Anyway at that moment good old Mattie stepped quickly forward and grabbed Miss Martha around the waist and held her tightly. Miss Martha tried frantically to escape for a moment but naturally Mattie was too strong for her. Then after maybe a half minute or so Miss Martha stopped struggling, and her face turned from fire red to the color of McBurney’s, or maybe even paler, and then she just sighed and went all limp in Mattie’s arms. Then Mattie eased her to the floor very gently and unbuttoned her and loosened her stays.
“Miss Harriet, pour me a little water here. Miss Marie, fetch me a good size onion from the kitchen,” Mattie instructed us.
Well I was so fascinated by all these happenings that I just hated to leave the scene. I waited for a moment to see if the water alone might restore our headmistress, but when it didn’t and Mattie continued to yell for the onion, I left the room, pausing only briefly in the hall outside in the hope that Miss Harriet might be going to offer some kind of explanation to Mattie. It was really very interesting to observe Miss Harriet’s attitude on that day. I had just never seen her speak or act with such confidence before, and I don’t think anyone else around here has ever seen anything like it either.
“That was mean of you, Miss Harriet,” I heard Mattie tell her. “It was just downright shameful of you to say those things.”
“I know,” said Miss Harriet, but she didn’t sound at all ashamed. “Nevertheless they needed to be said. It’s time Martha was notified that she can’t run the world to suit herself. Well never mind, she’s finished now. She’s done her worst with this boy. She’s not going to treat him the way she treated Robert. She isn’t God and it’s time she realized it.”
“You ain’t God either, Miss Harriet.”
“I don’t care to be. I don’t want to change him. I don’t want to make anything out of him. I just want him to be happy.”
“You talking about this boy or Mister Robert?”
“Both of them.”
Now that was certainly a strange coupling since Robert Farnsworth is dead and buried, or so the students here have always been led to believe. If there was any more to this conversation I didn’t hear it because Mattie caught sight of me at the door then and shouted that I’d better get the onion quickly or she was going to tan me. Naturally I am not at all upset by such talk from Mattie who is just like all the house darkies I have ever seen. They will threaten you with the most horrible punishments imaginable without the faintest hope of ever being able to carry them out. I suppose it is one of the few ways the poor dears have of expressing their dissatisfaction with the white world. Anyway, even though I have not been alarmed by such threats since the age of seven or eight or possibly even younger, I generally play along with them to give Mattie a little pleasure.
On this occasion I opened my eyes wide, clapped my hand to my mouth and began to tremble violently for a moment and then rushed off to the kitchen as fast as I could calling out things like, “Yes, Mattie . . . right away, Mattie . . . please don’t be angry, Mattie” and so forth. I think my performance as a frightened child gets better every time I play it. I can hardly wait to get back home and try it on Betsy and Cleo and the rest of the house people at our place. I might even give my mother a taste of it, but only if my acting seems to be getting superlatively good because my mother is probably the hardest person in the world to fool—as my father keeps learning to his great sorrow.
Also there was something else besides fooling which hurried me to the kitchen on that day. It was the sudden thought that Miss Alice might not yet be recovered from her faint and consequently might be available for a good whiff of the onion before I took it to Miss Martha. I knew that Mattie had been instructed to see to Alice after McBurney was taken back to bed, but with teachers fainting Mattie had no time to worry about students and so I had great hopes of finding our golden-haired temptress still stretched out on the dining room floor.
Unfortunately my hopes were in vain. Alice apparently had managed to come to her senses without any help because she was nowhere in sight when I reached the dining room and she wasn’t in the kitchen either. However after I had obtained my onion from the larder I stepped out the back door for a short glance around the garden and there was Miss Alice seated on the bench in the arbor beside her fellow deserter, Miss Emily Stevenson.
Well, I thought, now that I’ve come this far, I might as well take a moment longer to find out how my fellow students are feeling.
“Girls, if your stomachs have settled you can come back in the house now,” I called to them as I approached. “The operation is all completed, although the dining room is still somewhat unpresentable, in case that sort of thing is distressing to you.”
It evidently was. They were sitting there, the two of them, as pale as bedsheets and as rigid as a pair of scarecrows, as though the slightest word or breath escaping them would bring the past hour back again and make what could just possibly have been a bad dream a thing which had really happened.
Thinking to cheer them, I added, “I believe Mattie will have our dinner ready shortly—just as soon as she has the dining room tidied up a bit.”
“Get away from here, you little monster,” hissed Alice between her teeth.
“I’m not staying,” said I. “I’m on my way to revive Miss Martha who just fainted, but much more gracefully than you did, Alice.”
“Then get on with it,” Emily said, “and leave us alone.”
“Now, Emily,” I said soothingly. “I rather expected Alice to be upset since she obviously is a girl of very delicate feelings. However, I didn’t think a person like you who has so much knowledge and experience of military affairs would be overcome by a little thing like this.”
“I wasn’t overcome by the operation,” Emily replied. “It was just that the dining room had turned so stifling and I’ve had a headache anyway since early this morning.”
“I was certain it must be something like that.”
“How is Johnny now?” asked Alice hesitantly.
“I guess he’s as well as might be expected. He’s still asleep.”
“I think it was a terrible thing to do to him,” Alice said.
“You didn’t mention that before.”
“I didn’t realize what it would be like.”
“These things are naturally a bit upsetting for people who aren’t familiar with them,” Emily agreed. “But it’s just something soldiers have to get used to and put up with. I expect Corporal McBurney has been in the army long enough to accept it philosophically. The really unfortunate thing about it is the fact that it probably means the end of his military career. And the poor fellow has been after me for weeks, too, just wanting me to write my father about Johnny joining his regiment.”
“Well, I think if Johnny puts his mind to it he may be able to get over that disappointment,” I remarked.
“Probably we ought to be extra nice to him from now on,” said Alice.
“I was under the impression that you had adopted that policy already,” said I. “I’m afraid if your being nice to him is going to result in someone knocking him down the stairs again, you had better think twice about it, for Johnny’s own sake.”
“I don’t exactly mean a romantic kind of niceness,” Alice said, although she didn’t state that she was excluding that kind either. “What I had in mind was that maybe we ought to be kinder and more considerate toward him. We ought to make a great effort now to show him that he’s really welcome here.”
“I think I know what you mean, Alice,” Emily assured her. “What we must do now is spend as much time with him as possible and help him get his mind off this affliction. We can read to him and tell him stories and just generally talk to him about our homes and families, and keep him abreast of how the war is going, and all sorts of comforting things like that. In fact we may be able to improve his mind and character a great deal that way.”
“And
before you know it,” said I, “Corporal McBurney will be so improved he will be thanking us for cutting off his leg.”
“Will you get away from here, you nasty little thing!” yelled Emily.
Of course I wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention to that order had not Miss Harriet at that moment opened the parlor windows and stepped out on the lawn. This caused me to remember the onion I was carrying and poor Miss Martha prostrate on the parlor floor, and so I hurried over to the house as rapidly as I could.
“I’m sorry to have been so long about this,” I explained to Miss Harriet, handing her the remedy. “I just felt I ought to stop for a moment and see if I could do anything for Alice and Emily. Those two girls are not feeling at all well. I do trust Miss Martha is somewhat improved.”
“Miss Martha has recovered from her faint and gone to her room,” Miss Harriet answered rather waspishly. “I hope I am never in such a spell and have to depend on you for assistance. Now there is something else you can do and I want you to set about it more quickly than the last. Did you manage to find Amelia as I asked you to do earlier?”
“I haven’t had time to track her down,” said I, “but from past experience I’m sure I know where she is. She’s sitting in a special hiding place she has in the woods. She likes to be alone out there sometimes when things aren’t going too well for her.”
“Then I want you to go after her and bring her back. I don’t like to have her in that woods by herself, especially with night coming on. Also she may be able to do something for Corporal McBurney.”
“What?”
“I hope she may be able to calm him. He opened his eyes a moment ago and said something which sounded like he was asking for water. But when I took the water to him, he stared at me in fright . . . and shrank away from me. I came away from him then, and he went back to sleep . . . but he continues to moan softly.”
I was rather pleasantly surprised to be taken into Miss Harriet’s confidence that way. “Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “There’s no reason for him to be afraid of you. He’s probably delirious or something and confusing you with Miss Martha.”
“Nevertheless little Amelia has always been the most loyal to him and I think he knows that and would trust her. If he asks for water again, I’d like her to be here to give it to him.”
So I started for the woods, reflecting that I wouldn’t blame Amelia in the least if she never came back. What had happened to McBurney was in some respects an unpleasant thing for all of us, but it was especially hard on that poor girl who had found him and brought him here in the first place.
As I crossed the lawn it occurred to me that there was one other person in the house who had missed the operation—Miss Edwina Morrow. She supposedly spent the entire day in her room and it was therefore quite likely that she didn’t know anything about what had happened.
Thinking of Edwina, I turned and looked up at her room and there she was standing at her window, staring back at me. It gave me quite a shivery feeling to consider that she may have been there watching me the whole time I had been in the garden—just standing there staring coldly at me and thinking the Lord knows what kind of nasty thoughts about me.
Anyway I decided I might as well do her the kindness of bringing her up to date on the happenings in the house. I didn’t want to shout the news and have Miss Harriet and possibly even Miss Martha at my throat again, and so I did my best to pantomime it. I pointed to the parlor, assuming that Edwina would grasp that as a reference to McBurney, and then I pointed to my own leg and finally made a snipping movement with my fingers. To climax the presentation I gave a grimace of horrible pain and then lowered my cheek on to my folded hands to indicate unconsciousness. Edwina however was singularly unimpressed and if it made any sense to her at all she gave no sign of it.
In fact she turned her head to look beyond me, and, following her gaze, I saw that Mattie had come out of the kitchen carrying the garden basket containing Corporal McBurney’s leg. The basket was now covered quite tastefully and appropriately with some clean Irish linen napkins, and Mattie was bearing it reverently and slowly as she headed for the shed where the spades and other digging tools are kept. I noticed also that Emily and Alice, who had not moved from their bench, were keeping their eyes on Mattie, too.
Well I realized with a start that if I was going to be back in time for the burial ceremony, I had better be on my way to the woods and Amelia. Therefore I set off, running at my best speed for the distance, across the lawn and the corn field and then over the old logging road and the high ditch, and up into the woods itself, where my pace was lessened somewhat by the thickness of the brush and the uneven ground.
The smouldering from the battle of a few weeks before had ended by that time, although when the wind was right there was still an unpleasant odor from the burned-over area to the east. Anyway it wasn’t any smell of old battles that bothered me on that journey but simply the natural hazards of the woods—the creeper vines and twisted roots which block the trail, the swarms of bees and June flies and other insects, the slippery log you have to travel in order to get over the branch of the creek and worst of all, of course, as in any woods, are not those things that can be seen but the invisible dangers—the snakes and spiders which may be hanging from the next branch, the wolves and wildcats which might suddenly appear from behind the next tree, the leaf covered boggy places that just possibly might be quicksand into which one false step will send you swooshing down forever, leaving not a single bubble on the mud to mark your grave. Well, those were the kind of terrible thoughts which occupied my mind on that particular expedition.
However I did know exactly where I was going and the shortest way to get there. Until quite recently I was the only student here who had ever been permitted to visit this hiding place of Amelia’s—and those who know Amelia very well realize how much of an honor it is when she trusts you enough to share any of her secrets with you. Anyway, this place of hers is in a little glade in the center of a ring of oak trees which have grown very close together and whose trunks are covered by a lot of underbrush and tangled vines. There is only one way to get inside this glade—a very low and narrow tunnel in the brush through which you practically have to crawl on your hands and knees. When you finally come to the end of the tunnel—most likely with your face and arms and legs all scratched and your dress ripped to shreds from the thorns—you emerge into a very tiny but high-walled room whose carpet is of moss and whose ceiling is of lighter green with a small patch of blue in the center of it. Except at noonday, this room is very cool and shadowy—a very pleasant place indeed in which to lie on your back and listen to the birds rustling in the walls and watch the clouds float across the opening overhead.
And that is exactly what Amelia was doing when I came out of the tunnel—just lying there as I had predicted, and beside her in my teak wood jewel box was a dozing turtle—that smelly, ailing, snapping turtle which she was carrying with her constantly at that time.
“I really don’t know if it’s worth all this discomfort or not,” I said, sitting down beside her and beginning to pick the leaves and branches out of my hair. “Although I must say you always seem able to float through that tunnel very easily without tearing yourself half to pieces.”
“You disturb all the plants when you come in,” she said softly, still staring at the sky. “That’s your trouble. You can’t just fight your way through them. You have to push them aside gently the way they want to go. That’s the way animals do it and they seldom get scratched. Be careful how you move around there, please.”
“How is your pet feeling anyway?” I asked, not really caring but only to be sociable.
“Much better. He’s much better today.”
“I understand Corporal McBurney isn’t feeling too well.”
“I don’t want to talk about anyone of that name,” she said, still not looking at me. “I don’t know anyone of th
at name.”
“You found him.”
“No, I didn’t. I never met any such person in my life.”
You can’t argue with Amelia when she decides to act like that. She just shuts everything that bothers her out of her mind and the Lord Himself with an iron drill couldn’t bore the truth back into her.
“Well,” I said, “suit yourself. But whether you know him or not, if you stay out here much longer you’re going to miss a very unusual funeral ceremony. We’re all going to get together in a little bit and bury Corporal McBurney’s leg.”
I thought that might arouse her interest but it didn’t seem to have much effect. I was trying desperately to think of something which might bring her to her senses, because the afternoon was getting on and I was in severe danger of missing the burial myself. On the other hand, I was reluctant to return to Miss Harriet and admit defeat. When I set out on a task I like to finish it—even if on some occasions I’m in no particular hurry about it.
“Even if you don’t know Corporal McBurney, perhaps you’d enjoy meeting him now,” I told her. “I’d be glad to introduce you just as soon as he wakes up.”
“I don’t believe I care to know him.”
“But he’s such an interesting person. I’m sure you would enjoy his company. Also dinner will be ready very shortly anyway.”
“I have plenty to eat right here. I have some nuts and berries and mushrooms.”
“You’re going to eat the wrong kind of mushroom one of these days and that will be the end of Amelia Dabney.”
“That might be all right, too—except that I don’t think it could happen since the inedible ones are so easy to identify.”
“When do you think you might condescend to return to good old Farnsworth school?”
“Maybe never—maybe I’ll never go back.”
“Don’t you know those people either—Miss Martha and Miss Harriet and the girls?”
The Beguiled Page 32