He heard Mark's little voice sound shrilly from the pantry, "Come on, Elly. It's all right. I've even putten away the book that's got that song."

Some splendid, surging shouts from the piano and the voices began on "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Neale could hear Mr. Welles' shaky old bass booming away this time. He was probably sitting down with Paul on his knees. It was really nice of the old codger to take such a fancy to Paul, and be able to see those sterling qualities of his, through Paul's surface unloveliness that came mostly from his slowness of imagination.

The voices stopped; Elly said, "That song sounds as if it were proud of itself." Her father's heart melted in the utter prostration of tenderness he felt for his little daughter. How like Elly! What a quick intelligence animated the sensitive, touching, appealing, defenseless darling that Elly was! Marise must have been a little girl like that. Think of her growing up in such an atmosphere of disunion and flightiness as that weak mother of hers must have given her. Queer, how Marise didn't seem to have a trace of that weakness, unless it was that funny physical impressionableness of hers, that she could laugh at herself, but that still wrought on her, so that if measles were going the rounds, she could see symptoms of measles in everything the children did or didn't do; or that well-known habit of hers, that even the children laughed about with her, of feeling things crawling all over her for hours after she had seen a caterpillar. Well, that was only the other side of her extraordinary sensitiveness, that made her know how everybody was feeling, and what to do to make him feel better. She had often said that she would certainly die if she ever tried to study medicine, because as fast as she read of a symptom she would have it, herself. But she wouldn't die. She'd live and make a cracker-jack of a doctor, if she'd ever tried it, enough sight better than some callous brute of a boy with no imagination.

"One more song before bed-time," announced Marise. "And we'll let Mark choose. It's his turn."

A long silence, in which Neale amusedly divined Mark torn between his many favorites. Finally the high sweet little treble, "Well, let's make it 'Down Among the Dead Men.'"

At which Neale laughed silently again. What a circus the kids were!

The clock struck nine as they finished this, and Neale heard the stir and shifting of chairs. Paul said, "Mother, Mr. Welles and I have fixed it up, that he's going to put us to bed tonight, if you'll let him." Amused surprise from Marise: Mr. Welles' voice saying he really would like it, never had seen any children in their nightgowns except in the movies; Paul saying, "Gracious! We don't wear nightgowns like women. We wear pajamas!"; Mark's voice crying, "We'll show you how we play foot-fight on the rug. We have to do that barefoot, so each one can tickle ourselves;" as usual, no sound from Elly probably still reveling in the proudness of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

A clatter of feet on the stairs, the chirping voices muffled by the shutting of a door overhead, and Eugenia's voice, musical and carefully modulated, saying, "Well, Marisette, you look perfectly worn out with fatigue. You haven't looked a bit well lately, anyhow. And I'm not surprised. The way those children take it out of you!"

"Damn that woman!" thought Neale. That sterile life of hers had starved out from her even the capacity to understand a really human existence when she saw it. Not that she had ever seemed to have any considerable seed-bed of human possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. He remembered that he had said of her fantastically, to a fellow in the pension, that she reminded him of a spool of silk thread. And now the silk thread had all been wound off, and there was only the bare wooden spool left.

"It's not surprising that Mrs. Crittenden gets tired," commented Marsh's voice. "She does the work of four or five persons."

"Yes," agreed Eugenia, "I don't know how she does it . . . cook, nurse, teacher, housekeeper, welfare-worker, seamstress, gardener . . ."

"Oh, let up, let up!" Neale heard Marise say, with an impatience that pleased him. She must have been at the piano as she spoke, for at once there rose, smiting to the heart, the solemn, glorious, hopeless chords of the last part of the Pathetic Symphony. Heavens! How Marise could play!

When the last dull, dreary, beautiful note had vibrated into silence, Eugenia murmured, "Doesn't that always make you want to crawl under the sod and pull the daisies over you?"

"Ashes, ashes, not daisies," corrected Marsh, dreamily.

There was, thought Neale listening critically to their intonations, a voluptuous, perverse pleasure in despair which he found very distasteful. Despair was a real and honest and deadly emotion. Folks with appetites sated by having everything they wanted, oughtn't to use despair as a sort of condiment to perk up their jaded zest in life. "Confounded play-actors!" he thought, and wondered what Marise's reaction to them was.

He foresaw that it was going to be too much for his patience to listen to them. He would get too hot under the collar and be snappish, afterwards. Luckily he was in the library. There were better voices to listen to. He got up, ran his forefinger along a shelf, and took down a volume of Trevelyan, "Garbaldi and the Thousand." The well-worn volume opened of itself at a familiar passage, the description of the battle of Calatafimi. His eye lighted in anticipation. There was a man's book, he thought. But his pipe was out. He laid the book down to light it before he began to read. In spite of himself he listened to hear what they were saying now in the next room. Eugenia was talking and he didn't like what she was saying about those recurrent dreams of Marise's, because he knew it was making poor Marise squirm. She had such a queer, Elly-like shyness about that notion of hers, Marise had. It evidently meant more to her than she had ever been able to make him understand. He couldn't see why she cared so much about it, hated to have it talked about casually. But he wasn't Eugenia. If Marise didn't want it talked about casually, by George he wasn't the one who would mention it. They'd hardly ever spoken of them, those dreams, even to each other. People had a right to moral privacy, if they wanted it, he supposed, even married women. There was nothing so ruthless anyhow as an old childhood friend, to whom you had made foolish youthful confidences and who brought them out any time he felt like it.

"You ought to have those dreams of yours psycho-analyzed, Marisette," Eugenia was saying. To Marsh she went on in explanation, "Mrs. Crittenden has always had a queer kind of dream. I remember her telling me about them, years ago, when we were girls together, and nobody guessed there was anything in dreams. She dreams she is in some tremendous rapid motion, a leaf on a great river-current, or a bird blown by a great wind, or foam driven along by storm-waves, isn't that it, Marisonne?"

Neale did not need the sound of Marise's voice to know how she hated this. She said, rather shortly for her, as though she didn't want to say a word about it, and yet couldn't leave it uncorrected, "Not exactly. I don't dream I'm the leaf on the current. I dream I am the current myself, part of it. I'm the wind, not the bird blown by it; the wave itself; it's too hard to explain."

"Do you still have those dreams once in a while, Marisette, and do you still love them as much?"

"Oh yes, sometimes."

"And have you ever had the same sensation in your waking moments? I remember so well you used to say that was what you longed for, some experience in real life that would make you have that glorious sense of irresistible forward movement. We used to think," said Eugenia, "that perhaps falling in love would give it to you."

"No," said Marise. "I've never felt it, out of my dreams."

Neale was sorry he had elected to stay in the study. If he were out there now, he could change the conversation, come to her rescue. Couldn't Eugenia see that she was bothering Marise!

"What do you suppose Freud would make out of such dreams?" asked Eugenia, evidently of Marsh.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me," said Marsh, and Neale was obliged to hand it to him that the very sound of his voice had a living, real, genuine accent that was a relief after Eugenia. He didn't talk half-chewed and wholly undigested nonsense, the way Eugenia did. Neale had heard enough of his ideas to know that he didn't agree with a word the man said, but at least it was a vital and intelligent personality talking.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me. Americans have fadded the thing into imbecility, so that the very phrase has become such a bromide one hates to pronounce it. But of course the commonplace that all dreams are expressions of suppressed desires is true. And it's very apparent that Mrs. Crittenden's desire is a very fine one for freedom and power and momentum. She's evidently not a back-water personality. Though one would hardly need psycho-analysis to guess that!" He changed the subject as masterfully as Neale could have done. "See here, Mrs. Crittenden, that Tschaikowsky whetted my appetite for more. Don't you feel like playing again?"

The idea came over Neale, and in spite of his uneasy irritation, it tickled his fancy, that possibly Marsh found Eugenia just as deadly as he did.

Marise jumped at the chance to turn the talk, for in an instant the piano began to chant again, not Tschaikowsky, Neale noted, but some of the new people whom Marise was working over lately. He couldn't understand a note of them, nor keep his mind on them, nor even try to remember their names. He had been able to get just as far as Debussy and no further, he thought whimsically, before his brain-channels hardened in incipient middle-age.

He plunged into Trevelyan and the heart-quickening ups and downs of battle.

Some time after this, he was pulled back from those critical and glorious hours by the consciousness, gradually forcing itself on him on two discomforts; his pipe had gone out and Eugenia was at it again. He scratched a match and listened in spite of himself to that smooth liquid voice. She was still harping on psycho-analysis. Wasn't she just the kind of woman for whom that would have an irresistible fascination! He gathered that Marise was objecting to it, just as sweepingly as Eugenia was approving. How women did hate half-tones and reasonable qualifications!

"I'm a gardener," Marise was saying, "and I know a thing or two about natural processes. The thing to do with a manure pile is not to paw it over and over, but to put it safely away in the dark, underground, and never bother your head about it again except to watch the beauty and vitality of the flowers and grains that spring from the earth it has fertilized."

Neale as he held the lifted match over his pipe, shook his head. That was all very well, put picturesquely as Marise always put things; but you couldn't knock an idea on the head just with an apt metaphor. There was a great deal more to be said about it, even if fool half-baked faddists like Eugenia did make it ridiculous. In the first place it was nothing so new. Everybody who had ever encountered a crisis in his life and conquered it, had . . . why, he himself . . .

He felt his heart beat faster, and before he knew what was coming, he felt a great, heart-quickening gust of fresh salt air blow over him, and felt himself far from the book-tainted stagnant air of that indoor room. He forgot to light his pipe and sat motionless, holding the burning match till it flared up at the end and scorched his fingers. Then he dropped it with a startled oath, and looked quickly around him.

In that instant he had lived over again the moment in Nova Scotia when he had gone down to the harbor just as the battered little tramp steamer was pulling out, bound for China.

Good God! What an astonishing onslaught that had been! How from some great, fierce, unguessed appetite, the longing for wandering, lawless freedom had burst up! Marise, the children, their safe, snug middle-class life, how they had seemed only so many drag-anchors to cut himself loose from and make out to the open sea! If the steamer had been still close enough to the dock so that he could have jumped aboard, how he would have leaped! He might have been one of those men who disappeared mysteriously, from out a prosperous and happy life, and are never heard of again. But it hadn't been close enough. The green oily water widened between them; and he had gone back with a burning heart to that deadly little country hotel.

Well, had he buried it and forced himself to think no more about it? No. Not on your life he hadn't. He'd stood up to himself. He'd asked himself what the hell was the matter, and he'd gone after it, as any grown man would. It hadn't been fun. He remembered that the sweat had run down his face as though he'd been handling planks in the lumber-yard in midsummer.

And what had he found? He'd found that he'd never got over the jolt it had given him, there on that aimless youthful trip through Italy, with China and the Eastern seas before him, to fall in love and have all those plans for wandering cut off by the need for a safe, stable life.

Then he'd gone on. He'd asked himself, if that's so, then what? He hadn't pulled any of the moralizing stern-duty stuff; he knew Marise would rather die than have him doing for her something he hated, out of stern duty. It was an insult, anyhow, unless it was a positively helpless cripple in question, to do things for people out of duty only. And to mix what folks called "duty" up with love, that was the devil. So he hadn't.

That was the sort of thing Marise had meant, so long ago, when they were first engaged, that was the sort of thing she had asked him never to do. He'd promised he never would, and this wasn't the first time the promise had held him straight to what was, after all, the only decent course with a woman like Marise, as strong as she was fine. Anything else would be treating her like a child, or a dependent, as he'd hate to have her treat him, or anybody treat him.

So this time he'd asked himself right out, what he really wanted and needed in life, and he'd been ready, honestly ready, to take any answer he got, and dree his weird accordingly, as the best thing for everybody concerned, as the only honest thing, as the only thing that would put any bed-rock under him, as what Marise would want him to do. If it meant tramp-steamers, why it had to be tramp-steamers. Something could be managed for Marise and the children.

This was what he had asked. And what answer had he got? Why, of course, he hankered for the double-jointed, lawless freedom that the tramp-steamer stood for. He guessed everybody wanted that, more or less. But he wanted Marise and the children a damn sight more. And not only Marise and the children. He hadn't let himself lay it all on their backs, and play the martyr's role of the forcibly domesticated wild male. No, he wanted the life he had, outside the family, his own line of work; he wanted the sureness of it, the coherence of it, the permanence of it, the clear conscience he had about what he was doing in the world, the knowledge that he was creating something, helping men to use the natural resources of the world without exploiting either the natural resources or the men; he wanted the sense of deserved power over other human beings. That was what he really wanted most of all. You could call it smug and safe and bourgeois if you liked. But the plain fact remained that it had more of what really counted for him than any other life he could see possible. And when he looked at it, hard, with his eyes open, why the tramp-steamer to China sailed out of school-boy theatrical clouds and showed herself for the shabby, sordid little substitute for a real life she would have been to him.

He'd have liked to have that too, of course. You'd like to have everything! But you can't. And it is only immature boys who whimper because you can't have your cake and eat it too. That was all there was to that.

What he had dug for was to find his deepest and most permanent desires, and when he had found them, he'd come home with a happy heart.

It even seemed to him that he had been happier and quieter than before. Well, maybe Marise's metaphor had something in it, for all it was so flowery and high-falutin. Maybe she would say that what he had done was exactly what she'd described, to dig it under the ground and let it fertilize and enrich his life.

Oh Lord! how a figure of speech always wound you up in knots if you tried to use it to say anything definite!

He relighted his pipe, this time with a steady hand, and a cool eye; and turned to Trevelyan and Garibaldi again. He'd take that other side of himself out in books, he guessed.

He had now arrived at the crucial moment of the battle, and lifted his head and his heart in anticipation of the way Garibaldi met that moment. He read, "To experienced eyes the battle seemed lost. Bixio said to Garibaldi, 'General, I fear we ought to retreat.' Garibaldi looked up as though a serpent had stung him. 'Here we make Italy or die!' he said."

"That's the talk!" cried Neale, to himself. The brave words resounded in the air about him, and drowned out the voices from the next room.



CHAPTER XIII

ALONG THE EAGLE ROCK BROOK

July 1.

Paul was very much pleased that Mr. Welles agreed with him so perfectly about the hour and place for lunch. But then Mr. Welles was awfully nice about agreeing. He said, now, "Yes, I believe this would be the best place. Here by the pool, on that big rock, as you say. We'll be drier there. Yesterday's rain has made everything in the woods pretty wet. That's a good idea of yours, to build our fire on the rock, with water all around. The fire couldn't possibly spread." Paul looked proudly at the rain-soaked trees and wet soggy leaves which his forethought had saved from destruction and strode across the brook in his rubber boots, with the first installment of dry pine branches.

"Aren't you tired?" he said protectingly to his companion. "Whyn't you sit down over there and undo the lunch-basket? I'll make camp. Father showed me how to make a campfire with only one match."

"All right," said Mr. Welles. "I do feel a little leg-weary. I'm not so used to these mountain scrambles as you are."

"I'll clean the fish, too," said Paul; "maybe you don't like to. Elly can't abide it." He did not say that he did not like it very well himself, having always to get over the sick feeling it gave him.

"I never did it in my life," confessed Mr. Welles. "You see I always lived in towns till now."

Paul felt very sorry for Mr. Welles, and shook his head pityingly as he went off for more firewood.

When he had collected a lot, he began to lay the sticks. He did it just as Father had showed him, but it seemed lots harder to get them right. And it took a lot more than one match to get it started. He didn't have a bit of breath left in him, by the time he finally got it going. And my, weren't his hands black! But he felt very much set up, all the same, that he had done it. In his heart Paul knew that there was nothing anybody could do which he could not.

They hung the slimpsy slices of bacon from forked sticks, Paul showing Mr. Welles how to thread his on, and began to cook them around the edges of the fire, while the two little trout frizzled in the frying-pan. "I'm so glad we got that last one," commented Paul. "One wouldn't have been very much."

"Yes, it's much better to have one apiece," agreed Mr. Welles.

When the bacon was done (only burned a little at the edges, and still soft in the thicker places in the center of the slice), and the fish the right brown, and 'most shrunk up to nothing, they each of them put a trout and a piece of bacon on his slice of bread and butter, and gracious! didn't it taste good.

"You must have done this before," said Mr. Welles, respectfully; "you seem to know a good deal about camping."

"Oh, I'm a good camper, all right," agreed Paul. "Mother and I have gone off in the woods, lots of times. When I was littler, I used to get spells when I was bad. I do still, even now, once in a while."

Mr. Welles did not smile, but continued gravely eating his bread and bacon, his eyes on the little boy.

"I don't know what's the matter. I feel all snarled up inside. And then the first thing you know I've done something awful. Mother can tell when it first gets started in me, the least little teenty bit. How can she tell? And then she takes me off camping. She pretends it's because she's feeling snarled up, herself. But it's not. She never is. Why not?"

He considered this in silence, chewing slowly on a vast mouthful of bread. "Anyhow, we leave the little children with Toucle, if she's there," (he stopped here an instant to inspect Mr. Welles to make sure he was not laughing because he had called Elly and Mark the "little children." But Mr. Welles was not laughing at him. He was listening, really listening, the way grown-ups almost never did, to hear what you had to say. He did like Mr. Welles. He went on,) "or if Toucle's off somewheres in the woods herself, we leave them down at the Powers' to play with Addie and Ralph, and we light out for the woods, Mother and I. The snarleder up I feel, the further we go. We don't fish or anything. Just leg it, till I feel better. Then we make a fire and eat."

He swallowed visibly a huge lump of unchewed bread, and said, uncorking a thermos bottle, "I asked Mother to put up some hot coffee."

Mr. Welles seemed surprised. "Why, do you drink coffee?"

"Oh no, none of us kids ever take it. But I thought you'd like some. Grown-up folks mostly do, when they eat out-of-doors."

Mr. Welles took the cup of steaming coffee, ready sugared and creamed, without even saying thank you, but in a minute, as they began their second round of sandwiches, filled this time with cold ham from home, he said, "You've got quite a way of looking out for folks, haven't you?

"I like to," said Paul.

"I always liked to," said Mr. Welles.

"I guess you've done quite a lot of it," conjectured the little boy.

"Quite a lot," said the old man, thoughtfully.

Paul never liked to be left behind and now spoke out, "Well, I expect I'll do a good deal, too."

"Most likely you will," agreed the old man.

He spoke a little absently, and after a minute said, "Paul, talking about looking out for folks makes me think of something that's bothering me like everything lately. I can't make up my mind about whether I ought to go on, looking out for folks, if I know folks that need it. I keep hearing from somebody who lives down South, that the colored folks aren't getting a real square deal. I keep wondering if maybe I oughtn't to go and live there and help her look out for them."

Paul was so astonished at this that he opened his mouth wide, without speaking. When he could get his breath, he shouted, "Why, Mr. Welles, go away from Ashley to live!" He stared hard at the old man, thinking he must have got it twisted. But Mr. Welles did not set him straight, only stared down at the ground with a pale, bothered-looking face and sort of twitched his mouth to one side.

The little boy moved over closer to him, and said, looking up at him with all his might, "Aw, Mr. Welles, I wish't you wouldn't! I like your being here. There's lot of things I've got planned we could do together."

It seemed to him that the old man looked older and more tired at this. He closed his eyes and did not answer. Paul felt better. Mr. Welles couldn't have been in earnest.

How still it was in the woods that day. Not the least little flutter from any leaf. The sunlight looked as green, as green, coming down through the trees that way, like the light in church when the sun came in through the stained-glass windows.

The only thing that budged at all was a bird . . . was it a flicker? . . . he couldn't make out. It kept hopping around in that big beech tree across the brook. Probably it was worried about its nest and didn't like to have people so near. And yet they sat as still, he and Mr. Welles, as still as a tree, or the shiny water in the pool.

Mr. Welles opened his eyes and took the little boy's rough, calloused hand in his. "See here, Paul, maybe you can help me make up my mind."

Paul squared his shoulders.

"It's this way. I'm pretty nearly used up, not good for much any more. And the Electrical Company wanted to fix everything the nicest way for me to live. And they have. I hadn't any idea anything could be so nice as living next door to you folks in such a place as Crittenden's. And then making friends with you. I'd always wanted a little boy, but I thought I was so old, no little boy would bother with me."

He squeezed the child's fingers and looked down on him lovingly. For a moment Paul's heart swelled up so he couldn't speak. Then he said, in a husky voice, "I like to." He took a large bite from his sandwich and repeated roughly, his mouth full, "I like to."

Neither said anything more for a moment. The flicker . . . yes, it was a flicker . . . in the big beech kept changing her position, flying down from a top-branch to a lower one, and then back again. Paul made out the hole in the old trunk of the tree where she'd probably put her nest, and wondered why she didn't go back to it.

"Have you got to the Civil War, in your history yet, Paul?"

"Gee, yes, 'way past it. Up to the Philadelphia Exposition."

Mr. Welles said nothing for a minute and Paul could see by his expression that he was trying to think of some simple baby way to say what he wanted to. Gracious! didn't he know Paul was in the seventh grade? "I can understand all right," he said roughly.

Mr. Welles said, "Well, all right. If you can, you'll do more than I can. You know how the colored people got their freedom then. But something very bad had been going on there in slavery, for ever so long. And bad things that go on for a long time, can't be straightened out in a hurry. And so far, it's been too much for everybody, to get this straightened out. The colored people . . . they're made to suffer all the time for being born the way they are. And that's not right . . . in America . . ."

"Why don't they stand up for themselves?" asked Paul scornfully. He'd like to see anybody who would make him suffer for being born the way he was.

Mr. Welles hesitated again. "It looks to me this way. People can fight for some things . . . their property, and their vote and their work. And I guess the colored people have got to fight for those, themselves. But there are some other things . . . some of the nicest . . . why, if you fight for them, you tear them all to pieces, trying to get them."

Paul did not have the least idea what this meant.

"If what you want is to have people respect what you are worth, why, if you fight them to make them, then you spoil what you're worth. Anyhow, even if you don't spoil it, fighting about it doesn't put you in any state of mind to go on being your best. That's a pretty hard job for anybody."

Paul found this very dull. His attention wandered back to that queer flicker, so excited about something.

The old man tried to get at him again. "Look here, Paul, Americans that happen to be colored people ought to have every bit of the same chance to amount to their best that any Americans have, oughtn't they?"

Paul saw this. But he didn't see what Mr. Welles could do about it, and said so.

"Well, I couldn't do a great deal," said the old man sadly, "but more than if I stayed here. It looks as though they needed, as much as anything else, people to just have the same feeling towards them that you have for anybody who's trying to make the best of himself. And I could do that."

Paul got the impression at last that Mr. Welles was in earnest about this. It made him feel anxious. "Oh dear!" he said, kicking the toe of his rubber boot against the rock. He couldn't think of anything to say, except that he hated the idea of Mr. Welles going.

But just then he was startled by a sharp cry of distress from the bird, who flew out wildly from the beech, poised herself in the air, beating her wings and calling in a loud scream. The old man, unused to forests and their inhabitants, noticed this but vaguely, and was surprised by Paul's instant response. "There must be a snake after her eggs," he said excitedly. "I'll go over and chase him off."

He started across the pool, gave a cry, and stood still, petrified. Before their eyes, without a breath of wind, the hugh beech solemnly bowed itself and with a great roar of branches, whipping and crushing the trees about, it fell, its full length thundering on the ground, a great mat of shaggy roots uptorn, leaving an open wound in the stony mountain soil. Then, in a minute, it was all as still as before.

Paul was scared almost to death. He scrambled back to the rock, his knees shaking, his stomach sick, and clung to Mr. Welles with all his might. "What made it fall? There's no wind! What made it fall?" he cried, burying his face in the old man's coat. "It might just as easy have fallen this way, on us, and killed us! What made it fall?"

Mr. Welles patted Paul's shoulder, and said, "There, there," till Paul's teeth stopped chattering and he began to be a little ashamed of showing how it had startled him. He was also a little put out that Mr. Welles had remained so unmoved. "You don't know how dangerous a big tree is, when it falls!" he said, accusingly, to defend himself. "If you'd lived here more, and heard some of the stories . . . ! Nate Hewitt had his back broken with a tree falling on him. But he was cutting that one down, and it fell too soon. Nobody had touched this one! And there isn't any wind. What made it fall? Most every winter, some man in the lumber camp on the mountain gets killed or smashed up, and lots of horses too."

He felt much better now, and he did want to find out whatever had made that tree fall. He sat up, and looked back at it, just a mess of broken branches and upset leaves, where a minute before there had been a tall living tree! "I'm going over to see what made it fall," he said.

He splashed across the pool and poked around with a stick in the hole in the ground, and almost right away he saw what the reason was. He ran back to tell Mr. Welles. "I see now. The brook had kept sidling over that way, and washed the earth from under the rocks. It just didn't have enough ground left to hold on to."

He felt all right now he knew some simple reason for what had looked so crazy. He looked up confidently at the old man, and was struck into awed silence by the expression of Mr. Welles' face.

"Paul," said Mr. Welles, and his voice wasn't steady, "I guess what I ought to try to be is one more drop of water in the brook."

Paul stared hard. He did not understand this either, but he understood the expression in that tired, old face. Mr. Welles went on, "That wrong feeling about colored people, not wanting them to be respected as much as any American, is . . . that's a tree that's got to come down. I'm too old to take an axe to it. And, anyhow, if you cut that sort of thing down with an axe, the roots generally live and start all over again. If we can just wash the ground out from under it, with enough people thinking differently, maybe it'll fall, roots and all, of its own weight. If I go and live there and just am one more person who respects them when they deserve it, it'll help that much, maybe, don't you think?"

Paul had understood more what Mr. Welles' face and voice said to him than the words. He kept on looking into the old man's eyes. Something deep inside Paul said "yes" to what Mr. Welles' eyes were asking him.

"How about it, Paul?" asked the old man.

The child gave a start, climbed up beside him, and took hold of his hand. "How about it? How about it?" asked Mr. Welles in a very low tone.

The little boy nodded. "Maybe," he said briefly. His lips shook. Presently he sniffed and drew his sleeve across his nose. He held the old hand tightly.

"Oh dear!" he said again, in a small, miserable voice.

The old man made no answer.

The two sat motionless, leaning against each other. A ray of sun found the newly opened spot in the roof of the woods, and it seemed to Paul it pointed a long steady finger down on the fallen beech.

At first Paul's throat ached, and his eyes smarted. He felt heavy and sore, as though he hadn't eaten the right thing for lunch.

But by and by this went away. A quiet came all over him, so that he was better than happy. He laid his head against Mr. Welles' shoulder and looked up into the worn, pale old face, which was now also very quiet and still as though he too were better than happy.

He held Paul close to him.

Paul had a great many mixed-up thoughts. But there was one that was clear. He said to himself solemnly, "I guess I know who I want to be like when I grow up."

* * * * *

By and by, he stirred and said, "Well, I guess I better start to pack up. Don't you bother. I'll pack the things away. Mother showed me how to clean the frying-pan with sand and moss."



CHAPTER XIV

BESIDE THE ONION-BED

July 10.

Marise pulled nervously and rapidly at the weeds among the onions, and wiped away with her sleeve the drops that ran down her hot, red face. She was not rebellious at the dusty, tiresome task, nor aware of the merciless heat of the early-summer sun. She was not indeed thinking at all of what she was doing, except that the physical effort of stooping and reaching and pulling was a relief to her, made slightly less oppressive the thunder-heavy moral atmosphere she breathed. She was trying to think, but the different impressions came rushing into her mind with such vehement haste that they dashed against each other brutally, to her entire confusion.

When she tried to think out an answer to this perfectly preposterous idea of old Mr. Welles, why should a thousand other horrifying ideas which she had been keeping at bay pour in through the door, once opened to probing thought? What possible connection could there be between such a fantastic crazy notion as his, and those other heaving, looming possibilities which rolled themselves higher and murkier the longer she refused to look at them? She snatched at the weeds, twitching them up, flinging them down, reaching, straining, the sun molten on her back, the sweat stinging on her face. It was a silly impression of course, but it seemed to her that if she hurried fast enough with the weeds, those thoughts and doubts could not catch up with her.

She had put them off, and put them off while Neale was away, because they scared her, and she didn't want to look at them without Neale. But he had been back for weeks now and still she put them off. All those tarnishing sayings, those careless, casual negations of what she had taken for axioms; that challenge to her whole life dropped from time to time as though it were an accepted commonplace with all intelligent beings. . . .

Was her love for the children only an inverted form of sensual egotism, an enervating slavery for them, really only a snatched-up substitute for the personal life which was ebbing away from her? Was her attitude towards her beloved music a lazy, self-indulgent one, to keep it to herself and the valley here? Was that growing indifference of hers to dress and trips to the city, and seeing Eugenia's smart crowd there, a sign of mental dry-rot? Was it a betrayal of what was alive in her own personality to go on adapting herself to the inevitable changes in her relations with Neale, compromising, rather than . . ."

"Aren't you awfully hot to go on doing that?" asked Neale, coming up behind her, from the road. She was startled because she had not heard him approach on the soft, cultivated ground of the garden. And as she turned her wet, crimson face up to his, he was startled himself. "Why, what's the matter, dear?" he asked anxiously.

She sank back to a sitting position, drawing a long breath, mopping her forehead with her sleeve, as unconscious of her looks before Neale as though she had still been alone. She motioned him down beside her. "Oh, Neale, I'm so glad! How'd you happen to be so early? Maybe if we stay right out here, where the children won't know where we are, we can have a few minutes quite to ourselves. Toucle is going to get tea tonight. Neale, sit down a minute. I want to tell you something. I'm awfully upset. I went over to help Mr. Welles transplant his Brussels sprouts, and we got to talking. Neale, what do you suppose has been in his mind all this time we've been thinking him so happy and contented here?"

"Doesn't he like Crittenden's? Find it dull?"

"No, no, not that, a bit. He loves it. It's heart-breaking to see how much he loves it!" She stopped, her voice shaking a little, and waited till she could get it under control. Her husband took her stained, dusty hand in his. She gave his fingers a little pressure, absently, not noting what she did, and seeing the corner of his handkerchief showing in the pocket of his shirt, she pulled it out with a nervous jerk, and wiped her face all over with it.

He waited in silence.

"Listen, Neale, I know it will sound perfectly crazy to you, at first. But you might as well believe it, for he is serious. It seems he's been getting lots more letters from that niece or cousin of his, down in Georgia. She tells him about things, how the Negroes are treated, all the Jim Crow business carried into every single detail of every single minute of every single day. It seems they're not badly treated as long as they'll stay day-laborers or servants, but . . . oh well, there's no need to go on with telling you . . . you know. We all know well enough what the American attitude is. Only I didn't think it could be so bad, or so everlastingly kept up every minute, as this cousin tells him. I suppose she ought to know. She's lived there for forty years. She keeps citing instances she's seen." Marise broke out with a fierce, blaming sharpness, "I don't see what business she had, writing him that way. I think it was beastly of her. Why couldn't she let him alone!"

She felt her husband waiting patiently for her to quiet down and go on more coherently, and knew that his patience came from a long acquaintance with her mental habits, a certainty that her outbursts of feeling generally did quiet down if one waited: and across her genuine absorption in the story she was telling there flitted, bat-like, a distaste far being known so well as all that! There was something indiscreet and belittling in it, she thought, with an inward fastidious recoil. But this had gone, entirely, in a moment, and she was rushing on, "And, Neale, what do you think? She has worked on him, and he has worked on himself till he's got himself in a morbid state. He thinks perhaps he ought to leave Ashley that he loves so much and go down to live where this horrid cousin lives. . . ."

Her husband's astonishment at this was as great as she could have desired. None of Neale's usual, unsurprised acceptance of everything that happened as being in the nature of things, which occasionally so rubbed her the wrong way, and seemed to her so wilfully phlegmatic. He was sincerely amazed and astounded; that was plain from his exclamation, his tone, his face. Of course he wasn't as outraged as she, but that wasn't to be expected, since he hadn't seen so much of that dear old life-worn man, nor grown so protectingly fond of him. She revelled in Neale's astonishment as bearing out her own feeling. "Isn't it crazy, Neale! Don't you think it crazy! Is there the slightest justification for it? You feel, just as I do, don't you, that it's a perfectly unbalanced, fanatical, foolish thing to think of doing, his going down into that hopeless mess?"

But her husband had had a moment's time, while she exclaimed, to get back to his usual unhurried post in life. "It's certainly about as unexpected as anything I ever heard of," he admitted. "I should have to know a lot more about it, before I could be sure what to think."

An old impatience, at an old variance between their ways of thought, came out with an edge in Marise's tone as she said hotly, "Oh, Neale, don't take that line of yours! You know all there is to know, now! What else could you find out? You know how he's given all his life to looking out for his family, ending up with years of that bed-ridden old aunt the others wished on to him, just because he was too soft-hearted to get out from under. You know how anxious the Company was to do something to make up to him for all the years of service he gave them. And you know how happy he has been here, how he's loved it all, and fathered every root and seed in his garden, and how he and Paul have struck up such a sweet affection, and how he could be happier and happier." She struck her hands together. "Oh, Neale, I can't have him do such a foolish, useless thing, and spoil his life! It's not as if he'd be of any use down in Georgia. You know how the Southern white people detest Northerners coming down and interfering with the Negroes. Maybe they're wrong. But they're the people who live there. What could he do against them? What under the sun could one tired-out old man accomplish in a situation that every American knows to be simply impossible?" She looked hard at her husband's thoughtful face and threw herself against him with a petulant gesture. "Now, Neale, don't go and justify him! Don't say you think he's right."

He put his arm about her shoulders, hot and wet under their gingham covering, and she leaned against him, the gesture as unconsidered and unconscious for the one as the other. "No, I'm not going to try to justify him. I suppose I think he's very foolish. But I must say it shows a pretty fine spirit. I take off my hat to his intention."

"Oh yes, his intention . . ." conceded Marise. "He's an old saint, of course. Only he mustn't be allowed to ruin his life and break everybody's heart, even if he is a saint."

"That's the way saints usually run their business, isn't it?" asked Neale. "And I'd like to know how anybody's going to keep him from doing it, if he decides he ought to."

"Oh yes, we can," urged Marise, sitting up with energy. "We can, every one of us, throw ourselves against it, argue with him, tell him that it seems to us not only foolish, and exaggerated, and morbid, but conceited as if he thought what he did would count so very much. We can make him feel that it would be sort of cheating the Company, after what they've done for him; we can just mass all our personalities against it, use moral suasion, get excited, work on his feelings . . . she has done that, that cousin!"

"I wouldn't want to do that," said Neale quietly. "You can, if you think best."

She recognized a familiar emergence of granite in his voice and aspect and cried out on it passionately, "Now, Neale!"

He knew perfectly well what this meant, without further words from her. They looked at each other, an unspoken battle going on with extreme rapidity between them, over ground intimately familiar. In the middle of this, she broke violently into words, quite sure that he would know at which point she took it up. "You carry that idea to perfectly impossible lengths, Neale. Don't you ever admit that we ought to try to make other people act the way we think best, even when we know we're right and they're wrong?"

"Yes," admitted her husband, "I should think we were bound to. If we ever were sure we were right and they wrong."

She gave the impression of vibrating with impatience and cried out, "That's pettifogging. Of course there are times when we are sure. Suppose you saw a little child about to take hold of the red-hot end of a poker?"

"A child is different," he opposed her. "All grown-ups are responsible for all children. I suppose I'd keep him from taking hold of it. And yet I'm not dead sure I'd be right. If I thought he was only just going to touch it, to see if it really would burn him as people had told him, I guess I'd let him."

"You always get around things," she said blamingly, "but there are cases when you could be sure. Suppose you saw Aunt Hetty just about to take poison, or Frank Warner getting Nelly Powers to run away with him?"

He was startled by this, and asked quickly with a change of tone, "Whatever made you think of that? Are Frank and Nelly . . . ?"

"Oh, it just came into my head. No, I haven't heard anybody has said anything, noticed anything. But I had a sort of notion that 'Gene doesn't like Frank hanging around the house so much."

"Well . . ." commented her husband, with a lively accent of surprise. "I hadn't dreamed of such a thing. And it throws a light on something I happened to see this afternoon, on my way home. I came round the back way, the ravine road below the Eagle Rocks. I wanted to see about some popple we're thinking of buying from the Warners, on the shoulder beyond the Rocks. It didn't occur to me, of course, that anybody else would be up there, but just at the peak of the shoulder I saw 'Gene Powers, lying down beside a big beech-tree. He didn't hear me, walking on the pine-needles. And for a minute I stood there, and honestly didn't know what to do."

"How do you mean . . . 'lying down'?" asked Marise, not visualizing the scene. "As though he were sick?"

"No, not a bit that way. Not on his back, but on his face, looking over the edge of the ridge. All strung up like a bow, his head down between his shoulders and shot forwards like a cat stalking something. I tell you, he made me think of a hunter when he thinks he sees a deer. I thought probably he had. I've seen a buck and some does up there lately. Then he saw me and jumped up very quickly and came down past me. I was going to say, just for the sake of saying something, 'Laying your plans for next deer-week?' But as he went by and nodded, he looked at me with such an odd expression that I thought I'd better not. The idea came to me that maybe 'Gene does poach and occasionally take a deer out of season. Meat is so high it wouldn't be surprising. They have a pretty hard time scraping along. I don't know as I'd blame him if he did shoot a deer once in a while.

"Well, after I'd been on beyond and made my estimate on the popple, I came back that way. And as I passed where he'd been lying, I thought, just for curiosity, I'd go up and see if I could see what he'd been looking at so hard. I got up to the big beech where he'd been, and looked over. And I got the surprise of my life. He couldn't have been looking at deer, for on the other side the cliff drops down sheer, and you look right off into air, across the valley. I was so surprised I stood there, taken aback. The afternoon train went up the valley while I stood there, staring. It looked so tiny. You're really very high on those Rocks. I noticed you could see your Cousin Hetty's house from there, and the mill and the Powers house. That looked like a child's plaything, so little, under the big pine. And just as I looked at that, I saw a man come out from the house, get on a horse, and ride away."

"Why, that must have been Frank," said Marise. "He rides that roan mare of his as much as he drives her."

"Yes, that's what came into my mind when you spoke his name just now in connection with Nelly. I hadn't thought anything of it, before."

There was a moment's silence as they looked at each other.

"Oh, Neale!" said Marise, on a deep note. "How awful! You don't suppose there is anything in his jealousy. . . . Nelly is as inscrutable in her way as 'Gene."

"Heavens! how should I know? But my guess is that 'Gene is making a fool of himself for nothing. Nelly doesn't strike me as being the sort of woman to . . ."

"But Frank is awfully good-looking and dashing, and lots younger than 'Gene. And Nelly is young too and perfectly stunning to look at. And she's not one of our native valley girls, you know. It may seem very dull and cooped-up here, so far from town, and shops. She may envy her sisters, still living back in West Adams with city life around them."

"Oh, it's possible enough, I suppose," admitted Neale. "But she seems perfectly contented, and thinks the world of the children."

Marise's face clouded. The phrase had recalled her dark preoccupations of a moment ago. "Lots of people nowadays would say she seems to be fond of the children because she is using them to fill up a lack in her life," she said somberly; "that 'Gene no longer satisfied her, and that she fed on the children because she was starving emotionally." Her husband making no comment on this, she went on, "Neale, don't you think that people are saying horrid, distressing things nowadays? About marriage I mean, and all relations between men and women and between parents and children?" Her heart was beating faster as she finished this question. The subject was broached at last. Where would it lead them? Where would it lead them? She shut her eyes at the thought.

"There's a good deal to be said about all that, that's pretty horrid and perfectly true," remarked Neale casually. He tilted his hat further over his eyes and leaned back, propping himself on one elbow.

"Neale!" she protested, shocked and repelled. She had hoped for something very different from Neale. But she thought, in a momentary exasperation with him, she might have known she would not get it. He always took everything so abstractedly, so impersonally.

"I don't see any use in pretending there's not," he advanced with a reasonable, considering air. "I don't see that intimate human relationships are in any more of a mess than other human relations. International ones, for instance, just now. But they certainly are in considerable of a mess, in a great many cases. It is evident that lots of times they're managed all wrong."

Marise was so acutely disappointed that she felt a quavering ache in her throat, and kept silence for a moment. So this was what she had looked forward to, as a help. What was Neale there for, if not for her to lean against, to protect her, to be a defending wall about her? He was so strong and so clearheaded, he could be such a wall if he chose. How stern and hard he was, the core of him!

"Neale," she said after a moment, "I wonder if you even know what things are being said about what we've always believed in . . . motherhood for instance, and marriage?"

She had been unable to keep the quaver out of her voice, and at the sound of it, he sat up instantly, astonished, solicitous, tender. "Why, darling, what's the matter?" he said again, moving closer to her, bending over her.

"How can you think such things without their making you perfectly miserable, without making you want to go straight and cut your throat?" she cried out on his callousness.

He put his arm about her again, not absently this time, and drew her close. She thought angrily, "He thinks it's just a fit of nerves I can be soothed out of like a child," and pulled away from him.

He looked at her, his attentive, intelligent look, and let his arm drop. And yet, although he was serious now, she was sure that he saw only that the subject agitated her, and did not see any possibility that it might touch them both, personally.

"I have to think whatever I'm convinced is true, whether it makes me miserable or not, don't I?" he said gently. "And it does make me miserable, of course. Who can help being miserable at the spectacle of such rich possibilities as human life is full of, mismanaged and spoiled and lost?"

"But, Neale, do you realize that people are thinking, books are being written to prove that parents' love for their children is only self-love, hypocritically disguised, and sometimes even sexual love camouflaged; and that anybody is better for the children to be with than their mother; and that married people, after the first flare-up of passion is over, hate each other instead of loving?"

"I daresay there's a certain amount of truth in that, occasionally. It would certainly explain some of the inexplicable things we all see happen in family life," he remarked.

Marise started and cried out piercingly, "Neale, how can you say such things to me!"

He looked at her keenly again, keenly and penetratingly, and said, "I'm not one of those who think it inherent in the nature of women to take abstract propositions personally always. But I do think they will have to make a big effort to get themselves out of a mighty old acquired habit of thinking every general observation is directed at them personally."

She flashed out indignantly at him, "How can you help taking it personally when it shakes the very foundations of our life?"

He was astonished enough at this to suit even her. His face showed the most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her. "Shakes the . . . why, Marise dear, what are you talking about? You don't have to believe about yourself all the generalizing guesses that people are writing down in books, do you, if it contradicts your own experience? Just because you read that lots of American men had flat-foot and were refused at the recruiting station for that, you don't have to think your own feet flat, do you? If you do think so, all you have to do is to start out and walk on them, to know for sure they're all right. Heavens and earth! People of our age, who have really lived, don't need somebody in a book to tell them what's happening to them. Don't you know whether you really love Elly and Mark and Paul? If you don't, I should think a few minutes' thought and recollection of the last ten years would tell you, all right. Don't you know whether we hate each other, you and I?"

Marise drew a long breath of relief. This was the sort of talk she wanted. She clutched at the strong hand which seemed at last held out to her. She did so want to be talked out of it all. "Oh good! then, Neale, you don't believe any of that sort of talk? You were only saying so for argument."

He withdrew the hand. "Yes, I do believe a good deal of as a general proposition. What I'm saying, what I'm always saying, dear, and trying my best to live, is that everybody must decide for himself when a general proposition applies to him, what to believe about his own life and its values. Nobody else can tell him."

She approached along another line. "But, Neale, that's all very well for you, because you have so much withstandingness in you. But for me, there are things so sacred, so intimate, so much a part of me, that only to have some rough hand laid on them, to have them pulled out and pawed over and thought about . . . it frightens me so, sets me in such a quiver! And they don't seem the same again. Aren't there things in life so high and delicate that they can't stand questioning?"

He considered this a long time, visibly putting all his intelligence on it. "I can't say, for you," he finally brought out. "You're so much finer and more sensitive than I. But I've never in all these years seen that your fineness and your sensitiveness make you any less strong in the last analysis. You suffer more, respond more to all the implications of things; but I don't see that there is any reason to think there's any inherent weakness in you that need make you afraid to look at facts."

He presented this testimony to her, seriously, gravely. It took her breath, coming from him. She could only look at him in speechless gratitude and swallow hard. Finally she said, falteringly, "You're too good, Neale, to say that. I don't deserve it. I'm awfully weak, many times."

"I wouldn't say it, if it weren't so," he answered, "and I didn't say you weren't weak sometimes. I said you were strong when all was said and done."

Even in her emotion, she had an instant's inward smile at the Neale-like quality of this. She went on, "But don't you think there is such a thing as spoiling beautiful elements in life, with handling them, questioning them, for natures that aren't naturally belligerent and ready to fight for what they want to keep? For instance, when somebody says that children in a marriage are like drift-wood left high on the rocks of a dwindled stream, tokens of a flood-time of passion now gone by. . . ." She did not tell him who had said this. Nor did he ask. But she thought by his expression that he knew it had been Vincent Marsh.

He said heartily, "I should just call that a nasty-minded remark from somebody who didn't know what he was talking about. And let it go at that."

"There, you see," she told him, "that rouses your instinct to resist, to fight back. But it doesn't mine. It just makes me sick."

"Marise, I'm afraid that you have to fight for what you want to keep in this world. I don't see any way out of it. And I don't believe that anybody else can do your fighting for you. You ask if it's not possible to have beautiful, intimate things spoiled by questioning, criticisms, doubts. Yes, I do think it is, for young people, who haven't learned anything of life at first hand. I think they ought to be protected till they have been able to accumulate some actual experience of life. That's the only weapon for self-defense anybody can have, what he has learned of life, himself. Young people are apt to believe what older people tell them about life, because they don't know anything about it, yet, themselves, and I think you ought to be careful what is questioned in their presence. But I don't see that mature people ought to be protected unless you want to keep them childish, as women used to be kept. Nothing is your own, if you haven't made it so, and kept it so."

"But, Neale, it's so sickeningly hard! Why do it? Why, when everything seems all right, pry into the deep and hidden roots of things? I don't want to think about the possibility of some dreadful dry-rot happening to married people's feelings towards each other, as they get older and get used to each other. It's soiling to my imagination. What's the use?"

She had so hoped he would help her to sweep them all back to the cellar labeled "morbid" and lock them down in the dark again. Any other man would, she thought, amazed at him, any other husband! She focussed all her personality passionately to force him to answer as she wished.

He fell into another thoughtful silence, glanced up at her once sharply and looked down again. She always felt afraid of him when he looked like that. No, not afraid of him, but of the relentless thing he was going to say. Presently he said it. "What's the use? Why, the very fact you seem afraid of it . . . I can't imagine why . . . shows there would be some use. To turn your back on anything you're afraid of, that's fatal, always. It springs on you from behind."

She cried out to him in a sudden anguish that was beyond her control, "But suppose you face it and still it springs!"

Her aspect, her accent, her shaken voice gave him a great start. He faced her. He looked at her as though he saw her for the first time that day. And he grew very pale as he looked. Something wordless passed between them. Now he knew at last what she was afraid of.

But he did not flinch. He said desperately, in a harsh voice, "You have to take what comes to you in life," and was grimly silent.

Then with a gesture as though to put away something incredible, approaching him, he went on more quietly, "But my experience is that it doesn't dare spring if you walk right up to it. Generally you find you're less afraid of everything in the world, after that."

* * * * *

She had been frightened, stabbed through and through by the look they had interchanged, by the wordless something which had passed between them. But now she wondered suddenly, passionately, amazedly, if he had really understood all the dagger-like possibilities of their talk.

"Neale," she challenged him, "don't you put any limits on this? Isn't there anywhere you'd stop out of sheer respect? Nothing too hallowed by . . ."

"Nothing. Nothing," he answered her, his face pale, his eyes deep and enduring. "It's lying down, not to answer the challenge when it comes. How do you know what you have to deal with if you won't look to see? You may find out that something you have been trusting is growing out of a poisonous root. That does happen. What's the use of pretending that it couldn't to you, as to anybody else? And what's the use of having lived honestly, if you haven't grown brave enough to do whatever needs to be done? If you are scared by the idea that your motherhood may be only inverted sensuality, or if you think there is any possibility that the children would be better off in other hands, or if you think . . . if you think there is any other terrifying possibility in our life here, for God's sake look into your own heart and see for yourself! It all sounds like nonsense to me, but . . ."

She snatched at the straw, she who longed so for help. "Oh, Neale, if you think so, I know . . ."

"I won't have you taking my word for it!" he told her roughly. "I can't tell what's back of what you do. And you oughtn't to take my word for it if I tried to. Nobody on earth can make your decision for you, but you yourself." The drops stood out on his forehead as he spoke, and ran down his pale face.

She quivered and was silent for a moment. Then, "Neale, where shall I get the strength to do that?" she asked.

He looked full in her face. "I don't know anywhere to go for strength but out of one's naked human heart," he said.

She shrank from the rigor of this with a qualm of actual fear. "I think I must have something else," she told him wildly.

"I don't know," he returned. "I don't know at all about that. I'm no mystic. I can't help you there, dear. But I know, as well as I know anything on earth, that anything that's worth having in anybody's life, his parent-hood, his marriage, his love, his ambition, can stand any honest challenge it can be put to. If it can't, it's not valid and ought to be changed or discarded." His gaze on her was immeasurably steady.

She longed unspeakably for something else from him, some warming, comforting assurance of help, some heartening, stimulating encouragement along that stark, bleak way.

* * * * *

Somehow they were standing up now, both pale, looking profoundly into each other's eyes. Something almost palpable, of which not a word had been spoken aloud, came and stood there between them, and through it they still looked at each other. They had left words far behind now, in the fierce velocity of their thoughts.

And yet with the almost physical unity of their years of life together, each knew the other's thoughts.

She flung herself against him as though she had cried out to him. He put his arms strongly, tenderly about her, as though he had answered.

With no words she had cried out, silently, desperately to him, "Hold me! Hold me!"

And with no words, he had answered, silently, desperately, "No one can hold you but yourself."

* * * * *

A shouting babble of voices rose in the distance. The children crying to each other came out of the house-door and raced down the flag-stone walk. "There they are! In the garden! By the onion-bed! Father! Mother! We've been looking for you everywhere. Toucle says if you'll let her, she'll boil down some maple syrup for us to wax on ice for dessert."

They poured into the garden, children, cat and fox-terrier, noisy, insistent, clamorous. Mark, always frankly greedy of his mother's attention, pushed in jealously between his parents, clinging to his mother's knees. He looked up in her face and laughed out, his merry peal, "Oh, Mother, what a dirty face! You've been suspiring and then you've wiped your forehead with your dirty hand, the way you say I mustn't. How funny you look! And you've got a great, long tear in your sleeve, too."

Behind them, tiny, smooth and glistening, Eugenia Mills strolled to the edge of the garden, as far as the flag-stones went, and stood waiting, palpably incapable of taking her delicate bronze slippers into the dust.

"You've missed a kitchen call from that lively, earthy old Mrs. Powers and her handsome daughter-in-law," she announced casually. "Toucle says they brought some eggs. What a stunning creature that Nelly is! There's temperament for you! Can't you just feel the smouldering, primitive fire hidden under that scornful silence of hers?"

"Mother, may we tell Toucle to put the syrup on to boil?" begged Elly. Her hair was tangled and tousled, with bits of bark sticking in it, and dried mud was caked on her hands and bare legs. Marise thought of the repugnance she must have aroused in Eugenia.

"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles is going to give me a fishing-rod, he says. A real one. Boughten."

"Oh, I want one too!" cried Mark, jumping up and down. "I want one too."

"You're too little. Mother, isn't Mark too little? And anyhow, he always breaks everything. You do, Mark, you know you do. I take care of my things!"

* * * * *

Someone in the confusion stepped on the fox-terrier's toes and he set up a shrill, aggrieved yelping. The children pawed at her with dirty hands.

"Good-evening, Mr. Marsh," said Eugenia, looking over her shoulder at the dark-haired figure in flannels approaching from the other house. She turned and strolled across the grass to meet him, as white and gleaming as he.

* * * * *

A sick qualm of self-contempt shook Marise. For, high and clear above everything else, there had come into her mind a quick discomfort at the contrast between her appearance and that of Eugenia.



CHAPTER XV

HOME LIFE

July 20.

The heat was appalling even early in the morning, right after breakfast. There were always three or four such terrific days, even up here in the mountains, to remind you that you lived in America and had to take your part of the ferocious extremes of the American climate.

And of course this had to be the time when Toucle went off for one of her wandering disappearances. Marise could tell that by the aspect of the old woman as she entered the kitchen that morning, her reticule bag bulging out with whatever mysterious provisions Toucle took with her. You never missed anything from the kitchen.

Marise felt herself in such a nervously heightened state of sensitiveness to everything and everybody in those days, that it did not surprise her to find that for the first time she received something more than a quaint and amusing impression from the old aborigine. She had never noticed it before, but sometimes there was something about Toucle's strange, battered, leathery old face . . . what was it? The idea came to her a new one, that Toucle was also a person, not merely a curious and enigmatic phenomenon.

Toucle was preparing to depart in the silent, unceremonious, absent-minded way she did everything, as though she were the only person in the world. She opened the screen door, stepped out into the torrid glare of the sunshine and, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure, trudged down the path.

"Where does she go?" thought Marise, and "What was that expression on her face I could not name?"

Impulsively she went out quickly herself, and followed after the old woman.

"Toucle! Toucle!" she called, and wondered if her voice in these days sounded to everyone as nervous and uncertain as it did to her.

The old woman turned and waited till the younger had overtaken her. They were under the dense shade of an old maple, beside the road, as they stood looking at each other.

As she had followed, Marise regretted her impulse, and had wondered what in the world she could find to say, but now that she saw again the expression in the other's face, she cried out longingly, "Toucle, where do you go that makes you look peaceful?"

The old woman glanced at her, a faint surprise appearing in her deeply lined face. Then she looked at her, without surprise, seriously as though to see what she might read in the younger woman's eyes. She stood for a long moment, thinking. Finally she sat down on the grass under the maple-tree, and motioned Marise to sit beside her. She meditated for a long time, and then said, hesitatingly, "I don't know as a white person could understand. White people . . . nobody ever asked me before."

She sat silent, her broad, dusty feet in their elastic-sided, worn, run-over shoes straight before her, the thick, horny eyelids dropped over her eyes, her scarred old face carved into innumerable deep lines. Marise wondered if she had forgotten that anyone else was there. She turned her own eyes away, finally, and looking at the mountains saw that black thunderclouds were rolling up over the Eagle Rocks. Then the old woman said, her eyes still dropped, "I tell you how my uncle told me, seventy-five years ago. He said people are like fish in an underground brook, in a black cave. He said there is a place, away far off from where they live, where there is a crack in the rock. If they went 'way off they could get a glimpse of what daylight is. And about once in so often they need to swim there and look out at the daylight. If they don't, they lose their eyesight from always being in the dark. He said that a lot of Indians don't care whether they lose their eyesight or not, so long's they can go on eating and swimming around. But good Indians do. He said that as far as he could make out, none of the white people care. He said maybe they've lost their eyes altogether."

Without a move of her sagging, unlovely old body, she turned her deep black eyes on the flushed, quivering, beautiful woman beside her. "That's where I go," she answered. "I go 'way off to be by myself, and get a glimpse of what daylight is."

She got up to her feet, shifted her reticule from one hand to the other, and without a backward look trudged slowly down the dusty road, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure.

Marise saw her turn into a wood-road that led up towards the mountain, and disappear. Her own heart was burning as she looked. Nobody would help her in her need. Toucle went away to find peace, and left her in the black cave. Neale stood. . . .

A child's shriek of pain and loud wailing calls for "Mother! Mother! Mother!" sent her back running breathlessly to the house. Mark had fallen out of the swing and the sharp corner of the board had struck him, he said, "in the eye! in the eye!" He was shrieking and holding both hands frantically over his left eye. This time it might be serious, might have injured the eye-ball. Those swing-boards were deadly. Marise snatched up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen, terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to herself with one breath, "It's probably nothing," and in the next seeing Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his life long.

She opened the first-aid box on the kitchen-shelf, pulled out a roll of bandage and a length of gauze, sat down with Mark in her lap near the faucet, and wet the gauze in cold water. Then she tried in vain to induce him to take down his hands so that she could see where the blow had struck.

But the terrified, hysterical child was incapable of hearing what she said, incapable of doing anything but scream louder and louder when she tried to pull down those desperately tight little hands held with frantic tenseness over the hurt eye. Marise could feel all his little body, quivering and taut. His shrieks were like those of someone undergoing the most violent torture.

She herself responded nervously and automatically to his condition, felt herself begin to tighten up, and knew that she was equally ready to shake him furiously, or to burst into anguished tears of sympathy for his pain.

Wait now . . . wait . . . what was the thing to do for Mark? What would untie those knots of fright and shock? For Paul it would have been talk of the bicycle he was to have for his birthday; for Elly a fairy-story or a piece of candy! For Mark . . .

High above the tumult of Mark's shrieks and her own spasmodic reactions to them, she sent her intelligence circling quietly . . . and in an instant . . . oh yes, that was the thing. "Listen, Mark," she said in his ear, stopping her effort to take down his hands, "Mother's learned a new song, a new one, awfully funny. And ever so long too, the way you like them." She put her arms about him and began, hearing herself with difficulty through his cries.

"On yonder hill there stands a damsel, Who she is, I do not know."

("How preposterous we must sound, if Eugenia is listening," she thought to herself, as she sang, "out-yelling each other this way!")

"I'll go and court her for her beauty. She must answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

As usual Mark fell helpless before the combination of music and a story. His cries diminished in volume. She said in his ear, "And then the Lady sings," and she tuned her voice to a young-ladyish, high sweetness and sang,

"My father was a Spanish Captain, Went to sea a month ago,"

Mark made a great effort and choked down his cries to heaving sobs as he tried to listen,

"First he kissed me, then he left me; Bade me always answer 'no.'"

She told the little boy, now looking up at her out of the one eye not covered by his hands, "Then the gentleman says to her," she made her voice loud and hearty and bluff,

"Oh, Madam, in your face is beauty, On your lips red roses grow. Will you take me for your lover? Madam, answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

She explained in an aside to Mark, "But her father had told her she must always answer just the one thing, 'no,' so she had to say," she turned up in the mincing, ladylike key again, and sang,

"Oh no, John, no, John, no."

Mark drew a long quivering breath through parted lips and sat silent, his one eye fixed on his mother, who now sang in the loud, lusty voice,

"Oh, Madam, since you are so cruel, And that you do scorn me so, If I may not be your lover, Madam, will you let me go?"

And in the high, prim voice, she answered herself,

"Oh no, John, no, John, no!"

A faint smile hovered near Mark's flushed face. He leaned towards his mother as she sang, and took down his hands so that he could see her better. Marise noted instantly, with a silent exclamation of relief that the red angry mark was quite outside the eye-socket, harmless on the bone at one side. Much ado about nothing as usual with the children. Why did she get so frightened each time? Another one of Mark's hairbreadth escapes.

She reached for the cold wet compress and went on, singing loudly and boldly, with a facetious wag of her head, (how tired she was of all this manoeuvering!),

"Then I will stay with you forever If you will not be unkind."

She applied the cold compress on the hurt spot and put out her hand for the bandage-roll, singing with an ostentatiously humorous accent and thinking with exasperation how all this was delaying her in the thousand things to do in the house,

"Madam, I have vowed to love you; Would you have me change my mind?"

She wound the bandage around and around the little boy's head, so that it held the compress in place, singing in the high, sweet voice,

"Oh no, John, no, John, NO."

She went on with a heavy, mock solemnity, in the loud voice,

"Oh, hark, I hear the church-bells ringing; Will you come and be my wife?"

She pinned the bandage in place at the back of Mark's head,

"Or, dear Madam, have you settled To live single all your life?"

She gathered the child up to her, his head on her shoulder, his face turned to her, his bare, dusty, wiry little legs wriggling and soiling her white skirt; and sang, rollickingly,

"Oh no, John, no, John, NO!"

"There, that's all," she said in her natural voice, looking down at Mark. She said to herself rebelliously, "I've expended enough personality and energy on this performance to play a Beethoven sonata at a concert," and found she was quoting something Vincent Marsh had said about her life, the day before.

There was a moment while the joke slowly penetrated to Mark's six-year-old brain. And then he laughed out, delightedly, "Oh, Mother, that's a beaut! Sing it again. Sing it again! Now I know what's coming, I'll like it such a lots betterer."

Marise cried out in indignant protest, "Mark! When I've sat here for ten minutes singing to you, and all the work to do, and the sun getting like red-hot fire every minute."

"What must you got to do?" asked Mark, challengingly.

"Well, the very first thing is to get dinner ready and in the fireless cooker, so we can turn out the oil-stove and cool off this terrible kitchen."

Mark looked up at her and smiled. He had recently lost a front tooth and this added a quaintness to the splendor of his irresistible smile. "You could sing as you get the dinner ready," he said insinuatingly, "and I'll help you."

Marise smothered an impulse to shout to the child, "No, no, go away! Go away! I can't have you bothering around. I've got to be by myself, or I don't know what will happen!" She thought of Toucle, off in the green and silent woods, in a blessed solitude. She thought of Eugenia up in her shaded room, stretched on the chaise-longue in a thin silk room-gown, she thought of Neale and his stern eyes . . . she looked down on the dusty, tanned, tousle-headed little boy, with the bandage around his head, his one eye looking up at her pleadingly, his dirty little hand clutching at the fold of her skirt; and drearily and unwillingly she summoned herself to self-control. "All right, Mark, that's true. I could sing while I peel the potatoes. You could wash them for me. That would help."

They installed themselves for this work. The acrid smell of potato-parings rose in the furnace-like heat of the kitchen, along with the singing voice, asking and answering itself. Mark listened with all his might, laughing and wriggling with appreciation. When his mother had finished and was putting the potatoes into the boiling water, he said exultantly, "He got around her, all right, I should say what!"

Paul burst in now, saying, "Mother, Mother!" He stopped short and asked, "What you got on your head, Mark?"

The little boy looked surprised, put his hand up, felt the bandage, and said with an off-hand air, "Oh, I bunked my head on the corner of the swing-board."

"I know," said Paul, "I've done it lots of times." He went on, "Mother, my pig has lice. You can just see them crawling around under his hair. And I got out the oil Father said to use, but I can't do it. It says on the can to rub it on with a stiff little brush. I don't see how ever in the world you're going to get your pig to stand still while you do it. When I try to, he just squeals, and runs away."

His mother said with decision, from where she stooped before the open ice-box door, "Paul, if there is anything in the world I know nothing about, it is pigs. I haven't the slightest idea what to do." She shut the heavy door with a bang more energetic than was necessary to latch it, and came back towards the stove with a raw, red piece of uncooked meat on a plate.

"Oh, how nasty meat looks, raw," said Mark, with an accent of disgust.

"You eat it with a good appetite when I've cooked it," remarked his mother, somewhat grimly, putting it in a hot pan over the fire. An odor of searing fibers and smoke and frying onions rose up in the hot, still air of the kitchen.

"If I could have guessed we'd have such weather, I'd never have ordered a pot-roast," thought Marise, vexed.

"Please, Mother, please," begged Paul.

"Please what?" asked his mother, who had forgotten the pig.

"Henry!" said Paul. "If you could see how he scratches and scratches and how the behind of his ears is all scabs he's so bitten."

"Wouldn't Eugenia and Vincent Marsh love this conversation?" thought Marise, turning the meat in the pan and starting back from the spatters of hot fat.

"Mother, don't you see, I agreed to take care of him, with Father, and so I have to. He's just like my child. You wouldn't let one of us have lice all over, and scabs on our . . ."

"Oh stop, Paul, for Heaven's sake!" said his mother.

Through the smoke and smell and heat, the sensation of her underclothing sticking hotly to her limbs, the constant dogging fear and excitement that beset her, and the causeless twanging of her nerves, there traveled to her brain, along a channel worn smooth by the habit of her thought about the children, the question, "What is it that makes Paul care so much about this?" And the answer, almost lost in the reverberation of all those other questions and answers in her head, was, "It comes from what is best in Paul, his feeling of personal responsibility for the welfare of others. That mustn't be hindered." Aloud, almost automatically, she said, in a neutral tone, "Paul, I don't think I can do a single thing for you and Henry, but I'll go with you and look at him and see if I can think of anything. Just wait till I get this and the potatoes in the fireless cooker."

Paul made a visible effort, almost as though he were swallowing something too large for his throat, and said ungraciously, "I suppose I ought to help you in here, then."

"I suppose so," said his mother roughly, in an exact imitation of his manner.

Paul looked at her quickly, laughing a little, sheepishly. He waited a moment, during which time Mark announced that he was going out to the sand-pile, and then said, in a pleasant tone, "What can I do?"

His mother nodded at him with a smile, refrained from the spoken word of approbation which she knew he would hate, and took thought as to what he might do that would afflict him least. "You can go and sweep off the front porch, and straighten out the cushions and chairs, and water the porch-box geraniums."

He disappeared, whistling loudly, "Massa's in the cold, cold ground." Marise hoped automatically that Elly was not in earshot to hear this.

She felt herself tired to the point of exhaustion by the necessity always to be divining somebody's inner processes, putting herself in somebody's else skin and doing the thing that would reach him in the right way. She would like, an instant, just an instant, to be in her own skin, she thought, penetrated with a sense of the unstable equilibrium of personal relations. To keep the peace in a household of young and old highly differentiated personalities was a feat of the Blondin variety; the least inattention, the least failure in judgment, and opportunities were lost forever. Her sense of the impermanence of the harmony between them all had grown upon her of late, like an obsession. It seemed to her that her face must wear the strained, propitiatory smile she had so despised in her youth on the faces of older woman, mothers of families. Now she knew from what it came . . . balancing perpetually on a tight-rope from which . . .

Oh, her very soul felt crumpled with all this pressure from the outside, never-ending!

The worst was not the always recurring physical demands, the dressing and undressing the children, preparing their food and keeping them clean. The crushing part was the moral strain; to carry their lives always with you, incalculably different from each other and from your own. And not only their present lives, but the insoluble question of how their present lives were affecting their future. Never for a moment from the time they are born, to be free from the thought, "Where are they? What are they doing? Is that the best thing for them?" till every individual thought of your own was shattered, till your intelligence was atrophied, till your sensibilities to finer things were dulled and blunted.

Paul came back. "About ready for Henry?" he asked. "I've finished the porch."

She put the two tightly closed kettles inside the fireless cooker and shut down the lid. "Yes, ready for Henry," she said.

She washed her hot, moist face in cold water, drank a glass, put on a broad-brimmed garden hat, and set out for the field back of the barn. The kitchen had been hot, but it seemed cool compared to the heat into which they stepped from the door. It startled Marise so that she drew back for an instant. It seemed to her like walking through molten metal. "Mercy! what heat!" she murmured.

"Yes, ain't it great?" said Paul, looking off, down the field, "just what the corn needs."

"You should say 'isn't,' not 'ain't,'" corrected his mother.

"But it'll be cooler soon," said Paul. "There's a big thunderstorm coming up. See, around the corner of the mountain. See how black it is now, over the Eagle Rocks" He took her hand in his bramble-scarred little fingers, and led her along, talking proudly of his own virtue. "I've moved Henry's pen today, fresh, so's to get him on new grass, and I put it under the shade of this butternut tree."

They were beside the pen now, looking over the fence at the grotesque animal, twitching his gross and horribly flexible snout, as he peered up at them out of his small, intelligent eyes, sunk in fat, and almost hidden by the fleshy, hairy triangles of his ear-flaps.

"Don't you think Henry is a very handsome pig?" asked Paul.

"I think you take very good care of him," she answered. "Now what is the matter about the oil you can't put on? Doesn't he like it?"

"He hasn't felt it yet. He won't even let me try. Look!" The child climbed over the fence and made a quick grab at the animal, which gave an alarmed, startled grunt, wheeled with astonishing nimbleness, and darted away in a short-legged gallop.

"Look there, that's the way he always does!" said Paul in an aggrieved tone.

Marise considered the pig for a moment. He had turned again and was once more staring at her, his quivering, fleshy snout in the air, a singularly alert expression of attention animating his heavy-jowled countenance.

"Are there any things he specially likes?" she asked Paul.

"He likes to eat, of course, being a pig," said Paul, "and he loves you to scratch his back with a stick."

"Oh, then it's easy. Come outside the pen. Now listen. You go back to the barn and get whatever it is you feed him. Then you put that in the trough, and let him begin to eat, quietly. Then take your oil and your brush, and moving very slowly so that you don't startle him, lean over the fence and begin to brush it on his back where he likes to be rubbed. If he likes the feel of it, he'll probably stand still. I'll wait here, till you see how it comes out."

She moved away a few paces, and sank down on the grass under the tree, as though the heat had flung her there. The grass crisped drily under her, as though it too were parched.

She closed her eyes and felt the sun beating palpably on the lids . . . or was it that hot inward pulse still throbbing . . . ? Why wouldn't Neale do it for her? Why wouldn't he put out that strength of his and crush out this strange agitation of hers, forbid it to her? Then there was nothing in her but intense discomfort, as though that were a universe of its own. A low, distant growl of thunder shook the air with a muffled, muted roar.

After a time, a little voice back of her announced in a low, cautious tone, "Mother, it works! Henry loves it!"

She turned her head and saw the little boy vigorously rubbing the ears and flanks of the pig, which stood perfectly still, its eyes half shut, rapt in a beatitude of satisfaction.

Marise turned her head away and slid down lower on the grass, so that she lay with her face on her arm. She was shaking from head to foot as though with sobs. But she was not crying. She was laughing hysterically. "Even for the pig!" she was saying to herself. "A symbol of my life!"

She lay there a long time after this nervous fit of laughter had stopped, till she heard Paul saying, "There, I've put it on every inch of him." He added with a special intonation, "And now I guess maybe I'd better go in swimming."

At this Marise sat up quickly, with an instant experienced divination of what she would see.

In answer to her appalled look on him, he murmured apologetically, "I didn't know I was getting so much on me. It sort of spattered."

* * * * *

It was, of course, as she led the deplorable object towards the house that they encountered Eugenia under a green-lined white parasol, on the way back from the garden, carrying an armful of sweet-peas.

"I thought I'd fill the vases with fresh flowers before the rain came," she murmured, visibly sheering off from Paul.

"Eugenia ought not to carry sweet-peas," thought Marise. "It ought always to be orchids."

In the bath-room as she and Paul took off his oil-soaked clothes, Mark's little voice called to her, "Mother! Mo-o-other!"

"Yes, what is it?" she answered, suspending operations for a moment to hear.

"Mother, if I had to kill all the ants in the world," called Mark, "I'd a great deal rather they were all gathered up together in a heap than running around every-which-way, wouldn't you?"