Foxfire (3 page)

On the next to the last night out there was a gala dance, humbler replica of the Captain's dance taking place three decks up in First Class, and Amanda, while she batted balloons and drank inferior champagne, was actively and consciously miserable. The ship had entered the Gulf Stream now, the air was balmy, and Amanda had worn the most filmy and seductive dress she owned. It was of peacock-blue chiffon trimmed with gold, both colors designed to enhance her eyes and hair. Its effect on the other young men was instantaneous, but from Dart it evoked a long, thoughtful look. From this look she took what comfort she could and prayed that he would ask her to dance. Her prayer was answered presently; because all the others were dancing, they were left alone at the table and there was nothing else for him to do. His reluctance prompted her to schoolgirl gaucherie.

“It won't be so painful—” she said crossly. “The dances aren't long. You aren't by any chance afraid of me, are you?”

Dart considered this remark. Then he laughed. “Sorry if I seem rude. I'm not afraid of you but I guess I've always been wary of your type.”

This remark would have annoyed a saint and Amanda snapped, “I'm not a type, I'm me, you dope. You have the most insufferable...”

Suddenly Dart put his arm around her, she felt the faint pressure of his chin on her hair. “Shut up and let's dance,” he said.

Unlike many tall men Dart had lightness of foot and perfect muscular control. He also had a superb sense of rhythm. Amanda had little time to note this before she was swept by more compelling emotions. The physical contact with him overpowered her. Her body terrified her by a sensation of melting into him, of identification. The saloon and the other dancers, the lights and the colored streamers, the gentle creaking of the ship, the honeyed strains of the “Pagan Love Song.” all receded to an opalescent blur. She knew nothing sharply except the feel of Dart's hand on her waist, of his body against hers.

Surely this violence of physical response could not be onesided. The very essence of a feeling so primitive was reciprocity. She looked up into his face and knew from the expression of his eyes as they met hers that she was right.

When the orchestra stopped they both turned silently and went out on deck. Other couples had had the same impulse and all over the scanty deck space there were murmurs and giggles from the shadows. They moved toward the taffrail and stumbled over Peggy and somebody sitting behind a stanchion, their arms and faces commingled.

Amanda made an involuntary sound of revulsion and leaned against the rail watching the foaming wake flow back into darkness. Dart put his arm around her and also leaned against the rail. “I'm quite willing to neck too,” he said, “if you want to. I'm sure we'd both enjoy it.”

“Yes—” she said after a moment. “But no. Cheap. Wasn't there more than this”—she gestured towards the entwined couples behind them—“while we were dancing—It felt beautiful to me—deep—was I wrong?”

Dart glanced at her, removed his arm and lit a cigarette. “No. You weren't wrong. You're a sweet thing, Andy.”

“That surprises you?” she said, smiling faintly. “You haven't liked me, have you? But I liked you from the minute I saw you. I don't know why exactly.”

Or do I—she thought. Because, though he isn't technically handsome, he's physically so attractive to me? Because he's different from any man I've met? Deeper, more mature? Because I can't dominate him? But you shouldn't analyze love. That's what it is, she thought. Love, but not like the other times I've felt it.

Dart, when he chose, had intuition. He said now, “You've been in love quite often?” And the edge of indulgent amusement had returned to his voice, cutting the deeper intimacy.

She sighed. “Oh, in a way. The sort of thing everybody does in their teens. And you?”

“Girls—women from time to time. Not love. ‘One word is too often profaned for me to profane it,' I guess and, anyway, I don't much like spilling emotions around. Untidy.”

“Do you have any emotions to be untidy with?” she asked bitterly.

Dart laughed. “Yes,” he said. “I think I do.—Come on, let's go in and sit someplace, unless you'd like to try that German gallop that's going on in there.”

They did not dance again, nor did they go out on deck, but they stayed together for the rest of the evening, drinking a little and talking of desultory things. Amanda was content with what she could get and tried not to batter herself against the barrier he had again raised against her. And despite the barrier there was an encouraging change in their relationship. She knew that he was aware of her now and twice their eyes met in a long, searching look. This happened late in the evening, after the orchestra had vanished and several of the usual crowd had joined them in a corner of the lounge. One of the German students, a pimply youth in horn-rimmed spectacles, started a beery exposition of the virtues of Aryanism. The Williams junior was a liberal and said so. He cited the names of famous Jews—what about Mendelssohn, Einstein, Freud: The German countered with contempt. Peggy, looking rumpled and self-conscious, reappeared alone from outside anc jumped into the discussion. She brought up the mass psychology of social problems.

Amanda listened vaguely while the arguments ran along familiar tracks. Exceptional Jews but—the follies of racial mixture, and what about the Negro problem? asked the Ger man, with that air of triumph Europeans reserve for this question.

Peggy replied hotly that all intelligent Americans were perfectly aware of it and, anyway, all this racial pro and con wa: a matter of half-baked emotion, not logic.

Whereupon the Williams junior turned to Dart who had been sitting silently next to Amanda and said, “What do you think about all this, Dartland? Which side are you on?”

Dart uncrossed his legs and Amanda was aware that his bod] stiffened but he spoke with amiable calm. “I don't know tha my opinion on racial problems would be very objective, seeing that my mother is a half-breed Indian.”

There was a moment of silence. The German's jaw dropped. They all stared at Dart. Amanda's heart jumped. So that's it—she thought—oh, poor darling ... and she burst into speech.

“But, Dart, that's so different.
Indian
blood. That's romantic.”

Dart lifted his eyebrows. “More romantic than Jewish or Negro blood?” he asked.

“But of course it is!” she cried. “People are proud of Indian blood. Think of all the people who boast about being descended from Pocahontas!”

“That's true—” said Peggy judicially. “Though it's rather hard to analyze. It's the only racial mixture that's respectable in this country. Maybe because we subjugated them, and part of the ‘Lo the poor Indian' complex, perhaps. Excuse me, Dart. But it's interesting.”

“Yes, it is,” Dart agreed placidly. “Particularly as it was not at all respectable fifty years ago when my grandfather, Tanosay, murdered my white great-grandparents and abducted my grandmother from a wagon train. Tanosay actually married her, Indian fashion, after a while but he was an Apache, and neither the Apaches nor the Arizona whites considered the match in the least romantic.” He glanced at Amanda. “My mother, Saba, was born to them and was raised amongst the Apaches.”

“Himmel!” said the German student continuing to gape at Dart. “Apaches! It's fantastic. One has read of them, naturally. So vicious -—and how you say—ferocious.”

“Quite,” agreed Dart. “The ‘tigers of the desert.'”

“But it's ridiculous!” cried Amanda. “There must have been lots of nice ones. Besides, the Americans did dreadful things to the Indians, too. Everybody admits that now.”

She subsided, flushed and disgruntled, because Dart laughed. He patted her hand and said, “Bless you, my child,” but he showed no special appreciation. And yet Amanda had sensed the faintest bravado in his presentation of his Indian ancestry. Had felt that he must have been hurt by it sometimes, and that he had brought out these lurid facts now for her—as a warning.

The German, and the Williams junior, who looked embarrassed having now recaptured the additional fact about Dart's Andover background, both fell silent; but Peggy, whose clinical interest was aroused, continued to question eagerly.

“Please forgive me, Dart, but it's really such an unusual heritage. You weren't raised on a reservation, were you? What about your father?”

Amanda thought for a second that Dart, having proved whatever point he had set out to prove, was not going to answer but relapse into his habitual reserve.

“I'd like to know, too,” she said softly, looking up at him.

Dart nodded after a moment. She saw his long body relax.

“Okay,” he said. “Brief biography. My father was Jonathan Dartland, born in Ipswich, Mass., educated at Harvard, became a history professor at Amherst. He was a bachelor, caught T.B. and was sent to the Arizona desert to get well. That was in 1901 when he was about forty. He took an adobe cottage on the desert and hired an Indian girl from the Indian School to housekeep for him. That was Saba, my mother. They fell deeply in love and got married. I was born in 1905 and educated at home, by my father. When I was thirteen, Father began to fail, the old T.B. broke out, he wanted to see the East again before he died, and he wanted me to go to an Eastern school. So the three of us came East...” He paused a moment. “Father put me in Andover. They went back to Arizona and he died. After my graduation I went back to the College of Mines at Tucson. And that's that.”

From this bald recital Amanda garnered two things. In the slight change of tone as he said “They fell deeply in love,” the only emotional phrase he had used. So he does believe in love she thought, and he loved his parents. Especially Saba. She did not know how she knew this, but in the middle of Peggy comments—“All that Yankee scholastic strain mixed with the primitive, adds up to a definite plus factor, unless of course the environment”—Amanda said, “I'd love to meet your mother, Dart. I've a feeling she's a wonderful woman.”

Dart looked startled for the first time in her observation of him, and turning his shoulder on Peggy, he looked down into Amanda's frank and sympathetic eyes. “She is,” he answered seriously. “The Indian half of her predominates. She doesn't see life as white women do. Lots of things they think important, she doesn't. She's very simple, and strong.”

“Do you see her often?” asked Amanda timidly.

“No. She lives on the reservation with her people because she wants to. We don't need to see each other often, we understand each other. With Indians the silver cord is cut early and thoroughly.”

Peggy, who had been trying to overhear, caught enough of this to branch forth into the Oedipus complex, but Dart got up and held his hand out to Amanda as he had on their first deck meeting. This time she clung to it, unashamed.

“Let's walk around the deck before we go to bed,” Dart said to her, “or let's not go to bed at all. I've just realized how fast this tub's steaming toward New York.”

"But you'll stay in New York a while, won't you?” she asked very low as they stepped through the companionway. “I do hope you will.”

 

Amanda, dozing on Dart's shoulder in the Ford, heard a dull thump before she saw a long, grayish shape outlined against the darkness of the wash.

“Dart!” she whispered.

He awoke, instantly alert, and simultaneously reached for the flashlight on the seat between them. In the circle of light two little green lamps glared at them, then disappeared.

“Bobcat,” said Dart switching off the light. “Too small for lion.”

“Oh,” she said. Eyes watching from the darkness. The crouching wilderness filled with invisible life. But to Dart not invisible, not menacing. He understood it.

“Don't you wish you'd had your gun handy?” she asked, thinking of her father's delight in hunting expeditions to Canada and duckshooting in Carolina.

“Why, no,” said Dart, yawning. “I've got nothing against that bobcat. There's no point in killing except for food or because you're in danger. That's the law.”

“What law?”

“The law of the wild,” he said, chuckling suddenly. “Live and let live.”

“How about fishing?”

“For food only,” he answered and she knew that he was laughing at her, but under the laughter there was an inflexibility.

“I don't see what's wrong with hunting and fishing for sport, for just plain fun,” she said crossly. “You're sometimes so set about things. So—so Spartan.”

“My Indian blood, no doubt,” said Dart lightly. “Let's see if the wash is down enough.” He got out of the car with the flashlight and when he came back he started the engine. “We'll just about make it.”

The Ford slithered and chugged and pounded through the soft sand of the creek bed, the water lapped the running boards but they pulled through and up the other side of the dip.

“Thank goodness, that's over!” cried Amanda. “On to Lodestone.” She nestled against him again, ashamed of her momentary irritation. “I find I keep thinking about bed in a shameless way. I hope our bed's decent. Not all straw and lumps like that horror at Lordsburg last night. Beds are so important.”

“Oh, I guess it's okay,” said Dart, watching ahead for the next wash. If
one
of them was running, likely there'd be more down here in the valley, though this he forebore to tell Amanda. “I didn't notice the bed. Was so damn glad to find us any kind of a shack to live in.”

And so was I, she thought. And so damn glad when I finally got those letters from him. Their love had fruited and ripened by letter. After they landed he had lingered five days in New York before going back West. And he had, of course, met her family, Mrs. Lawrence and Jean and George. Each morning Dart had appeared at Mrs. Lawrence's cluttered little apartment on the edge of Beekman Place, and he had hardly concealed his impatience to get out of it again as quickly as possible with Amanda.