And she pretended to be indignant. "Did I meet her? I like your
nerve! Do you suppose I'm not telling you the truth? She is coming
down to see you. She said to me, right out, as soon as I saw her,
'Are you still sore about--that?' I just said: 'About what?
Where've you been all the time? Why don't you write mother oftener?
She wants to see you. Come on down with me.' This was at the
station, mammie, just when I was coming home the other day. If she
comes down here to stay with us, what can anybody say about----?"
She held the situation in a tight grasp now. If any minute of those
busy days she had suffered one pang, remembering the desperate
Christmas a year ago, she had never once given a sign of it. Since
the day of her first accusation of her mother she had avoided the
subject of her paternity excessively. Emily, too, had been afraid of
it. She had told Martha firmly that she was not going to Chicago to
live with her. Martha, for fear she might make explanations, had not
argued the subject very far.
"I never would be content to live in Chicago, you know that, Martha.
Our roots are here; I'm too old to be transplanted. I won't leave
this house."
"But you get bored to death, mammie. You want to shriek sometimes.
You said you did yourself that night, at the doctor's. I hate to go
away and leave you here."
"Stay here then. This is your home."
"No. I've got to _do_ something. It's all right here, when there's
a party on, or something. But I couldn't stand it all the time. I'd
get to scrapping with dad, you know I would."
The very mention of Bob brought up possibilities of uncomfortable
remarks.
Martha hastened to continue.
"I'll come back just as often as I can. And you come and stay with
me as much as you can. And in June we'll go to Europe together.
Nobody can talk about that! And maybe you'll like it well enough to
stay a year or two with me there; lots of people do. And that's the
only place really to learn about furnishings and furniture."
Emily lay in her bed that night, ashamed and unhappy. "It's as if I
had told her the most enormous and fundamental lie," she reflected.
"Nothing good can ever come of this. Strange," she thought, "that I
can't remember ever going into Woolworth's with Jim! She remembers
something of him that I don't. How old would she have been then?
The five-and-ten must have come to town--well--before Bronson came.
She loved that store at first, when she was little." She grudged
Martha a memory that belonged essentially to her; she thought
greedily over every look of his she had ever treasured. She
remembered their early love; she recalled still how his dear hands
had gone longing, discreetly up inside her stiff cuffs. She
remembered his kisses; she remembered how he had come back in the
days of his weariness to his mother, and how they had looked across
at each other, with that innocent old woman between them. She
remembered how he used to sit with little Martha on his knee, in the
days of his ill health and bitterness, stroking her hair and looking
into her face, trying some way to get close to the mother through the
child. She thought of that summer, and of Bronson, and of Jim's
irrepressible crying-out to her. She stopped there. She tried
always not to think of his death. "He just kissed me," she said,
"and went away."
"Oh," she cried to herself, "I'm going to Chicago to-morrow and tell
Martha the truth! He was too sweet, too dear. This isn't fair to
him. I don't care about Bob; but I won't have her thinking such
things of Jim. He was too good for such--baseness. He never forgot
I was his brother's wife. He did kiss me, but he went away then.
That's the point--he went away. I'll tell her that.
"And if I tell her, she'll never believe me. She thinks I'm sly and
sneaking and adulterous now, and if I tell her the truth, she'll
think I'm lying to her. She hasn't enough experience yet to believe
the truth; she doesn't know enough to believe it. That's why she
hates it all so! herself, and passion. All she knows of passion is
its roots, in the dark ground; its blossom in the air, its sweet
lovely blossom in the sun she hasn't seen. She doesn't know
forbearance or tenderness, and that's the best part of it--for us.
She wouldn't believe me if I told her what sort of man he was. I
don't know what's going to become of her now; she'll never marry now.
Probably that way such a lot of women don't marry; the roots of it
all look so ugly, so brutal to them. If I could make Martha believe
in some one like Jim now! The whole tragedy is that she can't."
When she fell asleep at last, she was thinking still of her
lover--not, however, that he went away, but that he kissed her.
Martha hadn't been gone two weeks when that most astonishing news
came. Nothing could have stunned the town more than that. The
telegram came first to Emily. She heard it over the 'phone.
Mrs. Benton had died suddenly, while motoring in California.
People gathered in groups on the street to discuss it. It seemed a
thing that could not be true. To be sure, when you thought it over,
you realized that Mrs. Benton was but mortal; but it seemed so unlike
her, just to die, to quit, to lay things down. Her body, lifeless,
was to be sent home for burial.
Recovering by degrees from the shock of the news; the cruder ones
began asking under their breaths what the more sentimental ones had
but pondered. Had she lived to hear of the success of the Christmas
party? They could not believe that she had. It didn't seem likely.
Mrs. Benton's body was to arrive on a Thursday, from the West.
Johnnie arrived from the East on Tuesday morning, to find his home
swept and garnished and in possession of an old and silent aunt and a
young and gushing one. He came to Emily for refuge that evening. He
seemed almost stupefied by the event. Emily had never thought of him
as a nervous man before. He talked in a way unnaturally incoherent,
and he stirred about nervously, unable to sit down. The second time
she noticed his hand refrain spasmodically from a cigarette, she said:
"Smoke if you want to."
But he burst out: "No. I won't have people laughing--about THIS. I
won't have them talking about her."
"But no one is going to talk about her if you smoke here with me."
"Don't you think so? Nobody would see me?"
"No. Nobody could find anything to laugh at in that."
He was already lighting a match. "I thought they looked at me funny
when I went to light up," he said. Emily knew he spoke of his aunts.
"I want everything done right for her. I won't have people talking
about THIS. They say I have to be the chief mourner, Mrs. Kenworthy."
"Well, you are that, Johnnie; you're nearest her."
"I know it; but they made me stay in there to see the minister. He
asked me what chapter I wanted read! I felt like a fool, Mrs.
Kenworthy. I felt like a dirty hypocrite!"
"I wouldn't feel that way. These things have got to be done,
apparently."
"Do you think 'Jesus, Lover of my Soul' is better than 'Lead, Kindly
Light'? One wants one and the other wants the other, and they say I
can decide! Look here, Mrs. Kenworthy, did you ever hear that mother
hadn't but a year to live? Did she ever tell YOU that?"
"No, never. Why, dear?"
"Aunt Ethel said the doctor in Chicago told somebody yesterday that
he told her last summer she hadn't a year to live. Didn't she tell
you that?"
"No."
"She never told me; she never told anybody."
"Maybe she didn't believe it."
He seemed relieved at the thought. He said, "Maybe that's it. But
she never told you where I was last summer, did she, until I was
about coming home? Do you know why?"
"I didn't know why. Never mind, Johnnie!"
"Yes, she didn't know where I was; I didn't tell her! I just lit
out; I never told her till I got to Hong-Kong. I knew she'd worry; I
didn't care if she did. I never thought of it coming out like this,
Mrs. Kenworthy! I made enough to come home on at Macao. You know,
gambling, she'd call it; it was, too. I won five hundred dollars,
almost---four hundred and seventy--so then I cabled her. Oh, I don't
know why I did that!"
"There's no use grieving over it now, Johnnie."
"But by the time I got her answer I had lost it all again. I came
home on the money she cabled me. She met me at the depot with a new
car! She never told me she wasn't well; she never told ME she hadn't
long to live! I'm glad I went back to college; she wanted me to do
that. I nearly didn't, I nearly lit out again. If they insist on
having the coffin open in church and me looking--in front of
everybody--I don't care. I'll do it; I won't have people laughing at
her _now_!"
Then Emily remembered a certain hour. "Oh, Johnnie!" she began.
And, as she understood the significance of what she recalled, she
hesitated.
"She told me once, not so very long ago, that she'd written out
directions for her funeral. She hated sensational funerals--and
people fainting. She wanted hers very simple."
"When was this?"
Now Emily remembered too distinctly, all of a sudden.
"It was after somebody's funeral, as we were walking home from the
cemetery. I don't remember--when, exactly." Why should she tell the
boy it had happened when he was sailing away towards Brazil and his
deserted mother had learned her fate in loneliness? "I imagine if
you go down to Johnson and Larned's, they'll have her directions put
away with her will."
"Oh, do you think--I ought to do that? I mean--I don't want to seem
to be grabbing her will in a hurry!"
"Ask your aunts about it. I'll go over and tell them with you, if
you want me to."
"Will you? Oh, do! But wait a little. Can't I have another smoke
here, first? It seems--strange, over there, this way."
And as he walked around smoking, Emily thought: "Yes, and she knew
all the time as we walked home together that day that she'd be there
in the cemetery soon, and she never told me. She wanted me to know
she had given directions for her funeral, and she let me think she
had no special reason for giving them; and she didn't know where this
boy was, or whether she would ever see him again, and she never said
a word to me about it. And she pointed out to me Mrs. Johnson's red
lilies as we passed, and said she was going to move hers into the
sun!"
Martha came down for the funeral, which was delayed with absolute
cruelty, Emily thought, by the aunts, until Saturday. Emily told her
of Mrs. Benton's stoicism, but not of Johnnie's unconscious hardness.
And Martha sighed and said, merely, "Well, I suppose everybody has
something up their sleeve, mammie!"
Johnnie came in on Friday evening, harassed and red eyed.
"You here, Martie!" he exclaimed, touched by the sight of her. "For
the love of Mike, don't let anyone know I'm here. Let's go up to
your sitting room! Somebody'll be coming in. I want to smoke; I got
to have a smoke!"
A pitiful Johnnie made Martha kind.
"It isn't heated up," she said. "We don't heat it now, weather like
this. But you can come and wash dishes with me. You can smoke
there; nobody'll see you."
It was the usual thing for Martha to insist on Emily's staying in the
living room when Martha was washing the evening dishes. So she
remained there, and people came in, as Johnnie had foreseen they
would. One hour passed, and another, and the supper dishes still
apparently detained the young things. After another half-hour Emily
went to the kitchen. She opened the door.
The scene was scarcely what she had expected. The room was thick
with smoke; and there, huddled over the stove, sat old Maggie, who
was supposed to have gone to bed hours ago, and across her old rough
face her mouth stretched from ear to ear in one great beaming smile,
while her eyes looked straight at the chief mourner. He sat on the
kitchen table, near the prunes soaking in the bowl overnight. He
still had on the blue-gingham apron some one had tied about his
slender body. He was leaning forward alertly, and in his hand he
held a cigarette all lit and ready to go into his mouth the moment
the flow of his eager narrative ceased for an instant. His eyes were
fixed upon Martha, who sat on the high kitchen stool with her feet on
its upper rungs. She had on a red jersey frock; she sported a very
long purple-and-black cigarette holder and she sat listening
intently, her chin atilt.
"And the chief--he was a good old sport--he says to the captain,
'It's the first time I was ever ordered to get a lady out of a----'"
He saw the door opening. He saw Emily. She knew at once that she
had spoiled a perfect hour. Johnnie's normal light-heartedness
collapsed. Emily saw him recalling horribly the coffin and its
contents, and the hushed and exaggerated reverence of those that
waited about it.
"Oh!" he groaned. "Oh, I forget!"
But Martha had heard nothing of his quarrel with his mother and his
passionate desire to atone as far as he could by all conventional
decencies.
"Well, go on!" she commanded. "Was the man dead?"
But Johnnie had no gusto for the rest of his tale. "I was just
telling Martha about what happened on the _Pomona_," he murmured to
Emily, apologetically. "There was a woman drunk, and she locked the
door of her cabin and wouldn't open it; they couldn't hear the man
with her and they thought maybe she had done something to him."
"But what happened in the end?" Martha insisted.
"The captain broke in, and there was the man, reading in his bunk.
He said he wasn't going to try to get her to open the door; he knew
her. He'd been reading the History of Poland, with nothing but
biscuit to eat. He said he was used to it. I didn't know it was so
late. I got to be going."
"Don't go yet," Emily urged. "We've never really heard anything
about your trip."
"I didn't mean to stay so long. I don't want to make them sore at
me," he said, nervously. "They look at me so funny all the time."
He went back to them. Bob and Martha sat for a while talking, and
Emily sat looking at them and thinking wistfully of what she had seen
in the kitchen. How happy those children had been together in their
young forgetfulness, a forgetfulness somewhat too facile, on
Johnnie's part, perhaps. Yet what a fine relief it had been for him
from the strain and depression of those unnatural days. Surely each
of them must be thinking how snugly, how cozily they had together
thrown off their burdens. If only it could have gone on! Martha
would have married him now, likely, since the maternal handicap was
removed--if that other thing had never happened. Johnnie, free and
with an income, wouldn't be long in marrying--someone, Emily was
convinced of that. But it would be a long time, a deplorably long
time, before Martha would be settling down. There was no use hoping
for so happy an ending to that story.
It was perhaps her kindness to Johnnie that cleansed Martha's mind,
for the time, from its chilling cynicism. She was lovely that
evening and gentle, and subdued. Emily lingered about with her in
the guest room, and sat on her bed a long time with her, yearning
over her. She had never felt so sure and mature a sort of oneness
with her daughter before. Martha wouldn't let her get away. She
clung to her; her trivial words were little caresses. It was an hour
to be remembered, to be tasted carefully in memory, and relished
indefinitely.
Emily's conscience smote her the more that night. How terrible this
deception of her was! All at once there came to her a thought
cuttingly vivid. People did die suddenly; no doubt about that; even
an extremely living woman like Cora Benton ceased without warning.
"Suppose I'd die suddenly, myself!" Emily gasped. "Suppose I should
die without ever telling her the truth! She'd have this house for
herself then; she might quarrel with her father; she might turn him
out of it in some evil moment. She might even tell him some time
what I let her think. To-morrow morning," Emily decided, "first
thing, I'll tell her the truth." She lay unhappily trying to screw
herself up to the necessary intensity of determination.
In the morning, however, Martha didn't come down to breakfast. Emily
went up to her room. She said she was tired, and Emily saw at once
she had been crying. She offered to bring her up something, but
Martha refused shortly. She said she was going to get up; she
wouldn't stay in bed. Not one least hint of the conciliatory mood of
the evening before was left. Emily was afraid of her, afraid of the
bitter things that might come slashing out of her mouth. If only she
knew what she had been crying about! Was it because the
companionship of the evening had seemed as pleasant as unattainable?
Had she been by any chance thinking how happy she might have been
with Johnnie? Or had she been mourning the lover who had destroyed
himself in her mind? Emily came downstairs and set about her morning
work hesitant, cautious, and perplexed.
Even as they sat side by side in the crowded church, Emily was
conscious of the hardness of her mood. Mrs. Benton might reasonably
have asked to have a sermon preached over her body in the great hall
she had built, but she had commanded that the service should be in
the small Congregational church. Emily, when she went to that
church, always thought of Jim's mother--rather than Bob's--and of his
father, whose heroic death was but a mildly interesting tale to
Martha. The crowded service promised at first to be all that Mrs.
Benton had hoped it never would be, but the minister, when he began
speaking, showed more sense than Emily had ever thought him capable
of. She saw Johnnie almost immediately lift his bewildered head to
listen.
"Our sister," he said, "lies here silent. Her works praise her.
Which one of us," he asked, "can lift a voice to contradict them?
Dare we dispute with the bathing beach? Shall we try arguing with
the memorial hall?" He named over her civic accomplishments,
scarcely mentioning the flowers that were to bloom all over the
county in the spring--they, Emily thought, might have suggested to
the scoffing, or the conscience-smitten, a certain joyous derision.
"There had been women more gentle than she," he said, frankly, "But
the gentle women had dammed no river. There had been women more
popular, but the popular had built no bridges. What she had built,
she had built well. Let the town, now, if it could, reach the
standard of excellence which she had set. Her example of doing
things exactly right was a heritage not to be despised in these
shoddy days."
But of all her works, he averred, the beach had the clearest voice
and the holiest. "Wash ye! Make ye clean!" the prophets of God had
been crying, through all the generations. And now the beach took up
the song, inviting all the children to throw themselves into the
cleanness of joy and to dive deep into the transparency of living.
It was the element of cleanness that she had made precious to the
children of the town. How many small boys of the town cared where
their winter clothes were put away for the summer? But how many of
them would there be who weren't conscious all the winter just where
their bathing suits were put away waiting for the summer? The snow
would scarcely be melted on the south slopes of the lawns until
children began shaking out their bathing suits and counting the weeks
until swimming began. The dancing feet of the young, and the music
of their youth, praised this woman all the winter months. And in the
summer, tanned and barefooted memorials of her would soon be running
down all the shaded streets to the river. And healthy dripping
tributes to her wisdom would be trudging home late to meals. When
there were no longer any children to love swimming, he said suddenly,
he hoped the town would build a stone memorial to its benefactress.
He sat down.
The church sighed its agreement.
The coffin, unopened, was carried away. Johnnie said afterwards that
the minister had sense.
_Chapter Eleven_
That night Bob Kenworthy sat unsuspectingly reading a coon story in a
popular weekly, in his own living room, in the light of a lamp his
daughter had given him for Christmas. His wife sat at her desk near
the window, pretending to write letters, and every once in a while
she glanced slyly over at him to see if he was conscious of what she
was doing; and sometimes she even looked suspiciously at the curtains
to make sure no one was peeping in at the words she had guiltily
written. She had sat there more than an hour, and she was beginning
that letter in vain. A more distasteful task she had seldom decided
upon. To put down in black and white a denial of the grotesque
mistake she had suffered to continue in Martha's thought seemed
impossible. An acknowledgment of her complicity in the
misunderstanding seemed too humiliating. How could she be sure,
besides, into whose hands her written words might not come? Might
not that complacent husband of hers, sitting there, never imagining
how thankfully he had been discarded by his child, sometime come upon
the letter that must seem to him treacherous? Emily didn't intend
sending the letter to Martha; that course was too perilous to
consider. She intended to put it away, in case of such an emergency
as this last one of Cora Benton's. It seemed, however, the right
thing altogether for Cora Benton to have given directions for her
funeral. The community expected her to do that. But for Emily
Kenworthy to do it seemed silly melodrama.
She sat with her arm hiding the words she had written, now that she
had begun for the fifth time, though there was no eye in the room to
behold them. She had finished.
"My dear Child." She had got down a further sentence or two. "I
couldn't collect my wits in time the other day to tell you what a
mistaken idea you had of your father and me. I have never been
unfaithful to him in my life." She glanced again guiltily at Bob.
Poor old harmless thing! He had been certainly--good and a patient
husband. And, sitting there, he did look like Jim. The elusive
likeness between the two had always fascinated her; Jim's head had
been like that. His face was longer, finer, more delicate. It was
for Jim's sake, of course, and not Bob's she was writing this. She
would not have Martha thinking Jim a common old love pirate! She
took her arms from across the paper; she re-read what she had
written. "I have never been unfaithful to him in my life." Then she
added, impulsively, "I never had a chance to be." She studied her
achievement, and covered it up with a blotter and sat thinking. Then
she went at it again for a few minutes. "I am writing this to you
the day of Mrs. Benton's funeral in case I haven't an opportunity to
tell you personally." She was on the point of adding, "Your uncle
wasn't that sort of man." But suppose Bob should sometime see those
words? She might say, "The Kenworthy men are too good for that sort
of thing." Yes, that might do.
Bob threw down his paper. Emily jumped.
"Some coon story!" he yawned. "Let's go to bed."
"You go on up, Bob," she said, earnestly. "I'm just coming."
When he came up from "fixing the furnace" she was rearranging her
desk. In the center of it was a little compartment that could be
locked but seldom was. It was full of rather useless trifles. She
had found the little key to it now in a small adjoining drawer, and
she had locked away a small envelope inclosed in the very center of
several larger ones. It was addressed to Martha, "to be opened after
my death." As she went upstairs wondering where to hide that key,
she felt more like a perfect fool than she had felt in years. She
looked about the room. At one side of her bureau there hung an
enlarged snapshot of Martha as a four-year-old, hugging a puppy.
Emily had always thought it a perfectly beautiful picture. When Bob
was in the bathroom, she went cautiously over to it and tied the key
to the wire by which the picture hung. "Nobody would ever find it
there if I _should_ die," she said to herself; "and besides I
probably won't." But later, when she heard Bob sleeping, she got up
gently and hid the key in the bottom drawer of the bureau beneath
some summer underthings, for, of course, Maggie would dust that
picture as soon as she was able to be about, and demand to be told
what key that was.
Afterwards she would say to herself, waking in the night: "Well,
suppose anyone _should_ find that key and open the desk and see the
letter. It's a very sensible thing to leave directions for your
funeral. Everybody ought to do it. Still..."
And Johnnie Benton was about from time to time, reminding her of the
possibility of sudden death. He wouldn't go back to school. He
might have agreed, in the shock of his grief, to conform to all
burial conventions out of respect for his mother. But to go back and
try for a degree, he refused absolutely and confidently.
"I haven't told THEM," he said to Emily, nodding his head towards the
house where his aunts still tarried. "Aunt Grace wants to keep house
for me!" The tone of his voice suggested she had proposed at least
to murder him. "I told them I'd go back as soon as it's settled, all
the business; but I couldn't get a degree in ten years if I did go
back. And goodness knows when things will be settled." The delay
wasn't annoying Johnnie.
Even Emily grew uneasy about Johnnie as the weeks passed. She
wondered sometimes, remembering a sort of threat, if his mother had
really disinherited him. Her lawyers, whom he was always going to
consult in Chicago, were saying now that Mrs. Benton had gone to
California for the express purpose of investigating investments
there, and presently the results would come to light. Emily didn't
see clearly why Johnnie should have to drive up to Chicago three days
a week to learn such meager facts. He stayed in Chicago so much that
his aunts closed the house and went home. And then when he came home
he stayed with the Kenworthys.
He stayed with them depressed, silent, and inactive. Emily was
troubled about his laziness; but, after all, she had been his
mother's stanchest friend and she owed him some sympathy and
patience. She was as kind to him as possible.
But not so Martha. She came down suddenly for a week-end, the last
of February. Emily told her to go into the small guest room;
Johnnie's things were in the other.
"Good night!" she cried. "Is he _here_, too?"
Was he then so much in Martha's Chicago?
"Now look here, mammie, I don't approve of this. He's taking
advantage of you. Why can't he stay at the hotel?"
"Martha, if you like the hotel so well, you'd better go down and try
a meal there! It isn't a comfortable place, and you know it."
"But why doesn't he stay at the Kendalls' or at the Johnsons'? Why
can't he stay with his friends?"
"Those boys aren't at home now, you know that."
"Well, he needn't try to--get a stand-in here just because his mother
is dead. Why don't he live in his own house, like anybody else
would?"
"I didn't know you were coming down, child. I didn't know you would
object. After all, you can't live in Chicago and dictate who's to
stay with me here."
"No, I suppose not. But you have enough to do without taking care of
Johnnie Benton. Why doesn't he go to work?"
"He does work--sometimes. He works in the garage."