Tira, recognizing herself, with a dull indifference, as too tired to move, was not at first conscious of thinking either about what she had gone through or what was before her. But as her muscles relaxed, her mind, as it was always doing now for its rest and comfort, left this present scene where, for the first active moments, Tenney had filled her thoughts, and settled upon Raven. He had told her to come to him. He had ordered it, as if she belonged to him, and there was heavenly sweetness in that. Tira loved this new aspect of him. She rested in it, as a power alive to her, protecting her, awake to her well-being. Yet, after that first glance at Tenney, sitting there with head bent over the stick, she had not a moment's belief in her right to go. It was sweet to be commanded, to her own safety, but here before her were the dark necessities she must share. And suddenly, as she sat there, and the sense of Raven's protectingness enfolded her and she grew more rested, a feeling of calmness fell upon her, of something friendly nearer her than Raven even (though it had seemed to her lately as if nothing could be more near), and she almost spoke aloud, voicing her surprised delight: "Why, the Lord Jesus Christ!" But she did not speak the words aloud. She refrained in time, for fear of disturbing Tenney in some way not wise for him; but her lips formed them and they comforted her. Then, suddenly tranquillized and feeling strong, she rose and fed the child and made some bustling ado, talking about milk and bread, hoping to rouse Tenney to the thought of food. But he sat there darkly, and by and by she put the kettle on and, in the most ordinary manner, made tea and spread their table.

"Come," she said to him. "Supper's ready. We might's well draw up."

He did glance at her then, as if she had surprised him, and she smiled, to give him confidence. At that time Tira felt all her strength, her wholesome rude endurance, to the full, and stood tall and steady there in the room with the two who were her charge and who now, it seemed to her, needed her equally. Tenney rose with difficulty and stood a moment to get control of his foot. He walked to the table and was about to sit down. But suddenly his eyes seemed to be drawn by his hand resting on the back of the chair. He raised it, turned it palm up and scrutinized it, and then he looked at the other hand with the same questioning gaze, and, after a moment, when Tira, reading his mind, felt her heart beating wildly, he went to the sink and pumped water into the basin. He began to wash his hands. There was nothing on them, no stain such as his fearful mind projected, but he washed them furiously and without looking.

"You stop a minute," said Tira quietly. "I'll give you a mite o' hot water, if you'll wait."

She filled a dipper from the tea kettle, and, tipping the water from his basin into the sink, mixed hot and cold, trying it solicitously, and left him to use it.

"There!" she said, standing by the table waiting for him, "you come as quick's you can. Your tea'll be cold."

So they drank their tea together, and Tira forced herself to eat, and, from the store of woman's experience within her, knew she ought to urge him also to hearten himself with meat and bread. But she did not dare. She could feel the misery of his sick mind. She had always felt it. But there were reactions, of obstinacy, of rage almost, in the obscurity of its workings, and these she could not challenge. But she poured him strong tea, and when he would take no more, got up and cleared the table. And he kept his place, staring down at his hand. He was studying it with a look curiously detached, precisely as he had regarded it at the moment when he seemed to become aware of its invisible stain. Tira, as she went back and forth about the room, found herself also, by force of his attitude, glancing at the hand. Almost she expected to find it red. When her work was done, she sat down by the stove and undressed the baby, who was fretful still and crying in a way she was thankful to hear. It made a small commotion in the room. If it irritated Tenney into waking from his daze, so much the better.

Ten o'clock came, and Tenney had not stirred. When eleven struck she roused from her doze and saw his head had sunken forward; he was at the nodding point of sleep. She had been keeping up the fire, and presently she rose to put in wood, knocking down a stick she had left on the end of the stove to be reached for noiselessly. He started awake and rose, pushing back his chair.

"Is that them?" he asked her, with a disordered wildness of mien. "Have they come?"

By this she knew he expected arrest for what he had done.

"No," she said, in her quietest voice. "Nobody's comin' here to-night. I dropped a stick o' wood, that's all. Don't you think you better poke off to bed?"

He did not answer her, but went to the window, put his hands to his face and peered out. Then he turned, stood a moment looking about the room as if for some suggestion of refuge, went to the couch, and lay down. Tira stood for a moment considering. Almost at once, he was asleep. She threw a shawl over him and went into the bedroom and stretched herself as she was on the bed.



XL

Raven, to his sorry amusement, discovered something. It was Milly, and she had changed. Indubitably Milly regarded him with a mixture of wonder and of awe. He had taken command of the situation in the house and developed it rationally. The house itself had become a converging point for all medical science could do for a man hit in a vital spot and having little chance of recovery. But what Raven knew to be the common sense of the measures he brought to pass, Milly, in her wildness of anxiety, looked upon as the miracles of genius. She even conciliated him, as the poor human conciliates his god. She brought him the burnt offering of her expressed belief, her humility of admiration. And whenever one of the family was allowed to supplement the nurses, by day or night, she effaced herself in favor of Raven or Nan. Raven was the magician who knew where healing lay. Nan was warmth and coolness, air and light. Dick's eyes followed Nan and she answered them, comforting, sustaining him, Raven and Milly fully believed, in his hold on earth. But as to Milly, Raven had to keep on wondering over her as she wondered at him. So implicit had been his belief in her acquired equipment for applying accepted remedies to the mischances of life, that he was amazed at seeing her devastated, overthrown. She was even less calm than the women he remembered here in this country neighborhood. When sickness entered their homes, they were, for the most part, models of efficient calm. They had reserves of energy. He wondered if Milly had crumbled so because she had not only to act but to decide how to seem to act. She had to keep up the wearisome routine of fitting her feelings to her behavior, her behavior to her feelings. There were not only things to be done; there were also the social standards of what ought, in crises, to be felt. She had to satisfy her gods. And she simply wasn't strong enough. Her hold was broken. She knew it, clutched at him and hung on him, a dead weight, while he buoyed her up. Were they all, he wondered, victims of the War? Milly, as she said that night when she came to him in her stark sincerity while Dick lay unconscious, had given him up once. She had given him to the War, and done the act with the high decorum suited to it. And the country had returned him to her. But now, grotesque, bizarre beyond words, she had to surrender him to a fool "shooting pa'tridges." For facing a travesty like that, she had no decorum left.

Dick, too, was the victim of abnormal conditions. He had been summoned to the great act of sacrifice to save the world, and the call had challenged him to after judgments he was not ripe enough to meet. It had beguiled him into a natural sophistry. For had not the world, in its need, called mightily on the sheer strength and endurance of youth to slay the dragon of brute strength in her enemies? Youth had done it. Therefore there was no dragon, whether of the mind or soul, it could not also slay. His fellows told him so, and because they were his fellows and spoke the tongue he understood, he believed it with a simple honesty that was Dick.

As to Nan, she seemed to Raven the one sane thing in a bewildered world; and for himself: "I'm blest if I believe I'm so dotty, after all," he mused. "What do you think about it?" And this last he addressed, not to himself, but to the ever-present intelligence of Old Crow. He kept testing things by what Old Crow would think. He spoke of him often, as of a mind active in the universe, but only to Nan. And one night, late enough in the spring for the sound of running water and a bitterness of buds in the air, he said it to her when she came down the path to him where he stood listening to the stillness broken by the ticking of the season's clock—steady, familiar sounds, that told him winter had broken and the heart of things was beating on to leaf and bloom. He had, if he was not actually waiting for her, hoped she would come out, and now he saw her coming, saw her step back into the hall for a scarf and appear again, holding it about her shoulders. At last, firm as she was in spirit, she had changed. She was thinner, with more than the graceful meagerness of youth, and her eyes looked pathetically large from her pale face. She had seen Dick go slipping down the slope, and now that beneficent reactions were drawing him slowly back again, she was feeling the waste of her own bodily fortitude.

"Where shall we go?" she asked him. "Been to the hut lately?"

No, Raven told her, he hadn't been there for days. They crossed the road and began the ascent into the woods.

"So you don't know whether she's been there?" Nan asked. She stopped to breathe in the wood fragrances, coming now like a surprise. She had almost forgotten "outdoors."

"Yes," said Raven. "I know. Sometimes I fancy she won't need to go there again. Tenney's a wreck. He sits there in the kitchen and doesn't speak. He isn't thinking about her. He's thinking of himself."

"How do you know? You haven't been over?"

"Yes, I went over the morning after the shooting. I intended to tell Tira to get her things on and come down to the house. But when I saw him—saw them—I couldn't."

"You were sorry for him?" Nan prompted.

They had reached the hut, and Raven took out the key from under the stone. Close by, there was a velvet fern frond ready to unfurl. He unlocked the door and they went in. Her last question he did not answer until he had thrown up windows and brought out chairs to the veranda at the west. When they were seated, he went on probing for his past impression and speaking thoughtfully.

"No, I don't know that I was particularly sorry for him. But somehow the two of them there together, with that poor little devil between them—well, it seemed to me I couldn't separate them. That's marriage, I suppose. Anyhow it looked to me like it: something you couldn't undo because they wouldn't have it undone."

Nan turned on him her old impetuous look.

"You simpleton!" she had it on her tongue to say. "She doesn't want it undone because anybody that lifts a finger will get you—not her—deeper into the mire." But she did say: "I don't believe you can even guess what she wants, chiefly because she doesn't want anything for herself. But if you didn't ask her to leave him, what did you do?"

"I told him to hold himself ready for arrest."

"You're a funny child," commented Nan. "You warn the criminal and give him a chance to skip."

"Yes," said Raven unsmilingly. "I hoped he would. I thought I was giving her one more chance. If he did skip, so much the better for her."

"How did she look?" asked Nan, and then added, tormenting herself, "Beautiful?"

"Yes, beautiful. Not like an angel, as we've seen her. Like a saint: haggard, with hungry eyes. I suppose the saints hunger, don't you? And thirst." He was looking off through the tree boles and Nan, also looking, found the distance dim and felt the sorrow of youth and spring. "Everything," said Raven, "seems to be in waves. It has its climax and goes down. Tenney's reached the climax of his jealousy. Now he's got himself to think about, and the other thing will go down. Rather a big price for Dick to pay, to make Tira safe, but he has paid and I fancy she's safe." He turned to her suddenly. "Milly's very nice to you," he asserted, half interrogatively.

He saw the corner of her mouth deepen a little as she smiled. Milly had not, they knew, been always nice.

"Yes," she agreed, "very nice. She gives me all the credit she doesn't give you about doctors and nurses and radiographs and Dick's hanging on by his eyelids. She says I've saved him."

"So you have," said Raven. "You've kept his heart up. And now you're tired, my dear, and I want you to go away."

"To go away?" said Nan. "Where?"

"Anywhere, away from us. We drain you like the deuce."

"No," said Nan, turning from him and speaking half absently, "I can't go away."

"Why can't you?"

"He'd miss me."

"He'd know why you went."

Her old habit of audacious truth-telling constrained her.

"I should have to write to him," she said. "And I couldn't. I couldn't keep it up. I can baby him all kinds of ways when he's looking at me with those big eyes. But I couldn't write him as he'd want me to. I couldn't, Rookie. It would be a promise."

"Milly thinks you have promised." This he ventured, though against his judgment.

"No," said Nan. "No, I haven't promised. Do you want me to?"

"I don't know," Raven answered, without a pause, as if he had been thinking about it interminably. "If it had some red blood in it, if you were—well, if you loved him, Nan, I should be mighty glad. I'd like to see you living, up to the top notch, having something you knew was the only thing on earth you wanted. But these half and half things, these falterings and doing things because somebody wants us to! God above us! I've faltered too much myself. I'd rather have made all the mistakes a man can compass, done it without second thought, than have ridden up to the wall and refused to take it."

"Do you think of her all the time?" she ventured, in her turn, and perversely wondered if he would think she meant Tira and not Aunt Anne.

But he knew. "No," he said, "I give you my word she's farther away from me than she ever was in her life. For a while she was here, at my elbow, asking me what I was going to do about her Palace of Peace. But suddenly—I don't know whether it's because my mind has been on Dick—suddenly I realized she was gone. It's the first time." Here he stopped, and Nan knew he meant it was the first time since his boyhood that he had felt definitely free from that delicate tyranny. And being jealous for him and his dominance over his life, she wondered if another woman had crowded out the memory of Aunt Anne. Had Tira done it?

"And you haven't decided about the money."

"I've decided," he surprised her by saying at once, "to talk it out with Anne."

She could only look at him.

"One night," he continued, "when Dick was at his worst, I was there alone with him, an hour or so, and I was pretty well keyed up. I seemed to see things in a stark, clear way. Nothing mattered: not even Dick, though I knew I never loved the boy so much as I did at that minute. I seemed to see how we're all mixed up together. And the things we do to help the game along, the futility of them. And suddenly I thought I wouldn't stand for any futility I could help, and I believe I asked Old Crow if I wasn't right. 'Would you?' I said. I knew I spoke out loud, for Dick stirred. I felt a letter in my pocket—it was about the estate, those bonds, you remember—and I knew I'd got to make up my mind about Anne's Palace of Peace."

Nan's heart was beating hard. Was he going to follow Aunt Anne's command, the poor, pitiful letter that seemed so generous to mankind and was yet so futile in its emotional tyranny?

"And I made up my mind," he said, with the same simplicity of hanging to the fact and finding no necessity for explaining it, "to get hold of Anne, put it to her, let her see I meant to be square about it, but it had got to be as I saw it and not as she did. Really because I'm here and she isn't."

Her eyes filled with tears, and as she made no effort to restrain them, they ran over and spilled in her lap. She had thought hard for him, but never so simply, so sternly as this.

"How do you mean, Rookie," she asked humbly, in some doubt as to her understanding. "How can you get hold of Aunt Anne?"

"I don't know," said he. "But I've got to. I may not be able to get at her, but she must be able to get at me. She's got to. She's got to listen and understand I'm doing my best for her and what she wants. Old Crow understands me. And when Anne does—why, then I shall feel free."

And while he implied it was freedom from the tyranny of the bequest, she knew it implied, too, a continued freedom from Aunt Anne. Would he ever have set his face so fixedly toward that if he had not found Tira? And what was Tira's silent call to him? Was it of the blood only, because she was one of those women nature has manacled with the heaviness of the earth's demands? Strangely, she knew, nature acts, sometimes sending a woman child into the world with the seeds of life shut in her baby hand, a wafer for men to taste, a perfume to draw them across mountain and plain. The woman may be dutiful and sound, and then she suffers bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her womanhood—here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch—he did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth because it was the maternal that spoke in her, and all the forces of nature must guard the maternal, that its purpose may be fulfilled. Tira could not speak the English language with purity, but this was immaterial. She was Tira, and as Tira she had innocently laid on Raven the old, dark magic. Nan was under no illusion as to his present abandonment of Tira's cause. That he seemed to have accepted the ebbing of her peril, that he should speak of it with something approaching indifference, did not mean that he had relaxed his vigilance over her. He was not thinking of her with any disordered warmth of sympathy. But he was thinking. Suddenly she spoke, not knowing what she was going to say, but out of the unconscious part of her:

"Rookie, you don't want anything really, do you, except to stand by and give us all a boost when we're down?"

Raven considered a moment.

"I don't know," he said, "precisely what I do want. If you told me Old Crow didn't want anything but giving folks a boost, I'm with you there. He actually didn't. You can tell from his book."

"I can't seem to bear it," said Nan. She was looking at the darkening woods and her wet eyes blurred them more than the falling dusk. "It isn't healthy. It isn't right. I want you to want things like fury, and I don't know whether I should care so very much if you banged yourself up pretty well not getting them. And if you actually got them! O Rookie! I'd be so glad."

"You're a dear child," said Raven, "a darling child."

"That's it," said Nan. "If you didn't think I was a child, perhaps you'd want me. O Rookie! I wish you wanted me!"

Into Raven's mind flashed the picture of Anne on her knees beside him saying, in that sharp gasp of her sorrow, "You don't love me." This was no such thing, yet, in some phase, was life going to repeat itself over and over in the endless earth journeys he might have to make, futilities of mismated minds, the outcry of defrauded souls? But at least this wasn't his cowardly silence on the heel of Anne's gasping cry. He could be honest here, for this was Nan.

"My darling," he said, "you're nearer to me than anything in this world—or out of it. Don't you make any mistake about that. And if I don't want things 'like fury,' as you say, it's a matter of the calendar, that's all. Dick wants them like fury. So do you. I'm an old chap, dear. You can't set back the clock."

But he had pushed her away, as his aloofness had pushed Anne. He had thrown Anne back upon her humiliated self. He had tossed Nan forward into Dick's generation and hers. But here was the difference. She wasn't going to cry out, "You don't love me." Instead, she turned to him, shivering a little and drawing her scarf about her shoulders.

"We'd better go down," she said. "It's getting cold. Dick'll be wondering."

They got up and Raven set the chairs inside the hut and took his glance about to see if all was in order: for he did not abandon the unwilling hope that Tira might sometime come. As they went down the hill the talk turned to the hylas and the spring, but when they reached the house Nan did not go in to Dick. She went to her own room and lay down on her bed and thought passionately of leaving Rookie free. How was it possible? Could he be free while she was bound? Sometimes of late she had been so tired that she could conceive of no refuge but wild and reckless outcry. And what could he think she meant when she said: "I wished you wanted me"?



XLI

Spring came on fast and Nan, partly to assure Milly she wasn't to be under foot forever, talked of opening her house and beginning to live there, for the first time without Aunt Anne. But she predicted it, even to Milly, with no great interest, and Raven, though he had urged her to run away from the cloudy weather Milly and Dick made for her, protested against her living alone. Dick was now strong enough to walk from his room to the porch, and Raven, watching him, saw in him a greater change than the languor of low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of it all, patently acquiescent.

Then Nan found herself rested, suddenly, in the way of youth. One morning she got up quite herself again, and wrote her housekeeper to assemble servants and bring them up, and told Raven he couldn't block her any longer. She had done it for herself, and she quoted the over-worked commonplace of the psychological moment. He, also believing in the moment, refrained from argument and went over to open doors and windows. He was curiously glad of a word with her house, not so much to keep up old acquaintance as to ask its unresponsiveness whether it was going to mean Nan alone for him hence-forth or whether, at a time like this when he stood interrogating it, Anne Hamilton also stood there, in her turn interrogating him. Was she there to-day? Everything spoke mutely of her, the wall-paper she had prized for its ancient quaintness, the furniture in the lines of grace she loved. At that desk she had sat, slender figure of the gentlewoman of a time older than her own. Was her presence so etched in impalpable tracery on the air that he ought to feel it? Was she aching with defeated hopes because she might almost be expecting him, not only to remember but even to hear and see? No death could be more complete than the death of her presence here. He could not, even by the most remorseful determination, conjure up the living thought of her. Somehow it had seemed that here at least he might explain himself to her, feel that he had made himself clear. He did actually speak to her:

"I can't do it, Anne. Don't you see I can't?"

This was what he had meant when he told Nan he must get hold of her. What place could be so fortunate as this, full of the broken threads of her personality? They only needed knitting up by his passionate challenge, to be Anne. He called upon her, he caught the fluttering fringes of her presence in his trembling hands. But he could not knit them up. They broke, they floated away. It seemed, from the dead unresponsiveness of her house, as if there had never been any Anne. So he gave it up, and, in extreme dullness of mind, went about opening windows, and as the breeze idled in and stirred the waiting air and the sunlight rushed to it, he seemed to be sweeping the last earthly vestiges of her from the place that had known her best. And at once it appeared to him that he had done an inexorable, perhaps even a cruel thing, and he hurried out, leaving the air and sun to be more merciful than he.

When he went into his own yard he saw Dick sitting under the western pines, where Raven had set a couple of chairs and had a hammock swung. Dick had ignored the hammock. He scarcely sat at ease, and Raven had an idea he was meeting discomfort halfway, with the idea of making himself fit. He did say a word of thanks for the chairs.

"Only," he added, "don't let it look too sociable. That'll be as bad as the porch." He laughed a little, and concluded: "I don't mean you, Jack. You know that, don't you?"

Raven guessed he was allowing himself the indulgence of avoiding his mother. For now Milly, as he recovered, had struggled hard for her lost poise and regained it, in a slightly altered form, it is true; but still she had it pretty well in hand, she was unweariedly attentive to him and inexorably self-sacrificing in leaving Nan the right of way. Her life had again become a severely ritualistic social enterprise, but now she was just far enough lacking in spontaneity to fail in playing her game as prettily as she used. It was tiring to watch, chiefly because you could see how it tired her to play.

Raven went down the little foot-path to Dick, and he thought anew how illness had ravaged him. He had the tired eyes, the hollow cheek of ineffective youth.

"Hoping you'd come," said Dick. "Now, where's Tenney?"

"Tenney," said Raven, "is at home, so far as I know. I saw him last night."

"Go up there?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

Raven smiled a little, as if he found himself foolish or at best incomprehensible.

"Well," he said, "I gave him every chance to skip. I hoped he would. That would be the simplest way out. But when I found he wasn't going to, I began to go there every night to let him see I was keeping an eye on him. I don't go in. I just call him out and we stare over each other's heads and I inform him you're better or not so well (the probation dodge, you know) and he never hears me, apparently, and then I go away. I've got used to doing it. Maybe he's got used to having it done. Maybe it's a relief to him. I don't know."

"Does he still look like a lunatic at large?"

"More or less. His eyes are less like infuriated shoe buttons, but on the whole he seems to have quieted a lot."

"You don't suppose," said Dick, "you've put the fear of God into him?"

"Not much. If anybody has, it was you when he saw you topple over and knew he'd got the wrong man."

"He was laying for you, then," said Dick.

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Tira was there, telling me he'd set up a gun, and she'd got to the point of letting Nan take her away, when he fired. What the dickens were you up there for, anyhow?" he ended, not quite able to deny himself reassurance.

"I'd heard he was out with a gun," said Dick briefly. "Charlotte told me. And I gathered from your leaving word for Nan that the Tenney woman was there—at the hut, you know."

"Don't say 'the Tenney woman,'" Raven suggested. "I can't say I feel much like calling her by his name myself, but 'the Tenney woman' isn't quite——"

"No," said Dick temperately. "All right, old man, I won't."

"Awfully sorry you got it instead of me," said Raven, apparently without feeling. He had wanted to say this for a long time. "Wish it had been the other way round."

"I don't, then," said Dick, gruffly in his turn. "It's been an eye-opener, the whole business."

"What has?"

"This." He evidently meant his own hurt and the general viewpoint induced by it. "I'm not going to stay round here, you know," he continued, presenting this as a proposition he had got to state abruptly or not at all.

"Why not?"

"I don't believe I could say," Dick temporized, in a way that suggested he didn't mean to try. "There's Mum, you know. She's going to be at me again to go in for my degree. Oh, yes, she will, soon as she thinks I won't come unglued. Well, I don't want it. I simply don't. And I don't want what she calls a profession: any old thing, you know, so long as it's a profession. I couldn't go in for that either, Jack. If I do anything, it's got to be on my own, absolutely on my own. Fact is, I'd like to go back to France."

"Reconstruction?" Raven suggested, after a minute.

"Maybe. Not that I'm specially valuable. Only it would be something to get my teeth into."

Was this, too, Raven wondered, an aftermath of the War? Had it shaken the atoms of his young purpose too far astray for them ever to cohere again? Dick had had one purpose. Even that didn't seem to be surviving, in any operative form.

"Writing?" he suggested. "Oxford—and poetry?"

Dick shook his head.

"Well," said Raven, "if it's France then, maybe I'll go with you."

Dick smiled slightly. Did his lip tremble?

"No," he said, at once, as if he'd been waiting for it, "you stay here and look after Nan."

This gave Raven the slightest opening.

"That's the devil of it," he said, "your leaving Nan."

"Yes," said Dick quietly, his eyes on an orchard tree where an unseen robin sang, "I'm leaving her."

"She's been devoted to you," Raven ventured.

"Quite so. I've been lying there and seeing——"

He paused and Raven prompted:

"Seeing what?"

Dick finished, with a deeper quiet:

"Seeing her look at you."

Raven, too, stared at the tree where the robin kept up the bright beauty of his lay. He was conscious, not of any need to combat this finality of Dick's, but of a sense, more poignant than he could support without calling on his practiced endurance, of the pity of it, the "tears of things." Here was youth, its first bitter draught in hand, not recoiling from it, but taking it with the calmness of the older man who has fewer years to taste it in. He could not ask the boy to consider, to make no hasty judgment. Whatever lay behind the words, it was something of a grave consequence. And Dick himself led the way out of the slough where they were both caught.

"Curious things come to you," he said, "when you're laid by the heels and can't do anything but think: I mean, as soon as you get the nerve to think."

"Such as?"

"Well, poetry, for one thing. When I began to think—and I didn't want it to be about Nan any more than I could help—I used to have a temperature, you know—puzzled them, doctor, nurse, all of you. Nan, that was! I knew it, though the rest of you hadn't the sense. Well, I made my mind run away from it. I said I'd think about poetry, my long poem. I'd lie there and say it over to myself, and see if the rest of it wouldn't come." He laughed a little, though not bitterly. He was frankly amused. "What do you think? I couldn't even remember the confounded thing. But I could other things: the verse I despised. Wasn't that the limit? Omar Khayyam! I lay there and remembered it by the yard."

"That's easy," said Raven. "Nothing like the first impressions. They stick."

"Evidently," said Dick. "They did stick. And my stuff didn't."

"Is this," Raven ventured, not seeing whether the boy was quivering under his calm, "a case against the moderns?"

Dick answered promptly, though Raven could only wonder, after all, just what he meant:

"It's a case against me." He went on, his eyes still on the melodious orchard converts. It must have been a vagabond robin swaggering there, really deriding nests, he found so much leisure to sing about them. "I wanted to say I didn't get you that time when you told me you'd pretty much done with the world. I though Mum was right: cafard, you remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system. I'm done with it."

Raven looked at him in a sudden sharp misery of apprehension. First, Old Crow, then he, then Dick, one generation following another.

"Don't you go that path, old man," he said. "You'll only lose your way and have to come back."

"Come back?"

"Yes. Old Crow did. Remember the book. He challenged the whole business, and then he swung round to adoring it all, the world and Whoever made it. He didn't understand it a whit better, but he believed, he accepted, he adored."

"What would you say?" Dick asked curiously, after a moment. "Just what happened to him?"

"Why, I suppose," said Raven, "in the common phrase, he found God."

They were silent for a time and both of them tried desperately to think of the vagabond robin. Raven, his mind released by this fascination of dwelling on Dick apart from any responsibility of talking to him, found it running here, there, back and forth, over these weeks of their stay together. It halted, it ran on, it stopped again to consider, but always it was of Dick and incidentally of himself who didn't matter so much, but who had to be in it all. Were they at one in this epidemic of world sickness? As the great explosive forces of destruction and decay seemed to have released actual germs to attack the physical well-being of races, had the terrible crashes of spiritual destinies unsettled the very air of life, poisoned it, drugged it with madness and despair? Was there a universal disease of the mind, following this wholesale slaughter, which the human animal hadn't been able really to bear though it had come to a lull in it, so that now it was, in sheer shrieking panic, clutching at its various antidotes to keep on living? One antidote was forgetfulness. They were forgetting the War, some thousands of decent folk who clearly had meant to remember. A horrible antidote that, but perhaps they had to take it to save themselves. Too big a price to pay for living (and such thread-paper lives!) but still there did seem to be a prejudice in favor of the mere drawing of breath. Maybe you couldn't blame them, spinning in the sunshine like insects of a day. Some of the others had to save themselves by the wildness of a new intoxication. They danced, their spirits danced: a carmagnole it was, a dance of death, the death of the spirit as he saw it. But maybe, with this preposterous love of life in them they, too, had to do it. Maybe you couldn't blame them. He and Dick—they had been like two children, scared out of their wits, crying out, hitting at each other in the dark. Youth and age, that was what they had fought about. It had been an unseemly scrap, a "you're another." Dick had been brought up against life as it looks when you see it naked, the world—and what a world! No wonder he swore it was a world such as neither he nor his fellows, like him aghast, would have made. He would simply have to live some quarter century to find out what sort of a world he and his fellows did actually make.

And Raven: Lord! Lord! what was the use of having traveled his own quarter century along the everlasting road if it didn't make him at least silent in sheer pity of it: youth singing along to the Dark Tower, jingling spurs and caracoling nag, something it didn't quite know the feeling of shut in its nervous hand? What was it shut there? The key, that was it: the key to the Dark Tower. Youth made no doubt it was the key, easy to hold, quick to turn, and the gate would fly open and, if youth judged best, even the walls would fall. And yet, and yet, hasn't all youth held the key for that borrowed interval and do the walls ever really fall? But if age doesn't know enough to include youth in its understanding, as youth (except the poets) couldn't possibly include age, why then!

"I am," thought Raven, returning to the Charlottian vernacular, "very small potatoes and few in a hill."

And what was the Dick, the permanent Dick who would remain after a few more years had stripped him of the merely imitative coloring he caught from his fellows? Dick talked about "herd madness," and here was he, at one with his own herd. He piped in verse because a few could sing, he—but what was the use hammering along on the old dissonance: youth, age, age, youth. And yet they needn't be dissonant. They weren't always. There was Nan! But as to Dick, he was simply Dick, a good substratum of his father, Anthony Powell, in him, a man who had had long views on trade and commerce and could manage men. And a streak of Raven, not too much but enough to imagine the great things the Powell streak would show him how to put his hand to.

Dick had been staring at him, finding him a long way off, and now he spoke, shyly if still curiously:

"Would you say you'd found God?"

Raven came back; he considered.

"No," he said, at last, "I couldn't say anything of the sort: it sounds like such awful swank. But I rather stand in with Old Crow. The fact is, Dick"—it was almost impossible to get this clarified in his own mind to the point of passing it on—"Old Crow's made me feel somehow—warm. As if there's a continuity, you know. As if they keep a hand on us, the generations that have passed. If that's so, we needn't be so infernally lonesome, now need we?"

"Well," said Dick, "we are pretty much alone."

"But we needn't be," said Raven, painfully sticking to his text, "because there are the generations. The being loyal to what the generations tried to build up, what they demand of us. And behind the whole caboodle of 'em, there's something else, something bigger, something warmer still. Really, you know, if only as a matter of convenience, we might call it—God."

A silence came here and he rather forgot Dick in fantastically thinking how you might have to climb to the shoulders of a man (Old Crow's, for instance) to make your leap to God. You couldn't do it from the ground. Dick had taken off his glasses to wipe them and Raven, recalling himself and glancing up, found his eyes suffused and soft.

"Jackie," said Dick, "you're a great old sport."



XLII

The spring had two voices for Tira, the voice of a fainting hope and the voice of fear. The days grew so capriciously lovely that her heart tried a few notes in answer, and she would stand at her door and look off over the mountain, fancying herself back there on the other side with the spirit of girlhood in her, drawing her, in spite of dreary circumstances, to run, to throw herself on the ground by cool violet banks to dream and wake, all flushed and trembling, and know she must not tell that dream. But when the dusk came down and the hylas peeped and the moist air touched her cheek, she would lose courage and her heart beat miserably in tune with the melancholy of spring. Still, on the whole, she was coming alive, and no one knew better than she that life, to be life, must be also a matter of pain. Tenney was leaving her to a great extent free. He was off now, doing his fencing, and he would even, returning at noon or night, forget to fall into the exaggerated limp he kept in reserve to remind her of his grievance. She had not seen Raven for a long time now, except as he and Nan went by, always looking at the house, once or twice halting a moment in the road, as if debating whether they should call. And Tira, when she saw them, from her hiding behind the curtain, would step to the door and fasten it against them. She would not answer, she told herself, if they knocked. But they never did knock. They went on and left her to her chosen loneliness. For an instant she would be unreasonably hurt, and then smile at herself, knowing it was she who had denied them.

It was an April morning when the spring so got into her blood that she began to wish for things. They were simple things she wished for: chiefly to feel herself active in the air and sun. She wanted to go away, to tire herself out with motion, and she made up her mind that, if Tenney went to the long pasture fencing, she would shut the house and run off with the baby into the woods. The baby was heavy now, but to-day, in her fullness of strength, his weight was nothing to her. They might even go over to Mountain Brook by the path "'cross lots" where the high stepping stones led to the track round the mountain. She loved the look of the stepping stones in spring when the river swirled about them and they dared you to cross and then jeered at you because the water foamed and threatened. She sang a little, finishing her morning tasks, and Tenney, coming from the barn with his axe, to start on his day's fencing, heard her sing. Tira, when she saw him, was in such haste to be off herself that she called to him from the window:

"Here! don't you forget your luncheon. I've got it 'most put up."

He glanced back over his shoulder, and spoke curtly:

"I don't want it. I'm goin' over on the knoll."

Her heart fell. The day was done. She would have to stay and get his dinner. Even an hour's vagabondage would be impossible, for the knoll was across the road overlooking the house and he would see her go. All these weeks she had held herself to a strict routine, so that every minute could be accounted for. This day only she had meant to break her habit and run. It was over then. She was bitterly disappointed, as if this, she thought, smiling a little to herself, was the only day there was. She might as well wash blankets. She went to the bedroom to slip off her dress and put on a thick short-sleeved apron: for Tira was not of those delicate-handed housewives who can wash without splashing. She dripped, in the process, as if, Tenney used to tell her in the first days of their marriage, she got in all over. In her bedroom, with the sweet air on her bare arms and the robins calling and the general tumult and busy ecstasy outside, she stopped to wonder. Could she take the baby and slip out by the side door, and come back in time to fry Tenney's ham for dinner? No, it wouldn't do. He would be in for a drink, or the cow shut up in the barn with her calf would "loo" and he would wonder if anything was happening to them. A dozen things might come up to call him back. She would wash blankets. Then she saw the baby, through the doorway, sitting where she had put him, on the kitchen rug, and a quick anger for him possessed her.

"In that hot kitchen," she said aloud, "when there's all outdoors!"

She dragged one of the blankets from the bed, ran out as she was, bare-armed, bare-necked, and spread it on the grass in front of the house.

"It's goin' to be washed anyways," she placated the housewifely instinct within her, and she ran in for the baby and set him on the blanket. One heart-breaking thing about this baby who was "not right" was that there were no answers in him. She had tried all the wiles of motherhood to show him how she loved him, and coax him to respond, not so much in actual sentience to her as a baby's rejoinder to the world he could see and touch. He had no answers. But this morning when the sun fell warmly on him and the breeze stirred his coppery hair, he did, it seemed, hear for an instant the voice of earth. He put out his fat hands and gurgled into a laugh. Tira went mad. She was immediately possessed by an overwhelming desire to hear him laugh again. She called to him, in little cooing shouts, she stretched out her arms to him, and then, when he would not be persuaded even to turn his head to her, she began to dance. Perhaps after the first step she really forgot about him. Perhaps the mother ecstasy ran into the ecstasy of spring. Perhaps, since she could not answer the lure of the woods by running to them that morning, the woods ran to her, the green magic of them, and threw their spell on her. She hardly saw what was about her, even the child. The cherry tree in bloom was a great whiteness at her right, the sun was a splendor, the breeze stirred her hair, and the child's head was a coppery ball she fixed her eyes upon. And while she waved her arms and danced, Martin, who had seen her from the road, and left his horse there, was coming toward her across the grass. Why could she not have seen him stop? Why was he nothing more than a tree trunk in the woods, standing there while she flung up her white arms and danced? The earth spirits may know. Pan might know. They had got Tira that day, released from her winter's chill. She did not, and still less Martin, his own blood rising with every pulse.

"Hooray!" he yelled. "That's the talk."

He made a stride and Tira darted back. But it was not she he ran toward. It was the child. He bent to the baby, caught him up and tossed him knowingly and the baby, again incredibly, laughed. Tira, taken aback at the sight of Martin, like a sudden cloud on her day, was arrested, in her first rush toward him, by the pretty laugh. Her baby in Martin's hands: that was calamity unspeakable. But the child had laughed. She would hardly have known what price she would refuse even to the most desperate of evil spirits that could conjure up that laugh. She stood there breathless waiting on the moment, afraid of the event yet not daring to interrupt it, and Martin tossed the baby and the baby laughed again, as if it were "right." For Martin himself, except as the instrument of the miracle, she had hardly a thought. It might have been a hand out of heaven that had caught up the child, a hand from hell. But the child laughed. Martin, for the interval, was neither malevolent nor calculating. This was not one of his impish pleasantries. It might have been in the beginning, but he was enormously flattered at having touched the spring of that gurgling delight. For this was, he knew, a solemn baby. He had glanced at it, when he came Tira's way, but only carelessly and with no idea it was not like all babies. He supposed they began to take notice sometime, when they got good and ready. Queer little devils! But he was as vain and eager in his enjoyment of the response to his own charm as he was prodigal in using it. The spring day had got into his blood, too, and when he saw Tira dancing, the baby a part of the bright picture, he had taken the little devil up, with no purpose but somehow because it seemed natural, and when the child laughed he knew he had made a hit and kept on, singing now, not a cradle song but a man's song, something he had not himself thought of since he heard his old grandmother drone it between smokes, while she sat by the fire and dreamed of times past. It was something about Malbrook—"gone to the army"—"hope he never'll come back." And there was Tira now, within the circle of his fascination, bending a little toward him, her eyes darker than he had seen them for many a day, her white arms wide, as if she invited him. He wondered how a woman with her black hair could have a skin so white; but he never guessed the lovely arms were stretched toward the child and not to him, and that they would have snatched the baby but for that amazing laugh. He stopped, breathless more from his thoughts than his gay exertion, and gave a shout.

"Here!" he cried, to Tira, in a joviality of finding her at one with him and the day (this first prime day of spring, a day that ought to make a person shake a leg), "you take him. Fine little chap! Set him on the ground ag'in an' you an' me'll have a tell."

Tira took the step toward him and lifted her arms for the child. She was glad the wild game had ended. Martin put the baby into her arms, but instantly she felt his hands on her elbows, holding her.

"Guess that's the way to git you, ain't it?" he inquired, in jovial good humor. "You can't scratch with the youngster between us. You can't cut an' run. By thunder, Tira! you're as handsome as you were that day I see you first an' followed you home? Remember? You're like"—his quick mind saw it at a leap—"you're like this cherry tree, all a-bloom."

He bent his head to her arm, almost as white as the cherry bloom and kissed it. A shadow dropped upon them. It was only a little sailing cloud but it startled Tira more than the kiss; the look of the day had changed so suddenly and as if it were changing for them alone. For there outside was the bright affluence of spring just as it had been but over them the warning cloud. She glanced about, in the one instant of darkening, and on the knoll across the road saw what the kind little cloud might have been sent to tell her. Tenney stood there, a stark figure, watching them. Her numbness to the presence of Martin who stood holding her broke in a throb of fear. The instant before, his lips on her arm had been no more than the touch of a leaf that might have blown there. She did not even remember it. She lifted her face to his and, seeing the fear in it, he involuntarily released her and she stepped away from him.

"You go," she said. "Go quick. He's over there on the knoll. My God! don't look. Don't you know no better'n to look? He's fencin'. He's got his axe."

But Martin had looked. He gave a little disconcerted laugh and turned away.

"So long!" he called back over his shoulder. "Glad the little chap took to me. Have him out here an' whenever I'm goin' by——"

She did not hear. She had run, as if from nearing danger, into the house and closed the door behind her. It was warmer even in the few minutes since she had come out, but she had lost her delight in the open. She was afraid, and as Martin stepped into his wagon, he wondered why. Tira was a good, strong, husky girl, a streak of the gypsy in her. Sometimes in the old days he'd been half afraid of her himself when things didn't suit, mostly after he got carrying on with some other girl. The way her eyes opened on a chap! Why didn't she open 'em that way on Tenney? Queer proposition, a woman was, anyways.

Tira carried the baby into the front room and sat down by the window, still holding him. She pushed her chair back until the curtain hid her and, through the narrow strip between curtain and casing, kept her eyes on Tenney. For several minutes after Martin had driven away, he stood there, still as a tree. Then the tree came alive. Tenney moved back to the left, where the fence ran between field and pasture, and she lost him. But she could not hear his axe. In her anxiety she strained the child against her until he struggled and gave a fitful cry. She did not heed the cry. This, her instinct told her, was the only safe place for him on earth: his mother's arms.

All through the morning she sat there, looking now and then from the window, and still holding the child. When the clock struck eleven, the sound awoke her. If she was to get dinner, she must be about it. Was she to get dinner? Or was she to assume that this day marked the settlement of the long account? The house itself, still in its morning disorder, told her the moment had come. The house itself, it seemed to whisper, could not possibly go on listening to the things it had listened to through the winter or holding itself against the horror of the more horrible silence. Who would think of eating on the verge of this last inevitable settlement? And what would the settlement be? What was there—she thought over the enemies she had feared. The crutch: that was gone. She had made sure of that. The gun: but if it were here she doubted whether Tenney would dare even look at it again, remembering that night when he washed at the invisible stain on his hands. A quarter of an hour had gone in these imaginings, and then she did get up, went into the kitchen, built her fire, and set the table. But as she moved about the room, she carried the baby with her, working awkwardly against his weight and putting him down for a minute only at a time and snatching him up again at an unexpected sound. Once a robin called just outside the window, a bold bright note; it might have been the vagabond robin from Raven's orchard who sang about nests but seemed never to break off singing long enough to find a straw for one. She caught up the child from the couch and stood breathless, listening. It seemed as if the robin knew, and somehow, like Martin, felt like laughing at her.

Tenney was there, at a few minutes after twelve, but dinner was not on time. He came in, washed his hands at the sink and glanced about him. The table was set, and Tira, at the stove, the child on her hip, was trying the potatoes. She did not look at him. If he looked strange, it seemed to her she might not be able to go on.

"I ain't dished up," she said. "I'm kinder late."

Tenney spoke immediately and his voice sounded merely quiet, not, she reasoned anxiously, as if he tried to make it so, but just—quiet.

"You ain't washed the breakfast dishes neither. Ain't you feelin' well?"

"Yes," said Tira, "well as common. I left 'em, that's all."

"Oh," said Tenney. "Wanted to git at suthin' else."

She turned and looked at him. Yes, he was different, not paler, nor, as she had seen him, aflame in a livid way, but different.

"Isr'el," she said, "I never knew 'Gene Martin was goin' to stop here. I knew no more'n the dead."

"Was that him?" asked Tenney indifferently. "I see somebody stopped. I thought mebbe 'twas the butcher. Then I remembered he comes of a Wednesday."

That settled it in her mind. The weekly call of the butcher was as fixed as church on Sunday. Tenney was playing for something, and she understood. The moment had come. The house and she both knew it. She was not sorry, and perhaps, though she had been good to it and kept it in faithful order, the house was not sorry either. Perhaps it would rather rest and fall into disorder the way Tenney would let it, if he were here alone. That was it. He had had enough of threats that made him sick with the reaction of nervous violence. He had had enough of real violence that recoiled on himself and made him cower under the shadow of the law. He was going to turn her out of the house, the baby with her. And he did not seem to be suffering much over it, now he had made up his mind. Perhaps, now that the scene of the morning—three together in May sunshine—had confirmed his ugly doubts, he was relieved to wash his hands of them both. The phrase came into her mind, and that in itself startled her more than any fear of him. Wash his hands! How pitiful he had been that night he washed his hands!

They sat down to dinner together, and though Tira could not eat, she made pretense of being too busy, getting up from the table for this and that, and brewing herself a cup of tea. Tenney had coffee left over from breakfast, and when her tea was done she drank it hastily, standing at the sink where she could spill a part of it unnoticed. And when dinner was over he went peaceably away to the knoll again, and she hastily set the house in order while the baby slept.

When Tenney came home he was quite the same, silent but unmoved, and after milking he took off his boots by the stove and seemed to doze, while Tira strained the milk and washed her dishes. She was still sure that she and the child were to go. When would it be? Would the warning come quickly? She wanted to leave the waiting house in order, the house that seemed to know so much more about it all than she did. The fire had gone down in the stove, but though the night was warm, Tenney still sat by the hearth, huddled now in his chair, as if he wanted the comforting of that special spot: the idea of the hearthstone, the beneficence of man's cooking place. Tira's mind was on the night, the warmth of it, the moist cool breath bringing the hylas' peeping. It made her melancholy as spring nights always had, even when she was most happy. She thought of the willows feathering out on the road to her old home, and how the sight of them against the sky, that and the distant frogs, made her throat thick with the clamor of a rising fear. The river road was the one she would take when she was turned out, even if the willows did look at her as she went by and lay that moist, cool hand of foreboding on her heart. She had a plan, sprung together like the pieces of a puzzle since she had known he was to send her away. There was a sawmill over the other side of the mountain and the men's boarding house. She could get work there. It would be strange if a woman so strong and capable could not get work.

Tenney stirred in his chair, roused himself from his huddled posture and got up. Was he going to tell her now?

"I guess mebbe I'll poke off to bed," he said, in his commonplace manner of that noon. "I've got to be up bright an' early."

"Ain't you finished on the knoll?" she ventured.

"Yes, or next to it. But I've got quite a number o' jobs to do round home."

He went up the stairs without a light, carrying his shoes in his hand, and Tira shivered once, thinking how horrible it was to go so softly in stockinged feet. She was not afraid of him. Only she did wish his feet would sound. She did not sleep that night. She brought in the cradle, put the baby in it, and drew it to the window and there she sat beside it, the night through, her hand on the broken hood. She had chosen a high, straight chair, so that she might be too uncomfortable to sleep, but she had no temptation to drop off. All her nerves were taut, her senses broad awake. She was ready, she knew, for anything. The night was peaceful, thrilled by little sounds of stirring life, and the house, whatever it guessed, had forgotten all about her. Toward three o'clock she suddenly lost her sense of vitality. She was cold, and so sleepy now that the thought of bed was an ache of longing. She got up, found herself stiff and heavy-footed, lifted the child from his cradle and went into the bedroom with him. There she put him inside the sheets, and lay down beside him on the outside of the bed. She slept at once, but almost at once she was recalled. Tenney was standing in the bedroom door, looking at her.

"Wake up," he was saying, not unkindly. "Wake up."

She came drowsily awake, but before she was fully herself her feet were on the floor and she was rubbing her heavy eyes. The sun was streaming in.

"I've blazed the fire an' het me up some coffee," he said, still in that impersonal way which was so disturbing only because it was not his way. "I've harnessed up. I'm goin' to the street. You remember where that Brahma stole her nest? I've got to have two eggs for even dozens."

"Up in the high mow," said Tira. "Right under the beam."

She heard him go out through the shed, and she followed, to the kitchen, slowly, with the squalid feeling that comes of sleeping in one's day clothes, and there she found the fire low and his cup and plate on the bare table. She could see him through the window. There was the horse, hitched to the staple in the corner of the barn, there was the basket of eggs on the ground waiting for its even dozens.

"D'you find any?" she called.

He did not answer, and she ran out to the barn and called up to the mow:

"You there? You find any?"

But the barn, in its soft darkness, with a beam of dusty light here and there, knew nothing about him. He had not climbed to the mow, for the ladder was on the other side of the barn floor. She lifted it, brought it over, set it against the hay and climbed. She was broad awake now, and her taut muscles obeyed and liked it. She stepped on the hay, found the dark hole old Brahma chose for her secret hoarding place, and put in her hand, once, twice. Three eggs! Brahma must have thought she was pretty smart to lay three without having them stolen away from her. Tira put the eggs carefully in her apron pocket and hurried down the ladder, and out to the basket waiting on the ground. How many eggs did he want to make even dozens? Did he tell her? She could not remember. Probably he had forgotten himself, by now. She sat down on the step and took the eggs out in her lap, and then began to count and put them back again. The sun lay on them and they looked pretty to her in their brown fairness. She liked them, she thought, as she counted, liked all the farm things, the touch of them, the smell. Even old Charlie, standing there, smelled of the barn, and that was good, too. Five dozen, that was it, and one over. She put the extra egg in her pocket, got up and carried the basket to the wagon, placing it in front where it could sit safely between Tenney's feet. And at that minute Tenney himself came round the corner from the front of the house, and the day was so kind and the sun so warm on her face that it seemed a long time ago she had thought he meant to send her away, and she called to him:

"You might git a quarter o' tea, the kind they call English breakfast. An' a half a dozen lemons. It's terrible hard to think up any kind of a pie these days, 'twixt hay an' grass."

"Tea," said Tenney, as if he were putting it down in his mind. "An' lemons. You might go out, in a half an hour or so, an' look at that calf."

He stepped into the wagon, took up the reins and drove away. Tira watched him out of the yard, and at last she had no suspicion of his coming back, as he had done so often, to surprise her. He was somehow—different. He was really gone. She went in, got her breakfast and ate it, this with more appetite than she had had for many weeks, and smiled at herself, thinking she was not sleepy yet, but when sleep came on her it would come like a cloud and smother her. She moved fast about the kitchen to get her work done before it came, and in perhaps an hour she remembered Tenney's telling her to have an eye to the calf. She smiled a little, grateful for even the tiniest impulse to smile, and told herself she wouldn't go out to look after any calf until she had looked at somebody else who ought to be awake. She went into the bedroom, and stopped a choked instant at the strangeness of the bed. The little coppery head was what she should have seen, but there was only the straight expanse of quilt, and a pillow, disarranged, lying crookedly near the top. She snatched up the pillow. There was the little coppery head. The baby was lying on his back, and over his face, carefully folded into a square, was her apron, the one Eugene Martin had torn away from her. The baby was dead.



XLIII

Tenney did not come home until two o'clock. When he drove into the yard he found Tira there, standing on the step. This was a day of clear sunlight, like that of yesterday, and the breeze moved her light rings of hair. Tenney glanced at her once, but, saying nothing, got out and began to unharness. Tira stood waiting. He led the horse into the barn, and when he came out and walked toward the house she was still waiting, a woman without breath even, one might have thought. When he was perhaps three feet from her she spoke, but in a quiet voice:

"Stop! You stan' right there an' I'll tell you. The doctor's been. I 'phoned him. I told him I overlaid the baby."

"Overlaid?" muttered Tenney, in a puzzled way.

Now a little feeling did manifest itself in her voice, as if he must be a fool not to have known these tragedies that come to mothers.

"Overlaid," she repeated, with the slightest tinge of scorn. "That's what women do sometimes, big heavy women! Roll over on the little creatur's an' lay on 'em so 't they can't breathe. I s'pose they can't help it, though. They're tired. I told him I done that. He was sorry for me. I asked him if the crowner'd come, an' I'd have to swear to't, an' he said no. I was glad o' that, though mebbe it's no worse to swear to anything than 'tis to say it. He was terrible good to me. I told him baby'd got to lay over to Mountain Brook, side o' mother, an' he said he was goin' there an' he'd git one of 'em to dig the little grave. I told him you're all run down, your foot behavin' so, an' you wouldn't be able to do nothin', an' I was 'most afraid o' your givin' out, when I told you. So he's goin' to send the man with the little coffin."

There was no faintest tremor of bitterness or gibing in this. It was the simplest statement of facts. Tenney had stood perfectly still, but now he lifted one hand and looked at it casually, as he had that other time. He made an uncertain step, as if to pass her and enter the house, but Tira stretched out her arms. They barred the way.

"No," she said, "you ain't comin' in."

"Ain't comin' in?" repeated Tenney.

He looked up at her, but his glance fell at once to the trembling hand.

"No," said Tira, "you ain't comin' into this house ag'in till he's carried out of it. I've made you up a bed in the lower barn an' I've set you out suthin' to eat there. Day after to-morrer mornin' the doctor's comin' over after me an' baby—or send somebody, if he can't come—an' he's goin' to see to the minister an' all. He was terrible sorry for me. An' that night, day after to-morrer night, you can come back into the house; but you can't come before."

She went in and shut the door behind her, and Tenney heard the key turn sharply in the lock. He stood there several minutes, moistening his dry lips and looking down at his hands, and then he, too, turned about and went down to the lower barn, where he found a bed made up and a cold lunch on a little table. But while he ate he wondered, in an absent muse, about the bed. It was the old four-poster he had packed away in the shed chamber. How had she carried the heavy hardwood pieces down, fitted them together and corded them? He was curious enough to lift the tick to find out what she had used for cord. Her new clothes-line; and there was the bed wrench in the corner by the chopping block. It looked as if, having done with it, she had thrown it there in a wild haste to get on with these things that must be done before he came. Even then, with his mind on his hands—not hands, it seemed to him, he could quite bear to touch food with—he wondered if some man had helped her. Had Martin been here again, or was it Raven? But, after all, nothing seemed to matter: only the queer state of his hands. That was the trouble now.

All through the next day he hung about the place, doing the barn work, milking, taking the milk to the house, but stopping there, for Tira met him at the door, took the pails from him, and carried them in without a word. He wondered vaguely whether, having denied him entrance to his own house, she meant to refuse him food also, but presently she appeared with a tray: meat and vegetables carefully arranged and the coffee he depended on. Then she pointed out a wooden box, a little chest that had lived up in the shed chamber, lifted the lid and bade him note the folded garments within: he must change to-morrow, and these were his clean clothes. Occasionally he glanced at her, but he could not see that she looked very different. She was always pale. Early in the morning of the third day she appeared with hot water and a basket filled with what seemed to him at first a queer assortment of odds and ends.

"Here," she said, "here's your shavin' things. I'll set the little lookin' glass up ag'inst the beam. Here's your razor. I'll fill the mug. Now, you shave you. If anybody should happen to see you, they'd say 'twa'n't fittin' for a man to have his baird all over his face, day of his baby's funeral."

The glass, with its picture of a red and blue house and a cedar tree, she set against a beam, but it escaped her fingers and fell forward and cracked straight across the little house. She picked it up, balanced it against the beam and held it, with a frowning care, until it was secure.

"Sign of a death!" she said, as if to herself, but indifferently. "There! you shave you now, an' then I'll bring you out your breakfast an' carry in the things."

Tenney shaved before the little mirror with its crack across the house, and, as if she had been watching him, she appeared at the minute of his finishing. Now she was carrying a breakfast tray, poising it absorbedly, with the intentness of a mind on one thing only. It was a good breakfast, eggs and coffee and bacon, and the thick corn-cake he liked; also, there was his tin lunch box. She pulled out the little table, set the tray on it and brought his chair.

"There!" said she. "Now soon as ever you've finished eatin' you take your luncheon an' your axe an' go over to the long pastur' an' don't you show your head back here till it's time to fetch the cows. You can bring 'em along with you, an' I'll have the pails out on the step so 't you can start right off milkin'. An' when you've got through, you fetch the milk into the house, same as usual."

As she was leaving the barn she turned and the breeze lifted those little rings of her hair and Tenney, looking full at her now, groaned. It was not, he felt, any of the other things that had happened to them: only there was always breeze enough, even on the stillest day, to stir her hair. Now it seemed to be the only thing in the world with life in it.

"I shall tell 'em," she said clearly, as if she wanted him to understand and remember—and she did not look at him, but across the road and up the slope where the hut stood waiting for her—"the doctor an' all the rest I've got to see, you was so sick over it, you couldn't come."

Then she stepped out of the picture she had made against the smiling day, the dark interior of the barn framing her, and walked, with her free-swinging step, to the house. And Tenney ate his breakfast, took his luncheon box and axe, and started for the woods. But he had not got out of the yard when she called to him. He stopped and she came running; she was no longer pale, and her eyes were rimmed with red. She came up with him.

"Isr'el," she said, "you think o' this. You think of it all day long. 'I'm goin' through it alone,' you says to yourself mebbe, after you've got off there into the woods. 'But I ain't alone. He'll be with me, the Lord Jesus Christ.' An' you remember there's that to think on. An' there's forgiveness. Isr'el, you lay down your axe. You let me take holt o' your hand."

He could only stare at her, and she took the axe from his hand and laid it at their feet. She took his hand and put it to her cheek. Then she took his other hand and laid that also on her cheek, and murmured a little formlessly, but in a way he sharply remembered as a means of stilling the baby. She lifted her head then, smiling a little, and still holding the hands. But before releasing them she stroked them softly and said, "There! there! Poor souls," she added, "poor souls!" Did she mean the unhappy hands, or all souls of men caught in the network of mysterious life? She picked up his axe and gave it to him as a mother might dismiss a child who was going to a distasteful task. "There!" she said again. "Now, you remember." She turned from him, and Tenney went, head down, to his work.

That afternoon, about three o'clock, Nan was in her garden, busy with the peony bed. She was dressed in cotton crepe the color of the soil, and her cheeks were red, like wild roses, and her ungloved hands also the color of mould. She was delightfully happy getting into the earth and the earth into her, and she looked it. Charlotte, coming on her across the grass, thought her face was like a bloom the rest of her had somehow made, as the earth was going to make red peonies. That is, I think Charlotte thought something of this sort, though she would not have put it in that way. Only she did have a great sense of Nan's entire harmony with the garden bed and the garden bed with her. Charlotte had other things on her mind, and she spoke without preamble:

"D'you know what's happened over to Tenney's?"

Nan got up from her knees, and her face was no longer the April-May face she had bent above the peonies.

"No," she said. "What is it?"

"I see doctor go by this mornin' in his car," said Charlotte, "carryin' Tira. In a couple of hours they come back. An' then he went by ag'in, goin' down home. I was on the lookout an' stopped him. I was kind of uneasy. An' he says: 'Yes, Mis' Tenney's baby's dead. She overlaid it,' he says. 'They feel terribly about it,' he says. 'Tenney run away from the services.'"

Nan stood staring. She was thinking not only about the baby and the Tenneys' feeling terribly—this Charlotte saw—but something farther behind, thinking back, and thinking keenly.

"I didn't say nothin' to nobody," Charlotte continued, "but the more I thought on't the more stirred up I got. The baby gone, an' she there all alone! So I run over. I knocked an' knocked, an' not a sound. Then, as I was turnin' away, I got a glimpse inside the kitchen winder, an' if you'll believe me there she set, hat an' all on, an' her hands full o' daffies. You know them big double daffies always come up in their grass. Well!"

Nan threw down her trowel.

"I'll go over," she said. "We'll both go."

"What I come for," Charlotte hesitated, as they crossed the grass, "was whether I better say anything to anybody."

Nan knew she meant Raven.

"No," she said, "Oh, I don't know! We can't tell till we see."

Nan remembered she had not washed the earth off her hands, and yet, though they were passing her door, she could not stop. When they came in sight of the house, there was Tira in the doorway. She had taken off her hat now, and there was no daffies in her hands. She looked so commonplace, if her height and nobility could ever be less august, that Nan felt a sudden drop in her own anxiety. Tira called to them.

"Couldn't you come in a minute? I'd be pleased to have you."

They went up the path, and when they stood at the foot of the steps, confronting her, Nan saw how she had changed. And yet not tragically: she was merely, one would have said, entirely calm, the stillest thing in that pageant of the moving day.

"I'd be pleased," she said, "if you'd walk in."

She looked at Nan, and Charlotte at once turned away, saying, as she went:

"If there's anything—well, I'll be over."

Nan and Tira went in, Nan holding Tira's hand in her earthy one.

"Let's sit here," said Nan, crossing the room to the sofa between the side windows. She was not sure of anything about this talk except that she must keep her hand on Tira. She noticed that the double daffies, a great bunch of them, were lying on the table. Tira was smiling faintly. She drew a deep breath. It sounded as if she had been holding herself up to something and had suddenly let go.

"Seems good to set," she said. "I ain't hardly set down to-day except——" She had it in mind to say except when she was in the car, carrying the baby over to Mountain Brook, but it seemed too hard a thing to say.

"If you'd just lie down," said Nan, "I'd sit here."

"No," said Tira, "I can't do that. I'm goin' over to Mountain Brook."

"Not again? Not to-day?"

"Yes, right off. I'm goin' to carry them daffies. He didn't have no flowers, the baby didn't. I never thought on't—then. But he never had none. He played with a daffy, 'most the last thing. I've got to git 'em over there."

"Not to-day, Tira," urged Nan. "You wouldn't get back till after dark."

"I shouldn't come back to-night," said Tira. "The Donnyhills were real good to me. They come to the grave. They'd admire to have me pass the night."

"Then," said Nan, "you wait till I go home and wash my hands, and I'll ask Mr. Raven for his car and you and I'll go over. Just we two."

"No," said Tira. "'Twouldn't do me no good to ride. When I've got anything on my mind I can't do better'n walk it off. You let me be!"

The last was a sharp, sudden cry, like the recoil from an unlooked-for hurt.

"I see," said Nan. "Yes, you must walk. I should want to, myself. But in the morning, Tira—mayn't I come over after you?"

Tira considered, her eyes on Nan's hand and her own clasped, lying on Nan's knee.

"Yes," she said, "you better. You come to the Donnyhills'. Yes, you come."

Then she considered again, and began one of her slow, difficult meanderings, where the quickness of her heart and brain ran ahead of her tongue's art to interpret them.

"Seems if you knew," she said, "'most everything that's gone on."

"Yes," said Nan, at a venture, and yet truthfully. "I think I've known."

"An' now it's come to an end," said Tira. "Or if it ain't, it's on the way to it. An' seems if you ought to know the whole. You're tough enough to stan' up to 't."

"Yes," said Nan simply, "I'm very tough. Nothing's going to hurt me."

"I bring," said Tira, still with difficulty, "bad luck. Some folks do. Folks set by me a spell. Then they stop. They think I'm goin' to be suthin' they'd do 'most anything for, an' then they seem to feel as if I wa'n't. An' there's no"—she sought for a word here and came out blunderingly—"no peace nor rest. Nor for me, neither. I ain't had peace nor rest. Except"—here she paused again and ended gravely, and not this time inadequately—"in him."

Nan understood. She was grave in her answer.

"Mr. Raven," she said. "I know."

The color flowed into Tira's face and she looked at Nan, with her jewel-like eyes.

"I'm goin' to tell you," she said, "the whole story. He's like—my God. Anything I could do for him—'twould be nothin'. Anything he asked of me——"

Here the light faded out from her face and the flesh of it had that curious look of curdling, as if with muscular horror.

"But," she said, "here 'tis. S'pose it come on him, that—that"—she threw back her head in despair over her poverty of words—"s'pose it made him like——Oh, I tell you there's suthin' queer about me, there's suthin' wrong. It ain't that I look different from other folks. I ain't ever meant to act different. I swear to my God I've acted like a decent woman—an' a decent girl—an' when I was little I never even had a thought! You tell me. You'd know."

Nan felt the hand on hers tighten. She put her other hand over it, and thought. What could she tell her? These matters were too deep in the causes of things for man to have caught a glimpse of them, except now and then darkly through some poet's mind. There was one word that, to a poet's mind only, might have illumined the darkness if only for an instant: beauty, that was the word. Mankind could not look on beauty such as this and not desire, for a moment at least, to possess it utterly. But these things belonged to the dark places where brute nature wrought her spells. And there were other beauties, other enchantments, and of these, what could Tira, her mind moulded by the brutal influences of her life, see, except as dreams of her own, not as having wholesome correspondences in the mind of man? Could she guess what the appeal of her loveliness would meet in Raven? Fastidious standards, pride of honor, pride of race. The jungle, in itself, was as hateful to him as it could be to her, who had been dragged through its fetid undergrowth with a violence that had cut indelible marks into her. But for him, Raven—as Nan believed she knew him and as Tira, her striving mind obscured by the veil of her remembered past, could never know—hadn't the jungle something for him beyond choking savors and fierce destructive poisons? Didn't he know that even that miasma nourished wholesome virtues, strength, abstinence, infinite compassion, if you crossed the horrible expanse to the clear air beyond? Tira, fair as her mind was in its untouched integrity, hated the jungle, but it was a part of the wrong life had done her that she could not, highly as she worshiped Raven, keep herself from seeing his kinship to the natural earth as Martin's kinship with it, Tenney's—all the beasts who had desired her. How to tell her that? How to tell her that although it was most loving of her to save Raven from the curse she believed to be upon all men, he would save himself?

"They think," Tira continued, in a voice rough enough to hurt the ear, "there's suthin' about me—different. An' they feel as if, if they owned me body an' soul they'd be—I dunno what they'd be."

"They think they'd be gods," Nan's mind supplied. "You are beauty, Tira. You are the cup. They think if they could drink of you they would never thirst again."

"An' now," said Tira, "s'pose a man like—like him—s'pose it looked to him some minute he never'd so much as expected—s'pose it looked to him as if he'd be made if he owned me body an' soul. Well! That's easy, you say. If I love him, what's my body an' what's my soul? Offer 'em to him, quick. An' wouldn't I, if that was all? Wouldn't I?"

She called it sharply, in an angry challenge.

"Yes," said Nan quietly, "I know you would."

"Well," said Tira, "what then? It wouldn't be any more"—her eyes, glancing here and there in troubled search for help in her impossible task of speech—"like them daffies over there. 'Twould be—mud."

This, though it did not satisfy her, carried an ineffable loathing, the loathing that had its seed in the pathway of her difficult life.

"Now," she said, "you set by him, don't you?"

"Yes," said Nan.

"If 'twas your body an' soul, they'd be nothin' to you if he needed 'em."

"Nothing."

"An' you're goin' to stan' by him, an' if you marry away from him——"

"Never mind that," said Nan. "What do you want me to do?"

"I want you," said Tira, "to see what I mean. An' I want you to tell it or not to tell it, as it seems best. An' if ever the time comes, when it'll do him good to know I run away from him because he was my life an' my soul an' my God, you tell him. An' if it ain't best for him to know, you let it rest betwixt you an' me."

"But, Tira," said Nan, "you're coming back?"

Tira considered.

"You see," she answered finally, "I've got my walkin' papers, as you might say. The baby's gone. 'Twas the baby that made trouble betwixt his father an' me. An' now there won't be no reason for my hidin' in the shack up there or even passin' the time o' day with you, either of you. An' that's a kind of a runnin' away, ain't it? Shouldn't you call it runnin' away?"

She smiled dimly, and Nan said:

"Yes. But I shall come over to the Donnyhills' to-morrow."

"Yes," said Tira, "so do. Now I'd better go."

They got up and Nan put her hands on Tira's shoulders—and one hand was numb from that iron clasp—and stood looking at her. Nan was not a kissing woman, but she considered whether she should kiss her, to show she loved her. She thought not. Tira's body had so revolted against life, the life of the earth that had grown up into a jungle, that it would be kinder to leave it inviolate even by a touch.

"Don't you want to change your mind?" Nan asked. "Mayn't I get the car? It's seven long miles, Tira."

"Not the way I'm goin'," said Tira. There was a little smile at the corners of her mouth. It was a kind smile, a mother smile. She meant to leave Nan reassured. "I go 'cross lots, by old Moosewood's steppin' stones."

Nan withdrew her hands and thought absently how thin Tira's shoulders were under her dress. She was like a ship, built for endurance and speed, but with all her loveliness in the beauty of bare line. Tira put on her hat and took up her daffodils and followed, out at the front door and down the path. Nan looked back.

"You've left the door open," said she. "Don't you want to lock up?"

"No," said Tira, "he'll see to it."

At the gate they parted, with a little smile from Tira, the kind that so strangely changed her into something more childlike than her youth.

"You come," she said, "in the mornin'. I shall be there, an' glad enough to have you."

She turned away and broke at once into her easy stride. Nan stood a minute watching her. Then something came up in her, a surge of human love, the pity of it all—Tira, Raven, the world, and perhaps a little of it Nan—and she ran after her. The tears were splashing down her face and blurring the bright day.

"Tira!" she called, and, as she came up with her, "darling Tira!"

"Why," said Tira, "you're cryin'! Don't you cry, darlin'. I never so much as thought I'd make you cry."