WE CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND US
It was a warm spring afternoon when we closed the door behind us for the
last time, and took the car for Church Hill, where we had rented several
rooms on the first floor of the house with the enchanted garden. As the
car descended into the neighbourhood of the Old Market, with its tightly
packed barrooms, its squalid junk shops, its strings of old clothes
waving before darkened, ill-smelling doorways, I seemed to have stepped
suddenly backward into a place that was divided between the dream and
the actuality. I remembered my awakening on the pile of straw, with the
face of John Chitling beaming down on me over the wheelbarrow of
vegetables; and the incidents of that morning--the long line of stalls
giving out brilliant flashes from turnips and onions, the sharp, fishy
odour from the strings of mackerel and perch, the very bloodstains on
the apron and rolled-up sleeves of the butcher--all these things were
more vivid to my consciousness than were the faces of Sally and of Aunt
Euphronasia, or the fretful cries of little Benjamin, swathed in a blue
veil, in the old negress's lap. I had meant to make good that morning,
when I had knelt there sorting the yellow apples. I had made good for a
time, and yet to-day I was back in the place from which I had started.
Well, not in the same place, perhaps, but my foot had slipped on the
ladder, and I must begin again, if not from the very bottom, at least
from the middle rung. The market wagons, covered with canvas, were still
standing with empty shafts in the littered street, as if they had waited
there, a shelter for prowling dogs, until my return. Mrs. Chitling's
slovenly doorstep I could not see, but as we ascended the long hill on
the other side, I recognised the musty "old clothes" shop, in which I
had stumbled on "Sir Charles Grandison" and Johnson's Dictionary. That
minute, I understood now, had been in reality the turning-point in my
career. In that close-smelling room I had come to the cross-roads of
success or failure, and swerving aside from the dull level of ignorance,
I had rushed, almost by accident, into the better way. The very odour of
the place was still in my nostrils--a mixture of old clothes, of stale
cheese, of overripe melons. A sudden dizziness seized me, and a wave of
physical nausea passed over me, as if the intense heat of that past
summer afternoon had gone to my head.
The car stopped at the corner of old Saint John's; we got out, assisting
Aunt Euphronasia, and then turned down a side street in the direction of
our new home. As we mounted the curving steps, Sally passed a little
ahead of me, and looked back with her hand on the door.
"I am happy, Ben," she said with a smile; and with the words on her
lips, she crossed the threshold and entered the wide hall, where the
moth-eaten stags' heads, worn bare of fur, still hung on the faded
plaster.
My first impression upon entering the room was that the strange
surroundings struck with a homelike and familiar aspect upon my
consciousness. Then, as bewilderment gave place before a closer
scrutiny, I saw that this aspect was due to the presence of the objects
by which I had been so long accustomed to see Sally surrounded. Her
amber satin curtains hung at the windows; the deep couch, with the amber
lining, upon which she rested before dressing for dinner, stood near the
hearth; and even the two crystal vases, which I had always seen holding
fresh flowers upon her small, inlaid writing desk, were filled now with
branching clusters of American Beauty roses. Beyond them, and beyond the
amber satin curtains at the long window, I saw the elm boughs arching
against a pale gold sunset into which a single swallow was flying. And I
remember that swallow as I remember the look, swift, expectant, as if
it, also, were flying, that trembled, for an instant, on Sally's face.
"It is George," she said, turning to me with radiant eyes; "George has
done this. These are the things he bought, and I wondered so what he
would do with them." Then before something in my face, the radiance died
out of her eyes. "Would you rather he didn't do it? Would you rather I
shouldn't keep them?" she asked.
A struggle began within me. Through the window I could see still the
pale gold sunset beyond the elms, but the swallow was gone, and gone,
also, from Sally's face was the look as of one flying.
"Would you rather that I shouldn't keep them?" she asked again, and her
voice was very gentle.
At that gentleness the struggle ceased as sharply as it had begun.
"Do as you choose, darling, you know far better than I," I replied; and
bending over her, I raised her chin that was lowered, and kissed her
lips.
A light, a bloom, something that was fragrant and soft as the colour and
scent of the American Beauty roses, broke over her as she looked up at
me with her mouth still opening under my kiss.
"Then I'll keep them," she answered, "because it would hurt him so, Ben,
if I sent them back."
The colour and bloom were still there, but in my heart a chill had
entered to drive out the warmth. My ruin, my failure, the poverty to
which I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition,
and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on my
shoulders--all these things returned to my memory, with an additional
heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more
crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure
came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous
self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born to
the possession of all necessary things.
Sally drew the long pins from her hat, laid them, with the floating
white veil and her coat, on a chair in one corner, and began to move
softly about in her restful, capable way. Her very presence, I had once
said of her, would make a home, and I remembered this a little later as
I watched the shadow of her head flit across the faded walls above the
fine old wainscoting, from which the white paint was peeling in places.
Her touch, swift and unfaltering, released some spirit of beauty and
cheerfulness which must have lain imprisoned for a generation in the
superb old rooms. On the floor with us there were no other tenants, but
when I heard an occasional sound in the room above, I remembered that
the agent had told me of an aristocratic, though poverty-stricken,
maiden lady, who was starving up there in the midst of some rare pieces
of old Chippendale furniture, and with the portrait of an English
ancestress by Gainsborough hanging above her fireless hearth.
"The baby is asleep, so Aunt Euphronasia and I are cooking supper," said
Sally, when she had spread the cloth over the little table, and laid
covers for two on either side of the shaded lamp; "at least she's
cooking and I'm serving. Come into the garden, Ben, before it's ready,
and run with me down the terrace."
"The garden is ruined. I saw it when I came over with the agent."
"Ruined? And with such lilacs! They are a little late because of the
cold spring, but a perfect bower."
She caught my hand as she spoke, and we passed together through the long
window leading from our bedroom to the porch, where a few startled
swallows flew out, crying harshly, from among the white columns. Many of
the elms had died; the magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of a
few stately trees, had decayed on the terrace, and the thick maze of box
was now thin and rapidly dwindling away from the gravelled paths. On the
ground, under the young green of dandelion and wild violets, the rotting
leaves of last year were still lying; and as we descended the steps, and
followed the littered walks down the hill-side, broken pieces of pottery
crumbled beneath our feet.
Clasping hands like two children, we stood for a minute in silence, with
our eyes on the ruin before us, and the memory of the enchanted garden
and our first love in our thoughts. Then, "Oh, Ben, the lilacs!" said
Sally, softly.
They were there on all sides, floating like purple and white clouds in
the wind, and shedding their delicious perfume over the scattered rose
arbours and the dwindling box. Light, delicate, and brave, they had
withstood frost and decay, while the latticed summer houses had fallen
under the weight of the microphylla roses that grew over them. The wind
now was laden with their sweetness, and the golden light seemed aware of
their colour as it entered the garden softly through the screen of
boughs.
"Do you remember the first day, Ben?"
"The first day? That was when President lifted me on the wall--and even
the wall has gone."
"Did you dream then that you'd ever stand here with me like this?"
"I dreamed nothing else. I've never dreamed anything else."
"Then you aren't so very unhappy as long as we are together?"
"Not so unhappy as I might be, but, remember, I'm a man, Sally, and I
have failed."
"Yes, you're a man, and you couldn't be happy even with me--without
something else."
"The something else is a part of you. It belongs to you, and that's
mostly why I want to make good. These debts are like a dead weight--like
the Old Man of the Sea--on my shoulders. Until I'm able to shake them
off, I shall not stand up straight."
"I'm glad you've gone back to the railroad."
"There are a lot of men in the railroad, and very few places. The
General found me this job at six thousand a year, which is precious
little for a man of my earning capacity. They'll probably want to send
me down South to build up the traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina,--I
don't know. It will take me a month anyway to wind up my affairs and
start back with the road. Oh, it's going to be a long, hard pull when it
once begins."
Pressing her cheek to my arm, she rubbed it softly up and down with a
gentle caress. "Well, we'll pull it, never fear," she responded.
At our feet the twilight rose slowly from the sunken terrace, and the
perfume of the lilacs seemed to grow stronger as the light faded. For a
moment we stood drawn close together; then turning, with my arm still
about her, we went back over the broken pieces of pottery, and ascending
the steps, left the pearly afterglow and the fragrant stillness behind
us.
Half an hour later, when we were in the midst of our supper, which she
had served with gaiety and I had eaten with sadness, a hesitating knock
came at the door leading into the dim hall, and opening it with
surprise, I was confronted by a small, barefooted urchin, who stood,
like the resurrected image of my own childhood, holding a covered dish
at arm's length before him.
"If you please, ma'am," he said, under my shoulder, to Sally, who was
standing behind me, "ma's jest heard you'd moved over here, an' she's
sent you some waffles for supper."
"And what may ma's name be?" enquired Sally politely, as she removed the
red and white napkin which covered the gift.
"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she's
been a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."
"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to see
me."
"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew,
his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico,
with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist in
the back.
"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like a
taste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an'
she lives around the corner."
"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door
closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the
well-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"
"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It's
the poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"
This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very red
face, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs.
Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.
"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and at
the words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small,
half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were made
out of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thought
as you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo'
po' ma's--the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on the
mornin' arter I buried my man."
Placing the dish upon the table, she seated herself, in response to an
invitation from Sally, and spread her rusty black skirt, with a
leisurely movement, over her comfortable lap. As I looked at her, I
forgot that I stood six feet two inches in my stockings; I forgot that I
had married a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes; and I
remembered as plainly as if it were yesterday, the morning of the
funeral, when, with my mother's grey blanket shawl pinned on my
shoulders, I had sat on the step outside and waited for the service to
end, while I made scornful faces at the merry driver of the hearse.
"It's been going on thirty years sence yo' ma died, ain't it, Benjy?"
she enquired, while I struggled vainly to recover a proper consciousness
of my size and my importance.
"I was a little chap at the time, Mrs. Cudlip," I returned.
"An' it's been twenty, I reckon," she pursued reminiscently, "sence yo'
pa was took. Wall, wall, time does fly when you come to think of deaths,
now, doesn't it? I al'ays said thar wa'nt nothin' so calculated to put
cheer an' spirit into you as jest to remember the people who've dropped
off an' died while you've been spared. You didn't see much of yo' pa
durin' his last days, did you?"
"Never after I ran away, and that was the night he brought his second
wife home."
"He had a hard time toward the end, but I reckon she had a harder. It
wa'nt that he was a bad man at bottom, but he was soft-natured an' easy,
an' what he needed was to be helt an' to be helt steady. Some men air
like that--they can't stand alone a minute without beginnin' to wobble.
Now as long as yo' ma lived, she kept a tight hand on yo' pa, an' he
stayed straight; but jest as soon as he was left alone, he began to
wobble, an' from wobblin' he took to the bottle, and from the bottle he
took to that brass-headed huzzy he married. She was the death of him,
Benjy; I ought to know, for I lived next do' to 'em to the day of his
burial. As to that, anyway, ma'am," she added to Sally, "my humble
opinion is that women have killed mo' men anyway than they've ever
brought into the world. It's a po' thought, I've al'ays said, in which
you can't find some comfort."
"You were very kind to him, I have heard," I observed, as she paused for
breath and turned toward me.
"It wa'nt mo'n my duty if I was, Benjy, for yo' ma was a real good
neighbour to me, an' many's the plate of buttered muffins you've brought
to my do' when you wa'nt any higher than that."
It was true, I admitted the fact as gracefully as I could.
"My mother thought a great deal of you," I remarked.
"You don't see many of her like now," she returned with a sigh, "the
mo's the pity. 'Thar ain't room for two in marriage,' she used to say,
'one of 'em has got to git an' I'd rather 'twould be the other!' 'Twa'nt
that way with the palaverin' yaller-headed piece that yo' pa married
arterwards. She'd a sharp enough tongue, but a tongue don't do you much
good with a man unless he knows you've got the backbone behind to drive
it. It ain't the tongue, but the backbone that counts in marriage. At
first he was mighty soft, but befo' two weeks was up he'd begun to beat
her, an' I ain't got a particle of respect for a woman that's once been
beaten. Men air born mean, I know, it's thar natur, an' the good Lord
intended it; but, all the same, it's my belief that mighty few women
come in for a downright beatin' unless they've bent thar backs to
welcome it. It takes two to make a beatin' the same as a courtin', an'
whar the back ain't ready, the blows air slow to fall."
"I never saw her but once, and then I ran away," I remarked to fill in
her pause.
"Wall, you didn't miss much, or you either, ma'am," she rejoined
politely; "she was the kind that makes an honest woman ashamed to belong
to a sex that's got to thrive through foolishness, an' to git to a place
by sidlin' backwards. That wa'nt yo' ma's way, Benjy, an' I've often
said that I don't believe she ever hung back in her life an' waited for
a man to hand her what she could walk right up an' take holt of without
his help. 'The woman that waits on a man has got a long wait ahead of
her,' was what she used to say."
Rising to her feet, she stood with the empty plate in her hand, and her
back ceremoniously bent in a parting bow.
"Is that yo' youngest? Now, ain't he a fine baby!" she burst out, as
little Benjamin appeared, crowing, in the arms of Aunt Euphronasia, "an
he's got all the soft, pleasant look of yo' po' pa a'ready."
I opened the door, and with a last effusive good-by, she passed out in
her stiff, rustling black, which looked as if she had gone into
perpetual mourning.
"Will you have some syllabub, Ben?" enquired Sally primly, as the door
closed.
"Sally, how will you stand it?"
"She wants to be kind--she really wants to be."
Crossing moodily to the table, I pushed aside the waffles, the muffins,
and the syllabub, with an angry gesture.
"It is what I came from, after all. It is my class."
"Your class?" she repeated, laughing and sobbing together with her arms
on my shoulders. "There's nobody else in the whole world in your class,
Ben."