Foxfire (2 page)

Yet that night on the
Bremen
she had thought him defensive and she had glowed with impulsive sympathy.

Amanda snapped on the flashlight and looked at her tiny gold wrist watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. Ahead the wash still gurgled darkly, beside her there was even, steady breathing. She pulled the blanket up across her chest, nestled close to Dart and tried to sleep. But her thoughts would not still, and over and over as if for reassurance her mind unreeled again those days on the boat, and after.

 

They had been a gay crowd of young people in Tourist Third on the
Bremen
last September, mostly students returning to college after happy vacations in Europe, though some like Amanda would not be able to continue their studies, but must go job-hunting, an uncertain prospect in that fall of 1932. Amanda had rationally accepted the new poverty which engulfed her family in '29, but except for passionate rebellion against her father's resultant death from a heart attack, the shadow of insecurity had not touched her emotionally. There had been enough money salvaged from life insurance for her to complete her sophomore year at Vassar, and to provide Mrs. Lawrence with a tiny income and a three-room flat in New York. There had been a few hundred dollars left to Amanda outright, and these she decided to spend on the student trip to Europe before facing the “grim realities” of life. This was Mrs. Lawrence's own phrase, often expressed. Let Amanda have what fun she might, while she could, poor child, and thank heaven that Jean, at least, was provided for.

Jean, six years older than Amanda, had in 1928 married a solid young man called George Walker. His solidity, though worthy and unencumbered by imagination, might not have ensured Jean's security during the panic years that followed, but his position, as vice-president in his father's Gelatine Products Company, did. George's income had shrunk, of course, but Jean still had her house in Greenwich, her Buick coupé, and a nurse for little Sally Lou.

“Maybe”—Mrs. Lawrence had said, laughing at the flavor of hopeful Victorian mama which underlay her thought—“on this trip to Europe, Andy darling, something will turn up. You never can tell. Thank heaven, you've still got some good clothes. Or”—she added wistfully—“maybe you'll make up your mind about Tim. I think he'd make you happy and you
would
be so well taken care of.”

But, not at all in accord with Mrs. Lawrence's hope for Amanda's future, it was Dart who had turned up.

Amanda had first noticed him just after they left Cherbourg on the voyage home. He was standing by the rail, his hands in his pockets, gazing out over the ocean toward the setting sun. She noted first that he was very tall, and that he was a little older than most of the students. His clothes were nondescript, a cheap and rumpled tweed suit, but the position of his body, leaning slightly forward against the wind, suggested an easy strength. So did his hands, she thought, as she watched him lighting a cigarette, and his blunt, thin profile interested her.

In the steamer chair next to Amanda's, Peggy Gordon, her cabin mate, had giggled. “I wouldn't bother to make a play for him, Andy. He looks pretty grim—inhibited, I'd say. Cerebretonic type.” Peggy was a psychology major at Vassar.

“I don't think he's grim exactly. There's something about him...” Amanda had paused trying to analyze the quality she felt in this tall, rangy and quite unexceptional young man—was it a lack of self-consciousness? An inner poise? “I think he's attractive, anyway,” she finished a trifle defiantly.

Dart had then turned, throwing his cigarette into the water, swept the two girls with an indifferent stare and walked off toward the stern.

Neither Amanda nor Peggy was accustomed to indifference in a masculine eye, especially on shipboard. Amanda, especially, had always breathed the incense of male attention. She was not beautiful, but she had known since she was fourteen how to appear so. She was five feet five, small-boned and smallbreasted, so that clothes became her. Bathing suits did too, for her legs were exquisite and years of tennis, swimming, and dancing had long ago vanquished an adolescent pudginess.

Her fine, curly hair had been abandoned by nature to a light brown exactly the shade of a wild mink furpiece, then rescued by beauty parlors to tints of rich and tawny gold. Her face was squared at the jaw and temples, belying a childishly soft and appealing mouth, which Amanda enlarged to a vivid scarlet.

These allurements and an aura of shining cleanliness she shared with many other American girls of her age and background, but it was her eyes which arrested attention. They were large and green-blue, set beneath dark brows. They held an expression of direct and friendly interest tinged with laughter, and a hint of coquetry.

Amanda was predisposed to like people and showed it. Nor had she as yet, in her twenty years, been met by anything but warm response. Her self-confidence was, therefore, ingrained and unassuming. She was also a romantic. The combination had led her into several love affairs besides the one with Tim, and led her out of them again. For the romance always unjelled, rapidly melting it seemed to her into a sticky mess of sexual byplay, and though bred on Freud and accustomed like all her generation to the frankest possible analyses of sex, her passions were still unawakened. This was before she met Dart, and despite Peggy's jeers she continued to watch for him while she played shuffleboard or lay in deck chairs with the other young people.

“Probably a shoe clerk, married, with three children in Brooklyn,” said Peggy.

“Maybe,” answered Amanda, “but I'd like to meet him. I think he looks lonely.”

Peggy snorted, and it turned out that she was right. Dart was never lonely, at least not in the usual way.

Amanda did meet him that night, as they all sat in the lounge and drank rich Bavarian beer. Some of the German exchange students clustered together and began clinking mugs and singing. Dart was sitting by himself in a corner, and emboldened by the fruity sentiment of “Alt Wien” Amanda walked over to him smiling. “Don't you want to join us?” she said, indicating her own group. “We thought we might set up a rival chorus when they've finished over there—the ‘Missouri Waltz,' or something.”

Dart laughed. “Thank you, no. My bullfrog bellow would lead you all into international hostilities. I was just going to turn in anyway.”

“Oh, I see,” she said, flushing a little. She was startled by his voice. Whatever he might aver as to his singing, his speaking voice had unusual richness, and the intonation was that of cultured New England. Not a Brooklyn shoe clerk, anyway. She saw Peggy watching her sardonically, and smiled at him again with gentle directness. “I thought you might be lonely.”

“Did you?” he said. “But I'm not.” He smiled back, answering her friendliness with equal candor and almost sparing her the implication that she was trying to pursue him. He had been pursued a good deal by women and he did not like it.

Amanda, unused to rebuff and caught by a pull of attraction stronger than she had expected, could not quite hide her dismay: “I'm sorry,” she said, flushing again. She added lightly, “Well, if you change your mind...” and walked back to her table.

“Misogynist?” asked Peggy with interest. “Impervious to female charm?”

“My charm, anyway.” Amanda sank down on the cushioned bench between the two Cornell seniors who received her with delight and amorous sparring in which she carried her part without effort.

The wind came up in the night and the next morning it was rough. The
Bremen,
large as she was, pitched convulsively and Tourist Third in the stern got full benefit of the motion. Peggy remained in her berth, as did most of the other passengers. Amanda, however, was immune to seasickness. She wandered up to her deck chair and began to read
Shadows on
the Rock
which she had found amongst the novels in the ship's library.

She was unconscious of Dart until he sat down in the vacant chair beside her and said without preliminary, “Willa Cather, is it? Has she got a new book out?
Death Comes for the Archbishop
was a magnificent job. One of the few novels I ever enjoyed.”

Amanda jumped. She looked from his face down to the book on her lap. So we have a literary discussion now, she thought, amused. She was happy that he had stopped and therefore wise enough not to make reference to last night's rebuff. Moreover, she knew instinctively that this was not a belated gambit. He was interested in Willa Cather, he had not been interested in the singing, and in her as a pretty girl or even an individual, he had as yet no interest at all.

“I've forgotten
Death Comes for the Archbishop,”
she said. “It came out some years ago, didn't it? Wasn't it about the West?”

“Yes,” said Dart. “New Mexico. She got some of the real feel of the country. Few people do.”

He had dark gray eyes, rather the color of the leaden waves beside the ship but, as he spoke, his eyes reflected light.

“You know the West?” she asked.

“Certainly. It's my home. Arizona. I was born there.”

She considered this with surprise. His voice was typically Eastern. Cultured and well-bred, her mother would have called it. And Amanda, like most people who had never traveled past the Alleghenies, had a vague mental montage of the West, pasted together from bits of Bret Harte, Zane Grey,
The Virginian
and cowboy movies.

“You don't sound like—I mean...” She stopped and laughed. “I thought you were a Yankee or a New Yorker.”

Dart smiled but he withdrew a little. “My father came from Massachusetts,” he said, getting up, and for a moment she thought he was going to leave her like that. They were alone on the deck except for a scurrying steward and she had no wish to be thus consigned back to her book. With anyone else, she would have suggested that they walk around the deck together. With Dart she dared not but she gave him a look of unconscious appeal. He responded to it after a moment, held his hand out and pulled her up from the chair. “All right—” he said, as though she had spoken. “We'll get some exercise.”

Amanda had read a great deal about electric thrills running between man and woman, and now while Dart held her hand to pull her out of the chair, she felt one. It frightened her and as they walked as briskly as possible, teetering from one side to the other on the heaving deck, she scolded herself, trying thereby to regain an inner balance.

Physical appeal, pure and simple, she told herself. One-sided at that, since he seemed to feel nothing at all. Humiliating and ridiculous. At the second turn around the deck it occurred to her that she did not even know his name and this reflection annoyed her into decisive action.

She stopped dead, saying, “I've had enough exercise, thanks. I'm getting chilly.” And turned to leave.

It was then that Dart first really saw her as anything but a pretty and self-assured little Eastern girl, ripe for shipboard dalliance.

There was gallantry and unconscious dignity in the way she held herself braced on the deck, her dull gold hair whipping about her head, her nose and cheeks pink from the biting, salt wind. Under the straight, dark brows her clear eyes looked up at him with direct honesty, the coquetry had vanished. Her mouth, almost bare of lipstick, quivered a little and he had a sudden impulse to kiss it which startled him.

He smiled suddenly, half at himself. “Well, come on into the lounge if you're cold,” he said laughing. “I'll buy you a drink.”

His amusement, which she did not understand, made her feel childish and flat. She would have liked to punish him by disappearing but she was sure it would not punish him, that he would have returned into the self-contained solitude which he obviously enjoyed.

He was, however, by no means a recluse, she found after she had followed him into the lounge. He talked easily and well when he wished to, and though reserved about himself, she did learn that he was a mining engineer. That he had just been recalled from an unfinished journey to the Transvaal because the American mining company which had sent him had suddenly collapsed, unable to weather the depression.

Later, Peggy and the two Cornell seniors drifted wanly up from their staterooms and joined them. Peggy was too feeble to express surprise when she saw Amanda sitting with Dart, except to growl that smugness could apparently draw people together when nothing else could, and that people who did not get seasick deserved to be drowned.

Dart laughed and ordered her a brandy and remained with them chatting until lunch time.

From then on he joined the other young people at times and they all liked him, though the boys deferred a little to his five years' seniority. Dart was twenty-seven, it developed, and had graduated from the Arizona College of Mines at Tucson. Since then he had worked in mines in Colorado, in Mexico, and this recent brief abortive job in South Africa. Other biographical data appeared casually in the course of conversation. His name was Jonathan Dartland, but he had been known as “Dart” since prep-school days. He had gone to prep school in the East, to Andover. Here a Williams junior pricked up his ears and said that he'd thought the name Dartland was familiar. “Didn't you win the interscholastic track meet for Andover once?”

Dart said briefly that he had and changed the subject. The Williams boy who had attended Andover several years after Dart looked puzzled, as one who is trying to remember. He mentioned this to Amanda later. “Something about that guy—something else I heard at Andover—something sort of screwy but I can't get it.”

Amanda did not encourage him. She wanted to know all about Dart but she wanted no possibly unsympathetic comments from the sidelines. Nor was their relationship progressing. Dart, when he now joined their group, was pleasant with everyone. He did not single out Amanda for special attention. He even seemed to assume that she was paired off with one of the Cornell seniors, and devoted what impersonal gallantries he showed to Peggy, or a little redhead from Memphis who had drifted somehow into their crowd.