THE NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS
_An Evening in the Life of Mrs. Neale Crittenden_
April 20.
Nowadays she so seldom spoke or acted without knowing perfectly well
what she was about, that Marise startled herself almost as much as her
callers by turning over that leaf in the photograph album quickly and
saying with abruptness, "No, never mind about that one. It's nothing
interesting."
Of course this brought out from Paul and little Mark, hanging over her
shoulder and knee, the to-be-expected shouts of, "Oh, let's see it! What
is it?"
Marise perceived that they scented something fine and exciting such as
Mother was always trying to keep from them, like one man choking another
over the edge of a cliff, or a woman lying on her back with the blood
all running from her throat. Whenever pictures like that were in any of
the magazines that came into the house, Marise took them away from the
little boys, although she knew helplessly that this naturally made them
extremely keen not to miss any chance to catch a glimpse of such a one.
She could see that they thought it queer, there being anything so
exciting in this old album of dull snapshots and geographical
picture-postcards of places and churches and ruins and things that
Father and Mother had seen, so long ago. But you never could tell. The
way Mother had spoken, the sound of her voice, the way she had flapped
down the page quick, the little boys' practised ears and eyes had
identified all that to a certainty with the actions that accompanied
pictures she didn't want them to see. So, of course, they clamored, "Oh
_yes_, Mother, just one look!"
Elly as usual said nothing, looking up into Mother's face. Marise was
extremely annoyed. She was glad that Elly was the only one who was
looking at her, because, of course, dear old Mr. Welles' unobservant
eyes didn't count. She was glad that Mr. Marsh kept his gaze downward on
the photograph marked "Rome from the Pincian Gardens," although through
the top of his dark, close-cropped head she could fairly feel the
racing, inquiring speculations whirling about. Nor had she any right to
resent that. She supposed people had a right to what went on in their
own heads, so long as they kept it to themselves. And it had been
unexpectedly delicate and fine, the way he had come to understand,
without a syllable spoken on either side, that that piercing look of his
made her uneasy; and how he had promised her, wordlessly always, to bend
it on her no more.
_Why_ in the world had it made her uneasy, and why, a thousand times
why, had she felt this sudden unwillingness to look at the perfectly
commonplace photograph, in this company? Something had burst up from the
subconscious and flashed its way into action, moving her tongue to speak
and her hand to action before she had the faintest idea it was there . . .
like an action of youth! And see what a silly position it had put her
in!
The little boys had succeeded with the inspired tactlessness of children
in emphasizing and exaggerating what she had wished could be passed over
unnoticed, a gesture of hers as inexplicable to her as to them. Oh well,
the best thing, of course, was to carry it off matter-of-factly, turn
the leaf back, and _let_ them see it. And then refute them by insisting
on the literal truth of what she had said.
"There!" she said carelessly; "look at it then."
The little boys bent their eager faces over it. Paul read out the title
as he had been doing for the other photographs, "'View of the Campagna
from the top of the cable-railway at Rocca di Papa. Rome in the
distance.'"
She had to sustain, for an instant, an astonished and disconcerted look
from all those eyes. It made her quite genuinely break into a laugh. It
was really a joke on them. She said to the little boys mischievously,
"What did Mother say? Do you find it very interesting?"
Paul and Mark stared hard at the very dull photograph of a cliff and a
plain and not even a single person or donkey in it, and gave
up the riddle. Mother certainly _had_ spoken to them in that
hide-it-away-from-the-children voice, and yet there was nothing there.
Marise knew that they felt somehow that Mother had unfairly slipped out
between their fingers, as grown-ups are always doing. Well, it wasn't
fair. She hated taking advantage of them like that. It was a sort of sin
against their awakening capacity to put two and two together and make a
human total, and understand what went on about them.
But it hadn't been against _their_ capacity to put two and two together
that she had instinctively thrown up that warding-off arm, which hadn't
at all warded off attention, but rather drawn it hard and scrutinizing,
in spite of those down-dropped sharp eyes. Well, there was no sum he
could do with only two, and slight probability he would ever get the
other two to put with it . . . whatever the other two might be.
Mr. Welles' pleasant old voice said, "It's a very pretty picture, I'm
sure. They certainly have very fine views about the Eternal City. I envy
you your acquaintance with all those historic spots. What is the next
one?"
Dear old Mr. Welles! What a restful presence! How unutterably sweet and
uncomplicated life could be with a good big dose of simplicity holding
everything in a clear solution, so that it never occurred to you that
what things seemed was very different from what they were.
"Ready to turn over, dears?" she asked the little boys. This time she
was in her usual control of the machine, regulated what she did from
the first motion to the last, made her voice casual but not elaborately
so, and put one arm around Mark's slim little shoulder with just the
right degree of uninterest in those old and faded photographs.
Very deep down, at the edge of consciousness, something asked her, "Why
did you try to hide that photograph?"
She could not answer this question. She didn't know why, any more than
the little boys did. And it wouldn't do now, with the need to be
mistress-of-the-house till a call ended, to stop to try to think it out.
Later on, tonight, after the children were in bed, when she was brushing
her hair . . . oh, probably she'd find as you so often did, when you went
after the cause of some unexpected little feeling, that it came from a
meaningless fortuitous association of ideas, like Elly's hatred of
grape-jelly because she had once taken some bitter medicine in it.
"'View of the Roman Aqueduct, taken from the tramway line to Tivoli,'"
read out Paul.
"Very pretty view," said Mr. Welles.
Mr. Marsh's silences were as abysmal as his speech was Niagara-like on
occasion. He said nothing.
Elly stirred and looked toward the doorway. Touclé stood there, her
shoe-button eyes not blinking in the lamp-light although she probably
had been sitting on the steps of the kitchen, looking out into the
darkness, in the long, motionless vigil which made up Touclé's evenings.
As they all turned their faces towards her, she said, "The cereus is
going to bloom tonight," and disappeared.
Marise welcomed this diversion. Ever since that absurd little gesture
about the photograph, she had felt thickening about her . . . what? What
you call "depression" (whatever that meant), the dull hooded apparition
that came blackly and laid its leaden hand on your heart. This news was
just the thing. It would change what was threatening to stand stagnant
and charge it with fresh running currents. She got up briskly to her
feet.
"Come on, children," she said. "I'll let you sit up beyond bed-time
tonight. Scatter quick, and put on your things. We'll all go down the
road to the Powers house and see the cereus in bloom."
The children ducked quickly out of the room, thudding along softly in
their felt slippers. Scramblings, chatterings, and stamping sounded back
from the front hall, as they put on their boots and wraps.
"Wouldn't you like to come, too?" she asked the men, rescuing them from
the rather high-and-dry position in which this unexpected incident had
left them. It was plainly, from their faces, as inexplicable as
unexpected. She explained, drawing a long, plain, black silk scarf
closely about her head and shoulders, "Why, yes, do come. It's an
occasion as uniquely Ashleyian as pelota is Basque. You, Mr. Marsh, with
your exhaustive inquiries into the habits and manners of Vermont
mountaineers, your data won't be complete unless you've seen Nelly
Powers' night-blooming cereus in its one hour of glory. Seriously, I
assure you, you won't encounter anything like it, anywhere else."
As Marsh looked at her, she noted with an inward amusement that her
words had lighted a smouldering glow of carefully repressed exasperation
in his eyes. It made her feel quite gay and young to be teasing somebody
again. She was only paying him back in his own coin. He himself was
always telling everybody about his deep interest in the curious quaint
ways of these mountaineers. And if he didn't have a deep interest in
their curious quaint ways, what else could he give as a reason for
staying on in the valley?
The men turned away to get their hats. She settled the folds of her
heavy black silk mantilla more closely about her head, glancing at
herself in the mirror. She smiled back with sympathy at the smiling face
she saw there. It was not so often since the war that she saw her own
face lighted with mirth.
Gravely, something deep on the edge of the unconscious called up to her,
"You are talking and feeling like a coquette."
She was indignant at this, up in arms to defend human freedom. "Oh, what
a hateful, little-villagey, prudish, nasty-minded idea!" she cried to
herself. "Who would have thought that narrowness and priggishness could
rub off on a person's mind like that! Mrs. Bayweather could have thought
that! Mercy! As if one civilized being can't indulge in a light touch or
two in human intercourse with another!"
The two men were ready now and all the party of six jostled each other
cheerfully as they went out of the front door. Paul had secured the hand
of old Mr. Welles and led him along with an air of proprietary
affection.
"Don't you turn out the lamp, or lock the door, or _any_thing?" asked
the old man, now.
"Oh no, we won't be gone long. It's not more than half a mile to the
Powers'. There's not a soul in the valley who would think of going in
and rummaging . . . let alone taking anything. And we never have tramps.
We are too far from the railroad," said Marise.
"_Well!_" exclaimed the other, looking back as they went down the path,
"it certainly looks queer to me, the door standing open into this black
night, and the light shining in that empty room."
Elly looked back too. She slipped her hand out of her mother's and ran
towards the house. She darted up to the door and stood there, poised
like a swallow, looking in.
"What does she want?" asked Mr. Welles with the naïve conviction of the
elderly bachelor that the mother must know everything in the child's
mind.
"I don't know," admitted Marise. "Nobody ever knows exactly what is in
Elly's mind when she does things. Maybe she is looking to see that her
kitten is safe."
The little girl ran back to them.
"What did you want, dear?" asked her mother.
"I just wanted to look at it again," said Elly. "I _like_ it, like that,
all quiet, with nobody in it. The furniture looks as though it were
having a good rest from us."
"Oh, listen to the frogs!" screamed Mark, out of the darkness where he
had run to join Touclé.
Elly and Paul sprang forward to join their little brother.
* * * * *
"What in the world are we going to see?" asked Marsh. "You forget you
haven't given us the least idea."
"You are going to see," Marise set herself to amuse them, "you're going
to see a rite of the worship of beauty which Ashley, Vermont, has
created out of its own inner consciousness."
She had succeeded in amusing at least one of them, for at this Mr. Marsh
gave her the not disagreeable shock of that singular, loud laugh of his.
It was in conversation like something-or-other in the orchestra . . . the
cymbals, that must be it . . . made you jump, and tingle with answering
vibrations.
"Ashleyians in the rôle of worshipers of beauty!" he cried, out of the
soft, moist, dense darkness about them.
"None so blind as those who won't see," she persisted. "Just because
they go to it in overalls and gingham aprons, instead of peplums and
sandals."
"What _is_ a night-blooming cereal?" asked Mr. Welles, patient of the
verbose by-play of his companions that never got anybody anywhere.
What an old dear Mr. Welles was! thought Marise. It was like having the
sweetest old uncle bestowed on you as a pendant to dear Cousin Hetty.
". . . -eus, not -eal," murmured Marsh; "not that I know any more than you
what it is."
Marise felt suddenly wrought upon by the mildness of the spring air,
the high, tuneful shrillness of the frogs' voices, the darkness, sweet
and thick. She would not amuse them; no, she would really tell them,
move them. She chose the deeper intonations of her voice, she selected
her words with care, she played upon her own feeling, quickening it into
genuine emotion as she spoke. She would make them feel it too.
"It is a plant of the cactus family, as native to America as is Ashley's
peculiar sense of beauty which you won't acknowledge. It is as ugly to
look at, the plant is, all spines and thick, graceless, fleshy pads; as
ugly as Ashley life looks to you. And this crabbed, ungainly
plant-creature is faithfully, religiously tended all the year around by
the wife of a farmer, because once a year, just once, it puts forth a
wonderful exotic flower of extreme beauty. When the bud begins to show
its color she sends out word to all her neighbors to be ready. And we
are all ready. For days, in the back of our minds as we go about our
dull, routine life, there is the thought that the cereus is near to
bloom. Nelly and her grim husband hang over it day by day, watching it
slowly prepare for its hour of glory. Sometimes when they cannot decide
just the time it will open, they sit up all through a long night, hour
after hour of darkness and silence, to make sure that it does not bloom
unseen. When they see that it is about to open, they fling open their
doors, wishing above everything else to share that beauty with their
fellows. Their children are sent to announce, as you heard Touclé say
tonight, 'The cereus is going to bloom.' And all up and down this end of
the valley, in those ugly little wooden houses that look so mean and
dreary to you, everywhere people tired from their day's struggle with
the earth, rise up and go their pilgrimage through the night . . . for
what? To see something rare and beautiful."
She stopped speaking. On one side of her she heard the voice of the
older man say with a quiver, "Well, I can understand why your neighbors
love you."
With entire unexpectedness Marsh answered fiercely from the other side,
"_They_ don't love her! They're not capable of it!"
Marise started, as though a charged electric wire had fallen across her
arm. Why was there so often a note of anger in his voice?
For a moment they advanced silently, pacing forward, side by side,
unseen but not unfelt by each of the others.
The road turned now and they were before the little house, every window
alight, the great pine somber and high before it. The children and
Touclé were waiting at the door. They all went in together, shaking
hands with the mistress of the house, neatly dressed, with a clean,
white flounced apron. "Nelly's garment of ceremony!" thought Marise.
Nelly acknowledged, with a graceful, silent inclination of her shining
blonde head, the presence of the two strangers whom Marise presented to
her. What an inscrutable fascination Nelly's silence gave to her! You
never knew what strange thoughts were going on behind that proud
taciturnity. She showed the guests to chairs, of which a great many,
mostly already filled, stood about the center table, on which sprawled
the great, spiny, unlovely plant. Marise sat down, taking little Mark on
her knees. Elly leaned against her. Paul sat close beside old Mr.
Welles. Their eyes were on the big pink bud enthroned in the
uncomeliness of the shapeless leafpads.
"Oh!" said Elly, under her breath, "it's not open yet! We're going to
_see_ it open, this time!" She stared at it, her lips parted. Her mother
looked at her, tenderly aware that the child was storing away an
impression to last her life long. Dear, strangely compounded little
Elly, with her mysticism, and her greediness and her love of beauty all
jumbled together! A neighbor leaned from her chair to say to Mrs.
Crittenden, "Warm for this time of year, ain't it?" And another
remarked, looking at Mark's little trousers, "That material come out
real good, didn't it? I made up what I got of it, into a dress for
Pearl." They both spoke in low tones, but constrained or sepulchral, for
they smiled and nodded as though they had meant something else and
deeper than what they had said. They looked with a kindly expression for
moment at the Crittenden children and then turned back to their gaze on
the flower-bud.
Nelly Powers, walking with a singular lightness for so tall a woman,
ushered in another group of visitors--a tall, unshaven farmer, his wife,
three little children clumping in on shapeless cow-hide boots, and a
baby, fast asleep, its round bonneted head tucked in the hollow of its
mother's gingham-clad shoulder. They sat down, nodding silent greetings
to the other neighbors. In turning to salute them, Marise caught a
glimpse of Mr. Marsh, fixing his brilliant scrutiny first on one and
then on another of the company. At that moment he was gazing at Nelly
Powers, "taking her in" thought Marise, from her beautiful hair to those
preposterously high-heeled shoes she always would wear on her shapely
feet. His face was impassive. When he looked neutral like that, the
curious irregularity of his features came out strongly. He looked like
that bust of Julius Caesar, the bumpy, big-nosed, strong-chinned one,
all but that thick, closely cut, low-growing head of dark hair.
She glanced at Mr. Welles, and was surprised to find that he was looking
neither at the people nor the plant. His arm was around his favorite
Paul, but his gaze seemed turned inward, as though he were thinking of
something very far away. He looked tired and old, it seemed to her, and
without that quietly shining aspect of peace which she found so
touching. Perhaps he was tired. Perhaps she ought not to have brought
him out, this evening, for that long walk over rough country roads. How
much older he was than his real age in years! His life had used him up.
There must have been some inner maladjustment in it!
There was a little stir in the company, a small inarticulate sound from
Elly. Marise saw everyone's eyes turn to the center of the room and
looked back to the plant. The big pink bud was beginning visibly to
swell.
A silence came into the room. No one coughed, or stirred, or scraped a
chair-leg. It was as though a sound would have wounded the flower. All
those human souls bowed themselves. Almost a light shone upon them . . . a
phrase from Dante came to Marise's mind . . . "_la mia menta fu percossa
da un fulgore_ . . ."
With a quick involuntary turn she looked at Marsh, fearing his mockery
of her, "quoting the _Paradiso_, about Vermont farmers!" as though he
could know, for all those sharp eyes of his, what was going on hidden in
her mind!
All this came and went in an instant, for she now saw that one big,
shining petal was slowly, slowly, but quite visibly uncurling at the
tip. From that moment on, she saw nothing, felt nothing but the opening
flower, lived only in the incredibly leisurely, masterful motion with
which the grotesquely shaped protecting petals curled themselves back
from the center. Their motion was so slow that the mind was lost in
dreaminess in following it. Had that last one moved? No, it stood still,
poised breathlessly . . . and yet, there before them, revealed, exultant,
the starry heart of the great flower shimmered in the lamp-light.
* * * * *
Then she realized that she had not breathed. She drew in a great
marveling aspiration, and heard everyone about her do the same. They
turned to each other with inarticulate exclamations, shaking their heads
wonderingly, their lips a little apart as they drew long breaths.
Two very old women, rubbing their age-dimmed eyes, stood up, tiptoed to
the table, and bent above the miraculously fine texture of the flower
their worn and wrinkled faces. The petals cast a clear, rosy reflection
upon their sallow cheeks. Some of the younger mothers took their little
children over to the table and lifting them up till their round shining
eyes were on a level with the flower, let them gaze their fill at the
mysterious splendor of stamen and pistil.
"Would you like to go quite close and look at it, children?" Marise
asked her own brood.
The little boys stepped forward at once, curiously, but Elly said, "No,
oh _no!_" and backed off till she stood leaning against Touclé's knee.
The old woman put her dark hand down gently on the child's soft hair and
smiled at her. How curious it was to see that grim, battered old visage
smile! Elly was the only creature in the world at whom the old Indian
ever smiled, indeed almost the only thing in the house which those
absent old eyes ever seemed to see. Marise remembered that Touclé had
smiled when she first took the baby Elly in her arms.
* * * * *
A little murmur of talk arose now, from the assembled neighbors. They
stood up, moved about, exchanged a few laconic greetings, and began
putting their wraps on. Marise remembered that Mr. Welles had seemed
tired and as soon as possible set her party in motion.
"Thank you so much, Nelly, for letting us know," she said to the
farmer's wife, as they came away. "It wouldn't seem like a year in our
valley if we didn't see your cereus in bloom."
She took Elly's hand in one of hers, and with Mark on the other side
walked down the path to the road. The darkness was intense there,
because of the gigantic pine-tree which towered above the little house.
"Are you there, Paul?" she called through the blackness. The little
boy's voice came back, "Yes, with Touclé, we're ahead." The two men
walked behind.
Elly's hand was hot and clasped her mother's very tightly. Marise bent
over the little girl and divined in the darkness that she was crying.
"Why, Elly darling, what's the matter?" she asked.
The child cried out passionately, on a mounting note, "Nothing, nothing!
_Nothing!_" She flung her arms around her mother's neck, straining her
close in a wild embrace. Little Mark, on the other side, yawned and
staggered sleepily on his feet. Elly gave her mother a last kiss, and
ran on ahead, calling over her shoulder, "I'm going to walk by myself!"
"_Well!_" commented the old gentleman.
Mr. Marsh had not been interested in this episode and had stood gazing
admiringly up at the huge pine-tree, divining its bulk and mass against
the black sky.
"Like Milton's Satan, isn't it?" was his comment as they walked on,
"with apologies for the triteness of the quotation."
For a time nothing was said, and then Marsh began, "Now I've seen it,
your rite of the worship of beauty. And do you know what was really
there? A handful of dull, insensitive, primitive beings, hardened and
calloused by manual toil and atrophied imaginations, so starved for any
variety in their stupefyingly monotonous life that they welcome
anything, anything at all as a break . . . only if they could choose, they
would infinitely prefer a two-headed calf or a bearded woman to your
flower. The only reason they go to see that is because it is a
curiosity, not because of its beauty, because it blooms once a year
only, at night, and because there is only one of them in town. Also
because everybody else goes to see it. They go to look at it only
because there aren't any movies in Ashley, nor anything else. And you
know all this just as well as I do."
"Oh, Mr. Welles," Marise appealed to him, "do you think that is the
truth of the facts?"
The old man pronounced judgment gently. "Well, I don't know that
_any_thing is the truth. I should say that both of you told the truth
about it. The truth's pretty big for any one person to tell. Isn't it
all in the way you look at it?" He added, "Only personally I think Mrs.
Crittenden's the nicest way."
Marsh was delighted with this. "There! I hope you're satisfied. You've
been called 'nice.' That ought to please any good American."
"I wonder, Mr. Welles," Marise said in an ostentatiously casual tone, "I
wonder if Mr. Marsh had been an ancient Greek, and had stood watching
the procession going up the Acropolis hill, bearing the thank-offerings
from field and loom and vineyard, what do you suppose he would have
seen? Dullness and insensitiveness in the eyes of those Grecian
farmer-lads, no doubt, occupied entirely with keeping the oxen in line;
a low vulgar stare of bucolic curiosity as the country girls, bearing
their woven linen, looked up at the temple. Don't you suppose he would
have thought they managed those things a great deal more artistically in
Persia?"
"Well, I don't know much about the ancient Greeks," said Mr. Welles
mildly, "but I guess Vincent would have been about the same wherever he
lived."
"Who is satisfied with the verdict now?" triumphed Marise.
But she noticed that Marsh's attack, although she considered that she
had refuted it rather neatly, had been entirely; efficacious in
destroying the aura of the evening. Of the genuine warmth of feeling
which the flower and the people around it had roused in her heart, not
the faintest trace was left. She had only a cool interested certainty
that her side had a perfectly valid foundation for arguing purposes. Mr.
Marsh had accomplished that, and more than that, a return from those
other centers of feeling to her preoccupation with his own personality.
He now went on, "But I'm glad to have gone. I saw a great deal else
there than your eccentric plant and the vacancy of mind of those sons of
toil, cursed, soul-destroying toil. For one thing, I saw a woman of
very great beauty. And that is always so much gained."
"Oh yes," cried Marise, "that's so. I forgot that you could see that.
I've grown so used to the fact that people here don't understand how
splendidly handsome Nelly Powers is. Their taste doesn't run to the
statuesque, you know. They call that grand silent calm of her,
stupidness! Ever since 'Gene brought her here as a bride, a year after
we came to live in Crittenden's, I have gone out of my way to look at
her. You should see her hanging out the clothes on a windy day. One
sculptured massive pose after another. But even to see her walk across
the room and bend that shining head is thrilling."
"I saw something else, too," went on Marsh, a cool voice speaking out of
the darkness. "I saw that her black, dour husband is furiously in love
with her and furiously jealous of that tall, ruddy fellow with an
expressive face, who stood by the door in shirt-sleeves and never took
his eyes from her."
Marise was silent, startled by this shouting out of something she had
preferred not to formulate.
"Vincent, you see too much," said Mr. Welles resignedly. The phrase ran
from his tongue as though it were a familiar one.
Marise said slowly, "I've sometimes thought that Frank Warner did go to
the Powers' a good deal, but I haven't wanted to think anything more."
"What possible reason in the world have you for not wanting to?" asked
Marsh with the most authentic accent of vivid and astonished curiosity.
"What reason . . . ?" she repeated blankly.
He said dispassionately, "I don't like to hear _you_ make such a flat,
conventional, rubber-stamp comment. Why in the world shouldn't she love
a fine, ardent, _living_ man, better than that knotty, dead branch of a
husband? A beautiful woman and a living, strong, vital man, they belong
together. Whom God hath joined . . . Don't try to tell me that your
judgment is maimed by the Chinese shoes of outworn ideas, such as the
binding nature of a mediaeval ceremony. That doesn't marry anybody, and
you know it. If she's really married to her husband, all right. But if
she loves another man, and knows in her heart that she would live a
thousand times more fully, more deeply with him . . . why, she's _not_
married to her husband, and nothing can make her. You know that!"
Marise sprang at the chance to turn his own weapons of mockery against
him. "Upon my word, who's idealizing the Yankee mountaineer now?" she
cried, laughing out as she spoke at the idea of her literal-minded
neighbors dressed up in those trailing rhetorical robes. "I thought you
said they were so dull and insensitive they could feel nothing but an
interest in two-headed calves, and here they are, characters in an
Italian opera. I only wish Nelly Powers were capable of understanding
those grand languages of yours and then know what she thought of your
idea of what's in her mind. And as for 'Gene's jealousy, I'll swear that
it amounts to no more than a vague dislike for Frank Warner's 'all the
time hanging around and gassin' instead of stickin' to work.' And you
forget, in your fine modern clean-sweep, a few old-fashioned facts like
the existence of three Powers children, dependent on their mother."
"You're just fencing, not really talking," he answered imperturbably.
"You can't pretend to be sincere in trying to pull that antimacassar
home-and-mother stuff on me. Ask Bernard Shaw, ask Freud, ask Mrs.
Gilman, how good it is for children's stronger, better selves, to live
in the enervating, hot-house concentration on them of an unbalanced,
undeveloped woman, who has let everything else in her personality
atrophy except her morbid preoccupation with her own offspring. That's
really the meaning of what's sentimentally called 'mothering.' Probably
it would be the best thing in the world for the Powers children if
their mother ran away with that fine broth of a lad."
"But Nelly loves her children and they love her!" Marise brought this
out abruptly, impulsively, and felt, as she heard the words, that they
had a flat, naïve sound, out of key with the general color of this talk,
like a C Major chord introduced into Debussy nuances.
"Not much she doesn't, nor they her. Any honest observer of life knows
that the only sincere relation possible between the young and the old
(after the babies are weaned) is hostility. We hated our elders, because
they got in our way. And they'll hate us as soon as they get the
strength to, because we'll be in their way. And we will hate them
because they will want to push us off the scene. It's impossible to
ignore the gulf. Most human tragedies come from trying to pretend it's
not there."
"Why, Mr. Welles," cried Marise again, "what do you say to such talk?
Don't you find him perfectly preposterous?"
Mr. Welles answered a little absently. "Oh, I'm pretty well used to him,
by now. And all his friends in the city are talking like that now. It's
the fashion. I'm so old that I've seen a good many fashions in talk come
and go. I never could see that people _acted_ any differently, no matter
which way they talk." As he finished, he drew a long sigh, which had
obviously no connection with what he had been saying. With the sigh,
came an emanation from him of dispirited fatigue. Marise wished she
dared draw his hand upon her arm and ask him to lean on her as they
walked.
Nothing more was said for a time. Marise lost herself in the outdoor
wideness of impression that always came to her under a night sky, where
she felt infinity hovering near. She was aware of nothing but the faint
voice of the pines, the distant diminuendo of the frog's song, the firm
elastic quality of the ground under her feet, so different from the iron
rigidity of the winter earth, and the cool soft pressure of the
night-air on her cheeks, when, like something thrust into her mind from
the outside, there rose into her consciousness, articulate and complete,
the reason why she had shrunk from looking at the photograph of Rocca di
Papa. It was because it was painful to her, intimately painful and
humiliating to remember how she and Neale had felt there, the wild, high
things they had said to each other, that astounding flood of feeling
which had swept them away at the last. What had become of all that?
Where now was that high tide?
* * * * *
Of course she loved Neale, and he loved her; there was nobody like
Neale, yes, all that; but oh! the living flood had been ebbing, ebbing
out of their hearts. They were not _alive_ as they had been alive when
they had clung to each other, there on that age-old rock, and felt the
tide of all the ages lift them high.
It must have been ebbing for a long time before she realized it because,
hurried, absorbed, surrounded incessantly by small cares as she was,
hustled and jostled in her rôle of mother and mistress-of-the-house in
servantless America, with the primitive American need to do so much with
her own hands, she had not even had the time to know the stupid, tragic
thing that was happening to her . . . that she was turning into a slow,
vegetating plant instead of a human being. And now she understood the
meaning of the strange dejection she had felt the day when little Mark
went off to school with the others. How curiously jaded and apprehensive
she had felt that morning, and when she had gone downstairs to see the
callers who arrived that day. That was the first time she had _felt_
that the tide was ebbing.
All this went through her mind with the cruel swiftness of a
sword-flash. And the first reaction to it, involuntary and reflex, was
to crush it instantly down, lest the man walking at her side should be
aware of it. It had come to her with such loud precision that it seemed
it must have been audible.
As she found herself still on the dark country road, cloaked and
protected by the blackness of the starless night, she was struck with
wonder, as though she had never thought of it before, at the human body,
its opaque, inscrutable mystery, the locked, sealed strong-box of
unimaginable secrets which it is. There they were, the three of them,
stepping side by side, brushing each other as they moved; and as remote
from each other as though they were on different stars. What were the
thoughts, powerful, complex, under perfect control, which were being
marshaled in that round, dark head? She felt a little afraid to think;
and turned from the idea to the other man with relief. She knew (she
told herself) as though she saw inside, the tired, gentle, simple,
wistful thoughts that filled the white head on her other side.
With this, they were again at the house, where the children and Touclé
had preceded them. Paul was laughing and saying, "Elly's the looniest
kid! She's just been saying that Father is like . . ." Elly, in a panic,
sprang up at him, clapping her hand over his mouth, crying out, "No,
Paul, you shan't tell! _Don't!_"
The older, stronger child pulled himself away and, holding her at arm's
length, continued, "She said Father was like the end of her hair that's
fastened into her head, and Mother was the end that flaps in the wind,
and Mr. Marsh was like the Eagle Rock brook, swirly and hurrying the way
it is in the spring."
Elly, half crying, came to her mother. "Mother, it's nasty-horrid in
Paul to tell when I didn't want him to."
Marise began taking off the little girl's coat. "It wasn't very kind in
Paul, but there was nothing in those funny little fancies to hide,
dear."
"I didn't care about you and Father!" explained the child. "Only . . ."
She looked at Mr. Marsh from under downbent brows.
"Why, Elly, I am very much complimented, I'm sure," Marsh hastened to
tell her, "to be compared with such a remarkably nice thing as a brook
in spring-time. I didn't suppose any young lady would ever have such a
poetic idea about me."
"Oh . . ." breathed Elly, relieved, "well . . ."
"Do you suppose you little folks can get yourselves to bed without me?"
asked Marise. "If one of you big children will unbutton Mark in the
back, he can manage the rest. I must set a bread-sponge before I go
upstairs."
They clung to her imploringly. "But you'll be upstairs in time to kiss
us good-night in our beds," begged Elly and Mark together. Paul also
visibly hung on his mother's answer.
Marise looked down into their clear eyes and eager faces, reaching out
to her ardently, and she felt her heart melt. What darlings they were!
What inestimable treasures! How sweet to be loved like that!
She stooped over them and gathered them all into a great armful, kissing
them indiscriminately. "Yes, of course, I will . . . and give you an extra
kiss now!" she cried.
She felt Marsh's eyes on her, sardonically.
She straightened herself, saying with affectionate roughness, "There,
that's enough. Scamper along with you. And don't run around with bare
feet!"
She thought to herself that she supposed this was the sort of thing
Marsh meant when he spoke about hot-house enervating concentration. She
had been more stung by that remark of his than she had been willing to
acknowledge to Marsh or to herself.
But for the moment, any further reflection on it was cut short by the
aspect of Mr. Welles' face. He had sunk into a chair near the lamp, with
an attitude and an expression of such weariness, that Marise moved
quickly to him. "See here, Mr. Welles," she said impulsively, "you have
something on your mind, and I've got the mother-habit so fastened on me
that I can't be discreet and pretend not to notice it. I want to make
you say what the trouble is, and then flu it right, just as I would for
one of mine."
The old man looked up at her gratefully and reaching out one of his
wrinkled hands took hers in it. "It does me good to have you so nice to
me," he said, "but I'm afraid even you can't fix it right. I've had a
rather distressing letter today, and I can't seem to get it out of my
mind."
"Schwatzkummerer can't send the gladioli," conjectured Marsh.
For the first time since he had entered the house, Marise felt a passing
dislike for him. She had often felt him to be hard and ruthless, but she
had never seen anything cheap in him, before, she thought.
"What was your letter?" she asked the older man.
"Oh, nothing in the least remarkable, nothing new," he said heavily.
"I've got a cousin whom I haven't seen since she was a little little
girl, though she must be somewhere near my age, now. She has been a
teacher in a school for Negroes, down in Georgia, for years, most of her
life. But I had sort of lost track of her, till I had to send her some
little family trinkets that were left after my old aunt died. Her
letter, that I received today, is in answer to that. And while she was
writing, she gave me her news, and told me a good deal about conditions
down there. Pretty bad, I should think it, pretty bad."
A little spasm crossed his face. He shook his head, as though to shake
off a clinging filament of importunate thought.
"What's the trouble? Do they need money, the school?" asked Marise with
a vague idea of getting up a contribution.
"No, my cousin didn't say anything about that. It's not so simple. It's
the way the Negroes are treated. No, not lynchings, I knew about them.
But I knew they don't happen every day. What I hadn't any idea of, till
her letter came, was how every day, every minute of every day, they're
subject to indignity that they can't avoid, how they're made to feel
themselves outsiders and unwelcome in their own country. She says the
Southern white people are willing to give them anything that will make
good day-laborers of them, almost anything in fact except the thing they
can't rise without, ordinary human respect. It made a very painful
impression on my mind, her letter, very. She gave such instances. I
haven't been able to get it out of my mind. For instance, one of the
small things she told me . . . it seems incredible . . . is that Southern
white people won't give the ordinary title of respect of Mr. or Mrs. or
Dr. even to a highly educated Negro. They call them by their first
names, like servants. Think what an hourly pin-prick of insult that must
be. Ever since her letter came, I've been thinking about it, the things
she told me, about what happens when they try to raise themselves and
refine themselves, how they're made to suffer intimately for trying to
be what I thought we all wanted all Americans to be." He looked at
Marise with troubled eyes. "I've been thinking how it would feel to be a
Negro myself. What a different life would be in front of your little
Elly if she had Negro blood!"
Marise had listened to him in profound silence. Sheer, unmixed
astonishment filled her mind, up to the brim. Of all the totally
unexpected things for Mr. Welles to get wrought up about!
She drew a long breath. How eternally disconcerting human beings are!
There she had been so fatuously sure, out there on the walk home, that
she knew exactly what was in that old white head. And all the time it
had been this. Who could have made the faintest guess at that? It
occurred to her for the first time that possibly more went on under Mr.
Welles' gently fatigued exterior than she thought.
She found not a word to say, so violent and abrupt was the transition of
subject. It was as though she had been gazing down through a powerful
magnifying glass, trying to untangle with her eyes a complicated twist
of moral fibers, inextricably bound up with each other, the moral
fibers that made up her life . . . and in the midst of this, someone had
roughly shouted in her ear, "Look up there, at that distant cliff.
There's a rock on it, all ready to fall off!"
She could not be expected all of a sudden, that way, to re-focus her
eyes. And the rock was so far away. And she had such a dim sense of the
people who might be endangered by it. And the confusion here, under the
microscope of her attention, was so vital and immediate, needing to be
understood and straightened before she could go on with her life.
She looked at the old man in an astonishment which she knew must seem
fairly stupid to him, but she could not bring out anything else. What
was it to her, whether a Negro physician was called Dr. or "Jo"?
Mr. Welles patted her hand, released it, smiled at her kindly, and stood
up. "I'm pretty tired. I guess we'd better be getting along home,
Vincent and I."
"Well, I should say we _would_ better be getting along home to bed!"
agreed the other man, coming forward and slipping his arm under the
older man's. "I'll tuck you up, my old friend, with a good hot toddy
inside you, and let you sleep off this outrageously crazy daylight
nightmare you've cooked up for yourself. And don't wake up with the fate
of the Japanese factory-hand sitting on your chest, or you'll get hard
to live with."
Mr. Welles answered this with literal good faith. "Oh, the Japanese
factory-hands, they're not on the conscience of Americans."
"But, when I see an aged and harmless inhabitant of Ashley, Vermont,
stretching his poor old protesting conscience till it cracks, to make it
reach clear down to the Georgia Negroes, how do I know where he's going
to stop?"
The old man turned to their hostess. "Well, good-night, Mrs. Crittenden.
I enjoyed seeing that wonderful flower very much. I wonder if I could
grow one like it? It would be something to look forward to, to have the
flower open in your own house."
To Marise he looked so sweet and good, and like a tired old child, that
she longed to kiss him good-night, as she had her own. But even as she
felt the impulse, she had again a startled sense of how much more goes
on under the human surface than ever appears. Evidently Mr. Welles, too,
was a locked and sealed strong-box of secrets.
* * * * *
In the doorway Marsh stopped abruptly and said, looking at the dense,
lustreless black silk wrap about Marise's head and shoulders, "What's
that thing? I meant to ask you when you put it on."
She felt as she often did when he spoke to her, as startled as though he
had touched her. What an extraordinarily living presence he was, so that
a word from him was almost like an actual personal contact. But she took
care not to show this. She looked down casually at the soft, opaque
folds of her wrap. "Oh, this is a thousand years old. It dates from the
Bayonne days. It's Basque. It's their variation, I imagine, on the
Spanish mantilla. They never wear hats, the Basque women. The little
girls, when they have made their first communion, wear a scarf of light
net, or open transparent lace. And when they marry they wear this. It's
made of a special sort of silk, woven just for this purpose. As far away
as you can see a woman in the Basque country, if she wears this, you
know she's married."
"Oh, you do, do you?" said Marsh, going out after his companion.
* * * * *
They were very far from the Negroes in Georgia.