"You were too little," he said. "You ought not to have been there."
"Oh, but nothing so exciting as that ever happened to me again. Only, like Memoria's mother, the things I recall most vividly are trifles. My mind is like that. Trifles always stick to the sides of it. I remember I was wearing a sprigged cambric, white and pink, and ribbed white socks, with a pair of shiny black slippers, tied with a bow of grosgrain ribbon over the instep. These are the things I remember best, and the way George ran down from a vacant lot, with a ball in his hand. He had been playing baseball, and there was a long jagged tear in his breeches where he had climbed over a fence. I have never forgotten the look of that tear and the bows on my new slippers. Is there any meaning in memory, I wonder."
"Who knows? The things I recollect best happened forty years and more ago. But you mustn't let yourself talk too long. If you get excited, you won't sleep."
"He came running down with the other boys," she resumed, as if there had been no interruption, "and Memoria's mother shrieked at him, 'I'se done lef' my baby. Gawd in heaven, I'se done lef' my baby!' George shook her hand off his arm and called out over the praying and shouting, 'Well, I'll get her, Cindy. Just hold my ball for me.' Would you believe it?" Eva asked suddenly, with a laugh of pure happiness. "Cindy stood there rocking the baseball as if it were a baby the whole time George was bringing out Memoria. She stood there swinging the ball back and forth in her arms, and screaming at the top of her voice, 'Oh, Lawd, I'se a sinner! Oh, Lawd, I'se a sinner, but I ain' gwine sin no mo'!' Then George came out of the smoke and threw a flannel bundle (he had rolled up Memoria in a blanket) into Cindy's arms. 'Give me my ball,' he said, just like that. 'Give me my ball.' He ran back to the vacant lot at the very instant the fire engines came rushing down the steep street. No," she continued pensively, "nothing so exciting ever happened to me again. But I fell in love with George then, and I never got over it. I think the thing I really loved him for was his courage. Courage has a lasting quality," she added, and for the first time her voice trembled with feeling. "Sometimes I think it is the only virtue that has a lasting quality."
"Perhaps you're right," he answered, and wondered if it were true. "Anyhow, it is well to love people for the sake of virtues that stay by one."
"That is what I mean. That is what I am trying to tell you." She spoke eagerly, grasping his tired old hand as it lay on the coverlet. "I don't know how to put it into words, but this something that stays by you makes last love more important than first love to a woman. And it is even stronger when it is all one love, first and last, like mine for George. First love is simply between two persons, you and your lover, and it changes as everything must that exists merely between two human beings. But last love has courage in it also; it has courage and finality, and facing the end and all the emptiness that is life. Finality is the only thing, isn't it, that really survives? Everything else, even love, passes." Her face was pale in the thickening dusk, and her eyes shone like blue fires as she looked up at him. What was she trying to tell him? How much did she suspect? How much did she know? How much had she always known?
"Don't ask me, my child. I cannot answer." He sighed under his breath, realizing that he looked on a last gallant endeavour to defend an illusion. Yes, he was right when he said that hers had been, and no doubt was still, a great passion. And was he right, too, when he thought that women had passion, but men (all men, he corrected himself, who were not poets) had only passions?
"That is what I had in my mind to tell you," she repeated, though she had told him nothing. "If anything should happen to me, I want you to feel that George has been—has been splendid. You do feel that now, don't you?"
"Yes, my dear, I feel that now."
"I made an excuse to John about my will, though, after all, I have only a few trinkets to leave. Most of my jewels I sold without telling George, and I even sold every piece of Mother's silver that we weren't obliged to use on the table. After the coffee service went, I used to take the goblets and forks and spoons down, one at a time, to old Mr. Mapleson. He never gave me away. Even George has never suspected, because I saved those six Georgian goblets Grandfather always used for mint juleps. And I didn't tell even you. I don't know why I am telling you now. Perhaps it is all the morphine I've taken, but something seems to have broken down in me. All the walls have been swept away, and I can't divide my mind into compartments. But I want Jenny Blair to have my aquamarine necklace and earrings. They aren't valuable; but she has always liked them, and the setting is good."
Though her eyes were dry and shining, he felt the tears brim over his withered eyelids and roll unchecked down the furrowed skin of his cheek. Yes, there are cracks even in stone, he thought. "You told me your silver was in the bank," he said, and wondered, in spite of his pity, if her confession were as natural, as impulsive, as he had believed.
"I couldn't bear you to know. That was false pride, I suppose, but it has always been stronger in me than anything else."
"Well, you ought to have come to me. There is nothing the old like so much as to be needed." The desire to talk of himself, to pour out his interminable disappointments, shuddered through his nerves in a spasm of longing. He had much to tell, and it seemed to him that from any point of view what he had to tell would be interesting. He had suffered deeply; he had had wide experience; he had lived through dramatic epochs in the world's history; he had observed; he had reflected; he had gathered, little by little, the long wisdom of eighty-three years. If only once he might open his closed soul and let the past gush out in a torrent of memory! But she wasn't thinking of him. Nobody was thinking of him except as a prop in weakness, a pillar to lean against. No matter how he had suffered, no matter how much talking might help him, there wasn't anybody who cared to sit down and listen.
"I don't know what we should have done without you, George and I," she said, but her voice was listless, the blue flames had died down in her eyes, and her clinging hand felt cold and limp in his grasp.
"You've talked too much," he answered. "I'd better be going."
The door opened, and a nurse bearing a tray came in briskly. She was tall, thin, active, and moved as if she were strung on wires beneath her starched uniform.
"It is time for your nourishment now," she said, with the artificial cheerfulness of a hospital or a nursery. "I hope you feel that you are going to have a good night." With an expert touch, she beat the pillows, arranged them at Mrs. Birdsong's back, and placed the tray on a little bed-table over her knees. "If you sip the milk very slowly, it will do you more good."
Eva glanced from the nurse to the old man, who had risen and was waiting to leave. "This is Miss Summers, General. She is very good to me."
Was the nurse really so sanguine as she looked? General Archbald wondered, trembling a little from the twinge of pain that shot through his right leg at the knee. Or was her cheerfulness also strung on wires underneath? As she bent over to stretch the coverlet under the bed-table, he saw that her reddish-black hair was grey at the roots. Trying to keep up an appearance, he supposed, moved by some stern compulsion to pretend that life was something she knew it was not.