Time Will Darken It (22 page)

“Do you really mean that?” Nora asked.

He nodded.

“I’m so glad,” Nora said. “Not that I’d dream of ever doing such a thing again. But just the idea that you wouldn’t mind if I——” She stopped, aware of Ab standing in the doorway watching them.

“If this and that,” Austin said, “and a half of this and that, and four make eleven——”

Ab’s face lit up at this old joke between them.

“—how much is this and that, and a half of this and that?” Smiling he picked her up and carried her into the front hall, where the tired travellers were divesting themselves of gloves, linen coat, and veils.

To remain free of people you need some disguise, and what better, more impenetrable false face can any man put on than the letters (so various, so contradictory in their assumptions and their appeals) of his family and his friends? It was an inspiration and like any inspiration it worked—far more powerfully than Austin had intended. It put an image
between Nora Potter and the sun. From that time on, she was conscious of no other presence in the house but his. And when his grey eyes came to rest on her for a moment, they left her so drained and weak that it was all she could do to stand.

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“The way I’ve got it figured out,” Mr. Potter said painstakingly (though this story was not going to end in a burst of laughter), “is that now is the time. Land in Mississippi is cheaper than it has any right to be. I’m going to buy the plantation next to mine and cotton-farm the two at a big saving. I reckon on taking three or four people into it with me, to swing the deal, but there’ll be money for all.”

By “all” Mr. Potter did not mean Miss Ewing, who was listening outside with her head just far enough away from the pane of glass that it would not cast a shadow; or Dr. Hieronymous, the osteopath. He meant Bud Ellis and Judge Fairchild and Alfred Ogilvee and Orin McNab, the undertaker, and Mr. Holby and Dr. Seymour and Louis Orthwein, who owned and published the
Draperville Evening Star
. While Mr. Potter walked the floor and talked and gestured, they sat still and listened and asked questions that had to be answered. In their eyes there was the light of—not ambition, precisely—but of an awareness that life had quickened for them, that they were in the presence of their Big Chance. It was up to them to decide whether they would cling to the caution that had served them well enough, up till now, or throw caution to the winds in the hope that the winds would blow power and influence back to them.

When the door opened and the men filed out, Miss Ewing was seated at her desk and the typewriter was thrashing out
so many legal words a minute that no one realized how quiet the outer office had been for the last hour and three-quarters. They said nothing to Miss Ewing about the offer that had just been laid before them, but the sound of their feet on the worn stairs was a dead giveaway. It was not beautiful, like the sound of an evening party breaking up but it had its own excitement and fear of the dark.

Faced with a circle of empty chairs, Austin and Mr. Potter sat down to appreciate the drop in tension.

“When you’re dealing with Northern businessmen,” Mr. Potter said, “everything has to be worked out so they know where they stand. That’s where you come into it, my boy. I want it all down on paper, so it’s legal and proper and there can’t be any trouble later on. Of course if you want to put some money into the venture, that’s another thing. I’m not urging you to. I’d rather not do business with relatives. It sometimes makes for hard feelings. But when a golden opportunity is knocking at your door——”

“What about old Mr. Ellis?” Austin asked.

“Bud wants to put up three thousand dollars,” Mr. Potter said. “I don’t know whether we can let him have that much stock in the company or not. We’ll have to see when the time comes. I haven’t spoken to the old gentleman yet. Old people are just naturally conservative, as you may have discovered. Mr. Ellis doesn’t know much about any but Illinois land, which is very good, there’s no getting around that; but land prices in the North are high. The South has possibilities for development that have never been realized. There has been poor management, poor equipment, poor everything. Mr. Ellis may hold off for a while, until he sees how the others react, but then he’ll be glad to be included. I thought I’d let Dr. Danforth in on it, and you, naturally, if you are interested. When your mind is made up, there’ll be plenty of time to discuss the details.” Mr. Potter dropped his cigar in the cuspidor with a gesture of finality.

“In any case,” Austin said, “I’ll be very glad to draw up the papers for you.”

Mr. Potter reached for his soiled Panama hat. “I’d better be getting along now,” he said. “I told the ladies I’d be home by four. Mrs. Potter will be wondering what’s become of me. Of course, we expect to pay you for any legal work that you do.”

“There won’t be any charge,” Austin said.

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In spite of failing mental powers, which made old Mr. Ellis forget sometimes what he had started to say, he knew a surprising amount about the boll weevil. He also behaved very childishly, lost his temper the second time that Mr. Potter’s plan was explained to him, shouted at his grandson, and stalked out of the parlour of the farmhouse. During the party which Mary Ellis gave for the Potters that evening, Mr. Ellis remained upstairs in his room, sulking.

A list of guests, an account of the refreshments, and a description of the Japanese lanterns which made the Ellises’ yard look like a fairyland, appeared in the
Star
the following evening but actually it rained during the late afternoon, and the lawn party was held indoors. The children of Elm Street, for reasons of their own which had nothing to do with the Ellises’ lawn party, appeared pulling lighted shoeboxes. In Bremen and Hamburg, which the children had never heard of, the same custom prevailed at this period and so it may have been brought to Illinois from one or the other of those German cities. The shoeboxes had star-shaped and moon-shaped windows cut in the sides and covered with coloured tissue paper, and there was a round hole in the top, directly over
the candle which supplied illumination. The shoeboxes, each drawn by a string, in a procession, made a soft shuffling sound and threw shafts of coloured light on the sidewalk.

Mrs. Potter, watching the procession from the Ellises’ porch, said “You know, I miss the darkies. They’re the chief thing I miss up North. Rachel’s little girl that Cousin Martha has in every now and then to help serve—I’ve grown so attached to her. If it were only possible, I’d take her home with me in my purse.… When you were a child, Mrs. Danforth, did you wake up expecting that overnight the house you went to sleep in had become a palace with marble floors and footmen to wait on you, and you had to put on a pink satin ball dress to eat breakfast in? I go into the kitchen sometimes to boil the water for a cup of tea and I see Thelma has a piece of asparagus fern and two half-dead daisies in a jelly glass by the kitchen window, and I want to say to her ‘Strange as it may seem, I was a little girl once. I remember what it was like.’ And I do remember, Mrs. Danforth, and I’m sure you do, too. I had tasks set for me, and all that, but what I liked to do best was to sit with my hands in my lap, thinking about all the wonderful things that were some day going to happen to me. My hair was in two braids down my back and there was a dreadful time when I thought I was going to have big feet, but it was only that they were growing and the rest of me hadn’t started yet.…”

Involuntarily, Mrs. Danforth tucked her own feet farther under the swing. In the dark, the parrot-like expression was not visible, and people forgot that she was homely and were aware instead of the warmth and gentleness of her voice. There was a good deal of laughing and loud talking in the parlour, which came out to them through the open window. Mrs. Danforth saw that Bud Ellis and Mr. Potter had her husband in a corner and were talking to him earnestly.

“My feet are quite small,” Mrs. Potter said, “now that I’ve caught up to them, but when I started to grow taller, something
happened to me. I forgot about being a princess and I stopped being surprised that I was not eating off golden plates.…”

To approach Dr. Danforth with a business proposition during a social evening was an error in tactics. Mr. Potter had to raise his voice to carry above the other conversations in the room, and a sure thing shouted has either a dubious or a desperate sound.

“It wasn’t as if that little girl died or anything,” Mrs. Potter said. “She just stepped aside, and she’s still there, waiting. I look at Thelma and I know that so far as she’s concerned, the practising that comes from the house next door isn’t the Beach girls, it’s the court musicians. The garden is full of fountains splashing and rose trees, and the rats that run in the walls at night—you’ve seen the place where they live, Mrs. Danforth?—are kings’ sons coming and going. ‘Well, dear child,’ I want to say to her, ‘that’s right. They
are
kings’ sons.’ ”

The children with their lighted shoeboxes were coming back now, on the other side of the street.

“It’s all I’ve arrived at,” Mrs. Potter said, “after a long and in some ways difficult life. The rats really are kings’ sons, and anyone who says they are rats wouldn’t know a king’s son if he saw one.”

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