The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (9 page)

Up the ladder scrambled the two gray-haired men, the officer and two of the sailors with their hands on their revolvers. Mr. Farnam folded his arms and stood looking at his niece.

“So,” he said, nodding his head slowly.

With a sigh her arms unwound from Carlyle's neck, and her eyes, transfigured and far away, fell upon the boarding party. Her uncle saw her upper lip slowly swell into that arrogant pout he knew so well.

“So,” he repeated savagely. “So this is your idea of—of romance. A runaway affair, with a high-seas pirate.”

Ardita glanced at him carelessly.

“What an old fool you are!” she said quietly.

“Is that the best you can say for yourself?”

“No,” she said as if considering. “No, there's something else. There's that well-known phrase with which I have ended most of our conversations for the past few years—‘Shut up!' ”

And with that she turned, included the two old men, the officer, and the two sailors in a curt glance of contempt, and walked proudly down the companionway.

But had she waited an instant longer she would have heard a sound from her uncle quite unfamiliar in most of their interviews. He gave vent to a whole-hearted amused chuckle, in which the second old man joined.

The latter turned briskly to Carlyle, who had been regarding this scene with an air of cryptic amusement.

“Well, Toby,” he said genially, “you incurable, hare-brained, romantic chaser of rainbows, did you find that she was the person you wanted?”

Carlyle smiled confidently.

“Why—naturally,” he said. “I've been perfectly sure ever since I first heard tell of her wild career. That's why I had Babe send up the rocket last night.”

“I'm glad you did,” said Colonel Moreland gravely. “We've been keeping pretty close to you in case you should have trouble with those six strange niggers. And we hoped we'd find you two in some such compromising position,” he sighed. “Well, set a crank to catch a crank!”

“Your father and I sat up all night hoping for the best—or perhaps it's the worst. Lord knows you're welcome to her, my boy. She's run me crazy. Did you give her the Russian bracelet my detective got from that Mimi woman?”

Carlyle nodded.

“Sh!” he said. “She's coming on deck.”

Ardita appeared at the head of the companionway and gave a quick involuntary glance at Carlyle's wrists. A puzzled look passed across her face. Back aft the negroes had begun to sing, and the cool lake, fresh with dawn, echoed serenely to their low voices.

“Ardita,” said Carlyle unsteadily.

She swayed a step toward him.

“Ardita,” he repeated breathlessly, “I've got to tell you the—the truth. It was all a plant, Ardita. My name isn't Carlyle. It's Moreland, Toby Moreland. The story was invented, Ardita, invented out of thin Florida air.”

She stared at him, bewildered amazement, disbelief, and anger flowing in quick waves across her face. The three men held their breaths. Moreland, Senior, took a step toward her; Mr. Farnam's mouth dropped a little open as he waited, panic-stricken, for the expected crash.

But it did not come. Ardita's face became suddenly radiant, and with a little laugh she went swiftly to young Moreland and looked up at him without a trace of wrath in her gray eyes.

“Will you swear,” she said quietly, “that it was entirely a product of your own brain?”

“I swear,” said young Moreland eagerly.

She drew his head down and kissed him gently.

“What an imagination!” she said softly and almost enviously. “I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.”

The negroes' voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them sing before.

 

“What was in the bags?” she asked softly.

“Florida mud,” he answered. “That was one of the two true things I told you.”

“Perhaps I can guess the other one,” she said; and reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him softly in the illustration.

The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.

Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nineteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark Darrow's ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot—being partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved—and Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps. There was a plaintive heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.

Sally Carrol gazed down sleepily. She started to yawn, but finding this quite impossible unless she raised her chin from the window-sill, changed her mind and continued silently to regard the car, whose owner sat brilliantly if perfunctorily at attention as he waited for an answer to his signal. After a moment the whistle once more split the dusty air.

“Good mawnin'.”

With difficulty Clark twisted his tall body round and bent a distorted glance on the window.

“ 'Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol.”

“Isn't it, sure enough?”

“What you doin'?”

“Eatin' 'n apple.”

“Come on go swimmin'—want to?”

“Reckon so.”

“How 'bout hurryin' up?”

“Sure enough.”

Sally Carrol sighed voluminously and raised herself with profound inertia from the floor, where she had been occupied in alternately destroying parts of a green apple and painting paper dolls for her younger sister. She approached a mirror, regarded her expression with a pleased and pleasant languor, dabbed two spots of rouge on her lips and a grain of powder on her nose, and covered her bobbed corn-colored hair with a rose-littered sunbonnet. Then she kicked over the painting water, said, “Oh, damn!”—but let it lay—and left the room.

“How you, Clark?” she inquired a minute later as she slipped nimbly over the side of the car.

“Mighty fine, Sally Carrol.”

“Where we go swimmin'?”

“Out to Walley's Pool. Told Marylyn we'd call by an' get her an' Joe Ewing.”

Clark was dark and lean, and when on foot was rather inclined to stoop. His eyes were ominous and his expression somewhat petulant except when startlingly illuminated by one of his frequent smiles. Clark had “a income”—just enough to keep himself in ease and his car in gasolene—and he had spent the two years since he graduated from Georgia Tech in dozing round the lazy streets of his home town, discussing how he could best invest his capital for an immediate fortune.

Hanging round he found not at all difficult; a crowd of little girls had grown up beautifully, the amazing Sally Carrol foremost among them; and they enjoyed being swum with and danced with and made love to in the flower-filled summery evenings—and they all liked Clark immensely. When feminine company palled there were half a dozen other youths who were always just about to do something, and meanwhile were quite willing to join him in a few holes of golf, or a game of billiards, or the consumption of a quart of “hard yella licker.” Every once in a while one of these contemporaries made a farewell round of calls before going up to New York or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh to go into business, but mostly they just stayed round in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy niggery street fairs—and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.

The Ford having been excited into a sort of restless resentful life Clark and Sally Carrol rolled and rattled down Valley Avenue into Jefferson Street, where the dust road became a pavement; along opiate Millicent Place, where there were half a dozen prosperous, substantial mansions; and on into the down-town section. Driving was perilous here, for it was shopping time; the population idled casually across the streets and a drove of low-moaning oxen were being urged along in front of a placid street-car; even the shops seemed only yawning their doors and blinking their windows in the sunshine before retiring into a state of utter and finite coma.

“Sally Carrol,” said Clark suddenly, “it a fact that you're engaged?”

She looked at him quickly.

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Sure enough, you engaged?”

“ 'At's a nice question!”

“Girl told me you were engaged to a Yankee you met up in Asheville last summer.”

Sally Carrol sighed.

“Never saw such an old town for rumors.”

“Don't marry a Yankee, Sally Carrol. We need you round here.”

Sally Carrol was silent a moment.

“Clark,” she demanded suddenly, “who on earth shall I marry?”

“I offer my services.”

“Honey, you couldn't support a wife,” she answered cheerfully. “Anyway, I know you too well to fall in love with you.”

“ 'At doesn't mean you ought to marry a Yankee,” he persisted.

“S'pose I love him?”

He shook his head.

“You couldn't. He'd be a lot different from us, every way.”

He broke off as he halted the car in front of a rambling, dilapidated house. Marylyn Wade and Joe Ewing appeared in the doorway.

“ 'Lo, Sally Carrol.”

“Hi!”

“How you-all?”

“Sally Carrol,” demanded Marylyn as they started off again, “you engaged?”

“Lawdy, where'd all this start? Can't I look at a man 'thout everybody in town engagin' me to him?”

Clark stared straight in front of him at a bolt on the clattering wind-shield.

“Sally Carrol,” he said with a curious intensity, “don't you like us?”

“What?”

“Us down here?”

“Why, Clark, you know I do. I adore all you boys.”

“Then why you gettin' engaged to a Yankee?”

“Clark, I don't know. I'm not sure what I'll do, but—well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”

“What you mean?”

“Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here, and Ben Arrot, and you-all, but you'll—you'll——”

“We'll all be failures?”

“Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of—of ineffectual and sad, and—oh, how can I tell you?”

“You mean because we stay here in Tarleton?”

“Yes, Clark; and because you like it and never want to change things or think or go ahead.”

He nodded and she reached over and pressed his hand.

“Clark,” she said softly, “I wouldn't change you for the world. You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail I'll love always—the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.”

“But you're goin' away?”

“Yes—because I couldn't ever marry you. You've a place in my heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I'd get restless. I'd feel I was—wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see. There's the sleepy old side you love; an' there's a sort of energy—the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that may be useful somewhere, that'll last when I'm not beautiful any more.”

She broke off with characteristic suddenness and sighed, “Oh, sweet cooky!” as her mood changed.

Half closing her eyes and tipping back her head till it rested on the seat-back she let the savory breeze fan her eyes and ripple the fluffy curls of her bobbed hair. They were in the country now, hurrying between tangled growths of bright-green coppice and grass and tall trees that sent sprays of foliage to hang a cool welcome over the road. Here and there they passed a battered negro cabin, its oldest white-haired inhabitant smoking a corncob pipe beside the door, and half a dozen scantily clothed pickaninnies parading tattered dolls on the wild-grown grass in front. Farther out were lazy cotton-fields, where even the workers seemed intangible shadows lent by the sun to the earth, not for toil, but to while away some age-old tradition in the golden September fields. And round the drowsy picturesqueness, over the trees and shacks and muddy rivers, flowed the heat, never hostile, only comforting, like a great warm nourishing bosom for the infant earth.

“Sally Carrol, we're here!”

“Poor chile's soun' asleep.”

“Honey, you dead at last outa sheer laziness?”

“Water, Sally Carrol! Cool water waitin' for you!”

Her eyes opened sleepily.

“Hi!” she murmured, smiling.

In November Harry Bellamy, tall, broad, and brisk, came down from his Northern city to spend four days. His intention was: to settle a matter that had been hanging fire since he and Sally Carrol had met in Asheville, North Carolina, in midsummer. The settlement took only a quiet afternoon and an evening in front of a glowing open fire, for Harry Bellamy had everything she wanted; and, besides, she loved him—loved him with that side of her she kept especially for loving. Sally Carrol had several rather clearly defined sides.