CHAPTER X

AT THE MILL

I

_An Afternoon in the Life of Mr. Neale Crittenden, aet. 38_

May 27.

The stenographer, a pale, thin boy, with a scarred face, and very white

hands, limped over to the manager's desk with a pile of letters to be

signed. "There, Captain Crittenden," he said, pride in his accent.

Neale was surprised and pleased. "All done, Arthur?" He looked over the

work hastily. "Good work, good work." He leaned back, looking up at the

other. "How about it, anyhow, Arthur? Is it going to work out all

right?"

The stenographer looked at him hard and swallowed visibly. "I never

dreamed I'd be fit to do anything I like half so well. I thought when I

was in the hospital that I was done for, for sure. Captain Crittenden,

if you only knew what my mother and I think about what you've done for

. . ."

Neale dodged hastily. "That's all right. That's all right. If you like

it, that's all that's necessary. And I'm not Captain any more."

"I forget, sir," said the other apologetically.

"Can you sit down and take a second batch right now? I want to get

through early. Mrs. Crittenden's going to bring some visitors to see the

place this afternoon, and I'll have to be with them more or less."

He looked at the clock. It was half-past three. Marise had said she

would be there about four. He gave a calculating glance at the stack of

letters. He would never be able to get through those. "We'll have to get

a move on," he remarked. "Things got pretty well piled up while I was

away."

He began to dictate rapidly, steadily, the end of a sentence clearly in

his mind before he pronounced the first word. He liked to dictate and

enjoyed doing it well. The pale young stenographer bent over his

note-book, his disfigured face intent and serious.

"Turned out all right, Arthur has," thought Neale to himself. "I wasn't

so far off, when I thought of the business college for him." Then he

applied himself single-mindedly to his dictation, taking up one letter

after another, with hardly a pause in his voice. But for all his

diligence, he had not come to the bottom of the pile when four o'clock

struck; nor ten minutes later when, glancing out of the window, he saw

Marise and the children with Mr. Bayweather and the two other men coming

across the mill-yard. Evidently Mr. Bayweather had dropped in just as

they were going to start and had come along. He stopped dictating and

looked at the group with a certain interest. Marise and the children had

had a good deal to say yesterday about the newcomers to Crittenden's.

It seemed to him that the impression he had received of them had been as

inaccurate as such second-hand impressions were apt to be. The older man

was just like any elderly business man, for all he could see, nothing so

especially attractive about him, although Marise had said in her ardent

way that he was "the sort of old American you love on sight, the kind

that makes you home-sick when you meet him in Europe." And as for Mr.

Marsh, he couldn't see any signs of his being such a record-breaking

live-wire as they had all said. He walked along quietly enough, and was

evidently as resigned as any of them to letting Mr. Bayweather do all

the talking. On the other hand, none of them had told him what a

striking-looking fellow he was, so tall, and with such a bold carriage

of that round dark head.

"Here they come, Arthur," he remarked. "No more time. But I'll try to

squeeze in a minute or two, while they are here, to finish up these last

ones."

The young man followed the direction of his eyes and nodded. He

continued looking at the advancing group for a moment, and as he stood

up, "You could tell that Mr. Marsh is a millionaire by the way his

clothes fit, couldn't you?" he remarked, turning to go back to his desk

in the outer office.

They were coming down the hall now. Neale went forward to open the door,

met and breasted the wave of children who after hugging casually at his

knees and arms, swept by; and stepped forward to be presented to the

newcomers. They had not crossed the threshold, before his first

impression was reversed in one case. Marsh was a live-wire all right.

Now that he had seen his eyes, he knew what Elly had meant when she said

that when he looked at you it was like lightning.

Mr. Bayweather barely waited for the first greetings to be pronounced

before he burst out, "Do they say, 'backwards and forwards' or 'back and

forth'?"

Neale laughed. Old Bayweather was perennial. "Backwards and forwards, of

course," he said. "English people always say everything the longest

possible way." He explained to the others, "Mr. Bayweather is an

impassioned philologist . . ."

"So I have gathered," commented Marsh.

". . . and whenever any friends of his go on travels, they are always

asked to bring back some philological information about the region where

they go."

He turned to Marise (how sweet she looked in that thin yellow dress).

"Where do you want your personally conducted to begin, dear?" he asked

her. (Lord! How good it seemed to get back to Marise!)

Mr. Bayweather cut in hastily, "If I may be permitted to suggest, I

think a history of the mill would be advisable as a beginning. I will be

glad to tell the newcomers about this. I've just been working the

subject up for a chapter in history of Ashley."

Neale caught an anguished side-glance from Marise and sent back to her a

shrugged message of helplessness in the face of Destiny. The man didn't

live who could head old Bayweather off when he got started on local

history. And besides, this would give him time to get those last three

letters finished. Aloud he said, "I wouldn't dare say a word about

history in Mr. Bayweather's presence. I have a few letters to finish.

I'll just step into the outer office and be ready to start when you've

heard the history lecture." He turned to the children, who were tapping

on the typewriter. "Look here, kids, you'd be better off where you won't

break anything. Get along with you out into the mill-yard and play on

the lumber-piles, why don't you? Paul, you see if you can tell yellow

birch from oak this time!"

He and the children beat a retreat together into the outer office, where

he bent over Arthur's desk and began to dictate in a low voice,

catching, as he did so, an occasional rotund phrase from the

disquisition in the other room. ". . . the glorious spirit of manly

independence of the Green Mountain Boys . . ."

To himself Neale thought, "He'd call it bolshevism if he met it today

. . ."

". . . second building erected in the new settlement, 1766, as a

fort. . . . No, _no_, Mr. Marsh, _not_ against the Indians! Our early

settlers _here_ never had any trouble with the Indians."

Neale laughed to himself at the clergyman's resentment of any ignorance

of any detail of Ashley's unimportant history.

". . . as a fort against the York State men in the land-grant quarrels

with New Hampshire and New York, before the Revolution." Neale, smiling

inwardly, bet himself a nickel that neither of the two strangers had

ever heard of the Vermont land-grant quarrels, and found himself vastly

tickled by the profound silence they kept on the subject. They were

evidently scared to death of starting old Bayweather off on another

line. They were safe enough, if they only knew it. It was inconceivable

to Mr. Bayweather that any grown person should not know all about early

Vermont history.

At this point Marise came out of the office, her face between laughter

and exasperation. She clasped her hands together and said, "Can't you do

_any_thing?"

"In a minute," he told her. "I'll just finish these two letters and then

I'll go and break him off short."

Marise went on to the accountant's desk, to ask about his wife, who sang

in her winter chorus.

He dictated rapidly: "No more contracts will go out to you if this

stripping of the mountain-land continues. Our original contract has in

it the clause which I always insist on, that trees smaller than six

inches through the butt shall not be cut. You will please give your

choppers definite orders on this point, and understand that logs under

the specified size will not be accepted at the mill." He held out to the

stenographer the letter he was answering. "Here, Arthur, copy the name

and address off this. It's one of those French-Canadian names, hard to

spell if you don't see it."

He paused an instant to hear how far Mr. Bayweather had progressed, and

heard him saying, "In the decade from 1850 on, there was a terrible and

scandalous devastation of the mountain-land . . ." and said to himself,

"Halfway through the century. I'll have time to go on a while. All

ready, Arthur." He dictated: "On birch brush-backs of the model

specified, we can furnish you any number up to . . ." He wound his way

swiftly and surely through a maze of figures and specifications without

consulting a paper or record, and drawing breath at the end, heard Mr.

Bayweather pronouncing his own name. ". . . Mr. Crittenden has taught us

all a great deal about the economic aspects of a situation with which we

had had years of more familiarity than he. His idea is that this

mountainous part of New England is really not fit for agriculture.

Farming in the usual sense has been a losing venture ever since the

Civil War high prices for wool ceased. Only the bottoms of the valleys

are fit for crops. Most of our county is essentially forest-land. And

his idea of the proper use to make of it, is to have a smallish

industrial population engaged in wood-working, who would use the bits of

arable land in the valleys as gardens to raise their own food. He has

almost entirely reorganized the life of our valley, along these lines,

and I daresay he cannot at all realize himself the prodigious change

from hopelessness and slow death to energy and forward-looking activity

which his intelligent grasp of the situation has brought to this corner

of the earth."

The young stenographer had heard this too, and had caught the frown of

annoyance which the personal reference brought to Neale's forehead. He

leaned forward and said earnestly, "It's so, Captain . . . Mr. Crittenden.

It's _so_!"

Mr. Bayweather went on, "There is enough wood in the forests within

reach of the mill to keep a moderate-sized wood-working factory going

indefinitely, cutting by rotation and taking care to leave enough trees

for natural reforestration. But of course that has not been the American

way of going at things. Instead of that steady, continuous use of the

woods, which Mr. Crittenden has shown to be possible, furnishing good,

well-paid work at home for the men who would be otherwise forced off

into cities, our poor mountains have been lumbered every generation or

so, on an immense, murderous, slashing scale, to make a big sum of money

for somebody in one operation. When old Mr. Burton Crittenden's nephew

came to town it was a different story. Mr. Neale Crittenden's ideal of

the lumber business is, as I conceive it, as much a service to mankind

as a doctor's is."

Neale winced, and shook his head impatiently. How ministers did put the

Sunday-school rubber-stamp on everything they talked about--even

legitimate business.

"And as Mrs. Crittenden's free-handed generosity with her musical

talent has transformed the life of the region as much as Mr.

Crittenden's high and disinterested . . ."

"Oh _Gosh_, Arthur, never mind about the rest!" murmured Neale, moving

back quickly into the inner office to create a diversion. "All ready?"

he asked in a loud, hearty voice, as he came up to them. "Up to 1920 by

this time, Mr. Bayweather?" He turned to Marsh, "I'm afraid there is

very little to interest you, with your experience of production on a

giant scale, in a business so small that the owner and manager knows

every man by name and everything about him."

"You couldn't show me anything more _out_ of my own experience,"

answered Marsh, "than just that. And as for what I know about production

on a giant scale, I can tell you it's not much. I did try to hook on,

once or twice, years ago--to find out something about the business that

my father spent his life in helping to build up, but it always ended in

my being shooed out of the office by a rather irritable manager who knew

I knew nothing about any of it, and who evidently hated above everything

else, having amateur directors come horning in on what was no party of

theirs. 'If they get their dividends all right, what more do they want?'

was his motto. I never was able to make any sense out of it. It's all on

such a preposterously big scale now. Once in a while, touring, I have

come across one of our branch establishments and have stopped my car to

see the men come out of the buildings at quitting-time. That's as close

as I have ever come. Do you really know their _names_?"

"I can't pronounce all the French-Canadian names to suit them, but I

know them all, yes. Most of them are just the overflow of the rural

population around here."

He said to himself in congratulation, "Between us, we pried old

Bayweather loose from his soft soap, pretty neatly," and gave the man

before him a look of friendly understanding. He was a little startled,

for an instant, by the expression in the other's bright eyes, which he

found fixed on him with an intentness almost disconcerting. "Does he

think I'm trying to put something over on him?" he asked himself with a

passing astonishment, "or is he trying to put something over on me?"

Then he remembered that everyone had spoken of Marsh's eyes as peculiar;

it was probably just his habit. "He can look right through me and out at

the other side, for all _I_ care!" he thought indifferently, meeting the

other's gaze with a faintly humorous sense of something absurd.

Marise had come back now, and was saying, "You really must get started,

Neale, the men will be quitting work soon."

"Yes, yes, this minute," he told her, and led the way with Mr. Welles,

leaving Marise and Mr. Bayweather to be showman for Mr. Marsh. He now

remembered that he had not heard the older man say a single word as yet,

and surmised that he probably never said much when the fluent Mr. Marsh

was with him. He wondered a little, as they made their way to the

saw-mill, what Marise saw in either of them to interest her so much. Oh

well, they were a change, of course, from Ashley and Crittenden's

people, and different from the Eugenia Mills bunch, in New York, too.

He stood now, beside Mr. Welles, in the saw-mill, the ringing high

crescendo scream of the saws filling the air. Marise stood at the other

end talking animatedly to the two she had with her. Marise was a wonder

on conversation anyhow. What could she find to say, now, for instance?

What in the world was there to say to an ex-office manager of a big

electrical company about a wood-working business?

His eyes were caught by what one of the men was doing and he yelled at

him sharply, "Look out there, Harry! Stop that! What do I have a guard

rail there for, anyhow?"

"What was the matter?" asked Mr. Welles, startled.

"Oh, nothing much. One of the men dodging under a safety device to save

him a couple of steps. They get so reckless about those saws. You have

to look out for them like a bunch of bad children."

Mr. Welles looked at him earnestly. "Are you . . . have you . . . Mr.

Bayweather has told us so much about all you do for the men . . . how they

are all devoted to you."

Neale looked and felt annoyed. Bayweather and his palaver! "I don't do

anything for them, except give them as good wages as the business will

stand, and as much responsibility for running things as they'll take.

Beyond that, I let them alone. I don't believe in what's known as

'welfare work.' I wouldn't want them messing around in my private life,

and I don't believe they'd like me in theirs."

The necessity to raise his voice to a shout in order to make himself

heard above the tearing scream of the saws made him sound very abrupt

and peremptory, more so than he had meant. As he finished speaking his

eyes met those of the older man, and were held by the clarity and candor

of the other's gaze. They were like a child's eyes in that old face. It

was as though he had been abrupt and impatient to Elly or Mark.

As he looked he saw more than candor and clarity. He saw a deep

weariness.

Neale smoothed his forehead, a little ashamed of his petulance, and drew

his companion further from the saws where the noise was less. He meant

to say something apologetic, but the right phrase did not come to him.

And as Mr. Welles said nothing further, they walked on in silence. They

passed through the first and second floors of the mill, where the

handling of the smaller pieces was done, and neither of them spoke a

word. Neale looked about him at the familiar, familiar scene, and found

it too dull to make any comment on. What was there to say? This was the

way you manufactured brush-backs and wooden boxes and such-like things,

and that was all. The older men bent over their lathes quietly, the

occasional woman-worker smartly hammering small nails into the holes

already bored for her, the big husky boys shoved the trucks around, the

elevator droned up and down, the belts flicked as they sped around and

around. Blest if he could think of any explanation to make to a grown

man on so simple and everyday a scene. And yet he did not enjoy this

silence because it seemed like a continuation of his grumpiness of a few

minutes ago. Well, the next time the old fellow said anything, he'd fall

over himself to be nice in his answer.

Presently as they came to the outside door, Mr. Welles remarked with a

gentle dignity, in evident allusion to Neale's cutting him short, "I

only meant that I was very much interested in what I see here, and that

I would like very much to know more about it."

Neale felt he fairly owed him an apology. He began to understand what

Marise meant when she had said the old fellow was one you loved on

sight. It was her way, emotionally heightened as usual, of saying that

he was really a very nice old codger. "I'll be glad to tell you anything

you want to know, Mr. Welles," he said. "But I haven't any idea what it

is that interests you. You fire ahead and ask questions and I'll agree

to answer them."

"That's what I'd like, all right. And remember if I ask anything you

don't want to talk about . . ." He referred evidently to Neale's

impatience of a few minutes ago.

"There aren't any trade secrets in the wood-working business," said

Neale, laughing. "Better come along and see our drying-room as we talk.

We've had to make some concession to modern haste and use kiln-drying,

although I season first in the old way as long as possible." They

stepped out of the door and started across the mill-yard.

Mr. Welles said with a very faint smile in the corner of his pale old

lips, "I don't believe you want to show me any of this, Mr. Crittenden.

And honestly that isn't what interests me about it. I wouldn't know a

drying-room from a steam-laundry."

Neale stopped short, and surveyed his companion with amusement and

admiration. "Good for you!" he cried. "Tell the truth and shame the

devil and set an example to all honest men. Mr. Welles, you have my

esteem."

The old man had a shy smile at this. "I don't tell the truth that way to

everybody," he said demurely.

Neale liked him more and more. "Sir, I am yours to command," he said,

sitting down on the steps, "ask ahead!"

Mr. Welles turned serious, and hesitated. "Mr. Bayweather said . . ." He

began and looked anxiously at Neale.

"I won't bite even if he did," Neale reassured him.

Mr. Welles looked at him with the pleasantest expression in his eyes.

"It's a great relief to find that we can get on with one another," he

said, "for I must admit to you that I have fallen a complete victim to

Mrs. Crittenden. I . . . I love your wife." He brought it out with a

quaint, humorous roundness.

"You can't get up any discussion with me about that," said Neale. "I do

myself."

They both laughed, and Mr. Welles said, "But you see, caring such a lot

about her, it was a matter of great importance to me what kind of

husband she had. I find actually seeing you very exciting."

"You're the first who ever found it so, I'm sure," said Neale, amused at

the idea.

"But it wasn't this I wanted to say," said Mr. Welles. He went back and

said again, "Mr. Bayweather said your idea of business is service, like

a doctor's?"

Neale winced at the Bayweather priggishness of this way of putting it,

but remembering his remorse for his earlier brusqueness, he restrained

himself to good humor and the admission, "Making allowance for

ministerial jargon, that's something like a fair statement."

He was astonished at the seriousness with which Mr. Welles took this.

What was it to him? The old man looked at him, deeply, unaccountably,

evidently entirely at a loss. "Mr. Crittenden," he said abruptly, "to

speak right out, that sounded to me like the notion of a nice

idealistic woman, who has never been in business. You see I've _been_ in

a business office all my life!"

Neale found his liking for the gentle, troubled old man enough for him

to say truthfully, "Mr. Welles, I don't mind talking to you about it.

Sure, yes I can understand how having a minister put it that way. . . .

Lord! How the old boy does spill over! And yet why should I care? I'm

ashamed of letting harmless Mr. Bayweather get on my nerves so."

Mr. Welles started to speak, found no words, and waved an arm as if to

imply that _he_ understood perfectly. This made Neale laugh a little,

and gave him a picture of the helplessness of a newcomer to Ashley,

before the flood-tide of Mr. Bayweather's local learning.

He went on, "He sort of taints an honest idea, doesn't he, by his

high-falutin' way of going on about it?"

He hesitated, trying to think of simple words to sum up what he had,

after all, never exactly formulated because it had been so much an

attitude he and Marise had silently grown into. It was hard, he found,

to hit on any expression that said what he wanted to; but after all, it

wasn't so very important whether he did or not. He was only trying to

make a nice tired old man think himself enough respected to be seriously

talked to. He'd just ramble on, till Marise brought the other visitors

up to them.

And yet as he talked, he got rather interested in his statement of it. A

comparison of baseball and tennis ethics came into his mind as apposite,

and quite tickled him by its aptness. Mr. Welles threw in an occasional

remark. He was no man's fool, it soon appeared, for all his mildness.

And for a time he seemed to be interested.

But presently Neale noticed that the other was looking absent and no

longer made any comments. That was what happened, Neale reflected with

an inward smile, as he slowed down and prepared to stop, when anybody

succeeded in getting you started on your hobby. They were bored. They

didn't really want to know after all. It was like trying to tell folks

about your travels.

But he was astonished to the limit of astonishment by what Mr. Welles

brought out in the silence which finally dropped between them. The old

man looked at him very hard and asked, "Mr. Crittenden, do you know

anything about the treatment of the Negroes in the South?"

Neale sat up blinking. "Why no, nothing special, except that it's a

fearful knot we don't seem to get untied," he said. "I contribute to the

support of an agricultural school in Georgia, but I'm afraid I never

take much time to read the reports they send me. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, no particular reason. I have a relative down there, that's all."

Marise and the others came out of a door at the far-end of the building

now, and advanced towards them slowly. Neale and Mr. Welles watched

them.

Neale was struck again by Marsh's appearance. As far away as you could

see him, he held the eye. "An unusual man, your friend Mr. Marsh," he

remarked. "Mrs. Crittenden tells me that he is one of the people who

have been everywhere and done everything and seen everybody. He looks

the part."

Mr. Welles made no comment on this for a moment, his eyes on the

advancing group. Marise had raised her parasol of yellow silk. It made a

shimmering halo for her dark, gleaming hair, as she turned her head

towards Marsh, her eyes narrowed and shining as she laughed at something

he said.

Then the old man remarked, "Yes, he's unusual, all right, Vincent is. He

has his father's energy and push." He added in a final characterization,

"I've known him ever since he was a little boy, and I never knew him not

to get what he went after."

II

_How the Same Thing Looked to Mr. Welles_

As they walked along towards the mill, Mr. Welles had a distinct

impression that he was going to dislike the mill-owner, and as distinct

a certainty as to where that impression came from. He had received too

many by the same route not to recognize the shipping label. Not that

Vincent had ever said a single slighting word about Mr. Crittenden. He

couldn't have, very well, since they neither of them had ever laid eyes

on him. But Vincent never needed words to convey impressions into other

people's minds. He had a thousand other ways better than words. Vincent

could be silent, knock off the ashes from his cigarette, recross his

legs, and lean back in his chair in a manner that slammed an impression

into your head as though he had yelled it at you.

But to be fair to Vincent, Mr. Welles thought probably he had been more

than ready to soak up an impression like the one he felt. They'd had

such an awfully good time with Mrs. Crittenden and the children, it

stood to reason the head of the house would seem to them like a

butter-in and an outsider in a happy-family group.

More than this, too. As they came within hearing of the industrial

activity of the mill, and he felt his heart sink and turn sore and

bitter, Mr. Welles realized that Vincent had very little to do with his

dread of meeting the mill-owner. It was not Mr. Crittenden he shrank

from, it was the mill-owner, the business man . . . business itself.

Mr. Welles hated and feared the sound of the word and knew that it had

him cowed, because in his long life he had known it to be the only

reality in the world of men. And in that world he had known the only

reality to be that if you didn't cut the other fellow's throat first he

would cut yours. There wasn't any other reality. He had heard

impractical, womanish men say there was, and try to prove it, only to

have their economic throats cut considerably more promptly than any

others. He had done his little indirect share of the throat-cutting

always. He was not denying the need to do it. Only he had never found it

a very cheerful atmosphere in which to pass one's life. And now he had

escaped, to the only other reality, the pleasant, gentle, slightly

unreal world of women, nice women, and children and gardens. He was so

old now that there was no shame in his sinking into that for what time

he had left, as other old fellows sank into an easy-chair. Only he

wished that he could have got along without being reminded so vividly,

as he would be by this trip to the business-world, of what paid for the

arm-chair, supported the nice women and children. He wished he hadn't

had to come here, to be forced to remember again that the inevitable

foundation for all that was pleasant and livable in private life was the

grim determination on the part of a strong man to give his strength to

"taking it out of the hide" of his competitors, his workmen, and the

public. He'd had a vacation from that, and it made him appallingly

depressed to take another dose of it now. He sincerely wished that sweet

Mrs. Crittenden were a widow with a small income from some impersonal

source with no uncomfortable human associations with it. He recalled

with a sad cynicism the story Mrs. Crittenden had told them about the

clever and forceful lawyer who had played the dirty trick on the farmer

here in Ashley, and done him out of his wood-land. She had been very

much wrought up about that, the poor lady, without having the least idea

that probably her husband's business-life was full of such

knifings-in-the-back, all with the purpose of making a quiet life for

her and the children.

Well, there was nothing for it but to go on. It wouldn't last long, and

Mr. Welles' back was practised in bowing to weather he didn't like but

which passed if you waited a while.

They were going up the hall now, towards a door marked "Office," the

children scampering ahead. The door was opening. The tall man who stood

there, nodding a welcome to them, must be Mr. Crittenden.

So that was the kind of man he was. Nothing special about him. Just a

nice-looking American business-man, with a quiet, calm manner and a

friendly face.

To the conversation which followed and which, like all such

conversations, amounted to nothing at all, Mr. Welles made no

contribution. What was the use? Mr. Bayweather and Vincent were there.

The conversation would not flag. So he had the usual good chance of the

silent person to use his eyes. He looked mostly at Mr. Crittenden. Well,

he wasn't so bad. They were usually nice enough men in personal

relations, business men. This one had good eyes, very nice when he

looked at the children or his wife. They were often good family men,

too. There was something about him, however, that wasn't just like all

others. What was it? Not clothes. His suit was cut off the same piece

with forty million other American business-suits. Not looks, although

there was an outdoor ruddiness of skin and clearness of eye that made

him look a little like a sailor. Oh yes, Mr. Welles had it. It was his

voice. Whenever he spoke, there was something . . . something _natural_

about his voice, as though it didn't ever say things he didn't mean.

Well, for Heaven's sake here was the old minister started off again on

one of his historical spiels. Mr. Welles glanced cautiously at Vincent

to see if he were in danger of blowing up, and found him looking

unexpectedly thoughtful. He was evidently not paying the least attention

to Mr. Bayweather's account of the eighteenth century quarrel between

New Hampshire and Vermont. He was apparently thinking of something else,

very hard.

He himself leaned back in his chair, but half of one absent ear given to

Mr. Bayweather's lecture, and enjoyed himself looking at Mrs.

Crittenden. She was pretty, Mrs. Crittenden was. He hadn't been sure

the first day, but now he had had a chance to get used to her face being

so long and sort of pointed, and her eyes long too, and her black

eyebrows running back almost into her hair, he liked every bit of her

face. It looked so different from anybody else's. He noticed with an

inward smile that she was fidgety under Mr. Bayweather's historical

talk. _He_ was the only person with any patience in that whole bunch.

But at what a price had he acquired it!

By and by Mrs. Crittenden got up quietly and went out into the other

office as if on an errand.

Mr. Bayweather took advantage of her absence to tell them a lot about

how much the Crittendens had done for the whole region and what a golden

thing Mrs. Crittenden's music had been for everybody, and about an

original conception of business which Mr. Crittenden seemed to have. Mr.

Welles was not interested in music, but he was in business and he would

have liked to hear a great deal more about this, but just at this point,

as if to cut the clergyman off, in came Mr. Crttenden, very brisk and

prompt, ready to take them around the mill.

Vincent stood up. They all stood up. Mr. Welles noted that Vincent had

quite come out of his brown study and was now all there. He was as he

usually was, a wire charged with a very high-voltage current.

They went out now, all of them together, but soon broke up into two

groups. He stayed behind with Mr. Crittenden and pretended to look at

the machinery of the saw-mill, which he found very boring indeed, as he

hadn't the slightest comprehension of a single cog in it. But there was

something there at which he really looked. It was the expression of Mr.

Crittenden's face as he walked about, and it was the expression on the

faces of the men as they looked at the boss.

Mr. Welles, not being a talker, had had a great deal of opportunity to

study the faces of others, and he had become rather a specialist in

expressions. Part of his usefulness in the office had come from that.

He had catalogued in his mind the different looks on human faces, and

most of them connected with any form of business organization were

infinitely familiar to him, from the way the casual itinerant temporary

laborer looked at the boss of his gang, to the way the star salesman

looked at the head of the house.

But here was a new variety to him, these frank and familiar glances

thrown in answer to the nodded greeting or short sentence of the boss as

he walked about. They were not so much friendly (although they were that

too), as they were familiar and open, as though nothing lay hidden

behind the apparent expression. It was not often that Mr. Welles had

encountered that, a look that seemed to hide nothing.

He wondered if he could find out anything about this from Mr. Crittenden

and put a question to him about his relations with his men. He tried to

make it tactful and sensible-sounding, but as he said the words, he knew

just how flat and parlor-reformerish they sounded; and it didn't

surprise him a bit to have the business-man bristle up and snap his head

off. It had sounded as though he didn't know a thing about business--he,

the very marrow of whose bones was soaked in a bitter knowledge that the

only thing that could keep it going was the fear of death in every man's

heart, lest the others get ahead of him and trample him down.

He decided that he wouldn't say another thing, just endure the temporary

boredom of being trotted about to have things explained to him, which he

hadn't any intention of trying to understand.

But Mr. Crittenden did not try to explain. Perhaps he was bored himself,

perhaps he guessed the visitor's ignorance. He just walked around from

one part of the big, sunshiny shops to another, taking advantage of this

opportunity to look things over for his own purposes. And everywhere he

went, he gave and received back that curious, new look of openness.

It was not noisy here as in the saw-mill, but very quiet and peaceful,

the bee-like whirring of the belts on the pulleys the loudest continuous

sound. It was clean, too. The hardwood floor was being swept clean of

sawdust and shavings all the time, by a lame old man, who pottered

tranquilly about, sweeping and cleaning and putting the trash in a big

box on a truck. When he had it full, he beckoned to a burly lad, shoving

a truck across the room, and called in a clear, natural, friendly voice,

"Hey, Nat, come on over." The big lad came, whistling, pushed the box

off full, and brought it back empty, still whistling airily.

There were a good many work-people in sight. Mr. Welles made a guessing

estimate that the business must keep about two hundred busy. And there

was not one who looked harried by his work. The big, cluttered place

heaped high with piles of curiously shaped pieces of wood, filled with

oddly contrived saws and lathes and knives and buffers for sawing and

turning and polishing and fitting those bits of wood, was brooded over

as by something palpable by an emanation of order. Mr. Welles did not

understand a detail of what he was looking at, but from the whole, his

mind, experienced in business, took in a singularly fresh impression

that everybody there knew what he was up to, in every sense of the word.

He and Mr. Crittenden stood for a time looking at and chatting to a

gray-haired man who was polishing smoothly planed oval bits of board. He

stopped as they talked, ran his fingers over the satin-smoothed surface

with evident pleasure, and remarked to his employer, "Mighty fine maple

we're getting from the Warner lot. See the grain in that!"

He held it up admiringly, turning it so that the light would show it at

its best, and looked at it respectfully. "There's no wood like maple,"

he said. Mr. Crittenden answered, "Yep. The Warner land is just right

for slow-growing trees." He took it out of the workman's hand, looked it

over more closely with an evident intelligent certainty of what to look

for, and handed it back with a nod that signified his appreciation of

the wood and of the workmanship which had brought it to that state.

There had been about that tiny, casual human contact a quality which Mr.

Welles did not recognize. His curiosity rose again. He wondered if he

might not succeed in getting some explanation out of the manufacturer,

if he went about it very tactfully. He would wait for his chance. He

began to perceive with some surprise that he was on the point of quite

liking Mrs. Crittenden's husband.

So he tried another question, after a while, very cautiously, and was

surprised to find Mr. Crittenden no longer snappish, but quite friendly.

It occurred to him as the pleasantest possibility that he might find his

liking for the other man returned. That _would_ be a new present hung on

the Christmas tree of his life in Vermont.

On the strength of this possibility, and banking on the friendliness in

the other man's eyes, he drove straight at it, the phrase which the

minister had used when he said that Mr. Crittenden thought of business

as an ideal service to humanity as much as doctoring. That had sounded

so ignorant and ministerial he hadn't even thought of it seriously, till

after this contact with the man of whom it had been said. The best way

with Crittenden was evidently the direct one. He had seen that in the

first five minutes of observation of him. So he would simply tell him

how bookish and impossible it had sounded, and see what he had to say.

He'd probably laugh and say the minister had it all wrong, of course,

regular minister's idea.

And so presently they were off, on a real talk, beyond what he had hoped

for, and Crittenden was telling him really what he had meant. He was

saying in his firm, natural, easy voice, as though he saw nothing

specially to be self-conscious about in it, "Why, of course I don't rank

lumbering and wood-working with medicine. Wood isn't as vital to human

life as quinine, or a knowledge of what to do in typhoid fever. But

after all, wood is something that people have to have, isn't it?

Somebody has to get it out and work it up into usable shape. If he can

do this, get it out of the woods without spoiling the future of the

forests, drying up the rivers and all that, and have it transformed into

some finished product that people need in their lives, it's a sort of

plain, everyday service, isn't it? And to do this work as economically

as it can be managed, taking as low a price as you can get along with

instead of screwing as high a price as possible out of the people who

have to have it, what's the matter with that, as an interesting problem

in ingenuity? I tell you, Mr. Welles, you ought to talk to my wife about

this. It's as much her idea as mine. We worked it out together, little

by little. It was when Elly was a baby. She was the second child, you

know, and we began to feel grown-up. By that time I was pretty sure I

could make a go of the business. And we first began to figure out what

we were up to. Tried to see what sort of a go we wanted the business to

have. We first began to make some sense out of what we were doing in

life."

Mr. Welles found himself overwhelmed by a reminiscent ache at this

phrase and burst out, his words tinged with the bitterness he tried to

keep out of his mind, "Isn't that an awful moment when you first try to

make some sense out of what you are doing in life! But suppose you had

gone on doing it, always, always, till you were an old man, and never

succeeded! Suppose all you seemed to be accomplishing was to be able to

hand over to the sons of the directors more money than was good for

them? I tell you, Mr. Crittenden, I've often wished that once, just

once, before I died I could be _sure_ that I had done anything that was

of any use to anybody." He went on, nodding his head, "What struck me so

about what Mr. Bayweather said is that I've often thought about doctors

myself, and envied them. They take money for what they do, of course,

but they miss lots of chances to make more, just so's to be of some use.

I've often thought when they were running the prices up and up in our

office just because they could, that a doctor would be put out of his

profession in no time by public opinion, if he ever tried to screw the

last cent out of everybody, the way business men do as a matter of

course."

Mr. Crittenden protested meditatively against this. "Oh, don't you think

maybe there's a drift the other way among decent business people now?

Why, when Marise and I were first trying to get it clear in our own

heads, we kept it pretty dark, I tell you, that we weren't in it only

for what money we could make, because we knew how loony we'd seem to

anybody else. But don't you see any signs that lately maybe the same

idea is striking lots of people in America?"

"No, I do _not_!" said Mr. Welles emphatically. "With a profiteer on

every corner!

"But look-y-here, the howl about profiteers, isn't that something new?

Isn't that a dumb sort of application to business of the doctor's

standard of service? Twenty years ago, would anybody have thought of

doing anything but uneasily admiring a grocer who made all the money he

could out of his business? 'Why shouldn't he?' people would have thought

then. Everybody else did. Twenty years ago, would anybody have dreamed

of legally preventing a rich man from buying all the coal he wanted,

whether there was enough for everybody, or not?"

Mr. Welles considered this in unconvinced silence. Mr. Crittenden went

on, "Why, sometimes it looks to me like the difference between what's

legitimate in baseball and in tennis. Every ball-player will try to

bluff the umpire that he's safe when he knows the baseman tagged him

three feet from the bag; and public opinion upholds him in his bluff if

he can get away with it. But like as not, the very same man who lies

like a trooper on the diamond, if he went off that very afternoon to

play tennis would never dream of announcing 'out' if his opponent's ball

really had landed in the court,--not if it cost him the sett and

match,--whether anybody was looking at him or not. It's 'the thing' to

try to get anything you can put over in baseball, anything the umpire

can't catch you at. And it's not 'the thing' in tennis. Most of the time

you don't even have any umpire. That's it: that's not such a bad way to

put it. My wife and I wanted to run our business on the tennis standard

and not on the baseball one. Because I believe, ultimately you know, in

fixing things,--everything,--national life as well, so that we'll need

as few umpires as possible. Once get the tennis standard adopted . . ."

Mr. Welles said mournfully, "Don't get started on politics. I'm too old

to have any hopes of that!"

"Right you are there," said Mr. Crittenden. "Economic organization is

the word. That's one thing that keeps me so interested in my little

economic laboratory here. Political parties are as prehistoric as the

mastodon, if they only knew it."

Mr. Welles said, "But the queer thing is that you make it work."

"Oh, anybody with a head for business could make it work. You've got to

know how to manage your machine before you can make it go, of course.

But that's not saying you have to drive it somewhere you don't want to

get to. I don't say that that workman back there who was making such a

beautiful job of polishing that maple could make it go. He couldn't."

Mr. Welles persisted. "But I've always thought, I've always _seen_ it,

or thought I had . . . that life-and-death competition is the only

stimulus that's strong enough to stir men up to the prodigious effort

they have to put out to _make_ a go of their business, start the machine

running. That, and the certainty of all they could get out of the

consumer as a reward. You know it's held that there's a sort of mystic

identity between all you can get out of the consumer and the exact

amount of profit that'll just make the business go."

Mr. Crittenden said comfortably, as though he were talking of something

that did not alarm him, "Oh well, the best of the feudal seigneurs

mournfully believed that a sharp sword and a long lance in their own

hands were the strongholds of society. The wolf-pack idea of business

will go the same way." He explained in answer to Mr. Welles' vagueness

as to this term, "You know, the conception that if you're going to get

hair brushes or rubber coats or mattresses or what-not enough for

humanity manufactured, the only way is to have the group engaged in it

form a wolf-pack, hunting down the public to extract from it as much

money as possible. The salesmen and advertisers take care of this

extracting. Then this money's to be fought for, by the people engaged in

the process, as wolves fight over the carcass of the deer they have

brought down together. This is the fight between the directors of labor

and the working-men. It's ridiculous to hold that such a wasteful and

incoherent system is the only one that will arouse men's energies enough

to get them into action. It's absurd to think that business men . . .

they're the flower of the nation, they're America's specialty, you know

. . . can only find their opportunity for service to their fellow-men by

such haphazard contracts with public service as helping raise money for

a library or heading a movement for better housing of the poor, when

they don't know anything about the housing of the poor, nor what it

ought to be. Their opportunity for public service is right in their own

legitimate businesses, and don't you forget it. Everybody's business is

his best way to public service, and doing it that way, you'd put out of

operation the professional uplifters who uplift as a business, and can't

help being priggish and self-conscious about it. It makes me tired the

way professional idealists don't see their big chance. They'll take all

the money they can get from business for hospitals, and laboratories,

and to investigate the sleeping sickness or the boll-weevil, but that

business itself could rank with public libraries and hospitals as an

ideal element in the life on the globe . . . they can't open their minds

wide enough to take in that."

Mr. Welles had been following this with an almost painful interest and

surprise. He found it very agitating, very upsetting. Suppose there had

been something there, all the time. He must try to think it out more.

Perhaps it was not true. But here sat a man who had made it work. Why

hadn't he thought of it in time? Now it was too late. Too late for him

to do anything. Anything? The voice of the man beside him grew dim to

him, as, uneasy and uncertain, his spirits sank lower and lower. Suppose

all the time there had been a way out besides beating the retreat to the

women, the children, and the gardens? Only now it was too late! What was

the use of thinking of it all?

For a moment he forgot where he was. It seemed to him that there was

something waiting for him to think of it . . .

But oddly enough, all that presented itself to him, when he tried to

look, was the story that had nothing to do with anything, which his

cousin had told him in a recent letter, of the fiery sensitive young

Negro doctor, who had worked his way through medical school, and

hospital-training, gone South to practise, and how he had been treated

by the white people in the town where he had settled. He wondered if she

hadn't exaggerated all that. But she gave such definite details. Perhaps

Mr. Crittenden knew something about that problem. Perhaps he had an idea

about that, too, that might be of help. He would ask him.

PART II

CHAPTER XI

IN AUNT HETTY'S GARDEN

I

June 10.

Marise bent to kiss the soft withered cheek. "Elly is a _real_

Vermonter, but I'm not. She can get along with just 'Hello, Aunt Hetty,'

but that's not enough for me," she said tenderly to the old woman; "I

have to kiss you."

"Oh, you can do as you like, for all of me," answered the other with an

unsparing indifference.

Marise laughed at the quality of this, taking the shaky old hand in hers

with a certainty of affection returned. She went on, "This is a regular

descent on you, Cousin Hetty. I've come to show you off, you and the

house and the garden. This is Mr. Welles who has settled next door to

us, you know, and this is Mr. Marsh who is visiting him for a time. And

here are the children, and Eugenia Mills came up from the city

last night and will be here perhaps, if she gets up energy after

her afternoon nap, and Neale is coming over from the mill after

closing hours, and we've brought along a basket supper and, if

you'll let us, we're going to eat it out in your garden, under

Great-great-grandmother's willow-tree."

Cousin Hetty nodded dry, though not uncordial greetings to the strangers

and said crisply, "You're welcome enough to sit around anywhere you can

find, and eat your lunch here, but where you're going to find anything

to show off, beats me."

"Mr. Welles is interested in gardens and wants to look at yours."

"Not much to look at," said the old lady uncompromisingly.

"I don't want to look at a _garden_!" clamored little Mark, outraged at

the idea. "I want to be let go up to Aunt Hetty's yattic where the sword

and 'pinning-wheel are."

"Would all you children like that best?" asked Marise.

Their old kinswoman answered for them, "You'd better believe they would.

You always did yourself. Run along, now, children, and don't fall on the

attic stairs and hurt yourselves on the wool-hetchels."

The fox-terrier, who had hung in an anguish of uncertainty and hope and

fear on the incomprehensible words passing between little Mark and the

grown-ups, perceiving now that the children ran clattering towards the

stairs, took a few agitated steps after them, and ran back to Marise,

shivering, begging with his eyes, in a wriggling terror lest he be

forbidden to follow them into the fun. Marise motioned him along up the

stairs, saying with a laughing, indulgent, amused accent, "Yes, yes,

poor Médor, you can go along with the children if you want to."

The steel sinews of the dog's legs stretched taut on the instant, in a

great bound of relief. He whirled with a ludicrous and undignified

haste, slipping, his toe-nails clicking on the bare floor, tore across

the room and dashed up the stairs, drunk with joy.

"If strong emotions are what one wants out of life," commented Marise

lightly, to Marsh, "one ought to be born a nervous little dog, given

over to the whimsical tyranny of humans."

"There are other ways of coming by strong emotions," answered Marsh, not

lightly at all.

"What in the world are wool-hetchels?" asked Mr. Welles as the grown-ups

went along the hall towards the side-door.

"Why, when I was a girl, and we spun our own wool yarn . . ." began Cousin

Hetty, trotting beside him and turning her old face up to his.

Marsh stopped short in the hall-way with a challenging abruptness that

brought Marise to a standstill also. The older people went on down the

long dusky hail to the door and out into the garden, not noticing that

the other two had stopped. The door swung shut behind them.

* * * * *

Marise felt the man's dark eyes on her, searching, determined. They were

far from those first days, she thought, when he had tacitly agreed not

to look at her like that, very far from those first days of delicacy and

lightness of touch.

With a determination as firm as his own, she made her face and eyes

opaque, and said on a resolutely gay note, "What's the matter? Can't you

stand any more information about early times in Vermont? You must have

been having too heavy a dose of Mr. Bayweather. But _I_ like it, you

know. I find it awfully interesting to know so in detail about any past

period of human life; as much so . . . why not? . . . as researches into

which provinces of France used half-timber houses, and how late?"

"You like a great many things!" he said impatiently.

"We must get out into the garden with the others, or Cousin Hetty will

be telling her old-time stories before we arrive," she answered, moving

towards the door.

She felt her pulse knocking loud and swift. Strange how a casual

interchange of words with him would excite and agitate her. But it had

been more than that. Everything _was_, with him.

He gave the sidewise toss of his head, which had come to be so familiar

to her, as though he were tossing a lock of hair from his forehead, but

he said nothing more, following her down the long hall in silence.

It was as though she had physically felt the steel of his blade slide

gratingly once more down from her parry. Her mental attitude had been so

entirely that of a fencer, on the alert, watchfully defensive against

the quick-flashing attack of the opponent, that she had an instant's

absurd fear of letting him walk behind her, as though she might feel a

thrust in the back. "How ridiculous of me!" she told herself with an

inward laugh of genuine amusement. "Women are as bad as fox-terriers

for inventing exciting occasions out of nothing at all."

Then in a gust of deep anger, instantly come, instantly gone, "Why do I

tolerate this for a moment? I was perfectly all right before. Why don't

I simply send him about his business, as I would any other bold

meddler?"

But after this, with an abrupt shift to another plane, "That would be

acting preposterously, like a silly, self-consciously virtuous matron.

What earthly difference does it make to me what a casual visitor to our

town says or does to amuse himself in his casual stay, that may end at

any moment? And how scarifyingly he would laugh at me, if he knew what

comic relics of old prudish reflexes are stirred up by the contact with

his mere human livingness. Heavens! How he would laugh to know me

capable of being so 'guindée,' so personal, fearing like any school-girl

a flirtation in any man's conversation. He must never see a trace of

that. No matter how startled I ever am, he mustn't see anything but a

smooth, amused surface. It would be intolerable to have him laugh at

me."

Her hand was on the latch, when a deep, muffled murmur from the depths

admonished her, "Personal vanity . . . that's what's at the bottom of all

that you are telling yourself. It is a vain woman speaking, and fearing

a wound to her vanity."

She resented this, pushed it back, and clicked the latch up firmly,

stepping out into the transparent gold of the late-afternoon sunshine.

She turned her head as her companion came up behind her on the garden

path, half expecting to have his eyes meet hers with a visible shade of

sardonic mockery, and prepared to meet it halfway with a similar

amusement at the absurdity of human beings, herself included.

* * * * *

He was not looking at her at all, but straight before him, unconscious

for an instant that she had turned her eyes on him, and in this instant

before the customary mask of self-consciousness dropped over his face,

she read there, plain and startling to see, unmistakable to her grown

woman's experience of life, the marks of a deep, and painful, and

present emotion.

All of her hair-splitting speculations withered to nothing. She did not

even wonder what it was that moved him so strangely and dreadfully.

There was no room for thought in the profound awed impersonal sympathy

which with a great hush came upon her at the sight of another human

being in pain.

He felt some intimate emanation from her, turned towards her, and for

the faintest fraction of time they looked at each other through a rent

in the veil of life.

* * * * *

Cousin Hetty's old voice called them cheerfully, "Over here, this way

under the willow-tree."

They turned in that direction, to hear her saying, ". . . that was in 1763

and of course they came on horseback, using the Indian trails the men

had learned during the French-and-Indian wars. Great-grandmother (she

was a twelve-year-old girl then) had brought along a willow switch from

their home in Connecticut. When the whole lot of them decided to settle

here in the valley, and her folks took this land to be theirs, she stuck

her willow switch into the ground, alongside the brook here, and this is

the tree it grew to be. Looks pretty battered up, don't it, like other

old folks."

Mr. Welles tipped his pale, quiet face back to look up at the great

tree, stretching its huge, stiff old limbs mutilated by time and

weather, across the tiny, crystal brook dimpling and smiling and

murmuring among its many-colored pebbles. "Queer, isn't it," he

speculated, "how old the tree has grown, and how the brook has stayed

just as young as ever."

"It's the other way around between 'Gene Powers' house and his

pine-tree," commented Aunt Hetty. "The pine-tree gets bigger and finer

and stronger all the time, seems 'sthough, and the house gets more

battered and feeble-looking."

Marise looked across at Marsh and found his eyes on her with an

expression she rarely saw in them, almost a peaceful look, as of a man

who has had something infinitely satisfying fall to his lot. He smiled

at her gently, a good, quiet smile, and looked away into the extravagant

splendor of a row of peonies.

Marise felt an inexplicable happiness, clear and sunny like the light in

the old garden. She sat down on the bench and fell into a more relaxed

and restful pose than she had known for some time. What a sweet and

gracious thing life could be after all! Could there be a lovelier place

on earth than here among Cousin Hetty's flower-children. Dear old Cousin

Hetty, with her wrinkled, stiff exterior, and those bright living eyes

of hers. She was the willow-tree outside and the brook inside, that's

what she was. What tender childhood recollections were bound up with the

sight of that quiet old face.

"And those rose-bushes," continued the old woman, "are all cuttings my

great-great-grandmother brought up from Connecticut, and _they_ came

from cuttings our folks brought over from England, in 1634. If 'twas a

little later in the season, and they were in bloom, you'd see how

they're not nearly so I double as most roses. The petals are bigger and

not so curled up, more like wild roses."

She sat down beside the others on the long wooden bench, and added, "I

never dig around one of those bushes, nor cut a rose to put in a vase,

without I feel as though Great-great-grandmother and Grandmother and all

the rest were in me, still alive."

"Don't you think," asked Marise of the two men, "that there is something

awfully sweet about feeling yourself a part of the past generations,

like that? As we do here. To have such a familiarity with any corner of

the earth . . . well, it seems to me like music, the more familiar it is,

the dearer and closer it is . . . and when there are several generations

of familiarity back of you. . . . I always feel as though my life were a

part of something much bigger than just _my_ life, when I feel it a

continuation of their lives, as much as of my own childhood. It always

seems deep and quieting to me."

Mr. Welles assented wistfully, "It makes me envious."

Marsh shook his head, sending up a meditative puff of smoke. "If you

want to know how it really strikes me, I'll have to say it sounds plain

sleepy to me. Deep and quieting all right, sure enough. But so's opium.

And in my experience, most things just get duller and duller, the more

familiar they are. I don't begin to have time in my life for the living

I want to do, my own self! I can't let my grandmothers and grandfathers

come shoving in for another whirl at it. They've had their turn. And my

turn isn't a minute too long for me. Your notion looks to me . . . lots of

old accepted notions look like that to me . . . like a good big dose of

soothing syrup to get people safely past the time in their existences

when they might do some sure-enough personal living on their own hook."

He paused and added in a meditative murmur, "That time is so damn short

as it is!"

He turned hastily to the old lady with an apology. "Why, I _beg_ your

pardon! I didn't realize I had gone on talking aloud. I was just

thinking along to myself. You see, your soothing syrup is working on me,

the garden, the sun, the stillness, all the grandmothers and

grandfathers sitting around. I am almost half asleep."

"I'm an old maid, I know," said Cousin Hetty piquantly. "But I'm not a

proper Massachusetts old maid. I'm Vermont, and a swear-word or two

don't scare me. I was brought up on first-hand stories of Ethan Allen's

talk, and . . ."

Marise broke in hastily, in mock alarm, "Now, Cousin Hetty, don't you

start in on the story of Ethan Allen and the cowshed that was too short.

I won't have our city visitors scandalized by our lack of . . ."

Cousin Hetty's laughter cut her short, as merry and young a sound as the

voice of the brook. "I hadn't thought of that story in years!" she said.

She and Marise laughed together, looking at each other. But they said

nothing else.

"Aren't you going to _tell_ us?" asked Mr. Welles with a genuine

aggrieved surprise which tickled Cousin Hetty into more laughter.

"I shall not rest day or night, till I have found someone who knows that

story," said Marsh, adding, "Old Mrs. Powers must know it. And _she_

will love to tell it to me. It is evidently the sort of story which is

her great specialty."

They all laughed, foolishly, light-heartedly.

Marise consciously delighted in the laughter, in the silly, light tone

of their talk, in the feeling of confidence and security which bathed

her as warmly as the new wine of the spring sunshine. She thought

passingly, swiftly, with her habitual, satiric wonder at her own

fancifulness, of her earlier notions about steel blades and passes and

parries, and being afraid to walk down the hall with her "opponent" back

of her.

Her opponent, this potent, significant personality, lounging on the

bench beside her, resting in the interval of a life the intensity of

which was out of her world altogether, the life, all power, of a modern

rich man in great affairs; controlling vast forces, swaying and shaping

the lives of thousands of weaker men as no potentate had ever done,

living in the instants he allowed himself for personal life (she felt

again the pang of her sympathy for his look of fierce, inexplicable

pain) with a concentration in harmony with the great scale of his other

activities. It was, just as the cheap novels called it, a sort, a bad,

inhuman, colorful, fascinating sort of modern version of the superman's

life, she reflected. She had been ridiculous to project her village

insignificance into that large-scale landscape.

A distant whistle blew a long, full note, filling the valley with its

vibrations.

"Is that a train, at this hour?" murmured Mr. Welles. His voice was sunk

to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved

slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was evident that he did

not in the least care whether it was a train or not.

"Oh _no!_" said Marise, severely, disapproving the vagueness and

inaccuracy of his observation. "That's the mill-whistle, blowing the

closing-hour. You're no true Ashleyan, not to have learned the

difference between the voices of the different whistles of the day."

She turned to Marsh, tilting her wings for a capricious flight. "I think

it's part of the stubborn stiff-jointedness of human imagination, don't

you, that we don't hear the beauty of those great steam-whistles. I

wonder if it's not unconscious art that gave to our mighty machines such

voices of qower."

"Isn't it perhaps ostentatious to call the family saw-mill a 'mighty

machine'?" inquired Marsh mildly. He sat at the end of the bench, his

arm along the back behind Mr. Welles, his head turned to the side, his

soft hat pulled low over his forehead, looking at the garden and at

Marise out of half-shut, sleepy eyes.

Marise went on, drawing breath for a longer flight. "When the train

comes sweeping up the valley, trailing its great beautiful banner of

smoke, I feel as though it were the crescendo announcing something, and

at the crossing, when that noble rounded note blares out . . . why, it's

the music for the setting. Nothing else could cope with the depth of the

valley, the highness and blackness of its mountain walls, and the

steepness of the Eagle Rocks."

"I call that going some, 'noble rounded note'!" murmured Marsh, lifting

his eyebrows with a visible effort and letting his eyes fall half shut,

against the brilliance of the sunshine.

Marise laughed, and persisted. "Just because its called a

steam-whistle, we won't hear its beauty and grandeur, till something

else has been invented to take its place, and then we'll look back

sentimentally and regret it."

"Maybe _you_ will," conceded Marsh.

The two elder looked on, idly amused at this give-and-take.

"And I don't suppose," continued Marise, "to take another instance of

modern lack of imagination, that you have ever noticed, as an element of

picturesque power in modern life, the splendid puissance of the traffic

cop's presence in a city street."

They all had a protesting laugh at this, startled for an instant from

their dreaminess.

"Yes, and if I could think of more grandiloquent words to express him,

I'd use them," said Marise defiantly, launching out into yet more

outrageous flights of rhetoric. "I could stand for hours on a street

corner, admiring the completeness with which he is transfigured out of

the human limitations of his mere personality, how he feels, flaming

through his every vein and artery, the invincible power of THE LAW,

freely set over themselves by all those turbulent, unruly human beings,

surging around him in their fiery speed-genii. He raises his arm. It is

not a human arm, it is the decree of the entire race. And as far as it

can be seen, all those wilful fierce creatures bow themselves to it. The

current boils past him in one direction. He lets it go till he thinks

fit to stop it. He sounds his whistle, and raises his arm again in that

inimitable gesture of omnipotence. And again they bow themselves. Now

that the priest before the altar no longer sways humanity as he did, is

there anywhere else, any other such visible embodiment of might,

majesty, and power as . . ."

"Gracious me, Marise!" warned her old cousin. "I know you're only

running on with your foolishness, but I think you're going pretty far

when you mix a policeman up with priests and altars and things. I don't

believe Mr. Bayweather would like that very well."

"He wouldn't mind," demurred Marise. "He'd think it an interesting

historical parallel."

"Mrs. Bayweather would have a thing or two to say."

"Right you are. _Mrs._ Bayweather would certainly say something!" agreed

Marise.

She stood up. "I'm hypnotized into perfect good-for-nothingness like the

rest of you by the loveliness of the afternoon and the niceness of

everybody. Here it is almost eating-time and I haven't even opened the

baskets. No, don't you move," she commanded the others, beginning to

stir from their nirvana to make dutiful offers of help. "I'll call the

children. And Neale will be here in a moment."

* * * * *

She went back to the house, down the long walk, under the grape-arbor,

still only faintly shaded with sprigs of pale green. She was calling,

"Children! _Children!_ Come and help with the supper."

She vanished into the house. There was a moment or two of intense quiet,

in which the almost horizontal rays of the setting sun poured a flood of

palpable gold on the three motionless figures in the garden.

* * * * *

Then she emerged again, her husband beside her, carrying the largest of

the baskets, the children struggling with other baskets, a pail, an

ice-cream-freezer, while the dog wove circles about them, wrought to

exaltation by the complicated smell of the eatables.

"Neale was just coming in the front gate," she explained, as he nodded

familiarly to the men and bent to kiss the old woman's cheek. "Cousin

Hetty, just _look_ at Elly in that night-cap of Great-aunt Pauline's.

Doesn't she look the image of that old daguerreotype of Grandmother? See

here, Mark, who said you could trail that sword out here? That belongs

in the attic."

"Oh, let him, let him," said Cousin Hetty peaceably.

"There's nothing much less breakable than a sword. He can't hurt it."

"I've woren it lots of times before," said Mark. "Aunt Hetty always let

me to. Favver, won't you 'trap it tight to me, so's I won't 'traddle it

so much."

"Mother," said Elly, coming up close to Marise, as she stood unpacking

the dishes, "I was looking inside that old diary, the one in the red

leather cover, your grandmother's, I guess, the diary she wrote when she

was a young lady. And she was having a perfectly dreadful time whether

she could believe the Doctrine of the Trinity. She seemed to feel so bad

about it. She wrote how she couldn't sleep nights, and cried, and

everything. It was the Holy Ghost she couldn't make any sense out of.

Mother, what in the world _is_ the Doctrine of the Trinity?

"For mercy's sakes!" cried Cousin Hetty. "I never saw such a family!

Elly, what won't you be up to, next? I can't call that a proper thing

for a little girl to talk about, right out, so."

"Mother, _you_ tell me," said Elly, looking up into her mother's face

with the expression of tranquil trust which was like a visible radiance.

Marise always felt scared, she told herself, when Elly looked at her

like that. She made a little helpless shrugged gesture of surrender with

her shoulders, setting down on the table a plate of cold sliced lamb.

"Elly, darling, I can't stop just this minute to tell you about it, and

anyhow I don't understand any more about it than Grandmother did. But I

don't care if I don't. The first quiet minute we have together, I'll

tell you enough so you can understand why _she_ cared."

"All right, when I go to bed tonight I'll remind you to," Elly made the

engagement definite. She added, with a shout, "Oh, Mother, _chicken_

sandwiches! Oh, I didn't know we were going to have _chicken_

sandwiches. Mother, can't we begin now? I'm awfully hungry."

"Hello," said Neale, looking back toward the house. "Here comes Eugenia,

arisen from her nap. Paul, run back into the house and bring out another

chair. Marise, have you explained who Eugenia is?"

"Oh là, là, no!" exclaimed Marise. "I forgot they didn't know her.

Quick, you do it, Neale."

"Old friend of my wife's, sort of half-cousin several-times removed,

schoolmates in France together, the kind of old family friend who comes

and goes in the house at will," said Neale rapidly. "Cultivated,

artistic, and so on."

"Oh, _Neale_, how slightingly you put it!" cried Marise under her

breath. "She's made herself into one of the rarest and most finished

creations!"

Neale went on rapidly, in a low tone as the newcomer stepped slowly down

the path, "She toils not, neither does she spin . . . doesn't have to.

Highbrow, very, and yet stylish, very! Most unusual combination." He

added as final information, "Spinster, by conviction," as he stepped

forward to greet her.

The other two men stood up to be presented to the newcomer, who, making

everything to Marise's eyes seem rough and countrified, advanced towards

them, self-possessed, and indifferent to all those eyes turned on her.

In her gleaming, supple dress of satin-like ivory jersey, she looked

some tiny, finished, jewel-object, infinitely breakable, at which one

ought only to look if it were safely behind glass.

"There is someone of Marsh's own world, the 'great world' he speaks of,"

thought Marise. She was not aware of any wistfulness in her recognition

of this fact, but she was moved to stand closer to her husband, and once

as she moved about, setting the table, to lay her fingers for an instant

on his hand.

"We're going to have ice-cream, Eugenia," announced Paul, leaning on the

arm of her chair after she and all the others were seated again.

"That's good news," she said equably. She laid a small, beautiful hand

on the child's shoulder, and with a smooth, imperceptible movement, set

him a little further from her. Paul did not observe this manoeuver, but

his mother did, with an inward smile. "Paul, don't hang on Eugenia like

that," she called to him.

"But she smells so sweet!" protested the little boy.

Mr. Welles held out a sympathizing hand and drew the child to him. He

too had seen that gesture.

"Come here, all you little folks," ordered Marise, now seriously

beginning to serve the meal, "and start waiting on the table."

"Cold lamb!" cried Cousin Hetty with enthusiasm. "I'm so glad. Agnes

won't touch mutton or lamb. She says they taste so like a sheep. And so

we don't often have it."

"Paul, can you be trusted to pour the hot chocolate?" asked his mother.

"No, Neale, don't get up. I want to see if the children can't do it

all."

* * * * *

From where she sat at the foot of the table, she directed the

operations. The children stepped about, serious, responsible, their rosy

faces translucent in the long, searching, level rays sent up by the sun,

low in The Notch. Dishes clicked lightly, knives and forks jingled, cups

were set back with little clinking noises on saucers. All these indoor

sounds were oddly diminished and unresonant under the open sky, just as

the chatting, laughing flow of the voices, even though it rose at times

to bursts of mirth which the children's shouts made noisy, never drowned

out the sweet, secret talk of the brook to itself.

Marise was aware of all this, richly and happily aware of the

complexities of an impression whose total seemed to her, for the moment,

felicity itself. It pleased her, all, every bit of it, pleased and

amused her; the dear children, Paul worshiping at the shrine of

Eugenia's elegancies, Mark the absurd darling with that grotesque sword

between his legs, Elly devouring her favorite sandwich with impassioned

satisfaction and wondering about the Holy Ghost; Cousin Hetty, ageless,

pungent, and savory as one of her herbs; Mr. Welles, the old tired

darling come into his haven, loving Paul as he would his own grandson;

Eugenia orchid-like against their apple-blossom rusticity; Marsh . . . how

tremendously more _simpático_ he had seemed this afternoon than ever

before, as though one might really like him, and not just find him

exciting and interesting; Neale, dear Neale with his calm eyes into

which it did everyone good to look. All of them at ease, friendly,

enjoying food, the visible world, and each other. Where, after all, were

those traditional, troubling, insoluble intricacies of human

relationships which had been tormenting her and darkening her sky? It

was all so good and simple if one could only remain good and simple

oneself. There was no lightning to fear in that lucent sunset air.

* * * * *

Presently, as the talk turned on flowers and the dates of their

blooming, Eugenia said to her casually, "Marisette, here we are the

first of June and past, and the roses here are less advanced than they

were at Tivoli the last of March. Do you remember the day when a lot of

us sat outdoors and ate a picnic dinner, just as we do now? It was the

day we climbed Monte Cavo."

Marise explained, "Miss Mills is a friend who dates back even before my

husband's time, back to our student days in Rome." To Eugenia she said,

"You're giving us both away and showing how long ago it is, and how

you've forgotten about details. We never could have climbed up Monte

Cavo, the day we went to Tivoli. They don't go on the same excursion, at

all."

"That's true," agreed Eugenia indifferently, "you're right. Monte Cavo

goes with the Rocca di Papa expedition."

Before she could imagine a possible reason, Marise felt her hands go

cold and moist. The sky seemed to darken and lower above her. Eugenia

went on, "And I never went to Rocca di Papa with you, at all, I'm sure

of that. That was a trip you took after you had dropped me for Neale. In

fact, it was on that very expedition that you got formally engaged,

don't you remember? You and Neale walked over from Monte Cavo and only

just caught the last car down."

* * * * *

Ridiculous! Preposterous! Marise told herself that it was not possible

that her hands were trembling so. It was merely a physical reaction,

such as one had when startled by some trivial sudden event. But she

couldn't make them stop trembling. She couldn't make them stop.

What nonsense to be so agitated. Nobody could remember the name from

that evening, weeks and weeks ago. And what if they did? What could they

make of it?

It seemed to her that dusk had fallen in the garden. Where was that

lucent sunset air?

She heard Eugenia's voice going on, and Neale chiming in with a laugh,

and did not understand what they said. Surely everybody must have

forgotten.

She hazarded a quick glance at Mr. Welles' face and drew a long breath

of relief. He had forgotten, that was evident. She looked beyond him to

Marsh. He too would certainly have forgotten.

He was waiting for her eyes. And when they met his, she felt the

lightning flash. He had not forgotten.

II

Marsh suddenly found it unbearable. He wasn't used to keeping the curb

on himself like this, and he hadn't the least intention of learning how

to do it. A fierce, physical irritability overcame him, and he stopped

short in the hall, just because he could not stand the silly chatter

that was always flowing from these silly people about their foolish

affairs. If they only knew what he was leaving unsaid!

He had not meant to make Marise halt, too, his movement having been a

mere unconsidered reflex, but of course she did stop, apparently

surprised by the brusqueness of his action, and faced him there in the

dusky hall-way. She was so close to him that he could see every detail

of her face and person, just as he could at night when he closed his

eyes; so close that for an instant he felt her breath on his face. He

ground his teeth, minded, that instant, to throw down the trumpery

little wall of convention. It couldn't stand, he knew with an

experienced certainty of his own power that it couldn't stand for an

instant against him. The day he chose to put his shoulder to it, down it

would go in a heap of rubble.

But the wall was not all. Usually it was all. But with this woman it was

nothing, a mere accident. Beyond it she stood, valid, and looked at him

out of those long eyes of hers. _What was in her mind?_ She looked at

him now, quietly, just as usual, made some light casual remark, and

effortlessly, as though she had some malign and invincible charm, she

had passed from out his power again, and was walking with that straight,

sure tread of hers, down to the door.

If he could have done it, he would have struck at her from behind.

He could get no hold on her, could not take the first step. All during

those weeks and weeks, he had thrown out his net, and had caught enough

facts, Lord knows. But had he any certainty that he had put them

together right? He had not yet caught in her any one tone or look or

phrase that would give him the unmistakable clue. He had set down words

and words and words that would tell him what her life really was, if he

only knew the alphabet of her language. He might be making a fool of

himself with his almost certainty that she was conscious of having

outgrown, like a splendid tropical tree, the wretched little

kitchen-garden where fate had transplanted her. When he could stamp down

his heat of feeling and let his intelligence have a moment's play, he

was perfectly capable of seeing that he might be misinterpreting

everything he had observed. For instance, that evening over the

photograph-album with her betrayal of some strong feeling of distaste

for the place near Rome. It was evident, from her tone, her look, her

gesture, that the name of it brought up some acutely distasteful memory

to her, but that could mean anything, or nothing. It might be merely

some sordid accident, as that a drunken workman had said something

brutal to her there. Women of her sort, he knew, never forgot those

things. Or any one of a thousand such incidents. He would never know the

significance of that gesture of shrinking of hers.

As he walked behind her, he looked hard at her back, with its

undulating, vase-like beauty, so close to him; and felt her immeasurably

distant. She opened the door now and went out into the sunlight,

stepping a little to one side as though to make room for him to come up

beside her. He found that he knew every turn of her head, every poise of

her shoulders and action of her hands, the whole rhythm of her body, as

though they were his own. And there she passed from him, far and remote.

A sudden certainty of fore-ordained defeat came over him, as he had

never known before. He was amazed at the violence of his pain,

intolerable, intolerable!

* * * * *

She turned her head quickly and caught his eyes in this instant of

inexplicable suffering.

* * * * *

What miraculous thing happened then? It seemed to him that her face

wavered in golden rays, from the radiance of her eyes. For she did not

withdraw her gaze. She looked at him with an instant, profound sympathy

and pity, no longer herself, transfigured, divine by the depth of her

humanity.

The sore bitterness went out from his heart.

* * * * *

A voice called. She turned away. He felt himself following her. He

looked about him, light-headed with relief from pain. The quiet,

flowering world shimmered rainbow-like. What a strange power one human

being could have with another that a look could be an event!

He walked more slowly, feeling with a curious pleasure the insatiable

desire for possession ebbing from him. Why not let it ebb entirely? Why

not enjoy the ineffable sweetness of what he could have? That was what

would please her, what she would like, what she would give, freely. In

this moment of hush, he quite saw how it would be possible, although he

had never for a moment before in his life believed it. Yes, possible and

lovely. After all, he must stop sometime, and take the slower pace. Why

not now, when there was a certain and great prize to be won . . . ?

* * * * *

People talked around him. He talked and did not know his own words.

Marise spun those sparkling webs of nonsense of hers, and made him

laugh, but the next moment he could not have told what she had said. He

must somehow have been very tired to take such intense pleasure in being

at rest.

Her husband came, that rough and energetic husband. The children came,

the children whose restless, selfish, noisy preying on their mother

usually annoyed him so, and still the charm was not broken. Marise, as

she always did when her husband and children were there, retreated into

a remote plane of futile busyness with details that servants should have

cared for; answering the children's silly questions, belonging to

everyone, her personal existence blotted out. But this time he felt

still, deep within him, the penetrating sweetness of her eyes as she had

looked at him.

A tiresome, sophisticated friend of Marise's came, too, somehow

intruding another personality into the circle, already too full, and yet

he was but vaguely irritated by her. She only brought out by contrast

the thrilling quality of Marise's golden presence. He basked in that, as

in the sunshine, and thought of nothing else.

Possibilities he had never dreamed of, stretched before him,

possibilities of almost impersonal and yet desirable existence. Perhaps

this was the turning-point of his life. He supposed there really was

one, sometime, for everybody.

* * * * *

". . . Rocca di Papa . . ." someone had said. Or had he dreamed it? He

awoke with an inward bound, like a man springing up from sleep at a

sudden noise. His first look was for Marise. She was pale. He had not

dreamed it.

The voice went on . . . the newcomer's, the one they called Eugenia . . .

yes, she had known them in Italy. Marise had just said they had been

friends before her marriage.

The voice went on. How he listened as though crouched before the keyhole

of a door! Only three or four sentences, quite casual and trivial in

content, pronounced in that self-consciously cosmopolitan accent. Then

the voice stopped.

It had said enough for him. Now he knew. Now he had that clue.

He had the sensation of rising to his full height, exultantly, every

faculty as alert as though he had never been drugged to sleep by those

weak notions of renunciation. The consciousness of power was like a

sweet taste in his mouth. The deep, fundamental, inalienable need for

possession stretched itself, titanic and mighty, refreshed, reposed, and

strengthened by the involuntary rest it had had.

* * * * *

He fixed his eyes on Marise, waiting for the first interchange of a

look. He could see that her hands were trembling; and smiled to himself.

She was looking at the old man.

Now, in a moment she would look at him.

There were her eyes. She had looked at him. Thunder rolled in his ears.

CHAPTER XII

HEARD FROM THE STUDY

June 20.

From his desk in the inner room where he finally buckled down to those

estimates about the popple-wood casters, Neale could follow, more or

less closely, as his attention varied, the evening activities of the

household.

First there had been the clinking and laughter from the dining-room and

kitchen where Marise and the children cleared off the table and washed

the dishes. How sweet their voices sounded, all light and gay! Every

occasion for being with their mother was fun for the kids. How happy

Marise made them! And how they throve in that happiness like little

plants in the sunshine!

When you really looked at what went on about you, how funny and silly

lots of traditional ideas did seem. That notion, solemnly accepted by

the would-be sophisticated moderns, for instance, that a woman of beauty

and intelligence was being wasted unless she was engaged in being the

"emotional inspiration" of some man's life: which meant in plain

English, stimulating his sexual desire to that fever-heat which they

called impassioned living. As if there were not a thousand other forms

of deep fulfilment in life. People who thought that, how narrow and

cramped they seemed, and blinded to the bigness and variety of life! But

then, of course, everybody hadn't had under his eyes a creature

genuinely rich and various, like Marise, and hadn't seen how all

children feasted on her charm like bees on honey, and how old people

adored her, and how, just by being herself, she enriched and civilized

every life that touched her, and made every place she lived in a home

for the human spirit. And Heaven knew she was, with all that, the real

emotional inspiration of a man's life, a man who loved her a thousand

times more than in his ignorant and passionate youth.

* * * * *

Come, this wasn't work. He might as well have stayed out with the family

and helped with the dishes. This was being like Eugenia Mills, who

always somehow had something to do upstairs when there was any work to

do downstairs. Eugenia was a woman who somehow managed to stand from

under life, anyhow, had been the most successful draft-dodger he knew.

No call had been urgent enough to get _her_ to the recruiting station to

shoulder her share of what everybody had to do. But what did she get out

of her successful shirking? She was in plain process of drying up and

blowing away.

He turned to his desk and drew out the papers which had the figures and

estimates on that popple. He would see if the Warner woodlot had as much

popple and basswood on it as they thought. It would, of course, be

easiest to get it off that lot, if there were enough of it to fill the

order for casters. The Hemmingway lot and the Dornwood lot oughtn't to

be lumbered except in winter, with snow for the sleds. But you could

haul straight downhill from the Warner lot, even on wheels, using the

back lane in the Eagle Rocks woods. There was a period of close

attention to his papers, when he heard nothing at all of what went on in

the rooms next his study. His mind was working with the rapid, trained

exactitude which was a delight to him, with a sure, firm grasp on the

whole problem in all its complicated parts.

Finally he nodded with satisfaction, pushed the papers away, and lighted

his pipe, contentedly. He had it by the tail.

He leaned back in his chair, drawing on the newly lighted pipe and

ruminating again. He thought to himself that he would like to see any

other man in the valley who could make an estimate like that, and be

sure of it, who would know what facts to gather and where to get them,

on the cost of cutting and hauling in different seasons, on mill-work

and transportation and overhead expenses, and how to market and where,

and how to get money and how to get credit and how to manage these

cranky independent Yankees and the hot-tempered irresponsible Canucks.

It was all very well for advanced radicals to say that the common

workmen in a business were as good as the head of the concern. They

weren't and that was all there was to be said about it. Any one of them,

any single one of his employees, put in his place as manager, would run

the business into a hole as deep as hell inside six months. And if you

put the whole lot of them at it, it would only be six weeks instead of

six months before the bust-up.

There again, what people kept saying about life, things clever people

said and that got accepted as the clever things _to_ say, how awfully

beside the mark they seem to you, when you found out actual facts by

coming up against them. What a difference some first-hand experience

with what you were talking about, did make with what you said. What

clever folks ought to say was not that the workmen were as good as the

head or the same sort of flesh and blood, because they weren't; but that

the head exploited his natural capacities out of all proportion, getting

such an outrageous share of the money they all made together, for doing

what was natural to him, and what he enjoyed doing. Take himself for

instance. If by some freak, he could make more money out of being one of

the hands, would he go down in the ranks, stand at a machine all day and

cut the same wooden shapes, hour after hour: or drive a team day after

day where somebody else told him to go? You bet your life he wouldn't!

He didn't need all the money he could squeeze out of everybody

concerned, to make him do his job as manager. His real pay was the

feeling of managing, of doing a job he was fitted for, and that was

worth doing.

How fine it had always been of Marise to back him up in that view of

the business, not to want him to cheat the umpire, even if he could get

away with it, even though it would have meant enough sight more money

for them, even though the umpire didn't exist as yet, except in his own

conscience, in his own idea of what he was up to in his business. Never

once had Marise had a moment of that backward-looking hankering for more

money that turned so many women into pillars of salt and their husbands

into legalized sneak-thieves.

He pulled out some of the letters from Canada about the Powers case, and

fingered them over a little. He had brought them home this evening, and

it wasn't the first time either, to try to get a good hour alone with

Marise to talk it over with her. He frowned as he reflected that he

seemed to have had mighty little chance for talking anything over with

Marise since his return. There always seemed to be somebody sticking

around; one of the two men next door, who didn't have anything to do

_but_ stick around, or Eugenia, who appeared to have settled down

entirely on them this time. Well, perhaps it was just as well to wait a

little longer and say nothing about it, till he had those last final

verifications in his hands.

What in thunder did Eugenia come to visit them for, anyhow? Their way of

life must make her sick. Why did she bother? Oh, probably her old

affection for Marise. They had been girls together, of course, and

Marise had been good to her. Women thought more of those old-time

relations than men. Well, he could stand Eugenia if she could stand

them, he guessed. But she wasn't one who grew on him with the years.

He had less and less patience with those fussy little ways, found less

and less amusing those frequent, small cat-like gestures of hers,

picking off an invisible thread from her sleeve, rolling it up to an

invisible ball between her white finger and thumb, and casting it

delicately away; or settling a ring, or brushing off invisible dust with

a flick of a polished finger-nail; all these manoeuvers executed with

such leisure and easy deliberation that they didn't make her seem

restless, and you knew she calculated that effect. A man who had had

years with a real, living woman like Marise, didn't know whether to

laugh or swear at such mannerisms and the self-consciousness that

underlay them.

There she was coming down the stairs now, when she heard Marise at the

piano, with the children, and knew there was no more work to be done.

Pshaw! He had meant to go out and join the others, but now he would wait

a while, till he had finished his pipe. A pipe beside Eugenia's perfumed

cigarettes always seemed so gross. And he wanted to lounge at his ease,

stretch out in his arm-chair with his feet on another. Could you do

that, with Eugenia fashion-plating herself on the sofa?

He leaned back smoking peacefully, listening to Marise's voice brimming

up all around the children's as they romped through "The raggle-taggle

gypsies, oh!"

What a mastery of the piano Marise had, subduing it to the slender pipe

of those child-voices as long as they sang, and rolling out sumptuous

harmonies in the intervals of the song. Lucky kids! Lucky kids! to have

childhood memories like that.

He heard Paul say, "Now let's sing 'Massa's in the cold, cold ground,'"

and Elly shriek out, "No, Mother, _no!_ It's so _terribly_ sad! I can't

stand it!" And Paul answer with that certainty of his always being in

the right, "Aw, Elly, it's not fair. Is it, Mother, fair to have Elly

keep us from singing one of the nicest songs we have, just because she's

so foolish?"

His father frowned. Queer about Paul. He'd do anything for Elly if he

thought her in trouble, would stand up for her against the biggest bully

of the school-yard. But he couldn't keep himself from . . . it was perhaps

because Paul could not _understand_ that . . . now how could Marise meet

this little problem in family equity, he wondered? Her solutions of the

children's knots always tickled him.

She was saying, "Let's see. Elly, it doesn't look to me as though you

had any right to keep Paul from singing a song he likes. And, Paul, it

doesn't seem as though you had any right to make Elly listen to a song

that makes her cry. Let's settle it this way. We can't move the piano,

but we can move Elly. Elly dear, suppose you go 'way out through the

kitchen and shut both doors and stand on the back porch. Touclé will

probably be there, looking out, the way she does evenings, so you won't

be alone. I'll send Mark out to get you when we're through. And because

it's not very much fun to stand out in the dark, you can stop and get

yourself a piece of cocoanut cake as you go through the pantry."

Neale laughed silently to himself as he heard the doors open and shut

and Elly's light tread die away. How perfectly Marise understood her

little daughter! It wasn't only over the piano that Marise had a

mastery, but over everybody's nature. She played on them as surely, as

richly as on any instrument. That's what he called real art-in-life. Why

wasn't it creative art, as much as anything, her Blondin-like accuracy

of poise among all the conflicting elements of family-life, the warring

interests of the different temperaments, ages, sexes, natures? Why

wasn't it an artistic creation, the unbroken happiness and harmony she

drew out of those elements, as much as the picture the painter drew out

of the reds and blues and yellows on his palette? If it gave an actor a

high and disinterested pleasure when he had an inspiration, or heard

himself give out a true and freshly found intonation, or make exactly

the right gesture, whether anybody in the audience applauded him or not,

why wouldn't the mother of a family and maker of a home have the same

pleasure, and by heck! just as high and disinterested, when she had once

more turned the trick, had an inspiration, and found a course that all

her charges, young and old, could steer together? Well, there was one,

anyhow, of Marise's audience who often gave her a silent hand-clap of

admiration.

The wailing, lugubrious notes of the negro lament rose now, Paul's voice

loud and clear and full of relish. "It takes a heavy stimulant to give

Paul his sensations," thought his father. "What would take the hide

right off of Elly, just gives him an agreeable tingle." His pipe went

out as he listened, and he reached for a match. The song stopped.

Someone had come in. He heard Paul's voice cry joyfully, "Oh goody, Mr.

Welles, come on up to the piano."

Neale leaned forward with a slightly unpleasant stirring of his blood

and listened to see if the old man had come alone. No, of course he

hadn't. He never did.

There was Eugenia's voice saying, "Good-evening, Mr. Marsh." She would

move over for him on the sofa and annex him with a look. Well, let her

have him. He was her kind more than theirs, the Lord knew. Probably he

was used to having that sort of woman annex him.

Neale moved his head restlessly and shifted his position. His pipe and

his arm-chair had lost their savor. The room seemed hot to him and he

got up to open a window. Standing there by the open sash, looking out

into the blue, misty glory of an overclouded moonlight night, he decided

that he would not go in at all, and join them. He felt tired and out of

sorts, he found. And they were such infernal talkers, Eugenia and Marsh.

It wore you out to hear them, especially as you felt all the time that

their speculations on life and human nature were so _far_ off, that it

would be just wasting your breath to try to set them right. He'd stay

here in the study and smoke and maybe doze off a little, till they went

away. Marise had known he had business figuring to do, and she would

have a perfectly valid excuse to give them for his non-appearance. Not

that he had any illusions as to anybody there missing him at all.

He heard Mark's little voice sound shrilly from the pantry, "Come on,

Elly. It's all right. I've even putten away the book that's got that

song."

Some splendid, surging shouts from the piano and the voices began on

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Neale could hear Mr. Welles' shaky

old bass booming away this time. He was probably sitting down with Paul

on his knees. It was really nice of the old codger to take such a fancy

to Paul, and be able to see those sterling qualities of his, through

Paul's surface unloveliness that came mostly from his slowness of

imagination.

The voices stopped; Elly said, "That song sounds as if it were proud of

itself." Her father's heart melted in the utter prostration of

tenderness he felt for his little daughter. How like Elly! What a quick

intelligence animated the sensitive, touching, appealing, defenseless

darling that Elly was! Marise must have been a little girl like that.

Think of her growing up in such an atmosphere of disunion and

flightiness as that weak mother of hers must have given her. Queer, how

Marise didn't seem to have a trace of that weakness, unless it was that

funny physical impressionableness of hers, that she could laugh at

herself, but that still wrought on her, so that if measles were going

the rounds, she could see symptoms of measles in everything the children

did or didn't do; or that well-known habit of hers, that even the

children laughed about with her, of feeling things crawling all over her

for hours after she had seen a caterpillar. Well, that was only the

other side of her extraordinary sensitiveness, that made her know how

everybody was feeling, and what to do to make him feel better. She had

often said that she would certainly die if she ever tried to study

medicine, because as fast as she read of a symptom she would have it,

herself. But she wouldn't die. She'd live and make a cracker-jack of a

doctor, if she'd ever tried it, enough sight better than some callous

brute of a boy with no imagination.

"One more song before bed-time," announced Marise. "And we'll let Mark

choose. It's his turn."

A long silence, in which Neale amusedly divined Mark torn between his

many favorites. Finally the high sweet little treble, "Well, let's make

it 'Down Among the Dead Men.'"

At which Neale laughed silently again. What a circus the kids were!

The clock struck nine as they finished this, and Neale heard the stir

and shifting of chairs. Paul said, "Mother, Mr. Welles and I have fixed

it up, that he's going to put us to bed tonight, if you'll let him."

Amused surprise from Marise: Mr. Welles' voice saying he really would

like it, never had seen any children in their nightgowns except in the

movies; Paul saying, "Gracious! We don't wear nightgowns like women. We

wear pajamas!"; Mark's voice crying, "We'll show you how we play

foot-fight on the rug. We have to do that barefoot, so each one can

tickle ourselves;" as usual, no sound from Elly probably still reveling

in the proudness of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

A clatter of feet on the stairs, the chirping voices muffled by the

shutting of a door overhead, and Eugenia's voice, musical and carefully

modulated, saying, "Well, Marisette, you look perfectly worn out with

fatigue. You haven't looked a bit well lately, anyhow. And I'm not

surprised. The way those children take it out of you!"

"Damn that woman!" thought Neale. That sterile life of hers had starved

out from her even the capacity to understand a really human existence

when she saw it. Not that she had _ever_ seemed to have any considerable

seed-bed of human possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he

could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him

in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. He remembered

that he had said of her fantastically, to a fellow in the _pension_,

that she reminded him of a spool of silk thread. And now the silk thread

had all been wound off, and there was only the bare wooden spool left.

"It's not surprising that Mrs. Crittenden gets tired," commented

Marsh's voice. "She does the work of four or five persons."

"Yes," agreed Eugenia, "I don't know how she does it . . . cook, nurse,

teacher, housekeeper, welfare-worker, seamstress, gardener . . ."

"Oh, let up, let up!" Neale heard Marise say, with an impatience that

pleased him. She must have been at the piano as she spoke, for at once

there rose, smiting to the heart, the solemn, glorious, hopeless chords

of the last part of the Pathetic Symphony. Heavens! How Marise could

play!

When the last dull, dreary, beautiful note had vibrated into silence,

Eugenia murmured, "Doesn't that always make you want to crawl under the

sod and pull the daisies over you?"

"Ashes, ashes, not daisies," corrected Marsh, dreamily.

There was, thought Neale listening critically to their intonations, a

voluptuous, perverse pleasure in despair which he found very

distasteful. Despair was a real and honest and deadly emotion. Folks

with appetites sated by having everything they wanted, oughtn't to use

despair as a sort of condiment to perk up their jaded zest in life.

"Confounded play-actors!" he thought, and wondered what Marise's

reaction to them was.

He foresaw that it was going to be too much for his patience to listen

to them. He would get too hot under the collar and be snappish,

afterwards. Luckily he was in the library. There were better voices to

listen to. He got up, ran his forefinger along a shelf, and took down a

volume of Trevelyan, "Garbaldi and the Thousand." The well-worn volume

opened of itself at a familiar passage, the description of the battle of

Calatafimi. His eye lighted in anticipation. There was a man's book, he

thought. But his pipe was out. He laid the book down to light it before

he began to read. In spite of himself he listened to hear what they were

saying now in the next room. Eugenia was talking and he didn't like what

she was saying about those recurrent dreams of Marise's, because he knew

it was making poor Marise squirm. She had such a queer, Elly-like

shyness about that notion of hers, Marise had. It evidently meant more

to her than she had ever been able to make him understand. He couldn't

see why she cared so much about it, hated to have it talked about

casually. But he wasn't Eugenia. If Marise didn't want it talked about

casually, by George he wasn't the one who would mention it. They'd

hardly ever spoken of them, those dreams, even to each other. People had

a right to moral privacy, if they wanted it, he supposed, even married

women. There was nothing so ruthless anyhow as an old childhood friend,

to whom you had made foolish youthful confidences and who brought them

out any time he felt like it.

"You ought to have those dreams of yours psycho-analyzed, Marisette,"

Eugenia was saying. To Marsh she went on in explanation, "Mrs.

Crittenden has always had a queer kind of dream. I remember her telling

me about them, years ago, when we were girls together, and nobody

guessed there was anything in dreams. She dreams she is in some

tremendous rapid motion, a leaf on a great river-current, or a bird

blown by a great wind, or foam driven along by storm-waves, isn't that

it, Marisonne?"

Neale did not need the sound of Marise's voice to know how she hated

this. She said, rather shortly for her, as though she didn't want to say

a word about it, and yet couldn't leave it uncorrected, "Not exactly. I

don't dream I'm the leaf on the current. I dream I _am_ the current

myself, part of it. I'm the wind, not the bird blown by it; the wave

itself; it's too hard to explain."

"Do you still have those dreams once in a while, Marisette, and do you

still love them as much?"

"Oh yes, sometimes."

"And have you ever had the same sensation in your waking moments? I

remember so well you used to say that was what you longed for, some

experience in real life that would make you have that glorious sense of

irresistible forward movement. We used to think," said Eugenia, "that

perhaps falling in love would give it to you."

"No," said Marise. "I've never felt it, out of my dreams."

Neale was sorry he had elected to stay in the study. If he were out

there now, he could change the conversation, come to her rescue.

Couldn't Eugenia see that she was bothering Marise!

"What do you suppose Freud would make out of such dreams?" asked

Eugenia, evidently of Marsh.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me," said Marsh, and Neale was obliged

to hand it to him that the very sound of his voice had a living, real,

genuine accent that was a relief after Eugenia. He didn't talk

half-chewed and wholly undigested nonsense, the way Eugenia did. Neale

had heard enough of his ideas to know that he didn't agree with a word

the man said, but at least it was a vital and intelligent personality

talking.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me. Americans have fadded the thing

into imbecility, so that the very phrase has become such a bromide one

hates to pronounce it. But of course the commonplace that all dreams are

expressions of suppressed desires is true. And it's very apparent that

Mrs. Crittenden's desire is a very fine one for freedom and power and

momentum. She's evidently not a back-water personality. Though one would

hardly need psycho-analysis to guess that!" He changed the subject as

masterfully as Neale could have done. "See here, Mrs. Crittenden, that

Tschaikowsky whetted my appetite for more. Don't you feel like playing

again?"

The idea came over Neale, and in spite of his uneasy irritation, it

tickled his fancy, that possibly Marsh found Eugenia just as deadly as

he did.

Marise jumped at the chance to turn the talk, for in an instant the

piano began to chant again, not Tschaikowsky, Neale noted, but some of

the new people whom Marise was working over lately. He couldn't

understand a note of them, nor keep his mind on them, nor even try to

remember their names. He had been able to get just as far as Debussy and

no further, he thought whimsically, before his brain-channels hardened

in incipient middle-age.

He plunged into Trevelyan and the heart-quickening ups and downs of

battle.

Some time after this, he was pulled back from those critical and

glorious hours by the consciousness, gradually forcing itself on him on

two discomforts; his pipe had gone out and Eugenia was at it again. He

scratched a match and listened in spite of himself to that smooth liquid

voice. She was still harping on psycho-analysis. Wasn't she just the

kind of woman for whom that would have an irresistible fascination! He

gathered that Marise was objecting to it, just as sweepingly as Eugenia

was approving. How women did hate half-tones and reasonable

qualifications!

"I'm a gardener," Marise was saying, "and I know a thing or two about

natural processes. The thing to do with a manure pile is not to paw it

over and over, but to put it safely away in the dark, underground, and

never bother your head about it again except to watch the beauty and

vitality of the flowers and grains that spring from the earth it has

fertilized."

Neale as he held the lifted match over his pipe, shook his head. That

was all very well, put picturesquely as Marise always put things; but

you couldn't knock an idea on the head just with an apt metaphor. There

was a great deal more to be said about it, even if fool half-baked

faddists like Eugenia did make it ridiculous. In the first place it was

nothing so new. Everybody who had ever encountered a crisis in his life

and conquered it, had . . . why, he himself . . .

He felt his heart beat faster, and before he knew what was coming, he

felt a great, heart-quickening gust of fresh salt air blow over him, and

felt himself far from the book-tainted stagnant air of that indoor

room. He forgot to light his pipe and sat motionless, holding the

burning match till it flared up at the end and scorched his fingers.

Then he dropped it with a startled oath, and looked quickly around him.

In that instant he had lived over again the moment in Nova Scotia when

he had gone down to the harbor just as the battered little tramp steamer

was pulling out, bound for China.

Good God! What an astonishing onslaught that had been! How from some

great, fierce, unguessed appetite, the longing for wandering, lawless

freedom had burst up! Marise, the children, their safe, snug

middle-class life, how they had seemed only so many drag-anchors to cut

himself loose from and make out to the open sea! If the steamer had been

still close enough to the dock so that he could have jumped aboard, how

he would have leaped! He might have been one of those men who

disappeared mysteriously, from out a prosperous and happy life, and are

never heard of again. But it hadn't been close enough. The green oily

water widened between them; and he had gone back with a burning heart to

that deadly little country hotel.

Well, had he buried it and forced himself to think no more about it? No.

Not on your life he hadn't. He'd stood up to himself. He'd asked himself

what the hell was the matter, and he'd gone after it, as any grown man

would. It hadn't been fun. He remembered that the sweat had run down his

face as though he'd been handling planks in the lumber-yard in

midsummer.

And what had he found? He'd found that he'd never got over the jolt it

had given him, there on that aimless youthful trip through Italy, with

China and the Eastern seas before him, to fall in love and have all

those plans for wandering cut off by the need for a safe, stable life.

Then he'd gone on. He'd asked himself, if that's so, _then_ what? He

hadn't pulled any of the moralizing stern-duty stuff; he knew Marise

would rather die than have him doing for her something he hated, out of

stern duty. It was an insult, anyhow, unless it was a positively

helpless cripple in question, to do things for people out of duty only.

And to mix what folks called "duty" up with love, that was the devil. So

he hadn't.

That was the sort of thing Marise had meant, so long ago, when they were

first engaged, that was the sort of thing she had asked him never to do.

He'd promised he never would, and this wasn't the first time the promise

had held him straight to what was, after all, the only decent course

with a woman like Marise, as strong as she was fine. Anything else would

be treating her like a child, or a dependent, as he'd hate to have her

treat him, or anybody treat him.

So this time he'd asked himself right out, what he really wanted and

needed in life, and he'd been ready, honestly ready, to take any answer

he got, and dree his weird accordingly, as the best thing for everybody

concerned, as the only honest thing, as the only thing that would put

any bed-rock under him, as what Marise would want him to do. If it meant

tramp-steamers, why it had to be tramp-steamers. Something could be

managed for Marise and the children.

This was what he had asked. And what answer had he got? Why, of course,

he hankered for the double-jointed, lawless freedom that the

tramp-steamer stood for. He guessed everybody wanted that, more or less.

But he wanted Marise and the children a damn sight more. And not only

Marise and the children. He hadn't let himself lay it all on their

backs, and play the martyr's rôle of the forcibly domesticated wild

male. No, he wanted the life he had, outside the family, his own line of

work; he wanted the sureness of it, the coherence of it, the permanence

of it, the clear conscience he had about what he was doing in the world,

the knowledge that he was creating something, helping men to use the

natural resources of the world without exploiting either the natural

resources or the men; he wanted the sense of deserved power over other

human beings. That was what he really wanted most of all. You could

call it smug and safe and bourgeois if you liked. But the plain fact

remained that it had more of what really counted for him than any other

life he could see possible. And when he looked at it, hard, with his

eyes open, why the tramp-steamer to China sailed out of school-boy

theatrical clouds and showed herself for the shabby, sordid little

substitute for a real life she would have been to him.

He'd have liked to have that too, of course. You'd _like_ to have

everything! But you can't. And it is only immature boys who whimper

because you can't have your cake and eat it too. That was all there was

to that.

What he had dug for was to find his deepest and most permanent desires,

and when he had found them, he'd come home with a happy heart.

It even seemed to him that he had been happier and quieter than before.

Well, maybe Marise's metaphor had something in it, for all it was so

flowery and high-falutin. Maybe she would say that what he had done was

exactly what she'd described, to dig it under the ground and let it

fertilize and enrich his life.

Oh Lord! how a figure of speech always wound you up in knots if you

tried to use it to say anything definite!

He relighted his pipe, this time with a steady hand, and a cool eye; and

turned to Trevelyan and Garibaldi again. He'd take that other side of

himself out in books, he guessed.

He had now arrived at the crucial moment of the battle, and lifted his

head and his heart in anticipation of the way Garibaldi met that moment.

He read, "To experienced eyes the battle seemed lost. Bixio said to

Garibaldi, 'General, I fear we ought to retreat.' Garibaldi looked up as

though a serpent had stung him. '_Here we make Italy or die!_' he said."

"That's the talk!" cried Neale, to himself. The brave words resounded in

the air about him, and drowned out the voices from the next room.

CHAPTER XIII

ALONG THE EAGLE ROCK BROOK

July 1.

Paul was very much pleased that Mr. Welles agreed with him so perfectly

about the hour and place for lunch. But then Mr. Welles was awfully nice

about agreeing. He said, now, "Yes, I believe this would be the best

place. Here by the pool, on that big rock, as you say. We'll be drier

there. Yesterday's rain has made everything in the woods pretty wet.

That's a good idea of yours, to build our fire on the rock, with water

all around. The fire couldn't possibly spread." Paul looked proudly at

the rain-soaked trees and wet soggy leaves which his forethought had

saved from destruction and strode across the brook in his rubber boots,

with the first installment of dry pine branches.

"Aren't you tired?" he said protectingly to his companion. "Whyn't you

sit down over there and undo the lunch-basket? I'll make camp. Father

showed me how to make a campfire with only one match."

"All right," said Mr. Welles. "I do feel a little leg-weary. I'm not so

used to these mountain scrambles as you are."

"I'll clean the fish, too," said Paul; "maybe you don't like to. Elly

can't abide it." He did not say that he did not like it very well

himself, having always to get over the sick feeling it gave him.

"I never did it in my life," confessed Mr. Welles. "You see I always

lived in towns till now."

Paul felt very sorry for Mr. Welles, and shook his head pityingly as he

went off for more firewood.