As she left the Tiffany gate and emerged into the main road between
Santa Clara and Los Gatos, Eleanor raised her serviceable khaki-brown
parasol. She was walking directly toward the setting sun, which poured
into her eyes; yet she dropped the sunshade behind her head as though
to shield herself against an approach from the rear. No one followed;
she had walked to the next fence corner before she assured herself of
that, dared to shift that feminine buckler against the eye of the sun,
to slacken her pace, and to muse on an afternoon whose events, so
quiet, so undramatic, and yet so profoundly significant, buzzed still
in her head. As she thought on them, other things came into her mind
as momentous and worthy of attention before the jump of the great
event--that moment alone with Bertram Chester, that panic of
unaccountable fear. Slow to anger as much by a native and hidden
sweetness as by that surface control which puzzled her demonstrative
Aunt Matilda, she surprised her cheeks burning and her blood beating
in her throat.
With this physical agitation came an army of disagreeable and
disturbing thoughts. At first they were only recollections of
irritations past; the tiny maladjustments of her life; things by which
she owed vengeance of slight wrongs. They came together at length,
into one great, sore grievance--the forwardness, the utter, mortifying
impudence, of Mr. Chester. It was long before she admitted this as a
cause of irritation; once admitted, it overshadowed all her other
complaints against life.
Timidly, she approached stage by stage that scene on the lawn, that
unaccountable moment in the kitchen. Again she saw his great shoulders
heave with unnecessary strength at the ridiculous cracker box; again
she caught the sense of confinement with a machine of crushing
strength and power. It seemed to her that her retina still danced with
the impression of him as he turned to face her, as he flashed upon her
like a drawn weapon. She found herself looking down at the dusty road;
suddenly she grew so sick and faint that the breath deserted her body
and she had to lean against the gate post for support. The touch of
it against her body revived her with a start, and brought to her mind
the extent and folly of her own imaginings. She pulled herself
together and dropped her parasol to shield her face from Maria, who
was hurrying over from the kitchen garden.
* * * * *
Life flowed in immediately. A hundred details of a household, of a
fruit farm in the picking season, awaited her attention. Her orchard
and the Tiffany orchard were conducted together on a kind of a loose
co-operative system devised by the Judge to give her the greatest
amount of freedom with just as much responsibility as would be good
for her. Foreseeing that Alice Sturtevant's daughter would never live
on a farm indefinitely, that marriage or her own kind would claim her
in the end, he arranged everything so that her oversight might pass on
short notice to Olsen or to himself. In this harvest season, for
example, he secured for both farms the cutters and pickers--the
hardest problem for the Californian farmer. Also, the fruit went to
his own sheds and yards for cutting and drying. He was among the
sturdy minority who stood out against the co-operative driers which
had absorbed most of the fruit crop in the Santa Clara Valley. The
detail work about her place--such as setting out the fruit boxes,
selecting the moment when apricots or pears were ripe for the picking,
seeing that the trees, her permanent investment, were not injured by
wagon or picker, keeping her own accounts in balance with those of
Judge Tiffany--these and a hundred other little things she did herself
and did them well. Especially was the up-keep of the orchard her
special care; and this she managed with such native mother-sense that
one learned in trees might have told just when he crossed the unfenced
line from the Gray orchard to the Tiffany orchard.
To-night, Olsen was waiting to know whether she thought that the ten
rows of Moor Parks were ready for picking; he had just finished the
first crop of the Judge's Royals and a small gang would be without
pressing work on Monday morning. So they walked over the orchard
together, pressing a golden ball here and there, and decided that the
fruit was ripe and ready. Eleanor summoned Antonio for directions
about boxes and ladders. The hen-house had to be inspected, for
Eleanor was fumigating against the pip, brought into the Santa Lucia
by an importation of fancy Eastern chickens. To-morrow's menu of the
housekeeper was to be looked after. The things kept her busy until her
solitary Sunday evening supper.
Eleanor had dined alone so much that she had quite recovered from any
self-pity on that score. Like the daughter of convent manners that she
was, she kept up her self-respect by a little ceremony at this meal.
She dressed for it usually; at least she put on fresh ribbons and
flowers, gave a touch here and there to the table, held Maria to the
refinements of service.
However, as she opened her napkin that evening the rush and emotional
strain of the day brought a certain flash of introspection. It came
first when she lifted her eyes and caught sight of herself in the
mirror--dewy eyed, fresh, a pink rose in her hair, a pink ribbon at
her throat. What was she, so young, so feminine, doing there, supping
alone in state? She remembered the invitation of Lars Wark in Munich;
he and his wife, living the life artistic away over there, had sent to
ask her that she visit them and share their winter in the studio or
their summer on the coast of Brittany. Why, in the face of that
alluring invitation, did she suffer her soul to keep her in such
prisons as this? She could afford it; there was no question of money.
According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to
old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here
she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age--and she less than
twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And
watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half
comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died
and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the
hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on
Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy
and responsibility came together--that moment had stretched itself out
to six years. She had lived by it; was living by it now.
In some unaccountable fashion, that picture would intertwine itself
with the impression, so new and vivid, which she had received that
afternoon. Momentarily, both united to produce one emotion--profound
disgust and dislike for the coarseness, the brutality, of male
humanity, which had laid her father out on the pavement for the sport
of a mob, which had made this perturbing young man trample on all
considerations and delicacies.
"You need not mind about dessert, Maria," she called out suddenly. She
rose, hurried out of doors, tore into the inspection of fruit crates
for to-morrow's picking.
Night, falling with little twilight, as always in those climes, found
her still ranging the house and barnyard, the rose incongruously in
her hair, the ribbon at her throat. When it was too dark to find
employment out of doors, she hurried back to the house, tried to read.
But a sense of confinement drove her forth. She started out toward the
road, stopped by the hedge gate, sat down finally on a bench under her
grape arbor. The leaves and the bunches of swelling fruit hid her from
sight of the highway, overshadowed at that point by a great bay tree.
A confusion of voices, masculine and feminine, sounded in the
distance. She caught a shrill, rowdy laugh. "The cutting-women and
their men," she thought dimly. That social phenomenon of the picking
season, grown accustomed by six years of passing summers and winters,
drew no special attention from her. But the noise continued; it became
plain that these reveling laborers were making in her direction.
Doubtless, they came from the women's camp at Judge Tiffany's. The
night was bringing her peace and sleep of the soul after a disturbing
day; alone, that raucous noise marred the calm.
She peered idly through the leaves. A half a dozen women, their white
dresses making them visible in the dusk, a few men whose forms loomed
indistinctly against the edge of the sky, noised past her and were
gone down the road. One couple, she perceived, lingered behind. They
had reached the shade of the bay tree, were so close that she might
have reached out and touched them, before she realized the situation.
She was about to call out, to cough, when the man spoke.
"No, I won't hurt you," he said, "I'm as gentle a little kisser as you
ever saw." The voice was that of Bert Chester.
"Aw, you're too fresh," came the voice of the girl. But as they drew
into deeper shadow, she was not pulling away from him.
"Fresh as a daisy!" said the voice of Bertram Chester. Followed a
struggle, a faint "stop, stop!" in the voice of the girl, the sound of
gross and heavy kissing. In a moment, the white form of the girl broke
down the road, the greater, darker form of the man lumbering after. He
caught her, held her for a longer time and a lesser struggle. She came
out of this one laughing, and down the road they went, his arm a black
shadow about her waist.
Eleanor's deeper and higher self--the self that lay like a filmy,
impalpable wrapper about her conscious mind, so that at times she
appeared to herself as two persons--that consciousness stood aloof in
expectation of disgust, revulsion, horror. It came as a confused
surprise that she felt nothing of the kind. A cloying sweetness, a
sensation purely physical, as though a syrup had been poured into all
the channels of her nerves, began in her throat, rushed through body
and limbs. The sweet tide surged backward, beat in a wave of faintness
upon her heart. Shame, like air into a vacuum, followed with a rush.
She sank to the ground, clinging to the bench.
When she had so far mastered herself that she could feel her own
senses, she was praying aloud--praying in the rite which held her
emotions while it failed with her reason.
"Ave Maria Sanctissima!" she was saying over and over again.