Part 19
I thought sure that’d make her boil over, but it didn’t. She just kept rocking back and forth and looking at me in that strange sort of way. I noticed a couple of tears that were running down her cheeks. They made little clear streaks through the dust. Maybe you think I wasn’t getting skeered.
“What’s the matter, Martha?” I asks in an anxious voice.
She didn’t answer a-tall.
“Do you feel bad?”
Still no answer. She just kept right on a-rocking and a-rocking, and she kept right on looking at me in that crazy sort of way. Then she says in a awful voice:
“The Lord’s judgment has fell upon us.”
Gosh, but I felt creepy! It was so gloomy there in the room in spite of it being broad open daylight. You see, the sun was hid behind dust clouds and the windows didn’t let in much light, they were so dirty. The sand was a-drizzling down from the ceiling and a-coming in through the cracks around the windows and doors; the wind was howling about the roof of the house; and there she set and just rocked and rocked, and every now and then she’d say:
“The Lord’s judgment has fell upon us.”
I tried to get her to go to bed, but she wouldn’t make a move; I got up and traipsed around trying to stir up some noise so’s I could drive away that creepy feeling that she gave me with her rocking and saying in such a awful voice that the Lord’s judgment was upon us. But somehow it didn’t do no good. I began to be afraid that she was going crazy, and the more I watched her the more I believed it. I had often thought that she’d do it some time when she’d get on one of her tears.
Every now and then she’d raise her hands up toward the ceiling and make the craziest motions and mutter something under her breath. And all the time she just kept a-rocking and a-rocking.
I tried several things to arouse her. The kids were beginning to notice it and to get scared and to cry. Leastwise, the youngest ones was. Finally I happened to think of a bright idea. If I’d pretend I’d suddenly got religion, thinks I to myself, maybe she’d get cheered up and get over her spell. I kinda hated to do it because I hated to be a hypocrite, but, thinks I, circumstances alter cases, so I decided to take a shot.
I went around where she could see me and got down on my knees and begin to pray. I asked her to help me; said I felt the spirit of the Lord descending upon me. Then I knew at once that I’d hit the nail right on the head. She let out a shout and fell on her knees by my side, and such praying I never heard before. It actually skeered me, she was so wild about it. She’d throw up her arms and cry out at the top of her voice for the Lord to send down His blessed healing power and wipe out all my sins. The little kids, they got skeered and begin to squall with all their might, and Johnnie, Minnie and Mollie were struck dumb at first; then they fell on their knees and begin to pray. That only added fuel to Martha’s praying.
“Lord,” she screamed above the roar of the storm, “Thou seest this man’s children on their knees to you pleading that you wash away their papa’s sins; you see his wife that has lived with him in all his wickedness all these years, kneeling and asking you to send your healing grace.”
About that time she got all choked up, and I decided it was time for me to give up, so I suddenly got up and told her that I saw the light; that I was saved.
Well, I’ve seen some wild ones in my time, but never one as crazy as she was for the next ten minutes or so. She begin to shout and jump around; then she threw her arms around my neck and praised the Lord so loud in my ear she nearly busted my eardrum; she sang and she shouted hurrah, hosannah, bless His precious name, and other such things, until the house fairly rung with her voice above the shriek of the storm. And Minnie, who is kinda like her ma in being religious and excitable like, begin to shout and sing too. Maybe you think that between them and the storm and the kids a-squalling there weren’t some racket being made. I felt kinda foolish.
The rest of the day Martha was so cheerful it made me ashamed of myself.
Thinks I: why, if I’d ’a’ known that it’d make so much difference to her I’d ’a’ confessed a long time ago. I’d ’a’ been a hypocrite to give Martha that much pleasure because she ain’t had any too much joy in this life, anyway.
Well, I joined the church, and I ain’t never had the nerve to tell Martha what a hypocrite I’ve been. She’s been much happier. Of course she gets on a spell now and then, but not near as often as she used to. She’s feeling much better too. I guess, all and all, it’s a good thing, a mighty good thing. Anyway, that’s how I come to be such a church-goer. They elected me deacon not long ago, said I was the regularest attending member they had. I don’t feel near so bad about being a hypocrite, any more. The fact is, I don’t know for sure that I am one.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Copyright, 1925, by P. F. Collier & Son Company. Copyright, 1926, by Robert Robinson.
THE OLD LADY[14]
By EVELYN SCOTT
(From _The Dial_)
The old lady was often to be seen walking on the beaches overlooked by the hotels. She had been tall, but was now stooped, and always advanced slowly, and with the help of a cane. In spite of the expensive soberness of her dress, of fine stuffs not quite in the fashion, yet much discussed by the maids in her hotel who expected generous remuneration for their services to her, the old lady had not that aloof confidence in herself and her position which is the usual endowment of wealth. She smiled too frequently into the faces of those who looked at her, and her excessive benevolence was like a subtle self-apology.
Her thoughts could not be read, and that was fortunate. When she awakened in the morning in a stately bed, from which, against an opposite wall of her large room, she saw an _armoire_ flanked with mirrors give back her image, she always, when possible, avoided the contemplation of this reflection; or, compelled to confront a revelation which caused her pain, remarked inwardly, “Can it be I?” and tried vainly to recall another almost-obliterated impression of her own features. Queer that, remembering so distinctly the most minute incidents of a past that had been filled with dramatic interest, able to visualize with exactitude the appearances of each of her friends, today dead or separated from her by years and oceans, she had so much difficulty in piecing together from fragments retained from the lost years, even the vaguest representation of her own countenance as it had been caught in looking-glasses long ago. People who had been dear to her, and even the people she had once disliked, had not aged, nor had they died, in that they existed continually in her thoughts in every moment of the time. Only her own personality, in its once-youthful aspect, had disappeared in the nothingness of a feeble present. She sighed, and said to herself, “Well, I never was pretty.” Yet without being pretty she had commanded affection and even very strong feeling.
It frightened her a little that she had become some one whom she did not know, some one whom she could not look at with clear eyes.
For all the sadness which pervaded her meditations, she did not, with truth, call herself unhappy. She slept badly, dreaming often of her married daughter whom she had not seen for many months, and of a dead son; but always, after noting the thinning of the darkness by a dawn yet scarcely visible and feeling, upon her dry cheeks and in her scanty hair, the still wind which rushed in a tide of freshness from the suddenly audible sea, she would turn upon her side, and, as if some sentinel duty of the night had been accomplished, find that she could rest easily. Then, from this hour into the morning, she would sleep like a child and awaken when the sun was shining rosily upon the gilt-flowered bedroom walls, while the lace curtains between the window hangings of brown-and-cream brocade seemed to expand as with an ecstatic delicacy, and, in the gilded foliage of the dark plane tree beyond them, birds sang.
Her maid, entering the chamber, and bringing the morning coffee in an immaculate service, received a cheery “_Bon jour_,” but, offering to assist the old lady at her toilet, was invariably sent away with a refusal couched in the same terms. “Not yet, Françoise. The time for that has not yet come.” And the old lady dressed herself. She waited for something miraculous to occur. Every morning approached her with an adventure which, finally, in the heat of noontime, had not revealed itself.
She felt that Françoise was a “good girl,” who should be treated generously, and the maid, stout, handsome, and slyly officious, with the characteristics of a peasant initiate in the ways of the rich, adopted in her manner toward her prosperous mistress, the attitude of a mother. The old lady was not deceived as to the motives which prompted this consideration, yet, in the passiveness of temperament engendered by old age, did not condemn. “Well, poor girl. I must try and do something for her. I’ll leave her something in my will.” And the old lady felt drawn to the girl by the very exposure of self-interest which, it seemed, should have been repelling. To know that some one depended on you, if only for money, made you feel that your presence in the world was yet of importance. Generous pity relieved the heart of the old lady from the oppression of exhausted but persistent emotions which had no outlet. There was no one to whom the old lady could express herself.
Yes, she was lonely, though had she been asked if, in this loneliness, she wished to depart to an oblivion in which loneliness is not felt, she would have said, “No,” sincerely and emphatically. Trifles which had once been of no account to her, objects and incidents which, in her youth, had failed to interest her, now compelled her whole attention and were infinitely precious. She loved her careful walks through the French town. She loved the hardy appearance of the cabbages planted in small gardens behind low fences covered with creepers. A neglected bush of marigolds, jutting ruddy-coloured blossoms beyond a wall, excited in her a tenderness for growing things. She watched the dark swallows in their bat-flights above a puddle in the road, and their shrill bleats, coming vaguely to her deaf ears, made her think of them innocently as lambs. Strong sunlight, stagnant upon the plaster façade of a dwelling, enchanted her. When, with a final exertion of her ever-waning strength, she climbed slowly, among heaps of refuse, to the summit of a crooked street which terminated on a hillside, and could gaze below her, between ancient roofs which interceded in the view, at the countryside--the still avalanches of the mountains, the small villages crushed under the red roofs that surmounted the houses, the acres of vines, tremblingly outspread in the soaring light of morning and resembling still lakes of green silk--the immense silence which lay beyond the town in which she was visiting seemed to her to enwrap her benevolently, and the whole world, dissension and struggle obliterated, was a friendly place.
It was only at noontime, in the heat of the day, when, after taking her luncheon in the table d’hôte downstairs and, with nodding head, listening for half an hour to some Spanish singers who, on a terrace ornamented with palms and young trees in pots and covered over by a pergola on which roses twined, were entertaining the guests of the hotel, she rested in her bedroom, that she felt depressed. The sunshine filled the street below her window, but the stillness it made, as the heat arrested the play of children and hushed their voices, and footsteps became so occasional that they echoed on the cobbles as footsteps echo in the night--this stillness was terrible and oppressive.
She lowered the Venetian blinds upon her balconies, and, in a semi-glow, in which the unchanging aspect of objects in her room became pronounced, she lay on her bed again, her eyes closed, and tried to sleep. Sleep was impossible. Her cheeks, pale and withered and covered by a scarcely-perceptible down of white, were hot and parched. With no relief from the violence of the light, that, even through drawn curtains could be discerned in the stolid brilliance of a stucco building opposite the hotel, she moistened her lips, several times adjusted the pillow beneath her head, and, without being conscious of the sounds she uttered, moaned slightly.
Her health was bad. At any moment she might have a recurrence of the heart trouble from which she suffered, a malady from which she would, at last, most certainly die. But it was not of death that she thought. Indeed she refused to think of death. It pleased her better to imagine that she would live a long time--a long, long, long time. And when, in her promenades, her steps turned inadvertently toward the cemetery, with its crumbling mausoleums making little intimate avenues for the dead below the black-green lines of conical cypress trees, she experienced, in her first glimpse of the tombs, decorated as for a perpetual holiday with wreaths of colored beads, black, violet, pale-blue, and white, and with bouquets of artificial flowers, a sudden shock of fright, of amazement--of some emotion which she did not attempt to describe--and turned back.
Why was she traveling like this, going all over Europe, from one hotel to another, rarely encountering an acquaintance and certainly not amusing herself in the ways habitual with tourists? In her young days she had been too much occupied with personal affairs to give much of her energy to travel. There was a great deal of the world that she had never seen. Now that her daughter was married, absorbed by interests in which the old lady had but slight part, and her son was dead, she, the old lady, had uninterrupted opportunity to see odd corners of the globe that had always intrigued her--even the names of the towns she visited were those that had, years ago, seemed to her remarkable. Besides she had a terror, continual if not dwelt upon, of being unwanted, and so, rather than remain as a tolerated outsider in her daughter’s home, she had preferred the company of strangers who were not obliged to show her any attentions that were not quite spontaneous.
On the terrace of the hotel, under the pergola covered with roses and with foliage which had turned blue and artificial in the glow of the electric lamps, the old lady sat in the evenings, watching those who came and went from the dancing in the saloon, while she tried to make herself unobtrusive. If a young couple, approaching her, ignored her, and it could be seen that they were covertly making love to one another, the old lady moved further away into the shadows and out of hearing. There she was able, when lifting her gaze, to discern the stars which, at one instant, appeared to her quite brilliant, while the next minute she saw only darkness, and could hear, distant under the rotating melody of a waltz played by an orchestra, a rushing sound in her ears which might be the sea and might only be the beating of her own heart. She always preferred to think the sound was the sea, and then she would rise and walk about, still clinging to the shadows and, because she was forgotten, feeling her own person as the person of another whom she also desired to forget.
No, the day was happier than the night. She loved children. In her black dress and bonnet, she often walked, with her stick, along the beaches. There she encountered children. She recalled the delights of her own childhood and longed to be able, in some manner, to indicate to the children, in some way which would convince them, that she had been a child, and that childhood was not foreign to her, as they supposed. And she was humiliated by something grotesque in this longing, as if she had convicted herself of a jealousy of youth.
The children paid no heed to her, and, screaming as they ran, they brushed past her blowing skirts, brushed past her and ran down to the sea. Feeling a pain which was so ignoble that she refused to recognize it, she thought, “They are so young. They don’t understand.” And she prayed to be able always to love children as she did now, and to wish for them, with her whole being, saturate with gratitude for a happy past, a continuance of their light-heartedness.
After such an experience, returning to the hotel, she wrote letters, to keep herself from growing “stale,” as she smilingly called it, letters to her daughter, letters to old acquaintances--some of them had almost ceased to take account of her existence--and the reward for this insistent attention to those who were far away, perhaps forever, was an interest in the coming of the postman, so keen that it embarrassed her. Often the mails brought her nothing at all, or there came a letter from some old friend who, burdened with age, expressed herself entirely in the utterance of complaints. “Poor Jane, poor Sally, poor Louisa,” the old lady would say, and try to evade the fact that she had anticipated a letter of a different kind, a letter containing something stimulating, something of especial interest, or something complimentary to herself. It seemed to her that her own troubles would have been quite bearable if only her dear old friends could find, as she did, the philosophical compensations of maturity. Occasionally, in her travels, she encountered a woman like herself, old, isolate, seeking, in new sights and scenes, a substitute for the personal drama which was finished. “Poor woman,” the old lady would say of the other old woman, then, suddenly, realizing that the one she pitied was like herself, and alarmed by the sense of an intolerable identity, she would conjure up cheerful thoughts and, from that time forward, gently avoid the new acquaintance, and this without any intention of being cruel, but simply to preserve something necessary to her.
“We must all live our own lives. We old people have no right to prey upon our children,” she often said. And it was this conviction which made her, secretly, a little afraid of her grandchildren of whom her daughter sent her photographs--the daughter who, with the dead son, had been for many years the one absorption of the old lady’s life. When she meditated upon the joys of maternity and the intimate relations of a family, the old lady became confused. In some manner, in spite of her devotion, her attitude toward her children had been an error, but an error which she would never be able to localize within her or describe to herself accurately. She only felt that such error, or its equivalent, must be common to all the world, and, in apologizing so constantly for herself, she apologized for others, too, and found that any emotion which was not pity had become incomprehensible to her. The most frightening thing of all was that pity itself required a defence, and her very desire to confess for herself and admit for others inadequacy, without condemning it, was the basis of her real apartness from her former life. She wanted to state all this intelligibly, but she had never been able to do so. Her thoughts became lost again in the past, when her eyes filled with tears and the grief she had felt at her husband’s death came back to her--not the grief she had experienced at the time, to which her health had succumbed while her reason was threatened, but another despair which was without any quality of protest and which she vainly attempted to unify with the emotions of twenty years before. She even tried to grieve more, but without success.
It was her present incapacity for strong passion which drove her, in her phantomlike existence, to dependence on routine, and the concrete regularity of meal hours had become as important to her as any critical event. In the vast dining saloon with its glass front overlooking the water, she was punctual at one o’clock and at half-past seven, and, though her appetite was variable, she was always one of the last to leave the table. What nice young people those two in the corner were, the ones who were newly married, and what an excellent mamma was the stout woman of thirty with the little daughter. The old lady usually had some pleasant remark for the waiter who, good-humored and polite, was ready to serve her immediately upon her entrance into the room, though he was somewhat perfunctory and reserved his most refined solicitude for persons who, not poorer than she was, were more difficult to please. She liked hot coffee that burned her withered lips, and Michael was careful to bring coffee steaming and perfumed, and she drank it on the terrace. Yet she bored him. There was nothing beyond her guessed-at fortune to supply material for scandals or invite interest.