Nora said nothing while the old lady criticized her daughters, but her silence struck her as disloyal, and if it had been possible, she would have sneaked out of the house without stopping to talk to Lucy and Alice. It wasn’t possible. There was only one stairs, and they were waiting for her at the bottom of it. As she stood up, Mrs. Beach said, “Remember me to your dear mother and father, and if Austin should ask about me—I know Martha won’t—tell him I spent a bad night but that, thanks to you, I’m feeling much better.”
The house next door is never the sanctuary it at first appears to be. If you reach the stage where you are permitted to enter without knocking, you are also expected to come oftener and to penetrate farther and in the end share, along with the permanent inhabitants, the weight of the roof tree.
3
What was missing from Austin King’s office overlooking the courthouse square was sociability. With a good cigar in his fist and his feet on Judge King’s slant-topped desk, Mr. Potter set about correcting this condition. It was not too difficult, and the only real opposition was supplied by Miss Ewing, who thought all Southerners were lazy and shiftless and should be kept waiting.
Mr. Potter waited once. He waited more than half an hour, and when Miss Ewing finally said, “Mr. King will see you now,” he went inside and discovered to his astonishment that Austin was alone and hadn’t even been told that Mr. Potter was waiting.
“Now don’t you bother, Miss Ewing,” he said as he walked into the outer office the next day. “Stay right where you are. I don’t want you jumping up and down for me.”
“Mr. King has someone in his office,” Miss Ewing said.
“Yes?” Mr. Potter said. “I wonder who it could be.”
“Alfred Ogilvee,” Miss Ewing said indicating with a slight turn of her head the chair Mr. Potter was to take advantage of. “Mr. King will be free in just a few minutes.”
“Well, if he’s busy, I don’t want to interfere,” Mr. Potter said. “But I’d better tell him I’m here. Otherwise he’ll be wondering about me. I’ll go in and get my business over arid leave right away.… Now you go right ahead, my boy, and don’t mind me!” Mr. Potter closed the door of the inner office behind him. “I know you two have something you want to talk over, and I’ll just sit here by the window and watch the crowd.… I don’t know anything about these legal matters, Mr. Ogilvee. I’m just a plain farmer. I run a cotton plantation down in Howard’s Landing, Mississippi, and when they start using all those big words, I have to take a back seat. The party of the first part and the party of the second part. It’s enough to drive an ordinary man crazy. But Austin here understands it. He can tell you what it all means, in simple language that anybody can follow. I wish I had his education. I wouldn’t be a farmer if I did. I’d get me a nice office somewhere and a girl to keep the books and answer the phone, and I’d sit back and watch the money roll in. If we could all write our own wills any time we felt like it and get up in court and address the judge in high-flown language, the lawyers would go hungry. I dare say that time’ll never come. You put your money in land and you may have a thousand and one worries, but there’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. The land won’t run off. It’s there to stay. I’ve known men—very smart men they were, too—worked hard all their life and everybody looked up to them, bankers and lawyers and men that had factories working day and night, and every reason, you might say, to feel high and dry—who went to bed worth forty or fifty thousand dollars and woke up without a cent to their name. May I ask what line of work you’re in, Mr. Ogilvee?…”
Alfred Ogilvee had come to have Austin draw up a deed of sale for a corner lot, but he stayed to visit, to discuss farming and politics and the old days when a horsemill was looked upon as a very important enterprise, and everything movable wasn’t placed under lock and key. What happened with Alfred Ogilvee happened with other clients. Recognizing that a change had set in, they not only stayed but came again, a day or two later, and on finding out from Miss Ewing that Mr. Potter and Mr. Holby were in Austin’s office, they went on in.
Mr. Potter had no sense of the relentless pressure of time. In keeping Austin from working he was, Mr. Potter assumed, doing him a favour. Once Austin realized that there was no way to dam the flow of Mr. Potter’s sociability or cut short his visits, he began to enjoy them. So long as he was kept from working, it didn’t matter how many men were sitting around in his office with their hats tipped back, their thumbs hooked to their vests, interrupting their own remarks to aim at the cuspidor, and wondering if there was any reason to suppose that the improvement of the next fifty years would be less than the improvement of the last fifty. Religion, politics, farming and medicine, the school tax, the war between capital and labour, feminism—all had their innings. One way or another, everything was settled, including how to ascertain the age of sheep. For the most part, Austin sat and listened. While the air grew thick with cigar smoke, he had the satisfaction of feeling himself taken in and accepted in a way that he had never been accepted before.
Anxious to be liked, to be looked up to, like the men who had gone to sleep worth forty or fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Potter found ways of ingratiating himself with the merchants of Draperville. Instead of fighting the Civil War over again, he said solemnly, “The South has come to see the error of its ways. What we need down there now are modern farm machinery and modern business methods, factories run the way they are up here.…” Any true Southerner, in 1912, would have rejected Mr. Potter’s ideas along with the accent that it had taken him many years to acquire. The merchants, with no basis of comparison, saw no reason to find fault with anything Mr. Potter did or said.
As a young man he had left the North to seek his fortune in Mississippi at a time when Northerners were not at all welcome there. In order to set foot inside certain doors, to hold down the job of credit manager to a mill, Mr. Potter had had to be something of an actor. Where he shone was not as Hamlet but as a vaudeville actor, an entertainer. His humorous stories, though they had often been told before, were still wonderful in the way they conveyed (as if Mr. Potter’s life depended on it) every nuance of character, every detail of setting, and above all the final rich flower of point. The stories always ended in a burst of laughter, and it was for this that they had been so painstakingly told.
Sometimes, when there was no one else in Austin’s office, Mr. Potter actually did sit by the window and watch the crowd, but there were so many activities going on down below in the courthouse square, so many matters of interest that crossed Mr. Potter’s mind. Both required comment and the comment usually required an answer. In the end, Austin found himself turning, without too great reluctance, from his littered desk.
4
Though the drive out to Mr. Ellis’ farm ended in a disaster, it was nevertheless followed by so many other afternoon and evening drives that it often seemed as if the visit were taking place on wheels. After supper Austin drove the cart around to the front of the house and waited for the screen door to open. There was no use trying to hurry the Potters. They came in their own good time, when Mr. Potter had finished reading the article on the seasons of the antipodes, in the evening paper; when Randolph facing some mirror had considered long enough how he looked with a bandage across the left side of his forehead; when Mrs. Potter had finished telling Martha King about a certain dress that she had not brought with her, high-waisted, of orange velvet and Irish crochet, covered with black marquisette; when Nora had found her gloves. If Austin attempted to hurry the Potters, it only injected a note of crisis into the proceedings. Eventually the screen door burst open and the rich Southern voices arguing happily, saying “What do you need gloves for anyway on a night like this?” or “Cousin Austin, why didn’t you tell us you were waiting?” took possession of the stage.
Sitting beside Austin King on the front seat of the cart, Mr. Potter talked on and on, his voice pitched to carry above the unhurried clop-clopping of the horse’s hoofs, and the chorale of the locusts. S
ometimes Mr. Potter tried Austin’s patience by telling him things he already knew.
“You’ve got a very fine wife,” he said. “I don’t know how you persuaded her to marry you, but you must have done something because I can see she just worships you. She’s a fine girl, pretty as they come, and full of spirit, which I always like in a woman, provided it doesn’t go with strong-mindedness.…” Or Mr. Potter said, “Now my boy, I’m going to give you some advice, and I want you to take it in the same spirit that it is offered. When I was your age, nobody could tell me anything because I wouldn’t listen to them, but I got all that knocked out of me, and I don’t know as I would want you or Randolph here to go through what I went through before I got my feet on the ground …”
Don’t be misled by the advice of old people, the locusts said. Or the clop-clopping of horses’ hoofs. There is no ground under your feet, or any solid place. If you start down, looking for it, you will just keep on going down and down. Nothing is safe any more, but if you must trust yourself to something, try resting on the air. Make a spinning sound like us, and maybe that will support you. The mindless, kindless voice of nature, audible enough to poets and other crackpots, Mr. Potter did not hear or want to hear.
“If you want to get ahead in the world,” he said, “and I’m sure you do—you’re ambitious, the same as any other young man—learn to be more like other people. Your father was a very able, clever man, but he was no saint. I could tell you a thing or two about him that isn’t generally known, but I don’t think any the less of him for being human. If you want people to come to you, you’ve got to meet them halfway. Somebody asks you to drop into a corner saloon with them, do it. Don’t always be making excuses that you have work to do, or that you have to get home to your wife. The work will keep and so will your wife. I’ve lived a long time and I know what I’m talking about.…”
Try scraping your wings together, said the locusts. Maybe that will put off the coming of the first hard frost. That’s the theory we operate on, and so do the katydids, but if you don’t like that theory, find one of your own that you do like and operate on that, and don’t trust people who know what they’re talking about.
“We all make mistakes,” Mr. Potter said. “It’s the only way we learn. But if you can profit by someone else’s experience, it saves a lot of time and heartache, believe me.”
Except for a nod and an occasional “That’s the fair grounds we’re passing now,” or “That’s the jail,” Austin sat and held the reins.
If offering advice made Mr. Potter happy, there was no reason why he shouldn’t listen to it, even though he often didn’t agree with what Mr. Potter said. There were certain matters that Austin would have liked to have someone’s advice about: Whether it wouldn’t be better if he dissolved the partnership with Mr. Holby and started out on his own. And what to do about his mother, who, now that she was older, leaned on him in a way she had never leaned on his father, and let the money he sent her from time to time slip through her fingers. What to do when Martha (whose happiness was far more important to him than his own) let herself strike out at him, wildly and carelessly, as if it were a matter of complete indifference to her whether the next bitter thing she said would be the remark that neither of them would ever forget. And why what he did for one person took away from what he tried to do for another, so that no matter what he did or whom he tried to please, he still felt somehow in the wrong. These things he couldn’t discuss with Mr. Potter.
The evening drives ended before dark. The afternoon drives were longer and required preparation in the way of veils and dustcoats. Sometimes they went in the cart, sometimes with Bud Ellis in his surrey. The men sat in front, and wisps of their conversation—the words “alfalfa” and “timothy,” the words “first and second sweepings”—drifted back with the cigar smoke. Ab sat on her mother’s lap or if Martha King stayed home, on Mrs. Potter’s, which she found quite comfortable after she got used to the projecting corset stays. With its big red wheels, the English cart was enough higher than the general run of rigs and surreys so that, on dirt country roads, they almost never had to eat other people’s dust but rode along smiling and superior. The conversation in the back seat came steadily and placidly. There were never any exchanges of private information when the men were present, never that carefully subdued, serious tone, just above a whisper, which was calculated to escape Ab but which invariably acted instead as a warning signal to her wandering attention. When the household secrets, the recipes, the ways of keeping silver from tarnishing, rose loud enough to be overheard in the front seat, Bud Ellis would sometimes wink at Mr. Potter and say, “Blah-blah-blah.…” Ab knew (and Bud Ellis didn’t) about the unfettered talk of the women on those occasions when no men were present.
In one corner of the porch of the house on Elm Street, there was a clay flower-pot filled with sand which she emptied out on the floor and then put back, a handful at a time, very quietly. Most of the talk that flowed over her head was cheerful and reassuring, but she waited patiently for those moments when the conversation took a darker tone. For example, the conversation between her mother and Aunt Ione, interrupted by the return of Mr. Potter from the barn.
“Nora and I used to be much closer,” were the words that caught Ab’s attention, “but because of an unfortunate thing that happened—I don’t know exactly how to tell you about it or whether I ought to, even, but there was a time when Mr. Potter and I—there were certain things about him that I didn’t understand or make allowance for, as I should have. So many doors were closed to us—neither of us was born and raised in the South, you know. And we had a darky nurse who took care of the children, and I sat around all day, ready to receive callers who never came. I couldn’t see that Mr. Potter needed me, and it didn’t seem that my life was leading anywhere. And then I met someone who cared very deeply for me.… It’s strange how just talking about it brings all the old feelings back. He kept begging me to run away with him, and I tried not to listen, even though I felt I belonged to him and not to the man I had married, and that it was my one chance for happiness. I know now that we none of us have that right. But anyway, I did finally. I left Mr. Potter and the children and went off with him. We lived in Charleston for a while, and then in Savannah. I thought he was happy. He seemed quite happy, but it turned out he wasn’t. It was just blindness on my part. He had a very fine mind and I knew I was no match for him in that, but I thought I could make it up to him in other ways. He had to tell me, and even then it was hard for me to realize that he … Mr. Potter never reproached me. If he had, it might have been easier. I had no one but Nora to talk to. By that time she was older and there was no way of keeping from her what had happened. I dare say I told her more than I should have. She was always a very serious child. For a while, as I say, we were very close, and then after a year or two she withdrew into herself. She never talks to me any more about what’s in her heart, and I try not to burden her with my feelings.…”
During this recital, Ab sat as still as a stone. In those moments when life is a play and not merely a backstage rehearsal, children are the true audience. With no lines to speak, they remain politely on their side of the proscenium unless (after the hero has blinded himself with his own hands) the playwright chooses to have one or two of them led onto the stage to be wept over and then frightened with some such blessing as May heaven be kinder to you than it has been to me. Although children are not always equipped to understand all that they see and overhear, they know as a rule which character is supposed to represent Good and which Evil, and they appreciate genuine repentance. By all rights, when the play is finished, the actors should turn and bow to them, and ask for their applause.
5
If Ab, tired of eavesdropping, tried to break in upon the conversation of her mother and Mrs. Potter, Martha King would turn her head and convey in a glance that this was not the time to test the invisible line past which Ab could not go without a spanking. Along with a great many other things, spankings
had been postponed until the visit of the Mississippi people was over. There was no telling when that would be. They had come a long way (a whole day and a whole night on the train) and Ab had been told that she must not ask them how long they were going to stay.
There were compensations. Mr. Potter brought home thin twisted peppermint sticks in a glass jar, and if coaxed, he would walk the length of the living-room with Ab sitting on his foot. And Cousin Randolph was always at her disposal. He allowed her to crawl all over him, to whisper inaudible secrets in his ear, and one rainy day he even played dolls with her. But every one of these delights was paid for, sooner or later, with confusion. If she told Randolph that gypsies came and set fire to the barn during the night, he not only believed her but made the gypsies set fire to the house as well, and also to the Danforths’ house. The fire department arrived and the conflagration became too real, so that Ab was driven back upon the truth, which was that she herself had lighted a match—a thing she was never supposed to do; and the truth Randolph would not believe, in spite of her anxious efforts to convince him of it.
Sometimes when they were alone, he would sit and stare at her with what seemed like intense dislike, though she knew that, since he was her cousin, it couldn’t be. Everywhere he went, Ab followed or walked ahead of him like an animal on a leash, and when Martha King tried to put a stop to this on the grounds that Ab was being a nuisance, Randolph insisted that he liked to have Ab with him, that he needed her to protect him from Mary Caroline.