She did not, as a rule, believe in earthquakes, or fires, or storms, as providential. But she had thought that about the Charleston earthquake. The Morrows, she and her mother and father, had already, in mid-summer, moved to Aiken. And she had already become engaged (though it hadn’t been publicly announced) to Marcellus Hightower and had written to Edward, breaking the news.
That really accounted for their being at the Hibernian Hall at the annual German that evening. He had an engagement for it with her from the year before, but she would not have filled it, would not have come down to Charleston for it, if he had not gone on so wildly. He telegraphed her that he was coming to Aiken to put a stop to her engagement and she had to wire him that he must not come, that she was on her way to Charleston to visit her eldest sister and would see him there.
She did not see him until he called to take her to the ball. He was going to give up the fellowship and not go to Johns Hopkins he vowed, and they were crossing the ballroom floor, when the first tremor came.
A fragmentary sense of its chaos smote Lucy now and she shuddered. It was as if the old high-ceilinged hall was having a hard glittering chill. But nobody was in doubt as to what it was for long; as incredible as it seemed. Even as they stood there transfixed by this realization, the floor heaved and the gas lights were broken. As they grasped for each other—she could always see Edward’s face, empty, gaping, and bulging with strain—they were thrown asunder, into the enveloping darkness.
Lucy could hear, could feel, could tremble again to that invisible bone-loosening rattle that went on into a hideous, ear-splitting, paralyzing roar—it was as if the jaws of hell had opened and Apollyon’s heavy artillery belched forth. The floor of the hall rocked up and down, like the deck of a ship in a storm.
Where was she? Who could say! She remembered sliding on her knees, rolling on the floor. In the formless dark. Then the room over them split wide open and part of it caved in, pilasters fell about them and on them. And suddenly, in the darkness a flame ran up one wall—one of the fallen gas jets had caught the draperies.
She could not say what happened in the melee. People were whimpering, crying, shouting, screaming, and praying. She probably did some of each, herself. She could not say. Nor could she say quite how she got out of the place. But, as she was pressed against the wall near the door by the panic-stricken people, all trying like herself to get out, and thinking that she was going to get crushed, trampled, another quake pitched the crowd in the opposite direction and suddenly she was moving at a drunken, rocking reel through the doorway to fresh air and the unsafe outside.
As she turned on the sidewalk, seizing the train of her ball dress in her hand for better walking, and began hurrying away from the building, she had, beyond her confusion and consuming fear for her own safety, some dim notion of seeking aid to get Edward out of the place. But the streets, if not as dark, were quite as appalling as the hall had been, with great gaps in the pavement, piles of debris and still falling stones. A fragment of a cornice grazed her shoulder and she shrank back, turning toward the street. She stumbled out into the middle of it, where after wandering about for a time, she perceived the dim outline of two men on their knees in the attitude of prayer. Gratefully she got down on her knees beside them.
While they were thus, a fire broke out in a building nearby. One of the men turned and, staring at her for a moment, exclaimed, “Little Lucy Morrow!” Then he got to his feet and helped her up, for the quake was beginning to subside, and she recognized the big bluff form of Dr. Middleton—her father’s friend. He reached down into the darkness and came up with his medicine bag. He shook his big bare head with its heavy gray mane and blinked his pop eyes at her. “Ha, Miss Lucy, now we’ve got to do something about all of this!” he said. But he faced about uncertainly, surveying their surroundings and shook his head again. “The puzzle is how and where to begin!” Then he turned to his still kneeling companion and forcibly brought him to his feet. Lucy saw that the man was his colored driver. “We’ve called on the Lord for His help, Ephraim,” Dr. Middleton said, “now He expects us to do our part. . .I have it,” he went on, looking at her, “the little park over at Wentworth, beside your old house! It won’t do to go to the Battery—there’ll be more of these quakes coming and likely a tidal wave.” He took Lucy by the arm. “I am sure that you’ll make a nurse, a good nurse, Miss Lucy. I’ve heard your father say that you don’t faint at the sight of blood and can take directions.”
But she held back and, after a moment’s confusion and questioning, she got it out. “It’s Edward Louthan, my escort—in the Hibernian Hall!”
He sized her up. “Since when did ladies start rescuing their escorts!” He barked. Then his manner softening, he said, “He may have been knocked out. But we can’t go into the hall now—it’s split wide open. We couldn’t find him in the dark, anyhow. And we’re going to get another quake any minute here. Let’s hurry!”
Lucy could not say how they made their way over the four blocks of rubble and darkness along Meeting Street to Wentworth, but they did—driven by the fear that another quake would hit them before they could reach the safety of the park. Somewhere along the way she tucked the hem of her dress under her basque for more freedom of motion. They made it just in time! Again the earth opened up to belch forth the awfulness of a nether region. And buildings wobbled and split open and fell. And people of all sorts shouted, screamed and prayed in agony. But the second quake did not bring the personal confusion for her that the first had. They were relatively safe now and they had a base from which to resist chaos. Moreover, the second quake was actually less violent, she felt sure.
At the park Dr. Middleton recruited two able-bodied white men to serve as stretcher bearers and a wooden window blind to use for a stretcher. The negro man built a fire and dug up an iron pot from somewhere and water to fill it. She had volunteered to find sheets to tear up for bandages and she did, after a time, across the street, in the disordered household of the man who had bought the Morrow house.
The third quake came before she got back to the park and she was thrown down in the street and suffered bruised hands and knees, but she didn’t have time to think of her bruises then and the violence of the third quake was less even than that of the second.
When she got back to Dr. Middleton’s emergency station, he had several patients stretched out on the grass and a second stretcher team going after more. He put her to work making bandages out of the sheets she had brought.
Throughout the night she urged one or the other of the stretcher teams to go through the ruins of Hibernian hall to look for Edward. They reported to her that they did go—and they brought back with them two injured men—but they found no trace of Edward. She wanted to go with one of the teams, herself, but Dr. Middleton wouldn’t hear of it. Later she wished she’d gone anyhow! She did not know what had happened to him until the following afternoon. She had been relieved from duty to go home and sleep, exhausted, of course, and a sight to behold, in her ruined chiffon dress. But she went by his house and found him there, in bed, his head swathed in bandages.
It was terrible! A falling pilaster had knocked him down, cutting a great gash in his head and he had lain unconscious on the floor of the hall most of the night. Someone had found him about daybreak and had taken him to another emergency station.
He was pale and shaken and did not rise up off his pillow when Lucy knelt down by his bedside. She told him what had happened to her and of her night-long efforts to locate him. He winced sympathetically and apologized, but he seemed too ill and depressed to take much interest. The wholesale grocery store, in which Edward’s father worked as chief clerk, had been wrecked. Edward was absorbed in the enveloping distress on every hand.
She sensed that their personal affair would be out of taste, if it was not, in fact, out of mind. He did not mention the argument they were having when the first convulsion came. He did not ask her again to break her engagement, he did not even ask her to come back t
o see him.
Perhaps the blow he had received did put her and her concerns out of his mind. At all events, five days later she returned to her home in Aiken, without having seen Edward again and without his ever having asked to see her. The falling pilaster, she decided, had struck more than his head!
10.
ANYHOW, SHE MARRIED Marcellus Hightower, forgetting all the rest and taking title to wild land on the banks of his Oconee.
And she had not finished writing the thank-you notes on all of their wedding presents before she discovered her awful mistake.
Not in the man. She did not doubt Marcellus then. She had never at any time during their marriage doubted him, though it was well that she could not see more than a step ahead on how they would spend the rest of their lives!
But she did not have the experience or imagination to envision the circumstances in which such a man, at forty, would be enmeshed. To begin with, she was not prepared for the backwoods.
She was wholly, provincially urban and had only romantic, ignorant notions of this country. Contrary to her expectation, her two years at Aiken had been no preparation for it, because the place her father had bought was only three miles from a fully civilized town, where, despite his poor health, he still engaged in the practice of medicine, and although he had directed the setting out of the vineyard, none of them actually knew or did anything about cultivating the grapes.
Perhaps, Mr. Hightower’s looks and dress and manner had misled her, though, Heaven knows, no man could be less pretentious than he was, less self-conscious! Perhaps it was simply that she had expected no king to have so mean a country. On that first ride out from the railroad at Riverton, they had stopped en route at the baronial place of the Adairs. Mr. Adair was Mr. Hightower’s biggest client then and he had come to Aiken for the wedding. The size and grandeur of the Adair place, ugly though it was, had been an unhappy preparation for a giddy bride, just come from Niagara Falls, when two miles further into the piney wilderness, she and her frock-coated lord came upon the Hightower house. There it stood, behind a rail fence, in a grassless yard: a double-pen-log—if pressed for a designation then, she wouldn’t have known not to call it a—cabin!
Lucy refolded Marcellus Hightower’s letter, still open on the writing board of the secretary, and put it back in its envelope. She should not make too much of the size of the place. There were nine rooms in it, upstairs and down, besides the dog-run. Nor even of its primitiveness. She came to appreciate the dog-run and even to find a sort of mellowness and grace about the balanced log pens, behind the shady front porch, under the high, gray-shingled ridge roof. It went well with the Spanish moss and the great oak and magnolia trees about it.
But the place was not really the point, it was the people. Backwoodsmen, whether to the manner born—that is, whether born on a River Road plantation or on a pine barrens patch (a distinction that was not at once apparent to her by their looks and speech)—were a peculiar breed. They were of a temper quite unknown to her. She never got over their drawling speech and their understatement. They always made her feel as if she was gushing. And she had never before in her life been made to feel so. More serious, she could not tell by his demeanor, when she had offended one of them. At first she thought they were hostile all of the time, all of them. But when she had hurt somebody’s feelings he seemed no different!
But she would have gotten adjusted to that, too, to be sure, in a few months time. Eventually, she believed, she would, even for them, have ceased to be so offensively a city girl. After all, didn’t she have the blood of Methodist circuit riders in her veins!
But it wasn’t merely that she was a little airy and citified that the Hightowers held against her. It was that she had married Big Bud!
There were eight of Marcellus’ brothers and sisters left. The oldest boy had been killed in the War, another brother had gone west, and their father and mother had been dead almost fifteen years. Three of the girls were married and only one of them lived in the vicinity. But two of the boys remained unmarried, and one of these was a roving hunter and fisherman, rarely ever under the parental roof or any roof, and the other and youngest was in law school at Georgia University. Yet she had blasted their hearthstone! She was an interloper and an upstart. And the worst of it was that she could not understand that she was.
When the elder Hightowers died and the inheritance was divided, Marcellus declined to accept any part of it. Such was his big-brotherly feeling for his family. Then he had bought the place from his brothers and sisters and ever since had been maintaining it, in as unchanged a way as possible, as the family home. Moreover, he had sent all of his brothers and sisters off to college, as often and as long as they would go. And from time to time he had done other things for them. There were substantial reasons why they didn’t want the old order changed.
But she might even have tried to carry on this way of life, have joined in, if Caroline, Mr. Hightower’s spinster older sister, who had been running the place since the death of their parents, had only made a few concessions.
Perhaps not, perhaps she could never have made herself over into a member of the Hightower household. At all events, their general differentness (if that phrase can describe the relation) finally took a specific form in contention over the servants. When the two sisters and the brother, the two cousins and an aunt, who had gathered for Big Bud’s homecoming with his fancy bride (and even John, called Fox, the hunter, came by for a day or two), when they had all departed and Lucy was able to establish just who was who, she found out that the leaner, older and more ill-favored of the two women who haunted the kitchen and presided over the meal table was supposed to be the cook, a Mrs. Warrick. The other was Caroline.
She was able, too, to detect a whine in Mrs. Warrick’s drawl and a tendency in her to eat with her fingers. (Caroline was brown and smooth and would not have been bad looking, but for the lipless, vindictive expression on her face.)
With the visitors gone and Mr. Hightower gone about his law practice (which took him away the greater part of the time) they became three lorn women gathered at common board. The kitchen and dining room, as was customary in that country, were housed apart and only connected with the main dwelling by a long porch, and she had had little to do with them at first, except to be escorted out to meals.
She was astonished to find the Hightowers, anyone in this country, in fact, with a white cook. And of course, she had never heard of a household where the cook ate with the family. It seemed to her that Mrs. Warrick did less waiting on the table and more eating with the family than Caroline did. But she wouldn’t have said anything—indeed, she didn’t say anything for a month—if Caroline had come even a little way toward her. With the others gone, Lucy found herself excluded at table, excluded by Caroline and the cook. Their conversations, with the barest of civilities, ignored her.
This was merely one aspect of a widespread exclusion. Mr. Hightower had given her a saddle horse as a wedding present. She loved to ride and finding so little possible company on the place, she rode a great deal. All too often, she rode the two miles over to the Adairs. Mrs. Adair, herself, was an outlander. But their whole place, and it was relatively new, was, so to speak, an importation—from library, with its ten thousand volumes encased from floor to ceiling around four walls, to the Italian marble baths. Mrs. Adair was a Godsend to her, but Mrs. Adair had a two-year-old son and was again in confinement. And, after all, Lucy could not live at the Adairs! And having no one to ride with her, Lucy had galloped along those dim sandy traces, through solitary miles of pine woods, alone, a young and generally-considered handsome married woman, whose husband was afar, all by herself. In Clark County this was a scandal and it was dangerous, too, as even a much less opinionated woman than Mrs. Warrick would know.
It had required great discipline of Lucy to sit at table with the cook and remain polite, especially during conversation with which she could scarcely keep a polite connection. Only her deep devotion to her husband and a
strict sense of her Christian duty made this at all possible. But when Mrs. Warrick essayed the role of her monitor, it became out of the question.
Abandoning her awkward hints one day at dinner, Mrs. Warrick looked down her gray turtle’s nose at Lucy and said, “I’ve heard of ridin’ for bizness and I’ve heard of ridin’ for pleasure—be it church or courtin’—but there’s one of us ‘round here’s plain ridin’ for a fall. And it’s liable to be by a hack in some turpentine nigger’s hand!”
Lucy gasped, but she was able to rise from the table and leave the room, without further reply.
That had ended Mrs. Warrick’s services in their entirety. But her going did not improve Lucy’s relations with Caroline. Nor did Lucy’s temerity then, herself, to take over her own kitchen.
Through Mrs. Adair she got hold of a negro woman cook and a likely young negro man whom, it was deemed, she might train as a butler. Caroline, during those days, stood by silently, her lipless mouth like the seal of doom. She only spoke when she was spoken to and with the coldest civility. But Mr. Hightower, at home for a few days then, encouraged Lucy, even if his jesting seemed heavy. She established a new kitchen and a new cuisine, for she had found the food as difficult as anything else. It was working well, despite the silent disfavor of the sister and the sceptical humor of the brother.
Then, maybe she over-extended herself. When she brought down an old broadcloth frock coat of Mr. Hightower’s one day to dress up her butler more properly, Caroline gasped and Marcellus broke into a laugh. For a moment there, they were country Hightowers, and she was Lucy Morrow of Charleston and she wanted to have no more to do with either of them!
Mr. Hightower finally defended his levity by saying, “If you give that negro that long-tailed suit it will be the last you’ll see of him. I warn you!” (And here Caroline permitted herself something almost like a cackle.) “He’ll go to preaching,” he added.
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 12
