Her coördinate, too, was constitutionally apathetic. She was a bovine creature who positively refused to get ruffled over obstacles, criticisms, or fate. Her name was Maida Jones. Two large pans of buns had burned. Mary Louise, seeking to fix the responsibility, had failed in doing so and was wracked at the prospect of frequently recurring waste. Responsibility to be effective must be undivided. Maida had only laughed. And Mary Louise removed herself from the scene of her defeat and stood in the doorway of the tea room proper and stared bleakly across a vista of deserted tables at a languid and heat-ridden thoroughfare. It was going to be a "hit-or-miss" proposition, a careless, slipshod affair—this tea room—unless she did something to prevent it—and it was too hot. That was what was the matter. It was too hot. She brushed back the hair from her face and slumped. Behind her came the clatter of dishes. And then someone laughed, a coarse, raucous laugh. Mary Louise shuddered. The post-office clock boomed six and she suddenly realized that the day was over. There would be no belated custom, for the service stopped at six and the room was empty. Irritation gave way to discouragement. The day's receipts had been slim indeed. Just then she noticed an automobile roll up to the curb outside, and a man got out. She saw him start for the door, and for a moment she pondered whether she would accomodate him or turn him away. He opened the door. It was Claybrook.
"Hullo," he said, catching sight of her. "Afraid I'd be too late. Come take a ride."
That was exactly what she wanted to do. "I can't," she said. "I have to wait till they get through back there," indicating with a jerk of the head those uncertain regions which had become suddenly quiet.
"Oh, let them take care of themselves. What is help for if you have to watch it every minute? Come on. It's too hot to work any longer, anyway."
She yielded. First she spent a moment or two before a mirror, tidying herself up, feeling as she did so a little thrill of anticipation. And then she stuck her head through the kitchen door and announced that she was leaving. "Don't burn the whole place up, Maida," she cautioned with a laugh as she caught sight of her sitting, humped forward in a kitchen chair, fat elbows resting on a table, placidly viewing a vast clutter of dishes that had not yet been put away.
Mary Louise escaped and clambered into the waiting car, into the vacant seat beside the driver.
They whirled away, turned a corner sharply, and soon were leaving the narrow, restricted streets of the down-town district which had been pulsing and glowering with heat all day. She caught a look at Claybrook in the seat beside her. He was as fresh and cool as though he had not been exposed to the weather at all. Instinctively she reached a restraining hand to her hair. It was blowing in wild disarray. A sudden stretch of stately old houses sitting well back on either side of the street, partly hidden by double rows of trees, caused her fresh doubts as to the fitness of her attire. In her shirtwaist and skirt she felt like an intruder.
A man from the sidewalk bowed to them. So busy was she with her hat that she could not see who it was.
"There goes Wilkes," said Claybrook. "You remember Wilkes out at Camp? Had charge of the Post Exchange."
She hoped she had escaped recognition. As if for protection she slipped farther down in the seat and was less troubled by the wind. The neighbourhood through which they were passing was becoming even more fashionable, and aristocratic nurse-maids with their aristocratic charges, alike in white, starchy, frilly things, were dotting the sidewalks on either side of the street, supplying a live motif to a prospect that might otherwise seem too orderly and remote. The lawns were beautiful, close cropped and freshly green, and frequent fountains sent a delightful mist across the pavement even to the street. It was all very cool and refreshing. She began to see where certain phases of city life might prove to be quite pleasant. The modern fleshpots may seem alluring not alone in retrospect.
At length they passed from the asphalt paving on to a roadway of yellow-red gravel, and up ahead, Mary Louise could see a stretch of open country and beyond, a ridge of misty blue hills. There was a double line of young maples on either side of the boulevard and the fresh young leaves were rustling vigorously in the evening breeze as they passed. Claybrook settled down in his seat us they gained the boundary between paving and roadway with what seemed almost like a sigh of relief. He turned upon his companion a satisfied smile, meanwhile cutting down their speed appreciably.
"This is something like it," he said. "Pretty hot down your way to-day?"
"Terrible," admitted Mary Louise. "I don't believe those walls will get cool again before Christmas."
He smiled without answering, being occupied at the moment with a little difficulty in the traffic. Directly he was free.
"Rare old boy—the other night," he said, still watching the road.
For a moment she did not catch the reference.
"Down in the Rathskeller," he added.
A hot rush of confusion struck her and she made no reply, but he went on:
"I've often wondered what these people were like fifty years ago—living on top of the world, best farm land anywhere, fine old homes, lots of servants—nothing to do but enjoy life. Let it slip away from them, didn't they? Must not have known what they had." He had relaxed and was driving comfortably. And as though wrapped in a mist of his own musing he continued, his eyes fixed on the road before him, "I've often thought that if I ever got to the point where I could afford it I would get me one of those old places—lot of land—stock it up well, fix up the house. I'd like to leave something like that to my family." He chuckled. "They might not appreciate it as much as I do, however."
"They might," she replied. "They might have just as hard a time trying to keep it as—as we have. Conditions might change again in the next fifty years."
He turned and smiled at her. "Hadn't thought of that." The crow's feet were thick about his eyes. "Who was the boy?—the one you were with the other night."
Mary Louise flushed in spite of herself. "Joe—Joe Hooper. You've heard me speak of him."
"Oh, yes. Lives in Bloomfield, doesn't he?"
"He did. Works here in town now—out at Bromley's."
He made no further reply, but somehow she felt an unuttered conviction, on the part of the man there beside her, of Joe's loss of heritage. And yet a certain compunction prevented her from making any explanation—that it was not Joe's fault. There was a sort of sacred inviolability about it. A hot little wave of feeling swept over her. She had treated Joe miserably. She had yielded to her feelings like a child. She ought to have been good sport enough to hide what she had felt. But she hadn't. She was a snob. She had hoped to conceal that she was not their sort—Joe and Mr. Mosby. In a sense, she had been going back on her own people. As if she were trying to pass them—trying to keep up with the procession. And yet that was exactly what she was doing. But to show it!
The straight level path of the boulevard came abruptly to an end and the road diverged to the left and mounted swiftly, skirting the incline of a white, chalky hill densely covered with a tangle of scrub oak, buckeye, cedar, and much underbrush. The slanting rays of the sun were shut off abruptly as by a shutter and they rolled between stretches of shade that were mistily fragrant and cool. Even the upper air currents in the spaces above the road, up toward the sky, seemed shadowy and unharried by the fierceness of the passing sunlight. The motor settled down to the business of climbing, and once Claybrook turned to her with a look of appreciation.
"Some park, this."
She hardly heard him, so intent was she on watching the road and the occasional glimpses, through the tangle, of declivitous stretches strewn with trunks of fallen trees and rank vegetation, down which the wind went wandering with vague whisperings. They had been suddenly transported out of the world of people into the world of hopes. The city had been left leagues behind.
They made a quick, sharp turn to the right, the road almost doubling back upon itself, and there was a steep grade for a short distance, during which time Mary Louise caught herself leaning forward and holding her breath in an instinctive impulse to help the labouring car. And then they gained the top. Before them lay a tableland of many acres thickly covered with trees. The grass, in the open spaces between, was sparse, and there was much moss and lichen and drifts of withered leaves, dried by the sun of more than one summer; and here and there in the northern shadow of some gnarled trunk and in dipping hollows the leaves were packed close in a damp and moulding compress. Great streamers of wild grape-vine hung precariously from weary limbs and swayed to and fro gently in the wind that came mounting up the slope from the west and went dipping away to the eastward, leaving a soft, shuddering wake. It was as if a mellower spirit hovered about the old giant knob resting there, watching with its head all venerably gray, though the sunlight ere it faded was elfishly splashing the shadow with golden green, and little flecks of crimson and orange came flashing through the tangle of branches as they passed, making light mockery. And then the trees suddenly opened and they came out upon a flat bare knoll, where the road, making a loop, signified that its journey was over. Around the outside edge was a wall of loose stones from which the hill sloped steeply in all directions, and before them, stretching away for miles, lay the country through which they had passed, till soft and green and gray in the distance. A huge smoke pall, its feathery top drifting slowly eastward, hung over a cup-shaped depression, and below it stretched a darker line, from which occasionally emerged a solitary stack, or above which a church spire, caught by an errant ray from the setting sun, would flash a momentary beacon. Slowly the mantle seemed to fade and mingle with the twilight, and even as they watched, a light flashed out, a single pin-prick of a light, and then another and another, as night, gathering in its intensity, swept over the valley, until it was met by an ever-increasing challenge. It was like a myriad host of fairy fire-flies, each diamond pointed, flickering, blinking, never still. And there settled on the under side of the smoke pall a lurid glow as of banked fires, waiting for the work of another day.
Mary Louise breathed a soft little sigh.
"It does get next to one, some way, doesn't it?" he said.
Rather to her thoughts she replied aloud: "To think of all those people living there, almost in the grasp of the hand. Think of them moving, scurrying about among those lights. It makes one feel it would be so easy to do things for them, move them about at one's will—from here. And yet——" She was silent a moment, thinking. "And yet even to be able to raise one's head above it all, to see—and be seen! Well——"
"That's what I mean to do." He spoke almost as if she were not there, and his voice, which was as though disembodied, and jarring a bit with its resonance, brought her back to the present.
"It's a hard thing to do and I've come to think it takes sometimes a lifetime, but—it can be done." He had turned and she could feel his warm breath in her ear. There was a note of assurance in his words and, as she watched, a change came over the scene before her and it all seemed like a huge graying blanket punched full of tiny, bright flat holes. Something had receded, escaped back into the darkness behind it all.
She made no reply.
"I wanted to tell you and it's about as good a time as any. You may be needing some help. It's not all so easy down there. And—well, if you need any help—make the way any easier for you—why, don't hesitate to call on me."
"That's good of you," she replied, and wondered at the lack of warmth in her own voice. "Perhaps I shall." But she could not help feeling that in some way she had seen what she had seen—alone.
They sat a little longer in silence, and then Mary Louise straightened in her seat and called to him briskly:
"Wemustbe going. Why, it must be eight o'clock. What have I been thinking of?"
"That's what I'd like to know," he laughed.
"Come, take me home, man. Maida will think—all sorts of things."
"You don't have to answer to her, do you?"
"No. But let's go."
He stooped over and switched on the lights and immediately two long, ghostly streamers went searching out across the wall and rested lightly in the tops of some ragged trees on the slopes, bringing them grotesquely into focus, while myriads of tiny motes danced down the twin circular paths off into space. Directly there was a roar of the engine, with an occasional sputtering cough—for the night air was cool—and then Claybrook's voice again:
"There really isn't any great hurry. We can stop at the Gardens at the foot of the hill and get a bite to eat."
"No, not to-night. Thank you ever so much."
"But why not? We needn't hurry then. It's a pretty good place." He seemed insistent, waiting, stooped there over the steering wheel.
"No," she said again. "I must get home. Maida will be waiting for me and I've some work to do. And besides, I don't want to go anywhere looking like this. I'm a fright, I know."
He muttered something to himself as he threw the car into gear, and they went whirling around the circle of the road in reckless disregard for the menace of the rock wall. It was pitch dark as they made their way across the level top of the knob, with occasional shadows of spectral limbs projecting their silhouettes against the sky, and once the jagged edge of a trailing creeper swished close to her head as they whirled along. Above the noise of the motor there was not a sound. Claybrook suddenly laughed:
"Some of the niggers down at the mill say this old hill is haunted."
She clung to the hand-grip of her seat, her mind filled with a tangle of impressions, with a shrinking from the sepulchral depths below them, and an effort to recall in detail that vision of the city.
"I have to shake it off before I can be any more good. It's like being moon-struck." He took another sharp curve at reckless speed, the tires grinding on the gravel, the brakes screeching.
Mary Louise held her breath for a moment and waited. And then she touched him lightly on the elbow. "Oh, please!"
He laughed and for a short time was more careful, slowing down at the curves which came every hundred yards or so. "Feels like they're coming after me. Like to get down to the level road again." He made a quick swerve to avoid a pointed rock. "Must have been great, driving to the top of this with a horse and buggy. Not for me."
And they were off again as swiftly as before. Twice they grazed the projecting roots of trees on the outside edge of the road by the scantiest of margins and once a board in a culvert snapped ominously as they swept across it, and Claybrook laughed aloud. And Mary Louise, wide-eyed, sat in a frenzy of preparedness, her gaze glued to the winding, ever-dipping road in fascination.
Suddenly a shadow seemed to leap out upon them, out of the darkness—the shadow of a man. There was a moment's hideous clamour of the brakes, a sickening swerve of the machine, a man's shout, a sudden instant's flash of gleaming trunks brought sharply into focus, and then a slow, gradual letting down of her side of the car, inch by inch. She grasped the arm beside her to keep from falling, and then all was still.
A moment later she could see that they were balanced on the edge of a culvert; to her right was the darkness; up ahead, the lights were glaring impotently off into space. And then she realized that an arm was encircling her waist in an iron grip and that the motor was still thrumming and that someone was running around in front of the car and then peering off down the slope where they tipped so perilously. These things came to her in just that order. And directly she was on the road, trembling just a little and feeling very helpless, and Claybrook's voice somewhere over in the darkness was giving directions, sharp, irritated. To her knowledge he had not uttered a word during it all. She could hear them somewhere over there crashing about in the underbrush, an occasional word, an occasional suppressed shout. Very unreal it was, with the stars shining faintly overhead, the black shadows all around, and those two shafts of light poking out into nowhere. She walked back to the inside edge of the road and sat down, and bye-and-bye she felt quieter. It had been such a childishly foolish thing to do and so useless. The minutes passed and she began to wonder what time it was getting to be. And then she felt a growing irritation and suddenly she was hungry. All she could hear was the threshing about of the brush and the sound of heavy dragging. Once she went around the rear of the car and peered down. She could dimly see that the rear wheel had passed completely over the brink, and below it lay a pile of sticks and brush. A little more and they might have rolled over, down into the darkness. She returned to her seat by the side of the road.
Just like a little boy he was, she thought—reckless, irresponsible, "full of the fullness of living." And his tone, when she had spoken of the dead-level of life in the city below them and the problem of raising one's head—"That's what I mean to do"—had seemed so like the confident tones of a child on the threshold of life. Were we all like that, after all—lifted up for a moment so that we could see; blundering forward the next, blindly, into pitfalls of our own making? His very offer of help, there on the hilltop, had been naïve, and yet she was troubled by it. Why was he thrusting his stick into the still waters of her life? And yet she had felt very much alone and in need of the realization of another presence.
And then suddenly she realized why and how it was she liked him. She liked to think of him as standing by, liked the realization of his strength, his confidence. He was big, he was good-looking, and there was a tonic freshness about him. He was good as a friend. And he needed watching over, needed guiding, himself. That made it all the better. And then she felt hungry again. But she was no longer irritated.
The roar of the motor roused her from her musings. There was a ripping, grinding noise and she could see the outline of the car move, sink back, and then lurch forward again. There was another whirring and grinding and then Claybrook's triumphant shout. She rose to her feet and walked over to him. They had succeeded. The car was standing, all four wheels on the hard, level surface, the engine racing like mad.
"Hop in," Claybrook called to her a bit shortly.
She complied and he reached forward to throw in the gear, when the man walked around in front of the car and held up a restraining hand. She saw then, for the first time, that he was a park policeman.
"Let's have your name before you go, friend," he said.
"But what for? There's no harm done. I thought I made it all right with you?"
"You did—with me. But then you're pretty dangerous on these roads and I'll have to turn you in so that they can be looking out for you."
Claybrook sullenly complied. And then, throwing the car into gear, they slipped quickly out of sight. After they had rounded the curve, he turned suddenly to Mary Louise. "That's a new one on me. I tipped him for helping me get the car out, and then he turns and takes my name. You can't count on anybody these days—ever since the war."
"I think he has a sense of humour," she replied, laughing softly.
As they passed the road-house he suggested once again that they stop for a bite to eat, but upon her refusal he made no comment. The night was no longer clear; gathering clouds on the western horizon were gradually spreading across the sky, and as they crossed the line on to the asphalt paving again, it began to rain, a few scattering drops. At which she teased him about his altered driving. He laughed but made no answer.
But the shower did not come and directly they drew up at the curb outside her apartment.
"Don't stop," she said. "Don't bother. You must get in before the rain." She felt singularly good humoured.
"I'm sorry I made such a mess of things," he began clumsily, "and—and—you were pretty decent about it." It was a concession, but she could see he was rankled about something.
"I hope they won't fine you too much," she called after him as he started off. And then she walked thoughtfully into the hallway and stepped into the elevator and was carried swiftly upward.
"You've got to make allowances for them all," she decided mentally. "Yes," she added force to that decision, half aloud.
"What d'you say, Miss Mac?" inquired the elevator boy.
"I said, 'Seventh,'" she smiled at him.
She was met at the door by Maida with her hair in curl papers and a most prodigious yawning and rubbing of eyes. The ideal night life for Maida was that spent comfortably in bed.
"Thought you'd eloped," she ventured sleepily and then turned and shuffled off to the inner room. At the door she called over her shoulder, "There's a note someone left for you—about two hours ago."
Mary Louise looked on the table and, lying on a pile of magazines and newspaper supplements, was a plain, thin, white envelope. She picked it up and looked at it curiously, wondering from whom it could be. There was no address. She tore it open and read, and as she read she reached over one hand and steadied herself against the table. The note was from Joe, and laconic:
"They phoned me this evening your Aunt Susie had
had another stroke. They said you had better come."
That was all it said. There was no expression of regret. There was no offer of help. She had a sudden rush of anxiety. But behind the anxious feeling was one of wonder and a tiny one of hurt. She laid the letter down upon the table and slowly and thoughtfully took off her hat.
Thingshad changed for Joe. It was as though he had been told that he had not amounted to much, that what he had come from had not amounted to much, and that in all probability he would never amount to much. Just how much had actually been suggested to him, and how much he had supplied out of the whole cloth of his imagination it is doubtful if even he could have said.
It was not the weather certainly. For the morning of the second day of May opened wide with promise. There was a lightness about the air and a clarity as Joe emerged from his lodging house from the ready-made breakfast which they doled out as though breakfasts were just like linen and towels and soap. The day would have made countless insinuations to a normal man. To some, it said golf; to others, a motor trip out to where a plethora of such bounties as it suggested might be available; and to others less fortunate—why, there was the "Ferry" just opening to hesitant crowds, with its band stand, its scenic railway, its forty-five minutes of vaudeville that was anything but mentally exhausting. It was an eloquent morning. But Joe turned a deaf ear.
His walk to the factory lay for a short distance along a pretty little park where, when the weather was proper, squirrels and babies and numerous other smaller, crawly things were wont to mingle together in democratic unconcern. But to him, this morning, it was just so much pavement.
He punched the time clock viciously as he passed through the office lobby and barely escaped collision with Mr. Boner as he turned the corner of the partition en route to his desk. Mr. Boner merely grunted. He bore in his hand a sheaf of orders for the mailing desk. He believed in getting an early start.
Joe sat down before his desk and gazed listlessly out of the window. The day arose before him in prospect, drab, desolate, and dreary. High up overhead, through the dingy panes, he could see the little fleecy clouds floating about in peaceful unconcern. May was a slack month. And at its end came June—June, with its four weeks' inventory period wherein each stick and stone of the entire plant, each ten-penny nail, each carriage bolt, would have to be listed, valued, and carried into an imposing total. It meant working late into the night under a pitiless glare with handkerchief tied about one's neck like a washer. It meant cramped fingers, and hot dry eyes, and a back that ached when it didn't feel crawly with infinitesimal bugs, and bugs that bumped and buzzed and then fell sprawling across one's paper. Each item had to be entered upon the sheet. Each item had to be valued. Discounts had to be figured, extensions had to be made, figures had to be checked meticulously, and the whole thing eventually bound up in six or eight huge volumes which were then allowed to languish in the Company safe. He had been through it before. And the thought of it was intolerable. This was June. June and inventory and Mr. Boner seemed to him to be cut from the same piece. For neither did Mr. Boner escape. Instead, he came earlier, stayed later, and worked with more furious rapidity than ever. And he was Mr. Boner's successor—that is, if he hit the ball and worked hard enough to deserve it. The thought of the little boy whose mother gave him a nickle every time he took his castor oil manfully came to his mind as he sat and gazed out the window. When asked what he did with the nickles, the Spartan youth had replied: "Buy more castor oil with it." Joe wearily dragged one of his stock ledgers from the rack and opened it.
All that day, as he made his entries and checked his totals, came the thought, "Why am I doing this? What is it all for?" He was feeling the double edge of scorn no less keenly because only implied. Why wasn't he doing a man's work? Why was he humbly taking his turn in a servile and remote succession, where death's was the only hand that moved the pawns? Why had he come back to it? He dared not confess the reason. The best he could do was admit to himself he had been mistaken. The rose tints had vanished from his sky and the path he had chosen was disclosed in all its drab ugliness. He had chosen it fatuously. The rose tints had been of his own making. He viciously snapped his mind shut on the thought. For a while he would feverishly clamp his attention to his work, while outside the sky continued serenely blue, and the breeze that drifted through his window was languorous and soft. But the work was too light. There was not enough of it, nor was it of the nature that demanded his absorbed concentration. He thought of Mr. Mosby, the unwitting cause of it all. And yet he did not blame Uncle Buzz in the least. Rather he sided with him. They were both inferior animals—not to be mentioned in the same breath with progress, thrift, success.
Uncle Buzz had his troubles, too. He was bookkeeper of the general store in Bloomfield, but he had never got to the point where he was absolutely sure of his trial balances. Nor had Aunt Loraine ever got to the point where she was absolutely sure of him, and he had had only the slightest hand in the management of what was left of the farm. The farm was Aunt Loraine's. But she always took what was necessary from what Uncle Buzz got from the store to make both ends meet on the farm, and that was, of late, becoming an ever-increasing distance. Uncle Buzz felt a proprietor's interest. He liked to speak about it as "his farm." Uncle Buzz would have loved to raise horses, thoroughbreds and saddlers, but for obvious reasons that had been impossible. But he went his jaunty way, waxing his moustaches, squandering his money on fancy neckties, taking his surreptitious nip with all the gay bravado of thirty years before, and getting seedier and seedier. He was a dandelion withering on the stalk. He had long since given up hope of being anything else but bookkeeper in the "Golden Rule," and indeed it was only the stock which he held in that institution that insured him the place such as it was. For Uncle Buzz was with age becoming more unreliable. His mind would play queer tricks on him. The figures would occasionally assume a demonic elusiveness and he could no longer carry his liquor with his former assurance. While outwardly he was the same suave, debonair old beau, he was beginning to have inner doubtings and despairs. And Joe, who had, as it were, taken up the pen when he had cast aside the sword, became for him a potential straw adrift on the downward current.
Uncle Buzz's message in the Rathskeller the night before had been cryptic to the others but plain enough to Joe. Uncle Buzz was in trouble again. Trial balance, maybe. There was no telling. As Joe finished footing up a long column of figures he smiled. It meant another trip to Bloomfield on Saturday. And Saturday was the day after to-morrow. Thus the day wore on.
On Saturday, which was a day of the same pattern as its predecessors, at eleven o'clock Joe quietly rose from his desk, took his hat, and unostentatiously walked out of the office. He punched the time clock gently so that it would attract the attention of only the most observant of clerks, and hurried away, feeling that this repeated dereliction was bound to bring him some notice, even if the first offense had not. But for some reason he felt singularly indifferent.
An hour later he had forgotten it all. The dumpy accommodation train was bumping itself along at a great rate, puffing stertorously up the long grade past "Sassafras Hill," and then swinging itself around the curves that followed the river so desperately that passengers and freight alike—for it was a combination train as well as accommodation—were like to be flung from it, hurled into space as useless encumbrances to its desperate need of getting there. It would rush along madly for a mile or two, then give a wild shriek and stop, and after a great puffing and snorting, start up again.
It was such an enthusiastic train that Joe could not long escape the contagion of its enthusiasm. Ten miles out they came into a stretch of rolling meadow where the shadows of trees were like purple splotches upon the shimmering mist of the grass. A high wind had arisen that set the countless blades vibrating so that each bit of sun-swept meadow was naught but a silverish blurr, with the tree tops above it tossing wildly about. A little girl, holding open a gate for an old man in a buggy behind a placid old white horse, was all fluttering ribbon ends, and as they passed, her sunbonnet was torn from her grasp and flung over the fence, far afield. Joe could see her running after it as they rounded a curve out of sight.
At twelve thirty-five they reached Guests where Joe alighted. He was the only passenger of like mind, and aside from the station master who made a hurried exchange of sundry small express packages and mail there was no one at the station but a fat little old man in a brown derby and a red sweater, and with a very dirty face. This latter gentleman accosted Joe with a warning gesture, lifting his arm and pointing to the sky, and at the same time giving him a significant look, and then scuttling over to a disreputable motor car that stood beside the station platform. Arriving there he twisted his fat neck half around to see if his prey was following him, and being thus assured, clambered in. The car was very aged and trembling from some violent internal disorder, while the top was bellying off sidewise with a great flapping of loose straps and curtain ends till it seemed doubtful if the whole thing might hold together for another minute.
"High wind," suggested the Jehu, in a fat wheezy voice as Joe crawled into the seat beside him. Joe agreed without qualification. The old man paused a minute, gave him a sober, reflective look of far-away intensity, and then suddenly turned and spat precariously into the wind.
"Bloomfield?" he suggested with increased lightness of manner.
"Bloomfield," Joe agreed again. It was a pleasant bit of procedure, invested with the dignity of a formula, for there was no other town within a radius of many miles and no other road over which such traffic was possible. Still it had to be gone through with.
They started with a rush, being ably seconded by a more severe gust of wind than usual, and for eight miles it was a stalemate between the wind and the motor as to which could make the most noise. But in spite of it all Joe was enjoying it. There was a freedom in the uproar, in the wildly tossing tree tops, in the white clouds that went scudding high overhead. He had an insane desire to fling his hat high up in the air, as they rolled along, and see how far the wind would carry it.
At length they arrived. Out of courtesy, perhaps, the wind abated; perhaps it was because nothing boisterous would be tolerated along those silent old streets. But as they passed the tavern, one green shutter could be seen hanging by one hinge, moving softly to and fro, and against the iron stair railing of the meeting house an old, yellowing newspaper clung for a moment and then dropped to the pavement. A very old man in a linen suit, followed by an old hound, was going through the door as they passed, and he pivoted on his stick and watched them. Here was the very essence of stability.
Reaching the central square, the driver swung his car in a majestic arc around the traffic post in the centre of the street and drew up at the curb in front of the post-office. There was a liberal sprinkling of small motors of the same general classification as the one in which they were arriving, parked with their noses headed toward the curb, at an angle. Uncle Buzz's figure suddenly appeared, hurrying from behind one of these, his face set in an earnest frown. He had evidently seen them from the "Golden Rule," diagonally opposite, and had come the most direct route, through the traffic.
"Well, Joseph, this is a surprise."
This, thought Joe, might mean anything. Either his Aunt Loraine had not been apprised of his expected arrival, or perhaps the old man had already extricated himself from his trouble.
"Any bags?"
"No. No bags." Joe was still holding the out-stretched hand of welcome.
Uncle Buzz turned to the driver and dropped a coin in that worthy gentleman's greasy palm as it lay inertly on the seat, beside him. "That will be all," he said with great dignity.
The driver gave him a long look, heavy lidded—a critical look, a deeply thoughtful look—sniffed, and then turned to Joe, "Goin' back?" he asked shortly, as though there were nothing more now for any one to stay for.
"No," said Joe. "Not to-day."
The driver pondered this in his heart for a moment, came to a sudden decision, sniffed again, and turned his back on them both and proceeded to stretch himself out as far as the narrow confines of the seat would permit. Business was apparently over for the day.
Uncle Buzz led Joe across the street to the busy side. The contrast of their figures was striking, for Joe was over a head taller, and loose where Uncle Buzz was stiff.
Mr. Mosby turned at the curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit indisposed this morning."
This established one conclusion. He was at least not expected at home. More than that, he could not decide without further premises.
They occupied stools at a high counter covered with oilcloth. Uncle Buzz ordered rolls and coffee. Joe took rolls and coffee. There was a period of silence as they waited.
Directly Mr. Mosby began talking in a low tone: "It's a rather fortunate thing you came up this week-end, Joseph. I was rather afraid you mightn't." He paused and Joe, while he felt reasonably sure of just what would come next, listened with polite interest.
"I've been troubled with frightful headaches this past week," he continued, "so severe that I could scarcely see the open page before me."
Joe murmured his regret over the cup's brim.
The old man paused and seemed to consider. Then hesitantly continuing: "If you could spare an hour or two this afternoon——?"
"Surely I can, Uncle Buzz. Easiest thing you know."
The old man breathed deep and long and set down his coffee cup. "It is a trifling matter of some forty-six dollars. Would you like to go out to Montgomery's this afternoon? He has a couple of two-year-olds that he will be shipping down for the Derby now pretty soon."
"I'd be very pleased to, Uncle Buzz."
And thus was the matter broached, and the matter accepted, without any bald reference to necessity, without the slightest violation to the tenets of hospitality. No reference was made to a previous understanding. Joe's visit was established on a purely social basis, and as such it would be presented to Mrs. Mosby, whose penchant for alarm might thus escape stimulus.
They finished their lunch hurriedly and made their way across to the "Golden Rule," where Uncle Buzz led his charge with swift, silent steps back to the little private office in the rear of the store. Once inside, the door was closed and the books quickly opened upon the table. "They are always a bit impatient for the balance this time of the year," Mr. Mosby offered in explanation.
An hour's work sufficed to find the trouble. It was in the carrying forward of a single account. Once found, the rest was very simple, and at three o'clock Uncle Buzz slammed the ledger shut with an air of complete satisfaction, walked confidently through the door into the adjoining office with his little sheaf of papers, and returning reached for his hat. "Burrus is out," he said crisply. "We won't wait."
Joe likewise reached for his hat.
At the door the old man turned, and with a reminiscent smile and in a confidential tone, "There is a lot of personal jealousy in this firm."
Joe expressed no surprise.
"He's just been elected deacon in the church." His old eyes began to twinkle. "Great changes can take place in a man's habits once you hitch him up with apron strings. His wife has never thought so much of Loraine. And now he doesn't think so much of me." He chuckled. "We were raised together, and I have a good memory." He opened the door and walked slowly toward the front of the store. It was empty of customers. A clerk stood leaning idly across a glass counter of notions looking into the street. Uncle Buzz proceeded calmly on, giving the clerk a pleasant nod. "She came from a farm back in the county. They say she had never seen a railroad until she was twenty-one years old."
The clerk inspected Joe thoroughly and critically and made no sign of having heard anything. And still Joe felt a bit dubious; indiscretion is like other normal weapons: it kills when one doesn't know it is loaded.
But Mr. Mosby was in rising spirits. They emerged to the street and turned the corner into the less populous thoroughfare, known commonly throughout Bloomfield as Pearl Street, and there they came upon Uncle Buzz's horse and buggy, standing as if carved from one and the same block of immutable immobility. Even the flies found little of excitement in lighting about the front section of the combination, and only one or two were buzzing about in the general neighbourhood in a dispirited manner.
The horse opened his eyes and lifted one ear as Uncle Buzz climbed in the buggy and took up the lines. But being complacent and particularly indisposed to anything as much like effort as resistance, the starting was quite without ceremony.
Eventually, and not too much so, they left the city streets, and soon were jogging down a winding little lane of the softest, yellowest earth imaginable. On either side, between the edge of the roadside and the snake rail fence, was a little bank all a-tangle with blackberry bushes, and here and there, with its roots protruding out into space, a gaunt and bare thorn tree or an occasional walnut thrusting its branches over the road. Beyond, the fields lay in cool, serrated rows, deep brown and freshly fragrant. The woodland which hung about in the background beyond the fields would occasionally sweep down and cross the road, and then would come a stretch of checkered shade on the yellow earth, and the lifting, expectant sound of high wind in top branches. And sometimes, in the heart of such an arm of woodland, the old horse's hoofs would echo hollow on the warped and mellowing boards of a tiny bridge, and there would be a momentary slip and gurgle of water underneath, on down through the ferns. Joe felt steeped in calm.
Mr. Montgomery was not at home. Nor were the horses. They found they were a week late. An old Negro whom they encountered just within the paddock gate so informed them: "Yessuh. They done took 'em down t' Louisville, las' Monday."
They left him scratching his kinky gray pate in meditation.
Uncle Buzz was disappointed. The little excursion was thus deprived of its sparkle. There was a something about going out to see racehorses——Well, at any rate, Uncle Buzz was disappointed. He showed it on the way home. Perhaps the fading sunlight, the lengthening shadows, had something to do with it. And the wind, too, that had come with the morning and kept up its bluster all day, had died to a whisper, so that a cluster of last year's corn-stalks standing in a fence corner were merely indifferently waggling. It may have been just a reflection of mood, but as they were rounding the brow of the hill above Bloomfield and could see the dip of the meadows to the creek and the white fences and outbuildings of the Fair Grounds away off to the right, the old horse stopped and gently switched his tail. And Uncle Buzz let him stop.
"Do you know," he said, and his voice was reminiscent and uncertain, "I've been thinking lately we ought to sell the place and move to town."
Joe looked up at him curiously. "Why do you think that, Uncle Buzz?"
Mr. Mosby pondered, as the horse, feeling perhaps the slight pricks of conscience, resumed his way at an imperceptible walk. "Well," he said, "this country is not what it used to be. All the other towns, Guests, Fillmore—all the rest of them—are on the railroad or interurban. They have the advantage of us."
Joe was watching him unperceived. The old man's face had lost its aggressive jauntiness. There was an odd pucker about the brows. His mouth, above the well-trimmed goatee, seemed small and indecisive. Joe could see the clear blue veins on the back of the hand as it listlessly held the lines.
"Business has been a bit slack this past year. Seems like it never got over the war. And prices are high, too. Can't get a nigger to do a day's work for you for less than three dollars now," he added fiercely. And then lapsing into his former vein again, "I wonder——"
Joe waited. "Wonder what, Uncle Buzz?"
The sun made one of its perceptible drops, just as though its setting was a matter of notches. A little cool breeze came up to meet them from the creek bottom as they moved slowly downward.
"Why couldn't you get me something to do in Louisville? How about the Plow Company? They must employ a great many men." He laughed a bit shrilly. "I've always thought I would like to live in Louisville."
Joe was aghast. He felt as if it might be some old lady demanding of him pink tights and a place in the front row of the ballet. However, he checked the exclamation that rose to his lips. But for a moment he did not know what to say. Uncle Buzz—wanting to go to work at Bromley's!—An ancient and decrepit Whittington!
"But you've been here so long, Uncle Buzz!" he managed at length.
"So I have. All the more reason. I'm getting in a rut. Besides, I'm getting tired of Burrus. Narrow-minded scoundrel! He throws out hints about Zeke bringing me my whiskey over from Fillmore. As if it were any of his business!" He subsided and silently contemplated the depths of Burrus' degradation.
Joe laughed softly and at the same time felt the sharp little warning edge of an intuition. Uncle Buzz was slipping, and he knew it.
"I wouldn't be in a hurry," he suggested at length, "Bromley's is full up. All those men coming back from the army, you know—I'll keep an eye open for you if you want me." It was most incongruous, the patronizing air that had crept into his voice, the tone that invariably greets the unemployed, wherever or whoever he be.
Uncle Buzz brightened. "Do," he said.
They drove through the gate and up to the house. Aunt Loraine profusely reproached her husband for not advising her of Joseph's arrival. "It's a shame. Here at the last minute. You might have at least sent me word, Bushrod."
"We had to go out in the country," Uncle Buzz replied with decision.
And so they supped meagrely on fried chicken and rice and gravy and hot biscuits and coffee. And afterward they sat in the high-ceilinged back parlour, in candlelight, and watched the glow die from the western sky. And Aunt Loraine asked him about the "season" in Louisville, and once she asked him about Mary Louise. And bye-and-bye Uncle Buzz began to nod just like a sleepy little boy, and with the prospect of a long, well-filled to-morrow, Joe suggested that they go to bed. And then there was a moment's pausing upon the threshold of a yawning black door beyond which things smelled mustily sweet, with dusty shadows that crept across the matting from a shielded lamp; and later a most delicious yielding of one's self to the cool envelope of soft white sheets, and a moment's wide-eyed staring at the ceiling; and then forgetfulness.
Sometime later—it seemed hours—Joe was awakened by the clatter of an automobile somewhere beneath his window. For a moment he lay still and wondered and then, the bustle continuing, only in a much subdued and muffled manner, he got up and in his bare feet walked over to the window across the matting and looked out. He saw an oil lantern sitting on the edge of the side steps, and he saw the open screen door. And then from a black shadow a short distance away, behind the old lilac bush he remembered so well, he saw a figure emerge, carrying a glass jug. The figure was Zeke's, stooped over and shuffling, in the same old peaked cap he had always worn. And in the jug was the apotheosis of Mr. Mosby's contempt for Mr. Burrus, and as it passed the light it gleamed and sparkled with a deep golden malevolence. And hearing steps on the porch, and voices, and fearing lest he might be seen spying at the window, Joe crept back to bed. And directly he heard the familiar roaring clatter of a car starting up somewhere down below there in the darkness, and after a while—silence. He fell into a deep and satisfying sleep.
MaryLouise had the power of concentration over her determinations as well as over her desires. Once having decided on a course she could keep herself driving at it without ceasing. If she made a digression, it was with eyes set on the goal, and for the reason that to so digress was to find a more facile path and save time in the end. Her past attainments had been gained apparently without effort, for in the little world she had known at Bloomfield all had been hers to do with as she desired. And then had come the eighteen months in Louisville, with its awakenings, its gradual undermining of her old standards and conceptions, and its whetting of the keen edge of her desire.
She had been made to see her facts in another light. Those things that had been wont to be considered as axioms and irrefutable postulates in her daily acceptance were suddenly seen as the most ephemeral hypotheses. The desirability of Bloomfield and the lustre about the name "McCallum"—two rocks upon which she had builded the edifice of her confidence—were found of a sudden to be but shifting sands, hard-packed enough on the surface, but subjected to the most insidious and devastating undertow. Many a weaker spirit would have thrown up his arms and dived with desperation overboard in search of solid footing. But not so Mary Louise. She had a momentary whirl at negation and then a firm and ever-increasing determination to build her own footing. If Bloomfield and the McCallum family were not all they should be, she would make them so, to her own satisfaction at least. Money was the one thing needed, she soon found or thought she found, and money was the thing she was determined to get, enough of it to accomplish her purpose. When she had started the tea room she had not had the slightest idea that she could possibly fail to do just exactly what she wanted.
As she read the note that Joe had left for her, the news of Miss Susie's illness caused her temporary distress. But her mind did not dwell for long on the distressing part of it, but got busy with the problem in hand, went into conference with itself over it, analyzed and dissected it to its complete satisfaction, and then put out the resulting dicta on the bulletin board of her consciousness. The particular "Thou must" was in this case "Go to Bloomfield." And inasmuch as Mary Louise never under any circumstances thought of disregarding these highly accurate mental dicta, go to Bloomfield she did. She went the following morning, which was Friday. And it must be said that in spite of the attention which was focused on the immediate difficulty before her, which was, "What to do with Miss Susie," her mind kept straining at this barrier for continued and reassuring glimpses of the ultimate goal ahead. Still, she loved her aunt, and the realization of her suffering was to her genuine pain.
As she entered the sitting-room door, she found the little old lady propped in a rocking chair just inside the doorway with a patchwork quilt across her lap, tucking her in. There was no appreciable change. She was as yellow, as parchment like as ever. Her eyes perhaps were brighter; indeed they seemed almost to have a heat of their own as Mary Louise stooped to kiss the cheek held up to her.
"Why didn't you let me know sooner?" she chided.
"There was no reason for you to come at all," Miss Susie responded briskly. "Some people haven't enough questions to decide for themselves. Have to go about hunting for other people's problems."
"But you weren't going to sit up here and not let me know anything about it?" Mary Louise took off her hat and came over to the rocking chair, toward which she dragged another, and seated herself. She reached out and took one of the little blue-veined hands and stroked it gently. "You weren't going to sit up here and let me know nothing about it? That's not what you promised."
Miss Susie's fixed, inexorable expression did not change. But she was pleased—was feeling softer. Unconsciously she liked Mary Louise to assume that patronizing, superior air toward her. She said nothing and began to rock softly to and fro, staring through the doorway.
Mary Louise continued the gentle stroking. Bye-and-bye she ventured softly, "You're right sure you're feeling all right now? What did the doctor say?"
Miss Susie turned on her, mouth snapping shut. "Doctor! Who said I had to have a doctor?" The look in her eyes, as she turned them full upon the girl, was one in which defiance mingled with alarm and struggled for mastery. For Miss Susie had waged a long and losing warfare with disease and she quailed before the emblems of surrender if not from the enemy itself.
Mary Louise for the moment let it go at that. After the air had appreciably cooled she ventured again: "I don't suppose Mrs. Mosby knew how to reach me?" Miss Susie looked puzzled and she continued in explanation, "I had a note from Joe Hooper saying you had had a little spell—I suppose Mrs. Mosby 'phoned him."
Miss Susie gave a little snort. "And what would Loraine Mosby be doing meddling in my affairs? She hasn't called on me for years. Like as not it was that fool Lavinia Burrus. You would think she owned and was running the town. The salvation of Bloomfield weighs mighty heavy on her shoulders these days—with her 'DearMiss McCallum,' and her 'Poor dear Mrs. Hamilton!' I've a mind to tell her that charity, even of thought, begins at home—where it's needed."
Mary Louise felt a sudden sort of displeasure. She had adopted the devious method of getting at the true state of affairs, for that was the only way any one could get anything out of Miss Susie. And now she found herself getting interested on her own account. She had once supposed that it had been through Mrs. Mosby's agency that she had been apprised. It now appeared that someone else—an outsider and a parvenu at that—had linked her name with that of Joe Hooper's to send her word through him. It gave her rank displeasure. To be officially tagged as "Such and such" by a "one-horse" little town. Yes it was a "one-horse" little town. Her assurance slipped from her and in confusion she sought to investigate no further.
"Where's Mattie? You ought to have something about your shoulders." She rose to her feet and began poking about on the wardrobe shelf.
"Mattie's not here," said Miss Susie.
Mary Louise turned around. "Mattie's not here?—And what's the reason she's not here?"
Miss Susie's voice was acquiring calm. "She decided that this wasn't good enough place for her. She couldn't bear to think of all the money servants were getting down in Louisville—so she left."
Mary Louise came back and stood before her chair. She looked at her aunt intently. "You mean to say sheleftyou?"
"She did."
It was too much for Mary Louise's comprehension and she contemplated the fact bleakly. "Why, her people have been here on the place for four generations!"
Miss Susie's face was grim. "Ten dollars a week was too much for her."
Slowly the conviction was taking root. "And she has really left?"
Miss Susie nodded.
"And taken Omar with her?"
Miss Susie nodded again.
"And Landy?"
There was a moment's silence. Miss Susie, it seemed, would for the dramatic effect have preferred that the defection had been universal. "No," she said half regretfully, "Landy's stayed with me."
"And done the cooking, I suppose?"
"He did—after Wednesday."
"And Wednesday?Youtried it until then, I suppose?" Mary Louise's tone was all reproach.
Miss Susie did not deny it.
They sat for a moment in dismal accord. Mary Louise had a sudden feeling as though the family were breaking up. All during the war the little corps of servants had remained intact. She had felt that, the war over, the danger point had been passed. Also the reason for Miss Susie's little spell was now apparent.
Directly she asked more briskly, "D' you try to get any one else?—Zibbie Tuttle?"
"Zibbie's gone to town, too."
Another moment's depressed silence.
"And how about Zenie? She used to cook."
Miss Susie sighed. "Zenie's got her head all full of fool notions. She thinks she has to stay home and look after that worthless Zeke."
"And she won't come? You've tried her?"
Miss Susie shook her head grimly.
Mary Louise suddenly laughed. It was a dry, mirthless sort of laugh. "Looks like the Negroes are getting all the latest notions of progress, too. I must have put the idea into their heads."
"All except Zenie," amended Miss Susie. "She's old-fashioned."
"Perhaps I'd better be coming back." She stood by the door, musing.
Miss Susie reached over for her spectacles. There was an almost imperceptible flash in her eyes. "And be like Zenie?"
The shot missed. Mary Louise was turning over many things in her mind. Her little plans were being threatened and by circumstances which she had previously scorned to notice. Irritation and a restless desire to be up and at her obstacles were prevailing over all other feelings. For several moments she pondered, gazing through the glass half of the sitting-room door, and then with a hurried, "I'll be back," she bolted from the room, out toward the kitchen.
When she returned some fifteen minutes later there was a look of settled calm on her face, and she busied herself making Miss Susie comfortable; for she had reached a decision and could think about other things. And the things that old Landy had told her had sobered her while they strengthened that decision.
That night she lay on a restless pillow. The sudden change from the rattle and bang of the city where all the little noises were swallowed up in a general roar was hard on her ravelled nerves. She missed the noise. She found herself painfully acute to all the little tickings and crackings and buzzings that an open country window brings to one's ears. There was an unpleasant smell of damp matting there in the dark room. And the wind, as it came soughing down from the hill behind, caught a loose end of the roof somewhere over her head and made as though to roll it back. But it never did. Her bed was lumpy. It had never seemed so before. And there was not enough ventilation in the room. The two windows, placed side by side in the eaves, allowed no circulation. People in the country did not know how to live. Now she would knock that partition away. There was no use having a hall at the head of the stairs, a hall that led nowhere except into one room. She would knock that partition away and make a single big room of the whole attic. And then the window in the hall would serve for additional light and air for the one room. Or would it be better to cut another window and run the partition lengthwise, thus making two rooms of it? That might be better. Two rooms were better than one great big barn of a room. Later on, perhaps, she would have it done. She fell asleep over the complexity of the problem.
The next morning she set out with dispatch to carry out her plan. She went to see Zenie Thompson.
She found that much maligned and misunderstood woman cheerily rocking her leisure away at the front door of her home. The air was warm and Zenie had, contrary to the tenets of her race's religion, thrown open all the front of her house, windows and all. The neck of her waist, which was a very old white one of Mary Louise's, was likewise frankly open, and as there was considerable difference in the respective sizes, Zenie seemed on the point of bursting from its doubtful whiteness into all her full-blown coffee-coloured creamness. She hastily pinned up the bosom of it a little as Mary Louise turned in at her gate.
"How do, Mis' Ma'y Louise," she beamed, rising to her feet and holding her offspring clutched at a precarious angle to her shoulder. She stood with one hand resting on the doorpost and in her eyes expectancy. "Won' you-all come in?"
"Just for a minute," said Mary Louise, refusing the proffered chair and giving the room a hasty, critical look. Even in that critical look she could find naught to criticize. The cabin was a small three-room affair, set back from the street, between two vacant old storehouses. Zeke had whitewashed it without and calcimined it within, and with the free air that circulated the place this treatment was enough to make the front rooms passable. Over the iron mantel hung Zeke's "Knights of Macabre" sword in its scabbard. Mary Louise looked for the white-plumed hat but it had evidently been put away. On the left wall, in a brilliant gilt frame, hung a coloured portrait of Admiral Dewey. The artist had in some way inspired a look of malign cunning on the face by shifting the position of the left eye a hair's breadth below normal, but the mouth and smile were benign. On a table to the right reposed a glass case with a base of felt and a rounded top—the mausoleum for an ancient bird creature that looked like a prairie chicken, very droopy and, in spite of its interment, quite dingy with dust. It was vaguely familiar to her somehow.
Zenie was watching the inspection with an eager, expectant look. When Mary Louise had apparently finished and turned to her again, she smiled.
"You ain' eveh see ouh house befo', is you?"
Mary Louise admitted she never had. And then to disarm any suspicion that she might have come for social reasons only, she attacked the matter in hand with characteristic vigour:
"Zeke's not home much, is he?"
"Right smaht he ain', no'm." Zenie's face was all expectant smiles. Not a shadow seemed to linger near it.
Mary Louise allowed her gaze to travel about the room. In the entire atmosphere of the place was no besmirching suggestion of toil. She returned again to Zenie. The latter was like some tropical flower in full bloom. She began, selecting carefully her ground: "You haven't any place to put your baby, no one to watch him while you work, have you?" This was spoken with all the force of conviction.
Zenie's face wreathed itself in another smile. "I ain' do no mo' wuk—not ontil Zeke he come home."
Mary Louise paused and drew breath. She began again: "If there was somewhere you could put him, someone who could look out for him, or if it was so that you could keep an eye on him yourself—why, you could go to work again, like you used to."
The brightness of Zenie's smile began to fade. "Yas'm. Yas'm, reckon I could." She turned her attention to the child in her arms and her voice, as she continued, was liquid soft. "Zeke's doin' so good—I ain' aim to wuk out no mo'. Jes' keep house heah fo' him."
Then Mary Louise, sensing defeat, struck; struck unerringly for her objective which she judged to be the vulnerable spot; struck with characteristic vigour and direct: "I'll give you six dollars a week if you'll come and do the cooking for Miss Susie, for this summer." She paused and observed the effect.
Zenie had suddenly acquired all the coy graces of a maid receiving a long-expected proposal. She cast her eyes discreetly down, toyed at the rocker edge with her shoe, and smiled.
"You won't have to clean up the house. Landy does that. You won't have to do a single thing but cook." The speech ended with a rising inflection. Mary Louise's eloquent picture inspired even herself with hope.
"Mis' Burrus done offa me seven."
There was a momentary silence, during which time Mary Louise marshalled her routed forces. Directly she gallantly renewed the attack: "I'll give you seven then. And you can have all the time off you want, whenever you get through with the dishes." She had come, in a way, prepared for shocks, but the whirlwind manner of her recklessness was leaving her a bit breathless.
Zenie's face at once assumed a look of concern and lifting her head she pondered far-off possibilities. "Zeke, he home so little," she began, and her voice had an ineffable sadness, "I likes to be home when he come."
"But youcanbe at home when he comes," Mary Louise explained with a patience which she far from felt. "You can get off directly dishes are done—seven o'clock every evening, I'm sure."
"I know," responded Zenie, still doubting. "But Zeke, he gone at night. Mos' eve' night. He home in de day, mos' de day."
It ended by Mary Louise's offering and Zenie's accepting ten dollars a week, and with a promise of starting in on the following Monday. Mary Louise descended the cabin steps with the hollow pomp of one who has bought his victory too dearly. Zenie, from the steps, called cheerily: "Mis' Ma'y Louise. You bring me some goods fuh a dress? Sometime when you come up ag'in?"
Mary Louise paused at the gate and speculated on the humble creature on whom she had wreaked her will. "I guess I might, Zenie. What kind do you want?"
Zenie beamed. "Oh, mos' any kin'. Whateveh you think is pritty. I pay you fo' it."
Mary Louise promised and departed. She walked home very thoughtfully. Ten dollars a week! Ten dollars just to get the cooking done! She had had her eyes fixed very clearly indeed on the coveted goal to brush aside such an expensive obstacle.
That afternoon, as she busied herself with little chores about the house—she was sweeping the side porch at the time—she chanced to look up and saw Joe Hooper driving by in a low-swung phaeton behind a sleepy old horse. Beside him sat Mr. Mosby, very prim and very erect, and Joe's arm lay along the back of the seat behind him. The street was rather shady and it was quite a distance from where she was to where he was passing. But somehow it seemed to her that there was a singularly cheerful, quite happy expression on his face as he lolled back against the cushion. And he did not look in as he passed.
Twoweeks passed. Joe felt himself gradually slipping into an abyss of resignation. Nearer and nearer came June. Less and less he seemed to care. He took interest in nothing. He ate and slept and plodded. He ate and slept and plodded as though all that life consisted of was eating and sleeping and plodding. Most of us have seen in some quiet fence corner, just behind the barn, under some old tree with gnarled trunk and droopy branches, an old gray horse, with eyes closed, muzzle resting on the top rail, one hind leg slightly bent and propped by the tip of a cracked and drying hoof. Most of us have seen such a horse, seemingly on the gradual slip into oblivion, whose very tail-switching was so rhythmic and regular as to fit in, in absolute harmony, with the swelling waves of sleep and measured breathing and all that sort of thing. And that very horse might well be on the brink of a day's exhausting labour. And furthermore he might well know it. Certainly his experience might tell him—easily enough. Yet he stands there switching in a sort of self-imposed numbness. It is probably nature's way of anaesthetizing him from the pain of unlimited drabness. It is the only way a sensitive nature can face such a prospect without going mad. Such was Joe.
He had slumped. He no longer cared. He no longer cared if skies were blue and if breezes were lazy and outdoors was calling. He no longer cared when the quitting whistle blew. He no longer cared that June was only two weeks off. He would not even have cared if June had been the end of it all. He had settled into his stupor.
And then one morning at about eleven o'clock he was summoned to the telephone by the switchboard operator. It was a drowsy morning, full of dronings and rustlings, and he was very heavy lidded as he stepped into the booth reserved for such calls. He had been expecting a message from Indianapolis about some shipment that had gone astray and for which he was putting in a claim. He sank heavily down upon the hard, polished little stool. The air was stuffy and foul about him.
"This Mr. Hooper?" he heard a voice say.
He said it was.
"Well, this is——" He had not the slightest idea what the name was. But it made not the slightest difference. It might have been the president or it might have been the shipping clerk. All that mattered was that it was a tiresome sack of castings giving him some extra trouble. And so he stretched a little and yawned a little and replied: "Yes. All right."
And then the voice went on a little hurriedly—too hurriedly for him to catch it all. And instead of "sack of castings," the voice kept on crazily alluding to "your uncle" and "all night"—and phrases that were jumbled as in a dream. He came to himself suddenly with a start and then the connection was broken off and there was nothing but a confused buzzing and rattling. He straightened up on the stool, waited a minute, and then jiggled the receiver. He felt very queer. He felt to blame for his stupidness. He felt someway as though he had been caught up with. And he could not understand.
Directly the exchange called his name and he responded quite sharply and briskly. Then her "Just a minute," and he was feeling suddenly taut and tense. And then the voice was switched on again.
Like a dream it came. He could barely make out the syllables. The voice was broken—seemed very far-away—very weak. It was telling him that his uncle—his uncle, Mr. Mosby—"Brrr! Brrr!"—and had not been seen since. There was a moment's pause.
And then—would he come?
Another pause and he had vague notions that that was all. And yet he had not heard. Yes, he would come.
There was a click and then silence, and there he was, sitting just as though he had dreamed it all. Then a voice called, "Did you get them?" And he mechanically put up the receiver without a word. Something had happened—just what, he could only guess—make out piecemeal. There was trouble—he could feel that. Uncle Buzz had somehow stepped beyond the pale. He had heard the words "all night" and "no trace of him." This was no ordinary trouble. This was not a matter of trial balance.
He opened the door and stepped out into the office. It was a changed place. Over there was his long flat-topped desk with the opened ledger upon it. A sheet of paper had blown to the floor and was sliding over toward him, its edges curling lazily. These seemed live, vibrant features. One of the clerks across the way had thought of something humorous and was leaning forward to tell his vis-à-vis. It had been so vital that he had laid his pen down to tell it. He was talking with half-shut lips, with eyes that shifted back and forth alert for a glance of disfavour. His rusty black derby sat on the back of his head: his white piqué tie had slipped away from a bright brass collar button....
Through the open door he could see Mr. Boner hunched up over his desk and as he watched, that gentleman suddenly plunged his head in a ducking motion toward the cuspidor on the floor and just as quickly bent down again over the desk. Like fire-flashes of consciousness all these things were. These were things going on outside of him. There was a world moving on outside of him, a world that took little count of the creatures in its path. All this—all this about him—was like a bit of stale, flat, slightly greenish backwater—the big wheels churning away just beyond and paying it no attention, letting it grow staler and staler. Some day there would come a change—as though the miller had opened up another sluice—and a few vigorous splashings and all would be changed even here. He viewed it speculatively, as one outside it all. He suddenly felt that for him it was all over. And he went into Mr. Boner's office.
Mr. Boner looked up sidewise.
"I've had a 'phone call from home."
Mr. Boner's eyes rolled slightly, showing the whites.
"There's some trouble there. I'll have to go."
A moment's pause. Mr. Boner cleared his throat. "All right," he said. And then he bent back over his work.