THE FLINT AND THE COAL
Love is love and there is nothing in all the world like it. Its romance comes but once, and it is the perfume that precedes the ripened fruit of all after life. It is not amenable to any of the laws of reason; nor subject to any law of logic; nor can it be explained by the analogy of anything in heaven or earth. Do not, therefore, try to reason about it. Only love once—and in youth—and be forever silent.
One of the mysteries of love to older ones is that two young people may become engaged and never a word be spoken. Put the girl in a convent, even, and let the boy but walk past, and the thing is done. They look and love, and the understanding is complete. They see and sigh, and read each other's secret thoughts, past and present—each other's hopes, fears.
They sigh and are engaged, and there is perfect understanding.
Time and Romance travel not together. Time must hurry on. Romance would loiter by the way. And so Romance, in her completeness, loves to dwell most where Time, traveling over the mile-tracks of the tropics, which belong by heredity to Alabama—stalks slower than on those strenuous half-mile tracks that spin around the earth in latitudes which grow smaller as they approach the frozen pole.
The sun had reached, in his day's journey, the bald knob of Sunset Peak, and there, behind it, seemed to stop. At least to Helen Conway, born and reared under the brow of Sand Mountain, he seemed every afternoon, when he reached the mountain peak, to linger, in a friendly way, behind it.
And a bold warrior-looking crest it was, helmeted with a stratum of sand-stone, jutting out in visor-shaped fullness about his head, and feathery above with scrub-oak and cedar.
Perhaps it had been a fancy which lingered from childhood; but from the time when Mammy Maria had first told her that the sun went to bed in the valley beyond the mountain until now,—her eighteenth year,—Helen still loved to think it was true, and that behind the face of Sunset Rock he still lingered to undress; and, lingering, it made for her the sweetest and most romantic period of the day.
True to her antebellum ideas, Mammy Maria dressed her two girls every afternoon before dinner. It is also true that she cooked the dinner herself and made their dresses with her own fingers, and that of late years, in the poverty of her drunken master, she had little to dress them with and less to cook.
But the resources of the old woman seemed wonderful—to the people round about,—for never were two girls more gorgeously gowned than Helen and Lily. It was humorous, it was pathetic—the way it was done.
From old bureau drawers and cedar chests, stored away in the attic and unused rooms of Millwood, where she herself had carefully put them in days long gone—days of plenty and thrift—she brought forth rich gowns of another age, and made them over for Helen and Lily.
“Now, this gown was Miss Clara's,” she would say as she took out a bundle of satin and old lace. She looked at it fondly—often with tears in her honest black eyes. “Lor', how well I disremember the night she fust wore it—the night of the ball we give to Jineral Jackson when he first come to see old Marster. This flowered silk with pol'naize she wore at the Gov'nor's ball and the black velvet with cut steel I've seed her wearin' at many an' many a dinner here in this very house.”
And so the old woman would go over all her treasures. Then, in a few days the gossipy and astounded neighbors would behold Helen and Lily, dressed, each, in a gown of white brocaded satin, with a dinner gown of black velvet, and for Sunday, old point lace, with petticoats of finest hand-made Irish linen and silk stockings—all modernized with matchless deft and skill.
“I guess my gals will shine as long as the old chist lasts,” she would say, “an' I ain't started on 'em yet. I'm a-savin' some for their weddin', bless Gord, if I ever sees a man fitten for 'em.”
It was an hour yet before dinner, and Aunt Maria had dressed Helen, this Saturday afternoon, with great care—for after a little frost, each day and night in Alabama becomes warmer and warmer until the next frost.
Mammy Maria knew things by intuition, and hence her care to see that Helen looked especially pretty to-day.
There was no sun save where he streamed his ribbon rays from behind Sunset Rock, and threw them in pearl and ivory fan handles—white and gold and emerald, across the mackerel sky beyond.
Helen's silk skirt fitted her well, and one of those beautiful old ribbons, flowered in broad leaf and blossoms, wound twice around her slender waist and fell in broad streamers nearly to the ground. The bodice was cut V-shaped at the throat—the corsage being taken from one of her grandmother's made in 1822, and around her neck was a long chain of pure gold beads.
She was a type of Southern beauty obtained only after years of gentle dames and good breeding.
Her face was pure and fine, rather expressionless at her age, with a straight nose and rich fine lips. Her heavy hair was coiled gracefully about her head and fell in a longer coil, almost to her shoulders. She was tall with a sloping, angular form, the flat outlines of which were not yet filled with that fullness that time would soon add.
Her waist was well turned, her shoulders broad and slightly rounded, with that fullness of chest and breast which Nature, in her hour of generosity, gives only to the queenly woman. The curves of her sloping neck were perfect and carried not a wave-line of grossness. It was as unsensual as a swan's.
Her gown, low cut, showed slight bony shoulders of classic turn and whiteness, waiting only for time to ripen them to perfection; and the long curved lines which ran up to where the deep braid of her rich brown hair fell over them, together with the big joints of her arms and the long, fine profile of her face were forerunners of a beauty that is strong—like that of the thoroughbred brood mare after a year's run on blue-grass.
Her eyes were her only weakness. They were deep and hazel, and given to drooping too readily with that feigned modesty wherein vanity clothes boldness. Down in their depths, also, shone that bright, penetrating spark of a taper by which Folly lights, in woman, the lamp of ambition.
Her forehead was high—her whole bearing the unconscious one of a born lady.
Romance—girlish, idealized romance—was her's to-day. A good intentioned, but thoughtless romance—and therefore a weak one. And worse still, one which, coupled with ambition, might be led to ruin.
Down through the tangled box-planted walks she strolled, swinging her dainty hat of straw and old lace in her hand; on through the small gate that bound the first yard, then through the shaded lawn, unkept now and rank with weeds, but still holding the old trees which, in other days, looked down over the well kept lawn of grass beneath. Now gaunt hogs had rooted it up and the weeds had taken it, and the limbs of the old trees, falling, had been permitted to lie as they fell.
The first fence was down. She walked across the road and took a path leading through a cottonfield, which, protected on all sides by the wood, and being on the elevated plateau on which the residence stood, had escaped the severer frosts.
And so she stopped and stood amid it, waist high.
The very act of her stopping showed the romance of her nature.
She had seen the fields of cotton all her life, but she could never pass through one in bloom and in fruit—the white and purple blossoms, mingled with the green of the leaves and all banked over billows of snowy lint,—that she did not stop, thrilled with the same childhood feeling that came with the first reading of the Arabian Nights.
She had seen the field when it was first plowed, in the spring, and the small furrows were thrown up by the little turning shovels. Then, down the entire length of the ridge the cotton-planter had followed, its two little wheels straddling the row, while the small bull-tongue in front opened the shallow furrow for the linty, furry, white seeds to fall in and be covered immediately by the mold-board behind. She had seen it spring up from one end of the ridge to the other, like peas, then chopped out by the hoe, the plants left standing, each the width of the hoe apart. Then she had watched it all summer, growing under the Southern sun, throwing out limb above limb of beautiful delicate leaves, drawing their life and sustenance more from the air and sunshine above than from the dark soil beneath. Drawing it from the air and sunshine above, and therefore cotton, silken, snowy cotton—with the warmth of the sun in the skein of its sheen and the purity of heaven in the fleece of its fold.
Child of the air and the sky and sun; therefore, cotton—and not corn, which draws its life from the clay and mud and decay which comes from below.
She had seen the first cream-white bloom come.
She had found it one sweet day in July, early in the morning, on the tip end of the eldest branch of the cotton stalk nearest the ground. It hung like the flower of the cream-white, pendulous abutilon, with pollen of yellow stars beaded in dew and throwing off a rich, delicate, aromatic odor, smelt nowhere on earth save in a cottonfield, damp with early dew and warmed by the rays of the rising sun. Cream-white it was in the morning, but when she had visited it again at nightfall, it hung purple in the twilight.
Then had she plucked it.
Through the hot month of July she had watched the boll grow and expand, until in August the lowest and oldest one next to the ground burst, and shone through the pale green leaves like the image of a star reflected in waters of green. And every morning new cream-white blooms formed to the very top, only to turn purple by twilight, while beneath, climbing higher and higher as the days went by and the cool nights came, star above star of cotton arose and stood twinkling in its sky of green and purple, above the dank manger where, in early spring, the little child-seed had lain.
To-day, touched by the great frost, the last purple bloom in the very tip-top seemed to look up yearningly and plead with the sun for one more day of life; that it, too, might add in time its snowy tribute to the bank of white which rolled entirely across the field, one big billow of cotton.
And in the midst of it the girl stood dreaming and wondering.
She plucked a purple blossom and pinned it to her breast. Then, with a deep sigh of saddened longing—that this should be the last—she walked on, daintily lifting her gown to avoid the damp stars of cotton, now fast gathering the night dew.
Across the field, a vine of wild grape ran over the top of two small hackberry trees, forming a natural umbrella-shaped arbor above two big moss-covered boulders which cropped out of the ground beneath, making two natural rustic seats. On one of these she sat down. Above her head glowed the impenetrable leaves of the grape-vine and the hackberry, and through them all hung the small purple bunches of wild grapes, waiting for the frost of affliction to convert into sugar the acid of their souls.
She was in plain view of Millwood, not a quarter of a mile away, and in the glow of the blazing red sunset, shining through its broken shutters and windows, she could see Mammy Maria busy about their dinner.
She looked up the road anxiously—then, with an impatient gesture she took the cotton bloom from her bosom and began to pluck the petals apart, one by one, saying aloud:
“One, I love—two, I love—
Three, I love, I say.
Four, I love with all my heart,
And five, I cast away—”
She stopped short and sighed—“O, pshaw! that was Harry; why did I name it for him?”
Again she looked impatiently up the road and then went on:
“Six, he loves, seven, she loves,
Eight, both love—”
She turned quickly. She heard the gallop of a saddle horse coming. The rider sprang off, tied his horse and sat on the rock by her side.
She appeared not to notice him, and her piqued face was turned away petulantly.
It was a handsome boyish face that looked at her for a moment mischievously. Then he seized and kissed her despite her struggles.
For this she boxed his ears soundly and sat off on another rock.
“Harry Travis, you can't kiss me every time you want to, no matter if we are engaged.”
It was a strong and rather a masculine voice, and it grated on one slightly, being scarcely expected from so beautiful a face. In it was power, self-will, ambition—but no tenderness nor that voice, soft and low, which “is an excellent thing in woman.”
He laughed banteringly.
“Did you ever hear that love is not love if it is a minute late? Just see how long I have waited here for you?”
She sat down by his side and looked fondly up into his face, flushed with exercise and smiling half cynically. It was the same smile seen so often on the face of Richard Travis.
“Oh, say,” he said, dolefully, “but don't start the hubby-come-to-taw-business on me until we are married. I was late because I had to steal the Gov'nor's new mare—isn't she a beauty?”
“Oh, say,” he went on, “but that is a good one—he has bought her for somebody he is stuck on—can't say who—and I heard him tell Jim not to let anybody get on her back.
“Well,”—he laughed—“she certainly has a fine back. I stole her out and galloped right straight here.
“You ought to own her,”—he went on flippantly—pinching playfully at the lobe of her ear—“her name is Coquette.”
Then he tried to kiss her again.
“Harry!” she said, pulling away—“don't now—Mammy Maria said I was never to—let you kiss me.”
“Oh,” he said with some iciness—“Listen to her an' you will die an old maid. Besides, I am not engaged to Mammy Maria.”
“Do you think I am a coquette?” she asked, sitting down by him again.
“Worst I ever saw—I said to Nellie just now—I mean—” he stopped and laughed.
She looked at him, pained.
“Then you've stopped to see Nellie, and that is why you are late? I do not care what she says—I am true to you, Harry—because—because I love you.”
He was feigning anger, and tapping his boot with his riding whip:
“Well—kiss me yourself then—show me that Mammy Maria does not boss my wife.”
She laughed and kissed him. He received it with indifference and some haughtiness.
Then his good nature returned and they sat and talked, watching the sunset.
“Don't you think my dress is pretty?” she asked after a while, with a becoming toss of her head.
“Why, I hadn't noticed it—stunning—stunning. If there is a queen on earth it is you,”—he added.
She flushed under the praise and was silent.
“Harry,”—she said after a while, “I hate to trouble you now, but I am so worried about things at home.”
He looked up half frowning.
“You know I have always told you I could not marry you now. I would not burden you with Papa.”
“Why, yes,” he answered mechanically, “we're both young and can wait. You see, really, Pet—you know I am dependent at present on the Gov'nor an'—”
“I understand all that,” she said quickly—“but”—
“A long engagement will only test our love,” he broke in with a show of dignity.
“You do not understand,” she went on. “Things have got so bad at home that I must earn something.”
He frowned and tapped his foot impatiently. She sat up closer to him and put her hand on his. He did not move nor even return the pressure.
“And so, Harry—if—if to help papa—and Millwood is sold—and I can get a good place in the mill—one off by myself—what they call drawer-in—at good wages,—and, if only for a little while I'd work there—to help out, you know—what would you think?”
He sprang up from his seat and dropped her hand.
“Good God, Helen Conway, are you crazy?” he said brutally—“why, I'd never speak to you again. Me? A Travis?—and marry a mill girl?”
The color went out of her face. She looked in her shame and sorrow toward the sunset, where a cloud, but ten minutes before, had stood all rosy and purple with the flush of the sunbeams behind it.
Now the beams were gone, and it hung white and bloodless.
In the crisis of our lives such trifles as these flash over us. In the greatness of other things—often turning points in our life—Nature sometimes points it all with a metaphor.
For Nature is the one great metaphor.
Helen knew that she and the cloud were now one.
But she was not a coward, and with her heart nerved and looking him calmly in the face, she talked on and told him of the wretched condition of affairs at Millwood. And as she talked, the setting sun played over her own cheeks, touching them with a halo of such exquisite colors that even the unpoetic soul of Harry Travis was touched by the beauty of it all.
And to any one but Harry Travis the proper solution would have been plain. Not that he said it or even meant it—for she was too proud a spirit even to have thought of it—there is much that a man should know instinctively that a woman should never know at all.
Harry surprised himself by the patience with which he listened to her. In him, as in his cousin—his pattern—ran a vein of tact when the crisis demanded, through and between the stratum of bold sensuousness and selfishness which made up the basis of his character.
And so as he listened, in the meanness and meagerness of his soul, he kept thinking, “I will let her down easy—no need for a scene.”
It was narrow and little, but it was all that could come into the soul of his narrowness.
For we cannot think beyond our fountain head, nor can we even dream beyond the souls of the two things who gave us birth. There are men born in this age of ripeness, born with an alphabet in their mouths and reared in the regal ways of learning, who can neither read nor write. And yet had Shakespeare been born without a language, he would have carved his thoughts as pictures on the trees.
Harry Travis was born as so many others are—not only without a language, but without a soul within him upon which a picture might be drawn.
And so it kept running in his mind, quietly, cold-bloodedly, tactfully down the narrow, crooked, slum-alleys of his mind: “I will—I will drop her—now!” She ceased—there were tears in her eyes and her face was blanched whiter even than the cloud.
He arose quickly and glanced at the setting sun: “Oh, say, but I must get the Gov'nor's mare back. Jim will miss her at feeding time.”
There was a laugh on his lips and his foot was already in the stirrup. “Sorry to be in such a hurry just now, too—because there is so much I want to say to you on that subject—awful sorry—but the Gov'nor will raise Cain if he knows what I've done. I'll just write you a long letter to-night—and I'll be over, maybe, soon—ta—ta—but this mare, confound her—see how she cuts up—so sorry I can't stay longer—but I'll write—to-night.”
He threw her a kiss as he rode off.
She sat dazed, numbed, with the shallowness of it all—the shale of sham which did not even conceal the base sub-stratum of deceit below.
Nothing like it had ever come into her life before.
She dropped down behind the rock, but instead of tears there came steel. In it all she could only say with her lips white, a defiant poise of her splendid head, and with a flash of the eyes which came with the Conway aroused: “Oh, and I kissed him—and—and—I loved him!”
She sat on the rock again and looked at the sunset. She was too hurt now to go home—she wished to be alone.
She was a strong girl—mentally—and with a deep nature; but she was proud, and so she sat and crushed it in her pride and strength, though to do it shook her as the leaves were now being shaken by the breeze which had sprung up at sunset.
She thought she could conquer—that she had conquered—then, as the breeze died away, and the leaves hung still and limp again, her pride went with the breeze and she fell again on her knees by the big rock, fell and buried her face there in the cool moss and cried: “Oh, and I loved that thing!”
Ten minutes later she sat pale and smiling. The Conway pride had conquered, but it was a dangerous conquest, for steel and tears had mingled to make it.
In her despair she even plucked another cotton bloom from her bosom as if trying to force herself to be happy again in saying:
“One, I love—two, I love,
Three, I love, I say—”
But this only hurt her, because she remembered that when she had said it before she had had an idol which now lay shattered, as the petals of the cotton-blossom which she had plucked and thrown away.
Then the breeze sprang up again and with it, borne on it, came the click—click—click of a hammer tapping a rock. It was a small gladey valley through which a gulley ran. Boulders cropped out here and there, and haws, red and white elms, and sassafras grew and shaded it.
Down in the gulch, not a hundred yards from her, she saw a pair of broad shoulders overtopped by a rusty summer hat—the worse for a full season's wear. Around the shoulders was strung a leathern satchel, and she could see that the person beneath the hat was closely inspecting the rocks he chipped off and put into the satchel. Then his hammer rang out again.
She sat and watched him and listened to the tap of his hammer half sadly—half amused. Harry Travis had crushed her as she had never been crushed before in her life, and the pride in a woman which endureth a fall is not to be trifled with afterwards.
She grew calmer—even quiet. The old spirit returned. She knew that she had never been as beautiful in her life, as now—just now—in the halo of the sunset shining on her hair and reflected in the rare old gown she wore.
The person with the leathern satchel was oblivious of everything but his work. The old straw hat bobbed energetically—the big shoulders nodded steadily beneath it. She watched him silently a few minutes and then she called out pleasantly:
“You do seem to be very busy, Clay!”
He stopped and looked up. Then he took off his hat and, awkwardly bowing, wiped his brow, broad, calm and self-reliant, and a deliberate smile spread over his face. Everything he did was deliberate. The smile began in the large friendly mouth and spread in kindred waves upward until it flashed out from his kindly blue eyes, through the heavy double-lens glasses that covered them.
Without a word he picked up the last rock he had broken off and put it into his satchel. Very deliberate, too, was his walk up the hill toward the grape arbor, mopping his brow as he came along—a brow big and full of cause and effect and of quiet deductions and deliberate conclusions. His coat was seedy, his trousers bagged at the knees, his shoes were old, and there were patches on them, but his collar and linen were white and very much starched, and his awkward, shambling gait was honest to the last footfall. A world of depth and soul was in his strong, fine face, lit up now with an honest, humble smile, but, at rest, full of quiet dignity.
He shuffled along and sat down in a big brotherly way by the girl's side.
She sat still, looking at him with a half amused smile on her lips.
He smiled back at her abstractedly. She could see that he had not yet really seen her. He was looking thoughtfully across at the hill beyond:
“It puzzles me,” he said in a fine, mellow voice, “why I should find this rotten limestone cropping out here. Now, in the blue limestone of the Niagara period I was as sure of finding it as I am—”
“Of not finding me at all,”—it came queenly, haughtily from her.
He turned, and the thick lenses of his glasses were focused on her—a radiant, superb being. Then there were swept away all his abstractions and deductions, and in their place a real smile—a lover's smile of satisfaction looking on the paradise of his dreams.
“You know I have always worshiped you,” he said simply and reverently.
She moved up in a sisterly way to him and looked into his face.
“Clay—Clay—but you must not—I have told you—I am engaged.”
He did not appear to hear her. Already his mind was away off in the hills where his eyes were. He went on: “Now, over there I struck a stratum of rotten limestone—it's a curious thing. I traced that vein of coal from Walker County—clear through the carboniferous period, and it is bound to crop out somewhere in this altitude—bound to do it.”
“Now it's just this way,” he said, taking her hand without being conscious of it and counting off the periods with her fingers. “Here is the carboniferous, the sub-carboniferous—” She jerked her hand away with what would have been an amused laugh except that in a half conscious way she remembered that Harry had held her hand but half an hour ago; and it ended in a frigid shaft feathered with a smile—the arrow which came from the bow of her pretty mouth.
He came to himself with a boyish laugh and a blush that made Helen look at him again and watch it roll down his cheek and neck, under the fine white skin there.
Then he looked at her closely again—the romantic face, the coil of brown hair, the old gown of rich silk, the old-fashioned corsage and the rich old gold necklace around her throat.
“If there's a queen on earth—it's you,” he said simply.
He reddened again, and to divert it felt in his satchel and took out a rock. Then he looked across at the hills again:
“If I do trace up that vein of coal and the iron which is needed with it—when I do—for I know it is here as well as Leverrier knew that Neptune was in our planetary system by the attraction exerted—when I do—”
He looked at her again. He could not say the words. Real love has ideas, but never words. It feels, but cannot speak. That which comes out of the mouth, being words, is ever a poor substitute for that which comes from the heart and is spirit.
“Clay,” she said, “you keep forgetting. I say I—I am—was—” She stopped confused.
He looked hurt for a moment and smiled in his frank way: “I know it is here,” he said holding up a bit of coal—“here, by the million tons, and it is mine by right of birth and education and breeding. It is my heritage to find it. One day Alabama steel will outrank Pittsburgh's. Oh, to put my name there as the discoverer!”
“Then you”—he turned and said it fondly—reverently—“you should be mine by right of—of love.”
She sighed.
“Clay—I am sorry for you. I can never love you that way. You have told me that, since—oh, since I can remember, and I have always told you—you know we are cousins, anyway—second cousins.” She shook her head.
“Under the heart of the flinty hill lies the coal,” he said simply.
But she did not understand him. She had looked down and seen Harry's foot-track on the moss.
And so they sat until the first star arose and shimmered through the blue mist which lay around the far off purpling hill tops. Then there was the clang of a dinner bell.
“It is Mammy Maria,” she said—“I must go. No—you must not walk home with me. I'd rather be alone.”
She did not intend it, but it was brutal to have said it that way—to the sensitive heart it went to. He looked hurt for a moment and then tried to smile in a weak way. Then he raised his hat gallantly, turned and went off down the gulch.
Helen stood looking for the last time on the pretty arbor. Here she had lost her heart—her life. She fell on the moss again and kissed the stone. Then she walked home—in tears.