"Say! Where's George?" asked Troy suddenly, looking up and down the table.
"At the Grove eating Aunt Primrose's guinea fowl," said India or somebody.
"He's left out for the Grove," Troy said, squinting up at Robbie, as if his eyes flinched.
"That booger! Did he know you were coming?" asked Battle, glancing up at her with bright eyes above the napkin he put to his lips.
She tried to shake her head, while Little Battle was dragging a chair up to the table for her, and Mr. Battle and Mr. Pinck and the boys were getting to their feet. "Won't you have some dinner? You must have some dinner," Ellen said anxiously, but "No, thanks," Robbie said. They all insisted on getting her kiss, passing and turning her from one to the other around the table. "Oh, Aunt Robbie, I love you, you're so pretty," said Ranny. Then Roxie was clearing off. They had been eating chicken and ham and dressing and gravy, and good, black snap beans, greens, butter beans, okra, corn on the cob, all kinds of relish, and watermelon-rind preserves, and that good bread—their plates were loaded with corncobs and little piles of bones, and their glasses drained down to blackened leaves of mint, and the silver bread baskets lined with crumbs.
"Won't you change your mind?" Ellen begged earnestly. But Robbie said, "No, thank you, ma'am."
Then Roxie was putting a large plate of whole peaches in syrup and a slice of coconut cake in front of her—she was seated between Shelley and Dabney—and bringing more tea in, and Mr. Battle was going on in a loud, sibilant voice which he used for reciting "Denis's poetry."
"You shun me, Chloe, wild and shy,
As some stray fawn that seeks its mother
Through trackless woods. If spring winds sigh
It vainly strives its fears to smother.
"The trembling knees assail each other
When lizards stir the brambles dry;—
You shun me, Chloe, wild and shy,—"
"Where have you been, Aunt Robbie?" asked Laura.
"As some stray fawn that seeks its mother.
And yet no Libyan lion I—"
"Battle," said Ellen.
"—No ravening thing to rend another!
Lay by your tears, your tremors dry..."
"Try your nice peach—you look so hot," Ellen whispered, pointing.
Then a silence fell, like the one after a flock of fall birds has gone over. Uncle Pinck Summers, who had passed Robbie at forty miles an hour in the road and covered her with a cloud of his dust, stared at her as if in clever recognition. Robbie had worn a dust-colored pongee dress, bought in Memphis, with a red silk fringed sash, and on the side of her hair a white wool tam-o'shanter—but what could get as many wrinkles just from sitting down in some little hot place, as pongee? She felt wrinkled in her soul. And she trembled at the mention of lizards; they ran up your skirt.
"Well, my dear, I suppose wherever you were, your invitation to the wedding reached you," Miss Tempe said. "And you made up your mind to accept!"
"I'm afraid you just missed George," Ellen said, all afresh, and added in haste, "He happened to go to eat dinner with his sisters at the Grove—but he'll be back. He always takes a nap here—where it's quiet."
"He must have gone another way, then. I saw every inch of the road," Robbie said aloud, without meaning to.
"We didn't quite expect you," Battle said heavily, again over the folds of his napkin.
The family were having just a pieced dessert, without George to fix something special for—some of Primrose's put-up peaches and the crumbs of the coconut cake; Ellen was sorry Robbie had picked just this time. "Wouldn't you try a little dinner? Let me still send for a plate for you. You don't like the peaches!"
"No, thank you, Mrs. Fairchild."
"There's plenty more food! Enough for a regiment if they walked in!" Dabney was saying with a new, over-bright smile she had—was it her married smile, that she would practice like that?
"I'm not to say hungry," Robbie said. She bent over her plate and tried to take a spoonful of her whole peach while they all looked at her, or looked at Ellen.
This child was so unguarded—in an almost determined way. She would come, not timidly at all, into Shellmound at a time like this! Shelley sat actually cringing, while Dabney was giving her mother a conspirator's look, as if they should have expected this. Aunt Tempe's elevated brows signaled to Ellen. As if she would ever truly run away and leave him! Ellen could have asked Tempe: she never would. She would say she would, to have them thinking of explanations, racking their brains, at a time like this, and then run back and show herself to make fools of them all.
Aunt Shannon gazed out the window, at a hummingbird in the abelias, but Aunt Mac sat up stiffly; it would show the upstart a thing or two if they ceased being polite and got anything like a scene over with at once.
Only Mary Lamar had excused herself, some moment or other, and beyond call again in her music was playing a nocturne—like the dropping of rain or the calling of a bird the notes came from another room, effortless and endless, isolated from them, yet near, and sweet like the guessed existence of mystery. It made the house like a nameless forest, wherein many little lives lived privately, each to its lyric pursuit and its shy protection....
Ellen saw Shelley look at the girl failing at her peach and say nothing to her. And Robbie was scarcely listening to anything that was being said (Orrin was politely telling her about the longest snake he had ever seen). She would only look down and try to eat her peach. She was suffering. Her eyelids fell and opened tiredly over her just-dried eyes. The intensity of her face affected Ellen like a grimace.
When Ellen was nine years old, in Mitchem Corners, Virginia, her mother had run away to England with a man and stayed three years before she came back. She took up her old life and everything in the household went on as before. Like an act of God, passion went unexplained and undenied—just a phenomenon. "Mitchem allows one mistake." That was the saying old ladies had at Mitchem Corners—a literal business, too. Ellen had grown up not especially trusting appearances, not soon enough suspecting, either, that other people's presence and absence were still the least complicated elements of what went on underneath. Not her young life with her serene mother, with Battle, but her middle life—knowing all Fairchilds better and seeing George single himself from them—had shown her how deep were the complexities of the everyday, of the family, what caves were in the mountains, what blocked chambers, and what crystal rivers that had not yet seen light.
Ellen sighed, giving up trying to make Robbie eat; but she felt that perhaps that near-calamity on the trestle was nearer than she had realized to the heart of much that had happened in her family lately—as the sheet lightning of summer plays in the whole heaven but presently you observe that each time it concentrates in one place, throbbing like a nerve in the sky.
"Roxie, bring us just a little more iced tea," she called, as if she asked a boon.
Then a little jumpily they all drank tea while Robbie turned her peach over and over in the plate.
"Do you start to school next year, Little Battle?" Lady Clare broke the silence in a peremptory conversational voice nearly like Aunt Tempe's.
"Yes, but I hate to start!" cried Little Battle.
"Well—why don't you cut your stomach out?"
"I'm going to take you out of here," said Aunt Tempe, motionless.
"Oh, Troy," India said, leaning forward so that she could watch Shelley, Dabney, and Laura, all three, "did you eat the cake Dabney sent you? How did it taste?"
"This isn't the time to speak of the cake," Troy said, and stared back at India. She giggled, and cutting her eye at Shelley said contritely, "Oh, me."
But suddenly Lady Clare, her fiery Buchanan hair spangling her Fairchild forehead, put out her tongue straight at Robbie and pulled down red eyelids. "This is the way you look!"
"You almost ruined my wedding!" cried Dabney, and then as if in haste she had said the wrong thing she put her hand comically to her lips. "I couldn't get married right if Geor
ge wasn't as happy as I am!" she said, leaning intensely toward Robbie, as if to appeal to her underlying chivalry.
"Why have you treated George Fairchild the way you have?" said Tempe across from her. "Except for Denis Fairchild, the sweetest man ever born in the Delta?"
"How could you?" Shelley suddenly gushed forth tears, and Orrin had to get his dry handkerchief out for her and run around the table with it.
Robbie drew in her shoulders, to give Shelley room, and looked with burning eyes at the slick yellow peach she had not made a dent in. What vanity was here! How vain and how tenacious to vanity, as to a safety, Shelley and Dabney and all were! What they felt was second. They had something else in them first, themselves, that core she knew well enough, why not?—it was like a burning string in a candle, and then they felt. But it was a second thing—not all one thing! The Fairchilds! The way that Dabney rode her horse, when she thought herself unseen!
Robbie was not afraid of them. She felt first—or perhaps she was all one thing, not divided that way—and let them kill her, with her wrinkled dress, and with never an acre of land among the Reids, and with a bad grief because of them, but she felt. She had never stopped for words to feelings—she felt only—with no words. But their smile had said more plainly than words, Bow down, you love our George, enter on your knees and we will pull you up and pet and laugh at you fondly for it—we can! We will bestow your marriage on you, little Robbie, that we sent to high school!
"Do you like butter?" asked a soft voice.
"Yes," said Robbie, looking around the table, not quite sure from which direction that had come.
"Then go sit in the gutter," said Ranny.
"Excuse yourself and leave the table, Ranny," said Battle.
"Oh, let him stay, Papa, he was trying to be nice" said Orrin and Roy together.
"Now you think up one," said Ranny to Robbie.
"I can think up one," growled Battle. "Why isn't George here where he belongs? What are we all going to do, sit here crying and asking riddles? Excuse me! That boy's never here, come any conceivable hell or high water!"
How unfair! Why, it's the exact opposite of the truth! Robbie looked up at Battle furiously. That's always when George is here—holding it off for you, she thought. If he were here and I came in he would make everything fine—so fine I couldn't even say a word ... and never tell them what I think of them...
All at once Vi'let came calling out in a lilting voice down the stairs and appeared in the doorway with both arms raised. "Bird in de house! Miss Rob' come in lettin' bird in de house!"
"Bird in de house mean death!" called Roxie instantly from the kitchen. She ran in from the other door, and the Negroes simultaneously threw their white aprons over their heads.
"It does mean that," said Troy thoughtfully. He pushed back his chair and slowly removed his coat and pushed a sleeve up. "A bird in the house is a sign of death—my mammy said so, proved it. We better catch her and get her out."
The Fairchilds jumped up buoyantly from their chairs. Orrin was the first out of the room, with the men next, and the children next, then Dabney and Shelley. Ellen looked after them. It was not anything but pure distaste that made them run; there was real trouble in Robbie's face, and the Fairchilds simply shied away from trouble as children would do. The beating of wings could be heard. Frantically the girls ran somewhere, their hands pressed to their hair. The chase moved down the hall—seemingly up the back stairs.... "Get it out! Get it out!" Shelley called, and Little Battle called after her, "Get it! Get it!"
"I shall go to the kitchen and make a practice cornucopia for tomorrow," said Aunt Tempe rather grandly. "I am too short of breath to chase birds, neither am I as superstitious as my brother, or my nephews and nieces. Will you excuse me, Ellen?"
And only Aunt Mac and Ellen were left to attend to Robbie now. No, Aunt Shannon did rock on in her corner; George had brought her, when he came (stopping to remember her always!), something fresh to embroider on.
Robbie did not seem to know whether she had let the bird in or not; she did not know what she had done. Running out, the children wore smiles in their excitement and even took a moment to look expectantly at Robbie, who stood up. They left their mother in the dining room with the little figure of wretchedness, who stood up staunch as the Bad Fairy, and cried, "I won't fool a minute longer with that round peach!"
Aunt Mac moved into a comfortable rocker and even eyed the peony-flowered bag that held her Armenian knitting. Stone-deaf as she was, she probably neither divined nor cared that there was a bird in the house, but she knew enough not to knit. She gave a positive nod, a little cock, of her topknotted head and made her curls bounce.
Ellen looked sighing from Aunt Mac to Robbie. Mr. Judge Reid, a Justice of the Peace, was her father; he was dead now—Dr. Murdoch threw up his hands on the case, in public, years before he died, he had some hopeless thing. "I don't see why you don't shoot yourself," he said. Mr. Judge had married Irene Swanson, the daughter of Old Man Swanson; she was trying to be a schoolteacher. Old Man Swanson was an old fellow at the compress, who stuttered. Every little boy in this part of the Delta proverbially cut up by talking and walking like Old Man Swanson. They could all hobble, the way his back hurt, into the store and ask for some s-s-s-s-sweet s-s-s-s-s-spirits o' niter. And mock him, little boys and their little boys, eventually to his own granddaughter working there; Robbie tried to be a schoolteacher too (the lower grades), but her sister Rebel had run off with that drunkard, and of course the board had thrown her out. George, who had not seemed to mind courting over the counter, as Battle called it, must have had to listen to that deathless joke of poor Old Man Swanson's stutter a thousand times, right through his kisses.
"Don't clear off now—little while yet," Aunt Mac called toward the Negro-deserted kitchen. "Of course you only married George for his money," she continued without a break, in that comfortable sort of voice in which this statement is always made.
Robbie answered, lifting her voice politely to the deaf, "No, ma'am. I married him because he begged me!" Then she sat down, in the dining-room chair with its carved basket of blunt roses that always prodded the shoulder blades at emphatic moments.
To be begged to give love was something that she could not have conceived of by herself, and she assumed no one else could conceive of it. Now for a moment it struck Robbie and also Ellen humbly to earth, for it implied a magnitude, a bounty, that could leave people helpless. Robbie knew that now, still, George in getting her back would start all over with her love, as if she were shy. It was his way—as if he took long trips away from her which she did not know about, and then came back to her as to a little spring where he had somehow cherished only the hope for the refreshment that all the time flowed boundlessly enough. As if in his abounding, laughing life, he had not really expected much to his lips! Well, she was always the same, the way a little picnic spot would remain the same from one summer to the next, under its south-riding moon, and he was the different and new, the picnicker, the night was the different night.
Luckily Aunt Mac did not hear Robbie's answer, or suppose there could be one; she was an old lady. But the Fairchilds half-worshiped alarm, and Ellen knew just how they would act if they could hear Robbie say "He begged me"—as well as if they had never left the room. It was a burden of responsibility, the awareness that had come to supply her with the Fairchild accompaniment and answer to everything happening, just as if they all were present, that unpredictable crowd; the same as, thinking in the night, she referred to Battle's violent and intricate opinions when his sleeping body lay snoring beside her.
Now when Robbie said "He begged me," and sat down, Ellen could see in a mental tableau the family one and all fasten an unflinching look upon George.... It was a look near to reproach, though George, exactly like little Ranny, would sit innocent or ignorant in the matter of reproach, blind to the look, but listening with great care for what would come next. The most rambunctious of the Fairchild men could all be extremely a
ffected by nervous changes around them, things they could not see, and put on a touching protective serenity at those times, a kind of scapegoat grace, which only reminded Ellen of pain—as when Dr. Murdoch, a rough man, set Orrin's broken arm and Orrin quite visibly filled himself with blissful trust to meet the pain he thought was coming.... The family of course had always acknowledged by an exaggerated and charming mood of capitulation toward George that George was mightily importunate—yet they had to reproach him, something made them or let them, and they would reproach him surely that they had never been granted the sight of him begging a thing on earth. Quite the contrary! Surely he took for granted! So he begged love—George? Love that he had more of than the rest of them put together? He begged love from Robbie! They would disbelieve.
"Then he risked his life for—for—and you all let him! Dabney knew the train was coming!"
"Now, listen here, Robbie, we all love Georgie, no matter how we act or he acts," said Ellen. "And isn't that all there is to it?" All of a sudden, she felt tired. She was never surer that all loving Georgie was not the end of it; but to hold back hurt and trouble, shouldn't it just now be enough? She had said so, anyway—as if she were sure.
But she sighed. There was a tramping upstairs and around corners, a sudden whistle of flight in the stair well, the tripping cries of her daughters in laughter or flight, and then vaguely to Ellen's ears it all mingled with the further and echoing sounds of a worse alarm. Dimly there seemed to be again in her life a bell clanging trouble, starting at the Grove, then at their place, the dogs beginning to clamor, the Negroes storming the back door crying, and the great rush out of this room, like the dme there was a fire at the gin.
"Get it out! Get it out!" It was one cry, long lasting, half delight, half distress, all challenge.