“No’m,” said Eugene, obedient after pumping.
“It’s a d-d-damn shame!” said Luke loyally.
At this moment Mrs. Barton, kindly but authoritative, called from the veranda:
“Hel-en! Where are you, Hel-en?”
“O gotohell. Gotohell!” said Helen, in a comic undertone.
“Yes? What is it?” she called out sharply.
You see, don’t you?
She was married at Dixieland, because she was having a big wedding. She knew a great many people.
As her wedding-day approached, her suppressed hysteria mounted. Her sense of decorum grew militant: she attacked Eliza bitterly for keeping certain dubious people in the house.
“Mama, in heaven’s name! What do you mean by allowing such goings-on right in the face of Hugh and his people? What do you suppose they think of it? Have you no respect for my feelings? Good heavens, are you going to have the house full of chippies on the night of my wedding?” Her voice was high and cracked. She almost wept.
“Why, child!” said Eliza, with troubled face. “What do you mean? I’ve never noticed anything.”
“Are you blind! Every one’s talking about it! They’re practically living together!” This last was a reference to a condition existing between a dissipated and alcoholic young man and a darkly handsome young woman, slightly tubercular.
To Eugene was assigned the task of digging this couple out of their burrow. He waited sternly outside the girl’s room, watching the shadow dance at the door crack. At the end of the sixth hour, the besieged surrendered — the man came out. The boy — pallid, but proud of his trust — told the house-defiler that he must go. The young man agreed with cheerful alcoholism. He went at once.
Mrs. Pert was saved in the house-cleaning.
“After all,” said Helen, “what do we know about her? They can say what they like about Fatty. I like her.”
Fems, flowers, potted plants, presents and guests arriving. The long nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The packed crowd. The triumphant booming of “The Wedding March.”
A flashlight: Hugh Barton and his bride limply astare — frightened; Gant, Ben, Luke, and Eugene, widely, sheepishly agrin; Eliza, high-sorrowful and sad; Mrs. Selborne and a smile of subtle mystery; the pert flower-girls; Pearl Hines’ happy laughter.
When it was over, Eliza and her daughter hung in each other’s arms, weeping.
Eliza repeated over and over, from guest to guest:
“A son is a son till he gets him a wife,
But a daughter’s a daughter all the days of her life.”
She was comforted.
They escaped at length, wilted, from the thronging press of well-wishing guests. White-faced, scared witless, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Barton got into a closed car. It was done! They would spend the night at the Battery Hill. Ben had engaged the wedding-suite. To-morrow, a honeymoon to Niagara.
Before they went, the girl kissed Eugene with something of the old affection.
“I’ll see you in the Fall, honey. Come over as soon as you’re settled.”
For Hugh Barton was beginning life with his bride in a new place. He was going to the capital of the State. And it had already been determined, chiefly by Gant, that Eugene was going to the State University.
But Hugh and Helen did not go honeymooning the next morning, as they had planned. During the night, as she lay at Dixieland, old Mrs. Barton was taken with a violent, a retching sickness. For once, her massive digestive mechanism failed to meet the heavy demands she had put upon it during the prenuptial banqueting. She came near death.
Hugh and Helen returned abruptly next morning to a scene of dismal tinsellings and jaded lilies. Helen hurled her vitality into the sick woman’s care; dominant, furious, all-mastering, she blew back her life into her. Within three days, Mrs. Barton was out of danger; but her complete recovery was slow, ugly, and painful. As the days lengthened out wearily, the girl became more and more bitter over her thwarted honeymoon. Rushing out of the sick-room, she would enter Eliza’s kitchen with writhen face, unable to control her anger:
“That damned old woman! Sometimes I believe she did it on purpose. My God, am I to get no happiness from life? Will they never leave me alone? Urr-p! Urr-p!”— Her rough bacchic smile played loosely over her large unhappy face. “Mama, in God’s name where does it all come from?” she said, grinning tearfully. “I do nothing but mop up after her. Will you please tell me how long it’s going to last?”
Eliza laughed slyly, passing her finger under her broad nosewing.
“Why, child!” she said. “What in the world! I’ve never seen the like! She must have saved up for the last six months.”
“Yes, sir!” said Helen, looking vaguely away, with a profane smile playing across her mouth, “I’d just like to know where the hell it all comes from. I’ve had everything else,” she said, with a rough angry laugh, “I’m expecting one of her kidneys at any minute.”
“Whew-w!” cried Eliza, shaken with laughter.
“Hel-en! Oh Hel’en!” Mrs. Barton’s voice came feebly in to them.
“O gotohell!” said the girl, sotto-voce. “Urr-p! Urr-p!” She burst suddenly into tears: “Is it going to be like this always! I sometimes believe the judgment of God is against us all. Papa was right.”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza, wetting her fingers, and threading a needle before the light. “I’d go on and pay no more attention to her. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s all imagination!” It was Eliza’s rooted conviction that most human ills, except her own, were “all imagination.”
“Hel-en!”
“All right! I’m coming!” the girl cried cheerfully, turning an angry grin on Eliza as she went. It was funny. It was ugly. It was terrible.
It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief celestial Cloud–Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns have sometimes called “the ancient Jester”— had turned his frown upon their fortunes.
It began to rain — rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell among the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement, glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow flood. It mined the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it drank the steep banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung to their aerial ties across a gutted canyon.
There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein.
The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted anti-climactic honeymoon.
“He will go where I send him or not at all,” Gant spoke