Sim Caley wielded an adroit knife; but, under the extraordinary pressure of this bountiful repast, Rutherford Berry easily outdistanced him. He consumed such unlimited amounts that he gained the audible displeasure of his wife.
“You’re not a camel,” she truthfully observed, “you don’t have to fill up for a week; you get something home. What Lettice’ll think of you I can’t make out.”
Substantial sections of pie were dispatched. Barnwell K., valiantly endeavoring to emulate his father, struggled manfully; he poked the last piece of crust into his mouth with his fingers. Then, in a shrill aside, he inquired, “Will Aunt Lettice have the baby while we’re here.” His mother’s hand rang like a shot on his face, and he responded instantly with a yell of appalling volume.
Lettice’s cup struck sharply upon its saucer. The delicate Rose flushed appropriately, painfully. The culprit was hauled, incontinently, dolefully wailing, to bed. The three men preserved an embarrassed silence. Finally Gordon said, “Have a cigar.” His brother-in-law responded with alacrity, but Sim preferred his plug tobacco, and Gordon Makimmon twisted a cigarette. Sim and Rutherford were patently uncomfortable amid the formality of the dining room; and, at Gordon’s suggestion, trooped with relief out to the shedlike stable. There they examined critically the two horses. Facing the stalls was an open space, and on boxes and the remnant of a chair they found places and smoked and spat informally.
“You could study a life on women,” Rutherford Berry pronounced, “and never come to any satisfaction. It seems to me the better they be the more sharp-like they get. There’s your sister, Gord—the way she does about the house, and with all the children to tend, is a caution to Dunkards. She does all you could ask and again. But it just seems she can’t be pleasant with it. Now there’s Nickles, next place to me, his old woman’s not worth a pinch of powder, but she is the nicest, easiest spoken body you’d meet in a day on a horse. You mind Effie when she was young, Gord—she just trailed song all over the house, but it wasn’t hardly a year before she got penetrating as a musket. Rose is just like her—she’s all taffy now on that young man, but in a little spell she’ll clamp down on him.”
Gordon had a swift vision of Lettice sharpening with the years; there sounded in prospect on his ear an endless roll of acidulous remarks, accompanied by the fretful whine of children, intensified by Mrs. Caley’s lowering silence. He thought of the change that had overtaken his sister Effie, remarked by her husband, the change from a trim, upright figure to the present stooped form, the turning of that voice brimming with song to a continuous, shrill troubling.
The cool, disdainful countenance of Meta Beggs returned to him: time, he divined, would not mark her in so sorry a fashion; to the last she would remain slimly rounded, graceful; her hands, like magnolia flowers, would never thicken and grow rough. He thought of Paris, of that life which, she said, would civilize him; he tried in vain to form an image of the cafés and little carriages, the bare-necked women drinking champagne. He recalled a burlesque show he had once seen in Stenton, called “The French Widows”; the revealed amplitude of the “widows” had been clad in vivid, stained pink tights; the scene in which they disported with a comic Irishman, a lugubrious Jew, was set with gilded palms, a saloon bar on one side and a tank on the other from which “Venus” rose flatly from a cotton sea. He dismissed that possibility of resemblance—it was too palpably at variance with what Meta Beggs would consider desirable; but, somehow, pink tights and Paris were synonymous in his thoughts. At any rate it was certain to be gay; the women would resemble Nickles’ wife rather than his sister ... than Lettice as she would be in a few years.
He recalled suddenly a neglected rite of hospitality, and from an obscure angle of the shed, produced a gallon jug. Drinking vessels were procured, and a pale, pungent whiskey poured out. Rutherford Berry sputtered and gasped over his glass; Sim Caley absorbed a brimming measure between breaths, without a wink of the eye; Gordon drank inattentively. The ceremony was repeated; a flare of color rose in Berry’s pallid countenance, Sim’s portion apparently evaporated from the glass. The whiskey made no visible impression on Gordon Makimmon. The jug was circulated again, and again. All at once Rutherford became drunk. He rose swaying, attempted to articulate, and fell, half in a stall. Simeon Caley pulled him out, slapped his back with a hard, gnarled palm, but was unable to arouse him from a profound stupor.
“He ain’t right strong,” Sim observed with a trace of contempt, propping the figure in a limp angle against the wall. It was dark now, and he lit the hand lantern, cautiously closing the door. Outside the whippoorwills had begun to call. A determined rattling of pots and pans sounded from the kitchen.
“How much is in her, Gord?” Sim asked.