I
A twilight like blue dust sifted into the shallow fold of the thickly
wooded hills. It was early October, but a crisping frost had already
stamped the maple trees with gold, the Spanish oaks were hung with
patches of wine red, the sumach was brilliant in the darkening
underbrush. A pattern of wild geese, flying low and unconcerned above
the hills, wavered against the serene, ashen evening. Howat Penny,
standing in the comparative clearing of a road, decided that the
shifting, regular flight would not come close enough for a shot. He
dropped the butt of his gun to the ground. Then he raised it again,
examining the hammer; the flint was loose, unsatisfactory. There was a
probability that it would miss firing.
He had no intention of hunting the geese. With the drooping of day his
keenness had evaporated; an habitual indifference strengthened,
permeating him. He turned his dark, young face toward the transparent,
green afterglow; the firm eyebrows drawn up at the temples, sombre eyes
set, too, at a slight angle, a straight nose, impatient mouth and
projecting chin. Below him, and to the left, a heavy, dark flame and
silvery smoke were rolling from the stack of Shadrach Furnace. Figures
were moving obscurely over the way that led from the coal house, set on
the hill, to the top and opening of the furnace; finishing, Howat Penny
knew, the charge of charcoal, limestone and iron ore.
Shadrach Furnace had been freshly set in blast; it was on that account
he was there, to represent, in a way, his father, who owned a half
interest in the Furnace. However, he had paid little attention to the
formality; his indifference was especially centred on the tedious
processes of iron making, which had, at the same time, made his family.
He had gone far out from the Furnace tract into an utterly uninhabited
and virginal region, where he had shot at, and missed, an impressive
buck and killed a small bear. Now, that he had returned, his apathy once
more flooded him; but he had eaten nothing since morning, and he was
hungry.
He could go home, over the nine miles of road that bound the Furnace to
Myrtle Forge and the Penny dwelling; there certain of whatever supper he
would elect. But, he decided, he preferred something now, less formal.
There were visitors at Myrtle Forge, Abner Forsythe, who owned the other
half of Shadrach, his son David, newly back from England and the study
of metallurgy, and a Mr. Winscombe, come out to the Provinces in
connection with the Maryland boundary dispute, accompanied by his wife.
All this Howat Penny regarded with profound distaste; necessary social
and conversational forms repelled him. And it annoyed his father when he
sat, apparently morose, against the wall, or retired solitary to his
room.
He would get supper here; they would be glad to have him at the house of
Peter Heydrick, the manager of the Furnace. Half turning, he could see
the dwelling at his back--a small, grey stone rectangle with a narrow
portico on its solid face and a pale glimmer of candles in the lower
windows. The ground immediately about it was cleared of brush and little
trees, affording Peter Heydrick a necessary, unobstructed view of the
Furnace stack while sitting in his house or when aroused at night. The
dwelling was inviting, at once slipping into the dusk and emerging by
reason of the warm glow within. Mrs. Heydrick, too, was an excellent
cook; there would be plenty of venison, roast partridge, okra soup.
Afterwards, under a late moon, he could go back to Myrtle Forge; or he
might stay at the Heydricks all night, and to-morrow kill such a buck as
he had lost.
The twilight darkened beneath the trees, the surrounding hills lost
their forms, in the east the distance merged into the oncoming night,
but the west was still translucent, green. There was a faint movement
in the leaves by the roadside, and a grey fox crossed, flattened on the
ground, and disappeared. Howat Penny could see the liquid gleam of its
eyes as it watched him. From the hill by the coal house came the heavy
beating of wild turkeys' wings.
He could go to Peter Heydrick's, where the venison would be excellent,
and Mrs. Heydrick was celebrated for her guinea pickle with cucumbers;
but ... the Heydricks had no daughter, and the Gilkans had. Thomas
Gilkan was only a founderman; his house had one room below and a
partition above; and Mrs. Gilkan's casual fare could not be compared to
Mrs. Heydrick's inviting amplitude. Yet there was Fanny Gilkan, erect
and flaming haired, who could walk as far as he could himself, and carry
her father's clumsy gun all the way.
His thoughts, deflected by Fanny Gilkan, left the immediate present of
supper, and rested upon the fact that his--his appreciation of her was
becoming known at the Furnace; while Dan Hesa must be circulating it,
with biting comments, among the charcoal burners. Dan Hesa, although
younger than Howat, was already contracting for charcoal, a forward
young German; and, Fanny had said with a giggle, he was paying her
serious attention. Howat Penny had lately seen a new moroseness among
the charcoal burners that could only have come from the association of
the son of Gilbert Penny and the potential owner of Myrtle Forge with
the founderman's daughter. Charcoal burners were lawless men, fugitive
in character, often escaped from terms of indenture; Dan Hesa was, he
knew, well liked by them; and the hazard created by his attraction to
Fanny Gilkan drew Howat Penny irresistibly away from the superior merits
of the Heydrick table.
That was his character: denial as a child had filled him with
slow-accumulating rage; later discipline at school had found him utterly
intractable. Something deep and instinctive within him resisted every
effort to make him a part of any social organization, however admirable;
he never formed any personal bonds with humanity in particular. He had
grown into a solitary being within whom were immovably locked all the
confidences, the spontaneous expressions of self, that bind men into a
solidarity of common failings and hopes. He never offered, nor,
apparently, required, any marks of sympathy; as a fact, he rarely
expressed anything except an occasional irrepressible scorn lashing out
at individuals or acts that conspicuously displeased him. This had
occurred more than once at Myrtle Forge, when assemblymen or members of
the Provincial Council had been seated at dinner.
It was after such a scene that his mother had witnessed perhaps his only
attempt at self-explanation. "I am sorry you were disturbed," he had
pronounced, after standing and regarding her for a silent, frowning
space; "but for me there is something unendurable in men herding like
cattle, protecting their fat with warning boards and fences. I can't
manage the fiddling lies that keep up the whole silly pretence of the
stuffy show. If it gets much thicker," he had threatened, waving vaguely
toward the west, "I'll go out to the Ohio, or the French forts."
That this was not merely a passive but an active state of mind was amply
expressed by his resolute movement toward Thomas Gilkan's house. He had,
ordinarily, an unusual liking for the charcoal burners, and had spent
many nights in their huts, built, like the charring stacks, of mud and
branches. But, organized by Dan Hesa into an opposition, a criticism of
his choice of way, they offered an epitome of the conditions he derided
and assailed.
His feeling for Fanny Gilkan was in the greater part understood,
measured; there was a certain amount of inchoate, youthful response to
her sheer physical well being, a vague blur of pleasant sensation at her
proximity; but beyond that he felt no attraction except a careless
admiration for her endurance and dexterity in the woods, a certain
relief in the freedom of her companionship. He had never considered her
concretely as a possible source of physical pleasure. He was not easily
excited sexually, and had had few adventures with women; something of
his contempt, his indifference, removed him from that, too. His emotions
were deep, vital; and hid beneath a shyness of habit that had grown into
a suspicious reserve. All bonds were irksome to him, and instinctively
he avoided the greater with the lesser; instinctively he realized that
the admission of cloying influences, of the entanglements of sex, would
more definitely bind him than any generality of society.
It had, he thought, grown dark with amazing rapidity. He could now see a
feeble light at the Gilkans, ahead and on the right. At the same moment
a brighter, flickering radiance fell upon the road, the thick foliage of
the trees. The blast was gathering at Shadrach Furnace. A clear, almost
smokeless flame rose from the stack against the night-blue sky. It
illuminated the rectangular, stone structure of the coal-house on the
hill, and showed the wet and blackened roof of the casting shed below.
The flame dwindled and then mounted, hanging like a fabulous oriflamme
on a stillness in which Howat Penny could hear the blast forced through
the Furnace by the great leather bellows.
He turned in, over the littered ground before the Gilkan house. Fanny
was standing in the doorway, her straight, vigorous body sharp against
the glow inside. "Here's Mr. Howat Penny," she called over her shoulder.
"Is everything off the table? There's not much," she turned to him, "but
the end of the pork barrel." A meagre fire was burning in the large,
untidy hearth; battered tin ovens had been drawn aside, and a pair of
wood-soled shoes were drying. The rough slab of the table, pushed back
against a long seat made of a partly hewed and pegged log, was empty
but for some dull scarred pewter and scraps of salt meat. On the narrow
stair that led above, a small, touselled form was sleeping--one of the
cast boys at the Furnace.
A thin, peering woman in a hickory-dyed wool dress moved forward
obsequiously. "Mr. Penny!" she echoed the girl's announcement; "and here
I haven't got a thing fit for you. Thomas Gilkan has been too busy to
get out, and Fanny she'll fetch nothing unless the mood's on her. If I
only had a fish I could turn over." She brushed the end of the table
with a frayed sleeve. "You might just take a seat, and I'll look
around."
Fanny Gilkan listened to her mother with a comprehending smile. Fanny's
face was gaunt, but her grey eyes were wide and compelling, her mouth
was firm and bright; and her hair, her father often said, resembled the
fire at the top of Shadrach. Howat knew that she was as impersonal, as
essentially unstirred, as himself; but he had a clear doubt of Mrs.
Gilkan. The latter was too anxious to welcome him to their unpretending
home; she obviously moved to throw Fanny and himself together, and to
disparage such suits as honest Dan Hesa's. He wondered if the older
woman thought he might marry her daughter. And wondering he came to the
conclusion that the other thing would please the mother almost as well.
She had given him to understand that at Fanny's age she would know how
to please any Mr. Howat Penny that chance fortune might bring her.
That some such worldly advice had been poured into Fanny's ears he
could not doubt; and he admired the girl's obvious scorn of such wiles
and surrenders. She sat frankly beside him now, as he finished a
wretched supper, and asked about the country in regions to which she had
not penetrated. "It's a three days' trip," he finished a recital of an
excursion of his own.
"I'd like to go," she returned; "but I suppose I couldn't find it
alone."
He was considering the possibility of such a journey with her--it would
be pleasant in the extreme--when her mother interrupted them from the
foot of the stair.
"A sensible girl," she declared, "would think about seeing the sights of
a city, and of a cherry-derry dress with ribbons, instead of all this
about tramping off through the woods with a ragged skirt about your
naked knees."
Fanny Gilkan's face darkened, and she glanced swiftly at Howat Penny. He
was filling a pipe, unmoved. Such a trip as he had outlined, with Fanny,
was fastening upon his thoughts. It would at once express his entire
attitude toward the world, opinion, and the resentful charcoal burners.
"You wouldn't really go," he said aloud, half consciously.
The girl frowned in an effort of concentration, gazing into the thin
light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun
dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory
stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. "I'd like
it," she repeated; "but afterward. There is father--"
She had said father, but Howat Penny determined that she was thinking of
Dan Hesa; Dan was as strong as himself, if heavier; a personable young
man. He would make a good husband. But that, he added, was in the
future; Dan Hesa apparently didn't want to marry Fanny to-morrow, that
week. Meanwhile a trip with him to the headwaters of a creek would not
injure her in the least. His contempt of a world petty and iron-bound in
endless pretence, fanning his smouldering and sullen resentment in
general, flamed out in a determination to take her with him if possible.
It would conclusively define, state, his attitude toward "men herding
like cattle." He did not stop to consider what it might define for Fanny
Gilkan. In the stir of his rebellious self there was no pause for
vicarious approximations. If he thought of her at all it was in the
indirect opinion that she was better without such a noodle as Dan Hesa
threatened to become.
"I'd get two horses from the Forge," he continued, apparently to his
mildly speculative self; "a few things, not much would be necessary.
That gun you carry," he addressed Fanny indirectly, "is too heavy. I'll
get you a lighter, bound in brass."
She repeated sombrely, leaning with elbows on the table, her chin in her
hands, "And afterwards--"
"I thought you were free of that," he observed; "it sounds like the
town women, the barnyard crowd. I thought you were an independent
person. Certainly," he went on coldly, "you can't mistake my attitude. I
like you, but I am not in the least interested in any way that--that
jour mother might appreciate. I am neither a seducer nor the type that
marries."
"I understand that, Howat," she assured him; "and I think, I'm not sure
but I think, that what you mean wouldn't bother me either. Anyhow it
shouldn't spoil the fun of our trip. But no one else in the world would
believe that simple truth. If you could stay there, in those splendid
woods or a world like them, why, it would be heaven. But you have to
come back, you have to live on, perhaps for a great while, in the world
of Shadrach and Myrtle Forge. I'm not sure that I'd refuse if you asked
me to go, Howat. I just don't know if a woman can stand alone, for
that's what it would come to afterward, against a whole lifeful of
misjudgment. It might be better in the end, for everybody, if she
continued home, made the best of things with the others."
"You may possibly be right," he told her with a sudden resumption of
indifference. After all, it was unimportant whether or not Fanny Gilkan
went with him to the source of the stream he had discovered. Every one,
it became more and more evident, was alike, monotonous. He wondered
again, lounging back against the wall, about the French forts, outposts
in a vast wilderness. There was an increasing friction between the
Province and France, the legacy of King George's War, but Howat Penny's
allegiance to place was as conspicuous by its absence as the other
communal traits. Beside that, beyond Kaskaskia, at St. Navier and the
North, there was little thought of French or English; the sheer problem
of existence there drowned other considerations. He would, he thought,
go out in the spring ... leave Myrtle Forge with its droning anvil, the
endless, unvaried turning of water wheel, and the facile, trivial
chatter in and about the house. David Forsythe, back from England in the
capacity of master of fluxing metals, might acquire his, Howat's,
interest in the Penny iron.
Fanny Gilkan said, "You'll burn a hole in your coat with that pipe." He
roused himself, and she moved across the room and pinched the smoking
wicks. The embers on the hearth had expired, and the fireplace was a
sooty, black cavern. Fanny, at the candles, was the only thing clearly
visible; the thin radiance slid over the turn of her cheek; her hovering
hand was like a cut-paper silhouette. It was growing late; Thomas Gilkan
would soon be back from the Furnace; he must go. Howat had no will to
avoid Gilkan, but the thought of the necessary conversational exchange
wearied him.
The sound of footsteps approached the house from without; it was, he
thought, slightly annoyed, the founderman; but the progress deflected
by the door, circled to a window at the side. A voice called low and
urgent, "Seemy! Seemy!" It was repeated, and there was an answering
mutter from the stair, a thick murmur and a deep sigh.
The cast boy slipped crumpled and silent in bare feet across the floor.
"Yes," he called back, rapidly waking.