Worry about Ora's intentions toward Tansy quenched half Myron's pleasure in receiving from Mark Elphinstone, early in April, the letter for which he had prayed:
'Dear Weagle: When you close up the Tippecanoe, come see me in New York. I'll have something for you to do, don't know just what yet, depends on our talk, come see me as soon as you arrive.'
He tried to get Ora to go north with him, but Ora announced, 'No, I think I'll stay here a while--maybe till June. I've found a cabin on the Island that I can rent for ten dollars a month. Swell place to write. I have an idea for a long story about the big swamp here--it's full of atmosphere--thousands of square miles of gloomy cypresses and wild orange trees, and secret waterways and moccasins and panthers and a hidden refuge for niggers escaped from the chain-gang, and their Queen--a marvellous coloured wench. By golly, I'll give the world the first real psychology of the negro in love and in trouble! To say nothing of the grand atmosphere. And of course right here is the place to get all the dope!'
'But there isn't any thousands of miles of swamp here! The biggest one within fifteen miles is about four acres. And I doubt if there's a panther within two hundred miles. And you don't know a thing about the psychology of negroes.'
'Oh hell, that just goes to show you don't understand! If you've got a trained eye for observation, you can see all you want in four acres--or half an acre. And Tansy Quill has promised to help me with the psychology. She's quite a bright girl, for a chambermaid. Now don't go scowling. You've got a dirty mind! Typical Puritan, you are--always seeing wrong where there isn't any! Tansy and I are just friends. Oh, say, could you possibly let me have a hundred dollars to see me through till I finish my big story? Send it back the minute I get my cheque. You know how I am: I always pay my debts.'
14
When Myron left for New York and Ora had moved to his little cracker cottage, with its scant table, bed, and two chairs, the theory was that Tansy was merely coming in to cook for him. She was an orphan, living with an indifferent uncle who let her drift as she would, and one night of relaxed indolence, it was too much trouble to go home, and she rested content beside him on the corn-husk bed, and was glad in the morning when he (for he did have that genius) was neither ashamed nor irritable.
She worshipped him, then, and Myron in him.
And he was happy in her, till he felt that he had explored her soul and come out on the other side, through the jungle to a shore facing new lands which he must enter. No staid settler was he, he meditated, but an explorer always.
Despair was sickening him, for he could not write, nor could Tansy give him wherewith to write.
The story of swamp and crouching negroes among the rotting cypresses which he had seen, definite as rock, when he had boasted of it to Myron, had crumbled day by day. He had nothing there, he realized, save one flaring chromo in his mind--no fable, no people, no truth.
Tansy gave him nothing new for his story. She knew no more about the voodoo or the slavery of the dark quarter of her ancestors than Ora knew about the history of Jonathan Edwards and Israel Putnam of Connecticut; she knew no more about swamps and poisonous moccasins and fevers and hidden cabins of refuge than he did about tobacco-curing in the Connecticut Valley. Both of them, the white hack writer and the part-white chambermaid, had about the same hash of American public-school knowledge; a little memory of Longfellow and Whittier and Poe; the opinion that Lee and Grant had, in vague forgotten ways, shown themselves to be excellent generals; the facts that the square root of four was two, that the chemical symbol of water was H20, that Beethoven was a widely esteemed musician, and that the United States was (1), the greatest nation in the world and (2), as a residence for sensitive souls like theirs, the most inferior nation in the world.
Out of this knowledge she picked items for the cultured chatter for which, all her life, while she had made beds and scrubbed out toilets and washed dishes, she had longed. She said excitedly, 'Boy dear, don't you think that Justice is the most important thing we all have to work for--even more than Beauty?' and 'Doesn't it just frighten you, how real Stephen Crane makes things when he writes?'
And he was bored. Her talk was just near enough to that of the more nearly literate of the Happy Hearts group to make him lonely for them. Had he been quite alone, he might have survived and been content, listening uninterrupted to the voices of his own self-praise, but she only tantalized him with memories.
He was so lonely for his fellow hack writers! And a familiar, dependable saloon around the corner! And a jolly burlekew show on the Bowery!
Here, in the evening, you could stay home, or go watch the Holy Rollers, shouting in their tabernacle roofed with palm-leaves, and that was all you could do.
He hated the view from his cabin door, though it had been utter enchantment at first: fishing-boats on the pewter surface of Pontevedra Inlet, poinsettias seen through the veil of Spanish moss, a log cabin set in arching cypresses.
It was so still--and the stillness was insulated by Tansy's loquacity as she stirred a hateful pot of beans.
He did not hear her. He was in despair. He could not write. The hundred dollars from Myron would be gone. He was in disgrace with that old devil Mousey Glebe--jumping his neck, that way, the jackass, for just doing what probably plenty of others did! He was marooned way off here, a million miles from New York. And he could not write. What the devil would he do?
'Boy dear, do you like Frank Norris's The Octopus? Such a time I had borrowing it. I was just dreadfully broke then--I was washing dishes at an orphanage! Did you like it?'
Ora drawled evenly, quite clearly, 'Like hell! I only like decent Northern beefsteak--and a little silence. Even you might occasionally note that I'm trying to plan a story, and keep your mouth shut!'
She stood so helplessly hurt, a hurt child, with idiotic quivering mouth and beseeching eyes, that he hated her. He stamped out and did not return for the lunch she had been cooking. She was gone, when he came back at five, after a wretched afternoon of planless crawling through the heat, and he was a little distressed. But that evening she crept back again, crawling to him like a bewildered dog which does not know why it has been beaten, and he hated her for her meekness. He was a man who merited tall proud women!
'Oh, for God's sake don't act like a slave--like your damn ancestors!' he snarled, assuring himself that he didn't really mean it, that he was much kinder than he sounded. 'Or if you have got to show up the nigger in you, why in hell don't you go out and get me some dope for my escaped slave in the swamp story, like I've asked you?'
He could scarcely hear her wail as she fled from the cabin. It was less a sound than a vibration in air.
He was ashamed--also hungry. He would apologize handsomely when she came back. Nobody could ever say that he failed to own up when he had been in the wrong, even just a little in the wrong!
She did not come back, all night, nor all the next day. Toward evening he was slightly anxious, and skulked about the log quarters where she lived with her uncle. He would have seen her if she had been there, easily enough; her uncle's dwelling had but two shallow rooms.
He was worried now, and bilious with his own cooking. He could not sleep, and he flung up from his pallet when, after midnight, he heard a long moaning outside.
He huddled in his doorway to watch a procession of negroes, lighted by pitch-pine torches and kerosene lanterns that threw maniac shadows on the writhing moss hanging from the live-oaks, on cypress trunks and the metallic leaves of scrub palmettos. They were bearing an old pine door, sticky with dry manure, on which, draped in the earthy jacket of a field-hand, was the body of a woman whose long black hair dripped water.