“‘We?’ Who?”
“Martha Shelby was with me,” the incautious Dan replied. “Why, you ought to’ve seen how she behaved, Lena! She didn’t mind it; she just laughed and kept on paddlin’ like a soldier. I honestly think she enjoyed it. Now, why can’t you — —”
“You hush!” Lena cried.
“But I only — —”
“Haven’t I enough to bear? Be quiet!”
He obeyed, gazing out upon the tumultuous landscape, and wondering sadly what made her so angry with him. Then, all at once, beyond and through the mazes of tossing rain he seemed to see, however vaguely, the new Martha he had recognized in that queer night after his homecoming; and the recollection of their strange moment together brought him another not unlike it now. Something mystic operated here; he felt again that same enrichment, charged with an indefinite regret; and though the moment was no more than a moment, passing quickly, it comforted him a little. “There! Don’t worry!” Martha seemed to say to him gently. So he said it to himself and felt in better spirits.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Lena wept, huddling in a corner of the shed. “How this horrible old world does make us pay for not knowing what to do!” And when he turned to try again to soothe her, she shrank but farther away from him and bade him let her alone.
“But it’ll be all cleared up, half an hour from now,” he said. “You’ll be warm as toast as soon as the sun comes out again, and then we’ll go over the whole Addition and see what’s what, Lena!”
The first half of this prediction was amply fulfilled; Lena was indeed warm soon after the sun reappeared; but they did not inspect the Addition further. They went home, and a few days later Lena wrote an account of the expedition in a letter to her brother George. Not altogether happy when she wrote, she was unable to refrain from a little natural exaggeration.
You said to me once you’d like to come here to live. Read Martin Chuzzlewit again before you do. “Eden!” That’s what the famous Ornaby Addition looks like! It isn’t swampy, but that’s all the difference I could see. We drove miles in the heat and choking dust and there wasn’t anything to see when we got there! Just absolutely nothing! People had been digging around in spots and cutting a lot of trees down and after a cyclone and cloudburst that came up while we were there he pointed out a post sticking out of the ground and showed the greatest pride because it had “47th St.” painted on it! This was when we were driving out of the woods. He wanted to poke all over the dreary place, looking at other posts and stumps of trees, but I couldn’t stand any more of it.
We had the most horrible storm I was ever out in, and it hailed so that after being ill in bed for a week with the ghastly heat, it got so cold I almost died, and then as soon as the cyclone was over it got hot again — it isn’t like ordinary heat; it gets hot with a sticky heaviness I can’t express and the thermometer must stay up over 100 even at night — and as soon as we got home I had to go to bed where I’ve been ever since — hence this pencil — and I’ve just escaped pneumonia! And during the cyclone when I was really ill with the nervous anguish lightning always causes me, he began telling me how wonderfully a former sweetheart of his behaved in a storm on a lake! It was his idea of how to make me not mind it. Of course he only meant to cheer me up — but really!
His father and mother aren’t bad, I must say. They’re quite like him, good-looking and full of kindness; his mother is really sweet and I like them both, though I’ll never get used to hearing people talk with this terrible Western accent. To a sensitive ear, it’s actual pain. The brother looks rather like Dan, too; but he’s pompous in a dry way and affected. Reads heavy things and seems to me a cold-hearted sort of prig, though he’s always polite. The father and mother read, too. Their idea is Carlyle and Emerson and Thoreau — you know the type of mind — and Harlan (the brother) talks about that Englishman, Shaw, who writes the queer plays. They say they have two theatres open in winter, but of course there’s no music here except something they brag about called the “April Festival,” when there’s a week of imported orchestra and some singing. Pleasant for me! — one week in the year! — though I suppose you’ll think it’s all I should have.
They meant to be kind, but they gave me the most fearful “reception.” I never endured such a ghastly ordeal. The weather was over 100 in the shade — and in crowded rooms, well, imagine it! The people were dressed well enough — some of them were rather queer, but so are some at home — but I wish you could have seen the vehicles they drive in and their coachmen! Slouchy darkies in old straw hats with long-tailed horses that get the reins under their tails — and fringed surreys and family carryalls, something like what you’d see out in the country towns in Connecticut. They have phaetons and runabouts and a few respectable traps, but I’ve seen just one good-looking victoria since I came here. They don’t like smartness really. I believe they think it’s effeminate!
The real head of the Oliphant family is an outrageous old hag, Dan’s grandmother, who behaved terribly to me at my only meeting with her — it will remain our only meeting! They’re all afraid of her, and she has a lot of money. Queer — I understand he’s tried to raise money for his Eden all over the town, but never asked the terrible grandmother. She doesn’t believe in it, and I must say she’s right about that! Rather!
How strange that any girl should do what I’ve done — and with my eyes wide open! I did it, and yet I knew he didn’t understand me. I ought to have known that he can never understand me, that we don’t speak the same language and never will. I ought to have realized what it means to know that I must live days, weeks, months, years with a person who will never understand anything whatever of my real self!
Yet I still care for him, and he is good. He does a thousand little kind things for me that do not help me at all, and the truth is most of them only irritate me. How odd it is that I write to you about not being understood — you who are seldom kind to me and often most unjust! Yet in a way I have always felt that you do understand me a little — perhaps unsympathetically — but at least you give me the luxury of being partly understood.
Yes, I still care for him, but when I think of his awful Ornaby thing I sometimes believe I have married a madman. It is nothing as I said — hopeless — a devastated farm — and yet when he speaks of it his eye lights up and he begins to walk about and gesture and talk as if he actually saw houses and streets — and shops — and thousands of people living there! If this isn’t hallucination, I don’t know what hallucination means.
But since our excursion to the place I’ve almost cured him of talking about it to me! I just can’t stand it! And what is pleasant, I think he probably goes to talk about it to another woman. Already! A perfectly enormous girl seven or eight feet tall that he’d picked out to be my most intimate friend! Because she’s been his most intimate friend, of course. But I suppose all men are like that.
The heat did relax for a day or two — but it’s back again. Sometimes I can’t believe I am actually in this place — apparently for life — and I begin to hope that I’ll wake up. I think even you would pity me sometimes, George.
Chapter XII
IN THE MINDS of Mrs. Savage’s neighbours across the street and of the habitual passers-by, that broad plate-glass window where it was her custom to sit for the last hour of every afternoon had come to bear the significance of a glass over a portrait. All long thoroughfares and many of even the shortest have such windows; and the people who repeatedly pass that way will often find the portrait window becoming a part, however slight, of their own lives; but it will seldom be an enduring part, except as a fugitive, pathetic memory. For a time the silent old face is seen framed there every day, or it may be a pale and wistful child looking out gravely upon the noisy world. Then abruptly one day the window is only a window and no more a portrait; the passer-by has a moment of wonder whenever he goes by, but presently may have his faintly troubled question answered by a wreath on the door; and afterwards the window that was once a portrait will
seem to him a little haunted.
Mrs. Savage’s window had been a portrait so long that even the school children who went homeward that way in the autumn afternoons noticed a vacancy behind the glass and missed her from the frame; but new seasons came and passed, and no wreath appeared upon her door. She had been so thoroughly alive for so many years that the separation of herself from life could not be abrupt, even if she wished it. She did not wish it she told Harlan, one rainy night, as he sat beside her bed after bringing her the news that she was a great-grandmother.
“I suppose it seems funny to you,” she said. “You must wonder why an old woman with nothing to live for would still want to live. I suppose you think it’s because I just want to eat a little more and to lie here listening to that!” With a hand now become the very ghost of a hand, she gestured toward a window where the parted curtains revealed black panes slushed with noisy water by the strong west wind. “How you must wonder!”
“Oh, no,” Harlan said, though she spoke the truth. “I don’t wonder at all, grandma.”
“Yes, you do! How could a young person help wondering about such a thing? Year before last I could still go out for a little walk; last year I could only go for a drive in the afternoons. After that I could still get downstairs and sit by the window; then I couldn’t even do that, and could only hobble around upstairs; — then I couldn’t even get into another room without being helped. And now for a month I’ve not been able to get out of bed — and I’ll never be able to. No wonder you wonder I want to hang on!”
“But I don’t,” he insisted. “I don’t, indeed.”
“You do. What do you think I have to live for?”
“Why, partly for your family, grandma. We’re all devoted to you; and besides you have your memories — I know you have many happy memories.”
She laughed feebly, but nevertheless with audible asperity, interrupting his rather stumbling reassurances. “‘Happy memories!’ Young people are always talking about ‘happy memories’; and they think old people ‘live in their happy memories.’ I advise you not to look forward to spending your old age in that way! There’s no such thing, young man.”
“No such thing as a happy memory?”
“Not when you’re as old as I am,” she said. “You can only have a happy memory of something when you can look forward to something of the same kind happening again; but I can’t look forward to anything. Yet I still want to hang on!”
Harlan laughed gently. “Then doesn’t that prove you do look forward to something, grandma?”
“No,” she said. “It only proves I still have a little curiosity. I’d like to live twenty years just to prove I’m right about how this baby’s going to turn out.”
The implication of her tone was grim with conviction — clearly she spoke of a baby who could not turn out well — and Harlan was amused by his own perception of a little drama: his grandmother, clinging with difficulty to one extreme edge of life and prophesying only black doom for this new person who had just crawled up into life over the opposite extreme edge. “I’m sorry you feel so gloomy about that baby, grandma. I’m rather pleased, myself, to be an uncle, and so far I haven’t been worrying about his future. Don’t you think there’s a chance for him?”
“Not with such a mother and father,” the old lady promptly replied. “Dan oughtn’t to have mixed with such a stock as that painted-up little photograph girl.”
Harlan protested a little; coming to Lena’s defense at least in this detail. “But I understand that the particular foible of the McMillan family is the magnificence of their stock, as you call it, grandma. It seems they’re so proud of it they don’t think of much else.”
“Yes; that’s always a sign a stock’s petered out. When people put a lot on what their folks used to do, it always means they haven’t got gimp enough left to do anything themselves. The minute I laid eyes on her picture I knew she came from a no-account stock; and when your mother gave her that reception everybody in town could tell right off what she was. Painted! That tells the story!”
Again Harlan protested on behalf of his sister-in-law. “Oh, I shouldn’t make too much of that, grandma. A little rouge now and then — —”
“‘A little rouge!’” the old lady echoed satirically. “She was plastered with it! That doesn’t make any difference though, because a woman that uses it at all is a bad woman and wants the men to know it.”
“Oh, no, no!”
“It’s so,” the old lady cried as fiercely as her enfeebled voice permitted. “It’s the truth, and you’ll live to see I’m right. I don’t want you to forget then that I told you so. You remember it, Harlan.”
“Yes, grandma,” he said placatively. “I will if — —”
“I don’t want any ‘if’ about it. You remember what I’m telling you! She’s bad!” Mrs. Savage spoke so vehemently that she had to pause and let her quickened breathing become more regular; — then she went on: “Look how she’s treated me. If she’d had the right stuff in her, she’d have been grateful to me for giving her a lesson. If she’d been just a foolish girl who’d made a mistake and painted herself because she wanted to look healthier when she met her new husband’s friends, why, she might have got a little pettish with me for showing her it was a mistake the way I did, but long before now she’d have forgiven me and thanked me for doing it. Not she! That was the last time I set foot out of doors; and has she ever come to see me? She’s never been near me! What’s more, she’s done her best to keep Dan from ever coming here. When he has come I know he hasn’t dared to tell her. Do you deny it?”
Harlan shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I can’t, grandma.”
“Do you know why she hates me so?” the old lady demanded. “It’s because she’s bad, and she knows I know it. People never forgive you for knowing they’re bad. And now she’s brought this baby into the world to inherit her badness, and you sit there and wonder I say the child’s bound to turn out wrong.”
“Grandma!” the young man exclaimed, laughing. “I only wonder you don’t take into account the fact that the baby is Dan’s, too. Dan may be a rather foolish sort of person — in fact, I think he is — but surely you’ve never thought him bad.”
The old lady looked at her grandson querulously. “Don’t be so superior, young man. That’s always been your trouble — you think you’re the only perfect person in the world.” And when he would have protested, defending himself, she checked him sharply and went on: “Never mind! I’m talking about other things now. The trouble with Dan is that he’s never seen anything as it really is and never will — not in all the days of his life! He was that way even when he was a boy. I remember once you hurt his feelings about some poor little brackets he was making with a little Jew boy. He thought the brackets were perfect, and he thought the little Jew boy was perfect, too. When you criticized them both he got into such a spasm of crying he had to go home to bed.”
“Yes,” Harlan said, smiling faintly; “I remember. He was always like that.”
“Yes, and always will be. So he’ll think this child of his is perfect, and it’ll never get any discipline. I’d like to live twenty years just to see the wrack and ruin that’s going to be made by these children born nowadays. Their parents got hardly any discipline at all, and they won’t get any, so they’ll never know how to respect anything at all. It only takes a little common sense to see from the start how this child’ll turn out. With no discipline or respect for anything, and with such a mother from a petered-out stock, and a father that hasn’t got a practical thought in his head, you can just as well as not expect the child to be in the penitentiary by the time he’s twenty years old!” Then, as Harlan laughed, the old lady uttered a faint sound of laughter herself, not as if admitting that she exaggerated anything, however, but grimly. “You’ll see!”
“You’re right about it this far,” Harlan said. “Dan already thinks the baby’s perfect.”
“Happy, is he?”
“The usual triump
hant young father. More triumphant than the usual one, I should say. He went whooping over the house till mother had to stop him and send him outdoors to keep him from disturbing Lena.”
“Yes; that’s like him,” the old lady said. “How queer it is; there are people who can always find something to whoop about, no matter what happens. Your grandfather was like that when he was a young man. Even when we were poor as Job’s turkey he’d burst out cackling and laughing over anything at all. I used to just look at him and wonder. Dan’s desperate for money, isn’t he?”
Harlan coughed, frowned, and then looked faintly amused. “Yes, I should just about use the word ‘desperate.’ I think he is.”
“He’ll not get any of mine!” Mrs. Savage said. “I’d not be very apt to help him anyhow, after the way his wife’s treated me. He wouldn’t listen to me; he would marry her, and he would throw all he had away on that miserable old farm! Now I guess he’s got nothing more to throw away.”
“He’s got rather less than nothing now, grandma. The place wouldn’t sell for enough to pay the mortgages, and he hasn’t been able to meet the interest. Father managed to let him have a thousand dollars two months ago, but it didn’t go very far. The truth is, I think Dan’s begun to be a little out of his head over the thing; — he had twenty teams hauling dirt while poor father’s thousand lasted. Now he’s going to lose the place, and I’d think it a fortunate misfortune if I believed he’d learn anything by it; but he won’t.”
“No,” Mrs. Savage agreed gloomily. “He’s like his grandfather, but he hasn’t got a wife to watch over him as his grandfather had. He’ll just be up to some new wastefulness.”
“He already is,” Harlan laughed. “You’re extraordinary, the way you put your finger on things, grandma. He’s already up to a new wastefulness.”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 343