dropped in, and when Horace and Harry cameup the three youths clamored politely for Harry to join them.
“Take Horace here,” Harry said, obviously pleased. “He’ll give youa run for your money.” But Horace demurred and the three continued to importune Harry. “Lemme get my racket,” he said finally and Horace followed the heavy scuttling of his backside across the court Belle glanced up at them briefly.
“Did you find a place?” she asked.
“Yes,” Harry answered, uncasing his racket again ‘Where I can play by 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 onto the court and take his position, watched the first serve. Then Belle’s magazine rustled and slapped onto the table.
“Come,” she said, rising. Horace rose too, 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 Wore remote and the furniture gleamed peacefully indistinct in the dying evening light Belle slid her soft prehensile hand into his, clutching his hand against her softly clothed thigh, and led him into a room beyond folding doors. This room too was quiet and empty and here she stopped against him half turning, land they kissed. But she freed her mouth presently and led him on in the rising dusk 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 fingertips, 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 shallow skill, a sense for their oversweet nuances. They sat thus for some time, Belle in another temporary vacuum of discontent, building with her hands and for herself an edifice, a world in which she moved romantically,finely and a little tragical; while Horace sat beside her and watched both Belle in her self-imposed and tragic role, and himself performing 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 ceased her hands and leaned her body 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,” she directed.
From his chair, she at the piano was half in shadow. Twilight was deeper yet; only the line of her bent head and her back, tragic and still, somehow young. We do turn corners upon ourselves, like suspicious old ladies spying on servants, Horace thought No, Eke boys trying to head off a parade. “There’s always divorce,” he said.
“To marry again?” Her hands trailed off into chords; they merged and faded again into a minor motif 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 rose, and in the dusk she was again tragic and young and familiar, and he knew the sad fecundity of the world, andtime’s hopeful disillusion 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 with a mad spuming movement; her hands crashed on the keys before she controlled her instinctive violent escape and 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? Sitover 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 supper time, 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 looked at them for a moment, then she turned obediently and went away. “Sit over there,” Belle repeated Horace resumed his chair and Belle sat in the twilight and played loudly and swiftly, with cold and hysterical skill. Overhead he heard Harry again, heard them descend the stairs. Harry was talking again; the voices passed on toward the rear, ceased. Belle continued to play. It was dance music in the new jazz tradition; still about him in the dark roomthat mindless protective antagonism like a muscular contraction that remains after the impulse of fright has faded Without ceasing she said:
“Are you going to stay for supper?”
He was not, he answered, waking suddenly. She did not rise with him, did not turn her head again, and he let himself out of the house and descended into the violet dusk of late spring, 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 over the bald crag of his head and his daughter and Rachel peered across his bent back, leaning their intent and dissimilar faces into the soft bluish glare of the light. Horace went on homeward. and supperward. Before he reached the narrow street on which be lived the street lamps sputtered and failed, then glared beneath the dark boughs of trees, beneath delicate motionless veils of leaves.
4
“General William Booth has gotten a leprechaun on Uriah’s wife.” Horace told himself, and gravely presented the flowers he had brought, and received in return the starry incense of her flying eyes
