Part 15

THEODOSIA:

The mountain and the squirrel Had a quarrel; And the former called the latter Little Prig. The former called the latter....

SECOND VOICE: Told her after he’d had her. Sat back afterward, cool, to smoke a little. Said old Daniels gave him to know. Too bad. Not a cent to any niece. All to some hospital. Away off somewhere.

THEODOSIA:

To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it’s no disgrace To occupy my place.

FIRST VOICE: She remembers Ross. A big man, he was. Dug ditches for the town. Whenever there was a heavy load or a big job....

SECOND VOICE: Then she ate a snake.

FIRST VOICE: Where’s Lethe now? In the prison. Among the women. She works all day in a room with iron over the windows. Twenty years. When she comes out she’ll be over fifty.

THEODOSIA: He is a fool that destourbeth the moder to wepen in the death of her child, til she have wept hir fille, as for a certein tyme....

FIRST VOICE: They sew all day, to make clothes for the men prisoners to wear. Over and over, a stitch, the same, over and over, never done.

THEODOSIA: You have to let her weep out her litter of tears. That’s all there is to it.

THIRD VOICE: No more lovers, no more men. She killed her man. Theodosia helping.

FIRST VOICE: Why don’t you tell Frank to bring you down food? F—o—o—d. A beefsteak. Give an order. Speak plain this time. Say, “See here....”

SECOND VOICE, _a retreating laughter_:

That creep or swim or fly or run, After me as you never saw!

THEODOSIA: I’ll tell him nothing.

SECOND VOICE:

By means of secret charms to draw All creatures living beneath the sun.

FIRST VOICE, _arguing_: Tell him how it is here. Say, “As an old friend, Frank, I’ll tell you my situation....”

THEODOSIA: I’ll say nothing. Shut your blabber.

SECOND VOICE: Last night while you were asleep a great black face, a man’s face, mouth open, teeth wide, bloody throat, came swimming, tonight will come swimming close into your eyes, into the very light of your brain. Swims up into your sight.

She turned quickly toward the window to dispel the too-vivid dream and looked at the boughs of the trees as they stood as cold lace against the sky. Across the steep ledge of dull light some crows were moving on stiff wings, the movements of the birds and the birds being two separate things, unrelated. When the birds were gone the movement remained, sobbing against the wall of light.

* * * * *

A morning in January cut across the air in a different way from a morning in some former month, she observed. The sky beyond the matted twigs of the trees crowded outward in unequal grays, but the twigs bore upward their January buds that were swollen in spite of the cold. She began to think of the Promethean substance, fire, diligently admired by man and guarded. First a few bits of thin wood at the end of a match, a faint sulphurous odor, a frail burning daintily coaxed to life and tenderly nursed by the shaded palm of a hand. The smoke would arise heavily, unwarmed as yet, and the blaze would spread and lie cautiously, perilously, buried under the damp smouldering wood. Another splinter and another, and then the blaze grows slowly, spreading laterally, having consumed the first splint and turned it to a bent cinder of red ash. Wood is laid across the steady blaze now and the fire laps lovingly around it. The cold slips back from the hearth and the breast reaches toward the warmth, the hands feel for it, outstretched. One is glad for it, grateful to it. In the northern zones man could not live without it. His life is owed to it. If the Promethean spell is lost man would shrink down toward the tropics, though the men might venture into the cold regions to hunt. Woman and fire are married now forever; she would have to have fire for herself and for the young.

She drew her hands under the coverlet to warm them and looked across at the dead hearth where the last of the wood was burnt. The pile in the wood-lot, saved for the evenings with the fiddle, would last, she thought, for four more burnings, and her picturing mind slipped along the stack as it had stood in autumn in the wood-yard, the knotted edges of the hickory protruding, the lichened beech sticks that were weathered and aerated, phantoms now. A few dry flakes of snow were falling, passing the opened window in a slanted line. Once man had got it he could never live without the Promethean gift, she thought, her gaze not lifted from the passing snow to the dead hearth but seeing both in one widespread plane of vision without focus.

Accustomed-unaccustomed sounds came from somewhere below. The liniment-man was at the door, the aunt crouching under an old cape receiving her purchases from the portico. His voice:

“Sakes-alive! It’s weatheren outside today. A right hard winter it is, I reckon. But it won’t be long now. No teacher yet for the Spring Valley school. Folks over there is right put-to to find a teacher. Miss Hettie up and married in the middle of the term and went off, resigned and went. Old Ronnie Beam’s wife has got a fine new girl up there, ten pounder, they say. I’ll tell you this-here, it’s weather. But it won’t be long now.”

The noises below sank to the usual delicate click and remote thump of silence, the front door having long since been closed and the steps having gone uncertainly back into the hallway.

SECOND VOICE: Old Ronnie Beam. Heaven sake! Father Time has begotten. There’s no end to it. Seventy years old.

FIRST VOICE: Why didn’t she take some clean meal and make a mush over her fire? Eat it hot with salt.

SECOND VOICE: The habit of the locked storeroom.

THIRD VOICE: Thank God she hasn’t got lice. What would she do to get rid of vermin?

THEODOSIA: Coal-oil out of the lamp. Kills, they say.

THIRD VOICE: A ten-pound girl. I tell you that-there, it’s weather.

FIRST VOICE: The dog bread is not bad bread to eat; a little ashy, perhaps. Unsifted meal. Slobbered over by the two bitches, Tilly and Old Mam.

SECOND VOICE, _softly_: She eats the dog bread.

THIRD VOICE: A small musical talent. A limited achievement in music.

THEODOSIA: Small talents should not be allowed. Small talents are treason. They shouldn’t be.

In the night she lay half asleep, running with the dogs as they hunted in the wooded slopes back of the fields. Young Blix, Nomie, Speed, Congo, they were on the trail of a hare, of a fox. She ran with them down the woods and pounded the earth of the plowed field, keen to the scent. She howled with them when the smell of the fox was renewed where the fence crossed the track. Congo turned toward her beyond the water of the creek when they had lashed swiftly over, clattering the rocks and dashing the spray. She ran neck to neck with Congo, seeing into his red mouth, feeling his flying breath, his wide jaw. At the foot of the walnut tree they were on the varmint, all their teeth in his side, in his flank, leaping over him, tearing at his hide, emptying out his entrails, her teeth in his flesh.

* * * * *

One day after the evening meal below-stairs she turned to the hearth and broke a piece of one of the corn-pones that lay there withering under the heat since morning. She carried the bread to her room and ate a part of it as she sat before the cold hearth. The sticks were sacred to the fiddle and she did not burn one that night. Later there was speaking.

FIRST VOICE: This is the whole story of the earth. He made love like a tomcat. Cat guts make fiddle strings. Cat guts hale souls out of men’s bodies.

THIRD VOICE: The daughter of the Don Juan of the Kentucky villages. God knows!

FIRST VOICE: The first to be born as far as is known at present was Lethe. River of forgetfulness. Her name shall be Lethe, saying, I forgot myself. A careless brown wench in a love mood and I forgot myself.

THIRD VOICE: Then Americy. A whole continent to name an incontinent hour.

THEODOSIA: A sad, kind-voiced creature. Given to religious practices.

THIRD VOICE: Then Theodosia, given the surname Bell, the first so honored. Named for Theodosia Singleton, born Bell, sister to the Old War Horse. Godmother sucks all day at the sugar-tit of books, turns back again to the nipple to avoid knowledge.

SECOND VOICE: I drink to the health of the unbegotten!

THIRD VOICE: Then Stiggins. Curious eyes bent down at the corners. Slobbery mouth. A steel-cunning in his hand. Elastic speed, recoil and reach.

FIRST VOICE: Man is a nervous system. I once saw a picture of a man, a real likeness.

SECOND VOICE: I drink to the health of the unbegotten! [_Shouting._] I drink to the health!

FIRST VOICE: He looked like something you might expect to see under a microscope. A ten-thousand-footed octopus, a rigmarole, a many-fanged serpent. A real likeness.

THEODOSIA: Something you might see under a microscope?

SECOND VOICE: A cunning in his hand, sewed up in a dull fist. Speed, recoil, reach. Stands above it a slobbery mouth.

FIRST VOICE: Annie, then. Fifth child. White, delicate. Fair hair, gray eyes, a frail body.

THEODOSIA: An angel among the white angels of the graves. All the sweetness of the earth brought into one frame. A tired little child, used to call to me to wait, gentled by sickness and pain maybe. Her little mouth with the fresh dew of God on it.

FIRST VOICE: She was a nervous system, like all the others.

SECOND VOICE: Something you might expect to see under a microscope.

THIRD VOICE: James Henry Burden, then, sixth child born to Horace and first male heir to the house of Burden. I baptize thee, James Henry Burden, in the name of the.... Second male in the house of Bell, as far as is known. Easy to know. Sweet, blonde languors among the cushions in a portico.

FIRST VOICE: I saw the picture of a man, a real speaking likeness. It was a ten-thousand-footed octopus.

THEODOSIA: What color was it?

FIRST VOICE: White and gray. They called the stuff white matter and gray matter.

THEODOSIA: Excellent names.

FIRST VOICE: A ten-thousand-footed serpent, every foot a feeler out to feel something.

SECOND VOICE: A maw in the middle of it, the chief part, the chief part set in the middle, a hungry enlargement in the alimentary gut.

THIRD VOICE: Another maw in the lower middle, the chiefest chief part, another hungry entrail, if you don’t like the short word.

FIRST VOICE: A little knob, a very little knob on the top. I saw the true likeness. An infinite number of feelers running out all ways, shaped like a serpent, and a very little knob on the top.

THEODOSIA: You couldn’t blaspheme the human mind, you couldn’t ever. To try to lower yourself by your own bootstraps. It wouldn’t operate, that’s all. You might try ever so hard, but you couldn’t do it. Stumble? Fall over your own boots and stumble, yes, but if you did you’d never know it. What you didn’t know couldn’t happen.

SECOND VOICE: Oh talk! Which of the commandments have you not broken? Every last God’s ten of the lot.

FIRST VOICE: There ought to be more than ten, ought to be about ten thousand more commandments. One for every nerve-end.

THIRD VOICE: A man could keep all ten and still be a writhing devil in hell.

SECOND VOICE: The whole thing draws itself inside its own maw, lies down to sleep in its snake’s nest, replete, when it has enough.

FIRST VOICE: Yellow hair, Annie, and gentle ways. Loved everybody. The angel whiteness of the grave on her from the first. “How He took little children as lambs to His fold.” The song.

THIRD VOICE: Your mother was dark, but this child was fair. Your father’s own child. The one most like your father. Your father’s own, then.

THEODOSIA: Oh, God, I believe, and there’s nothing to believe.

She thought again and again of the pond below the hill in the creek bottom. The water would be fresh and sweet after the long winter rains and it would stand high along the banks. In the morning someone would find her body there, water-soaked, lying in the clean mud at the bottom of the water, stones tied to her feet. It would be easy to go out the door some night and never come back. Once she had gone out the door the rest would be inevitable, the door having become the line between to go and not to go. The front door seemed necessary, and she could not think tenderly of the morning, of any morning, of the stones that would be tied to her feet. All circumstances were set toward this departure. The days of the week, distantly comprehended, did not differ, one from another; Tuesday or Monday, Friday, all sank into a flat mass and were approached without emotion. She felt her hand as it was folded into the other hand and knew the feel of the bones and their bent articulations and the texture of skin as felt by itself. Prophecy gathered vaguely about the facts which were already well stated. One fact more remained as the act of departure. She slept lightly, her sleep weighted by the act, burdened by it.

A pleasant sense of Frank gathered in and out of her sleep, Frank representative of something he was not, blended with the positive he signified and become one with it. A warmth as of life crept over her, memories that were symbols and dim anticipations. Half dreaming, her body knew that it would be renewed by his presence, that her beauty would be restored by his praise, that he would drape her scarf about her shoulders and set her hair to the way he liked. “It’s pretty this way, soft ripples in it,” a kind voice said, more kind than the voices of the dialogues. Kind voices were speaking now, voices of praise, giving warm life and the warm flow of blood through her members. The passage through the door receded and flattened to a mere saying, a doctrine. The kindness of Frank suffused her and the need of him ran over her. She knew clearly then the strength of his body as it was warm with life, his hands full of life-blood, his limbs rich with the throb of their joy. The odor of life was about him, the strength of people, of places, of people talking together.

* * * * *

A gentle rain had begun to fall and the snow of the day before would melt. She had waded to the wood-lot through the running snow and had brought in the last of the wood, six or eight pieces, piled now at the side of her hearth. A winter light lay on the running leaves of gray and silver and a winter apathy was settled deeply into the stilled vignettes at the border, the woodpeckers knocking at the recurring tendrils that spread about the faded roses. The day, Wednesday, seemed on tiptoe, aware of itself. She could scarcely remember whether she had been down to her aunt’s room for the noon meal or not. The light lying along the ceiling seemed to be an afternoon light, but the drifting of the rain across the air suggested morning. She tried to recall some detail of the descent for the food which would make the memory of it differ from every other descent. A picture of the old dog, Tilly, moving across the hearth near the baking pones of bread and lying down heavily on the stones beyond the hearth-rug came again and again. The dog had opened her mouth near the hot pone but she had drawn away, closing her mouth slowly with a yawn-spasm jerking her lower jaw, and just at that instant the clock on the mantel had begun to strike some hour.

THIRD VOICE: She’s already dead, already dead. She died one night. Anyhow they found her on the old rags down before the fire, dead, in the room with five old crazy hounds. Found her on the floor rolled up in a knot, dead where she’d been asleep. Five insane old dogs, half-starved, in the room all night. She died on the floor with the dogs.

SECOND VOICE: This house, it’s full of devils, full of demons, full of devils.

THIRD VOICE: Her bed had not been slept in for months on end. Dust on the pillows. Dead, she is, already.

THEODOSIA: She didn’t have to continue in life if she didn’t want to. She didn’t have to sleep in the bed either. She could sleep any way she wanted to. She didn’t have to sleep in some regular way to prove she was alive.

SECOND VOICE: This house, it’s full of devils. [_Screaming._] Full of demons.

THIRD VOICE: “See,” they said. “Look, look, she ate the dog bread.” What else is there around? Between her teeth a crust of the dog bread.

THEODOSIA: And very good bread it is. Don’t be too light with the dog bread.

FIRST VOICE: The foul breath of an old fox-killing bitch on a hot pone and a clock strikes. That’s what time is. There is nothing comparable to it on any other planet. Nothing like it.

THIRD VOICE: You are a murderer yourself. You, Theodosia. And an adulteress. Which of the commandments have you not broken?

THEODOSIA: I thought that was finished, settled. I thought I’d put that by.

THIRD VOICE: What honor did you show your father? Why didn’t you honor him as he wanted to be honored? Easy to know and lived in the same house.

Time was measured then by the walking of a dog over a hearth, but the day, Wednesday, stood apart from time as having some entity of its own, some extra faculty. She saw innumerable dogs walking in procession across a hearth, ticking time, yesterday and tomorrow, forever, as far back as memory could reach. A warmth then began to drown her memory of Tilly and she knew in some inner way that it was afternoon and that Frank would come. A pleasant sense of Frank stole over her. He would talk a little of his success in the courts and gossip of law secrets, wills, marriage settlements, threatened procedures, giving comradeship. Perhaps he would grow amorous, offering compliments. Through him she would touch the world again. The vignettes on the border were fading with the waning day, the birds being still, the sun set. She sat up in the bed suddenly, the act a sudden cry to the departing light. Except for a few patches of lit upland, the landscape was dark now, settling into the shadows where the hills arose, biting at the sky with sullen lines along the west hill rim. Weak from the strain of sitting up suddenly she sank into a momentary apathy, but her breathing was one continuous burden borne by the prophecy which was already clearly stated as fact. She arose from the bed as if some determination had come to her. She felt herself moving slowly, but with little forward rushes of settled opinion, going straight without dalliance. She mended the fire without stint of the wood and dressed herself in the first gown that came to her hand, the gray wool gown, and took the scarf to her shoulders. Her hands trembled with exhaustion, but she lit the lamp and carried it to the lower hall and set it on the table there.

She went to her aunt’s room and lingered a little by the fire, taking a farewell of her by a quiet lingering, a few commonplace speeches passing between them, the old sayings of the months that were past. Of the two ordeals that lay before her she regarded Frank as the more difficult, for he and his disposal had not been predicted by prophecy or settled to an act, he being rather a menace within her own body where it reached toward life. The aunt settled to her book again, and Theodosia stood by the door of the room, waiting and listening, and presently there was a noise at the front door of the house. She went into the hall then, and, Old Mam and Tilly following after her, she let them come or she laid her hand on Old Mam’s neck to keep her at hand. Frank was coming into the hall, was standing at the door looking cautiously back into the gloom of the half-lit spaces beyond the stairs.

She held Old Mam by the collar and called to Tilly, keeping them near. At the foot of the stairs she spoke to Frank across the ten feet that lay between them and she moved backward toward the steps, mounting the first, taking the dogs with her, holding them fast. He was arguing, outraged and unbelieving, growing angry. “I hold no grudge against you,” she said. She kept the dogs close to her, holding their collars. “I will never see you again,” she said. “But I hold no grudge.” She had gone half-way up the steps now, but the ascent was difficult, the dogs unwilling to come. The dogs dragged her back; “They make it too hard,” she thought, half yielding to their strength at the point where her own strength failed. Frank was commanding, accusing, saying she had not been fair.

“Drive those devils away,” he shouted after her. “You drive those dogs off. I’m here now. I’ve come.”

She was pushed by the great bodies of the dogs until she glided along the wall, but she moved upward, and the dogs came with her, a part of her ascending motion now. She took the dogs to her room and closed the door. The tumult in her mind had increased, for Frank had brought a newer quality of argument, of rational approach to himself. Pity for Frank worked in her now. He had called after her, “I want to marry you, Theodosia. That’s what I want now in life.” Frank was still below; the front door was yet open; she knew this by the draught under her door that sang a loud thin cry as the air rushed through the wide crevice and made for the loosely fitted window. Trembling, knowing that Frank was below, she began to hiss at Tilly, the more evil-tempered of the brutes, until the dog growled and barked in great anger, until she ran to the window and leaped again and again at the door. There was nothing left now but to walk out at the door when the menace of Frank should depart. She hissed up Tilly’s anger whenever it abated. She sat relaxed in her chair, her muscles indifferent to their functions. Below-stairs other dogs were in an uproar now, the whole house of dogs in a mad stir. She passed into the remote barkings of the dogs, already as dead, indifferent to the air she continued to suck in and out with her habitual breathing, indifferent to the icy water of the pond where it would lay pain about her. Her hissing was continuous with the anger of the dogs.

The crying of the draught under the door had ceased now, and the cold had ceased to rush along the floor. Then it seemed that a long while since she had heard the door below when it slammed and she heard the motor start. She continued to hiss Tilly’s anger. Sitting indifferently in her chair, relaxed in every fiber, she lived only where the hissing breath came from her lips to stir the dogs. She had no relation to the bed in which she had lain formerly and no need or thought or memory of it, no possessive sense of it. The world became more and more dim as the fire sank lower, the air colored with a pink afterglow, and the dark crept nearer, a fact which she held somehow but to which she was indifferent. Old Tilly barked fitfully now, or lay exhausted in a corner of the room. She kept no relation to the fiddle as it lay on the table beyond the hearth, beyond the reach of the firelight; it was a darkened mass among the shadows of the table, holding a remote kindness for some being far apart from herself, identical with some abstract goodness that would never be stated. It gathered to a dim shadow that concentrated to a dull point and receded through elastic space to infinite depths of remoteness. She stared at the wall to the left of the fireplace, her vision having no function. Only one fact held truth in the singleness of prophecy. She saw herself leap from the chair suddenly and rush out at the door; a sudden start and she would be gone. She stared at the wall; the picture of her going, a felt picture, spread downward through her limbs that lay relaxed now, ready for the sudden spasm of movement.

* * * * *