SUMMER

by Edith Wharton

1917

I

A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street

of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.

It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky

shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the

pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the

round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows

across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street

when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the

open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England

villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the

Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only

roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at

the other end of the village, the road rises above the church and skirts

the black hemlock wall enclosing the cemetery.

The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful

fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught the straw hat of a young man

just passing under them, and spun it clean across the road into the

duck-pond.

As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's doorstep noticed

that he was a stranger, that he wore city clothes, and that he was

laughing with all his teeth, as the young and careless laugh at such

mishaps.

Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that sometimes came

over her when she saw people with holiday faces made her draw back into

the house and pretend to look for the key that she knew she had already

put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror with a gilt eagle over it

hung on the passage wall, and she looked critically at her reflection,

wished for the thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel

Balch, the girl who sometimes came from Springfield to spend a week with

old Miss Hatchard, straightened the sunburnt hat over her small swarthy

face, and turned out again into the sunshine.

“How I hate everything!” she murmured.

The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, and she had the

street to herself. North Dormer is at all times an empty place, and at

three o'clock on a June afternoon its few able-bodied men are off in

the fields or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languid household

drudgery.

The girl walked along, swinging her key on a finger, and looking about

her with the heightened attention produced by the presence of a stranger

in a familiar place. What, she wondered, did North Dormer look like to

people from other parts of the world? She herself had lived there

since the age of five, and had long supposed it to be a place of some

importance. But about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopal

clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other Sunday--when the roads

were not ploughed up by hauling--to hold a service in the North Dormer

church, had proposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take the young

people down to Nettleton to hear an illustrated lecture on the Holy

Land; and the dozen girls and boys who represented the future of North

Dormer had been piled into a farm-waggon, driven over the hills to

Hepburn, put into a way-train and carried to Nettleton.

In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall had, for the first

and only time, experienced railway-travel, looked into shops with

plate-glass fronts, tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened

to a gentleman saying unintelligible things before pictures that she

would have enjoyed looking at if his explanations had not prevented her

from understanding them. This initiation had shown her that North Dormer

was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that

her position as custodian of the village library had previously failed

to excite. For a month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly

into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial Library; then the

impression of Nettleton began to fade, and she found it easier to take

North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading.

The sight of the stranger once more revived memories of Nettleton, and

North Dormer shrank to its real size. As she looked up and down it, from

lawyer Royall's faded red house at one end to the white church at the

other, she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, a weather-beaten

sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway,

trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern

communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no “business

block”; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state

of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been

bought for twenty years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed on

the damp shelves. Yet Charity Royall had always been told that she ought

to consider it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North Dormer.

She knew that, compared to the place she had come from, North Dormer

represented all the blessings of the most refined civilization. Everyone

in the village had told her so ever since she had been brought there as

a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said to her, on a terrible occasion

in her life: “My child, you must never cease to remember that it was Mr.

Royall who brought you down from the Mountain.”

She had been “brought down from the Mountain”; from the scarred cliff

that lifted its sullen wall above the lesser slopes of Eagle Range,

making a perpetual background of gloom to the lonely valley. The

Mountain was a good fifteen miles away, but it rose so abruptly from the

lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its shadow over North Dormer.

And it was like a great magnet drawing the clouds and scattering them

in storm across the valley. If ever, in the purest summer sky, there

trailed a thread of vapour over North Dormer, it drifted to the Mountain

as a ship drifts to a whirlpool, and was caught among the rocks, torn up

and multiplied, to sweep back over the village in rain and darkness.

Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she knew it was a bad

place, and a shame to have come from, and that, whatever befell her

in North Dormer, she ought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded her, to

remember that she had been brought down from there, and hold her tongue

and be thankful. She looked up at the Mountain, thinking of these

things, and tried as usual to be thankful. But the sight of the young

man turning in at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the vision of

the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she felt ashamed of her old

sun-hat, and sick of North Dormer, and jealously aware of Annabel Balch

of Springfield, opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on glories

greater than the glories of Nettleton.

“How I hate everything!” she said again.

Half way down the street she stopped at a weak-hinged gate. Passing

through it, she walked down a brick path to a queer little brick temple

with white wooden columns supporting a pediment on which was inscribed

in tarnished gold letters: “The Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library,

1832.”

Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she

would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her

only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For

Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had

enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of

the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked

literary gifts, written a series of papers called “The Recluse of Eagle

Range,” enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene

Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy.

Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a

link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity

Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a

freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt

any deader in his grave than she did in his library.

Entering her prison-house with a listless step she took off her hat,

hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva, opened the shutters, leaned out

to see if there were any eggs in the swallow's nest above one of the

windows, and finally, seating herself behind the desk, drew out a

roll of cotton lace and a steel crochet hook. She was not an expert

workwoman, and it had taken her many weeks to make the half-yard

of narrow lace which she kept wound about the buckram back of a

disintegrated copy of “The Lamplighter.” But there was no other way of

getting any lace to trim her summer blouse, and since Ally Hawes, the

poorest girl in the village, had shown herself in church with enviable

transparencies about the shoulders, Charity's hook had travelled faster.

She unrolled the lace, dug the hook into a loop, and bent to the task

with furrowed brows.

Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised her eyes she knew

that the young man she had seen going in at the Hatchard gate had

entered the library.

Without taking any notice of her he began to move slowly about the

long vault-like room, his hands behind his back, his short-sighted eyes

peering up and down the rows of rusty bindings. At length he reached the

desk and stood before her.

“Have you a card-catalogue?” he asked in a pleasant abrupt voice; and

the oddness of the question caused her to drop her work.

“A WHAT?”

“Why, you know----” He broke off, and she became conscious that he was

looking at her for the first time, having apparently, on his entrance,

included her in his general short-sighted survey as part of the

furniture of the library.

The fact that, in discovering her, he lost the thread of his remark,

did not escape her attention, and she looked down and smiled. He smiled

also.

“No, I don't suppose you do know,” he corrected himself. “In fact, it

would be almost a pity----”

She thought she detected a slight condescension in his tone, and asked

sharply: “Why?”

“Because it's so much pleasanter, in a small library like this, to poke

about by one's self--with the help of the librarian.”

He added the last phrase so respectfully that she was mollified, and

rejoined with a sigh: “I'm afraid I can't help you much.”

“Why?” he questioned in his turn; and she replied that there weren't

many books anyhow, and that she'd hardly read any of them. “The worms

are getting at them,” she added gloomily.

“Are they? That's a pity, for I see there are some good ones.” He seemed

to have lost interest in their conversation, and strolled away again,

apparently forgetting her. His indifference nettled her, and she picked

up her work, resolved not to offer him the least assistance. Apparently

he did not need it, for he spent a long time with his back to her,

lifting down, one after another, the tall cob-webby volumes from a

distant shelf.

“Oh, I say!” he exclaimed; and looking up she saw that he had drawn out

his handkerchief and was carefully wiping the edges of the book in his

hand. The action struck her as an unwarranted criticism on her care of

the books, and she said irritably: “It's not my fault if they're dirty.”

He turned around and looked at her with reviving interest. “Ah--then

you're not the librarian?”

“Of course I am; but I can't dust all these books. Besides, nobody ever

looks at them, now Miss Hatchard's too lame to come round.”

“No, I suppose not.” He laid down the book he had been wiping, and stood

considering her in silence. She wondered if Miss Hatchard had sent

him round to pry into the way the library was looked after, and the

suspicion increased her resentment. “I saw you going into her house just

now, didn't I?” she asked, with the New England avoidance of the proper

name. She was determined to find out why he was poking about among her

books.

“Miss Hatchard's house? Yes--she's my cousin and I'm staying there,” the

young man answered; adding, as if to disarm a visible distrust: “My name

is Harney--Lucius Harney. She may have spoken of me.”

“No, she hasn't,” said Charity, wishing she could have said: “Yes, she

has.”

“Oh, well----” said Miss Hatchard's cousin with a laugh; and after

another pause, during which it occurred to Charity that her answer

had not been encouraging, he remarked: “You don't seem strong on

architecture.”

Her bewilderment was complete: the more she wished to appear to

understand him the more unintelligible his remarks became. He reminded

her of the gentleman who had “explained” the pictures at Nettleton, and

the weight of her ignorance settled down on her again like a pall.

“I mean, I can't see that you have any books on the old houses about

here. I suppose, for that matter, this part of the country hasn't been

much explored. They all go on doing Plymouth and Salem. So stupid. My

cousin's house, now, is remarkable. This place must have had a past--it

must have been more of a place once.” He stopped short, with the blush

of a shy man who overhears himself, and fears he has been voluble. “I'm

an architect, you see, and I'm hunting up old houses in these parts.”

She stared. “Old houses? Everything's old in North Dormer, isn't it? The

folks are, anyhow.”

He laughed, and wandered away again.

“Haven't you any kind of a history of the place? I think there was one

written about 1840: a book or pamphlet about its first settlement,” he

presently said from the farther end of the room.

She pressed her crochet hook against her lip and pondered. There was

such a work, she knew: “North Dormer and the Early Townships of Eagle

County.” She had a special grudge against it because it was a limp

weakly book that was always either falling off the shelf or slipping

back and disappearing if one squeezed it in between sustaining volumes.

She remembered, the last time she had picked it up, wondering how anyone

could have taken the trouble to write a book about North Dormer and its

neighbours: Dormer, Hamblin, Creston and Creston River. She knew them

all, mere lost clusters of houses in the folds of the desolate ridges:

Dormer, where North Dormer went for its apples; Creston River, where

there used to be a paper-mill, and its grey walls stood decaying by the

stream; and Hamblin, where the first snow always fell. Such were their

titles to fame.

She got up and began to move about vaguely before the shelves. But she

had no idea where she had last put the book, and something told her that

it was going to play her its usual trick and remain invisible. It was

not one of her lucky days.

“I guess it's somewhere,” she said, to prove her zeal; but she spoke

without conviction, and felt that her words conveyed none.

“Oh, well----” he said again. She knew he was going, and wished more

than ever to find the book.

“It will be for next time,” he added; and picking up the volume he had

laid on the desk he handed it to her. “By the way, a little air and sun

would do this good; it's rather valuable.”

He gave her a nod and smile, and passed out.