“He had put the plate with Sister’s name on it back onto the cheap coffin that she started off with, so she was still all right for a coffin, even if it never had any handles and lining. I never said anything about that; that twenty-six dollars she had paid in since she give the money to Danny wouldn’t have helped any; I had already spent that much getting back to see about the money, and anyway, Sister still had a coffin——”
The voice of the man in uniform was quite near now, with a quality methodical, monotonous, and implacable: “Tickets. Tickets. Show your tickets. All without railroad tickets.”
The young man rose. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said. The old man rose too. Beyond the man in uniform the room was almost empty.
“I guess it’s about time,” the old man said. He followed the young man into the rotunda. There was an airplane in it, motionless, squatting, with a still, beetling look like a huge bug preserved in alcohol. There was a placard beside it, about how it had flown over mountains and vast wastes of snow.
“They might have tried it over New York,” the young man said. “It would have been closer.”
“Yes,” the old man said. “It costs more, though. But I guess that’s fair, since it is faster. When Sister died, Danny sent a wreath of flowers by air. It must have cost two hundred dollars. The wreath did, I mean. I don’t know what it cost to send it by air.”
Then they both looked up the ramp and through the arcade, toward the doors on Seventh Avenue. Beyond the doors lay a thick, moribund light that seemed to fill the arcade with the smell of snow and of cold, so that for a while longer they seemed to stand in the grip of a dreadful reluctance and inertia.
“So they went on back home,” the old man said. “Mrs. Zilich said how Sister was already shaking and she got Sister to bed. And that night Sister had a fever and Mrs. Zilich sent for the doctor and the doctor looked at Sister and told Mrs. Zilich she had better telegraph if there was anybody to telegraph to. When I got home Sister didn’t know me. The priest was already there, and we never could tell if she knew anything or not, not even when we read the letter from Danny that we had fixed up in the jail, about how he was all right. The priest read it to her, but we couldn’t tell if she heard him or not. That night she died.”
“Is that so?” The young man said, looking up the ramp. He moved. “I’m going to the Grand Central.”
Again the old man moved, with that same unwearying alacrity. “I guess that’s the best thing to do. We might have a good while there.” He looked up at the clock; he said with pleased surprise: “Half past one already. And a half an hour to get there. And if we’re lucky, we’ll have two hours before he comes along. Maybe three. That’ll be five o’clock. Then it will be only two hours more till daylight.”
Artist at Home
ROGER HOWES WAS a fattish, mild, nondescript man of forty, who came to New York from the Mississippi Valley somewhere as an advertisement writer and married and turned novelist and sold a book and bought a house in the Valley of Virginia and never went back to New York again, even on a visit. For five years he had lived in the old brick house with his wife Anne and their two children, where old ladies came to tea in horsedrawn carriages or sent the empty carriages for him or sent by Negro servants in the otherwise empty carriages shoots and cuttings of flowering shrubs and jars of pickle or preserves and copies of his books for autographs.
He didn’t go back to New York any more, but now and then New York came to visit him: the ones he used to know, the artists and poets and such he knew before he began to earn enough food to need a cupboard to put it in. The painters, the writers, that hadn’t sold a book or a picture—men with beards sometimes in place of collars, who came and wore his shirts and socks and left them under the bureau when they departed, and women in smocks but sometimes not: those gaunt and eager and carnivorous tymbesteres of Art.
At first it had been just hard to refuse them, but now it was harder to tell his wife that they were coming. Sometimes he did not know himself they were coming. They usually wired him, on the day on which they would arrive, usually collect. He lived four miles from the village and the book hadn’t sold quite enough to own a car too, and he was a little fat, a little overweight, so sometimes it would be two or three days before he would get his mail. Maybe he would just wait for the next batch of company to bring the mail up with them. After the first year the man at the station (he was the telegraph agent and the station agent and Roger’s kind of town agent all in one) got to where he could recognize them on sight. They would be standing on the little platform, with that blank air, with nothing to look at except a little yellow station and the back end of a moving train and some mountains already beginning to get dark, and the agent would come out of his little den with a handful of mail and a package or so, and the telegram. “He lives about four miles up the Valley. You can’t miss it.”
“Who lives about four miles up the valley?”
“Howes does. If you all are going up there, I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind taking these letters to him. One of them is a telegram.”
“A telegram?”
“It come this a.m. But he ain’t been to town in two-three days. I thought maybe you’d take it to him.”
“Telegram? Hell. Give it here.”
“It’s forty-eight cents to pay on it.”
“Keep it, then. Hell.”
So they would take everything except the telegram and they would walk the four miles to Howes’, getting there after supper. Which would be all right, because the women would all be too mad to eat anyway, including Mrs. Howes, Anne. So a couple of days later, someone would send a carriage for Roger and he would stop at the village and pay out the wire telling him how his guests would arrive two days ago.
So when this poet in the sky-blue coat gets off the train, the agent comes right out of his little den, with the telegram. “It’s about four miles up the Valley,” he says. “You can’t miss it. I thought maybe you’d take this telegram up to him. It come this a.m., but he ain’t been to town for two-three days. You can take it. It’s paid.”
“I know it is,” the poet says. “Hell. You say it is four miles up there?”
“Right straight up the road. You can’t miss it.”
So the poet took the telegram and the agent watched him go on out of sight up the Valley Road, with a couple or three other folks coming to the doors to look at the blue coat maybe. The agent grunted. “Four miles,” he said. “That don’t mean no more to that fellow than if I had said four switch frogs. But maybe with that dressing-sacque he can turn bird and fly it.”
Roger hadn’t told his wife, Anne, about this poet at all, maybe because he didn’t know himself. Anyway, she didn’t know anything about it until the poet came limping into the garden where she was cutting flowers for the supper table, and told her she owed him forty-eight cents.
“Forty-eight cents?” Anne said.
He gave her the telegram. “You don’t have to open it now, you see,” the poet said. “You can just pay me back the forty-eight cents and you won’t have to even open it.” She stared at him, with a handful of flowers and the scissors in the other hand, so finally maybe it occurred to him to tell her who he was. “I’m John Blair,” he said. “I sent this telegram this morning to tell you I was coming. It cost me forty-eight cents. But now I’m here, so you don’t need the telegram.”
So Anne stands there, holding the flowers and the scissors, saying “Damn, Damn, Damn” while the poet tells her how she ought to get her mail oftener. “You want to keep up with what’s going on,” he tells her, and her saying “Damn, Damn, Damn,” until at last he says he’ll just stay to supper and then walk back to the village, if it’s going to put her out that much.
“Walk?” she said, looking him up and down. “You walk? Up here from the village? I don’t believe it. Where is your baggage?”
“I’ve got it on. Two shirts, and I have an extra pair of socks in my pocket. Your cook can wash, can’t she?”
She looks at him, holding the flowers and the scissors. Then she tells him to come on into the house and live there forever. Except she didn’t say exactly that. She said: “You walk? Nonsense. I think you’re sick. You come in and sit down and rest.” Then she went to find Roger and tell him to bring down the pram from the attic. Of course she didn’t say exactly that, either.
Roger hadn’t told her about this poet; he hadn’t got the telegram himself yet. Maybe that was why she hauled him over the coals so that night: because he hadn’t got the telegram.
They were in their bedroom. Anne was combing out her hair. The children were spending the summer up in Connecticut, with Anne’s folks. He was a minister, her father was. “You told me that the last time would be the last. Not a month ago. Less than that, because when that last batch left I had to paint the furniture in the guest room again to hide where they put their cigarettes on the dressing table and the window ledges. And I found in a drawer a broken comb I would not have asked Pinkie (Pinkie was the Negro cook) to pick up, and two socks that were not even mates that I bought for you myself last winter, and a single stocking that I couldn’t even recognize any more as mine. You tell me that Poverty looks after its own: well, let it. But why must we be instruments of Poverty?”
“This is a poet. That last batch were not poets. We haven’t had a poet in the house in some time. Place losing all its mellifluous overtones and subtleties.”
“How about that woman that wouldn’t bathe in the bathroom? who insisted on going down to the creek every morning without even a bathing suit, until Amos Crain’s (he was a farmer that lived across the creek from them) wife had to send me word that Amos was afraid to try to plow his lower field? What do people like that think that out-doors, the country, is? I cannot understand it, any more than I can understand why you feel that you should feed and lodge——”
“Ah, that was just a touch of panic fear that probably did Amos good. Jolted him out of himself, out of his rut.”
“The rut where he made his wife’s and children’s daily bread, for six days. And worse than that. Amos is young. He probably had illusions about women until he saw that creature down there without a stitch on.”
“Well, you are in the majority, you and Mrs. Crain.” He looked at the back of her head, her hands combing out her hair, and her probably watching him in the mirror and him not knowing it, what with being an artist and all. “This is a man poet.”
“Then I suppose he will refuse to leave the bathroom at all. I suppose you’ll have to carry a tray to him in the tub three times a day. Why do you feel compelled to lodge and feed these people? Can’t you see they consider you an easy mark? that they eat your food and wear your clothes and consider us hopelessly bourgeois for having enough food for other people to eat, and a little soft-brained for giving it away? And now this one, in a sky-blue dressing-sacque.”
“There’s a lot of wear and tear to just being a poet. I don’t think you realize that.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. Let him wear a lamp shade or a sauce pan too. What does he want of you? advice, or just food and lodging?”
“Not advice. You must have gathered at supper what his opinion of my mentality is.”
“He revealed pretty clearly what his own mentality is. The only thing in the house that really pleased him was Pinkie’s colored head-rag.”
“Not advice,” Roger said. “I don’t know why he shows me his stuff. He does it like you’d give caviar to an elephant.”
“And of course you accept his dictum about the elephant. And I suppose you are going to get them to publish his book, too.”
“Well, there’s some good stuff in it. And maybe if he sees it in print, he’ll really get busy. Work. Or maybe someone will make him mad enough to really write something. Something with an entrail in it. He’s got it in him. It may not be but one poem. But it’s there. Maybe if he can just stop talking long enough to get it out. And I thought if he came down here, where he will have to walk four miles to find somebody to talk to, once Amos comes to recognize that blue coat.”
“Ah,” Anne said. “So you wrote him to come. I knew you had, but I’m glad to hear you admit it of your own free will. Go on to bed,” she said. “You haven’t done a stroke of work today, and Lord only knows now when you will.”
Thus life went along in its old pleasant way. Because poets are all different from one another, it seemed; this one, anyway. Because it soon developed that Anne doesn’t see this poet at all, hardly. It seems that she can’t even know he is in the house unless she hears him snoring at night. So it took her two weeks to get steamed up again. And this time she is not even combing her hair. “Is it two weeks he’s been here, or just two years?” She is sitting at the dressing table, but she is not doing anything, which any husband, even an artist, should know is a bad sign. When you see a woman sitting half dressed before a dressing table with a mirror and not even watching herself talk in the mirror, it’s time to smell smoke in the wind.
“He has been here two weeks, but unless I happen to go to the kitchen, I never see him, since he prefers Pinkie’s company to ours. And when he was missing that first Wednesday night, on Pinkie’s evening off, I said at first, ‘What tact.’ That was before I learned that he had taken supper with Pinkie’s family at her house and had gone with them to prayer meeting. And he went again Sunday night and again last Wednesday night, and now tonight (and though he tells me I have neither intelligence nor imagination) he would be surprised to know that I am imagining right now that sky-blue dressing-sacque in a wooden church full of sweating niggers without any incongruity at all.”
“Yes. It’s quite a picture, isn’t it?”
“But apart from such minor embarrassments like not knowing where our guest is, and bearing upon our patient brows a certain amount of reflected ridiculousness, he is a very pleasant companion. Instructing, edifying, and self-effacing. I never know he is even in the house unless I hear your typewriter, because I know it is not you because you have not written a line in—is it two weeks, or just two years? He enters the room which the children are absolutely forbidden and puts his one finger on that typewriter which Pinkie is not even permitted to touch with a dust-cloth, and writes a poem about freedom and flings it at you to commend and applaud. What is it he says?”
“You tell. This is fine.”
“He flings it at you like—like … Wait; I’ve got it: like flinging caviar at an elephant, and he says, ‘Will this sell?’ Not, Is this good? or Do you like it? Will this sell? and you——”
“Go on. I couldn’t hope to even compete.”
“You read it, carefully. Maybe the same poem, I don’t know; I’ve learned recently on the best authority that I am not intelligent enough to get my poetry at first hand. You read it, carefully, and then you say, ‘It ought to. Stamps in the drawer there.’ ” She went to the window. “No, I haven’t evolved far enough yet to take my poetry straight; I won’t understand it. It has to be fed to me by hand, when he has time, on the terrace after supper on the nights when there is no prayer meeting at Pinkie’s church. Freedom. Equality. In words of one syllable, because it seems that, being a woman, I don’t want freedom and don’t know what equality means, until you take him up and show him in professional words how he is not so wise, except he is wise enough to shut up then and let you show both of us how you are not so wise either.” The window was above the garden. There were curtains in it. She stood between the curtains, looking out. “So Young Shelley has not crashed through yet.”
“Not yet. But it’s there. Give him time.”
“I’m glad to hear that. He’s been here two weeks now. I’m glad his racket is poetry, something you can perpetrate in two lines. Otherwise, at this rate …” She stood between the curtains. They were blowing, slow, in and out. “Damn. Damn. Damn. He doesn’t eat enough.”
So Roger went and put another cushion in the pram. Only she didn’t say exactly that and he didn’t do exactly that.
Now get this. This is whe
re it starts. On the days when there wasn’t any prayer meeting at the nigger church, the poet has taken to doping along behind her in the garden while she cut the flowers for the supper table, talking to her about poetry or freedom or maybe about the flowers. Talking about something, anyway; maybe when he quit talking all of a sudden that night when he and she were walking in the garden after supper, it should have tipped her off. But it didn’t. Or at least, when they came to the end of the path and turned, the next thing she seemed to know was his mug all set for the haymaker. Anyway, she didn’t move until the clinch was over. Then she flung back, her hand lifted. “You damned idiot!” she says.
He doesn’t move either, like he is giving her a fair shot. “What satisfaction will it be to slap this mug?” he says.
“I know that,” she says. She hits him on the chest with her fist, light, full, yet restrained all at the same time: mad and careful too. “Why did you do such a clumsy thing?”
But she doesn’t get anything out of him. He just stands there, offering her a clean shot; maybe he is not even looking at her, with his hair all over the place and this sky-blue coat that fits him like a short horse-blanket. You take a rooster, an old rooster. An old bull is different. See him where the herd has run him out, blind and spavined or whatever, yet he still looks married. Like he was saying, “Well, boys, you can look at me now. But I was a husband and father in my day.” But an old rooster. He just looks unmarried, a born bachelor. Born a bachelor in a world without hens and he found it out so long ago he don’t even remember there are not any hens. “Come along,” she says, turning fast, stiff-backed, and the poet doping along behind her. Maybe that’s what gave him away. Anyway, she looks back, slowing. She stops. “So you think you are the hot shot, do you?” she says. “You think I’m going to tell Roger, do you?”