Chapter 9

An interest, a vivacity of manner, such as Gordon had not experienced for weeks stirred in him. Meta Beggs called back into being the old freedom of stage-driving days, of the younger years. Her manner flattered his sex vanity. They progressed famously.

"You don't like the children any better than you did?"

"They get more like rats every year."

"I thought about you, held against your will."

"Don't tell lies; I went right out of your mind."

"Not as quick as I went out of yours. I did think about you, though--" he stopped, but she insisted upon his finishing the remark. "Well, I remembered what you said about your shoulders, and I saw you that night at your window...."

"Men, somehow, are always curious about me," she remarked indifferently; "they have bothered me ever since I was a girl. I make them mad. I never worry about such things myself--from the way women talk, and men go on, there must be something left out of me ... it just seems silly to get all red in the face--"

He almost constructed her words into a challenge. Five years ago, he continued, or only two, he would have changed her conception of living, he would have broken down her indifference, but now--His mental deliberations ended abruptly, for, even in his mind, he avoided all reference to Lettice; they studiously omitted her name in their conversation.

"Are you going to the camp meeting on South Fork next week?" she demanded. "I have never seen one. Buckley Simmons says all sorts of things happen. He's going to take me on Saturday. I wish--" she broke off pointedly.

"What?"

"I was going to say that I wish, well--I wish I were going with somebody else than Buckley; he bothers me all the time."

"I'd like a lot to take you. It's not fit for you to go, though. The best people in Greenstream don't. They get crazy with religion, and with rum; often as not there's shooting."

"Oh! I had no idea. I don't know as I will go. I wish you would be there. If I go will you be there to look out for me?"

"I hadn't thought of it. Still, if you're there, and want me around, I guess that's where I will be."

"I feel better right away; I'll see you then; it's a sort of engagement between you and me. Buckley Simmons needn't know. Perhaps we can slip away from him for a while."

Voices rose from below them, and they drew back instinctively. Gordon found in this desire to avoid observation an additional bond with Meta Beggs; the aspect of secrecy gave a flavor to their communion. They remained silent, with their shoulders pressed together, until the voices, the footfalls, faded into the distance.

He rose to leave, and she held out her hand. At its touch he recalled how pointed the fingers were; it was incredibly cool and smooth, yet it seemed to instil a subtle fire in his palm. She stood framed in her doorway, bathed in the intimate, disturbing aroma of her person. Gordon recalled the cobwebby garment on the bed. He made an involuntary step toward her, and she drew back into the room ... the night was breathlessly still. If he took another step forward, he wondered, would she still retreat? Somewhere in the dark interior he would come close to her.

"Good night." Her level, impersonal voice was like a breath of cold air upon his face.

"Good night," he returned hastily. "I got turned right around." His departure over the gallery was not unlike a flight.

VII

The memory of Meta Beggs was woven like a bright thread through the monotonous texture of the days which immediately followed. She was never entirely out of his thoughts; she stirred him out of all proportion to any assignable cause; she irritated him. He remembered that she said she made men "mad." He recalled how ridiculous he had felt as he had said, "Good night." He wished to repay her for that injury to his self-esteem.

At the same time, curiously, he was more patient with Lettice, he had a more ready sympathy for her intangible fancies. Perhaps for the first time he enjoyed sitting quietly on the porch of his house with her and General Jackson. He sat answering her endless queries, fears, assenting half-absently to her projections, with the thought of Meta Beggs at the back of his mind. He wanted to be as nice as possible to Lettice. Suddenly she seemed a little removed from him, from the world in general, the world of the emotions and ideas that centered about the school-teacher.

Lettice was--superior; he recognized it pridefully. Behind her temporary, rational vagaries there was a quality of steadfastness. It was clear to him now from its contrast to his own devious mind. But he found a sharp pleasure in the mental image of the Beggs woman. He recalled the burning sensation that had lingered in his palm from the touch of her hand, the pressure of her shoulder against his as they had drawn back from the vision of those below.

He went early to the camp meeting on the Saturday appointed.

VIII

He drove over the road that lay at the base of the western range away from his dwelling and Greenstream village. The mature spring day had almost the appearance of summer; the valley was flooded with sparkling sunlight; but the young leaves were still red, the greenery still translucent, the trees black with risen sap. The buggy rolled through the shallow, rocky fords, the horse's hoofs flinging up the water in shining drops. The road rose slightly, turning to the right, where an intermediate valley lay diagonally through the range. Save for small, scattered farms the bottomland was uncultivated, the tangled brush impenetrable.

Gordon passed other vehicles, bound toward the camp meeting, usually a single seat crowded with three, or even four, adult forms. He passed flat wagons with their bottoms filled with straw, on which women sat with stiffly-extended legs. The young women wore gay colors, their eyes sparkled in hardy faces, their hands, broad and red and capable, awkwardly disposed. The older women, with shawls folded about their stooped shoulders, were close-lipped, somber. The men were sparely built, with high, prominent cheek bones, long, hollow cheeks and shaven mouths touched with sardonic humor, under undented, black felt hats. There were an appreciable number of invalids and leaden-faced idiots.

The way grew wilder, the natural forms shrunk, the valley became a small plain of broken, rocky hillocks matted with thorny bushes, surrounded by marshes of rank grass, flags, half-grown osiers. The vehicles, drawn into a single way, crowded together, progressed slowly. Gordon saw in the back of the buggy before him two whiskey jugs. Some one far ahead began to sing a revival hymn, and it ran along the line of carriages like a trail of ignited powder. A deep bass caught it behind Gordon Makimmon, then the piercing soprano of a woman farther back.

The camp meeting spread over a small, irregular plateau surrounded by swamp and sluggish streams. Gordon turned off the road, and drove over a rough, short descent to a ledge of solid ground by a stream and fringe of willows. The spring torrents had subsided, leaving the grass, the willows, covered with a grey, crackling coat of mud; the air had a damp, fetid smell; beyond, the swamp bubbled gaseously. The close line of hitched teams disappeared about an elbow of the thicket; groups of men gathered in the noisome shadows, bottles were passed, heads thrown back and arms bent aloft.

Above, a great, sagging tent was staked to the obdurate ground. To the left a wooden floor had been temporarily laid about a four-square, open counter, now bare, with a locked shed for storage. Before Gordon was the sleeping tent for women. The sun seemed unable to dispel the miasma of the swamp, the surrounding aspect of mean desolation. The scene was petty, depressing. It was surcharged by a curious air of tension, of suspense, a brooding, treacherous hysteria, an ugly, raw, emotional menace. A service was in progress; a sustained, convulsive murmur came from within, a wordless, fluctuating lament. Suddenly it was pierced by a shrill, high scream, a voice tormented out of all semblance to reason. The sound grew deeper and louder; it swung into a rhythm which formed into words, lines, a primitive chant that filled the plateau, swelled out over the swamp. It continued for an incredible length of time, rising to an unbearable pitch, then it died away in a great gasp.

A thin, sinister echo rose from among the willows--emotional, shrill curses, a brief, raving outburst of passion, sharply punctuated with double shots, and falling abruptly to heavy silence. Gordon saw men obscurely running below.

The curtained entrance to the tent was pushed aside, and a woman walked stiffly out, her hands clenched, and her glassy eyes set in a fixed stare. Her hat was gone, and her grey hair lay upon one shoulder. She progressed, stumbling blindly over the inequalities of the ground, until she tripped on a stone. She lay where she had fallen, with her muscles jerking and shuddering, until a man appeared from behind the counter, and dragged her unceremoniously to the women's shelter.

Gordon entered the tent where the service was in progress. A subdued light filtered through the canvas upon a horde that filled every foot of space; they sat pressed together on long, rough boards nailed together in the semblance of benches. On a platform at the farther side a row of men and women sat against the canvas wall; to their left a folding organ had been erected, and was presided over by a man with a blurred, greyish countenance; while, standing at the forefront of the platform, a large, heavy man in a black frock coat was addressing the assemblage. He had a round, pallid, smooth face with long, black hair brushed back upon his coat collar, and great, soft, white hands.

"... it's rising," he proclaimed, in a loud, sing-song voice, "the flood is rising; now it's about your pockets--praise God! now it's above your waists. It's rising! it's rising! Hallelujah! the sea of redemption is rising," his voice rose with the figurative flood. "At last it's about your hearts, your hearts are immersed in the Sacred Tide."

A man beside Gordon groaned and dropped upon his knees. A woman cried, "God! God! God!" A spindling, overgrown boy rose fumbling at his throat. "I can't breathe," he choked, "I can't--" His face grew purplish, congested. The tumult swelled, directed, dominated, by the voice of the revivalist. He dropped upon his knees, and, amid the sobbing silence, pled with an invisible Judge hovering, apparently, over a decision to destroy at one bloody blow the recalcitrant peoples of the earth, the peoples of His making.

"Spare us," he implored; "spare us, the sheep of hell; lead us to Thy shining pasture ... still water; lead us from the great fire of the eternal pit, from the boiling bodies of the unsaved...."

Gordon Makimmon indifferently regarded the clamor. The process of "getting religion" was familiar, commonplace. He saw Tol'able sitting on a back bench; with a mutual gesture the two men rose and left the tent.

"I had to bring m'wife," Tol'able explained; "did you see her sitting on the platform? She's one of the main grievers. I got some good licker in the wagon--better have a comforter."

They walked down to a dusty, two-seated surrey, where, from under a horse blanket, Tol'able produced a small jug. He wiped the mouth on his sleeve and passed it to Gordon; then held the gurgling vessel to his open throat. "There was some hell raised last night," he proceeded; "a man from up back had his head busted with a stone, and a drunken looney shot through the women's tent: an old girl hollered out they had Goddy right in there among 'em."

"They were shooting a while back," Gordon observed indifferently. "Have you seen Buck Simmons here?"

"No, I hain't. He wouldn't be here noways."

Gordon preserved a discreet silence in regard to his source of assurance of Buckley's presence at the camp meeting.

"Have another drink, Gord."

The services were temporarily suspended, and the throng emptied from the tent. A renewed sanity clothed them--girls drew into squares of giggling defense against the verbal sallies of robustly-witted young men. Women collected their offspring, gathering in circles about opened boxes of lunch: a multitude of papers and box lids littered the ground. A hot, steaming odor, analogous to coffee, rose from the crowded counter. A prodigious amount of raw whiskey was consumed among the vehicles by the stream and mud-coated willows.

Gordon slowly made his way through the throng, in search of Meta Beggs; perhaps, after all, she had decided not to come; he might easily miss her in that mob. It was not clear in his mind what he would do if he saw her. She would be with Buckley Simmons, and there was a well recognized course of propriety for such occasions: he would be expected merely to greet in passing a girl accompanying another man. Any other proceeding would be met with instant resentment. And Buckley Simmons, Gordon knew, must still nurse a secret antagonism toward him. However, he had disposed of Buckley in the past ... if necessary he could do so again.

At the entrance to the service tent the organist, his countenance still livid in the sunlight, blew a throaty summons on a cornet, and the crowd slowly trailed back within. In the thinning groups Gordon saw the school-teacher, clad in a bright blue skirt and a hat with a stiff, blue feather. She was at Buckley's side, consuming a slice of cake with delicate, precise motions of her hand, and greeting with patent abstraction his solicitous attentions.

IX

Meta Beggs saw Gordon at the same moment; and, without observation on the part of her escort, beckoned him to her. She said promptly:

"Mr. Makimmon, please take care of me while Buckley goes down by those carriages, where we saw you a little while ago, and gets his share of the refreshment there. I'm certain that dusty road made him as dry as possible."

Buckley grinned; such frank feminine acknowledgment and solicitude for the masculine palate was rare in Greenstream. "Why, no, Miss Beggs," he rejoined; "I'm in good shape for a while yet. I got a flask under the seat of the buggy--"

"I insist on your tending to it at once. I know just how it is with men--they have got to have that little refreshment ... don't you call it 'life preserver'? I'll be right by the counter; if Mr. Makimmon will be so kind--"

"Well," Buckley agreed, "a drink don't go bad any time; the road was kind of dusty. If you insist, Miss Beggs."

"I do! I do!" He turned and left them, striding toward the lower level. Then:

"The fool!" she exclaimed viciously; "my arm is all black and blue where he pinched it. My skin is not like the hides on these mountain girls, it tears and bruises dreadfully easy, it's so fine. Let's go back there," she pointed to where, behind the platform and counter, a path was trampled through brush higher than their heads. Gordon glanced swiftly in the direction in which Buckley Simmons had vanished. "He won't be back," she added contemptuously, "for a half hour. He'll stay down there and drink rotten whiskey and sputter over rotten stories." Without further parley she proceeded in the direction indicated; and, following her, Gordon dismissed Buckley from his thoughts.

Meta Beggs wore a shirtwaist perforated like a sieve; through it he saw flimsy lace, a faded blue ribband, her gleaming shoulders. In an obscure turn of the path she stopped and faced him. "Just look," she proclaimed, unfastening a bone button that held her cuff. She rolled her sleeve back over her arm. High up, near the soft under-turning, were visible the bluish prints of fingers. "You see," she added; "and there are others ... where I can't show you."

"Buck's pretty vigorous with the girls," he admitted; "I once dropped him down a spell for it."

He was fascinated by her naked, shapely arm; it was slender at the wrist, and surprisingly round above, at a soft, brown shadow. He was seized by a desire to touch it, and he held her pointed elbow while he examined the bruises more minutely. "That's bad," he pronounced; "on that pretty skin, too." He was confused by the close proximity of her bare flesh, the pulse in his neck beat visibly.

For a moment she stood motionless; then, with her eyes half closed, sulky, she drew away from him and rearranged her sleeve.

The brush ended on a slope where pine trees had covered the ground with a glossy mat of bronzed needles; and his companion sank to a sitting position with her back against a trunk. They were outside the influence of the camp meeting, beyond its unnatural excitation. The pine trees were black against the brilliant day; they might have been cast in iron, there was no suggestion of growth in the dun covering below; it was as seasonless where they sat as the sea; the air, faintly spiced and still, seemed to have lain unchanged through countless ages.

Meta Beggs sat motionless, with a look of inexpressible boredom on her pale countenance. Her hands, Gordon thought, were like folded buds of the mountain magnolia.

She said, unexpectedly, "You're rich now, aren't you, one of the richest men in the county?"

"Why I--I got some money; that is, my wife has."

She dismissed, with an impatient gesture, the distinction. "Money is life," she continued, with a perceptible, envious longing, "it's freedom, all the things worth having. It makes women--it's their leather boxes full of rings and pins and necklaces, their dresses of all-over lace, their silk and hand scalloped and embroidered underclothes; it's their fascination and chance and power--"

"I would like to see you in some of those lace things," he returned.

"Well, get them for me," she answered hardily.

Utterly unprepared for this direct attack he was thoroughly disconcerted. "Why, certainly!" he replied, laboriously polite, "the next time--I'll do it!--when I'm in Stenton again I'll bring you a pair of silk stockings."

"Black," she said practically, "and size eight and a half. You will like me in black silk stockings," she added enigmatically.

"I'll bet," he replied with enthusiasm. "I won't wait to go, but send for them. You would make the dollars dance. You are different from--" he was going to say Lettice, but, instinctively, he changed it to, "the women around here. You've got an awful lot of ginger to you."

"I know what I want, and I'm not afraid to pay for it. Almost everybody wants the same thing--plenty and pleasure, but they're afraid of the price; they are afraid of it alive and when they will be dead. Women set such a store on what they call their virtue, and men tend so much to the opinion of others, that they don't get anywhere."

"Don't you set anything on your--your virtue?"

"I'd make it serve me; I wouldn't be a silly slave to it all my life. If I can get things with it that's what I'm going to do."

Gordon Makimmon found these potent words from such a pleasing woman as Meta Beggs. Any philosophy underlying them, any ruthless strength, escaped him entirely. They appealed solely to him as "gay," highly suggestive. They stirred his blood into warm, heady tides of feeling. He moved over the smooth covering of pine needles, closer to her. But with an expression of petulance she rose.

"I suppose we must look for Buckley," she observed. Gordon had completely forgotten Buckley Simmons' presence at the camp meeting. The school-teacher, swaying slimly, led the way over the path to the plateau.

They saw Buckley Simmons at once: he was talking in an excited, angry manner to a small group of men. A gesture was made toward Gordon and his companion; Buckley turned, and his face flushed darkly, Gordon, stood still, Meta Beggs fell behind, as the former made his way toward them. Buckley spoke loudly when he was still an appreciable distance away:

"You were mighty considerate about my dusty throat," he began with heavy sarcasm; "I ought to have seen at the time that you had it made up between you. This is the second time that you have broken in on me, Makimmon. I'm not a boy any longer. You can't tread on me. It's going to stop ... now."

"There's nothing for you to get excited about, Buck. Miss Beggs and I took a little stroll while you were away."

"A 'little stroll.'" Buckley produced a heavy gold watch, the highly chased cover of which he snapped back. "Over half an hour," he proclaimed; "you stayed too long this time."

Gordon was aware of a form at his back. He turned, and saw Tol'able.

"What's the trouble, Gord?" the latter asked. Two or three others were compactly grouped behind him.

"Why, Buckley's hot because I walked with Miss Beggs while he took a drink."

The men about Buckley Simmons closed up. "Don't let Gordon crowd you down," they advised their principal; "put it up against him."

"Haven't you got enough at home," Buckley demanded, "without playing around here?"

Anger swiftly rose to Gordon Makimmon's head. His hand fell and remained close by his side. "Keep your tongue off my home," he commanded harshly, "or you will get more than a horsewhipping."

"By God," Buckley articulated. His face changed from dark to pale, his mouth opened, his eyes were staring. He fumbled desperately in his pocket. Gordon's hand closed smoothly, instantly, about the handle of his revolver. But, before he could level it, an arm shot out from behind him, and a stone the size of two fists sped like a bullet, striking Buckley Simmons where his hair and forehead joined. Gordon, in a species of shocked curiosity and surprise, clearly saw the stone hit the other. There was a sound like that made by a heel breaking a scum of ice on a frozen road.

Buckley said, "Ah," half turned, and dropped like a piece of carpet.

The belligerent attitude instantly evaporated from the group behind the stricken man. "Gracious," some one muttered foolishly. They all joined in a stooping circle about the prostrate figure. It was seen immediately that the skull was broken--a white splinter of bone stood up from a matted surface of blood and hair and dirt. Buckley's eyelids winked continuously and with great rapidity.

A mingled concern and deep relief swept through Gordon Makimmon. He knew that, had the stone not been thrown, he would have killed Buckley Simmons. He wondered if Tol'able had done him that act of loyalty. It had, probably, fatally wounded its object. He turned with a swift, silent look of inquiry to Tol'able. The other, unmoved, dexterously shifted a mouthful of tobacco. "Whoever did that," he observed, "could sure throw a rock."

A crowd gathered swiftly, cautious and murmuring. Simmons was lifted on a horse blanket to the flooring by the counter. There was an outcry for a doctor, but none was present, and it was agreed that the wounded man must be hurried into Greenstream. "He won't get there alive," it was freely predicted; "the top of his head is crumbled right off."

X

Gordon found Meta Beggs on the outskirt of the throng; she was pale but otherwise unshaken. "I was sure you were going to shoot Buckley," she told him.

"So was I," he returned grimly.

"Will he die?"

"It looks bad--his head's cracked. You didn't see anybody throw that stone!" His voice had more the accent of a command than an inquiry.

"I really didn't; the men were standing so closely ... nobody saw."

"That's good. You'll drive home with me, for certain."

"I'm glad you didn't kill him," she confided to Gordon in the buggy. She was sitting very close to him. "It would have--upset things."

"I don't believe you were a scrap frightened," he asserted admiringly.

"I wasn't. I thought how foolish you would be to spoil everything for yourself."

"I would have gone into the mountains," he explained; "a hundred men would have kept the law off me. I was a year and a half there, when--when I was younger," he ended lamely.