"Well, I reckon the Claypole would pull us through," commented Cyrus. The Claypole was an old brand of plug tobacco with which the first Treadwell factory had started. "But you're right about competition. It's got to stop or we'll be driven clean out of the business."
He drew out his latchkey as he spoke, for they had reached the corner of Bolingbroke Street, and the small dingy house in which they lived was only a few doors away. As they passed between the two blossoming oleanders in green tubs on the sidewalk, James glanced up at the flat square roof, and observed doubtfully, "You'll be getting out of this old place before long now, I reckon."
"Oh, someday, someday," answered Cyrus. "There'll be time enough when the market settles and we can see where the money is coming from."
Once every year, in the spring, James asked his father this question, and once every year he received exactly the same answer. In his mind, Cyrus was always putting off the day when he should move into a larger house, for though he got richer every week, he never seemed to get quite rich enough to commit himself to any definite change in his circumstances. Of course, in the nature of things, he knew that he ought to have left Bolingbroke Street long ago; there was hardly a family still living there with whom his daughter associated, and she complained daily of having to pass saloons and barber shops whenever she went out of doors. But the truth was that in spite of his answer to James's annual question, neither of them wanted to move away from the old home, and each hoped in his heart that he should never be forced into doing so. Cyrus had become wedded to the house as a man becomes wedded to a habit, and since the clinging to a habit was the only form of sentiment of which he was capable, he shrank more and more from what he felt to be the almost unbearable wrench of moving. A certain fidelity of purpose, the quality which had lifted him above the petty provincialism that crippled James, made the display of wealth as obnoxious to him as the possession of it was agreeable. As long as he was conscious that he controlled the industrial future of Dinwiddie, it was a matter of indifference to him whether people supposed him to be a millionaire or a pauper. In time he would probably have to change his way of living and put an end to his life-long practice of saving; but, meanwhile, he was quite content to go on year after year mending the roof and the chimneys of the old house into which he had moved the week after his marriage.
Entering the hall, he hung his hat on the walnut hat-rack in the dark corner behind the door, and followed the worn strip of blue and red oilcloth which ran up the narrow staircase to the floor above. Where the staircase bent sharply in the middle, the old-fashioned mahogany balustrade shone richly in the light of a gas-jet which jutted out on a brass stem from the wall. Although a window on the upper floor was opened wide to the sunset, the interior of the house had a close musty smell, as if it had been shut up, uninhabited, for months. Cyrus had never noticed the smell, for his senses, which were never acute, had been rendered even duller than usual by custom.
At the top of the stairs, a coloured washerwoman, accompanied by a bright mulatto boy, who carried an empty clothes basket on his head, waited humbly in the shadow for the two men to pass. She was a dark glistening creature, with ox-like eyes, and the remains of a handsome figure, now running to fat.
"Howdy, Marster," she murmured under her breath as Cyrus reached her, to which he responded brusquely, "Howdy, Mandy," while he glanced with unseeing eyes at the mulatto boy at her side. Then, as he walked rapidly down the hall, with James at his heels, the woman turned back for a minute and gazed after him with an expression of animal submission and acquiescence. So little personal to Cyrus and so free from individual consciousness was this look, that it seemed less the casual glance from a servant to a master than the intimate aspect of a primitive racial attitude toward life.
At the end of the hall, beyond the open door of the bedroom (which he still occupied with his wife from an ineradicable conviction that all respectable married persons slept together no matter how uncomfortable they might be), Cyrus discerned the untidy figure of Mrs. Treadwell reflected in a mirror before which she stood brushing her back hair straight up from her neck to a small round knot on the top of her head. She was a slender, flat-chested woman, whose clothes, following some natural bent of mind, appeared never to be put on quite straight or properly hooked and buttoned. It was as if she perpetually dressed in a panic, forgetting to fasten her placket, to put on her collar or to mend the frayed edges of her skirt. When she went out, she still made some spasmodic attempts at neatness; but Susan's untiring efforts and remonstrances had never convinced her that it mattered how one looked in the house—except indeed when a formal caller arrived, for whom she hastily tied a scarf at the neck of her dirty basque and flung a purple wool shawl over her shoulders. Her spirit had been too long broken for her to rebel consciously against her daughter's authority; but her mind was so constituted that the sense of order was missing, and the pretty coquetry of youth, which had masqueraded once as the more enduring quality of self-respect, was extinguished in the five and thirty penitential years of her marriage. She had a small vacant face, where the pink and white had run into muddiness, a mouth that sagged at the corners like the mouth of a frightened child, and eyes of a sickly purple, which had been compared by Cyrus to "sweet violets," in the only compliment he ever paid her. Thirty-five years ago, in one of those attacks of indiscretion which overtake the most careful man in the spring, Cyrus had proposed to her; and when she declined him, he had immediately repeated his offer, animated less by any active desire to possess her, than by the dogged male determination to over-ride all obstacles, whether feminine or financial. And pretty Belinda Bolingbroke, being alone and unsupported by other suitors at the instant, had entwined herself instinctively around the nearest male prop that offered. It had been one of those marriages of opposites which people (ignoring the salient fact that love has about as much part in it as it has in the pursuit of a spring chicken by a hawk) speak of with sentiment as "a triumph of love over differences." Even in the first days of their engagement, there could be found no better reason for their marriage than the meeting of Cyrus's stubborn propensity to have his way with the terror of imaginary spinsterhood which had seized Belinda in a temporary lapse of suitors. Having married, they immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, to make the worst of it. She, poor fluttering dove-like creature, had lost hope at the first rebuff, and had let go all the harmless little sentiments that had sweetened her life; while he, having married a dove by choice and because of her doveliness, had never forgiven her that she did not develop into a brisk, cackling hen of the barnyard. As usually happens in the cases where "love triumphs over differences," he had come at last to hate her for the very qualities which had first caught his fancy. His ideal woman (though he was perfectly unconscious that she existed) was a managing thrifty soul, in a starched calico dress, with a natural capacity for driving a bargain; and Life, with grim humour, had rewarded this respectable preference by bestowing upon him feeble and insipid Belinda, who spent sleepless nights trying to add three and five together, but who could never, to save her soul, remember to put down the household expenses in the petty cash book. It was a case, he sometimes told himself, of a man, who had resisted temptation all his life, being punished for one instant's folly more harshly than if he were a practised libertine. No libertine, indeed, could have got himself into such a scrape, for none would have surrendered so completely to a single manifestation of the primal force. To play the fool once, he reflected bitterly, when his brief intoxication was over, is after all more costly than to play it habitually. Had he pursued a different pair of violet eyes every evening, he would never have ended by embracing the phantom that was Belinda.
But it was more than thirty years since Cyrus had taken the trouble to turn his unhappiness into philosophy—for, aided by time, he had become reconciled to his wife as a man becomes reconciled to a physical infirmity. Except for that one eventful hour in April, women had stood for so little in his existence, that he had never stopped to wonder if his domestic relations might have been pleasanter had he gone about the business of selection as carefully as he picked and chose the tobacco for his factory. Even the streak of sensuality in his nature did not run warm as in the body of an ordinary mortal, and his vices, like his virtues, had become so rarefied in the frozen air of his intelligence that they were no longer recognizable as belonging to the common frailties of men.
"Ain't you dressed yet?" he inquired without looking at his wife as he entered—for having long ago lost his pride of possession in her, he had ceased to regard her as of sufficient importance to merit the ordinary civilities.