My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“She hates us because Grandfather sold his farm, or lost it somehow,” Theodosia said as they drove down the avenue toward the road. “She hates us because she’ll have to will us her land. We’re the only natural heirs she’s got. She hates to have to will us her property.”

Returning along the road the girls filled the buggy with dogwood boughs, and they sang to remove the memory of the dismal hour of the farm, alto and soprano, running from one ditty to another, while the horse jogged up the pike toward the town. The rolling hills were fresh with spring, were sweetly curved with the tender new growth, and sweet again with the scent of herbs and dew. At the creek crossing the horse craved a drink, and Theodosia loosened the check-rein and let the beast step aside into the pool, gay over the act and eager to dispel the malice of the old hour. The weathered limestone of the creek bottom lay crumpled and fluted, a mass of tightly welded shells from some old ocean bed. The stream had cut a wide valley for its use, had set the hills far back as it had chosen other beds in which to wander in other ages. The horse supped his drink from off the fluted rocks, and when he had got his fill, alto and soprano flowing anew around some sentimental air, they would jog higher up the broad valley and thus come home again to the town.

The young men, Conway Brooke and Albert Stiles, would come to Theodosia’s house singly or together. Coming together, they would beg her to play for them or they would bring sweets to eat. Conway calling alone would talk of himself, sitting happily in the dim light of the parlor and enjoying his heightened self, his ease, his good looks, Theodosia’s beauty, all the delights of remembered being. Albert coming alone would grow heavily reminiscent, self-appraising, romantic, planning his future, laying his plans before her, eager for acquiescence. He was broad and strong, filling his chair with his man’s frame. Another, Frank Railey, would stop casually on his way up or down the street, or he would take her to row on the pool beyond the town. He would bring his books to read portions aloud, bits of essay he admired, or verse from his favorite poets. He had studied law and was establishing himself in practice in the courts of equity. Persevering and conscientious, seeking to enrich his experience, he would seek talk with Anthony Bell, bringing up old matters and trying to pry open the shut past, but this past was strange to him in its coloring, its iridescences which had long since been lost from recorded history, and these discussions would fall apart and leave old Anthony wrathful, gesticulating, straining to regain his composure. Theodosia often forgot engagements with Frank and was then put to elaborate pains to escape rudeness. When he faded down the vista of the street, going toward the town, he evaporated entirely, and she had no picture of where he went or of what he might do there. His face was slightly out of proportion, slightly unsymmetrical, and this characteristic gave it a look of rugged beauty and strength. He would come back out of the nowhere into which he had gone, smiling at Theodosia’s door, his smile placed slightly to one side of his face, and she would cry out, “For heaven’s sake, it’s Frank!”

Conway was lovely in his approach and in his greetings, always offering a charming promise of some approximation. His soft accents were a blend of Virginia English and negro tones. He was slender and tall, slightly vague as to what he wanted of life and the world, happy in himself, a lover of himself and of life. He liked to sit beside Theodosia and talk of his day, uncommitted to it now it was over. He worked somewhere in the town, but his work stood beside him as a commonplace and was never an object to be attained with sweat and thought. He loved himself anew in the warmth of her presence, that she knew. He would sit idly in his chair, faintly smiling, happy over anything she remembered to tell of her day, and happy over his own memories and vague comments. He made light matters of all the heavy affairs of business, of family, of care of any sort. He wore the cleanliness and freshness of his linens as if he imparted these qualities to them, as if he yielded these qualities with his easy, careless gestures and uncommitted mood. Gone from her, he kept always in Theodosia’s mind as that which lent grace to any morning into which it might come, into any evening, any memory, so that she smiled faintly if she thought of him. She knew his delicacy in some harsh way, in some hard framework of knowing that lay over her momentary joys in his radiance, in his beauty. Once, into the midst of the intoxicating vapor which surrounded her sense of him, her own voice spoke aloud, surprising her with its casual finality:

“He’d follow after the last lovely face offered”—and added: “The trick around the eyes and he’d go.”

If he were coming she would wear the pale yellow dress he admired and arrange her hair in the way he most praised, a low knot drawn above her neck and pushed securely into the curves at the back of her skull. Knowing that he would come she would linger over the hair, a thought of him and of his gracious, easily given admiration in every lift of the comb as she gently tooled the mass into shape and smiled now and again at her long face with its firm thin red lips. She had read from her grandfather’s books and Frank had brought her books containing the new learning. Conway’s knowledge was more powerful with her, she knew, and she smiled at her curving smile until her own lips told her their subtle learning, over and over, retelling. Conway would seat her in the chair of the blue brocade and he would adjust the light to fall in a cascade on the yellow gown, or he would arrange the bowl of roses with some reference to herself and himself and then sit negligently in his chair, himself a part of some whole which he at the same instant encompassed, having no notion of why he did these things. Or did he have no notion? she argued. His knowledge would spread through the room, through the house, gathered to the brilliant constellations that swam in a sun-shaft of light before a window, the motes of the beam, and gathered again to the scent of the honeysuckle outside on the chimney.

Albert would come heavily into the parlor although his feet were agile and his large frame was light to his motions. He filled the parlor with his seriousness and with his ponderous future which circled about his agricultural studies. He would lay his pretexts out, this way and that, making his decisions in her presence, but if Conway were at hand he was more light and less committed, as if only Theodosia had his confidences, as if his approach to Conway were still by the way of the college they had attended, of the streets they now walked together, of the ball they sometimes tossed back and forth, the dogs they owned in common. His strong body, rich with blood and bulk, seemed about to burst from its clothing as he sat opposite the light, moving from time to time in his seat in an excess of vitality. If he bent over a printed page, his earnest eyes lowered to their drooping, his mouth caught in its relaxed, searching pose, his studious moment would give him back to his boyhood, even to childhood, and Theodosia would smile faintly beside her eyes, deeply under the flesh, in a moment of tenderness. Sometimes she would play for him the light music he desired, bent rhythms that paused over brinks and leaped with spasmodic passion to its fulfilment in another twisted measure, any sort so that it moved swiftly to its consummation and readily fulfilled its promises. She was contemptuous of his taste in melodies even when she wanted most to please him. He was a part of the rich insufficiency that surrounded her. “He looks just like Tramp,” she said one day as she mounted the stairway, and Tramp was a great mongrel, part Dane, part collie, that lived somewhere on the street.

“He looks exactly like Tramp,” she said. She was dressing for his coming, working her hair into the shapes Conway liked, her lips withdrawing from the tunes Albert wanted played. “Oh, Lord! his Leave Home Rags and his My Mandy Lanes” she said. Later she would play them for him, plucking the strings quaintly and withdrawing them from their meanings.

When he had first come back from his agricultural college he had talked of a girl named Judith. He still wrote to her, but seldom spoke of her now. He would settle into his chair with a great sigh of content, turning the letter addressed to Judith over and over in his hands, a letter he had forgotten to mail. When he talked of himself he came immediately to the subject that most concerned the farmers, the success of the tobacco pool. Sometimes he seemed cautious as he handled some letter from Judith, turning it about, as if he clung to it. He would beg Theodosia to play the new song he had brought, for he had come then to have her play a song.

“Gosh, you’re the only girl in town can play,” he said. “Fiddle or piano, it’s all one to her. And works either single or double.”