Elly removed her hand. From the row of them in the mirror frame she jerked one of the cards with its silken cord and tiny futile pencil. She wrote on the back of the card. He is not a negro he went to Va. and Harvard and everywhere.
The grandmother read the card. She looked up. “I can understand Harvard, but not Virginia. Look at his hair, his fingernails, if you need proof. I don’t. I know the name which his people have borne for four generations.” She returned the card. “That man must not sleep under this roof.”
Elly took another card and scrawled swiftly. He shall. He is my guest. I asked him here. You are my grandmother you would not have me treat any guest that way not even a dog.
The grandmother read it. She sat with the card in her hand. “He shall not drive me to Jefferson. I will not put a foot in that car, and you shall not. We will go home on the train. No blood of mine shall ride with him again.”
Elly snatched another card, scrawled furiously. I will. You cannot stop me. Try and stop me.
The grandmother read it. She looked at Elly. They glared at one another. “Then I will have to tell your father.”
Already Elly was writing again. She thrust the card at her grandmother almost before the pencil had ceased; then in the same motion she tried to snatch it back. But the grandmother had already grasped the corner of it and now they glared at one another, the card joining them like a queer umbilical cord. “Let go!” Elly cried. “Let it go!”
“Turn loose,” the grandmother said.
“Wait,” Elly cried thinly, whispering, tugging at the card, twisting it. “I made a mistake. I—” With an astonishing movement, the grandmother bent the card up as Elly tried to snatch it free.
“Ah,” she said, then she read aloud: Tell him. What do you know. “So. You didn’t finish it, I see. What do I know?”
“Yes,” Elly said. Then she began to speak in a fierce whisper: “Tell him! Tell him we went into a clump of trees this morning and stayed there two hours. Tell him!” The grandmother folded the card carefully and quietly. She rose. “Grandmother!” Elly cried.
“My stick,” the grandmother said. “There; against the wall.”
When she was gone Elly went to the door and turned the latch and recrossed the room. She moved quietly, getting a robe of her cousin’s from the closet, and undressed, slowly, pausing to yawn terrifically. “God, I’m tired,” she said aloud, yawning. She sat down at the dressing table and began to manicure her nails with the cousin’s equipment. There was a small ivory clock on the dressing table. She glanced at it now and then.
Then the clock below stairs struck midnight. She sat for a moment longer with her head above her glittering nails, listening to the final stroke. Then she looked at the ivory one beside her. ‘I’d hate to catch a train by you,’ she thought. As she looked at it her face began again to fill with the weary despair of the afternoon.
She went to the door and passed into the dark hall. She stood in the darkness, on her naked feet, her head bent, whimpering quietly to herself with bemused and childish self-pity. ‘Everything’s against me,’ she thought.
‘Everything.’ When she moved, her feet made no sound. She walked with her arms extended into the darkness. She seemed to feel her eyeballs turning completely and blankly back into her skull with the effort to see. She entered the bathroom and locked the door.
Then haste and urgency took her again. She ran to the angle of the wall beyond which the guest room was and stooped, cupping her voice into the angle with her hands. “Paul!” she whispered, “Paul!” holding her breath while the dying and urgent whisper failed against the cold plaster. She stooped, awkward in the borrowed robe, her blind eyes unceasing in the darkness with darting despair.
She ran to the lavatory, found the tap in the darkness and tempered the drip of water to a minor but penetrating monotony. Then she opened the door and stood just within it. She heard the clock below stairs strike the half hour. She had not stirred, shaking slowly as with cold, when it struck one.
She heard Paul as soon as he left the guest room. She heard him come down the hall; she heard his hand seek the switch. When it clicked on, she found that her eyes were closed.
“What’s this?” Paul said. He wore a suit of her uncle’s pajamas. “What the devil—”
“Lock the door,” she whispered.
“Like hell. You fool. You damned fool.”
“Paul!” She held him as though she expected him to flee. She shut the door behind him and fumbled for the latch when he caught her wrist.
“Let me out of here!” he whispered.
She leaned against him, shaking slowly, holding him. Her eyes showed no iris at all. “She’s going to tell daddy. She’s going to tell daddy to-morrow, Paul!” Between the whispers the water dripped its unhurried minor note.
“Tell what? What does she know?”
“Put your arms around me, Paul.”
“Hell, no. Let go. Let’s get out of here.”
“Yes. You can help it. You can keep her from telling daddy.”
“How help it? Damn it, let me go!”
“She will tell, but it won’t matter then. Promise. Paul. Say you will.”
“Marry you? Is that what you are talking about? I told you yesterday I wouldn’t. Let me go, I tell you.”
“All right. All right.” She spoke in an eager whisper. “I believe you now. I didn’t at first, but I do now. You needn’t marry me, then. You can help it without marrying me.” She clung to him, her hair, her body, rich with voluptuous and fainting promise. “You won’t have to marry me. Will you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Listen. You remember that curve with the little white fence, where it is so far down to the bottom? Where if a car went through that little fence. . . .”
“Yes. What about it?”
“Listen. You and she will be in the car. She won’t know, won’t have time to suspect. And that little old fence wouldn’t stop anything and they will all say it was an accident. She is old; it wouldn’t take much; maybe even the shock and you are young and maybe it won’t even . . . Paul! Paul!” With each word her voice seemed to faint and die, speaking with a dying cadence out of urgency and despair while he looked down at her blanched face, at her eyes filled with desperate and voluptuous promise. “Paul!”
“And where will you be all this time?” She didn’t stir, her face like a sleepwalker’s. “Oh. I see. You’ll go home on the train. Is that it?”
“Paul!” she said in that prolonged and dying whisper. “Paul!”
In the instant of striking her his hand, as though refusing of its own volition the office, opened and touched her face in a long, shuddering motion almost a caress. Again, gripping her by the back of the neck, he assayed to strike her; again his hand, something, refused.
When he flung her away she stumbled backward into the wall. Then his feet ceased and then the water began to fill the silence with its steady and unhurried sound. After a while the clock below struck two, and she moved wearily and heavily and closed the tap.
But that did not seem to stop the sound of the water. It seemed to drip on into the silence where she lay rigid on her back in bed, not sleeping, not even thinking. It dripped on while behind the frozen grimace of her aching face she got through the ritual of breakfast and of departure, the grandmother between Paul and herself in the single seat.
Even the sound of the car could not drown it out, until suddenly she realized what it was. ‘It’s the signboards,’ she thought, watching them as they diminished in retrograde. ‘I even remember that one; now it’s only about two miles. I’ll wait until the next one; then I will . . . now. Now.’ “Paul,” she said. He didn’t look at her. “Will you marry me?”
“No.” Neither was she looking at his face. She was watching his hands as they jockeyed the wheel slightly and constantly. Between them the grandmother sat, erect, rigid beneath the archaic black bonnet, staring straight ahead like a profile cut from parchment.
“I’m going to ask you just once more. Then it will be too late. I tell you it will be too late then, Paul . . . Paul?”
“No, I tell you. You don’t love me. I don’t love you. We’ve never said we did.”
“All right. Not love, then. Will you marry me without it? Remember, it will be too late.”
“No. I will not.”
“But why? Why, Paul?” He didn’t answer. The car fled on. Now it was the first sign which she had noticed; she thought quietly, ‘We must be almost there now. It is the next curve.’ She said aloud, speaking across the deafness of the old woman between them: “Why not, Paul? If it’s that story about nigger blood, I don’t believe it. I don’t care.” ‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘this is the curve.’ The road entered the curve, descending.
She sat back, and then she found her grandmother looking full at her. But she did not try now to veil her face, her eyes, any more than she would have tried to conceal her voice: “Suppose
