"Oh, I"ll join the church if it is needed to push the garden," said Nickols with a laugh, as he lit a cigarette and puffed a smoke ring out toward the gray little chapel. "Most people who join churches do it for some kind of pull, social or business, or a respectability stamp or to be white-washed. I"ll put on a frock coat and pa.s.s the plate if it will help the parson evolve another phase of gardenism."
"Billy gets home from his poker game at the Last Chance, down in the Settlement, on Sunday morning, just in time to bathe and get into his frock coat to perform that office," I said with a laugh that had a hint of recklessness tinged with contempt.
"I"ll see Billy through both ceremonials," said Nickols. "Has Billy come into the fold?"
"He has! So have all the rest," I answered. "I am the only black sheep and they are all backsliding down on me. I am getting, and will get, the blame of it all as a corrupter of public morals."
"Why don"t you join and then do as you please with the official stamp of Christianity upon you?" Nickols asked, as he puffed comfortably away in the moonlight.
One of the things that cause me the deepest hurt is to try to get Nickols to look down into my depths and read one, just any one, of the hieroglyphics there. I know each time I open my nature to him he is going to turn aside, and yet I will try. As his arm stole around me I made another one of the attempts that I always know beforehand are doomed to failure.
"There is something in me, a quality of mind that seems to be judicial, which insists that as a cold scheme for existence in this universe nothing compares with that of life followed by eternal redemption through personal effort interpreted by a mediator. The bare Christian tenets have a n.o.bility that it kills me to see belittled by the bored, half-hearted observances of most of its protestants, who in turn are not to be blamed for being half-hearted and bored by the dogmas and restrictions and littleness with which the great bare scheme has been enmeshed and clothed. The Methodist Church positively forbids Billy to play poker or drink, but it just as positively forbids him to see Pavlowa dance or Beerbohm Tree play Falstaff or Forbes Robertson incarnate Hamlet. And look at its wretched machinery--they allow a young man to give his life and expect inspiration from him at six hundred dollars a year with a wife and two dozen children, which he has been encouraged to bring down upon himself, dependent on that same six hundred dollars. The great men who are expected to direct our spiritual destinies don"t get as much money as many ordinary grocers and certainly not enough to support their obligations with dignity. What is true of the Methodist Church is true of all the rest, in perhaps a greater degree. So with their smallness and their pettiness and their befogging stupidity I feel that they may be denying thinkers like you and me the use of their scheme and we"ll have to find another for ourselves if we want immortality."
"Do we want that immortality?" asked Nickols easily. "This world is a pretty good old place if you don"t regard the "shalt nots," but isn"t it long enough to live the allotted time? What do we want to do it all over again for, that is, provided we do all the pleasant things while we have the chance? I don"t want to see any play twice, even a masterpiece.
I wouldn"t want to live again unless I had been a Christian in this life and felt that I wanted to come back and do a lot of the things I had just heard about and previously hadn"t tried."
"Certainly I wouldn"t want another life that is as unsatisfied as this,"
I murmured, more to myself than to Nickols.
"Do the things that satisfy," he urged again, and I could see a deviltry dancing at me out of the corner of his eyes that I resented deeply without exactly knowing why.
"Harriet Henderson can"t get Mark Morgan"s love or--his children, and Nell Morgan is unattainable for Billy. Though they have all the world"s goods and go a pace that pleases them, they are unsatisfied. If they don"t get the new deal that immortality promises they lose the whole thing," I answered straight out from the shoulder. "And what about those who die in infancy and--and you and me?"
"If you"ll just kiss me and hush preaching to me I"ll be entirely satisfied and ready to die as soon as I have lifted that fifty thousand out of old Jeffries with the judge"s and the Reverend Gregory"s garden and done a few more commissions. Try kissing me and see if you don"t feel more cheerful," Nickols answered with a laugh, as he drew me close to him. I sadly shut up the doors of my depths, warded off the kiss--why, I didn"t know--and persuaded him to go up to his rooms which I had seen Sallie and Dabney put in order that afternoon.
It was midnight when I parted with Nickols at the head of the old winding stairs in the fragrant darkness, lit only by the silver light of the night from a long window at the front of the hall. He held me close for a half second as he whispered:
"Let me make you happy. I understand."
"I don"t understand, and until I do I"d make you miserable, dear," I whispered back as I drew myself out of his reluctant arms and went into my own door.
Then for a long midnight hour I stood at my deep window and looked out over the garden, past the squat steeple silvering beyond the lilac hedge, to Paradise Ridge in the dim distance, and tried to read my own hieroglyphics. I needed help. Nickols had come after me to Goodloets in a spirit of gentle determination and I knew the fight would be to the finish. And why should I fight? Any woman ought to be proud to marry Nickols Morris Powers, especially a woman who had loved him since her heart had been developed to the knowledge of love. Very unostentatiously and with perfect good taste Nickols had let me see that Marie VanClive with her Knickerbocker ancestry and her Manhattan land-grants fortune was very decidedly interested in him in her cultured and perfected young way, and young Mrs. Houston had herself shown me the same thing on one of the week-end flights we had had on her yacht. And beyond all that my own heart told me that Nickols was desirable. His gentleness and his tenderness and his daring and his humor were irresistible to a woman.
And his lazy acquiescence in life was peaceful and inviting to my own strenuosity. I felt as if I had always been an eagle breasting the gale with no place to alight, and now Nickols was calling to me from an eyrie on a mountain side to come and rest and be mated and comforted.
"I"m tired of loneliness and I think I"ll drift and be happy," I murmured, as I fell asleep with my back to the silver steeple against the dim hills.
CHAPTER IX
INTO BRAMBLES
The next morning I awoke with the same resolve in my heart, to be happy if wicked, and proceeded to execute it with a great vigor. And in the execution of that resolve dear old Goodloets almost had some of the moss of its century"s repose sc.r.a.ped off of its back.
First and foremost, we all danced, day and night. We had really begun the giddy whirl the summer before when we had built the little clubhouse over in the oak grove by the river"s edge, just between the Town and the Settlement, so that we would no longer feel the limit and limitations to our gliding of anybody"s double parlors, and conservative Goodloets had been duly shocked thereat.
"Ladies did not dance outside of their own and their friends" private homes in my day," Mrs. c.o.c.krell had sighed, as she finished the petal of the rose she was embroidering upon some of Let.i.tia"s lingerie.
"I"d rather they danced in their den of iniquity than to execute these modern gyrations in my home," had responded Harriet"s mother, Mrs.
Sproul, as she finished the hundredth round on the shawl she was knitting. Harriet"s report of the conversation had been received with great hilarity that evening at dinner at the Club.
But Goodloets had had a year in which to recover from the shock of the inst.i.tution of the Country Club when I started in to enjoy myself.
Having church services there on Sundays and Wednesdays during the winter had done much to remove the prejudice in the minds of the conservative.
I suspected the Reverend Mr. Goodloe of a great deal of worldly wisdom when I saw how he had been able to persuade the directors, Hampton Dibrell and Mark and Cliff, to let him do such a weird thing. Mrs.
Sproul and Mrs. c.o.c.krell and their friends had first been tolled out to prayer meeting and then had come to witness a tennis match. Billy, in great glee, recounted to me the first time they had stayed to dinner with him and father and Mr. c.o.c.krell. They had been enjoying the prayer meetings to the utmost and had come out with Mother Spurlock by mistake on a Tuesday night, which was the regular dinner dance night. It was some time before they discovered their mistake, for they were immensely enjoying their visit with Mother Spurlock, and when the dancing began Billy had seized Mother Elsie in his arms and danced her the whole length of the room. The music had been too much for her feet in their sensible shoes, and very suddenly they had unfolded their wings after thirty long years of rest and had fairly flown up and down and backwards and forwards with Billy"s in a sedate version of one of the phases of the tango. Mrs. George Spurlock had been the best dancer in Goodloets when time was young.
"Do you think that it was the devil that tempted you, Mother Elsie?" I asked her about it one day when she had a leisure moment for teasing.
"Effie Burns" youngest baby was born exactly while I was dancing, and we will have six months" trouble with her because her band was not put on properly," was her answer, as she took up her parcel of five pairs of only slightly worn stockings that five girls in the Settlement needed worse than I needed darns, and departed in a great hurry. "Oh, but you should have seen Hattie Sproul"s eyes while I danced," she called back over her shoulder as she went through the gate.
And so in the second summer of the Club"s existence there had been no bridle upon its gayeties--I had almost used the word license, and I suppose it would have been a just one under the circ.u.mstances. Billy called it "The Bucket of the Lost Lid," and every individual member did exactly as he or she chose. The sideboard out on the back porch made as good a bar as any in the state with old Uncle Wilks to officiate, and in the wing in one of the private dining rooms a huge wheel stood with its face to the wall during the day, but came complacently out of its corner when night descended. On the porch could always be found either Mrs.
James Knight or Mrs. Buford Cunningham. They neither of them had children, hated home and were serenely happy sitting on the front porch knitting silk scarfs and gossiping with all comers, while James and Buford hung around the sideboard at the back. They were inst.i.tutions and all of the unmarried boys and girls, men and women, widowed and widowered, came and went at will, with the liberty that the chaperonage of their certain presence allowed.
"Suppose one of "em should fall dead and the other have to attend her funeral," Nickols remarked one Sat.u.r.day night at a dinner table not more than twelve feet away from the two couples. "The scandal that would soon disrupt this town for lack of their free chaperonage would be like an earthquake. None of you would have a shred of respectability with which to drape yourselves to appear in public."
"They don"t wear much respectability anyway in the eyes of the Settlement," said Billy, as he mixed the champagne cup with old Wilks standing admiringly by. "The floor manager ordered Luella May Spain off the floor at the dance they had in the lodge room over the Last Chance last Sat.u.r.day night for appearing in one of Harriet"s last year dancing frocks Mother Spurlock had collected for her, though they do say that Luella May had sewed in two inches of tucker and put in sleeves. How"s that for an opinion pa.s.sed upon the high and mighty from the meek and lowly?"
"I"d been in mourning a year. That was my coming out gown and I felt--"
Harriet was saying when Billy laughed and interrupted her.
"And you came out, Harriet dear," he a.s.sured her, as he poured her champagne cup and his and signaled Wilks to serve the rest of us.
On the surface all of the joy that most of Goodloets was having was real and brilliant and spontaneous, all the dancing and drinking and high playing, but under the surface there were dark currents that ran in many directions. Young Ted Montgomery and Billy played poker one Sat.u.r.day night until daylight out at the Club, and Bessie Thornton and Grace Payne had "staid by" and were having bacon and eggs with them when the sun rose. Judge Payne, Grace"s father, has been a widower ten years and Grace, with the four younger "pains," as Billy calls them, has run wild away from him and her grandmother, old Madam Payne, who lives in a world of crochet needles and silk thread with Mrs. c.o.c.krell and Mrs. Sproul.
One night I went with Billy in his car to take Grace home and he had to wait until I tiptoed to her room with my arm around her and put her to bed, while Harriet was doing the same thing with Bessie Thornton. Those girls are not much over twenty and they are only a little more "liberated," as they call it, than the rest of their friends. Ted Montgomery loves Grace, when he is himself and not at the card table, but what chance have they to form a union of any solidity and permanence? Billy"s nephew, Clive Harvey, has always loved Bessie Thornton, but he is teller in the Goodloets bank and almost never sees her. He is one of the stewards in the Harpeth Jaguar"s church, and the suffering on his slim young face hurts me like a blow every time I meet him. What"s going to satisfy him, no matter what pace he should choose to go or how many things he is driven by unhappiness to indulge himself in?
And it was true that everything done up in the town had its effect down in the Settlement. The lodge hall over the Last Chance was the only hall available for the young people in the Settlement to dance, and the bar of the East Chance, at which old Jacob Ensley officiated, was no better stocked than the lockers at the Country Club. And all of us knew that very frequently Billy and Nickols and the rest of our friends went down to dance and drink with the girls from the mills and the shops. Billy had told me once that Milly Burt, who stays at the cigar stand in the Goodloe Hotel in Goodloets, dances so much like me and is so perfumed with my especial sachet from France, Mother Spurlock having collected the chiffon blouse from me for her to wear at the entertainment of the Epworth League, that he came very near addressing her by my name in giving her the invitation to the dance.
"Settlement or Town, they all add up to the sum of girl," he laughed, as he told me about that Sat.u.r.day night frolic in the Last Chance.
It was the day after Billy"s account of the ball at the Last Chance, in which Luella May and Milly and the rest had frolicked in what ought to have been a perfectly harmless way, that Mother Spurlock came to spend the afternoon with me and in which we wrestled until I was almost on the mat--not quite.
"Goodloets has always been the gayest town in the state, but it has now reached the place of the most wicked," she said, after a few preliminary shots had been exchanged. "Every dignity of tradition seems to have been dropped and everybody is dance or play or drink or speed mad. You are the most influential personality in the whole town and I want you to call a halt."
"But aren"t they all happy? Isn"t everybody getting the most out of life? The men are all working to their capacity and making more money than they ever have before. Why shouldn"t they play hard?" I answered her, as I seated myself in the broad window seat of my room opposite the wide maternal ancestral rocker she had chosen.
"Are they happy?" she asked, with her keen eyes on my face.
"They seem to be," I parried.
"Well, as far as personal happiness is concerned I think it is not worth talking about. It is the good of the whole for which I am working, for which I am contending to-day. What you women do, who are not obliged to add to the work of the world that you may live in it, is not of any great importance; it is for the toilers in the vineyard that I plead.
The girls and young men in this town cannot dance and drink and play all night and do the constructive work of the community in the daytime. If Luella May Spain falls asleep or nods at her typewriter and fails to get out the telegram to you or Nickols which Mr. Tate has shouted to her off the keys, do you excuse her because she has been fatiguing herself until midnight trying to learn some new dance that Billy Harvey has brought down to the Last Chance from your Country Club? You would not!
She would be fired on your complaint."
"But are we responsible for how the girls and men in the Settlement spend their evenings?" I demanded with a fine show of indignation, but with a thrill of fear in my heart. There has always been something in Luella May Spain"s shy and admiring glances that drew me and I have always lingered to chat with her a few minutes if business called me into the station. The last time I had spoken to her, not a week before, she had seemed pale and listless and had answered me with indifference.
"You and your cla.s.s are the ones in power and what you do and what you think is a moral influence that reaches and permeates every soul in this town. You are not about your Father"s business; and those less powerful of brain and character follow you in by-paths from the straight road.