Part 9

Lethe went into the other room of the cabin and did not return. Theodosia sang the song with Americy and then showed her two chords more, and tried to teach her to tune her instrument. “I’ll pay you money too for the work,” she said. “How’d I ever come to forget that?” Americy seemed aimless and pale after the passion of the older woman. While Americy struggled with the chords a man came in at the door, a strong dark man in the prime of life. He glanced a moment toward Americy as he stood by the closed door and became slightly deferential when his glance fell upon Theodosia, but his manner was familiar as he walked across the floor and took some small thing from the bureau, as he passed into the inner room.

“You don’t need to pay no money,” Americy said. “We’ll have it like we said we would.”

“Do you and Lethe live here? Nobody else?” Theodosia asked.

“Me and Lethe. And Ross.”

“What’s Lethe’s name? Is Lethe married?”

“Her name is the same as mine is, Froman. That’s her name. Lethe Froman. Or she goes by the name of Lethe Ross.”

Theodosia went soon after. She left Americy standing by the table picking at the delicate laces of the garments with pleased scrutiny.

* * * * *

Sitting above in her chamber she saw the hill fields beyond the town as the light of the sunset withdrew from the valley and spread laterally over the plowed spaces that were ready now for the tobacco and the corn. Her own uncertainty spread to become the uncertainty of the passing light that lingered wanly, renewed itself, or was diffused into the somber twilight. Presently she was looking out upon the uncertainty of trees and gloom which was lit in feeble masses here and there by the street-lights. Long after this she prepared for bed by the indefinite light of her lamp, which made a hard and futile glow that subtended remote black shadows. When she slept the hour was late. She fell into a confused dream that centered about Albert, who leaned toward her from a bank giving her flowers that he had plucked from beyond a fence, who walked before her down a long hall, passing farther away, moving toward the inevitable disaster of doors. Beyond this vivid image lay another, vaguely merged with it but more remote, a picture under a picture, a large awkward collie dog floundering before her in a path, moving away from her toward some fixed limit, and in her inner being lay a disgust of him and a loathing that fulfilled itself in a sudden sob of thankfulness when he passed beyond her view. The passing form became then Conway with a laugh in his eyes and pleasure in his words, but when he leaned near her to kiss he became Albert, who caught her away into an unhappy fulfilment for which she wept even in the deep trance of dream.

Later, long after, it seemed, into her sleep came a flat muffled sound as if it were the shape of a peal of alarm, falling long and dull against the enduring quality of her torpor. It was shaped, the sound, like the fire alarm of the town, insistent and reiterated, but it fell toneless upon her deadened senses. It seemed to her that she had slept very long when it came again, that it was more perpetual, blurred into her dream with matter that clotted and cluttered weary thought, timbers laid into mind, shapeless and unwieldy masses set into a mind fixed upon sleep. A brief annoyance arose with each curiously shaped flat tone, annoyance that any matter should reiterate itself as if it had importance above any other matter, but she did not stir in her bed or know any real beyond the cluttering wooden masses of cry that had some relation to the village fire alarm, some foolish senseless likeness. When the shapes finally ceased she became aware of their withdrawal and missed them with a small distress that half awakened her, but later she slept again.

* * * * *

Conway was burned to death that night when his father’s house was destroyed. Theodosia had the news of this disaster from Siver when he came to kindle the fire in her grate; there was a hint of late frost in the air. She waked from unrested sleep when Siver fumbled with the wood and the coal, when he fumbled with the door latch. She turned on her pillow as he waited at the doorway, as he looked away from the bed uncertainly, his head leaned forward, preparing a disclosure.

“What is it?” she asked. She knew he had something to tell. “Tell it, Siver. Has Aunt Bet got a misery this morning? Do you have to cook the breakfast?”

He told her then as he worried with the latch. Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house had burned. “Towarge midnight,” he said.

“Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house,” he said. He lingered at the door, half closing it, drifting in and out of the doorway, looking at the floor where the bright light of the fire danced in brilliant yellow, averting his eyes from her.

She was sitting up in the bed now, the coverlets thrown aside, her passion to know what Siver had been saying over and over leaping the space that had been set between them by their offices as mistress and houseman. She asked rapid questions, impatient of the replies which came as if they had been known before, came to her ears as routine once the first great fact had assailed her.

“Mr. Conway, he got burned up too, got burned to death in the house, clean to death,” Siver said.

He stood in the doorway, rubbing his hand on the wood of the frame, mumbling his story over and over beyond the low flare of her repeated questions. Suddenly her mind became clear again after the fog of surprise. It was true that Siver had dreamed the story.

“You dreamed all this, Siver. You’re not awake yet.”

“You can smell the smoke out in the trees for your own self and you can smell the burn outside, if you go out. They got his body out towarge day and put it in a coffin and took it over to Mr. Eli Brooke’s house, his uncle’s house. You can see the smoke out in the trees and you can smell of the fire....”

The report was then a confirmation; the coffin, when Siver spoke of it, settled the truth into her. She arose and dressed herself for the day and later she met the music teacher in the parlor and played the lesson with mechanical care.

When the obligation of the lesson was done she went to her room and later she lay on her bed to stare at the ceiling until her grief took shape. At first there were three Conways to play back and forth in her mind, the Conway of the first fact, as he had been Friday evening and many another evening, charming, negligent, beautiful to see, kissing her at the door, flinging her a smile from beyond the lamp. Over against this lay the awful second fact, Conway a charred, shrunken ember lying in a coffin which no one dared open, which would never again be opened. This was Conway. Up the street half a mile, in an avenue of trees to a doorway, through a hall and a parlor, and there lay the horrible fact. She was not afraid of it. It was real, there, never to be denied, and if he could endure it so could she. The second fact was hers now. The third fact grew together, gaining strength as the minutes passed, dominating all the rest. This was Conway become a memory. The third fact had already begun to supplant the first. The fact of him as a memory, as finished, as perpetual now and unchanged, stole over the first and dimmed it. At this recognition she wept with more pain and reached for the first fact with greater eagerness, but the third prevailed until the first became an utter shadow and went before the day was done.

She lay on her bed, spent with weeping, remembering now the alarms of the night and knowing that they had been the last cry of Conway’s circumstance. She probed her memory of the night to penetrate its knowledge for every substance and sound, and she remembered the flat toneless matter that had cluttered her rest. She turned continually to Albert as the one who must give her comfort and ease her pain, and her longing for him became perpetual. She knew that he had gone across the state on some mission, but she thought that he would come to Conway’s funeral when he learned of the disaster. Over and over she decided that she would send him a message telling him to come, and she thought of his grief as identical with her own. Conway had been their friend, Albert’s first, and through Albert her own. She would weep anew to recall how much the two of them had loved Conway. But she kept to a passive rôle and sent no message. Albert did not come. He had been traveling all week into remote countries and was not easily reached by the telegraphed communications which someone sent.

The days passed slowly while her life seemed suspended in grief, days scarcely noticed until many of them were gone and Conway had become the last fact utterly, had achieved dissolution. He lay intangible now among the elements of a past that had slipped by while she was unaware.

* * * * *

Jane Moore came once or twice after she and Theodosia had sat together to talk of Conway’s death, but presently she was occupied with other friends who lived out the Olivet Pike and with these she had begun to go to Sulphur Springs, where there was a hotel and a pavilion for dancing. Frank would come to sit, stopping on his way from the town, or he would offer a bit of rowing on the pool beyond the fairgrounds. She went again and again to see Americy, and she would sit quietly on the chair opposite while Americy ironed for an hour, watching her motions and her changing face. Americy would talk with a slight embarrassment of one thing and another, and Theodosia would look intently at her skin, her looks, her clouded eyes, her hand on the iron, the still veins in her moving wrist where the blood must surely throb. A faint sickness would spread over her, so delicate as to be scarcely perceived, but she would cling to her act of penetration, probing to come nearer to the life under the brown flesh. She would watch Americy’s finger bones as they articulated in moving the iron and in settling the linen in a smooth path before her. She would ask all she dared of her life, her men, her lovers.

“Who’s your fellow now, Americy?”

“Aw, go on!”

“Your man, who is he now?”

“I got no man now.”

“You got a beau, you know you have.”

In the word, beau, she would edge away from a direct scrutiny of Americy’s affairs, diverting the question to gain more space for the discussion. “You know you’ve got a beau. Who takes you places?”

Americy was embarrassed. “I goes by my own self. I don’t need no beau.”

Looking at Americy’s drooping eyelids she would try to detect the nature of her wish, her pleasure, to go into her bosom and know its need, into her body, her limbs, her passive presence. Americy had had many men, that she knew. Did she have more than one at a time, she would wonder, and again she would plead with the brown veins at the wrist above the smoothing iron, with the swaying gestures of the hand above the board, to know what was the quality of the passion that bent Americy to her way of life, pity and pride and tenderness making within herself an emotion which might have been called love. Lethe was usually gone from the house, for she was working as a cook somewhere. If she were at hand she kept aloof, but even in her absence she was more easily comprehended as holding more direct passions.

“You could bring your clo’s for me to do same as always,” Americy said. “You learned me to play and I’d as lief as not do up your clo’s all time.”

Americy had mastered the chords slowly, but she liked to drone the songs that were sung at the church, and Theodosia helped her to set the tunes to the guitar—_Beulah Land_, _I Saw My Jesus_, _Tell It Again_, _Come Sinner Come_, and _Glory to His Name_. Once when Theodosia saw her own face in the dim glass above Americy’s bureau she searched it there, in this strange place. “Lethe hates me,” she thought on the instant, seeing her thin curving lips. It seemed to her that she lived with only a part of her being, that only a small edge of her person lifted up into the light of the day. “Lethe hates me,” she thought, and her mind was fascinated by Lethe’s strong will and by her indifferent enmity that was manifested by her continued absence from the cabin. Feeling herself a commonplace, she left the music when the needs of it were satisfied and went again to sit before Americy’s ironing table and listen to her reserved disclosures. “What am I to her?” she would question, searching into the relation of flesh to flesh.

She turned again and again to Albert, remembering Conway, clung to him in her suffering and implored him silently to come to her, to reconcile her to the loss. He was from the town much of the time, but, returned, he was seen continually with Florence now. Theodosia rejected Florence from her passion; since Conway’s loss she was of no account although she was allowed, recognized. Albert might choose and have whomever he would; this was no matter. But continually she listened for his step on the gallery floor and for his voice in the hallway. Walking to Americy’s cabin in the bright sun of a midday, she would suddenly see his strong firm hand, sunburned and full of power, taking its heavy certain being in gestures or in quiet. She thought that he would surely come some day to sit quietly with her, to talk with her sadly of Conway. She determined that she would contrive to see Albert again although each plan for an encounter was at once rejected. Americy would push her iron over a reach of damp cloth and leave a smooth trail of steaming surface behind, delicately pleased but embarrassed at the visit, and she would talk guardedly, disclosing as little as she might of her life and the life of Lethe. Sitting before her, watching the magic of the iron as it turned rough garments into smooth, Theodosia would know that she must somehow meet Albert again, that she would send him some message which would bring him to her door.

Once when she had brought her freshened clothing home, when she unrolled the papers from about it and prepared it for the drawer, she saw that a garment had been torn apart. The frayed piece was an underslip which was decorated with lace and fine stitchery. It had been torn open by an angry hand; one great tearing motion had sundered it from the hem to the embroidered upper portion where the enforced stitching had given it strength to resist the angry rending hands. It was frayed in many directions when renewed strength had been set upon it, and she knew that it had stood in the way of some quarrel between Americy and Lethe, that it had been torn apart by Lethe’s hands. She tossed the destroyed garment into a trash basket.

She returned over and over to her need to have Albert come, to have him satisfy some longing by coming through her door and sitting a half-hour in her parlor, but each suggestion her mind made toward the promotion of this imperfectly formed wish was repelled. Her divided wishes, the one prompted by her scorn of him, the other by her strange need, defeated each other continually. Once in a moment of clear-seeing she thought, with a flash of cruel wit, that her real need of him was her need to express to him her contempt of him and her indifference of his way, but this moment was fogged as, day after day, her sense of him yearned toward him. She knew of his coming and going, in and out of the town, with intuitive accuracy. But one day the news of his marriage with Florence spread over the town. They had gone away together and would live thereafter in Lexington, Albert’s work being now centered in that city.

* * * * *

It seemed to her that some barrier had come between her and the violin, as if the instrument were vaguely at fault in that it had allowed some intrusion. At intervals some words of the teacher had touched on the limits of the capacity of her hand. Casually once, as she turned the pages of some catalogue and wrote numbers on a paper, the teacher had said, “Beyond you,” or again, “The fingering beyond your reach,” or “Out of your reach.” These phrases built a deep unrest in Theodosia’s days. She went to sit before Americy’s iron and talk of Americy’s life, her hymns, her revivals, her chords, her work. As a commonplace having some relation to the early summer, she arose each morning and set about her tasks. Her playing was tentative, obeying only the suggestions of the teacher, withdrawing from searchings and explorations. The instrument had retreated from her old knowledge of it. She accomplished with skill all that the teacher required and heard the praise she earned with a leap of satisfaction within. She rested upon her perfections where they lay bounded and within her degree, and she surpassed herself at the designated tasks.

She went to the hill overlooking the town, to the spot where Conway was buried, taking Frank to walk there with her. The grave was near the brow of the hill on the side that sloped back from the town, slightly under the top of the rise where the enclosure looked toward the hill farms beyond. She walked about in the summer grass, which was tall now, much of it in blossom, and she heard in some dim way the talk Frank made as he sauntered by her side, as he spoke of Conway, of the grass, of the pine trees, as he quoted something about pines and grass. The high points of the town stood visible off to the north, and the church steeples arose among the tall trees, and a bit of the roof of the Seminary. To the south the graves dipped up and down with the flow of the near hillside and fell away at a fence where a rose clung, but beyond the rose lay a field of oats, ready to cut. It was a strange place in which to find Conway, and a renewed aspect of him arose with a new flavor. The mockingbird that sang on the fence near the rose began to partake of him. The tall grass waved in the late afternoon sun, swaying about throughout the entire graveyard, even over the new mould that had covered him but a few months. The town stretched away to an immeasurable distance, and the song of the mockingbird became the atmosphere one breathed, a touched substance, giving life to the breath of man, set about the earth to flow with the winds. The tall swaying grass with its sunlight was the people of the earth, the reason for the continuance of the world. When Frank spoke she folded his words together, having subtracted from them their meaning, and dropped them over the brow of the hill beyond the reach of the grass, beyond the mockingbird’s song.

“This grass needs to be cut, I declare,” he said. “It’s a shame. It looks as bad as a wilderness.”

“It’s tall. Everywhere. In bloom,” she said. “There might be a field-lark somewhere.”

“It’s the fault of the committee. There are some things....”

She had folded his words together at the moment of her reply and dropped them beyond the sublimated air of the hilltop. The third fact of Conway prevailed now to its last power and had shared now with every beautiful object which her mind might entertain. The former world had departed, shrunken to a minute size in its going, flattened to commonplace, gone with the departed town, the old air, the trite matter of talk. Because she had never before brought Conway into this intense relation with the song of a bird and with the grass, the act brought him nearer each instant. The sense of her losses lay above the hilltop world which was aerated by the mockingbird’s song, and it spread as a cloud drawing nearer, a desolation as yet to be realized.

“Everybody liked him,” Frank said. “He was just like his brother Reginald. Everybody likes Reg. It was careless to leave a lamp all night under an incubator, wasn’t it? It’s queer nobody heard the explosion.”

“Let’s sit here a little while, under this pine tree. On the grass.”

“I went to the creek to fish one summer with a party, Conway in the lot. I remember how we laughed and talked all the best part of a night once, a big log fire, and how Conway looked, by the fire, in the light of the blaze. Laughed till he shook all over when Albert told the one about the deacon up at Elijah Church. Did you ever hear Albert tell about Deacon Pope’s prayer?”

“No. Or maybe I have. I don’t know.”

She sat under the pine tree, inattentive to Frank’s story, lost in a haze of grief which was no less ever-present because she did not know exactly where it centered. She knew that if Frank had not been present she should actually have wept, but that he held the flow of her grief intact with some hushing power, that his presence called for definite tears, exactly wept, committed to a future which she had now obliterated.

Alone in her room when the walk was over, she remembered the beauty of the hilltop and the sublimated air of the bird’s song, and the grass that swung backward in the late afternoon sunlight. As her memory grew more intense, dwelt upon, the intensity of her grief multiplied, gathered now into a passion for Conway, whom she was free to mourn and long for. She remembered every gesture and posture of his body, conned each one to bring it back to being, and focused about his jealousy, which had become precious now, and about his bitter, hurt replies, that fell the more poignantly in that they were surrounded by his lightness and carelessness. She was free to love him and to want him. Her hate of Albert inverted itself and became an intense passion for Conway. She searched for a small picture of him, turning out boxes and drawers in a state of violent grief which centered half the night about the finding of this small physical token. When she had found it she set it upon her mantel in the place of honor from which she had withdrawn pictures of Albert, of Ruth, and of Jane.

Preoccupied with her grief she took less account of the town. Jane came no more to sit on her piano bench and twitter at the notes of the music, or if she came to the portico for a brief call she seemed business-like, abstracted, mirthless. Ruth had found diversions in another street. She saw them clearly now. They had liked her sincerely, in their ways, but they had liked her as a means of access to Conway and Albert. They had poured their friendship over her for this.

* * * * *