XII
Thatwas the first time Mr. Bixby unlocked the door and came down the stairway to Julie, but it was not the last. Almost every evening Elizabeth and Aunt Sadie went out to the moving pictures, and there was no one in the house except Mr. Bixby upstairs and Julie in her sitting-room below. Two or three nights after his first appearance he came again. This time he offered a small excuse. “Could I trouble you to lend me a pair of big shears?” he asked awkwardly. But after she found a pair and put them in his hands, he stood and looked at them uncertainly as though he did not know what to do with them, then suddenly he flushed and laid the scissors back on the centre table.
“I wasn’t tellin’ you the truth,” he confessed abruptly. “I don’t need your scissors. That wasn’t anything but just an excuse. But, someway I can’t lie to you.”
Julie looked straight up at him. “You don’t have to,” she said simply. “You don’t ever have to tell me anything but what’s the truth.”
With the words she came as it were into a place of peace. All the whirling haste and nervous anxiety of her existence, all its terrors and subterfuges, fell away, and left her still and secure.
She saw the tension of his face relax also.
“That’s so,” he said with quick relief. “That certainly is so, Miss Julie. You’re one person I don’t have to try to fool.”
He seated himself in the plush rocker easily and naturally. “All my life,” he went on, “I’ve been pretendin’ things. Puttin’ up a front an’ tryin’ to fool people into thinkin’ I’m something I ain’t.”
“I know. I always do it, too,” she answered. “I reckon it’s mighty foolish of us.” She looked at him out of her wide gray eyes which were kindled now with the light of discovery.
His face broke all at once into laughter. It was a whimsical trick of his nature to experience a certain rueful mirth over his own futilities. “Yes,” he assented, “it is foolish! But anyhow we don’t have to do it with one another, do we,” he said, restating the fact. “I’m kind of lonesome to-night, that was why I come down—I didn’t really want the shears.”
“I know. I understand,” she answered again.
“My wife likes the movies. She goes to ’em ’most every night, but I don’t care nothin’ about ’em. I don’t see what people finds in them.”
“I don’t either,” she confessed.
Thereafter they fell into easy and simple conversation. Indeed, why should he not sit and talk a little while to her? He told her of the small happenings of his day at theNewsoffice and of the big and terrible news of the world. He did not hasten to cover up any silence with the clatter of talk. He spoke when he felt like it, sitting in the plush rocker and watching her sew, and she replied—or was silent—as she pleased. He stayed for a half-hour or so and then he rose.
“Well, I reckon it’s time for me to tell you good-night,” he said, and slipped away up the stairs without further comment.
After that he came again and again. The house would be still,—as it never was when Elizabeth’s noisy personality was at home,—Julie would be sewing by her light, when she would hear the key turn in the lock and his foot upon the stair. Once or twice he said, “I waskind of lonesome; maybe you’ll let me sit here a spell,” but later he came without even that preamble, simply saying, “Well, Miss Julie, here I am,” and dropping into the plush rocker as though it were his place that was waiting for him. At first his talk was only general news of the day, but as their intimacy deepened they began to unfold themselves to each other more and more. With all the rest of humanity they continually had to pretend, dressing themselves in a garment of life that was altogether too big for them. With others they were always on the defensive, always erecting hasty barriers of reserve and shyness behind which their sensitive personalities might retreat, but with each other they were free; there they could be spontaneous and completely true. Their real selves came forth and played about naturally and easily in this intercourse of friendly comprehension. The key words of their intimacy came to be, “I know, I understand,” spoken by her, or “Yes, that’s the way it’s always been with me, too,” spoken by him. If there fell a momentary constraint or embarrassment between them, these words were all that were necessary to set them free again. And inthe finding of one another’s understanding they found themselves, and a whole new world as well. This world emerged from under all the difficulties and timidities of life as she had known it; from under the strangled inhibitions from which he suffered. It was for them a world that was large and beneficent, where they were big people who were unafraid. It was difficult to put into words what they experienced, but sometimes they groped about to find expression for it.
“Ain’t it strange?” he said. “When I open that door and come down the steps, it’s more than just a door opening. It’s—it’s something in myself. I open the door, and I see you sitting there under the light, and—someway—I find myself when I find you. It’s like when I was a kid and used to be scared in the dark. We lived in the country then, and sometimes they’d send me down to the stable on errands after nightfall. Coming back, the dark’ud all close in on me. I’d be so scared, I’d seem to be getting smaller and smaller an’ bein’ smothered. I’d run an’ stumble over things. An’ then all at once, I’d see the light from the kitchen, and folks moving about inside, and everything’d be all right. The darkwould kind of draw off. I’d open all up inside, like I’d been set free. An’ that’s the way it is when I come down the steps an’ see you sitting here. It’s like I’d come home. I’m a bigger person down here in this sitting-room than I am anywhere else. I mean to say,” he hesitated, turning the thought over, “there’s more of me here than anywhere else.”
“But it’s there all the time: I mean, what you really are is there, no matter where you are,” she interrupted.
“Maybe so, but it don’t come out other places. You’ve got the key, Miss Julie. I’ve got the key to the door, but you’ve got the key to what I am.”
But for the most part they did not attempt to phrase it, accepting it simply and easily. They had been cramped and terrified, constricted into their smaller selves, by other people and by their own constrained natures, and now this wider existence trembled into view: an existence set free from fear, where they might be themselves and be happy; and they seized upon it with avidity.
They almost never spoke of Elizabeth. Julienever did, and he but rarely. “My wife’s gone out with Mrs. Johnson. She’s crazy about the movies,” he sometimes said. Once he said, “I offered to go with her, but she said I wasn’t good enough company. She’d rather have anybody’s company but mine.”
“Well, if she leaves him every night like that, of course he’s lonesome,” Julie thought sharply to herself.
They did not meet thus a great number of times—not more than six or seven, all told. They wondered over the miracle of their friendship and they rejoiced in the new life that it brought to them, yet they spoke no word of love to each other. But there fell at last an evening when the summer night had come down over Hart’s Run; when children in pretty, clean frocks called to one another through the dusk; when lovers would have walked the street, if it had not been a war year, with most of the young men gone; when the whole village was relaxed and at ease; and when Julie, sitting sewing by her light, heard the key scrape in the lock, the creak of footsteps on the stairs, and in a moment looking up saw Mr. Bixby before her, but with aface so strange and pinched that she cried out, “What is it? What’s happened?”
He sat down in the rocker and looked at her for a dumb moment. Then he spoke.
“It’s come; my draft call’s come. I got to go.”
“You got to go?” she whispered.
“I just got it from the post office. I got to go in the mornin’. She’s out—my wife’s out. I ain’t told her yet. I came to you, Miss Julie.”
“You—you got to go in the morning,” she repeated blankly. Her work had fallen in her lap, and the delicate folds were crumpled between her clutched hands.
He nodded. “I got to go. They drafted me.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Julie swallowed spasmodically once or twice, looking around the little room where their imprisoned personalities had come together in the last weeks. Where they had found one another, and in that finding had discovered their hidden selves. Where their souls had ventured forth and found a whole new world impinging marvelously upon their constricted everyday existence, and where the timid and reserved room had taken on life from their life.
“You’re going away?” she faltered again, knowing that this world was falling to pieces. She felt herself beginning to tremble all over.
“I got to go, honey,” he said, and stretched out his hand open to her across the table. It was the first time he had used a term of endearment—the first time he had stretched his hand to her. She put her own swiftly into his. The two hands, small and thin, locked together there upon the table. She did not look at him, she looked down at their clasped hands in the light—hands that had miraculously found each other out of all the tumult and terrors of life. Through the tears that were beginning to burn into her eyes the hands looked dim and uncertain. The trembling of her body ran down her arm into her fingers, and communicated itself to his. A tremor shivered through their hands as they clung together.
“I—Igotto go, ain’t I, little honey?”
There was a question in his tone now, and she looked up swiftly into his face, the tears arrested and hanging upon her lashes. In his eyes looking hungrily at her she read hesitation and dread. She forgot herself in the realization of what was before him.
“You’re afraid,” she said abruptly.
His face flared darkly red, and he put his disengaged hand up before his eyes. But in a moment he took it down and looked straight at her.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “Look at me, honey, I don’t mind your knowin’ it. Iwantfor you to know. I want you to know just all I am. You’re the only person in all the world I could ever speak about it to, but I want you to know just the onery little feller I am. You’re my mother, an’ my sister—you’re what I am. I can’t keep nothing back from you. I want to lay my heart right out for you to see.”
“I know—I understand,” she whispered. She accepted his fear simply and uncritically.
His hand tightened upon hers desperately. “I’m just a coward, honey, just yeller. I’m afraid of the other fellers; they’ll guy the life out of me. I’ll be everybody’s goat, I know it.Shesaid I would, an’ it’s so. Maybe—maybe I can’t stand up to it any better than that Chapin boy. An’ I’m afraid of goin’ over an’ of gettin’ killed. I want for you to know itall—all I am! But—but it ain’t the first time I’ve stood up and made myself do things I was scared of. I’vegotto go. Oh, Lord! Maybe I’ll pull through all right!”
“Why do you have to go?” Julie cried suddenly, violently. Then like the breaking of a dam her words gushed out, tossing aside the mincing phraseology of her mother’s training, and reverting to the tongue of her mountain people. “What’s the world ever give you that you got to stand up now an’ maybe be killed for it? What’s folks ever done for you or for me that we got to please ’em now? Did they ever do anything for you? They never done one thing for me! My mother an’ my father was good to me—but they’re dead. An’ what’s other folks ever done for us? Ain’t they always crowded us out into the cold an’ slammed the door in our faces? They never let us in to life. They never even knowed we was there. Or if they took notice of us, it was just to knock us out er the road, er maybe stamp on us, or wrench us ’round the way they wanted us to go.”
“That’s God’s truth,” he said slowly.
“Ain’t it always been so?” she rushed on. “Did they ever let you be a real person? Wasn’t they always slappin’ you out into the cold? Evenwhen you was a child, did the other children ever let you in, an’ play with you like they did one another? They never did me.”
“They never did me either,” he answered. “I was the outsider. They always picked on me.”
“They tore my paper doll to pieces when I wasn’t doin’ one thing to anybody, an’ all of ’em tramped it into the snow! Oh my God! It’s been that way with both of us, always. All our lives we was pinched an’ strangled, an’ thrown aside. They didn’t let us do any more’n just cling to the edges of life. An’ then we found one another.” She was crying now, and her words were cut in two by her gasping breath. “We found one another—we found one another, an’ then we found life! Butnowthey open the door and say, ‘Come on in.’Nowthey got a use for you.Nowthey’ll let you stand up an’ git killed for ’em. They never opened the door to let you into life, but they’ve opened it up wide for you for death! No,” she cried wildly, “youdon’t owe folks nothin’! They never give us life—we’ve found life for ourselves together! An’ now, just as we found it, they’d snatch hit away! You don’t have to go!
“You don’thaveto go, do you?” she repeated.
He looked at her, dazzled by the flaming passion of her face. “We—we could go away an’ hide somewheres together,” he ventured, uncertainly.
She stared back at him.
“What would they do to you if they caught you?” she demanded.
“I dunno.” He shook his head. “But—if we went—it would—you know it would break your life all to pieces. If anything was to happen to me, you couldn’t come back here.”
“I never had no life to break, ’til you came into it,” she cried. “I never knew what life was. You’ve set me free! You’ve made me all I am. We’ve made each other! Our life together—our love—it’s just all there is! Oh God! Oh God!” she cried, “Ain’twe got a right to it?”
He bowed his head down upon their hands on the table.
“My honey! My love! My little honey!” he cried.