Chapter III: Part 3

The young men, Conway Brooke and Albert Stiles, would come to Theodosia’s house singly or together. Coming together, they would beg her to play for them or they would bring sweets to eat. Conway calling alone would talk of himself, sitting happily in the dim light of the parlor and enjoying his heightened self, his ease, his good looks, Theodosia’s beauty, all the delights of remembered being. Albert coming alone would grow heavily reminiscent, self-appraising, romantic, planning his future, laying his plans before her, eager for acquiescence. He was broad and strong, filling his chair with his man’s frame. Another, Frank Railey, would stop casually on his way up or down the street, or he would take her to row on the pool beyond the town. He would bring his books to read portions aloud, bits of essay he admired, or verse from his favorite poets. He had studied law and was establishing himself in practice in the courts of equity. Persevering and conscientious, seeking to enrich his experience, he would seek talk with Anthony Bell, bringing up old matters and trying to pry open the shut past, but this past was strange to him in its coloring, its iridescences which had long since been lost from recorded history, and these discussions would fall apart and leave old Anthony wrathful, gesticulating, straining to regain his composure. Theodosia often forgot engagements with Frank and was then put to elaborate pains to escape rudeness. When he faded down the vista of the street, going toward the town, he evaporated entirely, and she had no picture of where he went or of what he might do there. His face was slightly out of proportion, slightly unsymmetrical, and this characteristic gave it a look of rugged beauty and strength. He would come back out of the nowhere into which he had gone, smiling at Theodosia’s door, his smile placed slightly to one side of his face, and she would cry out, “For heaven’s sake, it’s Frank!”

Conway was lovely in his approach and in his greetings, always offering a charming promise of some approximation. His soft accents were a blend of Virginia English and negro tones. He was slender and tall, slightly vague as to what he wanted of life and the world, happy in himself, a lover of himself and of life. He liked to sit beside Theodosia and talk of his day, uncommitted to it now it was over. He worked somewhere in the town, but his work stood beside him as a commonplace and was never an object to be attained with sweat and thought. He loved himself anew in the warmth of her presence, that she knew. He would sit idly in his chair, faintly smiling, happy over anything she remembered to tell of her day, and happy over his own memories and vague comments. He made light matters of all the heavy affairs of business, of family, of care of any sort. He wore the cleanliness and freshness of his linens as if he imparted these qualities to them, as if he yielded these qualities with his easy, careless gestures and uncommitted mood. Gone from her, he kept always in Theodosia’s mind as that which lent grace to any morning into which it might come, into any evening, any memory, so that she smiled faintly if she thought of him. She knew his delicacy in some harsh way, in some hard framework of knowing that lay over her momentary joys in his radiance, in his beauty. Once, into the midst of the intoxicating vapor which surrounded her sense of him, her own voice spoke aloud, surprising her with its casual finality:

“He’d follow after the last lovely face offered”—and added: “The trick around the eyes and he’d go.”

If he were coming she would wear the pale yellow dress he admired and arrange her hair in the way he most praised, a low knot drawn above her neck and pushed securely into the curves at the back of her skull. Knowing that he would come she would linger over the hair, a thought of him and of his gracious, easily given admiration in every lift of the comb as she gently tooled the mass into shape and smiled now and again at her long face with its firm thin red lips. She had read from her grandfather’s books and Frank had brought her books containing the new learning. Conway’s knowledge was more powerful with her, she knew, and she smiled at her curving smile until her own lips told her their subtle learning, over and over, retelling. Conway would seat her in the chair of the blue brocade and he would adjust the light to fall in a cascade on the yellow gown, or he would arrange the bowl of roses with some reference to herself and himself and then sit negligently in his chair, himself a part of some whole which he at the same instant encompassed, having no notion of why he did these things. Or did he have no notion? she argued. His knowledge would spread through the room, through the house, gathered to the brilliant constellations that swam in a sun-shaft of light before a window, the motes of the beam, and gathered again to the scent of the honeysuckle outside on the chimney.

* * * * *

Albert would come heavily into the parlor although his feet were agile and his large frame was light to his motions. He filled the parlor with his seriousness and with his ponderous future which circled about his agricultural studies. He would lay his pretexts out, this way and that, making his decisions in her presence, but if Conway were at hand he was more light and less committed, as if only Theodosia had his confidences, as if his approach to Conway were still by the way of the college they had attended, of the streets they now walked together, of the ball they sometimes tossed back and forth, the dogs they owned in common. His strong body, rich with blood and bulk, seemed about to burst from its clothing as he sat opposite the light, moving from time to time in his seat in an excess of vitality. If he bent over a printed page, his earnest eyes lowered to their drooping, his mouth caught in its relaxed, searching pose, his studious moment would give him back to his boyhood, even to childhood, and Theodosia would smile faintly beside her eyes, deeply under the flesh, in a moment of tenderness. Sometimes she would play for him the light music he desired, bent rhythms that paused over brinks and leaped with spasmodic passion to its fulfilment in another twisted measure, any sort so that it moved swiftly to its consummation and readily fulfilled its promises. She was contemptuous of his taste in melodies even when she wanted most to please him. He was a part of the rich insufficiency that surrounded her. “He looks just like Tramp,” she said one day as she mounted the stairway, and Tramp was a great mongrel, part Dane, part collie, that lived somewhere on the street.

“He looks exactly like Tramp,” she said. She was dressing for his coming, working her hair into the shapes Conway liked, her lips withdrawing from the tunes Albert wanted played. “Oh, Lord! his _Leave Home Rags_ and his _My Mandy Lanes_” she said. Later she would play them for him, plucking the strings quaintly and withdrawing them from their meanings.

When he had first come back from his agricultural college he had talked of a girl named Judith. He still wrote to her, but seldom spoke of her now. He would settle into his chair with a great sigh of content, turning the letter addressed to Judith over and over in his hands, a letter he had forgotten to mail. When he talked of himself he came immediately to the subject that most concerned the farmers, the success of the tobacco pool. Sometimes he seemed cautious as he handled some letter from Judith, turning it about, as if he clung to it. He would beg Theodosia to play the new song he had brought, for he had come then to have her play a song.

“Gosh, you’re the only girl in town can play,” he said. “Fiddle or piano, it’s all one to her. And works either single or double.”

“Lady broke. Bridle wise. A right good five-gaited saddle mare,” she said. She would withdraw behind the neglected thumping of the piano or the plucked strings, indifferent to the tune but willing enough to accommodate a caller. When she had embarrassed him she would laugh a low laughter and let her eyes close over the music as she trailed it off into some theme she liked.

“Lady broke.... I didn’t call you that,” he said heavily. “I didn’t say it.”

* * * * *

In autumn it was reported that a musician was coming to Lester, a larger town ten miles away, to teach violin-playing there. Word was spread about that she would visit Anneville one morning each week if three students could be found for her there. Theodosia and two half-grown children made up the number, and the teacher came. She was a small dark woman, slight in form, quick in her ways, heavy-browed, ambitious to become a great teacher. Old Anthony Bell engaged her to come to his house, had sent for her as soon as he had heard of her presence in the town, and had talked with her in the parlor, grown coherent, alert under the stimulation of the young woman. She made him remember his _Heart Bowed Downs_ and his _Trovatores_.

Theodosia felt abashed before the superior skill and she drew her bow nervously over the strings at the test lesson. She was stifled into a few days of inactivity until the new gestures set within her. She must learn to hold the violin. To approach it with the bow. To observe the right angle. To listen to the tone and learn the acoustics of the instrument. Sometimes the dark woman would answer a question by playing a phrase, a skurry of phrases, and Theodosia was half afraid of these replies, knowing that she missed a part. Not virtuosity but good playing. The words sang in her mind and broke a new world into a firmament, a world fuller than the old. Theory, harmony, musical history, musical literature, technique, the legato, the perfect legato, the singing violin tone. The ragged chrysanthemums bloomed along the front of the house where the south sun shone, and the fallen leaves made every footstep clatter. The fields beyond the town, where they arose on the hills and were seen from the windows of the house, had lost their rough lines as they were turned under by the plow for the winter grains, were set in order for the next growing year. Her eyes, lifted from the strings, would rest far away on the hill field where the earth had been made new and where it ran perpetually now with her singing legato, the brown earth laid out brown in the autumn sun.

The music teacher came each week, her talk a bright flash from the world far outside. She talked in half with her music and with her quick hands, but her speech was crisp and clear. In her the master walked out upon the concert stage and worked his bow over the strings; she gathered intensely in her darkness and in the vibrant speed of her facile hands, her mouth easily turning, her strong slender limbs swaying, or she tapped the bow against her skirt as she told how the master played a movement. Her fingers were little brains secreting the music of thought. Around her a peculiar, scintillating half-brilliance spread like a fog of things half-known, half-sensed; it caught at the imagination and kindled it but gave it insufficient fuel. The man and the instrument were one. An interpretation of life. Of mind, mood, thought, by the way of sound. Man is speaking here. His voice. Sound brought to high refinements, nuances, exquisite variations to make a speech for the spirit of man. The musician knew; she flashed out of her darkness. These were days of unsatisfied knowing. One could never have enough.

Or again, how a ship cuts the waves open and spreads them apart to roll up on her sides and follow after her in a long sweep of tilting water with a froth of foam melting on its crest, how the little tugs draw a ship across a harbor, four little tugs or three joined to a ship by a long cable that stretches tight, pulling the great lazy giant down a bay. Or the Goddess of Liberty, how she is green like beryl or like deep sea water, her bronze burnt with salt fog until it is brilliantly green, catching the light of the morning on the front of her body and turning it off in bright yellow planes, her great squat figure too round and ample for grace, squarely set on firm skirts, short-thighed, great-waisted, holding her plump torch, a great progeny, a myriad brood mothered under her plump skirts. She is brightly green in the morning sun with planes of yellow light; she is looking down the bay and across the Narrows and out to the sea.

These were inaccessible but not far, making a relation somehow with the lightness of autumn, the mild sting of the coming cold that could be felt in the early morning. Walking about the town Theodosia wore a bright new coat of rich dark colors and a small velvet hat with a bronze buckle. Conway had helped her to choose the hat, and his lightly spoken approval, gaily negligent, rested upon it all through the autumn and seasoned her whole being with a delicate warmth. A fire burned now in the parlor grate. At nightfall Siver, the black houseboy, was sent through the rooms to renew the coal and brush the hearths clean. Old Tony Bell sat nodding in the room across from the parlor, his room, where the bookshelves were seldom assailed and the books sank together into a solid warped mass. “She will learn to play great music,” he said, “a concerto. I heard it in Paris, the Brahms Concerto. It was, I recollect, a night in December. Let her learn, it won’t hurt her. I never thought my own flesh and blood would master it. She’ll learn.” His bed stood against the wall that was farthest from the fireplace. He would sink often into the bed with unwanted satisfaction and fall asleep without consent, or he would arouse himself and take a brisk walk at twilight, stepping along the boards of the gallery.

Theodosia practised scales in single tones and thirds, working happily, blending them in her thought with the running autumn and the crisp frost, with the rich new color that had come to her garments in the coat and hat, in certain gowns she devised with her dressmaker, in her autumn stockings and a brilliant scarf. Jane Moore came sometimes to practise with the instruments, inaccurate as before but pretty in her gray fur and bright blue dress. She would laugh at the precision of the music teacher and clatter amiably on the piano, her eyes misty with her own prettiness and tender with the devotion of youth to youth. “You’re too sweet for words,” she would say to Theodosia as she touched the keys lightly, smiling over her shoulder. Her brown hair was softly rolled and centered into low knots. She would tinkle lightly at Albert’s songs, giving them a manner, _Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland_ dribbling from her pert fingers.

Catherine Lovell had a bright red hat for the mid-winter, accented with an unsubdued cock’s feather that tilted and swayed as she walked, as she sat lightly moving in her chair. She went to the Seminary every day to teach, but in the evening she would run to Theodosia for a chat or a walk, or she would bring a gift of winter flowers from her mother’s small window garden.

Back would come the day for the fiddle lesson. The teacher would enter with a quick smile, tossing aside her coat and her hat. The piano note would cry out briefly under her quick hand and the gut string would follow, slipping and crawling into tune, Theodosia’s heart beating fast with some cruel, fearful pleasure. A skurry of runs and a trill and a few bars from the cadenza of some concerto. The example would clarify her words: each note must stand out like a star in a dark night.... Smoothness in the change of position when the string must be crossed without sound.... The singing tone, the perfect legato.... The bow should be thought of as of indefinite length—no end to it, no break between the up-bow and the down-bow.... “But do not, for all this, be a slave to your fingers. The music must come out of your soul, out of your soul.”

* * * * *

Theodosia would wake from the deep first sleep of the night and see the rectangles of the high windows turn to pale silver with the winter dawn. She would move in her bed, opening her eyes briefly upon the familiar furniture of the room, the long glass between the windows, the high dresser, the deep sofa beside the fireplace. Then she would settle to the lighter sleep of the morning, hearing the steps of early passers on the pavement of the street and hearing the click of the gate latch when Siver came to his work. The warmth of the bed would shut about her in a matutinal caress as she sank into light half-slumber, as her mind fared here and yon in speculations and dreams, in plans and visions. The joy of friends would give her a pleasant sense of well-being, and her own warmed youthful blood would drowse and drown in its own relaxed languors. Sometimes she would float between the earth and some void in a half-intoxication of a dream while her ears half-heard the steps on the street or a call—some boy driving his cow to pasture. Her speculating mind would run forward into the plans for the day, so many hours with the music, the fiddle, the harmony, the piano; or it would center briefly about some dress she was designing with the dressmaker or repairing for herself, and over this or through it would glide her floating senses as they drifted in the void supported by strong fingers on which she lay drooping, circled by strong arms. Siver’s knock at the door would dimly arouse her and make her know that she had half-dreamed some image, and his step on the floor as he walked toward the fireplace and bent over the grate to arrange the fire would emphasize the light quality of her consciousness. The sound of the falling kindling would be heavy and remote. Between the separate sounds the spaces of quiet would be light with dreaming, with herself drowned in joy and myth, drooping in strong up-reaching fingers, Albert’s hands, but over her and above like the light of some final dawn, radiant but self-contained and entire, identical with light negligent laughter, would float some essence, some misty incandescence that merged with Conway and with her happiness.

When he had kindled a large fire of wood and coal, Siver would close the window and pour hot water from a pail into her pitcher on the wash-stand. He was nothing to her, Siver, but serving hands. He was but serving hands, unsensed, unrealized. He was a command given and accomplished. If he became momentarily real he was intently loathed and quickly transferred to serving hands again. The sound of the flowing water and the crockery would be as distinct and as meaningless as the other sounds of the morning, flat against the coming tide of the new day, unreal before her speculations about the dress or the fiddle-practice. Siver gone and the closed door having settled an hour of stillness upon the room, the earth would grow into the volume and substance of dream and lie finished and accomplished, apart and done.

* * * * *

The farmers were discontented with the tobacco sales. The speculators were busy passing the crop from hand to hand, playing a game to outdo one another. Sometimes a farmer saw his crop selling for twice the sum he had been paid less than a week earlier. “Too many dead-heads function between the grower and the manufacturer,” Albert said. The tobacco wagons, piled high, were lined in every open space about the warehouses. A heavy odor of crude tobacco hung in the damp air.

At Catherine Lovell’s home there was a large double parlor with a hard smooth floor. Often the rugs were rolled up for dancing, and then two negroes sat in the hallway making the music, _I Don’t Know Why I Feel So Shy_, or _Dixie Dan_, the rhythms brought down from Hill Street. Albert talked about the new association for the growers as he waited between the dances, sitting along the wall of the dining-room on the red divan. The men would have to combine, he said. The market was all in a wreck. There would have to be such a pool as was never formed before, something solid. He spent his days now going about among the farmers, pledging them to the new measure, talking of it to hostile growers. He carried memoranda in his pocket snapped importantly together under a rubber band. The throb of the dance rhythms would wail from the outer hall. Somebody had given the players a smart drink and they set the true rhythms of Hill Street under the dancers’ feet, rhythms richly ripened with use. Theodosia and Conway trampled the rhythms under their light tread.

I likes a little loven now and then,
When the loven one is you....

What was a rhythm more or less? their feet asked the smooth floor. “What’s this thing we’re a-dancen to?” Conway asked her. “Is it a two-step or a waltz or a barn dance, or what is it anyway?”

“Don’t you know really, on your honor?”

“I just get up and do what the music makes me. I never know what kind ’tis.”

Albert was a great bulk coming in at a door, coming nearer, taking his seat under the dim lamp when he sat in her parlor. His face was large and firm, sudden in its appraisals, but he was uncertain of her and of himself. She saw his uncertainty of her in his quick scrutiny of her when he spoke. The men would have to pool, he said. He had talked to twenty farmers and growers that day. He was dog tired. Some men were fools, unable to see their own good when it stood less than three inches away. She would turn to the fiddle, making herself remote.

* * * * *

She would pluck at his talkative music, making it utter its bland commonplace between flights of well-bowed musical comment, musical scorn. She would wrap each common saying into a sheaf bound lightly with shreds of scintillating clamor.

“Where’d you get that? How’d you know to do all that truck?” he asked.

“Imelda Montford wrote a diary and she left it in an old hamper. ‘I want to lern grek and laten. I will not be a idle fol. I will have what is in boks.’” She traced the words on the wall with her finger. “Roland built a bridge for a deposed king to ride on. William had red hair and owned nine thousand acres of Virginia land. Rufus bought a negro wench and three men from Captain Custer, and made a note of it in the back of a geography book. Thomas Montford bought a horse from Asa Fielding and left a note of that on the fly-leaf of an old grammar. Anne had a town named in her honor, Anneville. You know the place.”

“Anneville. I know. Gosh, yes.”

“Theodosia Montford took Luke Bell to husband and then the Bells got into the story.”

“Took. God’s sake! It’s my opinion she got took.”

“Gules two lions couchant argent....”

“What you a-comen to?”

“Gules with a fess and six crosslets gold....”

“What’s the joke?”

“Bendy of ten pieces, gold and azure....”

“What the ’ell?”

“The language of the Montfords. The speech of old Robert and his peers.”

“You’re too full of joy. I aim to take some of that joy out of you.”

“His glorious pals, you might say.”

“Two months from now and I aim to do it.”

“Or, go back to Roland, he built a bridge....”

“You need somebody and it’s my opinion you need me.”

“Rode. Kreutzer. Singer. The _Fingerübungen_. Excellent for muscular development in scale work. Miss Schuester, then. Duos for violin and piano. Duos for two fiddles. Does that answer your first question? If that’s not enough....”

“Some day I aim to smash that old fiddle plumb into the middle of perdition.”

“You’ll never get your hands on it.”

“In two months from now I aim to get you. Take your time and get ready. And if that old music box gets in my way....”

“You’ll never get your hands on it.” She bent her eyes to the strings where the hair lines of the bow sang over them. He was already a whirlwind under her flying fingertips.

“You get good and ready. When I come I’ll come like a roaren lion.”

His strength assailed her, and going about her unsettled routines in the early February cold she rested upon his decision where it suffused her mind. She thought of her grandfather as the chief witness of her achievement with the fiddle; he represented a throng of watchers, there to scrutinize her skill. She held inwardly an intense wish to show him what the fiddle could do in her hands, and as she brought a study to completion and played it with her master she thought of Anthony as the listener, as he was, as he sat over his mellow fire, or she would stop often by his chair and talk with him of the music, retelling all or much of what the teacher had brought her in interpretation.

Or, remembering that the music must come out of the spirit, the soul, she would search inwardly for some token or glimpse of this shadowy substance, this delicate eidolon. The question arose again and again. The soul, where and what was it? She observed that the preachers in the churches had souls for their commerce, and that there one learned that all souls were of equal value. But in the novel or the poem the lover said, “I love you from the depths of my soul,” or the author said, “He was stirred to the depths of his soul,” or “He was frightened in his soul.” Striving to divide her being, to set bounds upon parts, she would turn a half-whimsical gaze inward as she strove to achieve the singing tone and to bow the indefinite legato. “Does the music come out of me really, out of some inner unit, myself, all mine?” she would question, “or do I simply imitate, skilfully or not, what the teacher does?” She wanted to lay her finger on this integer and say, “This is mine.” She wanted to go past the bounding of blood in arteries and the throb of her pride in her grandfather’s witnessing of her advancing skill. The tone sang more true and she took a great, impatient joy in it, searching, as she was, more deeply for the answer to the riddle. Or, in the coming of Albert into her senses, her questioning thought would swim in a pool of inattention and semi-consciousness.

* * * * *

Toward the end of February Anthony Bell sickened of a cold and kept continually in his room sitting over his fire. The sound of his coughing went through the house, and of his scolding voice as he assailed Siver for, as he named them, his trifling ways. After a week he was no better, and the fact came to Theodosia in her preoccupation as a vague trouble. A vague sense of impending demands weighted her bow and her pencil. Writing chords all morning at her table a load bore heavily upon her hand, unrecognized or undefined. A dream-like unrest followed her as she passed her grandfather’s door or mounted the staircase, as she turned back to her studies after the departure of her friends. She went to his room often between her goings and comings. She would stand beside his fire and offer sympathy or question him. Had he tried this remedy or that? Unprepared for care she met this small demand with a slight vexation, or she set herself to prepare some comfort for him, or some diversion. He would soon be better, she assured him.

But there came a day when he was worse, when he kept his bed, and Theodosia called a physician, Dr. Muir. She went often to his bedside, offering to read, to talk, to prepare foods. Anthony seemed troubled, and as the days went by he continually called for papers from his desk or for letter-files from a cupboard in a back room upstairs. He seemed unable to find some paper although he searched endlessly, or he would fall asleep with the documents scattered over his bed or falling from his lax hands. One day an old friend, a Mr. Reed, from the bank, called and sat with him for an hour. When the visitor had gone Anthony seemed more than ever troubled, searching again for the missing paper, falling asleep.

As Theodosia sat with her father at supper on the evening after the banker’s visit she spoke of her grandfather’s worry, opening the subject with Horace in abstracted earnestness. The house was disturbed since her grandfather’s illness and she wanted relief.

“I wish you’d stop in to see Grandfather tonight,” she said. “He’s sick and he seems to have some matter to trouble his mind. I think you’d better talk with him a little. He’s worried.”

“Tell him I’ll take him on a trip next summer to the Virginia Ocean. A ship glides down the water on silken satin sails. Tell him to think about that and he’ll drop off right away. Tell him to think of silken satin sails. The silken sad uncertain. Tell him not to think about the silken sad uncertain, but tell him to think of silken satin sails. Nothing is uncertain. All is certain. I’m right.”

“I’m worried myself,” Theodosia said after a little. “Grandfather is real sick. He needs advice maybe. He’s lost heart. He’s got some trouble on his mind.”

“All is lost save honor and there’s damn little of that left, hardly a copper cent’s worth. Tell him to set his mind upon the silken satin sails of certainty. Pour me out another cup of coffee, Dosia, and pass me the jam, Siver. It is jam, isn’t it? Jam is the staff of life and there’s damn little of it left. Damn the jam. Tonight I have to practise again for the play. I take the part of the wicked villain because of my deep stentorian voice. It’s for the benefit of the Sabbath School, and you should go and assist a cause if not to see your sire saw the air. I am your sire, ain’t I? Theodosia sired by Horace, he by Anthony the grand old war horse, he out of Theodosia Montford by Luke Bell. I have to practise tonight for the play. It’s for the benefit of some charity, I forget what, some measure promoted by the combined Sabbath-school interests of the entire town. It’s a big thing. Which of these renderens do you like best? You see the beautiful young lady is in a hazardous position from poverty and what-not....”

“What did my mother die of?” Theodosia asked after the matter of the renderings had been settled.

“Of a meningitis. I was not here at the time. In Lester, I was, attenden court, I recall. I hurried home as soon as I learned of it and asked what was the matter. They said a meningitis. How old are you, Dosia?”

“I’m twenty.”

“To think it! Twenty! Then it’s been seven years, eight, how many? Since your mother died? I recollect I heard them say, ‘The poor motherless orphan, twelve years old.’ Or did they say thirteen? I don’t know why I never married again. Eight years a widower, I’ve been, and not altogether unpresentable to the sex, I’ve heard it said.”

Theodosia wept softly behind her downcast eyes when she turned her thought to her mother. She remembered her as a large broken woman lying on her couch all day, sometimes playing sonatas on the piano half the night. She had given Theodosia the bedroom above the parlor the spring before she died. She was remembered standing at the doorway of the room, ill, directing the houseman to change the furniture this way and that, trying several arrangements.

“Your mother was a lady and a pretty woman to boot,” Horace said. “But the family trees all come by your father, and don’t you forget that, all the shrubbery. I remember how Mike O’Connor laughed one time when I said, ‘Two lions couchant, male and female created he them.’ You ought to ’a’ heard old Mike O’Connor roar to that. ‘But don’t you ever let any woman get a hold onto you,’ Mike O’Connor says. ‘Not a firm hold. She’ll make you roll a baby buggy, and what does a man look like a-rollen a baby buggy? You never saw a Irishman a-rollen a baby buggy,’ Mike says. ‘Think back,’ Mike says, ‘and see if ever you saw a Irishman rollen one of them things. Not a real God-knows Irishman. You never did. And you never will.’”

Horace called for more sugar for his last cup of coffee, and Theodosia searched the sideboard and the pantry. “I’m part Irish,” he said. “And I need more sugar.” When Siver was called he found a little in an unused sugar dish on a high shelf. Theodosia knew the indifferent economic plan of the house. Either Horace or Anthony paid the bills, as they had money by. It was Anthony who owned the house, his inheritance along with the farm, Linden Hill, which had now passed to other hands. There had been some talk between Anthony and Mr. Reed of a mortgage, and when Horace went to his rehearsal she looked for the word mortgage in a dictionary to find its meaning.

* * * * *

From beyond her playing, as a recitative, Albert and his declarations reached her continually. “I hope you’re keepen the count of the weeks,” he said. “Six weeks is what you’ve got to get ready in.” Her continual reply, spoken or unspoken, beat and throbbed with the pulse of the music as she advanced her lyric work and won praise from her master, “I want to play the fiddle to the end of the earth. I want to go to the end of music and look over the edge at what’s on the other side.”

She thought of Albert as strong and good. She knew the beauty of his vigorous body, clean as it was with health. On the hills beyond the town the laborers were burning the plant beds and making ready for the long growing year. From her chamber she saw the smoke arise and “They’re burning tobacco beds,” she said, her mind running over the fields in a swift going and over the earth as it lay away in shield-like masses that were brown now with the uses of winter. “He makes love like a tomcat,” her lips said suddenly once while she paused in her playing to tinker with a bad string. “Albert. He makes love like a tomcat.”

The music teacher had her changing moods; in her entrance her mood was stated, in her down-flung coat and her quick bowing; but her presence, whatever it was, would never crush her student’s zeal.

“What’s that? I want to do that,” Theodosia said. “I want to learn to do that. I intend to learn it. Give it to me for an exercise. It can’t get away from me. I will have it. I want it.”

“You will never do that in this world,” she said. “Your hand wasn’t made for that. You couldn’t do successive octaves, Miss. Don’t cry for the moon. Artificial harmonics will always be beyond you. It’s no great matter.”

They were laughing, speaking idly. “I want it. I want that passage inside my skin. It’ll liberate my soul. I must have a showy, idle, ornamental soul, full of ruffles and grill-work. I want that very passage. Oh, God, how I want it.”

She did not believe what the teacher said of her hand. Eventually she would grow to that playing, she thought, and she would surprise her master. “I will go to the end of everything, I’ll look over the edge of the last precipice of music,” she said inwardly. “I’ll look over the last precipice of music and say, ‘God!’ I’ll say ‘Where are you?’ I’ll climb all the musical stairs there are.”

* * * * *

Anthony lingered in a state of half-illness, in and out of his bed. One day his distress for some missing paper seemed acute and she offered him her help. He was unwilling to share with her. “Your business is the violin now,” he said, sinking weakly into his chair by the fire, but in a moment after he was sickened with faintness and she helped him back to the bed.

Two days later Theodosia found that she had determined to search among the papers in the back upper room to try to find the truth about their house, that she would take upon herself the necessity which awaited her as her grandfather visibly failed. Siver had spoken to her of his wages, which, he said, had not been paid for five weeks. He must have his money, he said, speaking respectfully, embarrassed, for he needed clothing. He must have his pay or he would have to find another place. Theodosia paid him the money from a small sum which she had, and during that same evening she took a mass of papers and letters from the old desk and carried them to her room to examine them before the fire. Many of the letters had been tied into bundles and these she examined first because they offered a modicum of order in the chaos of the mass. Among them were letters of affection which ran through a long gamut of admiration and passion to apathy, letters which had passed between her father and mother.

She sat all the following day over the papers. The memoranda yielded a confusion of dates and moneys spent or collected, a going and coming of funds, lands, expenses. Nothing seemed to have marketable value. No memoranda indicated a note or mortgage held in fee. The farmland had been sold; there were records of sums paid for this tract or that. The musty papers told musty stories, already half-known to her, of acres inherited, of sale bills of watered farmlands and uncut forests lying along the banks of some stream, described with poles and links and the jargon of surveys. In the documents a surveyor walked around a stretch of land, in the sun of warm days, in the wind or the cold or the frost of ill seasons. He walked around tracts with his compass and chain, measuring, writing figures, drawing maps, making descriptions. Five people heired a five-part property, divided equally by the survey, a farm to Joseph, a farm to Eliza, a farm to Jacob, a farm to Anthony T., a farm to Theodosia, the wife of Thomas Singleton.... A will had been opened and read in a parlor, the heirs sitting formally in their seats as became the inheritors of land. Later they drew their chairs together in groups to confer. One sat apart dissatisfied. The truth of the letters met the truth of the surveys and the memoranda. It had been a rainy day. The inheritors had reached the place with difficulty, some of them wet to discomfort. The parlor had been dark and ill dusted, murky with age and memorials. A young woman had brought cedar wood for the fireplace.

They had met again when the survey had been made, sitting again in the light that fell through the old curtains, and their discontents had now been adjusted or hidden. The surveyor had made a plat for each one, a shield of irregular shape drawn on paper, representing lands, arable acres and woodlands. The plows of the spring would slip through the fields and the inheritors would be about their business, belonging now, each one, to his land. But the substance of the myth would fade out from under them. Some of them were dead, and from some the land had melted away. Owners were separated from their ownership. Memoranda of deeds began to tell their tales, items of barter. “Beginning at a stone at the east edge of the Quincy pike, corner to lot 4, thence with edge of said pike south 88½ west 32 poles 23 links, thence south.... Said farm known as Linden Hill....” It was accurately described, line for line. In the house someone was born, the birth told in a letter from Charlotte, the mother, to Anthony. Another paper, notes drawn up for the writing of some deed, “witnesseth that said Anthony, for and in consideration of the sum of nineteen thousand dollars to him paid by said Goodwin ... hath given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred, and released, and by these presents does give, grant, bargain, sell, transfer, and release unto said Goodwin, a certain tract of land situated, lying, and being in the county aforesaid on the south side of the Casey Run and bounded as follows: Beginning at a stone ... thence with edge of said pike south 88½ west 32 poles 23 links ... said farm known as Linden Hill.”

The road ran between the farms, mapped and charted, and the farms were charted and recorded, described and owned, bounded by fences and walls and watercourses, these men belonging to the land as owners of land. But the land was gone, cut from under their feet, in consideration of the sum of nineteen thousand dollars, it was released, bargained, granted, given, sold, transferred. The day of the sale had been a bright day in June. The tillers of the soil had already planted the tobacco and the corn in the arable fields. The child born had been herself. A letter told of the humid noon, dinner on long tables before the house door, the half of a mutton roasted by three negroes over a great wood fire, piles of bread, drink for the men in the barn, whisky poured into little glasses. She had been a baby above-stairs in a cradle. It was all now a mouldy smell on rotting paper, a faint stench and a choking dust. An imperfect chronicle arose out of the stench and this chronicle built the present into a new structure. She sat staring at the embers or she turned again to the documents, for they had hints of more to disclose.

It was on this day that she first helped her grandfather to the commode, that she had known the look of his feeble withered body, had glimpsed at it as she had folded his blanket about his shaking knees. She went away to walk in the twilight of the day, spinning rapidly along the street, meeting Frank and walking with him to the end of the town, merry with him over some joke that he had. Later Albert was sitting under her soft light.

“Take your time, no hurry,” he said, half whispering as he stood by the door at his departure. “Take your time.”

The papers scattered over her sofa in the room above had begun to reveal a hard story, hard to know and realize. She turned a bitter, unsmiling face from him as he stood by the door and glanced at her bent lips in the glass.

“I’ll not hurry. Don’t bother yourself.”

“But in the end you’ll come.”

“Like a millstone, I will. Like a mountain.”

“Mountain is no matter. I’ll get you. You’ll be glad to be got.... I’ll show you what a man can do. When I set-to I’m a real lover.”

She wanted his face between her hands at that moment, but she would not trust her tenderness. She remembered her grandfather’s withered body, his shrunken maleness, and she was broken by pity. She made her pity resemble scorn as she turned apart and laid the fiddlestick carefully in the case beside the fiddle. The evening was over.

“When I come I’ll be a real lover. The kind you’ll want. I know you.”

“Slam the door after you when you go, so it’ll lock. Please do. Just slam it hard.”

“Two months I gave you. Time flies. It’s half gone already. Goen fast.”

“Just slam it hard. Save me a trip out to the door.”

* * * * *

She had brought other papers from the cupboard in the back room, and she sat busy with these all of a day and half a night. She was weary now of the stale odors of decayed paper and dust, weary of the truth which was now established. Her father was father also to three mulattoes. Letters from her mother’s relatives touched the matter as if it were beyond dispute, reiterated it as if it were a knowledge well premised and antedating the discussions of funds and settlements. She laid all the letters relating to this subject in a pile together and studied them in order. They were letters from her mother’s father, now dead.

Her hands on the fiddle were weak and apathetic, startled into numbness. She put the instrument aside, shut it tenderly away into its case and sat staring at the flames or she moved suddenly to some new posture. She felt as if she were alone with her grandfather in this; Conway had been shut away as tenderly as had been the fiddle; Albert was avoided as pertaining somehow too nearly to the facts. She read the letters again, eating their words, leaping ahead to the telling phrases. “This is the last of your share from your mother’s estate. Make it go as far as it will. You knew when you married Horace Bell that he was the father of two blacks.... I will come whenever I can, or your brother will manage to go by Anneville on his way back from the meet.... You better turn your attention to something else. Take up church work.... Dropped his litter in the alley behind the jail. The half-wit, Dolly Brown, for God’s sake! Old Josie’s girl was a handsome wench, but slobbering Dolly Brown.... A strange taste in wenches.”

She gathered the letters together and dropped them into the fire in a fury of anger, but when they had turned to feathery cinders she wondered at her act and repented of it. Persons had grown out of the search, a man vaguely outlined in youth, Anthony Bell, or her mother, Charlotte, others. Her infantile concept of her father as one playful, merry, light-hearted, child-like, made a confused war with later concepts of him as a jumble of demands upon affection and forbearance. She remembered her mother as a large passionate woman who hated her broken life, but in turn she remembered little Annie, born after the incident behind the jail, five years after. She was benumbed before the new knowledge and shared only with Anthony.

Her outer vision dulled by the fire and by weariness, her inner vision heightened, and she began to divide her being, searching for some soul or spirit. Her search took her into her grandfather’s being where it touched accurately to her own. He was old, withered, palsied, but he had life, a life, from first to last, she observed, and the house was real for him and the people of the house, the pain of his sickness. Her search took her into many of the ways of men. When a man is a baby someone uncovers his nakedness and bathes it. Then he has a long season of being obscure, withdrawn within himself, alive, secret with life. Finally he is old and again someone must uncover his nakedness and bathe him, handle him as if he were new-born. She herself had done this for him. Where, she questioned, is his soul?

She brought forward her knowledge of the old man’s life, trying to make it stand as a picture before her. As a young man he had taught for a time in some college. His journals had come from far cities and he would read all night. He had been richly alive then, sensitive, secret with life, his nakedness covered, his bow gallant, his compliments ready. He had been a gay story-teller, and his friends had loved him. They had come miles to visit him, to sit all night over the fire. Then he had married Alice, a strange woman who liked to sit apart.

When all the subtractions were made the naked man was left, new-born, uncovered. There should be a soul there somewhere, she thought, and she searched into the withered leavings of crippled body and quavering voice. When she had found this entity in her grandfather she would, she thought, be able to identify it within herself. Her emotion for him pooled largely within her and brought her to tears, and she gazed down into the red coals of her fire with a blurred vision. Gratitude and anxiety mingled in her weeping, and when she thought of the burnt letters her tears were renewed. Then she drew a blanket about her shoulders and went softly down the stairs to her grandfather’s door and listened to his noisy breathing with a sob of thankfulness that he still lived. She went within and passed beyond the glow of the night-light Siver had placed on the table near the bed. There was a mouldy smell of age putrefaction, close air, burning oil from the lamp. The fire had been covered with ashes, but it smouldered and gave a jerky flame. The air near the bed was heavy with the sour odor. The man lay stretched at length, sinking flatly into the bed, scarcely raising the quilts from their level. He had spread a silk handkerchief over his forehead to protect it from the cold, and she saw with a moment of shame that the handkerchief was streaked with stains where he had worn it about his throat. A week before she had bathed his face and shoulders, somewhat loathingly, but three days later she had bathed his entire body. She had grown in the interval. The days since had towered above her and she had reached to accompany each one to its highest pinnacle.

She loathed nothing that he might reveal and she looked at him searchingly. She remembered that his knowledge was gone or blurred; he could no longer lay his hand upon it; it was gone then; his charm was gone. What, she questioned, did his spirit have to do with his knowledge, with his person, his courage, his putrefying flesh, his taste, his temper, his determination, his belief in herself? He wanted to be alive, secret, shut within himself. She tried to eliminate from herself all but that which they held in common and, the cancellations made, to identify something which one could describe as deathless, as indicative of a man. Her tenderness intervened, however, and she found that she had resolved to make him some light flannel caps to protect his head from the cold while he slept. She felt a holy sense of comfort when she went softly from his door. In the hall Horace was taking off his overcoat. He had just come in.

“You’re up late, Dosia,” he said. “You let your fellows stay till after midnight. It’s not prudent. Trust a Bell.”

He opened the parlor door and looked in at the dark and the fireless hearth. She had gone to the foot of the staircase.

“Grandfather,” she said. “I was in his room.” She was indifferent to his words.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ll go upstairs together, hand in hand, our hearts entwined. ‘She’s a pretty girl now,’ I said the other day, said it to myself, you understand, and it wasn’t a lie I told either. No need to worry about the old man. He’s better. I’ll lay a bet he’ll be out again in a week. The old war horse, he’s not so easy beaten. He’ll come under the wire first, the old horse will. It’s been a long time since I walked upstairs with as pretty a lady.”

At the top of the flight, where his way led him down the hall to his room at the back of the house, he caught her into his arms.

“Kiss your father good-night,” he said.

“I don’t want to.” He had not made such a demand for years.

“I want to kiss a pretty girl before I go to bed and by God you’re a pretty one. Kiss me good-night.”