When he had collected a lot, he began to lay the sticks. He did it just

as Father had showed him, but it seemed lots harder to get them right.

And it took a lot more than one match to get it started. He didn't have

a bit of breath left in him, by the time he finally got it going. And

my, weren't his hands black! But he felt very much set up, all the same,

that he had done it. In his heart Paul knew that there was nothing

anybody could do which he could not.

They hung the slimpsy slices of bacon from forked sticks, Paul showing

Mr. Welles how to thread his on, and began to cook them around the edges

of the fire, while the two little trout frizzled in the frying-pan. "I'm

so glad we got that last one," commented Paul. "One wouldn't have been

very much."

"Yes, it's much better to have one apiece," agreed Mr. Welles.

When the bacon was done (only burned a little at the edges, and still

soft in the thicker places in the center of the slice), and the fish the

right brown, and 'most shrunk up to nothing, they each of them put a

trout and a piece of bacon on his slice of bread and butter, and

gracious! didn't it taste good.

"You must have done this before," said Mr. Welles, respectfully; "you

seem to know a good deal about camping."

"Oh, I'm a good camper, all right," agreed Paul. "Mother and I have gone

off in the woods, lots of times. When I was littler, I used to get

spells when I was bad. I do still, even now, once in a while."

Mr. Welles did not smile, but continued gravely eating his bread and

bacon, his eyes on the little boy.

"I don't know what's the matter. I feel all snarled up inside. And then

the first thing you know I've done something awful. Mother can tell when

it first gets started in me, the least little teenty bit. _How_ can she

tell? And then she takes me off camping. She pretends it's because she's

feeling snarled up, herself. But it's not. She never is. Why not?"

He considered this in silence, chewing slowly on a vast mouthful of

bread. "Anyhow, we leave the little children with Touclé, if she's

there," (he stopped here an instant to inspect Mr. Welles to make sure

he was not laughing because he had called Elly and Mark the "little

children." But Mr. Welles was not laughing at him. He was listening,

_really_ listening, the way grown-ups almost never did, to hear what you

had to say. He did like Mr. Welles. He went on,) "or if Touclé's off

somewheres in the woods herself, we leave them down at the Powers' to

play with Addie and Ralph, and we light out for the woods, Mother and I.

The snarleder up I feel, the further we go. We don't fish or anything.

Just leg it, till I feel better. Then we make a fire and eat."

He swallowed visibly a huge lump of unchewed bread, and said, uncorking

a thermos bottle, "I asked Mother to put up some hot coffee."

Mr. Welles seemed surprised. "Why, do you drink coffee?"

"Oh no, none of us kids ever take it. But I thought you'd like some.

Grown-up folks mostly do, when they eat out-of-doors."

Mr. Welles took the cup of steaming coffee, ready sugared and creamed,

without even saying thank you, but in a minute, as they began their

second round of sandwiches, filled this time with cold ham from home, he

said, "You've got quite a way of looking out for folks, haven't you?

"I like to," said Paul.

"_I_ always liked to," said Mr. Welles.

"I guess you've done quite a lot of it," conjectured the little boy.

"Quite a lot," said the old man, thoughtfully.

Paul never liked to be left behind and now spoke out, "Well, I expect

I'll do a good deal, too."

"Most likely you will," agreed the old man.

He spoke a little absently, and after a minute said, "Paul, talking

about looking out for folks makes me think of something that's bothering

me like everything lately. I can't make up my mind about whether I

ought to go on, looking out for folks, if I know folks that need it. I

keep hearing from somebody who lives down South, that the colored folks

aren't getting a real square deal. I keep wondering if maybe I oughtn't

to go and live there and help her look out for them."

Paul was so astonished at this that he opened his mouth wide, without

speaking. When he could get his breath, he shouted, "Why, Mr. Welles, go

away from Ashley to live!" He stared hard at the old man, thinking he

must have got it twisted. But Mr. Welles did not set him straight, only

stared down at the ground with a pale, bothered-looking face and sort of

twitched his mouth to one side.

The little boy moved over closer to him, and said, looking up at him

with all his might, "Aw, Mr. Welles, I _wish't_ you wouldn't! I _like_

your being here. There's lot of things I've got planned we could do

together."

It seemed to him that the old man looked older and more tired at this.

He closed his eyes and did not answer. Paul felt better. Mr. Welles

couldn't have been in earnest.

How still it was in the woods that day. Not the least little flutter

from any leaf. The sunlight looked as green, as green, coming down

through the trees that way, like the light in church when the sun came

in through the stained-glass windows.

The only thing that budged at all was a bird . . . was it a flicker? . . .

he couldn't make out. It kept hopping around in that big beech tree

across the brook. Probably it was worried about its nest and didn't like

to have people so near. And yet they sat as still, he and Mr. Welles, as

still as a tree, or the shiny water in the pool.

Mr. Welles opened his eyes and took the little boy's rough, calloused

hand in his. "See here, Paul, maybe you can help me make up my mind."

Paul squared his shoulders.

"It's this way. I'm pretty nearly used up, not good for much any more.

And the Electrical Company wanted to fix everything the nicest way for

me to live. And they have. I hadn't any idea anything could be so nice

as living next door to you folks in such a place as Crittenden's. And

then making friends with you. I'd always wanted a little boy, but I

thought I was so old, no little boy would bother with me."

He squeezed the child's fingers and looked down on him lovingly. For a

moment Paul's heart swelled up so he couldn't speak. Then he said, in a

husky voice, "I _like_ to." He took a large bite from his sandwich and

repeated roughly, his mouth full, "I _like_ to."

Neither said anything more for a moment. The flicker . . . yes, it was a

flicker . . . in the big beech kept changing her position, flying down

from a top-branch to a lower one, and then back again. Paul made out the

hole in the old trunk of the tree where she'd probably put her nest, and

wondered why she didn't go back to it.

"Have you got to the Civil War, in your history yet, Paul?"

"Gee, yes, 'way past it. Up to the Philadelphia Exposition."

Mr. Welles said nothing for a minute and Paul could see by his

expression that he was trying to think of some simple baby way to say

what he wanted to. Gracious! didn't he know Paul was in the seventh

grade? "_I_ can understand all right," he said roughly.

Mr. Welles said, "Well, all right. If you can, you'll do more than I

can. You know how the colored people got their freedom then. But

something very bad had been going on there in slavery, for ever so long.

And bad things that go on for a long time, can't be straightened out in

a hurry. And so far, it's been too much for everybody, to get this

straightened out. The colored people . . . they're made to suffer all the

time for being born the way they are. And that's not right . . . in

America . . ."

"Why don't they stand up for themselves?" asked Paul scornfully. He'd

like to see anybody who would make him suffer for being born the way he

was.

Mr. Welles hesitated again. "It looks to me this way. People can fight

for some things . . . their property, and their vote and their work. And I

guess the colored people have got to fight for those, themselves. But

there are some other things . . . some of the nicest . . . why, if you

fight for them, you tear them all to pieces, trying to get them."

Paul did not have the least idea what this meant.

"If what you want is to have people respect what you are worth, why, if

you fight them to make them, then you spoil what you're worth. Anyhow,

even if you don't spoil it, fighting about it doesn't put you in any

state of mind to go on being your best. That's a pretty hard job for

anybody."

Paul found this very dull. His attention wandered back to that queer

flicker, so excited about something.

The old man tried to get at him again. "Look here, Paul, Americans that

happen to be colored people ought to have every bit of the same chance

to amount to their best that any Americans have, oughtn't they?"

Paul saw this. But he didn't see what Mr. Welles could do about it, and

said so.

"Well, I couldn't do a great deal," said the old man sadly, "but more

than if I stayed here. It looks as though they needed, as much as

anything else, people to just have the same feeling towards them that

you have for anybody who's trying to make the best of himself. And I

could do that."

Paul got the impression at last that Mr. Welles was in earnest about

this. It made him feel anxious. "Oh _dear_!" he said, kicking the toe of

his rubber boot against the rock. He couldn't think of anything to say,

except that he hated the idea of Mr. Welles going.

But just then he was startled by a sharp cry of distress from the bird,

who flew out wildly from the beech, poised herself in the air, beating

her wings and calling in a loud scream. The old man, unused to forests

and their inhabitants, noticed this but vaguely, and was surprised by

Paul's instant response. "There must be a snake after her eggs," he said

excitedly. "I'll go over and chase him off."

He started across the pool, gave a cry, and stood still, petrified.

Before their eyes, without a breath of wind, the hugh beech solemnly

bowed itself and with a great roar of branches, whipping and crushing

the trees about, it fell, its full length thundering on the ground, a

great mat of shaggy roots uptorn, leaving an open wound in the stony

mountain soil. Then, in a minute, it was all as still as before.

Paul was scared almost to death. He scrambled back to the rock, his

knees shaking, his stomach sick, and clung to Mr. Welles with all his

might. "What made it fall? There's no wind! What made it fall?" he

cried, burying his face in the old man's coat. "It might just as easy

have fallen this way, on us, and killed us! What made it fall?"

Mr. Welles patted Paul's shoulder, and said, "There, there," till Paul's

teeth stopped chattering and he began to be a little ashamed of showing

how it had startled him. He was also a little put out that Mr. Welles

had remained so unmoved. "You don't know how dangerous a big tree _is_,

when it falls!" he said, accusingly, to defend himself. "If you'd lived

here more, and heard some of the stories . . . ! Nate Hewitt had his back

broken with a tree falling on him. But he was cutting that one down, and

it fell too soon. Nobody had touched this one! And there isn't any wind.

What _made_ it fall? Most every winter, some man in the lumber camp on

the mountain gets killed or smashed up, and lots of horses too."

He felt much better now, and he did want to find out whatever had made

that tree fall. He sat up, and looked back at it, just a mess of broken

branches and upset leaves, where a minute before there had been a tall

living tree! "I'm going over to see what made it fall," he said.

He splashed across the pool and poked around with a stick in the hole

in the ground, and almost right away he saw what the reason was. He ran

back to tell Mr. Welles. "I see now. The brook had kept sidling over

that way, and washed the earth from under the rocks. It just didn't have

enough ground left to hold on to."

He felt all right now he knew some simple reason for what had looked so

crazy. He looked up confidently at the old man, and was struck into awed

silence by the expression of Mr. Welles' face.

"Paul," said Mr. Welles, and his voice wasn't steady, "I guess what I

ought to try to be is one more drop of water in the brook."

Paul stared hard. He did not understand this either, but he understood

the expression in that tired, old face. Mr. Welles went on, "That wrong

feeling about colored people, not wanting them to be respected as much

as any American, is . . . that's a tree that's got to come down. I'm too

old to take an axe to it. And, anyhow, if you cut that sort of thing

down with an axe, the roots generally live and start all over again. If

we can just wash the ground out from under it, with enough people

thinking differently, maybe it'll fall, roots and all, of its own

weight. If I go and live there and just am one more person who respects

them when they deserve it, it'll help _that_ much, maybe, don't you

think?"

Paul had understood more what Mr. Welles' face and voice said to him

than the words. He kept on looking into the old man's eyes. Something

deep inside Paul said "yes" to what Mr. Welles' eyes were asking him.

"How about it, Paul?" asked the old man.

The child gave a start, climbed up beside him, and took hold of his

hand. "How about it? How about it?" asked Mr. Welles in a very low tone.

The little boy nodded. "Maybe," he said briefly. His lips shook.

Presently he sniffed and drew his sleeve across his nose. He held the

old hand tightly.

"Oh dear!" he said again, in a small, miserable voice.

The old man made no answer.

The two sat motionless, leaning against each other. A ray of sun found

the newly opened spot in the roof of the woods, and it seemed to Paul it

pointed a long steady finger down on the fallen beech.

At first Paul's throat ached, and his eyes smarted. He felt heavy and

sore, as though he hadn't eaten the right thing for lunch.

But by and by this went away. A quiet came all over him, so that he was

better than happy. He laid his head against Mr. Welles' shoulder and

looked up into the worn, pale old face, which was now also very quiet

and still as though he too were better than happy.

He held Paul close to him.

Paul had a great many mixed-up thoughts. But there was one that was

clear. He said to himself solemnly, "I guess I know who I want to be

like when I grow up."

* * * * *

By and by, he stirred and said, "Well, I guess I better start to pack

up. Don't you bother. I'll pack the things away. Mother showed me how to

clean the frying-pan with sand and moss."

CHAPTER XIV

BESIDE THE ONION-BED

July 10.

Marise pulled nervously and rapidly at the weeds among the onions, and

wiped away with her sleeve the drops that ran down her hot, red face.

She was not rebellious at the dusty, tiresome task, nor aware of the

merciless heat of the early-summer sun. She was not indeed thinking at

all of what she was doing, except that the physical effort of stooping

and reaching and pulling was a relief to her, made slightly less

oppressive the thunder-heavy moral atmosphere she breathed. She was

trying to think, but the different impressions came rushing into her

mind with such vehement haste that they dashed against each other

brutally, to her entire confusion.

When she tried to think out an answer to this perfectly preposterous

idea of old Mr. Welles, why should a thousand other horrifying ideas

which she had been keeping at bay pour in through the door, once opened

to probing thought? What possible connection could there be between such

a fantastic crazy notion as his, and those other heaving, looming

possibilities which rolled themselves higher and murkier the longer she

refused to look at them? She snatched at the weeds, twitching them up,

flinging them down, reaching, straining, the sun molten on her back, the

sweat stinging on her face. It was a silly impression of course, but it

seemed to her that if she hurried fast enough with the weeds, those

thoughts and doubts could not catch up with her.

She had put them off, and put them off while Neale was away, because

they scared her, and she didn't want to look at them without Neale. But

he had been back for weeks now and still she put them off. All those

tarnishing sayings, those careless, casual negations of what she had

taken for axioms; that challenge to her whole life dropped from time to

time as though it were an accepted commonplace with all intelligent

beings. . . .

Was her love for the children only an inverted form of sensual egotism,

an enervating slavery for them, really only a snatched-up substitute for

the personal life which was ebbing away from her? Was her attitude

towards her beloved music a lazy, self-indulgent one, to keep it to

herself and the valley here? Was that growing indifference of hers to

dress and trips to the city, and seeing Eugenia's smart crowd there, a

sign of mental dry-rot? Was it a betrayal of what was alive in her own

personality to go on adapting herself to the inevitable changes in her

relations with Neale, compromising, rather than . . ."

"Aren't you awfully hot to go on doing that?" asked Neale, coming up

behind her, from the road. She was startled because she had not heard

him approach on the soft, cultivated ground of the garden. And as she

turned her wet, crimson face up to his, he was startled himself. "Why,

what's the matter, dear?" he asked anxiously.

She sank back to a sitting position, drawing a long breath, mopping her

forehead with her sleeve, as unconscious of her looks before Neale as

though she had still been alone. She motioned him down beside her. "Oh,

Neale, I'm so glad! How'd you happen to be so early? Maybe if we stay

right out here, where the children won't know where we are, we can have

a few minutes quite to ourselves. Touclé is going to get tea tonight.

Neale, sit down a minute. I want to tell you something. I'm awfully

upset. I went over to help Mr. Welles transplant his Brussels sprouts,

and we got to talking. Neale, what do you suppose has been in his mind

all this time we've been thinking him so happy and contented here?"

"Doesn't he like Crittenden's? Find it dull?"

"No, no, not that, a bit. He _loves_ it. It's heart-breaking to see how

much he loves it!" She stopped, her voice shaking a little, and waited

till she could get it under control. Her husband took her stained, dusty

hand in his. She gave his fingers a little pressure, absently, not

noting what she did, and seeing the corner of his handkerchief showing

in the pocket of his shirt, she pulled it out with a nervous jerk, and

wiped her face all over with it.

He waited in silence.

"Listen, Neale, I know it will sound perfectly crazy to you, at first.

But you might as well believe it, for he is serious. It seems he's been

getting lots more letters from that niece or cousin of his, down in

Georgia. She tells him about things, how the Negroes are treated, all

the Jim Crow business carried into every single detail of every single

minute of every single day. It seems they're not badly treated as long

as they'll stay day-laborers or servants, but . . . oh well, there's no

need to go on with telling you . . . _you_ know. We all know well enough

what the American attitude is. Only I didn't think it could be so bad,

or so everlastingly kept up every minute, as this cousin tells him. I

suppose she ought to know. She's lived there for forty years. She keeps

citing instances she's seen." Marise broke out with a fierce, blaming

sharpness, "I don't see what _business_ she had, writing him that way. I

think it was beastly of her. Why couldn't she let him alone!"

She felt her husband waiting patiently for her to quiet down and go on

more coherently, and knew that his patience came from a long

acquaintance with her mental habits, a certainty that her outbursts of

feeling generally did quiet down if one waited: and across her genuine

absorption in the story she was telling there flitted, bat-like, a

distaste far being known so well as all that! There was something

indiscreet and belittling in it, she thought, with an inward fastidious

recoil. But this had gone, entirely, in a moment, and she was rushing

on, "And, Neale, what _do_ you think? She has worked on him, and he has

worked on himself till he's got himself in a morbid state. He thinks

perhaps he ought to leave Ashley that he loves so much and go down to

live where this horrid cousin lives. . . ."

Her husband's astonishment at this was as great as she could have

desired. None of Neale's usual, unsurprised acceptance of everything

that happened as being in the nature of things, which occasionally so

rubbed her the wrong way, and seemed to her so wilfully phlegmatic. He

was sincerely amazed and astounded; that was plain from his exclamation,

his tone, his face. Of course he wasn't as outraged as she, but that

wasn't to be expected, since he hadn't seen so much of that dear old

life-worn man, nor grown so protectingly fond of him. She revelled in

Neale's astonishment as bearing out her own feeling. "Isn't it crazy,

Neale! Don't you think it crazy! Is there the slightest justification

for it? You feel, just as I do, don't you, that it's a perfectly

unbalanced, fanatical, _fool_ish thing to think of doing, his going down

into that hopeless mess?"

But her husband had had a moment's time, while she exclaimed, to get

back to his usual unhurried post in life. "It's certainly about as

unexpected as anything I ever heard of," he admitted. "I should have to

know a lot more about it, before I could be sure what to think."

An old impatience, at an old variance between their ways of thought,

came out with an edge in Marise's tone as she said hotly, "Oh, _Neale_,

don't take that line of yours! You know all there is to know, now! What

else could you find out? You know how he's given all his life to looking

out for his family, ending up with years of that bed-ridden old aunt the

others wished on to him, just because he was too soft-hearted to get out

from under. You know how anxious the Company was to do something to make

up to him for all the years of service he gave them. And you know how

happy he has been here, how he's loved it all, and fathered every root

and seed in his garden, and how he and Paul have struck up such a sweet

affection, and how he could be happier and happier." She struck her

hands together. "Oh, Neale, I can't have him do such a foolish, useless

thing, and spoil his life! It's not as if he'd be of any use down in

Georgia. You know how the Southern white people detest Northerners

coming down and interfering with the Negroes. Maybe they're wrong. But

they're the people who live there. What could _he_ do against them? What

under the sun could one tired-out old man accomplish in a situation that

every American knows to be simply impossible?" She looked hard at her

husband's thoughtful face and threw herself against him with a petulant

gesture. "Now, Neale, don't go and justify him! Don't say you think he's

right."

He put his arm about her shoulders, hot and wet under their gingham

covering, and she leaned against him, the gesture as unconsidered and

unconscious for the one as the other. "No, I'm not going to try to

justify him. I suppose I think he's very foolish. But I must say it

shows a pretty fine spirit. I take off my hat to his intention."

"Oh yes, his intention . . ." conceded Marise. "He's an old saint, of

course. Only he mustn't be allowed to ruin his life and break

everybody's heart, even if he is a saint."

"That's the way saints usually run their business, isn't it?" asked

Neale. "And I'd like to know how anybody's going to keep him from doing

it, if he decides he ought to."

"Oh yes, we can," urged Marise, sitting up with energy. "We can, every

one of us, throw ourselves against it, argue with him, tell him that it

seems to us not only foolish, and exaggerated, and morbid, but conceited

as if he thought what _he_ did would count so very much. We can make him

feel that it would be sort of cheating the Company, after what they've

done for him; we can just mass all our personalities against it, use

moral suasion, get excited, work on his feelings . . . she has done that,

that cousin!"

"I wouldn't want to do that," said Neale quietly. "You can, if you think

best."

She recognized a familiar emergence of granite in his voice and aspect

and cried out on it passionately, "Now, _Neale_!"

He knew perfectly well what this meant, without further words from her.

They looked at each other, an unspoken battle going on with extreme

rapidity between them, over ground intimately familiar. In the middle of

this, she broke violently into words, quite sure that he would know at

which point she took it up. "You carry that idea to perfectly impossible

lengths, Neale. Don't you ever admit that we ought to try to make other

people act the way we think best, even when we _know_ we're right and

they're wrong?"

"Yes," admitted her husband, "I should think we were bound to. If we

ever _were_ sure we were right and they wrong."

She gave the impression of vibrating with impatience and cried out,

"That's pettifogging. Of course there are times when we are sure.

Suppose you saw a little child about to take hold of the red-hot end of

a poker?"

"A child is different," he opposed her. "All grown-ups are responsible

for all children. I suppose I'd keep him from taking hold of it. And yet

I'm not dead sure I'd be right. If I thought he was only just going to

touch it, to see if it really would burn him as people had told him, I

guess I'd let him."

"You always get around things," she said blamingly, "but there _are_

cases when you could be sure. Suppose you saw Aunt Hetty just about to

take poison, or Frank Warner getting Nelly Powers to run away with him?"

He was startled by this, and asked quickly with a change of tone,

"Whatever made you think of that? Are Frank and Nelly . . . ?"

"Oh, it just came into my head. No, I haven't heard anybody has said

anything, noticed anything. But I had a sort of notion that 'Gene

doesn't like Frank hanging around the house so much."

"Well . . ." commented her husband, with a lively accent of surprise. "I

hadn't dreamed of such a thing. And it throws a light on something I

happened to see this afternoon, on my way home. I came round the back

way, the ravine road below the Eagle Rocks. I wanted to see about some

popple we're thinking of buying from the Warners, on the shoulder beyond

the Rocks. It didn't occur to me, of course, that anybody else would be

up there, but just at the peak of the shoulder I saw 'Gene Powers, lying

down beside a big beech-tree. He didn't hear me, walking on the

pine-needles. And for a minute I stood there, and honestly didn't know

what to do."

"How do you mean . . . 'lying down'?" asked Marise, not visualizing the

scene. "As though he were sick?"

"No, not a bit that way. Not on his back, but on his face, looking over

the edge of the ridge. All strung up like a bow, his head down between

his shoulders and shot forwards like a cat stalking something. _I_ tell

you, he made me think of a hunter when he thinks he sees a deer. I

thought probably he had. I've seen a buck and some does up there lately.

Then he saw me and jumped up very quickly and came down past me. I was

going to say, just for the sake of saying something, 'Laying your plans

for next deer-week?' But as he went by and nodded, he looked at me with

such an odd expression that I thought I'd better not. The idea came to

me that maybe 'Gene does poach and occasionally take a deer out of

season. Meat is so high it wouldn't be surprising. They have a pretty

hard time scraping along. I don't know as I'd blame him if he did shoot

a deer once in a while.

"Well, after I'd been on beyond and made my estimate on the popple, I

came back that way. And as I passed where he'd been lying, I thought,

just for curiosity, I'd go up and see if I could see what he'd been

looking at so hard. I got up to the big beech where he'd been, and

looked over. And I got the surprise of my life. He couldn't have been

looking at deer, for on the other side the cliff drops down sheer, and

you look right off into air, across the valley. I was so surprised I

stood there, taken aback. The afternoon train went up the valley while I

stood there, staring. It looked so tiny. You're really very high on

those Rocks. I noticed you could see your Cousin Hetty's house from

there, and the mill and the Powers house. That looked like a child's

plaything, so little, under the big pine. And just as I looked at that,

I saw a man come out from the house, get on a horse, and ride away."

"Why, that must have been Frank," said Marise. "He rides that roan mare

of his as much as he drives her."

"Yes, that's what came into my mind when you spoke his name just now in

connection with Nelly. I hadn't thought anything of it, before."

There was a moment's silence as they looked at each other.

"Oh, _Neale_!" said Marise, on a deep note. "How awful! You don't

suppose there is anything in his jealousy. . . . Nelly is as inscrutable in

her way as 'Gene."

"Heavens! how should I know? But my guess is that 'Gene is making a fool

of himself for nothing. Nelly doesn't strike me as being the sort of

woman to . . ."

"But Frank is awfully good-looking and dashing, and lots younger than

'Gene. And Nelly is young too and perfectly stunning to look at. And

she's not one of our native valley girls, you know. It may seem very

dull and cooped-up here, so far from town, and shops. She may envy her

sisters, still living back in West Adams with city life around them."

"Oh, it's possible enough, I suppose," admitted Neale. "But she seems

perfectly contented, and thinks the world of the children."

Marise's face clouded. The phrase had recalled her dark preoccupations

of a moment ago. "Lots of people nowadays would say she seems to be fond

of the children because she is using them to fill up a lack in her

life," she said somberly; "that 'Gene no longer satisfied her, and that

she fed on the children because she was starving emotionally." Her

husband making no comment on this, she went on, "Neale, don't you think

that people are saying horrid, distressing things nowadays? About

marriage I mean, and all relations between men and women and between

parents and children?" Her heart was beating faster as she finished this

question. The subject was broached at last. Where would it lead them?

Where would it lead them? She shut her eyes at the thought.

"There's a good deal to be said about all that, that's pretty horrid and

perfectly true," remarked Neale casually. He tilted his hat further over

his eyes and leaned back, propping himself on one elbow.

"_Neale_!" she protested, shocked and repelled. She had hoped for

something very different from Neale. But she thought, in a momentary

exasperation with him, she might have known she would not get it. He

always took everything so abstractedly, so impersonally.

"I don't see any use in pretending there's not," he advanced with a

reasonable, considering air. "I don't see that intimate human

relationships are in any _more_ of a mess than other human relations.

International ones, for instance, just now. But they certainly are in

considerable of a mess, in a great many cases. It is evident that lots

of times they're managed all wrong."

Marise was so acutely disappointed that she felt a quavering ache in her

throat, and kept silence for a moment. So this was what she had looked

forward to, as a help. What was Neale there _for_, if not for her to

lean against, to protect her, to be a defending wall about her? He was

so strong and so clearheaded, he could be such a wall if he chose. How

stern and hard he was, the core of him!

"Neale," she said after a moment, "I wonder if you even _know_ what

things are being said about what we've always believed in . . . motherhood

for instance, and marriage?"

She had been unable to keep the quaver out of her voice, and at the

sound of it, he sat up instantly, astonished, solicitous, tender. "Why,

darling, what's the matter?" he said again, moving closer to her,

bending over her.

"How _can_ you think such things without their making you perfectly

miserable, without making you want to go straight and cut your throat?"

she cried out on his callousness.

He put his arm about her again, not absently this time, and drew her

close. She thought angrily, "He thinks it's just a fit of nerves I can

be soothed out of like a child," and pulled away from him.

He looked at her, his attentive, intelligent look, and let his arm drop.

And yet, although he was serious now, she was sure that he saw only that

the subject agitated her, and did not see any possibility that it might

touch them both, personally.

"I have to think whatever I'm convinced is true, whether it makes me

miserable or not, don't I?" he said gently. "And it does make me

miserable, of course. Who can help being miserable at the spectacle of

such rich possibilities as human life is full of, mismanaged and spoiled

and lost?"

"But, Neale, do you realize that people are thinking, books are being

written to prove that parents' love for their children is only

self-love, hypocritically disguised, and sometimes even sexual love

camouflaged; and that anybody is better for the children to be with than

their mother; and that married people, after the first flare-up of

passion is over, hate each other instead of loving?"

"I daresay there's a certain amount of truth in that, occasionally. It

would certainly explain some of the inexplicable things we all see

happen in family life," he remarked.

Marise started and cried out piercingly, "Neale, how can you say such

things to _me_!"

He looked at her keenly again, keenly and penetratingly, and said, "I'm

not one of those who think it inherent in the nature of women to take

abstract propositions personally always. But I do think they will have

to make a big effort to get themselves out of a mighty old acquired

habit of thinking every general observation is directed at them

personally."

She flashed out indignantly at him, "How can you help taking it

personally when it shakes the very foundations of our life?"

He was astonished enough at this to suit even her. His face showed the

most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her. "Shakes the . . . why,

Marise dear, what are you talking about? You don't have to believe about

_yourself_ all the generalizing guesses that people are writing down in

books, do you, if it contradicts your own experience? Just because you

read that lots of American men had flat-foot and were refused at the

recruiting station for that, you don't have to think your own feet flat,

do you? If you do think so, all you have to do is to start out and walk

on them, to know for sure they're all right. Heavens and earth! People

of our age, who have really lived, don't need somebody in a book to tell

them what's happening to them. Don't you _know_ whether you really love

Elly and Mark and Paul? If you don't, I should think a few minutes'

thought and recollection of the last ten years would tell you, all

right. Don't you _know_ whether we hate each other, you and I?"

Marise drew a long breath of relief. This was the sort of talk she

wanted. She clutched at the strong hand which seemed at last held out to

her. She did so want to be talked out of it all. "Oh good! then, Neale,

you don't believe any of that sort of talk? You were only saying so for

argument."

He withdrew the hand. "Yes, I do believe a good deal of as a general

proposition. What I'm saying, what I'm always saying, dear, and trying

my best to live, is that everybody must decide for himself when a

general proposition applies to him, what to believe about his own life

and its values. Nobody else can tell him."

She approached along another line. "But, Neale, that's all very well for

you, because you have so much withstandingness in you. But for me, there

are things so sacred, so intimate, so much a part of me, that only to

have some rough hand laid on them, to have them pulled out and pawed

over and thought about . . . it frightens me so, sets me in such a quiver!

And they don't seem the same again. _Aren't_ there things in life so

high and delicate that they can't stand questioning?"

He considered this a long time, visibly putting all his intelligence on

it. "I can't say, for you," he finally brought out. "You're so much

finer and more sensitive than I. But I've never in all these years seen

that your fineness and your sensitiveness make you any less strong in

the last analysis. You suffer more, respond more to all the implications

of things; but I don't see that there is any reason to think there's any

inherent weakness in you that need make you afraid to look at facts."

He presented this testimony to her, seriously, gravely. It took her

breath, coming from him. She could only look at him in speechless

gratitude and swallow hard. Finally she said, falteringly, "You're too

good, Neale, to say that. I don't deserve it. I'm awfully weak, many

times."

"I wouldn't say it, if it weren't so," he answered, "and I didn't say

you weren't weak sometimes. I said you were strong when all was said and

done."

Even in her emotion, she had an instant's inward smile at the Neale-like

quality of this. She went on, "But don't you think there is such a thing

as spoiling beautiful elements in life, with handling them, questioning

them, for natures that aren't naturally belligerent and ready to fight

for what they want to keep? For instance, when somebody says that

children in a marriage are like drift-wood left high on the rocks of a

dwindled stream, tokens of a flood-time of passion now gone by. . . ." She

did not tell him who had said this. Nor did he ask. But she thought by

his expression that he knew it had been Vincent Marsh.

He said heartily, "I should just call that a nasty-minded remark from

somebody who didn't know what he was talking about. And let it go at

that."

"There, you see," she told him, "that rouses your instinct to resist, to

fight back. But it doesn't mine. It just makes me sick."

"Marise, I'm afraid that you _have_ to fight for what you want to keep

in this world. I don't see any way out of it. And I don't believe that

anybody else can do your fighting for you. You ask if it's not possible

to have beautiful, intimate things spoiled by questioning, criticisms,

doubts. Yes, I do think it is, for young people, who haven't learned

anything of life at first hand. I think they ought to be protected till

they have been able to accumulate some actual experience of life. That's

the only weapon for self-defense anybody can have, what he has learned

of life, himself. Young people are apt to believe what older people tell

them about life, because they don't know anything about it, yet,

themselves, and I think you ought to be careful what is questioned in

their presence. But I don't see that mature people ought to be protected

unless you want to keep them childish, as women used to be kept. Nothing

is your own, if you haven't made it so, and kept it so."

"But, Neale, it's so sickeningly _hard_! Why do it? Why, when everything

seems all right, pry into the deep and hidden roots of things? I don't

_want_ to think about the possibility of some dreadful dry-rot happening

to married people's feelings towards each other, as they get older and

get used to each other. It's soiling to my imagination. What's the use?"

She had so hoped he would help her to sweep them all back to the cellar

labeled "morbid" and lock them down in the dark again. Any other man

would, she thought, amazed at him, _any_ other husband! She focussed all

her personality passionately to force him to answer as she wished.

He fell into another thoughtful silence, glanced up at her once sharply

and looked down again. She always felt afraid of him when he looked like

that. No, not afraid of him, but of the relentless thing he was going to

say. Presently he said it. "What's the use? Why, the very fact you seem

afraid of it . . . I can't imagine why . . . shows there would be some use.

To turn your back on anything you're afraid of, that's fatal, always. It

springs on you from behind."

She cried out to him in a sudden anguish that was beyond her control,

"But _suppose you face it and still it springs_!"

Her aspect, her accent, her shaken voice gave him a great start. He

faced her. He looked at her as though he saw her for the first time that

day. And he grew very pale as he looked. Something wordless passed

between them. Now he knew at last what she was afraid of.

But he did not flinch. He said desperately, in a harsh voice, "You have

to take what comes to you in life," and was grimly silent.

Then with a gesture as though to put away something incredible,

approaching him, he went on more quietly, "But my experience is that it

doesn't dare spring if you walk right up to it. Generally you find

you're less afraid of everything in the world, after that."

* * * * *

She had been frightened, stabbed through and through by the look they

had interchanged, by the wordless something which had passed between

them. But now she wondered suddenly, passionately, amazedly, if he had

really understood all the dagger-like possibilities of their talk.

"Neale," she challenged him, "don't you put _any_ limits on this? Isn't

there _any_where you'd stop out of sheer respect? Nothing too hallowed

by . . ."

"Nothing. Nothing," he answered her, his face pale, his eyes deep and

enduring. "It's lying down, not to answer the challenge when it comes.

How do you know what you have to deal with if you won't look to see?

You may find out that something you have been trusting is growing out of

a poisonous root. That does happen. What's the use of pretending that it

couldn't to you, as to anybody else? And what's the use of having lived

honestly, if you haven't grown brave enough to do whatever needs to be

done? If you are scared by the idea that your motherhood may be only

inverted sensuality, or if you think there is any possibility that the

children would be better off in other hands, or if you think . . . if you

think there is any other terrifying possibility in our life here, for

God's sake look into your own heart and see for yourself! It all sounds

like nonsense to me, but . . ."

She snatched at the straw, she who longed so for help. "Oh, Neale, if

_you_ think so, I know . . ."

"I won't _have_ you taking my word for it!" he told her roughly. "_I_

can't tell what's back of what you do. And you oughtn't to take my word

for it if I tried to. Nobody on earth can make your decision for you,

but you yourself." The drops stood out on his forehead as he spoke, and

ran down his pale face.

She quivered and was silent for a moment. Then, "Neale, where shall I

get the strength to do that?" she asked.

He looked full in her face. "I don't know anywhere to go for strength

but out of one's naked human heart," he said.

She shrank from the rigor of this with a qualm of actual fear. "I think

I must have something else," she told him wildly.

"I don't know," he returned. "I don't know at all about that. I'm no

mystic. I can't help you there, dear. But I know, as well as I know

anything on earth, that anything that's worth having in anybody's life,

his parent-hood, his marriage, his love, his ambition, can stand any

honest challenge it can be put to. If it can't, it's not valid and ought

to be changed or discarded." His gaze on her was immeasurably steady.

She longed unspeakably for something else from him, some warming,

comforting assurance of help, some heartening, stimulating encouragement

along that stark, bleak way.

* * * * *

Somehow they were standing up now, both pale, looking profoundly into

each other's eyes. Something almost palpable, of which not a word had

been spoken aloud, came and stood there between them, and through it

they still looked at each other. They had left words far behind now, in

the fierce velocity of their thoughts.

And yet with the almost physical unity of their years of life together,

each knew the other's thoughts.

She flung herself against him as though she had cried out to him. He put

his arms strongly, tenderly about her, as though he had answered.

With no words she had cried out, silently, desperately to him, "Hold me!

Hold me!"

And with no words, he had answered, silently, desperately, "No one can

hold you but yourself."

* * * * *

A shouting babble of voices rose in the distance. The children crying to

each other came out of the house-door and raced down the flag-stone

walk. "There they are! In the garden! By the onion-bed! Father! Mother!

We've been looking for you everywhere. Touclé says if you'll let her,

she'll boil down some maple syrup for us to wax on ice for dessert."

They poured into the garden, children, cat and fox-terrier, noisy,

insistent, clamorous. Mark, always frankly greedy of his mother's

attention, pushed in jealously between his parents, clinging to his

mother's knees. He looked up in her face and laughed out, his merry

peal, "Oh, Mother, what a dirty face! You've been suspiring and then

you've wiped your forehead with your dirty hand, the way you say I

mustn't. How funny you look! And you've got a great, long tear in your

sleeve, too."

Behind them, tiny, smooth and glistening, Eugenia Mills strolled to the

edge of the garden, as far as the flag-stones went, and stood waiting,

palpably incapable of taking her delicate bronze slippers into the dust.

"You've missed a kitchen call from that lively, earthy old Mrs. Powers

and her handsome daughter-in-law," she announced casually. "Touclé says

they brought some eggs. What a stunning creature that Nelly is! There's

temperament for you! Can't you just feel the smouldering, primitive fire

hidden under that scornful silence of hers?"

"Mother, may we tell Touclé to put the syrup on to boil?" begged Elly.

Her hair was tangled and tousled, with bits of bark sticking in it, and

dried mud was caked on her hands and bare legs. Marise thought of the

repugnance she must have aroused in Eugenia.

"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles is going to give me a fishing-rod, he

says. A _real_ one. Boughten."

"Oh, I want one too!" cried Mark, jumping up and down. "I want one too."

"You're too little. Mother, _isn't_ Mark too little? And anyhow, he

always breaks everything. You do, Mark, you know you do. I take _care_

of my things!"

* * * * *

Someone in the confusion stepped on the fox-terrier's toes and he set up

a shrill, aggrieved yelping. The children pawed at her with dirty hands.

"Good-evening, Mr. Marsh," said Eugenia, looking over her shoulder at

the dark-haired figure in flannels approaching from the other house. She

turned and strolled across the grass to meet him, as white and gleaming

as he.

* * * * *

A sick qualm of self-contempt shook Marise. For, high and clear above

everything else, there had come into her mind a quick discomfort at the

contrast between her appearance and that of Eugenia.

CHAPTER XV

HOME LIFE

July 20.

The heat was appalling even early in the morning, right after breakfast.

There were always three or four such terrific days, even up here in the

mountains, to remind you that you lived in America and had to take your

part of the ferocious extremes of the American climate.

And of course this had to be the time when Touclé went off for one of

her wandering disappearances. Marise could tell that by the aspect of

the old woman as she entered the kitchen that morning, her reticule bag

bulging out with whatever mysterious provisions Touclé took with her.

You never missed anything from the kitchen.

Marise felt herself in such a nervously heightened state of

sensitiveness to everything and everybody in those days, that it did not

surprise her to find that for the first time she received something more

than a quaint and amusing impression from the old aborigine. She had

never noticed it before, but sometimes there was something about

Touclé's strange, battered, leathery old face . . . what was it? The idea

came to her a new one, that Touclé was also a person, not merely a

curious and enigmatic phenomenon.

Touclé was preparing to depart in the silent, unceremonious,

absent-minded way she did everything, as though she were the only person

in the world. She opened the screen door, stepped out into the torrid

glare of the sunshine and, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure, trudged

down the path.

"Where does she go?" thought Marise, and "What was that expression on

her face I could not name?"

Impulsively she went out quickly herself, and followed after the old

woman.

"Touclé! Touclé!" she called, and wondered if her voice in these days

sounded to everyone as nervous and uncertain as it did to her.

The old woman turned and waited till the younger had overtaken her. They

were under the dense shade of an old maple, beside the road, as they

stood looking at each other.

As she had followed, Marise regretted her impulse, and had wondered what

in the world she could find to say, but now that she saw again the

expression in the other's face, she cried out longingly, "Touclé, where

do you go that makes you look peaceful?"

The old woman glanced at her, a faint surprise appearing in her deeply

lined face. Then she looked at her, without surprise, seriously as

though to see what she might read in the younger woman's eyes. She stood

for a long moment, thinking. Finally she sat down on the grass under the

maple-tree, and motioned Marise to sit beside her. She meditated for a

long time, and then said, hesitatingly, "I don't know as a white person

could understand. White people . . . nobody ever asked me before."

She sat silent, her broad, dusty feet in their elastic-sided, worn,

run-over shoes straight before her, the thick, horny eyelids dropped

over her eyes, her scarred old face carved into innumerable deep lines.

Marise wondered if she had forgotten that anyone else was there. She

turned her own eyes away, finally, and looking at the mountains saw that

black thunderclouds were rolling up over the Eagle Rocks. Then the old

woman said, her eyes still dropped, "I tell you how my uncle told me,

seventy-five years ago. He said people are like fish in an underground

brook, in a black cave. He said there is a place, away far off from

where they live, where there is a crack in the rock. If they went 'way

off they could get a glimpse of what daylight is. And about once in so

often they need to swim there and look out at the daylight. If they

don't, they lose their eyesight from always being in the dark. He said

that a lot of Indians don't care whether they lose their eyesight or

not, so long's they can go on eating and swimming around. But good

Indians do. He said that as far as he could make out, none of the white

people care. He said maybe they've lost their eyes altogether."

Without a move of her sagging, unlovely old body, she turned her deep

black eyes on the flushed, quivering, beautiful woman beside her.

"That's where I go," she answered. "I go 'way off to be by myself, and

get a glimpse of what daylight is."

She got up to her feet, shifted her reticule from one hand to the other,

and without a backward look trudged slowly down the dusty road, a

stooped, shabby, feeble old figure.

Marise saw her turn into a wood-road that led up towards the mountain,

and disappear. Her own heart was burning as she looked. Nobody would

help her in her need. Touclé went away to find peace, and left her in

the black cave. Neale stood. . . .

A child's shriek of pain and loud wailing calls for "Mother! Mother!

_Mother!_" sent her back running breathlessly to the house. Mark had

fallen out of the swing and the sharp corner of the board had struck

him, he said, "in the eye! in the eye!" He was shrieking and holding

both hands frantically over his left eye. This time it might be serious,

might have injured the eye-ball. Those swing-boards were deadly. Marise

snatched up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen,

terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to

herself with one breath, "It's probably nothing," and in the next seeing

Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his life long.

She opened the first-aid box on the kitchen-shelf, pulled out a roll of

bandage and a length of gauze, sat down with Mark in her lap near the

faucet, and wet the gauze in cold water. Then she tried in vain to

induce him to take down his hands so that she could see where the blow

had struck.

But the terrified, hysterical child was incapable of hearing what she

said, incapable of doing anything but scream louder and louder when she

tried to pull down those desperately tight little hands held with

frantic tenseness over the hurt eye. Marise could feel all his little

body, quivering and taut. His shrieks were like those of someone

undergoing the most violent torture.

She herself responded nervously and automatically to his condition, felt

herself begin to tighten up, and knew that she was equally ready to

shake him furiously, or to burst into anguished tears of sympathy for

his pain.

Wait now . . . wait . . . what was the thing to do for Mark? What would

untie those knots of fright and shock? For Paul it would have been talk

of the bicycle he was to have for his birthday; for Elly a fairy-story

or a piece of candy! For Mark . . .

High above the tumult of Mark's shrieks and her own spasmodic reactions

to them, she sent her intelligence circling quietly . . . and in an

instant . . . oh yes, that was the thing. "Listen, Mark," she said in his

ear, stopping her effort to take down his hands, "Mother's learned a new

song, a _new_ one, awfully funny. And ever so long too, the way you like

them." She put her arms about him and began, hearing herself with

difficulty through his cries.

"On yonder hill there stands a damsel,

Who she is, I do not know."

("How preposterous we must sound, if Eugenia is listening," she thought

to herself, as she sang, "out-yelling each other this way!")

"I'll go and court her for her beauty.

She must answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

As usual Mark fell helpless before the combination of music and a story.

His cries diminished in volume. She said in his ear, "And then the Lady

sings," and she tuned her voice to a young-ladyish, high sweetness and

sang,

"My father was a Spanish Captain,

Went to sea a month ago,"

Mark made a great effort and choked down his cries to heaving sobs as he

tried to listen,

"First he kissed me, then he left me;

Bade me always answer 'no.'"

She told the little boy, now looking up at her out of the one eye not

covered by his hands, "Then the gentleman says to her," she made her

voice loud and hearty and bluff,

"Oh, Madam, in your face is beauty,

On your lips red roses grow.

Will you take me for your lover?

Madam, answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

She explained in an aside to Mark, "But her father had told her she must

always answer just the one thing, 'no,' so she had to say," she turned

up in the mincing, ladylike key again, and sang,

"Oh no, John, no, John, no."

Mark drew a long quivering breath through parted lips and sat silent,

his one eye fixed on his mother, who now sang in the loud, lusty voice,

"Oh, Madam, since you are so cruel,

And that you do scorn me so,

If I may not be your lover,

Madam, will you let me go?"

And in the high, prim voice, she answered herself,

"Oh no, John, no, John, _no!_"

A faint smile hovered near Mark's flushed face. He leaned towards his

mother as she sang, and took down his hands so that he could see her

better. Marise noted instantly, with a silent exclamation of relief that

the red angry mark was quite outside the eye-socket, harmless on the

bone at one side. Much ado about nothing as usual with the children. Why

_did_ she get so frightened each time? Another one of Mark's hairbreadth

escapes.

She reached for the cold wet compress and went on, singing loudly and

boldly, with a facetious wag of her head, (how tired she was of all this

manoeuvering!),

"Then I will stay with you forever

If you will not be unkind."

She applied the cold compress on the hurt spot and put out her hand for

the bandage-roll, singing with an ostentatiously humorous accent and

thinking with exasperation how all this was delaying her in the thousand

things to do in the house,

"Madam, I have vowed to love you;

Would you have me change my mind?"

She wound the bandage around and around the little boy's head, so that

it held the compress in place, singing in the high, sweet voice,

"Oh no, John, no, John, NO."

She went on with a heavy, mock solemnity, in the loud voice,

"Oh, hark, I hear the church-bells ringing;

Will you come and be my wife?"

She pinned the bandage in place at the back of Mark's head,

"Or, dear Madam, have you settled

To live single all your life?"

She gathered the child up to her, his head on her shoulder, his face

turned to her, his bare, dusty, wiry little legs wriggling and soiling

her white skirt; and sang, rollickingly,

"Oh no, John, no, John, NO!"

"There, that's all," she said in her natural voice, looking down at

Mark. She said to herself rebelliously, "I've expended enough

personality and energy on this performance to play a Beethoven sonata at

a concert," and found she was quoting something Vincent Marsh had said

about her life, the day before.

There was a moment while the joke slowly penetrated to Mark's

six-year-old brain. And then he laughed out, delightedly, "Oh, Mother,

that's a beaut! Sing it again. Sing it again! Now I know what's coming,

I'll like it such a lots betterer."

Marise cried out in indignant protest, "Mark! When I've sat here for ten

minutes singing to you, and all the work to do, and the sun getting like

red-hot fire every minute."

"What must you got to do?" asked Mark, challengingly.

"Well, the very first thing is to get dinner ready and in the fireless

cooker, so we can turn out the oil-stove and cool off this terrible

kitchen."

Mark looked up at her and smiled. He had recently lost a front tooth and

this added a quaintness to the splendor of his irresistible smile. "You

could sing as you get the dinner ready," he said insinuatingly, "and

I'll help you."

Marise smothered an impulse to shout to the child, "No, no, go away! Go

away! I can't have you bothering around. I've got to be by myself, or I

don't know what will happen!" She thought of Touclé, off in the green

and silent woods, in a blessed solitude. She thought of Eugenia up in

her shaded room, stretched on the chaise-longue in a thin silk

room-gown, she thought of Neale and his stern eyes . . . she looked down

on the dusty, tanned, tousle-headed little boy, with the bandage around

his head, his one eye looking up at her pleadingly, his dirty little

hand clutching at the fold of her skirt; and drearily and unwillingly

she summoned herself to self-control. "All right, Mark, that's true. I

could sing while I peel the potatoes. You could wash them for me. That

would help."

They installed themselves for this work. The acrid smell of

potato-parings rose in the furnace-like heat of the kitchen, along with

the singing voice, asking and answering itself. Mark listened with all

his might, laughing and wriggling with appreciation. When his mother had

finished and was putting the potatoes into the boiling water, he said

exultantly, "He got around _her_, all right, I should say what!"

Paul burst in now, saying, "Mother, Mother!" He stopped short and asked,

"What you got on your head, Mark?"

The little boy looked surprised, put his hand up, felt the bandage, and

said with an off-hand air, "Oh, I bunked my head on the corner of the

swing-board."

"I know," said Paul, "I've done it lots of times." He went on, "Mother,

my pig has lice. You can just _see_ them crawling around under his hair.

And I got out the oil Father said to use, but I can't do it. It says on

the can to rub it on with a stiff little brush. I don't see how ever in

the world you're going to get your pig to stand still while you do it.

When I try to, he just squeals, and runs away."

His mother said with decision, from where she stooped before the open

ice-box door, "Paul, if there is anything in the world I know nothing

about, it is pigs. I haven't the slightest idea what to do." She shut

the heavy door with a bang more energetic than was necessary to latch

it, and came back towards the stove with a raw, red piece of uncooked

meat on a plate.

"Oh, how nasty meat looks, raw," said Mark, with an accent of disgust.

"You eat it with a good appetite when I've cooked it," remarked his

mother, somewhat grimly, putting it in a hot pan over the fire. An odor

of searing fibers and smoke and frying onions rose up in the hot, still

air of the kitchen.

"If I could have guessed we'd have such weather, I'd never have ordered

a pot-roast," thought Marise, vexed.

"Please, Mother, _please_," begged Paul.

"Please what?" asked his mother, who had forgotten the pig.

"Henry!" said Paul. "If you could see how he scratches and scratches and

how the behind of his ears is all scabs he's so bitten."

"Wouldn't Eugenia and Vincent Marsh love this conversation?" thought

Marise, turning the meat in the pan and starting back from the spatters

of hot fat.

"Mother, don't you see, I agreed to take care of him, with Father, and

so I _have_ to. He's just like my child. You wouldn't let one of _us_

have lice all over, and scabs on our . . ."

"Oh stop, Paul, for Heaven's sake!" said his mother.

Through the smoke and smell and heat, the sensation of her underclothing

sticking hotly to her limbs, the constant dogging fear and excitement

that beset her, and the causeless twanging of her nerves, there traveled

to her brain, along a channel worn smooth by the habit of her thought

about the children, the question, "What is it that makes Paul care so

much about this?" And the answer, almost lost in the reverberation of

all those other questions and answers in her head, was, "It comes from

what is best in Paul, his feeling of personal responsibility for the

welfare of others. That mustn't be hindered." Aloud, almost

automatically, she said, in a neutral tone, "Paul, I don't think I can

do a single thing for you and Henry, but I'll go with you and look at

him and see if I can think of anything. Just wait till I get this and

the potatoes in the fireless cooker."

Paul made a visible effort, almost as though he were swallowing

something too large for his throat, and said ungraciously, "I suppose I

ought to help you in here, then."

"I suppose so," said his mother roughly, in an exact imitation of his

manner.

Paul looked at her quickly, laughing a little, sheepishly. He waited a

moment, during which time Mark announced that he was going out to the

sand-pile, and then said, in a pleasant tone, "What can I do?"

His mother nodded at him with a smile, refrained from the spoken word of

approbation which she knew he would hate, and took thought as to what he

might do that would afflict him least. "You can go and sweep off the

front porch, and straighten out the cushions and chairs, and water the

porch-box geraniums."

He disappeared, whistling loudly, "Massa's in the cold, cold ground."

Marise hoped automatically that Elly was not in earshot to hear this.

She felt herself tired to the point of exhaustion by the necessity

always to be divining somebody's inner processes, putting herself in

somebody's else skin and doing the thing that would reach him in the

right way. She would like, an instant, just an instant, to be in her own

skin, she thought, penetrated with a sense of the unstable equilibrium

of personal relations. To keep the peace in a household of young and old

highly differentiated personalities was a feat of the Blondin variety;

the least inattention, the least failure in judgment, and opportunities

were lost forever. Her sense of the impermanence of the harmony between

them all had grown upon her of late, like an obsession. It seemed to her

that her face must wear the strained, propitiatory smile she had so

despised in her youth on the faces of older woman, mothers of families.

Now she knew from what it came . . . balancing perpetually on a tight-rope

from which . . .

Oh, her very soul felt crumpled with all this pressure from the outside,

never-ending!

The worst was not the always recurring physical demands, the dressing

and undressing the children, preparing their food and keeping them

clean. The crushing part was the moral strain; to carry their lives

always with you, incalculably different from each other and from your

own. And not only their present lives, but the insoluble question of how

their present lives were affecting their future. Never for a moment from

the time they are born, to be free from the thought, "Where are they?

What are they doing? Is that the best thing for them?" till every

individual thought of your own was shattered, till your intelligence was

atrophied, till your sensibilities to finer things were dulled and

blunted.

Paul came back. "About ready for Henry?" he asked. "I've finished the

porch."

She put the two tightly closed kettles inside the fireless cooker and

shut down the lid. "Yes, ready for Henry," she said.

She washed her hot, moist face in cold water, drank a glass, put on a

broad-brimmed garden hat, and set out for the field back of the barn.

The kitchen had been hot, but it seemed cool compared to the heat into

which they stepped from the door. It startled Marise so that she drew

back for an instant. It seemed to her like walking through molten metal.

"Mercy! what heat!" she murmured.

"Yes, ain't it great?" said Paul, looking off, down the field, "just

what the corn needs."

"You should say 'isn't,' not 'ain't,'" corrected his mother.

"But it'll be cooler soon," said Paul. "There's a big thunderstorm

coming up. See, around the corner of the mountain. See how black it is

now, over the Eagle Rocks" He took her hand in his bramble-scarred

little fingers, and led her along, talking proudly of his own virtue.

"I've moved Henry's pen today, fresh, so's to get him on new grass, and

I put it under the shade of this butternut tree."

They were beside the pen now, looking over the fence at the grotesque

animal, twitching his gross and horribly flexible snout, as he peered up

at them out of his small, intelligent eyes, sunk in fat, and almost

hidden by the fleshy, hairy triangles of his ear-flaps.

"Don't you think Henry is a _very_ handsome pig?" asked Paul.

"I think you take very good care of him," she answered. "Now what is the

matter about the oil you can't put on? Doesn't he like it?"

"He hasn't felt it yet. He won't even let me try. Look!" The child

climbed over the fence and made a quick grab at the animal, which gave

an alarmed, startled grunt, wheeled with astonishing nimbleness, and

darted away in a short-legged gallop.

"Look there, that's the way he always does!" said Paul in an aggrieved

tone.

Marise considered the pig for a moment. He had turned again and was once

more staring at her, his quivering, fleshy snout in the air, a

singularly alert expression of attention animating his heavy-jowled

countenance.

"Are there any things he specially likes?" she asked Paul.

"He likes to eat, of course, being a pig," said Paul, "and he loves you

to scratch his back with a stick."

"Oh, then it's easy. Come outside the pen. Now listen. You go back to

the barn and get whatever it is you feed him. Then you put that in the

trough, and let him begin to eat, quietly. Then take your oil and your

brush, and moving very slowly so that you don't startle him, lean over

the fence and begin to brush it on his back where he likes to be rubbed.

If he likes the feel of it, he'll probably stand still. I'll wait here,

till you see how it comes out."

She moved away a few paces, and sank down on the grass under the tree,

as though the heat had flung her there. The grass crisped drily under

her, as though it too were parched.

She closed her eyes and felt the sun beating palpably on the lids . . .

or was it that hot inward pulse still throbbing . . . ? Why wouldn't Neale

do it for her? Why wouldn't he put out that strength of his and crush

out this strange agitation of hers, _forbid_ it to her? Then there was

nothing in her but intense discomfort, as though that were a universe of

its own. A low, distant growl of thunder shook the air with a muffled,

muted roar.

After a time, a little voice back of her announced in a low, cautious

tone, "Mother, it _works!_ Henry loves it!"

She turned her head and saw the little boy vigorously rubbing the ears

and flanks of the pig, which stood perfectly still, its eyes half shut,

rapt in a beatitude of satisfaction.

Marise turned her head away and slid down lower on the grass, so that

she lay with her face on her arm. She was shaking from head to foot as

though with sobs. But she was not crying. She was laughing hysterically.

"Even for the pig!" she was saying to herself. "A symbol of my life!"

She lay there a long time after this nervous fit of laughter had

stopped, till she heard Paul saying, "There, I've put it on every inch

of him." He added with a special intonation, "And now I guess maybe I'd

better go in swimming."

At this Marise sat up quickly, with an instant experienced divination of

what she would see.

In answer to her appalled look on him, he murmured apologetically, "I

didn't know I was getting so _much_ on me. It sort of spattered."

* * * * *

It was, of course, as she led the deplorable object towards the house

that they encountered Eugenia under a green-lined white parasol, on the

way back from the garden, carrying an armful of sweet-peas.

"I thought I'd fill the vases with fresh flowers before the rain came,"

she murmured, visibly sheering off from Paul.

"Eugenia ought not to carry sweet-peas," thought Marise. "It ought

always to be orchids."

In the bath-room as she and Paul took off his oil-soaked clothes, Mark's

little voice called to her, "Mother! Mo-o-other!"

"Yes, what is it?" she answered, suspending operations for a moment to

hear.

"Mother, if I had to kill all the ants in the world," called Mark, "I'd

a great deal rather they were all gathered up together in a heap than

running around every-which-way, wouldn't you?"

"For goodness' _sakes,_ what a silly baby thing to say!" commented Paul

with energy.

Marise called heartily to Mark, "Yes indeed I would, dear."

Paul asked curiously, "Mother, how can you answer him like that, such a

_fool_ thing!"

Marise felt another wave of hysterical laughter mounting, at the idea of

the difficulty in perceiving the difference in degree of flatness

between Mark's remarks and those of Paul.

But it suddenly occurred to her that this was the time for Elly's hour

at the piano, and she heard no sound. She hastily laid out the clean

clothes for Paul, saw him started on the scrub in the bath-tub, and ran

downstairs to see if she could find Elly, before the storm broke,

turning over in her mind Elly's favorite nooks.

* * * * *

The air was as heavy as noxious gas in the breathless pause before the

arrival of the rain.

In the darkened, shaded hall stood a man's figure, the face turned up

towards her, the look on it meant for her, her only, not the useful

house-mother, but that living core of her own self, buried, hidden, put

off, choked and starved as she had felt it to be, all that morning. That

self rose up now, passionately grateful to be recognized, and looked

back at him.

Thunder rolled among the distant hills.

She felt her pulse whirling with an excitement that made her lean

against the wall, as he took a great stride towards her, crying out,

"Oh, make an end . . . make an end of this. . . ."

The door behind him opened, and Elly ran in, red-faced and dusty.

"Mother, Mother, Reddy has come off her nest. And there are twelve

hatched out of the fourteen eggs! Mother, they are such darlings! I wish

you'd come and see. Mother, if I practise _good_, won't you come

afterwards and look at them?"

"You should say 'practise well,' not 'good,'" said Marise, her accent

openly ironical.

The wind, precursor of the storm falling suddenly on the valley, shook

the trees till they roared.

Over the child's head she exchanged with Vincent Marsh a long reckless

look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand, the abandon

of which she made no effort to restrain.

With a dry, clattering, immediate rattle, without distance or dignity,

the thunder broke threateningly over the house.

CHAPTER XVI

MASSAGE-CREAM; THEME AND VARIATIONS

July 20.

The hardest thing for Eugenia about these terribly hard days of suspense

was to keep her self-control in her own room. Of course for her as for

any civilized being, it was always possible to keep herself in hand with

people looking on. But for years she had not had to struggle so when

alone, for poise and self-mastery. Her room at the Crittendens', which

had been hers so long, and which Marise had let her furnish with her own

things, was no longer the haven of refuge it had been from the bitter,

raw crudity of the Vermont life. She tried to fill the empty hours of

Neale's daily absences from the house with some of the fastidious,

delicate occupations of which she had so many, but they seemed brittle

in her hot hands, and broke when she tried to lean on them. A dozen

times a day she interrupted herself to glance with apprehension at her

reflection in the mirror, the Florentine mirror with the frame of brown

wood carved, with the light, restrained touch of a good period, into

those tasteful slender columns. And every time she looked, she was

horrified and alarmed to see deep lines of thought, of hope, of

impatience, of emotion, criss-crossing fatally on her face.

Then she would sit down before her curving dressing-table, gather the

folds of her Persian room-dress about her, lift up her soul and go

through those mental and physical relaxing exercises which the wonderful

lecturer of last winter had explained. She let her head and shoulders

and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind

the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the crass rigidity of a

growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and

summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things;

the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human

note of their tilted corners; Arabian traceries; cunningly wrought,

depraved wood-carvings in the corners of Gothic cathedrals; the gay and

amusing pink rotundities of a Boucher ceiling. When she felt her face

calm and unlined again, she put on a little massage cream, to make

doubly sure, and rubbed it along where the lines of emotion had been.

But half an hour afterwards, as she lay stretched in the chaise-longue

by the window, reading Claudel, or Strindberg, or Rémy de Gourmont, she

would suddenly find that she was not thinking of what was on the page,

that she saw there only Marise's troubled eyes while she and Marsh

talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to

their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the

foolishness of the parents' notion that they would be formative elements

in the children's lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did

succeed in forcing themselves into the children's lives, the danger of

sexual mother-complexes. Eugenia found that instead of thrilling

voluptuously, as she knew she ought, to the precious pain and

bewilderment of one of the thwarted characters of James Joyce, she was,

with a disconcerting and painful eagerness of her own, bringing up to

mind the daunted silence Marise kept when they mentioned the fact that

of course everybody nowadays knew that children are much better off in a

big, numerous, robust group than in the nervous, tight isolation of

family life; and that a really trained educator could look out for them

much better than any mother, because he could let them alone as a mother

never could.

She found that such evocations of facts poignantly vital to her

personally, were devastatingly more troubling to her facial calm than

any most sickening picture in d'Annunzio's portrayal of small-town

humanity in which she was trying to take the proper, shocked interest.

Despite all her effort to remain tranquil she would guess by the stir of

her pulses that probably she had lost control of herself again, and

going to the mirror would catch her face all strained and tense in a

breathless suspense.

But if there was one thing which life had taught her, it was persevering

patience. She drew from the enameled bonbonnière one of the curious,

hard sweet-meats from Southern China; lifted to her face the spicy-sweet

spikes of the swamp-orchid in her Venetian glass vase; turned her eyes

on the reproduction of the Gauguin _Ja Orana Maria_, and began to draw

long, rhythmic breaths, calling on all her senses to come to her rescue.

She let her arms and her head and her shoulders go limp again, and fixed

her attention on rare and beautiful things of beauty . . . abandoning

herself to the pictures called up by a volume of translated Japanese

poems she had recently read . . . temples in groves . . . bells in the

mist . . . rain on willow-trees . . . snow falling without wind. . . .

How delicate and suggestive those poems were! How much finer, more subtle

than anything in the Aryan languages!

She came to herself cautiously, glanced at her face in the mirror, and

reached for the carved ivory pot of massage cream.

* * * * *

She decided then she would sew a little, instead of reading. The frill

of lace in her net dress needed to be changed . . . such a bore having to

leave your maid behind. She moved to the small, black-lacquered table

where her work-box stood and leaned on it for a moment, watching the dim

reflection of her pointed white fingers in the glistening surface of the

wood. They did not look like Marise's brown, uncared-for hands. She

opened the inlaid box and took from it the thimble which she had bought

in Siena, the little antique masterpiece of North Italian gold-work.

What a fulfilment of oneself it was to make life beautiful by

beautifying all its implements. What a revelation it might be to Neale,

how a woman could make everything she touched exquisite, to Neale who

had only known Marise, subdued helplessly to the roughness of the rough

things about her, Marise who had capitulated to America and surrendered

to the ugliness of American life.

* * * * *

But none of that, none of that! She was near the danger line again. She

felt the flesh on her face begin to grow tense, and with her beautiful,

delicate fore-fingers she smoothed her eyebrows into relaxed calm again.

She must keep herself occupied, incessantly; that was the only thing

possible. She had been about to have recourse to the old, old

tranquillizer of women, the setting of fine stitches. She would fix her

mind on that . . . a frill of lace for the net dress . . . which lace? She

lifted the cover from the long, satin-covered box and fingered over the

laces in it, forcing herself to feel the suitable reaction to their

differing physiognomies, to admire the robustness of the

Carrick-Macross, the boldness of design of the Argentan, the complicated

fineness of the English Point. She decided, as harmonizing best with the

temperament of the net dress, on Malines, a strip of this perfect,

first-Napoleon Malines. What an aristocratic lace it was, with its

cobwebby _fond-de-neige_ background and its fourpetaled flowers in the

scrolls. Americans were barbarians indeed that Malines was so little

known; in fact hardly recognized at all. Most Americans would probably

take this priceless creation in her hand for something bought at a

ten-cent store, because of its simplicity and classic reticence of

design. They always wanted, as they would say themselves, something more

to show for their money. Their only idea of "real lace," as they

vulgarly called it (as if anything could be lace that wasn't real), was

that showy, awful Brussels, manufactured for exportation, which was sold

in those terrible tourists' shops in Belgium, with the sprawling

patterns made out of coarse braid and appliquéd on, not an organic part

of the life of the design.

She stopped her work for a moment to look more closely at the filmy lace

in her hand, to note if the mesh of the réseau were circular or

hexagonal. She fancied that she was the only American woman of her

acquaintance who knew the difference, who had the least culture in the

matter of lace . . . except Marise, of course, and it was positively worse

for Marise to have been initiated and then turn back to commonness, than

for those other well-meaning, Philistine American women who were at

least innocently ignorant. Having known the exquisite lore of lace, how

could Marise have let it and all the rest of the lore of civilization

drop for these coarse occupations of hers, now? How could she have let

life coarsen her, as it had, how could she have fallen into such common

ways, with her sun-browned hair, and her roughened hands, and her

inexactly adjusted dresses, and the fatal middle-aged lines beginning to

show from the corner of the ear down into the neck, and not an effort

made to stop them. But as to wrinkles, of course a woman as unrestrained

as Marise was bound to get them early. She had never learned the ABC of

woman's wisdom, the steady cult of self-care, self-beautifying,

self-refining. How long would it be before Neale . . .

No! None of that! She must get back to impersonal thoughts. What was it

she had selected as subject for consideration? It had been lace. What

about lace? Lace . . . ? Her mind balked, openly rebellious. She could not

make it think of lace again. She was in a panic, and cast about her for

some strong defense . . . oh! just the thing . . . the new hat.

She would try on the new hat which had just come from New York. She had

been waiting for a leisurely moment, really to be able to put her

attention on that.

She opened the gaily printed round pasteboard box, and took out the

creation. She put it on with care, low over her eyebrows, adjusting it

carefully by feel, before she looked at herself to get the first

impression. Then, hand-glass in hand, she began to study it seriously

from various angles. When she was convinced that from every view-point

her profile had the unlovely and inharmonious silhouette fashionable

that summer, she drew a long breath of relief, and took it off gently,

looking at it with pleasure. Nothing gives one such self-confidence, she

reflected, as the certainty of having the right sort of hat. How much

better "chic" was than beauty!

With the hat still in her hand, her very eyes on it, she saw there

before her, as plainly as though in a crystal ball, Marise's attitude as

she had stood with Marsh that evening before at the far end of the

garden. Her body drawn towards his, the poise of her head, all of her

listening intently while he talked . . . one could see how he was

dominating her. A man with such a personality as his, regularly hypnotic

when he chose, and practised in handling women, he would be able to do

anything he liked with an impressionable creature like Marise, who as a

girl was always under the influence of something or other. It was

evident that he could put any idea he liked into Marise's head just by

looking at her hard enough. She had seen him do it . . . helped him do it,

for that matter!

And so Neale must have seen. Anybody could! And Neale was not raising a

hand, nor so much as lifting an eyebrow, just letting things take their

course.

_What could that mean except that he would welcome_ . . .

Oh Heavens! her pulse was hammering again. She sprang up and ran to the

mirror. Yes, the mirror showed a face that scared her; haggard and

pinched with a fierce desire.

There were not only lines now, there was a hollow in the cheek . . . or

was that a shadow? It made her look a thousand years old. Massage would

do that no good! And she had no faith in any of those "flesh-foods."

Perhaps she was underweight. The hideous strain and suspense of the last

weeks had told on her. Perhaps she would better omit those morning

exercises for a time, in this intense heat. Perhaps she would better

take cream with her oatmeal again. Or perhaps cream of wheat would be

better than oatmeal. How ghastly that made her look! But perhaps it was

only a shadow. She could not summon courage enough to move and see.

Finally she took up her hand-mirror, framed in creamy ivory, with a

carved jade bead hanging from it by a green silk cord. She went to the

window to get a better light on her face. She examined it, holding her

breath; and drew a long, long sigh of respite and relief. It _had_ been

only a shadow!

But what a fright it had given her! Her heart was quivering yet. What

unending vigilance it took to protect yourself from deep emotions. When

it wasn't one, it was another, that sprang on you unawares.

Another one _was_ there, ready to spring also, the suddenly conceived

possibility, like an idea thrust into her mind from the outside, that

there might be some active part she could play in what was going on in

this house. People did sometimes. If some chance for this offered . . .

you never could tell when . . . a word might be . . . perhaps something to

turn Marise from Neale long enough to . . .

She cast this idea off with shame for its crudeness. What vulgar raw

things would come into your head when you let your mind roam idly . . .

like cheap melodrama . . .

She would try the Vedanta deep-breathing exercises this time to quiet

herself; and after them, breathing in and out through one nostril, and

thinking of the Infinite, as the Yogi had told her.

She lay down flat on the bed for this, kicking off her quilted satin

_mules_, and wriggling her toes loose in their lace-like silk stockings.

She would lie on her back, look up at the ceiling, and fix her mind on

the movement up and down of her navel in breathing, as the Vedanta

priest recommended to quiet the spirit. Perhaps she could even say,

"Om . . . om . . . om . . ."

as they did.

* * * * *

No, no she couldn't. She still had vestiges of that stupid, gross

Anglo-Saxon self-consciousness clinging to her. But she would outgrow

them, yet.

She lay there quiet and breathed slowly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

And into her mind there slowly slid a cypress-shaded walk with Rome far

below on one side, and a sun-ripened, golden, old wall on the other. She

stood there with Marise, both so young, so young! And down the path

towards them came a tall figure, with a bold clear face, a tender

full-lipped mouth, and eyes that both smiled and were steady.

Helplessly she watched him come, groaning in spirit at what she knew

would happen; but she could not escape till the ache in her throat

swelled and broke, as she saw that his eyes were for Marise and his

words, and all of his very self for which she . . .

So many years . . . so many years . . . with so much else in the

world . . . not to have been able to cure that one ache . . . and she did

not want to suffer . . . she wanted to be at rest, and have what she

needed. The tears rose brimming to her eyes, and ran down on each side of

her face to the pillow. Poor Eugenia! Poor Eugenia!

* * * * *

She was almost broken this time, but not entirely. There was some fight

left in her. She got up from the bed, clenched her hands tightly, and

stood in the middle of the floor, gathering herself together.

Down with it! Down! Down! Just now, at this time, when such an utterly

unexpected dawn of a possible escape . . . to give way again.

She thought suddenly, "Suppose I give up the New-Thought way, always

distracting your attention to something else, always suppressing your

desire, resisting the pull you want to yield to. Suppose I try the Freud

way, bringing the desire up boldly, letting yourself go, unresisting."

It was worth trying.

She sat down in a chair, her elbows on the dressing-table, and let

herself go, gorgeously, wholly, epically, as she had been longing to

ever since she had first intercepted that magnetic interchange of looks

between Marsh and Marise, the day after her arrival, the day of the

picnic-supper in that stupid old woman's garden. That was when she had

first known that something was up.

* * * * *

Why, how easy it was to let yourself go! They were right, the Freudians,

it was the natural thing to do, you did yourself a violence when you

refused to. It was like sailing off above the clouds on familiar wings,

although it was the first time she had tried them. . . . Marise would fall

wholly under Marsh's spell, would run away and be divorced. Neale would

never raise a hand against her doing this. Eugenia saw from his aloof

attitude that it was nothing to him one way or the other. Any man who

cared for his wife would fight for her, of course.

And it was so manifestly the best thing for Marise too, to have a very

wealthy man looking out for her, that there could be no disturbing

reflexes of regret or remorse for anybody to disturb the perfection of

this fore-ordained adjustment to the Infinite. Then with the children

away at school for all the year, except a week or two with their father

. . . fine, modern, perfect schools, the kind where the children were

always out of doors, Florida in winter and New England hills in summer.

Those schools were horribly expensive . . . what was all her money for?

. . . but they had the best class of wealthy children, carefully selected

for their social position, and the teachers were so well paid that of

course they did their jobs better than parents.

Then Neale, freed from slavery to those insufferable children, released

from the ignoble, grinding narrowness of this petty manufacturing

business, free to roam the world as she knew he had always longed to

do . . . what a life they could have . . . India with Neale . . .

China . . . Paris . . . they would avoid Rome perhaps because of

unwelcome memories . . . Norway in summer-time. Think of seeing Neale

fishing a Norway salmon brook . . . she and Neale on a steamer

together . . . together . . .

She caught sight of her face in the mirror . . . that radiant, smiling,

triumphant, _young_ face, hers!

Yes, the Freud way was the best.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SOUL OF NELLY POWERS

July 20.

The big pine was good for one thing, anyhow, if it did keep the house as

dark as a cellar with the black shade it made. The side-porch was nice

and cool even on a hot summer day, just right for making butter. If it

wasn't for the horrid pitch-piny smell the tree wouldn't be so bad. The

churning was getting along fine too. The dasher was beginning to go the

blob-blob way that showed in a minute or two the butter would be there.

It had been a real good idea to get up early and get the work out of the

way so that the churning could be done before it got so hot. A

thunder-storm was coming, too, probably. You could feel it in the air.

There, perhaps the butter had come, now. Nelly pushed the dasher down

slowly and drew it back with care, turning her ear to listen expertly to

the sound it made. No, not yet, there wasn't that watery splash yet that

came after it had separated.

She went on with the regular rhythmic motion, her eyes fixed dreamily on

the round hole in the cover of the churn, through which the

dasher-handle went up and down and which was now rimmed with thick

yellow cream. She loved to churn, Nelly thought. She loved to have milk

to look out for, anyhow, from the time it came in from the barn, warm

and foamy and sweet-smelling, till the time when she had taken off the

thick, sour cream, like shammy-skin, and then poured the loppered milk

spatteringly into the pigs' trough. She liked seeing how the pigs loved

it, sucking it up, their eyes half shut because it tasted so good. There

wasn't anything that was better than giving people or animals what they

liked to eat. It made her feel good all over to throw corn to the hens

and see how they scrabbled for it. She just loved to get a bag of stick

candy at the store, when she went to town, and see how Addie and Ralph

and little 'Gene jumped up and down when they saw it.

And then it was so nice to be fore-handed and get the churning out of

the way before noon. She would have time this afternoon after the dishes

were done, to sit right down with that sprigged calico dress for little

Addie. She could get the seams all run up on the machine before

supper-time, and have the hand-work, buttonholes and finishing, for

pick-up work for odd minutes. She just loved to sit and sew, in a room

all nice and picked up, and know the house-work was done.

That would be a _real_ pretty dress, she thought, with the pink sprigs

and the pink feather-stitching in mercerized cotton she was going to put

on it. Addie would look sweet in it. And if it was washed careful and

dried in the shade it wouldn't fade so much. It was a good bright pink

to start with. Only Addie ought to have a new hat to wear with it. A

white straw with pink flowers on it. But that would cost a couple of

dollars, anyhow, everything was so dear now. Oh well, 'Gene would let

her buy it. 'Gene would let her do most anything.

She thought with pity of her sisters, mill-hands in West Adams still, or

married to mill-hands, men who got drunk on the sly and didn't work

regular, and wanted a full half of all they made for themselves. 'Gene

and his mother were always scolding about the money they could have had

if they'd kept that wood-land on the mountain. They'd ought to ha' been

really poor the way she had been, so's you didn't know where the next

meal was coming from, or how the rent was going to be paid. She had been

awfully lucky to get 'Gene, who let her decide how much money ought to

be spent on the children's clothes and hers, and never said a thing, or

scolded or bothered. He was kind of _funny_, 'Gene was, always so sober

and solemn, and it was a _sort_ of bother to have him so crazy about her

still. That had been all right when they were engaged, and first

married. She had liked it all right then, although it always seemed sort

of foolish to her. But men _were_ that way! Only now, when there were

three children and another one coming, and the house to be kept nice,

and the work done up right, and the farmwork and everything going so

good, and so much on her mind, why, it seemed as though they'd ought to

have other things to think about beside kissings and huggings. Not that

'Gene didn't do his share of the work. He was a fine farmer, as good as

anybody in the valley. But he never could settle down, and be

comfortable and quiet with her, like it was natural for old married

folks to do. If she went by him, close, so her arm touched him, why

then, if nobody was there he'd grab at her and kiss her and rumple her

hair, and set her all back in her work. With all she had to do and think

of, and she did her work as good as anybody if she did say it who

shouldn't, she had her day planned before she turned her feet out of bed

in the morning. And she liked to have things go the way she planned

them. She _liked_ 'Gene all right, only she had her work to get done.

She churned meditatively, looking off towards the mountain where the

Eagle Rocks heaved themselves up stiff and straight and high. 'Gene's

mother came to the door, asked if the butter was coming all right,

looked at her, and said, "My! Nelly, you get better looking every day

you live," and went back to her bread-baking.

Nelly went on with her reflections about 'Gene. It was more than just

that he bothered her and put her back with her work. She really didn't

think it was just exactly nice and refined to be so crazy about anybody

as that. Well, there was a streak in the Powerses that wasn't refined.

'Gene's mother! gracious! When she got going, laughing and carrying-on,

what wouldn't she say, right out before anybody! And dancing still like

a young girl! And that hateful old Mrs. Hewitt, just after they'd moved

back to Ashley, didn't she have to go and tell her about 'Gene's being

born too soon after his father and mother were married? 'Gene took it

from his mother she supposed; he wa'an't to blame, really. But she hoped

Addie and Ralph would be _like_ her folks. Not but what the Powerses

were good-hearted enough. 'Gene was a good man, if he was queer, and an

awful good papa to Addie and Ralph and little 'Gene. None of her sisters

had got a man half so good. That sprigged dress would look good with

feather-stitching around the hem, too. Why hadn't she thought of that

before? She hadn't got enough mercerized thread in the house, she didn't

believe, to do it all; and it was such a nuisance to run out of the

thread you had to have, and nobody going to the village for goodness

knows when, with the farmwork behind the way it was, on account of the

rains.

She shifted her position and happened to bring one of her feet into

view. Without disturbing a single beat of the regular rhythm of the

dasher, she tilted her head to look at it with approbation. If there was

one thing she was particular about it was her shoes. She took such

comfort in having them nice. They could say what they pleased, folks

could, but high heels _suited_ her feet. Maybe some folks, that had

great broad feet like that old Indian Touclé, felt better in those

awful, sloppy old gunboats they called "Common-sense shoes," but _she_

didn't! It would make her sick to wear them! How they did look! Was

there anything so pretty, anyhow, as a fine-leather shoe with a nice

pointed toe, and a pretty, curved-in heel? It made you feel refined, and

as good as anybody, even if you had on a calico dress with it. That was

another nice thing about 'Gene, how he'd stand up for her about wearing

the kind of shoes she wanted. Let anybody start to pick on her about it,

if 'twas his own mother, he'd shut 'em up short, and say Nelly could

wear what she liked he guessed. Even when the doctor had said so strict

that she hadn't ought to wear them in the time before the babies came,

'Gene never said a word, when he saw her doing it.

There, the butter was just almost there. She could hear the buttermilk

begin to swash! She turned her head to call to her mother-in-law to

bring a pitcher for the buttermilk, when a sound of galloping hoofs

echoed from the road. Nelly frowned, released her hold on the dasher,

listened an instant, and ran into the house. She went right upstairs to

her room as provoked as she could be. Well, she would make the bed and

do the room-work anyhow, so's not to waste _all_ that time. She'd be

that much ahead, anyhow. And as soon as Frank had finished chinning with

Mother Powers, and had gone, she'd go back and finish her churning. She

felt mad all through at the thought of that cream left at just the wrong

minute, just as it was separating. Suppose Frank hung round and _hung_

around, the way he did often, and the sun got higher and the cream got

too warm, and she'd have to put in ice, and go down cellar with it, and

fuss over it all the rest of the day? She was furious and thumped the

pillows hard, with her doubled-up fist. But if she went down, Frank'd

hang around worse, and talk so foolish she'd want to slap him. He wa'n't

more'n half-witted, sometimes, she thought. What was the _matter_ with

men, anyhow? They didn't seem to have as much sense as so many calves!

You'd think Frank would think up something better to do than to bother

the life out of busy folks, sprawling around all over creation the way

he did. But she never had any luck! Before Frank it had been that old

Mrs. Hewitt, nosing around to see what she could pick fault with in a

person's housekeeping, looking under the sink if you left her alone in

the kitchen for a minute, and opening your dresser drawers right before

your face and eyes. Well, Frank was getting to be most as much of a

nuisance. He didn't peek and snoop the way Mrs. Hewitt did, but he

_bothered_; and he was getting so impudent, too! He had the big-head

because he was the best dancer in the valley, that was what was the

matter with him, and he knew she liked to dance with him. Well, she did.

But she would like to dance with anybody who danced good. If 'Gene

didn't clump so with his feet, she'd love to dance with him. And Frank

needn't think he was so much either. That city man who was staying with

the old man next to the Crittendens was just as good a dancer as Frank,

just exactly as light on his feet. She didn't like him a bit. She

thought he was just plain fresh, the way he told Frank to go on dancing

with her. What was it to him! But she'd dance with him just the same, if

she got the chance. How she just loved to dance! Something seemed to get

into her, when the music struck up. She hardly knew what she was doing,

felt as though she was floating around on that thick, soft moss you

walked on when you went blue-berrying on the Burning above the Eagle

Rocks . . . all springly. . . . If you could only dance by yourself,

without having to bother with partners, that was what would be nice.

She stepped to the door to listen, and heard 'Gene's mother cackling

away like an old hen. How she would carry on, with anybody that came

along! She hadn't never settled down, not a bit really, for all she had

been married and was a widow and was old. It wa'n't nice to be so lively

as that, at her age. But she _wasn't_ nice, Mother Powers wasn't, for

all she was good to Addie and Ralph and little 'Gene. Nelly liked nice

people, she thought, as she went back to shake the rag rugs out of the

window; refined ladies like Mrs. Bayweather, the minister's wife. That

was the way _she_ wanted to be, and have little Addie grow up. She

lingered at the window a moment looking up at the thick dark branches of

the big pine. How horrid it was to have that great tree so close to the

house! It shaded the bedroom so that there was a musty smell no matter

how much it was aired. And the needles dropped down so messy too, and

spoiled the grass.

Frank's voice came up the stairs, bold, laughing, "Nelly, Nelly, come

down here a minute. I want to ask you something!"

"I can't," she called back. Didn't he have the nerve!

"Why can't you?" the skeptical question came from halfway up the stairs.

"I saw you on the side-porch, just as I came up."

Nelly cast about for an excuse. Of course you had to have some _reason_

for saying you couldn't see a neighbor who came in. She had an

inspiration. "I'm washing my hair," she called back, taking out the

hair-pins hastily, as she spoke. The great coils came tumbling down on

her shoulders. She soused them in the water pitcher, and went to the

door, opening it a crack, tipping her head forward so that the water

streamed on the floor. "Can't you ask Mother Powers for whatever it is?"

she said impatiently. She wished as she spoke that she could ever speak

right out sharp and scratchy the way other people did. She was too easy,

that was the trouble.

"Well," said Frank, astonished, "you be, for a fact."

He went back down the stairs, and Nelly shut the door. She was hot all

over with impatience about that butter. When it wasn't one thing to keep

her from her work, it was another. Her hair all wet now. And such a job

to dry it!

She heard voices in the kitchen, and the screen-door open. Thank

goodness, Frank was going away! Oh my! Maybe he was going to the

village! He could bring some of the pink mercerized cotton on his way

back. He might as well be of _some_ use in the world. She thrust her

head out of the window. "Frank, Frank, wait a minute!" she called. She

ran back to her work-basket, cut a length from a spool of thread, wound

it around a bit of paper, and went again to the window. "Say, Frank, get

me two spools of cotton to match that, will you, at Warner and Hardy's."

He rode his horse past the big pine, under her window, and stood up in

the stirrups, looking up boldly at her, her hair in thick wet curls

about her face. "I'd do anything for you!" he said jokingly, catching

at the paper she threw down to him.

She slammed the window down hard. How provoking he was! But anyhow she

would have enough thread to feather-stitch that hem. She'd got that much

out of him. The thought made up to her for some of the annoyance of the

morning. She put a towel around her shoulders under her wet hair, and

waited till he was actually out of sight around the bend of the road. It

seemed to her that she saw something stir in the long grass in the

meadow there. Could the woodchucks be getting so close to the house as

that? She'd have to tie Towser up by her lettuce, nights, if they were.

Gracious, there it was thundering, off behind the Rocks! She'd have to

hustle, if she got the butter done before the storm came. When Frank had

really disappeared, she ran downstairs, and rushed out to her churn. She

felt of it anxiously, her face clearing to note that it seemed no warmer

than when she had left it. Maybe it was all right still. She began to

plunge the dasher up and down. Well, it had gone back some, she could

tell by the feel, but not so much, she guessed, but what she could make

it come all right.

As she churned, she thought again of Frank Warner. This was the limit!

He got so on her nerves, she declared to herself she didn't care if he

_never_ danced with her again. She wished she had more spunk, like some

girls, and could just send him packing. But she never could think of any

sharp things to say to folks, in time. She was too easy, she knew that,

always had been. Look how long she had put up with Mrs. Hewitt's

snooping around. And then in the end she had got cold feet and had had

to sick 'Gene on to her, to tell her they didn't want her sitting around

all the time and sponging off them at meal-times.

But somehow she didn't want to ask 'Gene to speak to Frank that way. She

was afraid somehow it would get 'Gene excited. Mostly he was so still,

and then all of a sudden he'd flare up and she never could see a thing

to make him then more than any time. The best thing to do with Gene was

to keep him quiet, just as much as she could, not do anything to get him

started. That was why she never went close up to him or put her arms

around his neck of her own accord. She'd _like_ to pet him and make over

him, the way she did over the children, but it always seemed to get him

so stirred up and everything. Men were funny, anyhow! She often had

thought how nice it would be if 'Gene could only be another woman. They

could have such good times together.

Why, here was 'Gene himself come in from cultivating corn right in the

middle of the morning. Maybe he wanted a drink. He came up on the porch,

without looking at her and went into the house. How heavy he walked. But

then he always did. That was the trouble with his dancing. You had to

step light, to be a good dancer.

There was a crack of thunder again, nearer than the first one. She heard

him ask his mother, "Frank Warner been here?"

And Mother Powers say, "Yes, he come in to ask if we could loan him our

compass. He's going to go up tomorrow in the Eagle Rock woods to run out

the line between the Warner and the Benson woodlots. The Warners have

sold the popple on theirs to the Crittenden mill, and Frank says the

blazes are all barked over, they're so old."

Oh goody! thought Nelly, there the butter was, come all at once. The

buttermilk was splashing like water. Yes, even there around the hole you

could see the little yellow specks. Well, she needn't have got so

provoked, after all. That was fine. Now she could get at that sprigged

dress for Addie, after all, this afternoon.

'Gene came out on the porch again. She looked at him and smiled. She

felt very happy and relieved that the butter had come so that she could

finish working it over before noon.

'Gene glowered at her smiling face and at her hair curling and shining

all down her back. How cross he looked! Oh bother! Excited too. Well,

what could the matter be, _now_? She should think any man would be

satisfied to come in, right in the middle of the morning like that,

without any warning, and find his house as spick and span as a pin, and

the butter churned and half the day's work out of the way. She'd like to

know what more he wanted? Who else could do any better? Oh bother! How

queer men were!

Yes, it would really be lots nicer if there were only women and children

in the world. Gracious! how that lightning made her jump! The storm had

got there quicker'n she'd thought. But the butter had come, so it was

all right.

PART III

CHAPTER XVIII

BEFORE THE DAWN

July 21.

Neale had lain so long with his eyes on the place where the window ought

to be, that finally he was half persuaded he could see it, a faintly

paler square against the black of the room. Very soon dawn would come in

that window, and another day would begin.

At the thought the muscles of his forearms contracted, drawing his

fingers into rigidly clenched fists, and for a moment he did not

breathe.

Then he conquered it again; threw off the worst of the pain that had

sprung upon him when he had wakened suddenly, hours before, with the

fear at last there before him, visible in the darkness.

What was this like? Where before had he endured this eternity of

waiting? Yes, it was in France, the night when they waited for the

attack to break, every man haggard with the tension, from dark till just

before dawn.

He lay still, feeling Marise's breathing faintly stirring the bed.

There in France it had been a strain almost beyond human power to keep

from rushing out of the trenches with bayonets fixed, to meet the

threatened danger, to beat it back, to conquer it, or to die and escape

the suspense. Now there was the same strain. He had the weapons in his

hands, weapons of passion, and indignation and entreaty and reproach,

against which Marise would not stand for a moment.

But there in France that would have meant possibly an insignificant

local success and the greater victory all along the line imperiled. And

here that was true again. There hadn't been anything to do then but

wait. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Yes, but it was harder to wait now! There in France they had at least

known that finally the suspense would end in the fury of combat. They

would have the chance to resist, to conquer, to impose their will. And

now there was no active part for him. He must wait on, and hold back his

hand from the attack which would give him the appearance of victory, and

which would mean everlasting defeat for him, for Marise, the death and

ruin of what they had tried to be for each other, to build up out of

their life together.

What did he mean by that? Wasn't he fooling himself with words, with

priggish phrases? It was so easy to do that. And he was so mortally

fatigued with this struggle in the dark. He had been thinking about it

so deeply, so desperately, ever since he had faced it there, squarely,

those endless black hours ago. He might have lost his way.

Now, once more, slowly, step by step, once more over the terrible road

that led him here. Perhaps there was another way he had overlooked.

Perhaps this time it would lead him to something less intolerable. Quiet

now, steady, all that he had of courage and honesty and knowledge of

Marise, and of life, and of himself, put to work.

His brain began again to plod up the treadmill it had labored on for so

many black hours. He set himself to get it clear in his own mind,

forcing those fierce, burning thoughts of his into words, as if he had

been speaking aloud. "Now, now here I am. What must I do? What ought I

to do? There must be some answer if I can only think clearly, feel

aright. _What is it that I want?_"

The answer burst from him, as though in a cry of torture from his brain,

his body, his passion, his soul, "_I want Marise!_"

And at this expression of overmastering desire, memory flooded his mind

with a stream of unforgotten pictures of their life together; Marise

facing him at the breakfast table; Marise walking with him in the autumn

woods; Marise with Paul a baby in her arms; Marise, almost unknown then,

the flame-like divinity of her soul only guessed-at, looking into his

eyes as the Campagna faded into darkness below them. "What was it she

asked me then? Whether I knew the way across the dark plain? I was a

confident young fool then. I was sure I could find the way, _with her_.

I've been thinking all these years that we were finding it, step by step

. . . till now. And now, what is it I am afraid of? I'm afraid she finds

herself cramped, wants a fuller existence, regrets . . . no, that's

dodging. There's no use lying to myself. I'm afraid that Marise is in

love with Vincent Marsh. Good God! no! It can't be that . . . not Marise!

This is all nonsense. This is something left over from sleep and a bad

dream. I must wake up. I must wake up and find it not true."

He lay perfectly still, his fists clenched tight, perspiration standing

out on his rigid body. Then sternly he forced his mind to go forward

again, step by step.

"I suppose it's possible. Other women have. There's a lot in her that

must be starved here. I may not be enough for her. She was so young

then. She has grown so greatly. What right have I to try to hold her if

she is tired of it all, needs something else?"

He hesitated, shrinking back as from fire, from the answer he knew he

must give. At last he forced it out, "I haven't any right. I don't want

her to stay if she wants to go. I want Marise. But even more I want her

to be happy."

The thought, with all its implications, terrified him like a

death-sentence, but he repeated it grimly, pressing it home fiercely, "I

want her to be happy."

He realized where this thought would lead him, and in a panic wildly

fought against going on. He had tried to hold himself resolute and

steady, but he was nothing now save a flame of resentment. "Happy! She

won't be happy that way! She can't love that man! She's being carried

away by that damnable sensibility of hers. It would be the most hideous,

insane mistake. What am I thinking of . . . all these _words_! What I must

do is to keep her from ruining her life."