"It isn't the black man now, darling, is it? Remember there is no black man, and mamma is close here beside you."
No, it wasn't the black man; he wasn't afraid of the darkness now, but he would like to have his ship. When she brought it, he played for a few minutes, and dozed off still grasping the toy in his hands. At twelve the doctor came, and again at four, when the patch of sunlight, by which she told the hours, had begun to grow fainter on the windowsill.
"He is better, doctor, isn't he? Don't you notice that he struggles less when he breathes?"
He looked at her with an expression of contemplative pity in his old watery eyes, and she gave a little cry and stretched out her hands, blindly groping.
"Doctor, I'll do anything – anything, if you'll only save him." An impulse to reach beyond him to some impersonal, cosmic Power greater than he was, made her add desperately: "I'll never ask for anything else in my life. I'll give up everything, if you'll only promise me that you will save him."
She stood up, drawing her thin figure, as tense as a cord, to its full height, and beneath the flowered blue dressing-gown her shoulder blades showed sharply under their fragile covering of flesh. Her hair, which she had not undone since the first shock of Harry's illness, hung in straight folds on either side of her pallid and haggard face. Even the colour of her eyes seemed to have changed, for their flower-like blue had faded to a dull grey.
"If we can pull through the night, Jinny," he said huskily, and added almost sternly, "you must bear up, so much depends on you. Remember, it is your first serious illness, but it may not be your last. You've got to take the pang of motherhood along with the pleasure, my dear – "
The pang of motherhood! Long after he had left her, and she had heard the street gate click behind him, she sat motionless, repeating the words, by Harry's little bed. The pang of motherhood – this was what she was suffering – the poignant suspense, the quivering waiting, the abject terror of loss, the unutterable anguish of the nerves, as if one's heart were being slowly torn out of one's body. She had had the joy, and now she was enduring the inevitable pang which is bound up, like a hidden pulse, in every mortal delight. Never pleasure without pain, never growth without decay, never life without death. The Law ruled even in love, and all the pitiful little sacrifices which one offered to Omnipotence, which one offered blindly to the Power that might separate, with a flaming sword, the cause from the effect, the substance from the shadow – what of them? While Harry lay there, wrapped in that burning stupor, she prayed, not as she had been taught to pray in her childhood, not with the humble and resigned worship of civilization, but in the wild and threatening lament of a savage who seeks to reach the ears of an implacable deity. In the last twenty-four hours the Unknown Power she entreated had changed, in her imagination, to an idol who responded only to the shedding of blood.
"Only spare my child and I will give up everything else!" she cried from the extremity of her anguish. The sharp edge of the bed hurt her bosom and she pressed frantically against it. Had it been possible to lacerate her body, to cut her flesh with knives, she might have found some pitiable comfort in the mere physical pain. Beside the agony in her mind, a pang of the flesh would have been almost a joy.
When at last she rose from her knees, Harry lay, breathing quietly, with his eyes closed and the toy ship on the blanket beside him. His childish features had shrunken in a day until they appeared only half their natural size, and a faint bluish tinge had crept over his face, wiping out all the sweet rosy colour. But he had swallowed a few spoonfuls of his last cup of broth, and the painful choking sound had ceased for a minute. The change, slight as it was, had followed so closely upon her prayers, that, while it lasted, she passed through one of those spiritual crises which alter the whole aspect of life. An emotion, which was a curious mixture of superstitious terror and religious faith, swept over her, reviving and invigorating her heart. She had abased herself in the dust before God – she had offered all her life to Him if He would spare her child – and had He not answered? Might not Harry's illness, indeed, have been sent to punish her for her neglect? A shudder of abhorrence passed through her as she remembered the fox-hunt, and her passion of jealousy. The roll of blue silk, lying upstairs in a closet in the third storey, appeared to her now not as a temptation to vanity, but as a reminder of the mortal sin which had almost cost her the life of her child. And suppose God had not stopped her in time – suppose she had gone to Atlantic City as Oliver had begged her to do?
In the room the light faded softly, melting first like frost from the mirror in the corner beyond the Japanese screen, creeping slowly across the marble surface of the washstand, lingering, in little ripples, on the green sash of the windowsill. Out of doors it was still day, and from where she sat by Harry's bed, she could see, under the raised tent, every detail of the street standing out distinctly in the grey twilight. Across the way the houses were beginning to show lights at the windows, and the old lamplighter was balancing himself unsteadily on his ladder at the corner. On the mulberry tree near the crossing the broad bronze leaves swung back and forth in the wind, which sighed restlessly around the house and drove the naked tendrils of a summer vine against the green shutters at the window. The fire had gone down, and after she had made it up very softly, she bent over Harry again, as if she feared that he might have slipped out of her grasp while she had crossed the room.
"If he only lives, I will let everything else go. I will think of nothing except my children. It will make no difference to me if I do look ten years older than Abby does. Nothing on earth will make any difference to me, if only God will let him get well."
And with the vow, it seemed to her that she laid her youth down on the altar of that unseen Power whose mercy she invoked. Let her prayer only be heard and she would demand nothing more of life – she would spend all her future years in the willing service of love. Was it possible that she had imagined herself unhappy thirty-six hours ago – thirty-six hours ago when her child was not threatened? As she looked back on her past life, it seemed to her that every minute had been crowned with happiness. Even the loss of her newborn baby appeared such a little thing – such a little thing beside the loss of Harry, her only son. Mere freedom from anxiety showed to her now as a condition of positive bliss.
Six o'clock struck, and Marthy knocked at the door with a cup of milk. "Do you think he'll be able to swallow any of it?" she asked, and there were tears in her eyes.
"He is better, Marthy, I am sure he is better. Has mother been here this afternoon?"
"She stopped at the door, but she didn't like to come in on account of the children. They are both well, she says, and send you their love. Do you want any more water in the kettle, ma'am?"
The kettle, which was simmering away beside Harry's bed, under the tent of sheets, was passed to Marthy through the crack in the door; and when in a few minutes the girl returned with fresh water, Virginia whispered to her that he had taken three spoonfuls of milk.
"And he let me mop his throat with turpentine," she said in quivering tones. "I am sure – oh, I am sure he is better."
"I am praying every minute," replied Marthy, weeping; and it seemed suddenly to Virginia that a wave of understanding passed between her and the ignorant mulatto girl, whom she had always regarded as of different clay from herself. With that miraculous power of grief to level all things, she felt that the barriers of knowledge, of race, of all the pitiful superiorities with which human beings have obscured and decorated the underlying spirit of life, had melted back into the nothingness from which they had emerged in the beginning. This feeling of oneness, which would have surprised and startled her yesterday, appeared so natural to her now, that, after the first instant of recognition, she hardly thought of it again.
"Thank you, Marthy," she answered gently, and closing the door, went back to her chair under the raised corner of the sheet. When the doctor came at nine o'clock she was sitting there, in the same position, so still and tense that she seemed hardly to be breathing, so ashen grey that the sheet hanging above her head showed deadly white by contrast with her face. In those three hours she knew that the clinging tendrils of personal desire had relaxed their hold forever on life and youth.
"If he doesn't get worse, we'll pull through," said the doctor, turning from his examination of Harry to lay his hand, which felt as heavy as lead, on her shoulder. "We've an even chance – if his heart doesn't go back on us." And he added, "Most mothers are good nurses, Jinny, but I never saw a better one than you are – unless it was your own mother. You get it from her, I reckon. I remember when you went through diphtheria how she sent your father to stay with one of the neighbours, and shut herself up with old Ailsey to nurse you. I don't believe she undressed or closed her eyes for a week."
Her own mother! So she was not the only one who had suffered this anguish – other women, many women, had been through it before she was born. It was a part of that immemorial pang of motherhood of which the old doctor had spoken. "But, was I ever in danger? Was I as ill as Harry?" she asked.
"For twenty-four hours we thought you'd slip through our fingers every minute. 'Twas only your mother's nursing that kept you alive – I've told her that twenty times. She never spared herself an instant, and, it may have been my imagination, but she never seemed to me to be the same woman afterwards. Something had gone out of her."
Now she understood, now she knew, something had gone out of her, also, and this something was youth. No woman who had fought with death for a child could ever be the same afterwards – could ever value again the small personal joys, when she carried the memory of supreme joy or supreme anguish buried within her heart. She remembered that her mother had never seemed young to her, not even in her earliest childhood; and she understood now why this had been so, why the deeper experiences of life rob the smaller ones of all vividness, of all poignancy. It had been so easy for her mother to give up little things, to deny herself, to do without, to make no further demands on life after the great demands had been granted her. How often had she said unthinkingly in her girlhood, "Mother, you never want anything for yourself." Ah, she knew now what it meant, and with the knowledge a longing seized her to throw herself into her mother's arms, to sob out her understanding and her sympathy, to let her feel before it was too late that she comprehended every step of the way, every throb of the agony!
"I'd spend the night with you, Jinny, if I didn't have to be with Milly Carrington, who has two children down with it," said the doctor; "but if there's any change, get Marthy to come for me. If not, I'll be sure to look in again before daybreak."
When he had gone, she moved the night lamp to the corner of the washstand, and after swallowing hastily a cup of coffee which Marthy had brought to her before the doctor's visit, and which had grown quite tepid and unpalatable, she resumed her patient watch under the raised end of the sheet. The whole of life, the whole of the universe even, had narrowed down for her into that faint circle of light which the lamp drew around Harry's little bed. It was as if this narrow circle beat with a separate pulse, divided from the rest of existence by its intense, its throbbing vitality. Here was concentrated for her all that the world had to offer of hope, fear, rapture, or anguish. The littleness and the terrible significance of the individual destiny were gathered into that faintly quivering centre of space – so small a part of the universe, and yet containing the whole universe within itself!
Outside, in the street, she could see a half-bared bough of the mulberry tree, arching against a square of window, from which the white curtains were drawn back; and in order to quiet her broken and disjointed thoughts, she began to count the leaves as they fell, one by one, turning softly at the stem, and then floating out into the darkness beyond. "One. Two. How long that leaf takes to loosen. He is better. The doctor certainly thought that he was better. If he only gets well. O God, let him get well, and I will serve you all my life! Three – four – five – For twenty-four hours we thought you would slip through our fingers. Somebody said that – somebody – it must have been the doctor. And he was talking of me, not of Harry. That was twenty-six years ago, and my mother was enduring then all this agony that I am feeling to-night. Twenty-six years ago – perhaps at this very hour, she sat beside me alone as I am sitting now by Harry. And before that other women went through it. All the world over, wherever there are mothers – north, south, east, west – from the first baby that was born on the earth – they have every one suffered what I am suffering now – for it is the pang of motherhood! To escape it one must escape birth and escape the love that is greater than one's self." And she understood suddenly that suffering and love are inseparable, that when one loves another more than one's self, one has opened the gate by which anguish will enter. She had forgotten to count the leaves, and when she remembered and looked again, the last one had fallen. Against the parted white curtains, the naked bough arched black and solitary. Even the small silent birds that had swayed dejectedly to and fro on the branches all day had flown off into the darkness. Presently, the light in the window went out, and as the hours wore on, a fine drizzling rain began to fall, as soft as tears, from the starless sky over the mulberry tree. A sense of isolation greater than any she had ever known attacked her like a physical chill, and rising, she went over to the fire and stirred the pile of coal into a flame. She was alone in her despair, and she realized, with a feeling of terror, that one is always alone when one despairs, that there is a secret chamber in every soul where neither love nor sympathy can follow one. If Oliver were here beside her – if he were standing close to her in that throbbing circle around the bed – she would still be separated from him by the immensity of that inner space which is not measured by physical distances. "No, even if he were here, he could not reach me," she said, and an instant later, with one of those piercing illuminations which visit even perfectly normal women in moments of great intensity, she thought quickly, "If every woman told the truth to herself, would she say that there is something in her which love has never reached?" Then, reproaching herself because she had left the bed for a minute, she went back again and bent over the unconscious child, her whole slender body curving itself passionately into an embrace. His face was ashen white, except where the skin around his mouth was discoloured with a faint bluish tinge. His flesh, even his bones, appeared to have shrunk almost away in twenty-four hours. It was impossible to imagine that he was the rosy, laughing boy, who had crawled into her arms only two nights ago. The disease held him like some unseen spiritual enemy, against which all physical weapons were as useless as the little toys of a child. How could one fight that sinister power which had removed him to an illimitable distance while he was still in her arms? The troubled stupor, which had in it none of the quiet and the restfulness of sleep, terrorized her as utterly as if it had been the personal spirit of evil. The invisible forces of Life and Death seemed battling in the quivering air within that small circle of light.
While she bent over him, he stirred, raised himself, and then fell back in a paroxysm of coughing. The violence of the spasm shook his fragile little body as a rough wind shakes a flower on a stalk. Over his face the bluish tinge spread like a shadow, and into his eyes there came the expression of wondering terror which she had seen before only in the eyes of young startled animals. For an instant it seemed almost as if the devil of disease were wrestling inside of him, as if the small vital force she called life would be beaten out in the struggle. Then the agony passed; the strangling sound ceased, and he grew quiet, while she wiped the poison from his mouth and nostrils, and made him swallow a few drops of milk out of a teaspoon.
At the moment, while she fell on her knees by his bedside, it seemed to her that she had reached that deep place beyond which there is nothing.
"You've pulled him through. We'll have him out of bed before many days now," said the old doctor at daybreak, and he added cheerfully, "By the way, your husband came in the front door with me. He wanted to rush up here at once, but I'm keeping him away because he is obliged to go back to the bank."
"Poor Oliver," said Virginia gently. "It is terrible on him. He must be so anxious." But even while she uttered the words, she was conscious of a curious sensation of unreality, as though she were speaking of a person whom she had known in another life. It was three days since she had seen Oliver, and in those three days she had lived and died many times.
CHAPTER IX
THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUTH
"Father, I want to marry John Henry," said Susan, just as she had said almost ten years ago, "Father, I want to go to college."
It was a March afternoon, ashen and windy, with flocks of small fleecy clouds hurrying across a changeable blue sky, and the vague, roving scents of early spring in the air. After his dinner, which he had taken for more than fifty years precisely at two o'clock, Cyrus had sat down for a peaceful pipe on the back porch before returning to the office. Between the sunken bricks in the little walled-in yard, blades of vivid green grass had shot up, seeking light out of darkness, and along the grey wooden ledge of the area the dauntless sunflowers were unfolding their small stunted leaves. On the railing of the porch a moth-eaten cat – the only animal for whom Cyrus entertained the remotest respect – was contentedly licking the shabby fur on her side.
"Father, I want to marry John Henry," repeated Susan, raising her voice to a higher key and towering like a flesh and blood image of Victory over the sagging cane chair in which he sat.
Taking his pipe from his mouth, he looked up at her; and so little had he altered in ten years, that the thought flashed through her mind that he had actually suffered no change of expression since the afternoon on which she had asked him to send her to college. As a man he may not have been impressive, but as a defeating force who could say that he had not attained his fulfilment? It was as if the instinct of patriarchal tyranny had entrenched itself in his person as in a last stronghold of the disappearing order. When he died many things would pass away out of Dinwiddie – not only the soul and body of Cyrus Treadwell, but the vanishing myth of the "strong man," the rule of the individual despot, the belief in the inalienable right of the father to demand blood sacrifices. For in common with other men of his type, he stood equally for industrial advancement and for domestic immobility. The body social might move, but the units that formed the body social must remain stationary.
"Well, I don't think I'd worry about marrying, if I were you," he replied, not unkindly, for Susan inspired him with a respect against which he had struggled in vain. "You are very comfortable now, ain't you? And I'll see that you are well provided for after my death. John Henry hasn't anything except his salary, I reckon."
Marriage as an economic necessity was perfectly comprehensible to him, but it was difficult for him to conceive of anybody indulging in it simply as a matter of sentiment. That April afternoon was so far away now that it had ceased to exist even as an historical precedent.
"Yes, but I want to marry him, and I am going to," replied Susan decisively.
"What arrangements would you make about your mother? It seems to me that your mother needs your attention."
"Of course I couldn't leave mother. If you agree to it, John Henry is willing to come here to live as long as I have to look after her. If not, I shall take her away with me; I have spoken to her, and she is perfectly willing to go."
The ten years which had left Cyrus at a standstill had developed his daughter from a girl into a woman. She spoke with the manner of one who realizes that she holds the situation in her hands, and he yielded to this assumption of strength as he would have yielded ten years ago had she been clever enough to use it against him. It was his own manner in a more attractive guise, if he had only known it; and the Treadwell determination to get the thing it wanted most was asserting itself in Susan's desire to win John Henry quite as effectively as it had asserted itself in Cyrus's passion to possess the Dinwiddie and Central Railroad. Though the ends were different, the quality which moved father and daughter towards these different ends was precisely the same. In Cyrus, it was force degraded; in Susan, it was force refined; but the peculiar attribute which distinguished and united them was the possession of the power to command events.
"Take your mother away?" he repeated. "Why, where on earth would you take her?"
"Then you'll have to agree to John Henry's coming here. It won't make any difference to you, of course. You needn't see him except at the table."
"But what would James say about it?" he returned, with the cowardice natural to the habitual bully. The girl had character, certainly, and though he disliked character in a woman, he was obliged to admit that she had not failed to make an impression.
"James won't care, and besides," she added magnificently, "it is none of his business."
"And it's none of mine, either, I reckon," said Cyrus, with a chuckle.
"Well, of course, it's more of mine," agreed Susan, and her delicious laugh drowned his chuckle.
She had won her point, and strange to say, she had pleased him rather than otherwise. He had suddenly a comfortable feeling in his digestive organs as well as a sense of virtue in his soul. It was impossible not to feel proud of her as she towered there above him with her superb body, as fine and as supple as the body of a race horse, and her splendid courage that made him wish while he looked at her that she, instead of James, had been born a male. She was not pretty – she had never been pretty – but he realized for the first time that there might be something better even for a woman than beauty.
"Thank you, father," she said as she turned away, and he was glad again to feel that she had conquered him. To be conquered by one's own blood was different from being conquered by a business acquaintance.
"You mustn't disturb the household, you know," he said, but his voice did not sound as dry as he had endeavoured to make it.
"I shan't disturb anybody," responded Susan, with the amiability of a woman who, having gained her point, can afford to be pleasant. Then, wheeling about suddenly on the threshold, she added, "By the way, I forgot to tell you that Mandy was here three times this morning asking to see you. She is in trouble about her son. He was arrested for shooting a policeman over at Cross's Corner, you know, and the people down there are so enraged, she's afraid of a lynching. You read about it in the paper, didn't you?"
Yes, he had read about the shooting – Cross's Corner was only three miles away – but, if he had ever known the name of Mandy's son, he had forgotten it so completely that seeing it in print had suggested nothing to his mind.
"Well, she doesn't expect me to interfere, does she?" he asked shortly.
"I believe she thought you might go over and do something – I don't know what – help her engage a lawyer probably. She was very pitiable, but after all, what can one do for a negro that shoots a policeman? There's Miss Willy calling me!"
She ran indoors, and taking his pipe, which was still smoking, from his mouth, Cyrus leaned back in his chair and stared intently at the small fleecy clouds in the west. The cat, having cleaned herself to her satisfaction, jumped down from the railing, and after rubbing against his thin legs, leaped gently into his lap.
"Tut-tut!" he remarked grimly; but he did not attempt to dislodge the animal, and it may be that some secret part of him was gratified by the attention. He was still sitting there some minutes later, when he heard the warning click of the back gate, and the figure of Mandy, appeared at the corner of the kitchen wall. Rising from his chair, he shook the cat from his knees, and descending the steps, met the woman in the centre of the walk, where a few hardy dandelions were flattened like buttons between the bricks.
"Howdy, Mandy. I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with that boy of yours." He saw at once that she was racked by a powerful emotion, and any emotion affected him unpleasantly as something extravagant and indecent. Sweat had broken out in glistening clusters over her face and neck, and her eyes, under the stray wisps of hair, had in them an expression of dumb and uncomprehending submission.
"Ain't you gwineter git 'im away, Marster?" she began, and stronger even than her terror was the awe of Cyrus which subdued her voice to a tone of servile entreaty.
"Why did he shoot a policeman? He knew he'd hang for it," returned Cyrus sharply, and he added, "Of course I can't get him away. He'll have to take his deserts. Your race has got to learn that when you break the law, you must pay for it."
At first he had made as if to push by her, but when she did not move, he thought better of it and waited for her to speak. The sound of her heavy breathing, like the breathing of some crouching beast, awoke in him a curious repulsion. If only one could get rid of such creatures after their first youth was over! If only every careless act could perish with the impulse that led to it! If only the dried husks of pleasure did not turn to weapons against one! These thoughts – or disjointed snatches of thoughts like these – passed in a confused whirl through his brain as he stood there. For an instant it was almost as if his accustomed lucidity of purpose had deserted him; then the disturbance ceased, and with the renewal of order in his mind, his life-long habit of prompt decision returned to him.
"Your race has got to learn that when you break the law you must pay for it," he repeated – for on that sound principle of justice he felt that he must unalterably take his stand.
"He's all de boy I'se got, Marster," rejoined the negress, with an indifference to the matter of justice which had led others of her colour into those subterranean ways where abstract principles are not. "You ain' done furgot 'im, Marster," she added piteously. "He 'uz born jes two mont's atter Miss Lindy turnt me outer hyer – en he's jes ez w'ite ez ef'n he b'longed ter w'ite folks."
But she had gone too far – she had outraged that curious Anglo-Saxon instinct in Cyrus which permitted him to sin against his race's integrity, yet forbade him to acknowledge, even to himself, that he bore any part in the consequences of that sin. Illogical, he might have admitted, but there are some truths so poisonous that no honest man could breathe the same air with them.
Taking out his pocket-book, he slowly drew a fifty dollar bill from its innermost recesses, and as slowly unfolded it. He always handled money in that careful fashion – a habit which he had inherited from his father and his grandfather before him, and of which he was entirely unconscious. Filtering down through so many generations, the mannerism had ceased at last to be merely a physical peculiarity, and had become strangely spiritual in its suggestion. The craving for possession, the singleness of desire, the tenacity of grasp, the dread of relinquishment, the cold-blooded determination to keep intact the thing which it had cost so much to acquire – all that was bound up in the spirit of Cyrus Treadwell, and all that would pass at last with that spirit from off the earth, was expressed in the gesture with which he held out the bit of paper to the woman who had asked for his help. "Take this – it is all I can do for you," he said, "and don't come whining around me any more. Black or white, the man that commits a murder has got to hang for it."
A sound broke from the negress that resembled a human cry of grief less than it did the inarticulate moan of an animal in mortal pain. Then it stopped suddenly, strangled by that dull weight of usage beneath which the primal impulse in her was crushed back into silence. Instinctively, as if in obedience to some reflex action, she reached out and took the money from his hand, and still instinctively, with the dazed look of one who performs in delirium the customary movements of every day, she fell back, holding her apron deprecatingly aside while he brushed past her. And in her eyes as she gazed after him there dawned the simple wonder of the brute that asks of Life why it suffers.
Beyond the alley into which the gate opened, Cyrus caught sight of Gabriel's erect figure hurrying down the side street in the direction of the Old Ladies' Home, and calling out to him, he scrambled over the ash heaps and tomato cans, and emerged, irritated but smiling, into the sunlight.