Maggie cooks some bacon and eggs and brings them to the table. She announces then that there has been an accident near West Farm. A man was killed and a young woman was taken into the house. “Poor soul,” Honora says of the dead, but she says nothing else. Maggie hears the mailman’s step on the walk and the letters fall through the brass slot and spill onto the floor. She picks up the mail—there are a dozen letters—and puts them on the table beside Honora’s plate. Honora hardly glances at her mail. There may be letters here from old friends, checks from the Appleton Trust Company, bills, pleas and invitations. No one will ever know. Honora glances at the pile of envelopes, picks them up and throws them into the fire. Now we wonder why she burns her mail without reading it, but as she goes away from the fireplace back to her chair the light of a very clear emotion seems to cross her face and perhaps this is explanation enough. Admiring that which is most easily understood we may long for the image of some gentle old woman, kind to her servant and opening her letters with a silver knife, but how much more poetry there is to Honora, casting off the claims of life the instant they are made. When she has stowed away her breakfast she gets up and calls over her shoulder to Maggie, “I’ll be in the garden if anyone wants me.”
Mark, her gardener, is already at work. He comes to work at seven. “Good morning, Mark,” Honora says gaily, but Mark is deaf and dumb. Before she employed Mark, Honora ran through every gardener in the village. The last one before Mark was an Italian who behaved badly. He threw down his rake and shouted, “She’sa no good, working for you, Missa Honora. She’sa no good. She’sa planta this, she’sa pullupa that, she’sa changes her mind every five minutes, she’sa no good.” When he finished he went out of the garden leaving Honora in tears. Maggie ran out of the kitchen and took the old lady in her arms, saying, “You mustn’t pay any attention to him, you mustn’t pay any attention to him, Miss Wapshot. Everybody knows how wonderful you are. Everybody knows what a wonderful woman you are.” Mark, being deaf, is protected from her interference and when she tells him to move all the rose bushes she might as well be talking to a stone.
It is hard for Honora to get down on her knees, but she does this and works in her garden until the middle of the morning. Then she goes into the house, quietly washes her hands, gets a hat, gloves and a bag and goes out through her garden to the four corners, where she catches a bus to Travertine. Whether this fairly stealthy departure is calculated or not no one will ever know. If Honora asks people for tea and is not home when they, wearing their best clothes, arrive, she has not consciously done something that will make them feel ill at ease, but she has acted characteristically. At any rate a few minutes after she leaves her garden a trust officer of the Appleton Bank rings her front doorbell. During the years in which she has lived on the income from Lorenzo’s trust, Honora has never signed a form approving the bank’s management. Now the trust officer has been told not to leave St. Botolphs until he has her signature. He rings the doorbell for some time before Maggie throws open a window and tells him that Miss Wapshot is in the garden. Talking with Mark is hopeless, of course, and when he rings the doorbell again Maggie shouts at him, “If she ain’t in the garden I don’t know where she’s at but she might be at the farm where the other Wapshots live. That’s over on Route 40. A big house beside the river.” The trust officer starts for Route 40 just as Honora boards the bus for Travertine.
Honora doesn’t put a dime into the fare box like the rest of the passengers. As she says, she can’t be bothered. She sends the transportation company a check for twenty dollars each Christmas. They’ve written her, telephoned her and sent representatives to her house, but they’ve gotten nowhere. The bus is decrepit and the seats and several of the windows are held together with friction tape. Jarring and rattling, it gives, for a vehicle, an unusual impression of frailty. It is one of those lines that seem to carry the scrim of the world—sweet-natured but browbeaten women shoppers, hunchbacks and drunks. Honora looks out the window and at the river and the houses—those poignant landscapes against which she has played out most of her life and where she is known as the Wonderful Honora, the Splendid Honora, the Grand Honora Wapshot. When the bus stops at the corner in Travertine she goes up the street to Mr. Hiram’s fish market. Mr. Hiram is in back, opening a crate of salt fish. Honora goes around and behind the counter to where there is a small tank of sea water for lobsters. She puts down her bag and stick, rolls up one sleeve and plunges her hand into the tank, coming up with a good four-pound lobster just as Mr. Hiram comes in from the back. “Put that down, Miss Honora,” he shouts. “They ain’t pegged, they ain’t pegged yet.”
“Well, they don’t seem to be doing me any harm,” says Honora. “Just get me a paper bag.”
“George Wolf just brought them in,” says Mr. Hiram, scurrying around for a paper bag, “and if one of those four pounders tooka hold of you you could lose a finger.”
He holds the paper bag open and Honora drops the lobster into this, turns and plunges her hand into the tank again. Mr Hiram sighs, but Honora comes up quickly with another lobster and gets it into the bag. When she has paid Mr. Hiram she carries her lobsters out to the street and walks to the corner where the bus is waiting to pick up passengers for St. Botolphs. She hands the bag of lobsters to the bus driver. “Here,” she says. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She starts for the dry-goods store but, as she walks by the five-and-ten-cent store, the smell of frankfurters draws her in. She sits at the counter. “Your frankfurters smell so deliciously,” she tells the clerk, “that I can’t resist having one. Our Cousin Justina used to play the piano in here, y’know. Oh, if she knew I remembered, she’d die. . . .” She eats two frankfurters and a dish of ice cream. “That was delicious,” she tells the counter girl, and gathering up her things she starts down the street again toward the bus stop when she notices the sign above the Neptune movie theater: ROSE OF THE WEST. What harm can there be, she thinks, in an old lady going to a movie, but when she buys her ticket and steps into the dark, bad-smelling theater she suffers all the abrasive sensations of someone forced into moral uncleanliness. She does not have the courage of her vices. It is wrong, she knows, to go into a dark place when the world outside shines with light. It is wrong and she is a miserable sinner. She buys a box of popcorn and takes an aisle seat in the last row—a noncommittal position that seems to lighten her burden of guilt. She munches her popcorn and watches the movie suspiciously.
In the meantime Maggie is keeping her lunch warm on the back of the stove and her lobsters, battling for life in the paper bag, have made the trip to St. Botolphs and are now on their way back to Travertine. Mr. Burstyn, the trust officer, has driven to West Farm. Sarah has been courteous and helpful. “I haven’t seen Honora myself,” she says, “but she’s expected. She’s interested in some furniture in the barn. She may be there.” He walks down the driveway to the barn. Mr. Burstyn is a city boy and the size of the barn and its powerful smells make him homesick. A large yellow spider on the barn floor comes straight toward him and he makes a wide circle around the insect. There is a staircase up to the loft. Two of the lifts are broken and a third is about to break and when he gets up into the loft there is no one there although it would be hard to make sure, for the loft is lighted by a single window hung thickly with spiderwebs and drifted with hayseed.