Of Time and the River (94 page)

“SIMPLY swell . . . Gosh!” he whispered admiringly. “What a wit she’s got! It’s a swell story,” he whispered.

“By the way, Ida,” Mr. Joel growled, tugging at his short and grizzled moustache, “how is Frank? Have you been over to see them, lately?”

“Yes, Father,” she answered, “we drove over last Tuesday and spent the evening with them. . . . He looks very well,” she added, in answer to his question, “but, of COURSE,” she said decisively, “he’s NEVER going to be any better—they all say as much—”

“Hm,” old Mr. Joel growled, tugged reflectively at his short and grizzled moustache for a moment longer, and then said: “Has he been taking any part in the campaign this summer?”

“Very little,” she answered—“of course, the man has gone through hell these last few years—he’s suffered agonies! He seems a little better now, but”—her voice rose again on its tone of booming finality as she shook her head—“he’ll never get back the use of his legs again—the man is a PERMANENT cripple,” she said positively—“there’s no getting around it—and he himself is reconciled to it.”

“Hm,” growled old Mr. Joel again, as he tugged at his short moustache—“Pity! Nice fellow, Frank! Always liked him! . . . A little on the flashy order, maybe—like all his family . . . too easy-going, too agreeable . . . but great ability! . . . Pity!”

“Yes, isn’t it!” Joel whispered with soft eager sympathy. “And, Grandfather,” he went on with an eager enthusiasm, “—his charm is SIMPLY stupendous! . . . I’ve never known anything like it! . . . The moment that he speaks to you he makes you his friend for ever— and he KNOWS so much—he has such interesting things to say— really, the amount he knows is SIMPLY stupendous!”

“Hm, yes,” old Mr. Joel agreed with a consenting growl, as he tugged thoughtfully at his grizzled grey moustache, “—but a little superficial, too. . . . The whole lot is like that . . . go hell- for-leather at everything for three weeks at a time—and then forget it. . . . Still,” he muttered, “. . . an able fellow—very able. . . . Pity this thing had to happen to him just at the start of his career.”

“Still, Father,” Mrs. Pierce put in, “—don’t you think he’d gone about as far as he was going when this thing hit him? . . . I mean, of course, he IS a charming person—everyone agrees on that. I never knew a man with more native charm than Frank—But for all his charm, don’t you think there’s something rather weak in his character? . . . Do you think he would have had the stamina and determination to go much further if this disease hadn’t forced him to retire?”

“Um,” Mr. Joel growled, as he tugged thoughtfully at his short cropped moustache. “. . . Hard to say. . . . Hard to tell what would have happened to him. . . . A little soft, perhaps, but great ability . . . great charm . . . and great opportunists, everyone of them. . . . Have instinctive genius for seizing on the moment when it comes. . . . Never know what’s going to happen to a man like that—”

“Well,” said Mrs. Pierce, politely, but with an accent of conviction—“he might have kept on going—but I think he was through—that he’d gone as far as he could—I don’t think he could have stood the gaff—I don’t believe he had it in him.”

“Um,” Mr. Joel growled, “perhaps you’re right. . . . But great pity just the same. . . . Always liked Frank. . . . Very able fellow—”

The conversation proceeded in these channels for some time, the guests discussing politics, ambassadorships, using the names of the great and celebrated people of the earth with the casual and familiar intimacy of people talking about lifelong friends whom they had last seen at dinner Tuesday evening. It was the “inside” of the great world of wealth and fame and fashion—the world that the youth had read and heard about all his life—but that he had thought about, had visioned, as Olympus, mantled in celestial clouds, and for ever remote from the intruding gaze of common men. Now, to hear these great names, these celestial personages, bandied about on the tip of the tongue just as familiarly as one spoke of one’s own friends—to hear these people speak of the habits, the health, the conversation, and the personal home-life of this august parliament in just the same way that people spoke of their friends, acquaintances and familiars the whole world over, gave the youth a sense of living in a dream, of hearing incredible things—things incredible because of their very casual familiarity—of being the witness of an incredible event.

In this way, the meal drew to its close: Mrs. Pierce and her step- mother managed to avoid further friction, although once it threatened, when Mrs. Pierce, observing the retreating figure of one of the maid-servants—a robust and plain-featured countrywoman of middle age—noticed from the cropped and unnaturally white texture of her neck and skull that her hair had been cut, “bobbed” in the fashion that was to grow so popular and that was just then coming into style, and turned and questioned her step-mother about it:

“What has happened to that woman’s hair, Mother?” she said. “What did she do to it?”

“Why,” cried Mrs. Joel eagerly, beginning to beam and dimple around at her guests with an air of delighted satisfaction—“I had it cut off.”

“YOU had it cut off?” cried Mrs. Pierce in an astounded tone.

“Why, yes, my dear,” chirped Mrs. Joel eagerly, “I sent all the girls into the village one morning last week and had the barber cut their hair.”

“WHAT!” Mrs. Pierce boomed out in an astounded tone, and then sank back against her chair, and for a moment returned her son’s stare incredulously, “you mean you herded all these girls together and WHACKED their hair off at one stroke?”

“Why, of course, my dear,” said Mrs. Joel eagerly, in a rather excited and disturbed tone, “—or rather, I told them that they’d have to do it—that that was what I wanted.”

“What YOU wanted?” Mrs. Pierce boomed out in the same astounded and incredulous tone.

“Why, yes”—Mrs. Joel rushed on eagerly, excitedly, taking the whole table in now with a look of beaming explanation. “—You see, I had the whole house done over this spring—redecorated—I told the decorator the EFFECT I wanted,” she said gushingly—“I told him everything must be done for—for—LIGHTNESS!” she said triumphantly, “—COOLNESS! . . . to do everything in light cool colours . . . get THAT effect. . . . So last week,” she went on happily, “when we had that spell of FRIGHTFUL hot weather, I noticed suddenly how—how HOT—and disagreeable all the girls looked with their long hair—how—how OUT OF PLACE,” she said triumphantly, “they looked in this new scheme of things. . . . Ugh,” she shuddered with a little gesture of discomfort and distaste, “—the very SIGHT of them made me uncomfortable—I couldn’t BEAR them! So all of a sudden it occurred to me how nice it would be—how much it would improve the—the—the general ATMOSPHERE of the whole house if I made them bob their hair. . . . So,” she concluded, beaming around at everyone with dimpled satisfaction—“that’s how I came to do it—I called them all together one morning last week—Friday, I think it was—and told them what I wanted—and then sent them all into the village to get it done.”

There was a moment’s pause while Mrs. Joel beamed at her guests with a dimpled smile of triumphant finality that seemed to say— “There! Behold my work and marvel at it! That is the way the thing was done.” Her obvious satisfaction was suddenly disturbed, however, by Mrs. Pierce, who, after staring at her in astounded silence for a moment, boomed out incredulously:

“MOTHER! You KNOW you didn’t do a thing like THAT!”

“But—but, of course I did it, Ida,” Mrs. Joel returned in a surprised and nettled tone of voice—“That’s what I’m telling you. . . . What’s the matter with it? . . . Don’t you think the girls look nice?”

“I—think,” said Mrs. Pierce slowly, after a moment’s stunned reflection—“I—think—that—is—the—most—preposterous—the— most—highhanded—the—most—GOD!” she cried, and throwing her head back she fairly made the room ring with her hearty, booming, and astonished laughter: “I’ve heard of Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette and the days of the Medicis—and the things they did— but I never thought I’d live to see the day their methods were adopted here in free America—Why! hah! hah! hah! hah! hah!” she fell back in her chair and fairly rocked with booming and incredulous laughter—”WHACKING the hair off those eight girls at one fell stroke because—because—” her voice choked speechlessly— “because it made you HOT to look at them . . . because—because,” her voice rose to a rich choked scream and presently she said in an almost inaudible squeak—“because she’s had the house— REDECORATED,” she panted—“Why, MOTHER!” she cried strongly at last, her shoulders shaking, and her face still red with laughter, “—the King of Siam is not in it compared to you—you make absolute tyranny look like free democracy—hah! hah! hah! hah! hah!—Strike off their heads!” cried Mrs. Pierce, “—the very SIGHT of them makes me perspire!” And leaning back again she surrendered herself to free, ringing, and whole-hearted laughter, in which everyone save Mrs. Joel joined. When the laughter had somewhat subsided, Mrs. Joel, her plump white cheeks red with open anger, cried out in a furious voice:

“I don’t agree with you! . . . I don’t agree with you at all. . . . And I must say it seems very stupid of you, Ida, to take such a childish point of view.”

“Childish!” Mrs. Pierce cried in a challenging tone, “you’re the one who’s childish! . . . If I did a thing like that to MY girls— if I for one moment thought I had a right to take such liberties as that with other people, I’d feel like a fool! . . . Why, Mother,” she cried in a strong protesting tone, “wake up! . . . What kind of a world do you live in, anyway? . . . Whatever gave you the notion that you have a right to do things like that to other people—and all because you’re fortunate enough to be able to keep servants and pay them wages. . . . Wake up! Wake up!” she cried in a tone of almost furious indignation, “—You’re not living in the Dark Ages, Mother. . . . Slavery has been abolished! . . . This is the twentieth century! . . . Why, it’s absurd!” she cried scornfully, and with two spots of angry colour in her cheeks—“the most arrogant and high-handed thing I ever heard in all my life— The whole thing’s preposterous—I only hope that no one hears about it.”

“If you feel that way about it,” Mrs. Joel began in a voice choked with fury—and at this moment Joel came to the rescue and saved what really threatened to develop into an ugly, open, painful quarrel between the two women—

“Oh, but Granny,” he whispered—“I’m sure the girls don’t mind a bit! . . . And they look MUCH nicer—and MUCH cooler—without their hair than when they had it—I’m sure they feel that way about it, too.”

“Well,” Mrs. Joel began, still very angry but somewhat placated by her grandson’s tactful intervention—“I’m glad to see that someone still has a little common sense.”

And in this way the trouble was finally smoothed out by Joel’s quick diplomacy, and the guests, eager to avert another painful scene between the two women, rose to go. And it was in this way that they departed, not without a final explosion of booming and astounded laughter from Mrs. Pierce as she walked out towards her car, a final hilarious reference to “redecoration,” and the King of Siam, and the modern prototype of Catherine the Great.

LXIV

Joel and his friend did not return immediately to the house with Joel’s mother and her other guests. Instead, leaving old Mr. Joel’s house, they turned left, and struck out for a walk through the fields and slopes and wooded country of the great estate. The day was hot, the broad fields brooded in the powerful and fragrant- clovered scent of afternoon, the woods were dense with tangled mystery, immensely still and green, yet dark incredibly, and filled with drowsy silence, brooding calm, ringing with the lovely music of unnumbered birds, alive with the swift and sudden bullet-thrum of wings, and haunted with the cool and magical incantation of their hidden waters.

It was the wild, sweet, casual, savage, and incredibly lovely earth of America, and of the wilderness, and it haunted them like legends, and pierced them like a sword, and filled them with a wild and swelling prescience of joy that was like sorrow and delight.

They toiled upward through the tangled forest-jungle of a wooded slope, and down again into the cool green-gladed secrecies of a hollow, and up through the wild still music of the woods again and out into the great rude swell of unmown fields, alive with all their brooding potency, their powerful and silent energy of the hot and fragrant earth of three o’clock, the drowsy and tremulous ululation of afternoon.

Their feet trod pathways in the hot and fragrant grasses; where they trod, a million little singing things leaped up to life, and hot dry stalks brushed crudely at their knees: the earth beneath their feet gave back a firm and unsmooth evenness, a lumpy resiliency.

Once in a field before them they saw a tree dense-leaved and burnished by hot light: the sun shone on its leaves with a naked and un-green opacity, and Joel, looking towards it, whispered thoughtfully:

“. . . Hm . . . It’s nice, that—I mean the way the light falls on it—It would be hard to paint: I’d like to come out here and try it.”

And the other assented, not, however, without a certain nameless desolation in his heart that broad and naked lights, the white and glacial opacity of brutal day aroused in him—and wanting more the wooded grove, the green-gold magic of a wooded grass, the woodland dark and thrum and tingled mystery, and the sheer sheeting silence of the hidden water.

It was a swelling, casual, nobly lavish earth, for ever haunted by a drowsy spell of time, and the unfathomed mystery of an elfin enchantment, the huge dream-sorcery of the mysterious and immortal river.

It was what he had always known it to be in his visions as a child, and he came to it with a sense of wonder and of glorious discovery, but without surprise, as one who for the first time comes into his father’s country, finding it the same as he had always known it would be, and knowing always that it would be there.

And finally the whole design of that earth, with the casual and powerful surveys of its great fields, its dense still woods of moveless silence ringing with the music of the birds, its far-off hills receding into time as haunting as a dream, and the central sorcery of its shining river—that enchanted thread which ran through all, from which all swept away, and towards which all inclined—was unutterably the language of all he had ever thought or felt or known of America: the great plantation of the earth abundant to the sustenance of mighty men, and enriching all its glamorous women with the full provender of its huge compacted sweetness, an America that was so casual and rich and limitless and free, and so haunted by dark time and magic, so aching in its joy with all the bitter briefness of our days, so young, so old, so everlasting, and so triumphantly the place of man’s good earth, his ripe fulfilment and of the most fortunate, good, and happy life that any man alive had ever known.