Teeftallow/Chapter 33

THE impending Northcutt-Jones suit in chancery became, during the next few weeks, the chief topic of gossip and speculation in Lane County. It was a dramatic situation with two of the cleverest and shrewdest tricksters the county had ever produced embattled against each other.

To Abner Teeftallow the coming legal action held no especial interest except that he perscnally liked Railroad Jones and particularly hated Perry Nerthcutt. The railroad, no matter into whose hands it fell, promised eventually to enrich Abner by enhancing the value of his indeterminate holdings in the county. The details of that enrichment, Abner left, through inclination and necessity, in the hands of Buckingham Sharp. In fact, Abner did nothing at all in Lanesburg except sign an occasional legal decument for Mr. Sharp. He had fallen, by great good luck, into that goal of the hill people, a state of complete idleness. Indolence was not only the hill idea of earthly bliss; it was their notion of Heaven. Heaven was a place where nobody worked or created anything. Up there everything was furnished free from a celestial ready-to-wear department: robes, crowns, jewels, etc.

By way of amusement, Abner spent some time with Beatrice Belle learning to dance to jazz records on a phonograph. His progress was not rapid, as Beatrice entirely failed to inspire him with a gusto for dancing. As she whirled him around she was tantalized by the absence of any spiritual response in his mechanical efforts.

"Why don't you sway with me?" she would cry out wasp​ishly. "When I step back you step forward so we'll stay together."

But Abner lacked that physical sympathy with Beatrice which takes the place of finish with the ordinary run of dancers. He could never dance with Beatrice Belle, he could only practise dancing.

"You'll make a pretty out over at Adelaide's next week," she would sniff.

"I thought Adelaide's party was a social?"

"We call it a social so people won't know, but it's a dance. She's goin' to have a nigger band from Columbia."

"I'll come out all right."

But Abner did not feel the confidence in his words. He had the hill fear of making himself ridiculous.

Once during such practising, Adelaide came to the Sandage home. She stood in the hallway and clapped her hands.

"I bid for the next dance, Valentino," she cried, and burst out laughing so immoderately that Abner stopped with a reddened face int he midst of a braying passage from the phonograph.

"Oh, go on, go on!" she insisted.

"No, you an' Beatrice Belle can dance if you want to."

"Now don't get peeved; everybody has to learn; why don't you let yourself go? Watch me and Beatrice."

She spread out her arms, floated over to Beatrice in rhythm to the interrupted strain, then entwined herself in her companion's clasp, and struck into a florid step, whirling herself this way and that, flinging her torso over Beatrice's arm. Then she floated away from her partner until only their fingertips were engaged; closed again and came to a gay halt, leaning backward with her head down laughing at Abner with an inverted face.

"That's the way you do it," she cried, twisting herself lithely upright again. "Just imagine there's not a bone in your body, that you're a flame blowing in the wind."

"Why, Adelaide, I didn't know you could do that!" cried Beatrice in astonishment.

​"That's æsthetic dancing, my dear; æsthetic dancing is meant to be seen by men who don't know how to dance. It's a kind of last arrow in a girl's quiver which may bring him down when he's gone too far for ordinary weapons—it's expensive to learn."

"I should think it would be," agreed Beatrice, who did not follow these innuendoes.

Abner looked at Adelaide seriously. He thought she was the limberest girl he had ever seen. An impulse came to him that he would like to dance with Adelaide, but he said nothing about it. After she had gone away, a vision of her swaying over Beatrice's arm, taking high, pointed steps to the music, lingered with him and became a part of his growing amorousness for the girl. After this brief dance he never looked at her again without sensing in her the possibility of her limberness, her pointed tread, and the swaying of her delicately modelled torso.

Notwithstanding these symptoms it was not until the evening of Adelaide's dance that Abner discovered whither his emotions tended. As Beatrice Belle drove over to the Jones residence she warned Abner as to what he was about to see.

"What was the last dance you went to, Abner?" she began diplomatically.

"Old man Warrington's, clost to Arntown."

"In the country?"

"Yeh."

"Well, of course they don't dance town dances in the country. Town dances may look a little funny to you at first—ever'body dancin' like they do, lots o' times with perfect strangers—jest git interduced an' go to dancin' with their arms aroun' each other tangoing and charleston-ing."

"It won't look funny to me," protested Abner, disliking Beatrice Belle's patronage. "I guess I'm hard-boiled, all right. I seen things at the railroad camp. . . ."

"Well, it looked funny to me at first." Beatrice Belle swerved her car to avoid a rut. "I felt the funniest when ​Mr. Pratt, that new drug clerk at Ransom's, jest said, 'Glad to meet you, Miss Sandage,' an' next minute put his arms aroun' me and his cheek against mine an' went to dancin'. I kinder gasped inside myse'f, but I'm used to it now. I hope he asks me again to-night; he's a wonderful dancer."

"I imagine the wickedness you folks carry on ain't up to much," disparaged Abner, implying a wide criminal experience of his own.

"Well . . . no . . . I guess not," admitted Beatrice, a little abashed, recalling the lurid tales which accompanied Abner from Irontown.

But later that evening in the ballroom of the Jones residence, Abner forgot the vaunt of his hard heart. The dancers actually on the floor, swirling and jiggling to the blare and clash of the jazz band from Columbia, filled him with a feeling of impropriety. From the first dance he had realized that his own efforts would be clumsy, and a painful self-consciousness kept him prisoner on a settee. This settee was behind two artificial palms which Adelaide had borrowed from the Ransom drug store through the good will of this same Mr. Pratt who had danced with Beatrice Belle. The palms formed a little retreat behind which Abner was gratefully concealed. Girls and men circled past his eyes in a never-ending stream. In the opposite corner the jazz band neighed away in feverish syncopation. The leader, a yellow Negro, had a mephistophelian cast of countenance which he kept moulded in a satanic grin. This grin was as mechanical and as much a stage property as the saxaphonist's waving of his instrument up and down, but Abner did not know this: it looked wicked to him.

After the fashion of non-dancing men at a ball the youth gradually grew more and more melancholy and despondent. Whether he would or not quotations from the travelling evangelists concerning dancing floated through his head . . . devil's trap . . . road to hell . . . palace of shame. . . . And behind this was the hill-born in​stinct in Abner to associate wickedness with everything pleasant, graceful, or beautiful. It seemed to him that he was committing a subtle sin merely to sit and look at the dancers, although he disapproved. He thought if he should happen to drop dead in this ballroom—a fatality which, according to the evangelists, often occurred—he would very certainly go to hell. He felt far more wicked now than when he hurried after the mob in Irontown to help lynch Peck Bradley. And he knew this to be a true moral judgment because his conscience was whispering it to him; that still small voice in his heart, which according to the hill belief is the actual voice of God, and is therefore infallible.

Out of this generalized disapproval of the dance Abner's attention was drawn to certain particular objections. Beatrice Belle and her Mr. Pratt were the greatest of these. Abner could see Mr. Pratt's sleek black head dipping among the dancers as he pressed a perfectly strange jowl to Beatrice's cheek. As they dipped past the palms, Abner noticed a misty, unseeing expression in their eyes, a set seraphic smile on Beatrice Belle's lips, while Mr. Pratt's face wore the strained look of one clinging to the fringe of paradise.

Abner regarded this bliss with suspicion, suspecting some connection between it and the sex of the dancers; and, reverting to the evangelists, to possess sex at all was wicked, much less to enjoy it.

"I'm goin' to speak to Miss Haly about this," he thought, "the way B'atrice Belle's carryin' on."

He watched Pratt with the disgust a boy feels when he sees another boy kissing his sister.

"It wouldn't take much for me to tell that damn little drug clerk where he heads in—and a perfect stranger to her . . ."

In the midst of this brotherly mood another pair of dancers floated past the palms and a sharp constriction went through Abner's chest. He caught his breath, staring after Adelaide Jones and Buckingham Sharp. Both danced well; they were the most graceful dancers on the floor.

​Oddly enough Abner's feeling of the wickedness of the pastime evaporated completely in a stab of jealousy that Sharp's arms should be around Adelaide. He felt a sick envy of the lawyer. He watched the couple with little waves of cold and hot running over his skin. Sharp was in evening wear, and his black arm around Adelaide's waist; his white plump hand placed delicately sidewise against her shimmering green gown was the most exasperating spectacle that ever gnawed at Abner's patience. The girl's waist looked so slender in the revealing silk; her shoulders so white. Abner believed Sharp wanted to press in feverishly on that svelte waist, and then to hold his hand just so—"The damned hypocrite!" cursed the teamster under his breath. "He sha'n't have my land suits any more. I'll take 'em away from him!"

The united movements of the dancers suggested some profound sympathy between the two, some exquisite intimacy from which Abner felt for ever excluded. Adelaide was a sort of celestial creature whom his own arms might never encompass. If he might embrace her, put his arms about her—the voluptuousness of the fancy sent tremors through him.

The dancers swayed along languorously, but at intervals broke into a little running step which ended by swinging their feet lightly about and turning in a new direction. How Sharp managed his bulk so deftly, Abner could not imagine. The softly swaying bodies, masculine black, feminine green, were maddening. They were talking to each other, apparently lost in a dream. He saw Adelaide lift her brows, nod happily, her eyes scintillant with happiness.

And suddenly Abner knew that Sharp had asked Adelaide to marry him and had been accepted. His heart went down and down. His resentment at Sharp's embrace trailed off into sheer unrelieved misery. She was going to become Sharp's wife. The teamster thought he would go home.

At this point the palpitations of the jazz ceased; the dancers came to a standstill with a great clapping of hands. ​A few moments later the leaves of the artificial palms were pressed aside and Beatrice Belle and her Mr. Pratt stepped into the embrasure hunting a seat. Pratt murmured a "Pardon" and was about to take his partner elsewhere when Beatrice Belle saw who occupied the covert. She straightened indignantly.

"Abner Teeftaller, why wasn't you dancin'?"

"You know I kain't dance good enough for this place!" growled Abner.

"Why, he can, too!" cried Beatrice. "He dances very well, Sim."

"You must try, Mr. Teeftallow," encouraged Mr. Pratt earnestly. "It isn't hard when you get the hang of the thing."

"I didn't want to ball up the dance," said Abner, with his dislike of Mr. Pratt considerably diminished by this bit of sympathy.

"Oh, you won't," smiled the drug clerk. "We're used to collisions."

They were so kindly and considerate toward him that Abner's world brightened measurably. He decided that perhaps Sharp had not proposed and been accepted after all. It was possible Adelaide had nodded to some other suggestion.

"Adelaide thought you had gone home," reproved Beatrice Belle. "She was all cut up about it. I'll tell her you are here."

"No, don't!" cried Abner, with an irrational terror at being found.

"Why, the idea, you're not a hermit or anything . . ."

At that moment the roar and rattle of the jazz burst out anew. Mr. Pratt received Beatrice Belle in his arms, adjusted his blue-shaved cheek to her own, and wobbled rapturously out of the palms and away.

Abner, watching them, decided that Pratt was not an emissary of Satan as he had at first suspected, but that he was merely a sissy; one of those watered youths who go about ​with girls on purely feminine terms. Perhaps he placed his cheek against Beatrice Belle's in sheer girlish effusion—it was hardly worth while to mention the matter to Mrs. Sandage.

Amid the plangent jazz Abner began looking for Adelaide again when there was a rustle of the palm leaves and he glanced around to see Adelaide holding her green skirt aside and letting herself into his retreat. She smiled at him as she eased through the leaves.

"Is this a game of hide and seek, Mr. Teeftallow?"

A little thrill travelled deliberately through the hill youth, whether of pleasure or embarrassment he did not know.

"I kain't dance good enough to come out; ever'body would laugh at me, Adelaide."

"You don't want to dance with me?" She held out her arms, pouting her lips and shaking her head as if talking to a child.

The lifting of her arms, the temptingness of the girl, her faint perfume filled Abner with a sharp desire.

"I wish I could dance!" he cried.

"You don't do so badly. I've seen you try."

"But not here, before ever'body."

"Well—if you just won't . . ." She seemed about to go.

He was on nettles to keep her. "Look here, Adelaide, if it wouldn't be askin' too much, would you min' stayin' here an' talkin' a little?"

"You mean sit out a dance?" she smiled.

"Yes, if you wouldn't mind."

"Well—all right—strangle holds barred." She sank at his side, giggling at her impropriety. "I suppose you think I'm awful wicked?"

"Why, no-o," denied Abner, a little hazy as to what she meant.

"Anyway, it's nice to talk to such a cave-looking man after the usual dancing partner."

​"Don't you like your partner?" asked Abner hopefully.

"Why, Abner, they're my guests!" She regarded him with amused, speculative eyes. "You're awfully strong, aren't you, Mr. Teeftallow?"

Abner had difficulty in disregarding the white modelling of her neck and bosom and clinging to the thread of their conversation.

"I—guess so," he answered vaguely.

"You look as if you could hold a girl up in one hand—when do you do your daily dozen?"

"Look here," ejaculated Abner, entirely bewildered by this attack. "What are you driving at, Adelaide?"

"I'm not sure I'm driving at anything yet; this is probably a tour of inspection.—Papa says you're awfully wealthy."

Abner withdrew himself sufficiently from Adelaide's décolleté attire to answer in his country drawl, "You mean you're looking me over to see if I'll do?"

"Well, a girl has some idea of what she wants—after she falls in love the first time and lives over it."

"But she don't know the first time?" inquired Abner curiously.

"Of course not. Were you aware of any faults in your first sweetheart, Abner? No, life sends everybody just one paragon straight down out of Heaven, and that's the last one you'll ever see no matter how long you live. . . ." Adelaide broke off a tip of the artificial palm. "How old are you, Abner?"

"Nineteen."

"That's very young. I'm eighteen; that's very old. Such an old woman as I am oughtn't to rope in a kid like you, but if I don't—some other ancient will. How many farms have you got, Abner?"

Abner flushed slightly at Adelaide's chaffing air. She was certainly the most unladylike girl he had ever seen. She sat regarding him with a little smile, presently began again: "I saw you watching me dance with Buck Sharp; you didn't seem to enjoy it as much as we did."

​Abner reddened. "I thought you didn't know where I was?"

Adelaide shrugged a smooth shoulder. "When I'm interested in a man I would hardly lose him in my own parlour.—You haven't said how many farms you own—"

"I don't know. Buck Sharp is finding out."

"Buck Sharp!"

"Yes."

"Poor child, you do need a guardian."

She reached over, took one of his hands, spread it on her silk knee palm up, and perused it after the manner of a fortune teller.

"What's wrong with you, Mr. Teeftallow, is, you have a long tapering hand. It is calloused from work, but really it's the hand of a dreamer and an idler. I venture you sit around and dream all sorts of things and do almost nothing, don't you?"

"No-o," denied Abner, unable to recognize this description of himself.

"How came you to leave the poorhouse?" probed Adelaide. "Weren't you turned out?"

"No-o, not exactly."

"Yes, you were—exactly. Beatrice told me all about it. It was right pathetic, I call it. I've thought about it a lot."

Abner sat with his hand on the girl's knee, flushing uncomfortably. Adelaide placed her own small square palm on Abner's and looked at him with a kind of tenderness in her face.

"That's why you are so appealing, Abner," she continued. "When a man just constitutionally can't help himself, some woman feels like she's got to do it for him. The reason you are so wishy-washy is, you feel instead of think—and that's appealing. You know these thinking brains are terrible, Abner. They go straight, straight—you can coax, sob, implore, but you can't change their course because they're going somewhere. Most men are not like that, Abner. Most of 'em are like you, easy, wishy-washy fellows, and we ​women ought to fall on our knees and thank God for it." Her bosom lifted with a little irregular breath and she smiled faintly in his face.

"Papa wants to see you," she said unexpectedly.

Abner gave a little start as if coming out of a daydream.

"Where is he?"

"In the library. I'll take you in."

Alarm touched Abner. "Won't I get to see you any more to-night?"

She laughed. "You'll have to come thank me for my party afterward."

She arose, and Abner unwillingly concluded the most intriguing and confusing tête-à-tête he had ever known. They passed out of the palms through the dancers. "This door," she directed, and opened a door into a small room in which a single electric bulb was burning. She closed the shutter behind them and the music was muffled to a palpitant wail.

Adelaide seemed to listen to it. "You really ought to learn to dance, Abner," she advised in a queer tone. "You could if you'd try."

"I don't much believe I can."

"Try! You can try!" She caught his arm, slipped into it, wound her own arm about his body and began swaying to the subdued music. "Here, like this," she directed urgently, "swing with me . . . like this . . ." She pressed herself to him, bending back and forth.

Abner began swaying with her, self-consciously at first, but presently the beat of the jazz, the intimate feel of the girl's body, the curves of her bosom moving against his own changed from an awkwardness to a rising intoxication. The hot syncopation of the jazz band filled the room. The girl became part of the music. The cornet skirled, the saxophone wailed, the drums pounded—the voice of Africa, of burning suns and passionate bodies hurled them along in the provocation of its swift tempo. Abner gripped her to him with a strength he was not conscious of; Adelaide followed his ​lead limply, her eyes shut, her face against his, her limber body curving in and out with his own.

Very abruptly the jazz ceased. The dancers stopped writhing and stood clasping each other convulsively.

"Here," panted Adelaide, with her heartbeats shaking her voice, "let's sit down."

They moved together carefully to a seat as if afraid of breaking the intimate contact. The girl still clasped Abner's neck with her bare arms and the perfume of her corsage enveloped him with its provocation. He sat down, taking her in his lap, and her weight filled him with a sort of maddened despair. His hand crushed her bosom, but she caught her breath and pulled it away.

"No, no," she gasped.

"But you love me!" he whispered unsteadily.

"No—I don't know—I don't think so."

"You don't—my God!" Abner was stricken.

She pushed his hands away from her with decision and slipped out of his lap on to the seat beside him.

"N-no, you just attract me physically, Abner, I think. There are two parts to love, you know, physical and—what you call spiritual—now don't be angry. Here, you may kiss me. You haven't kissed me. The idea of doing a girl this way without kissing her first." She held up her lips with a shaky smile.

Abner kissed her. The caress was colourless after the feel of her whole body pressed to his, and he gave the kiss with a vexed feeling.

"How spoiled you are already," she said thoughtfully, staring at him as he withdrew his face. "Goodness, some girl has made a rotten job out of you, Abner. You have no feeling whatever for crescendo, just a wild explosion." She leaned happily against his chest again and reached an arm about his neck. "You are an old bear, dear, but you certainly have got pep." At that moment the jazz music brayed forth again. "Do you want to dance to this tune?"

"No."

​"Suit yourself. I'm your hostess and at your disposal, within limits. However, I have other guests and I'll have to go back to them after this piece. Conventionality is my synonym."

"Are you going to dance with that Sharp man again?" growled Abner, who found himself in a very bad humour indeed.

"I don't know. Why?" she glanced up at him sidewise.

"Suppose we go back in there and dance together?" suggested Abner, on an impulse.

"Oh, no, dear, you won't do to dance in polite society for several generations yet to come. Now, your great-great-grandson may be able to dance with a lady in a perfectly gentlemanly manner, like Buck."

For some reason this little speech whisked away Abner's dourness. He grinned and patted Adelaide's shoulder and this tempted him to another embrace, but she moved away.

"No, that's enough. I supposed the village would think this much perfectly awful, but it's necessary. How can you tell whether a person really attracts you or not?—You have to try it—that's what hugging and kissing are for. It's a try-out for passion. Folks make a great hullabaloo about passion, Abner, how wicked it is, but if you haven't got it it's S O S at the matrimonial altar. You can complain of petting parties all you please, Abner, but they are bound to save hundreds of divorces in the end. My room mate and I talked that over in the seminary."

Adelaide sighed and sat for a few moments following some thought. "Of course, dancing is a formal way of petting. That's why jazz has such a hold on everybody. I think young folks instinctively want to be frank and open in their love-making, Abner, but the old folks don't like to be reminded that they are old, so they make a great sin out of youth—that's what my room mate said."

She seemed so pensive and at sea that Abner was moved to tenderness. He took her hand and gently quoted the hills.

"Don't you think love comes from God?"

​Adelaide smiled sadly and shook her head. "Our first love comes from God, but after that He puts too many and too contradictory impulses in our hearts. Look at me, you attract me terribly physically, Abner; Buck Sharp entertains me mentally. And there was a theological student up at Nashville who, I believe, attracted me spiritually. Abner—now you wouldn't think I had a soul, would you? You think I am a very bad girl, don't you, Abner?" She looked at her companion, blinking her eyes a little.

"Why, no, I don't," said Abner with a queer feeling.

"You see the trouble is with God—as you call it—God divides your husband up among maybe half-a-dozen men, and then you've lost him, of course—only a few moments ago Buck Sharp was begging me to marry him. . . ."

Abner looked at her.

"Adelaide—is that why you—came in here with me and—danced?"

Miss Jones nodded faintly.

"Yes. I wanted to know how I felt toward you. I didn't know. G-God, as you call it, is such a bungler at making a g-girl's dream come true."

Abner was moved unwontedly. He leaned over and caressed the girl's naked shoulders for once without thinking of her flesh.

"Will you marry me, Adelaide?"

"I don't think so," she said sadly.

"Oh, Adelaide—I wish I was smart, like Buck! I wish to God I was what you wanted, but I haven't got much sense. I'm very ordinary."

He leaned toward her in his humility. The girl suddenly put up her arms and clutched his leonine head convulsively to her bosom.

The music stopped.

She put him away abruptly, arose, and began powdering her nose and eyes.

"This is what you call sitting out a dance," and she gave a choked giggle.

​"Are you going back in?" asked Abner, aghast.

She nodded swiftly, erasing the traces of her emotion.

"What are you going to say?"

"I don't know."

She was turning away.

"Wait! Wait!" cried Abner in despair. "Tell him no, Adelaide, tell him you love somebody else."

"Oh, I do! I do!" cried the girl with wide eyes. "I've already told him that!"

Abner followed her to the door, gripping her hand.

"T-tell him—"

Good-bye for to-night, Abner; come to see me to-morrow. Go through that door and you'll find Dad; he wants to see you. Now, kiss me good-bye."

He kissed her with a certainty that she was lost to him, and it filled him almost with a physical weakness. She disengaged herself gently from his arms, opened the door, and slipped through it. As she entered the illumination of the ballroom, Abner saw her face light up with a bright practised smile.