CHAPTER IX
THE GREAT MAN MOVES
Several weeks later, at the close of a June afternoon, Cyrus Treadwell sat alone on the back porch of his house in Bolingbroke Street. He was smoking, and, between the measured whiffs of his pipe, he leaned over the railing and spat into a bed of miniature sunflowers which grew along the stone ledge of the area. For thirty years these flowers had sprung up valiantly every spring in that bleak strip of earth, and for thirty years Cyrus had spat among them while he smoked alone on the back porch on June afternoons.
While he sat there a great peace enfolded and possessed him. The street beyond the sagging wooden gate was still; the house behind him was still; the kitchen, in which showed the ebony silhouette of a massive cook kneading dough, was still with the uncompromising stillness of the Sabbath. In the midst of this stillness, his thoughts, which were usually as angular as lean birds on a bough, lost their sharpness of outline and melted into a vague and feathery mass. At the moment it was impossible to know of what he was thinking, but he was happy with the happiness which visits men of small parts and of sterile imagination. By virtue of these limitations and this sterility he had risen out of obscurity – for the spiritual law which decrees that to gain the world one must give up one's soul, was exemplified in him as in all his class. Success, the shibboleth of his kind, had controlled his thoughts and even his impulses so completely for years that he had come at last to resemble an animal less than he resembled a machine; and Nature (who has a certain large and careless manner of dispensing justice) had punished him in the end by depriving him of the ordinary animal capacity for pleasure. The present state of vacuous contentment was, perhaps, as near the condition of enjoyment as he would ever approach.
Half an hour before he had had an encounter with Susan on the subject of her going to college, but even his victory, which had been sharp and swift, was robbed of all poignant satisfaction by his native inability to imagine what his refusal must have meant to her. The girl had stood straight and tall, with her commanding air, midway between the railing and the weather-stained door of the house.
"Father, I want to go to college," she had said quite simply, for she was one who used words very much as Cyrus used money, with a temperamental avoidance of all extravagance.
Her demand was a direct challenge to the male in Cyrus, and, though this creature could not be said to be either primitive or predatory, he was still active enough to defend himself from the unprovoked assault of an offspring.
"Tut-tut," he responded. "If you want something to occupy you, you'd better start about helping your mother with her preserving."
"I put up seventy-five jars of strawberries."
"Well, the blackberries are coming along. I was always partial to blackberries."
He sat there, bald, shrunken, yellow, as soulless as a steam engine, and yet to Susan he represented a pitiless manifestation of destiny – of those deaf, implacable forces by which the lives of men and women are wrecked. He had the power to ruin her life, and yet he would never see it because he had been born blind. That in his very blindness had lain his strength, was a fact which, naturally enough, escaped her for the moment. The one thought of which she was conscious was a fierce resentment against life because such men possessed such power over others.
"If you will lend me the money, I will pay it back to you as soon as I can take a position," she said, almost passionately.
Something that was like the ghost of a twinkle appeared in his eyes, and he let fall presently one of his rare pieces of humour.
"If you'd like a chance to repay me for your education," he said, "there's your schooling at Miss Priscilla's still owing, and I'll take it out in help about the housekeeping."
Then Susan went, because going in silence was the only way that she could save the shreds of dignity which remained to her, and bending forward, with a contented chuckle, Cyrus spat benevolently down upon the miniature sunflowers.
In the half hour that followed he did not think of his daughter. From long discipline his mind had fallen out of the habit of thinking of people except in their relation to the single vital interest of his life, and this interest was not fatherhood. Susan was an incident – a less annoying incident, it is true, than Belinda – but still an incident. An inherent contempt for women, due partly to qualities of temperament and partly to the accident of a disillusioning marriage, made him address them always as if he were speaking from a platform. And, as is often the case with men of cold-blooded sensuality, women, from Belinda downward, had taken their revenge upon him.
The front door-bell jangled suddenly, and a little later he heard a springy step passing along the hall. Then the green lattice door of the porch opened, and the face of Mrs. Peachey, wearing the look of unnatural pleasantness which becomes fixed on the features of persons who spend their lives making the best of things, appeared in the spot where Susan had been half an hour before. She had trained her lips to smile so persistently and so unreasonably, that when, as now, she would have preferred to present a serious countenance to an observer, she found it impossible to relax the muscles of her mouth from their expression of perpetual cheerfulness. Cyrus, who had once remarked of her that he didn't believe she could keep a straight face at her own funeral, wondered, while he rose and offered her a chair, whether the periodical sprees of honest Tom were the cause or the result of the look of set felicity she wore. For an instant he was tempted to show his annoyance at the intrusion. Then, because she was a pretty woman and did not belong to him, he grew almost playful, with the playfulness of an uncertain tempered ram that is offered salt.
"It is not often that I am honoured by a visit from you," he said.
"The honour is mine. Mr. Treadwell," she replied, and she really felt it. "I was on my way upstairs to see Belinda, and it just crossed my mind as I saw you sitting out here, that I'd better stop and speak to you about your nephew. I wonder Belinda doesn't plant a few rose-bushes along that back wall," she added.
"I'd pay you fifty dollars, ma'am, if you'd get Belinda to plant anything" – which was not delicately put, perhaps, but was, after all, spoken in the only language that Cyrus knew.
"I thought she was so fond of flowers. She used to be as a girl."
"Humph!" was Cyrus's rejoinder, and then: "Well, what about my nephew, madam?" Clasping his bony hands over his knee, he leaned forward and waited, not without curiosity, for her answer. He did not admire Oliver – he even despised him – but when all was said, the boy had succeeded in riveting his attention. However poorly he might think of him, the fact remained that think of him he did. The young man was in the air as inescapably as if he were the measles.
"I'm worrying about him, Mr. Treadwell; I can't help myself. You know he boards with me."
"Yes'm, I know," replied Cyrus – for he had heard the fact from Miss Priscilla on his way home from church one Sunday.
"And he's not well. There's something the matter with him. He's so nervous and irritable that he's almost crazy. He doesn't eat a morsel, and I can hear him pacing up and down his room until daybreak. Once I got up and went upstairs to ask him if he was sick, but he said that he was perfectly well and was walking about for exercise. I am sure I don't know what it can be, but if it keeps up, he'll land in an asylum before the summer is over."
The look of satisfaction which her first words had brought to Cyrus's face deepened gradually as her story unfolded. "He's wanting money, I reckon," he commented, his imagination seizing upon the only medium in which it could work. As a philosopher may discern in all life different manifestations of the Deity, so he saw in all affliction only the wanting of money under varied aspects. Sorrows in which the lack of money did not bear a part always seemed to him to be unnecessary and generally self-inflicted by the sufferers. Of such people he would say impatiently that they took a morbid view of their troubles and were "nursing grief."
"I don't think it's that," said Mrs. Peachey. "He always pays his bills promptly on the first day of the month, and I know that he gets checks from New York for the writing he does. I'm sometimes tempted to believe that he has fallen in love."
"Love? Pshaw!" said Cyrus, and dismissed the passion.
"But it goes hard with some people, and he's one of that kind," rejoined the little lady, with spirit, for in spite of her wholesome awe of Cyrus, she could not bear to hear the sentiment derided. "We aren't all as sensible as you are, Mr. Treadwell."
"Well, if he is in love, as you say, whom is he in love with?" demanded Cyrus.
"It's all guesswork," answered Mrs. Peachey. "He isn't paying attention to any girl that I know of – but, I suppose, if it's anybody, it must be Virginia Pendleton. All the young men are crazy about her."
She had been prepared for opposition – she had been prepared, being a lady, for anything, as she told Tom afterwards, short of an oath – but to her amazement the unexpected, which so rarely happened in the case of Cyrus, happened at that minute. Human nature, which she had treated almost as a science, proved suddenly that it was not even an art. One of those glaring inconsistencies which confute every theory and overturn all psychology was manifested before her.
"That's the daughter of old Gabriel, aint it?" asked Cyrus, and unconsciously to himself, his voice softened.
"Yes, she's Gabriel's daughter, and one of the sweetest girls that ever lived."
"Gabriel's a good man," said Cyrus. "I always liked Gabriel. We fought through the war together."
"A better man never lived, nor a better woman than Lucy. If she's got a fault on earth, it's that she's too unselfish."
"Well, if this girl takes after them, the young fool has shown more sense than I gave him credit for."
"I don't think he's a fool," returned Mrs. Peachey, reflecting how wonderfully she had "managed" the great man, "but, of course, he's queer – all writers are queer, aren't they?"
"He's kept it up longer than I thought, but I reckon he's about ready to give in," pursued Cyrus, ignoring her question as he did all excursions into the region of abstract wonder. "If he'll start in to earn his living now, I'll let him have a job on the railroad out in Matoaca City. I meant to teach him a lesson, but I shouldn't like Henry's son to starve. I've nothing against Henry except that he was too soft. He was a good brother as brothers go, and I haven't forgotten it."
"Perhaps, if you'd talk to Oliver," suggested Mrs. Peachey. "I'm afraid I couldn't induce him to come to you, but – "
"Oh, I ain't proud – I don't need to be," interrupted Cyrus with a chuckle. "Only fools and the poor have any use for pride. I'll look in upon him sometime along after supper, and see if he's come to his wits since I last talked to him."
"Then, I'm glad I came to you. Tom would be horrified almost to death if he knew of it – but I've always said that when an idea crosses my mind just like that," she snapped her thumb and forefinger, "there's something in it."
As she rose from her seat, she looked up at him with the coquetry which was so inalienable an attribute of her soul that, had the Deity assumed masculine shape before her, she would instinctively have used this weapon to soften the severity of His judgment. "It was so kind of you not to send me away, Mr. Treadwell," she said in honeyed accents.
"It is a pleasure to meet such a sensible woman," replied Cyrus, with awkward gallantry. Her flattery had warmed him pleasantly, and in the midst of the dried husks of his nature, he was conscious suddenly that a single blade of living green still survived. He had ceased to feel old – he felt almost young again – and this rejuvenation had set in merely because a middle-aged woman, whom he had known since childhood, had shown an innocent pleasure in his society. Mrs. Peachey's traditional belief in the power of sex had proved its own justification.
When she had left him, Cyrus sat down again, and took up his pipe from the railing where he had placed it. "I'll go round and have some words with the young scamp," he thought. "There's no use waiting until after supper. I'll go round now while it is light."
Then, as if the softening impulse were a part of the Sabbath stillness, he leaned over the bed of sunflowers, and fixed his eyes on the pinkish tower of Saint James' Church, which he could see palely enkindled against the afterglow. A single white cloud floated like a dove in the west, and beneath it a rain of light fell on the shadowy roofs of the town. The air was so languorous that it was as if the day were being slowly smothered in honeysuckle, the heavy scent of which drifted to him from the next garden. A vast melancholy – so vast that it seemed less the effect of a Southern summer than of a universal force residing in nature – was liberated, with the first cooling breath of the evening, from man and beast, from tree and shrub, from stock and stone. The very bricks, sun-baked and scarred, spoke of the weariness of heat, of the parching thirst of the interminable summers.
But to Cyrus the languor and the intense sweetness of the air suggested only that the end of a hot day had come. "It's likely to be a drought," he was thinking while his upward gaze rested on the illuminated tower of the church. "A drought will go hard with the tobacco."
Having emptied his pipe, he was about to take down his straw hat from a nail on the wall, when the sound of the opening gate arrested him, and he waited with his eyes fixed on the winding brick walk, where the negro washerwoman appeared presently with a basket of clean clothes on her head. Beneath her burden he saw that there were some primitive attempts at Sunday adornment. She wore a green muslin dress, a little discoloured by perspiration, but with many compensating flounces; a bit of yellow ribbon floated from her throat, and in her hand she carried the festive hat which would decorate her head after the removal of the basket. Her figure, which had once been graceful, had grown heavy; and her face, of a light gingerbread colour, with broad, not unpleasant features, wore a humble, inquiring look – the look of some trustful wild animal that man has tamed and only partly domesticated. Approaching the steps, she brought down the basket from her head, and came on, holding it with a deprecating swinging movement in front of her.
"Howdy, Marster," she said, as if uncertain whether to stop or to pass on into the doorway.
"Howdy, Mandy," responded Cyrus. "There's a hot spell coming, I reckon."
Lowering the basket to the floor of the porch, the woman drew a red bandanna handkerchief from her bosom and began slowly to wipe the drops of sweat from her face and neck. The acrid odour of her flesh reached Cyrus, but he made no movement to draw away from her.
"I'se been laid up wid er stitch in my side, Marster, so I'se jes got dese yer close done dis mawnin'. Dar wan' noner de chillen at home ter tote um down yer, so I low I 'uz gwine ter drap by wid um on my way ter church."
As he did not reply, she hesitated an instant and over her features, which looked as if they had been flattened by a blow, there came an expression which was half scornful, half inviting, yet so little personal that it might have been worn by one of her treetop ancestors while he looked down from his sheltering boughs on a superior species of the jungle. The chance effect of light and shadow on a grey rock was hardly less human or more primitive.
"I'se gittin' moughty well along, Marster," she said; "I reckon I'se gittin' on toward a hunnard."
"Nonsense, Mandy, you ain't a day over thirty-five. There's a plenty of life left in you yet."
"Go way f'om yer, Marster; you knows I'se a heap older 'n dat. How long ago was hit I done fust come yer ter you all?"
He thought a moment. A question of calculation always interested him, and he prided himself on his fine memory for dates.
"You came the year our son Henry died, didn't you? That was in '66 – eighteen years ago. Why, you couldn't have been over fifteen that summer."
For the first time a look of cunning – of the pathetic cunning of a child pitted against a man – awoke in her face.
"En Miss Lindy sent me off befo' de year was up, Marster. My boy Jubal was born de mont' atter she done tu'n me out." She hesitated a minute, and then added, with a kind of savage coquetry, "I 'uz a moughty likely gal, Marster. You ain't done furgit dat, is you?"
Her words touched Cyrus like the flick of a whip on a sore, and he drew back quickly while his thin lips grew tight.
"You'd better take that basket into the house," he said sharply.
In the negress's face an expression of surprise wavered for a second and then disappeared. Her features resumed their usual passive and humble look – a look which said, if Cyrus could have read human nature as easily as he read finance, "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding. Am I not what you have made me? Have I not been what you wanted? And yet you despise me for being the thing you made."
"I didn't mean nuttin', Marster. I didn't mean nuttin'," she protested aloud.
"Then get into the house," retorted Cyrus harshly, "and don't stand gaping there. Any more of your insolence and I'll never let you set foot in this yard again."
"'Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin'! Gawd a' moughty, I didn't mean nuttin'! I jes lowed as you mought be willin' ter gun me fo' dollars a mont' fur de washin'. My boy Jubal – "
"I'll not give you a red cent more. If you don't want it, you can leave it. Get out of here!"
All the primitive antagonism of race – that instinct older than civilization – was in the voice with which he ordered her out of his sight. "It was downright blackmail. The fool was trying to blackmail me," he thought. "If I'd yielded an inch I'd have been at her mercy. It's a pretty pass things have come to when men have to protect themselves from negro women." The more he reflected on her impudence, the stronger grew his conviction that he had acted remarkably well. "Nipped it in the root. If I hadn't – " he thought.
And behind him in the doorway the washerwoman continued to regard him, over the lowered clothes basket, with her humble and deprecating look, which said, like the look of a beaten animal: "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding because you are stronger than I."
Taking down his hat, Cyrus turned away from her, and descended the steps. "I'll look up Henry's son before supper," he was thinking. "Even if the boy's a fool, I'm not one to let those of my own blood come to want."
CHAPTER X
OLIVER SURRENDERS
When Cyrus's knock came at his door, Oliver crossed the room to let in his visitor, and then fell back, startled, at the sight of his uncle. "I wonder what has brought him here?" he thought inhospitably. But even if he had put the question, it is doubtful if Cyrus could have enlightened him – for the great man was so seldom visited by an impulse that when, as now, one actually took possession of him, he obeyed the pressure almost unconsciously. Like most men who pride themselves upon acting solely from reason, he was the abject slave of the few instincts which had managed to take root and thrive in the stony ground of his nature. The feeling for family, which was so closely entwined with his supreme feeling for property that the two had become inseparable, moved him to-day as it had done on the historic occasion when he had redeemed the mortgaged roof over the heads of his spinster relations. Perhaps, too, some of the vague softness of June had risen in him and made him gentler in his judgments of youth.
"I didn't expect you or I'd have straightened up a bit," said Oliver, not overgraciously, while he hastily pushed his supper of bread and tea to one end of the table. He resented what he called in his mind "the intrusion," and he had no particular objection to his uncle's observing his resentment. His temper, never of the most perfect equilibrium, had been entirely upset by the effects of a June Sunday in Dinwiddie, and the affront of Cyrus's visit had become an indignity because of his unfortunate selection of the supper hour. Some hidden obliquity in the Treadwell soul, which kept it always at cross-purposes with life, prevented any lessening of the deep antagonism between the old and the young of the race. And so incurable was this obliquity in the soul of Cyrus, that it forced him now to take a tone which he had resolutely set his mind against from the moment of Mrs. Peachey's visit. He wanted to be pleasant, but something deep down within him – some inherited tendency to bully – was stronger than his will.
"I looked in to see if you hadn't about come to your senses," he began.
"If you mean come to your way of looking at things – then I haven't," replied Oliver, and added in a more courteous tone, "Won't you sit down?"
"No, sir, I can stand long enough to say what I came to say," retorted the other, and it seemed to him that the pleasanter he tried to make his voice, the harsher grew the sound of it in his ears. What was it about the rascal that rubbed him the wrong way only to look at him?
"As you please," replied Oliver quietly. "What in thunder has he got to say to me?" he thought. "And why can't he say it and have it over?" While Cyrus merely despised him, he detested Cyrus with all the fiery intolerance of his age. "Standing there like an old turkey gobbler, ugh!" he said contemptuously to himself.
"So you ain't hungry yet?" asked the old man, and felt that the words were forced out of him by that obstinate cross-grain in his nature over which he had no control.
"I've just had tea."
"You haven't changed your mind since you last spoke to me, eh?"
"No, I haven't changed my mind. Why should I?"
"Getting along pretty well, then?"
"As well as I expected to."
"That's good," said Cyrus mildly. "That's good. I just dropped in to make sure that you were getting along, that's all."
"Thank you," responded Oliver, and tried from the bottom of his soul to make the words sincere.
"If the time ever comes when you feel that you have changed your mind, I'll find a place out at Matoaca City for you. I just wanted you to understand that I'd do as much for Henry's son then as now. If you weren't Henry's son, I shouldn't think twice about you."
"You mean that you'll still give me the job if I stop writing plays?"
"Oh, I won't make a point of that as long as it doesn't interfere with your work. You may write in off hours as much as you want to. I won't make a point of that."
"You mean to be generous, I can see – but I don't think it likely that I shall ever make up my mind to take a regular job. I'm not built for it."
"You're not thinking about getting married, then, I reckon?"
A dark flush rose to Oliver's forehead, and turning away, he stared with unseeing eyes out of the window.
"No. I haven't any intention of that," he responded.
A certain craftiness appeared in Cyrus's face.
"Well, well, you're young yet, and you may be in want of a wife before you're many years older."
"I'm not the kind to marry. I'm too fond of my freedom."
"Most of us have felt like that at one time or another, but when the thought of a woman takes you by the throat, you'll begin to see things differently. And if you ever do, a good steady job at twelve hundred a year will be what you'll look out for."
"I suppose a man could marry on that down here," said Oliver, half unconscious that he was speaking aloud.
"I married on less, and I've known plenty of others that have done so. A good saving wife puts more into a man's pocket than she takes out of it."
As he paused, Oliver's attention, which had wandered off into a vague mist of feeling, became suddenly riveted to the appalling spectacle of his uncle's marriage. He saw the house in Bolingbroke Street, with the worn drab oilcoth in the hall, and he smelt the smell of stale cooking which floated through the green lattice door at the back. All the sweetness of life, all the beauty, all the decency even, seemed strangled in that smell as if in some malarial air. And in the midst of it, the unkempt, slack figure of Belinda, with her bitter eyes and her sagging skirt, passed perpetually under the flickering gas-jet up and down the dimly lighted staircase. This was how one marriage had ended – one marriage among many which had started out with passion and courage and the belief in happiness. Knowing but little of the April brevity of his uncle's mating impulse, he had mentally embroidered the bare instinct with some of the idealism in which his own emotion was clothed. His imagination pictured Cyrus and Belinda starting as light-hearted adventurers to sail the chartless seas of romance. What remained of their gallant ship to-day except a stark and battered hulk wrecked on the pitiless rocks of the actuality? A month ago that marriage had seemed merely ridiculous to him. Standing now beside the little window, where the wan face of evening, languid and fainting sweet, looked in from the purple twilight, he was visited by one of those rare flashes of insight which come to men of artistic sensibility after long periods of spiritual warfare. Pity stabbed him as sharply as ridicule had done a moment before, and with the first sense of human kinship he had ever felt to Cyrus, he understood suddenly the tragedy that underlies all comic things. Could there be a deeper pathos, after all, than simply being funny? This absurd old man, with his lean, crooked figure, his mottled skin, and his piercing bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an overgorged bird of prey, appeared now as an object that moved one to tears, not to laughter. And yet because of this very quality which made him pitiable – this vulture-like instinct to seize and devour the smaller – he stood to-day the most conspicuously envied figure in Dinwiddie.
"I'm not the kind of man to marry," he repeated, but his tone had changed.
"Well, perhaps you're wise," said Cyrus, "but if you should ever want to – " The confidence which had gone out of Oliver had passed into him. With his strange power of reading human nature – masculine human nature, for the silliest woman could fool him hopelessly – he saw that his nephew was already beginning to struggle against the temptation to yield. And he was wise enough to know that this temptation would become stronger as soon as Oliver felt that the outside pressure was removed. The young man's passion was putting forward a subtler argument than Cyrus could offer.
When his visitor had gone, Oliver turned back to the window, and resting his arms on the sill, leaned out into the velvet softness of the twilight. His wide vision had deserted him. It was as if his gaze had narrowed down to a few roofs and the single street without a turning – but beyond them the thought of Virginia lay always like an enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom. To think of her was to pass from the scorching heat of the day to the freshness of dew-washed flowers under the starlight.
"It is impossible," he said aloud, and immediately, as if in answer to a challenge, a thousand proofs came to him that other men were doing the impossible every day. How many writers – great writers, too – would have jumped at a job on a railroad to insure them against starvation? How many had married young and faced the future on less than twelve hundred dollars a year? How many had let love lead them where it would without butting their brains forever against the damned wall of expediency?
"It's impossible," he said again, and turning from the window, made himself ready to go out. While he brushed his hair and pulled the end of his necktie through the loop, his gaze wandered back over the roofs to where a solitary mimosa tree drooped against the lemon-coloured afterglow. The dust lay like gauze over the distance. Not a breath stirred. Not a leaf fell. Not a figure moved in the town – except the crouching figure of a stray cat that crawled, in search of food, along the brick wall under the dead tree.
"God! What a life!" he cried suddenly. And beyond this parching desert of the present he saw again that enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom, which was Virginia. His resolution, weakened by the long hot afternoon, seemed to faint under the pressure of his longing. All the burden of the day – the heat, the languor, the scorching thirst of the fields, the brazen blue of the sky, the stillness as of a suspended breath which wrapt the town – all these things had passed into the intolerableness of his desire. He felt it like a hot wind blowing over him, and it seemed to him that he was as helpless as a leaf in the current of this wind which was sweeping him onward. Something older than his will was driving him; and this something had come to him from out the twilight, where the mimosa trees drooped like a veil against the afterglow.
Taking up his hat, he left the room and descended the stairs to the wide hall where Tom Peachey sat, gasping for breath, midway of two open doors.
"I'll be darned if I can make a draught," muttered the old soldier irascibly, while he picked up his alpaca coat from the balustrade, and slipped into it before going out upon the front porch into the possible presence of ladies. His usually cheerful face was clouded, for his habitual apathy had deserted him, and he had reached the painful decision that when you looked things squarely in the face there was precious little that was worth living for – a conclusion to which he had been brought by the simple accident of an overdose of Kentucky rye in his mint julep after church. The overdose had sent him to sleep too soon after his Sunday dinner, and when he had awakened from his heavy and by no means quiet slumber, he had found himself confronting a world of gloom.