THREE
Catherine Lovell’s face was dim in Theodosia’s memory now that it was gone from the town. To her this was something to contemplate, this sure loss of a face when it had passed beyond the sight of the eye. The face would be recognized instantly anywhere upon the earth, in any crowd, but it could not be restored to a vivid image in waking thought. Theodosia pursued all vanishing faces with moments of wonder and amazement, for Jane Moore, out of sight, was but dimly seen although the flavor of her being, of her way, her smile, was keenly discerned. The same was true of Ruth although she came often to the parlor, and true of Conway, of Albert, of Frank, and she played a game of trying to hold the image minute by minute after the face had disappeared through a doorway, but only a dim vision together with an estimate or a general essence could be assured, although Albert’s look with its momentary pleading and rough assurance somehow entered her frame and consorted with some part of her own being, richly remembered in the joyous consenting of her members, but accompanying this ran always a tender thought of Conway and his beauty, who, if he were but vaguely visualized, was real and one with Albert in whatever favor her mind yielded of contemplation and tenderness.
Perhaps, she reflected, these faces were the less vividly imaged because they were deeply known in other than visual reports. All the familiar faces of the town were so richly seasoned with all the rest that went with them in the making of a person that they were in themselves dimmed. Old faces, as these were, in youth or age, inherited of others, the Bell face, the Robinson face, the Moores, the Brookes, the Tanners, the MacDougals—one would know where they had derived. Bell faces had been greeting Robinson faces on the street of the town for more than a hundred and twenty-five years. Or, the face of the music teacher, out of sight, shadowed into her darkness of hair and brow and became less flesh under the remembered capricious flights of her fiddle singing. Albert, gone from the town now on an extended mission among the growers, offered a constant and joyous dare, by way of his dim image, in her game of hide-and-seek.
A new person had come to the town while Catherine was still making felt her departure, a strange face with no predecessors. A man, Captain Agnew, had bought a farm at the end of one of the streets, and his daughter, Florence, was presently seen driving about the town in a motor vehicle. She was a large girl, rich in the splendors of vitality, deep of chest and strong of limb. Her eyes were bright and her lips easily flowing. She flung her looks everywhere, careless of them, abundantly centered within herself. Theodosia saw her here and there over the town and talked with her at some gathering. She thought of her again and again as she practised the trills, her present occupation, and she experimented to try to visualize the new face with its looks, its beauty, its rapid sequence of smiles, frowns, and infinities of gesture. The new face had printed itself more cleverly than any other into her mind, and she herself smiled often, remembering the vivid picture that was clear and firm in determination. The new girl had moved swiftly into the life of the town, for in a few days she was seen everywhere. “Is it because she is new to me that I remember her looks?” Theodosia asked herself, waking out of sleep, and suddenly a clear image of Florence, as clear as reality, stood in the core of her inner vision.
It was a puzzle—Florence to be so keenly felt as to retain her pictured form in absence. Theodosia ran swiftly with the spring. Her long slender legs delighted in the daily walk, and in a few weeks there would be tennis on the courts at the Seminary. Stiggins spread onto her mind once as a flat unrecognized affront. Walking past the stable swiftly one bright day she saw his hand as it bent over the collar of a mule to slip a pad into place, a long slender hand, powerful and cunning, like her own hand but more powerful and more steadily placed to its task. The tawny fingers dragged knowingly over the buckles of the collar and then his face, viewed momentarily, was searched carelessly in the swift moment of a passing. “Between thee and me there is a great gulf fixed,” she thought, and the hour swept quickly by, having gathered nothing from the moment which was dominated by the dark accidental hand.
Florence Agnew grew daily into a personality, heard and felt as well as seen. Hers was a sensual voice, heavy with tone, low, trailing away into finalities. Her body was luxury-loving and radiantly indolent, using but a modicum of its intense vitality for her goings and comings. Her perfect teeth flashed their smile from between her rippling lips and she was alive to the ends of her animal being, which was set to have the best of the town for its own. Her hair was puffed and curled to be a gauze of rippling midnight over her head.
Jane Moore could do nothing with the Bach. She shook her head self-indulgently at the piano arrangement as if the music were some light joke to confound the keyboard. She touched a key here and there with her fingers but in the end she shrugged as if Bach were a responsibility she could not be asked to assume. Her hat was bright for the spring that delayed, out-dating the spring with its flowers and fragile crêpe. She wanted to talk of Florence continually, and she quoted her with an admiration which would fall suddenly under amused contempt or shock but would build itself back again in the charm of the unfamiliar. She went daily where Florence went, or she would retail to Theodosia the witty sayings and bold sallies that issued from the flame around which she was impelled to hover.
The days went hurriedly, the birds in the trees at dawn making a continuous breathless fluting, the mockingbird loudest and most insistent. Albert had gone far into the country, traveling from farm to farm, visiting the smaller villages, or he made farther journeys into outlying counties. Theodosia played trills looking at her thin lips in the tall glass of the parlor, searching her lips and her face there.
She had seen Florence that day with a group of people at the pool beyond the town where boats were paddled about. She gave the top of her mind to the trill, the finger pressed firmly down on the string, but underneath a voice recounted Albert’s words, hurled them out between the running web of the trill. “Some day I aim to smash that old fiddle into the middle of perdition.” Her fingers were joyous over the trill; she and her fingers were one and they would ride together on the top of the world. She comprehended Florence then and dwelt upon her minutely, saw her quick smile that knew all the inner part of a man or of a woman. Albert’s voice again: “You’re too full of joy. I aim to take some of the joy out of you.” The bird tones of the trill crashed over the words and lanced each one with a sharp dart. “Two months from now I aim to do’t. Take your time.” She had spent a month with the scales and then had set upon the harmony again, mornings when her pencil dribbled small black egg-shaped dots on the scaffolding set up by the staff and bound them together with a swift down-stroke, her ear hearing tone set upon tone in a fullness of design, the fear in her inner thought, but the fear had slunk away before her new joy and it was now only a dim thing, abstracted, unremembered, too remote to visit any image. Florence Agnew spread pleasure over the town and over the bodies of men and women, and all were more intensely alive. “A week now, I give you. The kind of lover you’ll want. I’ll close in against the week’s done,” the words met the bird-singing of the trill that twittered over them and brooded them in kindness. Her mind was suffused with half-knowing, drunk with sense, but her fingers knew their cleverness and the trill lived on while she floated in the reality of consenting fiber and essence. “His strength, it’s what I need after all,” she said wisely, looking at the chin-piece of the instrument, looking at the threads of the bow, her mouth speaking coolly above the languor of her blood. A day two weeks earlier reappeared to be lived more minutely than in its first appearing, and another day later. The present week cried out for recognition; he had sent her a note from Corinth and another from Mayfair Church. He had called her by the telephone the night before, “To hear the sound of you again,” saying, and “Three days and I’ll come back. Mark on your calendar, you better.” The voices became entirely real:
“You better mark on your calendar. It’ll be a red-letter day, against I come, red for you.”