Part 5
“I think I’d like to look around the place a little, Aunt Doe,” she said, when the call was near an end. “Could I look about a little? Could I show Ruth around, show her the vine? And the hilltop, maybe?”
“There’s little to entertain town girls with on the place. You can go and see, though, whatever you think there is to see.” She would laugh in a thin way, remaining indoors, peeping from behind the window curtains while they walked back into the farm.
The place was out of repair, and the dogs trampled it under. They were omnipresent, untrained, ill-mannered brutes. They lay sprawling in the doorway or they cluttered the path to the barns. They came up from the cellar sniffing with hostile interest, unused to visitors. The vine had died from the west wall and hung there withered and untended. Tom Singleton was greatly missed from the place.
“I hope you found everything to suit you,” Miss Doe said when they came back to the house door to say good-bye. “I hope you liked.”
“She hates us because Grandfather sold his farm, or lost it somehow,” Theodosia said as they drove down the avenue toward the road. “She hates us because she’ll have to will us her land. We’re the only natural heirs she’s got. She hates to have to will us her property.”
Returning along the road the girls filled the buggy with dogwood boughs, and they sang to remove the memory of the dismal hour of the farm, alto and soprano, running from one ditty to another, while the horse jogged up the pike toward the town. The rolling hills were fresh with spring, were sweetly curved with the tender new growth, and sweet again with the scent of herbs and dew. At the creek crossing the horse craved a drink, and Theodosia loosened the check-rein and let the beast step aside into the pool, gay over the act and eager to dispel the malice of the old hour. The weathered limestone of the creek bottom lay crumpled and fluted, a mass of tightly welded shells from some old ocean bed. The stream had cut a wide valley for its use, had set the hills far back as it had chosen other beds in which to wander in other ages. The horse supped his drink from off the fluted rocks, and when he had got his fill, alto and soprano flowing anew around some sentimental air, they would jog higher up the broad valley and thus come home again to the town.
* * * * *
The young men, Conway Brooke and Albert Stiles, would come to Theodosia’s house singly or together. Coming together, they would beg her to play for them or they would bring sweets to eat. Conway calling alone would talk of himself, sitting happily in the dim light of the parlor and enjoying his heightened self, his ease, his good looks, Theodosia’s beauty, all the delights of remembered being. Albert coming alone would grow heavily reminiscent, self-appraising, romantic, planning his future, laying his plans before her, eager for acquiescence. He was broad and strong, filling his chair with his man’s frame. Another, Frank Railey, would stop casually on his way up or down the street, or he would take her to row on the pool beyond the town. He would bring his books to read portions aloud, bits of essay he admired, or verse from his favorite poets. He had studied law and was establishing himself in practice in the courts of equity. Persevering and conscientious, seeking to enrich his experience, he would seek talk with Anthony Bell, bringing up old matters and trying to pry open the shut past, but this past was strange to him in its coloring, its iridescences which had long since been lost from recorded history, and these discussions would fall apart and leave old Anthony wrathful, gesticulating, straining to regain his composure. Theodosia often forgot engagements with Frank and was then put to elaborate pains to escape rudeness. When he faded down the vista of the street, going toward the town, he evaporated entirely, and she had no picture of where he went or of what he might do there. His face was slightly out of proportion, slightly unsymmetrical, and this characteristic gave it a look of rugged beauty and strength. He would come back out of the nowhere into which he had gone, smiling at Theodosia’s door, his smile placed slightly to one side of his face, and she would cry out, “For heaven’s sake, it’s Frank!”
Conway was lovely in his approach and in his greetings, always offering a charming promise of some approximation. His soft accents were a blend of Virginia English and negro tones. He was slender and tall, slightly vague as to what he wanted of life and the world, happy in himself, a lover of himself and of life. He liked to sit beside Theodosia and talk of his day, uncommitted to it now it was over. He worked somewhere in the town, but his work stood beside him as a commonplace and was never an object to be attained with sweat and thought. He loved himself anew in the warmth of her presence, that she knew. He would sit idly in his chair, faintly smiling, happy over anything she remembered to tell of her day, and happy over his own memories and vague comments. He made light matters of all the heavy affairs of business, of family, of care of any sort. He wore the cleanliness and freshness of his linens as if he imparted these qualities to them, as if he yielded these qualities with his easy, careless gestures and uncommitted mood. Gone from her, he kept always in Theodosia’s mind as that which lent grace to any morning into which it might come, into any evening, any memory, so that she smiled faintly if she thought of him. She knew his delicacy in some harsh way, in some hard framework of knowing that lay over her momentary joys in his radiance, in his beauty. Once, into the midst of the intoxicating vapor which surrounded her sense of him, her own voice spoke aloud, surprising her with its casual finality:
“He’d follow after the last lovely face offered”—and added: “The trick around the eyes and he’d go.”
If he were coming she would wear the pale yellow dress he admired and arrange her hair in the way he most praised, a low knot drawn above her neck and pushed securely into the curves at the back of her skull. Knowing that he would come she would linger over the hair, a thought of him and of his gracious, easily given admiration in every lift of the comb as she gently tooled the mass into shape and smiled now and again at her long face with its firm thin red lips. She had read from her grandfather’s books and Frank had brought her books containing the new learning. Conway’s knowledge was more powerful with her, she knew, and she smiled at her curving smile until her own lips told her their subtle learning, over and over, retelling. Conway would seat her in the chair of the blue brocade and he would adjust the light to fall in a cascade on the yellow gown, or he would arrange the bowl of roses with some reference to herself and himself and then sit negligently in his chair, himself a part of some whole which he at the same instant encompassed, having no notion of why he did these things. Or did he have no notion? she argued. His knowledge would spread through the room, through the house, gathered to the brilliant constellations that swam in a sun-shaft of light before a window, the motes of the beam, and gathered again to the scent of the honeysuckle outside on the chimney.
* * * * *
Albert would come heavily into the parlor although his feet were agile and his large frame was light to his motions. He filled the parlor with his seriousness and with his ponderous future which circled about his agricultural studies. He would lay his pretexts out, this way and that, making his decisions in her presence, but if Conway were at hand he was more light and less committed, as if only Theodosia had his confidences, as if his approach to Conway were still by the way of the college they had attended, of the streets they now walked together, of the ball they sometimes tossed back and forth, the dogs they owned in common. His strong body, rich with blood and bulk, seemed about to burst from its clothing as he sat opposite the light, moving from time to time in his seat in an excess of vitality. If he bent over a printed page, his earnest eyes lowered to their drooping, his mouth caught in its relaxed, searching pose, his studious moment would give him back to his boyhood, even to childhood, and Theodosia would smile faintly beside her eyes, deeply under the flesh, in a moment of tenderness. Sometimes she would play for him the light music he desired, bent rhythms that paused over brinks and leaped with spasmodic passion to its fulfilment in another twisted measure, any sort so that it moved swiftly to its consummation and readily fulfilled its promises. She was contemptuous of his taste in melodies even when she wanted most to please him. He was a part of the rich insufficiency that surrounded her. “He looks just like Tramp,” she said one day as she mounted the stairway, and Tramp was a great mongrel, part Dane, part collie, that lived somewhere on the street.
“He looks exactly like Tramp,” she said. She was dressing for his coming, working her hair into the shapes Conway liked, her lips withdrawing from the tunes Albert wanted played. “Oh, Lord! his _Leave Home Rags_ and his _My Mandy Lanes_” she said. Later she would play them for him, plucking the strings quaintly and withdrawing them from their meanings.
When he had first come back from his agricultural college he had talked of a girl named Judith. He still wrote to her, but seldom spoke of her now. He would settle into his chair with a great sigh of content, turning the letter addressed to Judith over and over in his hands, a letter he had forgotten to mail. When he talked of himself he came immediately to the subject that most concerned the farmers, the success of the tobacco pool. Sometimes he seemed cautious as he handled some letter from Judith, turning it about, as if he clung to it. He would beg Theodosia to play the new song he had brought, for he had come then to have her play a song.
“Gosh, you’re the only girl in town can play,” he said. “Fiddle or piano, it’s all one to her. And works either single or double.”
“Lady broke. Bridle wise. A right good five-gaited saddle mare,” she said. She would withdraw behind the neglected thumping of the piano or the plucked strings, indifferent to the tune but willing enough to accommodate a caller. When she had embarrassed him she would laugh a low laughter and let her eyes close over the music as she trailed it off into some theme she liked.
“Lady broke.... I didn’t call you that,” he said heavily. “I didn’t say it.”
* * * * *
In autumn it was reported that a musician was coming to Lester, a larger town ten miles away, to teach violin-playing there. Word was spread about that she would visit Anneville one morning each week if three students could be found for her there. Theodosia and two half-grown children made up the number, and the teacher came. She was a small dark woman, slight in form, quick in her ways, heavy-browed, ambitious to become a great teacher. Old Anthony Bell engaged her to come to his house, had sent for her as soon as he had heard of her presence in the town, and had talked with her in the parlor, grown coherent, alert under the stimulation of the young woman. She made him remember his _Heart Bowed Downs_ and his _Trovatores_.
Theodosia felt abashed before the superior skill and she drew her bow nervously over the strings at the test lesson. She was stifled into a few days of inactivity until the new gestures set within her. She must learn to hold the violin. To approach it with the bow. To observe the right angle. To listen to the tone and learn the acoustics of the instrument. Sometimes the dark woman would answer a question by playing a phrase, a skurry of phrases, and Theodosia was half afraid of these replies, knowing that she missed a part. Not virtuosity but good playing. The words sang in her mind and broke a new world into a firmament, a world fuller than the old. Theory, harmony, musical history, musical literature, technique, the legato, the perfect legato, the singing violin tone. The ragged chrysanthemums bloomed along the front of the house where the south sun shone, and the fallen leaves made every footstep clatter. The fields beyond the town, where they arose on the hills and were seen from the windows of the house, had lost their rough lines as they were turned under by the plow for the winter grains, were set in order for the next growing year. Her eyes, lifted from the strings, would rest far away on the hill field where the earth had been made new and where it ran perpetually now with her singing legato, the brown earth laid out brown in the autumn sun.
The music teacher came each week, her talk a bright flash from the world far outside. She talked in half with her music and with her quick hands, but her speech was crisp and clear. In her the master walked out upon the concert stage and worked his bow over the strings; she gathered intensely in her darkness and in the vibrant speed of her facile hands, her mouth easily turning, her strong slender limbs swaying, or she tapped the bow against her skirt as she told how the master played a movement. Her fingers were little brains secreting the music of thought. Around her a peculiar, scintillating half-brilliance spread like a fog of things half-known, half-sensed; it caught at the imagination and kindled it but gave it insufficient fuel. The man and the instrument were one. An interpretation of life. Of mind, mood, thought, by the way of sound. Man is speaking here. His voice. Sound brought to high refinements, nuances, exquisite variations to make a speech for the spirit of man. The musician knew; she flashed out of her darkness. These were days of unsatisfied knowing. One could never have enough.
Or again, how a ship cuts the waves open and spreads them apart to roll up on her sides and follow after her in a long sweep of tilting water with a froth of foam melting on its crest, how the little tugs draw a ship across a harbor, four little tugs or three joined to a ship by a long cable that stretches tight, pulling the great lazy giant down a bay. Or the Goddess of Liberty, how she is green like beryl or like deep sea water, her bronze burnt with salt fog until it is brilliantly green, catching the light of the morning on the front of her body and turning it off in bright yellow planes, her great squat figure too round and ample for grace, squarely set on firm skirts, short-thighed, great-waisted, holding her plump torch, a great progeny, a myriad brood mothered under her plump skirts. She is brightly green in the morning sun with planes of yellow light; she is looking down the bay and across the Narrows and out to the sea.
These were inaccessible but not far, making a relation somehow with the lightness of autumn, the mild sting of the coming cold that could be felt in the early morning. Walking about the town Theodosia wore a bright new coat of rich dark colors and a small velvet hat with a bronze buckle. Conway had helped her to choose the hat, and his lightly spoken approval, gaily negligent, rested upon it all through the autumn and seasoned her whole being with a delicate warmth. A fire burned now in the parlor grate. At nightfall Siver, the black houseboy, was sent through the rooms to renew the coal and brush the hearths clean. Old Tony Bell sat nodding in the room across from the parlor, his room, where the bookshelves were seldom assailed and the books sank together into a solid warped mass. “She will learn to play great music,” he said, “a concerto. I heard it in Paris, the Brahms Concerto. It was, I recollect, a night in December. Let her learn, it won’t hurt her. I never thought my own flesh and blood would master it. She’ll learn.” His bed stood against the wall that was farthest from the fireplace. He would sink often into the bed with unwanted satisfaction and fall asleep without consent, or he would arouse himself and take a brisk walk at twilight, stepping along the boards of the gallery.
Theodosia practised scales in single tones and thirds, working happily, blending them in her thought with the running autumn and the crisp frost, with the rich new color that had come to her garments in the coat and hat, in certain gowns she devised with her dressmaker, in her autumn stockings and a brilliant scarf. Jane Moore came sometimes to practise with the instruments, inaccurate as before but pretty in her gray fur and bright blue dress. She would laugh at the precision of the music teacher and clatter amiably on the piano, her eyes misty with her own prettiness and tender with the devotion of youth to youth. “You’re too sweet for words,” she would say to Theodosia as she touched the keys lightly, smiling over her shoulder. Her brown hair was softly rolled and centered into low knots. She would tinkle lightly at Albert’s songs, giving them a manner, _Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland_ dribbling from her pert fingers.
Catherine Lovell had a bright red hat for the mid-winter, accented with an unsubdued cock’s feather that tilted and swayed as she walked, as she sat lightly moving in her chair. She went to the Seminary every day to teach, but in the evening she would run to Theodosia for a chat or a walk, or she would bring a gift of winter flowers from her mother’s small window garden.
Back would come the day for the fiddle lesson. The teacher would enter with a quick smile, tossing aside her coat and her hat. The piano note would cry out briefly under her quick hand and the gut string would follow, slipping and crawling into tune, Theodosia’s heart beating fast with some cruel, fearful pleasure. A skurry of runs and a trill and a few bars from the cadenza of some concerto. The example would clarify her words: each note must stand out like a star in a dark night.... Smoothness in the change of position when the string must be crossed without sound.... The singing tone, the perfect legato.... The bow should be thought of as of indefinite length—no end to it, no break between the up-bow and the down-bow.... “But do not, for all this, be a slave to your fingers. The music must come out of your soul, out of your soul.”
* * * * *
Theodosia would wake from the deep first sleep of the night and see the rectangles of the high windows turn to pale silver with the winter dawn. She would move in her bed, opening her eyes briefly upon the familiar furniture of the room, the long glass between the windows, the high dresser, the deep sofa beside the fireplace. Then she would settle to the lighter sleep of the morning, hearing the steps of early passers on the pavement of the street and hearing the click of the gate latch when Siver came to his work. The warmth of the bed would shut about her in a matutinal caress as she sank into light half-slumber, as her mind fared here and yon in speculations and dreams, in plans and visions. The joy of friends would give her a pleasant sense of well-being, and her own warmed youthful blood would drowse and drown in its own relaxed languors. Sometimes she would float between the earth and some void in a half-intoxication of a dream while her ears half-heard the steps on the street or a call—some boy driving his cow to pasture. Her speculating mind would run forward into the plans for the day, so many hours with the music, the fiddle, the harmony, the piano; or it would center briefly about some dress she was designing with the dressmaker or repairing for herself, and over this or through it would glide her floating senses as they drifted in the void supported by strong fingers on which she lay drooping, circled by strong arms. Siver’s knock at the door would dimly arouse her and make her know that she had half-dreamed some image, and his step on the floor as he walked toward the fireplace and bent over the grate to arrange the fire would emphasize the light quality of her consciousness. The sound of the falling kindling would be heavy and remote. Between the separate sounds the spaces of quiet would be light with dreaming, with herself drowned in joy and myth, drooping in strong up-reaching fingers, Albert’s hands, but over her and above like the light of some final dawn, radiant but self-contained and entire, identical with light negligent laughter, would float some essence, some misty incandescence that merged with Conway and with her happiness.
When he had kindled a large fire of wood and coal, Siver would close the window and pour hot water from a pail into her pitcher on the wash-stand. He was nothing to her, Siver, but serving hands. He was but serving hands, unsensed, unrealized. He was a command given and accomplished. If he became momentarily real he was intently loathed and quickly transferred to serving hands again. The sound of the flowing water and the crockery would be as distinct and as meaningless as the other sounds of the morning, flat against the coming tide of the new day, unreal before her speculations about the dress or the fiddle-practice. Siver gone and the closed door having settled an hour of stillness upon the room, the earth would grow into the volume and substance of dream and lie finished and accomplished, apart and done.
* * * * *
The farmers were discontented with the tobacco sales. The speculators were busy passing the crop from hand to hand, playing a game to outdo one another. Sometimes a farmer saw his crop selling for twice the sum he had been paid less than a week earlier. “Too many dead-heads function between the grower and the manufacturer,” Albert said. The tobacco wagons, piled high, were lined in every open space about the warehouses. A heavy odor of crude tobacco hung in the damp air.
At Catherine Lovell’s home there was a large double parlor with a hard smooth floor. Often the rugs were rolled up for dancing, and then two negroes sat in the hallway making the music, _I Don’t Know Why I Feel So Shy_, or _Dixie Dan_, the rhythms brought down from Hill Street. Albert talked about the new association for the growers as he waited between the dances, sitting along the wall of the dining-room on the red divan. The men would have to combine, he said. The market was all in a wreck. There would have to be such a pool as was never formed before, something solid. He spent his days now going about among the farmers, pledging them to the new measure, talking of it to hostile growers. He carried memoranda in his pocket snapped importantly together under a rubber band. The throb of the dance rhythms would wail from the outer hall. Somebody had given the players a smart drink and they set the true rhythms of Hill Street under the dancers’ feet, rhythms richly ripened with use. Theodosia and Conway trampled the rhythms under their light tread.
I likes a little loven now and then, When the loven one is you....
What was a rhythm more or less? their feet asked the smooth floor. “What’s this thing we’re a-dancen to?” Conway asked her. “Is it a two-step or a waltz or a barn dance, or what is it anyway?”
“Don’t you know really, on your honor?”
“I just get up and do what the music makes me. I never know what kind ’tis.”
Albert was a great bulk coming in at a door, coming nearer, taking his seat under the dim lamp when he sat in her parlor. His face was large and firm, sudden in its appraisals, but he was uncertain of her and of himself. She saw his uncertainty of her in his quick scrutiny of her when he spoke. The men would have to pool, he said. He had talked to twenty farmers and growers that day. He was dog tired. Some men were fools, unable to see their own good when it stood less than three inches away. She would turn to the fiddle, making herself remote.
* * * * *