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Title: White Narcissus Author: Raymond Knister * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0301481h.html Edition: 1 Language: English Character set encoding: HTML (Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit) Date first posted: November 2003 Date most recently updated: November 2003 Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html
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Richard Milne was only two hours away from the city, and it seemed to be still with him. He found incredibly foreign the road down which he swung, as though with resolution. Its emptiness shortly became impressive. He met no one, and it seemed to lead burrowing, dusty, into the bleak wind, into the centre of lost wastes screened by scattered and fretful trees. The trees sighed as though in abandonment from struggling forests which, the man knew, would seem to recede as he went forward. He felt lost in this too-familiar country, and slackened his pace.
It was an immediate relief to get out of Lower Warping after ten minutes tramping its empty and shrunken streets, and inquire for a lodging-place. The old Hotel, known to his boyhood by no other name--blue-grey clapboards, two storeys and gable windows breasting the crossroads--was closed. Richard Milne saw that before he had gone a hundred yards down the cindered path from the station. He went back to learn from a meditative youth on a baggage truck whether there was now any other hotel in the place.
"Nope!" The fellow's grin showed a gap in his teeth. He raised his voice against an irruption of the departed, hooting train. "Tom Hughes puts up the travellers sometimes. If you're travellin' with some line he buys, you might try there. He lives above the store. Was you going to stay long?"
Prohibition, it appeared, had caused the place to close, at which Milne was inclined to wonder, since it had afforded hospitality to his last visit, scarcely a year ago. In any event, the remainder of the hamlet was so torpid that on the spur of the moment he determined to get out of it at once, and without seeking a welcome from any of these people who, it came to him, must exist, for the flowers beside their coloured verandas twitched peevish, proud heads in the wind, while the wire gates before their lawns were primly closed. And if he succeeded in finding them, would anyone remember him? No, he would walk out to the farm. For some reason he did not leave his bag, but carried it in his hand.
This matter was only one in the series of actions and adjustments which were a part of his determination, of his plans, and of the trip from the city. He had passed through it all with the impulsive consciousness of nothing but the goal. He must see Ada Lethen, though it were for the last time. Now, alone on the windy road, he began to hesitate, to wonder. The fields, river banks, the astounding, overwhelming sky he seemed to have forgotten, questioned him as an alien. What was he doing there? And what good, he further asked himself, would his coming do? He had returned often enough before. He was moved to ward off despair by reminding himself that he could <is(o nothing else. He had been compelled to come back. But ifi memory could prove so fugacious, how had he trusted it so long? Uncertainty came into his mind. But lifting his head he went forward.
Like the village which had seemed still smaller than a village, smaller than it had ever been before, this countryside had the look of having arisen about Mm foreignly with the incredible immediacy of a dream. The road made fitful efforts at directness, and would ignore the swing of the high river banks, only a little farther on to skirt a depression, a sunken, rich flat, bearing rank, blue-green oats surrounded by drooping willows, elms through which only a glimpse of the brown ripples of water could be seen; again, underbrush, small maples, wild apples, green sumach came right to the road and hung over the fence, hiding the drop of a ravine. A place of choked vistas.
The road was easy walking for the greater part, with firm gravel at first, and then, after a mile, occasional sandy spots, rutted, with hoof-beaten soil between the wheel marks. Richard Milne had buried his bare toes in this sand as a schoolboy. Recalling himself with a smile, he reflected that he was no longer much of a countryman, since he was allowing mere impressions of the place to take his mind, his eye, from its utilitarian aspect. He could not have told yet "how the crops looked," compared with the country he had seen from the train. And doubtless he would be asked by the first acquaintance he met to deliver an opinion.
Passably flourishing, he surmised, almost having forgotten how far these harvests, so assiduously watched over by men, should have progressed in maturity at the end of June.
The corn, he recalled, should be knee-high by the twelfth of July, and was far from that now. The wheat was in head, though still green, short and spindly, waving on almost discernible soil of light-coloured knolls. Oats were dark in the rich hollows, fading to a brighter green on the slopes. The clover heads were red, clustered; ah, there was something on which he could compliment an old-time friend. Perhaps the other things would come on better later.
He wasn't sure that he cared, he admitted, after these years. He had borne his share of such preoccupations, which seemed designed to pen his youthful hopes forever within this congeries of haphazard misshapen fields. Yet it all came back to him, fields and years, more poignant at every yard he traversed, and he knew that he could never be freed from the hold of this soil, however far from it he had travelled, though he were never to be called back by itself, but by a forfeit of love which in final desperation he had come to redeem or tear from its roots forever.
Again he found that he had hastened; then sauntering on with an appearance of ease, the memories stirred within him so that he should not have wished to meet an old neighbour on the road. Nothing could be farther from his wishes than a revealing sign of these conflicting emotions. At best it would be inadequate. And the presence of another would make any such display ridiculous, he reflected, thinking of the rebellious period in which he nearly had hated the place and its inhabitants. He glanced at the house he was passing.
Until now buildings had been part of the village in his mind and, indeed, there had been no rural mail box at the roadside before this one. Lilac bushes stood at either side of the gate; a path curved from townward between the gate and across the lawn, long grass of an evenness which showed that occasionally it was mown. The lumbering farmhouse seemed to stand on the edge of a brink, for nothing showed behind it but, in the distance, the round tops of apple trees, grey-green in the almost apparent wind. At the first glance he felt that the barn and other buildings might have dropped away, but turning he saw the unpainted, sagging-ridged building standing on the edge of the hollow, as near the road where he had unwittingly passed it, as the house. It had been moved up from the slope behind in his absence.
He knew this place very well, but not these improvements. It was the farm his uncle had owned, where he had lived as a boy. As he passed he looked at the mail box. William A. Burnstile was the name. ... How? Raffish, turbulent Bill Burn-stile, big boy of the country school, up to whom little Dick Milne had looked with the hero-worship only bad boys can evoke--chronically unstable on growing up, until his departure for "the West"--was Bill Burnstile the firmly established, evidently prudent or lucky farmer of this place?
While Richard Milne meditated, wondering whether he could not satisfy his curiosity as well as his need by putting up here for the night, he was decided by a series of shouts, wails, and pursuing cries. A boy of eleven with yellow hair on a thin neck rushed around the corner of the house, followed by a series younger, and turned at bay against their tumbling charge. Obviously this was no place for his sojourning; still, fascinated, he stayed and watched the children. The first, with exultant yips, trotted in a circle, and held high above his head a kitten, which clawed wistfully for a footing on the air. Two smaller boys, with shouts, jumped to reach it, seized the other by the legs and downed him torhis own deprecating yells of "No fair, le' me "lone." While they wrestled and squirmed in the grass, a little girl approached, and stepping gingerly among legs, managed to get hold of the kitten. She was running toward the man, to hide behind the snowball bushes at the side of the lawn, when an older girl appeared, calling out to the others. At that instant both girls caught sight of the stranger, and a hush came over the whole serried group of children, puffing yet with their struggle.
For an instant Richard Milne did not know whether or not to pass on. Of course, he would not stay here by deliberate choice, even if he could be accommodated. Still, there was his curiosity. "Boys!" he called. "Is this where Mr Burnstile lives?"
They nudged each other to go and see what the man wanted. Finally, the second boy, the doughty wrestler, left the others and came over to the fence, turning his head in the wind as though to listen, his yellow hair ruffling. "Can't hear. Wind's wrong way."
"Is this where Mr Burnstile lives? I mean, ah, Bill Burnstile?"
"Why, that's me! Oh, you mean my dad. Yes, he lives here. He's cutting hay. Will any of us do?"
The man smiled. "Yes. Your father was out West for a time, wasn't he? Well, you tell him that Dick Milne was here. Just see if he remembers."
"Ouch! That's poison ivy." The boy had been leaning too close to the fence. "What? Oh, all right. I'll tell him." With a last look of wonder at the clothes of the stranger he was gone, skipping into the midst of the other children, who in the meantime had approached nearer--like steam melting into a cloud. The girl with the forgotten cat dangling looked after him.
They were so like a little group of perturbed animals, crying out half-audibly there in the wind, that Richard Milne laughed as he went on. The sight of the country children strangely refreshed him, and no longer was the place alien, but lonesome, waiting to welcome the footsteps of any returning wanderer. He smiled. This life was all as it had been, though these boys and girls would lack the excitement of his own childhood in recognizing "an old tramp."
Evening was coming on, and even the apparently endless stationary evening of June waned after the supper hour. That consideration at least should urge him forward. Again he wondered; it seemed strange that no one he knew appeared in these familiar spaces. There was, of course, the one unchanging farm, where all his hopes were centred, his ultimate destination, and where he could expect no welcome. But surely before reaching it he would find people less interested in himself. He would have no trouble about a place for the night, and somewhere, if needed, there would be a boarding place for longer. He had money, after all, and that was usually unfailing in incidental uses. Still, the club bag was becoming notably heavy.
The land became more rolling, hummocky, confused, with bare cultivated spots, thick brush along random, half-concealed fences. The road and the river seemed to rival each other in the vagrancy of their courses. The banks were now white clay, now green with weedy grass or up-grown shrubbery, a brief row of tall trees--over all of which the sun flowed coldly. A man was tiny enough in the midst of great cities, he remembered strangely, but here it was possible to wonder how many more of these roads there were stretching away into the evening, endlessly, bearing each its strung-out farms, its weight of enigmatic human and animal circumstance.
He seemed suddenly to have walked a great distance. A burden of his own past seemed to have descended upon him. How beautiful all this had been, and as the years of his boyhood slipped past without more than a dream of wider freedom, how dreary! The changing of the seasons had only emphasized the impression of monotony, and he had been held by inertia, and uncertain hope of fulfilment, on the only soil he knew. He had begun to write, and it was comparatively late that he had obeyed that questing spirit which is the heritage of youth. Well, he had gone into the world and done all that he had dreamed of doing, and he had returned frequently enough with the one purpose, to the one being which could call him back; and still the land was the same, with a sorrowful sameness. It seemed that the beauty of this country should have increased, become clear and undeniable even to its preoccupied inhabitants. It always seemed that these people should have found larger interest and a wider view during his own period of Wanderjahre and Lehrjahre.
But now he was coming to the Hymerson farm. Here he knew he would be safe, more or less at home. Old friends of his family in a large phrase, old neighbours at least, they would be glad to see him, if only from curiosity. There did not seem to be improvements in the place, he noted, nor neglect. Wire fencing extending part way along the road, then the old rankly growing hedge, until that was clipped low in front of the house. This was a great affair of cheap yellow brick, which had been a showplace in his boyhood. It already showed signs of decay. The roof, of wooden shingles, was brown, the wood of the gables stained brown with weather, and the originally white veranda posts and scrollings were flaked grey and lead-coloured. There were high weeds along the roadside, and the lawn itself was lush with grass, except for spots uprooted in irregular holes. The source of these holes became apparent in squeals from behind the house. The chorus, kept up so pertinaciously, foretold the supper hour of the pigs.
Entering in at the open lane, for there was no gate to the lawn, Richard Milne saw again the familiar buildings. The barn, an L-shaped huge structure of splotched grey beneath an old coat of pink paint, had been raised upon a foundation of cement blocks, abutted by lengthy graded approaches, which occupied much of the space of the yard.
The yard was a broad expanse strewn with apparent indiscrimination : smaller buildings and used machinery. A long, slatted corncrib with sway-back roof looked as though, empty, it could have been drawn away by a team of horses. But yellow ears of corn protruded between the slats at one end, a remainder after the winter's feeding. A similarly disreputable granary stood at the other side. And all about sprawled cultivators, harrows, discs, a mower, a bare wagon, the rack of which leaned against the side of the corncrib.
These machines were not rusted in any state of disuse. In fact, they and the buildings, instead of giving the place a general effect of neglect, imparted a business-like aspect, as of work being in progress which forbade such fol-de-rols as neatness, newness, paint, and shelter from the elements of air and earth, for which all things were, in any case, ultimately destined.
Before Richard Milne came to the house he saw crossing the yard in the rear a flapping, overalled, small figure of a man, carrying a pair of dripping swill pails. He waved, going forward without setting down his club bag. It was Carson Hymerson, who went on to the swill barrels and dipped the pails, heaving them out with a swish of water whitened by the admixture of chopped grain, and vegetable refuse curling over the rims.
"Just time supper, have good trip out? Hogs here they know it's time for supper. 'Spose you're glad to get away to the country once 'nawhile, how long you goin' to stay?" Hymerson said all this apparently without breath, and with the automatic and evenly timed swiftness of a phonographic record turned at twice its normal speed. It was just his way, Richard remembered people said, as he shook hands with him. The farmer was over fifty, but still his ruddy, hard face, tinged to brass colour by tan, was unchanged by wrinkles, knobby as ever as to chin, nose, cheekbones, and saltily blue of eye. "Well, Missus'11 want to see you better go in supper, I'll be there right now."
Milne hesitated, still holding his bag, but the tone had, been so arbitrary that, considering that the man might have some other immediate task before the meal, he turned back toward the house, walking over a series of long, warped boards under the edges of which grass grew. The surface of the yard was sparsely green in places, where vegetation had survived the trampling of mud in the spring.
The screen door under the porch was open, a wood-burning range hummed cheerily, and there were steps from another room. "Shoo! Scat out of here!" A black cat sped before her, but Mrs Hymerson, compared with her husband, was ceremonial in her reception. She wore a white shirtwaist with high collar, and a black pleated skirt.
"Why, how do you do; you're quite a stranger, Richard. But I suppose I should call you Mr Milne. I thought, you know, I heard Carson talking to somebody, but I couldn't just be sure. You must stay for tea. How's--" She seemed to recall that he lived apart from relatives, that he had no near ones. "How's everything in the city? It must be hot there! Well! It's nice to have you come back and see us." She nodded.
Richard Milne, in the polite replies permitted him at intervals, was conscious of a subdued reservation, like excitement coming unreasonably into his mind. It was impatience, he discovered. He wanted to cloak it in random conversation, discussion of country doings, anything. He could have tried to arrange some provision for a long stay, but he knew that Mrs Hymerson would be offended if he immediately proposed a definite arrangement. And then his uncertainty recalled that he did not know himself how long or in what manner he would be staying.
He had washed the grime from hands and face in the kitchen, wiped on a prickly towel, and was sitting at the supper table where Mrs Hymerson, who insisted that they should not wait, was pouring tea, before the farmer came in, breathing audibly. Calves from a neighbouring farm had broken through the line fence; he had seen them afar off browsing on his oats, and chased them.
"Well, we'll go and call on him after supper, you and I," he announced to Milne.
"Are they from the Lethen side?" asked the latter.
"Certainly they're from Lethen's. That old man's past farming, if he ever was any good at it. Can't even keep up his fences. Why he ever stays on-- But then you must remember. Bet he'd seem as old when you were a kid as he does now."
"I remember how impressive he appeared, with his young brown face and his white hair. I hadn't seen anyone like him; and when I got to know him a little better he never quite became commonplace."
"Quite a character." Mrs Hymerson smiled, as though she knew and wished to take the flavour from what her husband was about to express. "And you know, he knows more than you'd think, too. They say he was well educated when he was young--"
"Appear distinguished, I guess he does, appear," burst in the rapid accents of Carson Hymerson. "That's all he does, is appear, the old fraud, don't I know him, know him like a book! I guess I ought to, hmph!" The man drew up his right shoulder and twisted his head aside in a grimace of cynic humour. "Why, when I and he was on the school board, there never was any peace, but he'd be thinking up ideas. And you couldn't do anything with him, once he got an idea in his head. Crazy, that's what he is, crazy, and he don't know it." The last few swift words came in a lower tone, for he was not unaware of Richard Milne's reception of them, a hardening of the mouth.
"I am sorry to hear that. Mr Lethen must have changed. It seemed to me that he was the kind of man who, if he could make out to live in the country at all, would be of invaluable service." The younger man spoke with a deliberation which spoke of long-weighed conclusions, and a disposition to regard only politeness in listening to whatever might be said on the subject. Carson Hymerson heard him with impatient snorts, scarcely able to keep from interrupting but, perhaps because of the still regard of his wife, less acrid in tone when he did rattle:
"You might think so. It's quite a while since you had much to do with old Lethen, ain't it? Well! You ask the neighbours when you want to find out about a man! You can ask . .." He mumbled, then went on with greater heat. "Invaluable use, why that's just what he ain't, is useful."
"Yes, of course, it must be kind of past his time for working very hard." Mrs Hymerson, Richard Milne's amusement noted, had preserved a sense for affable adjustment which her husband might never have possessed. The latter was not going to let her smooth things over.
"Why, look at the way he's always lived with that woman of his. That's enough for me, never speaking! And take his daughter--"
"Yes . . .?" began Richard, so quickly that the woman at once struck in, high-pitched.
"All I say is ... all I say is, we can't ever know, don't you see, what may be at the bottom of these things. Everyone has their cross to bear, and we can't always understand, so it behoves us not to judge others." Mrs Hymerson's voice became more even as she went on, despite the snort of Carson, as though she were reciting a well remembered scriptural lesson. Milne, too grateful now that a moment of rage had passed not to abet her irrelevance, turned to her.
"Is Arvin not at home now, Mrs Hymerson? I hope you'll pardon my not inquiring before; I missed him at once, of course."
"Arvin, he went out in the country today to look for a cow. Kind of running out of good cows, some going dry, going to fat a couple for beef. So I thought I'd give the boy a chance, let him use his own head this time and buy one without me near. I hope he don't get beat," he added grimly.
Richard Milne could not forbear a smile, which only belatedly he reflected might be taken as derogatory to the young man, twenty-six at the time of his last visit, but schooled-- better, dragooned--by his father's impatience daily."
"That's fine." The remark hearty and sincere. "I don't think they'll get ahead of Arvin in a deal."
"And how is your--work progressing?" asked Mrs Hymerson, beaming. "I've heard a lot about your books. They happen around here. Two of them, you've written, haven't you?"
Three had been published, Richard told her. "Things are going well enough that I'm taking a holiday." He chuckled. "Keeping in the office, where most of my work with the advertising agency is done, gets pretty tiresome, especially at this season of the year."
"Get you fellows out in the hayfield," was Hymerson's jocular amenity. "Find out it was hot enough there, too."
The young man did not reply to this, reflecting almost with dismay that he had forgotten the terms of intercourse in the country, by which it was necessary that he should be able to "give as good as was sent." Doing that, in fact, was one of the chief roads to respect--one certainly blocked to him, even if the restraint caused him to appear morose.
"Our work," he proceeded, "is interesting; so we are told by people who don't know it. And certainly it has a fascination. It's fun to know that you are writing for a million readers, from the start." This was a rough effort at approximation to which he felt that a response could be sought. Nothing tried him more than talking of his good work, his creative books, to curious or indifferent people, and he valued the topic of advertising in proportion to the lack of immediacy it had for him. From the time of his rural upbringing he retained a sense that no one but other craftsmen really could be concerned in such matters.
He listened idly to the exclamations of his hostess and the dubious questions of Carson Hymerson really in swelling restiveness. He fancied that the shadow of the crosspiece of the screen door crept across the kitchen floor with a surreptitious spurt. The evening would be upon him.
The meal was finished, and he had relished the potatoes fried in butter, the cold boiled pork, home-made bread, and rhubarb sauce. Carson Hymerson was in no haste now to rise, but drank a third cup of tea. At a remark upon the return of Bill Burnstile with a family, he sucked his lips and said complacently :
"Yes, rolling stone, Bill. Expect he'll be pulling out of here, even, one of these times, eh? Yes, he did collect a family, all right. Guess his woman's a pretty fair woman to help get along too, or he wouldn't be able to make a payment on a place like he has." He made the pronouncement with an unwavering, as it were a significant gaze of the little blue eyes in the direction of his wife, and Richard Milne turned to her. He would have to look up Bill while he was here.
"All the old neighbours," she assented, while Carson rapidly demanded how long he intended to stay. "Most of them are here yet. Not many have moved away."
"A few days, perhaps longer," Richard said, with an assumption of certainty surprising to himself, adding, "I think I'll take a stroll down the road this evening."
Carson seemed to be replying to his wife. "Good riddance if some would get out, let their land be farmed right." A thought seemed to strike him. "You wouldn't be going to Lethen's tonight, would you?"
"Yes," agreed Richard Milne candidly. "I'll probably call there." He paid no more attention to the anxious, almost signalling look of the woman than Carson Hymerson himself did. The latter seemed to regard him with stupefaction, which merged into an awkward grin of mocking badinage.
"Oh, I see! There's attraction over there, come to think of it. Not that I blame you. Now that I remember, you did use to kind of shine around Ada when you was a young gaffer. That's all right!"
They had risen from the table by this time, and a slow-mounting annoyance approaching anger had modified Richard Milne's haste to get away. "That's pleasant," he asserted. He secured his hat and went outside, to the accompaniment of the housewife's expressed wish that he remember her to Mrs Lethen; but Carson was still beside him, hands comfortably stuck in deep overall pockets.
"Kind of looks as though I wasn't going to have you help me see to them calves after all, eh? Unless you go that way through the fields with me. Maybe I'll see you over there, anyway. Ha! Ha! But, of course, you wouldn't be coming away with me yet so early. Well, I'll see the door's left unlocked for you."
Milne thanked him with a grave smile, as one willing to accept all this as well intentioned jocosity, and hurried down the lane to the road. His chief feeling was one of haste.
"Well, don't go 'way mad, looks like it was going to freeze, don't it," was the parting sally, which his mind repeated to his hurried steps down the dry road.
The wind was dying before the sunset, but had chilled, turning up the under sides of leaves. Trees shivered under a dulled sky. The evening, muted by wind and cold, given a sullen swiftness of animation, mated the feeling of Richard Milne. After a week of torrid weather in which the very sky seemed to melt, rain should have come to sweeten the smell of ripening grain and whitened clods. But first this dry cold, in which trees writhed blanching, while now and again a cricket chirping up fitfully made still greater the removal from the sultry quietude proper to the time and season.
Once more the man was overcome by a sense of strangeness. He had been in his office that morning, had walked and taxied in the streets of the city and left it at noon, riding through unforgettable miles of railway yards and factories and grimy suburbs. And already he could make himself believe in the existence of such things only with an effort. For all the years in which he had struggled for success there, it seemed that the only real and personal part of his life had been lived here, surrounded by trees, fields, river, which claimed him as though he had never left them. He did not need to look at this house or hedge or vista for a landmark, because he could have believed that he had walked down this road every night for the past year. And accompanying the return upon him bodily of the old life was the same sense of futility and uncertainty which he had known in those times--the cause of his eventual determination to leave, and also of his periodic returns. And with every step he was approaching nearer the source of that uncertainty.
The Lethen place hid the sunset, looming beyond a dredged cut to the river, like a moat, dry and overgrown with weeds. The tangle of vegetation, which in this light seemed to overlay the buildings, was in itself a quickening token to Richard Milne's remembrance, and he slowed, paused. Great evergreens shadowed the front of the place and guided his footsteps toward the lane. Dust flurried about him impotently as he reached the little leaning gate and went across the front yard, itself no haven to him: a wild expanse of grass and pine needles shadowy and whispering to his rising excitement of insuperable awaiting barriers.
The house was old, its narrow windows peered dark from drapery of Virginia creeper, only the gables showing the weathered brick expanse which towered remote as though to scan the oblivious invader below. There was something secret but secure about the air of the house, like an awareness of its life indecipherable in dark hiding of the vines. So much of its appearance Richard Milne knew more from an act of memory than by bodily sight. He had reached the low weathered wooden gate giving on the lawn, and he became unconscious of everything for that moment, of the mysteriously quickened night, the house, the trees, the dark, the pressing sky. For he knew that Ada Lethen was on the veranda before him, a few steps before his feet.
Her white dress stirred against the dusk, and he was filled and enveloped, overwhelmed with sense of her. He surprised a look of gladness and incredulity on her pale face as she slowly rose to greet him. And as of old her nervous pale fingers fluttered to her hair.
"Richard Milne! Why are you here? When-did you come?"
He held her hand, looking into her darkened eyes, almost level with his own. "You are asking!" he exclaimed slowly. "Do you know, I couldn't quite believe--well, in you." Suddenly he realized it. "Ever since I got off the train I've been hurried, urged by something. Something was wrong--at least; and I had to see you to believe that this sorry, this decorative and rapscallion world did hold you--all that you mean." In a boyish access he laughed.
She laughed a little, with an intonation of sadness, withdrawing her hand. "Sit down. You've not changed. When did you come?" She moved two books on the seat, and reposed beyond them.
He sighed, still lost in the sight of her. "Then you don't refuse to see me, you don't send me away this time ... or not yet." His tone was reproachfully accusing, more than ironical. She smiled faintly. Her pale, almost sallow face had become radiant.
"Why shouldn't I be ... simply enchanted, to see an old friend?" She spoke softly. "Not every evening. . . . It's a long time...."
His mind refused to hope, to consider implications, overpowering, impossible, and rapt. He was not annoyed by the word "friend." It was enough to be here. Without touching them he indicated the books.
"You still read a great deal." His tone strove to flit to a lightness belying his pity, the feeling in his familiar recognition which had brought the tears to his eyes when he met her. "Still," he had said. And "not every evening" did he come.
He had long since, for all his freedom in thought, his assent to her ideals, looked with uneasiness upon her unremitting, her almost possessed reading. That feeling was beyond his rationalizing. He had been able to object only interferingly, as he felt powerless. What were books to her? Anodyne, perhaps, and they had to be of increasing potency. She paid little heed to him. What was she to do? She had been too wise to put it so, knowing what his answer would be. He felt absurd to cavil, though he did not like some of the things she read. . . . In his remark was contained a whole cycle of reminiscence, of familiarity which now seemed impossible.
"Yes, the books." She spoke in tones which to his cherished vision of her were what finality is to despair. "I read a great deal still--still."
Her present listlessness did not relieve him, but incongruously made him more anxious for her. He tried to speak as casually as a stranger.
"I remember them, your wide and esoteric explorations! Am I to take it that you are wearying of wandering? Or are you only temporarily abashed by the illimitable wastes, you're waiting to start forth again, afresh--you see the minarets of your city, lost in vapour, and you pause; and its riddle, while you rest, calls again. Its riddle. . . ." As he went on, the words seemed to flow automatically, as though he were drunk with a surprise of enchantment, while he watched her happy and tired face.
"The riddle," she murmured. They were silent a little. "That alone used to serve as reward, but it is long since the penance."
"I am not a riddle, but a man," he reminded her. "Come, are you so quiet because you think I am a ghost? You want proof!" But he did not touch her. "I should inquire about your parents, the circumstances of our life which nobody else knows."
He had spoken as though determinedly gay, cheering one sick; and now there was purpose in the indirect reference to her family, as of a relic of embitterment.
Ada Lethen laughed. "Do I seem so quiet? I assure you it's not because I don't appreciate, in all the word means, that you are here. Only the other day Mother was speaking to me of you."
"Was she?"
His eagerness was based, again, upon imagined changes during his absence. But it was no time yet to stake anything on the possible discovery of what had taken place in that house. "I hope Mrs Lethen has been in good health lately?"
"Not exactly. She never is, of course, that would be too much to expect. Lately at times she seems better, and then a day or a week will come when she alarms me." Though the voice was soft, her articulation was definite and precise, her manner quietly explanatory, so that Richard Milne at moments fancied he was in a dream, not there, that far away she, like himself, sat alone.
He saw the real image of her as she sat alone, while seasons passed. How else should she sit, though her reason for being in that house always had been to keep from loneliness the father and mother whose estrangement had been one of the legends of his childhood? In itself that was enough to make for loneliness, and he marvelled at her endurance, her poised good sense. With the coming of womanhood, should she not feel free? But she could not believe in freedom.
She was talking softly, with the same certainty in which she had always shaken her head at his reasonings, his pleadings, implying that he understood her situation better than he pretended.
And in reality that was the case. He understood, but he felt surely that if the pair had been left to themselves long ago, they probably long ago should have become reconciled. Yet what seemed reasonable and practicable in the daylit world of the material and of work, ebbed away from him here before the power of a reality long-accepted, which denied the existence of all else. And peering into the past to that child, strange-eyed, fearfully watchful, wounded, which Ada Lethen must have been, he felt that her presence might have been a sword between the two, so that they could never forget the bitterness of the first few days after the quarrel. That bitterness, dying away to inanition, died to a complete disregard so deep that they did not care to separate, even would not have done so, perhaps, had the girl not been there.
Ada Lethen was silent now, looking across the fields, and Richard Milne could not believe that she had spoken. Those fields, he remembered, while they became dreary and inanimate to him at memory of the many times he had returned to them in vain, these fields barrenly flourishing to the darkening oblivious forests, were her constant sight. He seized her still hand --he who had vowed never to touch her again until the availing outcome of his quest had appeared. He had seen it all many an evening before, and she--she had looked on few other vistas throughout her years. "What is it holds you, Ada?" he asked in a choking tone, as though she were dying before his eyes.
She did not stir, there was no motion of her body on the bench while her hand warmed in his, and she looked into the approaching night. With a long sigh, a smile, she turned, looked at her hands on the books, at him. At last, quietly:
"I don't know." She roused herself and smiled almost brightly at him. "Why are you here?" she asked, as though the question were as reasonable as his had been.
He made no answer, since they both knew that it was not necessary to mention why he had returned this time. Something made him understand that she had not changed, that surely in all this place of eroded dreams she was least changeable. And yet he knew as well that his spirits were rising as if in obedience to an old call, and he was about to press her with reasonings, expostulations she had heard often enough before, and which would pour from his lips in a flood. But she turned her eyes away and went on.
"I don't know, and I have admitted to you that there is no reason which would operate logically. But perhaps what holds me here is knowing that if I went my mother would die. She would starve, as completely--God knows it is precious little that I do or can do for her, and yet it is only my being here that keeps her soul alive. They have been estranged so long that they are really dead to each other, and yet if they were left alone together they would both, she, at least, would die the bodily death as well."
He smiled bitterly. "It is always of her you speak," he added, with a surprising acrimony, for his thwarted feeling was being transferred to annoyance in behalf of the representative of his own sex in this generation-long quarrel. "Doesn't your father feel? Do you think he doesn't know the bitter of loneliness and misprision as well as your mother?"
"Father, of course. I know that, and it is why things are as they are. Possibly if I could take sides, there could be some outcome, even to strife. But I see, I understand too well, so that there is no hope. I see the sadness of both, and how oblivion awaits it all... across a mist of pathos like dreaming."
"You're too sympathetic," said the man gruffly. He wanted to add that she had been thinking about it too much. "Surely something could be done. I tell you, it would be a tonic, a rough cold-blooded treatment. Why, they could have been laughed out of everything, or I'm mistaken. To go on in this way--it's absurd. . . ." But he spoke less from reason than desperation, with a maddeningly increasing sense of impotence in the smothering shroud of time and place, the overpowering creep of memories that die only to haunt implacably. "It's plain to me that your father has a good deal to complain of. Perhaps you don't know that there are many kinds of men with whom no--no such situation could exist."
"I hope so," she murmured, so that he could scarcely hear. The silence grew, big with all that they could not say, which neither could understand well enough to form into words, and yet which they felt between them like an impalpable tie.
"There are women who wouldn't let it exist," he continued, with a doggedness which ignored his paradox. But Ada did not smile.
"Well," sighed Richard Milne at last. "We don't seem to know that we have been apart for a long time."
They smiled, lost in a sense of this, of being together, and that each dearly lost moment gave its measure of almost painful bliss. Looking at the clear profile of Ada Lethen, he felt his heart rise, as though it would break his body apart. The mazed night could have lasted forever, it might have been the beginning or end of eternity.
They exchanged little words, about his travels, how the village seemed to him, changes . . . almost as though shy. And a wave of tender memory came over Richard Milne at her questions, her concern. He saw those days mysterious and full of homely poetry, when he had been a boy in these fields--an evocation of weather, irrelevant transitory conditions, neighbours, above all the surveillance of these over the Lethen family, which had drawn to it his child's curiosity. The odd and vivid little girl of whom he was conscious sitting at one side and behind him in the schoolhouse; their awakening to each other which seemed without beginning; the silence between them, always the silence, and the forbidding looks which he read in the constraint of either of her parents he inadvertently met. The secret coming out at last from the mouth of gossip that wondered at his not always having known. All these made a medium through which translucently to see Ada Lethen--an image of sleet frozen upon maple buds.
"You do not love them/' he continued slowly, half unwilling to voice his thought. "But that does not cause you to change your attitude toward me. You're no kinder or more-- reasonable. I dare say if you hated them you'd think that gave you the right, or the obligation to care for their needs." The cruelty of his suffering was speaking now.
"Hate? I can never hate them--it would be impossible." Yet she had answered so swiftly, with an involuntary look at him, that he felt he had probed her most secret dread. "Only pity. It is pity which-- Pity will kill me!" she exclaimed with sudden wildness, as though the words themselves lent to her sense a foretaste of ultimate bitterness.
"I can't! I can't!"
She was sobbing words against his shoulder, while all his thoughts, the froth on the billow of his emotion flew scattered by this sudden contact. And he had come determined not to touch her hand, for the havoc it would be to him afterward. Now he held her, tightly, speaking incoherently.
"Precious Ada! This is going to kill you. Ada! Let us go away. You must' We can live a different life from this. We'll go--"
All the time her tears were changing something in his mind. The hot tears fell on his hands, and he began to try to comfort her. It was as though they were children again, and she had cried, as she did once, about something some of the other children said, and he had offered her his handkerchief. The years were broken up and their emotions returned upon him in a confused avalanche, while he held her, and at the same time he was in the present, his arms were holding her as they had longed to do.
"Let us go away!" he heard himself repeating in a tone of anguished pleading which was almost maudlin.
The night was flowing past them, through the trees, past them in the cold vines of the veranda of the decayed house. And it seemed as though they were being left, stranded in an unimaginable waste beyond life, alone and not together, deserted even of hot and frenzied words, while the mystery of the earth and the skies became in imminence torturingly sweet.
At this moment something made Richard Milne aware of a stirring in the room behind them. There was still light enough to show the figure of a woman, that woman who was sinister in his mind by very reason of her appalling and helpless misery. Her tall form bent over a vase of white narcissi. Other vases of the glowing white flower lent a distilled radiance to the dusk of the room. It seemed, though the window was down, that a sickly, heavy odour came spreading impalpable through the air. Richard seemed to be stupefied by it, and kept his watch in fascination; but the woman inside appeared unconscious of everything but the flowering bulbs. Her fingers caressed a blossom, and she passed to the other side of the room to look at a bulb just breaking into bud, with a slow, trembling shake of the head. She gazed, a long time at this one, and long at one wilting with the accomplishment of its short life. She turned at last and passed into another room, opening and closing the door in silence peculiarly a summation of her white face.
He felt and heard a sigh at his cheek. "She can't have heard us. . . ." The window was darkened by the Virginia creeper.
"You speak as though nothing could be more terrible than her hearing us," he replied aloud. "As a matter of fact, it would probably be one of the best things which could happen if they overheard us--both of them--discussing them in the harshest and least sympathetic manner." His own surprised misgiving at the urgency of these words was only equalled by hers. She was struck silent in a way which made patent the effort with which she began speaking again.
"She has always loved the narcissi." Ada's cadence on that word "loved" was enough to show that her fear was well grounded, and that pity could drain her soul. Instead of seeing an unreal, almost delusive quality in the situation, as one fresh from the sane world, she appeared to conceive of no other reality beyond this abnormal state of affairs. She accepted wholeheartedly the fact of her mother and her mother's state, where one unobsessed would have implied, for all its gravity, a lightness of reservation.
"I remember," he assented heavily, with an accumulation of unspoken criticism in his tone. "But how does she endure them? A bulb or two is nice to have, if you like them, but such a number, with their enervating odour, must be intolerable to anyone else."
"But she likes them, worships them. She seems to think of nothing else from day to night. She looks at them, cares for them, she has some of them beside her when she sleeps, and first thing in the morning she comes downstairs to look at the others. I have known her to get up in the middle of the night to come downstairs to the sitting-room and look at them. Sometimes she will fall in a reverie over them, and I can scarcely call her away to a meal."
"Yes, she must be fairly fond of them," he assented grimly. "But how do you stand it? It must get on your nerves, doesn't it, day after day?" He was consciously trying to arouse her. "To say nothing of the smell. And she keeps the windows closed all the time?"
"Yes, nearly all the time. . . . Sometimes I plead with her, but I think it does no good, it does harm. She becomes secretive, and starts when I come into the room and she is with them."
Richard was almost ready to feign such brutality as casual curiosity would dictate. "It's pathological," he muttered. "Should be looked into."
"They've always been so much to her, a refuge for her yearning, since I seem inanimate and averse. And--more now-- And then--" He could see that she was struggling with the obviousness of some feeling which was obscurely trying to make her refer to her father.
Richard Milne smiled bitterly at the conception of her as inanimate and averse, but he said :
"And your father still means more to her than she admits or knows, though she would cut her heart out to be rid of him--" There was a weary flippancy almost of cynicism in his utterance, as of one arming himself with brusqueness against too many torturing perplexities. And again there was an upward inflection here suddenly warily deceitful, though he would not openly question her; for while he knew the outward circumstances of this quandary, never yet had he known Ada Lethen to talk about it in the way he wished, as though she expected or even hoped that he could understand.
"That is to be expected," she answered, with a tinge of coldness, "seeing the source of it all. Had it been any ordinary quarrel which tempted them into declaring in the frenzied tones I remember, that they would never speak to each other again-- the bitterness might have, it must have, lapsed, passed away in the lukewarm tolerance with which most people must regard each other."
It came to him that she was a stranger to the warmth and coolness of ordinary domestic relations and family intercourse. An uncanny thrill was imparted with her words, as if they had embodied an exercise of intuition on the part of an immigrant from another planet, but hardly inured to the life of this; and he could have wept to think of that little girl.
"You--you were present at the quarrel, the original one?" He dared not ask, and yet he must.
Yes, she told him. The child had sat at the head of the stairs, shivering in her nightgown, and she heard it all. The raised voices went on for hours, and, as in the height of a storm, it always semed that violence could reach no further pitch and these emotions would come to outrageous ends. "I'll never forget how I shivered, and my heart went when I thought they meant to kill one another. But at last I fell asleep there." She went on with added constraint in her tone, "And there I was in the morning." They had passed her, the woman to her room, the father to get his coat in the hall. Neither had touched the child, though they had passed so near as almost to step over its insensible form.
His arm went out to her again. "Poor little thing! I'm afraid I can never understand all that your childhood was; only pity. But what you say does not tend to make me pity--these people. Quite the contrary."
In an instant, while he sat there unmoving, unchanged in aspect, a flame of rage had wrapped him as a tree may be robed in fire, leaving him for the moment gripped helpless and listening only half-consciously to her words.
"You shouldn't pity me," she murmured, and continued, "it must have been that, perhaps, rather than my rational intelligence, which taught me to be cold to both of them. Perhaps if any love for either of them had been left afterward my heart should have been broken. As it is--" She laughed bitterly.
"You know that as it is I am heartless." Yet this speech and the eyes with which she looked at him as she said it made Richard Milne wonder and hope. Clearly there had been a change, and she must have learned in his absence to admit to herself whether or not she loved him. The thought was enough: with mounting surety he felt that she did love him, that this was the time appointed--that surely he and Ada Lethen would not let go the chance of happiness without a struggle. If only it were just a matter of duty. But it was not. For so much of her life she had been bound to this place and to these slowly petrifying people that she could not imagine herself apart from them.
Perhaps the knot of the whole difficulty lay there. Desperately as she might yearn, he felt that she could not conceive happiness. Perhaps nothing but the death of one of those parents would bring her awake--alone--drive her to living.
"Your heart was too tender for such storms. It makes me wild to think of it--to think of your sitting there, hearing--" The vividness of the picture he saw caused him to wince away from its unbelievable pathos, its meagre sharpness, like the outline of a remote folk-story, suddenly quickened to life by the lips of one of its participants.
"I think I could repeat every word," she said quietly. "They--each thought the other unfaithful. They proved that each was certain, no matter how much the other denied it, and that they would be obliged by every human consideration to hate each other to the end of life. And they have never spoken to each other since."
"Never?" He mused with what seemed an idle particularity. His mind had accepted the fact long since, so that it did not occur to him to brand this inveterate silence as insane and foreign to humanity. Everyone in his boyhood world had accepted it.
Night had set in, wild as autumn; out in the open wind tore the darkness, the trees sighed loud, and colour was given to strain. Among the sheltered recesses of the lawn, about the thick evergreen trees, the hedge, and the veranda, the occasionally flawed quietude allowed the mind, lulled and affrighted anew, to return again and again to the turbulence without. A cricket or crickets took up their cry, silenced, and returned. What portion could there be, what human portion, but a strife of futility, meaningless turmoil? To watch it was to be lulled, only to hear were peace; and he looked at her face, hoping to hear her voice go on, sweetening the acrid past. But she said nothing, the moment was gone; and on the flood of many remembered longings and resolves surged back his single intent.
"Ada!" he burst out. "This is absurd. For anyone who could do that, much as I might ultimately pity them, it's impossible to find excuse or condolence. To pamper them emotionally all this time is ridiculous. As your parents they will receive my respect; not otherwise, I assure you. You know as well as I that unless some definite course is undertaken nothing can be hoped.
"A course! What course?" she half moaned.
"But," he adjured her, "if you let things take their own way there is bound to be a great deal of trouble and bitterness. You will find that you have acquired nothing for the furnishing of your life but sorrow and the memories of sorrow. You are even farther removed than my own ideals are from the dogma of today. That arrivism, opportunism, at best only cloaks the thirst for getting which is rendering barren the lives we see everywhere. Materialism. Yet in a degree we've got to recognize that it is based on the reality which is foundation to material things. People get it reversed and think that material things are the only basis of reality. But it is our destiny: we are bound to conquer. We must subdue things; we've got to take from life even the emotions, the experience, and fulfilment we need. If we shirk that we are doing a wrong as great as that of starving in the midst of nature's abundance." Words had betrayed him again. He did not know whether she were listening.
"There's no use talking, sacrifice is all right. It is part of the acceptance of life. Calmness and freedom from inordinate grasping is good. But the fact which you and I have to face right now is that happiness is not offered for ever in this world, it does not go begging; and we have a right to all of it we can make, a duty to ourselves which is imperative and primary, and only the fruition of which enables us to do a duty to others."
She said nothing. He knew that she agreed with him, and that her agreement would make no difference. She was not to be aroused by the acrimony of the first part of his harangue, nor by the reasons of his special plea. Though he spoke with a cool voice, emphatic intonations, and at times almost judicial deliberation, he had become warmed so that her inert silence met him like a chill barrier. He felt that he had talked the "sales-talk" of a "go-getter" of his city, city like an enthusiastic nightmare of another planet now.
What is there in her face, he asked himself with a sudden frenzied access, what is there in her soul, that has made me return, time after time--made my nights a memory and my days a double vision? Love? It was to laugh at the simplicity of the tiny word. Who had told that love was torture of the being, that love would blast life from him in a flutter of trivialities as oak-leaves are loosed upon the wind after the first frost? Who had told him that love would eat beneath his comfort in accomplishment until he knew himself in his wanderings a lost soul? Beneath everything, his most cherished activities, lay a weary impatience with them and a sense of their irrelevance in the lack of a determining motive to channel their force.
She turned to him, and it was as though she had descried a vision of beatification in the darkness; she took his hand as though she would warm it in her cold hand. But the light in her face slowly died as her low voice, with pauses, unwonted uncertainties here and there, went on. Again, as though tranced, he had nothing but to listen, given up not to her reasonings, but to her, the spirit beneath, which embraced not only them and her conduct, but the very qualities which made her to him what she was. And it was her hand which was wanned, though a gesture lifted both to her breast.
"Richard, I know. That is what makes it so hard, that I do understand. Oh, don't think I don't want happiness, that I am harsh. But I have found the hardest thing to do. ... I see Father going about the farm as though he were lost; and his hair is white. . . . Like his horses, he is old; like them, he is patient, even in waiting for the end. What should I be doing to leave him? There is some other way. My mother seems daily to give her frail life to the white narcissi; and, while she is not old, she makes me fear the more. You can see how it is with me, and how I must not listen to--the outer world, even to-- even as I have. ..." Her voice broke as if from a weight of longing which would return in after days.
Richard Milne's impelling desperation would no longer be kept within bounds. He seemed to find her pleas unanswerable as she had his. He rose from the seat. His voice quivered. A fear that they were cutting themselves off from each other as they had done before did not suffice to temper his embittered discomfiture, which he scarcely cloaked in polite circumstantiality.
"It is late and I must not keep you, Ada. We must talk again," he added with a perverse effort at balance. He was facing the window giving on the dark room; across it he saw the crack of light under the door, which showed that life went on in the rear portions of the house. "I hope my intrusion hasn't kept your mother too long from her bulbs." To this irrepressible malice in jejune and childish politeness Ada made a vague gesture and rose as he went on: "I am going to have a talk with your parents. They, too, may not be able to understand reason and common logic, but at least they shall listen. It is late now, and I shall not disturb them."
She put out her hand. "I'm sorry, Richard." She said it so simply and with such significance that his anger melted, and he half felt that he was defeated once more. Then his stubborn pugnacity whelmed the feeling. He grasped her extended hand.
"Give them my regards, please, and tell them that. We'll see."
Smiling a little at his grimness, the tall woman murmured :
"Tm sure they'll be glad to see you again. They have so few visitors, and they remember you, of course. Father was asking why you hadn't seen him the last time you were here."
"I look at the whole thing differently now," he declared again. "I must see them both regardless of any kind interest they may have in me."
Ada Lethen became grave. "Richard, you mustn't look at it in that way. There's nothing to get angry about, nothing to be done." She looked at him with steadfast, upraised eyes.
"That remains to be seen, and will be seen. Good night, Ada."
Smiling a little, she stood on the veranda and watched him quickly swallowed in the gloom of the night, his footsteps muffled by the grass and pine needles, by the wind roaring above him, wrapping him with huge tatters in the road.
He was gone.
He did not seem to have slept at all before strange noises, shoutings, silences, came and went in what he knew was dreaming. Strangely actual seconds only made a dream of the reality from which, tossing, he had tried through the night to find surcease. They merged with dozing unbelief in his return--so ineffectual--and his presence in a place alienated which should have welcomed him. . .. Richard Milne rose, bumping his head upon the gable ceiling, and stepped to the open window.
Dawn had come, lifting sharp colour from the fields. In a haze of level yellow sunshine on the dusty lane below, Carson Hymerson and his son manoeuvred and spoke, the voices ringing back from the shady, cliff-like barns at the far side of the yard. The skeleton of a hayrake stood between them, and they were fitting teeth into a long horizontal bar. Richard Milne had an impulse to laugh at the oblivious and loud-voiced preoccupation. Carson bent, showing patches on the back of faded clothes, clawed the air at one side of him without turning his head, and spoke with injured tones of imperial dudgeon.
"There! You've let loose and they're slipped out again. Give me that piece of wire! ... Show 'em!"
Arvin, a tall, bowed young man with prominent, aquiline features, went to the wire fence of the lane and lifted from it the piece which providentially hung there. His father viciously twisted the wire about the wooden bar and the rod on which the teeth were strung. It was evident that it would be impossible to insert the teeth between them.
"Now! What you gawpin' at me for? You've let the others loose, and now they've jumped out of the holes. If ever I see--"
Arvin, who had been contemplating his father's mistake, said nothing, but hastily jumped to the other end of the bar and held it against the teeth. His father continued to whine, until he said abruptly:
"Well! You told me to get the wire, and now see what you've done."
"You're too smart!" shouted his father without rancour. "It's all your fault. You just think we shouldn't be doing it ourselves, that's all, and you won't help."
The son digested this a moment, seeming about to speak, and then to think better of it.
"It's all right for you to talk," went on the older man, turning the teeth of the rake on the steel rod delicately until they hung loosely in a perfect row. "Yes, eh, send it to the blacksmith; don't do anything yourself for fear of getting your hands dirty. No, I'm not farming that way just yet.... I don't say but what if I was gone, stowed away safe enough under ground, there'll be enough of that goes on, but not just today, thank you, too rich for my blood. That ain't how the old pioneers got along. If your grandfather could see the slouchy way you do things, he'd turn over in his grave. Reach me that chisel...."
"Yeh, I bet he'd--"
"Don't you leave go!" yelled Hymerson. "People are getting more shiftless all the time. For a certainty."
Richard Milne stared half-awake from his window, and the argumentative, swift whine, with outbursts of shouting, the quiet, occasional remonstrance of the younger man ascended to him as though he were watching a play; until with a start he straightened and returned to bed. They even pursued him there. So he was back arnid the oblivion of the farmer's cares! It was a rousing reality. The possibility of sleep was gone for that night, and, seeing that it was nearly six o'clock according to the thin watch under his pillow, he dressed. In the kitchen he greeted Mrs Hymerson, who was holding a slice of bread on a fork over the lidless hole of the wood stove.
"I've been going to get me a regular toaster," she remarked offhandedly, "but I haven't got around to it yet." Richard wondered what formalities connected with the man of the house would be necessary before this could be accomplished. Meanwhile it semed likely that smoke would contribute as much as heat to the texture of the toast. "I didn't put your hat in the front hall," she added, as instinctively the young man reached to the nail behind the door. "Doesn't seem right to treat you like ordinary company so much--"
Outside the shade was chill and the air quiet, as though the trees had forgotten the struggle with the wind of the night before. The dust of the lane appeared to have been swept by it, smoothed from so much as a leaf upon the surface. The spirit of those gusty hours had belatedly entered Carson Hymerson.
"If he does stay it'll be all right for us. He won't know anything about it and people won't--"
The farmer was still ejaculating and gesturing, unaware of his guest's approach. Arvin tried to warn him of it by smiling and leaving the rake with outstretched hand to greet his early friend. "Here! What's the idea--" Then the other saw too.
Arvin Hymerson was perhaps an inch taller than Richard Milne when he straightened, and his rather bashful smile was not belied by the freshet of reminiscent inquiry with which such meetings are accompanied. Still the interest was there, real, and Richard Milne found himself feeling that he had been away perhaps two weeks. For the first time he fully realized his return. When the weather had been canvassed Arvin said:
"We're fixing up the old side-delivery rake. Kind of late getting around to it, but we thought we'd better do it ourselves instead of sending it to the blacksmith."
The older man looked up from the teeth of the rake and grinned mockingly.
"Arvin here's been buying a cow. I was just telling him he'd ought to have been making a regular study of the market before he went out. Then he'd been sure not to get beat."
Richard smiled. "Oh, I should think that Arvin must know a good deal about cattle, Mr Hymerson. I don't think I'd care to have a trade with him myself." He was not accusing Arvin of dishonesty. He found himself sympathetically taking on the attitude and locutions of a former time.
"Not 'less you wanted to get beat, eh?" The man was somewhat mollified. "Well, go and look at his cow. Just go and look at it, and see what you think of the bargain. I'll tell you how much he gave afterwards." A challenging malice spoke here, as though his son were not present.
The latter, Richard Milne reflected after looking at the cow, a goodly and not noteworthy Shorthorn, deserved consideration for his patience; for his industry also, since the floors of the cow stable were as spotless as its whitewashed cement walls. As though conscious of his friend's attitude, Arvin remarked :
"Litter-carriers. Farming's not so bad as it used to be. Things are getting a little handier."
They stood talking a few minutes at the doorway of the stable, which framed a green and grey landscape, and then went to breakfast. Richard Milne found himself in good spirits and inclined to play the part of the well-entertained guest. This would not hurt his cause with Mrs Hymerson, he knew. He had decided not to go back to the city, and to let it rest with her whether he was to stay, "spend his vacation," in that house. From Carson Hymerson, he divined, anything, or nothing, might be expected.
The farmer had changed considerably with the years, from the young man's memory of him--a surreptitiously waggish, brisk fellow taking chop to mill, striding about the muddy streets in a yellow raincoat and rubber boots, laughing and joking with other farmers on the steps of the store. This present swiftness of speech, innuendo, and attitude of not being taken in by anybody, was perhaps the result of forces in the man which the years could not but have brought out. Richard Milne had never ceased to admire the peripety of life, its myriad fugacious shadings like lake tints which become more intricate to the sight with care in scrutinizing them.
As they came out of the house after breakfast a team of horses emerged from alders around the bend of the road, with a two-wheeled implement surmounted by a barrel. On this a boy sat as though precariously, for it was perched horizontally, and looked ready to roll off. Two low, chair-like seats under and behind the barrel almost dragged the ground between the wheels.
"Tobacco-planter," Arvin told him.
"Yes, that's a tobacco-planter!" added Hymerson, as though it were a grim joke.
"Dad don't like the tobacco. Won't grow it. I keep telling him we're going to lose out, with tobacco the price it is...."
"I guess, eh! I wouldn't have the dirty stuff on my place, let alone smoke it, put the dirty stuff in my mouth. Agh! They can have it, them fellows." He went, with swinging steps and one arm held out, toward the pig-pen, a swill-pail brushing his bulky, stiffened overalls at every step. Arvin grinned, looking from him to Richard Milne.
He, too, went to the stable, and hitched a team to the rake. When he had gone creaking down the lane Richard followed the older man about while he did the chores, tended to the needs of the stock, and prepared another meal for them. Then they walked over the roiling, wooded farm together.
Carson said, as they crossed a hollow along a haphazard rail fence:
"That's how he looks after things, that old man. Won't even keep up the line fence between neighbours. I've had about enough of it, never keeping the fences fixed, letting the cattle run--even hogs."
Pausing to light a cigar, Milne asked thoughtfully, "Why don't you make some settlement, say, have it that--if this is Lethen's end of the line--that the fence should be fixed by him, or, if not, that you will do so at his expense? I should think that some arrangement could be made." He was tired of the man's complaints, and still more of his rancorous air of compunction.
"Oh, that wouldn't hardly do. Might get to be bad friends with him, that way." Carson glanced at him in alarm and joggled the two forks on his shoulder.
"I don't see the point," murmured Richard. He knew that Hymerson would talk about his injuries to any listener, and generally comport himself as though in fact a breach existed between the neighbours. At the hayfield which Arvin was raking Carson began to bunch a windrow, but Richard did not accept the hint of the extra fork--let him stand it in the ground and went away.
He walked across the fields and woods in the general direction of the village. It was a day of the perfected tranquillity which only June can match, and which even in June one feels unmatchable. The clouds in their quietude only gave surcease from warmth and brilliance to the surfeited vegetation and trees, only varied that intense blue which had not yet lost its softness of spring, and which, it seemed, could never take on the greenish bitterness of first snow, the darkness of autumn storm.
The young man wandered for a time with the sense of well-being and careless optimism tempering more individual feeling, even curious recognition of old landmarks. And the fields were remarkably little changed. Toward the river the banks, the dredged ditches leading into it, the hedges of underbrush, preserved the old contours, and new fencing was in evidence more usually in the fields nearer the fronts of the farms and along the road. The lanes were the same as those down which he had wandered in earliest times to the bush for wild flowers in spring and nuts in autumn. Richard Milne sat curiously aimless on a weathered, grey rail fence, looking at a rusty disc harrow with a home-made log tongue, to which bark still adhered. A huge, battered, old leather shoe had been nailed to the tongue for a tool-box.
He was impressed anew with the true reasonableness of farm practice. There was that about it which might appear elsewhere inertia and shiftlessness. If an appliance served its appointed purpose it was allowed to do so. There was no fever for the spick and span, and even glittering new-painted machinery soon took on protective colouring and comfortable, crude patchings. This was part of the nature of farming, and when it was overruled it was at the sacrifice of practical utility. He recalled visiting the farm of two graduates of an agricultural college, and how his expectations of a stricter formalization had been disappointed. Luckily farming did not lend itself to the simplifications of hospital wards, scientific laboratories, prisons. His experience with other departments of the modernized world led him to thank God for it.
At the end of a field of oats, so sparse and short that he skirted the patch as though in fear of injuring it, he came on a long, grey, fine-clodded field divided into narrow rows formed by the packed pattern of broad wheels. They belonged to a tobacco-planter, he guessed, because the tiny plants were in evidence, withered almost to nothing. And there was a man not far from the other ends of the field, stooping over a row. Picking his way, Richard Milne advanced toward the figure. It strode to meet him, carrying a basket and a pail a few steps, then stooping, piercing a hole in the dry earth with a blunt stick, pouring water into the hole from the pail, and taking a plant from the basket, planted it. By the time he could follow this procedure he could see the man distinctly, his gaunt angular movements of stooping, planting, his swift strides forward, while the eyes were busy with the ground before him, seeking unplanted spaces and withered plants which must be replaced. In the gait and these gestures there was something familiar, and he lingered, trying to remember before he should have passed. He was on the old home place, on Bill Burnstile's farm. That was it!
But Bill was not going to let him pass. Lit by the sun under a drooping straw hat as tanned as itself, his face was leanly smiling.
"Well, here's the Stranger!" he exclaimed, stretching forth his hand. "My boys told me you were here yesterday. I couldn't hardly believe it."
Their hands held. "Fine family, Bill. I was certainly surprised too. When did you come back from the West?"
"Oh, we came back about a year ago. Well, a year last winter. Time certainly flies. You're looking well, though I can't say I'd have known you in a crowd. Pretty pale," he chuckled, "like a city fellow. Oh, well, the sun out here, the open air, you'll soon get brightened up." He looked at Richard Milne with jovial compunction, as though he were semi-invalid. That was the way, Richard knew, in which he regarded all city men, categorically.
"Yes. Healthful weather just now. How are your crops. Bill? Clover seems to have a pretty good stand around here. What happened to everybody's oats?"
Bill Burnstile's lantern jaws opened in a vast "Haw, haw!" and he bent back. "You certainly ain't forgot all about farming, I can tell you that much."
Richard Milne could not imagine anyone else of the locality making such distinctions. Of course, impervious stolidity might have its compensations. ... In rural people it was often a part of instinctive caution.
It had been impossible, Bill was explaining, to put in the oats at the proper time. The ground was too wet, and even so lots of men had had to dub them in, any way to get them in, hopeless of good weather, and determined to have a few for their horses at least. Altogether it had not been a very good season. Now there was this drought. The bad weather was not ended yet, or he was mistaken. Still, there couldn't be a failure in everything--like in the West, where grain constituted the main asset. There a crop failure meant something.
"It was our West, of course," mused Richard. "When a Canadian 'goes West,' it usually means the Canadian West."
"Yes. . . . Have you been out yet?" The loose-jointed fellow seemed to take root in the ground, as though to stay there indefinitely talking.
"No. I'm sorry to say it, but I've never been there yet, not explored much of the world at all."
"Oh, I understood you had become a regular Yankee by this time. I was wondering whether we'd ever have you back with us at all or not. That's how it turns out, you know, when they get away once."
"On the contrary, this place has scarcely been out of my mind. Naturally, when one's been raised. ... Do you find it changed at all since your return?"
"Well, no, can't say I do. Of course, they grow more tobacco than they ever did. That began in the war, of course. Then there were a couple of years there they had to give away what they had. Over-production, I guess, or some warfare between the companies. That was just about the time I got back, and it looked kind of silly to me. But some way I got around to thinking it may be all right to put a few acres in. I see the other fellows doing it, anyway. Of course, I got enough of putting all my eggs in the one basket out West. When there's rust, frost, or anything, hail, you just naturally lose your year's work."
The lank, brown, musing face was wrinkled, Richard saw a spear or two of white in his yellow temples. The man was changed and unchanged. The West, its gambling hazards, even a roving life had seemed more fitting to him than his present situation. He had been the dare-devil hail-fellow to innumerable scrapes in his youth in this circumscribed place. But then, he had met a woman, acquired a wife, the Waterloo of that character.
It was a fate, Richard Milne thought he saw, which had completely humanized the harum-scarum; or, if not completely, so well that he was now to be counted upon for half-conscious, humorous understanding: in effect, since a descent to the practical was inevitable, for support. Having seen the world and touched the commonplace of romance, he would rightly estimate the commonplace, and see its quartz-glitter in the dust of his hands.
No, he would not be suspecting these things in himself, and that would make half his value in a self-conscious world such as Richard Milne had come to know. A true man, which is something different from a nice fellow, his tough, lean body, his brown, lean face told something about him; he was as old now as he had looked ten years ago, as he would be in ten years' time. For his hearer the remarkable thing, so frequently invoked in print, was that Here was a gentleman who had never read a book.
Meanwhile he, too, was stirred by the meeting, while the talk went on of crops. Only when such matters had been dealt with very thoroughly was it that Richard, about to leave, spoke again of the family.
"Yes, you've got to see the wife and our boys and girls while you're here. We're a regular tribe now. When I look at you, only a couple of years, ain't it, younger, it seems hard to believe."
"Well, we've both been away a long time. Time enough to have acquired a wife, you know." His tone was somewhat grim, though he tried to veil it with a smile.
"Well," declared the other in his turn, "my luck changed just as soon as we got married. And now, with a family, I've got to kep pegging away, so it doesn't seem to have a chance to change." He laughed.
"That's good. Why, here they come now!"
A sound echoing from the trees at the end of the field made them turn. A boy and a girl were running toward them, halfway across, while two little boys were climbing the fence. As they ran barefoot over the soft, even, warm ground, with cries back and forward to each other, light-hearted, breathless, light-footed, Richard Milne stood transfixed for a second, permeated with a sense of his own childhood. Intently looking at the stranger, and their father, expecting who knew what cryptic spoken index of the mysterious world of which they guessed only that it was wonderful, they came forward.
"Well, you're puffing, Bill." The older Bill put his hand on the boy's bristling yellow head, half shoving playfully. "This is Alice," he added of the girl, whom Richard had seen on the road the day before. "This gentleman used to live here when he was as little as you."
"This farm, this very farm?" Bill wanted to know.
"Right here," the man assented, smiling. "But I used to be everywhere, when I could get away."
"A great rover you used to be, Dick. Remember when we used to go for hickory nuts to old Broadus's place? Nobody else's was as good, because he didn't want us."
"Now, here come Johnnie and Tom," laughed Alice. "They couldn't stay away."
The two raced up in silence, even more nearly breathless than the others. "He's going to let me plant 'em," gasped a seven-year-old chubby, dark boy, not stopping to pant, but seizing the basket in his father's hand. He looked up, his long, silky lashes glistening, his dark skin shining. He was like a sleek baby animal, and somehow different from the others. They eyed his manoeuvre with misgiving, and knew better than to try to take the basket from him. The third boy, who had run with him, was evidently the oldest, thin, tall, stooped, with open mouth and light eyes.
"Now we've lots of help," mused Bill Burnstile. "I'm kind of juberous about letting you go at it; but maybe, if your sister looked after you, you could do a good job. Suppose Bill carries the basket, and Tom takes the plant out of it, while Johnnie here punches the hole with the stick. Alice can walk along behind and see that you keep straight in line with the row. And don't waste the plants, and don't miss any out. Give Bill the basket now, Johnnie." The dark eyes were hurt, but Johnnie took his assigned part.
"This drought makes it bad," Burnstile explained, once more turning to his visitor. "I kept working the ground up to keep the moisture in, and waiting for a rain. Got her in finally, day before yesterday, but no rain yet to help much."
"It makes a lot of work, when you've got to go over the whole field this way and transplant." Richard laughed, looking at the group of children hurrying down the row, stopping in a bunch, then running on. "Seems funny to see these infants planting tobacco. One thinks of nobody but men having been near that. Carson Hymerson was telling me this morning he doesn't approve of growing it."
"Carson's funny. Of course, it's hard on the land. But that isn't why he doesn't grow it."
"A more personal objection?" Richard raised his eyebrows.
"Seems like it. Arvin, he's grown to be quite a sensible fellow, though. And that's a wonder. He's sure working under disadvantages. Why, the boy can't open his mouth, can't say it's a fine day, but what the old man wants to argue. He'll argue black's white just to make out the boy's a liar. Doesn't matter to Carson that he's got to seem one himself. Perhaps he wants to provoke the boy to calling him one. What he does want I don't know, nor I guess he don't neither. It's a wonder Arvin doesn't give him such a back-hander! With me he wouldn't live long, or I wouldn't. Oh, he's a tartar."
"I seemed to see some change in the man. Something's wrong. Something seems to be troubling him."
"Well," said Bill Burnstile consideringly, "I've been among gangs of men, and I know just about how long he'd keep a whole skin if he acted that way...."
"He seems," Milne insisted on the word, "to have worries about the line fence between himself and Lethen. He was telling me a good deal about that."
"He would. You'll find out what an awful man poor old man Lethen is. Haw, haw! Carson, he hasn't bothered me much yet, and I suppose he's got to size me up. I don't think he will, either."
"Does Mr Lethen farm all of his own land himself?" Richard cared little that he was exaggerating the casual tone of his query.
"No; this tobacco's been a good thing for him. He fits up a few acres, and lets it on shares, and makes a little money that way. The rest of the farm he pastures, and grows some stuff on. Of course, he can't keep a hired man," said Bill Burnstile, looking him in the eyes. "Never has for years and years, they tell me. You'd know all about that, of course, as well as me. A fellow's got to feel sorry for him."
"It seems that nothing has changed...." Richard's voice was tinged by a fleeting memory of those very words between himself and Ada Lethen.
"Naw." The gaunt man spat. "Of course, there's something there you and me can't make out. I guess old lady Lethen is all right, from what I've always gathered. It just seems funny these days. I've heard my father talk about people who never spoke to each other, but I never come across but those two.... Makes it hard for the girl. Now she's smart, right sensible. If they would let her alone she'd fix things up, run the farm-- there must be a mortgage--in no time, just like nothing; good head on her. But them--why they don't seem livin'."
"Strange existence," mused the young man, wondering at the interest generated, and impelling the man's words.
"You understand me, they don't seem alive," continued Bill argumentatively. "Now when I'd go over there to borrow a tool or something, and get to the door, the old lady would be so polite, just as nice as pie, ask about the family, tell me where she thought I might find the old man, and all that. But if he wasn't home, no use leaving any message with her. Might as well save your breath. She'd never tell him anything if it was going to save you from the grave. Makes it unhandy that way for the neighbours."
Richard Milne roused himself from the reverie which he knew might divert the interest of his companion, and, without replying to the reference to Ada Lethen, took leave, after promising to visit the family some day soon.
Somehow the day had become overcast for him. It was as though a shadowy thought of happiness had been driven from his mind by some intervening emergency, and now he could not even recall in what this mood consisted. Probably it was no more than morning hope and healthy spirits. And those were as likely to be illusion as the anonymous doubt which was now filling his mind. At least he could not blame Bill Burnstile. He should have been--he was, he told himself--gratified by the encounter with this old friend of his boyhood, now a man, honest, simple, rough, real, true to himself, and open-eyed to what reality came his way.
It was what the man had told of the Lethens which bothered him. Somehow he must have thought that he possessed the secret in his own right, and that, possessing it, he might be able alone to unf athom the riddle. Behold now, though, others had watched, baffled, even dispirited as himself by the sight. Bill Burnstile had talked as though absorbed by the subject, though without ulterior intent; and Carson Hymerson spoke with bitterness. Richard could not help wondering whether all the neighbours were so deeply concerned, whether an atmosphere had not been caused to rise about these people which would forever forbid his imposing reality or recognition upon them. In what reality did they believe? What could he have believed in Ada Lethen's place?
He was sitting on an old wooden gate at the head of a green lane which sloped down into a farm, with no buildings in sight, and he jumped off to continue his walk when he saw the girl before him. He paused. It was Ada Lethen who came up to him. The stateliness which he had known in the dusk of last night was modified by a languor which must have been weariness, for he saw that she was really thin. Her smile quite transfigured her dark, pale face; her eyes remembered themselves in a glint of happiness, looking at him steadfastly.
"You're going the wrong way," he told her with an assumption of country jocosity. It seemed that for surprise of joy he could have leaped the high gate before her.
"I am? I hadn't any particular place in view--"
"Just out for a walk?" he interrupted urgently. "Then you may as well come with me."
She looked back over her shoulder at the forest into which the lane ran. "But I just did come out of that bush. I rather expected," she drawled softly, "that there might be some wild flowers there. Perhaps I'm too late. But then I didn't happen to think of them before ..."
"Never too late! Orange lilies, jack-in-the-pulpits, we'll find some! Come. I must explore the whole country while I'm here!"
They walked along the grass of the wide, rail-fenced lane, down and up the slopes of which twined branching cow-paths, worn in other years by droves of belling, tranquil animals. The morning was passing in a mellow green quiet, which seemed to Richard Milne loud with another clamour than that of the city: his awakened hopes, a tumult of memories and desire. Looking at her beside him, he heaved a great breath and said:
"I can hardly believe it, but here I am. Here are you, what's more. Here are we!" he sang suddenly in the echoes of the trees. "Whatever foundling gods take the place of Pan, we are here!"
She smiled slightly at his enthusiasm of a boy; her generous lips seemed trembling to a smile as they walked. "I'm inclined not to come out very often. I think today is the first since winter that I have left the farm like this. In winter, spring, autumn, it's good to come and see that there is growth, change, and death, nothing of which is bitter or gay, simply because it does return again. It does return again.... Yet in that way, too, it is very precious. But you don't wish me to be serious," she laughed.
He was silent, not knowing how to convey his risen spirits, and not daring to try for fear of jarring on her mood. She had kept inviolate for a few far-parted days of the year this desire to commune with nature, and had avoided the chafing with which day-by-day intercourse would have blunted her love. And this to her was everything, everything tangible of beauty beyond the poignant and trivial dullness of her days. After all, she scarcely had realized, save as a rumour, that there was another world beyond these fields. Had she not known the world of poetry, ideas, she perhaps would not have been conscious of loving them, nor ever have known the fear of love, that fear that she could grow to hate them, though her bitterness would be the mere working of monotony. Then she would wish that, like the clod-like people about her, she had never learned to love them. She looked about her with quiet eyes, not asking of the forest that it be to them rest from vain study, but that it be its strange self as it had been to her childhood memories, when in earlier spring she never forgot to come out for wild flowers, and sometimes little Dick Milne went beside her, and they raced each other to clustered violets or more common wet-rooted mayflowers, shy lady-slippers.
They paused as they had done in those times, and looked up the long trunks of rough trees, to the feathery, cloudy upper branches, and there, as in an old afternoon, circled a crane, its long, thin legs and neck stuck straight out against the sky: soared and soared in the opening above the feathery boughs, huge, until they thought they were staring up phantom trees, pillars of a dream, immeasurably high.
"Oh, it makes me dizzy!" The girl lowered her head.
"We must have looked up quite a while," the man muttered. "Ada, do you remember the time we saw a crane when we were children? We stared and stared just the same, and you were dizzy that time too. Seems impossible to believe that bird's not going to do something interesting. Does he see our faces in the rift of treetops, and wonder what those strange, wavering bulbs are going to do, whether they are a menace or. ... The bush is drier now than it was in those days. I remember it was all pools under the trees, brown with dead leaves. I thought you were going to fall into one when you became dizzy looking up."
"It's later now ... later in the year."
They walked forward. "And the land all about is drained now. How vast the bush seemed, and echoey then. Now we know how few acres it is, and how small a mystery."
They spoke of a girlhood and boyhood it seemed impossible to know would never return. It seemed that they had been nearer together then than now or at any time during the long siege of her. He remembered the first day Ada had gone to school at the little frame schoolhouse at the cross-roads, and how he and she had walked home on opposite sides of the road, along the ditch banks without a word. Soon they became friends and compared the lunches which they carried to school in tin pails, and shared them at noon. The teasing of the older children stopped this, and they did not pay much attention to each other during the day at school. But they always walked home together, until a new family moved to a neighbouring farm and provided Ada with the company of other girls. Later they walked together when the privilege of carrying her books had come to mean much to Richard.
Through these years he had been scarcely aware of her parents save as a rumour in the mouths of other children. Grown people seemed to keep silence about them. They must have been utterly indifferent to anything the little girl did away from their sight. She never spoke of them, and you could not think of her with them. She seemed perfect alone, needing no one. She was neatly dressed at school, on occasion came to Sunday school with neighbour girls, and looked a distinct and exotic creature among them. Scarcely ever in his memory had he seen Mrs Lethen. Once she had been driving past in a buggy with Ada, and picked him up. He had never forgotten the consciousness of her presence under the narrow buggy-top as they drove down the muddy road.
Mr Lethen was seen more, at threshing tables, in neighbours' houses, at meetings of the municipal council, of the school ratepayers, and so forth. He was not disposed to take a keen interest in his duties as a citizen, but his neighbours, knowing him a man of intelligence and some education, from time to tune pressed him into certain offices. He was known to have queer ideas, and by some this was laid to his being educated, and by others to his year-long misunderstanding with his wife; while others took it as one of the reasons the two had not been able to get on together. More of the women, however, sympathized with him than the men. Farming indifferently, he pursued a casual course among his neighbours, as though there was nothing to be remarked about him, and it was quite ordinary to live a life with neither an impelling motive nor the warmth of family ties.
He never appeared in public with Mrs Lethen, and when it was necessary to have people in the house she was not present. On her side, she avoided association with other women, often did not answer knocks at the door, and one who came of an afternoon to call was likely to go away puzzled. It was something to be marvelled at that their life could continue in the community and the family take its part therein as an efficient unit, while Mrs Lethen remained apart, indifferent, or malign, present-in-absence.
Her hold on her daughter became more apparent as the girl grew up, and a second estrangement, Richard Milne recalled, had come between him and Ada Lethen. She seemed to grow away from him. Music had been her passion, and she had lent herself to it wholly. Her parents, indulgent or indifferent, had allowed her unchecked progress with elementary teachers, local girls returned from the Toronto conservatory, who insisted that Ada must "go on" with her "wonderful touch." Who knew what triumph of musical splendour might yet be released? Music--it was the impelling passion of her life, by which she existed.
But even in those days the girl had begun to attempt composition of her own. She began to be haunted by the strange tantalizings which are known to the genius of expression. She would be in despair or dullness. Or a muted ecstasy came over her, in which, so high was her vision of the beauty she wanted to embody, she did not dare attempt composition. Everything was hard for her. It was unbearable to remain silent, chilling the music from her heart with duties of the household day; and unbearable to yearn for composition, filled with ineffable impulses which she knew from old would not flower into the singing perfection of art.
Something had happened between their infrequent meetings. Richard had known that, youth as he was; but he had not questioned her closely then or later. She told him that she was not leaving home. The most her willingness could explain was that the music affected her too strongly. She couldn't bear it, and the house was silent for ever, the piano closed, looking like a giant black bier, until it was moved into a storeroom of the rambling house, never opened. And after that again he had not seen her for months. Her mother had had a long illness; Ada had nursed the woman through it, at the same time helping her father and carrying on the household....
Looking at her now, it came to him that Ada Lethen had become that inaccessible music which had tortured her until she could bear it no more. There had been, finally, in her nineteenth year, what the local doctor had called a "nervous breakdown." This had been temporary, and seemed to leave no trace beyond the resignation which baffled her lover now, a sort of nihilism of the emotions, not of the will, which kept her from any new courses, or even acquiescence in the validity of the projects he urged. Yet she seemed strong; her activity dominated the family, which probably, as she said, would fall to pieces without her. It was strength which seemed to be in her soul now, beneath a wild vibrancy to ineffable spiritual intimations he could only guess, and in wonderment reverence.
But again, was it with her as she said, as she believed she felt? She feared that the lives of her parents, her mother, would tumble into ruin if she left them. But did she fear, too, that, lacking their supporting needs, she would collapse, become useless, a recluse, prey once more to music or to love more poignant and devastating still? He would bring all this to light; he would conquer it. He had been gathering his forces during all the months of being apart from her. Now he would test his will, his love for her, his belief in their happiness, test his whole ultimate life and hers. Perhaps his failures, his diversion to the course of ambition, had been a preparation, his own development for the goal which his imagination had held before him in a vision of her.
They had come out of the forest before they knew, and were walking in a by-path near the bank of the river. Their wanderings had transgressed line fences so vaguely that they did not know whose farm they were crossing. But they knew that the river glided smooth, occasionally revealed below them, the trees were gracious, the vines and hedges veiling. Far ahead of them loomed the top of a broad beech tree, among the slim second growth spared from the axe along the banks. Nearer, its quick leaves glittered before them as though it grew from the middle of the river. And indeed when they came up and stood on the bank opposite the towering old tree, they saw that, far below, it held an isthmus of its own from the river, which was forced to twine about its roots in springtime, but ran several yards away in a sunken bed now. The knoll beneath the trees was high, grassy, sheltered on one hand by a bend in the creek bank, and on the other by two cedars overgrown and joined to form a screen by creeping morning glory vine, which wrapped them to the tips. It was a place for shelter from too rough winds, from sun, and all noise and unquiet they looked into; but there seemed no path leading down to it.
They had scarcely walked fifty feet on along the lane before they met Carson Hymerson, both forks on his shoulder, evidently going home to dinner. The small, thick, stooped man looked at them quickly, suspiciously once, mumbled something, and had passed.
They looked at each other, and Richard Milne smiled.
"He won't be expecting you home for dinner now," Ada said with a soft drawl, "so you'd better come home with me. Never mind," she said with sudden decision as he began to excuse himself. "I want you to meet Mother, and it's no inconvenience."
His acceptance was curiously tentative, tacit. "You seem to know Carson."
She laughed a little. "Yes, but I wonder whether I do. One thinks one knows this one and that one, when, if one did, things would be different; there would be no flaws in intercourse."
"Obviously here there are. But don't you think that it is possible to know people too well for their comfort and yours?"
"Perhaps, if you know them without sympathy. But then if you didn't sympathize you couldn't know anyone perfectly. Could you? And if you did know a person perfectly you would be compelled to sympathize with him."
"Perhaps." Richard Milne was not tempted to explore this syllogism. "Still, people don't like to be understood. Not really. Not too well; and perhaps it is fortunate I don't understand Carson Hymerson. But he does cause me to speculate."
"I think my father does him, too," she said with an intonation of sadness. "If only such people would resign themselves not to understand. They seem to think that since my father is what they call 'queer,' they are licensed for any means to attain their ends, the petty ends of trickery. They do manage to bother him; it can't be denied. I can't see why they should attempt to do so, or what they hold against him. I suppose to see anyone unhappy arouses a sadistic tendency in coarser minds." Her voice trembled.
"Ada," broke in Richard Milne, his tones sharp and yet heavy, "you just tell me when anything overt--but, of course, nothing can happen, save by the rarest mischance. I'd just like to see them bother you." Ada looked up at the savageness of his tone. A thwarted anger struggled within him at the thought that this girl should be forced to consider such a trifle as he denominated the rest of the community, the rest of the world.
Her eyes met his intense gaze, then looked away and filled, while she caught her breath. "Dear boy . . ." she murmured. "Nothing's going to happen."
"Promise me you will," he insisted.
"Yes. I shall be glad of any help you can give." She spoke in the steady tones of one unwilling to reveal an invisible burden.
"Ada!" He stopped, unsatisfied, as though uncertain of what he wished to say to her, or of how he was to say it. "You don't seem to realize my right--haven't I earned it?--to want to protect you, in all the years you've ruled my life." He laughed shakily. "Why, my dear, I wouldn't be here. . . . Love is like--"
"Hush!"
"Like an intermittent fever." He had stopped in his preoccupation.
"Hush!" She stepped back toward him, taking his hand. "We are nearly there. Let's talk about--anything--dinner, until you can eat it! You're too late for the locust blossoms." She waved her hand above them.
They walked along together beneath the high, grey-barked trees with their fine, small leaves. The upper branches showed dead, broken off straight and blunt on the tops of the trees, and would have been even more conspicuous by contrast when the great white blooms of locust were interspersed among them.
When the pair reached the road the dust was deeper, but they saw that their shoes already had been covered by the deposit on the grasses of the lanes. In noonday silence and glare the river road was like a snake twining into the shade of the weeds, as it wended below uneven elms and clumps of wild apple, sumach, and elderberry in the fence corners. The road made Richard silent, perhaps with a memory of his walk along it the afternoon before and the night before, perhaps with the memories of earlier times.
Under this white glare of sunlight the Lethen place was appreciably less ominous and more dilapidated than it had appeared the previous night. The very trees edging the lawn at the road and along the drive seemed veterans recalling many storms. Rust-coloured needles and rotting cones were strewn beneath the evergreens in arcs which encroached upon the uneven and tufted grass. The brick gables of the house above the Virginia creeper were bleached and eroded of mortar like the face of a harridan washed of paint in the morning light. The roof, dirt-coloured shingles edged with green, looked water-soaked, and as they walked toward it Richard Milne could see a thread of sky through the top of an ornate, tall, ochre chimney.
"Your house doesn't seem to change," he remarked, grasping at symbolism as he spoke, "but still it does. It's becoming more dilapidated and worn, more forsaken-looking every year."
"Ah, forsaken." She laughed. "At any rate you don't say, as almost anyone else would, that it looks smaller than your memories of it."
"No, not smaller. Nothing connected with it could dwindle." He brought the implication to light.
Ada Lethen sighed, and they walked up the damp and shady lane in silence, turned across the unfenced lawn, and stood on the patch of grass, which was turning yellow from exposure to the sun, before the veranda.
"Come right in," said Ada, as he hesitated on the sagging veranda. "It's time I got dinner. Or would you rather wait here?"
He shook his head, and they went into a front room of indeterminate size and character, until his eyes became used to the dimness. Vague huge patterns adorned the wallpaper; the carpet was green, with great yellow scrollings. A sewing-machine stood in one corner, and in another stood a wood-burning stove without a pipe. Above was the hole in the ceiling through which it would have to reach the chimney, and glancing up, Richard Milne fancied that he heard a hasty stirring, silenced at once. Ada had retreated to the back of the house, after having murmured something about her mother. The young man crossed his knees and prepared to look as much more at ease than he felt, as the impending presence of Mrs Lethen would allow.
Until now he had not noticed the table, perhaps because, directly before him, it was too obvious. A large square dining-table, covered with a dark chenille cloth extending in shadowy pattern almost to the floor. On the cloth rested two large bowls, bearing each three bulbs of white narcissi, all in flower, and nicely arranged with the tallest in the middle of each bowl. The brilliance of these flowers, hard as flame for all their whiteness, seemed to diffuse a certain radiance throughout the dun room, with its two windows latticed by the creeping vine. The window-sills themselves, he noticed, each bore more bulbs, and the sewing-machine in the corner must have had one, but for the necessity of use, for it was opened, and on a chair beside it stood still another vase.
A gaunt, pale woman entered at this moment, and it was with something like terror in his surprise that Richard rose, facing her haggard and piercing eyes, even as Ada appeared behind her.
She grasped his hand, holding it high and limply for an instant, and then dropped it. Something made Ada speak, as though the two were strangers newly met.
"Mr Milne has consented to stay to dinner with us, but I'm afraid he'll have a little wait, for I've just put the potatoes on to boil. I spent too long on my walk, it seems. But we'll be alone."
The woman peered into his face quickly, but without seeming to have heard her daughter's last words. Then with a sharp glance aside she took a chair, laughing.
"Yes, you'll have to see to dinner, now you've said you would."
"I've every sympathy with her intentions," remarked Milne, "and I'm sure she can feel for us, since she has been out developing an appetite of her own." He tried to put understanding and support into his smiling attitude toward the girl. She turned away to the kitchen, leaving the door open.
Silence seemed to deaden the air of the room like a gas. There was nothing to be said to this lady, and the impression of the first seconds that she was an enemy returned to him, became conscious, so that he watched her critically.
Her dress was not old-fashioned: timeless rather, so that it would have seemed to become her in any age or scene: a long black skirt, a white shirt waist. Her hair was white, and though brushed straight back, so abundant that it seemed a tangled mass. Her face was almost equally colourless, except for black eyebrows, dark, burnt-out eyes. Her mouth kept up a constant movement of mood or, he considered, of calculated foiling of decipherment.
Half purposely he waited, feeling that she might be driven to utterance. What things in her soul! A feeling of pity arose upon his reverence of the mystery of life. His eyes roved hither and thither about the room, as though unaccustomed to it, then, as if in resolved defiance, rested upon the narcissi. She opened her lips.
"Look at them!" She extended her hand, smooth and well kept. "Look at them. Aren't they beautiful?" She laughed abruptly, as at an understatement so grotesque. "Beautiful!"
"Your narcissi are very nice," observed Richard Milne with sedate inflections, "and you have a good number of them too!" He did not veil the acid of his smile, behind firm eyes.
Her silence became remote as she looked at the flowers, then she seemed to return to him, and finally she said, as though satirically:
"They're worth coming a long way to see, aren't they, Mr Milne?"
He had to own himself beaten at the futile and childish game of discomfiture--what he called the feeling which gave rise to alarmed pity, carrying anxiety into his mind. Candour was better than such obvious perversity. There would have to be a reckoning, and he struck, with a directness which surprised them both.
"Mrs Lethen," he contended in deliberate tones, "don't you find something more beautiful in the souls of people about you than in these flowers? Something warmer at least, that concerns you, your own fate and your happiness, rather than a momentary pleasure of the eyes. Are you sure that you have not raised up an idol? Are you not likely to waken some time and find that everything vital in your life is gone, and there is left only these wilted flowers to mock you? What of the happiness of your daughter? Have you ever thought that Ada deserved your support all your effort now, to gain the happiness which the world, which life is saving for her, and which for reasons which you know it may be hard for her to discover? It is possible to look across the fields of everyday life to some mirage of mountains, longing to be there, and to find after years that one's limbs are too worn even to gather the valley flowers of reality. And then the mirage dissolves; you are left with nothing who might have had all the sweets of reality without the empty yearning of thwarted longing for unseizable beauty. But how empty and cold is such beauty without the part fulfilled by others. Think how wonderfully different Ada's life would be, and your own. Sacrifice is the badge of motherhood, and the honour of it finer than any flower.
Labelling himself a prig, he was consciously letting himself be carried away, so that, while at first his feeling had driven him to words, now the words were cumulating, carrying forward his emotion.
"The world! Beauty! The soul! Idols!" Mrs Lethen's white face laughed without interest or surprise at this long outburst. "Yes. I have erected an idol, and since it gives more satisfaction to my days, leavens them better than the clods of this dull life can, who is to say me nay? If they give me the love everything and everyone else denies me, what then?" She paused, as though surprised at this revelation coming uncalled from her lips. "Sacrifice. How like a man," she murmured, while her face took on a marble quietude, staring now at the hole in the ceiling. Then abruptly she rose and passed into the kitchen.
"Excuse me," she dropped in a perfect, conventionally polite tone at the door, which she was closing. "I should help her."
"Indeed, yes!"
The young man remained plunged in thought, apart from his consciousness of the house of his dreams and forebodings. He did not raise his eyes; he was feeling that he had always been there, as Ada had--living for himself her life--until the girl reappeared and called him to the meal.
She was changed. He saw it while she enumerated casually the excuses necessary for her extempore cooking, the tardiness and lack of conveniences. He paid little heed to the neat, painted, and oilclothed kitchen in which the table was set, with Mrs Lethen opposite him and Ada pouring tea at the head. A kettle sang diminuendo over a wood fire in a dull, huge stove, but a window was open above the "fourth side of the table. Upon the sill a pad of fly poison floated in water among a few dead flies. He spoke pleasantly and generally at first. Ada was preoccupied with serving the dinner, and Mrs Lethen maintained, of purpose, he saw, a watchful silence.
As he talked and the meal progressed he became aware of an obscene, unreasonable foreboding, and began to struggle with a sense that he was talking against time, like a man waiting to be taken to the gallows, who must conceal the fact. Ada replied to his remarks with consideration, as though weighing the literal meaning of each of them. The older woman's face, he now saw, was more fleshy than he had supposed, and more paste-like in colour. Her mouth was rayed with wrinkles gathering and slackening. With her chief attention on her food, she regarded him from time to time with a detachment almost amounting to hauteur. The oppression increased upon him, while with desperate inquiry he cajoled his strange impulse to rise and be gone. Surely it was all nothing. He had been recalling aloud old-time friends and neighbours, then:
"Mr Lethen is not at home today?" he asked the face opposite him, almost unaware of speaking at all, as one might unwittingly strike a mortal blow in a melee of combat.
The attitude of Ada Lethen gave him a feeling of having impudently blurted like a schoolboy. It was so conspicuously tense that he did not heed her mother for the moment.
"If you are really anxious to see my father, he will be at home tonight, or almost any time after that." It was as though he had been to Ada some stranger meddlesome in personal matters, some tradesman, a dealer come to buy a load of cattle, or to sell her father a hay-loader.
"Unfortunate," he murmured.
His own ire rose.
"I had naturally hoped to see him, but, of course, I am not giving up hope."
The two women said nothing. Richard, not to be drawn into conventional insincerities of manner, much less of fact, resigned himself almost to monosyllables until the end of the meal, and found himself once more in the sitting-room with Mrs Lethen, whom he asked if he might smoke. He had still to put in time until Ada should have dispatched her duties. Talk as he might, the woman stared alternately at the narcissi and at himself. Finally he was driven out to the veranda, and after waiting there another half-hour in a mounting uneasiness he walked over the lawn, already shaded pointedly along the western side by the row of evergreens. Returning, he found a stillness which seemed to bespeak a house deserted. At last he heard a step within and, going to the door, addressed Mrs Lethen: would she speak to Ada?
The very appearance of the girl, her quick step, look of concern, was reassuring to his now obviously absurd fear, which had been tantalizing, like that of a man who has lost a precious stone in the grass. In the relief and gratitude of having her before him again, as though she had escaped who knew what occult fate, he was made sure of all that he had doubted, and her bearing seemed to tell him that, instead of anything coming between them unaware, they were more subtly linked than before.
"What is it?"
He looked at her reproachfully, with a smile that made light of all he had been feeling, a smile which was to take away the embarrassment she must share. "What should it be? Do you want me to go away without seeing you?"
"Yes."
"But, Ada! What's the matter? What has come over you since I came?" He saw his worst fears realized, and himself put against one of those unforseeable psychic debacles as intangible as they are overpowering, and as irremediable as insidious.
"I don't like the attitude you take toward my parents." Ada spoke calmly.
"And I don't like the attitude they take toward you," he answered in a flare of anger. "Nor to me either. I thought you could make allowance for at least that."
"Your course then seems obvious." Her tone was unfathomable, without feeling. She might have been torturing him, though he fancied that if torturing herself she was delighting in the agony.
"My course is not obvious, but it will be definite, when I've decided. I've had about enough of this."
She made no reply, and so uncertain had everything become that he wondered whether in this he should see hope or forbearance which was more strongly entrenched than active repugnance; she did not ask him to go.
"What did your mother say in the kitchen?" he demanded. "What did she say about me?"
She shook her head slowly, looking far away over the fields, to the bright forest splotched with dark shade. There was no indecision apparent in her air, yet to Richard's vexation it was as though she did not know what she was doing, what she wanted. With an effort he eschewed forcible expression of this feeling of his; in a situation which seemed to him to demand the utmost care of reasonableness and good sense, these qualities appeared to have deserted Ada Lethen, and he was further angered by the abruptness with which he discovered them measurably lost to himself; when he should have risen to an occasion he was ready for any wild and final word or action.
"Let us go for a walk. You can't see things straight here, Ada; I can explain. Come."
He had never seen her more beautiful, in poise of foot and head. Her eyes were no longer sad, but bright with some enigma beyond his conception, wide, unfathomable, maddening :
"No, thank you."
Fearing himself, he turned and was gone. He would not say never to return to that house.
She had spoken, and he had pretended to accept what she said. He could scarcely convince even himself that there was any use of hoping, or of staying here. He could love her, with a love which should have moved mountains, and blown trivial obstacles from them as sand is swept across a beach, which should have caused happiness as the air of a valley is changed, charged with sunlight. But as for being effectively moved by these considerations, she might have been a worn-out stump in such a valley, on such a beach. What balked him, what finally enraged him, was not the feeling that she did not return his love, or the difficulty of convincing her that she loved him, but the fact that love could make so little difference. He had found exaltation and in his darkest despair had taken consolation from thinking that he was to learn what love alone could do, and he thought he saw now that it could do nothing when circumstances and temperaments conspired to cause a deadlock.
Nothing, nothing to be done, his mind repeated, and he did not know how he put in the rest of the day, the afternoon and evening. The Hymersons seemed to take it for granted that he should be preoccupied, revisiting his old haunts. It was an effort to recall the day of the week and month. No mail pursued him, he was cut off from his old world, and no work could be undertaken; no reading reminded him of either work or world.
As time passed he discovered that he was curiously thrust back into a self, an existence which he had thought to forget with boyhood. Sitting on a corn-cultivator in rough farm clothes, musing at the end of a row, he admitted to himself that it was not the circumstances of the present, his vacation, or any plan which held him. Days were following each other, and though they were futile, when he recalled their manifest summer beauty he lingered, postponed deciding to go. Before long, tired of the feeling of a spectator while every hour he became more a part of that former life, he had volunteered to join the Hymersons in their farm work.
"Well, I kind of thought from the start you was sensible that way, not scairt of getting your hands soiled," Carson told him. "We got an extra team all right, unless you'd rather use the hoe."
Any kind of work which would be of use, Richard assured him, would do, but he preferred a job of driving horses at first. Since no change in the terms of lodging was mentioned, the farmer was well satisfied, and disposed even to make a confidant of his guest, to become intimate with him. As opportunity arose Carson told him of all the wrongs he was suffering from his neighbours, particularly from Mr Lethen; the misunderstanding of his motives when he told people how things should and could be run; and prophecies of what would happen where his advice was disregarded. And Richard would lean against the dusty wall while evenings passed, interjecting the necessary rejoinders, keeping his thoughts from wandering far. Or he helped Carson with the milking, tying the cow's tail by its longest hair about the animal's hind leg.
Arvin Hymerson had soon given up interest in the new dispensation, baffled by the city man's apparent listlessness. He spent most evenings in the village store, which was a source of audible deprecation to his father. "He didn't use to be that way," the latter declared with a puzzled smile. "He didn't use to be the kind to waste time like that. I can't figure out what's got into him lately. He don't seem to have no interest in home ties, somehow." Milne was only surprised that Arvin had not been "this way" long ago. He was aware of a sympathetic reaching-out from the young man, but his own calloused and languid response did not add enough to serve as the basis of companionship. It seemed to be as unnecessary that they should be friends as that they should not be friends.
Usually silent and equable, the two were well matched to set off the garrulity of Carson, who at noon would glance at yesterday's paper, and start ridiculing the evolutionary theory, at the time coming in for much publicity. Mrs Hymerson, by way of maintaining a balance, sought to defend it with equal unreason: "Why, Pa, you know there's negroes in Africa a lot like monkeys."
"Not me. When them ginks start talking about evolution to me, I just got to say, "Look at Paul. Do they build better men than Paul nowadays?'" Arvin smiled without seeking the attention of Richard.
As day passed after day Milne knew himself deadened in them, carefully following such routine as was discoverable, trying to work out a programme which would account for all of his waking hours. He rose early, though once at first Carson Hymerson deferentially waived the right of calling him; harnessed the team, which had been curried the night before; ate breakfast to the equally inane jocularity or resentment of his host's talk, and the almost surprised taciturnity of Mrs Hymerson and Arvin; hitched the team to the cultivator or the mower, if he were not hoeing potatoes or pitching hay. Through the long hours of morning and afternoon he attempted participation in the ever-wonderfully oblivious pageantry of nature: sunlight, birds, greying green of oats, stylized symmetry of waxing corn hills; ripening amber ponds of wheat; in breezes for a damp brow, rain to give a half-day's respite. He felt that he had been part of this for ever.
Still a general enveloping indifference almost imposed upon him the illusion that something did hold him there. It was to go farther, coupled with the monotonous routine, until he found that to himself he was at times that earlier uncouth boy, for whom nothing was sure, not even his own hope or his smothered longing to get away into the world. He scarcely remembered his late life in the city, his books, his dealings with editors and publishers, film companies, and a return there seemed inconceivabl