Siesta, p.6
Siesta, page 6
She was sitting at her Louis XIV poudreuse when she heard the car return, stop under the porte cochère, drive on to the garage. She listened for the doorbell, gazing obliquely through her window at the down-pouring sunlight muffling the lawn and the shrubbery with a still woolen heat. Already the green of the spring grass was old, patched with ragged spots of oak brown that gave it a color at a distance like the uniforms the boys wore just a few years ago when she had put on the white dress and the cap with the red cross in it and shown the season’s débutantes how to roll bandages,—khaki, no, olive drab.… She thought he must have rung and she had failed to hear it. She went down.
He wasn’t in the living room, though, and she walked to the door to the veranda. The yellow wicker chairs were empty, giving off a sort of phosphorescent glow under the green and orange awnings. She turned back with a slight frown between her eyes and lifted the hanging band of tapestry by the fireplace to ring for Rosa and ask where he was. Then she heard the latch on the front door move with a subdued click and saw the dark hall fill with a growing daylight and the door opening slowly. A cluster of thoughts appeared in her mind then sank away: the bell must be out of order, get Rosa to go to the door, go herself, the informality might appeal to the artist.
“Come in, Saint Julian. I am so glad to see you. The bell is out of order. Rosa didn’t hear you ring—”
He looked solemnly at the V of her neck as she smiled and held out her hand, a gray-streaked twist of black hair out of line on his temple as if he had run his fingers through it; then his face lighted up and he handed her his walking stick.
She flushed slightly, taking it, but went on, smiling, “I hope you didn’t have to wait in the sun. But there is usually a little shade out there—”
He left her to put the walking stick away and strolled into the living room. She hung the stick on a chair and followed him; the air seemed to be filled with the warm scent of magnolia blossoms.
“It is terribly warm, isn’t it?” she said; evidently it was going to be a little difficult. There was something almost childlike about genius.
He rested his relaxed eyes blankly on her smile for a moment, then said with his marked English accent, “I beg your pardon.”
“Summer’s beginning early this year,” she said, thinking of his accent and his calm austerity and the weary ennui of his manner; all that could be very attractive against the right background.
He lifted his shoulders slightly and picked a green mint out of the dish. “It’s always summer.”
“How true that is! Yes, that’s so true. I wonder sometimes if it is really very good for us down here in Dixie to have no cold weather.”
He bit the mint, looked at the half in his fingers, then put that in his mouth too. She watched him for a silent second, surprised, then glanced at her Venetian blinds drawing the sharp black lines across the bright window; peculiarly full of summer, those dark bands across the sunlight,—and that sweet odor of magnolia, heavy like poured honey.
“Sit down, Saint Julian. Tell me about your plans for the summer.… What kind of cigarettes do you smoke?” She offered him a long silver box containing four kinds, then sat down opposite him on the linen-covered divan as Giulio in a black coat brought the tomato-juice cocktails.
Saint Julian declined the cocktail but took another mint.
She felt that she ought to speak to him, as a child might need to be spoken to. “Don’t you think, Saint Julian, you’d rather have the mints after luncheon? They may spoil your appetite if you eat them before.”
“If Beethoven, madam, came to your house and ate mints before luncheon you would be proud you had seen him do it.”
She gasped slightly. “I—I don’t mind at all, Saint Julian—”
“By the way, madam,” he said, glancing round the room, “is your husband here?”
“My husband?” she said, startled, her voice choking a little. “My husband is dead.”
“Ah!” He reached for another mint, bit it, then turned toward her sincerely. “Did you kill him?—Or did I kill him?”
She tried to set the cocktail deliberately on the table beside her but some of it shook over the rim; she somehow wanted her hands free, she didn’t know why.
He glanced at his cuffs in the silence, then pulled a magnolia petal out of his sleeve. “I’m lined with magnolia blossoms,” he said seriously.
Her forehead went cold and she stared at the petal almost tearfully.
He bent his other arm and looked up the sleeve, then carefully slipped out a crumpled bloom, brown-streaked where his fingers had rubbed it. He stood up and bowed before her, handing her the flower.
She accepted it with a wan smile, dabbing at her lips with the cocktail napkin. She tried to speak but nothing came.
“I am stuffed with magnolia blossoms. I am replete with lotus flowers.” He opened his coat and showed her the waxen leaves and flowers protruding from the inside of his frayed sleeves.
She drew herself up and inhaled deeply through her taut nostrils; the fragrance of the blooms almost stifled her.
“Daphne, fleeing from the sun god, my lady, became a laurel tree. But I am a Southerner. I am becoming a magnolia flower.… There are some more growing behind my neck.”
She thought she was going to faint. She didn’t know whether she could lift her hand to pull the bell or not. Then she saw that he was going and she felt like weeping with relief.
“Good-by, madam.” He bent over her shaking hand and touched it with his lips. “I wish I could stay longer, but I am having luncheon at one with Mrs. Winthrop Pickens.”
She pulled the bell and Giulio came and showed him out.
When Giulio returned she said to him, staring straight in front of her, “Tell Rosa to bring me a cup of tea upstairs. I won’t be down to luncheon.”
Giulio glanced at her with quick solicitude.
“That’s all, Giulio.”
“Yes, madam.”
9. Local Page
Wednesday, June 24
Mr. James McFarlane snatched the first paper that fanned out of the Daily News press, retreated to his cane-bottomed chair, tilted it adoitly back under the green drop-light, whipped the edition open to the page of local and sectional news, and settled himself to a critical examination of his handiwork:
HOG BUSINESS IN
GEORGIA LOOKING UP—
S. C. DRY LEADER
DECRIES DERN’S
VIEW ON REPEAL
In a sweeping reply to issues raised by repealists, Dr. J. C. Roper, chairman of the federation of organizations for prohibition in South Carolina, said today that prohibition had decreased drunkenness, reduced—
COTTON CHOPPING
JOBS OPEN HERE—
UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT OF UNION SOLDIERS
TO HOIST THE SOUTHERN FLAG RECOUNTED
DETAILS OF FORT SUMTER INCIDENT COME TO LIGHT FROM
LONG LOST EPISTLE
Mrs. W. Winthrop Pickens left on Monday for her cottage in Southampton, Long Island, after spending the winter in Georgetown at her home, the beautiful Villa Felice—
JENKINS CO. POSSE
USES BLOODHOUNDS
IN TRACKING NEGRO
ALLEGED SLAYER SOUGHT AFTER
SHOOTING AT AN ALL
NIGHT JAMBOREE
Sheriff G. M. Fennells of Jenkins County and a posse of men gathered for the purpose, spent Sunday tracking with bloodhounds Charlie Knight colored, alleged to have shot and killed another negro named Farlow about Sunup Sunday morning at a frolic near Herndon. There was not a mark on the negro’s body; one shot through the open mouth, direct to the vital spot, ended the life and broke up the party—
BAPTISTS GATHER
AT MILLEN SOON
FOR ANNUAL MEET
TRI-COUNTY SESSION—
The many friends of young Dr. Lucian Abercorn are delighted to learn of his return home to Georgetown after an extensive sojourn in European capitals—
LOCAL COTTON
DECLINES AFTER
EARLY RESPONSE
Middling cotton declined eight points yesterday to close at 11.65 as compared with the previous close of 11.73—
CHAPTER TWO
1. Patrimony
Thursday, June 25
When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, young Henri d’Aragné (his family, according to the records, was of apparently some consequence in Bordeaux), joined the host of some 500,000 Protestants who were fleeing the country and took ship to England. The next thing we hear of him was in 1689, when he was put in charge of a shipload of Huguenots sailing for the English colonies in America. “After a weary voyage and many trials and losses,” says his journal, now in the possession of the South Carolina Historical Society (his wife died at sea and he speaks of himself elsewhere as one ‘usé de chagrin’), “but with undying faith, we landed first at Port Royal, South Carolina, and subsequently at Charles Town, where we were kindly received and succored by the City Council.” He seems to have been a person of some education and was a tutor in the family of a Mrs. Boyle of Charleston until his second marriage, to Mrs. Boyle’s eldest daughter. There is a letter in the collection of the historical society to his father in Bordeaux, dated 1695, in which he says, “We enjoy perfect health here and an abundance of all that is necessary for me and mine. God gave me a son on the 17th of July.”
Either this son, or possibly a younger son (the record is not very clear), was evidently named Pierre after the old man in France, for in 1739 a regiment of volunteers took ship from Charleston for Savannah to join Oglethorpe in an expedition against the Spanish possessions in Florida, and the Charleston regiment was in command of Pierre d’Aragné. He married the daughter of a well-to-do Englishman who owned a large plantation on the Savannah River. He seems to have lived for a while in Charleston, where his wife bore him three sons and a daughter, but his death is recorded in the Horse Creek Methodist Church a few miles above Savannah, so it would seem that he returned with his family to the plantation.
Two of the boys died when they were children, in an epidemic of malaria, but the eldest, Henri, lived to be appointed Lieutenant Governor of the colony under the Crown. He was evidently quite an eminent man and J. T. W. Bulloch in his History of Colonial Georgia devotes a whole chapter to him and his works. For our purpose, though, it is enough to note that at his death he was survived by four daughters and three sons.
In the third year of the war, before his death, Henri’s son, Jules d’Aragné (though they seem to have begun to spell it at about this time as one word, Daragné), quarreled with his father, ran away from home, and joined General Marion. After the war Jules found himself in Georgetown. The quarrel with his father may have contributed to his not returning to Savannah; at any rate, the next thing we hear of him is in Georgetown in 1807, when Colonel Jules Daragné is mentioned in the court house records as defense counsel in a case involving a land dispute.
William N. Daragne, apparently his grandson (the accent seems to have been dropped, and the probable pronunciation of the name was the same as today: Daranny), “attended the then famous school of Professor Waddell at Willington”—the quotation is from some private papers belonging to the family—“graduated at the Alabama College and afterwards continued his studies at Berlin and Heidelberg. He practiced his profession of law in Wedgefield District, Alabama, served in the Mexican War under General Scott as Captain of D Company Palmetto Regiment and was killed at the gates of Mexico City, September 13, 1847.”
One of his sons, Nathaniel, rose to be a colonel in the Army of Northern Virginia and was wounded in a battle on the outskirts of Richmond; he returned to Georgetown with the bones of his left wrist shattered and an arm that he wore in a soft leather sling until his death in 1908. He had two daughters and a son (who died as a child), whom he had named Lee.
The eldest of these daughters married Thomas Hill, a lawyer. They had two daughters and a son before Thomas Hill’s death from pneumonia in 1918.
This son, Lee Hill, equipped with the ingredients that have been described to you, returned home after the Armistice, tried first this job then that, sold securities, was a salesman in the Dodge agency, then a clerk in a cotton office, and finally after ten years, in 1928, seemed to hit at last upon the one thing that he was best qualified to do, for he had held the job for four years and gave every outward sign of having caught his stride. He was the assistant manager of the Sinclair filling station on the corner of Green and Marbury Streets at which Mr. Applewhite’s taxi driver paused to have him put in two gallons of gasoline.
2. Company
Friday, June 26
In not going into the state of their finances with Austin, neither Eliot nor Gwendolyn had any desire to mislead him. They weren’t trying to stand before him in a false light of wealth; it was just that they wanted to avoid the serious misconstruction he might put on their arrival if they laid all their cards on the table and told him they had between them just about eighty dollars with nothing else in sight until the first of September. He might have thought they had come down because their money was running low; he might even have thought they were going to ask him for a loan. This would really have put them in an unfair light. Eliot hated to borrow money from his friends, and on the one or two occasions when he had been forced to, he had paid it back immediately upon receipt of his quarterly check; he owed a Philadelphia tailor and three of the best women’s shops in Fifty-seventh Street, but he didn’t owe any of his friends. He wasn’t embarrassed at all by having about seven dollars a week until September and he would gladly have discussed it with Austin from all possible angles except that he didn’t want their visit to be clouded by Austin’s fear that he might have to refinance them.
He was fond of Austin. He remembered him well. Austin had been two classes ahead of him, and though Austin had seen him round, the club for only one year and never heard of him since, he had seen Austin for a year and heard stories about him and his Southern accent until he graduated. He remembered particularly well the June dinner at the club the year Austin graduated when Austin stood up in his chair after declining the dessert and said that he came from a place where the hospitality grew on trees. “There’s plenty of hospitality,” Austin said, “and I want you all to come to see me. I don’t want you to wait for any more invitation; I’m inviting you now. And if any of you get within a hundred miles of my front door and don’t come in to see me I’m going to feel mighty, mighty bad.”
This made a tremendous impression on young Owens. He would never have considered issuing such an invitation himself and the picture of that broad and generous land where the son of the house invites a hundred of his college friends to see him without even naming a date brought him to his feet with loud and sincere applause. He wondered what his own mother and father would say if he told them that even ten of his classmates were coming home with him tomorrow; he knew that though his indulgent mother might send their Swedes off immediately for sheets and towels, his more business-like father was likely to tell him to go at once to the telephone and wire at least nine of them to stay where they were. He had never been south of Pinehurst but he thought Alabama must be a wonderfully fertile place to breed hospitality so colossal. Being then at the end of his Sophomore year, the amount of real disillusionment he had covered was practically negligible, and it didn’t occur to him that the telling difference between his invitation of ten for tomorrow and Austin’s of a hundred for anytime was not so much a matter of number as of definiteness; he hadn’t yet been far enough South to realize that in a pause of the conversation where someone else might light a cigarette or cross his legs, a true Southerner is more than likely to invite everybody present to come spend some winter with him.
He never forgot that dinner and as the years rolled round to his graduation, then to his entrance into the Harvard Law School and his exit some three months later, then to his connection with the law firm of Owens, Scott, Wharton and (as he put it) ‘his redemption thence’ the following year, and finally to that Yale-Princeton football game with a friend of his and two blind dates and his marriage later on that evening to one of them, he always had it in the back of his mind that some day he would drop in on Austin Toombs.
The marriage was another turn of the screw on Mr. Owens’s already rich cynicism and he told his secretary to mail no more allowance checks to Mr. Eliot until further notice. His mother, however, after a good deal more ado, transferred to him a certain block of oil stock that had been paying her a thousand dollars every quarter; she knew this would be quite a comedown for him, but she thought it might keep them from having to sleep on park benches or starving to death.
His wife, whose name he discovered was Gwendolyn, turned out to be the daughter of one of the original pilots on the Newark-Washington run. She had lost count of the number of hours she had spent in the air; she was twenty-two and she had made her first flight when she was ten. She had a private license and when he asked her at their first breakfast what she would like for a wedding present she gave him a really beautiful smile through a smear of butter and crumbs and said, “How about one of those Waco Wright 300s?”
He didn’t know what she was talking about but he found out soon enough; it cleaned out his safe deposit box at the Philadelphia Trust Company, but he was glad to do it; he would have been glad to give her the Philadelphia Trust Company. He thought she was the most seductive thing he had ever seen and he was as proud of her as if she had been a shining new Rolls-Royce. Indeed, he liked to go about with her where people could see them and if casual males seemed habitually unable to hide the covetousness in their eyes, it did not cause him to feel resentment, but rather somewhat the same sort of satisfaction as having them envy him his Rolls; indeed, being a thoroughly good-natured boy, it would have taken very little more to make him stop and (to follow out our metaphor) offer them a ride. He did not analyze it so far, but she had, indeed, an extraordinarily cosmic attitude toward her beauty, being interested in it not so much for its own sake as for its exchange value.
