The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [178]
The war came and all through it and even after 1918 people said Miss Eckhart was a German and still wanted the Kaiser to win, and that Miss Snowdie could get along without her. But the old mother died, and Miss Snowdie said Miss Eckhart needed a friendly roof more than she did herself. Miss Eckhart raised the price of her lessons to six dollars a month. Miss Mamie Carmichael stopped her girls from taking, for this or for one thing or another, and then Miss Billy Texas Spights stopped Missie to be like her. Virgie stopped taking her free lessons when her brother Victor was killed in France, but that might have been coincidence, for Virgie had a birthday: she was fourteen. It might have been Virgie's stopping that took away Miss Eckhart's luck for good.
And when she stopped, Virgie's hand lost its touch—that was what they said. Perhaps nobody wanted Virgie Rainey to be anything in Morgana any more than they had wanted Miss Eckhart to be, and they were the two of them still linked together by people's saying that. How much might depend on people's being linked together? Even Miss Snowdie had a little harder time than she had had already with Ran and Scooter, her bad boys, by being linked with roomers and music lessons and Germans.
The time came when Miss Eckhart had almost no pupils at all. Then she had only Cassie.
Her mother, Cassie had long known in her heart, could not help but despise Miss Eckhart. It was just for living so close to her, or maybe just for living, a poor unwanted teacher and unmarried. And Cassie's instinct told her her mother despised herself for despising. That was why she kept Cassie taking just a little longer after Miss Eckhart had been deserted by all the other mothers. It was more that than the money, which would go to Miss Snowdie on the rent bill. The child had to make up for her mother's abhorrence, to keep her mother as kind as she really was. While Miss Snowdie could stay kind through always being far away in her heart.
Cassie herself was well applauded when she played a piece. The recital audience always clapped more loudly for her than they did for Virgie; but then they clapped more loudly still for little Jinny Love Stark. It was Cassie who was awarded the Presbyterian Church's music scholarship that year to go to college—not Virgie. It made Cassie feel "natural"; winning the scholarship over Virgie did not surprise her too much. The only reason for that which she put into words, to be self-effacing, was that the Raineys were Methodists; and yet she did not, basically, understand a slight. And now stretching ahead of her, as far as she could see, were those yellow Schirmer books: all the rest of her life.
But Miss Eckhart sent for Virgie and gave her a present that Cassie for many days could close her eyes and see. It was a little butterfly pin made of cut-out silver, like silver lace, to wear on her shoulder; the safety-catch wasn't any good.
But that didn't make Virgie say she loved Miss Eckhart or go on practicing as she told her. Miss Eckhart gave Virgie an armful of books that were written in German about the lives of the masters, and Virgie couldn't read a word; and Mr. Fate Rainey tore out the Venusberg pictures and fed them to the pigs. Miss Eckhart tried all those things and was strict to the last in the way she gave all her love to Virgie Rainey and none to anybody else, the way she was strict in music; and for Miss Eckhart love was just as arbitrary and one-sided as music teaching.
Her love never did anybody any good.
Then one day, Miss Eckhart had to move out.
The trouble was that Miss Snowdie had had to sell the house. She moved with her two boys back to MacLain where she came from, seven miles away, and where her husband's people came from too. She sold the house to Mrs. Vince Murphy. And soon Miss Eckhart was put out, with Mrs. Vince Murphy retaining the piano and anything Miss Eckhart had or that Miss Snowdie had left for Miss Eckhart.