Gordon placed on the table before him the statements and accounts of his
newly-augmented options. The papers, to his clerical inefficiency,
presented a bewildering mass of inexplicable details and accounts. He
brought them, with vast difficulty, into a rough order. In the lists of
the acreages of timber controlled there were appended none of the names of
those from whom his privilege of option had been obtained, no note of the
slightly-varying sums paid--the sole, paramount facts to Gordon now. For
the establishment of these he was obliged to refer to the original,
individual contracts, to compare and add and check off.
Old Pompey had conducted his transactions largely from his buggy, lending
them a speciously casual aspect. The options made to him were written on
slips of paper hastily torn from a cheap note book, engrossed on yellowing
sheets of foolscap in tremulous Spencerian. Their wording was informal,
often strictly local. One granted privilege of purchase of, "The piney
trees on Pap's and mine but not Henny's for nineteen years." Another bore,
above the date, "In this year of Jesus Christ's holy redemption."
The sales made to Valentine Simmons were, invariably, formal in record,
the signatures were all witnessed.
It was a slow, fatiguing process. A number of the original vendors, Gordon
knew, had died, their families were scattered; others had removed from the
County; logical substitutes had to be evolved. The mere comparison of the
various entries, the tracing of the tracts to the amounts involved, was
scarcely within Gordon's ability.
He labored through the swiftly-falling dusk into the night, and took up
the task early the following morning. A large part of the work had to be
done a second, third, time--his brain, unaccustomed to concentrated mental
processes, soon grew weary; he repeated aloud a fact of figures without
the least comprehension of the sounds formed by his lips, and he would say
them again and again, until he had forced into his blurring mind some
significance, some connection.
He would fall asleep over his table, his scattered papers, in the grey
daylight, or in the radiance of a large glass lamp, and stay immobile for
hours, while his dog lay at his feet, or, uneasy, nosed his sharp, relaxed
knees.
No one would seek him, enter his house, break his exhausted slumbers.
Lying on an outflung arm his head with its sunken, closed eyes, loose
lips, seemed hardly more alive than the photographed clay of Mrs.
Hollidew in the sitting room. He would wake slowly, confused; the dog
would lick his inert hand, and they would go together in search of food to
the kitchen.
On the occasions when he was forced to go to the post-office, the store,
he went hurriedly, secretively, in a coat as green, as aged, as Pompey's
own.
He was anxious to finish his labor, to be released from its
responsibility, its weight. It appeared tremendously difficult to
consummate; it had developed far beyond his expectation, his original
conception. The thought pursued him that some needy individual would be
overlooked, his claim neglected. No one must be defrauded; all, all, must
have their own, must have their chance. He, Gordon Makimmon, was seeing
that they had, with Lettice's money ... because ... because....
The leaves had been swept from the trees; the mountains were gaunt, rocky,
against swift, low clouds. There was no sunlight except for a brief,
sullen red fire in the west at the end of day. At night the winds blew
bleakly down Greenstream valley. Shutters were locked, shades drawn, in
the village; night obliterated it absolutely. No one passed, after dark,
on the road above.
He seemed to be toiling alone at a hopeless, interminable task isolated in
the midst of a vast, uninhabited desolation, in a black chasm filled with
the sound of whirling leaves and threshing branches.
The morning, breaking late and grey and cold, appeared equally difficult,
barren, in vain. The kitchen stove, continually neglected, went
continually out, the grate became clogged with ashes, the chimney refused
to draw. He relit it, on his knees, the dog patiently at his side; he
fanned the kindling into flames, poured on the coal, the shining black
dust coruscating in instant, gold tracery. He bedded the horse more
warmly, fed him in a species of mechanical, inattentive regularity.
Finally the list of timber options he possessed was completed with the
names of their original owners and the amounts for which they had been
bought. A deep sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment, took the place of
his late anxiety. Even the weather changed, became complacent--the valley
was filled with the blue mirage of Indian summer, the apparent return of a
warm, beneficent season. The decline of the year seemed to halt, relent,
in still, sunny hours. It was as though nature, death, decay, had been
arrested, set at naught; that man might dwell forever amid peaceful
memories, slumberous vistas, lost in that valley hidden by shimmering
veils from all the implacable forces that bring the alternation of cause
and effect upon subservient worlds and men.