CHAPTER THIRTY
In March, before the actual building of the tenements began, Jean and Gregory went away for a week-end. They had decided on the spur of the moment and taken the train like two truant children. Their plan was to get off wherever it looked attractive and stop at the first farmhouse that would take them in.
The train was a popular express and crowded, so they had to stand until the first stop was reached. Then Jean got a seat and Gregory went into the smoker. With her elbow on the windowsill and her chin in her hand, Jean gazed into the fleeing fields and was glad that Gregory was not there. It was almost too much, the deep hollows still snow-filled, the bare earth of the upper stretches, the faint green of swelling buds, and the two days before them. No duties to intervene, no appointments to keep. It was their first interlude of almost perfect freedom. But there were going to be many more in the summer ahead.
The train had made two stops. There were plenty of seats now. Jean looked up and saw Gregory coming towards her. For a moment she had a mixed feeling of complete possession and at the same time of personal isolation. He was hers, so completely, so inevitably hers, and yet this was the first time they had gone away together, stolen a little piece of life for their own. It was a diminutive honeymoon, but she couldn't say that to him. As she moved over and made room for him beside her, she realized how little they knew of each other's daily habits, their methods of doing personal things, and yet the way Gregory dropped into the place she made for him, gave her the feeling of having been married to him for a long time. She wondered what he was thinking.
But evidently Gregory was concerned with no such complicated analysis, for he turned to her presently:
"No place has hit the mark yet?"
"I don't believe I've been looking. I've just been soaking."
"Let's toss. Heads, the next; tails, the one after."
It was heads. Jean settled in her seat. Gregory looked at her and smiled. The smile deepened. He could not help but think of Margaret. Whichever way it had fallen, she would have suggested throwing again. The second station "might be so much better."
"You're a brick."
"Perfectly true, but why at this particular moment?"
"The explanation's much too subtle for your feminine mind."
"Because I didn't suggest tossing again?"
"Well, I'll be darned! How did you guess that?"
"You're a brick," Jean grinned. "As dense, every bit."
They got off at the next station, to the astonishment of the solitary native waiting for the down train, and struck across the fields. When they came to a forked road they stopped.
"We'll take turns at these decisions. You first."
"North."
They walked a mile between rickety fences that seemed to go on forever. Gregory looked out of the corner of his eye and Jean laughed.
"Did you do it on purpose?"
"If there isn't a break before that big maple down there, we'll call that a turn."
They reached the maple.
"Left," shouted Gregory, without stopping to reconnoiter.
They crossed a field, boggy with snow-filled ruts, and climbed a low rise. Directly beneath lay an old farmhouse with a sagging brown roof and red window casings, dulled by generations of sun and storm. A woman in a blue apron moved across the brown, bare earth behind the house to a white chicken run. Jean thought of the Portuguese ranch where she and Herrick had gone on their honeymoon, with the silent woman and the cows wandering over the hills.
"It wasn'tme, that's all; it just wasn't me."
A very old dog rose from the sunshine, sniffed dutifully as they came up on the stoop, and lay down again. Gregory knocked on the screen door, and a girl with a baby in her arms opened it. She listened without interest while Gregory explained, and went off without a word. In a moment they heard her shrill:
"Ma, ohma!"
The woman who had been feeding the chickens appeared, wiping her hands on her apron. She had a lumpy, overworked body, but her face had in it the patience of the earth, and there was something of spring in the pale blue eyes.
"Well, I guess we kin fix you up, seein' it's only for a couple of days. We couldn't take permanents yet, the spring cleanin' ain't done."
"There's the little room up back, ma?"
"How about the one over Uncle's? You could fix that up—it don't want much more than airin'."
Jean and Gregory waited while the two women settled the matter. The decision was in favor of the big one over Uncle John's.
"Mattie'll show you." The older woman took the baby and the girl led them up a narrow white staircase, uncarpeted and spotless, that zigzagged to the floor above.
At the end of the hall she opened a low door, painted white and fastened with a hand-made latch. They entered a huge room, whitewashed, with white wainscoting, white matting and a great white bed, the most spotless room Jean had ever seen. Ancient apple trees brushed the four gleaming windows and the cluck of chickens came from the yard. The smell of the earth, warmed slightly in the spring sun, and a faint fragrance from swelling trees, flooded it.
Jean reached out and touched the baby green of apple leaves. It made her think of the old pine and her attic room, and of how often she had reached out to shake the fog diamonds from the needles and wish that something would happen, anything to break the monotony. The old pine was thousands of miles away and that self years in the past. Inwardly and outwardly she now lived in another world. And yet, looking down the years, Jean could put her finger on no moment of sudden change. It must all have been there, from the beginning, in herself; her right of way through the world of action, which she had once believed held no entry for her; her marriage with a man who came to her from one woman's arms and left her for another; this wonderful love that was so right in spite of the world's standards. And the future? It was there, just as the present had been in the past. Jean leaned out of the window and drew the warm sweetness into her. For the first time in her life she felt part of a scheme, obedient to a law that worked on without her will.
The girl went out of the room and Gregory put down the grip. He came and stood beside her. She turned and laid her face against his shoulder. He stroked her hair gently, a new tenderness in his touch.
After a moment she raised her head and smiled.
"Let's go out and explore."
From the kitchen window Mrs. Morrison watched them. "Seems like a nice couple and powerful fond. Look, Mattie, he's holdin' her hand."
Hand in hand, Gregory and Jean were peering into the chicken run. The girl shrugged:
"I guess they ain't been married long. He won't be doin' it this time next year."
"Don't talk so shaller, Mat. What if he ain't? It can't be spring all year."
"No need fur it to be winter, either."
"The sooner you git over thinkin' them things, the better it'll be fur you, my girl. You got one of the best men livin'. There ain't a better provider than Jim in this county. Kissin's good enough, but it don't fill the wood box or spread the table."
The girl looked sullenly after the retreating figures.
"I'm sick o' livin' with people that's good providers. It's like havin' nothin' but bread mornin', noon and night. I want some——"
"That'll do, Mat, I don't stand fur no such talk as that. When Jimmy begins runnin' round and needin' shoes, his ma and pa kissin' ain't goin' to put 'em on him. Besides a woman shouldn't want things like that. It's fur men to think of them things. Hand me out the bread pan; I'll mix up some biscuits, seein' we ain't enough loaves."
The girl handed it to her. "I suppose I'd better spread a clean cloth."
"Take the big one in the second drawer, and you might put the wax plant in the center."
As the girl worked, she kept glancing to the window, but Jean and Gregory were out of sight, beyond a dip in the orchard.
"It is nice," she said wistfully.
Then the baby whined and she went to him. As soon as he saw her he stopped and gooed. The girl laughed and picked him up.
"You old false alarm you!" She burrowed in his neck and he squirmed with delight.
Out in the orchard, Gregory and Jean wandered under the apple trees, great old things, cumbered with dead branches.
"They can't have made a cent from this place for years, and it would pay with a few hundreds put into it. But this eastern land, a lot of it, is just like the families, run to seed. The men who have enough kick in them to do anything go away. A place like this always makes me feel wonderfully business-like and efficient, as if I could make the dead thing live again."
"It doesn't make me feel business-like. It makes me feel vague and poetic and—and unresponsible. I can't imagine anything more peaceful than those old, useless, unfruitful things, all budded over with baby green. I wish humans could grow old like that, keeping the possibility of spring."
"That's properly vague and poetic, but I don't know that it would be such fun. Think of looking seventy and feeling twenty!"
"It would be better than looking seventy and feeling it. A wee bit of spring, every year, right to the end, would be better than none. Wouldn't it?"
Gregory laughed. "Half a loaf better than none? Not for me. I'd rather have nothing than a tantalizing dab like that."
A cold finger touched Jean's heart. Were their snatched hours more than a "dab," a half loaf to him? They were glorious hours, but after all they were only crumbs. Jean shook off the feeling, and her hand slipped into Gregory's.
"Well, when you're seventy and I'm sixty-five, you'll be so jealous of my little green leaves, you won't know what to do."
"Will I?" Gregory held her close and rubbed his cheek softly against her hair.
"We're never going to grow old and gnarled, Jeany."
"I'll come and stick a little green leaf on your deadest bough."
"Better give it to me now." Gregory turned her lips to his and kissed her. "That was a nice little leaf," he whispered.
They rambled on again, turning up dead leaves for the small celandine that peeped out in surprise that spring was really come. As they turned to go back, the clang of a bell, mellowed by distance, reached them.
"I'll race you." They started, Jean a yard ahead. In a moment Gregory was in front of her. He shook his head reprovingly.
"Why, Jean Herrick, I'm astonished! What would Dr. Fenninger say?"
"Put me under observation in a psychopathic ward."
Gregory kissed her in the hollow of her throat.
"For that, he'd commit me to Matteawan."
The midday dinner was a heavy affair, but both Jean and Gregory won Mrs. Morrison's approval by their appetites.
"I do despise to cook for them peckish people, that looks as if they was choking down every mouthful. We're all hearty eaters here; even Uncle treats his vittles like he enjoyed 'em."
The old man at the end of the table looked up. "You're a powerful good cook, Mary. I ain't never sat down to a meal at your table that didn't hit the mark."
He was a very old man, small and withered, with a wrinkled brown face and kind blue eyes that peered like the wildflowers from the dead leaves. His meal was a bowl of oatmeal, covered with yellow cream, and a special kind of brown bread on a blue willow plate. His defense of his niece's cooking was his only part in the conversation, but he filled the room with the sense of his presence. Like spring warmth from the frozen earth, peace radiated from him. When he had finished his cereal and cream he left the room.
Mary Morrison looked after him.
"He's the best man that ever lived. I've ate and slept in the same house with him for almost fifty years and I ain't never seen him cross or heard him say an unkind thing."
"He ain't got nothin' to cross him, ma; not that I'm saying he ain't good."
"There's always things to cross folks, when they're the crossin' kind. I never seen any one yet that couldn't git crossed, give 'em half a chance. Sometimes you shame me, Mattie, with that shaller talk."
The girl began scraping the plates without answering. Mrs. Morrison went on to Jean.
"Mattie here's the kind that no chip gets by, but life'll learn her. I kin remember when Uncle had things to upset anybody when he was younger, but he never let 'em. He'd just go off and read the Book a spell and come back among folks smilin'. Why, he's read the Bible clear through most two hundred times, and there's a stack ofChristian Heraldsout in the barn that reaches to the second loft. He don't read nothin' else and he reads 'em all the time."
Mattie carried off the scraped plates, and her mother gathered up the knives and forks. With the touch of the dirty dishes, she came back to her everyday manner.
"Now you folks kin do anything you like. There's some books on the shelf in the parlor, if you want to stay in, but most city folks want to be outdoors every minute. It's right pretty over in the woods, but the ground's damp yet, even in the sun. You'd better take a buggy robe; we got a lot of old ones in the barn fur that."
Jean was already at the door, when Mrs. Morrison added:
"I clear forgot to ask your names; seem like I always know people when they like the place."
Jean stepped into the outer hall.
"Murray," Gregory said after a brief pause.
"Murray. That's easy. We git some awful queer ones in summer, and I was never no good at names. Mattie has to keep 'em straight."
She passed through the swing door with the tray of forks and knives,
"It's Murray, Mattie; Mr. and Mrs. Murray," Jean heard her say.
Jean went quickly out into the sunshine. Gregory waited until his pipe was drawing well before he joined her.
For an hour they kept to the road that led up hill and then down into the dogwoods, just beginning to swell with spring. At last they spread the robe where the sun splattered through in golden pools and a little creek gurgled as if it had done something very sly and clever in stealing away from winter. Gregory lay with his head in Jean's lap and they talked, the silences growing longer and longer, until, looking down after an unusually long one, Jean saw that he was fast asleep.
It was the first time that Jean had ever seen Gregory asleep. She wanted, with an almost irresistible need, to draw him closer. The thought of Margaret Allen stabbed as it had never done before. Margaret had nothing that was hers, but she had so much less than was her own. And Gregory had so much less than was his. Between them Margaret stood, clutching with each hand a part of what was theirs, giving nothing in return.
Then the need to make Gregory happy, to yield for his happiness every scrap of herself, to give everything that was beautiful, to drown in this beauty the ugliness over which she had no control, and, if there was anything unbeautiful in their own relations, to make it perfect, swept Jean. There should be nothing but peace and content in her. Her hand moved lightly over Gregory's hair. It was thick and soft, with a deep wave that drew her hand.
Herrick's hair had been fine and rather silky. Again Jean wondered at the separateness of her two selves.
The sun was going when Gregory woke. He had slept deeply and woke with a dazed, child look in his eyes. Jean wished for a moment that he were really a child so that she could pick him up in her arms and carry him away, follow the sun, and never be separated any more.
"That was some sleep!"
"Youalmostsnored."
"Impossible. Even my prosaic soul couldn't snore in the spring woods—with a lady."
He reached both arms and drew Jean's head down.
"Such a nice lady! I love her."
"I don't believe it. Sleeping! While the lady has to stay awake and drive away—malaria. Look, the sun has almost gone, it's only just touching the very edge of the farthest strip."
Gregory heard none of this. He was watching the light in Jean's eyes. They were so gray and deep, so like quiet pools, touched with sun, in which one could go down and down and never reach the bottom.
"I don't believe it," Jean repeated; "I can't possibly, in view, or rather sound of, the evidence."
"Then you shouldn't be here with me. To go off with a gentleman who doesn't love you! You ought to be ashamed."
"I'm not." Jean laughed and laid her face against his. His lips touched her chin. "Maybe I love him enough for both," she whispered.
"No—you—couldn't—love—him as much—as that, because he loves you—just that—much himself." Little kisses on her neck and cheek broke the words. And Jean felt part of the soft, black earth, the tang of the rotting leaves and the spring budding.
They walked back through the woods, chilly now that the sun was gone. It was dusk when they came to the road again. The lamp was lit and there was a homey smell of fried potatoes and fresh cake. Mattie had put on a clean dress and done her hair low on her neck. The break of outsiders had penetrated her consciousness and she was looking forward to the evening, Uncle John had already had his supper, and was reading the Bible in his armchair by the stove. There was no sign of Mattie's husband. But near the end of supper a wagon stopped.
"Good land, that'll be Jim, and we've et most everything clean."
"I'll scramble him some eggs, if it is. Don't you go fussin', ma. He ought to let us know."
But the wagon went on and no one came.
Jean insisted on drying the dishes and after the requisite amount of objection Mrs. Morrison gave her a towel. She often talked over with Mattie this strange eagerness of city women to do dishes. Mattie always concluded that it was only because they never did them any other time. But Jean really wanted to do them. She liked the feel of the low-raftered room, all skewed out of plumb with age, dim in the corners, where the lamplight did not touch. Through the uncurtained windows the fields stretched away under the cold night sky. They framed the warm comfort within, gave it a permanence it did not really have. With the filling of the dishpan Mrs. Morrison began a story of a family feud that had gone on for years and was all about a chicken, in the beginning. From time to time she stopped while she held long arguments with Mattie on exact names and dates. Jean caught snatches of it between her own thoughts.
At last the dishes came to an end, and Mrs. Morrison hung up the checked apron.
"Now, if you folks likes music, we got some pretty records and Mat'll be glad to work 'em fur you."
"You're coming, too?"
"I don't mind if I do, until it's time to set the bread. But I'm an early bedder, like most country folks. Now, Mattie, she'd stay up gassin' all night."
The girl frowned. "Country folks got such silly notions they fix to live by. You got to go to bed at seven so you kin git up at five, whether there's anything to git up fur or not."
"Honest, Mat, sometimes you make me think of old cousin Beggs that hadn't all her senses. If country folks didn't git up till the time you want 'em to, who'd feed the chickens?"
"Seems like most people just keep 'em so they can git up to feed 'em. Not more'n a third of 'em lays, anyhow. What tunes do you like, Mrs. Murray?"
"Won't the graphaphone wake the baby?" Jean made a last attempt to save herself and Gregory.
"He always wakes up round this time anyhow and he likes it. When he's old enough I'm goin' to git him music lessons."
"You have quite a little time to look around for a teacher! How old is he?"
"Four months. But it'll take all that time to find one in this hole." The first spark of mischief lit the girl's eyes. Mrs. Morrison laughed.
"Go along with you and put on 'I'm Waiting at the Gate.'"
She rolled down her sleeves, lowered the lamp and followed them. She sat on the step that raised the "parlor" from the living-room and leaned back against the door jamb, as if the Axminster rug and plush rockers with which the delightful old room was desecrated, was unfamiliar ground. Mattie put on the record and it began its wailing call for some one to meet some one else at the old gate and not to forget.
The woman in the door closed her eyes. Mattie sat beside the machine, her cheek in her hand, staring at the carpet. They were lost in the sentiment of words and music.
"Pa always liked that terrible," the woman murmured, as the plaint ended in a mournful throb. "Mattie used to play it by the hour fur him."
For a moment something fleeted across her face and Jean saw it in the face of the younger woman, too, hopeless longing, desire without strength to demand.
Was that it, the bond that had held them, pa and ma, and Mattie? Was that why the girl had married and stayed? Would the baby, too, generation after generation, until the stock died out?
As if in answer, a small cry came from the room beyond.
"You kin put 'em on. It's easy. I got to go."
She went out. Jean followed. In the center of a fourpost bed, an atom kicked its flannel-swathed legs and puckered its face for a real howl, if its first warning did not bring immediate attention. But as Mattie lifted it the puckers smoothed, the incipient howl turned into a gurgle.
"Some day I'm just goin' to let you howl and howl and howl until you get so hungry, you old greedyguts! Don't you think I've got anything to do but feed you? Hey, answer me!"
She kissed and tickled him and he writhed with delight.
"There, satisfied now, ain't ye?" She held him close and the baby's doubled fists dug into her breast. The only sound was the faint hiss of the baby's sucking. Suddenly the girl looked up.
"Got any babies?"
Jean shook her head.
"Been married long?"
Again Jean moved her head slowly in negation. Her eyes never turned from the small black head against the girl's white breast.
"It's just as well not to begin right off. I was a fool, but nobody told me. I'd like to have waited a while till I'd been somewhere and seen somethin', besides trees and chickens."
The baby made his first stop, withdrew his milky lips and smiled at Jean. She knelt and laid her chin in the warm crease of his neck.
"You ought to have one if you like 'em that much." The girl nodded backwards to the room behind. "He kind of looks like he might like 'em, but you never kin tell. Most men don't care a rapafterthey're here."
Jean got up. The baby went half-heartedly back to finish. The girl began rocking him and humming the refrain of the couple that never met by the gate after all. The baby's eyes closed. Jean tiptoed from the room.
Gregory lay on the couch reading. In the kitchen Mrs. Morrison was setting the bread. Jean drew a glass of cold water from the pitcher pump on the sink, drank it slowly and went upstairs without going again into the parlor.