Bedelia (5 page)

“Drink it fast and you won't notice the taste,” she always said when she had spilled the powder into the water for him.

As he took off his bathrobe, Bedelia regarded him with shining eyes. “You're so tall,” she said, and height became the final standard of perfection. “And your shoulders are so broad. You've got a wonderful physique. That's what your mother always said. ‘My boy's not handsome, but he has a fine physique.'”

Charlie could not enjoy the full flavor of flattery without disturbing the ghosts of Puritan ancestors. To appease certain stones in the churchyard and the bronze figure of Colonel Nathaniel Philbrick, mounted on a bronze horse in the small park downtown, he pretended to reject her admiration. “Too skinny,” he remarked. Having made this gesture, he laughed and asked, “Who told you that? Abbie?”

“Ellen.”

“Oh!” Charlie said.

“Poor Ellen.”

“Why do you pity her?” Charlie asked as he got into bed. “It's no disgrace for a woman to earn her own living.”

“It's not that. I've worked myself. That's not what I mean.”

“I must say I admire Ellen's spunk. She's doing well on the paper. I met Clarence Green the other day and he told me she had real aptitude.”

“I'm sorry for Ellen because she's still head over heels about you.”

Charlie tried to deny it. Bedelia insisted. Ellen's every look betrayed a broken heart. “But she's a wonderful girl, Charlie. She tries her best to like me.”

Charlie lay on his side, studying the tilt of his wife's nose and the jolly curve of her cheek. He felt unworthy because he was loved by this enchanting woman and by Ellen, who had a strong character. What had he ever done to deserve all this devotion? He was no Casanova. If he had been hard, compact, and wiry, with abundant dark hair and a knowing smile, he might have accepted feminine admiration more complacently. But he was thirty-three, bland, undistinguished, going bald. The virtues he admitted were commonplace, the virtues of an unromantic man, the sort of fellow to whom a nickname like Charlie-Horse could stick for life.

“What about the light?” he asked. “Shall we try again?”

Without hesitation she replied, “Yes, dear. We'll really do it tonight.”

He stretched out his hand and the room was dark. Immediately a great variety of noises took possession of the night. The river seemed to rush along faster and to chatter in a wilder voice, the wind wailed, the black walnut tapped its skinny fingers against the windows, the shutters trembled, the panes rattled, and there were scratchings as if an army of rats had invaded the attic.

“Oh, Charlie!”

He took his wife in his arms, held her tightly, whispering. “There's nothing to be afraid of, Biddy. You've got me here, my sweetheart, my wife, my little love, you're not alone now. I'm here, nothing can hurt you.”

Her tears wet his cheek.

“Just what is it you're afraid of?”

“I don't know,” she wailed.

They clung together. Bedelia made herself small against him so that he should feel larger and more necessary to the frail woman. Since their wedding night he had been trying to help
her overcome her fear of the dark. Her efforts had been so sincere that Charlie had never scolded nor laughed at her for the childishness of her terror.

Gradually her fears had infected him. In the daytime he resolved to harden himself against contagion, but when she clung to him in the dark, weeping, his mind filled with strange fancies and his flesh, under the blankets, chilled. By day his wife was earthy, a woman who loved her home and had a genuine talent for housekeeping. In the dark she seemed entirely another sort of creature, female but sinister, a woman whose face Charlie had never seen. It was absurd for a man of his intelligence to let himself be affected by these vague and formless fantasies, and he tried to account for his wife's fear of the dark by remembering that she had lived a hard life. Her girlhood, according to stories she had told them in bits and pieces, a stray anecdote here, a fragment there, had been shadowed by so much misfortune and disillusionment that it would have been abnormal for her to not have been affected.

None of this reasoning did Charlie the slightest bit of good. The phantoms dwelt there as if they had taken a lease on the bedroom. On every other night he had weakened and relit the lamp. Tonight he was determined to prove by disapproval that the darkness was uninhabited and that he had no sympathy for her irrational, childish terror.

A quivering scream rent the blackness. Cold winds swept through the room. Under the blankets Charlie shivered.

“What is it, my dear?”

Bedelia did not scream again. After a silence so deep that she seemed to have stopped breathing, she whispered faintly, “Did you see it, too?”

“See what?” His voice was crisp with disapproval.

“It moved.”

“Now, Biddy,” he began firmly and coolly.

“I saw it.”

“There's nothing in the room, nothing. It's absurd for you . . .”

She pulled away from him and moved to the edge of the bed.
The pillow did not muffle her sobs nor the mattress conceal her tremors. The house was filled, quite suddenly, with small terrible sounds that were closer and more distinct than the rushing fury of the river.

In the ten seconds that passed while he stretched his hand toward the lamp, Charlie recognized the weakness that had taken possession of his spirit. It was a newly acquired quality. Charlie Philbrick Horst had been trained in the school that rejects idle whims and scorns self-indulgence. Morally slothful, his mother would have called his present state of mind.

“Oh, Charlie-Horse, darling, how good and sweet you are,” his wife murmured. Her tremors ceased. She relaxed, wiped away tears with the back of her hand, offered a dimpled smile.

A small, rose-shaded lamp shed light in a cone on the carpet. The furniture of the bedroom was real and assuring. Above the mantel hung a portrait of Charlie's mother at seventeen, a righteous girl, her lips tight with disapproval. And Charlie would assure himself that it was for his wife's sake that he had turned on the light. In this way he was arming himself against the scorn of weakness which had been planted in him by his mother.

“You're so good, so thoughtful, such an unusual man,” Bedelia whispered. “I'm sure it's hard for you to sleep with the light on.”

“Oh, I'm getting used to it,” Charlie answered, feeling the chill thaw out of his cramped limbs as he studied his wife's fair flesh, rosy lips, and the curves of her cheeks.

“WHY DO YOU LIVE WAY UP HERE IN THE WOODS? Are you hiding?”

That was Abbie and typical of her insolence. Ellen, disapproving, moved to the farthest corner of the cold leather seat. Ben had driven into town to fetch the girls and was driving them back to his house in his automobile. Their coast collars were turned up, their hands tucked in their muffs, their legs wrapped in blankets, but it was still torture to be speeding at twenty miles an hour through the country.

Abbie's question echoed the curiosity of the town. Why had a man who could afford to live comfortably close to his neighbors chosen a house in the woods for the winter months?

“A whim,” Ben said. “I wanted to try painting the country at its bleakest.”

“But why do you have to live in the wilderness? Couldn't you paint just as well if you were comfortable?”

“I couldn't be more comfortable in a New York apartment,” Ben said. And this was true. While his house was remote, it was a modern building equipped with a hot-air furnace and a water-heater. He rented it from Judge Bennett, whose family lived there from the first of June until the Tuesday after Labor Day when they moved back to their stone mansion opposite the Walkers' house in the center of town.

“I'm off the main road,” Ben continued, “but with a machine it doesn't make much difference. Asa Keeley and his boys cut my wood and do my errands.”

“Besides,” put in Ellen, “he's got Charlie and Bedelia as his closest neighbors.”

“And Hannah,” Ben said, smiling. “Hannah gives me more news of the town than I get from your paper, Miss Walker.”

“I believe that,” Ellen said. “And I hope you've no skeletons in your closet, because Hannah and her sisters and cousins work in half the houses in town, and no secret's safe. She's cousin of the Horsts' Mary, you know?”

“Don't I, though? I'm sure that whenever a button pops off my shirt, Hannah phones Mary about it. Mary tells Bedelia and the next time I see her, I catch her counting buttons.” Ben paused while the girls laughed. “The latest is the cigar situation,” he confided. “It seems that Bedelia threw away the cigars I gave Charlie for Christmas. She'd heard somewhere that cigars are bad for the digestion and didn't want him to smoke them. Hannah said he made Bedelia promise not to let me know about it, so that my feelings won't be hurt.”

“I think Bedelia's splendid,” Ellen said. “She takes such good care of Charlie.”

The Horst house was just off the highway at the junction
with the side road that led to the Bennett place. As they turned, they all looked at the Horst house and saw that lights were burning in the front bedroom.

“They'll be over a bit later,” Ben told the girls. “I told them to come at half-past six. I want to show you my paintings before dinner.”

“Won't they want to see them, too?” Abbie asked.

“No doubt Bedelia's seen them already,” Ellen remarked tartly.

If her legs had not been secured by blankets, Abbie would have kicked Ellen's shin.

“She's seen them often,” Ben remarked, apparently unmoved by Ellen's insinuations. “She's an excellent critic.”

Ben seemed anxious to show off his work. He hardly gave the girls time to take off their coats and hats before he rushed them into the north bedroom which he used as a studio. Except for an easel, a stool, and a paint-stained table, the room was bare. No canvas had been hung, but a number were stacked along the walls. “I'm sorry you have to see my work by artificial light, but I'm not offering any excuses,” Ben said as he tilted the lampshade so that full light should fall upon the easel. He showed his paintings, one by one, standing by patiently until his guests had enough of each picture.

His work was crude, but not without a certain forcefulness. The paintings revealed characteristics that his amiable manners concealed. He was shrewd and ruthless and saw deeply below the surface.

“You're fauve, aren't you?” inquired Abbie.

“Not by intention. It's probably my nature.”

“After seeing your work, I'm rather afraid of you.”

He turned to Ellen. “Do you think I'm dangerous?”

Ellen lowered her eyes so that she need not look any longer at the painting on the easel. It was of a red barn on the Silvermine River, a favorite subject with the artists who came to Southern Connecticut. Ellen had seen many versions of it. The work of a famous magazine illustrator had been used on the calendar distribution at Christmas by the insurance company
for which Wells Johnson worked. Ellen had always thought this a tranquil scene, but in Ben's picture the red barn seemed to be crumbling, the water choked with weeds, and in the flame of autumn foliage there was sense of winter's bitterness.

“It's daring.” Abbie spoke, although she knew it was Ellen's opinion he sought.

“At first it shocks you, but after you're used to it, you find that you rather like it. Like Stravinsky.”

“I'm sure I'd never grow to like it.”

Ellen spoke her mind freely. If she had deliberately set about antagonizing Ben Chaney, she could not have found a more effective method. Abbie tried to signal with her eyebrows.

“At first,” Ellen went on, ignoring Abbie's frantic signals, “I thought I disliked your work because you deliberately chose ugly things to paint, like slum scenes and garbage cans. But now I see you can also make a beautiful scene hideous.”

“I try to paint what I see. And to see things as they are.”

“Then you find truth ugly when others see beauty in it.”

He shrugged. “You may be right. I'm not sentimental.”

They heard Charlie's Oakland car puff up the hill. Ben said, “You've probably seen enough,” and led them out of the studio.

Ellen was glad to return to the glow of the gas logs. She pulled her chair close to the hearth and shivered as if she had just come in out of the cold.

Ben and Charlie drank cider brandy while the ladies sipped sherry. Bedelia was wearing a dress of black crepe de chine, draped at the hips and narrow at the hem. The bodice was cut low, but filled with ruffles of white lace. The dress was both decorous and daring. No woman could criticize, no man fail to notice.

“I'm sorry we're one man short tonight,' Ben explained. “My friend, whom I'd wanted you to meet, didn't get here after all.”

“So Mary told us,” said Bedelia.

“There are blizzards in the Middle West,” Ben went on. “No trains moving. I thought he'd arrived in New York this morning, and then I got a wire saying he hadn't left St. Paul.”