When Gordon returned to his dwelling he found Sim Caley and his sister's
husband taking the horse from the shafts of a dusty, two-seated carriage.
Rutherford Berry was a slightly-built man with high, narrow shoulders, and
a smooth, pasty-white face. He was clerk in a store at the farther end of
Greenstream valley, and had flat, fragile wrists and a constant,
irritating cough.
"H'y, Gord!" he shouted; "your sister wanted to visit with you over night,
and see Lettice. We only brought two--the oldest and Barnwell K."
The "oldest," Gordon recalled, was the girl who had worn Clare's silk
waist and "run the colors"; Barnwell K. Berry was, approximately, ten.
"That's right," he returned cordially. He assisted in running the carriage
back by the shed. Lettice and his sister were stiffly facing each other in
the sitting room. The latter had a fine, thin countenance with pale hair
drawn tightly back and fastened under a small hat pinned precariously
aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress
ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her
waist, her sole adornment a brassy wedding ring, that almost covered an
entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were
perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible
kitchen stove, or a child temporarily unaccounted for.
"Lettice looks right good," she declared, "and, dear me, why shouldn't
she, with nothing on her mind at all but what comes to every woman? When I
had my last Rutherford was down with the influenza, the youngest was taken
with green-sickness, and we had worked out all our pay at the store in
supplies. You're fixed nice here," she added without a trace of envy in
her tired voice. "I suppose that's Mrs. Hollidew in her shroud. We have
one of James--he died at three--sitting just as natural as life in the
rocker."
"Where's Rose?" he asked.
"In the kitchen, helping Mrs. Caley. I wanted to ask that nothing be said
before Rose of Lettice's expecting. We've brought her up very delicate;
and besides there's a young man paying her attention, it's not a fitting
time--she might take a scare. I had promised to bring Barnwell K. the next
time."
They could hear from without the boy and the hysterical yelping of General
Jackson. "That dog won't bite?" Mrs. Berry worried. Gordon, patently
indignant, replied that the General never bit. "Barnwell might cross
him," she answered; and, moving to the door, summoned her offspring. It
was the sturdy individual who had burst into a wail at Clare's funeral,
his hair still bristling against a formal application of soap.
"C'm on in, doggy," he called; "c'm in, Ginral. I wisht I had a doggy like
that," he hung on his mother's knees lamenting the absence from their
household of a General Jackson. "Our ol' houn' dog's nothing," he
asserted.
Lettice, worn by her visitor's rapid monotone, the stir and clatter of
young shoes, remarked petulantly, "Gordon paid two hundred dollars for
that single dog; there ought to be something extra to him."
Mrs. Berry received this item without signal amazement; it was evident
that she was prepared to credit any vagaries to the possessors of Pompey
Hollidew's fabulous legacy.
"Just think of that!" she exclaimed mildly; "I'll chance that dog gets a
piece of liver every day."
Rose, from the door, announced supper. She was an awkward girl of
seventeen, with the pallid face and blank brown eyes of her father, and
diffident speech. Gordon faced Lettice over her figured red cloth; on one
side Barnwell K. sat flanked by his mother and Simeon Caley, on the other
Rose sat by an empty chair, the place of the now energetically employed
Mrs. Caley. The great, tin pot of coffee rested at Lettice's hand, and,
before Gordon, a portentous platter held three gaunt, brown chickens with
brilliant yellow legs stiffly in air. Between these two gastronomic poles
was a dish of heaped, quivering poached eggs, the inevitable gravy boat,
steaming potatoes and a choice of pies. Gordon dismembered the chickens,
and, as the plates circled the table, they accumulated potatoes and gravy
and eggs. Barnwell K., through an oversight, was defrauded of the last
item, and proceeded to remedy the omission. He thrust his knife into the
slippery, poached mass. At best a delicate operation, he erred, eggs
slipped, and a thick yellow stream flowed sluggishly to the rim of the
plate. His mother met this fault of manner with profuse, disconcerted
apologies. She shook him so vigorously that his chair rattled. Simeon
Caley lifted the heavy coffee pot for Lettice.
Mrs. Caley's service was abrupt, efficient; she set down plates of hot
bread with a clatter; she rattled the stove lids from without, and
complained of General Jackson, faithfully following her every movement.
Sim Caley wielded an adroit knife; but, under the extraordinary pressure
of this bountiful repast, Rutherford Berry easily outdistanced him. He
consumed such unlimited amounts that he gained the audible displeasure of
his wife.
"You're not a camel," she truthfully observed, "you don't have to fill up
for a week; you get something home. What Lettice'll think of you I can't
make out."
Substantial sections of pie were dispatched. Barnwell K., valiantly
endeavoring to emulate his father, struggled manfully; he poked the last
piece of crust into his mouth with his fingers. Then, in a shrill aside,
he inquired, "Will Aunt Lettice have the baby while we're here." His
mother's hand rang like a shot on his face, and he responded instantly
with a yell of appalling volume.
Lettice's cup struck sharply upon its saucer. The delicate Rose flushed
appropriately, painfully. The culprit was hauled, incontinently, dolefully
wailing, to bed. The three men preserved an embarrassed silence. Finally
Gordon said, "Have a cigar." His brother-in-law responded with alacrity,
but Sim preferred his plug tobacco, and Gordon Makimmon twisted a
cigarette. Sim and Rutherford were patently uncomfortable amid the
formality of the dining room; and, at Gordon's suggestion, trooped with
relief out to the shedlike stable. There they examined critically the two
horses. Facing the stalls was an open space, and on boxes and the remnant
of a chair they found places and smoked and spat informally.
"You could study a life on women," Rutherford Berry pronounced, "and
never come to any satisfaction. It seems to me the better they be the more
sharp-like they get. There's your sister, Gord--the way she does about the
house, and with all the children to tend, is a caution to Dunkards. She
does all you could ask and again. But it just seems she can't be pleasant
with it. Now there's Nickles, next place to me, his old woman's not worth
a pinch of powder, but she is the nicest, easiest spoken body you'd meet
in a day on a horse. You mind Effie when she was young, Gord--she just
trailed song all over the house, but it wasn't hardly a year before she
got penetrating as a musket. Rose is just like her--she's all taffy now on
that young man, but in a little spell she'll clamp down on him."
Gordon had a swift vision of Lettice sharpening with the years; there
sounded in prospect on his ear an endless roll of acidulous remarks,
accompanied by the fretful whine of children, intensified by Mrs. Caley's
lowering silence. He thought of the change that had overtaken his sister
Effie, remarked by her husband, the change from a trim, upright figure to
the present stooped form, the turning of that voice brimming with song to
a continuous, shrill troubling.
The cool, disdainful countenance of Meta Beggs returned to him: time, he
divined, would not mark her in so sorry a fashion; to the last she would
remain slimly rounded, graceful; her hands, like magnolia flowers, would
never thicken and grow rough. He thought of Paris, of that life which, she
said, would civilize him; he tried in vain to form an image of the cafes
and little carriages, the bare-necked women drinking champagne. He
recalled a burlesque show he had once seen in Stenton, called "The French
Widows"; the revealed amplitude of the "widows" had been clad in vivid,
stained pink tights; the scene in which they disported with a comic
Irishman, a lugubrious Jew, was set with gilded palms, a saloon bar on one
side and a tank on the other from which "Venus" rose flatly from a cotton
sea. He dismissed that possibility of resemblance--it was too palpably at
variance with what Meta Beggs would consider desirable; but, somehow, pink
tights and Paris were synonymous in his thoughts. At any rate it was
certain to be gay; the women would resemble Nickles' wife rather than his
sister ... than Lettice as she would be in a few years.
He recalled suddenly a neglected rite of hospitality, and from an obscure
angle of the shed, produced a gallon jug. Drinking vessels were procured,
and a pale, pungent whiskey poured out. Rutherford Berry sputtered and
gasped over his glass; Sim Caley absorbed a brimming measure between
breaths, without a wink of the eye; Gordon drank inattentively. The
ceremony was repeated; a flare of color rose in Berry's pallid
countenance, Sim's portion apparently evaporated from the glass. The
whiskey made no visible impression on Gordon Makimmon. The jug was
circulated again, and again. All at once Rutherford became drunk. He rose
swaying, attempted to articulate, and fell, half in a stall. Simeon Caley
pulled him out, slapped his back with a hard, gnarled palm, but was unable
to arouse him from a profound stupor.
"He ain't right strong," Sim observed with a trace of contempt, propping
the figure in a limp angle against the wall. It was dark now, and he lit
the hand lantern, cautiously closing the door. Outside the whippoorwills
had begun to call. A determined rattling of pots and pans sounded from the
kitchen.
"How much is in her, Gord?" Sim asked.
Gordon Makimmon investigated the jug. "She's near three quarters full," he
announced.
An expression of profound content settled upon Simeon Caley. The jug went
round and round. Gordon grew a shade more punctilious than customary, he
wiped the jug's mouth before passing it to Sim--at the premature
retirement of Rutherford the glasses had been discarded as effete; but not
a degree of the other's manner betrayed the influence of his Gargantuan
draughts of liquor. The lantern flickered on the sloping, cobwebby roof,
on the shaggy horses as they lay clumsily down to rest, on the crumpled
figure of Gordon's sister's husband.
The potations were suddenly interrupted by a sharp knocking from without.
An expression of concern instantly banished Sim's content; he gazed
doubtfully at the jug, then, as Gordon made no move, rose and with marked
diffidence proceeded to open the door. The lantern light fell on the
gaunt, bitter countenance of his wife framed in imponderable night. Her
eyes made liquid gleams in the wavering radiance which, directed at
Gordon, seemed to be visible points of hatred.
"It's ten o'clock," she said to her husband, "and if you hain't got enough
sense to go to bed I'll put you."
"I'm coming right along," he assured her pacifically; "we were just having
a drink around."
"Mrs. Berry's asking for her husband," she added, gazing at that insensate
form.
"He must be kind of bad to his stomach," Sim remarked; "he dropped with
nothing 'tall on him." He bent and picked the other up. Rutherford Berry's
arms hung limply over Sim's grasp, his feet dragged heavily, in unexpected
angles, over the floor. "Coming, Gord?"
Gordon made no reply. He sat intent upon the jug before him. Simeon
considerately shut the door. At regular intervals Gordon Makimmon took a
long drink. He drank mechanically, without any evidence of desire or
pleasure; he resembled a man blindly performing a fatiguing operation in
his sleep; he had the fixed, open eyes of a sleep-walker, the precise,
unnatural movements. The lantern burned steadily, the horses slept with an
audible breathing. Finally the jug was empty; he endeavored to drink twice
after that was a fact before discovering it.
He rose stiffly and threw open the door. Dawn was flushing behind the
eastern range; the tops of the mountains were thinly visible on the
brightening sky. His dwelling, with every window closed, was silvery with
dew. He walked slowly, but without faltering, to the porch, and mounted
the steps from the sod; the ascent seemed surprisingly steep, long. The
door to the dining room was unlocked and he entered; in the thinning gloom
he could distinguish the table set as usual, the coffee pot at Lettice's
place glimmering faintly. He turned to the left and passed into their
bedroom. The details of the chamber were growing clear: the bed was placed
against the farther wall, projecting into the room, its low footboard held
between posts that rose slimly dark against the white counterpane beyond;
on the right were a window and high chest of drawers, on the left a stand
with a china toilet service and a couch covered with sheep skins, roughly
tanned and untrimmed. A chair by the bed bore Lettice's clothes, another
at the foot awaited his own. By his side a curtain hung out from the wall,
forming a wardrobe.
He vaguely made out the form of Lettice sitting upright in the bed, her
hands clasped about her knees.
"Your brother-in-law," he observed, "is a powerful spindling man." She
made no rejoinder to this, and, after a short pause, he further remarked,
"How he gets on sociable I don't see."
His wife's eyes were opened wide, gazing intently into the greying room;
not by a sound, a motion, did she show any consciousness of his presence.
He was deliberate in his movements, very deliberate, laboriously exact in
his mental processes, but they were ordered, logical. It began to annoy
him that his wife had made no reply to his pleasantries; it was out of
reason; he wasn't drunk like Rutherford Berry.
"I said," he pronounced, "that Berry is a nubbin. Didn't you hear me?
haven't you got an answer to you?"
She sat gazing into nothingness, ignoring him completely.
His resentment changed to anger; he moved to the foot of the bed, where,
in his shirt sleeves, he harangued her:
"I want a cheerful wife, one with a song to her, and not a dam' female
elder around the house. A good woman is a--a jewel, but when your goodness
gives you a face ache it's ... it's something different, it's a nuisance.
I'd almost rather have a wife that wasn't so good but had some give to
her." He sat down, clutching a heavy shoe which came off suddenly. Lettice
was as immobile as the chest of drawers.
"Goddy knows," he burst out again, "it's solemn enough around here anyhow
with Sim Caley's old woman like a grave hole, and now you go and get it
too.... Berry might put up with it, and Sim's just fool-hearted, but a
regular man wouldn't abide it, he'd--he'd go to Paris, where the women are
civilized and dance all night." He muttered an unintelligible period about
French widows and pink.... "Buried before my time," he proclaimed. He
stood with his head grizzled and harsh above an absurdly flowing
nightshirt. In the deepening light Lettice's countenance seemed thinner
than usual, her round, staring eyes were frightened, as though she had
seen in the night the visible apparition of the curse of suffering laid
upon all birth.
"You look like you've taken leave of your wits," he exclaimed in an
accumulated exasperation; "say something." He leaned across the bed, and,
grasping her elbow, shook her. She was as rigid, as unyielding, as the
bed posts. Then with a long, slow shudder she turned and buried her head
in the pillow.