The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 4
IN the seventies the town of Cordova straggled its length along the highroad which once had been a trail across the prairies into the Far West. There were a few houses built of sawed timber, a few of the log houses that were remnants of its early days, a few shanties that served as dwelling-places for the negroes along the river, and the pretentious brick buildings of the Primitive Methodist Divinity School. The village sat pressed against a flat prairie so vast that it seemed to extend to the limits of the known world. The only break in the even line of its monotony was the sluggish meandering river whose waters were red with the fertility of the earth. To the south there extended a great area of land that had once been only a vast marsh, but with the passing of centuries the slow-moving river had cut itself deeper and deeper into the soil, draining the marsh and leaving it dry with a caked peat-like surface which burned slowly with the flameless intensity of rotten wood. In the seventies there was so much rich land to be had that no one paused on his way west to claim any of the bog, and when the peat-like surface took fire it was allowed to burn until drowned by the flood-like rains of the spring. Always there was some part of the bog asmoulder, sending up great columns of white smoke. The sight provided variety in a landscape that otherwise was insanely monotonous. Sometimes the soil burned in a dozen places at once so that the whole countryside to the south of Cordova took on the aspect of Hell, and sometimes in the fantastic damp heat of the prairie summers there appeared in it the mirages of lakes that seemed made of smouldering brimstone. The water in wells of that flat country was stale and flat and without life.
It was to this town that Uriah Spragg and his sister Annie came on the death of their mother, for Uriah had set his mind on becoming a preacher of the Primitive Methodist faith and to thus atone for the colossal sins of his father, the Prophet. And Uriah Spragg was no longer a young man and he knew now that there was much to atone for. He planned after he was ordained to go from place to place in a wagon as his father had done, preaching in villages and crossroads, wiping out the evil spread by the Prophet.
The burden of his father's sin was a thing which never left him.
He was a tall man, raw-boned in the parlance of the country, with great wrists and knuckles and kneebones. Save for his great strength—he could straighten horseshoes and bend bars of iron—he had nothing in common with the Prophet. It was as if Nature had taken an impish delight in making father and son so unlike each other. Uriah's hair was sandy red and sparse; Uriah's lips were thin and always drawn a little, as if there was some pain forever gnawing him from within. His skin was pale and dry and covered with freckles; and his beard, which he shaved, was thin and scraggly. In his face there were deep furrows that seemed cut there by a careless chisel. His pale blue eyes had a way of wavering and shifting restlessly, so that they appeared never to be looking directly into the eyes of any person. It may have been the sense of his father's sin, the shame of being a son of the Prophet, which made him fearful and uneasy, for he was a sensitive man who suffered agonies. It was the soul of a woman in the body of a giant. And he was shy and silent and had no friends, for he believed that people were forever whispering about the doings of his father.
He came to Cordova to learn what he must learn, a man already on his way to middle age, to listen to sermons and read the teachings of Wesley with adolescent boys come out of the prairies and cornfields, all like himself believing themselves chosen by God to spread His word. There were boys among them scarcely more than half his age and none of them was as old as his youngest sister Annie.
There was between Annie and Uriah a mysterious feeling which bound them together, as if they had been twins born of the same cell rather than brother and sister separated by twelve years with many brothers and sisters between. It may have been the knowledge that they were the two most cherished by the tired long-suffering woman who had borne them, or that they alone of all the thirteen understood the long agony of her lifetime. And they had known now for a long time, without once speaking of it, that their father was neither God nor God's Prophet nor even a good man, but only a lustful old reprobate who deceived himself into believing that he was God. It was a thought neither of them had ever uttered. They knew it. And when their mother died they went quickly away because Uriah was in haste to begin the atonement.
It had never occurred to either of them that on leaving the Saint's colony they should go separate ways. Having lived always a little apart from the world in the strange migratory life of the Prophet, having been steeped always in religion and Bible reading, they came to believe without knowing it that they were strange marked creatures who did not belong to the world as others did. As far back as they could remember the world had treated them as curiosities. There were always crowds about the wagon of the Prophet staring at him and his children . . . as if they were wild beasts. At the time they came to Cordova Annie Spragg was possessed of a strange wild beauty that passed for plainness among the women of the place because it had none of the chromo-like prettiness for which their starved souls had a craving. More discerning and worldly critics would have discovered in her figure and in her sly face a mysterious excitement that stirred what was deepest and most carnal in man. Of all the thirteen legitimate children of the Prophet she alone appeared to have been touched by the same unholy power which he came to understand so well and to exploit with such profit. The two eldest sons had it not, for their joint imposture of the Prophet had been discovered soon enough by the women of the Saint's colony. They were not men enough to fill their father's shoes.
She was of middle height with red hair, not the nondescript sandy red of Uriah's hair, but a deep flaming red as her mother's hair had been on the day the Prophet first saw her in her father's cabin at St. Louis before she had borne thirteen children in fifteen years; and her skin was not pale and freckled like Uriah's, but of that waxen green-white to be found in the women of Titian. Her figure at twenty-four was slim, but possessed of curves which even stiff skirts and coarse black cloth could not conceal. Her eyes were greenish and of an odd almond shape, slanting upward at the outer corners; and her mouth was the mouth of the Prophet himself, red and full-blooded and voluptuous, with a disturbing power of excitement. She had a gliding, sinuous walk. Yet because love had not touched her, she went her way all unconscious of her power. Like Uriah, the dark unspoken things which they knew but never mentioned had made her afraid even of herself. Elsewhere, outside the lost village, she could have had what she wanted from the world, but in Cordova desire and the flesh were things to inspire horror. And always like a warning against the pale sky of that flat country rose the clouds of smoke from the burning bog, always the mirage of lakes of burning brimstone.
They rented one of the decaying log cabins from an old pioneer woman who had gone to live with her grandchildren, and when Uriah had stopped the holes in the roof and the walls they settled themselves in it until Uriah should be ordained. Though it was a thing never spoken of between them, they understood that neither of them should ever marry. Uriah had no desire to marry. Women had made his mother's life a long and passionate tragedy. She alone of all the women in the world was pure and good. He was afraid of women and hated them. There were even times when he hated his sister Annie for being a woman and the root of sin. He hated her for her fine shining hair and red lips, and for her sinuous walk.
Among all those who came to the seminary at Cordova believing they were the elect of God, there was a youth named Leander Potts, one of the nine sons of a farmer on the plains west of the Mississippi. He had come in a way as an offering to God from a father who was grateful for nine sons, but he would have come whether his father permitted it or not because he had seen visions while turning the sod and knew that God had chosen him. And his mother was a religious, who was half insane from the loneliness of a prairie where there were no other women. Leander was her darling and the one chosen by her to follow God. To him had been given the richest food. He alone had been given books and the time to read them. When he came to Cordova he was still an adolescent, chaste and tempted, troubled by visions and dreams, carnal and celestial. He was, too, a strong youth.
He was handsome in the florid way of Anglo-Saxon youths, with curling blond hair and bright blue eyes with long dark lashes like those of a girl. At forty he would be ruddy and perhaps bloated. At twenty he was like a young Florentine painted by Leonardo.
It was Leander Potts who became the only friend of Annie and Uriah Spragg. It was a slow thing, this friendship, for Uriah with his pride and sense of difference from the rest of the world, could make no advances. And Annie stayed much at home, save for solitary walks along the sluggish river when she was happy, noticing the ways of the birds and beasts, the trees and the flowers. Uriah acknowledged the greetings of his fellow students, but chose never to be the first to exchange a word regarding the weather or the sermons. He had the sensitiveness of a boy too old and too big for his schoolfellows. He was all joints and knuckles, ashamed and flushing easily.
But from the first day when he saw Leander's curly yellow head before him in the chapel, he felt drawn toward the boy. The sight of Leander was like a ray of sunlight piercing the gloomy depths of his soul, illuminating and warming it as no man or woman save his mother had ever been able to do. And Leander was, too, a sort of an ideal, a symbol of all that which Uriah might have been save for his age, his uncouthness and the scar upon his soul. Leander seemed in truth the chosen of God—comely, confident, young and, in a community made harsh by fear of a terrible God, a creature bright with charm. On the day he first spoke to Uriah, the older man felt the skies open and saw the sun pour through.
In Leander the first impulse to speak arose from a sense of pity for Uriah, who even in that queer community seemed strange and awkward and out of place. It was Uriah's loneliness that touched him, almost without his knowing it.
From that moment onward the older man came to look for the boy's greeting as one who lives in a dour climate looks for the sun. He plotted, without plotting, that he might encounter Leander during the day. To Annie, waiting for him at home, he seemed to grow more cheerful and talkative. She wondered at the reason, but she never asked him and Uriah could not have told her why the world seemed a better place, less black with sin.
As for Annie, she cooked and baked, and in order to help Uriah with money she began to do sewing for the women of the village. She even made an entrance into that trade which all small towns associate with fast women. She became a milliner. But the people of Cordova did not take kindly to her. Her silence and aloofness disturbed them. They came to know presently that she was the daughter of the Prophet Spragg and so they gave her a name for immorality and evil, a reputation which her appearance, despite all her plain and ugly clothes, could not deny. No matter how black her dresses, there was something in the green slanting eyes, the pointed nose, the red hair and the white skin which made women draw together in little groups like hens as she passed and caused men to look after her as if their wills had turned to butter. The wall of her isolation grew higher and higher, shutting her in from all the world. And so she took to going more and more on those solitary walks along the river-bank. The river was the only relief from the monotony of that smoke-hazed world.
Because human companionship was denied her she came to make friends of the birds and the tiny beasts, the flowers and the rare trees of that flat country. The very rabbits came to know her and the birds along the river-bank awaited her coming with the crumbs she brought from her table. It was a happy life and she seemed content with it, living only in dread of the coming of winter. Sometimes when she had gone a long way and could see across the flat land that there was no one within miles of her, she would take off her ugly black dress and tight stays and bathe in a warm sluggish stream, warming her naked body sinfully in the sunlight. And all the while she drifted further and further from the dreadful God of Cordova. Uriah noticed it and reproved her. He saw her sit dreaming in the House of God, deaf to the harsh words of the Reverend Mr. Simpson, her mind wandering far from "a Hell paved with the skulls of unbaptized infants." And his fear for her would be shadowed at times with a strange dark cloud of hatred and envy, as if he understood somehow that she was secretly escaping him and the sins of their father and the justice of a vengeful God.
His friendship with Leander grew, bringing with it a disturbing and incomplete happiness. As the older of the two he gave Leander timid advice. Together they had long talks of the future, rising into a flame of passion at the glory of spreading abroad the Kingdom of God as taught in Cordova. They went on long rambles across a country where each mile was exactly like the last and the one before and talk could be the only diversion. Uriah always walked bent forward a little, his great bony hands clasped behind his back. And one day Uriah in a burst of fire proposed timidly that when they left Cordova they should set out together in a covered wagon carrying their message to remote villages and crossroads where men of God seldom came. Annie, his sister, said Uriah, could go with them and cook and mend their clothes. Life seemed to become a bright and beautiful thing.
Leander said, "But your sister. I have never seen your sister. I will go home with you tonight and see her."
But Uriah's face grew dark and he was silent, torn between a desire to take the beloved Leander to his home and an obscure and nameless fear of having Leander lay eyes upon his sister Annie.
Leander did come to the house, not that day but another, one evening just after the long prairie sunset. Uriah was not there and Annie asked him in to await her brother's coming. The meeting disturbed them both, but in Leander's feelings there was no pity for Annie as there had been for Uriah. He was confused and frightened. For a long time now he had been aware of women, but he had never been aware of one woman, and there was something about this strange girl which seemed to be the apotheosis of all women. He watched her, afraid but fascinated, while she went quietly about her work in the kitchen, making polite and halting remarks about the weather or the corn or the sermon of the Reverend Mr. Simpson. It was all outwardly cold and meaningless and inwardly charged with disturbing things. Leander was aware of her in every nerve and muscle. Annie, watching him stealthily, was aware of a new beauty come into her life. Of late during the long walks by the river life had seemed to be opening like a flower, petal by petal, in a loveliness she had never suspected. And now came this beautiful young man with blue eyes and fair curling hair like an angel.
Uriah came at last, dark-browed and forbidding, and when Annie suggested that his friend stay to supper, he could not send Leander away. Leander did stay and all through supper Annie sat modestly with eyes cast down while her brother and his friend talked of the church and of God.
After that Leander came more and more often, though there was little talk between him and Annie. Evening after evening she sat quietly apart in the darkness by the fireplace while the two men read the Scriptures and interpreted them. Sometimes she sat watching Leander's golden head from under her long lashes without being seen and sometimes when he was reading she stole sudden quick glances at his odd disturbing beauty. Always Uriah took care that the atmosphere should be saturated with the words of the Bible. He fought his battle in silence, filled with a corroding jealousy, knowing always that Leander was there because of Annie and not because of himself or of God. Craftily he chose to read and expound passages filled with sonorous warnings against unchastity, of the evils of the flesh and of desire. He read always in the cold tight voice of one in pain.
And presently Leander came to look ill. The high color left his cheeks and there was a tired look in his blue eyes. At night his visions and dreams grew more and more fantastic and troubled, filled with strange beasts like those out of the Apocalypse. Annie gave him pennyroyal tea to drink lest he be coming down with the fevers that swept the hot, damp prairies, and as he drank she watched him closely out of the green, veiled, slanting eyes. Leander knew now when she was watching him. It was as if her gaze burned into his flesh and set his blood on fire. Slowly Uriah grew confident again, believing that he had won and kept the soul of Leander unstained by the sin of desire that had damned his own father. Annie said nothing, for they never spoke of such things.
Six months after Leander first came to the cabin, a tenth child was born in the house where he lodged and there was no longer room for him. Nor was there any room in all the village save in the house of Annie and Uriah Spragg. He came there with his carpet-bag and tin trunk to live in the extra room, and after that there was no longer any peace in the house, but only smothered passion and hatred and jealousy. Uriah, more terrified than before, talked much and hysterically of their mission, saying that they must give themselves in chastity to God alone, looking neither to right nor to left. Leander devoured himself with desire and a sense of sin.
One night in midsummer when the heat and stillness of the country was intolerable, the three of them sat as usual in the single common room. It was Leander's turn to read the Scripture and he chose to read from the Song of Songs which is Solomon's, showing the Mutual Love of Christ and his Church. He plunged deep into the middle of it as if he had been reading it again and again and knew each verse, and he read in a loud and terrible voice shaken with his inward illness. Crying out, he read,
"How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O Princess: the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.
"Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.
"Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.
"Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fish pools of Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.
"Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries.
"How fair and how pleasant art thou, O Love, for delights.
"This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.
"I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof; now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples.
"And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.
"I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me."
In her corner Annie Spragg stopped seeing. She clasped her hands together lest their trembling betray her. Uriah Spragg sat upright and very still, his bony hands hanging at his side, his furrowed face ashen and drawn and strangely like the head of death. He looked neither to one side nor the other. It was as if he did not hear the passionate voice of Leander, torn and twisted by the dark things in his soul.
And Annie Spragg knew now, for the words of Solomon had made her aware of her body.
When Leander had finished and put down the book, Uriah without a word reached out a knotty hand and took it from him. In silence he turned the pages and then in the cold strangled voice that was so different from the warm, rich voice of the Prophet, he read,
"We have heard it said of them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery.
"But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart."
When he had finished, he closed the book without a word and, rising, went into his own room, leaving them alone. Leander rose and in silence rushed through the open door out into the cornfields. And Annie, sitting alone in her corner, heard the voice of her brother raised in prayer.
All the next morning the three in the cabin went the mean small round of their existence betraying no sign of recognizing the thing that had happened. Life went on the same as if by denying the thing they could annihilate its existence. But at noonday neither Leander nor Uriah came home for dinner. Annie waited for them and when at last she gave up all hope of their coming, she locked the house and set out for a walk along the river.
It was a hot still afternoon, damp with the smell of growing corn turning to milk in the ear, and she walked slowly, stopping now and then to rest in the shade of the feathery willows and witch-hazel that grew in the fertile soil by the edge of the stream. Two little birds followed her, twittering and flying from bush to bush. Once while she was resting three quail came out from among the rows of corn to eat the crusts she brought them. The mud turtles, instead of slipping in alarm from logs and stones into the water, watched her with staring beady eyes, unafraid. The bluejays out of vulgar friendliness kept up a wild screeching and calling.
She wandered on and on, sadly and in a kind of dream, not knowing why it was she felt so tired and so confused, knowing only that the heat and the smell of the corn seemed to fill her with an overpowering desire to sleep. She had walked for miles and miles when she came at last to a spot which long ago she had chosen for her own. It lay in a wide bend of the meandering stream so that the fragment of earth was almost an island. In another year the spring floods would have cut through the narrow neck and isolated it, leaving it to be washed away bit by bit in the years that followed, into the distant ocean that Annie had never seen. No one had ploughed this land and it lay overgrown with a thicket of golden-rod and sumach and gentians. Here she had come alone many times. There was a kind of bower where she lay whole afternoons watching the ways of the birds and the beetles, the turtles and the ants. Sometimes she fell asleep, to awake only when the afternoon sun had fallen low on the prairie and the cool of evening had begun.
Today she pushed her way through the briars into the bower and flinging herself down yielded to the hunger for sleep.
It was late when she awakened slowly, aware of a faint pleasant sound of splashing somewhere near her, a sound that was cool, as if the water touched her own hot troubled brow. Slowly she sat up and looking out from the bower, she saw the cause of the noise. On the log in the midst of the stream sat Leander with his back to her, quite naked. He was splashing his feet in the water and sending it high in the air to fall down in glistening drops over his blond head and white body.
A strange, voluptuous weakness filled her body so that she could not rise. She felt that she must be dying. She knew that if she did rise she could not escape lest he notice her and know that she had seen him thus. She was frozen to the earth, fascinated and helpless, and suddenly Leander slipped into the reddish water and swam away toward the far shore. She tried to cover her face with her hands, but she could not move them to her face. On the sloping bank opposite Leander was lifting a great stone high above his head. She saw the muscles flow beneath the white skin as he lifted it higher and higher until with a gesture of triumph in his own strength he hurled it from him into the midst of the cornfield. Then he ran and leaped and turned cartwheels on the thick red-black soil, and Annie, burying her face in the thick grass to shield it from what she kept seeing, felt a sudden wave of sickening beauty, of a kind she had never known before. It was a new world, as unknown to her as it was to the people of Cordova. Beauty and delight in life flowed in upon her, dazzling and blinding her, and with a great sense of freshness and freedom, as if she were herself for the first time, she pressed her face against the earth and wept.
When she raised her head again he was gone, and pulling herself to her feet she pushed her way through the bushes and ran along the edge of the high corn, keeping close against the willows and sumach for fear that he might see her and know that she had seen him in his nakedness. When she had run a long way, she fell from exhaustion and lay panting.
"From this day," she thought, "I am a lost woman." For she knew now that she was sick with desire for Leander.
In the south the bog was afire and the white smoke drifted slowly up in a great cloud against the prairie sky. In it the lakes of brimstone swam and flickered in the heat. She found Uriah waiting for her, his narrow eyes dark with suspicion and accusation, but neither of them said anything. They waited for Leander to return and at last at dark when he had not come in they sat down to eat without speaking to each other. It was nine o'clock and Uriah had been many times to the door looking out into the darkness when at last Leander appeared. He was hatless and in his hand he carried Annie Sprugg's sunbonnet. Looking at her with a queer expression in his blue eyes, he said, "I found it by the bend in the river. I knew it was yours."
It was a strange accusing look as if he believed that she had been spying on him. Behind it lay a mist of shocked and confusing thoughts. She took the bonnet and ran into her room, closing the door and bolting it.
But she did not sleep. It was as if a demon had taken possession of her. She heard Uriah and Leander talking, talking, talking, still as if nothing unusual had occurred. She heard them reading the Scripture, Uriah in his tight pinched voice, Leander in his low warm soft one. She heard one of them go to bed and then the other. The light disappeared and all the house fell into darkness. She lay thinking, "I am an evil woman. I am cursed as my father was before me. I had better die. I had better kill myself at once."
Her love for Leander was so great that she could no longer breathe in peace. And he had said nothing. Perhaps tomorrow he would go away and she would never see him again. They could not go on like this. Perhaps if she did not kill herself, Uriah would kill her. She had thought of late that there was a look of cold murder in his eye. They could not go on like this.
She did not know how long she lay thus tormenting herself, but toward morning she rose, thinking to go into the kitchen for a drink of water from the pail that stood there. It was not clear sparkling water, but the dead stale water of the flat country. In the darkness she made her way through the common room into the kitchen. She found the pail. She was raising the dipper to her hot parched lips when there was a sound of a door opening. She pressed against the wall listening and presently someone crossed the common room and entered the kitchen. She thought, "It may be Uriah coming to kill me." And then with a sudden sick feeling, "It may be Leander. He, too, could not sleep." But in the blackness she could not make certain.
She heard the figure in the dark fumbling at the latch of the kitchen door. The door opened against the blue of the prairie night and she saw that it was Leander. He was dressed and in his hand he carried his carpet-bag. He was going away and she would never see him again. She grew cold and trembled and wanted to cry out, "Don't go, Leander. Don't go. I am here waiting for you. Nothing makes any difference." He must not go away. He must not go away.
And then, although she had not cried out, he hesitated for a moment as if he had felt her standing there in the darkness, and putting down the bag he turned and made his way toward the water pail. He was coming nearer and nearer. He was beside her now, he would see her in a moment. In a low voice, she said, "It's me, Annie. Leander, you mustn't go away."
She heard him make a sudden quick movement of terror and echo, "Annie," and then it seemed to her that they were enveloped by a flame.
In the morning he was gone and he did not return all that day though she went a hundred times to the door of the cabin to look for him. And he did not return the next day or the next. On the fourth day they found him. It was Uriah who made the discovery. Leander was lying at the bend in the river a little way from Annie's bower. He was dead and his gun lay beside him. He had shot himself through the head.
It was Uriah who brought her the news. He told the story simply, as if he did not know the reason why Leander had destroyed himself or that it meant anything at all to her. There was only the look in the pale blue eyes, so cold, so full of hatred that Annie Spragg turned away and hid her face. Uriah Spragg had now to atone for the sin of his sister as well as the sin of his father. They never spoke of it again, for it was their habit never to speak of sins but only of sin. And they never spoke again of Leander.
But they had to leave Cordova before Uriah was ordained because people began to whisper that they were evil because they were children of the Prophet, and that Annie was a witch and a bad woman. They even whispered that between them the brother and sister had made way with Leander because of the things he knew. One morning Annie found under the door a crude, misspelled letter warning them that if they did not leave the town before nightfall they would be tarred and feathered and driven out. They left and took up a life of wandering, for there was no place in all the world where they belonged.