He surpassed himself in Miss Marvina’s presence, and though sometimes his remarks were naive, they were uttered with such savoir-faire, such an implication of deeper meanings, that they probably stunned the young lady, who had little mind of her own.
After four months, Stuart had no more knowledge of the spirit of Miss Marvina than he had had on the very first night, except that she had a voice like rich slow honey, a voice which she rarely exercised. It was enough for him, however, that she smiled like an angel, that she blushed when he gazed at her boldly, and that she was apparently docile and well-bred and not at all clever. She was also an accomplished harpist, and after dinner she would sing sweet innocuous songs for him, totally without expression, creating such a marvelous picture of loveliness as her white hands stroked the strings and her bosom was lifted, that the infatuated young man was completely dazzled. He would gaze at her with the proud and delighted air of a proprietor.
He knew, however, that Miss Marvina was not insensible to him. He knew that he could catch her eye and hold it, and he felt himself very much the muscular snake bewitching the helpless and fluttering bird. He would pity her for her entrancement—the beautiful and innocent creature! He would feel tender compassion for her because she could not resist him, as, indeed, what female could? He did not know that Joshua watched all this with sly enjoyment, and that he would rub his dry hands in gleeful anticipation.
For Joshua, like Stuart, and practically everyone who came into contact with the entrancing Marvina, knew nothing at all about his daughter. From childhood she had been silent, though not secretive. She had always been docile and pliable, smiling when spoken to, moving with exquisite obedience, and never venturing any opinion of her own. As with all others, it had been enough for Joshua that she was incredibly lovely. The truth of the matter was that Marvina, though she could write a perfect hand, and could read aloud with expression, and knew her sums and her geography enough to pass the simplest tests, and could embroider with exactness if without inspiration, and could play the pianoforte and the harp and dance like a fairy and discuss topics proper to a young lady of elegance and gentility, was almost illiterate. Her soul was faceless, her heart perpetually untouched, and there had been practically no occasions when deep thought had ever darkened the placid shallow lake of her mind.
Miss Marvina, then, was a primitive, and what she desired she obtained. She desired few things ardently. One of them was Stuart.
Later, in fear, Father Houlihan was to say that he would never have believed that a human creature could be born and live without a soul had he not met Miss Marvina. For that man, she became a beautiful smiling horror, and out of the depths of his Celtic superstition he recalled stories of creatures who moved and smiled and talked and had their being like other human creatures, but who in reality did not exist at all, and who, when they passed from the perception of others into an illusion of death, were gone forever like a puff of mist, leaving no trace behind them, not even any memory of them. As they had no souls, no verity, even God was unaware of them, that they had lived, for never had they possessed the means of communicating with Him. Even Hell, itself, had known nothing of their existence; hence, they were incapable of evil.
To say that Stuart loved her would have been a gross extravagance. It was his blithe belief that no man could love a woman, with all that loving implied: friendship, communion, companionship, perceptive tenderness and profound devotion. A woman was a female with whom to sleep, and upon whom to beget, and, in daylight hours, a hostess and a housewife and a mother.
He brought her flowers and books. She would receive them with evident pleasure, holding the flowers in her lovely arms, or clasping the books in her white fingers. But the flowers made no impression upon her. The books were clasped in marble. Her eye was as blind as her mind. She moved and smiled instinctively, as others unconsciously agreed.
So besotted did Stuart become that he actually accompanied Miss Marvina and her ominous father to church every Sunday. He dissipated the tedium of the sterile Protestant service by staring at the girl, and imagining all sorts of delights. She would sit very primly, with her brown bonnets and cloaks and frocks and gloved hands, regarding the dull minister dutifully, her profile perfect in the gloomy dusk, gleaming like carved ivory. She never seemed aware of Stuart during her devotions. She filled that barren air in the church with a glow and a glory that was positively indecent, in the opinion of the more muddy ladies.
If Stuart drank more heavily Sunday, afternoons and nights than was usual with him, he did not know the reason. He told Father Houlihan, wryly, that he had to get the dust of a Protestant Sunday out of his throat. But it was the dust of emptiness, of associating with emptiness, that made him so distraught and sent him to his whiskey.
A Protestant Sunday in Grandeville was a dreary and horrific affair. “They hide under the beds,” said Stuart, “and pull the chambers over their heads.” But it was true that Grandeville became a ghost town for twenty-four hours, echoing and gray, only the tolling of the church-bells resounding over dead roofs and empty streets. Occasionally, a discreet carriage rumbled, muted, over the cobbled streets, during the hours when no services were being conducted, and inside some of the houses the inhabitants, stuffed with heavy dinners, slept the somber and oppressive hours away. Only rarely did one see an urchin, sluggishly expiring of ennui, walking languidly over the boardwalks, or a family group out on foot for an airing. In the main, Grandeville huddled under its trees in heavy silence, and the sparkling river turned gold in the sunset with only a few eyes to observe it.
It had always been Stuart’s custom to flee the confines of Grandeville Protestantism on Sunday and betake himself to that benighted section of the city called “Pope Town” by its haters. There, a subdued liveliness could be found. In the grimy streets youths would play ball, or lounge on corners to look over the sprightly girls who passed with their mamas or their brothers. Here one could see alien faces, still lively with the memory of European Sundays, which had been all bright gaiety and lightheartedness. Children would race over the broken wooden walks, shouting, and their mothers would stand in their shawls in doorways, exchanging gossip. Father Houlihan would visit his parishioners, children following him in an affectionate train. He always had a pocket of nuts, apples or sweetmeats for them. He was much loved. To this disreputable section, therefore, where life and simple happiness and released joy could be found, Stuart often made his way. Sometimes he would engage in pitching horseshoes with other benighted souls, or in arguing ferociously, and ignorantly, about politics with large red-faced young Irishmen. He would always end up with a cold glass of beer in Father Houlihan’s extremely modest residence, and accompany it with cold slices of good beef and hearty bread. There he would be joined by Sam Berkowitz, and the evening would pass happily in a game of cards, or in loud argument, and much laughter.
“The Sabbath.” said Father Houlihan, “was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. What joy have these poor people in their lives, for six days of a week? Nothing but work and toil and sweat and hardship, and uneasy exhausted sleep. The Good Lord made the Sabbath, I’ll be thinking, that His children might be happy and gay for a little, and forgetting how hard are their lives and their masters.”
His views were not shared by Protestant Grandeville, where Sunday was gray and and and cold and bitter and completely dead. In fact, they had long tried to have certain laws passed by which it would be a misdemeanor to play games on the streets, or gossip loudly, or laugh in public places, or indulge in cards and other innocent pleasures on a Sunday. “It’s cruel, and wrong, to make the Sabbath a wretched thing,” said Father Houlihan, with a sad shake of his head, “and if they pass these laws, it’s myself that’ll be the first to be hauled to the jails. They have made the Sabbath a day of penal servitude and sorrow.”
The laws were not passed. Grandeville relied on cold disapproval, ostracism and example to quell the happiness of the inhabitants of the pagan “Pope Town.” The
y did not succeed overwell, though policemen passed through the dingy and forlorn streets and made arguing and laughing groups of young men move on to another spot of vantage, and warned the children to cease their noise. But they said nothing to Father Houlihan who watched them with a sorrowful and meditative face.
He had a small and poverty-stricken little church before Stuart built the white jewel of a chapel for him. It was nothing for gross hoodlums from other sections of the city to invade that quarter and break the windows regularly, and deface the statues and befoul the interior. When Stuart built the chapel, he hired a bodyguard for it for many years, armed with clubs and guns. Father Houlihan protested, but the guard remained. “God will guard us,” said the priest. “It’s assisting Him they are,” said Stuart, grimly. “We have the law,” said the priest. “Law,” remarked Stuart, “lives in the pocket of the politician, and the politician lives in the pockets of the rich.”
In the meantime, Stuart’s house was rising near the river. More and more people walked casually along the tow-path to watch the process. Even the mule-drivers paused to stare, and the barges they convoyed slowed down almost to motionlessness in the turgid waters of the canal, and the chimney pipes of the boat-dwellers would send up their smoke in an undisturbed column.
Stuart often brought Miss Marvina and Joshua to see the house. The girl would pick her delicate and graceful way through heaps of white stones, assisted by the devoted Stuart, who would then turn to assist her father. The winter days became spring; the river turned bright blue under blazing blue skies. The summer came, all gold and soft cool breeze. Then it was winter again, with white snow and a strong blue light upon it, and the river was choked and gray with ice, and the Canadian shore was a black blur against fiery sunsets.
And now Stuart conceived his passion for his house, and dedicated himself to it. It was a living thing for him, a beautiful and perfect thing, an extension of his dreams. When it was finally finished, in the second February, he moved in and gave himself up to dark ecstasy.
Then, one Sunday, after Miss Marvina had retired, he asked her father for her hand.
CHAPTER 13
This momentous occasion occurred about four months before the coming of Janie. Stuart had been writing his cousin his usual highhearted and careless letters, and she had expressed her determination to “take up life anew” in America. Stuart, to tell the truth, hardly believed it. He had more important things on his mind at this time, and England was far away, and the creatures in that country scarcely existed in his consciousness.
On that Sunday when, with rolling heart and pounding pulses and with an exterior as debonair and flashing as always, he approached Joshua Allstairs on the subject of his daughter Stuart was not thinking of Janie in the least.
The dinner, as usual, was execrable. Stuart was even more heavily fortified than was customary by his frequent libations that morning. His repressed excitement, and the alcohol, got him through church services with magnificent oblivion. All through the dreary and protracted prayers and hymns and sermon he saw only Miss Marvina, lovely in brown velvet and brown fur, her face framed in the depths of a beaver bonnet lined with silken lace. Apparently she felt his excitement, for she kept glancing at him with her tawny eyes, in which a deep light was reflected. He did not know theft it was indeed only a reflection of his own tumult.
He had only occasionally hinted to Sam Berkowitz about his plans for Marvina. Sam had only looked at him steadily with his inscrutable sad brown eyes, and had said nothing. Nevertheless, something made Stuart cry irritably: “Think what we can do with one hundred thousand dollars or so, Sam!”
Then Sam had said, quietly: “You think her papa agree, yes?”
“Certainly!” Stuart had exclaimed, quite irately. “Why not? Is there anyone more eligible than I? Why not, for God’s sake?”
“I think,” said Sam, “her papa say no. No.”
As Stuart had some secret qualms himself, Sam’s remark only angered him.
“I think her papa say yes. Yes,” he said with some cruelty, mimicking Sam’s accent and manner. Then when Sam was silent, Stuart shouted: “Why not? Because I owe him a few thousand dollars? The dirty rascal will get it back, and he knows it. Why shouldn’t he agree?”
Sam gazed at him with compassionate despondency. “Mr. Allstairs is a wicked man, Stuart. A bad man.”
“What has that got to do with it?”
But Sam said nothing. He only returned to the shops and walked through them slowly, like an uneasy ghost. The shops had not been doing so well recently, perhaps because Stuart was so often absent these days, putting the final touches on his beloved house, and gloating over it. Sam had had to put quite a sum of money from his own private funds into meeting the last note on the house. Stuart had practically no reserve funds of his own. He had, with inner shame, and much outer irritability, offered to pay Sam an exorbitant interest, in fact insisted upon it. But Sam had only regarded him with eloquent affection and pain, and the matter had been dropped. “You’ll take a mortgage on it, then, for a thousand dollars?” Stuart suggested. Sam wanted to laugh a little, but had refrained. He put his hand on Stuart’s shoulder, and pressed it. “What is mine, my friend, is yours,” he said. “Besides, haf you not said there is a corner in that house for me? I pay for that corner, yes? It is only right.”
“There was that altar in Grundy’s church, too,” said Stuart, gloomily, after putting his fingers for a moment over Sam’s hand. It cost two hundred more than I expected. But the other was too cheap for the church. Why do churches cost so much, anyway?”
Sam studied him with profound love. What a child this was! Warmhearted and reckless, heedless and rapacious, wild and melting and fierce, all in one. This child should not be contaminated by the flesh of the Allstairs. It was evil and revolting. That maiden, with her empty eyes and her soulless body! He, Sam, could not endure the thought. But there was no arguing with this blind young man, who never suspected that evil was about to embrace him. The gates of hell are guarded by creatures who have no souls, and who contemplate with the eyes of dead statues those who descend.
And then Sam murmured aloud, in Hebrew, in slow sonorous phrases: “Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions.”
“What?” said Stuart, frowning. But Sam only turned away.
“You and your Talmud!” said Stuart, staring after him.
The whiskey, then, the intoxication of Miss Marvina, his determination that he should have her and her fortune, and the dark uneasy turbulence in himself, which was voiceless though ever-present, brought Stuart to Joshua Allstairs that Sunday afternoon four months before the arrival of Janie.
For some reason, Joshua was unusually affable and slyly humorous that afternoon. Stuart was quite exhilarated. He did not know that Joshua was well aware of what the young man wished to say, and that he was gloating over him in advance.
When Stuart with shaking hands put a cheroot into his mouth, Joshua did not rebuke him by reminding him that this was the Sabbath, and that tobacco was not permitted in “this house.” He only regarded Stuart benignly from the depths of his chair, where he lurked in malignant grayness.
It took Stuart several moments to light the cheroot, during which he cursed under his breath. His forehead was damp. His face was crimson. Then, having succeeded in drawing a cloud of smoke from the tobacco, he turned to Joshua abruptly.
“Sir,” he said without preamble, thoroughly forgetting the fine and elegant speech he had prepared, and which he was to deliver with a wonderful mixture of dignity and respect, “I wish your permission to sue for the hand of Miss Marvina.”
He paused abruptly. He did not know that he was panting quite audibly. His black eyes fixed themselves upon Joshua with a mingling of challenge, pleading and arrogance. His muscles tightened, as a preliminary to battle.
But Joshua continued to regard him with shining benevolence. He even chuckled a little, fondly, rubbing the palms of his hands against the polished he
ad of his cane. Nothing could have been more indulgent and more affectionate than his expression.
“Ah,” he murmured. “I suspected this. You love my daughter, eh?”
“I adore her!” exclaimed Stuart. He swallowed, and added: “I hope then, sir, that you do not disapprove of my suit.”
“The chit,” said Joshua, softly, “is hardly eighteen.”
Stuart, suddenly quite delirious because of Joshua’s mild manner and gentle attentiveness, cried: “But most girls are wives and mothers at that age, sir!”
“She has given you encouragement, Stuart?”
Stuart frowned. He cleared his throat. “Young ladies of breeding do not give encouragement, as you call it, Mr. Allstairs. But I have reason to believe that Miss Marvina is not insensible to me.”
Now Joshua had already perfected his plans to take Miss Marvina to England before the end of the year, and he could afford to enjoy himself at Stuart’s expense at this time. He prepared himself for complete gratification of his wickedness and hatred.