Part 30

When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds came to a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents with an additional quarter, feeling a glow of conscious generosity, as I did so. He refused it.

“It’s two dollars, suh,” he said.

“How’s that?” I asked. “I plainly heard you call out at the hotel: ‘Fifty cents to any part of the town.’”

“It’s two dollars, suh,” he repeated obstinately. “It’s a long ways from the hotel.”

“It is within the city limits and well within them.” I argued. “Don’t think that you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you see those hills over there?” I went on, pointing toward the east (I could not see them, myself, for the drizzle); “well, I was born and raised on their other side. You old fool nigger, can’t you tell people from other people when you see ’em?”

The grim face of King Cettiwayo softened. “Is you from the South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. They is somethin’ sharp in the toes for a Southern gen’l’man to wear.”

“Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?” said I inexorably.

His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility, returned, remained ten seconds, and vanished.

“Boss,” he said, “fifty cents is right; but I needs two dollars, suh; I’m obleeged to have two dollars. I ain’t demandin’ it now, suh; after I know whar you’s from; I’m jus’ sayin’ that I has to have two dollars to-night, and business is mighty po’.”

Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance.

“You confounded old rascal,” I said, reaching down to my pocket, “you ought to be turned over to the police.”

For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; he knew. HE KNEW.

I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed that one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner was missing, and it had been torn through the middle, but joined again. A strip of blue tissue paper, pasted over the split, preserved its negotiability.

Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, lifted the rope and opened a creaky gate.

The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint brush had not touched it in twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not have bowled it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the trees that hugged it close—the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still drew their protecting branches around it against storm and enemy and cold.

Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a queen’s, received me.

The reception room seemed a mile square, because there was nothing in it except some rows of books, on unpainted white-pine bookshelves, a cracked marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horsehair sofa and two or three chairs. Yes, there was a picture on the wall, a colored crayon drawing of a cluster of pansies. I looked around for the portrait of Andrew Jackson and the pinecone hanging basket but they were not there.

Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be repeated to you. She was a product of the old South, gently nurtured in the sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of splendid originality in its somewhat narrow scope. She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of essayists made. While she talked to me I kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and Hood. She was exquisite, she was a valuable discovery. Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much—oh, so much too much—of real life.

I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A house and a dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided between my duty to the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists who fought Thomas in the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her voice, which was like a harpsichord’s, and found that I could not speak of contracts. In the presence of the nine Muses and the three Graces one hesitated to lower the topic to two cents. There would have to be another colloquy after I had regained my commercialism. But I spoke of my mission, and three o’clock of the next afternoon was set for the discussion of the business proposition.

“Your town,” I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is the time for smooth generalities), “seems to be a quiet, sedate place. A home town, I should say, where few things out of the ordinary ever happen.”

It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more than 2,000 barrels.

Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.

“I have never thought of it that way,” she said, with a kind of sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. “Isn’t it in the still, quiet places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one’s window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world—I mean the building of the Tower of Babel—result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto in the North American Review.”

“Of course,” said I platitudinously, “human nature is the same everywhere; but there is more color—er—more drama and movement and—er—romance in some cities than in others.”

“On the surface,” said Azalea Adair. “I have traveled many times around the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings—print and dreams. I have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bowstring with his own hands one of his wives who had uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear up his theatre tickets because his wife was going out with her face covered—with rice powder. In San Francisco’s Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would never see her American lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil had reached three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East Nashville the other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates and lifelong friends because she had married a house painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine little smile that she carried from table to table. Oh, yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few miles of red brick houses and mud and lumber yards.”

Some one knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adair breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She came back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders.

“You must have a cup of tea before you go,” she said, “and a sugar cake.”

She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small Negro girl about twelve, barefoot, not very tidy, glowering at me with thumb in mouth and bulging eyes.