"And, besides, you've told everybody that we're going to-morrow. And it would be just like—Johnnie and everybody to be down to the station to see us off—with a band."
Chapter Seven
They traveled directly south until they came to a town which, stretching out along a blue-and-golden bay, had gone to sleep before the Revolution and has never been disturbed since. They found it all ease and dreams and laziness. The shadows of live oaks were its swiftest motion, and the dancing of oyster schooners over its sea was all its din. The Kenworthys arrived in the middle of a sunny afternoon at the sort of hotel to which they had been recommended. Although they had written they were coming, no one in authority was in sight to receive them. A slovenly negro maid didn't know what rooms they were to be in. Leaving their baggage on the veranda, where the taxi driver had deposited it, they walked down through a little garden to the snow-white sands and the golden clear water of the bay. An old man sitting on a bench, his legs wrapped around in a traveling rug, was sleeping, his bald head nodding, nodding, helplessly. They walked out to the end of the little pier. They sat down, and looked into the crystal shallows as jellyfish lapped about softly. The sun on the water was a lullaby. Emily presently felt her eyelids growing heavy.
"This'll be a good place to sleep, anyway," Martha said. The trouble was, in the days that followed, that Emily could never be sure that Martha was sleeping. Sometimes when the girl went to her room and, closing the door, begged not to be disturbed, Emily felt sure, as she sat listening involuntarily, that she was lying sobbing heart-brokenly. She never caught her in the act—she avoided that—but the curves of Martha's cheeks had the shadows and shape of many tears.
Emily had helplessly to sit and watch her progressing into bitterness. The first few days Martha said nothing; she watched the sea by day; by night she sat and stared into the fire. When Emily spoke to her, she would turn and bring herself into her mother's presence bewilderedly. She would look about her wonderingly, like a lost child in a strange world. Emily's remarks seemed scarcely to reach her. Her silence was unnatural. Certainly, Emily reflected, if she could utter the thoughts that seemed to be grinding her down, she would feel better. She longed to have her begin talking again.
Hints came out from time to time. Sometimes Martha was not able to refrain from groaning. The first afternoon they walked away down the beach, they came to an old cemetery with broken gnarled cypresses in it, and violets ready to bloom on old French graves.
Emily said, instinctively, "Let's go in." The gate stood open before them.
But Martha cried, "NO! I've had enough of THAT!" She shuddered.
What Martha said, when she began talking, was frightful. She resorted to speech only when her sense of outrage had become intolerable. She burst forth with noise and fury. It happened one evening that Emily had tarried, partly because Martha had refused so curtly from the first to pass even the time of day with anyone in the hotel, to be civil to an old and frail woman who sat alone at an adjoining table. When she went into her room, she found Martha in tears on her knees before the fire. She was always poking the fire; often she poked it viciously. But now she seemed to have attacked it brutally. She was tearing up papers, or something.