The Brimming Cup
CHAPTER XXVIII
TWO GOOD-BYES
August 10.
Marise welcomed the bother about the details of Eugenia's
departure and Mr. Welles', and flung herself into them with a
frightened desire for something that would drown out the roaring
wind of tragedy which filled her ears in every pause of the day's
activities, and woke her up at night out of the soundest sleep.
Night after night, she found herself sitting up in bed, her
night-gown and hair damp with perspiration, Nelly's scream ringing
knife-like in her ears. Then, rigid and wide-eyed she saw it all
again, what had happened in those thirty seconds which had summed
up and ended the lives of 'Gene and Nelly.
But one night as she sat thus in her bed, hammered upon beyond
endurance, she saw as though she had not seen it before what 'Gene
had finally done, his disregard of possible safety for himself, his
abandon of his futile, desperate effort to free Nelly from the
tangle where her childish vanity had cast her, the grandeur and
completeness of his gesture when he had taken Nelly into his strong
arms, to die with her. Marise found herself crying as she had not
cried for years. The picture, burned into her memory, stood there
endlessly in the black night till she understood it. The tears came
raining down her face, and with them went the strained, wild horror
of the memory.
But the shadow and darkness hung about her like a cloud, through
which she only dimly saw the neat, unhurried grace of Eugenia's
preparations for departure and far travels, and felt only a dimmed,
vague echo of the emotion she had thought to feel at the
disappearance of Mr. Welles, poor, weary, futile old crusader on
his Rosinante.
On that last morning of their stay she drove with them to the
station, still giving only a half-attention to the small episodes
of their departure. She did see and smile at the characteristic
quality of an instinctive gesture of Eugenia's as they stepped up
on the platform of the station. Two oddly-shaped pieces of metal
stood there, obviously parts of a large machine. Paul stumbled over
them as he climbed out of the car, and held tight to Mr. Welles'
hand to save himself from a fall. Eugenia saw them instantly from
afar as an element in life which threatened the spotlessness of her
gray traveling cloak, and as she passed them she drew the thick
folds of velvet-like wool about her closely. Marise thought to
herself, "That's Eugenia's gesture as she goes through the
world."
Neale turned off his switch, listened a moment to see if the
Ford were boiling from the long climb up the hill to the station,
and now made one long-legged step to the platform. He started
towards Eugenia with the evident intention of making some casual
pleasant remarks, such as are demanded by decency for a departing
guest, but in his turn his eyes caught the curiously shaped pieces
of metal. He stopped short, his face lighted up with pleasure and
surprise. All consciousness of anyone else on the platform
disappeared from his expression. "Hello!" he said to himself,
"those mandrels here." He picked up one in his strong hands on
which the metal left a gray dust, and inspected it. He might have
been entirely alone in his shop at the mill.
Marise noted with envy how he gave all of himself to that
momentary examination, entirely escaped from any awareness of that
tyrannical self which in her own heart always clamored like a
spoiled child for attention. The impersonal concentration of his
look as he turned the metal about between those strong dusty hands,
gave to his face the calm, freed expression not to be bought for
any less price than a greater interest in one's work than in one's
self. "They'll do," pronounced Neale. This was evidently a thought
spoken aloud, for it did not occur to him to make any pretense of
including the two women in his interest. He set down the casting he
held, and went off into the freight-house, calling loudly,
"Charlie! Charlie! Those mandrels have come. I wish you'd . . ."
his voice died away as he walked further into the dusky
freight-shed.
Marise happening to glance at Eugenia now, caught on her face an
expression which she took to be annoyance at a breach of manners.
She reflected, "Eugenia must find Neale's abrupt American ways
perfectly barbaric." And she was surprised to feel for the first
time a rather scornful indifference to all that was involved in
Eugenia's finding them barbaric. Heavens! What did it matter? In a
world so filled with awful and portentous and glorious human
possibilities, how could you bother about such things?
There was a silence. Mr. Welles and Paul had been standing near,
aimlessly, but now, evidently taking the silence for the inevitable
flatness of the flat period of waiting for a train, Mr. Welles drew
the little boy away. They walked down the cinder-covered
side-tracks, towards where the single baggage truck stood, loaded
with elegant, leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks,
marked "E. Mills. S.S. Savoie. Compagnie Générale
Transatlantique." Among them, out of place and drab, stood one
banal department-store trunk labeled, "Welles. 320 Maple Avenue.
Macon, Georgia."
The departure of the old man and the little boy left the two
women alone. Eugenia stepped closer to Marise and took her hand in
her own gloved fingers. She looked at it intently, with the
expression of one who is trying to find words for a complicated
feeling. Marise made an effort to put herself in the receptive mood
which would make the saying of it easier, but failed. The fall of
the big pine roared too loudly in her ears. She looked without
sympathy or admiration at Eugenia's perfection of aspect. "To look
like that, she must care for looks more than anything else. What
can she know about any real human feeling?" Marise asked herself,
with an intolerance she could not mitigate.
And yet as she continued to peer at Eugenia through that dark
cloud of tragedy, it seemed to her that Eugenia showed signs of
some real human emotion. As she gazed at her in the crude
brilliance of the gaudy morning sun, she saw for the first time
signs of years in Eugenia's exquisite small face. There was not a
line visible, nor a faltering of the firmness of the well-cared-for
flesh, but over it all was a faint, hardly discernible flaccid
fatigue of texture.
But perhaps she imagined it, for even as she looked, and felt
her heart soften to think what this would mean to Eugenia, an inner
wave of resolution reached the surface of the other woman's face,
and there was Eugenia as she always had been, something of
loveliness immutable.
She said impulsively, "Eugenia, it's a stupidly conventional
thing to say, but it's a pity you never married."
As Eugenia only looked at her, quietly, she ventured further,
"You might really be happier, you know. There is a great deal of
happiness in the right marriage." She had never said so much to
Eugenia.
Eugenia let Marise's hand drop and with it, evidently, whatever
intention she might have had of saying something difficult to
express. Instead, she advanced with her fastidious, delicate note
of irony, "I don't deny the happiness, if that sort of happiness is
what one is after. But I think my appetite for it . . . that sort .
. . is perhaps not quite robust enough to relish it."
Marise roused herself to try to put a light note of cheerfulness
into this last conversation. "You mean that it seems to you like
the coarsely heaped-up goodies set before a farmhand in a country
kitchen . . . chicken and butter and honey and fruit and coffee,
all good but so profuse and jumbled that they make you turn
away?"
"I didn't give that definition of domestic life," corrected
Eugenia, with a faint smile, "that's one of your
fantasies."
"Well, it's true that you get life served up to you rather
pell-mell, lots of it, take-it-as-it-comes," admitted Marise, "but
for a gross nature like mine, once you've had that, you're lost.
You know you'd starve to death on the delicate slice of toasted
bread served on old china. You give up and fairly enjoy wallowing
in the trough."
She had been struck by that unwonted look of fatigue on
Eugenia's face, had tried to make her laugh, and now, with an
effort, laughed with her. She had forgotten her passing notion that
Eugenia had something special to say. What could she have? They had
gone over that astonishing misconception of hers about the Powers
woodlot, and she had quite made Marise understand how hopelessly
incapable she was of distinguishing one business detail from
another. There could be nothing else that Eugenia could wish to
say.
"How in the world shall I get through the winter?" Eugenia now
wondered aloud. "Biskra and the Sahara perhaps . . . if I could
only get away from the hideous band of tourists. They say there are
swarms of war-profiteers from Italy now, everywhere, low-class
people with money for the first time." She added with a greater
accent of wonder, "How in the world are you going to get
through the winter?"
Marise was struck into momentary silence by the oddness of the
idea. There were phrases in Eugenia's language which were literally
non-translatable into hers, representing as they did ideas that did
not exist there. "Oh, we never have to consider that," she
answered, not finding a more accurate phrase. "There won't be time
enough to do all we'll try to do, all we'll have to do. There's
living. That takes a lot of time and energy. And I'll have the
chorus as usual. I'm going to try some Mendelssohn this year. The
young people who have been singing for five or six years are quite
capable of the 'Elijah.' And then any of the valley children who
really want to, come to me for lessons, you know. The people in
North Ashley have asked me to start a chorus there this year, too.
And in the mill, Neale has a plan to try to get the men to work out
for themselves some standards of what concerns them especially,
what a day's work really is, at any given job, don't you know."
What an imbecile she was, she thought, to try to talk about such
things to Eugenia, who could not, in the nature of things,
understand what she was driving at. But apparently Eugenia had
found something understandable there, for she now said sharply,
startled, "Won't that mean less income for you?"
She did not say, "Even less," but it was implied in the
energy of her accent.
Marise hesitated, brought up short by the solidity of the
intangible barrier between their two languages. There were phrases
in her own tongue which could not be translated into Eugenia's,
because they represented ideas not existing there. She finally said
vaguely, "Oh perhaps not."
Her pause had been enough for Eugenia to drop back into her own
world. She said thoughtfully, "I've half a notion to try going
straight on beyond Biskra, to the south, if I could find a caravan
that would take me. That would be something new. Biskra is so
commonplace now that it has been discovered and exploited." She
went on, with a deep, wistful note of plaintiveness in her voice,
"But everything's so commonplace now!" and added, "There's
Java. I've never been to Java."
It came over Marise with a shock of strangeness that this was
the end of Eugenia in her life. Somehow she knew, as though Eugenia
had told her, that she was never coming back again. As they stood
there, so close together, in the attitude of friends, they were so
far apart that each could scarcely recognize who the other was.
Their paths which in youth had lain so close to each other as to
seem identical, how widely they had been separated by a slight
divergence of aim! Marise was struck by her sudden perception of
this. It had been going on for years, she could understand that
now. Why should she only see it in this quiet, silent, neutral
moment?
An impalpable emanation of feeling reached her from the other
woman. She had a divination that it was pain. Perhaps Eugenia was
also suddenly realizing that she had grown irrevocably apart from
an old friend.
The old tenderness felt for the girl Eugenia had been, by the
girl Marise had been, looked wistfully down the years at the
end.
Marise opened her arms wide and took Eugenia into them for a
close, deeply moved embrace.
"Good-bye, Eugenia," she said, with sadness.
"Good-bye, Marise," said Eugenia, looking at her strangely.
Neale came back now, frankly consulting his watch with Neale's
bluntness in such matters. "Train's due in a minute or two," he
said. "Where's Mr. Welles?"
Marise said, "Over there, with Paul. I'll go tell them."
She found them both, hand in hand, sitting on the edge of the
truck which carried the leather-covered boxes and wicker
basket-trunks, bound for Biskra or beyond, or Java; and the square
department-store trunk bound for Maple Avenue, Macon, Georgia.
"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles has promised me that he'll come
up and visit us summers."
"There's no house in the world where you'll be more welcome,"
said Marise with all her heart, holding out her hand.
Mr. Welles shook it hard, and held it in both his. As the train
whistled screamingly at the crossing, he looked earnestly into her
face and tried to tell her something, but the words would not
come.
As she read in his pale old face and steady eyes what he would
have said, Marise cried out to herself that there do not exist in
the world any things more halting and futile than words. She put
her arms around his neck and kissed him. "Good-bye, dear Mr.
Welles," was all she said, but in the clinging of his old arms
about her, and in the quivering, shining face he showed as they
moved down the platform together, she knew that he too had not
needed words.
Paul clung to his hand till the last moment, gazing up at him
constantly, silently. Marise looked down on the little boy's
tanned, freckled, sober face and strained, rapidly winking eyes,
and had the intuition, "This is one of the moments Paul will never
forget. He will always be able to shut his eyes and see this old
Don Quixote setting forth." With a rush of her old, jealous,
possessive mother-love, she longed to share this with him and to
have him know that she shared it; to put her arms around him and
make him let her in. But she knew better now. She yearned
over him silently, and did not touch him.
"Well, good-bye, Paul," said Mr. Welles, shaking hands with
him.
"Well, good-bye," said Paul dryly, setting his jaw hard.
"Oh, this is the day-coach!" cried Eugenia. "Where is the
drawing-room car?"
"At the far end," said the conductor with the sweeping gesture
of a man used to talking with his arms.
"Good-bye, Mr. Welles," said Eugenia, giving him for an instant
a small, pearl-gray hand. "Boa voyage! Good luck!"
"Same to you," said the old gentleman, scrambling up the
unswept, cinder-covered steps into the day-coach.
At the front end of the train, the baggage man was tumbling into
the express car the fine, leather-covered boxes and the one square
trunk.
Neale carried Eugenia's two small bags down to the drawing-room
car and now handed them to the porter.
The two women kissed each other on both cheeks, hurriedly, as
someone cried, "All aboard!"
Eugenia took Neale's outstretched hand. "Good-bye, Neale," she
said.
With the porter's aid, she mounted the rubber-covered steps into
the mahogany and upholstery of the drawing-room car.
"Good luck, Eugenia! Bon voyage!" called Neale after her.
She did not turn around or look back.
Marise noted that characteristically Eugenia had forgotten Paul.
But Paul had forgotten her, too, and was now back near the
day-coach searching one window after another.
The conductor signaled widely, the whistle shrieked, the wheels
groaned. Neale drew Marise a little back out of the whirl of dust
and stood holding her arm for an instant.
It seemed to Marise as they stood thus, Neale holding her arm,
that she caught a last glimpse of Eugenia behind plate-glass,
looking at them gravely, steadily.
Paul suddenly caught sight of Mr. Welles' face at a window,
snatched off his cap, and waved it frantically, over and over, long
after the train was only an echoing roar from down the tracks.
Then the mountain-silence settled down about them calmly, and
they could hear their own hearts beat, and knew the thoughts in
their minds.
As they went back to their battered Ford, Marise said
thoughtfully, "Somehow I believe that it will be a long time before
we see Eugenia again."
Neale permitted himself no comment on this, nor showed the
alteration of a line in his face as he stepped into the car and
turned on the switch, but Marise cried out to him accusingly, "You
might as well say it right out, that you can support life if it
is."
Neale laughed a little and put his foot on the starter. "Get in
the back seat, Paul," was all he said, as the little boy came up
silently from the other side of the station.
He added as they started up the hill road, "First time in my
life I was ever sort of sorry for Eugenia. It seemed to me this
morning that she was beginning to show her age."
Marise hid the fact that she had had the same idea and opposed,
"Eugenia would laugh at that from you, the husband of such a
frankly middle-aged thing as I."
Neale was silent for a moment, and then, "You'll always look
younger than she. No, not younger, that's not it, at all. It's
living, you look. I tell you what, she's a cut flower in a
vase, that's beginning to wilt, and you're a living plant."
"Why, Neale!" said Marise, astonished and touched.
"Yes, quite a flight of fancy for me, wasn't it?" commented
Neale casually, leaning forward to change the carburetor
adjustment.
Marise felt Paul lean over her shoulder from the back of the
car. "Say, Mother," he said in her ear, "would you just as soon get
in back with me for a while?"
Neale stopped the care. Marise stepped out and in, and seated
herself beside Paul. He had apparently nothing to say, after all,
looking fixedly down at his bare brown feet.
But presently he moved nearer to his mother and leaned his head
against her breast. This time she put her arm around him and held
him close to her, the tears in her eyes.