THE ARTIST IN PHILISTIA
At dawn, after a sleepless night, Oliver dressed himself and made a cup
of coffee on the spirit lamp he carried in his bag. While he drank, a
sense of power passed over him like warmth. He was cheered, he was even
exhilarated. A single cup of this miraculous fluid, and his depression
was vanquished as no argument could have vanquished it. Without
sermonizing, without logic even, the demon of pessimism, which has its
home in an empty stomach, was expelled into spiritual darkness. He
remembered that he had eaten nothing for almost twenty-four hours
(having missed yesterday's dinner), and this thought carried him
downstairs, where he begged a roll from a yawning negro cook in the
kitchen. Coming up to his room again, he poured out a second cup of
coffee, added a dash of cream, which he had brought with him in a
handleless pitcher, and leaning comfortably back in the worn horsehair
covered chair by the window, relapsed into a positive orgy of enjoyment.
His whole attitude toward the universe had been altered by a bubbling
potful of brown liquid, and the tremendous result--so grotesquely out of
proportion to its cause--appeared to him at the minute entirely right
and proper. Everything was entirely right and proper, and he felt able
to approve with a clear conscience the Divine arrangement of existence.
Outside, the sunrise, which he could not see, was flooding the roofs of
Dinwiddie with a dull golden light. The heat had given way before the
soft wind which smelt of flowers, and scattered tiny shreds of mist,
like white rose-leaves, over the moist gardens. The look of unreality,
which had been a fiction of the moonlight, faded gradually as the day
broke, and left the harsh outlines and the blackened chimneys of the
town unsoftened by any shadow of illusion. Presently, as the sunlight
fell aslant the winding streets, there was a faint stir in the house;
but since the day was Sunday, and Dinwiddie observed the Sabbath by
sleeping late, this stir was slow and drowsy, like the movement of
people but half awake. First, a dilapidated milk wagon rumbled through
the alleys to the back gates, where dishevelled negro maids ran out with
earthenware pitchers, which went back foaming around the brims. Then the
doors of the houses opened slowly; the green outside shutters were flung
wide; and an army of coloured servants bearing brooms, appeared on the
porches, and made expressive gestures to one another over the railings.
Occasionally, when one lifted a doormat in order to beat the dust out of
it, she would forget to put it down again while she stared after the
milk cart. Nobody--not even the servants--seemed to regard the wasted
hours as of any importance. It struck Oliver that the only use Dinwiddie
made of time was to kill it.
He fell to work with enthusiasm, and he was still working when the
reverberations of the breakfast bell thundered in his ears. Going
downstairs to the dining-room, he found several thin and pinched looking
young women, with their hats on and Sunday-school lessons beside their
plates. Mrs. Peachey, still smiling her quizzical smile, sat at the head
of the table, pouring coffee out of an old silver coffee-pot, which was
battered in on one side as if it had seen active service in the war.
When, after a few hurried mouthfuls, he asked permission to return to
his work, she received his excuses with the same cheerful acquiescence
with which she accepted the decrees of Providence. It is doubtful,
indeed, if her serenity, which was rooted in an heroic hopelessness,
could have been shaken either by the apologies of a boarder or by the
appearance of an earthquake. Her happiness was of that invulnerable sort
which builds its nest not in the luxuriant gardens of the emotions, but
in the bare, rock-bound places of the spirit. Courage, humour, an
adherence to conviction which is wedded to an utter inability to respect
any opinion except one's own; loyalty which had sprung from a principle
into a passion; a fortifying trust, less in the Power that rules the
universe than in the peculiar virtues of the Episcopal prayer-book when
bound in black; a capacity for self-sacrifice which had made the South a
nation of political martyrs; complacency, exaltation, narrowness of
vision, and uncompromising devotion to an ideal--these were the
qualities which had passed from the race into the individual and through
the individual again back into the very blood and the fibre of the race.
"Do you work on Sunday?" she inquired sweetly, yet with the faintest
tinge of disapproval in her tone.
He nodded. "Once in a while."
"Saint James' Church is only a few minutes' walk from here; but I
suppose you are a Presbyterian, like your uncle?"
His respectability he saw hung in the balance--for to have avowed
himself a freethinker would have dyed him socially only one shade less
black than to have declared himself a Republican--so, escaping without a
further confession of faith, he ascended to his room and applied himself
anew to the regeneration of the American drama. The dull gold light,
which slept on the brick walls, began presently to slant in long beams
over the roofs, which mounted like steps up the hillside, while as the
morning advanced, the mellow sound of chimes floated out on the
stillness, calling Dinwiddians to worship, as it had called their
fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them. The Sabbath
calm, so heavy that an axe could hardly have dispelled it, filled the
curving streets and the square gardens like an invisible fog--a fog that
dulled the brain and weighed down the eyelids and made the grim walls of
the Treadwell tobacco factory look as if they were rising out of a
dream. Into this dream, under the thick boughs of mulberry trees, there
passed presently a thin file of people, walking alone or in pairs. The
men were mostly old; but the women were of every age, and all except the
very young were clad in mourning and wore hanging veils on their
bonnets. Though Oliver did not know it, he was, in reality, watching a
procession of those who, having once embraced a cause and lost it, were
content to go on quietly in a hush of memory for the rest of life.
Passion had once inflamed them, but they moved now in the inviolable
peace which comes only to those who have nothing left that they may
lose. At the end of the line, in the middle of the earthen roadbed
walked an old horse, with an earnest face and a dump cart hitched to
him, and in the cart were the boxes of books which Susan had helped
Oliver to pack the evening before. "Who'd have thought she'd get them
here so soon?" he said to himself. "By George, she is a wonder! And
Sunday too!"
The old horse, having reached the hilltop, disappeared behind the next
house, and ten minutes later Mrs. Peachey escorted the smallest of his
boxes into his bedroom.
"Your cousin is downstairs, but I didn't know whether you wanted me to
bring her up here or not?" she said.
"Of course you do, don't you, Oliver?" asked Susan's voice, and entering
the room, she coolly presented her cheek to him. This coolness, which
impressed him almost as much as her extraordinary capability, made him
feel sometimes as if she had built a stone wall between them. Years
afterwards he asked himself if this was why his admiration for her had
never warmed into love?
"Well, you're a good one!" he exclaimed, as she drew back from the
casual embrace.
"I knew you were here," she answered, "because John Henry Pendleton"
(was it his imagination or did the faintest blush tinge her face?) "saw
Major Peachey last night and told me on his way home."
"You can't help me straighten up, I suppose? The room looks a sight."
"Not now--I'm on my way to church, and I'll be late if I don't hurry."
She wore a grey cashmere dress, made with a draped polonaise which
accentuated her rather full hips, and a hat with a steeple crown that
did not suit the Treadwell arch of her nose. He thought she looked
plain, but he did not realize that in another dress and hat she might
have been almost beautiful--that she was, indeed, one of those
large-minded, passionately honest women who, in their scorn of pretence
or affectation, rarely condescend to make the best of their appearances.
To have consciously selected a becoming hat would have seemed to her a
species of coquetry, and coquetry, even the most innocent, she held in
abhorrence. Her sincerity was not only intellectual; it was of that
rarer sort which has its root in a physical instinct.
After she had gone, he worked steadily for a couple of hours, and then
opened one of the boxes Susan had brought and arranged a few of his
books in a row on the mantelpiece. It was while he stood still undecided
whether to place "The Origin of Species" or "The Critique of Pure
Reason" on the end nearest his bed, that a knock came at his door, and
the figure of Miss Priscilla Batte, attired in a black silk dolman with
bugle trimmings, stood revealed on the threshold.
"Sally Peachey just told me that you were here," she said, enfolding him
in the embrace which seemed common to Dinwiddie, "so I thought I would
speak to you on my way back from church. I don't suppose you've ever
heard of me, but I am your cousin Priscilla Batte."
Though he was entirely unaware of it, the moment was a momentous one in
his experience. The visit of Miss Priscilla may have appeared an
insignificant matter to those who have not learned that the
insignificant is merely the significant seen from another angle--but the
truth was that it marked a decisive milestone in his emotional history.
Even Mrs. Peachey, who had walked back from church with her, and who
harboured the common delusion that Life selects only slim bodies for its
secret agents, did not dream as she watched that enormous figure toil up
the staircase that she was gazing upon the movement of destiny. Had
Oliver been questioned as to the dominant influence in shaping his
career, he would probably have answered blindly, but sincerely, "The
Critique of Pure Reason"--so far was he from suspecting that his
philosophy had less control over his future than had the accident that
his mother was the third cousin of Priscilla Batte.
He pushed a chair into the widest space he could find, and she seated
herself as modestly as if she were not the vehicle of the invisible
Powers. The stiff grosgrain strings of her bonnet stood out like small
wings under her double chin, and on her massive bosom he saw the cameo
brooch bearing the war-like profile of Athene. As she sat there, beaming
complacently upon him, with her prayer-book and hymnal held at a decent
angle in front of her, she seemed to Oliver to dominate the situation
simply by the solid weight of her physical presence. In her single
person she managed to produce the effect of a majority. As a mere mass
of humanity she carried conviction.
"I was sorry not to see you at church," she said, "but I suppose you
went with Cyrus." As he shook his head silently, she added hastily, "I
hope there's nothing wrong between you and him."
"Nothing except that I have decided not to go into the tobacco
business."
"But what in the world are you going to do? How are you going to live if
he doesn't provide for you?"
"Oh, I'll manage somehow. You needn't worry, Cousin Priscilla." He
smiled at her across the unfinished page of his play, and this smile won
her as it had won Mrs. Peachey. Like most spinsters she had remained a
creature of sentiment, and the appeal of the young and masculine she
found difficult to resist. After all he was a charming boy, her heart
told her. What he needed was merely some good girl to take care of him
and convert him to the Episcopal Church. And immediately, as is the way
with women, she became as anxious to sacrifice Virginia to this possible
redemption of the male as she had been alarmed by the suspicion that
such a desire existed in Susan. Though it would have shocked her to hear
that she held any opinion in common with Mohammed (who appeared in the
universal history she taught only in a brief list of "false prophets"),
there existed deep down in her the feeling that a man's soul was of
greater consequence than a woman's in the eyes of God.
"I hope you haven't been foolish, Oliver," she said in a tone which
conveyed an emotional sympathy as well as a moral protest.
"That depends upon what you mean by foolishness," he returned, still
smiling.
"Well, I don't think you ought to quarrel with Cyrus. He may not be
perfect. I am not saying that he mightn't have been a better husband,
for instance--though I always hold the woman to blame when a marriage
turns out a failure--but when all's said and done, he is a great man,
Oliver."
He shook his head impatiently. "I've heard that until I'm sick of
it--forgive me, Cousin Priscilla."
"Everybody admires him--that is, everybody except Belinda."
"I should say she'd had excellent opportunities for forming an opinion.
What's he ever done, anyhow, that's great," he asked almost angrily,
"except accumulate money? It seems to me that you've gone mad over money
in Dinwiddie. I suppose it's the reaction from having to do without it
so long."
Miss Priscilla, whose native serenity drew strength from another's loss
of temper, beamed into his flushed face as if she enjoyed the spectacle
of his heightened colour.
"You oughtn't to talk like that, Oliver," she said. "How on earth are
you going to fall in love and marry, if you haven't any money to keep a
wife? What you need is a good girl to look after you. I never married,
myself, but I am sometimes tempted to believe that even an unhappy
marriage is better than none at all. At least it gives you something to
think about."
"I have enough to think about already. I have my work."
"But work isn't a wife."
"I know it isn't, but I happen to like it better."
Her matchmaking instinct had received a check, but the placid
determination which was the basis of her character was merely reinforced
thereby to further efforts. It was for his good to marry (had not her
mother and her grandmother instilled into her the doctrine that an early
marriage was the single masculine safeguard, since, once married, a
man's morality became not his own business, but his wife's), and marry
him she was resolved to do, either with his cheerful co-operation, or,
if necessary, without it. He had certainly looked at Virginia as if he
admired her, and surely a girl like that--lovely, loving, unselfish to a
fault, and trained from her infancy to excel in all the feminine
virtues--surely, this perfect flower of sex specialization could have
been designed by Providence only for the delight and the sanctification
of man.
"Then, if that is the way your mind is made up I hope you will be
careful not to trifle with the feelings of a girl like Jinny Pendleton,"
she retorted severely.
By a single stroke of genius, inspired by the diplomacy inherent in a
sex whose chief concern has been the making of matches, she transfixed
his imagination as skilfully as she might have impaled a butterfly on a
bodkin. While he stared at her she could almost see the iridescent wings
of his fancy whirling madly around the idea by which she had arrested
their flight. Trifle with Virginia! Trifle with that radiant vision of
girlhood! All the chivalry of youth revolted from the suggestion, and he
thought again of the wistful adoration in the eyes of a Perugino virgin.
Was it possible that she could ever look at him with that angelic
expression of weakness and surrender? The fire of first love, which had
smouldered under the weight of his reason, burst suddenly into flame.
His thoughts, which had been as clear as a geometrical figure, became
suddenly blurred by the mystery upon which passion lives. He was seized
by a consuming wonder about Virginia, and this wonder was heightened
when he remembered the appealing sweetness in her face as she smiled up
at him. Did she already love him? Had he conquered by a look the
exquisite modesty of her soul? With this thought the memory of her
virginal shyness stung his senses as if it were the challenge of sex.
Chivalry, love, vanity, curiosity--all these circled helplessly around
the invisible axis of Miss Priscilla's idea.
"What do you mean? Surely you don't suppose--she hasn't said
anything----"
"You don't imagine that Jinny is the kind of girl who would say
anything, do you?" inquired Miss Priscilla.
"But there must be some reason why you should have----"
"If there is, my dear boy, I'm not going to tell it," she answered with
a calmness which he felt, in his excited state, to be positively
infernal. "All I meant was to warn you not to trifle with any girl as
innocent of life as Jinny Pendleton is. I don't want her to get her
heart broken before she has the chance to make some man happy."
"Do you honestly mean to imply that I could break her heart if I tried
to?"
"I don't mean to imply anything. I am only telling you that she is just
the kind of girl a man would want to marry. She is her mother all over
again, and I don't believe Lucy has ever thought of herself a minute
since she married."
"She looks like an angel," he said, "but----"
"And she isn't a bit the kind of girl that Susan is, though they are so
devoted. Now, I can understand a man not wanting to marry Susan,
because she is so full of ideas, and has a mind of her own about
things. But Jinny is different."
Then, seeing that she had "unsettled" his mind sufficiently for her
purpose, she rose and looked around the room with the inordinate
curiosity about details which kept her still young in spite of her sixty
years.
"You don't mean to tell me you brought all those books with you,
Oliver?" she asked. "Why on earth don't you get rid of some of them?"
"I can't spare any of them. I never know which one I may want next."
"What are those you're putting on the mantelpiece? Isn't Darwin the name
of the man who said we were all descended from monkeys?"
As he made no answer to this except to press her hand and thank her for
coming, she left the mantelpiece and wandered to the window, where her
gaze rested, with a look of maternal satisfaction, on the roofs of
Dinwiddie.
"It's a jolly view of the town, isn't it?" he said. "There's nothing
like looking down from a hilltop to give one a sense of superiority."
"You can see straight into Mrs. Goode's backyard," she replied, "and I
never knew before that she left her clothes hanging on the line on
Sunday. That comes, I suppose, from not looking after her servants and
gadding about on all sorts of charities. She told me the other day that
she belonged to every charitable organization in Dinwiddie."
"Is she Abby's mother?"
"Yes, but you'd never imagine they were any relation. Abby gave me more
trouble than any girl I ever taught. She never would learn the
multiplication table, and I don't believe to this day she knows it.
There isn't any harm in her except that she is a scatter-brain, and will
make eyes or burst. I sometimes think it isn't her fault--that she was
just born man-crazy."
"She's awfully good fun," he laughed.
"Are you going to her garden party on Wednesday?"
"I accepted before I quarrelled with Uncle Cyrus, but I'll have to get
out of it now."
"Oh, I wouldn't. All the pretty girls in town will be there."
"Are there any plain ones? And what becomes of them?"
"The Lord only knows! Old Judge Bassett used to say that there wouldn't
be any preserves and pickles in the world if all women were born
good-looking. I declare I never realized how small the tower of Saint
James' Church is!"
For a moment he hesitated, and when he spoke his voice had taken a
deeper tone. "Will Virginia Pendleton be at the party?" he asked.
"She wouldn't miss it for anything in the world. Miss Willy Whitlow was
sewing there yesterday on a white organdie dress for her to wear. Have
you ever seen Jinny in white organdie? I always tell Lucy the child
looks sweet enough to eat when she puts it on."
He laughed again, but not as he had laughed at her description of Abby.
"Ask her please to put blue bows on her flounces and a red rose in her
hair," he said.
"Then you are going?"
"Not if I can possibly keep away. Oh, Cousin Priscilla, why didn't I
inherit my soul from your side of the family."
"Well, for my part I don't believe in all this talk about inheritance.
Nobody ever heard of inheriting anything but money when I was a girl.
You've got the kind of soul the good Lord wanted to put into you and
that's all there is about it."
When he returned from assisting her in her panting and difficult descent
of the stairs, he sat down again before the unfinished act of his play,
but his eyes wandered from the manuscript to the town, which lay as
bright and still in the sunlight as if it were imprisoned in crystal.
The wonder aroused in his mind by Miss Priscilla's allusion to Virginia
persisted as a disturbing element in the background of his thoughts.
What had she meant? Was it possible that there was truth in the wildest
imaginings of his vanity? Virginia's face, framed in her wreath of hair,
floated beneath the tower of Saint James' Church at which he was gazing,
and the radiant goodness in her look mounted like a draught of strong
wine to his brain. Passion, which he had discounted in his plans for the
future, appeared suddenly to shake the very foundations of his life.
Never before had the spirit and the flesh united in the appeal of a
woman to his imagination. Never before had the divine virgin of his
dreams assumed the living red and white of young girlhood. He thought
how soft her hair must be to the touch, and how warm her mouth would
glow from his kisses. With a kind of wonder he realized that this was
first love--that it was first love he had felt when he met her eyes
under the dappled sunlight in High Street. The memory of her beauty was
like a net which enmeshed his thoughts when he tried to escape it. Look
where he would he saw always a cloud of dark hair and two deep blue eyes
that shone as softly as wild hyacinths after a shower. Think as he would
he met always the haunting doubt--"What did she mean? Can it be true
that she already loves me?" So small an incident as Miss Priscilla's
Sunday call had not only upset his work for the morning, but had changed
in an instant the even course of his future. He decided suddenly that he
must see Virginia again--that he would go to Abby Goode's party, and
though the party was only three days off, it seemed to him that the
waiting would be almost unbearable. Only after he had once seen her
would it be possible, he felt, to stop thinking of her and to return
comfortably to his work.