National Avenue · Chapter 9 (2/2)

But here Martha’s protest was so vehement as to check him. “Everybody will hear you! Be quiet! Look there!”

She caught her breath, staring wide-eyed; and, turning to see what had so decisively fixed her attention, he realized that the clamorous place had become almost silent. Old Mrs. Savage, leaning upon her grandson Harlan’s arm, had entered the room and was on her way to the bride.

The guests made a passage for her, crowding back upon themselves until there was an aisle through which she and Harlan slowly passed. She was in fine gray silk and lace; and her hair, covered only in part by the lace cap, was still browner than it was white. But she could no longer hold herself upright as of yore; a cruel stoop had got into the indomitable back at last, and she was visibly tremulous all over. The emaciation, too, of such great age had come upon her; the last few months had begun the final shrivelling of everything except the self, but in her eyes that ageless self almost flamed;⁠—it had a kind of majesty, for its will alone and no other force could have made the spent body walk. Thus, among these people who had known her all their lives, there was an awe of her, so that they had hushed themselves, silently making room for her to pass; and she was so frail, so nearly gone from life, that to many of them it seemed almost as if a woman already dead walked among them. They perceived that she could never again do what she was doing today, nor could any fail to comprehend in her look her own gaunt recognition that this was the last time she would thus be seen.

Slowly, with Harlan helping her, she went through the room, came to Lena, and stood before her, looking at her and making little sighing murmurs that told of the effort it cost her still to live and move. Then, in a voice not cracked or quavering, though broken a little, she said: “I thought so! But you’re welcome.”

Lena looked frightened, but Dan laughed and kissed his grandmother’s cheek, talking cheerfully. “Well, this is an honour, grandma! We hardly hoped you’d come out in all this heat. We certainly appreciate it, grandma, and we’ll never forget you thought enough of us to do it. It’s just the best thing could happen to us in the world!”

His free and easy full voice released the guests from the sympathetic hush put upon them by the apparition; they turned to one another again and the interrupted chatter was loudly resumed; but Mrs. Savage extended her right arm and with her gloved hand abruptly touched the bride’s cheek.

Startled, Lena uttered a faint outcry, protesting. “What⁠—why, what do you mean?”

Mrs. Savage was looking fiercely at the tremulous fingertips of the white glove that had touched the rouged cheek.

“She’s painted!”

Dan laughed and patted the old lady’s shoulder. “You’d better go and get some iced coffee, grandma,” he said, and turned to his mother. “Couldn’t we all go and get something cold now with grandma? I don’t believe there are any more people coming and Lena’s pretty tired, I’m afraid.”

“I am,” Lena said. “I really am.” She came close to him, pleading in a faint voice: “For heaven’s sake let me go up to my room and lie down. I can’t stand any more!”

“Why, Lena⁠—”

“Please let me go, Dan.”

“Why⁠—but⁠—” he began. “Couldn’t you stick out just a little longer? If we go to the dining-room with grandma I think it might please her. Besides, if the bride disappeared at her own reception I’m afraid they might think⁠—”

“Please, Dan!”

“Well⁠—but, dear⁠—”

But Lena waited for no more argument; she made a gesture of most poignant appeal, slipped by him and went quickly out through a door that led into a rear hallway. Dan’s impulse was to follow her, but he decided that his first duty led him in another direction, and joined his grandmother who was on her way to the dining-room. When he had helped Harlan to bring the old lady iced coffee and such accompaniments as she would consent to nibble, it was time to return to the drawing-room to say farewell to the guests; for, according to a prevalent custom, they could not depart without assuring him that they had enjoyed themselves.

He explained to them that the heat had been too much for Lena, received their messages of sympathy for her and their renewed congratulations for himself, and finally, when they were all gone, ran anxiously upstairs to her. He found her lying face downward upon her bed in her bridal gown, an attitude less of exhaustion than of agitation, though it spoke of both. Both were manifest, too, in the disorder of her curled black hair and in the way one of her delicate arms was stretched upward across the pillow with a damp handkerchief half clenched in the childlike fingers.

“Why, Lena⁠—”

“You’d better let me alone!”

“But what is the matter?”

“Nothing!”

He touched the small hand on the pillow solicitously. “I’m afraid I let you get tired, dear.”

“ ‘Tired!’ ” she echoed, withdrawing her hand instantly. “ ‘Tired!’ ” And with that she abruptly sat upright upon the bed, showing him a face misshapen with emotion. What added to the disastrous effect upon her young husband was that her movement completed the disorder of her hair so that some heavy strands of it hung down, with the string of pearls, still enmeshed, dangling unheeded against her cheek. The picture she thus presented was almost unnerving to Dan, who had never seen a woman so greatly discomposed. His mother had wept heartbrokenly when her father died; but she had kept her face covered; and he had no recollection of ever seeing her with her hair in disorder.

“Why, Lena!” he cried. “What on earth⁠—”

“Nothing!” she said, and laughed painfully, satirizing the word. “Nothing! Nothing at all!”

“But, dear⁠—”

“Never mind!” She shivered, then sighed profoundly, and stared at him with curiosity, as if she were examining something unfamiliar. “So this is what it’s going to be like, is it?” she asked.

“What?”

“I mean this place! These people! This⁠—this climate!”

But here Dan was touched upon his native pride. “Climate? Why, this is the best climate in the world, Lena! There isn’t any climate to compare with it! And as for this little warm spell just now, why, you see we do need some hot weather.”

“Like this?”

“Why, certainly! You see this is the greatest corn belt in the country, dear. If it wasn’t for a stretch or two of good corn-growin’ weather like this every summer, the farmers wouldn’t get half a crop, and there’d be a big drop in prosperity.”

“And you’d rather have it hot like this, then?” Lena asked, seeming to find him increasingly strange. “You want the farmers to grow their corn, no matter what happens to your wife?”

“But, my goodness!” he cried, in his perplexity. “I don’t run the weather, Lena! It don’t make any difference how I might want it, the weather just is the way it is. Besides, we don’t mind it so much.”

“Don’t you?” She laughed briefly, and shook her head as though marvelling at the plight in which she found herself, wondering how she had come to it. “No, I suppose you were born and brought up to such weather. I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me about it before I came here. You probably didn’t realize what this deathly suffocating air might do to the nerves of a human being who’s always lived near the sea. And for your mother to make me stand hours in that oven, trying to talk to all those awful people⁠—”

“Lena!” Dan was as profoundly astonished as he was distressed. “Why, those are the best people in town; they’re our old family friends, and I don’t know where in the world you’d expect to find better. What fault could you find with ’em, dear? They were all so cordial and pleasant, and so anxious to be friends with you, I thought you’d enjoy⁠—”

“Oh, yes!” she cried. “ ‘Enjoy!’ Oh, yes!”

“What’s the matter with ’em? Weren’t their clothes⁠—”

“Their clothes!” she echoed desperately. “What do I care about their clothes!”

“Then what⁠—”

“Oh, don’t!” she moaned. “Don’t ask me what’s wrong with such people!”

“But I do ask you, Lena.”

“Don’t! My life wouldn’t be long enough to tell you.”

“Well, I declare!” the dismayed young husband exclaimed, and sat down beside her on the bed.

But she leaned away from him as he would have put his arm about her. “Please don’t try petting me,” she said. “You’ll never be able to make me stand such people. I couldn’t! It isn’t in me to!”

“This is just a little spell you’ve got, Lena; it won’t last. In a few days you’ll begin to feel mighty different, and then when you get to knowing mother a little better, and some of the younger people, like Martha Shelby⁠—”

“Who’s Martha Shelby?”

“You met her and her father this afternoon,” Dan explained. “Harlan and I grew up with her, and she’s one of the finest girls in the world. She’s always just the same⁠—cheerful, you know, and dependable, no matter what happens. You’ll get mighty fond of her, Lena. Everybody always does.”

“Was she that great hulking thing with the dried-up little old father that said, ‘Pleased to meet ye, ma’am?’ ”

Dan laughed uneasily. “Why, Martha isn’t ‘hulking.’ She’s a mighty fine-lookin’ girl! She’s tall, but she isn’t as tall as I am, and she’s⁠—”

“She is that big girl, then,” Lena said with conviction. “I hope you don’t intend to ask me to see anything of her!”

“But, Lena⁠—”

“She’s an awful person!”

“But you’ve just barely met her,” he cried, his distress and perplexity increasing. “You don’t know⁠—”

“She was perfectly awful,” Lena insisted sharply. “Do you have to let her call you ‘Dan?’ ”

“Why, good gracious, everybody in town calls me ‘Dan,’ and Martha lives next door.”

“I don’t see why you need to be intimate with people merely because they live next door,” Lena said coldly. “I suppose, though, in this heavenly climate you feel because a girl lives next door to you it’s necessary to let her hold your hand quite a little!”

“But she didn’t hold my hand.”

“Didn’t she? It seemed to me I noticed⁠—”

“No, no, no!” he exclaimed. “I only wanted to stop her a minute to say I hoped she’d help make you like it here and be as good a friend to you as she’s always been to me.”

“I see. That’s why you held her hand.”

“But I didn’t⁠—”

“Of course not!” Lena interrupted. “Not more than five minutes or so! And she’s the one you especially want me to be friends with! I never saw a more awful person.”

“But what’s ‘awful’ about her?”

Lena shook her head, as if in despair of him for not comprehending Martha’s awfulness. “She’s just awful,” she said, implying that if he didn’t perceive for himself why Martha was awful he hadn’t a mind capable of being enlightened. “I suppose you expect me to be intimate with her father, too?”

Dan laughed desperately. “I wouldn’t be apt to ask you to be particularly intimate with anybody his age, Lena.”

“I hope not,” she said, and became rigid, looking at him with a cold hostility that was new to his experience and almost appalled him. “I was afraid you might intend to ask me to be intimate with your grandmother.”

Dan seemed to crumple; he groaned, grew red, apologized unhappily: “Oh, Lord! I was afraid that’d upset you, but I kind of hoped you’d forget it.”

“ ‘Forget it?’ When she did it before everybody! Pawing me⁠—croaking at me⁠—”

“Oh, Lord!” he groaned. “I was afraid it bothered you.”

“ ‘Bothered’ me! Is that your word for it?”

“Nobody else noticed it, Lena,” he went on. “Nobody except just our family⁠—”

“Oh, yes!” she said. “The next-door person you admire so much was one of those that took it all in. She was in at the death⁠—my death, thank you!”

“Lena, you don’t understand at all. Nobody thinks anything about anything grandma does. You see she’s a good deal what people call a ‘privileged character.’ ”

“ ‘Privileged?’ Yes! I should say she takes privileges perhaps!”

“Oh, dear me!” he sighed. “Lena, you just mustn’t mind it. You see, she belongs to two generations back, and besides I suppose most people here wouldn’t know just what to make of your puttin’ artificial colour on your face. For that matter, your own mother and sister used to be against it, even in New York, and probably people would take notice of it here a little more than they would there. I kind of hoped myself, when you got here⁠—”

“How kind of you!” she said. “Possibly some day you’ll understand a little of what I’ve had to go through since you brought me to this place. Yesterday, when we got here, I thought I just couldn’t live in such heat. You’re used to it; you don’t know what it is to a person who’d never even imagined it. And in spite of the fact that I was absolutely prostrate with it, your mother informs me that she’s invited people to come and shake my hand and arm off for two hours in an oven. Then, because I’m so deathly pale that I look ghastly, I use a little rouge and am publicly insulted for it; after which my husband reproves me for trying to look a little less like a dead person.”

Dan was miserable with remorse. “No, no, no! I don’t mind your puttin’ it on, Lena. I didn’t mean to reprove you; I only⁠—”

“You only meant to say your grandmother’s insult was justified.”

“But it wasn’t an insult, Lena. After you get to know grandma better⁠—”

“After I what?” Lena interrupted.

“You’ll understand her better after you get to know her.”

“After I what?” Lena said again.

“I said⁠—”

“Listen!” she interrupted fiercely. “You must understand this. On absolutely no account must you expect me ever to go into that frightful old woman’s house, or to see her, or to speak to her, or to allow her to speak to me. Never!”

“Oh, Lord!” Dan groaned; then rose, rubbed his damp forehead, crossed the room with a troubled and lagging step, and, upon the sound of a bell-toned gong below, turned again to his bride. “There’s supper. Mother said we’d just have a light supper this evening instead of dinner. Could you⁠—”

“Could I what?”

“Could you wash your face and fix your hair up a little?” he said hopefully, yet with a warranted nervousness. “It’ll do you good to freshen up and eat a little. Except the family there’ll be nobody there except⁠—except⁠—”

“Except whom?” she demanded.

“Well⁠—except Martha,” he faltered. “Mother asked her yesterday because she thought you’d⁠—well, I mean except Martha and⁠—and grandma.”

Lena again threw herself face downward upon the bed; and when he tried to comfort her she struck at him feebly without lifting her head.