CHAPTER XVII
They were in the midst of packing and moving when the news came of Jesse Dick's death. She had no formal warning. No official envelope prepared her. And yet she received it with a dreadful calm, as though she had expected it, and had braced herself for it. She and her father were at breakfast surrounded by wooden packing boxes and burlap rolls. Charley, in peril of missing the 8:35 I. C. train, contented herself with the morning's news second-hand. Henry Kemp had the paper.
"What's the dailyschrecklichkeit, Dad?"
He had not answered. Suddenly the weight of his silence struck her. She looked up as though he had spoken her name. The open newspaper shielded his face. Something in the way he held it. You do not hold a paper thus when you are reading. "Dad!" The paper came down slowly. She saw his face.
"Dead?"
"Yes."
He stood up. She came around to him. She wanted to see it on paper, printed.
That morning she actually caught the 8:35 as usual. She sold little imports all that morning, went out at the lunch hour and never returned to Shields'. Outwardly she practised the stoicism of her kind. She cried herself to sleep night after night, indeed; beat on her pillow with an impotent fist; sat up, feverish and wakeful, to rage at life. But she was up next morning, as usual, pale and determined.
There was a curious scene with great-aunt Charlotte. At news of Jesse Dick's death she had summoned Charley; had insisted that she must see her; had been so mysteriously emphatic that Charley had almost rebelled, anticipating a garrulous hour of senile sympathy and decayed advice. Still she went, ascended the stairs to Aunt Charlotte's room (she came downstairs more and more rarely now) and at Aunt Charlotte's first words, "I knew he'd never come back, Charley," would have fled incontinently if something in the grim earnestness of the black-browed old countenance had not held her. There was no soft sentimentality in great-aunt Charlotte's word or look. Rather she seemed eager, vitalised, as though she had an important message to convey. Charley did groan a little, inwardly, when Aunt Charlotte brought out the yellow old photograph of the girl in the full-skirted wasp-waisted riding habit, with the plume and the rose. And she said vaguely, "Oh, yes," as she took it in her hand, and wished that she had not come. And then, "Why, Aunt Charlotte! You lovely thing! You never showed me this picture before! You're the family beauty. Your face is—the look—it sort of glows——"
"Just for a little while. Jesse Dick brought that look to it."
"How do you mean—Jesse Dick?"
And quietly, masterfully, with the repression of more than fifty years swept away before the urgence of this other Charlotte's need, she told her own brief stark story. "I was eighteen, Charley, when the Civil War began. That's the picture of me, taken at the time——"
Charley listened. Sometimes her eyes dwelt on the withered old countenance before her; sometimes she looked down, mistily, at the glowing face of the girl in the picture. But her attention never wandered. For the first time she was hearing the story of the first Jesse Dick. For the first time great-aunt Charlotte was telling it. She was telling it, curiously enough, with the detachment of an outsider—without reproach, without regret, without bitterness. When she had finished she sat back and glanced about the bedroom—the neat, shabby, rather close-smelling bedroom of an old, old woman—and then she opened her hands on her knees, palms out, as though in exposition. "And this is I," said the open palms and dim old eyes. "This is I, Charlotte Thrift."
As though in answer—in defense of her—Charley leaned forward, impetuously, and pressed her fresh young cheek against the sallow withered one. "You've been wonderful, Aunt Charlotte. You have! What would Grandma Payson have done without you!—or Lottie, or mother, for that matter."
But great-aunt Charlotte shook her head. She seemed to be waiting for something. And then Charley said, "I'll be all right. I'm the kind that goes on. You know. I'm too curious about life to want to miss any of it. I'll keep on trying things and people and I'll probably find the combination. Not the perfect combination, like Jesse. You don't, twice. But I suppose I'll marry—sometime."
"That's it. Don't you give in. You're twenty. Don't you give in. I was scared when you left your work——"
"Oh, that. I couldn't stay. I don't know. Restless."
"That's all right," said Aunt Charlotte, satisfied. "Restless is all right. Restless is better than resigned."
Of Jesse Dick's poems, two made a little furore. The reviewers all had a line or two or three about his having been one of the most promising of the younger poets of the virile school. They said his was American poetry, full of crude power. One poem—the one called "Chemin des Dames"—they even learned in the schools, mispronouncing its title horribly, of course. They took it seriously, solemnly. Charley alone knew that it had been written in satire and derision. It was his protest against all the poems about scarlet poppies and Flanders fields. Taken seriously, it was indeed a lovely lyric thing. Taken as Charley knew he had meant it, it was scathing, terrible.
People thought the one called "Death" was a little too bitter. Good—but bitter, don't you think? That part beginning:
"They said you were majestic, Death.Majestic! You!I know you for the foolish clown you are;A drooling zany, mouth agape and legs asprawl,A grotesque scarecrow on a barbed wire fence....."
"They said you were majestic, Death.Majestic! You!I know you for the foolish clown you are;A drooling zany, mouth agape and legs asprawl,A grotesque scarecrow on a barbed wire fence....."
"They said you were majestic, Death.Majestic! You!I know you for the foolish clown you are;A drooling zany, mouth agape and legs asprawl,A grotesque scarecrow on a barbed wire fence....."
"They said you were majestic, Death.
Majestic! You!
I know you for the foolish clown you are;
A drooling zany, mouth agape and legs asprawl,
A grotesque scarecrow on a barbed wire fence.
...."
When Charley read that one, as she often did, she would beat with her hard young fist on her knee and cry impotent tears of rage at the uselessness of it all.
They made a book of his poems and brought it out in the autumn, just before the armistice. A slim book of poems. There had been so few of them.