CHAPTER XXVII
WE CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND US
It was a warm spring afternoon when we closed the door behind us for thelast time, and took the car for Church Hill, where we had rented severalrooms on the first floor of the house with the enchanted garden. As thecar descended into the neighbourhood of the Old Market, with its tightlypacked barrooms, its squalid junk shops, its strings of old clotheswaving before darkened, ill-smelling doorways, I seemed to have steppedsuddenly backward into a place that was divided between the dream andthe actuality. I remembered my awakening on the pile of straw, with theface of John Chitling beaming down on me over the wheelbarrow ofvegetables; and the incidents of that morning--the long line of stallsgiving out brilliant flashes from turnips and onions, the sharp, fishyodour from the strings of mackerel and perch, the very bloodstains onthe apron and rolled-up sleeves of the butcher--all these things weremore vivid to my consciousness than were the faces of Sally and of AuntEuphronasia, or the fretful cries of little Benjamin, swathed in a blueveil, in the old negress's lap. I had meant to make good that morning,when I had knelt there sorting the yellow apples. I had made good for atime, and yet to-day I was back in the place from which I had started.Well, not in the same place, perhaps, but my foot had slipped on theladder, and I must begin again, if not from the very bottom, at leastfrom the middle rung. The market wagons, covered with canvas, were stillstanding with empty shafts in the littered street, as if they had waitedthere, a shelter for prowling dogs, until my return. Mrs. Chitling'sslovenly doorstep I could not see, but as we ascended the long hill onthe other side, I recognised the musty "old clothes" shop, in which Ihad stumbled on "Sir Charles Grandison" and Johnson's Dictionary. Thatminute, I understood now, had been in reality the turning-point in mycareer. In that close-smelling room I had come to the cross-roads ofsuccess or failure, and swerving aside from the dull level of ignorance,I had rushed, almost by accident, into the better way. The very odour ofthe place was still in my nostrils--a mixture of old clothes, of stalecheese, of overripe melons. A sudden dizziness seized me, and a wave ofphysical nausea passed over me, as if the intense heat of that pastsummer afternoon had gone to my head.
The car stopped at the corner of old Saint John's; we got out, assistingAunt Euphronasia, and then turned down a side street in the direction ofour new home. As we mounted the curving steps, Sally passed a littleahead of me, and looked back with her hand on the door.
"I am happy, Ben," she said with a smile; and with the words on herlips, she crossed the threshold and entered the wide hall, where themoth-eaten stags' heads, worn bare of fur, still hung on the fadedplaster.
My first impression upon entering the room was that the strangesurroundings struck with a homelike and familiar aspect upon myconsciousness. Then, as bewilderment gave place before a closerscrutiny, I saw that this aspect was due to the presence of the objectsby which I had been so long accustomed to see Sally surrounded. Heramber satin curtains hung at the windows; the deep couch, with the amberlining, upon which she rested before dressing for dinner, stood near thehearth; and even the two crystal vases, which I had always seen holdingfresh flowers upon her small, inlaid writing desk, were filled now withbranching clusters of American Beauty roses. Beyond them, and beyond theamber satin curtains at the long window, I saw the elm boughs archingagainst a pale gold sunset into which a single swallow was flying. And Iremember that swallow as I remember the look, swift, expectant, as ifit, also, were flying, that trembled, for an instant, on Sally's face.
"It is George," she said, turning to me with radiant eyes; "George hasdone this. These are the things he bought, and I wondered so what hewould do with them." Then before something in my face, the radiance diedout of her eyes. "Would you rather he didn't do it? Would you rather Ishouldn't keep them?" she asked.
A struggle began within me. Through the window I could see still thepale gold sunset beyond the elms, but the swallow was gone, and gone,also, from Sally's face was the look as of one flying.
"Would you rather that I shouldn't keep them?" she asked again, and hervoice was very gentle.
At that gentleness the struggle ceased as sharply as it had begun.
"Do as you choose, darling, you know far better than I," I replied; andbending over her, I raised her chin that was lowered, and kissed herlips.
A light, a bloom, something that was fragrant and soft as the colour andscent of the American Beauty roses, broke over her as she looked up atme with her mouth still opening under my kiss.
"Then I'll keep them," she answered, "because it would hurt him so, Ben,if I sent them back."
The colour and bloom were still there, but in my heart a chill hadentered to drive out the warmth. My ruin, my failure, the poverty towhich I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition,and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on myshoulders--all these things returned to my memory, with an additionalheaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back morecrushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failurecame to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generousself-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born tothe possession of all necessary things.
Sally drew the long pins from her hat, laid them, with the floatingwhite veil and her coat, on a chair in one corner, and began to movesoftly about in her restful, capable way. Her very presence, I had oncesaid of her, would make a home, and I remembered this a little later asI watched the shadow of her head flit across the faded walls above thefine old wainscoting, from which the white paint was peeling in places.Her touch, swift and unfaltering, released some spirit of beauty andcheerfulness which must have lain imprisoned for a generation in thesuperb old rooms. On the floor with us there were no other tenants, butwhen I heard an occasional sound in the room above, I remembered thatthe agent had told me of an aristocratic, though poverty-stricken,maiden lady, who was starving up there in the midst of some rare piecesof old Chippendale furniture, and with the portrait of an Englishancestress by Gainsborough hanging above her fireless hearth.
"The baby is asleep, so Aunt Euphronasia and I are cooking supper," saidSally, when she had spread the cloth over the little table, and laidcovers for two on either side of the shaded lamp; "at least she'scooking and I'm serving. Come into the garden, Ben, before it's ready,and run with me down the terrace."
"The garden is ruined. I saw it when I came over with the agent."
"Ruined? And with such lilacs! They are a little late because of thecold spring, but a perfect bower."
She caught my hand as she spoke, and we passed together through the longwindow leading from our bedroom to the porch, where a few startledswallows flew out, crying harshly, from among the white columns. Many ofthe elms had died; the magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of afew stately trees, had decayed on the terrace, and the thick maze of boxwas now thin and rapidly dwindling away from the gravelled paths. On theground, under the young green of dandelion and wild violets, the rottingleaves of last year were still lying; and as we descended the steps, andfollowed the littered walks down the hill-side, broken pieces of potterycrumbled beneath our feet.
Clasping hands like two children, we stood for a minute in silence, withour eyes on the ruin before us, and the memory of the enchanted gardenand our first love in our thoughts. Then, "Oh, Ben, the lilacs!" saidSally, softly.
They were there on all sides, floating like purple and white clouds inthe wind, and shedding their delicious perfume over the scattered rosearbours and the dwindling box. Light, delicate, and brave, they hadwithstood frost and decay, while the latticed summer houses had fallenunder the weight of the microphylla roses that grew over them. The windnow was laden with their sweetness, and the golden light seemed aware oftheir colour as it entered the garden softly through the screen ofboughs.
"Do you remember the first day, Ben?"
"The first day? That was when President lifted me on the wall--and eventhe wall has gone."
"Did you
dream then that you'd ever stand here with me like this?"
"I dreamed nothing else. I've never dreamed anything else."
"Then you aren't so very unhappy as long as we are together?"
"Not so unhappy as I might be, but, remember, I'm a man, Sally, and Ihave failed."
"Yes, you're a man, and you couldn't be happy even with me--withoutsomething else."
"The something else is a part of you. It belongs to you, and that'smostly why I want to make good. These debts are like a dead weight--likethe Old Man of the Sea--on my shoulders. Until I'm able to shake themoff, I shall not stand up straight."
"I'm glad you've gone back to the railroad."
"There are a lot of men in the railroad, and very few places. TheGeneral found me this job at six thousand a year, which is preciouslittle for a man of my earning capacity. They'll probably want to sendme down South to build up the traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina,--Idon't know. It will take me a month anyway to wind up my affairs andstart back with the road. Oh, it's going to be a long, hard pull when itonce begins."
Pressing her cheek to my arm, she rubbed it softly up and down with agentle caress. "Well, we'll pull it, never fear," she responded.
At our feet the twilight rose slowly from the sunken terrace, and theperfume of the lilacs seemed to grow stronger as the light faded. For amoment we stood drawn close together; then turning, with my arm stillabout her, we went back over the broken pieces of pottery, and ascendingthe steps, left the pearly afterglow and the fragrant stillness behindus.
Half an hour later, when we were in the midst of our supper, which shehad served with gaiety and I had eaten with sadness, a hesitating knockcame at the door leading into the dim hall, and opening it withsurprise, I was confronted by a small, barefooted urchin, who stood,like the resurrected image of my own childhood, holding a covered dishat arm's length before him.
"If you please, ma'am," he said, under my shoulder, to Sally, who wasstanding behind me, "ma's jest heard you'd moved over here, an' she'ssent you some waffles for supper."
"And what may ma's name be?" enquired Sally politely, as she removed thered and white napkin which covered the gift.
"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she'sbeen a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."
"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to seeme."
"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew,his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico,with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist inthe back.
"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like ataste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an'she lives around the corner."
"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the doorclosed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are thewell-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"
"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It'sthe poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"
This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very redface, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs.Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.
"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and atthe words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small,half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were madeout of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thoughtas you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo'po' ma's--the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on themornin' arter I buried my man."
Placing the dish upon the table, she seated herself, in response to aninvitation from Sally, and spread her rusty black skirt, with aleisurely movement, over her comfortable lap. As I looked at her, Iforgot that I stood six feet two inches in my stockings; I forgot that Ihad married a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes; and Iremembered as plainly as if it were yesterday, the morning of thefuneral, when, with my mother's grey blanket shawl pinned on myshoulders, I had sat on the step outside and waited for the service toend, while I made scornful faces at the merry driver of the hearse.
"It's been going on thirty years sence yo' ma died, ain't it, Benjy?"she enquired, while I struggled vainly to recover a proper consciousnessof my size and my importance.
"I was a little chap at the time, Mrs. Cudlip," I returned.
"An' it's been twenty, I reckon," she pursued reminiscently, "sence yo'pa was took. Wall, wall, time does fly when you come to think of deaths,now, doesn't it? I al'ays said thar wa'nt nothin' so calculated to putcheer an' spirit into you as jest to remember the people who've droppedoff an' died while you've been spared. You didn't see much of yo' padurin' his last days, did you?"
"Never after I ran away, and that was the night he brought his secondwife home."
"He had a hard time toward the end, but I reckon she had a harder. Itwa'nt that he was a bad man at bottom, but he was soft-natured an' easy,an' what he needed was to be helt an' to be helt steady. Some men airlike that--they can't stand alone a minute without beginnin' to wobble.Now as long as yo' ma lived, she kept a tight hand on yo' pa, an' hestayed straight; but jest as soon as he was left alone, he began towobble, an' from wobblin' he took to the bottle, and from the bottle hetook to that brass-headed huzzy he married. She was the death of him,Benjy; I ought to know, for I lived next do' to 'em to the day of hisburial. As to that, anyway, ma'am," she added to Sally, "my humbleopinion is that women have killed mo' men anyway than they've everbrought into the world. It's a po' thought, I've al'ays said, in whichyou can't find some comfort."
"You were very kind to him, I have heard," I observed, as she paused forbreath and turned toward me.
"It wa'nt mo'n my duty if I was, Benjy, for yo' ma was a real goodneighbour to me, an' many's the plate of buttered muffins you've broughtto my do' when you wa'nt any higher than that."
It was true, I admitted the fact as gracefully as I could.
"My mother thought a great deal of you," I remarked.
"You don't see many of her like now," she returned with a sigh, "themo's the pity. 'Thar ain't room for two in marriage,' she used to say,'one of 'em has got to git an' I'd rather 'twould be the other!' 'Twa'ntthat way with the palaverin' yaller-headed piece that yo' pa marriedarterwards. She'd a sharp enough tongue, but a tongue don't do you muchgood with a man unless he knows you've got the backbone behind to driveit. It ain't the tongue, but the backbone that counts in marriage. Atfirst he was mighty soft, but befo' two weeks was up he'd begun to beather, an' I ain't got a particle of respect for a woman that's once beenbeaten. Men air born mean, I know, it's thar natur, an' the good Lordintended it; but, all the same, it's my belief that mighty few womencome in for a downright beatin' unless they've bent thar backs towelcome it. It takes two to make a beatin' the same as a courtin', an'whar the back ain't ready, the blows air slow to fall."
"I never saw her but once, and then I ran away," I remarked to fill inher pause.
"Wall, you didn't miss much, or you either, ma'am," she rejoinedpolitely; "she was the kind that makes an honest woman ashamed to belongto a sex that's got to thrive through foolishness, an' to git to a placeby sidlin' backwards. That wa'nt yo' ma's way, Benjy, an' I've oftensaid that I don't believe she ever hung back in her life an' waited fora man to hand her what she could walk right up an' take holt of withouthis help. 'The woman that waits on a man has got a long wait ahead ofher,' was what she used to say."
Rising to her feet, she stood with the empty plate in her hand, and herback ceremoniously bent in a parting bow.
"Is that yo' youngest? Now, ain't he a fine baby!" she burst out, aslittle Benjamin appeared, crowing, in the arms of Aunt Euphronasia, "anhe's got all the soft, pleasant look of yo' po' pa a'ready."
I opened the door, and with a last effusive good-by, she passed out inher stiff, rustling black, w
hich looked as if she had gone intoperpetual mourning.
"Will you have some syllabub, Ben?" enquired Sally primly, as the doorclosed.
"Sally, how will you stand it?"
"She wants to be kind--she really wants to be."
Crossing moodily to the table, I pushed aside the waffles, the muffins,and the syllabub, with an angry gesture.
"It is what I came from, after all. It is my class."
"Your class?" she repeated, laughing and sobbing together with her armson my shoulders. "There's nobody else in the whole world in your class,Ben."