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The Voice of the People, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Book 4. The Man And The Times - Chapter 8 |
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_ BOOK IV. THE MAN AND THE TIMES CHAPTER VIII Miss Chris, in her hired carriage, rolled leisurely into Franklin Street, where pretty women in visiting gowns were going in and out of doorways. She leaned out and bowed smilingly several times, but she was not thinking of the gracefully dressed callers or of the houses into which they went. When Emma Carr threw her a kiss from Galt's porch, she responded amiably; but she was as blind to the affectionate gesture as to the striking beauty of the girl in her winter furs. Up the quiet street the leafless trees made a gray vista that melted into transparent mist. The sunshine stretched in pale gold bars from sidewalk to sidewalk, and overhead the sky was of a rare Italian blue. But for the frost in the air and the naked boughs, it might have been a day in April. Presently the carriage turned into Main Street, halting abruptly while a trolley car shot past. "Please be very careful," called Miss Chris nervously, gathering herself together as they stopped before a big gray house that faced a gray church on the opposite corner. A flight of stone steps ran from the doorway to a short tesselated entrance leading to the street, where two scraggy poplars still held aloft the withered skeletons of last year's tulips. The Webbs had taken the house because the box bushes in the yard reminded Eugenia of Battle Hall, while Dudley declared it to be the best breathing space he could get for the money. "We done git back, Mistis," announced the negro driver, descending from his perch, and at the same instant the door of the house flew open and Eugenia ran out, bareheaded, followed by Dudley. "I saw you from the window, Aunt Chris," she cried, "and now I want to know the meaning of this mystery. Dudley suspects you of having a lover, but I am positive that you've stolen a march on me and have been to market. What a pity I confessed to you that I couldn't tell brains from sweetbreads." "Let me get there, Eugie," said Dudley, as Miss Chris emerged with the assistance of the driver. "Take my arm, Aunt Chris, and I'll hoist you into the house before you know it." "Well, I declare," remarked Miss Chris, carefully stepping forth. "I don't know when I've had such a turn. These street car drivers have lost all their manners. If we hadn't pulled up in time, I believe he would have gone right into us. And to think that a few years ago we never got ready to go to market until the car was at the door. Betty Taylor used to call to the driver every morning to wait till she put on her bonnet--and time and again I've seen him stop because she had forgotten her list of groceries. Now, if you weren't standing right on the corner, I actually believe they'd go by without you." "That's progress, Aunt Chris," responded Dudley cheerfully. Here the driver insisted upon lending a hand, and between them they established Miss Chris before the fire in the sitting-room. "I wish you'd make Giles go out and pick up that loose paper that's scattered on the pavement," she said to Eugenia. "It looks so untidy. If I wasn't rheumatic I'd do it myself." Dudley and Eugenia seated themselves across from her. "Now where have you been, Aunt Chris?" they demanded. Miss Chris laughed softly as she took off her bonnet and gloves and gave them to Eugenia; then she unfastened her cape and passed it over. "You'll never find out that, my dears," she returned. "I'm not too old to keep a secret. Why, I've gone and lost my bag. Didn't I carry that bag with me, Eugenia?" "Of course you did," said Eugenia. "Never mind, I'll make you another." She went out to put away Miss Chris's wraps, and came back presently, laughing. "Have you found out her secret, Dudley?" she asked. "If she doesn't tell you, it will die with her." "I know better than to ask," returned Dudley good-humouredly. "That's the reason I'm her favourite. I don't ask impertinent questions, do I, Aunt Chris?" "Bless you, no," responded Miss Chris serenely, as she stretched out her feet in their cloth shoes. "You're her favourite because you happen to be a man," protested Eugenia. "She comes of a generation of man spoilers. I believe she thinks I ought to bring you your slippers in the evening--now don't you, Aunt Chris?" "My dear mother always brought them to my father," replied Miss Chris placidly. "It was her pleasure to wait on him." "And it is mine to have Dudley wait on me. But you do make an unfair difference between us, Aunt Chris. Why did you call me 'uncharitable' when I said Mrs. Gordon painted immodestly! Dudley said the same thing this morning, and you only smiled." "It was uncharitable, my dear, and besides it is too palpable to need mention--but men will be men." Eugenia frowned. "I wish you would occasionally remember that women will be women," she suggested. She wore a scarlet shirtwaist, and the glow from the fire seemed to follow her about. "I won't have Aunt Chris bullied, Eugie," declared Dudley as he rose. "Well, I'm off again. I may bring a legislator or two back to dinner. What have we got?" "The Lord knows," replied Eugenia desperately. "Our third cook this month for one thing, and Congo refuses to serve dinner in courses. He says 'dar's too much shufflin' er de dishes for too little victuals.'" Dudley laughed at her mimicry. "Oh, I suppose we'll do," he said. "By the way, don't forget to call on Mrs. Rann to-day." Miss Chris was gazing placidly into the fire. As Dudley turned with his hand on the door knob, she looked up. "I was surprised to find the Capitol so dirty," she observed regretfully. Dudley swung round breathlessly. "Well, I am--blessed!" he gasped. "So that's where you've been!" cried Eugenia. She threw herself beside Miss Chris's chair. "What did he say, Aunt Chris?" she implored. Miss Chris blushed with confusion. "Well, if I haven't let it out!" she exclaimed. "Who'd have thought I couldn't keep a secret at my age." Then she patted Eugenia's hand. "He's a good man," she said softly, "and it's all right about Bernard." "I knew it would be," said Dudley quickly. "You know, Eugie, I always told you he'd do it." But Eugenia had turned away with swimming eyes. "I must tell Lottie," she said hurriedly. "Oh, Aunt Chris, how could you keep it? To think the children are at school!" Dudley, with an afterthought, turned from the door and gave her an affectionate pat on the shoulder. "It's fine news, old girl," he said cheerfully, and Eugenia smiled at him through her tears. As he went out she followed him into the hall and slowly ascended the stairs. On the landing above she entered a room where Bernard's wife was lying on a wicker couch, cutting the pages of a magazine. "Lottie, I've good news for you," she exclaimed, "the best of news." Lottie tossed aside the magazine and raised herself on her elbow. She had a pretty, ineffectual face and a girlish figure, and, despite her faded colouring, looked almost helplessly young. Her round white hands were as weak as a child's. "I'm sure I don't know what it can be," she returned. "You look awfully well in that red waist, Eugie. I think I'll get one like it." Eugenia picked up a child's story book from the rug and laid it on the table; then she stood looking gravely down on the younger woman. "Can't you guess what it is?" she asked. Lottie looked up with a nervous blinking of her eyes. She had paled slightly and she leaned over and drew an eiderdown quilt across her knees. "It--it's not about Bernard?" she asked in a whisper. "Yes, it is about Bernard. You may go to him and bring him home. You may go to-morrow. Oh, Lottie, doesn't it make you happy?" Lottie drew the eiderdown quilt still higher. She was not looking at Eugenia, and her mouth had grown sullen. "I don't see why you send me," she said. "Why can't Jack Tucker bring him home? He's with him." "But I thought you wanted to go," returned Eugenia blankly. "I haven't seen him for six years," said Lottie, her face still turned away. "He is almost a stranger--and I am afraid of him." "Oh, Lottie, he loves you so!" "I don't know," protested Lottie. "He has been so wicked." Eugenia was looking down upon her with dismayed eyes. "Don't you love him, Lottie?" she asked. For a moment the other did not reply. Her lips trembled and her knees were shaking beneath the eiderdown quilt. Then with a slow turn of the head she looked up doggedly. "I believe I hate him," she answered. A swift flush rose to Eugenia's face, her eyes flashed angrily, she took a step forward. "And you are his wife!" she cried. But Lottie had turned at last. She flung the quilt aside and rose to her feet, her girlish figure quivering in its beribboned wrapper. There were bright pink spots in her cheeks. "Yes, I am his wife, God help me," she said. Eugenia had drawn back before the childish desperation. Lottie had never revolted before--she had thought Eugenia's thoughts and weakly lived up to Eugenia's conception of her duty. She had been meek and amiable and ineffectual; but it came to Eugenia with a shock that she had never admired her until to-day--until the hour of her rebellion. She spoke sternly--as she might have spoken to herself in a moment of dear, but dismal failure. "Hush," she commanded. "You are one of us, and you have no right to desert us. It is because you are his wife that my home is yours and your children's. I am only his sister, and I have stood by him through it all. Do you think, if his sins were twenty times as great, that I should fall away from him now?" Lottie looked at her and laughed--a little heartless laugh. "Oh, but I am not a Battle," she replied bitterly. "Battle sins are just like other people's sins to me." Then she raised her pretty, nerveless hands to her throat. "I have wanted to be free all these years," she said. "All these years when you would not let me forget Bernard Battle--when you shut me up and hid me away, and made me old when I was young. And now--just as I am beginning to be happy with my children--you tell me that I must go back to him and start afresh." Her voice grated upon Eugenia's ears, and she realised more acutely than her pity the fact that Lottie was common--hopelessly common. For an instant she forgot Bernard's greater transgressions in the wonder that a Battle should have married a woman who did not know how to behave in a crisis--who could even chant her wrongs from the housetop. At the moment this seemed to her the weightier share of the family remissness. The loyalty of the Battle wives had been as a lasting memorial to the Battle breeding--which, after all, was more invincible than the Battle virtue. She crossed to the window and stood looking out upon the winter sunshine falling on the gray church across the way. On the stone steps a negro nurse was sitting, drowsily trundling back and forth before her a beruffled baby carriage. Nearer at hand, in the yard on the left of the tesselated entrance below, a pointed magnolia tree shone evergreen beside the naked poplars, and a bevy of sparrows fluttered in and out amid the sheltering leaves. "Oh, you will never understand," wailed Lottie. She had flung herself upon the couch and was sobbing weakly. "It is so different with you and Dudley." Eugenia turned and came back. "I do understand," she returned gently, and before Lottie could raise her lowered head she left the room. She had promised Dudley that the calls should be made, and she put on her visiting gown without a thought of shirking the fulfilment of her pledge. From the day of her marriage she had zealously accepted the obligations forced upon her by Dudley's political aspirations, and Mrs. Rann became to-day simply a heavier responsibility than usual. Her world was full of Mrs. Ranns, and she braved them with dauntless spirits and triumphant humour. As she buttoned her gloves on the way downstairs she was conscious of a singularly mild recognition of the fact that the world might have been the gainer had Mrs. Rann abided unborn. But the fresh air restored her courage, and by the time she sat in Mrs. Rann's drawing-room, face to face with her hostess, she was at ease with herself and her surroundings. She gave out at once the peculiar social atmosphere of her race; she uttered her gay little nothings with an intimate air; she laughed good-humouredly at Mrs. Rann's gossip, and she begged to see photographs of Mrs. Rann's babies. It was as if she had immediately become the confidential adviser of Mrs. Rann's domestic difficulties. Mrs. Rann, herself, was little and plain and obsolete. She appeared to have been left behind in the sixties, like words that have become vulgar from disuse. She wore bracelets on her wrists, and her accent was as flat as her ideas. Before the war--and even long after--nobody had heard of the Ranns; they had arrived as suddenly as the electric lights or the trolley cars. When Miss Chris had alluded to them as "new people," and Juliet Galt had declared that she "did not call there," Dudley had thrown out an uncertain line to Eugenia. "Rann is a useful man, my dear," he had said. "He may be of great help to me," and the next day Eugenia had left her card. Where Dudley's ambitions led she cheerfully followed. "We are politicians," was her excuse to Juliet, "and we can't afford to be exclusive. Of course, with Emma Carr and yourself it is different. You may exclude half society if you please, and, in fact, you do; but Dudley and I really don't mind. He wants something, and I, you know, was born without the instinct of class." So she sat in Mrs. Rann's drawing-room and received her confidences, while Juliet and Emma Carr were gossiping across the street. "The greatest trouble I have with Mr. Rann when he comes to town," said Mrs. Rann, "is that he refuses to wear woollen socks. I don't know whether Mr. Webb wears woollen socks or not." Eugenia shook her head. "I've no doubt he would be a better and a wiser man if he did," she responded. "Then he doesn't catch cold when he puts on thin ones with his dress suit. Now Mr. Rann says woollen socks don't look well in the evening--and he takes cold every time he goes out at night. He won't even let me put red flannel in the soles of his shoes." "Then he's not the man I thought him," said Eugenia as she rose. "Do you know, the baby is so pretty I stopped her carriage. If she were mine I shouldn't let her grow up." Mrs. Rann glowed with pride, and in the depths of her shallow eyes Eugenia read a triumphant compassion. This little vulgar countrywoman, upon whom she looked so grandly down, was pitying her in her narrow heart. She flushed and turned away. "You have never had a child?" asked the little common voice. Eugenia faced her coldly. "I lost one--a week old," she replied, and she hated herself that she was proud of her seven days' motherhood. She had mourned the loss, but she had never vaunted the possession until now. As she left the house her name was called by Juliet Galt from her window across the way. "Come over, Eugie," she cried. "We've been watching you," and as Eugenia ascended the steps the door was opened and she was clasped in Emma Carr's arms. "We've shut our eyes and ground our teeth and put ourselves in your place," she said. "Oh, Eugie, she's worse than the dentist!" "I went to the dentist's first," was Eugenia's reply. She followed Miss Carr into the drawing-room and sank into the window-seat beside Juliet, who was bending over her embroidery frame. Then she laughed--a full, frank laugh. "You dear women," she said, "if you knew the lot of a politician's wife, you'd--marry a footman." "Provided he were Dudley Webb," returned Emma Carr. She seized Eugenia's hand and they smiled at each other in demonstrative intimacy. "You know, of course, that we are all in love with your husband--desperately, darkly in love--and you ought to be gray with jealousy. If I were married to the handsomest man in Virginia I'd get me to a nunnery." "That's not Eugie's way," said Juliet, snapping off her silk. "If she went, she'd drag him after." "Oh, he's just Dudley," protested Eugenia. "I'd as soon be jealous of Aunt Chris--and he's waiting at home this instant with his senators come to judgment on my dinner. If I were free, I'd spend the day with you. Juliet, but I've married into servitude." _ |
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