment. People, even Manning, thought he would be a permanent cripple. But David, moodily watching other youngsters at play, possessed a patient courage. There were good doctors. And Da vid faithfully followed their instructions. There were braces. There were little exercises; then there were exercises that called for more exertion. It was slow work. It took the years of his childhood and the years of his youth. It took unending patience.
He couldn't go to school. His lessons came from tutors. He couldn’t go |o college, but he read voraciously, systematically. In the end, violent exercise was forbidden. But became a slow, sure swimmer; a slow, well- balanced skater. He found that walking satisfied, and so he hunted—not that he loved to kill, but because a gun slung under his left arm was a comfortable thing and balanced one of the two remaining marks of his early affliction: the sideward, downward pull of his handsome head which compelled his broad right shoulder to slope. People did not notice that at first. What usually impressed them instantly was the hard solid nature of his body and his thick unruly hair which, although he was but twenty-six, was now cream white.
Sara, again feeling the burn beneath her wrist watch, was relieved that David did not pursue the subject. She knew he would bring it up again when she least expected it; just as again he had referred to the man on Ninth Street. Tenacity in his search for explanations was characteristic of him.
Her wrist throbbed. A dozen times in the privacy of her tiny room she had examined that tiny crescent. How did he place it there? Why? Was it branded by a wisp of hot wire he might have held? Or had he managed somehow to. paint a drop of add on the flesh? She knew only that the pain served constantly to remind her of him and of his eyes, which attracted even as they repelled. .
Sara’s lower lip trembled. Emotions damned up for months in the reservoir of her self restraint spilled over. She sobbed and her body shook with the sobs. But there were still no tears when David, freeing a hand from the wheel, pulled her gently to him.
She was quiet at dinner that night. She was quiet as she and Pierre sat in the library.
Once the public room of the Fountain Head, the library, too, had for its central fixture a fireplace—but one that boasted ivory-painted elegance. Its narrow, classically carved mantel and fireboard were supported by slender fluted columns, each well worn midway from the base where travelers, lounging in chairs, had parked their feet in warm and solid comfort. Some of those feet, tradition said, were shod in the boots of Washington and Knox and Hamilton and Sullivan when, on cold winter nights, they mapped their campaign against Cornwallis.
Pierre, pretending to read the
Bulletin
, a considerably less scandalous newspaper than the
Herald
which Manning Trent published each and every morning, peered over the masthead at Sara, sitting on a spindly love seat, the book on her lap open to a page she wasn’t reading.
Pierre “would have remarked how pale she looked; remembered, just in time, that she was always pale, yet the suggestion was in her. face. It lay in the deepening shadows under her eyes; in the very restlessness of her body; in her attitude of listening for some far-off sound.
She had anticipated any questions about the watch by showing it to Pierre at dinner.
“Very pretty,” he’d said. “I always thought—”
He didn’t finish what he’d begun. Sara knew he wouldn’t. Always considerate, he continued, instead: “—that a watch would look lovely on you, pet.”
He had noticed that it was very plain; white gold without ornament or stone; just such a watch as a girl who had never liked jewelry would select. But—where in damnation did she get that idea?
Her silence beginning to wear on him, he put his paper aside.
“Book any, good?”
She shrugged, her rising shoulders sending radiant ripples down along the soft clinging velvet of her blouse.
“The usual thing,” she said with assumed cheerfulness. “Boy meets girl. . . .”
She started to recite the plot, hoping to throw off the weight that was hourly becoming more burdensome. Pierre pretended to listen. Actually, he was proudly inspecting her inch by inch from the trim points of her patent-leather pumps to the hem of her pleated skirt; to the allure of her white, slender throat; to her black hair done primly back, revealing ears that were the shapeliest feature of her head.
Suddenly she ended her recital. She closed the book, replaced it on an end table, got up. She moved to the French doors which opened upon the veranda running half the length of the house. Beyond, the lawn swept down toward the Neshaminy. The shadows of trees lay on the lawn, relieved by wide and ragged patches of golden moonlight. Where the lawn ended the gold was transmuted to silver as the fast-running waters of the creek caught and held the light, cast it away and took it back again. In the field beyond the creek corn stood in shocks, casting triangular shadows upon the black earth.
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” Sara said.
IT WAS fifteen minutes past three o’clock the next afternoon when a cab drove up to Eighth and South Streets. A young woman, chic in a silver-fox jacket that reached just short of her hips, stepped out. She handed the driver a bill and walked away with long, swaying strides.
She walked west on South Street, knowing full well how the ragtag and bobtail of that ragtag street were staring at her.
At Ninth Street she turned. A moment later she rang a bell. Almost instantly the door opened.
A man with a lean, handsome face and a small mustache appeared.
“I thought you would return,” he said.
He guided her along the passage to the rear of the house and into a small chamber which, she found, had need of only the most meager furnishings. His personality filled every crack and crevice and corner.
He seated her, and then seemed to forget.
He started working over some papers. Sara had no idea what they were. But his preoccupation was total.
She studied his face. She noted again the chiseled lines that somehow had an eternal look: the length in the thick black brows; thick hair that might have been touseled by all the winds of the world. She started as she remembered a portrait in a book Pierre had at home—Francis Barrett’s engraving of the demon Ashtaroth.
She was extremely conscious, though they were lowered, of his eyes. She was glad that they did not look at her.
She could not tell how long she sat there, nor when it was that she began to feel a change within herself. The pull and tug of self-questioning still went on. But now a new growth seemed to manifest itself. It was as if a tentacle reached out toward her from somewhere in the room—a tentacle that was as immaterial and yet as actual as a current of electricity. Watching the man at the desk, she became positive that the current flowed from him.
The current was switched off.
Perhaps fifteen minutes passed, in which she sat relaxed—and receptive. And then again the flow of that force began, sweeping into her with even greater strength. But this time it brought with it something else: a fragment of knowledge, as if the current were lighting a small incandescent lamp from the ray of which she could search (but only a little way) into herself. The weak beam turned first in one psychical direction and then another, hesitating and then moving on; revealing to Sara parts of herself that, formerly, she vaguely had perceived but never understood.
The light swept the shadows from the old longings and exposed those longings in clearer outlines; yet the outlines, while giving promise of greater limning, were still so incomplete as to create tantalizing interest. And the promise, too, was of such delights, such ecstasies as Sara had never dared to imagine.
The thought occurred to her that, for these, the price must be great. Then, just as the light seemed burning brighter, the man at the table stood up. He said:
“I think that will be all—today.”
Sara stood up. She stood uncertainly.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He answered, “You would not believe me if I told you.”
A moment later she was walking in the street, on her way home.
That night Pierre noticed that she was more nervous than ever. She toyed with the silver at dinner, stared at her plate, ate little. He said gently:
“You don’t seem to have much appetite, dear.”
“Well enough,” Sara said curtly.
He remained silent, then, for a little. But at length his concern overcame his natural tolerance.
“I think,” he said, “a tonic would do - wonders for you. How’s a trip to Europe sound? Portugal? Spain? Take the Clipper to Lisbon? Better yet, South America.”
She said nothing. He began to expand,
“I’ve some business I could do in Buenos Aires.”
Sara said shortly, “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
And she got up and left the table. But when she reached her room, she collapsed on her bed. She did want to go somewhere: she did want to get away. What contrariness forced her to answer Pierre as she did?
Emotion shook her. But she did not cry. Never in her life had she wept. She sat upon the edge of the bed; she could see her reflection in the long mirror on the wall. She would go down and tell Pierre she wanted the trip—and she would add that it was awfully thoughtful of him. But she didn’t.
Pierre, sitting below, stirred his coffee thoughtfully.
“Damn the girl!”
Anybody could see she needed a change.