Dynasty of Death Page 4
Her neighbors, with whom she was only dimly familiar, called her an old witch, but this was unkind, as there was nothing mysterious or malevolent about the old woman. Rather, she was vague and forgetful, with hazy blue eyes, pale, wrinkled face, white hair, plump little body and uncertain gait. She loved birds, and kept several in cages in her sun-drowned kitchen, and endured her cat only because he kept mice away. She never visited anyone except her great-nephew Joseph, and that was only at Christmas. Squire Broderick managed her affairs, as he had been instrumental in securing the pension for her, and she lived a dreamy, half-conscious life, like that of a young child.
Martin was the only one of the Barbours who cared for her. He would sit for hours in her gardens, as in a retreat from an insufferable and untenable reality. He would help her weed the haphazard flower beds, kill slugs, tie up a vine too heavy with fruit or leaves, brush the stone flags of her paths with a broom that was a huge bundle of stiff straw, and feed her birds. He was enthralled by the way the very shy sparrows would allow the old woman’s approach, as they squatted on the crumbling rims of the birdbaths, and they would stare at her with brilliant wild eyes, their bodies trembling. He could never get enough of the hollihocks, the marigolds, the primroses, the bachelor’s buttons, the lilies of the valley, the small sweet roses on their knotted stems; he never tired of watching the pale, molten light along the edges of the calla lilies, and touching, very gently, the dusty gold of their hearts.
There were no wise conversations between the little lonely boy and the little lonely old woman. They rested in each other. Mrs. Barbour was not always clear as to who he was. Sometimes she called him Nicholas, thinking him, for a moment, one of her long-dead young sons, and sometimes she called him Joseph, thinking he was his father. He answered gently to all the names, not wishing to disturb the vague, tranced light of her eyes. They had no real love for each other in the usual meaning of the word, not even an active affection. But the presence of the boy comforted the old woman, and the presence of the old woman mysteriously comforted the boy. They were like low wind and slow rain together, sometimes not speaking for hours, half-forgetting each other.
Before Martin would leave at twilight, he would follow the vague outlines of his old great-great-aunt into her parlor, where a dim fire would be burning, and he would drink her thin China tea in tall, delicate china cups, and eat a slice of her seed-cake. He never in all his life thereafter tasted seed-cake like this: it had a strange, dim, old taste, spicy and rich, which clung to his tongue and palate long after he had eaten it. Hilda said it wasn’t made with good earthly flour and caraway seeds and milk and eggs, but of some bewitched stuff. Then as the hushed pale stars came out over a landscape swimming in a violet mist he would go home, often without a word of good-by, and as he closed the iron gate in the low gray walls he felt that he had left some entranced spot for a reality that was hot and weary and desolate.
As Joseph rarely saw his great-aunt more than once or twice a year, he did not tell her he was leaving England. Likely as not, he told Hilda, she wouldn’t know what he was talking about, and would forget it immediately. She would never miss any of them, even if she never saw them again. She would go on, whispering to herself among the flower beds under the trees, feeding her birds, brushing her flags, stroking her black brute of a cat, knitting, nodding, dreaming, forgetting, drowsing in the vaporous light of a sun that seemed unreal in these gardens. A foolish, helpless old woman who nevertheless managed to keep her tiny old house immaculate and filled with forgotten memories, the smell of herbs, the odor of caraway, the small warm hiss of a polished copper kettle on a small dim fire, the songs of caged birds. It was a marvel that she also managed to keep her black, gnarled furniture glitteringly polished, and that she never forgot the ancient tales about it. In one corner of her parlor stood a grandfather’s clock of immense age, its wood black and lustrous, its face blurred and faintly gilt. And no matter what she was doing at the moment it struck, she would pause, vaguely smiling, lifting a finger. “Ah,” she would murmur, “you see, it still strikes, though your grandfather would say, after it was repaired by our John in ’68, that it would never strike again.”
Two days before he left England, Martin came to see the old woman for the last time, and to say good-by to her. He felt certain that his good-by would not penetrate through the silences of the large, twilight country in which she lived, nor that, after he left, she would miss him. Nevertheless, he came to say good-by. It was good-by, not only to her, but to the enchanted house, the spring silences, the trees, the birds, the flowers, the damp green grass, the refuge and the peace.
It had been raining for the past few days, but during the afternoon the rain had stopped, leaving the air sweet and tranquil and melancholy. A few carriages were abroad on Sandy Lane, filled with women and children released by the end of the raining. A warmth had crept into the wet English twilight, filling it with clear soft sounds, promise, fragrance, dripping trees, murmurous birds. Martin pushed the rusty iron gate, thrust it, shrieking, behind him, and walked up the lichen-covered flags to the old house. As he always did, he marvelled that the very closing of the iron gate had shut out the sounds of the outer world, and it seemed to him again, for the hundredth time, that he had stepped under deep, transparent water into enchantment, timeless and profound.
Old Mrs. Barbour was not in her drenched gardens this dying evening. Martin found her before the fire in her parlor. The shadows were so warm and dark here that she was barely discernible from them, and she merely nodded to him without looking up, keeping on with her endless, mysterious knitting. Her cap, with its many frills, was rosy with firelight; the skeins of wool slid upon her black silk knees, and falling, were caught by the huge cat, who played with them kittenishly and self-consciously. Her eyes were vaguer than ever, her face more of an expressionless blur. On her bosom the old yellowed lace was caught by an immense cameo.
“Oh, it’s you, Nicholas,” she murmured. “Sit down, like a good lad, and dry your boots. All covered with mold, they are. The kettle’s on, and we’ll have a cup of tea before the other young uns come home. Stir up the fire for me; it’s gettin’ low.”
Martin picked up a brass poker and poked the small fire so that it turned into a hot fretwork of black and gold. Mrs. Barbour had already forgotten the tea, and murmured over her knitting, and rocked. Silence gathered in the small room with its black, polished, incredible furniture, and the odor of herbs rose, and the firelight lay on the white flags of the hearth, and the kettle hissed drowsily on its hook. Once the cat yawned, and showed Martin a savage pink cavern behind long white teeth.
The immovable quality of the deep silence was such that when Martin got up and went to one of the thickly sunken little latticed windows his movements did not disturb it. Rather, they seemed a contained motion of the silence itself, enhancing it. The old woman did not look up, the cat did not turn its yellow eyes in his direction, the fire did not rise, the kettle did not hiss louder. He pushed open the window, out upon the crowding lilacs.
A rain had begun to fall again, a silvery, whispering rain, itself increasing the silence. It fell from a sky full of heliotrope mist, fell upon the lilacs that the little opened window was pressing into, and from those cool wet spears of faint purple drew out a piercing and nostalgic fragrance. Martin put his hand out and touched chill leaves running with that silvery water, drew toward him a thin pyramid of flowers and touched his cheek to it. The garden floated with a gaseous mist a little darker than the heliotrope sky, and the trees, mighty and motionless in the drowned gardens, seemed to stand in that mist as in faintly colored water. So standing, they lost clear outline and reality, became dreams in a twilit world of dream which itself swam in cloudy violet.
It seemed to Martin, standing at the little opened window with the leaves and cold wet flowers of the lilac against his thin hot cheek, that he would never forget this moment, this smell, this fresh rain running down his fingers and cheeks, this wan violet light and silenc
e. Its poignancy seemed more than he could bear. Then when a thrush, a single thrush, began to sing, dimly, a last melancholy song in the fountain of trees, he burst into tears. The sweet, faint, unearthly notes, so clear and sad, so thrilling and lonely, poured through him as though he had been mist himself, and their pouring was exquisite pain.
Behind him lay the motionless warm dusk of the room with its low spot of fire, knitting old woman, cat, whitestone hearth, odor of caraway seed and ancient furniture, hissing of a copper kettle that shone like gold.
He wiped away his tears, closed the window gently and slowly. He crept back to the fire, and sitting there on his stool, stared for a long time at the old drowsing woman.
“Shall I light the candles, Auntie Ellen?” he asked at last, very softly.
The old woman, startled out of her dreams, peered at him vaguely over her square spectacles.
“Eh? Oh, it’s you, Nicholas. Yes, dearie, light the candles. It’s dark, and I was almost asleep. Dear me, the kettle’s boilin’, too.”
Martin touched a wax taper to the fire, then lit the candles on the mantelpiece. They flamed into slender gold in the russet darkness, and a few drops of melted tallow, clear as water, began to slide down them toward the porcelain candlesticks. Martin touched a few drops, let them congeal on his thin fingers, then rolled the milky mass together. Mrs. Barbour, murmuring busily, put down her knitting in a basket, pushed aside the cat, and drew the singing kettle from the fire. From the recesses of the chimney corner she drew forth a canister of tea and a squat blue teapot. Martin carried a small table closer to the fire; it was a round mahogany table with a raised and fluted edge, and was dark red with age. He went to the tall cupboard in the shadows and brought out two blue cups and saucers, two thin silver spoons and two small blue plates. The hot water hissed on the tea, the fire flared up into rosy sparks, and the cat leaned against the old woman’s legs, arched and sleek and purring. Outside, the rain sang with a thin, musical sound on the lilac leaves.
“Aunt Ellen,” said Martin again in that soft voice that seemed to enhance the quiet, “we are going to America.”
The old woman continued to slice, very carefully, the dark richness of her cake. It was not until the fourth and last slice lay on the blue plate that she looked up, confused.
“Did ye say America, Nicholas? America? No, but you be too young and tender to be goin’ from your Ma yet. Maybe, when you are a man.” She smiled at him tenderly and cunningly, shaking her head as if admonishing a small adventurer who had been dead all of forty years.
Martin, starving for sympathy and understanding, opened his lips. But he did not speak. Tonight, he was Nicholas. He must not confuse and frighten the old woman. He sighed, sat down, and began to drink the delicate pale tea. It seemed to scald his mouth, and the seed cake choked him.
Too wretched to move, he crouched on his stool, long after he should have been gone. The grandfather’s clock tolled out a farewell to him, solemnly and in measured sounds, as if it, too, sorrowed because Martin would never again sit in that parlor before that fire. But the fire was almost out, and its dark gold coals fell into coldness and ashes, and the cat slept on the dimming hearth, and the old woman slept in her chair. Outside the rain was louder, falling with hollow and mournful sounds, and it ran, choking, along the ancient eaves. Now a wind was rising, mourning at the latticed windows, and blew down the cooling chimney. It seemed to Martin, chilled and full of despair, that he was the only living thing in a universe that was steeped in vague, shadowy dreams. Slow cold waters of fright and dread rose in him, and though he wished to go he could not get up.
Again the clock chimed, and now the sound was loud and menacing in an almost complete darkness. On the hearth lay two last red coals, burning without heat. The old woman’s head was sunken deep on her breast, and the cat whined once and shortly in its dreams.
Martin got up. He felt as if he had been crying for hours, but his eyes were quite dry. In the darkness he kissed the old woman’s soft and, withered cheek. It felt like old paper under his lips.
When he went, the door closed behind him without a sound and the two red coals winked out, and the old woman and the cat and the clock were left to themselves.
CHAPTER IV
As from a mighty tilted brass vessel poured the brassy cataract of unendurable light upon the river, the flat lands, the distant hills, the whole world.
Martin had never seen such light, and it hurt his eyes. More than that, it seemed to set something aching frightfully within him. Light like this, so different from the soft and gauzy sunshine of England not only frightened, but oppressed him. His fair skin burned and withered under it; his flesh seemed to melt. He blinked at it, shuddered at it, tried to hide from it under any dusty tree, under the lee of any wooden shack, in the shadow of any stark wall. But he could not escape it; it fumed all about him, and became a personal foe from whom it was impossible to escape. They said winter would come at last, and raised ominous eyes about that winter, but Martin could hardly believe that such a blessing as a winter would finally arrive and release him before he died.
The little town of Windsor on the Allegheny River was a new, raw, big village, only some thirty years old. Thirty years before there had been a handful of farmers in this region; now Windsor was proud of its ten thousand inhabitants. They prophesied that within twenty-five years Windsor would be the State Capital. Less sentimental men, who cared nothing about politics but only about money, declared that Capital be damned, the town would be a city of half a million, bigger than New York, eventually, and would find its glory in vast industrial development. Weren’t there tremendous coal mines just beginning to be opened? And where coal was found didn’t wealth and business and activity follow? There was no end to the possibilities. Go west, across the prairies, fighting through Indians, crossing those accursed Rockies, wandering through deserts, through strange red country full of burning cliffs and painted rocks? Why? Let those who liked frontiers push them, at the cost of muscle and blood and life, farther toward the hot Pacific. Here, in this State, was to be found every inducement, every hope, every chance for a man who was not a rascal or a ne’er-do-well. All he needed was his hands and his guts and a dash of brains. His fortune was made.
Windsor sprawled in the heat of the valley, dishevelled, dirty, hideous, noisy and exuberant. Most of the streets were just flattened mud roads that rolled in hot golden dust in the summer and seethed with mud in the late winter and spring. Very often the town was flooded with fall rains and melting snow, for the river overflowed and the flimsy wooden shacks and sturdier stone houses stood like queer-shaped arks in flat sheets of gray water. After prolonged rains, when the sun came out, the valley steamed and newcomers sickened and even died in the malarial air. Almost without exception, every sidewalk was made of rough plank boards except in the wealthier section, where neatly placed stone flags kept the ladies’ shoes clean. Most of the houses were hastily built of wood, designed for temporary use, the dwellers said. They were almost all unpainted, and there were few gardens and lawns. Tramped, bare brown earth ran from the boardwalks to the high wooden steps of these ugly little cottages where few women bothered to hang curtains at the windows or put a potted plant against the warped glass.
It would have been a frontier town, built only for a day, had it not been for a bourgeoisie section. The bourgeoisie spirit, so jealously brought from England with family silver in wooden chests, made the more intelligent and prosperous citizens build careful, ugly houses of stone and brick, plant gardens, build white wooden fences or low walls, buy watchdogs and monstrous mahogany furniture and turkey-red carpets and tables with marble tops, and sedulously and patiently made creditable housemaids of raw farm and immigrant girls. This solid minority sent to New York for carriages, and bred sleek carriage horses. On Sundays and holidays it lifted their hearts to ride in these carriages through the town, their eyes sparkling as they listened to the jingling of the harness, their women tilting tiny parasols above imm
ense coal-scuttle bonnets also imported from New York, and disposing the flounces of their great skirts about them. This finery, this solidity, comforted spirits that as yet did not feel entirely secure and free from homesickness. And so they buttressed themselves against loneliness and fear with thick walls and planted trees, with great fireplaces and fine tea, carriages and imported silks, immense mahogany sideboards loaded with silver, pianos laboriously hauled to Philadelphia by railroad, with servant girls and wine.
The bourgeoisie section was older than Newtown, as the ramshackle and industrial section was called. It withdrew itself meticulously, allowed no encroaches. It did not care for the river, down which passed water traffic increasingly thick. So between the section of the bourgeoisie and Newtown there lay an empty space, like a pause. This space was owned by the “better element,” and they would allow no one to build upon it. It was an open road, but open though it was few of the newcomers felt any inducement to cross it. A branch of the railroad had long been promised Windsor, and through this space, within twelve years, shining steel tracks were to be laid, dividing Oldtown and Newtown more grimly than ever.
Newtown ran, in its rush of shacks and small factories, right down to the river, and as it ran it scarred and twisted, blasted and despoiled. Half of the inhabitants were but newly from Europe, from ancient, ancestral villages of sunken beauty and ivy and scented lanes and flowers, and the other half were but a generation removed. In the blood of all of them ran a love of leisure, of quiet and passionless living, of home and hearthstone. Yet here, in this new land, they ruined and laid waste, building few permanent homes, raping a luxuriant land of all its heroic beauty, laying on it for tens of generations, and even longer, the curse of impermanence, of indifference, of sterility and greed. This could not have been done by men who loved the land, who desired to live here, making a home not only for themselves but for their children’s children, and cherishing and keeping alive the many-branched tree of loved tradition. But they did not love this land who gave herself innocently up to them. They did not desire to live upon it, to make a home upon it; they let die upon it all the branches of tradition they had brought with them. And this was because they despised this new land, wished only the things they ravished from her, and had their faces turned inexorably, hopefully, longingly, to the lands from which they had come.