II
On top of Chimney Rock, which is a great monolith breaking off from the mountains like the spout of a teapot, about twenty persons can stand and look down at ten counties and a dozen rivers and valleys. This morning Atlanta looked down alone upon miles of green wheat and light blue rye and upon cotton fields and red clay and terribly swift streams capped with white foam. By noon she had looked at plenty of scenery while the airplane zoomed round and round the rock, and she was hungry when she descended the winding steps to the restaurant, and found Carley Delannux and a girl on the terrace.
“You looked nice up there,” he said. “Sort of remote and unimportant—but nice.”
She sighed; she was weary.
“Roger made me climb those steps three times running,” she said. “I think it was punishment for sitting up last night.”
He introduced his companion.
“This is Miss Isabelle Panzer—she wanted to meet you and since she saved my life I couldn’t refuse her.”
“Saved your life?”
“When I had whooping cough. Miss Panzer’s a nurse—just barely a nurse—I was her first case.”
“My second,” the girl corrected him.
It was a lovely discontented face—if ever the two can go together. It was very American and rather sad, mirroring an eternal hope of being someone like Atlanta without either the talent or the self-discipline that makes strong individuals. Atlanta answered some shy questions about Hollywood.
“You know as much about it as I do,” she said, “—if you read the magazines. All I know about pictures is someone says to climb up a rock and so I climb up a rock.”
They waited to order lunch, until Roger could arrive from the landing field at Asheville.
“The way I feel is all your fault,” said Atlanta, looking reproachfully at Delannux. “I didn’t get to sleep until four.”
“Thinking about me?”
“Thinking about my mother in California. Now I need diversion.”
“Well, I’ll divert you,” he suggested. “I know a song—do you want to hear it?”
He went inside and presently some chords drifted out with his voice.
I’d climb the highest mountains—
“Stop!” she groaned.
“All right,” he agreed. “How’s this one—”
—I love to climb a mountain
And to reach the highest peak—
“Don’t do it,” she begged him.
Tourists were droning up from the highroad to the restaurant; Roger Clark arrived and they ordered luncheon on the terrace.
“I want to hear what Delannux is hiding from,” Atlanta announced.
“So do I,” Roger said, relaxing from his morning with a glass of beer.
“We come here and he picks us up—” Atlanta continued.
“You picked me up. Here I come to hide—”
“That’s what we want to know about,” Roger’s tone was cheerful but Atlanta saw that he was regarding Delannux quizzically. “Have you got a bear after you?”
“My past is a sort of bear.”
“We haven’t got any pasts in pictures,” said Atlanta, mollifying the turn of the conversation.
“Haven’t you? It must be great to be that way. I’ve got enough past for three people—you see I’m a sort of survival from the boom days—I’ve lived too long.”
“Sort of a luxury article,” suggested Roger mildly.
“That’s it. Not much in demand anymore.”
Underneath his light tone Atlanta detected a certain discouragement. For the first time in her life she wondered what it felt like to be discouraged. So far she had never known anything but hope and fulfillment. From the time she was fourteen there were always picture people coming into her father’s drug store in Beverly Hills and promising to get her a test. And finally one of them had remembered.
Discouragement should be when you didn’t have money or a job.
With Delannux on the hotel porch after dinner that night she asked him suddenly:
“What did you mean when you said you’d lived too long?”
He laughed but at her seriousness he answered:
“I fitted in to a time when people wanted excitement, and I tried to supply it.”
“What did you do?”
“I spent a lot of money—I backed plays and tried to fly the Atlantic, and tried to drink all the wine in Paris—that sort of thing. It was all pointless and that’s why it’s so dated—it wasn’t about anything.”
Roger came out at ten o’clock and said somewhat gruffly:
“I think you ought to turn in early, Atlanta. We’re working at eight tomorrow.”
“I’m going right away.”
She and Roger walked upstairs together. Outside her room he said:
“You don’t know anything about this man—except that he has a bad reputation.”
“What junk!” she answered impatiently. “Talking to him is like talking to a girl. Why, last night I almost went to sleep—he’s harmless.”
“I’ve heard that story before. It’s a classic.”
There were steps on the stairs and Carley Delannux came up. He paused on the landing a moment.
“When Miss Downs goes to bed the lights go out,” he complained.
“Roger was afraid I’d got drowned last night,” said Atlanta.
Then Roger said something utterly unlike himself.
“It did cross my mind that you were drowned. After all, you were out with Suicide Carley.”
There was a hushed awful moment. Then Delannux made a lightning motion with his hand and Roger’s head and body slapped back against the wall.
Another pause, with Roger half stunned keeping on his feet only with the aid of his back and palms against the wall and Delannux facing him, hands by his side clenched and twitching.
Atlanta gave a whispered cry:
“Stop! Stop!”
For another instant neither man moved. Then Roger pushed himself upright and shook his head in a dazed way. He was the taller and heavier of the two and Atlanta had seen him throw a drunken extra over a five foot fence. She tried to wedge herself between them but Clark’s arm brushed her aside.
“It’s all right,” he said. “He was perfectly right. I had no business saying that.”
She drew a breath of relief—this was the Clark she knew, generous and just. Delannux relaxed.
“I’m sorry I was so hasty. Good night.”
He nodded to them both and turned away toward his room.
After a minute Clark said, “Good night, Atlanta,” and she was standing alone in the hall.
III
“That’s the end of Roger and me,” she thought next morning. “I never loved him—he was only my best friend.”
But it made her sad when he did not tell her when to go to bed the next night, and it was not much fun now on location or at meals.
Two days of rain arrived and she drove with Carley Delannux back into the hills and stopped at lost shacks trading cigarettes for mountain talk and drinking iron water that tasted of fifty years ago. Everything was all right when she was with Carley. Life was gay or melancholy by turns but it was at all times what he made it. Roger rode along with life—Carley dominated it with his sophistication and humor.
This was the season of flowers and she and Carley spent a rainy day fixing up a float to represent Lake Lure for the Rhododendron Festival in Asheville that night. They decided on a sailboat with a sea of blue hydrangeas and an illuminated moon. Seamstresses worked all afternoon on old-fashioned swimming costumes; and Atlanta turned herself into a stout bathing beauty of 1890, and they telephoned the little nurse, Isabelle Panzer, to be a mermaid. Roger would drive the truck and Atlanta insisted on sitting in front beside him. She was inspired to this gesture by the vague idea, peculiar to women in love, that her presence would cheer and console the other man.
The rain had stopped and it was a fair night. In Asheville their float took its place in the assembling parade—there had already been one parade in the afternoon and the streets were littered with purple pink rhododendrons and cloudy white azaleas. Tonight was to be Carnival, wild and impudent—but it was soon apparent that to plant an old world saturnalia in the almost virgin soil of the resort was going to be difficult; the gaiety was among the participants rather than in the silent throngs from the mountains, who gathered on the sidewalks to watch the floats move by in the shaky and haphazard manner peculiar to floats, with great silent gaps, and crowdings and dead halts.
They lurched along the festooned streets between a galley manned by those vague Neros and sirens that turn up in all parades and a straggling battalion that featured the funny papers. This last provoked comment from critical youth on the sidewalks:
“You s’posed to be Andy Gump?”
“Hey, you’re too fat for Tillie the Toiler!”
“I thought Moon Mullins was s’posed to be funny!”
Atlanta kept thinking that Carley would have brought the scene alive to her somehow if only with mockery—but not Roger.
“Cheer up!” she urged him, “we’re supposed to be jolly.”
“Is this jolly? Are we having fun?”
She agreed that they weren’t but she resented his lack of effort.
“Did you expect a million dollar super-film? You’ve got to make things fun.”
“Well, you’re doing your part all right—and the crowd is going to have a circus next time you move. Then the whole top of your bathing suit is going to fall off.”
“Good Lord!” She grabbed at her back, and finding nothing, simply tipped over backward into the bottom of the float, rolling through the flowers until she could get space to pull the flimsy garment together. Above her and almost beside her were two figures—Miss Panzer on a rocky throne and Carley, holding a pitch-fork trident. While Atlanta patched the rip, she tried to catch what he was saying, but only fragments floated down to her. Then as she sat upright and hunched her back to test the adjustment she heard Isabelle Panzer say:
“You didn’t tell me you loved me but you made me think so.”
Atlanta stiffened and sat still as still,
