The Brimming Cup Part 16

She felt a mounting wave of horror and nausea, and knowing well from experience what was on its way, fought desperately to ward it off, reading hurriedly a real-estate item in the newspaper, an account of a flood in the West, trying in vain to fix her mind on what she read. But she could not stop the advance of what was coming. She let the newspaper fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her heart ... "suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the 'peace' is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the whole nightmare will start over."

She looked down at the little boy, applying himself seriously to his b.u.t.tons. "In fifteen years' time my baby will be a man of twenty-one."

Wild cries broke out in her heart. "No, oh no! I couldn't live through another. To see them all go, husband and sons! Not another war! Let me live quickly, anyhow, somehow, to get it over with ... and die before it comes."

The little boy had been twisting himself despairingly, and now said in a small voice, "Mother, I've tried and I've tried and I can't do that back b.u.t.ton."

His mother heard his voice and looked down at him uncomprehendingly for a moment. He said, less resigned, impatience p.r.i.c.king through his tone, "Mother, I _told_ you I never could reach that b.u.t.ton behind."

She bent from her chair, mechanically secured the little garment, and then, leaning back, looked down moodily at her feet. The little boy began silently to put on and lace up his shoes.

Marise was aware of a dimming of the light in the inner room of her consciousness, as though one window after another were being darkened. A hushed, mournful twilight fell in her heart. Melancholy came and sat down with her, black-robed. What could one feel except Melancholy at the sight of the world of humanity, poor world, war-ridden, broken in health, ruined in hope, the very nerves of action cut by the betrayal of its desperate efforts to be something more than base.

Was that really Melancholy? Something else slid into her mind, something watchful. She sat perfectly still so that no chance movement should disturb that mood till it could be examined and challenged. There was certainly something else in her heart beside sorrow over the miseries of the after-war world.

She persisted in her probing search, felt a cold ray of daylight strike into that gloom and recognized with amazement and chagrin what else it was! Disgusting! There in the very bottom of her mind, lay still that discomfort at beginning to look like Cousin Hetty! And so that wound to her vanity had slowly risen again into her consciousness and clothed itself in the ampler, n.o.bler garments of impersonal Melancholy... .

"_Oh_," she cried aloud, impatiently, contemptuous of herself, "what picayune creatures human beings are! I'm ashamed to be one!"

She started up and went to the window, looking out blankly at the mountain wall, as she had at the newspaper, not seeing what was there, her eyes turned inward. "Wait now, wait. Don't go off, half-c.o.c.ked. Go clear through with this thing," she exhorted herself. "There _must_ be more in it than mere childish, silly vanity." She probed deep and brought up, "Yes, there is more to it. In the first place I was priggish and hypocritical when I tried to pretend that it was nothing to me when I looked in the gla.s.s and saw for the first time that my youth has begun to leave me. That was Anglo-Saxon pretense, trying to seem to myself made of finer stuff than I really am. It's really not cheerful for any woman, no matter on what plane, to know that the days of her physical flowering are numbered. I'd have done better to look straight at that, and have it out with myself."

She moved her head very slightly, from side to side. "But there was more than that. There was more than that. What was it?" She leaned her ear as if to listen, her eyes very large and fixed. "Yes, there _was_ the war, and the awfulness of our disappointment in it, too, after all. There was the counsel of despair about everything, the pressure on us all to think that all efforts to be more than base are delusions. We were so terribly fooled with our idealistic hopes about the war ... who knows but that we are being fooled again when we try for the higher planes of life?

Perhaps those people are right who say that to grab for the pleasures of the senses is the best ... those are _real_ pleasures, at least. Who knows if there is anything else?"

Something like a little, far-away tolling said to her, "There was something else. There was something else."

This time she knew what it was. "Yes, there was that other aspect of the loss of physical youth, when you think that the pleasures of the senses are perhaps all there are. There was the inevitable despairing wonder if I had begun to have out of my youth all it could have given, whether ..."

There tolled in her ear, "Something else, something else there." But now she would not look, put her hands over her eyes, and stood in the dark, fighting hard lest a ray of light should show her what might be there.

A voice sounded beside her. Toucle was saying, "Have you got one of your headaches? The mail carrier just went by. Here are the letters."

She took down her hands, and opened her eyes. She felt that something important hung on there being a letter from Neale. She s.n.a.t.c.hed at the handful of envelopes and sorted them over, her fingers trembling. Yes, there it was, the plain stamped envelope with Neale's firm regular handwriting.

She felt as though she were a diver whose lungs had almost collapsed, who was being drawn with heavenly swiftness up to the surface of the water. She tore open the envelope and read, "Dearest Marise." It was as though she had heard his voice.

She drew in a great audible breath and began to read. What a relief it was to feel herself all one person, not two or three, probing hatefully into each other!

But there was something she had not done, some teasing, unimportant thing, she ought to finish before going on with the letter. She looked up vacantly, half-absently, wondering what it was. Her eyes fell on Toucle. Toucle was looking at her, Toucle who so seldom looked at anything. She felt a momentary confusion as though surprised by another person in a room she had thought empty. And after that, uneasiness. She did not want Toucle to go on looking at her.

"Mark hasn't had his breakfast yet," she said to the old Indian woman.

"Won't you take him downstairs, please, and give him a dish of porridge for me?"

CHAPTER IX

"The Gent Around the Lady

and

The Lady Round the Gent"

_An Evening in the Life of Mr. Vincent Marsh_

May 25.

"Come in, come in!" cried an old black-clad woman, with a white ap.r.o.n, who opened the door wider into the flaring brilliance of the lamp-lit kitchen. "I'm _real_ glad you felt to come to one of our dances. They're old-fashioned, but _we_ like 'em." She closed the door behind them and added cordially, "Now Mr. Welles is going to live here, he'll have to learn to shake his feet along with the rest of us."

Mr. Welles was frankly terrified at the idea. "Why, I never dreamed of dancing in all my life!" he cried. "I only came to look on." He hesitated to divest himself of his overcoat, panic-struck and meditating flight. Vincent fell upon him from one side and the lively old woman from the other. Together they stripped the older man of his wraps.

"Never too late to learn," old Mrs. Powers a.s.sured him briskly. "You dance with _me_ and I'll shove ye around, all right. There ain't a quadrille ever danced that I couldn't do backwards with my eyes shut, as soon as the music strikes up." She motioned them towards the door, "Step right this way. The folks that have come are all in the settin'-room."

As they followed her, Vincent said, "Mrs. Powers, aren't you going to dance with me, too?"

"Oh, of course I be," she answered smartly, "if you ask me."

"Then I ask you now," he urged, "for the first dance. Only I don't know any more than Mr. Welles how to dance a quadrille. But I'm not afraid."

"I guess there ain't much ye _be_ afraid of," she said admiringly. They came now into the dining-room and caught beyond that a glimpse of the living-room. Both wore such an unusual aspect of elegance and grace that Vincent stared, stopping to look about him. "Looks queer, don't it,"

said Mrs. Powers, "with the furniture all gone. We always move out everything we _can_, up garret, so's to leave room for dancing."

Oh yes, that was it, Vincent thought; the shinily varnished cheap furniture had almost disappeared, and the excellent proportions of the old rooms could be seen. Lamps glowed from every shelf, their golden light softened by great sprays of green branches with tender young leaves, which were fastened everywhere over the doors, the windows, banked in the corner The house smelled like a forest, indescribably fresh and spicy.

"There ain't many flowers yet; too early," explained Mrs. Powers apologetically, "so we had to git green stuff out'n the woods to kind of dress us up. 'Gene he _would_ have some pine boughs too. He's crazy about pine-trees. I always thought that was one reason why he took it so hard when we was done out of our wood-land. He thinks as much of that big pine in front of the house as he does of a person. And tonight he's got the far room all done up with pine boughs."

They arrived in the living-room now, where the women and children cl.u.s.tered on one side, and the men on the other, their lean boldly marked faces startlingly clear-cut in the splendor of fresh shaves. The women were mostly in light-colored waists and dark skirts, their hair carefully dressed. Vincent noticed, as he nodded to them before taking his place with the men, that not a single one had put powder on her face. Their eyes looked shining with antic.i.p.ation. They leaned their heads together and chatted in low tones, laughing and glancing sideways at the group of men on the other side of the room. Vincent wondered at the presence of the children. When she arrived, he would ask Marise about that. At the inward mention of the name he felt a little shock, which was not altogether pleasurable. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head slightly, as though to toss a lock of hair from his forehead, a gesture which was habitual with him when he felt, with displeasure, an unexpected emotion not summoned by his will. It pa.s.sed at once.

On joining the dark-suited group of men he found himself next to young Frank Warner, leaning, loose-jointed and powerful, against the wall, and not joining in the talk of weather, pigs, roads, and spring plowing which rose from the others. Vincent looked at him with approval. He felt strongly drawn to this splendid, primitive creature, and knew perfectly well why. He liked anybody who had pep enough to have an original feeling, not one prescribed by the ritual and tabu of his particular tribe.

"h.e.l.lo, Frank," he said. "Have a cigarette?

"We'll have to go out if we smoke," said Frank.

"Well, why shouldn't we?" suggested Vincent, looking around him.

"There's nothing to do here, yet."

Frank tore himself loose from the supporting wall with a jerk, and nodded. Together they stepped out of the front door, unused by the guests, who all entered by the kitchen. At first it was as though they had plunged into black velvet curtains, so great was the contrast with the yellow radiance of the room they had left. They looked back through the unshaded windows and saw the room as though it were an ill.u.s.tration in a book, or a scene in a moving-picture play, the men grouped in a dark ma.s.s on one side, the women, smiling, bending their heads towards each other, the lamps glowing on the green branches and on the shining eyes of all those pleasure-expectant human beings.

As they looked, Nelly Powers came in from another room, doubtless the "far room" of which her mother-in-law had spoken. She was carrying a large tray full of cups. She braced herself against the weight of the earthenware and balancing herself with a free swinging motion on her high-heeled shoes walked with an accentuation of her usual vigorous poise.

"By George, she's a beauty!" cried Vincent, not sorry to have an opportunity to talk of her with his companion.

Frank made no comment. Vincent laughed to himself at the enormous capacity for silence of these savages, routing to the imagination of a civilized being. He went on, determined to get some expression from the other, "She's one of the very handsomest women I ever saw anywhere."