To-morrow Morning (Parrish)/Chapter 26
J. HARTLEY HARRISON, his mother, and his grandmother, sat about a neatly laid fireplace that held no ashes and was surrounded by Christmas presents and Gift Shoppe souvenirs of summer holidays—a "witch broom," a Cape Cod fire lighter, a toddy spoon, a never-used trivet for a teapot or a plate of muffins. In the dining room, a spick-and-span continuation of safe browns and greens sprinkled with minute bits of mahogany, they could see Ida filling the water glasses.
"Well, what's new, Hartley?" Mrs. Harrison asked, folding up the napkin she was embroidering with a fat teapot and "Polly put the kettle on, we'll all have tea" in blue cross-stitch. But her son was too good a gossip to yield his real news so lightly.
"It was certainly a made-to-order spring day."
"Yes, it was. I was sorry I wore my high shoes."
"Asparagus'll be getting cheaper."
"Yes, indeed, mother, and you'll like that, won't you?"
"No more than you will, Sadie. Gracious! A body'd think no one in this house ate but me!"
"Dinner's served," said Ida.
"Dinner? Oh-a—Ida! I think it would be nice if you struck the new gong, just the way I showed you. I guess you just didn't remember."
Ida's face turned scarlet. She gave a quick nervous tap to the Chinese gong.
"Oh, I didn't mean now; I meant next time. No, that's all right. That's all right. Dinner, Hartley. Dinner, mother."
"That girl don't hit the gong right," said old Mrs. Hartley.
"I know; she doesn't bring out the beauty at all. I showed her and showed her, but she got sort of embarrassed, for some reason. Dinner, mother."
"Seems a pity not to hit it right, when Cousin Fannie brought it all the way from China."
"Slo-ow and sing-ing!" Hartley demonstrated.
"You show her, son; she'd take it from you. Dinner, mother."
"I'm not deaf, Sadie! Mercy! Dinner, mother, dinner, mother!"
The steam from the platter of boiled fowl and rice dimmed Hartley's spectacles, so that he had to wipe them with one of Aunt Martha's Christmas-present handkerchiefs after he finished carving. "Now, grandma, here's a choice portion. This looks good to a hungry woodsman, girls!" For he no longer avoided starches, but now was interested in cutting out red meat. "I had my Sunday-school boys out in the woods behind Joe Green's house this afternoon. We identified fourteen birds, and one I couldn't quite place, with a call like this" He laid down his knife and fork and whistled, but neither Mrs. Hartley nor Mrs. Harrison could quite place it, either, though Mrs. Hartley thought it sounded like something.
"By the way—" His ladies pricked up their ears at his carefully casual tone. "A funny thing happened this afternoon. . . . A little more rice and gravy, grandma? . . . When we were in the woods Joe Green came tearing through as if he was going to a fire, and I called to him and so did Sonny Boy Driggs, but he went plunging right ahead as if he didn't see or hear us."
"Maybe he was drunk."
"Oh no, grandma, I wouldn't like to think that."
"I saw him this afternoon, too," Mrs. Harrison put in. "Through, mother? Through, Hartley? Sure? Very well, Ida, you may clear. I stopped in at the station to get a new time-table, and he was seeing his wife off on the four-fifteen. She was crying."
"I think there's something wrong there," Mrs. Hartley said.
"H'm! mother—h'm!"
"What are you humming about, Sadie?"
"Some other subject while Ida's passing, if you don't mind, mother. Well, it was a lovely afternoon to take the kiddies to the woods, son."
The spoons made a sucking sound as they helped themselves to rocking chocolate blancmange turned out of a mold with an ear of corn on top.
"Do you think they'll get a divor"
"Ida's coming with cream, mother. Well, spring is really here, I guess."
"Yes, we saw a yellow-spotted tortoise moving under the leaves in the pond."
"Ugh!" said Mrs. Hartley, taking more than her share of the cream. "Disgusting!"
"Mrs. Green says Joe's wife's just going away for a little rest and change," said Mrs. Harrison, eagerly, as the swing door swished behind Ida. "But you know her; anything connected with that wonderful son of hers is perfect."
"I wonder if things are wrong in that quarter?" said Hartley, looking bright and pleased. "Tck! I hope not; I sincerely hope not!"
"It's a skinch they are, though," remarked his grandmother, who liked to feel she was keeping up with modern slang.
"I was just wondering— Oh no!"
"Now, Hartley, what?"
"Nothing, really; it was wrong of me to suggest it."
"Now, son, no fair teasing!"
"Well, I was simply thinking about that Mr. Levinson I met at their home. He looked to me like a victim of the tender passion, and milady didn't seem exactly indifferent."
"My goodness! I— Mother, what are you doing?"
"Picking up my handkerchief, with your kind permission."
"He's been here a lot this winter—at least that big olive-green car has. . . . What, mother?"
"I said, can't a body pick up her handkerchief?"
"And that time Joe was in Boston. Remember, Hartley, when we asked them to the sing and he was in Boston so she didn't come? Well, that man was staying at The Inglenook, because I met Miss Stamper at the library and she told me so; she said he was there four days, and he was at the table next to hers, but he wasn't there for any of his meals, hardly. I don't believe we'd have to work overtime to guess who he was having them with! Miss Stamper said she couldn't help sort of liking him. She dropped her knitting bag once, and she said the way he picked it up and handed it back to her made her feel like a queen in exile. Well, well! Poor Joe!"
"Tck! Tck! Poor Joe, indeed!"
"Well, I guess Ida'd like to clear. I move we adjourn to the parlor. Anyone second the motion?"
Joe had not seen Hartley holding a white flower and surrounded by little boys to whom he had been explaining what bees did about pollen. People in the woods, to be hurried past, that was all.
After he had taken Evelyn to the train, after their cold sad kiss of good-by, he drove home, shuddering and yawning. He longed for sleep. But he could not go into the house that was really haunted now. He left the Ford and plunged into the woods, going on until it was dark. He tripped over a root and lay, where he fell, face down, in anguish, pressing closer to the earth, his fingers tearing up the mold. He knew she would never come back. To press deeper and deeper into the comforting earth, until it received him, covered him, made him its own again. To have this aching body broken open, to be free!
Rain began to fall, sounding like little feet pattering over the dead leaves. He lay there all night, utterly crushed, crumbled. A deadly drowsiness numbed him after the dumb anguish.
In the morning he was almost too stiff to move, feverish, and shot through by flashes of pain. As he limped out of the woods everything was strange and vivid. The weeping-willow branches flowed like water weeds in a stream against the wet gray sky. Starlings, glossy black swelling in light and curving to shadow, chattered on the telegraph poles that held wires humming with life and death. Smoke came from the chimney of his darling's empty house, that Effa was getting ready to close, and melted into the wet sky. He saw everything through thin crystal—a touch would shatter it; the world would end.
In the bright green meadow where every ditch and little stream was full of cowslips that looked like rivulets and pools of pure sunlight, Hope was playing alone, the youngest angel in the streets of gold.
Kate was busy, worried, happy again, because Joe had rheumatic fever and needed her. Charlotte took Hope, and Kate flung herself into nursing. And Joe was grateful and patient, smiling at her so that she had to run into the bathroom and cry on to the laundry bag.
"He says he's well enough to go back to work to-morrow," she said on the afternoon in May when Charlotte brought Hope to 29 Chestnut Street. "He seems almost like himself, only thin. Well, you've been wonderful to take care of Hope, Charlotte."
"She's a handful, Aunt Kate, I warn you! I don't think she means to be naughty, but she's so full of life. It seems to me I was sending all three of them to bed all the time, and my two are generally so good. This morning I came home from taking Nancy Lou to the dentist, and Hope and Sonny Boy had printed all over the new white paneling in the hall with that toy printing press Carrie Pyne gave him ages ago and he's never thought of using, but Hope dug it out, and what did they print but 'Her unchaste bed proved a springboard to a throne' in capital letters, all over! Sonny Boy says they copied it out of a book. What book can we have with that kind of a thing in it?"
"History, I guess. I'm so sorry, Charlotte. Yet you can't help loving the little thing."
"I know. You spank her hands, and the next minute she has her arms around your neck. Is Evelyn coming back, Aunt Kate?"
"I don't believe so."
"Neither do Hoagland and I. She'll certainly be wanting Hope. I will say for her she adored the child. Poor Joe!"
Poor Joe, my poor darling Joe! Kate thought, going out into the kitchen. There was a smell of hot toast mingling with the fragrance of lilacs and newly cut grass that came in through the screen door. Hope was having her supper at the kitchen table, talking eagerly to Effa, who now and then contributed: "Uh-huh." "Sure!" "You tell 'em, kid!" That girl! Such a way to talk! But she loved the baby.
At the sight of Kate, Hope began to laugh, showing her enchanting little teeth, and Kate began to laugh, too. "Now what's so funny, Goosie?" And she kissed the top of the silky head, thinking of Jodie having his supper here, ever so long ago.
Oh how can I be so happy when my Joe is unhappy? But I don't believe he minds so much, after all, she thought, not wanting to admit that he was suffering, because then she would have to suffer, too. He's thinner—but then he's been so ill. And he's cheerful; he eats and makes jokes. But she was pierced by his shining eyes, that shone clear, out of torture. Once she cried: "Oh, if all this had never happened—if you had never met her!" But he answered: "No, you don't understand."
He knew utter loss, deeper than if Evelyn had died, for then she would not have left him of her own will. But he knew that nothing was wasted—not one word, one silence that had been between them, not one hour of sorrow; nothing could have been spared.
He knew Evelyn was suffering, too. He wanted to tonsole her.
He dreaded the lessening of his anguish because it drew him from her. But he never tried to hold it as the high tide withdrew. He could not have suffered so, and lived. He felt life coming back to him; other pleasures pierced through to him, other pains that were not from Evelyn. He accepted them. Suffering had given him the courage to accept whatever happiness and comfort life brought.
He was walking home one afternoon when he heard some one call behind him:
"Hello, Joe Green! Going to a funeral?"
"Why, hello, Opal!"
"I thought maybe you wouldn't remember me. It's fierce the way people round here are troubled with loss of memory."
"I haven't seen you for ever so long."
"I've been in New York. Gee, it's hot!"
"Come on into McCardle's and have a soda."
"Isn't he the brave boy, tossing away his reputation just like that!"
He had forgotten how blue her eyes were, how ridiculously long her eyelashes, stuck with lumps of mascara. And for a moment he wanted achingly to pull her off her stool, to put his arms tight about her slender roundness, to press his face into her warm white curve of throat, forgetting everything else. Something quivered about her, promising—promising
"It's a pity you wouldn't put some ice cream in this soda, Roy," she was saying to the clerk. "Well! That's better! Gee! This tastes nice and cool, Joe!"
"Isn't that that Mendoza girl with Joe Green?" Mrs. Harrison asked Mrs. Jackson in the back of the store. "A can of violet talc, Mr. McCardle, and a bottle of citronella; I guess that's all. Oh, and a small box of mints if you're sure they're fresh. . . . Look! Look at her going out of the door! You can see right through. I don't believe she has a stitch of underclothes on. Disgusting!"
"I was awful sorry to hear you'd had trouble, Joe," Opal said as they walked along Maple Street.
"I— Thank you, Opal."
"It's tough when you're crazy about somebody and anything happens. I was crazy about a fellah in New York—gee, I certainly had it bad. Then he died that year there was so much flu. I nearly went crazy. I tried to take poison, but the old fools pumped me out, and here I am. So I mean—I sort of know how you feel"
She was pulling leaves from the privet hedge as they walked past the rectory. Her face was turned away from him.
"Listen, Joe—things get better. Gee! I just hated myself when I began to sit up and take notice, but we're human. I remember the first time I forgot my friend after he died. I met a fellah and we went to the movies; it was a Harold Lloyd. Laugh! Oh, boy! And I felt kinda crazy about this other fellah, too; he was a nice kid. I never thought about my friend at all until the orchestra begun to play 'Somewhere a Voice Is Calling,' and that made me think of him— Well, anyway, I mean things get better; you think you're through, but things kinda turn up"
"Do they, Opal?"
He heard in her words the eternal promise; he believed and was comforted. Kate heard him whistling in the bathroom as he got ready for supper. But, holding the towel, he stopped, forgetting to dry his face, forgetting to move, lost in sudden longing for Evelyn, violent, terrible,