Toward dusk, in the summer of the year, a man dressed in a frock coat
and top hat, and carrying a cane, crept through the underbrush bordering
the corral of the Buckler farm.
As he moved small twigs snapped, fell and were silent. His knees were
green from wounded shrubbery and grass, and his outspread hands tore
unheeded plants. His wrists hurt him and he rested from time to time,
always caring for his hat and knotted yellow cane, blowing through his
moustache.
Dew had been falling covering the twilight leaves like myriad faces,
damp with the perspiration of the struggle for existence, and half a
mile away, standing out against the darkness of the night, a grove of
white birches shimmered, like teeth in a skull.
He heard the creaking of a gate, and the splashing of late rain into the
depths of a dark cistern. His heart ached with the nearness of the
earth, the faint murmur of it moving upon itself, like a sleeper who
turns to throw an arm about a beloved.
A frog began moaning among the skunk cabbages, and John thrust his hand
deep into his bosom.
Something somnolent seemed to be here, and he wondered. It was like a
deep, heavy, yet soft prison where, without sin, one may suffer
intolerable punishment.
Presently he went on, feeling his way. He reached a high plank fence
and sensing it with his fingers, he lay down, resting his head against
the ground.
He was tired, he wanted to sleep, but he searched for his hat and cane
and straightened out his coat beneath him before he turned his eyes to
the stars.
And now he could not sleep, and wondered why he had thought of it;
something quick was moving the earth, it seemed to live, to shake with
sudden immensity.
He heard a dog barking, and the dim light from a farm window kept
winking as the trees swung against its square of light. The odor of
daisies came to him, and the assuring, powerful smell of the stables; he
opened his mouth and drew in his moustache.
A faint tumult had begun. A tremor ran under the length of his body and
trembled off into the earth like a shudder of joy,--died down and
repeated itself. And presently he began to tremble, answering, throwing
out his hands, curling them up weakly, as if the earth were withholding
something precious, necessary.
His hat fell off, striking a log with a dull hollow sound, and he
pressed his red moustache against the grass weeping.
Again he heard it, felt it; a hundred hoofs beat upon the earth and he
knew the horses had gone wild in the corral on the other side of the
fence, for animals greet the summer, striking the earth, as friends
strike the back of friends. He knew, he understood; a hail to summer, to
life, to death.
He drew himself against the bars, pressing his eyes under them, peering,
waiting.
He heard them coming up across the heavy turf, rounding the curve in the
Willow Road. He opened his eyes and closed them again. The soft menacing
sound deepened, as heat deepens, strikes through the skin into the very
flesh. Head on, with long legs rising, falling, rising again, striking
the ground insanely, like needles taking terrible, impossible and
purposeless stitches.
He saw their bellies, fawn colored, pitching from side to side, flashing
by, straining the fence, and he rose up on his feet and silently,
swiftly, fled on beside them.
Something delirious, hysterical, came over him and he fell. Blood
trickled into his eyes down from his forehead. It had a fine feeling for
a moment, like a mane, like that roan mare's mane that had passed
him--red and long and splendid.
He lifted his hand, and closed his eyes once more, but the soft pounding
did not cease, though now, in his sitting position, it only jogged him
imperceptibly, as a child on a knee.
It seemed to him that he was smothering, and he felt along the side of
his face as he had done in youth when they had put a cap on him that was
too large. Twining green things, moist with earth-blood, crept over his
fingers, the hot, impatient leaves pressed in, and the green of the
matted grass was deathly thick. He had heard about the freeness of
nature, thought it was so, and it was not so.
A trailing ground pine had torn up small blades in its journey across
the hill, and a vine, wrist-thick, twisted about a pale oak, hideously,
gloriously, killing it, dragging it into dust.
A wax Patrick Pipe leaned against his neck, staring with black eyes, and
John opened his mouth, running his tongue across his lips snapping it
off, sighing.
Move as he would, the grass was always under him, and the crackling of
last autumn's leaves and last summer's twigs--minute dead of the
infinite greatness--troubled him. Something portentous seemed connected
with the patient noises about him. An acorn dropped, striking a thin
fine powder out of a frail oak pod. He took it up, tossing it. He had
never liked to see things fall.
He sat up, with the dim thunder of the horses far off, but quickening
his heart.
He went over the scene he had with Freda Buckler, back there in the
house, the long quivering spears of pot-grass standing by the window as
she walked up and down, pulling at them, talking to him.
Small, with cunning fiery eyes and a pink and pointed chin. A daughter
of a mother who had known too many admirers in her youth; a woman with
an ample lap on which she held a Persian kitten or a trifle of fruit.
Bounty, avarice, desire, intelligence--both of them had always what they
wanted.
He blew down his moustache again thinking of Freda in her floating
yellow veil that he had called ridiculous. She had not been angry, he
was nothing but a stable boy then. It was the way with those small
intriguing women whose nostrils were made delicate through the pain of
many generations that they might quiver whenever they caught a whiff of
the stables.
"As near as they can get to the earth," he had said and was Freda angry?
She stroked his arm always softly, looking away, an inner bitterness
drawing down her mouth.
She said, walking up and down quickly, looking ridiculously small:
"I am always gentle, John--" frowning, trailing her veil, thrusting out
her chin.