That day John had to see a customer, and Jean had to feed her dogs, and so I was to be deprived temporarily of my friends’ company. I made out such items as “…after a year of separation we may…” “…oh, my dearest, oh my…” “…worse than if it had been a woman you kept…” “…or, maybe, I shall die…” But on the whole my gleanings made little sense the various fragments of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their elements had been in poor Charlotte’s head. but to another boarding school which was said to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the nickname of “Reformatory for Young Ladies.” Finally, the third epistle was obviously addressed to me. Other tatters and shreds (never had I thought I had such strong talons) obviously referred to an application not to St. I assumed that “…and you had better find it because I cannot buy…” came from a letter to Lo and other fragments seemed to point to Charlotte’s intention of fleeing with Lo to Parkington, or even back to Pisky, lest the vulture snatch her precious lamb. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to be sorted into three complete sets. Next morning I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. But a few incidents pertaining to those four or five days after Charlotte’s simple death, have to be noted. I have no reason to dwell, in this very special memoir, on the pre-funeral formalities that had to be attended to, or on the funeral itself, which was as quiet as the marriage had been.
The sun was still a blinding red when he was put to bed in Dolly’s room by his two friends, gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean who, to be near, retired to the Humberts’ bedroom for the night which, for all I know, they may not have spent as innocently as the solemnity of the occasion required.
He staggered a bit, that he did but he opened his mouth only to impart such information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the identification, examination and disposal of a dead woman, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor raved. Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket.
I LOST MY KEYS IN JALOPY GAME DRIVER
At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he laya banked banker so to speakwas not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words their physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.’s nurse running with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened porchwhere the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to groupfrom a bunch of neighbors already collected on the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise shell glasses.
To the anatomical right of this car, on the trim turn of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dresseddouble-breasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tielay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. A big black glossy Packard had climbed Miss Opposite’s sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap), and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery. The far side of our steep little street presented a peculiar sight.