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.

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