Teeftallow/Chapter 24

TWO days later the labourers of the railroad construction works, their families, and all their household goods were loaded into box cars at Irontown and were shipped to a camp site some sixteen miles to the west of the village.

The ordeal of parting brought Nessie Sutton to the station with Abner, and the two stood in the shade of the depot watching the trucks and wagons back up to the waiting cars and deliver their loads. The furniture of the labourers was shabby and seemed on the verge of falling apart. As it arrived in wagons, the two lovers would identify it mechanically as "That belongs to the Davises; that to the McLemores," but this was done without the slightest personal interest. It was a mere ticketing which went on mechanically in the strange trance of their leave-taking.

It seemed to Abner as if Time had paused, that it hung in a pool above the cataract of their parting. Down the line of cars sweaty labourers heaved and shoved at rickety furniture; the little engine of the new railroad panted intermittently; a brakeman in greasy overalls lay under a car wheel repacking a hot box with oily waste. The whole scene was laid on in pale yellow sunshine and soft bluish shadows. It seemed to Abner that he and Nessie would go on thus for ever, standing with their hands secretly clasped behind a fold of Nessie's skirt, watching the men, the wagons, the train, with all his senses wrapped up in the intimacy and sympathy of the girl. The touch of her small warm palm pressed against his own, their interlaced fingers filled him with a sense of unity with Nessie which he had never known even in moments of their closest embraces. A quietness, a ​steadfastness of affection seemed to emanate from her. It was an affection upon which Abner knew in his heart he could rely all the rest of his life; that she would always love him, always absolve his frailties, his intemperances and shortcomings with the endless patience of the hill women for their men.

The thought that he was leaving such a largesse filled him with a great depression. To defend his own failing heart he pressed her hand and said to her, "But, Nessie, I can come back jest any time on the train; it makes a trip ever' day."

She nodded faintly, drew in her lips and bit them.

A pang went through Abner that he had not clung to the externals of the scene: the furniture, the labourers, a pet goat of one of the children.

Nearly all the men had wives; women who followed them everywhere. He and Nessie stood apart, alone in this eternal parting, this melting pain. He gripped the girl's hand till he hurt her.

"Nessie . . ." he began in a taut undertone.

At that moment the whistle of the locomotive deafened their ears. Amid the din they could faintly distinguish a dog howling. The blast swept the lovers out of their entranced security and flung them into the very moment of parting. They shrunk as best they could behind the corner of the depot and caught each other passionately in their arms. They pressed their lips and bodies together as if they could never tear away.

"Abner, good-bye. . . . God bless you. . . . O-oh, Abner . . ."

"Good-bye, good-bye. . . . I'll be back. . . ."

The teamster could barely make out her face blurred by his tears. It seemed to the youth as if he were tearing out a very part of his own body. His desire to marry her, to keep her by him for ever arose to an agony. Other men were not subject to these tearings asunder. He took his lips from hers.

"Nessie," he trembled, "I want you to be my . . ."

At that moment the last blast of the locomotive over​powered their ears. It shocked him into instant and violent action. He stooped, seized his paper suitcase and wooden box, and the next moment went running down the platform, jumped off the end on to the long cinder strip beside the track, and made for the last box car. Just as it clashed forward he swung his bags inside, leaped at the entrance, landed on his stomach across the bottom of the door. In an instant he wriggled, stood up, and began waving his hand at Nessie.

The girl waved back, gasping at this display of activity. For the moment she had been terrified lest he fall under the car and be ground to pieces. But the ease and suppleness with which he had jumped and righted himself sent a thrill through her. It brought to her nerves the wild, passionate power she was losing. It was like so much strength being taken away from her own person; it left her a kind of shell of a girl, as if the stronger, more vital part of her were moving away on the box car.

She waved her handkerchief miserably, blinking her eyes so she could discern Abner’s form in the square black door of the freight car. The youth, the door, the whole train rattled down the track, out of the freight yard, growing smaller and smaller. At the limit of the yard, the engine gave a final shriek, rounded a curve toward the west, and the tiny figure in the small black door was lost to Nessie’s view.

After the train had vanished Nessie still stood wiping her eyes and staring down the track when a voice behind her drawled,

"Girlie, don’t blubber so, when one’s gone leaves room fer another."

In her pain Nessie did not understand the sentence or realize it was addressed to her. She continued wiping her eyes, made an effort to compose her face, and then turned to go home, holding her lips between her teeth.

"Hell," observed the voice behind her, "you ain't none too good to notice a feller. . . ."

​But the man might as well have been talking to a patient under a surgeon's knife. Nessie walked on around the depot platform, then set out through the utter emptiness of the village streets.

The man continued looking at her with a sardonic leer on a face peculiarly adapted to this expression. His name was Nathan Bagley. In his pleasanter moments, Mr. Bagley’s face wore a look of soiled cynicism as if he had learned thoroughly the dubiety of truth, the emptiness of chastity, the futility of kindliness, and the general inadaptability of the virtues to life as it is lived. He was a kind of be-smutted Nathan the Wise. No salacious rumour in Irontown escaped him, and he felt a personal interest in each report.

Now he stood looking after Nessie with a sneer on his face because she had not paused to fall into conversation with him. As she walked away he scrutinized the curve of her ankles, which was the part of a woman he always observed, and snarled loud enough for Nessie to have heard him, "Old skirt, if you think you're too good to talk to me, you've got another think coming!"

The overtures of Mr. Nathan Bagley toward Nessie Sutton at the railroad station were, broadly interpreted, an advance notice served on the girl of village excommunication. The fact that Nessie, in the pain of parting from her lover, did not hear Mr. Bagley's remarks was of little moment; the village could be depended upon to call the matter to her attention later.

It required a number of days for Irontown to formulate its position toward the milliner's assistant. By the different village groups she was discussed lickerishly, scornfully, philosophically; from garage to bank. The monotony of village life was stirred by this touch of colour.

The whole village readjusted its attitude toward the milliner’s assistant under the conviction that she had turned out something different from what they had esteemed her. ​The villagers immediately attributed a duplicity to Nessie's year-long church and Sunday-school going. "What hypocrisy!" they said. "The pretence she's been making!" Naturally, they could never suspect that the same emotional trait which caused her to tithe and give herself profoundly to religious observances might be transposed into as equally complete surrender to a lover. No one imagined she had remained consistent in character, so each village group readjusted itself to this new or "real" character which the girl had discovered.

When Mrs. Roxie Biggers heard the scandal, she was moved to take some instant action about it, as was her wont. Mrs. Roxie was sewing some sheets which she meant to give to a labourer's wife who had been brought down with puerperal fever. She had begged enough cloth from the stores to make four sheets, and she meant to keep two of them for her own use.

Now without looking up from the clatter of her sewing machine she spoke to the neighbour who was making an afternoon call upon her.

"It's the hypocrisy of the thing!" she denounced, glaring at her seam with thin, widely spread nostrils, "Going prissing down to my brother Perry's Sunday-school ever' Sunday; out to prayer meetin'; then to church; then workin' among sinners in the revival; and now turned out to be a strumpet! What will Brother Perry think!"

The caller at the Bigger's home, a Mrs. Gumerton, was a heavy, slow-motioned woman who went right on with the tally of her gossip entirely disregarding the angry ejaculations of her hostess.

"Kissed him right down there at the station before ever'body!"

"Shameless baggage, advertisin' her sin! Flauntin' it in our faces!"

"Mister Bagley—you know Mister Bagley, the freight agent—he said they simply clung to each other—kissed fer three or four minutes. . . ."

​"Didn't she have no sense of decency a-tall?" flared Mrs. Roxie, "Kissin' like that in public!"

"Outrageous!" echoed Mrs. Gumerton.

Gossip of this prolonged caress was peculiarly irritating to both of the good women, because it just happened that neither of them had been kissed in any sort of fashion for years and years.

Mrs. Biggers stopped her galloping seam to say, "I do think Brother Perry ort to be informed of how she's treated him— Law, look here, this hemmer ain't been ketchin' for two yards! Well, that pore woman will jest have to put up with it. I'm in such a rush! Sally, would you min' goin' back over this while I run down an' warn Brother Perry—he ort to know it!"

Mrs. Gumerton, who also wanted to spread the news, began slowly getting up.

"I'm sorry, Roxie, but I jest haven't got time."

"Now, Sally," snapped Mrs. Roxie determinedly. "I don't know how it is that ever' bit of the work done by the Willin' Workers gits put off on me. There's not a thing in the worl' to hinder you from doin' a little. It won't hurt you none! Me, bent down to it all day long an' ha'f the night! Now you jest take holt here, and when you git this finished, here's another'n cut out"—she jabbed it at her. "I'll be down at Brother Perry's jest a minute!"

The force of her superior will moved Mrs. Gumerton unwillingly to the machine and seated her in the chair. The guest went slowly back to the point which the hostess, in her rush, had skipped.

Mrs. Biggers seized an old shawl, clapped it around her thin shoulders as protection against the faint autumn chill in the air, then with a final admonition to her guest to work diligently in her absence, she hurried out of the house. As she crossed her porch she saw her husband in an old armchair asleep in the sunshine. For some reason, the sight made her more rancorous still toward Nessie, and she thought to herself,

​"That girl deserves to be drummed out of town exactly like all the rest of the prostitutes!"

This thought was still in her mind when she entered the bank and went into the directors' room, the only private room in the building. She called sharply through an open door into the cashier's department,

"Brother Perry, I want to see you a minute!"

Mr. Perry Northcutt detached himself grudgingly from the work of drafting a letter to Railroad Jones. It was a delicately poised instrument designed to mark the beginning of a fracture in the relations of the bank and Mr. Jones; or, in the event that the magnate had more property to hypothecate, the letter was intended to cement more firmly the friendship between the bank and the builder; a very diplomatic letter indeed. So now he walked into the directors' room with a projected sentence forming itself in his head.

"Well, Roxie," he asked in a professional tone, "what can I do for you?"

The sight of Perry as the controlling figure in the Irontown Bank always pleased Roxie.

"Perry, I just come to tell you about that Sutton girl in your Sunday-school class. . . . I thought it was my duty," she added as an afterthought.

The cashier looked at his thin gray-haired sister suspiciously. He knew when Roxie's duty moved her to make disclosures they were usually of a compromising nature.

"What did you want to say about her?" he inquired, transferring a little more of his attention from his letter to his sister.

"Perry, your confidence has been violated," she began solemnly.

"What are you talking about, Roxie? The bank hasn't advanced any money to Miss Sutton."

"It isn't money, it isn't as serious as that, but it's bad enough; she has disgraced herself with that Teeftaller boy—an' she's in your Sunday-school class. Such wickedness! Such ingratitude!"

​The banker really was shocked. "You don't mean Miss Sutton has—" The pause in his sentence was eloquent and he stared at his sister in genuine dismay.

"That's exactly what I mean. It's all over town! Ever'body's talkin' it!"

"Oh, that's awful! Maybe it's a false rumour—things get started. . . ."

"False rumour nothing!" cried the old woman. "Mr. Bagley saw 'em down at the station huggin' an' kissin' in a disgustin' manner!"

"Bagley's a lecher and a rake himself!"

"They tell that on Mr. Bagley, but I don't know—he makes a mighty good salary down there at the freight office."

Here the conversation came to a pause; the banker continued to look inquiringly at his sister and finally said, "Roxie, you didn't come down here simply to tell me that?"

"No, I didn't!" exclaimed the old woman, breaking into rancour again. "It's like this"—she shook a bony finger at her brother. "What right has Nessie Sutton got to stay in this town! Other loose women haff to git out!"

Mr. Northcutt was genuinely surprised. "You wouldn't treat a young girl as the boys did those old strumpets, Roxie?"

Mrs. Biggers compressed her thin lips. "The Bible says, God is no respecter of persons, Perry, and besides you know a young pretty girl can raise more trouble in less time than a house full of the other sort. Now sence Nessie Sutton has showed up in her true character, I think the people of Arntown ort to make her clear out along with the rest. No use bein' mealy-mouthed about it even if she is purty. We don't want her kind amongst us. So I say a delegation ort to wait on her jest like they did on old Mol Garraty!"

Mr. Perry Northcutt, who thought he knew his sister, marvelled for the hundredth time in his life at the peculiar ferocity of women toward women. A notion, due to his Biblical studies, flitted across his mind that if Christ had ​been a woman, Mary Magdalene would never have received absolution.

The banker came back to the topic in hand.

"Well, I couldn't sanction any such procedure as that, Roxie; Miss Nessie is entirely different. . . ."

"You mean she's prettier!" snapped the old woman.

"I mean it's her first offence!" retorted the banker sharply. "I'd like to know where your Christian charity comes in if a single misstep—"

"Single misstep! Huh! You're mighty innocent; her and that Teeftaller boardin' in the same hotel!"

"Anyway, I don't consider her habitually bad, and I personally won't do a thing to disturb the unfortunate girl. You and some other good woman ought to go down and talk to her, Roxie."

"Huh, I'm goin' down an' talk to Mr. Baxter an' tell him what sort of a girl he's got workin' in his millinery department!"

"Roxie!" exclaimed the cashier in alarm. "I wouldn't do that, it'll cost the girl her position!"

"It's somebody's duty to do it!" cried the old woman fiercely. "Somebody ort to tell Mr. Baxter what a hypocrite he's housin'. She'll run off all his trade! What decent woman would go there and trade with an unchaste woman! Take it to yourse'f, Perry Northcutt, supposed you had a crooked girl in your bank, would you keep her there a minute? Course not! Somebody ort to tell Mr. Baxter, an' I, for one, don't shirk my duty when I see it!" She wagged her gray unkempt head determinedly. "I'll tell it right before the girl if she's there! I'm not the one to say behind a person's back what I won't say to her face! So there!"

Mrs. Roxie snapped her lean jaws together, dilated her high thin nostrils, whirled about, and hurried out of the bank to discharge her duty as a citizen of Irontown. As she went she fired a last broadside,

"If your father, Perry Northcutt, who is dead an' in Heaven, can look over the golden walls and see you taking ​up for a whorish woman, I wonder what he is thinking this minute of his son?"

By this token the cashier knew that he had irritated his sister deeply; she never wondered what their father in Heaven would think of him unless she herself disapproved profoundly.

A vision of his father leaning over a wall of gold with a rather extra fine crown on his head and a harp neglected for the nonce while he surveyed the earth in general and Irontown in particular, to see what his son Perry was doing about the Teeftallow-Sutton scandal, flitted across the cashier's mind. He knew his dead father would approve his position, but he had a notion that his mother, who was also up there with a somewhat smaller and less gaudily ornamented crown and a less sonorous harp, would not approve if his father should chance to call her attention to the disturbance back in their old earthly home. The cashier trusted to the discretion of his beatified father not to mention the matter to his beatified mother because he felt sure that women are always a little unreasonable; as on earth, so they are in Heaven.