Part 3

Is it because I live here on the edge of the world, outside of its activity, that I read Bobby’s letter over and over? Is that the reason I search page 78 and page 131 of the book? The eyes of Bobby’s heroine are beautiful, and he says they are like mine. It was dear of him to remember the colour of my eyes through all these years. I couldn’t have told the colour of his eyes. And I fibbed when I said those old memories were laid away in lavender scented sheets. That’s the trouble with a spinster. She can be counted on to run to sentiment with or without encouragement.

Oh, dear, I’m so tired. I want life different—not just to go in and eat supper and look over the lessons for to-morrow and read something and go to bed, as I have done all the nights of the past twelve Octobers and am likely to continue for the next several dozen of them. I fibbed when I wrote Bobby I had memories. I haven’t. And I don’t want memories—memories that sigh of age. I want joys that dance with youth. I want to sit at a little table and look across—not at John.

_October 6th. Friday._

When I came home this afternoon there was my letter. I could have told Bobby that Marsville young women were hopelessly ancient at twenty-five, that nobody ever looked at them after they were thirty. Instead, I told him about the drummer who tried to flirt with me on the train. In my effort to get rid of him I moved all over the coach and finally took the last seat, to have him take the last seat opposite. I wrote Bobby that I thought of moving into the Pullman, but that the trip was short and my economic soul balked at the suggestion.

Bobby answers:

_New York, October 4th._

DEAR LADY OF THE UNLAVENDER SCENTED MEMORIES:

Please send that picture. You have moved to the very last seat in the car and I have picked up my traps and followed you. Will you send it, or are you going to move into the Pullman?

Yours as ever, B. H.

_October 7th. Saturday. In the Garden. Sunset._

I was up with the day this morning. At sunrise I had breakfasted and was in the lumbering old hack bumping over the miles that end with the trolley that carries us these days into our mountain city and metropolis twenty miles away from this little town. I went in to do my fall shopping, hat and coat suit and some other needed little things. There’s a new woman’s outfitter that has stimulated shopping marvellously. I saw some stunning things, and I bought—a white silk evening gown, very modern, very clinging, very beautiful. There’s a cunning little fringe of crystal beads on the short sleeves. The dear little skimpy sash-ends have the crystal fringe, too. When I moved about in it and tried it on, the funny little waves of happiness ran up and down my spine and thrilled my knees just as if I really had my hand on the doorknob of that Magic Palace I first divined that day at Edna Kennedy’s. Something pagan stirred in me with the tinkle of my barbaric finery. I bought white silk stockings and white satin slippers, too. I spent every penny of three months’ hard work, and I borrowed my fare on the trolley from our butcher. If he had not been on I suppose I would have asked the conductor for a loan. The Bible says take no thought of the morrow. I did not. But to-morrow, when icy winds blow, with what shall I be clothed? I shan’t worry now. It is too warm and lovely. If I should spend my winter in the state asylum, and I do seem headed that way, my old suit will be quite stylish enough.

There are some La France roses blooming, as lovely ones as I have ever had. I get up from the garden seat and catch their pink satin faces to me and bury my face in their fragrant hearts. I whisper to them: “My poor foolish darlings, why do you bloom so late? Do you not know that all this wonderfulness of warmth, this semblance of summer, is a deception? Do you not know that winter is at hand? What is this absurd thing blooming in my heart as satiny pink and perfumed as they? The amethyst light has gone from the hills; gray and quiet they wrap their night robes of mist about them and wait for the morning. And the sky, still tender, waits for the stars. And I—for what do I wait?”

_October 8th. Sunday. Garden. Sunset._

The day has been hot. It has rained somewhere and there is a superb sunset display. It seems that all the golds and crimsons and purples in the world have been pounded and mixed in a vast mortar and flung in one magnificent wave of colour on the western sky. The mountains are wine drenched. The garden riots in colour. Everywhere colour, warmth, perfume. The glory fades, but the warmth remains. Oh, the moon! Big as a wagon wheel it wavers on the hill, hesitating about its plunge into space. I must go in. Mammy is calling me to supper. Yes, blessed old coloured lady, I am coming! Her eyes are dim. She could not have seen that it was my bedroom rug I put under the cherry tree.

_Midnight._

Was it I who put the rug under the cherry tree? Was it I who crept down the stairs in such delicious stealth? And did it all happen just two hours ago when John’s light went out? I had dressed in my tinkling finery, with my hair done like hers on page 131, and I went down to see myself full length in the big old mirror brought from the childhood home. I did not mean to go outside, but the moonlight lay in silver splashes on the portico, and as I stepped into it it swept over me in one great delirious wave, not just ordinary moonlight—sorcery. Standing there in my shimmering gown and satin shoes, I lost all sense of the real me. Drawn by that compelling light that lay on the world beyond the door in a still white flood, I stepped into the fragrant night and sped to the big old cherry tree. No, not I—a red-lipped, shining-eyed, radiant young creature that bore only a physical resemblance to me. Not a leaf dropped to fret the stillness. Nothing stirred, and yet the whole world seemed afloat. I heard the gate’s click as it opened. The man’s soft felt hat was pulled down low on his brow, shading the features, but I knew him—that is, I divined who it was. Just for a moment I thought him a vision breathed into the night by its magic and my desire to have him there. Just for a moment the solid earth, the misty hills lost foundation. He did not see me so still in the shadow of the cherry tree. Halfway up the walk he stopped, perhaps with the realization that the house was dark, for I had blown out the lamp I carried down. He stood there very still. When he turned he walked rapidly down the walk and out the gate. I made a swift little rush from under the tree, a swift little rush that sent out a myriad of tiny sounds—that pagan thing in me alive, clamouring for its woman’s birthright. I think the gate’s sharp click drowned the tinkling call of my finery. He did not glance back. After what seemed an æon of time I heard voices—the faint roll of wheels.

Perhaps I would think the whole fantastic thing a dream were it not for the wicked glitter of the baubles on my poor little frock that lies in a neglected heap there in the moonlight where I stepped out of it.

_October 26th._

Twenty days since I wrote those last words—twenty warm, still, sun-drenched days as like one to another as peas in a pod. The oldest inhabitant fails to remember such another October. But this morning, without the warning of a frost, it has come. The sun floods my desolated and blackened garden. It always hurts me to give up my flower children. I should hear only the pleasantest things at breakfast the morning of a freeze, but this morning after John had gone mammy brought my hot cakes in and told me that Lucius Blake was the author of a story that was spreading over the village like fire. Lucius said that he had driven the finest sort of a dude down to our house Sunday night, October 8th. Lucius said he came inside the gate, stood there like a stone, and that when he came back to the buggy he said: “I should have warned my friends of my arrival. I suspect from the darkened house that they are absent at Grand Opera.” He then offered Lucius ten dollars to drive him to town, and they rode through the night in silence. I should think the silence would have killed Lucius, but he has lived to tell the tale. I am not in the least comforted that mammy, on the pretense that we need sugar, has hurried up to the village to tell everybody that Lucius is a liar—in the language of the mountains a master liar. I am not in the least comforted with anything. Fate, you are a cruel jade to let me put the light out, and I hate you. I have snatched the poor innocent-of-offence gown from its hanger, if it is innocent—I remember that night it twinkled so wickedly—and I have flung it into the fire. I feel wildly happy that Bobby’s book smoulders on it. But I have turned my eyes away as a wicked, yellowish-red, forked tongued flame leaps at the wavy lock of hair that always I know escapes Bobby’s brushes because it likes to lie on his broad, thoughtful brow.

How odd the room feels without the picture. I’ve got in the way of looking for the greeting from those watchful eyes, in the way of seeing the mocking smile on those pictured lips, the minute I open my door. No simple maiden in her charm for you, Mr. Robert Haralson! Do I see you this minute motoring down your brilliant Avenue? And do I see her, the pride of your Avenue? Our uplands do not breed such exotics.

_November 15th._

The days drift by like dull-hued birds. There’s not a song in the throat of a single one. Dull-hued is the word, for the rains have washed the colour from the hills. And like a giant graystone prison wall the mountains, desolate, rattlesnaky things, stand against the sky. Jack the Giant Killer himself couldn’t scale them. Mammy watches me anxiously. She says I am sick. I am—sick for a bigger life. Teaching is routine after twelve years. I haven’t any worry. Dicky since her “Personal” escapade is being good, unless some mischief is brewing she has not yet got into trouble over. Some day—not this dull-eyed day—I mean to put to myself the question, “Why have you never said one word to Robert Haralson about Dicky—poor, cooped-up, lonely little Dicky?” And I mean to get an honest answer.

_Friday. December 21st._

The gods on Mount Olympus, if it be they that control gray, heavy-lidded days like these, had compassion on me and let to-day be Friday. I’d have killed all the children in another day, and now I have until Monday to get back to something akin to normal. I must have looked my mood when I came in, for poor old mammy had brought me hot toast and tea and delicious peach jam. I received it with gratitude, but when she began the recital of that well-known story in which she stood and received my great aunt’s false teeth in her last hour, when she launched into my great uncle’s handing them to her with the words, “Give these into the hands of this faithful servant,” I leaped up so abruptly that I frightened her. I wonder if I really meant to pitch the dear, faithful old soul out the window? I am developing temperament, or is it temper? Perhaps it is all due to the outside world. The snow sifts bleakly from a bleak sky. What am I to do with these walled-round-by-winter days? What am I to do with this woman whose outward appearance is mine? She terrifies me. For thirty years I’ve tended my little garden plot of life in placid content; cheerfully I’ve hoed my bean and cabbage rows. Now I want to dynamite these homely plants. Where the cabbages stand in rows I want red roses; I can’t abide beans a minute longer, and in their stead I would like purple orchids. And there’s something else I want: I want to cry and cry on a broad man shoulder—not John’s shoulder. Half timidly I glance over my own shoulder as I write it. My own mother never kissed my father until after they were married, and my grandmother all her life long dressed and undressed behind the shelter of the door of the great wardrobe that is here in my room this very minute, but no reproachful ghosts are gazing at me. And if all the spinsters in this broad land with their battle cry of freedom and suffrage (I’ve got freedom and I’m willing for suffrage) had had the sort of day I’ve had with the children—it’s been a wild beast of a day and its sharp claws have drawn blood—when twilight came they would do just what I am doing now. They would whisper into the firelit gloom which invites reckless confidences, as I am whispering, “Eve, Eve, you want your Paradise, don’t you?” I do solemnly believe that soon or late this moment comes to every woman; I do solemnly believe that she can no more escape this dominant reaching out of her heart, this dominant yearning for that other one in the world of two outside of which the rest of humanity is excluded. Since when have you believed this, Caroline Howard? Honest now. Face Dicky’s letter—aren’t you the daughter of a soldier?

This time it’s a big, blond young German—a baron. A slight accident to his hand brought about the acquaintance. Always, Dicky “did” his hand for him. The acquaintance progressed to the point that he knew her afternoon off. “Of course,” Dicky writes, “it flattered me to find him waiting outside the hospital—and with a taxi.”

It seems they had the gayest of drives, but when they turned in at the Pennsylvania Station Dicky demanded the meaning of it. The baron was ready with an answer. He told her that they were going away to an ideal life where they would always be together and always alone. Dicky objected. Her protest was smothered in the depths of the baron’s hat, flung quick as magic over her face.

“How I ever emerged from the embrace of that hat with a smiling face I don’t know. I must thank a year’s training at the hospital for that. I came out game—cool on the outside, at any rate. I said: ‘We can’t go away together without baggage—think of the scandal of it.’ From the depths of the cab he produced a big black bag. But I said, ‘That won’t help me.’ It didn’t work. He said in Washington we would buy enough clothes to last me forever. I fell in gayly with his plans. Inside the station he bought tickets to Washington. I tried to get near the ticket window, but he flanked the move. There seemed to be no people in the station. The few that were there were miles apart in isolated little groups. Just before our train was called, standing together as alone as if we were already on the desert to which he said we would go when we left Washington, a stream of incoming people surged up from the left wing of the station. I felt sure one of the men was Bobby Haralson—he or his double. I asked the baron to let me say good-bye to an old friend, as we were never coming back. He agreed.

“‘Aren’t you Mr. Haralson?’ I gasped. ‘If you are, don’t you remember the little gypsy girl who answered your ad?’

“‘Sure Mike, I do,’ he said, and swung his bag into his left hand and gave me a hearty right hand. My face must have shown that something was wrong, for he drew me out of the crowd, put down his travelling bag, and asked me, oh, so quietly, what was wrong. His quiet manner calmed me. As briefly as I could I told him. He grasped the situation in a lightning-like flash. ‘Go back to him,’ he said. ‘Keep cool. I’m on to the job.’ Had I been on to my job I’d never have got in that cab. The morning paper says he’s a baron all right. It says he’s a lunatic all right, too. And he has been sent to a private asylum.

“He took his arrest quietly. It was so unexpected it dazed him. I was so limp after it was all over that Bobby Haralson took me over to the Waldorf and made me drink a milk punch. Then he brought me home. We had a heavenly time, and I promised not to be naughty again.

“At the door, he didn’t come in; he said good-bye with that smile that lights and warms up his face—you remember I told you how reticent and sort of impersonal he is—and he said next time I wanted an adventure just send out a wireless and he would answer. I didn’t tell him about you, Caroline. You have tried so hard to make a hoyden into a lady that I did not reveal my identity.”

_December 8th._

What an odd, spoiled Bobby! I have a letter from him. Last fall—the afternoon I went to town and came back with the ill-fated gown—I sent him the picture. The P. M. (Particularly Mean) letter was the little note that demanded its return after we failed to meet in our promenade down in our yard. Bobby expects an answer by return mail—it is in every confident line of his letter. Mr. Robert Haralson, spoiled darling of your town, once an old lady of my acquaintance sent her husband across the mountain to get some “camfire” for her. The gum was dissolved in whiskey. He drank it and was very sick. I was present when, convalescent, he humbly asked for chicken soup. The old lady, with uplifted forefinger said, “Nary a chicken will ye git.”

See, Mr. Robert Haralson? as you New Yorkers say.

Bobby’s confident letter says:

As I write, at my left hand is a basket of letters. I have just taken from the basket the last nice one you wrote me and the awfully mean one you wrote afterward. The others run back a month or two and none are answered yet. My right arm is resting on a cushion, and I am writing with three fingers.

I have been away. In my accumulated mail there were a couple of letters from you, and the photo you sent in the lot. The next morning after I got back I had to send for a doctor. I had got a knock on my blamed old elbow and she swelled up as big as a prize beet at the Roseboro County Fair.

Well, old doc said it was cellulitis, which didn’t sound very reassuring. It comes from having the cellular tissues hurt. And every day he done that arm up in plaster and eight miles of bandages. And three or four times he brung along his knives and lancets and was going to carving at it, but I wouldn’t let him. I haven’t been able to write any more than a rabbit. I’m getting so I can use a small quantity of my fingers now, and this is the first answer to any letter in the basket.

And that is why I haven’t written to thank you for the photo, which I appreciate highly, and shall not return as you suggest in your P. M. (Particularly Mean) letter. What’s the matter with it? It looks all right to me. I can’t suggest any improvement in it. It has lots of your old expression in it, and although the fool photographer did all he could to spoil it by making you turn your head as if you were looking to see if your dress was buttoned all down the back, it’s a ripping nice picture, and you needn’t want to be “any better to look at than the picture.” (Can’t you say the mean things when you want to!)

Now, I wish you’d behave, and take your finger out of your mouth and stand right there—turn your toes out—and say you are sorry.

Lemme see!—there was another dig—oh, yes—if I “had been a pauper or a millionaire.”

You bet I’m a pauper now, Miss Carrie. Blowed all my money in on my trip, and ain’t made any to speak of since except what doc would carry away with him every day.

Getting along all right again, though, now. How’s your writing coming on?

Now will you shake hands again, although it’s my left one this time?

Yours as ever, R. H.

_December 20th._

I have another letter from Bobby. And I didn’t answer his last letter. As I read it a wicked little joy steals in on me and grows and _grows_.

_New York, December 18th._

MY DEAR MISS CARRIE:

Now get mad if you want to, but couldn’t you agree to let somebody call you that? (Bobby has scratched out the “Miss.”) That’s the way I think of you, and if you insist on being called by your golf and automobile name of Carrie, why, tear up this letter and throw it out the kitchen window over the cliff.

Why didn’t you answer my last letter? Rowing on the lake, I suppose, with the gent that comes to see you. I hope the lake will freeze. And I hope the gent—won’t freeze. So, there!

I am looking over your last letter to-night, and it’s like the breath of a spring wind through a laurel thicket. I’m going to take it page by page and answer it.

The first page contains a quotation from a letter to you from an insect known as a “literary agent.” Dear Carrie, listen to the chirp of the crickets on the mountain, but don’t pay any attention to the noise of that tribe. I am fortunate enough not to know this particular duffer that has written such “piffle” (as they say in Chicago), but I’ve heard about him—and you cut him out. He’s an insufferable, measly kid, at the Sweet Caporal cigarette age, and his graft is to stuff you provincial writers (I’m speaking impersonally now) with his taffy so he can get your stuff to peddle around. Don’t you believe his trick; and you quit sending him your stuff. He’s trying to make you think you’ve got George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward beat to a batter, when you know yourself it ain’t so. Isn’t that a sage, oh, what a wonderfully sage remark when he says “you must write your best!”

Don’t you believe “that the editors are asking about you constantly, and are more than anxious to see your work.” It’s not so.

Now get mad again, and when that old-time smile comes back, read on further.

Mein Gott! what a recollection you have of me! “A tall, slender lad with nice eyes—awfully quiet, and——Oh, I’ll admit the exceedingly fond.” Was it a mystery why? Well, I dunno, except because you were so sweet and devilish.

To-day I am as slender as anybody five feet eight and weighing 175 pounds could be, and I’ve sharp, mean eyes. (I told Bobby that he had nice eyes because I couldn’t remember the colour.) I’ve been taken for a detective lots of times, but I haven’t changed so much inside, and if you were on the twentieth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria to-night, and had a string long enough, I’ll bet I’d have a magnolia or two and a box of candy to tie to the end of it.

You speak of meeting old Tom in your letter. Well, just a few days afterward I got a letter from him talking about old days. Said he’d been in New York often and might be back. Lordy! I’d like to see him again. (Back in the old days at Roseboro Tom was one of the whistlers under my window the night I got the magnolias.)

Well, now, Carrie, what do _you_ care if Tom pays attention to somebody and likes her? Ain’t that the only thing there is that’s worth two cents? Doesn’t the gentleman that takes you out driving and boat riding ever—ever—talk about how nice the moon looks? Oh, Carrie, never get so you feel like running down such foolishness. After everything is added and subtracted, _that_ is the only remainder.

On the next page I find the very wise remark of your friend Miss Baxter (whom I would be glad to consider mine—I mean mein freund!) that you can’t write a love story because you know nothing about it. Miss Baxter is altogether wrong but none the less charming. That led me to inclose you a little story of mine—a thing that is apparently egotistical to do—that settles the question beyond all controversy. Read it some time when you are up in the arbour about twilight when they are calling you to supper—but don’t go.

On page three of your letter I observe a reference to your picture. Sure, Mike! I asked you for your picture. And I’ve got it, ain’t I? I’d like to see you get it back!