A daughter of Adam

Front matter

o I 1

^ V

? o

Chapter I

I sat up, startled out of a deep sleep. Who had called me? I felt called. And there were no voices. Stillness, an immense silence.

The room was dark but strangely familiar, as if the very things in it had known me a long time. I leaned forward and stared through the open win¬ dow—pale greenish-ivory boughs spreading there beneath a lavender mist of bloom in the moonlight. Ah, I remembered now, the crape myrtle tree out¬ side my bedroom window at Redfields!

All this in the first flash of consciousness after the profound unconsciousness of sleep.

Instantly I recalled what had happened. The message that reached me three nights ago in New York announcing father’s illness and summoning me to his bedside. The scattering of a party of friends who had been dining with me that evening, as fine feathers whirl and disappear in a sudden gust of wind. Oliver Winchell waiting while I changed and flung a few things together in my bag. The mad rush to catch the midnight train. That last moment in the deep shadow beyond the station gate when Oliver caught me to his breast, his anguish at this parting, like a lover’s, deeper than his sym¬ pathy with my grief. Then the long hot journey, the sleepless night above rattling rails. The delays, the unbearable suspense. My arrival at last in the gray dawn of this day at Redfields, the pallor of everything in this light, the creeping silence of wakeful people in the house, the sibilant coming and going of neighbors all day long, the awful curi¬ osity of the living about the approach of death, or if death might by the hardest be kept out of this house. And now the end of the day when I had fallen asleep exhausted by the long strain.

I sprang hastily to my feet, feeling guilty of this rest, and slipped noiselessly across the hall to the open doorway of a deeper silence.

The nurse seated beside the night lamp, busy with her chart, looked up and motioned me not to enter, meaning that this was sleep at last and that it must not be disturbed.

Through the shadowy darkness I made out the immense bed in the midst of this room. It was a bed not made for any man, but for one man who excelled other men and who would not jam his breath against walls in a corner but must lie promi¬ nent even when he slept. The covers on it were awry, dragged and tumbled as if some old Jupiter had been kicking his clouds about and was now wrapped in them with his huge knees sticking up, his head resting high upon the pillows, his face the tragic gray shadow of a great countenance with closed eyes and bristling brows.

I withdrew and came softly down the stairs, hear¬ ing again the creak of the very steps that used to creak long ago beneath my younger feet.

I had been born in this house, in that proud old room upstairs where father now lay having it out with his last enemy. But for years it had been no more than a memory, like verses learned in childhood. Now each familiar object came back to me like a line from these verses. The flaming feathered birds perched on golden harps in the gray wall paper seemed to sing a flowery tale of fairer years. There was the same round table halfway down the wide hall, the same old mahogany sofa magnificently withdrawn at the farther end, the gun rack behind the front doors, the tall clock opposite the stairway with its raucous tick, still rebukingly truthful.

How far apart every thing seemed—not bare but spacious, as if this house had been built by men for men with a long stride; nothing small or merely pretty in it, nothing weak or superfluous. A hurri¬ cane might blow through it and do no great dam¬ age, everything was so far apart, so heavy, and had been where it was for such a long time.

I experienced a curious sense of expansion, as if my mind let go little things and spread in this an¬ cient spaciousness. The great doors of this hall were flung wide. I passed through on to the flagged floor of the veranda. A low wall divided this veranda from the grounds beyond. I moved across between the scattered chairs and sat on the wall, leaning against the column behind me.

Not in years had I seen such a huge night, clear, hot, and blossoming with stars. No narrowness any¬ where, no masses of buildings, nor spires, nor towers to break the dark rim of this darkness. No dew, no scent, save the dusty odor of the famished earth in a midsummer drought. Not a sound save the crickets strumming in the withered grass and the whispering of poplar leaves turning and turning in the moonlight like a thousand tiny silver fans.

There is no darkness compared to the blackness to be found in the cities. But it is always inside, never above. It gathers in cells, behind the doors of poverty and crime. Night there is only the evening gown the town wears when the day’s work is done, slashed and seamed and pearled with myriad lights, fantastically splendid; but it lacks the ma¬ jesty and mystery of infinite darkness.

I had been for so many years the companion of these noisy, tinkling, spangled nights that now I had no thoughts equal to this vastness, peopled with stars and shadows; only a vague fear when from time to time I looked up at the windows of father’s room, listening, waiting for what might be going to happen there.

At last, as one invariably slips back from every other experience, however strange or terrifying, into that which is familiar, I found myself thinking of my own affairs; ordinary things, such as what had I done with the key to my apartment? I had for¬ gotten to leave instructions about forwarding the mail. I remembered suddenly that the proofs of my book lay on my desk, still to be corrected. I must write to Oliver about this, about everything. I would ask him to send the proofs to Redfields.

Ten years ago I had gone to New York, as so many men and women go, to achieve a career. This is a brave thing to do, but we do not know that until we are committed to the adventure. I was in no need of a career. Few women are; we only choose one from lack of interest or because we are dissatisfied in whatever condition we find ourselves.

This was exactly my situation. Father was a man who kept his womenkind in the background, simply by occupying the whole front of life. Mother had died there when I was a young girl, quite peace¬ fully, of that feminine inanition which destroys so many women. I had no mind for such a fate. I had been born with a bee in my bonnet. My gender, it appeared, was an accident. I had the nature of a woman, but the will and courage of my father, who was very man. We loved each other. We even suffered from a sort of indignant admira¬ tion for each other, but we could no more endure one another than two restless and affirmative bodies can occupy the same space at the same time.

Finally, after a series of violent scenes, I was permitted to have my wish, which was to go to New York and earn my living as a writer. My only qualification for this profession at the time was a certain passion for words, as another might love lines and colors, and a few things accepted by adventurous editors. It made no difference, father scornfully informed me, what kind of writer I be¬ came, so that I did not return to Redfields until I was sobered and humbled by some kind of success.

This condition was momentary. Many times dur¬ ing the years that followed he had implored me to come home, but with that manly perversity which I had inherited from him I put off the prodigal s return until I should have made the big success which every author covets.

There is a difference between honest thinking and the mere manufacture of ideas. To think cor¬ rectly one must have a creed, some kind of faith which purges and exalts the mind. And one must have standards by which to test human experience. In the manufacture of ideas one uses the same mental machinery without reference to creeds or standards of life. One simply reproduces impres¬ sions, however perverted or fallacious. This is an unscrupulous business, but profitable—especially to writers of fiction. The truth is difficult to drama¬ tize and hard to sell. It is much easier to produce the fiction antics of human nature, its decadent moods and frailties. I wrote this kind—popular stuff—and got away with it. I assumed a name, a man’s name, and literally earned it in the best as well as the worst magazines in this country. It was like living a double life. I had a taste for that. Most people have, especially women, who have no privacy, their virtues and limitations being known to all men. For five years I enjoyed the privilege of hearing my stories discussed, branded as in¬ famous, praised as the work of a man with genius, before I was discovered. Then I was obliged to take my place in a certain reeling, dissolving circle of artists and literary folk. But to this day there are some tens of thousands of readers in this country who have never surrendered their contention that the name signed to this chronicle is that of a man, or at the very least an elderly woman who wears a little black Sabbath bonnet on the prayerful head of her pieties and a rusty cape over her philosophy of life.

However that may be, one thing is certain: Since the year 1910, when this performance of mine began in New York, I have lived. Like father I had a gift for living, rather than that one many women have for merely suffering. I craved excitement, folly, wisdom, and my own share of the spoils. I was never satiated nor tired of the fray. I had health, red hair, a clear skin, a rollicking energy of the spirit and what you may call an open-faced, blue-eyed mind. There are words that suggest cer¬ tain colors, like “resurrection,” which recalls that first tender golden green of leaves in the early spring. So the word “candor” always seemed to me of an entrancing shade of blue, an artless word like the eyes of a child, who sees everything and occasionally exposes something with unconscious but impish wit. In this sense I had a candid mind, neither malicious nor merciful, but enterprising and irresponsible about tearing the covers off the hidden thoughts 6f other people and writing them into whatever I happened to be writing at the time, without knowing or caring where I obtained them. Nothing can be more innocent. It is a sort of right of way one gets through the minds of his fellow men and uses like any other franchise. This ac¬ counted in some measure for the uncanny quality of my most trivial stories; also for a certain fearful distinction I had among the men and women of my own profession. I was the least cynical, the most believing disciple of human nature among them. But I had a reputation for satire, which is what many people think the truth is.

In spite of the fact that I had worked and played furiously during these years, now at the age of thirty-two my youth was still preserved by this for¬ tunate circumstance: I had never lacked for lovers. One lover cannot do it, however faithful, but one lover after another may keep a woman ageless a long time after she is no longer really young. Each of them discovers in her a different cause for en¬ chantment, so that at last all her banners are fly¬ ing, every vanity and every virtue exalted by these standard bearers of love. I was splendidly en¬ dowed with this sense of charm and power which frequent and different lovers unconsciously develop in a woman. I had a reputation for discretion, which enhanced me. I was a cheerful and unscrupu¬ lous capitalist who owned myself. I was one of those women whom men court with a vindictive will to win, chiefly for the victory of the achievement.

I do not think well of this interpretation of my¬ self, but it is truthful—and the truth about any one of us is rarely flattering if we tell the whole of it. Still if you are a woman it is something not to be vanquished and to have kept your heart and liberty with a sort of singing, humorous valor. For, after all is said, every lover is an adversary. One is not morally bound to yield, and one is not morally obliged to be less lovable for conscience’s sake. That indicates a kind of simpleton’s conceit which I never had.

For more than a year I thought I should end by marrying Oliver Winchell. “End” is the last word of every woman’s imagination about marriage. It is the one full stop she makes in life at an early age, and she really never expects to get over it or go on or be her own self again. I have often wondered if men feel the same way.

Nature appeared to have made Oliver with prob¬ ably two strokes of a very pale pencil. He was a tall man, graceful with that angular grace of a deli¬ cately articulated frame. His knees and elbows were prominent, as if at all times he folded himself with an eye to the shadow he might make on the wall or the image he might cast upon the retina of some eye. His face was a poem for which you could find only the rhythm, not the words—lean, pallid and very handsome. Dark hair, luminous eyes, not feminine in their softness, but mystical, as if he might have been a prophet but was not, being utterly and intentionally indifferent to the spiritual exercise of prophesying. Mentally he achieved those subtleties which do not exist but must be created, emotions so delicate that the human of you does not feel them. Attenuated spiritual stuff which denied matter as something negligible, if not actually repulsive. I cannot say why, but his thoughts always seemed to me to come up out of the grave, stone images of the imagination in for¬ lorn poses of negation.

He wrote so well that he rarely published any¬ thing. I am certain that he did not care, as the rest of us did, to see his mind advertised in the printed word. He was serious and industrious, however, at this business of dissolving language. But any real effort was offensive to him. He was honestly convinced that there could be no rational reason for achievement. What had been achieved was not good and would not last. The only thing that lasted was dead dust. The minute life infested any¬ thing the processes of decay began. Life, he swore, was a perpetual form of decay and decadence.

He was a very rich man, but he despised money, using it frugally and decently, like a poor man with fine virtues. The clawing, scrambling acquisitive world to Oliver was like the fox the Spartan boy carried beneath his cloak without a murmur even while the fox devoured him. It was this air of high fortitude which attracted me. An immaterial man in a material universe appealed to my imagi¬ nation, and in secret to the mischievous humor all women feel toward men. He was a new adventure in the kingdom of love, and as a lover he had a gossamer use of words, very flattering to one who had been so frequently courted according to her strictly feminine realities. I was no metaphysician, but a woman easily taken in by a florescent lover be¬ cause there was nothing in Oliver’s pale passion which inspired the usual defenses against him. I do not know why it is the instinct of every woman to deny her instincts, but it is. Modesty is a gar¬ ment her mind weaves and wears to conceal her natu¬ ral emotions. There was no occasion for such fem¬ inine privacy between Oliver and me, because he inspired no such emotions. I simply enjoyed the odd distinction of being the dear anathema of his spirit; the woman whom he resented above all other women because her very existence stultified his con¬ victions and gave a meaning to life, when from his point of view life had no intelligible meaning, but was a sort of recurrent disease in aimless dust. I leave it to those who have studied the various effects of decadence to explain why he excited in me the keenest interest and curiosity.

But now, seated in this tranquil darkness, watch¬ ing the black shadows thicken beneath the drifting moon over Redhelds, I began to think of Oliver with a strange lassitude. I tried to visualize him. How would I feel toward him here 4 ? Standing upon this scroll of land that rolled away into the vast dark¬ ness, I felt that he would be strangely diminished. He did not belong. He would be no more than one of those rarefied sentences that he could write. And in this place such a sentence would not mean any¬ thing. For here was something older than civiliza¬ tions or cities or the attenuated intellectual dust of men’s minds. This was the great countenance of the Earth, the big thing, the one tremendously real thing that neither changed nor passed, upon which the Lord breathed the winds in the beginning, before ever Adam received the breath of life—still func¬ tioning like the almighty will of God, forever liv¬ ing, forever silent, keeping the confidence of all men’s bones. What could Oliver say commensurate with this 4 ? And the worst of it was that I felt that he would say something.

i

Chapter II

Sometimes you may be born again, as you were the first time, by no will of your own. The wind of destiny gets you, blows you out of the world that was your world and out of the life that was your life. Your former thoughts and deeds pass away. They are not. And you begin to be again, shriven of yourself, of your diaphanous vanities, of the very virtues that fitted you so well but are now far too small.

Until this moment I had no sense of permanency in this wide place. I had been called to Redfields by father’s illness. Presently I should return to New York, where my life and my work lay straight before me. I was still thinking of Oliver as a pos¬ session, open to criticism, no more maybe than a sort of intellectual condiment, but belonging to me and to the existence I had chosen. But now I recalled something that Doctor Fosberry had said to me in the late afternoon.

I had followed him from the room where father lay tossing upon his bed, unable to speak, equally unable to sleep, regarding us with a fierce question in his clouded eyes.

“He will be quiet presently. This is merely the momentum of his violent vitality. It will pass. He will be changed,” he had said.

“How changed?” I asked tremblingly.

He laid his two hands upon my head, drew them with rough tenderness over my hair.

“Thick as a horse’s tail, Nancy! Still red and rumpled. It used to be the color of the freckle on your nose. Bless me, lass, you have not lost that freckle, have you?” he exclaimed, holding me at arm’s length, turning my face to the light, pursing up his lips and squinting at me through his glasses.

“Ah, there it is; you have kept it, the little sun kiss!” he murmured, nodding his head approvingly.

“I was the first man to lay eyes on you, Nancy! You came into the world in a fine rage. You had both fists doubled. It was here at the head of these stairs that I laid you in your father’s arms,” he went on, rearing back, as if he still held this lively burden.

“Your father was coming up the steps, taking them two at a time, his long legs working like pistons. Ts it a boy?’ he roars.

“ ‘No, it’s a witch,’ I told him, and laid you in his arms.

“He was mad as fire, wanting a son. But you defied him. You blazed him a glance. You bowed your back and yelled. You fought him. He was afraid of you!

C£ c Kedie McPherson/ I said, ‘you have begotten what will turn you and rule you at last.’ ”

“But you were saying just now—” I began.

“And you did, Nancy, you had us all going. You had no sense but your own sense, no will but your own will. I remember the day you ran away— not three years old—your father raging up and down this place with everybody on it looking for you. Your mother, poor lady, lying in a dead faint, for fear of what might have happened to you, and me running about distracted with physicking her and waiting for news from the searchers.

“They never did find you! But toward the mid¬ dle of the afternoon you toddled round the corner of the house. And you had this freckle on your nose. You went off and got it, and that has been your way always. You would have what you wanted,” he concluded and regarded me attentively, the crinkles about his eyes fading.

“But there are things that come to us, lass. We do not seek them. They come,” he began again.

“Yes, about father, you were saying just now that he will be—changed. How do you mean*?” I urged, seeing that during these fine speeches there was a mist of tears in his eyes.

“I cannot tell you, my dear,” he answered, sigh¬ ing. “He will be different. Never again the man he has been. Nature, Nancy, has clapped a lid on him. He will live, I think. He will recover his speech, he may be fairly active, but he will never come out from under. A slight stroke, but enough to put the whole man that he was away.”

He stood looking down while he told me this, the sun shining from the window through his thin white hair on the pink skin beneath, the tears glisten¬ ing on his cheeks. A little round-bodied man in a black frock coat that hung away from his legs, be¬ cause he always seemed to be walking out of his coat.

“You understand, don’t you?” he asked. “It means that he needs you,” he explained gently.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Your place and your duty are here at Redfields. You cannot go back to New York.”

“No, not now,” I answered faintly.

“Not until he is gone. It may be years.”

We stood for a moment in this silence.

“Do you mind so much?” he asked.

“I can think now only of father—what you have told me,” I evaded.

“The heart of you speaks, Nancy! Time comes when life drops out of her periods, and that is the end of the sentence. You cannot change it, even if it falls, as this one does, in the middle of your own career. We are all proud of you, but you have other work laid out for you here. It is finer than the writing of a fine book, and it will not be so bad once you are used to it—to him, I mean,” glancing at me. “Nature made Kedie McPherson a great man, but not a good one. You will probably have a tre¬ mendous child on your hands.”

“Child?” I repeated.

“Well, something like that. I have told you. He could be changed some and no great harm done. There was a strain of flaming peat in him. You know what I mean. He lived in a blast. The smoke of his deeds has been curling about here for fifty years. The wonder is that such a conflagration of a man could last so long. Now it is over. The peat smolders and the wind of his will has died down. It will not come again.”

I felt that this kind old man who had seen me into the world was now trying with awkward tender¬ ness to close the door of it to me. What he had been saying had a meaning beyond that of his Ossian eloquence in disposing of father’s roaring career.

“What are you trying to tell me?” I demanded.

“That you have a man’s task before you here, as well as a woman’s tender duties,” holding me now with a steady gaze, as one supports another across a dangerous passage.

“Yes, what is it? Go on!” I exclaimed, feeling the chill of some disaster.

“Your father has been slipping for years. He has lost more than a thousand acres of Redfields plantation. What remains of it is mortgaged— this house, everything.”

With my eyes still fixed on his a shadow black as blind darkness seemed to pass between us. In the bright sunlight I could not see his face. I experi¬ enced a curious dizziness, as if all familiar things were passing away. I did not know until this mo¬ ment that Redfields had never ceased to be the very foundation of my life, that subconsciously even dur¬ ing these last years in New York this roof was still the personal private roof over my head.

Somehow I found my hand in his, held tightly with trembling strength.

“Come here,” he said, drawing me to the window.

“Do you see that gap in the Big Woods ?” He in¬ dicated a wide stretch of land through the trees.

“Never before has there been a break in that forest. Six hundred acres of the finest timberland in the state. Last winter your father sold it, the whole tract, and the cleared land this side as far as the river.”

“But why*?” I gasped.

“Had to do it. Price of cotton down. Notes falling due that he could not meet. And there was the interest on the mortgage. You know what a magnificent notion he had of his integrity. Every debt was a debt of honor to him. This made his credit rating fabulous, and he was reckless.”

“But how did he contract these debts 4 ? Father, as I remember him, was—frugal,” I said, hesitating over the last word, to make it kind since he lay stricken, but mindful that an old contention between us had been his parsimony.

“Yes,” he admitted, “in a way he was the stingi¬ est man I ever knew about little things. He would always borrow a match to light his pipe, rather than use one of his own.”

We exchanged a smile, recalling a certain legend connected with father.

One spring morning years ago, after a particularly stormy revival in Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, the congregation assembled on the banks of Redfields River to witness the ceremony of baptizing re¬ cent converts to the faith.

The people stood among the tall alder flowers and wild lilies, silent, waiting with bowed heads. Suddenly every man removed his hat as the preacher waded out into the stream, his long coat tails float¬ ing on it, accompanied by Archie Winch, who was about to be baptized to make sure of the remission of his sins, which were many, because he was old, and a blacksmith, and had the flare of his red forge on his reputation. At this solemn moment, when nothing should have occurred to distract the concentra¬ tion of prayers upon old Archie, father, who towered conspicuously above everybody else, stepped forth, his broad white hat crushed politely to God beneath his arm, his hair rising like a red crest above his fine fierce face, and created a scandalous hiatus be¬ tween the carnal and the spiritual. He wanted a match. He made a hasty canvass among the men for one, and when it appeared that no man carried matches in his strictly Sabbath pockets father, look¬ ing slightly critical of his fellow men, whisked a hand hastily into his own pocket, drew forth a small silver box he always carried filled with matches and artlessly spent one, cupping his long fingers against the wind over the bowl of his pipe and sending a fine spiral of smoke just as the preacher thrust Winch deep beneath the purling flood with solemn invoca¬ tions.

“But when it came to his sense of himself he was tremendous,” Doctor Fosberry went on after a pause. “He would not commit a small sin nor prac¬ tice any of the minor virtues. If he needed only a hundred dollars he borrowed a thousand, out of a sort of contempt for owing any man a little debt.”

“How well you knew him,” I said with a sigh.

“You must just forgive him, Nancy, and do the best you can with what is left, Tou can save it. These hills and valleys have bred McPhersons since this state was a British colony. You have the brains and courage to clear it of the mortgage, as the first Kedie McPherson cleared the forests from this rich red land. Don’t let go! That is what your father was doing. He had lost his man’s grip on the land that made him and kept him!”