Time Will Darken It (18 page)

“Mother had a bad night,” Lucy said. “We were up with her until past daylight.” Nora started to say that she would come back some other time, but Lucy said, “No, don’t go. She’s awake now and it’ll do her good to see you.”

Mrs. Beach’s room was high-ceilinged and gloomy, with massive golden oak furniture, and on the walls and dressing-table, on the bureau and the nightstand, a hundred mementoes and votive offerings to Mrs. Beach’s marriage and motherhood. The old lady herself was lying propped up in bed, and, for someone who had been keeping people up all night, she looked quite well indeed. “Pshaw,” she said when she saw Nora. “Just see what they’ve gone and done to me!”

“If you
will
eat things you know you’re not supposed to,” Lucy said.

“It wasn’t the baked beans. They never hurt anybody, and you can tell Dr. Seymour I said so. There was an onion in the stewed tomatoes. I tasted it.”

“I’ve told you twenty times——” Lucy began.

“Onion never agrees with me,” Mrs. Beach said. And then
to Nora, “You were a dear to come and entertain an old woman like this. I wish you were staying with us instead of at the Kings’. I could be dying up here and Martha King wouldn’t come near me.”

“Mother, you know that isn’t true,” Lucy said indignantly.

“True enough,” Mrs. Beach said. She lifted the napkin that covered her tray and peered under it. “I don’t think I’d better eat any toast, especially since you put butter on it. Just a cup of tea is all I want. Did you remember to scald the pot?”

Her daughter nodded impatiently, and Mrs. Beach, still sceptical, put her hand against the side of the Limoges teapot. “All right, dear,” she said. “I’ll call you if I want anything.”

All the things that in her own mother annoyed Nora—her mother’s unreasonableness, her arbitrary opinions, her interminable stories about the past—she could be patient with in Mrs. Beach. She dragged a white rattan chair over to the bed and showed such interest in Mrs. Beach’s symptoms that the invalid developed an appetite, drank two cups of strong tea, and ate all the buttered toast. Nora took the tray away when Mrs. Beach had finished with it. Then she adjusted the pillows successfully—a thing that neither Lucy nor Alice ever managed to do.

“I can see a change in the girls just since you’ve been here, Nora,” Mrs. Beach said. “You’re very good for them, you know. They spend so much time with me when they ought to be going to parties or at least seeing someone nearer their own age. I’ve tried my best to encourage them to bring their friends here, but they don’t seem to want any outside companionship. Or else there isn’t anybody that interests them. They’ve had more than most girls, though I dare say they don’t appreciate it. I didn’t appreciate the things my father and mother tried to do for me until I was older and had children of my own. But the girls are not like me. They’re not like any of my people so far as I can see. Mr. Beach had a sister; possibly Lucy and Alice take after her, though she was
a cripple all her life, and could hardly have been expected to …”

Nora’s friendship with the Beaches was happy because it was with the whole household. She felt herself, for the first time, being plucked at, being forced, whether she wanted to or not, to take sides. Her eyes fell on the faded picture of Mr. Beach—a dapper, middle-aged man who in effigy was no more help than he had been in real life.

“If they would only talk to me,” Mrs. Beach said. “I have to worm information out of them. There was a young man who liked Alice for a time. His father owned some land, I believe, out near Kaiserville, and he was a nice enough boy, Mr. Beach thought, but no polish or refinement, of course, and that dreadful red neck all farm boys have. I had a little talk with him one evening and he didn’t come back any more. Alice isn’t strong, you know. She could never have done the work a woman is expected to do in the country. And besides, the girls had their music … Tomorrow or the next day, when I’m feeling better, remind me to show you the album of pressed flowers that we brought back with us from the Holy Land.…”

Nora said nothing while the old lady criticized her daughters, but her silence struck her as disloyal, and if it had been possible, she would have sneaked out of the house without stopping to talk to Lucy and Alice. It wasn’t possible. There was only one stairs, and they were waiting for her at the bottom of it. As she stood up, Mrs. Beach said, “Remember me to your dear mother and father, and if Austin should ask about me—I know Martha won’t—tell him I spent a bad night but that, thanks to you, I’m feeling much better.”

The house next door is never the sanctuary it at first appears to be. If you reach the stage where you are permitted to enter without knocking, you are also expected to come oftener and to penetrate farther and in the end share, along with the permanent inhabitants, the weight of the roof tree.

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What was missing from Austin King’s office overlooking the courthouse square was sociability. With a good cigar in his fist and his feet on Judge King’s slant-topped desk, Mr. Potter set about correcting this condition. It was not too difficult, and the only real opposition was supplied by Miss Ewing, who thought all Southerners were lazy and shiftless and should be kept waiting.

Mr. Potter waited once. He waited more than half an hour, and when Miss Ewing finally said, “Mr. King will see you now,” he went inside and discovered to his astonishment that Austin was alone and hadn’t even been told that Mr. Potter was waiting.

“Now don’t you bother, Miss Ewing,” he said as he walked into the outer office the next day. “Stay right where you are. I don’t want you jumping up and down for me.”

“Mr. King has someone in his office,” Miss Ewing said.

“Yes?” Mr. Potter said. “I wonder who it could be.”

“Alfred Ogilvee,” Miss Ewing said indicating with a slight turn of her head the chair Mr. Potter was to take advantage of. “Mr. King will be free in just a few minutes.”

“Well, if he’s busy, I don’t want to interfere,” Mr. Potter said. “But I’d better tell him I’m here. Otherwise he’ll be wondering about me. I’ll go in and get my business over arid leave right away.… Now you go right ahead, my boy, and don’t mind me!” Mr. Potter closed the door of the inner office behind him. “I know you two have something you want to talk over, and I’ll just sit here by the window and watch the crowd.… I don’t know anything about these legal matters, Mr. Ogilvee. I’m just a plain farmer. I run a cotton plantation
down in Howard’s Landing, Mississippi, and when they start using all those big words, I have to take a back seat. The party of the first part and the party of the second part. It’s enough to drive an ordinary man crazy. But Austin here understands it. He can tell you what it all means, in simple language that anybody can follow. I wish I had his education. I wouldn’t be a farmer if I did. I’d get me a nice office somewhere and a girl to keep the books and answer the phone, and I’d sit back and watch the money roll in. If we could all write our own wills any time we felt like it and get up in court and address the judge in high-flown language, the lawyers would go hungry. I dare say that time’ll never come. You put your money in land and you may have a thousand and one worries, but there’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. The land won’t run off. It’s there to stay. I’ve known men—very smart men they were, too—worked hard all their life and everybody looked up to them, bankers and lawyers and men that had factories working day and night, and every reason, you might say, to feel high and dry—who went to bed worth forty or fifty thousand dollars and woke up without a cent to their name. May I ask what line of work you’re in, Mr. Ogilvee?…”

Alfred Ogilvee had come to have Austin draw up a deed of sale for a corner lot, but he stayed to visit, to discuss farming and politics and the old days when a horsemill was looked upon as a very important enterprise, and everything movable wasn’t placed under lock and key. What happened with Alfred Ogilvee happened with other clients. Recognizing that a change had set in, they not only stayed but came again, a day or two later, and on finding out from Miss Ewing that Mr. Potter and Mr. Holby were in Austin’s office, they went on in.

Mr. Potter had no sense of the relentless pressure of time. In keeping Austin from working he was, Mr. Potter assumed, doing him a favour. Once Austin realized that there was no
way to dam the flow of Mr. Potter’s sociability or cut short his visits, he began to enjoy them. So long as he was kept from working, it didn’t matter how many men were sitting around in his office with their hats tipped back, their thumbs hooked to their vests, interrupting their own remarks to aim at the cuspidor, and wondering if there was any reason to suppose that the improvement of the next fifty years would be less than the improvement of the last fifty. Religion, politics, farming and medicine, the school tax, the war between capital and labour, feminism—all had their innings. One way or another, everything was settled, including how to ascertain the age of sheep. For the most part, Austin sat and listened. While the air grew thick with cigar smoke, he had the satisfaction of feeling himself taken in and accepted in a way that he had never been accepted before.

Anxious to be liked, to be looked up to, like the men who had gone to sleep worth forty or fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Potter found ways of ingratiating himself with the merchants of Draperville. Instead of fighting the Civil War over again, he said solemnly, “The South has come to see the error of its ways. What we need down there now are modern farm machinery and modern business methods, factories run the way they are up here.…” Any true Southerner, in 1912, would have rejected Mr. Potter’s ideas along with the accent that it had taken him many years to acquire. The merchants, with no basis of comparison, saw no reason to find fault with anything Mr. Potter did or said.

As a young man he had left the North to seek his fortune in Mississippi at a time when Northerners were not at all welcome there. In order to set foot inside certain doors, to hold down the job of credit manager to a mill, Mr. Potter had had to be something of an actor. Where he shone was not as Hamlet but as a vaudeville actor, an entertainer. His humorous stories, though they had often been told before, were still wonderful in the way they conveyed (as if Mr. Potter’s life
depended on it) every nuance of character, every detail of setting, and above all the final rich flower of point. The stories always ended in a burst of laughter, and it was for this that they had been so painstakingly told.

Sometimes, when there was no one else in Austin’s office, Mr. Potter actually did sit by the window and watch the crowd, but there were so many activities going on down below in the courthouse square, so many matters of interest that crossed Mr. Potter’s mind. Both required comment and the comment usually required an answer. In the end, Austin found himself turning, without too great reluctance, from his littered desk.

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