|THE School-teacher had been helping the miller.
He had taken the shirts which she had offered to him, but he had refused
to put upon her the labor of making up the big piece of linen that
remained.
“Keep it,” he said, “until I need it.” All of Saturday he had been at
work mending the wooden water wheel. In the evening he set out to return
to Nicholas Parks' house. He took the short way up the mountain. When
he came out on the great hickory ridge, the sun was not yet down. He
stopped where the path entered the two roads, one turning along the
ridge to his house, the other winding down the mountain, eastward,
toward the far-off lumber mills, sometimes faintly to be indicated by a
tiny wisp of smoke on the horizon.
There had been a gentle rain, and now under the soft evening sun the
earth seemed to recover something of the virility of springtime, as
though the impulse of life waning in the autumn were about to reconquer
its dominion. Here and there, in the moist earth, a little flower crept
out, as though tricked into the belief that it was springtime--a white
strawberry, a tiny violet.
The sap seemed about to move under the bark of the beech trees, the buds
to issue from the twigs.
In the forest the wren and the catbirds fluttered as under a nesting
instinct, the gray squirrels fled around the rough shellbark trees and
from one tree top to another, far off a pheasant drummed, and farther
off a mountain bull lowed as he wandered through the forest.
The road descending the mountain was decked out in color, banked along
its border with the poison ivy and the Virginia creeper, now a mass of
scarlet. Above the beech and hickory leaves were yellow, the clay of the
road below was yellow, and the soft sunlight entered and fused the edges
of these colors. The forest for this hour took on the ripe expectancy of
springtime.
The School-teacher stood where the path emerged from the forest
Presently from below him, beyond the turn of the road, a voice arose,
a voice full, rich and sensuous--a woman's voice singing a song. It
carried through the forest, swaggering, defiant melody. The words could
not be determined. Indeed, there seemed to be no words. The song was a
thing of sounds--of tropical, sensuous sounds. As though all the love
calls of the creatures of the forest had been fused into one great,
barbaric symphony.
A moment later the singer came into view.
She was a young, buxom woman, and she walked, singing, in the middle
of the road, with a defiant swagger. Her hair was heavy and yellow like
wheat straw. Her lips, colored purple from the wild grapes which she had
been eating, were full, the under one drooping a little at the middle.
Her face was whitened with a cheap powder to be had at the village
store. Her bodice and her petticoat were of bright vivid colors. There
was a crimson handkerchief tied around her neck, a cheap glittering
bangle on her wrist, heavy, gilded earrings hanging in the lobes of
her ears, and at her throat a breastpin of jet set in a lattice work of
brass.
The School-teacher remained motionless. He watched the woman approaching
in the middle of the road, her body swinging loose in her swaggering
stride, and the full volume of her voice abandoned to her song.
She was halfway up the bend of the road before she realized that another
was within sound of her voice. Then she saw the School-teacher and
stopped.
The song ceased.
Her head went up and her eyes opened wide. She remained as though the
power to move had been on the instant stricken out of her. Her foot
advanced, her heel lifted, her mouth shaped to sing. Then, slowly, her
face changed to an expression of profound astonishment.
The School-teacher did not speak. He did not move. The sun descending
behind him slowly crept up the road to his feet, as though, bidden to
withdraw from the world, it were loath to leave him.
The woman's face again changed. It became troubled. She moved now a few
steps closer, softly, on tiptoe. Then, suddenly, with a swift gesture,
she covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. Her body shook
as with a convulsion. The tears streamed through her fingers.
Until now the School-teacher had not moved. Now he came slowly along the
road to where she stood. As he approached, the woman sank down huddled
together, her face covered, her bosom heaving, her hands wet. He stood
before her in the road looking down at the bowed head.
“Poor child!” he said.
The woman continued to sob. The eyes of the School-teacher deepened with
a profound sorrow. He stooped over to put his hand on the coarse yellow
hair, redolent with a cheap perfume. But before the descending fingers
touched her, the woman sprang up and flew like a wild thing into the
forest.
The sun was now gone.
The tropical colors of the leaves, the vines, the yellow earth, departed
with it. The gray twilight began to descend. The School-teacher walked
slowly to the top of the ridge, and returned along the little meadow to
Nicholas Parks' house. As he approached he saw a figure moving off down
the mountain along the rail fence.
When he came to the house he stopped.
There was a paper tacked on the door. He looked at it for a moment, but
he did not touch it. The four corners of the paper were doubled under
and a tack at each end held it. He pulled the worn leather string,
lifted the wooden latch and went in, leaving the paper fastened to the
door.
The night had descended.
The house was dark. But when he entered it, on the instant, as though
the opening of the door had made a draft through the fireplace, a log
smoldering shot up a red flame that illumined the house.
The School-teacher went over to a table that stood by the wall.
On this table were a homemade cheese and the half of a loaf of bread.
Beside them was a knife with a wooden handle and a thick china plate
chipped at the rim. Before this table was a hickory chair, the seat of
roughly plaited bark. The School-teacher sat down and ate his supper.
Everything in this house remained as Nicholas Parks had left it.
This chair, this table, a larger hickory chair with arms and a ragged
cushion by the fireplace, a fourpost bed in the corner covered with a
patchwork quilt. When Nicholas Parks died there had been, as now, a log
on the fire, a cheese and a loaf of bread on the table.
There were, however, now on this table, before the School-teacher, some
objects that had not been there. There was a little worn, broken toy
that had once been a wooden horse; there was a top whittled out of a
spool with a hickory pin through it. There was a Barlow knife with an
iron handle, the blade broken at the point; there was a brass ring tied
to a cotton rib-hon; and there were little bunches of wild flowers, the
stems of which were primly wrapped with black thread. These were laid
out on the table beyond the cheese and the loaf. And before he sat down
to eat, the School-teacher touched them.
When he had finished his supper, the
School-teacher went over to the fireplace and sat down in the armchair.
He sat beside the hearth where he could see the doer. He remained for a
long time without moving, except now and then he looked toward the
door, and when there came to him any sound from the night outside, he
listened.
The night advanced. He remained in in the chair before the fire. The
log continued to burn among the ashes in the fireplace. But it no longer
flamed. It burned with a deep crimson glow that flooded the hair, the
face, the hands of the School-teacher. The glow thus reflected seemed to
take on a deeper crimson.
It became like the crimson of blood.
The School-teacher hardly ever moved except to raise his head to listen,
but he was not asleep; there was no sleep in him. The glow of the
smoldering log, changing on his face, gave it an expression of agony.
The night continued to advance; the hours passed. The vagrant sounds of
the world outside ceased. The profound silence of midnight arrived and
passed. The temperature changed.
But the School-teacher did not go to bed.
He sat in the fantastic glow of the fire, with its agony on him. Now
and then, when the playing of the light seemed to convulse his
features--seemed to distort them with a deeper agony, he turned his face
toward the table standing along the wall, near the door, and his eyes
rested on the broken toy horse, the top, the Barlow knife, the ring and
little hunches of flowers; and turned thus out of the glow of the fire,
his features no longer presented the aspect of agony. Moreover, when
his head was turned like that, the glow of the fire, that had been thus
distorting his face, passed by him and streamed over the objects on the
table, bringing them into vivid contrast with every other object in the
room.
The body of the night passed.
The morning began to arrive. And still the School-teacher waited. No
one came. The room was profoundly silent. The breath of the morning
entering, distilled a faint perfume out of the little bunches of wild
flowers, a vague odor that arose and sweetened the room. The night was
dead. The day was beginning to be born. Then it was that the one for
whom the School-teacher waited finally came.
There was a faint sound outside, as though one approached walking softly
on the grass, as though a hand passed gently along the door.
The School-teacher rose.
The latch of the door moved, the door turned noiselessly on its hinges,
and the woman who had fled from the Schoolteacher into the forest
entered.
The whole aspect of the woman was changed.
The purple stains on her mouth, the powder on her face, were gone.
Her hair, too, had been cleansed of its cheap scent. It clung in damp
strands about her face. The swagger, the defiance, the loud notes and
color had gone out of her. And that which remained after these things
were gone, now alone existed--as though the whole fabric of the woman
had been washed with water. The woman put her hand swiftly to her face,
to her hair; she caught her breath.
“Oh!” she said, “I thought you were asleep.”
The School-teacher's voice was incomparably gentle.
“No,” he said, “I have been waiting for you.”
“Then you thought I would come?”
“I knew that you would come.”
“I had to come,” she said. “I could not go back to--to--the other!”
“No,” he said, “you never could go back to that.”
“An'--an'--I had nowhere else to go.”
“I know that,” replied the Schoolteacher, “there is no place that you
could go, except to me.”