It was afternoon on the last day of December when Stacey arrived at the
little station of Pickens, North Carolina. His face had a sunken ravaged
look, and grime from the repulsively dirty train made its underlying
pallor ghastly. But Stacey was not really in any such abject condition
as he appeared to be. He was worn out, beaten back at every point, but
something in him still hung on; his eyes were tired but alive. In the
train, which was crowded, as only a branch-line train of the Southern
Railway can be crowded, with commercial travellers and with slovenly
mothers publicly nursing crying children much too old to be nursed
either publicly or privately, he had listened with even a little
amusement to talk of how much better the service would be as soon as the
government turned the road back to the company; and his will to get away
by himself, out of touch with men and women, was strong and intense,
sustaining him. He was not repelled by the sordid ugliness of the
station and the glimpse of Main Street, but felt rather an unemotional
sense of home-coming, which any native of Pickens would have attributed
to the fact that Stacey’s mother’s people, though now all dead or widely
scattered, had been the Pickens Barclays, but which more likely arose in
Stacey because the end of his quest was in sight.
Anyway here came old Elijah, grinning broadly, hat in hand, his fringe
of white hair blowing about his nearly bald black head. He shook
Stacey’s hand vigorously.
“I shuah almos’ thought you wasn’t on that theah train, Mistuh Stacey,”
he declared. “Theah didn’ seem nothin’ but babies.” And he carried
Stacey’s bag across the platform to a buggy.
“Hello!” said Stacey, “you’re driving Duke! What will Mr. Carroll say to
that, Elijah?”
“Well, Mistuh Stacey, suh, I jes’ had to get you home somehow. These
heah Fohds at the garage, jes’ as like as not they get stuck on the
Meldrun road. I wouldn’ have drove Duke ’cept foh that. It’s been
rainin’ a powehful lot.”
“Haven’t they mended that road yet?” Stacey inquired, getting into the
buggy.
“No, suh, not yet. You stop that, Duke, suh!” he called to the horse,
who, impatient of the shafts, was curveting sideways down the street.
Two or three people came up to the buggy and shook Stacey’s hand, and he
replied to their greetings as heartily as he could; but he was eager to
be rid of them, and felt relief when presently the town was left behind
and the buggy was ploughing through the waste of red mud known as the
Meldrun road. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat, drawing in
deep breaths of the damp chilly air, and letting Elijah’s words run on
unchecked and unheeded.
The landscape was a sweet and pleasant one even now in winter when the
oaks and the poplars were bare of leaves. The rolling brick-colored
fields, planted with corn, were interspersed with patches of woods,
where hills rose, blue with spruce and dark green with white pine.
Beyond were the low friendly mountains. Log cabins were scattered about
here and there, with pigs, dogs and ragged children playing
indiscriminately before them. All the people Stacey met or passed on the
road raised their hats gravely, and Stacey raised his in return. He was
enough of this country, and also sufficiently intelligent, to have no
sentimental northern fancies about its romantic aristocracy. He had no
more illusions about the people of Pickens than about the people of
Vernon. If the latter were vulgar, the former were bigoted. There greed
took on gigantic forms; here it revealed itself in petty ways. Here, as
there, he thought, it was the one permanent human instinct. He did not
know what labor conditions were now at the knitting mills; he knew what
they had been six years ago, the last time he had been down, and he was
skeptical of any change. Yet the sight of people here bothered him less
than in Vernon, it seemed. That, he thought idly, was because here the
inhabitants were more a part of their country, stood out less blatantly
against the landscape, blended with it—or almost. Not because they and
it were picturesque, but because they had belonged to their country for
many generations, whereas in Vernon nobody had been molded by continuous
residence into harmony with anything. And Stacey reflected that only in
rural New England and the South did you get this impression of harmony
between landscape and people, as though they had mutually made one
another. Really they were at bottom very alike, rural New England and
the South, though each would have been shocked at the idea. Each with a
continuous past from which it had sprung, to which it belonged. A tight,
narrow, little past, but authentic.
Stacey was roused from meditation by a sense that Elijah had been saying
the same words a great many times, and that the words were a question.
“How’s that, Elijah?” he asked.
“I was jes’ sayin’, Mistuh Stacey, as how I reckoned you’d be wantin’
some colohed girl to cook foh you an’ make youah bed?”
“No,” said Stacey calmly, “I don’t want any one. You’ll do that,
Elijah.”
The old man grew melancholy. “Shuah, Mistuh Stacey, if you say so,” he
replied sadly. “I’ll wohk myself to the bone foh you, but I jes’ don’
know if I positively got the time to do everythin’ jes’ right. I got a
powehful lot to do, Mistuh Stacey.”
“What is it, Elijah?”
“Well, I got to look afteh Duke, suh, an’ then theah’s all that big
place to see to.”
“A couple of men working on it, aren’t there?”
“Yes, suh, but that’s jes’ it. They don’ wohk ’less’n I stan’s oveh them
all the time.”
“They probably don’t work if you do. I don’t want a maid, Elijah. You
can hire a woman to come in and clean for a couple of hours in the
morning, but I don’t want to see her.”
“Yes, suh,” said the negro, in a tone of aggrieved resignation. But he
got over it almost at once, with quick forgetfulness, and was presently
babbling on as before.
When at last they approached the Carroll property Stacey looked about
him more attentively, with a wistful sense of what was past, such as one
might feel in reading over old letters, full of youthful affection, to
some one all but forgotten now.
The house, three miles distant from the town, was low and rambling, with
deep verandahs and numerous sleeping-porches. It sat on a knoll among
ten acres of sloping lawn and perhaps ninety of oak and pine woods; and
from its front verandah one looked away, west, for miles up a narrowing
valley between tree-clad mountains. “Valley Ridge,” Stacey remembered,
half humorously, half painfully, Julie had tried to call the place in
her boarding-school days, and had come down one Christmas vacation with
heavy blue stationery embossed in silver with that legend; at which
their father had remarked that if she ever used any of that “Princess
Alice abomination” he’d get some pink paper for himself, have “The Pig
Sty” engraved for a heading, and write letters on it to the principal of
Julie’s school.
It was odd, Stacey thought, that the recollection of this trivial
incident should remain in his mind as something touching, more touching
than the memory of really emotional events—his mother’s death, for
instance. How things clung—the absurdest things! One could never get
rid of them. They were like tattered cobwebs in corners.
But they had reached the end of the driveway by now, and Stacey sprang
out.
After supper he sat, huddled in an overcoat, on the wide front verandah
of the house. The low mountains, only a mile to the north, were hazy
blue in the twilight. Later the moon rose, and soft brightness spread
over everything. Straight ahead the narrow valley took on shimmering
pearly tints, range after luminous range of mountains intersecting its
sides, like filmy theatre-drops in a stage setting.
In the midst of this pale silence a sense of reposefulness came over
Stacey. It did not spring from any achieved harmony. He had harmonized
nothing. He had, as he was perfectly aware, merely bolted. And nothing
that he had felt was gone. His pain at Phil’s death, his compassion for
Catherine, his hatred of men, his resentment at this rag of a
world,—all this and everything was still alive within him, but
submerged beneath his isolation. When he thought of men he still thought
of them as greedy beasts of prey; but it was possible for him now, he
believed, not to see them and be one of them.
At last, when it had grown very late, he went up to the bed Elijah had
made for him on a sleeping-porch, from which, too, he had the same view
of the shining valley; and so fell asleep.
And now began for Stacey as solitary a life as that of any medieval
hermit. Every morning he went out on Duke for a fifteen- or twenty-mile
ride over mountain roads and paths, returning splashed with mud and
frequently drenched through, for the season was exceptionally rainy. And
after the late cold luncheon which he trained Elijah to leave spread out
for him, he would set off again, on foot, for the woods.
The letters that came for him he tossed unopened into the library desk,
except those from his father and Catherine. Theirs he read, but hastily,
and replied to them with an effort. He did not so much mind reading or
even answering Mr. Carroll’s; he did so almost mechanically. But
Catherine’s were different. Matter-of-fact and never touching on general
ideas, they were yet, in some cool way, intimate, and certainly without
the shyness that had always hampered Catherine in talking to Stacey. It
was as though in these letters she assumed that he was real, as he felt
that she was. And this was painful to him, dragging him back into the
world from which he had fled. Writing to her was hard, and he was aware
that his letters must be dull. But Catherine did not write often—only
once every two or three weeks.
Stacey also read a letter from Julie. But Julie was a poor
correspondent, writing, when positively forced to, in an odd stilted
manner quite uncharacteristic of her pleasant self. Only this one effort
came from her; but Stacey would not have minded fifty letters as unreal.
The postscript, however, did sound like Julie, and brought Stacey back
for a moment to Vernon. “How did Irene know where you were when Phil was
dying?” it demanded. Oh, so it was Irene who had told Julie, and Julie
Catherine, that he was at Clarefield! He stared ahead of him, recalling
the tragedy; then laid Julie’s letter among the others in the desk
drawer.
A few people called on Stacey, and he was polite enough to them; but he
never returned their visits, and soon no one troubled him further. It
was a difficult matter to drive out from town through all that mud.
When, rarely, he did talk with people he received an impression that
they were literally very far off. Their voices seemed to reach him from
a distance, or deadened as though through a barrier of fog. It was like
conversation in a dream.
Sometimes on his rides he would get so far away or be caught in so
terrific a storm that he would stay over night in some mountaineer’s
cabin. On these occasions he was welcomed with a grave courtesy unmarred
by apologies for what his hosts had to offer. The cabin invariably had
but one room and a lean-to. Supper over, the women would go to bed,
while the master of the house and Stacey smoked their pipes outside.
Then the two of them would enter, undress in the dark, and lie down
together. It did not irk Stacey to be with these people. They seemed
apathetic and emotionless, and their eyes had an abstracted look.
On the other hand, if human feeling had faded in him, his long neglected
fancy was waking to new life. His mind grew, like an enchanted wood,
into a tangle of imaginings, that gave him sometimes a feeling of
release, a lifting sense of delight. Similes flitted through it rapidly.
A cloud shadow on a blue mountain was like a veil flung across the face
of a goddess, heightening her loveliness. The sudden sound of a brook in
the forest was like shy laughter. What was laughter? Something
delicately unhuman, perhaps, an expression of the youthful buoyant
relation between earth’s creatures and the earth. Biologists said that
animals could not laugh. Idiotic! It was only animals and children that
could laugh. A dog laughed. Even Duke could laugh. It was true that cats
could not, but this was because they were not primitive animals, but
civilized. Men did not laugh. They smirked or—or—_ricanaient_. Stacey
could not think of the English word and indolently did not try to.
He noted with calm contempt this revival of fancifulness in himself,
saying that he had reverted to the sentimentalism of his early life. For
all along he was contemptuous of himself for his surrender. Further than
this he would not look. He avoided himself as persistently as he avoided
others.
Yet in his reading he did not turn to poetry and romance. He read
Tolstoy, Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy. He cared, in fact, for no books
that did not treat solely and squarely of men’s relations to one
another. He would have nothing to do with men; he would read of nothing
else.
Months passed, with Stacey scarcely aware of their smooth succession. He
was like a man asleep, vaguely dreaming. But it _was_ only a sleep, a
semi-conscious state into which one sinks, however pleasantly, when
tired. Even in those moments when his fancy played delightedly over some
sudden glimpse of beauty he was at bottom dissatisfied—like a man
struggling achingly in a dream to enfold and make real the unsubstantial
vision of his mistress.
By this time April had come. The Judas trees had burned themselves out,
the fresh pale green of oaks and maples shimmered against the dark green
of the pines, the forests were white with dog-wood blossom, and on the
lower mountain slopes masses of flame azalea made the ground beneath the
trees appear on fire. Much of Stacey’s present calm came through his
freedom from men; but much, too, from the silent satisfaction of his
starved sense of beauty. He read less now and went on longer rides.
But his calm was insecure. Something impetuous fluttered within him, too
strong for this life of fancy. Mentally he was still isolated;
physically he was restless, stirred tumultuously by the spring, called
to union with the warm thrilling life all about him.