"Of course, the worst part was having to leave you, but when George found out about it, he insisted upon fetching and carrying my bundles."
"George!" I exclaimed sharply, and a spasm of pain, like the entrance of poison into an unhealed wound, contracted my heart. "Was that confounded package under his arm," I questioned, almost angrily, "some of the stuff?"
"That was a blouse of Maggie Tyler's. He is going to take it back to her on Friday. There, now, stay quiet, while I run and speak to him. He is waiting for me in the kitchen."
She went out, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to take in washing and for George to deliver it, while, opening the long green shutters, I sat staring, beyond the humming-birds and the white columns, to the shimmering haze that hung over the old tea-roses and the dwindled box in the garden. Here the heat, though it was still visible to the eyes, was softened and made fragrant by the greenness of the trees and the grass and by the perfume of the jessamine and the old tea-roses, dropping their faintly coloured leaves in the sunshine. From time to time the sounds of the city, grown melancholy and discordant, like the sounds that one hears in fever, reached me across the shimmering vagueness of the garden.
And then as I sat there, with folded hands, there came to me, out of some place, so remote that it seemed a thousand miles away from the sunny stillness, and yet so near that I knew it existed only within my soul, a sense of failure, of helplessness, of humiliation. A hundred casual memories thronged through my mind, and all these memories, gathering significance from my imagination, plunged me deeper into the bitter despondency which had closed over my head. I saw the General, with his little, alert bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an intelligent bulldog, with that look of stubbornness, of tenacity, persisting beneath the sly humour that gleamed in his face, as if he were thinking always somewhere far back in his brain, "I'll hang on to the death, I'll hang on to the death." His figure, which, because of that legendary glamour I had seen surrounding it in childhood, still personified shining success in my eyes, appeared to add a certain horror to this sense of helplessness, of failure, that dragged me under. Deep down within me, down below my love for Sally or for the child, something older than any emotion, older than any instinct except the instinct of battle, awakened and passed from passiveness into violence. "Let me but start again in the race," said this something, "let me but stand once more on my feet." The despondency, which had been at first formless and vague as mere darkness, leaped suddenly into a tangible shape, and I felt that the oppressive weight of the debt on my shoulders was the weight, not of thought, but of metal. Until that was lifted—until I had struggled free—I should be crippled, I told myself, not only in ambition, but in body.
From the detached kitchen, at the end of the short brick walk, overgrown with wild violets, that led to it, the sound of George's laugh fell on my ears. Rising to my feet with an effort, I stood, listening, without thought, to the sound, which seemed to grow vacant and sad as it floated to me in the warm air over the sunken bricks. Then passing through the long window, I descended the steps slowly, and stopped in the shadow of a pink crape myrtle that grew near the kitchen doorway. Again the merriment came to me, Sally's laughter mingling this time with George's.
"No, that will never do. This is the way," she said, in her sparkling voice, which reminded me always of running water.
"Sally!" I called, and moving nearer, I paused at the kitchen step, while she came quickly forward, with some white, filmy stuff she had just rinsed in the tub still in her hands.
"Why, here's Ben!" she exclaimed. "You bad boy, when I told you positively not to get up out of that chair!"
A gingham apron was pinned over her waist and bosom, her sleeves were rolled back, and I saw the redness from the hot soapsuds rising from her hands to her elbows.