Eugene squirmed.
“Well what about it, boy?” said Eliza banteringly.
“Do you think you’re worth that much money?”
Mr. Leonard placed his white dry hand upon Eugene’s shoulders, affectionately sliding it down his back and across his kidneys, leaving white chalk prints everywhere.
Then he clamped his meaty palm tightly around the slender bracelet of boy-arm.
“That boy’s worth it,” he said, shaking him gently to and fro.
“Yes, sir!”
Eugene smiled painfully.
Eliza continued to purse her lips.
She felt a strong psychic relation to Leonard.
They both took time.
“Say,” she said, rubbing her broad red nose, and smiling slyly,
“I used to be a school-teacher.
You didn’t know that, did you?
But I didn’t get any such prices as you’re asking,” she added.
“I thought myself mighty lucky if I got my board and twenty dollars a month.”
“Is that so, Mrs. Gant?” said Mr. Leonard with great interest.
“Well, sir!”
He began to laugh in a vague whine, pulling Eugene about more violently and deadening his arm under his crushing grip.
“Yes,” said Eliza, “I remember my father — it was long before you were born, boy,” she said to Eugene, “for I hadn’t laid eyes on your papa — as the feller says, you were nothing but a dish-rag hanging out in heaven — I’d have laughed at any one who suggested marriage then — Well, I tell you what [she shook her head with a sad pursed deprecating mouth], we were mighty poor at the time, I can tell you. — I was thinking about it the other day — many’s the time we didn’t have food in the house for the next meal. — Well, as I was saying, your grandfather [addressing Eugene] came home one night and said — Look here, what about it?
— Who do you suppose I saw today? — I remember him just as plain as if I saw him standing here — I had a feeling —[addressing Leonard with a doubtful smile] I don’t know what you’d call it but it’s pretty strange when you come to think about it, isn’t it?
— I had just finished helping Aunt Jane set the table — she had come all the way from Yancey County to visit your grandmother — when all of a sudden it flashed over me — mind you [to Leonard] I never looked out the window or anything but I knew just as well as I knew anything that he was coming — mercy I cried — here comes — why what on earth are you talking about, Eliza? said your grandma — I remember she went to the door and looked out down the path — there’s no one there — He’s acoming, I said — wait and see — Who? said your grandmother — Why, father, I said — he’s carrying something on his shoulder — and sure enough — I had no sooner got the words out of my mouth than there he was just acoming it for all he was worth, up the path, with a tow-sack full of apples on his back — you could tell by the way he walked that he had news of some sort — well — sure enough — without stopping to say howdy-do — I remembered he began to talk almost before he got into the house — O father, I called out — you’ve brought the apples — it was the year after I had almost died of pneumonia — I’d been spitting up blood ever since — and having hemorrhages — and I asked him to bring me some apples — Well sir, mother said to him, and she looked mighty queer, I can tell you — that’s the strangest thing I ever heard of — and she told him what had happened — Well, he looked pretty serious and said — Yes, I’ll never forget the way he said it — I reckon she saw me.
I wasn’t there but I was thinking of being there and coming up the path at that very moment — I’ve got news for you he said — who do you suppose I saw today — why, I’ve no idea, I said — why old Professor Truman — he came rushing up to me in town and said, see here: where’s Eliza — I’ve got a job for her if she wants it, teaching school this winter out on Beaverdam — why, pshaw, said your grandfather, she’s never taught school a day in her life — and Professor Truman laughed just as big as you please and said never you mind about that — Eliza can do anything she sets her mind on — well sir, that’s the way it all came about.”
High-sorrowful and sad, she paused for a moment, adrift, her white face slanting her life back through the aisled grove of years.
“Well, sir!” said Mr. Leonard vaguely, rubbing his chin.
“You young rascal, you!” he said, giving Eugene another jerk, and beginning to laugh with narcissistic pleasure.
Eliza pursed her lips slowly.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll send him to you for a year.”
That was the way she did business.
Tides run deep in Sargasso.
So, on the hairline of million-minded impulse, destiny bore down on his life again.
Mr. Leonard had leased an old prewar house, set on a hill wooded by magnificent trees.
It faced west and south, looking toward Biltburn, and abruptly down on South End, and the negro flats that stretched to the depot.
One day early in September he took Eugene there.
They walked across town, talking weightily of politics, across the Square, down Hatton Avenue, south into Church, and southwesterly along the bending road that ended in the schoolhouse on the abutting hill.
The huge trees made sad autumn music as they entered the grounds.
In the broad hall of the squat rambling old house Eugene for the first time saw Margaret Leonard.
She held a broom in her hands, and was aproned.
But his first impression was of her shocking fragility.
Margaret Leonard at this time was thirty-four years old.
She had borne two children, a son who was now six years old, and a daughter who was two.
As she stood there, with her long slender fingers splayed about the broomstick, he noted, with a momentary cold nausea, that the tip of her right index finger was flattened out as if it had been crushed beyond healing by a hammer.
But it was years before he knew that tuberculars sometimes have such fingers.
Margaret Leonard was of middling height, five feet six inches perhaps.
As the giddiness of his embarrassment wore off he saw that she could not weigh more than eighty or ninety pounds.
He had heard of the children.
Now he remembered them, and Leonard’s white muscular bulk, with a sense of horror.
His swift vision leaped at once to the sexual relation, and something in him twisted aside, incredulous and afraid.
She had on a dress of crisp gray gingham, not loose or lapping round her wasted figure, but hiding every line in her body, like a draped stick.
As his mind groped out of the pain of impression he heard her voice and, still feeling within him the strange convulsive shame, he lifted his eyes to her face.