The Eighth Day (42 page)

Twice a day Eustacia's eyes lost their unloving glaze; once—where there were few to see—at the earliest mass, and once—late at night, in treasured solitude—when she unlocked the snowy wonder of her trousseau.

She knew her vocation. She knew why she had been born into the world. It was to love; to be a wife and mother. She had seen no examples of the kind of marriage to which she aspired. She invented marriage. She raised an edifice. A bird hatched from an egg in a dark room can build a nest without having seen one. She assembled fragments from the admonitions of priests at weddings, from passages in the few
romans roses
that circulated on the island, from the very marriages she saw about her—tired, spiritless, insulted, at best resigned—from altar paintings. It is given to some to “idealize” continuously and strongly, as a
Bombyx mori
secretes silk. Eustacia Sims intended to give and receive all the plenitude of the earth by love; to grow seven feet tall by love; to have ten children—Chevalier Bayards, Joséphines—by love; to merit her beauty by love; to live to a hundred, bowed down beneath the crowns of love. She would remain simple and humble—yes, leaving her two score children and grandchildren outside the church, she would kneel in the side chapel—as she did now—only asking acceptance of a woman's life in love. She had arrived at the age of nineteen without having glimpsed a man, young or old, who could be imagined as sharing this life with her. Eustacia was as healthy in mind as in body. She did not indulge in disdain, but she knew all the marriageable young men in the region (they were all, more or less, her cousins); she knew the landscape of their minds, the good and the bad. It was certain that her husband would not come from these islands. Her interest quickened when she heard foreign languages spoken. She doubted that there were more beautiful lands in the world than her own, but she could easily believe that there were countries less steeped in vanity, malice, sloth, and contempt for women. She cast searching glances at the German, Italian, Russian, and Scandinavian officers who visited the port; but held herself aloof from their overtures. Her husband would not be a seaman absent on long voyages from the home they would build together.

She waited. Her mother, from her vast rattan chair, watched Eustacia's progress and understood her problem. She worried about her own: she had three older daughters to marry off, but the island's marriageable young men had eyes only for her youngest. She was constantly being approached by the first citizens on the island, and by the priests—“
Chère madame . . . ?
Jean-Baptiste's Antoine is an exellent young man . . . ? will inherit . . . ? good habits . . . ? very much in love with your daughter Eustacia. Could you speak to your daughter, Madame Marie-Madeleine?”

One evening she called Eustacia into her bedroom.

“Now, my daughter, for two years you've been refusing every offer that comes to us. You refuse to marry and you stand in the way of your sisters' getting married. What is it you want?”

“
Maman
, are you angry with me for working in the store?”

“No.”

“Why are you angry with me? Is it my fault that Antoine and Mémé and
le petit à Beaurepaire
want to marry me? They are nice boys. I like them. I do not love them.
Maman
, they waste my time when I have work to do.”

“So!—Now listen to me, Eustachie.”

Apparently in France when a pretty girl must go alone on a journey, by public coach, or on one of those railway trains, she is often annoyed. She is pushed and pinched and followed by young men and old men who have no fear of God. What do those modest girls do? They brush their foreheads and their cheeks with
le vert de houx.
It does not hurt the skin. You can wash it off in a moment. It merely removes the glow of youth. It gives a gray pallor—even a faintly green tinge—to the skin. The shameless men leave the dear girls alone!

“What do you think of that,
ma fille?
”

“
Maman
, angel.
Maman
, have you some of this
vert de houx?
”

“Here on the island we have no holly, but we have something else. We have the root called
borqui
, or some call it
boraqui.
Look!”

“Quick! Quick!
Maman!
Quick, let me try it.”

People began to say that Eustacia was working too hard at the store. She was beginning to look old. She would be an old maid. Her sisters were serenaded. Marjolaine was engaged to be married by Christmas.

Breckenridge Lansing had not been three days on the island of St. Kitts when suddenly Eustacia Sims regained all her lost beauty between a Tuesday and a Wednesday.

Breckenridge Lansing was good at the start of everything he started. He went from island to island organizing the delivery of bay oil and rum. Everywhere he met with success. For him barrels and carboys and kegs rolled from plantation warehouses and were stamped with the address of his company's laboratories in Jelinek, New Jersey. Entertainments were improvised for him. There were dances by candlelight in the courtyards of great estates. He was taken hunting. Mothers bedecked their daughters for him. Men soon tired of his company. He had a number of the likable traits of a boy, but these men were not accustomed to the conversation of boys. Among the women he won all hearts, including that of Eustacia Sims.

For years, thereafter, Eustacia was to ask herself, tormentedly: how? why?

One morning in early December, years before Lansing's visit, the citizens of Basseterre lifted their eyes to behold a great fourmasted schooner gliding into the port. On each yard a dozen youths were standing, dressed in white, their arms outspread. This was a strange apparition, but what followed was no less spectacular. The training ship
Gdynia
of the Polish navy was making a tour of the world. It carried two hundred midshipmen between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. A people with dark hair and dark eyes, like these islanders, assume that their coloring—together with all the characteristics that accompany it—is human nature itself, is Man. It has no secrets from them. They have resigned themselves to it—perfidious, self-advertising, backsliding. But lo! the two hundred midshipmen and their officers came ashore bringing with them the wonder of another Man—the vulnerable candor of blue eyes, the promise of innocence invested in honey-colored hair. When Gregory the Great first saw British slaves in the market place of Rome, he exclaimed, “Not Angles but Angels.” The fourmaster
Gdynia
continued its journey around the world, but another
Gdynia
floated, white sails furling, through the imaginations of the island women, a ship manned by incorruptible knights of rose and gold, with cerulean eyes.

Dr. Gillies, who worried ideas as a dog worries old bones, used to say: “Nature's trying to get rid of extremes. There was too much dispersion in the last million million years. I see in the paper how there aren't so many blondes left in France; they have to go to Sweden and England to fill those girly-girly shows. We'll all be brown-haired soon. The churches in Russia are hard put to it to find more basses that can make the chandeliers rock, and in Berlin there's an awful dearth of tenors. We'll all be baritones from now on. Nobody'11 be tall or short or dark or light. Nature can't stand extremes. She's throwing opposites into each other's arms to hurry the business. The Bible says that ultimately—when the golden age comes—the lion will lie down with the lamb. I see it coming.”

“Charles, stop it!”

“The violent man will be attracted by the gentle and prudent girl. The owl will lie down with the petrel. Ineffective somnolent wisdom will couple with stormy vitality. Eggs, eggs, interesting eggs. Look at you and me, Cora!”

“Oh, go along with you.”

“Darwin's never tired of showing us how nature selected types for adaptation and survival.”

“I won't have that man mentioned in my house, Charles!”

“Well, maybe
NATURE
after hundreds of millions of years has begun selecting for intelligence and mind and spirit. Maybe
NATURE
is moving into a new era. Breed out the stupid; breed in the wise. Maybe that's why Stacey married Breck. N
ATURE
commanded it. She wanted some interesting babies for her new idea.—We keep on saying that we ‘live our lives.' Shucks; Life lives us.”

“That's bad grammar.”

Breckenridge Lansing had the commonplace face of an Iowa druggist's assistant, but his eyes were of a light cornflower blue and hair was of a silver gold. To the business men of the Antilles he represented fair dealing; to Eustacia Sims he gave promise of children like those that hover among the clouds in altar paintings.

The office in New York was pleased with Lansing's work. He returned to the States, teeming with projects and ideas. He adroitly blocked any suggestion that he return to the Caribbean. He knew already that he was one who could not repeat a success. He was sent to the laboratories in New Jersey. He leaned over the steaming vats, half closed his eyes and murmured “hmm,” judiciously. He picked up a smattering of ideas concerning the processes from the men about him. He submitted some notions for improvement, but his first reception had begun to wear thin. There are certain by-products of coal tar that are put to similar uses through similar processes. The company sent him to Pittsburgh to explore the possibilities of combined research and combined patents. The Pittsburgh company was struck with admiration for his intelligence and energy (“Best young man we've seen in a long time,” . . . ? “bright as a penny”) and offered him a position. He accepted promptly. He liked change. There were good card-playing fellows everywhere; there were animals to be shot everywhere; the kind of women he liked liked him and they could be found everywhere. Before he moved to Pittsburgh, he returned to Basseterre and married Eustacia Sims. The charming young couple spent only a year in Pittsburgh. Lansing was sent, with many a congratulatory handshake, to the “Poor John” mines in Coaltown, Illinois.

Eustacia Sims on the island spent some agonizing hours in her church. She was marrying outside her faith. But several events in the town during those last months seemed to confirm her resolve. They extended her knowledge of what could be expected by women married to a dark-haired, dark-eyed male. She sold the larger part of her trousseau; she put her hand in the store's till and withdrew what she thought was due her. Lansing never knew that she had over a thousand dollars concealed in the back of her grandmother's mirror and in the seams of her clothing. Some doubt might be entertained as to whether Eustacia Sims was ever married, truly married. She bound herself by vows in three ceremonies—one in the Queen's registry office, one in a Baptist church, and one in a church of her own faith. They were all crowded into three days, because Lansing must return to his position in Pittsburgh. The only ceremony that meant anything to her was performed in a little church on the farther side of the island. She was married by an uncle who loved her dearly. He stretched the rite as far as it could go. (Lansing had given his promise that he would receive “instruction” at the earliest possible moment.) Eustacia did not notice—or, perhaps, did not choose to notice—certain lacunae in the ceremony. She certainly heard a nuptial blessing. Lansing twice placed a wedding ring on her finger. He had bought it in New York, but unfortunately on the eve of leaving that harbor he had lost forty dollars in a card game among strangers. Eustacia—bright-eyed saleswoman that she was—knew at once that the ring was of plated brass. She dipped into her own savings and replaced it with one of purest gold.

They were very popular on the ship that carried them to New York—he for his wit, she for her beauty. (Her wit was as remarkable as her beauty, but she lost it within three days; it returned like a famished dog, eight years later.) On the seventh and last night the captain raised his glass to the most attractive couple he had ever had the privilege of conveying. The passengers rose from their chairs and shouted.

Eustacia had the sensation of climbing mountain after mountain of despair. She could perhaps become accustomed to the discovery that he was obsequious to wealth and office—a trait she had fled from in her father; that he browbeat servants—a trait that she had fled from in her mother; that he was stingy in small things and spendthrift in large. Perhaps the thing that most affronted her was the constant play in his fancy with assassination. On the deck, in the dining saloon he aimed imaginary guns at his fellow passengers: “Click! Got 'em where the camel got the needle!” “Got to raise my sights. There! Sorry, madam! Goodnight!” “Wait till the old giraffe comes round again.”

“But, Breckenridge, let them live.”

“All right, Stacey, if you say so, honey. Just one more for the sharks.”

He was silent only in sleep. It is the privilege of a bridegroom to introduce a sheltered girl to a store of witty anecdotes that has hitherto been closed to her. There is a small proportion of jokes about sexual relations that does not conceal—like a bludgeon in a bouquet—an aggressive contempt for woman. Breckenridge Lansing may have heard some of these, but his memory was not able to retain them.

The attractive young couple disembarked in New York on St. Valentine's Day, 1878. Eustacia had never seen snow; she had never felt the cold. As soon as she was able she stumbled through the snowdrifts to a church of her faith. Toward the end of the hour on her knees she assumed the yoke as punishment for her disobedience. She had made a mistake, but she trusted that the sacrament of marriage would, in some unforseeable way, support her.

They went on to Pittsburgh and from Pittsburgh to Coaltown. Neither place could boast a salubrious climate—least of all for a daughter of sun and sea. They lost three children. We have seen how Lansing readily let the reins of administration pass first to Miss Thoms, then to Ashley. But every man must establish some area in his life where he is a success. He was a success in clubs and lodges; he was a great success in those taverns up the River Road where his laughter, stories, and horseplay reanimated a company that was not always joyous. Several times a week he drove his team home as the sun rose. Staggering, he released his horses to the croquet lawn. It was not necessary for him to climb any stairs; he could slip into bed in an abandoned playroom on the first floor. He released his horses to the croquet lawn—an all but unimaginable example of bad husbandry—not because he was drunk, but because he was tired. He was exhausted with that multiplication of fatigue that follows exertions spent—above a ground bass of self-doubt and despair—in search of pleasure. Eustacia early learned that she had been spared one burden—her husband was not a drinking man. Alcohol disagreed with him. To Breckenridge Lansing this was a deep mortification, for heavy drinking played a large part in the image he had received in childhood of what is required of a
man.
Nevertheless, he drank and talked in large terms about his drinking. He had learned all the devices of concealment. He emptied his glass in flower pots and spittoons; he exchanged his full glasses for half-filled glasses around the table. He even carried a goose feather with which, apart, he could empty his stomach.