to come, too hastily, to a conclusion.” He began searching for his pipe.
“Only you know yourself, Julie, how I torment myself, if it’s a big
enough thing, for days, weeks, years; and the reason is, the real reason
is, that I come to my conclusions instantly, and then fight to destroy
them.” He seemed to Julie a little pompous now. “It’s because first I’m
human, and second, logical. Well, I don’t know—perhaps I’ll be able to
tell you something later—give you a beginning at least—later——” He
twitched his shoulders and went out, closing the door after him. She
heard him climbing the familiar creaking stairs, the yellow painted
stairs that led up into the roof—she heard him strike a match—then
silence.
The dark had begun, closing in about bushes and barn, and filling the
air with moist joyousness, the joyousness of autumn that trusts itself
to the darkness, and Julie leaned on her hand by the shelf and listened.
She could hear, far away and faint, the sound of dogs on heavy chains.
She tried to stop, listening to the outside, but her thoughts rotted
away like clouds in a wind.
The sense of tears came to her, but it was only a sentimental memory of
her early childhood, and it brought a smile to her long face. She had
cried once when they made her kiss a dead priest—“Qui habitare facit
sterilem—matrem filiorum laetantem”—then “Gloria Patri—” and she had
wept then, or thought she had, because he was not only beyond glory and
all mercy, but beyond the dubious comfort of the feeling.
She heard Paytor walking above, and the smoke of his pipe crept down
between loose boards and uneven plaster and laths.
She went—quite mechanically—over to a chest in one corner, and opened
the lid. A shirt waist, of striped taffeta, one she had worn years
before, some old Spanish lace—her mother’s—the child——
Paytor did not seem to like the child—“How ridiculous!” she thought.
“She is good, quiet, gentle—but that’s not enough now.” She removed her
hat. Living with Paytor and the child—Paytor so strong,—always was, and
so was his family—and she sickly, coughing. Perhaps she had made a
mistake in coming back. She went toward the steps to tell this to Paytor
but thought better of it. That wasn’t what she wanted to say.
The hours drew out and Julie Anspacher, sitting now at the window
overlooking the garden—nodded without sleep—long dreams—grotesque and
abominable—stupid irrelevances dull and interminable. Somewhere little
Ann coughed in her sleep. Julie Anspacher coughed also, and in between,
the sound of Paytor walking up and down, and the smell of tobacco
growing stronger.
To take her own life, that was right, if only she had not the habit of
fighting death—“but death is past knowing, and to know is better than to
make right——” She shook her head. “That’s another detour on the wrong
side,” she told herself. “If only I had the power to feel pain as
unbearable, a gust of passion, of impatience, and all would be over—but
I’ve stood so much so long, there is no too long.” She thought what she
would not give for any kind of feeling, anything that was vital and
sudden and determining. “If Paytor will have patience I will get around
to it.”
Then it seemed that something must happen, must inevitably happen.
“If I could only think of the right word before it happens,” she said to
herself, over and over, and over. “It’s because I’m cold and I can’t
think, I’ll think soon——” She would take her jacket off, put on her
coat——
She got up, running her hand along the wall. Or had she left it on the
chair? “I can’t think of the word,” she said to keep her mind on
something.
She turned around. All his family—long lives. “And me too, me too,” she
murmured. She became dizzy. “It is because I must get on my knees—but it
isn’t low enough.” She contradicted herself. “Yet if I put my head
down—way down—down——”
Then she heard the shot. “He has quick warm blood” went through her
mind—and her blood was cold.
Her forehead had not quite touched the boards, now she touched them, but
she got up immediately, stumbling over her dress.
PASTORAL
A frog leaps out across the lawn,
And crouches there—all heavy and alone,
And like a blossom, pale and over-blown,
Once more the moon turns dim against the dawn.
Crawling across the straggling panoply
Of little roses, only half in bloom,
It strides within that beamed and lofty room
Where an ebon stallion looms upon the hay.
The stillness moves, and seems to grow immense,
A shuddering dog starts, dragging at its chain,
Thin, dusty rats slink down within the grain,
And in the vale the first far bells commence.
Here in the dawn, with mournful doomèd eyes
A cow uprises, moving out to bear
A soft-lipped calf with swarthy birth-swirled hair,
And wide wet mouth, and droll uncertainties.
The grey fowls fight for places in the sun,
The mushrooms flare, and pass like painted fans:
All the world is patient in its plans—
The seasons move forever, one on one.
Small birds lie sprawling vaguely in the heat,
And wanly pluck at shadows on their breasts,
And where the heavy grape-vine leans and rests,
White butterflies lift up their furry feet.
The wheat grows querulous with unseen cats;
A fox strides out in anger through the corn,
Bidding each acre wake and rise to mourn
Beneath its sharps and through its throaty flats.
And so it is, and will be year on year,
Time in and out of date, and still on time
A billion grapes plunge bleeding into wine
And bursting, fall like music on the ear.
The snail that marks the girth of night with slime,
The lonely adder hissing in the fern,
The lizard with its ochre eyes aburn—
Each is before, and each behind its time.
OSCAR
Before the house rose two stately pine trees, and all about small firs
and hemlocks. The garden path struggled up to the porch between wild
flowers and weeds, and looming against its ancient bulk the shadows of
out-houses and barns.
It stood among the hills, and just below around a curve in the road, lay
the placid grey reservoir.
Sometimes parties would cross the fields, walking slowly toward the
mountains. And sometimes children could be heard murmuring in the
underbrush of things they scarcely knew.
Strange things had happened in this country town. Murder, theft, and
little girls found weeping, and silent morose boys scowling along in the
ragweed, with half-shut sunburned eyelids.
The place was wild, deserted and impossible in Winter. In Summer it was
over-run with artists and town folk with wives and babies. Every
Saturday there were fairs on the green, where second-hand articles were
sold for a song, and flirting was formidable and passing. There were
picnics, mountain climbings, speeches in the townhall, on the mark of
the beast, on sin, and democracy, and once in a while a lecture on
something that “everyone should know,” attended by mothers, their
offspring left with servants who knew what everyone shouldn’t.
Then there were movies, bare legs, deacons, misses in cascades of curls
and on Sunday one could listen to Mr. Widdie, the clergyman, who
suffered from consumption, speak on love of one’s neighbour.
In this house and in this town had lived, for some fifteen years or so,
Emma Gonsberg.
She was a little creature, lively, smiling, extremely good-natured. She
had been married twice, divorced once, and was now a widow still in her
thirties.
Of her two husbands she seldom said anything. Once she made the remark:
“Only fancy, they never did catch on to me at all.”
She tried to be fashionable, did her hair in the Venetian style, wore
gowns after the manner of Lady de Bath entering her carriage; and tried
to cultivate only those who could tell her “where she stood.”
Her son Oscar was fourteen or thereabouts. He wore distinctly
over-decorative English clothes, and remembered two words of some
obscure Indian dialect that seemed to mean “fleas,” for whenever he
flung these words defiantly at visitors they would go off into peals of
laughter, headed by his mother. At such times he would lower his eyes
and show a row of too heavy teeth.
Emma Gonsberg loved flowers, but could not grow them. She admired cats
because there was “nothing servile about them,” but they would not stay
with her; and though she loved horses and longed to be one of those
daring women who could handle them “without being crushed in the
stalls,” they nevertheless ignored her with calm indifference. Of her
loves, passions and efforts, she had managed to raise a few ill-smelling
pheasants, and had to let it go at that.
In the Winter she led a lonely and discriminating life. In the Summer
her house filled with mixed characters, as one might say. A hot
melancholy Jew, an officer who was always upon the point of depreciating
his medals in a conceited voice, and one other who swore inoffensively.
Finally she had given this sort of thing up, partly because she had
managed, soon after, to get herself entangled with a man called Ulric
Straussmann. A tall rough fellow, who said he came from the Tyrol; a
fellow without sensibilities but with a certain bitter sensuality. A
good-natured creature as far as he went, with vivid streaks of German
lust, which had at once something sentimental and something careless
about it; the type who can turn the country, with a single gesture, into
a brothel, and makes of children strong enemies. He showed no little
audacity in putting things into people’s minds that he would not do
himself.
He smelled very strongly of horses, and was proud of it. He pretended a
fondness for all that goes under hide or hair, but a collie bitch, known
for her gentleness, snapped at him and bit him. He invariably carried a
leather thong, braided at the base for a handle, and would stand for
hours talking, with his legs apart, whirling this contrived whip, and,
looking out of the corner of his eyes would pull his moustache, waiting
to see which of the ladies would draw her feet in.
He talked in a rather even, slightly nasal tone, wetting his lips with a
long outthrust of tongue, like an animal. His teeth were splendid and
his tongue unusually red, and he prided himself on these and on the
calves of his legs. They were large, muscular and rather handsome.
He liked to boast that there was nothing that he could not do and be
forgiven, because, as he expressed it, “I have always left people
satisfied.” If it were hate or if it were love, he seemed to have come
off with unusual success. “Most people are puny,” he would add, “while I
am large, strong, healthy. Solid flesh through and through,” whereat he
would pound his chest and smile.
He was new to the town and sufficiently insolent to attract attention.
There was also something childishly naïve in him, as there is in all
tall and robust men who talk about themselves. This probably saved him,
because when he was drinking he often became gross and insulting, but he
soon put the women of the party in a good humour by giving one of them a
hearty and good-natured slap on the rear that she was not likely to
forget.
Besides this man Emma had a few old friends of the less interesting,
though better-read, type. Among them, however, was an exception, Oliver
Kahn, a married man with several children one heard of and never saw. A
strange, quiet man who was always talking. He had splendid eyes and a
poor mouth—very full lips. In the beginning one surmised that he had
been quite an adventurer. He had an odour about him of the rather recent
cult of the “terribly good.” He seemed to have been unkind to his family
in some way, and was spending the rest of his life in a passion of
regret and remorse. He had become one of those guests who are only
missed when absent. He finally stayed for good, sleeping in an ante-room
with his boots on,—his one royal habit.
In the beginning Emma had liked him tremendously. He was at once gentle
and furious, but of late, just prior to the Straussmann affair, he had
begun to irritate her. She thought to herself, “He is going mad, that’s
all.” She was angry at herself for saying “that’s all,” as if she had
expected something different, more momentous.
He had enormous appetites, he ate like a Porthos and drank like a
Pantagruel, and talked hour after hour about the same thing, “Love of
one’s neighbour,” and spent his spare time in standing with his hands
behind him, in front of the pheasants’ cage. He had been a snipe hunter
in his time, and once went on a big game hunt, but now he said he saw
something more significant here.
He had, like all good sportsmen, even shot himself through the hand, but
of late he pretended that he did not remember what the scar came from.
He seemed to suffer a good deal. Evil went deep and good went deep and
he suffered the tortures of the damned. He wept and laughed and ate and
drank and slept, and year by year his eyes grew sweeter, tenderer, and
his mouth fuller, more gross.
The child Oscar did not like Kahn, yet sometimes he would become
extraordinarily excited, talk very fast, almost banteringly, a little
malignly, and once when Kahn had taken his hand he drew it away angrily.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because it is dirty,” he retorted maliciously.
“As if you really knew of what I was thinking,” Kahn said, and put his
own hands behind him.
Emma liked Kahn, was attached to him. He mentioned her faults without
regret or reproval, and this in itself was a divine sort of love.
He would remark: “We cannot be just because we are bewildered; we ought
to be proud enough to welcome our enemies as judges, but we hate, and to
hate is the act of the incurious. I love with an everlasting but a
changing love, because I know I am the wrong sort of man to be good—and
because I revere the shadow on the threshold.”
“What shadow, Kahn?”
“In one man we called it Christ—it is energy; for most of us it is dead,
a phantom. If you have it you _are_ Christ, and if you have only a
little of it you are but the promise of the Messiah.”
These seemed great words, and she looked at him with a little admiring
smile.
“You make me uneasy for fear that I have not said ‘I love you with an
everlasting love,’ often enough to make it an act of fanaticism.”
As for Oscar, he did what he liked, which gave him character, but made
him difficult to live with.
He was not one of those “weedy” youths, long of leg, and stringy like
“jerked beef, thank God!” as his mother said to visitors. He was rather
too full-grown, thick of calf and hip and rather heavy of feature. His
hands and feet were not out of proportion as is usually the case with
children of his age, but they were too old looking.
He did not smoke surreptitiously. On the contrary he had taken out a
pipe one day in front of his mother, and filling it, smoked in silence,
not even with a frightened air, and for that matter not even with a
particularly bold air;—he did it quite simply, as something he had
finally decided to do, and Emma Gonsberg had gone off to Kahn with it,
in a rather helpless manner.
Most children swing in circles about a room, clumsily. Oscar on the
contrary walked into the four corners placidly and officially, looked at
the backs of the books here and a picture there, and even grunted
approvingly at one or two in quite a mature manner.
He had a sweetheart, and about her and his treatment of her there were
only a few of the usual signs—he was shy, and passionately immersed in
her, there was little of the casual smartness of first calf love about
it, though he did in truth wave her off with a grin if he was
questioned.
He took himself with seriousness amounting to a lack of humour—and
though he himself knew that he was a youth, and had the earmarks of
adolescence about him—and know it he certainly did—once he said, “Well,
what of it—is that any reason why I should not be serious about
everything?” This remark had so astonished his mother that she had
immediately sent for Kahn to know if he thought the child was
precocious—and Kahn had answered, “If he were, I should be better
pleased.”
“But what is one to expect?”
“Children,” he answered, “are never what they are supposed to be, and
they never have been. He may be old for his age, but what child hasn’t
been?”
In the meantime, she tried to bring Straussmann and Kahn together—“My
house is all at odds,” she thought, but these two never hit it off.
Straussmann always appeared dreadfully superficial and cynical, and Kahn
dull and good about nothing.
“They have both got abnormal appetites,” she thought wearily. She
listened to them trying to talk together of an evening on the piazza
steps. Kahn was saying:
“You must, however, warn yourself, in fact I might say arm yourself,
against any sensation of pleasure in doing good; this is very difficult,
I know, but it can be attained. You can give and forgive and tolerate
gently and, as one might say, casually, until it’s a second nature.”
“There you have it, tolerate—who wants tolerance, or a second nature?
Well, let us drop it. I feel like a child—it’s difficult not to feel
like a child.”
“Like Oscar—he has transports—even at his age,” Emma added hesitatingly.
“Perhaps that’s not quite as it should be?”
“The memory of growing up is worse than the fear of death,” Kahn
remarked, and Emma sighed.
“I don’t know; the country was made for children, they say—I could tell
you a story about that,” Straussmann broke off, whistling to Oscar.
“Shall I tell Oscar about the country—and what it is really like?” he
asked Emma, turning his head.
“Let the boy alone.”
“Why, over there in that small village,” Straussmann went on, taking
Oscar by the arm. “It is a pretty tale I could tell you—perhaps I will
when you are older—but don’t let your mother persuade you that the
country is a nice, healthful, clean place, because, my child, it’s
corrupt.”
“Will you let the boy alone!” Emma cried, turning very red.
“Ah, eh—I’ll let him alone right enough—but it won’t make much
difference—you’ll see,” he went on. “There is a great deal told to
children that they should not hear, I’ll admit, but there wasn’t a thing
I didn’t know when I was ten. It happened one day in a hotel in
Southampton—a dark place, gloomy, smelling frightfully of mildew, the
walls were damp and stained. A strange place, eh, to learn the delights
of love, but then our parents seldom dwell on the delights,—they are too
taken up with the sordid details, the mere sordid details. My father had
a great beard, and I remember thinking that it would have been better if
he hadn’t said such things. I wasn’t much good afterwards for five or
six years, but my sister was different. She enjoyed it immensely and
forgot all about it almost immediately, excepting when I reminded her.”
“Go to bed, Oscar,” Emma said abruptly.
He went, and on going up the steps he did not let his fingers trail
along the spindles of the banisters with his usual “Eeny meeny miny mo,”
etc.
Emma was a little troubled and watched him going up silently, hardly
moving his arms.
“Children should be treated very carefully, they should know as much as
possible, but in a less superficial form than they must know later.”
“I think a child is born corrupt and attains to decency,” Straussmann
said grinning.
“If you please,” Emma cried gaily, “we will talk about things we
understand.”
Kahn smiled. “It’s beautiful, really beautiful,” he said, meaning her
gaiety. He always said complimentary things about her lightness of
spirit, and always in an angry voice.
“Come, come, you are going mad. What’s the good of that?” she said,
abruptly, thinking, “He is a man who discovered himself once too often.”
“You are wrong, Emma, I am not worthy of madness.”
“Don’t be on your guard, Kahn,” she retorted.
Oscar appeared before her suddenly, barefoot. She stared at him. “What
is it?” she at last managed to ask in a faint almost suffocated voice.
“I want to kiss you,” he whispered.
She moved toward him slowly, when, half way, he hurried toward her,
seized her hand, kissed it, and went back into the house.
“My God,” she cried out. “He is beginning to think for himself,” and ran
in after him.
She remembered how she had talked to him the night before, only the
night before. “You must love with an everlasting but a changing love,”
and he became restless. “With an everlasting but a changing love.”
“What do you mean by ‘changing’?” His palms were moist, and his feet
twitched.
“A love that takes in every detail, every element—that can understand
without hating, without distinction, I think.”
“Why do you say, ‘I think’?”
“I mean, I know,” she answered, confused.
“Get that Kahn out, he’s a rascal,” he said, abruptly, grinning.
“What are you saying, Oscar?” she demanded, turning cold. “I’ll never
come to your bed again, take your hands and say ‘Our Father.’”
“It will be all right if you send that man packing,” he said, stressing
the word “packing.”
She was very angry, and half started toward the door. Then she turned
back. “Why do you say that, Oscar?”
“Because he makes you nervous—well, then—because he crouches”; he saw by
his mother’s face that she was annoyed, puzzled, and he turned red to
his ears. “I don’t mean that, I mean he isn’t good; he’s just watching
for something good to happen, to take place——” His voice trailed off,
and he raised his eyes solemn and full of tears to her face. She leaned
down and kissed him, tucking him in like a “little boy.”
“But I’m not a little boy,” he called out to her.
And tonight she did not come down until she thought Kahn and Straussmann
had gone.
Kahn had disappeared, but Straussmann had taken a turn or two about the
place and was standing in the shadow of the stoop when she came out.
“Come,” he said. “What is it that you want?”
“I think it’s religion,” she answered abruptly. “But it’s probably
love.”
“Let us take a walk,” he suggested.
They turned in toward the shadows of the great still mountains and the
denser, more arrogant shadows of the out-houses and barns. She looked
away into the silence, and the night, and a warm sensation as of
pleasure or of something expected but intangible came over her, and she
wanted to laugh, to cry, and thinking of it she knew that it was
neither.
She was almost unconscious of him for a little, thinking of her son. She
raised her long silk skirts about her ankles and tramped off into the
dampness. A whippoorwill was whistling off to the right. It sounded as
if he were on the fence, and Emma stopped and tried to make it out. She
took Ulric’s arm presently, and feeling his muscles swell began to think
of the Bible. “Those who take by the sword shall die by the sword. And
those who live by the flesh shall die by the flesh.”
She wished that she had someone she could believe in. She saw a door
before her mental eye, and herself opening it and saying, “Now tell me
this, and what it means,—only today I was thinking ‘those who live by
the flesh’”—and as suddenly the door was slammed in her face. She
started back.
“You are nervous,” he said in a pleased whisper.
Heavy stagnant shadows sprawled in the path. “So many million leaves and
twigs to make one dark shadow,” she said, and was sorry because it
sounded childishly romantic, quite different from what she had intended,
what she had meant.
They turned the corner of the carriage-house. Something moved, a toad,
grey and ugly, bounced across her feet and into the darkness of the
hedges. Coming to the entrance of the barn they paused. They could
distinguish sleeping hens, the white films moving on their eyes—and
through a window at the back, steam rising from the dung heap.
“There don’t seem to be any real farmers left,” she said aloud, thinking
of some book she had read about the troubles of the peasants and
landholders.
“You’re thinking of my country,” he said smiling.
“No, I wasn’t,” she said. “I was wondering what it is about the country
that makes it seem so terrible?”
“It’s your being a Puritan—a tight-laced delightful little Puritan.”
She winced at the words, and decided to remain silent.
It was true, Straussmann was in a fever of excitement—he was always this
way with women, especially with Emma. He tried to conceal it for the
time being, thinking, rightly, that a display of it would not please her
just at the moment—“but it would be only a matter of minutes when she
would welcome it,” he promised himself, and waited.
He reflected that she would laugh at him. “But she would enjoy it just
the same. The way with all women who have had anything to do with more
than one man and are not yet forty,” he reflected. “They like what they
get, but they laugh at you, and know you are lying——”
“Oh, my God!” Emma said suddenly, drawing her arm away and wiping her
face with her handkerchief.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, it’s the heat.”
“It is warm,” he said dismally.