19. SHE LOVED ME FOR THE DANGERS
TYPE:
Restless wanderer, appearing at intervals of four or six years to sit on the hearthstones of his old college friends and look wistful. At the slightest chance of attaining a hearthstone of his own he dives back into the wilderness.
SUBJECT:
Any co-ed
APPARATUS:
1 Automobile
1 Head of gray hair, above one of these
never fading bronzed faces.
1 Precise accent.
REMARKS:
The advanced student will favor this method, since it transcends the makeshifts and awkwardness of all other human experiments and utilizes a policy which has heretofore been monopolized by divinity (see Introduction). Here the student seduces by means of imagination. It is the culmination of our efforts; the ultimate degree of subtlety.
SHE LOVED ME FOR THE DANGERS
It is a dull afternoon in the sorority house and Dorothy is trying to make up her mind to study; but she isn’t having much success. In fact, the idea is so unattractive that she doesn’t waste more than half a minute trying. Everybody has gone to the last game of the season across the river, and Dot didn’t go because she has used up all her week-ends. Oh, well ... Sunday afternoon and five hours before her date. Nothing left to read. Washed her hair yesterday—you mustn’t do that more than once a week. Manicured her nails before lunch. Plucked her eyebrows, darned her stockings—oh, bother Sunday afternoon. And there is a theme due on Tuesday, but that’s a long time and anyway you write better themes at the last minute. Oh, glory, there’s the phone. What if just once it could be someone unexpected?
“Miss Dormer? This is Donald Banks, from Los Angeles. I have a letter for you from Genevieve Reed. When I left I mentioned that I might be coming through here and she thought——”
“Why, any friend of Jen’s—why, of course. Can’t you come over?”
“I’d very much like to. When would it be convenient?”
“Any time this afternoon. I think I’m busy tonight, but if you’d like to come over now or pretty soon it would be all right.”
Well! Oh, well, he’ll probably be a mess. Jen never mentioned him. Haven’t heard from Jen lately, though. It wouldn’t be like her to send up a wet smack.
No, you aren’t a wet smack at first glance, anyway. Interesting looking. Lean and distinguished; something like Lewis Stone, if not quite so tall. How funny of you to think that the sitting-room is really a place to sit—surely no one else spent all afternoon on that horse-hair sofa since the Dean of Women was a pup. If you were one of the boys you’d know enough to suggest going out. But it is rather fun at that.
“Oh, you mustn’t think,” she protests, “that you have to go just because it’s so quiet. We’re allowed to have visitors indefinitely on Sunday.”
Laugh. “You’re tired, though. I remember Sunday afternoon at school from my own experience. Thank you, and—I may see you quite soon again? Not only, I assure you, because my time in your city is so limited.”
Ooo, what a funny way to talk! “Certainly.” It is queer, how hard it is to keep from getting an accent like that too, while she talks to him. “Yes, I’d like to see you again before you leave. It doesn’t happen to be a very—busy time for me just now.”
“How fortunate! I don’t want to interfere with your studies. Can’t we have dinner this evening?”
“Oh—why—yes, thank you, I’d like to. At six-thirty? Good-bye.”
Oh, well, Tom ought to excuse her for an out-of-town friend. That is perfectly legitimate.
“Hello. Alpha Belt house? Is that Tom? Well, listen, Tom? I hope you won’t be perfectly furious because I really can’t help it, but it’s this way——”
A co-ed is a well-protected person, in spite of what may be read in the newspapers about her freedom. She is so hemmed in by public opinion—not the opinion of the outside world, but that of her own public, the campus—that it is with a distinct sense of guilt that she associates with anyone so foreign as an out-of-town visitor, be his appearance ever so distinguished. Not that Dorothy isn’t thrilled as well as apprehensive. If she dared, she would even have dined in the roseate and familiar publicity of Ye Kandy Shoppe, stared at by her friends and causing a poorly concealed flurry of gossip. But you would be puzzled by Ye Kandy Shoppe, and perhaps dissatisfied with the food. That is why you proceed solemnly through the menu of the Imperial Hotel Dining-room, sherbet-on-the-side and all, surrounded by the younger married set of the town, with an occasional drummer or a professor’s party.
“Well, yes, I see that you know Genevieve quite well,” you are saying. “Much better than I do. It’s perhaps the only fault that I can find with my work—the lack of real social contact. Going and coming as I do, I must resign myself to being the picturesque figure; oft forgotten. Interesting, perhaps, but so occasionally!” Smile.
“But doesn’t your work keep you in one place at a time pretty much?” asks Dorothy. “I thought it took at least six years at a time to build bridges. Surely there are people there—in Abyssinia, or wherever you’re going next?”
“People? My dear child, you’ve been going to the movies. The natives are really dark—much more so than you seem to suspect. Of course once in a while you do find people, and if they are people at all, you understand, they mean much more to you than they would here, at home. That mode of life has given me a distressingly intense way of taking my friends, I find. You children with your great circles of acquaintances wouldn’t understand my attitude.”
“I might,” she says, eagerly. “Once I spent a summer camping—in Maine—with just three other people, and I certainly was glad to get back to town. I was so sick of them!”
“Yes, that might give you some idea of it. But don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. After all in the face of certain things, what do people matter? I give you my word—” here your face grows intent as you finger a fork; you seem to have forgotten Dorothy and the dining-room “—a man gets pretty close to the fundamental reason for things, out there. So close that he is perilously near to discovery. What keeps him from going farther? Sometimes he goes too far. Sometimes a boy is sent back home just for going too far—for discovering, or thinking he has discovered.... Fever? Insanity? Truth?”
Dorothy shivers. The tawdry dining-room is forgotten in dark imaginings. Slimy twisted vegetation, slow streams of oily water, houses built on stilts, lifted from the swamp.... Or the monotonous sun of the desert; the undulating, glaring floor of sand with one heroic little clump of tents....
“Would you care to dance?” You have come out of it. She smiles, rather late, and nods. You dance the way they do in those places in Europe, she thinks—slow and romantic, not hopping all over, like Tom.
“When do you start back again?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I won’t know until I get back to New York. They keep these things quiet, of course—international policy, I might say.” For the first time, your smile is for her; a personal thing. “I have a very definite regret that my visit is so short. It’s an unaccustomed feeling. The last time I saw civilization—let’s see, it must have been four years ago—I was positively glad to go back. Where do they keep you young girls? Are you always at school? Ah, well—thank education for our salvation!”
It is difficult to imagine you at a movie, she thinks. You go, however, and sit through a news weekly, a very old domestic comedy, at which you laugh quite surprisingly hard, and half a problem picture before you give it up.
“I say,” you suddenly announce, “stupid of me not to have thought of it before. Simply driving somewhere would be better than this. Or have you a rule about cars and that sort of thing?”
“I suppose we must have, but no one ever pays any attention to it.”
You must drive a good way before the Sunday traffic is at last left behind.
“You drive well for not being used to the city,” she ventures.
“It’s good fun,” you explain. “Much more dangerous than the life out there. And you mean to say that you do a lot of driving? In streets like those in town? Brave girl!”
Safe from the eyes of any university official, she takes a cigarette. Your silence and proximity are very thrilling; there will be a lot to tell the room mate when she gets back. Or perhaps it would be better not to say too much—to act as if this sort of out-of-town friend is to be expected from a background like Dorothy’s. She is rather different than the usual co-ed, anyway, she thinks comfortably. More interesting friends, on the whole. Of course these little boys are all right when you have nothing else....
Stop the car on the edge of the Hawk Bluff, which in the sober light of common day looks out over a not-very-far-down golf course, but which now hangs over mysterious abysses.
“Dorothy,” you say.
It has come at last; she knows it and turns to you with the fatal feeling of one for whom circumstance has been too strong. And then nothing happens for a minute.
“You are a lovely child,” you say. Then, very quickly, draw her to you and kiss her on the brow. And then drive home through the quiet night. Anyway, it is quiet until you reach town and the boisterous returning students.
Home again, an hour before she has to be. Stand in the light-speckled gloom of the verandah and say farewell.
“So very, very nice of Jen. I’ll never forget it. Something to remember when I go back.... Lovely child.”
And without even another kiss on the brow you are gone.
Does Dorothy call up the Alpha Delt house to arrange for a malted before she goes to bed? Or does she go to her room and sit there in the dark, thinking?
She goes to her room quite thoroughly, as it were, seduced. After all, this is the most subtle method of them all.