"Wait a minute," the old man had said slowly. What, he wondered immediately afterwards, had made him say that. "Wait a minute," as if he had nothing more to do than stand in the mud of a red clay road and haggle with a negro urchin over a hunting-dog that was not only gun-shy but peppered with bird-shot. Very slowly, he had opened his pocketbook, and very slowly, after unfolding two one-dollar notes, he had handed them to the boy in exchange for the dog and the rope. What on earth—he had muttered under his breath, what on earth—and Cora didn't like dogs. Suddenly the moment had gone flat. Cora didn't like dogs. Long after the boy had pattered off down the red clay road, the General had stood there, with the dirty rope in his hand, waiting, in the midst of the autumn landscape, for a gleam of light to break into his mind. Cora didn't like dogs. And all the time William had looked up at him, from the other end of the rope, defeated, suspicious, utterly disillusioned. "No, I do not love human nature," the old man had thought, without irony and without emotion, while he bent over to ease the strain on the dog's neck.
That was the beginning of a satisfactory, though reticent, association. Unhappy memories had dampened the joy of living and extinguished sentimentality in man and dog. But Cora, who did not like dogs, admired, as she said, their fine qualities, and refused, as usual, to make a point of her prejudices. It may have occurred to her, as a simple way out of her troubles, that a dog, especially one that is gun-shy, is less upsetting in the house than a second wife, especially one that is young. No matter what happened, it is always possible, she had found, to believe the best and to trust that, sooner or later, with the help of a merciful Providence, the best may turn out to be true. As for the General, he had been obliged, for forty years, to bestow perfunctory caresses, and now, in his old age, he asked little more than the companionship that makes no demands. William, more soundly disenchanted, appeared, and perhaps was, contented to lie for hours at peace in the sunshine. Only, whenever he was taken into the country that first autumn, he would begin to tremble again at the sight of fields and woods; and then the General would take him in his arms and stroke his body, while Robert, the coachman, was ordered to return to the city. And again the old man would think, "No, it is true, I do not love human nature." Three years had gone by; yet even to-day the noise of a train or the faint far-off sound of a shot would awaken in William's nerves the old paroxysms of fear.
"And Isabella?" The General's manner was still playful. "Is she in the kitchen too?"
"She was here a minute ago," Mrs. Archbald answered, "but I'm afraid I said something that hurt her feelings. She went out. I think down to the stable." For an instant she hesitated, and then added with a significant look, "Don't you think, Father, it is time the work on the stable was finished?"
The General started, for he never missed a point in his daughter-in-law's strategy. "The Crockers will do the best they can," he replied. "I left it to them."
"I know," Mrs. Archbald assented. Then she said in a severe tone, "Jenny Blair, stop hanging on your grandfather. I told you not to worry him."
"I'm not worrying him, Mamma, but you said I might ask him. Grandfather, will you pay me for a hundred and fifty pages? They are dreadfully poky."
"We'll see, we'll see. If you are in urgent need, I suppose I'll have to do something about it."
"Oh, thank you, Grandfather darling." She took a step toward the door, picked up her skates, and swinging them in her hand, paused to look back over her shoulder. "Did you know the bad smell had come back?"
"Yes, I know, my child, but there's nothing to be done about that. Already it has gone, hasn't it?"
She wheeled round on the threshold. "I wish I could go down to the place it comes from. Do people live down there?"
"Yes, people live there. That is one of the wrongs of our civilization, that some people are obliged to live with bad smells."
"I wish I could go down there. I mean just to look."
"Put that idea straight out of your mind, Jenny Blair," Mrs. Archbald commanded with weary tartness. "I have trouble enough as it is."
CHAPTER 4
Outside, in the slanting beams of the sun, Jenny Blair strapped on her roller-skates and started dangerously over the sunken bricks of the pavement. Her mother had told her to keep on the sunny side of the street and not to skate beyond the corner, where the bricks were uneven and loose at the edges; but experience had shown her that it was safe to interpret broadly her mother's directions. The other children at school had dared her to walk alone, just before sunset, down Canal Street as far as the edge of Penitentiary Bottom; and though she belonged to that gallant breed which has never, as she told herself proudly, "taken a dare," she decided to keep up appearances by going the longest way round, through the Birdsongs' garden at the end of the block. Three long blocks, divided by three dingy alleys, stretched between Washington Street and the mysterious quarter which began with Canal Street and ended in the crowded hollow known as Penitentiary Bottom; but in upper Canal Street, where white people still occupied some of the old houses, she might be able to look over the hill into the exciting place from which the bad smells sprang up on the wind. Always, until to-day, she had paused at the end of Hickory Street and gazed with the eager eye of adventure past the unpaved alleys, where no skates could roll, to the muddy sidewalks and crumbling fences over which the gleaming whitewashed wall of the penitentiary presided. Nobody, least of all her mother, could understand the fascinated horror that drew her, like a tightened cord, toward the unknown and the forbidden. Nobody who had not been born with a rebel heart could share her impulse to skip and dance and flap her arms like fledgling wings as soon as she had broken away from the house and was sure that none of them could run after her because none of them knew where she was going. None of them, not even Grandfather, who was more of a child than the others, would ever suspect that she meant to walk down Canal Street as soon as the sun dipped beyond the walls of the prison. She hadn't told them because it never did any good to tell grown-up people the truth. It simply couldn't be done.
"I'll go and peep in on Mrs. Birdsong," she thought, honourably postponing her excursion until the sun had declined. "It won't take but a minute if I go through her yard."
Something—it may have been the beauty of Mrs. Birdsong—enveloped the small wistaria-mantled house in a perpetual air of surprise. No matter how often she went there, everything was always fresh and dewy and delightful, as if she had never seen it before. The ragged garden at the back, with its untrimmed shrubs and overgrown pool, had seemed to her, even as a little child, far more exciting than the carefully pruned borders and flower-beds of the garden at home. Especially, she loved to be at the Birdsongs' when Uncle Abednego, an ancient negro who lived in the almshouse, was making ineffectual efforts to preserve the dwindling box-trees, the straggling perpetual roses, and the flowering shrubs that had not died in the winter. Sometimes Mrs. Birdsong would come out with a trowel and plant a few flowers in the borders; but she did not like to dig in the earth; even when she wore gloves, she complained, the soil ruined her hands, and there was so much work to do in the house that she preferred to leave the garden to the feeble exertions of Uncle Abednego. The truth was that she knew little of flowers, and loved most the orchids and gardenias that came from florists and were grown only in hothouses. She rarely went into the garden for pleasure, and never walked there except on summer evenings when she was in search of a breeze. John Welch, an orphan cousin, was the only member of the Birdsong family who liked planting, and he had raised a border of what he called "witches' herbs" near the back porch.