That was the first time Mr. Bixby unlocked the door and came down
the stairway to Julie, but it was not the last. Almost every evening
Elizabeth and Aunt Sadie went out to the moving pictures, and there
was no one in the house except Mr. Bixby upstairs and Julie in her
sitting-room below. Two or three nights after his first appearance
he came again. This time he offered a small excuse. “Could I trouble
you to lend me a pair of big shears?” he asked awkwardly. But after
she found a pair and put them in his hands, he stood and looked at
them uncertainly as though he did not know what to do with them, then
suddenly he flushed and laid the scissors back on the centre table.
“I wasn’t tellin’ you the truth,” he confessed abruptly. “I don’t need
your scissors. That wasn’t anything but just an excuse. But, someway I
can’t lie to you.”
Julie looked straight up at him. “You don’t have to,” she said simply.
“You don’t ever have to tell me anything but what’s the truth.”
With the words she came as it were into a place of peace. All the
whirling haste and nervous anxiety of her existence, all its terrors
and subterfuges, fell away, and left her still and secure.
She saw the tension of his face relax also.
“That’s so,” he said with quick relief. “That certainly is so, Miss
Julie. You’re one person I don’t have to try to fool.”
He seated himself in the plush rocker easily and naturally. “All my
life,” he went on, “I’ve been pretendin’ things. Puttin’ up a front an’
tryin’ to fool people into thinkin’ I’m something I ain’t.”
“I know. I always do it, too,” she answered. “I reckon it’s mighty
foolish of us.” She looked at him out of her wide gray eyes which were
kindled now with the light of discovery.
His face broke all at once into laughter. It was a whimsical trick
of his nature to experience a certain rueful mirth over his own
futilities. “Yes,” he assented, “it is foolish! But anyhow we don’t
have to do it with one another, do we,” he said, restating the fact.
“I’m kind of lonesome to-night, that was why I come down--I didn’t
really want the shears.”
“I know. I understand,” she answered again.
“My wife likes the movies. She goes to ’em ’most every night, but I
don’t care nothin’ about ’em. I don’t see what people finds in them.”
“I don’t either,” she confessed.
Thereafter they fell into easy and simple conversation. Indeed, why
should he not sit and talk a little while to her? He told her of the
small happenings of his day at the _News_ office and of the big and
terrible news of the world. He did not hasten to cover up any silence
with the clatter of talk. He spoke when he felt like it, sitting in the
plush rocker and watching her sew, and she replied--or was silent--as
she pleased. He stayed for a half-hour or so and then he rose.
“Well, I reckon it’s time for me to tell you good-night,” he said, and
slipped away up the stairs without further comment.
After that he came again and again. The house would be still,--as it
never was when Elizabeth’s noisy personality was at home,--Julie would
be sewing by her light, when she would hear the key turn in the lock
and his foot upon the stair. Once or twice he said, “I was kind of
lonesome; maybe you’ll let me sit here a spell,” but later he came
without even that preamble, simply saying, “Well, Miss Julie, here I
am,” and dropping into the plush rocker as though it were his place
that was waiting for him. At first his talk was only general news of
the day, but as their intimacy deepened they began to unfold themselves
to each other more and more. With all the rest of humanity they
continually had to pretend, dressing themselves in a garment of life
that was altogether too big for them. With others they were always on
the defensive, always erecting hasty barriers of reserve and shyness
behind which their sensitive personalities might retreat, but with each
other they were free; there they could be spontaneous and completely
true. Their real selves came forth and played about naturally and
easily in this intercourse of friendly comprehension. The key words of
their intimacy came to be, “I know, I understand,” spoken by her, or
“Yes, that’s the way it’s always been with me, too,” spoken by him.
If there fell a momentary constraint or embarrassment between them,
these words were all that were necessary to set them free again. And
in the finding of one another’s understanding they found themselves,
and a whole new world as well. This world emerged from under all the
difficulties and timidities of life as she had known it; from under the
strangled inhibitions from which he suffered. It was for them a world
that was large and beneficent, where they were big people who were
unafraid. It was difficult to put into words what they experienced, but
sometimes they groped about to find expression for it.
“Ain’t it strange?” he said. “When I open that door and come down the
steps, it’s more than just a door opening. It’s--it’s something in
myself. I open the door, and I see you sitting there under the light,
and--someway--I find myself when I find you. It’s like when I was a kid
and used to be scared in the dark. We lived in the country then, and
sometimes they’d send me down to the stable on errands after nightfall.
Coming back, the dark’ud all close in on me. I’d be so scared, I’d
seem to be getting smaller and smaller an’ bein’ smothered. I’d run
an’ stumble over things. An’ then all at once, I’d see the light from
the kitchen, and folks moving about inside, and everything’d be all
right. The dark would kind of draw off. I’d open all up inside, like
I’d been set free. An’ that’s the way it is when I come down the steps
an’ see you sitting here. It’s like I’d come home. I’m a bigger person
down here in this sitting-room than I am anywhere else. I mean to say,”
he hesitated, turning the thought over, “there’s more of me here than
anywhere else.”
“But it’s there all the time: I mean, what you really are is there, no
matter where you are,” she interrupted.
“Maybe so, but it don’t come out other places. You’ve got the key, Miss
Julie. I’ve got the key to the door, but you’ve got the key to what I
am.”
But for the most part they did not attempt to phrase it, accepting it
simply and easily. They had been cramped and terrified, constricted
into their smaller selves, by other people and by their own constrained
natures, and now this wider existence trembled into view: an existence
set free from fear, where they might be themselves and be happy; and
they seized upon it with avidity.
They almost never spoke of Elizabeth. Julie never did, and he but
rarely. “My wife’s gone out with Mrs. Johnson. She’s crazy about the
movies,” he sometimes said. Once he said, “I offered to go with her,
but she said I wasn’t good enough company. She’d rather have anybody’s
company but mine.”
“Well, if she leaves him every night like that, of course he’s
lonesome,” Julie thought sharply to herself.
They did not meet thus a great number of times--not more than six or
seven, all told. They wondered over the miracle of their friendship
and they rejoiced in the new life that it brought to them, yet they
spoke no word of love to each other. But there fell at last an evening
when the summer night had come down over Hart’s Run; when children
in pretty, clean frocks called to one another through the dusk; when
lovers would have walked the street, if it had not been a war year,
with most of the young men gone; when the whole village was relaxed
and at ease; and when Julie, sitting sewing by her light, heard the
key scrape in the lock, the creak of footsteps on the stairs, and in a
moment looking up saw Mr. Bixby before her, but with a face so strange
and pinched that she cried out, “What is it? What’s happened?”
He sat down in the rocker and looked at her for a dumb moment. Then he
spoke.
“It’s come; my draft call’s come. I got to go.”
“You got to go?” she whispered.
“I just got it from the post office. I got to go in the mornin’. She’s
out--my wife’s out. I ain’t told her yet. I came to you, Miss Julie.”
“You--you got to go in the morning,” she repeated blankly. Her work had
fallen in her lap, and the delicate folds were crumpled between her
clutched hands.
He nodded. “I got to go. They drafted me.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Julie swallowed spasmodically
once or twice, looking around the little room where their imprisoned
personalities had come together in the last weeks. Where they had found
one another, and in that finding had discovered their hidden selves.
Where their souls had ventured forth and found a whole new world
impinging marvelously upon their constricted everyday existence, and
where the timid and reserved room had taken on life from their life.
“You’re going away?” she faltered again, knowing that this world was
falling to pieces. She felt herself beginning to tremble all over.
“I got to go, honey,” he said, and stretched out his hand open to
her across the table. It was the first time he had used a term of
endearment--the first time he had stretched his hand to her. She
put her own swiftly into his. The two hands, small and thin, locked
together there upon the table. She did not look at him, she looked down
at their clasped hands in the light--hands that had miraculously found
each other out of all the tumult and terrors of life. Through the tears
that were beginning to burn into her eyes the hands looked dim and
uncertain. The trembling of her body ran down her arm into her fingers,
and communicated itself to his. A tremor shivered through their hands
as they clung together.
“I--I _got_ to go, ain’t I, little honey?”
There was a question in his tone now, and she looked up swiftly into
his face, the tears arrested and hanging upon her lashes. In his eyes
looking hungrily at her she read hesitation and dread. She forgot
herself in the realization of what was before him.
“You’re afraid,” she said abruptly.
His face flared darkly red, and he put his disengaged hand up before
his eyes. But in a moment he took it down and looked straight at her.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “Look at me, honey, I don’t mind your knowin’ it.
I _want_ for you to know. I want you to know just all I am. You’re the
only person in all the world I could ever speak about it to, but I want
you to know just the onery little feller I am. You’re my mother, an’ my
sister--you’re what I am. I can’t keep nothing back from you. I want to
lay my heart right out for you to see.”
“I know--I understand,” she whispered. She accepted his fear simply and
uncritically.
His hand tightened upon hers desperately. “I’m just a coward, honey,
just yeller. I’m afraid of the other fellers; they’ll guy the life
out of me. I’ll be everybody’s goat, I know it. _She_ said I would,
an’ it’s so. Maybe--maybe I can’t stand up to it any better than that
Chapin boy. An’ I’m afraid of goin’ over an’ of gettin’ killed. I want
for you to know it _all_--all I am! But--but it ain’t the first time
I’ve stood up and made myself do things I was scared of. I’ve _got_ to
go. Oh, Lord! Maybe I’ll pull through all right!”
“Why do you have to go?” Julie cried suddenly, violently. Then like
the breaking of a dam her words gushed out, tossing aside the mincing
phraseology of her mother’s training, and reverting to the tongue of
her mountain people. “What’s the world ever give you that you got to
stand up now an’ maybe be killed for it? What’s folks ever done for
you or for me that we got to please ’em now? Did they ever do anything
for you? They never done one thing for me! My mother an’ my father was
good to me--but they’re dead. An’ what’s other folks ever done for us?
Ain’t they always crowded us out into the cold an’ slammed the door in
our faces? They never let us in to life. They never even knowed we was
there. Or if they took notice of us, it was just to knock us out er the
road, er maybe stamp on us, or wrench us ’round the way they wanted us
to go.”
“That’s God’s truth,” he said slowly.
“Ain’t it always been so?” she rushed on. “Did they ever let you be a
real person? Wasn’t they always slappin’ you out into the cold? Even
when you was a child, did the other children ever let you in, an’ play
with you like they did one another? They never did me.”
“They never did me either,” he answered. “I was the outsider. They
always picked on me.”
“They tore my paper doll to pieces when I wasn’t doin’ one thing to
anybody, an’ all of ’em tramped it into the snow! Oh my God! It’s
been that way with both of us, always. All our lives we was pinched
an’ strangled, an’ thrown aside. They didn’t let us do any more’n
just cling to the edges of life. An’ then we found one another.” She
was crying now, and her words were cut in two by her gasping breath.
“We found one another--we found one another, an’ then we found life!
But _now_ they open the door and say, ‘Come on in.’ _Now_ they got a
use for you. _Now_ they’ll let you stand up an’ git killed for ’em.
They never opened the door to let you into life, but they’ve opened
it up wide for you for death! No,” she cried wildly, “_you_ don’t owe
folks nothin’! They never give us life--we’ve found life for ourselves
together! An’ now, just as we found it, they’d snatch hit away! You
don’t have to go!
“You don’t _have_ to go, do you?” she repeated.
He looked at her, dazzled by the flaming passion of her face. “We--we
could go away an’ hide somewheres together,” he ventured, uncertainly.
She stared back at him.
“What would they do to you if they caught you?” she demanded.
“I dunno.” He shook his head. “But--if we went--it would--you know it
would break your life all to pieces. If anything was to happen to me,
you couldn’t come back here.”
“I never had no life to break, ’til you came into it,” she cried. “I
never knew what life was. You’ve set me free! You’ve made me all I am.
We’ve made each other! Our life together--our love--it’s just all there
is! Oh God! Oh God!” she cried, “_Ain’t_ we got a right to it?”
He bowed his head down upon their hands on the table.
“My honey! My love! My little honey!” he cried.