VIII
The Bixbysmoved into Aunt Sadie’s rooms the next day. The little apartment was already furnished, so there was not a great deal of moving to do: merely the carrying in of a couple of trunks, a phonograph, and a suit-case. The windows and doors were all open, and Julie down in her little shop could hear much of what went on overhead. She heard Elizabeth calling out sharp directions to Mr. Bixby as he staggered up the stairway under one of the trunks. Then he was sent off to buy a broom and some extra cooking-utensils. He came back presently, laden with all sorts of angular bundles; but he had evidently forgotten something, for his wife’s voice was raised in complaint. Julie could not often hear the exact words, and she almost never heard his answers. She gathered that often he did not reply at all, for every now and then Elizabeth would burst out, “Answerme!”
But at last they settled down and had dinner, after which Mr. Bixby went off to the office oftheHart’s Run News; Elizabeth did some ostentatious sweeping, and then the creaking tread of her footsteps subsided.
“She’s taking a rest now,” Julie told herself. “She’ll get up after a little bit, and then she’ll dress herself and come down here.”
It was curious how the whole morning, during all her accustomed duties in the shop, Julie had been aware of all that took place upstairs. The Bixbys’ activities ran in a disturbing undercurrent through all she did. She was right in supposing that Elizabeth would come down to the shop after she had had her nap. At about four o’clock Julie heard her get up, and after moving about for some time, she started down her outside stairs. Certain boards creaked in the floor above. And over her head the heavy footsteps had gone back and forth, punctuated every now and then by a cringing squeak.
“Imustget those boards fixed,” Julie told herself. “I’ll go crazy if that keeps up. I don’t know why I never noticed them when the Edwardses were up there.”
Realizing the impending encounter, Julie had made what defense she could. She had carriedout to her back rooms the two extra chairs she usually kept in the shop, so that there was nowhere for a visitor to sit down, and was herself safely tucked in behind her counter, sewing, when Elizabeth entered.
For her first visit the newcomer had made an elaborate toilet, consisting of a pink summer dress, white shoes, pink silk stockings, a string of white beads around her neck, and her face frankly made-up. She was rested and refreshed by her nap, and was handsome in a large self-confident way.
She entered the shop with assurance, preceded by a wave of perfume.
“Well, Miss Rose, here’s your new neighbor,” she announced. “I’ve got my rooms fixed at last, an’ it took some straightening, let me tell you! I suppose Mis’ Johnson thought she had everything clean, but poor old soul, I reckon she can’t see so very good. An’ now I’ve come to visit with you a spell.
“Well,” she went on, sweeping her bold dark eyes condescendingly around the shop, “you got a right nice place here. I wouldn’t have looked for anything so nice in such a rotten little town.”
Julie had gotten up as though to serve her, and stood waiting behind the counter, but Elizabeth waved a protesting hand. “Oh don’t mind me. I’ll just look about and make myself at home, and if I find anything I like I’ll let you know. That’s a right pretty hat—that red one. What’s the price of it?—Oh well,” she continued, after Julie had told her, “I’ll wait a while. You’ll have to put it down ’fore the season’s over. People ain’t payin’ much for hats a war year like this. It ain’t patriotic. Besides it ain’t a style that would suit everybody. But it looks good on me, don’t it? Red’s one of my best colors.”
She put on the hat, and preened herself before Julie’s mirror. In her pink dress, crowned by the red hat, she made a garish flash of color, given back in duplicate from the mirror. Her overpowering personality dominated the place. Julie had been working all day and was tired. Glancing across, she saw her own sober little figure with its pale face mirrored beside Elizabeth’s pink and red. For a moment she contemplated the two figures side by side in sharp contrast, then she stooped to her sewing once more. Elizabeth saw the reflections and laughed. “We lookkind of funny together, don’t we,” she said complacently. Then she moved to get a better view of herself, and Julie’s reflection was blotted out by her dominant pink.
“You ain’t got your mirror in a very good light,” she informed Julie. “If I was you, I’d hang it over on that side; and I’d get a better one. This don’t make people look their best, an’ what you want in a shop like this is a glass that’ll just make people look better’n they ever looked in their lives before, so they’ll think, ‘My, ain’t that hat becomin’!’ An’ then they’ll buy the hat, an’ never know it was the mirror all the time. That’s the way to sell hats, dearie! Oh, I could show you a heap about running your shop.”
Julie said nothing, but went steadily on with her sewing, her needle weaving deftly in and out of the soft blue material she was at work on; but Elizabeth was too completely wrapped up in her own atmosphere to be aware of the other’s unresponsiveness.
“I always did know about hats,” she went on. “It seems like it’s a kind of a gift with me. I can always tell what kind of a hat a person ought to wear. Now you—you ought to wear somethingkind of startling to bring you into view. If you don’t have it, you’re the kind of mousey little woman that slips by without any one’s payin’ any attention. I looked at you on Sunday, and I says, ‘That little woman kind of needs something to bring her out. Now what is it?’ I says, sort of turning you over in my mind, like you taste cake-batter to see what it needs. And all at once it came to me: ‘It’s a hat,’ I says, ‘a cerise turban:thatwould do the trick.’ If folks didn’t notice a thing else about you, they’d see that turban. You ain’t got just the color I had in mind,” she went on, surveying the hat counter, “but,” taking up a green turban, “this is kind of the shape I mean. Now if you had a piece of cerise silk you could fix this right over for yourself. Lemme see how it looks on you.”
But Julie shrunk hastily away. “No, no thank you,” she said with that quick breathlessness that was a nervous trick with her. “No, I never wear cerise, and I don’t care for that shape on myself.”
“Oh, all right then,” Elizabeth retorted, laying down the hat in a pique. “You can suit yourself. I was just trying to show you how you could attracta little attention. But you’re just like my husband; he sort of wants to slink through the world without anybody noticing him. I tell him a person would think he was a submarine, he’s so anxious to have that ‘low visibility’ the papers are always talking about these days. I declare, I’d like to put a cerise turban onhim—a red hat like what the Popes wear in the Catholic Church. Maybe he couldn’t get by without folks seein’ that! ‘Look a’ here, Tim,’ I’m always sayin’ to him, ‘What’s the matter with you? It ain’t going to kill you if folks sees you. Come out into the open,’ I says. ‘You can’t hide behindmyskirts all the time.’ But the more I talk at him, the more he goes in the ground an’ pulls the hole in after him. I declare, I think it’ll be a right good thing if the draft does take him.”
“The draft?” Julie looked up quickly.
“Mm—h’m,” Elizabeth nodded. “He’s liable to be called any time now. He just took this little job here while he was waiting. That’s why I didn’t bring any of my furniture with me. I got a nice house and a lot of elegant furniture in Lynchburg where we was, an’ we’ll go back there after the war. The paper he worked on there’sjust suspended for a while. The editor an’ owner’s both gone to the front. Well, you don’t catch me stayin’ on here if Tim’s drafted. I’ll go on back to my own home. I got plenty of friends there. But say—he’llmake a great soldier, won’t he? I always tell him Tim’s short for timid with him. You can laugh if you want. I know just how funny he always strikes folks.”
“I—I don’t want to laugh,” Julie protested. “I—oh, I think the war’s awful!” she burst out. “I don’t want to laugh over any one’s going.”
“Oh, well,” Elizabeth said carelessly. “I wouldn’t be s’prised if the war didn’t make a man out of him—the drill an’ all would be fine. But I tell him he’d better mind out, or he’ll be the goat of the whole camp.”
Finding no chair to sit in, Elizabeth had been drifting about the shop, inspecting one showcase after another; now she came to rest at the counter behind which Julie was seated, and leaning nonchalantly against it, she did what was to Julie an amazing thing. She opened a gilt vanity-bag which she had been swinging, and taking from it a cigarette case, selected one and proceeded to light it with a knowing air. Julie knew,of course, that women did smoke cigarettes somewhere, but she had never seen them do it, much less light one in her discreet little shop. She was used to seeing the mountain women out in the country smoke pipes; indeed, her own grandmother on her father’s side had smoked and chewed as well. “But that’s different,” she told herself now. Her grandmother’s corncob pipe before a stone hearth seemed wholly in keeping with the old woman’s kerchief-covered head, her spinning wheel, her loom, and patchwork quilts. Not so Elizabeth’s insolent cigarette. That appeared to Julie an affront to her mother’s spirit, which always seemed to her still hovering dimly in the background of the little shop. She and her mother, living their gentle reserved lives there together, had made up the atmosphere, the soul, of the little establishment, pouring into it all the timid modesty, gentle propriety, and sincerity of their own hearts. They had neither of them had a brave or robust attitude toward life, but they had nevertheless woven a pattern that was adorned with a thousand tendernesses toward one another, with exquisite bits of understanding consideration, with gentle courtesies and kindnessestoward their neighbors, and with a careful honesty in all their dealings. Timid as they were, they yet had wrought an unseen mesh of life that had a delicate beauty all its own. And now to Julie, all that past that her mother and she had woven together was outraged by Elizabeth’s cigarette.
“I’ve got to stop her! She shan’t smoke here in my shop. What would mother say?” she thought breathlessly to herself, trying to control the tremor that ran through her hands, so that she might set even stitches in her work. “I’vegotto stop her! It’s my shop. She’s got no business to smoke here. Why, I wouldn’t let my best friend smoke here!” But though she protested these things to herself, Julie could not whip her courage up to bringing them forth in spoken words, and Elizabeth continued to puff out long blue columns of smoke, watching them with satisfaction, while with an affected gesture, she flecked her ashes here and there over the clean floor. She was in truth a little disappointed that her cigarette had provoked no comment. She had expected Julie at least to look startled, and was prepared to defend herself with condescendingpatronage. Julie’s silence was disconcerting, for Elizabeth possessed none of the spiritual antennæ with which to sense another’s atmosphere if unexpressed by word or gesture. She strolled back to the mirror, and under cover of patting her hair into place peeped at Julie’s reflection to see if she was being watched from behind her back. But Julie, whose weakness it was to have antennæ far too sensitive to another’s atmosphere, knew what Elizabeth expected, and kept her eyes resolutely upon the threading of her needle. It was a little defiant clash between the two women, of which Julie was fully aware, but which Elizabeth realized only from her own standpoint.
At this moment Aunt Sadie Johnson bustled into the shop, and having none of Julie’s delicate hesitancy, exploded the hidden situation with a startled exclamation.
“Julie,” she began, “I just ran in to see if that white ruchin’ I got you to order for me—Well, for themercy sake!” she broke off, suddenly catching sight of Elizabeth. “Well, my lands!” she continued, staring frankly, and unafraid of drawing upon herself the full fire of the cigarette.
It was some such violent attention as this that Elizabeth had hoped for.
“What’s the matter?” she inquired in her most superior manner. “Oh,” feigning surprise, “my cigarette? Why surely, Mrs. Johnson, I’m not the first woman you’ve seen smoke.”
“That you ain’t!” Aunt Sadie retorted promptly. “I’ve seen a plenty of ’em do it.”
Elizabeth was somewhat dashed, but she rallied as best she could. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad Hart’s Run ain’t such a back number as not to know that all the smart women smoke nowadays.”
“Smart?” Aunt Sadie cried, and went off into billows of large mirth. “Well, you may call ’em smart, but I dunno’s they look so stylish to me. There’s old Betty Willets from off Rocky Ridge. She drives her old wagon an’ broken-down horse into town, to collect the swill from folks’ backyards to take up to her hog. She’s one of our smart smokers. An’ they all smoke up Spitzer’s Holler—an’ chew too—they’re ’bout the lowest-down lot of folks we have ’round here. Oh, no, you ain’t the first I’ve seen smoke, not by a long sight. But it does look like a pity for a rightyoung woman like you to be smoking and chewin’—it’ll just ruin your teeth.”
“Chew?” cried Elizabeth wildly. “You don’t think I chew tobacco, do you?”
“Oh, don’t tell me!” Aunt Sadie returned. “I never saw a woman yet who smoked, that she didn’t chew on the sly an’ dip snuff, too. Oh, I’d be the last person in the world to say there was any real harm in it,” she went on tolerantly, “with so many of our old folks still doin’ it; it’s only that I always did think chewin’ an’ spittin’—”
“I don’t chew!” Elizabeth cried furiously. “Of course I don’t! Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, I’m going,” she announced, flouncing to the door. “An’ I’ll say this, Miss Rose,” she added, “I don’t thinkyou’reany too polite either to strangers. In all the time I’ve been here, you’ve hardly said two words, and you haven’t so much as asked me to take a chair.” Angry tears leaped in her eyes, and she flung herself away out of the shop and up her own stairs.
“Well, the poor thing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “I made her mad all right! I reckon it was a sin, but I just couldn’t stand her airing ’round herewith that cigarette, an’ showings off to us moss-backs. What’d you let her smoke in here for, Julie? You know your mother wouldn’t have liked it.”
“I didn’t know how to stop her,” Julie confessed helplessly.
“Well, I stopped her all right!” Aunt Sadie returned, shaken again by large laughter. “But ain’t the world funny, Julie? Here we’ve all come to look down on smokin’, and feel sort of ashamed of the old women that still do it, when along comes all the young smart Alecks, an’ says it’s the thing to do, an’ if you don’t do it, it just shows you’re right from the backwoods. Now ain’t that funny? If you just live long enough in the world, you’ll see everything turned upside down! But I feel kind of sorry for poor Mis’ Bixby,” she added tolerantly.
“Sorryfor her?” Julie’s eyes opened in astonishment.
“Yes,” the other nodded her large gray head. “Don’t you think it’s kind of pitiful to see a grown person putting so much confidence in fine clothes, and thinking she’s so grand showing off with a cigarette? When you’ve been up againstreal life like I have, that kind of cheap person seems right pitiful.”
“She just stifles me,” Julie said. “She’s so—so big an’ satisfied with herself.”
“Oh, I don’t know’s she’s so satisfied with herself. She wants you to think she is, an’ that’s why she tries to show off so.”
“Well, all the same she does stifle me,” Julie repeated.
“I reckon she does,” Aunt Sadie conceded, surveying Julie’s shrinking make-up with her shrewd and kindly eyes. “She stifles you, honey, an’ I b’lieve she’s just about choked that poor little husband of hers to death.”
“I don’t see why in the world he ever married her,” Julie said.
“Who? That little Bixby? I’ll bet he never marriedher—she marriedhim.”
“I b’lieve that’s true!” Julie cried with conviction. “Yes, I just b’lieve that’s so.” Aunt Sadie’s statement seemed to her an illuminating discovery. Of course that was it. None of his real self had gone into the union; that accounted for his detached air, which had made her suppose at first that they were brother and sister.
“Of course it’s so,” Mrs. Johnson reaffirmed. “You’re so innocent, Julie, you still think the man does all the courtin’; but I’ll bet poor Bixby did mighty little. I wouldn’t wonder if she married him out of spite. I’ll bet there was another she wanted an’ couldn’t get, so she turned ’round an’ snapped up that little feller, just to show people she could get a man if she wanted one.”
“Well, anyway he isn’t all there,” Julie said absently, still pursuing her own line of thought.
Aunt Sadie was startled. “Why, what on earth do you mean? Why, Julie, you don’t think he’s wanting, do you? He’s right nervous an’ scary lookin’, I know, but I wouldn’t for a minute say he was feeble-minded.”
“No, no, of course I don’t mean that!” Julie protested.
“Well, I shouldn’t think you would. Why, he’s real smart in his trade. I heard Mr. McLane bragging about him in the post office this morning. He said they never did have such a good printer on theNewsbefore. Said he seemed to understand high-class printing better’n anybody he’d ever known. No, whatever he is, he certainly ain’t feeble-minded.”
“Oh, no, of course not,” Julie reiterated. “Of course I didn’t mean that. I just meant she didn’t get the whole of him. She doesn’t own all of him.”
“Well, maybe so. I’m sure I hope so—the poor little feller,” Aunt Sadie returned.