THE RUNNING BROOK
Some weeks later, at dusk on a calm evening, Miles and his sole
companion sat outdoors for the first time that year. A little
bench--Tony’s handiwork--girdled the hackmatack, so that while leaning
against the same trunk, each saw a different quarter of the valley,
and talked over the shoulder lazily, facing two cardinal points, with
thoughts as far asunder. The time was neither spring nor summer, but
that rare Arcadian interval, too brief for a season, too elusive for
even a transition, and yet in the calendar of sense marked off as
plain as a festival. The night fell neither warm nor cool; a tempered
fragrance of blossoms drew down, without stir of air, from the orchard
over the hill; lower field and shore, river and farthest ridge, lay
confounded in blackness under the stars, land and water parted only by
faint zigzag margins, where the last edge of daylight lined some inlet
or hooked about a promontory.
“Them days,” continued Ella in a distant monotone, “the Injuns camped
in back of ar house at Sweet Water. Old Lewie Neptune, he was chieft.
An’ nights he got drunk, he’d pitch ’em outdoor, so’s all hands would
come beg for in. Midnight an’ bitter cold, sometimes, women-fo’ks an’
youngsters, they rout us out o’ bed. Big Mary, Æneas Moon an’ his
brother Peter, an’ Lolas an’ Francises an’ Socabasins,--whol’ slews of
’em, all wropped an’ huddledt up in blankets, scairt, an’ sayin’ they’d
be killed. I see the kitchen floor covered with ’em, many the time,
sleepin’ curled round the stove--Who’s that?”
A flurry of footsteps came up out of the dark; some one raced by them
toward the house.
“We’re out here,” called Miles, rising. “What’s wanted?”
“Oh!” The runner stopped, and returned panting. “I’ve come. You told me
to.”
“Anna!” he cried joyfully.
She stood for an instant motionless, breathing hard; gave a little
failure of a laugh; then spoke quickly, in a voice meant to be calm.
“I stood them as long as I could. Now you must tell me where to go.
Those men! While my father stayed himself, I had somebody; but now
he’s--they’re both against me.” She broke off, as though stifled. “I’ll
never go back; I won’t, I won’t!”
Ella suddenly moved between them.
“Come in the house,” she ordered coldly. “Can’t see ye. If the’ ’s
trouble, we’ll take a light to it, first thing.”
They went in together to the front room. Miles lighted the candle
(which, since Tony’s day, replaced the lamp) and over the trembling
leaf-point of flame saw the girl’s head start into radiance like a
vision. She stood before them with a half-shy, half-defiant composure;
but her eyes and her brown cheeks told another story, a pulse throbbed
in her bare throat, and under the thin blue cloth her breathing
fluttered deeply.
“He tried to beat me,” she said, with the same quiet scorn. “Me, after
all the time I was--”
Ella had stood watching with eyes puckered skeptically, and round face
set in lines of no compromise. But now, without warning, she flung both
her stout arms round the refugee.
“Wild Injuns!” she fumed. “What was I tellin’ ye? You’re all alike, you
men-fo’ks. There, there, poor thing!” Awkward and motherly, she stroked
the girl’s bright hair, scolding and consoling in a breath. “There,
there, nubbin, you’re all of a quiver--all on a string. Worse ’n old
Neptune, they are!--Miles, I left my knittin’ somewheres by that tree.
Jest you hyper out an’ find it.”
Needles and all, it lay on the table before them, but Miles obeyed. He
paced back and forth under the stars, watching the lighted window. He
should be sorry for her, ran his thought. But his one clear emotion was
nothing of the kind; buoyantly, against reason and through suspense,
rioted the conviction that all was well. When the voices ceased within,
he entered, and found the two women sitting like friends agreed. They
smiled at him rather uncertainly.
“Well,” exclaimed the elder, whipping a handkerchief out of sight.
“That’s settled, anyhow. She’ll stay here with us till she finds
somewheres better.”
“But I forgot,” the girl objected. “All my things are there.”
“I’ll get them,” offered Miles.
“You’d look well,” the servant retorted grimly. “I’ll go my own self.
Incidental, I’ll see that pair o’ shoats. And they won’t ask me to set
and come again, either!”
“But,” said the girl, “they’ll come after me.”
“Let ’em!” cried Ella, with sudden extravagance. “I’ll set ’em down so
hard they--they can comb their hair with their spinal columes! Let ’em
come.”
For that night no one accepted the challenge; and next morning Ella
promptly descended on Alward’s, to return in ferocious triumph, bearing
a little armful of spoils.
“There’s your clothes!” she cried with the voice of Deborah. “A haley
old mess that house is already, without ye! What did I say to ’em?
Never you mind. They know more ’n they did. The fear o’ the Lord’s the
beginnin’ o’ wisdom. I said what was vouched to me that hour. I bit a
piece out o’ the roof!”
At all events she had determined the situation, and from now forward
there were three in the house. It seemed incredible. Miles passed the
first days in a dream, a revolution of thoughts and habits. To have
this shining guest come and go upon the stairs, or sit at table like a
mortal, or read beside the window on rainy afternoons, or move at night
overhead in Tony’s chamber, not only threw all indoor routine into the
bright confusion of drama, but changed the very air upon the hills, the
light on the waters. The valley was visited, like the plains of Mamre.
And even when this earliest wonder passed, and they began to live as
though always under the same roof, he could not find the old bearings.
The change had scattered, tossed, and revived his faculties, as
haymakers pitch a mouldy windrow abroad in the sun. By an odd transfer,
she who rightfully should radiate all that was new and strange, had
slipped at once into customary life, established, familiar, like a
thing of childhood; and when they walked the shore, dug in the garden
side by side, or tended lamps in the early evening, it was she who
always had belonged there: all other things--trees he had seen grow,
rocks he knew in every line and fissure, paths he could follow running
in the dark--had altered as after long absence or some new gift of
sight.
It was a happy, incomprehensible time; none the less happy, although
he felt somehow that vague elements were weaving into danger, that an
unknown thread guided them in a maze. Perhaps it was only that their
delight would keep no even level, but daily mounted; perhaps that in
their simplest talk, when their friendship seemed the oldest, there
fell a silence, a chance word, a shock of difference or agreement, a
flash of bygone things, to show how unerringly their lines converged,
across what gulfs.
One afternoon, when summer had glowed and ripened, they revisited
Kilmarnock Brook. Alders flanked the bend through a long meadow,
mapping it distantly as a curved wall of darker green, and losing it,
to near approach, in a cool, low wood where grassy clearings wound so
intricately that a stranger (unless he made the one plunge through
tangle) might wander among leaves, see the oozy light quivering over
them from below, and hear the invisible water sing like a stream of
Tantalus. But Anna and Miles knew all these interlocked recesses, and,
threading them in and out, had reached their own secret place,--an
alder closet, where a tiny crescent of lawn curved round a pool. On a
bank which ran smoothly into brown water, they sat a little apart, in
shadow. Above them sunlight dappled the leaves, and day-flies danced
in brief ecstasy; below, with a delicate breath of steeping earth and
roots and brookmint, the water stole away silently, to take up its
tinkling narrative round the next bend.
For a long time neither had spoken. Suddenly Miles laughed.
“Ophelia!”
She was looking past her open book, considering the pool.
“You needn’t call names,” she replied, without rousing. “Besides, I
don’t know what you mean.”
“‘Read on this book!’” he scoffed. “The old chucklehead knew! No girl
would ever read _in_ one.”
“A lot you know about them!” She laughed at him, with a sidelong
glance, but quickly returned to her contemplation. “I was thinking.”
“What?”
She shook her head. A leaf-pattern of shadows and golden flame settled
once more upon it, trembling.
“The river-drivers,” she answered at last. “I was only thinking about
the river-drivers.”
Following her glance, he tried, as he had so often tried in the last
weeks, to see with her eyes. The peace of the pool beside them, like
all peace in Nature, was an illusion. Minnows steered over the brown
sand, or whipped their magnified shadows, blurred and globular, through
sunny patches under the farther bank; even where the water lay most
dark and thick, weeds tugged slowly at the tether; and over the surface
her “river-drivers,” snapping and kicking between wind and water,
floated erratically down an imperceptible current.
“About those?” he asked incredulously. “What, those beetles?”
“Yes.” Her eyes danced with that look of hers which he had never seen
in any other person,--a look both grave and whimsical. “Yes, they’re
only beetles. See, though: they scoot here and there, but always head
upstream. They can’t have any reason to, and it’s so much easier going
down. And still they’re stubborn, and fight along. I wonder--I think
they must have an Idea.”
“You’re a funny girl!” he laughed. Yet as he watched, the darting
insects began to appear not wholly insensate.
“Now the fish down there,” she continued, as though to herself, “they
nose about their business. And the day-flies--with them it’s all
dancing,--just eat, drink, and be merry. But the river-drivers--see
that one, floating on the blade of grass, all tired out; and there
he goes again, up and up, and all the time carried below. They’re
like--like people. They’re betwixt and between, like us. And it may be
no use. But they must. Their Idea. And the stream flows down and down,
and sweeps everything--”
Her words were quiet as the brook beyond.
“A parable,” said Miles.
His voice rose no higher; for both were suddenly a little awed, as
though their spirits had caught some rushing echo of that broader
flood, the irrevocable and universal. And now some influence as wide,
something neither gradual nor swift, closed about them powerfully. They
had leaned forward, shoulder to shoulder, over the brown pool; but at
this mystical, blind accession, each felt the other tremble and draw
back.
A kingfisher chattered angrily, away in the upper reaches. It was the
recurring silence, however, that alarmed. Of all their silences, this
seemed as it were the end, the turning, and the explication. But still
it endured, throbbing with a perilous energy.
Slowly, in a kind of sleep-waking effort, the girl got upon her feet.
“Come,” she said. Her face, in the alder shadows, was very pale. A
shiver of light from the brook played golden about her throat, like the
reflected glow of buttercups in the children’s game.
“Come,” she repeated. “We can’t--we must get home.”
Moved by the helplessness of that command, he followed. They crossed
the sunset pastures almost without word or look, like pilgrims
crossing the Debatable Ground. And when they had climbed the last hill,
and come racing steeply down toward the river and the house, she went
straight to the shelter of Ella’s kitchen.
He did not see her alone again till that evening. Meanwhile he had
walked the shore, raging at himself for what had passed, put almost
beside his reason at thought of what might come. After blindness, it
was an aching sight that disclosed how their friendship--so wholesome,
firm, and precious--could change at a breath, and in the most tranquil
moment of security could totter above unknown deeps. Was he then worse
than Tony, and their house no better than the drunkard’s? This girl had
fled to him; she had taken his promises, was here upon his honor; and
now, because he had willfully drifted down a pleasant way, they had
reached such a pass that--He closed the thought with a groan. By some
detestable trick, he foresaw, their very speech could no longer be free
and honest.
She made no offer, that evening, to go down with him to the lamps;
and he was rather glad of the fact than sorry at its cause. To walk
alone from tower to tower, through the cool firs and cedars, proved a
respite. Yet when he faced the hill to return, trepidation seized him
afresh. He climbed toward the house, vexed and wondering; and for the
second time in all his memory, was afraid to enter.
She sat behind the candle-flame, a great book flattened wide on the
table, and her head bent over it as for dear life. All the brightness
in the room had gathered in this corner, and at first he dared not go
near. But it was now or never with his play-acting; and so, choosing
a book at random, he sat down opposite her resolutely, to begin the
pretense that all things remained as before.
Ella had gone to bed with the birds. Except the two readers, all the
world might have been asleep. Their breathing, and the tick of a death
watch in the wall, made the only sounds in house or valley. For all
the window stood open, the little blade of light between them reared
without wavering. This silence at full stretch, this preposterous
calmness at close range, were alike unreal and unbearable. His book
appeared to be “The Polar and Tropical Worlds,” a treasury of boyhood;
but the pictures swam in a blur--icebergs, gorillas, the open coffin
on Spitzbergen, the march of land-crabs through a palm-grove, all an
empty jumble. Sometimes his eyesight escaped the page; but then perhaps
he found her looking up, by the same chance; caught for an instant, as
her eyes dropped, the last of a pitiful, appealing light; and plunged
into his book again, like a desperate man hunting a text of divination.
He might thus have turned a hundred pages, and she none at all, when
the contest ended. There came a stir, a little broken sound, abrupt and
choking, which tugged at his heart more than words.
“Oh,” she sobbed, “where can I go next?” and dropped head upon arms,
across the open volume.
As though a musket were shot off in the room, his chair had struck the
floor. He circled the table and caught her up, in a gust that sent the
candle-light reeling.
“Oh, what a wretched girl!” she cried, her voice stifled in his jacket.
All the inevitable drift of their summer, the whole multitude of their
hidden motives, shone clear before and about them,--a wide, manifold
peace in the tumult, like a field of daisies seen by lightning.
[Illustration]