A TREADWELL IN REVOLT
York Street, in which Mrs. Peachey lived and supplied the necessaries of
life to a dozen boarders, ran like a frayed seam of gentility between
the prosperous and the impoverished quarters of Dinwiddie; and in order
to reach it, Oliver was obliged to pass the rectory, where, though he
did not see her, Virginia sat in stiffly starched muslin on the old
horsehair sofa. The fragrance of honeysuckle floated to his nostrils
from the dim garden, but so absorbed was he in the engrossing problems
of the moment, that only after he had passed the tower of the church did
he remember that the house behind him sheltered the girl who reminded
him of one of the adorable young virgins of Perugino. For an instant he
permitted himself to dwell longingly on the expression of gentle
goodness that looked from her face; but this memory proved so
disturbing, that he put it obdurately away from him while he returned to
the prudent consideration of the fifty dollars in his pocket. The appeal
of first love had been almost as urgent to him as to Virginia; but the
emotion which had visited both alike had affected each differently, and
this difference was due to the fundamental distinction between woman,
for whom love is the supreme preoccupation of being, and man, to whom it
is at best a partial manifestation of energy. To the woman nothing else
really mattered; to the man at least a dozen other pursuits mattered
very nearly as much.
The sultriness of the weather dampened his body, but not his spirits,
and as he walked on, carrying his heavy bag, along York Street, his
consciousness of the tremendous importance to the world of his decision
exhilarated him like a tonic. He had freed himself from Cyrus and from
commercialism at a single blow, and it had all been as easy as talking!
The joke about starvation he had of course indulged in merely for the
exquisite pleasure of arousing Susan. He wasn't going to starve; nobody
was going to starve in Dinwiddie on thirty dollars a month, and there
was no doubt in the world of his ability to make that much by his
reviewing. It was all simple enough. What he intended to do was to write
the national drama and to practise economy.
He had, indeed, provided for everything in his future, he was to
discover a little later, except for the affable condescension of Mrs.
Peachey toward the profession of letters. Cyrus's antagonism he had
attributed to the crass stupidity of the commercial mind; but it was a
blow to him to encounter the same misconception, more discreetly veiled,
in a woman of the charm and the character of Mrs. Peachey. Bland, plump,
and pretty, she received the modest avowal of his occupation with the
smiling skepticism peculiar to a race whose genius has been chiefly
military.
"I understand--it is very interesting," she observed sweetly. "But what
do you do besides--what do you do, I mean, for a living?"
Here it was again, this fatuous intolerance! this incomprehensible
provincialism! And the terrible part of it was that he had suddenly the
sensation of being overwhelmed by the weight of it, of being smothered
under a mountain of prejudice. The flame of his anger against Cyrus went
out abruptly, leaving him cold. It was the world now against which he
rebelled. He felt that the whole world was provincial.
"I shall write reviews for a New York paper," he answered, trying in
vain to impress her by a touch of literary hauteur. At the moment it
seemed to him that he could cheerfully bear anything if they would only
at least pretend to take him seriously. What appalled him was not the
opposition, but the utter absence of comprehension. And he could never
hope to convince them! Even if he were to write great plays, they would
still hold as obstinately by their assumption that the writing of plays
did not matter--that what really mattered was to create and then to
satisfy an inordinate appetite for tobacco. This was authentic success,
and by no illegitimate triumph of genius could he persuade an industrial
country that he was as great a man as his uncle. The smiling incredulity
in Mrs. Peachey's face ceased to be individual and became a part of the
American attitude toward the native-born artist. This attitude, he
admitted, was not confined to Dinwiddie, since it was national. He had
encountered it in New York, but never had the destructive force of it
impressed him as it did on the ripe and charming lips of the woman
before him. In that illuminating instant he understood why the American
consciousness in literature was still unawakened, why the creative
artist turned manufacturer, why the original thinker bent his knee in
the end to the tin gods of convention.
Her eyes--beautiful as the eyes of all happy women are beautiful--dwelt
on him kindly while he struggled to explain his mission. All the dread
of the unusual, all the inherited belief in the sanctity of fixed
opinions, all the passionate distrust of ideas that have not stood the
test of centuries--these things which make for the safety and the
permanence of the racial life, were in the look of motherly indulgence
with which she regarded him. She had just risen from a rocking-chair on
the long porch, where honest Tom sat relating ponderous war anecdotes to
an attentive group of boarders; and beyond her in the dimly lighted hall
he could see the wide old staircase climbing leisurely into the
mysterious silence of the upper storeys.
"I have a small room at the back that I might rent to you," she said
hesitatingly after a pause. "I am afraid you will find it warm in
summer, as it is just under the roof and has a western exposure, but I
hardly think I could do better for you at the price you are able to pay.
I understood that you intended to live with your uncle," she added in a
burst of enthusiasm. "My husband has always been one of his greatest
admirers."
The mention of Cyrus was like a spur to Oliver's ambition, and he
realized with gratitude that it was merely his sensibility, not his
resolution, which had been shaken.
"I'll take the room," he returned, ignoring what she had said as well as
what she had implied about Cyrus. Then as she tripped ahead of him, he
entered the dismantled hall, filled with broken pieces of fine old
furniture, and ascended the stairs as far as the third storey. When she
turned a loosened door-knob and passed before him into the little room
at the back, he saw first of all the narrow window, with its torn green
shade, beyond which clustered a blur of silvery foliage in the midst of
red roofs and huddled chimneys. From this hilltop, he could look down
unseen on that bit of the universal life which was Dinwiddie. He could
watch the town at work and at play; he could see those twenty-one
thousand souls either moved as a unit by the secret forces which ignore
individuality, or separated and enclosed by that impenetrable wall of
personality which surrounded each atom among them. He could follow the
divisions of class and the still deeper divisions of race as they were
symbolized in the old brick walls, overgrown with young grasses, which
girdled the ancient gardens in High Street. From the dazzling glimpses
of white muslin under honeysuckle arbours, to the dusky forms that
swarmed like spawn in the alleys, the life of Dinwiddie loved, hated,
enjoyed, and suffered beneath him. And over this love and this hatred,
this enjoyment and this suffering, there presided--an outward and
visible sign of the triumph of industrialism--the imposing brick walls
of the new Treadwell tobacco factory.
A soft voice spoke in his ear, and turning, he looked into the face of
Mrs. Peachey, whom he had almost forgotten.
"You will find the sun warm in the afternoon, I am afraid," she
murmured, still with her manner of pleasantly humouring him which he
found later to be an unconscious expression of her half maternal,
wholly feminine attitude toward his sex.
"Oh, I daresay it will be all right," he responded. "I shall work so
hard that I shan't have time to bother about the weather."
Leaving the window, he gazed around the little room with an impulse of
curiosity. Who had lived here before him? A clerk? A travelling
salesman? Perhaps one of the numerous indigent gentlewomen that formed
so large and so important a part of the population of Dinwiddie? The
walls were smeared with a sickly blue wash, and in several places there
were the marks left from the pictures of the preceding lodger. An old
mahogany bureau, black with age and ill usage, stood crosswise in the
corner behind the door, and reflected in the dim mirror he saw his own
face looking back at him. A film of dust lay over everything in the
room, over the muddy blue of the walls, over the strip of discoloured
matting on the floor, over the few fine old pieces of furniture, fallen
now into abject degradation. The handsome French bed, placed
conveniently between door and window, stood naked to the eyes, with its
cheap husk mattress rolled half back, and its bare slats, of which the
two middle ones were tied together with rope, revealing conspicuously
its descent from elegance into squalor. As he saw it, the room was the
epitome of tragedy, yet in the centre of it, on one of the battered and
broken-legged Heppelwhite chairs, sat Mrs. Peachey, rosy, plump, and
pretty, regarding him with her slightly quizzical smile. "Yes, life, of
course, is sad if you stop to think about it," her smile seemed to
assure him; "but the main thing, after all, is to be happy in spite of
it."
"Do you wish to stay here to-night?" she asked, seeing that he had put
down his bag.
"If you will let me. But I am afraid it will be inconvenient."
She shook her head. "Not if you don't mind the dust. The room has been
shut up for weeks, and the dust is so dreadful in the spring. The
servants have gone out," she added, "but I'll bring you some sheets for
your bed, and you can fill your pitcher from the spout at the end of the
hall. Only be careful not to stumble over the step there. It is hard to
see when the gas is not lit."
"You won't object to my putting shelves around the walls?" he asked,
while she pushed the mattress into place with the light and
condescending touch of one who preserves the aristocratic manner not
only in tragedy, but even in toil. It was, indeed, her peculiar
distinction, he came to know afterward, that she worked as gracefully as
other women played.
"Couldn't you find room enough without them?" she inquired while her
gaze left the mattress and travelled dubiously to the mantelpiece. "It
seems a pity for you to go to any expense about shelves, doesn't it?"
"Oh, they won't cost much. I'll do the work myself, and I'll do it in
the mornings when it won't disturb anybody. I daresay I'll have to push
that bed around a bit in order to make space."
Something in his vibrant voice--so full of the richness and the buoyant
energy of youth--made her look at him as she might have looked at one
of her children, or at that overgrown child whom she had married. And
just as she had managed Tom all his life by pretending to let him have
his way, so she proceeded now by instinct to manage Oliver. "You dear
boy! Of course you may turn things upside down if you want to. Only wait
a few days until you are settled and have seen how you like it."
Then she tripped out with her springy step, which had kept its
elasticity through war and famine, while Oliver, gazing after her,
wondered whether it was philosophy or merely a love of pleasure that
sustained her? Was it thought or the absence of thought that produced
her wonderful courage?
He heard her tread on the stairs; then the sound passed to the front
hall; and a minute later there floated up the laughter with which the
assembled boarders received her. Closing the door, which she had left
open, he turned back to the window and stared from his hilltop down on
the red roofs of Dinwiddie. White as milk, the moonlight lay on the
brick wall at the foot of the garden, and down the gradual hill rows of
chimneys were outlined against the faintly dappled sky in the west. In
the next yard a hollow tree looked as if it were cut out of silver, and
beneath its boughs, which drooped into the alley, he could see the
huddled figure of an aged negress who had fallen asleep on a flagstone.
So still was the night that the very smoke appeared to hang suspended
above the tops of the chimneys, as though it were too heavy to rise and
yet too light to float downward toward the motionless trees. Under the
pale beams the town lost its look of solidity and grew spectral. Nothing
seemed to hold it to the earth except the stillness which held the
fallen flowers of the syringa there also. Even the church towers showed
like spires of thistledown, and the winding streets, which ran beside
clear walls and dark shining gardens, trailed off from the ground into
the silvery air. Only the black bulk of the Treadwell factory beside the
river defied the magic of the moon's rays and remained a solid reminder
of the brevity of all enchantment.
Gradually, while Oliver waited for Mrs. Peachey's return, he ceased to
think of the furniture in his room; he ceased to think even of the way
in which he should manage to do his work, and allowed his mind to dwell,
almost with a feeling of ecstasy, on the memory of Virginia. He saw the
mist of little curls on her temples, her blue eyes, with their good and
gentle expression, and the look of radiant happiness which played like
light over her features. The beauty of the night acted as a spur to his
senses. He wanted companionship. He wanted the smile and the touch of a
woman. He wanted to fall in love with a girl who had blue eyes and a
mouth like a flower!
"It wouldn't take me ten minutes to become a fool about her," he
thought. "Confound this moonlight, anyhow. It's making an idiot of me."
Like many persons of artistic sensibility, he had at times the feeling
that his imagination controlled his conduct, and under the sharp
pressure of it now, he began to picture what the end would be if he were
to fling himself headlong in the direction where his desires were
leading him. If he could only let himself go! If he could only defy the
future! If he could only forget in a single crisis that he was a
Treadwell!
"If I were the right sort, I suppose I'd rush in and make her fall in
love with me, and then marry her and let her starve," he thought. "But
somehow I can't. I'm either not enough of a genius or not enough of a
Treadwell. When it comes to starving a woman in cold blood, my
conscience begins to balk. There's only one thing it would balk at more
violently, and that is starving my work. That's what Uncle Cyrus would
like--nothing better. By Jove! the way he looked when he had the nerve
to make that proposition! And I honestly believe he thought I was going
to agree to it. I honestly believe he was surprised when I stood out
against him. He's a downright idiot, that's what is the matter with him.
Why, it would be a crime, nothing less than a crime, for me to give up
and go hunting after freight orders. Any ninny can do that. James can do
that--but he couldn't see, he positively couldn't see that I'd be wasted
at it."
The vision of Cyrus had banished the vision of Virginia, and leaving the
window, Oliver began walking rapidly back and forth between the
washstand and the bare bedstead. The fire of his ambition, which
opposition had fanned into a blaze, had never burned more brightly in
his heart than it did at that instant. He felt capable not only of
renouncing Virginia, but of reforming the world. While he walked there,
he dedicated himself to art as exclusively as Cyrus had ever dedicated
himself to money--since Nature, who had made the individual, had been
powerless to eradicate this basic quality of the type. A Treadwell had
always stood for success, and success meant merely seeing but one thing
at a time and seeing that thing at every instant. It meant to Cyrus and
to James the thought of money as absolutely as it meant to Oliver the
thought of art. The way to it was the same, only the ideas that pointed
the way were different. To Cyrus and to James, indeed, as to all
Treadwells everywhere, the idea was hardly an idea at all, since it had
been crystallized by long usage into a fact. The word "success" (and
what was success except another name for the universal Treadwell
spirit?) invariably assumed the image of the dollar in the mind of
Cyrus, while to Oliver, since his thinking was less carefully
coördinated, it was without shape or symbol. Pacing the dusty floor,
with the pale moonlight brooding like a flock of white birds over the
garden, the young man would have defined the word as embracing all the
lofty aspirations in the human soul. It was the hour when youth scaled
the heights and wrested the divine fire from the heavens. At the moment
he was less an individual than the embodied age of two-and-twenty. He
was intellect in adolescence--intellect finding its strength--intellect
in revolt against the tyranny of industrialism.
The staircase creaked softly, and following a knock at the door, Mrs.
Peachey entered with her arms full of bed-clothes.
"I am so sorry I kept you waiting, Mr. Treadwell, but I was obliged to
stop to speak to a caller. Oh, thank you. Do you really know how to make
up a bed? How very clever of you! I'm sure Mr. Peachey couldn't do such
a thing if his life depended upon it. Men are so helpless that it
surprises me--it really does--when they know how to do anything. Oh, of
course, you have lived about the world so much that you have had to
learn how to manage. And you've been abroad? How very interesting! Some
day when I have the time you must tell me about it. Not that I should
ever care to go myself, but I love to hear other people talk about their
travels. Professor Trimble--he lived over there a great many years--gave
a talk before the Ladies' Aid Society of our church, and everybody said
it was quite as instructive as going one's self. And then, too, one
escaped all the misery of seasickness."
All the time she was busily spreading his bed, while he assisted her
with what she described to her husband afterward as "the most charming
manner, just as if he enjoyed it." This charming manner, which was the
outward expression of an inborn kindliness, won her entirely to his side
before the bed-making was over. That any one so frank and pleasant, with
such nice boyish eyes, and so rich a colour, should prove untrustworthy,
was unbelievable to that part of her which ruled her judgment. And since
this ruling part was not reason, but instinct, she possessed, perhaps,
as infallible a guide to opinions as ever falls to the lot of erring
humanity. "I know he's all right. Don't ask me _how_ I know it, Mr.
Peachey," she observed while she brushed her hair for the night; "I
don't know how I know it, but I do know it."
Oliver, meanwhile, had thrown off his coat, and settled down to work
under the flickering gas, at the end of the mantelpiece. Inspiration had
seized him while he helped Mrs. Peachey make his bed, and his "charming
manner," which had at first been natural enough, had become at last
something of an effort. He was writing the second act of a play in
which he meant to supplant the pretty shams of the stage by the aspect
of sober reality. The play dealt with woman--with the new woman who has
grown so old in the last twenty years--with the woman whose past is a
cross upon which she crucifies both herself and the public. Like most
men of twenty-two, he was convinced that he understood all about women,
and like most men of any age, he was under the impression that women
acted, thought, and felt, not as individuals, but as a sex. The classic
phrases, "women are like that," and "women think so queerly about
things," were on his lips as constantly as if he were an average male
and not an earnest-minded student of human nature. But while the average
male applies general principles loosely and almost unconsciously, with
Oliver the habit was the result of a distinctly formulated philosophy.
He had, as he would probably have put it, a feeling for reality, and the
stage appeared to him, on the whole, to be the most effective vehicle
for revealing the universe to itself. If he was not a genius, he
possessed the unconquerable individualism of genius; and he possessed,
also, a cleverness which could assume the manner of genius without
apparent effort. His ability, which no one but Cyrus had ever
questioned, may not have been of the highest order, but at least it was
better stuff than had ever gone into the making of American plays. In
the early eighties profound darkness still hung over the stage, for the
intellect of a democracy, which first seeks an outlet in statesmanship,
secondly in commerce, and lastly in art and literature, had hardly begun
to express itself, with the immaturity of youth, in several of these
latter fields. It was Oliver's distinction as well as his misfortune
that he lived before his country was ready for him. Coming a quarter of
a century later, he might have made a part of a national emancipation of
intellect. Coming when he did, he stood merely for one of the spasmodic
reactions against the dominant spirit. Unwritten history is full of such
reactions, since it is by the accumulated energy of their revolts that
the world moves on its way.
But at the age of twenty-two, though he was assured that he understood
both woman and the universe in which she belonged, he was pathetically
ignorant of his own place in the extravagance of Nature. With the rest
of us, he would have been astounded at the suggestion that he might have
been born to be wasted. Other things were wasted, he knew, since those
who called Nature an economist had grossly flattered her. Types and
races and revolutions were squandered with royal prodigality--but that
he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable. Deep down in him there
was the obstinate belief that his existence was a vital matter to the
awful Power that ruled the universe; and while he worked that May
evening at the second act of his great play, with the sweat raining from
his brow in the sweltering heat, it was as impossible for him to
conceive of ultimate failure as it was for him to realize that he should
ever cease to exist. The air was stagnant, the light was bad, his
stomach was empty, and he was tormented by the stinging of the gnats
that circled around the flame--but he was gloriously happy with the
happiness of a man who has given himself to an idea.