“We’re going to look over a location for a tennis court. I think I’ll take up tennis, myself,” he told Mrs. Marders with heavy irony. It was later still when they returned. Mrs. Marders was gone and Belle sat alone, with a magazine. A youth in a battered Ford had called for the girl Frankie, but another young man had dropped in, and when Horace and Harry came up the three youths clamored politely for Harry to join them.
“Take Horace here,” Harry said, obviously pleased. “He’ll give you a run for your money.” But Horace demurred and the three continued to importune Harry.
“Lemme get my racket, then,” he said finally, and Horace followed the heavy scuttling of his backside across the court. Belle looked briefly up.
“Did you find a place?”
“Yes,” Harry answered, uncasing his racket again; “where I can play myself, sometimes. A place too far from the street for everybody that comes along to see it and stop.” But Belle was reading again. Harry unscrewed his racket press and removed it.
“I’ll go in one set; then you and I can get in a fast one before dark,” he told Horace.
“Yes,” Horace agreed. He sat down and watched Harry stride heavily on to the court and take his position, watched the first serve. Then Belle’s magazine rustled and slapped on to the table.
“Come,” she said, rising. Horace rose, and Belle preceded him and they crossed the lawn and entered the house. Rachel moved about in the kitchen, and they went on through the house, where all noises were remote and the furniture gleamed peacefully indistinct in the dying evening light.
Belle slid her hand into his, clutching his hand against her silken thigh, and led him on through a dusky passage and into her music room. This room was quiet too and empty and she stopped against him half turning, and they kissed. But she freed her mouth presently and moved again, and he drew the piano bench out and they sat on opposite sides of it and kissed again. “You haven’t told me you love me,” Belle said, touching his face with her finger tips, and the fine devastation of his hair, “not in a long time.”
“Not since yesterday,” Horace agreed, but he told her, she leaning her breast against him and listening with a sort of rapt, voluptuous inattention, like a great, still cat; and when he had done and sat touching her face and her hair with his delicate wild hands, she removed her breast and opened the piano and touched the keys.
Saccharine melodies she played, from memory and in the current mode, that you might hear on any vaudeville stage, and with a shallow skill, a feeling for their oversweet nuances. They sat thus for some time while the light faded, Belle in another temporary vacuum of discontent, building for herself a world in which she moved romantically, finely, and a little tragically, with Horace sitting beside her and watching both Belle in her self-imposed and tragic role, and himself performing his part like the old actor whose hair is thin and whose profile is escaping him via his chin, but who can play to any cue at a moment’s notice while the younger men chew their bitter thumbs in the wings.
Presently the rapid heavy concussions of Harry’s feet thumped again on the stairs mounting, and the harsh wordless uproar of his voice as he led someone else in the back way and up to his bathroom. Belle stopped her hands and leaned against him and kissed him again, clinging.
“This is intolerable,” she said, freeing her mouth with a movement of her head. For a moment she resisted against his arm, then her hands crashed discordantly upon the keys and slid through Horace’s hair and down his cheeks tightening. She freed her mouth again. “Now, sit over there.”
He obeyed; she on the piano bench was in half shadow. Twilight was almost accomplished; only the line of her bent head and her back, tragic and still, making him feel young again. We do turn corners upon ourselves, like suspicious old ladies spying on servants, Horace thought. No, like boys trying to head off a parade. “There’s always divorce,” he said.
“To marry again?” Her hands trailed off into chords; merged, faded again into a minor in one hand. Overhead Harry moved with his heavy staccato tread, shaking the house. “You’d make a rotten husband.”
“I won’t as long as I’m not married,” Horace answered.
She said, “Come here,” and he went to her, and in the dusk she was again tragic and young and familiar with a haunting sense of loss, and he knew the sad fecundity of the world and time’s hopeful unillusion that fools itself. “I want to have your child, Horace,” she said, and then her own child came up the hall and stood diffidently in the door.
For a moment Belle was an animal awkward and mad with fear. She surged away from him in a mad, spurning movement; her hands crashed on the keys as she controlled her instinctive violent escape that left in the dusk a mindless protective antagonism, pervading, in steady cumulate waves, directed at Horace as well.
“Come in, Titania,” Horace said.
The little girl stood diffidently in silhouette. Belle’s voice was sharp with relief. “Well, what do you want? Sit over there,” she hissed at Horace. “What do you want, Belle?” Horace drew away a little, but without rising.
“I’ve got a new story to tell you, soon,” he said. But little Belle stood yet, as though she had not heard, and her mother said:
“Go on and play, Belle. Why did you come in the house? It isn’t suppertime yet.”
“Everybody’s gone home,” she answered. “I haven’t got anybody to play with.”
“Go to the kitchen and talk to Rachel, then,” Belle said. She struck the keys again, harshly. “You worry me to death, hanging around the house.” The little girl stood for a moment longer; then she turned obediently and went away. “Sit over there,” Belle repeated. Horace resumed his chair and Belle played again, loudly and swiftly, with cold hysterical skill.
Overhead Harry thumped again across the floor; they descended the stairs. Harry was still talking; the voices passed on toward the rear, ceased. Belle continued to play; still about him in the darkening room that blind protective antagonism, like a muscular contraction that remains after the impulse of fright has died. Without turning her head she said, “Are you going to stay to supper?”
He was not, he answered, waking suddenly. She did not rise with him, did not turn her head, and he let himself out the front door and into the late spring twilight, where was already a faint star above the windless trees. On the drive just without the garage, Harry’s new car stood.
At the moment he was doing something to the engine of it while the house-yard-stable-boy held a patent trouble-lamp above the beetling crag of his head, and his daughter and Rachel, holding tools or detached sections of the car’s vitals, leaned their intent dissimilar faces across his bent back and into the soft bluish glare of the light. Horace went on homeward. Twilight, evening, came swiftly. Before he reached the corner where he turned, the street lamps sputtered and failed, then glared above the intersections, beneath the arching trees.
3
It was the evening of little Belle’s recital, the climacteric of her musical year. During the whole evening Belle had not looked at him, had said no word to him, even when, in the departing crush at the door and while Harry was trying to persuade him upstairs for a nightcap, he felt her beside him for an instant, smelled the heavy scent she used. But she said no word to him even then, and he put Harry aside at last and the door closed on little Belle and on Harry’s glazed dome, and Horace turned into the darkness and found that Narcissa hadn’t waited. She was halfway to the street.
“If you’re going my way, I’ll walk along with you,” he called to her. She made no reply, neither did she slacken her pace nor increase it when he joined her.
“Why is it,” he began, “that grown people will go to so much trouble to make children do ridiculous things, do you suppose? Belle had a houseful of people she doesn’t care anything about and most of whom don’t approve of her, and kept little Belle up three hours past her bedtime; and the result is, Harry’s about half tight, and Belle is in a bad humor, and little Belle is too excited to go to sleep, and you and I wish we were home and are sorry we didn’t stay there.”
“Why do you go there, then?” Narcissa asked. Horace was suddenly stilled. They walked on through the darkness, toward the next street light. Against it branches hung like black coral in a yellow sea.
“Oh,” Horace said. Then: “I saw that old cat talking with you.”
“Why do you call Mrs. Marders an old cat? Because she told me something that concerns me and that everybody else seems to know already?”
“So that’s who told you, is it? I wondered. . . .” He slid his arm within her unresponsive one. “Dear old Narcy.” They passed through the dappled shadows beneath the light, went on into darkness again.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“You forget that lying is a struggle for survival,” he said, “little puny man’s way of dragging circumstance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the world. Revenge on the sinister gods.”
“Is it true?” she
