Teeftallow/Chapter 26

THE telephone tinkled in the Scovell House, and Miss Lydia Scovell answered it. She began with the usual, "Hello—yes, this is Liddy.—What? What? She did?—You don't say so! You know I suspicioned something like that! I sure did! Oh, I seen enough! Plenty! I'll tell you when I see you. No, you can be sure she won't! Not a day longer! I run a respectable house. I do! Why, I'd see her in Jericho before I'd keep her a minute longer! I will, I'll go right up this minute an' give her her walkin' papers! Yes, I will! Good-bye, Roxie, an' much obliged for tellin' me!—Oh, I guess that's all right, me an' you didn't see exactly the same about Mr. Beavers, but now I know you are my frien'.—Well, I try to do right, too. Good-bye an' thank you ag'in," and she snapped up the receiver.

The old woman started up the stairs, thinking to herself, "I'll show her! The two-faced hussy!" She tramped smartly along the upper hall to the door of her boarder's room.

When she entered the door the hotel keeper stood, tall and gaunt, looking at the girl who lay prostrate on the bed with her hair about her face.

Miss Scovell had meant to fall into instant and violent vituperation, but now there was something about the forlorn figure on the bed which checked the bitterest of her thoughts. She cleared her throat in a menacing manner. Nessie gave a faint start and turned her face from her pillow to look with swollen eyes at the old maid.

The two women looked at each other silently for a moment, the young woman struck down, the old one slowly soured through causes fundamentally the same. Neither was ​aware of how near their grievances lay together, and they looked at each other with inimical eyes. Presently the elder woman said in a strained tone, "Miss Sutton, I'll want this room after to-morrer." She had meant to say, "I'll want this room to-morror," but some weakening had granted an extra day.

It required, perhaps, two seconds for Nessie to understand that she was being turned out of the hotel. A last defensive impulse caused her to fall back on her legal rights.

"B-but, M-Miss Scovell," she protested unsteadily, "I—I paid for a week."

This faint opposition aroused the old maid's life-long sense of wrong. "It makes no diff'runce if you paid for a year!" she snapped. "A girl like you kain't stay here! Git yore things packed an' git out—prancin' off to church an' prayer meetin' an' Sunday-school ever Sunday, an' now this!" The old woman trembled from the implicit irony that this thing had happened here in her own hotel. "I'll have your trunk hauled off in the mornin', and between now an' then, I'll have yore meals sent up to you—you needn't come down to the dinin' room!"

The sentence revealed to the girl in a flash of illumination exactly how the village women looked upon her as something loathsome; something to be kept out of sight. And Nessie remembered that she herself had felt the same way toward other unfortunate women. It had seemed to Nessie then, and it seemed to Miss Scovell now, that some chemical change came over women who had sinned; their very flesh was not the same as other women's flesh; pollution was intrinsic in them; and yet now Nessie had no sensation of evil save that she was bayed at on every side; that every human being whom she saw reviled and despised her.

"Miss Scovell," she asked piteously, "where can I go?"

"Huh, you ort to know such places better'n I do!" and the landlady gave Nessie a look of hatred, turned on her heel, and with her thin dew-lapped neck held high, walked back down the hall with condemnation in her footfalls.

​The milliner remained on the bed, closed her eyes, and moved her aching head. She tried to think. Where would she go? No matter where she went the "nice" people, the Christian people with whom she had associated all of her life, would have none of her. She could never speak to another "nice" woman, never help design another hat, never freely indulge in the simple pleasure of prayer meeting and Sunday-school lesson; and yet the thought of any other sort of association was terrifying to her. She was exactly what she had been before her passionate surrender to her lover.

A strange thought trickled through Nessie’s throbbing head that perhaps all "nice" girls were merely fortunate girls, and "bad" girls merely unfortunate. This fancy itself seemed impure, not maidenly, and she thought with dismay, "Am I really becoming bad?"

Presently her thoughts came back to the problem actually in hand. Where could she go? How could she search out another boarding place, and then what could she do? The notion of walking out into the staring village and asking anywhere for board was impossible.

A profound shudder ran through the girl. A vision of those depths to which she knew unfortunate women did sink arose in terrifying detail before her. Tears trickled out of her eyes and wet her cheeks, and she prayed silently, gripping her hands and looking up at the fly-stained ceiling, "O God, don’t let me come to that! God have mercy, I'd rather die than do that!" She grew chill with repulsion at the thought. She shock away the horrible imaginings and almost mechanically arose to her feet and set about her packing.

As she worked, her thoughts continued to skurry here and there like terrified rats seeking to escape from a trap. She saw Buckingham Sharp's law book still lying on her table and she thought of appealing to him. But she decided he would not hear her. She thought of going to other men of the village. She did not know that the essential thing in a ​woman's loss of chastity was a lowering of conventional masculine restraints; a loosing of the men upon her.

But presently her thoughts returned to Mrs. Roxie Biggers again, to the charitable old woman who had always befriended the stricken and the weak. Her fancy turned to the old Samaritan with a kind of yearning faith.

She was stuffing her slippers, hose, and underwear into her trunk, utilizing for the smaller articles the space between her novels; the pure benign novels which had never contemplated for their heroines any such desperate disgrace as this.

As she touched the books and sensed their tenor, her own falling away from the rôle of heroine filled her with shame and dismay. It seemed to Nessie that she would give her every possession on earth if she could reinstate herself in that perfect sphere where once her imagination moved. She still did not suspect that in essence it was an impossible sphere; that there were no such lives.

As she worked, the check for her month's salary which Mr. Baxter had given her appeared on her table in the mysterious way such objects have of appearing and disappearing in the hands of a careless person. It demanded some sort of disposal. Nessie took it up and looked at it. She needed the money on it, but the mere thought of taking it to the bank and getting it cashed daunted her. She could not take it to the bank with the whole village watching her and thinking that she had been first discharged from the Grand and then driven from her boarding house. The check was for seventy-five dollars.

Again Mrs. Biggers entered her mind as one who would assist her in getting the check cashed. She finished packing, pondering how she could get to the Biggers home. She could slip out of the hotel at about six o'clock when the village was at supper. The streets would be almost deserted then.

As she closed the lid of her trunk there came a faint tapping at her door. The girl looked around defensively and was surprised to see it was John, the Negro chore boy, who unac​countably had returned to the hotel. He had a dinner on a black oxidized tin tray.

She told him to put it on her table. John entered gingerly, rolling his eyes after the manner of a frightened Negro.

"Goin' away, Miss Nessie?" he asked in a low voice.

The girl nodded and looked at the food with throbbing temples. The black boy shifted feet and cap uneasily.

"Is dey anything else I kin bring ye, Miss Nessie?"

"I'm not hungry, John."

"Yessum," agreed the boy.

The girl thought he was waiting for the plates and sipped a little of the thick soup. Its greasiness made her shudder and almost nauseated her.

"You can take it all away," she said in a sick voice.

"Yessum." He moved again to the table and when he was nearest her he said in a low tone without looking at her, "Miss Nessie, would you min' if I tol' you somp'in'?"

"What is it?" she asked in the same tone.

"You won't tell I tol' je?" whispered the Negro, plainly frightened—"'case, if you did, you sho will git me in Dutch, Miss Nessie."

"No, I won't tell. What is it?"

The Negro looked at her and barely whispered, moving his thick dark lips in the exaggerated manner of his race.

"Whitecaps gwinter git you to-night, Miss Nessie. I heared it down to de garage. Dat's why I tuk my ol' job back. . . ."

The girl's face went white.

"Coming for me?"

The Negro nodded, terrified; there was nothing under heaven which frightened him as badly as the whitecaps.

"Now I gotto go, I sho is gwinter git out o' dis town; an', please, if you don't want me hung up lak Mistah Peck Bradley, please don' tell I tol' je, Miss Nessie."

"I—I won't," promised the girl.

"Thank ye, Miss Nessie," the Negro whispered humbly, took up his tray, and passed silently out of the door.

​A notion went through Nessie’s mind that she should have given a last tip to the chore boy. The incongruity of tipping John for risking his life to save her the obscenity of mob violence did not strike her. The thought vanished instantly in the feeling of terror and helplessness which rushed upon her and snuffed out the last remnants of her courage and hope.

The girl sat with a beating heart, listening now with screwed-up attention to every sound in the street. A noise caught her by the throat. She looked out of her window at a long angle and saw it was a motor car. She was so nervous she could hardly endure to remain in the bare, dismantled room, and yet she dared not show herself on the street.

"Oh Lord! Lord!" she prayed incoherently. "Have mercy on me!"

The ticking of her clock called her attention to the flight of time. She stared at its round face, tried to control herself and think. The whitecaps would not come until night, midnight. She had planned to do something. She sat looking at the clock thinking intently, biting her under lip, trying to recollect what she had meant to do. She seemed on the verge of recapturing the plan, when the vision of the whitecaps chivvying her along the streets, down the road and out of town, as they had done the others . . . those others . . . She sickened at the inclusion of herself in this term; and for the first time in her life there dawned upon her the possibility that those others, the women whom the men of the neighbourhood had misused and then thrust contemptuously forth, had been, like herself, human beings, who grew hot and cold, felt shame and bruises . . . were women. . . .

As she sat peering out of her window, weeping as silently as she could, she received a hint of something grotesquely stolid and cruel in village existence—the "nice" folk, the church members; there was a mechanical, unimaginative quality to their functioning that inflicted ghastly wounds of which they knew nothing.

​"Like horses . . . cows . . ." she whispered to herself; "kicking and horning. . . ."

She found herself again doubling and pulling at the check for her month's pay. She did not know when she had picked it up. As she stared at her check, she suddenly remembered her plan to get it cashed. This feeble plan brought her a little relief from the abject terror into which the thought of the whitecaps had plunged her.

She looked at her little clock to see how soon would come the supper hour when she could steal out of the hotel to Mrs. Biggers. The good woman would surely plan some way of escape for her.

In the vague relief this brought her she became aware that the afternoon was wearing away, and of the emptiness of the upper story of the boarding house. Suddenly it seemed that Abner must be in his room waiting to come to her. A profound desire for Abner to come to her and protect her rushed over the girl. If he would only marry her and save her as Zed Parrum did the Tolbert girl! If Abner only would come!

She went to her bed, fell on her knees, and prayed God to send her lover to her rescue.

"O God, put it in his heart to come to me to-night! O God, I need him, send him, put it in his heart. . . ."

But she felt as if she were trying to project her prayer into some hard, impenetrable space. The fly-specked ceiling seemed to cut off her pleas; in her memory swam the words of a text, "The prayer of the unrighteous availeth nothing."

It grew upon the girl with a sense of horror that even God had deserted her.

She got to her feet and ceased weeping. After all, she was bad. She wiped her eves and looked with swollen, tear-bleared face at the clock. It was six o'clock, the hour when the village was at supper.

The necessity of action brought its relief. She bathed her face, powdered away the stains, then took her handbag, put the check for her month's salary in her purse, and tiptoed silently out of the room.

​She met no one in the hotel, and a little later passed under the dingy sign hanging to the mulberry and so along the street in the direction of the Biggers home.

It had been a cloudy day, for purple and slate clouds covered the sky, but far in the west the sun set clear in a long strip of serene yellows and bluish greens. It seemed to Nessie as the cool autumn evening breathed against her face that the western zone of colour and light was the delayed blessing on her prayer. A little courage came to her. The west was of infinite depth and infinite tenderness. It forgave everything; it forgave even that Nessie had loved . . . unpaid and uncontracted for.

Not a person was on the streets. The village was at supper. The village devoted this single moment of the day when all the filth of its streets and all the moral cruelties and pettinesses of its life were forgiven in the solemn absolution of sunset; it devoted that single moment to eating. What cared the village for this pageantry of the west? Of what moment to them this tender forgiving hour; they, who had nothing to be forgiven? Let them eat hot bread in mean rooms beneath lithographs of dead fish, let them talk of the last scandal, or simply eat in silence. That miracle of jade and turquoise fades slowly into the sea-blue depths of night, but what have they to do with that?

Nessie paused at the Biggers's gate and her heart began beating again; but she embattled all her fortitude in her heart. She thought, "I know she will help me; she helps everyone, the weak, the poor, the broken, I know she won't refuse me. . . ."

A swift vision of herself being clasped in the old woman's arms and being allowed to weep out her aching heart flooded Nessie's emotions and softened the desperation of her mood.

The girl opened the sagging gate and entered the yard.