The Romance of a Plain Man

"Not so unhappy as I might be, but, remember, I'm a man, Sally, and I have failed."

"Yes, you're a man, and you couldn't be happy even with me – without something else."

"The something else is a part of you. It belongs to you, and that's mostly why I want to make good. These debts are like a dead weight – like the Old Man of the Sea – on my shoulders. Until I'm able to shake them off, I shall not stand up straight."

"I'm glad you've gone back to the railroad."

"There are a lot of men in the railroad, and very few places. The General found me this job at six thousand a year, which is precious little for a man of my earning capacity. They'll probably want to send me down South to build up the traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina, – I don't know. It will take me a month anyway to wind up my affairs and start back with the road. Oh, it's going to be a long, hard pull when it once begins."

Pressing her cheek to my arm, she rubbed it softly up and down with a gentle caress. "Well, we'll pull it, never fear," she responded.

At our feet the twilight rose slowly from the sunken terrace, and the perfume of the lilacs seemed to grow stronger as the light faded. For a moment we stood drawn close together; then turning, with my arm still about her, we went back over the broken pieces of pottery, and ascending the steps, left the pearly afterglow and the fragrant stillness behind us.

Half an hour later, when we were in the midst of our supper, which she had served with gaiety and I had eaten with sadness, a hesitating knock came at the door leading into the dim hall, and opening it with surprise, I was confronted by a small, barefooted urchin, who stood, like the resurrected image of my own childhood, holding a covered dish at arm's length before him.

"If you please, ma'am," he said, under my shoulder, to Sally, who was standing behind me, "ma's jest heard you'd moved over here, an' she's sent you some waffles for supper."

"And what may ma's name be?" enquired Sally politely, as she removed the red and white napkin which covered the gift.

"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she's been a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."

"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to see me."

"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew, his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico, with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist in the back.

"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like a taste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an' she lives around the corner."

"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the well-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"

"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It's the poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"

This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very red face, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs. Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.

"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and at the words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small, half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were made out of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thought as you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo' po' ma's – the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on the mornin' arter I buried my man."

Placing the dish upon the table, she seated herself, in response to an invitation from Sally, and spread her rusty black skirt, with a leisurely movement, over her comfortable lap. As I looked at her, I forgot that I stood six feet two inches in my stockings; I forgot that I had married a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes; and I remembered as plainly as if it were yesterday, the morning of the funeral, when, with my mother's grey blanket shawl pinned on my shoulders, I had sat on the step outside and waited for the service to end, while I made scornful faces at the merry driver of the hearse.

"It's been going on thirty years sence yo' ma died, ain't it, Benjy?" she enquired, while I struggled vainly to recover a proper consciousness of my size and my importance.

"I was a little chap at the time, Mrs. Cudlip," I returned.

"An' it's been twenty, I reckon," she pursued reminiscently, "sence yo' pa was took. Wall, wall, time does fly when you come to think of deaths, now, doesn't it? I al'ays said thar wa'nt nothin' so calculated to put cheer an' spirit into you as jest to remember the people who've dropped off an' died while you've been spared. You didn't see much of yo' pa durin' his last days, did you?"

"Never after I ran away, and that was the night he brought his second wife home."

"He had a hard time toward the end, but I reckon she had a harder. It wa'nt that he was a bad man at bottom, but he was soft-natured an' easy, an' what he needed was to be helt an' to be helt steady. Some men air like that – they can't stand alone a minute without beginnin' to wobble. Now as long as yo' ma lived, she kept a tight hand on yo' pa, an' he stayed straight; but jest as soon as he was left alone, he began to wobble, an' from wobblin' he took to the bottle, and from the bottle he took to that brass-headed huzzy he married. She was the death of him, Benjy; I ought to know, for I lived next do' to 'em to the day of his burial. As to that, anyway, ma'am," she added to Sally, "my humble opinion is that women have killed mo' men anyway than they've ever brought into the world. It's a po' thought, I've al'ays said, in which you can't find some comfort."

"You were very kind to him, I have heard," I observed, as she paused for breath and turned toward me.

"It wa'nt mo'n my duty if I was, Benjy, for yo' ma was a real good neighbour to me, an' many's the plate of buttered muffins you've brought to my do' when you wa'nt any higher than that."

It was true, I admitted the fact as gracefully as I could.

"My mother thought a great deal of you," I remarked.

"You don't see many of her like now," she returned with a sigh, "the mo's the pity. 'Thar ain't room for two in marriage,' she used to say, 'one of 'em has got to git an' I'd rather 'twould be the other!' 'Twa'nt that way with the palaverin' yaller-headed piece that yo' pa married arterwards. She'd a sharp enough tongue, but a tongue don't do you much good with a man unless he knows you've got the backbone behind to drive it. It ain't the tongue, but the backbone that counts in marriage. At first he was mighty soft, but befo' two weeks was up he'd begun to beat her, an' I ain't got a particle of respect for a woman that's once been beaten. Men air born mean, I know, it's thar natur, an' the good Lord intended it; but, all the same, it's my belief that mighty few women come in for a downright beatin' unless they've bent thar backs to welcome it. It takes two to make a beatin' the same as a courtin', an' whar the back ain't ready, the blows air slow to fall."

"I never saw her but once, and then I ran away," I remarked to fill in her pause.

"Wall, you didn't miss much, or you either, ma'am," she rejoined politely; "she was the kind that makes an honest woman ashamed to belong to a sex that's got to thrive through foolishness, an' to git to a place by sidlin' backwards. That wa'nt yo' ma's way, Benjy, an' I've often said that I don't believe she ever hung back in her life an' waited for a man to hand her what she could walk right up an' take holt of without his help. 'The woman that waits on a man has got a long wait ahead of her,' was what she used to say."

Rising to her feet, she stood with the empty plate in her hand, and her back ceremoniously bent in a parting bow.

"Is that yo' youngest? Now, ain't he a fine baby!" she burst out, as little Benjamin appeared, crowing, in the arms of Aunt Euphronasia, "an he's got all the soft, pleasant look of yo' po' pa a'ready."

I opened the door, and with a last effusive good-by, she passed out in her stiff, rustling black, which looked as if she had gone into perpetual mourning.

"Will you have some syllabub, Ben?" enquired Sally primly, as the door closed.

"Sally, how will you stand it?"

"She wants to be kind – she really wants to be."

Crossing moodily to the table, I pushed aside the waffles, the muffins, and the syllabub, with an angry gesture.

"It is what I came from, after all. It is my class."

"Your class?" she repeated, laughing and sobbing together with her arms on my shoulders. "There's nobody else in the whole world in your class, Ben."

CHAPTER XXVIII

IN WHICH SALLY STOOPS

A week or two later the General stopped me as I was leaving his office.

"I don't like the look of you, Ben. What's the matter?"

"My head has been troubling me, General. It's been splitting for a week, and I can't see straight."

"You've thought too much, that's the mischief. Why not cut the whole thing and go West with me to-morrow in my car? I'll be gone for a month."

"It's out of the question. A man who is over head and ears in debt oughtn't to be spinning about the country in a private car."

"I don't see the logic of that as long as it's somebody else's car."

"You'd see it if you had two hundred thousand dollars of debt."

"Well, I've been worse off. I've had two hundred thousand devils of gout. Here, come along with me. Bring Sally, bring the youngster. I'll take the whole bunch of 'em."