He has an engagement with a young lady.”
“He should find ample field for gentlemanly drinking there,” Horace said. “Gentlemanly anything else. I suppose that’s why he is going down ahead of time.”
“Taking an old girl to a dance,” the boy said. “He’s going to Starkville Saturday, to the base ball game. He said he’d take me, but you wont let me go.”
4
Townspeople taking after-supper drives through the college grounds or an oblivious and bemused faculty- member or a candidate for a master’s degree on his way to the library would see Temple, a snatched coat under her arm and her long legs blonde with running, in speeding silhouette against the lighted windows of the Coop, as the women’s dormitory was known, vanishing into the shadow beside the library wall, and perhaps a final squatting swirl of knickers or whatnot as she sprang into the car waiting there with engine running on that particular night. The cars belonged to town boys. Students in the University were not permitted to keep cars, and the men—hatless, in knickers and bright pull-overs—looked down upon the town boys who wore hats cupped rigidly upon pomaded heads, and coats a little too tight and trousers a little too full, with superiority and rage.
This was on week nights. On alternate Saturday evenings, at the Letter Club dances, or on the occasion of the three formal yearly balls, the town boys, lounging in attitudes of belligerent casualness, with their identical hats and upturned collars, watched her enter the gymnasium upon black collegiate arms and vanish in a swirling glitter upon a glittering swirl of music, with her high delicate head and her bold painted mouth and soft chin, her eyes blankly right and left looking, cool, predatory and discreet.
Later, the music wailing beyond the glass, they would watch her through the windows as she passed in swift rotation from one pair of black sleeves to the next, her waist shaped slender and urgent in the interval, her feet filling the rhythmic gap with music. Stooping they would drink from flasks and light cigarettes, then erect again, motionless against the light, the upturned collars, the hatted heads, would be like a row of hatted and muffled busts cut from black tin and nailed to the window-sills.
There would always be three or four of them there when the band played Home, Sweet Home, lounging near the exit, their faces cold, bellicose, a little drawn with sleeplessness, watching the couples emerge in a wan aftermath of motion and noise. Three of them watched Temple and Gowan Stevens come out, into the chill presage of spring dawn. Her face was quite pale, dusted over with recent powder, her hair in spent red curls. Her eyes, all pupil now, rested upon them for a blank moment. Then she lifted her hand in a wan gesture, whether at them or not, none could have said. They did not respond, no flicker in their cold eyes. They watched Gowan slip his arm into hers, and the fleet revelation of flank and thigh as she got into his car. It was a long, low roadster, with a jacklight.
“Who’s that son bitch?” one said.
“My father’s a judge,” the second said in a bitter, lilting falsetto.
“Hell. Let’s go to town.”
They went on. Once they yelled at a car, but it did not stop. On the bridge across the railroad cutting they stopped and drank from a bottle. The last made to fling it over the railing. The second caught his arm.
“Let me have it,” he said. He broke the bottle carefully and spread the fragments across the road. They watched him.
“You’re not good enough to go to a college dance,” the first said. “You poor bastard.”
“My father’s a judge,” the other said, propping the jagged shards upright in the road.
“Here comes a car,” the third said.
It had three headlights. They leaned against the railing, slanting their hats against the light, and watched Temple and Gowan pass. Temple’s head was low and close. The car moved slowly.
“You poor bastard,” the first said.
“Am I?” the second said. He took something from his pocket and flipped it out, whipping the sheer, faintly scented web across their faces. “Am I?”
“That’s what you say.”
“Doc got that step-in in Memphis,” the third said. “Off a damn whore.”
“You’re a lying bastard,” Doc said.
They watched the fan of light, the diminishing ruby taillamp, come to a stop at the Coop. The lights went off. After a while the car door slammed. The lights came on; the car moved away. It approached again. They leaned against the rail in a row, their hats slanted against the glare. The broken glass glinted in random sparks. The car drew up and stopped opposite them.
“You gentlemen going to town?” Gowan said, opening the door. They leaned against the rail, then the first said “Much obliged” gruffly and they got in, the two others in the rumble seat, the first beside Gowan.
“Pull over this way,” he said. “Somebody broke a bottle there.”
“Thanks,” Gowan said. The car moved on. “You gentlemen going to Starkville tomorrow to the game?”
The ones in the rumble said nothing.
“I dont know,” the first said. “I dont reckon so.”
“I’m a stranger here,” Gowan said. “I ran out of liquor tonight, and I’ve got a date early in the morning. Can you gentlemen tell me where I could get a quart?”
“It’s mighty late,” the first said. He turned to the others. “You know anybody he can find this time of night, Doc?”
“Luke might,” the third said.
