The mumbling instantly became voices, loud enough to be recognized. You tiptoed in your bare feet down the narrow hall to the door of Larry’s room.
“You’re a little fool,” Larry was saying. “Can’t you take a hint?”
Then Erma, somewhat louder and much more calmly.
“Come, Larry, you’re the fool. Why do you pretend I’m not attractive to you? Such conceit. Don’t you know that I made you kiss me the first time I decided it was worth the trouble?”
“The first and the last. You’ve no sense of decency, Erma. Now go.”
“It would be nicer to kiss me now — like this.”
You heard a quick movement, and another. Larry’s voice came, “I tell you to go, I mean it,” and immediately you heard something that you would have given a great deal to see — a loud sharp slap, the smack of a heavy open palm.
You tiptoed swiftly back down the hall. What if it were Erma up there now in that room; imagine yourself here on these stairs, equipped, desperate, with death in your heart! Bah, you couldn’t even slap her as Larry did that night.
IV
He stood there, trying to force his brain to consider and decide the instant problem, whether to call to Mrs. Jordan. He was completely confused. If he called to her, that settled it; but if he did not call to her, how was he to know whether she had heard him come in, or seen him?
He stood there without moving a muscle, still less than halfway up the first flight, and all at once he heard a voice from a great distance calling to him, well, aren’t you coming up?
You fool, he told himself...
You fool, to stand here on the edge of hell.
So you did stop on the stairs, though, that night in Cleveland many years ago, and so did Lucy Crofts call down to you as you stood hesitating.
“Well, aren’t you coming up?”
At that time you would rather hear Lucy’s voice than any other sound in the world.
You decided, after the fiasco of your call to Mrs. Davis that the thing to do was to find a nice Cleveland girl and take her for a mistress. You went over your scanty list of friends and acquaintances; there was no one.
Of a late afternoon, as you walked from the office in Pearl Street to the Jayhawker Club, the sidewalks were filled with girls. Working girls, high-school girls, fur-coated girls. You knew that three out of five of these girls could be picked up, for Dick had said so.
The easiest way would be with the car. You began to leave the office a little early, get the car and drive around the Square, up and down Euclid Avenue, through the narrow crowded crosstown streets. You had often seen it done; one drove slowly, against the curb, and at just the right moment, one said in a low tone, rapidly, but clearly, “Hello, want to ride?”
But you never did actually pronounce those words.
Late one rainy afternoon in April, you were driving the car slowly along Cedar Avenue, aimlessly aware of the wet glistening pavements in the gathering dusk, the clanging street cars, the forest of bobbing umbrellas on the sidewalk at your right. Suddenly there was a sharp cry ahead, and other shouts of alarm as you automatically jammed your foot on the brake. You jumped out. Almost under your front wheels a girl was being helped to her feet. In an instant you were there beside her, helping another man hold her up.
“It’s my fault,” the girl was saying. “I’m not hurt. I stepped right in front of the car. Where’s my music?”
A search disclosed a black leather roll lying in a puddle of water against the curb. You picked it up and handed it to her.
“I’m terribly sorry,” you said. “That’s the first time I ever hit anybody.”
“I don’t think you really hit me, I think I just slipped. Goodness, I’m soaked too. I’d better get a cab.”
“I’d be glad to take you if you’ll let me,” you offered hurriedly.
She looked at your face, and down at her dress. “I suppose I’ll have to go back home. It’s quite a distance.”
“I haven’t a thing to do,” you assured her. “I have all the time there is. I was just fooling around watching the rain.”
She gave you a quick glance and sank back into a silence which was scarcely broken during the long ride. You wanted to talk but were afraid of making a false step. She was quite young, you guessed not over eighteen, and very pretty.
Finally you drew up at the curb in front of a large house set behind a wide lawn. It was still raining.
“My name is Will Sidney,” you said abruptly. “I’m the assistant treasurer of the Carr Corporation. I wonder if you would care to go to the theater with me sometime?”
She looked directly at you and said promptly and simply: “I’d like to very much.” Suddenly she smiled. “You know I’ve been arguing with myself the last ten minutes whether you’d say something like that to me.”
“How did it come out?”
“I didn’t decide, only I thought you might. I really would like to, only it wouldn’t be easy, because I live here with my uncle and aunt and they are very strict with me.”
“You could tell them we met somewhere.”
She frowned. “I don’t know. I could tell them something.”
It was arranged. You wrote down her name, Lucy Crofts, and the telephone number, and the name of her uncle, Thomas M. Barnes. Next day, at the lunch hour, you went to the Hollenden and got tickets for a play the following week; but you waited four days before telephoning her, as agreed.
When she took off her hat at the theater, and patted her hair and looked around at the audience, you realized that she was even better-looking that you had thought, and a little nearer maturity. But on the whole the evening was a disappointment. She didn’t care to go to supper afterwards, and driving home through the spring night she talked mostly of her father’s farm near Dayton.
A day or two later, receiving through Dick an invitation to a dance at the Hollenden, you phoned Lucy and asked her to go. That was more like it. She danced well, and so did you; and Dick danced with her once and afterwards observed to you:
“If she needs her shoes shined or anything and you’re too busy let me know.”
On the way home Lucy said: “I had a wonderful time. This is the latest I’ve ever been out. Of course I’m only nineteen. Mr. Carr dances very well, but not as well as you. You dance much better than I do.”
You took her to the theater again, several times, and to another dance or two. On one of those occasions you were invited by Mrs. Barnes to dine with them. You were no longer inventing fancies about her or imagining easy triumphs; with her the pose of a triumph had become absurd.
Towards the end of May Lucy began to talk of going home for the summer. In two weeks, she said, her music teacher would leave for Europe, and she was going home to the farm to remain until he returned in the fall. Or perhaps she would then go to New York; she supposed that was really the best thing to do, if her father could be persuaded.
“I’ve heard of a place down south of here,” you said. “Down near Cuyahoga Falls. A deep canyon, with walls two hundred feet high, quite wild. Let’s go down there next Sunday. We can drive it in two hours, easy.”
Her aunt and uncle didn’t like the idea, but they knew that a whole generation was against them, and early Sunday morning saw you off with a huge lunch basket and a thermos bottle of coffee. But it rained most of the day, and early in the afternoon you surrendered and returned to a roadhouse just outside the city, wet and chilled and hungry. Lucy didn’t seem to mind it, but you were unduly miserable, and when she asked you what was the matter you observed gloomily that it was only a little more than a week before she would be gone and you would be alone.