Flight, page 11
The human impulse to talk, to move, to be saying or doing something, anything rather than endure introspection however slight, found gushing release as soon as the minister finished. Cloaks and wraps half donned as the benediction was being pronounced were adjusted and feminine hats given the final pat of arrangement, while little eddies of gusts of greeting and conversation flew back and forth. Comments, most of them admiring, were made on the sermon; inquiries, most of them perfunctory, regarding the health of those absent and those present; remarks on the weather, all the petty chit-chat which serves as the mucilage that holds together everyday social relations.
Mimi maneuvred her way from the pew into the aisle, timing it so exactly that she reached the end of the seat just as the Hunters were passing up the aisle. She greeted them inclusively but her eyes were on Carl. He sought to avoid her but as his parents passed on he was left standing face to face with Mimi. She smiled easily, he somewhat embarrassedly.
“I haven’t seen you lately—that is, only at a distance,” she said. “I saw you enter Wright’s grocery rather hastily one day, though,” she added maliciously.
Carl flushed and seemed anxious to escape.
“Why should you see me?” he demanded, half angrily. “You practically told me to stay away from you just because of some silly old fools gossiping “
“You know that isn’t the truth,” she corrected him. “But I didn’t mean for you to avoid me as though I had some sort of contagious disease.”
Carl’s aggressiveness vanished, a tortured, hurt look in his eyes.
“It’s best things go along this way, Mimi,” he pleaded. “If we can’t be the kind of friends we were, it’s wisest I stay away from you altogether.”
His earnestness, for some reason she could not explain; created within her a vague uneasiness. He went on hurriedly before she could speak, his voice lowered to prevent those near overhearing.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking during the last few weeks and I think you were right in breaking off our friendship. No, I don’t mean on account of Hilda—I wish I did care for her, it would make things easier. But I don’t and that’s all there is to it. I was happy with you, Mimi, because you made me content to go along and try to satisfy Dad by working. But now I see I was just fooling myself—I never will be an insurance man “
“But, Carl, you’ve no right—” Mimi interrupted him.
“Right? What do I care about right? And who’s to say what is right for me and what isn’t? I’m no fool I know pretty well what I’m doing and I know I’m a pretty rotten sort—you’ll know what I mean by that before long—as soon as the anvil chorus starts on me again.”
“Why don’t you come to see us any more, Carl? You know papa and I’ll always welcome, you.” Neither of them noticed that Mrs. Daquin had not been included.
“No—I’ve caused enough talk about you already,” he answered cryptically as he lost himself in the crowd …
For many days Mimi thought of the talk she had had with Carl. Naturally his mysterious statements of the talk he was certain to create piqued her interest. As discreetly as she could, she sought to find out what he referred to but with no success until Mrs. Hunter called at the Daquin home a week or two later and asked to speak to Mimi, alone. Mrs. Daquin, bursting with curiosity, regretfully complied with the suggestion that she absent herself.
As soon as the door closed, Mrs. Hunter explained her mission. She prefaced her story with a disconcerting question.
“Mimi,” she demanded, her eyes fixed on Mimi’s face, “do you love my Carl?”
“Oh, Mrs. Hunter, why do you ask me such a question?” Mimi, startled, parried the query. She was amazed—she had never asked herself so directly the question Carl’s mother had flung at her.
“Don’t be frightened or worried—I was so in hopes you did care for him. His father and I are terribly worried about him—he has always been a restless, queer sort of a child but as long as you and he were friendly he seemed satisfied. Oh, yes, I know the silly talk that was going around.” she put in as Mimi started to speak, “but nobody who counted ever believed that rot.”
“That wasn’t the reason we did what we did, Mrs. Hunter,” Mimi quickly broke in. “It was on account of Hilda—”
“Hilda? What did she have to do with it?”
Mimi told her the story while Mrs. Hunter showed on her face the amazement she felt.
“Silly little fool!” she pontifically announced when Mimi had finished.
“She isn’t a silly little fool and she’s far too good a girl for Carl or any other boy I’ve seen around here!” Mimi hotly declared, her anger flaming high at the disparagement of her friend. It never occurred to her that she had applied the same term to Hilda or at least terms suspiciously similar in meaning.
“Oh, don’t misunderstand me, dearie,” Mrs. Hunter hastened to cover her hasty statement. “Mind you, I didn’t mean she wasn’t good enough for my Carl but that she didn’t show very good judgment. But that isn’t what I came to talk about. It’s this. Carl, since you and he stopped seeing each other, has taken to staying out nights with all sorts of people and three times this week he’s come home drunk. He’s in such a nasty temper I’ve been afraid to say anything to him and I know there’ll be a terrible scene when his father finds out about his carryings-on.”
“I’m sorry to hear Carl’s acting this way, Mrs. Hunter, but what have I got to do with it?” Mimi, puzzled, asked.
“I was wondering if you’d let him see you occasionally—and—and I thought maybe you cared enough to be willing to do that and see if he would stop. Oh, Mimi, he’s my boy and I want you to help me to save him from himself.”
Mimi did not know what to say. She felt sorry, terribly sorry, for Mrs. Hunter—knowing her, she knew the ordeal through which the older woman was going, imperiously proud as she was, in abasing herself before a younger woman, an outsider, and confessing her weakness, her impotence in saving her own son. On the other hand there was her promise to Hilda. True, Carl had said twice he did not care and would never care for Hilda, but that made her own promise none the less binding. She felt impatience with Carl coming over her. She was not puritanical by nature but Carl’s rapid succumbing to temptation vexed her, he was destroying the ideal she had created in her mind of which he was the embodiment.
Her indecisiveness was due more than to any other cause to her own lack of understanding of the full importance of Mrs. Hunter’s words. This was not because of stupidity, it was because of Mimi’s amazing innocence of life. She had never fully realized why there should have been so much talk regarding the visit she and Carl had paid to the dance hall. The people she saw there she knew were not of her class nor were they of the kind she ever encountered. Margot and Jean had closely guarded Mimi from all influences which they felt might contaminate her mind. They had seen to it that her playmates were from families which observed identically the same customs and beliefs as did the Daquins. At school Mimi had heard phrases which would have shocked her had she understood their import but, knowing nothing of what they meant, she had given them no particular thought.
The same circumstance had existed during the years in Atlanta, where it was considered highly immoral to mention even the most rudimentary facts about oneself. Mimi had asked questions but these had been more or less skillfully evaded. She had asked only once about certain amazingly distressing things she noticed in her body and the answer to that query, implying as it did that she had said something she should not have mentioned, had sealed her lips. But in her own mind she had wondered at and been distressed by these things, by periods of intense depression when the most minor incident made her cry or laugh. Thus Mrs. Hunter’s dark suggestions regarding Carl’s deviations meant little to her and she wondered that his own mother and father could be so lacking in control over him that she had to appeal to her to help save him.
“I asked Carl at church two weeks ago,” she began, Mrs. Hunter meanwhile waiting anxiously for Mimi’s decision, “why he never came to see us anymore and he told me he didn’t want to.”
“Oh, please, Mimi,” the mother pleaded, begging almost piteously for her boy, “ask him again and again until he does come. You can save him—if you will.”
“I’ve asked him once and if he doesn’t want to come to see me then I won’t ask him again,” Mimi said firmly.
Mrs. Hunter rose, her eyes wet with tears. She jabbed them jerkily with a tiny square of linen, ludicrously small for one of her bulk, Mimi thought irrelevantly even as she pitied the older woman’s plight …
Mrs. Daquin sought skillfully to pry from Mimi the reason for Mrs. Hunter’s visit but Mimi evaded her questions and went to her own room. Her resentment against Carl increased. It was so silly of him to act as he was doing. Mrs. Hunter was an old frump, it was true, but she was a decent old sort after all. Mimi wondered just what he had been doing. Getting drunk was pretty bad for a young man who was yet in most respects a boy. Mimi remembered Jean and his demijohn of double port-wine after Margot died and before Mary Robertson came to New Orleans. Her loyalty to Jean and the contact with intoxication having removed some of its terrors made her maintain stoutly that getting drunk wasn’t the worst sin in the world. She wondered what sort of people Mrs. Hunter was referring to when she spoke of Carl’s new associates. There had been a note in Mrs. Hunter’s voice when she said it that brought little chills of apprehension to Mimi. Suppose Carl were killed by these shadowy and horrible creatures. Mimi felt an iciness gripping her that took her breath from her. The very indefiniteness of the danger that threatened Carl made it all the more terrifying and horrific …
Chapter X
It was not long before Mimi knew in greater detail the reasons for Mrs. Hunter’s apprehension. Like a great orchestra beginning pianissimo upon a symphony, the tongues started clacking in soft and cryptic whisperings. Carl, with reckless disregard of the conventions, made no attempt to conceal his derelictions, his wandering from the ultra-strict codes which governed his family and the set in which it moved. He gave the prying eyes and clattering tongues an abundance of fuel, his flaunting of local standards serving much as the upward sweep of a conductor’s baton would draw forth a great swelling tone from his players. Carl was seen no more at church despite several acrimonious discussions on the subject with his father. Twice he was seen at a moving-picture show with a girl who was déclassée—years before, her name had been linked in somewhat opprobrious fashion with that of a married man of the town. It was true no proof had been produced of any wrongdoing on their part and, as was the usual custom in such affairs, the man’s connexion with the embryonic scandal had been long since forgotten. With the passage of years the blot on her name had grown through the very in definiteness of the original rumour. For years she had been considered by the good Christians of the town almost as though her offence had been that of being “a fancy woman.”
Carl had known the girl for many years, as long, in fact, as he could remember. When Mimi had refused to see him, he had by chance met and talked with the girl one day and she had interested him. Even when he said to her one day: “Why haven’t we been friendly all these years?” she had made no defence of her reputation nor had she complained of the years of ostracism she had undergone. Had she done either of these, Carl’s interest in her would probably have died instantly. Knowing in a hazy sort of way of her story, he was attracted by her calm acceptance of it, and he found himself more and more drawn to her. Neither of them thought of their friendship save as friendship. But it would have been a feat of no mean proportions to convince those who saw them together that there was nothing questionable about their relationship. Her halting suggestion to Carl that he might bring unpleasant comment upon himself if he were seen too frequently with her had angered him—he resolved to go with her wherever and whenever he chose.
This affair, together with the known fact that Carl was drinking rather heavily, was all that was needed to consign him to the outermost circles. His family’s standing saved him from complete condemnation, though at the same time it brought more criticism upon him. He knew that had he come from a less respected family little would have been said regarding his derelictions. But the fact of his dissipation, which he took little pains to conceal, only furnished the groundwork for the reputation that grew with startling speed. Bandied about over tea-cups and back fences, across pews and shop-counters, through telephone and letter, a character of infinitely intricate pattern was woven around him.
All this meant little to Carl, however. He knew now that his feeling towards Mimi was not the disinterested, impersonal affair he had thought it. Women were queer, he concluded. At times they can be as ruthless and as without scruples as pirates or highwaymen and then turn right around and permit far-fetched and ultra-chivalrous and foolish little consciences to destroy happiness for themselves and for others. He knew Mimi did not love him but he could not understand why she had insisted, all because she felt she owed some vague sort of duty to Hilda, that they sacrifice all the happiness there had been for them in their companionship.
And while Carl was rambling through the misty and unhappy realm of his thoughts, Mimi was treading much the same path. She heard the stories of his dissipation—her friends saw to it that she should hear them with all current elaborations. These, instead of having the intended effect of driving the wedge between her and Carl deeper, appealed to her vanity—she rather enjoyed the romantic glow which filled her on realizing that a man was throwing his life away for love of her. She found, too, that Carl occupied an increasing part in her thoughts. At night she lay awake for hours, seeing his face, hearing his voice. The separation which she herself imposed began to act as a boomerang upon her emotions—instead of holding herself in check, as she had never experienced any difficulty in doing when she was seeing Carl regularly, she now found that she could no longer keep him from her thoughts. With rapidly growing intensity these moods came upon her until the mention of Carl’s name caused a queerly delightful sensation within her …
Mrs. Adams took her turn entertaining the Fleur-de-Lis in October. Jean objected strenuously to going but Mrs. Daquin insisted.
“It’s only once a year husbands are allowed to attend and it’s little enough to ask you to go just this once. Besides, Mrs. Adams will feel badly if you don’t go,” she had pleaded, successfully.
After they had gone Mimi sat on the porch enjoying the crisp, chilly air. Tiring, she was entering the house when she saw a familiar figure enter and pass through the circle of light cast by the corner street-lamp. She waited until the shadowy form was passing the gate. It turned and looked up at the darkened house as it passed and she was happy that it did so.
“Carl,” she called softly.
The figure stopped suddenly.
“Won’t you come in awhile?” she urged.
Carl stood indecisively at the gate, then opened it and entered. As he greeted her a mantle of constraint like a pall fell upon them both.
“Come inside it’s rather chilly out here,” she remarked.
He followed her into the parlour and sat silent while she adjusted the shades and switched on the light.
“Well, you’re back again even if I did have to shanghai you,” she laughed. The forced pleasantry and the laugh both fell rather flat, she felt.
“Why did you make me come in?” he demanded, sullenly.
“Make you come in?” she laughed again.
“Don’t try to be coy, Mimi, or evade my question,” Carl almost angrily charged. “You told me to stay away from you—”
She evaded the challenge.
“I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about you lately,” she sought to change the subject.
“What of it? And what’s the use of discussing it? These people here would talk about Jesus Christ himself.”
Mimi watched him closely. Here was a newer and more bitter mood than any in which she had hithertoo seen him. And he looked badly, too. His face was haggard. Under his eyes were dark circles, and the eyes themselves were sunken, reddened. Deep lines were in his face. He looked distrait, miserable. As she watched, his face became softer and he sank it in his hands. In muffled tones he began to speak again.
“Mimi, I’m a weak, vicious creature and no good to myself or anybody else. I used to fuss a lot about these people around here who talk about other people’s affairs I still talk about them and hate them. But, after all, they’re right—I’m everything vile and low they’ve said I am—”
“You mustn’t talk that way, Carl. You’re nothing of the sort.”
She tried to comfort him but he stopped her with a gesture of mingled impatience and denial. His abjectness stirred her deeply. She felt again the wave of tenderness coming over her that she had experienced the last time she had talked with him in this very room, the time she had sent him away. She was a little frightened—her emotion was deeper, more moving than before. His unhappiness had subtly transferred itself to her and she found herself filled with an almost overwhelming desire to touch him, to hold him near her.
Carl raised his head and looked searchingly at her. His gaze disturbed her, moved her, made her uncomfortable. She remembered the day she first met him, the inclusive way in which he had surveyed her and the resentment his look had stirred in her. There was no resentment now. Instead there was a fear he might see way down beneath and know how she had missed him, how she had longed for him.
“Mimi, there’s one thing I want to tell you now that I’m here. I feel like a dog in telling you—I have no business even thinking it. But I want you to know—no matter what stories you hear—that—that—I love you!” His tone was half defiant, half tender, as he nervously flung the last three words at her.
Mimi sat silent, her eyes in her lap. With Carl’s declaration a great peace came upon her. Doubt, fear, uncertainty left her.
“And I love you, too, Carl,” she said, simply.
