XII
Gordon carefully explained the entire circumstance of the timber to Lettice. “I just happened to be by the stream,” he continued, “and overheard them. Your father and Simmons evidently had arranged the thing, and Simmons was going to crowd you out of all the gain.”
“You see to it,” she returned listlessly; “you have my name on that paper, the power of something or other.” She was seated on the porch of their dwelling. A low-drifting mass of formless grey cloud filled the narrow opening of the ranges, drooping in nebulous veils of suspended moisture down to the vivid green of the valley. The mountains seemed to dissolve into the nothingness above; the stream was unusually noisy.
“I might see him this evening,” he observed; “and I could find out how Buck was resting.”
“However did he come to get hurt?”
“I never knew rightly, there we were all standing with Buckley a-talking, when the stone flew out of the crowd and hit him on the head. Nobody saw who did it.”
“I wish you hadn’t been there, Gordon. You always seem to be around, to get talked about, when anything happens.”
He saw that she was irritable, in a mood for complaint, and he rose. “You mean Mrs. Caley talks wherever I am,” he corrected. He left the porch and walked over the road to the village. The store, he knew, would be closed; but Valentine Simmons, an indefatigable church worker, almost invariably after the service pleasantly passed the remainder of Sunday in the contemplation and balancing of his long and satisfactory accounts and assets.
He was, as Gordon had anticipated, in the enclosed office bent over his ledgers. The door to the store was unlocked. Simmons rose, and briefly acknowledged Gordon’s presence.
“I was sorry Buckley got hurt,” the latter opened; “it wasn’t any direct fault of mine. We were having words. I don’t deny but that it might have gone further with us, but some one else stepped in.”
“So I was informed. Buckley will probably live ... that is all the Stenton doctor will say; a piece of his skull has been removed. I am not prepared to discuss it right now ... painful to me.”
“Certainly. But I didn’t come to discuss that. I want to talk to you about the timber—those options of Lettice’s.”
“She doesn’t agree to the deal?” Simmons queried sharply.
“Whatever I say is good enough for Lettice,” Gordon replied.
An expression of relief settled over the other. “The papers will be ready this week,” he said. “I have taken all that, and some expense, off you. You will make a nice thing out of it.”
“I will,” Gordon assented heartily. “And that reminds me—I saw an old acquaintance of Pompey Hollidew’s in Greenstream to-day. I don’t know his name; I drove him up in the stage, and Pompey greeted him like a long-lost dollar.”
A veiled, alert curiosity was plain on Simmons’s smooth, pinkish countenance.
“I wonder if you know him too?—a man with a beard, a great hand for maps and cigars.”
“Well?” Valentine Simmons temporized.
“Could he have anything to do with those timber options of the old man’s, with your offer for them?”
“Well?” Simmons repeated. His face was now absolutely blank; he sat turned from his ledgers, facing Gordon, without a tremor.
“It’s no use, Simmons,” Gordon Makimmon admitted; “I was out by the old mill this morning. I saw you both, heard something that was said. That railroad will do a lot for values around here, but mostly for timber.”
Instantly, and with no wasted regrets over lost opportunities, Simmons changed his tactics to meet existing conditions. “Your wife’s estate controls about three thousand acres of timber,” he pronounced. “What will you take for them?”
“How much do you control?” Gordon asked.
“About twenty-five hundred at present.”
Gordon paused, then, “Lettice will take thirty dollars an acre.”
“Why!” the other protested, “Pompey bought them for little or nothing. You’re after over two hundred per cent. increase.”
“What do you figure to get out of yours?”
“That doesn’t concern us now. I’ve had to put this through—a tremendous thing for Greenstream, a lasting benefit—entirely by myself. I will have to guarantee a wicked profit outside; I stand alone to lose a big sum. I’ll give you ten dollars for the options.”
Gordon rose. “I’ll see the railroad people myself,” he observed; “and find out what I can do there.”
“Hold on,” Simmons waved him back to his chair. “If there’s too much talk the thing will get out. You know these thick skulls around here—at the whisper of transportation you couldn’t cut a sapling with a gold axe. It took managing to interest the Tennessee and Northern; they are going through to Buffalo; a Greenstream branch is only a side issue to them.” He paused, thinking. “There’s no good,” he resumed, “in you and me getting into each other. The best thing we can do is to control all the good stuff, agree on a price, and divide the take.”
Gordon carefully considered this new proposal. It seemed to him palpably fair. “All the papers would have to be made together,” he added; “what’s for one’s for the other.”
Now that the deal was fully exposed Valentine Simmons was impatient of small precautions. “Can’t you see how the plan lays?” he demanded irritably. “We’ll draw up a partnership. Don’t get full and talk,” he added discontentedly. It was evident that he keenly resented the absence of Pompey Hollidew from the transaction.
“A thing like this,” he informed the other, “ain’t put through in a week. It will be two or three years yet before the company will be ready for construction.”
Minor details were rehearsed, concluded. Two weeks later Gordon signed an agreement of partnership with Valentine Simmons to purchase collectively such timber options as were deemed desirable, and to merchandise their interests at a uniform price to the railroad company concerned.
XIII
When Gordon returned to his dwelling he found Sim Caley and his sister’s husband taking the horse from the shafts of a dusty, two-seated carriage. Rutherford Berry was a slightly-built man with high, narrow shoulders, and a smooth, pasty-white face. He was clerk in a store at the farther end of Greenstream valley, and had flat, fragile wrists and a constant, irritating cough.
“H’y, Gord!” he shouted; “your sister wanted to visit with you over night, and see Lettice. We only brought two—the oldest and Barnwell K.”
The “oldest,” Gordon recalled, was the girl who had worn Clare’s silk waist and “run the colors”; Barnwell K. Berry was, approximately, ten.
“That’s right,” he returned cordially. He assisted in running the carriage back by the shed. Lettice and his sister were stiffly facing each other in the sitting room. The latter had a fine, thin countenance with pale hair drawn tightly back and fastened under a small hat pinned precariously aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her waist, her sole adornment a brassy wedding ring, that almost covered an entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible kitchen stove, or a child temporarily unaccounted for.
“Lettice looks right good,” she declared, “and, dear me, why shouldn’t she, with nothing on her mind at all but what comes to every woman? When I had my last Rutherford was down with the influenza, the youngest was taken with green-sickness, and we had worked out all our pay at the store in supplies. You’re fixed nice here,” she added without a trace of envy in her tired voice. “I suppose that’s Mrs. Hollidew in her shroud. We have one of James—he died at three—sitting just as natural as life in the rocker.”
“Where’s Rose?” he asked.
“In the kitchen, helping Mrs. Caley. I wanted to ask that nothing be said before Rose of Lettice’s expecting. We’ve brought her up very delicate; and besides there’s a young man paying her attention, it’s not a fitting time—she might take a scare. I had promised to bring Barnwell K. the next time.”
They could hear from without the boy and the hysterical yelping of General Jackson. “That dog won’t bite?” Mrs. Berry worried. Gordon, patently indignant, replied that the General never bit. “Barnwell might cross him,” she answered; and, moving to the door, summoned her offspring. It was the sturdy individual who had burst into a wail at Clare’s funeral, his hair still bristling against a formal application of soap.
“C’m on in, doggy,” he called; “c’m in, Ginral. I wisht I had a doggy like that,” he hung on his mother’s knees lamenting the absence from their household of a General Jackson. “Our ol’ houn’ dog’s nothing,” he asserted.
Lettice, worn by her visitor’s rapid monotone, the stir and clatter of young shoes, remarked petulantly, “Gordon paid two hundred dollars for that single dog; there ought to be something extra to him.”
Mrs. Berry received this item without signal amazement; it was evident that she was prepared to credit any vagaries to the possessors of Pompey Hollidew’s fabulous legacy.
“Just think of that!” she exclaimed mildly; “I’ll chance that dog gets a piece of liver every day.”
Rose, from the door, announced supper. She was an awkward girl of seventeen, with the pallid face and blank brown eyes of her father, and diffident speech. Gordon faced Lettice over her figured red cloth; on one side Barnwell K. sat flanked by his mother and Simeon Caley, on the other Rose sat by an empty chair, the place of the now energetically employed Mrs. Caley. The great, tin pot of coffee rested at Lettice’s hand, and, before Gordon, a portentous platter held three gaunt, brown chickens with brilliant yellow legs stiffly in air. Between these two gastronomic poles was a dish of heaped, quivering poached eggs, the inevitable gravy boat, steaming potatoes and a choice of pies. Gordon dismembered the chickens, and, as the plates circled the table, they accumulated potatoes and gravy and eggs. Barnwell K., through an oversight, was defrauded of the last item, and proceeded to remedy the omission. He thrust his knife into the slippery, poached mass. At best a delicate operation, he erred, eggs slipped, and a thick yellow stream flowed sluggishly to the rim of the plate. His mother met this fault of manner with profuse, disconcerted apologies. She shook him so vigorously that his chair rattled. Simeon Caley lifted the heavy coffee pot for Lettice.
Mrs. Caley’s service was abrupt, efficient; she set down plates of hot bread with a clatter; she rattled the stove lids from without, and complained of General Jackson, faithfully following her every movement.
Sim Caley wielded an adroit knife; but, under the extraordinary pressure of this bountiful repast, Rutherford Berry easily outdistanced him. He consumed such unlimited amounts that he gained the audible displeasure of his wife.
“You’re not a camel,” she truthfully observed, “you don’t have to fill up for a week; you get something home. What Lettice’ll think of you I can’t make out.”
Substantial sections of pie were dispatched. Barnwell K., valiantly endeavoring to emulate his father, struggled manfully; he poked the last piece of crust into his mouth with his fingers. Then, in a shrill aside, he inquired, “Will Aunt Lettice have the baby while we’re here.” His mother’s hand rang like a shot on his face, and he responded instantly with a yell of appalling volume.
Lettice’s cup struck sharply upon its saucer. The delicate Rose flushed appropriately, painfully. The culprit was hauled, incontinently, dolefully wailing, to bed. The three men preserved an embarrassed silence. Finally Gordon said, “Have a cigar.” His brother-in-law responded with alacrity, but Sim preferred his plug tobacco, and Gordon Makimmon twisted a cigarette. Sim and Rutherford were patently uncomfortable amid the formality of the dining room; and, at Gordon’s suggestion, trooped with relief out to the shedlike stable. There they examined critically the two horses. Facing the stalls was an open space, and on boxes and the remnant of a chair they found places and smoked and spat informally.
“You could study a life on women,” Rutherford Berry pronounced, “and never come to any satisfaction. It seems to me the better they be the more sharp-like they get. There’s your sister, Gord—the way she does about the house, and with all the children to tend, is a caution to Dunkards. She does all you could ask and again. But it just seems she can’t be pleasant with it. Now there’s Nickles, next place to me, his old woman’s not worth a pinch of powder, but she is the nicest, easiest spoken body you’d meet in a day on a horse. You mind Effie when she was young, Gord—she just trailed song all over the house, but it wasn’t hardly a year before she got penetrating as a musket. Rose is just like her—she’s all taffy now on that young man, but in a little spell she’ll clamp down on him.”
Gordon had a swift vision of Lettice sharpening with the years; there sounded in prospect on his ear an endless roll of acidulous remarks, accompanied by the fretful whine of children, intensified by Mrs. Caley’s lowering silence. He thought of the change that had overtaken his sister Effie, remarked by her husband, the change from a trim, upright figure to the present stooped form, the turning of that voice brimming with song to a continuous, shrill troubling.
The cool, disdainful countenance of Meta Beggs returned to him: time, he divined, would not mark her in so sorry a fashion; to the last she would remain slimly rounded, graceful; her hands, like magnolia flowers, would never thicken and grow rough. He thought of Paris, of that life which, she said, would civilize him; he tried in vain to form an image of the cafés and little carriages, the bare-necked women drinking champagne. He recalled a burlesque show he had once seen in Stenton, called “The French Widows”; the revealed amplitude of the “widows” had been clad in vivid, stained pink tights; the scene in which they disported with a comic Irishman, a lugubrious Jew, was set with gilded palms, a saloon bar on one side and a tank on the other from which “Venus” rose flatly from a cotton sea. He dismissed that possibility of resemblance—it was too palpably at variance with what Meta Beggs would consider desirable; but, somehow, pink tights and Paris were synonymous in his thoughts. At any rate it was certain to be gay; the women would resemble Nickles’ wife rather than his sister ... than Lettice as she would be in a few years.
He recalled suddenly a neglected rite of hospitality, and from an obscure angle of the shed, produced a gallon jug. Drinking vessels were procured, and a pale, pungent whiskey poured out. Rutherford Berry sputtered and gasped over his glass; Sim Caley absorbed a brimming measure between breaths, without a wink of the eye; Gordon drank inattentively. The ceremony was repeated; a flare of color rose in Berry’s pallid countenance, Sim’s portion apparently evaporated from the glass. The whiskey made no visible impression on Gordon Makimmon. The jug was circulated again, and again. All at once Rutherford became drunk. He rose swaying, attempted to articulate, and fell, half in a stall. Simeon Caley pulled him out, slapped his back with a hard, gnarled palm, but was unable to arouse him from a profound stupor.
“He ain’t right strong,” Sim observed with a trace of contempt, propping the figure in a limp angle against the wall. It was dark now, and he lit the hand lantern, cautiously closing the door. Outside the whippoorwills had begun to call. A determined rattling of pots and pans sounded from the kitchen.
“How much is in her, Gord?” Sim asked.
Gordon Makimmon investigated the jug. “She’s near three quarters full,” he announced.
An expression of profound content settled upon Simeon Caley. The jug went round and round. Gordon grew a shade more punctilious than customary, he wiped the jug’s mouth before passing it to Sim—at the premature retirement of Rutherford the glasses had been discarded as effete; but not a degree of the other’s manner betrayed the influence of his Gargantuan draughts of liquor. The lantern flickered on the sloping, cobwebby roof, on the shaggy horses as they lay clumsily down to rest, on the crumpled figure of Gordon’s sister’s husband.
The potations were suddenly interrupted by a sharp knocking from without. An expression of concern instantly banished Sim’s content; he gazed doubtfully at the jug, then, as Gordon made no move, rose and with marked diffidence proceeded to open the door. The lantern light fell on the gaunt, bitter countenance of his wife framed in imponderable night. Her eyes made liquid gleams in the wavering radiance which, directed at Gordon, seemed to be visible points of hatred.
“It’s ten o’clock,” she said to her husband, “and if you hain’t got enough sense to go to bed I’ll put you.”
“I’m coming right along,” he assured her pacifically; “we were just having a drink around.”
“Mrs. Berry’s asking for her husband,” she added, gazing at that insensate form.
“He must be kind of bad to his stomach,” Sim remarked; “he dropped with nothing ’tall on him.” He bent and picked the other up. Rutherford Berry’s arms hung limply over Sim’s grasp, his feet dragged heavily, in unexpected angles, over the floor. “Coming, Gord?”
Gordon made no reply. He sat intent upon the jug before him. Simeon considerately shut the door. At regular intervals Gordon Makimmon took a long drink. He drank mechanically, without any evidence of desire or pleasure; he resembled a man blindly performing a fatiguing operation in his sleep; he had the fixed, open eyes of a sleep-walker, the precise, unnatural movements. The lantern burned steadily, the horses slept with an audible breathing. Finally the jug was empty; he endeavored to drink twice after that was a fact before discovering it.
He rose stiffly and threw open the door. Dawn was flushing behind the eastern range; the tops of the mountains were thinly visible on the brightening sky. His dwelling, with every window closed, was silvery with dew. He walked slowly, but without faltering, to the porch, and mounted the steps from the sod; the ascent seemed surprisingly steep, long. The door to the dining room was unlocked and he entered; in the thinning gloom he could distinguish the table set as usual, the coffee pot at Lettice’s place glimmering faintly. He turned to the left and passed into their bedroom. The details of the chamber were growing clear: the bed was placed against the farther wall, projecting into the room, its low footboard held between posts that rose slimly dark against the white counterpane beyond; on the right were a window and high chest of drawers, on the left a stand with a china toilet service and a couch covered with sheep skins, roughly tanned and untrimmed. A chair by the bed bore Lettice’s clothes, another at the foot awaited his own. By his side a curtain hung out from the wall, forming a wardrobe.
He vaguely made out the form of Lettice sitting upright in the bed, her hands clasped about her knees.
“Your brother-in-law,” he observed, “is a powerful spindling man.” She made no rejoinder to this, and, after a short pause, he further remarked, “How he gets on sociable I don’t see.”
His wife’s eyes were opened wide, gazing intently into the greying room; not by a sound, a motion, did she show any consciousness of his presence. He was deliberate in his movements, very deliberate, laboriously exact in his mental processes, but they were ordered, logical. It began to annoy him that his wife had made no reply to his pleasantries; it was out of reason; he wasn’t drunk like Rutherford Berry.
“I said,” he pronounced, “that Berry is a nubbin. Didn’t you hear me? haven’t you got an answer to you?”
She sat gazing into nothingness, ignoring him completely.
His resentment changed to anger; he moved to the foot of the bed, where, in his shirt sleeves, he harangued her:
“I want a cheerful wife, one with a song to her, and not a dam’ female elder around the house. A good woman is a—a jewel, but when your goodness gives you a face ache it’s ... it’s something different, it’s a nuisance. I’d almost rather have a wife that wasn’t so good but had some give to her.” He sat down, clutching a heavy shoe which came off suddenly. Lettice was as immobile as the chest of drawers.
“Goddy knows,” he burst out again, “it’s solemn enough around here anyhow with Sim Caley’s old woman like a grave hole, and now you go and get it too.... Berry might put up with it, and Sim’s just fool-hearted, but a regular man wouldn’t abide it, he’d—he’d go to Paris, where the women are civilized and dance all night.” He muttered an unintelligible period about French widows and pink.... “Buried before my time,” he proclaimed. He stood with his head grizzled and harsh above an absurdly flowing nightshirt. In the deepening light Lettice’s countenance seemed thinner than usual, her round, staring eyes were frightened, as though she had seen in the night the visible apparition of the curse of suffering laid upon all birth.
“You look like you’ve taken leave of your wits,” he exclaimed in an accumulated exasperation; “say something.” He leaned across the bed, and, grasping her elbow, shook her. She was as rigid, as unyielding, as the bed posts. Then with a long, slow shudder she turned and buried her head in the pillow.
XIV
Rutherford Berry and Effie, Barnwell K. and the delicate Rose, left after breakfast. Sim drove off behind the sturdy horse and Mrs. Caley was audibly energetic in the kitchen. When Gordon appeared on the porch Lettice was seated in the low rocker that had so often held Clare. She responded in a suppressed voice to her husband’s salutation. “You went and spoiled Effie’s whole visit,” she informed him, “making Rutherford drunk.”
“Why,” he protested, “we never; he just got himself drunk.”
“It was mean anyway—sitting drinking all night in the stable.”
“You’ll say I was drunk too next.”
“It doesn’t matter to you what I say, or what I go through with. I’ve stood more than I rightly ought, more than I’m going to—you must give me one thought in a day. You just act low. Father was self-headed, but he was never real trashy. He never got into fights at those common camp meetings.”
“I threw the stone that hit Buck, didn’t I! I busted his head open, didn’t I! Oh, of course, I’m to blame for it all ... put it on me.”
“Well, how did you get in it? how did you get mixed up with the school-teacher?”
“I got Mrs. Caley to thank for this, and I’ll thank her.” He hotly recited the obvious aspect of his connection at the camp meeting with Meta Beggs.
“It sounds all right as far as it goes,” she retorted; “but I’ll chance there’s a good deal more; I’ll chance you had it made up to meet her there. You would never have gone for any other reason; I don’t believe you have been to a revival for twenty years. You had it made up between you. And that Miss Beggs is too smart for you, she’ll fool you all over the mountain. I don’t like her either, and I don’t want you to give her the satisfaction of making up to you. It’s what she’d like—laughing at my back!”
“Miss Beggs never spoke any harm of you.”
She made a gesture, hopeless, impatient, at his innocence. Her resentment burst out again, “Why does she want to speak to you—another woman’s husband? Anybody knows it’s low down. When did you see her? What did you talk about?”
“Of course when I see her coming I ought to go ’round by South Fork,” he replied, heavily sarcastic.
“Well, you don’t have to stand and talk like I warrant you do. There’s something deep about her look.”
“I’ve taken care of myself for some years, and I guess I can keep on.”
“You can if you want to go to ruin, like you were when I married you, and you only had one shirt to your name.”
“Throw it up to me. It’s no wonder a man drinks here, he’s got more to forget than to think about.” He stepped from the porch, preparing to leave.
“Wait!” she commanded; “I’ll put up with being left, and having you drink all night with the beasts, and fooling my money away, but,” her voice rose and her eyes burned over dark shadows, “I won’t put up with another woman, I won’t put up with that thin thing making over my husband. I won’t! I won’t! do you understand that.... I—I can’t.”
He went around the corner of the house with her last words ringing in his ears, kicking angrily at the rough sod. His house, between Mrs. Caley’s glum silence and Lettice’s ceaseless complaining, was becoming uninhabitable. And, as Rutherford Berry had pointed out, the latter would only increase, sharpen, with the years. Lettice was a good wife, she was not like Nickles’ old woman, worthless but the pleasantest body you’d meet in a day on a horse. She was not like Meta Beggs. He had never seen any other like the latter. Lettice had said that she would fool him all over the mountain ... but not him, not Gordon Makimmon, he thought complacently.
He was well versed in the ways of women; he would not go a step that he did not intend, understand. This business of Paris, for example: he might tell Meta Beggs that he’d go, and then, at—say, Norfolk, he would change his mind. Anyhow that was a plan worth considering. He recalled the school-teacher’s level, penetrating gaze; she was as smart as Lettice had divined; he would have difficulty in fooling her. He felt obscurely that any step taken with her would prove irrevocable.
Lettice kept at him and at him; after the baby arrived it would be no better; there would be others; he regarded a succession of such periods, a succession of babies, with marked disfavor. He had been detached for so long from the restraints of commonplace, reputable relationships that they grew increasingly irksome, they chafed the old, established freedom of morals and action. Meta Beggs blew into fresh flame the embers of dying years. And yet, as he had told her by the stream, an involuntary lassitude, a new stiffness, had fallen upon his desire. Although his marriage was burdensome it was an accomplished fact; Lettice’s wishes, her quality of steadfastness, exerted their influence upon him.
They operated now to increase his resentment; they formed an almost detached disapproval situated within his own breast, a criticism of his thoughts, his emotions, against which he vainly raged, setting himself pointedly in its defiance.
He lounged past the Courthouse, past Peterman’s hotel, to the post-office. It was a small frame structure, with the wing of the postmaster’s residence extending from the back. At the right of the entrance was a small show window holding two watches with shut, chased silver lids, and a small pasteboard box lined with faded olive-colored plush containing two plated nut crackers and six picks. The postmaster was the local jeweller. Within, beyond the window which gave access to the governmental activities a glass case rested on the counter. It was filled with an assortment of trinkets—rings with large, highly-colored stones, wedding bands, gold pins and bangles engraved with women’s flowery names; and, laid by itself, a necklace of looped seed pearls.
The latter captured Gordon’s attention, it was so pale, and yet, at the same time, so suggestive of elusive colors; it was so slender and graceful, so finished, that it irresistibly recalled the person of Meta Beggs.
“Let’s see that string of pearls,” he requested.
The postmaster laid it on top of the glass case. “The jobber sent it up by accident,” he explained; “I can’t see anything to it—for the price; it’s too slimsy. I wouldn’t advise it, Gord. Why, for thirty dollars, and that’s what it costs—diamond clasp, you can get a string of fish skin pearls, experts can’t tell ’em from original, as big as your finger end that would go twice about the neck and then hang some.”
The necklace slipped coldly through Gordon Makimmon’s hand; it reminded him of a small, pearly snake with a diamond head; it increasingly reminded him of Meta Beggs. She loved jewelry. If she had kissed him for a pair of silk stockings—
“I think I’ll take it,” he decided slowly; “I don’t know if I’ve got her right here in my pants.”
“Now, Gordon,” the other heartily reassured him, “whenever you like. Of course it’s a fine article—all strung on gold wire. I won’t be surprised but Lettice’ll think it’s elegant. I often wondered why you didn’t stop in lately and look over my stock; ladies put a lot on such little trifles.”
Meta Beggs would have to wear it under her dress in Greenstream, he realized; perhaps she had better not wear it at all until she was out of the valley. He would clasp the pearls about that smooth, round throat.... The postmaster wrapped the pearls into a small, square package, talking voluminously. A new driver of the Stenton stage had lost a mail bag, he had lamed a horse—a satisfactory driver had not been discovered since Gordon ... left. He had heard of a law restraining the sale of patent medicines, of Snibbs’ Mixture, and what the local drinkers would do, already deprived of the more legitimate forms of spirituous refreshment, was difficult to say. The postmaster predicted they would take to “dope.” Then there was to be a sap-boiling over on the western mountain, to-morrow night, at old man Entriken’s.... Everybody had been invited; if the weather was ugly it would take place the first clear spell.
Sap-boilings, Gordon knew, held late in spring in the maple groves, lasted all night. Baskets of food were driven to the scene; the fires under the great, iron kettles were kept replenished; everybody stirred the bubbling sap, ate, gabbled; the young people even danced on the grass.
It was a romantic ceremonial: the unusual hours of its celebration, the mystery of night in close groves lit by the stars temporarily unsettled life from its prosaic, arduous journey toward the inevitable, blind termination. It moved the thoughts into unwonted fantasy, the heart to new, unguessed possibilities. For that night established values, life-long habits, negations, prudence, were set at naught.
Gordon wondered whether Meta Beggs would be there? He would like to be with her at a sap-boiling, in the sooty shadows. With the necklace of seed pearls in his pocket he walked over the street revolving in his mind the problem of asking her to accompany him. He could not hope to hide it from Lettice; and, to-day, he had recognized a note of finality in his wife’s voice with regard to the school-teacher. If he went with Meta Beggs serious trouble would ensue in his home ... he wished to avoid any actual outbreak with Lettice. He remembered, tardily, her condition; it would be dangerous for her. He might, conceivably, at some time or another, go away; even to Paris—yet, at that latter thought, the wish, almost the necessity, of a return lingered at the back of his brain—but he would not goad her into an explosion of misery and temper. He acknowledged to himself, with a faint glow of pride, that he was not anxious to encounter Lettice Makimmon’s full displeasure; she possessed the capability of tenacity, an iron-like resolve, inherited from old Pompey.
In the outcome his difficulty was unexpectedly solved for him—a large farm wagon, with boards temporarily laid from side to side, was to convey a quantity of people, and among them Meta Beggs, from the village to the sap-boiling. He learned this from the idlers before theBugleoffice. Sitting with his chair canted against that dingy wooden façade he thought of the school-teacher and the coming night. It was late afternoon of the day on which he had bought the necklace. The small package still rested in his pocket. It had been his intention to give the pearls to Meta Beggs before he returned to his home, but no opportunity had offered. After school she had passed the seated row of men, uneasily stirring their hats in response to her collected greeting; and, with Mrs. Peterman, gone into the body of the hotel. Gordon could not follow her. Anyhow, the presentation could be made with better effect in the obscurity of the maples to-morrow night ... her gratitude could have fuller sweep.
He made his way finally, reluctantly, home. There, alone in the bedroom, he swiftly withdrew the necklace from its pasteboard box, and dropped it into the pocket of a coat hanging in the curtained wardrobe. It was, he noted, the checked suit with the red thread, the one he would wear to the sap-boiling. He heard approaching footsteps, and, hastily crumpling the paper and small box into a compact unit, he flung it into a corner of the wardrobe, behind a heap of linen.
XV
It was comparatively a short distance to the elder Entriken’s farm, and, rather than invent a laborious explanation of the horse’s absence all night, Gordon walked. Numberless excuses offered him plausible reason for his own delayed return home.—It was better to say nothing to Lettice of his actual intention; she was already suspicious of his sudden interest in local gatherings.
The road beyond Greenstream village crossed a brook and mounted by sharp turns the western range. The day had faded to amethyst, pale in the translucent vault of the sky, deepening in the valley; the plum-colored smoke of evening fires ascended in tenuous columns to an incredible height. He walked rapidly, with the oppressed heart that had lately grown familiar, the sense of imminence, the feeling of advancing into a vague, towering shadow. That last sensation was at once new and familiar—where before had he been conscious of a vast, indefinable peril, blacker than night, looming implacably before him? He summoned his old hardihood and advanced over the still, bosky side of the mountain.
He descended, beyond the ridge, into the fact of evening accomplished. At the base of the range he crossed a softly-swelling expanse of close-cropped grass, skirted a bog and troop of naked-seeming birches, and came in view of the maple grove toward which he was bound.
The maple trees towered compact and majestic over the level sod, holding their massed foliage black against the green sky. Low in the right the new moon hung like a gold fillet above the odorous, crepuscular earth; and, at the base of the trees, the fires were like bubbling, crimson sealing wax poured into the deeper, indigo gloom.
As Gordon advanced he saw a number of vehicles, from which the horses had been taken and tied to an improvised railing. Figures moved darkly against the flames; beyond familiar features flickered like partial, painted masks on the night. In the grove the sap, stirred in the great iron kettles, kept up a constant, choking minor; the smooth trunks of the trees swept up from the unsteady radiance into the obscurity of invisible branches looped with silver strings of stars.
Blurred forms moved everywhere. He searched for Meta Beggs. She was not by the kettles of sap; beyond the trees, by covered baskets of provisions lanterns made a saffron pool of light, but she was not there. He felt in his pocket the cool, sinuous necklace. Finally he found her; or, rather, she slipped illusively into his contracted field of vision.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” she reproached him.
She wore a red dress, purple in the night, with a narrow, black velvet ribband pinned about her throat; her straw hat was bound in red. She gained an extraordinary potency from the dark; it almost seemed to Gordon Makimmon that her skin had a luminous quality; he could see her pointed hands distinctly, and her small, cold face. All her dresses strained about her provocative body, an emphasis rather than a covering of her slim maturity. They drifted, without further speech, out of the circles of wavering light, into the obscurity beyond.
They sat, resting against a hillock of sod, facing the sinking visible rim of the moon. From the bog the frogs sounded like a continuously and lightly-struck xylophone. Meta Beggs shivered.
“I’ll go mad here,” she declared, “in this—this nothingness. Look—the moon dropping into wilderness; other lucky people are watching it disappear behind great houses and gardens; women in the arms of their lovers are watching it through silk curtains.”
He gazed critically over the valley, the mountains, into the sky scarfed by night. “I’m used to it,” he returned; “it doesn’t bother me like it does you. Some people even like it. A man who came here from the city to die of lung trouble sat for weeks looking up Greenstream valley; he couldn’t get enough morning or evening.”
“But I don’t want to die, I want to live. I’m going to live, too; I’ve decided—”
“What?”
“To stop teaching. When the term’s over, in a few weeks, I’m going to take the money I make and go to New York. It will be just enough to get me there and buy me a pretty hat, with a few dollars over. I am going with those into a café and get a bottle of champagne, and pick out the man with the best clothes. I’ll tell him I’m a poor school-teacher from the South who came to New York to meet a man who promised to marry me, but who had not kept his word. I’ll tell him that I’m good—I can, you know; no man has ever fooled anything out of me—and that I bought wine to get the courage to kill myself.”
“It sounds right smart,” he admitted; “you can do it too, you can lie like hell. But,” he added importantly, “I don’t know that I will let you.” This, he assured himself, was purely experimental. He had decided nothing; his course in the future was hidden from him absolutely. He thought discontentedly of his home, of the imagined long, dun vista of years.
He was now, he realized dimly, at the crucial point of his existence: with Meta Beggs, in that world of which Paris was the prefigurement, he might still wring from life a measure of the sharp pleasures of tempestuous youth and manhood; he might still dance to the piping of the senses. With Lettice in Greenstream he would rapidly sink into the dullness of increasing age.
He was vaguely conscious of the baseness of the mere weighing of such a choice; but he was engulfed in his overmastering egotism; his sense of obligation was dulled by the supreme selfishness of a lifetime, of a lifetime of unbridled temper and appetite, of a swaggering self-esteem which the remorseless operation of fate had ignored, had passed indifferently by, leaving him in complete ignorance of the terrible and grim possibilities of human mischance.
He had suffered at the loss of his dwelling, but principally it had been his pride that had borne the wound; Clare’s death had affected him finally as the arbitrary removal of a sentimental object for his care, on which to lavish the gifts of his large generosity.
He sat revolving in his mind the choice of paths which seemed to open for his decision in such different directions, which seemed to await the simple ordering of his footsteps as he chose. The night deepened to its darkest hour; the moon, in obedience to its automatic, fixed course, had vanished behind the mountains; the frogs, out of their slime, raised their shrill plaint of life in death.
XVI
“I’ve got something for you,” Gordon said suddenly.
“I hope it’s pretty,” she replied, leaning forward, resting against his shoulder.
He brought from his pocket the slender, looped necklace of seed pearls. It was faintly visible in the dark, the diamond clasp made a small glint. She took it eagerly from him. “I’ll light a match,” he told her. In the minute, orange radiance the pearls shimmered in her fingers.
“But it’s wonderful!” she exclaimed, unable to suppress her surprise at his unerring choice; “it’s exactly right. Have you been to Stenton? however could you get this here?”
“Oh, I know a few things,” he assured her; “I got an eye. Let me put it on for you.” He took it from her, and his hands fumbled about her smooth throat. He required a long time to fasten it. The intoxication of the subtlety of her sex welled from hand to head. He kissed her still lips until he ceased from sheer lack of breath. He drew her close to him, with an arm about her pliant waist.
“I’ve been thinking of you in those pretty clothes,” he admitted.
“All lace and webby pink silk and ribbands underneath,” she reminded him; “but only for you, and satin trains and diamonds for the others.”
Her words winged like little flames into his imagination. He whispered in her ear, “Richmond.” She stiffened in his arms as if that single word had the power to freeze her. “We’ll see, we’ll see,” he added hastily, fearing to dispel her complacency. “Paris is a long way ... a man could never come back.”
“I didn’t know you were so cautious,” she challenged; “I thought you were bolder—that’s your reputation in Greenstream, a bad one for a man or woman to cross.”
“So I’ve been,” he acknowledged; “I told you I wouldn’t have hesitated a while back.”
“What is holding you now—your wife? She would soon get over it. She’s only a girl, she hasn’t had enough experience to hold a man. Besides, she must know by now that you only married her for money; she must know you don’t care for her; women always find out.”
The bald, incontestable statement of his reason for marrying Lettice disconcerted him. He had never made the acknowledgment of putting it into words to himself, and no one else had openly guessed, had dared....
Suddenly it appeared to him in the light of a possible act of cowardice—Lettice, a girl, blinded by affection. And, equally, it was undeniably true that he did not care for her ... he did not care for her? that realization too carried a slight sting. But neither did he care for Meta Beggs; something different attracted him to the latter; she—she brought him out, that was it; she ministered to his pleasure, his desire, his—
“Don’t,” she said firmly.
His balked feelings overmastered him, and he disregarded her prohibition. She slipped from his grasp as lithely as the serpentine pearls had run through his fingers.
“Haven’t you learned,” she demanded, standing, “that I can’t be bought with silk stockings or a little necklace? Or, perhaps, you are cheap, and I have been entirely wrong.... I’m going to get something to eat, with the people who brought me from Greenstream. I will be back here in two hours, but it will be for the last time. You must decide one way or the other while I am gone. You may stay or leave; I’m going to leave. Remember—no more penny kisses, no more meetings like this; it must be all or nothing. Some man will take me to Paris, have me.” She dissolved against the dark of the maple grove.
XVII
But, curiously, sitting alone, he gave little consideration to the decision, immediate and irrevocable, which confronted him. His thoughts evaded, defied, him, retreated into night-like obscurity, returned burdened with trivial and unexpected details of memory. It grew colder, the rich monotone of mountain and sky changed to an impenetrable, ugly density above which the constellations wheeled without color. His back was toward the maple grove; the removed, disembodied voices mingled in a sound not more intelligible than the chorus of frogs. It occurred to him suddenly that, perhaps, in a week, a month, he might not be in Greenstream, nor in the mountains, but with the white body of Meta Beggs in the midst of one of those vast, fabulous cities the lust of which possessed her so utterly.... Or she would be gone.
He thought instinctively of the little cemetery on the slope above the village. One by one that rocky patch was absorbing family and familiars. Life appeared to be a stumbling procession winding through Greenstream over the rise and sinking into that gaping, insatiable chasm. He was conscious of an invisible force propelling him into that sorry parade, toward those unpretentious stones marked with the shibboleth of names and dates. A desperate anxiety to evade this fate set his soul cowering in its fatal mask of clay. This, he realized, was unadulterated, childish fear, and he angrily aroused himself from its stifling influence.
Meta Beggs would be back soon; she would require an answer to her resolve ... all or nothing. The heat, chilled by the night and loneliness, faded a little from his blood. She demanded a great deal—a man could never return. He bitterly cursed his indecision. He became aware of a pervading weariness, a stiffness from his prolonged contact with the earth, and he rose, moved about. His legs were as rigid, as painful, as an old man’s; he had been leaning on his elbow, and the arm was dead to the fingers. The nerves pricked and jerked in infinitesimal, fiery agonies. He swung his arms, stamped his feet, aiding his stagnating circulation. The frogs ceased their complaint abruptly; the concerted jangle of voices in the grove rose and fell. The replenished fires poured their energy over the broad bottoms of the sap kettles.
The night faded.
The change, at first, was imperceptible: as always the easterly mountains grow visible against a lighter sky. The foliage of the maples, stripped of the looping stars, took the form of individual branches brightening from black to green. There was a stir of dim figures about the impatient horses. Meta Beggs came swiftly to him. He could see her face plainly now, and was surprised at its strained, anxious expression. Her hand closed upon his arm, she drew him to her:
“Which?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” he dully replied.
“Save me,” she implored; “take me away.” She whispered maddeningly in his ear, summoning the lust within him, the clamor in his brain, the throbbing in his throat, his wrists. He shut his eyes, and, when he opened them, the dawn had arrived. It forced her from him. Her gown changed to vivid red; about her throat the graceful pearls were faintly iridescent.
“I don’t know,” he repeated wearily.
Over her shoulder he saw a buggy approaching across the grass. It was disconcertingly familiar, until he recognized, beyond any doubt, that it was his own. Sim, he assured himself, had learned of his presence at the sap-boiling, and, in passing, had stopped to fetch him home. But there was no man in the buggy ... only two women. Meta Beggs, intercepting his intent gaze, turned and followed it to its goal ... Gordon saw now that Mrs. Caley was driving, and by her side ... Lettice! Lettice—riding over the rough field, over the dark stony roads, when now, so soon ... in her condition ... it was insanity. Simeon Caley’s wife should never have allowed it.
The horse, stolidly walking over the sod, stopped before them. Mrs. Caley held a rein in either hand, her head, framed in a rusty black bonnet and strings, was as dark, as immobile as iron. Lettice gathered her shawl tightly about her shoulders; she had on a white waist and her head was bare. She descended clumsily from the buggy and walked slowly up to Gordon. Her face was older than he had ever seen it, and pinched; in one hand she grasped a small pasteboard box.