(From _The Pictorial Review_)
When Tansy Snow was a young man of eighteen or nineteen he went one
night to the Stone Fold. The Stone Fold is an islet lying about two
miles to the southeast of us. There is a house on it built of stones,
and a sheep-shelter, and toward the southern end three thorn trees.
Tansy took his father’s skiff and steered straight through the shoals
that lie that way, guided by the lamp in the garret of the house.
Donna, who had been in town with her father two days before, told him
she would put it there when the old man was asleep and the dogs shut up.
Donna Salisbury wasn’t pretty. And she would have been better for a
mother’s care; better to look at. As you’d expect, living with only a
shepherd father, her clothes were heavy, stout things, fitted mostly
by guess, and none too clean, and her hair was thick and untended, and
the color of her father’s sheep. But she was strong, stronger than a
boy, and if her face had a dull look, there was something behind the
dullness that would make a fellow stop to look again, especially when
stars were bright enough to cast shadows among the rocks and the gray
grass.
Tansy couldn’t understand why he should want to have anything to do
with her. He’d been to the Academy and now he had a position in the
new bank; he had to wear decent clothes every day, clean collars, and
polished boots; it went deeper than that: he had every day to be a
decent _man_ and wear a clean conscience; otherwise the pointing finger
of the banking business would find him out--bound to--in the long run
of a man’s life.
He had been to the Stone Fold three times, steering by the light.
This time he was coming simply to say he wasn’t coming. It would be
awkward telling the girl. For a day and a night he had been busy trying
to think up something humane, but at the same time final. Finished.
Chopped off.
He hadn’t guessed how awkward it would be, after all. They couldn’t
talk there on the beach on account of the dogs; they had to go along a
way. Occasional clouds, great fluffs of things, sailed over the sky,
and in the dark when they covered the stars Donna led him, taking his
fingers in her strong, dull, warm, eager hand.
He would have said it at the first turn of the shore, but the surf on
the bar there was too loud; he didn’t want to shout. He would have said
it when they started inland toward the thorn-trees, but now they had
got into the wind, the full weight of the wind that came in from the
open sea and bore the great clouds among the stars and made a living
sound among the grasses. He would have said it under the thorn tree,
but under the thorn tree was Donna.
It was half-past two when he left the island, and he hadn’t said it
yet. What he _had_ said he could hardly remember. Sometimes words,
fragments of sentences, promises, will come from a man’s mouth as if it
were some one else speaking: things he doesn’t mean at all.
He pushed the skiff off the sand, holding it by the painter.
“When’ll you be again?” she whispered.
Now was the time to tell her. She might have seen how pale he was;
might have helped him by saying something. But she was a dumb young
thing and she hadn’t a word. Of a sudden he reached into his pocket and
pulled out the money he had there and thrust it into her hands.
She was a dumb one, and she couldn’t make it out.
“What’s this?”
“I want you should buy yourself some present or other.”
“Huh?”
The dogs in the sheepfold began to bark. Tansy jumped into the skiff
and pushed off, leaving Donna to stand there, dumber than ever.
He had a fair wind back and put up the sail.
It was six dollars he had given her, a lot of money, the whole of his
first week’s wages. There were things he could have bought with that:
a new tire for his bicycle, and a Young People’s Union pin to give
Elsie Baker on her birthday. But it was all right. Better to start off
clear--not a debt outstanding--no matter what the cost might be.
Even yet, though, he didn’t feel quite right. When he got home and up
to his room he had three hours to sleep, but he couldn’t sleep. He was
disgusted with himself. His memory reviewed the night with shame and
loathing. He saw the path down which he had started, and even if he had
got out of it now, it was disgusting to remember.
All next day he felt drugged and haggard. He made mistakes with
figures, so that Mr. Matheson had to speak to him. But what was it?
He’d paid, hadn’t he? Squared up? Given everything he had to the girl?
Yes, but how about the Lord God? Slowly, as the day went by, he saw
this. You can’t pay God with money.
There was a sociable at Center Church that night. He had asked to see
Elsie Baker home. He looked so ill at supper time that his mother
advised him to stay in. To her surprise he acquiesced without trouble.
He went upstairs. When he was half undressed for bed, however, he
couldn’t do it. Getting dressed again, he stole out the back way and
went and stood behind a tree near the church and watched the people
going in.
The windows were bright and there were sounds of a good time, a hymn,
then after a decent interval laughter and runnings about, games. Tansy
walked across the street and stood at the steps.
He had given the girl everything he had. Can you give more than you
have? And, anyway, any girl that would do that!
Yes, yes; but how about the Lord God?
He went around to the wagon-shed, and in the dark there he fell on
his knees. “O, Heavenly Father, I’ve walked in evil; I’ve committed a
grievous sin; I beg Thee to forgive me in Thy mercy. I repent. O God, I
repent; I do, I do, honestly! Honestly, God, honestly----”
In the church they were singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
Tansy got up and brushed off his knees. His weariness was gone, like a
heavy coat he might have taken off and left there in the shed. In its
place there was a sense of security and well-being, such as comes after
a bath at the end of a sweaty day. He slipped back to his room and put
on his blacks, and, coming down the front way, he said he thought he
would go to the sociable. There was no turning him.
Actually he didn’t go in, but waited on the steps. There was something
about his feelings that would no more have mixed with the romping and
the din than oil will mix with water. Yet it was marvelous just to sit
apart and listen to it, especially when the organ struck into some
familiar air, and all sang, soprano and alto, tenor and bass. It was
marvelous to be whiter than snow, one with God, a little child.
He saw Elsie home, after all. It was only a couple of hundred yards,
down the shore street and up London Lane, but he would never forget it.
It was the first time he’d known that love and reverence could be one
and the same thing. Earthly love and religious reverence.
Elsie was so pretty, so enchanting in ribbons and laces, so pure,
as pure as a flower on which God’s sun shines and God’s rain falls
unfailing, as if He were saying in the sun and rain: “Of such is the
portion of them that think none but healthy thoughts and dream none but
wholesome dreams; yea, even to the third and the fourth generation.”
Elsie’s great-grandfather it was who gave the land for the Atheneum.
Her grandfather rescued the missionaries in Paul Straits, and founded
the “Light in Darkness.” Her father and mother were in the forefront of
everything for decency and right living, and they were well-to-do.
The forefathers of that girl on the Stone Fold--what could they have
been? By what steps of wrong thinking, of evil impulses given way to
and higher impulses denied, must that strain have come down?
But now, because something had been changed in him, Tansy could think
of her with nothing but pity.
In London Lane the lights, shining up under the willows, made it seem
the nave of some dim cathedral, in which a boy and a girl walked
together. And then Elsie was up on her stoop and he stood at the foot
of the steps.
“W-e-l-l?” she said. The light from the two long panes flanking the
door fell softly on either side of her figure.
“Elsie,” he said, “excepting for my father and mother there’s nobody in
the world but you amounts to _that_, with me.”
“What _are_ you saying, you silly?”
She came back down the steps to read the silly’s eyes. She was so good
she didn’t guess the risk. He could have grabbed her and kissed her.
But not he; not now! He kept his hands behind him.
“Elsie, you wait and see. Some day I shall be the biggest man in this
town.” It wasn’t like boasting. “For your sake,” he might have said.
He marveled as he walked homeward. On one side there were loveliness,
niceness, world’s goods; on the other unloveliness, a hard living, the
scorn of friends. Yet did God ask him to choose the stony way? By a
miracle, no. God asked him to choose the way it would have been the
part of even the worldly-wise to choose.
Marveling so, as he crossed above the White Boys’ place he spied a
pin-prick of light away out beyond the Point. It was as though it
rested on the low neck of sand, a fallen star.
“_Tonight?_” He felt angry. “She’s got her cheek, I must say!”
On impulse he went down to his father’s wharf, cast off the skiff’s
painter, and got in. He would finish _that_ off. He would tell Donna
what was what. Straight from the shoulder! Then, before he had got the
oars out, he realized that it was only the devil tempting him, weaving
any arguments at all, just to get him out there to the Stone Fold again.
He made the boat fast and went home. His parents were still up. He
shook his father’s hand and kissed his mother on the brow. She eyed him
with a knowing little smile. “Been seeing Elsie Baker home?”
Tansy stood with his jaw out.
“I’ve made a decision to-night,” he said. “Some day I shall be the
biggest man in this town.”
He married Elsie Baker on the day he was made assistant cashier at the
bank. Within three months he was cashier.
People trusted him. “No need to count your money when it’s Tansy passes
it out of the till.” His word was as good as a bond; better, for bonds
can be lost or burned or stolen.
Old man Baker bought the Dow residence in the Brick Walk, had it
renovated, and gave it to the couple as a wedding-present. Nothing
could have been fitter. It was the smallest of the big houses built at
the height of the California days, brick for walls, slate for roofing,
and a wrought-iron grill around the turf-plot. Four-square with the
street, a house of strength and dignity. It was not too large, and
that was fit, too. In the great-grandfather’s family there were eleven
children; in the grandfather’s, fourteen; in the father’s, three. Elsie
herself had none.
It was a town house, pure and simple; the Dows had always been
shorefolks, lawyers and doctors and the like. From the windows of the
guest-chamber upstairs, full of leafy boughs and neighboring gables,
you might have been a thousand miles from the nearest salt; the
sewing-room was the same, and so was the west-chamber, that had always
been known as “the children’s room.” Yet it is a hard thing to find a
house in Urkey without some peep of the water; even at Gramma Pilot’s,
about as thoroughly shut in as any in town, you’ve but to climb to the
garret to get a sight of blue under the rod of the drug-store chimney.
We may wear Brockton shoes, but we’re a web-footed race for all that.
And so it was from the “used chamber” in the new Snow home.
The first time they slept there after their wedding-tour to Boston
Elsie awoke in the middle of the night. For a moment she couldn’t say
why. It was too queer. She didn’t stir; simply lay there trying to
think what it was could be wrong. It wasn’t for instants that she
recollected where she was, that she was married, that her husband was
there beside her. She slid a hand over his pillow to touch his head.
There was no head to touch. She was so startled she didn’t know what
to do or think. She went cold. Then, of course, when she began to paw
around, her hand found Tansy’s back. He was sitting up in bed; that was
all.
“What _is_ the _matter_?” she demanded, she was so upset.
“Nothing. Why, nothing at all.” And he lay back on the pillow.
But by and by, when he thought her asleep, he was up again, on an
elbow, looking at the window over the foot of the bed. Like burglars.
You know the feeling of that. Up went Elsie without a word, staring
at that window too. And there was nothing there. Nothing but the rear
corner of Center Church, one side, and the corner of the Nickerson
house, the other, and their one outlook on the harbor in the slit
between. By day there would have been a bit of the harbor, a segment
of the Point, and out to sea. Now there was nothing but the spark of
a chance light; it might have been at the masthead of some vessel at
anchor; it was too low for a star.
She was provoked. “What _are_ you _gawping_ at?”
“Nothing. Why, nothing in the world. What makes you think I----”
“Is it that light?”
“Wha--what light?”
“Well, I’m all afidget now.”
He lay back and comforted her. They were young.
Next morning, at the chamber-work, Elsie made a discovery.
“You remember that light last night, Tansy?” she laughed at
supper-time. “Well, ’twas nothing but old Cabe Sal’sbury’s light in his
house over to the Stone Fold; you can see how it ranges in daylight.
Must be some one sick.”
“Or else Cabe’s a great student,” she modified it when, at bedtime, she
saw the lamp burning again in the window on the Stone Fold.
“What you say to closing those blinds?” Tansy suggested. “I vow there’s
a tang in the air to-night.”
No, Elsie wouldn’t listen to that.
“The best doctors nowadays say all the air you can have in your bedroom
is none too much, even in winter-time. I’d suffocate.”
It was the following day that Tansy began to seem restless. To begin
with, he didn’t see where they were going to expect much company,
overnight, all their friends being local people, with houses of their
own. So why didn’t they shift into the front chamber, which was
roomier, with two closets; and as for air, certainly there was as much
air coming up the Brick Walk as there was in the church back yard.
“My _spare_ chamber?” was all Elsie could gasp.
“Or even the west chamber----”
“The _children’s_ room?”
Elsie went straight to her mother about it. Her mother smiled. Phidela
Baker had been a young woman once, with a new young husband and a new
house of her own. “They’re all the same; Providence made ’em so. Ever
notice a dog that’s made up his mind to lie down in a certain spot?
Made up or no, he’s got to wander and fidget a dozen times around it
first, before he settles down. Don’t you take on.”
“But over and above everything,” was the parting advice, “don’t you
start out by humoring him too much. Be cheery, but put your foot down.”
So when Elsie found Tansy at work one of those days, surreptitiously,
trying to get the bureau switched for the bed, and the carpet in a
tangle with it, she put her foot down. He looked foolish to be caught
so. His face got redder and redder.
“Light shines in my eyes. That is--in the mornings.”
“Can you _imagine_ how this room would _look_?” She demolished him
ruthlessly, but all the while with a smile.
That smile of Elsie Snow’s grew famous. No matter if this went bad and
that worse, Tansy Snow’s wife always had a smile, always seemed to
be saying, like her mother before her: “Don’t you take on; God will
provide.”
Her energy was amazing and fruitful. Once she was married and settled
down, and since she had no children to stop her, she was able to be a
power for good. She was a treasure for Tansy; she saved his pennies;
where another in her place might have got trained help from the
mainland she did with young girls to come in, carried the bulk of the
house herself, and never looked the worse for it.
As she matured she rounded out amazingly; folks wouldn’t have believed
it, from the slip of a girl she had been. But no matter how full her
hands were, they were never too full to spare a finger where help was
needed. In the church, in the Dorcases, in the “Light in Darkness,” in
the Town Farm Association, at Easter, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, the
word came to be: “See Elsie Snow; she’ll manage.”
There were plenty to say that her capacity for managing didn’t go for
nothing in Tansy’s affairs. Certainly, once, when he wouldn’t have
foreclosed on Mrs. Hemans’s store--which was going to be a valuable
property as soon as the fish-freezer was built--certainly then it was
his wife showed the common sense of the two, asking him plainly: “Which
do you figure you owe the most to, Sarah Hemans or the men and women
and children that’ve got their all in your bank?”
Yet too much may have been made of that. Tansy was honest, and honesty
goes a long way. When he made a statement across his desk in the
bank-block--it mattered not whether it was to the highest or the
humblest--that statement held. And yet, again, in another way, where
would he have been if it hadn’t been for her? People would really have
forgotten that he was alive.
Tansy had turned out a silent and unsociable man. He never went to the
post-office; his mail came to the bank. From there home he took the
back way; that was about the only place, except church, you’d ever see
him, and then half the time he wouldn’t see you, walking as he did with
his eyes on the ground, studying.
A silent man is a wise one: that’s common knowledge. Tansy ought to
have been Selectman. Yet he never was. It hurt Elsie. Fall after fall,
as town meeting came and passed, and somehow or other Tansy’s name
wasn’t mentioned, it got deeper and deeper under her skin. Of course
nobody ever knew. It wasn’t anything you could say anything about. But
it was bitter when she recollected the young Tansy standing at the
bottom of the steps and vowing: “Some day I shall be the biggest man in
this town.”
She never mentioned it directly to her husband. The nearest she came
was when she would plague him: “Why _don’t_ you see more of folks? I
declare, I can’t make you out. What good does it do going to church if
you don’t take a hand in any of the activities? Or in town affairs?
See here now, So-and-so and So-and-so are coming in after supper about
the cake-sale, and I want you to put on your blacks and stay down
awhile--and talk. ’Twouldn’t harm you to crack a joke, even. Be cheery!”
Tansy would change his collar and put on his blacks. He never crossed
his wife; never put _his_ foot down. Never but once. That was when
Elsie, perceiving at last that there was to be no one for the
“children’s room,” and moved by something too vague to say, suggested
they might be more comfortable in the west chamber, after all, as he
himself had said. It was the first time she had ever heard him speak as
he did. “We’ll stay where we are.” And they had stayed.
But so he would freshen up after supper and come down as she bade
him and sit, absent of eye and mind, in a corner of the cake-sale
conference. Ten minutes. Half an hour. Then presently, as things warmed
up, like dew under the heightening sun, he would be found to be not
there. “Studying,” his wife would have to tell them with a sigh. “What
can a body do with a man whose work is never done? Up there in the
dark, from now to bedtime, like as not, studying, studying. You’d never
guess. But I declare if some folks were to work the amount Tansy Snow
does, and take on so blessed little about it-- Well, well. And now,
who’s it arranged shall get the paper for the streamers and festoons?”
So Tansy would sit there, studying. All alone in the “used chamber,”
in the dark, in his shirt-sleeves, in the rocker. Studying, studying.
First, in the early days, he thought it was a sin. It seemed to him
that it must be Satan himself who was putting that lamp in Donna’s
garret on the Stone Fold, night after night after night, to mock him,
around the very corner of the church of God, and beckon him from the
very pillow where he lay beside his wife.
At first he was angry. “The cheek of her!” She knew he was married,
must know it; she had been in town with her father many times; he
had seen their boat. Yes, he had seen _her_--at a distance. Angry
and scared. Anything to escape that ray that poisoned his thoughts,
his dreams! Any room, any window, but that! Angry, scared, and
_fascinated_! That was the worst. Fascinated, so that it ate a hole
in the fabric of his honesty, like a moth-hole, tiny enough to escape
notice, but big enough to let a lie through.
“I’ve to step upstairs and get my slippers, wife dear.”
“You’re tired, Tansy; let me go.”
“No, no, you stay by the fire and read; I’ll be but a moment, dear.”
For a while he was ashamed of himself. He ran to the stairs and started
down if he heard Elsie coming. He felt he ought to make it up to her
somehow, pet her, show himself ten times more fervent than it was in
his nature to be. But that couldn’t last. Nothing that’s not in a man’s
nature can last. What _is_ in his nature will out.
It’s in the nature of islanders to be weather-vanes. As the weather
goes, so do our spirits. There’s none that hasn’t, in some one of his
generations, had a ship. So, even though her husband was a confirmed
shore body, Elsie never thought it anything out of the way that he
should be weather-tender, and show it by fidgeting and prowling on
nights when the fog came and the wind was in the east.
Through the spring and summer of their first year there was prevailing
fair weather, and only rarely a night like that--a blessed one (at
first) when the star on the Stone Fold was blotted out--a torment
(later on) when Tansy was upstairs as much as down, stealing peeps,
dreading, hoping. In September, though, there came a real spell, five
days of it as thick as a hat. In the night of the fourth a lobsterman
named Antony Coral claimed to have seen Mr. Snow of the bank in a dory
in Chalk Ground Slough, toward the Stone Fold--was near to running into
him--fact!
If a tale like that had been let go far it might have harmed a man in
Snow’s position. But it didn’t go far. Before his mates at the dock had
got through guying the credulous “Portugee,” he began to wonder if he
hadn’t been asleep at his oars, after all, and dreaming dreams, and he
never brought it up again.
One thing about that night is certain, however: Tansy wasn’t at home.
Another thing is certain: it was he that was rowing the dory in Chalk
Ground Slough, toward the Stone Fold. And it wasn’t above five minutes
after he had avoided collision with Coral’s lobster-boat that, close
aboard the island beach, he made out finally a disk of warm light the
size of a penny, up in that part of the vapors where Donna’s garret
window ought to be.
That settled it. That made it another thing. Had it been no more than
spite, Donna wouldn’t have wasted oil and wick in weather that would
smother the spark in twenty rods, and never a chance in God’s world
for Tansy to see and suffer. It was something in _her_ made her do it,
then; like an act in some ritual of memory. Turning his boat around, he
rowed for home. What he had found out filled him with a sense of pity.
No, not pity. There was solemnity, tragedy in it, but it wasn’t pity,
nor sorrow.
After that he began to lose his feeling of shame when he made excuses
to slip away upstairs, till he made them no more. He no longer stole
peeps from the window; he sat there brazenly, “studying.” As time
went by, if the good people gathered in Elsie’s parlor--if they could
have seen him at the moment of his escape upstairs--they would never
have known him for Tansy Snow. His face was contorted. He shook his
fist. “----the lot of you, you gabbling, gossiping little parcel of
busybodies, you and your holy little schemes, your little brains! The
devil! What claim have you on _me_?”
But when he had reached the bedroom and found the rocker and sat down
with his back to the bedpost and his sock-feet on the window-sill,
little by little the lines would vanish from his face. Little by
little as he watched the fallen star, or thought of it shining in
secret there, he forgot to hear the busy voices below; he heard the
wind running in gray grasses and the living sound of breakers on
far-strewn reefs and the dry rustle of leaves in a thorn tree. And
what had happened was that he was no longer surrounded by walls and
gables and hemmed in by the thoughts and needs and elbows of hundreds
of industrious little two-legged vegetables; the walls had melted, his
horizon was the horizon of dark ocean, and he walked in space.
And a girl walked with him--no, a woman--no (as time passed), more than
a woman, a kind of goddess, sea-begot, earth-born, the soil of the
mother still carelessly on her, and she the stronger for it, and slow,
as the tides as slow, and generous, as the earth is generous with the
seeds of life, and brooding calm as the sky is, which, knowing nothing,
holds within itself all the generations of them that know all. Her hair
was thick and tangled, because the grass grows so; eyes heavy, because
they looked at things far off; hands large, because the blood that fed
them was warm; and her words little words, because only little words
can stay in the wind that blows from the caverns among the stars.
“The gray ewe dropped twins in that brush-patch. That’s a good ewe.”
And Tansy could imagine his own words as simple. “Yes, a good ewe.”
“I like the feel of the wind, like tonight; there’s rain to come. I
like it to blow under my hair, the same as kisses. I love kisses.”
“I love to kiss you. I love to be with you with nothing but water
roundabout and nothing but stars above, and all on earth asleep, hushed
up.”
“They’re awake in China, though, for the world’s round like a ball.”
“Most folks know the world’s round, yet they think it’s flat. I love
that in you, Donna; you can _feel_ it, you can _see_ it being round
like a ball. And you can see the stars being round like balls as big as
suns, to shine hot on other worlds where there were sheep and people
living and having twins and dead under the grass a million centuries
before Adam and Eve--and never a thought in all their races whether it
should be a thousand or twelve hundred on the Dee Nickerson house, or
something useful like aprons or something tasty like doilies at the
Dorcas meeting next Tuesday week. You see it. You feel it.”
“Yes, Tansy, I see it. I feel it.”
“You and I. I love you. And here we are at the tree.”
Nor could he any longer, caught in the net of fantasy, recognize the
thing as sin. _There’s_ revenge for you. To have grown to be a man who
didn’t know right from wrong. Tansy, whose honesty was his strength!
After all, he wasn’t a man; he was two men. It was the other that
became president of the bank, director in both the new freezers, and
owner of considerable property in the town. No one knew his duplicity.
How was it possible? Certainly, after living with him ten years, his
wife didn’t know. Donna herself, who might have guessed, might have
wished, even Donna couldn’t _know_. He could assure himself there
was no one. So he had forgotten what had happened that night in the
wagon-shed behind the church (and almost under his window now). He had
forgotten God, who never forgets.
But God moves in a mysterious way. It was a mystery to all “what it
was bit Tansy” in his thirty-sixth year. There he was one week, a
bit stoop-shouldered perhaps, but wiry for all that and going his
way. Honest Tansy, who ought to have been Selectman--and why didn’t
_some_body ever put him up? And there he was the next week, and talk of
galloping consumption. Or Bright’s disease. Or what?
They couldn’t have got it out of him; he was too close of mouth. Nor
dig and delve as they would they couldn’t get it out of Mrs. Snow.
She didn’t know; that’s why. He sleeps poorly; that’s about all she
could say. He would toss, his head as restless on the pillow as if it
wore a crown of thorns. Once when he thought her asleep he got up and
went into the spare chamber. From the hall where she had stolen she
saw him with a candle staring at his own face in the bureau glass.
The night-puffed face, the thinning hair, the stooped shoulders--in
the mirrored eyes there was the look of a soul in hell, self-pity,
self-hate, self-mockery.
Elsie was worried in earnest. When, without warning, a day or so later,
he announced: “We’ll try the west room a spell for a change,” she was
quick to humor him. Yet it came to nothing. Before she had so much as a
bedsheet shifted, there he was back, bareheaded: “Let it be as ’twas.”
Here are the facts. Tansy oughtn’t to have gone near the docks. For
years he had kept clear of them, by instinct more than by reason. Now
the mysterious way God took was to make him careless. It was a bright
and innocent morning anyway; insurance was wanted on a big yawl; it’s
better to see a risk with your own eyes than to go by hearsay. (If you
can see the risk.)
Alongside the yawl three single-handers were lying, the men in them
sorting their last night’s catch; lusty, brawny young fellows, a
pleasure to the eye with their deep color and their flashing grins
(more pleasure to the eye than a banker in a night-shirt before a
looking-glass). And their voices, in the clear of the morning, were gay
and strong.
Five years later Tansy could have repeated every syllable of every word:
“Looks o’ that catch o’ yourn there, Eddie, you didn’t set no very
likely place last night, did ye?”
“Aw, leave Eddie be, Sam. Didn’t ye hear the terrible thing? Got a good
fare o’ haddock, Eddie did, only he had to heave the best part away.
Turn out to be moth-millers when he come to look. Whatcha make o’ that?”
“Laugh, you fellows; I like to hear ye. But if ye really want to know
who _’twas_ fishin’ the Stone Fold las’ night, don’t ask me; ask
Codhead Collins; he’s the boy’ll know.”
“All right, all right, don’t jump so. All reminded me was, I was
thinking I noted a new little face on the beach over there when I come
by the old girl’s last week. And a new batch o’ wash on the line.”
“Godfrey! How many’s that she’s got now?”
“Don’t ask me; I ain’t the only dory in the fleet.”
It wasn’t consumption; Tansy didn’t cough. Nor Bright’s disease; it
didn’t act that way. The doctor said it was just insomnia, and it came
from too much work. Human flesh can’t stand studying at a desk the
livelong day and then in a bedroom rocker half the night. He advised,
and Elsie insisted, that Tansy ease up, go off somewhere, and take a
holiday.
“No, I’ll just see it through,” was all Tansy would say.
When he said that morning: “We’ll try the west room a spell,” it was a
confession of rout. Once away from that window he might forget; that’s
how he figured it. He hadn’t yet got it through his head that God
never forgets. At the bank, who should be waiting to see him but two
of those trawlmen, Eddie and Sam. It was something about a loan; Tansy
hardly knew; the business was done mechanically; the whole sudden thing
_he_ saw was that he wasn’t to be let escape; that God had sent those
wind-browned lusty young fellows as a sign and reminder that by no
hiding of his eyes was he to be let forget. He faced it.
When the emissaries were gone he got down on his elbows on his desk
and looked at his conscience, and he saw that in all those years of
letting his imagination run to that island, instead of keeping it home
of nights where it belonged, he had been doing a sinful thing. Now for
atonement he was given a cross to bear. In the long run, unless he bore
it without flinching, the failure would find him out. It was then,
forgetting his hat, he ran home to Elsie with his “Let it be as ’twas.”
“As ’twas!” The irony! As though it could be any nearer to what it had
been than heaven is to hell.
He tried never to flinch. Shirt-sleeves and sock-feet, “as ’twas,” he
sat there whole evenings through. No longer did he stride across the
wind-blown grass with Donna by his side. He ran at a crouch under cover
of the brush-patches, peeping, spying. Or he lay hidden as near as he
dared to the thorn tree, holding his breath and listening--to youth.
Almost as bad as the jealousy was the shame. Beginning by boasting he
would be the biggest man in town, he had ended by being the least in a
shady brotherhood, the scummiest of the scum of the waterfront.
Sometimes he had to flinch a little; sometimes, revoking the image of
the goddess he had created, he would rail at them. And now his “_I was
the first!_” was the whine of a whip, and he had to grovel:
“Lord, when I have borne enough, in Thy mercy take it away.”
There came a time when it seemed it was to be taken away. Mercy’s
instrument was Austin Dow, the proprietor of the Seaside Lunch
that came with the steamer, along with other changes, when the old
packet-schooner gave up. More and more excursionists were coming for
the day’s sail from Gillyport, with an hour ashore at noon, and Dow
got to thinking he’d have a sign put on his roof, a big fellow, one
you could read from the harbor coming in, with “SHORE DINNERS OUR
SPECIALTY” in letters five feet high. And he wanted a license from the
town.
It came up in special meeting in January, and it made a stir. There
were forward-looking people who realized that times had changed, and
they spoke in favor. There were just as many against it, though not
quite so apt at saying why; anyway, it would be an eyesore to the
worshipers coming out of Center Church, that monstrosity on a roof
across the street. And then a man got up in the back of the hall and
asked permission to speak.
The man was Tansy Snow. If it had been George True, the town dummy,
folks wouldn’t have been struck so dead. And that was only the
beginning. From the first the thing that had made it look as though Dow
might get the vote was that it was the business men that were with him;
it was the sentimental old ladies (male and female) that were against.
And now to hear Banker Snow, the busiest business man of them all, the
dried-up human calculator, the man with no sentiment, no romance, no
imagination beyond set-down-five-and-carry-two--to see him standing
there like a born revivalist--and to hear him carrying on--diving back
into history and coming up again--his face running sweat and his eyes
as big as quarters with earnestness--reciting the beauty and dignity
and grandeur of our island metropolis--recalling the impressions of his
boyhood, the simple nobility of that shore-street sky-line, as great
epochs had builded it slowly--and then taking the proposed sign-board
as a symbol of all the ills the mainland suffers from, making bigness
an idol, bustle a religion, the dollar a god to trample them in the
dust--it was too much for the town meeting. When it came to a vote,
there wasn’t a voice for the lunchroom: Dow was too done up even to
lift his own.
No one was more amazed than Elsie Snow, or more thrilled. If Tansy
didn’t fathom what he had done, or what was to follow, she did. As she
took him out and home through the streets where people lingered she
held him by the arm, “the biggest man in town”; you couldn’t fool Elsie
Snow.
When they had undressed and she had blown out the light and gone
to lift the window, she stood for a moment dreaming down at Dow’s
lunchroom on the shore, bright in the moonlight in the bottom of the
crevice between the Nickerson house and the corner of the church,
and, “By gracious,” she mused, “it never till this instant occurred
to me, but it would’ve cut off half our one and only sea-view, that
monstrosity of his.”
No, there was one more amazed than Elsie.
Staring out through the moonlight, and through the darkness when the
moon had set, Tansy Snow was wondering:
“Why in the name of the Eternal did I do that?”
Elsie was right about consequences. The town waked up and rubbed its
eyes. Tansy Snow had pulled the wool over them for a couple of decades,
but he couldn’t do it any more. From the minute he sat down after his
speech in meeting there wasn’t a question in anybody’s mind but what
he’d be chosen Selectman the coming autumn, in place of John Matheson,
who was “getting through.” If he’d take it, that is.
What a question! As we used to say: “Will a duck swim?” And yet very
presently here was Elsie Snow going around with another kind of smile
and another and mysterious light in her eye. She was a wonder, Elsie
was.
How did she get wind of it? you’ll ask. But you must remember that,
what with being chairman of this, manager of that, and corresponding
secretary of the other, the banker’s wife had in her hands the ends of
more underground wires than any dozen in Urkey, and under-water wires
too, tapping the gossip of all the towns and precincts the length of
the Cape. And wise in politics, she knew that two and two, coming at
the right time and at all dramatic, are apt to make nearer forty than
four. And she knew that there is a tide in the affairs of men. And she
knew that it never rains but it pours.
She could hear them at Gillyport: “Well, they say Honest Tansy Snow
opened up his mouth at last, and the man’s a spellbinder; vow he is.”
And at Barnstable: “They knew him, and they knew he meant it; he ain’t
the kind to spout for spoutin’ sake, Banker Snow ain’t. And they do say
there was a good many noses blowed there toward the end.”
But Elsie knew more than that. Piecing it together in her astute mind,
from a hint here, an allusion there, a slip of somebody’s tongue or
pen, she knew a thing that only three men in the Congressional District
happened yet to know. And this was that “the party,” what with the
chill of old blood and the heat of bad blood, was secretly in a bad
way indeed; that it wanted a doctor, and wanted one quickly--with the
autumn elections coming forward, and a member of Congress to be sent to
Washington. No veteran; no silver-trumpeting old war-horse. No, a new
name, a fresh fame, a clean slate.
“And where, oh, where,” thought Elsie, “where will the lightning
strike?”
Selectman? Selectman of a village? That was why she smiled. Since
Barlow Atkins left Congress in 1884 people in Urkey had almost
forgotten that an islander could sit under the dome in Washington. “The
biggest man in this town.” She remembered the young Tansy standing up
straight in London Lane. Well, she’d see.
One afternoon in mid-July the Knights came over in the steamer _Senator
Bates_ for their annual “time,” a clambake at Blue Goat Cove in the
evening and the sail back home by moonlight later on. When they had
marched the length of the shore street behind their band and got a
start for the cove, they took half the population with them, but they
left three of their own number behind.
The sail was all right for these three, but they weren’t much on
clambakes. They’d rather loaf around the old town, looking at the
houses. Perhaps they were interested in architecture. Or perhaps it
was lightning-rods. They were Mr. Claude Byram of Gillyport, Captain
Charlie Slocum of Barnstable, and ex-Senator Bates himself, and they
were the three men in the district who knew what Elsie knew. As
they strolled they talked. They talked about Henry Poor, the young
lawyer in Provincetown, who, unheard of a year ago, had just won the
Province-land suit for the Commonwealth. They talked of the new man who
was making such a name for himself as head of the Highmarket Academy--a
scholar--no taint of politics there. And once or twice, lingering
near the end of the Brick Walk, “Well, here’s where _he_ lives,” they
temporized. “What do we say?”
But they couldn’t seem quite to say. They had to talk it all over
again. Six o’clock passed. They had a snack at Dow’s place, and then it
was seven, and then it was eight. Elsie Snow wasn’t the woman to wait
forever. It was in the drug store, where they had stopped for cigars,
that she brought them to earth.
“Captain Slocum, as I live! And _Mr._ Byram! And--_not_ Senator
_Bates_! Well, I declare, who’d have thought to find _you_ drifting
around our little town, and without a soul to manage for you? I give
you my word----”
She gave them her word it was an outrage, and that even if there wasn’t
a committee of welcome, there was a home that would be honored by their
presence, and a fresh lemon layer-cake, and a drop of rhubarb wine, put
down the year she and Tansy were married. And Tansy _would_ be tickled.
It seemed providential; seemed to help to clear their minds. When they
had arrived, most easily, most pleasantly, at the foot of the Snow
steps, they slackened pace and let their hostess go on in ahead.
She made it simple for them. “I’ll run on and see Tansy’s fit to be
looked at; he’s that much of a home body, he’s probably in slippers
now.”
“I guess, Mrs. Snow,” the Senator called after her, spokesman for the
three, “I guess you can tell Snow _we’ll_ be tickled to see _him_.”
All the woman could think, and that over and over, was, “This is the
greatest day in Urkey’s history.”
Tansy, hearing voices, was half-way upstairs. She bustled him up the
other half, the news on her tongue, but then it was too enormous to
tell.
“Get into your blacks, and _hurry_,” she bade him; “there’s company.”
As she turned and swept downstairs again to put the company at its ease
with ash-trays and cake and rhubarb wine, the chosen of fortune felt
along the wall for the chamber door; with a sigh. Why wouldn’t people
let him be?
Once inside, he started toward the window, of habit a quarter-century
old. Then he remembered he was to hurry. Company. Who? Why had there
been that note in her voice? Perhaps at last it was somebody about the
autumn meeting and the Selectmanship. Oh, Tansy knew. He never let on,
but he wasn’t a fool And he wanted it--as he’d never wanted anything.
Why? For the name? Yes, in a way. More than anything in life, he wanted
to be able to go to that window and throw back the taunt of that
leering eye of light.
“Yah! Take a look at me--the man that’s trusted above all others!
Selectman! The biggest man in this island and this town! You, and your
‘moth-millers,’ your dirty, filthy nobodies, look at me! Yah!”
But he had been told to hurry. In that funny way--hurry! It was the
Selectmanship! As good as done already. Because he had been an upright
citizen and an honest man. Here he was at the window, after all.
It wasn’t a “Yah!” It wasn’t a sound, nothing formed, just a formless
outlashing of a life that was tired in secret; secretly, prematurely
old. Then, as he looked again, he lifted a hand and drew it across his
eyes.
“Fog coming in. Won’t have much of a moonlight sail, that crowd.”
He removed his hand and stared. There was no fog. The sky was as clear
as glass and full of stars. He put his other hand on the bedpost. The
bedpost was solid, anyway.
“Good God! What’s--wh-what’s happened? What’s wrong?”
Elsie couldn’t keep them occupied forever, even with cake and rhubarb
wine. Minutes are minutes to such men. When fifteen had passed, and
Slocum had looked at his watch twice, she went to the stairs and
called. Then, laughing, “What would you do with such a man?” she
marched up to find him. The bedroom was dark, and he wasn’t there. She
went to the spare chamber, to the west chamber, down the back way to
the kitchen. She returned to their bedroom; he _must_ be there.
She felt on the bed, the chair; she stood staring out of the window.
She shut her eyes and opened them again. A curious uneasiness, having
nothing to do with the company downstairs, seemed to lay hold of her.
“Fog,” she said to herself.
She turned around. What was the matter with this room tonight? Why
was everything so--so--so wrong--so lost--so funny? She touched the
bedpost. It was solid enough. She glanced toward the window again.
She laughed. She saw what was wrong, and it was ridiculous. For two
dozen years, without knowing it, she had depended on seeing a light
there when the weather was clear. When it was thick, there was no
light; no light, it must be thick. And here it was clear, and no light.
Absurd, but it had given her the jumps.
That shows what habit is.
Rid of the spell, she remembered what she was about. Her lips whiter
and whiter with anger, running on frantic tip-toe, she searched the
house.
Coming through the parlor she was all cheer. “Tansy’ll be down
directly,” she promised them, and, slipping out of the door, she was
gone.
Time passed. Once or twice they heard a voice calling “Tansy! Tansy!”
off in the distance, among the houses and lanes.
They got to talking. “You can’t tell me this fellow Poor hasn’t made
a big impression, especially down-Cape.” “Yes, but he’s a lawyer, and
that means politician to lots of people. Now this man McDowell over at
the Academy----”
When Mrs. Snow reappeared it was awkward. They didn’t want to seem to
run, but there was a man Byram ought to see, and there was the boat.
They got out backward, Slocum saying: “We’re right sorry not to have
seen Snow,” and the old Senator adding a word of kindness: “The talk’s
been up our way that your husband’s slated for the next Selectman over
here. I’m glad of that; he ought to make a good one, from all I hear.”
Elsie stood staring at the closed door when they were gone.
“Selectman!” she whispered. “_Selectman!_”
All the poison of all the years came pouring out. “I’ll _see_ him
Selectman! I’d kill myself first! He shall stay a stick till the day of
his death, he shall. A dumb, stupid stick--stick-in-the-mud! _Ohhhh!_”
In the kitchen of the house on the Stone Fold they were playing pachisi
down on the floor. The board was an old one, held together with
court-plaster; most of the men were buttons, and there were only two
dice left. Despite these defects, however; despite the two youngest,
two babies, creeping in continually and grabbing and getting slapped;
and despite the paralytic old shepherd in the chair behind the towel
rack, who wanted attending to now and then--despite these handicaps
they played with a quiet concentration, watching each the moves of all
the others, alert for cheating, a gamin shrewdness in the eyes narrowed
under the forelocks of tangled hair. It was an old game with them; yet
tonight there was something new about it; as new as though it had been
another game altogether, or the same game transported to heaven, where
all is light.
“Better’n that old lantern!”
“Better’n two lanterns!”
“Better’n _ten_ lanterns!”
So, from time to time, between moves, carried away afresh by
realization, they joined and gloated.
“Better’n a _hundred_ lanterns!”
The dogs were barking outside. An old one from under the stove sniffed
toward the door, bristling. The players paid no attention, but the
grandfather began to screech at the top of his lungs: “Shan’t have it!
Shan’t! Ain’t nobody no decency? With _her_ there? Etta, you tell ’em
go way. It’s an unholy sin--comin’ round a night like tonight--that’s
what it is! Etta!”
“Shut your face!” Etta threw at him as, without haste, she got up from
the floor. She was a woman of twenty-odd, the mother of one of the
infants underfoot. “Remember, you, it’s my next move!” she threatened
the others; then again to the old man: “Won’t you shut up, f’ gracious
sake!” and finally to the door: “Well, well, ’tain’t locked, is it?
_Come in!_”
The door opened. Those on the floor sat up straight. Etta retreated a
step, taken aback to see a stranger.
“What d’y’ want?” she muttered.
The man kept standing there, staring at her; staring at her squat,
strong-muscled figure, her lowering face, her hair, thick and matted
about her head, the color of unwashed brown sheep. She didn’t like it.
“Who are ye, and what d’y’ want? Y’ dumb?”
But the old shepherd began to screech now: “_I_ know ’im! I seen ’im
many’s the time over to the village. I see ye, Mr. Snow. I know ye
well, Banker Snow. Well, I vow! Draw out a chair for Mr. Snow, Etta.
Florry! Frank! Scabby! What a parcel o’ dummies! Git a chair for Banker
Snow.”
“What d’y’ want?” Etta persisted, unmoved.
Snow lifted a hand and passed it down over his face, which looked drawn
and moist. Like a man talking in his sleep, he asked: “What’s wrong
with Donna?”
That seemed to loosen all tongues at once. The kitchen was as full of
voices, of a sudden, as it was of the yellow glare.
“Donna’s dead.”
“Donna’s in there; wanta see ’er?”
“Ma went sick and she got worse and died off.”
“Donna ain’t boss no longer, she ain’t.”
“We got the lamp down.”
“We gone and got the lamp on ’er now, for _all_ ’er.”
“At last we got the lamp.”
Snow seemed to see the lamp for the first time. Like a man walking in
his sleep he went to look at it. It was worth looking at. It stood on
its own stand, a good four feet high; its finely swelled reservoir
had variegated chasings of brass and nickel all over it; it had an
extra-size chimney without a nick, and two wicks, one within the other.
A lamp for any parlor in the world. All the parts that could be rubbed
were as bright as a new one in the store. It had been looked after,
like new; the price-tag, even, had never been taken off. It hung from
the stem of the regulator, and the mark was still legible on it amongst
the spotting of flies. Tansy read it.
“$6.”
Some folks have a God of Mercy. And some have a terrible God.