Читать книгу The Shoulders of Atlas - Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman - Страница 5

The weather was wonderful on Abrahama White's funeral day. The air had at once the keen zest of winter and the languor of summer. One moment one perceived warm breaths of softly undulating pines, the next it was as if the wind blew over snow. The air at once stimulated and soothed. One breathing it realized youth and an endless vista of dreams ahead, and also the peace of age, and of work well done and deserving the reward of rest. There was something in this air which gave the inhaler the certainty of victory, the courage of battle and of unassailable youth. Even old people, pausing to notice the streamer of crape on Abrahama White's door, felt triumphant and undaunted. It did not seem conceivable, upon such a day, that that streamer would soon flaunt for them.

The streamer was rusty. It had served for many such occasions, and suns and rains had damaged it. People said that Martin Barnes, the undertaker, ought to buy some new crape. Martin was a very old man himself, but he had no imagination for his own funeral. It seemed to him grotesque and impossible that an undertaker should ever be in need of his own ministrations. His solemn wagon stood before the door of the great colonial house, and he and his son-in-law and his daughter, who were his assistants, were engaged at their solemn tasks within.

The daughter, Flora Barnes, was arraying the dead woman in her last robe of state, while her father and brother-in-law waited in the south room across the wide hall. When her task was performed she entered the south room with a gentle pride evident in her thin, florid face.

“She makes a beautiful corpse,” she said, in a hissing whisper.

Henry Whitman and his wife were in the room, with Martin Barnes and Simeon Capen, his son-in-law. Barnes and Capen rose at once with pleased interest, Henry and Sylvia more slowly; yet they also had expressions of pleasure, albeit restrained. Both strove to draw their faces down, yet that expression of pleasure reigned triumphant, overcoming the play of the facial muscles. They glanced at each other, and each saw an angry shame in the other's eyes because of this joy.

But when they followed Martin Barnes and his assistants into the parlor, where Abrahama White was laid in state, all the shameful joy passed from their faces. The old woman in her last bed was majestic. The dead face was grand, compelling to other than earthly considerations. Henry and Sylvia forgot the dead woman's little store which she had left behind her. Sylvia leaned over her and wept; Henry's face worked. Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he, although much younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful Abrahama White. He remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead and majestic, with something like the light of her lost beauty in her still face. It was like a rose which has fallen in such a windless atmosphere that its petals retain the places which they have held around its heart.

Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander. He took his wife's little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly. Her bony fingers clung gratefully to his.

When they were all out in the south room Flora Barnes spoke again. “I have never seen a more beautiful corpse,” said she, in exactly the same voice which she had used before. She began taking off her large, white apron. Something peculiar in her motion arrested Sylvia's attention. She made a wiry spring at her.

“Let me see that apron,” said she, in a voice which corresponded with her action.

Flora recoiled. She turned pale, then she flushed. “What for?”

“Because I want to.”

“It's just my apron. I—”

But Sylvia had the apron. Out of its folds dropped a thin roll of black silk. Flora stood before Sylvia. Beads of sweat showed on her flat forehead. She twitched like one about to have convulsions. She was very tall, but Sylvia seemed to fairly loom over her. She held the black silk out stiffly, like a bayonet.

“What is this?” she demanded, in her tense voice.

Flora twitched.

“What is it? I want to know.”

“The back breadth,” replied Flora in a small, scared voice, like the squeak of a mouse.

“Whose back breadth?”

“Her back breadth.”

“Her back breadth?”

“Yes.”

“Robbing the dead!” said Sylvia, pitilessly. Her tense voice was terrible.

Flora tried to make a stand. “She hadn't any use for it,” she squeaked, plaintively.

“Robbing the dead! Its bad enough to rob the living.”

“She couldn't have worn that dress without any back breadth while she was living,” argued Flora, “but now it don't make any odds. It don't show.”

“What were you going to do with it?”

Flora was scared into a storm of injured confession. “You 'ain't any call to talk to me so, Mrs. Whitman,” she said. “I've worked hard, and I 'ain't had a decent black silk dress for ten years.”

“How can you have a dress made out of a back breadth, I'd like to know?”

“It's just the same quality that Mrs. Hiram Adams's was, and—” Flora hesitated.

“Flora Barnes, you don't mean to say that you're robbing the dead of back breadths till you get enough to make you a whole dress?”

Flora whimpered. “Business has been awful poor lately,” she said. “It's been so healthy here we've hardly been able to earn the salt to our porridge. Father won't join the trust, either, and lots of times the undertaker from Alford has got our jobs.”

“Business!” cried Sylvia, in horror.

“I can't help it if you do look at it that way,” Flora replied, and now she was almost defiant. “Our business is to get our living out of folks' dying. There's no use mincing matters. It's our business, just as working in a shoe-shop is your husband's business. Folks have to have shoes and walk when they're alive, and be laid out nice and buried when they're dead. Our business has been poor. Either Dr. Wallace gives awful strong medicine or East Westland is too healthy. We haven't earned but precious little lately, and I need a whole black silk dress and they don't.”

Sylvia eyed her in withering scorn. “Need or not,” said she, “the one that owns this back breadth is going to have it. I rather think she ain't going to be laid away without a back breadth to her dress.”

With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the parlor. She closed the door behind her. When she came out a few minutes later she was pale but triumphant. “There,” said she, “it's back with her, and I've got just this much to say, and no more, Flora Barnes. When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you've got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel the Ladies' Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next week, and don't you ever touch a back breadth again, or I'll tell it right and left, and you'll see how much business you'll have left here, I don't care how sickly it gets.”

“If father would—only have joined the trust I never would have thought of such a thing, anyway,” muttered Flora. She was vanquished.

“You do it, Flora Barnes.”

“Yes, I will. Don't speak so, Mrs. Whitman.”

“You had better.”

The undertaker and his son-in-law and Henry had remained quite silent. Now they moved toward the door, and Flora followed, red and perspiring. Sylvia heard her say something to her father about the trust on the way to the gate, between the tall borders of box, and heard Martin's surly growl in response.

“Laying it onto the trust,” Sylvia said to Henry—“such an awful thing as that!”

Henry assented. He looked aghast at the whole affair. He seemed to catch a glimpse of dreadful depths of feminity which daunted his masculine mind. “To think of women caring enough about dress to do such a thing as that!” he said to himself. He glanced at Sylvia, and she, as a woman, seemed entirely beyond his comprehension.

The whole great house was sweet with flowers. Neighbors had sent the early spring flowers from their door-yards, and Henry and Sylvia had bought a magnificent wreath of white roses and carnations and smilax. They had ordered it from a florist in Alford, and it seemed to them something stupendous—as if in some way it must please even the dead woman herself to have her casket so graced.

“When folks know, they won't think we didn't do all we could,” Sylvia whispered to Henry, significantly. He nodded. Both were very busy, even with assistance from the neighbors, and a woman who worked out by the day, in preparing the house for the funeral. Everything had to be swept and cleaned and dusted.

When the hour came, and the people began to gather, the house was veritably set in order and burnished. Sylvia, in the parlor with the chief mourners, glanced about, and eyed the smooth lap of her new black gown with a certain complacency which she could not control. After the funeral was over, and the distant relatives and neighbors who had assisted had eaten a cold supper and departed, and she and Henry were alone in the great house, she said, and he agreed, that everything had gone off beautifully. “Just as she would have wished it if she could have been here and ordered it herself,” said Sylvia.

They were both hesitating whether to remain in the house that night or go home. Finally they went home. There was an awe and strangeness over them; besides, they began to wonder if people might not think it odd for them to stay there before the will was read, since they could not be supposed to know it all belonged to them.

It was about two weeks before they were regularly established in the great house, and Horace Allen, the high-school teacher, was expected the next day but one. Henry had pottered about the place, and attended to some ploughing on the famous White grass-land, which was supposed to produce more hay than any piece of land of its size in the county. Henry had been fired with ambition to produce more than ever before, but that day his spirit had seemed to fail him. He sat about gloomily all the afternoon; then he went down for the evening mail, and brought home no letters, but the local paper. Sylvia was preparing supper in the large, clean kitchen. She had been looking over her new treasures all day, and she was radiant. She chattered to her husband like a school-girl.

“Oh, Henry,” said she, “you don't know what we've got! I never dreamed poor Abrahama had such beautiful things. I have been up in the garret looking over things, and there's one chest up there packed with the most elegant clothes. I never saw such dresses in my life.”

Henry looked at his wife with eyes which loved her face, yet saw it as it was, elderly and plain, with all its youthful bloom faded.

“I don't suppose there is anything that will suit you to have made over,” he said. “I suppose they are dresses she had when she was young.”

Sylvia colored. She tossed her head and threw back her round shoulders. Feminine vanity dies hard; perhaps it never dies at all.

“I don't know,” she said, defiantly. “Three are colors I used to wear. I have had to wear black of late years, because it was more economical, but you know how much I used to wear pink. It was real becoming to me.”

Henry continued to regard his wife's face with perfect love and a perfect cognizance of facts. “You couldn't wear it now,” he said.

“I don't know,” retorted Sylvia. “I dare say I don't look now as if I could. I have been working hard all day, and my hair is all out of crimp. I ain't so sure but if I did up my hair nice, and wasn't all tuckered out, that I couldn't wear a pink silk dress that's there if I tone it down with black.”

“I don't believe you would feel that you could go to meeting dressed in pink silk at your time of life,” said Henry.

“Lots of women older than I be wear bright colors,” retorted Sylvia, “in places where they are dressy. You don't know anything about dress, Henry.”

“I suppose I don't,” replied Henry, indifferently.

“I think that pink silk would be perfectly suitable and real becoming if I crimped my hair and had a black lace bonnet to wear with it.”

“I dare say.”

Henry took his place at the supper-table. It was set in the kitchen. Sylvia was saving herself all the steps possible until Horace Allen returned.

Henry did not seem to have much appetite that night. His face was overcast. Along with his scarcely confessed exultation over his good-fortune he was conscious of an odd indignation. For years he had cherished a sense of injury at his treatment at the hands of Providence; now he felt like a child who, pushing hard against opposition to his desires, has that opposition suddenly removed, and tumbles over backward. Henry had an odd sensation of having ignominiously tumbled over backward, and he missed, with ridiculous rancor, his sense of injury which he had cherished for so many years. After kicking against the pricks for so long, he had come to feel a certain self-righteous pleasure in it which he was now forced to forego.

Sylvia regarded her husband uneasily. Her state of mind had formerly been the female complement of his, but the sense of possession swerved her more easily. “What on earth ails you, Henry Whitman?” she said. “You look awful down-in-the-mouth. Only to think of our having enough to be comfortable for life. I should think you'd be real thankful and pleased.”

“I don't know whether I'm thankful and pleased or not,” rejoined Henry, morosely.

“Why, Henry Whitman!”

“If it had only come earlier, when we had time and strength to enjoy it,” said Henry, with sudden relish. He felt that he had discovered a new and legitimate ground of injury which might console him for the loss of the old.

“We may live a good many years to enjoy it now,” said Sylvia.

“I sha'n't; maybe you will,” returned Henry, with malignant joy.

Sylvia regarded him with swift anxiety. “Why, Henry, don't you feel well?” she gasped.

“No, I don't, and I haven't for some time.”

“Oh, Henry, and you never told me! What is the matter? Hadn't you better see the doctor?”

“Doctor!” retorted Henry, scornfully.

“Maybe he could give you something to help you. Whereabouts do you feel bad, Henry?”

“All over,” replied Henry, comprehensively, and he smiled like a satirical martyr.

“All over?”

“Yes, all over—body and soul and spirit. I know just as well as any doctor can tell me that I haven't many years to enjoy anything. When a man has worked as long as I have in a shoe-shop, and worried as much and as long as I have, good-luck finds him with his earthworks about worn out and his wings hitched on.”

“Oh, Henry, maybe Dr. Wallace—”

“Maybe he can unhitch the wings?” inquired Henry, with grotesque irony. “No, Sylvia, no doctor living can give medicine strong enough to cure a man of a lifetime of worry.”

“But the worry's all over now, Henry.”

“What the worry's done ain't over.”

Sylvia began whimpering softly. “Oh, Henry, if you talk that way it will take away all my comfort! What do you suppose the property would mean to me without you?”

Then Henry felt ashamed. “Lord, don't worry,” he said, roughly. “A man can't say anything to you without upsetting you. I can't tell how long I'll live. Sometimes a man lives through everything. All I meant was, sometimes when good-luck comes to a man it comes so darned late it might just as well not come at all.”

“Henry, you don't mean to be wicked and ungrateful?”

“If I am I can't help it. I ain't a hypocrite, anyway. We've got some good-fortune, and I'm glad of it, but I'd been enough sight gladder if it had come sooner, before bad fortune had taken away my rightful taste for it.”

“You won't have to work in the shop any longer, Henry.”

“I don't know whether I shall or not. What in creation do you suppose I'm going to do all day—sit still and suck my thumbs?”

“You can work around the place.”

“Of course I can; but there'll be lots of time when there won't be any work to be done—then what? To tell you the truth of it, Sylvia, I've had my nose held to the grindstone so long I don't know as it's in me to keep away from it and live, now.”

Henry had not been at work since Abrahama White's death. He had been often in Sidney Meeks's office; only Sidney Meeks saw through Henry Whitman. One day he laughed in his face, as the two men sat in his office, and Henry had been complaining of the lateness of his good-fortune.

“If your property has come too late, Henry,” said he, “what's the use in keeping it? What's the sense of keeping property that only aggravates you because it didn't come in your time instead of the Lord's? I'll draw up a deed of gift on the spot, and Sylvia can sign it when you go home, and you can give the whole biling thing to foreign missions. The Lord knows there's no need for any mortal man to keep anything he doesn't want—unless it's taxes, or a quick consumption, or a wife and children. And as for those last, there doesn't seem to be much need of that lately. I have never seen the time since I came into the world when it was quite so hard to get things, or quite so easy to get rid of them, as it is now. Say the word, Henry, and I'll draw up the deed of gift.”

Henry looked confused. His eyes fell before the lawyer's sarcastic glance. “You are talking tomfool nonsense,” he said, scowling. “The property isn't mine; it's my wife's.”

“Sylvia never crossed you in anything. She'd give it up fast enough if she got it through her head how downright miserable it was making you,” returned the lawyer, maliciously. Then Sidney relented. There was something pathetic, even tragic, about Henry Whitman's sheer inability to enjoy as he might once have done the good things of life, and his desperate clutch of them in flat contradiction to his words. “Let's drop it,” said the lawyer. “I'm glad you have the property and can have a little ease, even if it doesn't mean to you what it once would. Let's have a glass of that grape wine.”

Sidney Meeks had his own small amusement in the world. He was one of those who cannot exist without one, and in lieu of anything else he had turned early in life toward making wines from many things which his native soil produced. He had become reasonably sure, at an early age, that he should achieve no great success in his profession. Indeed, he was lazily conscious that he had no fierce ambition to do so. Sidney Meeks was not an ambitious man in large matters. But he had taken immense comfort in toiling in a little vineyard behind his house, and also in making curious wines and cordials from many unusual ingredients. Sidney had stored in his cellar wines from elder flowers, from elderberries, from daisies, from rhubarb, from clover, and currants, and many other fruits and flowers, besides grapes. He was wont to dispense these curious brews to his callers with great pride. But he took especial pride in a grape wine which he had made from selected grapes thirty years ago. This wine had a peculiar bouquet due to something which Sidney had added to the grape-juice, the secret of which he would never divulge.

It was some of this golden wine which Sidney now produced. Henry drank two glasses, and the tense muscles around his mouth relaxed. Sidney smiled. “Don't know what gives it that scent and taste, do you?” asked Sidney. “Well, I know. It's simple enough, but nobody except Sidney Meeks has ever found it out. I tell you, Henry, if a man hasn't set the river on fire, realized his youthful dreams, and all that, it is something to have found out something that nobody else has, no matter how little it is, if you have got nerve enough to keep it to yourself.”

Henry fairly laughed. His long, hollow cheeks were slightly flushed. When he got home that night he looked pleasantly at Sylvia, preparing supper. But Sylvia did not look as radiant as she had done since her good-fortune. She said nothing ailed her, in response to his inquiry as to whether she felt well or not, but she continued gloomy and taciturn, which was most unusual with her, especially of late.

“What in the world is the matter with you, Sylvia?” Henry asked. The influence of Sidney Meeks's wine had not yet departed from him. His cheeks were still flushed, his eyes brilliant.

Then Sylvia roused herself. “Nothing is the matter,” she replied, irritably, and immediately she became so gay that had Henry himself been in his usual mood he would have been as much astonished as by her depression. Sylvia began talking and laughing, relating long stories of new discoveries which she had made in the house, planning for Horace Allen's return.

“He's going to have that big southwest room and the little one out of it,” Sylvia said. “To-morrow you must get the bed moved into the little one, and I'll get the big room fixed up for a study. He'll be tickled to pieces. There's beautiful furniture in the room now. I suppose he'll think it's beautiful. It's terrible old-fashioned. I'd rather have a nice new set of bird's-eye maple to my taste, and a brass bedstead, but I know he'll like this better. It's solid old mahogany.”

“Yes, he'll be sure to like it,” assented Henry.

After supper, although Sylvia did not relapse into her taciturn mood, Henry went and sat by himself on the square colonial porch on the west side of the house. He sat gazing at the sky and the broad acres of grass-land. Presently he heard feminine voices in the house, and knew that two of the neighbors, Mrs. Jim Jones and Mrs. Sam Elliot, had called to see Sylvia. He resolved that he would stay where he was until they were gone. He loved Sylvia, but women in the aggregate disturbed and irritated him; and for him three women were sufficient to constitute an aggregate.

Henry sat on the fine old porch with its symmetrical pillars. He had an arm-chair which he tilted back against the house wall, and he was exceedingly comfortable. The air was neither warm nor cold. There was a clear red in the west and only one rose-tinged cloud the shape of a bird's wing. He could hear the sunset calls of birds and the laughter of children. Once a cow lowed. A moist sense of growing things, the breath of spring, came into his nostrils. Henry realized that he was very happy. He realized for the first time, with peaceful content, not with joy so turbulent that it was painful and rebellious, that he and his wife owned this grand old house and all those fair acres. He was filled with that great peace of possession which causes a man to feel that he is safe from the ills of life. Henry felt fenced in and guarded. Then suddenly the sense of possession upon earth filled his whole soul with the hope of possession after death. Henry felt, for the first time in his life, as if he had a firm standing-ground for faith. For the first time he looked at the sunset sky, he listened to the birds and children, he smelled the perfume of the earth, and there was no bitterness in his soul. He smiled a smile of utter peace which harmonized with it all, and the conviction of endless happiness and a hereafter seemed to expand all his consciousness.