Siesta, p.11
Siesta, page 11
It was here that the name, Jeb, began to take shape before him and he remembered at last his secretary’s old suitor. He exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke and turned this cogent fact over in his mind. Devoted for fifteen years. Willing to forgive everything if she would marry him—If! Why, certainly she would marry him. Here was the chance he had been waiting for. Give them a present; give them a trip to Niagara Falls, to Europe, round the world! It was the chance of a lifetime! He would have to get a new stenographer, they would have a baby in nine months. He would have to get a new stenographer. Have to? Good Lord, what a privilege!
It was about noon when he looked round and saw that the outer office was empty.
“Well, I reckon you’re due for congratulations,” he said, grinning.
“Why?” said Miss Judy innocently.
“Atlanta’s a fine town.”
Miss Judy sniffed.
“Look here, girl, you’re not by any chance considering the possibility of turning this fine boy down again, are you?”
She hit at a lone and cheerless fly on her shorthand book; “You don’t think I’d marry Jeb—er—now, do you?”
“Why not!”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Listen! You’ll make him a fine little wife, better than he deserves, I reckon—”
“No,” she said, patting with the fly-killer on her typewriter. “I’m spoiled, Mr. Telfair.” She laughed.
“Spoiled, hell! Do—do you mean to say I’ve—I’ve spoiled you!”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the—”
“You have, Mr. Telfair; there’s no use—”
“But, God almighty, girl—”
“You don’t really think I could put up with Jeb now, do you?”
“But—”
“I’m used to gentlemen now, Mr. Telfair. I just couldn’t possibly. I’ve been with you too long now—”
The telegraph boy came in through the blue room and handed a message into Miss Judy’s outstretched hand. She opened the envelope neatly with a paper knife and gave it to Mr. Telfair. It said:
THANKS FOR YOUR TELEGRAM HOLD MY COTTON
BEN GRAY
Mr. Telfair looked up as Tucker came through the warehouse door with his weight book and a handful of stencils.
“Tucker,” he said, “here’s a telegram from old man Ben Gray. He wants us to hold his cotton. Just take it off the tables.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, oh, Tucker.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just step out and see what the market is.”
Tucker shifted his yellow straw hat from the very back to the very front of his head and strode out into the brilliant sun.
“Miss Judy, take a letter to Mr. Ben Gray at Due West, Georgia. Dear Mr. Gray. Your wire received. We are holding your cotton. There is, I think, every reason to believe the market is going to improve. In spite of the fairly favorable weather, the crop through all this section from what I hear is short, and recent reports of heavy rains in Texas point to the possibility of a million bales shortage. As I wired you, I don’t want to advise you one way or another; I’ve been in this business too long to think I can tell what the market’s going to do. And it’s too early in the season yet to make any responsible guess about the crop. I can’t see much reason for the market to decline appreciably, though, and there is a good possibility for an advance. Anyhow, this is my candid opinion. Paragraph.”
“I understand, Mr. Telfair.”
“The latest quotation is—What’s the market, Tucker?”
“October eased off a little bit, Mr. Telfair. It’s ten and an eighth.”
“Suppose you just leave out that last sentence, Miss Judy.”
“Ending, ‘Anyhow, this is my candid opinion.’”
“Yes. Oh, say, ‘Drop in to see me when you come to town.’”
5. And Thou—
Sunday, July 5
When Nora’s mother and father shut the front door behind them the clock at the Arsenal was striking five. It was really not only striking five, she thought, but five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in midsummer; she thought she could have heard it and known by the sound it was Sunday and midsummer,—Sunday and summer and the servants gone and the clocks ticking and a vacuous melancholy floating in the air on the solemn green perfume of the tea-olive by the garden window. She sat down at the piano and laid her fingers desultorily on the keys; she knew the paragraph by heart:
The many friends of young Dr. Lucian Abercorn are delighted to learn of his return to Georgetown after an extensive sojourn in European capitals. He is staying with his father, Dr. Henry Abercorn, in the Abercorn home on—
The paper was old; he had probably been in Georgetown for two weeks. Maybe he wasn’t going to telephone her at all. The clear notes of the treble, venturing timidly off the strings, masking themselves with a sort of rigid matter-of-factness, fell off suddenly into the futility of a minor chord. Her left hand traced three notes of the allegretto of Brahms’s Symphony in C-minor. Her eyes changed. She lifted her head. She began the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Concerto.
She remembered music downstairs when she was a child in the nursery. She knew that now, through all the empty rooms of the old house music was beginning to flow,—space, filled with the poetry of time passing; time, flowing silently by, now beginning to sing; mute seconds, now embroidered with patterns of sound, flowing out from no origin into no fate. Or was there an origin? Time, coming from somewhere, going somewhere else; growing out of some embryo time, flooding past, dying and changing into something else; growing like a river out of cold springs on the slopes of far mountains, flooding past and down into an infinite sea. Or, time the recorder, the inanimate static recorder of change in everything else, non-changing, non-existent except through the changes of changing things, measurable only by change, the less change the less time. You might live a hundred years while someone beside you was living ten! Time, for one a thread of water, for another a streaming river; for one a chord, for another a symphony!… She stood up and walked away. Where was the crowded hour?
Certainly not here. This was home. Where people knew you,—knew you to just the wrong degree. It was just that kinship that threw things off, just that speaking what seemed to be the same language but wasn’t. It was trying to teach somebody the proper way to play the piano after he has already learned an improper way; easier to teach somebody who has never seen a piano before. Easier to teach somebody to know you, easier to learn to know them, if you all begin as strangers. If you wanted to stand for what you were, for your own special uniqueness, go any place but home. You were just a certain generation at home,—just one of the fourth or fifth generation, as you might be a chicken out of the batch of eggs in the fourth or fifth incubator. You were not a person, you were an incubation. You settled into your parents’ groove, you saw one small class of people. Imagine being where Pavinovsky was out of the question! Think of Pavinovsky’s being out of the question! Her uncle had come down on the train with him, suggested innocently to her mother having him out to supper. And it was unthinkable. It really was.
You didn’t see even somebody like Lucian. Just a slightly different groove. Still that was not impossible; she might see him,—if she stayed. She certainly wouldn’t see him if she went away. What should she do? Stay as one of that generation and see him again, talk to him again, or go away as Nora and close that little page of her life. And then she might stay and still not see him.
She turned petulantly away from the window, then came back. He wasn’t going to call her. That was two years ago, beyond the memory of man. And nothing to remember, even then. What difference did it make whether she saw him or not; better, maybe, if she didn’t. Her mother hadn’t liked him. People didn’t understand him. He had his faults; perhaps he wasn’t very kind; perhaps there were other things. But he had his feet on the ground; he didn’t go mooning round, like Austin. He had more drive and push to him than anybody in Georgetown; he was going somewhere. If she had a little more of that—that fervor,—things might be different.
She watched a long-billed humming bird standing in the air in the midst of a sort of blur to snatch a glance into the bell of a flower on the trumpet vine.… The hard, flat beach of the Isle of Palms, the glare of the sun pressing down upon her, the dry wind hot against her face and legs. He came out of the chilly wet shade under the pavilion and spoke to her as he passed. She went on into the shadow and sat down, looking out over the shelving sand through the forest of dark barnacled posts at the lazy surf; then she turned away and watched him, small and vivid against the brilliance.
They walked up the beach to Fort Burke the day before he was coming back to Georgetown. At first he talked about the South; she remembered what he had said, remembered the half-jesting way in which he lifted his finger and said, “Listen, girl.”
“Listen, girl,” he said, “this is just a geographical human experiment. For the first time in history Nordics have lived below the 39th Parallel for as long as three generations. In India they are reënforced continually from England. We have been down here two hundred and fifty years, long enough to really contribute something. All right, what have we contributed? I say, ‘All right, old South, let’s see what you’ve got; just empty your bag out here for us and let’s have a look.’ What do we find? Lawyers? Oh, yes, plenty of lawyers. Doctors? Yes. But how about scientists and engineers and musicians and painters and poets? I want to lean backward on this, so suppose for the sake of argument we call Sidney Lanier a poet—. But our contributions, to say the least, have been very limited. Where are our Henry Adamses, our Copleys, our Holmeses and Lowells and Jameses—. Did it ever occur to you that the experiment might not be going so well?”
“That’s silly.”
“You have put Nordics on the 32nd Parallel and maybe it’s not going to work—”
Under the palmetto trees, past the yellow and white barracks with the screened verandas, down along the sea wall molded of shells and pebbles, the slow somnolent surf tumbling in the heat.
“You aren’t going to live here?”
“Oh, yes, I am. I’m interested in it,—more interested now than I ever was before.”
“What do you mean?”
“I love you.”
She laughed. “Impossible!” Then she was sorry. “At least it’s very unlikely.”
He wanted to kiss her, but she didn’t want to.
The next afternoon he went away, and the beach seemed very broad and flat and finite. Four days later she found some pretext to drive up to Georgetown; she wanted to see him. The nurse answered the telephone.
“Mr. Abercorn’s gone away.”
“Gone? I didn’t think he was going until next week.”
“He changed his plans.”
“Will—will he be back before he sails?”
“No, he won’t.”
“Thank you.” She pulled the receiver fork down with her finger coldly and broke the connection; then she slowly took the receiver from her ear and slowly hung it up. She had a feeling that this was a portentous moment.…
Now, after two years, he had returned. And she was going away. He wasn’t going to call her. Even if she should meet him accidentally, it wouldn’t mean anything. It hadn’t mattered to him. Or if it had, he had forgotten—
And there was the telephone ringing—
She was on her feet with a spring.… But, no. That was somebody else. Of course it was.
“Hello,” she said.
“May I speak to Miss Fenwick, please?”
A flush surged up into her cheeks. She didn’t know that voice! She tried to disguise her rapid breathing as she said, “This is she.”
“Oh, Nora; I didn’t recognize you. This is your old Uncle John.”
“Hello, Uncle John,” she said, suddenly empty. “I didn’t recognize you either.”
“I thought I might drop by if you weren’t doing anything.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Are you all right? Your voice—”
“Yes, I’m fine. I’ve got some news for you.”
“News?”
“I’m not going on our little trip.”
6. Opaque
Sunday, July 5
In 1841 old Hy V. Toombs, Austin’s great-grandfather, head of the firm of Toombs & Daragne, Bankers, acquired, through the failure of one Jules Hardee to meet a note of $6,000, a tract of some ten thousand acres along the upper Congaree River fifteen miles above Georgetown on the Georgia side; a northern corner of it came within a few miles of the cross-roads called Due West. It was mostly pebble land and fairly fertile, but owing to the fact that between it and the Georgetown market lay Seven-Mile Shoals, making it inaccessible by water, and the impracticability of the winding Georgia roads, making it almost as inaccessible by land, the ownership of it descended upon him a good deal more like a debit than a credit. For a while it looked as if the only thing he could do to improve its value was either to rebuild the Georgia roads leading to it or to dynamite Seven-Mile Shoals. Neither of these methods, in the character of one of Alabama’s more astute financiers, appealed to him in the least, and for several years he annually paid the taxes on the Hardee Place with considerable pain, not to say humiliation.
In studying one day, however, a large map of that part of the world hanging on his office wall, another scheme began to dawn upon him and he took his cheroot out of his brown teeth and stood before the map stroking his imperial for a quarter of an hour. The result of this was the formation of the Georgetown Canal Board, an organization of half a dozen leading citizens (Mr. Toombs declined to serve on the board) whose worthy purpose was to promote the civic importance of their town by digging a canal from a point on the river above Seven-Mile Shoals straight into the heart of Georgetown. The Daily News, privately owned in those days, having allowed some twelve thousand dollars of Mr. Toombs’s gold to disappear apparently irretrievably over its dam, permitted hardly a morning to pass for half a year without in some way emphasizing the fact that with the opening of such a canal Georgetown would become one of the world’s most thriving markets; lines of tight barges towed by fat mules would ply the stream from dawn until dark, hundreds of tons of farm equipment and manufactured goods would be carried regularly upcountry to the impatient plowmen, thousands of square miles of the fairest cotton land in Dixie would burst into blossom over night. When at length the brass tacks of a bond issue were got down to, it was voted with an enthusiasm that might have brought a blush to the cheeks of a lesser financier.
But five years later, though occasional barges were in truth hauled up the torpid stream and through the locks with a few plows aboard for the upcountry, and a few bales of cotton and tobacco were landed in the heart of the city, Georgetown’s prosperity still lay shrouded in its perdurable obscurity, and Mr. Toombs still paid the annual taxes on the Hardee Place.
One day, however, Mr. Toombs’s surveyor and a lean man of indeterminate age with flame-colored hair and freckles over the narrow bridge of his nose who gave his name as Robie Gray, went up the canal on one of the barges, were poled across the shallow river to the Georgia side, and landed at length on the old wharf that had belonged to Jules Hardee. He bought the place from Mr. Toombs for ten thousand dollars; he paid him two thousand down and a thousand a year for eight years and interest. Mr. Toombs heaved a great sigh and turned his mind to other projects.
He put half the money into Canal Bonds, which could be bought by then for about eighty dollars, and took up the matter of developing the canal into a power plant, his engineer having informed him that with the drop of fifty feet at the Georgetown end between the canal and the river there was room for several mills of one kind and another to be built on its inner bank. Before he died The Georgetown Manufacturing Company had dug a spillway connecting the upper level of the canal with a lower loop and erected a cotton mill of 14,000 spindles and 325 looms. By 1890 there were six cotton mills lining its bank.
As you go about the Georgetown streets today you cross one or another level of it innumerable times, one level wider than you could throw a rock, lined with a tow path of Chinese-red and stretching away more or less due north, through the tall water-grass and under the rows of willow trees planted to hold the bank, straight in the accusing direction of Mr. Toombs’s old farm; another level is merely a narrow shallow ditch of orange water, hardly moving, almost brushing the under sides of the flat bridges; another is a deep muddy cut with sycamore trees growing obliquely out of the inner bank and meeting over the water where you see an occasional negro fisherman baiting his hook out of an old tomato can. It finally wakes from its lethargy and leaps out from beneath the bridge on Broad Street in a tawny flood, plunging heavily downward with a smooth pink sheen and a savage tumult of sound into the caldron below and racing back into the river. Everywhere it is opaque.
Even when, now and then, an emergency arises and the gates at the locks up the river are closed and the water drains out to a depth of two or three feet, it is visually impenetrable and it hides to the last what has been entrusted to it. It keeps its counsel, as they say.
It cuts through a section of town that keeps its counsel too; a section of wooden weather-blackened houses, of dirt sidewalks, rain-washed, broken by the protruding roots of the oak trees that separate them from the unpaved streets; a section that glories in Sunday, teeming all day with sensuous life, ringing with whole-hearted wide-mouthed laughs, very striking to you if you happen to pass through fresh from the bare streets elsewhere, oppressive with a sabbath silence. They call it The Territory, or usually The Terry, and it hides its private business under an opacity like the canal’s.
Mrs. Mattie Small lived on Kollock Street about two hundred yards before it crossed the second level. She had been there only about a year, but she was already considering moving. She didn’t stay in one neighborhood very long. After a year or two she hired a dray from somebody not near by, loaded it with her iron kettle and washtubs and two trunks, and gave the man the new address, following along behind the cart as casually as if she had been going up to Lim Tom’s Grocery or to Glover’s Drug Store on the corner where the street car stopped.
