Somewhere, inherent in his nature, there was a love of the soil. He was particularly interested in the wagons of the farmers who stopped at the back door of the grocery with great loads of crisp cabbages, golden tomatoes, purple beets, silvery-skinned onions, long white radishes with blue tops, and turnips of the same colour, spreading into great, juicy circles of crisp tartness. He liked to slice the top from one of these, peel it, and stand biting into it like an apple, as he negotiated the purchase of the load and its transfer to the back of the grocery. Sometimes he went and stood beside the teams and slipped his slender fingers under the harness, easing it about the horses’ ears, straightening out the mane, talking to them as if they had been people. The one thing upon which he had determined was that he would not remain much longer with Peter Potter, and the other thing about which he had not determined, but concerning which in his heart he admitted the lure, was land. He would like to grow such wagonloads of fruits and vegetables as he constantly handled in Peter Potter’s grocery. He would like to own a stable filled with cows and calves and sheep and horses. He would like to have around his feet once more a flock of chickens such as he had lost upon the night when he lost everything else on earth that belonged to him except his life and the clothing he wore.
He understood what it meant when boys who had scorned and taunted him at school began dropping into the grocery and asking him to the backs of certain buildings after working hours were over. Now that they knew he had money, they were willing to gamble with him. As he increased in stature and it became known that he really was a partner in Peter Potter’s business, there were boys, and girls as well, who began to be friendly and occasionally he was asked to a party or some social gathering; but not in one instance had Jason ever accepted any of these invitations. Firmly fixed in his mind were his days of privation, the days when he would have been so delighted to be included at the merry makings devised for other children, the days when his heart and brain were hungry. Now that he was mentally occupied and physically satisfied, he could not quite control the feeling of repulsion that crept up in his heart when he met with an advance on the part of any boy or girl who, once upon a time, had seared his brain and repulsed his body with the taunt: “Washerwoman’s son!”
Jason knew, in the depths of his heart, that as the years passed, the same hunger for love, for companionship, for the diversions of the young around him, were even stronger than they had been as a child. He realized that there was something for which he was waiting, something that he wanted with an intensity that at times seared his body like a fever, but what it was that he wanted was not a thing that could be supplied by tardy kindness on the part of his former tormentors.
For four years the bright spots in Jason’s life had been the few minutes each Friday evening of the school week when Mahala, usually armed with a list of groceries, had slipped into the store, come straight to him and put in his fingers the neat slip giving the pages of advance over the previous week; and sometimes there had been written out the start of a difficult equation, a hint that read: “You will find a catch in the fifteenth problem on the sixty-seventh page. You divide by nine and multiply by fifty-four,” and sometimes she had carried to him for a few weeks of his use, a volume of supplementary reading that helped him.
With Commencement these things stopped. Almost immediately thereafter, Mahala’s troubles had begun, and then, to Jason’s bewilderment, there had speedily come the time when there were things that he could do for her, things that saved her work, that saved her money, that helped her to keep her head high and her face pridefully lifted and fronting the world that so soon had forgotten her. There was beginning in his heart a yeasty ferment, a boiling up of many things, a wandering and a questioning, and above everything else, each day more deeply rooted, the conviction that the same hand that had so much to do with his destiny was the hand that deliberately had brought ruin into the life of the girl who, alone of the whole town, had gone out of her way to show him compassion and human kindness. He was beginning to wonder what there was that he could do to free Mahala from this sinister power under which so many others had fallen. He was beginning to study, occasionally to ask questions, and in his heart there grew a slow wonder as to just what money was, how it had originated, and why it gave to any man the power to ride in a carriage, to mingle in the best society, to hold up his head in the churches, to control for years in the schools and the town council, in every enterprise in which money or business welfare was concerned, and at the same time to be the unseen cause of financial wreck, of physical downfall for other men.
Definitely Jason was beginning to settle in his own mind as to what such power also entailed in the lives of women. Sometimes, when his thoughts were skipping over the surface, or delving deep, he thought of Mrs. Moreland. He remembered her dark face, the pathetic lines around her mouth. He remembered the story of how she had come to the village upon a visit in the days when she was young and good looking and richly dressed. He had been told of the whirlwind courtship of Martin Moreland and how she had married him, believing that he loved her, and how she had put her fortune into his hands and was now so dependent upon him that she might only spend of her own money by charging an account at the stores which would be paid by a check from the bank. Certainly, she was not a happy woman. Certainly, she could not be, if she knew anything concerning the financial transactions in which her husband indulged. Because she remained the larger part of her time at home and busied herself about her household affairs, it was generally conceded that she did not know many of the things that were known concerning her husband. There was a tendency to speak of her in a whisper as “the poor thing.”
Then one day Jason’s brain found a new subject for consideration. He had gone to the Bluffport bank, carrying an unusually heavy deposit for Peter Potter and himself. Standing at a small side desk, occupied with pen and blotter, going over his account, he caught an oblique glimpse of a woman entering the door, a woman in the very prime of life, having a frank face of alluring beauty. He noticed the attractive way in which her hair was dressed; he noticed the neatness, the dignity, the style of her clothing. The fact that she was bareheaded told him that she must be from one of the near-by stores. With the sure step of one accustomed by a long-formed habit, she took her place at the window of the paying teller and transacted her business. Jason slid around the corner of the desk, pulled his hat a bit lower over his face, and gripping the pen firmly, watched in almost stupefying bewilderment.
It could not be possible; but it was possible. There was no mistaking the tones of the quick, incisive voice. It was the same voice that had told him, almost every day of his youth, that his only chance lay through books. It was the same frame now fashionably, even expensively, clothed, that had bent above the washtub in the dingy kitchen of his childhood. It was the same face, with the accompanying miracle of elaborate and attractive hair dressing and a chamois skin dusted with pink powder. When Jason’s lips met, he realized that they had been hanging open until they were dry. Above the marvel of seeing Marcia standing so confidently at the wicket of the bank, transacting a financial matter that appeared to be of considerable importance, came the marvel of the deference with which she was treated by the cashier. For her the wicket was swung open; for her there were polite greetings and a few words concerning the weather and outside matters; for her there was a laughing jest as she turned away and went swiftly as she had come.
Jason laid down the pen and followed at a distance. One block down the street she crossed and went into an interesting building on the corner. From across the street, he looked at the front window, at the side, at the entrance, and read, in letters of white china placed upon the glass, “Millinery and Ladies’ Furnishings. Nancy Bodkin and Company.”
Jason repeated it over and over—“‘and Company.’” Did that mean that Martin Moreland had given liberty to his slave, that she was no longer a creature of dingy kitchens and the subterfuge of washtubs in order that for a few night hours she might be the creature Jason once had seen in the rose-pink environment and the dress of snow? Was Marcia the woman who could carry such an alliance further, and at the same time look and move and speak as he had just seen her?