“What hap-pen-ed ...”
“Please,” said John. “Please don’t. You make my blood run cold.”
“She’s that way ever since,” said Thane, with an air of sharing his
misery.
“Then you tell me,” said John.
“I carried her home,” said Thane, now weary of telling it, “from where
she got hurt between me an’ the Cornishman knocking ourselves around in
the path, an’ old Enoch he got a wicked notion as I don’t know what an’
sent for the preacher an’ we was married. Then he handed me the blue
ticket an’ put us out of the house.”
John turned to Agnes with a question on his tongue. She anticipated him
and began to sing:--
“What hap-pen-ed ...”
As he shuddered and turned away again she stopped.
“I was coming for my street clothes to where I live,” continued Thane,
“being as I was all that time in my puddling rig an’ we got bogged
here like you see us now. Nothing I say let’s do will move her. And
when I say all right, what does she want, she chanties about me, making
them up out of nothing.”
“When they get like that,” said John, “you have to use force. You’ve
got to pick them up.”
“Can’t work it,” said Thane.
“Why not? Does she bite?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Can’t work it,” said Thane. “Not since,” he added.
“The subject of this clinic is conscious,” said Agnes, pleasantly.
They paid no attention to her.
“You board, don’t you? You were not intending to take her there?” said
John.
“Only so as to get my clothes,” said Thane.
“We can’t do anything until you get your clothes,” said John. “That’s
plain. I’ll stay here with her while you go for them. But don’t be
long. Then maybe we can think of something to do.”
Thane went off at once with a tremendous sigh of relief in the feeling
of action. His feet made a cavernous _tlump, tlump, tlump_-ing on the
hard dirt road. John, who stood regarding Agnes from the side of the
road, was sure he saw her shudder. Then from the heedless tone with
which she broke the silence he was sure he had been mistaken.
“It seems you know my husband,” she said.
He was surprised that she had no difficulty with the word, though it
must have been the first time she had ever used it in the possessive
sense--and in such circumstances!
“Can’t you think of anything feasible to do?” John asked.
“Do you like him?” she inquired.
“Because if you can’t,” said John, “I can. It’s too much for Thane.
That isn’t fair.”
He supposed she was thinking. To his disgust she began to sing, softly,
tunefully:
“Lovely maiden, tell me truly,
Is the ocean very wet?
If I meet you on the bottom,
Will you never once----”
“Stop it!” He moved as if to menace her. She stopped and looked at him
soberly.
“Is there nothing I can do to entertain you? I might recite. And you
haven’t answered my question.”
“You give me the horrors,” he blurted. “No, no I’m sorry. I’m unstrung,
that’s all. Please do be serious. We’ve got to think of what we shall
do.”
“Who are we?”
“I beg your pardon. You, then,” he amended.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Agnes, do for....”
“Mrs. Thane, please.”
“I don’t expect you to be amiable,” he said, “but please for one moment
be reasonable.”
“When they are like that you can’t do anything with them,” she said.
“Really you can’t. You will have to see my husband.”
She had seated herself on a grassy bench with her back to the fence,
her feet in the dry ditch, and was viciously jabbing the earth with a
limber stick. She threw the stick from her, leaned back, folded her
arms and tilted her chin at the sky, with an air of casting John out of
existence. He had given up trying to talk and stood observing her in
an overt manner. It was thus he saw how she looked at the moon, first
vacantly without seeing it, then with a start as of recognition or
recollection, and at length with an expression of such twisted mocking
wistfulness that he knew one shape of her heart and turned wretchedly
away, almost wishing he had not seen.
For a long time she did not move. She seemed under a kind of spell.
Thane found them so, in separate states of reverie. Neither heard his
footsteps approaching.
“I was thinking why should I bother you like this,” said Thane, “being
though as we are friends in a way. If only it was so as I could touch
something.”
“Thane,” said John, slowly, “listen to what I am thinking. The skeins
of our three lives have run together in a hard knot. Mine and that of
Agnes were already twisted together in a very strange history. Yours
got entangled by chance, heaven knows why. Fate does it. Nobody is to
blame. But I am responsible.”
“For us being married?” asked Thane.
“For that, yes. But for a great deal more. I am only beginning to see
the meaning of things. By inheritance I am responsible for something
my father and mother did to Enoch before I was born, for the fact that
Agnes is his daughter and he is not my father, for the fact that he
is mad. He has had his revenge on Aaron’s son, greater than he knows.
What that means I cannot tell you. I shall never say it again. But what
I want you to see is that I cannot leave you to face the consequences
alone. It is not a matter of friendship. You are married to Agnes. In a
foster sense I am married to both of you.”
His face was lighted from within. He spoke in the absent, anonymous
manner of one undergoing a mystical experience. Something of his mood
entered Thane. With one impulse they had struck hands and now stood
looking deeply into each other’s eyes.
“I don’t know as I see what you mean,” said Thane.
“No,” said John. “You wouldn’t. I’ve confused you, trying to get it all
said at once. There is first the fact that we are friends. My feeling
for you in that way has increased suddenly, I don’t quite know why. And
now, above that, is my sense of responsibility for what has happened.
You must accept my view of that. It shall be understood that I have a
right to stand by and that I may be trusted ... absolutely trusted ...
whatever comes....”
He groped and stopped and seemed to have gone to sleep with his eyes
open.
Thane moved uneasily. John, returning to himself, started slightly and
released Thane’s hand. When he spoke his voice was altered.
“I can’t make it come clear,” he said. “I thought I could.”
“I’ve looked my eyes out that way, too,” said Thane. “Let’s take it as
it is.”
What John at first had so clear a vision of was an act of heroic
self-denial. It thrilled him with momentary ecstasy. That may be
understood. Man is an emotional formation, subject to sudden passions,
one of which is the passion of sacrifice. Blindly on the spot he rears
an altar, lays the wood in order and looks to see what offering hath in
a miraculous manner provided itself to be burnt. Lo! there stands the
one thing most beloved in all the world. The Lord sometimes interferes,
as for Isaac. Sometimes the victim saves itself. Then again the man
draws back. He has not the heart to do it.
John drew back. To conclude the covenant with Thane meant forswearing
Agnes in his heart forever. That was a vow he could neither bring
himself to make nor trust himself to keep. And yet, any secret
reservation seemed treachery to Thane. So there he stood before this
truth of contradiction and “looked his eyes out” at it. How came Thane
to have a thought like that?
Agnes was observing them intently with one elbow on her knee, her chin
in her hand, eyes half closed. She was not thinking. She was verifying
a kind of knowledge that underlies the mind. She knew why John
faltered, why he lost his way toward what he meant to do, what that
was, and why he dropped Thane’s hand. She knew what it was of a sudden
to become a woman and why a woman need never be afraid.
Far away in the sky of her immemorial self, so far that what she saw
of it was but its heat’s reflection, passed a flash of contempt for
those tame, romantic vanities in which now man sublimates the reckless
impulses of his savage egoism. At that instant, too, as it were in the
light of this archaic intuition, there stood upon her memory the figure
of the Cornishman, and she was horribly ashamed.
Nevertheless she continued to feel cynical about the emotional male
principle. It bored her. There was one obvious thing to do. There was
in fact only one thing possible to be done. But apparently neither
Thane nor John was ever going to think of it, or give her a chance to
suggest it without boldly naming it. One might have thought they had
forgotten her existence. They stood in the middle of the road, John
with his back to her, Thane with his eyes in the heavens, sharing a
vast man-silence. She was at the core of that silence; she was all
there was there. That did not interest her at all. She wished to be
somewhere else.
She got up quietly and walked away from them, away from New Damascus,
with a very bad list and limp. They overtook her in four or five steps,
one on each side.
“What’s this way now?” Thane asked.
No answer.
“She isn’t fit to walk,” said John. “Don’t let her do it.”
She looked at Thane; the gesture he was making toward her froze in the
air.
“Take her as you would a nettle, firmly,” John recommended.
“’Tain’t what’s outside I’m afraid of,” said Thane.
Stepping ahead and turning, John confronted her. Thane did the same.
She made to go around them, right. They moved that way. She made to go
around them, left. They moved that way. With a frustrated gesture she
gave it up, turned a tormented profile and made them feel how much she
despised them.
“Mrs. Thane,” said John, “do you wish to leave New Damascus--leave it
now--tonight?”
Agnes turned on him in a sudden rage of exasperation.
“Fly, I suppose! Fly away with a--a--what is he? I forget.”
“Oh, oh,” John groaned.
“What are you?” she said to Thane.
“Puddler,” he answered, with dignity, the look of a hurt animal in his
face.
“It’s very well known,” she said, “puddlers don’t fly. Besides it’s
too late. We’ve stopped to think. We had to take time to change his
clothes. He’s out of a job and has no money. He told me so. I wonder
what the wives of puddlers do.”
“Some would envy you your sting,” said John, horrified at what she was
doing to Thane. She understood him perfectly.
“But you are immune,” she said. “I have not married you. Or have I? Are
you this puddler’s David? What are your rights in him? How come you to
suppose that you have rights in me?”
“Tantrums, thank God, and not hysterics,” said John.
“Shall we spend the rest of the night in this way?” she asked. “And
what then?”
“I am leaving New Damascus tonight,” said John, pursuing a flash of
intuition.
Agnes gave him an incredulous glance.
“So far as I know, forever,” he continued. “This decision is my own.
You have nothing to do with it. But if you were also about to leave,
perhaps taking the same direction, why shouldn’t we go together, as far
as it’s parallel?”
“Who goes or stays, no matter what happens, I shall not be in sight of
New Damascus at daybreak,” said Agnes, her face averted from both John
and her husband, and she spoke as one making a vow. “So, whatever you
do,” she added, “please hurry.”
Thane would have asked her a question, not knowing how women consent;
John restrained him with a sign.
“Then I’ll pick you up here,” he said, setting off abruptly. “And I
won’t be very long.”
When he returned with a smart bay team and a light road wagon, his
own rig, the moon was sinking. Agnes was asleep on the dewy grass in
Thane’s coat. He wrapped her in the rug John held out to him and
lifted her to the seat. She was docile and limp, like a groggy child.
John had to hold her erect until Thane got up on the other side. She
sat between them.
Where the road turns abruptly out of the valley John pulled up and
looked back. It was now quite dark. All that he could see was the mill,
like a live malignant cinder in the eye of darkness, glowing faintly,
going almost out, then spurting forth quick tongues of flame. He had
the sensation of a great solitary weight rolling about in his stomach.
Tears came to his eyes. Until that moment he had not known that he
cared for New Damascus. His caring was like an inherited memory.
And though he knew it not, this night was the time and his exit the
sign that sealed the fate of New Damascus. It was left in the hands of
Enoch, who fanatically withheld it from the steel age.
“Where to?” Thane asked.
“Wilkes-Barre tonight,” said John. “Then to Pittsburgh. I’m buying a
mill at Pittsburgh that I want you to take hold of. We’ll discuss it
tomorrow.”
“What shape of mill?” asked Thane.
John hesitated.
“Nothing like the mill behind us,” he said.
The idea of buying a mill had only that instant come to him. So of
course he did not know what kind of mill it was.
He looked at Agnes. She was sound asleep, leaning on Thane, who had his
arm around her. Again he looked at her. She was in the same position,
but her eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead.