Time Will Darken It (17 page)

Mrs. Beach advised that the collie’s head be sent to a laboratory in Chicago for testing. When Martha King failed to convey this suggestion to the Ellises, Mrs. Beach conveyed it herself. The dog was kept under observation for a week, and when neither it nor Randolph developed symptoms of rabies, Dr. Danforth sent the dog back to the farm.

During the week of waiting, Mr. Potter got volume MUN–PAY of the encyclopædia in the study and made Nora read
aloud the article on Pasteur. He was particularly moved by the closing words of Pasteur’s oration at the founding of the Institute: “Two opposing laws seem to me now in contest. The one, a law of blood and death, opening out each day new modes of destruction, forces nations always to be ready for battle. The other, the law of peace, work, and health, whose only aim is to deliver mankind from the calamities which beset him …” When Nora had finished reading, Mr. Potter with tears in his eyes said, “Those are the words of a great man. If it weren’t for Pasteur and General Robert E. Lee, the world would be far worse off than it is today. They’re the leaders and the rest of us follow along after them and owe what we have to their wisdom and self-sacrifice.”

“But that isn’t what it means,” Nora said.

“That’s what I got out of it,” Mr. Potter said. “You can interpret it any way you please. I know that if your father were here, Austin, he would agree with me. All this talk about education—what good does it do to teach a nigger to read and write? They’re put here on earth for a definite purpose, just like the rest of us, and when you try to change that, you’re going against the Lord’s intention.”

“What Nora is trying to say——” Austin began.

“It’s all in the Bible,” Mr. Potter interrupted, “right down in black and white: ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Women and men are different and anybody who says that a woman can do the same things a man can do is talking through his hat. Woman’s place is in the home, and if only a lot of crackpots, busybodies, and old maids would stop agitating for equal rights, the vote, and all the rest of it——”

“Nora has just as much right to her opinion,” Mrs. Potter said, drawing out her crochet thread, “wrong though it may be——”

“But it isn’t a matter of opinion,” Nora cried. “It’s a matter of words, and they only mean one thing. Scientists, it says, are trying to——”

“They’ll ruin the country,” Mr. Potter said. “Mark my words. Every radical and every reformer will join hands with the suffragettes, and the first thing you know——”

Nora got up from her chair and left the room. A moment later they heard the screen door slam.

“
Now
what did I say?” Mr. Potter asked, turning helplessly to his wife.

The cigar-smoking, cigar-smelling men, simple, forthright, and forever dangerous—to themselves as well as to other people—swing from prejudice to hanging prejudice in the happy delusion that their feet are on solid ground, and any small table or delicate vase or new idea they come near stands a good chance of being knocked over. Even so (or perhaps because of the very great number of tables and vases and ideas that he had at one time or another upset) Mr. Potter waited for some reassurance from his wife, some gesture of approval.

“I expect she’s gone over to the Beaches’,” Mrs. Potter said; and then, pursuing the one comparison that never lost its charm for her, “At home Nora always goes to see Miss Washburn when she wants to let off steam. Miss Washburn was one of her teachers at the seminary. She doesn’t think I’ve been all that I should have been to Nora. She told someone that, and I haven’t spoken to her since. It’s easy for people who——This fall, she’s leaving Mississippi for good. She’s going East to teach at some girls’ college and she wanted to take Nora with her.”

“If I had my way she’d ride out of town on a rail,” Mr. Potter said bitterly. “Anyone who tries to come between children and their parents, and especially a dried-up old maid that no man ever looked twice at——”

“Mr. Potter doesn’t believe in education for women,” Mrs. Potter interrupted him. “And I must say, I don’t either. At least, not very much. There are other things they can do, I always say. Some day the right man will come along and Nora
will marry and have a home and children of her own and then she’ll come to her father and thank him for knowing what was best. But it was a terrible disappointment to her. She’s a great reader, you know. Just now, she doesn’t know what she wants to make of her life. She’s all mixed up, and try as I may, I can’t seem to help her.”

Randolph touched the edge of his bandage lightly with his finger.

“She just has to work it out for herself,” Mrs. Potter said. “Does your wound bother you?”

“I think it’s draining,” Randolph said.

“Well, stop touching it,” Mrs. Potter said. “You’ve been very brave, but if you don’t stop worrying it——”

Having brought the conversation around to where he and not Nora was the centre of attention, Randolph let his bandage alone.

When he grew tired of lying still, he usually got up and went out to the kitchen, and Martha King, coming into the pantry on some errand, would hear derisive laughter that stopped abruptly as she pushed open the swinging door. Rachel had washed and ironed the bloodstained shirt so to Randolph’s satisfaction that he wouldn’t let Martha King send his shirts to Mrs. Coffey with the family washing. Rachel took them home and did them late at night. He wouldn’t allow his mother to heat the water for the hot applications Dr. Seymour had ordered; only Rachel, his favourite, could do this. No matter how late Randolph came down to breakfast, there was a place set for him, at the dining-room table, and usually some mark of favour—fried chicken livers, a lamb kidney or a chop—that hadn’t been served to the others. Under his patronage, Rachel’s position in the household rose considerably. The Mississippi people plied her with compliments on her cooking and when they got into an argument among themselves, asked her to support and corroborate their opinions. “Isn’t that so, Rachel?” they would ask, and
Rachel would answer, “That’s right, Mr. Potter. You tell them!” And then, “Miss Nora, that’s a true fact what you just said,” and retire to the kitchen leaving them both convinced that she was on their side.

The conversations between Randolph and Rachel in the kitchen were not all a matter of sly joking. There were sometimes intimate revelations, things Randolph told her about himself, about the members of his family, that he would not have told any white person. Rachel got so she listened continually for his step, coming through the pantry towards the kitchen, and her manner towards Mrs. Potter was not always wholly respectful. Randolph had become her child, as he had been long ago in the past the child of some other black woman who watched over him in the daytime, put him to bed at night, sang to him, told him stories, and was there always, the eternal audience for anything he had to say.

“The trouble with you,” Rachel said to him one day, “is you want everything. And you don’t want to do no work for it.”

“That’s right,” Randolph said nodding. “There’s a crippled boy at home—Griswold, his name is—had infantile paralysis when he was small and the other boys used to pick on him a lot. I don’t think he ever had a friend till I came along and was nice to him. Griswold’s very smart. He notices everything, especially people’s weak points, and that way, when the time comes, he gets what he wants. The other day …”

Most people, when they are describing a friend or telling a story, make the mistake of editing, of leaving things out. Fearing that their audience will grow restless, they rush ahead to the point, get there too soon, have to go back and explain, and in the end, the quality of experience is not conveyed. Randolph was never in a hurry, never in doubt about whether what he had to say would interest Rachel. By the time he had finished, she had a very clear idea in her mind of the crippled boy who knew how to wait for what he wanted, and she also knew one more thing about Randolph Potter.

Turning from the sink, she asked out loud a question that had been in the back of her mind for days: “What you want to go and hurt that dog for?”

“I didn’t hurt it,” Randolph said, and then when Rachel rolled her eyes sceptically, “I tell you I didn’t!”

“You was just petting it and it bit you?”

“Ummm,” he said. Their eyes met and he smiled slowly. “I don’t really know what happened. I was tired of playing with her and she kept jumping on me and asking for more so I kicked her.”

He looked at Rachel to see if she were shocked, but her face revealed nothing whatever. If she had been shocked, it would have been all right. Or if she had been sufficiently under his spell that she had laughed, but all she did was look at him thoughtfully.

“I kicked her in the head,” he said. “And if she’d been my dog and bit me like that, I’d have taken a gun and shot her. You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I believe you,” Rachel said. “I reckon that’s what you’d of done, all right.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Randolph said, and got up from the stool and left her. From that day on, he never came into the kitchen, never looked at Rachel when she was passing platters of food around the table, never spoke to her when they met on the back stairs.

2

Nora Potter tried again and again to make friends with Martha King, and each time the effort spent itself without accomplishing any more than waves accomplish when they wash over rock. Sympathy is almost never to be had by asking. It comes of itself or not at all. And those who are engaged
in work of great moment, such as fomenting conspiracy or carrying a child inside them, do not really have it to offer.

Martha would sit and listen to Mrs. Potter (who wanted nothing except to be a decent, pleasant, untroublesome guest) by the hour. But when she found herself alone with Nora, she usually got up after a minute or two and went to look at the loaf of nutbread baking in the oven or to count the sheets that had come back from the wash. Defeated time after time by these tactics and with no idea why they were being used against her, Nora would go across the side yard to the Beaches, who were always delighted when she came. Mrs. Beach put down her volume of aristocratic memoirs, the girls left the piano, and they all settled down on the porch or in the shade of a full-grown mulberry tree in the back yard.

The Beach girls said very little, and the few remarks they made were generally corrected or cut short by their mother, who, like Mrs. Potter, had a long continued story to tell. “The sky this morning reminds me of Florence,” she would begin, while with one hand she made sure that her cameo breastpin had not come undone. “The same deep blue. You’d love Florence, Nora. I wish we could all go there together. Perhaps we will, some day. Such a beautiful city …” Or, “I’ll never forget my first glimpse of Venice. We arrived on a Saturday night and left the railway station in a gondola and found ourselves on the Grand Canal …”

No one coming into the Beaches’ house could have remained unaware of the fact that Mrs. Beach had travelled. In every room and on every wall there was some testimony to this wonderful advantage which she had had over nearly everyone else in Draperville. A huge photograph of the Colosseum hung in the front hall. The Bridge of Sighs and St. Mark’s Square were represented, one in colour, one in black and white, in the living-room. In the dining-room the Beaches ate with the Cumaean Sibyl and Raphael’s Holy Family looking on.

The greatest concentration of
objets d’art
was in the parlour
where there was a Louis XV glass-and-gilt cabinet full of curios—ornamental scissors from Germany, imitation tanagra figurines, Bohemian glass, Dresden china, miniature silver souvenir albums of Mont St. Michel and the châteaux country, wood-carvings from the Black Forest, a tiny spy-glass that offered a microscopic view of the façade of Cologne Cathedral, and enough other treasures to occupy the eyes and mind of a child for hours. Over the piano a row of familiar heads—Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Schumann—testified to the importance and value of great music, and did what they could to make up for the fact that the piano was not a Steinway.

Nora Potter soon felt so at home at the Beaches’ that to knock or pull the front-door chime when she came to see them would have seemed an act of impoliteness. She walked in one morning and wandered through the house until she found Lucy in the kitchen, fixing a tray.