Short Stories

V

On the August evening as Rosalind sat on the porch before her father’s house in Willow Springs, Walter Sayers came home from the factory by the river and to his wife’s suburban garden.  When the family had dined he came out to walk in the paths with the two children, boys, but they soon tired of his silence and went to join their mother.  The young negro came along a path by the kitchen door and joined the party.  Walter went to sit on a garden seat that was concealed behind bushes.  He lighted a cigarette but did not smoke.  The smoke curled quietly up through his fingers as it burned itself out.

Closing his eyes Walter sat perfectly still and tried not to think.  The soft evening shadows began presently to close down and around him.  For a long time he sat thus motionless, like a carved figure placed on the garden bench.  He rested.  He lived and did not live.  The intense body, usually so active and alert, had become a passive thing.  It was thrown aside, on to the bench, under the bush, to sit there, waiting to be reinhabited.

This hanging suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness was a thing that did not happen often.  There was something to be settled between himself and a woman and the woman had gone away.  His whole plan of life had been disturbed.  Now he wanted to rest.  The details of his life were forgotten.  As for the woman he did not think of her, did not want to think of her.  It was ridiculous that he needed her so much.  He wondered if he had ever felt that way about Cora, his wife.  Perhaps he had.  Now she was near him, but a few yards away.  It was almost dark but she with the negro remained at work, digging in the ground—­somewhere near—­caressing the soil, making things grow.

When his mind was undisturbed by thoughts and lay like a lake in the hills on a quiet summer evening little thoughts did come.  “I want you as a lover—­far away.  Keep yourself far away.”  The words trailed through his mind as the smoke from the cigarette trailed slowly upwards through his fingers.  Did the words refer to Rosalind Wescott?  She had been gone from him three days.  Did he hope she would never come back or did the words refer to his wife?

His wife’s voice spoke sharply.  One of the children in playing about, had stepped on a plant.  “If you are not careful I shall have to make you stay out of the garden altogether.”  She raised her voice and called, “Marian!” A maid came from the house and took the children away.  They went along the path toward the house protesting.  Then they ran back to kiss their mother.  There was a struggle and then acceptance.  The kiss was acceptance of their fate—­to obey.  “O, Walter,” the mother’s voice called, but the man on the bench did not answer.  Tree toads began to cry.  “The kiss is acceptance.  Any physical contact with another is acceptance,” he reflected.

The little voices within Walter Sayers were talking away at a great rate.  Suddenly he wanted to sing.  He had been told that his voice was small, not of much account, that he would never be a singer.  It was quite true no doubt but here, in the garden on the quiet summer night, was a place and a time for a small voice.  It would be like the voice within himself that whispered sometimes when he was quiet, relaxed.  One evening when he had been with the woman, Rosalind, when he had taken her into the country in his car, he had suddenly felt as he did now.  They sat together in the car that he had run into a field.  For a long time they had remained silent.  Some cattle came and stood nearby, their figures soft in the night.  Suddenly he had felt like a new man in a new world and had begun to sing.  He sang one song over and over, then sat in silence for a time and after that drove out of the field and through a gate into the road.  He took the woman back to her place in the city.

In the quiet of the garden on the summer evening he opened his lips to sing the same song.  He would sing with the tree toad hidden away in the fork of a tree somewhere.  He would lift his voice up from the earth, up into the branches, of trees, away from the ground in which people were digging, his wife and the young negro.

The song did not come.  His wife began speaking and the sound of her voice took away the desire to sing.  Why had she not, like the other woman, remained silent?

He began playing a game.  Sometimes, when he was alone the thing happened to him that had now happened.  His body became like a tree or a plant.  Life ran through it unobstructed.  He had dreamed of being a singer but at such a moment he wanted also to be a dancer.  That would have been sweetest of all things—­to sway like the tops of young trees when a wind blew, to give himself as grey weeds in a sunburned field gave themself to the influence of passing shadows, changing color constantly, becoming every moment something new, to live in life and in death too, always to live, to be unafraid of life, to let it flow through his body, to let the blood flow through his body, not to struggle, to offer no resistance, to dance.

Walter Sayers’ children had gone into the house with the nurse girl Marian.  It had become too dark for his wife to dig in the garden.  It was August and the fruitful time of the year for farms and gardens had come, but his wife had forgotten fruitfulness.  She was making plans for another year.  She came along the garden path followed by the negro.  “We will set out strawberry plants there,” she was saying.  The soft voice of the young negro murmured his assent.  It was evident the young man lived in her conception of the garden.  His mind sought out her desire and gave itself.

The children Walter Sayers had brought into life through the body of his wife Cora had gone into the house and to bed.  They bound him to life, to his wife, to the garden where he sat, to the office by the riverside in the city.

They were not his children.  Suddenly he knew that quite clearly.  His own children were quite different things.  “Men have children just as women do.  The children come out of their bodies.  They play about,” he thought.  It seemed to him that children, born of his fancy, were at that very moment playing about the bench where he sat.  Living things that dwelt within him and that had at the same time the power to depart out of him were now running along paths, swinging from the branches of trees, dancing in the soft light.

His mind sought out the figure of Rosalind Wescott.  She had gone away, to her own people in Iowa.  There had been a note at the office saying she might be gone for several days.  Between himself and Rosalind the conventional relationship of employer and employee had long since been swept quite away.  It needed something in a man he did not possess to maintain that relationship with either men or women.

At the moment he wanted to forget Rosalind.  In her there was a struggle going on.  The two people had wanted to be lovers and he had fought against that.  They had talked about it.  “Well,” he said, “it will not work out.  We will bring unnecessary unhappiness upon ourselves.”

He had been honest enough in fighting off the intensification of their relationship.  “If she were here now, in this garden with me, it wouldn’t matter.  We could be lovers and then forget about being lovers,” he told himself.

His wife came along the path and stopped nearby.  She continued talking in a low voice, making plans for another year of gardening.  The negro stood near her, his figure making a dark wavering mass against the foliage of a low growing bush.  His wife wore a white dress.  He could see her figure quite plainly.  In the uncertain light it looked girlish and young.  She put her hand up and took hold of the body of a young tree.  The hand became detached from her body.  The pressure of her leaning body made the young tree sway a little.  The white hand moved slowly back and forth in space.

Rosalind Wescott had gone home to tell her mother of her love.  In her note she had said nothing of that but Walter Sayers knew that was the object of her visit to the Iowa town.  It was on odd sort of thing to try to do—­to tell people of love, to try to explain it to others.

The night was a thing apart from Walter Sayers, the male being sitting in silence in the garden.  Only the children of his fancy understood it.  The night was a living thing.  It advanced upon him, enfolded him.  “Night is the sweet little brother of Death,” he thought.

His wife stood very near.  Her voice was soft and low and the voice of the negro when he answered her comments on the future of the garden was soft and low.  There was music in the negro’s voice, perhaps a dance in it.  Walter remembered about him.

The young negro had been in trouble before he came to the Sayers.  He had been an ambitious young black and had listened to the voices of people, to the voices that filled the air of America, rang through the houses of America.  He had wanted to get on in life and had tried to educate himself.  The black had wanted to be a lawyer.

How far away he had got from his own people, from the blacks of the African forests!  He had wanted to be a lawyer in a city in America.  What a notion!

Well he had got into trouble.  He had managed to get through college and had opened a law office.  Then one evening he went out to walk and chance led him into a street where a woman, a white woman, had been murdered an hour before.  The body of the woman was found and then he was found walking in the street.  Mrs. Sayers’ brother, a lawyer, had saved him from being punished as a murderer and after the trial, and the young negro’s acquittal, had induced his sister to take him as gardener.  His chances as a professional man in the city were no good.  “He has had a terrible experience and has just escaped by a fluke” the brother had said.  Cora Sayers had taken the young man.  She had bound him to herself, to her garden.

It was evident the two people were bound together.  One cannot bind another without being bound.  His wife had no more to say to the negro who went away along the path that led to the kitchen door.  He had a room in a little house at the foot of the garden.  In the room he had books and a piano.  Sometimes in the evening he sang.  He was going now to his place.  By educating himself he had cut himself off from his own people.

Cora Sayers went into the house and Walter sat alone.  After a time the young negro came silently down the path.  He stopped by the tree where a moment before the white woman had stood talking to him.  He put his hand on the trunk of the young tree where her hand had been and then went softly away.  His feet made no sound on the garden path.

An hour passed.  In his little house at the foot of the garden the negro began to sing softly.  He did that sometimes in the middle of the night.  What a life he had led too!  He had come away from his black people, from the warm brown girls with the golden colors playing through the blue black of their skins and had worked his way through a Northern college, had accepted the patronage of impertinent people who wanted to uplift the black race, had listened to them, had bound himself to them, had tried to follow the way of life they had suggested.

Now he was in the little house at the foot of the Sayers’ garden.  Walter remembered little things his wife had told him about the man.  The experience in the court room had frightened him horribly and he did not want to go off the Sayers’ place.  Education, books had done something to him.  He could not go back to his own people.  In Chicago, for the most part, the blacks lived crowded into a few streets on the South Side.  “I want to be a slave,” he had said to Cora Sayers.  “You may pay me money if it makes you feel better but I shall have no use for it.  I want to be your slave.  I would be happy if I knew I would never have to go off your place.”

The black sang a low voiced song.  It ran like a little wind on the surface of a pond.  It had no words.  He had remembered the song from his father who had got it from his father.  In the South, in Alabama and Mississippi the blacks sang it when they rolled cotton bales onto the steamers in the rivers.  They had got it from other rollers of cotton bales long since dead.  Long before there were any cotton bales to roll black men in boats on rivers in Africa had sung it.  Young blacks in boats floated down rivers and came to a town they intended to attack at dawn.  There was bravado in singing the song then.  It was addressed to the women in the town to be attacked and contained both a caress and a threat.  “In the morning your husbands and brothers and sweethearts we shall kill.  Then we shall come into your town to you.  We shall hold you close.  We shall make you forget.  With our hot love and our strength we shall make you forget.”  That was the old significance of the song.

Walter Sayers remembered many things.  On other nights when the negro sang and when he lay in his room upstairs in the house, his wife came to him.  There were two beds in their room.  She sat upright in her bed.  “Do you hear, Walter?” she asked.  She came to sit on his bed, sometimes she crept into his arms.  In the African villages long ago when the song floated up from the river men arose and prepared for battle.  The song was a defiance, a taunt.  That was all gone now.  The young negro’s house was at the foot of the garden and Walter with his wife lay upstairs in the larger house situated on high ground.  It was a sad song, filled with race sadness.  There was something in the ground that wanted to grow, buried deep in the ground.  Cora Sayers understood that.  It touched something instinctive in her.  Her hand went out and touched, caressed her husband’s face, his body.  The song made her want to hold him tight, possess him.

The night was advancing and it grew a little cold in the garden.  The negro stopped singing.  Walter Sayers arose and went along the path toward the house but did not enter.  Instead he went through a gate into the road and along the suburban streets until he got into the open country.  There was no moon but the stars shone brightly.  For a time he hurried along looking back as though afraid of being followed, but when he got out into a broad flat meadow he went more slowly.  For an hour he walked and then stopped and sat on a tuft of dry grass.  For some reason he knew he could not return to his house in the suburb that night.  In the morning he would go to the office and wait there until Rosalind came.  Then?  He did not know what he would do then.  “I shall have to make up some story.  In the morning I shall have to telephone Cora and make up some silly story,” he thought.  It was an absurd thing that he, a grown man, could not spend a night abroad, in the fields without the necessity of explanations.  The thought irritated him and he arose and walked again.  Under the stars in the soft night and on the wide flat plains the irritation soon went away and he began to sing softly, but the song he sang was not the one he had repeated over and over on that other night when he sat with Rosalind in the car and the cattle came.  It was the song the negro sang, the river song of the young black warriors that slavery had softened and colored with sadness.  On the lips of Walter Sayers the song had lost much of its sadness.  He walked almost gaily along and in the song that flowed from his lips there was a taunt, a kind of challenge.