Virginia Part 10

He heard her tread on the stairs; then the sound pa.s.sed to the front hall; and a minute later there floated up the laughter with which the a.s.sembled boarders received her. Closing the door, which she had left open, he turned back to the window and stared from his hilltop down on the red roofs of Dinwiddie. White as milk, the moonlight lay on the brick wall at the foot of the garden, and down the gradual hill rows of chimneys were outlined against the faintly dappled sky in the west. In the next yard a hollow tree looked as if it were cut out of silver, and beneath its boughs, which drooped into the alley, he could see the huddled figure of an aged negress who had fallen asleep on a flagstone.

So still was the night that the very smoke appeared to hang suspended above the tops of the chimneys, as though it were too heavy to rise and yet too light to float downward toward the motionless trees. Under the pale beams the town lost its look of solidity and grew spectral. Nothing seemed to hold it to the earth except the stillness which held the fallen flowers of the syringa there also. Even the church towers showed like spires of thistledown, and the winding streets, which ran beside clear walls and dark s.h.i.+ning gardens, trailed off from the ground into the silvery air. Only the black bulk of the Treadwell factory beside the river defied the magic of the moon's rays and remained a solid reminder of the brevity of all enchantment.

Gradually, while Oliver waited for Mrs. Peachey's return, he ceased to think of the furniture in his room; he ceased to think even of the way in which he should manage to do his work, and allowed his mind to dwell, almost with a feeling of ecstasy, on the memory of Virginia. He saw the mist of little curls on her temples, her blue eyes, with their good and gentle expression, and the look of radiant happiness which played like light over her features. The beauty of the night acted as a spur to his senses. He wanted companions.h.i.+p. He wanted the smile and the touch of a woman. He wanted to fall in love with a girl who had blue eyes and a mouth like a flower!

"It wouldn't take me ten minutes to become a fool about her," he thought. "Confound this moonlight, anyhow. It's making an idiot of me."

Like many persons of artistic sensibility, he had at times the feeling that his imagination controlled his conduct, and under the sharp pressure of it now, he began to picture what the end would be if he were to fling himself headlong in the direction where his desires were leading him. If he could only let himself go! If he could only defy the future! If he could only forget in a single crisis that he was a Treadwell!

"If I were the right sort, I suppose I'd rush in and make her fall in love with me, and then marry her and let her starve," he thought. "But somehow I can't. I'm either not enough of a genius or not enough of a Treadwell. When it comes to starving a woman in cold blood, my conscience begins to balk. There's only one thing it would balk at more violently, and that is starving my work. That's what Uncle Cyrus would like--nothing better. By Jove! the way he looked when he had the nerve to make that proposition! And I honestly believe he thought I was going to agree to it. I honestly believe he was surprised when I stood out against him. He's a downright idiot, that's what is the matter with him.

Why, it would be a crime, nothing less than a crime, for me to give up and go hunting after freight orders. Any ninny can do that. James can do that--but he couldn't see, he positively couldn't see that I'd be wasted at it."

The vision of Cyrus had banished the vision of Virginia, and leaving the window, Oliver began walking rapidly back and forth between the washstand and the bare bedstead. The fire of his ambition, which opposition had fanned into a blaze, had never burned more brightly in his heart than it did at that instant. He felt capable not only of renouncing Virginia, but of reforming the world. While he walked there, he dedicated himself to art as exclusively as Cyrus had ever dedicated himself to money--since Nature, who had made the individual, had been powerless to eradicate this basic quality of the type. A Treadwell had always stood for success, and success meant merely seeing but one thing at a time and seeing that thing at every instant. It meant to Cyrus and to James the thought of money as absolutely as it meant to Oliver the thought of art. The way to it was the same, only the ideas that pointed the way were different. To Cyrus and to James, indeed, as to all Treadwells everywhere, the idea was hardly an idea at all, since it had been crystallized by long usage into a fact. The word "success" (and what was success except another name for the universal Treadwell spirit?) invariably a.s.sumed the image of the dollar in the mind of Cyrus, while to Oliver, since his thinking was less carefully coordinated, it was without shape or symbol. Pacing the dusty floor, with the pale moonlight brooding like a flock of white birds over the garden, the young man would have defined the word as embracing all the lofty aspirations in the human soul. It was the hour when youth scaled the heights and wrested the divine fire from the heavens. At the moment he was less an individual than the embodied age of two-and-twenty. He was intellect in adolescence--intellect finding its strength--intellect in revolt against the tyranny of industrialism.

The staircase creaked softly, and following a knock at the door, Mrs.

Peachey entered with her arms full of bed-clothes.

"I am so sorry I kept you waiting, Mr. Treadwell, but I was obliged to stop to speak to a caller. Oh, thank you. Do you really know how to make up a bed? How very clever of you! I'm sure Mr. Peachey couldn't do such a thing if his life depended upon it. Men are so helpless that it surprises me--it really does--when they know how to do anything. Oh, of course, you have lived about the world so much that you have had to learn how to manage. And you've been abroad? How very interesting! Some day when I have the time you must tell me about it. Not that I should ever care to go myself, but I love to hear other people talk about their travels. Professor Trimble--he lived over there a great many years--gave a talk before the Ladies' Aid Society of our church, and everybody said it was quite as instructive as going one's self. And then, too, one escaped all the misery of seasickness."

All the time she was busily spreading his bed, while he a.s.sisted her with what she described to her husband afterward as "the most charming manner, just as if he enjoyed it." This charming manner, which was the outward expression of an inborn kindliness, won her entirely to his side before the bed-making was over. That any one so frank and pleasant, with such nice boyish eyes, and so rich a colour, should prove untrustworthy, was unbelievable to that part of her which ruled her judgment. And since this ruling part was not reason, but instinct, she possessed, perhaps, as infallible a guide to opinions as ever falls to the lot of erring humanity. "I know he's all right. Don't ask me _how_ I know it, Mr.

Peachey," she observed while she brushed her hair for the night; "I don't know how I know it, but I do know it."

Oliver, meanwhile, had thrown off his coat, and settled down to work under the flickering gas, at the end of the mantelpiece. Inspiration had seized him while he helped Mrs. Peachey make his bed, and his "charming manner," which had at first been natural enough, had become at last something of an effort. He was writing the second act of a play in which he meant to supplant the pretty shams of the stage by the aspect of sober reality. The play dealt with woman--with the new woman who has grown so old in the last twenty years--with the woman whose past is a cross upon which she crucifies both herself and the public. Like most men of twenty-two, he was convinced that he understood all about women, and like most men of any age, he was under the impression that women acted, thought, and felt, not as individuals, but as a s.e.x. The cla.s.sic phrases, "women are like that," and "women think so queerly about things," were on his lips as constantly as if he were an average male and not an earnest-minded student of human nature. But while the average male applies general principles loosely and almost unconsciously, with Oliver the habit was the result of a distinctly formulated philosophy.

He had, as he would probably have put it, a feeling for reality, and the stage appeared to him, on the whole, to be the most effective vehicle for revealing the universe to itself. If he was not a genius, he possessed the unconquerable individualism of genius; and he possessed, also, a cleverness which could a.s.sume the manner of genius without apparent effort. His ability, which no one but Cyrus had ever questioned, may not have been of the highest order, but at least it was better stuff than had ever gone into the making of American plays. In the early eighties profound darkness still hung over the stage, for the intellect of a democracy, which first seeks an outlet in statesmans.h.i.+p, secondly in commerce, and lastly in art and literature, had hardly begun to express itself, with the immaturity of youth, in several of these latter fields. It was Oliver's distinction as well as his misfortune that he lived before his country was ready for him. Coming a quarter of a century later, he might have made a part of a national emanc.i.p.ation of intellect. Coming when he did, he stood merely for one of the spasmodic reactions against the dominant spirit. Unwritten history is full of such reactions, since it is by the acc.u.mulated energy of their revolts that the world moves on its way.

But at the age of twenty-two, though he was a.s.sured that he understood both woman and the universe in which she belonged, he was pathetically ignorant of his own place in the extravagance of Nature. With the rest of us, he would have been astounded at the suggestion that he might have been born to be wasted. Other things were wasted, he knew, since those who called Nature an economist had grossly flattered her. Types and races and revolutions were squandered with royal prodigality--but that he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable. Deep down in him there was the obstinate belief that his existence was a vital matter to the awful Power that ruled the universe; and while he worked that May evening at the second act of his great play, with the sweat raining from his brow in the sweltering heat, it was as impossible for him to conceive of ultimate failure as it was for him to realize that he should ever cease to exist. The air was stagnant, the light was bad, his stomach was empty, and he was tormented by the stinging of the gnats that circled around the flame--but he was gloriously happy with the happiness of a man who has given himself to an idea.

CHAPTER VII

THE ARTIST IN PHILISTIA

At dawn, after a sleepless night, Oliver dressed himself and made a cup of coffee on the spirit lamp he carried in his bag. While he drank, a sense of power pa.s.sed over him like warmth. He was cheered, he was even exhilarated. A single cup of this miraculous fluid, and his depression was vanquished as no argument could have vanquished it. Without sermonizing, without logic even, the demon of pessimism, which has its home in an empty stomach, was expelled into spiritual darkness. He remembered that he had eaten nothing for almost twenty-four hours (having missed yesterday's dinner), and this thought carried him downstairs, where he begged a roll from a yawning negro cook in the kitchen. Coming up to his room again, he poured out a second cup of coffee, added a dash of cream, which he had brought with him in a handleless pitcher, and leaning comfortably back in the worn horsehair covered chair by the window, relapsed into a positive orgy of enjoyment.

His whole att.i.tude toward the universe had been altered by a bubbling potful of brown liquid, and the tremendous result--so grotesquely out of proportion to its cause--appeared to him at the minute entirely right and proper. Everything was entirely right and proper, and he felt able to approve with a clear conscience the Divine arrangement of existence.

Outside, the sunrise, which he could not see, was flooding the roofs of Dinwiddie with a dull golden light. The heat had given way before the soft wind which smelt of flowers, and scattered tiny shreds of mist, like white rose-leaves, over the moist gardens. The look of unreality, which had been a fiction of the moonlight, faded gradually as the day broke, and left the harsh outlines and the blackened chimneys of the town unsoftened by any shadow of illusion. Presently, as the sunlight fell aslant the winding streets, there was a faint stir in the house; but since the day was Sunday, and Dinwiddie observed the Sabbath by sleeping late, this stir was slow and drowsy, like the movement of people but half awake. First, a dilapidated milk wagon rumbled through the alleys to the back gates, where dishevelled negro maids ran out with earthenware pitchers, which went back foaming around the brims. Then the doors of the houses opened slowly; the green outside shutters were flung wide; and an army of coloured servants bearing brooms, appeared on the porches, and made expressive gestures to one another over the railings.

Occasionally, when one lifted a doormat in order to beat the dust out of it, she would forget to put it down again while she stared after the milk cart. n.o.body--not even the servants--seemed to regard the wasted hours as of any importance. It struck Oliver that the only use Dinwiddie made of time was to kill it.

He fell to work with enthusiasm, and he was still working when the reverberations of the breakfast bell thundered in his ears. Going downstairs to the dining-room, he found several thin and pinched looking young women, with their hats on and Sunday-school lessons beside their plates. Mrs. Peachey, still smiling her quizzical smile, sat at the head of the table, pouring coffee out of an old silver coffee-pot, which was battered in on one side as if it had seen active service in the war.

When, after a few hurried mouthfuls, he asked permission to return to his work, she received his excuses with the same cheerful acquiescence with which she accepted the decrees of Providence. It is doubtful, indeed, if her serenity, which was rooted in an heroic hopelessness, could have been shaken either by the apologies of a boarder or by the appearance of an earthquake. Her happiness was of that invulnerable sort which builds its nest not in the luxuriant gardens of the emotions, but in the bare, rock-bound places of the spirit. Courage, humour, an adherence to conviction which is wedded to an utter inability to respect any opinion except one's own; loyalty which had sprung from a principle into a pa.s.sion; a fortifying trust, less in the Power that rules the universe than in the peculiar virtues of the Episcopal prayer-book when bound in black; a capacity for self-sacrifice which had made the South a nation of political martyrs; complacency, exaltation, narrowness of vision, and uncompromising devotion to an ideal--these were the qualities which had pa.s.sed from the race into the individual and through the individual again back into the very blood and the fibre of the race.

"Do you work on Sunday?" she inquired sweetly, yet with the faintest tinge of disapproval in her tone.

He nodded. "Once in a while."

"Saint James' Church is only a few minutes' walk from here; but I suppose you are a Presbyterian, like your uncle?"

His respectability he saw hung in the balance--for to have avowed himself a freethinker would have dyed him socially only one shade less black than to have declared himself a Republican--so, escaping without a further confession of faith, he ascended to his room and applied himself anew to the regeneration of the American drama. The dull gold light, which slept on the brick walls, began presently to slant in long beams over the roofs, which mounted like steps up the hillside, while as the morning advanced, the mellow sound of chimes floated out on the stillness, calling Dinwiddians to wors.h.i.+p, as it had called their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them. The Sabbath calm, so heavy that an axe could hardly have dispelled it, filled the curving streets and the square gardens like an invisible fog--a fog that dulled the brain and weighed down the eyelids and made the grim walls of the Treadwell tobacco factory look as if they were rising out of a dream. Into this dream, under the thick boughs of mulberry trees, there pa.s.sed presently a thin file of people, walking alone or in pairs. The men were mostly old; but the women were of every age, and all except the very young were clad in mourning and wore hanging veils on their bonnets. Though Oliver did not know it, he was, in reality, watching a procession of those who, having once embraced a cause and lost it, were content to go on quietly in a hush of memory for the rest of life.

Pa.s.sion had once inflamed them, but they moved now in the inviolable peace which comes only to those who have nothing left that they may lose. At the end of the line, in the middle of the earthen roadbed walked an old horse, with an earnest face and a dump cart hitched to him, and in the cart were the boxes of books which Susan had helped Oliver to pack the evening before. "Who'd have thought she'd get them here so soon?" he said to himself. "By George, she is a wonder! And Sunday too!"

The old horse, having reached the hilltop, disappeared behind the next house, and ten minutes later Mrs. Peachey escorted the smallest of his boxes into his bedroom.

"Your cousin is downstairs, but I didn't know whether you wanted me to bring her up here or not?" she said.

"Of course you do, don't you, Oliver?" asked Susan's voice, and entering the room, she coolly presented her cheek to him. This coolness, which impressed him almost as much as her extraordinary capability, made him feel sometimes as if she had built a stone wall between them. Years afterwards he asked himself if this was why his admiration for her had never warmed into love?

"Well, you're a good one!" he exclaimed, as she drew back from the casual embrace.

"I knew you were here," she answered, "because John Henry Pendleton"

(was it his imagination or did the faintest blush tinge her face?) "saw Major Peachey last night and told me on his way home."

"You can't help me straighten up, I suppose? The room looks a sight."

"Not now--I'm on my way to church, and I'll be late if I don't hurry."

She wore a grey cashmere dress, made with a draped polonaise which accentuated her rather full hips, and a hat with a steeple crown that did not suit the Treadwell arch of her nose. He thought she looked plain, but he did not realize that in another dress and hat she might have been almost beautiful--that she was, indeed, one of those large-minded, pa.s.sionately honest women who, in their scorn of pretence or affectation, rarely condescend to make the best of their appearances.

To have consciously selected a becoming hat would have seemed to her a species of coquetry, and coquetry, even the most innocent, she held in abhorrence. Her sincerity was not only intellectual; it was of that rarer sort which has its root in a physical instinct.

After she had gone, he worked steadily for a couple of hours, and then opened one of the boxes Susan had brought and arranged a few of his books in a row on the mantelpiece. It was while he stood still undecided whether to place "The Origin of Species" or "The Critique of Pure Reason" on the end nearest his bed, that a knock came at his door, and the figure of Miss Priscilla Batte, attired in a black silk dolman with bugle tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, stood revealed on the threshold.

"Sally Peachey just told me that you were here," she said, enfolding him in the embrace which seemed common to Dinwiddie, "so I thought I would speak to you on my way back from church. I don't suppose you've ever heard of me, but I am your cousin Priscilla Batte."

Though he was entirely unaware of it, the moment was a momentous one in his experience. The visit of Miss Priscilla may have appeared an insignificant matter to those who have not learned that the insignificant is merely the significant seen from another angle--but the truth was that it marked a decisive milestone in his emotional history.

Even Mrs. Peachey, who had walked back from church with her, and who harboured the common delusion that Life selects only slim bodies for its secret agents, did not dream as she watched that enormous figure toil up the staircase that she was gazing upon the movement of destiny. Had Oliver been questioned as to the dominant influence in shaping his career, he would probably have answered blindly, but sincerely, "The Critique of Pure Reason"--so far was he from suspecting that his philosophy had less control over his future than had the accident that his mother was the third cousin of Priscilla Batte.

He pushed a chair into the widest s.p.a.ce he could find, and she seated herself as modestly as if she were not the vehicle of the invisible Powers. The stiff grosgrain strings of her bonnet stood out like small wings under her double chin, and on her ma.s.sive bosom he saw the cameo brooch bearing the war-like profile of Athene. As she sat there, beaming complacently upon him, with her prayer-book and hymnal held at a decent angle in front of her, she seemed to Oliver to dominate the situation simply by the solid weight of her physical presence. In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority. As a mere ma.s.s of humanity she carried conviction.

"I was sorry not to see you at church," she said, "but I suppose you went with Cyrus." As he shook his head silently, she added hastily, "I hope there's nothing wrong between you and him."

"Nothing except that I have decided not to go into the tobacco business."

"But what in the world are you going to do? How are you going to live if he doesn't provide for you?"

"Oh, I'll manage somehow. You needn't worry, Cousin Priscilla." He smiled at her across the unfinished page of his play, and this smile won her as it had won Mrs. Peachey. Like most spinsters she had remained a creature of sentiment, and the appeal of the young and masculine she found difficult to resist. After all he was a charming boy, her heart told her. What he needed was merely some good girl to take care of him and convert him to the Episcopal Church. And immediately, as is the way with women, she became as anxious to sacrifice Virginia to this possible redemption of the male as she had been alarmed by the suspicion that such a desire existed in Susan. Though it would have shocked her to hear that she held any opinion in common with Mohammed (who appeared in the universal history she taught only in a brief list of "false prophets"), there existed deep down in her the feeling that a man's soul was of greater consequence than a woman's in the eyes of G.o.d.

"I hope you haven't been foolish, Oliver," she said in a tone which conveyed an emotional sympathy as well as a moral protest.

"That depends upon what you mean by foolishness," he returned, still smiling.

"Well, I don't think you ought to quarrel with Cyrus. He may not be perfect. I am not saying that he mightn't have been a better husband, for instance--though I always hold the woman to blame when a marriage turns out a failure--but when all's said and done, he is a great man, Oliver."

He shook his head impatiently. "I've heard that until I'm sick of it--forgive me, Cousin Priscilla."

"Everybody admires him--that is, everybody except Belinda."

"I should say she'd had excellent opportunities for forming an opinion.

What's he ever done, anyhow, that's great," he asked almost angrily, "except acc.u.mulate money? It seems to me that you've gone mad over money in Dinwiddie. I suppose it's the reaction from having to do without it so long."