Hidden Flower
Page 17
She had not quite understood. Well, now he would make her understand.
They reached the hotel, she still very silent and he supposed bewildered, and he gave her bags to a bellboy and they went into the elevator up to the seventeenth floor where their windows looked out over the sea. He tipped the boy and locked the door. When he took off her little hat, which was not, he decided, very becoming, he slipped her coat from her shoulders, and held her in his arms. Oh, the fragrance of her skin, the sweetness of the curve of her neck, the pressure of her little breasts against him! He could not wait. And why should he wait? He saw her eyes so dark, so luminous, and the softness of her young mouth. She knew, she understood his need. She was the essence of all that was woman, a woman of the Orient, instinctive in the ways of the heart.
“Do you still love me?” He stayed to demand so much, to hear at least those words.
“I do love you,” she said, not in a whisper, but in a voice lovely and clear. “I come so far for love of you, Allenn.”
When was the mortal life of the child begun? They did not know at which moment in the day’s brightness or in what shadow of the night his spirit stepped from the eternity before birth into the world of life. Whether it was in that first screened room now across the sea, or in the high room looking toward the west, whether it was in the mountain cabin where they spent a handful of days, reluctant to leave the snow-crowned peaks, whether it was in the upper room in a little hotel in a small town on the endless plain, or in the rolling hills of the Midwest, they did not know. Somewhere in the glorious months, at some place of love in the chain of days and nights of love, the world child was living, but still they did not know. They were not thinking of him but of themselves.
“We must tell your parents exactly when we come,” Josui said. Of this they both had been thinking, each secretly from the other, each reluctant to acknowledge that one day soon this transcendent journey must end, the glorious days, the shimmering nights be past. The heavens were kind and the autumn warmth made the mystic atmosphere in which they moved or lingered. It had to end, they knew it; this was not life, it was only love, and somewhere there had to be fusion of the two. Josui, the more practical, thus suggested the last day. Sensitive to his every look, she knew already that he dreaded it. Something loomed ahead, she did not know what, but she prepared herself as best she could. If she were very careful, very dutiful, very helpful, if she considered the elders always first, perhaps they could he happy together. She was the key figure, that she understood. At night while he slept she considered her increasing knowledge of this man and though she loved him more and more, though she yielded herself to him wholly, yet she was beginning dimly to understand that the woman could yield no more than the man wanted. The capacity to receive must equal the capacity to give. Did he want her whole? Of this she was not sure.
“Unless we stop somewhere a couple of days,” he said, “we can’t help getting home day after tomorrow.”
“You don’t want to go home?” she inquired.
“Oh, I do, of course. We have to settle down. I have to think what to do about a job. Maybe I’ll give up the army entirely. I can—my time was up several years ago, for that matter. Maybe I’ll just be what my father is—a country gentleman.”
She followed everything he said with an exact attention, but she did not always understand the over and above, the extra meaning, the allusions of idiom. Each English word contained its dictionary definition for her and no more.
“We must tell them the hour we come,” she said, returning to her concept of duty.
“Day after tomorrow, about six o’clock in the evening,” he said.
“So tomorrow, Allenn, please, you telephone to your parents,” she said, coaxing.
He found her attempts to control him as charming as the dictates of a child. She was so sweetly anxious to guide him while she adored and obeyed. It was so necessary in her eyes that he behave always at his best, at least toward others. She laughed when he was what she called “naughty” toward her, when he would not get up in the morning, when he left his pajamas on the floor, when he rumpled her smooth hair or her fresh dress, when he teased her to make her argue with him, which she did seriously and with such earnestness that his eyes betrayed him. When she saw the glints of his laughter she cried out at him, “Naughty Allenn!” and put her small right hand over her mouth to hide her own laughter. She spoiled him outrageously, he acknowledged. She expected no help from him in the little housekeeping duties of the places where they stopped, she waited on him as a matter of course, holding the towel ready when he bathed, washing his shaving things when he had finished.
At first he had cried out against such service. “Here, you little thing, you’re my wife, not my slave!”
But she persisted and he found himself yielding to her, for this was her way of expressing her love. It was very pleasant, he had to say so, it was pleasant not to wait upon himself. It gave him a feeling of leisure and freedom from detail. She showed herself Japanese at heart. An American girl would never have so served him. He began to understand why men said it was impossible to love an American woman if one had known a woman of the Orient.
“So this morning you telephone your parents?” Josui suggested sweetly the next morning.
“Oh, sometime,” he said carelessly. Another matchless day had begun in the haze of purple upon the Alleghenies. He did not want to think of its end.
Yet soon he saw that she was troubled. She sat beside him in anxious restraint, and he felt her anxiety.
“Relax,” he told her. “I’ll do it, Josui.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “so nice to do it now, isn’t it?”
He laughed suddenly. “All right, at the very next public telephone we stop. Watch for the little blue bell.”
She saw it first and within ten minutes in a cluster of houses that was scarcely a village. “There—there!” she cried, pointing with her middle right finger.
He was compelled to it then. He stopped the car. “You can wait here,” he commanded. Now that the moment had arrived he was troubled and reluctant. He was not so childish as to be frightened, whatever happened. He could take Josui away and they could live where they pleased in the world. But he did not want to leave his home. The years abroad had deepened his love of his own country, his own state, his town, and the big house which his great-grandfather had built to shelter the generations to come. It was a way of life which might be doomed but it would last his time, at least in America. He wanted to live it, to be able to be the sort of man his father was, wise, leisured, content.
He stood in the booth, thinking such thoughts while he waited. And could Josui take his mother’s place?
“Here’s your party,” the operator’s voice sang over the wires.
“Hello, Dad? This is Allen.” He had called his father, person-to-person, dreading the impact upon his mother without the presence.
“Yes, son?” His father’s voice came to his ears surprisingly strong and vibrant. “Where are you?”
“In the Alleghenies. I wanted you to know that we’ll probably reach home tomorrow night, or maybe the day after, if we dawdle along, as we may.”
“Yes, well—” his father hesitated. “Allen, I reckon you better stay in a hotel the first night, son. You and I better have a talk.”
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“I can’t tell you right now. We better have a talk. Suppose you stay over in Richmond. I’ll go up there in the afternoon and wait for you. You call me at the club when you get in.”
“All right, we’ll be there.” He wanted to get there. Whatever it was his father said they must talk about, he wanted to know it and face it.
“Good-by, Dad. See you tomorrow.”
“All right, son.”
He hung up and loitered a moment in the little general store. He bought some chocolate bars and waited for change. This was to allow him time to remove anxiety from his face. Josui’s eyes were so keen, she could read
his very thoughts, she caught the atmosphere of his spirit. He did not want to hide himself from her except to save her hurt. He had begun to know her, too, and he discerned in her a rock bottom of quick despair, a readiness to give up hope and to believe in the worst, which he recognized as a characteristic of the Japanese nature. She must not give up hope now at the very beginning.
When he went back to the car he was smiling and he offered the chocolate.
“Oh, thank you,” she exclaimed. He liked to give her little gifts that he might hear the heartfelt sweetness of her polite gratitude, her thanks spoken in that warm accepting voice. “And did you talk with parents?”
“Yes, with my father. We’ll stop the first night in Richmond, though, in a good hotel. My father said he’d meet us there.”
“Oh, how nice and kind he is,” she exclaimed. Her eyes suddenly misted with tears. “I hope he is not too old. Such trouble! And your mother?”
He improvised. “She’ll want to stay home and have the house nice.”
Josui was very happy after that. She fed him bits of chocolate while he drove, ate a very little herself, and she wrapped what was left neatly in the silver paper and then in some newspaper and put it in the glove compartment for another time. Her economical ways touched him. She was careful about scraps of food, about his garments and hers, about half sheets of writing paper and penny stamps and all small items which might be wasted. She had lived among a people taught to save and make the most of everything material. How, he wondered, would she take the vast wastefulness of the big house, the four servants, the baskets of food taken home, the food thrown away, the carelessness about money and clothing and all material goods which here could so easily be replaced? He was troubled as he thought. There was something adamant about her. Underneath all the seemingly soft yielding she had principles which could not be moved. Right was an absolute in her clear, even hard young mind. Though she was swept by her love for him, right remained. She had a zeal for whatever she considered proper, in attitude, in speech, in behavior. She did not expect the same zeal in him, but with herself she was relentless. He could foresee a future wherein she was zealous in his defense, earnest to guard his money, his sources of food, his happiness. He would not be able to persuade her that wastefulness could be right, or that the mild pilfering of old servants was not theft. All would be done for his sake, but he foresaw that this love, too, though passionately tender, might be inexorable.
He chose to stop at a small hotel that was on a quiet street in Richmond, and he was honest enough to acknowledge that he did so in order to be less conspicuous when he came in with Josui. He must accustom himself to the curious looks, the unspoken question. There must have been the same curiosity and question about him in Japan, but he had not noticed it. Had she, perhaps, and had she not told him? He would not ask her now lest here she had not noticed, and lest he might put into her mind a wound that she might be spared.
The hotel was pleasant. Josui liked the rather old-fashioned quiet, and when they were settled in a small suite whose windows gave upon a little square park where a few trees were still bright with autumn color, Allen telephoned to his father’s club.
Mr. Kennedy was awaiting the call. He had arrived the day before and had spent the time visiting a few old friends, not in their homes, where he never went if he could help it, but in their offices. Leisure seemed abundant, and each man was glad to see him because he carried with him a store of knowledge. Tom Kennedy was better than a newspaper.
“I’ll be right over, son,” he replied to Allen’s voice on the telephone.
He hung up the receiver, ambled across the large pleasant room which he rented regularly in the club, put on his loose topcoat of grayish-brown tweed and his somewhat shapeless brown felt hat, and walked down the wide curving stairs. There was no elevator and he would not have used it if there had been.
Outside the air was muggy with a belated damp heat and he stopped a taxicab. “Take me to the Mansfield,” he ordered, and then sat oblivious while the cab wound its way through the city. He had no intention of concealing from his son the long talk he had had with Josephine. The sooner Allen knew what he had to face the better it would be. Time must pass before anyone could know the end. He got out at the hotel and paid the fare and shook his head at the small black bellboy loitering at the door.
“I’m not stopping here. I’ve just come to see somebody.”
He was astonished at himself. Why did he not say, “I have come to see my son?” Was there some damned unwillingness in him, too? If there was he would root it out. He despised prejudice. He believed, within the privacy of his own skull, that the day would inevitably come, and the sooner the better, when all people would be the same color. Let everybody be a dirty brown! What did it matter? So the more quickly would be removed from the tangle of human affairs one source of trouble. Once he had been in New York and there had encountered at a public dinner an earnest female savior of the nation.
“But what, Mr. Kennedy, shall we do with the color problem?” the insistent woman had asked.
Safe among strangers and far from his native South and those who knew him, he had attacked the toughest fried chicken he had ever met upon his plate. “Fade ’em out, fade ’em out,” he had said cheerfully. The woman had not spoken to him again.
He ambled now to the desk. “Tell Mr. Allen Kennedy that his father is coming upstairs,” he ordered the pallid clerk.
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said, staring at him.
So people stared, did they? He would not notice.
“Elevator is that way, sir,” the clerk called.
“I’ll walk,” Mr. Kennedy replied. It was only one floor up. He hated exercise and salved his conscience by stairs. They were wide and easy and the upstairs corridor was deeply carpeted. His footfall made no sound and he knocked heavily on the door—twenty-two, Allen had said. He heard a little cry through the open transom, a girl’s voice, and then Allen’s reply. “It’s my father.”
The door opened immediately. The room was empty except for Allen, smiling at him. “Josui has gone into the bedroom to touch up her hair. She’s fearfully anxious to look her best. Come on in, Dad.”
“I reckon all women are fussy about their hair,” Mr. Kennedy said.
He came in and allowed Allen to help with his coat and take his hat and cane. Then he sat down in the most comfortable chair and looked around the little sitting room. He must delay no longer, but he did delay enough to light a cigar.
“Before she comes in, son, I ought to tell you that your mother is in no good frame of mind. I don’t like to talk about it before your wife, but you and I will have to think things over.”
Allen stood where he was, transfixed by the dejected solemnity of his father’s face.
“You mean she doesn’t want us to come home?” he demanded.
Mr. Kennedy looked miserable. He turned his head away and drew on the cigar. “I’m afraid not, son. At least, she isn’t ready yet to have your wife come home. Of course she’ll always be glad to see you. In fact, she told me especially to tell you that you are always welcome. She said to tell you that your room would be kept just as it is, always, ready for you whenever you want it.”
“Wait a minute—”
Allen darted out of the room into the bedroom and closed the door between. There was a long silence, a long wait. Mr. Kennedy kept drawing on the cigar. It was long and thin and when he held it a long thin curl of smoke came from its end. He hoped that Allen was not telling the girl. It was much easier to manage solutions if the women did not know. But like most bridegrooms Allen probably thought he had to tell his wife everything. It took men a while to learn, and a father could not teach his son anything either.
His mind went back to his own wife and the wretched evening they had spent. He had told her the truth, that he was going up to Richmond to meet Allen and his bride. Instead of being grateful, she had blamed him bitterly, apparently for that which certainly he could not help.
“I’m not asking for that,” she had retorted. “I simply say what I have said all along, that he cannot bring that girl here.”
“They’re married, Sugar,” he had reminded her.
Upon her pretty face there had come something which long ago he had acknowledged was a sneer. The first time he had seen it was on their honeymoon, and he had forgotten why. He remembered only the shock that it had been to him to see that lovely mouth, made for his kisses, twisted into a shape to repel even his love. But in those days he had not known that love cannot change even the beloved. In the years since then he had not ceased to love her but he no longer loved her whole. There were hours and days and certainly many moments when he preferred not to think about her and when his love waited.
“They are not married,” she had declared crisply. She spoke with a soft sweet drawl, the gentlest of women when she wished to be, but there was also this harsh crisp voice that he feared.
“Sugar, why do you say that again? You know I told you that a temple is just the same thing as a church—”
“I don’t care about the temple,” she said.
He had not at all liked the look of triumph on her face. He had seen it there before, two or three times, once when she had entered Allen in a military school against his wish and the boy’s. He had let her have her way because to have insisted upon the boy’s withdrawal would have created a public commotion.
“It’s not what you care about—” he began.
She cut across his meandering with a whiplike cry, “You’re right! It doesn’t matter what I think or what you think. It’s the law. The law of this state forbids marriage between the white and colored races.”