The Brimming Cup Part 14

She drew a long breath. How eternally disconcerting human beings are!

There she had been so fatuously sure, out there on the walk home, that she knew exactly what was in that old white head. And all the time it had been this. Who could have made the faintest guess at that? It occurred to her for the first time that possibly more went on under Mr.

Welles' gently fatigued exterior than she thought.

She found not a word to say, so violent and abrupt was the transition of subject. It was as though she had been gazing down through a powerful magnifying gla.s.s, trying to untangle with her eyes a complicated twist of moral fibers, inextricably bound up with each other, the moral fibers that made up her life ... and in the midst of this, someone had roughly shouted in her ear, "Look up there, at that distant cliff.

There's a rock on it, all ready to fall off!"

She could not be expected all of a sudden, that way, to re-focus her eyes. And the rock was so far away. And she had such a dim sense of the people who might be endangered by it. And the confusion here, under the microscope of her attention, was so vital and immediate, needing to be understood and straightened before she could go on with her life.

She looked at the old man in an astonishment which she knew must seem fairly stupid to him, but she could not bring out anything else. What was it to her, whether a Negro physician was called Dr. or "Jo"?

Mr. Welles patted her hand, released it, smiled at her kindly, and stood up. "I'm pretty tired. I guess we'd better be getting along home, Vincent and I."

"Well, I should say we _would_ better be getting along home to bed!"

agreed the other man, coming forward and slipping his arm under the older man's. "I'll tuck you up, my old friend, with a good hot toddy inside you, and let you sleep off this outrageously crazy daylight nightmare you've cooked up for yourself. And don't wake up with the fate of the j.a.panese factory-hand sitting on your chest, or you'll get hard to live with."

Mr. Welles answered this with literal good faith. "Oh, the j.a.panese factory-hands, they're not on the conscience of Americans."

"But, when I see an aged and harmless inhabitant of Ashley, Vermont, stretching his poor old protesting conscience till it cracks, to make it reach clear down to the Georgia Negroes, how do I know where he's going to stop?"

The old man turned to their hostess. "Well, good-night, Mrs. Crittenden.

I enjoyed seeing that wonderful flower very much. I wonder if I could grow one like it? It would be something to look forward to, to have the flower open in your own house."

To Marise he looked so sweet and good, and like a tired old child, that she longed to kiss him good-night, as she had her own. But even as she felt the impulse, she had again a startled sense of how much more goes on under the human surface than ever appears. Evidently Mr. Welles, too, was a locked and sealed strong-box of secrets.

In the doorway Marsh stopped abruptly and said, looking at the dense, l.u.s.treless black silk wrap about Marise's head and shoulders, "What's that thing? I meant to ask you when you put it on."

She felt as she often did when he spoke to her, as startled as though he had touched her. What an extraordinarily living presence he was, so that a word from him was almost like an actual personal contact. But she took care not to show this. She looked down casually at the soft, opaque folds of her wrap. "Oh, this is a thousand years old. It dates from the Bayonne days. It's Basque. It's their variation, I imagine, on the Spanish mantilla. They never wear hats, the Basque women. The little girls, when they have made their first communion, wear a scarf of light net, or open transparent lace. And when they marry they wear this. It's made of a special sort of silk, woven just for this purpose. As far away as you can see a woman in the Basque country, if she wears this, you know she's married."

"Oh, you do, do you?" said Marsh, going out after his companion.

They were very far from the Negroes in Georgia.

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT GOES ON INSIDE

_Half an Hour in the Life of a Modern Woman_

May 8.

Marise looked at the clock. They all three looked at the clock. On school mornings the clock dominated their every instant. Marise often thought that the swinging of its great pendulum was as threatening as the Pendulum that swung in the Pit. Back and forth, back and forth, bringing nearer and nearer the knife-edge of its dire threat that nine o'clock would come and the children not be in school. Somehow they must all manage to break the bonds that held them there and escape from the death-trap before the fatal swinging menace reached them. The stroke of nine, booming out in that house, would be like the Crack o' Doom to the children.

Marise told Paul not to eat so fast, and said to Elly, who was finis.h.i.+ng her lessons and her breakfast together, "I let you do this, this one time, Elly, but I don't want you to let it happen again. You had plenty of time yesterday to get that done."

She stirred her coffee and thought wistfully, "What a policeman I must seem to the children. I wish I could manage it some other way."

Elly, her eyes on the book, murmured in a low chanting rhythm, her mouth full of oatmeal, "Delaware River, Newcastle, Brandywine, East Branch, West Branch, Crum Creek, Schuylkill."

Paul looked round at the clock again. His mother noted the gesture, the tension of his att.i.tude, his preoccupied expression, and had a quick inner vision of a dirty, ragged, ignorant, gloriously free little boy on a raft on the Mississippi river, for whom life was not measured out by the clock, in thimbleful doses, but who floated in a golden liberty on the very ocean of eternity. "Why can't we bring them up like Huckleberry Finns!" she thought, protestingly, pressing her lips together.

Then she laughed inwardly at the thought of certain sophisticated friends and their opinion of her life. "I daresay we do seem to be bringing them up like Huckleberry Finns, in the minds of any of the New York friends, Eugenia Mills for instance!" She remembered with a pa.s.sing gust of amus.e.m.e.nt the expression of slightly scared distaste which Eugenia had for the children. "Too crudely quivering lumps of life-matter for Eugenia's taste," she thought, and then, "I wonder what Marsh's feeling towards children really is, children in general. He seems to have the greatest capacity to ignore their existence at all. Or does he only seem to do that, because I have grown so morbidly conscious of their existence as the only thing vital in life? That's what he thinks, evidently. Well, I'd like to have him live a mother's life and see how he'd escape it!"

"Mother," said Paul seriously, "Mother, Mark isn't even awake yet, and he'll never be ready for school."

"Oh, his teacher had to go to a wedding today. Don't you remember? He doesn't have any school till the afternoon session."

She thought to herself, "What a sense of responsibility Paul has! He is going to be one of the pillars of the earth, one of those miraculous human beings who are mixed in just the right proportions, so that they aren't pulled two ways at once. _Two_ ways! Most of us are pulled a thousand ways! It is one of the injustices of the earth that such people aren't loved as much as impulsive, selfish, brilliant natures like dear little Mark's. Paul has had such a restful personality! Even when he was a baby, he was so straight-backed and robust. There's no yellow streak in Paul, such as too much imagination lets in. I know all about that yellow streak, alas!"

The little boy reached down lovingly, and patted the dog, sitting in a rigid att.i.tude of expectancy by his side. As the child turned the light of his countenance on those adoring dog eyes, the animal broke from his tenseness into a wriggling fever of joy.

"'Oh, my G.o.d, my dear little G.o.d!'" quoted Marise to herself, watching uneasily the animal's ecstasy of wors.h.i.+p. "I wish dogs wouldn't take us so seriously. We don't know so much more than they, about anything." She thought, further, noticing the sweetness of the protecting look which Paul gave to Medor, "All animals love Paul, anyhow. Animals know more than humans about lots of things. They haven't that horrid perverse streak in them that makes humans dislike people who are too often in the right. Paul is like my poor father. Only I'm here to see that Paul is loved as Father wasn't. Medor is not the only one to love Paul. _I_ love Paul. I love him all the more because he doesn't get his fair share of love. And old Mr. Welles loves him, too, bless him!"

"Roanoke River, Staunton River, Dan River," murmured Elly, swallowing down her chocolate. She stroked a kitten curled up on her lap.

"What shall I have for lunch today?" thought Marise. "There are enough potatoes left to have them creamed."

Like a stab came the thought, "Creamed potatoes to please our palates and thousands of babies in Vienna without milk enough to _live_!" She shook the thought off, saying to herself, "Well, would it make any difference to those Viennese babies if I deprived my children of palatable food?" and was aware of a deep murmur within her, saying only half-articulately, "No, it wouldn't make any literal difference to those babies, but it might make a difference to you. You are taking another step along the road of hardening of heart."

All this had been the merest muted arpeggio accompaniment to the steady practical advance of her housekeeper's mind. "And beefsteak ... Mark likes that. At fifty cents a pound! What awful prices. Well, Neale writes that the Canadian lumber is coming through. That'll mean a fair profit. What better use can we put profit to, than in buying the best food for our children's growth. Beefsteak is not a sinful luxury!"

The arpeggio accompaniment began murmuring, "But the Powers children.

Nelly and 'Gene can't afford fifty cents a pound for beefsteak. Perhaps part of their little Ralph's queerness and abnormality comes from lack of proper food. And those white-cheeked little Putnam children in the valley. They probably don't taste meat, except pork, more than once a week." She protested sharply, "But if their father won't work steadily, when there is always work to be had?" And heard the murmuring answer, "Why should the children suffer because of something they can't change?"

She drew a long breath, brushed all this away with an effort, asking herself defiantly, "Oh, what has all this to do with _us_?" And was aware of the answer, "It has everything to do with us, only I can't figure it out."

Impatiently she proposed to herself, "But while I'm trying to figure it out, wouldn't I better just go ahead and have beefsteak today?" and wearily, "Yes, of course, we'll have beefsteak as usual. That's the way I always decide things."

She b.u.t.tered a piece of toast and began to eat it, thinking, "I'm a lovely specimen, anyhow, of a clear-headed, thoughtful modern woman, muddling along as I do."

The clock struck the half-hour. Paul rose as though the sound had lifted him bodily from his seat. Elly did not hear, her eyes fixed dreamily on her kitten, stroking its rounded head, lost in the sensation of the softness of the fur.

Her mother put out a reluctant hand and touched her quietly. "Come, dear Elly, about time to start to school."

As she leaned across the table, stretching her neck towards the child, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the other side of the room, and thought, "Oh, how awful! I begin to look as Cousin Hetty does, with that scrawny neck... ."

She repulsed the thought vigorously. "Well, what does it matter if I do?

There's nothing in my life, any more, that depends on my looking young."

At this thought, something perfectly inchoate, which she did not recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books into her school-bag. Her face was rosy and calm with the sweet ineffable confidence of a good child who has only good intentions. As she packed her books together, she said, "Well, I'm ready. I've done my grammar, indefinite p.r.o.nouns, and I can say all those river-tributaries backwards. So now I can start. Good-bye, Mother dear." Marise bent to kiss the s.h.i.+ning little face. "Good-bye, Elly."