Sir Willie of the Valley

by Stephen Vincent Benét

 

Willie's mind seemed to shoot off at a tangent. “Talk about dreams,” he confided. “Know things about dreams myself. Psychoanalyst,” he gulped. “Dreams, great things.” She thought him a little mad, but that only made him more interesting. “Of course, dear,” she assented meekly.

SIR WILLIE OF THE VALLEY

A Short Story by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

Illustrated by F. R. Gruger

THE Freud craze has passed its apogee—it may even be possible soon to tell one's dreams in mixed company without a nervous blush. While it lasted, I must admit that it was rather wearing. Between Œdipus and the toddle-top we hardly knew where we were. I, for one, shall never forget the nasty shock I got on discovering that a perfectly ingenuous dream, the clou of which was my purchase of an oversize Jersey heifer, revealed me, past possibility of error, the prey of a furious suppressed desire to elope with my great-great-aunt. But now it is all blowing over and our nicest people are going back to mental cruelty as the smarter ground for divorce. Those of us who still have complexes are doing their best to tuck the short ends under. In spite of the resolutions passed by the National Convention of Psychoanalysts, the ego-line is dropping steadily toward the ankles.

All the same, there is no use denying that the movement did a lot of us a whole lot of good. I hate going around denying things; anyway—I haven't a firm enough voice and it merely makes people who don't know me well think I'm spiteful. If the Freud wave didn't get us all out into the healthy open air like croquet, or foster the study of Chinese like this new Mah-Jong game you play with illustrated laundry checks, it provided enough conversation for the more serious among our hostesses, so that if you laid, side by side, every one of them who liked to serve sparkling white grape juice at dinner parties from a full-topped bottle with a napkin wound around its tummy to hide the label and then tittered after one's first eager sip, “Oh, Mr. Whippet, I'm so sorry it isn't champagne!”—if you boiled each one of these worthy ladies in oil, I say, and then laid them out, permanent wave by permanent wave, they would probably describe a curve that might go three and a half times around the space of ground the Woolworth Building would cover if it fell down. I think this is saying a good deal for psychoanalysis.

Besides, hasn't my ex-roommate, William McKinley Keeler, had his copy of Professor Freud's Dream Book bound in royal green ooze leather with one of those white parchment slip-covers over it that progressive publishers favor as a sort of hyperbolical wound-stripe in free literature's present battle with Mr. Sumner? If a fellow like Willie has enough respect for the interpretation of dreams, it ought to prove something, shouldn't it? It shouldn't? Well, wait and see!

WILLIAM McKINLEY KEELER—here, by a clever transition, we slip into the real story—William McKinley Keeler, I repeat, has, naturally, never been known as anything but “Willie” since he broke away from his teether. And, almost as much of course, he never was much at baseball. Football was another article—the minute the special wires began clicking off all the wrong plays to the various graduates' clubs of our mutual Alma Mater in late November, the amateur strategy boards around the ticker began to take vicious bites at their cigars and murmur prayerfully, “If only Keeler breaks loose!” He was little and light, but fast as a prairie rabbit and tricky as a roulette wheel—the mildest looking little quarterback that ever gave a tackler a foot and then took it away from him before he could really grab it.

AS a quarterback he functioned, there was no denying it, but as soon as he took off his funny clothes his impressiveness vanished. Flappers who retired to the dressing-room for one last conference with powder-puff, hip-flask, and a pocket copy of “Racy Yarns” before meeting Willie were guilty of serious miscueage. At a dance Willie was about as spectacular as a mechanical mouse. His most sophisticated bon mot was an “Oh, yes, yes!”

In habits simple, in disposition retiring, in outlook upon existence serious—such was Willie. Not lumpish at all, but almost obtrusively quiet. The only queer taste I ever knew him to have was an enthusiasm for history. In other courses his marks were merely respectable, but in history he soared. Our room was simply filthy with books on his pet subject. He ran to the ones that are all dressed up in purple and gold, like boxes of drug-store candy, for his lighter moments—“Six Sirens of Fontainebleau,” “Napoleon, World-Famous Lover, in Camp and Court,” these things. I believe he actually wanted to become a professor when friends rescued him and started him out with the Universal Emulsifying Company after the war.

“This castle is mine,” said Guillaume, half to himself. “And you are mine,” he said to the girl.

He settled down soon enough, though, and started to make good right away. The emulsifying business recovered from the war depression quicker than most of the others and by the middle of 1920 Willie was able to afford a set of medieval source books in half-morocco. In April, 1921, he met Sheila Winslow; in October he got a little glass office all to himself and his name on the sign-board down-stairs, and on December 27, 1921, he was proposing marriage to Sheila for the fifteenth time.

Of Sheila it is only necessary to remark that her hair and skirts are exactly the right length now—and that two years ago they were just the right length for then. She is and was very personable and she was historic. Each débutante year produces a new crop of Sheilas—about three in the hundred—and they are the ones who introduce monkey-fur, pogo-sticks, and the Chicago to the rest of the world.

Now that they say the Prince of Wales is matching pearls for his little engagement necklace, I don't really know of anybody extant, marriage to whom would give Sheila a genuine thrill. Willie Keeler had about as much chance with her, to the casual observer, as a Plymouth Rock would have of capturing a flamingo by uttering plaintive cries at it from the chicken-house roof.

She liked him, of course—he was far too much the faithful Fido for her not to. He could fetch and carry admirably and she could make him play dead as dead. But his nose was the wrong shape and his eyes that ordinary sort of brown, and as for romance and excitement—to her, William was just about as exciting as a chocolate malted milk. All of which things Willie, who was not stupid, perceived. But it was too late for him to change his nose or his eyes, and as for being exciting—he wanted to be most desperately, but she always got him so excited first whenever he saw her that he never had a chance.

She had listened to his proposal rather abstractedly, only paying attention when the time came for the usual sisterly replies. Internally she was wondering just where she was going from there. She made her début as a baby vampire and graduated swiftly into the expert class of catch-as-catch-can Prom favorites. For two years she had been as prominent in this rôle as a saxophone in a modern jazz band. Now the same part of her mind that told her when to wear English sport stockings informed her that it was time to revamp. Flapperism was punctured. She would have to look out for a new incarnation and make it snappy, at that, before the rest of the world caught up with her.

“Well, anyhow,” the pitiful Willie pleaded, “anyhow, Sheila, tell me there isn't anybody else!”

“Why, Willie, of course not! I just don't want to get married.” She let her voice be kind.

A trusted tooth that had been bothering Willie at intervals for the last three days jumped unexpectedly as if under a red-hot poker.

“Well—there's that big George Follett—he's around here all the time—” Willie persisted, his voice unusually peevish.

Sheila frowned. That was tactless of Willie. Not that she thought she intended to marry George Follett—but he was a person who might fit in well with her new rôle. A big, soft, handsome thirty-year-old, with a too pleasant voice and too pinky nails, who always managed to bring the conversation daringly around to semi-medical topics—Freud—birth-control—faith healing; a man who would say, “Dear lady,” who had Lived, who so frequently informed you that he had Lived, and yet—a change—a different flavor—a certain attraction. She considered him, he Faced Facts so firmly. An enemy might have said that those facts lay always somehow on the fringes of sex and that he not only Faced them continually but even dragged them out when nobody else would have found them there to Face—a slick, blond collie never weary of exhuming the same disreputable bone. Still—she saw herself in her new phase, a Free Soul, with a tired, wise smile, Facing Facts.

Again Willie interrupted. “I'm always seeing him around here,” he continued. The tooth hurt again. “And I don't like his looks, not a little bit!” he ended with a mouselike growl.

Sheila bounced up from beside him at once. This was sheer rebellion.

“You must really allow me to choose my own friends, Willie, in spite of your approval or disapproval—” she began. She continued at length and things came to their usual conclusion. Willie apologetic, Sheila graciously forgiving. But when he had gone, after being informed that, as a mark of special favor, he might be allowed to take her out to tea the following Saturday, Sheila found herself a little disturbed. There was no doubt about it—Willie's apologies had been much less abject than usual. He had even been almost noisy a couple of times. Not knowing about his tooth, the cause of it all, she couldn't quite decide whether she were pleased or annoyed. She dressed for dinner and the theater with George Follett with less care than usual, still wondering.

Willie, on the contrary, was quite sure of his mental state. He was annoyed. He was tremendously annoyed. He was raging. The tooth, now definitely painful, accentuated his rage. He bit on it, growling.

“Nice way for a girl to treat you—thinks I'll stand it forever—play messenger boy—that bum, 'Duke' Follett, ouch!” A little devil was jumping up and down on his tooth with hot spiked shoes. He informed a lamp-post that he wouldn't stand it any longer. He informed a plate-glass window that this time was the last time, that she'd marry him or he'd quit, break off, make it final. Then the devil in his tooth was joined by companions and he spent the rest of the evening devising medieval torments for big blond men who slicked their hair, till at last he fell into an uneasy sleep.

“WELL, well,” said the dentist. “This will have to come out, Mr. Keeler,” and he rattled a couple of his little steel jackstraws together in gay anticipation.

“Come out?” said Willie, rather faintly, “come out right now?”

“Oh, yes—just open, if you please—that's it, yes. We'll have it out in a jiffy, it won't take long or hurt—very much.” The dentist's voice punctuated the sentence with a long and ominous dash before the last two words.

Willie gargled, waving his hands. The dentist bent an attentive ear.

“You have an important appointment late in the afternoon, Mr. Keeler? Oh, that will be quite all right. I shall give you gas.” He offered the last suggestion to Willie like a pair of new rompers. Then his face grew sterner.

“Oh, Miss Smith!” he called, politely.

A spectacled, ineffably aseptic young woman in white appeared.

“You see?” the dentist muttered, flashing his little mirror around and around Willie's mouth. “A fine specimen—really a typical case—far advanced—”

Miss Smith made approving sounds. Willie's nervousness increased. He had not been able to sleep much the night before and a combination of reading “Mace and Lance in Early Aquitaine” through the small hours to the orchestral accompaniment of his toothache and a hard morning at the office had left his mind rather blurred. Odd scraps of reading went jigging through his heaad—Fulkes Plantagenet—basnets—arms varied with a fesse—no, that wasn't right—Sheila—tea—meet her at 4:30, no matter what happened—what on earth was going to happen?—gas—he had never had gas.

Miss Smith was fitting something funny over his face. “Now, just take it easy, Mr. Keeler!” the dentist said and smiled. Willie fixed his eyes on that smile. As he breathed it grew larger, larger, blotted out the world.

THE rain had been falling for hours and seemed prepared to continue falling for hours more. He cursed it anew in a soft and deadly whisper, wriggling his muscles as best he could in the odd, metallic garments that covered him like a suit of iron scales, for the comfort of feeling that they were still alive. He lay in a dismal puddle and wet drops trickled continually down his back from the bush above that concealed him. And yet he was not unhappy. Night had long fallen—there was only a little while left to wait.

He reviewed his plans in his mind—they were impeccable. The wedding feast must be at its drunken height by now—if a dozen of the castle garrison were even half sober it would be a marvel. His robber-comrades, he knew, lay hidden within three steps of the great gate—the guards of that very gate he had bought and paid for. There remained but for him, Guillaume de la Vallée, to give the signal.

They had thought to take the girl away from him by the strong hand—that old white ferret, her father, these cubs, her brothers, had thought to marry her to the duke in his very teeth. He stretched his arms out wide with an enormous arrogance. They had not known him. To-night they should know him indeed.

She was beautiful as a golden picture before altar candles. She was tender and gentle as an apple-tree in its first blossoming. Her voice had a proud and gallant accent. They would love each other so.

No other man under heaven should take her from him while he had hands!

It was time, now. He raised himself cautiously from his lurking place, flattened himself against the castle wall, peered up. It was huge above him, a tall, enormous blackness. He smiled. That impregnable castle! And, far up, the little window to which he would climb, spiderwise, up and up, dagger in teeth, then in at last, triumphant, like a bee with a long sharp sting in the heart of a violated flower.

He tested all his muscles—they were ready and strong. He began to climb.

Before he would have thought it possible, he was at the window-ledge. He swung himself up upon it, rested. His hand went out to the bars. Yes, they had been sawn through—he could bend them aside quite easily. He smiled again—his plans been well considered—they would not fail.

Noiselessly he squeezed through the space left by pushing the bars aside and let himself down into the room. Now he was behind a tapestry. Chinks of light came through it, and a murmur of voices. He crept to a little hole in the hanging about the height of his eye. He peered through it, listening, not breathing.

A fine sight on the other side of the tapestry! A long oak table lit by two branched silver candlesticks and on it three bags of gold, one so crammed that it slumped on its side and spilled a bright heap of coins. At the end of the table three people. A shrinking girl in bride's white, her eyes full of terror. A gross, red-faced man in rich clothing, white-haired, his nostrils distended like the nostrils of a hungry fox, as his puffy hand lay cherishingly on one of the bags, her father. Lounging in a chair at the girl's side, his pink face flushed with love and liquor, his hand paddling the girl's wrist with desirous fingers, magnificent in half-armor, the big blond duke.

Guillaume de la Vallée made a sucking sound with his lips. He crouched away a little from where he had been standing and with his dagger quietly slit the tapestry from top to bottom.

The three at the table were too absorbed in their own affairs to notice the little sound. The duke was speaking.

“Well, there is the coin, good father-in-law!” he said with his roaring laugh. The old man whimpered with pleasure; his other hand stretched out to the other bags.

“I thank you, my lord, I thank you!” he whined, unpleasingly.

“Oh, 'tis little!” The duke waved his hand in the air. His eyes burned at his bride. Behind the tapestry Guillaume de la Vallée drew his sword. His left hand went down to his side for his hunting-horn.

“'Tis nothing,” the duke repeated. “Oh, a price, a good price—but the article pleases me!” His hand clamped down on the girl's wrist.

“And now I shall take seizin!” he said, crushing her to him.

“Guillaume!” sobbed the girl. “Guillaume!”

The duke shook with laughter. “Guillaume is biting his nails in his valley!” he boomed.

FROM behind the tapestry, sudden as the trumpet of Judgment, came the long and shaking blast of a hunting-horn.

“I am here, my lord duke!” said Guillaume de la Vallée in a snarling cry, and stepped through the slit in the tapestry.

The duke had time to draw his sword, but that was all. It did not avail him greatly.

When the battle-fit passed from Guillaume, he was standing beside the table, wiping his sword. The duke lay slack on the floor, his dead mouth grinning. From the lower parts of the castle shouts came, disorderly, victorious, “La Vallée! Bon Dieu pour la Vallée! Guillaume! Guillaume!”

“This castle is mine, it seems,” said Guillaume, half to himself.

The old man at the table made no reply. He sat there stupefied, whimpering, his arms embracing the bags of gold.

“And you are mine,” said Guillaume and smiled at her. And now she, too, was smiling.

Avoiding the blood on the floor with a considerate daintiness, Guillaume de la Vallée stepped over his foe's body and took his lady into his arms.

WILLIAM McKINLEY KEELER was laughing as he had never laughed before. “Oh! Ho! Ho! Ho!” he laughed. “What a funny dream! What a funny dream! What a fu—”

Then he stopped short, abashed by his dentist's serious gaze

“All over, Mr. Keeler!” said the latter with professional heartiness. “Feel happy?” and he achieved a painful smile.

The sentence struck Willie as the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. He laughed till his sides ached. When the fit had passed,

“Now rinse!” said the dentist, sternly.

Willie rinsed, sputtering. “Can I—can I see it?” he managed to ejaculate at last.

The dentist held up an unpleasant object severely between his prongs.

“Oh! Ho! Ho! Ho! As little as that and the place in my mouth feels as big as the subway!” giggled Willie and shook.

Miss Smith came in. “Mrs. Winkle, Doctor,” she murmured, and Willie perceived that it was time for him to go.

He had never been much of a drinker and so found it hard to understand the condition that overtook him as soon as he was out on the street again. It was not so much light-headedness as light-leggedness. His legs felt as light as balloons and extremely brittle. His feet seemed rather uncertain of just where they meant to go and he was still oppressed by an aching realization of the utter absurdity of the cosmos. A traffic policeman's gesture in halting traffic struck him as being so intensely humorous that he had to lean up against the side of a building to recover himself, to the profound disapproval of an earnest old lady who sniffed for the taint of rum as she passed by.

Fantastic thoughts came to his well-ordered mind—he was going to take Sheila to tea, and he tittered as he thought of it. He was very, very sensible—the most sensible man in the world.

He arrived at Sheila's door in a taxi with one of those dissipated-looking, pajamaed French dolls that had just then begun to come into favor dandled in his arms. The laughter had begun to wear off somewhat and his jaw hurt confoundedly, but the lightness in his legs persisted

The maid at the door looked dubious, but he brushed her aside as he had always wanted to brush people aside and never been able except on the football field and in that funny dream of his in the dentist's chair. “Going take her to tea!” he explained with unnecessary vigor and heard a muffled giggle as the maid disappeared. He mounted the stairs very firmly—if he did not put his feet down heavily he was not quite sure where they would go.

HE stumbled into the living-room. Sheila was there, hatted and ready to go out, and so was George Follett. They seemed surprised to see him, but the obviousness of their surprise did not at first annoy him—it was all just part of the humor of the world.

“H'lo, Sheila!” he almost whooped, then, condescendingly, “H'lo, Follett! How's all the little psycheses psyching?” Then, turning back to Sheila, “Christmas Gift!” he cried and chucked the disreputable doll into her arms as neatly as he had ever thrown a forward pass.

“Why, thank you, Willie! For me? How lovely!” said Sheila automatically, but her eyes were very puzzled.

“But, really—” she began.

“Really and truly?” said Willie, imbecilically, “Really and truly, Sheila?” He emitted a long and whistling laugh.

“Why, Willie Keeler!” said Sheila, dropping the doll, her voice wavering between anger, shame and a growing interest.

“Had tooth out,” Willie explained. The recollection devoured him with merriment. Besides, he was amusing Sheila. He exaggerated what needed no exaggeration. “Dentist in nice white coat—gay me laughing gas—Oh! Ho! Ho!”

“Laughing gas! said Sheila tartly, “Laughing water, you mean! Why, Willie, you're as boiled as—”

But here George Follett did his best to take charge of the situation. He snapped his teeth together with a capable click. “Leave him to me—I've handled men when they were like that before,” he commanded the astonished Sheila in a brisk undertone, then took three paces forward with military precision and confronted Willie.

“Look here, Keeler!” he began, sticking out his jaw.

“Well, Follett?” said Willie, giggling, and this time Sheila giggled too.

Then Follett lost his smooth, bland temper completely. “Don't get funny with me, my man!” he barked like a terrier. “You're insulting—that's what you are—insulting and gauche! To come to a lady's house in this condition—uninvited. She doesn't want to see you—she's going out with me! Go home and sleep it off!”

“George Follett!” Sheila began in a raging whisper and then stopped suddenly, silenced by what was happening to Willie's face. All the color drained out of it and left it white and pinched. The mild fury of laughter that had shaken him was gone as suddenly. When he spoke again it was in a harsh thick voice she did not recognize.

“See here!” he said slowly, breathing. “What do you mean? I am taking Miss Winslow to tea this afternoon, I believe.”

Follett laughed in his face, looking down at him.

“Not this afternoon,' he condescended to explain. “Though I must say I can't blame you for mixing your dates—the state you're in! This afternoon Miss Winslow has promised to come with me to attend a little study group some of us are forming to dig into the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. Come, Sheila.” He made as if to brush Willie aside. But Willie was very much in the way.

“Dreams,” said Willie, reflectively. He stared at Follett, measuring him as he had often measured a charging end. “I had a funny dream a little while ago,” he said, as if to himself. His fists balled up.

“Oh, go home!” said Follett, exasperated, and put his hand on Willie's shoulder.

“Leggo of me, you big bum!” yelped Willie at the touch, and his voice was the strained fierce voice of a quarterback calling a signal.

“Get out! You don't belong here!” said Follett, breathing through his nose.

“I am here, my lord duke—and I stay here!” said Willie, rather dreamily. The big man pushed him.

“Wuff!” said George Follett, wholeheartedly, and crashed to the floor, his breath shaken out of him by Willie's sudden tackle. He rolled over twice and started to stumble to his feet. “Come on!” yipped Willie. “Come on!” and danced in front of him like a wasp. “Come on, my lord duke—ah, my lord—” and his small hard fist connected with Follett's chin and the latter fell over a chair and went down for the second time.

“Nuff?” said Willie, dangerously, a little later, his fists waving over the flabby bulk of his fallen foe.

“Yeah,” said Follett, briefly, feeling his mouth with his hand. “Lemme up, you little devil!” There were tears in his soulful eyes.

“All right,” said Willie, magnanimously, and Follett scrambled to his feet. He left without another word or a backward glance.

WILLIE trod behind him to the door, strutting like a game-cock. Then he turned back to Sheila. She was crumpled on the couch. The sight stirred little pity in Sir Willie of the Valley.

“Sorry I had to—um—chastise that—er—big bum in your living-room,” he remarked with grandeur. “Apologize. G'by!”

“Willie!” moaned Sheila, unbelievingly, but Willie's heart was of marble. “No use. All over,” he proceeded dejectedly. “You're through with me. I know. All right—you're through. Maybe better that way. Break a date with me to go to psycho-psychopathic séance with your friend, the stuffed shirt. Think I'm drunk when I come in here—with toothache—after operation—” His voice was nobly pathetic, nobly renunciatory. “G'by!” He marched to the door.

“Willie!” said Sheila piteously, a very hurt child.

“Too late, g'by!” Willie flung over his shoulder

“Wil-lie! Willie dear! Oh, Willie, come back!” said Sheila with a gulping sob, her arms stretched out to him.

He came back.

Some half an hour later he roused sufficiently from bliss to apologize once more for his treatment of Mr. Follett.

“Can't think what got into me, darling,” he began. “But his voice—and the way he acted—just as if you belonged to him—made me so mad.”

“Oh, Willie, you were splendid!” crooned Sheila, trustingly.

“So damn mad,” said Willie reflectively.

“I know.” She soothed him. “Why, I was afraid of you, Willie. If you ever looked at me that way—” and her voice was awed and delighted.

“Can't tell,” said Willie, briefly. “Got a nasty temper—nasty. From a child. Done my best to keep it under but—”

“Oooh, Willie!” said Sheila, the once imperious, with delicious respect. He reverted to more serious matters.

“Tell your family to-night, huh, darling?”

“Why, Willie, I thought—” she hesitated, “we might wait—just a little, a day or so—”

“Tell your family to-night!” His voice was suddenly rasping.

“All right, dear.” She was exquisitely docile. “Just as you say.”

Still later she ventured a question, timidly.

“Willie?”

“Yes, sweetness.”

“I just wondered—about George Follett—oh, no, no, nothing important—only—before you licked him—remember?—you called him 'duke'—'my lord duke' and—”

“Oh, that,” Willie chuckled. “Just nickname. People used to call him that at college,” he deigned to elucidate. Then his mind seemed to shoot off at a tangent.

“Sweetness?”

“Yes.

Again Willie chuckled.

“Talk about dreams,” he confided. “Know things about dreams myself. Psychoanalyst,” he gulped, and gave way to laughter. “Dreams, great things.”

When he had recovered, “Know first thing I'm going to buy for our sectional bookcase?”

Dutifully. “No, dear. What?”

He was laughing.

“Professor Sigmund Freud's Interpretative Dreambook—best binding I can find in New York. My mascot, sweetness. Our mascot.” The laughter shook him. “Send wedding invitation to good old dentist, too!” he wheezed.

She thought him a little mad, but that only made him more interesting. Besides, he was looking straight at her—and his eyes had the battle look.

“Of course, dear,” she assented meekly.

And since he had so commanded, it was so.