Mother.
8
“Anybody home?” Austin King called, standing in the front hall at five o’clock that afternoon.
The answer came from the study, and it was not his wife’s voice but Nora’s that he heard. When she appeared, he thought for a moment she was ill, she looked so listless, so dejected, so unlike herself.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.
“Is that so?”
“Something I have to confess.”
“Very well.” Austin put his hat away and, as she started for the study, said, “Let’s go in here.” He sat down, crossed one knee over the other, and waited. He had been particularly careful about Nora all during the visit. He never manœuvred her into the front seat of the cart when they went driving—in fact, he occasionally manœuvred her out of it. And when he came home from the office and found her sitting alone on the porch, instead of following his natural inclination to be friendly, he stood with one hand on the screen door, asked her what kind of a day she had had, and went on into the house. When Nora was set upon by her family for expressing some idea that seemed to him reasonable and just, he sometimes raised his voice in her defence, but what he said (“I agree with Nora.…” or “I think this is what Nora is trying to say.…”) was usually drowned out in the same clamour that did away with Nora’s opinions. If this cautious show of friendliness had been enough, and she was able to come to him when she had something on her mind, he was pleased. “Now tell me all about it,” he said encouragingly.
In the window seat, facing him, Nora was silent.
“Don’t worry,” Austin said. “Whatever it is, I promise I won’t be angry with you.”
“You ought to be angry,” Nora said. With her head bent, she examined her hands—the palms and then the backs—with a detachment that reminded him of Martha in front of her mirror.
“I’ve been through the house,” she said at last, and then waited, as if for him to understand from this vague preliminary what it was that she really had to confess, and so spare her the difficulty and pain and humiliation of telling it.
“That’s perfectly all right,” Austin said. “The house is just as much yours, Nora, while you are staying in it, as it is ours.”
“But that’s not all,” Nora said. “I did something I’ve never done before, and I don’t know what made me do it this time. They went off driving without me, and I found the letter and read it.”
“What letter, Nora?” He couldn’t think of any correspondence that was in the slightest degree incriminating, but even so, a chill passed through him.
“Upstairs. I don’t know what made me do such a thing. All I know is I feel dreadful because of it.”
“Upstairs?”
“In the little secret drawer in your bureau. I found the letter from your mother and read it.”
“Oh that!” Austin said, and then he nodded.
“It was a very nice letter but I had no right to read it. I felt terrible afterwards. I felt so ashamed.”
“You mustn’t take it so to heart,” Austin said. “There was no reason why you shouldn’t have read it if you wanted to.” Though it was odd, of course, that she had been going through his bureau.
“But I didn’t want to. Something made me. I didn’t even want to be alone in the house. I didn’t feel right about it. I kept thinking maybe someone would come. And it was so still—the way it is sometimes when there’s going to be a storm. And afterwards I wanted to hide so I wouldn’t have to face you and Cousin Martha ever again. Because you’ve been so kind to us all and that’s the way we repay kindness.”
“There was nothing in the letter that I didn’t want you to know. But for your own sake, I’m glad you told me. Because now you won’t ever have to think about it again.”
“I can’t help thinking about it. If you only knew how I——”
“I don’t remember ever reading someone else’s mail,” Austin said, “but I know I wanted to, lots of times, and I did other things—when I was a boy—that I was ashamed of afterwards.”
“I’ve learned my lesson,” Nora said. “I won’t ever do such a thing again as long as I live.”
When people say I have learned my lesson, what they usually mean is that the lesson was expensive. This one had cost Nora the conversation she had been looking forward to, the conversation that was to have revealed what Austin King felt about life. Instead of talking to him as one grown person to another, she had to come to him now in a storm of childish repentance and like a child have her transgression forgiven.
“I don’t see how you really can forgive me!”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” Austin was hot and tired and he wanted to escape upstairs and put his face in a basin of cold water. He could not escape because Nora did not allow him to. She sat with her mouth slightly open and her eyes had a sick look in them, as if in a moment of absent-mindedness she had allowed some beautiful and valuable object to slip through her fingers and was now staring at the jagged pieces on the floor.
Outside, a carriage stopped in front of the Kings’ house. Mr. Potter got down and handed Ab from her mother’s lap to the sidewalk. While the others were telling Bud Ellis how much they had enjoyed his company and the ride (which had been too long), Ab wandered up the sidewalk and into the house.
“Forget about it,” Austin said. “So far as I’m concerned, it never happened.”
The one person he didn’t care to have read this letter was Martha, whose name was nowhere mentioned in it and for whom the letter contained no affectionate messages. Certain parts of the letter he could explain. His brother Charles lived in Detroit and was in the real estate business—a simple, amiable man who loved his wife and children, and threw himself into whatever he happened to be doing with an enthusiasm and pleasure that were never complicated by introspection. “This is wonderful!” he was always saying, no matter whether he was swimming or riding or playing tennis or merely out for a Sunday-afternoon walk. “Gosh, I feel fine!” he would tell people, or “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything on earth!”—and mean it. Maud lived in Galesburg, was married to a professor at Knox College, and was a very different story. She had the measuring eye that waits to see how cakes and affection are going to be divided, and was not only jealous but also moody and implacable. If the letter had been from either his brother or his sister, he could have told Nora that he seldom saw or heard from Charles and that, although they liked each other, they had nothing to say when they met; or that his sister had certain terrible difficulties to contend with, inside herself, and he had learned to get along with her by remaining always in a state of armed readiness to avoid trouble. In this way he would have aroused Nora’s interest and turned her mind away from the fact that she had had no reason (except curiosity) to read the letter in the first place. Since the letter was from his mother this was impossible. He knew far less about his mother than he knew about Nora. If he had tried to tell Nora about his mother, he would only have ended up telling her about himself, and he did not want any of the Mississippi people, so long as they were guests in his house, to know what he was really like. Otherwise, nowhere, neither in the attic nor in the basement nor behind closet doors would he have been safe from them. And so he said, “If I’d thought, Nora, I’d have told you that any letter you find in this house you can read. I give you my complete permission and approval, do you understand?”
“Do you really mean that?” Nora asked.
He nodded.
“I’m so glad,” Nora said. “Not that I’d dream of ever doing such a thing again. But just the idea that you wouldn’t mind if I——” She stopped, aware of Ab standing in the doorway watching them.
“If this and that,” Austin said, “and a half of this and that, and four make eleven——”
Ab’s face lit up at this old joke between them.
“—how much is this and that, and a half of this and that?” Smiling he picked her up and carried her into the front hall,
where the tired travellers were divesting themselves of gloves, linen coat, and veils.
To remain free of people you need some disguise, and what better, more impenetrable false face can any man put on than the letters (so various, so contradictory in their assumptions and their appeals) of his family and his friends? It was an inspiration and like any inspiration it worked—far more powerfully than Austin had intended. It put an image between Nora Potter and the sun. From that time on, she was conscious of no other presence in the house but his. And when his grey eyes came to rest on her for a moment, they left her so drained and weak that it was all she could do to stand.
9
“The way I’ve got it figured out,” Mr. Potter said painstakingly (though this story was not going to end in a burst of laughter), “is that now is the time. Land in Mississippi is cheaper than it has any right to be. I’m going to buy the plantation next to mine and cotton-farm the two at a big saving. I reckon on taking three or four people into it with me, to swing the deal, but there’ll be money for all.”
By “all” Mr. Potter did not mean Miss Ewing, who was listening outside with her head just far enough away from the pane of glass that it would not cast a shadow; or Dr. Hieronymous, the osteopath. He meant Bud Ellis and Judge Fairchild and Alfred Ogilvee and Orin McNab, the undertaker, and Mr. Holby and Dr. Seymour and Louis Orthwein, who owned and published the Draperville Evening Star. While Mr. Potter walked the floor and talked and gestured, they sat still and listened and asked questions that had to be answered. In their eyes there was the light of—not ambition, precisely—but of an awareness that life had quickened for them, that they were in the presence of their Big Chance. It was up to them to decide whether they would cling to the caution that had served them well enough, up till now, or throw caution to the winds in the hope that the winds would blow power and influence back to them.
When the door opened and the men filed out, Miss Ewing was seated at her desk and the typewriter was thrashing out so many legal words a minute that no one realized how quiet the outer office had been for the last hour and three-quarters. They said nothing to Miss Ewing about the offer that had just been laid before them, but the sound of their feet on the worn stairs was a dead giveaway. It was not beautiful, like the sound of an evening party breaking up but it had its own excitement and fear of the dark.
Faced with a circle of empty chairs, Austin and Mr. Potter sat down to appreciate the drop in tension.
“When you’re dealing with Northern businessmen,” Mr. Potter said, “everything has to be worked out so they know where they stand. That’s where you come into it, my boy. I want it all down on paper, so it’s legal and proper and there can’t be any trouble later on. Of course if you want to put some money into the venture, that’s another thing. I’m not urging you to. I’d rather not do business with relatives. It sometimes makes for hard feelings. But when a golden opportunity is knocking at your door——”
“What about old Mr. Ellis?” Austin asked.
“Bud wants to put up three thousand dollars,” Mr. Potter said. “I don’t know whether we can let him have that much stock in the company or not. We’ll have to see when the time comes. I haven’t spoken to the old gentleman yet. Old people are just naturally conservative, as you may have discovered. Mr. Ellis doesn’t know much about any but Illinois land, which is very good, there’s no getting around that; but land prices in the North are high. The South has possibilities for development that have never been realized. There has been poor management, poor equipment, poor everything. Mr. Ellis may hold off for a while, until he sees how the others react, but then he’ll be glad to be included. I thought I’d let Dr. Danforth in on it, and you, naturally, if you are interested. When your mind is made up, there’ll be plenty of time to discuss the details.” Mr. Potter dropped his cigar in the cuspidor with a gesture of finality.
“In any case,” Austin said, “I’ll be very glad to draw up the papers for you.”
Mr. Potter reached for his soiled Panama hat. “I’d better be getting along now,” he said. “I told the ladies I’d be home by four. Mrs. Potter will be wondering what’s become of me. Of course, we expect to pay you for any legal work that you do.”
“There won’t be any charge,” Austin said.
10
In spite of failing mental powers, which made old Mr. Ellis forget sometimes what he had started to say, he knew a surprising amount about the boll weevil. He also behaved very childishly, lost his temper the second time that Mr. Potter’s plan was explained to him, shouted at his grandson, and stalked out of the parlour of the farmhouse. During the party which Mary Ellis gave for the Potters that evening, Mr. Ellis remained upstairs in his room, sulking.
A list of guests, an account of the refreshments, and a description of the Japanese lanterns which made the Ellises’ yard look like a fairyland, appeared in the Star the following evening but actually it rained during the late afternoon, and the lawn party was held indoors. The children of Elm Street, for reasons of their own which had nothing to do with the Ellises’ lawn party, appeared pulling lighted shoeboxes. In Bremen and Hamburg, which the children had never heard of, the same custom prevailed at this period and so it may have been brought to Illinois from one or the other of those German cities. The shoeboxes had star-shaped and moon-shaped windows cut in the sides and covered with coloured tissue paper, and there was a round hole in the top, directly over the candle which supplied illumination. The shoeboxes, each drawn by a string, in a procession, made a soft shuffling sound and threw shafts of coloured light on the sidewalk.
Mrs. Potter, watching the procession from the Ellises’ porch, said “You know, I miss the darkies. They’re the chief thing I miss up North. Rachel’s little girl that Cousin Martha has in every now and then to help serve—I’ve grown so attached to her. If it were only possible, I’d take her home with me in my purse.… When you were a child, Mrs. Danforth, did you wake up expecting that overnight the house you went to sleep in had become a palace with marble floors and footmen to wait on you, and you had to put on a pink satin ball dress to eat breakfast in? I go into the kitchen sometimes to boil the water for a cup of tea and I see Thelma has a piece of asparagus fern and two half-dead daisies in a jelly glass by the kitchen window, and I want to say to her ‘Strange as it may seem, I was a little girl once. I remember what it was like.’ And I do remember, Mrs. Danforth, and I’m sure you do, too. I had tasks set for me, and all that, but what I liked to do best was to sit with my hands in my lap, thinking about all the wonderful things that were some day going to happen to me. My hair was in two braids down my back and there was a dreadful time when I thought I was going to have big feet, but it was only that they were growing and the rest of me hadn’t started yet.…”
Involuntarily, Mrs. Danforth tucked her own feet farther under the swing. In the dark, the parrot-like expression was not visible, and people forgot that she was homely and were aware instead of the warmth and gentleness of her voice. There was a good deal of laughing and loud talking in the parlour, which came out to them through the open window. Mrs. Danforth saw that Bud Ellis and Mr. Potter had her husband in a corner and were talking to him earnestly.
“My feet are quite small,” Mrs. Potter said, “now that I’ve caught up to them, but when I started to grow taller, something happened to me. I forgot about being a princess and I stopped being surprised that I was not eating off golden plates.…”
To approach Dr. Danforth with a business proposition during a social evening was an error in tactics. Mr. Potter had to raise his voice to carry above the other conversations in the room, and a sure thing shouted has either a dubious or a desperate sound.
“It wasn’t as if that little girl died or anything,” Mrs. Potter said. “She just stepped aside, and she’s still there, waiting. I look at Thelma and I know that so far as she’s concerned, the practising that comes from the house next door isn’t the Beach girls, it’s the court musicians. The garden is full of fountains splash
ing and rose trees, and the rats that run in the walls at night—you’ve seen the place where they live, Mrs. Danforth?—are kings’ sons coming and going. ‘Well, dear child,’ I want to say to her, ‘that’s right. They are kings’ sons.’ ”
The children with their lighted shoeboxes were coming back now, on the other side of the street.
“It’s all I’ve arrived at,” Mrs. Potter said, “after a long and in some ways difficult life. The rats really are kings’ sons, and anyone who says they are rats wouldn’t know a king’s son if he saw one.”
11
During the second and third week in August the centre of Draperville shifted from the courthouse square to a section of wooded land and shallow ravines two miles south of town. Rocking and swaying, the open street-car that all the rest of the year went only as far as the cemeteries now went on to the end of the line. The passengers got off, passed over a narrow footbridge, and presented their season tickets at the gates of the Draperville Chautauqua.
A cinder drive led past the ice-cream tent, the women’s building, the administration and post-office building, the dining-hall, and the big cone-roofed auditorium, built on the brow of a hill and open on the sides to all kinds of weather. Every year the sloping floor of the auditorium was sprinkled with fresh tanbark, the bare stage was decorated with American flags and potted palms. The acoustics were excellent.
Spreading out from the auditorium in a series of circles were the cottages, rustic, creosote-stained, painted white or green, or with crazy Victorian Gothic embellishments for children to climb on, and with the names that small, cramped cottages always have—Bide Awee, Hillcrest, and The House That Jack Built. Between the cottages there were brown canvas tents with mosquito netting across the entrance flaps and ropes and stakes for the unwary to trip over after dark.
The cottages were occupied by the same families year after year. They did not come for the simple life—life being, if anything, too simple in town. They came for self-improvement, and because it was a change, with new neighbours and unfamiliar china and kerosene stoves to worry over and a partial escape from the heat. Mornings at the encampment of pleasure were for breakfast, for cot-making, for leisure and social calls. For the women there was the cooking school, for the children the slides and swings of the playground. At two o’clock a bell high up in the rafters backstage summoned everybody to the auditorium for a half-hour of music followed by a lecture. The audience kept the air stirring with palm-leaf fans and silk Japanese fans and folding fans and sections of newspaper. The finer shades of meaning were sometimes wafted away but at all events there was rhetoric, there was eloquence, there was the tariff question, diagrammed by the swallows flying through the iron girders of the cone-shaped roof. When the afternoon programme was over, the baseball game drew some of the audience, the ice-cream tent others. Dinner, and then the bell once more, its harsh sound turned musical as it passed through layer upon layer of lacquered oak leaves.
Time Will Darken It Page 14