To-morrow Morning (Parrish)/Chapter 8
Now the battle day is past;
Now upon the farther shore
Lands the voyager at last."
The white unearthly voices of the choir boys, Mr. Strachey's bass booming softly like distant surf.
There its hidden things are clear"
And then words that wove together into a shimmering curtain before the Holy Mystery.
"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday . . . as soon as thou scatterest them they are even as a sleep. . . .
"There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars. . . ."
Beautiful solemn words, what have you to do with Joe, who loved to laugh, who brought home surprises, who admired himself in Piccadilly collars with white-dotted blue bow ties, who was really greedy about Camembert cheese? Joe, who couldn't pay his bills, but would give away his last borrowed penny. Joe, who loved to boast and show off, who joked so that Lizzie used to have to run out of the dining room when there was company and she mustn't laugh. Joe, who was going to do so much, so soon. Joseph Montgomery Green, one of the Greens of Westlake. Joe, who had been Kate's and now was God's.
Kate kept wanting to consult him about everything, to tell him things, even funny things. All the hushed, solemn voices—if only Joe were there to speak in a natural voice and break the spell, so that she could speak back naturally.
She wanted him to know how people loved him; to show him the sheaf of lilies that must mean bread and cheese meals for weeks to come for the three Misses Mortimer; to show him the basket Mr. and Mrs. Driggs had sent to the city for, the golden basket full of mauve and froglike brown and green orchids, its great horseshoe of handle tied with palms and yards and yards of glossy mauve ribbon. She wanted him to read the wonderful letters his old friends wrote about him.
She wanted him, desperately, to comfort her.
For tiny breathing spaces, in the shallows, she knew that everyone thought she was being "wonderful." She was proud for Joe that St. Stephen's had never been so full for a funeral; she took an interest in the becomingness of her widow's bonnet.
"Kate"—Carrie's solemn face, red-eyed, red-nosed, looked into the room where she was lying on the bed—"I hate to bother you, but Miss Bertha sent up a lot of bonnets. Could you try them on now, dear?"
And—faintly, only faintly—Kate was interested in the way the bonnets became her. Joe always said black made her hair look brightest. But how heavy the long crêpe veils were.
"Kate, I can't help it. I never saw anything so becoming as that one with the fold of white," Carrie said, thickly, through the wad of her moist handkerchief, and Kate couldn't help thinking so, too.
And then the moment of respite was over. She remembered again, sinking to depth below depth, drowned in the waters of sorrow.
Life seems so solid, until those two seas of love and death surge through one, those deep seas whose tides are at flood, somehow, sometime, for all of us.
Bitterest, most heartbreaking, was the feeling that somehow she hadn't done enough to keep Joe from dying. She remembered his appealing eyes following her and her reassurance, more and more emphatic as her heart turned to ice, burning cold in her breast. He had believed her, and how had she kept her promises? The feeling that she was letting him die had flooded her before, unacknowledged, while she watched him melting away before her eyes—now, now, life is still in him, somehow we must keep it, somehow we can. And yet the unbelievable moment had come and gone, and Joe was dead. They had let him die. So love must feel forever.
The snow lay deep on the ground the day Joe was buried. In the next plot Mrs. Irving's marble angel wore a white fur collarette; there were soft new feathers of snow on the marble wings. The ribbon on the wreath of blue and moth-colored pansies lying on Joe's coffin was all snow stained. Carrie Pyne couldn't help noticing, though she was shocked at herself for being able to see anything. Mr. Partridge had on arctics. She could see them under his cassock. Her own feet were two solid pieces of ice. Her nose needed blowing, but her handkerchief was of no more use, simply soaking. She tried to manage by sniffing.
She stole a frightened glance at Kate. That was the way she imagined sleepwalkers looked, and they said you must never wake them suddenly, or something awful happened.
The tears poured down Carrie's face. She had loved Joe. He had been kinder to her than anyone else in the world, joking with her and teasing her, and now he was dead.
The wind twisted black veils, reddened noses, and made the moth-colored pansies flutter. High in the blowing, brightening sky a bird was soaring and floating.
Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.
Noble took Jodie and Hoagland for a sleigh ride on the afternoon of the funeral. When Kate told Jodie that Father had gone to Heaven he had wept, terrified and bewildered. And now the laughter that followed his crying was too vivid, too violent.
The two little boys were covered up to their chins with the bearskin robe, their breath puffed out in clouds.
"I'm smoking a cigar! Puff puff puff! See the smoke? Look, Jodie. Look, Noble. Noble. Noble. Noble. Look! See the smoke?"
"So am I too smoking a cigar! Look, Hoagland! Look, Noble!"
High over their heads a bird tilted and swooped in the wind that cut their faces and filled their eyes with tears.
"What kind of bird is that, Noble?"
"Looks like it was a sea gull. Purty far inland for it."
The wind sounded like the waves of the sea in the pine trees behind the haunted house. Noble stopped the horse so they could listen to it, rushing, dying away. Except for the ringing of sleigh bells as Clara shook herself, there was no other sound in a world silent with snow. Rushing—dying away.
"Puts me in mind o' the days I was a sailor. Giddap, Clara."
"Aw gee! you weren't ever a sailor!"
"Wa'n't, wa'n't I? How'd I git shipwrecked on a desert island, then, and nearly git et up by cannibals?"
"Aw-w!" jeered Hoagland, but Jodie's eyes were nearly popping out of his head.
"Yessir, I want to tell you I thought I was a goner! It was the year I shipped aboard the Saucy Sally, and she went down in a hurricane in the South Seas—never a man saved but me, and I floated ashore on a piece o' mast, more dead than alive, to this yere cannibal island; right purty spot, too, rubber trees, and green and yaller parrots all callin' Polly wants a cracker"
"Like Aunt Sarah's!"
"Shouldn't wonder a particle. So anyways up comes the cannibals, dancin' and givin' war whoops— Hey, Hoagland, you do that again and we'll be in a runaway! Whoa, there, Clara old girl!"
"I was just giving a cannibal war whoop."
"You try it again if you want me to give you somethin' to war whoop about! There, old lady! There, old girl! Well, up comes the cannibals, with the king at their head—I can see him still, plain as plain, a colored fellah with a big ring in his nose, and a skirt made outa parrot feathers, green and yaller, like I said, and a high silk hat on his black wool, that had belonged to some poor missionary they'd et. And that ain't the worst!"
"What's the worst, Noble?"
"Around his neck he wore a necklace of human bones!"
It was a splendid afternoon. Noble bought them maple sugar, and they ate it all the way back to town, together with black hairs from the bearskin and red mitten-fuzz. Jodie ate so much that he was sick in the night. Kate heard him whooping, and went in to him to hold his hot head, to comfort him. And when he was better she rocked him in her arms until he fell asleep, both of them wrapped in the old silkolene quilt that Lizzie brought, the warmth of his relaxed little body melting her, until her tears fell, quietly, slowly.
The sorrow of Joe's death made a new trouble almost unimportant, at first. All the money Joe had put into the Thunder Bird property—Kate's money, Lulu's, Aunt Sarah's, Carrie's—was lost. The prospect had been salted. Mr. Donner had lost everything, had tried to kill himself, but his trembling hand sent the bullet into his shoulder. He had failed in that, too.
No one reproached Joe to Kate, but she was quiveringly sensitive to what they must be feeling, although they were all so kind. Carrie was always at the house, trying to help, sending off notes in the wrong envelopes, making so much trouble by trying not to make any. Lulu was in bed, not able to come herself, but she wrote Kate a long letter on both sides of transparent paper. Kate couldn't make out much of it, but the few words she could read were words of love and sympathy. Even Aunt Sarah made no complaint to her, and sent great hampers of carnations, wet and spicy-sweet, of velvet snapdragons, scarlet-black and apricot and rose, whose throats Jodie squeezed between his thumb and finger to make them open and shut their mouths. Last gifts from Cedarmere before it was sold for an expensive sanitarium. The servants were sent away, and Aunt Sarah and Carrie, with Benjie the parrot and Mopsa the spaniel, moved into the little house on the corner of Lake and West Streets, with the pump and the snowball bush in the side yard, and Lizzie's greenhorn cousin Bridget Kelly to teach them patience.
Lulu, always languishing, crumpled beneath the blow, and took what money she had left to go to New. York for a course of treatments.
This trouble was a bugle call sounding through Kate's despair, waking her to courage. Turning from side to side at night in the big bed, she promised Joe, she promised herself, that she would try to pay everybody back, somehow, if it took all her life.
She worked until her back ached and her temples thudded, helping Aunt Sarah and Carrie move, tacking down carpets, balancing on stepladders. When Lulu went away Kate took Charlotte. The studio was the only room she had to give her. She made up a bed on the divan, pushed the easel into a corner behind the herons and willow-tree screen, and hid the life-class studies in the closet under the stairs, because she didn't know how Lulu felt about the human form. And Charlotte moved in with her small trunk, the doll's bureau that held four pairs of white kid gloves, and a light-blue sateen parasol with pinked edges that Jodie admired above everything. He marched about the house under it, like a mouse under a flax flower, and only Charlotte's piercing shrieks stopped him from borrowing it to carry to Laddie Baylow's through the rain.
"Of course it's only for a little while," Kate told herself, feeling, now the studio was occupied, that there was nothing in the world she wanted as much as long uninterrupted days of painting there. But Charlotte was in it, a good, square little girl with spectacles, dressed in a brown serge dress with a white guimpe, saying, "Yes, please, Aunt Kate," and "No, thank you, Aunt Kate," and crying quietly after she had gone to bed, from homesickness.
Kate wrote to the men she knew Joe had borrowed from, to ask how much it was, and say she would pay them as soon as she could. And each man answered that Joe had paid him before he died.
Some of them wanted to help her now, but she had a sick terror of borrowing. She would get along without it if she could. She would find work somehow, get orders for portraits, or give lessons.
She tried to explain to Lizzie that she couldn't afford to keep her any more.
"I'm sure I've tried to suit you!" said Lizzie, sniffing, banging the oven door, refusing to look at Kate.
"Lizzie, you know it isn't that. I'm poor as poor can be. I couldn't pay you half the time, maybe."
"Well, wait till I ask you for the money," said Lizzie, crossly, climbing on a chair, poking her head into the cupboard, rattling things. "We need baking powder, Mis' Green, I told you that yesterday; and we need cinnamon. Jodie finds the cinnamon sticks no matter where I hide them."
"No, Lizzie, I want you to go and get some nice place with good wages. Nobody could expect you to stay here for the tiny little bit I can pay."
Lizzie's face turned as red as fire.
"Mis' Green, you ain't got no right to speak to me that way!"
And then she burst into tears, throwing her apron over her face, rocking back and forth, sobbing. And Kate cried, too, and kissed her. All the rest of the day Kate was gentle and shining, with pink nose and eyelids, and Lizzie was as cross as two sticks. She put on her hat and her coat—the old burgundy-colored coat from Kate's trousseau—and marched downtown, and that evening there was a wonderful charlotte russe for supper. When Kate asked her about the cream and lady fingers, she banged the oven door and clattered the pans and pretended not to hear.