Up a Road Slowly

by Irene Hunt

  I am annoyed with you, my sweet. I do not like stepping out of character even for a little niece who kisses me good night and, by that token, makes a vapid old fool of me. But I’ll be for a few minutes your good, gray uncle, full of wisdom. I’ll say to my sad-faced little Julie: Guilt feelings will do nothing for either you or the Kilpin child. But your compassion as you grow into womanhood may well become immortality for the girl you call “Aggie.”

  Uncle Haskell

  I read his letter several times and then secreted it in the little leather box where I hid other treasures. Hopefully, I half expected to find a changed Uncle Haskell that morning, a man who had given up lying and drinking and had awakened to his responsibilities to society. But he hadn’t changed; he did not show by a single glance that he remembered the note he had written to me.

  5

  Uncle Haskell had mentioned the name of Jonathan Eltwing once or twice; Mrs. Peters had also spoken of him in a mysterious way as if she didn’t want Aunt Cordelia to overhear her. Once I had grown bold enough to say quite casually, “Do you know a man named Jonathan Eltwing, Aunt Cordelia?”

  She hadn’t blinked an eye. She said very smoothly, “I knew him a number of years ago, Julia. Why do you ask?”

  I was embarrassed then and ill at ease. “I just wondered,” I said.

  “Then it was an idle question, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered and resolved never to get myself out on such a limb again.

  But when I went to help Laura out the fall little Julie was born, I remembered to ask her what she knew about this character, Jonathan Eltwing. Mother had long ago told Laura all about the man who, she suspected, had once been Aunt Cordelia’s sweetheart. I listened, agog with interest, as Laura repeated the story to me.

  Jonathan Eltwing was about Aunt Cordelia’s age, which meant that he must have been eighteen the fall she commenced teaching in the country school. She was still teaching in the same school thirty-five years later, when Chris and I with all the others sat at the wooden desks and watched her firm hand write out instructions and examples on the blackboard.

  He had come to school that fall, this awkward, earnest boy who towered above the young teacher, and he confided in her the hope that someday he might be able to go to college, although the hope was dim for he had neither money nor the prerequisite high school training. The father of the Eltwing children had little use for higher learning, and was unwilling either to pay for their schooling or to allow himself to be deprived of the benefits of their labor on his farm. However, he had made one foolish mistake: he had married a woman who had a hunger for learning, and every one of their six children was born with her intelligence and was later stimulated by her to seek an education. Jonathan was the first; encouraged by his mother and Aunt Cordelia, he broke with his father and started the climb which was to lead to the finest universities of the country and to the highest academic honors. The other five, one by one, followed him.

  Aunt Cordelia had been immediately fired by anger against the father and sympathy for the son. She had family problems of her own, even at eighteen, but she turned them aside that winter and gave herself up fully to the project of getting Jonathan Eltwing ready for his college entrance examinations.

  She had only a high school education herself, but she had been an excellent student, and she was a natural teacher. She carried loads of her own books to school, and she and young Eltwing mapped out a course of study that would have overwhelmed two youngsters of less enthusiasm and determination.

  It was soon apparent to Aunt Cordelia that she had excellent material with which to work. Jonathan Eltwing had high intelligence and a motivation that drove him to attack with fury the piles of work she laid out for him. She was delighted when he soon overtook her in mathematics and the natural sciences; she guided his reading in history, in American and English literature, and in spite of an occasional groan from him, she made him learn a little Latin and considerable English grammar and rhetoric.

  They worked together early of a morning before school, and then during the day while Aunt Cordelia taught younger pupils, Jonathan Eltwing sat at a desk in the back of the room and labored at the pile of work his young teacher had assigned to him. In the late afternoon, following the dismissal of the other children, they worked again, sometimes until the winter twilight drove them home.

  Of course, tongues began to wag in hopeful suspicion that youthful immorality was afoot in the small schoolhouse, and one evening Aunt Cordelia had word that the directors of the school planned to visit her the following morning.

  My grandfather seems to have had perfect confidence in his daughter and pride in what she was doing for Jonathan Eltwing. Grim, tight-lipped old Amos Bishop went with Aunt Cordelia to school that morning, and while she and Jonathan stood on either side of him, gave the school fathers a stern dressing-down. However, after that scene, Aunt Cordelia always kept my mother, a child of eight or ten, with her after school hours. Laura told me the story of how Mother would sit reading in the back of the room from four until five or later, a patient little chaperone guarding the good name of her sister.

  Whether the two had fallen in love that winter, no one ever quite knew. Laura said that Mother thought they did. She remembered looks that passed between them, and clasped hands that were quickly unclasped; she remembered too, that on the night before Jonathan left for college she had seen two shadowy figures standing close together in the dusky woods beyond her window. She remembered that many letters came for a while, that finally they came much more rarely, that Aunt Cordelia became less pretty, with a tightened mouth and a stiffer air. She never had another “beau” and by the time she was twenty, people were speaking of her as “the old-maid school teacher.”

  Jonathan Eltwing took advanced degrees, performed brilliantly in the various universities he attended, became an authority on Russian literature, and married a delicate girl with large, brilliant eyes and a passion for music.

  Through the years he had never returned to the community until the autumn which I remember. His mother had joined him as soon as he was able to support her; the father had died, never seeing or even asking about his oldest son until a few days before his death when he had inquired of a neighbor if the man knew what “this Phi Beta Kappa business was all about.” He had read in the local paper that it was something that had happened to Jonathan.

  One day in the fall of my twelfth year, Father called Aunt Cordelia, and I remember that her face flushed and then grew pale as she stood at the old-fashioned telephone anchored against the dining room wall. I heard her say, “Why, of course, Adam; I’d like very much to see Jonathan again and to meet Mrs. Eltwing. Why don’t you bring them out Saturday, say, at three in the afternoon?”

  She was quite calm and matter-of-fact when she turned away from the telephone. “Your father tells me that Dr. Jonathan Eltwing is buying the old Meridan place and is moving out here for the winter while he finishes his latest book.” She corrected the height of a window shade and ran her finger across the sill at which gesture I trembled, but she smiled at me in a very friendly way. “You really are becoming very careful, Julia; your dusting is much more thorough than it used to be.”

  I decided to try once again. “Who is Dr. Jonathan Eltwing, Aunt Cordelia?” I asked, betting to myself that she would never get into the romantic angle involving the distinguished professor.

  She didn’t. She raised her brows ever so slightly and adjusted another shade. “He is a noted lecturer and writer,” she said, “an authority on nineteenth-century Russian literature. I knew him rather well when we were young; it will be very nice to see him again—and his wife, of course.” She hesitated, frowning thoughtfully. “I have heard that Mrs. Eltwing’s mind is a little deranged; if she should seem—different, we must be very tactful.”

  We commenced right away to get the house in order for the Eltwing visit. “There will be a lot to do, Julia; I think we had better get Mrs. Peters to help us if she has
the time.” She stroked her chin in concentration. “I wonder if we should serve tea; Mrs. Eltwing is English, I believe. No, I think in spite of that, we’ll serve coffee. Jonathan used to enjoy coffee and a special kind of cinnamon roll my mother made for him. Mamma was very fond of Jonathan until he outshone—someone very dear to her.”

  Uncle Haskell, I thought. Grandmother’s fair-haired darling. I guessed that there was no love lost between Jonathan Eltwing and Uncle Haskell.

  There was a pleasurable excitement in the air that week as we made our preparations. My grandmother’s china had to be taken from the closet and each piece washed carefully and wiped. I was not allowed to breathe upon it, much less to touch it and so, with proper humility, I helped Mrs. Peters wax floors and wash windows, tasks in which my lack of coordination could do no particular damage. I didn’t mind at all since I enjoyed working with Mrs. Peters; she was a chatty little woman, and a very good source of information regarding Aunt Cordelia and Jonathan Eltwing.

  “Oh, they were in love, all right. She herself once admitted as much to me when we were young together,” Mrs. Peters told me in a low voice as we washed the outside of the living room windows and kept on the lookout for any sudden appearance of Aunt Cordelia. “But after he left, the months went by, and she would have to say no to Jonathan’s urging that she come to him—there was always sickness or debt or another worn-out old woman to be cared for. One couldn’t blame Jonathan—he waited and hoped for a long time, and after a while I suppose that if the memory of her hurt, there were other women to soothe that hurt. I suppose I haven’t any right to say this, Julie, but I’ll say it anyway—if your grandfather had lived, things would have turned out differently around here. He would have seen to it that a certain person who shall be nameless would have carried his share of the burdens that fell upon this household. But not old Mrs. Bishop. Oh, no! According to her way of thinking, Cordelia was created to carry on for the rest of the family.” Mrs. Peters paused for a few seconds and polished a pane of glass with a flash of energy out of all proportion to the need of her task. “I’ve said to Jim Peters many a time,” she continued, “and he’s always agreed with me, that old Mrs. Bishop was lacking in the qualities that make a good mother. And saying it that way makes her sound a good deal better than she really was.”

  By the week’s end the whole house shone with the effects of ammonia and wax and furniture polish. On Saturday morning Aunt Cordelia allowed me to arrange several bowls of flowers for the piano and the mantel of the living room fireplace. “You show very good taste at that task, Julia,” she said of my flower arrangements. There was an unmistakable air of graciousness about Aunt Cordelia that morning.

  Fortunately it was chilly enough to warrant a fire in both fireplaces, and so we laid the kindling and wood, all ready to be lighted a half hour before our guests were expected. I polished the silver coffee service and set it on a low table in front of the fire, and Aunt Cordelia brought out a collection of little cakes and rolls which she had baked at ten that morning in order that they be oven-fresh.

  The fires were crackling brightly at two-thirty, and the reflection of flame was deep in the polished mahogany lid of Uncle Haskell’s grand piano, in the old wine decanter and the silver coffee service. Outside, the day was perfect with bright skies and the gay colors of our wooded surroundings. If Jonathan Eltwing had ever loved this old place, it must have wakened memories for him that afternoon.

  Father drove up with Dr. and Mrs. Eltwing precisely at three o’clock; he knew Aunt Cordelia well enough to respect her passion for punctuality. I watched them walk up the brick-paved path to the porch where Aunt Cordelia stood waiting to greet them: Jonathan Eltwing so tall and huge as to dwarf my handsome and rather tall father; Mrs. Eltwing, a tiny, graceful woman wearing a pale gray velvet suit with a frilly blouse and a heavy gold pin at her throat. She had great, strangely brilliant eyes that dominated her tiny face and a mass of half-blonde, half-gray hair that she drew back smoothly from her forehead and wore in a great bun close to her neck. She was a lovely little creature with an air of childlike sweetness and innocence; she stood smiling and looking off into our bright woods as Jonathan Eltwing took Aunt Cordelia’s hand in both his own and stood looking at her as if he were searching for the girl he had once known. I was proud of Aunt Cordelia; she looked slim and elegant standing there in the autumn sunlight, not once losing her cool composure as she greeted Jonathan Eltwing and his wife. I noticed that Father kissed her with special tenderness as if he understood that it was a difficult moment for her.

  Then we were all in the living room in front of the fire. I sat close to Father and watched the faces of those around me with keen interest.

  Dr. Eltwing gave all of his attention at first to Aunt Cordelia, asking her many questions, the two of them exchanging memories. Mrs. Eltwing seemed to pay no attention to any of us; she gave a little exclamation of pleasure over a plate of tidbits, and seating herself near it, picked up one piece after another, placing them quickly in her mouth and sucking off the grains of sugar or specks of frosting that clung to her fingers. There was somehow nothing greedy in her actions; each bit of food was held daintily, was bitten into with what seemed more like gay satisfaction than greed. Even the little gesture of removing the sugar from her fingers was done lightly and with a kind of merry charm. But the eating continued steadily until Dr. Eltwing held out his hands to her.

  “Come and sit here beside me, Katy,” he said gently. “I want to be sure that you understand who Miss Bishop is. Do you remember that I have often told you about the girl who tutored me when we were young, the one who helped me day after day until I was ready for my entrance examinations?”

  Mrs. Eltwing uttered an amazed little “O-h-h” and turned to Aunt Cordelia in what seemed to be complete surprise. “Oh-h-h, I want to thank you—many, many times. You have been so good to my Jonathan.” She hardly glanced at Aunt Cordelia as she spoke, but took the chair at her husband’s side and looked up into his face as if to ask if she had said the right words.

  Dr. Eltwing was very nice to me, once he got around to noticing that I was there. He was interested that I had read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and that I had tried to read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but hadn’t been able to get much out of it. He smiled a little at that admission.

  “I think Dostoyevsky is pretty heavy fare for a young lady of your age,” he said. “Aren’t you pushing her a little, Cordelia?”

  “I haven’t pushed her at all, Jonathan,” Aunt Cordelia answered, “but I don’t forbid her to browse either. She soon knows when she is beyond her depth.”

  “She pushed me, Julie; she really pushed me without mercy. And I’ve loved her for it—all these many years,” he said quietly, and he was no longer smiling.

  Aunt Cordelia’s face was flushed, but she turned pleasantly to Mrs. Eltwing. “I know that you are a composer and a musician, Mrs. Eltwing. Do you feel like playing for us this afternoon? We’ve just had the piano tuned; I think you’ll find it in good condition.”

  Mrs. Eltwing just smiled at Aunt Cordelia without answering until her husband bent down to her again. “Cordelia has asked if you will play for us, Katy. Do you feel up to it?”

  She jumped eagerly to her feet as if he had interpreted a pleasant message in some foreign tongue. “Oh, yes, I’ll play, Jonathan. Of course. Of course.”

  She walked lightly over to the piano bench, seated herself, and pushed back the cuffs of her velvet suit. It was then that I noticed the ruffle that extended from the sleeve of her blouse beyond the velvet cuff. It was torn and hung loosely; it was also a little soiled. A sad sign of her illness, I thought. No normal woman having the taste to groom herself so carefully in all other details would have overlooked that dangling ruffle.

  In another minute, though, I had forgotten everything about me as Mrs. Eltwing poised her hands above the keys and then struck them as if in a wild fury. Waves of music crashed throughout the rooms of the old house, mountains b
egan to shake and comets to fall under her hands while I could imagine tidal waves rolling in and the wind uprooting trees and sending ships spinning to the bottom of the sea. Then as my heart seemed almost ready to burst with the tumult, her music suddenly subsided and the sky became bright; the storm was over. The melody had become quiet, but it was not happy; it seemed to cry as if some lonely soul walked over the earth and mourned the ravages that Nature had committed.

  There was something eerie about Mrs. Eltwing as she played. Her frail body swayed a little with the music, her eyes that had looked so blue as she smiled at us in greeting were now quite black and brilliant with light. She looked strange, and I felt for a moment that I would be afraid to be alone with her.

  Then it was over, and Mrs. Eltwing dropped her hands into her lap. I was too moved to applaud, but from the doorway between the library and living room came a cry of “Bravo! Bravo!” and standing there was Uncle Haskell, slender and graceful, clapping his hands and smiling at Mrs. Eltwing.

  I had never seen him look so handsome or so outlandishly affected. He was wearing the black velvet smoking jacket which he kept folded in layers of tissue paper, and under that, a white silk shirt. His skin was clear and firm, and his thick blond hair waved back from a brow unmarked by either time or anxiety. He looked a little like a foolish mannikin suddenly animated; he also looked a little like a Greek god. I couldn’t quite decide which description best fitted him.

  Mrs. Eltwing stood up at the sound of his cheering, and she gave a little gasp as she looked at him. She reminded me of a small girl who has suddenly discovered an unbelievably beautiful toy; her eyes never left him as he came forward, took her hand lightly, and kissed it.

  “Thank you for that music, dear Mrs. Eltwing, thank you a million times. You have given me something precious just now, something infinitely precious.”