Eugene Martin had driven at a quick pace through the back road and down
again to the point where it met the highway. He had stuffed Tira's apron
into his pocket, and through his passion he was aware of it as something
he could use, how he did not yet know. But the key: that was a weapon in
itself. She could not get into her house without it. Tenney could not
get in. So far as Tira was concerned, it was lost, and Tenney would have
to be told. And as he turned into the other road, there was Tenney
himself driving toward home, and Martin knew what he was to do.
"Hi!" he called, but Tenney did not stop. He drew out slightly to the
side of the road, the implication that Martin might pass. Martin drove
up alongside and, the way growing narrower, seemed bent on crowding him.
The horses were abreast and presently the road narrowed to a point
where, if they continued, one would be in the ditch.
"I've got something o' yourn," called Martin. He was good humor itself.
The chances of the road had played patly into his hand. "Anyways, I
s'pose 'tis. I come across your woman on the back road. She turned into
the loggin' road, to Raven's shack. She dropped her apron an' I picked
it up. There's a key in the pocket. Looks like a key to somebody's outer
door. Yourn, ain't it? Here 'tis, rolled up in the apron. Ketch!"
He had taken out the apron, rolled it tighter and then, as Tenney made
no movement, tossed it into the sleigh. He shook the reins and passed,
narrowly escaping an over-turn, but, at the same moment, he was aware
that Tenney had stooped slightly and lifted something. It was a familiar
motion. What had he lifted? It could not be a gun, he told himself. Yet
he knew it could be nothing else. Was this the next move in the mad
game? For the first time he began to wonder whether Tenney's religion
would really keep him cool and questioned whether, having neatly
balanced his own account, he might close it now before he found himself
in danger. Driving fast, he was aware that Tenney, behind him, was also
coming on. But he would not look until he had passed Tenney's house, and
then he did give one backward glance. Tenney had turned into the yard,
and Martin relaxed, satisfied with the day's job. Perhaps it was really
finished, and he and Tira were square.
Tenney, having driven into the yard, blanketed the horse and thrust the
apron under the seat of the sleigh. He stood for a moment, thinking.
Should he unlock the door, go into the house, and lock it against the
woman who had run away to Raven's shack? He could not think clearly, but
it did seem to him best to open the door and look about. How had she
left things behind her? Was her absence deliberately planned? Inside, he
proceeded mechanically with the acts he would ordinarily have done after
an absence. The familiar surroundings seemed to suggest them to him. He
fitted the key into the lock again, took off his great-coat and hung it
up, chiefly because the nail reminded him, and then, the house suddenly
attacking him with all the force of lonely silence, he turned and went
out again and shut the door behind him. There was the horse. Why had he
covered him? He would naturally have unharnessed. But then he saw the
gun in the sleigh, and that, like the silent house, seemed to push him
on to something he had lost the power to will, and he took the gun and
walked fast out of the yard. Now at once he felt clear in the head. He
was going to find Raven. That was the next step. Wherever Raven was, he
must find him. But when he turned out of the yard to go up the back
road, he was aware of a strange dislike to coming upon him at the hut.
Tira was there, he knew, but if Raven also was, then there would be
something to do. It was something in the back of his mind, very dark and
formless as yet, but it was, he told himself again, something that had
to be done. Perhaps after all, even though it was to be done sometime,
it need not be to-day. Even though Tira was up there, the job was a
terrifying one to tackle when he felt so weak in his disabled foot, so
cold after Martin's jeering voice when he tossed over the key. He turned
again and went down the road to Raven's. His foot ached badly, but he
did not mind it so much now, the confusion and pain of his mind had
grown so great. It seemed, like this doubt that surrounded Tira, a curse
that was to be always with him. At Raven's, he went to the kitchen door
and knocked, and Charlotte came.
"He to home?" he asked, not looking at her, but standing there a
drooping, miserable figure.
"Jerry?" she asked. "Yes. He's in the barn, gone to feed an' water."
"No," said Tenney. "John Raven. Is he to home?"
"Why, no," said Charlotte. "Not round the house. He said he's goin' up
to the hut."
At that he stared at her desperately, as if begging her to take back her
words; they might have been a command to him, a verdict against him. She
stepped out a pace.
"Why, Mr. Tenney," she said, "what you round with a gun for, this time
o' night? You can't see nothin'. It'll be dusk in a minute."
"Pa'tridges," he called back to her, adding darkly, "I guess I can see
well enough, come to that."
Charlotte stood there watching him out of the yard and noted that he
turned toward home. When Nan and Dick came up the road the other way,
she had gone in, and they had been in the house five minutes or more
before she knew of it. Then Dick wandered into the kitchen, on one of
the vague quests always bringing the family there in search of her, and
she called to him from the pantry:
"D'you see anything of Isr'el Tenney on the road?"
No, Dick had seen nobody. He stood leaning against the casing, watching
her floury hands at their deft work.
"He come here, not ten minutes ago," said Charlotte, "after your Uncle
John. He had a gun. I never see Isr'el Tenney with a gun. 'Pa'tridge
shootin,' he said. Pa'tridges, when you can't see your hand afore you in
the woods! I told him Uncle John'd gone up to the hut. When Uncle John
went off, he said he wanted Nan should come up there, quick as ever she
could. You tell her, won't you? I forgot."
Then Dick knew. Tira was up there. And Tenney was out with a gun: New
England tragedy. It was impossible, the sanctimonious Tenney. Yet there
was New England tragedy, a streak of it, darkly visible, through all New
England life. It would be ridiculous: old Tenney with his
prayer-meetings and his wild appeals. And yet, he reflected, all tragedy
was ridiculous to the sane, and saw before his mind's eye a satiric poem
wherein he should arraign the great sad stories of the world and prove
their ironic futility. But all this was the hurried commentary of the
mind really bent on something actual, and from that actuality he spoke:
"Don't tell Nan, Charlotte. I'll see what he wants."
He went off and Charlotte thought he was right, the afternoon waning as
it was. She would tell Nan later, a good deal later, when Raven and Dick
had had time to come down again. And this was how Dick climbed the slope
and was approaching the door of the hut when Tenney stole behind him
through the dusk and fired.
Raven, in the instant of seeing Dick there on the ground, locked the
door of the hut, dropped the key in his pocket, knelt by him and, with a
hand on his pulse, snapped out his orders to Tenney, standing there
staring vacuously:
"Go down to the house. Get Jerry and the sled. Come back with him. Get a
move on. Run!"
Tenney continued looking emptily at him, still babbling about
pa'tridges, and Raven got up and wrenched the gun from his hand, calling
loudly, though they were close together:
"Don't you hear me? Get Jerry and the sled. Run, man, run."
Tenney started away in a dazed indecisiveness and Raven remembered his
hurt and that he probably could not run. At the same instant Tenney's
mind cleared. He was plunging down the slope and, whatever anguish it
caused him, insensible to it.
Raven unlocked the door, stepped in and found Tira facing him.
"Go home," he said. "Get the boy and go down to my house. You're to stay
there now."
At the instant of saying this, he set the gun inside the door, snatched
some blankets from the bedroom and came out again. Tira stepped aside to
let him pass. It looked as if he would have walked over her. He covered
Dick warmly, picked up the boy's glasses from the snow and dropped them
into his pocket. With that involuntary act, the emotional assault of the
whole thing nearly had him. He remembered Dick's eyes as he had
sometimes seen them without their glasses, wistful and vaguely soft.
Always his eyes, denuded of the lenses behind which they lived, had a
child's look of helpless innocence, and here he was floored by life's
regardless cruelty. Though, if he was not only floored but actually done
for, he was not yet the one to suffer. He was away in that sanctuary of
the assaulted body known as unconsciousness, and Raven did not dwell for
more than an instant on "the pity of it" all.
Tira had come out of the hut and, at sight of Dick under his mound of
covering, she gave a little cry and stooped to him with outstretched
hand, perhaps with an idea of somehow easing him. But Raven caught her
wrist before she touched him.
"Don't," said he. "I've sent down for the sled."
"Is he----?" she whispered, stepping back as he released her.
"I don't know," said he. "You can't do anything. Don't stay here."
But she stood still, staring down at the mound of blankets and Raven
again on his knees beside it, his fingers on Dick's wrist.
"Didn't you hear me?" said he curtly. "You're to get the child and come
to my house for the night."
"Will he"--and now he saw her mind was with Tenney--"will he be
arrested?"
"I hope," Raven allowed himself the bitterness of saying, "I hope he'll
get imprisonment for life."
And there was such sternness in the kind voice that Tira turned and
went, half running, up the path to the back road and home.
That night at eleven, when the house had quieted, and Raven was alone in
the library, he permitted himself a glimpse at the denied emotional
aspect of the day. Jerry had got quickly to the top of the hill and Dick
had been moved down without disaster, Tenney, white-faced and
bewildered, lending his strength as he was told. Raven called upon him
for this and that, and kept him by them on the way down to the house, so
that Tira might have time to snatch the child and hurry away. At the
moment of nearing the house he remembered her, and that if Tenney went
directly back by the high road, he might meet her.
"Here!" This to Tenney, who was sagging on behind the sled, and who at
once hurried along to his side. "Go back to the hut and see if I've left
the key in the door. If it's there, you can lock up and bring it down to
me. If it isn't, don't come back."
Then, he assumed, Tenney would go home by the back road, the shortest
route. For he would not find the key, which was still in Raven's pocket.
Tenney looked at him, seemed to have something to say, and finally
managed it. As Raven remembered, it was something about pa'tridges and
his gun. Whether he was shaken by fright, one could not have told, but
he was, as Charlotte remarked upon it afterward, "all to pieces." Raven
ignored the mumble, whatever it was, and Tenney, finally understanding
that he might as well be as far off the earth as Dick, for all the
attention anybody was going to pay him, turned, limping, and then Raven,
with that mechanical sensitiveness to physical need always awake in him
now, caught up a stick lying in the dooryard and tossed it to him.
"Here!" said he. "That'll do for a cane."
Tenney could not catch; he was too stupid from bewilderment of mind. But
he picked it up, and went limping off across the road and up the hill.
Then the women had to be told, and when Jerry brought the horses to a
standstill at the door, Raven ran in, pushing Charlotte aside--dear
Charlotte! she was too used to life and death to need palliatives of
indirection in breaking even such news as this--and believed now, as he
thought it over, that he met Milly and Nan, who had seen their approach,
running to meet him, and that he said something about accident and, as
if it were an echo of Tenney, a fool shooting partridges. Milly, shocked
out of her neat composure, gave a cry, but Nan turned on her, bade her
be quiet, and called Charlotte to the bedroom to get it ready. It was
Milly's room, but the most accessible place. Raven telephoned for the
doctor at the street and called a long-distance for a Boston surgeon of
repute, asking him to bring two nurses; and he and Nan rapidly dressed
the wound, with Dick still mercifully off in the refuge called
unconsciousness. Raven remembered that Milly, as she got in his way,
kept telling him she ought to have taken a course in first aid, and that
Dick was her son and if a mother didn't know, who did? But he fancied he
did not answer at all, and that he and Nan worked together, with quick
interrogative looks at each other here and there, a lifted eyebrow, a
confirming nod. And now the local doctor had arrived, had professed
himself glad his distinguished colleague had been summoned and approved
Raven's work. He was gone in answer to another urgent call, and the
surgeon had not come, could not come for hours. But Dick was conscious,
though either too weak or too wisely cautious to lift an eyelid, and Nan
was with him. That Raven had ordered, and told Milly she was to come to
the library after Jerry moved her things upstairs and she was settled
for the night.
Milly was badly shaken. She looked, her strained eyes and mouth
compressed, as if not only was she robbed of the desire of sleep, but
had sworn never, in her distrust of what life could do to her, to sleep
again. But she had not appeared, and as Raven sat there waiting for her,
Charlotte came down the stairs and glanced in, a comprehensive look at
the light, the fire, and at him, as if to assure him, whatever the need
in the sick room, she kept him also in mind. Raven signed to her and she
nodded. He had a question to ask. It had alternated in his mind with
queer little heart-beats of alarm about Dick: hemorrhage, shock,
hemorrhage--recurrent beats of prophetic disaster.
"Have you seen Tira?" he asked. "I told her to come here and stay till
we could get her off somewhere."
Then he remembered that, so wide-reaching did Charlotte always seem to
him in her knowledge of the life about her, he had not explained why
Tira must be got out of the way, and that also was before him. But in
her amazing habit of knowing, she knew.
"No," she said, "she ain't b'en near. She won't leave Tenney. She's one
o' them that sticks by."
Immediately he was curious to hear what she had imagined, how she knew.
Was the neighborhood awake to even the most obscure local drama? While
Tira thought she was, at the expense of her own safety, covering
Tenney's wildness of jealousy, were they all walking in the sun?
"Who told you?" he asked her.
"Why, nobody," said Charlotte. "It didn't take no tellin'. Jerry heard
him hollerin' after her that day you was up in the woods, an' when you
kep' the loggin' road broke, I knew you was givin' her some kind of a
hole to creep into."
So they had known, she and Jerry. But they had not told. They would
never tell.
"One thing," said Charlotte, smoothing her apron and looking at him in
an anxious interrogation, "what be we goin' to say? That was the first
thing doctor asked: 'Who done it?' (You know I let him in.) ''Twas a
poor crazed creatur,' says I, 'after pa'tridges.' I was goin' to say
Dick had a gun an' tripped up over a root; but that never'd do in the
world, shot in the back so."
"The partridges'll do for the present," said Raven grimly. "He's
certainly crazy enough. He said he was shooting partridges. We'll take
it at that."
Charlotte went on, and he sat thinking. So Tira had chosen not to come.
So fixed was his mind on the stern exigency of the situation, as it now
stood, that her disobedience in itself irritated him. The right of
decision, as he reasoned, had passed out of her hands into his. He was,
in a sense, holding the converging lines of all this sudden confusion;
he was her commanding officer. At that moment, when he was recognizing
his anger against her and far from palliating, cherishing it as one of
the tools in his hand, to keep him safely away from enfeebling doubt,
Milly came noiselessly down the stairs. She would, he realized, in her
unflinching determination to do the efficient thing, be as silent as a
shadow. She appeared in the doorway, and her face, her bearing, were no
longer Milly's. This was a paper semblance of a woman, drawn on her
lines, but made to express grief and terror. Quiet as she was, the shock
had thrown her out of her studied calm. She was elemental woman,
despising the rigidities of training, scourged into revolt. Even her
dress, though fitted to the technical needs of the hour, was unstudied.
Her hair, ordinarily waved, even in the country, by the intelligence of
her capable fingers, was twisted in a knot on the back of her head.
Raven, so effective had been the success of her ameliorating devices,
thought Milly's hair conspicuously pretty. But now there was a little
button of it only, as if she had prepared for exacting service where one
displaced lock might undo her. A blue silk negligee was wrapped about
her, with a furled effect of tightening to the blast, and her face was
set in a mask of grief that was not grief alone, but terror. She came in
and sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth, not relaxing in the
act, but as if she could no longer stand.
"John!" she said, in a broken interrogation. "John!"
He got up and elaborately tended the fire, laying the sticks together
with an extreme care, and thinking, as he did it, by one of those idle
divagations of the mind, like a grace note on the full chord of action,
that a failing fire had helped a man out of more than one hole in this
disturbing life. It gave your strung nerves and rasped endurance a
minute's salutary pause. He put down the tongs and returned to his
chair.
"Buck up, Milly," said he. "Everything's being done. Now it'll be up to
Dick."
But he realized, as if it were another trial setting upon him at the
moment when he had borne enough, that his eyes were suddenly hot. This
was not for Milly, not for himself. Again, for some obscure reason, he
saw Dick's eyes, softened, childlike, as he had recalled them without
their glasses. Through these past weeks of strain, he had been irritated
with the boy, he had jeered at him for the extravagances of his gusty
youth. Why, the boy was only a boy, after all! But Milly, leaning
forward to the fire, her trembling hands over the blaze, was talking
with amazing intensity, but still quietly, not to disturb the stillness
of the expectant house. For the house, suddenly changed, seemed itself
to be waiting, as houses do in time of trouble. Was it for Dick to die
or to take on life again? Houses are seldom kind at such times, even in
their outward tranquillity. They are sinister.
And when Milly began to speak, Raven found he had to deal with a woman
surprisingly different from the one who had striven to heal him through
her borrowed aphorisms.
"To think," she began, "to think he should escape, after being over
there--over there, John, in blood and dirt and death--and come home to
be shot in the back by a tramp with a gun! Where is the man? You
detained him, didn't you? Don't tell me you let him go."
"I know where to find him," Raven temporized. "He'd no idea of going."
She insisted.
"You think it was an accident? He couldn't have had a grudge. Dick
hadn't an enemy."
"You can make your mind easy about that," said Raven, taking refuge in a
detached sincerity. "It wasn't meant for Dick. He was as far from the
fellow's thoughts as the moon."
He remembered the fringe of somber woods and the curve of the new moon.
"It isn't so much the misfortunes of life," Milly kept on. She was
beating her knee now with one closed hand and her voice kept time. "It's
the chances, the horrible way things come and knock you down because
you're in their path. If he doesn't"--here she stopped and Raven knew
she added, in her own mind, "if he doesn't live--I shall never believe
in anything again. Never, John, never!"
Raven was silent, not only because it seemed well for her to free her
mind, but because he had a sudden curiosity to hear more. This was Milly
outside her armor at last. When she had caught him out of his armor, she
had proposed sending him to the Psychopathic, and here she was herself,
raving against heaven and earth as unrestrainedly as a savage woman
might beat her head against a cliff.
"Chance!" she repeated. "That's what it is, chance! He got in the way
and he was struck. I lived through the War. I gave my son. What more
could I do? But now, to have him come home to our old house and be shot
in the back! How can you sit there and not move a muscle or say a word?
What are you thinking about?"
"Well," said Raven quietly, "if you'll believe me, I'm thinking about
you. I'm mighty sorry for you, Milly. And I'm keeping one ear cocked for
Nan."
"There's no change," she interrupted him. "Charlotte would tell us. I
left Nan on purpose. I want him, every time he opens his eyes, to see
her there. She's the one he wants. Mothers don't count." Here again the
elemental woman flashed out and Raven welcomed the reality of it. "She
couldn't help being kind, with him as he is."
No, he inwardly concurred, Nan, who had kissed the boy to hearten him in
his need, would be ready with her medicinal love again. She'd pour
herself out: trust her for that.
"Besides," he said, "besides you and Dick and Nan, I was thinking of Old
Crow."
"Old Crow?" This threw her out for an instant and she went back to her
conception of Raven as a victim of complexes of which Old Crow was
chief. "It's no time for dwelling on things that are past and gone. You
think far too much about Old Crow. It weakens you."
"Old Crow," said Raven quietly, "is the chap you and I need here
to-night. I'd like mighty well to sit down and talk it over with him. So
would you, if you knew him better. Old Crow went through what you and I
are going through now. He found the world a deuced puzzling place and he
didn't see the conventional God as any sort of a solution. And then--I
don't suppose you're going to bed right off. You won't feel like sleep?"
"Bed!" she flung out. "Sleep!"
"Then look here, Milly," said Raven, "you do what I tell you." He opened
a drawer in his desk and took out the mottled book. "Here's Old Crow's
journal. You sit here by the fire and read it while I take Nan's place
and send her off to bed. And if it doesn't give you an idea Old Crow's
got his mind on us to-night, wherever he is, I'm mistaken."
He brought her the book. She took it, with no interest, leaving it
unopened on her knee.
"Wherever he is," she repeated, not precisely curious, but as if she
might be on the verge of it when she again had time. "I didn't know you
believed in immortality."
"I didn't, either," said Raven. "But," he added, "I believe in Old
Crow."
She was holding the book mechanically and he left her sitting with it
still unopened and went in to Dick. He found him restless, not in any
movement of his body but in the glance of his dilated eyes. Nan looked
up, grave, steady, gone back, as Raven saw, to her trained habit of
action, emotionless, concentrated on the moment.
"You'd better go up to bed," said Raven. "I'll stay now. He can have you
to-morrow."
"He can have me all the time," said Nan clearly, and Dick's eyes turned
upon her with an indifferent sort of query. How much did she mean by
that? It sounded as if she meant everything, and yet Raven, his heart
constricting, knew it might not be more than impetuous sacrifice, the
antidote given in haste. But now Dick spoke and Raven bent to him, for
either he was too weak to speak clearly or he was saving himself.
"Don't arrest him. No end of talk."
"No," said Raven. "It wasn't you he was out for."
The restless eyes turned on Nan.
"Go to bed," said Dick.
Her hand had been on his and she took it gently away, and got up.
"I'm not sleepy," she said. "I'll camp in the library a while."
When she had gone Raven, sitting there by Dick, who did not speak again,
listened for the murmur of voices from the library. Would they keep
companionable vigil, the two women, heartening each other by a word, or
would they sit aloof, each wrapped in her own grief? There was not a
sound. They were falling in with that determination of the house to
maintain its sinister stillness, its air of knowing more than it would
tell.