Virginia
by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow · English · Gutenberg #26316 · 837,545 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Virginia
Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Release date: August 14, 2008 [eBook #26316]
Most recently updated: January 3, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26316
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGINIA ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
VIRGINIA
By ELLEN GLASGOW
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
MCMXIII
_Copyright, 1913, by_
Doubleday, Page & Company
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into Foreign Languages,
including the Scandinavian._
TO THE RADIANT SPIRIT WHO WAS MY SISTER CARY GLASGOW McCORMACK
CONTENTS
BOOK FIRST--THE DREAM
I. The System
II. Her Inheritance
III. First Love
IV. The Treadwells
V. Oliver, the Romantic
VI. A Treadwell in Revolt
VII. The Artist in Philistia
VIII. White Magic
IX. The Great Man Moves
X. Oliver Surrenders
BOOK SECOND--THE REALITY
I. Virginia Prepares for the Future
II. Virginia's Letters
III. The Return
IV. Her Children
V. Failure
VI. The Shadow
VII. The Will to Live
VIII. The Pang of Motherhood
IX. The Problem of the South
BOOK THIRD--THE ADJUSTMENT
I. The Changing Order
II. The Price of Comfort
III. Middle-age
IV. Life's Cruelties
V. Bitterness
VI. The Future
BOOK FIRST
THE DREAM
CHAPTER I
THE SYSTEM
Toward the close of a May afternoon in the year 1884, Miss Priscilla
Batte, having learned by heart the lesson in physical geography she
would teach her senior class on the morrow, stood feeding her canary on
the little square porch of the Dinwiddie Academy for Young Ladies. The
day had been hot, and the fitful wind, which had risen in the direction
of the river, was just beginning to blow in soft gusts under the old
mulberry trees in the street, and to scatter the loosened petals of
syringa blossoms in a flowery snow over the grass. For a moment Miss
Priscilla turned her flushed face to the scented air, while her eyes
rested lovingly on the narrow walk, edged with pointed bricks and
bordered by cowslips and wallflowers, which led through the short garden
to the three stone steps and the tall iron gate. She was a shapeless yet
majestic woman of some fifty years, with a large mottled face in which a
steadfast expression of gentle obstinacy appeared to underly the more
evanescent ripples of thought or of emotion. Her severe black silk gown,
to which she had just changed from her morning dress of alpaca, was
softened under her full double chin by a knot of lace and a cameo brooch
bearing the helmeted profile of Pallas Athene. On her head she wore a
three-cornered cap trimmed with a ruching of organdie, and beneath it
her thin gray hair still showed a gleam of faded yellow in the sunlight.
She had never been handsome, but her prodigious size had endowed her
with an impressiveness which had passed in her youth, and among an
indulgent people, for beauty. Only in the last few years had her
fleshiness, due to rich food which she could not resist and to lack of
exercise for which she had an instinctive aversion, begun seriously to
inconvenience her.
Beyond the wire cage, in which the canary spent his involuntarily
celibate life, an ancient microphylla rose-bush, with a single imperfect
bud blooming ahead of summer amid its glossy foliage, clambered over a
green lattice to the gabled pediment of the porch, while the delicate
shadows of the leaves rippled like lace-work on the gravel below. In the
miniature garden, where the small spring blossoms strayed from the prim
beds into the long feathery grasses, there were syringa bushes, a little
overblown; crape-myrtles not yet in bud; a holly tree veiled in bright
green near the iron fence; a flowering almond shrub in late bloom
against the shaded side of the house; and where a west wing put out on
the left, a bower of red and white roses was steeped now in the faint
sunshine. At the foot of the three steps ran the sunken moss-edged
bricks of High Street, and across High Street there floated, like
wind-blown flowers, the figures of Susan Treadwell and Virginia
Pendleton.
Opening the rusty gate, the two girls tripped with carefully held
flounces up the stone steps and between the cowslips and wallflowers
that bordered the walk. Their white lawn dresses were made with the
close-fitting sleeves and the narrow waists of the period, and their
elaborately draped overskirts were looped on the left with graduated
bows of light blue ottoman ribbon. They wore no hats, and Virginia, who
was the shorter of the two, had fastened a Jacqueminot rose in the thick
dark braid which was wound in a wreath about her head. Above her arched
black eyebrows, which lent an expression of surprise and animation to
her vivid oval face, her hair was parted, after an earlier fashion,
under its plaited crown, and allowed to break in a mist of little curls
over her temples. Even in repose there was a joyousness in her look
which seemed less the effect of an inward gaiety of mind than of some
happy outward accident of form and colour. Her eyes, very far apart and
set in black lashes, were of a deep soft blue--the blue of wild
hyacinths after rain. By her eyes, and by an old-world charm of
personality which she exhaled like a perfume, it was easy to discern
that she embodied the feminine ideal of the ages. To look at her was to
think inevitably of love. For that end, obedient to the powers of Life,
the centuries had formed and coloured her, as they had formed and
coloured the wild rose with its whorl of delicate petals. The air of a
spoiled beauty which rested not ungracefully upon her was sweetened by
her expression of natural simplicity and goodness.
For an instant she stood listening in silence to the querulous pipes of
the bird and the earnest exhortations of the teacher on the joys of cage
life for both bird and lady. Then plucking the solitary early bud from
the microphylla rose-bush, she tossed it over the railing of the porch
on the large and placid bosom of Miss Priscilla.
"Do leave Dicky alone for a minute!" she called in a winning soprano
voice.
At the sound, Miss Priscilla dropped the bit of cake she held, and
turned to lean delightedly over the walk, while her face beamed like a
beneficent moon through the shining cloud of rose-leaves.
"Why, Jinny, I hadn't any idea that you and Susan were there!"
Her smile included Virginia's companion, a tall, rather heavy girl, with
intelligent grey eyes and fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her
forehead. She was the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell, the wealthiest and
therefore the most prominent citizen of the town, and she was also as
intellectual as the early eighties and the twenty-one thousand
inhabitants of Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be. Her friendship for
Virginia had been one of those swift and absorbing emotions which come
to women in their school-days. The stronger of the two, she dominated
the other, as she dominated every person or situation in life, not by
charm, but by the force of an energetic and capable mind. Though her
dress matched Virginia's in every detail, from the soft folds of tulle
at the neck to the fancy striped stockings under the _bouffant_
draperies, the different shapes of the wearers gave to the one gown an
air of decorous composure and to the other a quaint and appealing grace.
Flushed, ardent, expectant, both girls stood now at the beginning of
womanhood. Life was theirs; it belonged to them, this veiled, radiant
thing that was approaching. Nothing wonderful had come as yet--but
to-morrow, the day after, or next year, the miracle would happen, and
everything would be different! Experience floated in a luminous mystery
before them. The unknown, which had borrowed the sweetness and the
colour of their illusions, possessed them like a secret ecstasy and
shone, in spite of their shyness, in their startled and joyous look.
"Father asked me to take a message over to General Goode," explained
Virginia, with a little laugh as gay as the song of a bird, "but I
couldn't go by without thanking you for the cherry bounce. I made mother
drink some of it before dinner, and it almost gave her an appetite."
"I knew it was what she needed," answered Miss Priscilla, showing her
pleasure by an increasing beam. "It was made right here in the house,
and there's nothing better in the world, my poor mother used to say, to
keep you from running down in the spring. But why can't you and Susan
come in and sit a while?"
"We'll be straight back in a minute," replied Susan before Virginia
could answer. "I've got a piece of news I want to tell you before any
one else does. Oliver came home last night."
"Oliver?" repeated Miss Priscilla, a little perplexed. "You don't mean
the son of your uncle Henry, who went out to Australia? I thought your
father had washed his hands of him because he had started play-acting or
something?" Curiosity, that devouring passion of the middle-aged, worked
in her breast, and her placid face grew almost intense in expression.
"Yes, that's the one," replied Susan. "They went to Australia when
Oliver was ten years old, and he's now twenty-two. He lost both his
parents about three years ago," she added.
"I know. His mother was my cousin," returned Miss Priscilla. "I lost
sight of her after she left Dinwiddie, but somebody was telling me the
other day that Henry's investments all turned out badly and they came
down to real poverty. Sarah Jane was a pretty girl and I was always very
fond of her, but she was one of the improvident sort that couldn't make
two ends meet without tying them into a bow-knot."
"Then Oliver must be just like her. After his mother's death he went to
Germany to study, and he gave away the little money he had to some
student he found starving there in a garret."
"That was generous," commented Miss Priscilla thoughtfully, "but I
should hardly call it sensible. I hope some day, Jinny, that your father
will tell us in a sermon whether there is biblical sanction for
immoderate generosity or not."
"But what does he say?" asked Virginia softly, meaning not the rector,
but the immoderate young man.
"Oh, Oliver says that there wasn't enough for both and that the other
student is worth more to the world than he is," answered Susan. "Then,
of course, when he got so poor that he had to pawn his clothes or
starve, he wrote father an almost condescending letter and said that as
much as he hated business, he supposed he'd have to come back and go to
work. 'Only,' he added, 'for God's sake, don't make it tobacco!' Wasn't
that dreadful?"
"It was extremely impertinent," replied Miss Priscilla sternly, "and to
Cyrus of all persons! I am surprised that he allowed him to come into
the house."
"Oh, father doesn't take any of his talk seriously. He calls it
'starvation foolishness,' and says that Oliver will get over it as soon
as he has a nice little bank account. Perhaps he will--he is only
twenty-two, you know--but just now his head is full of all kinds of new
ideas he picked up somewhere abroad. He's as clever as he can be,
there's no doubt of that, and he'd be really good-looking, too, if he
didn't have the crooked nose of the Treadwells. Virginia has seen him
only once in the street, but she's more than half in love with him
already."
"Do come, Susan!" remonstrated Virginia, blushing as red as the rose in
her hair. "It's past six o'clock and the General will have gone if we
don't hurry." And turning away from the porch, she ran between the
flowering syringa bushes down the path to the gate.
Having lost his bit of cake, the bird began to pipe shrilly, while Miss
Priscilla drew a straight wicker chair (she never used rockers) beside
the cage, and, stretching out her feet in their large cloth shoes with
elastic sides, counted the stitches in an afghan she was knitting in
narrow blue and orange strips. In front of her, the street trailed
between cool, dim houses which were filled with quiet, and from the hall
at her back there came a whispering sound as the breeze moved like a
ghostly footstep through an alcove window. With that strange power of
reflecting the variable moods of humanity which one sometimes finds in
inanimate objects, the face of the old house had borrowed from the face
of its mistress the look of cheerful fortitude with which her generation
had survived the agony of defeat and the humiliation of reconstruction.
After nineteen years, the Academy still bore the scars of war on its
battered front. Once it had watched the spectre of famine stalk over the
grass-grown pavement, and had heard the rattle of musketry and the roar
of cannon borne on the southern breeze that now wafted the sounds of the
saw and the hammer from an adjacent street. Once it had seen the flight
of refugees, the overflow of the wounded from hospitals and churches,
the panic of liberated slaves, the steady conquering march of the army
of invasion. And though it would never have occurred to Miss Priscilla
that either she or her house had borne any relation to history (which
she regarded strictly as a branch of study and visualized as a list of
dates or as a king wearing his crown), she had, in fact, played a modest
yet effective part in the rapidly changing civilization of her age. But
events were powerless against the genial heroism in which she was
armoured, and it was characteristic of her, as well as of her race,
that, while she sat now in the midst of encircling battlefields, with
her eyes on the walk over which she had seen the blood of the wounded
drip when they were lifted into her door, she should be brooding not
over the tremendous tragedies through which she had passed, but over the
lesson in physical geography she must teach in the morning. Her lips
moved gently, and a listener, had there been one, might have heard her
murmur: "The four great alluvial plains of Asia--those of China and of
the Amoo Daria in temperate regions; of the Euphrates and Tigris in the
warm temperate; of the Indus and Ganges under the Tropic--with the Nile
valley in Africa, were the theatres of the most ancient civilizations
known to history or tradition----"
As she ended, a sigh escaped her, for the instruction of the young was
for her a matter not of choice, but of necessity. With the majority of
maiden ladies left destitute in Dinwiddie after the war, she had turned
naturally to teaching as the only nice and respectable occupation which
required neither preparation of mind nor considerable outlay of money.
The fact that she was the single surviving child of a gallant
Confederate general, who, having distinguished himself and his
descendants, fell at last in the Battle of Gettysburg, was sufficient
recommendation of her abilities in the eyes of her fellow citizens. Had
she chosen to paint portraits or to write poems, they would have rallied
quite as loyally to her support. Few, indeed, were the girls born in
Dinwiddie since the war who had not learned reading, penmanship ("up to
the right, down to the left, my dear"), geography, history, arithmetic,
deportment, and the fine arts, in the Academy for Young Ladies. The
brilliant military record of the General still shed a legendary lustre
upon the school, and it was earnestly believed that no girl, after
leaving there with a diploma for good conduct, could possibly go wrong
or become eccentric in her later years. To be sure, she might remain a
trifle weak in her spelling (Miss Priscilla having, as she confessed, a
poor head for that branch of study), but, after all, as the rector had
once remarked, good spelling was by no means a necessary accomplishment
for a lady; and, for the rest, it was certain that the moral education
of a pupil of the Academy would be firmly rooted in such fundamental
verities as the superiority of man and the aristocratic supremacy of the
Episcopal Church. From charming Sally Goode, now married to Tom
Peachey, known familiarly as "honest Tom," the editor of the Dinwiddie
_Bee_, to lovely Virginia Pendleton, the mark of Miss Priscilla was
ineffaceably impressed upon the daughters of the leading families.
Remembering this now, as she was disposed to do whenever she was
knitting without company, Miss Priscilla dropped her long wooden needles
in her lap, and leaning forward in her chair, gazed out upon the town
with an expression of child-like confidence, of touching innocence. This
innocence, which belonged to the very essence of her soul, had survived
both the fugitive joys and the brutal disillusionments of life.
Experience could not shatter it, for it was the product of a courage
that feared nothing except opinions. Just as the town had battled for a
principle without understanding it, so she was capable of dying for an
idea, but not of conceiving one. She had suffered everything from the
war except the necessity of thinking independently about it, and, though
in later years memory had become so sacred to her that she rarely
indulged in it, she still clung passionately to the habits of her
ancestors under the impression that she was clinging to their ideals.
Little things filled her days--the trivial details of the classroom and
of the market, the small domestic disturbances of her neighbours, the
moral or mental delinquencies of her two coloured servants--and even her
religious veneration for the Episcopal Church had crystallized at last
into a worship of customs.
To-day, at the beginning of the industrial awakening of the South, she
(who was but the embodied spirit of her race) stood firmly rooted in all
that was static, in all that was obsolete and outgrown in the Virginia
of the eighties. Though she felt as yet merely the vague uneasiness with
which her mind recoiled from the first stirrings of change, she was
beginning dimly to realize that the car of progress would move through
the quiet streets before the decade was over. The smoke of factories was
already succeeding the smoke of the battlefields, and out of the ashes
of a vanquished idealism the spirit of commercial materialism was born.
What was left of the old was fighting valiantly, but hopelessly, against
what had come of the new. The two forces filled the streets of
Dinwiddie. They were embodied in classes, in individuals, in articles of
faith, in ideals of manners. The symbol of the one spirit was the
memorial wreaths on the battlefields; of the other it was the prophetic
smoke of the factories. From where she stood in High Street, she could
see this incense to Mammon rising above the spires of the churches,
above the houses and the hovels, above the charm and the provincialism
which made the Dinwiddie of the eighties. And this charm, as well as
this provincialism, appeared to her to be so inalienable a part of the
old order, with its intrepid faith in itself, with its militant
enthusiasm, with its courageous battle against industrial evolution,
with its strength, its narrowness, its nobility, its blindness, that,
looking ahead, she could discern only the arid stretch of a civilization
from which the last remnant of beauty was banished forever. Already she
felt the breaking of those bonds of sympathy which had held the
twenty-one thousand inhabitants of Dinwiddie, as they had held the
entire South, solidly knit together in a passive yet effectual
resistance to the spirit of change. Of the world beyond the borders of
Virginia, Dinwiddians knew merely that it was either Yankee or foreign,
and therefore to be pitied or condemned according to the Evangelical or
the Calvinistic convictions of the observer. Philosophy, they regarded
with the distrust of a people whose notable achievements have not been
in the direction of the contemplative virtues; and having lived
comfortably and created a civilization without the aid of science, they
could afford not unreasonably to despise it. It was a quarter of a
century since "The Origin of Species" had changed the course of the
world's thought, yet it had never reached them. To be sure, there was an
old gentleman in Tabb Street whose title, "the professor," had been
conferred in public recognition of peaceful pursuits; but since he never
went to church, his learning was chiefly effective when used to point a
moral from the pulpit. There was, also, a tradition that General Goode
had been seen reading Plato before the Battle of Seven Pines; and this
picturesque incident had contributed the distinction of the scholar to
the more effulgent glory of the soldier. But for purely abstract
thought--for the thought that did not construct an heroic attitude or a
concrete image--there was as little room in the newer industrial system
as there had been in the aristocratic society which preceded it. The
world still clung to the belief that the business of humanity was
confined to the preservation of the institutions which existed in the
present moment of history--and Dinwiddie was only a quiet backwater into
which opinions, like fashions, were borne on the current of some
tributary stream of thought. Human nature in this town of twenty-one
thousand inhabitants differed from human nature in London or in the
Desert of Sahara mainly in the things that it ate and the manner in
which it carried its clothes. The same passions stirred its heart, the
same instincts moved its body, the same contentment with things as they
are, and the same terror of things as they might be, warped its mind.
The canary fluted on, and from beyond the mulberry trees there floated
the droning voice of an aged negress, in tatters and a red bandanna
turban, who persuasively offered strawberries to the silent houses.
"I'se got sw-eet straw-ber'-ies! I'se got swe-e-t str-aw-ber'-ies!
Yes'm, I'se got sw-e-et straw-ber'ies des f'om de coun-try!"
Then, suddenly, out of nothing, it seemed to Miss Priscilla, a miracle
occurred! The immemorial calm of High Street was broken by the sound of
rapidly moving wheels (not the jingling rattle of market wagons nor the
comfortable roll of doctors' buggies), and a strange new vehicle,
belonging to the Dinwiddie Livery Stables, and containing a young man
with longish hair and a flowing tie, turned the corner by Saint James'
Church, and passed over the earthen roadbed in front of the green
lattice. As the young man went by, he looked up quickly, smiled with the
engaging frankness of a genial nature, and lifting his hat with a
charming bow, revealed to Miss Priscilla's eyes the fact that his hair
was thick and dark as well as long and wavy. While he looked at her, she
noticed, also, that he had a thin, high-coloured face, lighted by a pair
of eager dark eyes which lent a glow of impetuous energy to his
features. The Treadwell nose, she recognized, but beneath the Treadwell
nose there was a clean-shaven, boyish mouth which belied the Treadwell
nature in every sensitive curve and outline.
"I'd have known him anywhere from Susan's description," she thought, and
added suspiciously, "I wonder why he peered so long around that corner?
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if those girls were coming back that way."
Impelled by her mounting excitement, she leaned forward until the ball
of orange-coloured yarn rolled from her short lap and over the polished
floor of the porch. Before she could stoop to pick it up, she was
arrested by the reappearance of the two girls at the corner beyond which
Oliver had gazed so intently. Then, as they drew nearer, she saw that
Virginia's face was pink and her eyes starry under their lowered lashes.
An inward radiance shone in the girl's look, and appeared to shape her
soul and body to its secret influence. Miss Priscilla, who had known her
since the first day she came to school (with her lunch, from which she
refused to be parted, tightly tied up in a red and white napkin), felt
suddenly that she was a stranger. A quality which she had never realized
her pupil possessed had risen supreme in an instant over the familiar
attributes of her character. So quickly does emotion separate the
individual from the inherent soul of the race.
Susan, who was a little in advance, came rapidly up the walk, and the
older woman greeted her with the words:
"My dear, I have seen him!"
"Yes, he just passed us at the corner, and I wondered if you were
looking. Do tell us what you think of him."
She sat down in a low chair by the teacher's side, while Virginia went
over to the cage and stood gazing thoughtfully at the singing bird.
"Well, I don't think his nose spoils him," replied Miss Priscilla after
a minute, "but there's something foreign looking about him, and I hope
Cyrus isn't thinking seriously about putting him into the bank."
"That was the first thing that occurred to father," answered Susan, "but
Oliver told me last night while we were unpacking his books--he has a
quantity of books and he kept them even when he had to sell his
clothes--that he didn't see to save his life how he was going to stand
it."
"Stand what?" inquired Miss Priscilla, a trifle tartly, for after the
vicissitudes of her life it was but natural that she should hesitate to
regard so stable an institution as the Dinwiddie Bank as something to be
"stood." "Why, I thought a young man couldn't do better than get a place
in the bank. Jinny's father was telling me in the market last Saturday
that he wanted his nephew John Henry to start right in there if they
could find room for him."
"Oh, of course, it's just what John Henry would like," said Virginia,
speaking for the first time.
"Then if it's good enough for John Henry, it's good enough for Oliver, I
reckon," rejoined Miss Priscilla. "Anybody who has mixed with beggars
oughtn't to turn up his nose at a respectable bank."
"But he says it's because the bank is so respectable that he doesn't
think he could stand it," answered Susan.
Virginia, who had been looking with her rapt gaze down the deserted
street, quivered at the words as if they had stabbed her.
"But he wants to be a writer, Susan," she protested. "A great many very
nice people are writers."
"Then why doesn't he go about it in a proper way, if he isn't ashamed of
it?" asked the teacher, and she added reflectively after a pause, "I
wish he'd write a good history of the war--one that doesn't deal so much
with the North. I've almost had to stop teaching United States history
because there is hardly one written now that I would let come inside my
doors."
"He doesn't want to write histories," replied Susan. "Father suggested
to him at supper last night that if he would try his hand at a history
of Virginia, and be careful not to put in anything that might offend
anybody, he could get it taught in every private school in the State.
But he said he'd be shot first."
"Perhaps he's a genius," said Virginia in a startled voice. "Geniuses
are always different from other people, aren't they?"
"I don't know," answered Susan doubtfully. "He talks of things I never
heard of before, and he seems to think that they are the most important
things in the world."
"What things?" asked Virginia breathlessly.
"Oh, I can't tell you because they are so new, but he seems on fire when
he talks of them. He talks for hours about art and its service to
humanity and about going down to the people and uplifting the masses."
"I hope he doesn't mean the negroes," commented Miss Priscilla
suspiciously.
"He means the whole world, I believe," responded Susan. "He quotes all
the time from writers I've never heard of, and he laughs at every book
he sees in the house. Yesterday he picked up one of Mrs. Southworth's
novels on mother's bureau and asked her how she could allow such immoral
stuff in her room. She had got it out of the bookcase to lend to Miss
Willy Whitlow, who was there making my dress, but he scolded her so
about it that at last Miss Willy went off with Mill's 'Essay on
Liberty,' and mother burned all of Mrs. Southworth's that she had in the
house. Oliver has been so nice to mother that I believe she would make a
bonfire of her furniture if he asked her to do it."
"Is he really trying to unsettle Miss Willy's mind?" questioned the
teacher anxiously. "How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if
she didn't have her religious convictions?"
"That's just what I asked him," returned Susan, who, besides being
dangerously clever, had a remarkably level head to keep her balanced.
"But he answered that until people got unsettled they would never move,
and when I wanted to find out where he thought poor little Miss Willy
could possibly move to, he only got impatient and said that I was trying
to bury the principle under the facts. We very nearly quarrelled over
Miss Willy, but of course she took the book to please Oliver and
couldn't worry through a line of it to save her soul."
"Did he say anything about his work? What he wants to do, I mean?" asked
Virginia, and her voice was so charged with feeling that it gave an
emotional quality to the question.
"He wants to write," replied Susan. "His whole heart is in it, and when
he isn't talking about reaching the people, he talks about what he calls
'technique.'"
"Are you sure it isn't poetry?" inquired Miss Priscilla, humming back
like a bee to the tempting sweets of conjecture. "I've always heard that
poetry was the ruination of Poe."
"No, it isn't poetry--not exactly at least--it's plays," answered Susan.
"He talked to me till twelve o'clock last night while we were arranging
his books, and he told me that he meant to write really great dramas,
but that America wasn't ready for them yet and that was why he had had
to sell his clothes. He looked positively starved, but he says he
doesn't mind starving a while if he can only live up to his ideal."
"Well, I wonder what his ideal is?" remarked Miss Priscilla grimly.
"It has something to do with his belief that art can grow only out of
sacrifice," said Susan. "I never heard anybody--not even Jinny's father
in church--talk so much about sacrifice."
"But the rector doesn't talk about sacrifice for the theatre," retorted
the teacher, and she added with crushing finality, "I don't believe
there is a particle of sense in it. If he is going to write, why on
earth doesn't he sit straight down and do it? Why, when little Miss
Amanda Sheppard was left at sixty without a roof over her head, she
began at once, without saying a word to anybody, to write historical
novels."
"It does seem funny until you talk with him," admitted Susan. "But he is
so much in earnest that when you listen to him, you can't help believing
in him. He is so full of convictions that he convinces you in spite of
yourself."
"Convictions about what?" demanded Miss Priscilla. "I don't see how a
young man who refuses to be confirmed can have any convictions."
"Well, he has, and he feels just as strongly about them as we do about
ours."
"But how can he possibly feel as strongly about a wrong conviction as we
do about a right one?" insisted the older woman stubbornly, for she
realized vaguely that they were approaching dangerous ground and set out
to check their advance in true Dinwiddie fashion, which was strictly
prohibitive.
"I like a man who has opinions of his own and isn't ashamed to stand up
for them," said Virginia with a resolution that made her appear suddenly
taller.
"Not _false_ opinions, Jinny!" rejoined Miss Priscilla, and her manner
carried them with a bound back to the schoolroom, for her mental vision
saw in a flash the beribboned diploma for good conduct which her
favourite pupil had borne away from the Academy on Commencement day two
years ago, and a shudder seized her lest she should have left a single
unprotected breach in the girl's mind through which an unauthorized idea
might enter. Had she trusted too confidently to the fact that Virginia's
father was a clergyman, and therefore spiritually armed for the defence
and guidance of his daughter? Virginia, in spite of her gaiety, had been
what Miss Priscilla called "a docile pupil," meaning one who
deferentially submitted her opinions to her superiors, and to go through
life perpetually submitting her opinions was, in the eyes of her parents
and her teacher, the divinely appointed task of woman. Her education
was founded upon the simple theory that the less a girl knew about life,
the better prepared she would be to contend with it. Knowledge of any
sort (except the rudiments of reading and writing, the geography of
countries she would never visit, and the dates of battles she would
never mention) was kept from her as rigorously as if it contained the
germs of a contagious disease. And this ignorance of anything that could
possibly be useful to her was supposed in some mysterious way to add to
her value as a woman and to make her a more desirable companion to a man
who, either by experience or by instinct, was expected "to know his
world." Unlike Susan (who, in a community which offered few
opportunities to women outside of the nursery or the kitchen, had been
born with the inquiring spirit and would ask questions), Virginia had
until to-day accepted with humility the doctrine that a natural
curiosity about the universe is the beginning of infidelity. The chief
object of her upbringing, which differed in no essential particular from
that of every other well-born and well-bred Southern woman of her day,
was to paralyze her reasoning faculties so completely that all danger of
mental "unsettling" or even movement was eliminated from her future. To
solidify the forces of mind into the inherited mould of fixed beliefs
was, in the opinion of the age, to achieve the definite end of all
education. When the child ceased to wonder before the veil of
appearances, the battle of orthodoxy with speculation was over, and Miss
Priscilla felt that she could rest on her victory. With Susan she had
failed, because the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell was one of those
inexplicable variations from ancestral stock over which the naturalists
were still waging their merry war; but Virginia, with a line of earnest
theologians and of saintly self-effacing women at her back, offered as
little resistance as some exquisite plastic material in the teacher's
hands.
Now, as if the same lightning flash which had illuminated the beribboned
diploma in Miss Priscilla's mind had passed to Virginia also, the girl
bit back a retort that was trembling on her lips. "I wonder if she can
be getting to know things?" thought the older woman as she watched her,
and she added half resentfully, "I've sometimes suspected that Gabriel
Pendleton was almost too mild and easy going for a clergyman. If the
Lord hadn't made him a saint, Heaven knows what would have become of
him!"
"Don't try to put notions into Jinny's head, Susan," she said after a
thoughtful pause. "If Oliver were the right kind of young man, he'd give
up this nonsense and settle down to some sober work. The first time I
get a chance I'm going to tell him so."
"I don't believe it will be any use," responded Susan. "Father tried to
reason with him last night, and they almost quarrelled."
"Quarrelled with Cyrus!" gasped the teacher.
"At one time I thought he'd walk out of the house and never come back,"
pursued Susan. "He told father that his sordid commercialism would end
by destroying all that was charming in Dinwiddie. Afterward he
apologized for his rudeness, but when he did so, he said, 'I meant every
word of it.'"
"Well, I never!" was Miss Priscilla's feeble rejoinder. "The idea of
his daring to talk that way when Cyrus had to pay his fare down from New
York."
"Of course father brought it on," returned Susan judicially. "You know
he doesn't like anybody to disagree with him, and when Oliver began to
argue about its being unscrupulous to write history the way people
wanted it, he lost his temper and said some angry things about the
theatre and actors."
"I suppose a great man like your father may expect his family to bow to
his opinions," replied the teacher, for so obscure was her mental
connection between the construction of the future and the destruction of
the past, that she could honestly admire Cyrus Treadwell for possessing
the qualities her soul abhorred. The simple awe of financial success,
which occupies in the American mind the vacant space of the monarchical
cult, had begun already to generate the myth of greatness around Cyrus,
and, like all other myths, this owed its origin less to the wilful
conspiracy of the few than it did to the confiding superstition of the
many.
"I hope Oliver won't do anything rash," said Susan, ignoring Miss
Priscilla's tribute. "He is so impulsive and headstrong that I don't see
how he can get on with father."
At this Virginia broke her quivering silence. "Can't you make him
careful, Susan?" she asked, and without waiting for an answer, bent over
and kissed Miss Priscilla on the cheek. "I must be going now or mother
will worry," she added before she tripped ahead of Susan down the steps
and along the palely shining path to the gate.
Rising from her chair, Miss Priscilla leaned over the railing of the
porch, and gazed wistfully after the girls' vanishing figures.
"If there was ever a girl who looked as if she were cut out for
happiness, it is Jinny Pendleton," she said aloud after a minute. A tear
welled in her eye, and rolling over her cheek, dropped on her bosom.
From some obscure corner of her memory, undevastated by war or by ruin,
her own youth appeared to take the place of Virginia's. She saw herself,
as she had seen the other an instant before, standing flushed and
expectant before the untrodden road of the future. She heard again the
wings of happiness rustling unseen about her, and she felt again the
great hope which is the challenge that youth flings to destiny. Life
rose before her, not as she had found it, but as she had once believed
it to be. The days when little things had not filled her thoughts
returned in the fugitive glow of her memory--for she, also, middle-aged,
obese, cumbered with trivial cares, had had her dream of a love that
would change and glorify the reality. The heritage of woman was hers as
well as Virginia's. And for the first time, standing there, she grew
dimly conscious of the portion of suffering which Nature had allotted to
them both from the beginning. Was it all waiting--waiting, as it had
been while battles were fought and armies were marching? Did the future
hold this for Virginia also? Would life yield nothing more to that
radiant girl than it had yielded to her or to the other women whom she
had known? Strange how the terrible innocence of youth had moved her
placid middle-age as if it were sadness!
CHAPTER II
HER INHERITANCE
A block away, near the head of High Street, stood the old church of
Saint James, and at its back, separated by a white paling fence from the
squat pinkish tower and the solitary grave in the churchyard (which was
that of a Southern soldier who had fallen in the Battle of Dinwiddie),
was the oblong wooden rectory in which Gabriel Pendleton had lived since
he had exchanged his sword for a prayer-book and his worn Confederate
uniform for a surplice. The church, which was redeemed from
architectural damnation by its sacred cruciform and its low ivied
buttresses where innumerable sparrows nested, cast its shadow, on clear
days, over the beds of bleeding hearts and lilies-of-the-valley in the
neglected garden, to the quaint old house, with its spreading wings, its
outside chimneys, and its sloping shingled roof, from which five
dormer-windows stared in a row over the slender columns of the porch.
The garden had been planned in the days when it was easy to put a dozen
slaves to uprooting weeds or trimming flower beds, and had passed in
later years to the breathless ministrations of negro infants, whose
experience varied from the doubtful innocence of the crawling age to the
complete sophistication of six or seven years. Dandelion and wire-grass
rioted, in spite of their earnest efforts, over the crooked path from
the porch, and periwinkle, once an intruder from the churchyard, spread
now in rank disorder down the terraced hillside on the left, where a
steep flight of steps fell clear to the narrow cross street descending
gradually into the crowded quarters of the town. Directly in front of
the porch on either side of the path grew two giant paulownia trees,
royal at this season in a mantle of violet blossoms, and it was under
their arching boughs that the girls stopped when they had entered the
garden. Ever since Virginia could remember, she had heard threats of
cutting down the paulownias because of the litter the falling petals
made in the spring, and ever since she could lisp at all she had begged
her father to spare them for the sake of the enormous roots, into which
she had loved to cuddle and hide.
"If I were ever to go away, I believe they would cut down these trees,"
she said now a little wistfully, but she was not thinking of the
paulownias.
"Why should they when they give such splendid shade? And, besides, they
wouldn't do anything you didn't like for worlds."
"Oh, of course they wouldn't, but as soon as I was out of sight they
might persuade themselves that I liked it," answered Virginia, with a
tender laugh. Though she was not by nature discerning, there were
moments when she surprised Susan by her penetrating insight into the
character of her parents, and this insight, which was emotional rather
than intellectual, had enabled her to dominate them almost from infancy.
Silence fell between them, while they gazed through the veil of twilight
at the marble shaft above the grave of the Confederate soldier. Then
suddenly Susan spoke in a constrained voice, without turning her head.
"Jinny, Oliver isn't one bit of a hero--not the kind of hero we used to
talk about." It was with difficulty, urged by a vigorous and
uncompromising conscience, that she had uttered the words.
"And besides," retorted Virginia merrily, "he is in love with Abby
Goode."
"I don't believe that. They stayed in the same boarding-house once, and
you know how Abby is about men."
"Yes, I know, and it's just the way men are about Abby."
"Well, Oliver isn't, I'm sure. I don't believe he's ever given her more
than a thought, and he told me last night that he couldn't abide a
bouncing woman."
"Does Abby bounce?"
"You know she does--dreadfully. But it wasn't because of Abby that I
said what I did."
Something quivered softly between them, and a petal from the Jacqueminot
rose in Virginia's hair fluttered like a crimson moth out into the
twilight. "Was it because of him, then?" she asked in a whisper.
For a moment Susan did not answer. Her gaze was on the flight of steps,
and drawing Virginia with her, she began to walk slowly toward the
terraced side of the garden. An old lamplighter, carrying his ladder to
a lamp-post at the corner, smiled up at them with his sunken toothless
mouth as he went by.
"Partly, darling," said Susan. "He is so--I don't know how to make you
understand--so unsettled. No, that isn't exactly what I mean."
Her fine, serious face showed clear and pale in the twilight. From the
high forehead, under the girlish fringe of fair hair, to the thin, firm
lips, which were too straight and colourless for beauty, it was the
face of a woman who could feel strongly, but whose affections would
never blur the definite forms or outlines of life. She looked out upon
the world with level, dispassionate eyes in which there was none of
Virginia's uncritical, emotional softness. Temperamentally she was
uncompromisingly honest in her attitude toward the universe, which
appeared to her, not as it did to Virginia, in mere formless masses of
colour out of which people and objects emerged like figures painted on
air, but as distinct, impersonal, and final as a geometrical problem.
She was one of those women who are called "sensible" by their
acquaintances--meaning that they are born already disciplined and
confirmed in the quieter and more orderly processes of life. Her natural
intelligence having overcome the defects of her education, she thought
not vaguely, but with clearness and precision, and something of this
clearness and precision was revealed in her manner and in her
appearance, as if she had escaped at twenty years from the impulsive
judgments and the troublous solicitudes of youth. At forty, she would
probably begin to grow young again, and at fifty, it is not unlikely
that she would turn her back upon old age forever. Just now she was too
tremendously earnest about life, which she treated quite in the large
manner, to take a serious interest in living.
"Promise me, Jinny, that you'll never let anybody take my place," she
said, turning when they had reached the head of the steps.
"You silly Susan! Why, of course, they shan't," replied Virginia, and
they kissed ecstatically.
"Nobody will ever love you as I do."
"And I you, darling."
With arms interlaced they stood gazing down into the street, where the
shadow of the old lamplighter glided like a ghost under the row of pale
flickering lights. From a honeysuckle-trellis on the other side of the
porch, a penetrating sweetness came in breaths, now rising, now dying
away. In Virginia's heart, Love stirred suddenly, and blind, wingless,
imprisoned, struggled for freedom.
"It is late, I must be going," said Susan. "I wish we lived nearer each
other."
"Isn't it too dark for you to go alone? John Henry will stop on his way
from work, and he'll take you--if you really won't stay to supper."
"No, I don't mind in the least going by myself. It isn't night, anyway,
and people are sitting out on their porches."
A minute afterwards they parted, Susan going swiftly down High Street,
while Virginia went back along the path to the porch, and passing under
the paulownias, stopped beside the honeysuckle-trellis, which extended
to the ruined kitchen garden at the rear of the house. Once vegetables
were grown here, but except for a square bed of mint which spread
hardily beneath the back windows of the dining-room, the place was left
now a prey to such barbarian invaders as burdock and moth mullein. On
the brow of the hill, where the garden ended, there was a gnarled and
twisted ailanthus tree, and from its roots the ground fell sharply to a
distant view of rear enclosures and grim smoking factories. Some clothes
fluttered on a line that stretched from a bough of the tree, and turning
away as if they offended her, Virginia closed her eyes and breathed in
the sweetness of the honeysuckle, which mingled deliciously with the
strange new sense of approaching happiness in her heart. The awakening
of her imagination--an event more tumultuous in its effects than the
mere awakening of emotion--had changed not only her inner life, but the
ordinary details of the world in which she lived. Because a young man,
who differed in no appreciable manner from dozens of other young men,
had gazed into her eyes for an instant, the whole universe was altered.
What had been until to-day a vague, wind-driven longing for happiness,
the reaching out of the dream toward the reality, had assumed suddenly a
fixed and definite purpose. Her bright girlish visions had wrapped
themselves in a garment of flesh. A miracle more wonderful than any she
had read of had occurred in the streets of Dinwiddie--in the very spot
where she had walked, with blind eyes and deaf ears, every day since she
could remember. Her soul blossomed in the twilight, as a flower
blossoms, and shed its virginal sweetness. For the first time in her
twenty years she felt that an unexplored region of happiness surrounded
her. Life appeared so beautiful that she wanted to grasp and hold each
fugitive sensation before it escaped her. "This is different from
anything I've ever known. I never imagined it would be like this," she
thought, and the next minute: "I wonder why no one has ever told me that
it would happen? I wonder if it has ever really happened before, just
like this, since the world began? Of all the ways I've dreamed of his
coming, I never thought of this way--no, not for an instant. That I
should see him first in the street like any stranger--that he should be
Susan's cousin--that we should not have spoken a word before I knew it
was he!" Everything about him, his smile, his clothes, the way he held
his head and brushed his hair straight back from his forehead, his
manner of reclining with a slight slouch on the seat of the cart, the
picturesque blue dotted tie he wore, his hands, his way of bowing, the
red-brown of his face, and above all the eager, impetuous look in his
dark eyes--these things possessed a glowing quality of interest which
irradiated a delicious excitement over the bare round of living. It was
enough merely to be alive and conscious that some day--to-morrow, next
week, or the next hour, perhaps, she might meet again the look that had
caused this mixture of ecstasy and terror in her heart. The knowledge
that he was in the same town with her, watching the same lights,
thinking the same thoughts, breathing the same fragrance of
honeysuckle--this knowledge was a fact of such tremendous importance
that it dwarfed to insignificance all the proud historic past of
Dinwiddie. Her imagination, seizing upon this bit of actuality, spun
around it the iridescent gossamer web of her fancy. She felt that it was
sufficient happiness just to stand motionless for hours and let this
thought take possession of her. Nothing else mattered as long as this
one thing was blissfully true.
Lights came out softly like stars in the houses beyond the church-tower,
and in the parlour of the rectory a lamp flared up and then burned dimly
under a red shade. Looking through the low window, she could see the
prim set of mahogany and horsehair furniture, with its deep, heavily
carved sofa midway of the opposite wall and the twelve chairs which
custom demanded arranged stiffly at equal distances on the faded
Axminster carpet.
For a moment her gaze rested on the claw-footed mahogany table, bearing
a family Bible and a photograph album bound in morocco; on the engraving
of the "Burial of Latane" between the long windows at the back of the
room; on the cloudy, gilt-framed mirror above the mantel, with the two
standing candelabra reflected in its surface--and all these familiar
objects appeared to her as vividly as if she had not lived with them
from her infancy. A new light had fallen over them, and it seemed to her
that this light released an inner meaning, a hidden soul, even in the
claw-footed table and the threadbare Axminster carpet. Then the door
into the hall opened and her mother entered, wearing the patched black
silk dress which she had bought before the war and had turned and darned
ever since with untiring fingers. Shrinking back into the dusk, Virginia
watched the thin, slightly stooping figure as it stood arrested there in
the subdued glow of the lamplight. She saw the pale oval face, so
transparent that it was like the face of a ghost, the fine brown hair
parted smoothly under the small net cap, the soft faded eyes in their
hollowed and faintly bluish sockets, and the sweet, patient lips, with
their expression of anxious sympathy, as of one who had lived not in her
own joys and sorrows, but in those of others. Vaguely, the girl realized
that her mother had had what is called "a hard life," but this knowledge
brought no tremor of apprehension for herself, no shadow of disbelief in
her own unquestionable right to happiness. A glorious certainty
possessed her that her own life would be different from anything that
had ever been in the past.
The front door opened and shut; there was a step on the soft grass under
the honeysuckle-trellis, and her father came towards her, with his long
black coat flapping about him. He always wore clothes several sizes too
large for him under the impression that it was a point of economy and
that they would last longer if there was no "strain" put upon them. He
was a small, wiry man, with an amazing amount of strength for his build,
and a keen, humorous face, ornamented by a pointed chin beard which he
called his "goatee." His eyes were light grey with a twinkle which
rarely left them except at the altar, and the skin of his cheeks had
never lost the drawn and parchment-like look acquired during the last
years of the war. One of the many martial Christians of the Confederacy,
he had laid aside his surplice at the first call for troops to defend
the borders, and had resumed it immediately after the surrender at
Appomattox. It was still an open question in Dinwiddie whether Gabriel
Pendleton, who was admitted to have been born a saint, had achieved
greater distinction as a fighter or a clergyman; though he himself had
accepted the opposite vocations with equal humility. Only in the dead of
sweltering summer nights did he sometimes arouse his wife with a groan
and the halting words, "Lucy, I can't sleep for thinking of those men I
killed in the war." But with the earliest breeze of dawn, his remorse
usually left him, and he would rise and go about his parochial duties
with the serene and child-like trust in Providence that had once carried
him into battle. A militant idealism had ennobled his fighting as it now
exalted his preaching. He had never in his life seen things as they are
because he had seen them always by the white flame of a soul on fire
with righteousness. To reach his mind, impressions of persons or objects
had first to pass through a refining atmosphere in which all baser
substances were eliminated, and no fact had ever penetrated this medium
except in the flattering disguise of a sentiment. Having married at
twenty an idealist only less ignorant of the world than himself, he had,
inspired by her example, immediately directed his energies towards the
whitewashing of the actuality. Both cherished the naïve conviction that
to acknowledge an evil is in a manner to countenance its existence, and
both clung fervently to the belief that a pretty sham has a more
intimate relation to morality than has an ugly truth. Yet so unconscious
were they of weaving this elaborate tissue of illusion around the world
they inhabited that they called the mental process by which they
distorted the reality, "taking a true view of life." To "take a true
view" was to believe what was pleasant against what was painful in spite
of evidence: to grant honesty to all men (with the possible exception of
the Yankee army and a few local scalawags known as Readjusters); to deny
virtue to no woman, not even to the New England Abolitionist; to regard
the period before the war in Virginia as attained perfection, and the
present as falling short of that perfection only inasmuch as it had
occurred since the surrender. As life in a small place, among a simple
and guileless class of gentlefolk, all passionately cherishing the same
opinions, had never shaken these illusions, it was but natural that they
should have done their best to hand them down as sacred heirlooms to
their only child. Even Gabriel's four years of hard fighting and scant
rations were enkindled by so much of the disinterested idealism that
had sent his State into the Confederacy, that he had emerged from them
with an impoverished body, but an enriched spirit. Combined with his
inherent inability to face the facts of life, there was an almost
superhuman capacity for cheerful recovery from the shocks of adversity.
Since he had married by accident the one woman who was made for him, he
had managed to preserve untarnished his innocent assumption that
marriages were arranged in Heaven--for the domestic infelicities of many
of his parishioners were powerless to affect a belief that was founded
upon a solitary personal experience. Unhappy marriages, like all other
misfortunes of society, he was inclined to regard as entirely modern and
due mainly to the decay of antebellum institutions. "I don't remember
that I ever heard of a discontented servant or an unhappy marriage in my
boyhood," he would say when he was forced against his will to consider
either of these disturbing problems. Not progress, but a return to the
"ideals of our ancestors," was his sole hope for the future; and in
Virginia's childhood she had grown to regard this phrase as second in
reverence only to that other familiar invocation: "If it be the will of
God."
As he stood now in the square of lamplight that streamed from the
drawing-room window, she looked into his thin, humorous face, so
spiritualized by poverty and self-sacrifice that it had become merely
the veil for his soul, and the thought came to her that she had never
really seen him as he was until to-day.
"You're out late, daughter. Isn't it time for supper?" he asked, putting
his arm about her. Beneath the simple words she felt the profound
affection which he rarely expressed, but of which she was conscious
whenever he looked at her or spoke to her. Two days ago this affection,
of which she never thought because it belonged to her by right like the
air she breathed, had been sufficient to fill her life to overflowing;
and now, in less than a moment, the simplest accident had pushed it into
the background. In the place where it had been there was a restless
longing which seemed at one instant a part of the universal stirring of
the spring, and became the next an importunate desire for the coming of
the lover to whom she had been taught to look as to the fulfilment of
her womanhood. At times this lover appeared to have no connection with
Oliver Treadwell; then the memory of his eager and searching look would
flush the world with a magic enchantment. "He might pass here at any
minute," she thought, and immediately every simple detail of her life
was illuminated as if a quivering rosy light had fallen aslant it. His
drive down High Street in the afternoon had left a trail of glory over
the earthen roadbed.
"Yes, I was just going in," she replied to the rector's question, and
added: "How sweet the honeysuckle smells! I never knew it to be so
fragrant."
"The end of the trellis needs propping up. I noticed it this morning,"
he returned, keeping his arm around her as they passed over the short
grassy walk and up the steps to the porch. Then the door of the rectory
opened, and the silhouette of Mrs. Pendleton, in her threadbare black
silk dress with her cameo-like profile softened by the dark bands of her
hair, showed motionless against the lighted space of the hall.
"We're here, Lucy," said the rector, kissing her; and a minute later
they entered the dining-room, which was on the right of the staircase.
The old mahogany table, scarred by a century of service, was laid with
a simple supper of bread, tea, and sliced ham on a willow dish. At one
end there was a bowl of freshly gathered strawberries, with the dew
still on them, and Mrs. Pendleton hastened to explain that they were a
present from Tom Peachey, who had driven out into the country in order
to get them. "Well, I hope his wife has some, also," commented the
rector. "Tom's a good fellow, but he could never keep a closed fist,
there's no use denying it."
Mrs. Pendleton, who had never denied anything in her life, except the
biblical sanction for the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
shook her head gently and began to talk in the inattentive and anxious
manner she had acquired at scantily furnished tables. Ever since the
war, with the exception of the Reconstruction period, when she had lived
practically on charity, she had managed to exist with serenity, and
numerous negro dependents, on the rector's salary of a thousand dollars
a year. Simple and wholesome food she had supplied to her family and her
followers, and for their desserts, as she called the sweet things of
life, she had relied with touching confidence upon her neighbours. What
they would be for the day, she did not know, but since poverty, not
prosperity, breeds the generous heart, she was perfectly assured that
when Miss Priscilla was putting up raspberries, or Mrs. Goode was making
lemon pie, she should not be forgotten. During the terrible war years,
it had become the custom of Dinwiddie housekeepers to remember the wife
of the rector who had plucked off his surplice for the Confederacy, and
among the older generation the habit still persisted, like all other
links that bound them to a past which they cherished the more
passionately because it guarded a defeated cause. Like the soft
apologetic murmur of Mrs. Pendleton's voice, which was meant to distract
attention rather than to impart information, this impassioned memory of
the thing that was dead sweetened the less romantic fact of the things
that were living. The young were ignorant of it, but the old _knew_.
Mrs. Pendleton, who was born a great lady, remained one when the props
and the background of a great lady had crumbled around her; and though
the part she filled was a narrow part--a mere niche in the world's
history--she filled it superbly. From the dignity of possessions she had
passed to the finer dignity of a poverty that can do without. All the
intellect in her (for she was not clever) had been transmuted into
character by this fiery passage from romance into reality, and though
life had done its worst with her, some fine invincible blade in the
depths of her being she had never surrendered. She would have gone to
the stake for a principle as cheerfully as she had descended from her
aristocratic niche into unceasing poverty and self-denial, but she would
have gone wearing garlands on her head and with her faint, grave smile,
in which there was almost every quality except that of humour, touching
her lips. Her hands, which were once lovely, were now knotted and worn;
for she had toiled when it was necessary, though she had toiled always
with the manner of a lady. Even to-day it was a part of her triumph that
this dignity was so vital a factor in her life that there was none of
her husband's laughter at circumstances to lighten her burden. To her
the daily struggle of keeping an open house on starvation fare was not a
pathetic comedy, as with Gabriel, but a desperately smiling tragedy.
What to Gabriel had been merely the discomfort of being poor when
everybody you respected was poor with you, had been to his wife the slow
agony of crucifixion. It was she, not he, who had lain awake to wonder
where to-morrow's dinner could be got without begging; it was she, also,
who had feared to doze at dawn lest she should oversleep herself and not
be downstairs in time to scrub the floors and the furniture before the
neighbours were stirring. Uncle Isam, whose knees were crippled with
rheumatism, and Docia, who had a "stitch" in her side whenever she
stooped, were the only servants that remained with her, and the nursing
of these was usually added to the pitiless drudgery of her winter. But
the bitter edge to all her suffering was the feeling which her husband
spoke of in the pulpit as "false pride"--the feeling she prayed over
fervently yet without avail in church every Sunday--and this was the
ignoble terror of being seen on her knees in her old black calico dress
before she had gone upstairs again, washed her hands with cornmeal,
powdered her face with her pink flannel starchbag, and descended in her
breakfast gown of black cashmere or lawn, with a net scarf tied daintily
around her thin throat, and a pair of exquisitely darned lace ruffles
hiding her wrists.
As she sat now, smiling and calm, at the head of her table, there was no
hint in her face of the gnawing anxiety behind the delicate blue-veined
hollows in her forehead. "I thought John Henry would come to supper,"
she observed, while her hands worked lovingly among the old white and
gold teacups which had belonged to her mother, "so I gathered a few
flowers."
In the centre of the table there was a handful of garden flowers
arranged, with a generous disregard of colour, in a cut-glass bowl, as
though all blossoms were intended by their Creator to go peaceably
together. Only on formal occasions was such a decoration used on the
table of the rectory, since the happiest adornment for a meal was
supposed to be a bountiful supply of visible viands; but the hopelessly
mended mats had pierced Mrs. Pendleton's heart, and the cut-glass bowl,
like her endless prattle, was but a pitiful subterfuge.
"Oh, I like them!" Virginia had started to answer, when a hearty voice
called, "May I come in?" from the darkness, and a large, carelessly
dressed young man, with an amiable and rather heavy countenance, entered
the hall and passed on into the dining-room. In reply to Mrs.
Pendleton's offer of tea, he answered that he had stopped at the
Treadwells' on his way up from work. "I could hardly break away from
Oliver," he added, "but I remembered that I'd promised Aunt Lucy to take
her down to Tin Pot Alley after supper, so I made a bolt while he was
convincing me that it's better to be poor with an idea, as he calls it,
than rich without one." Then turning to Virginia, he asked suddenly:
"What's the matter, little cousin? Been about too much in the sun?"
"Oh, it's only the rose in my hair," responded Virginia, and she felt
that there was a fierce joy in blushing like this even while she told
herself that she would give everything she possessed if she could only
stop it.
"If you aren't well, you'd better not go with us, Jinny," said Mrs.
Pendleton. "It was so sweet of John Henry to remember that I'd promised
to take Aunt Ailsey some of the bitters we used to make before the war."
Everything was "so sweet" to her, the weather, her husband's sermons,
the little trays that came continually from her neighbours, and she
lived in a perpetual state of thankfulness for favours so insignificant
that a less impressionable soul would have accepted them as undeserving
of more than the barest acknowledgment.
"I am perfectly well," insisted Virginia, a little angry with John Henry
because he had been the first to notice her blushes.
Rising hurriedly from the table, she went to the door and stood looking
out into the spangled dusk under the paulownias, while her mother
wrapped the bottle in a piece of white tissue paper and remarked with an
animation which served to hide her fatigue from the unobservant eyes of
her husband, that a walk would do her good on such a "perfectly lovely
night."
Gabriel, who loved her as much as a man can love a wife who has
sacrificed herself to him wisely and unwisely for nearly thirty years,
had grown so used to seeing her suffer with a smile that he had drifted
at last into the belief that it was the only form of activity she really
enjoyed. From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her
anything she had set her heart upon--not even the privilege of working
herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.
"Well, well, if you feel like it, of course you must go, my dear," he
replied. "I'll step over and sit a minute with Miss Priscilla while you
are away. Never could bear the house without you, Lucy."
While this protest was still on his lips, he followed her from the
house, and turned with Virginia and John Henry in the direction of the
Young Ladies' Academy. From the darkness beyond the iron gate there came
the soothing flow of Miss Priscilla's voice entertaining an evening
caller, and when the rector left them, as if irresistibly drawn toward
the honeyed sound of gossip, Virginia walked on in silence between John
Henry and her mother. At each corner a flickering street lamp burned
with a thin yellow flame, and in the midst of the narrow orbit of its
light several shining moths circled swiftly like white moons revolving
about a sun. In the centre of the blocks, where the darkness was broken
only by small flower-like flakes of light that fell in clusters through
boughs of mulberry or linden trees, there was the sound of whispering
voices and of rustling palm-leaf fans on the crowded porches behind
screens of roses or honeysuckle. Mrs. Pendleton, whose instinct prompted
her to efface herself whenever she made a third at the meeting of maid
and man (even though the man was only her nephew John Henry), began to
talk at last after waiting modestly for her daughter to begin the
conversation. The story of Aunt Ailsey, of her great age, and her
dictatorial temper, which made living with other servants impossible to
her, started valiantly on its familiar road, and tripped but little when
the poor lady realized that neither John Henry nor Virginia was
listening. She was so used to talking for the sake of the sound she made
rather than the impression she produced that her silvery ripple had
become almost as lacking in self-consciousness as the song of a canary.
But Virginia, walking so quietly at her side, was inhabiting at the
moment a separate universe--a universe smelling of honeysuckle and
filled with starry pathways to happiness. In this universe Aunt Ailsey
and her peculiarities, her mother's innocent prattle, and the solid body
of John Henry touching her arm, were all as remote and trivial as the
night moths circling around the lamps. Looking at John Henry from under
her lowered lashes, she felt a sudden pity for him because he was so
far--so very far indeed from being the right man. She saw him too
clearly as he was--he stood before her in all the hard brightness of the
reality, and first love, like beauty, depends less upon the truth of an
outline than it does upon the softening quality of an atmosphere. There
was no mystery for her in the simple fact of his being. There was
nothing left to discover about his great stature, his excellent heart,
and his safe, slow mind that had been compelled to forego even the sort
of education she had derived from Miss Priscilla. She knew that he had
left school at the age of eight in order to become the support of a
widowed mother, and she was pitifully aware of the tireless efforts he
had made after reaching manhood to remedy his ignorance of the
elementary studies he had missed. Never had she heard a complaint from
him, never a regret for the sacrifice, never so much as an idle wonder
why it should have been necessary. If the texture of his soul was not
finely wrought, the proportions of it were heroic. In him the Pendleton
idealism had left the skies and been transmuted into the common
substance of clay. He was of a practical bent of mind and had developed
a talent for his branch of business, which, to the bitter humiliation of
his mother, was that of hardware, with a successful specialty in
bathtubs. Until to-day Virginia had always believed that John Henry
interested her, but now she wondered how she had ever spent so many
hours listening to his talk about business. And with the thought her
whole existence appeared to her as dull and commonplace as those hours.
A single instant of experience seemed longer to her than all the years
she had lived, and this instant had drained the colour and the sweetness
from the rest of life. The shape of her universe had trembled suddenly
and altered. Dimly she was beginning to realize that sensation, not
time, is the true measure of life. Nothing and everything had happened
to her since yesterday.
As they turned into Short Market Street, Mrs. Pendleton's voice trailed
off at last into silence, and she did not speak again while they passed
hurriedly between the crumbling houses and the dilapidated shops which
rose darkly on either side of the narrow cinder-strewn walks. The scent
of honeysuckle did not reach here, and when they stopped presently at
the beginning of Tin Pot Alley, there floated out to them the sharp
acrid odour of huddled negroes. In these squalid alleys, where the lamps
burned at longer distances, the more primitive forms of life appeared to
swarm like distorted images under the transparent civilization of the
town. The sound of banjo strumming came faintly from the dimness beyond,
while at their feet the Problem of the South sprawled innocently amid
tomato cans and rotting cabbage leaves.
"Wait here just a minute and I'll run up and speak to Aunt Ailsey,"
remarked Mrs. Pendleton with the dignity of a soul that is superior to
smells; and without noticing her daughter's reproachful nod of
acquiescence, she entered the alley and disappeared through the doorway
of the nearest hovel. A minute later her serene face looked down at them
over a patchwork quilt which hung airing at half length from the window
above. "But this is not life--it has nothing to do with life," thought
Virginia, while the Pendleton blood in her rose in a fierce rebellion
against all that was ugly and sordid in existence. Then her mother's
tread was heard descending the short flight of steps, and the sensation
vanished as quickly and as inexplicably as it had come.
"I tried not to keep you waiting, dear," said Mrs. Pendleton, hastening
toward them while she fanned herself rapidly with the small black fan
she carried. Her face looked tired and worn, and before moving on, she
paused a moment and held her hand to her thin fluttering breast, while
deep bluish circles appeared to start out under the expression of
pathetic cheerfulness in her eyes. This pathetic cheerfulness, so
characteristic of the women of her generation, was the first thing,
perhaps, that a stranger would have noticed about her face; yet it was a
trait which neither her husband nor her child had ever observed. There
was a fine moisture on her forehead, and this added so greatly to the
natural transparency of her features that, standing there in the wan
light, she might have been mistaken for the phantom of her daughter's
vivid flesh and blood beauty. "I wonder if you would mind going on to
Bolingbroke Street, so I may speak to Belinda Treadwell a minute?" she
asked, as soon as she had recovered her breath. "I want to find out if
she has engaged Miss Willy Whitlow for the whole week, or if there is
any use my sending a message to her over in Botetourt. If she doesn't
begin at once, Jinny, you won't have a dress to wear to Abby Goode's
party."
Virginia's heart gave a single bound of joy and lay quiet. Not for
worlds would she have asked to go to the Treadwells', yet ever since
they had started, she had longed unceasingly to have her mother suggest
it. The very stars, she felt, had worked together to bring about her
desire.
"But aren't you tired, mother? It really doesn't matter about my dress,"
she murmured, for it was not in vain that she had wrested a diploma for
deportment from Miss Priscilla.
"Why can't I take the message for you, Aunt Lucy? You look tired to
death," urged John Henry.
"Oh, I shan't mind the walk as soon as we get out into the breeze,"
replied Mrs. Pendleton. "It's a lovely night, only a little close in
this alley." And as she spoke she looked gently down on the Problem of
the South as the Southern woman had looked down on it for generations
and would continue to look down on it for generations still to
come--without seeing that it was a problem.
"Well, it's good to get a breath of air, anyway!" exclaimed John Henry
with fervour, when they had passed out of the alley into the lighted
street. Around them the town seemed to beat with a single heart, as if
it waited, like Virginia, in breathless suspense for some secret that
must come out of the darkness. Sometimes the sidewalks over which they
passed were of flag-stones, sometimes they were of gravel or of strewn
cinders. Now and then an old stone house, which had once sheltered
crinoline and lace ruffles, or had served as a trading station with the
Indians before Dinwiddie had become a city, would loom between two small
shops where the owners, coatless and covered with sweat, were selling
flat beer to jaded and miserable customers. Up Bolingbroke Street a
faint breeze blew, lifting the moist satin-like hair on Mrs. Pendleton's
forehead. Already its ancient dignity had deserted the quarter in which
the Treadwells lived, and it had begun to wear a forsaken and injured
look, as though it resented the degradation of commerce into which it
had descended.
"I can't understand why Cyrus Treadwell doesn't move over to Sycamore
Street," remarked John Henry after a moment of reflection in which he
had appeared to weigh this simple sentence with scrupulous exactness.
"He's rich enough, I suppose, to buy anything he wants."
"I've heard Susan say that it was her mother's old home and she didn't
care to leave it," said Mrs. Pendleton.
"I don't believe it's that a bit," broke in Virginia with characteristic
impulsiveness. "The only reason is that Mr. Treadwell is stingy. With
all his money, I know Mrs. Treadwell and Susan hardly ever have a dollar
they can spend on themselves."
Though she spoke with her accustomed energy, she was conscious all the
time that the words she uttered were not the ones in her thoughts. What
did Cyrus Treadwell's stinginess matter when his only relation to life
consisted in his being the uncle of Oliver? It was as if a single shape
moved alive through a universe peopled with shadows. Only a borrowed
radiance attached itself now to the persons and objects that had
illumined the world for her yesterday. Yet she approached the crisis of
her life so silently that those around her did not recognize it beneath
the cover of ordinary circumstances. Like most great moments it had come
unheralded; and though the rustling of its wings filled her soul,
neither her mother nor John Henry heard a stir in the quiet air that
surrounded them. Walking between the two who loved her, she felt that
she was separated from them both by an eternity of experience.
There were several blocks of Bolingbroke Street to walk before the
Treadwells' house was reached, and as they sauntered slowly past decayed
dwellings, Virginia's imagination ran joyously ahead of her to the
meeting. Would it happen this time as it had happened before when he
looked at her that something would pass between them which would make
her feel that she belonged to him? So little resistance did she offer to
the purpose of Life that she seemed to have existed from the beginning
merely as an exquisite medium for a single emotion. It was as if the
dreams of all the dead women of her race, who had lived only in loving,
were concentrated into a single shining centre of bliss--for the
accumulated vibrations of centuries were in her soul when she trembled
for the first time beneath the eyes of a lover. And yet all this
blissful violence was powerless to change the most insignificant
external fact in the universe. Though it was the greatest thing that
could ever happen to her, it was nothing to the other twenty-one
thousand human beings among whom she lived; it left no mark upon that
procession of unimportant details which they called life.
They were in sight of the small old-fashioned brick house of the
Treadwells, with its narrow windows set discreetly between outside
shutters, and she saw that the little marble porch was deserted except
for the two pink oleander trees, which stood in green tubs on either
side of the curved iron railings. A minute later John Henry's
imperative ring brought a young coloured maid to the door, and Virginia,
who had lingered on the pavement, heard almost immediately an effusive
duet from her mother and Mrs. Treadwell.
"Oh, do come in, Lucy, just for a minute!"
"I can't possibly, my dear; I only wanted to ask you if you have engaged
Miss Willy Whitlow for the entire week or if you could let me have her
for Friday and Saturday? Jinny hasn't a rag to wear to Abby Goode's lawn
party and I don't know anybody who does quite so well for her as poor
Miss Willy. Oh, that's so sweet of you! I can't thank you enough! And
you'll tell her without my sending all the way over to Botetourt!"
By this time Susan had joined Virginia on the sidewalk, and the liquid
honey of Mrs. Pendleton's voice dropped softly into indistinctness.
"Oh, Jinny, if I'd only known you were coming!" said Susan. "Oliver
wanted me to take him to see you, and when I couldn't, he went over to
call on Abby."
So this was the end of her walk winged with expectancy! A disappointment
as sharp as her joy had been pierced her through as she stood there
smiling into Susan's discomfited face. With the tragic power of youth to
create its own torment, she told herself that life could never be the
same after this first taste of its bitterness.
CHAPTER III
FIRST LOVE
The next morning, so indestructible is the happiness of youth, she awoke
with her hope as fresh as if it had not been blighted the evening
before. As she lay in bed, with her loosened hair making a cloud over
the pillows, and her eyes shining like blue flowers in the band of
sunlight that fell through the dormer-window, she quivered to the early
sweetness of honeysuckle as though it were the charmed sweetness of love
of which she had dreamed in the night. She was only one of the many
millions of women who were awaking at the same hour to the same miracle
of Nature, yet she might have been the first woman seeking the first man
through the vastness and the mystery of an uninhabited earth. Impossible
to believe that an experience so wonderful was as common as the bursting
of the spring buds or the humming of the thirsty bees around the
honeysuckle arbour!
Slipping out of bed, she threw her dressing-gown over her shoulders, and
kneeling beside the window, drank in the flower-scented air of the May
morning. During the night, the paulownia trees had shed a rain of violet
blossoms over the wet grass, where little wings of sunshine, like golden
moths, hovered above them. Beyond the border of lilies-of-the-valley she
saw the squat pinkish tower of the church, and beneath it, in the
narrow churchyard, rose the gleaming shaft above the grave of the
Confederate soldier. On her right, in the centre of the crooked path,
three negro infants were prodding earnestly at roots of wire-grass and
dandelion; and brushing carelessly their huddled figures, her gaze
descended the twelve steps of the almost obliterated terrace, and
followed the steep street down which a mulatto vegetable vendor was
urging his slow-footed mule.
A wave of joy rose in her breast, and she felt that her heart melted in
gratitude for the divine beauty of life. The world showed to her as a
place filled with shining vistas of happiness, and at the end of each of
these vistas there awaited the unknown enchanting thing which she called
in her thoughts "the future." The fact that it was the same world in
which Miss Priscilla and her mother lived their narrow and prosaic lives
did not alter by a breath her unshakable conviction that she herself was
predestined for something more wonderful than they had ever dreamed of.
"He may come this evening!" she thought, and immediately the light of
magic suffused the room, the street outside, and every scarred roof in
Dinwiddie.
At the head of her bed, wedged in between the candle stand and the
window, there was a cheap little bookcase of walnut which contained the
only volumes she had ever been permitted to own--the poems of Mrs.
Hemans and of Adelaide Anne Procter, a carefully expurgated edition of
Shakespeare, with an inscription in the rector's handwriting on the
flyleaf; Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England"; and several
works of fiction belonging to the class which Mrs. Pendleton vaguely
characterized as "sweet stories." Among the more prominent of these
were "Thaddeus of Warsaw," a complete set of Miss Yonge's novels, with a
conspicuously tear-stained volume of "The Heir of Redclyffe," and a
romance or two by obscure but innocuous authors. That any book which
told, however mildly, the truth about life should have entered their
daughter's bedroom would have seemed little short of profanation to both
the rector and Mrs. Pendleton. The sacred shelves of that bookcase
(which had been ceremoniously presented to her on her fourteenth
birthday) had never suffered the contaminating presence of realism. The
solitary purpose of art was, in Mrs. Pendleton's eyes, to be "sweet,"
and she scrupulously judged all literature by its success or failure in
this particular quality. It seemed to her as wholesome to feed her
daughter's growing fancy on an imaginary line of pious heroes, as it
appeared to her moral to screen her from all suspicion of the existence
of immorality. She did not honestly believe that any living man
resembled the "Heir of Redclyffe," any more than she believed that the
path of self-sacrifice leads inevitably to happiness; but there was no
doubt in her mind that she advanced the cause of righteousness when she
taught these sanctified fallacies to Virginia.
As she rose from her knees, Virginia glanced at her white dress, which
was too crumpled for her to wear again before it was smoothed, and
thought regretfully of Aunt Docia's heart, which invariably gave warning
whenever there was extra work to be done. "I shall have to wear either
my blue lawn or my green organdie this evening," she thought. "I wish I
could have the sleeves changed. I wonder if mother could run a tuck in
them?"
It did not occur to her that she might smooth the dress herself, because
she knew that the iron would be wrested from her by her mother's hands,
which were so knotted and worn that tears came to Virginia's eyes when
she looked at them. She let her mother slave over her because she had
been born into a world where the slaving of mothers was a part of the
natural order, and she had not as yet become independent enough to
question the morality of the commonplace. At any minute she would gladly
have worked, too, but the phrase "spare Virginia" had been uttered so
often in her hearing that it had acquired at last almost a religious
significance. To have been forced to train her daughter in any
profitable occupation which might have lifted her out of the class of
unskilled labour in which indigent gentlewomen by right belonged, would
have been the final dregs of humiliation in Mrs. Pendleton's cup. On one
of Aunt Docia's bad days, when Jinny had begged to be allowed to do part
of the washing, she had met an almost passionate refusal from her
mother. "It will be time enough to spoil your hands after you are
married, darling!" And again, "Don't do that rough sewing, Jinny. Give
it to me." From the cradle she had borne her part in this racial custom
of the sacrifice of generation to generation--of the perpetual
immolation of age on the flowery altars of youth. Like most customs in
which we are nurtured, it had seemed natural and pleasant enough until
she had watched the hollows deepen in her mother's temples and the
tireless knotted hands stumble at their work. Then a pang had seized her
and she had pleaded earnestly to be permitted to help.
"If you only knew how unhappy it makes me to see you ruining your pretty
fingers, Jinny. My child, the one comfort I have is the thought that I
am sparing you."
Sparing her! Always that from the first! Even Gabriel chimed in when it
became a matter of Jinny. "Let me wash the dishes, Lucy," he would
implore. "What? Will you trust me with other people's souls, but not
with your china?"
"It's not a man's work, Mr. Pendleton. What would the neighbours think?"
"They would think, I hope, my dear, that I was doing my duty."
"But it would not be dignified for a clergyman. No, I cannot bear the
sight of you with a dishcloth."
In the end she invariably had her way with them, for she was the
strongest. Jinny must be spared, and Gabriel must do nothing
undignified. About herself it made no difference unless the neighbours
were looking; she had not thought of herself, except in the indomitable
failing of her "false pride," since her marriage, which had taken place
in her twentieth year. A clergyman's wife might do menial tasks in
secret, and nobody minded, but they were not for a clergyman.
For a minute, while she was dressing, Virginia thought of these
things--of how hard life had been to her mother, of how pretty she must
have been in her youth. What she did not think of was that her mother,
like herself, was but one of the endless procession of women who pass
perpetually from the sphere of pleasure into the sphere of service. It
was as impossible for her to picture her mother as a girl of twenty as
it was for her to imagine herself ever becoming a woman of fifty.
When she had finished dressing she closed the door softly after her as
if she were afraid of disturbing the silence, and ran downstairs to the
dining-room, where the rector and Mrs. Pendleton greeted her with
subdued murmurs of joy.
"I was afraid I'd miss you, daughter," from the rector, as he drew her
chair nearer.
"I was just going to carry up your tray, Jinny," from her mother. "I
kept a nice breast of chicken for you which one of the neighbours sent
me."
"I'd so much rather you'd eat it, mother," protested Jinny, on the point
of tears.
"But I couldn't, darling, I really couldn't manage it. A cup of coffee
and a bit of toast is all I can possibly stand in the morning. I was up
early, for Docia was threatened with one of her heart attacks, and it
always gives me a little headache to miss my morning nap."
"Then you can't go to market, Lucy; it is out of the question," insisted
the rector. "After thirty years you might as well make up your mind to
trust me, my dear."
"But the last time you went you gave away our shoulder of lamb to a
beggar," replied his wife, and she hastened to add tenderly, lest he
should accept the remark as a reproof, "it's sweet of you, dearest, but
a little walk will be good for my head if I am careful to keep on the
shady side of the street. I can easily find a boy to bring home the
things, and I am sure it won't hurt me a bit."
"Why can't I go, mother?" implored Virginia. "Susan always markets for
Mrs. Treadwell." And she felt that even the task of marketing was
irradiated by this inner glow which had changed the common aspect of
life.
"Oh, Jinny, you know how you hate to feel the chickens, and one can
never tell how plump they are by the feathers."
"Well, I'll feel them, mother, if you'll let me try."
"No, darling, but you may go with me and carry my sunshade. I'm so sorry
Docia can't smooth your dress. Was it much crumpled?"
"Oh, dreadfully! And I did so want to wear it this evening. Do you think
Aunt Docia could show me how to iron?"
Docia, who stood like an ebony image of Bellona behind her mistress's
chair, waving a variegated tissue paper fly screen over the coffee-urn,
was heard to think aloud that "dish yer stitch ain' helt up er blessed
minute sence befo' daylight." Not unnaturally, perhaps, since she was
the most prominent figure in her own vision of the universe, she had
come at last to regard her recurrent "stitch" as an event of greater
consequence than Virginia's appearance in immaculate white muslin. An
uncertain heart combined with a certain temper had elevated her from a
servile position to one of absolute autocracy in the household.
Everybody feared her, so nobody had ever dared ask her to leave. As she
had rebelled long ago against the badge of a cap and an apron, she
appeared in the dining-room clad in garments of various hues, and her
dress on this particular morning was a purple calico crowned
majestically by a pink cotton turban. There was a tradition still afloat
that Docia had been an excellent servant before the war; but this
amiable superstition had, perhaps, as much reason to support it as had
Gabriel's innocent conviction that there were no faithless husbands when
there were no divorces.
"I'm afraid Docia can't do it," sighed Mrs. Pendleton, for her ears had
caught the faint thunder of the war goddess behind her chair, and her
soul, which feared neither armies nor adversities, trembled before her
former slaves. "But it won't take me a minute if you'll have it ready
right after dinner."
"Oh, mother, of course I couldn't let you for anything. I only thought
Aunt Docia might be able to teach me how to iron."
At this, Docia muttered audibly that she "ain' got no time ter be
sho'in' nobody nuttin'."
"There, now, Docia, you mustn't lose your temper," observed Gabriel as
he rose from his chair. It was at such moments that the remembered joys
of slavery left a bitter after taste on his lips. Clearly it was
impossible to turn into the streets a servant who had once belonged to
you!
When they were in the hall together, Mrs. Pendleton whispered nervously
to her husband that it must be "poor Docia's heart that made her so
disagreeable and that she would feel better to-morrow."
"Wouldn't it be possible, my dear?" inquired the rector in his pulpit
manner, to which his wife's only answer was a startled "Sh-sh-ush."
An hour later the door of Gabriel's study opened softly, and Mrs.
Pendleton entered with the humble and apologetic manner in which she
always intruded upon her husband's pursuits. There was an accepted
theory in the family, shared even by Uncle Isam and Aunt Docia, that
whenever Gabriel was left alone for an instant, his thoughts naturally
deflected into spiritual paths. In the early days of his marriage he had
tried honestly to live up to this exalted idea of his character; then
finding the effort beyond him, and being a man with an innate
detestation of hypocrisy, he had earnestly endeavoured to disabuse his
wife's imagination of the mistaken belief in his divinity. But a notion
once firmly fixed in Mrs. Pendleton's mind might as well have been
embedded in rock. By virtue of that gentle obstinacy which enabled her
to believe in an illusion the more intensely because it had vanished,
she had triumphed not only over circumstances, but over truth itself. By
virtue of this quality, she had created the world in which she moved and
had wrought beauty out of chaos.
"Are you busy with your sermon, dear?" she asked, pausing in the
doorway, and gazing reverently at her husband over the small black silk
bag she carried. Like the other women of Dinwiddie who had lost
relatives by the war, she had never laid aside her mourning since the
surrender; and the frame of crape to her face gave her the pensive look
of one who has stepped out of the pageant of life into the sacred
shadows of memory.
"No, no, Lucy, I'm ready to start out with you," replied the rector
apologetically, putting a box of fishing tackle he had been sorting back
into the drawer of his desk. He was as fond as a child of a day's sport,
and never quite so happy as when he set out with his rod and an old
tomato can filled with worms, which he had dug out of the back garden,
in his hands; but owing to the many calls upon him and his wife's
conception of his clerical dignity, he was seldom able to gratify his
natural tastes.
"Oh, father, please hurry!" called Virginia from the porch, and rising
obediently, he followed Mrs. Pendleton through the hall and out into the
May sunshine, where the little negroes stopped an excited chase of a
black and orange butterfly to return doggedly to their weeding.
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather I'd go to market, Lucy?"
"Quite sure, dear," replied his wife, sniffing the scent of
lilies-of-the-valley with her delicate, slightly pinched nostrils. "I
thought you were going to see Mr. Treadwell about putting John Henry
into the bank," she added. "It is such a pity to keep the poor boy
selling bathtubs. His mother felt it so terribly."
"Ah, so I was--so I was," reflected Gabriel, who, though both of them
would have been indignant at the suggestion, was as putty in the hands
of his wife. "Well, I'll look into the bank on Cyrus after I've paid my
sick calls."
With that they parted, Gabriel going on to visit a bedridden widow in
the Old Ladies' Home, while Mrs. Pendleton and Virginia turned down a
cross street that led toward the market. At every corner, it seemed to
Virginia, middle-aged ladies, stout or thin, wearing crape veils and
holding small black silk bags in their hands, sprang out of the shadows
of mulberry trees, and barred their leisurely progress. And though
nothing had happened in Dinwiddie since the war, and Mrs. Pendleton had
seen many of these ladies the day before, she stopped for a sympathetic
chat with each one of them, while Virginia, standing a little apart,
patiently prodded the cinders of the walk with the end of her sunshade.
All her life the girl had been taught to regard time as the thing of
least importance in the universe; but occasionally, while she listened
in silence to the liquid murmur of her mother's voice, she wondered
vaguely how the day's work was ever finished in Dinwiddie. The story of
Docia's impertinence was told and retold a dozen times before they
reached the market. "And you really mean that you can't get rid of her?
Why, my dear Lucy, I wouldn't stand it a day! Now, there was my Mandy.
Such an excellent servant until she got her head turned----" This from
Mrs. Tom Peachey, an energetic little woman, with a rosy face and a
straight gray "bang" cut short over her eyebrows. "But, Lucy, my child,
are you doing right to submit to impertinence? In the old days, I
remember, before the war----" This from Mrs. William Goode, who had been
Sally Peterson, the beauty of Dinwiddie, and who was still superbly
handsome in a tragic fashion, with a haunted look in her eyes and masses
of snow-white hair under her mourning bonnet. Years ago Virginia had
imagined her as dwelling perpetually with the memory of her young
husband, who had fallen in his twenty-fifth year in the Battle of Cold
Harbor, but she knew now that the haunted eyes, like all things human,
were under the despotism of trifles. To the girl, who saw in this
universal acquiescence in littleness merely the pitiful surrender of
feeble souls, there was a passionate triumph in the thought that her own
dreams were larger than the actuality that surrounded her. Youth's scorn
of the narrow details of life left no room in her mind for an
understanding of the compromise which middle-age makes with necessity.
The pathos of resignation--of that inevitable submission to the petty
powers which the years bring--was lost upon the wistful ignorance of
inexperience. While she waited dutifully, with her absent gaze fixed on
the old mulberry trees, which whitened as the wind blew over them and
then slowly darkened again, she wondered if servants and gossip were the
only things that Oliver had heard of in his travels? Then she remembered
that even in Dinwiddie men were less interested in such matters than
they were in the industries of peanuts and tobacco. Was it only women,
after all, who were in subjection to particulars?
When they turned into Old Street, John Henry hailed them from the
doorway of a shop, where he stood flanked by a row of spotless bathtubs.
He wore a loose pongee coat, which sagged at the shoulders, his straight
flaxen hair had been freshly cut, and his crimson necktie had got a
stain on it at breakfast; but to Virginia's astonishment, he appeared
sublimely unconscious both of his bathtubs and his appearance. He was
doubtless under the delusion that a pongee coat, being worn for comfort,
was entirely successful when it achieved that end; and as for his
business, it was beyond his comprehension that a Pendleton could have
reason to blush for a bathtub or for any other object that afforded him
an honest livelihood.
He called to them at sight, and Mrs. Pendleton, following her instinct
of fitness, left the conversation to youth.
"John Henry, father is going to see Mr. Treadwell about the place in the
bank. Won't it be lovely if he gives it to you!"
"He won't," replied John Henry. "I'll bet you anything he's keeping it
for his nephew."
Virginia's blush came quickly, and turning her head away, she gazed
earnestly down the street to the octagonal market, which stood on the
spot where slaves were offered for sale when she was born.
"Mr. Treadwell is crossing the street now," she said after a minute. "I
wonder why he keeps his mouth shut so tight when he is alone?"
A covered cart, which had been passing slowly, moved up the hill, and
from beyond it there appeared the tall spare figure of a man with
iron-gray hair, curling a little on the temples, a sallow skin,
splotched with red over the nose, and narrow colourless lips that looked
as if they were cut out of steel. As he walked quickly up the street,
every person whom he passed turned to glance after him.
"I wonder if it is true that he hasn't made his money honestly?" asked
Virginia.
"Oh, I hope not!" exclaimed Mrs. Pendleton, who in her natural desire to
believe only good about people was occasionally led into believing the
truth.
"Well, I don't care," retorted Virginia, "he's mean. I know just by the
way his wife dresses."
"Oh, Jinny!" gasped Mrs. Pendleton, and glanced in embarrassment at her
nephew, whose face, to her surprise, was beaming with enjoyment. The
truth was that John Henry, who would have condemned so unreasonable an
accusation had it been uttered by a full-grown male, was enraptured by
the piquancy of hearing it on the lovely lips of his cousin. To demand
that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility of a human
being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of gallantry.
His slow wit was enslaved by Jinny's audacity as completely as his kind
ox-like eyes were enthralled by the young red and white of her beauty.
"But he's a great man. You can't deny that," he said with the playful
manner in which he might have prodded a kitten in order to make it claw.
"A great man! Just because he has made money!"
"Well, he couldn't have got rich, you know, if he hadn't had the sense
to see how to do it," replied the young man with enthusiasm. Like most
Southerners who had been forced without preparation into the hard school
of industry, he had found that his standards followed inevitably the
changing measure of his circumstances. From his altered point of view,
the part of owing property appeared so easy, and the part of winning it
so difficult, that his respect for culture had yielded almost
unconsciously to his admiration for commerce. When the South came again
to the front, he felt instinctively that it would come, shorn of its
traditional plumage, a victor from the hard-fought industrial
battlefields of the century; and because Cyrus Treadwell led the way
toward this triumph, he was ready to follow him. Of the whole town, this
grim, half legendary figure (passionately revered and as passionately
hated) appeared to him to stand alone not for the decaying past, but for
the growing future. The stories of the too rapid development of the
Treadwell fortune he cast scornfully aside as the malicious slanders of
failure. What did all this tittle-tattle about a great man prove anyhow
except his greatness? Suppose he _had_ used his railroad to make a
fortune--well, but for him where would the Dinwiddie and Central be
to-day if not in the junk shop? Where would the lumber market be? the
cotton market? the tobacco market? For around Cyrus, standing alone and
solitary on his height, there had gathered the great illusion that
makes theft honest and falsehood truth--the illusion of Success; and
simple John Henry Pendleton, who, after nineteen years of poverty and
memory, was bereft alike of classical pedantry and of physical comforts,
had grown a little weary of the endless lip-worship of a single moment
in history. Granted even that it was the greatest moment the world had
seen, still why couldn't one be satisfied to have it take its place
beside the wars of the Spartans and of the ancient Britons? Perpetual
mourning was well enough for ladies in crape veils and heroic gentlemen
on crutches; but when your bread and meat depended not upon the graves
you had decorated, but upon the bathtubs you had sold, surely something
could be said for the Treadwell point of view.
As Virginia could find no answer to this remark, the three stood in
silence, gazing dreamily, with three pairs of Pendleton eyes, down
toward the site of the old slave market. Directly in their line of
vision, an over-laden mule with a sore shoulder was straining painfully
under the lash, but none of them saw it, because each of them was
morally incapable of looking an unpleasant fact in the face if there was
any honourable manner of avoiding it. What they beheld, indeed, was the
most interesting street in the world, filled with the most interesting
people, who drove happy animals that enjoyed their servitude and needed
the sound of the lash to add cheer and liveliness to their labours.
Never had the Pendleton idealism achieved a more absolute triumph over
the actuality.
"Well, we must go on," murmured Mrs. Pendleton, withdrawing her
visionary gaze from the hot street littered with fruit rinds and
blood-stained papers from a neighbouring butcher shop. "It was lovely
to have this glimpse of you, John Henry. What nice bathtubs you have!"
Smiling her still lovely smile into the young man's eyes, she proceeded
on her leisurely way, while Virginia raised the black silk sunshade over
her head. In front of them they could see long rows of fish-carts and
vegetable stalls around which hovered an army of eager housekeepers. The
social hours in Dinwiddie at that period were the early morning ones in
the old market, and Virginia knew that she should hear Docia's story
repeated again for the benefit of the curious or sympathetic listeners
that would soon gather about her mother. Mrs. Pendleton's marketing,
unlike the hurried and irresponsible sort of to-day, was an affair of
time and ceremony. Among the greetings and the condolences from other
marketers there would ensue lengthy conversations with the vendors of
poultry, of fish, or of vegetables. Every vegetable must be carefully
selected by her own hands and laid aside into her special basket, which
was in the anxious charge of a small coloured urchin. While she felt the
plump breasts of Mr. Dewlap's chickens, she would inquire with
flattering condescension after the members of Mr. Dewlap's family. Not
only did she remember each one of them by name, but she never forgot
either the dates of their birthdays or the number of turkeys Mrs. Dewlap
had raised in a season. If marketing is ever to be elevated from an
occupation to an art, it will be by a return to Mrs. Pendleton's method.
"Mother, please buy some strawberries," begged Virginia.
"Darling, you know we never buy fruit, or desserts. Somebody will
certainly send us something. I saw Mrs. Carrington whipping syllabub on
her back porch as we passed."
"But they're only five cents a basket."
"Well, put a basket with my marketing, Mr. Dewlap. Yes, I'll take that
white pullet if you're sure that she is plumper than the red one."
She moved on a step or two, while the white pullet was handed over by
its feet to the small coloured urchin and to destruction. If Mrs.
Pendleton had ever reflected on the tragic fate of pullets, she would
probably have concluded that it was "best" for them to be fried and
eaten, or Providence, whose merciful wisdom she never questioned, would
not have permitted it. So, in the old days, she had known where the
slave market stood, without realizing in the least that men and women
were sold there. "Poor things, it does seem dreadful, but I suppose it
is better for them to have a change sometimes," she would doubtless have
reasoned had the horror of the custom ever occurred to her--for her
heart was so sensitive to pain that she could exist at all only by
inventing a world of exquisite fiction around her.
"Aren't you nearly through, mother?" pleaded Virginia at last. "The sun
will be so hot going home that it will make your head worse."
Mrs. Pendleton, who was splitting a pea-shell with her thumb in order to
ascertain the size and quality of the peas, murmured soothingly, "Just a
minute, dear"; and the girl, finding it impossible to share her mother's
enthusiasm for slaughtered animals, fell back again into the narrow
shade of the stalls. She revolted with a feeling of outrage against the
side of life that confronted her--against the dirty floor, strewn with
withered vegetables above which flies swarmed incessantly, and against
the pathos of the small bleeding forms which seemed related neither to
the lamb in the fields nor to the Sunday roast on the table. That divine
gift of evasion, which enabled Mrs. Pendleton to see only the thing she
wanted to see in every occurrence, was but partially developed as yet in
Virginia; and while she stood there in the midst of her unromantic
surroundings, the girl shuddered lest Oliver Treadwell should know that
she had ever waited, hot, perspiring, with a draggled skirt, and a bag
of tomatoes grasped in her hands, while her mother wandered from stall
to stall in a tireless search for peas a few cents cheaper than those of
Mr. Dewlap. Youth, with its ingenuous belief that love dwells in
external circumstances, was protesting against the bland assumption of
age that love creates its own peculiar circumstances out of itself. It
was absurd, she knew, to imagine that her father's affection for her
mother would alter because she haggled over the price of peas; yet the
emotion with which she endowed Oliver Treadwell was so delicate and
elusive that she felt that the sight of a soiled skirt and a perspiring
face would blast it forever. It appeared imperative that he should see
her in white muslin, and she resolved that if it cost Docia her life she
would have the flounces of her dress smoothed before evening. She, who
was by nature almost morbidly sensitive to suffering, became, in the
hands of this new and implacable power, as ruthless as Fate.
"Now I'm ready, Jinny dear. Are you tired waiting?" asked Mrs.
Pendleton, coming toward her with the coloured urchin in her train.
"Why, there's Susan Treadwell. Have you spoken to her?"
The next instant, before the startled girl could turn, a voice cried out
triumphantly: "O Jinny!" and in front of her, looking over Susan's
shoulder, she saw the eager eyes and the thin, high-coloured face of
Oliver Treadwell. For a moment she told herself that he had read her
thoughts with his penetrating gaze, which seemed to pierce through her;
and she blushed pink while her eyes burned under her trembling lashes.
Then the paper bag, containing the tomatoes, burst in her hands, and its
contents rolled, one by one, over the littered floor to his feet. Both
stooped at once to recover it, and while their hands touched amid wilted
cabbage leaves, the girl felt that love had taken gilded wings and
departed forever!
"Put them in the basket, dear," Mrs. Pendleton could be heard saying
calmly in the midst of her daughter's agony--for, having lived through
the brief illumination of romance, she had come at last into that steady
glow which encompasses the commonplace.
"This is my cousin Oliver, Virginia," remarked Susan as casually as if
the meeting of the two had not been planned from all eternity by the
beneficent Powers.
"I'm afraid I've spoiled your nice red tomatoes," said a voice that
filled Virginia's whirling mind with a kind of ecstatic dizziness. As
the owner of the voice held out his hand, she saw that it was long and
thin like the rest of him, with blue veins crossing the back, and
slender, slightly crooked fingers that hurt hers with the strength of
their pressure. "To confess the truth," he added gaily after an instant,
"my breath was quite taken away because, somehow, this was the last
place on earth in which I expected to find you. It's a dreadful
spot--don't you think so? If we've got to be cannibals, why in Heaven's
name make a show and a parade of it?"
"What an extraordinary young man!" said Mrs. Pendleton's eyes; and
Virginia found herself blushing again because she felt that her mother
had not understood him. A delicious embarrassment--something different
and more vivid than any sensation she had ever known--held her
speechless while he looked at her. Had her life depended on it, she
could not have uttered a sentence--could hardly even have lifted her
lashes, which seemed suddenly to have become so heavy that she felt the
burden of them weighing over her eyes. All the picturesque phrases she
had planned to speak at their first meeting had taken wings with
perfidious romance, yet she would have given her dearest possession to
have been able to say something really clever. "He thinks me a
simpleton, of course," she thought--perfectly unconscious that Oliver
was not thinking of her wits at all, but of the wonderful rose-pink of
her flesh. At one and the same instant, she felt that this silence was
the most marvellous thing that had ever happened to her and longed to
break it with some speech so brilliant that he would never forget it.
Little thrills of joy, like tiny flames, ran over her, and the light in
her eyes shone on him through the quivering dusk of her lashes. Even
when she looked away from him, she could still see his expression of
tender gaiety, as though he were trying in vain to laugh himself free
from an impulse that was fast growing too strong for him. What she did
not know was that the spring was calling to him through her youth and
sex as it was calling through the scented winds and the young buds on
the trees. She was as ignorant that she offered herself to him through
her velvet softness, through the glow in her eyes, through her quivering
lips, as the flower is that it allures the bee by its perfume. So subtly
did Life use her for its end that the illusion of choice in first love
remained unimpaired. Though she was young desire incarnate, he saw in
her only the unique and solitary woman of his dreams.
"Do you come here every day?" he asked, and immediately the blue sky and
the octagonal market spun round at his voice.
As nothing but commonplace words would come to her, she was obliged at
last to utter them. "Oh, no, not every day."
"I've always had a tremendous sympathy for women because they have to
market and housekeep. I wonder if they won't revolt some time?"
This was so heretical a point of view that she tried earnestly to
comprehend it; but all the time her heart was busy telling her how
different he was from every other man--how much more interesting! how
immeasurably superior! Her attention, in spite of her efforts at serious
thought, would not wander from the charm of his voice, from the peculiar
whimsical trick of his smile, which lifted his mouth at one corner and
made odd little wrinkles come and go about his eyes. His manner was full
of sudden nervous gestures which surprised and enchanted her. All other
men were not merely as clay beside him--they were as straw! Seeing that
he was waiting for a response, she made a violent endeavour to think of
one, and uttered almost inaudibly: "But don't they like it?"
"Ah, that's just it," he answered as seriously as if she hadn't known
that her speech bordered on imbecility. "Do they really like it? or have
they been throwing dust in our eyes through the centuries?" And he gazed
at her as eagerly as if he were hanging upon her answer. Oh, if she
could only say something clever! If she could only say the sort of thing
that would shock Miss Priscilla! But nothing came of her wish, and she
was reduced at last to the pathetic rejoinder, "I don't know. I'm afraid
I've never thought about it."
For a moment he stared at her as though he were enraptured by her reply.
With such eyes and such hair, she might have been as simple as she
appeared and he would never have known it. "Of course you haven't, or
you wouldn't be you!" he responded; and by the time she came to her
senses, she was following her mother and the negro urchin out of the
market. Though she was in reality walking over cinders, she felt that
her feet were treading on golden air.
CHAPTER IV
THE TREADWELLS
Above the Dinwiddie of Virginia's girlhood, rising sharply out of the
smoothly blended level of personalities, there towered, as far back as
she could remember, the grim and yet strangely living figure of Cyrus
Treadwell. From the intimate social life of the town he had remained
immovably detached; but from the beginning it had been impossible for
that life to ignore him. Among a people knit by a common pulse, yet
separated by a multitude of individual differences, he stood aloof and
indispensable, like one of the gaunt iron bridges of his great railroad.
He was at once the destroyer and the builder--the inexorable foe of the
old feudal order and the beneficent source of the new industrialism.
Though half of Dinwiddie hated him, the other half (hating him, perhaps
none the less) ate its bread from his hands. The town, which had lived,
fought, lost, and suffered not as a group of individuals, but as a
psychological unit, had surrendered at last, less to the idea of
readjustment than to the indomitable purpose of a single mind.
And yet nobody in Dinwiddie, not even Miss Willy Whitlow, who sewed out
by the day, and knew the intimate structure of every skeleton in every
closet of the town--nobody could tell the precise instant at which Cyrus
had ceased to be an ordinary man and become a great one. A phrase,
which had started as usual, "The Mr. Treadwell, you know, who married
poor Belinda Bolingbroke--" swerved suddenly to "Cyrus Treadwell told me
that, and you must admit that _he_ knows what he is talking about"--and
a reputation was made! His marriage to "poor Belinda," which had at
first appeared to be the most conspicuous fact in his career, dwindled
to insignificance beside the rebuilding of the tobacco industry and his
immediate elevation to the vacant presidency of one of the Machlin
railroads.
It was true that in the meantime he had fought irreproachably, but
without renown, through a number of battles; and returning to a
vanquished and ruined city, had found himself still young enough to go
to school again in matters of finance. Whether he had learned from
Antrum, the despised carpet-bagger for Machlin & Company, or had taken
his instructions at first hand from the great Machlin himself, was in
the eighties an open question in Dinwiddie. The choice was probably
given him to learn or starve; and aided by the keen understanding and
the acute sense of property he had inherited from his Scotch-Irish
parentage, he had doubtless decided that to learn was, after all, the
easier way. Saving he had always been, and yet with such strange and
sudden starts of generosity that he had been known to seek out distant
obscure maiden relatives and redeem the mortgaged roof over their heads.
His strongest instinct, which was merely an attenuated shoot from his
supreme feeling for possessions, was that of race, though he had
estranged both his son and his daughter by his stubborn conviction that
he was not doing his duty by them except when he was making their lives
a burden. For, as with most men who have suffered in their youth under
oppression, his ambition was not so much to relieve the oppressed as to
become in his turn the oppressor. Owing, perhaps, to his fine
Scotch-Irish blood, which ran a little muddy in his veins, he had never
lost a certain primitive feeling of superstition, like the decaying root
of a religious instinct; and he was as strict in his attendance upon
church as he was loose in applying the principles of Christianity to his
daily life. Sunday was vaguely associated in his mind with such popular
fetiches as a frock coat and a roast of beef; and if the roast had been
absent from dinner, he would have felt precisely the same indefinite
disquietude that troubled him when the sermon was left out of the
service. So completely did his outward life shape itself around the
inner structure of his thought, that, except for the two days of the
week which he spent with unfailing regularity in Wall Street, he might
have been said to live only in his office. Once when his doctor had
prescribed exercise for a slight dyspepsia, he had added a few
additional blocks to his morning and evening walk, and it was while he
was performing this self-inflicted penance that he came upon Gabriel,
who was hastening toward him in behalf of John Henry.
For an instant a gleam of light shone on Cyrus's features, and they
stood out, palely illuminated, like the features of a bronze statue
above which a torch suddenly flares. His shoulders, which stooped until
his coat had curved in the back, straightened themselves with a jerk,
while he held out his hand, on which an old sabre cut was still visible.
This faded scar had always seemed to Gabriel the solitary proof that
the great man was created of flesh and blood.
"I've come about a little matter of business," began the rector in an
apologetic tone, for in Cyrus's presence he was never without an uneasy
feeling that the problems of the spirit were secondary to the problems
of finance.
"Well, I'm just going into the office. Come in and sit down. I'm glad to
see you. You bring back the four happiest years of my life, Gabriel."
"And of mine, too. It's queer, isn't it, how the savage seems to sleep
in the most peaceable of men? We were half starved in those days, half
naked, and without the certainty that we'd live until sunset--but,
dreadful as it sounds, I was happier then--God help me!--than I've ever
been before or since."
Passing through an outer office, where a number of young men were
bending over ledgers, they entered Cyrus's private room, and sat down in
two plain pine chairs under the coloured lithograph of an engine which
ornamented the largest space on the wall. The room was bare of the most
ordinary comforts, as though its owner begrudged the few dollars he must
spend to improve his surroundings.
"Well, those days are over, and you say it's business that you've come
about?" retorted Cyrus, not rudely, but with the manner of a man who
seldom wastes words and whose every expenditure either of time or of
money must achieve some definite result.
"Yes, it's business." The rector's tone had chilled a little, and he
added in spite of his judgment, "I'm afraid it's a favour. Everybody
comes begging to you, I suppose?"
"Then, it's the Sunday-school picnic, I reckon. I haven't forgotten it.
Smithson!" An alert young man appeared at the door. "Make a note that
Mr. Pendleton wants coaches for the Saint James' Church picnic on the
twenty-ninth. You said twenty-ninth, didn't you, Gabriel?"
"If the weather's good," replied Gabriel meekly, and then as Smithson
withdrew, he glanced nervously at the lithograph of the engine. "But it
wasn't about the picnic that I came," he said. "The fact is, I wanted to
ask you to use your influence in the matter of getting John Henry a
place in the bank. He has done very well at the night school, and I
believe that you would find him entirely satisfactory."
At the first mention of the bank, a look of distrust crept into Cyrus's
face--a look cautious, alert, suspicious, such as he wore at directors'
meetings when there was a chance that something might be got out of him
if for a minute he were to go off his guard.
"I feel a great responsibility for him," resumed Gabriel almost sternly,
though he was painfully aware that his assurance had deserted him.
"Why don't you go to James? James is the one to see about such a
matter."
If the rector had spoken the thought in his mind, he would have
answered, "Because James reminds me of a fish and I can't abide him";
but instead, he replied simply, "I know James so slightly that I don't
feel in a position to ask a favour of him."
The expression of suspicion left Cyrus's face, and he relaxed from the
strained attitude in which he had sat ever since the Sunday-school
picnic had been dismissed from the conversation. Leaning back in his
chair, he drew two cigars from the pocket of his coat, and after
glancing a little reluctantly at them both, offered one to the rector.
"I believe he really wanted me to refuse it!" flashed through Gabriel's
mind like an arrow--though the other's hesitation had been, in fact,
only an unconscious trick of manner which he had acquired during the
long lean years when he had fattened chiefly by not giving away. The
gift of a cigar could mean nothing to a man who willingly contributed to
every charity in town, but the trivial gestures that accompany one's
early habits occasionally outlast the peculiar circumstances from which
they spring.
For a few minutes they smoked in silence. Then Cyrus remarked in his
precise voice: "James is a clever fellow--a clever fellow."
"I've heard that he is as good as right hand to you. That's a fine thing
to say of a son."
"Yes, I don't know what I should do without James. He's a saving hand,
and, I tell you, there are more fortunes made by saving than by
gambling."
"Well, I don't think James need ever give you any concern on that
account," replied Gabriel, not without gentle satire, for he recalled
several unpleasant encounters with the younger Treadwell on the subject
of charity. "But I've heard different tales of that nephew of yours who
has just come back from God knows what country."
"He's Henry's son," replied Cyrus with a frown. "You haven't forgotten
Henry?"
"Yes, I remember. Henry and George both went out to Australia to open
the tobacco market, and Henry died poor while George lived and got rich,
I believe?"
"George kept free of women and attended to his affairs," returned Cyrus,
who was as frank about his family as he was secretive about his
business.
"But what about Henry's son? He's a promising chap, isn't he?"
"It depends upon what you call promising, I reckon. Before he came I
thought of putting him into the bank, but since I've seen him, I can't,
for the life of me, think of anything to do with him. Unless, of course,
you could see your way toward taking him into the ministry," he
concluded with sardonic humour.
"His views on theology would prevent that, I fear," replied the rector,
while all the kindly little wrinkles leaped out around his eyes.
"Views? What do anybody's views matter who can't make a living? But to
tell the truth, there's something about him that I don't trust. He isn't
like Henry, so he must take after that pretty fool Henry married. Now,
if he had James's temper, I could make something out of him, but he's
different--he's fly-up-the-creek--he's as flighty as a woman."
Gabriel, who had been a little cheered to learn that the young man, with
all his faults, did not resemble James, hastened to assure Cyrus that
there might be some good in the boy, after all--that he was only
twenty-two, and that, in any case, it was too soon to pass judgment.
"I can't stand his talk," returned the other grimly. "I've never heard
anybody but a preacher--I beg your pardon, Gabriel, nothing
personal!--who could keep going so long when nobody was listening. A
mere wind-bag, that's what he is, with a lot of nonsensical ideas about
his own importance. If there wasn't a girl in the house, it would be no
great matter, but that Susan of mine is so headstrong that I'm half
afraid she'll get crazy and imagine she's fallen in love with him."
This proof of parental anxiety touched Gabriel in his tenderest spot.
After all, though Cyrus had a harsh surface, there was much good at the
bottom of him. "I can enter into your feelings about that," he answered
sympathetically, "though my Jinny, I am sure, would never allow herself
to think seriously about a man without first asking my opinion of him."
"Then you're fortunate," commented Cyrus dryly, "for I don't believe
Susan would give a red cent for what I'd think if she once took a fancy.
She'd as soon elope with that wild-eyed scamp as eat her dinner, if it
once entered her head."
A knock came at the door, and Smithson entered and conferred with his
employer over a telegram, while Gabriel rose to his feet.
"By the way," said Cyrus, turning abruptly from his secretary and
stopping the rector as he was about to pass out of the door, "I was just
wondering if you remembered the morning after Lee's surrender, when we
started home on the road together?"
"Why, yes." There was a note of surprise in Gabriel's answer, for he
remembered, also, that he had sold his watch a little later in the day
to a Union soldier, and had divided the eighty dollars with Cyrus. For
an instant, he almost believed that the other was going to allude for
the first time to that incident.
"Well, I've never forgotten that green persimmon tree by the roadside,"
pursued the great man, "and the way you stopped under it and said, 'O
Lord, wilt Thou not work a miracle and make persimmons ripen in the
spring?'"
"No, I'd forgotten it," rejoined Gabriel coolly, for he was hurt by the
piece of flippancy and was thinking the worst of Cyrus again.
"You'd forgotten it? Well, I've a long memory, and I never forget.
That's one thing you may count on me for," he added, "a good memory. As
for John Henry--I'll see James about it. I'll see what James has to
say."
When Gabriel had gone, accompanied as far as the outer door by the
secretary, Cyrus turned back to the window, and stood gazing over a
steep street or two, and past the gabled roof of an old stone house, to
where in the distance the walls of the new building of the Treadwell
Tobacco Company were rising. Around the skeleton structure he could see
the workmen moving like ants, while in a widening circle of air the
smoke of other factories floated slowly upward under a brazen sky.
"There are too many of them," he thought bitterly. "It's competition
that kills. There are too many of them."
So rapt was his look while he stood there that there came into his face
an expression of yearning sentiment that made it almost human. Then his
gaze wandered to the gleaming tracks of the two great railroads which
ran out of Dinwiddie toward the north, uncoiling their length like
serpents between the broad fields sprinkled with the tender green of
young crops. Beside them trailed the ashen country roads over which
farmers were crawling with their covered wagons; but, while Cyrus
watched from his height, there was as little thought in his mind for the
men who drove those wagons through the parching dust as for the beasts
that drew them. It is possible even that he did not see them, for just
as Mrs. Pendleton's vision eliminated the sight of suffering because her
heart was too tender to bear it, so he overlooked all facts except those
which were a part of the dominant motive of his life. Nearer still,
within the narrow board fences which surrounded the backyards of negro
hovels, under the moving shadows of broad-leaved mulberry or sycamore
trees, he gazed down on the swarms of mulatto children; though to his
mind that problem, like the problem of labour, loomed vague, detached,
and unreal--a thing that existed merely in the air, not in the concrete
images that he could understand.
"Well, it's a pity Gabriel never made more of himself," he thought
kindly. "Yes, it's a pity. I'll see what I can do for him."
At six o'clock that evening, when the end of his business day had come,
he joined James at the door for his walk back to Bolingbroke Street.
"Have you done anything about Jones's place in the bank?" was the first
question he asked after his abrupt nod of greeting.
"No, sir. I thought you were waiting to find out about Oliver."
"Then you thought wrong. The fellow's a fool. Look up that nephew of
Gabriel Pendleton, and see if he is fit for the job. I am sorry Jones is
dead," he added with a touch of feeling. "I remember I got him that
place the year after the war, and I never knew him to be ten minutes
late during all the time that I worked with him."
"But what are we to do with Oliver?" inquired James after a pause. "Of
course he wouldn't be much good in the bank, but----"
And without finishing his sentence, he glanced up in a tentative,
non-committal manner into Cyrus's face. He was a smaller and somewhat
imperfect copy of his father, naturally timid, and possessed of a
superstitious feeling that he should die in an accident. His thin anæmic
features lacked the strength of the Treadwells, though in his cautious
and taciturn way he was very far indeed from being the fool people
generally thought him. Since he had never loved anything with passion
except money, he was regarded by his neighbours as a man of
unimpeachable morality.
At the end of the block, while the long pointed shadows of their feet
kept even pace on the stone crossing, Cyrus answered abruptly: "Put him
anywhere out of my sight. I can't bear the look of him."
"How would you like to give him something to do on the road? Put him
under Borrows, for instance, and let him learn a bit about freight?"
"Well, I don't care. Only don't let me see him--he turns my stomach."
"Then as long as we've got to support him, I'll tell him he may try his
hand at the job of assistant freight agent, if he wants to earn his
keep."
"He'll never do that--just as well put him down under 'waste,' and have
done with him," replied Cyrus, chuckling.
A little girl, rolling a hoop, tripped and fell at his feet, and he
nodded at her kindly, for he had a strong physical liking for children,
though he had never stopped to think about them in a human or personal
way. He had, indeed, never stopped to think about anything except the
absorbing problem of how to make something out of nothing. Everything
else, even his marriage, had made merely a superficial impression upon
him. What people called his "luck" was only the relentless pursuit of an
idea; and in this pursuit all other sides of his nature had been sapped
of energy. From the days when he had humbly accepted small commissions
from the firm of Machlin & Company, to the last few years, when he had
come to be regarded almost superstitiously as the saviour of sinking
properties, he had moved quietly, cautiously, and unswervingly in one
direction. The blighting panic of ten years before had hardly touched
him, so softly had he ventured, and so easy was it for him to return to
his little deals and his diet of crumbs. They were bad times, those
years, alike for rich and poor, for Northerner and Southerner; but in
the midst of crashing firms and noiseless factories, he had cut down his
household expenses to a pittance and had gone on as secretively as
ever--waiting, watching, hoping, until the worst was over and Machlin &
Company had found their man. Then, a little later, with the invasion of
the cigarette, there went up the new Treadwell factory which the subtle
minded still attributed to the genius of Cyrus. Even before George and
Henry had sailed for Australia, the success of the house in Dinwiddie
was assured. There was hardly a drug store in America in those days that
did not offer as its favourite James's crowning triumph, the Magnolia
cigarette. A few years later, competition came like a whirlwind, but in
the beginning the Treadwell brand held the market alone, and in those
few years Cyrus's fortune was made.
"Heard from George lately?" he inquired, when they had traversed,
accompanied by their long and narrow shadows, another couple of blocks.
The tobacco trade had always been for him merely a single pawn in the
splendid game he was playing, but he had suspected recently that James
felt something approaching a sentiment for the Magnolia cigarette, and
true to the Treadwell scorn of romance, he was forever trying to trick
him into an admission of guilt.
"Not since that letter I showed you a month ago," answered James. "Too
much competition, that's the story everywhere. They are flooding the
market with cigarettes, and if it wasn't for the way the Magnolia holds
on, we'd be swamped in little or no time."
"Well, I reckon the Claypole would pull us through," commented Cyrus.
The Claypole was an old brand of plug tobacco with which the first
Treadwell factory had started. "But you're right about competition. It's
got to stop or we'll be driven clean out of the business."
He drew out his latchkey as he spoke, for they had reached the corner of
Bolingbroke Street, and the small dingy house in which they lived was
only a few doors away. As they passed between the two blossoming
oleanders in green tubs on the sidewalk, James glanced up at the flat
square roof, and observed doubtfully, "You'll be getting out of this old
place before long now, I reckon."
"Oh, someday, someday," answered Cyrus. "There'll be time enough when
the market settles and we can see where the money is coming from."
Once every year, in the spring, James asked his father this question,
and once every year he received exactly the same answer. In his mind,
Cyrus was always putting off the day when he should move into a larger
house, for though he got richer every week, he never seemed to get quite
rich enough to commit himself to any definite change in his
circumstances. Of course, in the nature of things, he knew that he ought
to have left Bolingbroke Street long ago; there was hardly a family
still living there with whom his daughter associated, and she complained
daily of having to pass saloons and barber shops whenever she went out
of doors. But the truth was that in spite of his answer to James's
annual question, neither of them wanted to move away from the old home,
and each hoped in his heart that he should never be forced into doing
so. Cyrus had become wedded to the house as a man becomes wedded to a
habit, and since the clinging to a habit was the only form of sentiment
of which he was capable, he shrank more and more from what he felt to be
the almost unbearable wrench of moving. A certain fidelity of purpose,
the quality which had lifted him above the petty provincialism that
crippled James, made the display of wealth as obnoxious to him as the
possession of it was agreeable. As long as he was conscious that he
controlled the industrial future of Dinwiddie, it was a matter of
indifference to him whether people supposed him to be a millionaire or a
pauper. In time he would probably have to change his way of living and
put an end to his life-long practice of saving; but, meanwhile, he was
quite content to go on year after year mending the roof and the chimneys
of the old house into which he had moved the week after his marriage.
Entering the hall, he hung his hat on the walnut hat-rack in the dark
corner behind the door, and followed the worn strip of blue and red
oilcloth which ran up the narrow staircase to the floor above. Where the
staircase bent sharply in the middle, the old-fashioned mahogany
balustrade shone richly in the light of a gas-jet which jutted out on a
brass stem from the wall. Although a window on the upper floor was
opened wide to the sunset, the interior of the house had a close musty
smell, as if it had been shut up, uninhabited, for months. Cyrus had
never noticed the smell, for his senses, which were never acute, had
been rendered even duller than usual by custom.
At the top of the stairs, a coloured washerwoman, accompanied by a
bright mulatto boy, who carried an empty clothes basket on his head,
waited humbly in the shadow for the two men to pass. She was a dark
glistening creature, with ox-like eyes, and the remains of a handsome
figure, now running to fat.
"Howdy, Marster," she murmured under her breath as Cyrus reached her, to
which he responded brusquely, "Howdy, Mandy," while he glanced with
unseeing eyes at the mulatto boy at her side. Then, as he walked rapidly
down the hall, with James at his heels, the woman turned back for a
minute and gazed after him with an expression of animal submission and
acquiescence. So little personal to Cyrus and so free from individual
consciousness was this look, that it seemed less the casual glance from
a servant to a master than the intimate aspect of a primitive racial
attitude toward life.
At the end of the hall, beyond the open door of the bedroom (which he
still occupied with his wife from an ineradicable conviction that all
respectable married persons slept together no matter how uncomfortable
they might be), Cyrus discerned the untidy figure of Mrs. Treadwell
reflected in a mirror before which she stood brushing her back hair
straight up from her neck to a small round knot on the top of her head.
She was a slender, flat-chested woman, whose clothes, following some
natural bent of mind, appeared never to be put on quite straight or
properly hooked and buttoned. It was as if she perpetually dressed in a
panic, forgetting to fasten her placket, to put on her collar or to mend
the frayed edges of her skirt. When she went out, she still made some
spasmodic attempts at neatness; but Susan's untiring efforts and
remonstrances had never convinced her that it mattered how one looked in
the house--except indeed when a formal caller arrived, for whom she
hastily tied a scarf at the neck of her dirty basque and flung a purple
wool shawl over her shoulders. Her spirit had been too long broken for
her to rebel consciously against her daughter's authority; but her mind
was so constituted that the sense of order was missing, and the pretty
coquetry of youth, which had masqueraded once as the more enduring
quality of self-respect, was extinguished in the five and thirty
penitential years of her marriage. She had a small vacant face, where
the pink and white had run into muddiness, a mouth that sagged at the
corners like the mouth of a frightened child, and eyes of a sickly
purple, which had been compared by Cyrus to "sweet violets," in the only
compliment he ever paid her. Thirty-five years ago, in one of those
attacks of indiscretion which overtake the most careful man in the
spring, Cyrus had proposed to her; and when she declined him, he had
immediately repeated his offer, animated less by any active desire to
possess her, than by the dogged male determination to over-ride all
obstacles, whether feminine or financial. And pretty Belinda
Bolingbroke, being alone and unsupported by other suitors at the
instant, had entwined herself instinctively around the nearest male prop
that offered. It had been one of those marriages of opposites which
people (ignoring the salient fact that love has about as much part in it
as it has in the pursuit of a spring chicken by a hawk) speak of with
sentiment as "a triumph of love over differences." Even in the first
days of their engagement, there could be found no better reason for
their marriage than the meeting of Cyrus's stubborn propensity to have
his way with the terror of imaginary spinsterhood which had seized
Belinda in a temporary lapse of suitors. Having married, they
immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, to make the worst of it.
She, poor fluttering dove-like creature, had lost hope at the first
rebuff, and had let go all the harmless little sentiments that had
sweetened her life; while he, having married a dove by choice and
because of her doveliness, had never forgiven her that she did not
develop into a brisk, cackling hen of the barnyard. As usually happens
in the cases where "love triumphs over differences," he had come at last
to hate her for the very qualities which had first caught his fancy. His
ideal woman (though he was perfectly unconscious that she existed) was a
managing thrifty soul, in a starched calico dress, with a natural
capacity for driving a bargain; and Life, with grim humour, had rewarded
this respectable preference by bestowing upon him feeble and insipid
Belinda, who spent sleepless nights trying to add three and five
together, but who could never, to save her soul, remember to put down
the household expenses in the petty cash book. It was a case, he
sometimes told himself, of a man, who had resisted temptation all his
life, being punished for one instant's folly more harshly than if he
were a practised libertine. No libertine, indeed, could have got himself
into such a scrape, for none would have surrendered so completely to a
single manifestation of the primal force. To play the fool once, he
reflected bitterly, when his brief intoxication was over, is after all
more costly than to play it habitually. Had he pursued a different pair
of violet eyes every evening, he would never have ended by embracing the
phantom that was Belinda.
But it was more than thirty years since Cyrus had taken the trouble to
turn his unhappiness into philosophy--for, aided by time, he had become
reconciled to his wife as a man becomes reconciled to a physical
infirmity. Except for that one eventful hour in April, women had stood
for so little in his existence, that he had never stopped to wonder if
his domestic relations might have been pleasanter had he gone about the
business of selection as carefully as he picked and chose the tobacco
for his factory. Even the streak of sensuality in his nature did not run
warm as in the body of an ordinary mortal, and his vices, like his
virtues, had become so rarefied in the frozen air of his intelligence
that they were no longer recognizable as belonging to the common
frailties of men.
"Ain't you dressed yet?" he inquired without looking at his wife as he
entered--for having long ago lost his pride of possession in her, he had
ceased to regard her as of sufficient importance to merit the ordinary
civilities.
"I was helping Miss Willy whip one of Susan's flounces," she answered,
turning from the mirror, with the hairbrush held out like a peace
offering before her. "We wanted to get through to-day," she added
nervously, "so Miss Willy can start on Jinny Pendleton's dress the first
thing in the morning."
If Cyrus had ever permitted himself the consolation of doubtful
language, he would probably have exclaimed with earnestness, "Confound
Miss Willy!" but he came of a stock which condemned an oath, or even an
expletive, on its face value, so this natural outlet for his irritation
was denied him. Instead, therefore, of replying in words, he merely
glanced sourly at the half-open door, through which issued the whirring
noise of the little dressmaker at her sewing. Now and then, in the
intervals when her feet left the pedal, she could be heard humming
softly to herself with her mouth full of pins.
"Isn't she going?" asked Cyrus presently, while he washed his hands at
the washstand in one corner and dried them on a towel which Belinda had
elaborately embroidered in red. Peering through the crack of the door as
he put the question, he saw Miss Willy hurriedly pulling basting threads
out of a muslin skirt, and the fluttering bird-like motions of her hands
increased the singular feeling of repulsion with which she inspired him.
Though he was aware that she was an entirely harmless person, and,
more-over, that her "days" supplied the only companionship his wife
really enjoyed, he resented angrily the weeks of work and gossip which
the little seamstress spent under his roof. Put two gabbling women like
that together and you could never tell what stories would be set going
about you before evening! A suspicion, unfortunately too well founded,
that his wife had whimpered out her heart to the whirring accompaniment
of Miss Willy's machine, had caused him once or twice to rise in his
authority and forbid the dressmaker the house; but, in doing so, he had
reckoned without the strength which may lie in an unscrupulous weakness.
Belinda, who had never fought for anything else in her life, refused
absolutely to give up her dressmaker. "If I can't see her here, I'll go
to her house," she had said, and Cyrus had yielded at last as the bully
always yields before the frenzied violence of his victim.
After a hasty touch to the four round flat curls on her forehead, Mrs.
Treadwell turned from the bureau with her habitually hopeless air, and
slipped her thin arms into the tight sleeves of a black silk basque
which she took up from the bed.
"Did you see Oliver when you came in?" she asked. "He was in here
looking for you a few minutes ago."
"No, I didn't see him, but I'm going to. He's got to give up this
highfaluting nonsense of his if he expects me to support him. There's
one thing the fellow's got to understand, and that is that he can choose
between his precious stuff and his bread and meat. Before I give him a
job, he'll have to let me see that he is done with all this business of
play-writing."
A frightened look came into his wife's face, and indifferently glancing
at her as he finished, he was arrested by something enigmatical and yet
familiar in her features. A dim vision of the way she had looked at him
in the early days of their marriage floated an instant before him.
"Do you think he wants to do that?" she asked, with a little sound as if
she had drawn her breath so sharply that it whistled. What in thunder
was the matter with the woman? he wondered irritably. Of course she was
a fool about the scamp--all the women, even Susan, lost their heads over
him--but, after all, why should it make any difference to her whether he
wrote plays or took freight orders, as long as he managed to feed
himself?
"Well, I don't reckon it has come to a question of what he wants," he
rejoined shortly.
"But the boy's heart is bound up in his ambition," urged Belinda, with
an energy he had witnessed in her only once before in her life, and that
was on the occasion of her historic defence of the seamstress.
For a moment Cyrus stared at her with attention, almost with curiosity.
Then he opened his lips for a crushing rejoinder, but thinking better of
his impulse, merely repeated dryly, "His heart?" before he turned toward
the door. On the threshold he looked back and added, "The next time you
see him, tell him I'd like a word with him."
Left alone in her room, Mrs. Treadwell sat down in a rocking-chair by
the window, and clasped her hands tightly in her lap with a nervous
gesture which she had acquired in long periods of silent waiting on
destiny. Her mental attitude, which was one of secret, and usually
passive, antagonism to her husband, had stamped its likeness so
indelibly upon her features, that, sitting there in the wan light, she
resembled a woman who suffers from the effects of some slow yet deadly
sickness. Lacking the courage to put her revolt into words, she had
allowed it to turn inward and embitter the hidden sources of her being.
In the beginning she had asked so little of life that the denial of that
little by Fate had appeared niggardly rather than tragic. A man--any man
who would have lent himself gracefully as an object of worship--would
have been sufficient material for the building of her happiness.
Marriage, indeed, had always appeared to her so desirable as an end in
itself, entirely apart from the personal peculiarities or possibilities
of a husband, that she had awakened almost with surprise one morning to
the knowledge that she was miserable. It was not so much that her
romance had met with open disaster as that it had simply faded away.
This gradual fading away of sentiment, which she had accepted at the
time as only one of the inevitable stages in the slow process of
emotional adjustment, would perhaps have made but a passing impression
on a soul to whom every other outlet into the world had not been closed
by either temperament or tradition. But love had been the one window
through which light could enter her house of Life; and when this
darkened, her whole nature had sickened and grown morbid. Then at last
all the corroding bitterness in her heart had gathered to a canker which
ached ceaselessly, like a physical sore, in her breast.
"He saw I'd taken to Oliver--that's why he's anxious to spite him," she
thought resentfully as she stared with unseeing eyes out into the gray
twilight. "It's all just to worry me, that's why he is doing it. He
knows I couldn't be any fonder of the boy if he had come of my own
blood." And she who had been a Bolingbroke set her thin lips together
with the only consciousness of superiority to her husband that she had
ever known--the secret consciousness that she was better born. Out of
the wreck of her entire life, this was the floating spar to which she
still clung with a sense of security, and her imagination, by long
concentration upon the support that it offered, had exaggerated its
importance out of all proportion to the other props among which it had
its place. Like its imposing symbol, the Saint Memin portrait of the
great Archibald Bolingbroke, which lent distinction, by its very
inappropriateness, to the wall on which it hung, this hidden triumph
imparted a certain pathetic dignity to her manner.
"That's all on earth it is," she repeated with a kind of smothered
fierceness. But, even while the words were on her lips, her face changed
and softened, for in the adjoining room a voice, full of charm, could be
heard saying: "Sewing still, Miss Willy? Don't you know that you are
guilty of an immoral act when you work overtime?"
"I'm just this minute through, Mr. Oliver," answered the seamstress in
fluttering tones. "As soon as I fold this skirt, I'm going to quit and
put on my bonnet."
A few more words followed, and then the door opened wider and Oliver
entered--with his ardent eyes, his irresolute mouth, and his physical
charm which brought an air of vital well-being into the depressing
sultriness of the room.
"I missed you downstairs, Aunt Belinda. You haven't a headache, I hope,"
he said, and there was the same caressing kindness in his tone which he
had used to the dressmaker. It was as if his sympathy, like his charm,
which cost him so little because it was the gift of Nature, overflowed
in every casual expression of his temperament.
"No, I haven't a headache, dear," replied Mrs. Treadwell, putting up her
hand to his cheek as he leaned over her. "Your uncle is waiting for you
in the library, so you'd better go down at once," she added, catching
her breath as she had done when Cyrus first spoke to her about Oliver.
"Have you any idea what it means? Did he tell you?"
"Yes, he wants to talk to you about business."
"The deuce he does! Well, if that's it, I'd be precious glad to get out
of it. You don't suppose I could cut it, do you? Susan is going to take
me to the Pendletons' after supper, and I'd like to run upstairs now and
make a change."
"No, you'd better go down to him. He doesn't like to be kept waiting."
"All right, then--since you say so."
Meeting the dressmaker on the threshold, he forgot to answer her
deprecating bow in his eagerness to have the conversation with Cyrus
over and done with.
"I declare, he does startle a body when you ain't used to him," observed
Miss Willy, with a bashful giggle. She was a diminutive, sparrow-like
creature, with a natural taste for sick-rooms and death-beds, and an
inexhaustible fund of gossip. As Mrs. Treadwell, for once, did not
respond to her unspoken invitation to chat, she tied her bonnet strings
under her sharp little chin, and taking up her satchel went out again,
after repeating several times that she would be "back the very minute
Mrs. Pendleton was through with her." A few minutes later, Belinda,
still seated by the window, saw the shrunken figure ascend the area
steps and cross the dusty street with a rapid and buoyant step, as
though she, also, plain, overworked and penniless, was feeling the
delicious restlessness of the spring in her blood. "I wonder what on
earth she's got to make her skip like that," thought Belinda not without
bitterness. "I reckon she thinks she's just as important as anybody,"
she added after an instant, touching, though she was unaware of it, the
profoundest truth of philosophy. "She's got nothing in the world but
herself, yet I reckon to her that is everything, even if it doesn't make
a particle of difference to anybody else whether she is living or dead."
Her eyes were still on Miss Willy, who stepped on briskly, swinging her
bag joyously before her, when the sound of Cyrus's voice, raised high in
anger, came up to her from the library. A short silence followed; then a
door opened and shut quickly, and rapid footsteps passed up the
staircase and along the hall outside of her room. While she waited,
overcome by the nervous indecision which attacked her like palsy
whenever she was forced to take a definite action, Susan ran up the
stairs and called her name in a startled and shaking voice.
"Oh, mother, father has quarrelled dreadfully with Oliver and ordered
him out of the house!"
CHAPTER V
OLIVER, THE ROMANTIC
An hour later Oliver stood before the book-shelves in his room, wrapping
each separate volume in newspapers. Downstairs in the basement, he knew,
the family were at supper, but he had vowed, in his splendid scorn of
material things, that he would never eat another morsel under Cyrus's
roof. Even when his aunt, trembling in every limb, had brought him
secretly from the kitchen a cup of coffee and a plate of waffles, he had
refused to unlock his door and permit her to enter. "I'll come out when
I am ready to leave," he had replied to her whispered entreaties.
It was a small room, furnished chiefly by book-shelves, which were still
unfinished, and with a depressing view from a single window of red tin
roofs and blackened chimneys. Above the chimneys a narrow band of sky,
spangled with a few stars, was visible from where Oliver stood, and now
and then he stopped in his work and gazed up at it with an exalted and
resolute look. Sometimes a thin shred of smoke floated in from the
kitchen chimney, and hung, as if drawn and held there by some magnetic
attraction, around the kerosene lamp on a corner of the washstand. The
sultriness of the night, which was oppressive even in the street, was
almost stifling in the little room with its scant western exposure.
But the flame burning in Oliver's breast had purged away such petty
considerations as those for material comforts. He had risen above the
heat, above the emptiness of his pockets, above the demands of his
stomach. It was a matter of complete indifference to him whether he
slept in a house or out of doors, whether he ate or went hungry. His
exaltation was so magnificent that while it lasted he felt that he had
conquered the physical universe. He was strong! He was free! And it was
characteristic of his sanguine intellect that the future should appear
to him at the instant as something which existed not beyond him, but
actually within his grasp. Anger had liberated his spirit as even art
had not done; and he felt that all the blood in his body had rushed to
his brain and given him the mastery over circumstances. He forgot
yesterday as easily as he evaded to-day and subjugated to-morrow. The
past, with its starved ambitions, its tragic failures, its blighting
despondencies, melted away from him into obscurity; and he remembered
only the brief alternating hours of ecstasy and of accomplishment. With
his wind-blown, flame-like temperament, oscillating in the heat of youth
between the inclinations he miscalled convictions, he was still, though
Cyrus had disowned him, only a romantic variation from the Treadwell
stock. Somewhere, in the depths of his being, the essential Treadwell
persisted. He hated Cyrus as a man hates his own weakness; he revolted
from materialism as only a materialist in youth revolts.
A knock came at his door, and pausing, with a volume of Heine still
unwrapped in his hand, he waited in silence until his visitor should
retire down the stairs. But instead of Mrs. Treadwell's trembling
tones, he heard, after a moment, the firm and energetic voice of Susan.
"Oliver, I must speak to you. If you won't unlock your door, I'll sit
down on the steps and wait until you come out."
"I'm packing my books. I wish you'd go away, Susan."
"I haven't the slightest intention of going away until I've talked with
you----" and, then, being one of those persons who are born with the
natural gift of their own way, she laid her hand on the door-knob while
Oliver impatiently turned the key in the lock.
"Since you are here, you might as well come in and help," he remarked
none too graciously, as he made way for her to enter.
"Of course I'll help you--but, oh, Oliver, what in the world are you
going to do?"
"I haven't thought. I'm too busy, but I'll manage somehow."
"Father was terrible. I heard him all the way upstairs in my room. But,"
she looked at him a little doubtfully, "don't you think he will get over
it?"
"He may, but I shan't. I'd rather starve than live under a petty tyranny
like that?"
"I know," she nodded, and he saw that she understood him. It was
wonderful how perfectly, from the very first instant, she had understood
him. She grasped things, too, by intelligence, not by intuition, and he
found this refreshing in an age when the purely feminine was in fashion.
Never had he seen a finer example of young, buoyant, conquering
womanhood--of womanhood freed from the consciousness and the
disabilities of sex. "She's not the sort of girl a man would lose his
head over," he reflected; "there's too little of the female about
her--she's as free from coquetry as she is from the folderol of
sentimentality. She's a free spirit, and God knows how she ever came out
of the Treadwells." Her beauty even wasn't of the kind that usually goes
by the name. He didn't suppose there were ten men in Dinwiddie who would
turn to look back at her--but, by Jove, if she hadn't beauty, she had
the character that lends an even greater distinction. She looked as if
she could ride Life like a horse--could master it and tame it and break
it to the bridle.
"It's amazing how you know things, Susan," he said, "and you've never
been outside of Dinwiddie."
"But I've wanted to, and I sometimes think the wanting teaches one more
than the going."
He thought over this for an instant, and then, as if the inner flame
which consumed him had leaped suddenly to the surface, he burst out
joyously: "I've come to the greatest decision of my life in this last
hour, Susan."
Her eyes shone. "You mean you've decided not to do what father asks no
matter what happens?"
"I've decided not to accept his conditions--no matter what happens," he
answered.
"He was in earnest, then, about wanting you to give up writing?"
"So much in earnest that he would give me a job only on those terms."
"And you declined absolutely?"
"Of course I declined absolutely."
"But how will you live, Oliver?"
"Oh, I can easily make thirty dollars a month by reviewing German books
for New York papers, and I dare say I can manage to pull through on
that. I'll have to stay in Dinwiddie, of course, because I couldn't live
anywhere else on nearly so little, and, besides, I shouldn't be able to
buy a ticket away."
"That will be twenty dollars for your board," said the practical Susan,
"and you will have to make ten dollars a month cover all your other
expenses. Do you think you can do it?"
"I've got to. Better men have done worse things, haven't they? Better
men have done worse things and written great plays while they were about
them."
"I believe Mrs. Peachey would let you have a back room and board for
that," pursued Susan. "But it will cost you something to get your books
moved and the shelves put up there."
"As soon as I get through this I'll go over and see her. Oh, I'm free,
Susan, I'm happy! Did you ever see an absolutely happy man before? I
feel as if a weight had rolled off my shoulders. I'm tired--dog-tired of
compromise and commercialism and all the rest of it. I've got something
to say to the world, and I'll go out and make my bed in the gutter
before I'll forfeit the opportunity of saying it. Do you know what that
means, Susan? Do you know what it is to be willing to give your life if
only you can speak out the thing that is inside of you?" The colour in
his face mounted to his forehead, while his eyes grew black with
emotion. In the smoky little room, Youth, with its fierce revolts, its
impassioned egoism, its inextinguishable faith in itself, delivered its
ultimatum to Life. "I've got to be true to myself, Susan! A man who
won't starve for his ambition isn't worth his salt, is he? And, besides,
the best work is all done not in plenty, but in poverty--the most
perfect art has grown from the poorest soil. If I were to accept Uncle
Cyrus's offer, I'd grow soft to the core in a month and be of no more
use than a rotten apple."
His conviction lent a golden ring to his voice, and so winning to Susan
was the impetuous flow of his words, that she felt herself swept away
from all the basic common sense of her character. She saw his ambition
as clearly as he saw it; she weighed his purpose, as he weighed it, in
the imaginary scales of his judgment; she accepted his estimate of his
powers as passionately as he accepted it.
"Of course you mustn't give up, Oliver; you couldn't," she said.
"You're right, I couldn't."
"If you can get steady reviewing, I believe you can manage," she
resumed. "Living in Dinwiddie costs really so very little." Her voice
thrilled suddenly. "It must be beautiful to have something that you feel
about like this. Oh, I wish I were you, Oliver! I wish a thousand times
I were you!"
Withdrawing his eyes from the sky at which he had been gazing, he turned
to look at her as if her words had arrested him. "You're a dear girl,"
he answered kindly, "and I think all the world of you." As he spoke he
thought again what a fine thing it would be for the man who could fall
in love with her. "It would be the best thing that could happen to any
man to marry a woman like that," he reflected; "she'd keep him up to the
mark and never let him grow soft. Yes, it would be all right if only
one could manage to fall in love with her--but I couldn't. She might as
well be a rose-bush for all the passion she'd ever arouse in me." Then
his charming egoism asserted itself, and he said caressingly: "I don't
believe I could stand Dinwiddie but for you, Susan."
She smiled back at him, but there was a limpid clearness in her look
which made him feel that she had seen through him while he was thinking.
This clearness, with its utter freedom from affectation or
sentimentality, embarrassed him by its unlikeness to all the attributes
he mentally classified as feminine. To look straight seemed to him
almost as unwomanly as to throw straight, and Susan would, doubtless, be
quite capable of performing either of these difficult feats. He liked
her fine brow under the short fringe, which he hated, and he liked the
arched bridge of her nose and the generous curve of her mouth. Yet had
he stopped to analyze her, he would probably have said that the woman
spirit in her was expressed through character rather than through
emotion--a manifestation disconcerting to one whose vision of her sex
was chiefly as the irresponsible creature of drama. The old
shackles--even the shackles of that drama whose mistress and slave woman
had been--were out of place on the spirit which was incarnated in Susan.
Amid the cramping customs of the period, she moved large, free, and
simple, as though she walked already in the purer and more bracing air
of the future.
"I wish I could help you," she said, stooping to pick up a newspaper
from a pile on the floor. "Here, let me wrap that Spinoza. I'm afraid
the back will come off if you aren't careful."
"Of course a man has to work out his own career," he replied, as he
handed over the volume. "I doubt, when it comes to that, if anybody can
be of much help to another where his life's work is concerned. The main
thing, after all, is not to get in one's way, not to cripple one's
energy. I've got to be free--that's all there is about it. I've got to
belong to myself every instant."
"And you know already just what you are going to do? About your writing,
I mean."
"Absolutely. I've ideas enough to fill fifty ordinary lifetimes. I'm
simply seething with them. Why, that box over there in the corner is
full of plays that would start a national drama if the fool public had
sense enough to see what they are about. The trouble is that they don't
want life on the stage; they want a kind of theatrical wedding-cake.
And, by Jove, they get it! Any dramatist who tries to force people to
eat bread and meat when they are crying for sugar plums may as well
prepare to starve until the public begins to suffer from acute
indigestion. Then, if he isn't dead--or, perhaps, if he is--his hour
will come, and he will get his reward either here or in heaven."
"So you'll go on just the same and wait until they're ready for you?"
asked Susan, laughing from sheer pride in him. "You'll never, never
cheapen yourself, Oliver?" For the first time in her life she was face
to face with an intellectual passion, and she felt almost as if she
herself were inspired.
"Never. I've made my choice. I'll wait half a century if need be, but
I'll wait. I know, too, what I am talking about, for I could do the
other thing as easily as I could eat my dinner. I've got the trick of
it. I could make a fortune to-morrow if I were to lose my intellectual
honesty and go in simply for the making of money. Why, I am a Treadwell,
after all, just as you are, my dear cousin, and I could commercialize
the stage, I haven't a doubt, as successfully as your father has
commercialized the railroad. It's in the blood--the instinct, you
know--and the only thing that has kept it down in me is that I
sincerely--yes, I sincerely and enthusiastically believe that I am a
genius. If I didn't, do you think I'd stick at this starvation business
another fortnight? That's the whole story, every blessed word of it, and
I'm telling you because I feel expansive to-night--I'm such a tremendous
egoist, you know, and because--well, because you are Susan."
"I think I understand a little bit how you feel," replied Susan. "Of
course, I'm not a genius, but I've thought sometimes that I should
almost be willing to starve if only I might go to college."
Checking the words on his lips, he looked at her with sympathy. "It's a
shame you can't, but I suppose Uncle Cyrus won't hear of it."
"I haven't asked him, but I am going to do it. I am so afraid of a
refusal--and, of course, he'll refuse--that I've lacked the courage to
speak of it."
"Good God! Why is one generation left so absolutely at the mercy of the
other?" he demanded, turning back to the strip of sky over the roof. "It
makes a man rage to think of the lives that are spoiled for a whim.
Money, money--curse it!--it all comes to that in the end. Money makes us
and destroys us."
"Do you remember what father said to you the other night--that you would
come at last to what you called the property idea and be exactly like
James and himself?"
"If I thought that, I'd go out and hang myself. I can understand a man
selling his soul for drink, though I rarely touch a drop, or for women,
though I've never bothered about them, but never, not even in the last
extremity, for money."
A door creaked somewhere on the second floor and a minute afterwards the
slow and hesitating feet of Mrs. Treadwell were heard ascending the
stairs.
"Let her come in just a moment, Oliver," begged Susan, and her tone was
full of the impatient, slightly arrogant affection with which she
regarded her mother. There was little sympathy and less understanding
between them, but on Susan's side there was a feeling of protective
tenderness which was almost maternal. This tenderness was all her own,
while the touch of arrogance in her manner belonged to the universal
inability of youth to make allowances for age.
"Oh, well," said Oliver indifferently; and going to the door, he opened
it and stood waiting for Mrs. Treadwell to enter.
"I came up to ask if you wouldn't eat something, dear?" she asked. "But
I suppose Susan has brought you your supper?"
"He won't touch a morsel, mother; it is useless to ask him. He is going
away just as soon as we have finished packing."
"But where is he going? I didn't know that he had any place to go to."
"Oh, a man can always find a place somewhere."
"How can you take it so lightly, Susan," protested Mrs. Treadwell,
beginning to cry.
"That's the only sensible way to take it, isn't it, Oliver?" asked
Susan, gaily.
"Don't get into a fidget about me, Aunt Belinda," said Oliver, pushing
the pile of newspapers out of her way, while she sat down nervously on
the end of a packing-case and wiped her eyes on the fringe of her purple
shawl. The impulsive kindness with which he had spoken to her a few
hours before had vanished from his tone, and left in its place an accent
of irritation. His sympathy, which was never assumed, resulted so
entirely from his mood that it was practically independent of the person
or situation which appeared to inspire it. There were moments when,
because of a sensation of mental or physical well-being, he overflowed
with a feeling of tenderness for the beggar at the crossing; and there
were longer periods, following a sudden despondency, when the suffering
of his closest friend aroused in him merely a sense of personal outrage.
So complete, indeed, was his absorption in himself, that even his
philosophy was founded less upon an intellectual conception of the
universe than it was upon an intense preoccupation with his own
personality.
"But you don't mean that you are going for good?--that you'll never come
back to see Susan and me again?" whimpered his aunt, while her sagging
mouth trembled.
"You can't expect me to come back after the things Uncle Cyrus has said
to me."
A look so bitter that it was almost venomous crept into Mrs. Treadwell's
face. "He just did it to worry me, Oliver. He has done everything he
could think of to worry me ever since he persuaded me to marry him. I
sometimes believe," she added, gloating over the idea like a decayed
remnant of the aristocratic spirit, "that he has always been jealous of
me because I was born a Bolingbroke."
To Oliver, who had not like Susan grown accustomed through constant
repetition to Mrs. Treadwell's delusion, this appeared so fresh a view
of Cyrus's character, that it caught his interest even in the midst of
his own absorbing perplexities. Until he saw Susan's head shake
ominously over her mother's shoulder, it did not occur to him that his
aunt, whom he supposed to be without imagination, had created this
consoling belief out of her own mental vacancy.
"Oh, he wanted to worry me all right, there's no doubt about that," he
replied.
"He hasn't spoken to me when he could help it for twenty years," pursued
his aunt, who was so possessed by the idea of her own relation to her
husband that she was incapable of dwelling upon any other.
"I wouldn't talk about it, mother, if I were you," said Susan with
resolute cheerfulness.
"I don't know why I shouldn't talk about it. It's all I've got to talk
about," returned Mrs. Treadwell peevishly; and she added with smothered
resentment, "Even my children haven't been any comfort to me since they
were little. They've both turned against me because of the way their
father treats me. James hardly ever has so much as a word to say to me."
"But I do, mother. How can you say such an unkind thing to me?"
"You never do the things that I want you to. You know I'd like you to go
out and enjoy yourself and have attention as other girls do."
"You are disappointed because I'm not a belle like Abby Goode or Jinny
Pendleton," said Susan with the patience that is born of a basic sense
of humour. "But I couldn't help that, could I?"
"Any girl in my day would have felt badly if she wasn't admired,"
pursued Mrs. Treadwell with the venom of the embittered weak, "but I
don't believe you'd care a particle if a man never looked at you twice."
"If one never looked at me once, I don't see why you should want me to
be miserable about it," was Susan's smiling rejoinder; "and if the girls
in your day couldn't be happy without admiration, they must have been
silly creatures. I've a life of my own to live, and I'm not going to let
my happiness depend on how many times a man looks at me." In the clear
light of her ridicule, the spectre of spinsterhood, which was still an
object of dread in the Dinwiddie of the eighties, dissolved into a
shadow.
"Well, we've about finished, I believe," remarked Oliver, closing the
case over which he was stooping, and devoutly thanking whatever
beneficent Powers had not created him a woman. "I'll send for these
sometime to-morrow, Aunt Belinda."
"You'd just as well spend the night," urged Mrs. Treadwell stubbornly.
"He need never know of it."
"But I'd know of it--that's the great thing--and I'd never forget it."
Rising unsteadily from the box, she stood with the ends of her purple
shawl clutched tightly over her flat bosom. "Then you'll wait just a
minute. I've got something downstairs I'd like to give you," she said.
"Why, of course, but won't you let me fetch it?"
"You'd never find it," she answered mysteriously, and hurried out while
he held the door open to light her down the dark staircase.
When her tread was heard at last on the landing below, Susan glanced at
the books that were still left on the shelves. "I'll pack the rest for
you to-morrow, Oliver, and your clothes, too. Have you any money?"
"A little left from selling my watch in New York. My clothes don't
amount to much. I've got them all in that bag, but I'll leave my books
in your charge until I can find a place for them."
"I'll take good care of them. O Oliver!" her face grew disturbed. "I
forgot all about my promise to Virginia that I'd bring you to see her
to-night."
"Well, I've no time to meet girls now, of course, but that doesn't mean
that I'm not awfully knocked up about it."
"I hate so to disappoint her."
"She won't think of it twice, the beauty!"
"But she will. I'm sure she will. Hush! Mother is coming."
As he turned to the door, it opened slowly to admit the figure of his
aunt, who was panting heavily from her hurried ascent of the stairs. Her
ill-humour toward Susan had entirely disappeared, for the only
resentment she had ever harboured for more than a few minutes was the
life-long one which she had borne her husband.
"It was not in the place where I had put it, so I thought one of the
servants had taken it," she explained. "Mandy was alone in my room
to-day while I was at dinner."
In her hand she held a small pasteboard box bearing a jeweller's
imprint, and opening this, she took out a roll of money and counted out
fifty dollars on the top of a packing-case. "I've saved this up for six
months," she said. "It came from selling some silver forks that belonged
to the Bolingbrokes, and I always felt easier to think that I had a
little laid away that he had nothing to do with. From the very day that
I married him, he was always close about money," she added.
The sordid tragedy--not of poverty, but of meanness--was in the gesture
with which she gathered up the notes and pressed them into his shrinking
hands. And yet Cyrus Treadwell was a rich man--the richest man living in
Dinwiddie! Oliver understood now why she was crushed--why she had become
the hopeless victim of the little troubles of life. "From the very day
of our marriage, he was always close about money."
"I had three dozen forks and spoons in the beginning," she resumed as if
there were no piercing significance in the fact she stated so simply,
"but I've sold them all now, one or two at a time, when I needed a
little money of my own. He has always paid the bills, but he never gave
me a cent in my life to do as I pleased with."
"I can't take it from you, Aunt Belinda. It would burn my fingers."
"It's mine. I've got a right to do as I choose with it," she persisted
almost passionately, "and I'd rather give it to you than buy anything in
the world." Something in her face--the look of one who has risen to a
generous impulse and finds happiness in the sacrifice--checked the hand
with which he was thrusting the money away from him. He was deeply
touched by her act; it was useless for him to pretend either to her or
to himself that she had not touched him. The youth in him, unfettered,
strong, triumphant, pitied her because she was no longer young; the
artist in him pitied her because she was no longer beautiful. Without
these two things, or at least one of these two, what was life worth to a
woman?
"I'll take it on condition that you'll let me pay it back as soon as I
get out of debt to Uncle Cyrus," he said in obedience to Susan's
imploring nod.
To this she agreed after an ineffectual protest. "You needn't think
about paying it back to me," she insisted; "I haven't anything to spend
money on now, so it doesn't make much difference whether I have any or
not. I can help you a little more after a while," she finished with
enthusiasm. "I'm raising a few squabs out in the back yard, and Meadows
is going to buy them as soon as they are big enough to eat."
An embarrassment out of all proportion to the act which produced it held
him speechless while he gazed at her. He felt at first merely a sense of
physical revolt from the brutality of her self-revelation--from the
nakedness to which she had stripped the horror of her marriage under the
eyes of her daughter. Nothing, not even the natural impulse to screen
one's soul from the gaze of the people with whom one lived, had
prevented the appalling indignity of this exposure. The delusion that it
is possible for a woman by mere virtue of being a woman to suffer in
sweetness and silence, evaporated as he looked at her. He had believed
her to be a nonentity, and she was revealing an inner life as intense,
as real, as acutely personal as his own. A few words of casual kindness
and he had made a slave of her. He regretted it. He was embarrassed. He
was sorry. He wished to heaven she hadn't brought him the money--and yet
in spite of his regret and his embarrassment, he was profoundly moved.
It occurred to him as he took it from her how easy it would have been
for Cyrus to have subjugated and satisfied her in the beginning. All it
needed was a little kindness, the cheapest virtue, and the tragedy of
her ruined soul might have been averted. To make allowances! Ah, that
was the philosophy of human relations in a word! If men and women would
only stop judging each other and make allowances!
"Well, I shan't starve just yet, thanks to you, Aunt Belinda," he said
cheerfully enough as he thrust the notes into his pocket. It was a small
thing, after all, to make her happy by the sacrifice of his pride. Pride
was not, he remembered, included among the Christian virtues, and,
besides, as he told himself the next instant, trifling as the sum was,
it would at least tide him over financially until he received the next
payment for his reviewing. "I'd better go, it's getting late," he said
with a return of his old gaiety, while he bent over to kiss her. He was
half ashamed of the kiss--not because he was self-conscious about
kissing, since he had long since lost that mark of provincialism--but
because of the look of passionate gratitude which glowed in her face.
Gratitude always made him uncomfortable. It was one of the things he was
forever evading and yet forever receiving. He hated it, he had never in
his life done anything to deserve it, but he could never escape it.
"Good-bye, Susan." His lips touched hers, and though he was moving only
a few streets away, the caress contained all the solemnity of a last
parting. Words wouldn't come when he searched for them, and the bracing
sense of power he had felt half an hour ago was curiously mingled now
with an enervating tenderness. He was still confident of himself, but he
became suddenly conscious that these women were necessary to his
happiness and his success, that his nature demanded the constant daily
tonic of their love and service. He understood now the primal necessity
of woman, not as an individual, but as an incentive and an appendage to
the dominant personality of man.
"Send for me if you need me," said Susan, resting her loving eyes upon
him; "and, Oliver, please promise me to be very careful about money."
"I'll be careful, never fear!" he replied with a laugh, as he took up
his bag and opened the door. A few minutes later, when he was leaving
the house, he reflected that the fifty dollars in his pocket would keep
life in him for a considerable time in Dinwiddie.
CHAPTER VI
A TREADWELL IN REVOLT
York Street, in which Mrs. Peachey lived and supplied the necessaries of
life to a dozen boarders, ran like a frayed seam of gentility between
the prosperous and the impoverished quarters of Dinwiddie; and in order
to reach it, Oliver was obliged to pass the rectory, where, though he
did not see her, Virginia sat in stiffly starched muslin on the old
horsehair sofa. The fragrance of honeysuckle floated to his nostrils
from the dim garden, but so absorbed was he in the engrossing problems
of the moment, that only after he had passed the tower of the church did
he remember that the house behind him sheltered the girl who reminded
him of one of the adorable young virgins of Perugino. For an instant he
permitted himself to dwell longingly on the expression of gentle
goodness that looked from her face; but this memory proved so
disturbing, that he put it obdurately away from him while he returned to
the prudent consideration of the fifty dollars in his pocket. The appeal
of first love had been almost as urgent to him as to Virginia; but the
emotion which had visited both alike had affected each differently, and
this difference was due to the fundamental distinction between woman,
for whom love is the supreme preoccupation of being, and man, to whom it
is at best a partial manifestation of energy. To the woman nothing else
really mattered; to the man at least a dozen other pursuits mattered
very nearly as much.
The sultriness of the weather dampened his body, but not his spirits,
and as he walked on, carrying his heavy bag, along York Street, his
consciousness of the tremendous importance to the world of his decision
exhilarated him like a tonic. He had freed himself from Cyrus and from
commercialism at a single blow, and it had all been as easy as talking!
The joke about starvation he had of course indulged in merely for the
exquisite pleasure of arousing Susan. He wasn't going to starve; nobody
was going to starve in Dinwiddie on thirty dollars a month, and there
was no doubt in the world of his ability to make that much by his
reviewing. It was all simple enough. What he intended to do was to write
the national drama and to practise economy.
He had, indeed, provided for everything in his future, he was to
discover a little later, except for the affable condescension of Mrs.
Peachey toward the profession of letters. Cyrus's antagonism he had
attributed to the crass stupidity of the commercial mind; but it was a
blow to him to encounter the same misconception, more discreetly veiled,
in a woman of the charm and the character of Mrs. Peachey. Bland, plump,
and pretty, she received the modest avowal of his occupation with the
smiling skepticism peculiar to a race whose genius has been chiefly
military.
"I understand--it is very interesting," she observed sweetly. "But what
do you do besides--what do you do, I mean, for a living?"
Here it was again, this fatuous intolerance! this incomprehensible
provincialism! And the terrible part of it was that he had suddenly the
sensation of being overwhelmed by the weight of it, of being smothered
under a mountain of prejudice. The flame of his anger against Cyrus went
out abruptly, leaving him cold. It was the world now against which he
rebelled. He felt that the whole world was provincial.
"I shall write reviews for a New York paper," he answered, trying in
vain to impress her by a touch of literary hauteur. At the moment it
seemed to him that he could cheerfully bear anything if they would only
at least pretend to take him seriously. What appalled him was not the
opposition, but the utter absence of comprehension. And he could never
hope to convince them! Even if he were to write great plays, they would
still hold as obstinately by their assumption that the writing of plays
did not matter--that what really mattered was to create and then to
satisfy an inordinate appetite for tobacco. This was authentic success,
and by no illegitimate triumph of genius could he persuade an industrial
country that he was as great a man as his uncle. The smiling incredulity
in Mrs. Peachey's face ceased to be individual and became a part of the
American attitude toward the native-born artist. This attitude, he
admitted, was not confined to Dinwiddie, since it was national. He had
encountered it in New York, but never had the destructive force of it
impressed him as it did on the ripe and charming lips of the woman
before him. In that illuminating instant he understood why the American
consciousness in literature was still unawakened, why the creative
artist turned manufacturer, why the original thinker bent his knee in
the end to the tin gods of convention.
Her eyes--beautiful as the eyes of all happy women are beautiful--dwelt
on him kindly while he struggled to explain his mission. All the dread
of the unusual, all the inherited belief in the sanctity of fixed
opinions, all the passionate distrust of ideas that have not stood the
test of centuries--these things which make for the safety and the
permanence of the racial life, were in the look of motherly indulgence
with which she regarded him. She had just risen from a rocking-chair on
the long porch, where honest Tom sat relating ponderous war anecdotes to
an attentive group of boarders; and beyond her in the dimly lighted hall
he could see the wide old staircase climbing leisurely into the
mysterious silence of the upper storeys.
"I have a small room at the back that I might rent to you," she said
hesitatingly after a pause. "I am afraid you will find it warm in
summer, as it is just under the roof and has a western exposure, but I
hardly think I could do better for you at the price you are able to pay.
I understood that you intended to live with your uncle," she added in a
burst of enthusiasm. "My husband has always been one of his greatest
admirers."
The mention of Cyrus was like a spur to Oliver's ambition, and he
realized with gratitude that it was merely his sensibility, not his
resolution, which had been shaken.
"I'll take the room," he returned, ignoring what she had said as well as
what she had implied about Cyrus. Then as she tripped ahead of him, he
entered the dismantled hall, filled with broken pieces of fine old
furniture, and ascended the stairs as far as the third storey. When she
turned a loosened door-knob and passed before him into the little room
at the back, he saw first of all the narrow window, with its torn green
shade, beyond which clustered a blur of silvery foliage in the midst of
red roofs and huddled chimneys. From this hilltop, he could look down
unseen on that bit of the universal life which was Dinwiddie. He could
watch the town at work and at play; he could see those twenty-one
thousand souls either moved as a unit by the secret forces which ignore
individuality, or separated and enclosed by that impenetrable wall of
personality which surrounded each atom among them. He could follow the
divisions of class and the still deeper divisions of race as they were
symbolized in the old brick walls, overgrown with young grasses, which
girdled the ancient gardens in High Street. From the dazzling glimpses
of white muslin under honeysuckle arbours, to the dusky forms that
swarmed like spawn in the alleys, the life of Dinwiddie loved, hated,
enjoyed, and suffered beneath him. And over this love and this hatred,
this enjoyment and this suffering, there presided--an outward and
visible sign of the triumph of industrialism--the imposing brick walls
of the new Treadwell tobacco factory.
A soft voice spoke in his ear, and turning, he looked into the face of
Mrs. Peachey, whom he had almost forgotten.
"You will find the sun warm in the afternoon, I am afraid," she
murmured, still with her manner of pleasantly humouring him which he
found later to be an unconscious expression of her half maternal,
wholly feminine attitude toward his sex.
"Oh, I daresay it will be all right," he responded. "I shall work so
hard that I shan't have time to bother about the weather."
Leaving the window, he gazed around the little room with an impulse of
curiosity. Who had lived here before him? A clerk? A travelling
salesman? Perhaps one of the numerous indigent gentlewomen that formed
so large and so important a part of the population of Dinwiddie? The
walls were smeared with a sickly blue wash, and in several places there
were the marks left from the pictures of the preceding lodger. An old
mahogany bureau, black with age and ill usage, stood crosswise in the
corner behind the door, and reflected in the dim mirror he saw his own
face looking back at him. A film of dust lay over everything in the
room, over the muddy blue of the walls, over the strip of discoloured
matting on the floor, over the few fine old pieces of furniture, fallen
now into abject degradation. The handsome French bed, placed
conveniently between door and window, stood naked to the eyes, with its
cheap husk mattress rolled half back, and its bare slats, of which the
two middle ones were tied together with rope, revealing conspicuously
its descent from elegance into squalor. As he saw it, the room was the
epitome of tragedy, yet in the centre of it, on one of the battered and
broken-legged Heppelwhite chairs, sat Mrs. Peachey, rosy, plump, and
pretty, regarding him with her slightly quizzical smile. "Yes, life, of
course, is sad if you stop to think about it," her smile seemed to
assure him; "but the main thing, after all, is to be happy in spite of
it."
"Do you wish to stay here to-night?" she asked, seeing that he had put
down his bag.
"If you will let me. But I am afraid it will be inconvenient."
She shook her head. "Not if you don't mind the dust. The room has been
shut up for weeks, and the dust is so dreadful in the spring. The
servants have gone out," she added, "but I'll bring you some sheets for
your bed, and you can fill your pitcher from the spout at the end of the
hall. Only be careful not to stumble over the step there. It is hard to
see when the gas is not lit."
"You won't object to my putting shelves around the walls?" he asked,
while she pushed the mattress into place with the light and
condescending touch of one who preserves the aristocratic manner not
only in tragedy, but even in toil. It was, indeed, her peculiar
distinction, he came to know afterward, that she worked as gracefully as
other women played.
"Couldn't you find room enough without them?" she inquired while her
gaze left the mattress and travelled dubiously to the mantelpiece. "It
seems a pity for you to go to any expense about shelves, doesn't it?"
"Oh, they won't cost much. I'll do the work myself, and I'll do it in
the mornings when it won't disturb anybody. I daresay I'll have to push
that bed around a bit in order to make space."
Something in his vibrant voice--so full of the richness and the buoyant
energy of youth--made her look at him as she might have looked at one
of her children, or at that overgrown child whom she had married. And
just as she had managed Tom all his life by pretending to let him have
his way, so she proceeded now by instinct to manage Oliver. "You dear
boy! Of course you may turn things upside down if you want to. Only wait
a few days until you are settled and have seen how you like it."
Then she tripped out with her springy step, which had kept its
elasticity through war and famine, while Oliver, gazing after her,
wondered whether it was philosophy or merely a love of pleasure that
sustained her? Was it thought or the absence of thought that produced
her wonderful courage?
He heard her tread on the stairs; then the sound passed to the front
hall; and a minute later there floated up the laughter with which the
assembled boarders received her. Closing the door, which she had left
open, he turned back to the window and stared from his hilltop down on
the red roofs of Dinwiddie. White as milk, the moonlight lay on the
brick wall at the foot of the garden, and down the gradual hill rows of
chimneys were outlined against the faintly dappled sky in the west. In
the next yard a hollow tree looked as if it were cut out of silver, and
beneath its boughs, which drooped into the alley, he could see the
huddled figure of an aged negress who had fallen asleep on a flagstone.
So still was the night that the very smoke appeared to hang suspended
above the tops of the chimneys, as though it were too heavy to rise and
yet too light to float downward toward the motionless trees. Under the
pale beams the town lost its look of solidity and grew spectral. Nothing
seemed to hold it to the earth except the stillness which held the
fallen flowers of the syringa there also. Even the church towers showed
like spires of thistledown, and the winding streets, which ran beside
clear walls and dark shining gardens, trailed off from the ground into
the silvery air. Only the black bulk of the Treadwell factory beside the
river defied the magic of the moon's rays and remained a solid reminder
of the brevity of all enchantment.
Gradually, while Oliver waited for Mrs. Peachey's return, he ceased to
think of the furniture in his room; he ceased to think even of the way
in which he should manage to do his work, and allowed his mind to dwell,
almost with a feeling of ecstasy, on the memory of Virginia. He saw the
mist of little curls on her temples, her blue eyes, with their good and
gentle expression, and the look of radiant happiness which played like
light over her features. The beauty of the night acted as a spur to his
senses. He wanted companionship. He wanted the smile and the touch of a
woman. He wanted to fall in love with a girl who had blue eyes and a
mouth like a flower!
"It wouldn't take me ten minutes to become a fool about her," he
thought. "Confound this moonlight, anyhow. It's making an idiot of me."
Like many persons of artistic sensibility, he had at times the feeling
that his imagination controlled his conduct, and under the sharp
pressure of it now, he began to picture what the end would be if he were
to fling himself headlong in the direction where his desires were
leading him. If he could only let himself go! If he could only defy the
future! If he could only forget in a single crisis that he was a
Treadwell!
"If I were the right sort, I suppose I'd rush in and make her fall in
love with me, and then marry her and let her starve," he thought. "But
somehow I can't. I'm either not enough of a genius or not enough of a
Treadwell. When it comes to starving a woman in cold blood, my
conscience begins to balk. There's only one thing it would balk at more
violently, and that is starving my work. That's what Uncle Cyrus would
like--nothing better. By Jove! the way he looked when he had the nerve
to make that proposition! And I honestly believe he thought I was going
to agree to it. I honestly believe he was surprised when I stood out
against him. He's a downright idiot, that's what is the matter with him.
Why, it would be a crime, nothing less than a crime, for me to give up
and go hunting after freight orders. Any ninny can do that. James can do
that--but he couldn't see, he
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