Chapter 23

They met again at the station, in rather-too-new traveling costumes. During the maverick reception on the platform, with champagne served in paper cups, it was not Roy, the best man, but Bradd Criley who was the clown. He yelled, he slapped backs, he kissed Jinny, Lyra Coggs, Chris Grau, and Jinny’s astonished mother. The train was going then, and Cass was muttering to Jinny, “It’s good to get away from our loving friends.”

In their Pullman seats, she boldly held his hand, not caring who looked, and said with a strange little fierceness, “We’ve started, and I’m incredibly excited and cheerful, and Heaven knows where it will end—maybe China and temple bells.”

But she had never been farther East or South than Central Wisconsin, and when they had left St. Paul for Chicago, the bold and Chinaward girl became less confident and Cass was promoted from home-town neighbor to expert traveler, who knew all about altitudes and populations and how to treat dining-car waiters, and she looked at him with 1880 bridal reverence, and asked him about the scenery as though he were a geologist.

There was food for awe: The palisades along the Mississippi, dark giant rock and swooping slopes of snow. The ravines of Wisconsin, leading to wintry valleys. The North Shore suburbs of Chicago, where at stations influenced by the Alhambra the wives of significant insurance-brokers looked haughtily out from station wagons. Lake Michigan, a relentless ocean. The portentous jungle of Chicago factories and warehouses and slums, the smutted steel insanity of the Loop, and the leather and crystal Pump Room, where she listened admiringly while Cass, who knew nothing whatever about the subject, held a symposium on sauternes with the wine-waiter.

The Liveoak Special, leaving for Florida at one A.M., was a supple serpent of a train, all in crimson-barred silver, with no vestibules breaking its smoothness. The fourth-fastest train on the continent, it had a library car, a bar-room car, a car for dancing, four bathrooms, two stenographers, and a Social Hostess who had once been married to a Russian prince who had once been married to a Hollywood female star who had once been married to practically anybody.

Jinny looked at these conveniences as one of her peasant ancestors might have looked at Kenilworth Castle. It was her Cass who had given her this train. There was a husband for you!

She did not know that he was in the agony of accommodations-trouble.

Like many young people of the day, Jinny was familiar with automobiles but less familiar with trains than her own grandmother had been. She had motored with her parents twelve hundred miles out to Yellowstone Park, confidently driving four hundred miles a day, but she had never spent a night on a sleeping-car and she knew no more about the subtle categories of berths, sections, roomettes, bedrooms, compartments, and drawing-rooms than she did about the etiquette of wedding-nights, so delicately connected with them.

In the Florida rush which was now taking the place of trips to war-barred Europe, the Liveoak Special’s private rooms had all been engaged a fortnight before Cass applied. He unscrupulously tried to use the influence of the court, the mayor, the local political bosses, and the department-store owner, but the best he had been able to do was two lower berths across from each other.

They rustled through the Pullman, already stuffy with sleep and green curtains, and Jinny had no surprise when he showed her the two separate cloth-smothered caves. She only said, inevitably, “Do I have to sit on my clothes while I’m taking them off? Mercy! Good night, dearest; wonderful day, wonderful journey. I LIKE being Mrs. Timberlane!”

And vanished between the curtains.

He sat on his berth, smolderingly took his shoes off, and thoughtfully rubbed his toes. He was in his pajamas (very refined mellilunar ones, a dark-blue silk with a fine silver stripe) and under the close-tucked bedclothes before he decided that he had to do better than this. He would kiss her good night, anyway. They were married, weren’t they? He had some rights, didn’t he?

The solid Sioux nose of Judge Timberlane jutted cautiously out into the aisle, and turned right and left and hung there, rigid, as the eyes immediately above it perceived that George the Porter was standing inflexibly in the curving niche of Drawing Room A, on watch.

The nose was jerked inside and its proprietor felt guilty, but also credulous that, through the sound of the moving train, he had heard a delicious flutter of disrobing in the berth across the aisle—so near, so perilous.

Three times the nose came solemnly pushing out. Once it shot back at the approach of the conductor, once at the return of the persistent and unromantic George, but the third time it shot across, and Cass was shaking her curtain, moaning, “Unbutton this— open it up—quick!”

He was safe inside then, but flustered.

She was in pajamas, pale-yellow silk, well curving, and she was sitting up, staring at him. He expected a protest at his wild invasion, but what she said was, “Aren’t those the nicest little lights! You can lie awake and read by ’em!”

“Jinny! Kiss me—and in the greatest hurry!”

“Why?”

“If the conductor finds me here—He doesn’t know we’re married. I should hate a public argument! Kiss me!”

She did, leaning forward. She was in his arms, only the two thin layers of silk between them; and shakily, not at all masterfully, he undid the top button of her tunic and softly kissed her breast. Then she drew back, as far as the thick pillows would let her, and whispered, “It frightens me—you dash in here so quickly—I do love you, but now I’m kind of frightened and so alone—this huge train rushing us along in the darkness; you couldn’t escape from it, if you wanted to—Be gentle with me, Cass; I’m such a spoiled baby.”

“Yes, I’ll always be gentle, I hope. I love you very much. And now good night, dear wife. . . . And don’t you sit up and read, either!”

He had shot back into his own berth through green denim space, unconscious of transition or of spying conductors, and he lay awake alternately exultant with memory of how satin-like her breast had been and worrying lest she prove too anemic for ardent love. He had heard that these pencil-wise, half-intellectual girls were often so.

His berth-light was on, and in it he gapingly saw a smooth hand slip between the curtains and begin to unbutton them, and then, grotesquely, there was Jinny cheerfully returning his visit. But with a woman’s sense and realism and magnificent vulgarity, she was not playing at furtive lover, as he had. She drew wide the curtains and left them open, and in her pajamas, with the vaguest of negligees merely setting them off, she sat cross-legged on his bed. And she was smoking a cigarette.

“Golly!” said the learned Judge.

Her bent knees were extraordinarily round and suave, he noted, and where was that porter, and would he have to have a row?

“It did seem so unfriendly not to return your call,” she said, and her expression was like that of Cleo in one of her better moods. “And I wanted to tell you something—I’ve always wanted to, but I was too embarrassed—but you must have wondered, I don’t see how you could have helped it—of course you were too much of a gentleman to ever ask—”

The porter’s voice, not so much shocked as official, came from just beyond Jinny’s shoulder.

“Sorry, Miss, but we don’t allow any smoking in the berths.”

Cass could see the edge of Jinny’s affable smile as she turned. “Oh, I am sorry. Porter, will you please take this cigarette and finish it up for me? It’s an awfully good one—a wedding present— today!”

The dazed Cass saw the dazed porter carry the cigarette away, at arm’s length, while Jinny turned back with:

“Of course you would never even hint at it, but I do imagine you’d like to know, so now I can tell you—and I’m darned if I know whether this is a boast or a confession—but if it interests you, I’m still a virgin.”

Suddenly he grew up a little, and he was placid in saying, “Yes, it does interest me, and I’m glad, though I don’t think I’d ‘ve been ugly if it had been the opposite. And I love you madly and you go back to bed or I’ll spank hell out of you.”

“Right here in public? In my pajamas? I dare you to!” she said, and kissed him and was gone.

Infinite pity encompassed him that she should have to grow older and more frail, helpless before covetous men and corroding illness, before poverty and storms that would come halfway round the world to threaten her proud head.

In the morning they had left the snow and were running through level farmlands with a sparkle of frost on gray grass and gray snake-fences. He did not know whether they were in Illinois or Indiana or Kentucky, so for her information he picked the last, as most distant from the center of the world—Grand Republic. She stared out and said joyfully, “Look what you’ve started! This is my first foreign country. How near are we to China now?”

He had explained that, in preference to the gaudiness of Palm Beach and Miami, he had chosen a plain West Coast Florida resort, for privacy, for adventurous fishing, for bathing and shell-hunting on great lonely beaches. He had never seen the place, but Harley Bozard said the food was excellent and the fishing superb. She’d certainly enjoy catching a tarpon.

Oh, yes. She’d always wanted to catch a—a what? Oh, much better than dancing with a lot of handsome tennis players. Yes, she had brought old clothes with her, as he had directed; she’d wear them— when she wore anything at all.

He did not add, not even to himself—not really—that the place would also be much cheaper.

Thus she was not completely disappointed when, on the morning of December fifth, they came to Baggs City, Charlotte County, Florida, and to the trim, clean, white, and completely dolorous Bryn–Thistle-on-the-Bay Inn. The small lobby was full of old ladies who listened and of geraniums which stared, and their bedroom, just large enough for a double bed and a bureau and two chairs, was adorned with a hand-lettered version of the poem about the man who wanted to live by the side of the road, a pink chamber-pot with forget-me-nots, and a three-color job of a cupid piloting a bomber.

“In here, I wouldn’t even let you kiss me,” protested Jinny.

“Well, there’s a lot of outdoors down here.”

They walked through the Inn grounds, which were as suburban as Glendale, but it was magical, two days from the wintry street-hurrying of Grand Republic, to stroll in this rich and scented air. Jinny eyed the crepe myrtle, the roses, the obese wonder of a grape fruit growing, and looked at the Cass who had worked this magic for her.

“My Merlin!” she said.

All afternoon, in a slow, good-natured launch, they fished in a deep salt-water inlet bordered by the shade and jungle brightness of a swamp; they stared at the palms, which meant India and the Congo to these inlanders from the wheat prairies and the pine woods; they relaxed and, cheerful as honeymooners rarely are, they came back to the Inn for supper. But the horrible daintiness of the place enfeebled them at once. It was like being choked with pink bedjackets.

All the widows watched them as they ate a meal consisting of fish and finger-bowls; they had too many invitations to play bridge and too little competition when they did play; three several females flickered about “the little bride”; and when they went up to bed, making it as late as was physically possible after an afternoon spent on the water, the air was so thick with lascivious female glances that they could have climbed it instead of the stairs.

They shut the door against a world of intrusive friendliness. They faced each other, and he understood her shyness and tried to speak as he thought her Gang at Miss Hatter’s would speak:

“Well, baby, this is it. I guess we’re up against it. But let me explain that I’m not just violently in love with you. I’m also extremely fond of you.”

She was shivering, but she tried to be merry.

“They all make so much of this accidental virtue of virginity that you get scared about it, and the wedding-night—I suppose this is our real wedding-night—is a combination of getting drunk and winning a million-dollar lottery and waiting to be hanged. Animals are a lot wiser.” Then, more sharply, “I hate being an amateur, in ANYTHING!”

In a practical way, she had begun to undo her belt, and when he had tremblingly drawn off his jacket, she stood, looking admirably casual, in brassiere and absurd small pants. He could not help kissing her shoulder, which tasted faintly of sun and sea. When she had put on a pathetically gay little rose-colored nightgown that must have come from Pioneer Falls and had mutely slid into bed beside him, he held her quietly, hoping that she would feel secure.

He was conscious of the creeping and thunderous silences of the Inn: hesitant slippered footsteps past the door, whispering in the adjoining rooms, a feeling that an inquisitive world was looking at them through the wallboard partitions. He was tense with listening, and Jinny, in his arms, was as impersonal to him as a pillow, and apprehensively he realized that he could no more make ardent love to her now than to that pillow.

Was he going to be a failure as lover with this one girl whom he had loved utterly?

She muttered, with almost prayerful earnestness, “Was the bathroom the third door on the right or the second? I’d hate to go rocketing in on some old maid!”

He laughed then, and lost his apprehensiveness. But as he kissed her it was she who had become fearful and unyielding, and in pity for her his ardor sank to a gentle stroking of her cheek.

When she seemed to have relaxed a little, to be expectant, his intensity had so worn him that he could only hold her softly, while fear crept through him again, and he stammered, “I’ve heard of such things but I never expected—I find I’m so fond of you, and maybe scared of you, that just now I can’t even make love to you.”

She answered as sweetly and briskly as though they were discussing a picnic-basket.

“Yes, I’ve heard of it. Temporary—not matter a bit. Oh, you’d be surprised at all the things Lyra and Wilma and I used to talk about. Don’t worry. I love just lying with my cheek on your shoulder—now that I’ve found a comparatively regular valley among the jagged peaks of your shoulder-blades. Dear darling!”

They were almost instantly asleep and Cass came to life at dawn to sit up and see, on her own side of the bed, curled like a cat and rosily sleeping, his adored and inviolate bride.