Siesta, p.4
Siesta, page 4
His son, Austin’s father, worked himself into an early grave by intensive worry over the agricultural situation in Alabama and Georgia, pondering for six months of the year on how many bales of cotton the weather was planning to permit to be raised in his section, and for the other six on how he could sell what passed through his hands at the peak price for the season. He wouldn’t have had to work, but it was a tacitly-understood maxim of his generation that a man’s not having to work all day for his living was no excuse for his not doing it; nobody refused to work but the riff-raff connected with the cotton mills and here and there a socially-prominent inebriate.
It was a mercy, therefore, that he died before his son finished college, for Austin, being provided for by his grandfather in a modest but secure way, turned his attention appreciatively and critically to the world about him and to the more impractical of life’s details. At Princeton he wrote a good deal of verse, as most of his friends did, but when they took their A.B. degrees and settled down to some kind of work, he left a Paris address to which his $4,500 should be sent as the sundry branches of American government paid it to him and lived in Europe for three years with different friends. When times got hard and the business his principal friend was in closed its Paris office and called him home, Austin, never being, at heart, much of a one for solitude, crossed the ocean too and appeared one morning in Jackson Street as quiet and sad eyed as ever. He greeted the few people who remembered him as if he had seen them the day before and said, in answer to their polite question, that he would be in Georgetown a week or two; he was going back to Princeton to take a Ph.D.
But he didn’t go. He said his health wasn’t good. He looked perfectly well, but after eating he would put a little white pill into his palm and pop it into his mouth, stoically and with a certain sophisticated hopelessness. It was on his mind, though, as if a munificent Nature, lest he have nothing at all to worry him, was letting him make for himself his own synthetic cross. He played golf, thinking that the exercise might help him or at any rate enable him to hold his own. He was quite a nice-looking boy, slightly shorter than the average, and his face had a quiet sort of melodious expression that you see on poets and many blind men.
And he really had something of a poet’s sensitiveness to colors and shapes and sounds, to words and feelings. He would stop in the middle or the fairway to listen to such things as the noise of an ax on a fallen tree in the hollow. He saw the summer golf course with “great jets from the sprinklers revolving about, blown out in a far smoke by the hot breezes, white veils with the sun on them, streaked in certain phases by a rainbow, revolving with a large jet and a small, weaving a harmonious symmetry like a vase, spinning slowly about on the Alabama hills, two to each purple and green hole,—our own Versailles, our Villa d’Este of the frontier. Your eyes, starved of beauty, look at it with a deep gratitude, as a man looks at a woman he loves.” He wrote this in a little brown notebook which he carried round with him in the pocket of his linen coat. He wrote other things in it, such as, “Youth with its nostalgia for infinity!” And “To the old men up front near the edge, we cry, ‘What do you see, old men?’ But they don’t answer.”—All in all, he made life for himself very poignant and rather difficult.
He looked forward to coming over the first hill and hearing the plea of the Sanctified Baptists for rain. He even saw with some regret the occasional gathering of the vast bruised clouds in the west, prophesying as it did the end of the drought and the inconsolable wailing. With disappointment he would feel the air quiet down with a still quality like a glassy pool. And when the clouds shifted to the north and caught the river valley, drifting down over the damper air and away to the southeast, leaving the burned hills behind lifeless under the moaning chant and the revolving plumes of water, he would feel almost joyous.…
In the halcyon days of Grandpa Toombs’s King Cotton the élite of Georgetown had build their dwellings along the river bank below Center Street, tall brick houses behind iron fences and iron fountain pieces and now and then a pair of iron deer or iron grayhounds, shady under the heavy trees lofty and green in the fertile soil of the flood plain. It was a section of carriage-gates and liveries and short-checked horses.
But the automobile destroyed it, by motor, the village of Summerville, five miles out of town on the shoulder of a low hill, was hardly any farther from the Cotton Exchange than the river-bank section had been by foot and carriage. The arrival of the automobile was a signal for quitting the ship such as Grandpa Toombs might have recognized, but Austin’s father, caring more for the old tradition than the old man had ever done, stuck by his sleek horses and his iron fences. When Austin was fifteen the Wheelis house, three doors down the street, changed hands and hung out a sign for boarders, and when his parents died the Toombs house was the only one left with the original owners. Austin tried to sell it, but the market had broken.
He lived in it alone with the help of a negro cook and yardman named Oregon, who swept spasmodically over the exposed centers of the polished oak floors and now and then sharpened a scythe melodiously in the brick basement and attacked the weeds that grew up so bounteously under the bellies of the iron deer. As time went on and Oregon worked sedulously toward the goal of making no exertion whatever, he persuaded Austin to sow the yard in peas; having already heartily endorsed Austin’s idea of shutting all the windows and blinds and covering all the furniture in the house, except two rooms at the back, with dust-covers, he had practically nothing to do and stood in the old carriage gate in the side wall most of the day, gazing down the green vista toward the river or down the opposite toward the distant smudge of red of the factory of the Georgetown Chemical Company, wondering if he could persuade Austin to give up hot supper until the weather got cool.
The next afternoon about four o’clock Austin was in his straw-bottomed rocking chair on the screened porch reading a new batch of travel folders. He was tired of Georgetown. Two or three times a year he would study steamship booklets and touring pamphlets; but he hadn’t been anywhere in three years. He was not feeling well enough; he would pause now and then in his reading to hold up his wrist and count his pulse expertly by sight.
He was on the point of putting the folders away and going back to the second volume of Gibbon, which he had set himself to finish by September, when he heard the scrape of a shoe on the sidewalk below and looked down to see a Western Union boy dismounting adroitly from his bicycle.
He waited for the boy at the top of the cast-iron banisters.
“Are you Austin Toombs?”
“I am,” said Austin, always slightly resentful at evidences of the rise of modern insolence.
He signed for the telegram and returned to his chair.
When he opened it he read it three times without moving. Then he stared off into the trees in complete speechlessness. It said:
GWENDOLYN AND I ARRIVING AIRPORT ABOUT FOUR THIRTY. ELIOT.
“For God’s sake!” cried Austin, almost tearfully. He shuffled his feet and glanced about him. He looked at his wrist watch. It was four fifteen. He stood up and took two uncertain strides toward the French window. Then he stopped and turned his head and called helplessly for Oregon.
There was no answer.
He looked at the paper again.
“Eliot?” he said with a frown, becoming really conscious for the first time of the signature. “I don’t know anybody named Eliot!”
He read the message again, thinking there might have been a mistake; it was dated Atlanta, 2:45 P.M., and was addressed to Austin Toombs, Georgetown. The only Eliot he could think of was a boy he had hardly known in the club at Princeton.
But as he studied the message the signature seemed to lose all importance. Somebody and his wife were evidently coming to visit him; who it was didn’t matter much. In any case the household would be disrupted: newspapers torn off the rolled-up mattresses, chairs and tables suddenly stripped of their covers, blinds thrown open, spider webs brushed down, Oregon in a ferment. His health wasn’t equal to it; he didn’t feel like having visitors, showing them the town, giving them a party, playing bridge with them all day; he thought it would probably put him in the hospital. Besides, he had hoped to go over a sheaf of poems that week; he had a novel he wanted to write; it was time he started research for his biography of General Oglethorpe. He thought if he could only pinch himself and find all this just some horrible dream, he would be able to start to work in earnest that very afternoon.
Half an hour later he was standing on the sand-blown apron in front of the hangar, lighting cigarette after cigarette, squinting at the hot blue sky to the northeast, as miserable as any of his countrymen waiting to open their arms in fabulous hospitality. He moved about restlessly in the black shade cast by the shelter, stopping as he neared the sharp edges of the brilliant masses of light as if he were in a box; he cursed all visitors and all means of transporting visitors, particularly the aeroplane. He responded unenthusiastically to the somewhat eager smile of Dr. Troupe, the dentist, who had been inspecting the ships in the hangar with a curly-haired little boy.
It was into the middle distance before he saw it, a small biplane, its motor firing in a deep whine. It shot across the hangar on the wind, its wings bright yellow and a red and yellow fuselage; then it banked in a wide arc over the valley and returned. The motor was suddenly cut off like the blowing out of a match. It slipped down, began to fall off, straightened up with a roar and landed in a spurt of orange dust. He watched it come bobbing in starts over the rough grass straight at him, as depressed as if it were Fate implacable and were running him down. He tried to summon a brighter expression to his face.
A gangly youth in oily khaki walked out of the hangar and stopped in the shade. Austin stared in weak enthusiasm at the two smooth balls with human mouths now visible behind the windshields. As the plane halted, the ball in the rear, looking at him as if through binoculars, suddenly lifted a hand and shook it violently. Austin clasped his hands out in front of him and wiggled them in welcome. He hurried over.
The lips went into a grin and the glasses were lifted; the flesh-colored oval still seemed strange to Austin, almost sinister.
“Glad to see you, old boy,” cried Austin, stretching out his hand, fingers apart, palm down. “This is swell.”
In the meantime a lithe figure in the forward cockpit climbed with complete self-possession over the fuselage and, disdaining Austin’s proffered arm, hopped easily to the ground and felt for a cigarette.
“That’s Gwendolyn, Austin.”
Austin put his heels together in half-mocking punctiliousness.
She gave him a solemn scrutiny for a second after he held a match for her, then unfastened her linen helmet and surveyed the surroundings.
“Where’s all the cotton?” she said, giving a slight laugh.
Her face was of a flat sheenless pastel tan that made him as conscious of the sky blue of her eyes as if they had spoken. He followed their glance and found them resting upon Dr. Troupe’s oblivious countenance.
6. Off Season
Wednesday, June 17
There was hardly anybody at Mrs. Eubanks’s. Summer, she explained to Mr. Applewhite with a trace of apology in her voice, was the off season; in winter Northerners came down to get away from the cold and she also had several out-of-town teachers in the girls’ high school. She showed him the tops of some of the tables she had to put in the dining room, now leaning against the banisters on the back porch, markedly unpainted. “The fewer the better in summer, though; it gives you more room to breathe.”
At two-thirty when he went in to lunch there was nobody with Mrs. Eubanks except her mother, a frail little old woman in white lace, and a middle-aged woman with short grayish hair named Tannahill; Miss Tannahill wore nose glasses, and gave Mr. Applewhite a nod and a smile while jabbing at the sugar in the bottom of her iced tea.
Mr. Applewhite replied with his best smile, anxious to like and be liked. Mrs. Eubanks got up from her table near the screen beside the door into the pantry, introduced him, and led him to his table by the open window. He stood in some embarrassment until she moved away, then sat down and cast a tourist’s eye up at the wooden fan slowly revolving in the ceiling and creating a languid stir in the warm air. A very black waitress, with manner neither private nor professional, brought him a long glass of tea.
He was fishing with his spoon for the lemon segment in the bottom when Mr. and Mrs. Wheaton came in; he remembered the moment, having a mind that fastened to such things. The boy had thick black hair and the kind of good features which Mr. Applewhite thought he had often observed in Southern men, more symmetrical and appealing than strong. His first glance at the girl seemed to net him nothing; she was really arrestingly pretty, but he thought about her later and he wondered if she perceived quite clearly enough that her beauty was only a very small unit in Nature’s great pageant; he was afraid she might be taking it too personally; then he thought about her some more and he decided that wasn’t true; he wondered if she hadn’t really decided yet, herself. She was bareheaded and her hair rippled away from a middle part in neat waves. She shook hands with him at Mrs. Eubanks’s introduction, a firm, strong hand with pink nails. He thought at first that she seemed a little like a glass flower and he was relieved when he saw a faint gleam of perspiration on her upper lip; that somehow reassured him.
“I’d like for you to meet my husband,” she said, reaching behind her for his hand. “Honey, this is Mr. Applewhite from New York. You brought us some mighty hot weather with you, Mr. Applewhite.”
“It was pretty hot in New York,” said Mr. Applewhite.
“I declare! But don’t you think it’s the humidity in New York?”
“The humidity is bad,” said Mr. Applewhite; as he had grown older clichés had lost more and more of their poignancy for him. “Then we don’t have anything like this either,” he added, glancing at the ceiling fan.
“Isn’t that a wonderful thing! I declare, I tell Mrs. Eubanks sometimes I’m right glad when my cook does get sick and I can make Branch bring me over here under this grand fan.”
He stole glances at them during his rice and gravy and chicken. He had seen many young married people and he thought he had noticed this about them: sometimes they gave him a sense of wholeness and sometimes of parts. He had often wondered about it, but he had no suggestion as to the cause. He had even denied the feeling, but it kept recurring, until now it was one of the first things he felt. He had tried to put his finger on why; it was not a congeniality in the usual sense, for he had felt wholeness with some who said very little to each other, and sometimes it existed even in the face of quarreling; he had been with one pair with whom he had felt it strongly during two days when they were not speaking. And conversely, he had noticed the opposite through layers of real pleasantness. He didn’t know what it was, but he wondered if he were sensing the fact that the wound in each, where they had been grafted, had in one case healed sound and tight and in the other had, for some reason, failed up to that moment to get well; that was as much as he could say. But during the meal he stole glances at the two at the corner table and as he ate the dessert he said to himself subconsciously, while consciously perceiving the cool taste of the cream on his peaches, that Mr. and Mrs. Branch Wheaton, whatever the future might bring them, had up to then failed to heal.
He turned away and looked out beneath the awning at Mrs. Eubanks’s scraggly ant-infested grass and the tall magnolia tree in the center, its blossoms running the gamut of life from tight balls of ivory yellow to open flowers flat like a clover.
“My grandfather planted that tree, Mr. Applewhite, when he was married.”
But it reminded him of Nora. He had telephoned her as soon as he landed, but she hadn’t been home. He thought he would call her again; then he changed his mind and decided he would just walk in.…
He swung slowly up the hill. Everything was very quiet. A negro in a wet shirt swept magnolia leaves into a pile in the gutter. The delivery boy from the drug store in the basement of the closed hotel pushed his bicycle up the road. A street car with two passengers ground its way wearily past. On a shady piece of wall a negro lay on his back, knees up, asleep. He wondered how Nora would be, amidst all this drowsiness.
She came into the hall as he was handing his hat to a negro butler in a white coat.
“Uncle John!”
He chuckled a little.
“What in the world, what in the world are you doing in Georgetown!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “What are you doing in Georgetown?”
She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Let me go see if mother has waked up yet.… Where are your suitcases?”
“I hope you are going to understand about the suitcases,” said Mr. Applewhite. “I’m staying down at Mrs. Eubanks’s—”
“Oh, but—”
“I’m an old bachelor, my dear, and I’m used to the freedom of solitude. And what’s more, I’m an old bachelor and I’m too set in my ways to be good company for very long at a stretch.”
“Oh—”
