Part 6

She would pluck at his talkative music, making it utter its bland commonplace between flights of well-bowed musical comment, musical scorn. She would wrap each common saying into a sheaf bound lightly with shreds of scintillating clamor.

“Where’d you get that? How’d you know to do all that truck?” he asked.

“Imelda Montford wrote a diary and she left it in an old hamper. ‘I want to lern grek and laten. I will not be a idle fol. I will have what is in boks.’” She traced the words on the wall with her finger. “Roland built a bridge for a deposed king to ride on. William had red hair and owned nine thousand acres of Virginia land. Rufus bought a negro wench and three men from Captain Custer, and made a note of it in the back of a geography book. Thomas Montford bought a horse from Asa Fielding and left a note of that on the fly-leaf of an old grammar. Anne had a town named in her honor, Anneville. You know the place.”

“Anneville. I know. Gosh, yes.”

“Theodosia Montford took Luke Bell to husband and then the Bells got into the story.”

“Took. God’s sake! It’s my opinion she got took.”

“Gules two lions couchant argent....”

“What you a-comen to?”

“Gules with a fess and six crosslets gold....”

“What’s the joke?”

“Bendy of ten pieces, gold and azure....”

“What the ’ell?”

“The language of the Montfords. The speech of old Robert and his peers.”

“You’re too full of joy. I aim to take some of that joy out of you.”

“His glorious pals, you might say.”

“Two months from now and I aim to do it.”

“Or, go back to Roland, he built a bridge....”

“You need somebody and it’s my opinion you need me.”

“Rode. Kreutzer. Singer. The _Fingerübungen_. Excellent for muscular development in scale work. Miss Schuester, then. Duos for violin and piano. Duos for two fiddles. Does that answer your first question? If that’s not enough....”

“Some day I aim to smash that old fiddle plumb into the middle of perdition.”

“You’ll never get your hands on it.”

“In two months from now I aim to get you. Take your time and get ready. And if that old music box gets in my way....”

“You’ll never get your hands on it.” She bent her eyes to the strings where the hair lines of the bow sang over them. He was already a whirlwind under her flying fingertips.

“You get good and ready. When I come I’ll come like a roaren lion.”

His strength assailed her, and going about her unsettled routines in the early February cold she rested upon his decision where it suffused her mind. She thought of her grandfather as the chief witness of her achievement with the fiddle; he represented a throng of watchers, there to scrutinize her skill. She held inwardly an intense wish to show him what the fiddle could do in her hands, and as she brought a study to completion and played it with her master she thought of Anthony as the listener, as he was, as he sat over his mellow fire, or she would stop often by his chair and talk with him of the music, retelling all or much of what the teacher had brought her in interpretation.

Or, remembering that the music must come out of the spirit, the soul, she would search inwardly for some token or glimpse of this shadowy substance, this delicate eidolon. The question arose again and again. The soul, where and what was it? She observed that the preachers in the churches had souls for their commerce, and that there one learned that all souls were of equal value. But in the novel or the poem the lover said, “I love you from the depths of my soul,” or the author said, “He was stirred to the depths of his soul,” or “He was frightened in his soul.” Striving to divide her being, to set bounds upon parts, she would turn a half-whimsical gaze inward as she strove to achieve the singing tone and to bow the indefinite legato. “Does the music come out of me really, out of some inner unit, myself, all mine?” she would question, “or do I simply imitate, skilfully or not, what the teacher does?” She wanted to lay her finger on this integer and say, “This is mine.” She wanted to go past the bounding of blood in arteries and the throb of her pride in her grandfather’s witnessing of her advancing skill. The tone sang more true and she took a great, impatient joy in it, searching, as she was, more deeply for the answer to the riddle. Or, in the coming of Albert into her senses, her questioning thought would swim in a pool of inattention and semi-consciousness.

* * * * *

Toward the end of February Anthony Bell sickened of a cold and kept continually in his room sitting over his fire. The sound of his coughing went through the house, and of his scolding voice as he assailed Siver for, as he named them, his trifling ways. After a week he was no better, and the fact came to Theodosia in her preoccupation as a vague trouble. A vague sense of impending demands weighted her bow and her pencil. Writing chords all morning at her table a load bore heavily upon her hand, unrecognized or undefined. A dream-like unrest followed her as she passed her grandfather’s door or mounted the staircase, as she turned back to her studies after the departure of her friends. She went to his room often between her goings and comings. She would stand beside his fire and offer sympathy or question him. Had he tried this remedy or that? Unprepared for care she met this small demand with a slight vexation, or she set herself to prepare some comfort for him, or some diversion. He would soon be better, she assured him.

But there came a day when he was worse, when he kept his bed, and Theodosia called a physician, Dr. Muir. She went often to his bedside, offering to read, to talk, to prepare foods. Anthony seemed troubled, and as the days went by he continually called for papers from his desk or for letter-files from a cupboard in a back room upstairs. He seemed unable to find some paper although he searched endlessly, or he would fall asleep with the documents scattered over his bed or falling from his lax hands. One day an old friend, a Mr. Reed, from the bank, called and sat with him for an hour. When the visitor had gone Anthony seemed more than ever troubled, searching again for the missing paper, falling asleep.

As Theodosia sat with her father at supper on the evening after the banker’s visit she spoke of her grandfather’s worry, opening the subject with Horace in abstracted earnestness. The house was disturbed since her grandfather’s illness and she wanted relief.

“I wish you’d stop in to see Grandfather tonight,” she said. “He’s sick and he seems to have some matter to trouble his mind. I think you’d better talk with him a little. He’s worried.”

“Tell him I’ll take him on a trip next summer to the Virginia Ocean. A ship glides down the water on silken satin sails. Tell him to think about that and he’ll drop off right away. Tell him to think of silken satin sails. The silken sad uncertain. Tell him not to think about the silken sad uncertain, but tell him to think of silken satin sails. Nothing is uncertain. All is certain. I’m right.”

“I’m worried myself,” Theodosia said after a little. “Grandfather is real sick. He needs advice maybe. He’s lost heart. He’s got some trouble on his mind.”

“All is lost save honor and there’s damn little of that left, hardly a copper cent’s worth. Tell him to set his mind upon the silken satin sails of certainty. Pour me out another cup of coffee, Dosia, and pass me the jam, Siver. It is jam, isn’t it? Jam is the staff of life and there’s damn little of it left. Damn the jam. Tonight I have to practise again for the play. I take the part of the wicked villain because of my deep stentorian voice. It’s for the benefit of the Sabbath School, and you should go and assist a cause if not to see your sire saw the air. I am your sire, ain’t I? Theodosia sired by Horace, he by Anthony the grand old war horse, he out of Theodosia Montford by Luke Bell. I have to practise tonight for the play. It’s for the benefit of some charity, I forget what, some measure promoted by the combined Sabbath-school interests of the entire town. It’s a big thing. Which of these renderens do you like best? You see the beautiful young lady is in a hazardous position from poverty and what-not....”

“What did my mother die of?” Theodosia asked after the matter of the renderings had been settled.

“Of a meningitis. I was not here at the time. In Lester, I was, attenden court, I recall. I hurried home as soon as I learned of it and asked what was the matter. They said a meningitis. How old are you, Dosia?”

“I’m twenty.”

“To think it! Twenty! Then it’s been seven years, eight, how many? Since your mother died? I recollect I heard them say, ‘The poor motherless orphan, twelve years old.’ Or did they say thirteen? I don’t know why I never married again. Eight years a widower, I’ve been, and not altogether unpresentable to the sex, I’ve heard it said.”

Theodosia wept softly behind her downcast eyes when she turned her thought to her mother. She remembered her as a large broken woman lying on her couch all day, sometimes playing sonatas on the piano half the night. She had given Theodosia the bedroom above the parlor the spring before she died. She was remembered standing at the doorway of the room, ill, directing the houseman to change the furniture this way and that, trying several arrangements.

“Your mother was a lady and a pretty woman to boot,” Horace said. “But the family trees all come by your father, and don’t you forget that, all the shrubbery. I remember how Mike O’Connor laughed one time when I said, ‘Two lions couchant, male and female created he them.’ You ought to ’a’ heard old Mike O’Connor roar to that. ‘But don’t you ever let any woman get a hold onto you,’ Mike O’Connor says. ‘Not a firm hold. She’ll make you roll a baby buggy, and what does a man look like a-rollen a baby buggy? You never saw a Irishman a-rollen a baby buggy,’ Mike says. ‘Think back,’ Mike says, ‘and see if ever you saw a Irishman rollen one of them things. Not a real God-knows Irishman. You never did. And you never will.’”

Horace called for more sugar for his last cup of coffee, and Theodosia searched the sideboard and the pantry. “I’m part Irish,” he said. “And I need more sugar.” When Siver was called he found a little in an unused sugar dish on a high shelf. Theodosia knew the indifferent economic plan of the house. Either Horace or Anthony paid the bills, as they had money by. It was Anthony who owned the house, his inheritance along with the farm, Linden Hill, which had now passed to other hands. There had been some talk between Anthony and Mr. Reed of a mortgage, and when Horace went to his rehearsal she looked for the word mortgage in a dictionary to find its meaning.

* * * * *

From beyond her playing, as a recitative, Albert and his declarations reached her continually. “I hope you’re keepen the count of the weeks,” he said. “Six weeks is what you’ve got to get ready in.” Her continual reply, spoken or unspoken, beat and throbbed with the pulse of the music as she advanced her lyric work and won praise from her master, “I want to play the fiddle to the end of the earth. I want to go to the end of music and look over the edge at what’s on the other side.”

She thought of Albert as strong and good. She knew the beauty of his vigorous body, clean as it was with health. On the hills beyond the town the laborers were burning the plant beds and making ready for the long growing year. From her chamber she saw the smoke arise and “They’re burning tobacco beds,” she said, her mind running over the fields in a swift going and over the earth as it lay away in shield-like masses that were brown now with the uses of winter. “He makes love like a tomcat,” her lips said suddenly once while she paused in her playing to tinker with a bad string. “Albert. He makes love like a tomcat.”

The music teacher had her changing moods; in her entrance her mood was stated, in her down-flung coat and her quick bowing; but her presence, whatever it was, would never crush her student’s zeal.

“What’s that? I want to do that,” Theodosia said. “I want to learn to do that. I intend to learn it. Give it to me for an exercise. It can’t get away from me. I will have it. I want it.”

“You will never do that in this world,” she said. “Your hand wasn’t made for that. You couldn’t do successive octaves, Miss. Don’t cry for the moon. Artificial harmonics will always be beyond you. It’s no great matter.”

They were laughing, speaking idly. “I want it. I want that passage inside my skin. It’ll liberate my soul. I must have a showy, idle, ornamental soul, full of ruffles and grill-work. I want that very passage. Oh, God, how I want it.”

She did not believe what the teacher said of her hand. Eventually she would grow to that playing, she thought, and she would surprise her master. “I will go to the end of everything, I’ll look over the edge of the last precipice of music,” she said inwardly. “I’ll look over the last precipice of music and say, ‘God!’ I’ll say ‘Where are you?’ I’ll climb all the musical stairs there are.”

* * * * *

Anthony lingered in a state of half-illness, in and out of his bed. One day his distress for some missing paper seemed acute and she offered him her help. He was unwilling to share with her. “Your business is the violin now,” he said, sinking weakly into his chair by the fire, but in a moment after he was sickened with faintness and she helped him back to the bed.

Two days later Theodosia found that she had determined to search among the papers in the back upper room to try to find the truth about their house, that she would take upon herself the necessity which awaited her as her grandfather visibly failed. Siver had spoken to her of his wages, which, he said, had not been paid for five weeks. He must have his money, he said, speaking respectfully, embarrassed, for he needed clothing. He must have his pay or he would have to find another place. Theodosia paid him the money from a small sum which she had, and during that same evening she took a mass of papers and letters from the old desk and carried them to her room to examine them before the fire. Many of the letters had been tied into bundles and these she examined first because they offered a modicum of order in the chaos of the mass. Among them were letters of affection which ran through a long gamut of admiration and passion to apathy, letters which had passed between her father and mother.

She sat all the following day over the papers. The memoranda yielded a confusion of dates and moneys spent or collected, a going and coming of funds, lands, expenses. Nothing seemed to have marketable value. No memoranda indicated a note or mortgage held in fee. The farmland had been sold; there were records of sums paid for this tract or that. The musty papers told musty stories, already half-known to her, of acres inherited, of sale bills of watered farmlands and uncut forests lying along the banks of some stream, described with poles and links and the jargon of surveys. In the documents a surveyor walked around a stretch of land, in the sun of warm days, in the wind or the cold or the frost of ill seasons. He walked around tracts with his compass and chain, measuring, writing figures, drawing maps, making descriptions. Five people heired a five-part property, divided equally by the survey, a farm to Joseph, a farm to Eliza, a farm to Jacob, a farm to Anthony T., a farm to Theodosia, the wife of Thomas Singleton.... A will had been opened and read in a parlor, the heirs sitting formally in their seats as became the inheritors of land. Later they drew their chairs together in groups to confer. One sat apart dissatisfied. The truth of the letters met the truth of the surveys and the memoranda. It had been a rainy day. The inheritors had reached the place with difficulty, some of them wet to discomfort. The parlor had been dark and ill dusted, murky with age and memorials. A young woman had brought cedar wood for the fireplace.

They had met again when the survey had been made, sitting again in the light that fell through the old curtains, and their discontents had now been adjusted or hidden. The surveyor had made a plat for each one, a shield of irregular shape drawn on paper, representing lands, arable acres and woodlands. The plows of the spring would slip through the fields and the inheritors would be about their business, belonging now, each one, to his land. But the substance of the myth would fade out from under them. Some of them were dead, and from some the land had melted away. Owners were separated from their ownership. Memoranda of deeds began to tell their tales, items of barter. “Beginning at a stone at the east edge of the Quincy pike, corner to lot 4, thence with edge of said pike south 88½ west 32 poles 23 links, thence south.... Said farm known as Linden Hill....” It was accurately described, line for line. In the house someone was born, the birth told in a letter from Charlotte, the mother, to Anthony. Another paper, notes drawn up for the writing of some deed, “witnesseth that said Anthony, for and in consideration of the sum of nineteen thousand dollars to him paid by said Goodwin ... hath given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred, and released, and by these presents does give, grant, bargain, sell, transfer, and release unto said Goodwin, a certain tract of land situated, lying, and being in the county aforesaid on the south side of the Casey Run and bounded as follows: Beginning at a stone ... thence with edge of said pike south 88½ west 32 poles 23 links ... said farm known as Linden Hill.”

The road ran between the farms, mapped and charted, and the farms were charted and recorded, described and owned, bounded by fences and walls and watercourses, these men belonging to the land as owners of land. But the land was gone, cut from under their feet, in consideration of the sum of nineteen thousand dollars, it was released, bargained, granted, given, sold, transferred. The day of the sale had been a bright day in June. The tillers of the soil had already planted the tobacco and the corn in the arable fields. The child born had been herself. A letter told of the humid noon, dinner on long tables before the house door, the half of a mutton roasted by three negroes over a great wood fire, piles of bread, drink for the men in the barn, whisky poured into little glasses. She had been a baby above-stairs in a cradle. It was all now a mouldy smell on rotting paper, a faint stench and a choking dust. An imperfect chronicle arose out of the stench and this chronicle built the present into a new structure. She sat staring at the embers or she turned again to the documents, for they had hints of more to disclose.

It was on this day that she first helped her grandfather to the commode, that she had known the look of his feeble withered body, had glimpsed at it as she had folded his blanket about his shaking knees. She went away to walk in the twilight of the day, spinning rapidly along the street, meeting Frank and walking with him to the end of the town, merry with him over some joke that he had. Later Albert was sitting under her soft light.

“Take your time, no hurry,” he said, half whispering as he stood by the door at his departure. “Take your time.”

The papers scattered over her sofa in the room above had begun to reveal a hard story, hard to know and realize. She turned a bitter, unsmiling face from him as he stood by the door and glanced at her bent lips in the glass.

“I’ll not hurry. Don’t bother yourself.”

“But in the end you’ll come.”

“Like a millstone, I will. Like a mountain.”

“Mountain is no matter. I’ll get you. You’ll be glad to be got.... I’ll show you what a man can do. When I set-to I’m a real lover.”

She wanted his face between her hands at that moment, but she would not trust her tenderness. She remembered her grandfather’s withered body, his shrunken maleness, and she was broken by pity. She made her pity resemble scorn as she turned apart and laid the fiddlestick carefully in the case beside the fiddle. The evening was over.

“When I come I’ll be a real lover. The kind you’ll want. I know you.”

“Slam the door after you when you go, so it’ll lock. Please do. Just slam it hard.”

“Two months I gave you. Time flies. It’s half gone already. Goen fast.”

“Just slam it hard. Save me a trip out to the door.”

* * * * *

She had brought other papers from the cupboard in the back room, and she sat busy with these all of a day and half a night. She was weary now of the stale odors of decayed paper and dust, weary of the truth which was now established. Her father was father also to three mulattoes. Letters from her mother’s relatives touched the matter as if it were beyond dispute, reiterated it as if it were a knowledge well premised and antedating the discussions of funds and settlements. She laid all the letters relating to this subject in a pile together and studied them in order. They were letters from her mother’s father, now dead.

Her hands on the fiddle were weak and apathetic, startled into numbness. She put the instrument aside, shut it tenderly away into its case and sat staring at the flames or she moved suddenly to some new posture. She felt as if she were alone with her grandfather in this; Conway had been shut away as tenderly as had been the fiddle; Albert was avoided as pertaining somehow too nearly to the facts. She read the letters again, eating their words, leaping ahead to the telling phrases. “This is the last of your share from your mother’s estate. Make it go as far as it will. You knew when you married Horace Bell that he was the father of two blacks.... I will come whenever I can, or your brother will manage to go by Anneville on his way back from the meet.... You better turn your attention to something else. Take up church work.... Dropped his litter in the alley behind the jail. The half-wit, Dolly Brown, for God’s sake! Old Josie’s girl was a handsome wench, but slobbering Dolly Brown.... A strange taste in wenches.”

She gathered the letters together and dropped them into the fire in a fury of anger, but when they had turned to feathery cinders she wondered at her act and repented of it. Persons had grown out of the search, a man vaguely outlined in youth, Anthony Bell, or her mother, Charlotte, others. Her infantile concept of her father as one playful, merry, light-hearted, child-like, made a confused war with later concepts of him as a jumble of demands upon affection and forbearance. She remembered her mother as a large passionate woman who hated her broken life, but in turn she remembered little Annie, born after the incident behind the jail, five years after. She was benumbed before the new knowledge and shared only with Anthony.

Her outer vision dulled by the fire and by weariness, her inner vision heightened, and she began to divide her being, searching for some soul or spirit. Her search took her into her grandfather’s being where it touched accurately to her own. He was old, withered, palsied, but he had life, a life, from first to last, she observed, and the house was real for him and the people of the house, the pain of his sickness. Her search took her into many of the ways of men. When a man is a baby someone uncovers his nakedness and bathes it. Then he has a long season of being obscure, withdrawn within himself, alive, secret with life. Finally he is old and again someone must uncover his nakedness and bathe him, handle him as if he were new-born. She herself had done this for him. Where, she questioned, is his soul?