The Eighth Day (10 page)

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Thank you, Porky. Just put this card on the parcel.”

On the card was written, “From a well-wisher.”

One day Miss Doubkov, the town's dressmaker, called on Porky with a troublesome shoe.

“Porky, you know the Ashleys, don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I have two chairs I don't need. Could you pick them up at my door tonight and leave them at their back door?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And no one's to know, Porky, except you and me.”

During these early weeks a rocking chair was found within the picket fence; three blankets, not new but clean and neatly mended; a large cardboard box containing all sizes of spoons, knives, and forks with cups and saucers and a soup tureen—from the women of the Methodist Church, perhaps.

Young traveling men seldom applied for admission at “The Elms.” They could not afford it. They spent the night in a large drafty dormitory on the top floor at the Tavern—twenty-five cents a night. Nevertheless, Mrs. Ashley had turned a number away. There were growing daughters in the house and the town was malicious. One afternoon in January she relaxed her rule and admitted a man of about thirty carrying a grip and a suitcase of samples. At nine-thirty Beata Ashley banked the furnace, locked the front and back doors, and put out the lights. Toward two in the morning she was awakened by the smell of smoke. She roused her daughters and the mathematics teacher. They descended the stairs and traced the smoke to the kitchen. The teacher hurried on before them, crossed the room coughing, and opened the back door. Thick oddly smelling smoke was issuing from the oven, in which lay a mass of smoldering pink paper. The fire was easily extinguished. The women made themselves some hot cocoa and waited for the air to clear. When Mrs. Ashley returned to her room she found that it had been ransacked. The contents of her bureau drawers had been flung about the floor. In the cupboard the lining of her coat had been slit open. A knife had been run through her mattress; her pillow was cut into shreds. The backs of the pictures on the walls had been torn away.

Colonel Stotz in Springfield hated the Ashleys. He was convinced that somewhere in Mrs. Ashley's room there would be information about John Ashley's rescuers. There would be letters; there might even be recent letters from the hunted man. There might be a photograph of him that could be reproduced on posters.

Throughout their married life Ashley had been only four times separated from his wife for twenty-four hours. The only letters she had from him were those which he had written her daily from the jail. These were missing. Missing, too, was her only photograph of him—a faded blue print from which he looked out laughing, holding high his two-year-old son. The following morning the daughters looked wonderingly at their mother. Her face had never shown anxiety or fear and did not show it now. The confrontation with the enemy seemed to strengthen her.

As the months went by Beata Ashley gradually emerged from her torpor. The work was unremitting. There is no day of rest for those who take lodgers. To Constance it was an exciting game. She was never tired, not even on Monday evenings after a day over the washtubs. Lily seemed to have returned from that far country where she had been moving in a dream. All day there was cooking, dusting, making beds, and dishwashing. Sophia was the only member of the family to pass the gate; Lily had no wish to; Constance longed to accompany her sister into the town, but Sophia knew that she was not yet ready to face the hostility of her school-friends. Roger's remittances to his mother rose to ten and twelve dollars a month. He reported that he was doing well, but he sent no name or address to which she might reply. Sophia did the shopping, took the lodgers' money, bought furniture, opened new rooms, and abounded in “ideas.” She wrote her brother long letters. It was a proud day when she could tell him that she had paid the taxes. The town watched her activity with grudging admiration. She was said to be “sharp as a scalping knife.” Auctions were rare in Coaltown, but it was often quietly circulated that a family was selling its “things”—elderly people were leaving town or a home was broken up by death. There was Sophia. When fire and the overenthusiasm of the volunteer fire department combined to make havoc of a house or the contents of an attic, there was Sophia buying bed linen, window curtains, old clothes, mattresses, and chamber pots. A Baptist church by Old Quarry Pond faltered to its end; Sophia bought the piano that had served its Sunday school—three dollars a month for five months. She bought a second cow. She began raising ducks; she suffered a defeat with turkeys. An eighth room was fitted out by the end of May, 1904. During the warm weather guests were even lodged in the Rainy Day House. Mrs. Swenson was persuaded to return as hired girl. After the occasion on which Mrs. Ashley's bedroom had been ransacked it was Lily's idea—or, to all appearances, Lily's idea—that Porky should live at “The Elms,” sleeping in a small room off the kitchen. In return for his meals he did the heavy work about the house and helped the family to master those difficulties to which hostelries are particularly subject. There were heart attacks and convulsions. There was sleepwalking and drunkenness and theft. Mrs. Ashley came to know the drummer's condition: the uprootedness, the compulsion to boast, the burden of having to present all day a front of dazzling success (“Mrs. Ashley, I got so many orders today, I don't see how I'll be able to fill 'em!”), the drinking to obtain sleep, the nightmare in which existence presents a face of vacancy or derision. She came to divine the black hours when the razor blade trembles in the hand. During the early months of the venture it was the Ashleys' custom to retire upstairs after the dishes had been washed and to continue their reading aloud in Mrs. Ashley's room. But she soon learned that it was unwise to leave the lodgers to themselves at that hour; she became aware that most of the rooms contained restless, fretful, or frantic human beings. Some particular tension began to collect in them after sunset. So the evenings were spent in the large sitting room. Often Lily sang to her mother's accompaniment. One by one the roomers would creep down the stairs. Many would stay for the reading aloud. During the hot months the social hour was transferred to the summerhouse; a reader's eyes would be spared and the group would sit in silence under the spell of the moonlight or starlight on the pond and the muted complaints of Sophia's slowly gliding ducks.

Beata Ashley admirably filled the role of boardinghouse keeper. She set up a ward against disorder as many schoolmasters do—she exacted a standard of behavior of more than human height. She demanded punctuality, precedence for ladies, coats and neckties at table, decorum in speech, grace before meals, and restraint in expressing admiration for the waitresses. A number of traveling gentlemen were not accepted a second time at “The Elms.” They took to boasting at the Tavern's saloon that they had been disbarred from “Rope-end Hall,” but the boasts rang increasingly hollow. The legend spread—a mixture of perfect fried chicken, the best coffee in Illinois, sheets smelling of lavender, of being aroused in the morning not by kicks on the door but by angel voices repeating one's name. During the trial and the months that followed Ashley's rescue the girls were aware that their mother was giving little attention to the books read aloud in the evening, even when it fell her turn to read. A change took place in the summer of 1903, however. On Tuesday nights they read
Don Quixote
in French. Beata Ashley found not humor but truth in the adventures of the knight for whom the world was filled with evil necromancers and with those bitter injustices which a man must put right. Her needle would come to rest, suspended in meditation, at the account of his devotion to a peasant girl whom he declared to be the first of all women. They read the
Odyssey.
It told of a man undergoing many trials in far countries; to him came the wise goddess, the gray-eyed Pallas Athene, upbraiding him when he was discouraged and promising him that one day he would return to his homeland and to his dear wife. She was tired by the housework, she was consoled by the reading, and she slept.

For all their work the profits were meagre. The Ashleys held their heads just above water.

Lodgers came and went at “The Elms,” but there were few callers. Dr. Gillies made professional visits and on each occasion exchanged a few words, but he did not sit down. Mrs. Gillies dropped in from time to time on a Sunday afternoon, as did Wilhelmina Thoms. There was one regular visitor, however, Miss Olga Doubkov, the town's dressmaker. She called on alternate Wednesday evenings. She was not received with notable warmth by Mrs. Ashley, but the girls welcomed her eagerly. She brought the news of the town and of the world.

Hard circumstances had left Olga Doubkov—reportedly a Russian princess—high and dry in Coaltown. Her father, pursued by the police for revolutionary activity, had fled to Constantinople with an ailing wife and two daughters. He had joined Russian friends in a mining town in western Canada, but his wife's health was unable to sustain the climate there and he had accepted a call to Coaltown. Olga Doubkov was an orphan at twenty-one and set out to support herself by her skill as a needlewoman. Most of the women of Coaltown made and remade their own clothes and those of their younger children. Weddings had always been important affairs in Coaltown; Miss Doubkov elevated their importance. She was an authority on modes and trousseaux; her advice on every aspect of the ceremony was as much valued as her art. Few mothers had the courage to array their daughters and themselves for such occasions unaided. Weddings became Coaltown's grand opera. Her principal income, fortunately, was derived from her services at the Illinois Tavern where she was in charge of the linen room. She was a foreigner, so foreign that her idiosyncrasies were tolerated as being outside the town's ability to judge them. She smoked long yellow cigarettes. She practiced idolatry—that is, a corner of her sitting room held a number of icons with burning lamps beneath them, before which she crossed herself on entering and leaving the room. She was extremely outspoken and her “latest” was repeated from house to house in shocked undertones. She was tall and thin and carried herself straightly. Her sallow skin was drawn tightly over her high cheekbones. Her long narrow eyes intimidated children; they were thought to resemble those of a cat. Her sandy hair was piled high on her head and adorned with small black velvet bows. She dressed with elegance, tightly laced, and rustling in silk. In winter she wore a tall fur hat and a dragoon's redingote, faced with frogs and brave with epaulettes. She was poor; the whole town knew how poor she was. It was believed that she subsisted on oatmeal, cabbage, apples and tea—a chop on Sunday. Clothes and the one party she gave in the year were her only extravagances. She invited twenty guests to a Russian Easter tea. These occasions were awesomely foreign: the great cakes, the ritual greeting, “The Lord is risen!” “The Lord is risen indeed!” the ceremonial kiss, the eggs decorated with symbolic designs, the lamps under the icons. It was known that she was saving her money to return to Russia and that she would board the train at Coaltown without one backward glance of regret. The saving of money where there was so little to be saved was a race with time. Olga Sergeievna did not intend to return to Russia a pauper. She was not a princess but a countess, nor was her name Doubkov.

Miss Doubkov had never known the Ashleys well. Her friend in town was Mrs. Lansing. Both Eustacia Lansing and her older daughter Félicité were even better needlewomen than she, but they consulted her, employed her, and enjoyed her company. Together the three of them made many elaborate and handsome garments. Miss Doubkov admired Mrs. Lansing (“Girls,” she would say at a sewing session among bridesmaids, “the most important thing for a woman is charm—watch Mrs. Lansing well!”), but she detested Breckenridge Lansing and made no secret of it. She once rebuked him in his own house for a contemptuous remark he had made about his son George. She read him a lecture on the bringingup of boys, put on her hat and tippet, bowed to Eustacia and Félicité, and left “St. Kitts,” as she thought, forever. Although she did not know the Ashleys well, the whole town was aware of her admiration for them: “the children had the best manners of any in Coaltown; at ‘The Elms' things were as they should be.” Mrs. Ashley now distrusted these Wednesday-evening visits, coming only gradually to see that they were prompted neither by curiosity nor by compassion. The reason for the calls lay in Miss Doubkov's upbringing. She was an aristocrat. In prosperity aristocrats do not intrude upon one another; in misfortune they close their ranks. They man the walls against barbarians. During the trial, although the courtroom was full to suffocation, there were always a few vacant seats beside Mrs. Ashley and her son, perhaps out of respect, perhaps because crime and misfortune are felt to be contagious. From time to time Miss Doubkov, Miss Thoms, or Mrs. Gillies filled them—after nodding shortly toward Mrs. Ashley, as one does at funerals.

There was another reason for Miss Doubkov's fortnightly calls at “The Elms.” Like Sophia, she lived suspended on hope. We have said that the hopeful find nourishment in marvels. Such, for her, was Ashley's rescue. For her it had been a repetition of the most important event in her life and it confirmed a promise of hope for her future. In Russia a sentence of death had been passed on her father. He too had slipped through the hands of the police. In Coaltown she hoped for an escape for herself that could only arrive by a miracle. She hoped to return to her native land, to present herself to her relatives, and to end her days serving her fellow countrymen. She had no desire to return in ostentatious state; she wished merely to be above condescension, commiseration, and favor. She had set aside the train fare to Chicago (three years—the first most difficult years), then the ticket to the port of Halifax in Nova Scotia (seven years), a ship's passage to St. Petersburg (twelve years). She was now saving the money, ruble by ruble, to support herself in Russia while she applied for a position as a schoolteacher or as a governess. She was fifty-two years old. This was an exercise in hope. Illness and death might intervene; fire or thieves might rob her of her savings; a nationwide devaluation of currency might wipe them out. Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous. The defeat of hope leads not to despair, but to resignation. The resignation of those who have had a grasp of hope retains hope's power.