"Oh, father, please hurry!" called Virginia from the porch, and rising obediently, he followed Mrs. Pendleton through the hall and out into the May sunshine, where the little negroes stopped an excited chase of a black and orange butterfly to return doggedly to their weeding.
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather I'd go to market, Lucy?"
"Quite sure, dear," replied his wife, sniffing the scent of lilies-of-the-valley with her delicate, slightly pinched nostrils. "I thought you were going to see Mr. Treadwell about putting John Henry into the bank," she added. "It is such a pity to keep the poor boy selling bathtubs. His mother felt it so terribly."
"Ah, so I was – so I was," reflected Gabriel, who, though both of them would have been indignant at the suggestion, was as putty in the hands of his wife. "Well, I'll look into the bank on Cyrus after I've paid my sick calls."
With that they parted, Gabriel going on to visit a bedridden widow in the Old Ladies' Home, while Mrs. Pendleton and Virginia turned down a cross street that led toward the market. At every corner, it seemed to Virginia, middle-aged ladies, stout or thin, wearing crape veils and holding small black silk bags in their hands, sprang out of the shadows of mulberry trees, and barred their leisurely progress. And though nothing had happened in Dinwiddie since the war, and Mrs. Pendleton had seen many of these ladies the day before, she stopped for a sympathetic chat with each one of them, while Virginia, standing a little apart, patiently prodded the cinders of the walk with the end of her sunshade. All her life the girl had been taught to regard time as the thing of least importance in the universe; but occasionally, while she listened in silence to the liquid murmur of her mother's voice, she wondered vaguely how the day's work was ever finished in Dinwiddie. The story of Docia's impertinence was told and retold a dozen times before they reached the market. "And you really mean that you can't get rid of her? Why, my dear Lucy, I wouldn't stand it a day! Now, there was my Mandy. Such an excellent servant until she got her head turned – " This from Mrs. Tom Peachey, an energetic little woman, with a rosy face and a straight gray "bang" cut short over her eyebrows. "But, Lucy, my child, are you doing right to submit to impertinence? In the old days, I remember, before the war – " This from Mrs. William Goode, who had been Sally Peterson, the beauty of Dinwiddie, and who was still superbly handsome in a tragic fashion, with a haunted look in her eyes and masses of snow-white hair under her mourning bonnet. Years ago Virginia had imagined her as dwelling perpetually with the memory of her young husband, who had fallen in his twenty-fifth year in the Battle of Cold Harbor, but she knew now that the haunted eyes, like all things human, were under the despotism of trifles. To the girl, who saw in this universal acquiescence in littleness merely the pitiful surrender of feeble souls, there was a passionate triumph in the thought that her own dreams were larger than the actuality that surrounded her. Youth's scorn of the narrow details of life left no room in her mind for an understanding of the compromise which middle-age makes with necessity. The pathos of resignation – of that inevitable submission to the petty powers which the years bring – was lost upon the wistful ignorance of inexperience. While she waited dutifully, with her absent gaze fixed on the old mulberry trees, which whitened as the wind blew over them and then slowly darkened again, she wondered if servants and gossip were the only things that Oliver had heard of in his travels? Then she remembered that even in Dinwiddie men were less interested in such matters than they were in the industries of peanuts and tobacco. Was it only women, after all, who were in subjection to particulars?
When they turned into Old Street, John Henry hailed them from the doorway of a shop, where he stood flanked by a row of spotless bathtubs. He wore a loose pongee coat, which sagged at the shoulders, his straight flaxen hair had been freshly cut, and his crimson necktie had got a stain on it at breakfast; but to Virginia's astonishment, he appeared sublimely unconscious both of his bathtubs and his appearance. He was doubtless under the delusion that a pongee coat, being worn for comfort, was entirely successful when it achieved that end; and as for his business, it was beyond his comprehension that a Pendleton could have reason to blush for a bathtub or for any other object that afforded him an honest livelihood.
He called to them at sight, and Mrs. Pendleton, following her instinct of fitness, left the conversation to youth.
"John Henry, father is going to see Mr. Treadwell about the place in the bank. Won't it be lovely if he gives it to you!"
"He won't," replied John Henry. "I'll bet you anything he's keeping it for his nephew."
Virginia's blush came quickly, and turning her head away, she gazed earnestly down the street to the octagonal market, which stood on the spot where slaves were offered for sale when she was born.
"Mr. Treadwell is crossing the street now," she said after a minute. "I wonder why he keeps his mouth shut so tight when he is alone?"
A covered cart, which had been passing slowly, moved up the hill, and from beyond it there appeared the tall spare figure of a man with iron-gray hair, curling a little on the temples, a sallow skin, splotched with red over the nose, and narrow colourless lips that looked as if they were cut out of steel. As he walked quickly up the street, every person whom he passed turned to glance after him.
"I wonder if it is true that he hasn't made his money honestly?" asked Virginia.
"Oh, I hope not!" exclaimed Mrs. Pendleton, who in her natural desire to believe only good about people was occasionally led into believing the truth.
"Well, I don't care," retorted Virginia, "he's mean. I know just by the way his wife dresses."
"Oh, Jinny!" gasped Mrs. Pendleton, and glanced in embarrassment at her nephew, whose face, to her surprise, was beaming with enjoyment. The truth was that John Henry, who would have condemned so unreasonable an accusation had it been uttered by a full-grown male, was enraptured by the piquancy of hearing it on the lovely lips of his cousin. To demand that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility of a human being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of gallantry. His slow wit was enslaved by Jinny's audacity as completely as his kind ox-like eyes were enthralled by the young red and white of her beauty.
"But he's a great man. You can't deny that," he said with the playful manner in which he might have prodded a kitten in order to make it claw.
"A great man! Just because he has made money!"
"Well, he couldn't have got rich, you know, if he hadn't had the sense to see how to do it," replied the young man with enthusiasm. Like most Southerners who had been forced without preparation into the hard school of industry, he had found that his standards followed inevitably the changing measure of his circumstances. From his altered point of view, the part of owing property appeared so easy, and the part of winning it so difficult, that his respect for culture had yielded almost unconsciously to his admiration for commerce. When the South came again to the front, he felt instinctively that it would come, shorn of its traditional plumage, a victor from the hard-fought industrial battlefields of the century; and because Cyrus Treadwell led the way toward this triumph, he was ready to follow him. Of the whole town, this grim, half legendary figure (passionately revered and as passionately hated) appeared to him to stand alone not for the decaying past, but for the growing future. The stories of the too rapid development of the Treadwell fortune he cast scornfully aside as the malicious slanders of failure. What did all this tittle-tattle about a great man prove anyhow except his greatness? Suppose he had used his railroad to make a fortune – well, but for him where would the Dinwiddie and Central be to-day if not in the junk shop? Where would the lumber market be? the cotton market? the tobacco market? For around Cyrus, standing alone and solitary on his height, there had gathered the great illusion that makes theft honest and falsehood truth – the illusion of Success; and simple John Henry Pendleton, who, after nineteen years of poverty and memory, was bereft alike of classical pedantry and of physical comforts, had grown a little weary of the endless lip-worship of a single moment in history. Granted even that it was the greatest moment the world had seen, still why couldn't one be satisfied to have it take its place beside the wars of the Spartans and of the ancient Britons? Perpetual mourning was well enough for ladies in crape veils and heroic gentlemen on crutches; but when your bread and meat depended not upon the graves you had decorated, but upon the bathtubs you had sold, surely something could be said for the Treadwell point of view.
As Virginia could find no answer to this remark, the three stood in silence, gazing dreamily, with three pairs of Pendleton eyes, down toward the site of the old slave market. Directly in their line of vision, an over-laden mule with a sore shoulder was straining painfully under the lash, but none of them saw it, because each of them was morally incapable of looking an unpleasant fact in the face if there was any honourable manner of avoiding it. What they beheld, indeed, was the most interesting street in the world, filled with the most interesting people, who drove happy animals that enjoyed their servitude and needed the sound of the lash to add cheer and liveliness to their labours. Never had the Pendleton idealism achieved a more absolute triumph over the actuality.
"Well, we must go on," murmured Mrs. Pendleton, withdrawing her visionary gaze from the hot street littered with fruit rinds and blood-stained papers from a neighbouring butcher shop. "It was lovely to have this glimpse of you, John Henry. What nice bathtubs you have!" Smiling her still lovely smile into the young man's eyes, she proceeded on her leisurely way, while Virginia raised the black silk sunshade over her head. In front of them they could see long rows of fish-carts and vegetable stalls around which hovered an army of eager housekeepers. The social hours in Dinwiddie at that period were the early morning ones in the old market, and Virginia knew that she should hear Docia's story repeated again for the benefit of the curious or sympathetic listeners that would soon gather about her mother. Mrs. Pendleton's marketing, unlike the hurried and irresponsible sort of to-day, was an affair of time and ceremony. Among the greetings and the condolences from other marketers there would ensue lengthy conversations with the vendors of poultry, of fish, or of vegetables. Every vegetable must be carefully selected by her own hands and laid aside into her special basket, which was in the anxious charge of a small coloured urchin. While she felt the plump breasts of Mr. Dewlap's chickens, she would inquire with flattering condescension after the members of Mr. Dewlap's family. Not only did she remember each one of them by name, but she never forgot either the dates of their birthdays or the number of turkeys Mrs. Dewlap had raised in a season. If marketing is ever to be elevated from an occupation to an art, it will be by a return to Mrs. Pendleton's method.
"Mother, please buy some strawberries," begged Virginia.
"Darling, you know we never buy fruit, or desserts. Somebody will certainly send us something. I saw Mrs. Carrington whipping syllabub on her back porch as we passed."
"But they're only five cents a basket."
"Well, put a basket with my marketing, Mr. Dewlap. Yes, I'll take that white pullet if you're sure that she is plumper than the red one."
She moved on a step or two, while the white pullet was handed over by its feet to the small coloured urchin and to destruction. If Mrs. Pendleton had ever reflected on the tragic fate of pullets, she would probably have concluded that it was "best" for them to be fried and eaten, or Providence, whose merciful wisdom she never questioned, would not have permitted it. So, in the old days, she had known where the slave market stood, without realizing in the least that men and women were sold there. "Poor things, it does seem dreadful, but I suppose it is better for them to have a change sometimes," she would doubtless have reasoned had the horror of the custom ever occurred to her – for her heart was so sensitive to pain that she could exist at all only by inventing a world of exquisite fiction around her.
"Aren't you nearly through, mother?" pleaded Virginia at last. "The sun will be so hot going home that it will make your head worse."
Mrs. Pendleton, who was splitting a pea-shell with her thumb in order to ascertain the size and quality of the peas, murmured soothingly, "Just a minute, dear"; and the girl, finding it impossible to share her mother's enthusiasm for slaughtered animals, fell back again into the narrow shade of the stalls. She revolted with a feeling of outrage against the side of life that confronted her – against the dirty floor, strewn with withered vegetables above which flies swarmed incessantly, and against the pathos of the small bleeding forms which seemed related neither to the lamb in the fields nor to the Sunday roast on the table. That divine gift of evasion, which enabled Mrs. Pendleton to see only the thing she wanted to see in every occurrence, was but partially developed as yet in Virginia; and while she stood there in the midst of her unromantic surroundings, the girl shuddered lest Oliver Treadwell should know that she had ever waited, hot, perspiring, with a draggled skirt, and a bag of tomatoes grasped in her hands, while her mother wandered from stall to stall in a tireless search for peas a few cents cheaper than those of Mr. Dewlap. Youth, with its ingenuous belief that love dwells in external circumstances, was protesting against the bland assumption of age that love creates its own peculiar circumstances out of itself. It was absurd, she knew, to imagine that her father's affection for her mother would alter because she haggled over the price of peas; yet the emotion with which she endowed Oliver Treadwell was so delicate and elusive that she felt that the sight of a soiled skirt and a perspiring face would blast it forever. It appeared imperative that he should see her in white muslin, and she resolved that if it cost Docia her life she would have the flounces of her dress smoothed before evening. She, who was by nature almost morbidly sensitive to suffering, became, in the hands of this new and implacable power, as ruthless as Fate.
"Now I'm ready, Jinny dear. Are you tired waiting?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, coming toward her with the coloured urchin in her train. "Why, there's Susan Treadwell. Have you spoken to her?"
The next instant, before the startled girl could turn, a voice cried out triumphantly: "O Jinny!" and in front of her, looking over Susan's shoulder, she saw the eager eyes and the thin, high-coloured face of Oliver Treadwell. For a moment she told herself that he had read her thoughts with his penetrating gaze, which seemed to pierce through her; and she blushed pink while her eyes burned under her trembling lashes. Then the paper bag, containing the tomatoes, burst in her hands, and its contents rolled, one by one, over the littered floor to his feet. Both stooped at once to recover it, and while their hands touched amid wilted cabbage leaves, the girl felt that love had taken gilded wings and departed forever!
"Put them in the basket, dear," Mrs. Pendleton could be heard saying calmly in the midst of her daughter's agony – for, having lived through the brief illumination of romance, she had come at last into that steady glow which encompasses the commonplace.
"This is my cousin Oliver, Virginia," remarked Susan as casually as if the meeting of the two had not been planned from all eternity by the beneficent Powers.
"I'm afraid I've spoiled your nice red tomatoes," said a voice that filled Virginia's whirling mind with a kind of ecstatic dizziness. As the owner of the voice held out his hand, she saw that it was long and thin like the rest of him, with blue veins crossing the back, and slender, slightly crooked fingers that hurt hers with the strength of their pressure. "To confess the truth," he added gaily after an instant, "my breath was quite taken away because, somehow, this was the last place on earth in which I expected to find you. It's a dreadful spot – don't you think so? If we've got to be cannibals, why in Heaven's name make a show and a parade of it?"
"What an extraordinary young man!" said Mrs. Pendleton's eyes; and Virginia found herself blushing again because she felt that her mother had not understood him. A delicious embarrassment – something different and more vivid than any sensation she had ever known – held her speechless while he looked at her. Had her life depended on it, she could not have uttered a sentence – could hardly even have lifted her lashes, which seemed suddenly to have become so heavy that she felt the burden of them weighing over her eyes. All the picturesque phrases she had planned to speak at their first meeting had taken wings with perfidious romance, yet she would have given her dearest possession to have been able to say something really clever. "He thinks me a simpleton, of course," she thought – perfectly unconscious that Oliver was not thinking of her wits at all, but of the wonderful rose-pink of her flesh. At one and the same instant, she felt that this silence was the most marvellous thing that had ever happened to her and longed to break it with some speech so brilliant that he would never forget it. Little thrills of joy, like tiny flames, ran over her, and the light in her eyes shone on him through the quivering dusk of her lashes. Even when she looked away from him, she could still see his expression of tender gaiety, as though he were trying in vain to laugh himself free from an impulse that was fast growing too strong for him. What she did not know was that the spring was calling to him through her youth and sex as it was calling through the scented winds and the young buds on the trees. She was as ignorant that she offered herself to him through her velvet softness, through the glow in her eyes, through her quivering lips, as the flower is that it allures the bee by its perfume. So subtly did Life use her for its end that the illusion of choice in first love remained unimpaired. Though she was young desire incarnate, he saw in her only the unique and solitary woman of his dreams.
"Do you come here every day?" he asked, and immediately the blue sky and the octagonal market spun round at his voice.
As nothing but commonplace words would come to her, she was obliged at last to utter them. "Oh, no, not every day."
"I've always had a tremendous sympathy for women because they have to market and housekeep. I wonder if they won't revolt some time?"
This was so heretical a point of view that she tried earnestly to comprehend it; but all the time her heart was busy telling her how different he was from every other man – how much more interesting! how immeasurably superior! Her attention, in spite of her efforts at serious thought, would not wander from the charm of his voice, from the peculiar whimsical trick of his smile, which lifted his mouth at one corner and made odd little wrinkles come and go about his eyes. His manner was full of sudden nervous gestures which surprised and enchanted her. All other men were not merely as clay beside him – they were as straw! Seeing that he was waiting for a response, she made a violent endeavour to think of one, and uttered almost inaudibly: "But don't they like it?"
"Ah, that's just it," he answered as seriously as if she hadn't known that her speech bordered on imbecility. "Do they really like it? or have they been throwing dust in our eyes through the centuries?" And he gazed at her as eagerly as if he were hanging upon her answer. Oh, if she could only say something clever! If she could only say the sort of thing that would shock Miss Priscilla! But nothing came of her wish, and she was reduced at last to the pathetic rejoinder, "I don't know. I'm afraid I've never thought about it."
For a moment he stared at her as though he were enraptured by her reply. With such eyes and such hair, she might have been as simple as she appeared and he would never have known it. "Of course you haven't, or you wouldn't be you!" he responded; and by the time she came to her senses, she was following her mother and the negro urchin out of the market. Though she was in reality walking over cinders, she felt that her feet were treading on golden air.