THE DREAM OF DANIEL SMITH
He had been recommended for lodging to a certain Mrs. Twine, and at five
o'clock, when the day's work at Baxter's was over, he started up the
street in a bewildered search for her house, which he had been told was
situated immediately beyond the first turn on the brow of the hill. When
he reached the corner there was no one in sight except a small boy who
sat, crying loudly, astride a little whitewashed wooden gate. Beyond the
boy there was a narrow yard filled with partly dried garments hung on
clothes lines, which stretched from a young locust tree near the
sidewalk to the front porch, where a man with a red nose was reading the
local newspaper. As the man with the red nose paid no attention to the
loud lamentations of the child, Ordway stopped by the gate and inquired
sympathetically if he could be of help.
"Oh, he ain't hurt," remarked the man, throwing a side glance over his
paper, "he al'ays yells like that when his Ma's done scrubbed him."
"She's washed me so clean that I feel naked," howled the boy.
"Well, you'll get over that in a year's time," observed Ordway
cheerfully, "so suppose you leave off a minute now and show me the way
to Mrs. Twine's."
At his request the boy stopped crying instantly, and stared up at him
while the dirty tearmarks dried slowly on his cheeks.
"Thar ain't no way," he replied solemnly, "'cause she's my ma."
"Then jump down quickly and run indoors and tell her I'd like to see
her."
"'T ain't no use. She won't come."
"Well, go and ask her. I was told to come here to look for board and
lodging."
He glanced inquiringly at the man on the porch, who, engrossed in the
local paper, was apparently oblivious of the conversation at the gate.
"She won't come 'cause she's washin' the rest of us," returned the boy,
as he swung himself to the ground, "thar're six of us an' she ain't done
but two. That's Lemmy she's got hold of now. Can't you hear him holler?"
He planted his feet squarely on the board walk, looked back at Ordway
over his shoulder, and departed reluctantly with the message for his
mother. At the end of a quarter of an hour, when Ordway had entered the
gate and sat down in the cold wind on the front steps, the door behind
him opened with a jar, and a large, crimson, untidy woman, splashed with
soapsuds, appeared like an embodied tempest upon the threshold.
"Canty says you've come to look at the dead gentleman's room, suh," she
began in a high voice, approaching her point with a directness which
lost none of its force because of the panting vehemence with which she
spoke.
"Baxter told me I might find board with you," explained Ordway in her
first breathless pause.
"To be sure he may have the dead gentleman's room, Mag," put in the man
on the porch, folding his newspaper, with a shiver, as he rose to his
feet.
"I warn't thinkin' about lettin' that room agin'," said Mrs. Twine,
crushing her husband's budding interference by the completeness with
which she ignored his presence. "But it's jest as well, I reckon, for a
defenceless married woman to have a stranger in the house. Though for
the matter of that," she concluded in a burst of domestic confidence,
"the woman that ain't a match for her own husband without outside help
ain't deservin' of the pleasure an' the blessin' of one." Then as the
man with the red nose slunk shamefacedly into the passage, she added in
an undertone to Ordway, "and now if you'll jest step inside, I'll show
you the spare room that I've got to let."
She led the way indoors, scolding shrilly as she passed through the
hall, and up the little staircase, where several half-dressed children
were riding, with shrieks of delight, down the balustrade. "You needn't
think you've missed a scrubbing because company's come," she remarked
angrily, as she stooped to box the ears of a small girl lying flat on
her stomach upon the landing. "Such is my taste for cleanness," she
explained to Ordway, "that when my hands once tech the soap it's as
much as I can do to keep 'em back from rubbin' the skin off. Thar 're
times even when the taste is so ragin' in my breast that I can hardly
wait for Saturday night to come around. Yet I ain't no friend to license
whether it be in whiskey or in soap an' water. Temperance is my passion
and that's why, I suppose, I came to marry a drunkard."
With this tragic confession, uttered in a matter of fact manner, she
produced a key from the pocket of her blue gingham apron, and ushered
Ordway into a small, poorly furnished room, which overlooked the front
street and the two bared locust trees in the yard.
"I kin let you have this at three dollars a week," she said, "provided
you're content to do yo' own reachin' at the table. Thar ain't any
servant now except a twelve year old darkey."
"Yes, I'll take it," returned Ordway, almost cheerfully; and when he had
agreed definitely as to the amount of service he was to receive, he
closed the creaking door behind her, and looked about the crudely
furnished apartment with a sense of ownership such as he had not felt
since the afternoon upon which he had stood in his wife's sitting-room
awaiting his arrest. He thought of the Florentine gilding, the rich
curtains, the long mirrors, the famous bronze Mercury and the Corot
landscape with the sunlight upon it--and then of the terrible oppression
in which these familiar objects had seemed closing in upon him and
smothering him into unconsciousness. The weight was lifted now, and he
breathed freely while his gaze rested on the common pine bedstead, the
scarred washstand, with the broken pitcher, the whitewashed walls, the
cane chairs, the rusted scuttle, filled with cheap coal, and the
unpainted table holding a glass lamp with a smoked chimney. From the
hall below he could hear the scolding voice of Mrs. Twine, but neither
the shrill sound nor the poor room produced in him the smothered anguish
he felt even to-day at the memory of the Corot landscape bathed in
sunlight.
An hour later, when he came upstairs again as an escape from the
disorder of Mrs. Twine's supper table, he started a feeble blaze in the
grate, which was half full of ashes, and after lighting the glass lamp,
sat watching the shadows flicker to and fro on the whitewashed wall. His
single possession, a photograph of his wife taken with her two children,
rested against the brick chimney piece, and as he looked at it now it
seemed to stand in no closer relationship to his life than did one of
the brilliant chromos he had observed ornamenting the walls of Mrs.
Twine's dining-room. His old life, indeed, appeared remote, artificial,
conjured from unrealities--it was as if he had moved lightly upon the
painted surface of things, until at last a false step had broken through
the thin covering and he had plunged in a single instant against the
concrete actuality. The shock had stunned him, yet he realised now that
he could never return to his old sheltered outlook--to his pleasant
fiction--for he had come too close to experience ever to be satisfied
again with falsehood.
The photograph upon the mantel was the single remaining link which held
him to-day to his past life--to his forfeited identity. In the
exquisite, still virgin face of his wife, draped for effect in a scarf
of Italian lace--he saw embodied the one sacred memory to which as
Daniel Smith he might still cling with honour. The face was perfect, the
expression of motherhood which bent, flamelike, over the small boy and
girl, was perfect also; and the pure soul of the woman seemed to him to
have formed both face and expression after its own divine image. In the
photograph, as in his memory, her beauty was touched always by some rare
quality of remoteness, as if no merely human conditions could ever
entirely compass so ethereal a spirit. The passion which had rocked his
soul had left her serenity unshaken, and even sorrow had been powerless
to leave its impress or disfigurement upon her features.
As the shadows flickered out on the walls, the room grew suddenly
colder. Rising, he replenished the fire, and then going over to the bed,
he flung himself, still dressed, under the patchwork quilt from which
the wool was protruding in places. He was thinking of the morning
eighteen years ago when he had first seen her as she came, with several
girl companions, out of the old church in the little town of Botetourt.
It was a Christmas during his last year at Harvard, when moved by a
sudden interest in his Southern associations, he had gone down for two
days to his childhood's home in Virginia. Though the place was falling
gradually to ruin, his maiden great-aunt still lived there in a kind of
luxurious poverty; and at the sight of her false halo of gray curls, he
had remembered, almost with a start of surprise, the morning when he had
seen the convict at the little wayside station. The station, the
country, the muddy roads, and even the town of Botetourt were unchanged,
but he himself belonged now to another and what he felt to be a larger
world. Everything had appeared provincial and amusing to his eyes--until
as he passed on Christmas morning by the quaint old churchyard, he had
seen Lydia Preston standing in the sunshine amid the crumbling
tombstones of several hundred years. Under the long black feather in her
hat, her charming eyes had dwelt on him kindly for a minute, and in that
minute it had seemed to him that the racial ideal slumbering in his
brain had responded quickly to his startled blood. Afterward they had
told him that she was only nineteen, a Southern beauty of great promise,
and the daughter of old Adam Preston, who had made and lost a fortune in
the last ten years. But these details seemed to him to have no relation
to the face he had seen under the black feather against the ivy-covered
walls of the old church. The next evening they had danced together at a
ball; he had carried her fan, a trivial affair of lace and satin, away
in his pocket, and ten days later he had returned, flushed with passion,
to finish his course at Harvard. Love had put wings to his ambition; the
following year he had stood at the head of his class, and before the
summer was over he had married her and started brilliantly in his
career. There had been only success in the beginning. When had the tide
turned so suddenly? he wondered, and when had he begun to drift into the
great waters where men are washed down and lost?
Lying on the bed now in the firelight, he shivered and drew the quilt
closer about his knees. She had loved beauty, riches, dignity,
religion--she had loved her children when they came; but had she ever
really loved him--the Daniel Ordway whom she had married? Were all pure
women as passionless--as utterly detached--as she had shown herself to
him from the beginning? And was her coldness, as he had always believed,
but the outward body of that spiritual grace for which he had loved her?
He had lavished abundantly out of his stormy nature; he had spent his
immortal soul upon her in desperate determination to possess her utterly
at her own price; and yet had she ever belonged to him, he questioned
now, even in the supreme hours of their deepest union? Had her very
innocence shut him out from her soul forever?
In the end the little world had closed over them both; he had felt
himself slipping further--further--had made frantic efforts to regain
his footing; and had gone down hopelessly at last. Those terrible years
before his arrest crowded like minutes into his brain, and he knew now
that there had been relief--comfort--almost tranquillity in his life in
prison. The strain was lifted at last, and the days when he had moved
in dull hope or acute despair through the crowd in Wall Street were over
forever. To hold a place in the little world one needed great wealth;
and it had seemed to him in the time of temptation that this wealth was
not a fugitive possession, but an inherent necessity--a thing which
belonged to the inner structure of Lydia's nature.
A shudder ran over him, while he drew a convulsive breath like one in
physical pain. The slow minutes in which he had waited for a rise in the
market were still ticking in agony somewhere in his brain. Time moved
on, yet those minutes never passed--his memory had become like the face
of a clock where the hands pointed, motionless, day or night, to the
same hour. Then hours, days, weeks, months, years, when he lived with
ruin in his thoughts and the sound of merriment, which was like the pipe
of hollow flutes, in his ears. At the end it came almost suddenly--the
blow for which he had waited, the blow which brought something akin to
relief because it ended the quivering torture of his suspense, and
compelled, for the hour at least, decisive action. He had known that
before evening he would be under arrest, and yet he had walked slowly
along Fifth Avenue from his office to his home; he recalled now that he
had even joked with a club wit, who had stopped him at the corner to
divulge the latest bit of gossip. At the very instant when he felt
himself to be approaching ruin in his house, he remembered that he had
complained a little irritably of the breaking wrapper of his cigar. Yet
he was thinking then that he must reach his home in time to prevent his
wife from keeping a luncheon engagement, of which she had spoken to him
at breakfast; and ten minutes later it was with a sensation of relief
that he met the blank face of his butler in the hall. On the staircase
his daughter ran after him, her short white, beruffled skirts standing
out stiffly like the skirts of a ballet dancer. She was taking her music
lesson, she cried out, and she called to him to come into the music room
and hear how wonderfully she could run her scales! Her blue eyes, which
were his eyes in a child's face, looked joyously up at him from under
the thatch of dark curls which she had inherited from him, not from her
blond mother.
"Not now, Alice," he answered, almost impatiently, "not now--I will come
a little later."
Then she darted back, and the stumbling music preceded him up the
staircase to the door of his wife's dressing-room. When he entered Lydia
was standing before her mirror, fastening a spotted veil with a diamond
butterfly at the back of her blond head; and as she turned smilingly
toward him, he put out his hand with a gesture of irritation.
"Take that veil off, Lydia, I can't see you for the spots," he said.
Complaisant always, she unfastened the diamond butterfly without a word,
and taking off the veil, flung it carelessly across the golden-topped
bottles upon her dressing-table.
"You look ill," she said with her charming smile; "shall I ring for
Marie to bring you whiskey?"
At her words he turned from her, driven by a torment of pity which
caused his voice to sound harsh and constrained in his own ears.
"No--no--don't put that on again," he protested, for while she waited
she had taken up the spotted veil and the diamond pin.
Something in his tone startled her into attention, and moving a step
forward, she stood before him on a white bearskin rug. Her face had
hardly changed, yet in some way she seemed to have put him at a
distance, and he felt all at once that he had never known her.
From the room downstairs he heard Alice's music lesson go on at broken
intervals, the uncertain scales she ran now stopping, now beginning
violently again. The sound wrought suddenly on his nerves like anger,
and he felt that his voice was querulous in spite of the torment of pity
at his heart.
"There's no use putting on your veil," he said, "a warrant is out for my
arrest and I must wait here till it comes."
* * * * *
His memory stopped now, as if it had snapped suddenly beneath the
strain. After this there was a mere blank of existence upon which people
and objects moved without visible impression. From that minute to this
one appeared so short a time that he started up half expecting to hear
Alice's scales filling Mrs. Twine's empty lodgings. Then his eyes fell
on the whitewashed walls, the smoking lamp, the bare table, and the
little square window with the branches of the locust tree frosted
against the pane.
Rising from the bed, he fell on his knees and pressed his quivering face
to the patchwork quilt.
"Give me a new life, O God--give me a new life!"