CHAPTER III. Showing that a Little Culture Entails Great Care
Carraway had risen to meet his host in a flutter that was almost one of dread. In the eight years since their last interview it seemed to him that his mental image of his great client had magnified in proportions—that Fletcher had "out-Fletchered" himself, as he felt inclined to put it. The old betrayal of his employer's dependence, which at first had been merely a suspicion in the lawyer's mind, had begun gradually, as time went on, to bristle with the points of significant details. In looking back, half-hinted things became clear to him at last, and he gathered, bit by bit, the whole clever, hopeless villainy of the scheme—the crime hedged about by law with all the prating protection of a virtue. He knew now that Fletcher—the old overseer of the Blake slaves—had defrauded the innocent as surely as if he had plunged his great red fist into the little pocket of a child, had defrauded, indeed, with so strong a blow that the very consciousness of his victim had been stunned. There had been about his act all the damning hypocrisy of a great theft—all the air of stern morality which makes for the popular triumph of the heroic swindler.
These things Carraway understood, yet as the man strode into the room with open palm and a general air of bluff hospitality—as if he had just been blown by some fresh strong wind across his tobacco fields—the lawyer experienced a relief so great that the breath he drew seemed a fit measure of his earlier foreboding. For Fletcher outwardly was but the common type of farmer, after all, with a trifle more intelligence, perhaps, than is met with in the average Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest, sir," was what one expected him to utter at every turn. It was written in the coarse open lines of his face, half-hidden by a bushy gray beard; in his small sparkling eyes, now blue, now brown; in his looselimbed, shambling movements as he crossed the room. His very clothes spoke, to an acute observer, of a masculine sincerity naked and unashamed—as if his large coffee-spotted cravat would not alter the smallest fold to conceal the stains it bore. Hale, hairy, vehement, not without a quality of Rabelaisian humour, he appeared the last of all men with whom one would associate the burden of a troubled conscience.
"Sorry to have kept you—on my word I am," he began heartily; "but to tell the truth, I thought thar'd be somebody in the house with sense enough to show you to a bedroom. Like to run up now for a wash before supper?"
It was what one expected of him, such a speech blurted in so offhand a manner, and the lawyer could barely suppress a threatening laugh.
"Oh, it was a short trip," he returned, "and a walk of five miles on a day like this is one of the most delightful things in life. I've been looking out at your garden, by the way, and—I may as well confess it—overhearing a little of your conversation."
"Is that so?" chuckled Fletcher, his great eyebrows overhanging his eyes like a mustache grown out of place. "Well, you didn't hear anything to tickle your ears, I reckon. I've been having a row with that cantankerous fool, Blake. The queer thing about these people is that they seem to think I'm to blame every time they see a spot on their tablecloths. Mark my words, it ain't been two years since I found that nigger Boaz digging in my asparagus bed, and he told me he was looking for some shoots for ole miss's dinner."
"The property idea is very strong in these rural counties, you see," remarked the lawyer gravely. "They feel that every year adds a value to the hereditary possession of land, and that when an estate has borne a single name for a century there has been a veritable impress placed upon it. Your asparagus bed is merely an item; you find, I fancy, other instances."
Fletcher turned in his chair.
"That's the whole blamed rotten truth," he admitted, waving his great red hand toward the door; "but let's have supper first and settle down to talk on a full stomach. Thar's no hurry with all night before us, and that, to come to facts, is why I sent for you. No lawyer's office for me when I want to talk business, but an easy-chair by my own table and a cup of coffee beforehand."
As he finished, a bell jangled in the hall, and the door opened to admit the girl whom Carraway had seen a little earlier upon the porch.
"Supper's a good hour late, Maria," grumbled Fletcher, looking at his heavy silver watch, "and I smelt the bacon frying at six o'clock."
For an instant the girl looked as if she had more than half an intention to slap his face; then quickly recovering her self-possession, she smiled at Carraway and held out a small white hand with an air of quiet elegance which was the most noticeable thing in her appearance.
"I am quite a stranger to you, Mr. Carraway," she said, with a laugh, "but if you had only known it, I had a doll named after you when I was very small. Guy Carraway!—it seemed to me all that was needed to make a fairy tale."
The lawyer joined in her laugh, which never rose above a carefully modulated minor. "I confess that I once took the same view of it, my dear young lady," he returned, "so I ended by dropping the name and keeping only the initial. Your grandfather will tell you that I am now G. Carraway and nothing more. I couldn't afford, as things were, to make a fairy tale of my life, you see."
"Oh, if one only could!" said the girl, lowering her full dark eyes, which gave a piteous lie to her sullen mouth.
She was artificial, Carraway told himself with emphasis, and yet the distinction of manner—the elegance—was certainly the point at which her training had not failed. He felt it in her tall, straight figure, absurdly overdressed for a granddaughter of Fletcher's; in her smooth white hands, with their finely polished nails; in her pale, repressed face, which he called plain while admitting that it might become interesting; in her shapely head even with its heavy cable of coal-black hair.
What she was her education had made of her—the look of serene distinction, the repose of her thin-featured, colourless face, refined beyond the point of prettiness—these things her training had given her, and these were the things which Carraway, with his old-fashioned loyalty to a strong class prejudice, found himself almost resenting. Bill Fletcher's granddaughter had, he felt, no right to this rare security of breeding which revealed itself in every graceful fold of the dress she wore, for with Fletcher an honest man she would have been, perhaps, but one of the sallow, over-driven drudges who stare like helpless effigies from the little tumbledown cabins along country roadsides.
Fletcher, meanwhile, had filled in the pause with one of his sudden burly dashes into speech.
"Maria has been so long at her high-and-mighty boarding-school," he said, "that I reckon her head's as full of fancies as a cheese is of maggots. She's even got a notion that she wants to turn out all this new stuff—to haul the old rubbish back again but I say wait till the boy comes on—then we'll see, we'll see."
"And in the meantime we'll go in to supper," put in the girl with a kind of hopeless patience, though Carraway could see that she smarted as from a blow. "This is Will, Mr. Carraway," she added almost gaily, skillfully sweeping her train from about the feet of a pretty, undersized boy of fourteen years, who had burst into the room with his mouth full of bread and jam. "He's quite the pride of the family, you know, because he's just taken all the honours of his school."
"History, 'rithmatic, Latin—all the languages," rolled out Fletcher in a voice that sounded like a tattoo. "I can't keep up with 'em, but they're all thar, ain't they, sonny?"
"Oh, you could never say 'em off straight, grandpa," retorted the boy, with the pertness of a spoiled girl, at which, to Carraway's surprise, Fletcher fairly chuckled with delight.
"That's so; I'm a plain man, the Lord knows," he admitted, his coarse face crinkling like a sundried leaf of tobacco.
"We've got chickens for supper—broiled," the boy chattered on, putting out his tongue at his sister; "that's why Lindy's havin' it an hour late she's been picking 'em, with Aunt Mehitable helping her for the feathers. Now don't shake your head at me, Maria, because it's no use pretending we have 'em every night, like old Mrs. Blake."
"Bless my soul!" gasped Fletcher, nettled by the last remark. "Do you mean to tell me those Blakes are fools enough to eat spring chicken when they could get forty cents apiece for 'em in the open market?"
"The old lady does," corrected the boy glibly. "The one who wears the queer lace cap and sits in the big chair by the hearth all day—and all night, too, Tommy Spade says, 'cause he peeped through once at midnight and she was still there, sitting so stiff that it scared him and he ran away. Well, Aunt Mehitable sold her a dozen, and she got a side of bacon and a bag of meal."
"Grandfather, you've forgotten Aunt Saidie," broke in Maria, as Fletcher was about to begin his grace without waiting for a dumpy little woman, in purple calico, who waddled with an embarrassed air from her hasty preparations in the pantry. At first Carraway had mistaken her for an upper servant, but as she came forward Maria laid her hand playfully upon her arm and introduced her with a sad little gaiety of manner. "I believe she has met one of your sisters in Fredericksburg," she added, after a moment. Clearly she had determined to accept the family in the lump, with a resolution that—had it borne less resemblance to a passive rage could not have failed to glorify a nobler martyrdom. It was not affection that fortified her—beyond her first gently tolerant glance at the boy there had been only indifference in her pale, composed face—and the lawyer was at last brought to the surprising conclusion that Fletcher's granddaughter was seeking to build herself a fetish of the mere idle bond of blood. The hopeless gallantry of the girl moved him to a vague feeling of pity, and he spoke presently with a chivalrous desire of making her failure easy.
"It was Susan, I think," he said pleasantly, shaking hands with the squat little figure in front of him, "I remember her speaking of it afterward."
"I met her at a church festival one Christmas Eve," responded Aunt Saidie, in a high-pitched, rasping voice. "The same evening that I got this pink crocheted nuby." She touched a small pointed shawl about her shoulders. "Miss Belinda Beale worked it and it was raffled off for ten cents a chance."
Her large, plump face, overflushed about the nose, had a natural kindliness of expression which Carraway found almost appealing; and he concluded that as a girl she might have possessed a common prettiness of feature. Above her clear blue eyes a widening parting divided her tightly crimped bands of hair, which still showed a bright chestnut tint in the gray ripples.
"Thar, thar, Saidie," Fletcher interrupted with a frank brutality, which the lawyer found more repelling than the memory of his stolen fortune. "Mr. Carraway doesn't want to hear about your fascinator. He'd a long ways rather have you make his coffee."
The little woman flushed purple and drew back her chair with an ugly noise from the head of the lavishly spread table.
"Set down right thar, suh," she stammered, her poor little pretense of ease gone from her, "right thar between Brother Bill and me."
"You did say it, Aunt Saidie, I told you you would," screamed the pert boy, beginning an assault upon an enormous dish of batterbread.
Maria flinched visibly. "Be silent, Will," she ordered.
"Grandfather, you must really make Will learn to be polite."
"Now, now, Maria, you're too hard on us," protested Fletcher, flinging himself bodily into the breach, "boys will be boys, you know—they warn't born gals."
"But she did say it, Maria," insisted the boy, "and she bet me a whole dish of doughnuts she wouldn't. She did say 'set'; I heard her." Maria bit her lip, and her flashing eyes filled with angry tears, while Carraway, as he began talking hurriedly about the promise of tobacco, resisted valiantly an impulse to kick the pretty boy beneath the table. As his eyes traveled about the fine old room, marking its mellow wainscoting and the whitened silver handles on the heavy doors, he found himself wondering with implacable approval if this might not be the beginning of a great atonement.
The boy's mood had varied at the sight of his sister's tears, and he fell to patting penitently the hand that quivered on the table. "You needn't give me the doughnuts, Aunt Saidie; I'll make believe you didn't say it," he whispered at last.
"Do you take sugar, Mr. Carraway?" asked Miss Saidie, flushed and tremulous at the head of the overcrowded table, with its massive modern silver service. Poor little woman, thought the lawyer, with his first positive feeling of sympathy, she would have been happier frying her own bacon amid bouncing children in a labourer's cabin. He leaned toward her, speaking with a grave courtesy, which she met with the frightened, questioning eyes of a child. She was "quite too hopeless," he reluctantly admitted —yet, despite himself, he felt a sudden stir of honest human tenderness—the tenderness he had certainly not felt for Fletcher, nor for the pretty, pert boy, nor even for the elegant Maria herself.
"I was looking out at the dear old garden awhile ago," he said, "and I gathered from it that you must be fond of flowers—since your niece tells me she has been away so long."
She brightened into animation, her broad, capable hands fumbling with the big green-and-gold teacups.
"Yes, I raise 'em," she answered. "Did you happen to notice the bed of heartsease? I worked every inch of that myself last spring—and now I'm planting zinnias, and touch-me-nots, and sweet-williams they'll all come along later."
"And prince's-feather," added the lawyer, reminiscently; "that used to be a favourite of mine, I remember, when I was a country lad."
"I've got a whole border of 'em out at the back large, fine plants, too—but Maria wants to root 'em up. She says they're vulgar because they grow in all the niggers' yards."
"Vulgar!" So this was the measure of Maria, Carraway told himself, as he fell into his pleasant ridicule. "Why, if God Almighty ever created a vulgar flower, my dear young lady, I have yet to see it."
"But don't you think it just a little gaudy for a lawn," suggested the girl, easily stung to the defensive.
"It looks cheerful and I like it," insisted Aunt Saidie, emboldened by a rare feeling of support. "Ma used to have two big green tubs of it on either side the front door when we were children, and we used to stick it in our hats and play we was real fine folks. Don't you recollect it, Brother Bill?"
"Good Lord, Saidie, the things you do recollect!" exclaimed Fletcher, who, beneath the agonised eyes of Maria, was drinking his coffee from his saucer in great spluttering gulps.
The girl was in absolute torture: this Carraway saw in the white, strained, nervous intensity of her look; yet the knowledge served only to irritate him, so futile appeared any attempt to soften the effect of Fletcher's grossness. Before the man's colossal vulgarity of soul, mere brutishness of manner seemed but a trifling phase.