Marise stood very still, her eyes bent downward. "Aren't you going to answer me?" he said, furious.

She nodded. "Yes, I'm going to answer you," she said, without raising her eyes. He understood that he must wait, and stood opposite to her, close to her, looking at her, all the strength of his passion in that avid gaze.

She was stamped on his mind in every detail as she looked at that instant, infinitely desirable, infinitely alluring, in her thin white dress, her full supple woman's body erect and firm with a strong life of its own, her long sensitive hands clasped before her . . . how many times in his dreams had he held them in his . . . her shining dark hair bound smoothly about her head and down low on each side of her rounded forehead. Her thick white eyelids, down-dropped, were lowered over her eyes, and her mouth with its full lips and deep corners . . . at the sight of her mouth on which he had laid that burning kiss, Vincent felt a barrier within him give way . . . here he was at last with the woman he loved, the woman who was going to give herself to him . . . Good God! all these words . . . what did they mean? Nothing. He swept her into his arms and drew her face to his, his eyes closed, lost in the wonder and ecstasy of having reached his goal at last.

* * * * *

She did not make the startled virginal resistance of a girl. She drew away from him quietly . . . the hatred for that quiet was murderous in him . . . and shook her head. Why, it was almost gently that she shook her head.

How dared she act gently to him, as though he were a boy who had made a mistake! How dared she not be stirred and mastered! He felt his head burning hot with anger, and knew that his face must be suffused with red.

And hers was not, it was quiet. He could have stamped with rage, and shaken her. He wanted to hurt her at once, deeply, to pierce her and sting her back to life. "Do you mean," he said brutally, "that you find, after all, that you are a cold, narrow, cowardly, provincial woman, stunted by your life, so that you are incapable of feeling a generous heat?"

As she remained silent, he was stung by the expression on her face which he did not understand. He went on vindictively snatching up to drive home his thrust the sharpest and cruelest weapon he could conceive, "Perhaps you find you are too old?"

At this she looked away from him for an instant, up to the lower branches of the oak under which they stood. She seemed to reflect, and when she brought her eyes back to his, she answered, "Yes, I think that is it. I find I am too old."

He was for years to ponder on the strangeness of the accent with which she said this, without regret, with that damnable gentleness as though to hide from him a truth he might find hard to bear, or be incapable of understanding.

How could any woman say "I find I am too old" with that unregretting accent? Was it not the worst of calamities for all women to grow old? What was there left for a woman when she grew old?

But how preposterous, her saying that, she who stood there in the absolute perfection of her bloom!

He found that he did not know what to say next. That tolerant acquiescence of hers in what he had meant to sting intolerably . . . it was as though he had put all his force into a blow that would stun, and somehow missing his aim, encountering no resistance, was toppling forward with the impetus of his own effort. He recovered himself and looked at her, choking, "You don't mean . . ." he began challenging her incredulously, and could go no further.

For she nodded, her eyes on his with that singular expression in them which he did not understand, and which he intensely resented.

He was so angry that for a moment he could not speak. He was aware of nothing but anger. "It's impotence and weakness on your part, that's all it is!" he cast out at her, hating her savagely as he spoke, "no matter what fine words you've decided to call it to cloak your own feebleness. It's the littleness of the vital spark in you. Or it's cowardly inertia, turning from the real fulfilment that calls for you, back to chips and straw because you are used to them. It's being a small, poor, weak, cowed creature, traditional-minded, instead of the splendid, brave, living woman I thought I loved. I am glad to leave you behind, to have no more of you in my life. I have no use for thin-blooded cowards."

She made no answer at all, not a word. His flaming eyes fell away from her face. He turned from her abruptly and walked rapidly away, not looking back.

Then he found he had ceased to advance rapidly, had stopped and was standing still, wrung in so dreadful a pain that his hand was at his side as though he had been stabbed. With no thought, with no awareness of what he was doing, he ran back to her, his hands outstretched, suffering so that he must have help. He did not mean to speak, did not know what he was to say . . . he cried out to her, "Marise, Marise . . . I love you! What can I do?"

The cry was desperate, involuntary, forcing its way out from unfathomed depths of feeling below all his anger and resentment, and tearing him to pieces as it came. It was as though he had taken his heart out and flung it at her feet.

Her face changed instantly and was quiveringly alight with a pale and guilty agitation. "No . . . oh no, Vincent! I thought you only . . . I had thought you could not really . . . Vincent, forgive me! Forgive me!" She took one of his hands in both hers . . . the last unforgotten touch he was ever to have of her. . . .

* * * * *

It came to him through those words which he did not understand that she was pitying him; and stung to the quick, he drew back from her, frowning, with an angry toss of his head.

Instantly she drew back also, as though she had misinterpreted something.

He stood for an instant looking full at her as though he did not see her; and then with a wide gesture of utter bewilderment, strange from him, he passed her without a look.

This time he did not turn back, but continued steadily and resolutely on his way.



CHAPTER XXVII

THE FALL OF THE BIG PINE

August 2.

I

When Marise reached the place on the wood-road where she had had that last talk with Vincent Marsh, she stopped, postponing for a moment the errand to the Powers which she had so eagerly undertaken. She stood there, looking up into the far green tops of the pines, seeing again that strange, angry, bewildered gesture with which he had renounced trying to make anything out of her, and had turned away.

It remained with her, constantly, as the symbol of what had happened, and she looked at it gravely and understandingly. Then, very swiftly, she saw again that passing aspect of his which had so terribly frightened her, felt again the fear that he might be really suffering, that she might really have done a hurt to another human being.

This brought her a momentary return of the agitation it had caused in her that day, and she sat down abruptly on a tree-trunk, her knees trembling, her hands cold.

That fear had come as so totally unexpected a possibility, something which his every aspect and tone and word up to then had seemed to contradict. Strange, how unmoved he had left her, till that moment! Strange the impression of him, that first time after she had known herself strong enough to stand up and be herself, not the responsive instrument played on by every passing impression. Strange, how instantly he had felt that, and how passionate had been his resentment of her standing up to be herself, her being a grown woman, a human being, and not a flower to be plucked. How he had hated it, and alas! how lamentable his hatred of it had made him appear. What a blow he had dealt to her conception of him by his instant assumption that a change in her could only mean that Neale had been bullying her. It had been hard to see him so far away and diminished as that had made him seem, so entirely outside her world. It had dealt a back-hand blow to her own self-esteem to have him seem vulgar.

How strange an experience for her altogether, to be able to stand firm against noise and urgent clamor and confusion, and to see, in spite of it, what she was looking at; to see, back of the powerful magnetic personality, the undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom in the relations between human beings; to be able to hear Vincent cry out on her with that fierce, masterful certainty of himself, that she was acting from cowed and traditional-minded motives and not to believe a word of it, because it was not true; not even to feel the scared throb of alarm at the very idea that it might be true; to have it make no impression on her save pity that Vincent should be imprisoned in a feeling of which possession was so great a part that failure to possess turned all the rest to poison and sickness.

What had happened to her, in truth, that she had this new steadfastness? She had told Vincent he could not understand it. Did she understand it herself? She leaned her chin on her two hands looking deep into the green recesses of the forest. High above her head, a wind swayed the tops of the pines and sang loudly; but down between the great brown columns of their trunks, not a breath stirred. The thick-set, myriad-leaved young maples held all their complicated delicately-edged foliage motionless in perfect calm.

It was very still in the depths of Marise's complicated mind also, although the wind stirred the surface. Yes, she knew what had happened to her. She had seen it completely happen to three other human beings, miraculously, unbelievably, certainly; had seen the babies who could not tell light from dark, heat from cold, emerge by the mere process of healthful living into keenly sensitive beings accurately alive to every minutest variation of the visible world. It must be that like them she had simply learned to tell moral light from dark, heat from cold, by the mere process of healthful living. What happened to the child who at one time could not grasp the multiplication table, and a few years later, if only he were properly fed and cared for, had somehow so wholly changed, although still the same, that he found his way lightly among geometric conceptions, and only a few years after that was probing with expert fingers at some unsolved problem of astronomy? He had grown up, that was all. By calling the miracle a familiar name we veiled the marvel of it. Insensibly to him, with no visible change from one day to the next, he had acquired a totally different conception of the universe, a totally different valuation of everything in life.

That was what had happened to her. She had grown up . . . why should not a woman grow up to other valuations of things as well as her comrade in life?

And it had happened to her as it did to the child, because someone stronger than she had protected her while she was growing . . . not protected from effort, as though one should try to protect the child from learning his lessons. . . . Back there, such ages ago in Italy, in her ignorant . . . how ignorant! . . . and frightened girlhood, she had begged Neale, without knowing what she did, to help her grow up, to help her save what was worth saving in her, to help her untangle from the many-colored confusion of her nature what was best worth keeping. And Neale had done it, had clung steadily to his divination of what was strong in her, in spite of her clamor to him to let it go.

But Vincent had not grown up, was back there still in confusion, holding desperately with all that terrific strength of his to what could not be held, to what was impermanent and passing in its nature. Why should he do that? Neale knew better than that. Then she saw why: it was because Vincent conceived of nothing but emptiness if he let it go, and horribly feared that imaginary emptiness. Out of the incalculable richness of her kingdom she wondered again at his blindness. . . . And made a pitying guess at the reason for it . . . perhaps for him it was not imaginary. Perhaps one of the terms of the bargain he had made with life was that there should be nothing later but emptiness for him. Yes, she saw that. She would have made that bargain, too, if it had not been for Neale. She would have been holding terrified to what was not to be held; with nothing but that between her and the abyss. Who was she to blame Vincent for his blindness?

That, perhaps, had been the meaning of that singular last moment of their talk together, which had frightened her so, with its sudden plunge below the surface, into the real depths, when, changed wholly into someone else, he had run back to her, his hands outstretched, his eyes frightened, his lips trembling . . . perhaps he had felt the abyss there just before him. For an instant there, he had made her think of Paul, made her remember that Vincent himself had, so short a time ago, been a little boy too. She had been so shocked and racked by pity and remorse, that she would have been capable of any folly to comfort him. Perhaps she had seen there for an instant the man Vincent might have been, and had seen that she could have loved that man.

But how instantly it had passed! He had not suffered that instant of true feeling to have space to live, but had burned it up with the return of his pride, his resentment that anyone save himself should try to stand upright, with the return of the devouring desire-for-possession of the man who had always possessed everything he had coveted. There was something sad in being able to see the littleness of life which underlay the power and might of personality in a man like Vincent. He could have been something else.

She wondered why there should slide into her mood, just now, a faint tinge of regret. . . . Why should there be anything there but the bright gladness of thanksgiving for the liberation from the chains which her own nature might have forged about her? She had at last stepped outside the narrow circle of personal desire, and found all the world open to her. And yet there was room in her heart for a shade of wistful wonder if perhaps all this did not mean that she might be sliding from the ranks of those who feel and do, into the ranks of those who only understand.

But one glance at the life that lay before her scattered this hanging mist-cloud . . . good heavens! what feeling and doing lay there before her!

Had she thought that Neale was nothing to her because he had become all in all to her so that he penetrated all her life, so that she did not live an instant alone? Had she thought the loss of the amusing trinket of physical newness could stand against the gain of an affection ill massy gold? Would she, to buy moments of excitement, lose an instant of the precious certainty of sympathy and trust and understanding which she and Neale had bought and paid for, hour by hour, year by year of honest life-in-common? Where was real life for her? Had she not known? Where were the real depths, where the real food for the whole woman she had grown to be? Neale had opened the door so that she could go away from him if that was what she needed, or go back to stand by his side; and through the open door had come the flood of daylight which had shown her that she could not go back to stand by his side because she had been there all the time, had never left it, never could leave it, any more than she could leave half of her body in one place, and go on to another.

II

There was other feeling and doing now, too, before her, this instant, which she had forgotten, idling here in her much-loved forest, as much a part of her home as her piano or her own roof-tree. She had been trying to understand what had been happening that summer. Let her try first of all to understand what she must do in that perfectly definite and concrete dilemma in which she had been placed by that strange sight of 'Gene Powers, fleeing back from the Eagle Rocks. She must look squarely at what she supposed was the legal obligation . . . she instantly felt a woman's impatience of the word legal as against human, and could not entertain the thought of the obligations of the situation. She must see, and think and try to understand, with Neale to help her. She had not yet had time to tell Neale.

But not today. Today she was only the bearer of the good tidings to Nelly and 'Gene, tidings which would wipe out for her the recollection of a day which was shameful to her, the day when she had conceived the possibility of believing some thing base against Neale. It was not that she had believed it,—no, she had stood it off till Neale came back. But there was shame for her in those recurrent spasms of horror when she had conceived the possibility that she might believe it. There had been proof of it, of course, Eugenia's positive statement . . . strange how Eugenia could have so entirely misunderstood the affair! . . . But what was mere proof against human certainty? No, she had been attacked suddenly and for an instant had failed to rise to defend what was hers to defend. It was a failure to live down.

She stood up and moved forward along the path, changing the thick envelope in one hand to the other. She had already lost time. She ought to have been by this time through the forest and out in the edge of the Powers pasture.

She became aware that for some time she had heard a distant sound, a faint toc-toc-toc, like the sound of chopping. This being associated in her mind with snow and winter woods, she had not thought it could be the sound of the axe which it seemed to be. Nobody could be felling trees in the height of the farming season, and on this day of swooning heat. But as she came to the edge of the woods and turned into the path along the brook, she heard it more plainly, unmistakable this time, not far now, the ringing blows delivered with the power and rhythmic stroke of the trained chopper. It came not from the woods at all, she now perceived, but from the open farming land, from the other side of the pasture, beyond the Powers house.

But there were no woods there, only the Powers' big pine which towered up, darkly glorious, into the shimmering summer haze.

As she looked at it wondering, it came into her mind had somebody told her, or had she overheard it somewhere? . . . that 'Gene had promised Nelly at last to cut down the big pine he and his fathers had so cherished.

Could it be that? What a sacrifice! And to a foolish whim of Nelly's. There had been no musty smell in the house till Nelly came there to keep the shutters closed so that the sun would not fade the carpets. The old pine was one of the most splendid things of beauty in the valley. And it was something vital in 'Gene's strange, choked, inarticulate life. She stopped to listen a moment, feeling a chill of apprehension and foreboding. It was dreadful to have 'Gene do that. It was as though he were cutting at his own strength, cutting off one of his own members to please his wife. Poor 'Gene! He would do that too, now, if Nelly asked him.

The resonant winter note rang out loud, strange in that sultry summer air. She looked from afar at the tree, holding its mighty crest high above the tiny house, high above the tiny human beings who had doomed it. So many winters, so many summers, so many suns and moons and rains and snows had gone to make it what it was. Like the men who had planted it and lived beneath its shade, it had drawn silently from the depths of the earth and the airy treasures of the sky food to grow strong and live its life. And now to be killed in an hour, in attempted expiation of a deed for which it bore no guilt!

Marise was coming closer now. The axe-strokes stopped for a moment as though the chopper drew breath. The silence was heavy over the breathless summer field.

But by the time she had arrived at the back door of the house, the axe-blows were renewed, loud, immediate, shocking palpably on her ear. She knocked, but knew that the ringing clamor of the axe drowned out the sound. Through the screen-door she saw old Mrs. Powers, standing by the table, ironing, and stepped in. The three children were in the pantry, beyond, Ralph spreading some bread and butter for his little brother and sister. Ralph was always good to the younger children, although he was so queer and un-childlike! Nelly was not there. Mrs. Powers looked up at Marise, and nodded. She looked disturbed and absent. "We're at it, you see," she said, jerking her head back towards the front of the house. "I told you 'bout 'Gene's sayin' he'd gi'n in to Nelly about the big pine."

Marise made a gesture of dismay at this confirmation. The old woman went on, "Funny thing . . . I ain't a Powers by birth, Lord knows, and I never thought I set no store by their old pine tree. It always sort o' riled me, how much 'Gene's father thought of it, and 'Gene after him . . . sort of silly, seems like. But just now when we was all out there, and 'Gene heaved up his axe and hit the first whack at it . . . well, I can't tell you . . . it give me a turn most as if he'd chopped right into me somewhere. I got up and come into the house, and I set to ironin', as fast as I could clip it, to keep my mind off'n it. I made the children come in too, because it ain't no place for kids around, when a tree that size comes down."

Marise demurred, "'Gene is such a fine chopper, he knows to a hair where he'll lay it, of course."

"Well, even so, who knows what notion a kid will take into his head? They was playin' right there on a pile of pole-wood 'Gene's brought in from the woods and ain't got sawed up into stove-lengths yet. I didn't want to take no chances; maybe they wouldn't ha' moved quick enough when their papa yelled to them. No, ma'am, I made 'em come in, and here they'll stay. Nelly, she's out there, walkin' round and round watchin' 'Gene. She's awfully set up havin' it come down. 'Gene he's told her he'll give her the money from the lumber in it. There'll be a sight of boards, too. It's the biggest pine in the valley."

Marise went to the window and looked at the scene, penetrated by the strangeness of the difference between its outer and inner aspect: 'Gene, his faded blue overalls tucked into his plowman's heavy cow-hide boots, his shirt open over his great throat and chest, his long corded arms rising and falling with the steady effortless rhythm of the master woodsman. Nelly, in one of her immaculate blue ginghams, a white apron over it, a white frilled shade-hat on her head, her smartly shod small feet, treading the ground with that inimitable light step of hers, circling slowly about, looking at 'Gene as he worked, looking up at the crown of the tree, high, so insolently high above her head, soon to be brought low by a wish from her heart, soon to be turned into money for her to spend.

"I came over to talk to 'Gene and Nelly about some business," Marise said, over her shoulder, to Mrs. Powers, not able to take her eyes from the trio in the drama out there, "but I'd better wait till the tree is down before I speak to them."

"'Twon't be long now. 'Gene's been at it quite a while, and he's stavin' away like all possessed. Seems as if, now he's started in, he couldn't get it over with quick enough to suit him. He acted awful queer about it, I thought."

She left her ironing and, looking over her shoulder at the children, came closer to where Marise stood. Then she stepped back and shut the door to the pantry. "Mis' Crittenden," she said in an anxious troubled voice, "'Gene ain't right these days. He acts to me like he's comin' down with a sick spell, or something. He ain't right. Today Nelly told me she woke up in the night last night and 'Gene wasn't there. She hollered to him, and he didn't answer. It scared her like everything, and she scrambled out of bed and lighted the lamp, and she said she 'most fainted away, when she see 'Gene, rolled up in a blanket, lying on the floor, over against the wall, his eyes wide open looking at her. She said she let out a yell . . . it scairt the life out of her . . . and 'Gene he got right up. She says to him, 'For the Lord's sake, 'Gene, what ails you?' And what do you suppose he says to her, he says, 'I didn't know whether you wanted me there or not, Nelly.' What do you think of that? She says back, 'For goodness' sake, 'Gene Powers, where would you be nights, except in your own bed!' He got back and for all Nelly knows slept all right the rest of the night. She says she guesses he must have had some sort of funny dream, and not been really all waked up yet. But it must ha' gi'n her a turn, for all she ain't one of the nervous kind."

Marise turned sick with shocked pity. The two women looked at each other, silently with shadowed eyes of foreboding. Mrs. Powers shook her head, and turned back into the pantry, shutting the door behind her. Marise heard her speaking to the children, in the cheerful, bantering, affectionate, grandmother tone she had always had for them. She was brave, old Mrs. Powers, she always said she could "stand up to things." She was the sort of woman who can always be depended on to keep life going, no matter what happens; who never gives up, who can always go on taking care of the children.

Marise herself did not feel at all brave. She sat down heavily in a chair by the window looking out at the man who for his wife's sake was killing something vital and alive. He had done that before, 'Gene had. He went at it now with a furious haste which had something dreadful in it.

Nelly, who had sat down to rest on the pile of brush and poles, seemed a carved and painted statuette of ivory and gold.

She took off her ruffled pretty hat, and laid it down on the white-birch poles, so that she could tip her head far back and see the very top of the tree. Her braids shone molten in the sunshine. Her beautiful face was impassive, secreting behind a screen all that Marise was sure she must have been feeling.

'Gene, catching sight of her now, in a side-glance, stopped abruptly in the middle of a swing, and shouted to her to "get off that brush-pile. That's jus' where I'm lottin' on layin' the tree."

Somewhat startled, Nelly sprang up and moved around to the other side, back of him, although she called protestingly, "Gracious, you're not near through yet!"

'Gene made no answer, returning to the fury of his assault on what he so much loved. The great trunk now had a gaping raw gash in its side. Nelly idled back of him, looking up at the tree, down at him. What was she thinking about?

Marise wondered if someone with second-sight could have seen Frank Warner, there between the husband and wife? 'Gene's face was still gray in spite of the heat and his fierce exertion. Glistening streams of perspiration ran down his cheeks.

What did the future hold for 'Gene? What possible escape was there from the tragic net he had wrapped stranglingly around himself?

Very distantly, like something dreamed, it came to Marise that once for an instant the simple, violent solution had seemed the right one to her. Could she have thought that?

What a haunted house was the human heart, with phantoms from the long-dead past intruding their uninvited ghastly death's-heads among the living.

The axe-strokes stopped; so suddenly that the ear went on hearing them, ghost-like, in the intense silence. 'Gene stood upright, lifting his wet, gray face. "She's coming now," he said.

Marise looked out, astonished. To her eyes the tree stood as massively firm as she had ever seen it. But 'Gene's attitude was of strained, expectant certainty: he stood near Nelly and as she looked up at the tree, he looked at her. At that look Marise felt the cold perspiration on her own temples.

Nelly stepped sideways a little, tipping her head to see, and cried out, "Yes, I see it beginning to slant. How slow it goes!

"It'll go fast enough in a minute," said 'Gene.

Of what followed, not an instant ever had for Marise the quality of reality. It always remained for her a superb and hideous dream, something symbolical, glorious, and horrible which had taken place in her brain, not in the lives of human beings.

* * * * *

Nelly, . . . looking down suddenly to see where the tree would fall, crying out, "Oh, I left my hat where it'll . . ." and darting, light as a feather, towards it.

'Gene, making a great futile gesture to stop her, as she passed him, shouting at her, with a horrified glance up at the slowly leaning tree, "Come back! Come back!"

Nelly on the brush-pile, her hat in her hand, whirling to return, supple and swift, suddenly caught by the heel and flung headlong . . . up again in an instant, and falling again, to her knees this time. Up once more with a desperate haste, writhing and pulling at her shoe, held by its high heel, deep between the knotty poles.

'Gene, bounding from his place of safety, there at her feet, tearing in a frenzy at the poles, at her shoe. . . .

Above them the great tree bearing down on them the solemn vengeful shadow of its fall.

Someone was screaming. It was Nelly. She was screaming, "'Gene! 'Gene! 'Gene!" her face shrunken in terror, her white lips open.

* * * * *

And then, that last gesture of 'Gene's when he took Nelly into his great arms, closely, hiding her face on his shoulder, as the huge tree, roaring downward, bore them both to the earth, forever.



CHAPTER XXVIII

TWO GOOD-BYES

August 10.

Marise welcomed the bother about the details of Eugenia's departure and Mr. Welles', and flung herself into them with a frightened desire for something that would drown out the roaring wind of tragedy which filled her ears in every pause of the day's activities, and woke her up at night out of the soundest sleep. Night after night, she found herself sitting up in bed, her night-gown and hair damp with perspiration, Nelly's scream ringing knife-like in her ears. Then, rigid and wide-eyed she saw it all again, what had happened in those thirty seconds which had summed up and ended the lives of 'Gene and Nelly.

But one night as she sat thus in her bed, hammered upon beyond endurance, she saw as though she had not seen it before what 'Gene had finally done, his disregard of possible safety for himself, his abandon of his futile, desperate effort to free Nelly from the tangle where her childish vanity had cast her, the grandeur and completeness of his gesture when he had taken Nelly into his strong arms, to die with her. Marise found herself crying as she had not cried for years. The picture, burned into her memory, stood there endlessly in the black night till she understood it. The tears came raining down her face, and with them went the strained, wild horror of the memory.

But the shadow and darkness hung about her like a cloud, through which she only dimly saw the neat, unhurried grace of Eugenia's preparations for departure and far travels, and felt only a dimmed, vague echo of the emotion she had thought to feel at the disappearance of Mr. Welles, poor, weary, futile old crusader on his Rosinante.

On that last morning of their stay she drove with them to the station, still giving only a half-attention to the small episodes of their departure. She did see and smile at the characteristic quality of an instinctive gesture of Eugenia's as they stepped up on the platform of the station. Two oddly-shaped pieces of metal stood there, obviously parts of a large machine. Paul stumbled over them as he climbed out of the car, and held tight to Mr. Welles' hand to save himself from a fall. Eugenia saw them instantly from afar as an element in life which threatened the spotlessness of her gray traveling cloak, and as she passed them she drew the thick folds of velvet-like wool about her closely. Marise thought to herself, "That's Eugenia's gesture as she goes through the world."

Neale turned off his switch, listened a moment to see if the Ford were boiling from the long climb up the hill to the station, and now made one long-legged step to the platform. He started towards Eugenia with the evident intention of making some casual pleasant remarks, such as are demanded by decency for a departing guest, but in his turn his eyes caught the curiously shaped pieces of metal. He stopped short, his face lighted up with pleasure and surprise. All consciousness of anyone else on the platform disappeared from his expression. "Hello!" he said to himself, "those mandrels here." He picked up one in his strong hands on which the metal left a gray dust, and inspected it. He might have been entirely alone in his shop at the mill.

Marise noted with envy how he gave all of himself to that momentary examination, entirely escaped from any awareness of that tyrannical self which in her own heart always clamored like a spoiled child for attention. The impersonal concentration of his look as he turned the metal about between those strong dusty hands, gave to his face the calm, freed expression not to be bought for any less price than a greater interest in one's work than in one's self. "They'll do," pronounced Neale. This was evidently a thought spoken aloud, for it did not occur to him to make any pretense of including the two women in his interest. He set down the casting he held, and went off into the freight-house, calling loudly, "Charlie! Charlie! Those mandrels have come. I wish you'd . . ." his voice died away as he walked further into the dusky freight-shed.

Marise happening to glance at Eugenia now, caught on her face an expression which she took to be annoyance at a breach of manners. She reflected, "Eugenia must find Neale's abrupt American ways perfectly barbaric." And she was surprised to feel for the first time a rather scornful indifference to all that was involved in Eugenia's finding them barbaric. Heavens! What did it matter? In a world so filled with awful and portentous and glorious human possibilities, how could you bother about such things?

There was a silence. Mr. Welles and Paul had been standing near, aimlessly, but now, evidently taking the silence for the inevitable flatness of the flat period of waiting for a train, Mr. Welles drew the little boy away. They walked down the cinder-covered side-tracks, towards where the single baggage truck stood, loaded with elegant, leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, marked "E. Mills. S.S. Savoie. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique." Among them, out of place and drab, stood one banal department-store trunk labeled, "Welles. 320 Maple Avenue. Macon, Georgia."

The departure of the old man and the little boy left the two women alone. Eugenia stepped closer to Marise and took her hand in her own gloved fingers. She looked at it intently, with the expression of one who is trying to find words for a complicated feeling. Marise made an effort to put herself in the receptive mood which would make the saying of it easier, but failed. The fall of the big pine roared too loudly in her ears. She looked without sympathy or admiration at Eugenia's perfection of aspect. "To look like that, she must care for looks more than anything else. What can she know about any real human feeling?" Marise asked herself, with an intolerance she could not mitigate.

And yet as she continued to peer at Eugenia through that dark cloud of tragedy, it seemed to her that Eugenia showed signs of some real human emotion. As she gazed at her in the crude brilliance of the gaudy morning sun, she saw for the first time signs of years in Eugenia's exquisite small face. There was not a line visible, nor a faltering of the firmness of the well-cared-for flesh, but over it all was a faint, hardly discernible flaccid fatigue of texture.

But perhaps she imagined it, for even as she looked, and felt her heart soften to think what this would mean to Eugenia, an inner wave of resolution reached the surface of the other woman's face, and there was Eugenia as she always had been, something of loveliness immutable.

She said impulsively, "Eugenia, it's a stupidly conventional thing to say, but it's a pity you never married."

As Eugenia only looked at her, quietly, she ventured further, "You might really be happier, you know. There is a great deal of happiness in the right marriage." She had never said so much to Eugenia.

Eugenia let Marise's hand drop and with it, evidently, whatever intention she might have had of saying something difficult to express. Instead, she advanced with her fastidious, delicate note of irony, "I don't deny the happiness, if that sort of happiness is what one is after. But I think my appetite for it . . . that sort . . . is perhaps not quite robust enough to relish it."

Marise roused herself to try to put a light note of cheerfulness into this last conversation. "You mean that it seems to you like the coarsely heaped-up goodies set before a farmhand in a country kitchen . . . chicken and butter and honey and fruit and coffee, all good but so profuse and jumbled that they make you turn away?"

"I didn't give that definition of domestic life," corrected Eugenia, with a faint smile, "that's one of your fantasies."

"Well, it's true that you get life served up to you rather pell-mell, lots of it, take-it-as-it-comes," admitted Marise, "but for a gross nature like mine, once you've had that, you're lost. You know you'd starve to death on the delicate slice of toasted bread served on old china. You give up and fairly enjoy wallowing in the trough."

She had been struck by that unwonted look of fatigue on Eugenia's face, had tried to make her laugh, and now, with an effort, laughed with her. She had forgotten her passing notion that Eugenia had something special to say. What could she have? They had gone over that astonishing misconception of hers about the Powers woodlot, and she had quite made Marise understand how hopelessly incapable she was of distinguishing one business detail from another. There could be nothing else that Eugenia could wish to say.

"How in the world shall I get through the winter?" Eugenia now wondered aloud. "Biskra and the Sahara perhaps . . . if I could only get away from the hideous band of tourists. They say there are swarms of war-profiteers from Italy now, everywhere, low-class people with money for the first time." She added with a greater accent of wonder, "How in the world are you going to get through the winter?"

Marise was struck into momentary silence by the oddness of the idea. There were phrases in Eugenia's language which were literally non-translatable into hers, representing as they did ideas that did not exist there. "Oh, we never have to consider that," she answered, not finding a more accurate phrase. "There won't be time enough to do all we'll try to do, all we'll have to do. There's living. That takes a lot of time and energy. And I'll have the chorus as usual. I'm going to try some Mendelssohn this year. The young people who have been singing for five or six years are quite capable of the 'Elijah.' And then any of the valley children who really want to, come to me for lessons, you know. The people in North Ashley have asked me to start a chorus there this year, too. And in the mill, Neale has a plan to try to get the men to work out for themselves some standards of what concerns them especially, what a day's work really is, at any given job, don't you know."

What an imbecile she was, she thought, to try to talk about such things to Eugenia, who could not, in the nature of things, understand what she was driving at. But apparently Eugenia had found something understandable there, for she now said sharply, startled, "Won't that mean less income for you?"

She did not say, "Even less," but it was implied in the energy of her accent.

Marise hesitated, brought up short by the solidity of the intangible barrier between their two languages. There were phrases in her own tongue which could not be translated into Eugenia's, because they represented ideas not existing there. She finally said vaguely, "Oh perhaps not."

Her pause had been enough for Eugenia to drop back into her own world. She said thoughtfully, "I've half a notion to try going straight on beyond Biskra, to the south, if I could find a caravan that would take me. That would be something new. Biskra is so commonplace now that it has been discovered and exploited." She went on, with a deep, wistful note of plaintiveness in her voice, "But everything's so commonplace now!" and added, "There's Java. I've never been to Java."

It came over Marise with a shock of strangeness that this was the end of Eugenia in her life. Somehow she knew, as though Eugenia had told her, that she was never coming back again. As they stood there, so close together, in the attitude of friends, they were so far apart that each could scarcely recognize who the other was. Their paths which in youth had lain so close to each other as to seem identical, how widely they had been separated by a slight divergence of aim! Marise was struck by her sudden perception of this. It had been going on for years, she could understand that now. Why should she only see it in this quiet, silent, neutral moment?

An impalpable emanation of feeling reached her from the other woman. She had a divination that it was pain. Perhaps Eugenia was also suddenly realizing that she had grown irrevocably apart from an old friend.

The old tenderness felt for the girl Eugenia had been, by the girl Marise had been, looked wistfully down the years at the end.

Marise opened her arms wide and took Eugenia into them for a close, deeply moved embrace.

"Good-bye, Eugenia," she said, with sadness.

"Good-bye, Marise," said Eugenia, looking at her strangely.

* * * * *

Neale came back now, frankly consulting his watch with Neale's bluntness in such matters. "Train's due in a minute or two," he said. "Where's Mr. Welles?"

Marise said, "Over there, with Paul. I'll go tell them."

She found them both, hand in hand, sitting on the edge of the truck which carried the leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, bound for Biskra or beyond, or Java; and the square department-store trunk bound for Maple Avenue, Macon, Georgia.

"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles has promised me that he'll come up and visit us summers."

"There's no house in the world where you'll be more welcome," said Marise with all her heart, holding out her hand.

Mr. Welles shook it hard, and held it in both his. As the train whistled screamingly at the crossing, he looked earnestly into her face and tried to tell her something, but the words would not come.

As she read in his pale old face and steady eyes what he would have said, Marise cried out to herself that there do not exist in the world any things more halting and futile than words. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. "Good-bye, dear Mr. Welles," was all she said, but in the clinging of his old arms about her, and in the quivering, shining face he showed as they moved down the platform together, she knew that he too had not needed words.

Paul clung to his hand till the last moment, gazing up at him constantly, silently. Marise looked down on the little boy's tanned, freckled, sober face and strained, rapidly winking eyes, and had the intuition, "This is one of the moments Paul will never forget. He will always be able to shut his eyes and see this old Don Quixote setting forth." With a rush of her old, jealous, possessive mother-love, she longed to share this with him and to have him know that she shared it; to put her arms around him and make him let her in. But she knew better now. She yearned over him silently, and did not touch him.

"Well, good-bye, Paul," said Mr. Welles, shaking hands with him.

"Well, good-bye," said Paul dryly, setting his jaw hard.

"Oh, this is the day-coach!" cried Eugenia. "Where is the drawing-room car?"

"At the far end," said the conductor with the sweeping gesture of a man used to talking with his arms.

"Good-bye, Mr. Welles," said Eugenia, giving him for an instant a small, pearl-gray hand. "Boa voyage! Good luck!"

"Same to you," said the old gentleman, scrambling up the unswept, cinder-covered steps into the day-coach.

At the front end of the train, the baggage man was tumbling into the express car the fine, leather-covered boxes and the one square trunk.

Neale carried Eugenia's two small bags down to the drawing-room car and now handed them to the porter.

The two women kissed each other on both cheeks, hurriedly, as someone cried, "All aboard!"

Eugenia took Neale's outstretched hand. "Good-bye, Neale," she said.

With the porter's aid, she mounted the rubber-covered steps into the mahogany and upholstery of the drawing-room car.

"Good luck, Eugenia! Bon voyage!" called Neale after her.

She did not turn around or look back.

* * * * *

Marise noted that characteristically Eugenia had forgotten Paul. But Paul had forgotten her, too, and was now back near the day-coach searching one window after another.

The conductor signaled widely, the whistle shrieked, the wheels groaned. Neale drew Marise a little back out of the whirl of dust and stood holding her arm for an instant.

It seemed to Marise as they stood thus, Neale holding her arm, that she caught a last glimpse of Eugenia behind plate-glass, looking at them gravely, steadily.

Paul suddenly caught sight of Mr. Welles' face at a window, snatched off his cap, and waved it frantically, over and over, long after the train was only an echoing roar from down the tracks.

* * * * *

Then the mountain-silence settled down about them calmly, and they could hear their own hearts beat, and knew the thoughts in their minds.

As they went back to their battered Ford, Marise said thoughtfully, "Somehow I believe that it will be a long time before we see Eugenia again."

Neale permitted himself no comment on this, nor showed the alteration of a line in his face as he stepped into the car and turned on the switch, but Marise cried out to him accusingly, "You might as well say it right out, that you can support life if it is."

Neale laughed a little and put his foot on the starter. "Get in the back seat, Paul," was all he said, as the little boy came up silently from the other side of the station.

He added as they started up the hill road, "First time in my life I was ever sort of sorry for Eugenia. It seemed to me this morning that she was beginning to show her age."

Marise hid the fact that she had had the same idea and opposed, "Eugenia would laugh at that from you, the husband of such a frankly middle-aged thing as I."

Neale was silent for a moment, and then, "You'll always look younger than she. No, not younger, that's not it, at all. It's living, you look. I tell you what, she's a cut flower in a vase, that's beginning to wilt, and you're a living plant."

"Why, Neale!" said Marise, astonished and touched.

"Yes, quite a flight of fancy for me, wasn't it?" commented Neale casually, leaning forward to change the carburetor adjustment.

* * * * *

Marise felt Paul lean over her shoulder from the back of the car. "Say, Mother," he said in her ear, "would you just as soon get in back with me for a while?"

Neale stopped the care. Marise stepped out and in, and seated herself beside Paul. He had apparently nothing to say, after all, looking fixedly down at his bare brown feet.

But presently he moved nearer to his mother and leaned his head against her breast. This time she put her arm around him and held him close to her, the tears in her eyes.



CHAPTER XXIX

VIGNETTES FROM HOME LIFE

I

August 20.

Paul had been sent for blue-berries through the Eagle Rock woods to the high upland pasture where the Powers cows fed during the day. On the upper edge of that, skirting a tract of slash left from an old cutting, was a berry-patch, familiar to all the children of Crittenden's valley.

When at four o'clock there was no sign of him, and then at five still none, Marise began to feel uneasy, although she told herself that nothing in the world could happen to Paul on that well-known mountain-side. He had taken Medor with him, who would certainly have come for help if Paul had fallen and hurt himself. She excused herself to the tall, awkward lad from North Ashley come to try over his part in a quartet, asked Toucle to help Elly set the supper things on the table if she should be late, and set off at a rapid pace by the short-cut over the ledges.

As she hurried over the rough trail, frankly hastening, now frankly alarmed, she thought that probably for all the life-time of the people in the valley the death of Frank Warner would set a sinister element of lurking danger in those familiar wooded slopes. Nothing could have happened to Paul, but still she hurried faster and faster, and as she came near the upper edge of the pasture she began to shout loudly, "Paul! Paul!" and to send out the high yodel-cry that was the family assembly call. That act of shouting brought her a step nearer to panic.

But almost at once she heard the little boy's answer, not far from her saw his dog bounding through the bushes, and as she emerged from the woods into the open pasture she saw Paul running towards her, pail in hand, evidently astonished to know her there. But there was about him something more than astonishment, something which Marise's mother-eye catalogued as furtitve, that consciousness of something to hide which always looks to grown-ups like guilt. She gave no sign of seeing this, however, stopping short to catch her breath, smiling at him, and wondering with great intensity what in the world it could be. He looked a little frightened.

He came up to her, answering her smile uneasily, and she saw that he had only a few berries in his pail. At this she was relieved, thinking that possibly all that had happened was that he had lingered to play. But when she glanced back at his face, she had the impression that there was something more, very much more. He had received some indelible impression and it was his instinct to hide it from his mother. Her heart sank forebodingly.

"What is the best thing to do?" she asked herself. "To speak about it first, or to wait till he does?"

She sat down on a stone, fanning herself with her hat, watching him, trying to make out the meaning of every shift of expression, turn of eye, position of his hands, carriage of his head, bringing to this all her accumulated knowledge of Paul, afire with the sudden passion to protect him which had flamed up with her intuition that something had happened to him.

(Come and gone with the dry rapidity of fingers snapped, she had thought, "The point is, that other people may be more clever than mothers, but nobody else cares enough, always, always to try to understand!")

"I thought I'd come up and walk back with you," she offered.

"I haven't got very many," said Paul, abashed, looking down at the few, blue, bloom-covered balls in the bottom of his shining tin pail. "I was trying to hurry up and get enough for supper, anyhow."

Marise in spite of herself, moved by pity for his confusion, offered him a way out. It always seemed to her too dreadful for anyone not to have a way out, even if it implied a fib. "Weren't there very many on the bushes?" she asked.

But he refused it with a characteristic integrity. "Oh yes, there were lots there," he said.

A silence fell. The little dog, sensitively aware of something wrong, whined uneasily, and pawed at Paul's hand. But Paul did not look down at him. He stood, his bare feet wide apart, the empty pail in his hand, looking down the beautiful green slope of the pasture, golden now in the long rays from the sun poised low on the line of the mountains opposite.

Marise looked at him, seeing nothing in all the world but that tanned, freckled, anxious little face. With what an utter unexpectedness did these moments of crisis spring on you; something vital there, and no warning, no chance to think.

"Anything the matter, Paul?" she said gently.

He nodded, silent.

"Anything you can tell Mother?" she asked, still more gently.

Paul said gruffly, "I don't know: it's about Ralph Powers. He was up here this afternoon." He looked down at his brown, bramble-scratched legs.

Marise's imagination gave an unbridled leap of fear. She had always felt something strange and abnormal about Ralph. But she thought, "I mustn't tyrannize over Paul, even by a too-waiting expectant silence," and stooped over with the pretext of tying her shoe. A lump came to her throat. How terribly, helplessly, you cared about what came to your children!

When she lifted her head, Paul had come nearer her and was looking down at her, with troubled eyes. "Say, Mother, he didn't say not to tell you. Do you suppose it would be fair?"

She made a great effort at loyalty and said, "I can't tell, Paul. You saw him. You know better than I, if you think he meant you not to tell. Try to remember if he said anything about it."

Paul thought hard. "You wouldn't tell anybody?" he asked.

"Not if you don't want me to," she answered.

Paul sat down by her and drew a long breath. "I don't believe he would care, your knowing it, if you never told anybody else, nor said anything to him. Mother, I was going along, up there by the big rock where the white birches grow, and I saw Ralph. . . . He was in front of a sort of table he'd fixed up with a long piece of slate-stone, and he had some queer-shaped stones on it . . . oh, Mother . . . he was crying so, and talking to himself! And when he saw me he got as mad! And he told me about it, just as mad all the time, as though he was mad at me. Mother, it's an altar!

"An altar!" said Marise, stupidly, utterly disconcerted by the word, so totally other than what her fears had been foreboding.

"Yes, an altar, and he says the stones on it are idols, and he bows down and worships them, the way the Bible says it's wicked to."

Marise was too much astonished to open her lips.

Paul said, "Mother, Ralph says he hates God, and isn't going to say his prayers to him any more. He says God let his father and mother both get killed, and he don't know what the devil could do any worse than that. He said he started in having an altar to idols because he thought from what the Bible said that if you did you'd be so wicked lightning would strike you dead. But it didn't, and now he doesn't believe anything. So he's going on, having idols because the Bible says not to."

Marise's first rounded and exclusive emotion was of immense relief. Nothing had happened to her own son, and beside this relief, nothing for the moment seemed of any consequence. She drew Paul to her with a long breath of what was, she recognized it the moment afterward, her old, clear, undiluted, ferocious, hateful mother-egotism. For that instant she had not cared an atom what happened to another woman's child, so long as hers was safe.

But the next instant, the awareness of her hard heart cut across her like the lash of a whip. She shrank under it, horrified. She hung her head guilty and ashamed, divining the extremity of the other child's misery.

As she sat there, with her living arms around her own little son, the boy whose mother was dead came and stood before her in imagination, showing those festering, uncared-for wounds of sorrow and bitterness and loneliness, and furious, unavailing revolt from suffering too great to be borne.

She felt the guilt driven out from her narrow heart as it swelled larger to take him in. Any child who needed a mother so much, was her own child. He had no longer any mother who would care enough to try to understand, but she would care enough.

"He bowed down and worshiped," said Paul, in a shocked, frightened voice. "He knocked his head on the stones and cried like anything. He said he hated God."

"Oh!" cried Marise, intolerably stung by sympathy and pity. She started up to her feet, her heart burning, the tears on her cheeks. Her arms ached with emptiness till she should have drawn that suffering into them.

Paul said shyly, "Say, Mother, it's awful hard on those Powers kids, isn't it, not having anybody but their grandmother. Say, Mother, don't you think maybe we could . . . we could . . ." He turned his freckled, tanned, serious little face up to hers.

His mother stooped to kiss him, furiously, burningly, passionately, as she did not often kiss Paul, and he clung to her with all the strength of his strong little arms. "Yes, yes, you darling, you darling," she told him brokenly. "Yes, yes, yes."

II

September 10.

Marise was slowly going through a passage of Scriabine, which had just come in the mail. She was absorbed in the difficulties and novelties of it, her ear alert to catch a clue to the meaning of those new rhythms and progressions, her mind opened wide to understand them when she heard them.

It was with an effort that she brought her attention back to Elly, who had come in behind her and was saying something urgently. Marise turned around on the piano-stool, her head humming with the unfamiliar, tantalizing beauties and intricacies of the page she had left half unread, and considered the little girl for an instant before she heard what she said. How Elly did grow! That dress was already much too small for her.

Well, Elly was not the only one who had grown out of her old clothes this summer . . . the old garments that had been large enough and now must be laid aside! . . . Elly was saying, "Mother, one of my chickens looks sick, and I don't know what to do. I wish you'd come!"

Marise began a process of mentally weighing which was more important, Scriabine or Elly's chicken. Elly looked at her mother with imploring eyes. "Mother, he looked awfully sick. And he is my nicest little Downy-head, the one I've always loved the best. I've tried to take such good care of him. Mother, I'm worried about him."

Marise decided that Scriabine had at least the capacity to wait, while the chicken might not. She got up, saying, "All right, Elly, we'll see what we can do."

Elly pulled her along rapidly to the chicken-yard where grossly self-satisfied hens scratched in trash and filth undiscriminatingly, and complacently called their families to share what they had found there, or indeed at times apparently to admire them for having found nothing. Marise stood regarding them with a composed, ironic eye. It was good, she reflected, to be able to know that that was the way you looked from the outside, and not to care a bit because you knew firmly that there was something else there that made all the difference. All the same, it was a very good thing to have had the scaring thought that you were like that . . . "there but for the grace of God. . . ." Was it complacent to say that? Oh, what did it matter what you called it,—complacent or not, if you knew! It all came back to not caring so much about what things could be called, if you knew what they were.

Elly had disappeared into the chicken-house and now came back with a perplexed face. "Downy-head was there, by the nests, and now he's gone." Marise caught in the child's eyes the realness of her anxiety and thrilled to it, as she always did to any real emotion. "I'll help you look," she said, turning her eyes about the chicken-yard, crowded with voluble, intently self-centered, feathered personalities. "Which hen is his mother, Elly?

"This one, Old Speckle. Oh, Mother, there he is, lying down. He must be feeling worse!" She ran forward and stooped over a little panting yellow ball. Across the intervening space and beyond all those carelessly alive bodies, Marise's eyes caught the unmistakable aspect of death in the tiny creature lying there.

"Mother!" cried Elly, "his eyes look so! He can't get his breath. Mother!" Marise felt the child's agitation and alarm knock at her heart. She looked down helplessly at the dying creature. That tiny, tiny scrap of down-covered flesh to be alive, to contain the miracle and mystery of life, and now to be struggling, all alone, with the miracle and mystery of death!

The little thing opened its glazing eyes once more, drew a long breath, and lay still. An age-old inherited knowledge and experience told Elly what bad happened. She gave a scream, picked it up and held it in her cupped hands, her little face drawn in horrified incredulity. She looked up at her mother and said in a whisper, "Mother, he's dead."

Marise nodded silently. Poor Elly! She wished she could think of something comforting to say. But what is there to say? For her there had never been anything but stoic silence. The mother hen clucked unconcernedly at their feet, and with coaxing guttural sounds called the rest of the chickens to eat a grain. The strong ammonia smell of the chicken-yard rose in the sunshine. Elly stood perfectly still, the little ball of yellow down in her hand, her face pale.

Marise looked down on her with infinite sympathy. Her child, flesh of her flesh, meeting in this uncouth place the revelation of the black gulf! But she remained silent, not knowing what to say.

Elly spoke in a low voice, "But, Mother, how can he be dead, just so quick while we were looking at him? Mother, he was alive a minute ago. He was breathing. He looked at me. He knew me. And in just a minute like that . . . nothing!"

She looked around her wildly. "Mother, where has his life gone to?"

Marise put her arm around the little girl's shoulders tenderly, but she still only shook her head without a word. She did not know any more than Elly where his life had gone. And surely loving silence was better than tinkling words of falseness.

Elly looked up at her, glistening drops of sweat standing on her temples. "Mother," she asked, urgently, in a loud, frightened whisper, "Mother, do we die like that? Mother, will you die like that? All in a moment . . . and then . . . nothing?"

It came like thunder, then, what Marise had never thought to feel. With a clap, she found that this time she had something to answer, something to say to Elly. Looking deep, deep into Elly's eyes, she said firmly with a certainty as profound as it was new to her, "No, Elly, I don't believe we do die like that . . . all in a moment . . . nothing."

She was astonished by what she said, astonished by the sudden overflowing of something she had not known was there, but which was so great that her heart could not contain it, "comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine." And she was as moved as she was astonished. Elly came into her arms with a comforted gasp. They clung to each other closely, Marise's ears humming with the unfamiliar beauty and intricacy of that new page at which she had had that instant's glimpse. Here was a new harmony, a new progression, a new rhythm to which her ear had just opened . . . heard here in this uncouth place!

* * * * *

That evening, after the children were in bed, she stopped her reading of the new music for a moment to say to Neale, "You know those ideas that other people are better for children than their parents are?"

"Yes," said Neale, laying down the baseball page of his newspaper, instantly all there, looking at her intently.

"Well, I don't believe a word of it," said Marise.

"I should say it depended on which parents and on which children were meant," advanced Neale guardedly.

Marise had at first an affectionate smile for this, and then a laugh. She got up from the piano-stool and went to kiss him. He said with a whimsical suspicion of this, "Why so?"

"Because you are so entirely you," she told him, and went back to Scriabine.

III

September 22.

It was the half-hour of pause after lunch. The children played idly with the fox-terrier and lounged on the steps of the side-porch, strong and brown, living cups filled to the brim with life. Neale had pushed his chair back from the table, lighted his pipe, and sat meditating. Presently he put out his hand and laid it on Marise's, who had turned to look down the sun-flooded valley.

It was high-noon, dreamy, entranced, all the world golden with the magnificent weather as a holly-hock is golden with pollen. From the brook came the living voice of the water, with the special note of brave clarity it always had for brilliant noons.

It seemed to Marise that she too was all gold-powdered with the magnificence of life, that in her heart there sang a clear living voice that did not fear high-noons.

IV

October.

Would Vincent come back at all? Marise had wondered so often. Not Vincent in the flesh; that last angry bewildered gesture had finality in it. He had given her up then, totally. But would he come back to haunt her in those inevitable moments of flat ebb-tide in life, when what should be moist and living, withered and crisped in the merciless drought of drudgery and routine? She feared it, frankly dreaded it at first, and tried to think how to brace herself against it. But it was not then that tie came, not when she was toiling with dishes to wash, or vegetables to pare, or the endless care of the children's never-in-order clothes. Instead she found in those moments, which had been arid before, a curious new savor, a salt without which life would seem insipid, something which gave her appetite for the rest. "This is all Tolstoyan nonsense and sentimentality," she told herself mockingly, "there is nothing sacred about scrubbing the floor." Or on another day, "I wonder if it's a twist of the absurd mediaeval ascetic perversity left over?" Or again, "All it does for me is to take off the curse of belonging to the bourgeoisie." But no matter what skeptical name she called it, nor how much she minimized the reality of it, she felt some odd value in it which she would not have gone without. Once she said to herself, "It's ballast, to a person like me," although she did not know exactly what this meant. And another time she said, "Perhaps it's that I'm making an honest effort to do my share." But it was true and real, the fact that after such work the reading of the day's news of the world brought her a less oppressive sense of guilt. And stranger than this, music had greater vitality for her. She felt it a deeper, richer soil than even she had dreamed of, and struck her roots profoundly into depths which kept her whole complicated organism poised, steady, and upright.

And here it was that Vincent came back. Not the Vincent of the hawk-like imperious face, or burning eyes of desire, which had seemed to him his realest self. But the Vincent who had come in from the porch that day in March when she had first played to him, who had smiled at her, the good, grateful, peaceful smile, and had said to her music, "Go on, go on." It was the same Vincent of the afternoon in Cousin Hetty's garden when the vulture of the desire to possess had left him for a moment in peace. Often and often he came thus as she played and leaned his head back and said, "Go on." And thus Marise knew he would always come. And thus she welcomed him.

This was what was left of him in the house he had so filled with his smoky, flaming brilliance.

V

December.

They had been talking around the fire of the stars and their names and stories, she and Neale and the children. Presently interest overcoming inertia they decided to go out and see if the clouds had blown away so that the stars could be seen. They huddled on hastily found wraps, thrust their feet into flapping, unbuckled overshoes, and leaving the still, warm, lamp-lit room, they shuffled out, laughing and talking, into the snow which lay thick and still before the house.

At first they carried out between them so much of the house atmosphere that it hung about them like warm fog, shielding them from the fiercely pure, still cold of the air, and from the brilliant glitter of the myriad-eyed black sky. They went on talking and laughing, pointing out the constellations they knew, and trying to find others in the spangled vault over their heads.

"A bear!" cried Mark. "I could draw a better bear than that any day!" And from Paul, "They can call it Orion's belt all they want to, but there's no belt to it!" And from Elly, "Aldebaran! Aldebaran! Red-eyed Aldebaran!"

But little by little the house-air began to be thinned about them, to blow away from between them in wisps and wreathes, off into the blackness. The warmed, lighted house dwindled to nothing. There were only the great cold black sky and the small cold white earth. Their voices were lowered; they stood very still, close together, their heads tipped back, their faces and hearts upraised silently to receive the immensity above and about them.

Elly murmured under her breath, "Doesn't it seem funny, our world being just one of all those, and such a little one, and here we are, just these few of us, standing on the world and looking at it all."

Marise thought, "We seem to be the only living things in all creation." In that huge, black, cold glittering universe how tiny was the little glow of life they made!

Tiny but unquenchable! Those myriads of hard staring eyes could not look down the immortal handful of human life and love which she and Neale had created between them.

There was a silence, filled with still, breathless cold; with enormous space, with infinity.

Marise felt a rigorous shudder run over her, as though something vital were coming to her, like the rending pang of pain which heralds child-birth. After this, did she close her eyes for a moment, or did it come to her while she continued to gaze wide-eyed at the stern greatness of the universe? What was this old, familiar, unknown sensation?

. . . as though, on a long journey in the dark it had grown light, so that she had suddenly recognized which way she was going.

Then she knew what it was. Conscious and awake, she was feeling herself one with the great current, advancing with an irresistible might, majesty and power, in which she shared, to which she gave her part.

VI

January.

She was putting away the clean sheets from the washing on the shelves at the end of the hall, upstairs, her mind entirely on the prosaic task, wondering when she would have to replace some of the older ones, and wishing she could put off buying till the outrageous post-war prices went down. Someone stirred behind her and she turned her head quickly to see who was there. It was Neale, come in early. He was standing, looking at her back; and in the instant before he saw that she had turned, she caught the expression on his face, the tender fathomless affection that was there.

A warm gush of happiness surged up all over her. She felt a sudden intense physical well-being, as though her breath came more smoothly, her blood ran more sweetly in her veins.

"Oh, Neale!" she said, under her breath, flushing and turning to him. He looked at her, his strong, resolute face and clear eyes smiled, and opening his arms he drew her into them. The ineffable memory of all the priceless past, the ineffable certainty of the priceless future was in their kiss.

That evening, after a long golden hour at the piano, she chanced to take down the Largo in the Chopin sonata. As she began it, something stirred in her mind, some memory that instantly lived with the first notes of the music. How thick-clustered with associations music became, waking a hundred echoes and overtones!

This was the memory of the time when she had played it, almost a year ago, and had thought how intimacy and familiarity with music but deepened and enriched and strengthened its hold on you. It was only the lower pleasures of which one grew tired,—had enough. The others grew with your growing capacity to hold them. She remembered how that day she had recalled the Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free," and had thought that music took you in to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine, that you adored none the less although you were at home there and not breathless with adoration like the nun: because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang of joy, because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at home there.

She finished the last note of the Largo and sat silent. She was thinking that her marriage was like that, too.

Presently she got up, took out the old portfolio of photographs, and pinned upon the wall over the piano the view taken from Rocca di Papa.

VII

February 24.

Marise had been drilling the chorus in the Town Hall of Ashley after the men's working-hours, and now in the dimming light of the early evening was going home on snow-shoes, over the hill-path. She liked to use snow-shoes and occasionally said that she could walk more easily and more lightly on them than on bare ground. She trod over the tops of the deep drifts with an accentuation of her usual strong free step.

The snow fell thickly and steadily, a cold, finely-spun, straight-hung curtain, veiling all the muffled sleeping valley. There was an inconceivable silence about her as she drew her snow-shoes over the velvet-like masses of the snow. But within her were ringing echoes of the rhythms and cadences of the afternoon's struggle, imperfectly sung most of them, haltingly, or dully, or feebly, or with a loud misunderstanding of the phrase. At the recollection of these failures, she clenched her hands hard inside her fur gloves with an indomitable resolution to draw something better from her singers the next time.

But mingled with them was a moment of splendor. It was when the men had tried over the passage she had explained to them the week before. She had not known then, she did not know now, how clearly or definitely she had reached them with her summary of the situation of the drama: the desperate straits of the Israelites after the three-year drought, the trial by fire and water before the scorning aristocracy, Elijah stark and alone against all the priesthood of Baal, the extremity of despair of the people . . . and then the coming of the longed-for rain that loosened the terrible tension and released their hearts in the great groaning cry of thanksgiving. She had wondered how clearly or definitely she had reached their understanding, but she knew that she had reached their hearts, when suddenly she had heard all those men's voices pealing out, pure and strong and solemn and free, as she had dreamed that phrase could be sung.



The piercing sweetness of the pleasure this had brought to her came over her again in a wave. She halted on the crest of the hill, and for a moment in place of the purples and blues of the late snowy afternoon there hung before her eyes the powerful, roughly clad bodies of those vigorous men, their weather-beaten faces, their granite impassivity, under which her eye had caught the triumph of the moment, warming them as it did her, with the purest of joys this side of heaven, the consciousness of having made music worthily. The whole valley seemed to be filled to its brim with that shout of exultation. It had taken all of her patience, and will-power, and knowledge of her art and of these people to achieve that moment. But it had lifted her high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.

The snow fell more and more thickly, covering her as she stood with a fine, soft mantle of white. She had heard the men that afternoon saying they had seen signs of the winter break-up, and she wondered at it now, looking about the frozen, buried, beautiful valley and up to the frozen towering mountains, breathing in the cold air, as pure as the ether itself. It seemed to her that spring was as remote and unreal and impossible an imagination of the heart as a child's fairy-tale.

Then suddenly, bursting out of the dimming distance, close in front of her, flying low, silently, strongly, a pair of wild geese went winging off towards the north, their gray shapes the only moving thing in all the frost-held world.

Marise drew a great breath of delight in their strong and purposeful vitality. She looked after them, her heart rising and singing with comradely pride in them. She would have liked to shout an exultant greeting after them, "Hurrah!"

They went beating off, fast and straight, for their unseen destination, while, treading the velvet-like snow-drifts with her strong free tread, Marise went home.



VIII

March 2.

It was the first warm day of the year. The hard-frozen ruts of the road thawed on top and glistened. The snow-banks shrank visibly from one hour to the next under a warm wind and a hazy sun. The mountains were unbelievably beautiful and seductive in a shimmer of blue and silver. The children had brought home a branch of pussy-willows, and as Marise and Neale stood for a moment at the open door breathing in the new softness, they saw Toucle, old and stooped and shabby, her reticule bag bulging, her flat feet in enormous overshoes plodding up the road towards the mountain.

They smiled at one another. It was in truth the first day of spring. Marise said, after a pause, "Do you know what she goes off for?"

Neale shook his head with a wide indifference as to the reason. "Because she's an Injun," he conjectured casually.

"She told me once," said Marise, with a sudden wonder what Neale would think of that glimpse into the old mystic's mind, how he would (for she knew beforehand he would) escape the wistfulness which struck at her even now, at the thought of that door to peace. She repeated to him word for word what Toucle had told her on that hot August day.

Neale gave her his usual careful attention. Marise thought to herself, "Neale is the only person I ever knew who could listen to other people's ideas." But when she finished he made no comment. She asked him, "Did you ever think that old carven-image had that in her? How profound a disdain for us busy-about-nothing white people she must have!"

Neale nodded. "Most likely. Everybody has a good deal of disdain for other people's ideals."

"Well, you haven't for hers, have you?" challenged Marise. Neale looked thoughtful. "I'm no mystic. Their way of managing life often looks to me like sort of lying down on the job. I'm no mystic and I'm no fish. Looks to me as though the thing to do isn't to go off in a far corner to get your momentary glimpse of daylight, but to batter a hole in the roof of your cave and let daylight in where you live all the time. I can't help being suspicious of a daylight that's so uncertain you have to go away from life and hold your breath before you can see it for a minute. I want it where I do my work."

Marise looked at him, thinking deeply. That was just what Neale did. But when she looked back at the old Indian woman, just now turning into the wood-road, she sighed wistfully, and did not know why.

There was so very much growing always to be done in life.

IX

March 10.

(A letter from Eugenia:)

". . . I'm planning perhaps to make the trip to the temples in the Malay jungle. Biskra was deadly, and Italy worse . . . vulgarity and commonness everywhere. What an absolutely dreary outlook wherever one turns one's eyes! There is no corner of the modern world that is not vulgar and common. Democracy has done its horrible leveling down with a vengeance . . ."

* * * * *

(A letter from Mr. Welles:)

". . . The life here is full of interest and change, and it's like dew on my dusty old heart to see the vitality of the joy-in-life of these half-disinherited people. I'm ashamed to tell you how they seem to love me and how good they are to me. Their warmness of heart and their zest in life. . . . I'm just swept back into youth again. It makes me very much mortified when I think what a corking good time I am having and what sanctimonious martyr's airs I put on about coming down here. Of course a certain amount of my feeling younger and brisker comes from the fact that, working as I am, nobody feels about me the laid-on-the-shelf compassion which everybody (and me too) was feeling before. I am somebody here and every time I say 'Dr. Martin' to a well-educated Negro physician whom another white man has just hailed as 'Andy' I feel not only a real sense of righteous satisfaction but the joyful mischievous fun that a small boy has. Give my love to Paul (speaking of small boys) and tell him I'm saving up for the fishing-pole I am going to use when I go fishing with him next summer. He said in his last letter he wanted to come down here and make me a visit; but you tell him I think he'd better get his growth before he does that."

X

March 15, 1921.

From a profound sleep, serene warm infinity of rest, Marise was wakened by a little outcry near the bed, a sobbing voice saying through chattering teeth, "Mother! Father!"

Still drowned in sleep, Marise cried out, "What? What's that?" and then, "Oh, you, Elly. What's the matter, dear? Notions again?"

"Oh, Mother, it was an awful dream this time. Can't I get into bed with you?"

"Why yes, come along, you dear little silly."

The fumbling approach to the bed, Marise holding the sheets open and stretching out her hand through the cold darkness towards the little fingers groping for her; the clutch at her hand with a quick anguish of relief and joy. "Oh, Mother!"

Then the shivering body rolling into bed, the little cold arms tight around her neck, the cold smooth petal-like cheek against hers.

Marise reached over beyond Elly and tucked the covers in with one arm, drew the child closer to her, and herself drew closer to Neale. She wondered if he had been awakened by Elly's voice, and the little stir in the room, and hoped he had not. He had been off on a very long hard tramp over mountain trails the day before, and had been tired at night. Perhaps if he had been wakened by Elly he would drowse off again at once as she felt herself doing now, conscious sleepily and happily of Elly's dear tender limbs on one side of her and of Neale's dear strong body on the other.

* * * * *

The strong March wind chanted loudly outside in the leafless maple-boughs. As Marise felt her eyelids falling shut again it seemed to her, half-awake, half-asleep, that the wind was shouting out the refrain of an old song she had heard in her childhood, "There's room for all! There's room for all! What had it meant, that refrain? She tried drowsily to remember, but instead felt herself richly falling asleep again, her hands, her arms, her body.

"There's room for all! There's room for all!"

She was almost asleep. . . .

Someone was speaking again. Elly's voice, calmer now, wistful and wondering, as though she were lying awake and trying to think.

"Mother."

"Yes, dear, what is it?

"Mother, aren't you and father afraid of anything?"

* * * * *

Marise was wide-awake now, thinking hard. She felt Neale stir, grope for her hand and hold it firmly . . . Neale's strong hand!

She knew what she was saying. Yes, she knew all that it meant when she answered, "No, Elly, I don't believe we are."

THE END