“No,” Martha said. “What does it matter? It’s a small thing that I’ve married a man who doesn’t care for me.”
She was rewarded with a look which said quite plainly I am married to a stranger and there is no possibility of ever coming to terms with her. It only lasted for a second and was replaced by a look of such understanding, and such sadness as the result of understanding, that she had to turn her face away. Once more he had found her out, got through the barrier and seen her for what she was, a beautiful woman who could not believe in her own beauty or accept love without casting every conceivable doubt upon it. Now and every other time that they quarrelled, she was merely seeing how far she could go, leading him to the edge of the pit and making him look down, threatening their common happiness in order to convince herself of its reality.
“I’m going downstairs,” he said. “Ab’s tricycle is out in the rain and it’ll get all rusty.”
Part Three
A Serious Mistake
1
The gash that ran down Randolph Potter’s forehead and through his left eyebrow healed rapidly without becoming infected. Because of it he was, for a time, both a hero and a household pet. Nora changed bedrooms with her brother so that he wouldn’t have to sleep in the oven-like heat engendered by the sun on the tin roof. During the daytime he lay stretched out on a sofa in the living-room or on the porch swing and held court. Someone was always at his side, anxious to wait upon him, eager to run upstairs for a clean handkerchief or out to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. He saw the evening paper before anyone else did, and he had only to bite his lip or frown or sit up and arrange the pillows at his back, and people stopped talking and inquired if he was in pain.
The Ellises, feeling responsible for the accident, dropped in to see Randolph every day. Sitting between his mother and sister, he took no part in the conversation. In his eyes there was a look of tired contentment. His family and all the people around him had abandoned their ordinary preoccupation with their own affairs and were now concerned about him for a change; not merely about him—about a very small part of him. He was quite satisfied.
Mrs. Beach advised that the collie’s head be sent to a laboratory in Chicago for testing. When Martha King failed to convey this suggestion to the Ellises, Mrs. Beach conveyed it herself. The dog was kept under observation for a week, and when neither it nor Randolph developed symptoms of rabies, Dr. Danforth sent the dog back to the farm.
During the week of waiting, Mr. Potter got volume MUN–PAY of the encyclopædia in the study and made Nora read aloud the article on Pasteur. He was particularly moved by the closing words of Pasteur’s oration at the founding of the Institute: “Two opposing laws seem to me now in contest. The one, a law of blood and death, opening out each day new modes of destruction, forces nations always to be ready for battle. The other, the law of peace, work, and health, whose only aim is to deliver mankind from the calamities which beset him …” When Nora had finished reading, Mr. Potter with tears in his eyes said, “Those are the words of a great man. If it weren’t for Pasteur and General Robert E. Lee, the world would be far worse off than it is today. They’re the leaders and the rest of us follow along after them and owe what we have to their wisdom and self-sacrifice.”
“But that isn’t what it means,” Nora said.
“That’s what I got out of it,” Mr. Potter said. “You can interpret it any way you please. I know that if your father were here, Austin, he would agree with me. All this talk about education—what good does it do to teach a nigger to read and write? They’re put here on earth for a definite purpose, just like the rest of us, and when you try to change that, you’re going against the Lord’s intention.”
“What Nora is trying to say——” Austin began.
“It’s all in the Bible,” Mr. Potter interrupted, “right down in black and white: ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Women and men are different and anybody who says that a woman can do the same things a man can do is talking through his hat. Woman’s place is in the home, and if only a lot of crackpots, busybodies, and old maids would stop agitating for equal rights, the vote, and all the rest of it——”
“Nora has just as much right to her opinion,” Mrs. Potter said, drawing out her crochet thread, “wrong though it may be——”
“But it isn’t a matter of opinion,” Nora cried. “It’s a matter of words, and they only mean one thing. Scientists, it says, are trying to——”
“They’ll ruin the country,” Mr. Potter said. “Mark my words. Every radical and every reformer will join hands with the suffragettes, and the first thing you know——”
Nora got up from her chair and left the room. A moment later they heard the screen door slam.
“Now what did I say?” Mr. Potter asked, turning helplessly to his wife.
The cigar-smoking, cigar-smelling men, simple, forthright, and forever dangerous—to themselves as well as to other people—swing from prejudice to hanging prejudice in the happy delusion that their feet are on solid ground, and any small table or delicate vase or new idea they come near stands a good chance of being knocked over. Even so (or perhaps because of the very great number of tables and vases and ideas that he had at one time or another upset) Mr. Potter waited for some reassurance from his wife, some gesture of approval.
“I expect she’s gone over to the Beaches’,” Mrs. Potter said; and then, pursuing the one comparison that never lost its charm for her, “At home Nora always goes to see Miss Washburn when she wants to let off steam. Miss Washburn was one of her teachers at the seminary. She doesn’t think I’ve been all that I should have been to Nora. She told someone that, and I haven’t spoken to her since. It’s easy for people who——This fall, she’s leaving Mississippi for good. She’s going East to teach at some girls’ college and she wanted to take Nora with her.”
“If I had my way she’d ride out of town on a rail,” Mr. Potter said bitterly. “Anyone who tries to come between children and their parents, and especially a dried-up old maid that no man ever looked twice at——”
“Mr. Potter doesn’t believe in education for women,” Mrs. Potter interrupted him. “And I must say, I don’t either. At least, not very much. There are other things they can do, I always say. Some day the right man will come along and Nora will marry and have a home and children of her own and then she’ll come to her father and thank him for knowing what was best. But it was a terrible disappointment to her. She’s a great reader, you know. Just now, she doesn’t know what she wants to make of her life. She’s all mixed up, and try as I may, I can’t seem to help her.”
Randolph touched the edge of his bandage lightly with his finger.
“She just has to work it out for herself,” Mrs. Potter said. “Does your wound bother you?”
“I think it’s draining,” Randolph said.
“Well, stop touching it,” Mrs. Potter said. “You’ve been very brave, but if you don’t stop worrying it——”
Having brought the conversation around to where he and not Nora was the centre of attention, Randolph let his bandage alone.
When he grew tired of lying still, he usually got up and went out to the kitchen, and Martha King, coming into the pantry on some errand, would hear derisive laughter that stopped abruptly as she pushed open the swinging door. Rachel had washed and ironed the bloodstained shirt so to Randolph’s satisfaction that he wouldn’t let Martha King send his shirts to Mrs. Coffey with the family washing. Rachel took them home and did them late at night. He wouldn’t allow his mother to heat the water for the hot applications Dr. Seymour had ordered; only Rachel, his favourite, could do this. No matter how late Randolph came down to breakfast, there was a place set for him, at the dining-room table, and usually some mark of favour—fried chicken livers, a lamb kidney or a chop—that hadn’t been served to the others. Under his patronage, Rachel’s position in the household rose considerably. The Mississippi people plied her with compliments on her cooking and when
they got into an argument among themselves, asked her to support and corroborate their opinions. “Isn’t that so, Rachel?” they would ask, and Rachel would answer, “That’s right, Mr. Potter. You tell them!” And then, “Miss Nora, that’s a true fact what you just said,” and retire to the kitchen leaving them both convinced that she was on their side.
The conversations between Randolph and Rachel in the kitchen were not all a matter of sly joking. There were sometimes intimate revelations, things Randolph told her about himself, about the members of his family, that he would not have told any white person. Rachel got so she listened continually for his step, coming through the pantry towards the kitchen, and her manner towards Mrs. Potter was not always wholly respectful. Randolph had become her child, as he had been long ago in the past the child of some other black woman who watched over him in the daytime, put him to bed at night, sang to him, told him stories, and was there always, the eternal audience for anything he had to say.
“The trouble with you,” Rachel said to him one day, “is you want everything. And you don’t want to do no work for it.”
“That’s right,” Randolph said nodding. “There’s a crippled boy at home—Griswold, his name is—had infantile paralysis when he was small and the other boys used to pick on him a lot. I don’t think he ever had a friend till I came along and was nice to him. Griswold’s very smart. He notices everything, especially people’s weak points, and that way, when the time comes, he gets what he wants. The other day …”
Most people, when they are describing a friend or telling a story, make the mistake of editing, of leaving things out. Fearing that their audience will grow restless, they rush ahead to the point, get there too soon, have to go back and explain, and in the end, the quality of experience is not conveyed. Randolph was never in a hurry, never in doubt about whether what he had to say would interest Rachel. By the time he had finished, she had a very clear idea in her mind of the crippled boy who knew how to wait for what he wanted, and she also knew one more thing about Randolph Potter.
Turning from the sink, she asked out loud a question that had been in the back of her mind for days: “What you want to go and hurt that dog for?”
“I didn’t hurt it,” Randolph said, and then when Rachel rolled her eyes sceptically, “I tell you I didn’t!”
“You was just petting it and it bit you?”
“Ummm,” he said. Their eyes met and he smiled slowly. “I don’t really know what happened. I was tired of playing with her and she kept jumping on me and asking for more so I kicked her.”
He looked at Rachel to see if she were shocked, but her face revealed nothing whatever. If she had been shocked, it would have been all right. Or if she had been sufficiently under his spell that she had laughed, but all she did was look at him thoughtfully.
“I kicked her in the head,” he said. “And if she’d been my dog and bit me like that, I’d have taken a gun and shot her. You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I believe you,” Rachel said. “I reckon that’s what you’d of done, all right.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Randolph said, and got up from the stool and left her. From that day on, he never came into the kitchen, never looked at Rachel when she was passing platters of food around the table, never spoke to her when they met on the back stairs.
2
Nora Potter tried again and again to make friends with Martha King, and each time the effort spent itself without accomplishing any more than waves accomplish when they wash over rock. Sympathy is almost never to be had by asking. It comes of itself or not at all. And those who are engaged in work of great moment, such as fomenting conspiracy or carrying a child inside them, do not really have it to offer.
Martha would sit and listen to Mrs. Potter (who wanted nothing except to be a decent, pleasant, untroublesome guest) by the hour. But when she found herself alone with Nora, she usually got up after a minute or two and went to look at the loaf of nutbread baking in the oven or to count the sheets that had come back from the wash. Defeated time after time by these tactics and with no idea why they were being used against her, Nora would go across the side yard to the Beaches, who were always delighted when she came. Mrs. Beach put down her volume of aristocratic memoirs, the girls left the piano, and they all settled down on the porch or in the shade of a full-grown mulberry tree in the back yard.
The Beach girls said very little, and the few remarks they made were generally corrected or cut short by their mother, who, like Mrs. Potter, had a long continued story to tell. “The sky this morning reminds me of Florence,” she would begin, while with one hand she made sure that her cameo breastpin had not come undone. “The same deep blue. You’d love Florence, Nora. I wish we could all go there together. Perhaps we will, some day. Such a beautiful city …” Or, “I’ll never forget my first glimpse of Venice. We arrived on a Saturday night and left the railway station in a gondola and found ourselves on the Grand Canal …”
No one coming into the Beaches’ house could have remained unaware of the fact that Mrs. Beach had travelled. In every room and on every wall there was some testimony to this wonderful advantage which she had had over nearly everyone else in Draperville. A huge photograph of the Colosseum hung in the front hall. The Bridge of Sighs and St. Mark’s Square were represented, one in colour, one in black and white, in the living-room. In the dining-room the Beaches ate with the Cumaean Sibyl and Raphael’s Holy Family looking on.
The greatest concentration of objets d’art was in the parlour where there was a Louis XV glass-and-gilt cabinet full of curios—ornamental scissors from Germany, imitation tanagra figurines, Bohemian glass, Dresden china, miniature silver souvenir albums of Mont St. Michel and the châteaux country, wood-carvings from the Black Forest, a tiny spy-glass that offered a microscopic view of the façade of Cologne Cathedral, and enough other treasures to occupy the eyes and mind of a child for hours. Over the piano a row of familiar heads—Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Schumann—testified to the importance and value of great music, and did what they could to make up for the fact that the piano was not a Steinway.
Nora Potter soon felt so at home at the Beaches’ that to knock or pull the front-door chime when she came to see them would have seemed an act of impoliteness. She walked in one morning and wandered through the house until she found Lucy in the kitchen, fixing a tray.
“Mother had a bad night,” Lucy said. “We were up with her until past daylight.” Nora started to say that she would come back some other time, but Lucy said, “No, don’t go. She’s awake now and it’ll do her good to see you.”
Mrs. Beach’s room was high-ceilinged and gloomy, with massive golden oak furniture, and on the walls and dressing-table, on the bureau and the nightstand, a hundred mementoes and votive offerings to Mrs. Beach’s marriage and motherhood. The old lady herself was lying propped up in bed, and, for someone who had been keeping people up all night, she looked quite well indeed. “Pshaw,” she said when she saw Nora. “Just see what they’ve gone and done to me!”
“If you will eat things you know you’re not supposed to,” Lucy said.
“It wasn’t the baked beans. They never hurt anybody, and you can tell Dr. Seymour I said so. There was an onion in the stewed tomatoes. I tasted it.”
“I’ve told you twenty times——” Lucy began.
“Onion never agrees with me,” Mrs. Beach said. And then to Nora, “You were a dear to come and entertain an old woman like this. I wish you were staying with us instead of at the Kings’. I could be dying up here and Martha King wouldn’t come near me.”
“Mother, you know that isn’t true,” Lucy said indignantly.
“True enough,” Mrs. Beach said. She lifted the napkin that covered her tray and peered under it. “I don’t think I’d better eat any toast, especially since you put butter on it. Just a cup of tea is all I want. Did you remember to scald the pot?”
Her daughter nodded impatiently, and Mrs. Beach, still sceptical,
put her hand against the side of the Limoges teapot. “All right, dear,” she said. “I’ll call you if I want anything.”
All the things that in her own mother annoyed Nora—her mother’s unreasonableness, her arbitrary opinions, her interminable stories about the past—she could be patient with in Mrs. Beach. She dragged a white rattan chair over to the bed and showed such interest in Mrs. Beach’s symptoms that the invalid developed an appetite, drank two cups of strong tea, and ate all the buttered toast. Nora took the tray away when Mrs. Beach had finished with it. Then she adjusted the pillows successfully—a thing that neither Lucy nor Alice ever managed to do.
“I can see a change in the girls just since you’ve been here, Nora,” Mrs. Beach said. “You’re very good for them, you know. They spend so much time with me when they ought to be going to parties or at least seeing someone nearer their own age. I’ve tried my best to encourage them to bring their friends here, but they don’t seem to want any outside companionship. Or else there isn’t anybody that interests them. They’ve had more than most girls, though I dare say they don’t appreciate it. I didn’t appreciate the things my father and mother tried to do for me until I was older and had children of my own. But the girls are not like me. They’re not like any of my people so far as I can see. Mr. Beach had a sister; possibly Lucy and Alice take after her, though she was a cripple all her life, and could hardly have been expected to …”
Nora’s friendship with the Beaches was happy because it was with the whole household. She felt herself, for the first time, being plucked at, being forced, whether she wanted to or not, to take sides. Her eyes fell on the faded picture of Mr. Beach—a dapper, middle-aged man who in effigy was no more help than he had been in real life.
“If they would only talk to me,” Mrs. Beach said. “I have to worm information out of them. There was a young man who liked Alice for a time. His father owned some land, I believe, out near Kaiserville, and he was a nice enough boy, Mr. Beach thought, but no polish or refinement, of course, and that dreadful red neck all farm boys have. I had a little talk with him one evening and he didn’t come back any more. Alice isn’t strong, you know. She could never have done the work a woman is expected to do in the country. And besides, the girls had their music … Tomorrow or the next day, when I’m feeling better, remind me to show you the album of pressed flowers that we brought back with us from the Holy Land.…”
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