A young woman named Jane Moore played accompaniments for Theodosia.
They played in the parlor of the Bell house, the piano standing against
the east wall and running back into the bay of the windows. Jane Moore
laughed a great deal as she played, and she played many notes wrong, but
she offered Theodosia a steady tinkle-tinkle of piano rhythms against
which to set her fiddle. Over the chimney hung a steel engraving of Henry
Clay in some congressional pose, and the insignia of the Trotters and
the Montfords, done in color by some artist and neatly framed, hung near
together on the north wall. Through the freshly curtained windows the
scent of locust blossoms would come, and outside, from garden to garden,
up the street, the locust trees had their flower.
Sometimes the piano outdid itself, as when Jane Moore was caught on some
rapture which swept her beyond her nervous inattention. Then she would
go steadily on, without a giggle or a blunder, one with Theodosia, the
piano married to the fiddle, rhythm after rhythm, measure after measure,
and Theodosia’s fervid “Repeat!” as she struck the music with her bow and
marched the melodies forward and marshalled them forth, would hold the
good spell to the end of the piece.
“Oh, Jane Moore, Jane Moore!” Theodosia would say. “Why in the name of
the Lord, why can’t you play like that every day?”
They would laugh until their eyes ran tears, laughter induced by Jane
Moore’s concentrated interval. She had soft white skin and a round
soft body, an inattentive mind. It was, as the flowering locust trees
attested, the spring of the year.
There were garden parties in the evenings, all the boys and all the
girls gathering to laugh and joke and play with light caresses among
the shrubs that were lit with paper lanterns. The girls would come
walking with the young men, and their little shining shoes would tap on
the village pavements. Catherine Lovell had curling yellow hair that
stood in a soft roll on the top of her head, and in her bright organdie
dress she was fair in the way of a pink in a garden. She was lovely to
know, always coming to Theodosia with her smiles and her pretty little
jokes, always wanting Theodosia to play her fiddle again. She would come
running to Theodosia’s room on a morning after a party to talk over all
the happenings of the occasion, and she would sit on the foot of the bed
while Theodosia had her breakfast from the tray Aunt Bet had brought
upstairs. Then they would tell over the names of all who had been present
and repeat the bright sayings of the young men, Conway and Albert, whose
names they called often, and they would praise the girls for their
loveliness in the fullness of their own self-admiration and self-love.
“Wasn’t May Wilmore a dear in her flowered sash?”
“Like a sweet pea,” Theodosia would say.
“Like a whole bouquet of little flowers.”
“And Ruth was sweet in her green dress, dark bands across her hair.”
Or Ruth Robinson would run in during the morning to ask Theodosia to
go for a drive far into the country. Once they went to gather dogwood
blossoms from a tree she knew of, far down the Quincy pike. They set out
early in the afternoon and let the old horse take his own way of keeping
clear of the few passing cars. In the end they went as far as the farm
where Theodosia’s aunt lived. They talked with the old aunt in the musty
parlor, sitting stiffly on the curve-backed chairs, and were scratched
under the knees by the broken horse-hair cloth. Miss Doe brought a plate
of stale little cakes for a treat. Somewhere back among the barns the
useless old jack stallion would bray, and the great hounds, fat and
indolent, would loll in the front doorway or wander through the rooms,
sniffing at Theodosia’s dress again and again, or at Ruth’s slipper,
dull-minded and slow, stretching stiffly by the parlor wall and returning
to lie by the door and sleep. Tom Singleton was buried on the hilltop
now. Miss Doe had had some need of him and when he was dead she mourned
her loss with a perpetual attention to his memory. She kept all the
hounds he had used for his hunting although they grew old and some of
them became half insane. She let them multiply without discrimination and
gave them access to the rooms of the house where, Theodosia suspected,
they chose their own kennels and made free of the house from the garret
to the pantries.
Now Miss Doe was grateful to the girls for their call, for the long drive
they had taken, and she passed the cakes about with a thin gayety. She
asked after the health of Horace and of Anthony, but she would not ask
the girls to stay for the night. She withheld any gossip of the farm, of
new calves or colts or chickens, feigning that these matters were too
common for the interest of the parlor, reticent to answer questions.
“She doesn’t want to share even the news of a new-dropped colt with me,”
Theodosia would think, biting the little cake.
“I think I’d like to look around the place a little, Aunt Doe,” she said,
when the call was near an end. “Could I look about a little? Could I show
Ruth around, show her the vine? And the hilltop, maybe?”
“There’s little to entertain town girls with on the place. You can go
and see, though, whatever you think there is to see.” She would laugh in
a thin way, remaining indoors, peeping from behind the window curtains
while they walked back into the farm.
The place was out of repair, and the dogs trampled it under. They were
omnipresent, untrained, ill-mannered brutes. They lay sprawling in the
doorway or they cluttered the path to the barns. They came up from the
cellar sniffing with hostile interest, unused to visitors. The vine
had died from the west wall and hung there withered and untended. Tom
Singleton was greatly missed from the place.
“I hope you found everything to suit you,” Miss Doe said when they came
back to the house door to say good-bye. “I hope you liked.”
“She hates us because Grandfather sold his farm, or lost it somehow,”
Theodosia said as they drove down the avenue toward the road. “She hates
us because she’ll have to will us her land. We’re the only natural heirs
she’s got. She hates to have to will us her property.”
Returning along the road the girls filled the buggy with dogwood boughs,
and they sang to remove the memory of the dismal hour of the farm, alto
and soprano, running from one ditty to another, while the horse jogged up
the pike toward the town. The rolling hills were fresh with spring, were
sweetly curved with the tender new growth, and sweet again with the scent
of herbs and dew. At the creek crossing the horse craved a drink, and
Theodosia loosened the check-rein and let the beast step aside into the
pool, gay over the act and eager to dispel the malice of the old hour.
The weathered limestone of the creek bottom lay crumpled and fluted, a
mass of tightly welded shells from some old ocean bed. The stream had
cut a wide valley for its use, had set the hills far back as it had
chosen other beds in which to wander in other ages. The horse supped his
drink from off the fluted rocks, and when he had got his fill, alto and
soprano flowing anew around some sentimental air, they would jog higher
up the broad valley and thus come home again to the town.
* * * * *
The young men, Conway Brooke and Albert Stiles, would come to Theodosia’s
house singly or together. Coming together, they would beg her to play for
them or they would bring sweets to eat. Conway calling alone would talk
of himself, sitting happily in the dim light of the parlor and enjoying
his heightened self, his ease, his good looks, Theodosia’s beauty, all
the delights of remembered being. Albert coming alone would grow heavily
reminiscent, self-appraising, romantic, planning his future, laying
his plans before her, eager for acquiescence. He was broad and strong,
filling his chair with his man’s frame. Another, Frank Railey, would stop
casually on his way up or down the street, or he would take her to row
on the pool beyond the town. He would bring his books to read portions
aloud, bits of essay he admired, or verse from his favorite poets. He had
studied law and was establishing himself in practice in the courts of
equity. Persevering and conscientious, seeking to enrich his experience,
he would seek talk with Anthony Bell, bringing up old matters and trying
to pry open the shut past, but this past was strange to him in its
coloring, its iridescences which had long since been lost from recorded
history, and these discussions would fall apart and leave old Anthony
wrathful, gesticulating, straining to regain his composure. Theodosia
often forgot engagements with Frank and was then put to elaborate pains
to escape rudeness. When he faded down the vista of the street, going
toward the town, he evaporated entirely, and she had no picture of where
he went or of what he might do there. His face was slightly out of
proportion, slightly unsymmetrical, and this characteristic gave it a
look of rugged beauty and strength. He would come back out of the nowhere
into which he had gone, smiling at Theodosia’s door, his smile placed
slightly to one side of his face, and she would cry out, “For heaven’s
sake, it’s Frank!”
Conway was lovely in his approach and in his greetings, always offering
a charming promise of some approximation. His soft accents were a blend
of Virginia English and negro tones. He was slender and tall, slightly
vague as to what he wanted of life and the world, happy in himself, a
lover of himself and of life. He liked to sit beside Theodosia and talk
of his day, uncommitted to it now it was over. He worked somewhere in
the town, but his work stood beside him as a commonplace and was never
an object to be attained with sweat and thought. He loved himself anew
in the warmth of her presence, that she knew. He would sit idly in his
chair, faintly smiling, happy over anything she remembered to tell of
her day, and happy over his own memories and vague comments. He made
light matters of all the heavy affairs of business, of family, of care of
any sort. He wore the cleanliness and freshness of his linens as if he
imparted these qualities to them, as if he yielded these qualities with
his easy, careless gestures and uncommitted mood. Gone from her, he kept
always in Theodosia’s mind as that which lent grace to any morning into
which it might come, into any evening, any memory, so that she smiled
faintly if she thought of him. She knew his delicacy in some harsh way,
in some hard framework of knowing that lay over her momentary joys in his
radiance, in his beauty. Once, into the midst of the intoxicating vapor
which surrounded her sense of him, her own voice spoke aloud, surprising
her with its casual finality:
“He’d follow after the last lovely face offered”—and added: “The trick
around the eyes and he’d go.”
If he were coming she would wear the pale yellow dress he admired and
arrange her hair in the way he most praised, a low knot drawn above
her neck and pushed securely into the curves at the back of her skull.
Knowing that he would come she would linger over the hair, a thought of
him and of his gracious, easily given admiration in every lift of the
comb as she gently tooled the mass into shape and smiled now and again
at her long face with its firm thin red lips. She had read from her
grandfather’s books and Frank had brought her books containing the new
learning. Conway’s knowledge was more powerful with her, she knew, and
she smiled at her curving smile until her own lips told her their subtle
learning, over and over, retelling. Conway would seat her in the chair
of the blue brocade and he would adjust the light to fall in a cascade
on the yellow gown, or he would arrange the bowl of roses with some
reference to herself and himself and then sit negligently in his chair,
himself a part of some whole which he at the same instant encompassed,
having no notion of why he did these things. Or did he have no notion?
she argued. His knowledge would spread through the room, through the
house, gathered to the brilliant constellations that swam in a sun-shaft
of light before a window, the motes of the beam, and gathered again to
the scent of the honeysuckle outside on the chimney.
* * * * *
Albert would come heavily into the parlor although his feet were agile
and his large frame was light to his motions. He filled the parlor with
his seriousness and with his ponderous future which circled about his
agricultural studies. He would lay his pretexts out, this way and that,
making his decisions in her presence, but if Conway were at hand he was
more light and less committed, as if only Theodosia had his confidences,
as if his approach to Conway were still by the way of the college they
had attended, of the streets they now walked together, of the ball
they sometimes tossed back and forth, the dogs they owned in common.
His strong body, rich with blood and bulk, seemed about to burst from
its clothing as he sat opposite the light, moving from time to time in
his seat in an excess of vitality. If he bent over a printed page, his
earnest eyes lowered to their drooping, his mouth caught in its relaxed,
searching pose, his studious moment would give him back to his boyhood,
even to childhood, and Theodosia would smile faintly beside her eyes,
deeply under the flesh, in a moment of tenderness. Sometimes she would
play for him the light music he desired, bent rhythms that paused over
brinks and leaped with spasmodic passion to its fulfilment in another
twisted measure, any sort so that it moved swiftly to its consummation
and readily fulfilled its promises. She was contemptuous of his taste in
melodies even when she wanted most to please him. He was a part of the
rich insufficiency that surrounded her. “He looks just like Tramp,” she
said one day as she mounted the stairway, and Tramp was a great mongrel,
part Dane, part collie, that lived somewhere on the street.
“He looks exactly like Tramp,” she said. She was dressing for his coming,
working her hair into the shapes Conway liked, her lips withdrawing from
the tunes Albert wanted played. “Oh, Lord! his _Leave Home Rags_ and his
_My Mandy Lanes_” she said. Later she would play them for him, plucking
the strings quaintly and withdrawing them from their meanings.
When he had first come back from his agricultural college he had talked
of a girl named Judith. He still wrote to her, but seldom spoke of her
now. He would settle into his chair with a great sigh of content, turning
the letter addressed to Judith over and over in his hands, a letter he
had forgotten to mail. When he talked of himself he came immediately to
the subject that most concerned the farmers, the success of the tobacco
pool. Sometimes he seemed cautious as he handled some letter from Judith,
turning it about, as if he clung to it. He would beg Theodosia to play
the new song he had brought, for he had come then to have her play a song.
“Gosh, you’re the only girl in town can play,” he said. “Fiddle or piano,
it’s all one to her. And works either single or double.”
“Lady broke. Bridle wise. A right good five-gaited saddle mare,” she
said. She would withdraw behind the neglected thumping of the piano
or the plucked strings, indifferent to the tune but willing enough to
accommodate a caller. When she had embarrassed him she would laugh a low
laughter and let her eyes close over the music as she trailed it off into
some theme she liked.
“Lady broke.... I didn’t call you that,” he said heavily. “I didn’t say
it.”
* * * * *
In autumn it was reported that a musician was coming to Lester, a larger
town ten miles away, to teach violin-playing there. Word was spread about
that she would visit Anneville one morning each week if three students
could be found for her there. Theodosia and two half-grown children made
up the number, and the teacher came. She was a small dark woman, slight
in form, quick in her ways, heavy-browed, ambitious to become a great
teacher. Old Anthony Bell engaged her to come to his house, had sent for
her as soon as he had heard of her presence in the town, and had talked
with her in the parlor, grown coherent, alert under the stimulation of
the young woman. She made him remember his _Heart Bowed Downs_ and his
_Trovatores_.
Theodosia felt abashed before the superior skill and she drew her bow
nervously over the strings at the test lesson. She was stifled into
a few days of inactivity until the new gestures set within her. She
must learn to hold the violin. To approach it with the bow. To observe
the right angle. To listen to the tone and learn the acoustics of the
instrument. Sometimes the dark woman would answer a question by playing
a phrase, a skurry of phrases, and Theodosia was half afraid of these
replies, knowing that she missed a part. Not virtuosity but good playing.
The words sang in her mind and broke a new world into a firmament, a
world fuller than the old. Theory, harmony, musical history, musical
literature, technique, the legato, the perfect legato, the singing violin
tone. The ragged chrysanthemums bloomed along the front of the house
where the south sun shone, and the fallen leaves made every footstep
clatter. The fields beyond the town, where they arose on the hills and
were seen from the windows of the house, had lost their rough lines as
they were turned under by the plow for the winter grains, were set in
order for the next growing year. Her eyes, lifted from the strings, would
rest far away on the hill field where the earth had been made new and
where it ran perpetually now with her singing legato, the brown earth
laid out brown in the autumn sun.
The music teacher came each week, her talk a bright flash from the world
far outside. She talked in half with her music and with her quick hands,
but her speech was crisp and clear. In her the master walked out upon the
concert stage and worked his bow over the strings; she gathered intensely
in her darkness and in the vibrant speed of her facile hands, her mouth
easily turning, her strong slender limbs swaying, or she tapped the bow
against her skirt as she told how the master played a movement. Her
fingers were little brains secreting the music of thought. Around her
a peculiar, scintillating half-brilliance spread like a fog of things
half-known, half-sensed; it caught at the imagination and kindled it
but gave it insufficient fuel. The man and the instrument were one. An
interpretation of life. Of mind, mood, thought, by the way of sound. Man
is speaking here. His voice. Sound brought to high refinements, nuances,
exquisite variations to make a speech for the spirit of man. The musician
knew; she flashed out of her darkness. These were days of unsatisfied
knowing. One could never have enough.
Or again, how a ship cuts the waves open and spreads them apart to roll
up on her sides and follow after her in a long sweep of tilting water
with a froth of foam melting on its crest, how the little tugs draw a
ship across a harbor, four little tugs or three joined to a ship by a
long cable that stretches tight, pulling the great lazy giant down a
bay. Or the Goddess of Liberty, how she is green like beryl or like deep
sea water, her bronze burnt with salt fog until it is brilliantly green,
catching the light of the morning on the front of her body and turning it
off in bright yellow planes, her great squat figure too round and ample
for grace, squarely set on firm skirts, short-thighed, great-waisted,
holding her plump torch, a great progeny, a myriad brood mothered under
her plump skirts. She is brightly green in the morning sun with planes of
yellow light; she is looking down the bay and across the Narrows and out
to the sea.
These were inaccessible but not far, making a relation somehow with the
lightness of autumn, the mild sting of the coming cold that could be felt
in the early morning. Walking about the town Theodosia wore a bright new
coat of rich dark colors and a small velvet hat with a bronze buckle.
Conway had helped her to choose the hat, and his lightly spoken approval,
gaily negligent, rested upon it all through the autumn and seasoned her
whole being with a delicate warmth. A fire burned now in the parlor
grate. At nightfall Siver, the black houseboy, was sent through the rooms
to renew the coal and brush the hearths clean. Old Tony Bell sat nodding
in the room across from the parlor, his room, where the bookshelves were
seldom assailed and the books sank together into a solid warped mass.
“She will learn to play great music,” he said, “a concerto. I heard it
in Paris, the Brahms Concerto. It was, I recollect, a night in December.
Let her learn, it won’t hurt her. I never thought my own flesh and blood
would master it. She’ll learn.” His bed stood against the wall that
was farthest from the fireplace. He would sink often into the bed with
unwanted satisfaction and fall asleep without consent, or he would arouse
himself and take a brisk walk at twilight, stepping along the boards of
the gallery.
Theodosia practised scales in single tones and thirds, working happily,
blending them in her thought with the running autumn and the crisp frost,
with the rich new color that had come to her garments in the coat and
hat, in certain gowns she devised with her dressmaker, in her autumn
stockings and a brilliant scarf. Jane Moore came sometimes to practise
with the instruments, inaccurate as before but pretty in her gray fur and
bright blue dress. She would laugh at the precision of the music teacher
and clatter amiably on the piano, her eyes misty with her own prettiness
and tender with the devotion of youth to youth. “You’re too sweet for
words,” she would say to Theodosia as she touched the keys lightly,
smiling over her shoulder. Her brown hair was softly rolled and centered
into low knots. She would tinkle lightly at Albert’s songs, giving them a
manner, _Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland_ dribbling from her pert fingers.
Catherine Lovell had a bright red hat for the mid-winter, accented with
an unsubdued cock’s feather that tilted and swayed as she walked, as
she sat lightly moving in her chair. She went to the Seminary every day
to teach, but in the evening she would run to Theodosia for a chat or a
walk, or she would bring a gift of winter flowers from her mother’s small
window garden.
Back would come the day for the fiddle lesson. The teacher would enter
with a quick smile, tossing aside her coat and her hat. The piano note
would cry out briefly under her quick hand and the gut string would
follow, slipping and crawling into tune, Theodosia’s heart beating fast
with some cruel, fearful pleasure. A skurry of runs and a trill and a
few bars from the cadenza of some concerto. The example would clarify
her words: each note must stand out like a star in a dark night....
Smoothness in the change of position when the string must be crossed
without sound.... The singing tone, the perfect legato.... The bow should
be thought of as of indefinite length—no end to it, no break between the
up-bow and the down-bow.... “But do not, for all this, be a slave to your
fingers. The music must come out of your soul, out of your soul.”
* * * * *
Theodosia would wake from the deep first sleep of the night and see the
rectangles of the high windows turn to pale silver with the winter dawn.
She would move in her bed, opening her eyes briefly upon the familiar
furniture of the room, the long glass between the windows, the high
dresser, the deep sofa beside the fireplace. Then she would settle to
the lighter sleep of the morning, hearing the steps of early passers
on the pavement of the street and hearing the click of the gate latch
when Siver came to his work. The warmth of the bed would shut about her
in a matutinal caress as she sank into light half-slumber, as her mind
fared here and yon in speculations and dreams, in plans and visions. The
joy of friends would give her a pleasant sense of well-being, and her
own warmed youthful blood would drowse and drown in its own relaxed
languors. Sometimes she would float between the earth and some void in a
half-intoxication of a dream while her ears half-heard the steps on the
street or a call—some boy driving his cow to pasture. Her speculating
mind would run forward into the plans for the day, so many hours with the
music, the fiddle, the harmony, the piano; or it would center briefly
about some dress she was designing with the dressmaker or repairing for
herself, and over this or through it would glide her floating senses
as they drifted in the void supported by strong fingers on which she
lay drooping, circled by strong arms. Siver’s knock at the door would
dimly arouse her and make her know that she had half-dreamed some image,
and his step on the floor as he walked toward the fireplace and bent
over the grate to arrange the fire would emphasize the light quality
of her consciousness. The sound of the falling kindling would be heavy
and remote. Between the separate sounds the spaces of quiet would be
light with dreaming, with herself drowned in joy and myth, drooping in
strong up-reaching fingers, Albert’s hands, but over her and above like
the light of some final dawn, radiant but self-contained and entire,
identical with light negligent laughter, would float some essence, some
misty incandescence that merged with Conway and with her happiness.
When he had kindled a large fire of wood and coal, Siver would close the
window and pour hot water from a pail into her pitcher on the wash-stand.
He was nothing to her, Siver, but serving hands. He was but serving
hands, unsensed, unrealized. He was a command given and accomplished.
If he became momentarily real he was intently loathed and quickly
transferred to serving hands again. The sound of the flowing water and
the crockery would be as distinct and as meaningless as the other sounds
of the morning, flat against the coming tide of the new day, unreal
before her speculations about the dress or the fiddle-practice. Siver
gone and the closed door having settled an hour of stillness upon the
room, the earth would grow into the volume and substance of dream and lie
finished and accomplished, apart and done.
* * * * *
The farmers were discontented with the tobacco sales. The speculators
were busy passing the crop from hand to hand, playing a game to outdo one
another. Sometimes a farmer saw his crop selling for twice the sum he had
been paid less than a week earlier. “Too many dead-heads function between
the grower and the manufacturer,” Albert said. The tobacco wagons, piled
high, were lined in every open space about the warehouses. A heavy odor
of crude tobacco hung in the damp air.
At Catherine Lovell’s home there was a large double parlor with a hard
smooth floor. Often the rugs were rolled up for dancing, and then two
negroes sat in the hallway making the music, _I Don’t Know Why I Feel So
Shy_, or _Dixie Dan_, the rhythms brought down from Hill Street. Albert
talked about the new association for the growers as he waited between the
dances, sitting along the wall of the dining-room on the red divan. The
men would have to combine, he said. The market was all in a wreck. There
would have to be such a pool as was never formed before, something solid.
He spent his days now going about among the farmers, pledging them to the
new measure, talking of it to hostile growers. He carried memoranda in
his pocket snapped importantly together under a rubber band. The throb of
the dance rhythms would wail from the outer hall. Somebody had given the
players a smart drink and they set the true rhythms of Hill Street under
the dancers’ feet, rhythms richly ripened with use. Theodosia and Conway
trampled the rhythms under their light tread.
I likes a little loven now and then,
When the loven one is you....
What was a rhythm more or less? their feet asked the smooth floor.
“What’s this thing we’re a-dancen to?” Conway asked her. “Is it a
two-step or a waltz or a barn dance, or what is it anyway?”
“Don’t you know really, on your honor?”
“I just get up and do what the music makes me. I never know what kind
’tis.”
Albert was a great bulk coming in at a door, coming nearer, taking his
seat under the dim lamp when he sat in her parlor. His face was large
and firm, sudden in its appraisals, but he was uncertain of her and of
himself. She saw his uncertainty of her in his quick scrutiny of her when
he spoke. The men would have to pool, he said. He had talked to twenty
farmers and growers that day. He was dog tired. Some men were fools,
unable to see their own good when it stood less than three inches away.
She would turn to the fiddle, making herself remote.
* * * * *
She would pluck at his talkative music, making it utter its bland
commonplace between flights of well-bowed musical comment, musical scorn.
She would wrap each common saying into a sheaf bound lightly with shreds
of scintillating clamor.
“Where’d you get that? How’d you know to do all that truck?” he asked.
“Imelda Montford wrote a diary and she left it in an old hamper. ‘I want
to lern grek and laten. I will not be a idle fol. I will have what is in
boks.’” She traced the words on the wall with her finger. “Roland built a
bridge for a deposed king to ride on. William had red hair and owned nine
thousand acres of Virginia land. Rufus bought a negro wench and three men
from Captain Custer, and made a note of it in the back of a geography
book. Thomas Montford bought a horse from Asa Fielding and left a note
of that on the fly-leaf of an old grammar. Anne had a town named in her
honor, Anneville. You know the place.”
“Anneville. I know. Gosh, yes.”
“Theodosia Montford took Luke Bell to husband and then the Bells got into
the story.”
“Took. God’s sake! It’s my opinion she got took.”
“Gules two lions couchant argent....”
“What you a-comen to?”
“Gules with a fess and six crosslets gold....”
“What’s the joke?”
“Bendy of ten pieces, gold and azure....”
“What the ’ell?”
“The language of the Montfords. The speech of old Robert and his peers.”
“You’re too full of joy. I aim to take some of that joy out of you.”
“His glorious pals, you might say.”
“Two months from now and I aim to do it.”
“Or, go back to Roland, he built a bridge....”
“You need somebody and it’s my opinion you need me.”
“Rode. Kreutzer. Singer. The _Fingerübungen_. Excellent for muscular
development in scale work. Miss Schuester, then. Duos for violin and
piano. Duos for two fiddles. Does that answer your first question? If
that’s not enough....”
“Some day I aim to smash that old fiddle plumb into the middle of
perdition.”
“You’ll never get your hands on it.”
“In two months from now I aim to get you. Take your time and get ready.
And if that old music box gets in my way....”
“You’ll never get your hands on it.” She bent her eyes to the strings
where the hair lines of the bow sang over them. He was already a
whirlwind under her flying fingertips.
“You get good and ready. When I come I’ll come like a roaren lion.”
His strength assailed her, and going about her unsettled routines in
the early February cold she rested upon his decision where it suffused
her mind. She thought of her grandfather as the chief witness of her
achievement with the fiddle; he represented a throng of watchers, there
to scrutinize her skill. She held inwardly an intense wish to show him
what the fiddle could do in her hands, and as she brought a study to
completion and played it with her master she thought of Anthony as the
listener, as he was, as he sat over his mellow fire, or she would stop
often by his chair and talk with him of the music, retelling all or much
of what the teacher had brought her in interpretation.
Or, remembering that the music must come out of the spirit, the soul,
she would search inwardly for some token or glimpse of this shadowy
substance, this delicate eidolon. The question arose again and again.
The soul, where and what was it? She observed that the preachers in the
churches had souls for their commerce, and that there one learned that
all souls were of equal value. But in the novel or the poem the lover
said, “I love you from the depths of my soul,” or the author said, “He
was stirred to the depths of his soul,” or “He was frightened in his
soul.” Striving to divide her being, to set bounds upon parts, she would
turn a half-whimsical gaze inward as she strove to achieve the singing
tone and to bow the indefinite legato. “Does the music come out of me
really, out of some inner unit, myself, all mine?” she would question,
“or do I simply imitate, skilfully or not, what the teacher does?” She
wanted to lay her finger on this integer and say, “This is mine.” She
wanted to go past the bounding of blood in arteries and the throb of her
pride in her grandfather’s witnessing of her advancing skill. The tone
sang more true and she took a great, impatient joy in it, searching, as
she was, more deeply for the answer to the riddle. Or, in the coming of
Albert into her senses, her questioning thought would swim in a pool of
inattention and semi-consciousness.
* * * * *
Toward the end of February Anthony Bell sickened of a cold and kept
continually in his room sitting over his fire. The sound of his coughing
went through the house, and of his scolding voice as he assailed Siver
for, as he named them, his trifling ways. After a week he was no better,
and the fact came to Theodosia in her preoccupation as a vague trouble.
A vague sense of impending demands weighted her bow and her pencil.
Writing chords all morning at her table a load bore heavily upon her
hand, unrecognized or undefined. A dream-like unrest followed her as she
passed her grandfather’s door or mounted the staircase, as she turned
back to her studies after the departure of her friends. She went to
his room often between her goings and comings. She would stand beside
his fire and offer sympathy or question him. Had he tried this remedy
or that? Unprepared for care she met this small demand with a slight
vexation, or she set herself to prepare some comfort for him, or some
diversion. He would soon be better, she assured him.
But there came a day when he was worse, when he kept his bed, and
Theodosia called a physician, Dr. Muir. She went often to his bedside,
offering to read, to talk, to prepare foods. Anthony seemed troubled, and
as the days went by he continually called for papers from his desk or for
letter-files from a cupboard in a back room upstairs. He seemed unable to
find some paper although he searched endlessly, or he would fall asleep
with the documents scattered over his bed or falling from his lax hands.
One day an old friend, a Mr. Reed, from the bank, called and sat with
him for an hour. When the visitor had gone Anthony seemed more than ever
troubled, searching again for the missing paper, falling asleep.
As Theodosia sat with her father at supper on the evening after the
banker’s visit she spoke of her grandfather’s worry, opening the subject
with Horace in abstracted earnestness. The house was disturbed since her
grandfather’s illness and she wanted relief.
“I wish you’d stop in to see Grandfather tonight,” she said. “He’s sick
and he seems to have some matter to trouble his mind. I think you’d
better talk with him a little. He’s worried.”
“Tell him I’ll take him on a trip next summer to the Virginia Ocean. A
ship glides down the water on silken satin sails. Tell him to think about
that and he’ll drop off right away. Tell him to think of silken satin
sails. The silken sad uncertain. Tell him not to think about the silken
sad uncertain, but tell him to think of silken satin sails. Nothing is
uncertain. All is certain. I’m right.”
“I’m worried myself,” Theodosia said after a little. “Grandfather is real
sick. He needs advice maybe. He’s lost heart. He’s got some trouble on
his mind.”
“All is lost save honor and there’s damn little of that left, hardly
a copper cent’s worth. Tell him to set his mind upon the silken satin
sails of certainty. Pour me out another cup of coffee, Dosia, and pass
me the jam, Siver. It is jam, isn’t it? Jam is the staff of life and
there’s damn little of it left. Damn the jam. Tonight I have to practise
again for the play. I take the part of the wicked villain because of my
deep stentorian voice. It’s for the benefit of the Sabbath School, and
you should go and assist a cause if not to see your sire saw the air.
I am your sire, ain’t I? Theodosia sired by Horace, he by Anthony the
grand old war horse, he out of Theodosia Montford by Luke Bell. I have
to practise tonight for the play. It’s for the benefit of some charity,
I forget what, some measure promoted by the combined Sabbath-school
interests of the entire town. It’s a big thing. Which of these renderens
do you like best? You see the beautiful young lady is in a hazardous
position from poverty and what-not....”
“What did my mother die of?” Theodosia asked after the matter of the
renderings had been settled.
“Of a meningitis. I was not here at the time. In Lester, I was, attenden
court, I recall. I hurried home as soon as I learned of it and asked what
was the matter. They said a meningitis. How old are you, Dosia?”
“I’m twenty.”
“To think it! Twenty! Then it’s been seven years, eight, how many? Since
your mother died? I recollect I heard them say, ‘The poor motherless
orphan, twelve years old.’ Or did they say thirteen? I don’t know why I
never married again. Eight years a widower, I’ve been, and not altogether
unpresentable to the sex, I’ve heard it said.”
Theodosia wept softly behind her downcast eyes when she turned her
thought to her mother. She remembered her as a large broken woman lying
on her couch all day, sometimes playing sonatas on the piano half the
night. She had given Theodosia the bedroom above the parlor the spring
before she died. She was remembered standing at the doorway of the room,
ill, directing the houseman to change the furniture this way and that,
trying several arrangements.
“Your mother was a lady and a pretty woman to boot,” Horace said. “But
the family trees all come by your father, and don’t you forget that, all
the shrubbery. I remember how Mike O’Connor laughed one time when I said,
‘Two lions couchant, male and female created he them.’ You ought to ’a’
heard old Mike O’Connor roar to that. ‘But don’t you ever let any woman
get a hold onto you,’ Mike O’Connor says. ‘Not a firm hold. She’ll make
you roll a baby buggy, and what does a man look like a-rollen a baby
buggy? You never saw a Irishman a-rollen a baby buggy,’ Mike says. ‘Think
back,’ Mike says, ‘and see if ever you saw a Irishman rollen one of them
things. Not a real God-knows Irishman. You never did. And you never
will.’”
Horace called for more sugar for his last cup of coffee, and Theodosia
searched the sideboard and the pantry. “I’m part Irish,” he said. “And I
need more sugar.” When Siver was called he found a little in an unused
sugar dish on a high shelf. Theodosia knew the indifferent economic plan
of the house. Either Horace or Anthony paid the bills, as they had money
by. It was Anthony who owned the house, his inheritance along with the
farm, Linden Hill, which had now passed to other hands. There had been
some talk between Anthony and Mr. Reed of a mortgage, and when Horace
went to his rehearsal she looked for the word mortgage in a dictionary to
find its meaning.
* * * * *
From beyond her playing, as a recitative, Albert and his declarations
reached her continually. “I hope you’re keepen the count of the weeks,”
he said. “Six weeks is what you’ve got to get ready in.” Her continual
reply, spoken or unspoken, beat and throbbed with the pulse of the music
as she advanced her lyric work and won praise from her master, “I want to
play the fiddle to the end of the earth. I want to go to the end of music
and look over the edge at what’s on the other side.”
She thought of Albert as strong and good. She knew the beauty of his
vigorous body, clean as it was with health. On the hills beyond the town
the laborers were burning the plant beds and making ready for the long
growing year. From her chamber she saw the smoke arise and “They’re
burning tobacco beds,” she said, her mind running over the fields in a
swift going and over the earth as it lay away in shield-like masses that
were brown now with the uses of winter. “He makes love like a tomcat,”
her lips said suddenly once while she paused in her playing to tinker
with a bad string. “Albert. He makes love like a tomcat.”
The music teacher had her changing moods; in her entrance her mood was
stated, in her down-flung coat and her quick bowing; but her presence,
whatever it was, would never crush her student’s zeal.
“What’s that? I want to do that,” Theodosia said. “I want to learn to do
that. I intend to learn it. Give it to me for an exercise. It can’t get
away from me. I will have it. I want it.”
“You will never do that in this world,” she said. “Your hand wasn’t
made for that. You couldn’t do successive octaves, Miss. Don’t cry for
the moon. Artificial harmonics will always be beyond you. It’s no great
matter.”
They were laughing, speaking idly. “I want it. I want that passage inside
my skin. It’ll liberate my soul. I must have a showy, idle, ornamental
soul, full of ruffles and grill-work. I want that very passage. Oh, God,
how I want it.”
She did not believe what the teacher said of her hand. Eventually she
would grow to that playing, she thought, and she would surprise her
master. “I will go to the end of everything, I’ll look over the edge of
the last precipice of music,” she said inwardly. “I’ll look over the last
precipice of music and say, ‘God!’ I’ll say ‘Where are you?’ I’ll climb
all the musical stairs there are.”
* * * * *
Anthony lingered in a state of half-illness, in and out of his bed. One
day his distress for some missing paper seemed acute and she offered him
her help. He was unwilling to share with her. “Your business is the
violin now,” he said, sinking weakly into his chair by the fire, but in
a moment after he was sickened with faintness and she helped him back to
the bed.
Two days later Theodosia found that she had determined to search among
the papers in the back upper room to try to find the truth about their
house, that she would take upon herself the necessity which awaited her
as her grandfather visibly failed. Siver had spoken to her of his wages,
which, he said, had not been paid for five weeks. He must have his money,
he said, speaking respectfully, embarrassed, for he needed clothing.
He must have his pay or he would have to find another place. Theodosia
paid him the money from a small sum which she had, and during that same
evening she took a mass of papers and letters from the old desk and
carried them to her room to examine them before the fire. Many of the
letters had been tied into bundles and these she examined first because
they offered a modicum of order in the chaos of the mass. Among them were
letters of affection which ran through a long gamut of admiration and
passion to apathy, letters which had passed between her father and mother.
She sat all the following day over the papers. The memoranda yielded a
confusion of dates and moneys spent or collected, a going and coming
of funds, lands, expenses. Nothing seemed to have marketable value. No
memoranda indicated a note or mortgage held in fee. The farmland had
been sold; there were records of sums paid for this tract or that. The
musty papers told musty stories, already half-known to her, of acres
inherited, of sale bills of watered farmlands and uncut forests lying
along the banks of some stream, described with poles and links and the
jargon of surveys. In the documents a surveyor walked around a stretch
of land, in the sun of warm days, in the wind or the cold or the frost
of ill seasons. He walked around tracts with his compass and chain,
measuring, writing figures, drawing maps, making descriptions. Five
people heired a five-part property, divided equally by the survey, a
farm to Joseph, a farm to Eliza, a farm to Jacob, a farm to Anthony T.,
a farm to Theodosia, the wife of Thomas Singleton.... A will had been
opened and read in a parlor, the heirs sitting formally in their seats as
became the inheritors of land. Later they drew their chairs together in
groups to confer. One sat apart dissatisfied. The truth of the letters
met the truth of the surveys and the memoranda. It had been a rainy day.
The inheritors had reached the place with difficulty, some of them wet to
discomfort. The parlor had been dark and ill dusted, murky with age and
memorials. A young woman had brought cedar wood for the fireplace.
They had met again when the survey had been made, sitting again in the
light that fell through the old curtains, and their discontents had now
been adjusted or hidden. The surveyor had made a plat for each one, a
shield of irregular shape drawn on paper, representing lands, arable
acres and woodlands. The plows of the spring would slip through the
fields and the inheritors would be about their business, belonging now,
each one, to his land. But the substance of the myth would fade out from
under them. Some of them were dead, and from some the land had melted
away. Owners were separated from their ownership. Memoranda of deeds
began to tell their tales, items of barter. “Beginning at a stone at the
east edge of the Quincy pike, corner to lot 4, thence with edge of said
pike south 88½ west 32 poles 23 links, thence south.... Said farm known
as Linden Hill....” It was accurately described, line for line. In the
house someone was born, the birth told in a letter from Charlotte, the
mother, to Anthony. Another paper, notes drawn up for the writing of some
deed, “witnesseth that said Anthony, for and in consideration of the
sum of nineteen thousand dollars to him paid by said Goodwin ... hath
given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred, and released, and by these
presents does give, grant, bargain, sell, transfer, and release unto said
Goodwin, a certain tract of land situated, lying, and being in the county
aforesaid on the south side of the Casey Run and bounded as follows:
Beginning at a stone ... thence with edge of said pike south 88½ west 32
poles 23 links ... said farm known as Linden Hill.”
The road ran between the farms, mapped and charted, and the farms were
charted and recorded, described and owned, bounded by fences and walls
and watercourses, these men belonging to the land as owners of land. But
the land was gone, cut from under their feet, in consideration of the sum
of nineteen thousand dollars, it was released, bargained, granted, given,
sold, transferred. The day of the sale had been a bright day in June.
The tillers of the soil had already planted the tobacco and the corn in
the arable fields. The child born had been herself. A letter told of the
humid noon, dinner on long tables before the house door, the half of a
mutton roasted by three negroes over a great wood fire, piles of bread,
drink for the men in the barn, whisky poured into little glasses. She had
been a baby above-stairs in a cradle. It was all now a mouldy smell on
rotting paper, a faint stench and a choking dust. An imperfect chronicle
arose out of the stench and this chronicle built the present into a new
structure. She sat staring at the embers or she turned again to the
documents, for they had hints of more to disclose.
It was on this day that she first helped her grandfather to the commode,
that she had known the look of his feeble withered body, had glimpsed at
it as she had folded his blanket about his shaking knees. She went away
to walk in the twilight of the day, spinning rapidly along the street,
meeting Frank and walking with him to the end of the town, merry with him
over some joke that he had. Later Albert was sitting under her soft light.
“Take your time, no hurry,” he said, half whispering as he stood by the
door at his departure. “Take your time.”
The papers scattered over her sofa in the room above had begun to reveal
a hard story, hard to know and realize. She turned a bitter, unsmiling
face from him as he stood by the door and glanced at her bent lips in the
glass.
“I’ll not hurry. Don’t bother yourself.”
“But in the end you’ll come.”
“Like a millstone, I will. Like a mountain.”
“Mountain is no matter. I’ll get you. You’ll be glad to be got.... I’ll
show you what a man can do. When I set-to I’m a real lover.”
She wanted his face between her hands at that moment, but she would not
trust her tenderness. She remembered her grandfather’s withered body, his
shrunken maleness, and she was broken by pity. She made her pity resemble
scorn as she turned apart and laid the fiddlestick carefully in the case
beside the fiddle. The evening was over.
“When I come I’ll be a real lover. The kind you’ll want. I know you.”
“Slam the door after you when you go, so it’ll lock. Please do. Just slam
it hard.”
“Two months I gave you. Time flies. It’s half gone already. Goen fast.”
“Just slam it hard. Save me a trip out to the door.”
* * * * *
She had brought other papers from the cupboard in the back room, and she
sat busy with these all of a day and half a night. She was weary now
of the stale odors of decayed paper and dust, weary of the truth which
was now established. Her father was father also to three mulattoes.
Letters from her mother’s relatives touched the matter as if it were
beyond dispute, reiterated it as if it were a knowledge well premised and
antedating the discussions of funds and settlements. She laid all the
letters relating to this subject in a pile together and studied them in
order. They were letters from her mother’s father, now dead.
Her hands on the fiddle were weak and apathetic, startled into numbness.
She put the instrument aside, shut it tenderly away into its case and sat
staring at the flames or she moved suddenly to some new posture. She felt
as if she were alone with her grandfather in this; Conway had been shut
away as tenderly as had been the fiddle; Albert was avoided as pertaining
somehow too nearly to the facts. She read the letters again, eating their
words, leaping ahead to the telling phrases. “This is the last of your
share from your mother’s estate. Make it go as far as it will. You knew
when you married Horace Bell that he was the father of two blacks.... I
will come whenever I can, or your brother will manage to go by Anneville
on his way back from the meet.... You better turn your attention to
something else. Take up church work.... Dropped his litter in the alley
behind the jail. The half-wit, Dolly Brown, for God’s sake! Old Josie’s
girl was a handsome wench, but slobbering Dolly Brown.... A strange taste
in wenches.”
She gathered the letters together and dropped them into the fire in a
fury of anger, but when they had turned to feathery cinders she wondered
at her act and repented of it. Persons had grown out of the search, a
man vaguely outlined in youth, Anthony Bell, or her mother, Charlotte,
others. Her infantile concept of her father as one playful, merry,
light-hearted, child-like, made a confused war with later concepts of him
as a jumble of demands upon affection and forbearance. She remembered her
mother as a large passionate woman who hated her broken life, but in turn
she remembered little Annie, born after the incident behind the jail,
five years after. She was benumbed before the new knowledge and shared
only with Anthony.
Her outer vision dulled by the fire and by weariness, her inner vision
heightened, and she began to divide her being, searching for some soul or
spirit. Her search took her into her grandfather’s being where it touched
accurately to her own. He was old, withered, palsied, but he had life, a
life, from first to last, she observed, and the house was real for him
and the people of the house, the pain of his sickness. Her search took
her into many of the ways of men. When a man is a baby someone uncovers
his nakedness and bathes it. Then he has a long season of being obscure,
withdrawn within himself, alive, secret with life. Finally he is old
and again someone must uncover his nakedness and bathe him, handle him
as if he were new-born. She herself had done this for him. Where, she
questioned, is his soul?
She brought forward her knowledge of the old man’s life, trying to make
it stand as a picture before her. As a young man he had taught for a time
in some college. His journals had come from far cities and he would read
all night. He had been richly alive then, sensitive, secret with life,
his nakedness covered, his bow gallant, his compliments ready. He had
been a gay story-teller, and his friends had loved him. They had come
miles to visit him, to sit all night over the fire. Then he had married
Alice, a strange woman who liked to sit apart.
When all the subtractions were made the naked man was left, new-born,
uncovered. There should be a soul there somewhere, she thought, and she
searched into the withered leavings of crippled body and quavering voice.
When she had found this entity in her grandfather she would, she thought,
be able to identify it within herself. Her emotion for him pooled largely
within her and brought her to tears, and she gazed down into the red
coals of her fire with a blurred vision. Gratitude and anxiety mingled
in her weeping, and when she thought of the burnt letters her tears were
renewed. Then she drew a blanket about her shoulders and went softly down
the stairs to her grandfather’s door and listened to his noisy breathing
with a sob of thankfulness that he still lived. She went within and
passed beyond the glow of the night-light Siver had placed on the table
near the bed. There was a mouldy smell of age putrefaction, close air,
burning oil from the lamp. The fire had been covered with ashes, but it
smouldered and gave a jerky flame. The air near the bed was heavy with
the sour odor. The man lay stretched at length, sinking flatly into the
bed, scarcely raising the quilts from their level. He had spread a silk
handkerchief over his forehead to protect it from the cold, and she saw
with a moment of shame that the handkerchief was streaked with stains
where he had worn it about his throat. A week before she had bathed his
face and shoulders, somewhat loathingly, but three days later she had
bathed his entire body. She had grown in the interval. The days since
had towered above her and she had reached to accompany each one to its
highest pinnacle.
She loathed nothing that he might reveal and she looked at him
searchingly. She remembered that his knowledge was gone or blurred; he
could no longer lay his hand upon it; it was gone then; his charm was
gone. What, she questioned, did his spirit have to do with his knowledge,
with his person, his courage, his putrefying flesh, his taste, his
temper, his determination, his belief in herself? He wanted to be alive,
secret, shut within himself. She tried to eliminate from herself all but
that which they held in common and, the cancellations made, to identify
something which one could describe as deathless, as indicative of a man.
Her tenderness intervened, however, and she found that she had resolved
to make him some light flannel caps to protect his head from the cold
while he slept. She felt a holy sense of comfort when she went softly
from his door. In the hall Horace was taking off his overcoat. He had
just come in.
“You’re up late, Dosia,” he said. “You let your fellows stay till after
midnight. It’s not prudent. Trust a Bell.”
He opened the parlor door and looked in at the dark and the fireless
hearth. She had gone to the foot of the staircase.
“Grandfather,” she said. “I was in his room.” She was indifferent to his
words.
“Come on,” he said, “we’ll go upstairs together, hand in hand, our hearts
entwined. ‘She’s a pretty girl now,’ I said the other day, said it to
myself, you understand, and it wasn’t a lie I told either. No need to
worry about the old man. He’s better. I’ll lay a bet he’ll be out again
in a week. The old war horse, he’s not so easy beaten. He’ll come under
the wire first, the old horse will. It’s been a long time since I walked
upstairs with as pretty a lady.”
At the top of the flight, where his way led him down the hall to his room
at the back of the house, he caught her into his arms.
“Kiss your father good-night,” he said.
“I don’t want to.” He had not made such a demand for years.
“I want to kiss a pretty girl before I go to bed and by God you’re a
pretty one. Kiss me good-night.”
“I don’t want to,” she was saying. He had already kissed her many times
and was trying to force her to return the expression. She pulled herself
from his arms and went quickly to her room, hearing his step recede down
the hallway. She locked her door and turned to the cluttered room, which
she set in order. She prepared for bed quickly, for the room was cold.
She felt liberated, inwardly cool, free to love and hate. Between her
grandfather and herself there was some relation, she resolved. There was
some beauty in his putrefaction, some flower in his decay. She was freed
to hate Horace Bell. His touch on her arms and on her breast had been
obscene. Somewhere there was a soul within her, within her grandfather
likewise, she thought. She had identified it with a swift moment of
concentrated loathing, cut it free with hate. Now there would be to
describe it, to outline it, to study it, to see it. The music must come
out of it. She lay in her bed, hard with determination and cool with the
end of emotion.
In the day that followed she gave herself to her work without
interruption. The teacher had set a difficult task and the time for the
lesson was near at hand. She took a respite in the difficulties that lay
before her fingers.
* * * * *
She saw that Anthony was better now, his voice stronger in speech,
his will stronger. “Siver, send that barber fellow up here. I must be
trimmed,” he had called out. He sat beside the fire with a book which
he thought that he read. She would not think in detail of the facts
disclosed to her by the letters, holding her mind steadily apart from
that knowledge. No one but the music teacher reached her inner immunity.
Their duos for violin and piano, for two violins, became two remote
minds conversing as abstraction was laid over against abstraction, theme
against theme, and once, for experiment, key against key.
She stood beside Anthony’s chair to talk of the music, to tell him the
names of the masters whose works she played. She would play a Concerto,
he asserted, his heart set to it. “They’ll hear you in the capitals,”
he said. He was able to care for his body now; he had reached for his
manhood, but she could not go back to her former place. “The Brahms
Concerto, you’ll play it. That’s what I want. I heard it in Paris. It was
the second time I went there.” Standing thus beside him her identifying
mind went swiftly to the matter on which she would not dwell, sped over
it, naming it with a wordless withdrawal. “It may take four years, six
maybe, study and practice, but that’s my wish. You’ll play the Concerto.
You’ll go to the metropolis to study.” She kissed his cheek, her naming
mind on the matter that gave her pain and fear. Then, faltering, she told
him of what she had learned from the papers. He burst into a torrent of
anger, oaths choking back his words.
“Never let me hear you mention it. Not whilst I live. The worst piece
of impudence that ever I saw in life. Enough virtue in a Bell, in a
Montford, to carry along a little excess weight. Never let me hear a sign
of this again. Get about your business.”
Hard words, cracked with age and anger, spent strength, and he trembled
in his chair. Tone left his words high as jagged missiles thrust upon the
air of the room. She was weeping now.
“Get about your business. Get on. Get outen here. Away.”
* * * * *
She was playing scales all morning in her room, using difficult
intervals, her content running now with the cry of the tone and settling
to the grace of her fingers as they crumpled over the strings. Her hands
were pliant but narrow, not good fiddle hands, the teacher had said. They
were her mother’s hands much diminished. She was hearing the words of
the teacher, her master, as they discoursed of vibration. She was, the
teacher, herself an epitome of the fiddle, her quick graceful standing
figure, her hand that was broad and flexible in the palm. She wondered
if anything else touched this woman. The inner psychic vibration which
should be reflected in the rapid vibrations of the fingers on the
strings, such as this was her meat and drink. The greater master had
played a Chopin Nocturne for one “eating the bitter bread of exile.”
“It should be easy, though, to make a dethroned king weep,” she said.
She let her fingers have their joy in their skill knowing that an ironic
undertow had set upon her thought. Enough virtue in a Bell to carry
along any quantity of excess weight, Anthony had said to her, his anger
in a flame. The two daughters of black Josie’s girl, Deb, were grown
women now. She remembered them as cooks or nurses or laundresses. They
were named Americy and Lethe, and now she remembered vividly one warm
September day when she had stopped Lethe on the street and asked her to
do some laundry work. The reply had been a faintly smiling refusal, some
evil in it. She recalled now her tone of mind and her bodily attitude as
she had worked the end of her parasol between the bricks of the pavement,
a gesture to accompany the slightly forward pose of her head, her manner
condescending, amused, expectant. “Could I get you to do some fine
laundry work for me, Lethe?”
Now she labored with the more difficult scales, grown weary of them as
she thought of the September day, her parasol daintily plucking at the
bricks, her assurance and expectancy, and then the strange, brief, but
not curt refusal, “No’m, you couldn’t.” A smile she could not understand,
some evil in it, had dented the brown girl’s face, had dented her brown
cheeks and slightly lifted her lips. Her words had been slowly spoken
and her gaze had fixed itself upon the parasol for an instant while
the decision was being made, but had traveled then over the blue silk
crêpe dress to Theodosia’s face. She remembered the evil of the smile
and the slowly spoken refusal, and how they had lain over her evening,
had weighted her day as with a rebuff and had brought a distress to her
members that had mounted to a deep fatigue.
“My sisters,” she said, rubbing the rosin over the hair threads of the
bow. A distinct fear stood in her breast for the moment. She opened the
window wide.
She thought minutely of Americy and Lethy—or Lethe. She wondered which
of the names she should think when she thought of the brown girl, and
she guessed the origin of the name. “Call it Aphrodite, Aurora, Lethe,
call it Lethe, Lethy,” she heard a voice say. Now she thought intently
of the two dark women and tried to picture them. They were older than
herself. Americy had strange marks like freckles on her face, splotches
of deeper brown. There had been some story of her which she could not
now distinctly remember. It had something to do with her having been in
the jail for stealing or for drunkenness. She found that her penetrating
memory yielded her more of Lethe than of Americy, for she could recall
Lethe’s face more sharply. Her picture of Lethe’s face was more clear
than the detailed story of Americy although she now remembered that
it was for drunken brawling that Americy had been incarcerated. The
incident belonged a year or two back in time. Americy had been making
loud obscene talk on the street, in a brawl with some man, and she had
been taken to the lockup. There was something more of it, she remembered,
cocaine or whisky. She had pled guilty and had somehow raised the money
for the fine when she was tried in the court two days later.
“All right, then, my sisters,” she said. A great weariness assailed her
and she was aware of fear. There was more to comprehend and the exercises
grew irksome, difficult.
Her thought passed beyond fear and rested on pity, abhorrence, sickening
loathing. Stiggins, then—she turned no longer from the thought of
Stiggins. His mother was the half-wit who lived in the alley behind the
jail. She had lived there many years, for the cabin there had been left
to her by some white woman. There had once been some litigation over the
property; it had been wanted by the county for some purpose and there had
been a suit in the court, all the lawyers taking sides, half-jocularly
at first. In the end the cabin had not been sold, for Dolly Brown had
been adjudged incompetent and her property had been secured from sale or
condemnation. The affair had been threshed through several courts and
all the lawyers had enlisted, renewing old bitternesses over it. The
people of the town had gone to hear the speeches of the lawyers. “They’re
a-tryen Dolly Brown’s cabin,” Conway had said.
All the town had gone to the court as if it were a show to see, and the
lawyers had spoken in turn—eloquence, bitterness, laughter. Horace Bell
had been on the side of the half-wit and he had made a long speech in
defense of her rights as one of the innocents of the earth, rhetoric
flowing richly. People had gone in groups to look at the cabin behind the
jail and Dolly Brown had met them with smiles and giggling laughter until
these visits had wearied her. Then she had thrown boiling water at groups
to drive them off. Theodosia could not remember when Stiggins had not
stayed in the livery stable and she had always thought of him as being
somehow related to the horses and mules there. She had seen his hand
on a mule’s throat to slip the harness over the stubby hair, a yellow
hand moving knowingly over the mule’s flesh. He was still as a boy of
ten in mind although she knew that he was but a few months younger than
herself. He had grown up in the livery stable, sleeping on the straw in
the loft, and nobody regarded him as more than a semi-idiot. Ladies never
went beyond the door of the stable, but she herself had been far inside
once when she was a child. Romping along beside her uncle, the horse
dealer, on the way to the candy store, she had gone with him into the
half-dark of the stable when he had stopped there to look at a horse. She
remembered water dripping from a rotting trough, a hand pump where some
workmen bent and lifted to the lilt of an iron handle, the closed stall
where the show horse was kept. The earth floor was beaten hard by the
feet of the horses, and the stalls went, one after another, far back into
a brown darkness. Men came there to relieve themselves in the stalls, and
there was a foul odor all about.
Stiggins, a link between what men keep and what they throw away,
summarized her thought. He breathed the air of the discarded, the foul;
he slept in it. She put the scales aside, for their mounting tones no
longer reached toward some infinite adjustment, some perpetual promise.
Stiggins was her brother. The scales were a weariness.
Albert too was a weariness, set far back and left when she had gone into
the region about the yellow half-wit, Stiggins. She refused to ride with
him when he asked her to go. He had stood at the house door gravely
pleading that the day was warm and bright. His strong limbs offered her
ease as he stood there before the bright warmth of the sun. Distracted,
she waited beside her grandfather’s door, listening to his argument, but
she gave a negative reply. Standing there, she wanted suddenly to go into
his breast and rest. Her eyes clung a moment to his large clean bosom
where a single intention dwelt, clung to his strong hands. She went back
into Anthony’s room shaking her head, closing the door after her.
* * * * *
Catherine Lovell was going away to live in another town and her going
began to leave a mark upon the days of the season even before it was
consummated at a point upon some exact day. Her going spread through
the week that preceded it and gave it a heightened reality, touching it
with a not altogether unpleasant sense of disaster. For the last time
the rugs were rolled back in the Lovell parlors and the musicians sat in
the outer hall. Knowing it to be the last, the dancers were tender and
gay, bending toward the departure with heightened beings. Theodosia was
more intensely aware of Catherine in her leaving, her affection for her
running in a full tide that ran counter to her recent unrest and swept
this into its own channel. There was abundant virtue in a Bell then, and
with Conway she walked lightly on the rhythms of Hill Street, adoring
him in the moment of Catherine’s going. She worked all morning over the
fiddle or the harmony, Catherine’s departure giving her faculties intense
acumen so that the chords dripped from her pencil-tip and spread over the
sheets of lined paper and her lips hummed phrases that played over the
chords and departed from them in airy flights of inconsequential song,
never returning. Ruth Robinson had brought her a gift of spring blossoms
and Jane Moore had come to talk of how much Catherine would be missed.
Intensities of affection welled all around her. Albert in the dance,
settling his fingers to steady her in the step, had whispered again, “Two
weeks now I give you. I’ll close in against next week is done.” They were
a warmth of life touching her life minutely. They excluded fear with the
warm touch of their nearness.
After a day in the house she went to walk at nightfall, in the dusk of
the last twilight hour. People were assembled about the reading-lamps
of the firesides, for the shades were not yet drawn and she could see
into the houses. Little children were running before the firelight,
their heads just reaching above the low window sills. It had been county
court day and the town had been filled with busy people and the clatter
of pleasant noises. Albert had been everywhere about, talking with the
growers, and he had made a speech from the court-house steps. Forty per
cent of the farmers had already been pledged to the measure, he had told
her, and he would count eighty per cent an assured success, his eyes
forgetful of her when he made the declaration, his eyes resting upon her
without seeing. “You would eat his per cents from his hand,” now she said.
Footsteps came from the deeply shadowed pavement before her, going steps,
receding quickly. The drama of the darkening town was but lightly held
together, as if she could break it with a laugh. She walked briskly
through an upper street thinking of her friends and of Catherine’s going.
She had from each, she reflected, what each held out to her, and her
music counted richly for something. A long strange gloom was settling
over the rolling hills beyond the town where the fields and the pastures
lay, a gloom lit with the strange light from a low-bent horizon, vividly
burnt to orange and black-red. The town was the dark core around which
the fields centered. Albert was whispering his wish and his intention,
growing daily more sure and more restless. All day the town had been the
leaping, out-crying center of the farmed acres, the traders shouting
their musical incantations over the mounting prices of cattle and mules,
and Albert had summarized many goods as he had stood before her to make
his speech from the court-house, had set a hilltop upon the day and
upon the plowed fields. “In less than two weeks,” he had said the night
before, and the week was well begun. “The kind of lover you’ll want.”
All about, up and down the street, were remote sounds of retreating
steps, coming steps, voices that cried out in low commands or questions,
but they said nothing for her beyond the abundant drama of their passing.
She moved in a richness and fullness of sensation, cloaked in sense, or
the pleasure of setting her feet forward swiftly drowned all thought in
momentary pools of physical being. Or, standing at the gate after the
walk, having heard the click of the gate latch which always meant the
end of a journey, the peculiar sound of the gate when it was closed from
within the garden, a deep metal click, alto, unlike that of any other
gate she knew, a token of possible finalities came into her thought and
her bodily presence. Albert gathered the fields together and centered
them, but in turn he centered himself into her body. The parallels of
the street converged far down in the west at the line the set sun made
with the hills. The cool of the night touched her face and a shiver
passed over her body, less of cold than of emotion deeply established as
she recognized some unity within herself which related to her friends, to
Albert’s wish, to Conway’s gentleness and beauty, and a clear thought of
Conway brought a smile to her lips.
“This is my spirit, my soul. It’s here,” she said. “This unit. I can
almost touch it with my words.” Dark had come now. The lights of the town
were burning in order, one after the other up the street. She passed up
the steps of the gallery slowly.