Part 4
They seemed sweetly childish in their pleasure in the vine and Theodosia looked at them with wonder and detachment. The best thing in the world teased her for a reply. She saw that her aunt had cared for the vine and had become actual and present in her pride of it. She had brought it from a long distance and had cared for it along the way in the train, giving it water. It had come from the wall of some relative in Virginia. She turned to Mnemosyne, for the beautiful word came again and again to her ear once her grandfather had named it. He had told her of it before, Memory, the mother of all, the seed of the mind. It was a curious question, the query her uncle had made, as simple as breath; she thought that all the people in the world must know the answer or must be in pursuit of the answer to a question of such importance—the best thing in the world. She wondered if Mnemosyne might not be the answer, the best, and her mind swam dizzily in a sense of vaguely remembered beautiful words, their ideas ill-shaped, words remembered more for their beauty of tone than for their thought—asphodel, Mytilene. But there were other beautiful things, other best things. They eluded her, unnamed, receding down a long vista into her inner sight. She recalled particular occasions when the surrounding world had seemed good, a good place in which to be. Admiring words from others, caresses, gifts, all the people singing in the church—in the seed of each happening an insufficiency. There was never enough.
They were on the portico again, the mottled shadows of the boughs falling on their faces. The voices became sharp and firm, pleasantly outlined, immense, governed by some relation to the vine on the wall and its great reach from the soil of the ground. In the moment all the people present became actors in a pageant and all the words they said seemed deeply significant as if they were proclaiming themselves now in their real and permanent, unillusory aspect, in their true cause and relation. Annie lay in the doorway with a picture book. Anthony Bell was talking, his hand upraised. Lucas came from the kitchen garden with a respectful message, affected embarrassment, his head bowed, the proper approach. Their voices stood with length and breadth, sharply edged.
* * * * *
Every day or two Theodosia would ask her aunt if she and Annie might go to see Aunt Deesie. The walk across the pasture and the cornfield was long, but the pleasure of Aunt Deesie’s yard was sweet. Aunt Deesie ironed the clothes, heating the irons on the open embers of the fire that burned in the yard. The baby always lay on the quilt and the small girls stood bashfully about. One day Theodosia took them some of the candy Tom Singleton had brought from the store. She could scarcely endure the joy of her loathing as she touched their fingers in giving them the sweets.
Near the end of the week Miss Doe went away in the buggy early in the afternoon and Tom and Anthony played checkers under the pine tree. The dogs walked about sleepily in the bright air, which was of the radiance of early autumn, or they slept in the shaded doorway of the barn. The day moved slowly and her stay at the farm seemed to Theodosia to be bent or deflected from its purposes. Little Annie wanted to play with the dolls, but Theodosia grew weary of them. The kitchen was closed; there was no drama being done there; no one was feeding the stock at the barns or fastening the dogs into the apple house. She wandered back to the pine tree where the game of checkers went happily along, but it could not entertain her. She whispered to Annie as they went behind the house in their search for something to do.
“We’ll go to see Aunt Deesie.”
They took the cotton umbrella from the back porch although there were no clouds. The memory of the first visit should tinge this adventure. They crossed the pasture in the brilliant sun and entered the cornfield, but when they were scarcely started along the path by the corn Annie said that she was thirsty and that she must have a drink, and she cried. She could not go farther without a drink, she said. Theodosia urged her on and promised a drink at Aunt Deesie’s cabin. When they left the cornfield and came near the cove a strange aspect of the place accosted them, for it was closed and still. All the tubs were neatly piled beside the door, their bottoms turned up, and the clotheslines were gone. They shouted from the small gate but the house was empty. Aunt Deesie and the children were gone. The place was frightful crouched under its loneliness.
Annie cried again and said that she was thirsty and Theodosia went into the wooded hill behind the cabin to try to find the spring, but she did not look for a path and her search led them far up the hillside but gave them nothing. It was cool under the trees and Annie forgot her need for the water. Presently they saw two small animals, and Annie ran after them, calling them her little cats. The small beasts ran close to the ground and kept together. They were strange creatures and they made the wooded hill seem strange to Theodosia, as if she had never seen it before. Annie herself seemed strange, having forgotten her thirst now in an ecstasy of pleasure over the little animals, which she tried to catch with her hands.
“They’re little doggies,” she said. “They’re my little cats.”
Theodosia tried to catch them too, and she closed her hands upon them once, but they were elusive and quick although they seemed unable to run very fast. They ran along, tumbling at each other, keeping together. Theodosia knelt quickly and spread her skirt before them, but they turned aside and ran away. Then suddenly they went into a hollow stump through a little hole at the side, and Theodosia poked the umbrella into the hole and Annie called, “Come out, little doggies,” but a cat-like hiss came from the stump and when Theodosia jerked the umbrella away a quick paw shot out and a snarl followed. The girls ran away from the stump, afraid of it, and presently they went back toward the cornfield. The sun was low now and they hurried across the pasture. They had not asked leave to go.
At the end of the pasture where the fodder stalks were scattered near the feeding ricks two of the dogs came toward them, Blix and Lady, and in an instant Theodosia knew that they were not coming for play. Blix and Lady and Roscoe were coming fast upon them, full speed now, rushing down the littered pasture, their eyes set and their jaws opened, their backs a straight line. Theodosia screamed and caught Annie’s hand as she ran, and the dogs were upon them, five beasts now. She dropped the umbrella and turned screaming toward the barn, dragging Annie, and Uncle Red came from the cattle shed and shouted something. The dogs stopped at the umbrella and set upon it with their teeth and tore it to pieces at once, but the delay gave Theodosia time to come near the barn before they set upon her again. All the dogs were out now, a dozen or more, some of them worrying the torn pieces of the umbrella and some in a pack around the girls. Uncle Red beat them away with a rail and carried Annie to the house, for she was weak with terror.
“Um—m! Skunk!” he said. “That-there skunk. Has you-all youngones been handlen a skunk or a polecat maybe?”
Theodosia remembered the terror and fury in the eyes of the dogs and all through the evening she sat quietly with a book she tried to read. Annie cried out in her sleep many times during the night. The next day the dogs were locked in the apple house, but Annie would not go beyond the doorway unless she held her grandfather’s hand. Soon afterward the week came to an end and the visit was over.
* * * * *
The ladies of the town played a game with cards, a simple game that did not prevent conversation. On the day of the card party there was a faint flutter in the town, the ladies riding by in phaëtons and traps, wearing their best. If Charlotte Bell entertained the group she would, at some time during the party, sit at the piano with Theodosia standing near, and they would play some simple part of an overture or a popular air. The Bell house was a white frame structure to which several additions had been built, a long portico or gallery running almost the entire length of the front giving a pleasant open space above stairs as well as below where one might take the air. On summer evenings Charlotte would sit for a while on the upper gallery with the two girls and sing, sitting apart from the house where Horace Bell came and went lightly, never troubling to hide his destination whether it was a gambling party with men or an evening with some woman. Seen once at dusk as she sat on the upper gallery, her head against the bank of vines, her two little girls grouped close about her to sing, she had looked like the pitying madonna diverted by hate. She had wanted a rightly-placed hearth. Now she played much with Theodosia, their simple airs arising above the quiet of the street. Horace, departing, would wave them a gay farewell, a greeting that was all of himself, lightly given, or once in a while he would stop briefly beside the piano and join his great voice to the song, booming the words across the fiddle notes, taking a pride and a delight in his great running voice that emasculated the piano. When he had made his point he would leave in a thunder of laughter, waving a hasty good-bye.
When Annie was seven years old she sickened of a fatal child malady and died. The funeral was held in the church, and Luce wept when she saw the Bells weeping as they sat near together at the front of the church in the space respectfully left for the mourners, seeing them huddled together and set apart by death. The minister preached of the kingdom of heaven, the world to come, and of becoming as a little child. A lady, Mrs. Bent, sang a song while the organ hummed softly. She was full-breasted and maternal, and as she sang she looked as if she only a moment before had held a child in her arms, and the words of the song seemed truer as she sang them, truer than the sayings of the minister to which they lent truth. Her own children sat with their father in a pew at the side, and the words of the song came very gently across the church as she looked as if some child might easily creep into her arms.
I think when I read that sweet story of old, Of Jesus while here among men, How He took little children as lambs to His fold....
The words were of her own, coming from her soft bosom and her strong round arms. The Bells, Anthony, Charlotte, Horace, and Theodosia, sat huddled together to weep, remote from the others of the church, sitting forward. They could not hear the words of the song as Miss May Bent sang it, as she sent it from her warm, kind body, they being too near to the whole of the event. In Charlotte Bell was the song itself, waiting. She could not hear the singing. Theodosia heard it as a bright myth having some celestial, candle-lit meaning she could not understand.
* * * * *
Theodosia was delicately modeled with strong slender limbs, swift in a game, quick-witted at play. Her red-brown hair hung in a long braid or was twined braided about her head. Her fingers were small and thin, bent strangely about a fiddle, were quick among the fiddle strings, weighted with music. Little Annie’s grave was marked now by a small white stone in the graveyard, a stone which read only the name, ANNIE, in hard letters set deeply into the marble. To see Theodosia was to think of the child and to wonder if she had forgotten. As she ran down the ball field where the boys and girls played together, as swift as the best of the girls, the act would question if she had forgotten. As she bent her fingers over the fiddle strings and pressed them down in cunning ways, her knowing fingers keen with music, the act again would test her memory of the small girl.
The people of the town were assembled at the chapel hall of the Seminary to hear the school choruses and solo pieces, the last day of the term. The piano had been tuned and its dark squat legs had been polished, an effort made to remove all blemishes and all dust. There were pieces recited and some bits of dialogue given. When Theodosia had finished playing, Anthony Bell went forward and lifted her down from the platform and kissed her, proud of her applause. “Her playen, it’s not so much,” voices in the throng said. “I’ve heard better fiddle-playen.” Hostile voices, and then another, “But fine for a child only fourteen, right good for a child now.” “Right good for anybody, I’d say. I only wish I could do half as well.” “But it sounds like exercises.” “It’s classical music. It all sounds like that, classical music does.” “Classical music all sounds alike.” “Give her another encore. It pleases old Mr. Bell.” “It pleases him too much. He’s a vain old man.” “But do it no matter. It’s right sweet the way he takes on over Dosia’s playen. He’s given her his fiddle and they say it’s one of the finest in the whole state. It’s a famous fiddle, they say. Give another encore.” “He says he aims to send her off to learn from a high teacher, away off somewheres, and he may do it.” “It would take a sight of money to do that.” “They may manage it somehow. Give another encore.” “She’s a-goen to play again. He may manage it.” “I for one hope so.” “She’s right sweet with her fiddle up to her chin like that.” “She’s as sweet as a picture. I just love to sit here and watch her.”
* * * * *
Charlotte Bell died one cold season when the town was numb and bewildered with the unaccustomed freezing. Few could realize her loss. When the mild days reappeared she was somehow gone from the gallery.
Old Anthony Bell walked the garden path in the early morning in a soiled smoking-jacket, stiff-legged, his eyes dim. Theodosia went to school at the Seminary, or she practised at the fiddle half the day, exploring music without guidance. She studied harmony at the school and assembled a small group there to play quartets, her quick skill dominating. She grew tall in a year. Her rounded breasts were up-tilted—two small graceful cups—as if they would offer drink to some spirit of the air. She ran swiftly from one thing to the next, the books in her grandfather’s cases, the fiddle, the games with the other girls. “This,” her grandfather said to her, “is the family tree of the Montfords and the Trotters. There’s a collection of family traditions written into the blank book on the second shelf. My mother was a Montford, and don’t you forget that, Miss.”
She read the notes in the book of records swiftly one hour while she waited for a dance at the tobacco warehouse. She had learned to kiss with her first lover, but she had learned to kiss more deeply with her second, one of the boys at the Seminary, Charles Montgomery. In the kitchen at the back of the house she would bake a cake or make a pudding to augment Aunt Bet’s plain dinner, the cook book propped up on the music rack she had set in the middle of the floor. Her slender legs leaped quickly from the pantry to the table, and she made emphases unconsciously with fiddle gestures, a long wooden spoon in her right hand. “The whites of five eggs, it says. Have we got five, Aunt Bet? Here’s one says four whole eggs. All right, Aunt Bet. You fire up. Gentle at first, then big later on. Here we go.”
The movements in the streets and along the roads were becoming more swift, and there were fewer horses in the pastures. “The horse business, it’s ruined, plumb ruined, or soon will be,” Anthony Bell said. Theodosia quarreled with Charles after slapping his face one night in early spring.
“You don’t know what you want,” he said.
“Maybe so,” she said. She could feel her anger rising and spreading within, a subtle fuel in her body mounting to a swift burning in her face. “Maybe so, but I know what I don’t want.”
Charles went away from the town at some time after that and did not return. Anthony was palsied in his hands, but he would stop in his stroll along the path and beat the ground sharply with his cane, tapping on the bricks or on the boards under his feet. “Oh, tut!” he would say. Sometimes Theodosia would see him in his mantle of old age as he stepped uncertainly along, and a pang of pity, self-pity, fear, and apprehension would assail her. Or, seeing his shrunken form, his feet questioning the path for a place, she herself would walk there and she would see through her present self as through a swift glass, quickly adjusted for vision, as would say, “See, bent spine, eyes fixed, gestures squared at their turnings, the up-and-down jog of age.” But her life ran upon itself eagerly and there were other things to see.
He would begin to sing as formerly, letting his voice fall away to a whisper when it failed in its tone. “Oh, tut!” he would say, returning to mumble his old knowledge, reiterating himself endlessly. “Yet hath the shepherd boy at some times raised his rustic reed to rhymes more rumbling than rural, more rumbling than rural.” Theodosia had won a diploma at the Seminary. She was a tall girl now, fragile but quick, swift at the girls’ sports. “She must study to play the fiddle. She’s a master fiddler,” the old man said, stepping more briskly over the boards. “With rhymes more rumbling than rural.... She must. She gets her music two ways, Charlotte and the Trotters. Old Matthew Trotter was a master musicianer in his day, and had red hair.... Yet hath the shepherd boy.... I’ll see to the matter myself.... A small matter, a few paltry dollars to buy instruction for a girl of talent.... Oh, tut! What became of the farmland, sixteen hundred broad acres, I had? Well, I’ll say, ask her aunt Doe for the small sum. A rich farm, she’s got, and not a chick or a child to spend on. ‘Madam, your one namesake, your only godchild, has a rare musical gift. Madam, are you aware that your namesake has a bit of a musical talent? Has it ever occurred to you to give the child a gift, a year in the metropolis maybe? Madam! Your humble servant. Yours very truly, Anthony Bell. Give the child a big red apple. A peach plucked from the peach orchard. Send the child the first peach of the season. Namesake! For God’s sake! Has it ever occurred to you, Madam, to do something you might call substantial for the baby, your namesake? If your husband, Tom Singleton, had lived it would occur to him. To reward his wife’s namesake. God knows it would!’ ... Oh tut!... What became of the farmland, my patrimony? ‘Young Man, your only daughter.’ ... God’s sake!... As well talk to a jacksnipe. ‘Horace, your daughter approaches her maturity lacken a few miserable pennies to buy her a bit of a finish in music.’ I’ll see to the matter myself.”
TWO
A young woman named Jane Moore played accompaniments for Theodosia. They played in the parlor of the Bell house, the piano standing against the east wall and running back into the bay of the windows. Jane Moore laughed a great deal as she played, and she played many notes wrong, but she offered Theodosia a steady tinkle-tinkle of piano rhythms against which to set her fiddle. Over the chimney hung a steel engraving of Henry Clay in some congressional pose, and the insignia of the Trotters and the Montfords, done in color by some artist and neatly framed, hung near together on the north wall. Through the freshly curtained windows the scent of locust blossoms would come, and outside, from garden to garden, up the street, the locust trees had their flower.
Sometimes the piano outdid itself, as when Jane Moore was caught on some rapture which swept her beyond her nervous inattention. Then she would go steadily on, without a giggle or a blunder, one with Theodosia, the piano married to the fiddle, rhythm after rhythm, measure after measure, and Theodosia’s fervid “Repeat!” as she struck the music with her bow and marched the melodies forward and marshalled them forth, would hold the good spell to the end of the piece.
“Oh, Jane Moore, Jane Moore!” Theodosia would say. “Why in the name of the Lord, why can’t you play like that every day?”
They would laugh until their eyes ran tears, laughter induced by Jane Moore’s concentrated interval. She had soft white skin and a round soft body, an inattentive mind. It was, as the flowering locust trees attested, the spring of the year.
There were garden parties in the evenings, all the boys and all the girls gathering to laugh and joke and play with light caresses among the shrubs that were lit with paper lanterns. The girls would come walking with the young men, and their little shining shoes would tap on the village pavements. Catherine Lovell had curling yellow hair that stood in a soft roll on the top of her head, and in her bright organdie dress she was fair in the way of a pink in a garden. She was lovely to know, always coming to Theodosia with her smiles and her pretty little jokes, always wanting Theodosia to play her fiddle again. She would come running to Theodosia’s room on a morning after a party to talk over all the happenings of the occasion, and she would sit on the foot of the bed while Theodosia had her breakfast from the tray Aunt Bet had brought upstairs. Then they would tell over the names of all who had been present and repeat the bright sayings of the young men, Conway and Albert, whose names they called often, and they would praise the girls for their loveliness in the fullness of their own self-admiration and self-love.
“Wasn’t May Wilmore a dear in her flowered sash?”
“Like a sweet pea,” Theodosia would say.
“Like a whole bouquet of little flowers.”
“And Ruth was sweet in her green dress, dark bands across her hair.”
Or Ruth Robinson would run in during the morning to ask Theodosia to go for a drive far into the country. Once they went to gather dogwood blossoms from a tree she knew of, far down the Quincy pike. They set out early in the afternoon and let the old horse take his own way of keeping clear of the few passing cars. In the end they went as far as the farm where Theodosia’s aunt lived. They talked with the old aunt in the musty parlor, sitting stiffly on the curve-backed chairs, and were scratched under the knees by the broken horse-hair cloth. Miss Doe brought a plate of stale little cakes for a treat. Somewhere back among the barns the useless old jack stallion would bray, and the great hounds, fat and indolent, would loll in the front doorway or wander through the rooms, sniffing at Theodosia’s dress again and again, or at Ruth’s slipper, dull-minded and slow, stretching stiffly by the parlor wall and returning to lie by the door and sleep. Tom Singleton was buried on the hilltop now. Miss Doe had had some need of him and when he was dead she mourned her loss with a perpetual attention to his memory. She kept all the hounds he had used for his hunting although they grew old and some of them became half insane. She let them multiply without discrimination and gave them access to the rooms of the house where, Theodosia suspected, they chose their own kennels and made free of the house from the garret to the pantries.
Now Miss Doe was grateful to the girls for their call, for the long drive they had taken, and she passed the cakes about with a thin gayety. She asked after the health of Horace and of Anthony, but she would not ask the girls to stay for the night. She withheld any gossip of the farm, of new calves or colts or chickens, feigning that these matters were too common for the interest of the parlor, reticent to answer questions. “She doesn’t want to share even the news of a new-dropped colt with me,” Theodosia would think, biting the little cake.