Farther Off from Heaven by William Humphrey

Author:William Humphrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504006293
Publisher: Open Road Media

HE SEEMED TO HAVE NOTICED, all right, but to have decided to excuse them for the cool reception the Varleys gave him when he came courting their Nell. As though he had gotten the message, but, having glanced at the envelope and seen whom it was from, he had thrown it away unopened. He made himself welcome, overlooking their ungraciousness as though not wanting to embarrass them by drawing attention to their bad manners.

He drove out from Clarksville—he had left home when he was little more than a boy, lived in town in bachelor’s quarters (everybody knew what that meant)—on Sunday afternoons, proclaiming his coming by the dust he raised all along the road. He would sit behind the wheel for a moment after he had reined up at the gate to let the dust settle. Then out he swaggered. There was about him an air of accounting himself a new sort of man, one of a new age, the age of speed, of the automobile, amused by and slyly patronizing toward those whom he had superseded, the slow, older sort, the horse-drawn ones, like Ed Varley, for example.

That machine which delivered him to the gate was enough in itself to rouse Ed Varley’s mistrust, dislike, fear. He recognized it for what it was: the vehicle of change. It brought to Sherry, to his own doorstep, a tremor of that seismic upheaval which, since the war, was shaking the world. The restlessness, the waywardness of youth, their flight from parental authority, the wide scattering of families; the automobile symbolized all this, it was the actual instrument of it, and the impudent little bugger, up from nowhere, who came sauntering out of that one of his, whose trade it was to fix the things, personified this onslaught of mechanization which threatened to disrupt and replace all that was familiar, comprehensible, easygoing.

It was plain to see that he had not come from church in those duds. When you knew—as everyone did know, whom did he think he was fooling?—what he came from, what he was, then that straw boater he wore was even more of an impudence, the angle at which he set it provoking enough to make a man want to knock it off his head. He seemed to be just daring you to do that.

All smiles, all politeness, all compliments (so that later, when they found fault with him, she could contrast his gentlemanliness toward them) he could not be made to feel unwelcome. And there was something about him which kept you from telling him to his face that he was, from ordering him off the place. Odd that such a little runt of a man could give that impression. Or was that so odd, after all? His being little was what made it dangerous to cross him.

Besides, as they could see to their dismay and despair, the child was infatuated with him. Always such a good girl—he seemed to have brought out a devil in her. Their opposition to him brought it out, too.

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