HAVING IT OUT
"Well, of course, we knew Nickols would follow you, Charlotte, but we
did hope to have you all to ourselves for more than just a week," moaned
Nell Morgan, as we all sat on the front porch of the Poplars in the warm
spring sunlight several mornings after I had told them of Nickols'
arrival on Friday, which announcement had come in the midnight telegram.
I winced at the words "follow you," and then smiled at the absurdity of
the little shudder.
"Yes, Nickols will be absorbing, but we can all sit hard on him and
perhaps put him in his place," responded Letitia Cockrell, as she drew a
fine thread through a ruffle she was making to adorn some part of the
person of one of Nell's progeny. "I do not believe in ever allowing a
man to take more than his share of a woman's time."
"Do you use grocery scales or a pint cup to measure out Cliff Gray's
daily portion of yourself, Letitia?" asked Harriet Henderson, with a
very sophisticated laugh in which Nell joined with a little giggle.
Harriet was appliqueing velvet violets on a gray chiffon scarf and was
doing it with the zest of the newly liberated. Roger Henderson had had a
lot of money that, in default of a will, the law gave mostly to Harriet,
but in life he had not had the joy of seeing her spend it that he might
have had if he could have gazed back from placid death. "Do you make the
same allowance of affection to him in the light of the moon that you do
in the dark?" she further demanded of the serene Letitia.
"Well, he doesn't have to see his share divided up into bits and handed
out to the other men," was the serene answer to Harriet's gibe and which
was pretty good for Letitia.
"My dear child," declaimed Harriet, as she poised a purple violet on the
end of her needle, "don't ever, ever make the mistake of letting one of
the creatures know just what is coming to him. Isn't that right, Nell?"
"Yes, and it is pretty hard to keep them in a state of uncertainty
about you when there are four certain children between you, but I go
over to visit my mother at Hillsboro as often as she'll have the caravan
and plead with Billy Harvey or Hampton Dibrell to keep me out until I'm
late for dinner every time they pick me up for a little charitable spin.
That and other deceptions have kept Mark Morgan uncertainly happy so
far, but if I am pushed to the wall I'll--I'll go to the Reverend Mr.
Goodloe's study for ministerial counsel like you did last Friday
afternoon, Harriet," was Nell's contribution to the discussion, which
she delivered over the head of the Suckling on her breast.
"Now how did you get hold of that choice bit of scandal, Nellie?" asked
Harriet, with serene interest as she bit off a tag of purple silk thread
from the stem of one of her violets.
"Billy Harvey says that scandal is a yellow pup that dogs a parson's
heels, to which everybody throws some kind of bone," remarked Jessie.
Jessie always vigorously represses Billy in his own presence and then
quotes him eternally when he is absent.
"Mother Spurlock had come over from the Settlement to see him about the
state of the treasury of the Mothers' Aid Class, and she stopped in to
get a bundle of clothes I had for her," Nell answered Harriet's
question. "She said she didn't mind the hour lost if the parson could
give a 'wee bit of comfort' to your 'wrestling' soul. I didn't like to
tell her that I thought it might be Mr. Goodloe who was wrestling--for
life and liberty--for you and I have been friends since we could toddle,
Harriet, but it was temptation to share my anxiety with her." And
serenely Nellie patted the back of the drowsing Suckling.
"Wrong this time, Nell," answered Harriet, as she placed still another
violet. "I was doing the wrestling, but I went to the mat. I gave up
twenty-five dollars and took the directorship of that Mothers' Aid.
Never having been a mother, I pointed out to him that I was not exactly
qualified, but he laid stress upon my energy and business acumen and I
gave up. I mentioned you for the honor, but those marvelous eyes of his
glowed with some sort of inner warmth and he said that you had all you
could do and would need help from me just as the women at the Settlement
do. I'm going to present your Susan with a frock out of that linen and
real Valenciennes I bought in the city last week for a blouse for my own
self, and I'm going to give the making to that little Burns woman, who
sews so beautifully and cheaply to support her seven offspring, while
Mr. Burns supports 'The Last Chance' saloon down at the end of the road.
In that way I'll be aiding two of Mr. Goodloe's flock at the same time,
and when I told him my decision he laughed and said be sure and have it
made two inches shorter than you made Sue's frocks, because her bare
knees ought not to be hid from the world. That was about all that
transpired in the whole hour of spiritual conference you are spreading
the scandal about, and you ought to be ashamed."
Suddenly something in me made me determine to have it out with those
four women and see what results I could get. I felt thirsty for
knowledge of the wellsprings of other people's lives.
"Harriet," I demanded, "just why did you join Mr. Goodloe's church?"
"Let's see," answered Harriet, as she poised a violet and gave herself
up to introspection.
"Mr. Goodloe?" I asked squarely, and my honesty drew its spark from
hers.
"Mostly," she answered briefly. "And I believe in the church as an
institution," she added, with honest justice to herself.
"I think it is absolutely horrid of you to ask a question like that,
Charlotte," said Nell, as she turned the fretting Suckling over on her
knee and began another series of pats. "We all of us went to church and
Sunday school when we were children."
"Up to the time I left, not a single one of you ever had gone to church
with any kind of regularity and not a one of you had ever supported its
institutions. I've been here less than a week and each one of you has in
some way shown me how bored you are with the relation. That's all the
case I have against your or any church--just that the members are bored.
Also, do any of you get any help in your daily lives, aside from the
emotional pleasure it is to you to hear your minister sing twice a week,
which would be as great or greater if he sang love and waltz songs from
light opera for you?"
And as I asked my question I looked quickly from one to the other of the
four women seated with me under the roof of the Poplars and tried to
search out what was in their hearts. I knew them and their lives with
the cruel completeness it is given to friends to know each other in
small towns like Goodloets and I could probe with a certain touch. And
as they all sat silent with me, each one driven to self-question by my
demand, I threw the flash of a searchlight into each of them. These are
some of the things that stood out in the illumination:
Harriet Henderson has always been in love with Mark Morgan, since her
shoe-top-dress days, and she married Roger Henderson because Mark was as
poor as she before the Phosphate Company gave him his managership. Nell
and the babies are the nails driven in her heart every day and she loves
them all passionately. She is only twenty-eight and life will be long
for her. She needs help to live it. Whence will the help come?
Nell married Mark when she was eighteen and has produced a result every
year and a half since. She loves him mildly and he loves her after a
fashion, but her endurance is wearing thin. His mother had seven
children and he thinks that an ideal number, though she was one
generation nearer the pioneer woman and also had a nurse trained in
slavery who was a wizard with children. Mark wants to have a lot of joy
of life and so far he drags poor exhausted Nell with him. It is a
question how long she can stand the social pace and the over-production.
What is going to help her when she breaks down? How will she hold him
faithful while she rears and trains all the kiddies? Where will she get
spirit to love him and work out their salvation? Also Harriet is always
there. Something will have to help Nell. What?
Billy loves Nell and doesn't know it. He loved her before she was
married. The children make him rage superficially and burn inwardly. He
gambles and drinks, but is honest and adorable. What is going to make a
real man of him?
Jessie Litton's mother died in a private sanitarium for the mentally
unbalanced and she knows all about it. She loves Hampton Dibrell and
never looks in his direction or is a moment alone with him. He is in the
unattached state of ease where any woman can get him if she cares to
try, and Jessie has to keep her hands behind her.
Letitia is serenely happy with not a dark corner that I know of. She
loves Cliff Gray and always will. Cliff is faithful and as good as gold,
but he will hang around Jessie, who encourages him, because she is
lonely and considers him safely tied up with Letitia. Mr. Cockrell is
the best lawyer in town and Mrs. Cockrell the most devoted wife and
mother. I can only feel that Letitia Cockrell needs a jolt and I don't
see where it is coming from.
And I? I am lonely. And I feel that the constant anxiety about father is
more than I can bear, worse now when I realize what he has been and
could be--and that I love him. He is the hardest drinker in Goodloets
and yet never is drunk. He is soaked from the beginning of one day to
another. He began to drink like that the day my mother died and I have
always known that _I_ was helpless to help him. The weakness was in him,
only supported by her strength so long as she was there. He was the most
brilliant mind in the state, and was one of the supreme judges when
mother died. Now Mr. Cockrell manages his business for him and I have
lately come to know that I must sit by and watch him disintegrate. I
cannot endure it now, as I have been doing. What is going to help me in
this--shame for him? I have gone away to my mother's people to forget
and left him to Dabney, and I've come home--to begin the suffering all
over. I'll never leave him again. What's going to help me?
And there is something deeper--a race something that fairly eats the
heart out of my pride. On almost every page of the history of the
Harpeth Valley the name of Powers occurs. One Powers man has been
governor of the state, and there have been two United States congressmen
and a senator of our house. Father is the last of the line. Because race
instinct is the strongest in women, I am the one who suffers as I see my
family die out. What is going to help me? A few gospel hymns in a tenor
voice the like of which I should have to pay at least three dollars to
hear in the Metropolitan? The scene on the porch rose in my mind, but I
felt that I both doubted and feared such succor.
And I am in still deeper depths. Nickols is the son of father's first
cousin, and has father's full name, Nickols Morris Powers, and he is the
last of his branch of the house. Father loves him and is proud of him
and nothing ever enters his mind except that I will marry Nickols and
start the family all over again. And this is the tragedy. I love Nickols
and am entirely unsatisfied with him. He is the Whistler nocturne that
my Sorolla nature demands, and he eternally makes me hold out my hand to
grasp--nothing. He stands just beyond. I am unable to decide whether he
does or does not love me. In New York he lives his life among the
artists and fashionable people with whom his highly successful
profession throws him, and I don't see why he cares to come back here
where he was born and reared, in pursuit of a woman like me. I am as
elemental as a shock of wheat back on one of father's meadows and
Nickols is completely evolved. He laughs at race pride and resents mine.
For six months I had been in New York living with Aunt Clara in Uncle
Jonathan Van Eyek's old house down on Gramercy just to go into Nickols'
life with him. I went about in the white lights of both Murray Hill and
Greenwich Village for about one hundred and eighty-five evenings, and
then I fled back to my garden and the poplars--and my anxiety. I thought
I had come home to be free and I found the same old chains. And then
had come Nickols' telegram of pursuit in the midnight after I had stood
by in the shadow and watched a strong man pray and a weak man battle
with himself. I was frightened, frightened at the future, and what was
going to help me?
"I don't actually understand a word of Gregory Goodloe's sermons, really
understand them, I mean, but it helps me to see that somebody truly
believes that there is something somewhere that will straighten out
tangles--in life as well as thread."
Harriet broke in on my still hunt into my own and other people's inner
shrines as she snapped a bit of tangled purple silk thread, knotted it
and began all over again on the violet.
"I don't care what he preaches about--he's soothing and I need a little
repose in my life after--Oh, what is the matter now?" And as she
finished speaking Nell Morgan arose and went with the Suckling asquirm
in her arms to meet the large noise that was arriving down the front
walk.
The delegation was headed by young Charlotte, whose blue eyes flamed
across a very tip-tilted nose that bespoke mischief. Jimmy stolidly
brought up the rear with small Sue clinging loyally to his dirty little
paddie, which she only let go to run and bury her cornsilk topknot in
Harriet's outspread arms, where she was engulfed into safety until only
the most delicious dimpled pink knees protruded above dusty white socks
and equally dusty white canvas sandals. Though within a few months of
four, Sue had discovered Harriet, and never failed to take advantage of
her.
"What is the matter?" again demanded Nell, as the vocal chords of
Charlotte ceased reverberating and her countenance resumed a more normal
color and expression.
"A rock flew and the minister's window got broked." Charlotte gave forth
this announcement with a diplomacy that might have been admirable
exerted in a juster cause.
"Who had the rock?" demanded the mother sternly.
"Jimmy," was the decided answer, given with a threatening glance at the
son of the house of Morgan, who quailed in his socks and sandals and
began an attempt to screw one of his toes under one of the flagstones of
the walk. I knew in an instant that that rock had never left the hand of
small James, but the clash of Nell's wits with young Charlotte is so
constant that at times the maternal ones are dulled. The accused must
have psychically scented my sympathy, for he lifted large, scared,
pleading eyes to mine for a brief second and then dropped them again. I
went to the rescue.
"Sue, who broke the window?" I asked, as I extricated the four-year-old
witness from Harriet's chiffon and violets. I doubted if young Susan had
attained the years of prevarication as yet. I was right.
"Tarlie," was the positive answer. "Boom--book--crk!" was the graphic
description of the crash she added as she squirmed back among the
violets and the needles and the thread.
"Charlotte!" exclaimed Nell, in real despair.
"Jimmy did have the rock in his pocket, and he just lent it to me to
throw at a bird right above the window. It was a nice round one, and he
brought it from home to see if he could kill anything. It most killed
the minister, and the rock is a little bluggy. Isn't it, Jimmy? He's
got it in his pocket for keeps."
"Yes," answered young James, with the brevity with which he usually made
responses to the loquacity of his sister.
"Do you mean that you hit Mr. Goodloe, as well as broke the window?"
demanded Nell in still more horror, as she came down two of the front
steps.
"He didn't mind," answered Charlotte. "He liked it, because he made us
both learn a verse of a hymn to sing for punish, and Sue can sing it,
too. Come on, Sue!" and before any of us could recover from our horror
at the violence the young parson had suffered at the hands of the
marauders, Charlotte had lined the other two up on either hand and begun
her exhibition of the benefit arising from the throwing of the rock. It
was a very good example of the good that may result from evil, which is
one of the puzzling reverses of one of the Christian tenets.
"'Work, for the night is coming,
Work through the morning hours,
Work while the dew is sparkling,
Work 'mid springing flowers,'"
trilled Charlotte in a high, buzzy young voice, while Jimmy piped in a
few notes lower. Baby Sue's little, clear jumble of words in perfect
tune was so bewitchingly sweet that Harriet again engulfed her, while
the outraged mother, not so easily beguiled, sailed down the steps and
around through the garden toward the chapel, driving the two older
offenders before her to the scene of the crime.
"Who is going to help Nell train up liars and murderers into good
citizens?" I asked myself in my depths, as I joined with the others in
the admiring laugh at young Charlotte's dramatic powers.
"Mr. Goodloe is the most wonderful thing I ever saw with kiddies," said
Jessie Litton, as she rose to her feet to begin leave-taking. "Yes, I
must go, for father expects me to luncheon," she added, at my
remonstrance.
"I'm going to kidnap Sue while I can, and I may never bring her back. I
must fly!" said Harriet, and she departed hastily to the small roadster
she had parked beside the gate. "Come on, Letitia, and let me take you
home," she called over her shoulder, and Letitia followed to secure the
short spin around the corner to the old Cockrell home, which was set
back from the street behind a tall hedge of waxy-leaved Cherokee roses.
Thus almost in the twinkling of an eye I was left alone, which state,
however, did not last more than a few seconds, for around the corner of
the house from the chapel, from which direction the whole world seemed
to be going or coming, arrived Mrs. Elsie Spurlock, beaming the welcome
to me that had always found a ready response.