Chapter IV: Part 4

“I don’t want to,” she was saying. He had already kissed her many times and was trying to force her to return the expression. She pulled herself from his arms and went quickly to her room, hearing his step recede down the hallway. She locked her door and turned to the cluttered room, which she set in order. She prepared for bed quickly, for the room was cold. She felt liberated, inwardly cool, free to love and hate. Between her grandfather and herself there was some relation, she resolved. There was some beauty in his putrefaction, some flower in his decay. She was freed to hate Horace Bell. His touch on her arms and on her breast had been obscene. Somewhere there was a soul within her, within her grandfather likewise, she thought. She had identified it with a swift moment of concentrated loathing, cut it free with hate. Now there would be to describe it, to outline it, to study it, to see it. The music must come out of it. She lay in her bed, hard with determination and cool with the end of emotion.

In the day that followed she gave herself to her work without interruption. The teacher had set a difficult task and the time for the lesson was near at hand. She took a respite in the difficulties that lay before her fingers.

* * * * *

She saw that Anthony was better now, his voice stronger in speech, his will stronger. “Siver, send that barber fellow up here. I must be trimmed,” he had called out. He sat beside the fire with a book which he thought that he read. She would not think in detail of the facts disclosed to her by the letters, holding her mind steadily apart from that knowledge. No one but the music teacher reached her inner immunity. Their duos for violin and piano, for two violins, became two remote minds conversing as abstraction was laid over against abstraction, theme against theme, and once, for experiment, key against key.

She stood beside Anthony’s chair to talk of the music, to tell him the names of the masters whose works she played. She would play a Concerto, he asserted, his heart set to it. “They’ll hear you in the capitals,” he said. He was able to care for his body now; he had reached for his manhood, but she could not go back to her former place. “The Brahms Concerto, you’ll play it. That’s what I want. I heard it in Paris. It was the second time I went there.” Standing thus beside him her identifying mind went swiftly to the matter on which she would not dwell, sped over it, naming it with a wordless withdrawal. “It may take four years, six maybe, study and practice, but that’s my wish. You’ll play the Concerto. You’ll go to the metropolis to study.” She kissed his cheek, her naming mind on the matter that gave her pain and fear. Then, faltering, she told him of what she had learned from the papers. He burst into a torrent of anger, oaths choking back his words.

“Never let me hear you mention it. Not whilst I live. The worst piece of impudence that ever I saw in life. Enough virtue in a Bell, in a Montford, to carry along a little excess weight. Never let me hear a sign of this again. Get about your business.”

Hard words, cracked with age and anger, spent strength, and he trembled in his chair. Tone left his words high as jagged missiles thrust upon the air of the room. She was weeping now.

“Get about your business. Get on. Get outen here. Away.”

* * * * *

She was playing scales all morning in her room, using difficult intervals, her content running now with the cry of the tone and settling to the grace of her fingers as they crumpled over the strings. Her hands were pliant but narrow, not good fiddle hands, the teacher had said. They were her mother’s hands much diminished. She was hearing the words of the teacher, her master, as they discoursed of vibration. She was, the teacher, herself an epitome of the fiddle, her quick graceful standing figure, her hand that was broad and flexible in the palm. She wondered if anything else touched this woman. The inner psychic vibration which should be reflected in the rapid vibrations of the fingers on the strings, such as this was her meat and drink. The greater master had played a Chopin Nocturne for one “eating the bitter bread of exile.”

“It should be easy, though, to make a dethroned king weep,” she said.

She let her fingers have their joy in their skill knowing that an ironic undertow had set upon her thought. Enough virtue in a Bell to carry along any quantity of excess weight, Anthony had said to her, his anger in a flame. The two daughters of black Josie’s girl, Deb, were grown women now. She remembered them as cooks or nurses or laundresses. They were named Americy and Lethe, and now she remembered vividly one warm September day when she had stopped Lethe on the street and asked her to do some laundry work. The reply had been a faintly smiling refusal, some evil in it. She recalled now her tone of mind and her bodily attitude as she had worked the end of her parasol between the bricks of the pavement, a gesture to accompany the slightly forward pose of her head, her manner condescending, amused, expectant. “Could I get you to do some fine laundry work for me, Lethe?”

Now she labored with the more difficult scales, grown weary of them as she thought of the September day, her parasol daintily plucking at the bricks, her assurance and expectancy, and then the strange, brief, but not curt refusal, “No’m, you couldn’t.” A smile she could not understand, some evil in it, had dented the brown girl’s face, had dented her brown cheeks and slightly lifted her lips. Her words had been slowly spoken and her gaze had fixed itself upon the parasol for an instant while the decision was being made, but had traveled then over the blue silk crêpe dress to Theodosia’s face. She remembered the evil of the smile and the slowly spoken refusal, and how they had lain over her evening, had weighted her day as with a rebuff and had brought a distress to her members that had mounted to a deep fatigue.

“My sisters,” she said, rubbing the rosin over the hair threads of the bow. A distinct fear stood in her breast for the moment. She opened the window wide.

She thought minutely of Americy and Lethy—or Lethe. She wondered which of the names she should think when she thought of the brown girl, and she guessed the origin of the name. “Call it Aphrodite, Aurora, Lethe, call it Lethe, Lethy,” she heard a voice say. Now she thought intently of the two dark women and tried to picture them. They were older than herself. Americy had strange marks like freckles on her face, splotches of deeper brown. There had been some story of her which she could not now distinctly remember. It had something to do with her having been in the jail for stealing or for drunkenness. She found that her penetrating memory yielded her more of Lethe than of Americy, for she could recall Lethe’s face more sharply. Her picture of Lethe’s face was more clear than the detailed story of Americy although she now remembered that it was for drunken brawling that Americy had been incarcerated. The incident belonged a year or two back in time. Americy had been making loud obscene talk on the street, in a brawl with some man, and she had been taken to the lockup. There was something more of it, she remembered, cocaine or whisky. She had pled guilty and had somehow raised the money for the fine when she was tried in the court two days later.

“All right, then, my sisters,” she said. A great weariness assailed her and she was aware of fear. There was more to comprehend and the exercises grew irksome, difficult.

Her thought passed beyond fear and rested on pity, abhorrence, sickening loathing. Stiggins, then—she turned no longer from the thought of Stiggins. His mother was the half-wit who lived in the alley behind the jail. She had lived there many years, for the cabin there had been left to her by some white woman. There had once been some litigation over the property; it had been wanted by the county for some purpose and there had been a suit in the court, all the lawyers taking sides, half-jocularly at first. In the end the cabin had not been sold, for Dolly Brown had been adjudged incompetent and her property had been secured from sale or condemnation. The affair had been threshed through several courts and all the lawyers had enlisted, renewing old bitternesses over it. The people of the town had gone to hear the speeches of the lawyers. “They’re a-tryen Dolly Brown’s cabin,” Conway had said.

All the town had gone to the court as if it were a show to see, and the lawyers had spoken in turn—eloquence, bitterness, laughter. Horace Bell had been on the side of the half-wit and he had made a long speech in defense of her rights as one of the innocents of the earth, rhetoric flowing richly. People had gone in groups to look at the cabin behind the jail and Dolly Brown had met them with smiles and giggling laughter until these visits had wearied her. Then she had thrown boiling water at groups to drive them off. Theodosia could not remember when Stiggins had not stayed in the livery stable and she had always thought of him as being somehow related to the horses and mules there. She had seen his hand on a mule’s throat to slip the harness over the stubby hair, a yellow hand moving knowingly over the mule’s flesh. He was still as a boy of ten in mind although she knew that he was but a few months younger than herself. He had grown up in the livery stable, sleeping on the straw in the loft, and nobody regarded him as more than a semi-idiot. Ladies never went beyond the door of the stable, but she herself had been far inside once when she was a child. Romping along beside her uncle, the horse dealer, on the way to the candy store, she had gone with him into the half-dark of the stable when he had stopped there to look at a horse. She remembered water dripping from a rotting trough, a hand pump where some workmen bent and lifted to the lilt of an iron handle, the closed stall where the show horse was kept. The earth floor was beaten hard by the feet of the horses, and the stalls went, one after another, far back into a brown darkness. Men came there to relieve themselves in the stalls, and there was a foul odor all about.

Stiggins, a link between what men keep and what they throw away, summarized her thought. He breathed the air of the discarded, the foul; he slept in it. She put the scales aside, for their mounting tones no longer reached toward some infinite adjustment, some perpetual promise. Stiggins was her brother. The scales were a weariness.

Albert too was a weariness, set far back and left when she had gone into the region about the yellow half-wit, Stiggins. She refused to ride with him when he asked her to go. He had stood at the house door gravely pleading that the day was warm and bright. His strong limbs offered her ease as he stood there before the bright warmth of the sun. Distracted, she waited beside her grandfather’s door, listening to his argument, but she gave a negative reply. Standing there, she wanted suddenly to go into his breast and rest. Her eyes clung a moment to his large clean bosom where a single intention dwelt, clung to his strong hands. She went back into Anthony’s room shaking her head, closing the door after her.

* * * * *

Catherine Lovell was going away to live in another town and her going began to leave a mark upon the days of the season even before it was consummated at a point upon some exact day. Her going spread through the week that preceded it and gave it a heightened reality, touching it with a not altogether unpleasant sense of disaster. For the last time the rugs were rolled back in the Lovell parlors and the musicians sat in the outer hall. Knowing it to be the last, the dancers were tender and gay, bending toward the departure with heightened beings. Theodosia was more intensely aware of Catherine in her leaving, her affection for her running in a full tide that ran counter to her recent unrest and swept this into its own channel. There was abundant virtue in a Bell then, and with Conway she walked lightly on the rhythms of Hill Street, adoring him in the moment of Catherine’s going. She worked all morning over the fiddle or the harmony, Catherine’s departure giving her faculties intense acumen so that the chords dripped from her pencil-tip and spread over the sheets of lined paper and her lips hummed phrases that played over the chords and departed from them in airy flights of inconsequential song, never returning. Ruth Robinson had brought her a gift of spring blossoms and Jane Moore had come to talk of how much Catherine would be missed. Intensities of affection welled all around her. Albert in the dance, settling his fingers to steady her in the step, had whispered again, “Two weeks now I give you. I’ll close in against next week is done.” They were a warmth of life touching her life minutely. They excluded fear with the warm touch of their nearness.

After a day in the house she went to walk at nightfall, in the dusk of the last twilight hour. People were assembled about the reading-lamps of the firesides, for the shades were not yet drawn and she could see into the houses. Little children were running before the firelight, their heads just reaching above the low window sills. It had been county court day and the town had been filled with busy people and the clatter of pleasant noises. Albert had been everywhere about, talking with the growers, and he had made a speech from the court-house steps. Forty per cent of the farmers had already been pledged to the measure, he had told her, and he would count eighty per cent an assured success, his eyes forgetful of her when he made the declaration, his eyes resting upon her without seeing. “You would eat his per cents from his hand,” now she said.

Footsteps came from the deeply shadowed pavement before her, going steps, receding quickly. The drama of the darkening town was but lightly held together, as if she could break it with a laugh. She walked briskly through an upper street thinking of her friends and of Catherine’s going. She had from each, she reflected, what each held out to her, and her music counted richly for something. A long strange gloom was settling over the rolling hills beyond the town where the fields and the pastures lay, a gloom lit with the strange light from a low-bent horizon, vividly burnt to orange and black-red. The town was the dark core around which the fields centered. Albert was whispering his wish and his intention, growing daily more sure and more restless. All day the town had been the leaping, out-crying center of the farmed acres, the traders shouting their musical incantations over the mounting prices of cattle and mules, and Albert had summarized many goods as he had stood before her to make his speech from the court-house, had set a hilltop upon the day and upon the plowed fields. “In less than two weeks,” he had said the night before, and the week was well begun. “The kind of lover you’ll want.”

All about, up and down the street, were remote sounds of retreating steps, coming steps, voices that cried out in low commands or questions, but they said nothing for her beyond the abundant drama of their passing. She moved in a richness and fullness of sensation, cloaked in sense, or the pleasure of setting her feet forward swiftly drowned all thought in momentary pools of physical being. Or, standing at the gate after the walk, having heard the click of the gate latch which always meant the end of a journey, the peculiar sound of the gate when it was closed from within the garden, a deep metal click, alto, unlike that of any other gate she knew, a token of possible finalities came into her thought and her bodily presence. Albert gathered the fields together and centered them, but in turn he centered himself into her body. The parallels of the street converged far down in the west at the line the set sun made with the hills. The cool of the night touched her face and a shiver passed over her body, less of cold than of emotion deeply established as she recognized some unity within herself which related to her friends, to Albert’s wish, to Conway’s gentleness and beauty, and a clear thought of Conway brought a smile to her lips.

“This is my spirit, my soul. It’s here,” she said. “This unit. I can almost touch it with my words.” Dark had come now. The lights of the town were burning in order, one after the other up the street. She passed up the steps of the gallery slowly.

THREE

Catherine Lovell’s face was dim in Theodosia’s memory now that it was gone from the town. To her this was something to contemplate, this sure loss of a face when it had passed beyond the sight of the eye. The face would be recognized instantly anywhere upon the earth, in any crowd, but it could not be restored to a vivid image in waking thought. Theodosia pursued all vanishing faces with moments of wonder and amazement, for Jane Moore, out of sight, was but dimly seen although the flavor of her being, of her way, her smile, was keenly discerned. The same was true of Ruth although she came often to the parlor, and true of Conway, of Albert, of Frank, and she played a game of trying to hold the image minute by minute after the face had disappeared through a doorway, but only a dim vision together with an estimate or a general essence could be assured, although Albert’s look with its momentary pleading and rough assurance somehow entered her frame and consorted with some part of her own being, richly remembered in the joyous consenting of her members, but accompanying this ran always a tender thought of Conway and his beauty, who, if he were but vaguely visualized, was real and one with Albert in whatever favor her mind yielded of contemplation and tenderness.

Perhaps, she reflected, these faces were the less vividly imaged because they were deeply known in other than visual reports. All the familiar faces of the town were so richly seasoned with all the rest that went with them in the making of a person that they were in themselves dimmed. Old faces, as these were, in youth or age, inherited of others, the Bell face, the Robinson face, the Moores, the Brookes, the Tanners, the MacDougals—one would know where they had derived. Bell faces had been greeting Robinson faces on the street of the town for more than a hundred and twenty-five years. Or, the face of the music teacher, out of sight, shadowed into her darkness of hair and brow and became less flesh under the remembered capricious flights of her fiddle singing. Albert, gone from the town now on an extended mission among the growers, offered a constant and joyous dare, by way of his dim image, in her game of hide-and-seek.

A new person had come to the town while Catherine was still making felt her departure, a strange face with no predecessors. A man, Captain Agnew, had bought a farm at the end of one of the streets, and his daughter, Florence, was presently seen driving about the town in a motor vehicle. She was a large girl, rich in the splendors of vitality, deep of chest and strong of limb. Her eyes were bright and her lips easily flowing. She flung her looks everywhere, careless of them, abundantly centered within herself. Theodosia saw her here and there over the town and talked with her at some gathering. She thought of her again and again as she practised the trills, her present occupation, and she experimented to try to visualize the new face with its looks, its beauty, its rapid sequence of smiles, frowns, and infinities of gesture. The new face had printed itself more cleverly than any other into her mind, and she herself smiled often, remembering the vivid picture that was clear and firm in determination. The new girl had moved swiftly into the life of the town, for in a few days she was seen everywhere. “Is it because she is new to me that I remember her looks?” Theodosia asked herself, waking out of sleep, and suddenly a clear image of Florence, as clear as reality, stood in the core of her inner vision.

It was a puzzle—Florence to be so keenly felt as to retain her pictured form in absence. Theodosia ran swiftly with the spring. Her long slender legs delighted in the daily walk, and in a few weeks there would be tennis on the courts at the Seminary. Stiggins spread onto her mind once as a flat unrecognized affront. Walking past the stable swiftly one bright day she saw his hand as it bent over the collar of a mule to slip a pad into place, a long slender hand, powerful and cunning, like her own hand but more powerful and more steadily placed to its task. The tawny fingers dragged knowingly over the buckles of the collar and then his face, viewed momentarily, was searched carelessly in the swift moment of a passing. “Between thee and me there is a great gulf fixed,” she thought, and the hour swept quickly by, having gathered nothing from the moment which was dominated by the dark accidental hand.

Florence Agnew grew daily into a personality, heard and felt as well as seen. Hers was a sensual voice, heavy with tone, low, trailing away into finalities. Her body was luxury-loving and radiantly indolent, using but a modicum of its intense vitality for her goings and comings. Her perfect teeth flashed their smile from between her rippling lips and she was alive to the ends of her animal being, which was set to have the best of the town for its own. Her hair was puffed and curled to be a gauze of rippling midnight over her head.

* * * * *

Jane Moore could do nothing with the Bach. She shook her head self-indulgently at the piano arrangement as if the music were some light joke to confound the keyboard. She touched a key here and there with her fingers but in the end she shrugged as if Bach were a responsibility she could not be asked to assume. Her hat was bright for the spring that delayed, out-dating the spring with its flowers and fragile crêpe. She wanted to talk of Florence continually, and she quoted her with an admiration which would fall suddenly under amused contempt or shock but would build itself back again in the charm of the unfamiliar. She went daily where Florence went, or she would retail to Theodosia the witty sayings and bold sallies that issued from the flame around which she was impelled to hover.

The days went hurriedly, the birds in the trees at dawn making a continuous breathless fluting, the mockingbird loudest and most insistent. Albert had gone far into the country, traveling from farm to farm, visiting the smaller villages, or he made farther journeys into outlying counties. Theodosia played trills looking at her thin lips in the tall glass of the parlor, searching her lips and her face there.

She had seen Florence that day with a group of people at the pool beyond the town where boats were paddled about. She gave the top of her mind to the trill, the finger pressed firmly down on the string, but underneath a voice recounted Albert’s words, hurled them out between the running web of the trill. “Some day I aim to smash that old fiddle into the middle of perdition.” Her fingers were joyous over the trill; she and her fingers were one and they would ride together on the top of the world. She comprehended Florence then and dwelt upon her minutely, saw her quick smile that knew all the inner part of a man or of a woman. Albert’s voice again: “You’re too full of joy. I aim to take some of the joy out of you.” The bird tones of the trill crashed over the words and lanced each one with a sharp dart. “Two months from now I aim to do’t. Take your time.” She had spent a month with the scales and then had set upon the harmony again, mornings when her pencil dribbled small black egg-shaped dots on the scaffolding set up by the staff and bound them together with a swift down-stroke, her ear hearing tone set upon tone in a fullness of design, the fear in her inner thought, but the fear had slunk away before her new joy and it was now only a dim thing, abstracted, unremembered, too remote to visit any image. Florence Agnew spread pleasure over the town and over the bodies of men and women, and all were more intensely alive. “A week now, I give you. The kind of lover you’ll want. I’ll close in against the week’s done,” the words met the bird-singing of the trill that twittered over them and brooded them in kindness. Her mind was suffused with half-knowing, drunk with sense, but her fingers knew their cleverness and the trill lived on while she floated in the reality of consenting fiber and essence. “His strength, it’s what I need after all,” she said wisely, looking at the chin-piece of the instrument, looking at the threads of the bow, her mouth speaking coolly above the languor of her blood. A day two weeks earlier reappeared to be lived more minutely than in its first appearing, and another day later. The present week cried out for recognition; he had sent her a note from Corinth and another from Mayfair Church. He had called her by the telephone the night before, “To hear the sound of you again,” saying, and “Three days and I’ll come back. Mark on your calendar, you better.” The voices became entirely real:

“You better mark on your calendar. It’ll be a red-letter day, against I come, red for you.”

“Will it?”

“You’ll see. If you hadn’t wanted me you would ’a’ stopped me long ago. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. You’ll see.”

“Will I?”

“You’ll see in three days’ time.”

* * * * *

Conway was coming into the parlor, her “Come” making a recitative as she sang it against the continued trill. He looked at her appealingly and stopped his ears against the shrill high notes.

“Getten ready for a contest?” he asked.

“What you want now?”

“You think too much about Albert. Too much to suit me.”

“Albert makes me think. He’ll be back tomorrow for sure.”

“He’s back today. He came back about one o’clock this evening to meet some men here from up the state. Town’s full of men from up around Fayette.”

“Is he? A sudden change, a new plan. He talked to me last night. He was out at Johntown.”

“It’s about time you thought about me a little.”

“I think about you fifty times a day, Connie.”

“Call it fifty.”

Conway gathered into his unspecified vagueness and sat distraught in his chair, or he arose and stepped lightly about the room, moving a curtain here or drawing a bowl into the light of the setting sun, closing a shutter, pushing the chair of the blue brocade into the kindest manifestation of the light.

“What’s the good of fifty? What kind of fifty.”

“I think about you every time I think at all.”

“If you marry Albert I’ll go off and never come back. This town, it’ll never see a sight of me again.”

“I wouldn’t want you to go.”

“Go, I will, you’ll see.”

“Well.”

“I’m like that. I couldn’t bear to see you marry Albert. I couldn’t bear it. I’ll go so far this town’ll never hear a buzz of me while time lasts.”

“Marry? That’s a long way off. I wasn’t thinken about marry.”

“Go I will. You’ll see. A long piece from here. You’re the only thing that keeps me here, you and my brother Reg.”

Reg was a good friend, a fine boy, she admitted. She looked vaguely at the passing sunlight, speaking aimlessly of Reg.

“I don’t care much for a whole mob of people. Don’t wish nobody no harm, but all the same ... I like you better’n anybody else on earth. I like a few people in a big way. You and Reg most. You most of all. It came to me about a month ago I liked you best, and nothing else I ever did in life amounted to a rap. It seems like nothing else I ever did mattered nohow. That’s how I look at it. I been studyen it out a right smart the last few weeks. Not one other God’s thing I ever done matters now. No matter what ’twas.”

She arose quickly and walked toward the door. Albert would be coming then, soon, the day’s work over. Conway walked toward the door beside her.

“Kiss me,” she said, leaning slightly near. “You will kiss me and go now. Albert will be here soon. I have to go on an errand for Grandfather. I don’t know what I’ll do. I haven’t been thinken about what you’re talken about. You kiss me. Good-bye, Connie.”

* * * * *

Albert had come back then, sooner than he had expected. Visitors from other counties where tobacco was grown had met in the town, and men from the farms lying close about had been conferring with these. Conway’s report of the busy day followed her through the house after his departure. Young women had given their time to the growers’ project, typing in the offices, writing letters, carrying the visiting farmers from place to place in their cars. She had kept at home all day and the trills had mounted; she had not known of the business in the town. “The pool is something, but I am something else,” she thought. She made ready for the call her grandfather had asked her to make for him.

When she returned from this errand Albert was at hand; he had been let in by Horace and was sitting relaxed in his chair, recounting his day.

“I’m dead tired,” he said, when they were alone. He began to tell of his journey through three counties. His eyes were weary and listless, heavily troubled, and his voice was monotonous. Under his apathetic gaze he seemed to be looking at her lazily or sadly, as if he were sad for the weariness that now oppressed him.

“Back to Corinth, Monday that was, and then on to Mayfair.... Broke an axle and got stuck in a mud hole.... On to Johntown.... Over to Richelieu.... Back to Johntown.... By that time it was last night.” He seemed to be looking at her with some extra vision that shone from under the gaze of his shifting eyes.

“Already been all up in around Payne Lick and over beyond the Ridge. Over into the far side of the river. Had no sleep for a week till last night. Slept last night like a log.”

Theodosia sat on the chair of the blue cushions and the parlor was arranged as Conway had left it, as he had settled it to the afternoon light. Albert seemed suffused in sadness now, and the tale of his wanderings in behalf of the farmers would scarcely hold together longer. The end of the week had come and the end of his odyssey. The day in the town with eminent speakers from outside followed, touched sparingly. He had arrived soon after noon. He had worked all afternoon in one of the offices, seeing men. There was a greater plan for coöperative selling on foot, a tight pool. Finally he said:

“You know Florence Agnew?”

“Oh, yes, I know her.”

“Do you like her?”

“How do I know?... I don’t have to like her, do I?”

“What you think about her looks?”

“Oh, she’s a beauty, I guess. Yes, I’m sure of it. She’s a real beauty.”

“How many times you seen Florence?” he asked.

“All week. I’ve been to the reservoir when she was there and all over town. At a party one day. Eight or ten times, a dozen maybe, I’ve seen Florence, I reckon.”

“I’ve seen her only once.”

“Today?”

“All the rest of the day after I came. She was in Kirk’s office to write for the pool men, she and Ruth and one or two more.”

She had reached for the fiddle and was touching the strings without a sound. He said that he was tired as a dog and that he would go home and go to bed. He looked at her covertly, oppressed with weariness or some other burden. “I ought to ’a’ gone straight home, but I just thought I’d drop by.” His old smile, touched with some bitterness or sadness, went over his face for a moment and he took his hat from the table.

“So long,” he said. “I’m off.”

* * * * *

Albert and Florence were coming in at the doorway. It was the day after his return. He was richly alive, his life leaping within him, and Florence’s deep low voice was cutting to the end of the parlor, to the end of the hallway, as Theodosia came down the staircase to meet them.

They were sitting on the black haircloth divan toward the piano, and Theodosia sat on the blue chair opposite, giving them her searching interest, questioning, lending her low laugh to their hearty laughter. Florence Agnew’s lips had the ripples of water. “The flesh beside her mouth is a pearl with life in it,” Theodosia was thinking, and the event was gathering swiftly. Florence rested continually upon her beauty, luxuriating upon it, and her quick eyes went frequently to Albert’s eyes where they continued some former contact and some growing knowledge. They were telling of the day before, of the afternoon spent among the growers, and they had many incidents to recall, droll sayings, laughter, droll prejudices, caricatures of close-handed men. When their eyes met, Theodosia knew that she was forgotten. Once she arose quickly, murmuring some apology, and left the room. She walked the length of the cabinets of the Indian flints and looked through the glass, seeing nothing beyond. She stared at a stone hatchet, seeing no meaning beyond the outline. When she went back to the parlor they were sitting apart, Albert on the chair by the window, and she knew from some look of ease that enveloped them that they had had their caress. After that the talk lay quietly among the matters of the town, gossip of this one or that, but it flowed back to the farmers again and settled among the percentages and statistics.

“Is the pool assured?” Theodosia asked, and Albert seemed lost for the moment in some remote shock, seemed dazed as she came back thus into her former relation to the pool, to her interest in it. Her final report of it came through Florence Agnew.

“Oh, yes, it is,” Florence said. “Isn’t it, Albert?”

“Oh, yes, a sure thing now. All set.”

Their eyes were building between them again and their laughter was renewed. They went away laughing over the stories they had told, retelling themselves. Theodosia let them pass beyond the door of the room and then she began to push the chairs into place and to arrange the shutters. She took her instrument from its case and tested a string, but her ear was dead to tone as her limbs were dead to feeling. Then Albert ran back through the doorway and stood beside her.

“You see how it is with me, Theodosia?”

“Yes.”

“I brought her here so’s you’d see. For yourself.”

“I see.”

“She’s out at the gate to wait for me.”

There was a quiet space while she drew at the string, her ear deaf to the tone, but her fingers tinkering knowingly.

“Good-bye,” he said.

She had no reply for this. Her words were caught in her stiff throat, whatever they might have been. He began to walk toward the door, going slowly, on tiptoe, whispering something. He went toward the door aimlessly, moving uncertainly, bent forward under some burden or pain. Then he said, whispering from the doorway:

“Good-bye.

“Good-bye, Theodosia,” still whispering.

“Why, good-bye,” she said aloud, smiling toward him. “Good-bye, Albert. Good-bye.”

* * * * *

Her hands were dull and wooden over the trills and she laid the instrument aside. Fear and pain mounted in her mind and she wandered over the house or sat stiffly in a chair. Fear that had been allayed arose and multiplied, meeting other curious hurts and shames, meeting pride in a vortex of confusion. Toward nightfall she went from the house quickly and walked through Crabtree Lane, away from the chief avenue of the town. She turned into Hill Street and passed among the small cabins that were lined along the unpaved roadway. The people of the street were leaning over their fences or sitting in their doorways. They looked at her searchingly as she went by, their slightly averted eyes asking what had brought her there. When she had passed ten or twelve cabins she saw Americy sitting on a doorstep. There was a low gate before the door of the house, and Theodosia came near to this and laid her hands upon it before she was discovered. Americy was touching the strings of a guitar uncertainly and making a chord or two, and as she strummed she was singing softly. She looked up when the hands were shaken on the gate and stopped her strumming, and when she saw Theodosia she cast her eyes upward in surprised questioning and embarrassment.

“You need one chord more,” Theodosia said. “Let me show you. One chord, like this.” She had gone within the gate and was sitting on the step beside Americy now. “One chord more is all. To make the song go.”

“You needn’t to bother. I don’t play nohow. I was just a-picken a little bit. I can’t play.”

“It’s like this,” Theodosia said. She sat on the step beside Americy and took the guitar out of her hands. “You put in this one, and then the first again, and see, it all rounds out and makes the song go better.” The guitar felt greasy in her hands and it smelt of the brown girl’s fingers. Americy was reticent, not eager to try the chord, afraid or hostile, but Theodosia urged her to take the instrument again. When the new chord was needed she placed the fingers on the strings, and Americy yielded although her mind groped in a gloom and did not learn the new way easily. Her brows were smooth and sharply cut but her mouth was heavy and her chin dull and clumsy. The dark splotches on her face were much less prominent than Theodosia had remembered.

“Who taught you to play?” Theodosia asked.

“A boy I know taught me, but I don’t play none nohow. I can’t play.”

“Where’s Lethe?”

“I don’t know. Somewheres down town.”

“Does Lethe live here with you?”

“What you want here? What you come here for?”

“I heard you play and I just stopped by.”

Americy fumbled with the new chord and found it. The other people of the street had turned into their doors and the dark had suddenly come close. Theodosia was searching for some pretext for returning and her mind reverted to its loathing and gloated on its disgust. She wanted to see Americy minutely, to search her to the roots of her life and her being, and she dwelt on the chord hoping that it would yield a way. She lingered over the latching of the gate, making efforts to approach the other, turning her hands about on the deeply weathered pickets of the fence. She thought that she might make some exchange with Americy on the basis of the music and thus gain some commerce with her. She spoke easily when the idea shaped itself into an offer, a direct appeal.

“I need somebody to do some work for me, a little laundry work, crêpe-de-chine things, nightgowns, petticoats, slips. I’ll teach you the chords in trade, if you’ll do it.” She bargained, encouraged by Americy’s interest and willingness. “I’ll show you some chords you can use to play a dozen songs, easy chords too.” Americy was acquiescent. They arranged that Theodosia would bring the garments and come for them when they were ready.

At home again Theodosia selected the clothing at once, some delicately embroidered undergarments of silk, presents from Ruth and Jane. Beyond her interest in the clothing she could not have a mind for any other matter, and she sat beyond the curtains of an upper window looking down on the street unseen, her eyes unseeing, nor would she answer any voice that called up the steps to her. She carried the garments to Hill Street the day after her first visit there. The small house was heavy with steam and the odors of human sweat, of drying clothing. She was fearful of Lethe, but she had gone in the early morning with the hope of seeing her. Americy was cordial in her greeting. She leaned over the clothing admiringly or she appraised the pieces to make an estimate of the time they would require.

“If five’s too many,” Theodosia said, “I’ll leave only four, or maybe three. How about four?”

“I’d as lief do five as not. Leave all, you can. I don’t mind.”

Lethe had come out of the kitchen and stood behind them. When Theodosia turned about she was standing near looking over their arms at the garments tossed upon the table. She was a matured woman, heavy-breasted but light on her feet. Theodosia saw that she had not remembered her face accurately, that she had remembered it too much in its attitude of unpassionate refusal. Lethe was larger than Americy, more settled and determined by life. Her hands were long, making long lines where they lay, the one on her breast and the other at her hip, strong hands, but little marked by their labor. Her face was long and was pointed slightly at the chin, a heavy face, moving from moment to moment, changing from curiosity, suspicion, hate, admiration, undefined emotions blended and divided. She was darker than Americy. Her hair was combed back and parted, but a few black kinky spirals of it resisted the parting and lay on her forehead. She looked from Theodosia to the clothing on the table, back and forth, and said in a low voice that came from one corner of her lips:

“What is it she wants, Americy?”

“She wants these-here pieces washed.”

“Charge her a plenty,” she said.

“I’ll pay money,” Theodosia said, and she was ashamed then that she had proposed any other bargain. She turned to Americy and said, “What’s it worth, those pieces?”

“Miss Theodosia said she’d teach me how to play,” Americy said.

“What does she want here?” Lethe said.

“Have you time enough to play the chords now, Americy?” Theodosia asked quickly. “Get the guitar. Where is it?”

Americy had remembered the chords from the last teaching although she was shy to sing the song through before Lethe’s hostile presence. She hummed the tune, sitting on the edge of the bed. Theodosia glanced down then and saw the small frayed foot-mat under Americy’s feet and saw that the room was cluttered with poor, ill-used things, a chair rudely mended, another chair that had lost its under-structure and was propped upon a small box. The walls had been roughly plastered and were hung with ugly and useless bric-à-brac, cast-away ornaments from the homes of the whites. A red plush couch behind the door was neatly laid with ironed clothing.

“Lethe sang it along with me last night,” Americy said. “It goes a sight better if two sing. Lethe can sing a right smart better’n I can nohow. Lethe can sing.”

“Come on, Lethe, and sing,” Theodosia said. “Americy says you can sing. Come on.”

“I can’t no such thing,” Lethe said, but her manner was more warm. She moved away toward the small fireplace, her hands now folded under her bosom, her mind set upon some pleasant inner sense of herself, her steps slow and aimless. “I can’t sing so fine as Americy makes out.”

Lethe went into the other room of the cabin and did not return. Theodosia sang the song with Americy and then showed her two chords more, and tried to teach her to tune her instrument. “I’ll pay you money too for the work,” she said. “How’d I ever come to forget that?” Americy seemed aimless and pale after the passion of the older woman. While Americy struggled with the chords a man came in at the door, a strong dark man in the prime of life. He glanced a moment toward Americy as he stood by the closed door and became slightly deferential when his glance fell upon Theodosia, but his manner was familiar as he walked across the floor and took some small thing from the bureau, as he passed into the inner room.

“You don’t need to pay no money,” Americy said. “We’ll have it like we said we would.”

“Do you and Lethe live here? Nobody else?” Theodosia asked.

“Me and Lethe. And Ross.”

“What’s Lethe’s name? Is Lethe married?”

“Her name is the same as mine is, Froman. That’s her name. Lethe Froman. Or she goes by the name of Lethe Ross.”

Theodosia went soon after. She left Americy standing by the table picking at the delicate laces of the garments with pleased scrutiny.

* * * * *

Sitting above in her chamber she saw the hill fields beyond the town as the light of the sunset withdrew from the valley and spread laterally over the plowed spaces that were ready now for the tobacco and the corn. Her own uncertainty spread to become the uncertainty of the passing light that lingered wanly, renewed itself, or was diffused into the somber twilight. Presently she was looking out upon the uncertainty of trees and gloom which was lit in feeble masses here and there by the street-lights. Long after this she prepared for bed by the indefinite light of her lamp, which made a hard and futile glow that subtended remote black shadows. When she slept the hour was late. She fell into a confused dream that centered about Albert, who leaned toward her from a bank giving her flowers that he had plucked from beyond a fence, who walked before her down a long hall, passing farther away, moving toward the inevitable disaster of doors. Beyond this vivid image lay another, vaguely merged with it but more remote, a picture under a picture, a large awkward collie dog floundering before her in a path, moving away from her toward some fixed limit, and in her inner being lay a disgust of him and a loathing that fulfilled itself in a sudden sob of thankfulness when he passed beyond her view. The passing form became then Conway with a laugh in his eyes and pleasure in his words, but when he leaned near her to kiss he became Albert, who caught her away into an unhappy fulfilment for which she wept even in the deep trance of dream.

Later, long after, it seemed, into her sleep came a flat muffled sound as if it were the shape of a peal of alarm, falling long and dull against the enduring quality of her torpor. It was shaped, the sound, like the fire alarm of the town, insistent and reiterated, but it fell toneless upon her deadened senses. It seemed to her that she had slept very long when it came again, that it was more perpetual, blurred into her dream with matter that clotted and cluttered weary thought, timbers laid into mind, shapeless and unwieldy masses set into a mind fixed upon sleep. A brief annoyance arose with each curiously shaped flat tone, annoyance that any matter should reiterate itself as if it had importance above any other matter, but she did not stir in her bed or know any real beyond the cluttering wooden masses of cry that had some relation to the village fire alarm, some foolish senseless likeness. When the shapes finally ceased she became aware of their withdrawal and missed them with a small distress that half awakened her, but later she slept again.

* * * * *

Conway was burned to death that night when his father’s house was destroyed. Theodosia had the news of this disaster from Siver when he came to kindle the fire in her grate; there was a hint of late frost in the air. She waked from unrested sleep when Siver fumbled with the wood and the coal, when he fumbled with the door latch. She turned on her pillow as he waited at the doorway, as he looked away from the bed uncertainly, his head leaned forward, preparing a disclosure.

“What is it?” she asked. She knew he had something to tell. “Tell it, Siver. Has Aunt Bet got a misery this morning? Do you have to cook the breakfast?”

He told her then as he worried with the latch. Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house had burned. “Towarge midnight,” he said.

“Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house,” he said. He lingered at the door, half closing it, drifting in and out of the doorway, looking at the floor where the bright light of the fire danced in brilliant yellow, averting his eyes from her.

She was sitting up in the bed now, the coverlets thrown aside, her passion to know what Siver had been saying over and over leaping the space that had been set between them by their offices as mistress and houseman. She asked rapid questions, impatient of the replies which came as if they had been known before, came to her ears as routine once the first great fact had assailed her.

“Mr. Conway, he got burned up too, got burned to death in the house, clean to death,” Siver said.

He stood in the doorway, rubbing his hand on the wood of the frame, mumbling his story over and over beyond the low flare of her repeated questions. Suddenly her mind became clear again after the fog of surprise. It was true that Siver had dreamed the story.

“You dreamed all this, Siver. You’re not awake yet.”

“You can smell the smoke out in the trees for your own self and you can smell the burn outside, if you go out. They got his body out towarge day and put it in a coffin and took it over to Mr. Eli Brooke’s house, his uncle’s house. You can see the smoke out in the trees and you can smell of the fire....”

The report was then a confirmation; the coffin, when Siver spoke of it, settled the truth into her. She arose and dressed herself for the day and later she met the music teacher in the parlor and played the lesson with mechanical care.