XV
When Gabriella awoke on that same morning after the storm, she too ascertained that her shutters could not be opened. But Gabriella did not go down into the kitchen for hot water to melt the ice from the bolts and hinges. She fled back across the cold matting to the high-posted big bed and cuddled down solitary into its warmth again, tucking the counterpane under her chin and looking out from the pillows with eyes as fresh as flowers. Flowers in truth Gabriella's eyes were—the closing and disclosing blossoms of a sweet nature. Somehow they made you think of earliest spring, of young leaves, of the flutings of birds deep within a glade sifted with golden light, fragrant with white fragrance. They had their other seasons: their summer hours of angry flash and swift downpour; their autumn days of still depths and soberness, and autumn nights of long, quiet rainfalls when no one knew. One season they lacked: Gabriella's eyes had no winter.
Brave spirit! Had nature not inclined her to spring rather than autumn, had she not inherited joyousness and the temperamental gayety of the well-born, she must long ago have failed, broken down. Behind her were generations of fathers and mothers who had laughed heartily all their days. The simple gift of wholesome laughter, often the best as often the only remedy for so many discomforts and absurdities in life—this was perhaps to be accounted among her best psychological heirlooms.
Her first thought on awaking late this morning (for she too had been kept awake by the storm) was that there could be no school. And this was only Friday, with Saturday and Sunday to follow—three whole consecutive days of holiday! Gabriella's spirits invariably rose in a storm; her darkest days were her brightest. The weather that tried her soul was the weather which was disagreeable, but not disagreeable enough to break up school. When she taught, she taught with all her powers and did it well; when not teaching, she hated it with every faculty and capacity of her being. And to discharge patiently and thoroughly a daily hated work—that takes noble blood.
Nothing in the household stirred below. The members of the family had remained up far into the night. As for the negroes, they understand how to get a certain profit for themselves out of all disturbances of the weather. Gabriella was glad of the chance to wait for the house-girl to come up and kindle her fire—grateful for the luxury of lying in bed on Friday morning, instead of getting up to a farmer's early breakfast, when sometimes there were candles on the table to reveal the localities of the food! How she hated those candles, flaring in her eyes so early! How she loved the mellow flicker of them at night, and how she hated them in the morning—those early-breakfast candles!
In high spirits, then, with the certainty of a late breakfast and no school, she now lay on the pillows, looking across with sparkling eyes at last night's little gray ridge of ashes under the bars of her small grate. Those hearthstones!—when her bare soles accidentally touched one on winter mornings, Gabriella was of the opinion that they were the coldest bricks that ever came from a fiery furnace. There was one thing in the room still colder: the little cherrywood washstand away over on the other side of the big room between the windows,—placed there at the greatest possible distance from the fire! Sometimes when she peeped down into her wash-pitcher of mornings, the ice bulged up at her like a white cannon-ball that had gotten lodged on the way out. She jabbed at it with the handle of her toothbrush; or, if her temper got the best of her (or the worst), with the poker. Often her last act at night was to dry her toothbrush over the embers so that the hair in it would not be frozen in the morning.
Gabriella raised her head from the pillows and peeped over at the counterpane covering her. It consisted of stripes of different colors, starting from a point at the middle of the structure and widening toward the four sides. Her feet were tucked away under a bank of plum color sprinkled with salt; up her back ran a sort of comet's tail of puddled green. Over her shoulder and descending toward her chin, flowed a broadening delta of well-beaten egg.
She was thankful for these colors. The favorite hue of the farmer's wife was lead. Those hearthstones—lead! The strip of oilcloth covering the washstand—lead! The closet in the wall containing her things—lead! The stair-steps outside—lead! The porches down below—lead! Gabriella sometimes wondered whether this woman might not have had lead-colored ancestors.
A pair of recalcitrant feet were now heard mounting the stair: the flowers on the pillow closed their petals. When the negro girl knelt down before the grate, with her back to the bed and the soles of her shoes set up straight side by side like two gray bricks, the eyes were softly opened again, Gabriella had never seen a head like this negro girl's, that is, never until the autumn before last, when she had come out into this neighborhood of plain farming people to teach a district school. Whenever she was awake early enough to see this curiosity, she never failed to renew her study of it with unflagging zest. It was such a mysterious, careful arrangement of knots, and pine cones, and the strangest-looking little black sticks wrapped with white packing thread, and the whole system of coils seemingly connected with a central mental battery, or idea, or plan, within. She studied it now, as the fire was being kindled, and the kindler, with inflammatory blows of the poker on the bars of the grate, told her troubles over audibly to herself: "Set free, and still making fires of winter mornings; how was THAT? Where was any freedom in THAT? Her wages? Didn't she work for her wages? Didn't she EARN her wages? Then where did freedom come in?"
One must look low for high truth sometimes, as we gather necessary fruit on nethermost boughs and dig the dirt for treasure. The Anglo-Saxon girl lying in the bed and the young African girl kindling her fire—these two, the highest and the humblest types of womanhood in the American republic—were inseparably connected in that room that morning as children of the same Revolution. It had cost the war of the Union, to enable this African girl to cast away the cloth enveloping her head—that detested sign of her slavery—and to arrange her hair with ancestral taste, the true African beauty sense. As long as she had been a slave, she had been compelled by her Anglo-Saxon mistress to wear her head-handkerchief; as soon as she was set free, she, with all the women of her race in the South, tore the head-handkerchief indignantly off. In the same way, it cost the war of the Union to enable Gabriella to teach school. She had been set free also, and the bandage removed from her liberties. The negress had been empowered to demand wages for her toil; the Anglo-Saxon girl had been empowered to accept without reproach the wages for hers.