Helen put her hand over the mouthpiece, making a face at him as he stood catlike and sniggering by, burlesquing the Pentland manner, tone, mouthing.
“H-m! Why, law me, child, yes — it’s GOOD soup.”
He was convulsed silently.
And then aloud: “Well, it’s your own lookout, not mine. If he doesn’t want to stay up there, I can’t help it.”
When he returned to Dixieland, Eliza would question him with bitter working lips; she would prick at his hot pride in an effort to keep him by her.
“What do you mean by running off to your papa’s like that? If I were you, I’d have too much pride for that. I’d be a-sha-a-med!” Her face worked with a bitter hurt smile. “Helen can’t be bothered with you. She doesn’t want you around.”
But the powerful charm of Gant’s house, of its tacked and added whimsy, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its great gummed trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the blistered varnish, the hot calfskin, the comfort and abundance, seduced him easily away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland, particularly in winter, since Eliza was most sparing of coal.
Gant had already named it “The Barn”; in the morning now, after his heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntly toward town by way of Spring Street, composing en route the invective that he had formerly reserved to his sitting-room. He would stride through the wide chill hall of Dixieland, bursting in upon Eliza, and two or three negresses, busy preparing the morning meal for the hungry boarders who rocked energetically upon the porch. All of the objections, all of the abuse that had not been uttered when she bought the place, were vented now.
“Woman, you have deserted my bed and board, you have made a laughing stock of me before the world, and left your children to perish. Fiend that you are, there is nothing that you would not do to torture, humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted me in my old age; you have left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It was a bitter day for us all when your gloating eyes first fell upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn. There is no ignominy to which you will not stoop if you think it will put a nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not even your own brothers will come near you. ‘Nor beast, nor man hath fallen so far.’”
And in the pantries, above the stove, into the dining-room, the rich voices of the negresses chuckled with laughter.
“Dat man sho’ can tawk!”
Eliza got along badly with the negroes. She had all the dislike and distrust for them of the mountain people. Moreover, she had never been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or govern it graciously. She nagged and berated the sullen negro girls constantly, tortured by the thought that they were stealing her supplies and her furnishings, and dawdling away the time for which she paid them. And she paid them reluctantly, dribbling out their small wages a coin or two at a time, nagging them for their laziness and stupidity.
“What have you been doing all this time? Did you get those back rooms done upstairs?”
“No’m,” said the negress sullenly, slatting flatfootedly down the kitchen.
“I’ll vow,” Eliza fretted. “I never saw such a good-for-nothing shiftless darkey in my life. You needn’t think I’m going to pay you for wasting your time.”
This would go on throughout the day. As a result, Eliza would often begin the day without a servant: the girls departed at night muttering sullenly, and did not appear the next morning. Moreover, her reputation for bickering pettiness spread through the length and breadth of Niggertown. It became increasingly difficult for her to find any one at all who would work for her. Completely flustered when she awoke to find herself without help, she would immediately call Helen over the telephone, pouring her fretful story into the girl’s ear and entreating assistance:
“I’ll declare, child, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I could wring that worthless nigger’s neck. Here I am left all alone with a house full of people.”
“Mama, in heaven’s name, what’s the matter? Can’t you keep a nigger in the house? Other people do. What do you do to them, anyway?”
But, fuming and irritable, she would leave Gant’s and go to her mother’s, serving the tables with large heartiness, nervous and animated good-humor. All the boarders were very fond of her: they said she was a fine girl. Every one did. There was a spacious and unsparing generosity about her, a dominant consuming vitality, which ate at her poor health, her slender supply of strength, so that her shattered nerves drew her frequently toward hysteria, and sometimes toward physical collapse. She was almost six feet tall: she had large hands and feet, thin straight legs, a big-boned generous face, with the long full chin slightly adroop, revealing her big gold-traced upper teeth. But, in spite of this gauntness, she did not look hard-featured or raw-boned. Her face was full of heartiness and devotion, sensitive, whole-souled, hurt, bitter, hysterical, but at times transparently radiant and handsome.
It was a spiritual and physical necessity for her to exhaust herself in service for others, and it was necessary for her to receive heavy slatherings of praise for that service, and especially necessary that she feel her efforts had gone unappreciated. Even at the beginning, she would become almost frantic reciting her grievances, telling the story of her service to Eliza in a voice that became harsh and hysterical:
“Let the least little thing go wrong and she’s at the phone. It’s not my place to go up there and work like a nigger for a crowd of old cheap boarders. You know that, don’t you? DON’T you?”
“Yes’m,” said Eugene, meekly serving as audience.
“But she’d die rather than admit it. Do you ever hear her say a word of thanks? Do I get,” she said laughing suddenly, her hysteria crossed for the moment with her great humor, “do I get so much as ‘go-to-hell’ for it?”
“NO!” squealed Eugene, going off in fits of idiot laughter.
“Why, law me, child. H-m! Yes. It’s GOOD soup,” said she, touched with her great earthy burlesque.
He tore his collar open, and undid his trousers, sliding to the floor in an apoplexy of laughter.
“Sdop! Sdop! You’re g-g-gilling me!”
“H-m! Why, law me! Yes,” she continued, grinning at him as if she hoped to succeed.
Nevertheless, whether Eliza was servantless or not, she went daily at dinner, the mid-day meal, to help at table, and frequently at night when Gant and the boys ate with Eliza instead of at home. She went because of her deep desire to serve, because it satisfied her need for giving more than was returned, and because, in spite of her jibes, along with Gant, at the Barn, and the “cheap boarders,” the animation of feeding, the clatter of plates, the braided clamor of their talk, stimulated and excited her.
Like Gant, like Luke, she needed extension in life, movement, excitement: she wanted to dominate, to entertain, to be the life of the party. On small solicitation, she sang for the boarders, thumping the cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and singing in her strong, vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertory of songs classical, sentimental, and comic. Eugene remembered the soft cool nights of summer, the assembled boarders and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” which Gant demanded over and over; “Love Me and the World Is Mine”; “Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold”; “Dear Old Girl, the Rob-BIN Sings Above You”; “The End of a Perfect Day”; and “Alexander’s Rag–Time Band,” which Luke had practised in a tortured house for weeks, and sung with thunderous success in the High School Minstrels.
Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his torrential eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.
“— And what did WE do, gentlemen? We sank their navy in an action that lasted only twenty minutes, stormed at by shot and shell, Teddy and his Rough Riders