Dark Valley Destiny (53 page)

Robert scoffed: "He'd never take
you
out! No guy would fall for you; you're just saying that to make me jealous."
¹⁵

That was all Novalyne needed to cement her determination to have
a
date with Truett Vinson. And after the date she told Howard about it. At first Robert refused to believe her, even when she showed him a book Vinson had given her with his initials in it. When at last he could no longer deny the fact, Robert became furious and stopped seeing Novalyne.

After a lapse of several weeks, Novalyne sent Bob a note suggesting that he come around to renew their acquaintance. With the Howard talent for forgetting or ignoring unwelcome facts, Robert replied in a letter bristling with injured dignity, wounded feelings, and anger:

Cross Plains, Texas July 8, 1935

Dear Novalyne:

Thank you for the invitation to call; but you honestly can't expect me to enjoy ridicule and contempt so much that I come back for another dose.

You understand me, I think, but I'll make myself clear so there won't be any chance of misunderstanding. It's simply that you and Truett haven't played fair with me, in concealing the fact that you were going together —and you know you haven't. There wasn't any need for such secrecy and the only motive for it was to make a fool out of me. It's none of my business who you go with, or who Truett goes with; but if either of you had had any consideration whatever for me, you'd have at least casually mentioned the fact that you were going together. If you'd merely told me, I wouldn't have thought anything about it. If you'd even neglected to tell me through carelessness I'd have overlooked it. But both of you had plenty of opportunity to mention it to me, and instead you concealed the fact, made a secret of it—and no doubt laughed at me because of it.

I understand now why you laughed at me so much the last time I was with you, though I still fail to see the joke. Why you thought it was such a hilarious joke on me for me to be kept ignorant of the fact that you were going with Truett, is something I can not fathom. Nor shall I try to fathom it; the knowledge that the slight was intentional is quite enough for me.

Taking advantage of a friend's trust, respect and consideration to try to make a fool out of him seems a poor triumph.

Very truly yours, Robert E. Howard
¹⁶

No woman to accept such unwonted reproof, Novalyne sent back a spirited reply:

July 12, 1935

Dear Bob,

Although you leave nothing for me to say, being a woman, I'll say something anyway. You said that you didn't care whom I went with. I know that, Bob. During the time that I went with you, I realized perfectly how you felt about women. You always wanted to be free and independent. Women chain a man. Such an idea was obnoxious to you. Self-preservation was the first law which you recognize. Strange as it may seem, I, too, demand my freedom; self-preservation is also a law of my life. I'll do anything which gives me pleasure and consider myself under no obligation to tell my friends my personal business.

I did tell you that I wanted to go with Truett when I came home. Once when you were over, and I mentioned that I had seen Truett you said, "you're trying to make me believe that you've had a date with him, but I don't believe it." I said, "I am certainly going with him this summer." You chose to think that I expected to go with him in the future. You said, "You may do it, but you haven't yet." So I dropped the subject. Later (the last time you were over) you picked up a book that he had given me, and on the first page are his initials and mine. I saw you look at the page, and when you ignored the matter I mentally applauded you. "Well," I said to myself, "he intends to put one over on me by not mentioning the fact. He wants to further impress upon me that he is not in love with me nor the least bit jealous of me. He's pretty clever." I thought that you were laughing at me because you thought that I thought I was putting something by and I wasn't. You remember that you were always careful to let me know that I was just a friend, and I was careful to let you know that I knew that that was all there was between us.

Clyde and I went together four years. Two weeks before he married I had a date with him and he didn't tell me that he was fixing to marry. When he did, I was utterly dumbfounded. All my friends in Brownwood offered me sympathy. Was that easy to take? I considered that his affair and I didn't say a word to him nor about him for not telling me. And today

I like Clyde as well as I ever did. I still think of him as a real friend, and I don't think that he did not play fair with me.

I have always considered you head and shoulders above the average man. I didn't believe that you'd resort to middle-class melodrama and I can't believe that you really in your heart think that Truett and I have not played fair. You know both of us well enough to know that we haven't been untrue to your friendship. I can't help but think that you were tired of wasting your time with me and this is an opportunity of getting rid of me for next year. I could not help but know that I sometimes interfered with your work and the well-ordered routine of your life. You might have told me in a nice way that you could not spare me anymore of your time.

In my last letter I took it for granted that we were still friends and I invited you to call assuming that our friendship would continue as it had been in the past. I apologize for having made that mistake.

Please know that you will always have my sincere wishes for your continued success and happiness.

Novalyne
¹⁷

As
the weeks passed, the storm blew over. Robert and Novalyne began seeing each other again, although on a more impersonal basis than before. Both knew that there was no one else in Cross Plains who spoke their language. With whom else could they talk about things other than local gossip and the price of wheat, cotton, and petroleum?

Robert and Novalyne continued a desultory friendship through the fall of 1935. Although during the winter months Howard's time was largely consumed with the care of his mother, in February 1936 they had another date. Womanlike, Novalyne had not given up all hope of guiding Bob along the path he should follow, so she urged him to stand on his own two feet and unknot his mother's apron strings. While we do not know the details of the conversation, we surmise that Bob dug in his heels and retorted that nobody was going to tell him how to live
his
life. At any rate, the evening erupted into a blazing quarrel and ended with a grim parting.

It was their last date. Howard wrote Lovecraft that he had "renewed an old love affair and broken it off again."
¹⁸
At the end of the school term that spring, Novalyne departed for Louisiana State University, where she began her studies for a master's degree.

Howard enjoyed an occasional respite from his nursing duties. On June 19,1935, he set out with Truett Vinson on a five-day trip to New Mexico. Howard drove through Carlsbad and Roswell to Lincoln, a tiny village near the Mescalero Apache Reservation—a village which, in the late 1870s, had been the center of the bloody Lincoln County War, in which Billy the Kid had served as a warrior. Howard and Vinson had their picture taken in front of the old wooden courthouse and jail, whence Billy the Kid had escaped, killing two men in the process. Aware that many men died in Lincoln, Howard wrote later:

I have never felt anywhere the exact sensations Lincoln aroused in me— a sort of horror predominating. If there is a haunted spot on this hemisphere, then Lincoln is haunted. I felt that if I slept the night there, the ghosts of the slain would stalk through my dreams.
¹⁹

As they drove on through Albuquerque to Santa Fe, Howard became irritated at the crowds of tourists, especially those dressed in "British style sun-helmets, short-sleeved knit shirts, and knee-length pants." At the time the short-sleeved sport shirt, derived from the polo shirt, was just coming into use; while walking shorts were not fully Americanized for another twenty years. He also noted the large Hispanic population of New Mexico:

Or as they call them out here, Spanish-Americans. You or I would be Anglo-Americans according to their way of putting it. Spanish-American, hell. A Mexican is a Mexican to me, wherever I find him.
²⁰

While he found the Mexican population of New Mexico better educated and more prosperous than the Mexicans in Oklahoma and Texas, he added: "I'll admit it seemed strange to me to see Mexicans treated on the same footing as white people. . . ."
²¹
Despite this expression of Caucasoid chauvinism, he later agreed with Lovecraft that the population of New Mexico would eventually become homogenized.

With Vinson, Robert visited the art museum and the old governor's palace in Santa Fe. In the museum, he saw the painting of "The Stoic," which he found so vastly moving, and looked, with only desultory interest, at an archaeological exhibit of the artifacts of the Pueblo Indians. Later he wrote Lovecraft:

We stayed only one night in Santa Fe. It had been my intention to stay longer. . .. But Vinson got in a swivet to get home, for some reason which
he
never made entirely clear, but which seemed so important to him that 1 didn't press the matter.
²²

Vinson
was eager to go home because he found Bob "a terrible driver, and
| worse
bedmate."
²³
The tourist cabins of that time contained only one
double
bed and often no bathroom. Sleeping in such cramped quarters,
Vinson
found himself constantly disturbed by Howard's thrashings and fnutterings. So Howard and Vinson drove home via El Paso, where they
RAW
movies, including "The Informer," and spent the night. The next day Howard drove to Brownwood, dropped Vinson, and came home, having
Spent
sixteen hours behind the wheel. He had in one day driven 570 miles.

In January 1936 Howard had another opportunity for a little fun. He went to Brownwood and picked up his friends Smith and Vinson for A few drinks. As before, the storyteller in him transformed a small drinking party into an orgy. He wrote his correspondent August Derleth about this alcoholic get-together:

One of them—a 220 pound giant—went on a real tear—high, wide and handsome. He revived the old Western custom of shooting up the joint, and mixing whiskey with gun-smoke and flying lead is not a combination for a peaceable man. ... I do remember coming to hand-grips with him, and one of my knees is still a bit lame from the knock it got as we hit the floor together.
²⁴

During the winter of 1935-36, Robert Howard indulged in sartorial quirks. He grew a large, black walrus mustache. Novalyne, who had said that she liked a small, trim mustache on a man, thought that Bob was sporting this outsized hirsute ornament just to annoy her. After their final date, he shaved it off.

Then, somewhere Robert obtained a light blue-gray nineteenth-eentury gentleman's knee-length frock coat; people who remember it report that it might have been a Confederate officer's coat. In cool weather he wore this unusual garment around town, along with the once-discarded Mexican sombrero. This bizarre attire made Howard an even more strange and suspect figure, confirming his fellow townsmen's worst opinions of him. According to our late collaborator, Dr. Jane Griffin, such a bid for attention was a silent cry for help.

It was a cry that none could answer, for no one could spare Howard the agony of seeing his mother in her terminal decline. With the usual ups and downs of tuberculosis, her steep declines were followed by minor rallies. When she seemed to be better, euphoria seized Robert. He would go about the house singing, or he would retire to his study to type at furious speed. Often he would rock vigorously back and forth on the porch swing, singing all the while at the top of his powerful lungs.

When his mother sank lower, Robert would fall into one of his blackest moods. He would "just go out of his head."
²⁵
In one of these dark moods, he wrote:

This has been a bitter winter, and the harshness of the weather has hurt her. First one woman and then another we hired to help wait on her has taken sick herself, so the job of nursing my mother has been done largely by my father and myself. ... I find little, if any time to write, which ia why this letter is brief . . . and disconnected. . . . There seems to be little we or anyone can do to help her, though God knows I'd make any sacrifice, including my own life, if it could purchase her any relief.
²⁶

That winter Dr. Howard moved his office from the drugstore to his house. Patients came in through the front door and were received on the sleeping porch.

Early in 1936, the Howards hired their neighbor Kate Merryman to serve as housekeeper and nurse. Mrs. Howard's nocturnal sweats required that Miss Merryman and Robert change the dying woman's nightclothes several times during the night; and because of her sensitivity to cold, the task had to be done beneath the covers. Robert and Miss Merryman spent alternate nights sitting up with the patient; but while Robert could catch up on his sleep the following day, Kate Merryman had to cook and clean. Yet, even when Robert slept, he left the window between his room and his mother's wide open so that he could hear any sound that she might make.

Eventually the overload of work wore Kate Merryman down. In May 1936 she was forced to quit. The Howards then hired two nurses and a cook to handle the work that Miss Merryman and Robert had been doing; but, even then, Miss Merryman often came back to help. According to Kate Merryman, Robert never was much help as a houseworker. This is not to his discredit; for in that day housekeeping was "woman's work," and men and boys were discouraged from invading their womenfolk's domain.

In seeking a food that might build up Hester's strength, the How-•rdl bought a pair of milch goats, and Robert learned to milk them. The
goats'
milk seemed to help Hester for a while, but then pleurisy set in
again.
Since she was unable to travel, a doctor was called in from Brownwood to draw off the fluid.