A CLANDESTINE ADVENTURE
It seems a strange, almost savage thing that the few months before a woman's marriage are always filled so full of the doing of thousands and tens of thousands of small things that she has no time to think of the hugeness of the responsibilities she is assuming. Perhaps if she were given time to realize them she would never assume them. Once or twice in the long two, nearly three months that I had given myself to get ready to marry Nickols, I paused and found myself thinking of the weighty things of life, but I soon was able to shake off the thought of the future. The time I felt it press most heavily was one morning that Jessie Litton and I sat quietly sewing on some sort of fluff she and Harriet had planned for my adornment, and very suddenly Jessie laid down her ruffle and looked at me as she said:
"Charlotte, I would be frightened, positively frightened, at the prospect of marrying Nickols Powers."
"I am; but why would you be?" I asked her directly.
"I read that long résumé of his work in the Review last night and for the first time I really realized what an important person he is to the development of American art. He really is a huge national machine and you'll be one of the important cogs on which the whole thing runs. You'll be ground and ground by his life and you'll have to make good or be responsible for some sort of a crash."
"No," I answered, slowly drawing my thread through the sheer cloth. "No, Nickols will live his own way regardless of the cogs on which it grinds. I shall have an enormous task in keeping up with the social side of his life, but Nickols is not the kind of a man who takes a woman into his work."
As I made my answer I was stabbed by the memory of the words that Gregory Goodloe had said to me on that day in the garden: "Separated from you, you going one way and I another, I can do nothing. You short-circuit my force—I am helpless without you." And he had been inviting me into the work for which he had been ordained into the holy Church of Christ. I felt myself groping blindly into the futility of my own life, and I was sick at heart.
"And if that is so, I would be still more frightened," Jessie said, gazing at me with dismayed and honest affection.
"Don't let's talk about it," I answered her and took up my sewing. At that moment and from that moment I cast myself into the whole whirl of activities in Goodloets and gave myself no more time or strength for self-communion. I was fleeing, and from what I dared not know.
And it was a busy month that stretched from August through September. Nickols said it would be his last fling at the old town and he proposed to leave his mark on its mossy sides. And he did.
In the first place money was pouring into little old Goodloets from three huge sources. The little one-horse tannery down by the river beyond the Settlement doubled, tripled and then quadrupled its capacity and next to it the little old saddle and harness factory in which Mr. Cockrell and old Mr. Sproul had been making saddles and harness since the days of the Confederacy, did the same and sent out consignment after consignment of saddles and bridles which were paid for in huge checks of Russian origin which almost paralyzed the Goodloets Bank and Trust Company and which worked pale Clive Harvey into the night until he managed to get young Henry Thornton in to assist him. His salary was raised three times until it was large enough to harbor Bessie and any number of small editions of them both, only she preferred to drink and dance and joy-ride with Hugh Payne, who could not have supported such a flowering by his own effort to have saved his own life and soul.
And then to burden poor Clive still further, Hampton Dibrell and Mr. Thornton hastily built huge pens over by the railroad and in these assembled hundreds and thousands of mules to be shipped through to France, which brought in return a steady stream of French francs to be translated into American dollars. Still further, Billy and Mark and Cliff, with Nickols' assistance, and the telegraph system, speculated in War Brides down on Wall Street until their individual bank accounts began to mount to giddy sums. Father and Mr. Sproul and more of the other men did likewise and Buford Cunningham got some spectacular returns from copper in Canada that Billy said would make Mrs. Buford Cunningham try to buy the Country Club outright for a summer home. And while there was prosperity in the Town the Settlement also had its share. Wages rose higher and higher and many of the women went to work at the machines in the saddle factory, leaving the care of the children to the old dames, which resulted in an added pandemonium in the Settlement streets.
"I don't know what is the matter. Goodloets is money mad," wailed Mother Spurlock, as she sank with weariness into the rocker on my porch one hot August afternoon. "The girls and the women are all at work and two babies have died this week from pure lack of mother's care, I might say mother's milk. Ed Jones' wife weaned her six-months'-old baby so she could go in the factory, and left it on condensed milk with old Mrs. Jones, who fed it incessantly and not at all cleanly. Now it is not expected to live. And they dance at the Last Chance until one o'clock almost every night. Is the world mad?"
"No, just prosperous, Mother Elsie," I answered her as I gave her a large fan and Dabney brought her a tall glass of very cold tea. "Little old Goodloets is having the same boom that the rest of America is getting from feeding and furnishing the rest of the warring world."
"Nickols Powers told me just last night that over two hundred thousand dollars would be spent on the improvements to this town in the next two months, counting the new schoolhouse, the restoration of the courthouse, the paving of the public square and the enlargement of the electric light plant. That doesn't count the money everybody is putting on their own private homes. That camp of workmen down by the river that Nickols has had sent down from the city has a hundred men in it now, and that is one thing that demoralizes the Settlement. Jacob Ensley has had that dance hall enlarged twice and he has employed George Spain to stand behind the bar. It is breaking Mrs. Spain's heart, but she is helpless, for George is being paid three dollars a day for being just where he wants to be. I don't know what to do. I firmly believe the town is mad, with only Gregory Goodloe to stand between it and God's wrath."
"What is he doing to stem the joy tide?" I asked with a laugh, for it did seem in a way funny to see one of the leading citizens of old Goodloets so distressed over its improvement and modernization through its enormous prosperity.
"He was down in the workmen's camp last night having a song service and seventy-five of them stayed there singing until midnight. Jacob had to put out his lights at eleven o'clock because there were not enough to pay to keep open. The chapel was full Sunday night and Jacob closed the Last Chance at six o'clock for the first time in its existence. The men passed it on to him to do it and he came and sat in a back pew himself. They all call Mr. Goodloe 'Parson,' and he walks in and around and about this town night and day shedding a kind of peace and good will even into the darkest corners. He lends a hand here and there with the work, eats out of the men's dinner pails when that Jefferson is too lazy to cook for him, or takes a bite off some stove down in the Settlement out of some old woman's pork and cabbage pot with just as much grace and heartiness as he eats at Nell Morgan's or Harriet Henderson's most elaborate dinners. And outside of his pulpit he never preaches; he just lives. This is what I heard Jacob say to him just yesterday:
"'Sure, and I wint up to set in one of your pews to see if your action in your own job was as good as it is in the many you lend a hand to week about.'
"'Well?' asked Mr. Goodloe, as he picked up, one of those rosy apples from the box Jacob keeps out on the sidewalk to blind the Last Chance.
"'I knows when to run and not be caught,' Jacob answered, as he put another apple in the parson's pocket and went back into the grocery door."
"Do you ever see Martha?" I asked with a kind of impatience. I had been three times down to the Last Chance and each time Jacob's excuses for Martha had been positive though courteous, and I had come away baffled, with the green groceries I had purchased as a blind to my visit. I had written to her and had had no response. At that I had stopped, with a self-sufficient feeling of a duty well done, but through it all I also felt that she was on the other side of a prison wall crying to me.
"Never," answered Mother Spurlock, with real pain in her voice. "She stays in that back room and cooks for Jacob, and the child stays with her and has only the small yard back of the bar in which to play. Jacob only let him come up to sing with Mr. Goodloe and the children a few times and now he is kept as near in prison as his mother. Jacob's attitude grows more morose about her and the child every day. I don't understand it. I never will. Martha was the loveliest girl that ever bloomed in the Settlement, and now she has been plucked and thrown into the dust. And the child is too young to share her prison fate. He must be got out and away."
"He will," I answered, with a calm confidence. I didn't tell Mother Spurlock, and I didn't know exactly why I didn't, but I was deeply involved in a clandestine affair with the Stray which was fast becoming one of the adventures of my life. It had begun in a positively weird manner and was continuing along the same lines. One morning several weeks after my first acquaintance and turtle adventure with him I had waked up at dawn and gone to look out of the window just as the morning star was fading over Old Harpeth. In the dim light I had spied a small figure down in the garden, hopping along by a row of early young rose bushes, with a can in one hand and a long stick in the other. Hastily getting into a few clothes I crept down through the silent house and out in the garden to find the Stray busily engaged in knocking large slugs off into a can.
"I feed 'em to mother's bird in the cage, 'cause he can't get out to get 'em," he explained. "They all sleep hard 'cause they work so late and I crawl out the window and go back while they don't wake up. I like your yard better than I do mine." The statement was made simply, without envy of apology.
And from that morning a queer kind of dawn life went on between the small boy and me. Morning after morning he threw a pebble to waken me and I hurried down to our tryst, which extended through the hour that lies between the crack of day and the first glint of the awakening sun. At first I had carried sweetmeats to our tryst, which were accepted with moderate pleasure, but one morning I had taken a huge volume of Rackham's Mother Goose which Nickols had brought me, and from then on our hour had been one of spiritual communion. I found the young mind insatiate and I had to ransack the library for stories and poems and pictures suitable to his years, though he rapidly developed a very advanced taste. The morning I read him the Shakespearian lines woven around the little Princes in the Tower, having suitably connected up the story for him with words of my own, we forgot the time and he overstayed his limit, for Dabney was opening the house when he fled. For five mornings he did not come and I could find no way to get news of him. I asked Mikey and got a maddening response.
"They shut up Stray in the back yard because he's a shame to old Jake," was his answer to my question. "Jake would shoot anybody that climbed that fence."
"I bet I could get over and the bad man not see if I could get out in the dark," Charlotte declared as she stood listening to my questioning. "And I am going after Stranger that way, too, if ever they leave the front door to my house unlocked. It is wicked to shut up a little boy, and the devil would help me get him out." Charlotte's purpose was high if she did slightly mix her theology.
That night a wonderful thing happened in my moonlit room. I was dead asleep when I felt a soft hand stroking my face, and then my hair, and I awoke to find the Stray standing by my bed.
"They tied me in bed when they found out I had runned away in the mornings to see you, but I gnawed the rope that he put, because I wanted to tell you that I can go to the big school when it opens because Minister told him that he would be put in jail if I didn't. It is a law. I heard him last night, and mother cried a long time, for what, I don't know. Was she glad or sorry? Do you know?"
"No, darling, I don't know, and I wish I did," I answered him as I put my arms around him while he snuggled his black-crested head down beside mine on the pillow.
"My mother is sick, she cries so much," he said with a manly struggle that drowned the sob in his throat. "I don't know what to do. Do you know?"
"I'll find out," I said with a sudden fierceness as I strained him against my shoulder for an instant and then sat up in bed as if I must do something at once.
"I must run right back and tie myself before he wakes up and whips me," the Stray said, and it sickened me to see him wrap the gnawed rope around his little arm.
"No!" I exclaimed, and held out my arms to him.
"I must, but I don't mind whippings if I can read books in school and you make mother not cry," and before I could stop him he ran out of the dim room and I could hear his cautious bare feet patter down the long stairway and hall.
That moonlight tryst was the last of the adventure, but I did not worry, for I knew that the school would be opened formally in ten days, and I had laid my plans for Stray in an interested friendship with the very competent young woman who had already come down from the state normal college to teach the amalgamated young ideas of Goodloets to shoot. Also, I had vague plans that hurt me, of getting Jessie or Harriet to continue the trysts for me after the wedding, whose details they were all pushing to completion by a mid-September day.
And added to the strenuosity of the laying of my plans for at least a year's absence, I had to help father make his arrangements for a six months' stay in Washington, for he had accepted the President's appointment on the Commerce Commission, and night and day he was at his library desk. The silver-topped decanter still stood on the sideboard in the dining room, and the silver ice bowl was formally filled before every meal by Dabney. The mint glass was kept fresh and fragrant but apparently father had forgotten entirely about all three. He ate twice as much as I had ever seen him consume and the worn lines in his face were slowly filling out into a delicious joviality. Mr. Hicks, the little tailor who had always clothed him, had little by little made over the outer man with new garments as the old ones grew restrictive, and Mother Spurlock had carried his entire discarded wardrobe, garment at a time, down to the Settlement for the clothing of some of her most needy friends.
But the most reborn person I had ever seen was Dabney. The little black man had lived so long under the shadow of father's moroseness that when the pressure was lifted from his bent black shoulders he rebounded to an amazing extent. His reaction took the form of gala attire in which Nickols encouraged him to the extent of silk hosiery of the most delicate shades from his own wardrobe, with ties to match, not to mention his own last year's Panama hat, pressed over into the extreme of the prevailing style for youthful masculine head adornment. Also Nickols bestowed upon him a very up-to-date Palm Beach suit, purchased at the Hicks shop, and on his first appearance in the kitchen for his wife's inspection I was present.
"Go take them clothes off, nigger, and put 'em along of my black silk shroud in the bottom drawer of the chist," she commanded, as she put her hands on her sixty-inch waist and stood before him with arms akimbo. "Folks is got no business to dress in life so fine that they shames they burying clothes."
"Shoo fly, I'm jest going to Washington, not to Heaven, in this here rig. When I git into Heaven it'll be 'cause I'm hiding behind that black silk skirt of your shroud, honey, if I'm as naked as borned," was the admiring, wily and also wholly sincere answer to Mammy's fling at the gorgeous raiment.
And while the Poplars teemed with wedding plans Nickols kept the whole village steamed up to be in readiness for the visit of Mr. Jeffries, which was dated for just a week before the wedding, and the village festival at the opening of the new school was to be the most important ceremonial of the whole visit. Father was to give him a dinner at which all of the Solons of the Harpeth Valley were to be present, and a ball at the Country Club was being planned by Billy with all enthusiasm. But the center of the buzz was down at Mother Spurlock's Little House, where Mr. Goodloe daily, and it seemed almost hourly, drilled the children for the ceremonial of the opening of their house of learning across the way from the Little House by the Road. Only echoes of the orgies reached the outside, and gossip ran high in the Settlement as well as the Town at the fragments that the delighted scions brought home, of curious folk dances mixed with fragments of weird tunes.
"Sure, a minister of the gospel to teach me Mikey to stand on one leg and spin around on the other with his hands over his head is a quare thing, but the Riverend Goodloe is no ordinary man," said Mrs. Burns to Mother Spurlock, who answered:
"You can trust him, Mrs. Burns, even with Mikey's legs."
And during all the long weeks of activity not once did I have a word alone with the Harpeth Jaguar. We met constantly at dinner at the tables of our friends and he came and went at the Poplars with the same freedom that Nickols enjoyed. He was long hours in the library with father, and somehow I felt that he was strengthening the structure that he had builded on the ruined foundation and something passionate rose in my heart and filled it with pain every time I heard his ringing laugh come from the library table, accompanied by father's booming chuckle. Also, he worked early and late in the garden with Nickols and the young man from White Plains, and I saw that Nickols' artistic ideas flowed at top speed when Gregory Goodloe was standing by.
It was the same thing over at the new schoolhouse. Mr. Todd and the men worked miracles with their stone and mortar and wood and iron when he was standing by or lending a hand. The school was built partly of stone like the chapel and partly of old purple-pink brick like Mother Spurlock's Little House, and it was beamed with heavy timbers. It was roofed with heavy colonial clapboards which made it look as if it had already stood a century before the floors were laid or the very modern desks installed. It was built to house increasing generations, though only about fifty children would open its portals of education.
"It speaks of education de luxe, doesn't it?" Billy asked as Nell and Harriet and I stood with him and Nickols and the parson watching Mr. Todd directing the men in screwing down the desks just a few days before the opening.
"There is scarcely a village in England to compare with old Goodloets now, and nothing at all like it," said Nickols, as he looked first up the hill to the Town and down the hill to the Settlement. "I know that it is the first spot in America to express what the full grown nation is going to be. When we add beauty to the materially perfected mode of existence we are enjoying, life will be too short in the living. That schoolhouse ought to produce some results in art cultures in the infant mind of Goodloets."
"Yes, America is learning that the foundation of its national existence, trait upon trait, must be laid in the lives of the children," said Mr. Goodloe, slowly, and he smiled as across from the Little House came wee Susan's exquisite treble in a waltz song which was backed up by Mother Spurlock's bumble and Charlotte's none too accurate accompaniment. And we all smiled with him.
Always it seemed to me I was with him and a part of a number of people who felt the radiance of his loveliness, and not once had I for a second come into personal touch with him. I had, like the rest, got my smiles and friendliness from the dark eyes under dull gold, but the door to the land in which I had been with Tristan when he sang his death song had vanished and there were no traces of its portals. The only sign that was between him and me was his continued evasion of setting a date for the dedication of the chapel. He always answered inquiries by saying that the opening of the school must come first and when the dedication was mentioned he never looked in my direction. My soul seemed to be standing still and listening for something that never came.
And then Mr. Jeffries arrived on the scene of action.
That night of Billy's ball for the magnate, who was having the time of his gray-headed life under Billy's and Nickols' enthusiastic direction, the strange alien thing that had been developed in my depths, part unrest and part rebellion, since I had first looked into the eyes of the young Methodist parson, who had intruded himself and his chapel into my existence, got its death blow. In my presence Nickols made his formal request of the Reverend Mr. Goodloe to officiate at our marriage.
"Of course, Greg, old fellow, you are going to marry us next Tuesday, aren't you?" asked Nickols, as we stood on the steps of the Poplars after dinner, chatting with him as he was leaving to go over to the chapel while we went out to the dance. "I suppose there is some sort of formal way to make the request, but I don't know it."
"If there is I don't know it, either," was the kindly answer, which both Nickols and I took for assent.
"Thank you, sir," said Nickols, as he turned away towards father and Mr. Cockrell and Mr. Jeffries, who had come out on the porch with their cigars, and left him and me standing alone in the starlight.
"God guard you!" he said to me without taking the hand I held out to him in the darkness with a kind of desperation that seemed that of a drowning woman. "Good-bye!" and he was gone out into the night, leaving me, I knew, forever outside of his life.
"Wait, Oh wait!" I pleaded, but he was gone and I didn't even know if he heard the cry out into the velvet darkness.
That night was the most brilliant night that Goodloets had ever known. The Town was full of guests who had motored over from all the towns around in the Harpeth Valley. The Governor had come down from the capital in his huge touring car to congratulate father on his appointment and to meet Mr. Jeffries. His adjutant-general and several of his aids were with him in their showy State Guard uniforms and all of the girls were rosy with excitement at the presence of so many rows of brass buttons. Mr. Jeffries opened the ball, and to the delight and amusement of us all, he succeeded in leading out with him Mrs. Sproul, who turned the opening dance into a stately old Virginia reel, which so delighted the tango dancers with its novelty that the dance was repeated several times during the evening by enthusiastic requests.
And while the Town reveled in celebration of the new Goodloets, down in the Settlement like rejoicings were being held at the dance hall of the Last Chance. In fact, the whole small city was in the throes of a great rejoicing. Why shouldn't all Goodloets revel when it was enjoying a prosperity beyond anybody's dreams of two years before? Everybody had been generous to the old town with the money that had come so easily from other suffering people's necessities, and security and good fellowship and prosperity reigned supreme. In each heart there was the feeling that now the old town and their personal lives were founded on solid rocks of peace and plenty and it was the time to eat, drink and be merry.
At supper the Governor's first toast, after that to the town itself, was to father and his distinctions. Then Mr. Jeffries toasted Nickols and me. He called Nickols the "American Wizard of Habitations," and, amid cheering and clapping hands, announced his intention to have Nickols build the American town on the Hudson. He called me the "Heart of the Achievement," and father's pride as he looked down the long table at Nickols and me was very wonderful and beautiful; and as great a pride rose in my heart as I saw him lift his glass of water to pledge me, leaving the bubbles breaking in his champagne.
It was very near dawn when we all motored home and it was upon the verge of the crack of day by the time Dabney and Nickols had got the Governor and Mr. Jeffries and the other guests settled under the wide roof of the Poplars, which had never hovered a more distinguished or brilliant house party.
For a few quiet minutes after they had all gone to their rooms Nickols and I stood alone on the front porch in the cool darkness with its hint of the dawn, while old Dabney shut up the back part of the house.
"The school festival will be over to-morrow, sweetheart, and the next day they will all be gone. The photographers are all through with the photographing and to-morrow night all the extra workmen go back to the city. There'll be three whole quiet days for you to get ready to give me that kiss, which I won't take when you are as tired as you are now," said Nickols, as he put a limp arm around me and leaned against the tall door post.
"To-morrow the old makes way for the new. Goodloets is dead! Long live Goodloets!" I answered, as I in turn leaned against Nickols' jaded arm for only a second before we preceded Dabney up the stairs to our rooms.
In my room I went immediately to the window and opened wide the heavy shutters. I found myself looking down on Goodloets, which lay below the darkness of the Poplars like a long glowworm, brilliant with the lights from the homes of the revelers who were going to bed with a sense of perfect security. Still farther down the hill the lights from the Settlement glowed with scarcely less brilliancy and I felt sure that the Last Chance was still harboring a last fling of joy.
Suddenly over my spirit came a deep wave of depression that amounted to a great fear and then as I stood trembling in the darkness, a broad ray of morning light shot up over Paradise Ridge and spread rapidly into a crimson glow that was reflected against a black cloud hanging low over the head of Old Harpeth. A flash of lightning darted from the cloud and spread its gold fire through the crimson of the coming day, and then the sullen-pointed cloud sank rapidly below Paradise Ridge, over which it had risen, as if reconnoitering. Positively shuddering, I knelt against the window seat and watched the day come with a hitherto unknown terror. Then as I watched the dawn begin to drive away the sullen clouds a rich voice began to sing out beyond the old poplars as a window of the gray chapel was thrown open:
"Arise, my soul, arise,
Shake off thy guilty fears;
... ... ... ...
Before the throne my Surety stands
My name is written on His hands."
The calmness that came into my frightened heart was like the peace of a deep sleep, and with its strength I faced the day that was to be that of my humiliation and which was to be the crest of the wave of the high tide of Goodloets.