Tenney did not come home until two o'clock. When he drove into the yard
he found Tira there, standing on the step. This was a day of clear
sunlight, like that of yesterday, and the breeze moved her light rings
of hair. Tenney glanced at her once, but, saying nothing, got out and
began to unharness. Tira stood waiting. He led the horse into the barn,
and when he came out and walked toward the house she was still waiting,
a woman without breath even, one might have thought. When he was perhaps
three feet from her she spoke, but in a quiet voice:
"Stop! You stan' right there an' I'll tell you. The doctor's been. I
'phoned him. I told him I overlaid the baby."
"Overlaid?" muttered Tenney, in a puzzled way.
Now a little feeling did manifest itself in her voice, as if he must be
a fool not to have known these tragedies that come to mothers.
"Overlaid," she repeated, with the slightest tinge of scorn. "That's
what women do sometimes, big heavy women! Roll over on the little
creatur's an' lay on 'em so 't they can't breathe. I s'pose they can't
help it, though. They're tired. I told him I done that. He was sorry for
me. I asked him if the crowner'd come, an' I'd have to swear to't, an'
he said no. I was glad o' that, though mebbe it's no worse to swear to
anything than 'tis to say it. He was terrible good to me. I told him
baby'd got to lay over to Mountain Brook, side o' mother, an' he said he
was goin' there an' he'd git one of 'em to dig the little grave. I told
him you're all run down, your foot behavin' so, an' you wouldn't be able
to do nothin', an' I was 'most afraid o' your givin' out, when I told
you. So he's goin' to send the man with the little coffin."
There was no faintest tremor of bitterness or gibing in this. It was the
simplest statement of facts. Tenney had stood perfectly still, but now
he lifted one hand and looked at it casually, as he had that other time.
He made an uncertain step, as if to pass her and enter the house, but
Tira stretched out her arms. They barred the way.
"No," she said, "you ain't comin' in."
"Ain't comin' in?" repeated Tenney.
He looked up at her, but his glance fell at once to the trembling hand.
"No," said Tira, "you ain't comin' into this house ag'in till he's
carried out of it. I've made you up a bed in the lower barn an' I've set
you out suthin' to eat there. Day after to-morrer mornin' the doctor's
comin' over after me an' baby--or send somebody, if he can't come--an'
he's goin' to see to the minister an' all. He was terrible sorry for me.
An' that night, day after to-morrer night, you can come back into the
house; but you can't come before."
She went in and shut the door behind her, and Tenney heard the key turn
sharply in the lock. He stood there several minutes, moistening his dry
lips and looking down at his hands, and then he, too, turned about and
went down to the lower barn, where he found a bed made up and a cold
lunch on a little table. But while he ate he wondered, in an absent
muse, about the bed. It was the old four-poster he had packed away in
the shed chamber. How had she carried the heavy hardwood pieces down,
fitted them together and corded them? He was curious enough to lift the
tick to find out what she had used for cord. Her new clothes-line; and
there was the bed wrench in the corner by the chopping block. It looked
as if, having done with it, she had thrown it there in a wild haste to
get on with these things that must be done before he came. Even then,
with his mind on his hands--not hands, it seemed to him, he could quite
bear to touch food with--he wondered if some man had helped her. Had
Martin been here again, or was it Raven? But, after all, nothing seemed
to matter: only the queer state of his hands. That was the trouble now.
All through the next day he hung about the place, doing the barn work,
milking, taking the milk to the house, but stopping there, for Tira met
him at the door, took the pails from him, and carried them in without a
word. He wondered vaguely whether, having denied him entrance to his own
house, she meant to refuse him food also, but presently she appeared
with a tray: meat and vegetables carefully arranged and the coffee he
depended on. Then she pointed out a wooden box, a little chest that had
lived up in the shed chamber, lifted the lid and bade him note the
folded garments within: he must change to-morrow, and these were his
clean clothes. Occasionally he glanced at her, but he could not see that
she looked very different. She was always pale. Early in the morning of
the third day she appeared with hot water and a basket filled with what
seemed to him at first a queer assortment of odds and ends.
"Here," she said, "here's your shavin' things. I'll set the little
lookin' glass up ag'inst the beam. Here's your razor. I'll fill the mug.
Now, you shave you. If anybody should happen to see you, they'd say
'twa'n't fittin' for a man to have his baird all over his face, day of
his baby's funeral."
The glass, with its picture of a red and blue house and a cedar tree,
she set against a beam, but it escaped her fingers and fell forward and
cracked straight across the little house. She picked it up, balanced it
against the beam and held it, with a frowning care, until it was secure.
"Sign of a death!" she said, as if to herself, but indifferently.
"There! you shave you now, an' then I'll bring you out your breakfast
an' carry in the things."
Tenney shaved before the little mirror with its crack across the house,
and, as if she had been watching him, she appeared at the minute of his
finishing. Now she was carrying a breakfast tray, poising it absorbedly,
with the intentness of a mind on one thing only. It was a good
breakfast, eggs and coffee and bacon, and the thick corn-cake he liked;
also, there was his tin lunch box. She pulled out the little table, set
the tray on it and brought his chair.
"There!" said she. "Now soon as ever you've finished eatin' you take
your luncheon an' your axe an' go over to the long pastur' an' don't you
show your head back here till it's time to fetch the cows. You can bring
'em along with you, an' I'll have the pails out on the step so 't you
can start right off milkin'. An' when you've got through, you fetch the
milk into the house, same as usual."
As she was leaving the barn she turned and the breeze lifted those
little rings of her hair and Tenney, looking full at her now, groaned.
It was not, he felt, any of the other things that had happened to them:
only there was always breeze enough, even on the stillest day, to stir
her hair. Now it seemed to be the only thing in the world with life in
it.
"I shall tell 'em," she said clearly, as if she wanted him to understand
and remember--and she did not look at him, but across the road and up
the slope where the hut stood waiting for her--"the doctor an' all the
rest I've got to see, you was so sick over it, you couldn't come."
Then she stepped out of the picture she had made against the smiling
day, the dark interior of the barn framing her, and walked, with her
free-swinging step, to the house. And Tenney ate his breakfast, took his
luncheon box and axe, and started for the woods. But he had not got out
of the yard when she called to him. He stopped and she came running; she
was no longer pale, and her eyes were rimmed with red. She came up with
him.
"Isr'el," she said, "you think o' this. You think of it all day long.
'I'm goin' through it alone,' you says to yourself mebbe, after you've
got off there into the woods. 'But I ain't alone. He'll be with me, the
Lord Jesus Christ.' An' you remember there's that to think on. An'
there's forgiveness. Isr'el, you lay down your axe. You let me take holt
o' your hand."
He could only stare at her, and she took the axe from his hand and laid
it at their feet. She took his hand and put it to her cheek. Then she
took his other hand and laid that also on her cheek, and murmured a
little formlessly, but in a way he sharply remembered as a means of
stilling the baby. She lifted her head then, smiling a little, and still
holding the hands. But before releasing them she stroked them softly and
said, "There! there! Poor souls," she added, "poor souls!" Did she mean
the unhappy hands, or all souls of men caught in the network of
mysterious life? She picked up his axe and gave it to him as a mother
might dismiss a child who was going to a distasteful task. "There!" she
said again. "Now, you remember." She turned from him, and Tenney went,
head down, to his work.
That afternoon, about three o'clock, Nan was in her garden, busy with
the peony bed. She was dressed in cotton crepe the color of the soil,
and her cheeks were red, like wild roses, and her ungloved hands also
the color of mould. She was delightfully happy getting into the earth
and the earth into her, and she looked it. Charlotte, coming on her
across the grass, thought her face was like a bloom the rest of her had
somehow made, as the earth was going to make red peonies. That is, I
think Charlotte thought something of this sort, though she would not
have put it in that way. Only she did have a great sense of Nan's entire
harmony with the garden bed and the garden bed with her. Charlotte had
other things on her mind, and she spoke without preamble:
"D'you know what's happened over to Tenney's?"
Nan got up from her knees, and her face was no longer the April-May face
she had bent above the peonies.
"No," she said. "What is it?"
"I see doctor go by this mornin' in his car," said Charlotte, "carryin'
Tira. In a couple of hours they come back. An' then he went by ag'in,
goin' down home. I was on the lookout an' stopped him. I was kind of
uneasy. An' he says: 'Yes, Mis' Tenney's baby's dead. She overlaid it,'
he says. 'They feel terribly about it,' he says. 'Tenney run away from
the services.'"
Nan stood staring. She was thinking not only about the baby and the
Tenneys' feeling terribly--this Charlotte saw--but something farther
behind, thinking back, and thinking keenly.
"I didn't say nothin' to nobody," Charlotte continued, "but the more I
thought on't the more stirred up I got. The baby gone, an' she there all
alone! So I run over. I knocked an' knocked, an' not a sound. Then, as I
was turnin' away, I got a glimpse inside the kitchen winder, an' if
you'll believe me there she set, hat an' all on, an' her hands full o'
daffies. You know them big double daffies always come up in their grass.
Well!"
Nan threw down her trowel.
"I'll go over," she said. "We'll both go."
"What I come for," Charlotte hesitated, as they crossed the grass, "was
whether I better say anything to anybody."
Nan knew she meant Raven.
"No," she said, "Oh, I don't know! We can't tell till we see."
Nan remembered she had not washed the earth off her hands, and yet,
though they were passing her door, she could not stop. When they came in
sight of the house, there was Tira in the doorway. She had taken off her
hat now, and there was no daffies in her hands. She looked so
commonplace, if her height and nobility could ever be less august, that
Nan felt a sudden drop in her own anxiety. Tira called to them.
"Couldn't you come in a minute? I'd be pleased to have you."
They went up the path, and when they stood at the foot of the steps,
confronting her, Nan saw how she had changed. And yet not tragically:
she was merely, one would have said, entirely calm, the stillest thing
in that pageant of the moving day.
"I'd be pleased," she said, "if you'd walk in."
She looked at Nan, and Charlotte at once turned away, saying, as she
went:
"If there's anything--well, I'll be over."
Nan and Tira went in, Nan holding Tira's hand in her earthy one.
"Let's sit here," said Nan, crossing the room to the sofa between the
side windows. She was not sure of anything about this talk except that
she must keep her hand on Tira. She noticed that the double daffies, a
great bunch of them, were lying on the table. Tira was smiling faintly.
She drew a deep breath. It sounded as if she had been holding herself up
to something and had suddenly let go.
"Seems good to set," she said. "I ain't hardly set down to-day
except----" She had it in mind to say except when she was in the car,
carrying the baby over to Mountain Brook, but it seemed too hard a thing
to say.
"If you'd just lie down," said Nan, "I'd sit here."
"No," said Tira, "I can't do that. I'm goin' over to Mountain Brook."
"Not again? Not to-day?"
"Yes, right off. I'm goin' to carry them daffies. He didn't have no
flowers, the baby didn't. I never thought on't--then. But he never had
none. He played with a daffy, 'most the last thing. I've got to git 'em
over there."
"Not to-day, Tira," urged Nan. "You wouldn't get back till after dark."
"I shouldn't come back to-night," said Tira. "The Donnyhills were real
good to me. They come to the grave. They'd admire to have me pass the
night."
"Then," said Nan, "you wait till I go home and wash my hands, and I'll
ask Mr. Raven for his car and you and I'll go over. Just we two."
"No," said Tira. "'Twouldn't do me no good to ride. When I've got
anything on my mind I can't do better'n walk it off. You let me be!"
The last was a sharp, sudden cry, like the recoil from an unlooked-for
hurt.
"I see," said Nan. "Yes, you must walk. I should want to, myself. But in
the morning, Tira--mayn't I come over after you?"
Tira considered, her eyes on Nan's hand and her own clasped, lying on
Nan's knee.
"Yes," she said, "you better. You come to the Donnyhills'. Yes, you
come."
Then she considered again, and began one of her slow, difficult
meanderings, where the quickness of her heart and brain ran ahead of her
tongue's art to interpret them.
"Seems if you knew," she said, "'most everything that's gone on."
"Yes," said Nan, at a venture, and yet truthfully. "I think I've known."
"An' now it's come to an end," said Tira. "Or if it ain't, it's on the
way to it. An' seems if you ought to know the whole. You're tough enough
to stan' up to 't."
"Yes," said Nan simply, "I'm very tough. Nothing's going to hurt me."
"I bring," said Tira, still with difficulty, "bad luck. Some folks do.
Folks set by me a spell. Then they stop. They think I'm goin' to be
suthin' they'd do 'most anything for, an' then they seem to feel as if I
wa'n't. An' there's no"--she sought for a word here and came out
blunderingly--"no peace nor rest. Nor for me, neither. I ain't had peace
nor rest. Except"--here she paused again and ended gravely, and not this
time inadequately--"in him."
Nan understood. She was grave in her answer.
"Mr. Raven," she said. "I know."
The color flowed into Tira's face and she looked at Nan, with her
jewel-like eyes.
"I'm goin' to tell you," she said, "the whole story. He's like--my God.
Anything I could do for him--'twould be nothin'. Anything he asked of
me----"
Here the light faded out from her face and the flesh of it had that
curious look of curdling, as if with muscular horror.
"But," she said, "here 'tis. S'pose it come on him, that--that"--she
threw back her head in despair over her poverty of words--"s'pose it
made him like----Oh, I tell you there's suthin' queer about me, there's
suthin' wrong. It ain't that I look different from other folks. I ain't
ever meant to act different. I swear to my God I've acted like a decent
woman--an' a decent girl--an' when I was little I never even had a
thought! You tell me. You'd know."
Nan felt the hand on hers tighten. She put her other hand over it, and
thought. What could she tell her? These matters were too deep in the
causes of things for man to have caught a glimpse of them, except now
and then darkly through some poet's mind. There was one word that, to a
poet's mind only, might have illumined the darkness if only for an
instant: beauty, that was the word. Mankind could not look on beauty
such as this and not desire, for a moment at least, to possess it
utterly. But these things belonged to the dark places where brute nature
wrought her spells. And there were other beauties, other enchantments,
and of these, what could Tira, her mind moulded by the brutal influences
of her life, see, except as dreams of her own, not as having wholesome
correspondences in the mind of man? Could she guess what the appeal of
her loveliness would meet in Raven? Fastidious standards, pride of
honor, pride of race. The jungle, in itself, was as hateful to him as it
could be to her, who had been dragged through its fetid undergrowth with
a violence that had cut indelible marks into her. But for him, Raven--as
Nan believed she knew him and as Tira, her striving mind obscured by the
veil of her remembered past, could never know--hadn't the jungle
something for him beyond choking savors and fierce destructive poisons?
Didn't he know that even that miasma nourished wholesome virtues,
strength, abstinence, infinite compassion, if you crossed the horrible
expanse to the clear air beyond? Tira, fair as her mind was in its
untouched integrity, hated the jungle, but it was a part of the wrong
life had done her that she could not, highly as she worshiped Raven,
keep herself from seeing his kinship to the natural earth as Martin's
kinship with it, Tenney's--all the beasts who had desired her. How to
tell her that? How to tell her that although it was most loving of her
to save Raven from the curse she believed to be upon all men, he would
save himself?
"They think," Tira continued, in a voice rough enough to hurt the ear,
"there's suthin' about me--different. An' they feel as if, if they owned
me body an' soul they'd be--I dunno what they'd be."
"They think they'd be gods," Nan's mind supplied. "You are beauty, Tira.
You are the cup. They think if they could drink of you they would never
thirst again."
"An' now," said Tira, "s'pose a man like--like him--s'pose it looked to
him some minute he never'd so much as expected--s'pose it looked to him
as if he'd be made if he owned me body an' soul. Well! That's easy, you
say. If I love him, what's my body an' what's my soul? Offer 'em to him,
quick. An' wouldn't I, if that was all? Wouldn't I?"
She called it sharply, in an angry challenge.
"Yes," said Nan quietly, "I know you would."
"Well," said Tira, "what then? It wouldn't be any more"--her eyes,
glancing here and there in troubled search for help in her impossible
task of speech--"like them daffies over there. 'Twould be--mud."
This, though it did not satisfy her, carried an ineffable loathing, the
loathing that had its seed in the pathway of her difficult life.
"Now," she said, "you set by him, don't you?"
"Yes," said Nan.
"If 'twas your body an' soul, they'd be nothin' to you if he needed
'em."
"Nothing."
"An' you're goin' to stan' by him, an' if you marry away from him----"
"Never mind that," said Nan. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you," said Tira, "to see what I mean. An' I want you to tell it
or not to tell it, as it seems best. An' if ever the time comes, when
it'll do him good to know I run away from him because he was my life an'
my soul an' my God, you tell him. An' if it ain't best for him to know,
you let it rest betwixt you an' me."
"But, Tira," said Nan, "you're coming back?"
Tira considered.
"You see," she answered finally, "I've got my walkin' papers, as you
might say. The baby's gone. 'Twas the baby that made trouble betwixt his
father an' me. An' now there won't be no reason for my hidin' in the
shack up there or even passin' the time o' day with you, either of you.
An' that's a kind of a runnin' away, ain't it? Shouldn't you call it
runnin' away?"
She smiled dimly, and Nan said:
"Yes. But I shall come over to the Donnyhills' to-morrow."
"Yes," said Tira, "so do. Now I'd better go."
They got up and Nan put her hands on Tira's shoulders--and one hand was
numb from that iron clasp--and stood looking at her. Nan was not a
kissing woman, but she considered whether she should kiss her, to show
she loved her. She thought not. Tira's body had so revolted against
life, the life of the earth that had grown up into a jungle, that it
would be kinder to leave it inviolate even by a touch.
"Don't you want to change your mind?" Nan asked. "Mayn't I get the car?
It's seven long miles, Tira."
"Not the way I'm goin'," said Tira. There was a little smile at the
corners of her mouth. It was a kind smile, a mother smile. She meant to
leave Nan reassured. "I go 'cross lots, by old Moosewood's steppin'
stones."
Nan withdrew her hands and thought absently how thin Tira's shoulders
were under her dress. She was like a ship, built for endurance and
speed, but with all her loveliness in the beauty of bare line. Tira put
on her hat and took up her daffodils and followed, out at the front door
and down the path. Nan looked back.
"You've left the door open," said she. "Don't you want to lock up?"
"No," said Tira, "he'll see to it."
At the gate they parted, with a little smile from Tira, the kind that so
strangely changed her into something more childlike than her youth.
"You come," she said, "in the mornin'. I shall be there, an' glad enough
to have you."
She turned away and broke at once into her easy stride. Nan stood a
minute watching her. Then something came up in her, a surge of human
love, the pity of it all--Tira, Raven, the world, and perhaps a little
of it Nan--and she ran after her. The tears were splashing down her face
and blurring the bright day.
"Tira!" she called, and, as she came up with her, "darling Tira!"
"Why," said Tira, "you're cryin'! Don't you cry, darlin'. I never so
much as thought I'd make you cry."
They put their arms about each other and their cheeks were together, wet
with Nan's tears, and then--Nan thought afterward it was Tira who did
it--they kissed, and loosed each other and were parted. Nan went home
shaken, trembling, the tears unquenchably coming, and now she did not
turn to look.