Without his family to restrain him, Mr. Potter’s voice grew louder and his bragging more open. “I knew what I was up against. I’d had dealings with Henry Fuqua before. So when he come to me and said he’d heard I had a pair of mules I was fixing to dispose of and how much did I want for them, I said, ‘Henry, you got a good mule now. What do you want with two more?’ ‘Well I do,’ he said, ‘and furthermore I got my eye on them two white mules.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘tell you the honest truth, I don’t know as I want to sell that pair of mules. They’re nicely broken in now and used to each other and I might have trouble finding another pair that would satisfy me. Why don’t you go talk to Fred Obermeier? I was out by his place the other day and he’s got some nice mules, two or three of them.’ ‘If I wanted to talk to Fred Obermeier,’ he said, ‘I’d be talking to him now. I wouldn’t be here dickering with you. I’ll give you eighty dollars for the two of them.’ Well, eighty dollars is a good price down home for a pair of mules, but I figured if they were worth that to Henry, they were worth more to somebody else, because he can’t bear to part with a nickel he don’t have to, so I said, ‘Tell you what I’ll do. You can have Jake, if you want him, but Olly belongs to the children. They raised him and he’s kind of a pet. You know how it is, Henry,’ I said, ‘if I was to sell Jake and Olly both, they’d probably feel bad.’ ‘Make it eighty-five,’ he said. ‘No, Henry,’ I said. ‘That’s a decent enough offer, but these mules—I don’t know as I can see my way clear to selling them. Not at this time, anyway.’ So we argued back and forth, and the sum and substance of it was …”
Mr. Ellis dropped back beside Austin King and the tenant, a short stocky man of about forty, with light hair, blue eyes, and a dark sunburned neck. “My oats aren’t as good this year as last,” Mr. Ellis said. “We had a lot of rain in the late spring and planted late. But the corn will even things up—isn’t that right, John?”
“It ought to, if this weather holds,” the tenant said, his voice low and unemphatic.
“John had his own farm until a few years ago,” Mr. Ellis said, turning to Austin. “He’s a very good man, a hard worker. They both are. When we’re short of help she comes right out in the field and works alongside of him. They’ve got three nice children and she puts up enough vegetables to last through the winter and keeps the house neat as a pin. I want to get her some linoleum for the kitchen floor when I sell my corn. It always pays to keep the womenfolks happy, you know. Some people are eternally changing tenants but I’ve had this couple on the place for the last seven years and we get along fine.”
When the corn was delivered to the grain elevator, the tenant would claim his share of the profits. Meanwhile, he allowed old Mr. Ellis to take unto himself full credit for ploughing this forty-acre field, for sowing the seed, for disking and harrowing in dry weather. As they walked along under the enormous sky and in the midst of heat so luxuriant and growth so swift that they could almost be seen and heard, the tenant farmer’s arms remained always at his side as if he had no power of gesture, and his eyes, not even angry, reflected no pride, no pleasure, no possession of anything that they saw.
8
When the men disappeared into the cornfield, Mrs. Potter didn’t have Dr. Danforth to fall back upon. There was Nora, of course, but to fall back upon Nora in time of need was to take up all manner of unsolved problems that Mrs. Potter, who loved peace and harmony, had agreed to let alone. She couldn’t make friends with the dog because Randolph had bewitched it, and Randolph himself was never to be counted on. He was only there when she didn’t need him. He was kneeling in the dust now, his face hidden by his crossed arms, and the dog was walking round and round, nosing Randolph, trying to get in past his hand, past his elbow. Mrs. Potter retired to the porch, opened her silk bag, and found her spectacles.
When the men came back from the fields, she could stuff her crocheting into the bag again and with the extreme adaptability which marks the lady, be ready to please, to console and comfort, to mother old Mr. Ellis, who was twenty-five years her senior but who would nevertheless need mothering after he had been so long in the hot sun.
“It’s cooler out here,” Nora called from the shade of a cottonwood tree.
“My knees,” Mrs. Potter called back.
Nora offered to drag the rocker out onto the grass, but Mrs. Potter would not allow it. She was happier where she was. Occasionally she raised her eyes from her crocheting and let them wander over as much of the farm as she could see from the porch. She did not insist on the tangles of cane-brakes and somewhere among the enormous cypresses of the primeval forest, the scream of sawmills. She did not expect to see the great rolling sheet of cotton as it came from the gin or to be offered sow-belly and hot biscuits and sorghum molasses. What distressed her was that there should be no old trees around the farmhouse, no lawn, no flower garden. Neatness and order were wasted upon her and so was the fertility of black soil. She wanted something that gratified her sense of family tradition, of home as the centre of the universe. What Mrs. Potter saw was a flayed landscape that a hundred years earlier had been one of the natural wonders of the world—the great western prairie with timber here and there in the distance, following a stream, and the tall prairie grass whipped into waves by the wind, by the cloud shadows passing over it, mile after mile, as if the landscape (once an inland sea) remembered and was trying to reproduce its ancient aspect.
The farmer’s three children huddled in a group by the windmill and watched Randolph and the dog for some time before they overcame their shyness and allowed him to charm them with tricks. The laughter and the squealing of the children reached the porch and caused Mrs. Potter to peer down at them over the railing. With a sigh she began another round on her centrepiece. No matter where Randolph was, he had to be loved; he couldn’t rest until he had made someone (even if it was only a long-nosed collie) a victim to his charm.
The crocheting grew under Mrs. Potter’s fingers until it was the size of a small saucer, and then the farmer’s wife came out of the house with a jelly glass in her hand, worked the rusty pump-handle, and brought Mrs. Potter a drink of cold water.
“Now aren’t you kind!”
Mrs. Potter could not invite the farmer’s wife to visit her in Mississippi but she was ready, even so, to make a friend. She pressed her crocheting flat on her knee and explained the pattern, so like a snowflake under the magnifying glass, and the farmer’s wife invited her to come inside out of the heat.
Under the cottonwood tree Nora amused herself by picking blades of sunburnt grass and measuring them, one against another, discarding in each case the shorter one. Drowsy with the heat, her mind drifted helplessly, now coming to rest against the children’s voices, now returning to the house in town. What I don’t see, she said to herself, is why life should be so simple for some people; why everything that Cousin Martha could possibly want or need should be granted to her, with no strings attached, happiness within reach, where she has only to bend down and gather it, day after day. And other people.… These games I play, Nora said to herself, looking out over the cornfields; this mindless measuring and discarding of grassblades; these voices that cry Nora, where are you? because no human voice ever asks that in a tone anything like the sound I hear in my mind—I know they aren’t real voices, but am I the only one who hears them? Cousin Martha doesn’t imagine that she’s invisible or want to see what is on the other side of the wall. She doesn’t want to watch people when they don’t know they’re being watched. Motives don’t interest her the way they do me. She has things to do, and if I had been allowed to stay home with her this afternoon, I might have found out her secret—what it is that makes it possible for her to be so sure of herself. But since I’m here instead, something ought to happen to me. Things that start ought to be finished, even if it takes twenty or thirty years. We were asked out to this farm and therefore something ought to come of it, for all of us, and for Cousin Austin. Most of all for Cousin Austin, because he didn’t want to come. He wa
s tired and he didn’t want to drive us out into the country. Nothing but politeness made him do it. He’s seen the farm before and he doesn’t care about farming or expect anything to come of this drive. It’s one thing for me to expect something and not get it, but if people who expect nothing come away empty-handed, then there is really no hope.
No hope, said the heat, the only actor on this wide empty stage, drawing the last moisture out of the ground into the dry air. There is no such person as Cousin Austin. The whole business of expecting and receiving is an illusion.
Frightened by this communication from the landscape, Nora stood up suddenly, brushed her skirt off, and ran towards the porch. Every window in the house had been closed since early morning, and the blinds pulled to the window sills to keep out the sun. The downstairs rooms had an air of scrubbed, solemn poverty. When Nora came into the parlour, Mrs. Potter and the farmer’s wife paused and then (since she seemed to have nothing to tell them, no message from the men) turned back to each other and went on talking about their canning, their church work, and their children.
9
Between quarter to two and quarter past three an age of quiet passed over the house on Elm Street, over the richness contained in cupboards, the serenity of objects in empty rooms. The front stairs creaked, but not from any human footstep. The sunlight relinquished its hold on the corner of an oriental rug in the study in order to warm the leg of a chair. A fly settled on the kitchen ceiling. In the living-room a single white wheel-shaped phlox blossom hung for a long time and then dropped to the table without making a sound. On a dusty beam in the basement a spider finished its web and waited. Just when the arrangement of the furniture, the disposition of light and shadow, the polish and sweet odour of summer seemed final and the house itself a preserved invaluable memory, Ab awoke and called out to her mother.
Between three-thirty and quarter to four, the leaves on the trees began to stir. There were dust eddies, dry whirlpools in Elm Street. The locusts grew shriller. One of the little Ritchie girls, walking and skipping on her way to the store for a loaf of bread and two pounds of small yellow onions, passed the Kings’ house and saw Martha King in the garden, cutting Shasta daisies. Mrs. Danforth looked out of her kitchen window and saw her at about the same time—saw Ab pulling flowers off the trumpet vine while Martha arranged the daisies in a cut-glass vase on the back steps. So did Rachel’s son, Eugene, who came to the back door that afternoon, talked to his mother for a few minutes, and went out the driveway, eating a slice of bread with butter and sugar on it.
When Martha King had finished arranging the flowers, there was nothing more for her to do. She went upstairs to her room and stood looking around and frowning, as though something had brought her here and she could not remember what it was. The closet door, slightly ajar, drew her attention. Half the closet was dedicated to Austin King, his suits, his shoes, his ties, his sober, tobacco-smelling presence. The empty coat-sleeves, the trousers hanging upside down, reminded her of how she had been irritable with him before lunch when he was only trying to do his best by the company from Mississippi and by her. Resolving to do better by him and by them, she let her eyes rove through her own wardrobe, feeling the pleasure of dark purple against flamingo red, stopping at a row of white blouses then going on to folds of velvet or silk. She lifted the white dress she had worn the night before from its hanger, and holding it in front of her, consulted the dressing-table mirror. Then she sat down in the chair by the window and with a pair of sewing scissors she snipped the threads that held the silk rose in place.
When Austin King went away to law school, Martha Hastings was a girl who had only just lengthened her skirts and been permitted to leave off wearing hair-ribbons. Three years later, when he began to practise law in his father’s office overlooking the court-home square, she was a grown woman, quite different from the girl he remembered, with mysterious shadows in her face and beautiful brown eyes that were sometimes sad, sometimes wilful and arrogant. For a long time he merely watched for her, in any group of people where she was likely to be, and wondered about her when he was falling asleep at night, finding now this explanation and now that for the mysterious shadows, investing her with the sweetness and gentleness and pliability of a story-book heroine, walking with her, in his imagination, over moon-dappled grass, their hands sometimes touching, their faces reflecting one another’s need. Accident at last brought them together; the Women’s Club decided to produce Erminie with local talent. After a rehearsal at the Draperville Academy, Austin King asked if he could escort Martha Hastings home. He was, and always had been, shy with girls. If she had rewarded him with the slightest encouragement, it is more than likely that he would have seen no more of her. But from the very beginning she fought against him. The never-ending effort to do what was right, upon which Austin King spent so much of his energy, she had already had more than enough of at home. She had been boxed in by Christian unselfishness, by church and Sunday school, by the Epworth League, from the time that she was old enough to be at all aware of her surroundings.
In an atmosphere laden with Methodism, people smiled at her, the same complacent, oversweet smile that they smiled at everyone else. They had no idea who she was, or what she was like. They weren’t taking any chances. They were singing their way to eternal salvation and she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to run risks and there weren’t any offered to her. What she missed was excitement, weakness in her knees, the sense of falling and falling and nothing under you to break the fall, nothing but empty space, and who knows what, when you land or if you ever land at all. Wasn’t there anyone, she asked herself, standing on the church steps in the brilliant sunshine, or holding a plate of strawberry ice cream at a church social—wasn’t there someone who would give her the sense of danger, a man who would look at her and make everything go dim around her? A man that she would see only once and know that she would marry him if he raised his little finger to ask her to; even though she didn’t know anything about him, maybe not even his name, or whether he was kind or false, loved her or was making a game of love?
The first time that Austin kissed Martha Hastings good night on the front steps of her uncle’s house, her arm rose in an involuntary gesture and then, feeling his uncertainty, she let her arm drop to her side and said, “You didn’t have to do that.” Boys brought up the way Austin King was brought up are taught, along with table manners, to create a handsome high pedestal and put the woman they admire on it, for purposes of worship. What they are not taught is how to get her off the pedestal, for purposes of love. (Martha King slipped the white dress on over her head. Standing in front of the mirror, turning slowly, she considered the effect without the rose. The face in the mirror became doubtful. Without the flower, the pleated silk sash didn’t look right. It might be the way the sash was draped, but on the other hand, sashes were not being worn so much any more. If the dress were plainer.… She took it off and very carefully cut the threads that held the sash in place, and then went on cutting and removed the lace inset at the throat. It made the dress look too sweet, she decided, too much like a young girl’s first party dress.)
The next day she received a letter asking her to marry him. Her first reaction was pleasure, wholly unexpected, like coming outdoors on a May morning and finding that the Baltimore orioles had arrived. He’s so gentle, she thought, and so trusting. Some girls would take advantage of him, and so I’d better marry him and protect him from them. Then, in a spasm of irritation at her own foolishness, she tore the letter into small pieces and dropped it in the wastebasket.
Sitting in the porch swing that night she told him that it was no use, that she didn’t love him and never would love him and that sooner or later she would have to ask him to stop seeing her. “When that time comes,” he said solemnly, “all you have to do is tell me and I won’t bother you any more.”
The time didn’t come, though she often threatened him with it, always with such pain in her voice, as if it were he who had threat
ened to send her away and never let her see him any more. This contradiction between what she said and the voice that said it confused and encouraged him. Part of him was ready to agree with her. It was impossible that he would ever possess a beautiful woman. Nevertheless, he kept coming, night after night, drawn by the desire to see her face and hear the sound of her voice, to be near her. Her voice was sometimes young and confiding, sometimes harsh, and occasionally altogether hopeless. Martha Hastings had many different voices, each one so full of shading and meaning that even to think about them was to cause shivers of delight to pass over his body.
Though Austin King was, by Mrs. Beach’s standards, an eligible young man, attractive, of good family, well-mannered, ambitious, and kind, his own opinion of himself was not very high; not as high as—taking human nature by and large, all the grossness, selfishness, and loutish cruelty—it might have been. He knew that Martha Hastings did not want to marry him, but he also remembered how her arm had come to rest for a second on his shoulder, and from this physical memory, this sensation which the shoulder could produce at will, he derived hope. He even tried a little experiment. Instead of asking her, as he had been doing each night when he left, if he could see her the next night, he deliberately omitted this question, and when he arrived the following evening—tall, thin, hollow-cheeked, with a bunch of white roses in his hand—she was expecting him. But she did not like the roses. “I don’t mind them when they’re just buds like this,” she said, with a troubled expression on her face. “But I don’t like them when they open.” After that he brought her other flowers—violets, carnations, lilies of the valley, whatever the florist had that reminded him of her. Instead of kissing her good night, against her will, he watched her carefully, studied her moods, listened for anything in her glance or her voice that would give her away to him.