The dry branch has come alive. The young Jeff Lydia had known through
Farvie was here, miraculously full of hope and laughter. Jeff was as
different after that day as a man could be if he had been buried and
revived and cast his grave-clothes off. He measured everything by his
new idea and the answers came out pat. The creative impulse shot up in
him and grew. He knew what it was to be a prisoner under penalty, every
cruel phase of it; and now that he saw everybody else in bonds, one to
an unbalanced law of life we call our destiny, one to cant, one to
greed, one to untended impulse, he was afire to let the prisoners out.
If they knew they were bound they could throw off these besetments of
mortality and walk in beauty. Old Addington, the beloved, must free
herself. Too long had she been held by the traditions she had erected
into forms of worship. The traditions lasted still, though now nobody
truly believed in them. She was beating her shawms and cymbals in the
old way, but to a new tune, and the tune was not the song of liberty, he
believed, but a child's lullaby. In that older time she had decently
covered discomfiting facts, asserted that she believed revealed
religion, and blessed God, in an ingenuous candour, for setting her feet
in paths where she could walk decorously. But now that she was really
considering new gods he wanted her to take herself in hand and find out
what she really worshipped. What was God and what was Baal? Had she the
nerve to burn her sacrifices and see? He began to understand her better
every day he lived with her. Poor old Addington! she had been suddenly
assaulted by the clamour of the times; it told her shameful things were
happening, and she had, with her old duteous responsiveness, snatched at
remedies. The rich, she found, had robbed the poor. Therefore let there
be no more poverty, though not on that account less riches. And here the
demagogue arose and bade her shirk no issue, even the red flag. God
Himself, the demagogue informed her, gives in His march of time
spectacular illustration of temporal vanity. The earthquake ruins us,
the flood engulfs us, fire and water are His ministers to level the pomp
of power. Therefore, said the demagogue, forget the sweet abidingness of
home, the brooding peace of edifices, the symbolic uses of matter to
show us, though we live but in tents of a night, that therein is a sign
of the Eternal City. Down with property. Addington had learned to
distrust one sort of individual, and she instantly believed she could
trust the other individual who was as unlike him as possible. Because
Dives had been numb to human needs, Lazarus was the new-discovered
leader. And the pitiful part of it all was that though Addington used
the alphabet and spoke the language of "social unrest", it did it merely
with the relish of playing with a new thing. It didn't make a jot of
difference in its daily living. It didn't exert itself over its local
government, it didn't see the Weedon Moores were honeycombing the soil
with sedition. It talked, and talked, and knew the earth would last its
time.
When Jeffrey tore up the life of his fellow prisoner he did it as if he
tore his own past with it. He sat down to write his new book which was,
in a way, an autobiography. He had read the enduring ones. He used to
think they were crudely honest, and he meant now to tell the truth as
brutally as the older men: how, in his seething youth, when he scarcely
knew the face of evil in his arrogant confidence that he was strong
enough to ride it bareback without falling off, if it would bring him to
his ends, he leaped into the money game. And at that point, he owned
ingenuously, he would have to be briefly insincere. He could unroll his
own past, but not Esther's. The minute the stage needed her he realised
he could never summon her. He might betray himself, not her. It was she,
the voice incarnate of greed and sensuous delight, that had whipped him
along his breathless course, and now he had to conceal her behind a
wilful lie and say they were his own delights that lured him.
He sat there in his room writing on fiery nights when the moths crowded
outside the screen and small sounds urged the freedom and soft
beguilement of the season, even in the bounds of streets. The colonel,
downstairs, sat in a determined patience over Mary Nellen's linguistic
knots, what time he was awake long enough to tackle them, and wished
Jeff would bring down his work where he could be glanced at occasionally
even if he were not to be spoken to. The colonel had thought he wanted
nothing but to efface himself for his son, and yet the yearning of life
within him made him desire to live a little longer even by sapping that
young energy. Only Lydia knew what Jeff was doing, and she gloried in
it. He was writing a book, mysterious work to her who could only compass
notes of social import, and even then had some ado to spell. But she
read his progress by the light in his eyes, his free bearing and his
broken silence. For now Jeff talked. He talked a great deal. He chaffed
his father and even Anne, and left Lydia out, to her own pain. Why
should he have kissed her that long ago day if he didn't love her, and
why shouldn't he have kept on loving her? Lydia was asking herself the
oldest question in the woman's book of life, and nobody had told her
that nature only had the answer. "If you didn't mean it why did you do
it?" This was the question Lydia heard no answer to.
Jeff was perpetually dwelling upon Addington, torn between the factions
of the new and old. He asked Lydia seriously what she should recommend
doing, to make good citizens out of bamboozled aliens. Lydia had but one
answer. She should, she said, teach them to dance. Then you could get
acquainted with them. You couldn't get acquainted if you set them down
to language lessons or religious teaching, or tried to make them read
the Constitution. If people had some fun together, Lydia thought, they
pretty soon got to understand one another because they were doing a
thing they liked, and one couldn't do it so well alone. That was her
recipe. Jeff didn't take much stock in it. He was not wise enough to
remember how eloquent are the mouths of babes. He went to Miss Amabel as
being an expert in sympathy, and found her shy of him. She was on the
veranda, shelling peas, and in her checked muslin with father's portrait
braided round with mother's hair pinning together her embroidered
collar. To Jeff, clad in his blue working-clothes, she looked like
motherhood and sainthood blended. He sat himself down on the lower step,
clasped his knees and watched her, following the movements of her plump
hands.
"We can't get too homesick for old Addington while we have you to look
at," said he.
She stopped working for one pod's space and looked at him.
"Are you homesick for old Addington?" she asked. "Alston Choate says
that. He says it's a homesick world."
"He's dead right," said Jeff.
"What do you want of old Addington?" said she. "What do we need we
haven't got?"
Jeff thought of several words, but they wouldn't answer. Beauty? No, old
Addington was oftener funny than not. There was no beauty in a pint-pot.
Even the echoes there rang thin. Peace? But he was the last man to go to
sleep over the task of the day.
"I just want old Addington," he said. "Anyway I want to drop in to it as
you'd drop into the movies. I want to hesitate on the brink of doing
things that shock people. Nobody's shocked at anything now. I want to
see the blush of modesty. Amabel, it's all faded out."
She looked at him, distressed.
"Jeff," said she, "do you think our young people are not--what they
were?"
He loved her beautiful indirection.
"I don't want 'em to be what they were," said he, "if they have to lie
to do it. I don't know exactly what I do want. Only I'm homesick for old
Addington. Amabel, what should you say to my going into kindergarten
work?"
"You always did joke me," said she. "Get a rise out of me? Is that what
you call it?"
"I'm as sober as an owl," said Jeff. "I want these pesky Poles and
Syrians and all the rest of them to learn what they're up against when
they come over here to run the government. I'm on the verge, Amabel, of
hiring a hall and an interpreter, and teaching 'em something about
American history, if there's anything to teach that isn't disgraceful."
"And yet," said she, "when Weedon Moore talks to those same men you go
and break up the meeting."
"But bless you, dear old girl," said Jeff, "Weedon was teaching 'em the
rules for wearing the red flag. And I'm going to give 'em a straight
tip about Old Glory. When I've got through with 'em, you won't know 'em
from New Englanders dyed in the wool."
She meditated.
"If only you and Weedon would talk it over," she ventured, "and combine
your forces. You're both so clever, Jeff."
"Combine with Weedie? Not on your life. Why, I'm Weedie's antidote. He
preaches riot and sedition, and I'm the dose taken as soon as you can
get it down."
Then she looked at him, though affectionately, in sad doubt, and Jeff
saw he had, in some way, been supplanted in her confidence though not in
her affection. He wouldn't push it. Amabel was too precious to be lost
for kindergarten work.
When they had talked a little more, but about topics less dangerous, the
garden and the drought, he went away; but Amabel padded after him, bowl
in hand.
"Jeff," said she, "you must let me say how glad I am you and Weedon are
really seeing things from the same point of view."
"Don't make any mistake about that," said Jeff. "He's trying to bust
Addington, and Tin trying to save it. And to do that I've got to bust
Weedie himself."
He went home then and put his case to Lydia, and asked her why, if Miss
Amabel was so willing to teach the alien boy to read and teach the alien
girl to sew, she should be so cold to his pedagogical ambitions. Lydia
was curiously irresponsive, but at dusk she slipped away to Madame
Beattie's. To Lydia, what used to be Esther's house had now become
simply Madame Beattie's. She had her own shy way of getting in, so that
she need not come on Esther nor trouble the decorous maid. Perhaps Lydia
was a little afraid of Sophy, who spoke so smoothly and looked such
cool hostility. So she tapped at the kitchen door and a large cook of
sound principles who loved neither Esther nor Sophy, let her in and
passed her up the back stairs. Esther had strangely never noted this
adventurous way of entering. She was rather unobservant about some
things, and she would never have suspected a lady born of coming in by
the kitchen for any reason whatever. Esther, too, had some of the
Addington traditions ingrain.
Madame Beattie was in bed, where she usually was when not in mischief,
the summer breeze touching her toupee as tenderly as it might a young
girl's flossy crown. She always had a cool drink by her, and she was
always reading. Sometimes she put out her little ringed hand and moved
the glass to hear the clink of ice, and she did it now as Lydia came in.
Lydia liked the clink. It sounded festive to her. That was the word she
had for all the irresponsible exuberance Madame Beattie presented her
with, of boundless areas where you could be gay. Madame Beattie shut her
book and motioned to the door. But Lydia was already closing it. That
was the first thing when they had their gossips. Lydia came then and
perched on the foot of the bed. Her promotion from chair to bed marked
the progress of their intimacy.
"Madame Beattie," said she, "I wish you and I could go abroad together."
Madame Beattie grinned at her, with a perfect appreciation.
"You wouldn't like it," said she.
"I should like it," said Lydia. Yet she knew she did not want to go
abroad. This was only an expression of her pleasure in sitting on a bed
and chatting with a game old lady. What she wanted was to mull along
here in Addington with occasional side dashes into the realms of
discontent, and plan for Jeff's well-being. "He wants to give lectures,"
said she. "To them."
The foreign contingent was always known to her and Madame Beattie as
They.
"The fool!" said Madame Beattie cheerfully. "What for?"
"To teach them to be good."
"What does he want to muddle with that for?"
"Why, Madame Beattie, you know yourself you're talking to them and
telling them things."
"But that isn't dressing 'em in Governor Winthrop's knee breeches," said
Madame Beattie, "and making Puritans of 'em. I'm just filling 'em up
with Jeff Blake, so they'll follow him and make a ringleader of him
whether he wants it or not. They'll push and push and not see they're
pushing, and before he knows it he'll be down stage, with all his
war-paint on. You never saw Jeff catch fire."
"No," said Lydia, lying. The day he took her hands and told her what she
still believed at moments--he had caught fire then.
"When he catches fire, he'll burn up whatever's at hand," said the old
lady, with relish. "Get his blood started, throw him into politics, and
in a minute we shall have him in business, and playing the old game."
"Do you want him to play the old game?" asked Lydia.
"I want him to make some money."
"To pay his creditors."
"Pay your grandmother! pay for my necklace. Lydia, I've scared her out
of her boots."
"Esther?" Lydia whispered.
Madame Beattie whispered, too, now, and a cross-light played over her
eyes.
"Yes. I've searched her room. And she knows it. She thinks I'm searching
for the necklace."
"And aren't you?"
"Bless you, no. I shouldn't find it. She's got it safely hid. But when
she finds her upper bureau drawer gone over--Esther's very
methodical--and the next day her second drawer and the next day the
shelves in her closet, why, then--"
"What then?" asked Lydia, breathless.
"Then, my dear, she'll get so nervous she'll put the necklace into a
little bag and tell me she is called to New York. And she'll take the
bag with her, if she's not prevented."
"What should prevent her? the police?"
"No, my dear, for after all I don't want the necklace so much as I want
somebody to pay me solid money for it. But when the little bag appears,
this is what I shall say to Esther, perhaps while she's on her way
downstairs to the carriage. 'Esther,' I shall say, 'get back to your
room and take that little bag with you. And make up to handsome Jeff and
tell him he's got to stir himself and pay me something on account. And
you can keep the diamonds, my dear, if you see Jeff pays me something.'"
"She'd rather give you the diamonds," said Lydia.
"My dear, she sets her life by them. Do you know what she's doing when
she goes to her room early and locks the door? She's sitting before the
glass with that necklace on, cursing God because there's no man to see
her."
"You can't know that," said Lydia.
She was trembling all over.
"My dear, I know women. When you're as old as I am, you will, too: even
the kind of woman Esther is. That type hasn't changed since the
creation, as they call it."
"But I don't like it," said Lydia. "I don't think it's fair. She hates
Jeff--"
"Nonsense. She doesn't hate any man. Jeff's poor, that's all."
"She does hate him, and yet you're going to make him pay money so she
can keep diamond necklaces she never ought to have had."
"Make him pay money for anything," said the old witch astutely, "money
he's got or money he hasn't got. Set his blood to moving, I tell you,
and before he knows it he'll be tussling for dear life and stamping on
the next man and getting to the top."
Lydia didn't want him to tussle, but she did want him at the top. She
had not told Madame Beattie about the manuscript growing and growing on
Jeff's table every night. It was his secret, his and hers, she reasoned;
she hugged the knowledge to her heart.
"That's all," said Madame Beattie, in that royal way of terminating
interviews when she wanted to get back to literature. "Only when he
begins to address his workingmen you tell me."
Lydia, on her way downstairs, passed Esther's room and even stood a
second breathlessly taking in its exquisite order. Here was the bower
where the enchantress slept, and where she touched up her beauty by the
secret processes Lydia, being very young and of a pollen-like freshness,
despised. This was not just of Lydia. Esther took no more than a normal
care of her complexion, and her personal habits were beyond praise.
Lydia stood there staring, her breath coming quick. Was the necklace
really there? If she saw it what could she do? If the little bag with
the necklace inside it sat there waiting to be taken to New York, what
could she do then? She fled softly down the stairs.
Addington was a good deal touched when Jeffrey Blake took the old town
hall and put a notice in the paper saying he would give a talk there on
American History in the administration of George Washington. He would
speak in English and parts of the lecture would be translated, if
necessary, by an able interpreter. Ladies considered seriously whether
they ought not to go, to encourage him, and his father was sure it was
his own right and privilege. But Jeff choked that off. He settled the
matter at the supper table.
"Look here," said he, "I'm going down there to make an ass of myself.
Don't you come. I won't have it."
So the three stayed at home, and sat up for him and he told them, when
he came in, at a little after ten, that there had been five Italians
present and one of them had slept. Two ladies, deputed by the Woman's
Club, had also come, and he wished to thunder women would mind their
business and stay at home. But there was the fighting glint in his eye.
His father remembered it, and Lydia was learning to know it now. He
would give his next lecture, he said, unless nobody was there but the
Woman's Club. He drew the line. And next day Lydia slipped away to
Madame Beattie and told her the second lecture would be on the following
Wednesday night.
That night Jeff stood up before his audience of three, no ladies this
time. But Andrea was not there. Jeff thought a minute and decided there
was no need of him.
"Will you tell me," said he, looking down from the shallow platform at
his three men, "why I'm not talking in English anyway? You vote, don't
you? You read English. Well, then, listen to it."
But he was not permitted to begin at once. There was a stir without and
the sound of feet. The door opened and men tramped in, men and men,
more than the little hall would hold, and packed themselves in the
aisles and at the back. And with the foremost, one who carried himself
proudly as if he were extremely honored, came Madame Beattie in a
long-tailed velvet gown with a shining gold circlet across her forehead,
and a plethora of jewels on her ungloved hands. She kept straight on,
and mounted the platform beside Jeff, and there she bowed to her
audience and was cheered. When she spoke to Jeff, it was with a perfect
self-possession, an implied mastery of him and the event.
"I'll interpret."
After all, why not fall in with her, old mistress of guile? He began
quite robustly and thought he was doing very well. In twenty minutes he
was, he thought, speaking excellently. The men were warmly pleased. They
sat up and smiled and glistened at him. Once he stopped short and threw
Madame Beattie a quick aside.
"What are they laughing at?"
"I have to put it picturesquely," said Madame Beattie, in a stately
calm. "That's the only way they'll understand. Go on."
It is said in Addington that those lectures lasted even until eleven
o'clock at night, and there were petitions that The Prisoner should go
to the old hall and talk every evening, instead of twice a week. The
Woman's Club said Madame Beattie was a dear to interpret for him, and
some of the members who had not studied any language since the
seventies, when they learned the rudiments of German, to read Faust,
judged it would be a good idea to hear her for practice. But somebody
told her that, and she discouraged it. She was obliged, she said, to
skip hastily from one dialect to another and they would only be
confused; therefore they thought it better, after all, to remain
undisturbed in their respective calm. Jeff sailed securely on through
Lincoln's administration to the present day, and took up the tariff
even, in an elementary fashion. There he was obliged to be drily
technical at points, and he wondered how Madame Beattie could accurately
reproduce him, much less to a response of eager faces. But then Jeff
knew she was an old witch. He knew she had hypnotised wives that hated
her and husbands sworn to cast her off. He knew she had sung after she
had no voice, and bamboozled even the critics, all but one who wrote for
an evening paper and so didn't do his notice until next day. And he saw
no reason why she should not make even the tariff a primrose path.
Madame Beattie loved it all. Also, there was the exquisite pleasure,
when she got home late, of making Sophy let her in and mix her a
refreshing drink, and of meeting Esther the next day at dinner and
telling her what a good house they had. Business, Madame Beattie called
it, splendid business, and Esther hated her for that, too. It sounded
like shoes or hosiery. But Ether didn't dare gainsay her, for fear she
would put out a palmist's sign, or a notice of seances at twenty-five
cents a head. Esther knew she could get no help from grandmother. When
she sought it, with tears in her eyes, begging grandmother to turn the
unprincipled old witch out for good, grandmother only pulled the sheet
up to her ears and breathed stertorously.
But Madame Beattie was tired, though this was the flowering of her later
life.
"My God!" she said to Lydia one night, before getting up to dress for a
lecture, "I'm pretty nearly--what is it they call it--all in? I may drop
dead. I shouldn't wonder if I did. If I do, you take Jeff into the joke.
Nobody'd appreciate it more than Jeff."
"You don't think the men like him the less for it?" said Lydia.
"Oh, God bless me, no. They adore him. They think he's a god because he
tells their folk tales and their stories. I give you my word, Lydia, I'd
no idea I knew so many things."
"What did you tell last night?" said Lydia.
"Oh, stories, stories, stories. To-night I may spice it up a little with
modern middle-Europe scandal. Dear souls! they love it."
"What does Jeff think they're listening to?" asked Lydia.
"The trusts, last time," said Madame Beattie. "My Holy Father! that's
what he thinks. The trusts!"