Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Albert,” all at once she seemed eager to talk, “they—Mac, Marcia and them—they’re a little shallow.”

  “But they’re like little children,” she went on.

  “And you’d like to be that free and that happy?” he challenged. He was sweating and trembling all over. He put his hand on the door knob to steady himself. At last, his quiet wife was going to speak her mind. She could not escape him now. There would be a scene and she would go away and there would be no unhappy person in the house.

  “Yes,” she said softly, “I think I might like to be that happy and that free.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to sleep and forget them,” she said. She kept staring at the design on the carpet.

  “And will it be easier or harder after to-night?” He had to know even if she guessed why he had invited the city people down. The sunny morning he had stood with her before Reverend Thomas in the Methodist church, he had wanted to be near her whether she loved him or not. (He believed she would learn to love him and to read his books and to care for his farm. He wanted her because he loved her. To be near her was all he asked.)

  “Will it be easier or harder after, to-night?” he said.

  She must not have heard him for the wind was blowing that shutter against the house—

  Susan stood up. “Good-night,” she said. “I’m glad I told little Tom to shut the baby chickens up to-night. I believe it’s going to rain to-night.”

  Albert climbed into bed ten minutes after Susan did, but she was already asleep. He listened to the frogs singing by the pond, and dog howling over at the Johnsons’ house and the eleven strokes of the courthouse clock upon the quiet air of the town.

  The Lady Is Civilized

  THE RAIN was beating murderously down on the black shingles of every farm house and on the cotton, tomato, strawberry fields in Gibson County. The rain was pounding on the muddy Forked Deer River a mile from the present site of Port Gibson. The rain was beating murderously on the slick shingles of every house top, on the scorched grass of every yard and the dried vegetables of every garden in the dark town.

  Every church in town had been praying for rain all through July. And everybody that prayed in private had prayed for rain at his bedside. There had been special meetings in the country churches and in the town “nigger” churches to pray for rain; but the white churches in Port Gibson felt that the regular Sunday and Wednesday night prayers were as much as could be expected of them. The town white folks said that since they weren’t dependent on the crops they couldn’t be expected to pray as often as the farmers and the town niggers all of whom had cotton or tomato or strawberry patches in their back yards.

  But the rain was beating down murderously on the gardens and patches in the town. It wasn’t the friendly, slow, constant rain they had prayed for. It was a hard, flaying, murderous rain. It was the kind that beats the turnip greens to pieces and washes the plants up from the ground.

  Yet, of course, it was better than no rain at all. Everyone agreed to this, and everyone said so to everyone else. This cloud burst had been coming down for only an hour, but there was only one person in Port Gibson who had not said that it was a shame it had to be this kind of rain or that after all it was better than nothing.

  The rain was beating murderously on the grass and on the green roof. Because there was no wind, it was not beating on the window pane. Inside the white remodeled house with the green roof and the new white pillars across its front, Beatrice Gray sat knitting beneath a white ceiling fan. All the windows and shades of the white room had been down all day. Beatrice said she was keeping the hot air out. So, sitting there on the chaise longue beneath the ceiling fan, she hadn’t known when the rain started. She had not realized that the temperature had changed. She often boasted that she didn’t care what the weather did, that she could always keep perfectly comfortable in the privacy of her home.

  The electric clock on the new Italian marble mantelpiece chimed hurriedly that it was eleven o’clock. She dropped the knitting in her lap, rested her head on the chair back, and looked at the face of the clock. The second hand spun round and round and her eyes followed its revolution seven times. Then her eyes lifted to the portrait hanging above the marble mantel. She gazed at the picture she had recently had painted from the old photograph of her father. The portrait was just like that photograph; except, of course, she had asked Mr. Guiozeppe if he didn’t think it would be nicer to put a tie on the old gentleman. And Mr. Guiozeppe had very definitely thought so. Yes, she gazed at the portrait and thought not of her father but of what an astutely correct picture it was. After all she had rather have it than the ludicrous thing his cousin Lucius Price had done of him in his grey uniform—the one out at her sister’s, in the old house. Hers was much better. It was just like the photograph.

  She thought how nice it was to have everything she wanted; how fortunate it was that her father had been such a friend of Mr. West and how nice it was that Mr. West had picked her out of the three daughters to befriend in his last years and to leave his fortune to. She thought of those last years of his life.

  She remembered there had been one white letter in the black mail box. She took it out and saw that it was for her and that it was from Mr. C. Ely West, W. 63rd Street, New York City. She showed it to Ernest who was leaving for the office and he asked if it wasn’t that old bachelor friend of her father who was such a roué. She said that it was, and Tommy or Mettie, one, said that they had never heard grandfather mention his name before he died. And Ernest winked at his wife. He kissed her goodbye and he and the children started off to work and to school.

  Beatrice had sat down on the swing on the little square front porch that had been there before Mr. West died and she had had the house remodeled. She opened the letter and read the big writing of the old man.

  The letter had said that since Mr. West had no relations of his own to go back to and be near in his old age, he was going to come back and be near the children of his dead friend.

  And two weeks later Mr. C. Ely West had arrived on the midnight in Port Gibson.

  The great light of the locomotive made Beatrice hide her eyes behind her white leather purse. The midnight train came whistling and puffing around the bend. It slowed up jerkily and noisily before the station with the one bare light over the doorway. A porter climbed off the last car and another handed him down three bags. And a man in a grey checked suit and a derby stepped down on the white gravel and greeted his friend’s three daughters and their husbands. His voice was loud and northern, and he had said a lot before the train began to jerk out of the station. When the black locomotive had disappeared and they started for the cars, Beatrice had decided that she did not like him and had reminded herself that he was a very rich man. She took his arm, which he twice raised to twist his tiny dyed moustache, and walked with him over the white gravel to her automobile.

  They drove him through the dark town, around the court house square to the Mary Anne Hotel. Soon after he had climbed off the train he had told them that he would not stay at anyone’s house and Beatrice realized that Ely West did not intend to become a member of anybody’s family. He had not changed since the last time she saw him. And he did not look over fifty. Ernest said that he still had the fifty disease along with the disease of the heart.

  Mr. West spent his first day in Port Gibson with Beatrice’s sister Jane, out at the old house. The second day he spent with her sister Mettie over on Church Street. And the third day Beatrice asked him to come spend with her. There was so much about old times to talk over. And Mr. West knew a lot of fine things their father had done that he expected they had never heard of.

  The children were at school and Ernest had long since left for the office. The house was clean and from the sitting room Beatrice could hear Sana singing as she clattered the breakfast dishes into the sink.

  She looked out the open window and saw Mr. C. Ely West strutting up the brick walk o
utside the iron fence that surrounded the yard. He was whistling, “Sister, Take a Walk With Me.” When he had closed the iron gate behind him he stooped to pick a chestnut burr off the grass. He was a young looking man, but it was the careful stoop of an old man with a disease of the heart.

  Sana showed the strange man into the sitting room and Beatrice rose from the platform rocker to shake his hand and tell him how good it was to see him. Ely West tossed his derby on the top of the folding bed and wondered when he had seen one of those. Beatrice said she thought it had belonged to Ernest’s grandmother, but Mr. West knew the bed wasn’t that old and he knew that Beatrice didn’t think that it was. She blushed a little when he confronted her with that.

  Ely said it was the sweet blush of a school girl and Beatrice asked him if he had ever seen the picture album her father used to keep.

  She took the metal-backed album from the lower part of the desk and carried it to the leather couch where her visitor sat. Sitting beside him she looked at the outline of a rose scratched on the back and the name “Thomas Harwood” in the lower left corner. She opened the book to the first picture. It was her mother dressed in light taffeta with a bustle, and a saucy hat with primroses on it, leaning against an iron gate. Mr. West said that she had hated him. Beatrice turned the page. And there were she and Jane and Mettie in the pony cart.

  Mr. West took Beatrice’s hand in his. He must have felt it stiffen and then relax. For she looked at his pouchy face, his dyed, twisted moustache, his big round stomach. The feel of his moist hand on her own sickened her. Then she thought of something else and the future and the will of Mr. Ely West. And she closed the album.

  Sitting there in the redecorated sitting room beneath the ceiling fan a hundred scenes were flashing across the mind of Beatrice. Once she was sitting beneath the chestnut tree with Ely. Then she was driving over to Dyersburg with him to see an old friend who they found had moved away. Again they would be talking in the sitting room. Once they were down at The Lake on the porch of the club house while the others were out fishing. Then they were on the Methodist picnic out at Pea Ridge. Sometimes the children or Ernest were present, but never her sisters.

  Then she saw the white, still snow that was on the ground the Christmas Eve before Ely dropped dead on the hotel porch. She saw him coming through the iron gate with the package of presents under his arm. She saw him distributing them before the Christmas tree in the sitting room and then rubbing his moist, wrinkled hands together before the fire and smiling that self-satisfied smile. Then she saw him go out into the gentle snow that had started falling. And clearest of all was the last sight she ever had of him alive; pushing through the gentle fall of snow, with his fur collar turned up all around his ears and his derby almost meeting it.

  Before Ely had closed the iron gate Ernest had sent the children off to bed. He waited while from the sitting room window she watched the old bachelor fade into the white speckled night. He seemed to know just how long it would take Ely to get out of sight. For when his wife could see the round figure no longer and felt lost way out there in the snow somewhere, he suddenly drew her back into the bright, warm sitting room. He made her feel the presence of that room and of himself more distinctly than she had ever felt anything. He spoke one word to her. He had spoken it many times before, but always in an affectionate, admiring tone. He had always seemed to be caressing the word as much as herself. But he spoke it now in a tone she had not known he was capable of assuming. It was almost dramatic; as if he had practiced saying it that way for years and years just to get the right effect. He spoke in a deep, resonant voice and threw all of the force into the first syllable.

  “Beatrice.”

  The sound of his voice in that room with the Christmas tree and the wrapping paper and the rocking chairs and the clock with the swinging pendulum had never died in her ears. Whenever she was in that room and there was a silence, she could hear him pronouncing her name as he did that night. No matter how many people were in the room, if there was a moment’s silence and her mind wandered she could hear him saying her name, putting all the emphasis on that first “ee” sound. She had had the room redecorated, the whole house redecorated, yet she could still hear his saying it in that bright little room on Christmas Eve.

  “Beatrice.”

  She had whirled around and faced him, smiling fixedly. Determined to tell him before he asked, she produced the diamond pin that Ely had slipped into her hand when he came in the door. She knew Ernest had seen the bungling old man and she knew that at last he suspected. She called Ely a timid old dear and said she had never had an uncle be as good to her. And Ernest just looked silently at the glittering pin. He saw the green, yellow, and red lights on the biggest Christmas tree they had ever had reflected in the diamonds.

  He turned his back to her and to the tree and stared at the four black stockings that hung from the wooden mantelpiece. He asked her if she loved Ely. And so there was no use denying what had gone on. She saw that he was not going to leave her, so she had to make him know the truth; that C. Ely West was revolting to her; that she had to be nice to him because of the will. She had never cared for him. But for all she could scream she could not make her voice present in that room as his one word had been.

  Then he said in such a quiet voice that she could hardly hear him—for he still stared at the four black stockings—that he believed her, that it had been that that he had feared. He said he would not have minded what she had done to him for the love of another man.

  She didn’t quite understand what he said, but it was something to that effect. But anyway he went up and tore his stocking down from the mantel and threw it on the red coals in the grate and it blazed up. He watched the blaze die down, and then he went up stairs.

  The next morning, of course, there was Ely’s awful death, and Ernest was tender and kind to Beatrice for a month or so. But he never touched her and they never talked when they were alone.

  The second hand of the electric clock on the marble mantel spun foolishly round and round, but the minute and hour hands told Beatrice that it was a quarter past eleven o’clock. And Ernest had not come home from the office and Sarah had not come back to stay with her till he got home.

  Sarah had gone home after dinner to give Elijah his dinner. She was supposed to come back and stay with Beatrice, however, because when Ernest worked at night on a case he was sometimes twelve or one o’clock getting home. But the rain had set in after dinner, and nobody could have made it from nigger town up to the Grays’ house.

  But Beatrice was not afraid. In her house she was safe from the weather and the world. She was so unafraid that she grew sleepy when she saw the time, and she got up to go to bed.

  She was leaning over her knitting bag putting her knitting away when she heard the voice of a woman somewhere outside calling her name. She straightened up and listened, her head cocked to one side.

  “M’ss Be-atrice! M’ss Be-atrice!” it called again. It was Sarah’s voice. Beatrice went to a front window of the sitting room and looked out. Sarah waved to her from a model T Ford whose motor was still running.

  “Have the do’ op’n. I’ comin’ in.”

  Beatrice rushed into the hall, laughing. She knew exactly what had happened. Sarah had gotten a ride with someone but she was afraid to wait outside alone while Beatrice came to the door, and Sarah didn’t want to pound on the door because Sarah would never pound on a door again after that horrible night the summer after Mr. West dropped dead.

  Beatrice flung the door open and looked out into the cold, hard, murderous rain. She gasped for breath. The rain was falling just as it had that night last summer. And then Sarah rushed in past her with the newspaper over her kinky head. Beatrice nearly fainted and she thought Sarah would have, if niggers did faint.

  It was so much like that night that neither of them would look at the other, and Sarah ran straight back to her room behind the kitchen. Beatrice sat down on a little hall chair and thought about that nig
ht and all that went with it. In her reflective mood she went over the whole thing in her mind.

  She recalled that morning when Sana came in to get up the grocery list and said that Irvin had left her. She said it so casually that Beatrice hardly noticed what she had said. But when Irvin didn’t come to work the next two mornings, she asked Sana if he was quitting his job and if she had better get someone else.

  “I gues y’ had better, M’ss Be-atrice. They’re sayin’ he’s lef’ town. Ain’t nobody seen him in three days.”

  When Ernest came home that night he said from behind his paper, on the front porch, “There’s a lot of funny talk going on about Irvin down town.”

  “Sana says they don’t know where he is.”

  Ernest put his paper down and looked at Beatrice over his reading glasses. “They’re saying he’s dead, down town.”

  “What makes them think so?” she asked. She was used to such rumors about niggers.

  “That kind of talk’s been going round nigger town for two or three days. The sheriff thinks maybe there’s something in it. He came over to talk to me about it today.”

  Beatrice looked up from her knitting. This was the most talkative Ernest had been since Christmas.

  “It seems,” he continued, “that the sheriff himself saw Irvin as he turned off the square ’bout eight o’clock Monday night and Sana says he never came home.”

  He sat up on the edge of his chair and whispered. “But the sheriff says he was carrying a new skillet in his hand, and he went down to see Sana last night and there was a new skillet on the stove, and that Jake Roberts was there with Sana. He thinks Jake’s living with Sana now.”

  Sarah, who was the house girl then, stepped out on the porch and said that dinner was ready.

  “I only told you, so that whatever happens won’t be such a shock to you,” he added abruptly as they went in to dinner. Beatrice understood that she was not to think this little confidence meant he was going to be like he had been before Mr. West came.