“Well, I’m not going to any longer. That’s one thing sure! No, indeed! I want a home and some children. I’m going to have them!” she said defiantly. In a moment, she added tenderly:
“Poor old papa! I wonder what he’s going to say?”
He said very little. The Gants, after initial surprise, moulded new events very quickly into the texture of their lives. Abysmal change widened their souls out in a brooding unconsciousness.
Mr. Hugh Barton came up into the hills to visit his affianced kin. He came, to their huge delight, lounging in the long racing chassis of a dusty brown 1911 Buick roadster. He came, in a gaseous coil, to the roaring explosion of great engines. He descended, a tall, elegant figure, dyspeptic, lean almost to emaciation, very foppishly laundered and tailored. He looked the car over slowly, critically, a long cigar clamped in the corner of his saturnine mouth, drawing his gauntlets off deliberately. Then, in the same unhurried fashion, he removed from his head the ten-gallon gray sombrero — the only astonishing feature of his otherwise undebatable costume — and shook each long thin leg delicately for a moment to straighten out the wrinkles. But there were none. Then, deliberately, he came up the walk to Dixieland, where the Gants were assembled. As he came, unhurried, he took the cigar from his mouth calmly and held it in the fingers of his lean, hairy, violently palsied hand. His thin black hair, fine spun, was fanned lightly from its elegance by a wantoning breeze. He espied his betrothed and grinned, with dignity, sardonically, with big nuggets of gold teeth. They greeted and kissed.
“This is my mother, Hugh,” said Helen.
Hugh Barton bent slowly, courteously, from his thin waist. He fastened on Eliza a keen penetrating stare that discomposed her. His lips twisted again in an impressive sardonic smile. Every one felt he was going to say something very, very important.
“How do you do?” he asked, and took her hand.
Every one then felt that Hugh Barton had said something very, very important.
With equal slow gravity he greeted each one. They were somewhat awed by his lordliness. Luke, however, burst out uncontrollably:
“You’re g-g-getting a fine girl, Mr. B-b-barton.”
Hugh Barton turned on him slowly and fixed him with his keen stare.
“I think so,” he said gravely. His voice was deep, deliberate, with an impressive rasp. He was selling himself.
In an awkward silence he turned, grinning amiably, on Eugene.
“Have a cigar?” he asked, taking three long powerful weeds from his upper vest pocket, and holding them out in his clean twitching fingers.
“Thanks,” said Eugene with a dissipated leer, “I’ll smoke a Camel.”
He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. Gravely, Hugh Barton held a match for him.
“Why do you wear the big hat?” asked Eugene.
“Psychology,” he said. “It makes ’em talk.”
“I tell you what!” said Eliza, beginning to laugh. “That’s pretty smart, isn’t it?”
“Sure!” said Luke. “That’s advertising! It pays to advertise!”
“Yes,” said Mr. Barton slowly, “you’ve got to get the other fellow’s psychology.”
The phrase seemed to describe an action of modified assault and restrained pillage.
They liked him very much. They all went into the house.
Hugh Barton’s mother was in her seventy-fourth year, but she had the strength of a healthy woman of fifty, and the appetite of two of forty. She was a powerful old lady, six feet tall, with the big bones of a man, and a heavy full-jawed face, sensuous and complacent, and excellently equipped with a champing mill of strong yellow horse-teeth. It was cake and pudding to see her at work on corn on the cob. A slight paralysis had slowed her tongue and thickened her speech a little, so that she spoke deliberately, with a ponderous enunciation of each word. This deformity, which she carefully hid, added to, rather than subtracted from, the pontifical weight of her opinions: she was an earnest Republican — in memory of her departed mate — and she took a violent dislike to any one who opposed her political judgment. When thwarted or annoyed in any way, the heavy benevolence of her face was dislodged by a thunder-cloud of petulance, and her wide pouting underlip rolled out like a window-shade. But, as she barged slowly along, one big hand gripping a heavy stick on which she leaned her massive weight, she was an impressive dowager.
“She’s a lady — a real lady,” said Helen proudly. “Any one can see that! She goes out with all the best people.”
Hugh Barton’s sister, Mrs. Genevieve Watson, was a sallow woman of thirty-eight years, tall, wren-like and emaciated, like her brother; dyspeptic, and very elegantly kept. The divorced Watson was conspicuous for his absence from all conversations: there was once or twice a heavy flutter around his name, a funereal hush, and a muttered suggestion of oriental debauchery.
“He was a beast,” said Hugh Barton, “a low dog. He treated sister very badly.”
Mrs. Barton wagged her great head with the slow but emphatic approval she accorded all her son’s opinions.
“O-o-h!” she said. “He was a ter-rib-bul man.”
He had, they inferred, been given to hellish practices. He had “gone after other women.”
Sister Veve had a narrow discontented face, a metallic vivacity, an effusive cordiality. She was always very smartly dressed. She had somewhat vague connections in the real estate business; she spoke grandly of obscure affairs; she was always on the verge of an indefinite “Big Deal.”
“I’m getting them lined up, brother,” she would say with cheerful confidence. “Things are coming my way. J. D. came in today and said: ‘Veve — you’re the only woman in the world that can put this thing across. Go to it, little girl. There’s a fortune in it for you.’” And so on.
Her conversation, Eugene thought, was not unlike Brother Steve’s.
But their affection and loyalty for one another was beautiful. Its unaccustomed faith, its abiding tranquillity, puzzled and disturbed the Gants. They were touched indefinably, a little annoyed, because of it.
The Bartons came to Woodson Street two weeks before the wedding. Within three days after their arrival, Helen and old lady Barton were at odds. It was inevitable. The heat of the girl’s first affection for Barton’s family wore off very quickly: her possessive instinct asserted itself — she would halve no one’s love, she would share with no other a place in the heart. She would own, she would possess completely. She would be generous, but she would be mistress. She would give. It was the law of her nature.
She began immediately, by force of this essential stress, to make out a case against the old woman.
Mrs. Barton, too, felt the extent of her loss. She wanted to be sure that Helen realized the extent of her acquisition of one of the latter-day saints.
Rocking ponderously in the dark on Gant’s veranda, the old woman would say:
“You are get-ting a good boy, Hel-en.” She would wag her powerful head from side to side, pugnaciously emphatic. “Though I do say it myself, you are get-ting one good boy, Hel-en. A bet-ter boy than Hugh doesent live.”
“Oh, I don’t know!” said Helen, annoyed. “I don’t think it’s such a bad bargain for him either, you know. I think pretty well of myself, too.” And she would laugh, huskily, heartily, trying in laughter to conceal her resentment, but visibly, to every eye but Mrs. Barton’s, angered.
A moment later, on some pretext, she would be back into the house, where, with a face contorted by her rising hysteria, to Luke, Eugene, or any sympathetic audience, she would burst out:
“You