Time Will Darken It (3 page)

He gave his daughter a pat on the behind and then, stepping over a doll’s bed and a house of alphabet blocks, left her and went back into the bedroom across the hall.

2

Elm Street, the street the Kings lived on, had been finished for almost a generation when the Potters arrived for their visit. The shade had encroached gradually upon the areas of sunlight, and the outermost branches of the trees—maples and elms, cottonwoods, lindens and box elders—had managed to meet in places over the brick pavement. The houses reflected no set style or period of architecture, but only a
pleasure in circular bay windows, wide porches, carpenter’s lace, and fresh white paint. Elm Street led nowhere in particular and there was never much traffic on it. The most exciting vehicle that passed on a summer day was the ice-cream wagon, painted white, its slow progress announced by a silvery
ka-ling, ka-ling, ka-ling
that brought children running to the kerb. The ice-cream wagon was the high point of the monumental July or August afternoon, and much of its importance came from the fact that it was undependable. The children often waited for it in vain, their only consolation the chips that fell from the iceman’s pick. There were also gypsy wagons, but they were infrequent, not to be expected more than once or twice a summer. When they did come, the smaller children, clutching their playthings, withdrew to their own front porches where, in safety, they stood and stared until the caravan of five or six covered wagons had passed by.

For a street only three unbroken blocks long—Elm Street below the intersection was another world entirely—there were an unusual number of children and it was they who gave the street its active character and its air of Roman imperishability. In feature and voice and attitude they were small copies of the women who shook dustcloths out of upstairs windows and banged mops on porch railings, of the men who came home from work in the late afternoon and stood in their shirt-sleeves dampening the lawns and flower beds with a garden hose. But for a time, for as long as they were children, they were almost as free as the sparrows.

With two alleys and any number of barns, pigeon houses, chicken coops, woodsheds, and sloping cellar doors (all offering excellent hiding and sliding places to choose from, all in the public domain), the children seldom left the street to play.

In the daytime boys and girls played apart, but evening brought them all together in a common dislike of the dark and of their mother’s voice calling them home. They played
games, some of which were older than Columbus’ voyages. They caught lightning bugs and put them in a bottle. They frightened themselves with ghost stories. They hid from and hunted one another, in and out of the shrubbery. For the grown people relaxing on their porches after the heat of the day, the cry of
Ready or not you shall be caught
was no more alarming than the fireflies or the creak of the porch swing.

Elm Street is now in its old age and nothing of all this is left. There are cars instead of carriages, no gypsy wagon has been seen in this part of the country for many years. The ice-cream wagon stopped being undependable and simply failed to come.

If you happen to be curious about the Indians of Venezuela, you can supply yourself with credentials from the Ministry of Education and letters from various oil companies to their representatives in field camps. With your personal belongings and scientific instruments, including excavating tools for, say, a crew of twelve men—with several hundred sugar bags for specimens, emergency food rations, mosquito netting, and other items essential for carrying on such archæological work—you can start digging and with luck unearth pottery and skeletons that have lain in the ground since somewhere around A.D. 1000. The very poverty of evidence will lead you to brilliant and far-reaching hypotheses.

To arrive at some idea of the culture of a certain street in a Middle Western small town shortly before the First World War, is a much more delicate undertaking. For one thing, there are no ruins to guide you. Though the houses are not kept up as well as they once were, they are still standing. Of certain barns and outbuildings that are gone (and with them trellises and trumpet vines) you will find no trace whatever. In every yard a dozen landmarks (here a lilac bush, there a sweet syringa) are missing. There is no telling what became of the hanging fern baskets with American flags in them or of all
those red geraniums. The people who live on Elm Street now belong to a different civilization. They can tell you nothing. You will not need mosquito netting or emergency rations, and the only specimens you will find, possibly the only thing that will prove helpful to you, will be a glass marble or a locust shell split up the back and empty.

3

“If you want me to ask them to leave, I will,” Austin said, turning to the four-poster bed. “I’ll go right now and explain to them that it was all a mistake, and that we just aren’t in a position to have company at this time.”

To do this meant that he and the Potters would have to face each other in an embarrassment so hideous that he didn’t dare think about it. Nevertheless, if that was what she wanted, if he had put a greater burden on her than she could manage, then he was ready, at whatever cost to himself, to set her free.

“Seriously,” he said.

The offer was not accepted.

He turned away and opened the bottom drawer of the highboy, searching for summer underwear. “I’m going to take a bath and shave,” he said. “It’s almost five-thirty. Somebody has to be downstairs to let people in.” He went off down the hall.

Now is the time to be quiet, to stand patiently in this upstairs bedroom and wait for some change in the position of the woman on the bed. So far as a marriage is concerned, nothing that happens downstairs in the living-room or the dining-room or the kitchen is ever as important as what goes on behind the closed bedroom door. It is the point at which curious friends and anxious or interfering relatives have to turn away.

The big double bed, like the quilt, is an heirloom and possibly a hundred years old. At the top of each heavy square post there is a dangerous spike, intended to hold the huge canopy that is now in the Kings’ barn, gathering dust. The highboy, also of antique mahogany, contains a secret drawer in which (since Martha King had no secrets and Austin hid his elsewhere) are kept a velvet pincushion in the shape of a strawberry and odds and ends of ribbon. Originally dark, the woodwork in this room has been painted white. The windows extend to the floor and are open to the slight stirring of air that blesses this side of the house, carrying with it the scent of petunias from the window-box. The ceiling of the bedroom is eleven feet high, indicating the house’s age and some previous history—quarrels between husband and wife, perhaps, in this very room.

After twenty minutes he came back and went over to the dressing-table. With his head bent forward so that the mirror would accommodate his reflection, he parted his damp hair solemnly on the left side and combed it flat against his skull. In sleep, in repose, in all unguarded moments, his face had a suggestion of sadness about it.

“Was it something that happened this afternoon?” he asked, standing beside the bed. “Did I do something or say something in front of them that hurt your feelings?”

With her voice half-smothered in the pillow Martha King said, “You didn’t do anything or say anything and my feelings are not hurt. Now will you please go away?”

He leaned across her, trying to see her face.

“And please don’t touch me!”

Austin had a sudden angry impulse to turn her over and slap her, but it was so faint and so immediately disowned that he himself was hardly aware of it. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve got to get up now and come downstairs. I don’t know what they’ll think if you——”

“I don’t care what they think. I’m not going downstairs.”

“You’ve got to. We have company in the house and you’ve asked all those people.”

“You go down if you want to. It’s your company.”

“But what’ll I tell them?”

“Whatever you feel like telling them. Tell them you’re married to an impossible woman who doesn’t care what she does or how much humiliation she brings upon you.”

“That isn’t true,” he said, in a tone of voice that carried only partial conviction—the intention to believe what he had just said, rather than belief itself.

“Yes it is, it’s all true and you know it! Tell them I’m lazy and extravagant and a bad housekeeper and that I don’t take proper care of my child!”

Austin’s eyes wandered to the clock on the dressing-table.

“Couldn’t we postpone this—this discussion until later? I know I said something that hurt your feelings but I didn’t mean to. Really I didn’t. I don’t know what it was, even.” Again the voice was not wholly convinced of what it said. “Tonight after the party, we’ll have it all out, everything. And in the meantime——”

“In the meantime I wish I were dead,” Martha King said, and rolled over on her back. Her face was flushed and creased from the pillow, and so given over to feeling that one part of him looked at it with curiosity and detachment. Beautiful (and dear to him) though her ordinary face was, in colouring and feature, in the extreme whiteness and softness of the skin and in the bone structure that lay under this whiteness and softness, and the bluish tint of the part of her eyes surrounding the brown iris, it was a beauty that was all known to him. He saw something now that he might not ever see again, an effort on the part of flesh to make a new face, stranger and more vulnerable than the other. And more beautiful. Tears formed in the right eye and spilled over, and then both eyes were blinded by them. The detachment gave way and he gathered her in his arms.

“I don’t see why you aren’t happy with me,” she said mournfully. “I try so hard to do everything the way you want me to do it.”

He wiped the tears away with his hand gently, but there were more. “I
am
happy,” he said. “I’m very happy.”

“You can’t be. Not as long as you’re married to a woman who gives you no peace.”

“But I am, I tell you. Why do I have to keep saying that I’m happy? If you’d only stop worrying about it and take things for granted, we’d never have these——Was it Nora Potter? Was it something about Nora?”