Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell Read Free Book Online

conversations, none of which made the least concession to inexperience, she fingered the silk rose at her mother’s waist.
    “When I was nine,” young Mrs. Ellis said to Martha King, “we moved from the part of town where we knew everybody, and I thought I wouldn’t ever again have any friends. I used to sit in my swing in the back yard of the new house and watch the two little girls who lived next door. I envied their curls and their clothes and everything about them. And then one day I caught them using my swing. They were swinging each other and eating liquorice, and they gave me some.… But it took a long time, it took years for me to realize that wherever I went, there would always be someone who——”
    “You’ll find people very friendly here,” Martha said, stroking Ab’s hair.
    In the evening air outside, the throbbing sound of the locusts rose and ebbed. Austin King left the circle of men and came across the room. What he had to say was for his wife’s ear alone. She nodded twice, and he sat down at the piano and played a series of chords which produced a brief and respectful silence. “We’re going to play a game called Mystic Music,” he said. Mrs. Potter had never heard of this game and, instead of listening to the rules as Austin explained them, she kept going off into descriptions of parlour games that they played in Mississippi. The men were reluctant to leave their closed circle and the subject of Teddy Roosevelt, who out of egotism had split the Republican Party.
    Though it was taken so seriously that night in the Kings’ living-room, the split in the Republican Party was as nothing compared to the split between the men and the women. Before dinner and again immediately afterwards, the men gathered at one end of the room near the ebony pier glass and the women at the opposite end, around the empty fireplace.What originally brought the split about, it would be hard to say. Perhaps the women, with their tedious recipes and their preoccupation with the diseases of children drove the men away. Or perhaps the men, knowing how nervous the women became when their husbands’ voices were raised in political argument, withdrew of their own accord in order to carry on, unhampered, the defence of their favourite misconceptions. Both men and women may have decided sadly that after marriage there was no common ground for social intercourse. At all events, the separation had taken place a long time before. In Draperville only the young, ready (like Randolph and Mary Caroline) for courtship, or the old, bent (like Mrs. Potter and Dr. Danforth) on preserving the traditions of gallantry, were willing to talk to one another. They met as ambassadors and kept open the lines of communication between the sexes.
    Austin King continued his efforts at the piano until eventually one person at a time relinquished his right to speak and the room was ready for the new game. Young Mrs. Ellis was chosen to be the first victim, and left the room. Austin began to improvise. He played the same mysterious little tune over and over, the end being woven each time into the beginning, until the company arrived at the stunt that Mrs. Ellis must do. She was called back from the study and the music became louder. She changed the direction of her steps and the music diminished. Now louder, now softer, it led her around the living-room on invisible wires until at last, hesitantly, she transferred a vase of white phlox from the table to the mantelpiece and the music stopped altogether.
    The next victim, Randolph Potter, had to stand before Mary Caroline Link, bow from the waist, and ask her to dance with him. Under the spell of the music, Alice Beach (whose sister had sung for Geraldine Farrar’s teacher, though she herself, being the younger one, had had no such opportunity) took a copy of
Janice Meredith
out of the bookcase inthe study, returned to the living-room, sat down in the wing chair, and commenced to read aloud.
    Since