Raven went to sleep thinking simply about the house, while the fire
flickered down on the hearth and shadows all about the room flickered
with it and then went out. He always loved shadows, their beauties and
grotesqueries, and he was unfeignedly glad he had no scientific
understanding of them, why they played this way or that and translated
the substance that made them so delicately and sometimes with such an
adorable foolishness. He liked it better that way, liked to make out of
them a game of surprises and pretend they were in good form and doing
particularly well, or again far below their highest. And following his
childishly enchanting game he began to feel rather abashed over what had
brought him here. He was glad to have come. It was the only place for
him, disordered as he was, with its wholesome calm, and he wondered
further if the state of mind that had become habitual to him was now a
state of mind at all. Was it not rather a temporary drop in mental
temperature now calming to normal? Hadn't he exaggerated the
complication of Anne's bequest? There was a way out of it; there must
be, a sane, practical way to satisfy what she wished and what she might
be supposed to wish now. He comforted himself with the pious sophistry
of an Anne raised on the wind of death above early inconclusions and so,
of course, agreeing with him who didn't have to pass the gates of
mystery to be so raised. He knew enough, evidently, so that he didn't
need to die to know more. His letter to Dick seemed of inconsiderable
importance, even the disaster of its reaching Amelia. If she held him up
to it, he could laugh it off. Anything could be laughed off. So, the
shadows mingling with the inconsequence of his thoughts, he drifted away
to sleep, catching himself back, now and then, to luxuriate in the
assurance that he was in the right place, finding comfortable
assuagements, and that inexplicably, because so suddenly, everything was
for the best in a mysterious but probably entirely unaccountable world.
At four o'clock he woke. He had not for a moment last night expected
this. Four o'clock had been for months the hour of his tryst with the
powers of darkness. They hovered over him then with dull grey wings
extended, from sunrise to sunset, from east to west. He never had the
courage to peer up at them and see how far the wings really did reach.
They covered his mortal sky, and when he refused to stare up into their
leaden pinions, they stooped to him and buffeted and smothered him,
until he was such a mass of bruised suffering within that he could
almost believe his body also was quivering into the numbness of
acquiescent misery. And here were the wings again. They were even lower,
in spite of this clear air. They did not merely shut it out from his
nostrils, but the filthy pinions swept his face and roused in him the
uttermost revulsion of mortal man against the accident of his mortality.
The trouble of earth passed before him in its unceasing panorama, a
pageant of pain and death. Every atom of creation was against every
other atom, because everywhere was warfare, murder and rapine, for the
mere chance of living. He had won his inherited chance by sheer luck of
contest through millions of years while his forebears came up from the
slime and the cave. The little hunted creature, shrieking out there in
the wood in the clutch of a predatory enemy was not so lucky. It was the
enemy who was lucky to-night, but to-morrow night the enemy himself
might go down under longer claws and be torn by fangs stronger than his
own. And God had made it so. And God did not care.
Raven lay there panting under the horror of it. The sweat started on his
skin. He was afraid. It was not his own well-being he feared for. Man's
life was short at the most. A few years might finish him up. It was
unlikely that he need live again. But he feared seeing still more of the
acts of this unmindful God, who could make, and set the wheel of being
to turning and then stand aside and let them grind out their
immeasurable grist of woe. And when he asked himself how he knew God was
standing aside, letting the days and years fulfil their sum, he believed
it was because he had suddenly become aware that time was a boundless
sea and that the human soul was sometimes in the trough of it and
sometimes on the crest. But never would the sea cast its derelicts upon
warm shores where they might build the house of life and live in peace
and innocence. Ever would they find themselves tossed from low to high
and fall from high to low again in the salt wash of the retreating wave.
For after all, it was the mysterious sea God had a mind to, never the
derelict atoms afloat on it. They would have to take sea weather to
time's extremest verge, as they always had taken it. They were
derelicts.
As the light came, the leaden wings lifted and he went down to the early
breakfast Charlotte and Jerry intended to eat alone. Charlotte, with her
good morning, gave him a quick glance. He found she had not expected him
so early and knew she saw at once how harassed he was. He insisted on
sitting down to breakfast with them and, after Jerry had gone out, went
over the house in a mindless way, into all the rooms, to give himself
something to do. Also there seemed to be a propriety in it, a
fittingness in presenting himself to his own walls and accepting their
silent recognition. Then, hearing Charlotte upstairs, he went back into
the kitchen, as straight as if he had meant to go there all the time and
had merely idled on these delaying quests, and up to the nail by the
shed door where the key always hung, the key to Old Crow's hut. He took
it off the nail, dropped it in his pocket, got a leather jacket from the
hall and went out into the road. As he went, he heard Jerry moving about
in the barn and walked the faster, not to be halted or offered friendly
company. At the great maples he paused, two of them marking the entrance
to the wood road, and looked about him. The world was resolutely still.
The snow was not deep, but none of it had melted. It was of a uniform
whiteness and luster and the shadows in it were deeply blue. There were
tracks frozen into it all along the road, many of them old ones, others
just broken, the story of some animal's wandering. Then he turned into
the wood road and began to climb the rise, and as he went he was
conscious of an unaccountable excitement. Dick was responsible for that,
he told himself. Dick had waked his mind to old memories. This was, in
effect, and all owing to Dick, a tryst with Old Crow.
He remembered every step of the way, what he might find if he could
sweep off the snow or wait until June and let the mounting sun sweep it
according to its own method. Here at the right would be the great patch
of clintonia. Further in at the left was tiarella, with its darling
leaf, and along under the yellow birches the lady's slipper he had
transplanted, year after year, and that finally took root and showed a
fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing
over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy,
wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native
ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he
had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to
the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as
if his inner self heard the command to halt. He looked about him, and
his heart began to beat hard. But he was not surprised. What could be
more moving than the winter stillness of the woods in a spot all
memories? Yet he was in no welcoming mood for high emotion, and looking
up and about, to shake off the wood magic, there at a little distance at
his right, between pine boles, he saw her, the woman. She was tall and
slender, yet grandly formed. A blue cloak was wrapped about her and her
head was bare. Her face had a gaunt beauty such as he had never seen.
The eyes, richly blue but darkened by the startled pupil, were
bewildering in their soft yet steady appealingness. Her hair was parted
and carried back in waves extraordinarily thick and probably knotted
behind. That, of course, he could not see. But the little soft rings of
it about her forehead he noted absently. And her look was so full of
dramatic tension, of patient, noble gravity, even grief, that one phrase
flashed into his mind, "The Mother of Sorrows!" and stayed there. So
moving was her face that, although he had at the first instant taken in
her entire outline, the significance of it had not struck him until now.
On her arm, in the immemorial mother's fashion, she carried a child. The
child was in white and a blue scarf was tied about his head. When Raven
saw the scarf, his tension relaxed. There was something about the scarf
that was real, was earthly: a ragged break in one free corner. In the
relief of seeing the break, and being thus brought back to tangible
things, he realized that he had, in a perfect seriousness, for one
amazing minute, believed the woman and the child to be not human but
divine. They were, as they struck upon his eyes, a vision, and he would
have been in no sense surprised to see the vision fade. It was the
Virgin Mary and her Son. Now, as he realized with the lightning rapidity
of a morbidly excited mind how terribly sensitive to his own needs he
must be to have clutched so irrationally at a world-old remedy, he took
off his hat and called to her:
"You startled me."
Without waiting for any response, he turned to the left, because the
probabilities were that he had startled her also, and that was why she
had stood there, petrified into the catalepsy of wood animals struck by
cautionary fear. But, as he turned, a man's voice sounded through the
woods, and waked an echo:
"Hullo!" it called. "Hullo!"
Raven involuntarily paused, and saw the woman running toward him. There
were stumps in her way, but she stepped over them lightly, and once,
when she had to cross a hollow where the snow lay deep, she sank in up
to her knees, and Raven involuntarily stepped forward to help her. But
she freed herself with incredible quickness and came on. It might have
been water she was wading in, so little did it check her. She halted
before him, only a pace away, as if she must be near in order to speak
cautiously, and Raven noted the exquisite texture of her pale skin and
the pathos of her eyes, the pupils distended now so that he wondered if
they could be blue. Meantime the voice kept on calling, "Hullo! hullo!"
She spoke tremulously, in haste:
"He'll be up here in a minute. You say you ain't seen me."
"Is it some one you're afraid of?" Raven asked.
She nodded, in a dumb anguish.
"Then," said he, "we'll both stay here till he comes, and afterward I'll
go with you, wherever you're going."
This, it seemed, moved her to a terror more acute.
"No! no!" she said, and she appeared to have so little breath to say it
that, if he had not been watching her lips, he could not have caught it.
"Not you. That would make him madder'n ever. You go away. Hide you
somewheres, quick."
"No," said Raven, "I sha'n't hide. I'll hide you. Come along."
He took her by the arm and, though she was remonstrating breathlessly,
hurried her to the left. They passed the three firs at the turn and he
smiled a little, noting Jerry's good road and thinking there was some
use in this combined insistence on his following the steps of Old Crow.
There was the hut, in its rough kindliness, and there, the smoke told
him, was a fire. Jerry had been up that morning, because Charlotte must
have known he'd come there the first thing. Still smoothing the road to
Old Crow! He had been fumbling with one hand for the key, the while he
kept the other on her arm. She was so terrified a creature now that he
did not trust her not to break blindly away and run. He unlocked the
door, pushed her in, closed and locked it. Then he dropped the key in
his pocket and went back to the wood road. With a sudden thought, he
took his knife from his pocket and tossed it down the road into a little
heap of brush. Meanwhile the man was coming nearer and, as he came, he
called: "Hullo!"
Raven, waiting for him, speculated on the tone. What did it mean? It was
a breathless tone, though not in any manner like the woman's. It was as
if he had run and stumbled and caught himself up, and all the time been
strangled from within by rage or some like madness. The woman's
breathlessness had simply meant life's going out of her with sheer
fright. Now the man was coming up the slope, bent at the shoulders, as
if he carried a heavy load or as if almost doubling himself helped him
to go the faster. He was a thin man with long arms and he carried an
axe. Raven called to him:
"Hullo, there! Take a look as you come along and see if you can find my
knife."
The man stopped short, straightened, and looked at him. Meantime Raven,
bending in his search, went toward him, scrutinizing the road from side
to side. He had a good idea of the fellow in the one glance he gave him:
a pale, thin face, black eyes with a strange spark in them, a burning
glance like the inventor's or the fanatic's, and black hair. It was an
ascetic face, and yet there was passion of an unnamed sort ready to
flash out and do strange things, overthrow the fabric of an ordered life
perhaps, or contradict the restraint of years. He stood motionless until
Raven, still searching, had got within three feet of him. Then he spoke:
"Who be you?"
He had a low voice, agreeable, even musical. Raven concluded he must
have been strangely moved to break into that mad "Hullo." It had been
more, he thought, that wild repetition with the echo throwing it back,
like the Gabriel hounds. But Raven took no notice of the question. He
spoke with a calculated peevishness.
"I'm willing to bet my knife is within three feet, and see how the
confounded thing's hidden itself. It was right along here. Let me take
your axe and I'll blaze a tree."
The man, without a word, passed him the axe and Raven notched a sapling.
Then, still holding the axe, he turned to the man with a smile. No one
had ever told him what a charming smile it was. Anne used to wonder, in
her dignified anguishes of love forbidden, if she could ever make him
understand how he looked when he smiled.
"Well," said Raven, "who may you be?"
"My name's Tenney," said the man, in the low, vibrant voice.
"Oho!" said Raven, remembering Charlotte's confidences. Then, as Tenney
frowned slightly and glanced at him in a questioning suspicion, he
continued, "Then we're neighbors. My name's Raven."
The man nodded.
"They said you were comin'," he remarked.
He held out his hand for the axe. Raven, loath to give it to him, yet
saw no excuse for withholding it. After all, she was safely locked in.
So he tossed the axe and Tenney caught it lightly, and was turning away.
But he stopped, considered a moment, looking down at the ground, and
then, evidently concluding the question had to be put, broke out, and,
Raven thought, shamefacedly:
"You seen anything of her up here?"
"Her?" Raven repeated, though he knew the country shyness over family
terms.
"Yes. My woman."
"Your wife?" insisted Raven. "I don't believe I know her. No, I'm sure I
don't. I've been away several years. On the road, you mean? No--not a
soul."
A swift rage passed over Tenney's face. It licked it like a flash of
evil light and Raven thought he saw how dangerous he could be.
"No," he said, "I don't mean on the road. I mean in the woods."
"Up here?" persisted Raven. "No, certainly not. This is no place for a
woman. A woman would have to be off her head to come traipsing up here
in the snow. Is that what you were yelling about? I thought you were a
catamount, at least."
He laughed. He had an idea, suddenly conceived, that the man, having a
keen sense of personal dignity, was subject to ridicule, and that a
laugh would be salutary for him. And he was right. Tenney straightened,
put his axe over his shoulder, and walked away down the hill.