TABLE TALK
_An Hour in the Home Life of Mrs. Neale Crittenden, aet. 34_
March 20.
As she and Paul carried the table out to the windless, sunny side-porch,
Marise was struck by a hospitable inspiration. "You and Elly go on
setting the table," she told the children, and ran across the side-yard
to the hedge. She leaned over this, calling, "Mr. Welles! Mr. Welles!"
and when he came to the door, "The children and I are just celebrating
this first really warm day by having lunch out of doors. Won't you and
Mr. Marsh come and join us?"
By the time the explanations and protestations and renewals of the
invitation were over and she brought them back to the porch, Paul and
Elly had almost finished setting the table. Elly nodded a
country-child's silent greeting to the newcomers. Paul said, "Oh goody!
Mr. Welles, you sit by me."
Marise was pleased at the friendship growing up between the gentle old
man and her little boy.
"Elly, don't you want me to sit by you?" asked Marsh with a playful
accent.
Elly looked down at the plate she was setting on the table. "If you want
to," she said neutrally.
Her mother smiled inwardly. How amusingly Elly had acquired as only a
child could acquire an accent, the exact astringent, controlled brevity
of the mountain idiom.
"I think Elly means that she would like it very much, Mr. Marsh," she
said laughingly. "You'll soon learn to translate Vermontese into
ordinary talk, if you stay on here."
She herself went through the house into the kitchen and began placing
on the wheel-tray all the components of the lunch, telling them over to
herself to be sure she missed none. "Meat, macaroni, spinach, hot
plates, bread, butter, water . . . a pretty plain meal to invite city
people to share. Here, I'll open a bottle of olives. Paul, help me get
this through the door."
As he pulled at the other end of the wheeled tray, Paul said that Mark
had gone upstairs to wash his hands, ages ago, and was probably still
fooling around in the soap-suds, and like as not leaving the soap in the
water.
"Paul the responsible!" thought his mother. As they passed the foot of
the stairs she called up, "Mark! Come along, dear. Lunch is served. All
ready," she announced as they pushed the tray out on the porch.
The two men turned around from where they had been gazing up at the
mountain. "What is that great cliff of bare rock called?" asked Mr.
Marsh.
"Those are the Eagle Rocks," explained Marise, sitting down and
motioning them to their places. "Elly dear, don't spread it on your
bread so _thick_. If Mr. Bayweather were here he could probably tell you
why they are called that. I have known but I've forgotten. There's some
sort of tradition, I believe . . . no, I see you are getting ready to hear
it called the Maiden's Leap where the Indian girl leaped off to escape
an unwelcome lover. But it's not that this time: something or other
about Tories and an American spy . . . ask Mr. Bayweather."
"Heaven forfend!" exclaimed Mr. Marsh.
Marise was amused. "Oh, you've been lectured to on local history, I
see," she surmised.
"_I_ found it very interesting," said Mr. Welles, loyally. "Though
perhaps he does try to give you a little too much at one sitting."
"Mr. Welles," said Paul, with his mouth full, "fishing season begins in
ten days."
Marise decided that she would really have to have a rest from telling
Paul not to talk with food in his mouth, and said nothing.
Mr. Welles confessed that he had never gone fishing in his life, and
asked if Paul would take him.
"Sure!" said Paul. "Mother and I go, lots."
Mr. Marsh looked at Marise inquiringly. "Yes," she said, "I'm a
confirmed fisherman. Some of the earliest and happiest recollections I
have, are of fishing these brooks when I was a little girl."
"Here?" asked Mr. Welles. "I thought you lived in France."
"There's time in a child's life to live in various places," she
explained. "I spent part of my childhood and youth here with my dear old
cousin. The place is full of associations for me. Will you have your
spinach now, or later? It'll keep hot all right if you'd rather wait."
"What is this delicious dish?" asked Mr. Marsh. "It tastes like a man's
version of creamed chicken, which is always a little too lady-like for
me."
"It's a _blanquette de veau_, and you may be sure I learned to make it
in one of the French incarnations, not a Vermont one."
Paul stirred and asked, "Mother, where _is_ Mark? He'll be late for
school, if he doesn't hurry."
"That's so," she said, and reflected how often one used that phrase in
response to one of Paul's solid and unanswerable statements.
Mark appeared just then and she began to laugh helplessly. His hands
were wetly, pinkly, unnaturally clean, but his round, rosy, sunny little
face was appallingly streaked and black.
Paul did not laugh. He said in horrified reproach, "Oh, Mark! You never
_touched_ your face! It's piggy dirty."
Mark was staggered for a moment, but nothing staggered him long. "I
don't get microbes off my face into my food," he said calmly. "And you
bet there aren't any microbes left on my hands." He went on, looking at
the table disapprovingly, "Mother, there isn't a many on the table
_this_ day, and I wanted a many."
"The stew's awful good," said Paul, putting away a large quantity.
"'Very,' not 'awful,' and don't hold your fork like that," corrected
Marise, half-heartedly, thinking that she herself did not like the
insipid phrase "very good" nor did she consider the way a fork was held
so very essential to salvation. "How much of life is convention, any way
you arrange it," she thought, "even in such an entirely unconventional
one as ours."
"It _is_ good," said Mark, taking his first mouthful. Evidently he had
not taken the remarks about his face at all seriously.
"See here, Mark," his mother put it to him as man to man, "do you think
you ought to sit down to the table looking like that?"
Mark wriggled, took another mouthful, and got up mournfully.
Paul was touched. "Here, I'll go up with you and get it over quick," he
said. Marise gave him a quick approving glance. That was the best side
of Paul. You could say what you pleased about the faults of American and
French family life, but at any rate the children didn't hate each other,
as English children seemed to, in novels at least. It was only last week
that Paul had fought the big French Canadian boy in his room at school,
because he had made fun of Elly's rubber boots.
As the little boys clattered out she said to the two guests, "I don't
know whether you're used to children. If you're not, you must be feeling
as though you were taking lunch in a boiler factory."
Mr. Welles answered, "I never knew what I was missing before.
Especially Paul. That first evening when you sent him over with the
cake, as he stood in the door, I thought, 'I wish _I_ could have had a
little son like that!'"
"We'll share him with you, Mr. Welles." Marise was touched by the
wistfulness of his tone. She noticed that Mr. Marsh had made no comment
on the children. He was perhaps one of the people who never looked at
them, unless they ran into him. Eugenia Mills was like that, quite
sincerely.
"May I have a little more of the _blanquette_, if I won't be considered
a glutton?" asked Mr. Marsh now. "I've sent to the city for an
invaluable factotum of mine to come and look out for us here, and when
he comes, I hope you'll give him the recipe."
The little boys clattered back and began to eat again, in haste with
frequent demands for their mother to tell them what time it was. In
spite of this precaution, the clock advanced so relentlessly that they
were obliged to set off, the three of them, before dessert was eaten,
with an apple in one hand and a cookie in the other.
The two men leaned back in their chairs with long breaths, which Marise
interpreted as relief. "Strenuous, three of them at once, aren't they?"
she said. "A New York friend of mine always says she can take the
vibration-cure, only by listening to family talk at our table."
"What's the vibration-cure?" asked Mr. Welles seriously.
"Oh, _I_ don't know!" confessed Marise. "I'm too busy to keep up with
the latest fads in cures as Eugenia does. You may meet her there this
summer, by the way. She usually spends a part of the summer with us. She
is a very old school-friend of mine."
"French or Vermont incarnation?" inquired Marsh casually. "May I smoke?
Won't you have a cigarette, yourself?"
"Oh, _French!_" Marise was immensely amused, and then, remembering that
the joke was not apparent, "If you'd ever seen her, even for a moment,
you'd know why I laugh. She is the embodiment of sophisticated
cosmopolitanism, an expert on all sorts of esoteric, aesthetic and
philosophic matters, book-binding, historic lace, the Vedanta creed,
Chinese porcelains, Provençal poetry, Persian shawls . . ."
"What nationality is she, herself?" inquired Mr. Welles with some
curiosity.
Marise laughed. "She was born in Arkansas, and brought up in Minnesota,
what did you suppose? No European could ever take culture so seriously.
You know how any convert always has a thousand times more fervor than
the fatigued members of the faith who were born to it."
"Like Henry James, perhaps?" suggested Marsh.
"Yes, I always envied Henry James the conviction he seems to have had,
all his life, that Europeans are a good deal more unlike other people
than I ever found them. It may be obtuseness on my part, but I never
could see that people who lived in the Basses-Pyrénées are any more
cultivated or had any broader horizons than people who live in the Green
Mountains. My own experience is that when you actually live with people,
day after day, year after year, you find about the same range of
possibilities in any group of them. But I never advance this theory to
Eugenia, who would be horrified to know that I find a strong family
likeness between her New York circle and my neighbors here."
She had been aware that Marsh was looking at her as she spoke. What a
singular, piercing eye he had! It made her a little restive, as at a
too-intimate contact, to be looked at so intently, although she was
quite aware that there was a good deal of admiration in the look. She
wondered what he was thinking about her; for it was evident that he was
thinking about her, as he sent out that penetrating gaze.
But perhaps not, after all; for he now said as if in answer to her last
remark, "I have my own way of believing that, too, that all people are
made of the same stuff. Mostly I find them perfectly negligible, too
utterly without savor even to glance at. Once in a thousand years, it
seems to me, you come across a human being who's alive as you are, who
speaks your language, is your own kind, belongs to you. When you do,
good Lord! What a moment!"
He pronounced this in a perfectly impersonal tone, but something about
the quality of his voice made Marise flash a quick glance at him. His
eyes met hers with a sudden, bold deepening of their gaze. Marise's
first impulse was to be startled and displeased, but in an instant a
quick fear of being ridiculous had voiced itself and was saying to her,
"Don't be countrified. It's only that I've had no contact with
people-of-the-world for a year now. That's the sort of thing they get
their amusement from. It would make him laugh to have it resented."
Aloud she said, rather at random, "I usually go down once a season to
the city for a visit to this old friend of mine, and other friends
there. But this last winter I didn't get up the energy to do that."
"I should think," said Mr. Welles, "that last winter you'd have used up
all your energy on other things, from what Mrs. Powers tells me about
the big chorus you always lead here in winters."
"That does take up a lot of time," she admitted. "But it's a generator
of energy, leading a chorus is, not a spender of it."
"Oh, come!" protested Marsh. "You can't put that over on me. To do it as
I gather you do . . . heavens! You must pour out your energy and
personality as though you'd cut your arteries and let the red flood
come."
"You pour it out all right," she agreed, "but you get it back a thousand
times over." She spoke seriously, the topic was vital to her, her eyes
turned inward on a recollection. "It's amazing. It's enough to make a
mystic out of a granite boulder. I don't know how many times I've
dragged myself to a practice-evening dog-tired physically with work and
care of the children, stale morally, sure that I had nothing in me that
was profitable for any purpose, feeling that I'd do anything to be
allowed to stay at home, to doze on the couch and read a poor novel."
She paused, forgetting to whom she was speaking, forgetting she was not
alone, touched and stirred with a breath from those evenings.
"Well . . . ?" prompted Mr. Marsh. She wondered if she were mistaken in
thinking he sounded a little irritable.
"Well," she answered, "it has not failed a single time. I have never
come back otherwise than stronger, and rested, the fatigue and staleness
all gone, buried deep in something living." She had a moment of
self-consciousness here, was afraid that she had been carried away to
seem high-flown or pretentious, and added hastily and humorously, "You
mustn't think that it's because I'm making anything wonderful out of my
chorus of country boys and girls and their fathers and mothers. It's no
notable success that puts wings to my feet as I come home from that
work. It's only the music, the hearty satisfying singing-out, by
ordinary people, of what too often lies withering in their hearts."
She was aware that she was speaking not to sympathizers. Mr. Welles
looked vague, evidently had no idea what she meant. Mr. Marsh's face
looked closed tight, as though he would not open to let in a word of
what she was saying. He almost looked hostile. Why should he? When she
stopped, a little abashed at having been carried along by her feelings,
Mr. Marsh put in lightly, with no attempt at transition, "All that's
very well. But you can't make me believe that by choice you live up her
all the year around. You must nearly perish away with homesickness for
the big world, you who so evidently belong in it."
"Where is the big world?" she challenged him, laughing. "When you're
young you want to go all round the globe to look for it. And when you've
gone, don't you find that your world everywhere is about as big as you
are?"
Mr. Marsh eyed her hard, and shook his head, with a little scornful
downward thrust of the corners of his mouth, as though he were an augur
who refused to lend himself to the traditional necessity to keep up the
appearance of believing in an exploded religion. "_You_ know where the
big world is," he said firmly. "It's where there are only people who
don't have to work, who have plenty of money and brains and beautiful
possessions and gracious ways of living, and few moral scruples." He
defined it with a sovereign disregard for softening phrases.
She opposed to this a meditative, "Oh, I suppose the real reason why I
go less and less to New York, is that it doesn't interest me as it used
to. Human significance is what makes interest for me, and when you're
used to looking deep into human lives out of a complete knowledge of
them as we do up here, it's very tantalizing and tormenting and after a
while gets boring, the superficial, incoherent glimpses you get in such
a smooth, glib-tongued circle as the people I happen to know in New
York. It's like trying to read something in a language of which you know
only a few words, and having the book shown to you by jerks at that!"
Mr. Marsh remarked speculatively, as though they were speaking of some
quite abstract topic, "It may also be possibly that you are succumbing
to habit and inertia and routine."
She was startled again, and nettled . . . and alarmed. What a rude thing
to say! But the words were no sooner out of his mouth than she had felt
a scared wonder if perhaps they were not true. She had not thought of
that possibility.
"I should think you would like the concerts, anyhow," suggested Mr.
Welles.
"Yes," said Marise, with the intonation that made the affirmation almost
a negative. "Yes, of course. But there too . . . music means so much to
me, so very much. It makes me sick to see it pawed over as it is among
people who make their livings out of it; used as it so often is as a
background for the personal vanity or greed of the performer. Take an
ordinary afternoon solo concert given by a pianist or singer . . . it
always seems to me that the music they make is almost an unconsidered
by-product with them. What they're really after is something else."
Marsh agreed with her, with a hearty relish, "Yes, musicians are an
unspeakable bunch!
"I suppose," Marise went on, "that I ought not to let that part of it
spoil concert music for me. And it doesn't, of course. I've had some
wonderful times . . . people who play in orchestra and make chamber-music
are the real thing. But the music you make yourself . . . the music we
make up here . . . well, perhaps my taste for it is like one's liking
(some people call it perverse) for French Primitive painting, or the
something so awfully touching and heart-felt that was lost when the
Renaissance came up over the Alps with all its knowingness."
"You're not pretending that you get Vermonters to make music?" protested
Marsh, highly amused at the notion.
"I don't know," she admitted, "whether it is music or not. But it is
something alive." She fell into a muse, "Queer, what a spider-web of
tenuous complication human relationships are. I never would have
thought, probably, of trying anything of the sort if it hadn't been for
a childhood recollection. . . . French incarnation this time," she said
lightly to Marsh. "When I was a little girl, a young priest, just a
young parish priest, in one of the poor hill-parishes of the Basque
country, began to teach the people of his parish really to sing some of
the church chants. I never knew much about the details of what he did,
and never spoke to him in my life, but from across half the world he has
reached out to touch this cornet of America. By the time I was a young
lady, he had two or three big country choruses under his direction. We
used to drive up fist to one and then to another of those hill-towns,
all white-washed houses and plane-tree atriums, and sober-eyed Basques,
to hear them sing. It was beautiful. I never have had a more complete
expression of beauty in all my life. It seemed to me the very soul of
music; those simple people singing, not for pay, not for notoriety, out
of the fullness of their hearts. It has been one of the things I never
forgot, a standard, and a standard that most music produced on platforms
before costly audiences doesn't come up to."
"I've never been able to make anything out of music, myself," confessed
Mr. Welles. "Perhaps you can convert me. I almost believe so."
"'Gene Powers sings!" cried Marise spiritedly. "And if he does . . ."
"Any relation to the lively old lady who brings our milk?"
"Her son. Haven't you seen him yet? A powerfully built granite rock of a
man. Silent as a granite rock too, as far as small talk goes. But he
turns out to have a bass voice that is my joy. It's done something for
him, too, I think, really and truly, without sentimental exaggeration at
all. He suffered a great injustice some six or seven years ago, that
turned him black and bitter, and it's only since he has been singing in
our winter choir that he has been willing to mix again with anyone."
She paused for a moment, and eyed them calculatingly. It occurred to her
that she had been talking about music and herself quite enough. She
would change the subject to something matter-of-fact. "See here, you'll
be sure to have to hear all that story from Mr. Bayweather in relentless
detail. It might be your salvation to be able to say that I had told
you, without mentioning that it was in a severely abridged form. He'd
want to start back in the eighteenth century, and tell you all about
that discreditable and unreconstructed Tory ancestor of mine who, when
he was exiled from Ashley, is said to have carried off part of the town
documents with him to Canada. Whether he did or not (Mr. Bayweather has
a theory, I believe, that he buried them in a copper kettle on Peg-Top
Hill), the fact remains that an important part of the records of Ashley
are missing and that has made a lot of trouble with titles to land
around here. Several times, unscrupulous land-grabbers have taken
advantage of the vagueness of the titles to cheat farmers out of their
inheritance. The Powers case is typical. There always have been Powerses
living right there, where they do now; that big pine that towers up so
over their house was planted by 'Gene's great-grandfather. And they
always owned an immense tract of wild mountain land, up beyond the Eagle
Rock range, along the side of the Red-Brook marsh. But after paying
taxes on it for generations all during the time when it was too far away
to make it profitable to lumber, it was snatched away from them, seven
years ago, just as modern methods and higher prices for spruce would
have made it very valuable. A lawyer from New Hampshire named Lowder
turned the trick. I won't bother you going into the legal details--a
question of a fake warranty deed, against 'Gene's quit-claim deed, which
was all he had in absence of those missing pages from the town records.
As a matter of fact, the lawyer hasn't dared to cut the lumber off it
yet, because his claim is pretty flimsy; but flimsy or not, the law
regards it as slightly better than 'Gene's. The result is that 'Gene
can't sell it and daren't cut it for fear of being involved in a
law-suit that he couldn't possibly pay for. So the Powers are poor
farmers, scratching a difficult living out of sterile soil, instead of
being well-to-do proprietors of a profitable estate of wood-land. And
when we see how very hard they all have to work, and how soured and
gloomy it has made 'Gene, and how many pleasures the Powers' children
are denied, we all join in when Mrs. Powers delivers herself of her
white-hot opinion of New Hampshire lawyers! I remember perfectly that
Mr. Lowder,--one of the smooth-shaven, thin-lipped, fish-mouthed
variety, with a pugnacious jaw and an intimidating habit of talking his
New Hampshire dialect out of the corner of his mouth. The poor Powers
were as helpless as rabbits before him."
It all came up before her as she talked, that horrid encounter with
commercial ruthlessness: she saw again poor 'Gene's outraged face of
helpless anger, felt again the heat of sympathetic indignation she and
Neale had felt, recognized again the poison which triumphant
unrighteousness leaves behind. She shook her head impatiently, to shake
off the memory, and said aloud, "Oh, it makes me sick to remember it! We
couldn't believe, any of us, that such bare-faced iniquity could
succeed."
"There's a good deal of bare-faced iniquity riding around prosperously
in high-powered cars," said Mr. Welles, with a lively accent of
bitterness. "You have to get used to it in business life. It's very
likely that your wicked Mr. Lowder in private life in New Hampshire is a
good husband and father, and contributes to all the charitable
organizations."
"I won't change _my_ conception of him as a pasty-faced demon," insisted
Marise.
It appeared that Mr. Marsh's appetite for local history was so slight as
to be cloyed even by the very much abbreviated account she had given
them, for he now said, hiding a small yawn, with no effort to conceal
the fact that he had been bored, "Mrs. Crittenden, I've heard from Mr.
Welles' house the most tantalizing snatches from your piano. Won't you,
now we're close to it, put the final touch to our delightful lunch-party
by letting us hear it?"
Marise was annoyed by his _grand seigneur_ air of certainty of his own
importance, and piqued that she had failed to hold his interest. Both
impressions were of a quicker vivacity than was at all the habit of her
maturity. She told herself, surprised, that she had not felt this little
sharp sting of wounded personal vanity since she was a girl. What did
she care whether she had bored him or not? But it was with all her
faculties awakened and keen that she sat down before the piano and
called out to them, "What would you like?"
They returned the usual protestations that they would like anything she
would play, and after a moment's hesitation . . . it was always a leap in
the dark to play to people about whose musical capacities you hadn't the
faintest idea . . . she took out the Beethoven Sonata album and turned to
the Sonata Pathétique. Beethoven of the early middle period was the
safest guess with such entirely unknown listeners. For all that she
really knew, they might want her to play Chaminade and Moskowsky. Mr.
Welles, the nice old man, might find even them above his comprehension.
And as for Marsh, she thought with a resentful toss of her head that he
was capable of saying off-hand, that he was really bored by all
music--and conveying by his manner that it was entirely the fault of the
music. Well, she would show him how she could play, at least.
She laid her hands on the keys; and across those little smarting,
trivial personalities there struck the clear, assured dignity and worth
of her old friend . . . was there ever such a friend as that rough old
German who had died so long before she was born? No one could say the
human race was ignoble or had never deserved to live, who knew his
voice. In a moment she was herself again.
Those well-remembered opening chords, they were by this time not merely
musical sounds. They had become something within her, of her own being,
rich with a thousand clustered nameless associations, something that
thrilled and sang and lived a full harmonious life of its own. That
first pearling down-dropping arabesque of treble notes, not only her
fingers played those, but every fiber in her, answering like the
vibrating wood of a violin, its very cells rearranged in the pattern
which the notes had so many times called into existence . . . by the time
she had finished she had almost forgotten that she had listeners.
And when, sitting for a moment, coming back slowly from Beethoven's
existence to her own, she heard no sound or stir from the porch, she
had only a quiet smile of tolerant amusement. Apparently she had not
guessed right as to their tastes. Or perhaps she had played them to
sleep.
As for herself, she was hungry for more; she reached out her hand
towards that world of high, purified beauty which miraculously was
always there, with open doors of gold and ivory. . . .
What now? What did she know by heart? The Largo in the Chopin Sonata.
That would do to come after Beethoven.
The first plunge into this did not so intimately startle and stir her as
the Beethoven movement had done. It was always like that, she thought as
she played, the sound of the first note, the first chord struck when one
had not played for a day or so; it was having one's closed eyes unsealed
to the daylight anew, an incredulous rapture. But after that, though you
didn't go on quaking and bowing your head, though you were no longer
surprised to find music still there, better than you could possibly
remember it, though you took it for granted, how deeply and solidly and
steadfastly you lived in it and on it! It made you like the child in the
Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free"; it took you in
to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine; and
you adored none the less although you were not "breathless with
adoration," like the nun; because it was a whole world given to you, not
a mere pang of joy; because you could live and move and be blessedly and
securely at home in it.
She finished the last note of the Largo and sat quiet for a moment. Then
she knew that someone had come into the room behind her. She turned
about, facing with serene, wide brows whatever might be there.
The first meeting with the eyes of the man who stood there moved her. So
he too deeply and greatly loved music! His face was quite other from the
hawk-like, intent, boldly imperious countenance which she had seen
before. Those piercing eyes were softened and quietly shining. The
arrogant lines about the mouth that could look so bitter and skeptical,
were as sweet and candid as a child's.
He smiled at her, a good, grateful, peaceful smile, and nodded, as
though now they understood each other with no more need for words. "Go
on . . . go on!" was all he said, very gently and softly. He sank down in
an arm-chair and leaned his head back in the relaxed pose of listening.
He looked quite and exactly what Marise was feeling.
It was with a stir of all her pulses, a pride, a glory, a new sympathy
in her heart, that she turned back to the piano.