Catherine Lovell’s face was dim in Theodosia’s memory now that it was
gone from the town. To her this was something to contemplate, this sure
loss of a face when it had passed beyond the sight of the eye. The face
would be recognized instantly anywhere upon the earth, in any crowd, but
it could not be restored to a vivid image in waking thought. Theodosia
pursued all vanishing faces with moments of wonder and amazement, for
Jane Moore, out of sight, was but dimly seen although the flavor of her
being, of her way, her smile, was keenly discerned. The same was true
of Ruth although she came often to the parlor, and true of Conway, of
Albert, of Frank, and she played a game of trying to hold the image
minute by minute after the face had disappeared through a doorway, but
only a dim vision together with an estimate or a general essence could
be assured, although Albert’s look with its momentary pleading and rough
assurance somehow entered her frame and consorted with some part of her
own being, richly remembered in the joyous consenting of her members, but
accompanying this ran always a tender thought of Conway and his beauty,
who, if he were but vaguely visualized, was real and one with Albert in
whatever favor her mind yielded of contemplation and tenderness.
Perhaps, she reflected, these faces were the less vividly imaged because
they were deeply known in other than visual reports. All the familiar
faces of the town were so richly seasoned with all the rest that went
with them in the making of a person that they were in themselves dimmed.
Old faces, as these were, in youth or age, inherited of others, the
Bell face, the Robinson face, the Moores, the Brookes, the Tanners, the
MacDougals—one would know where they had derived. Bell faces had been
greeting Robinson faces on the street of the town for more than a hundred
and twenty-five years. Or, the face of the music teacher, out of sight,
shadowed into her darkness of hair and brow and became less flesh under
the remembered capricious flights of her fiddle singing. Albert, gone
from the town now on an extended mission among the growers, offered
a constant and joyous dare, by way of his dim image, in her game of
hide-and-seek.
A new person had come to the town while Catherine was still making felt
her departure, a strange face with no predecessors. A man, Captain Agnew,
had bought a farm at the end of one of the streets, and his daughter,
Florence, was presently seen driving about the town in a motor vehicle.
She was a large girl, rich in the splendors of vitality, deep of chest
and strong of limb. Her eyes were bright and her lips easily flowing.
She flung her looks everywhere, careless of them, abundantly centered
within herself. Theodosia saw her here and there over the town and talked
with her at some gathering. She thought of her again and again as she
practised the trills, her present occupation, and she experimented to try
to visualize the new face with its looks, its beauty, its rapid sequence
of smiles, frowns, and infinities of gesture. The new face had printed
itself more cleverly than any other into her mind, and she herself
smiled often, remembering the vivid picture that was clear and firm in
determination. The new girl had moved swiftly into the life of the town,
for in a few days she was seen everywhere. “Is it because she is new to
me that I remember her looks?” Theodosia asked herself, waking out of
sleep, and suddenly a clear image of Florence, as clear as reality, stood
in the core of her inner vision.
It was a puzzle—Florence to be so keenly felt as to retain her pictured
form in absence. Theodosia ran swiftly with the spring. Her long slender
legs delighted in the daily walk, and in a few weeks there would be
tennis on the courts at the Seminary. Stiggins spread onto her mind once
as a flat unrecognized affront. Walking past the stable swiftly one
bright day she saw his hand as it bent over the collar of a mule to slip
a pad into place, a long slender hand, powerful and cunning, like her own
hand but more powerful and more steadily placed to its task. The tawny
fingers dragged knowingly over the buckles of the collar and then his
face, viewed momentarily, was searched carelessly in the swift moment
of a passing. “Between thee and me there is a great gulf fixed,” she
thought, and the hour swept quickly by, having gathered nothing from the
moment which was dominated by the dark accidental hand.
Florence Agnew grew daily into a personality, heard and felt as well as
seen. Hers was a sensual voice, heavy with tone, low, trailing away into
finalities. Her body was luxury-loving and radiantly indolent, using but
a modicum of its intense vitality for her goings and comings. Her perfect
teeth flashed their smile from between her rippling lips and she was
alive to the ends of her animal being, which was set to have the best of
the town for its own. Her hair was puffed and curled to be a gauze of
rippling midnight over her head.
* * * * *
Jane Moore could do nothing with the Bach. She shook her head
self-indulgently at the piano arrangement as if the music were some light
joke to confound the keyboard. She touched a key here and there with her
fingers but in the end she shrugged as if Bach were a responsibility
she could not be asked to assume. Her hat was bright for the spring
that delayed, out-dating the spring with its flowers and fragile crêpe.
She wanted to talk of Florence continually, and she quoted her with an
admiration which would fall suddenly under amused contempt or shock but
would build itself back again in the charm of the unfamiliar. She went
daily where Florence went, or she would retail to Theodosia the witty
sayings and bold sallies that issued from the flame around which she was
impelled to hover.
The days went hurriedly, the birds in the trees at dawn making a
continuous breathless fluting, the mockingbird loudest and most
insistent. Albert had gone far into the country, traveling from farm to
farm, visiting the smaller villages, or he made farther journeys into
outlying counties. Theodosia played trills looking at her thin lips in
the tall glass of the parlor, searching her lips and her face there.
She had seen Florence that day with a group of people at the pool beyond
the town where boats were paddled about. She gave the top of her mind to
the trill, the finger pressed firmly down on the string, but underneath
a voice recounted Albert’s words, hurled them out between the running
web of the trill. “Some day I aim to smash that old fiddle into the
middle of perdition.” Her fingers were joyous over the trill; she and her
fingers were one and they would ride together on the top of the world.
She comprehended Florence then and dwelt upon her minutely, saw her quick
smile that knew all the inner part of a man or of a woman. Albert’s
voice again: “You’re too full of joy. I aim to take some of the joy out
of you.” The bird tones of the trill crashed over the words and lanced
each one with a sharp dart. “Two months from now I aim to do’t. Take your
time.” She had spent a month with the scales and then had set upon the
harmony again, mornings when her pencil dribbled small black egg-shaped
dots on the scaffolding set up by the staff and bound them together with
a swift down-stroke, her ear hearing tone set upon tone in a fullness of
design, the fear in her inner thought, but the fear had slunk away before
her new joy and it was now only a dim thing, abstracted, unremembered,
too remote to visit any image. Florence Agnew spread pleasure over the
town and over the bodies of men and women, and all were more intensely
alive. “A week now, I give you. The kind of lover you’ll want. I’ll
close in against the week’s done,” the words met the bird-singing of the
trill that twittered over them and brooded them in kindness. Her mind
was suffused with half-knowing, drunk with sense, but her fingers knew
their cleverness and the trill lived on while she floated in the reality
of consenting fiber and essence. “His strength, it’s what I need after
all,” she said wisely, looking at the chin-piece of the instrument,
looking at the threads of the bow, her mouth speaking coolly above the
languor of her blood. A day two weeks earlier reappeared to be lived more
minutely than in its first appearing, and another day later. The present
week cried out for recognition; he had sent her a note from Corinth and
another from Mayfair Church. He had called her by the telephone the night
before, “To hear the sound of you again,” saying, and “Three days and
I’ll come back. Mark on your calendar, you better.” The voices became
entirely real:
“You better mark on your calendar. It’ll be a red-letter day, against I
come, red for you.”
“Will it?”
“You’ll see. If you hadn’t wanted me you would ’a’ stopped me long ago.
You can’t say I didn’t warn you. You’ll see.”
“Will I?”
“You’ll see in three days’ time.”
* * * * *
Conway was coming into the parlor, her “Come” making a recitative as she
sang it against the continued trill. He looked at her appealingly and
stopped his ears against the shrill high notes.
“Getten ready for a contest?” he asked.
“What you want now?”
“You think too much about Albert. Too much to suit me.”
“Albert makes me think. He’ll be back tomorrow for sure.”
“He’s back today. He came back about one o’clock this evening to meet
some men here from up the state. Town’s full of men from up around
Fayette.”
“Is he? A sudden change, a new plan. He talked to me last night. He was
out at Johntown.”
“It’s about time you thought about me a little.”
“I think about you fifty times a day, Connie.”
“Call it fifty.”
Conway gathered into his unspecified vagueness and sat distraught in
his chair, or he arose and stepped lightly about the room, moving a
curtain here or drawing a bowl into the light of the setting sun, closing
a shutter, pushing the chair of the blue brocade into the kindest
manifestation of the light.
“What’s the good of fifty? What kind of fifty.”
“I think about you every time I think at all.”
“If you marry Albert I’ll go off and never come back. This town, it’ll
never see a sight of me again.”
“I wouldn’t want you to go.”
“Go, I will, you’ll see.”
“Well.”
“I’m like that. I couldn’t bear to see you marry Albert. I couldn’t bear
it. I’ll go so far this town’ll never hear a buzz of me while time lasts.”
“Marry? That’s a long way off. I wasn’t thinken about marry.”
“Go I will. You’ll see. A long piece from here. You’re the only thing
that keeps me here, you and my brother Reg.”
Reg was a good friend, a fine boy, she admitted. She looked vaguely at
the passing sunlight, speaking aimlessly of Reg.
“I don’t care much for a whole mob of people. Don’t wish nobody no harm,
but all the same ... I like you better’n anybody else on earth. I like a
few people in a big way. You and Reg most. You most of all. It came to me
about a month ago I liked you best, and nothing else I ever did in life
amounted to a rap. It seems like nothing else I ever did mattered nohow.
That’s how I look at it. I been studyen it out a right smart the last few
weeks. Not one other God’s thing I ever done matters now. No matter what
’twas.”
She arose quickly and walked toward the door. Albert would be coming
then, soon, the day’s work over. Conway walked toward the door beside her.
“Kiss me,” she said, leaning slightly near. “You will kiss me and go now.
Albert will be here soon. I have to go on an errand for Grandfather. I
don’t know what I’ll do. I haven’t been thinken about what you’re talken
about. You kiss me. Good-bye, Connie.”
* * * * *
Albert had come back then, sooner than he had expected. Visitors
from other counties where tobacco was grown had met in the town, and
men from the farms lying close about had been conferring with these.
Conway’s report of the busy day followed her through the house after his
departure. Young women had given their time to the growers’ project,
typing in the offices, writing letters, carrying the visiting farmers
from place to place in their cars. She had kept at home all day and the
trills had mounted; she had not known of the business in the town. “The
pool is something, but I am something else,” she thought. She made ready
for the call her grandfather had asked her to make for him.
When she returned from this errand Albert was at hand; he had been let in
by Horace and was sitting relaxed in his chair, recounting his day.
“I’m dead tired,” he said, when they were alone. He began to tell of
his journey through three counties. His eyes were weary and listless,
heavily troubled, and his voice was monotonous. Under his apathetic gaze
he seemed to be looking at her lazily or sadly, as if he were sad for the
weariness that now oppressed him.
“Back to Corinth, Monday that was, and then on to Mayfair.... Broke
an axle and got stuck in a mud hole.... On to Johntown.... Over to
Richelieu.... Back to Johntown.... By that time it was last night.” He
seemed to be looking at her with some extra vision that shone from under
the gaze of his shifting eyes.
“Already been all up in around Payne Lick and over beyond the Ridge. Over
into the far side of the river. Had no sleep for a week till last night.
Slept last night like a log.”
Theodosia sat on the chair of the blue cushions and the parlor was
arranged as Conway had left it, as he had settled it to the afternoon
light. Albert seemed suffused in sadness now, and the tale of his
wanderings in behalf of the farmers would scarcely hold together longer.
The end of the week had come and the end of his odyssey. The day in the
town with eminent speakers from outside followed, touched sparingly. He
had arrived soon after noon. He had worked all afternoon in one of the
offices, seeing men. There was a greater plan for coöperative selling on
foot, a tight pool. Finally he said:
“You know Florence Agnew?”
“Oh, yes, I know her.”
“Do you like her?”
“How do I know?... I don’t have to like her, do I?”
“What you think about her looks?”
“Oh, she’s a beauty, I guess. Yes, I’m sure of it. She’s a real beauty.”
“How many times you seen Florence?” he asked.
“All week. I’ve been to the reservoir when she was there and all over
town. At a party one day. Eight or ten times, a dozen maybe, I’ve seen
Florence, I reckon.”
“I’ve seen her only once.”
“Today?”
“All the rest of the day after I came. She was in Kirk’s office to write
for the pool men, she and Ruth and one or two more.”
She had reached for the fiddle and was touching the strings without a
sound. He said that he was tired as a dog and that he would go home and
go to bed. He looked at her covertly, oppressed with weariness or some
other burden. “I ought to ’a’ gone straight home, but I just thought I’d
drop by.” His old smile, touched with some bitterness or sadness, went
over his face for a moment and he took his hat from the table.
“So long,” he said. “I’m off.”
* * * * *
Albert and Florence were coming in at the doorway. It was the day after
his return. He was richly alive, his life leaping within him, and
Florence’s deep low voice was cutting to the end of the parlor, to the
end of the hallway, as Theodosia came down the staircase to meet them.
They were sitting on the black haircloth divan toward the piano, and
Theodosia sat on the blue chair opposite, giving them her searching
interest, questioning, lending her low laugh to their hearty laughter.
Florence Agnew’s lips had the ripples of water. “The flesh beside her
mouth is a pearl with life in it,” Theodosia was thinking, and the event
was gathering swiftly. Florence rested continually upon her beauty,
luxuriating upon it, and her quick eyes went frequently to Albert’s eyes
where they continued some former contact and some growing knowledge.
They were telling of the day before, of the afternoon spent among the
growers, and they had many incidents to recall, droll sayings, laughter,
droll prejudices, caricatures of close-handed men. When their eyes met,
Theodosia knew that she was forgotten. Once she arose quickly, murmuring
some apology, and left the room. She walked the length of the cabinets of
the Indian flints and looked through the glass, seeing nothing beyond.
She stared at a stone hatchet, seeing no meaning beyond the outline. When
she went back to the parlor they were sitting apart, Albert on the chair
by the window, and she knew from some look of ease that enveloped them
that they had had their caress. After that the talk lay quietly among the
matters of the town, gossip of this one or that, but it flowed back to
the farmers again and settled among the percentages and statistics.
“Is the pool assured?” Theodosia asked, and Albert seemed lost for the
moment in some remote shock, seemed dazed as she came back thus into her
former relation to the pool, to her interest in it. Her final report of
it came through Florence Agnew.
“Oh, yes, it is,” Florence said. “Isn’t it, Albert?”
“Oh, yes, a sure thing now. All set.”
Their eyes were building between them again and their laughter was
renewed. They went away laughing over the stories they had told,
retelling themselves. Theodosia let them pass beyond the door of the
room and then she began to push the chairs into place and to arrange the
shutters. She took her instrument from its case and tested a string, but
her ear was dead to tone as her limbs were dead to feeling. Then Albert
ran back through the doorway and stood beside her.
“You see how it is with me, Theodosia?”
“Yes.”
“I brought her here so’s you’d see. For yourself.”
“I see.”
“She’s out at the gate to wait for me.”
There was a quiet space while she drew at the string, her ear deaf to the
tone, but her fingers tinkering knowingly.
“Good-bye,” he said.
She had no reply for this. Her words were caught in her stiff throat,
whatever they might have been. He began to walk toward the door, going
slowly, on tiptoe, whispering something. He went toward the door
aimlessly, moving uncertainly, bent forward under some burden or pain.
Then he said, whispering from the doorway:
“Good-bye.
“Good-bye, Theodosia,” still whispering.
“Why, good-bye,” she said aloud, smiling toward him. “Good-bye, Albert.
Good-bye.”
* * * * *
Her hands were dull and wooden over the trills and she laid the
instrument aside. Fear and pain mounted in her mind and she wandered
over the house or sat stiffly in a chair. Fear that had been allayed
arose and multiplied, meeting other curious hurts and shames, meeting
pride in a vortex of confusion. Toward nightfall she went from the house
quickly and walked through Crabtree Lane, away from the chief avenue of
the town. She turned into Hill Street and passed among the small cabins
that were lined along the unpaved roadway. The people of the street were
leaning over their fences or sitting in their doorways. They looked
at her searchingly as she went by, their slightly averted eyes asking
what had brought her there. When she had passed ten or twelve cabins
she saw Americy sitting on a doorstep. There was a low gate before the
door of the house, and Theodosia came near to this and laid her hands
upon it before she was discovered. Americy was touching the strings of
a guitar uncertainly and making a chord or two, and as she strummed she
was singing softly. She looked up when the hands were shaken on the gate
and stopped her strumming, and when she saw Theodosia she cast her eyes
upward in surprised questioning and embarrassment.
“You need one chord more,” Theodosia said. “Let me show you. One chord,
like this.” She had gone within the gate and was sitting on the step
beside Americy now. “One chord more is all. To make the song go.”
“You needn’t to bother. I don’t play nohow. I was just a-picken a little
bit. I can’t play.”
“It’s like this,” Theodosia said. She sat on the step beside Americy and
took the guitar out of her hands. “You put in this one, and then the
first again, and see, it all rounds out and makes the song go better.”
The guitar felt greasy in her hands and it smelt of the brown girl’s
fingers. Americy was reticent, not eager to try the chord, afraid or
hostile, but Theodosia urged her to take the instrument again. When the
new chord was needed she placed the fingers on the strings, and Americy
yielded although her mind groped in a gloom and did not learn the new way
easily. Her brows were smooth and sharply cut but her mouth was heavy and
her chin dull and clumsy. The dark splotches on her face were much less
prominent than Theodosia had remembered.
“Who taught you to play?” Theodosia asked.
“A boy I know taught me, but I don’t play none nohow. I can’t play.”
“Where’s Lethe?”
“I don’t know. Somewheres down town.”
“Does Lethe live here with you?”
“What you want here? What you come here for?”
“I heard you play and I just stopped by.”
Americy fumbled with the new chord and found it. The other people of the
street had turned into their doors and the dark had suddenly come close.
Theodosia was searching for some pretext for returning and her mind
reverted to its loathing and gloated on its disgust. She wanted to see
Americy minutely, to search her to the roots of her life and her being,
and she dwelt on the chord hoping that it would yield a way. She lingered
over the latching of the gate, making efforts to approach the other,
turning her hands about on the deeply weathered pickets of the fence. She
thought that she might make some exchange with Americy on the basis of
the music and thus gain some commerce with her. She spoke easily when the
idea shaped itself into an offer, a direct appeal.
“I need somebody to do some work for me, a little laundry work,
crêpe-de-chine things, nightgowns, petticoats, slips. I’ll teach you the
chords in trade, if you’ll do it.” She bargained, encouraged by Americy’s
interest and willingness. “I’ll show you some chords you can use to play
a dozen songs, easy chords too.” Americy was acquiescent. They arranged
that Theodosia would bring the garments and come for them when they were
ready.
At home again Theodosia selected the clothing at once, some delicately
embroidered undergarments of silk, presents from Ruth and Jane. Beyond
her interest in the clothing she could not have a mind for any other
matter, and she sat beyond the curtains of an upper window looking down
on the street unseen, her eyes unseeing, nor would she answer any voice
that called up the steps to her. She carried the garments to Hill Street
the day after her first visit there. The small house was heavy with
steam and the odors of human sweat, of drying clothing. She was fearful
of Lethe, but she had gone in the early morning with the hope of seeing
her. Americy was cordial in her greeting. She leaned over the clothing
admiringly or she appraised the pieces to make an estimate of the time
they would require.
“If five’s too many,” Theodosia said, “I’ll leave only four, or maybe
three. How about four?”
“I’d as lief do five as not. Leave all, you can. I don’t mind.”
Lethe had come out of the kitchen and stood behind them. When Theodosia
turned about she was standing near looking over their arms at the
garments tossed upon the table. She was a matured woman, heavy-breasted
but light on her feet. Theodosia saw that she had not remembered her
face accurately, that she had remembered it too much in its attitude of
unpassionate refusal. Lethe was larger than Americy, more settled and
determined by life. Her hands were long, making long lines where they
lay, the one on her breast and the other at her hip, strong hands, but
little marked by their labor. Her face was long and was pointed slightly
at the chin, a heavy face, moving from moment to moment, changing from
curiosity, suspicion, hate, admiration, undefined emotions blended and
divided. She was darker than Americy. Her hair was combed back and
parted, but a few black kinky spirals of it resisted the parting and lay
on her forehead. She looked from Theodosia to the clothing on the table,
back and forth, and said in a low voice that came from one corner of her
lips:
“What is it she wants, Americy?”
“She wants these-here pieces washed.”
“Charge her a plenty,” she said.
“I’ll pay money,” Theodosia said, and she was ashamed then that she had
proposed any other bargain. She turned to Americy and said, “What’s it
worth, those pieces?”
“Miss Theodosia said she’d teach me how to play,” Americy said.
“What does she want here?” Lethe said.
“Have you time enough to play the chords now, Americy?” Theodosia asked
quickly. “Get the guitar. Where is it?”
Americy had remembered the chords from the last teaching although she was
shy to sing the song through before Lethe’s hostile presence. She hummed
the tune, sitting on the edge of the bed. Theodosia glanced down then and
saw the small frayed foot-mat under Americy’s feet and saw that the room
was cluttered with poor, ill-used things, a chair rudely mended, another
chair that had lost its under-structure and was propped upon a small box.
The walls had been roughly plastered and were hung with ugly and useless
bric-à-brac, cast-away ornaments from the homes of the whites. A red
plush couch behind the door was neatly laid with ironed clothing.
“Lethe sang it along with me last night,” Americy said. “It goes a sight
better if two sing. Lethe can sing a right smart better’n I can nohow.
Lethe can sing.”
“Come on, Lethe, and sing,” Theodosia said. “Americy says you can sing.
Come on.”
“I can’t no such thing,” Lethe said, but her manner was more warm. She
moved away toward the small fireplace, her hands now folded under her
bosom, her mind set upon some pleasant inner sense of herself, her steps
slow and aimless. “I can’t sing so fine as Americy makes out.”
Lethe went into the other room of the cabin and did not return. Theodosia
sang the song with Americy and then showed her two chords more, and
tried to teach her to tune her instrument. “I’ll pay you money too for
the work,” she said. “How’d I ever come to forget that?” Americy seemed
aimless and pale after the passion of the older woman. While Americy
struggled with the chords a man came in at the door, a strong dark man
in the prime of life. He glanced a moment toward Americy as he stood by
the closed door and became slightly deferential when his glance fell upon
Theodosia, but his manner was familiar as he walked across the floor and
took some small thing from the bureau, as he passed into the inner room.
“You don’t need to pay no money,” Americy said. “We’ll have it like we
said we would.”
“Do you and Lethe live here? Nobody else?” Theodosia asked.
“Me and Lethe. And Ross.”
“What’s Lethe’s name? Is Lethe married?”
“Her name is the same as mine is, Froman. That’s her name. Lethe Froman.
Or she goes by the name of Lethe Ross.”
Theodosia went soon after. She left Americy standing by the table picking
at the delicate laces of the garments with pleased scrutiny.
* * * * *
Sitting above in her chamber she saw the hill fields beyond the town as
the light of the sunset withdrew from the valley and spread laterally
over the plowed spaces that were ready now for the tobacco and the corn.
Her own uncertainty spread to become the uncertainty of the passing light
that lingered wanly, renewed itself, or was diffused into the somber
twilight. Presently she was looking out upon the uncertainty of trees and
gloom which was lit in feeble masses here and there by the street-lights.
Long after this she prepared for bed by the indefinite light of her lamp,
which made a hard and futile glow that subtended remote black shadows.
When she slept the hour was late. She fell into a confused dream that
centered about Albert, who leaned toward her from a bank giving her
flowers that he had plucked from beyond a fence, who walked before her
down a long hall, passing farther away, moving toward the inevitable
disaster of doors. Beyond this vivid image lay another, vaguely merged
with it but more remote, a picture under a picture, a large awkward
collie dog floundering before her in a path, moving away from her toward
some fixed limit, and in her inner being lay a disgust of him and a
loathing that fulfilled itself in a sudden sob of thankfulness when he
passed beyond her view. The passing form became then Conway with a laugh
in his eyes and pleasure in his words, but when he leaned near her to
kiss he became Albert, who caught her away into an unhappy fulfilment for
which she wept even in the deep trance of dream.
Later, long after, it seemed, into her sleep came a flat muffled sound as
if it were the shape of a peal of alarm, falling long and dull against
the enduring quality of her torpor. It was shaped, the sound, like the
fire alarm of the town, insistent and reiterated, but it fell toneless
upon her deadened senses. It seemed to her that she had slept very long
when it came again, that it was more perpetual, blurred into her dream
with matter that clotted and cluttered weary thought, timbers laid into
mind, shapeless and unwieldy masses set into a mind fixed upon sleep. A
brief annoyance arose with each curiously shaped flat tone, annoyance
that any matter should reiterate itself as if it had importance above any
other matter, but she did not stir in her bed or know any real beyond the
cluttering wooden masses of cry that had some relation to the village
fire alarm, some foolish senseless likeness. When the shapes finally
ceased she became aware of their withdrawal and missed them with a small
distress that half awakened her, but later she slept again.
* * * * *
Conway was burned to death that night when his father’s house was
destroyed. Theodosia had the news of this disaster from Siver when he
came to kindle the fire in her grate; there was a hint of late frost
in the air. She waked from unrested sleep when Siver fumbled with the
wood and the coal, when he fumbled with the door latch. She turned on
her pillow as he waited at the doorway, as he looked away from the bed
uncertainly, his head leaned forward, preparing a disclosure.
“What is it?” she asked. She knew he had something to tell. “Tell it,
Siver. Has Aunt Bet got a misery this morning? Do you have to cook the
breakfast?”
He told her then as he worried with the latch. Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house
had burned. “Towarge midnight,” he said.
“Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house,” he said. He lingered at the door, half
closing it, drifting in and out of the doorway, looking at the floor
where the bright light of the fire danced in brilliant yellow, averting
his eyes from her.
She was sitting up in the bed now, the coverlets thrown aside, her
passion to know what Siver had been saying over and over leaping the
space that had been set between them by their offices as mistress and
houseman. She asked rapid questions, impatient of the replies which came
as if they had been known before, came to her ears as routine once the
first great fact had assailed her.
“Mr. Conway, he got burned up too, got burned to death in the house,
clean to death,” Siver said.
He stood in the doorway, rubbing his hand on the wood of the frame,
mumbling his story over and over beyond the low flare of her repeated
questions. Suddenly her mind became clear again after the fog of
surprise. It was true that Siver had dreamed the story.
“You dreamed all this, Siver. You’re not awake yet.”
“You can smell the smoke out in the trees for your own self and you can
smell the burn outside, if you go out. They got his body out towarge day
and put it in a coffin and took it over to Mr. Eli Brooke’s house, his
uncle’s house. You can see the smoke out in the trees and you can smell
of the fire....”
The report was then a confirmation; the coffin, when Siver spoke of it,
settled the truth into her. She arose and dressed herself for the day and
later she met the music teacher in the parlor and played the lesson with
mechanical care.
When the obligation of the lesson was done she went to her room and later
she lay on her bed to stare at the ceiling until her grief took shape.
At first there were three Conways to play back and forth in her mind,
the Conway of the first fact, as he had been Friday evening and many
another evening, charming, negligent, beautiful to see, kissing her at
the door, flinging her a smile from beyond the lamp. Over against this
lay the awful second fact, Conway a charred, shrunken ember lying in
a coffin which no one dared open, which would never again be opened.
This was Conway. Up the street half a mile, in an avenue of trees to a
doorway, through a hall and a parlor, and there lay the horrible fact.
She was not afraid of it. It was real, there, never to be denied, and if
he could endure it so could she. The second fact was hers now. The third
fact grew together, gaining strength as the minutes passed, dominating
all the rest. This was Conway become a memory. The third fact had already
begun to supplant the first. The fact of him as a memory, as finished,
as perpetual now and unchanged, stole over the first and dimmed it. At
this recognition she wept with more pain and reached for the first fact
with greater eagerness, but the third prevailed until the first became an
utter shadow and went before the day was done.
She lay on her bed, spent with weeping, remembering now the alarms
of the night and knowing that they had been the last cry of Conway’s
circumstance. She probed her memory of the night to penetrate its
knowledge for every substance and sound, and she remembered the flat
toneless matter that had cluttered her rest. She turned continually to
Albert as the one who must give her comfort and ease her pain, and her
longing for him became perpetual. She knew that he had gone across the
state on some mission, but she thought that he would come to Conway’s
funeral when he learned of the disaster. Over and over she decided that
she would send him a message telling him to come, and she thought of his
grief as identical with her own. Conway had been their friend, Albert’s
first, and through Albert her own. She would weep anew to recall how
much the two of them had loved Conway. But she kept to a passive rôle
and sent no message. Albert did not come. He had been traveling all week
into remote countries and was not easily reached by the telegraphed
communications which someone sent.
The days passed slowly while her life seemed suspended in grief, days
scarcely noticed until many of them were gone and Conway had become the
last fact utterly, had achieved dissolution. He lay intangible now among
the elements of a past that had slipped by while she was unaware.
* * * * *
Jane Moore came once or twice after she and Theodosia had sat together
to talk of Conway’s death, but presently she was occupied with other
friends who lived out the Olivet Pike and with these she had begun to go
to Sulphur Springs, where there was a hotel and a pavilion for dancing.
Frank would come to sit, stopping on his way from the town, or he would
offer a bit of rowing on the pool beyond the fairgrounds. She went again
and again to see Americy, and she would sit quietly on the chair opposite
while Americy ironed for an hour, watching her motions and her changing
face. Americy would talk with a slight embarrassment of one thing and
another, and Theodosia would look intently at her skin, her looks, her
clouded eyes, her hand on the iron, the still veins in her moving wrist
where the blood must surely throb. A faint sickness would spread over
her, so delicate as to be scarcely perceived, but she would cling to her
act of penetration, probing to come nearer to the life under the brown
flesh. She would watch Americy’s finger bones as they articulated in
moving the iron and in settling the linen in a smooth path before her.
She would ask all she dared of her life, her men, her lovers.
“Who’s your fellow now, Americy?”
“Aw, go on!”
“Your man, who is he now?”
“I got no man now.”
“You got a beau, you know you have.”
In the word, beau, she would edge away from a direct scrutiny of
Americy’s affairs, diverting the question to gain more space for the
discussion. “You know you’ve got a beau. Who takes you places?”
Americy was embarrassed. “I goes by my own self. I don’t need no beau.”
Looking at Americy’s drooping eyelids she would try to detect the nature
of her wish, her pleasure, to go into her bosom and know its need, into
her body, her limbs, her passive presence. Americy had had many men,
that she knew. Did she have more than one at a time, she would wonder,
and again she would plead with the brown veins at the wrist above the
smoothing iron, with the swaying gestures of the hand above the board,
to know what was the quality of the passion that bent Americy to her way
of life, pity and pride and tenderness making within herself an emotion
which might have been called love. Lethe was usually gone from the
house, for she was working as a cook somewhere. If she were at hand she
kept aloof, but even in her absence she was more easily comprehended as
holding more direct passions.
“You could bring your clo’s for me to do same as always,” Americy said.
“You learned me to play and I’d as lief as not do up your clo’s all time.”
Americy had mastered the chords slowly, but she liked to drone the songs
that were sung at the church, and Theodosia helped her to set the tunes
to the guitar—_Beulah Land_, _I Saw My Jesus_, _Tell It Again_, _Come
Sinner Come_, and _Glory to His Name_. Once when Theodosia saw her own
face in the dim glass above Americy’s bureau she searched it there,
in this strange place. “Lethe hates me,” she thought on the instant,
seeing her thin curving lips. It seemed to her that she lived with only
a part of her being, that only a small edge of her person lifted up into
the light of the day. “Lethe hates me,” she thought, and her mind was
fascinated by Lethe’s strong will and by her indifferent enmity that
was manifested by her continued absence from the cabin. Feeling herself
a commonplace, she left the music when the needs of it were satisfied
and went again to sit before Americy’s ironing table and listen to her
reserved disclosures. “What am I to her?” she would question, searching
into the relation of flesh to flesh.
She turned again and again to Albert, remembering Conway, clung to him
in her suffering and implored him silently to come to her, to reconcile
her to the loss. He was from the town much of the time, but, returned,
he was seen continually with Florence now. Theodosia rejected Florence
from her passion; since Conway’s loss she was of no account although
she was allowed, recognized. Albert might choose and have whomever he
would; this was no matter. But continually she listened for his step on
the gallery floor and for his voice in the hallway. Walking to Americy’s
cabin in the bright sun of a midday, she would suddenly see his strong
firm hand, sunburned and full of power, taking its heavy certain being in
gestures or in quiet. She thought that he would surely come some day to
sit quietly with her, to talk with her sadly of Conway. She determined
that she would contrive to see Albert again although each plan for an
encounter was at once rejected. Americy would push her iron over a reach
of damp cloth and leave a smooth trail of steaming surface behind,
delicately pleased but embarrassed at the visit, and she would talk
guardedly, disclosing as little as she might of her life and the life of
Lethe. Sitting before her, watching the magic of the iron as it turned
rough garments into smooth, Theodosia would know that she must somehow
meet Albert again, that she would send him some message which would bring
him to her door.
Once when she had brought her freshened clothing home, when she unrolled
the papers from about it and prepared it for the drawer, she saw that
a garment had been torn apart. The frayed piece was an underslip which
was decorated with lace and fine stitchery. It had been torn open by an
angry hand; one great tearing motion had sundered it from the hem to
the embroidered upper portion where the enforced stitching had given
it strength to resist the angry rending hands. It was frayed in many
directions when renewed strength had been set upon it, and she knew that
it had stood in the way of some quarrel between Americy and Lethe, that
it had been torn apart by Lethe’s hands. She tossed the destroyed garment
into a trash basket.
She returned over and over to her need to have Albert come, to have him
satisfy some longing by coming through her door and sitting a half-hour
in her parlor, but each suggestion her mind made toward the promotion of
this imperfectly formed wish was repelled. Her divided wishes, the one
prompted by her scorn of him, the other by her strange need, defeated
each other continually. Once in a moment of clear-seeing she thought,
with a flash of cruel wit, that her real need of him was her need to
express to him her contempt of him and her indifference of his way, but
this moment was fogged as, day after day, her sense of him yearned
toward him. She knew of his coming and going, in and out of the town,
with intuitive accuracy. But one day the news of his marriage with
Florence spread over the town. They had gone away together and would live
thereafter in Lexington, Albert’s work being now centered in that city.
* * * * *
It seemed to her that some barrier had come between her and the violin,
as if the instrument were vaguely at fault in that it had allowed some
intrusion. At intervals some words of the teacher had touched on the
limits of the capacity of her hand. Casually once, as she turned the
pages of some catalogue and wrote numbers on a paper, the teacher had
said, “Beyond you,” or again, “The fingering beyond your reach,” or “Out
of your reach.” These phrases built a deep unrest in Theodosia’s days.
She went to sit before Americy’s iron and talk of Americy’s life, her
hymns, her revivals, her chords, her work. As a commonplace having some
relation to the early summer, she arose each morning and set about her
tasks. Her playing was tentative, obeying only the suggestions of the
teacher, withdrawing from searchings and explorations. The instrument
had retreated from her old knowledge of it. She accomplished with skill
all that the teacher required and heard the praise she earned with a
leap of satisfaction within. She rested upon her perfections where they
lay bounded and within her degree, and she surpassed herself at the
designated tasks.
She went to the hill overlooking the town, to the spot where Conway was
buried, taking Frank to walk there with her. The grave was near the brow
of the hill on the side that sloped back from the town, slightly under
the top of the rise where the enclosure looked toward the hill farms
beyond. She walked about in the summer grass, which was tall now, much of
it in blossom, and she heard in some dim way the talk Frank made as he
sauntered by her side, as he spoke of Conway, of the grass, of the pine
trees, as he quoted something about pines and grass. The high points of
the town stood visible off to the north, and the church steeples arose
among the tall trees, and a bit of the roof of the Seminary. To the south
the graves dipped up and down with the flow of the near hillside and fell
away at a fence where a rose clung, but beyond the rose lay a field of
oats, ready to cut. It was a strange place in which to find Conway, and
a renewed aspect of him arose with a new flavor. The mockingbird that
sang on the fence near the rose began to partake of him. The tall grass
waved in the late afternoon sun, swaying about throughout the entire
graveyard, even over the new mould that had covered him but a few months.
The town stretched away to an immeasurable distance, and the song of the
mockingbird became the atmosphere one breathed, a touched substance,
giving life to the breath of man, set about the earth to flow with the
winds. The tall swaying grass with its sunlight was the people of the
earth, the reason for the continuance of the world. When Frank spoke she
folded his words together, having subtracted from them their meaning, and
dropped them over the brow of the hill beyond the reach of the grass,
beyond the mockingbird’s song.
“This grass needs to be cut, I declare,” he said. “It’s a shame. It looks
as bad as a wilderness.”
“It’s tall. Everywhere. In bloom,” she said. “There might be a field-lark
somewhere.”
“It’s the fault of the committee. There are some things....”
She had folded his words together at the moment of her reply and dropped
them beyond the sublimated air of the hilltop. The third fact of Conway
prevailed now to its last power and had shared now with every beautiful
object which her mind might entertain. The former world had departed,
shrunken to a minute size in its going, flattened to commonplace, gone
with the departed town, the old air, the trite matter of talk. Because
she had never before brought Conway into this intense relation with
the song of a bird and with the grass, the act brought him nearer each
instant. The sense of her losses lay above the hilltop world which was
aerated by the mockingbird’s song, and it spread as a cloud drawing
nearer, a desolation as yet to be realized.
“Everybody liked him,” Frank said. “He was just like his brother
Reginald. Everybody likes Reg. It was careless to leave a lamp all night
under an incubator, wasn’t it? It’s queer nobody heard the explosion.”
“Let’s sit here a little while, under this pine tree. On the grass.”
“I went to the creek to fish one summer with a party, Conway in the lot.
I remember how we laughed and talked all the best part of a night once,
a big log fire, and how Conway looked, by the fire, in the light of the
blaze. Laughed till he shook all over when Albert told the one about the
deacon up at Elijah Church. Did you ever hear Albert tell about Deacon
Pope’s prayer?”
“No. Or maybe I have. I don’t know.”
She sat under the pine tree, inattentive to Frank’s story, lost in a haze
of grief which was no less ever-present because she did not know exactly
where it centered. She knew that if Frank had not been present she should
actually have wept, but that he held the flow of her grief intact with
some hushing power, that his presence called for definite tears, exactly
wept, committed to a future which she had now obliterated.
Alone in her room when the walk was over, she remembered the beauty of
the hilltop and the sublimated air of the bird’s song, and the grass
that swung backward in the late afternoon sunlight. As her memory
grew more intense, dwelt upon, the intensity of her grief multiplied,
gathered now into a passion for Conway, whom she was free to mourn and
long for. She remembered every gesture and posture of his body, conned
each one to bring it back to being, and focused about his jealousy,
which had become precious now, and about his bitter, hurt replies, that
fell the more poignantly in that they were surrounded by his lightness
and carelessness. She was free to love him and to want him. Her hate of
Albert inverted itself and became an intense passion for Conway. She
searched for a small picture of him, turning out boxes and drawers in a
state of violent grief which centered half the night about the finding
of this small physical token. When she had found it she set it upon her
mantel in the place of honor from which she had withdrawn pictures of
Albert, of Ruth, and of Jane.
Preoccupied with her grief she took less account of the town. Jane came
no more to sit on her piano bench and twitter at the notes of the music,
or if she came to the portico for a brief call she seemed business-like,
abstracted, mirthless. Ruth had found diversions in another street. She
saw them clearly now. They had liked her sincerely, in their ways, but
they had liked her as a means of access to Conway and Albert. They had
poured their friendship over her for this.
* * * * *
She practised in her chamber now, above the street, close to the lower
boughs of the great elm tree, remote from interruption, and in her zeal
Conway kept with her in mind, delighting with her in each graceful
run and in each whispering trill. She would speak to him continually,
commenting on each effort and each achievement, assuming him in mind
as a companion. “You hear that?” she would say, or “How’s that for a
few first-hand remarks on the joy of being above the ground? Of running
around the wheel of the seasons?” Or, inarticulate before what she
did, articulating only with the cry of the strings, she felt such rush
of impulse as would say: Here in this succession of sound cries out a
sorrow greater than our personal sorrows, the sorrow of the whole of
man at finding himself in an earth addicted to time. As would say: Here
in the adagio man spreads out the infinite tentacles of his multiform
being, his personality, and lays, kind for kind, each sensitive feeler
upon a like that protrudes from the Source. As would say: This theme,
a pastoral from some central-European rolling plain, is ours as we sit
in the heart of this land where the seasons rise and fall in waves, a
melancholy procession, and men mark their time with their labor as they
roll the soil over from year to year endlessly plowing. Conway was with
her in these articulations, in the breath of her throat, in the beat of
her right hand over the gut wires. The people went by, fluttering to the
county fair and back, and August was over. A disaster from the outside
world, reported, passed over the town and left a ripple of hysteria.
Theodosia played in her chamber, except on the day set for the appearance
of her master, above the shock of the street, above the calamity,
relating her carefully guarded playing, guardedly within its bounds, to
Conway. The town had begun to rumble of a mishap of its own.
Through the buying and selling of the town, the greetings and passings
here and there, a mishap had begun to be felt. A young woman, a girl
named Minnie Harter, was known to be bearing a child. Whispers of this
had floated over the gossip of the streets and the porches. Minnie was a
plump soft girl who limped slightly when she walked. She lived with her
parents at the end of the street, near the house where Conway had lived.
Whispers said that she had had too many intimates. The long roadway up
the avenue under the trees now led to Minnie’s door as the shock of her
ill-doing mounted and frayed out to a settled fact. The rumor of Minnie
came upon Theodosia as she worked over the adagio one summer morning,
or it faintly colored her sense of her act as she darned the household
linens that were now worn and thin. Looking intently at the lapping
threads of the cloth as she darned, she penetrated the folding lines
of cotton, one up and one down, over and over, they unsatisfied and
completed in one instant, and she searched minutely into the flash of
recognition that had accompanied her first seeing when reality had lain
on the instant just behind the warp and weft of these accurately braided
lines of old worn cloth. “Some truth is near at hand,” she thought,
striving to regain the acumen of the lost moment. She became more cool
and more abstracted, passing to another mood regarding her playing, as
if some cold disinterested part stood outside herself. In this temper
she searched into the limitations of her hand, at the end of an hour of
duos with her master, and pried out each truth, flinching from nothing,
testing her reach as if it were the reach of some other musician, some
hand remote from her in which she had only a curious interest.
“And that marks the limit of what you can do in that direction.... Your
mind can go beyond your hand....” The master made her points clear.
Theodosia leaned over the instrument, her mind cool before these words,
a sensation as of a keen blade cutting a cold path down her back near
her spine. “Then I’ll make a new instrument,” her sad arrogance said.
Determination yielded nothing before the words of her master. “I’ll not
be stopped,” she said. “If this instrument can’t serve me.... I’m still
here.”
At practice her mind turned continually to Conway, relating to him the
curious limitations of musical machines, tools, implements, and retold to
him her predicament in half-amused despair that yielded nothing. “We’re
here,” she said, addressing Song, taking Conway with her as she walked
impudently up to the face of Song. “They can remake the thing,” she said.
“They must make a new kind.... You’re not done with us yet.”
The summer was passing. Mr. Reed called on Anthony again, sitting with
him in the shade of the gallery, and after his departure Theodosia
felt the renewed distress that had settled over her grandfather’s day.
Ruth Robinson came but seldom now, or if she came she seemed vague,
matter-of-fact, unlovely, preoccupied, ready to go soon after her coming.
“Ours is a dull house now,” Theodosia thought, and she turned again to
her grandfather’s need. She decided to stop her lessons for a time, for
she was afraid that the bill would never be paid. She scarcely dared
to give her distrust of her grandfather’s further ability to pay as a
reason for her act, and so she asked for a vacation. She was in need of a
rest, she said. She stressed her weariness and recalled that the summer
had been very warm. Having established the season of vacation with the
teacher, she said, “I will pay whatever is owed. You may send the bill to
me.”
One or two students had applied to her for tuition, and presently another
came, boys who were too immature in their talent to interest her own
teacher, and she thought that after a little she might find a class
of beginning students in the town. She practised many hours, relating
her playing over and over to her devotion to Conway, glancing at his
beautiful pictured face. “We’re here,” she said, addressing Song with her
mind where the value of a phrase was tasted even before it was played and
where harmonies were heard. She took delight in the lyric quality of the
instrument and in her running fingers, and she had a pensive happiness
in the running, singing parts she played, or she supplied a second-fiddle
part in her thought, her ear leaning inwardly to listen. The whispers of
the town came but faintly into her intense preoccupations. “I can’t be
called upon to decide the paternity of Minnie Harter’s young one,” she
said, addressing the town as she set her bow over the strings, a cruel
saying, as she knew, as she commented upon all cruelty then with plucked
wires. “Her lameness has set her apart,” the plucked strings said, “and
her isolation has made her wanton.”
“A smart say-so,” her own lips replied to the last speaker. “It’s easy to
summarize other people in their talents and ways. It’s all, likely, not
so easy to Minnie Harter herself.” The dialogue continued.
The whispers of the town became less hushed. They began to penetrate her
chamber or to meet her in her walks, to meet her in Frank’s diligent
talk of other matters. The settled fact, accepted by the town, came
accidentally upon her in her passing to and fro, came from Aunt Bet,
from Siver’s shuffled tread and shifted glance, from Americy’s lowered
eyelids. Horace brought the last bold word, the summary. Minnie Harter
had called out a name in the hour of birth.
“I see by the papers that Conway was acquainted with Minnie,” Horace
said. “Did you know Minnie, Dosia?”
“Oh, yes. At school, I knew her.”
“Oh, incomparable brown eyes and the lispen tongue. Just enough limp to
make her, you might say, appealen. ‘Oh, wait for me, Minnie,’ and her
walk said, ‘I’ll wait.’ Conway knew Minnie. All the town in a whisper.
Simplest thing on earth. Not worth one damn ‘hush.’ Easy to know and
lived next door.”
“The story they tell, it’s not true,” she said softly. “It’s not true.”
Some part of her knowledge of which she had not been taking account
seemed to be speaking to her suddenly out of a confused dark, speaking,
rejecting, foretelling. Indignation and pain clouded her thinking, and
her protective sense surrounded all that was left of Conway so that she
spoke angrily, arisen now to become a flame of anger. “It’s not true.
Minnie Harter lied. What is there to do?... In the face of the town what
can I do?”
* * * * *
Her business with the three students occupied very much of her time,
for she helped them generously with their practice. She knew that the
report Minnie Harter had made was not true. It might have been true
in the nature of the earth, but it was not in this case true. On the
second day after her talk with Horace she knew again within herself that
the report was untrue. She was busy all day mending undergarments for
Anthony. Cotton cloth drawn together with sewing thread, scrutinized
minutely, told her a final thing about the form of yarn which was in
reality floating undevised lint brought into a line by spinning, bound
together in a knitted chain of net. The lint floated from the design in
a continual wasting, perpetual dissolution, and her own mind strove to
bind its own threads, to regather its lint and impose some well-knit
conclusions into the chaos. On the third day she knew again that the
story was untrue. Minnie Harter had, she divined, claimed Conway as it
were out of the grave to give herself a posthumous romance, a right
lover. With this story she would arise in dignity in the town. The infant
had been still-born and after a little all but the richly tragic parts of
the drama would be forgotten.
Passing in her room, Theodosia observed that she had removed Conway’s
picture from her shelf although she scarcely remembered the act. It had
been put into a box of photographs, taken up without passion and slipped
inside the cover of the box at some casual moment between coming and
going. She laughed once a swift, cruel laughter that bent downward the
corners of her mouth at the spectacle of two women quarreling over a dead
man, herself one. She discovered that she had no quarrel beyond that
induced by friendly loyalty. A suspicion grew in the arising confusion
of her thought that her own posthumous passion for Conway had been
identified with her lost hope of the fiddle, with her tenderness and
self-love that had been shielding her limitation from inner examination
and despair. The story remained untrue, but Conway grew remote for her,
increasing in remoteness as three days wore away. The shock of the
argument opened new vistas down into the dark of her inner thought. She
remembered him tenderly, as dead, as wronged in his grave. She thought of
him less often.