LOW HANGS THE MOON
He broke his promise to be waiting for them Friday morning at the farm.
It was Graham who caught sight of their car, as it stopped in front of
the farm-house, and came plunging down the bank to greet them and explain
how unavoidable it had been that Rush should go to Elgin.
He was somewhat flushed and a little out of breath but he seemed, after
the first uncomfortable minute, collected enough. He mounted the
running-board and directed the chauffeur to drive on across the bridge
and fork to the right with the main road up to a small nondescript
building on the far side of it.
It was a part of the farm, he explained, indicating the wilderness off to
the left,--a part of what must once have been a big apple orchard.
Indeed, exploring it yesterday for the first time, he had found a
surprising number of old trees, which, choked as they were with
undergrowth, looked as if they were still bearing fruit. The building,
which they had never even entered until yesterday, had served as a
sorting and packing house for the crop, though the old part of
it--paradoxically the upper part--appeared to have been built as a
dwelling by some pioneer settler. A second story had been added
underneath by digging out the bank.
It stood well back from the road, a grass grown lane with a turning
circle leading to it. It had what had once been a loading platform, wagon
high, instead of a veranda. The lower story, a single room which they
peered into through a crack in a warped unhinged door, seemed unpromising
enough, a dark cobwebby place, cumbered with wooden chutes from the floor
above by which, Graham explained, they rolled the apples down into
barrels after they had been sorted up-stairs. A carpenter had been busy
most of the morning, he added, flooring over the traps from which these
chutes led down.
Mary, though, fairly cried out with delight, and even Miss Wollaston
beamed appreciation when, Graham, having led them up the bank and around
to the back of the building, ushered them in, at the ground level up
here, to the upper story of the building. There was a fireplace in the
north end of it with twin brick erections on either side which they
thought must have been used for drying apples. The opposite end,
partitioned off, still housed a cider mill and press, but they had
contrived, he said, a makeshift bedroom out of it.
Along the east side of the room were three pairs of casement windows
which commanded a view of the greater part of the farm; across the road,
across Hickory Creek, across the long reach of the lower pasture and the
seemingly limitless stretches of new plowed fields. The clump of farm
buildings, old and new, was in the middle of the picture. Over to the
left not quite a mile away, behind what looked like nothing more than a
fold in the earth (the creek again, Graham explained. It swung an arc of
two hundred degrees or so, about the main body of their tillable land)
rose the heavily wooded slopes of Hickory Hill.
"We were surprised at this place," he said, "when we opened it up
yesterday. It's the best view on the farm. It will be a fine place
to build a real country house, some day, if we ever make money
enough to do that."
"It is a real country house already," Mary told him briskly. "You two,
living in a tent with a lovely old place like this just waiting for you!
Wait until Aunt Lucile and I have had a day at it and you'll see."
He looked as if he believed her. Indeed, he looked unutterable things,
contemplating her, there in that mellow old room,--wrinkling her nose a
little and declaring that she could still smell apples. But all he said
was that he supposed the roof leaked, but it couldn't be very bad because
everything seemed quite decently dry and not at all musty. He added that
he must be getting back to work, but that an odd-job man, capable more or
less of anything, was at her disposal for as long as she wanted him.
She went with him to the door when he made his rather precipitate
departure and stood, after she had waved him a temporary farewell, gazing
up at the soft sun-bathed slope with its aisles of gnarled trees. She
smiled at the sight of a decrepit long-handled wooden pump. She took a
long breath of the smell of the month of May. Then she turned, with Aunt
Lucile, to such practical matters as bedding, brooms and tea-kettles.
There was more to do than a first look had led them to suppose, and
their schemes grew ambitious, besides, as they advanced with them, so
that, for all the Briarean prodigies of Bill, the odd-job man, they went
to bed dog tired at nine o'clock that night with their labors not more
than half complete. They slept--Mary did, anyhow, the deepest sleep she
had known in years.
She waked at an unearthly--a heavenly hour. The thin ether-cool air was
quivering with the dissonance of bird calls; the low sun had laid great
slow-moving oblongs of reddish gilt upon the brown walls of the big room.
(She had left her aunt in undivided possession of the extemporized
bed-chamber.) She rose and opened the door and looked out into the
orchard. But what her eye came to rest upon was the old wooden pump.
It was a triumph of faith over skepticism, that pump. Graham had
contemned it utterly, hardly allowing, even, that it was picturesque, but
Bill, the odd-job man had, with her encouragement, spent a patient hour
over it and in the teeth of scientific probability, lo, it had given
forth streams of water as clear as any that had ever miraculously been
smitten out of a rock. The partners had forbidden her to drink any of it
except boiled, until it had been analyzed.
She looked about. She had the world to herself. So she carried her rubber
tub, her sponge and a bath-towel out to the warped wooden platform and
bathed _en plein air_, water and sun together. She came in, deliciously
shuddering, lighted a fire, already laid, of shavings and sticks, put the
kettle on to boil and dressed. She felt--new born that morning.
This sensation made the undercurrent of a long fully filled day. She
almost never had time to look at it but she knew it was there. It
enabled her to take with equanimity the unlooked-for arrival (so far as
she and her aunt were concerned) of Graham's young torn-boy sister,
Sylvia. It made it possible for her to say, "Why, yes, of course! I'd
love to," when Graham, along in the afternoon asked her if she wouldn't
go for a walk over the farm with him. They spent more than an hour at
it, sitting, a part of the time, side by side atop the gate into the
upper pasture, yet not even then had the comfortable sense of pleasant
companionship with him taken fright. It was a security that resided, she
knew, wholly in herself.
He was holding himself, obviously, on a very tight rein, and it was quite
conceivable that before her visit ended, he would bolt. There was a
moment, indeed--when he came with Rush to supper at the apple house and
got his first look at the transformation she had wrought in it--when that
possibility must have been in the minds of every one who saw his face.
She had dramatized the result of her two days' labor innocent of any
intention to produce an effect like that. The partners when they came
dropping in from time to time had, learned nothing of her plans, seen
none of their accomplishments, so to-night the old-fashioned settle
which Bill had knocked together from lumber in the packing room and she
had stained, two of the sorting tables, fitted into the corners beside
the fireplace to make a dais, the conversion of another into a capital
dining table by the simple expedient of lengthening its legs, the rag
rug, discovered in the village, during a flying trip with Sylvia this
morning in her car and ravished from the church fair it had been
intended for, the sacks of sheeting Aunt Lucile had been sewing
industriously all day, covered with burlaps and stuffed with hay to
serve as cushions, the cheese-cloth tacked up in gathers over the
windows and hemmed with pins,--all this, revealed at once, had the
surprise of a conjurer's trick, or, if one were predisposed that way,
the entrancement of a miracle.
She was a little entranced, herself, partly with fatigue for she had put
in, one after the other, two unusually laborious days, but partly no
doubt with her own magic, with this almost convincing simulation of a
home which she and her assistants had produced. It didn't matter that she
had gone slack and silent, because Sylvia, who just before supper had
shown a disposition to dreamy elegiac melancholy, rebounded, as soon as
she was filled with food, to the other end of the scale altogether and
swept Rush after her into a boisterous romp, which none of Aunt Lucile's
remonstrant asides to her nephew was effectual to quell.
She was an amazing creature, this product of the latest generation to
begin arriving at the fringes of maturity, a reedy young thing, as tall
as Graham, inches taller than Rush. She had the profile of a young Greek
goddess and the grin of a gamin. She was equally at home in a
ballgown--though she was not yet out--or in a pair of khaki riding
breeches and an olive drab shirt. She was capable of assuming a manner
that was a genuine gratification to her great aunt or one that startled
her father's stable men. She read French novels more or less at random,
(unknown to her mother. She had a rather mischievous uncle who was
responsible for this development) and she was still deadly accurate with
a snowball. A bewildering compound of sophistications and innocence, a
modern young sphinx with a riddle of her own.
Mary watched her tussling and tumbling about with Rush, pondering the
riddle but making no great effort to find an answer to it. Was she child
or woman? To herself what was she? And what did Rush think about her?
They were evidently well established on some sort of terms. Rush, no
doubt, would tell you--disgustedly if you sought explanation--that Sylvia
was just a kid. That he was fond of her as one would be of any nice kid
and that her rough young embraces, her challenges and her pursuits, meant
precisely what those of an uproarious young--well, nephew, say,--would
mean. Only his eagerness to go on playing the game cast a doubt upon that
explanation.
They went out abruptly after a while, just as it was getting dark, to
settle a bet as to which of them could walk the farthest along the top
rail of a certain old fence. Miss Wollaston saw them go with unconcealed
dismay, but it was hard to see how even a conscientious chaperon could
have prevented it so long as the child's elder brother would do nothing
to back her up. To Mary, half-way in her trance, it didn't seem much to
matter what the relation was or what came of it. It was a fine spring
night and they were a pair of beautifully untroubled young animals. Let
them play as they would.
Their departure, did, however, arouse Graham to the assumption of his
duties as host and he launched himself into a conversation with Miss
Wollaston; a fine example, Mary thought, of what really good breeding
means. Her aunt's questions about life in the navy were not the sort that
were easy to answer pleasantly and at large. They drew from him things he
must have been made to say a hundred times since his return and sometimes
they were so wide of the mark that it must have been hard not to stare or
laugh. He must have been wishing, too, with all his might down in the
disregarded depths of his heart, that the old lady would yield to the
boredom and fatigue that were slowly creeping over her. Soon! Before that
pair of Indians came back. But by nothing, not even the faintest
irrepressible inflection of voice was that wish made manifest.
It broke over Mary suddenly that this would never happen. Aunt Lucile
might die at her post, but she'd never, in Graham's presence, retire
through a door which was known to lead to her bedroom. She rose and going
around to her aunt's chair, laid a light hand on her shoulder. But she
spoke to Graham.
"Let's go out and bring in the wanderers," she said. "Aunt Lucile has had
a pretty long day and I know she won't be able to go to sleep until
Sylvia is tucked in for the night."
When the door had closed behind them and they stood where the path,
already faintly indicated, led down to the road, he stopped with a jerk
and mutely looked at her.
"Do you know where that fence of theirs is?" she asked.
"Yes, I guess so," he said. Then--it was almost a cry--"Must we go there?
Right away?"
"I don't know that we need." (Why should he be tortured like that! What
did it matter if the rigidity of some of her nightmare-born resolutions
got relaxed a little?) "Where do you want to go with me?"
He didn't answer for a minute, but when he did speak his voice was
steady enough. "There's a place up on the top of this hill where the
trees open out to the east, a lovely place. I went up there last night
after Rush had turned in. There'll be a moon along in a few minutes and
you can see it come up, from there. Could we wait for it?--I suppose Miss
Wollaston..."
"No, she'll be all right," Mary said. "Now that she thinks we're looking
for them."
As she moved up the slope she added, "I've a sort of interest in the
moon, myself, to-night."
"Perhaps if you'll take my hand--" he said stiffly. "It is dark here
under the trees."
Her single-minded intention had been to make him a little happier. She
liked him better to-night than ever, and that was saying a lot. But this
elaborate covering up of what he really wanted under the pretended need
of guiding her, tried her patience. The pretense was for himself, too, as
much as for her. He was holding her off at arm's length behind him as if
they were scaling an Alp!
In the spirit of mischief, half irritated, half amused, she crowded up to
his side and turned her hand so that their palms lay together. And she
said in a voice evenly matter-of-fact, "That's nicer, isn't it?"
He didn't succeed in producing anything audible in answer to that, but he
began presently, and rather at random, to talk. As if--she reflected,
mutinously,--some fact that must on no account be looked at would emerge,
un-escapable, the moment he stopped.
But the bewitching loveliness of the place he led her to made amends,
sponged away her irritation, brought back the Arcadian mood of the day. A
recently fallen apple tree just on the crest of the hill, offered in its
crotched arms a seat for both of them. With an ease which thrilled her he
lifted her in his hands to her place and vaulted up beside her. His arm
(excusably, again, for the hand was seeking a hold to steady him), crept
around behind her.
Once more he began to talk,--of nature, of the farm, of how it was the
real way to live, as we were meant to. One couldn't, of course, cut off
the city altogether. There were concerts and things. And the
companionship of old friends. Even at that it would be lonely. They had
felt it already. That was why it was such a marvelous thing to have her
here. She made a different world of it. Just as she had made what seemed
like a home out of that old apple house. No one could do that but a
woman, of course ...
She was no longer irritated by this. She barely listened, beyond noting
his circuitous but certain approach to the point of asking her, once
more, to marry him.
Her body seemed drugged with the loveliness of the night, with fatigue,
with him, with the immediacy of him,--but her mind was racing as it does
in dreams.
Nature was not, of course, the gentle sentimentalist Graham was talking
about, but one did get something out of close communion with her. A sense
of fundamentals. She was a--simplifier of ideas. Plain and
straightforward even in her enchantments. That moon they were waiting
for.... Already she was looking down upon a pair of lovers, somewhere,--a
thousand pairs!--with her bland unseeing face. And later to-night, long
after she had risen on them, upon a thousand more.
Of lovers? Well perhaps not. Not if one insisted upon the poets'
descriptions. But good enough for nature's simple purposes. Answering to
a desire, faint or imperious, that would lead them to put on her harness.
Take on her work.
Anthony March had never put on a harness. A rebel. And for the price of
his rebellion never had heard his music, except in his head. Clear
torment they could be, he had told her, those unheard melodies. Somehow
she could understand that. There was an unheard music in her. An
unfulfilled destiny, at all events, which was growing clamorous as the
echo of the boy's passion-if it were but an echo-pulsed in her throat,
drew her body down by insensible relaxations closer upon his.
The moon came up and they watched it, silent. The air grew heavy. The
call of a screech-owl made all the sound there was. She shivered and he
drew her, unresisting, tighter still. Then he bent down and kissed her.
He said, presently, in a strained voice, "You know what I have been
asking. Does that mean yes?"
She did not speak. The moon was up above the trees, yellow now. She
remembered a great broad voice, singing:
"Low hangs the moon. It rose late.
It is lagging-O I think it is heavy with love, with love"
With a passion that had broken away at last, the boy's hands took
possession of her. He kissed her mouth, hotly, and then again; drew back
gasping and stared into her small pale face with burning eyes. Her head
turned a little away from him.
"... Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me
My mate back again if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.
O rising stars!..."
The languor was gone. She shivered and sat erect, he watching her in an
agony of apprehension. She looked slowly round at him.
"You haven't answered!" His voice broke over that into a sob. "Will you
marry me, Mary?"
"I don't know," she said dully, like one struggling out of a dream. "I
will if I can. I meant to for a while, I think. But ..."
He leaped to the ground and stood facing her with clenched hands. "I
ought to be shot," he said. "I'm not fit to touch you--a white thing like
you. I didn't mean to. Not like that. I meant ..."
She stared for an instant, totally at a loss for the meaning--the mere
direction of what he was trying to say. Then, slipping down from the
branch, she took him by the arms. "Don't!" she cried rather wildly.
"Don't talk like that! That's the last impossibility. Listen. I'm going
to tell you why."
But he was not listening for what it might be. He was still morosely
preoccupied with his own crime. He had been a beast! He had bruised, once
more, the white petals of a flower!
It was not that her courage failed. She saw he wouldn't believe. That he
couldn't be made to believe. It was no use. If he looked at her any
longer like that, she would laugh.
She buried her face in her arms and sobbed.
He rose to this crisis handsomely, waited without a word until she was
quiet and then suggested that they go and find Rush and Sylvia. And until
they were upon the point of joining the other pair nothing more was said
that had any bearing on what had happened in the apple tree. But in that
last moment he made a mute appeal for a chance to say another word.
He reminded her that she had said she would marry him if she could. This
was enough for him. More than he deserved. He was going back to the
beginning to try to build anew what his loss of self-control had wrecked.
She need say nothing now. If she'd wait, she'd see.