When the World War broke out he went over to England and managed to get himself enrolled as an aviator, very much, I gathered, in the spirit in which a countryman, in a city for a night, might take in a show.
The English had been glad enough to take him on. He was one more man. They were glad enough to take any one on just then. He was small and delicately built but after he got in he turned out to be a first-rate flyer, serving all through the War with a British flying squadron, but at the last got into a crash and fell.
Both legs were broken, one of them in three places, the scalp was badly torn and some of the bones of the face had been splintered.
They had put him into a field hospital and had patched him up. “It was my fault if the job was rather bungled,” he said. “You see it was a field hospital, a hell of a place. Men were torn all to pieces, groaning and dying. Then they moved me back to a base hospital and it wasn’t much better. The fellow who had the bed next to mine had shot himself in the foot to avoid going into a battle. A lot of them did that, but why they picked on their own feet that way is beyond me. It’s a nasty place, full of small bones. If you’re ever going to shoot yourself don’t pick on a spot like that. Don’t pick on your feet. I tell you it’s a bad idea.
“Anyway, the man in the hospital was always making a fuss and I got sick of him and the place too. When I got better I faked, said the nerves of my leg didn’t hurt. It was a lie, of course. The nerves of my leg and of my face have never quit hurting. I reckon maybe, if I had told the truth, they might have fixed me up all right.”
I got it. No wonder he carried his drinks so well. When I understood, I wanted to keep on drinking with him, wanted to stay with him until he got tired of me as he had of the man who lay beside him in the base hospital over there somewhere in France.
The point was that he never slept, could not sleep, except when he was a little drunk. “I’m a nut,” he said smiling.
It was after we got over to Aunt Sally’s that he talked most. Aunt Sally had gone to bed when we got there, but she got up when we rang the bell and we all went to sit together in the little patio back of her house. She is a large woman with great arms and rather a paunch, and she had put on nothing but a light flowered dressing-gown over a thin, ridiculously girlish, nightgown. By this time the moon had come up and, outside, in the narrow street of the Vieux Carré, three drunken sailors from a ship in the river were sitting on a curb and singing a song,
“I’ve got to get it,
You’ve got to get it,
We’ve all got to get it
In our own good time.”
They had rather nice boyish voices and every time they sang a verse and had done the chorus they all laughed together heartily.
In Aunt Sally’s patio there are many broad-leafed banana plants and a Chinaberry tree throwing its soft purple shadows on a brick floor.
As for Aunt Sally, she is as strange to me as he was. When we came and when we were all seated at a little table in the patio, she ran into her house and presently came back with a bottle of whisky. She, it seemed, had understood him at once, had understood without unnecessary words that the little Southern man lived always in the black house of pain, that whisky was good to him, that it quieted his throbbing nerves, temporarily at least. “Everything is temporary, when you come to that,” I can fancy Aunt Sally saying.
We sat for a time in silence, David having shifted his allegiance and taken two drinks out of Aunt Sally’s bottle. Presently he rose and walked up and down the patio floor, crossing and re-crossing the network of delicately outlined shadows on the bricks. “It’s really all right, the leg,” he said, “something just presses on the nerves, that’s all.” In me there was a self-satisfied feeling. I had done the right thing. I had brought him to Aunt Sally. “I have brought him to a mother.” She has always made me feel that way since I have known her.
And now I shall have to explain her a little. It will not be so easy. That whole neighborhood in New Orleans is alive with tales concerning her.
Aunt Sally came to New Orleans in the old days, when the town was wild, in the wide-open days. What she had been before she came no one knew, but anyway she opened a place. That was very, very long ago when I was myself but a lad, up in Ohio. As I have already said Aunt Sally came from somewhere up in the Middle-Western country. In some obscure subtle way it would flatter me to think she came from my State.
The house she had opened was one of the older places in the French Quarter down here, and when she had got her hands on it, Aunt Sally had a hunch. Instead of making the place modern, cutting it up into small rooms, all that sort of thing, she left it just as it was and spent her money rebuilding falling old walls, mending winding broad old stairways, repairing dim high-ceilinged old rooms, soft-colored old marble mantels. After all, we do seem attached to sin and there are so many people busy making sin unattractive. It is good to find someone who takes the other road. It would have been so very much to Aunt Sally’s advantage to have made the place modern, that is to say, in the business she was in at that time. If a few old rooms, wide old stairways, old cooking ovens built into the walls, if all these things did not facilitate the stealing in of couples on dark nights, they at least did something else. She had opened a gambling and drinking house, but one can have no doubt about the ladies stealing in. “I was on the make all right,” Aunt Sally told me once.
She ran the place and took in money, and the money she spent on the place itself. A falling wall was made to stand up straight and fine again, the banana plants were made to grow in the patio, the Chinaberry tree got started and was helped through the years of adolescence. On the wall the lovely Rose of Montana bloomed madly. The fragrant Lantana grew in a dense mass at a corner of the wall.
When the Chinaberry tree, planted at the very center of the patio, began to get up into the light it filled the whole neighborhood with fragrance in the Spring.
Fifteen, twenty years of that, with Mississippi River gamblers and race-horse men sitting at tables by windows in the huge rooms upstairs in the house that had once, no doubt, been the town house of some rich planter’s family—in the boom days of the Forties. Women stealing in, too, in the dusk of evenings. Drinks being sold. Aunt Sally raking down the kitty from the game, raking in her share, quite ruthlessly.
At night, getting a good price too from the lovers. No questions asked, a good price for drinks. Moll Flanders might have lived with Aunt Sally. What a pair they would have made! The Chinaberry tree beginning to be lusty. The Lantana blossoming—in the Fall the Rose of Montana.
Aunt Sally getting hers. Using the money to keep the old house in fine shape. Salting some away all the time.
A motherly soul, good, sensible Middle-Western woman, eh? Once a race-horse man left twenty-four thousand dollars with her and disappeared. No one knew she had it. There was a report the man was dead. He had killed a gambler in a place down by the French Market and while they were looking for him he managed to slip in to Aunt Sally’s and leave his swag. Some time later a body was found floating in the river and it was identified as the horseman but in reality he had been picked up in a wire-tapping haul in New York City and did not get out of his Northern prison for six years.
When he did get out, naturally, he skipped for New Orleans. No doubt he was somewhat shaky. She had him. If he squealed there was a murder charge to be brought up and held over his head. It was night when he arrived and Aunt Sally went at once to an old brick oven built into the wall of the kitchen and took out a bag. “There it is,” she said. The whole affair was part of the day’s work for her in those days.
Gamblers at the tables in some of the rooms upstairs, lurking couples, from the old patio below the fragrance of growing things.
When she was fifty, Aunt Sally had got enough and had put them all out. She did not stay in the way of sin too long and she never went in too deep, like that Moll Flanders, and so she was all right and sitting pretty. “They wanted to gamble and drink and play with the la
dies. The ladies liked it all right. I never saw none of them come in protesting too much. The worst was in the morning when they went away. They looked so sheepish and guilty. If they felt that way, what made them come? If I took a man, you bet I’d want him and no monkey-business or nothing doing.
“I got a little tired of all of them, that’s the truth.” Aunt Sally laughed. “But that wasn’t until I had got what I went after. Oh, pshaw, they took up too much of my time, after I got enough to be safe.”
Aunt Sally is now sixty-five. If you like her and she likes you she will let you sit with her in her patio gossiping of the old times, of the old river days. Perhaps—well, you see there is still something of the French influence at work in New Orleans, a sort of matter-of-factness about life—what I started to say is that if you know Aunt Sally and she likes you, and if, by chance, your lady likes the smell of flowers growing in a patio at night—really, I am going a bit too far. I only meant to suggest that Aunt Sally at sixty-five is not harsh. She is a motherly soul.
We sat in the garden talking, the little Southern poet, Aunt Sally and myself—or rather they talked and I listened. The Southerner’s great-grandfather was English, a younger son, and he came over here to make his fortune as a planter, and did it. Once he and his sons owned several great plantations with slaves, but now his father had but a few hundred acres left, about one of the old houses—somewhere over in Alabama. The land is heavily mortgaged and most of it has not been under cultivation for years. Negro labor is growing more and more expensive and unsatisfactory since so many Negroes have run off to Chicago, and the poet’s father and the one brother at home are not much good at working the land. “We aren’t strong enough and we don’t know how,” the poet said.
The Southerner had come to New Orleans to see Fred, to talk with Fred about poetry, but Fred was out of town. I could only walk about with him, help him drink his home-made whisky. Already I had taken nearly a dozen drinks. In the morning I would have a headache.
I drew within myself, listening while David and Aunt Sally talked. The Chinaberry tree had been so and so many years growing—she spoke of it as she might have spoken of a daughter. “It had a lot of different sicknesses when it was young, but it pulled through.” Some one had built a high wall on one side of her patio so that the climbing plants did not get as much sunlight as they needed. The banana plants, however, did very well and now the Chinaberry tree was big and strong enough to take care of itself. She kept giving David drinks of whisky and he talked.
He told her of the place in his leg where something, a bone perhaps, pressed on the nerve, and of the place on his left cheek. A silver plate had been set under the skin. She touched the spot with her fat old fingers. The moonlight fell softly down on the patio floor. “I can’t sleep except somewhere out of doors,” David said.
He explained how that, at home on his father’s plantation, he had to be thinking all day whether or not he would be able to sleep at night.
“I go to bed and then I get up. There is always a bottle of whisky on the table downstairs and I take three or four drinks. Then I go out doors.” Often very nice things happened.
“In the Fall it’s best,” he said. “You see the niggers are making molasses.” Every Negro cabin on the place had a little clump of ground back of it where cane grew and in the Fall the Negroes were making their ’lasses. “I take the bottle in my hand and go into the fields, unseen by the niggers. Having the bottle with me, that way, I drink a good deal and then lie down on the ground. The mosquitoes bite me some, but I don’t mind much. I reckon I get drunk enough not to mind. The little pain makes a kind of rhythm for the great pain—like poetry.
“In a kind of shed the niggers are making the ’lasses, that is to say, pressing the juice out of the cane and boiling it down. They keep singing as they work. In a few years now I reckon our family won’t have any land. The banks could take it now if they wanted it. They don’t want it. It would be too much trouble for them to manage, I reckon.
“In the Fall, at night, the niggers are pressing the cane. Our niggers live pretty much on ’lasses and grits.
“They like working at night and I’m glad they do. There is an old mule going round and round in a circle and beside the press a pile of the dry cane. Niggers come, men and women, old and young. They build a fire outside the shed. The old mule goes round and round.
“The niggers sing. They laugh and shout. Sometimes the young niggers with their gals make love on the dry cane pile. I can hear it rattle.
“I have come out of the big house, me and my bottle, and I creep along, low on the ground, ’til I get up close. There I lie. I’m a little drunk. It all makes me happy. I can sleep some, on the ground like that, when the niggers are singing, when no one knows I’m there.
“I could sleep here, on these bricks here,” David said, pointing to where the shadows cast by the broad leaves of the banana plants were broadest and deepest.
He got up from his chair and went limping, dragging one foot after the other, across the patio and lay down on the bricks.
For a long time Aunt Sally and I sat looking at each other, saying nothing, and presently she made a sign with her fat finger and we crept away into the house. “I’ll let you out at the front door. You let him sleep, right where he is,” she said. In spite of her huge bulk and her age she walked across the patio floor as softly as a kitten. Beside her I felt awkward and uncertain. When we had got inside she whispered to me. She had some champagne left from the old days, hidden away somewhere in the old house. “I’m going to send a magnum up to his dad when he goes home,” she explained.
She, it seemed, was very happy, having him there, drunk and asleep on the brick floor of the patio. “We used to have some good men come here in the old days too,” she said. As we went into the house through the kitchen door I had looked back at David, asleep now in the heavy shadows at a corner of the wall. There was no doubt he also was happy, had been happy ever since I had brought him into the presence of Aunt Sally. What a small huddled figure of a man he looked, lying thus on the brick, under the night sky, in the deep shadows of the banana plants.
I went into the house and out at the front door and into a dark narrow street, thinking. Well, I was, after all, a Northern man. It was possible Aunt Sally had become completely Southern, being down here so long.
I remembered that it was the chief boast of her life that once she had shaken hands with John L. Sullivan and that she had known P. T. Barnum.
“I knew Dave Gears. You mean to tell me you don’t know who Dave Gears was? Why, he was one of the biggest gamblers we ever had in this city.”
As for David and his poetry—it is in the manner of Shelley. “If I could write like Shelley I would be happy. I wouldn’t care what happened to me,” he had said during our walk of the early part of the evening.
I went along enjoying my thoughts. The street was dark and occasionally I laughed. A notion had come to me. It kept dancing in my head and I thought it very delicious. It had something to do with aristocrats, with such people as Aunt Sally and David. “Lordy,” I thought, “maybe I do understand them a little. I’m from the Middle West myself and it seems we can produce our aristocrats too.” I kept thinking of Aunt Sally and of my native State, Ohio. “Lordy, I hope she comes from up there, but I don’t think I had better inquire too closely into her past,” I said to myself, as I went smiling away into the soft smoky night.
The Flood
* * *
IT came about while he was trying to do a very difficult thing. He was a college professor and was trying to write a book on the subject of values.
A good many men had written on the subject, but now he was trying his hand.
He had read, he said, everything he could find that had been written on the subject.
There had been books consumed, months spent sitting and reading books.
The man had a house of his own at the edge of the town where stood the college in which he taught, but he was n
ot teaching that year. It was his sabbatical year. There was a whole year to be spent just on his book.
“I thought,” he said, “I would go to Europe.” He thought of some quiet place, say in a little Normandy town. He remembered such a town he had once visited.
It would have to be very quiet, a place where no one would know him, where he would be undisturbed.
He had got a world of notes down into little books, piled neatly on a long work table in his room. He was a small alert almost bald man and had been married, but his wife was dead. He told me that for years he had been a very lonely man.
He had lived alone in his house for several years, having no children. There was an old housekeeper. There was a walled garden.
The old housekeeper did not sleep in the house. She came there early in the morning and went to her own home at night.
Nothing had happened to the man for months at a time, through several years, he said.
He had been lonely, had felt his loneliness a good deal. He hadn’t much of a way with people.
He had, I gathered, before that Summer, been rather hungry for people. “My wife was a cheerful soul, when she was here,” he said, speaking of his loneliness. I got from him and others—I had never known his wife—the sense of her as a rather frivolous-seeming woman.
She had been a light-hearted little woman, fond of frills, one of the kind whose blond hair is always flying in the wind. They are always chattering, that kind. They love everyone. My friend, the scholar, had adored his wife.
And then she had died, and there he was. He was one of the sort who hurry along through streets, with books under their arms. You are always seeing such men about college towns. They go along staring at people with their impersonal eyes. If you speak to such a one he answers you absent-mindedly. “Don’t bother me, please,” he seems to be saying, while all the time, within himself, he is cursing himself that he cannot be more outgoing toward people.