The Last Adam (31 page)

From the anonymous rear a voice or two cried, "That's telling them, Henry!" But in the hesitant silence, Matthew Herring, erecting his tall figure above the seated rows, said: "Mr. Chairman! Now that Mr. Harris seems to have finished his misrepresentations, may I suggest that we proceed with the business of the meeting. I don't think there's any need to waste time pointing out to intelligent people the irrelevance of such points as Mr. Harris could be said to have made. His interpretation of the vital statistics won't stand up a moment when you recall that this has always been a prosperous and isolated agricultural community in one of the healthiest sections of the state. No one here has denied that it is human to make mistakes; Mr. Harris appears to feel that it is also divine and ought to be encouraged. His attack on a person not present, and on the motives of those who are, can only be called contemptible and, I am sure, has been recognized as only that. May we get on, Mr. Chairman?"

"Yes, I guess so," Walter Bates said. He hit the table with the mallet. "Please don't make so much noise back there. Now the proposition, I mean, the resolution offered is—I got it written down here somewhere. Just a moment —"

This small inadvertency—Walter Bates' flustered search for his paper—was plainly fatal.

"Ah!" said Robert Newall. There was a hard click of his boot heels striking the floor as he stood up, and he stopped, staring about him, for he could feel the crowded hall in psychological crisis. He had meant only to say that he was going home, but aware now of the delicate balance, his violent, destructive instinct was to bring it down. He shouted again, "Ah, to hell with it! Never mind that paper! We know who wrote it! This meeting's been nothing but a lot of foolishness and a waste of busy men's time. Harris said the things most of us probably believe —"

A quick mounting roar, which might be protest, but which had an indubitable note of cheering, made him pause.

"Mr. Chairman!" came Matthew Herring's voice, edged and distinct.

Walter Bates lifted his mallet, but Robert Newall put a foot on the chair seat, stood on it, rising that much higher than Herring. He shouted: "If you ask me, I think Doc Bull's all right, and I know more about it than some. During the average summer, he probably is up to my camp a dozen times. He's never killed anybody yet. I've never seen a guest who wasn't satisfied with the treatment given him. Now, let's adjourn and get out of here. We don't want any resolution; we aren't going to sign anything —"

Mrs. Bates had got up, livid in an inarticulate fury. "Just let everyone who feels that way go," she said. "I believe there are enough decent and responsible people here to —"

"Sure," agreed Newell, "let the hens stay and scratch until they're tired! Good place for 'em. Who's chairman here, Walter, you or your wife? How long is this gang of yowling females going to run this town, anyway?"

In the back they were shouting, delighted, "Move we adjourn. Second it! Hell, I third it! You can't do that. Sure I can, I just did —"

Harry Weems cupped his hands and yelled, "Say, how about a vote of confidence in Doc Bull? All in favour—"

Miss Kimball, standing up, cried, "Shame! Shame!" The stir and confusion of voices drowned them both out; so Harry called, "All right, let's go!" Someone opened the doors, and they began to move.

"Will everyone please take his seat?" began Matthew Herring, but it was plain that very few were going to. "Let them go," Miss Kimball said. "They won't think so well of themselves when they see it in print. That much I'm sure of —"

"You don't mean to tell me," said Henry Harris, "that
The Times
would print it all?"

"I certainly do, and —"

Over the disordered front rows, over empty chairs, Matthew Herring said, "Henry, you're quite a speaker! You've beaten me. But I don't think you can beat truth and decency. Not every time, at any rate."

"Why, Matthew," Henry Harris answered, turning his delighted grin from Miss Kimball and her notebook, "I never have any quarrel with intangibles."

Unhurried, he went out, crossed slowly over to the station and stepped into a telephone booth. When his dropped coin got him Doris Clark, he said, "Doris, I want Sansbury one-six-two."

Smiling, leaning against the closed door, he reflected that matters could have been worse. Of course, it was too bad that Lester had to get sick and as he'd said—he grinned again, relishing the circumstances of his saying it—he'd never see his hundred and fifty dollars again; but after all, Matthew Herring couldn't have been any madder, or in any less doubt about who cooked his goose.

"Hello," he said. "Sansbury
Times
? Mr. Marden in? Yes. Oh, Marden. Harris. Listen, will you do me a favour? No, you don't. You don't have to do anything; I'm just asking if you will. I think it would be a good idea to kill the New Winton correspondent's story this week. Well, we've had a kind, of hot town meeting, and she hasn't much judgment. No sense in spreading our troubles all over the state. Sure, that's all: No, after that, it'll be all right. She knows her business when she doesn't get excited. Fine. Much obliged. I'll do something for you some time."

Emerging, he crossed the open space, saluting with a casual lift of hand various drivers of cars starting and backing. Reaching Gosselin Brothers' store, he went in. "Give me a dozen of those big Florida oranges you have that poetry about pasted on the front window," he said. "It is poetry, isn't it? I tell you what, put them in a bag and send them down to the Evarts' place for Mr. Dunn, will you?"

Bending down, Mr. Banning brushed the thin crust of mud from the wooden tag, read the words:
Mevrouw Van Gendt.
Remembering at once the long pointed buds, the flowers in salmon shading out of yellow and pink, he applied his pruning shears. That was the last of the four beds, leaving "him only the narrow strip of old-fashioned remontants in a curve beyond the sundial
—
General McArthur
,
Jonkheer Mock
,
Mrs. John Laing.
They were varieties his mother had favoured for a rose jar—he could even remember the jar, three-quarters full of curled petals in a pungent arrested decay. It was hard to think of anything more useless.

Straightening up, he pulled off his loose yellow horse-hide gloves, laid them with the pruning shears on the sundial while he looked at his watch. It was half-past ten, and, refilling his pipe slowly, he wondered how the town meeting was getting on. He meant, more particularly, how his absence and Lucile's would be interpreted, suppose it was noticed at all in the excitement.

The truth was that he couldn't quite make up his mind, which always proved a great help in taking the easier course. Not regarding the business with any warm approval, he none the less wouldn't object to Matthew's success. The resulting picture of himself didn't please him. It had a complacently passive quality. When other men had got the unpleasantness over, he would be content to join them in what resulting profit there was. The one frank and correct course would probably be for him to oppose the whole scheme; not vaguely and half-heartedly in private, but publicly:
"I do not think any good or just purpose will be served
—"

That was, of course, impossible. Lucile would consider it too outrageous of him. If she thought about them at all, she probably made some distinctively feminine allowance for opinions he might express which were not hers. She didn't mind if it amused him to say what no one expected him to in casual conversation; but when it came to matters she considered serious, she would see it as a wanton betrayal of things which she couldn't help believing they both stood for. Matthew would naturally see it the same way; he would be deeply astonished, unable or perhaps unwilling to explain so irresponsible an attitude.

Sighing unconsciously, he roused himself, struck a match and laid the flame to the packed tobacco. A thick privet hedge sheltered him from the north wind and it was almost warm. He could feel the vehemence of the March sun on the turf, the spaced rose-buds, the flagged path; he could even feel it through the suède jacket on his back, and it cheered him with the promise of an eventual peaceful summer, all this business somehow settled and largely forgotten. Taking up the shears and his gloves, he uncovered the swash letter script encircling the old dial plate:
It is later than you think.

He was reminded again of his mother, who had placed the sundial and done, by fits and starts, a little general flower-growing around it. The inscription had, to her, he knew, a religious value. You were to think how little time remained to prepare to face your Maker, not how little time remained in which to be happy. Of course, having thought of it, that was enough. She would not expect that any person in her garden would be in the vulgar need of reforming his life. Gentlefolk meeting had no reason to exchange admonitions: Do not commit adultery. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Defraud not. Honour thy father and mother. Propriety would take ample care of the commandments. Manners and morals all fitted together, all made for the placid positiveness with which his mother accepted life.

So sure of it all, she was much less devoted to church work than Lucile. Her religious relationship was to God, not to the rector. Only a very rude person would suggest it, but the Church, in its sense of the Episcopal parishes, undoubtedly meant more to Lucile than religion did. She thought of the Church with a comfortable sense of its formal beauty and dignity. In this particular fellowship in Christ, all was easy; the people everywhere would be approximately her own kind; their attitudes and interests would be comprehensible to her and in keeping with an ecclesiastical tradition of means, breeding, and education.

That was all very well, Mr. Banning could see, but it was not static any more. It would not be the end. Virginia, in a next generation of Banning women, would undoubtedly have no religion, nor any interest in a surviving tradition. At Virginia's age, he could feel intuitively his parents' sober, perhaps smug, acceptance. What Virginia felt would be his unspoken indifference; and little better, Lucile's preoccupation with the formal aspects. Presumably his parents would have taken disciplinary measures if he had failed in a sober, godly, and righteous attitude. Lucile, by doing nothing, acknowledged her failure. If Virginia went to Church, it was distinctly as a favour to her mother and tacitly recognized as that. As far as Virginia was concerned, there was no sense in it. For her to go alone—that was, without any reason—would be unthinkable. Church-going was simply a form—fortunately growing milder as she got older—of that adult tyranny to which she submitted because she must. Lucile really would not dare speak to her about God or the teachings of Jesus. It would be safer not to bring up the issue of Virginia's real thoughts and sentiments.

What those were, he couldn't presume to know. Virginia didn't consider him or her mother suitable people to confide in. Probably she expected nothing from them but interference. What, she might reasonably argue, was the point in their declarations of love and interest when most of their time was spent in forbidding her to do what she wanted to do, or finding means to punish her when she did it anyway? Possibly she distrusted her mother more than him—sometimes he could see a skittish, wary approach to frankness or affection; but it never really got there. Prematurely, she would be emboldened to hope, would risk one more of her unpredictable requests; and, necessarily refused, draw back to nurse her new hurts.

There was nothing to be done about it, he knew now. His instincts, from the first to help her, defend her, cherish her—she was not like Guy, who never from the time he could walk and begin to speak was anything but the competent, reasonable, and assured master of his world—got him nowhere. Probably, as in other things, his inability to express himself, except in the most stiff and formal terms, hampered him. Perhaps, in any event, there could have been no explaining to Virginia. She did not care about explanations. If he answered indirectly, she would wait only until she was sure that the answer was going to be "No." The light of her unquenched hope, the wild impossible appeal, went out. Wordless, she went away at once; or, if required to stay, stayed not really listening, never agreeing or assenting; as though she could not imagine why he found it necessary to talk so much when he had already said all that mattered.

Sighing again, he pulled his gloves on, for he could see that never would that difficulty resolve. The time was coming, perhaps was almost here, when saying "No" could not stop her; when, probably angry and bitter, she would do what she wanted without having to ask anybody. Common sense foresaw the disgraces and disasters almost certain to attend her when life, having no words, corrected her viciously with results. He stood still, looking at the sundial, for he had never been able to defend her, or help her, or save her. Perhaps the most he could expect would be the chance to comfort her when she had hurt herself beyond hope. Unhappy, he could see the fine-cut script:
It is later than you think.

"Mrs. Cole!"

"Now, my goodness, who's that? Who's there?"

"It's me."

Aunt Myra came out into the kitchen. The back door was open and she could see Mabel Baxter on the verge of entering. "Well," she said, "what time is this for you to come? Now, don't you let it happen again. You come here before school, and I told you you could have your breakfast."

"Well, I was here before. There isn't any school to-day; it's Saturday, Mrs. Cole."

"Oh, I forgot. Well, there probably will be next week. You march right up afterwards. If I'm not here the key's always under the mat, so don't make that an excuse. Now, I'm sure I don't know what you can do this morning. I've done everything myself."

"Well, I just wanted to come back and tell you my father said it would be all right."

"I should hope so! I'm paying you as much as I paid Susie, who'd been here three years. You tell him that if he'd work sometimes himself he wouldn't have to worry so much about what his children were paid."