← catalogue

Old Crow

by Alice Brown · English · Gutenberg #31372 · 881,627 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Old Crow
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world 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 License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Old Crow

Author: Alice Brown


        
Release date: February 24, 2010 [eBook #31372]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31372

Credits: Produced by David Clarke, Mary Meehan and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD CROW ***




Produced by David Clarke, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









                                    OLD CROW

                                 BY ALICE BROWN


New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

_All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Copyright, 1922,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1922.




OLD CROW




I


John Raven sat in the library of his shabby, yet dignified Boston house,
waiting for Richard Powell, his nephew, whom he had summoned for an
intimate talk. He was sitting by the fire making a pretense of reading
the evening paper, but really he was prefiguring the coming interview,
dreading it a good deal, and chiefly for the reason that there was an
argument to be presented, and for this he was insufficiently prepared,
and must be, however long it might be delayed. When he telephoned Dick
to come he was at last armed with a bold conviction of being able to
proffer a certain case to him (his own case, in fact); but, as these
last moments went on, he weakened sensibly in any hope he might have had
that Dick would be able to meet him from any illuminating viewpoint of
his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where
Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of
their capacities--Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a
diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he
felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the
beginning of the War--which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his
war--made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business
training with inconsiderable excursions into literature, he wanted
nothing so much as to get into the thick of it and the rough of it, so
far as a man might who was past his physical best, and now he was back
again, more fit than when he went, but at this present moment breathless
at the realization that he had been up against life as it actually is,
and that he found it a brute business and hated it. And this was not so
much the horror of life in the field where, however the human heart
cried out against the argument of desecrated flesh, the spirit could
call mightily upon God, challenging Him to grant the chrism of
fulfilment in return for this wild sacrifice of blood, as the horror of
life when peace was exercising her rights in unbelievable ways. This he
was going to explain to Dick, if he could manage it, while he set forth
also his need of retreating from the active scene and leaving some of
his formerly accepted duties on Dick's shoulders. As he sat there,
gaunt, long, lean man, with a thin brown face and the eagle's look, a
fineness of aquiline curve that made him significant in a dominant type,
he fitted his room as the room fitted him. The house was old; nothing
had been changed in it since the year when, in his first-won prosperity,
he persuaded his mother up from the country and let her furnish it with
her shyly modest taste, a sense of values that bade her keep within the
boundary of the atmosphere she brought with her in good old pieces
tenderly used. The room was dim, even by day, from these shadows of the
brooding past, and the dull blue draperies at the windows, while they
touched it to a more inspiriting tone, still spoke softly of the repose
a man wanted when he escaped from the outer world to the assuagement of
silence and his books.

To-night, when Raven had just about come to the conclusion that he could
not possibly enter upon certain things with Dick because, although Dick
elected to be a poet, there was no recognized form of words that would
make him understand, and he'd better telephone him to put the interview
off, he heard his voice in the hall, and, answering it, even breaking
over it, like bright bubbles of a vocal stream, the voice of the girl
they both loved, in ways becoming to their differences. Raven drew a
comfortable breath. The intimate conference with Dick would have to be
deferred, though he would quite as willingly have had Nan listen to it,
except for the chance of her carrying it away with her, in that
sympathetic tenderness of hers, to burden her young heart. Nan would
have made quick work of understanding. She translated you as you went,
and even ran ahead of you, in her haste, just as she sometimes cut in on
your speech, not rudely rebuking you for being too slow, but in her
eagerness to assure you she caught at the first toss. And then they came
in, she full of anticipatory delight at seeing Raven, and Dick so full
of her that he seemed not to know whether his uncle were there or not,
except as an habitual figure in the furnishing of the room.

We must pause a dull minute, while they were projecting themselves into
the scene, to find out how they looked and whether they also fitted the
room and Raven. Nan, known to her larger world as Annette Hamilton, was
a tall, slim, yet muscular girl, graced with as many physical
contradictions as you are likely to imagine. While she stood for an
instant before, puppy-like, precipitating herself upon Raven, her eyes
crinkled up like Mary Seraskier's, and she showed a line of milk-white
teeth. Altogether nature--for she had only the most inconsiderable help
from art--had done her exceedingly well. She had the hurling
impetuosities of the puppy when she found herself anywhere near persons
familiarly dear to her; but, unlike the puppy, she was a thing of grace.
Her hands and slim arms had a girl's loveliest contours, and yet, hidden
somewhere under that satin flesh with its rose and silver lustre, were
muscles serviceably strong. Her eyes were grey like Athena's, her hair
fine and thick and pale, and her face altogether too irregular to talk
about reasonably.

How is it possible to delineate Dick, even with all profuse generosity
of comment, without suggesting that he was not of the type to please
himself, or tagging him with a priggishness afar from him? He certainly
was not the sort of hero his dramatic poems described with a choppy
vigor of detail, and whom there is no doubt he would have chosen to
resemble. But nature had given him a slimness and an actual grace he
found, in his private self-scrutiny, almost girlish, nor could he wholly
outwit and supplement her by the athletic training he never intermitted.
Dick's face, too, he found much against him, being of a round solidity
with a nose too thick and a mouth a thought too small. How could such
despite have happened to him, he asked himself in moments of depression
when, confronting the mirror, he recognized the wrongs inheritance had
done him. But he knew. It was father's people, that was it. They were
all round and owlish, and they thickened up in middle life. If he could
have shared Uncle Jack's lean aquilinity, people would have looked at
him twice, as they did at Uncle Jack, which in itself would be a bore,
except that Nan also might look. Aware of these things and hiding them
in his soul, he held himself tight, shut his mouth close, and challenged
you with a spectacled eye, pinning you down as if to say: "I am born in
every particular as I didn't want to be, but take notice that I'll have
no light recognition of the hateful trick they did me. I am in training
for a husky fellow. I haven't let up on myself one instant since I found
out how horrible it was to be a good deal more of a fellow than I shall
ever look. I never shall let up. And don't you let me catch you letting
up either, in the way you treat me."

Nan, to go back to the minute of their entrance, made a swift assault
upon Raven. In the old days when he was a youngish man and she a little
girl, a growing thing, elongating like Alice, she used to hurl herself
into his arms and insist on staying there. Her aunt, Miss Anne Hamilton,
who had brought her up from babyhood, was always detaching her from
Raven; but Nan clung as persistently. Raven would look at Miss Anne,
over the girl's rumpled silk poll, with whimsically imploring eyes. Why
couldn't Nan be allowed to break upon him like a salty, fragrant wave of
the sea, he seemed to ask Miss Anne, bringing all sorts of floating
richness, the outcrop of her fancies and affections? Aunt Anne would
return the glance with her sweet, immovable deprecation and go on
detaching, while Nan, with an equal obstinacy--though hers was
protesting, vocable, sometimes shrill to the point of anguish--stuck to
her self-assumed rights. It was Raven himself who involuntarily stepped
over to Aunt Anne's side and finished the detaching process. When Nan
came back after her first term at the seminary Aunt Anne preferred to
college, and was running to him with her challenge of welcome, he was
taken aback by the nymph-like grace and beauty of her, the poise of the
small head with its braided crown--the girls at the seminary told her
she might have been a Victorian by the way she wore her hair--and he
instinctively caught her arms, about to enwreath his neck, held her
still and looked at her. She could not know what vision, overwhelming in
its suddenness, she brought before him, of childhood gone and maidenhood
come and the sacredness of this new state. Aunt Anne knew and frowned a
little to herself, from her silent, savage jealousy, realizing, though
she would never, in her proud integrity, allow herself to think it, that
this hushed veneration of Raven's was worse than the old tumultuous
intercourse. What Raven really might have said was:

"Darling, you're a woman and you're a beauty. You don't know it, but you
don't want to hug a jaded old reveler like me."

He was not, by any means, a reveler. His life had been little more than
a series of walks to business. But those were the words that came to
him, catching her adorable freshness of body and mind, and determining
to keep it untouched by dusty old pantaloons such as he saw himself. Nan
stood for a minute paling out under his eyes, and then drew away from
him and left the room, her braid-crowned head high. She had to meet him
at dinner, and he knew she had cried and Aunt Anne knew it and was hard
on her over the little things she could reprove her for, in a silky,
affectionate way, and Raven's heart swelled until he thought they both
must know its congestion, and tried to put round it another bond of
quiet, kind affection. Since that time, Nan had never kissed him; but
now, this two months since the death of Aunt Anne, she had adopted a
greeting of her own. She put her hands on his arm and bent her forehead
for a minute to his shoulder. The first time she did it, he wanted to
kiss the bright hair, but forbade himself, and the second time he said,
he was so curious over it:

"A rite?"

She was ready with her answer. He suspected she must have thought it out
ingeniously beforehand.

"It's because I'm sorry for you."

"Sorry?" he repeated.

"Yes," she said, "about Aunt Anne."

Then he realized she was sorry because Aunt Anne was dead, and he was
more and more conscious of the unbecoming lightness and freedom where he
found himself at the death of Aunt Anne. He had not dared acknowledge it
to himself. He couldn't, for shame. But whereas, in the past years, when
he ventured to formulate his own life a little and see what it had done
to him and how he could go on meeting it, he had had a sense of
harassment and of being driven too hard, after Aunt Anne's death he
began to recognize the stillness of the space she had left behind. Now
to-day, before Nan had accomplished the little rite of the bowed head on
his shoulder, something queer about it seemed to strike Dick, and he
said to her:

"He's your uncle, too, you know."

Raven took this with composure, as signifying the length as well as the
depth of his adoptive relation toward her, but Nan met it with
resentment. She left him and turned upon Dick.

"Now what," she said, "do you mean by that?"

"Why, Nan," said the poor youth, keeping a stiff upper lip, because he
recognized the signs of an approaching squabble, "I've told him. I'll
tell him again. Jack, we're engaged."

"We're nothing of the sort," said Nan, either in pure surprise or an
excellent simulation of it.

Dick met this doggedly.

"We are, too," he said. "You promised me."

"Maybe I did," Nan yielded. "But it was that awful night when you were
going out. We won't talk about that. I'd have promised you anything
then. I'd have promised anybody, just as I'd have given 'em coffee or a
smoke. But when we got back and you expected to begin from there, didn't
I tell you to shut up? I've told you to ever since. And I believe," she
added, with an acumen that struck him in the center, "you're only
dragging it out now to catch me--before him."

"I did shut up," said Dick, holding himself straight and using his mouth
tautly, "because your aunt was sick and then because she was worse. But
you needn't think I've shut up for good. Besides, it's only Jack I told.
He's nobody."

"No," said Raven mildly, "I'm nobody. Only I wish you wouldn't come here
to fight. Why can't you get it over on the steps, and then act like
Christians after you come in?"

Nan laughed. She was instantly and most obligingly sweet, as if wholly
bent on pleasing him. But Richard glowered. It was quite like her, he
thought, to sprinkle herself over with that May morning look of hers
when she knew she had the horrible advantage not only of being adorable
in herself, but a female to boot, within all the sanctities that still
do hedge the sex, however it behaves.

"You see," said Nan maternally, "in France we were living at high
pressure. Now everything's different. We mustn't be silly. Run away,
Dick, just as I told you, and leave me to talk to Rookie."

This was her name for Raven, saved over from childish days.

"All right then," said Dick. "But I sha'n't wait for you. I shall go to
Cambridge."

It was such an anticlimax of a threat, delivered in so determined a
voice, that he expected them to laugh, in a silly way they had of seeing
the merest foolishness always from the same angle. But, as he turned to
go, it was with the chill certainty that they had forgotten all about
him. Nan had settled herself by the fire and his uncle was bringing her
a footstool, an elderly attention, Dick floutingly thought, very well
suited to Aunt Anne, but pure silliness for a girl who flung herself
about all over the place. At any rate, he wasn't wanted, and he did go
to Cambridge and hunted up some of the fellows likely to talk sense; but
no sooner had he settled within their circle of geniality than he found
himself glooming over Nan and tempted to go back and break in on that
mysterious conclave.

It was mysterious. Nan herself had made it so. Her face, on Dick's
going, had fallen into a grave repose, and she turned at once to Raven,
saying:

"You see, Dick ran in on the way over here, and when he told me you'd
sent for him, I said I'd come along, because I'd got to see you instead.
Was that cheeky? I really have got to. Couldn't the other thing wait?"

"Perfectly well," said Raven, with a ready cheerfulness he was aware she
could not understand. How should she? He had not been in the habit of
troubling Dick, or indeed any one, with his vaporings. He had lived, of
late years, as a sedate, middle-aged gentleman should, with no
implication of finding the world any less roseate than his hopes had
promised. As to Dick, the very sight of him had shown him beyond a doubt
how little disposed he was to take the lad into that area of tumultuous
discontent which was now his mind. "Fire away," he bade her. "You in
trouble, dear? You want patriarchal advice?"

Nan might not have heard. She was looking, with a frowning gravity, into
the fire. How should she begin? He saw the question beating about in her
mind and hoped he could give her a lead. But she found the way for
herself. She turned to him with a sudden lovely smile.

"Aunt Anne," she said, "has done something beautiful."

He felt his heart shrinking within him as he combated the ungracious
feeling which, it seemed, would not down: that he was never to be done
with Aunt Anne's deeds, so often demanding, as they did, a reciprocal
action from him. What he wanted, he realized grimly, was to have his
cake and eat it, if he might use so homespun a simile for a woman who
had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear spaces
about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in
the space she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of
recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to
allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she
generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a
preconceived task of breaking something to him.

"Yes, she's done something beautiful, and done it for you."

Raven's heart had shrunk so now that he wondered it could weigh so
heavily. How could a woman, his rebellious intelligence asked him,
manage to pursue a man with her benefits even from the grave? All his
grown-up life he had fought them, but still they hung about him him like
shackles. When he tore them off from one member--always wounding himself
only, and scrupulously sure of never, except by the inevitability of his
refusals, hurting her--they fastened on him somewhere else. When he was
under twenty--for he was fourteen years younger than she--had come the
question of her endowing him for the period of his apprenticeship to
literature, that he might write with a free mind. He had, tempting as
that was and safe as it seemed to his arrogant youth, found the decency
and prudence to refuse. He wondered now how he had been spared, saved
really by the prophetic gods from taking that guarantee, though he was
then so sure of his ability to justify the risk and pay it all back.
Perhaps his mother had helped him. She was a woman of rare sanity, and
though he could not remember her uttering a dissuading word, he was
sure, in the light of his own middle-aged vision, that she must have
been throwing the weight of her clear-mindedness into the scale.

Then there was the question of a college course and of European travel:
those were among the colossal gifts Anne Hamilton had sought to lavish
on him. But again he had saved himself, accepting one thing only, a
benefit that must have hurt her heart like a stone, she was so bent on
his beautiful, bright aptitude at writing taking its place as soon as
possible, and with no dimming from a prosaic drudgery, in the world as
she knew it: the Boston world, the New England world, the court of
judgment that sits across the Atlantic. This benefit he asked for and
received, from her father: a clerk's place in the mills--Hamilton was a
wool magnate--and a chance to earn steady money for himself and his
mother, who was every year, in spite of her stout heart, slipping into
the weakness of the chronic invalid. Raven wrote his books at the fag
end of days given to his dull industry, and he succeeded in calling
attention to himself as a classical scholar, and then, as he impatiently
hit out with what he called pot-boilers in dialect, he got a popular
hearing and more money as well. All the time he was advancing in the
mills, and, as he advanced, he never failed to see before him the
flutter of Anne's discreet draperies or hear the click of her determined
heel. She never appeared in the business at all, but he was perfectly
sure there wasn't a preferment offered him by her father for which he
wasn't indebted to her manipulation of Hamilton in long, skillful hours
beforehand. Hamilton had no slightest idea he was being influenced, but,
as the years went on, he grew in appreciation of young Raven's business
abilities to such a degree that John, reading his mind like a familiar
tongue, wondered whether after all it was true, and he hadn't a genius
for the affairs of wool. Was he doing the thing that seemed so dull to
him with such mechanical and yet consummate cleverness that he was worth
all this unripe advancement, or was it indeed Anne's white hand that was
turning the wheel of power, her wand that was keeping the augmented
vision of him ever before her father's credulous eyes? But he could not
retard the wheels of his progress without making a fool of himself, and
by the time his sister had prosperously married and his mother had died,
he was a partner in the business, and then Hamilton also died and Raven
was asking Dick, hoping all the time he would refuse, if he wanted to
come in. Dick did refuse, with an instant hearty decision for which his
uncle inwardly blessed him. Raven had got so restive by this time over
the position he had himself won through Anne's generalship that he felt
the curse was going down through the family, and that Dick, if he should
come in, would wake up at forty-odd and find himself under the too heavy
shade of the Hamilton benevolence.

"Not on your life," said Dick, when he was halfheartedly offered the
chance of battening on wool, "not while Mum's got the dough. There's
only one of me, and she's bound to keep me going."

"You couldn't marry on it," said Raven.

For that also Dick was cheerfully prepared.

"By the time Nan's ready," he said, having at that point asked her
intermittently for several years, "I shall be getting barrelfuls out of
my plays."

"'If,'" quoted Raven, "'Medina Sidonia had waited for the skin of the
bear that was not yet killed, he might have catched a great cold.'"

"That's all right," said Dick. "You needn't worry, not till it begins to
worry me. The only thing that gets me is not pinning Nan down."

"Yes," said Raven, "she's a difficult person to pin."

And saying it, he had a vision of a bright butterfly with "dye-dusty
wings" in stiff, glass-covered brittleness. He wondered if marrying
might pin Nan down like that.

Another thought troubled him a little: whether Dick had built even
obscurely in his own mind on the money Nan would have from Aunt Anne,
and the more modest sum she had now from her dead father and mother. He
concluded not. He hadn't got to worry about that. Dick had lived in the
atmosphere of money and he took its permanence for granted.

But we are keeping Nan looking at the fire and trying to get her news
out adequately, waiting a long time for these explanatory excursions
into past history. Raven also was waiting, a good deal excited and
conscious of his apprehensive heart. And when she spoke, in a studied
quietude, he found the words were the very last he expected to hear:

"I wanted to be the one to tell you. We've found her will."




II


They sat there silent for several minutes. Raven was keeping desperate
clutch on the inner self lashed by his hurrying heart, and telling it
there was no danger of his saying any of the things it was hounding him
on to say. He wanted to break out with an untempered violence:

"Of course you've found it. And of course she's left a lot of it to me."

He did not really believe that: only it so linked up with the chain of
her unceasing benevolences toward him that it seemed the only thing to
complete them adequately. And Nan, as if his premonition had prompted
her, too, was saying, after the minute she had left him to get his pace
even with hers, as if to assure him that, although she knew so much more
than he, she wouldn't hurry ahead:

"Rookie, dear, she's left it all to you."

Raven felt himself tighten up, every nerve and sinew of him, to do
something before it should be too late. He bent forward to her and said,
a sharp query:

"Who found it?"

"Why," said Nan, smiling as if she couldn't ask anything better, "I
found it, in a perfectly innocent looking envelope with some old deeds
and mortgages."

"You haven't got it here, have you?" he pelted on. "You didn't bring it
with you?"

His eyes interrogated her with his voice, and she shook her head,
wondering at him.

"Nothing to you?" he asked sharply. "I'm the sole legatee?"

"Oh, I have the house, of course," said Nan, "the one here and the place
at Wake Hill. She had those only for her lifetime, you know. Yes, you're
the sole legatee."

"You haven't told anybody, have you?" he asked, in a despairing haste,
as if he were seeking about for ways to suppress the document.

She broke into an amused giggle, the note he sometimes fancied she kept
for him alone.

"Why, yes," she said, "of course I have. I telephoned Mr. Whitney, and
he was in a great state over it. He came round, and I gave it to him."

"A lawyer!" said Raven, in disgust. "A damned accurate,
precedent-preaching lawyer! Well, the fat's in the fire now. What did
you have to be so confounded previous for?"

Nan was smiling at him as if she found herself wiser than he.

"You didn't think you could tear it up, did you, Rookie?" she inquired.
"You can't, you know, except in stories."

"I don't know what I thought," he said. "Only I wish it hadn't been
done, that's all. It's a"--he ended blankly--"a mistake."

She was looking at him now in a warm, sweet way, to tell him she
understood and thanked him.

"You're afraid I sha'n't have enough," she said. "I shall. I'd ever so
much rather you had it, Rookie."

"It isn't a question," said Raven curtly, in his disaffection, "of how
much you're worth. It's simply yours, that's all, and you've got to have
it. Well, I can refuse it, I suppose. Only that's so boorish. It drags
everybody out into the open. What made her! Oh, what made her!"

"I think it's nice," said Nan comfortably. "It seems to make everything
so right. As to other people--why, it's telling them, don't you know,
you really were the one she cared most about, though she couldn't care
quite in the way you wanted her to."

He sat staring at her. What did she mean? What had she made up, in her
adequate mind, about his relation to Aunt Anne? She couldn't know how he
had fought off the yearly increasing benefits Anne had showered him
with, unless indeed Anne had told her. And it wasn't like her. Anne was
dignity itself. She kept her own counsel. She took her stately course
without the least recognition that there were peculiarities in the pace
she kept or the road she chose. She had the unconscious arrogance of her
class, a class perhaps, except as surviving in individuals, almost
extinct. She never accounted for herself, because it could not have
forced its way into her mind, from birth to death, that there was
anything in her conduct save the inevitable best, as ordered as the
stars. So, Raven knew, she had probably never talked over his nebulous
relation with her to Nan; but he was suddenly alive with curiosity to
know. He couldn't coax Nan into betraying that confidence, but he was
nevertheless set on getting at it somehow. He wondered if it might be
decent to do it by direct attack.

"Nan," said he, "just what was my relation to your Aunt Anne? What do
you assume it to have been?"

She looked at him as if in reproach, a hurt pride flushing her cheek and
giving a sort of wounded appeal to her glance.

"Why," she stumbled, "I know. Of course I know. Everybody did that heard
how long you'd been devoted to her."

This gave him so sharp a pang that it might almost have seemed she had
been told off to avenge some of Aunt Anne's wrongs of omission suffered
at his hands. He had never been devoted to her, even with his decent
show of deference in return for the benefits he had to reject. And now
Nan was accusing him of having kept up the relation he had been all his
life repudiating, and since Aunt Anne was gone (in the pathetic immunity
that shuts the lips of the living as it does those of the dead), he
could not repudiate it any more. Nan was looking at him now in her
clear-eyed gravity, but still with that unconscious implication of there
being something in it all to hurt her personally. The words came as if
in spite of her, so impetuously that she might easily not have seen how
significant they were:

"There's nothing to be ashamed of in not getting the woman you want,
especially with that reason. She adored you, Rookie. I know she did. And
it was pretty heroic in her to keep her mind fixed on all those years
between you. I wouldn't, I can tell you. Do you s'pose I'd let a matter
of fourteen years keep me from the only man? No, sir. Not me."

They sat gazing at each other, she as self-willed as her words and he
abjectly afraid of her finding out. Why? He could not have told. But it
did seem as if he must protect Anne, in the shadows where she lived now,
from the flashing directness of this terrible young glance. It was all
he could do for her. It was bad enough to have Nan build up a beautiful
dream house of eternal love and renunciation. It was infinitely worse to
be the cause of her demolishing it. And as his eyes, in sheer terror of
leaving her to reflect any more astutely and productively on this, held
hers, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in
their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions.
She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers
over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying
to maintain, she burst out, in the extremity of her wonder:

"Good heavens! I don't believe it was so at all. You weren't in love
with her. She was with you, and that was the only way she----" Here she
saw the morass her crude candor was leading them both into, and stopped,
but not soon enough for him to miss the look of eager relief sprung into
her eyes. He turned from her and spoke roughly:

"We don't know what we're talking about. Going into things now--why,
it's the merest folly. Haven't we enough to worry over in the matter of
the will? That's the thing we've got to meet next."

She had now, he saw, the consciously sweet and warming smile she had for
him when she wanted to coax him into doing something or ignoring
something she had done.

"I'm in hopes," she said, "you may feel differently after you've read
her letter."

"Her letter?" he repeated, as if that were a superadded shock. "What
letter?"

"It was in the envelope," said Nan soothingly, "with the will."

"Who's it to?"

He was a writer of English, but his extremity was such that only the
briefest slovenliness would serve.

"To you," she said, unclasping her little bag and bringing it out, the
familiar superscription uppermost and the very size and texture of the
envelope so reminiscent of Anne's unchanging habits that he felt again
the pressure of her fine indomitable hand on his.

"Have you," he asked bleakly, "shown that to Whitney?"

"Why, no," said she, in a clear-eyed surprise. "Of course not. It's
addressed to you."

She held it out to him and, after a perceptible pause, he took it from
her and sat holding it, looking over it into the fire, as if he saw his
fate there, or as if he should determine it for himself by tossing the
letter in, to be devoured. Then he became aware that Nan was gathering
herself up to go. It was rather a mental intimation than anything
tangible. She was tight furled, like all the women of that moment of
fashion, and had no flying draperies to collect. But he felt her
flitting and knew at the same instant that he could not lose her, since,
determined as he was to bar her out of the inner recesses of his
unfurnished mental prison, where he and the memory of Aunt Anne dwelt so
miserably together, it was still a comfort to keep her human presence
within call.

"Don't go," he implored her, and she, surprised, settled back, saying:

"No, of course not, if you don't want me to. I thought you'd like to
read it straight off. Wouldn't it be easier to read it alone?"

"I don't know whether I can ever read it," said Raven, and then, seeing
what a great booby he must sound, he ended savagely: "I'll read it now."

Nan took a paper-knife from the table and offered it to him. Evidently
she felt an unformulated tenderness there, a guess that if he tore it
open it would seem as if he were somehow tearing at Aunt Anne's vanished
and helpless delicacies. Then, as he did not accept the knife, or,
indeed, seem to see it, she took the letter from his hand, ran the blade
noiselessly under the flap, withdrew the folded sheets, and gave them to
him. Raven, with a little shake of the head, as if he were reminding
himself not to be a fool, opened the letter, fixed his attention on it
and, without looking up, hurried through the closely written pages. Nan
sat as still as an image of silence, and when he had done and she heard
him folding the sheets and putting them back into the envelope, she did
not look up.

"Well," said he, his voice so harsh and dry that now she did glance at
him in a quick inquiry, "it's as bad as it can be. No, it couldn't very
well be worse."

Harrying thoughts raced through her mind. Had Aunt Anne reproached him
for any friendliness unreturned, any old hurt time had never healed? No,
Aunt Anne was too effectually armored by an exquisite propriety. She
would have been too proud to make any egotistical demand for herself
during life. Assuredly she could not have done it after death. Raven may
have guessed what she was thinking.

"No," he said, in the same tone of dry distaste. All at once it seemed
he could be definitely allowed to treat himself to a little wholesome
rebuttal of Anne and her ways. "It's nothing you could possibly imagine.
She leaves the money to me to be used for a certain purpose. She doesn't
leave it to any association of the people that think as she does,
because she doesn't absolutely trust them never to divert it into some
channel she wouldn't approve. She leaves it to me to administer because
I know precisely what she means and I'd feel bound to do it in her way
and no other."

"But what is the purpose?" Nan asked him. She was thoroughly surprised
and very curious. "So it's for a cause. Aren't you glad, Rookie? A
minute ago you didn't want it. What is the cause?"

"The cause," said Raven, with infinite distaste, as if it galled him
even to say it, "is the cause of Peace."

"Good Lord!" said Nan breathlessly. "O my stars!" She thought of it a
moment, and he thought also, and then she gathered herself hopefully.
"But, Rookie dear, you believe in peace. You don't have to carry it out
in her way. You can carry it out in yours--and mine--and Dick's--we that
have seen things over there. Why, bless you, Rookie, it's a great idea.
It's a chance: Liberty enlightening the world! a big educational fund,
and you to administer it. Cheer up, Rookie dear. It's a chance."

"Oh, no, it's not a chance," said Raven bitterly. "She's seen to that.
She's tied me up, hand and foot. It's got to be done in her way, the way
she'd been doing it herself since 1914."

"The acutely sentimental?" asked Nan ruthlessly. Then the misery of his
face--a look, too, of mortification as if somebody had put him to public
shame--hurt her so that she spoke with an impetuous bitterness of her
own: "It was a cruel thing to do. Well, it was like her."

Raven put in heavily:

"She never meant to be cruel."

"No," said Nan, "but the whole thing--all the things she had to do
with--came out of her being absolutely stupid and absolutely sure she
was right."

Raven thought apathetically for a moment. His mind went plodding back
over the years of his acquaintance with Anne, as he had never meant it
should again. There had been moments, of late, when he wondered if he
need ever go back to that guiding hand of hers on his unresponsive life.
Of herself, he would have protested, he must have the decency to think.
Just now, recurring to that also, he wondered, with a grim amusement,
whether he had perhaps meant to set apart a day for it, say Thursdays
from ten to twelve, to think gratefully of Anne. But here he was again
at war with her, and the curious part of it seemed to be that he
couldn't undertake the warfare with the old, steady, hopeless
persistence he had got used to in their past; the mere thought of it had
roused him to a certain alarming wildness of revolt.

"Well," he found himself saying to Nan, because there might be a
propriety in curbing her impetuous conclusions, "she had a way of being
right--conventionally, you might say."

"Was she right about the War?" Nan threw back at him.

"No," he felt obliged to own.

"Is she right about this, trying to fetter you, hand and foot, against
what she knew you believed, and banking on your doing it because she's
crowded you and rushed you so many times and you've never failed her?"

"Oh, yes," said Raven miserably, "I've failed her often enough."

"But answer me that: was she right when she left you her money to do
this fool thing and give the world another kick down hill where the
sentimentalists are sending it? Now I ask you, Rookie, was she right?"

"No," he owned again.

"Then," said Nan triumphantly, "you mean she's right about teas and
dinners and women's clubs and old portraits and genealogy and believing
our family tree was the tree of life. That's what you mean, isn't it,
Rookie?"

Raven looked at her, an unhappy smile dawning. He was moderately sure,
in his unspoken certainties, that this was what he did mean. She had
been the perfect product of a certain form of civilization, her
proprieties, her cruelties even--though, so civilized were they, they
seemed to rank only as spiritual necessities.

"I'd rather see a monkey climbing our family tree," said Nan, with a
rash irrelevance she hoped might shock him into the reaction of a
wholesome disapproval, "than all those stiffs she used to hold up for me
to imitate."

"Don't!" said Raven involuntarily. "It would hurt her like the mischief
to hear you say a thing like that."

"Why, Rookie," said Nan, with a tenderness for him alone, he saw, not
for Aunt Anne, "you act as if she might be--in the room." She kept a
merciful restraint on herself there. She had almost said: "You act as if
you were afraid she might be in the room."

He sat staring at her from under frowning brows. Was it possible, his
startled consciousness asked itself, that the spell of Anne's tenacity
of will had not lifted in the least and he did think she might be in the
room? Not to intimidate him: he had never feared her. He had been under
the yoke, not only of his decent gratitude, but his knowledge of the
frightful hurts he could deal her. He wondered what Nan would say if he
could tell her that, if he could paint for her the most awful hour in
his remembrance, more terrible even than that of seeing his mother
suffer under mortal disease, when Anne had actually given way before
him, the only time in her ordered life, and accused him of the cruelty
of not loving her. This had not been the thin passion of the family
portraits smiling down on them from her walls, but the terrible
nerve-destroying anguish of a woman scorned. That was one of the things
in his life he never allowed himself to think about; but it would, in
moments of physical weariness, come beating at the door. He would hear
it leave the threshold while he sat, hands clenched and lips shut tight,
and go prowling round the house, peering in at him through the windows,
bidding him waken and remember. And when he did find himself forced to
remember before he could get out of doors and walk or ride, it was
always with an incredulous amazement that he had, in that moment of her
downfall, found the courage to withstand her. When the implacable ghost
of remembrance flashed on his mind the picture of her, face wet with
streaming tears, hands outstretched to him--beautiful hands, the product
of five generations of idleness and care--why did he not meet her
passion with some decency of response, swear he did love her, and spend
the rest of his life in making good? Would a lifetime of dogged
endurance be too much for a man to give, to save all this inherited
delicacy of type from the ruin of knowing it had betrayed itself and was
delicate no more?--the keenest pang it could feel in a world made, to
that circumscribed, over-cultured intelligence, for the nurture of such
flowers of life. He felt, as he stood there looking despairingly upon
her, as if he had seen all the manufactured expensiveness of the world,
lustrous silks, bloom of velvet, filigreed jewels, in rags and ruin. Yet
there was more, and this it was that had brought enduring remorse to his
mind. It was pride. That was in ruins. If she had assaulted him with the
reproaches of an unfed passion, there would have been some savage
response of rebuttal in him, to save them both from this meager sort of
shame. But what could heal in a man's mind the vision of a woman's
murdered pride, as deep as the pride of queens, in the days when the
world itself bowed its neck for queens to set their feet on? Nan was
looking at him curiously. He became aware of it, and returned to himself
with a start. He must, he judged, have been acting queerly. It had never
happened before that he had been under other eyes when the vision rose
to plague him.

"You've been such a long time without speaking," said Nan gently. "What
is it, Rookie dear?"

He shook his head. His forehead was damp with the sweat of his renewed
remorses.

"There's such a lot of things, Nan," he answered, "that can't be said."

"Yes," she agreed, "that's true. Want me to go home?"

He didn't want her to go home. He caught at her dear presence. Almost he
wished he might tell her how horrible it was, not only to repudiate
Anne's last request of him, but to feel he was repudiating it on the
heels of that other refusal years ago.

"No, dear," he said, "not yet. I'll go with you when you must."

"I don't believe," Nan ventured, "it's as bad as you think. She did do
some foolish things," she meditated, "these last years."

"She did some hideous things," said Raven, "because they weren't normal.
They weren't decent. And so they weren't right."

"Maybe I don't know so much as you do about them," said Nan. "You see
she was so furious with me for going to France----"

"Oh, don't say she was furious," urged Raven, still out of that sense of
her being in the room. "It would hurt her so confoundedly."

"Well, she was, you see," said Nan. "I thought you knew about it. But I
remember, you'd gone. And when I told her I was going over, she was
furious. Oh, she was, Rookie! You can't say anything else. I know Aunt
Anne."

"But just cut out some of the adjectives," said Raven, still with that
sense of Anne's being in the room and the unsportsmanlike business of
putting her in her place when she could not, even from her place, defend
herself. "She never was furious. She simply didn't believe in war and
she wouldn't join any relief work and didn't want you to."

"She wouldn't join any relief work," said Nan, relentlessly rehearsing.
"She said the most frightful things and said them publicly. She ought to
have been arrested, only they didn't take the trouble. She wasn't a
Quaker. There was nothing inbred to excuse her. We're decent folks,
Rookie, we Hamiltons. But she stood for non-resistance. She said Belgium
shouldn't have resisted, and England shouldn't have gone in, and France
shouldn't have lifted a finger or thrown a bomb, and when you told
her--that is, I told her--she was crazy, she said something awful."

Raven was startled out of his determination to show no curiosity.

"What did she say?" he asked. "What was it that was awful?"

Nan seemed to have paled a little under the rose-leaf texture of her
cheek.

"Why, you know," she said, "what they all come back to. Whatever they
believe, they come back to that. I don't see how they can. I couldn't,
it scares me so. They tell you what He said--Christ."

Raven sat looking at her, wondering absently, in the unregarded depths
of his mind, how they could go on with a talk that was ploughing deeper
and deeper and yet could get nowhere in the end. For certainly they were
both mercifully bent on saving Anne, and Anne, under this shadow of her
latest past, herself would not let them.

"She absolutely forbade my going to France," said Nan, this with no
special feeling, but as if she had dwelt on it until there was no
emotion left to put into it. "She said it was notoriety I wanted. I told
her I'd scrub floors over there, if they wanted me to. It proved I did,
too, you know. I did it remarkably well. And then she said she forbade
me, and I reminded her I was of age and had my own money. And I went."

Raven nodded. He thought they had said enough, but Nan's calm
impartiality did rest him. It was something he could not himself attain.

"And now," said Nan, "she wants you to keep on doing the fool things
she'd have done then, if they'd let her. She probably wants to get up a
big scheme of propaganda and put it into the schools. And every blessed
boy and girl in this country is to be taught not to serve the truth and
do his job but--safety first."

"Yes," said Raven, drearily "I suppose that's about it."

"But actually," said Nan, suddenly aware that he had not told her, "what
does she say? Does she specify? What does she say?"

"She says," Raven answered, in a toneless voice, glancing at the letter
but making no movement toward sharing it with her more definitely, "that
her money is to build a Palace of Peace--she doesn't say where--for
lectures, demonstrations of the sort I know she approves, all the
activities possible in the lines she has been following--for the
doctrine of non-resistance and the consequent abolishment of war."

Again he ended drearily.

"Well," said Nan, "what are you going to do about it? going to spend
your life and the lives of a lot of more or less intelligent pacifists
teaching children to compute the number of movies they could go to for
the money spent on one battleship----"

"But, good God, Nan!" Raven broke in, "you and I don't want to preach
war."

"No," said Nan, "but we can't let Aunt Anne preach peace: not her brand,
as we've seen it. O Rookie! what's the use of taking the world as it
isn't? Why don't we see if we can't make something of the old thing as
it is and has been? and blest if I don't believe as it always will be?"

Raven looked at her in a maze of interrogation. Was this the fragility
of girlhood speaking, or was it womanhood, old as time itself, with the
knowledge of good and evil? She answered the look.

"No," she said, "I'm not a kid. Don't think it. I suppose it's because
I've seen--life."

The pause before the last word, the drop on the word itself was not from
bitterness, he knew. But it was sad.

"Well," he said irrepressibly, "you've seen life, and what do you think
of it?"

She hesitated. Then she put out her hand and touched the petal of a
rose, one of a great dome of splendor in a bowl.

"I like--roses," she said whimsically.

She looked at him with that most moving look of a lovely face: the
knitted brows of rueful questioning, the smiling lips. Raven, staring
back at her, felt a sudden impulse to speak, to tell. It was the form of
her reply that invited him.

"I don't believe, Nan," he said, "I even care about roses. I don't care
about the whole infernal scheme. That's what I sent for Dick for--to
tell him. Practically, you know I should have to tell Dick. And I
haven't done it and now I'm telling you."




III


Nan sat looking at him with an air of patient alertness, ready, he saw,
to meet what he had to say and do the best she could with it. He had an
irritated apprehension that, as her work through the last few years had
lain chiefly in meeting emergencies, so now he was an emergency. And as
Dick, poet though the inner circle of journalism had listed him, might
not understand in the least what he was driving at, so there was danger
of Nan's understanding too quickly and too much, with the resultant
embarrassment of thinking something could be done. And nothing could be
done beyond the palliatives he meant to allow himself. He would try her.
He might see how far she would insist on going with him along his dreary
way. What if she had Anne's over-developed and thwarted maternity of
helpfulness? What if she insisted on going all the way and never leaving
him to the blessed seclusion of his own soul?

"You see, Nan," he adventured, "I'm sick of the whole show."

She nodded.

"Yes," she said, "I know. Coming back. Finding we aren't any better than
we were before we got frightened and said our prayers and promised God
if He'd stop the War we'd be different forever and ever, amen. That's
it, Rookie, isn't it?"

"Why, yes," said Raven, staring at her, she seemed so accurate,
according to his own mental gauging, and so unmoved in her flippancy,
"that's pretty nearly it."

She nodded at him again, whether to hearten him or to assure him of
their perfect unison he could not tell.

"It was an awful jolt, wasn't it?" she inquired frankly. "You know, I
should think it might make some of them laugh, the ones they say observe
us from--where is it from? Mars? up in the heavens somewhere. It's like
reading a bitter sort of book. It is funny. Rookie, don't you think it's
funny?"

Raven remembered a character in Mr. Owen Wister's "Virginian," the hen
crazed by her thwarted destiny.

"Well," he said, quoting "The Virginian," "not so damned funny either.
But how the dickens did you know what I was going to say?"

"Because it's what we've all come back to," said she, "and what
everybody that stayed at home feels, or ought to if they've got anything
inside their nuts. Just think, Rookie! we were like the great multitude
in the Bible, somewhere, praising God. We broke our idols and--I don't
know what we didn't do. And now we're not scared any more, we've set 'em
up again: same old idols. Rookie, I bet you the only reason we ever
sacrificed to God at all was because we thought He was the biggest joss
and things were so desperate and all, we'd better make a sure thing of
it. And now we think we aren't in any particular danger, seems as if the
little gods would do, same as they did before; and they're not so
expensive."

"Goodness, Nan!" said Raven, "how naughty you are. You didn't use to run
on so."

"I haven't talked very much to you," said Nan drily, "not since I grew
up."

He knew it was true, and knew also that the reason was, if she had
allowed her lips to utter it, "Aunt Anne wouldn't let me."

"But," she said, "I don't understand altogether. I know you're mad and
discouraged and all the rest of it. But I don't see what Dick has got to
do with it."

"It's simply this," said Raven. "I'm going away."

She looked at him in what seemed to be serious alarm.

"Relief work?" she asked. "Reconstruction?"

"No," said Raven. "I don't believe I should be any good to them. There
isn't a blamed thing I can do, so far as I see, except for what money
I've got. I'm no good, Nan. I shouldn't sell for my hide and horns. And
I hate the whole blamed show. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of the system,
from the beasts that devour one another to the rest of us. And I'm
simply going to desert. I'm going to run away."

"Where?" asked Nan. "You can't run away from the earth."

"No," said Raven, "I can't jump off. So I'm going to do the next
convenient thing. I'm going up to Wake Hill and shovel snow with Jerry,
and maybe get into the woods and do some thinning out and, if I remember
anything about the millennium we've just shaved the edge of, just say to
myself there ain't a-going to be no millenium, so I can shut up."

"You've taken advice, haven't you?" she concluded. "That's what they've
prescribed. I suppose it's all right."

"Good God, no!" said Raven. "Do you think I've been to a doctor and
turned myself inside out? I'm going because Wake Hill is as far out of
the world as I can manage. If the whole earth hadn't gone crazy, I'd cut
stick for Tartary or some confounded place that isn't on the map. But
they're all on the map. There isn't an inch of ground that isn't under
some sort of moral searchlight. No, I'll be hanged if it's moral. It's
only the mites in the cheese getting busy and stirring up fermentation."

Nan laughed out and then looked up at him in her rueful apology.

"I couldn't help it," she said. "I thought of Dick, your telling him.
Dick's just got his book ready for the printer: Democracy, you know, in
three-legged verse. And they'll say it's full of insight and prophecy.
That's what they said about the other one: insight, prophecy! But Dick
won't have the least idea what you're driving at."

"You see," said Raven, "he's thinking of doing some stiff work and
getting a degree: a sort of sop to his mother. She's as wild as a hawk,
you know, to get him to distinguish himself, doesn't much care how. I'd
meant to ask him to camp here with me this winter. I believe I did
actually ask him, now I think of it."

"Yes, you did," said Nan. "It'll make a lot of difference to him, your
being away."

"I don't think so," said Raven. "Anyhow, he'll have to get used to it,
especially as I'm not merely going away. I'm getting out, out of the
business and all."

He was really surprising her now. She had grown up in the atmosphere of
belief in that particular business. When a Hamilton said his earthly
creed, he would have begun, if he had been honest, "I believe in wool."

"You're not retiring?" she hesitated.

"Yes."

"Made your pile, Rookie?"

At once they thought of Anne and the new complication she had saddled
him with.

"That isn't the question," he evaded. "The amount of it is, I couldn't
go to the office every morning and come home and go the next day,
without--well, Nan, frankly, going off my nut. I hate it. I hate the
whole business of what we call civilized life. I even think of giving
Dick power of attorney and passing all my stuff over into his hands."

"Oh, no," said Nan quickly, "you mustn't do that."

He frowned at her, perplexedly.

"Don't you trust him?" he asked. "Don't you trust Dick?"

"Of course I trust Dick," said she impatiently, "his intentions, that
is."

"You ought to," said Raven. "You're bound to, the man you're going to
marry."

She kept her eyes on him, but she said nothing. And suddenly Raven
realized that he wanted to know about this business of marrying Dick. He
wanted to know tremendously. Yet, though this was the little Nan who
sometimes used to seem more his child than anybody's, he could not ask
her. She looked difficult, if not wayward.

"Well," he compromised, "that's about where it is. I'm going into the
country, to get away from the clack of men. My income, all but the
little of it I set aside for food and taxes, will go to France. It may
go through Dick or it may----Oh, well, well," he added, seeing the
quick rebuttal again on her face, "that hasn't got to be decided in a
hurry. But ultimately it goes to France."

"Why France?" asked Nan. "I see, though. They're all deserting her."

"It isn't altogether that," said Raven, as if he hadn't finished
thinking it out. "It's because I believe in her so tremendously, that
quick intelligence of hers. She mustn't be downed, mustn't be kept
depleted. It's a loss too horrible to face. She sees the world as it is.
She knows the dangers. She's got to be protected from them, so she can
go on seeing."

"What does she see?" asked Nan curiously. "What kind of thing?"

"Everything. Life. When it comes to what the collective brain can do,
you can't limit her. You never'll make her believe in miracles, but she
can find out how they're done."

"Mercy!" said Nan. "You talk like a book."

"Notes, for an essay: 'France.' I've been thinking 'em out. How she
ought to be given a hand, so she doesn't have to spend the next thirty
years or so outwitting the German devil. That's hard sledding for her
beautiful intelligence. She ought to be safe, so she can turn it to
other things: the science of living, hers, ours, everybody's."

"Ah," said Nan, "but they'll tell you it won't be for everybody: only
France."

"That's the point," said Raven. "It's a gamble. But they can't deny
she's got the beautiful intelligence. I can trust anything so perfect. I
trust it absolutely."

"Why don't we do it ourselves? Build a fire under us, Rookie. Come on!"

"We aren't homogeneous," said Raven. "We've no race spirit, no live
nerve through the whole of us. France has. That mind of hers, that
leaping intelligence! If she were as holy as she is keen, she'd make the
world the poets dreamed of."

"Then go to it," said Nan. "Turn in your money. I will mine. Stump you!"

"Not yet," said Raven. "You sit tight and see how I come out. I haven't
got enough to set the Seine afire, but such as it is, I'd like to turn
it over to her for what she needs most: agriculture, schools, research.
Administered so it could be withdrawn if she didn't make good and turned
in somewhere else. Oh, it's a gamble! I told you it was. But
administered, mind you. That's the point."

"Through Dick," she commented, plainly with dissatisfaction. "Now, why
Dick?"

"Because," said Raven, "Dick's got a head for organizing. He's his
father over again, plus the Raven streak. And the Raven streak doesn't
do him any harm. It isn't soft, like Old Crow--and me. It's his mother
in him, and she takes back--but O Lord! what's the sense of going into
that?"

"Anyhow," said Nan, with decision, "you keep your affairs in your own
hands."

"For the present, yes," said Raven. "And I do want to think it out in
detail. I can do it at Wake Hill. I shall get on my pins enough for
that."

"Isn't it funny?" said she. "Aunt Anne with her Palace of Peace and you
with your invincible France. But, Rookie, you hear to me. Whatever you
do with your own money, you do it your own way. Don't be a slacker."

Raven sat looking at her, a slow smile dawning. He rather liked Nan's
taking him in hand.

"That's it, is it?" he asked, with a relish she was glad to see. "A
slacker! so be it. If I'm a slacker, I am. I'm a conscientious objector.
What I object to is the universe, the pattern it's made on. I object to
the way we're running it, and, being made as we are, I don't see how we
can be expected to do anything but what we're doing. It's a perfectly
logical proposition. And except for a few minor chores I've got to see
to, I simply won't play."

Nan was thinking. She looked down at her hands, lying in her lap. Raven
looked at them also and wondered, as he often had, since they came home,
how such hands could have done the tasks she set them to. She looked up
and met his eyes gravely with something imperative in hers. It is a way
women have sometimes. They seem to be calling on the boy in man and
bidding him take heed.

"I wouldn't," said she, "talk to Dick about going to Wake Hill."

"What would you do? Cut stick, and let him wonder what in the deuce it's
all about?"

"I wouldn't talk; I'd write."

"Oh, write!--what's the difference?"

"If you talk, he'll say something that'll shut you up and you'll be just
as far apart as you are to-day. If you write, you can tell him as much
as you want to and no more. And the first thing he'll do will be to
bring the letter to me."

"I see," said Raven. "And you'll interpret."

"I'll interpret. I can, Rookie. I know you, don't I? and I know Dick."

"You ought to," said Raven rashly again because he was again curious,
"the man you're going to marry."

"Yes," said Nan calmly, rising, "the man I'm going to marry. Only"--her
face, as she turned it to him, brimmed over with a childish sort of
fun--"don't tell him that, Rookie. It's perfectly true I haven't
promised him. And I don't mean to--yet."

"Quite right," said Raven, rising. He felt a distinct relief. He, too,
wanted to see what Dick would make of himself. "You do your own
telling."

"There he is," said Nan, "just as it is in a play. We've got to a climax
and he comes in at the door. But, Rookie----" She stopped, for Dick was
nearing in the hall, and Raven knew what she would have said. It was in
both their minds. They hadn't finished their talk. It had merely strayed
into another channel, or bolted and run away there. Aunt Anne's money
and her Palace of Peace still stared them in the face. Dick put his head
in at the door. He looked rather sheepish, as if his dignified going had
been invalidated by this impetuous coming back, as if he couldn't live
without Nan and she was bound to see through it.

"Well?" he said gruffly. "Talked out?"

They both laughed, with the sudden absurdity of it. How should they,
their eyes questioned each other, ever be talked out, what with Aunt
Anne and the universe and France?

"Absolutely," said Nan. "Good night, Rookie. Going to write your letter?
Come on, Dick."




IV


Raven sat down at the table and began his letter. He was wrestling with
it at once, to give himself no time to argue over the point of its being
no ordinary letter such as he had been accustomed to write to Dick. He
began with the succinct statement of what he meant to do. He had made
all his arrangements for getting out of the business. They could be
concluded in short order. As to the business itself, he had no complaint
to make. The old man--he permitted himself this indulgence as he never
could have in Anne's lifetime, as touching her father--the old man had
been square all through. He was as good as they make 'em. But there was
nothing for him, Raven, in the concern except its cumulative capacity
for making money. He'd no traditional pride in it, as the old man had.
He'd worked for all he was worth, to squeeze every drop he could out of
it so that his mother--"your grandmother, you know, Dick"--might have
every last luxury she wanted. Well, she'd had 'em, though one of the
ironical things about it was that she didn't want so very many, and he
needn't have worked so hard or so long. However, that's neither here nor
there. What's done is done. The War's done--they say--and the thing that
would please Raven best would be----Here he brought up with a full stop.
He was running into dangerous revelations, going back to a previous
state of mind, one he had begun cherishing as soon as his mother died,
and even caressed, with a sort of denied passion, when Anne also died,
and he felt so shamefacedly free. All his life he had wanted to wander,
to explore, to bruise himself against the earth and pick himself up and
go on and get bruised again. He loved the earth, he wanted her, in her
magnificence and cruelty, wanted to write about her, and make the
portrait of her for stay-at-homes who weren't adventurous and were
content with reading about her in the blank moments after the office
grind. Yet he was a stay-at-home himself. Why? in God's name why?

He asked himself the question, as he sat with lifted pen, almost the
words dropping off it, to tell Dick the things it would be simply
disconcerting to know. Raven saw, with a sad clearness, why he hadn't
written the books he wanted to about the earth. They would have been
rough books, full of rock and clay and the tumbling of rivers and
thunder grumbling in the clouds. If he had been really afraid of Anne
and her ordered ambitions for him, he could have printed them under an
assumed name. She need never have known at all. They wouldn't have been
the books he could have written if he had been foot-loose and gone
blundering along in strange trails over the earth, but they might have
held something of the sort his inner man wanted to fashion. And if the
secret of them had been kept, they needn't have interfered with his smug
little folk stories Anne and her women's clubs prized so much. Had he
been actually afraid of Anne? Was he one of the men who are shamefully
under the feminine finger, subject to mother, subject to wife, without
the nerve--scarcely the wish, indeed--to break away? He was not afraid
of his mother, or, if he had been, it was the fear of hurting her who
had been so hurt already. Ever since he could remember, he saw himself,
even as a little boy, trying to get her away from his father who had a
positive cast of mind, a perfect certainty of being right and a
confirmed belief that robust measures always were the thing. If you did
wrong, you were to be punished, promptly and effectually. If you were
afraid of the dark, and came downstairs in your nightgown upon the
family sitting by the lamp, you were whaled for it, to teach you there
was something worse than bed even in the dark. If you said your head
ached and you couldn't eat bacon and greens, which father elected to
consider a normal dish, you were made to eat a lot with no matter what
dire result, because there wasn't a physical ill which couldn't be
mended by treating it robustly. He was God. He knew. And he was
perfectly well and had never once for half a minute entered into those
disordered cells of bodily ill where the atom cries to its Creator in an
anguish of bewilderment and pain. And when his body met the fate
appointed for its destruction, as all bodies must, and he was brought
home broken after the runaway that made him a thing almost too terrible
to look upon, except by eyes so full of compassion that they love the
more, Raven, then a very little John, found himself wondering how it
seemed to father now. Even runaways, father had appeared to think, could
always be governed, if you kept your head.

They never knew what he thought. He died quickly, under opiates, and
John believed his mother was so thankful for the merciful haste of it
that she could not, until long after, recall herself to mourn. And she
did honestly mourn. The little John was glad of that. So ill and tired
had she been for years and yet so bound upon the rack of her husband's
Spartan theories for her, that John thought he could not have borne it
if she had not adored her righteous tormentor, if she had had to look on
him as her master, not her lord by love. It seemed to him he was always
mourning over his mother, in those days, always lying awake and
wondering if she were awake, too, always trying to save her from some
task too heavy for her and too heavy for him also, so that, if she were
to be saved, it had to be by stratagem. But stratagem was difficult in
that house, because his older sister, who became Dick's mother, was of
her father's temperament, always perfectly well and also an inferior god
who knew at every point what to do, and she had not merely imbibed
father's certainty that the only thing mother needed was to take a
brace: she had it by nature. And when, father being gone to heaven--and
John, young John now, not little any more, made no doubt he had gone, it
pleased mother so to say it and be obligingly agreed with--Amelia, his
sister, took her departure, on the night of her marriage with a very
prosperous Mr. Powell, for the middle west, John Raven, then beginning
his apprenticeship to wool, danced a fantastic fling in the sitting-room
where the wedding gifts still lay displayed and whooped with emotion at
last let loose. His mother, in the gray silk and commendable lace Amelia
had selected and he had paid for, did smile unwillingly, but she spoke
to him in the reproving tone which was the limit of severity his boyhood
had known from her and which he had learned, in those earliest days,
meant nothing at all:

"I'd be ashamed! Any one would think you were glad your sister had
gone!"

John did not say he was glad. He knew too much to stir up loyal
reactions in mother's conscience. He simply wove a dance of intricate
mazes about her, as she sat in her chair, and his inner mind was one
pæan of thanksgiving to God, not the spurious gods who had been his
father and sister, but the mysterious Deity who had, for obscure
purposes, called them into being, because now John had at last full
swing and could let mother out of bondage. What difference did it make
that he wasn't trekking through darkest Africa or being hunted by the
jungle in India, so long as mother was out of bondage? He even took his
allegiance to Anne rather lightly, those first years, he was so
absent-minded about everything but hypnotising mother into thinking she
was going to be very happy and live a long time doing it. And that was
the part of his life when there seemed to be a great deal of it, and if
he didn't have a thing now there would be plenty of chances to snatch at
it later. He had simply been eaten up, the energy of him, the will,
perhaps, by compassion. And then his mother had died and he knew he
could have done no more for her than he had done, and while he was
turning round to look about him--and ah! in that lean year came Anne's
horrible accusation that he did not love her!--the War broke out, and he
felt himself shocked into action. The very atoms of his body seemed to
fall asunder and rearrange themselves and, as soon as he could decently
get away, without throwing the bewilderment of the business on Anne, he
had gone, and he had never seen her again.

He had written to her faithfully, and with the compassion that was
either natally or by the habit of life a part of him, but he had not
obeyed her. For she begged him, almost, at intervals, commanded him, to
return to work with her for the peace of mankind. At first he tried to
explain himself and assuage her grief over what she called his desertion
of their common ideals. He answered the arguments in the letters that
had become a misery to him to receive as his had become an inexpressible
burden to write. Finally, with a wrench to himself, he ceased, and, with
infinite pains, compiled data that might interest without offending her.
The letters continued, but as soon as he found she was sending him
abstractions valueless because they had no roots in the living issues of
things, he had to stop. That, not her death, had been their lasting
farewell.

What, in the name of all that was mysterious, he reflected, had made
Anne--and so early--assume the burden of an unasked allegiance to him?
His family and hers had been next-door neighbors at Wake Hill, but on no
equality of worldly footing. The Hamiltons, thriving on wool, had been
able to buy for themselves all the picturesque luxuries of civilized
life. Their women toiled not. Their delicate air was the product of
tuition in dainty ways. Their men had acquired the unconscious pose of
dominance, of knowing what was their due and expecting to get it without
argument. Sometimes up there at Wake Hill they did receive a
disconcerting knock or two from some "embattled farmer" whom they called
"my man," and who didn't like the sound of it. But the answering rebuff
never penetrated the fine mail of their acquired arrogance. It meant,
they smilingly said, "New England," and tolerantly passed it by. Raven's
people were of a different stripe, "brainy," he thought with an unspoken
pride of his own, yet deficient in a certain practical quality of taking
the world "but as the world," and consequently always poor. Their ways
were rougher ways. Their women had to work to trim the edges of their
plainer surroundings with the alleviating prettinesses the Hamiltons
cast aside with every changing style. And Anne, coming home from Europe
one summer, where she had not only seen wonder and beauty, already
familiar to her--for she was a young lady then--and where he knew she
had met men and women whose names were trumpet calls in his
ears--singled him out, in his shyness and obscurity, and offered him the
key to the fulfilment of his dreams. Education, travel, the life of
books--all were in her hand, the potential fruit of her father's doting
affection for her, and all were to be his. What could have inspired her
with so wholesale and fantastic a philanthropy? He could never
adequately guess, and he was no nearer doing it now than in the old
bewildering days when the Hesperidean apples were dropping over him and
he was, from some shy instinct, dodging to avoid them. And the reason he
had never guessed and never could guess was that he left out of all the
data at his hand the one first moving factor: that he was a beautiful
youth and Anne had imperiously loved him and had never ceased to love.

As he sat there, the pen lifted, his mind going back over the things
that had led him away from adventure into wool, and were now leading him
as far from wool as might be, he was tempted. What if, in spite of Nan,
he should risk it and tell Dick, once for all, why he was going away,
make it clear so there should be no after-persuasions, no clutter of
half understanding? He was tired of thinking about his life as a life.
The temptation to such morose musing had come upon him in the last six
months, and once yielded to, he felt the egotistical disease of it
through his very blood and bones. If he were Catholic, he could confess
and get rid of it. He was not Catholic, only pagan, the natural man. The
Church had a wisdom of her own. All her rites and ceremonies found their
root in something salutary for the human mind. Confession was salutary.
You might not be absolved, but if you were pagan you could believe that
the very act of it absolved you. Nan said Dick never would understand.
So much the better. Let him carry off the burden of it. If he
understood, he'd see the extreme sacredness of a confidence entrusted to
him. If he didn't, he'd hide it as a thing you'd better say as little
about as possible. So he tucked his first letter into its envelope and
began to write again, with no date and no direct address, but from a
sense that it was going to be an enormously comforting thing to do.




V


"I think I'll tell you the real reason why I'm going to Wake Hill. I've
told you I'm going, but just as my nerves move the muscles that move my
legs to go, so my will moves my nerves and the me that is inside
somewhere and is a perfect stranger to you--and also to the me I am used
to myself--moves my will. You see, the me inside me knows there's
something wrong. Something mighty bad--or it may be merely
inevitable--has happened to me. I went through the War all right, on a
pretty even keel, because I thought I saw a bright light at the end. I
thought we all saw the light. And the light wasn't any electric
signboard out to say there never would be any more wars, but it was a
light you could see to read by. You could see the stars and see them
differently from the old way we'd been seeing them. We could see the
moon and the Milky Way--but I suppose that comes under stars--and the
upshot of it was that we thought we saw God. And after you'd seen God,
you knew saying there shouldn't be any more war was only beginning at
the wrong end of the puzzle. Of course war is a damnable business,
perhaps the most damnable we go into because it's so wholesale. But if
you begin at the right end of the puzzle and not the wrong, the thing we
learn is that the only reality in this universe for which it's worth
going through the obscene hells of which war is one, is God. To be aware
of Him, not to explain Him. You can't explain Him. You can't explain
what He's done to you or means to do. All you can do is to keep your eye
on Him and fall in.

"I came home. I was rather cracked, when I got here, I was so pleased
with my little plaything. I'd seen God. I was only one of a good many
millions that saw Him. And it was exactly as if you went into an
enchanter's cave and expected to find some dream you'd dreamed made
real, and all you found was the Forty Thieves sitting there counting
over their spoils. No! no! it isn't an allegory. I don't mean America
and profiteers. I don't mean anybody particularly. But it began to come
over me more and more every day that we and everybody else on the round
world, if they had seen God, had forgotten all about it. Just as the
old-fashioned men at Wake Hill used to read their Bible Sunday and put
it away on the parlor table with the album and go out early Monday
morning to carry the apples to market all deaconed on top. By George! we
were the same old lot. And worse, for we'd had our look through the
peep-hole into eternities, and now we said, 'It makes my eyes ache. I'm
going to wear a shade.' No, son, I don't mean Leagues of Nations and
Internationalism or any of the quack remedies. I mean just God. We'd
been badly scared--Nan said so to-day--and we got down on our knees and
howled to the Highest and offered Him tribute.

"Now you may say that even if the whole world had forgotten God, if I'd
seen Him why couldn't I still remember Him? Why couldn't I consider the
millions of years that go to the making of man and do my little bit and
wait on His will? Because my temptation came on me. I was tempted in the
wilderness of my own credulity and conceit. For I looked back over time
past and I said like Solomon--I don't know whether he ever said it, but
he's the most blasé Johnnie I remember--'All is vanity.' As it was in
the beginning, so it ever shall be. We are not made in the image of God.
We are made rather grotesquely out of dust, and to dust we shall return,
all our hopes, all our aspirations, all the pretty plans we form for
defeating death and time. And who made us and put us on this dark planet
where it is next to impossible to see a step before us? God. Who is
responsible for us? God. Can we find out His will? Never. Can we hope
for any alleviation of misery on our dark planet? Never: for if we seek
out many inventions to down disease and poverty, we shall unloose as
many by-products of discovery and bring new plagues upon us. And so I
had to turn away from God. Do you see? I didn't deny He exists. I didn't
accuse Him of bad faith to us. How can He show either good faith or bad
when He has made us no promises? He has merely set us on the dark planet
and forced us to whirl with it on the wheel of time. And so, do you see,
having turned away from God--and I had to, I had to in mere honesty--I
simply lost Him. And having lost Him, there is nothing left to lose.
Also, having once seen Him and then lost Him, I can't take up the puzzle
again. I can't play the game. If I hadn't what we New Englanders call
common sense, I suppose I should put an end to myself. What would be the
good? He would simply catch me, like a rabbit out of a cage, and chuck
me back again on the dark planet. Don't think I blame Him. He wouldn't
do it out of cruelty. He'd have to put me back. That's the way His laws
are made. So I'm going up to Wake Hill and live with Charlotte and
Jerry, and see if I can't get tired enough every day to sleep at night.
I couldn't keep on here. I couldn't. What we call civilization is too
sickening to me. I should simply go off my nut. And when you come to
that, it's an awful complication, besides the suffering of it. That I
shrink from, too. I'm talking a good deal, but actually it's the thing I
least want to do. I don't want a fuss."

Here he paused, wondered if he had more to say, thinking Dick must be
unusually dull, even for a poet, if he couldn't understand such a plain
state of things, and then took an irrational satisfaction in carefully
folding these last pages and putting them in the envelope with what he
had written first. He addressed the envelope to Dick, sealed and weighed
it, got up and stretched himself and felt distinctly better. He had, in
a way, confessed, and it was having the effect on him he had so sagely
anticipated. He could sleep to-night. And he did sleep. It was one of
the nights he used to have after long tramps about Wake Hill, when his
tired legs thrilled deliciously before they sank into a swoon of
nothingness.

In the morning, he leaped the chasm from four to six, a wakeful misery
of late, when he was accustomed to go over and over the last harassing
pages in his book of doubts. He did not wake until seven, and then it
was with a clear-eyed resumption of consciousness. And here he was,
exactly as he had found himself on other mornings when the bath of
oblivion had not been so deep. Here was his world, the world he was
trying to run away from, waiting for him in all its ordered hostilities.
Immediately it struck him full in the center that, instead of having
something less to brood upon by reason of his confession to Dick, he had
saddled himself with more. He had the letter itself to repent of. He had
given, not his unhappiness but his actual self away, and, no matter how
clearly Dick understood, he had conjured up another anguish in admitting
to his disordered inner world the lenses of another mind. This was only
a matter of a second's disconcerting thought. It was also immediately
clear to him that the letter must not go, and he spoke from his bedside
to the kitchen and gave orders that nothing should be mailed until he
came down. A contrite voice replied. The letters were mailed: that is,
the thick one on the library table. Mary had gone in last night to lock
the windows, and saw it, and knew he had forgotten to leave it in the
hall. He often did forget. It was stamped and sealed. And the furnace
man came then. Raven thought he might, in another minute, be groaning
into her sympathetic ear; so he shut her up with an assurance that it
was all right. But he felt the sweat start on his forehead at the
picture of Dick sitting down to breakfast--Dick always ordered a big
breakfast, having a hunter's appetite and a general impression that, the
more he nourished himself, the more manly it would make his nose--and
poring over the fable of his uncle's soul, or what seemed to be his
soul, with eyes strained to their limit of credulity. However, it was of
no use. Nothing was of any use when destiny had one of those ironic fits
of hers and sat down to make a caricature of you, just for the fun of
bursting her old sides over it. He dressed in a dogged haste, wondering
if he'd better telephone Dick and ask him not to open any letter he
might have from him that morning, and then dismissing it, because it had
assuredly been received and Dick was now absorbing it with his chops and
eggs.

Raven went down to his own eggs in a grim and sulky frame of mind. He
would repudiate the letter, if need be, tell Dick it was only something
he had written as a literary experiment and thought he'd try it on the
dog. But the moment he heard the boy's key in the door and then his step
through the hall, he knew he could not, for some unexplained reason
inherent in his own frame of mind, "put it over." It was as if Dick
represented the universe Raven was arraigning, was counsel for it, so to
speak, and Raven had got, in sheer decency of honor, to stand to his
guns. But it was all worse than he thought. Dick's entrance was so
quick, his onslaught so unstudied, his glance so full of alarmed
commiseration, that Raven saw at once he had been shocked out of all
manly proprieties. Dick caught at a chair, on the way to the table,
brought it with him and, placing it at a near angle to Raven's, dropped
into it as if exhausted.

"I'd no idea," he began, "why, I'd no more idea----"

Raven's hand tightened on his fork. Then he laid the fork down, for,
after all, he had finished breakfast, and might as well make the most of
running his hands into his pockets and shutting them there.

"Morning, Dick," he said. "Have in some toast and eggs?"

Dick, in no mind even to weigh the significance of toast and eggs, was
staring at him. He was cheated by a poverty of words when he most needed
them, and could only repeat:

"I hadn't the least idea. I tell you it never occurred to me. I don't
believe it did to Nan, either."

"What?" asked Raven. "What is it that didn't occur to you?"

"I did think of it when you first spoke of going to France, you know,"
said Dick, in a justification of himself that seemed more for his own
ease than Raven's. "I didn't believe you could pull it off, a man of
your years. You took it so easy! You never turned a hair. But I might
have known you'd have to pay for it afterward."

"What is it I've taken so admirably?" asked Raven. "What is it I've got
to pay for?"

"Why," said Dick, "your slogging over there--a man of your age----"

"Well," said Raven curtly, cracking his voice at him in a way Dick had
never had to take from him, "how is it I'm paying? What's the matter
with me?"

"Why," said Dick, in a perfect innocence of any offense in it, "don't
you know? You've seen enough of it. I should think you'd be the first to
know."

Raven simply looked at him. Dick had a feeling that his uncle was about
to roar out something, and braced himself for the unbelievable event.
However, it would not surprise him. That, he knew, was a part of it. But
Raven was putting his question again, smoothly and tolerantly, as if to
assure him there was time enough to make a well considered reply:

"Just what, in your opinion, is the matter with me?"

"Why," said Dick, that innocent gaze still upon him, "shell shock."

Raven jumped. Every nerve in him seemed to give a little twitch of pure
surprise with every other.

"O Lord!" said he. "Who could ever have expected that? It's worse than I
thought."

"Why, it's no disgrace," Dick assured him eagerly. "Think how many
fellows have had it. They haven't got over it. They're having it now.
The only thing to do is to recognize it and put yourself under
treatment."

"That'll do," said Raven, with a determined calm. "Your diagnosis has
gone far enough. And now I shall have to ask you to do two things for
me."

"Two!" Dick echoed, and Raven, though at the end of his patience, was
touched to see the suffused look of the boy's eyes. "You needn't cut it
down to two. Just you tell me----"

There, though he was poetically eloquent and diffuse in print, he
stopped and could literally say no more without an emotion he considered
unworthy of him.

"Two things," said Raven. "One is to forget every blamed word of the
screed I was jackass enough to send you. The other is to give me your
word you won't mention it, even to me. Oh, there's another thing. Go
home and burn the thing up."

Dick's eyes were all a wild apprehension.

"Oh," said he, "I can't burn it. I haven't got it."

"You haven't it? Who has?"

"Nobody--not yet."

"Oh, then you've destroyed it already."

"No," said Dick miserably. "I've sent it off."

"Who to? Nan?"

"No. Mother."

Raven could hardly believe him. He did not remember any illuminating
confidences from Dick on the subject of mother, but he made no doubt the
boy looked upon her as he did, as a force too eccentrically
irresponsible to be unloosed.

"Well!" he said. The state of things struck him as too bad to be taken
otherwise than calmly. You couldn't spend on it the amount of emotion it
deserved, so you might as well get the credit with yourself and your
antagonist of an attack unexpectedly gentle. "Now, what did you think
you were doing when you sent it off to your mother?"

"Uncle Jack," said Dick, rather awkwardly blundering about his mental
armory for some reasonable defense, "she's your sister."

"Yes," said Raven, "Milly is my sister. What then?"

"Then, why, then," said Dick, "when a thing like this happens to you,
she'd feel it, wouldn't she?"

"You're perfectly sure you know what has happened to me? You trust your
own diagnosis?"

"Of course I trust it," Dick burst forth. "Your letter--why, your letter
isn't normal. Shell shock's a perfectly legitimate thing. You know it
is. You're just the one to be hit. You did perfectly crazy things over
there, entirely beyond any man of your years. And I'm mighty thankful we
can put our finger on it. For if it isn't shell shock, it's something
worse."

"You mean," said Raven, "I've gone off my nut."

Dick did not answer, but there could be no doubt of his own mental
excitement, and he was apprehensive in a measure that moved Raven to an
amused compassion. Raven sat looking at him a long minute. Then he got
up and took his newspaper from the table beside him.

"Come," he said. "We'll go into the library and see if we can get
anywhere."

Dick followed him, and they sat down together by the fire, this after
Raven had moved a third chair into the space between them. He smiled at
himself as he did it. It was the chair Nan had sat in the night before.
He had a foolish feeling that he was invoking her remembered presence,
calling on her to help them out.

"Now, Dick," he began, when they were seated, "you said something about
my letter's not being normal. What is normal, when you come to that?"

Dick frowned into the fire. This, he felt, had some hidden leading, and
he wasn't going to be caught.

"What's the use of asking fool questions?" he inquired, in his turn.
"You know."

"Can't help it," said Raven. "I've got to be Socratic. Help me out, old
man. Let me have my little game. What is normal?"

"Why," said Dick, floundering, "I suppose it's what the general run of
people think--and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the
course. It isn't going off at some tangent of your own."

Dick felt rather proud of this, its fluency and general appositeness. He
plucked up his spirits, thinking he might be going to manage Raven,
after all.

"Now, see here," said Raven, suddenly leaning forward and looking at him
in the friendliest community of feeling, "it means a good deal when a
fellow of my years, as you say, gets a biff that sends him staggering."

"Just what I said," Dick assured him. "It's mighty serious. It's awful."

"Has it occurred to you," said Raven, "that I may be right?"

"Right? How right?"

Thereupon question and answer piled up fast.

"I've indicted the universe, as it were. How can you prove the universe
hasn't laid herself open to it? How do you know the indictment of the
creature she made and then ground under her heel isn't the very thing
she's been waiting for all these millions of years?"

"Oh, come, Jack! the universe hasn't been waiting for you. That's a part
of it, don't you see? You've got delusions, delusions of greatness,
delusions----"

"Shut up. Don't use your spurious jargon on me. Just answer my
questions. How do you know it isn't the healthiest thing that ever
happened in this rotten tissue of pretense we call civilization for even
one man--just one--to get up and swear at the whole system and swear
again that, so far as his little midge's existence goes, he won't
subscribe to it? What business have you to call that disease? How do you
know it isn't health? How do you know I'm not one of the few normal
atoms in the whole blamed carcass?"

Dick felt himself profoundly shocked. He was having to reverse his
conclusions. Uncle Jack had stood for a well ordered sanity, conversant
with wool and books and mysteriously devoted to Miss Anne Hamilton,
whose conventional perfections evidently held within their limit Uncle
Jack's highest ideals. Uncle Jack had shown a neat talent with his pen.
He had grown middle-aged at an imperceptible and blameless pace, and now
he was raging about like a sort of cave man with nothing less than the
universe to bound his wild leaps and curvetings.

"But you know, Jack," he remonstrated feebly, "there isn't anything new
in saying the nation's going to the dogs. The Britishers say it, we say
it----"

"I don't say it," Raven asserted. "We're not going to the dogs. We've
gone. We're there. We're the dogs ourselves, and nothing worse could
happen to a criminal--from Mars, for example--than to be sent to us. We
ought to be the convict colony of the universe."

"Don't," said Dick, with an affectionate sweetness as exasperating as it
was moving. "It only excites you. Come on out and have a tramp. We could
motor out to----"

"O Lord!" groaned Raven. "Why don't you beguile me up to the
Psychopathic?"

Then he was, for the first time, aghast at what he had set going. Dick
was looking at him again with that suffused glance of an affection too
great to mind disclosing itself in all its pathetic abnegation.

"I couldn't say it myself," he began brokenly. "But you've said it; you
see yourself. If you would----"

There he stopped and Raven sat staring at him. He felt as if the words
had got inside his body and were somehow draining his heart. When he
spoke, his voice sounded hoarse in his own ears.

"Dick, old man," he said, "I'm not--that."

"No! no!" Dick hastened to assure him, and somehow his hand had found
Raven's and gripped it. "Only--O good God!" he ended, and got out of his
chair and turned his back.

Raven, too, rose.

"Dick," said he quietly, "you go home now. And don't you speak about
this to anybody, not to Nan even. You understand."

Dick nodded, still with his back turned, and got out of the room, and
Raven thought he must have caught at his hat in the hall, and made one
stride for the door. The door banged and Raven was alone.




VI


The next day Nan telephoned Raven that she was taking train for New York
for perhaps a week's stay with the Seaburys. These were her nearest
relatives, cousins at a remove Raven never really untangled, and of late
they had been spending persuasive energy in trying to induce her to live
with them. Since she had come home from France and Aunt Anne had died,
they were always descending upon her for brief visits in the house where
she succeeded Aunt Anne, and liking her so tumultuously, in her grown-up
state, that they pelted her with arguments based on her presumable
loneliness there and the silliness of carrying on the establishment
really as a species of home for superannuated servants. Nan honestly
liked the cousins, in a casual way, though it was as inconceivable to
her that the Boston house might be given up as it would have been to
Aunt Anne. There was, she felt, again in Aunt Anne's way, a certain
continuity of things you didn't even think of breaking. Now she was
seeking the Seaburys for reasons of her own. They had to be suitably
told that Aunt Anne had left her money away from them as from her, and
naturally, though ridiculously, to "that Raven she was always making a
fool of herself about." They were ruthless of speech within family
conclave, though any one of them would have thought more than twice
about calling Aunt Anne any sort of fool, in her lifetime, even at a
distance safely beyond hearing. Raven was not, if Nan could forestall
the possibility, to be assaulted by mounting waves of family animosity.

Raven was glad, for once, to get rid of her, to find she was removing
herself from the domestic turmoil he had created. There could not be the
triangular discussions inevitable if she and Dick fell upon him at once,
nor should he have to bear the warmth of her tumultous sympathy. Dick
had evidently told her nothing, and he even gathered that she was going
without notice to Dick. Then Raven began a systematic and rapid
onslaught on his immediate affairs, to put them in order. Mr. Whitney,
Anne's lawyer, who had always seemed to regard him in a disconcerting
way as belonging to Anne, or her belonging in some undefined fashion to
him, opened out expansively on the provisions of the will. He most
sincerely congratulated Raven. Of course it was to have been expected,
but----! Raven kept miserably to the proprieties of the moment. He
listened with all due reserve, silent on the subject of Anne's letter.
That was his affair, he thought, his and Nan's; unless, indeed, it was
nobody's affair but Anne Hamilton's, and he was blindly to constitute
himself the unreasoning agent of her trust. That must be thought out
later. If he undertook it now, piling it on the pack of unsubstantial
miseries he was carrying, he would be swamped utterly. He could only
drop it into a dark pocket of his mind where an ill-assorted medley of
dreads and fear lay waiting--for what? For a future less confusing than
this inscrutable present? At least, they could not be even glanced at
now. He wrote Charlotte and Jerry, his caretakers on the place at Wake
Hill, that he was coming for an indefinite stay. He instructed his
housekeeper in Boston that the house was to be kept open; possibly Mr.
Richard would be there a good deal. Then he sat down to write his
sister. That was the problem: what should he say to her who would
presently be receiving his unfortunate screed with some inflammatory
introduction from Dick and would--he knew her!--scarcely have finished
it before she took steps toward flooding him with epistolary advice and
comment. He could see her now at her desk, assembling data of conduct,
bodily well-being, and putting it all down in that masterful hand of
hers. That settled it. He mustn't write her. He must telegraph and
forestall Dick. And he did telegraph her, on the moment, a message of
noncommittal brevity:

"Letter Dick sent you is all poppycock. Forget it."

That might, he concluded, yet without hope, keep her from rushing her
pen to the rescue, even if it did not prevent her fuming. And as he sat
at the library table with a disorder of papers before him, Dick appeared
at the door: good boy, full of zeal and pity. He looked so overflowing
with honest affection, so eagerly ready to help that Raven exasperatedly
loved him for his kind officiousness. Yet he had nothing for him but a
gruff:

"Now what do you think you're here for?"

Dick was prepared for repulse, this or any other. He had armed himself
against all possible whims and obstinacies, and he wore the air of a
carefully adjusted patience.

"Can't I help there?" he inquired, advancing to the table and drawing up
a chair. "Couldn't you let me run over those and just tell you what they
are?"

"You go to thunder," said Raven, rapidly assorting, clapping into
bundles and casting aside. "Yes, you can, too. Take this basket and
empty it into the fireplace. Behind the log and smash it down so it
won't set the chimney afire. Remember how your grandmother used to keep
a scare going all the time for fear of chimneys? I guess I've inherited
it. I have to use the formula."

Dick emptied the papers with a grave care foreign to him, as if even so
small a service, at such a moment, bore a weightier meaning, and brought
the basket back. He sat down and waited in a silence Raven felt more
portentously vocal than the loudest outcry.

"Dick!" he said. He stopped work and looked at the youth, an unwilling
smile twisting his mouth. He was not sure of its being well to take it
humorously; yet it was funny. "Dick, if you've got anything to say, say
it. If you haven't, clear out. This is my busy day."

Dick shook his head despairingly and yet obstinately. He wasn't going to
leave Uncle Jack to the powers of darkness.

"Just tell me what you're winding things up for?" he ventured. "I ought
to know."

"Then don't ask as if you were whispering into the ear of Buddha, or
trying not to wake baby," said Raven, tearing a package of letters with
a sudden savage haste. They were Anne's letters to him when he was in
France, and he had meant to keep them because she would have an ideal of
the sacredness they ought to bear, and exasperatingly the suggestion
seemed to include a power of imposing itself on him. And if Dick hadn't
come in to bait him with irrelevant questions, his perverse inner self
excused itself, he might not be defying the ideal and tearing the
letters up. As it was, he found them a salutary sacrifice.

"If you mean my going to Wake Hill, yes, I'm going. I've written
Charlotte. Or rather I've addressed it to Jerry, she's so careful about
his prerogative as a male."

"When?" asked Dick.

"The minute I get some boots and things to go logging in. This house
will be open. You can come in and roost if you want to. If you marry
Nan"--this was an audacity that occurred to him at the moment. It
suddenly seemed to him a blessed comfort to think of Nan in his
house--"you can come here and live."

Dick lost his sacrificial air and turned sulky.

"I don't know about Nan," he said. "I never know about her, not since
we've come back. She was soft as--as silk over there."

"The maternal," said Raven briefly, tearing one of Anne's letters, with
a crack, across the pages. "It was what you needed to keep you going.
Not personal, only because you were a sojer boy."

The mortification of it all, the despite of not holding his own with her
now he was not serving a cause, was plainly evident in Dick's face. He
had had a bad night of it, after Nan's flouting and Uncle Jack's letter
on top of that.

"She was beastly," he said, with no further elaboration.

But Raven knew he was returning to his walk home with her and some
disconcerting circumstances of it. No doubt Nan had been ruthless. Her
mind had been on Aunt Anne and the Palace of Peace. Little boys in love
couldn't joggle her fighting arm and expect to escape irritated reproof.

"Nan's got a good deal to think of just now," he said. "Besides, you may
not be man enough for her yet. Nan's very much of a woman. She'll expect
things."

Dick sat glowering.

"I'm as much of a man as I was in France," he said obstinately. "More.
I'm older." Then his sacrificial manner came back, and, remembering what
he was there for, he resumed, all humble sweetness, like the little Dick
who used to climb on Raven's knee and ask for a tell-story: "I'm going
down with you. I've made all my plans."

Raven looked up at him in a new surprise.

"The deuce you are," said he. "No, you're not, boy. If I catch you down
there I'll play the game as you've mapped it out for me. I'll grab
Jerry's axe or pitchfork and run amuck, blest if I don't. You'll wake up
and find yourself sending for the doctor."

Glancing cheerfully up, he was instantly aware, from the boy's unhappy
face, that Dick believed him. Raven burst into a laugh, but he quickly
sobered. What a snare they were getting themselves into, and only by an
impish destiny of haphazard speech.

"Don't look so shocked, Dickie," he said flippantly. "I'm no more dotty
than--Hamlet."

There he stopped again to wonder whimsically at the ill fate of it all.
For Hamlet was mad; at least, Dick thought so. He couldn't have caught
at anything more injurious to his cause.

"'They fool me to the top of my bent,'" he reflected ruefully.

That was what Dick was ready to do. But sister Amelia wouldn't fool him,
if she got East with her emergency dressing bag and her perfectly
equipped energy. She would clap him into the Psychopathic before he had
time for even half as much blank verse as Hamlet had. They wouldn't
allow him a first act.

"Don't look like that," he suggested again and kindly, because it was
evident that, however irritating Dick might be as a prospective
guardian, he was actually suffering an honest misery.

"I don't," said Dick. "I mean, I don't mean to look different. But
somehow it's got me, this whole business has, and I can't get away from
it. I've thought of it every minute since you told me. It isn't so much
you I'm thinking about. It's him."

Raven, as a writer of English, paused to make a mental note that, in
cases of extreme emotion, the nominative case, after the verb to be, is
practically no good. You simply have to scrap it.

"Who?" he inquired, in the same line of natural language.

"Old Crow."

Dick uttered the name in a low and hesitating tone. He seemed to offer
it unwillingly. Raven stared at him in a perfect surprise, now uncolored
by any expectation he might have had of what was coming.

"Old Crow?" he repeated. "What do you know about Old Crow?"

"Well," said Dick, defensively, "I know as much as you do. That is, I
suppose I do. I know as much as all Wake Hill does, anyway."

"Who told you?"

"Mother. I didn't suppose it was any secret."

"No," said Raven thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he
was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of
it. That's why I never've talked about him."

"Mother did," said Dick, in a sudden expansion. It seemed to ease him up
a little, this leading Raven to the source of his own apprehension.
Indeed, he had felt, since Raven's letter, that they must approach the
matter of his tired wits with clearness, from the scientific standpoint.
The more mental facts and theories they recognized the better. "She told
me once you looked just like him, that old daguerreotype."

"Had sister Amelia concluded from that," inquired Raven quietly, "that I
was bound to follow Old Crow, live in the woods and go missionarying
across the mountain?"

"No," said Dick, so absorbed in his line of argument that he was
innocently unaware of any intended irony. "She just happened to speak of
it one day when we found the daguerreotype. Uncle Jack, just what do you
know about him?"

Raven considered a moment. He was scanning his memory for old
impressions and also, in his mild surprise over the pertinency of
reviving them, wondering whether he had better pass them on. Or would
they knot another tangle in the snarl he and Dick seemed to be, almost
without their volition, making?

"Old Crow," he began slowly, "was my great-uncle. His name was John
Raven. He was poor, like all the rest of us of that generation and the
next, and did the usual things to advance himself, the things in
successful men's biographies. He studied by the kitchen fire, not by
pine knots, I fancy--that probably was the formula of a time just
earlier. Anyhow he fitted himself for the college of the day, for some
reason never went, but did go into a lawyer's office instead, was said
to have trotted round after a gypsy sort of girl the other side of the
mountain, found she was no good, went up into the woods and built the
old hut I got into shape in the spring of 1914. Queer! I expected to go
up there to study and write. I'd got to the point, I s'pose, where I
thought if I had a different place to write in I could write better.
Sure sign of waning powers! Well, he lived there by himself, and folks
thought he was queer and began to call him Old Crow. I saw him several
times when I was a little chap, never alone. Father took me with him
when he went up to the hut to carry food. Mother never approved of my
going. She disapproved of it so much that father stopped taking me."

"Well, you saw him," said Dick, in a way of holding him to his
narrative, so that Raven, wondering why it was of such importance, bent
a frowning look on him.

"Yes, I saw him. And he was nice to me, uncommon nice. He put his hand
on my shoulder and looked down at me in a way--well, not the
patronizing, grown-up way, but as if, now I come to think of it, as if
he pitied me."

"How did he look?"

Dick was catching at things, Raven saw, the slightest clue to Old Crow's
withdrawn personality. He seemed, on his side, to be constructing a
portrait. Raven sought about in the closed chambers of his mind and
produced one significant bit of remembrance after another. They were
retrieved with difficulty out of the disorder of things regarded as of
no importance: but here they were.

"He was tall, thin, rather hatchet-faced, something as I am. Oh, you
knew that, didn't you? No beard, and I think he was the neatest person I
ever saw. Father was clean shaven, you remember; but there were days
when he either got lazy or was too busy to shave. I remember how
exquisitely nice and peeled his face used to look on Sunday. But Old
Crow was shaved all the time, judging from the way he looked the few
times I saw him. I've heard father and mother speak of it, too.
Charlotte told me once she'd seen him and he was neat as a new pin."

"How old was he when he went up there into the woods?"

"To live alone? I don't know. Forty, maybe. Comparatively young,
anyway."

"Was it the woman? Was there a cause for it, a cause people knew?"

"There wasn't any cause I knew. He simply, so far as I ever heard,
passed the place over to father--that was his nephew, you know--and went
up the hill and built himself a log hut. It was well built. I only had
to calk it some more and put in another flooring when I came into it."

As Raven went on, he became uncomfortably aware of the resemblance
between his own proposed withdrawal and Old Crow's; but he stuck to it
doggedly. It was all playing into Dick's hands and Amelia's, assuming he
could predicate her mind; but he was resolved they shouldn't have it all
their own way. He would give them every last straw of evidence, and it
should do them no good in the end. There was a bravado about it. If
Dick, in his affectionate virtue and Amelia in her energy of well-doing,
wanted to challenge him to the proof, he'd give them a pretty tussle for
it.

"What I want to know is," said Dick, "what he thought he was going off
there for? Didn't anybody know?"

"They may have," said Raven. "I didn't know."

"And he lived his life out there, till he died?"

"Yes. And died in a very gentlemanly fashion, of pneumonia, and was
found in a dignified position on his bed, hands folded, and everything
in a great state of order, as if he'd known he was going and arranged
things to give as little trouble as he could."

"What did he do up there all by himself? Read? Write?"

"He read a good deal, I believe. We found him reading when we went up."

"What sort of books?"

"Oh, hang it, Dick," said Raven, beginning to fidget under examination,
"you're district-attorneying it a trifle too much to interest me. I'm
getting bored, son. This isn't a third degree."

But Dick was not to be curbed or reasoned with.

"I think," he said, "if you don't mind, we'd better talk it out. You see
I do really need to know about him, and you're the only one that can
tell me. Mother's is chiefly hearsay."

"Fire away," said Raven easily, accepting the situation. He leaned back
in his chair and began making patterns on the block of paper before him
with a silver dagger at his hand. "What is it you want to know?"

"Everything. How the neighbors regarded him, what they said."

"The neighbors didn't regard him at all, in your sense. Don't you know
the way country folks have of passing over the most eccentric things as
if they're all in the day's work? They gossip like thunder, and, if they
can whip up a scandal, they're made. But they never seem so awfully
shocked. Perhaps it's because they're used to the plain facts of life,
death, birth, madness, suicide. Maybe there's a sort of _gaucherie_
about it. There are things you're shocked about that you wouldn't dare
discuss at Cambridge or the Club. You'd be afraid it wasn't good form.
Maybe you would though, now. Sometimes I forget the world's moved on a
peg."

"But what did they say?"

"Can't tell you, Dick. I belong to the family, you know, and maybe they
had some decency about talking over Old Crow when I was round. I don't
think there was anything they could say. He was a perfectly clean,
decent citizen. He kept on voting. He didn't meddle with them and they
didn't with him. The only eccentricity about him was that he lived alone
and that, the last ten years or so of his life, he tramped all round
that region, over the mountain, too, taking care of the sick, if there
were any. The last five years he went round preaching, and the very last
year of all he took old Billy Jones into his hut, an awful old rip, if
ever there was one, and tended him till his death--Billy's death, I
mean. And if you consider that as indicating queerness--except that
people don't do it--I don't. I should call any conventional disapproval
of it an indictment rather, an indictment of Christianity. If it's too
eccentric to fit into a so-called Christian civilization, that is."

Dick wasn't going to call it anything at the moment. He sat staring at
the table, evidently reflecting, digesting and bowed down by his own
gravity in a way that always amused Raven even when he loved the boy
most. He fancied, when Dick looked like that, he was brooding over his
nose.

"Take it easy, son," he advised him pleasantly. "You won't get anywhere
with Old Crow. Guess again."

"No," said Dick, oblivious of the flippancy of this, "we sha'n't get
anywhere. We haven't enough data."

"Now," said Raven, coming up from his lounging posture, "I've got to
hustle. You run along and we'll go out somewhere to-night: dine, if you
want to, and drop in at a show. But, for heaven's sake, don't go to
digging up graveyards and expecting me to reconstruct your ancestors
from as few bones as we've got of Old Crow's. You bore me sometimes,
horribly, Dick. And that's the truth."

Dick did go away, though with an inarticulate remonstrance on his
tongue. But Raven was good-natured and yet decided, and even went to the
door with him, propelling him by a firm yet affectionate hand on his
shoulder.

They did dine out that night in a manner mildly bohemian, really
determined upon by Raven to show Dick he wasn't incapable yet of the
accepted forms of diversion, afflictingly dull though they might prove.




VII


In less than a week Raven, hurried beyond any design of his own by
Dick's anxious attentions, had actually gone. Once in the train on the
way into the uplands where Wake Hill lies, he reflected, with a smile,
that Dick had really helped him inconceivably in this matter of haste.
He might have loitered along, dallying with the wisdom of going, and
possibly ended by not going at all. But Dick's insistence on formulating
the situation, his neatness and energy in getting all the emotions of
the case into their proper pigeon holes, had so harassed and then bored
him that he had worked like a beaver, he told himself, to get off and
escape them altogether. And not a word from Amelia, either to his
telegram or Dick's letter. Things were looking up. It might be Amelia
had been elected to some new and absorbing organization for putting the
social edifice still more irretrievably into the disorder it seemed bent
for, in which case she might forget the inner wobblings of such an
inconspicuous nomad as a brother in metaphysical pangs. He became
recklessly optimistic, as the train climbed higher into the hills, and
luxuriated in it, conscious all the time that it was altitude that was
intoxicating him, not any real hope of hoodwinking Amelia. You couldn't
do that so easily.

The first glimpse of a far-away mountain brought the surprising tears to
his eyes. It was an inconsiderable ridge with an outline of no
distinction, but it had the old charm, the power of clutching at his
heart and dragging it up from the glories and sorrows of the sea. Raven
always insisted that he loved the sea best, with its terrors and
multitudinous activities; but the mountains did pull him up somewhere
into a region he did not inhabit all the time. He had an idea that this
was simply a plane of physical exhilaration; but it didn't matter. It
was an easement of a sort, if only the difference of change. When he
stepped out of the train at Wake Hill he was in a tranquil frame of
mind, and the more the minute he saw Jerry Slate there in the pung,
enveloped in the buffalo coat he had worn through the winter months ever
since he attained his present height. Jerry was a typical man of Wake
Hill. He was ten years, at least, older than Raven and had lived here,
man and boy, all his life, and his wife, Charlotte, was the presiding
benevolence of the Raven home. Seeing his passenger, he lifted his
whip-stock in salute and stepped out of the pung to meet him. Jerry was
yellow and freckled and blue-eyed, with a face, Raven always thought,
like a baked apple. It had still a rosy bloom, but the puckers
overspread it, precisely like an apple's after fervent heat. They shook
hands, Jerry having extracted a gnarled member from his mitten.

"You take a look an' see 'f your trunk's come," he recommended,
restoring his hand to its beautifully knit sheath. "You're better
acquainted with the looks on't than I be. There 'tis now. Anyways it's
the only one there."

It was Raven's own, and he and Jerry lifted it into the back of the
pung, and were presently jogging temperately homeward. Jerry never had
horses with any go in them. In the old days, when Raven used to come to
the farm with his mother, he would write Jerry to see that he had a
horse.

"Get me a horse," he would write, "a horse, a horse, with four feet and
a mane and tail. Not a wooden freak out of Noah's ark, whittled out with
a jack-knife, such as I had last year. Get me a horse."

And he would arrive to find some aged specimen, raw-boned and
indifferent, waiting for him in the stable. And Jerry would slap the
creature's haunches with a fictitious jollity and prophesy, the while he
kept an anxious eye on Raven, "I guess he'll suit ye all right."

He never did suit. He had to be swapped off or, as it happened once or
twice, given away, and yet Raven was obtuse to the real reason until
Charlotte enlightened him. She took him aside, one day in the autumn,
when he and his mother were going back to town.

"I guess if you want any horses next spring," she said, with one eye on
the door where Jerry might appear, "you better fetch 'em along with
you."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "of course I can. Only I had an idea Jerry liked
to do the buying for the place."

"Not horses," said Charlotte firmly. "Jerry's a peculiar sort of man.
They know it an' they kinder take advantage of him. I dunno why."

Then Raven realized that Charlotte herself was responsible for his faith
in Jerry's bargaining prowess. She had hypnotized him into considering
Jerry a great fellow at a trade as at everything else manly and
invincible. She was watching him now with a doubtful and anxious eye.

"No," she repeated, "I dunno why."

"No," said Raven, "I don't know why either. But I'll look out for it."
At that instant he understood her way with Jerry and loved her for it.
She was tall and heavy-browed and dark, with warm, brown tints of eyes
and skin, and seven times the man Jerry was, but it was her passionate
intent to hold him supreme at home and market.

Meantime they were jingling along, with a chill clashing of bells, and
Raven had heard all about the prospects of an open winter and the
difficulties of ice-cutting, and he gathered that Jerry and Charlotte
were extremely pleased to have him come.

"Didn't know's we should ever set eyes on ye ag'in," said Jerry, with an
innocuous flick of his whiplash, hitting the dasher by intent. "That War
an' all."

Raven thought he detected in his tone a general hostility to the War as
a disturber even of Wake Hill, and wondered if he should have to fight
it all over again with the imperfectly satisfied ideals of Jerry and
Charlotte. But Jerry laid that bogey to rest.

"Not that I wouldn't ha' had ye go," he announced. "I'd ha' gone myself
if I hadn't been a leetle mite over age. I dunno but I could ha' been
some use as 'twas. I'm spry for my years. I never so much as thought
you'd git into it. Charlotte an' I were talkin' it over last night, an'
she says, 'He's forty-three, if he's a day.' How old be you?"

"Forty-five," said Raven. "I wasn't in the trenches, you know. Ambulance
Corps."

"Sho!" said Jerry. "Never come nigh the fightin' line, I s'pose."

"Sometimes," said Raven, smiling a little to himself. "But the boys in
the trenches, you know, they're the ones that did the business. I
suppose the Hamilton house was closed all summer?"

Jerry gave him a quick look and then took off a mitten to pass his hand
across his mouth. Raven knew what the look meant. It meant Anne
Hamilton: how had her death affected him? would he ask about her? and
the mild inquisitive neighborhood mind would go back to the old question
it had probably dropped and taken up intermittently for years: why, in
their curious intimacy, had he never married her?

"Yes," said Jerry, "all summer. Little Nan was over there, too, where
you were, I understood."

"Yes, she was over there. She's home now."

"You knew her aunt died?" said Jerry speciously. It was foolish, he knew
it was foolish, and yet he could not, in his craving for some
amplification of the fact, help saying it.

"Yes," said Raven, "I knew it."

There the topic died. They were passing the last stretch of woods that
fringed the road before Raven's own house. Up on that slope at the
right, draped about by a dense woodland, occasional patches of pines
girdled by birch and maple, was the hut where Old Crow had lived. A
logging road came down from the ridge, and Raven saw with interest that
it had been broken out.

"Chopping?" he asked, Jerry following his glance to the ascending road.

Jerry grinned and clucked to the horse. He looked well satisfied with
himself.

"No," he said. "But the minute you wrote you was comin', I yoked up the
oxen an' broke her out. Charlotte said you'd want to be goin' up there."

Raven laughed. It was funny, too grimly funny. Even Charlotte and Jerry
were pushing him on up the rise to Old Crow's hut. Dick had begun it and
they were adding the impulse of their kindly forethought.

"Yes," he said, "I shall. I'll go up at once." ("And have it over!" his
mind cynically added.)

They were descending the last slope and the mild-mannered horse caught
the idea of stables and put on a gait. Raven could see the house,
delightful to him in its hospitable amplitude and starkly fitting the
wintry landscape. There in the columned front porch running away at each
side into wide verandas, stood a woman, tall, of proportions that
looked, at this first glance, heroic. She wore a shawl about her
shoulders, but her head was bare.

"There she is," said Jerry, with an evident pride in so splendid a fact.
"I tell her she never can wait a minute to let anybody turn round."

It was true. Charlotte could not wait. She began to wave--no short,
staccato, pump-handle wave, but a sweep indicative of breadth, like the
horizon line. Raven, while they were jingling up to the house, took one
more look at it, recognizing, with a surprise that was almost poignant,
how much it meant to him. He might not be glad to get back to it--in his
present state of disaffection he could not believe there was a spot on
earth he should be glad to see--but it touched the chord of old memories
and his eyes were hot with the assault of it. A square house with many
additions, so that it rambled comfortably away, threaded over at
advantageous points by leafless lines of woodbine and bitter-sweet and
murmured over by a great grove of pines at the west: his roots of life
were here, he recognized, with a renewed pang of surprise. He was not
used to thinking about himself. Now that the changed bias of his mind
had bred new habits, he was thinking a great deal.

They stopped at the porch and Charlotte came down to them, stepping
lightly yet with deliberation. Raven knew she probably moved slowly
because she was so heavy, but it gave the effect of majesty walking. She
was unchanged, he thought, as he grasped her firm hand: her smooth brown
hair was as thick, her healthy face unlined. When he touched Charlotte
he always felt as if he touched the earth itself. Her hand was the hand
of earth, ready to lead you to wholesome and satisfying things.

"Well," said she, "if I ain't pleased to see you! Jerry, you goin' to
take the trunk in this way?"

Jerry gave her a quick look of inquiry. They had subtle modes of
communication. Charlotte could command him by the flicker of an eyelash
or a modulation of tone, so that Jerry seemed, in the resultant act, to
be following only his own careless or deliberate will.

"Yep," said he, "I'll see to her."

Raven laid hold of it with him and they carried it upstairs to the great
front room looking out to the eastern sky. And Raven was again moved, as
he went, by another surprising discovery: Charlotte had tears in her
eyes. He had at all times a moderate estimate of his own value in the
world, his own appeal to it. Perhaps that was one reason, aside from the
natural sex revulsion, why Anne's exaggerated fostering had roused in
him that wearied perversity. But it was warming to see Charlotte glad
enough to cry over him. When they had set down the trunk and the two had
gone downstairs, he looked about the room and found it good. The walls
were chiefly paneling, all but some expanses of a rich rose and blue
paper; the hangings were of a delicious blue, and a roaring fire was
making great headway. He could guess Charlotte had timed that birch log,
relative to their approach, for the curling bark had not yet blackened
and the fat chuckle of it was still insistent. He laughed a little at
himself. He might have repudiated the scheme of creation and his own
place in it, but he did love things: dear, homespun, familiar things,
potent to eke out man's well-being with their own benevolence and make
him temporarily content in an inhospitable world.

When he went downstairs, the smells from the kitchen were something
overwhelming in their rich pervasiveness. He went directly in where
Charlotte bent at the oven door for a frowning inspection and a
resultant basting.

"Yes," she said, glancing up, "turkey. Terry set him aside, sort of--he
was so well formed and had such nice, pretty ways. Jerry said we'd have
him first time you come. He's always be'n a terrible nice turkey."

Raven had seen his place laid in the dining-room with bravery of damask
and old china.

"I'm not going to eat alone," he said. "I couldn't face a whole turkey.
You and Jerry come on in and back me up. You set on two more plates."

"Oh, no," said Charlotte, closing the oven door and rising. "I guess
I'll give him a minute longer. No. It's real nice of you, but we
couldn't. Jerry never would in the world."

"Jerry be hanged!" said Raven. He wandered into the pantry and began
helping himself to the celery waiting by the cool window-pane. "Tell him
it's all decided. Jerry's got to do what we say."

"If that ain't just like you," said Charlotte, with what seemed a pride
in his knowing ways. "Eatin' up the celery an' all, the minute 'fore
dinner, too. I wonder you don't pry into the cooky jar."

"I will, now you mention it," said Raven, bending to it where it lurked,
with its secretive look, under the lower shelf. He lifted the cover with
an involuntary care. He had been there so often when he wanted a handful
of cookies and knew, if he clinked the cover, he might hear his father's
voice from the dining-room where he sat reading his paper: "What are you
doing out there?" The cookies were waiting for him, unchanged, as if
there were an everlasting pattern of cookies and you couldn't get away
from it: oak-leaf, discreetly specked with caraway. "Hurry up," said he,
coming out to Charlotte with his clutch of oak-leaves. "Put on your
plate and Jerry's or the turkey'll be done before you know it."

Charlotte glanced round at him, absently took the cookies from his hand,
as if he were a child whose greed must be regulated, and laid them in a
plate on the table.

"Don't you spoil your appetite," she said, still absently, for her mind
was with the turkey. "Well, I'll go an' ask Jerry. I don't believe he'll
feel to. Miss Anne----"

Raven was sure he heard the last two words as she made her light way out
into the shed in a fictitious search for Jerry. He stood staring after
her and wondering. It was inconceivable that Anne, by sheer force of a
mind absolutely convinced of its own rightness, should have had such a
grip on everybody she came in contact with. It had been Anne's house
next door. She had spent her summers in it, and even Charlotte had
imbibed through its walls the pronouncements of a social code. Anne was
dead, but when Charlotte and Jerry were asked to sit down to turkey with
their employer and familiar friend, it was Anne's unforgotten ideal that
rose before her, the illuminated copy of the social code in its rigid
hand. As he stood, he saw Jerry pulling the pung under a shed at the
back of the barn. He knew Charlotte hadn't seen him, didn't intend to
take the time to see him, but would presently be back with Jerry's
ultimatum. That was her system. She implicitly followed Jerry's command,
a command she had already put into his mouth. It was so accepted a part
of the household routine that he had ceased to think of it as in the
least unusual. She was back again almost at once.

"Jerry says he'd be happy to, to-day," she announced, "so long's as he
ain't changed back into his barn clo'es. We'll be kinder company. But
after this, he says, we'll begin as usual."

So presently they sat down together to the crackly brown turkey and
Raven carved and fought off Charlotte, who rose from her place in a
majestic authority which seemed the highest decorum to take the fork and
pick out titbits for his plate, and they talked of countryside affairs,
but never, Raven was grateful to notice, of his absence or of France.
Once Jerry did begin a question relative to "them long range guns," but
Charlotte bore him down before Raven could lay hold of the question,
even if he had been eager for it.

"Jerry's forbid me to ask you the leastest thing about how 'twas over
there," she said smoothly, without a look at Jerry, but a direct
intention that was like a swift secret communication between them, a
line not even to be tapped. "He says, 'We won't say one word about what
Mr. Raven's been through, not if he begins to talk about it himself.
He's been through enough,' says he. 'Now le's let him turn his mind to
suthin' else.'"

"Yes," said Jerry boldly, "I guess that's pretty nigh what I said--what
I'd say now, anyways."

Raven smiled a little inwardly, as he often did at "Mr. Raven." He and
Jerry and Charlotte had been neighbors, and he, being younger, was
always "young John" to them, and sometimes, in excess of friendliness or
exhortation, "Jack." He wondered if it had been the social idealism of
Anne that had made them attain the proper title, or if, when the crust
of renewed convention broke through, they would, under the stress of
common activities, flounder about as they did before he went away, in an
intermittent familiarity.

"All the houses shut up," he said, "the summer houses?"

"Yes," said Charlotte, eating her wing delicately, perhaps with a
thought of Anne. "City folks all gone. Went early this year, too. Wood's
so high now, if they ain't cut their own they don't seem to want to lay
in. Jerry says they'd ought to think further ahead."

"Yes," said Jerry, with his mechanical acquiescence, "they'd ought to
think further ahead."

"Who's bought the old Frye place?" asked Raven. "Or is it empty?"

"No," said Charlotte, "it ain't empty. I dunno's you remember the
Tenneys that used to live over the mountain, what they call Mountain
Brook. Kind of a shif'less lot they were. Some of 'em drinked."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "I remember 'em. The boys used to do a lot of
trapping. One of 'em--what was his name? Israel, yes, that's it.
Israel--he seemed to be of a different stripe. Used to work out. Seemed
to want to make something of himself."

"That's him," said Charlotte. "Well, he's bought the Frye place."

"Married?"

"Yes, he married a girl over there, at Mountain Brook. He'd been away
years an' years, sence he was a growin' boy, an' he come back, an' seems
he had money laid up, an' he bought the Frye farm an' went straight off
over to Mountain Brook an' hunted her up an' married her. She used to
have folks, but they've all moved away. Seems if he'd had her in mind
all the time. Kind o' that way, he is, lays his fires a good while
beforehand."

"Nice girl?" Raven inquired.

Charlotte hesitated. Her brown cheek flushed.

"Well," she said, "I never've heard anything ag'inst her, not anything I
should be willin' to repeat. You know what they be, there over the
mountain. There's the Donnyhills. Good folks, but shif'less! my soul!
Though she ain't that."

"Called on her, haven't you?"

"No," said Charlotte. She wore the flush of resentful matronhood. "I was
goin' to. I started, one afternoon. An' after I'd knocked, I heard him
jawin'. Well! You never heard a man talk so in all your life. I never
did, anyways! twittin' her with everything under the sun."

"Nice for you," said Raven, "butting in on a row."

"I didn't butt in," said Charlotte. "I turned round an' come straight
home. An' the next day they rode by, as budge as you please, she with
the baby in her lap. Baby had on a nice white coat. I didn't go ag'in. I
didn't feel to."

Then Raven, seeing that Jerry had regretfully but inevitably laid down
his knife and fork, as one who can no more, relinquished the Tenneys,
and there was a period of that silence so blessed among intimates, and
Charlotte brought in the pudding. And after dinner, while she washed the
dishes, Raven sat in the kitchen and smoked a pipe with Jerry and
thought intermittently, in the inmost cell of his most secret mind,
about the blessed beauties of things. Here they were all about him,
inherited treasures of memory, some of them homely and of little value,
many of them far less convenient than the appliances of the present day.
He even thought he recognized ancient utensils, as Charlotte washed
them, the great iron spider where crullers were fried--always with a few
cut in hands with straight fat fingers, to suit a boyish fancy--and the
colander he had once been found utilizing as a helmet in a play of
chivalry. Such smells came out of this kitchen, like no other smells in
any house he knew. The outlines of things, the tints of time and use!
There was the red door into the buttery, where once, when he was a
little boy, he had caught for a few minutes only an enchanting glow from
the setting sun. Sunrise and rubies and roses: none of them had ever
equaled the western light on the old red paint. Over and over again he
had tried to recall the magic, to set the door at the precise angle to
catch the level rays, but in vain. It was a moment of beauty, fleeting
as the sunset itself, and only to be found in the one permanence that is
memory. He remembered it now with a thousand other impressions as
lasting and as lost, and childhood and youth came alive in him and hurt
and helped him. Yes, this was home. In a hostile universe there was one
spot where he and the past could safely rest.




VIII


Raven went to sleep thinking simply about the house, while the fire
flickered down on the hearth and shadows all about the room flickered
with it and then went out. He always loved shadows, their beauties and
grotesqueries, and he was unfeignedly glad he had no scientific
understanding of them, why they played this way or that and translated
the substance that made them so delicately and sometimes with such an
adorable foolishness. He liked it better that way, liked to make out of
them a game of surprises and pretend they were in good form and doing
particularly well, or again far below their highest. And following his
childishly enchanting game he began to feel rather abashed over what had
brought him here. He was glad to have come. It was the only place for
him, disordered as he was, with its wholesome calm, and he wondered
further if the state of mind that had become habitual to him was now a
state of mind at all. Was it not rather a temporary drop in mental
temperature now calming to normal? Hadn't he exaggerated the
complication of Anne's bequest? There was a way out of it; there must
be, a sane, practical way to satisfy what she wished and what she might
be supposed to wish now. He comforted himself with the pious sophistry
of an Anne raised on the wind of death above early inconclusions and so,
of course, agreeing with him who didn't have to pass the gates of
mystery to be so raised. He knew enough, evidently, so that he didn't
need to die to know more. His letter to Dick seemed of inconsiderable
importance, even the disaster of its reaching Amelia. If she held him up
to it, he could laugh it off. Anything could be laughed off. So, the
shadows mingling with the inconsequence of his thoughts, he drifted away
to sleep, catching himself back, now and then, to luxuriate in the
assurance that he was in the right place, finding comfortable
assuagements, and that inexplicably, because so suddenly, everything was
for the best in a mysterious but probably entirely unaccountable world.

At four o'clock he woke. He had not for a moment last night expected
this. Four o'clock had been for months the hour of his tryst with the
powers of darkness. They hovered over him then with dull grey wings
extended, from sunrise to sunset, from east to west. He never had the
courage to peer up at them and see how far the wings really did reach.
They covered his mortal sky, and when he refused to stare up into their
leaden pinions, they stooped to him and buffeted and smothered him,
until he was such a mass of bruised suffering within that he could
almost believe his body also was quivering into the numbness of
acquiescent misery. And here were the wings again. They were even lower,
in spite of this clear air. They did not merely shut it out from his
nostrils, but the filthy pinions swept his face and roused in him the
uttermost revulsion of mortal man against the accident of his mortality.
The trouble of earth passed before him in its unceasing panorama, a
pageant of pain and death. Every atom of creation was against every
other atom, because everywhere was warfare, murder and rapine, for the
mere chance of living. He had won his inherited chance by sheer luck of
contest through millions of years while his forebears came up from the
slime and the cave. The little hunted creature, shrieking out there in
the wood in the clutch of a predatory enemy was not so lucky. It was the
enemy who was lucky to-night, but to-morrow night the enemy himself
might go down under longer claws and be torn by fangs stronger than his
own. And God had made it so. And God did not care.

Raven lay there panting under the horror of it. The sweat started on his
skin. He was afraid. It was not his own well-being he feared for. Man's
life was short at the most. A few years might finish him up. It was
unlikely that he need live again. But he feared seeing still more of the
acts of this unmindful God, who could make, and set the wheel of being
to turning and then stand aside and let them grind out their
immeasurable grist of woe. And when he asked himself how he knew God was
standing aside, letting the days and years fulfil their sum, he believed
it was because he had suddenly become aware that time was a boundless
sea and that the human soul was sometimes in the trough of it and
sometimes on the crest. But never would the sea cast its derelicts upon
warm shores where they might build the house of life and live in peace
and innocence. Ever would they find themselves tossed from low to high
and fall from high to low again in the salt wash of the retreating wave.
For after all, it was the mysterious sea God had a mind to, never the
derelict atoms afloat on it. They would have to take sea weather to
time's extremest verge, as they always had taken it. They were
derelicts.

As the light came, the leaden wings lifted and he went down to the early
breakfast Charlotte and Jerry intended to eat alone. Charlotte, with her
good morning, gave him a quick glance. He found she had not expected him
so early and knew she saw at once how harassed he was. He insisted on
sitting down to breakfast with them and, after Jerry had gone out, went
over the house in a mindless way, into all the rooms, to give himself
something to do. Also there seemed to be a propriety in it, a
fittingness in presenting himself to his own walls and accepting their
silent recognition. Then, hearing Charlotte upstairs, he went back into
the kitchen, as straight as if he had meant to go there all the time and
had merely idled on these delaying quests, and up to the nail by the
shed door where the key always hung, the key to Old Crow's hut. He took
it off the nail, dropped it in his pocket, got a leather jacket from the
hall and went out into the road. As he went, he heard Jerry moving about
in the barn and walked the faster, not to be halted or offered friendly
company. At the great maples he paused, two of them marking the entrance
to the wood road, and looked about him. The world was resolutely still.
The snow was not deep, but none of it had melted. It was of a uniform
whiteness and luster and the shadows in it were deeply blue. There were
tracks frozen into it all along the road, many of them old ones, others
just broken, the story of some animal's wandering. Then he turned into
the wood road and began to climb the rise, and as he went he was
conscious of an unaccountable excitement. Dick was responsible for that,
he told himself. Dick had waked his mind to old memories. This was, in
effect, and all owing to Dick, a tryst with Old Crow.

He remembered every step of the way, what he might find if he could
sweep off the snow or wait until June and let the mounting sun sweep it
according to its own method. Here at the right would be the great patch
of clintonia. Further in at the left was tiarella, with its darling
leaf, and along under the yellow birches the lady's slipper he had
transplanted, year after year, and that finally took root and showed a
fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing
over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy,
wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native
ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he
had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to
the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as
if his inner self heard the command to halt. He looked about him, and
his heart began to beat hard. But he was not surprised. What could be
more moving than the winter stillness of the woods in a spot all
memories? Yet he was in no welcoming mood for high emotion, and looking
up and about, to shake off the wood magic, there at a little distance at
his right, between pine boles, he saw her, the woman. She was tall and
slender, yet grandly formed. A blue cloak was wrapped about her and her
head was bare. Her face had a gaunt beauty such as he had never seen.
The eyes, richly blue but darkened by the startled pupil, were
bewildering in their soft yet steady appealingness. Her hair was parted
and carried back in waves extraordinarily thick and probably knotted
behind. That, of course, he could not see. But the little soft rings of
it about her forehead he noted absently. And her look was so full of
dramatic tension, of patient, noble gravity, even grief, that one phrase
flashed into his mind, "The Mother of Sorrows!" and stayed there. So
moving was her face that, although he had at the first instant taken in
her entire outline, the significance of it had not struck him until now.
On her arm, in the immemorial mother's fashion, she carried a child. The
child was in white and a blue scarf was tied about his head. When Raven
saw the scarf, his tension relaxed. There was something about the scarf
that was real, was earthly: a ragged break in one free corner. In the
relief of seeing the break, and being thus brought back to tangible
things, he realized that he had, in a perfect seriousness, for one
amazing minute, believed the woman and the child to be not human but
divine. They were, as they struck upon his eyes, a vision, and he would
have been in no sense surprised to see the vision fade. It was the
Virgin Mary and her Son. Now, as he realized with the lightning rapidity
of a morbidly excited mind how terribly sensitive to his own needs he
must be to have clutched so irrationally at a world-old remedy, he took
off his hat and called to her:

"You startled me."

Without waiting for any response, he turned to the left, because the
probabilities were that he had startled her also, and that was why she
had stood there, petrified into the catalepsy of wood animals struck by
cautionary fear. But, as he turned, a man's voice sounded through the
woods, and waked an echo:

"Hullo!" it called. "Hullo!"

Raven involuntarily paused, and saw the woman running toward him. There
were stumps in her way, but she stepped over them lightly, and once,
when she had to cross a hollow where the snow lay deep, she sank in up
to her knees, and Raven involuntarily stepped forward to help her. But
she freed herself with incredible quickness and came on. It might have
been water she was wading in, so little did it check her. She halted
before him, only a pace away, as if she must be near in order to speak
cautiously, and Raven noted the exquisite texture of her pale skin and
the pathos of her eyes, the pupils distended now so that he wondered if
they could be blue. Meantime the voice kept on calling, "Hullo! hullo!"

She spoke tremulously, in haste:

"He'll be up here in a minute. You say you ain't seen me."

"Is it some one you're afraid of?" Raven asked.

She nodded, in a dumb anguish.

"Then," said he, "we'll both stay here till he comes, and afterward I'll
go with you, wherever you're going."

This, it seemed, moved her to a terror more acute.

"No! no!" she said, and she appeared to have so little breath to say it
that, if he had not been watching her lips, he could not have caught it.
"Not you. That would make him madder'n ever. You go away. Hide you
somewheres, quick."

"No," said Raven, "I sha'n't hide. I'll hide you. Come along."

He took her by the arm and, though she was remonstrating breathlessly,
hurried her to the left. They passed the three firs at the turn and he
smiled a little, noting Jerry's good road and thinking there was some
use in this combined insistence on his following the steps of Old Crow.
There was the hut, in its rough kindliness, and there, the smoke told
him, was a fire. Jerry had been up that morning, because Charlotte must
have known he'd come there the first thing. Still smoothing the road to
Old Crow! He had been fumbling with one hand for the key, the while he
kept the other on her arm. She was so terrified a creature now that he
did not trust her not to break blindly away and run. He unlocked the
door, pushed her in, closed and locked it. Then he dropped the key in
his pocket and went back to the wood road. With a sudden thought, he
took his knife from his pocket and tossed it down the road into a little
heap of brush. Meanwhile the man was coming nearer and, as he came, he
called: "Hullo!"

Raven, waiting for him, speculated on the tone. What did it mean? It was
a breathless tone, though not in any manner like the woman's. It was as
if he had run and stumbled and caught himself up, and all the time been
strangled from within by rage or some like madness. The woman's
breathlessness had simply meant life's going out of her with sheer
fright. Now the man was coming up the slope, bent at the shoulders, as
if he carried a heavy load or as if almost doubling himself helped him
to go the faster. He was a thin man with long arms and he carried an
axe. Raven called to him:

"Hullo, there! Take a look as you come along and see if you can find my
knife."

The man stopped short, straightened, and looked at him. Meantime Raven,
bending in his search, went toward him, scrutinizing the road from side
to side. He had a good idea of the fellow in the one glance he gave him:
a pale, thin face, black eyes with a strange spark in them, a burning
glance like the inventor's or the fanatic's, and black hair. It was an
ascetic face, and yet there was passion of an unnamed sort ready to
flash out and do strange things, overthrow the fabric of an ordered life
perhaps, or contradict the restraint of years. He stood motionless until
Raven, still searching, had got within three feet of him. Then he spoke:

"Who be you?"

He had a low voice, agreeable, even musical. Raven concluded he must
have been strangely moved to break into that mad "Hullo." It had been
more, he thought, that wild repetition with the echo throwing it back,
like the Gabriel hounds. But Raven took no notice of the question. He
spoke with a calculated peevishness.

"I'm willing to bet my knife is within three feet, and see how the
confounded thing's hidden itself. It was right along here. Let me take
your axe and I'll blaze a tree."

The man, without a word, passed him the axe and Raven notched a sapling.
Then, still holding the axe, he turned to the man with a smile. No one
had ever told him what a charming smile it was. Anne used to wonder, in
her dignified anguishes of love forbidden, if she could ever make him
understand how he looked when he smiled.

"Well," said Raven, "who may you be?"

"My name's Tenney," said the man, in the low, vibrant voice.

"Oho!" said Raven, remembering Charlotte's confidences. Then, as Tenney
frowned slightly and glanced at him in a questioning suspicion, he
continued, "Then we're neighbors. My name's Raven."

The man nodded.

"They said you were comin'," he remarked.

He held out his hand for the axe. Raven, loath to give it to him, yet
saw no excuse for withholding it. After all, she was safely locked in.
So he tossed the axe and Tenney caught it lightly, and was turning away.
But he stopped, considered a moment, looking down at the ground, and
then, evidently concluding the question had to be put, broke out, and,
Raven thought, shamefacedly:

"You seen anything of her up here?"

"Her?" Raven repeated, though he knew the country shyness over family
terms.

"Yes. My woman."

"Your wife?" insisted Raven. "I don't believe I know her. No, I'm sure I
don't. I've been away several years. On the road, you mean? No--not a
soul."

A swift rage passed over Tenney's face. It licked it like a flash of
evil light and Raven thought he saw how dangerous he could be.

"No," he said, "I don't mean on the road. I mean in the woods."

"Up here?" persisted Raven. "No, certainly not. This is no place for a
woman. A woman would have to be off her head to come traipsing up here
in the snow. Is that what you were yelling about? I thought you were a
catamount, at least."

He laughed. He had an idea, suddenly conceived, that the man, having a
keen sense of personal dignity, was subject to ridicule, and that a
laugh would be salutary for him. And he was right. Tenney straightened,
put his axe over his shoulder, and walked away down the hill.




IX


Raven stood looking after him a minute and then began an ostentatious
search for his knife, went to the little pile of brush and saw it--the
steel tip of the handle shining there--and pulled the brush aside to get
it. As he was rising with it in his hand, he saw Tenney turn and look
back at him. He held up the knife and called:

"I've got it."

Tenney, not answering even by a sign, went on over the rise and
disappeared below. Then Raven, after lingering a little to make sure he
did not reappear, turned up the slope and into the path at the left and
so came again to the hut. He unlocked the door and went in. She was
sitting by the fire and the child was on the floor, staring rather
vacuously at his little fingers, as if they interested him, but not
much. The woman was looking at the child, but only in a mechanical sort
of way, as if it were her job to look and she did it without intention
even when the child was safe. But she was also watching the door,
waiting for him; it was in an agony of expectation, and her eyes
questioned him the instant he stepped in.

"Warm enough?" he inquired, as incidentally, he hoped, as if it were not
unusual to find her here. "Let me throw on a log."

He did throw on two and the fire answered. The solemn child, who proved,
at closer view, to have an unusual beauty of pink cheeks, blue eyes, and
reddish hair, did not intermit his serious gaze at his fingers. When
Raven had put on the logs and dusted himself off, he found himself at a
loss. How should he begin? Was Tenney, with his catamount yells and his
axe, to be ignored altogether, or should he reassure her by telling her
the man had gone? But she herself began.

"I suppose," she said, in the eloquent low voice that seemed to make the
smallest word significant, "you think it's funny."

Raven knew what sense the word was meant to convey.

"No," he said, "not in the least. It's pretty bad for you, though," he
added gravely, on second thought that he might.

She made a little gesture with her hand. It was a beautifully formed
hand, but reddened with work. The gesture was as if she threw something
away.

"He won't hurt me," she said.

"No," Raven returned, "I should hope not."

He drew up a chair to the hearth and was about to take it when she spoke
again. The blood ran into her cheeks, as she did it, and she put her
request with difficulty. It seemed to Raven that she was suddenly
engulfed in shame.

"Should you just as soon," she asked, "take the key inside an' lock the
door?"

She put it humbly, and Raven rose at once.

"Of course," he said. "Good idea."

He locked the door and came back to his chair and she began, never
omitting to share her attention with the child:

"I know who you be. It's too bad this has come upon you. I'll have to
ask you not to let it go any further."

Raven was about to assure her that nothing had come upon him, and then
he bethought himself that a great deal had. She had looked to him like
the Mother of Sorrows and, though the shock of that vision was over, she
seemed to him now scarcely less touching in her beautiful maternity and
her undefended state. So he only glanced at her and said gravely:

"Nobody will know anything about it from me. After all"--he was bound to
reassure her if he could--"I've nothing to tell."

Her face flashed into an intensity of revolt against any subterfuge, the
matter was so terrible.

"Why, yes, you have," said she. "Isr'el Tenney chased his woman up into
the woods with an axe. An' you heard him yellin' after her. That's God's
truth."

Raven felt rising in him the rage of the natural man, a passion of
protection for the woman who is invincibly beautiful yet physically
weak.

"An'," she went on, "you might ha' seen him out there, axe an' all."

"Oh," said Raven, as if it were of no great account, "I did see him."

"O my soul!" she breathed. "You see him? I'm glad you come in. He might
ha' asked you if you'd seen me."

"He did."

This was a new terror and she was undone.

"How'd you do it?" she asked breathlessly. "You must ha' put it better'n
I could or he'd be here now."

"I didn't 'put it,'" said Raven, easily. "I lied, and he went off down
the hill."

Extravagant as it seemed, he did get an impression, like a flash, that
she was disappointed in him because he had lied. But this was no time
for casuistry. There were steps to be taken.

"You won't go back to him," he said, and said it definitively as if it
were a matter he had thought out, said it like a command.

She stared at him.

"Not go back to him?" she repeated. "Why, I've got to go back to him.
I've got to go home. Where do you expect I'm goin', if I don't go home?"

"Haven't you any people?" Raven asked her. "Can't you go to them?"

She laughed a little, softly, showing fine white teeth. The spell of her
beauty was moving to him. He might never, he thought, have noticed her
at all in other circumstances, if he had not seen her there in the woods
and felt her need knock at his heart with the imperative summons of the
outraged maternal. Was this the feeling rising in him that had made his
mother's servitude to his father so sickening in those years gone by?
Was the old string still throbbing? Did it need but a woman's hand to
play upon it? And yet must he not have noted her, wherever they had met?
Would not any man?

"I've got four brothers," she said. "They'd laugh at me. They'd tell me
I'd married well an' got a better home than any of them could scrape
together if they begun at the beginnin' an' lived their lives over.
There's nothin' in Isr'el Tenney to be afraid of, they'd tell me. And
there ain't--for them."

"No," said Raven quietly. He felt an intense desire to feel his way,
make no mistakes, run no risk of shutting off her confidence. "It's a
different thing for you."

Now she turned her face more fully upon him, in a challenging surprise.

"Why," she said, "I ain't afraid--except for him."

By the smallest motion of her hand she indicated the child, who was now,
in sudden sleepiness, toppling back against the wall.

"Put him up here," said Raven, indicating the couch.

He opened the folded rug and held it until she had disposed the little
lax figure among the pillows. Then she took the rug from him and covered
the child, with quick, capable movements of her beautiful worn hands.
Raven, watching her, felt a clutch at his throat. Surely there was
nothing in the known world of plastic action so wonderful as these
movements of mothers' hands in their work of easing a child. With a last
quick touch on the rug, drawing it slightly away from the baby cheek,
she returned to her chair, and Raven again took his. He was afraid lest
she repent her open-mindedness toward him and talk no more. But she was
looking at him earnestly. It was evidently a part of her precautionary
foresight that he should know. Did she think he could help her? His
blood quickened at the thought. It seemed enough to have lived for, in
so brutal a world. She veered for a moment from her terror to the
necessity for justifying herself.

"You needn't think," she said, almost aggressively, "I'd talk to
everybody like this."

He was holding himself down to a moderation he knew she wanted, and
replied:

"No, of course not. But you can talk to me."

"Yes," she said, "I can." She dismissed that, having said it, as if she
saw no need of finding the underlying reasons they were both going by.
"You see," she said, "it's the baby. When he gits one o' them spells,
it's the baby he pitches on."

Raven picked out from her confusion of pronouns the fact that Tenney, in
his spells, incredibly threatened the baby.

"Don't you think," he said, "you make too much of it--I mean, as to the
baby. He wouldn't hurt his own child."

Again the blood ran into her cheeks, and she looked a suffering so acute
that Raven got up and walked through the room to the window. It seemed
an indecency to scan the anguished page of her face.

"That's it," she said, in a strangled voice. "When he has his spells he
don't believe the baby's his."

"God!" muttered Raven. He turned and came back to her. "You don't mean
to live with him," he said. "You can't. You mustn't. The man's a brute."

She was looking up at him proudly.

"But," she said, "baby is his own child."

"Good God! of course it is," broke out Raven, in a fever of impatience.
"Of course it's his child. You don't need to tell me that."

Then, incredibly, she smiled and two dimples appeared at the corners of
her mouth and altered her face from a mask of tragic suffering to the
sweetest playfulness.

"You mustn't say 'it,'" she reproved him. "You must say 'he.' Anybody'd
know you ain't a family man."

Raven stood looking at her a moment, his own smile coming. Then he sat
down in his chair. He wanted to tell her how game she was, and there
seemed no way to manage it. But now he could ask her questions. Her
friendliness, her amazing confidence, had opened the door.

"Exactly what do you mean?" he asked, yet cautiously, for even after her
own avowals he might frighten her off the bough. "Does he drink?"

She looked at him reprovingly.

"No, indeed," she said. "He's a very religious man."

"The devil he is!" Raven found himself muttering, remembering the
catamount yells and the axe. "Then what," he continued, with as complete
an air as he could manage of taking it as all in the day's work, "what
do you mean by his spells?"

She was silent a moment. Her mind seemed to be going back.

"He gits--mad," she said slowly. "Crazy, kind of. It's when he looks at
baby and baby looks different to him."

"Different? How different?"

"Why," she said, in a burst of pride turning for an instant to the
little figure on the couch, "baby's got awful cunnin' little ways. An'
he's got a little way o' lookin' up sideways, kind o' droll, an' when he
does that an' Mr. Tenney sees it"--here Raven glanced at her quickly,
wondering what accounted for her being so scrupulous with her "Mr.
Tenney"--"he can't help noticin' it an' he can't help thinkin' how baby
ain't colored like either of us--we're both dark----"

There she stopped, at last in irreparable confusion, and Raven was
relieved. How could he let her, he had been thinking, go on with the
sordid revelation? When he spoke, it was more to himself than to her,
but conclusively:

"The man's a beast."

"No, he ain't," said she indignantly. "Baby's light complected. You see
he is. An' I'm dark an' so's Mr. Tenney. An' I told him--I told him
about me before we were married, an' he thought he could stand it then.
But we went over to the county fair an' he see--_him_. He come up an'
spoke to him, that man did, spoke to us both, an' Mr. Tenney looked at
him as if he never meant to forgit him, an' he ain't forgot him, not a
minute since. He's light complected, blue eyes an' all. An' he stood
there, that man did, talkin' to us, kinder laughin' an' bein' funny, an'
all to scare me out o' my life for fear o' what he'd say. He didn't say
a word he hadn't ought to, an' when he'd had his joke he walked off. But
he had just that way o' lookin' up kinder droll, an' baby's got it. Mr.
Raven, for God's sake tell me why my baby's got to look like that man?"

She was shaking him into a passion as unendurable as her own. He had
never felt such pity for any human being, not even the men blinded and
broken in the War. And he understood her now. Even through his belief in
her, that sudden belief born of her beauty and her extremity, he had
been amazed at her accepting him so absolutely. Now he saw. He was her
last hope and perhaps because he was different from the neighbors to
whom she could not speak, she was throwing herself into the arms of his
compassion. And she had to hurry lest she might not see him again. He
sat there, his hands clenched between his knees, his head bent. He must
not look at her.

"Poor chap!" he said finally, his altered thoughts now on Tenney. "He's
jealous."

She broke into a sob that seemed to rend her and then pulled herself up
and sat silent. But he could see, from her shadowy outline through his
oblique vision, that she was shaking horribly.

"Can't you," he said, "make him understand, make him see how--how
tremendously you love him?"

That was pretty mawkish, he thought, as he said it, but he meant it, he
meant volumes more. Flood the man with kindness, open the doors of her
beauty and let him see how really incorruptible she was, how loyal, how
wronged. For, with every minute of her company, he was the more
convinced of her inviolate self. Whatever the self had been through, now
it was motherhood incarnate. What was she saying to this last?

"Be nice to him?" she asked, "that kind o' way?" And he saw, as she did,
that he had meant her to drown the man's jealous passion in passion of
her own. "He thinks," she said bitterly, "that's the kind o' woman I
am."

Then he looked with her upon the barricaded road of her endeavor.

"I can't even," she said, "have the house pretty when he comes home an'
be dressed up so's he'll have a pleasant evenin' but he thinks--that's
the kind o' woman I am." The last she said as if she had said it many
times before and it held the concentrated bitterness of her hateful
life. "An'," she added, turning upon him and speaking fiercely, as if he
had been the one to accuse her, "it's true. It is the kind o' woman I
am. An' I don't want to be. I want to set down with my sewin' an' watch
the baby playin' round. What is it about me? What makes 'em foller me
an' offer me things an' try, one way or another, to bring me down? What
is it?"

She was panting with the passion of what seemed an accusation of him
with all mankind. He added one more to his list of indictments against
nature as God had made it. Here she was, a lure, innocent, he could have
sworn, backed up against the defenses of her ignorance, and the whole
machinery of nature was moving upon her, seeking, with its multitudinous
hands, to pull her in and utilize her for its own ends.

"Never mind," he said harshly. "Don't try to understand things. You
can't. We can't any of us. Only I'll tell you how you looked to me, that
first minute. You looked like the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ."

She shrank a little. He had touched, he saw, innocent prejudices.

"Are you a Roman Catholic?" she asked.

"No," he said, "not that nor anything. But you see how good you looked
to me. It doesn't hurt any of us to be Catholic, if we're good."

"I didn't mean anything," she said humbly. "Only there ain't many round
here."

"You say your husband is religious. Does he go to church?"

"Yes," she answered soberly, and also with a kind of wonder at a man's
accomplishing so dull an observance. "We go twice every Sunday, an'
Sunday school an' evenin' meetin' besides."

"Do you like it?"

"No," she said, looking rueful, as if trusting he might forgive her. "I
git sleepy."

At this Raven laughed and she glanced at him mildly, as if wandering
what he had found to please him. He had been thinking.

"Now," he said, "we must plan what you're going to do. You won't let me
send you and the baby away to stay awhile?"

She shook her head.

"Then what are we going to do? Can't you let me go to him and tell him,
man to man, what an infernal fool he is?"

A wild alarm flew into her face.

"No! no!" she said.

"What is going to happen? You can't go home."

"Oh, yes, I can," said she. "I always do. It works off. Maybe it's
worked off now. He gits all wore out actin' the way he does, an' then
he's terrible scared for fear I've made way with myself, an' he's all
bowed down."

"Oh!" said Raven. "And you've got him where you want him. And you settle
down and wait for another spell. How long do you generally stay away?"

"Long's I can," she answered simply. "Till I'm afraid baby'll git cold.
I keep his little things where I can ketch 'em up an' run. But sometimes
he 'most gits a chill."

The yearning of anxiety in her voice was intense enough, he thought, to
balance the grief of all the mothers bereft by Herod.

"I don't see," he said, "how you get up here anyway. You must come by
the road? Why doesn't he follow you?"

The slow red surged into her face. She was hesitating. There was
evidently worse to come.

"He gits so mad," she said, with frequent pauses between the words, "he
don't stay in the house after he's had a spell. I guess he don't dare
to. He's afraid of what he'll do. He goes out an' smashes away at the
woodpile or suthin.' An' it's then I ketch up the baby an' run. I go out
the side door an' up the road a piece an' into the back road. Then I
come down the loggin' road the back way an' end up here. It's God's
mercy," she said passionately, "they've broke out that loggin' road or
there wouldn't be any path an' he'd see my tracks in the snow."

"Then," said Raven, "if he has sense enough to go and work it off on the
woodpile, perhaps you aren't in any real danger, after all."

She looked at him piteously. Her eyes narrowed with a frowning return to
a scene of terror past and persistently avoided in retrospect.

"'Most always," she said, in a low tone, "it comes on him ag'in, an'
then, 'fore you know it, he's back in the house. Once he brought the axe
with him. Baby was in the cradle. The cradle head's split right square
acrost."

"Good God!" said Raven. "And you won't let me send you away from here?"

"Why, Mr. Raven," said she, and her voice was only less exquisite in its
tenderness than when she spoke of the baby, "ain't I married to him?"

They sat looking at each other, and the suffused beauty of her face was
so moving to him that he got up and went to the window and stared out at
the tree branches in their winter calm. He made himself stand there
looking at them and thinking persistently of them, not of her. She would
not bear thinking of, this thing of beauty and need and, at the same
time, inexorability of endurance. Unless she would let him help her, he
was only driving the hot ploughshare of her misery through his own heart
for nothing. So he stood there, mechanically studying the trees and
remembering how they would wake from this frozen calm on a night when
the north wind got at them and made them thrash at one another in the
fury of their destiny. Her voice recalled him.

"I don't mean," she said, "to make you feel bad. I hadn't ought to put
it on anybody else's shoulders, anyway."

Then Raven realized that the tenderness in her voice was for him. He
turned and came back to his place by the fire. But he did not sit. He
stood looking at her as she looked anxiously up at him.

"I'll tell you what we'll do," he said, "for the present, anyway. I'm
going now, and you're to stay here as long as you think best. When you
go, lock the door and put the key under the flat stone out by the step.
I often leave the key there. I'll make sure the stone isn't frozen down.
Now, you understand, don't you? You're to come up here whenever you
like. If there isn't a fire, you're to build one. Nobody will disturb
you. Jerry won't be cutting up here. I'll send him down into the lower
woods."

"But," she said, in evident concern, "I can't do that. You come up here
to write your books. Mr. Tenney said so, when he was tellin' me who all
the neighbors were. He said you had the shack repaired so's to write
your books."

Raven smiled. Books seemed far removed from this naked face of life.

"I'm not writing books now," he said. "I'm just hanging round. I may go
over and see your husband, ask him to do some work for me."

The quick look of alarm ran into her face.

"Oh," she breathed, "you won't----"

"No," he answered steadily, "I won't say a word about you. Of course I
sha'n't. And I won't to anybody."

"An'," she broke in tumultuously, "if you should see me--oh, it's an
awful thing to say, after what you've done for me this day--but you
won't act as if you ever see me before?"

That was the only wisdom, Raven saw, but a band seemed to tighten about
his heart. Deny her before men, she whom he had not yet untangled from
the rapt vision of their meeting?

"No," he said, "I won't even look at you. Now I'm going. I'll loosen up
the stone."

She rose to her imposing height and came to him where he stood, his hand
on the latch. Her eyes brimmed. In the one glance he had of her, he
thought such extremity of gratitude might, in another instant, break in
a flood of words.

"Go back," he said, "where nobody can see you when I open the door.
Jerry may have taken a notion to come up."

She turned obediently and he did not look at her again. He opened the
door and stepped out. The stone was there beside the larger one below
the sill. He bent and wrenched it up from the ground where the frost was
holding it, and with such unregarding force that the edges hurt his
hands. He smiled a little at the savage satisfaction of the act,
wondering if this was how Tenney felt when he smashed away at the wood.
Then he remembered that the key was inside, tapped on the door, opened
it and spoke to her:

"You'd better lock the door. Keep it locked till you go."

She was sitting before the fire, her head bent almost to her knee, her
face in her hands. He closed the door and waited until he heard her step
and the turning of the key. Then he strode out into the logging road and
down the slope. One certainty surged and trembled in him: that he had
never been so sorry for anybody in his life.




X


Raven, determinedly shedding his emotion, plunged fast down the hill and
into the house where Charlotte was busy in a steam of fragrances from
stove and cooking table and Jerry sat smoothing an axe helve.

"See here," said Raven, pulling off his gloves and advancing to the
stove, where Jerry, looking mildly up, made room for him, "are you
thinning out up on the ridge?"

Jerry nodded.

"That's what you wrote," said he.

"I've changed my mind," said Raven. "It looks mighty well up there as it
is, for the present, anyway. Didn't you say there was a lot of gray
birch that needed to go down in the river pasture?"

Again Jerry nodded, and Charlotte, evidently not finding this definite
enough, put in:

"Why, yes, Jerry, seems to me you said so. 'Twas in that letter you had
me write."

"Well," said Raven, "I want you to get at the river woods. I want 'em
cleaned up. Couldn't you get somebody to help you? That man Tenney, how
about him?"

Jerry, confronted by haste and emergency, two flying visitants he never
could encounter adequately, opened his mouth and looked at Charlotte.

"Why, yes," said she. "He's a great hand to work. You said so yourself,
Jerry, only last week."

"Then what if we should hire him?" said Raven. "What if I should go up
and ask him now?"

Jerry was slowly coming to.

"He's been by here to-day," said he, "axe in his hand. Went as if he's
sent for. Then he went back."

"Well, that was an hour or more ago," said Charlotte. "You says to me,
'Where's he be'n?' says you. Yes, he's got home long 'fore this. You'll
find him some'r's round home."

"All right," said Raven. "Don't go up on the ridge again, Jerry. I want
it left as it is."

He hurried out through the shed and Charlotte and Jerry exchanged
glances, his entirely bemused and she sympathetically tender.

"'Course he don't want you cuttin' on the ridge," she said. "He's goin'
up there to write his books. I should think you could see that."

For Charlotte, when no third person was by to observe Jerry's sloth at
the uptake, had methods of her own to keep him mentally alive. If he did
lag a pace behind, it was his secret and hers, and sometimes, between
themselves, it was wholesome to recognize it.

Raven walked at top speed. He could not, at his utmost, get to Tenney
soon enough. It was true, he was under vow not to assault or accuse him,
but it seemed to him the woman would not be even intermittently safe
unless the man were under his eye. As the picture of her flashed again
to his mind, sitting by his hearth, her head bowed in grief unspeakable,
he wondered what he should call her. Surely not, in his rage against
Tenney, by Tenney's name. She was "the woman," she was the pitiful type
of all suffering womanhood.

There was the house, rather narrow in build, but painted white, with
green blinds. The narrowness gave it a look of unwelcoming meagerness,
this although it was of a good size. Raven wondered why some minds ran
to pointed roofs, inhospitable to the eye. This looked to him like
Tenney, his idea of him. The barn was spacious, and beautiful in silver
gray, and the woodpile, Raven decided ironically, a marvel of artistic
skill. He had never seen such a big woodpile, so accurately trimmed at
the corners, so perfect in the face of an extended length. It must, he
judged, represent a good many hours of jealous madness, if it was
entirely the product of those outbreaks when Tenney went out to smash
wood. And there, round one corner of the pile, was Tenney himself. Raven
realized that he had not expected to find him. Actually he had believed
the man was raging over snowy hillsides somewhere about, armed with his
axe and uttering those catamount cries. Tenney was not at work. He was
standing perfectly still, looking up the road.

"Hullo!" called Raven, turning into the yard, and the man jerked back a
step and then stopped and awaited him.

It was not a step actually. His feet did not leave the ground. He
merely, his whole body, seemed thrown out of position, to recover
instantly. Raven, watching him as he traversed the few steps between
them, decided that he was uncontrollably nervous, frightened, too,
perhaps, at what his apprehensive mind pictured: and that was good for
him. What was Tenney, according to his look? Raven, scrutinizing him as
he approached, determined to know something more than he had caught from
those preoccupied minutes in the woods. How, if he had his pen in hand,
would he describe Israel Tenney for one of the folk tales Anne had so
persistently urged him to? A thin, tall man with narrow shoulders and
yet somehow giving an impression of great wiry strength. He had a boldly
drawn line of profile, hair black and glossy and, as Raven saw with
distaste, rather long under his hat, vertical lines marking his cheeks,
lines deeper than seemed justified by his age, and, as he had noted
before, his eyes were also black with a spark in them. What was the
spark? It was, Raven concluded again, in this quick scrutiny, like that
in the eyes of inventors and visionaries. He wore clothes so threadbare
that it seemed as if he must have been cold. But they were patched with
a scrupulous nicety that made some revulsion in Raven rise up and
dramatically spur him to a new resentment. She had patched them. Her
faithful needle had spent its art on this murderer of her peace. He had
reached the woodpile now and Tenney came a step forward.

"Great woodpile you've got here," said Raven.

Tenney put out his hand and rested it on one of the sticks. He might
have been caressing a pet dog.

"Stove wood length," he said briefly. Then he seemed to feel some
curiosity over being sought out after their meeting on the rise and
asked: "D'you find your knife?"

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Didn't you see me hold it up to you?"

Tenney nodded, frowning. He seemed to conclude he was giving himself
away, showing more interest in the stranger than the stranger had in any
way earned. But he asked another question. It leaped from him. He had to
ask it.

"D'you see anybody up round there after I come down?"

Raven shook his head, looking, he hoped, vague.

"I came down myself," he said. "I had to talk with Jerry about his
thinning out."

The eagerness faded from Tenney's face.

"I didn't see Jerry up there this mornin'," he volunteered, in an
indifferent contribution toward the talk.

"No," said Raven. "You won't see him up there at all after this--for a
spell, that is. I write, you know, books. I like to go up to the hut to
work. Not so likely to be interrupted there. I don't want chopping going
on."

Tenney, with a quick lift of the head, looked at him questioningly.
Raven saw anger also in the look, at last anger ready to spring. Both
men had the same thought. Tenney wondered if the owner of the wood was
going to taunt him again with yelling like a catamount, and Raven did
actually put aside an impulse toward it.

"D'you come over here to forbid my goin' up in your woods?" Tenney
inquired.

"No," said Raven. "I came to ask you if you could help Jerry do some
thinning out in the river pasture. I'm rather in a hurry about that."

"Why, yes," Tenney began. Then he added breathlessly, as if another part
of his mind (the suffering, uncontrolled part) broke in on his speech:
"Not yet, though. I can't do anything yet, not till I see how things
turn."

Raven thought he understood. Tenney could settle to nothing until he
knew when his wife was coming back or whether she was coming at all. Now
that the vision of her had entered on their stage, he was conscious of
answering coldly:

"All right. You can make up your mind and go over and see Jerry. He'll
arrange it with you."

On these words, he was about turning away, when he found Tenney suddenly
oblivious of him. The man's thin face was quivering into a pathetic
disorder, flushed, quite beyond his control. He neither heard Raven nor
saw him, though he did speak brokenly:

"There!" he said. "There she is now."

Raven, turning, followed his gaze, directed up the road, not the way he
had come. There she was, walking toward them with swift, long steps, the
child held with the firmness that still seemed a careless buoyancy, as
he had seen her in the woods. She had come home, as she went, the back
way. Raven could have stood there through the long minute, motionless,
waiting for her to come to him, for it seemed as if it were to him she
came, not Tenney. But he recalled himself with a brusqueness so rough
and sudden that it was as if he gave himself a blow. That last glance
had shown him she had nothing more to fear from Tenney, for this time at
least. The man had been horribly frightened at her going. Now he was
under her heel. Raven did not give her another look. He turned homeward,
and called back to Tenney loudly enough for her to overhear him and be
under no apprehension as to what had passed:

"Make up your mind, then come and talk it over with Jerry. It's
chopping, you understand, gray birches down in the river pasture."

Tenney did not answer, and Raven, striding along the road, listened with
all possible intentness to hear whether husband and wife spoke together.
He thought not, but he did hear the closing of a door.




XI


Thyatira--this was her name, and she was called Tira--passed her husband
apparently without a glance. Nevertheless she had, in approaching,
become adequately aware of his disordered look, and the fact of it
calmed her to a perfect self-possession. She could always, even from one
of these fleeting glimpses, guess at the stage his madman's progress had
reached, and the present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense
of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The
"spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left
her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too,
to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently
not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in,
she was sitting in his great chair by the fire, taking off the baby's
coat, and, with the capable, anxious mother motion, feeling the little
hands. Tenney came up to her and the child, turning at his step, looking
up at him solemnly. Tira's heart seemed to contract within her. This was
the very glance, "lookin' up kinder droll," that had brought on the
storm. But for Tenney it evidently meant something now that fitted his
mood of passionate anxiety to get back into the warm security of
domestic peace.

"You lemme take him," he said, "whilst you git off your things. You'll
ketch your death o' cold, carryin' on so."

The last he had to add. She was, his defensive inner mind told him, all
wrong in flying out of the house "like a crazed creatur'" when she might
have stayed and told him, just told him, whether she was the kind of
woman he, at these unheralded mad moments, thought she was. That was the
undercurrent always in his mind: if she wouldn't be so still and
hateful, if she would only tell him. She might have some pity on a man,
that defensive inner mind advised him, when she saw him all worked up.
But the minute he warned her the devil of doubt was again tempting him,
she began to freeze up and wouldn't speak to him at all. No wonder, with
that devil inside whispering to him and hounding him on--no wonder he
said things and--he trembled here and dared not follow out that
thought--and was afraid he might do things. But she shook her head, at
his offer of taking the child.

"You might go an' cut a slice o' ham," she said wearily. "It's 'most
dinner time. We might's well have that as anything."

But the baby reached out and closed his little fingers about Tenney's
thumb. Tenney stood there, his heart swelling within him at the contrast
between the child's forgivingness and her cruelty. Now she had the
child's outer things off, and she rose with them in one hand, carrying
the child on the other arm, and it was her movement that dragged the
little fingers away and broke that significant clasp on Tenney's thumb.
How hateful she could be, he thought, his heart swelling more and more.
He stood where she left him, and she went to the low couch and set the
baby down there, and put into his hand a formless doll she wanted him to
love. He never really noticed it, but she felt he would sometime love
the doll. Then she glanced, with the air of being recalled to a
wearisome routine, at the table in the middle of the floor; it meant ham
and eggs. It seemed also to occur to her that she had not taken off her
cloak, and she hung it on its nail behind the door. Soon, as Tenney,
still motionless there by the stove, seemed mutely accusing her, mutely
imploring her not to be cruel, she did turn and look at him. The thought
of Raven was uppermost in her mind. It had been there every minute since
she had gone into his house in the woods, but now it roused
compellingly, stronger than even her present apprehension. Most of all,
she was penetrated by a wonder almost greater than any emotion she had
ever felt, at having laid before him at once and without persuasion, the
story of her life. Why should she have told him? She would have said no
decent woman could betray her husband to another man. It was entirely
mysterious, and she gave it up. But there was, behind the wonder, a
dazzling sense that he was different. As he had told her that strange
thing she hardly dared think of now, because it seemed as if she must
have misunderstood him--the thing about her looking so good and
wonderful when he came upon her--so he, in his kindness and compassion,
his implication of assuming a mysterious responsibility for her, seemed
unbelievably good, not a citizen of this bleak neighborhood--or even the
world (her mind, though stumblingly, ran as far as that) and, more
astounding still, the real miracle was that he had been sent for this:
to save her. And at that moment of dazed reflection, it all meant the
passionate necessity of obeying him. He had bade her show her husband
how she loved him. Seeing the man was jealous, he had pitied him.
Perhaps she had not thought, since these last apprehensive days with
Tenney, whether she loved him or not. He had simply, at the times of
recurrent tragedy, been the terror within the house, and she had lived a
life of breathless consecration to the one task of saving the child. Did
she love him? Raven had assumed she did, and in her devotion to him she
must, in some form, obey. Almost it seemed to her there would be shame
in not loving her husband, if Raven expected it of her. None of these
things were formulated in her mind. They were only shadowy impulses,
like the forces of nature, persuading, impelling her. She had no words;
she had scarcely, as to the abstractions she dimly felt and never saw,
any reasoned thought. But she did have an unrecognized life of the
emotions, and this was surging in her now.

She stood for a second looking at Tenney, the distended beauty of her
eyes like a question, a challenge. She seemed, though this neither of
them could know, to be beseeching him to tell her what treatment he
deserved of her, or what would make their case whole. They were simple
people, these two, but she had leaped, without knowing it herself, to a
new plane of life. She was still with Raven in the hut, trying to speak
his language, follow out his thought for her. She gave a little quick
rush across the room and, to Tenney's overwhelming surprise, her hands
were on his shoulders, her face so close to his that her sweet breath
fanned him. He had never seen her so. She had to be pursued, coaxed,
tired out with persuasion before she would even accept the warmth he too
often had for her.

"Isr'el," she said, "Isr'el Tenney! if you ever ag'in, so long as you
live, think wrong o' that baby there, you'll be the wickedest man on
God's earth."

His arms closed about her and she stood passive. Yet she wanted to free
herself. Did she love him? The question Raven had seemed to illuminate
kept beating on in her tired head. Did she love him? And as Tenney's
arms clung closer and his lips were on hers, she threw back her head and
cried violently:

"No, I don't."

"Don't what?" he asked, releasing her slightly, and she drew away from
him and, still obeying Raven, made one disordered effort at assurance.

"If you think"--here she stopped. She could not go on. It had always
seemed to her a wrong to the baby to put the vile suspicion into words.
"If you think," she tried again, "what you said this mornin'--O Isr'el,
I've been as true to you as you are to your God."

He was religious, she often told herself, chiefly in her puzzled musings
after a "spell" was over, and this was the strongest vow she could
imagine. But it disconcerted him.

"There! there!" he said. "Don't say such things."

Evidently the name of God was for Sundays. But he was uneasily
reassured. He was, at least, in a way of sense, delighted. He put his
face to hers and thickly bade her kiss him. He was not for the moment
horrible to her unconsenting will. Rather she found herself rejoicing.
When she could escape from him (and she felt no fear, her wild belief in
herself was so great) she thought she could dance and sing. For now she
knew she did not love him, and it made her feel so free. Always there
had been some uneasy bond, first with the man who cajoled her to her
heart-break and the miserable certainty that, whatever magic was in a
good name, it was hers no more, and then with Tenney, whom she had
followed humbly, gratefully, because he had been so kind and told her
nothing mattered if she would marry him. But now she felt a sudden
snapping of the bond and she knew that, in her mind, at least, in her
moments of solitude with the baby, she could dance upon the hills of
life. It was an entirely new sense of ecstasy, a thrilling of her blood.
She laughed out, a low, excited laugh, and put him from her and called
gaily:

"You slice the ham, an' I'll git out some eggs."

Tenney stared at her a minute, perplexed and wondering. Then his face
relaxed slightly. It might have been said he smiled. There was
apparently a good feeling in the house, such as he had never been able
to create. She had always been kind, conformable, but she had never
laughed like this, nor in his sight taken up the baby and tossed him
until he, too, laughed gurglingly. She cooked the dinner and Tenney, not
able to take himself out of her bewildering presence, hung about and
watched her and, when the baby began to fret for food, took him up and
walked with him until Tira was free. And while they ate dinner the baby
slept again on the lounge: for the cradle, grim witness Tenney could not
bring himself to look at now, had been moved into the bedroom.

"D'you see that feller jest goin' when you come into the yard?" Tenney
asked her, when his first hunger was over and he leaned back in his
chair to look at her where she sat, only picking at her food, he thought
anxiously. She seemed queer to him to-day, with the rapt, exalted look
of one who had seen strange things and been tired by them, the tremulous
eloquence of her lips. She was, he owned to himself, yet not with any
satisfaction, because any smallest allurement in her lessened his chance
of keeping her faith inviolate, a likely looking woman.

"I wish," he said irritably, out of his uneasiness over her, "you'd eat
suthin.' You're all beat out."

She smiled at him. She felt kindly toward him as to a part of the world
that had at least begun to show its softer side to her.

"No," she said, "I ain't beat out."

"D'you see him?" he pursued, his thoughts recurring to Raven.

"Yes," she responded, in a low tone, "I see him."

"'Twas Raven. You knew he was comin' up to stay a spell. Don't ye
remember I see Jerry an' he told me? He wants me to go down in his river
pastur', choppin'. All of a whew to git at it. Jest like them city
folks. If a thing comes into their head, they'll shake the footstool but
they'll git it."

"Yes," said Tira. "I think 's likely."

She got up to bring the pie, warming in the oven, and when her back was
toward him she allowed herself a smile, happy, unrestrained, at Raven's
thought for her. She knew why Tenney was to be drawn off down to the
river pasture. This was a part of Raven's understanding and his
beneficence.

"You goin'?" she asked, returning to her chair.

"Yes," said Tenney. "Might 's well."

When he had eaten he went out to his chores and she cleared the table
and walked about the house with a light step. She had been working
heavily of late, with a dull mind, but now there seemed to be a reason
for doing every task as perfectly as it could be done. There was not a
suspicion in her mind that Raven had a charm for her or that she could
possibly have a charm for him. He had simply opened a window for the
light to come in; he had shown her the door of escape. This was the
first simple kindness she had ever had. When she was little, the family
life had been a disorderly struggle for bare existence, and as she grew
into an ignorant girlhood she began to be angrily conscious that she
herself, she who did not recognize the power of her own beauty and with
it the strange force that lay beneath it, like a philter, for man's
undoing, was an object of pursuit by men made mad through passions she
hated. She had the simplest tastes, the most inconsiderable desires. She
would go off by herself then and spend a day wandering about the woods,
cooling her feet in brooks, sleeping under a tree. No man could make her
happiness completer, hanging about her steps, staring her down with
bold, impudent eyes. She even thought, in a formless way (for she had no
orderly inner life of wonder and conclusion) whether she should have
taken refuge with the light-haired man who was now driving Tenney to
madness, if he had not had that drollery of looking at you, like a boy
really, who cared only for a boy's fitful fun. But he was not kind. The
kindness had been only to lure her into trusting him, just as Tenney's
had turned into a rage of abusive jealousy. Raven's kindness was
different. It was not in any degree personal to her. She knew he would
have been as merciful to a squirrel caught in a trap. And the scars of
his own mental sufferings and restraints had done something to him,
something inexplicable that made him wonderful in her eyes. He seemed,
too, all-powerful. He was that miraculous combination of the human guide
and heavenly helper, with the wisdom to understand earthly trouble and
the power to administer what remedy there might be.

Tenney did not come in until supper time. He had been over to Raven's,
he told her, and seen Jerry about the chopping. They were going in the
morning early. She made no reply. She was still at peace in the thought
of Raven's kindness, but the turmoil of the day had told on her, and she
was so tired that she could scarcely drag herself about; her eyes kept
closing as she moved. Tenney was still expectantly eager for an
awakening of her leniency. At eight o'clock he brought out the Bible and
stiffened himself into the rigidity that was the mail for his spiritual
combats. He was always referring to himself, at these times of religious
observance, as a servant of the Cross, and Tira used wearily to wonder
whether he felt obliged to arrange himself for combats that, so far as
she knew, never seemed to come off. There was a mysterious adversary he
was always describing with an apprehension that made her wonder if
Israel could really be afraid, and if that was why he announced so
belligerently that he was ready for him. Neither of them thought of the
combat as being simply the grim fight the will of men is doomed to on
the dark plain of man's mysterious sojourn. It seemed to them outside
somewhere, dramatic, imminent, and yet, if you prayed loudly enough and
read your chapter, not certain to happen at all. At least this seemed to
be what Tenney thought, and Tira, when she dwelt upon it, sleepily
followed him. To-night he was reading in Revelation, and when he had
finished that, he would begin, in due course, at Genesis, and go on with
an iron persistency of accomplishment as methodical as ploughing a
field. Tira, sitting at her side of the hearth, heard, through drowsy
ears, the incomprehensible vision of the tree of life with its twelve
manner of fruits, and when Israel shut the Bible with an air of virtuous
finality, she came awake and sat guiltily upright.

"You've been asleep," he accused her frowningly. "Anybody'd think you
could keep yourself awake over the Word o' God."

Tira leaned back in her chair and yawned with the simplicity of the
natural animal. Tenney caught his breath, the redness of her mouth and
the gleam of her teeth were so bewitching to him. He got up and carried
away the Bible. When he came back from the best room she was moving
about, setting away chairs and then brushing up the few chips on the
hearth.

"I'm beat out," she acknowledged, with a wistful look at him, half
deprecating humility. "I guess I'll poke off to bed."

"Yes," said Tenney, "le's go."

At that minute there was a little waking call from the bedroom off the
sitting-room. Tenney gave her a startled glance.

"Why," he said, "you got him in there?"

They had been used to keeping the baby covered on the kitchen or the
sitting-room couch until their own bedtime and Tenney, preoccupied with
his last chore of reading the Scriptures, had not noticed that his wife
had carried him into the bedroom instead.

"Yes," she said, with a significant quiet. "I thought 'twas full warmer
in the bed. I'm goin' to stay with him."

"In there?" Tenney repeated. "All night?"

She nodded at him. The afternoon brightness was again on her face, and
for an instant he felt afraid of her, she looked so strange. Then he
laughed a little. He thought he understood, and, advancing, put a hand
on her shoulder and spoke in an awkward tenderness.

"Here," said he, "you ain't afraid o' me, be you? Why, I wouldn't no
more lay hands on him----"

He had meant to add that she had reassured him by her disclaimer of the
morning. But he could not quite manage that. Words were not his
servants. They were his enemies, especially at such times as he was mad
with rage. Then they came too fast and got the better of him, and he
could hardly ever remember afterward what they were. Tira slipped from
under his hand and continued her ordered tasks about the room. But she
smiled at him in the friendliest way.

"Oh, no," she said, "I ain't the leastest mite afraid." She laughed a
little, in a manner mystifying to him, for it suddenly seemed to her she
should never be afraid of anything again.

Tenney stood there, his eyes following her as she moved about the room,
and again the thought of her cruelty possessed him. Last of all her
orderly deeds, she lighted a little lamp and set it on the table near
him.

"Don't you forgit to blow it out," she warned him. "I'm terrible afraid
o' fire, these winter nights. I won't put out the big lamp yet. I can
see to undress by it, an' then baby won't wake up."

He took his lamp and set it down again and went to the bedroom door, her
eyes following him.

"I dunno," he said, in a strangled voice, "as there's any need o' that
in there, for folks to tumble over."

He stepped inside, took up the cradle with the telltale gash in the
hood, carried it through the kitchen and set it outside the door, in the
shed.

"I'll carry it up into the shed chamber to-morrer," he said, in the same
tortured voice.

Then he took his lamp and turned to go. He was as much surprised at
himself as she could have guessed. For some reason--and he did not know
the reason--he could not bear to leave her there in the dark with the
silent witness standing by to cry out against him. Yet this he did not
think. He only knew he must get the cradle out of the room and do it
quickly. When he had reached the door to the enclosed staircase, her
voice halted him so abruptly that the light quivered in his hand.

"Isr'el," it called, "you're real good. Don't you be cold. There's a
blanket on the foot."

But though he hesitated another minute, the voice had nothing more for
him, and he went slowly up to bed. As he undressed, his thoughts down
there with her, he wondered how her voice could have sounded so gay.

I

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/31372