ONE
Frequentlya well-used, high buggy was seen on the streets of the town, a vehicle of a slightly unfamiliar type, bought perhaps in some remote market. It would turn slowly around before the county offices and stand all afternoon under the shade of the tree at the doorway, a privileged conveyance. It was drawn by a well-conditioned horse, a tall bay that would step daintily along the stones of the street, and turn the wheels carefully. The owner, Mr. Tom Singleton, would buy easily at the stores, careless of bargains, asking for the best. Sometimes he would talk all afternoon with Anthony Bell, sitting on the gallery of the white house or under the elm tree. If Tom Singleton’s wife, Miss Doe, were present she would give great care to her leave-taking. She would mount to the buggy with ceremonious ease and seat herself, smiling at the accomplished act, scarcely belonging to the event, her smile lingering until the need for good-byes obliterated her inner vision of herself. She was a sister to Anthony Bell. Her name, Theodosia, had been shortened to Doe. The Singleton farm was ten miles from the town, northwest, down the valley.
Sometimes Mr. Tom would come to town in a carriagedrawn by two fine brown mules. Then he would take Anthony Bell and the two girls, Theodosia and Annie, back to the farm for a visit.
The two mules trotted down the Quincy pike in the bright widely-spread glow of a late morning, the waves of heat rolling up from the macadam and turning about among the cooler undulations that flowed from the tall corn of the fields. Eight miles from the town and the carriage left the Quincy pike and entered a crossroad, and here the mules walked slowly under the roadside trees. The stone wall at the right was rich with moss and shadows. Two miles along this way, and Tom Singleton’s gate was set into the stone wall. Beyond, and the mules trotted evenly up a gravel road under American elms that were widely placed, the driveway leading to the farmhouse. Pines, lindens, locusts, tulip poplars and elms grew about the house in a pleasant confusion. The fox hounds, great mongrel beasts, walked in and out over the portico. From somewhere toward the rear a great jack, the breeding stallion, was braying at the arrivals.
“You can take the west room,” Miss Doe said, standing with her hands folded before her body when she welcomed her guests, when she had kissed each little girl as was her duty. “Anthony, he can take the east room. Lucas will carry up the valises.”
Upstairs Theodosia showed Annie the high bed in which they were to sleep, and in the east room another bed, as high, for their grandfather. They would leanout the window to look far over the west hills where other farms lay stretched over the rolling earth, white-fenced barnyards and remote houses about which old trees had gathered. The avenue down to the stone wall and the white gate turned lightly with its elm trees, the way they had come. They would look at the photographs of former Bells and Trotters and Montfords on the chamber walls, and would gaze at a chromo print of a ship standing above a great sea, caught suspended upon a wave. Once they explored all the upper rooms, opening all the doors, and finding a staircase to the attic, they went there to peer out at the land of the farms, thinking that they could see a hundred miles away. Annie was six years old. She would look at Theodosia for confirmation of each new wonder, as if she would say, “And is it so? Is it real?”
Theodosia saw her aunt’s vague hostility to her grandfather where it was carefully shawled under her function as hostess. The aunt would mount the stairs to see that all had been made neat in the rooms above, the visit an ostentation, reserved until the guests were at hand.
A negro girl, Prudie, cooked the meals, passing quickly from the cooking range to the tables, to the pantry. Her face shaded from one brown to another and the sweat ran in the neat wrinkles across her neck. She seemed neither glad nor sorry the guests had come. Miss Doe would give her pans of flour, sugar, or meal, or cuts of ham, all from the locked storeroom. “Be sureto take out a plenty,” she would say at the door, the keys in her fingers. When the uncle and the grandfather were away for a meal those left at home were served in the breakfast-room behind the dining-room, and Prudie instead of Lucas carried in the food. One day soon after the visit began Miss Doe sent the children to carry a message to a cabin back in the farm. Theodosia knew the way, for she had been for a walk in that direction with her uncle. There were clouds in the sky threatening a shower, and the aunt told the little girls to take the old cotton umbrella from the back porch.
They walked across the pasture and climbed over a gate into a cornfield, and it was pleasant to walk under the umbrella, treading on the shadow that moved with them down the field. The path was well beaten, for Prudie lived in the cabin with her mother, Aunt Deesie, and with Uncle Red. The cabin stood in a cove under some trees, a place where two hills began. Aunt Deesie was washing clothes in the yard, and all the lines were filled with white things hung to dry. A great kettle of boiling clothes steamed over a wood fire on the ground. The air about was pleasantly cool from the wooded hills behind the house, and a pleasant odor of lye soap spread about when the boiling kettle was dipped of its garments. Aunt Deesie was tall and strong, and she moved slowly among the tubs and kettles, keeping an even gait. On a quilt safely removed from the fire a small baby lay asleep, and two other small children ranabout the yard or clung to Aunt Deesie’s skirt when Theodosia gave her message. These were Prudie’s children.
“Yes’m,” Aunt Deesie said. “Tell your Aunt Doe she didn’t send me down no blues. To clear the white clo’s. Tell your Aunt Doe all the blues is gone, the bluen.”
Theodosia stood about in the cool of Aunt Deesie’s yard, fascinated by the work that went forward and by the sweet smell of the lye, by the smell of Aunt Deesie’s warm body leaning over the tubs. The baby waked and squirmed on the quilt, working its arms and legs about, and Aunt Deesie stopped her washing to pin a fresh rag about its hips, trying to hide what she did because the rag was old and without a hem. Theodosia saw her slip the soiled rag under the wash-bench and she was fascinated by her shame. The baby was dark brown, a boy child, and the two that ran about under Aunt Deesie’s feet were girls, their heads a tight nap of thin wool. Aunt Deesie would push them gently aside and move from tub to tub, her voice gentle as she worked.
“Why don’t you-all chil’n talk to the white gals. White gals come to see you-all.”
The little negroes would stare with strange dark faces, their mouths going up and down as they chewed at their fingers. Theodosia would watch every move they made, curious, following them, or she would go back to the quilt to watch the baby. She would watchtheir small dresses, their brown legs, their moving gestures, and she would ask them questions to pretend to an interest in their replies, but her pleasure was in her own sense of superiority and loathing, in a delicate nausea experienced when she knelt near the baby’s quilt.
“Katie, why don’t you pick up the baby’s gum rattler offen the ground and give it to him into his hand,” Aunt Deesie said. “Pick up the baby’s rattler, Katie.”
The child gave the rattle to the baby, and in the act Theodosia knew a sweet loathing of the small dark infant and knew that she herself could not be brought to touch it or to touch Katie. She knew the half-pleasant disgust felt for the young of another kind, a remote species. Their acts sent little stabs of joy over her, sickly stabs of pleasant contempt and pride.
Theweek at the farm was always full of enhanced being. She would see her grandfather under the wooden pillars of the portico and see him in his joyous encounters with his old friend. Away from home he flowered into some newer intensity, and his rusty clothes were elegant against the rough running landscape. The office of host became Tom Singleton well, and Anthony as guest responded. Doe Singleton’s hostility to her brother did not penetrate his joy or reduce it or shape it in any part. She scarcely existed for it at all, for sheseemed unrelated to everything present. The dinner waited until she came, Lucas going and coming, bringing something more, seeming to spread the time of preparation about until she appeared. When she arrived she came hurrying through the door and sat at the head of the board. She seemed to be sitting too far from the table and neglecting her own ease. She handled the cups without routine or precision, but she poured each cup herself and gave it to Lucas, who conveyed it to its place. She would ask Anthony how many spoons of sugar he took, seeming to forget each time that the amount had been established.
“You’re welcome to all the sugar you want. Pass Mr. Anthony the sugar bowl,” she would say to Lucas. “And get Mr. Tom the sharp knife. That’s not the right knife. They say sugar is bad. For grown people, it’s said.” She would not let her hostility extend to any controversy over the food. Sitting after the serving was done, she seemed unrelated to her knife and fork, to her cup, even when her hand lifted it to her mouth to drink.
“When I go next time I think I’ll take nothing along but Blix and Tim and Roscoe,” Tom Singleton said. “I never cared for a big set-to of dogs when I hunt. Give me three or four good dogs. What’s the use?”
“Blix is the smartest dog in the whole lot,” Anthony said. “That dog Blix has got first-rate brains inside his skull. One time....”
“Brains! He’s the stupidest one in the whole pack,the way I look at it,” Miss Doe said. “Blix hasn’t got one grain of sense. Since he was a pup he’s been the stupidest one in that litter.”
“We’ll go down after dinner and look over the yearlen mules,” Tom Singleton said. “I just want to hear what you’ll say about my yearlens.” He was glad in his guest, unaffectedly gracious, the sweetness of his smile giving a flavor to every word he spoke. He was childishly nervous in his care of each hospitality. “As pretty a bunch of mules as ever was. But I just want your opinion. You’re a prime judge of stock, that I well know.”
Like his friend, Anthony, he seemed unaware of Miss Doe’s denials. Their entire unconsciousness of this led Theodosia to distrust her own sense of the house, the furniture, the shading trees in the garden as seen from the windows of the dining-room. Lucas walked slowly about the table, his passing timed to some unreality that colored her whole vision. Her joy in being there spread widely about her and suffused her knowledge of her aunt’s way until she was scarcely sure that she was there at all, scarcely sure that Annie was real or that her grandfather was of the same flesh she had always known him to be. She could touch Annie but was she the same, she questioned, that she had touched before and was she herself present? Her joy in the farm and her pain in her aunt could not interfuse. The talk, as something extra and beyond her reach, flowed about the dogs, the coming elections, or it woulddrift away to market prices or to books they had read, to the gossip of the town.
“Downing, he’s the best man. I aim to vote for the best man this time,” Tom Singleton said.
Lucas walked evenly about with a dish of some scalloped food, passing it from place to place. Miss Doe spoke then, acquiescing; Downing was, she said, a good man, a good clever man. The county could see what he had in him when he was magistrate. The trees outside moved lightly in the air, green moving against blue in a motion which flowed continually, never returning, some unfamiliar tree which settled a new rhythm into Theodosia’s mind, and a passion to know all of this strange thing exalted her being as she glanced again toward the window where the boughs stood across a meadow and a field and passed thus to the blue of the horizon.
“And Bond in his way is all right,” Anthony said. “For the place he’s expected to fill. And Johns is a right clever man now. Honest, he is, and fair-spoken.”
“I never yet saw any good in old Johns,” Miss Doe said, “and Bond, he’s not one whit better. If that’s what you call honest! I know a tale would make his honesty blush, and you know it too, Anthony Bell.”
It seemed to Theodosia then that the air would split asunder with a great crash, the flaw centering in her aunt’s hands and extending two ways across the solid of the room. She glanced at her uncle in distress and apprehension. His smile then was open and tender, andhe reached across and touched her hand with his palm while he finished saying something to her grandfather, and then he said:
“What does Ladybug want? I know what’ll be good for her. Doe, le’s pour some more cream in her milk, outen the cream pitcher. Take this glass around to Miss Doe, Lucas. She needs it to grow on. Growen like a weed now, Ladybug is. What does Little Lady want on her plate? Doe, Little Lady’s got not one thing on her plate.”
Thememories of his college sat lightly upon his mind, guests indulgently entertained when they were given any recognition. He had never overtaken the attitude of learning. Anthony would bring some book to the portico and read aloud, or he would say, “Do you remember Thomas, old Thomas?” A professor in some college he would mean. “English letters.... He loved it too well to teach it well....” The aunt would sit with her hands folded in her lap, a smile that scarcely belonged to her lips hovering over the bent hands while the man’s voice intoned the sumptuous lines. She had heard him read all this before, but she lent herself gracefully to the act, and Tom Singleton lowered his head, remembering, or he would glance up at Anthony’s face when some new guest arrived and was joyously greeted and housed for the time in elegant chambers. The reading:
Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours.
Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours.
Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours.
Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours.
Anthony Bell’s hair was thinly grizzled. His hands were familiar upon the book, his voice well-used to the words of the poets. Vertical lines lay parallel across his cheeks. His mouth was thin-lipped and shut down at the corners with drooping plumes, feathered lines that frayed out upon the skin.
Tramping the slant winds on highWith golden-sandalled feet that glow....
Tramping the slant winds on highWith golden-sandalled feet that glow....
Tramping the slant winds on highWith golden-sandalled feet that glow....
Tramping the slant winds on high
With golden-sandalled feet that glow....
Theodosia thought sometimes, when he read aloud, seeing his moving mouth running perpetually along the channels of song, that he must know some eternals, some truths, some ways unknown to her, and she would yearn with an inner sob of longing that he might impart this thing to her, whatever it might be. It was known to his body rather, to his delicate hands bent lovingly at the edges of a book, his sitting posture, his mouth that rolled out the elegant words and was unafraid of any word or saying. She would sit quietly among these, her elders, trying to understand, gaining a rich exaltation where the words revealed their splendor even if they withheld their thought. She was eleven years old.
These are Jove’s tempest-walking houndsWhom he gluts on groans and blood....
These are Jove’s tempest-walking houndsWhom he gluts on groans and blood....
These are Jove’s tempest-walking houndsWhom he gluts on groans and blood....
These are Jove’s tempest-walking hounds
Whom he gluts on groans and blood....
When the old man spoke suddenly after a period of quiet a tiny spray of spittle would sometimes fly from his ill-balanced teeth. In rest his thin-lipped mouth bentdownward at the corners and imposed its angles upon the lower cheeks. She did not know it then, but his mouth had been closed by sorrow. “By God, Shelley was no jackass,” he said, snapping shut the book.
Annie had brought the paper dolls to the doorsill, hinting for play. Theodosia joined her there and began to stand the long, slim ladies in rows against the house, half gravely, half in frolic, wavering between Annie and the men, her grave way belonging to Annie. The hour had been rich and dark with the voices from the poem. Now Annie’s soft child-speech fell high and thin about the matters of the paper images of women and girls, the chirping of some familiar bird.
“I wish you-all had brought the fiddle,” Tom said. “I’m just sick for a little fiddle music myself. Tony, you got no call to come down here without you bring along your music. Next time you come you got to play a double quantity just because you forgot this time to fetch it along.”
“Too many people sit around and do nothing all day as ’tis,” Miss Doe said.
“I recall how you used to play Heart Bowed Down and Lucy Lammermoor. ‘Farewell, farewell my own true love.’ I recall one night ...”
“It’s Theodosia plays the fiddle now,” Anthony said. “I give over now to the young hoss. Plays, egad, yes she does. Takes right after it.”
Theodosia turned to the paper dolls with grave willingness and preoccupation. Her blood flowed warmlybecause of the praise, spreading over her like a soft mantle.
Thegirls went for a walk with their uncle one bright mid-morning, going to a tobacco barn which stood down in a creek valley beyond two fields. Of the dogs, Blix and Roscoe were allowed, and they ran smelling at the path, quietly humble when they were called. The other dogs were locked into the old apple house, the place where they were kept when they were not wanted running about, where they were seasoned for the hunt.
Some abundance within herself would not let Theodosia acquiesce completely to the hour, to any hour or to any experience, as being sufficient. She kept on the way a pleasant sense of her grandfather sitting reading under the pine before the house, knowing a curious joy in his absence and enjoying the walk more intensely in that she enjoyed it for him as well as for herself. The corn in the field was very high, near its maturing. Tom Singleton wondered and delighted in the height of the corn. His pride in the high corn seemed then to touch her vague distrust of pride and delight, and she smiled with him happily, swinging his hand.
“Some of it fifteen feet high, Ladybug, if it’s one inch. Have to tear the shock down to pluck it.”
A humming came from one end of the cornfield, audible as they passed, and there myriads of bees wereworking over the corn tassels, taking the pollen of the corn. A walnut tree glistened in the light. The edges of the leaves made crystals on the green bank of the tree, sharp facets of brightness on green leaves. Theodosia did not know the name of this hard, brilliant tree, but she knew some response to the scintillating surfaces and lined edges where the sun met the leaves.
“This-here, it’s a walnut tree. A fine old walnut,” he said. “And what’s this, Ladybug?”
“That’s the queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief,” he said when she could not reply. The name was itself a bright altar-cloth for some shrine in a valley, and Theodosia grew in all ways to comprehend the beauty of the weed, but insufficiency grew likewise, moving outward beyond every comprehended meaning and pleasure.
Some buzzards were soaring over the stream, lying out on the air with long wings, searching the water-holes for fowls that might come there to drink. They seemed rather to rest on the air and to turn about for the mere happiness of turning. Near the creek a pool of water, fed by some spring, had been banked about with earth to make a pond, the place where the mules drank when the creek was low and the water-holes foul. Four light sorrel horses stood by the fence, one of them a large glossy mare with a half-grown mule colt beside her, the colt sorrel and brilliant like the mother. It seemed very foolish in its fright, edging close to its mother’s side, afraid even of little Annie when she rannear to gather the plush, aster-like flowers that grew near the creek.
In the field the laborers were bending over the tobacco plants, breaking out the top of each and trimming away undesired growth. They lifted their backs from the labor to watch the passing and to greet the owner of the field. At the barn beyond the field Tom left the girls in the shade of the doorway while he looked at the walls of the building, or he climbed high into the upper structure, talking happily to himself as he mounted. It was a good barn, he said. It would do. A little work on the roof and a few nails to tighten the loose scantlings. Then they went back along the tobacco field and passed the shy sorrel colt again.
“Oh, it’s a good morning,” he said. “I someways like a day just like this, just enough heat so’s you know it’s summer. Cool breezes shiften in and out of the thicket and a mockbird over towards the hill a-singen once in a little while. A prime good day. I don’t know why it is but seems like I always liked a hilltop. We’ll go up this-here fenceline and around home by the orchard to see if the early harvests are all gone offen the trees. That’s a summer apple fit for a queen to eat.”
They accepted his joy in them as their due and saw it blend with his joy in the morning. It had been but a little while since Annie had thought that if she darkened her eyes with her hand the sun went out and all the earth was in darkness. Suddenly a redbird made a solitary peal of song, a rich modulation from the threehigh whistled notes to the low throaty altos of the decline where the singing darkened to meet the brush and undergrowth of the thicket. The song set the hilltop clear in a high relief.
“I sometimes plow this-here, but mainly I leave it in pasture grass.” Beyond the fence the earth rolled gently up to a summit that held a few scattered trees, an oak and two or three thorns. “And on the top, right there on the summit, is where I expect to be buried, right there. Off to the left of the oak but on the summit like. From that-there spot you can see—it’s curious now—you can see the whole farm, every last field. You can look down on the house and the barns and right down this-here valley to the creek. It’s curious. There’s where I expect to be buried some day. I always like family buryen-grounds. I expect to lay down my bones right there on this hilltop.”
The hill-crest rolled in a fair curve against the sky between the limits of the trees, but it slipped beyond the trees again and sank away into the curving field, and Theodosia felt a quick pleasure in it as the place where he would be buried, and felt it as the summit of the farm that looked down upon all the fields and the meanderings of the creek and the life of the barns, on the singing mockingbird and the goodness of the day. Her eagerness ran forward and longed to have him buried there, anticipated his entombment on the brow of the hill he had chosen, so that she could scarcely wait for the consummation of his wish. She looked at himhappily and smiled, and he took her hand in some unconscious delight, and thus they walked up the fence path.
Theodosiawould watch the long brown hand with its yellow shadowed nails when Lucas passed a plate of some food at her side. While she helped herself to a serving her eyes would cling to the hand where it folded at the edge of the plate, the thumb near the food, and she would remember the baby on the quilt in Aunt Deesie’s yard. An exquisite disgust of the hand would make the food taste doubly sweet in her mouth when the hand was withdrawn.
“Well, Ladybug,” Tom Singleton said when they had passed to the portico, “what’s the best thing in the world?”
She had never thought before that one thing might be the best, superior to all other things, but when her uncle placed the question at once it became clear that among all the betters there must be one supreme best. She was bewildered in her pursuit of some reply, wanting to find the true answer, and she stared at the ground or at the wooden pillar, penetrating the query with the whole of her strength. Her uncle had turned to some other matter, he was talking with Anthony now—the foot-and-mouth disease, Henry Watterson, the tobacco pool in the dark district, Mnemosyne, the secret of themind, the price of sugar mules, and back to the pool again. The vine that spread over the brick walls of the house made a great plane of flowing green that turned with the turning wall and lapped over the south front and reached to the north gable. It had come from somewhere far away; her attention did not cling to the place as Anthony repeated it with wonder. The main stem of the vine grew on the south side of the house under the window of the room where the aunt and uncle lived, the room across the hall from the parlor, but the longest reach of it, at the farthest end of the west wall, was a hundred feet or more from the root. It was as if it were a great tree, flattened and attenuated to a vine and bent about a house, and her grandfather and uncle were two children in their simple delight in the great growth. Doe had brought it from some place far away a long while ago. From Virginia. She had come back from a visit there and had brought the vine wrapped in a bit of earth, delicately rooted in soil. She was proud now of the vine and of herself as its author.
“See, Tony,” she said. “See.”
They walked about the house to the north wall and traced the creeper to its last and most remote tendril high at the eaves above the north attic window, calling, “See here!”
“See, Tony,” she said. “A hundred feet and over since it touched ground.”
They seemed sweetly childish in their pleasure inthe vine and Theodosia looked at them with wonder and detachment. The best thing in the world teased her for a reply. She saw that her aunt had cared for the vine and had become actual and present in her pride of it. She had brought it from a long distance and had cared for it along the way in the train, giving it water. It had come from the wall of some relative in Virginia. She turned to Mnemosyne, for the beautiful word came again and again to her ear once her grandfather had named it. He had told her of it before, Memory, the mother of all, the seed of the mind. It was a curious question, the query her uncle had made, as simple as breath; she thought that all the people in the world must know the answer or must be in pursuit of the answer to a question of such importance—the best thing in the world. She wondered if Mnemosyne might not be the answer, the best, and her mind swam dizzily in a sense of vaguely remembered beautiful words, their ideas ill-shaped, words remembered more for their beauty of tone than for their thought—asphodel, Mytilene. But there were other beautiful things, other best things. They eluded her, unnamed, receding down a long vista into her inner sight. She recalled particular occasions when the surrounding world had seemed good, a good place in which to be. Admiring words from others, caresses, gifts, all the people singing in the church—in the seed of each happening an insufficiency. There was never enough.
They were on the portico again, the mottled shadows of the boughs falling on their faces. The voices became sharp and firm, pleasantly outlined, immense, governed by some relation to the vine on the wall and its great reach from the soil of the ground. In the moment all the people present became actors in a pageant and all the words they said seemed deeply significant as if they were proclaiming themselves now in their real and permanent, unillusory aspect, in their true cause and relation. Annie lay in the doorway with a picture book. Anthony Bell was talking, his hand upraised. Lucas came from the kitchen garden with a respectful message, affected embarrassment, his head bowed, the proper approach. Their voices stood with length and breadth, sharply edged.
Everyday or two Theodosia would ask her aunt if she and Annie might go to see Aunt Deesie. The walk across the pasture and the cornfield was long, but the pleasure of Aunt Deesie’s yard was sweet. Aunt Deesie ironed the clothes, heating the irons on the open embers of the fire that burned in the yard. The baby always lay on the quilt and the small girls stood bashfully about. One day Theodosia took them some of the candy Tom Singleton had brought from the store. She could scarcely endure the joy of her loathing as she touched their fingers in giving them the sweets.
Near the end of the week Miss Doe went away in the buggy early in the afternoon and Tom and Anthony played checkers under the pine tree. The dogs walked about sleepily in the bright air, which was of the radiance of early autumn, or they slept in the shaded doorway of the barn. The day moved slowly and her stay at the farm seemed to Theodosia to be bent or deflected from its purposes. Little Annie wanted to play with the dolls, but Theodosia grew weary of them. The kitchen was closed; there was no drama being done there; no one was feeding the stock at the barns or fastening the dogs into the apple house. She wandered back to the pine tree where the game of checkers went happily along, but it could not entertain her. She whispered to Annie as they went behind the house in their search for something to do.
“We’ll go to see Aunt Deesie.”
They took the cotton umbrella from the back porch although there were no clouds. The memory of the first visit should tinge this adventure. They crossed the pasture in the brilliant sun and entered the cornfield, but when they were scarcely started along the path by the corn Annie said that she was thirsty and that she must have a drink, and she cried. She could not go farther without a drink, she said. Theodosia urged her on and promised a drink at Aunt Deesie’s cabin. When they left the cornfield and came near the cove a strange aspect of the place accosted them, for it was closed and still. All the tubs were neatly piled beside the door,their bottoms turned up, and the clotheslines were gone. They shouted from the small gate but the house was empty. Aunt Deesie and the children were gone. The place was frightful crouched under its loneliness.
Annie cried again and said that she was thirsty and Theodosia went into the wooded hill behind the cabin to try to find the spring, but she did not look for a path and her search led them far up the hillside but gave them nothing. It was cool under the trees and Annie forgot her need for the water. Presently they saw two small animals, and Annie ran after them, calling them her little cats. The small beasts ran close to the ground and kept together. They were strange creatures and they made the wooded hill seem strange to Theodosia, as if she had never seen it before. Annie herself seemed strange, having forgotten her thirst now in an ecstasy of pleasure over the little animals, which she tried to catch with her hands.
“They’re little doggies,” she said. “They’re my little cats.”
Theodosia tried to catch them too, and she closed her hands upon them once, but they were elusive and quick although they seemed unable to run very fast. They ran along, tumbling at each other, keeping together. Theodosia knelt quickly and spread her skirt before them, but they turned aside and ran away. Then suddenly they went into a hollow stump through a little hole at the side, and Theodosia poked the umbrella into the hole and Annie called, “Come out, little doggies,” buta cat-like hiss came from the stump and when Theodosia jerked the umbrella away a quick paw shot out and a snarl followed. The girls ran away from the stump, afraid of it, and presently they went back toward the cornfield. The sun was low now and they hurried across the pasture. They had not asked leave to go.
At the end of the pasture where the fodder stalks were scattered near the feeding ricks two of the dogs came toward them, Blix and Lady, and in an instant Theodosia knew that they were not coming for play. Blix and Lady and Roscoe were coming fast upon them, full speed now, rushing down the littered pasture, their eyes set and their jaws opened, their backs a straight line. Theodosia screamed and caught Annie’s hand as she ran, and the dogs were upon them, five beasts now. She dropped the umbrella and turned screaming toward the barn, dragging Annie, and Uncle Red came from the cattle shed and shouted something. The dogs stopped at the umbrella and set upon it with their teeth and tore it to pieces at once, but the delay gave Theodosia time to come near the barn before they set upon her again. All the dogs were out now, a dozen or more, some of them worrying the torn pieces of the umbrella and some in a pack around the girls. Uncle Red beat them away with a rail and carried Annie to the house, for she was weak with terror.
“Um—m! Skunk!” he said. “That-there skunk. Has you-all youngones been handlen a skunk or a polecat maybe?”
Theodosia remembered the terror and fury in the eyes of the dogs and all through the evening she sat quietly with a book she tried to read. Annie cried out in her sleep many times during the night. The next day the dogs were locked in the apple house, but Annie would not go beyond the doorway unless she held her grandfather’s hand. Soon afterward the week came to an end and the visit was over.
Theladies of the town played a game with cards, a simple game that did not prevent conversation. On the day of the card party there was a faint flutter in the town, the ladies riding by in phaëtons and traps, wearing their best. If Charlotte Bell entertained the group she would, at some time during the party, sit at the piano with Theodosia standing near, and they would play some simple part of an overture or a popular air. The Bell house was a white frame structure to which several additions had been built, a long portico or gallery running almost the entire length of the front giving a pleasant open space above stairs as well as below where one might take the air. On summer evenings Charlotte would sit for a while on the upper gallery with the two girls and sing, sitting apart from the house where Horace Bell came and went lightly, never troubling to hide his destination whether it was a gambling party with men or an evening with somewoman. Seen once at dusk as she sat on the upper gallery, her head against the bank of vines, her two little girls grouped close about her to sing, she had looked like the pitying madonna diverted by hate. She had wanted a rightly-placed hearth. Now she played much with Theodosia, their simple airs arising above the quiet of the street. Horace, departing, would wave them a gay farewell, a greeting that was all of himself, lightly given, or once in a while he would stop briefly beside the piano and join his great voice to the song, booming the words across the fiddle notes, taking a pride and a delight in his great running voice that emasculated the piano. When he had made his point he would leave in a thunder of laughter, waving a hasty good-bye.
When Annie was seven years old she sickened of a fatal child malady and died. The funeral was held in the church, and Luce wept when she saw the Bells weeping as they sat near together at the front of the church in the space respectfully left for the mourners, seeing them huddled together and set apart by death. The minister preached of the kingdom of heaven, the world to come, and of becoming as a little child. A lady, Mrs. Bent, sang a song while the organ hummed softly. She was full-breasted and maternal, and as she sang she looked as if she only a moment before had held a child in her arms, and the words of the song seemed truer as she sang them, truer than the sayings of the minister to which they lent truth. Her own children sat with their father in a pew at the side, andthe words of the song came very gently across the church as she looked as if some child might easily creep into her arms.
I think when I read that sweet story of old,Of Jesus while here among men,How He took little children as lambs to His fold....
I think when I read that sweet story of old,Of Jesus while here among men,How He took little children as lambs to His fold....
I think when I read that sweet story of old,Of Jesus while here among men,How He took little children as lambs to His fold....
I think when I read that sweet story of old,
Of Jesus while here among men,
How He took little children as lambs to His fold....
The words were of her own, coming from her soft bosom and her strong round arms. The Bells, Anthony, Charlotte, Horace, and Theodosia, sat huddled together to weep, remote from the others of the church, sitting forward. They could not hear the words of the song as Miss May Bent sang it, as she sent it from her warm, kind body, they being too near to the whole of the event. In Charlotte Bell was the song itself, waiting. She could not hear the singing. Theodosia heard it as a bright myth having some celestial, candle-lit meaning she could not understand.
Theodosiawas delicately modeled with strong slender limbs, swift in a game, quick-witted at play. Her red-brown hair hung in a long braid or was twined braided about her head. Her fingers were small and thin, bent strangely about a fiddle, were quick among the fiddle strings, weighted with music. Little Annie’s grave was marked now by a small white stone in the graveyard, a stone which read only the name,ANNIE, in hard lettersset deeply into the marble. To see Theodosia was to think of the child and to wonder if she had forgotten. As she ran down the ball field where the boys and girls played together, as swift as the best of the girls, the act would question if she had forgotten. As she bent her fingers over the fiddle strings and pressed them down in cunning ways, her knowing fingers keen with music, the act again would test her memory of the small girl.
The people of the town were assembled at the chapel hall of the Seminary to hear the school choruses and solo pieces, the last day of the term. The piano had been tuned and its dark squat legs had been polished, an effort made to remove all blemishes and all dust. There were pieces recited and some bits of dialogue given. When Theodosia had finished playing, Anthony Bell went forward and lifted her down from the platform and kissed her, proud of her applause. “Her playen, it’s not so much,” voices in the throng said. “I’ve heard better fiddle-playen.” Hostile voices, and then another, “But fine for a child only fourteen, right good for a child now.” “Right good for anybody, I’d say. I only wish I could do half as well.” “But it sounds like exercises.” “It’s classical music. It all sounds like that, classical music does.” “Classical music all sounds alike.” “Give her another encore. It pleases old Mr. Bell.” “It pleases him too much. He’s a vain old man.” “But do it no matter. It’s right sweet the way he takes on over Dosia’s playen. He’s given her his fiddle and they say it’s one of the finest in the whole state. It’s afamous fiddle, they say. Give another encore.” “He says he aims to send her off to learn from a high teacher, away off somewheres, and he may do it.” “It would take a sight of money to do that.” “They may manage it somehow. Give another encore.” “She’s a-goen to play again. He may manage it.” “I for one hope so.” “She’s right sweet with her fiddle up to her chin like that.” “She’s as sweet as a picture. I just love to sit here and watch her.”
Charlotte Belldied one cold season when the town was numb and bewildered with the unaccustomed freezing. Few could realize her loss. When the mild days reappeared she was somehow gone from the gallery.
Old Anthony Bell walked the garden path in the early morning in a soiled smoking-jacket, stiff-legged, his eyes dim. Theodosia went to school at the Seminary, or she practised at the fiddle half the day, exploring music without guidance. She studied harmony at the school and assembled a small group there to play quartets, her quick skill dominating. She grew tall in a year. Her rounded breasts were up-tilted—two small graceful cups—as if they would offer drink to some spirit of the air. She ran swiftly from one thing to the next, the books in her grandfather’s cases, the fiddle, the games with the other girls. “This,” her grandfather said to her, “is the family tree of the Montfordsand the Trotters. There’s a collection of family traditions written into the blank book on the second shelf. My mother was a Montford, and don’t you forget that, Miss.”
She read the notes in the book of records swiftly one hour while she waited for a dance at the tobacco warehouse. She had learned to kiss with her first lover, but she had learned to kiss more deeply with her second, one of the boys at the Seminary, Charles Montgomery. In the kitchen at the back of the house she would bake a cake or make a pudding to augment Aunt Bet’s plain dinner, the cook book propped up on the music rack she had set in the middle of the floor. Her slender legs leaped quickly from the pantry to the table, and she made emphases unconsciously with fiddle gestures, a long wooden spoon in her right hand. “The whites of five eggs, it says. Have we got five, Aunt Bet? Here’s one says four whole eggs. All right, Aunt Bet. You fire up. Gentle at first, then big later on. Here we go.”
The movements in the streets and along the roads were becoming more swift, and there were fewer horses in the pastures. “The horse business, it’s ruined, plumb ruined, or soon will be,” Anthony Bell said. Theodosia quarreled with Charles after slapping his face one night in early spring.
“You don’t know what you want,” he said.
“Maybe so,” she said. She could feel her anger rising and spreading within, a subtle fuel in her body mountingto a swift burning in her face. “Maybe so, but I know what I don’t want.”
Charles went away from the town at some time after that and did not return. Anthony was palsied in his hands, but he would stop in his stroll along the path and beat the ground sharply with his cane, tapping on the bricks or on the boards under his feet. “Oh, tut!” he would say. Sometimes Theodosia would see him in his mantle of old age as he stepped uncertainly along, and a pang of pity, self-pity, fear, and apprehension would assail her. Or, seeing his shrunken form, his feet questioning the path for a place, she herself would walk there and she would see through her present self as through a swift glass, quickly adjusted for vision, as would say, “See, bent spine, eyes fixed, gestures squared at their turnings, the up-and-down jog of age.” But her life ran upon itself eagerly and there were other things to see.
He would begin to sing as formerly, letting his voice fall away to a whisper when it failed in its tone. “Oh, tut!” he would say, returning to mumble his old knowledge, reiterating himself endlessly. “Yet hath the shepherd boy at some times raised his rustic reed to rhymes more rumbling than rural, more rumbling than rural.” Theodosia had won a diploma at the Seminary. She was a tall girl now, fragile but quick, swift at the girls’ sports. “She must study to play the fiddle. She’s a master fiddler,” the old man said, stepping more briskly over the boards. “With rhymes more rumblingthan rural.... She must. She gets her music two ways, Charlotte and the Trotters. Old Matthew Trotter was a master musicianer in his day, and had red hair.... Yet hath the shepherd boy.... I’ll see to the matter myself.... A small matter, a few paltry dollars to buy instruction for a girl of talent.... Oh, tut! What became of the farmland, sixteen hundred broad acres, I had? Well, I’ll say, ask her aunt Doe for the small sum. A rich farm, she’s got, and not a chick or a child to spend on. ‘Madam, your one namesake, your only godchild, has a rare musical gift. Madam, are you aware that your namesake has a bit of a musical talent? Has it ever occurred to you to give the child a gift, a year in the metropolis maybe? Madam! Your humble servant. Yours very truly, Anthony Bell. Give the child a big red apple. A peach plucked from the peach orchard. Send the child the first peach of the season. Namesake! For God’s sake! Has it ever occurred to you, Madam, to do something you might call substantial for the baby, your namesake? If your husband, Tom Singleton, had lived it would occur to him. To reward his wife’s namesake. God knows it would!’ ... Oh tut!... What became of the farmland, my patrimony? ‘Young Man, your only daughter.’ ... God’s sake!... As well talk to a jacksnipe. ‘Horace, your daughter approaches her maturity lacken a few miserable pennies to buy her a bit of a finish in music.’ I’ll see to the matter myself.”