From Place to Place

Followed a recapitulation of the greater grievance against the absent offender. Before Emmy Lou was done baring the burden of her complaint Mildred's lips had tightened in angered sympathy.

"It must have been just perfectly awfully horrible, Em," she said with a characteristic prodigality of adjectives when the other had finished her recital. "You just ought to give Aunt Sharley a piece of your mind about the way she behaves. And the worst of it is she gets worse all the time. Don't you think you're the only one she picks on. Why, don't you remember, Em, how just here only the other day she jumped on me because I went on the moonlight excursion aboard the Sophie K. Foster with Sidney Baumann?—told me right to my face I ought to be spanked and put to bed for daring to run round with 'codfish aristocracy'—the very words she used. What right has she, I want to know, to be criticising Sidney Baumann's people? I'm sure he's as nice a boy as there is in this whole town; seems to me he deserves all the more credit for working his way up among the old families the way he has. I don't care if his father was a nobody in this town when he first came here.

"Quality folks—quality folks! She's always preaching about our being quality folks and about it being wrong for us to demean ourselves by going with anybody who isn't quality folks until I'm sick and tired of the words. She has quality folks on the brain! Does she think we are still babies? You're nearly twenty-three and I'm past twenty-one. We have our own lives to live. Why should we be so–"

She broke off at the sound of a limping footstep in the hall.

"Supper's ready," announced Aunt Sharley briefly. "You chillen come right in an' eat it whilst it's hot."

Strangely quiet, the two sisters followed the old negress back to the dining room. Aunt Sharley, who had prepared the meal, now waited upon them. She was glumly silent herself, but occasionally she broke, or rather she punctuated, the silence with little sniffs of displeasure. Only once did she speak, and this was at the end of the supper, when she had served them with blackberries and cream.

"Seem lak de cat done got ever'body's tongue round dis place to-night!" she snapped, addressing the blank wall above the older girl's head. "Well, 'tain't no use fur nobody to be poutin' an' sullin'. 'Tain't gwine do 'em no good. 'Tain't gwine budge me nary hair's brea'th frum whut I considers to be my plain duty. Ef folkses don't lak it so much de wuss fur dem, present company not excepted. Dat's my say an' I done said it!"

And out of the room she marched with her head held defiantly high.

That night there were callers. At the Dabney home there nearly always were callers of an evening, for the two sisters were by way of being what small-town society writers call reigning belles. Once, when they had first returned from finishing school the year before, a neighbouring lady, meeting Aunt Sharley on the street, had been moved to ask whether the girls had many beaus, and Aunt Sharley, with a boastful flirt of her under lip which made her side face look something like the profile of a withered but vainglorious dromedary, had answered back:

"Beaus? Huh! Dem chillens is got beaus frum ever' state!" Which was a slight overstretching of the real facts, but a perfectly pardonable and proper exaggeration in Aunt Charlotte's estimation. At home she might make herself a common scold, might be pestiferously officious and more than pestiferously noisy. Abroad her worshipful pride in, and her affection for, the pair she had reared shone through her old black face as though a lamp of many candle power burned within her. She might chide them at will, and she did, holding this to be her prerogative and her right, but whosoever spoke slightingly of either of them in her presence, be the speaker black or white, had Aunt Charlotte to fight right there on the spot; she was as ready with her fists and her teeth to assert the right of her white wards to immunity from criticism as she was with her tongue lashings.

These things were all taken into consideration when Emmy Lou and Mildred came that night to balance the account for and against the old woman—so many, many deeds of thoughtfulness, of kindness, of tenderness on the credit side; so many flagrant faults, so many shortcomings of temper and behaviour on the debit page. The last caller had gone. Aunt Sharley, after making the rounds of the house to see to door boltings and window latchings, had hobbled upstairs to her own sleeping quarters over the kitchen wing, and in the elder sister's room, with the lights turned low, the two of them sat in their nightgowns on the side of Emmy Lou's bed and tried the case of Spinster Charlotte Helm, coloured, in the scales of their own youthful judgments. Without exactly being able to express the situation in words, both realised that a condition which verged upon the intolerable was fast approaching its climax.

Along with the impatience of youth and the thought of many grievances they had within them a natural instinct for fairness; a legacy perhaps from a father who had been just and a mother who had been mercifully kind and gentle. First one would play the part of devil's advocate, the while the other defended the accused, and then at the remembrance of some one of a long record of things done or said by Aunt Sharley those attitudes would be reversed.

There were times when both condemned the defendant, their hair braids bobbing in emphasis of the intensity of their feelings; times when together they conjured up recollections of the everlasting debt that they owed her for her manifold goodnesses, her countless sacrifices on behalf of them. The average Northerner, of whatsoever social status, would have been hard put to it either to comprehend the true inwardness of the relationship that existed between these girls of one race and this old woman of another or to figure how there could be but one outcome. The average Southerner would have been able at once to sense the sentiments and the prejudices underlying the dilemma that now confronted the orphaned pair, and to sympathise with them, and with the old negress too.

To begin with, there were the fine things to be said for Aunt Charlotte; the arguments in her behalf—a splendid long golden list of them stretching back to their babyhood and beyond, binding them with ties stronger almost than blood ties to this faithful, loving, cantankerous, crotchety old soul. Aunt Charlotte had been born in servitude, the possession of their mother's mother. She had been their mother's handmaiden before their mother's marriage. Afterward she had been their own nurse, cradling them in babyhood on her black breast, spoiling them, training them, ruling them, overruling them, too, coddling them when they were good, nursing them when they were ailing, scolding them and punishing them when they misbehaved.

After their father's death their mother, then an invalid, had advised as frequently with Aunt Sharley regarding the rearing of the two daughters as with the guardians who had been named in her husband's will—and with as satisfactory results. Before his death their father had urged his wife to counsel with Aunt Sharley in all domestic emergencies. Dying, he had signified his affectionate regard for the black woman by leaving her a little cottage with its two acres of domain near the railroad tracks. Regardless though of the fact that she was now a landed proprietor and thereby exalted before the eyes of her own race, Aunt Sharley had elected to go right on living beneath the Dabney roof. In the latter years of Mrs. Dabney's life she had been to all intents a copartner in the running of the house, and after that sweet lady's death she had been its manager in all regards. In the simple economies of the house she had indeed been all things for these past few years—housekeeper, cook, housemaid, even seamstress, for in addition to being a poetess with a cook-stove she was a wizard with a needle.

As they looked back now, casting up the tally of the remembered years, neither Emmy Lou nor Mildred could recall an event in all their lives in which the half-savage, half-childish, altogether shrewd and competent negress had not figured after some fashion or other: as foster parent, as unofficial but none the less capable guardian, as confidante, as overseer, as dictator, as tirewoman who never tired of well-doing, as arbiter of big things and little—all these rôles, and more, too, she had played to them, not once, but a thousand times.

It was Aunt Sharley who had dressed them for their first real party—not a play-party, as the saying went down our way, but a regular dancing party, corresponding to a début in some more ostentatious and less favoured communities. It was Aunt Sharley who had skimped and scrimped to make the available funds cover the necessary expenses of the little household in those two or three lean years succeeding their mother's death, when dubious investments, which afterward turned out to be good ones, had chiseled a good half off their income from the estate. It was Aunt Sharley who, when the question of going away to boarding school rose, had joined by invitation in the conference on ways and means with the girls' guardians, Judge Priest and Doctor Lake, and had cast her vote and her voice in favour of the same old-fashioned seminary that their mother in her girlhood had attended. The sisters themselves had rather favoured an Eastern establishment as being more fashionable and smarter, but the old woman stood fast in her advocacy of the other school. What had been good enough for her beloved mistress was good enough for her mistress' daughters, she insisted; and, anyhow, hadn't the quality folks always gone there? Promptly Doctor Lake and Judge Priest sided with her; and so she had her way about this important matter, as she had it about pretty much everything else.

It was Aunt Sharley who had indignantly and jealously vetoed the suggestion that a mulatto sewing woman, famed locally for her skill, should be hired to assist in preparing the wardrobes that Emmy Lou and Mildred must take with them. It was Aunt Sharley who, when her day's duties were over, had sat up night after night until all hours, straining her eyes as she plied needle and scissors, basting and hemming until she herself was satisfied that her chillen's clothes would be as ample and as ornate as the clothes which any two girls at the boarding school possibly could be expected to have. It was Aunt Sharley who packed their trunks for them, who kissed them good-by at the station, all three of them being in tears, and who, when the train had vanished down the tracks to the southward, had gone back to the empty house, there to abide until they came home to her again. They had promised to write to her every week—and they had, too, except when they were too busy or when they forgot it. Finally, it was Aunt Sharley who never let them forget that their grandfather had been a governor of the state, that their father had been a colonel in the Confederacy, and that they were qualified "to hole up they haids wid de fines' in de land."

When they came to this phase of the recapitulation there sprang into the minds of both of them a recollection of that time years and years in the past when Aunt Sharley, accompanying them on a Sunday-school picnic in the capacity of nursemaid, had marred the festivities by violently snatching Mildred out of a circle playing King Willyum was King James' Son just as the child was about to be kissed by a knickerbockered admirer who failed to measure up to Aunt Sharley's jealous requirements touching on quality folks; and, following this, had engaged in a fight with the disappointed little boy's coloured attendant, who resented this slur upon the social standing of her small charge. Aunt Sharley had come off victor in the bout, but the picnic had been spoiled for at least three youngsters. So much for Aunt Sharley's virtues—for her loyalty, her devotion, her unremitting faithfulness, her championship of their destinies, her stewardship over all their affairs. Now to turn the shield round and consider its darker side:

Aunt Sharley was hardly a fit candidate for canonisation yet. Either it was too early for that—or it was too late. She was unreasonable, she was crotchety, she was contentious, she was incredibly intolerant of the opinions of others, and she was incredibly hardheaded. She had always been masterful and arrogant; now more and more each day she was becoming a shrew and a tyrant and a wrangler. She was frightfully noisy; she clarioned her hallelujah hymns at the top of her voice, regardless of what company might be in the house. She dipped snuff openly before friends of the girls and new acquaintances alike. She refused point-blank to wear a cap and apron when serving meals. She was forever quarrelling with the neighbours' servants, with delivery boys, with marketmen and storekeepers. By sheer obstinacy she defeated all their plans for hiring a second servant, declaring that if they dared bring another darky on the place she would take pleasure in scalding the interloper with a kettle of boiling water. She sat in self-imposed judgment upon their admirers, ruthlessly rejecting those courtiers who did not measure up to her arbitrary standards for appraising the local aristocracy; and toward such of the young squires as fell under the ban of her disfavour she deported herself in such fashion as to leave in their minds no doubt whatsoever regarding her hostility. In public she praised her wards; in private she alternately scolded and petted them. She was getting more feeble, now that age and infirmities were coming upon her, wherefore the house showed the lack of proper care. They were afraid of her, though they loved her with all their hearts and knew she loved them to the exclusion of every living person; they were apprehensive always of her frequent and unrestrained outbreaks of temper. She shamed them and she humiliated them and she curbed them in perfectly natural impulses—impulses that to them seemed perfectly proper also.

Small enough were these faults when set up alongside the tally of her goodnesses; moreover, neither of the two rebels against her authority was lacking in gratitude. But it is the small things that are most annoying usually, and, besides, the faults of the old woman were things now of daily occurrence and recurrence, which chafed their nerves and fretted them, whereas the passage of time was lessening the sentimental value of her earlier labours and sacrifices in their behalf.

And here was another thing: While they had been getting older Aunt Sharley had been getting old; they had grown up, overnight, as it were, and she could not be made to comprehend the fact. In their case the eternal conflict between youth and crabbed age was merely being repeated—with the addition in this particular instance of unusual complications.

For an hour or more the perplexed pair threshed away, striving to winnow the chaff from the pure grain in Aunt Sharley's nature, and the upshot was that Emmy Lou had a headache and Mildred had a little spell of crying, and they agreed that never had there been such a paradox of part saint and part sinner, part black ogre and part black angel, as their Auntie was, created into a troubled world, and that something should be done to remedy the evil, provided it could be done without grievously hurting the old woman's feelings; but just what this something which should be done might be neither of them could decide, and so they went to bed and to sleep.

And the next day was another day exactly similar in its petty annoyances to the day before.

But a day was to come before the summer ended when a way out was found. The person who found the way out—or thought he did—was Mr. Harvey Winslow, the hero or villain of the hammock episode previously described in this narrative. He did not venture, though, to suggest a definite course of action until after a certain moonlit, fragrant night, when two happy young people agreed that thereafter these twain should be one.

Mildred knew already what was impending in the romance of Emmy Lou. So perhaps did Aunt Sharley. Her rheumatism had not affected her eyesight and she had all her faculties. All the same, it was to Aunt Sharley that Emmy Lou went next morning to tell of the choice she had made. There was no one whose consent had actually to be obtained. Both the girls were of age; as their own master they enjoyed the use and control of their cosy little inheritance. Except for an aunt who lived in New Orleans and some cousins scattered over the West, they were without kindred. The Dabneys had been an old family, but not a large one. Nevertheless, in obedience to a feeling that told her Aunt Sharley should be the first, next only to her sister, to share with her the happiness that had come into her life, Emmy Lou sought out the old woman before breakfast time.

Seemingly Aunt Sharley approved. For if at the moment she mumbled out a complaint about chillens too young to know their own minds being prone to fly off with the first young w'ite gen'l'man that came along frum nobody knowed whar, still there was nothing begrudged or forced about the vocal jubilations with which she made the house ring during the succeeding week. At prayer meeting on Wednesday night at Zion Coloured Baptist Church and at lodge meeting on Friday night she bore herself with an air of triumphant haughtiness which sorely irked her fellow members. It was agreed privily that Sis' Charlotte Helm got mo' and mo' bigotty, and not alone that, but mo' and mo' uppety, ever' day she lived.

If young Mr. Winslow had been, indirectly, the cause for her prideful deportment before her own colour, it was likewise Mr. Winslow who shortly was to be the instrument for humbling her into the dust. Now this same Mr. Winslow, it should be stated, was a masterful young man. Only an abiding sense of humour kept him sometimes from being domineering. Along with divers other qualities it had taken masterfulness for him at twenty-nine to be superintendent of our street-railway system, now owned and operated by Northern capitalists. Likewise it had taken masterfulness for him to distance the field of Emmy Lou's local admirers within the space of five short months after he procured his transfer to our town from another town where his company likewise had traction interests. He showed the same trait in the stand he presently took with regard to the future status of Aunt Sharley in the household of which he was to become a member and of which he meant to be the head.

For moral support—which she very seriously felt she needed—Emmy Lou took her sister with her on the afternoon when she invaded the kitchen to break the news to Aunt Sharley. The girls came upon the old woman in one of her busiest moments. She was elbows deep in a white mass which in due time would become a batch of the hot biscuits of perfection. "Auntie," began Emmy Lou in a voice which she tried to make matter-of-fact, "we've—I've something I want to say to you."

"Ise lissenin', chile," stated the old woman shortly.

"It's this way, Auntie: We think—I mean we're afraid that you're getting along so in life—getting so old that we–"

"Who say Ise gittin' ole?" demanded Aunt Sharley, and she jerked her hands out of the dough she was kneading.

"We both think so—I mean we all think so," corrected Emmy Lou.

"Who do you mean by we all? Does you mean dat young Mistah Winslow, Esquire, late of de North?" Her blazing eyes darted from the face of one sister to the face of the other, reading their looks. "Uh-huh!" she snorted. "I mout 'a' knowed he'd be de ver' one to come puttin' sech notions ez dem in you chillens' haids. Well, ma'am, an' whut, pray, do he want?" Her words fairly dripped with sarcasm.

"He thinks—in fact we all three do—that because you are getting along in years—you know you are, Auntie—and because your rheumatism bothers you so much at times that—that—well, perhaps that we should make a change in the running of the house. So—so–" She hesitated, then broke off altogether, anxious though she was to make an end to what she foresaw must be a painful scene for all three of them. Poor Emmy Lou was finding this job which she had nerved herself to carry through a desperately hard job. And Aunt Sharley's attitude was not making it any easier for her either.

"'So' whut?" snapped Aunt Sharley; then answered herself: "An' so de wind blow frum dat quarter, do hit? De young gen'l'man ain't j'ined de fambly yit an' already he's settin' hisse'f to run it. All right den. Go on, chile—quit mumblin' up yore words an' please go on an' tell me whut you got to say! But ef you's fixin' to bring up de subjec' of my lettin' ary one of dese yere young flighty-haided, flibbertigibbeted, free-issue nigger gals come to work on dis place, you mout ez well save yore breath now an' yereafter, 'ca'se so long ez Ise able to drag one foot behine t'other I p'intedly does aim to manage dis yere kitchen."

"It isn't that—exactly," blurted out Emmy Lou. "You see, Auntie," she went on desperately, "we've decided, Harvey and I, that after our marriage we'll live here. We couldn't leave Mildred alone, and until she gets married this is going to be home for us all. And so we're afraid—with one more coming into the household and everything—that the added work is going to be too heavy for you to undertake. So we've decided that—that perhaps it would be better all round if you—if we—if you–"

"Go on, chile; say it, whutever it is."

"–that perhaps it would be better if you left here altogether and went to live in that nice little house that papa left you in his will."

Perhaps they did not see the stricken look that came into the eyes of the old negress or else she hid the look behind the fit of rage that instantly possessed her. Perhaps they mistook the grey pallor that overspread the old face, turning it to an ashen colour, for the hue of temper.

"Do it all mean, den, dat after all dese yeahs you's tryin' to git shet of me—tryin' to t'row me aside lak an' ole worn-out broom? Well, I ain't gwine go!" Her voice soared shrilly to match the heights of her tantrum.

"Your wages will go on just the same—Harvey insists on that as much as we do," Emmy Lou essayed. "Don't you see, Auntie, that your life will be easier? You will have your own little home and your own little garden. You can come to see us—come every day if you want to. We'll come to see you. Things between us will go on almost exactly the same as they do now. You know how much we love you—Mildred and I. You know we are trying to think of your comfort, don't you?"

"Of course you do, Aunt Sharley," Mildred put in. "It isn't as if you were going clear out of our lives or we out of yours. You'll be ever so much happier."

"Well, I jes' ain't gwine go nary step." The defiant voice had become a passionate shriek. "Think Ise gwine leave yere an' go live in dat little house down dere by dem noisy tracks whar all dem odds an' ends of pore w'ite trash lives—dem scourin's an' sweepin's whut come yere to wuk in de new cotton mill! Think Ise gwine be corntent to wuk in a gyarden whilst I knows Ise needed right yere to run dis place de way which it should be run! Think Ise gwine set quiet whilst Ise pulled up by de roots an' transported 'way frum de house whar Ise spend purty nigh de whole of my endurin' life! Well, I won't go—I won't never go! I won't go—'ca'se I jes' can't!" And then, to the intense distress of the girls, Aunt Sharley slumped into a chair, threw her floury hands over her face and with the big tears trickling out between her fingers she moaned over and over again between her gulping breaths:

"Oh, dat I should live to see de day w'en my own chillens wants to drive me away frum 'em! Oh, dat I should live to see dis day!"

Neither of them had ever seen Aunt Sharley weep like this—shaken as she was with great sobs, her head bowed almost to her knees, her bared arms quivering in a very palsy. They tried to comfort her, tried to put their arms about her, both of them crying too. At the touch of their arms stealing about her hunched shoulders she straightened, showing a spark of the spirit with which they were more familiar. She wrenched her body free of them and pointed a tremulous finger at the door. The two sisters stole out, feeling terribly guilty and thoroughly miserable.

It was not the Aunt Sharley they knew who waited upon them that dusk at supper. Rather it was her ghost—a ghost with a black mask of tragedy for a face, with eyes swollen and reddened, with lips which shook in occasional spasms of pain, though their owner strove to keep them firm. With their own faces tear-streaked and with lumps in their throats the girls kept their heads averted, as though they had been caught doing something very wrong, and made poor pretense of eating the dishes that the old woman placed before them. Such glances as they stole at her were sidelong covert glances, but they marked plainly enough how her shoulders drooped and how she dragged herself about the table.