Delta Wedding (24 page)

"Don't clear off now—little while yet," Aunt Mac called toward the Negro-deserted kitchen. "Of course you only married George for his money," she continued without a break, in that comfortable sort of voice in which this statement is always made.

Robbie answered, lifting her voice politely to the deaf, "No, ma'am. I married him because he begged me!" Then she sat down, in the dining-room chair with its carved basket of blunt roses that always prodded the shoulder blades at emphatic moments.

To be begged to give love was something that she could not have conceived of by herself, and she assumed no one else could conceive of it. Now for a moment it struck Robbie and also Ellen humbly to earth, for it implied a magnitude, a bounty, that could leave people helpless. Robbie knew that now, still, George in getting her back would start all over with her love, as if she were shy. It was his way—as if he took long trips away from her which she did not know about, and then came back to her as to a little spring where he had somehow cherished only the hope for the refreshment that all the time flowed boundlessly enough. As if in his abounding, laughing life, he had not really expected much to his lips! Well, she was always the same, the way a little picnic spot would remain the same from one summer to the next, under its south-riding moon, and he was the different and new, the picnicker, the night was the different night.

Luckily Aunt Mac did not hear Robbie's answer, or suppose there could be one; she was an old lady. But the Fairchilds half-worshiped alarm, and Ellen knew just how they would act if they could hear Robbie say "He begged me"—as well as if they had never left the room. It was a burden of responsibility, the awareness that had come to supply her with the Fairchild accompaniment and answer to everything happening, just as if they all were present, that unpredictable crowd; the same as, thinking in the night, she referred to Battle's violent and intricate opinions when his sleeping body lay snoring beside her.

Now when Robbie said "He begged me," and sat down, Ellen could see in a mental tableau the family one and all fasten an unflinching look upon George.... It was a look near to reproach, though George, exactly like little Ranny, would sit innocent or ignorant in the matter of reproach, blind to the look, but listening with great care for what would come next. The most rambunctious of the Fairchild men could all be extremely affected by nervous changes around them, things they could not see, and put on a touching protective serenity at those times, a kind of scapegoat grace, which only reminded Ellen of pain—as when Dr. Murdoch, a rough man, set Orrin's broken arm and Orrin quite visibly filled himself with blissful trust to meet the pain he thought was coming.... The family of course had always acknowledged by an exaggerated and charming mood of capitulation toward George that George was mightily importunate—yet they had to reproach him, something made them or let them, and they would reproach him surely that they had never been granted the sight of him begging a thing on earth. Quite the contrary! Surely he took for granted! So he begged love—George? Love that he had more of than the rest of them put together? He begged love from Robbie! They would disbelieve.

"Then he risked his life for—for—and you all let him!
Dabney
knew the train was coming!"

"Now, listen here, Robbie, we all love Georgie, no matter how we act or he acts," said Ellen. "And isn't that all there is to it?" All of a sudden, she felt tired. She was never surer that all loving Georgie was not the end of it; but to hold back hurt and trouble, shouldn't it just now be enough? She had said so, anyway—as if she were sure.

But she sighed. There was a tramping upstairs and around corners, a sudden whistle of flight in the stair well, the tripping cries of her daughters in laughter or flight, and then vaguely to Ellen's ears it all mingled with the further and echoing sounds of a worse alarm. Dimly there seemed to be again in her life a bell clanging trouble, starting at the Grove, then at their place, the dogs beginning to clamor, the Negroes storming the back door crying, and the great rush out of this room, like the dme there was a fire at the gin.

"Get it out! Get it out!" It was one cry, long lasting, half delight, half distress, all challenge.

"He won't be pulled to pieces over something he did, and so he ran away," said Robbie, her voice suddenly full. "Sure I came here to fight the Fairchilds—but he wasn't even here when I came.
Shelley
warned him. All the Fairchilds run away."

"Where have you been, Robbie Reid?" asked Aunt Mac.

"You've got a piece of cotton or a feather, one, in your hair." Aunt Shannon with rising voice hummed a girlhood ballad.

"There is a fight and it's come between us, Robbie," said Ellen, her voice calm and a little automatic. "But it's not over George, we won't have it. And how that would hurt him, and shame him, to think it was, he's so gentle. It's not right to make him be pulled to pieces, and over something he did, and very honorably did. There's a fight
in
us, already, I believe—
in
people on this earth, not between us, and there is a fight in Georgie too. It's part of being alive, though you may think he cannot be pulled to pieces."

Another near flutter of wings, a beating on walls, was in the air; but the throbbing softly insinuated in a strange yet familiar manner the sound of the plantation bells being struck and the school bell and the Methodist Church bell ringing, and cries from the scene of the fire they all ran to, cries somehow more joyous than commiserating, though it threatened their ruin.

Robbie stood up again. Her poor wrinkled dress clung to her, and her face was pale as she said, "If there's a fight in George, I think when he loves me he really hates you—hates the Fairchilds that he's one of!"

"But the fight in you's over things, not over people," said Ellen gently. "Things like the truth, and what you owe people.—Yes, maybe he hates some thing in us, I think you're right—right."

But Aunt Mac was answering Robbie too, knocking her folded fan on the arm of her chair. "You'll just have to go on back if you're going to use ugly words in here," she was saying. "You're in Shellmound now, Miss Robbie, but I know where you were brought up and who your pa and your ma were, and anything you say don't amount to a row of pins."

"Aunt Mac Fairchild!" said Robbie, lifting her voice again, and turning to the old lady her intense face. "Mrs. Laws! You're all a spoiled, stuck-up family that thinks nobody else is really in the world! But they are! You're just one plantation. With a little crazy girl in the family, and listen at Miss Shannon. You're not even rich! You're just medium. Only four gates to get here, and your house needs a coat of paint! You don't even have one of those little painted wooden niggers to hitch horses to!"

"Get yourself a drink of water, child," said Aunt Mac, through her words. "You'll strangle yourself. And talk louder. Nobody's going to make me wear that hot earphone, not in September!"

"Of course not, dear heart!" Aunt Shannon remarked.

Robbie sank into her chair and leaned, with her little square nails white on her small brown fingers, against the side of the table. "My sister Rebel is right. You're either born spoiled in the world or you're born not spoiled. And people keep you that way until you die.
The people you love
keep you the way you are."

"Why, Robbie," said Ellen. "If you weren't born spoiled, George has certainly spoiled you, I can
see
he has. And I've been thinking you were happy, surely happy."

"But he went to the Grove for dinner, when Miss Primrose had guinea for him, he couldn't stay for me!
Troy
knew I was coming!"

"If George knew you were coming, it was his deepest secret," said Ellen. "He just went to his dinner, he had a royal meal waiting for him at the Grove, and he went and ate it like any man, a sensible human being."

"He always goes to you. He always goes when you call him," said Robbie. "If
Bluet
would call him!" Her small fingers, with one of Mashula's rings, curled into fists in the cake crumbs over the cloth, and then opened out and waited as Ellen spoke.

"But George loves us! Of course he comes. George loves a great many people, just about everybody in the Delta, if you would count them. Don't you know that's the mark of a fine man, Robbie? Battle's like that. Denis was even more, even more well-loved. Why, George loves countless people."

"No, he doesn't!" Robbie looked at her frantically, as if Ellen had told her just what she feared. "I'm going to l-leave out of here," she said, with a sob like a little stutter in her words. "Mr. Doolittle. He loves him," she said seemingly to herself, to mystify herself.

"Well. You love George," Ellen told her, as if there were no mystery there. There was a faint little scream from a bedroom, ending in laughter—Dabney's.

Robbie looked around the room fatalistically—was she too imagining all the Fairchilds' rapt faces? "Maybe he didn't run away from me," she said. "But he let me run away from him. That's just as bad! Oh, I wish I was dead." Her brown eyes went wide.

A boy's gleeful cry rose from upstairs, from Ellen's and Battle's room. "Don't," Ellen whispered, not to Robbie. Then she could hear—from where, now, it did not matter—the most natural and yet the most terrible thing possible to hear just now—laughter, laughter filled with the undeniable music of relief.

Robbie flinched—at her own words, perhaps.

"Don't you die. You love George," Ellen told her. "He's such a splendid boy, and we have all of us always honored him so." She leaned back.

"It's funny," Robbie said then, her voice gentle, almost confiding. "Once I tried to be like the Fairchilds. I thought I knew how." When there was no answer from Ellen, she went on eagerly and yet sadly, "Don't any other people in the world feel like me? I wish I knew. Don't any people somewhere love other people so much that they want to be—not like—but the same? I wanted to turn into a Fairchild. It wasn't that I thought you were so wonderful. And I had a living room for him just like Miss Tempe's. But that isn't what I mean.

"But you all—you don't ever turn into anybody. I think you are already the same as what you love. So you couldn't understand. You've just loving yourselves in each other—yourselves over and over again!" She flung the small brown hand at the paintings of melons and grapes that had been trembling on the wall from the commotion in the house, forgetting that they were not portraits of Fairchilds in this room, and with a circle of her arm including the two live old ladies too. "You still love
them,
and they still love you! No matter what you've all done to each other! You don't need to know how to love anybody else. Why, you couldn't love
me!"

She gave a daring little laugh, and let out a sigh that was a kind of appeal after it. Ellen sat up straight with an effort. In the room's stillness, in Aunt Mac's stare and Aunt Shannon's sweet song, the absence of the Fairchilds and the quiet seemed almost demure, almost perverse. There was a festive little clatter from Tempe in the pantry, laughter coming downstairs.

Then there was George in the door, staring in.

Ellen got up and took hold of the back of her chair, for she felt weak. She held herself up straight, for she felt ready to deliver some important message to George, since he had come back. She was moved from her lethargy, from hearing things, a fluttering in the house like a bodily failing, by a quality of violation she felt quivering alive in Robbie, and looking at George she grew courageous in his implied strength. Yet in the same moment, for her eyes, he stood with his shirt torn back and his shoulders as bare (she thought in a cliché of her girlhood) as a Greek god's, his hair on his forehead as if he were intoxicated, unconscious of the leaf caught there, looking joyous. "Is it out? Is the fire out?" she asked. Her hand held tightly to little Laura McRaven's blue hair ribbon that lay caught over the chair back, flung behind her. Then, "Georgie," she said, "don't let them forgive you, for anything, good or bad. Georgie, you've made this child suffer."

The Yellow Dog had not run down George and Maureen; Robbie had not stayed away too long; Battle had not driven Troy out of the Delta; no one realized Aunt Shannon was out of her mind; even Laura had not cried yet for her mother. For a little while it was a charmed life.... And after giving George an imploring look in which she seemed to commit herself even further to him and even more deeply by wishing worse predicaments, darker passion, upon all their lives, Ellen fell to the floor.

Primrose and Jim Allen came in through the archway behind George, wearing their Sunday hats, and both gave little screams—first the little screams of mild surprise or greeting with which they always entered Shellmound, and then second screams of dismay. "Oh, Primrose," said Jim Allen, and stopping still they shook their flowered heads at each other as if there were no more to be done.

Tempe, coming that instant into the room with a pastry cornucopia on a napkin, shrieked to hear her sisters and then to see Ellen being lifted in George's arms. Then she said calmly, "Fainted. I have these spells myself, semi-occasionally. They are nothing to what I used to have as a girl.—I bet the bird came in here!" She shuddered.

The new screams in the dining room brought in a roomful of Fairchilds with amazing quickness. Robbie backed against the china closet. Orrin was carrying a stunned or dead bird in his cupped hands. The girls, fingers still darting reminiscently to their hair, all fell kneeling, in a stair-steps, around the settee. George was taking off their mother's shoes. Ellen lay with her eyes closed, and with her childlike feet propped shallowly on the inclining end under the fern.

George pushed the children a little. He rushed from Ellen's side to fill a glass from a decanter on the sideboard, and as he went back to her with it, he leaned out and brushed Robbie's wrist with his free hand. Next time he went by, for water, he bent and kissed her rapidly, and asked in pure curiosity that gave her a fierce feeling of joy, "Why did you throw the pans and dishes out the window?" Then he was touching Ellen's lips with various little glasses of stuff, frowning with concentration.