XXXV
It was nearly four o'clock that afternoon when the dust-covered car arrived at Malcolm's one-eyed place some miles from Charleston, South Carolina. It was a long, tedious, hot drive through country which Beatrix called untidily picturesque. The telegraph posts along the roads leaned at rakish angles. Everywhere there were cotton fields with irregular lines of plants from which the blossoms had fallen, dilapidated shacks with piccaninnies playing about them and uncorseted colored women squatting on the stoops. Strange washing hung out to dry with great frequency and every now and then there was a fine Colonial house with a garden alight with flowers.
The inn, or hotel, as it insisted on being called, was the only building in the settlement which seemed to have received a coat of white paint for many moons and it was obviously the centre of attraction. Three rather carelessly treated Fords were parked near its main entrance and two drummers were rocking on the unwashed stoop with soft damp cigars tucked into the corners of their mouths. Little families of chickens ran after their conscientious mothers around the building and several turkeys stalked aimlessly here and there like actors out for a walk. Numerous outhouses leaned against each other for support,—one or two of them showing an ingenuity in repair that was almost Irish. On the walls of several were pasted glaring bills of motion picture plays then being shown in Charleston, and one was entirely given up to the glorification in large letters of a certain small pill. There was, indeed, a curious intimacy, a sort of who-cares-a-whoop air about the whole place. You could tease the turkeys, scatter the chickens, grin at the Fords and spit with the drummers. It was Carolina and hot and the cotton was coming on. What the deuce, anyway!
From the beginning of the journey to the end of it Franklin hardly opened his mouth. Watched surreptitiously by Beatrix, he sat silent and peculiarly distrait, like a man who was either working out an engrossing problem or bored to extinction. After several dogged attempts to get him to talk, Malcolm gave him up and for some miles devoted himself entirely to Beatrix. To her he told everything funny that he had ever heard or invented without winning a smile. She too was as far away and as unresponsive as Franklin. And so, giving them both up, Malcolm joined the sphinxes and let his imagination run loose. When this unsociable party halted for lunch at a wayside inn the conspiracy of silence was broken, but only as it would have been by three people who were total strangers thrown together briefly. The few necessary commonplaces were said. Franklin and Beatrix went on thinking and Malcolm continued to imagine what they were thinking about. The driver of the hired car, a middle-aged man who had married an argumentative woman in his youth, gave a great deal of slow consideration to the matter. His sense of beauty pulled his sympathy towards Beatrix, but his sense of brotherhood impelled him to stand by Franklin in what he decided must be a matrimonial bust-up, and so he remained neutral as far as they were concerned and concentrated pity upon Malcolm, to whom, luckily, sleep eventually came.
Franklin was suffering from inevitable reaction. He had returned to earth from a dream. He had come back to a very practical world from the land of make-believe. He had fallen from the unnatural height of a sublime, passionless love to the natural level of a man whose passion pounded on the walls of his heart and ran like electricity through his veins. Out of the brief mist which had shut out the truth of things he stared to find that Beatrix was as far away from him as ever. He was in the pit of depression, especially as he had a feeling that any chance he might have had to win Beatrix was gone now that she had left the yacht. It seemed to him that she had escaped.
As for Beatrix, who had felt the beat of Franklin's heart against her breast and would smilingly have gone beyond the outpost of eternity in his arms, reaction came with a shock that left her with no other desire than to cry. Suddenly to have found herself and the meaning of life; suddenly, out there in the fog, to have seen the sense and sanity of things and burgeoned into a woman under the warmth of love and dreamed all night of its fulfilment and then to waken to this,—a man who neither looked at her nor spoke, who hustled her from the yacht and would probably leave her with her friends and go his way. If he had loved her as well as been stirred by the attraction of her sex he must have told her so that morning. This was the end of all her arguments. Having her at his mercy he let her go, she told herself bitterly. Probably he had escorted her to shore to renew his flirtation with Ida Larpent. Ah! That was it. Malcolm had said that she had remained at the hotel. She wouldn't be a bit surprised if the Larpent woman had bribed Malcolm to come to the yacht with his tale of woe ... and when, as the car drew up, Ida Larpent sauntered out wearing one of her most enigmatical smiles and a very becoming frock the hitherto unknown demon of jealousy seized Beatrix in his burning grasp and for the first time in her life she became the little sister of all womankind, a girl whose wealth had turned to ashes and whose autocracy fell about her like dead leaves.
"How's Brownie?" She ignored Mrs. Larpent's hand and cheek, and passed into the house without waiting for an answer. The screen door went back with a clang.
"Good Lord," said Franklin, summing up the whole place in one rapid glance, "what a filthy hole!"
Malcolm pointed to the chickens. "But look at these," he laughed, refreshed.
"Welcome," said Ida Larpent, not so much clasping Franklin's hand as embracing it. She had the knack. "It's good to see you again. Life has its compensations."