 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
V
After a while the coat of clean white paint on the
Jeffrey Curtain house made a definite compromise with
turning gray. It scaled—huge peelings of very brittle
old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising
grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy
death in the overgrown grass beneath. The paint on
the front pillars became streaky; the white ball was
knocked off the left-hand door-post; the green blinds
darkened, then lost all pretense of color.
It began to be a house that was avoided by the tenderminded—some
church bought a lot diagonally opposite
for a graveyard, and this, combined with "the place
where Mrs Curtain stays with that living corpse," was
enough to throw a ghostly aura over that quarter of the
road. Not that she was left alone. Men and women
came to see her, met her down town, where she went to
do her marketing, brought her home in their cars—and
came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the glamour
that still played in her smile. But men who did not
know her no longer followed her with admiring glances
in the street; a diaphanous veil had come down over her
beauty, destroying its vividness, yet bringing neither
wrinkles nor fat.
She acquired a character in the village—a group of
little stories were told of her: how when the country was
frozen over one winter so that no wagons nor automobiles
could travel, she taught herself to skate so that she
could make quick time to the grocer and druggist, and
not leave Jeffrey alone for long. It was said that every
night since his paralysis she slept in a small bed beside
his bed, holding his hand.
Jeffrey Curtain was spoken of as though he were
already dead. As the years dropped by those who had
known him died or moved away—there were but half
a dozen of the old crowd who had drunk cocktails together,
called each other's wives by their first names,
talented fellow that Marlowe had ever known. Now, to
the casual visitor, he was merely the reason that Mrs.
Curtain excused herself sometimes and hurried up-stairs;
he was a groan or a sharp cry borne to the silent parlor
on the heavy air of a Sunday afternoon.
He could not move; he was stone blind, dumb, and
totally unconscious. All day he lay in his bed, except
for a shift to his wheel-chair every morning while she
straightened the room. His paralysis was creeping
slowly toward his heart. At first—for the first year
—Roxanne had received the faintest answering pressure
sometimes when she held his hand—then it had
gone, ceased one evening and never come back, and
through two nights Roxanne lay wide-eyed, staring into
the dark and wondering what had gone, what fraction
of his soul had taken flight, what last grain of comprehension
those shattered broken nerves still carried to
the brain.
After that hope died. Had it not been for her unceasing
care the last spark would have gone long before.
Every morning she shaved and bathed him, shifted him
with her own hands from bed to chair and back to bed.
She was in his room constantly, bearing medicine,
straightening a pillow, talking to him almost as one talks
to a nearly human dog, without hope of response or
appreciation, but with the dim persuasion of habit, a
prayer when faith has gone.
Not a few people, one celebrated nerve specialist
among them, gave her a plain impression that it was
futile to exercise so much care, that if Jeffrey had been
conscious he would have wished to die, that if his spirit
were hovering in some wider air it would agree to no
such sacrifice from her, it would fret only for the prison
of its body to give it full release.
"But you see," she replied, shaking her head gently,
"when I married Jeffrey it was—until I ceased to love
him."
"But," was protested, in effect, "you can't love that."
"I can love what it once was. What else is there for
me to do?"
The specialist shrugged his shoulders and went away
to say that Mrs. Curtain was a remarkable woman and
just about as sweet as an angel—but, he added, it was
a terrible pity.
"There must be some man, or a dozen, just crazy
to take care of her. . . ."
Casually—there were. Here and there some one began
in hope—and ended in reverence. There was no
love in the woman except, strangely enough, for life,
for the people in the world, from the tramp to whom
she gave food she could ill afford to the butcher who sold
her a cheap cut of steak across the meaty board. The
other phase was sealed up somewhere in that expressionless
mummy who lay with his face turned ever toward
the light as mechanically as a compass needle and
waited dumbly for the last wave to wash over his
heart.
After eleven years he died in the middle of a May
night, when the scent of the syringa hung upon the window-sill
and a breeze wafted in the shrillings of the frogs
and cicadas outside. Roxanne awoke at two, and realized
with a start she was alone in the house at last.
| Tales of the jazz age | |