Part 21 (1/2)
XXIX
Mariana, however, followed him almost immediately. She stood before him in an informal, belted black wool sweater, a ridiculously inadequate skirt, and the solid shoes he detested on women. But he soon forgot her garb.
”Howat,” she told him, ”I have made a cowardly and terrible mistake. I was meant to marry Jimmy, and I didn't. Perhaps I have ruined his life.
Mine will be nothing without him.” They were in the middle room, and a fire of hickory was burning in the panelled hearth. She dropped on a chair, and sat gazing into the singing flames. Here it's all to do over, he thought, with a feeling of weariness. ”He may get along very well with his Harriet,” he remarked, resentful of his dissipated contentment.
”You know he won't,” she replied sharply. ”He loves me; and I love him, Howat. I never knew how much, or how little anything else mattered, until I was in my room, after his wedding. It wasn't a wedding, really,”
she declared. ”All that doesn't make one. He'll find it out, too. Jimmy will be desperate, and I'm afraid he will drink harder. He told me they were getting frightfully strict about that at the Works. And there's that reorganization; it will embitter him if he isn't made superintendent. He has worked splendidly for it. That woman he--he went off with is a squash,” she said vindictively. ”She will be in bed when he goes away in the morning, and in crepe de Chine negligee when he gets back. Perhaps it won't last,” she added thoughtfully.
The sense of future security generated in Howat Penny by the marriage abruptly departed. He fumbled with his gla.s.s, directed it at Mariana.
”What do you mean by that?” he demanded. ”I would go to him like a shot, if he needed me,” she coolly returned. The dreadful part of it was that he was sure she would. ”Nonsense,” he a.s.serted, hiding his concern; ”there will be no fence climbing.” All this came from the letting down of conversational bars, the confounded books he found about on tables.
Words, like everything else, had lost their meanings. In his day a bad woman was bad, a good, likewise, good; but the Lord couldn't tell them apart now. It was the dancing, too. Might as well be married to a man, he thought.
Mariana was haggard, the paint on her face crudely--paint. He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he turned away confused, rose. The slot in his cigarette box refused to open, and he shook it violently, then put it back with a clatter. ”Tell Rudolph you're here,” he said disjointedly; and, miserable, left the room. Dressing he stood at a window; the west held a narrow strip of crimson light under a windy ma.s.s of cloud. The ruin of Shadrach Furnace was sombre. Within, the room was almost bare. There was a large, high-posted bed without drapings, a vermilion lacquered table, dark with age, supporting a gla.s.s lamp at its side; a set of drawers with old bra.s.s handles; a pair of stiff Adam chairs with wheel backs; and a modern mahogany dressing case, variously and conveniently divided, a clear mirror in the door.
The day failed rapidly, and he lit a pair of small lamps on the set of drawers. The sun sank in no time at all. Mariana, crying. The girl ought to go to her mother, and not come out to him, an old man, with her intimate troubles. ”A name I never repeat,” Charlotte had said. That was just like her. Small sympathy there, and no more understanding. He knotted his tie hurriedly, askew; and gathered the ends once more. It tired him a little to dress in the evening; often he longed to stay relaxed, pondering, until Rudolph called him to dinner. But every day something automatic, tyrannical, dragged him up to his room, encased him in rigid linen, formal black. Mariana, against the fireplace, ate listlessly; and, later, he beat her with shameful ease at sniff.
”You can't do that,” he pointed out with asperity, when she thoughtlessly joined unequal numbers. ”Why not?” she asked. She must be addled. ”It's against the rule.” Mariana said, ”I'm tired of rules.”
She always had put away the dominoes, but to-night she ignored them, and he returned the pieces to their morocco case. She relapsed into silence and a chair; and he sat with gaze fixed on the hickory in the fireplace, burning to impalpable, white ash.
What a procession of logs had been there reduced to dust, warming generations of men now cold. The thought of all those lapsed winters and lives soothed him; the clamour of living seemed to retreat, to leave him in a grey tranquillity. His head sank forward, and his narrow, dark hands rested in absolute immobility on the arms of his chair. He roused suddenly to discover that Mariana had gone up, and that there were only some fitful, rosy embers of fire left. In November it had been his custom to go into town for the winter; and it was time for him to make such arrangement; but, all at once, he was overwhelmingly reluctant to face the change, the stir, of moving. The city seemed intolerably noisy, oppressive; the thought of the hurrying, indifferent crowds disconcerted him. At Shadrach it was quiet, familiar, s.p.a.cious. He had had enough of excursions, strange faces, problems.... He would speak to Rudolph. Stay.
x.x.x
The countryside, it appeared to Howat Penny, flamed with autumn and faded in a day. Throughout the night he heard the crisp sliding of dead leaves over the roof, the lash of the wind swung impotently about the rectangular, stone block of his dwelling. At the closing of shutters the December gales only penetrated to him in a thin, distant complaint. The burning hickory curtained the middle room with a ruddy warmth. It was a period of extreme peace; he slept for long hours in a deep chair, or sat lost in a simulation of sleep, living again in the past. The present was increasingly immaterial, unimportant; old controversies occupied him, long since stilled; and among the memories of opera, of Eames as a splendid girl, forgotten roles, were other, vaguer a.s.sociations, impressions which seemed to linger from actual happenings, but persistently evaded definition. At times, his eyes closed, the glow of his fireplace burned hotter, more lurid, and was filled with faintly clamorous sounds; at times there was, woven through his half-wakeful dreaming, a monotonous beat ... such as the fall of a hammer. He saw, too, strange and yet familiar faces--a girl in silk like an extravagant tea rose; a countenance seamed and glistening with pain floated in shadow; and then another mocked and mocked him. Once he heard the drumming of rain, close above; and the illusion was so strong that he made his way to the door; a black void was glistening with cold and relentless stars.... Now he was standing by a dark, hurrying river, nothing else was visible; and yet he was thrilled by a sense of utter rapture.
He developed a feeling of the impermanence of life, his hold upon it no stronger than the tenuous cord of a balloon straining impatiently in great, unknown currents. The future lost all significance, reality; there were only memories; the vista behind was long and clear, but the door to to-morrow was shut. Looking into his mirror the reflection was far removed; it was hollow-cheeked and silvered, unfamiliar. He half expected to see a different face, not less lean, but more arrogant, with a sharply defined chin. The actual, blurred visage accorded ill with his trains of thought; it was out of place among the troops of gala youth.
A wired letter, a customary present of cigarettes, came from Mariana on Christmas, gifts from Charlotte and Bundy Provost. There was champagne at his place for dinner; and he sealed crisp money in envelopes inscribed Rudolph, Honduras, and the names of the cook and maid. He drank the wine solemnly; the visions were gone; and he saw himself as an old man lingering out of his time, alone. There was, however, little sentimental melancholy in the realization; he held an upright pride, the inextinguishable accent of a black Penny. His disdain for the commonality of life still dictated his prejudices. He informed Rudolph again that the present opera was without song; and again Rudolph gravely echoed the faith that melody was the heart of music.
The winds grew even higher, shriller; the falls of snow vanished before drenching, brown rains, and the afternoons perceptibly lengthened. There was arbutus on the slopes, robins, before he recognized that April was accomplished. A farmer ploughed the vegetable garden behind the house; and Honduras dragged the cedar bean poles from their resting place.
Mariana soon appeared.
”I wouldn't miss the spring at Shadrach for a hundred years of hibiscus,” she told him. He gathered that she had been south. She brought him great pleasure, beat him with annoying frequency at sniff, and was more companionable than ever before. She had, he thought, forgot James Polder; and he was careful to avoid the least reference to the latter. Mariana was a sensible girl; birth once more had told.
She was better looking than he had remembered her, more tranquil; a distinguished woman. It was incredible that a man approximately her equal had not appeared. Then, without warning--they were seated on the porch gazing through the tender green foliage of the willow at the vivid young wheat beyond--she said:
”Howat, I am certain that things are going badly with Jimmy. He wrote to me willingly in the winter, but twice since then he hasn't answered a letter.”
He suppressed a sharp, recurrent concern. ”It's that Harriet,” he told her, capitally diffident. ”You are stupid to keep it up. What chance would he have had answering her letters married to you?”
”This is different,” she replied confidently. He saw that he had been wrong--nothing had changed, lessened. Howat swore silently. That d.a.m.nable episode might well spoil her entire existence. But he wisely avoided argument, comment. A warm current of air, fragrant with apple blossoms, caught the ribbon-like smoke of his cigarette and dissipated it. She smiled with half-closed eyes at the new flowering of earth. Her expression grew serious, firm. ”I think we'd better go out to Harrisburg,” she remarked, elaborately casual, ”and see Jimmy for ourselves.”
He protested vehemently, but--from experience in that quarter--with a conviction of futility. ”She'll laugh at you,” he told Mariana. ”Haven't you any proper pride?” She shook her head.
”Not a sc.r.a.p. It's just that quality in Jim that annoyed me, and spoiled everything. I'd cook for them if it would do any good.” Irritation mastered him. ”This is shameful, Mariana,” he declared. ”Don't your position, your antecedents, stand for anything? If I had Jasper Penny here I would tell him what I thought of his confounded behaviour!” He rose, and walked the length of the porch and back.