"Can't we sing one of the nice old hymns? Coronation! That's got such a swing to it."

She began it, and the young voices broke in pell-mell after her like a joyous crowd, seeing a vine-clad procession, and losing no time in joining for fear of losing step. Raven knew perfectly well the great old hymn was no matter for a passionately remorseful, sin-laden meeting of this sort. Nan knew it, too. He was sure she had not ventured it for the protection of Tira. No one had ever told Nan about the man with the devil in him who "looked up kinder droll." But she could see the tide of human emotion had better be turned to the glorification of God than to the abasement of man. Raven, in the swell of it, put his lips to her ear and whispered:

"I'm going to ask you to change your seat."

She gave no sign of having heard, but sang on, in a delightful volume, to "Crown Him Lord of all." The moment the last note died, Raven came to his feet. He addressed Tenney:

"One minute. There's a draught here by the door."

He went over to Martin, Nan following:

"Do you mind sitting by the door?" he asked the man. "There's a good deal of a draught."

Martin, his surprised look at Nan changing to a ready gallantry, got up at once.

"Anything," said he, "to oblige a lady."

Nan sat down and Raven and Martin took the seats by the door. There, too, Martin had advantage of a sort. He could stare down Tenney at short range, and this he did with a broad smile. Tenney, Raven concluded, was down and out. His comb was cut. Whatever passions might stir in him later—however, in reviewing the scene, he might rage over the disturber of his peace—now his spiritual leadership had passed from him and the prayer-meeting itself was quashed. An air of curiosity hung over it. Two or three of the older men and women in the other room offered testimony and one man, the old clock-mender from the other side of the mountain, who swore with a free tongue about his secular affairs, but always wept when he went through the observance he called approaching the throne, knelt and prayed in a high voice through sobs. This lightened the atmosphere. No one ever regarded this performance seriously. He was the comic relief. On his Amen, Nan (blessed Nan! thought Raven) proposed:

"Let's sing again."

"No!" said Tenney. He had got back his self-assertiveness. Raven could guess his jealous anger, the tide of fury coming, flooding the stagnant marshes of his soul. "I want to hear one more testimony. Thyatira Tenney, get up and tell what God has done for you."

Tira gave a start so violent that the blue scarf fell from her shoulders and one end of it lay over Nan's arm. She did get up. She rose slowly and stood there looking straight before her, eyes wide and dark, her hands clasped. Her stiff lips moved. She did piteously, Raven saw, try to speak. But she could not manage it and after the long moment she sank back into her seat. Nan placed the blue scarf about her shoulders, carefully, as if the quiet concern of doing it might tell the woman something—that she was companioned, understood—and, one hand on the knot of Tira's clasped fingers, began to sing. She sang the Doxology, and after that, through unbreakable custom, the meeting was over and you had to go home. Men and women came to their feet, there were greetings and good nights and about Nan gathered a group of those who remembered her. But she kept her left hand on Tira's, and after the others had gone she said something quickly to the woman who stood, looking dead tired, uttering mechanical good nights. Martin, with a jovial good night to Tenney, had hurried off at once.

"See you later," he called back to him at the door, and Tenney looked after him with the livid concentration of a man who sends his curse forward to warn where it is not yet time for a blow. A laughing group followed Martin. There were girls who, horrified at the implications that hung about his name, were yet swayed by his dashing gallantry, and young men who sulkily held the girls back, swearing under their breath. Tira broke loose from Nan and went, fast as running water, through the room, to the back of the house. Raven made no pretense of saying good night to Tenney. He forgot it, forgot Tenney, save as an element of danger to be dealt with later. On the doorstep he stopped with Nan, in the seclusion of the moment while the others were bringing out horses and putting them into the sleighs.

"We can't leave her here with him," he said.

"What was the matter?" Nan returned as quickly. "What happened? That man?"

"Yes. The one he's jealous of. We can't leave her here."

"No use," said Nan. "She won't go. I asked her, told her I was living over at the house alone, wanted company. No use. She wouldn't go."

"She must go."

"She won't, I tell you. Then I asked if she'd let me stay over here and she said no. She said——"

"What?" urged Raven when she stopped.

"I almost can't tell, it's so pathetic. Just a word—three words: 'You don't know.' Then she stopped. Just that: 'You don't know.'"

Raven gave a little sound she could not bear, a breath, a curse—what was it? Anyway, the breaking impatience of a helpless man. He did not stir. He meant, she saw, to stay there, doggedly stay, on the step, to await what happened. She put her hand through his arm.

"Come," she said authoritatively, "let's walk up the road and drop in again when they've all gone. It's no use staying now."

That, he saw, was wise, and they went out into the road, waited a moment for the sleighs just starting, and then walked away from home. Some of the people were singing "camp-meeting hymns," and there was one daring burst of "Good night, ladies," and a chorused laugh. Prayer-meeting at Tenney's was not, Raven concluded, regarded much more seriously than Charlotte had foreseen. The bells jingled off into the distance. The horses were bent on home. As if the sound only had torn up the night into shreds of commotion, so now the bits of silence drew together into a web and the web covered them. Nan, in spite of the perplexed question of Tira, could have settled under the web, there with Raven, as under wings. But he was hot with impatience. They had gone half a mile perhaps, when he stopped.

"Come back," he said. "I've got to know."

Nan turned with him and they went on in silence but very fast. Once or twice she was about asking him not to take such long steps, but she set her teeth and swung forward. In front of Tenney's they stopped. The rooms were lighted. The house was still. Raven drew a deep breath. What he had expected he did not know, whether calls for help or Tenney's voice of the woods shouting, "Hullo!" This, at any rate, was a reprieve.

"Come on," he said. "I'll take you home and then come back."

Again Nan stepped out in time. No use, she thought, to beg him to let her come, too. But she could come back. Women were useful, she knew, with their implied terrors and fragility, in holding up certain sorts of horror. Nan was willing to fight, if need were, with all the weapons of her sex. In the road in front of her own house, was Charlotte, waiting for them. Nan left Raven, put a hand on Charlotte's arm, and called her "Ducky."

"You won't come in?" she said to Raven. "Don't you think you'd better. Half an hour or so?"

"Not a minute," said Raven. "Good night."

He left them and after a few striding steps was aware of Charlotte, calling him. She came up and spoke his name.

"I've just met that woman."

"What woman?" he asked impatiently.

"Tira Tenney. With the baby. This time o' night."

"Where?"

"Front o' the house, just as I come out."

"Then she was coming there," he burst forth. "Too bad! too bad! Didn't you know that? Didn't you ask her in?"

"Yes," said Charlotte, "I asked her in an' she said no, she was goin' down along. An' I stood an' watched her an' she turned off up the rise into the woods."

So it had begun, the terror, the flight. She was going to the hut and, for some reason, not the back way.

"There's somethin' 'tain't right," Charlotte was beginning, but he seized her wrist and held it. To keep her attention, or to feel the touch of something kindly and warm?

"Yes," he said, "something's wrong. Don't tell, Charlotte. Not a word—not to Nan or Jerry or—above all not to Tenney. I'll see to it."

He left her and hurried loping along the road, almost at a run, and Charlotte went in to Nan.



XXI

Raven passed his house and turned into the wood road. There he did not slacken, but took the rise at a great gait. He was at the hut a moment after Tira: she had had time for neither light nor fire.

"It's Raven," he called. She did not come, and he added: "I'm alone. Let me in."

Waiting there at the door, he had time to note the stillness of the woods, the creak of a branch now and then, and the half-drawn sigh from the breeze you hardly felt. At the instant of his beginning to wonder whether she might have fallen there from a hurt or whether she was even terrified of him, he heard the sound of the key and the door opened. He stepped in and her hand was at once on the key. She turned it and melted noiselessly into the dark of the room, and he followed her.

"No fire!" he reproached her, or perhaps himself, for it seemed, in the poignancy of his tenderness, as if he should have had it burning night and day. He set a match to the kindling and the flame answered it. She had taken one of the chairs at the hearth and he saw, in the leaping light, that she had put the child on the couch and covered him. She was shuddering all over, shaking horribly, even her lips, and he went into the bedroom, came back with a blanket and wrapped it about her. She held it close, in that humble way she had of trying to spare him trouble, indeed to make no confusion in the world she found so deranged already. He remembered the chartreuse she had once refused and took it down from the high cupboard, poured a little and set the glass in her shaking hand, and, when the muscles did not answer, put it to her lips.

"It won't hurt you," he said. "Down it."

She drank, and the kindly fire of it warmed her. She looked up at him, and what she said was more unexpected than anything he could have imagined:

"Do you believe it?"

"Believe what?"

He could only guess she meant something connected with Tenney's madness of suspicion and the devil of a man.

"What he said." She was looking at him with intensity, as if life and death lay in his answer. "He said He was there to-night, there in the room. Do you believe that?"

"Who was there?" Raven prompted her, and the immediate reply staggered him.

"Jesus Christ."

He temporized.

"I've no doubt he believed it," he said, unwilling to speak Tenney's name. It was doubly hateful to him at the moment of her being so patently undone. He could only think she was trying to reconcile the ugly contrast between her husband's expressed faith and his insane action. "I'm sure he thought so."

"That ain't what I mean," she hesitated, and he began to see how her mind was striving in an anguish of interrogation. "What he thinks—that's neither here nor there. What I want to know is whether it's so. If there's Somebody"—she clasped her hands on her knees and looked up at him, mutely imploring him who was so wise in books and life to help her striving mind—"if there's Somebody that cares—that died over it, He cared so much—if He's round here everywhere—if He sees it all—an' feels terrible, same as we do ourselves—why, then it's different."

"What's different?" Raven asked, out of his fog.

She was demanding something of him and he felt, in a sickness of despair, that it was something he couldn't give her because he hadn't it himself. Tenney could read her the alphabet of comfort, though he was piling on her those horrors of persecution that made her hungry for it.

"Why," she said, and the light and a bloom of something ineffable swept over her face, changing its tragic mystery from the somberness of the Fates to the imagined youthful glory of the angels, "if He's here all the time, if He's in the room when things happen to us, an' wishes He could stop it an' can't because"—again her mind labored and she saw she had come up against the mysterious negatives of destiny—"anyways, He would if He could—an' He knows how we feel inside when we feel the worst, an' cares, cares same as——" here she was inarticulate. But she turned for an instant toward the couch where the child lay, and her face was the mother face. She meant, he knew, as she cared for her child. "Why, then," she continued, "there wouldn't be anything to fret about, ever. You never'd be afraid, not if you was killed, you wouldn't. You'd know there was Somebody in the room."

This was the most deeply considered speech of her whole life. The last words, ingenuous as a child's unconscious betrayal, tore at him as, he suddenly thought, it would be if he saw a child tortured and in fear: as if he saw Nan. They told him how desperately lonesome and undefended she had felt.

"An' don't you see," she concluded, with the brightness of happy discovery, "even if you was killed, what harm would it do you? He'd be waitin'. You'd go with Him. Wherever it is He lives, you'd go."

Raven turned abruptly, walked to a window and stood there looking into the dark. The challenge of her face was impossible to bear. Suppose she asked him again if he believed it? Did he believe in a God made man? By no means. He believed in one God, benevolent, he had once assumed, but in these latter years too well hidden behind His cloud for man to say. Did the old story of a miraculous birth and an atonement move him even to a desire to believe? It repelled him rather? What, to his honest apprehension, was the God made man? An exemplar, a light upon the path of duty, as others also had been. Had the world gone wrong, escaped from its mysterious Maker, and did it need to be redeemed by any such dramatic remedy? No, his God, the God who made, could not botch a job and be disconcerted at the continuing bad results of His handiwork. The only doubt about his God was whether He was in any degree benevolent. When he reflected that He had made a world full to the brim of its cup of bitterness, he sometimes, nowadays, thought not. All this swept through his mind in a race of thoughts that had run on that course before, and again he heard her and knew she was pulling him back to the actual issue as it touched herself.

"You tell me," she was calling him. Her voice insisted. He did not turn, but he knew her face insisted even more commandingly. "You know. There's nothin' you don't know. Is it true?"

Nothing he didn't know! The irony of that was so innocently piercing that he almost broke into a laugh. Nan was right then. Tira did regard him, if not as an archangel, as something scarcely less authoritative. He turned and went back to the fire, threw on an armful of sticks, and stood looking into the blaze.

"What makes you say that?" he asked her. "What makes you think I know?"

"Why," said she, in a patent surprise, "'course you know. I've always heard about you, writin' books an' all. An' that's the kind you be, too. You're"—she paused to marshal her few words and ended in an awed tone—"you're that way, too. When folks are in trouble, you're so sorry it 'most kills you."

This was a blow staggering enough to hit his actual heart and stop it for a beat. What if he should say to her: "Yes, I do care. I care when you are hurt. I don't know about the God made man, but isn't my caring enough for you?"

Then bitter certainties cut in and told him it wouldn't do. She had learned her world lesson too terribly well. It would be only another case of man's pursuing, promising—what had they promised in the past? And after all, he thought recklessly, what did the private honor of his testifying yes or no amount to anyway? What moral conceit! To save his own impeccable soul by denying a woman the one consolation that would save her reason.

"Yes, Tira," he said quietly, and did not know he had used her name, "it's all true."

She gave a little sound, half sob, half ecstatic breath, and he saw she had not been sure he would yield her the bright jewel she had begged of him.

"True!" she said, in the low tone of an almost somnolently brooding calm. "All of it! Everywhere!"

"Yes," said Raven steadily, "everywhere."

"Over there where He was born, here!" That seemed to amaze her to a glory of belief. "Why, if He's everywhere, He's here, too."

"Yes," said Raven. He loved his task now. He was putting her sorrows to sleep. "He's here, too."

At that moment, incredibly, it seemed to him that a difference pervaded the place, or at least that his eyes had been opened to a something unsuspected, dwelling in all things. Did he, his unchanged mind asked him, actually believe what he had not believed before? No, the inner core of him signaled back to his mind. His belief had not changed. Yet indubitably something had happened and happened blessedly, for it brought her peace. Tira gave a little laugh, a child's laugh of surprised content. He glanced at her. She was looking into the fire and the haggardness of her face had softened. It was even, under the warmth of the flames and her own inner delight, absorbed and dreamy. And Raven knew he must wake her, and, he hoped, without flawing the dream, to present action.

"Now," he said, "I want you to come with me down to Nan's"—still he dared not put her off a step from the intimacy of neighborly relations by presenting Nan more formally—"and spend the night there. In the morning, you'll go back to Boston with her. I shall enter a complaint against your husband."

It wasn't so hard to give Tenney the intimacy of that name, now she looked so sweetly calm. She started from her dream, glanced up at him and, to his renewed discomfort, broke into a little laugh. It was sheer amusement, loving raillery too, of him who could give her the priceless gift of a God made man and then ask her to forsake the arena where the beasts were harmless now because she no longer feared them.

"Why, bless your heart," she said, in a homespun fashion of address that might have been Charlotte's, "I wouldn't no more run away! An' if you should have him before the judge, I'd no more say a word ag'inst him! I wouldn't git you into any trouble either," she explained, in an anxious loyalty. "I'd say you was mistaken, that's all."

Something seemed to break in him.

"What do you mean?" he asked roughly. "What do you think you mean? I suppose you're in love with him?"

Tira looked at him patiently. She yielded to a little sigh.

"Why," she said, "that's where I belong. I don't," she continued hesitatingly, in her child's manner of explaining herself from her inadequate vocabulary, "I guess I don't think about them things much, not same as men-folks think. But there's one or two things I've got to look out for." Here she gave that quick significant glance at the little mound on the couch. "An' there ain't no way to do it less'n I stay right there in my tracks."

Raven, his hand gripping the mantel, rested his forehead on it and dark thoughts came upon him. They quickened his breath and brought the blood to his face and his aching eyes. It was all trouble, it seemed to him, trouble from the first minute of his finding her in the woods. She might draw some temporary comfort from his silent championship, in the momentary safety of this refuge he had given her. But he could by no means cut her knot of difficulty. She was as far from him as she had been the moment before he saw her. She was speaking.

"It ain't," she said, in a low voice, "it ain't that I don't keep in mind what you've done for me, what you're doin' all the time. But I guess you don't see what you've done this night's the most of all. Now you've told me you know it's true"—here she was shy before the talk of god-head—"why, I know it's so, too. An' I sha'n't ever be afraid any more. I sha'n't ever feel alone."

"But Tira," he felt himself saying to her weakly, "I feel alone."

Did he actually say it, he wondered. No, for he lifted his face from his shielding hand and turned miserable eyes upon her, and her eyes met him clearly. Yet they were deeper, softer, moved by a sad compassion. There was something patiently maternal in them, as if she had found herself again before the old sad question of man's uncomprehended desires. She spoke, strangely he thought then, and afterward he wondered if she actually had said the thing at all.

"There's nothin' in the world I wouldn't do for you, not if 'twas anyways right. But——" and again she gave that fleeting glance of allegiance to the child.

He tried impatiently to pull himself together. She must see there was something hideous in his inability to make her safe, something stupid, also.

"Tira," he said, "you don't understand. Sometimes I think you don't realize what might happen to you. And it's silly to let it happen, foolish, ignorant. If some one told you there was a man outside your door and he wanted to kill you, you'd lock the door. Now there's a man inside your house, inside your room, that wants to kill you. Yes, he does," he insisted, answering the denial in her face, "when he's got one of his brain storms. Is there anything to pride yourself on in staying to be killed?"

She answered first with a smile, the sweet reassurance of a confident look.

"He won't," she said, "he won't try to kill me, or kill him"—she made a movement of the hand toward the couch—"no, not ever. You know why? I'm goin' to remind him Who's in the room."

"Why didn't you remind him this time?" Raven queried, pushed to the cynical logic of it. "You could have turned his own words against him. It wasn't an hour since he'd said it himself."

"Because," she answered, in a perfect good faith, "then I didn't know 'twas so."

"Didn't know 'twas so? Why didn't you?"

Her eyes were large with wonder.

"Because," she said, "then you hadn't told me."

Raven stared at her a full minute, realizing to the full the exact measure of his lie coming back to him.

"Tira," said he, "I believe you're not quite bright."

"No," said she simply, with no apparent feeling, "I guess I ain't. 'Most everybody's told me so, first or last."

It sobered him.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I didn't mean that. I'm off my head a little. I'm so worried, you see. I want to know you're safe. You're not safe. It isn't easy to accept that—to lie down under it."

Usually he had spoken to her in the homespun phrasing he instinctively used with his country neighbors, but the last words were subtly different to her, they were more distant, and she accepted them with a grave humility.

"Yes, sir," she said, and Raven awoke to the irritating knowledge that she was calling him "sir." He smiled at her and she realized that, as mysteriously as she had been pushed away, now she was taken back.

"So," he said, "you won't go down to Nan's and spend the night?"

She shook her head, watching him. Little as she meant to do what he told her, she wanted less to offend him.

"Then," said Raven, "you'll stay here. I'll bring in some more blankets, and you lie on the couch. You'll have to keep an eye on the fire. Don't let it go down entirely. It can get pretty cold."

He got up, lighted a candle and went into the bedroom for the blankets. Tira followed him and silently took the pair he gave her, came back to the couch and spread them carefully, not to waken the child. He followed with more and, while she finished arranging her couch, piled wood on the fire. For a moment he had an idea of announcing that he would stay and keep the fire up while she slept. But even if she submitted to that, she would be uneasy. And she was a hardy woman. It would not hurt her to come awake, as he knew she could, with the house-guarding instinct of the woman trained to serve.

"There," he said, beating the wood-dust from his hands, "now lock me out. Remember, you're not to go back there to-night. You owe that to me. You've given me bother enough."

But his eyes, when hers sought them timidly, were smiling at her. She laughed a little, happily. It was all right, then.

"You ain't mad," she said, half in shy assertion, following him to the door.

"No," he said gravely. "I'm not mad. I couldn't be, with you. I never shall be. Good night."

He opened the door, went out and waited an instant to hear the key click behind him and ran plunging down the snowy road. Once on the way he looked up at the mysterious stars visible in the line of sky above the track he followed. Deeper and deeper it was, the mystery. He had given her a God to adore and keep her protecting company. He who did not believe had wrought her faith out of his unbelief. When he turned into the road, he thought he saw someone under the porch of his house and hurried, his mind alive to the chance of meeting Tenney, searching for her. The figure did not move and as he went up to the house a voice called to him. It was Amelia's.

"O John, is that you? I can't see how you can leave the house alone to go wandering off in the woods and never saying a word."

There she was in her fur coat, not so much frightened, he thought, as hurt. She was querulous with agitation.

"All right, Milly," he said, and put an arm through hers, "here I am. And the house isn't alone. Don't get so nervous. Next thing you know, you'll have to see a specialist."

"And Charlotte's gone," she lamented sharply, allowing him to march her in and turning, in the warm hall, to confront him. "Here I've been all alone."

"Where's Jerry?"

Raven had thrown off his hat and coat and frankly owned himself tired.

"In the kitchen. But he won't tell where Charlotte is. He says she's gone up along."

"Well, so she has, to a neighbor's. Come into the library and get 'het' through before you go to bed."

"And," she lamented, letting him give her a kindly push toward the door, "I've got to pack, myself, if Charlotte doesn't come."

"Pack?" He stared at her. "You're not leaving?"

"Yes, John." She said it portentously, as bidding him remember he might be sorry when she was no more. "I'm going. Dick has telegraphed."

"Anything the matter?"

"That's it. I don't know. If I did, I could decide. He orders me, simply orders me, to take the early train. What do you make of it?"

Raven considered. Actually, he thought, Dick was carrying out his benevolent plan of getting her back, by hook or crook.

"I don't believe I'd worry, Milly," he said, gravely, "but I think you'd better go."

"Yes," she said, "that's it. I don't dare not to. Something may be the matter. I've tried to telephone, but he doesn't answer. I must go."



XXII

Raven always remembered that as the night of his life, up to this present moment, the mountain peak standing above the waters of his discontent. The top of the mountain, that was what lifted itself in an island inexpressibly green and fair above those sullen depths, and on this, the island of deliverance, he was to stand. After he had reasoned Amelia into her room and persuaded her to leave her packing till the morning, he went up to his own chamber, mentally spent and yet keyed to an exhausting pitch. He was excited yet tired, tied up into nervous knots without the will to loose them. What sense in going to bed, when he could not sleep? What need of reviewing the last chapter of his knowledge of the woman who was so compelling in her helplessness and her childlike faith? He would read: something silly, if he had it at hand. The large matters of the mind and soul were not for this unwilling vigil; and at this intruding thought of the soul he smiled, remembering how glibly he had bartered the integrity of his own to add his fragment to the rising temple of Tira's faith. He had strengthened her at the expense of his own bitter certainties. It was done deliberately and it was not to be regretted, but it did open a window upon his private rectitude. Was his state of mind to be taken so very seriously, even by himself? Not after that! Lounging before his book-shelves in search of a soporific, suddenly he remembered the mottled book. It flashed into his mind as if a hand had hurled it there. He would read Old Crow's journal.

Settled in bed, the light beside him and the mottled book in his hand, he paused a thoughtful minute before opening it. Poor old devil! Was this the jangled record of an unsound mind, or was it the apologia for an eccentricity probably not so uncommon, after all? Foolish, he thought, to leave a record of any sort, unless you were a heaven-accredited genius, entrusted with the leaves of life. Better to recognize your own atomic insignificance, and sink willingly into the predestined sea. He opened it and took a comprehensive glance over the first page: an oblong of small neat handwriting. Many English hands were like that. He was accustomed to call it a literary hand. Over the first date he paused, to refer it back to his own years. How big was he when Old Crow had begun the diary? Seven, that was all. He was a boy of seven years, listening with an angry yet fascinated attention to the other boys talking about Old Crow, who was, they said, luny, love-cracked. He never could hear enough about the terrifying figure choosing to live up there in the woods alone, and who yet seemed so gentle and so like other folk when you met him and who gave you checker-berry lozenges. Still he was furious when the boys hooted him and then ran, because, after all, Old Crow was his own family. And with the first words, his mind started to an alert attention. The words were to him.

"I am going to write some things down for the boy," Old Crow began, in the neat-handed script. "He is a good little boy. He looks like me at his age. I had a kind of innocence. He has it, too. If he should grow up anything like me, I want him to have this letter"—the last word was crossed out and a more formal one substituted—"statement. If he thinks about things anyways different from what the neighbors do, they will begin to laugh at him, and try to make him believe he is not in his right mind."

Over and over, through the first pages of the book, there were grammatical lapses when Old Crow, apparently from earnestness of feeling, fell into colloquial speech. This was always when he got so absorbed in his subject that he lacked the patience to go back and rewrite according to rules he certainly knew but which had ceased to govern his daily intercourse.

"He must remember he may be in his right mind, for all that. If one man thinks a thing, it might be true if forty thousand men think different. The first man that thought the earth was round, when everybody else thought it was flat, was one man. The boy will be told I was crazy. He will be told I was love-cracked. I did want Selina James. She was a sweet, pretty girl and high-headed, and the things some folks thought of her were not so. But she was the kind that takes the world as it was made and asks no questions, and when I couldn't take it so and tried to explain to her how I felt about it, she didn't know any way but to laugh. Perhaps she was afraid. And she did get sick of me and turned me off. She married and went away. I was glad she went away, because it is very hard to keep seeing anybody you thought liked you and find they didn't, after all. It keeps reminding you. It was after that time I built me the hut and came up here to live.

"Now the boy will hear it was on account of Selina James that I came up here, but it is not so, though it well might have been. It was about that time I began to understand what a hard time 'most everybody is having—except for a little while when they are young, and sometimes then—and I couldn't stand it. And I thought how it might not be so if everybody would turn to and help everybody else, and that might be the kingdom of heaven, the same as we read about it. And then one day I went out—I was always going round the fields and woods, kind of still, because I liked to come on little animals living their own lives in their own way—and I came to the open spot up above the hut where there are the old apple trees left from the first house the Ravens lived in, on the back road, before the other road went through. And on one of the lower limbs of the apple tree was a robin and she was making that noise a robin makes when she is scared 'most to pieces, and on another limb there was a red squirrel, and he was chattering so I knew he was scared, too. And down under the tree there was a snake pointed right at a little toad, and I stamped my foot and hollered to scare him away; and that same minute he struck and the toad fell over, whether poisoned to death or scared to death I didn't know. And the snake slipped away, because he was afraid of me, just as the toad was afraid of him. And the bird smoothed down her feathers and flew away, and the squirrel run along where he was going. They had got off that time, and I suppose the next minute they forgot all about it. But I never forgot. It was just as if something had painted a picture to show me what the world was. It was full of fear. Everything was made to hunt down and kill everything else, except the innocent things that eat grass and roots, and innocent as they be—as they are—they are killed, too. And who made it so? God. So what peace could I have—what peace could anybody ever have—in a world where, from morning till night, it is war and murder and the fear of death? And what good is there in trying to bring the kingdom of heaven down to men? You can't bring it to the animals. What if you could die for men? A good many have done that besides Jesus Christ. But who is going to die for the animals? And the animals in captivity—I saw a bear once, in a cage, walking up and down, up and down, and moaning. I saw a polar bear once trying to cool himself on a cake of ice. I saw an eagle with his wings clipped. An eagle ought to be up in the air. And all that could be done away with, by law, if men would see to it. But even then (and this is the strangest part of it, the part that won't bear thinking about) it is not only that men are unmerciful to the animals, but the animals, when they are hungry, are unmerciful to one another. I shall come back to this.

"Now about Jesus Christ. I hate to write this because, if the boy does not see things as I do, maybe it will be bad for him to read it, and he may think I am blaspheming holy things. I pray him to remember I write in earnestness and love, love for him, for the earth and for the animals. I want to tell him things look very black to me. When I think how I felt over losing Selina James it seems to me as nothing compared with the way I feel about the way the world is made. For it is all uncertainty and 'most all pain. It seems to me it is not possible for anything to be blacker than the earth is to me. I wake in the morning with a cloud over me, and when I go to bed at night the cloud is there. It settles down on me like—I don't know how to say what it is like—and I call out, up here alone in the woods. I call to God. I remember how He made the earth and I ask Him why He had to do it so. Over and over I ask Him. He does not answer. He can't. I suppose that is what it is to be God. You have to make a thing a certain way, and after it is done they have to take it, the men and the animals, and do the best they can with it. And one night when I was calling to God, there was a scream of an animal—a little animal—just outside, and I knew an owl had got him. And I covered my ears, for it seemed as if that was God's answer to me, and I didn't want to hear any more. I even thought—and I tell the boy this so that if he has thoughts that frighten him he will have the comfort of knowing somebody has thought them before—I thought that scream was God's answer. It was a good many months before I could pray again, even to ask God why.

"Now about religion. A great many people go to church and find comfort in it, and they come home and eat meat for their dinners, meat killed—they don't know how it is killed. Sometimes it is killed the best you can and sometimes not. They don't seem to think about that. They have done their duty and gone to church, and they go out to feed the animals they are going to kill when they are fat enough, and sometimes the animals will be killed the best they can and sometimes not. And if they think about their sins, they quiet themselves by thinking Christ has taken them on His own shoulders. And so, unless somebody they love has died, or they are poor or disappointed, they say it is a very pleasant world, and they ask for another slice of beef and plan what they will do Monday, now Sunday is so far along. Now if the boy is that kind of a boy, let him be like those people who do the best they can without questioning. Let him do the best he can and not question. But if he is different, if he has to think—sometimes I am sure he will have to, for I cannot help seeing he looks out of his eyes like me. His eyes are terrible to me, for they are always asking questions, and that is what Grandmother Raven used to say to me. She used to say: 'You are always asking questions with your eyes. Stop staring and ask your questions right out.' But I couldn't. As long ago as that, I knew my questions hadn't any answers.

"Now if the boy begins to ask himself questions about Jesus Christ, whether He is the son of God, and whether He could take on Himself the sins of the world, I want to tell him that I am sure it is not so. I want the boy to remember that nobody can take away his sins: nobody but himself. He must accept his punishments. He must even go forward to meet them, for through them alone can he learn how to keep away from sin. And I want him to regard the life of Jesus Christ with love and reverence, and make his own life as much like it as he can. But I want him to remember, too, that God made him as he is, and made his father and mother and all the rest back to the first man, and that there is no guilt of sinfulness upon man as a race. There is only the burden of ignorance. We live in the dark. We were born into it. As far as our knowledge of right and wrong goes, so far are we guilty. But He has made us as we are, and if there is guilt, it is not ours."

As Raven read this, he found himself breathing heavily in the excitement of knowing what it cost the man to write so nakedly for casual eyes. To that elder generation, trained in the habit of thought that prevailed in a country region, so many years ago, it was little short of blasphemy. He turned a page, and had a cumulative surprise. For time had leaped. The date was seven years later. Old Crow was now over sixty, and this was the year before his death. Raven could hardly believe in the likelihood of so wide a leap, but the first line showed him it was actual. The subject matter was different and so was the style. The sentences raced as if they were in a hurry to get themselves said before the pen should drop from a palsied hand.

"I gave up writing with that last line. I thought there was no more to say. I didn't even want to read it over. If I hadn't said it well, still I had said it and I didn't see any better way. I wanted to fortify the boy against the loneliness of feeling there was nobody that understood. I wanted to tell him I understood. That was all I could do for him at that time. But a great deal more has happened. The last of it happened over two years ago, but I was too busy to write it down. Besides, I didn't know there would be such things to write. The boy knows me a little now. He comes up oftener. His mother brings him. She is very sweet and gentle, but she will not leave him alone with me because I am queer and she is afraid I may teach him to be queer. She does not understand. She wouldn't if I told her. She takes things as they are. There are no questions in her mind. There will be in the boy's. They have begun to come. I can see them more than ever by the look in his eyes. Several years ago, about when I finished writing in this book, I saw I should have to give up questioning myself and calling on God. There were no answers. If there were, He didn't mean to let me have them. I mustn't keep on. It was dangerous. I got no good out of it and I should come to harm. And if I had got to live, I must be as near like other folks as I could. So I must be as busy as I could. And it came to me that over beyond the mountain there were folks poorer than I am, and that knew less, a good deal less. I didn't know anything about God, but I did know I must keep clean and eat the right food. So I begun to take long tramps round the countryside, and wherever I went I'd try to find out the sick and, if the family was poor, work for them a while and sit up with the sick one, and, if he was discouraged, try to help him through.

"So it happened I was away from the hut a good deal of the time, and I got an idea the Ravens liked that. It must have touched their pride to have Old Crow living up here alone, queer as Dick's hat-band. Whichever way I fixed it, I was a kind of a curse: for when I went off on my wanderings I was a tramp and the news of it came back home, and I often think the boy's mother was sorry and wished I wouldn't, though even that was better than my being around, toleing off the boy. I liked my wanderings, in summer best of all. But in winter the folks needed me more, shut up so in tight houses, catching colds in bad air, and it got so when they were sick they'd send for me and I was proper pleased to go. And they came to have a kind of a trust in me, and I was nearer being contented than I'd been in my whole life. Because the questions didn't come hardly at all, now. I was too busy by day and too tired at night. So it went on till one day I came to old Billy Jones's little house, where he lived all alone in the dirt and filth. It was just at the foot of the mountain and no neighbors under half a mile. I say he lived there, but he wasn't there more than a third of the time. The boy will remember how he used to go along the road, full as a tick, and the school children making fun of him and then running before he could get at them. I don't know as he would, though. There never was any harm in him, only he did neglect himself so he was an awful sight. And the only time he was in his little house was when he'd been hired out haying or something, and got his money and spent it and come back with crackers and cheese in his old carpet bag, to sober up.

"This day I was speaking about (it was October and no wind) I was going by his house and I saw a smoke coming out of the chimney, and I thought old Billy had come home to sober up. But I hadn't hardly got to the house before I heard him calling me, and I looked and there he was in the front door leaning on a cane.

"'You come in here,' says he, and I went in.

"It was a terrible hog's nest, his front room was, but I paid no attention, for that's the way he lived. He sat down in a chair and made a motion with his hand for me to come near, and I did, and he took my hand and put it on his knee.

"'Feel that,' he says. And when I didn't know what he meant, nor care hardly, for I thought he might be in drink, he called out, in a queer voice—sharp it was, and pitiful—and says he: 'My legs are swelling. Hard as a rock.'

"Then I saw he was in a trouble of fear, and I asked him questions and he told me how long it had been coming on and how he went to the doctor down to the street, and the doctor told him he was a sick man, and how he would grow worse instead of better and could never take care of himself in the world, and the doctor would get him sent to the Poor Farm. That was his trouble. He did not want to go to the Farm, and when I told him it was the right way, he broke down and shook and cried and said he was afraid to go. Then he told me why. The boy must not read this until he is grown up, but when he is, he will hear there was a man killed over across the mountain: Cyrus Graves, a poor, good-for-nothing creature as it was said. (But God made him.) He was found by the side of the road, and it was thought he had words with a peddler that went along that day and never was found afterward. But some thought the authorities never tried so hard as they might to find the peddler, because Cyrus was such a poor good-for-nothing that he was well rid of, and if the peddler was found and not convicted he might come back and burn their barns. And when old Billy Jones was shaking there before me, I kept asking him what he was afraid of, and he said:

"'Will you promise not to tell?'

"I said I would. And he said:

"'It was me that killed Cyrus Graves. We were coming home together, and we had both had a drop too much, and we had words about something, I forget what. And which of us struck first I don't know, but I know I struck him and he fell pitch-polling down the side of the road into the gully and I went home and crawled into bed. And the next day they found him, and I said I came home across lots, and there was a man that met me and he said it was so and I was so far gone in liquor I never could have raised my head again that night, once I'd laid down and begun to sleep it off. But he never knew I did raise my head for I was not so well started as common and I went out again about ten to fill up. And it was then I met Cyrus Graves.'

"I told him there was but one thing for him to do. He must send for the sheriff and give himself up. But he cried out at that and said:

"'Look at my poor legs. Do you think a man with such legs as mine has got strength enough to be hung?'

"I told him he would not be hung. He was a very sick man, and there was no court of law in the world so unmerciful as not to take that into account. But he would not do it. He had not meant to kill Cyrus Graves, he said, and he would not die a murderer and known for one. And that was why he would not go to the Poor Farm. As he got sicker, he might be delirious or talk in his sleep. Rave, that was the word he used. He might rave. After he stopped speaking, I sat thinking it over, and he watched my face. He spoke first, and he spoke as if he could hardly wait to hear the answer and yet was obliged to hear it.

"'Ain't you goin' to say you'll come here an' take care of me?' he said. 'My time won't be long.'

"Then I could see my going round taking care of the sick had made him turn to me. That was the way with all of them round here. They turned to me. It was the only comfort I had. I told him I could not take care of him there. It was no fit place. I thought a spell longer, and he watched me. His eyes were full of fear. The little animals look like that when they are trapped. Then I told him I would have him brought over to the hut if he would come, and he jumped at it. I scarcely ever saw a man so wild with thankfulness. And the next day I hired a team and went over after him, and I took care of him to the end."

Here was a heavy dash. Raven could imagine Old Crow's drawing the line with one impatient stroke because he had got so far in a story he could ill stop to write, but that had to be written. Raven had forgotten Tira up there in the lonesome woods, forgotten a day was very near when she would have to make one more of her desperate decisions. He was thinking of Old Crow.



XXIII

He went on reading:

"There is no need of going into old Billy's sickness. It made a great change in my life. As soon as it got about that I had taken him to live with me, folks began to say I was queer, the same as they did before, and the children would hoot and run. He was known to be so bad (they had always called him bad; they never once thought God made him) they thought I liked to keep company with him because I must be bad, too. And I could not go about any more doing for people because I was doing for him and there was no time. But people kept sending for me, and when they saw old Billy Jones sitting there with his bandaged legs, they would feel hard toward me. They said I would rather do for him than for them, and he ought, by rights, to be on the town. That meant his going to the Farm. Sometimes I thought they felt so about it there might be action taken to get him there—to the Poor Farm. He never thought of this, I am sure. He had a peaceful time, as much so as a man could have that has killed his body and begins to be afraid he has killed his soul. That was the hardest time I had with him: about his soul. He was afraid to die. I told him God made him and would see to him in the end, and that He well knew he did not mean to kill Cyrus Graves. He said that was true, but if he had been tried here in a court of law the jury would have pronounced him guilty and it was very likely God would. And there was hell. These things I could not answer because I did not know, and if I had any convictions they were as dark as his, though of another sort. But I did try to put heart into him, and I hoped the end would come before he suffered any more.

"I want the boy to know that all this time his mother was a very great comfort to me. Of course she could not let the boy come up to the hut, because old Billy Jones was too dreadful a sight for a child to see. But she cooked a great many delicate things and brought them up or sent them, and, one day I shall never forget, when I had a blind headache and had to lie down in the dark, she sat with Billy a long time, to keep him from being lonesome, and afterward I found she had bandaged his legs.

"As time went on and he grew worse and worse, there was but one thing he wanted. It was to be forgiven. I tried again to persuade him to tell publicly the straight story of the killing and so die with a clean mind. This he would not do. He had asked me to get him a headstone, with his name on it all complete, and he was much set against being remembered as a murderer. All his life he had lived outside the law, so to speak, and he wanted to die respectable. I told him it might happen to him that, after his death, somebody would be accused of the death of Cyrus Graves and in that case I should break my promise to him and tell. To this he consented, though unwillingly, and I am now telling, not only for the sake of the boy, but for the sake of all to whom the boy may have to pass on the strange things that came to Billy Jones. His sickness went on in a very painful way, and when it got to be near the end he was still more distressed in mind. He could not die, he said, unless he was forgiven. And yet he had to die. For a while he seemed almost to hate me because I could not show him the way.

"'If I was a Roman Catholic,' he said, 'and you was a priest, you could forgive me yourself. You would forgive me, I'll warrant ye.'

"I did not deny it, though I felt very hopeless of anything I might do. In those last days I could have denied him nothing. He seemed to me like all the trouble in the world beating out there in the hut. God had made him, and made him so that he did not rightly see good from evil, and he had ruined his body, and now he was taking the consequences. And the night before he died, he cried out a terrible voice:

"'You don't say a word about Jesus Christ.'

"I stood by his bed in anguish of mind perhaps as great as his. Yet not as great, for he had no strength of body to bear the anguish with.

"'You never have said anything,' he went on.

"I felt as if he was accusing me of not giving him water when he was fevered, or bread if he was hungry. Then he said he remembered something he used to hear when he was little and he had hardly ever heard of it since. But he had heard other things. And I guessed he was remembering he had lived with the people who used the name of Jesus Christ only to swear by. He had heard, he told me, that Jesus Christ was the son of God, and God sent Him here to save sinners, and, if sinners called on Him to save them, they would be saved. And then he looked at me for a minute with that same look, as if he hated me, and he said:

"'You don't believe it. You wouldn't let me suffer like this, if you did.'

"And all my spirit broke up in me, and my legs were weak under me, and the tears ran down on my face, and I said to him:

"'I do believe it.'

"'Will you swear it?' he asked me. He was very wild then. 'Will you swear by Jesus Christ it is so?'

"'Yes,' I said, 'I will swear.'

"And I fell on my knees by the bed and said: 'Let us pray.' And I prayed, in what words I don't know, but my hand was on his, and when I said Amen, he said Amen, too, and when I looked at him all the trouble was smoothed out of his face and he said, 'Jesus Christ!' as he never could have said it in his life before. It was as if you were speaking to your mother or your friend (yet not just a friend, but a heavenly friend) and shortly he died. And I had told him a lie. But I was not sorry. I was glad. What was my keeping my poor soul clean to old Billy Jones's dying in peace? It was the last thing I could give him, and he was welcome to it.

"It was in the early morning he died, and I did what I knew about making him right for his coffin, and then went down to get one of the neighbors that knew more, and all that day I was busy. The next day he would be taken away and lie in the Methodist church at the Ridge, and the third day he would be buried. And nobody had ever taken any interest in him except to call him a poor good-for-nothing creature—nobody except your mother (she is a good woman) but it looked as if he would have a well-attended funeral. I was glad of that, for I knew he would be pleased. He was laid out in the bedroom of the hut and the window was open and the cold air blowing on him, and I lay down on the couch in the large room. I didn't take my clothes off, for at such times it is respectful to have watchers about the dead. It may not be necessary, but it is the custom, and I wanted old Billy to have everything that was fitting and right. I did not mean to go to sleep, but lie there a spell and then get up and put on more wood and go into his cold room and let him feel as if he was being taken care of to the last. And I lay there thinking how I had heard there was diphtheria over beyond the mountain and I would take a day or two to rest me and then I'd go over there and help. I laughed a little to myself, and I see now it wasn't a very pleasant kind of laugh, for I thought the people would begin to like me again because I was free to do for them.

"And I did go to sleep, being, as I said, very tired, and how long I slept I don't know. But suddenly I waked up, just as wide awake as I am this minute, and I knew as well as I ever knew anything, that Billy Jones was in the room. I didn't see him. I didn't hear him. I didn't hear anything, outside or in. It was a very still night, and there wasn't even the creaking of the branches against each other. But Billy Jones was in the room. I wasn't afraid, but I felt queer. I had a kind of prickly feeling all over me. The hair on my head moved somehow, according to the feeling it gave me. Perhaps that was being afraid, only I don't take it so. The reason I think differently is that I didn't want it to stop. If Billy Jones was there, I didn't want him to go away. If he had anything to say, I wanted to hear it. And I was as sure as ever I was of anything in my life that there was something to say. If this was the beginning of something that was going to happen, it was only the beginning. There was more to come. And I wanted to know what. I lay there as still almost as Billy's body in the next room. I was afraid of missing something. If there was something for me to hear I'd got to keep still to hear it. But I said that before. I have to keep saying it, it took such hold of me. The fire hadn't wholly died down. I could tell by that I hadn't been asleep long. But I didn't dare to get up and put on another stick. I was afraid if I moved I might jar something and it would break. And I couldn't have it break till the end—the end of my knowing what it was.

"And now the boy must remember that what follows, if I live to write it, is faithful and true. That is what the Bible says about things like that: they are faithful and true. And mine are just as true. It seemed to me as if the ceiling of the room raised up and the walls opened out and the room was as if it was not. Whether I looked through it or whether it was gone, I do not know. But I looked into a great space. And it was dark and at one side of it there was a great light. And the light was not angry, as a sunset looks when it flames and flares. It was steady, and I knew it was to light the world. And there came into my head some words: 'And the darkness comprehended it not.' When I waked up, I found the words in the Bible, but that night it seemed to me they were said for the first time. The boy must remember Billy Jones was in all this. He was the chief part of it. As to the words, it was as if Billy Jones said them. I was in the darkness, and I was to be made to comprehend. And when I looked lower through the darkness—and I cannot tell how, but I seemed to be in it and yet at the same time I was above it, so that I looked down and saw what was going on—I saw multitudes of men and women, trying to get through it. Sometimes they walked slowly, as if it was hard to walk, and sometimes they jostled each other and sometimes stopped to push one another about, and sometimes when some were down the others stamped on them. But they were all going somewhere, and it was toward the light. And as I say, I was in the darkness though I could see through it, and I wondered if I was going, too.

"And then I understood. I couldn't tell the boy how I understood, not if he was here to ask me; but it was as if a voice spoke and told me in two or three words, and few as they were, I took them in and I knew. Perhaps there was a voice. Perhaps it was the voice of Billy Jones. There is no reason why not. The minute after he got out of his body, he might have known everything: I don't mean everything, I mean the one thing that would explain it all. And he had a kindness for me, and if he learned anything that smoothed out his trouble and turned it into joy, he would want me to know, too. And this is it, though now I have got to the place for telling it, I don't know how. It is like a dream. You have to tell it the minute you wake, or it is gone. I saw that creation had been a long time going on. I saw that although we have minds to think with, we haven't really, in comparison with the things to be thought out. I saw that we are so near the dust that we can no more account for the ways of Almighty God than the owl hooting out there in the woods can read the words I am writing here. I saw that nothing is to be told us. We are to find out everything for ourselves, just as we have found electricity and the laws of physics. And poisons—we have found out those, some of them, even if we had to die to do it. And God lets us die trying to find out. He doesn't care anything about our dying. And if He doesn't care anything about our dying, He doesn't care anything about the rabbit broken by the owl, or the toad struck by the snake.

"Now, why doesn't He care? For the first time, I knew there was a reason that was not a cruel reason. I knew His reasons were all good. And I saw that though He could not break the rules of His plan by telling us things, He could give us a kind of a something inside us that should make us work it out ourselves. We had hungers. We had one hunger for eternal life. We had to believe in it, to help us bear this present life. We believed it so hard that men rose up and said it was so, and we said God had put the words into their mouths. And out of our sufferings, pity was born, and now and then a man would be raised up so full of pity that other men believed in him and followed everything he said and even called him a god. And this was well, because if they had not thought he was a god, they might not have followed him. And I seemed to be told that a great many men were born who were sent from God, but I have not read many books and how can I prove whether it is true?

"But Jesus Christ came, and His story is the story of the will of God. For men believed His father was God. That is to keep in our minds always the fatherhood of God. And his mother was believed to be a virgin. I do not know how to say this, but I was given to believe that that was no more true than I had thought, but still that it was the truest of all. It is one of the things we are to believe. We are to learn from it—how can I say?—that there is a heavenly birth out of purity and light. It is a symbol. That is the word: a symbol. And His death for mankind is the everlasting symbol of man's duty: to die for one another. And He went into the grave, and ascended into heaven, and so shall we all die and live again. But every observance of every church is a symbol—nothing more. And the man that was a god is a symbol and nothing more. But nothing could be more. For to find a symbol that has lasted, in one form or another, since the beginning of the world is to learn that it is something the world itself is built on. It is the picture book we are given before we can read print. And it means that something is working out—and is not yet—and the eye of man hath not seen or the ear of man heard. And about fear—that is the most wonderful of all and the hardest to tell. It is our friend. At first everything fed upon everything else; and so it does now, for how shall I say the animal has fear and the growing plant has not? And our fear tells us what to turn away from, and it fits us for the fight of the mortal life. But in the end will our fear be only the fear of evil? Fear is our counselor. It is our friend.

"Now perhaps I have done wrong in trying to write this out. Perhaps I have not helped the boy or anybody he tells. Perhaps I have offended them. I know the sound of what I must have heard and the sight of what I saw was clearer to me before I tried to tell about them. At first I kept them back somewhere in my mind and didn't try to see them or hear them too close. And when I did that, the great light was always there and I was running toward it. But now I have tried to tell, I see it is no more than words. They darken counsel. And I have put it back into my mind, not so much to be thought about as to have at hand. And all my trouble has gone. It has been a long trouble. I am over sixty now. But I am not afraid of anything and I am not in doubt. When I see men suffering, I know they are suffering for a reason. When I find the bird with a broken wing or the rabbit bit by the trap I know God knows about them, and if I cannot know, it proves it is not necessary I should. For there is the great light. (But it is not likely the boy will see this account of it at all, because I shall try to write it over—to write it better—and if I make it clearer this will be destroyed.)

"Another thing: about the worship of God. He does not want us to worship Him as we understand it, to crawl before Him as if He were an idol we had set up to get us victories over our enemies and to fill us with food. He wants us—what shall I say?—to open our hearts and our minds and our ears and eyes to what He wants us to know. He is not an idol. He is God. And all the way to Him, the horrible way through burnt offerings, the blood of lambs and goats—blood, blood, all the way—is the way that climbs up to the real sacrifice, the last of all: the man's own heart.

"One thing more: the greatest thing that ever happened to me was old Billy Jones. Was it because I was sorry for him? Was it because I could do something for him? I don't know. But I tell the boy that the man or the woman that makes him shed his blood in pity for them, that is the man or woman that will open his eyes to what we call Eternal Life. What is Eternal Life? Is it living forever? I do not know. But the words—those two words—stand for the great light ahead of us, the light I truly saw. And what the light is, still I do not know. But this I know: God is. He lives. And He is sorry. The boy may tell me this is no more than the words about His caring for the sparrow that falleth. But I tell him it is more to me, for this I have found out for myself. And I have found it out through great tribulation. But the tribulation is not now. It has stopped. It stopped with the sound of old Billy Jones's voice I heard—somehow I heard it—when his body lay in there dead. And I am not afraid. I am not afraid of fear—even for the little animals—and that is more than for myself. And that is my legacy to the boy. He must not be afraid."

There it ended, and Raven sat for a long time looking at the fine painstaking script and seeing, for the moment, at least, the vision of Old Crow. He felt a great welling of love toward him, a longing to get hold of him somehow and tell him the journal had done its work. He understood. And it meant to him, in its halting simplicity, more than all the books he had ever read on the destiny of man. Meager as it was, it seemed to him something altogether new, because it had come out of the mind of an ignorant man, if a man can be called ignorant who has used his mind to its full capacity of thought and unconsciously fitted it, so far as he might, to the majestic simplicities of the Bible. Old Crow had never read anything about legend or the origins of belief. There were no such books then at Wake Hill. He read no language but his own. Whatever he had evolved, out of the roots of longing, had been done in the loneliness of the remote shepherd who charts the stars. And in the man himself Raven had found a curious companionship. Their lives seemed to have run a parallel course. Old Crow, like himself, was a victim of world sickness. And his wound had been cleansed; he had been healed.

Raven did give a little smile to the thought that, at least, the man had been saved one thing: he had no authoritative Amelia on his track to betray him to organized benevolence. And for himself something, he could not adequately tell what, was as clear to him as a road of light to unapprehended certainties. It was a symbol. It was the little language men had to talk in because they could not use the language of the stars: their picture language. But it was the rude token of ineffable reality. As the savage's drawing of a man stands for the man, so the symbols wrought out by the hungry world stand for what is somewhere, yet not visibly here. For the man exists or the savage could not have drawn him. Not all the mystics, he thought, smiling over his foolish inner conviction that could not be reached through the mind but only through the heart, not all the divines, could have set up within him the altar of faith he seemed suddenly to see before him: it had to be Old Crow. And he slept, and in the morning it did not need the mottled book at his bedside to remind him. Still it was Old Crow.

He put it all away in his mind to think over later, just as Old Crow had turned aside from his vision for the more convincing clearness of an oblique angle upon it, and dressed hastily. He got out of the house without meeting even Charlotte, and was about crossing the road on the way to the hut when he saw Tenney coming, axe and dinner pail in hand. Raven swerved on his path, and affected to be looking down the road. He could not proceed the way he was going. Tenney's mind must not be drawn toward that living focus by even the most fragmentary hint. Yet if Tira was still there, she and the child must be fed. After his glance down the road he turned back to the house, nodding at Tenney as he neared. But Tenney motioned to him.

"Here," he called stridently. "You wait."

Raven halted and as Tenney was approaching, at a quick stride, noted how queerly he was hung. It was like a skeleton walking, the dry joints acting spasmodically. When the man came up with him, he saw how ravaged his face was, and yet lighted by what a curious eagerness. Ready, he hoped, at all points for any possible attack involving Tira, Raven still waited, and the question Tenney shot at him could not have been more surprising:

"Did you find salvation?"

Raven stood looking at him for an instant, and suddenly he remembered Old Crow, who had accomplished the salvation of a sick heart and bequeathed the treasure to him.

"Yes," he said, more tolerantly than he had ever spoken to Tenney. "I think I did."

Was it his imagination that Tenney looked disappointed?

"Last night?" the man insisted. "Did you find it last night? Through me?"

"No," said Raven. "I didn't find it through you."

Tenney was ingenuously taken aback.

"There is one way," he said, "into the sheepfold—only one."

He turned about, muttering, and Raven, looking after him, thought he was an ugly customer. For a woman to be shut up alone with him, her young, too, to defend! It was like being jailed with an irrational beast. But Tenney paid no further attention to him. He walked away, swinging his dinner pail, down across the meadow to the lower woods, and Raven, after the fringe of birches had closed upon him, hurried off to the hut. He did not expect to find her. The pail in Tenney's hand was sufficient evidence, even if the man's going to his work were not. Tenney would never have abandoned his search or his waiting for her, and if he had, he would not have delayed to pack a dinner pail. The hut was empty of human life, but the bricks were warm. She could not have left until the early morning. Mechanically he piled kindling near the hearth. But curiously, though the hut was warm not only with the fire but the suggestion of her breathing presence, it was not she who seemed to be with him but Old Crow.

He went back to the house and found Amelia in traveling dress, her face tuned to the note of concentration when something was to be done. She was ready. She had the appearance of the traveler needing only to slip on an outer garment to go, not merely from New Hampshire down to Boston, but to uncharted fastnesses. It meant, he found, this droll look of being prepared for anything, not the inconsiderable journey before her but a new enterprise for him. And he would have to be persuaded to it. Well, she knew that. She met him in the hall.

"John," she said, with the firmness of her tone in active benevolences, "I have asked Jerry to take me to the train. I want you to go with me."

"Me?" said Raven, unaffectedly surprised. "What for?"

"For several things. If Dick is in any sort of trouble——"

"He's not," said Raven. "Take my word for that."

"And," she concluded, "I want you to see somebody."

"Somebody?" Raven repeated. He put his hand on her shoulder, smiling down at her. Milly was a good sort. It was too bad she had to be, like so many women benevolence mad, so disordered in her meddling. "I suppose you mean an alienist."

She nodded, her lips compressed. She would stick at nothing.

"Now Milly," said Raven, "do I seem to you in the least dotty?"

Tears came into her eyes.

"I wish you wouldn't use such words," she said tremulously. It meant much for Milly to tremble. "It's like calling that dreadful influenza the flu."

Raven was reminded of the old man down the road who forbade secular talk in the household during a thunder shower. It "madded" the Almighty. You might be struck.

"I won't," he said, the more merciful of her because she was on the point of going. "And I won't go back with you."

"Will you come later?" she persisted, still tremulous.

"No," said Raven, "probably not. If I do, I'll let you know. And you mustn't come up here without notifying me well in advance."

"That shows——" she began impulsively. "John, that isn't a normal thing to say: to expect your own sister to notify you."

"All right," said Raven cheerfully. "Then I'm not normal. The funny part of it is, I don't care whether I'm normal or not. I've got too many other things to think of. Here's Charlotte with your brekky. Come on."

In the two hours before she went, he was, she told Dick afterward, absolutely scintillating. She never knew John could be so brilliant. He talked about things she never knew he had the slightest interest in: theosophy and feminism and Americanization. She couldn't help wondering whether he was trying to convince her of his mental soundness. But he certainly was amazing. Dick received this in silence. He understood.

It was true. Raven did fill the time from a racing impetuosity, only slackened when Jerry appeared with the pung. Then he hurried her into her coat, kissed her warmly—and she had to comment inwardly that she had never found John so affectionate—and, standing bareheaded to watch her away, saluted her when she turned at the bend in the road. Then, when the scene was empty of her, he plunged in, past Charlotte, standing with hands rolled in her apron, snatched his cap, and hurried up the road to Nan.



XXIV

Raven, relieved of his hindering Amelia, felt extraordinarily gay. He went fast along the road, warm in the deepening sun, and saw Nan coming toward him. He waved his cap and called to her:

"She's gone."

"Who?" Nan was coming on with her springing stride, and when she reached him she looked keenly at him, adding: "What's happened to you, Rookie?"

Nothing had happened to her, he could see. She was always like a piece cut out of the morning and fitted into any part of the day she happened to be found in: always of a gallant spirit, always wholesome as apples, always ready. This was not altogether youth. It was, besides, something notable and particular which was Nan. He laughed out, she caught his mood so deftly.

"Something has happened," he said. "First place, Milly's gone. Second, I've found Old Crow."

"You've found Old Crow? What do you mean by that?"

"Can't tell you now. Wait till we sit down together."

"And she's truly gone?"

They stood there in the road as if Nan's house were not at hand; but the air and the sun were pleasant to them.

"Gone, bag and baggage. Dick wired and ordered her in some way she didn't dare ignore. I suspect he did it to save me. He's a good boy."

"He is a good boy," said Nan. There was a reminiscent look in her eyes. "But he's a very little one. Were we ever so young, Rookie, you and I?"

"You!"

"Yes. I'm a sphinx compared with Dick. I didn't tell you last night, there was so much else to say, but I had a letter from him, returned to Boston from New York. He assumed, you know, if I wasn't in Boston I'd gone to the Seaburys'. So he wrote there."

"What's he want?"

Nan hesitated a moment. Then she said:

"It's a pretty serious letter, Rookie. I suppose it's a love-letter."

"Don't you know?"

"Yes, I suppose I know. But it's so childish. He's furious, then he's almost on his knees begging, and then he goes back to being mad again. Rookie, he's so young."

"When it comes to that," said Raven, "you're young, too. I've told you that before."

"Young! Oh! but not that way. I couldn't beg for anything. I couldn't cry if I didn't get it. I don't know what girls used to do, but we're different, Rookie, we that have been over there."

"Yes," said Raven, "but you mustn't let it do too much to you. You mustn't let it take away your youth."

Nan shook her head.

"Youth isn't so very valuable," she said, "not that part of it. There's lots of misery in it, Rookie. Don't you know there is?"

"Yes," said Raven, "I know." Suddenly he remembered Anne and the bonds she had laid on him. Had he not suffered them, in a dumb way, finding no force within himself to strike them off? Had he been a coward, a dull fellow tied to women's restraining wills? And he had by no means escaped yet. Wasn't Anne inexorably by his side now, when he turned for an instant from the problem of Tira, saying noiselessly, this invisible force that was Anne: "What are you going to do about my last wish, my last command? You are thinking about Nan, about that strange woman, about yourself. Think about me." But he deliberately summoned his mind from the accusing vision of her, and turned it to Nan. "Then," he said, "there doesn't seem to be much hope for Dick, poor chap!"

"Doesn't there?" she inquired, a certain indignant passion in her voice. "Anyway, there's no hope for me. I'd like to marry Dick. I'd like to feel perfectly crazy to marry him. He won't write his poetry always. That's to the good, anyhow. If I don't marry him I shall be a miserable old thing, more and more positive, more and more like all the women of the family, the ones that didn't marry"—and they both knew Aunt Anne was in her mind—"drying rose leaves and hunting up genealogical trash."

"But, my own child," said Raven in a surge of pity for her, as if some clearest lens had suddenly brought her nearer him, "you don't have to marry Dick to get away from that. You'll simply marry somebody else."

"No," said Nan, "you know I sha'n't."

"Then," said Raven, "there is somebody else."

She shook her head.

"I'm an odd number, Rookie," she said, with a bitterness he found foreign to her. "All those old stories of kindred souls may be true, but they're not true for me."

"You have probably," said Raven, a sharp light now on her, bringing out the curves and angles of her positive mind, "you have done some perverse thing to send him off, and you won't move a finger to bring him back."

Nan laughed. She was no longer bitter. This was the child he knew.

"Rookie," she said, "you are nearer an absolute fool than any human being I ever saw. If I wanted a man back, it's likely I could get him. Most of us can. But do you think I would?"

"Then you're proud, sillykins."

"I'm not proud," said Nan—and yet proudly. "If I loved anybody, I'd let him walk over me. That's what Charlotte would say. Can't you hear her? It isn't for my sake. It's for his. Do you think I'd bamboozle him and half beckon and half persuade, the way women do, and trap him into the great enchantment? It is an enchantment. You know it is. But I'd rather he'd keep his grip on things—on himself—and walk away from me, if that's where it took him. I'd rather he'd walk straight off to somebody else, and break his heart, if it came that way."

"Good Lord, Nan," said Raven, "where do you get such thoughts?"

"Get them?" she repeated. "I got them from you first. You've been a slave all your life. Don't you know you have? Don't you know you had cobwebs spun round you, round and round, till she had you tight, hand and foot, not hers but so you couldn't walk off to anybody else? And even now, after her death——"

"Stop," said Raven. "That's enough, Nan."

Again Anne Hamilton was beside them on the wintry road, and they were hurting her inexpressibly.

"That's it," said Nan. "You're afraid she'll hear."

"If I am," said Raven, "it's not——" There he stopped.

"No," said Nan. She had relented. Her eyes were soft. "You're not afraid of her. But you are afraid of hurting her. And even that's weak, Rookie—in a man. Don't be so pitiful. Leave it to the women."

Raven laughed a little now. Again she seemed a child, crying after the swashbuckling hero modern man has put into the discard, where apparently he has to stay, except now and then when he ventures out and struts a little. But it avails him nothing. Somebody laughs, and back he has to go.

"I am pretty stupid," he said. "But never mind about an old stager like me. Don't be afraid of showing him—the man, I mean—all your charm. Don't be afraid of going to his head. You've got enough to justify every possible hope you could hold out to him. You're the loveliest—Nan, you're the loveliest thing I ever saw."

"The loveliest?" said Nan, again recklessly. "Lovelier than Tira?"

For an instant she struck him dumb. Was Tira so lovely? To him certainly she had a beauty almost inexpressible. But was it really inherent in her? Or was it something in the veil he found about her, that haze of hopeless suffering?

"Do you think she's beautiful?"

His voice was keen; curiosity had thinned it to an edge. Nan answered it with exactness.

"I think she's the most beautiful thing I ever saw. She doesn't know it. If she did, she'd probably wave her hair and put on strange chiffons, what Charlotte calls dewdads. She'd have to be the cleverest woman on earth to resist them. And because she's probably never been an inch out of this country neighborhood, she'd rig herself up—Charlotte again!—in the things the girls like round here. But she either doesn't know her power or she doesn't care."

"I'm inclined to think," said Raven slowly, "she never has looked at herself in that way. It has brought her things she doesn't want, things that made her suffer. And she's worked so hard trying to manage the whole business—life and her sufferings—she hasn't had time to lay much stress on her looks."

"It's all so strange," said Nan, as if the barriers were down and she wanted to indicate something hardly clear to herself. "You see, she isn't merely beautiful. Most of us look like what we are. We're rather nice looking, like me, or we're plain. But she 'takes back,' as Charlotte would say. She reminds you of things, pictures, and music, and dead queens—isn't there a verse about 'queens that died young and fair'?—and—O heavens, Rookie! I can't say it—but all the old hungers and happinesses, the whole business."

"I wonder," said Raven impetuously, "if you think she's got any mind at all. Or whether it's nothing but line and color?"

Nan shook her head.

"She's got something better than a mind. She has a faithful heart. And if a man—a man I cared about—got bewitched by her, I'd tell him to snatch her up and run off with her, and even if he found she was hollow inside, he'd have had a minute worth living for, and he could take his punishment and say 'twas none too much."

"You'd tell him!" Raven suggested, smiling at her heat and yet moved by it. "You weren't going to fetter your man by telling him anything."

"No," said Nan, returned to her composure, which was of a careless sort, "I shouldn't, really. I'd hope though. I'd allow myself to hope he'd snatch her away from that queer devil's darning needle she's married to, and buy her a divorce and marry her."

"You would, indeed! Then you don't know love, my Nan, for you don't know jealousy. And with a mystery woman like that, wouldn't the man be forever wondering what's behind that smile of hers? Tenney wonders. It isn't that flashy fellow at the prayer-meeting that makes him wonder. It's the woman herself. Yet she's simplicity itself—she's truth—but no, Nan, you don't know jealousy."

"Don't I?" said Nan, unperturbed. "You're mighty clever, aren't you, Rookie? But I tell you again I'd rather leave my man to live his life as he wants it than live it with him. Now"—she threw off the moment as if she had permanently done with it—"now, I went to see her this morning."

"You did? What for?"

"It was so horrible last night," said Nan. "Hideous! There was that creature sitting there beside her, that perfumery man."

"Perfumery?"

"Yes. He smelled like the soap the boys used to buy, the ones that lived 'down the road a piece.' He frightened her, just his sitting down beside her. And it put some kind of a devil into that awful Tenney. I thought about her all night, and this morning I went over and asked her to go back with me now, while Tenney's away chopping. I told her I'd help her pack, and Jerry'd take us to the train."

"What did she say?"

"Nothing. Oh, yes, she did." Nan laughed, in the irritation of it. "She said I was real good. Said Israel was going to kill soon."

"Kill?"

"Hogs. There were two. They'd weigh three hundred apiece. It was quite a busy season, trying out and all, and no time for her to be away."

It was irresistible. They both laughed. They had been dowering her with the grace of Helen, and now she stood before them inexorably bent on trying out.

"I gather," said Nan, rather drily, "you're going over to see her yourself."

"Yes," said Raven. "But not till I've seen you. You ran away from Milly. Now Milly's gone, and you're coming back."

Her eyes roved from him to the steadfast green of the slope across the road. She was moved. Her mouth twitched at the tight corners, her eyes kindled.

"It would be fun," said she.

"Besides, think how silly to keep Charlotte provisioning you and tugging over to spend nights, poor Charlotte!"

"I really stayed," said Nan, temporizing, "for this Tira of yours—and Tenney's."

This form of statement sounded malicious to her own ears, but not to his. Sometimes Nan wished he were not quite so "simple honest." It was, she suspected, the woman's part—her own—to be unsuspecting and obstinately good.

"But if," she continued, "she won't have anything to do with you, I might as well go back to town."

"Not yet," said Raven. "I've got something to tell you."

"What's it about?"

"Old Crow."

Nan thought a minute.

"All right," she said. She looked at once unreasonably happy, like, he extravagantly thought, a beautiful statue with the fountain of life playing over it. "I'll come—for Old Crow."

"Pick up your duds," said he, "and I'll go along and see if I can make anything out of her. You be ready when I come back."

Nan looked after him and thought how fast he walked and how Tira, as well as Tira's troubles, drew him. If Tira knew the power of her own beauty, how terribly decisive a moment this would be in the great dark kitchen Nan had just left! And yet if Tira, having looked in her mirror and the mirror of life, were cruelly sophisticated enough to play that part, the man would be given odds to resist her. He was no ingenuous youth.



XXV

Raven walked up to the side door of the house and knocked. She came at once, her face blank of any expectation, though at seeing him she did stand a little tenser and her lips parted with a quicker breath.

"Good morning," said he. "Aren't you going to ask me in?"

"Oh!" breathed Tira. It seemed she did actually consider keeping him out. "I don't know," she blundered. "I'm alone, but I never feel certain——"

She never felt certain, he concluded, whether her peril might not be upon her. But he had a sense of present security. He had seen Tenney disappearing inside the fringe of woods.

"Let me come in," he said quietly. "I want to talk to you. It's cold for you out here."

She moved aside and he followed her to the kitchen. The room was steaming with warmth, the smell of apple sauce and a boiling ham. Her moulding board, dusted with flour, was on the table, and her yellow mixing bowl beside it. Raven did not think what household duties he might be delaying, but the scene was sweet to him: a haven of homely comfort where she ought to find herself secure. There was, in the one casual glance he took, no sign of the child, and he was glad. That strange, silent witness, since Nan and Charlotte had both, by a phrase, banished the little creature into an alien room of its own, had begun to embarrass him. He wanted to talk to Tira alone.

"Baby's in the bedroom," said Tira, answering his thought. "When he's in here, I wake him up steppin' round."

Raven stood waiting for her to sit, and she drew forward a chair, placing it to give her an oblique view from the window. Having seated herself, she asked him, with a shy hospitality:

"Won't you set?"

He drew a chair nearer her and his eyes sought her in the light of what Nan had said. Yes, she was beautiful. Her blue calico, faded to a softness suited to old pictures, answered the blue of her eyes. The wistful look of her face had deepened. It was all over a gentle interrogation of sweet patience and unrest.