Читать книгу The Mad Carews - Martha Ostenso - Страница 5

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The sitting-room felt very full, like a church when the congregation stood up to sing, Elsa thought. And yet, besides her mother, and herself sitting in her little red rocking-chair, there were only Bayliss and the two Carew women in the room. Perhaps it was because Mrs. Grace Carew was so wide and Miss Hildreth Carew, her sister-in-law, so very high. They filled the tiny sitting-room like two large birds in a small cage, spreading and settling down over the cheap green carpet with the faded roses in it; over the imitation oak chairs with the crocheted doilies hanging on the backs; over all the gray, hot air of the room. The green window shades had been drawn but there were two large holes in one of them and two ragged splotches of sunlight played over Mrs. Grace Carew’s person, one on the gold locket which dangled upon her breast, the other on the white taffeta pleats of her skirt. She seemed pleasantly aware of the eyes of light and rocked to and fro, watching the piercing beams move up and down.

Bayliss had come in with Elsa, Leon having gone to the field with Uncle Fred. The Carew boy sat looking up at the ceiling, paying no attention to his aunts. When they wanted his attention, they had to speak to him twice before he would reply. When he did speak, he was very polite and they seemed very pleased and fond. Elsa thought they already looked upon him as a grown man, and that puzzled her.

From the time Elsa had come into the room, the two Carew women had talked incessantly. The manner of their talk was strange. It was as if there was no one else in the room but these two. And they talked at each other, as if they had been quarreling on the way out from town and were merely proceeding with the quarrel, quite regardless of everything about them. Did they not know about Reef? Elsa looked at her mother, saw her sitting with hands meekly folded, eyes sad under her smile. Had she not told them? Or was it simply that other people’s affairs were no concern of the Carews? Suddenly Elsa could not bear her mother’s humility. She wanted to burst into the endless chatter of these strangers and tell them about Reef. She wanted to get up and tell them to go on home where they could sit in their fine house, the house with the new wing building, and quarrel as much as they liked so long as there was quiet in the house where Reef lay upstairs dreaming of his pain.

That, of course, would not be right. You had to be polite to people like the Carews. And besides, they had come because of some business they had with Elsa’s father, who would be coming in soon now wanting his supper and asking about Reef. Pa would talk to them, maybe joke with them in spite of Reef—he always had something funny to say where women were. He would have them stay for supper, too; make them stay even if they wanted to leave. Then there would be more talk at the table, and more joking, and then they would go away with their fine horse and their sleek buggy and the house in the hollow would be quiet again.

“They will never come here again,” Elsa thought. “They will never come here because they are not our kind of folks.”

Old Sarah Phillips would come, and Fanny Ipsmiller, and Nate Brazell, but they wore clothes like other people’s and talked about things you could understand. The Carew women talked about themselves and their men, talked in a queer way, as if the Carews were kings and queens and not just folks, as if you could never be quite like them no matter how you tried.... And the sun spots move up and down on Grace Carew’s white taffeta, and across the room in the dim light Miss Hildreth sits under the wedding picture of Ma and Pa with their heads together in a gold, chipped frame. Ma isn’t listening much to their talk; she is listening with one ear upstairs where Reef is lying, the other out in the kitchen where the roasting chicken spits and hisses. There would be enough chicken for the visitors and perhaps a little for Pa and Uncle Fred when the others were served.

“You speak, Grace,” Miss Hildreth Carew was saying crisply, “as though you had been born into the family, and not merely married into it. I beg your pardon, of course, but that silver was brought over from England by the second Bayliss Carew on his first trip, not by the first Bayliss on his second trip, as you would have it. He didn’t dare go back, that first Bayliss. Of course, Grace, you never did have the family history straight. Not that I have any fault to find with you there. It’s hard enough for us who were born into the family to get it straight.”

Miss Hildreth seemed to be very old to be unmarried, Elsa thought. Did no one ever ask her to marry him, or did she never want to get married like other people? She was nice to look at. She was like drying autumn flowers; like stiff-petaled black-eyed Susans, varnished and prickly and not exactly sweet. Looking at her now, Elsa remembered Miss Gertie Schwartz, the thin, tall woman who used to play the organ in the church down in Iowa, and always wore black, stiff dresses that were narrow across the chest, and a black velvet ribbon around her throat. Elsa’s father used to tell about her. One stormy night two men driving a lumber wagon stopped their horses just as she was going to run straight into them, her arms outspread, her black hair down and streaming all about her, the lightning on her white face. She was calling some one’s name, but they never would let the children hear whose name it was. Gertie Schwartz had gone out of her mind and was running in the rain, calling, calling.

Miss Hildreth Carew was like Gertie Schwartz. But Elsa liked her. She did not think she would like Mrs. Grace Carew. She was softer, gentler, better-mannered, perhaps. But how can you know why you like some people and dislike others? You should try to like every one. You ought to love your neighbors. Well, Elsa liked Miss Hildreth. She liked her tar-black hair and her dark, narrow eyes and her nose that came out in her face like a square bone.

“I have always thought, Hildreth,” Grace said quietly, “that it was quite enough to marry into the Carew family without having been born into it.” Her chin, as she spoke, drew back against the folds of her neck like a turkey gobbler’s. “When I married Peter Carew I did so because I thought him the best man who ever walked. I may say I still think so. But there isn’t much in the family history to recommend it to any woman. I never have been superstitious, Hildreth, as you know, but I’ve learned enough of the family history to convince me that there is some sort of Nemesis pursuing it. What about the first Bayliss Carew, innocently hounded out of England? What about the second Bayliss Carew, innocently hounded out of Connecticut? And then his sons, Seth and Peter, the victims of a swindler in Springfield, innocently hounded——”

Hildreth sniffed loudly. “Innocently—rats!” The faint vein-channels in her cheeks were suddenly flooded with red. “There never was such a thing as an innocent Carew—I am speaking of the men, of course. The Carew men have always taken what they wanted, where they wanted it. You mention the first Bayliss Carew—innocently hounded out of England. Who was he? A gentleman, yes—God bless him!—but one who drank and fought and gambled until he had wasted his father’s estate and couldn’t find money enough to pay his debts! And what about his son, the second Bayliss Carew—innocently hounded out of Connecticut?” She shook a bony finger at Grace, who had lowered her eyes and was patting the white pleated taffeta over her knee. “Not for nothing was he hounded out of the place he had lived in for years. He was my own father, Grace, but I have never been afraid to face the truth. His little scandals were taken lightly enough by his friends, but when he began his romance with——”

“The children, Hildreth, the children!” Grace murmured.

“Well—” Hildreth cleared her throat indignantly, looking about in a flurry. “Don’t talk to me about the innocence of the Carew men. If they are punished, it is not for nothing. Not that they have ever learned anything from their misfortunes. What they get they occasionally pay for, it’s true—but they get it, my dear, they get it! And in the long run, it is their women who suffer for them. My God! how my mother could suffer! The Carew women—! Who was it got Seth and Peter out of their scrape in Springfield? What would have become of the family if we women hadn’t taken hold and got out in time to save it?”

Elsa, watching her alertly, thought that she was almost beautiful as she talked. Her eyes were bright with malice, with perverse delight in setting forth the deviltries of the Carews to those who had never heard them before. She hoped that Miss Hildreth might go on talking, because of the little fires that burned in her eyes. But Grace, it seemed, thought the talk had gone far enough.

“Really, Hildreth, is it quite good taste——”

“Good taste—fiddlehooks! The Bowerses might as well know the truth about us—first as last. What’s more, they’d better know it from us. The Carews have been everything from horse thieves to international spies working both ways. They’re as crooked as the devil and as beautiful as gods. And the crookedest thing about them is that they always manage to marry good women.”

She was like a preacher in a pulpit. No, she was like that lawyer who came last year and talked to Pa about something.

Then—Reef! Reef upstairs, with pain in his dreams—because he had climbed up in the darkness to release the wheel in the wind—because Seth Carew had refused to pay what the land was worth when he bought it from Steve Bowers. She had forgotten Reef for the moment—forgotten him, and her sitting there listening to Seth Carew’s sister—and liking her—and wishing she would talk some more because of the little fires in her eyes! But that was only for the moment. Now—she hated herself for listening at all. She hated Miss Hildreth and that other one, hated their bright crackle and smell of silk, and their talk of other Carews who belonged far, far back in the dark green past—like mirrors reflecting mirrors. She hated their nephew, Bayliss, raspberry red, bored, staring at the cracked paper on the ceiling of the Bowers sitting-room. She hated her mother, docile, waiting, heart-heavy, listening. She flashed up out of her chair, her mouth shut tight and downward, and ran out of the house.

Where she lay among the crushed leaves in the pigweed house, Elsa heard her father’s clear whistle from the other side of the creek, almost a half mile away. He always came home at evening whistling in that high, piercing way of his, as though he wanted those at home to know that he was coming to supper. Ma always heeded the warning so as to have things ready for him to sit down as soon as he had washed his hands and face. “That’s Pa now,” she would say. “Get the dishes on the table—he’ll be here in a minute.” She would be expecting Elsa now to set the table while she finished her work about the stove. Pa never wasted any time getting to the table once he was in from the fields. It would be different this evening, of course. He would have to go up and look at Reef first, as soon as he came in. After that he would talk to the Carew women for a while and carry himself altogether as if getting to supper was no great thing, after all.

Elsa could not go back to the house, even though she knew her mother must be waiting for her to help with the table. She would not face those Carew women again without her father. She stood up quietly and listened to the whistling, a clear, unbroken melody that came up from the grassland beside the hollow and across the field of ripe wheat like the rippling song of a meadow-lark. You would almost think the world was the same today as it was yesterday, as it had been days without number when Reef would come home from the fields with Pa, driving the team with his two strong hands and the weight of his shoulders thrown back against the tug of the lines. You would almost think he had forgotten that Reef wasn’t with him now, to hear him whistling like that. But that was the way with Pa. He could whistle and he could laugh, and all the time you could tell nothing about what was going on in his head. Ma would say, “What’s the use in living!” But Pa would say, “What’s the use in dying!” and go off whistling to his work in the fields.

Elsa slipped from the cover of the pigweed house and ran down past the barn to where the trail followed the edge of the wheatfield. Where the creek with its fringe of willows crossed the trail and made another field, she waited in a tangle of grass and rank weeds that were already a little gray from the late summer and flushed faintly from the low sun. Her father’s whistling had stopped. Perhaps he was thinking of Reef now. All at once she felt like crying. There was something that made you want to cry, waiting alone there in the tangle of grass and weeds and thinking about Reef, who ought to be driving the horses home instead of dreaming up there under the low roof, and strangers in the house.

She heard the heavy thud of the horses’ feet in the soft ground and the sharp tangle of the swinging chains. In a moment now they would be crossing the creek and coming up out of the willows. “Come on, Blackie!” Her father’s voice sounded very close there with the willows about him, and very soft, too, as though he hadn’t been thinking of the horses, at all. Then, suddenly, they were out of the willows, her father was beside her and was sweeping her up in his arms and setting her astride old Blackie. For a moment then she wanted to cling to him with her arms about his brown neck and make herself think that there was nothing wrong in the whole world. But her father went back to his place behind the team and Elsa, looking across the yellowing wheat, could see the house where the Carew women were still talking and the Carew boy still staring up at the cracked paper on the ceiling of the sitting-room. And above the thud of the heavy feet and the sharp clanking of the trace-chains, her father’s voice was asking about Reef: Had he slept well since the doctor left, and what had made her come out alone from the house when she might have been giving a little help to her mother? When she told him that the two Carew women were waiting for him and were going to stay for supper, he said nothing and presently began whistling to himself as if people like the Carews had been calling to see him every day of his life.

Uncle Fred was in the barnyard. “Those two Carew hawks are waiting for you in the house,” he said.

“Elsa was telling me. Maybe they’ve brought the payment, though it won’t be due for near a month yet.”

“I guess a month don’t matter much to a man with Seth Carew’s money.”

“Maybe Hildreth is down to get a good look at you, Fred. There’s no telling where a woman’s fancy is going to strike.”

Uncle Fred sniffed and plodded away with the team. Elsa’s father laughed loudly and started for the house.

“We’ll be getting you a new dress and some shoes and stockings to cover those bare legs of yours one of these days,” he told Elsa. You could tell from the way he said it that he was thinking of the Carew women and their finery. “And your mother would be none the worse for a decent something to change into when people come calling.”

To be always hoping for things that never happened, and to be meeting people for whom such things happened without their trying! Above all, to have dreadful things happen to you when others escaped who were better able to bear it! Was there nothing more to being alive than that?

Elsa’s mother was in the kitchen. “You go in and talk to the Carews, Steve, while I finish getting supper,” she said quickly. “And you, Elsa, get the dishes on. You have no call running off when you know I need you to help.”

Through the open doorway, Elsa, laying the dishes, could hear the subdued voices of the visitors. They must know about Reef now, or why should Miss Hildreth’s words come in a whisper? Presently her father’s feet sounded on the stairs. He was going up to look at Reef before he went in to talk to the Carews. His step was slow, muffled, and Elsa set the plates on the table very softly so that she could follow the sound of his feet crossing the floor above, to halt at last by the side of Reef’s bed. For a moment then she stood—heard Lenny calling to Uncle Fred at the barn; heard Miss Hildreth’s sharp whisper from the sitting-room; heard her mother move something on the stove in the kitchen; but above all, heard her own heart beating clamorously as she waited for the sound of Reef’s voice talking to her father. What if her father should speak once—and then again—and get no answer? People sometimes died in their sleep. Old Sarah Phillips said so. Her father’s soft step moved across the floor overhead. He was coming away again.

“The boy’s having a good sleep,” he said as soon as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he went into the sitting-room.

“Will you hurry, Elsa!” Her mother had come in from the kitchen, looking about her nervously, the red patches on her cheeks flaming now from her work at the stove.

It was hard to hurry when you had to listen to the talk coming from the sitting-room, low, serious talk that would be about Reef and how he had climbed up in the darkness to release the wheel that had not been working right for weeks and how the wind had come in a sudden gust.... People did die in their sleep, sometimes. But why couldn’t you feel yourself dying and wake up before it was too late? “Yes, it’s a great loss to us. And he was getting to be such a help about the place, too. But we’ll have to give him his schooling now and try to make up for it.” As if Pa hadn’t always said Reef would get his schooling, anyhow!

And then they were coming in to the table. Elsa’s father went to a small cupboard in the corner where he kept his papers.

“I’ll give you the receipt now, Miss Hildreth, before I forget it,” he was saying.

“Just sit in, now,” her mother urged, making awkward motions with her red hands and shifting chairs about busily.

“And you can tell your brother for me, Miss Hildreth, that there isn’t a better quarter-section of land within a hundred miles of Sundower,” Elsa’s father said proudly, coming to his place at the table and handing the slip of white paper to Hildreth Carew.

“The Carews, Mr. Bowers,” she said, “know good land as well as anybody else. When they buy land, they buy nothing but the best. It’s the same with their land as it is with their women. My grandfather used to say that a man had no right to an opinion on anything unless he was a good judge of women and horseflesh. If they knew how to use what they get it would be a sight better for all concerned. It’s the misfortune of good land, good women and good horseflesh that a Carew’s judgment stops as soon as he gets what he wants.”

Elsa’s father laughed as he began to pass to the visitors the dishes before him. “Give them time, Miss Hildreth. They’ll learn.”

“Pht! Time! They’ve had generations of it. The Carew men have had their own way so long they’ll never get over it. I ought to know, Mr. Bowers. I’ve lived the biggest part of one generation with them. Somewhere back in the history of the family there was a pirate or two and the Carew blood has carried the taint of it ever since. That’s the only way I can account for it, and it’s as good a way as any, to my way of thinking.”

Elsa’s father was chuckling to himself. “I hope your sister-in-law has a better opinion of the family than you have,” he said.

“The Carews are a fine family, Mr. Bowers,” Mrs. Grace Carew said, very mildly. “Hildreth sometimes——”

“Pht! I tell the truth, Grace! What’s more, you know it. There might have been some hope for the Carew men when they took up farming, but they think more of a horse-race than they do of a harvest. They buy more land than they can farm decently—and then they put machinery on it to do the work they ought to be doing with their own hands. They’re quite hopeless, however you choose to look at them. Their women know it.”

The little fires were flashing again in Miss Hildreth’s eyes and Elsa was watching, fascinated. Beside Elsa, Bayliss sat, quite bored. You would almost think he was too grown-up to heed any longer what a Carew woman might have to say about the men of the family.

Once, out of sheer deviltry, Bayliss moved his foot stealthily across and set the edge of his shoe on one of Elsa’s bare toes. As he pinched the toe against the floor, he did not even look at her. She squealed sharply, but Bayliss continued to look straight before him. A moment later, however, he turned to her and grinned.

“I hope you’re not casting eyes at our Elsa, young fellow,” Elsa’s father said, shaking a finger at Bayliss.

“Steve!” her mother protested.

“God forbid!” Miss Hildreth breathed.

“I married a Carew, myself,” Mrs. Grace said sweetly. “A girl might do worse.”

“She couldn’t!” said Miss Hildreth flatly.