“He wasn’t in love with me,” she protested. “He got fresh in a dance we had together and I called him for it.”
“Barney was wrought up too—said he felt like a father to you.”
“They make me tired,” she exclaimed. “Now they think they’re in love with me just because——”
“Because they see I am.”
“Because they think I’m interested in you. None of them were so eager until two days ago. So long as I make them laugh it’s all right but the minute I have any impulse of my own they all bustle up and think they’re being so protective. I suppose Eddie O’Sullivan will be next.”
“It was my fault telling them we found we lived only a few miles from each other in Maryland.”
“No, it’s just that I’m the only decent-looking girl on an eight-day boat, and the boys are beginning to squabble among themselves. Once they’re in New York they’ll forget I’m alive.”
Still later they were together when the city burst thunderously upon them in the early dusk—the high white range of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge, rising again into uptown New York, hallowed with diadems of foamy light, suspended from the stars.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Evelyn sobbed. “I cry so much lately. Maybe I’ve been handling a parrot.”
The German band started to play on deck but the sweeping majesty of the city made the inarch trivial and tinkling; after a moment it died away.
“Oh, God! It’s so beautiful,” she whispered brokenly.
If he had not been going south with her the affair would probably have ended an hour later in the customs shed. And as they rode south to Washington next day he receded for the moment and her father came nearer. He was just a nice American who attracted her physically—a little necking behind a lifeboat in the darkness. At the iron grating in the Washington station where their ways divided she kissed him good-bye and for the time forgot him altogether as her train shambled down into the low-forested clayland of southern Maryland. Screening her eyes with her hands Evelyn looked out upon the dark infrequent villages and the scattered farm lights. Rocktown was a shrunken little station and there was her brother with a neighbour’s Ford—she was ashamed that her luggage was so good against the exploded upholstery. She saw a star she knew and heard Negro laughter from out of the night; the breeze was cool but in it there was some smell she recognized—she was home.
At the service next day in the Rocktown churchyard, the sense that she was on a stage, that she was being watched, froze Evelyn’s grief—then it was over and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Then as they turned from the graveside her eyes fell
on George Ives who stood a little apart with his hat in his hand. Outside the gate he spoke to her.
“You’ll excuse my coming. I had to see that you were all right.”
“Can’t you take me away somewhere now?” she asked impulsively. “I can’t stand much of this. I want to go to New York tonight.”
His face fell. “So soon?”
“I’ve got to be learning a lot of new dance routines and freshening up my stuff. You get sort of stale abroad.”
He called for her that afternoon, crisp and shining as his coupe. As they started off she noticed that the men in the gasoline stations seemed to know him with liking and respect. He fitted into the quickening spring landscape, into a legendary Maryland of graciousness and gallantry. He had not the range of a European; he gave her little of that constant reassurance as to her attractiveness—there were whole half-hours when he seemed scarcely aware of her at all.
They stopped once more at the churchyard—she brought a great armful of flowers to leave as a last offering on her father’s grave. Leaving him at the gate she went in.
The flowers scattered on the brown unsettled earth. She had no more ties here now and she did not know whether she would come back any more. She knelt down. All these dead, she knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with hard blue flashing eyes, their spare violent bodies, their souls made of new earth in the long forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century. Minute by minute the spell grew on her until it was hard to struggle back to the old world where she had dined with kings and princes, where her name in letters two feet high challenged the curiosity of the night A line of William McFee’s surged through her:
O staunch old heart that toiled so long for me
I waste my years sailing along the sea.
The words released her—she broke suddenly and sat back on her heels, crying.
How long she was staying she didn’t know; the flowers had grown invisible when a voice called her name from the churchyard and she got up and wiped her eyes.
“I’m coming.” And then, “Good-bye then Father, all my fathers.”
George helped her into the car and wrapped a robe around her. Then he took a long drink of country rye from his flask.
“Kiss me before we start,” he said suddenly.
She put up her face towards him.
“No, really kiss me.”
“Not now.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“I don’t feel like it, and my face is dirty.”
“As if that mattered.”
His persistence annoyed her.
“Let’s go on,” she said.
He put the car into gear.
“Sing me a song.”
“Not now, I don’t feel like it.”
He drove fast for half an hour—then he stopped under thick sheltering trees.
“Time for another drink. Don’t you think you better have one—it’s getting cold.”
“You know I don’t drink. You have one.”
“If you don’t mind.”
When he had swallowed he turned towards her again.
“I think you might kiss me now.”
Again she kissed him obediently but he was not satisfied.
“I mean really,” he repeated. “Don’t hold away like that. You know I’m in love with you and you say you like me.”
“Of course I do,” she said impatiently, “but there are times and times. This isn’t one of them. Let’s go on.”
“But I thought you liked me.”
“I won’t if you act this way.”
“You don’t like me then.”
“Oh don’t be absurd,” she broke out, “of course I like you, but I want to get to Washington.”
“We’ve got lots of time.” And then as she didn’t answer, “Kiss me once before we start.”
She grew angry. If she had liked him less she could have laughed him out of this mood. But there was no laughter in her—only an increasing distaste for the situation.
“Well,” he said with a sigh, “this car is very stubborn. It refuses to start until you kiss me.” He put his hand on hers but she drew hers away.
“Now look here.” Her temper mounted into her cheeks, her forehead. “If there was anything you could do to spoil everything it was just this. I thought people only acted like this in cartoons. It’s so utterly crude and”—she searched for a word—“and American. You only forgot to call me „baby“.”
“Oh.” After a minute he started the engine and then the car. The lights of Washington were a red blur against the sky.
“Evelyn,” he said presently. “I can’t think of anything more natural than wanting to kiss you, I——”
“Oh, it was so clumsy,” she interrupted. “Half a pint of corn whisky and then telling me you wouldn’t start the car unless I kissed you. I’m not used to that sort of thing. I’ve always had men treat me with the greatest delicacy. Men have been challenged to duels for staring at me in a casino—and then you, that I liked so much, try a thing like that. I can’t stand it——” And again she repeated, bitterly “It’s so American.”
“Well, I haven’t any sense of guilt about it but I’m sorry I upset you.”
“Don’t you see?” she demanded. “If I’d wanted to kiss you I’d have managed managed to let you know.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” he repeated. They had dinner in the station buffet. He left her at the door of her pullman car.
“Good-bye,” she said, but coolly now, “Thank you for an awfully interesting trip. And call me up when you come to New York.”
“Isn’t this silly,” he protested. “You’re not even going to kiss me good-bye.”
She didn’t want to at all now and she hesitated before leaning forward lightly from the step. But this time he drew back.
“Never mind,” he said. “I understand how you feel. I’ll see you when I come to New York.”
He took off his hat, bowed politely and walked away. Feeling very alone and lost Evelyn went on into the car. That was for meeting people on boats, she thought, but she kept on feeling strangely alone.
II
She climbed a network of steel, concrete and glass, walked under a high echoing dome and came out into New York. She was part of it even before she reached her hotel. When she saw mail waiting for her and flowers around her suite, she was sure she wanted to live and work here with this great current of excitement flowing through her from dawn to dusk.
Within two days she was putting in several hours a morning Umbering up neglected muscles, an hour of new soft-shoe stuff with Joe Crusoe, and making a tour of the city to look at every entertainer who had something new.
Also she was weighing the prospects for her next engagement. In the background was the chance of going to London as a co-featured player in a Gershwin show then playing
