Time Will Darken It (23 page)

During the second and third week in August the centre of Draperville shifted from the courthouse square to a section of wooded land and shallow ravines two miles south of town. Rocking and swaying, the open street-car that all the rest of the year went only as far as the cemeteries now went on to the end of the line. The passengers got off, passed over a narrow
footbridge, and presented their season tickets at the gates of the Draperville Chautauqua.

A cinder drive led past the ice-cream tent, the women’s building, the administration and post-office building, the dining-hall, and the big cone-roofed auditorium, built on the brow of a hill and open on the sides to all kinds of weather. Every year the sloping floor of the auditorium was sprinkled with fresh tanbark, the bare stage was decorated with American flags and potted palms. The acoustics were excellent.

Spreading out from the auditorium in a series of circles were the cottages, rustic, creosote-stained, painted white or green, or with crazy Victorian Gothic embellishments for children to climb on, and with the names that small, cramped cottages always have—Bide Awee, Hillcrest, and The House That Jack Built. Between the cottages there were brown canvas tents with mosquito netting across the entrance flaps and ropes and stakes for the unwary to trip over after dark.

The cottages were occupied by the same families year after year. They did not come for the simple life—life being, if anything, too simple in town. They came for self-improvement, and because it was a change, with new neighbours and unfamiliar china and kerosene stoves to worry over and a partial escape from the heat. Mornings at the encampment of pleasure were for breakfast, for cot-making, for leisure and social calls. For the women there was the cooking school, for the children the slides and swings of the playground. At two o’clock a bell high up in the rafters backstage summoned everybody to the auditorium for a half-hour of music followed by a lecture. The audience kept the air stirring with palm-leaf fans and silk Japanese fans and folding fans and sections of newspaper. The finer shades of meaning were sometimes wafted away but at all events there was rhetoric, there was eloquence, there was the tariff question, diagrammed by the swallows flying through the iron girders of the cone-shaped roof. When the afternoon programme was over,
the baseball game drew some of the audience, the ice-cream tent others. Dinner, and then the bell once more, its harsh sound turned musical as it passed through layer upon layer of lacquered oak leaves.

After the evening concert, the part of the audience that had come out from town for the day crowded the street-cars that were waiting for them outside the entrance gates or got into buggies and drove back to town, choking all the way in a continuous cloud of dust that they themselves helped to create. Because of the dust, the route was marked at intervals by gasoline lamps that spluttered and flared up occasionally, frightening the horses. The campers followed a winding cinder road until they came to their own tents and cottages. By eleven, when the curfew rang, all lights were out and the Chautauqua was as dark and quiet as it was on those nights when the chain hung across the entrance and the north wind and snow had their season.

Austin King came home from his office at noon, hitched the horse, and as soon as lunch was over, drove his guests out to the Chautauqua grounds. Mr. Potter liked best the military band, Randolph the light opera company that gave a performance of
Olivette
(with interpolations from
Robin Hood, The Bohemian Girl
, and
The Chimes of Normandy
), but to Mrs. Potter it was all one and the wonderful same. She did not wait for the bell to ring, but left the others in the dining-hall or on the porch of the Ellises’ rustic cottage, and went on ahead with her pillow, her fan, and her bottle of citronella. No string trio was ever too long for her, no lecturer ever dull. She was equally delighted with William Jennings Bryan, the explorer who had been in Patagonia, and the man with a potter’s wheel who turned out clay vases and made a larger than life-size head of Marie Antoinette grown old and fretful.

Sunday cast its shadow over the Chautauqua grounds as it did in town, but the religious services were shorter. After Sunday school and church at the auditorium, the atmosphere
brightened, and by evening there might be glee singers or the “Anvil Chorus” performed with real anvils. Martha King, feeling unwell, missed the second Sunday in the 1912 season. The picture on the bulletin board outside the administration building showed a group of twenty handsome young men in white uniforms heavy with gold braid. Travelling from Chautauqua to Chautauqua, the White Huzzars may have lost track of the days of the week. Or perhaps they were the instruments of Change, pointing towards the fast automobiles, the golf courses, and the Sunday-night movies of the future. Anyway, their musical selections and their behaviour (especially when they grabbed up their clarinets and trumpets, shoved their chairs in a double line, and indulged in a mock sleigh-ride) were light-hearted and long remembered. The grey-haired members of the audience, guardians of a gentle Calvinistic era and with fixed ideas of what entertainment was appropriate to a day of worship, sat shocked and disapproving. The rest applauded wildly, reminded of something they had almost forgotten or known only in snatches—of how wonderful it is to be young.

When the last encore was over, Austin took Ab from Mrs. Potter’s lap and lifted her like a limp sack to his shoulder. Her head collapsed of its own weight and her eyelids remained closed, but she knew they were moving slowly up the aisle of the big auditorium, with people all around them. She was in that delicate state of balance in which the mind grasps one thing at a time. Before they reached the long row of hitching posts, even that limited faculty had left her.

Austin started to hand the sleeping child up to Mrs. Potter in the back seat of the carriage, but Nora said, “Oh, let me hold her!” and Nora’s voice was so earnest and so desiring that, over Mrs. Potter’s protests, Austin handed the child up to the front seat instead. When the carriage wheels started to turn, Ab stirred and seemed on the point of waking, but then a woman’s hand cushioned her head in the hollow between
two breasts and held it there, and whatever strangeness had penetrated into Ab’s sleep went away again or was absorbed into even stranger matters.

Austin drove back to town the long way round to avoid the dust. The night was cool, and the people in the English cart spoke in murmurs and then not at all. As they passed the cemeteries, Nora said, “I’ve never held a sleeping child before.”

“She’s not too heavy for you?” Austin asked.

“Oh no,” Nora said. “But it’s a very strange feeling.”

With the reins lying loose in his hands, he was free to turn and look at his daughter and at the girl beside him. With wisps of soft hair blowing against her cheek, Nora’s face looked very young and open and vulnerable.

“Will you promise me something, Nora,” Austin King said suddenly.

“What is it?”

“Before you marry, bring the man to see me. I want to look him over.”

“What if I never find such a person?”

“You don’t have to find him. He’ll find you. But it has to be the right kind of a man, or you won’t be happy.”

“Will you be able to tell, just by looking at him?”

“I think so,” Austin said.

“All right,” Nora said quietly, “I promise.”

As they entered the outskirts of town, Ab felt the change from country dirt road to brick pavement, and wakened sufficiently to hear a voice say, “Cousin Austin, do you believe in immortality?” And then shortly afterward, a great many hands lifted her and carried her up a great many steps, brought her through long hallways, and undressed her. When she woke up, it was morning, and she was in her own bed, with no knowledge of how she got there.

12

The Potters’ visit lasted four weeks and three days. During the final week Mr. Potter held a series of business meetings in Austin King’s office, and the plan was put down on paper, so that there couldn’t be any trouble later on. After sober consideration, Austin King decided that his other obligations (especially the money that he had to send his mother from time to time) made it inadvisable for him to invest in the Mississippi corporation. Dr. Danforth also stayed out of the venture. But in a town the size of Draperville it was not difficult to find six men who were ready and willing to make a fortune.

Mrs. Potter wanted very much to stay on till the end of the Chautauqua season, but Mr. Potter had received a letter from the bank in Howard’s Landing and business came before pleasure. The banging sound that Ab heard when she was supposed to be taking her nap turned out to be Mr. Potter and Randolph hauling the two trunks up from the basement.

They went one last time to the Chautauqua grounds and when the afternoon lecture was over, wandered into the museum, a log cabin not unlike the one old Mr. Ellis was born in, except that in the old days log cabins didn’t have a water cooler just inside the door and visitors were not handed small printed cards urging them, in the name of the First National Bank, to save for a rainy day.

There were barely enough relics in the museum to go around—a gourd that had been used as a powder flask during the battle of Fort Meigs, a pair of antlers, a baby’s dress, a tomahawk, a bed with rope springs, a few letters and deeds. By all rights, the first hoe that shaved the prairie grass and so
brought an end to one of the wonders of the world, should have been here; but historically important objects that are useful in their own right are seldom found in museums.

It is hard to say why Nora Potter chose this place to announce to her father and mother that she was not going back to Mississippi with them. Perhaps the regimental flags and the rifle that had originally come from Virginia encouraged her to take a defiant stand. Or possibly it was her mother’s annoying interest in a stuffed alligator that was swung on wires from the ceiling. At all events, with no warning or preparation, she turned and said, “I’m not going home.” Mr. Potter bent down and signed the register in the full expectation that it would guarantee his immortality. Mrs. Potter gazed up at the alligator. “So lifelike,” she murmured, and then “What do you mean you’re not going home, Nora?”

“The Beach girls are starting a kindergarten and they want me to work with them. I told them I would.”

Mrs. Potter’s face took on a sudden angry flush. “It’s preposterous!” she exclaimed. “I never heard of such a thing.”

The present with its unsolved personal relationships and complex problems seldom intrudes upon the past, but when it does, the objects under glass, the framed handwriting of dead men, the rotting silk and corroded metal all are quickened, for a tiny fraction of time and to an almost imperceptible degree, by life.

“We’d better wait outside,” Martha King said to Austin, and pushing Ab ahead of her, she went past the water-cooler out into the sunlight. While the Potters converged (
God and Liberty
, Voltaire said) upon Nora, Austin and Martha and Ab waited uneasily in the cinder drive. Occasionally, the sound of voices, rising higher and higher, came through the open door of the museum. Ab was prevented from hearing what was said inside by her mother and father’s resolute and uninteresting conversation about Prince Edward, who was showing
signs of lameness from being driven so much. After a time the Potters appeared, with blank faces. Mr. Potter drew Austin aside and said, “Mrs. Potter thinks we’d better not stay for the evening performance.” A moment later the whole party started walking in the general direction of the cement entrance gates.

Late that night, after the others had retired to their rooms, Mrs. Potter in her brocade dressing-gown knocked on Nora’s door, opened it, and went in. Nora was sitting up in bed reading. Mrs. Potter sat down on the edge of the bed, and picked up Nora’s book.

“What’s this, if I may ask?”

“Certainly you can ask,” Nora said. “It’s a book the Beach girls loaned me.”

Mrs. Potter read the title of the book aloud, dubiously, “
The Montessori Method
 … I don’t understand. I really don’t. How you can talk about leaving your family and your home and everyone dear to you! Why do you want to stay up North among strangers?”