"He won't be pulled to pieces over something he did, and so he ran away," said Robbie, her voice suddenly full. "Sure I came here to fight the Fairchilds—but he wasn't even here when I came. Shelley warned him. All the Fairchilds run away."
"Where have you been, Robbie Reid?" asked Aunt Mac.
"You've got a piece of cotton or a feather, one, in your hair." Aunt Shannon with rising voice hummed a girlhood ballad.
"There is a fight and it's come between us, Robbie," said Ellen, her voice calm and a little automatic. "But it's not over George, we won't have it. And how that would hurt him, and shame him, to think it was, he's so gentle. It's not right to make him be pulled to pieces, and over something he did, and very honorably did. There's a fight in us, already, I believe—in people on this earth, not between us, and there is a fight in Georgie too. It's part of being alive, though you may think he cannot be pulled to pieces."
Another near flutter of wings, a beating on walls, was in the air; but the throbbing softly insinuated in a strange yet familiar manner the sound of the plantation bells being struck and the school bell and the Methodist Church bell ringing, and cries from the scene of the fire they all ran to, cries somehow more joyous than commiserating, though it threatened their ruin.
Robbie stood up again. Her poor wrinkled dress clung to her, and her face was pale as she said, "If there's a fight in George, I think when he loves me he really hates you—hates the Fairchilds that he's one of!"
"But the fight in you's over things, not over people," said Ellen gently. "Things like the truth, and what you owe people.—Yes, maybe he hates some thing in us, I think you're right—right."
But Aunt Mac was answering Robbie too, knocking her folded fan on the arm of her chair. "You'll just have to go on back if you're going to use ugly words in here," she was saying. "You're in Shellmound now, Miss Robbie, but I know where you were brought up and who your pa and your ma were, and anything you say don't amount to a row of pins."
"Aunt Mac Fairchild!" said Robbie, lifting her voice again, and turning to the old lady her intense face. "Mrs. Laws! You're all a spoiled, stuck-up family that thinks nobody else is really in the world! But they are! You're just one plantation. With a little crazy girl in the family, and listen at Miss Shannon. You're not even rich! You're just medium. Only four gates to get here, and your house needs a coat of paint! You don't even have one of those little painted wooden niggers to hitch horses to!"
"Get yourself a drink of water, child," said Aunt Mac, through her words. "You'll strangle yourself. And talk louder. Nobody's going to make me wear that hot earphone, not in September!"
"Of course not, dear heart!" Aunt Shannon remarked.
Robbie sank into her chair and leaned, with her little square nails white on her small brown fingers, against the side of the table. "My sister Rebel is right. You're either born spoiled in the world or you're born not spoiled. And people keep you that way until you die. The people you love keep you the way you are."
"Why, Robbie," said Ellen. "If you weren't born spoiled, George has certainly spoiled you, I can see he has. And I've been thinking you were happy, surely happy."
"But he went to the Grove for dinner, when Miss Primrose had guinea for him, he couldn't stay for me! Troy knew I was coming!"
"If George knew you were coming, it was his deepest secret," said Ellen. "He just went to his dinner, he had a royal meal waiting for him at the Grove, and he went and ate it like any man, a sensible human being."
"He always goes to you. He always goes when you call him," said Robbie. "If Bluet would call him!" Her small fingers, with one of Mashula's rings, curled into fists in the cake crumbs over the cloth, and then opened out and waited as Ellen spoke.
"But George loves us! Of course he comes. George loves a great many people, just about everybody in the Delta, if you would count them. Don't you know that's the mark of a fine man, Robbie? Battle's like that. Denis was even more, even more well-loved. Why, George loves countless people."
"No, he doesn't!" Robbie looked at her frantically, as if Ellen had told her just what she feared. "I'm going to l-leave out of here," she said, with a sob like a little stutter in her words. "Mr. Doolittle. He loves him," she said seemingly to herself, to mystify herself.
"Well. You love George," Ellen told her, as if there were no mystery there. There was a faint little scream from a bedroom, ending in laughter—Dabney's.
Robbie looked around the room fatalistically—was she too imagining all the Fairchilds' rapt faces? "Maybe he didn't run away from me," she said. "But he let me run away from him. That's just as bad! Oh, I wish I was dead." Her brown eyes went wide.
A boy's gleeful cry rose from upstairs, from Ellen's and Battle's room. "Don't," Ellen whispered, not to Robbie. Then she could hear—from where, now, it did not matter—the most natural and yet the most terrible thing possible to hear just now—laughter, laughter filled with the undeniable music of relief.
Robbie flinched—at her own words, perhaps.
"Don't you die. You love George," Ellen told her. "He's such a splendid boy, and we have all of us always honored him so." She leaned back.
"It's funny," Robbie said then, her voice gentle, almost confiding. "Once I tried to be like the Fairchilds. I thought I knew how." When there was no answer from Ellen, she went on eagerly and yet sadly, "Don't any other people in the world feel like me? I wish I knew. Don't any people somewhere love other people so much that they want to be—not like—but the same? I wanted to turn into a Fairchild. It wasn't that I thought you were so wonderful. And I had a living room for him just like Miss Tempe's. But that isn't what I mean.
"But you all—you don't ever turn into anybody. I think you are already the same as what you love. So you couldn't understand. You've just loving yourselves in each other—yourselves over and over again!" She flung the small brown hand at the paintings of melons and grapes that had been trembling on the wall from the commotion in the house, forgetting that they were not portraits of Fairchilds in this room, and with a circle of her arm including the two live old ladies too. "You still love them, and they still love you! No matter what you've all done to each other! You don't need to know how to love anybody else. Why, you couldn't love me!"
She gave a daring little laugh, and let out a sigh that was a kind of appeal after it. Ellen sat up straight with an effort. In the room's stillness, in Aunt Mac's stare and Aunt Shannon's sweet song, the absence of the Fairchilds and the quiet seemed almost demure, almost perverse. There was a festive little clatter from Tempe in the pantry, laughter coming downstairs.
Then there was George in the door, staring in.
Ellen got up and took hold of the back of her chair, for she felt weak. She held herself up straight, for she felt ready to deliver some important message to George, since he had come back. She was moved from her lethargy, from hearing things, a fluttering in the house like a bodily failing, by a quality of violation she felt quivering alive in Robbie, and looking at George she grew courageous in his implied strength. Yet in the same moment, for her eyes, he stood with his shirt torn back and his shoulders as bare (she thought in a cliché of her girlhood) as a Greek god's, his hair on his forehead as if he were intoxicated, unconscious of the leaf caught there, looking joyous. "Is it out? Is the fire out?" she asked. Her hand held tightly to little Laura McRaven's blue hair ribbon that lay caught over the chair back, flung behind her. Then, "Georgie," she said, "don't let them forgive you, for anything, good or bad. Georgie, you've made this child suffer."
The Yellow Dog had not run down George and Maureen; Robbie had not stayed away too long; Battle had not driven Troy out of the Delta; no one realized Aunt Shannon was out of her mind; even Laura had not cried yet for her mother. For a little while it was a charmed life.... And after giving George an imploring look in which she seemed to commit herself even further to him and even more deeply by wishing worse predicaments, darker passion, upon all their lives, Ellen fell to the floor.
VI
>
Primrose and Jim Allen came in through the archway behind George, wearing their Sunday hats, and both gave little screams—first the little screams of mild surprise or greeting with which they always entered Shellmound, and then second screams of dismay. "Oh, Primrose," said Jim Allen, and stopping still they shook their flowered heads at each other as if there were no more to be done.
Tempe, coming that instant into the room with a pastry cornucopia on a napkin, shrieked to hear her sisters and then to see Ellen being lifted in George's arms. Then she said calmly, "Fainted. I have these spells myself, semi-occasionally. They are nothing to what I used to have as a girl.—I bet the bird came in here!" She shuddered.
The new screams in the dining room brought in a roomful of Fairchilds with amazing quickness. Robbie backed against the china closet. Orrin was carrying a stunned or dead bird in his cupped hands. The girls, fingers still darting reminiscently to their hair, all fell kneeling, in a stair-steps, around the settee. George was taking off their mother's shoes. Ellen lay with her eyes closed, and with her childlike feet propped shallowly on the inclining end under the fern.
George pushed the children a little. He rushed from Ellen's side to fill a glass from a decanter on the sideboard, and as he went back to her with it, he leaned out and brushed Robbie's wrist with his free hand. Next time he went by, for water, he bent and kissed her rapidly, and asked in pure curiosity that gave her a fierce feeling of joy, "Why did you throw the pans and dishes out the window?" Then he was touching Ellen's lips with various little glasses of stuff, frowning with concentration.
"I thought I saw Battle go by with a wild look, did you?" said Tempe. "Battle! You can come in, she's not dying!"
Battle came in and roamed up and down the room and now and then gave a touch or shake to Ellen's shoulder. Bluet climbed up beside her mother and sang to her softly and leisurely, "Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day," crowding her a little where she was stretched out. It was taking some time to revive her, she was too clumsy now for other people to make easy. There was a right ring of Fairchilds around her. Maureen every now and then went around the table, arms pumping, long yellow hair flying.
Roxie pressed her forefinger under her nose. Poor Miss Ellen just wasn't strong enough any longer for such a trial. She wasn't strong enough for Miss Dabney and Miss Robbie and everything right now. One time before, Miss Ellen fainted away when everybody went off and left her—it was when the gin caught fire—and she had lost that little baby, that came between Mr. Little Battle and Ranny. Wasn't it pitiful to see her so white? Poor Miss Ellen at this time.
Robbie caught glimpses of the white face from her distance outside the ring.
"Rub her wrists, George," pleaded Battle.
It was Mrs. Fairchild's tenth pregnancy. But oh, why had she waited to faint just at this moment? Why couldn't Battle bring his own wife to? For the same reason the bird had got in the house when she came in, Robbie thought; for the reason Aunt Primrose killed her guinea fowl today for George: the way of the Fairchilds, the way of the world.
Ellen opened her eyes, then closed them again.
"I saw her peep," said Roxie. "Now then. Git to work, Vi'let, Little Uncle!"
"Half an hour," Tempe announced to Ellen, as if that would gratify a lady who had fainted.
"Oh, Mama!" cried Dabney. "Shelley, bring a pillow to prop her up."
"We caught the bird, Mama," said Ranny clearly. "It was a brown thrush. It was the female."
"It could have flown around our house all day and night with a thousand windows and never found the way out," said Little Battle. "I didn't think we was going to catch it, but Orrin caught it with Papa's hat and batted it to the wall."
Ellen opened her eyes. Orrin held out the still bird. "Veni, vidi, vici!" he said.
Dabney was leaning over her mother accusingly. "Mama! What happened? I know! You were upset about me."
"I'm all right," said Ellen, lifting one arm and pulling Dabney's hair low over her forehead the way she thought it looked nicer.
"Mama! Oh, Mama!"
Shelley, wordless beside Dabney, knelt on as if in a dream.
"I have the same thing, every now and then," said Aunt Tempe. "I nearly died when Mary Denis married—could scarcely be revived."
"Mama! Do you want me to get married?"
"Certainly she doesn't," said Tempe with surprise.
"Oh, she doed too," said Primrose.
"I think about your happiness," said Ellen, in the thoughtful, slow voice of people coming out of faints.
"Oh, then!" Dabney jumped up, whirled, and with a scatter of tissue-paper and ribbons she flung wide her newest present, which somebody had put on the table ("A Point Valenciennes banquet cloth!" exclaimed Tempe. "Who from?") and pulled it to her with it spreading behind her like a peacock tail, and pranced around. Then she spread it out before her with her arms wide and smiled tenderly over it at her mother, as if from a balcony. "Don't you see you don't need to worry?" she asked, showing how wide, how fine, how much in her possession she had everything, all for her mother to see.
Shelley, getting up to look, turned on her heel, to go write in her diary. Then she turned back; belatedly, the dining room's one forlorn figure had printed itself on her mind.
"Don't you want to take a bath, Robbie?" she asked meditatively. "Where'd Little Uncle put your suitcase?"
"It got lost when I turned George's car over in a ditch and wrecked it," Robbie said, rocking gently on her high heels from one to the other.
"What?" cried George across the room, with his finger on Ellen's pulse.
"Right out of Memphis, and the day I left," Robbie said with some satisfaction.
"You haven't a stitch but what's on your back?" cried Tempe. "Fathers alive, what a state to come to a wedding in!"
George looked at Robbie intently, without smiling, across the still prancing Dabney, who marched between them.
Battle let out a generous laugh and ambled over to give Robbie a spank. "I'm going to get you a horse to ride for the next time you run away—no, a safe old mule with a bell around the neck. Hear, George?"
"Do you feel stronger?—How'd you get here?" George patted Ellen's hand. His voice for both women had an intolerant sound that made him seem trapped. Tempe made her way toward him and with a smile of mischief popped a pastry into his mouth.
"Do you know that she walked from Fairchilds?" said Ellen, turning her face toward the room. "And nobody's even offered her a bath till Shelley just now, or a place to lie down? Robbie, you lie down here."
George glared across the room. "What? You fought the mosquitoes clear from Fairchilds? I ought to whip you all the way home."
"By yourself? You could easily have met a mad dog," said Aunt Jim Allen, who had been able to hear all this.
"Don't chide her, Georgie," said Aunt Primrose. "She won't do it again, will you, Robbie?"
Robbie was basking a little, and fanned her face with the back of her hand.
"Well!" said Troy. "Now then. I've got to get back to East Field before dark." He picked up Aunt Tempe's cornucopia which went to bits under his thumb. "Oh-oh. Something you made me, Dabney?"
Dabney was still prancing—she seemed to see nobody in the room, and was smiling with her lower lip caught under her pretty teeth. "Dabney can't cook!" Tempe and several more cried together.
"She evermore can't," said Troy.
"I'm awfully sorry I can," said Aunt Tempe severely.
"'Fare thee well,'" sang Bluet, patting her mother with soft raps like drum beats, her eyes gazing blissfully at Dabney in the glittering train. "Fare thee well, fare thee well, my fairy fay ...'"
"The right place for a tablecloth is on a table, though," said somebody—Troy. He gazed at Dabney, side-stepped her path, and left the room.
VII
"Want to get out?" asked Roy, just outside the dining-room arch. He and Laura both stood there, chins ducked. "Come on, Laura." He had seen a lady's hand reach out and pull his father in.
&n
bsp; "All right." She loved Roy—his scars, bites, scabs and bandages, and intricate vaccination—his light eyes and his sunburn, little berry-colored nipples. The minute he was out of the dining room he was with a visible flash naked to the waist, flat and neat as a hinge in his short pants with the heavy leather belt that was too big around for him, so that he seemed to walk stepping in a tub. Roy was eight. He still shivered to hear the hounds in the night. He was giving her an intent, sizing-up look.
"You'll have to tote my turtle," he said. "The whole time, and keep him right side up and not set him down anywhere, if you come with me."
"Oh, I will," Laura promised, shuddering.
"You'll have to wait till I find him, so you can carry him."
India skipped out, her heavy straight hair swinging behind like a rope; she carried a stack of crackers in her mouth and skipped from side to side, going off to eat by herself.
"Do you want to come, India?" asked Roy, running up with his turtle.
"No," said India, who could talk plainly with anything in her mouth. "Do you want Maureen to come?"
"O—nay, I—day on't-day."
"Let's all the girls go sit in the chinaberry tree and see who is the one can make their crackers last the longest," said Lady Clare, coming out; she seemed tired—company always was.
"You have to chunk at Maureen, or she'll come." India picked up a stone and threw it.
"Don't hit her," said Laura.
"You can't hit her," said India scornfully.
"India, let us take Bluet!" said Roy crazily.
"Take me," said Bluet, clasping Roy around the knees and kissing them fervently.
"Not this time, Roy. I need her here." They all skipped off except Maureen, who did not go away but did not come either, this time. She only threatened, taking stamping steps forward with one foot.
***
They ran down to the bayou, the turtle in Laura's hands bouncing against her diaphragm. Roy went between two close Spanish daggers and she went after him. The bayou had a warm breath, like a person.