The Happy End
by
Joseph Hergesheimer
Part 4 out of 5
"If you'll get along," the former told him, "I can make a living till
you come back. We can do without any Truebner money. I'm not a lot at
German, but I guess you can understand me," she again addressed August.
"Not that I blame you for the change, such as it is."
"I'll have to go with her," Morice unhappily declared.
August Turnbull's face was stiff with congestion. The figures before
him wavered in a sort of fog. He put out a hand, supporting himself on
the back of his chair.
"Get out of my house," he repeated in a hoarse whisper.
Fortunately Morice's leave had come to an end, and Rosalie and he
withdrew in at least the semblance of a normal departure. August's rage
changed to an indignant surprise, and he established himself with a
rigid dignity on the veranda. There, happening on a cigar that burned
badly, he was reduced to a state of further self-commiseration. That
is, he dwelt on the general deterioration of the world about him. There
was no discipline; there was no respect; authority was laughed at. All
this was the result of laxness, of the sentimentality he condemned; a
firmer hand was needed everywhere.
He turned with relief to the contemplation of Meta Beggs; she was
enormously satisfactory to consider. August watched her now with the
greatest interest; he even sat in his wife's room while her companion
moved silently and gracefully about. Miss Beggs couldn't have noticed
this, for scarcely ever did her gaze meet his; she had a habit of
standing lost in thought, her slimness a little drooping, as if she
were weary or depressed. She was in his mind continually--Miss Beggs
and Emmy, his wife.
The latter had a surprising power to disturb him; lately he had even
dreamed of her starving to death in the presence of abundant food. He
began to be superstitious about it, to think of her in a ridiculous
nervous manner as an evil design on his peace and security. She seemed
unnatural with her shrunken face bowed opposite him at the table. His
feeling for her shifted subconsciously to hatred. It broke out publicly
in sardonic or angry periods under which she would shrink away,
incredibly timid, from his scorn. This quality of utter helplessness
gave the menace he divined in her its illusive air of unreality. She
seemed--she was--entirely helpless; a prematurely aged woman, of the
mildest instincts, dying of malnutrition.
Miss Beggs now merged into all his daily life, his very fiber. He
regarded her in an attitude of admirable frankness. "Still it is
extraordinary you haven't married."
The tide was out, it was late afternoon, and they were walking over the
hard exposed sand. Whenever she came on a shell she crushed it with a
sharp heel.
"There were some," she replied indifferently.
He nodded gravely. "It would have to be a special kind of man," he
agreed. "An ordinary individual would be crushed by your personality.
You'd need a firm hand."
Her face was inscrutable. "I have always had the misfortune to be too
late," she told him.
"I wish I had known you sooner!" he exclaimed.
Her arms, in transparent sleeves, were like marble. His words
crystallized an overwhelming realization of how exactly she was suited
to him. The desire to shut her will in his hand increased a
thousandfold.
"Yes," she said, "I would have married you. But there's no good
discussing it." She breathed deeply with a sinking forward of her
rounded shoulders. All her vigor seemed to have left her. "I have been
worried about Mrs. Turnbull lately," she went on. "Perhaps it's my
imagination--does she look weaker to you?"
"I haven't noticed," he answered brusquely.
Curiously he had never thought of Emmy as dying; she appeared eternal,
without the possibility of offering him the relief of such freedom as
yet remained. Freedom for--for Meta Beggs.
"The doctor was at the cottage again Thursday," she informed him. "I
didn't hear what he said."
"Humbugs," August Turnbull pronounced.
A sudden caution invaded him. It would be well not to implicate himself
too far with his wife's companion. She was a far shrewder woman than
was common; there was such a thing as blackmail. He studied her
privately. Damn it, what a pen he had been caught in! Her manner, too,
changed immediately, as though she had read his feeling.
"I shall have to go back."
She spoke coldly. A moment before she had been close beside him, but
now she might as well have been miles away.
V
The fuse of the electric light in the dining room burned out, and
dinner proceeded with only the illumination of the silk-hooded candles.
In the subdued glow Meta Beggs was infinitely attractive. His wife's
place was empty. Miss Beggs had brought apologetic word from Emmy that
she felt too weak to leave her room. A greater degree of comfort
possessed August Turnbull than he had experienced for months. With no
one at the table but the slim woman on the left and himself a positive
geniality radiated from him. He pressed her to have more champagne--he
had ordered that since she preferred it to Rhine wine--urged more
duckling, and ordered the butler to leave the brandy decanter before
them.
She laughed--a rare occurrence--and imitated, for his intense
amusement, Mrs. Frederick Rathe's extreme cutting social manner. He
drank more than he intended, and when he rose his legs were insecure.
He made his way toward Meta Beggs. She stood motionless, her thin lips
like a thread of blood on her tense face.
"What a wife you'd make!" he muttered.
There was a discreet cough at his back, and swinging about he saw a
maid in a white starched cap and high cuffs.
"Excuse me, sir," she said; "Mrs. Turnbull wants to know would you
please come up to her room."
He swayed slightly, glowering at her with a hot face in which a vein
throbbed persistently at his temple. Miss Beggs had disappeared.
"Very well," he agreed heavily.
Mounting the stairs he fumbled for his cigar case, and entered the
chamber beyond his, clipping the end from a superlative perfecto.
Emmy was in bed, propped up on a bank of embroidered pillows. A light
from one side threw the shadow of her head on a wall in an animated
caricature of life.
"I didn't want to disturb you, August."
Her voice was weak and apologetic. He stood irritably beside her.
"It's hot in here." His wife at once detected whatever assaulted his
complete comfort. She fell into a silence that strained his patience to
the utmost.
When at last she spoke it was in a tone of voice he had never heard
from her--impersonal, with at the same time a note of fear like the
flutter of a bird's wing.
"The doctor has been here two or three times lately. I didn't want to
bother you, and he said----"
She broke off, and her hand raised from her side in a gesture of
seeking. He held it uncomfortably, wishing that the occasion would
speedily end.
"August, I've--I've got to leave you."
He did not comprehend her meaning, and stood stupidly looking down at
her spent face. "I'm going to die, August, almost any time now. I
wanted to tell you first when we were quietly together; and then Louise
and Bernard must know."
His sensations were so confused, the mere shock of such an announcement
had so confounded him that he was unable to penetrate the meaning of
the sudden expansion of his blood. His attention strayed from the
actuality of his wife to the immaterial shadow wavering on the wall.
There Emmy's profile, grotesquely enlarged and sharpened, grimaced at
him. August Turnbull's feelings disentangled and grew clearer, there
was a conventional memory of his wife as a young woman, the infinitely
sharper realization that soon he must be free, a vision of Meta Beggs
as she had been at dinner that night, and intense relief from nameless
strain.
He moved through the atmosphere of suspense that followed the knowledge
of Emmy's condition with a feeling of being entirely apart from his
family. Out of the chaos of his emotions the sense of release was most
insistent. Naturally he couldn't share it with any one else, not at
present. He avoided thinking directly of Meta Beggs, partly from the
shreds of the superstitious dread that had once colored his attitude
toward his wife and partly from the necessity to control what otherwise
would sweep him into a resistless torrent. However, most of his
impatience had vanished--a little while now, and in a discreet manner
he could grasp all that he had believed so hopelessly removed.
Except for the occasions of Louise's informal presence he dined alone
with Miss Beggs. They were largely silent, attacking their plates with
complete satisfaction. On the day of her monthly payment he drew the
check for a thousand dollars in place of the stipulated hundred, and
gave it to her without comment. She nodded, managing to convey entire
understanding and acceptance of what it forecast. Once, at the table,
he called her Meta.
She deliberated a reply--he had asked her opinion about British bottled
sauces--but when she answered she called him Mr. Turnbull. This, too,
pleased him. She had an unerring judgment in the small affairs of
deference. Dinner had been better than usual, and he realized he had
eaten too much. His throat felt constricted, he had difficulty in
swallowing a final gulp of coffee; the heavy odors of the dining room
almost sickened him.
"We'll get out on the beach," he said abruptly; "a little air."
They proceeded past the unremitting sprinklers on the strip of lawn to
the wide gray sweep of sand. At that hour no one else was visible, and
a new recklessness invaded his discomfort. "You see," he told her,
"that bad luck of yours isn't going to hold."
"It seems incredible," she murmured. She added without an appearance of
the least ulterior thought: "Mrs. August Turnbull."
"Exactly," he asserted.
A triumphant conviction of pleasure to come surged through him like a
subtle exhilarating cordial.
"I'll take no nonsensical airs from Louise or the Rathes," he
proclaimed.
"Don't let that worry you," she answered serenely.
He saw that it need not, and looked forward appreciatively to a scene
in which Meta would not come off second.
Above them the long curve of the boardwalk was empty, with, behind it,
the suave ornamental roofs of the cottages. A wind quartering from the
shore had smoothed the ocean into the semblance of a limitless and
placid lake. Minute waves ruffled along the beach with a continuous
whispering, and the vault of the west, from which the sun had just
withdrawn, was filled with light the color of sauterne wine.
It was inconceivable to August Turnbull that soon Emmy would be gone
out of his life. He shook his thick shoulders as if by a gesture to
unburden himself of her unpleasant responsibility. He smiled slightly
at the memory of how he had come to fear her. It had been the result of
the strain he was under; once more the vision of mountainous bread and
Emmy returned. The devil was in the woman!
"What are you smiling at?" Meta asked.
"Perhaps it was because my luck, as well, has changed," he admitted.
She came close up to him, quivering with emotion.
"I want everything!" she cried in a vibrant hunger; "everything! Do you
understand? Are you willing? I'm starved as much as that woman up in
her bed. Can you give me all the gayety, all the silks and emeralds
there are in the world?"
He patted her shoulder. "You'll look like a Christmas tree. When this
damned war is over we will go to Europe, to Berlin and Munich. They
have the finest streets and theaters and cafes in the world. There
things are run by men for men. The food is the best of all--no French
fripperies, but solid rare cuts. Drinking is an art----"
"What is that out in the water?" she idly demanded.
He gazed impatiently over the unscored tide and saw a dark
infinitesimal blot.
"I have been watching it for a long while," she continued. "It's coming
closer, I think."
He again took up his planning.
"We'll stay two or three years; till things get on their feet here.
Turn the bakery into a company. No work, nothing but parties."
"Do look!" she repeated. "It's coming in--a little boat. I suppose it
is empty."
The blot was now near enough for him to distinguish its outline. As
Meta said, no one was visible. It was drifting. Against his wish his
gaze fastened on the approaching boat. It hesitated, appeared to swing
away, and then resumed the progress inshore.
"I believe it will float into that cut in the beach below," he told
her.
His attention was divided between the craft and the image of all the
pleasures he would introduce to Meta--Turnbull. It was a lucky
circumstance that he had plenty of money, for he realized that she
would not marry a poor man. This was not only natural but commendable.
Poor men were fools, too weak for success; only the strong ate white
bread and had fine women, only the masterful conquered circumstance.
"Come," she said, catching his hand; "it's almost here."
She half pulled him over the glistening wet sand to where the deeper
water thrust into the beach. Her interest was now fully communicated to
him.
"We must drag it safely up," he articulated, out of breath from her
eagerness. The bow swept into the onward current, it moved more
swiftly, and then sluggishly settled against the bottom. Painted on its
blistering white side was a name, "_Veronica_," and "Ten persons."
There was a slight movement at the rail, and a sharp unreasoning horror
gripped August Turnbull.
"Something in it," he muttered. He wanted to turn away, to run from the
beach; but a stronger curiosity dragged him forward. Not conscious of
stepping through shallow water he advanced.
A hunger-ravished dead face was turned to him from the bottom, a huddle
of bony joints, dried hands. There were others--all dead, starved. In a
red glimmer he saw the incredible travesty of a child, a lead-colored
woman, shriveled and ageless from agony.
He fell back with a choking cry, "Emmy!"
There was a dull uproar in his head, and then a violent shock at the
back of his brain. August Turnbull's body slid down into the tranquil
ripples that ran along the boat's side.
ROSEMARY ROSELLE
It would be better for my purpose if you could hear the little clear
arpeggios of an obsolete music box, the notes as sweet as barley sugar;
for then the mood of Rosemary Roselle might steal imperceptibly into
your heart. It is made of daguerreotypes blurring on their misted
silver; tenebrous lithographs--solemn facades of brick with classic
white lanterns lifted against the inky smoke of a burning city; the
pages of a lady's book, elegant engravings of hooped and gallooned
females; and the scent of crumbled flowers.
Such intangible sources must of necessity be fragile--a perfume linked
to a thin chime, elusive faces on the shadowy mirror of the past,
memories of things not seen but felt in poignant unfathomable emotions.
This is a magic different from that of to-day; here perhaps are only
some wistful ghosts brought back among contemptuous realities--a man in
a faded blue uniform with a face drawn by suffering long ended, a girl
whose charm, like the flowers, is dust.
It is all as remote as a smile remembered from youth. Such apparent
trifles often hold a steadfast loveliness more enduring than the
greatest tragedies and successes. They are irradiated by an
imperishable romance: this is my desire--to hold out an immaterial
glamour, a vapor, delicately colored by old days in which you may
discover the romantic and amiable shapes of secret dreams.
I
It will serve us best to see Elim Meikeljohn first as he walked across
Winthrop Common. It was very early in April and should have been cool,
but it was warm--already there were some vermilion buds on the maples--
and Elim's worn shad-belly coat was uncomfortably heavy. The coat was
too big for him--his father had worn it for twenty years before he had
given it to Elim for college--and it hung in somber greenish folds
about his tall spare body. He carried an equally oppressive black stiff
hat in a bony hand and exposed a gaunt serious countenance.
Other young men passing, vaulting lightly over the wooden rail that
enclosed the common, wore flowing whiskers, crisply black or brown like
a tobacco leaf; their luxuriant waistcoats were draped with a profusion
of chains and seals; but Elim's face was austerely shaved, he wore
neither brocade nor gold, and he kept seriously to the path.
He was, even more than usual, absorbed in a semi-gloom of thought. It
was his birthday, he was twenty-six, and he had been married more than
nine years. Already, with his inherited dark temperament, he was
middle-aged in situation and feeling. He had been assistant to the
professor of philosophy and letters for three of those married years;
yes--he had been graduated when he was twenty-three. He arrived at an
entrance to the common that faced the row of houses where he had his
room, and saw that something unusual was in progress.
The front of his boarding house was literally covered with young men:
they hung over the small portico from steps to ridge, they bulged from
every window and sat astride of the dormer windows in the roof. Before
them on the street a camera had been set up and was covered, all save
the snout, by a black rubber cloth, backward from which projected the
body and limbs of the photographer.
The latter, Elim realized, was one of a traveling band that took
pictures of whatever, on their way, promised sufficient pecuniary
return. Here the operator had been in luck--he would sell at least
thirty photographs at perhaps fifty cents each. Harry Kaperton, a great
swell, was in his window with his setter, Spot; his legs, clad in bags
with tremendous checks and glossy boots, hung outward. On the veranda
were Hinkle and Ben Willing, the latter in a stovepipe hat; others wore
stovepipes set at a rakish angle on one ear. They were all
irrepressibly gay, calling from roof to ground, each begging the
photographer to focus on his own particular charm.
Perhaps fifty cents--Elim Meikeljohn would have liked a place in the
picture; he would like to possess one, to keep it as a memento of the
youthful life that flowed constantly about him, but the probable cost
was prohibitive. He even wished, as he paused before making his way up
the crowded veranda steps, that some one would ask him to stay and have
his picture taken with the rest. He delayed, hoping for the mere
formality of this friendliness. But it was not forthcoming. He had felt
that it wouldn't be; he had divined the careless silence with which the
men moved aside for him to mount. There was even a muttered allusion to
his famous Scotch thrift, contained in a sharper word. Elim didn't
mind--actively. He had been accustomed to the utmost monetary caution
since the first dawn of his consciousness. He had come to regard the
careful weighing of pennies as an integral part of his being. It had
always been necessary for the Meikeljohns, father and son, on their
rocky pastures. He didn't mind, but at the same time he bore a faint
resentment at the injustice of the marked and perceptible disdain of
the majority of his fellows.
They didn't understand, he told himself, still ascending to his room in
the third floor back. Every cent that he could squeeze from his small
salary must go back to the support of the invalid, his wife. He had
never, of course, explained this to any one in Cambridge. They wouldn't
be particularly interested and, in addition, his daily companions
seemed far too young for such serious confidences. In reality Harry
Kaperton was three years older than Elim; and Kaperton had been
pleasantly at college, racing horses, for seven years; many others were
Elim's age, but the maturity of the latter's responsibility separated
them.
In his room he took off his formal coat and nankeen waistcoat and hung
them on a pegged board. The room was bare, with two uncurtained windows
that afforded a glimpse of the shining river; it contained a small air-
tight stove, now cold and black, and a wood box, a narrow bed, a deal
table with a row of worn text-books and neatly folded papers, a stand
for water pitcher and basin, and two split-hickory Windsor chairs. Now
it was filled with an afternoon glow, like powdered gold, and the
querulously sweet piping of an early robin.
He dipped his face and hands in cooling water and, at the table, with
squared elbows, addressed himself to a set task.
II
Elim Meikeljohn laid before him a small docket of foolscap folded
lengthwise, each section separately indorsed in pale flowery ink, with
a feminine name, a class number and date. They were the weekly themes
of a polite Young Ladies' Academy in Richmond, sent regularly north for
the impressive opinion of a member of Elim's college faculty. The
professor of philosophy and letters had undertaken the task primarily;
but, with the multiplication of his duties, he had turned the essays
over to Elim, whose careful judgments had been sufficiently imposing to
secure for him a slight additional income.
He sat for a moment regarding the papers with a frown; then, with a
sudden movement, he went over the names that headed each paper. Two he
laid aside. They bore above their dates in March, eighteen sixty-one,
the name Rosemary Roselle.
He picked one up tentatively. It was called A Letter. Elim opened it
and regarded its tenuous violet script. Then, with an expression of
augmented determination, he folded it again and placed it with its
fellow at the bottom of the heap. He firmly attacked the topmost theme.
He read it slowly, made a penciled note in a small precise hand on its
margin, folded it once more and marked it with a C minus. He went
carefully through the pile, jotting occasional comments, judging the
results with A, B or C, plus or minus. Finally only the two he had
placed at the bottom remained.
Elim took one up again, gazing at it severely. He wondered what
Rosemary Roselle had written about--in her absurd English--this time.
As he looked at the theme's exterior, his attention shifted from the
paper to himself, his conscience towered darkly above him, demanding a
condemnatory examination of his feelings and impulses.
Had he not begun to look for, to desire, those essays from a doubtless
erroneous and light young woman? Had he not even, on a former like
occasion, awarded her effort with a B minus, when it was questionable
if she should have had a C plus? Had his conduct not been dishonest,
frivolous and wholly reprehensible? To all these inexorable accusations
he was forced to confess himself guilty. He had undoubtedly, only a few
minutes before, looked almost impatiently for something from Rosemary
Roselle. Beyond cavil she should have had an unadorned C last month.
And these easily proved him a broken reed.
He must at once take himself in hand, flames were reaching hungrily for
him from the pit of eternal torment. In a little more he would be
damned beyond any redemption. He was married ... shame! His thoughts
turned to Hester, his wife for nine and more years.
Her father's farm lay next to the Meikeljohns'; the two places formed
practically one convenient whole; and when Elim had been no more than a
child, Meikeljohn Senior and Hester's parents had solemnly agreed upon
a mutually satisfactory marriage. Hester had always been a thin pale
slip of a girl, locally famous for her memory and grasp of the
Scriptures; but it was only at her fourteenth year that her health
began perceptibly to fail, at the same time that a succession of
material mischances overwhelmed her family. Finally, borne down to
actual privation, her father decided to remove to another section and
opportunity. He sold his place for a fraction more than the elder
Meikeljohn could pay ... but there was Hester, now an invalid; and
there was the agreement that Meikeljohn had made when it had seemed to
his advantage. The latter was a rigidly upright man--he accepted for
his son the responsibility he himself had assumed, and Hester was left
behind. Space in the Meikeljohn household was valuable, the invalid
presented many practical difficulties, and, with the solemn concurrence
of the elders of their church, Elim--something short of seventeen but a
grave mature-seeming boy--and Hester were married.
The winter of his marriage Elim departed for college--his father was a
just man, who had felt obscurely that some reparation was due Elim;
education was the greatest privilege of which Meikeljohn could
conceive, so, at sacrifices that all grimly accepted, Elim was sent to
Cambridge. There, when he had been graduated, he remained--there were
already more at the Meikeljohn home than their labor warranted--
assistant to the professor of philosophy and letters.
Elim again opened the paper before him and spread it severely on the
table. The supposititious letter, "Two, Linden Row," opened in proper
form and spelling, addressed to "Dearest Elizabeth." Its progress,
however, soon wabbled, its periods degenerated into a confusion. It
endeavored to be casual, easy, but he judged it merely trivial. At one
paragraph, despite his resolution of critical impersonality, his
interest deepened:
"On Thursday we have to have ready a Theme to send off to Harvard. Of
course, every Thursday morning We, with one accord, begin to make
excuses. Well, the Dread Day rolls around to-morrow, and consequently I
am deep in the Slough of Despond. My only consolation is that our
Geniuses can't write regularly, but then the mood to write never
possesses me.... This week, in writing a comparison between Hamlet and
Antonio, I did succeed in jotting down something, but unfortunately I
found that I had said the same many times before, only about different
heroes. My tale of Woe----"
Elim once more took himself firmly in hand; he folded the paper and
sharply indorsed it with a C minus. Afterward he felt decidedly
uncomfortable. He wondered if Rosemary Roselle would be made unhappy by
the low marking? Probably she wouldn't care; probably all that occupied
her mind were dress and company. Possibly she danced--light, godless.
The haze within deepened; he could see through the window the tops of
the maples--they held a green sheen as if in promise of the leaves to
follow. The robin whistled faint and clear.
Possibly she danced. Carried away on the gracious flood of the
afternoon, he wondered what Rosemary Roselle looked like. He was
certain that she was pretty--her writing had the unconscious assurance
of a personable being. Well, he would never know.... Rosemary Roselle--
the name had a trick of hanging in the memory; it was astonishingly
easy to repeat. He tried it aloud, speaking with a sudden emphasis that
startled him. The name came back to him from the bare walls of his room
like an appeal. Something within him stirred sharp as a knife. He rose
with a deep breath, confused, as if some one else, unseen, had
unexpectedly spoken.
III
His conscience, stirring again, projected the image of Hester, with her
pinched glistening countenance, on his conjecturing. He resolutely
addressed himself to the judgment of Rosemary Roselle's second paper,
his lighter thoughts drowned in the ascending dark tide of his
temperament It was called Our Waitress, and an instant antagonism for
the entire South and its people swept over him.
He saw that the essay's subject was a negro, a slave; and all his
impassioned detestation of the latter term possessed him. The essence
of the Meikeljohns was a necessity for freedom, an almost bitter pride
in the independence of their bodies. Their souls they held to be under
the domination of a relentless Omnipotence, evolved, it might have
been, from the obdurate and resplendent granite masses of the highland
where they had first survived. These qualities gave to Elim
Meikeljohn's political enmity for the South a fervor closely resembling
fanaticism. Even now when, following South Carolina, six other states
had seceded, he did not believe that war would ensue; he believed that
slavery would be abolished at a lesser price; but he was a supporter of
drastic means for its suppression. His Christianity, if it held a book
in one hand, grasped a sword in the other, a sword with a bright and
unsparing blade for the wrong-doer.
He consciously centered this antagonism on Rosemary Roselle; he
visualized her as a thoughtless and capricious female, idling in vain
luxury, cutting with a hard voice at helpless and enslaved human
beings. He condemned his former looseness of being, his playing with
insidious and destructive forces. A phrase, "Babylonish women," crept
into his mind from some old yellow page. He read:
"Indy is a large light mulatto, very neat and very slow. She has not
much Sense, but a great deal of Sensibility. Helping her proves Fatal.
The more that is done for her the less well does she work.... Indy is
very unfortunate: going out with a present of money she lost every
penny. Of course she was incapable of work until the sum was replaced."
Elim paused with an impatient snort at this exhibition of
shiftlessness. If the negroes were not soon freed they would be ruined
beyond redemption. He read the remainder of the paper rigid and
unapproving. It gave, he considered, such an excellent picture of
Southern iniquities that he marked it B plus, the highest rating his
responsibility had allowed Rosemary Roselle. Now he was certain that
her very name held a dangerous potentiality--it came too easily to the
tongue; it had a wanton sound like a silk skirt.
The warm glow faded from the room; without, the tenuous and bare upper
branches of the maples wavered in the oncoming dusk. The river had
disappeared. Elim was acutely conscious of the approaching hour of
supper; and in preparation to go out to it he donned again the nankeen
waistcoat and solemn garment that had served his father so long and so
well.
IV
The following day was almost hot; at its decline coming across Winthrop
Common Elim was oppressed and weary. Nothing unusual was happening at
the boarding house; a small customary group was seated on the veranda
steps, and he joined it. The conversation hung exclusively to the
growing tension between North and South, to the forming of a
Confederate States of America in February, the scattered condition of
the Union forces, the probable fate of the forts in Charleston harbor.
The men spoke, according to their dispositions, with the fiery emphasis
or gravity common to great crises. The air was charged with a sense of
imminence, the vague discomfort of pending catastrophe. Elim listened
without comment, his eyes narrowed, his long countenance severe. Most
of the men had gone into Boston, to the Parker House, where hourly
bulletins were being posted. Those on the steps rose to follow, all
except Elim Meikeljohn--in Boston he knew money would be spent.
He went within, stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived
letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's
painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the
letter. Its beginning was commonplace--"My dear son, Elim"--but what
followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained:
Hester, his wife, was dead.
At first he was unable to comprehend the details of what had happened
to him; the fact itself was of such disturbing significance. He had
never considered the possibility of Hester's dying; he had come to
think of her as a lifelong responsibility. She had seemed, in her
invalid's chair, withdrawn from the pressure of life as it bore upon
others, more enduring than his father's haggard concern over the
increasing difficulties of material existence and spiritual salvation,
than his mother's flushed toiling.
Elim had lived with no horizon wider than the impoverished daily
necessity; he had accepted this with mingled fatality and fortitude;
any rebellion had been immediately suppressed as a wicked reflection
upon Deity. His life had been ordered in this course; he had accepted
it the more readily from his inherited distrust of worldly values and
aspirations; it had, in short, been he, and now the foundations of his
entire existence had been overthrown.
He read the letter more carefully, realizing the probable necessity of
his immediate return home for the funeral. But that was dispelled--his
father wrote that it had been necessary to bury Hester at once. The
elder Meikeljohn proceeded relentlessly to an exact exposition of why
this had been done. "A black swelling" was included in the details. He
finished:
"And if it would be inconvenient for you to leave your work at this
time it is not necessary for you to come here. In some ways it would be
better for you to stay. There is little enough for you to do and it
would stop your money at college.... The Lord is a swift and terrible
Being Who worketh His will in the night."
Hester was dead. Elim involuntarily walked to a window, gazing with
unseeing eyes at the familiar pleasant prospect. A realization flashed
unbidden through his mind, a realization like a stab of lightning--he
was free. He overbore it immediately, but it left within him a strange
tingling sensation. He directed his mind upon Hester and the profitable
contemplation of death; but rebellion sprang up within him, thoughts
beyond control whirled in his brain.
Free! A hundred impulses, desires, of which--suppressed by his rigid
adherence to a code of duty--he had not been conscious, leaped into
vitality. His vision of life swung from its focus upon outward and
invisible things to a new surprising regard of his own tangible self.
He grew aware of himself as an entity, of the world as a broad and
various field of exploit and discovery.
There was, his father had bluntly indicated, no place for him at home;
and suddenly he realized that his duties at college had been a tedious
grind for inconsiderable return. This admission brought to him the
realization that he detested the whole thing--the hours in class; the
droning negligent recitations of the men; the professor of philosophy
and letters' pedantic display; the cramped academic spirit of the
institution. The vague resentment he had felt at the half-concealed
disdain of his fellows gave place to a fiery contempt for their
majority; the covert humility he had been forced to assume--by the
thought of Hester and the few miserable dollars of an inferior
position--turned to a bitter freedom of opinion.
The hour for supper approached and passed, but Elim did not leave his
room. He walked from wall to wall, by turns arrogant and lost in his
new situation. Of one thing he was certain--he would give up his
occupation here. It might do for some sniveling sycophant of learning
and money, but he was going forth to--what?
He heard footfalls in the bare hall below, and a sudden easy desire for
companionship seized him; he drew on the sturdy Meikeljohn coat and
descended the stairs to the lower floor. Harry Kaperton's door was open
and Elim saw the other moving within. He advanced, leaning in the
doorway.
"Back early," Elim remarked. "What's new at Parker's?"
Kaperton was unsuccessful in hiding his surprise at the other's
unexpected appearance and direct question. "Why--why, nothing when I
left;" then more cordially: "Come in, find a chair. Bottle on the
table--oh, I didn't think." He offered an implied apology to Elim's
scruples.
But Elim advanced to the table, where, selecting a decanter at random,
he poured out a considerable drink of pale spirits. Harry Kaperton
looked at him in foolish surprise.
"Had no idea you indulged!" he ejaculated. "Always took you to be a
severe Puritan duck."
"Scotch," Elim corrected him, "Presbyterian."
He tilted the glass and the spirits sank smoothly from sight. His
throat burned as if he had swallowed a mouthful of flame, but there was
a quality in the strong rum that accorded with his present mood: it was
fiery like his released sense of life. Kaperton poured himself a drink,
elevated it with a friendly word and joined Elim.
"I'm going home," the former proceeded. "You see, I live in Maryland,
and the situation there is getting pretty warm. We want to get our
women out of Baltimore, and our affairs conveniently shaped, before any
possible trouble. I had a message this evening to come at once."
The two men presented the greatest possible contrast--Harry Kaperton
had elegantly flowing whiskers, a round young face that expressed
facile excitement at a possible disturbance, and sporting garb of
tremendous emphasis. Elim's face, expressing little of the tumult
within, harsh and dark and dogged, was entirely appropriate to his
somber greenish-black dress. Kaperton gestured toward the bottle, and
they took a second drink, then a third.
Kaperton's face flushed, he grew increasingly voluble, but Elim
Meikeljohn was silent; the liquor made no apparent impression upon him.
He sat across the table from the other with his legs extended straight
before him. They emptied the decanter of spirits and turned to sherry,
anything that was left. Kaperton apologized profoundly for the depleted
state of his cellar--knowing that he was leaving, he had invited a
party of men to his room the night before. He was tremendously sorry
that Elim had been overlooked--the truth being that no one had known
what a good companion Elim was.
It seemed to Elim Meikeljohn, drinking sherry, that the night before he
had not existed at all. He did not analyze his new being, his
surprising potations; he was proceeding without a cautious ordering of
his steps. It was neither a celebration nor a protest, but instinctive,
like the indiscriminate gulping of a man who has been swimming under
the water.
"Why," Kaperton gasped, "you've got a head like a cannon ball."
He rose and wandered unsteadily about, but Elim sat motionless, silent,
drinking. He was conscious now of a drumming in his ears like distant
martial music, a confused echo like the beat of countless feet. He
tilted his glass and was surprised to find it empty.
"It's all gone," Kaperton said dully.
He was as limp as an empty doll, Elim thought contemptuously. He, Elim,
felt like hickory, like iron; his mind was clear, vindicative. He rose,
sweeping back the hair from his high austere brow. Kaperton had slid
forward in his chair with hanging open hands and mouth.
The drumming in Elim's ears grew louder, a hum of voices was added to
it, and it grew nearer, actual. A crowd of men was entering the
boarding house, carrying about them a pressure of excited exclamations
and a more subtle disturbance. Elim Meikeljohn left Kaperton and went
out into the hall. An ascending man met him.
"War!" he cried. "The damned rebels have assaulted and taken Sumter!
Lincoln has called for fifty thousand volunteers!" He hurried past and
left Elim grasping the handrail of the stair.
War! The word carried an overwhelming significance to his mind
dominated by the intangible drumming, to his newly released freedom.
War upon oppression, upon the criminal slaveholders of the South! He
descended the stairs, pausing above the small agitated throng in the
hall.
A passionate elation swept over him. He held his long arms upward and
out.
"How many of the fifty thousand are here?" he asked. His ringing voice
was answered in an assent that rolled in a solid volume of sound up the
stairs. Elim Meikeljohn's soul leaped in the supreme kinship that linked
him, man to man, with all.
V
It was again April, extremely early in the morning and month, and
thickly cold, when Brevet-Major Elim Meikeljohn, burning with the fever
of a re-opened old saber wound, strayed away from his command in the
direction of Richmond. His thoughts revolved with the rapidity of a
pinwheel, throwing off crackling ideas, illuminated with blinding
spurts and exploding colors, in every direction. A vague persistent
pressure sent him toward the city. It was being evacuated; the Union
forces, he knew, were to enter at dawn; but he had stumbled ahead,
careless of consequences, oblivious of possible reprisal.
He was, he recognized by the greater blackness ahead, near the
outskirts of the city--for Richmond was burning. The towering black
mass of smoke was growing more perceptible in the slowly lightening
dawn. Elim Meikeljohn could now hear the low sullen uprush of flames,
the faint crackling of timbers, and a hot aromatic odor met him in
faint waves.
His scabbard beat awkwardly about his heels, and he impatiently
unhooked it and threw it into the gloom of the roadside. The service
revolver was still in its holster; but he had forgotten its presence
and use. In the multicolored confusion of his mind but one conscious
impression remained; and, in its reiteration, he said aloud, over and
over, in dull tones, "Two, Linden Row."
The words held no concrete meaning, they constructed no vision,
embodied no tangible desire; they were merely the mechanical expression
of an obscure and dominating impulse. He was hardly more sensate in his
progress than a nail drawn irresistibly by a magnet.
The gray mist dissolved, and his long haggard face grew visible; it had
not aged in the past four years of struggle--almost from boyhood it had
been marked with somber longitudinal lines--but it had grown keener,
more intense, with the expression of a man whose body had starved
through a great spiritual conflict. His uniform, creased and stained,
and now silvery with dew, flapped about a gaunt ironlike frame; and
from under the leather peak of his kepi, even in his fever, his eyes
burned steady and compelling.
Scattered houses, seemingly as unsubstantial as shadows, gathered about
him; they grew more frequent, joined shoulder to shoulder, and he was
in a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid
and smooth and unshining; a knot of men passed shouting hoarsely, and a
wave of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his
mind partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former
were a disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration spread in lurid
waves.
The great stores of the tobacco warehouses had been set on fire, and
the spanning flames threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the
burning tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of
ruby sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim
saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing
the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw
soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing
away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with
white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the
opposite direction and demanded:
"Two, Linden Row?"
The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.
The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with
hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the
flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces,
heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now
below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke
blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important
thoroughfare now, and inquired again:
"Two, Linden Row?"
This man ejaculated:
"The Yankees are here!" The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood
with hanging hands and mouth.
Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had
joined them.
"On ahead, capt'n," he volunteered; "fourth turn past the capitol and
first crossing."
The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim,
but the latter moved swiftly on.
Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a classic white
building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then
from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen
sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling
blackness.
"The powder magazines," Elim heard repeated from person to person. An
irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo
of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry,
with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim
recognized, to Kautz' command.
He had now reached the fourth turn beyond the withdrawn vision of the
capitol, and he advanced through a black snowing of soot. Flames,
fanlike and pallid, now flickered about his feet, streamed in the
gutters and lapped the curbs. He saw heaps of broken bottles against
the bricks, and the smell of fine spilled wines and liquors hung in his
nostrils. His reason again wavered--the tremendous spectacle of burning
assumed an apocalyptic appearance, as if the city had burst
spontaneously into flame from the passionate and evil spirits
engendered and liberated by war.
He stopped at the first crossing and saw before him a row of tall brick
houses, built solidly and set behind small yards and a low iron
fencing. They had shallow porticoes with iron grilling, and at this end
a towering magnolia tree swept its new glossy greenery against the
third-story windows.
"Linden Row," he muttered. "Well--Number Two?"
He swung back a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to
the door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the
floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the
fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose
silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city.
He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the
stillness of the facade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was
solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location
in his brain. It was a name--Rose--Rosemary Roselle. He beat with an
emaciated fist on the paneling and called, "Roselle! Roselle!"
There was a faint answering stir within; he heard the rattle of a
chain; the door swung back upon an apparently empty and cavernous cool
hall.
VI
A colored woman, in a crisp white turban, with a strained face more
gray than brown, suddenly advanced holding before her in both hands a
heavy revolver of an outworn pattern. Elim Meikeljohn could see by her
drawn features that she was about to pull the trigger, and he said
fretfully:
"Don't! The thing will explode. One of us will get hurt." She closed
her eyes, Elim threw up his arm, and an amazingly loud report crashed
through the entry. He stood swaying weakly, with hanging palms, while
the woman dropped the revolver with a gasp. Elim Meikeljohn began to
cry with short dry sobs.... It was incredible that any one should
discharge a big revolver directly at his head. He sank limply against a
chest at the wall.
"Oh, Indy!" a shaken voice exclaimed. "Do you think he's dying?" The
colored woman went reluctantly forward and peered at Elim. She touched
him on a shoulder.
"'Deed, Miss Rosemary," she replied, relieved and angry, "that shot
didn't touch a hair. He's just crying like a big old nothing." She
grasped him more firmly, gave him a shake. "Dressed like a soldier,"
she proceeded scornfully, "and scaring us out of our wits. What did you
want to come here for anyhow calling out names?"
Elim's head rolled forward and back. The hall seemed full of flaming
arrows, and he collapsed slowly on the polished floor. He was moved; he
was half-conscious of his heels dragging upstairs, of frequent pauses,
voices expostulating and directing thinly. Finally he sank into a
sublimated peace in, apparently, a floating white cloud.
He awoke refreshed, mentally clear, but absurdly weak--he was lying in
the middle of a four-posted bed, a bed with posts so massive and tall
that they resembled smooth towering trees. Beyond them he could see a
marble mantel; a grate filled with softly smoldering coals, and a
gleaming brass hod; a highboy with a dark lustrous surface; oval gold
frames; and muslin curtains in an open window, stirring in an air that
moved the fluted valance at the top of the bed. It was late afternoon,
the light was fading, the interior wavering in a clear shadow filled
with the faint fat odor of the soft coal.
The immaculate bed linen bore an elusive cool scent, into which he
relapsed with profound delight. The personality of the room, somber and
still, flowed about him with a magical release from the inferno of the
past years, the last hours. He heard a movement at a door, and the
colored woman in the white turban moved to the side of the bed.
"I told her," she said in an aggrieved voice, "there wasn't nothing at
all wrong with you. I reckon now you're all ready to fight again or
eat. Why did you stir things all up in Richmond and kill good folks?"
"To set you free!" Elim Meikeljohn replied.
She gazed at him thoughtfully.
"Capt'n," she asked finally, "are you free?"
"Why, certainly----" he began, and then stopped abruptly, lost in the
memory of the dour past. He recalled his father, with a passion for
learning, imprisoned in the narrow poverty of his circumstances and
surroundings; he remembered Hester, with her wishful gaze in the
confines of her invalid chair; his own laborious lonely days. Freedom,
a high and difficult term, he saw concerned regions of the spirit not
liberated--solved--by a simple declaration on the body. The war had
been but the initial, most facile step. The woman had silenced his
sounding assertion, humiliated him, by a word. He gazed at her with a
new, less confident interest. The mental effort brought a momentary
recurrence of fever; he flushed and muttered: "Freedom ... spirit."
"You're not as wholesome as you appeared," the woman judged. "You can't
have nothing beside a glass of milk." She crossed the room and,
stirring the fire, put on fresh coal that ignited with an oily crackle.
Again at the door she paused. "Don't you try to move about," she
directed; "you stay right in this room. Mr. Roselle, he's downstairs,
and Mr. McCall, and--" her voice took on a faint insistent note of
warning. He paid little heed to her; he was lost in a wave of
weariness.
The following morning, stronger, he rose and tentatively trying the
door found it locked. The colored woman appeared soon after with a tray
which, when he had performed a meager toilet, he attacked with a
pleasant zest.
"The city's just burning right up," she informed him, standing in the
middle of the floor; "the boats on the river caught fire and their
camions banged into Canal Street." She had a pale even color, a
straight delicate nose and sensitive lips.
"Are the Union troops in charge?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. They got some of the fire out, I heard tell. But that's not
the worst now--a body can't set her foot in the street, it's so full of
drunken roaring trash, black and white. It's good Mr. Roselle and Mr.
McCall and Mr. John are here," she declared again; "they could just
finish off anybody that offered to turn a bad hand."
This, Elim felt, was incongruous with his reception yesterday.
Still he made no inquiry. The breakfast finished, he relapsed once more
on his pillows and heard the key stealthily turn in the door from the
outside.
He told himself, without conviction, that he must rise and join his
command. The war, he knew, was over; the courage that had sustained him
during the struggle died. The simple question of the colored woman had
largely slain it. His own personality, the vision of his forthcoming
life and necessity, rose to the surface of his consciousness. Elim
realized what had drawn, him to his present situation--it had, of
course, been the memory of Rosemary Roselle. The days when he--an
assistant to a professor of philosophy and letters--had read and marked
her essays seemed to lie in another existence, infinitely remote. How
would he excuse his presence, the calling of her name before the house?
This was an inopportune--a fatal--moment for a man in the blue of the
North to make his bow to a Richmond girl, in the midst of her wasted
and burning place of home. He decided reluctantly that it would be best
to say nothing of his connection with her academic labors, but to
depart as soon as possible and without explanation of his first
summons.... Rosemary Roselle--the name had clung persistently to his
memory. It was probable that he would see her--once. That alone was
extraordinary. He marveled at the grim humor of circumstance that had
granted him such a wildly improbable wish, and at the same time made it
humanly impossible for him to benefit from it.
VII
The leisurely progress of his thoughts was interrupted by hasty feet
without; the bolt was shot back and his door flung open. It was the
colored woman--the Indy of the essay--quivering with anger and fear.
"Capt'n," she exclaimed, gasping with her rapid accent, "you come right
down to the dining room, and bring that big pistol of yours. There's
two, two----" Words failed her. "Anyhow you shoot them! It's some of
that liberty you brought along, I reckon. You come down to Miss
Rosemary!"
She stood tense and ashen, and Elim rose on one elbow.
"Some of our liberty?" he queried. "Did Miss Roselle send for me?"
"No, sir, she didn't. Miss Rosemary she wouldn't send for you, not if
you were the last man alive. I'm telling you to come down to the dining
room.... We've tended you and--"
"Well," he demanded impatiently, "what do you want; whom shall I
shoot?"
"You'll see, quick enough. And I can't stand here talking either; I've
got to go back. You get yourself right along down!"
With painful slowness Elim made his preparations to descend; his
fingers could hardly buckle the stiff strap of his revolver sling, but
finally he made his way downstairs through a deep narrow hall. He
turned from a blank wall to a darkened reception room, with polished
mahogany, somber books and engravings on the walls, and a rosy blur of
fire in the hearth. A more formal chamber lay at his right, empty, but
through an opposite door he caught the faint clatter of a spoon.
Rosemary Roselle was seated, rigid and white, at the end of a table
that bore a scattered array of dishes. There were shadows beneath her
eyes, and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in
an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair,
breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid
countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a
carefully brushed gray suit, with a crimson satin necktie surcharged by
vivid green lightning. His bony face, the deep pits of his temples,
were the dry spongy black of charcoal, and behind steel-rimmed glasses
his eyes rolled like yellow agates. He glanced about, furtive and
startled, when Elim Meikeljohn entered, but he was immediately
reassured by Elim's disordered uniform. He made a solemn obeisance.
"Colonel," he said, "will you make one of a little informal repast? We
are, you see, at the lady's table."
Overcome by a sharp weakness, Elim slipped into the chair at his side
and faced Rosemary Roselle. The latter gave no sign of his presence.
She sat frozen into a species of statuesque rage. "Like you," the negro
continued pompously, "we invited ourselves. All things are free and
easy for all. The glorious principle of equality instituted lately has
swept away--swept away the inviderous distinctions of class and color.
The millenium has come!" He made a grandiloquent gesture with a sooty
hand.
"'Ray!" the sodden individual opposite unexpectedly cried.
"We came in," the other continued, "to uphold our rights as the
exponents of--of----"
"You sneaked in the kitchen," the woman in the doorway interrupted;
"and I found you rummaging in the press."
"Silence!" the orator commanded. "Are you unaware of the dignity now
resting on your kinks--hair, hair." He rose, facing Elim Meikeljohn.
"Colonel, gentleman, in a conglomeration where we are all glorious
cohevals of--of--"
"Shut up!" said the apostrophized colonel, sudden and fretful. "Get
out!"
The orator paused, disconcerted, in the midflow of his figures; and
unaccustomed arrogance struggled with habitual servility. "Gentleman,"
he repeated, "in a corposity of souls high above all narrow
malignations--"
Elim Meikeljohn took his revolver from its holster and laid it before
him on the table. The weapon produced an electrical effect on the
figure nodding in a drunken stupor. He rose abruptly and uncertain.
"I'm going," he asserted; "come on, Spout. You can be free and equal
better somewheres else."
The negro hesitated; his hand, Elim saw, moved slightly toward a knife
lying by his plate. Elim's fingers closed about the handle of his
revolver; he gazed with a steady cold glitter, a thin mouth, at the
black masklike countenance above the hectic tie and neat gray suit.
The latter backed slowly, instinctively, toward the rear door. His
companion had already faded from view. The negro proclaimed:
"I go momentiously. There are others of us banded to obtain equality
irrespectable of color; we shall be back and things will go
different.... They have gone different in other prideful
domestications."
Elim Meikeljohn raised the muzzle lying on the cloth, and the negro
disappeared. Rosemary Roselle did not move; her level gaze saw,
apparently, nothing of her surroundings; her hands were still clenched
on the board. She was young, certainly not twenty, but her oval
countenance was capable of a mature severity not to be ignored. He saw
that she had wide brown eyes the color of a fall willow leaf, a high-
bridged nose and a mouth--at present--a marvel of contempt. Her slight
figure was in a black dress; she was without rings or ornamental gold.
"That talking trash gave me a cold misery," the colored woman admitted.
She glanced at the girl and moved a bowl of salad nearer Elim
Meikeljohn. "Miss Rosemary," she begged, "take something, my heart."
Rosemary Roselle answered with a slow shudder; she slipped forward,
with her face buried in her arms on the table. Elim regarded her with
profound mingled emotions. In the fantastic past, when he had created
her from the studied essays, he had thought of her--censoriously--as
gay. Perhaps she danced! He wondered momentarily where the men were
Indy had spoken of as present; then he realized that they had been but
a precautionary figment of Indy's imagination; the girl, except for the
woman with the tender brown hand caressing her shoulder, was alone in
the house.
He sat with chin on breast gazing with serious speculation at the
crumpled figure opposite him. Indy, corroborating his surmise, said to
the girl:
"I can't make out at all why your papa don't come back. He said
yesterday when he left he wouldn't be hardly an hour."
"Something dreadful has happened," Rosemary Roselle insisted, raising a
hopeless face. "Indy, do you suppose he's dead like McCall and--and--"
"Mr. Roselle he ain't dead," the woman responded stoutly; "he's just
had to keep low trash from stealing all his tobacco."
"He could easily be found," Elim put in; "I could have an orderly
detailed, word brought you in no time." The girl paid not the slightest
heed to his proposal. From the street came a hoarse drunken shouting, a
small inflamed rabble streamed by. It wouldn't be safe to leave
Rosemary Roselle alone here with Indy. He recalled the threat of the
black pomposity he had driven from the house--it was possible that
there were others, banded, and that they would return. It was clear to
him that he must stay until its head reappeared, order had been
reestablished--or, if he went out, take the girl with him.
"You let the capt'n do what he says," the woman urged. Rosemary
Roselle's eyes turned toward Elim; it was, seemingly, the first time
she had become aware of his presence. She said in a voice delicately
colored by hate:
"Thank you, I couldn't think of taking the--the orderly from his
conquests."
"Then I'll find your father myself," Elim replied. "You will come with
me, of course; show me where to go. It would be a good thing to start
at once. I--we--might be of some assistance to him with his tobacco."
Indy declared with an expression of instant determination:
"We'll go right along with you." She silenced Rosemary's instinctive
protest. "I'll get your hat and shawl," she told the girl.
And, before the latter could object, the colored woman hurried from the
room.
Silence enveloped the two at the table. Elim replaced his revolver in
its belt. He had never before studied a girl like Rosemary Roselle;
fine white frills fell about her elbows from under the black short
sleeves. Her skin was incredibly smooth and white. It was evident that
her hands had never done manual labor; their pointed little beauty
fascinated him. He thought of the toil-hardened hands of the women of
his home. This girl represented all that he had been taught to abjure,
all that--by inheritance--he had in the abstract condemned. She
represented the vanities; she was vanity itself; and now he was
recklessly, contumaciously, glad of it. Her sheer loveliness of being
intoxicated him; suddenly it seemed as absolutely necessary to life as
the virtues of moral rectitude and homely labor. Personally, he
discovered, he preferred such beauty to the latter adamantine
qualities. He had a fleet moment of amazed self-consciousness: Elim
Meikeljohn--his father an elder in the house of God--astray in the
paths of condemned worldly frivolities! Then he recalled a little bush
of vivid red roses his mother carefully protected and cultivated; he
saw their bright fragrant patch on the rocky gray expanse of the
utilitarian acres; and suddenly a light of new understanding enveloped
his mother's gaunt drearily-clad figure. He employed in this connection
the surprising word "starved." ... Rosemary Roselle was a flower.
Indy returned with a small hat of honey-colored straw and a soft white-
silk mantilla. The former she drew upon the girl's head and wrapped the
shawl about the slim shoulders.
"Now," she pronounced decisively, "we're going to find your papa." She
led Rosemary Roselle toward the outer door. Elim found his cap in the
hall and followed them down the bricked steps to the street. It was at
present deserted, quiet; and they turned to the left, making their way
toward the river and warehouses.
The fires had largely subsided; below them rose blackened bare walls of
brick, sullen twisting flags of smoke; an air of sooty desolation had
settled over the city. Houses were tightly shuttered; some with broken
doors had a trail of hastily discarded loot on the porticoes; still
others were smoldering shells.
A bugle call rose clear and triumphant from the capital; at one place
they passed Union soldiers, extinguishing flames.
They descended the flagged street over which Elim had come, turned into
another called--he saw--Cary, and finally halted before a long somber
facade. Here, too, the fire had raged; the charred timbers of the
fallen roof projected desolately into air.
A small group at a main entrance faced them as they approached; a
coatless man with haggard features, his clothes saturated with water,
advanced quickly.
"Miss Rosemary!" he ejaculated in palpable dismay. He drew Elim
Meikeljohn aside. "Take her away," he directed; "her father ... killed,
trying to save his papers."
"Where?" Elim demanded. "Their house is empty. She can't stay in
Richmond alone."
"I'd forgotten that!" the other admitted. "McCall and John both gone,
mother dead, and now--by heaven!" he exclaimed, low and distressed,
"she has just no one. I'm without a place. Her friends have left.
There's a distant connection at Bramant's Wharf, but that's almost at
the mouth of the James."
Rosemary Roselle came up to them.
"Mr. Jim Haxall," she asked, direct and white, "is father dead?"
He studied her for a moment and then answered:
"Yes, Miss Rosemary."
She swayed. Indy, at her side, enveloped her in a sustaining arm.
"Indy," the girl said, her face on the woman's breast, "he, too!"
"I'm sending a few bales of leaf down the river," Haxall continued to
Elim; "the sloop'll pass Bramant's Wharf; but the crew will be just
anybody. Miss Rosemary couldn't go with only her nigger--"
Elim Meikeljohn spoke mechanically:
"I'll be responsible for her." The war was over; he had been ordered
from the column when his wound had broken afresh, and in a maze of
fever he had been irresistibly impelled toward Linden Row. "I'll take
her to Bramant's Wharf."
Haxall regarded suspiciously the disordered blue uniform; then his gaze
shifted to Elim's somber lined countenance.
"Miss Rosemary's rubies and gold--" he said finally. "But I believe
you're honest, I believe you're a good man."
VIII
James Haxall explained this to Rosemary. Elim, standing aside, could
see that the girl neither assented nor raised objection. She seemed
utterly listless; a fleet emotion at the knowledge of her father's
death had, in that public place, been immediately repressed. The sloop,
Elim learned, was ready to start at once. The afternoon was declining;
to reach Bramant's Wharf would take them through the night and into the
meridian of tomorrow. They had made no preparations for the trip, there
was neither bedding nor food; but Elim and Haxall agreed that it was
best for Rosemary Roselle to leave the city at the price of any slight
momentary discomfort.
Elim looked about for a place where he might purchase food. A near-by
eating house had been completely wrecked, its floor a debris of broken
crockery. Beyond, a baker's shop had been deserted, its window
shattered but the interior intact. The shelves, however, had been swept
bare of loaves. Elim searched behind the counters--nothing remained.
But in walking out his foot struck against a round object, wrapped in
paper, which on investigation proved to be a fruit cake of satisfactory
solidity and size. With this beneath his arm he returned to Rosemary
Roselle, and they followed Haxall to the wharf where the sloop lay.
The tiller was in charge of an old man with peering pale-blue eyes and
tremulous siccated hands. Yet he had an astonishingly potent voice, and
issued orders, in tones like the grating of metal edges, to a loutish
youth in a ragged shirt and bare legs. The cabin, partly covered, was
filled with bagged bales; a small space had been left for the
steersman, and forward the deck was littered with untidy ropes and
swab, windlass bar and other odds.
Elim Meikeljohn moved forward to assist Rosemary on to the sloop, but
she evaded his hand and jumped lightly down upon the deck, Indy,
grumbling and certain of catastrophe, was safely got aboard, and Elim
helped the youth to push the craft's bow out into the stream. The grimy
mainsail rose slowly, the jib was set, and they deliberately gathered
way, slipping silently between the timbered banks, emerging from the
thin pungent influence of the smoking ruins.
Behind them the sun transfused the veiled city into a coppery blur that
gradually sank into a tender-blue dusk. Indy had arranged a place with
the most obtainable comfort for Rosemary Roselle; she sat with her back
against the mast, gazing toward the bank, stealing backward, at the
darkening trees moving in solemn procession.
After the convulsed and burning city, the uproar of guns and clash of
conflict, the quiet progress of the sloop was incredibly peaceful and
withdrawn. Elim felt as if they had been detached from the familiar
material existence and had been set afloat in a stream of silken
shadows. The wind was behind them, the boom had been let far but, the
old steersman drowsed at his post, and the youth had fallen instantly
asleep in a strange cramped attitude.
Elim was standing at the stern--he had conceived it his duty to stay as
far away from Rosemary Roselle as her wish plainly indicated; but, in
this irrelated phase of living, he gradually lost his sense of
responsibility and restrained conduct. He wanted extravagantly to be
near Rosemary, to be where he could see her clearly. Perhaps, but this
was unlikely, she would speak to him. His desire gradually flooded him;
it induced a species of careless heroism, and he made his way
resolutely forward and sat on a heap of rope at a point where he could
study her with moderate propriety and success. She glanced at him
momentarily when he took his place--he saw that her under lip was
capable of an extremely human and annoying expression--and returned to
her veiled scrutiny of the sliding banks.
An unfamiliar emotion stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking
introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the
same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was
a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the
conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of
affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being
toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into
the gathering evening. On the other side of the mast, Indy was sleeping
with her head upon her breast. The feeling in Elim steadily increased
in poignancy--faint stars appearing above the indefinite foliage
pierced him with their beauty, the ashen-blue sky vibrated in a singing
chord, the river divided in whispering confidences on the bow of the
sloop.
Elim Meikeljohn debated the wisdom of a remark; his courage grew
immeasurably reckless.
"The wind and river are shoving us along together." Pronounced, the
sentence seemed appallingly compromising; he had meant that the wind
and river together, not--
She made no reply; one hand, he saw, stirred slightly.
Since he had not been blasted into nothingness, he continued:
"I'm glad the war's over. Why," he exclaimed in genuine surprise, "you
can hear the birds again." A sleepy twitter had floated out over the
stream. Still no response. He should not, certainly, have mentioned the
war. He wondered desperately what a fine and delicate being like
Rosemary Roselle talked about? It would be wise to avoid serious and
immediate considerations for commonplaces.
"Ellik McCosh," he said, "a girl in our village who went to Boston,
learned to dance, and when she came back she taught two or three. Her
communion medal was removed from her," he added with complete veracity.
"Perhaps," he went on conversationally, "you don't have communion
medals in Richmond--it's a little lead piece you have when you are in
good standing at the Lord's table. Mine was taken away for three months
for whistling by the church door. A long while ago," he ended in a
different voice. He thought of the fruit cake, and breaking off a piece
offered it to the silent girl. "It's like your own," he told her,
placing it on a piece of paper at her side; "it's from Richmond and
wasn't even paid for with strange silver."
At this last a sudden uneasiness possessed him, and he hurriedly
searched his pockets. He had exactly fifty cents. Until the present he
had totally overlooked the depleted state of his fortune. Elim had some
arrears of pay, but now he seriously doubted whether they were
collectible. Nothing else. He had emerged from the war brevetted major
but as penniless as the morning of his enlistment. He doubted whether,
in the hurry of departure, Rosemary Roselle had remembered to bring any
money.
Still, she would be cared for, supplied with every necessity, at
Bramant's Wharf. There he would leave her ... his breathing stopped,
for, incredibly, he saw that her hand was suspended over the piece of
cake. She took it up and ate it slowly, absently. This, he felt, had
created a bond between them; but it was a conviction in which,
apparently, she had no share. She might have thanked him but she
didn't.
An underhanded and indefensible expedient occurred to him, and he sat
for a perceptible number of minutes concentrating his memory upon a dim
and special object. Finally he raised his head.
"Indy," he quoted, "a large light mulatto, hasn't much sense but a
great deal of sensibility. That," he added of himself, "is evidently
very well observed." He saw that Rosemary turned her head with an
impatient curiosity. "She is very unfortunate," he continued
uncertainly; "she lost a present of money and couldn't work till it was
given back."
"But how," demanded Rosemary Roselle, "did you know that?" Curiosity
had betrayed her.
Elim Meikeljohn concealed a grin with difficulty. It was evident that
she profoundly regretted the lapse, yet she would not permit herself to
retreat from her position. She maintained a high intolerant aspect of
query.
"Have you forgotten," he went on, "how the dread day rolled around?" He
paused wickedly. "The slough of despond?" he added.
"What silly stuff!" Rosemary pronounced.
"It was," he agreed, "mostly. But the paper about Indy was a superior
production. B plus, I think."
A slow comprehension dawned on her face, blurred by the night.
"So that's where they went," she observed; "you marked them." He would
have sworn that a smile hovered for the fraction of a moment on her
pale lips. She drew up her shoulders slightly and turned away.
His best, his only hope had flickered for a minute and died away. Her
silence was like impregnable armor. A puff of wind filled the sails,
there was a straining of cordage, an augmented bubbling at the sloop's
bow, and then the stir subsided. He passed into a darkness of old
distresses, forebodings, grim recollections from his boyhood, inherited
bleak memories. Rosemary Roselle's upright figure gradually sank. He
realized that she was asleep on her arm. Elim bent forward shamelessly
and studied her worn countenance. There was a trace of tears on her
cheek. She was as delicate, as helpless as a flower sleeping on its
stalk.
An impulse to touch her hair was so compelling that he started back,
shaken; a new discordant tumult rose within him, out of which emerged
an aching hunger for Rosemary Roselle; he wanted her with a passion
cold and numbing like ether. He wanted her without reason, and in the
desire lost his deep caution, his rectitude of conscience. He was torn
far beyond the emotional possibilities of weak men. The fact that,
penniless and without a home, he had nothing to offer was lost in the
beat and surge of his feelings. He went with the smashing completeness
of a heavy body, broken loose in an elemental turmoil. He wanted her;
her fragrant spirit, the essence that was herself, Rosemary Roselle. He
couldn't take it; such consummations, he realized, were beyond will and
act, they responded from planes forever above human desire--there was
not even a rift of hope. The banks had been long lost in the night; the
faint disembodied cry of an owl breathed across the invisible river.
IX
She woke with a little confused cry, and sat gazing distractedly into
the dark, her hands pressed to her cheeks.
"Don't you remember," Elim Meikeljohn spoke, "Haxall and the sloop;
your relatives at Bramant's Wharf?"
She returned to a full consciousness of her surroundings.
"I was dreaming so differently," she told him. It seemed to Elim that
the antagonism had departed from her voice; he even had a feeling that
she was glad of his presence. Indy, prostrate on the deck with her chin
elevated to the stars, had not moved.
The darkness increased, broken only by the colored glimmer of the port
and starboard lights and a wan blur about the old man bent over the
tiller. Once he woke the youth and sent him forward with a sounding
pole, once the sloop scraped heavily over a mud bank, but that was all;
their imperceptible progress was smooth, unmarked.
Elim, recalling Joshua, wished that the sloop and night were anchored,
stationary. Already he smelled the dawn in a newly stirring, cold air.
The darkness thickened. Rosemary Roselle said:
"I'm dreadfully hungry."
He immediately produced the fruit cake.
"It's really quite satisfactory," she continued, eating; "It's like the
rest of this--unreal.... What is your name?" she demanded unexpectedly.
"Elim Meikeljohn."
"That's a very Northern sort of name."
"It would be hard to come by one more so," he agreed. "It's from the
highlands of Scotland."
"Then if you don't mind, I'll think of you as Scotch right now."
He conveyed to her the fact that he didn't.
"Look!" she exclaimed. "There's the morning!"
A thin gray streak widened across the east. Almost immediately the
night dissolved. They were sweeping down the middle of a river that
surprised Elim with its width and majesty. The withdrawn banks bore
clustered trees, undulating green reached inland, the shaded facades of
houses sat back on lawns that dipped to the stream.
Rosemary Roselle's face was pale with fatigue; her eyes appeared
preternaturally large; and this, for Elim, made her charm infinitely
more appealing. She smoothed her dress, touched her hair with light
fingers. The intimacy of it all thrilled him. A feeling of happy
irresponsibility deepened. He lost sight of the probable unhappiness of
tomorrow, the catastrophe that was yesterday; Elim was radiantly
content with the present.
"You look Northern too," she went on; "you are so much more solemn than
the Virginia men--I mean your face is."
"I suppose I've had a solemn sort of existence," he agreed. "Life's an
awful serious thing where I was born. The days are not long enough,
life's too short, to get your work done. It's a stony pasture," he
admitted. He described the Meikeljohn farm land, sloping steeply to
swift rocky streams, the bare existence of the sheep, the bitter
winters. He touched briefly on Hester and his marriage.
"It's no wonder," she pronounced, "that you have shadows in your eyes.
You can't imagine," she continued, "how wonderful everything was in
Richmond, before--I simply can't talk about it now. I suppose we are
ruined, but there isn't a man or woman who wouldn't do the same thing
all over again. I'm almost glad that father isn't--isn't here; misery
of any kind made him so wretched ... perfect memories." She closed her
eyes.
Her under lip, he saw, projected slightly, her chin was fine but
stubborn. These details renewed his delight; they lent a warm humanity
to her charm.
"Any one would know," she said, regarding him, "that you are absolutely
trustworthy. It's a nice quality now, but I don't think I would have
noticed it even a month ago. You can see that I have grown frightfully
old in the littlest while. Yes, you are comfortable to be with, and I
suspect that counts for a great deal. It's quite sad, too, to grow old.
Oh, look, we've changed! Where do you suppose he is going? This can't
nearly be Bramant's."
The mainsail had been hauled in, and the course of the sloop changed,
quartering in toward the shore. The youth, moving forward, stopped to
enlighten them. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the old man.
"He's got kin here at Jerico," he explained; "and we're setting in to
see them. We won't stop long."
The mainsail came smoothly down, the jib fluttered, and the sloop slid
in beside a sturdy old wharf, projecting from a deep fringe of willows.
No sign of life or habitation was visible.
The youth made fast a hawser, the old man mounted painfully to the
dock, and Indy stirred and rose.
"I must have just winked asleep," she declared in consternation.
Rosemary Roselle lightly left the boat, and Elim followed. "If we
explored," he proposed, "perhaps we could get you a cup of coffee." She
elected, however, to stay by the river, and Elim went inward alone.
Beyond the willows was an empty marshland. The old man had disappeared,
with no trace of his objective kin. A road, deep in yellow mire,
mounted a rise beyond and vanished a hundred yards distant. Elim,
unwilling to get too far away from the sloop, had turned and moved
toward the wharf, when he was halted by the sound of horses' hoofs.
He saw approaching him over the road a light open carriage with a
fringed canopy and a pair of horses driven by a negro in a long white
dust coat. In the body of the carriage a diminutive bonneted head was
barely visible above an enormous circumference of hoops. Elim saw
bobbing gray curls, peering anxious eyes, and a fluttering hand in a
black silk-thread mit.
"Gossard," a feminine voice cried shrilly to the driver, at the sight
of Elim on the roadside, "here's a Yankee army; lick up those horses!"
The negro swung a vicious whip, the horses started sharply forward, but
the carriage wheels, sinking in a deep slough, remained fixed; the
harness creaked but held; the equipage remained stationary. The negro
dismounted sulkily, and Elim crossed the road and put his shoulder to a
wheel. Together with the driver, he lifted the carriage on to a firmer
surface. The old lady was seated with tightly shut eyes.
"This here man ain't going to hurt you," the driver exclaimed
impatiently. "This exdus is all nonsense anyways," he grumbled. "I got
a mind to stop--I'm free."
She directed upon him a beady black gaze.
"You get right into this carriage," she commanded; "you'd be free to
starve. You are a fool!" The man reluctantly obeyed her. "I thank you
for your clemency," she said to Elim. She fumbled among her flounces
and hoops and produced an object carefully wrapped and tied. "Here,"
she proclaimed; "I can still pay for a service. Gossard--" the carriage
moved forward, was lost in the dip in the road. Elim opened the package
in his hand and regarded, with something like consternation, a bottle
of champagne.
Beyond the wharf the great yellow flood of the river gleamed in the
sun; choirs of robins whistled in trees faintly green. Rosemary Roselle
was seated with her feet hanging over the water.
"Champagne for breakfast," she observed, shaking her head; "only the
most habitual sports manage that." He recounted the episode of the
"Yankee army," delighted by her less formal tone, then the old man
returned as enigmatically as he had disappeared. The ropes were cast
off, the sloop swung out into the current, and their smooth progress
was resumed.
A few more hours and they would be at Bramant's Wharf. There, Elim
knew, he would be expected to leave Rosemary. There would be a
perfunctory gratitude from her relatives, perhaps a warmer appreciation
from herself--a moment--a momentary pressure of her hand--and then--
where? He would never again come in contact with so exquisite a girl;
they were, he realized, customarily held in a circle where men like
himself, outsiders, rarely penetrated; once more with her family and he
would be forgotten. Anyhow, he had nothing.
But in spite of these heavy reflections his irresponsible happiness
increased. In this segment of existence no qualifications from the
shore were valid. Time, himself, at the tiller, seemed drifting,
unconcerned. Rosemary Roselle regarded Elim with a franker interest.
She took off a small slipper and emptied some sand from the shore; the
simple act seemed to him burdened with gracious warmth. Now she was
infinitely easier than any girl he had known before. Those about his
home met the younger masculine world either with a blunt sarcasm or
with an uneasy voiceless propriety. Rosemary, propped on an elbow, was
as unconcerned as a boy. This made her infinitely more difficult of
approach. Her slight beautiful body, not hidden by clothes--as decency
demanded in the more primitive state--was delightfully marked,
suggested. Here was beauty admitted, lauded, even studied, in place of
the fierce masking and denouncement of his father and the fellow
elders.
He remembered, from collegiate hours, the passion of the Greeks for
sheer earthly strength and loveliness--Helen and Menelaus, Sappho on
the green promontories of Lesbos. At the time of his reading he had
maintained a wry brow ... now Elim Meikeljohn could comprehend the siege
of Troy.
He said aloud, without thinking and instantly aghast at his words:
"You are like a bodied song." He was horrified; then his newer spirit
utterly possessed him, he didn't care; he nodded his long solemn head.
Rosemary Roselle turned toward him with a cool stare that was lost in
irresistible ringing peals of laughter.
"Oh!" she gasped; "what a face for a compliment. It was just like
pouring sirup out of a vinegar cruet."
He became annoyed and cleared his throat in an elder-like manner, but
her amusement strung out in silvery chuckles.
"It's the first I've said of the kind," he admitted stiffly; "I've no
doubt it came awkward."
She grew more serious, studied him with thoughtful eyes. "Do you know,"
she said slowly, "I believe you. Compliments in Virginia are like
cherries, the trees are full of them; they're nice but worth--so much."
She measured an infinitesimal degree with a rosy nail against a finger.
"But I can see that yours are different. They almost hurt you, don't
they?"
He made no reply, struggling weakly against what, he perceived, was to
follow.
"You're like a song that to hear would draw a man about the world,"
said Elim Meikeljohn, pagan. "He would leave his sheep and byre, he'd
drop his duty and desert his old, and follow. I'm lost," he decided, in
a last perishing flicker of early teaching; and then he smiled
inexplicably at the wrath to come.
Rosemary Roselle grew more serious.
"But that's not a compliment at all," she discovered; "it's more, and
it makes me uncomfortable. Please stop!"
"About the world," echoed Elim, "and everything else forgotten."
"Please," she repeated, holding up a prohibitory palm.
"Rose petals," he said, regarding it. His madness increased. She
withdrew her hand and gazed at him with a small frown. She was sitting
upright, propped on her arms. Her mouth, with its slightly full under
lip, was elevated, and an outrageous desire possessed him. His
countenance slowly turned hotly red, and slowly a faint tide of color
stained Rosemary Roselle's cheeks. She looked away; Elim looked away.
He proceeded aft and learned that Bramant's Wharf lay only a few miles
ahead.
The old man cursed the wind in his stringent tones. Elim hadn't noticed
anything reprehensible in the wind. It appeared that for a considerable
time there hadn't been any. A capful was stirring now, and humanity--
ever discontented--silently cursed that.
"We're nearly there," he said, returning to Rosemary Roselle.
He was unable to gather any intelligence from her expression.
She rose, and stood with a hand on Indy's shoulder, murmuring
affectionately in the colored woman's ear. The sloop once more headed
at a long angle for the shore. Bramant's Wharf grew visible, projecting
solidly from a verdant bank. They floated silently up to the dock, and
the youth held the sloop steady while Rosemary Roselle and Indy mounted
from its deck. Elim followed, but suddenly he stopped, and his hand
went into his pocket. A half dollar fell ringing into the boat. Elim
indicated the youth; he was now penniless.
X
"The house," Rosemary explained, "is almost a mile in. There is a
carriage at the wharf when they expect you. And usually there is some
one about."
Elim, carrying the cake and bottle, followed over a grassy road between
tangles of blackberry bushes. On either hand neglected fields held a
sparse tangle of last year's weeds; beyond, trees closed in the
perspective. The sun had passed the zenith, and the shadows of walnut
trees fell across the road. Elim's face was grim, a dark tide rose
about him, enveloping his heart, bothering his vision. He wanted to
address something final to the slim girl in black before him, something
now, before she was forever lost in the gabble of her relatives; but he
could think of nothing appropriate, expressive of the tumult within
him. His misery deepened with every step, grew into a bitterness of
rebellion that almost forced an incoherent reckless speech. Rosemary
Roselle didn't turn, she didn't linger, there were a great many things
that she might say. The colored woman was positively hurrying forward.
A great loneliness swept over him. He had not, he thought drearily,
been made for joy.
"It's queer there's no one about," Rosemary Roselle observed. They
reached the imposing pillars of an entrance--the wooden gate was
chained, and they were obliged to turn aside and search for an opening
in a great mock-orange hedge. Before them a wide sweep of lawn led up
to a formal dark facade; a tanbark path was washed, the grass ragged
and uncut. Involuntarily they quickened their pace.
Elim saw that towering brown pillars rose to the roof of the dwelling
and that low wings extended on either hand. Before the portico a
stiffly formal garden lay in withered neglect.
The flower beds, circled with masoned rims and built up like wired
bouquets, held only twisted and broken stems.
A faint odor of wet plaster and dead vegetation rose to meet them. On
the towering wall of the house every window was tightly shuttered. The
place bore a silent and melancholy air of desertion.
The girl gave a dismayed gasp. Elim hastily placed his load on the
steps and, mounting, beat upon the door. Only a dull echo answered.
Dust fell from the paneling upon his head.
"Maybe they have shut up the front for protection," he suggested. He
made his way to the rear; all was closed. Through the low limbs of
apple trees he could see a double file of small sad brick quarters for
the slaves. They, too, were empty. The place was without a living
being. He stood, undecided, when suddenly he heard Rosemary Roselle
calling with an acute note of fear.
He ran through the binding grass back to the garden.
"Elim Meikeljohn!" She stumbled forward to meet him. "Oh, Elim," she
cried; "there's no one in the world----" A sob choked her utterance.
He fell on his knees before her:
"There's always me."
She sank in a fragrant heap into his arms.
Elim Meikeljohn laughed over her shoulder at his entire worldly goods
on the steps--the fragmentary fruit cake and a bottle of champagne.
Here they are lost on the dimming mirror of the past.
THE THRUSH IN THE HEDGE
I
Harry Baggs came walking slowly over the hills in the blue May dusk. He
could now see below him the clustered roofs and tall slim stack of a
town. His instinct was to avoid it, but he had tramped all day, his
blurred energies were hardly capable of a detour, and he decided to
settle near by for the night. About him the country rose and fell,
clothed in emerald wheat and pale young corn, while trees filled the
hollows with the shadowy purple of their darkening boughs. A robin
piped a belated drowsy note; the air had the impalpable sweetness of
beginning buds.
A vague pleasant melancholy enveloped him; the countryside swam
indistinctly in his vision--he surrendered himself to inward
sensations, drifting memories, unformulated regrets. He was twenty and
had a short powerful body; a broad dusty patient face. His eyes were
steady, light blue, and his jaw heavy but shapely. His dress--the
forlorn trousers, the odd coat uncomfortably drawn across thick
shoulders, and incongruous hat--held patently the stamp of his worldly
position: he was a tramp.
He stopped, looking about. The road, white and hard, dipped suddenly
down; on the right, windows glimmered, withdrawn behind shrubbery and
orderly trees; on the left, a dark plowed field rose to a stiff company
of pines and the sky. Harry Baggs stood turned in the latter direction,
for he caught the faint odor of wood smoke; behind the field, a newly
acquired instinct told him, a fire was burning in the open. This, now,
probably meant that other wanderers--tramps--had found a place of
temporary rest.
Without hesitation he climbed a low rail fence, found a narrow path
trod in the soft loam and followed it over the brow into the hollow
beyond. His surmise was correct--a fire smoldered in a red blur on the
ground, a few relaxed forms gathered about the wavering smoke, and at
their back were grouped four or five small huts.
Harry Baggs walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence,
he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a
peering suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the
other silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an
amazing and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken
black hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage
properties of a stupid and conventional parody of a tramp.
Another, sitting with clasped knees beyond the fire, interrupted a
monotonous whining recital to question Harry Baggs. "Where'd you come
from?"
"Somewhere by Lancaster."
"Ever been here before?" And, when Baggs had said no: "Thought I hadn't
seen you. Most of us here come back in the spring. It's a comfortable
dump when it don't rain cold." He was uncommonly communicative. "The
Nursery's here for them that want work; and if not nobody's to ask you
reasons."
A third, in a grimy light overcoat, with a short bristling red mustache
and morose countenance, said harshly: "Got any money?"
"Maybe two bits."
"Let's send him in for beer," the other proposed; and a new animation
stirred the dilapidated one and the talker.
"You can go to hell!" Baggs responded without heat.
"That ain't no nice way to talk," the second proclaimed. "Peebles,
here, meant that them who has divides with all that hasn't."
Peebles directed a hard animosity at Harry Baggs. His gaze flickered
over the latter's heavy-set body and unmoved face. "Want your jaw
slapped crooked?" he demanded with a degree of reservation.
"No," the boy placidly replied.
A stillness enveloped them, accentuated by the minute crackling of the
disintegrating wood. The dark increased and the stars came out; the
clip-clip of a horse's hoofs passed in the distance and night. Harry
Baggs became flooded with sleep.
"I s'pose I can stay in one of these brownstones?" he queried,
indicating the huts.
No one answered and he stumbled toward a small shelter. He was forced
to bend, edge himself into the close damp interior, where he collapsed
into instant unconsciousness on a heap of bagging. In the night he
cried out, in a young strangely distressed voice; and later a drift of
rain fell on the roof and ran in thin cold streams over his still body.
II
He woke late the following morning and emerged sluggishly into a
sparkling rush of sunlight. The huts looked doubly mean in the pellucid
day. They were built of discarded doors and variously painted fragments
of lumber, with blistered and unpinned roofs of tin, in which rusted
smokepipes had been crazily wired; strips of moldy matting hung over an
entrance or so, but the others gaped unprotected. The clay before them
was worn smooth and hard; a replenished fire smoked within blackened
bricks; a line, stretched from a dead stump to a loosely fixed post,
supported some stained and meager red undergarb.
Harry Baggs recognized Peebles and the loquacious tramp at the edge of
the clearing. The latter, clad in a grotesquely large and sorry suit of
ministerial black, was emaciated and had a pinched bluish countenance.
When he saw Baggs he moved forward with a quick uneven step.
"Say," he proceeded, "can you let me have something to get a soda-
caffeine at a drug store? This ain't a stall; I got a fierce headache.
Come out with a dime, will you? My bean always hurts, but to-day I'm
near crazy."
Harry Baggs surveyed him for a moment, and then, without comment,
produced the sum in question. The other turned immediately and rapidly
disappeared toward the road.
"He's crazy, all right, to fill himself with that dope," Peebles
observed; "it's turning him black. You look pretty healthy," he added.
"You can work, and they're taking all the men they can get at the
Nursery."
The boy was sharply conscious of a crawling emptiness--hunger. He had
only fifteen cents; when that was gone he would be without resources.
"I don't mind," he returned; "but I've got to eat first."
"Can't you stick till night?" his companion urged. "There's only half a
day left now. If you go later there'll be nothing doing till tomorrow."
"All right," Harry Baggs assented.
The conviction seized him that this dull misery of hunger and dirt had
settled upon him perpetually--there was no use in combating it; and,
with an animal-like stoicism, he followed the other away from the road,
out of the hollow, to where row upon row of young ornamental trees
reached in mathematical perspective to broad sheds, glittering expanses
of glass, a huddle of toolhouses, and office.
His conductor halted at a shed entrance and indicated a weather-bronzed
individual.
"Him," he said. "And mind you come back when you're through; we all
dish in together and live pretty good."
Harry Baggs spent the long brilliant afternoon burning bunches of
condemned peach shoots. The smoke rolled up in a thick ceaseless cloud;
he bore countless loads and fed them to the flames. The hungry crawling
increased, then changed to a leaden nausea; but, accepting it as
inevitable, he toiled dully on until the end of day, when he was given
a dollar and promise of work to-morrow.
He saw, across a dingy street, a small grocery store, and purchased
there coffee, bacon and a pound of dates. Then he returned across the
Nursery to the hollow and huts. More men had arrived through the day,
other fires were burning, and an acrid odor of scorched fat and boiling
coffee rose in the delicate evening. A small group was passing about a
flasklike bottle; a figure lay in a stupor on the clay; a mutter of
voices, at once cautious and assertive, joined argument to complaint.
"Over this way," Peebles called as Harry Baggs approached. The former
inspected the purchased articles, then cursed. "Ain't you got a bottle
on you?"
But when the bacon had been crisped and the coffee turned into a
steaming thick liquid, he was amply appreciative of the sustenance
offered. They were shortly joined by Runnel, the individual with the
bluish poisoned countenance, and the elaborately ragged tramp.
"Did you frighten any cooks out of their witses?" Peebles asked the
last contemptuously. The other retorted unintelligibly in his
appropriately hoarse voice. "Dake knocks on back doors," Peebles
explained to Harry Baggs, "and then fixes to scare a nickel or grub
from the women who open."
Quiet settled over the camp; the blue smoke of pipes and cigarettes
merged imperceptibly into the dusk of evening. Harry Baggs was
enveloped by a momentary contentment, born of the satisfaction of food,
relaxation after toil; and, leaning his head back on clasped hands, he
sang:
_"I changed my name when I got free
To Mister, like the res'.
But now ... Ol' Master's voice I hears
Across de river: 'Rome,
You damn ol' nigger, come and bring
Dat boat an' row me home!'"_
His voice rolled out without effort, continuous as a flowing stream,
grave and round as the deep tone of a temple bell. It increased in
volume until the hollow vibrated; the sound, rather than coming from a
single throat, seemed to dwell in the air, to be the harmony of evening
made audible. The simple melody rose and fell; the simple words became
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