My Heart and
My Flesh

By the same author

THE TIME OF MAN

A Novel—Mcmxxvi

UNDER THE TREE

Poems—Mcmxxii

My Heart and
My Flesh

“My heart and my flesh crieth out
for the living God.”—Psalms 84.2

A NOVEL BY
Elizabeth Madox Roberts

New York · THE VIKING PRESS · Mcmxxvii

Copyright, 1927, by The Viking Press, Inc.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

First Edition, October, 1927
Second printing before publication
Third printing, November, 1927

To My Sister
L. R. B.

My Heart and My Flesh

PROLOGUE

As a child, Luce was running to the store to get a small can of oil, for it was growing dark and she had the lamp to fill. Across the street the lamp-lighter was lifting a burning swab of waste to the street-lamp, a gasoline lamp on the top of a high post. The lamp-lighter stood on a ladder to lift the brand, and when the lamp was lit he would take the ladder on his shoulder and walk away at an even step, the same yesterday and the same tomorrow. When he had new shoes the step was marked with crying leather. She ran past the lamp-lighter hardly giving a moment to look at him, for she knew all his ways and all his motions, all the rhythms of his feet. The street-lamp made a thin, feeble light when there was any day left in the air, but the lighter had to start on his rounds early to have all the lamps ready by the time the dark came to the last one at the end of Hill Street. The lamp flickered dimly in the light of day that was left in the air, but after a little a passer would be glad for the glow; it showed the way to the pump and helped one over the well-curb and over the stones at the crossing. On dark nights when there was a wind the mules in the livery stable cried out with great cries. There would be a wind that night making little wells of feeling pool up in one’s chest, and a thought of Mome, the city, came to her mind.

There, in Mome, all the lights were electric, and there was one great light over all the place, a high great light like a sun. It shone down on the streets and on the tall house where Mr. Preston, the richest man in the world, kept his money—the money house—and on the fountains in the square. It made a great sheet of light that spread over Mome as a sunset would spread over a hill. But there were dark alleyways for all that, and dark doorways, and at the thought deep wells of feeling would pool up in one’s chest, dark roadways and deep doorways and dark lanes where wheels had cut deep tracks. There would be houses standing high above lanes and late wagons going down into the dark. There would be a little light at the corner, electric but very little, blinking in the fog. A thief would be slipping down a dark lane with—what? one could never think what—in his hand.

In the store the boy with thin arms took her oil can and said, “A dime’s worth?” and set the can aside to wait until the man came with the key to the oil house. She stood beside the old black man who was buying a nickel’s worth of meal and a dime’s worth of bacon, her eyes on the hurrying clerk whose arms reached here and there above the barrels and weighed the sugar as it poured in a stream into a sack. She enjoyed the crowding of the store and the pageant of buying. A heroic freedom surrounded the man, old Anthony Bell, who bought lavishly, never asking the price, calling over the heads of the others, “A hundred pounds of sugar. Send it up tomorrow.” He had stepped lightly in at the doorway, a lifted head, the large gesture of shouting and the lifted cane, “Send it up tomorrow,” and then his exit while the piece went forward, the play enhanced.

Moll Peters, the negress, came heavily in at the door and stood beyond Luce, waiting her turn. She was large and fat and the belt of her apron sank into the rolls of her body and was lost from sight. She would buy freely as long as her money lasted, buying for her children on Hill Street; she cooked at the hotel and had no need to buy food for herself. “Ol’ Hog Mouth, what-all you a-buyen?” she said to a tall man who stood beyond her, a tall yellow man whose clothes were white with plaster. “You ain’t treated Moll this whole enduren year.” Her voice came from her mouth with a clatter of low half-musical squawks and softly blurred vowels delicately stressed.

“Aw, go on,” the man said. He kept in a good humor.

“It’s a God’s truth, now. Whenever did you-all ever treat Moll? Pocket full o’ money. Ol’ Stingy! Buy Moll some candy.”

“Aw go on. Buy your own candy.”

“It’s a God’s own truth, now. Whenever did you ever buy Moll any candy? Go and buy me some candy.”

“I ain’t got no money. I swear I’m got to ask credit till Sat’day for a little meal and lard. I swear.”

“Aw, buy me some candy.”

Moll was trying to make up with the yellow man. The grocer’s clerk came back with the can of oil and Luce dumped the money, a nickel and five coppers, into his large hand and turned quickly toward the door, remembering now that she must fill the lamp. She ran home through the twilight. The lamp-lighter had gone from the street now and all the lights glimmered faintly, broadly, because they had not yet been concentrated into points by the dark. They marched unevenly up the street, far past the Baptist Church, past the Seminary gate.

In the lecture room of the church Miss Charlotte Bell played the march for the children. There was to be a pageant. The girls walked to the time of the music, spreading over the platform and returning, opening the lines and making fans or closing together into a design. Theodosia Bell, Miss Charlotte’s daughter, walked first, leading, and the music of the piano said the words of the song as Miss Charlotte drummed the keys with her fingers. Miss Charlotte hardly looked at the piano as she played. She looked at the girls who were walking up and down, her head turned about, her lips bending into smiles or her head nodding. Miss Patty Thomas ran up and down before the platform telling how the march should be done. “Now, all together. Up front, Theodosia. Now down center back.” Her tongue clicked over the words and she was important beating her hands. Theodosia walked tossing her body with the up-and-down toss of the music, to the words which the girls would sing after a little, “To the tap of the drum here we come come come.” There was a stop to rearrange some of the girls.

“Whose little girl is this? What’s her name?”

“Luce. She’s Luce Jarvis.”

“She lives down the street a way.”

It was Miss Charlotte who had answered the last. Luce walked near the end of the line and they were off again to the tap of the music, some of them lilting to the time, some heavily laboring, unaware of the beat. If Miss Charlotte nodded her head to the patter of feet she smiled the next instant, but when the song was done, while Miss Patty talked to the children about what they should do, Miss Charlotte sat as if she did not hear, and then her lips were without life and a darkness seemed to have come over her. She looked then at the piano keys, her hands in her lap, or her younger child, Annie, would creep up beside her and push her little face into her broad shoulder.

A boy was taken to the platform to say a piece, Miss Patty showing him how, and the other children went to the seats or they spread about on the floor. “To the tap of the drum here we come come come” had been set aside now, and a girl said, “I like that song.” “It’s a Faust march,” Miss Charlotte said. The word “Faust” fitted to Miss Charlotte’s mouth after it had been said and remained hers entirely, whatever it meant. The Bells lived a little way up the street past the well from which Luce drank, past the street-light, the house standing under a great tree and near two other trees. Looking at Miss Charlotte after she had grown dark, the music ended, her face heavy, Luce thought of the word Anthony, Anthony Bell, the old man, father to Horace Bell who was Miss Charlotte’s husband. Anthony Bell, as words, made a sort of singing in her thought if they came forward as tone, or if they lay quiet they were reminiscent of the faint kindness offered by drama, by enriched being. He was an old man and a scholar, as was said. Luce remembered their house with Miss Charlotte walking on the lower gallery and saw the planes of her pale dress as she stood a moment before one of the large square pillars. Anthony Bell came and went behind her, stepping along the gallery in his easy slippers, taking a morning walk. Now the voice of the boy tattled endlessly over the piece he was learning to say and the little girls lolled together, teasing one another slyly. Luce went into Miss Patty’s feet as they twinkled about and she felt the flutter of the skirt as it swept her ankles, and she knew what it was to be two slim little shoes buckled over two insteps that rested on pointed toes and hour-glass heels, and to walk in harmony with someone’s thinking, up and down, objecting, agreeing, complaining, repeating. Near at hand the piano was a large black box holding an infinity of tunes somehow in its sides. She looked at Charlotte Bell where she sat waiting. The eyes were dark, averted, and the mouth had no smile. Her large shoulders were erect and her rich dress crumpled about her feet.

Charlotte Bell’s hands could fly easily over the piano if she were minded to make a tune. Sometimes in the evening old Anthony played his fiddle standing beside her as she played. Her rich white dress had many yards of small lace sewed into it in designs and her hat was off. Her dark hair was laid softly over her head and knotted at the back in a large coil. Luce looked at her and felt her presence reach past the white dress as if there were some large thing inside. Then she laid her bare. She tore away the clothes from around her shoulders and opened her body. She emptied the heart out of it and flung out the entrails, for she had seen men butcher a hog. She went searching down through blood and veins, liver and lights, smelt and kidney. Out came the fat, the guts, the ribs. She was looking for something. Then on beyond, past the flesh, to the bone, she was searching. Past the brains, past the skull bone. She flung everything aside as she took it out and went deeper, eager to find. Past the bones she came to the skin again, on the other side, and finally to the red of the yarn carpet, everything rejected, nothing found, nothing left. Quickly she reassembled Miss Charlotte. She brought back the bone, the flesh, the organs. She hooked the right arm onto its shoulder and hooked on the left. She set her head on her shoulders and fitted her back into her dress. Put together again, Miss Charlotte suggested something within, hinted of it with her turning mouth and with the slight movement of her limbs under the pretty dress, gave a brief warning of it in the way the lace was sewed into the dress and the way the two large pins were placed to hold up her hair.

All the while the red of the carpet and the smell of the carpet gave a flavor of Sunday and the catechism. There was a question then, she thought, for every answer. The little girls were weary of the boy’s speech and his dull gestures and weary of Miss Patty’s efforts to arouse his voice to eloquence. Luce looked from one to another, letting her self enter the arrogance of one, the humility of one, the stupidity of one. She saw what it would be not to know a rhythm, to march as Esther marched, on dull feet. The tone of the Sunday questioning pervaded the place, question and answer, final and done, well said. All that was asked had a reply, curt and certain. She looked at Miss Charlotte where she sat behind the piano, her eyes on the keys, and the questions took possession of the event.

Who made you, Miss Charlotte?

God.

Why did God make Miss Charlotte?

For His own glory.

Old Mr. Bell had a collection of Indian arrow-points and stone hatchets mounted and displayed in cabinets that were strung through the halls and passages of the house. Luce had once stood wondering at the door of a hallway while Theodosia called to her to come and play. “Oh, come on, come on,” she had called. “Leave those old rubbishes. What’s any good beside a game? You’re It. Come on.” But a child had told of a wonder. Old Mr. Bell had once opened the cabinet of Indian relics and had shown the children the arrow-flints, had let them take some of them into their hands. They were hard stone weapons from the stone age of the country before the time of the white men. Luce had not been present and the cabinets had never been opened for her. Miss Charlotte sat now turning the pages of a music book, her eyes busy with the songs in the book. Once, in a game, when she was not It, and when she was so well hidden that no one could find her, so well that she was forgotten, Luce had slipped into the hallway of the largest of the cabinets, a rear enclosed gallery, and had looked her fill at the wonders inside. She knew that these wonders had been picked up from an old Indian battlefield not far from the town. Horace Bell was a tall man, standing above most of the people of the street. He had a great voice that sometimes burst from the court-room when he made a speech there. He had a pride in his voice and he liked to roll out long sayings that gave it a chance to flow and turn and recede. One day he had boomed at some pigeons that took flight and swept across the street by the pump with a low thunder of wings, and he had made a saying quickly to run with them in their going, his eyes full of his laughter. He had then run his hand through his upstanding yellow hair with a great gesture and had taken a remembered delight in the pigeons and his voice that could match their rumble of wings. Miss Tennie Burden, Tennessee, lived out another street. The Sunday questioning passed into the region of Miss Charlotte’s darkly averted, sad face.

How can I glorify God?

By loving Him and doing His holy will.

Can you see God?

No, but He can always see me.

Does Charlotte Bell know about Tennie Burden?

She knows.

Does she care because Horace Bell goes to sit in Miss Tennie’s doorway?

Ask somebody else.

Why would she care?

A big girl said she would care. A big girl knew why.

What do Horace Bell and Miss Tennie talk about?

About old times.

Who is Miss Tennie’s husband?

Mr. Joe Burden.

How many children has Miss Tennie got?

Two. Joyce and Evaline.

Any boys?

No boys.

How do you know that you have a soul?

Because I can think about God and the world to come.

I can’t think about God and the world to come.

Try.

I tried.

Who made Theodosia Bell?

God, I reckon.

Is God a smell or something?

Whose little girl is this?

Luce. Luce Jarvis.

She lives down the street a way.

Her own look had looked back at her out of Charlotte Bell’s look when Charlotte had spoken to give the answer. To see Charlotte then was to remember Tennessee Burden and to pluck in mind at the strange fair vapor that gathered before Charlotte’s darkness and over her sadness, Tennie Burden, her bright hair easily curled over her head. She would sit in her door all day, the gallery with its high pillars running close to the roadway, and she would stop any who passed to talk a little. The cushions at her feet were soft and warm. She would stop any who passed, even Moll Peters, even Uncle Nelse, even Stiggins, the small yellow boy who lived in the livery stable.

Questioning the question, the hour passed and was eaten away entirely when the march began again. “To the tap of the drum here we come come come” spread through the entire air now. Luce looked at Theodosia as she marched and looked into her pride in walking first and her pride again in the feel of the drumming of the music, her feet set down rightly upon the rhythm. She looked at her. She was the daughter of Charlotte Bell and Horace. Her hair was brown with an over-tint of red that showed at the sides where the rolls were turned up to the light and showed again where the ends of the braid sprayed out beyond the ribbon below her shoulders and down her back. She spread a trail of herself down the platform as she went proudly first, the other girls walking on her steps, setting feet down where she guided, she leaving a comet-train of herself behind to be entered, walked into, known by the knower, the chronicler.

The boy who lived in the livery stable was named Stiggins, a yellow boy who slept somewhere in the stable in the straw. If travelers came long after night they were obliged to pound on the door and cry out for admittance for their horses, and then the night man would send Stiggins down to open the door. The men who worked at the stable gave Stiggins bits of money from time to time. When there was not much to do the hostlers would tease Stiggins by locking him into the loft or the old harness closet or by holding him under the spout of the pump. Or they would crack a whip under his knees to make him jump up high to avoid the keen sting of the whip-snapper. Sometimes when the proprietor was gone all day this sport went on for hours until Stiggins would cry, but if he cried he was unfailingly locked into the loft or the harness closet. He seemed happiest on court day when there was a great crowd in town and many horses to care for. Everybody was busy then, calling him to do this or to do that, speaking quickly, even cheerily. “Here, Stig, take this filly and hurry back with fifty-four. Twenty-two wants feed, but sixteen just a hitch.”

Stiggins was not, in fact, a name; some of the men had given it to him one day when he was leaping to escape the whip. His mother was Dolly Brown, a half-witted negress who lived in the alley behind the jail, and his father had been some white man. Luce saw him going about, a small boy, as small as herself; and he belonged to the stable. He was not, she assumed, a real being, and it did not matter what one did to him. Push him into the stall where the horse manure was thrown, make him pump all morning at the broken pump, tear a bigger hole in his old ragged breeches, or make him leap to avoid the whip, it was no matter. He was a half-wit; he could never learn; he was not real. But Luce was often sorry for Stig. She had inferred that he was not a real creature, and this pity which she had was, then, sentimental. Even she felt that it must be somehow false and unnecessary, pretty in some way, as if one would be sorry for a hog because it lay in the mire. His mouth was loose and easy to drip. He would do anything anyone told him to do, or once in a while, reversed, he would do nothing anyone told him to do. He was not real, was scarcely there at all, was not a being; but often when he was tormented until he cried, or when he was locked into the filthy dark of the old harness closet, or when his clothes were torn anew until he cringed under some sort of shame that, curiously enough, he seemed to have about him, Luce would feel the approach of her own tears and a hurt would gather in her breast and spread as a fog through her members, through the substance of the earth and the air. She would wander about, unable to discover the cause, unable to discern the result or resolve it to any meanings. At the end of her confusion she would think again of Mome with richer ecstasy.

The streets of Mome were the streets of Anneville, running right and left, in and out, as she knew and saw, but over these—Hill Street, Main Street, Jackson Street, Simon Street, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane—lay the great city of Mome, reaching out for miles and adding other streets and avenues, Chester, Dover, Cowslip, Bangor, Elm, Pine, Walnut, Vine, and many more, running out among fair parks and lovely gardens. Instead of the low shops on Main Street there arose great office buildings and spires and towers where people fluttered by, quick in their steps, beautiful, alert. On Jackson Street in Anneville grew great poplar trees under which men sat all day telling slow stories they had told over and over before, old men grown epic with age and fatalism. Their refrains recurring were, “Ain’t that always the way!... No sooner you get ... but along comes a place to spend it.... Looks like as soon as a man gets on his feet.... Always the way....” They spoke without malice, interspersing their wisdom with long slow happenings. “Did ever you know hit to fail?... Would a man ever strike hit on his corn and his wheat in one and the same year?... But of course it had to happen that way.... About the time Luke got outen that-there fix here a note he owed at the bank fell due, but it so happened that corn turned out right good that year and he tided over....” These were the leisured and the old setting a summary on the town. In the square the prisoners from the jail worked on the rock pile and thus gave a meager drama to the slow scene. But over this lay Jackson Street in Mome, as one might read in a book, tall offices and great palaces where courts were held, where the great went about the great business of the world, the great business of men. Over the cobbler’s shop stood a palace where some unguessed thing transpired. Coincident with Rusty Fuller’s harness shop, having its same contours enhanced and made splendid in size, stood a white tower with a top that shone high in the sunlight and here some important deed not yet realized or named had befallen and would continue to befall. Beyond stood the library, pillars of marble and cupola of gold, and inside one could have all the books of the world for the asking. Great tiers of books, bound in brown or gold or blue, stood on shelves, the wonders of all ages and the knowledge of all time, future and past. One had only to go inside the wide marble doors and nothing would be denied, the reason for this or that and the time of all things being there set down in books and explained, and there were all beautiful stories and songs.

With a swift effort she could take the whole library with all its wisdom into her heart, a swift ecstasy. She would think of Mome as she worked indoors, a consolation. Or she would think of Mome again as she hurried across the pasture among the low weeds, going to gather blackberries on the hill. The sudden appearance of a tender little sickle moon up in the western sky—and Mome. A report of a thief, an adventurer, a disaster, a bold deed, a shame, a carnival, and, enhanced, it enriched itself in Mome, it grew there to heroic proportions. Turning swiftly in at the small gate, returning from the well, the day being slow, a duplicate of days past, when the street was hot and fly-ridden and the trash from the stores littered the roadway, she could hang her head far to one side and look down the street toward the court-house and the jail and see a street in Mome where marble causeways ran up to marble stairs and tall white walls gave out onto high balconies, cool and fresh in a sweet wind, the people eager and exact and clear, intent with being.

In Mome there was nothing commonplace and dreary. There time never waited upon a fly-blown afternoon. Quick sayings flashed on the lips of men there, true finalities or bright quips—jests with the sudden tilt of quicksilver.

The people came to the church on Sundays wearing rustling clothes, some of them riding in carriages that were harnessed to plow horses or to driving nags or gay well-bred roadsters. In the church the ladies taught lessons of the regeneration of the elect and the death in Adam, all men born in a state of sin, of Eve who had eaten the fruit and had given of it to Adam, that what God did foreknow that he did ordain. The words would be confused with drowsiness and weariness, and the foreknowledge of God would settle to the odors of the yarn carpet and the dry melancholy of the village Sabbath, sin being any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. A savory wooden tray would be passed about for the collection, a tray smelling of rich cedar wood and varnish. The savor of the tray being passed and done, the lady would draw the mind back again to the hard matter of Eden and sin, to the fearful definition which was heavy with meaningless wordings. Was it for this, these laborings with odorless words and long unregenerated sayings, that she, Luce Jarvis, that she, Theodosia Bell, had put on her new white dress and her silk sash? It was an impenetrable matter. The foreknowledge arose from the carpet in an aromatic stench, but the desire to cough would not follow. There was no relief. Want-of-conformity-to took Transgression-of into a great stale book and closed flat the covers, and in Adam all men were born in a state of sin. Eve was a woman and a terrible instigator of Want-of-conformity-to. The lady teacher was severe upon Eve. But Adam, said the lady, was equal with her in guilt.

Each Sunday came the gayety of putting on the favored dress, the best muslin. There would be the tying of the sash, an anxious ceremony, a flutter of petticoats brushing at the knees, the happiness of the Sunday hat. There would be the sprig of honeysuckle to wear at the breast, or a rosebud brought in from the garden for Theodosia, brought by her grandfather and presented, “A morning gift to a little lady, a posy to set off her pretties.” Then, in the church, the clatter of greetings and pleasure in one’s coming. “Here’s a seat. Sit here. Glad you came.... How sweet she looks.... How sweet we all look, all the little folks. This bright Sabbath morning....”

Then the business of getting settled, the text asked all around. The hour grew long and time was suppressed. Time lost all elasticity and became a fixed substance. The seat turned hard like the impenetrable words; the seat pressed with infinite woodenness at her flattened thighs and her pointed spine. Adam was equal. Moses had been given the law. Holy Men taught by the Holy Ghost had written the book. They were all undiscernible with age, older than the earth, Adam, Eve the woman. Would she be Mrs. Eve? Or Miss Eve? Who ever heard of a woman named Eve? She was rejected entirely. The whole hour was sunk, Adam, Moses, Eve, God, Want-of-conformity, Holy Men, sunk into unyielding time. Men far across the church were shaking hands, curious persons, playing at living, but in earnest about it. The foreknowledge continued to arise with Adam, who was in all equal, and through him we are all born in sin. Once into the hour flashed a meaning, a clear thought, a sum toward which all was momentarily moved, the relation never clear but the summary comprehended: To do good, to act right.

All the little girls were dressed in muslins and some of them were perfumed. The lady teacher wore tight kid gloves and smelled of some sweet stuff, her shining shoe just peeping from the edge of her dress. One little girl would tell of a sin she knew of. Somebody she would not name had said a book was hers when it was really her sister’s.

“That was very wrong,” the lady said. “That was a lie, and God looks into our hearts and knows when we lie. You can deceive another person but you cannot deceive God, for God knows all things.”

“And I knew a boy,” another child said, “and he found a ball and kept it for his own because he found it.”

“That was wrong too,” the lady said, a hard voice, “for he might have found the owner of the ball if he had tried. You cannot escape the eye of God. He sees all we do and looks into every heart. We can never deceive God, for He knows our inmost thoughts.”

Moll Peters was a friendly person, always kind to a child. She worked in a house where boarders were kept and where there were two other servants, a dark thin girl and a man named Berry. Other negroes would come to the kitchen, two or three men often, for Moll would slip them a bite of something to eat, a fresh hot pie or a cookie or a piece of bread dripping with rich hot gravy. They would laugh loud over their stories and carry forward their jokes from day to day. Or having been reticent because of the presence of a child, speaking in half-syllables and signs, they would suddenly flash quick fearful stories they knew.

Moll was trying to win over the young man, Berry, from the dark girl. He would eat her hot sops and pies and kiss her fat jaws, but in the end he would go when the dark girl called him, and the dark girl was not afraid. She would look at Berry with hard gathering eyes or hold out toward him briefly one dark thin hand whose palm was pale yellow-white, and she would treat Moll with friendly indifference, bragging on her pies and her sauces.

Berry would sing a song, throwing into the words an infinity of soft gliding modulations and quickly-breathed grace-notes, looking meltingly at Moll as he sang. His song,

I cannot stand to see my baby lose,

I love her from her head down to her shoes,

would burst through the great laughter when he came down from the dining-room with a tray. The kitchen knew that Horace Bell was the father of Miss Tennie’s unborn infant. This fact was well known to the pans in the scullery closet under the sink, to the pans and skillets that were put away into the secret and ill-odored dark but would come clattering out in the hurry of their wanting.

“Ol’ big-mouthed devil!” Moll said once with a great laugh, after a great roll of laughter and a whispered comment. “Him and Miss Tennie! God knows!”

Known, these, to the pans and pots and skillets, to the spoons and dippers and colanders, but not to the sauces and syrups and gravies and roasts that went up to the boarders’ dining-room. A gravy could roll discreetly out from a skillet and leave all knowledge behind to flavor the rich scrapings which Moll spooned upon a bit of bread for her own mouth or for the mouth of some chosen friend.

Miss Nannie Poll and Mr. Trout flavored one of Moll’s sops, a sauce which was sweet with the grease of knowledge. A white man was the father of Letty’s youngone, and old Mr. Preacher Benton was, God knew, a feisty old cuss, after Mag. She, Moll, had nursed old Mrs. Putty in her deliriums and listened to her talk all night, and the men that woman had had in her time would fill a prayer-meeting, God knew, if half she said in her ravings was true. Old Jonas Beatty smelled like a billygoat, and Miss Jodie Whippleton tried to hide her dead brat in the calf lot but the hogs got in and rooted it up for her.

Coming down across the kitchen yard with a tilted tray and a burst of song, Berry would cast a melting, joyful glimmer of eyes toward Moll. Her poor fat would quiver with pleasure and pain. His lilted words,

I’m proud o’ my black Venus,

No coon can come between us ...

would accent his quick coming steps and he would clatter the dishes from the tray with cunning small gestures.

“Aw Be’y,” Moll would plead, ready to cry.

My gal, she’s a high-born lady,

She’s dark but not too shady.

Down the line, oh, there we shine,

Me an’ that high-born gal o’ mine....

“Aw, Be’y, go on,” a softly pled distress.

“I just likes to sing,” Berry said, “and someways I’m partial to that old song.”

“Oh, God knows, if I ain’t let Mr. Preacher Benton’s soft-boiled egg get as hard as a rock. God knows! Hard as nails!” A wail from a voice that was near its tears.

“Aw, put a little water in it and stir it up. The preacher, he’ll not never know the difference,” the dark girl said.

“I’ll not do so. I’m a fool, I am. I won’t send up no such egg to nobody. I’ll make another one. Poor old Moll. Hand me a egg outen the icebox, Be’y, whilst I make the water boil again. Poor old Moll.” She was weeping now.

From the icebox to the stove with the egg shuffled in his hand. The handsome yellow boy with his melting quiver of eyes and already broken promise, broken in its borning.

I’ll telegraph my baby,

She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....

“Aw Be’y, go on,” Moll was pleading again, won again and rejected. “Aw, Be’y.”

At the Seminary, chapel service was held each morning in the chief assembly hall, the great and the little being required in attendance. The small children sat on the front seats, huddled together, fearful that some impossible thing might be demanded of them. On some mornings there were opening songs, or now and then a girl would walk to the platform and say a piece in a light, pretty voice, or a large boy would pronounce an oration. The song, all singing together, would roll out in a great shaking throb of noise and pain that beat upon sensitive ears and passed inward to become a pleasure, under the noise running the music.

Land where our fathers died,

Land where the Pilgrims pried....

On the blackboard were the algebraic emblems and geometric designs belonging to the great boys and girls. Small children who had labored to keep their efforts at learnings distinct, who had used letters for spelling words and numbers for making sums, read upon the board of the assembly hall such dissipated and trivial statements as a - b = 6.

Beyond the lessons of the books and the precepts of the teachers the young moved in the great flow of the body of human knowledge, learning slowly from one another. The fruit of knowledge passed downward perpetually from the older groups, becoming more grotesque as it descended beyond the reach of its accompanying emotions. The bulging piano legs on the chapel platform were with child, pregnant. The Pilgrims were thought of as a prying lot; they were heard of around Thanksgiving Day. A child had once designated his navel as his birthplace. A small child in an upper back room, dressing for a pageant, whispered to another child, “That’s my birthplace.” Word of it was passed about in a whisper; it was doubtless true; there was such a word; it could be found in the spelling book. In the assembly a child looked hard at the pregnant piano leg, trying to distinguish a mark upon it. Another day, and the mark was there, the birthplace.

Luce had learned to read and was passing well into the body of knowledge. The games were a delight, and so too were the calisthenics when one marched on light toes, Theodosia walking first. One day a group gathered on the playground around a crying child that had fallen on the gravel. The teacher assured him that the mishap had not hurt him, that it was but a light scratch, nothing to cry for. The crowd began to spread about.

“What was the matter?” was asked.

“Fell down and scratched his cuticle a little,” the teacher said.

Did she have a cuticle? she wondered. She had never heard anyone say that she had scratched or bruised or torn or maimed her cuticle. She dared not ask.

Numbers became rich designs when they passed beyond the commonplace literalness of addition. A multiplication table was a poem and a song. The numbers, written and viewed, kept personalities within their shapes and evoked colors even after they became parts of tables, the number songs. One, written 1, was whimsical and comical, unserious, too easy to learn and to write. No child could ever take it heavily, for anyone could have invented it. 2 was beyond knowing in its infinity of curves and arcs that melted into an angle and stiffened into a straight line. It had caused tears in the beginning, and even after it became routine its forbidding resistance was not forgotten; it was a cruelty. Nine, uttered, was the cry of a bird. Written 9, it rolled easily from the hand and was a maker of joy. It was the consummation of numbers, the last of its kind, the end of the series. After it the numbers were patched together of those already learned, a poverty of ideas. Its multiplication table was the most beautiful in song with its receding scheme of backward-counting adornments that played through the forward-going lilt of rising quantities.

One day in the assembly the chief professor asked questions, preparing for a day of patriotism. Only the little children might answer.

“Where was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus?”

Mome is disposed now, it is not a place now, is an actual substance as it was in the beginning, is become entirely what it always was. It has lost its delusion. No one ever called it now by a name.

It is the four-arc’d clock of the seasons ticking its tick-tock around the year, and it is the mid-winter spring song of the joree bird, the Carolina wren, when he tee-teedle tee-teedle tee-deets on a high bare bough on a bright morning in January, spring not being here, not being there, not being anywhere.

It is the will to say, the power never being sufficient, the reach toward the last word—less than word, half-word, quarter-word, minimum of a word—that shrinks more inwardly and farthest toward its center when it is supplicated, that cries back, “Come,” or “Here, here I am,” when it is unsought. It is the act of looking when the mirror of the earth looks back into a creature, back into quickened nerves and raw sensitive feelers that run to the ends of a town, gray and white threads, living threads, knotted into a net and contrived to catch and to hold pleasure and pain, chiefly to hold pain.

It is the beauty of the thing itself welling up within itself continually in a constant rebirth, a resurrection. At any point it partakes of the whole nature of itself—like an onion.

It is nobody’s useless old cat, having been stoned three times to death and left by boys in a tin-can heap at the bottom of a gully in Dee Young’s pasture, arising, one eye hanging by a thread, to cry “meauw” on a woman’s kitchen doorstep and to drink warm milk from a brown saucer.

It is the wide-opened jaw of a hound blowing hot breath on a little field beast and crying a howled curse on the perfidy of escape. It is a wave of hard shadows running over dried grass and winter stubble under a vast warted sky, the rabbit having taken to the brush heap at the field’s end. It embraces the new food and the new hunger. It is in part a man, a farmer, walking across his pasture in mid-summer singing a song he himself is making as he goes kicking his work shoes through the grass, singing, “Loo loo lo lo hum bang fi oo,” singing “Old Whosoever Will is walken on the top of the meadow,” a cattle farmer, a breeder of Shorthorns, ten years hence or now, singing a mediæval altarpiece over the heads of his cows and tramping through a field of a here unnamed community of flowers out of which the great bee eats. It is a farmer, the same, Caleb Burns, a farmer of fine cattle, a cattle husbandman, walking among his barns or over his pastures making the beginnings of songs or butchering a young beef for food: he would, with his men to help, stab the young beast at the throat and hang it to bleed, one of his men catching the blood in a bucket, a bucket of blood running out of a young beef, warm stuff, sickening to the smell, stuff that nice people fear. Caleb Burns, son of George Burns and Rose Hamilton, an experienced husbandman knowing foolishness and loss, or a young man beginning his way, Caleb Burns singing a song.

Of the curbs and the streets, the lamp-posts and the street crossings, the drama of the court day, all the people kept a sense that these had been there a very long time, that these were the eternal marks of the earth and the ways by which man recognized himself in life. The town was but a little over a hundred years old, and back of that lay the wilderness; but few of the people knew how recently the town had begun. “Out of Virginia,” “Away back long ago,” were sayings in their vague accounts of themselves. The marks they had put upon the wilderness were older than any of the people could tell or the race remember and had been brought whole from some other life.

The roads ran out from the town toward other towns, roads known now as hard streamers of yellow earth and broken stones, inviting going, winding among the rolling farms and lost in remote regions where unfamiliar hills came down toward alien fences and gathered here and there a curious tree or made off toward a distant unmeasured horizon. In the farms Jersey cattle or Shorthorns grazed, the last the red of the old Patton stock, brought from Virginia. The farmers came to town and thus brought the roads back to the streets and the lanes, came driving wagons laden with tobacco or hay or wheat or corn, and the cattle-men brought steers along the roads or the traders drove in the sheep, the spring lambs crying all June through the streets as they were flocked from day to day at the commons around the shipping pens.

For the people of Hill Street, there was only one season and that was summer, warm, seasonable, lush with rain, the season of easy living and song. Against this was set an anti-season, a not-existence, negative, cruel, hard with poverty and cold and insufficient food—winter. Life then was suspended. Begetting and bearing went forward through this negative period because the law was established by which they progressed, but life which sustained these waited, dull, suffering, and monotonous.

One spring the negroes began to dig long trenches through the streets to lay water pipes through the town. The white people were having water hydrants put into their gardens and houses, the water to be pumped from a reservoir which was being made between two hills far up in the farms above the town. In the houses bathrooms were erected at the ends of back porches or upper hallways. There was work for every black laborer in the building of the dam and the digging of the trenches through the streets and roads. The negroes at the picks would sing now and then, not in unison, but each one would cry out his song, a phrase or a rhyme, timed to the regular throb of the body as it hammered with the tool upon the beaten earth, the song falling an instant behind the blow of the arm in half-humorous comment.

Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I will

Ma-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....

The song was always heard to the steady fall of the pick or the rise of the shovel, syncopated so that it set the shovel apart from itself and but half-owned its rhythms, or rather as if it accepted its confines and then escaped from them by the witty loophole of a quarter-beat. The men who worked were the strong men of the town, brown men or yellow, men who worked as teamsters, handlers of stone, lumber, coal, brick. They were named Wade Spalding, Ben MacVeigh, Ross, Tom Rusty, and there was a man called Gluco. Joe Davis was among them, a man prodigious of strength. Ross was a large man, young at that time, brown-skinned and broad in shoulders. All of them were willing, if they were paid well and well watched, to do a day’s work. A song would cry out from beneath the throb of the picks, escaped from the hard rhythm of the labor.

Chicken in the tree

Nobody there but me....

A wailing minor slurred through infinite intervals from tone to tone, sliding on the word “there” down four semitones of the scale by gradations unknown to established song. As a sequel to this some other voice would offer, after a space with the thud of the picks, the deeply intoned fatalism, swifter than the last, major, without wailing.

Hounds on my track

Chicken on my back.

Ross was a tall broad young negro, not over-sized, but well-knit and strong, his weight about one hundred and sixty pounds. He maintained a rivalry with Wade Spalding at the business of the picks, neither of them deigning to outdo himself but each taking pride in what he could achieve, foot by foot, by using as little of his strength as he might. Each negro used but the cream of his vitality on the labor, working relaxed, saving himself for life and her uses. A song, called out quickly,

Nigga, nigga, what can you do?

I can line a track,

Pull a jack;

I can pick and shovel too.

Water for bathing was being piped into all the better houses of the town, but few people would drink water from the pipes. Pump water, water from cisterns and wells, was better liked. The cisterns were not yet to be discarded. Wade had cleaned many a cistern and well. He would go down into the drained reservoir and dip up the sediments of mud to send it aloft in buckets. He would sop up the last of the water with cloths and rinse again with fresh water. No one sang at a lonely task such as this. Song flowed best when the men worked together in a long line, the picks and shovels rising and falling.

Look down that dirt-road,

Far as I could see.

Saw a jail door....

Look like home to me.

ONE

Frequently a well-used, high buggy was seen on the streets of the town, a vehicle of a slightly unfamiliar type, bought perhaps in some remote market. It would turn slowly around before the county offices and stand all afternoon under the shade of the tree at the doorway, a privileged conveyance. It was drawn by a well-conditioned horse, a tall bay that would step daintily along the stones of the street, and turn the wheels carefully. The owner, Mr. Tom Singleton, would buy easily at the stores, careless of bargains, asking for the best. Sometimes he would talk all afternoon with Anthony Bell, sitting on the gallery of the white house or under the elm tree. If Tom Singleton’s wife, Miss Doe, were present she would give great care to her leave-taking. She would mount to the buggy with ceremonious ease and seat herself, smiling at the accomplished act, scarcely belonging to the event, her smile lingering until the need for good-byes obliterated her inner vision of herself. She was a sister to Anthony Bell. Her name, Theodosia, had been shortened to Doe. The Singleton farm was ten miles from the town, northwest, down the valley.

Sometimes Mr. Tom would come to town in a carriage drawn by two fine brown mules. Then he would take Anthony Bell and the two girls, Theodosia and Annie, back to the farm for a visit.

The two mules trotted down the Quincy pike in the bright widely-spread glow of a late morning, the waves of heat rolling up from the macadam and turning about among the cooler undulations that flowed from the tall corn of the fields. Eight miles from the town and the carriage left the Quincy pike and entered a crossroad, and here the mules walked slowly under the roadside trees. The stone wall at the right was rich with moss and shadows. Two miles along this way, and Tom Singleton’s gate was set into the stone wall. Beyond, and the mules trotted evenly up a gravel road under American elms that were widely placed, the driveway leading to the farmhouse. Pines, lindens, locusts, tulip poplars and elms grew about the house in a pleasant confusion. The fox hounds, great mongrel beasts, walked in and out over the portico. From somewhere toward the rear a great jack, the breeding stallion, was braying at the arrivals.

“You can take the west room,” Miss Doe said, standing with her hands folded before her body when she welcomed her guests, when she had kissed each little girl as was her duty. “Anthony, he can take the east room. Lucas will carry up the valises.”

Upstairs Theodosia showed Annie the high bed in which they were to sleep, and in the east room another bed, as high, for their grandfather. They would lean out the window to look far over the west hills where other farms lay stretched over the rolling earth, white-fenced barnyards and remote houses about which old trees had gathered. The avenue down to the stone wall and the white gate turned lightly with its elm trees, the way they had come. They would look at the photographs of former Bells and Trotters and Montfords on the chamber walls, and would gaze at a chromo print of a ship standing above a great sea, caught suspended upon a wave. Once they explored all the upper rooms, opening all the doors, and finding a staircase to the attic, they went there to peer out at the land of the farms, thinking that they could see a hundred miles away. Annie was six years old. She would look at Theodosia for confirmation of each new wonder, as if she would say, “And is it so? Is it real?”

Theodosia saw her aunt’s vague hostility to her grandfather where it was carefully shawled under her function as hostess. The aunt would mount the stairs to see that all had been made neat in the rooms above, the visit an ostentation, reserved until the guests were at hand.

A negro girl, Prudie, cooked the meals, passing quickly from the cooking range to the tables, to the pantry. Her face shaded from one brown to another and the sweat ran in the neat wrinkles across her neck. She seemed neither glad nor sorry the guests had come. Miss Doe would give her pans of flour, sugar, or meal, or cuts of ham, all from the locked storeroom. “Be sure to take out a plenty,” she would say at the door, the keys in her fingers. When the uncle and the grandfather were away for a meal those left at home were served in the breakfast-room behind the dining-room, and Prudie instead of Lucas carried in the food. One day soon after the visit began Miss Doe sent the children to carry a message to a cabin back in the farm. Theodosia knew the way, for she had been for a walk in that direction with her uncle. There were clouds in the sky threatening a shower, and the aunt told the little girls to take the old cotton umbrella from the back porch.

They walked across the pasture and climbed over a gate into a cornfield, and it was pleasant to walk under the umbrella, treading on the shadow that moved with them down the field. The path was well beaten, for Prudie lived in the cabin with her mother, Aunt Deesie, and with Uncle Red. The cabin stood in a cove under some trees, a place where two hills began. Aunt Deesie was washing clothes in the yard, and all the lines were filled with white things hung to dry. A great kettle of boiling clothes steamed over a wood fire on the ground. The air about was pleasantly cool from the wooded hills behind the house, and a pleasant odor of lye soap spread about when the boiling kettle was dipped of its garments. Aunt Deesie was tall and strong, and she moved slowly among the tubs and kettles, keeping an even gait. On a quilt safely removed from the fire a small baby lay asleep, and two other small children ran about the yard or clung to Aunt Deesie’s skirt when Theodosia gave her message. These were Prudie’s children.

“Yes’m,” Aunt Deesie said. “Tell your Aunt Doe she didn’t send me down no blues. To clear the white clo’s. Tell your Aunt Doe all the blues is gone, the bluen.”

Theodosia stood about in the cool of Aunt Deesie’s yard, fascinated by the work that went forward and by the sweet smell of the lye, by the smell of Aunt Deesie’s warm body leaning over the tubs. The baby waked and squirmed on the quilt, working its arms and legs about, and Aunt Deesie stopped her washing to pin a fresh rag about its hips, trying to hide what she did because the rag was old and without a hem. Theodosia saw her slip the soiled rag under the wash-bench and she was fascinated by her shame. The baby was dark brown, a boy child, and the two that ran about under Aunt Deesie’s feet were girls, their heads a tight nap of thin wool. Aunt Deesie would push them gently aside and move from tub to tub, her voice gentle as she worked.

“Why don’t you-all chil’n talk to the white gals. White gals come to see you-all.”

The little negroes would stare with strange dark faces, their mouths going up and down as they chewed at their fingers. Theodosia would watch every move they made, curious, following them, or she would go back to the quilt to watch the baby. She would watch their small dresses, their brown legs, their moving gestures, and she would ask them questions to pretend to an interest in their replies, but her pleasure was in her own sense of superiority and loathing, in a delicate nausea experienced when she knelt near the baby’s quilt.

“Katie, why don’t you pick up the baby’s gum rattler offen the ground and give it to him into his hand,” Aunt Deesie said. “Pick up the baby’s rattler, Katie.”

The child gave the rattle to the baby, and in the act Theodosia knew a sweet loathing of the small dark infant and knew that she herself could not be brought to touch it or to touch Katie. She knew the half-pleasant disgust felt for the young of another kind, a remote species. Their acts sent little stabs of joy over her, sickly stabs of pleasant contempt and pride.

The week at the farm was always full of enhanced being. She would see her grandfather under the wooden pillars of the portico and see him in his joyous encounters with his old friend. Away from home he flowered into some newer intensity, and his rusty clothes were elegant against the rough running landscape. The office of host became Tom Singleton well, and Anthony as guest responded. Doe Singleton’s hostility to her brother did not penetrate his joy or reduce it or shape it in any part. She scarcely existed for it at all, for she seemed unrelated to everything present. The dinner waited until she came, Lucas going and coming, bringing something more, seeming to spread the time of preparation about until she appeared. When she arrived she came hurrying through the door and sat at the head of the board. She seemed to be sitting too far from the table and neglecting her own ease. She handled the cups without routine or precision, but she poured each cup herself and gave it to Lucas, who conveyed it to its place. She would ask Anthony how many spoons of sugar he took, seeming to forget each time that the amount had been established.

“You’re welcome to all the sugar you want. Pass Mr. Anthony the sugar bowl,” she would say to Lucas. “And get Mr. Tom the sharp knife. That’s not the right knife. They say sugar is bad. For grown people, it’s said.” She would not let her hostility extend to any controversy over the food. Sitting after the serving was done, she seemed unrelated to her knife and fork, to her cup, even when her hand lifted it to her mouth to drink.

“When I go next time I think I’ll take nothing along but Blix and Tim and Roscoe,” Tom Singleton said. “I never cared for a big set-to of dogs when I hunt. Give me three or four good dogs. What’s the use?”

“Blix is the smartest dog in the whole lot,” Anthony said. “That dog Blix has got first-rate brains inside his skull. One time....”

“Brains! He’s the stupidest one in the whole pack, the way I look at it,” Miss Doe said. “Blix hasn’t got one grain of sense. Since he was a pup he’s been the stupidest one in that litter.”

“We’ll go down after dinner and look over the yearlen mules,” Tom Singleton said. “I just want to hear what you’ll say about my yearlens.” He was glad in his guest, unaffectedly gracious, the sweetness of his smile giving a flavor to every word he spoke. He was childishly nervous in his care of each hospitality. “As pretty a bunch of mules as ever was. But I just want your opinion. You’re a prime judge of stock, that I well know.”

Like his friend, Anthony, he seemed unaware of Miss Doe’s denials. Their entire unconsciousness of this led Theodosia to distrust her own sense of the house, the furniture, the shading trees in the garden as seen from the windows of the dining-room. Lucas walked slowly about the table, his passing timed to some unreality that colored her whole vision. Her joy in being there spread widely about her and suffused her knowledge of her aunt’s way until she was scarcely sure that she was there at all, scarcely sure that Annie was real or that her grandfather was of the same flesh she had always known him to be. She could touch Annie but was she the same, she questioned, that she had touched before and was she herself present? Her joy in the farm and her pain in her aunt could not interfuse. The talk, as something extra and beyond her reach, flowed about the dogs, the coming elections, or it would drift away to market prices or to books they had read, to the gossip of the town.

“Downing, he’s the best man. I aim to vote for the best man this time,” Tom Singleton said.

Lucas walked evenly about with a dish of some scalloped food, passing it from place to place. Miss Doe spoke then, acquiescing; Downing was, she said, a good man, a good clever man. The county could see what he had in him when he was magistrate. The trees outside moved lightly in the air, green moving against blue in a motion which flowed continually, never returning, some unfamiliar tree which settled a new rhythm into Theodosia’s mind, and a passion to know all of this strange thing exalted her being as she glanced again toward the window where the boughs stood across a meadow and a field and passed thus to the blue of the horizon.

“And Bond in his way is all right,” Anthony said. “For the place he’s expected to fill. And Johns is a right clever man now. Honest, he is, and fair-spoken.”

“I never yet saw any good in old Johns,” Miss Doe said, “and Bond, he’s not one whit better. If that’s what you call honest! I know a tale would make his honesty blush, and you know it too, Anthony Bell.”

It seemed to Theodosia then that the air would split asunder with a great crash, the flaw centering in her aunt’s hands and extending two ways across the solid of the room. She glanced at her uncle in distress and apprehension. His smile then was open and tender, and he reached across and touched her hand with his palm while he finished saying something to her grandfather, and then he said:

“What does Ladybug want? I know what’ll be good for her. Doe, le’s pour some more cream in her milk, outen the cream pitcher. Take this glass around to Miss Doe, Lucas. She needs it to grow on. Growen like a weed now, Ladybug is. What does Little Lady want on her plate? Doe, Little Lady’s got not one thing on her plate.”

The memories of his college sat lightly upon his mind, guests indulgently entertained when they were given any recognition. He had never overtaken the attitude of learning. Anthony would bring some book to the portico and read aloud, or he would say, “Do you remember Thomas, old Thomas?” A professor in some college he would mean. “English letters.... He loved it too well to teach it well....” The aunt would sit with her hands folded in her lap, a smile that scarcely belonged to her lips hovering over the bent hands while the man’s voice intoned the sumptuous lines. She had heard him read all this before, but she lent herself gracefully to the act, and Tom Singleton lowered his head, remembering, or he would glance up at Anthony’s face when some new guest arrived and was joyously greeted and housed for the time in elegant chambers. The reading:

Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours.

Anthony Bell’s hair was thinly grizzled. His hands were familiar upon the book, his voice well-used to the words of the poets. Vertical lines lay parallel across his cheeks. His mouth was thin-lipped and shut down at the corners with drooping plumes, feathered lines that frayed out upon the skin.

Tramping the slant winds on high

With golden-sandalled feet that glow....

Theodosia thought sometimes, when he read aloud, seeing his moving mouth running perpetually along the channels of song, that he must know some eternals, some truths, some ways unknown to her, and she would yearn with an inner sob of longing that he might impart this thing to her, whatever it might be. It was known to his body rather, to his delicate hands bent lovingly at the edges of a book, his sitting posture, his mouth that rolled out the elegant words and was unafraid of any word or saying. She would sit quietly among these, her elders, trying to understand, gaining a rich exaltation where the words revealed their splendor even if they withheld their thought. She was eleven years old.

These are Jove’s tempest-walking hounds

Whom he gluts on groans and blood....

When the old man spoke suddenly after a period of quiet a tiny spray of spittle would sometimes fly from his ill-balanced teeth. In rest his thin-lipped mouth bent downward at the corners and imposed its angles upon the lower cheeks. She did not know it then, but his mouth had been closed by sorrow. “By God, Shelley was no jackass,” he said, snapping shut the book.

Annie had brought the paper dolls to the doorsill, hinting for play. Theodosia joined her there and began to stand the long, slim ladies in rows against the house, half gravely, half in frolic, wavering between Annie and the men, her grave way belonging to Annie. The hour had been rich and dark with the voices from the poem. Now Annie’s soft child-speech fell high and thin about the matters of the paper images of women and girls, the chirping of some familiar bird.

“I wish you-all had brought the fiddle,” Tom said. “I’m just sick for a little fiddle music myself. Tony, you got no call to come down here without you bring along your music. Next time you come you got to play a double quantity just because you forgot this time to fetch it along.”

“Too many people sit around and do nothing all day as ’tis,” Miss Doe said.

“I recall how you used to play Heart Bowed Down and Lucy Lammermoor. ‘Farewell, farewell my own true love.’ I recall one night ...”

“It’s Theodosia plays the fiddle now,” Anthony said. “I give over now to the young hoss. Plays, egad, yes she does. Takes right after it.”

Theodosia turned to the paper dolls with grave willingness and preoccupation. Her blood flowed warmly because of the praise, spreading over her like a soft mantle.

The girls went for a walk with their uncle one bright mid-morning, going to a tobacco barn which stood down in a creek valley beyond two fields. Of the dogs, Blix and Roscoe were allowed, and they ran smelling at the path, quietly humble when they were called. The other dogs were locked into the old apple house, the place where they were kept when they were not wanted running about, where they were seasoned for the hunt.

Some abundance within herself would not let Theodosia acquiesce completely to the hour, to any hour or to any experience, as being sufficient. She kept on the way a pleasant sense of her grandfather sitting reading under the pine before the house, knowing a curious joy in his absence and enjoying the walk more intensely in that she enjoyed it for him as well as for herself. The corn in the field was very high, near its maturing. Tom Singleton wondered and delighted in the height of the corn. His pride in the high corn seemed then to touch her vague distrust of pride and delight, and she smiled with him happily, swinging his hand.

“Some of it fifteen feet high, Ladybug, if it’s one inch. Have to tear the shock down to pluck it.”

A humming came from one end of the cornfield, audible as they passed, and there myriads of bees were working over the corn tassels, taking the pollen of the corn. A walnut tree glistened in the light. The edges of the leaves made crystals on the green bank of the tree, sharp facets of brightness on green leaves. Theodosia did not know the name of this hard, brilliant tree, but she knew some response to the scintillating surfaces and lined edges where the sun met the leaves.

“This-here, it’s a walnut tree. A fine old walnut,” he said. “And what’s this, Ladybug?”

“That’s the queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief,” he said when she could not reply. The name was itself a bright altar-cloth for some shrine in a valley, and Theodosia grew in all ways to comprehend the beauty of the weed, but insufficiency grew likewise, moving outward beyond every comprehended meaning and pleasure.

Some buzzards were soaring over the stream, lying out on the air with long wings, searching the water-holes for fowls that might come there to drink. They seemed rather to rest on the air and to turn about for the mere happiness of turning. Near the creek a pool of water, fed by some spring, had been banked about with earth to make a pond, the place where the mules drank when the creek was low and the water-holes foul. Four light sorrel horses stood by the fence, one of them a large glossy mare with a half-grown mule colt beside her, the colt sorrel and brilliant like the mother. It seemed very foolish in its fright, edging close to its mother’s side, afraid even of little Annie when she ran near to gather the plush, aster-like flowers that grew near the creek.

In the field the laborers were bending over the tobacco plants, breaking out the top of each and trimming away undesired growth. They lifted their backs from the labor to watch the passing and to greet the owner of the field. At the barn beyond the field Tom left the girls in the shade of the doorway while he looked at the walls of the building, or he climbed high into the upper structure, talking happily to himself as he mounted. It was a good barn, he said. It would do. A little work on the roof and a few nails to tighten the loose scantlings. Then they went back along the tobacco field and passed the shy sorrel colt again.

“Oh, it’s a good morning,” he said. “I someways like a day just like this, just enough heat so’s you know it’s summer. Cool breezes shiften in and out of the thicket and a mockbird over towards the hill a-singen once in a little while. A prime good day. I don’t know why it is but seems like I always liked a hilltop. We’ll go up this-here fenceline and around home by the orchard to see if the early harvests are all gone offen the trees. That’s a summer apple fit for a queen to eat.”

They accepted his joy in them as their due and saw it blend with his joy in the morning. It had been but a little while since Annie had thought that if she darkened her eyes with her hand the sun went out and all the earth was in darkness. Suddenly a redbird made a solitary peal of song, a rich modulation from the three high whistled notes to the low throaty altos of the decline where the singing darkened to meet the brush and undergrowth of the thicket. The song set the hilltop clear in a high relief.

“I sometimes plow this-here, but mainly I leave it in pasture grass.” Beyond the fence the earth rolled gently up to a summit that held a few scattered trees, an oak and two or three thorns. “And on the top, right there on the summit, is where I expect to be buried, right there. Off to the left of the oak but on the summit like. From that-there spot you can see—it’s curious now—you can see the whole farm, every last field. You can look down on the house and the barns and right down this-here valley to the creek. It’s curious. There’s where I expect to be buried some day. I always like family buryen-grounds. I expect to lay down my bones right there on this hilltop.”

The hill-crest rolled in a fair curve against the sky between the limits of the trees, but it slipped beyond the trees again and sank away into the curving field, and Theodosia felt a quick pleasure in it as the place where he would be buried, and felt it as the summit of the farm that looked down upon all the fields and the meanderings of the creek and the life of the barns, on the singing mockingbird and the goodness of the day. Her eagerness ran forward and longed to have him buried there, anticipated his entombment on the brow of the hill he had chosen, so that she could scarcely wait for the consummation of his wish. She looked at him happily and smiled, and he took her hand in some unconscious delight, and thus they walked up the fence path.

Theodosia would watch the long brown hand with its yellow shadowed nails when Lucas passed a plate of some food at her side. While she helped herself to a serving her eyes would cling to the hand where it folded at the edge of the plate, the thumb near the food, and she would remember the baby on the quilt in Aunt Deesie’s yard. An exquisite disgust of the hand would make the food taste doubly sweet in her mouth when the hand was withdrawn.

“Well, Ladybug,” Tom Singleton said when they had passed to the portico, “what’s the best thing in the world?”

She had never thought before that one thing might be the best, superior to all other things, but when her uncle placed the question at once it became clear that among all the betters there must be one supreme best. She was bewildered in her pursuit of some reply, wanting to find the true answer, and she stared at the ground or at the wooden pillar, penetrating the query with the whole of her strength. Her uncle had turned to some other matter, he was talking with Anthony now—the foot-and-mouth disease, Henry Watterson, the tobacco pool in the dark district, Mnemosyne, the secret of the mind, the price of sugar mules, and back to the pool again. The vine that spread over the brick walls of the house made a great plane of flowing green that turned with the turning wall and lapped over the south front and reached to the north gable. It had come from somewhere far away; her attention did not cling to the place as Anthony repeated it with wonder. The main stem of the vine grew on the south side of the house under the window of the room where the aunt and uncle lived, the room across the hall from the parlor, but the longest reach of it, at the farthest end of the west wall, was a hundred feet or more from the root. It was as if it were a great tree, flattened and attenuated to a vine and bent about a house, and her grandfather and uncle were two children in their simple delight in the great growth. Doe had brought it from some place far away a long while ago. From Virginia. She had come back from a visit there and had brought the vine wrapped in a bit of earth, delicately rooted in soil. She was proud now of the vine and of herself as its author.

“See, Tony,” she said. “See.”

They walked about the house to the north wall and traced the creeper to its last and most remote tendril high at the eaves above the north attic window, calling, “See here!”

“See, Tony,” she said. “A hundred feet and over since it touched ground.”

They seemed sweetly childish in their pleasure in the vine and Theodosia looked at them with wonder and detachment. The best thing in the world teased her for a reply. She saw that her aunt had cared for the vine and had become actual and present in her pride of it. She had brought it from a long distance and had cared for it along the way in the train, giving it water. It had come from the wall of some relative in Virginia. She turned to Mnemosyne, for the beautiful word came again and again to her ear once her grandfather had named it. He had told her of it before, Memory, the mother of all, the seed of the mind. It was a curious question, the query her uncle had made, as simple as breath; she thought that all the people in the world must know the answer or must be in pursuit of the answer to a question of such importance—the best thing in the world. She wondered if Mnemosyne might not be the answer, the best, and her mind swam dizzily in a sense of vaguely remembered beautiful words, their ideas ill-shaped, words remembered more for their beauty of tone than for their thought—asphodel, Mytilene. But there were other beautiful things, other best things. They eluded her, unnamed, receding down a long vista into her inner sight. She recalled particular occasions when the surrounding world had seemed good, a good place in which to be. Admiring words from others, caresses, gifts, all the people singing in the church—in the seed of each happening an insufficiency. There was never enough.

They were on the portico again, the mottled shadows of the boughs falling on their faces. The voices became sharp and firm, pleasantly outlined, immense, governed by some relation to the vine on the wall and its great reach from the soil of the ground. In the moment all the people present became actors in a pageant and all the words they said seemed deeply significant as if they were proclaiming themselves now in their real and permanent, unillusory aspect, in their true cause and relation. Annie lay in the doorway with a picture book. Anthony Bell was talking, his hand upraised. Lucas came from the kitchen garden with a respectful message, affected embarrassment, his head bowed, the proper approach. Their voices stood with length and breadth, sharply edged.

Every day or two Theodosia would ask her aunt if she and Annie might go to see Aunt Deesie. The walk across the pasture and the cornfield was long, but the pleasure of Aunt Deesie’s yard was sweet. Aunt Deesie ironed the clothes, heating the irons on the open embers of the fire that burned in the yard. The baby always lay on the quilt and the small girls stood bashfully about. One day Theodosia took them some of the candy Tom Singleton had brought from the store. She could scarcely endure the joy of her loathing as she touched their fingers in giving them the sweets.

Near the end of the week Miss Doe went away in the buggy early in the afternoon and Tom and Anthony played checkers under the pine tree. The dogs walked about sleepily in the bright air, which was of the radiance of early autumn, or they slept in the shaded doorway of the barn. The day moved slowly and her stay at the farm seemed to Theodosia to be bent or deflected from its purposes. Little Annie wanted to play with the dolls, but Theodosia grew weary of them. The kitchen was closed; there was no drama being done there; no one was feeding the stock at the barns or fastening the dogs into the apple house. She wandered back to the pine tree where the game of checkers went happily along, but it could not entertain her. She whispered to Annie as they went behind the house in their search for something to do.

“We’ll go to see Aunt Deesie.”

They took the cotton umbrella from the back porch although there were no clouds. The memory of the first visit should tinge this adventure. They crossed the pasture in the brilliant sun and entered the cornfield, but when they were scarcely started along the path by the corn Annie said that she was thirsty and that she must have a drink, and she cried. She could not go farther without a drink, she said. Theodosia urged her on and promised a drink at Aunt Deesie’s cabin. When they left the cornfield and came near the cove a strange aspect of the place accosted them, for it was closed and still. All the tubs were neatly piled beside the door, their bottoms turned up, and the clotheslines were gone. They shouted from the small gate but the house was empty. Aunt Deesie and the children were gone. The place was frightful crouched under its loneliness.

Annie cried again and said that she was thirsty and Theodosia went into the wooded hill behind the cabin to try to find the spring, but she did not look for a path and her search led them far up the hillside but gave them nothing. It was cool under the trees and Annie forgot her need for the water. Presently they saw two small animals, and Annie ran after them, calling them her little cats. The small beasts ran close to the ground and kept together. They were strange creatures and they made the wooded hill seem strange to Theodosia, as if she had never seen it before. Annie herself seemed strange, having forgotten her thirst now in an ecstasy of pleasure over the little animals, which she tried to catch with her hands.

“They’re little doggies,” she said. “They’re my little cats.”

Theodosia tried to catch them too, and she closed her hands upon them once, but they were elusive and quick although they seemed unable to run very fast. They ran along, tumbling at each other, keeping together. Theodosia knelt quickly and spread her skirt before them, but they turned aside and ran away. Then suddenly they went into a hollow stump through a little hole at the side, and Theodosia poked the umbrella into the hole and Annie called, “Come out, little doggies,” but a cat-like hiss came from the stump and when Theodosia jerked the umbrella away a quick paw shot out and a snarl followed. The girls ran away from the stump, afraid of it, and presently they went back toward the cornfield. The sun was low now and they hurried across the pasture. They had not asked leave to go.

At the end of the pasture where the fodder stalks were scattered near the feeding ricks two of the dogs came toward them, Blix and Lady, and in an instant Theodosia knew that they were not coming for play. Blix and Lady and Roscoe were coming fast upon them, full speed now, rushing down the littered pasture, their eyes set and their jaws opened, their backs a straight line. Theodosia screamed and caught Annie’s hand as she ran, and the dogs were upon them, five beasts now. She dropped the umbrella and turned screaming toward the barn, dragging Annie, and Uncle Red came from the cattle shed and shouted something. The dogs stopped at the umbrella and set upon it with their teeth and tore it to pieces at once, but the delay gave Theodosia time to come near the barn before they set upon her again. All the dogs were out now, a dozen or more, some of them worrying the torn pieces of the umbrella and some in a pack around the girls. Uncle Red beat them away with a rail and carried Annie to the house, for she was weak with terror.

“Um—m! Skunk!” he said. “That-there skunk. Has you-all youngones been handlen a skunk or a polecat maybe?”

Theodosia remembered the terror and fury in the eyes of the dogs and all through the evening she sat quietly with a book she tried to read. Annie cried out in her sleep many times during the night. The next day the dogs were locked in the apple house, but Annie would not go beyond the doorway unless she held her grandfather’s hand. Soon afterward the week came to an end and the visit was over.

The ladies of the town played a game with cards, a simple game that did not prevent conversation. On the day of the card party there was a faint flutter in the town, the ladies riding by in phaëtons and traps, wearing their best. If Charlotte Bell entertained the group she would, at some time during the party, sit at the piano with Theodosia standing near, and they would play some simple part of an overture or a popular air. The Bell house was a white frame structure to which several additions had been built, a long portico or gallery running almost the entire length of the front giving a pleasant open space above stairs as well as below where one might take the air. On summer evenings Charlotte would sit for a while on the upper gallery with the two girls and sing, sitting apart from the house where Horace Bell came and went lightly, never troubling to hide his destination whether it was a gambling party with men or an evening with some woman. Seen once at dusk as she sat on the upper gallery, her head against the bank of vines, her two little girls grouped close about her to sing, she had looked like the pitying madonna diverted by hate. She had wanted a rightly-placed hearth. Now she played much with Theodosia, their simple airs arising above the quiet of the street. Horace, departing, would wave them a gay farewell, a greeting that was all of himself, lightly given, or once in a while he would stop briefly beside the piano and join his great voice to the song, booming the words across the fiddle notes, taking a pride and a delight in his great running voice that emasculated the piano. When he had made his point he would leave in a thunder of laughter, waving a hasty good-bye.

When Annie was seven years old she sickened of a fatal child malady and died. The funeral was held in the church, and Luce wept when she saw the Bells weeping as they sat near together at the front of the church in the space respectfully left for the mourners, seeing them huddled together and set apart by death. The minister preached of the kingdom of heaven, the world to come, and of becoming as a little child. A lady, Mrs. Bent, sang a song while the organ hummed softly. She was full-breasted and maternal, and as she sang she looked as if she only a moment before had held a child in her arms, and the words of the song seemed truer as she sang them, truer than the sayings of the minister to which they lent truth. Her own children sat with their father in a pew at the side, and the words of the song came very gently across the church as she looked as if some child might easily creep into her arms.

I think when I read that sweet story of old,

Of Jesus while here among men,

How He took little children as lambs to His fold....

The words were of her own, coming from her soft bosom and her strong round arms. The Bells, Anthony, Charlotte, Horace, and Theodosia, sat huddled together to weep, remote from the others of the church, sitting forward. They could not hear the words of the song as Miss May Bent sang it, as she sent it from her warm, kind body, they being too near to the whole of the event. In Charlotte Bell was the song itself, waiting. She could not hear the singing. Theodosia heard it as a bright myth having some celestial, candle-lit meaning she could not understand.

Theodosia was delicately modeled with strong slender limbs, swift in a game, quick-witted at play. Her red-brown hair hung in a long braid or was twined braided about her head. Her fingers were small and thin, bent strangely about a fiddle, were quick among the fiddle strings, weighted with music. Little Annie’s grave was marked now by a small white stone in the graveyard, a stone which read only the name, ANNIE, in hard letters set deeply into the marble. To see Theodosia was to think of the child and to wonder if she had forgotten. As she ran down the ball field where the boys and girls played together, as swift as the best of the girls, the act would question if she had forgotten. As she bent her fingers over the fiddle strings and pressed them down in cunning ways, her knowing fingers keen with music, the act again would test her memory of the small girl.

The people of the town were assembled at the chapel hall of the Seminary to hear the school choruses and solo pieces, the last day of the term. The piano had been tuned and its dark squat legs had been polished, an effort made to remove all blemishes and all dust. There were pieces recited and some bits of dialogue given. When Theodosia had finished playing, Anthony Bell went forward and lifted her down from the platform and kissed her, proud of her applause. “Her playen, it’s not so much,” voices in the throng said. “I’ve heard better fiddle-playen.” Hostile voices, and then another, “But fine for a child only fourteen, right good for a child now.” “Right good for anybody, I’d say. I only wish I could do half as well.” “But it sounds like exercises.” “It’s classical music. It all sounds like that, classical music does.” “Classical music all sounds alike.” “Give her another encore. It pleases old Mr. Bell.” “It pleases him too much. He’s a vain old man.” “But do it no matter. It’s right sweet the way he takes on over Dosia’s playen. He’s given her his fiddle and they say it’s one of the finest in the whole state. It’s a famous fiddle, they say. Give another encore.” “He says he aims to send her off to learn from a high teacher, away off somewheres, and he may do it.” “It would take a sight of money to do that.” “They may manage it somehow. Give another encore.” “She’s a-goen to play again. He may manage it.” “I for one hope so.” “She’s right sweet with her fiddle up to her chin like that.” “She’s as sweet as a picture. I just love to sit here and watch her.”

Charlotte Bell died one cold season when the town was numb and bewildered with the unaccustomed freezing. Few could realize her loss. When the mild days reappeared she was somehow gone from the gallery.

Old Anthony Bell walked the garden path in the early morning in a soiled smoking-jacket, stiff-legged, his eyes dim. Theodosia went to school at the Seminary, or she practised at the fiddle half the day, exploring music without guidance. She studied harmony at the school and assembled a small group there to play quartets, her quick skill dominating. She grew tall in a year. Her rounded breasts were up-tilted—two small graceful cups—as if they would offer drink to some spirit of the air. She ran swiftly from one thing to the next, the books in her grandfather’s cases, the fiddle, the games with the other girls. “This,” her grandfather said to her, “is the family tree of the Montfords and the Trotters. There’s a collection of family traditions written into the blank book on the second shelf. My mother was a Montford, and don’t you forget that, Miss.”

She read the notes in the book of records swiftly one hour while she waited for a dance at the tobacco warehouse. She had learned to kiss with her first lover, but she had learned to kiss more deeply with her second, one of the boys at the Seminary, Charles Montgomery. In the kitchen at the back of the house she would bake a cake or make a pudding to augment Aunt Bet’s plain dinner, the cook book propped up on the music rack she had set in the middle of the floor. Her slender legs leaped quickly from the pantry to the table, and she made emphases unconsciously with fiddle gestures, a long wooden spoon in her right hand. “The whites of five eggs, it says. Have we got five, Aunt Bet? Here’s one says four whole eggs. All right, Aunt Bet. You fire up. Gentle at first, then big later on. Here we go.”

The movements in the streets and along the roads were becoming more swift, and there were fewer horses in the pastures. “The horse business, it’s ruined, plumb ruined, or soon will be,” Anthony Bell said. Theodosia quarreled with Charles after slapping his face one night in early spring.

“You don’t know what you want,” he said.

“Maybe so,” she said. She could feel her anger rising and spreading within, a subtle fuel in her body mounting to a swift burning in her face. “Maybe so, but I know what I don’t want.”

Charles went away from the town at some time after that and did not return. Anthony was palsied in his hands, but he would stop in his stroll along the path and beat the ground sharply with his cane, tapping on the bricks or on the boards under his feet. “Oh, tut!” he would say. Sometimes Theodosia would see him in his mantle of old age as he stepped uncertainly along, and a pang of pity, self-pity, fear, and apprehension would assail her. Or, seeing his shrunken form, his feet questioning the path for a place, she herself would walk there and she would see through her present self as through a swift glass, quickly adjusted for vision, as would say, “See, bent spine, eyes fixed, gestures squared at their turnings, the up-and-down jog of age.” But her life ran upon itself eagerly and there were other things to see.

He would begin to sing as formerly, letting his voice fall away to a whisper when it failed in its tone. “Oh, tut!” he would say, returning to mumble his old knowledge, reiterating himself endlessly. “Yet hath the shepherd boy at some times raised his rustic reed to rhymes more rumbling than rural, more rumbling than rural.” Theodosia had won a diploma at the Seminary. She was a tall girl now, fragile but quick, swift at the girls’ sports. “She must study to play the fiddle. She’s a master fiddler,” the old man said, stepping more briskly over the boards. “With rhymes more rumbling than rural.... She must. She gets her music two ways, Charlotte and the Trotters. Old Matthew Trotter was a master musicianer in his day, and had red hair.... Yet hath the shepherd boy.... I’ll see to the matter myself.... A small matter, a few paltry dollars to buy instruction for a girl of talent.... Oh, tut! What became of the farmland, sixteen hundred broad acres, I had? Well, I’ll say, ask her aunt Doe for the small sum. A rich farm, she’s got, and not a chick or a child to spend on. ‘Madam, your one namesake, your only godchild, has a rare musical gift. Madam, are you aware that your namesake has a bit of a musical talent? Has it ever occurred to you to give the child a gift, a year in the metropolis maybe? Madam! Your humble servant. Yours very truly, Anthony Bell. Give the child a big red apple. A peach plucked from the peach orchard. Send the child the first peach of the season. Namesake! For God’s sake! Has it ever occurred to you, Madam, to do something you might call substantial for the baby, your namesake? If your husband, Tom Singleton, had lived it would occur to him. To reward his wife’s namesake. God knows it would!’ ... Oh tut!... What became of the farmland, my patrimony? ‘Young Man, your only daughter.’ ... God’s sake!... As well talk to a jacksnipe. ‘Horace, your daughter approaches her maturity lacken a few miserable pennies to buy her a bit of a finish in music.’ I’ll see to the matter myself.”

TWO

A young woman named Jane Moore played accompaniments for Theodosia. They played in the parlor of the Bell house, the piano standing against the east wall and running back into the bay of the windows. Jane Moore laughed a great deal as she played, and she played many notes wrong, but she offered Theodosia a steady tinkle-tinkle of piano rhythms against which to set her fiddle. Over the chimney hung a steel engraving of Henry Clay in some congressional pose, and the insignia of the Trotters and the Montfords, done in color by some artist and neatly framed, hung near together on the north wall. Through the freshly curtained windows the scent of locust blossoms would come, and outside, from garden to garden, up the street, the locust trees had their flower.

Sometimes the piano outdid itself, as when Jane Moore was caught on some rapture which swept her beyond her nervous inattention. Then she would go steadily on, without a giggle or a blunder, one with Theodosia, the piano married to the fiddle, rhythm after rhythm, measure after measure, and Theodosia’s fervid “Repeat!” as she struck the music with her bow and marched the melodies forward and marshalled them forth, would hold the good spell to the end of the piece.

“Oh, Jane Moore, Jane Moore!” Theodosia would say. “Why in the name of the Lord, why can’t you play like that every day?”

They would laugh until their eyes ran tears, laughter induced by Jane Moore’s concentrated interval. She had soft white skin and a round soft body, an inattentive mind. It was, as the flowering locust trees attested, the spring of the year.

There were garden parties in the evenings, all the boys and all the girls gathering to laugh and joke and play with light caresses among the shrubs that were lit with paper lanterns. The girls would come walking with the young men, and their little shining shoes would tap on the village pavements. Catherine Lovell had curling yellow hair that stood in a soft roll on the top of her head, and in her bright organdie dress she was fair in the way of a pink in a garden. She was lovely to know, always coming to Theodosia with her smiles and her pretty little jokes, always wanting Theodosia to play her fiddle again. She would come running to Theodosia’s room on a morning after a party to talk over all the happenings of the occasion, and she would sit on the foot of the bed while Theodosia had her breakfast from the tray Aunt Bet had brought upstairs. Then they would tell over the names of all who had been present and repeat the bright sayings of the young men, Conway and Albert, whose names they called often, and they would praise the girls for their loveliness in the fullness of their own self-admiration and self-love.

“Wasn’t May Wilmore a dear in her flowered sash?”

“Like a sweet pea,” Theodosia would say.

“Like a whole bouquet of little flowers.”

“And Ruth was sweet in her green dress, dark bands across her hair.”

Or Ruth Robinson would run in during the morning to ask Theodosia to go for a drive far into the country. Once they went to gather dogwood blossoms from a tree she knew of, far down the Quincy pike. They set out early in the afternoon and let the old horse take his own way of keeping clear of the few passing cars. In the end they went as far as the farm where Theodosia’s aunt lived. They talked with the old aunt in the musty parlor, sitting stiffly on the curve-backed chairs, and were scratched under the knees by the broken horse-hair cloth. Miss Doe brought a plate of stale little cakes for a treat. Somewhere back among the barns the useless old jack stallion would bray, and the great hounds, fat and indolent, would loll in the front doorway or wander through the rooms, sniffing at Theodosia’s dress again and again, or at Ruth’s slipper, dull-minded and slow, stretching stiffly by the parlor wall and returning to lie by the door and sleep. Tom Singleton was buried on the hilltop now. Miss Doe had had some need of him and when he was dead she mourned her loss with a perpetual attention to his memory. She kept all the hounds he had used for his hunting although they grew old and some of them became half insane. She let them multiply without discrimination and gave them access to the rooms of the house where, Theodosia suspected, they chose their own kennels and made free of the house from the garret to the pantries.

Now Miss Doe was grateful to the girls for their call, for the long drive they had taken, and she passed the cakes about with a thin gayety. She asked after the health of Horace and of Anthony, but she would not ask the girls to stay for the night. She withheld any gossip of the farm, of new calves or colts or chickens, feigning that these matters were too common for the interest of the parlor, reticent to answer questions. “She doesn’t want to share even the news of a new-dropped colt with me,” Theodosia would think, biting the little cake.

“I think I’d like to look around the place a little, Aunt Doe,” she said, when the call was near an end. “Could I look about a little? Could I show Ruth around, show her the vine? And the hilltop, maybe?”

“There’s little to entertain town girls with on the place. You can go and see, though, whatever you think there is to see.” She would laugh in a thin way, remaining indoors, peeping from behind the window curtains while they walked back into the farm.

The place was out of repair, and the dogs trampled it under. They were omnipresent, untrained, ill-mannered brutes. They lay sprawling in the doorway or they cluttered the path to the barns. They came up from the cellar sniffing with hostile interest, unused to visitors. The vine had died from the west wall and hung there withered and untended. Tom Singleton was greatly missed from the place.

“I hope you found everything to suit you,” Miss Doe said when they came back to the house door to say good-bye. “I hope you liked.”

“She hates us because Grandfather sold his farm, or lost it somehow,” Theodosia said as they drove down the avenue toward the road. “She hates us because she’ll have to will us her land. We’re the only natural heirs she’s got. She hates to have to will us her property.”

Returning along the road the girls filled the buggy with dogwood boughs, and they sang to remove the memory of the dismal hour of the farm, alto and soprano, running from one ditty to another, while the horse jogged up the pike toward the town. The rolling hills were fresh with spring, were sweetly curved with the tender new growth, and sweet again with the scent of herbs and dew. At the creek crossing the horse craved a drink, and Theodosia loosened the check-rein and let the beast step aside into the pool, gay over the act and eager to dispel the malice of the old hour. The weathered limestone of the creek bottom lay crumpled and fluted, a mass of tightly welded shells from some old ocean bed. The stream had cut a wide valley for its use, had set the hills far back as it had chosen other beds in which to wander in other ages. The horse supped his drink from off the fluted rocks, and when he had got his fill, alto and soprano flowing anew around some sentimental air, they would jog higher up the broad valley and thus come home again to the town.

The young men, Conway Brooke and Albert Stiles, would come to Theodosia’s house singly or together. Coming together, they would beg her to play for them or they would bring sweets to eat. Conway calling alone would talk of himself, sitting happily in the dim light of the parlor and enjoying his heightened self, his ease, his good looks, Theodosia’s beauty, all the delights of remembered being. Albert coming alone would grow heavily reminiscent, self-appraising, romantic, planning his future, laying his plans before her, eager for acquiescence. He was broad and strong, filling his chair with his man’s frame. Another, Frank Railey, would stop casually on his way up or down the street, or he would take her to row on the pool beyond the town. He would bring his books to read portions aloud, bits of essay he admired, or verse from his favorite poets. He had studied law and was establishing himself in practice in the courts of equity. Persevering and conscientious, seeking to enrich his experience, he would seek talk with Anthony Bell, bringing up old matters and trying to pry open the shut past, but this past was strange to him in its coloring, its iridescences which had long since been lost from recorded history, and these discussions would fall apart and leave old Anthony wrathful, gesticulating, straining to regain his composure. Theodosia often forgot engagements with Frank and was then put to elaborate pains to escape rudeness. When he faded down the vista of the street, going toward the town, he evaporated entirely, and she had no picture of where he went or of what he might do there. His face was slightly out of proportion, slightly unsymmetrical, and this characteristic gave it a look of rugged beauty and strength. He would come back out of the nowhere into which he had gone, smiling at Theodosia’s door, his smile placed slightly to one side of his face, and she would cry out, “For heaven’s sake, it’s Frank!”

Conway was lovely in his approach and in his greetings, always offering a charming promise of some approximation. His soft accents were a blend of Virginia English and negro tones. He was slender and tall, slightly vague as to what he wanted of life and the world, happy in himself, a lover of himself and of life. He liked to sit beside Theodosia and talk of his day, uncommitted to it now it was over. He worked somewhere in the town, but his work stood beside him as a commonplace and was never an object to be attained with sweat and thought. He loved himself anew in the warmth of her presence, that she knew. He would sit idly in his chair, faintly smiling, happy over anything she remembered to tell of her day, and happy over his own memories and vague comments. He made light matters of all the heavy affairs of business, of family, of care of any sort. He wore the cleanliness and freshness of his linens as if he imparted these qualities to them, as if he yielded these qualities with his easy, careless gestures and uncommitted mood. Gone from her, he kept always in Theodosia’s mind as that which lent grace to any morning into which it might come, into any evening, any memory, so that she smiled faintly if she thought of him. She knew his delicacy in some harsh way, in some hard framework of knowing that lay over her momentary joys in his radiance, in his beauty. Once, into the midst of the intoxicating vapor which surrounded her sense of him, her own voice spoke aloud, surprising her with its casual finality:

“He’d follow after the last lovely face offered”—and added: “The trick around the eyes and he’d go.”

If he were coming she would wear the pale yellow dress he admired and arrange her hair in the way he most praised, a low knot drawn above her neck and pushed securely into the curves at the back of her skull. Knowing that he would come she would linger over the hair, a thought of him and of his gracious, easily given admiration in every lift of the comb as she gently tooled the mass into shape and smiled now and again at her long face with its firm thin red lips. She had read from her grandfather’s books and Frank had brought her books containing the new learning. Conway’s knowledge was more powerful with her, she knew, and she smiled at her curving smile until her own lips told her their subtle learning, over and over, retelling. Conway would seat her in the chair of the blue brocade and he would adjust the light to fall in a cascade on the yellow gown, or he would arrange the bowl of roses with some reference to herself and himself and then sit negligently in his chair, himself a part of some whole which he at the same instant encompassed, having no notion of why he did these things. Or did he have no notion? she argued. His knowledge would spread through the room, through the house, gathered to the brilliant constellations that swam in a sun-shaft of light before a window, the motes of the beam, and gathered again to the scent of the honeysuckle outside on the chimney.

Albert would come heavily into the parlor although his feet were agile and his large frame was light to his motions. He filled the parlor with his seriousness and with his ponderous future which circled about his agricultural studies. He would lay his pretexts out, this way and that, making his decisions in her presence, but if Conway were at hand he was more light and less committed, as if only Theodosia had his confidences, as if his approach to Conway were still by the way of the college they had attended, of the streets they now walked together, of the ball they sometimes tossed back and forth, the dogs they owned in common. His strong body, rich with blood and bulk, seemed about to burst from its clothing as he sat opposite the light, moving from time to time in his seat in an excess of vitality. If he bent over a printed page, his earnest eyes lowered to their drooping, his mouth caught in its relaxed, searching pose, his studious moment would give him back to his boyhood, even to childhood, and Theodosia would smile faintly beside her eyes, deeply under the flesh, in a moment of tenderness. Sometimes she would play for him the light music he desired, bent rhythms that paused over brinks and leaped with spasmodic passion to its fulfilment in another twisted measure, any sort so that it moved swiftly to its consummation and readily fulfilled its promises. She was contemptuous of his taste in melodies even when she wanted most to please him. He was a part of the rich insufficiency that surrounded her. “He looks just like Tramp,” she said one day as she mounted the stairway, and Tramp was a great mongrel, part Dane, part collie, that lived somewhere on the street.

“He looks exactly like Tramp,” she said. She was dressing for his coming, working her hair into the shapes Conway liked, her lips withdrawing from the tunes Albert wanted played. “Oh, Lord! his Leave Home Rags and his My Mandy Lanes” she said. Later she would play them for him, plucking the strings quaintly and withdrawing them from their meanings.

When he had first come back from his agricultural college he had talked of a girl named Judith. He still wrote to her, but seldom spoke of her now. He would settle into his chair with a great sigh of content, turning the letter addressed to Judith over and over in his hands, a letter he had forgotten to mail. When he talked of himself he came immediately to the subject that most concerned the farmers, the success of the tobacco pool. Sometimes he seemed cautious as he handled some letter from Judith, turning it about, as if he clung to it. He would beg Theodosia to play the new song he had brought, for he had come then to have her play a song.

“Gosh, you’re the only girl in town can play,” he said. “Fiddle or piano, it’s all one to her. And works either single or double.”

“Lady broke. Bridle wise. A right good five-gaited saddle mare,” she said. She would withdraw behind the neglected thumping of the piano or the plucked strings, indifferent to the tune but willing enough to accommodate a caller. When she had embarrassed him she would laugh a low laughter and let her eyes close over the music as she trailed it off into some theme she liked.

“Lady broke.... I didn’t call you that,” he said heavily. “I didn’t say it.”

In autumn it was reported that a musician was coming to Lester, a larger town ten miles away, to teach violin-playing there. Word was spread about that she would visit Anneville one morning each week if three students could be found for her there. Theodosia and two half-grown children made up the number, and the teacher came. She was a small dark woman, slight in form, quick in her ways, heavy-browed, ambitious to become a great teacher. Old Anthony Bell engaged her to come to his house, had sent for her as soon as he had heard of her presence in the town, and had talked with her in the parlor, grown coherent, alert under the stimulation of the young woman. She made him remember his Heart Bowed Downs and his Trovatores.

Theodosia felt abashed before the superior skill and she drew her bow nervously over the strings at the test lesson. She was stifled into a few days of inactivity until the new gestures set within her. She must learn to hold the violin. To approach it with the bow. To observe the right angle. To listen to the tone and learn the acoustics of the instrument. Sometimes the dark woman would answer a question by playing a phrase, a skurry of phrases, and Theodosia was half afraid of these replies, knowing that she missed a part. Not virtuosity but good playing. The words sang in her mind and broke a new world into a firmament, a world fuller than the old. Theory, harmony, musical history, musical literature, technique, the legato, the perfect legato, the singing violin tone. The ragged chrysanthemums bloomed along the front of the house where the south sun shone, and the fallen leaves made every footstep clatter. The fields beyond the town, where they arose on the hills and were seen from the windows of the house, had lost their rough lines as they were turned under by the plow for the winter grains, were set in order for the next growing year. Her eyes, lifted from the strings, would rest far away on the hill field where the earth had been made new and where it ran perpetually now with her singing legato, the brown earth laid out brown in the autumn sun.

The music teacher came each week, her talk a bright flash from the world far outside. She talked in half with her music and with her quick hands, but her speech was crisp and clear. In her the master walked out upon the concert stage and worked his bow over the strings; she gathered intensely in her darkness and in the vibrant speed of her facile hands, her mouth easily turning, her strong slender limbs swaying, or she tapped the bow against her skirt as she told how the master played a movement. Her fingers were little brains secreting the music of thought. Around her a peculiar, scintillating half-brilliance spread like a fog of things half-known, half-sensed; it caught at the imagination and kindled it but gave it insufficient fuel. The man and the instrument were one. An interpretation of life. Of mind, mood, thought, by the way of sound. Man is speaking here. His voice. Sound brought to high refinements, nuances, exquisite variations to make a speech for the spirit of man. The musician knew; she flashed out of her darkness. These were days of unsatisfied knowing. One could never have enough.

Or again, how a ship cuts the waves open and spreads them apart to roll up on her sides and follow after her in a long sweep of tilting water with a froth of foam melting on its crest, how the little tugs draw a ship across a harbor, four little tugs or three joined to a ship by a long cable that stretches tight, pulling the great lazy giant down a bay. Or the Goddess of Liberty, how she is green like beryl or like deep sea water, her bronze burnt with salt fog until it is brilliantly green, catching the light of the morning on the front of her body and turning it off in bright yellow planes, her great squat figure too round and ample for grace, squarely set on firm skirts, short-thighed, great-waisted, holding her plump torch, a great progeny, a myriad brood mothered under her plump skirts. She is brightly green in the morning sun with planes of yellow light; she is looking down the bay and across the Narrows and out to the sea.

These were inaccessible but not far, making a relation somehow with the lightness of autumn, the mild sting of the coming cold that could be felt in the early morning. Walking about the town Theodosia wore a bright new coat of rich dark colors and a small velvet hat with a bronze buckle. Conway had helped her to choose the hat, and his lightly spoken approval, gaily negligent, rested upon it all through the autumn and seasoned her whole being with a delicate warmth. A fire burned now in the parlor grate. At nightfall Siver, the black houseboy, was sent through the rooms to renew the coal and brush the hearths clean. Old Tony Bell sat nodding in the room across from the parlor, his room, where the bookshelves were seldom assailed and the books sank together into a solid warped mass. “She will learn to play great music,” he said, “a concerto. I heard it in Paris, the Brahms Concerto. It was, I recollect, a night in December. Let her learn, it won’t hurt her. I never thought my own flesh and blood would master it. She’ll learn.” His bed stood against the wall that was farthest from the fireplace. He would sink often into the bed with unwanted satisfaction and fall asleep without consent, or he would arouse himself and take a brisk walk at twilight, stepping along the boards of the gallery.

Theodosia practised scales in single tones and thirds, working happily, blending them in her thought with the running autumn and the crisp frost, with the rich new color that had come to her garments in the coat and hat, in certain gowns she devised with her dressmaker, in her autumn stockings and a brilliant scarf. Jane Moore came sometimes to practise with the instruments, inaccurate as before but pretty in her gray fur and bright blue dress. She would laugh at the precision of the music teacher and clatter amiably on the piano, her eyes misty with her own prettiness and tender with the devotion of youth to youth. “You’re too sweet for words,” she would say to Theodosia as she touched the keys lightly, smiling over her shoulder. Her brown hair was softly rolled and centered into low knots. She would tinkle lightly at Albert’s songs, giving them a manner, Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland dribbling from her pert fingers.

Catherine Lovell had a bright red hat for the mid-winter, accented with an unsubdued cock’s feather that tilted and swayed as she walked, as she sat lightly moving in her chair. She went to the Seminary every day to teach, but in the evening she would run to Theodosia for a chat or a walk, or she would bring a gift of winter flowers from her mother’s small window garden.

Back would come the day for the fiddle lesson. The teacher would enter with a quick smile, tossing aside her coat and her hat. The piano note would cry out briefly under her quick hand and the gut string would follow, slipping and crawling into tune, Theodosia’s heart beating fast with some cruel, fearful pleasure. A skurry of runs and a trill and a few bars from the cadenza of some concerto. The example would clarify her words: each note must stand out like a star in a dark night.... Smoothness in the change of position when the string must be crossed without sound.... The singing tone, the perfect legato.... The bow should be thought of as of indefinite length—no end to it, no break between the up-bow and the down-bow.... “But do not, for all this, be a slave to your fingers. The music must come out of your soul, out of your soul.”

Theodosia would wake from the deep first sleep of the night and see the rectangles of the high windows turn to pale silver with the winter dawn. She would move in her bed, opening her eyes briefly upon the familiar furniture of the room, the long glass between the windows, the high dresser, the deep sofa beside the fireplace. Then she would settle to the lighter sleep of the morning, hearing the steps of early passers on the pavement of the street and hearing the click of the gate latch when Siver came to his work. The warmth of the bed would shut about her in a matutinal caress as she sank into light half-slumber, as her mind fared here and yon in speculations and dreams, in plans and visions. The joy of friends would give her a pleasant sense of well-being, and her own warmed youthful blood would drowse and drown in its own relaxed languors. Sometimes she would float between the earth and some void in a half-intoxication of a dream while her ears half-heard the steps on the street or a call—some boy driving his cow to pasture. Her speculating mind would run forward into the plans for the day, so many hours with the music, the fiddle, the harmony, the piano; or it would center briefly about some dress she was designing with the dressmaker or repairing for herself, and over this or through it would glide her floating senses as they drifted in the void supported by strong fingers on which she lay drooping, circled by strong arms. Siver’s knock at the door would dimly arouse her and make her know that she had half-dreamed some image, and his step on the floor as he walked toward the fireplace and bent over the grate to arrange the fire would emphasize the light quality of her consciousness. The sound of the falling kindling would be heavy and remote. Between the separate sounds the spaces of quiet would be light with dreaming, with herself drowned in joy and myth, drooping in strong up-reaching fingers, Albert’s hands, but over her and above like the light of some final dawn, radiant but self-contained and entire, identical with light negligent laughter, would float some essence, some misty incandescence that merged with Conway and with her happiness.

When he had kindled a large fire of wood and coal, Siver would close the window and pour hot water from a pail into her pitcher on the wash-stand. He was nothing to her, Siver, but serving hands. He was but serving hands, unsensed, unrealized. He was a command given and accomplished. If he became momentarily real he was intently loathed and quickly transferred to serving hands again. The sound of the flowing water and the crockery would be as distinct and as meaningless as the other sounds of the morning, flat against the coming tide of the new day, unreal before her speculations about the dress or the fiddle-practice. Siver gone and the closed door having settled an hour of stillness upon the room, the earth would grow into the volume and substance of dream and lie finished and accomplished, apart and done.

The farmers were discontented with the tobacco sales. The speculators were busy passing the crop from hand to hand, playing a game to outdo one another. Sometimes a farmer saw his crop selling for twice the sum he had been paid less than a week earlier. “Too many dead-heads function between the grower and the manufacturer,” Albert said. The tobacco wagons, piled high, were lined in every open space about the warehouses. A heavy odor of crude tobacco hung in the damp air.

At Catherine Lovell’s home there was a large double parlor with a hard smooth floor. Often the rugs were rolled up for dancing, and then two negroes sat in the hallway making the music, I Don’t Know Why I Feel So Shy, or Dixie Dan, the rhythms brought down from Hill Street. Albert talked about the new association for the growers as he waited between the dances, sitting along the wall of the dining-room on the red divan. The men would have to combine, he said. The market was all in a wreck. There would have to be such a pool as was never formed before, something solid. He spent his days now going about among the farmers, pledging them to the new measure, talking of it to hostile growers. He carried memoranda in his pocket snapped importantly together under a rubber band. The throb of the dance rhythms would wail from the outer hall. Somebody had given the players a smart drink and they set the true rhythms of Hill Street under the dancers’ feet, rhythms richly ripened with use. Theodosia and Conway trampled the rhythms under their light tread.

I likes a little loven now and then,

When the loven one is you....

What was a rhythm more or less? their feet asked the smooth floor. “What’s this thing we’re a-dancen to?” Conway asked her. “Is it a two-step or a waltz or a barn dance, or what is it anyway?”

“Don’t you know really, on your honor?”

“I just get up and do what the music makes me. I never know what kind ’tis.”