That afternoon she met Paul downtown. “Was everything all right last night?” he said. “Why, what is it? Did they—”
“No. Paul, marry me.” They were in the rear of the drugstore, partially concealed by the prescription counter, though anyone might appear behind it at any moment. She leaned against him, her face wan, tense, her painted mouth like a savage scar upon it. “Marry me. Or it will be too late, Paul.”
“I don’t marry them,” Paul said. “Here. Pull yourself together.”
She leaned against him, rife with promise. Her voice was wan and urgent. “We almost did last night. If you’ll marry me, I will.”
“You will, eh? Before or after?”
“Yes. Now. Any time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not even if I will now?”
“Come on, now. Pull yourself together.”
“Oh, I can hear you. But I don’t believe you. And I am afraid to try and find out.” She began to cry. He spoke in thin and mounting annoyance:
“Stop it, I tell you!”
“Yes. All right. I’ve stopped. You won’t, then? I tell you, it will be too late.”
“Hell, no. I don’t marry them, I tell you.”
“All right. Then it’s good-bye. Forever.”
“That’s O.K. by me, too. If that’s how you feel. If I ever see you again, you know what it will mean. But no marrying. And I’ll see next time that we don’t have any audience.”
“There won’t be any next time,” Elly said.
The next day he was gone. A week later, her engagement was in the Memphis papers. It was to a young man whom she had known from childhood. He was assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day. He was a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits, who had been calling on her for about a year with a kind of placid formality.
He took supper with the family each Sunday night, and when infrequent road shows came to town he always bought tickets for himself and Elly and her mother. When he called on her, even after the engagement was announced, they did not sit in the dark swing.
Perhaps he did not know that anyone had ever sat in it in the darkness. No one sat in it at all now, and Elly passed the monotonous round of her days in a kind of dull peace. Sometimes at night she cried a little, though not often; now and then she examined her mouth in the glass and cried quietly, with quiet despair and resignation. ‘Anyway I can live quietly now,’ she thought. ‘At least I can live out the rest of my dead life as quietly as if I were already dead.’
Then one day, without warning, as though she, too, had accepted the armistice and the capitulation, the grandmother departed to visit her son in Mills City. Her going seemed to leave the house bigger and emptier than it had ever been, as if the grandmother had been the only other actually living person in it.
There were sewing women in the house daily now, making the trousseau, yet Elly seemed to herself to move quietly and aimlessly, in a hiatus without thought or sense, from empty room to empty room giving upon an identical prospect too familiar and too peaceful to be even saddening any longer.
For long hours now she would stand at her mother’s bedroom window, watching the slow and infinitesimal clematis tendrils as they crept and overflowed up the screen and onto the veranda roof with the augmenting summer. Two months passed so; she would be married in three weeks. Then one day her mother said, “Your grandmother wants to come home Sunday.
Why don’t you and Philip drive down to Mills City and spend Saturday night with your uncle, and bring her back Sunday?” Five minutes later, at the mirror, Elly looked at her reflection as you look at someone who has just escaped a fearful danger. ‘God,’ she thought, ‘what was I about to do? What was I about to do?’
Within the hour she had got Paul on the telephone, leaving home to do it, taking what precautions for secrecy her haste would afford her.
“Saturday morning?” he said.
“Yes. I’ll tell mother Phi . . . he wants to leave early, at daylight. They won’t recognize you or the car. I’ll be ready and we can get away quick.”
“Yes.” She could hear the wire, distance; she had a feeling of exultation, escape. “But you know what it means. If I come back. What I told you.”
“I’m not afraid. I still don’t believe you, but I am not afraid to try it now.”
Again she could hear the wire. “I’m not going to marry you, Elly.”
“All right, darling. I tell you I’m not afraid to try it any more. Exactly at daylight. I’ll be waiting.”
She went to the bank. After a time Philip was free and came to her where she waited, her face tense and wan beneath the paint, her eyes bright and hard. “There is something you must do for me. It’s hard to ask, and I guess it will be hard to do.”
“Of course I’ll do it. What is it?”
“Grandmother is coming home Sunday. Mother wants you and me to drive down Saturday and bring her back.”
“All right. I can get away Saturday.”
“Yes. You see, I told you it would be hard. I don’t want you to go.”
“Don’t want me to . . .” He looked at her bright, almost haggard face. “You want to go alone?” She didn’t answer, watching him. Suddenly she came and leaned against him with a movement practiced, automatic. She took one of his arms and drew it around her. “Oh,” he said. “I see. You want to go with someone else.”
“Yes. I can’t explain now. But I will later. But mother will never understand. She won’t let me go unless she thinks it is you.”
“I see.” His arm was without life; she held it about her. “It’s another man you want to go with.”
She laughed, not loud, not long. “Don’t be foolish. Yes. There’s another man in the party. People you don’t know and that I don’t expect to see again before I am married. But mother won’t understand. That’s why I must ask you. Will you do it?”
“Yes. It’s all right. If we can’t trust one another, we haven’t got any business marrying.”
“Yes. We must trust one another.” She released his arm. She looked at him intently, speculatively, with a cold and curious contempt. “And you’ll let mother believe . . .”
“You can trust me. You know that.”
“Yes. I’m sure I can.” Suddenly she held out her hand. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
She leaned against him again. She kissed him. “Careful,” he said. “Somebody might . . .”
“Yes. Until later, then. Until I explain.” She moved back, looked at him absently, speculatively. “This is the last trouble I’ll ever give you, I expect. Maybe this will be worth that to you. Good-bye.”
That was Thursday afternoon. On Saturday morning, at dawn, when Paul stopped his car before the dark house, she seemed to materialize at once, already running across the lawn. She sprang into the car before he could descend and open the door, swirling down into the seat, leaning forward and taut with urgency and flight like an animal. “Hurry!” she said. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
But he held the car a moment longer. “Remember. I told you what it meant if I came back. O.K.?”
“I heard you. I tell you I’m not afraid to risk it now. Hurry! Hurry!”
And then, ten hours later, with the Mills City signs increasing with irrevocable diminishment, she said, “So you won’t marry me? You won’t?”
“I told you that all the time.”
“Yes. But I didn’t believe you. I didn’t believe you. I thought that when I — after — And now there is nothing else I can do, is there?”
“No,” he said.
“No,” she repeated. Then she began to laugh, her voice beginning to rise.
“Elly!” he said. “Stop it, now!”
“All right,” she said. “I just happened to think about my grandmother. I had forgotten her.”
Pausing at the turn of the stair, Elly could hear Paul and her uncle and aunt talking in the living-room below. She stood quite still, in an attitude almost pensive, nun-like, virginal, as though posing, as though she had escaped for the moment into a place where she had forgotten where she came from and where she intended to go.
Then a clock in the hall struck eleven, and she moved. She went on up the stairs quietly and went to the door of her cousin’s room, which she was to occupy for the night, and entered.
The grandmother sat in a low chair beside the dressing table littered with the frivolous impedimenta of a young girl . . . bottles, powder puffs, photographs, a row of dance programs stuck into the mirror frame. Elly paused. They looked at one another for a full moment before the old woman spoke: “Not contented with deceiving your parents and your friends, you must bring a Negro into my son’s house as a guest.”
“Grandmother!” Elly said.
“Having me sit down to table with a negro man.”
“Grandmother!” Elly cried in that thin whisper, her face haggard and grimaced. She listened. Feet, voices were coming up the stairs, her aunt’s voice and Paul’s. “Hush!” Elly cried. “Hush!”
“What? What did you say?”
Elly ran to the chair and stooped and laid her fingers on the old woman’s thin and bloodless lips and, one furiously importunate and the other furiously implacable, they glared
