Every Soul Hath Its Song Part 32

Then, as though the current of his returning vigor could know no bounds, he scooped her in a one-armed embrace that fairly raised her from the floor.

"All of a sudden, when you went out, Renie, I remembered Aunt Becky. You remember she was the one who made Uncle Isadore fork over to papa that time about the mortgage?"

"Yes, yes."

"All of a sudden it came over me that she was the only one who could do anything with him. I ran over to the house--all the way I ran, Renie.

She was up in her room, and--and it's all right, Renie. I told her, and she's fixed it--fixed it!"

"Oh, Izzy!"

"She's fixed it. When he came home to supper we got him right away up in her room before he had his hat off. Like a mother she begged for me, Renie--like a mother. G.o.d! I--I tell you I couldn't go through it again; but she got him, Renie--she got him!"

"Go on, Izzy--go on!"

"She told him I wouldn't face the shame; she told him I--I'd kill my own father, and that the blood would be on his hands; she told him if he'd let me go to the devil without another chance--me that had been named after him--that a curse would roost on his chest. He didn't want to give in to her--he didn't want to; but she scared him, and she's a woman and she knew how to get inside of him--she knew how. They're going to send me out to his mines, where I can start over, Renie. Out West, where it'll make a new man of me; where I can begin over--start right, Renie.

Start right!"

"Oh, Izzy darling!"

"I can pay up when I earn the money like a man, Renie. It would have killed me if you had sold yourself to him for me. I'd have gone to the stripes first. But I got a man's chance now, Renie, and I don't have to do that rotten thing to you and Squash. A man's chance, Renie, and--and I'm going to take it."

She sat down on the bed suddenly, as though the blood had flowed out of her heart, weakening her.

"A sister like you that would have stuck; and--and I'm going to make good to a sister like you, Renie. I am, this time. Please believe me, Renie. I am! I am!"

Her hand lay pressed to his cheek and she could feel the warm course of his tears. "Izzy, I knew you wasn't yellow; I--I knew you wasn't."

Sobs shook him suddenly and he buried his face in the pillow beside her.

"Why, Izzy! Why, Izzy darling, what--what is it, Izzy darling?"

"It's nothing. You--you get out, Renie. I'm all right; only--only it's--it's--Now that it's all over, I--I--Just let me alone a minute, Renie. Go--you--please--please!"

She closed the door behind her and fumbled through the gloom of the hallway, her hand faltering as she groped ahead.

From the recesses of the moonflower vine Mr. Hochenheimer rose to meet her; and, because her limbs would tremble, she slid quickly into her chair.

"You--you must excuse me, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"It's all right, Miss Renie. I take up where we left off. It ain't so easy, Miss Renie, to begin all over again to say it, but--but will you be my--will you be my--"

She was suddenly in his arms, burrowing against the speckled waistcoat a little resting-place for her head.

IN MEMORIAM

Toward the city Mother Earth turns a plate-gla.s.s eye and an asphalt bosom. The rhythm of her heart-beats does not penetrate through paved streets. That cadence is for those few of her billion children who have stayed by to sleep with an ear to the mossy floor of her woodlands. The prodigals, the future Tammany leaders, merchant princes, cotton kings, and society queens march on, each to an urban destiny.

Nor is the return of the prodigal to Mother Earth along a piked highway.

The road back to Nature is full of her own secrets, and few who have trod the streets of the city remember the brambled return, or care.

Men who know to the centime each fluctuation of the wheat-market have no eye for the tawny beauty of a whole field of the precious product fluctuating to a breeze. Women stayed by steel and convention into the mold of form love the soft faces of flowers looking up at them from expensive corsages, but care not for their nativity. Greeks, first of men, perched their G.o.ds up on Olympus and wandered down to build cities.

Because the city is as insidious as the sleeping-draught of an Indian soothsayer, under its spell men go mad for gain and forget that to stand on the brow of a mountain at night, arms outstretched in kins.h.i.+p to Vega and Capella, is a golden moment of purer alloy than certified bonds.

What magnate remembers where the best tackle squirms, or the taste of gra.s.s sucked in from the tender end of the blade? All progress is like that. How immediately are the yesterdays metamorphosed into memories; and memories, even the stanchest of them, mold and disintegrate.

There were times when Mrs. Simon Meyerburg, who was threescore and ten years removed from the days when her bare feet had run fleet across a plushy meadow, would pause, hand on brow, when a memory, perhaps moving as it crumpled, would pa.s.s before her in faded daguerreotype. A gallery of events--so many pictures faded from her mental walls that the gaps seemed, as it were, to separate her from herself, making of her and that swift-footed girl back there vague strangers. And yet the vivid canvases! A peasant child at a churn, switching her black braids this way and that when they dangled too far over her shoulders; a linnet dead in its cage outside a thatched doorway, and the taste of her first heart tears; a hand-made crib in a dark corner and hardly ever empty of a little new-comer.

Then gaps, except here and there a faded bit. Then again large memories close and full of color: Simon Meyerburg, with the years folded back and youth on him, wooing her beside a stile that led off a South German country road, his peasant cap fallen back off his strong black curls, and even then a seer's light in his strong black eyes. Her own black eyes more diffident now and the black braids looped up and bound in a tight coronet round her head. The voice of the mother calling her homeward through cupped hands and in the Low Dutch of the Lowlands. A moonrise and the sweet, vivid smell of evening, and once more the youth Simon Meyerburg wooing her there beside the roadside stile.

The crowded steerage of a wooden s.h.i.+p, her first son suckling at her breast. At the prow Simon Meyerburg again, his peasant cap pushed backward and his black eyes, with the seer's light in them, gleaming ahead for the first glimpse of the land of fulfilment. An unbelievable city sucking them immediately into its slums. Filth. A quick descent into squalor. A second son. A third. A fourth. A fifth. A girl child.

Mouths too eager for black bread. Always the struggle and the sour smell of slums. Finally light. White light. The seer sees!

Then, ever green in her mind, a sun-mottled kitchen with a black iron range, and along the walls festoons of looped-up green peppers. White bread now in abundance for small mouths not so hungry. At evening, Simon Meyerburg, with rims of dirt under his nails, entering that kitchen door, the girl child turning from her breast to leap forward....

Sometimes in her stately halls, caught, as it were, in pa.s.sing from room to room, Mrs. Simon Meyerburg would pause, a.s.saulted by these memories of days so remote that her mind could not always run back to meet them.

Then again the glittering present studded with the jewels of fulfilment lay on her brow like the thin line of a headache, pressing out the past.

In Mrs. Meyerburg's bedroom a great arched ceiling, after the narrative manner of Paolo Veronese, lent such vastness to the apartment that moving across it, or sitting in her great overstuffed armchair beside a window, she hardly struck a note. Great wealth lay in canopied silence over that room. A rug out of Persia, so large that countless extra years and countless pairs of tired eyes and tired fingers had gone to make it, let noises sink noiseless into its nap. Brocade and tufting ate up sound. At every window more brocade shut out the incessant song of the Avenue.

In the overstuffed chair beside one of these windows sat Mrs. Meyerburg with her hands idle and laid out along the chair sides. They were ringless hands and full of years, with a great network of veins across their backs and the aging fingers large at the knuckles. But where the hands betrayed the eyes belied. Deep in Mrs. Meyerburg's soft and scarcely flabby face her gaze was straight and very black.

An hour by an inlaid ormolu clock she sat there, her feet in soft, elastic-sided shoes, just lifted from the floor. Incongruous enough, on a plain deal table beside her, a sheaf of blue-prints lay unrolled. She fingered them occasionally and with a tenderness, as if they might be sensitive to touch; even smiled and held the sheets one by one up against the shrouded window so that the light pressing through them might emphasize the labyrinth of lines. Dozed, with a smile printed on her lips, and awoke when her head lopped too heavily sidewise.

After an interval she slid out of her chair and crossed to the door; even in action her broad, squat figure infinitesimal to the room's proportions. When she opened the door the dignity of great halls lay in waiting. She crossed the wide vista to a closed door, a replica of her own, and knocked, waited, turned the crystal k.n.o.b, knocked, waited.

Rapped again, this time in three staccatos. Silence. Then softly and with her cheek laid against the imperturbable panel of the closed door:

"Becky! Becky! Open! Open!"

A m.u.f.fled sound from within as if a sob had been let slip.

Then again, rattling the k.n.o.b this time: "Becky, it's mamma. Becky, you should get up now; it's time for our drive. Let me in, Becky. Open!"

shaking the handle.

When the door opened finally, Mrs. Meyerburg stepped quickly through the slit, as if to ward off its too heavy closing. A French maid, in the immemorial paraphernalia of French maids, stood by like a slim sentinel on stilts, her tall, small heels clicked together. Perfume lay on the artificial dusk of that room.

"Therese, you can go down awhile. When Miss Becky wants she can ring."

"Oui, madame."

"I wish, Therese, when you go down you would tell Anna I don't want she should put the real lace table-cloth from Miss Becky's party last night in the linen-room. Twice I've told her after its use she should always bring it right back to me."

"Oui, madame." And Therese flashed out on the slim heels.

In the crowded apartment, furnished after the most exuberant of the various exuberant French periods, Miss Rebecca Meyerburg lay on a Louis Seize bed, certified to have been lifted, down to the casters, from the Grand Trianon of Marie Antoinette. In a great confusion of laces and linens, disarrayed as if tossed by a fever patient, she lay there, her round young arm flung up over her head and her face turned downward to the curve of one elbow.