"I can't git it out o' my head," he continued, in a broken whisper, "there's suthin' on 'em. You don't see nothin', do you? They look to me——"
There he stopped, and Raven was glad he did not venture the word. What had Raven to say to him? There seemed not to be anything in the language of man, to say. But Tenney came alive. He was shaking with a great eagerness.
"I tell you," he said, "a man don't know what to do. There was that—that—what I done it to—he wa'n't mine."
He looked at Raven in a hunger of supplication. He was almost dying to be denied.
"Yes," said Raven steadily. "He was yours."
"How do you know?" shrieked Tenney, as if he had caught him. "She talk things over?"
Raven considered. What could he say to him?
"Tenney," he said at last, "you haven't understood. You haven't seen her as she was, the best woman, the most beautiful——"
Here he stopped, and Tenney threw in angrily, as if it were a part of his quarrel with her:
"She was likely enough. But what made her," he continued violently, "what made her let a man feel as if her mind was somewheres else? Where was her mind?"
That was it, Raven told himself. Beauty! it promised ineffable things, even to these eyes of jealous greed, and it could not fulfil the promise because everything it whispered of lay in the upper heavens, not on earth. But Tenney would not have heard the answer even if Raven could have made it. He was broken. He bent his head into his hands and sobbed aloud.
"Good? 'Course she was good. Don't I know it? An' she's gone. An' me—what be I goin' to do?"
Somehow Raven understood that he was not thinking of his desolate house and lonesome mind, but of himself in relation to the law he had broken and the woman's heart, broken, too. Grotesquely almost, came to his mind Tira's grave reminder: "He's a very religious man." And Tenney seemed to have come, by some path of his own, round to the same thing.
"If there was a God——"
"Oh, yes," Raven threw in, moved by some power outside himself, "there is a God."
"If there was," said Tenney, "he couldn't forgive me no more'n He could Cain. There'sthaton my hands. When there's that——"
He stopped before the vision of the man God had scourged into exile for the shedding of blood. To Raven there was suddenly a presence beside them: not a Holy Presence, such as they might well have invoked, but Old Crow. And he remembered how Old Crow had eased the mind of Billy Jones.
"Tenney," he said, "don't you remember what Tira believed in? She believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. She believed He could forgive sins."
"Do you believe it?" Tenney hurled at him. "Can He forgive—that?"
Again he stretched out his hands.
"Yes," said Raven. "He can forgive that."
"An' I be," Tenney continued, in his scriptural phrasing, "whiter than snow?"
Raven found himself halting. There were, behind this vision of the symbol by which God made Himself manifest to man, reserves of strict integrities.
"Tenney," he said, "you've killed a child. Your child. You're a criminal. The only thing you can do to get back among men is to give yourself up. To the law. And take your medicine."
"O my God!" cried Tenney. "Tell it? Tell that? Bring it up afore judge an' jury how I thought——"
"Don't tell me what you thought," said Raven sharply. "You've said it once. You were crazy, and you killed your child."
"An' what if——" he began, and Raven finished for him:
"What if they hang you? We can't go into that. There's your first step. Give yourself up."
The next instant he was sorry for the brutality of this. But Tenney did not find it brutal. Strangely it seemed to him a way out, the only way. He was brooding. Suddenly he looked up.
"You told me," he said, apparently in wonder, "you didn't believe."
What to say? "I believe in God Who is letting me—tenderly, oh, with such pity for my human foolishness—seize whatever crutch I can to help you over this dark mortal way?" Could he say that? No, it was true, but somehow it couldn't be said.
"Yes," he answered gravely, "I believe."
"Then," said Tenney eagerly, "you pray with me."
Raven, thinking on this afterward, knew he did pray, in what words he never could recall, and that the substance of it was Forgiveness: Forgive our sins. And that when he had finished Tenney completed his faltering close with "For Christ's sake. Amen!" And that because Tenney looked at him for confirmation, he, Raven, repeated it after him, humbly and with sincerity. And when, shaken both of them beyond the possibility of speech, they rose from their knees, they heard a voice outside, Nan's voice:
"Rookie, let me in."
Raven opened the door, and found her there, and Dick was with her.
"You shouldn't have come up here," he said to Dick. "You're not supposed to climb hills."
"He had to," said Nan. "I came up and listened and I heard voices. So I went back again and asked Charlotte for sandwiches. And Dick would come. But I carried the basket." She had gone past him into the room and was unpacking food. "No, Mr. Tenney, you stay. They're for you, too. We're all tired out, you know. Let's keep together all we can. We're so lonesome. Tira! but she's the only one that isn't lonesome.She'sgone to heaven. Look! hot coffee, too. Now you eat, both of you. There's nothing like grub."
In the midst of this, Dick had gone round the table and put out his hand to Tenney and said:
"H' are you, Tenney?" and Tenney, dazed, had given his.
Raven found he was hungry and began to eat, and Nan somehow saw to it that Tenney also ate. And Raven, at least, felt in the breath of the spring night, something ebbing there in the hut. What was it: waves of wild human turmoil finding a channel where they could flow equably? Nan and Dick went out on the veranda while the two finished, and Raven noted the murmur of their voices and wondered a little, idly, whether they were better friends—lovers or only better friends. Presently Nan was back again. She brushed up their crumbs and packed the dishes into the basket.
"Now, Mr. Tenney," she said, "this is what we've done. When I found you were both up here, I had Jerry go over and get your cows. He milked and I strained the milk. I locked up the house, too. Here's your key. What makes you go back to-night? It'll be easier by daylight. Rookie, couldn't he sleep up here?"
"Yes," said Raven, "of course he can. We'll be down to breakfast, tell Charlotte."
Tenney offered no preference or opinion. He sat there, his key—the key Tira had lost, he did remember vaguely—on the table before him. Nan, with the air of there being no more to do, wafted Dick away with her. And Raven and Tenney spent the night together in the hut. Raven did not sleep. He had an impression that Tenney did not, either. It seemed to him a watch with the dead.
In that darkest minute when it seems as if dawn will never come or, if it does, to bring with it a deeper chill, Raven, for the first time in weeks, found his old enemies upon him: the fear of life, the terrible distaste for continuance in a world where there is no escape, even in going on. Was this grief for Tira? Her needs had pulled him out from his own sickness of mind, and now that she would never need anything again, must he return to the dark dwelling of his mental discontent and crouch there whimpering as Tenney had whimpered when he came to him here a few hours ago? And slowly, achingly, his mind renewedly accepted the iron necessity which is living. There was no giving up. There was no escape. He had to live because the other choice—was it the fool's choice or the coward's?—was not only unthinkable, but it did no good. There was no escape. And side by side with the sickness of distaste for life as he found it, was another distaste, as strong: for this malady of nostalgia itself. He could not abide it another instant. It was squalid, it was unclean, and he found his mind crying out: "Help me! for God's sake help me!" But it was not to God he cried. It was to Old Crow. And Old Crow heard. Indubitably he heard. For there was an answer. "Yes! yes!" the answer kept beating in his mind. He would help.
And what of Tira? Was she resolved into the earth that made her? Or would she also help? He wondered why she had died. Was it because she had been unable to face the idea of the little boy who was not right taking his maimed innocence into some other state alone? No. Tira had her starkly simple faith. She had her Lord Jesus Christ. She would, as simply as she believed, have trusted the child to Him. Did she so fear to face her life with Tenney—the hurtling, blind, elemental creature with blood on his hands—that she took herself away? No. Tira was no such person. There was a wild, high courage in her that, the more terrible the challenge, responded the more valiantly. Why did she take herself away? And what was she in these walls that had been dedicated to her safety? Was she existent, like Old Crow? Was she here with Raven when his mind clamored for peace? Did she, too, answer "Yes, yes!" She had, he concluded, gone. It seemed as if she had withdrawn herself, by her own will, for some inexorable reason. He remembered threnodies that saw the beloved dead absorbed into the course of nature: the dawn, the sunset, the season's round, the flowers that spring ever renewed to deck the laureate hearse. And as his mind sought her in the night breeze that came in to fan him and Tenney alike, in the sky where the stars, through arboreal spaces, never looked so piercingly bright, he did seem to be aware of an actual intelligence. But it was assuredly not Tira and it was not Old Crow. It was Anne.
Whether his mind had been so occupied by these other more immediate things that she could not get the connection between her will and his, whether she now found him, bereft of Tira, free to do her unchanged bidding, he could not see. But Anne was there. At least, the knowledge of her was in his mind, insisting on being heard, and insisting as it never had in this present life. For whereas then her attack had been subtly organized, Anne herself, the directing general, behind almost invisible potencies of suggestion and finesse, now here she was in the open, plainly commanding him, as if this might be the only fight she should be able to manage, and it must be to the finish. And what she wanted was plain obedience touching the disposal of her trust. It was not his love she was asking for now. That, he concluded, though without bitterness, might not look desirable to her any more. Or perhaps she had learned how futile it was to ask it. Or, indeed, was all love futile beyond the grave? No, for he loved Tira withdrawn into her impenetrable seclusion—but that he must not think of. The fight was on, the conclusive fight with Anne. And he seemed to be battling for the integrity of his own soul, the freedom of his will. He sat up on his couch, and heard himself say aloud:
"No. I won't do it. You can't make me."
Was this the way to speak to Anne, to whom all the reticences and delicacies of life were native air? But she was not Anne now so much as the enemy of sane conduct here in this world and of his struggling will.
"D'you speak?" called Tenney from the next room.
"All right," said Raven, and realized he must not speak again.
Thereafter the fight with Anne went on within the arena of his mind. He poured himself forth to her. For the first time in his life, he admitted her to his inner beliefs and sympathies. He would not, he told her, devote her money to the debasing of the world. Wherever she was, she had not learned a page more than she had known when she wrote that letter to him about the things that help the world and the things that hinder. He didn't believe, he told her, she really wanted to learn. She wanted only to be obeyed, to put her money where she had ordered it to go merely because she had ordered it.
"You can't have it, Anne," he repeated, whenever his mind halted in argument, and she kept pressing him back, back into his old hopeless subserviency. "I'll tell you where it's going. It's going to France. There won't be any palace, Anne. It's going into the land. It's going to help little French boys and French girls to grow up with time enough and strength enough to put their beautiful intelligence into saving the earth. It's going to be that sort of a bulwark between them and the enemies of the earth. And that's the only road to peace. Don't you see it is, Anne? Don't you see it? You won't get peace by talking about it. You wasted your money when you did it, all through war-time. You harmed and hindered. Don't you know you did? If you don't, what's the use of dying? Don't they know any more there than we do here? Anyway, I know more than you did when you made your will, and that's what I'm going to do. Train up beautiful intelligences, Anne, the ones that are likeliest to work it all out practically: how to live, that's what they're going to work out, how to live, how to help the world to live. Don't you see, Anne? For God's sake, don't you see?"
She didn't see, or, if she did, she was too angry to give him the comfort of knowing she did. But suddenly, in the midst of her anger, there was a break, a stillness, though it had been still before. Perhaps it was most like a stillness of mind, and he felt himself as suddenly awake to a certainty that Anne had done with him. Once before she had seemed to leave him, but this time it was for good. She had gone, wherever the road was open to her. He had armed his will and sent it out to fight her will. She was routed, and she would never challenge him again. Perhaps, in her scorn, she had repudiated him. Perhaps the world, if it were called on to pronounce judgment, would repudiate him for betraying a dead woman's trust. Well, let it. The impeccability of his own soul wasn't so very valuable, after all, weighed against what he saw as the indisputable values of mortal life. He lay back on his bed, exhausted by the fight, foolishly exhausted because, he told himself, there hadn't been any real Anne. Only her mind, as he had known it, and his own mind had been grappling, like two sides of an argument. But while he tried to dull himself with this denial of the possibilities beyond our sense, he knew underneath that there had been Anne. And she had gone. She would not come again.
Then he must have slept, for there was a gulf of forgetfulness, and when his eyes came open, it was on Tenney standing there in the doorway. Raven felt squalid after the night in his clothes, and Tenney looked to him in much the same case. Also Tenney was shrunken, even since he had come to the hut the day before, and then he had seemed not three-quarters of his height. He asked now, not as if he cared, but as if he wondered idly:
"D' I leave my ammunition up here?"
He had the gun in his hand.
"Let the gun alone," said Raven. He got up and took it away from him, and Tenney dumbly suffered it. "We'll go down now and have some breakfast, and Jerry'll do your chores."
"I can do my own chores," said Tenney. "I can go into the barn, I guess."
By this Raven understood that he did not mean to go into the house. Perhaps he was afraid of it. Men are afraid of houses that have grown sinister because of knowing too much.
That day was a curious medley of watchfulness over Tenney: for Raven felt the necessity of following him about to see he did himself no harm. He called him in to breakfast, but Tenney did not even seem to hear, and stood brooding in the yard, looking curiously down at his lame foot and lifting it as if to judge how far it would serve him. Then Charlotte, who had been watching from the window, went out and told him she had a bite for him in the shed, and he went in with her at once and drank coffee and ate the bread she buttered. He didn't, so he told her, want to touch things any more. So she broke the bread and he carried the pieces to his mouth with an air of hating them and fearing. When he went over to his house, Raven went with him, and, finding Jerry had milked and driven the cows to pasture, they stood outside, miserably loitering, because Tenney had evidently made that resolve not to go in.
"I suppose," said Raven, after a little, to recall him, "the milk is in there."
"Yes," said Tenney. "I s'pose 'tis."
"It isn't strained, you know. What do you mean to do about it?"
"Do?" said Tenney. "Let it set."
Again they loitered, back and forth, sometimes on one side of the woodpile, sometimes the other, each with a pretense of finding the woodpile itself a point of interest. Suddenly Tenney ceased his foolish walk up and down.
"Look here," said he, "should you jest as lieves go in?"
"Yes," said Raven. "Only you'd better come with me. Get it over. You've got to go into your own house."
"What I want," said Tenney, "is a blue apron, blue with white specks. I don't believe it's there, but if 'tis I want it."
To Raven, this was not strange. It was Tira's apron he wanted, something that belonged to her, to touch, perhaps to carry about with him as a reminder of the warmth and kindliness that lay in everything she owned. Blue! that was her Madonna color. No wonder Tenney remembered it, if it was blue.
"It ain't hangin' up," said Tenney, with a particularity that seemed to cause him an intense pain of concentration. "She never'd hang it up with t'others. It's folded. Mebbe in her work-basket, mebbe—my God in heaven! she wouldn't ha' kep' it. She's burnt it up. You take off the cover o' the kitchen stove. You look there an' see if you can't find the leastest scrid. Blue, you remember, all folded up."
Raven went into the kitchen where the pails of milk were on the table, waiting. He took off the stove cover and looked in, still an idle compliance, to quiet the man's mind. It was like an outcome to a dream. For there it was, a soft disorder easily indicating burned cloth, and one shred of blue, a piece perhaps an inch and a half square, hemmed on three sides: the end of an apron string. He took this carefully out, and stood there looking at it a tense moment, as if it could summon Tira back to tell him what it meant; look out his pocketbook, laid it in, and put the pocketbook away. Then he went back to Tenney.
"You were right," he said. "She burned it up."
Tenney stared at him for what seemed a long time.
"Oh," he said, as if it had been Raven who suggested it, "so she burnt it up. Wa'n't there any left—not a scrid?"
"Yes," said Raven, "there was. What do you want of it?"
"Nothin'," said Tenney. "No, I don't want it. If 'twas the whole on't I shouldn't want it, come to think. A man couldn't hang himself by an apron. Even that one you couldn't. I guess"—he turned upon Raven so sick a gaze that Raven advanced to him and put a hand on his arm—"I guess," said Tenney, "I'm done. I've got to git some sleep. Should you jest as soon I'd go up to that shack o' yourn an' lay down a spell?"
Again they went up to the hut, and Tenney, throwing himself on the couch, was at once asleep. All that day Raven watched by him, and that night also they were there together: a strange day and night, Raven remembered afterward, with Charlotte coming and Nan and finally Dick, all with food or wistful companionship, and Nan's assuring him, in her way of finding nothing out of the common, that everything had been done for Tira, and she would go over to the service. Charlotte would go with her. It would be better—her eyes questioned him, and he nodded, not answering. It would be better he should not go. On the third day she appeared again, in the middle of the afternoon, and said she had just come from Mountain Brook and everything was——That she did not finish, Tenney's somber eyes waited upon her with such a dumb expectancy. What was going to be done, she wondered. Tenney couldn't stay in the hut, keeping Raven there with him, as Billy Jones had kept Old Crow. Yet she wasn't sure Raven wouldn't stay. But while she thought it, Tenney was answering her, though he didn't seem to be speaking to either of them. He might have been appealing to something invisible in the room.
"I'll shave me," he said, "an' then I'll see." Something passed over him like a great moving wind. "Why, God A'mighty!" he cried. "I can't stop to shave me. It's now or never, don't you know 'tis?"
He snatched his hat from the chair where he had thrown it, and went out of the hut, limping down the hill. And Raven was with him. He was with him as he hurried along the road so fast that it seemed as if the next step meant breaking into a run. He was with him when, halfway to the street, Eugene Martin passed them, in his buggy, stopped further on and called to them: "Ride?" He was not laughing now, he was not jibing. He seemed to be constrained to ask them to ride, they were hurrying so. Raven threw a curse at him, but Tenney broke into a limping run and jumped into the tail of the wagon and sat there, his legs dangling. And he called so piercingly to Martin to drive along, to "Hurry, for God's sake, hurry!" that Martin did whip up, and the wagon whirled away, and Raven hurried on alone.
That night, at eight o'clock, Nan went over to ask if Raven had come home, and finding he had not, loitered back to her own gate and waited. She could not go in. If she kept her mind on him, he might come. And presently he came. She walked to meet him and put her hand through his arm. He was walking firmly, but he looked "all in."
"Come," she said. "Supper's waiting."
"No," said Raven, "not yet. I got a fellow to bring me back from the street. Dick said you'd been over."
"Yes," said Nan. "I was horribly worried. Where's Tenney?"
"Gone."
"Where?"
"To jail. He had Martin take him to a man he knew about at the street. Sworn in special constable in the War. Had him telephone the sheriff. Then I got there. Had to inquire round, to find out where he'd gone. When I went in, Tenney was sitting there telling the sheriff he'd killed his child. Sheriff asked what for. Said he had to do it. Then I came in and he began to ask me questions about the Lord Jesus Christ."
"But, Rookie," said Nan, "he didn't. He couldn't. Tira told me she——"
"Yes," said Raven heavily. "You may be called to testify."
"But when he asked that," said Nan, "about——" she hesitated.
"About the Lord Jesus Christ? It was whether his sins were whiter than snow."
"What did you tell him?"
"Oh," said Raven, "I told him yes. If he was sorry, they were. Of course I told him yes. What could I tell him? But I don't believe I'd have told Martin yes, if he'd asked me about his sins. He's scared blue. He was there at the gate when I went in. Shook like a palsy, kept saying he didn't know—didn't think—nobody need ask him——"
"What did you say, Rookie?"
"Nothing. I went in to Tenney. Now I'll go back."
"You won't come in and have a bite? Nice supper, Rookie. Saved for you."
"No. Not to-night." He turned away from her as if she were as actually the outside shell of herself as he was of himself. They were mechanical agents in a too terrible world. But he called back to her: "Nan, I've told her."
She was at his side, hoping for more, perhaps a touch of his hand.
"Anne. I got word to her somehow. She understood."
"Was she——" Nan paused.
"Yes," said Raven. "But it's over—done."
He turned away from her and went fast along the road home. He had, she saw, escaped Aunt Anne. He had got himself back. Did his quick steps along the road say he meant to escape her, too? That was easy. Darling Rookie! he should if he wanted to.
The story ends, as it began, with a letter. It was written by Raven, in Boston, to Dick, in France, about a year after Tenney gave himself up. The first half of it had to do with accounts, money paid over by Raven to Dick, requisitions sent in by Dick to Raven, concise statements of what Raven judged it best to do in certain contingencies Dick had asked instructions upon. Then it continued on a new page, an intimate letter from Raven to the nephew who was administering the Anne Hamilton Fund. The previous pages would be submitted to the two Frenchmen, who, with Dick, formed the acting board. These last pages were for Dick alone.
"No, Tenney wasn't even indicted. There was the whirlwind of talk you can imagine. Reminiscent, too! 'Don't you remember?' from house to house, and whenever two men met in the road or hung over the fence to spit and yarn. It was amazing, the number of folks who had set him down as 'queer,' 'odd,' all the country verdicts on the chap that's got to be accounted for. Even his religion was brought up against him. The chief argument there was that he always behaved as if the things he believed were actually so. He believed in hell and told you you were bound for it. But I can't go into that. They couldn't, the ones that tried to. They got all balled up, just as their intellectual betters do when they tackle theology. All this, of course, began before you went away, and it continued in mounting volume. If you want New England psychology, you have it there, to the last word. That curious mixture of condemnation and acceptance! They believed him capable of doing things unspeakable, and yet there wasn't a public voice to demand an inquiry as to whether he really had done them. They cheerfully accepted the worst and believed the best. And it's true he had behaved more or less queer for a long time, wouldn't speak to people when he met them, didn't seem to know them, and then suddenly breaking out, in the blacksmith's shop or buying his grain at the store, and asking if they were saved. The women were the queerest. They said he set his life by the child. Why, he couldn't even bear to go to the funeral of his wife or the child either, and hadn't they seen him and Tira drivin' by, time and again, the baby in Tira's lap, in his little white coat and hood? I don't know how many times I heard the evidence of that little white hood. Even Charlotte caught it and plumped it at me.
"You remember yourself how disgusted the authorities were when he trotted about like a homeless dog and insisted on being arrested for a crime they knew he didn't commit. Poor old Tenney! they said, any man might be crazed, losing his wife and child in one week. They were very gentle with him. They told him if he hung round talking much longer he'd be late for his planting. Of course the doctor did set the pace. He'd told, everywhere he went, how Tira had sent for him at once, and how she had said she had, in that hideous country phrase, 'overlaid' the child. One interesting psychological part of it has persisted to this day: the effect Tira had on the doctor, his entire belief in her simple statement which she was never asked to swear to. (You remember there was no inquest.) He never, he said, was so sorry for a woman in his life. He seems to have been so determined to prove her a tragic figure that he wouldn't for a moment have the disaster lightened by denying her that last misfortune of having done it herself. Lots of these things I haven't told you, they're so grim and, to me now, so wearing. They've got on all our nerves like the devil, and I fancy even the Wake Hill natives are pretty well fed up with 'em. At first they couldn't get enough. When Tenney couldn't get the law to believe in him so far as to indict him, the embattled farmers took it on themselves to cross-examine him, not because they thought for a minute he was guilty, but because they itched to hear him say so: drama, don't you see? And he never wavered in asserting he did it: only when they asked him how, he just stared, and once told a particularly smart Alec, he guessed it was a man's own business how he killed his own child. And he stayed up in the hut, just as he was doing when you went away, and night after night I had to stay with him. Stuck to me like a burr and wore me threadbare asking if he was forgiven, and if that didn't mean he was whiter than snow. I tell you, Dick, it was all so involved that I believe, although he used the set phrases about the Lord Jesus Christ, he really believed it was I that had forgiven him. He used to ask me to tell God to do it for my sake; and I remembered Old Crow and how he played up to Billy Jones, and, if you'll believe it, Ididask God (though not for my sake!), and horrible as it is, grotesque as it is (no, by George, it isn't grotesque to speak to a man in the only language he can understand! he wanted God and he couldn't any more reach Him! he had to climb up on another man's shoulders), well, I told him it was all right. He was forgiven. Then he scared me blue by saying he was going round preaching the gospel—his farm is sold, you know, stock gone, everything wiped out—and I told him he'd proved too dangerous to be let loose on the world again. But he had me there. He asked if he was forgiven, why wasn't he whiter than snow? And he hung to me like my shadow, and asked if he couldn't keep on living in the hut, till he felt strong enough to preach. I told him he could, and blest if I didn't see him and me there together, world without end, like Old Crow and Billy Jones, for nothing was ever going to persuade him to let go of me again. You'd better laugh, Dick. Nan and I had to. We almost cried. It is funny. I bet Old Crow laughed. But Tenney saved me. He took it into his own hands. And what do you think did it? We went down to the house one morning for breakfast, and Charlotte came out to meet us, tying on a clean apron. It was blue with white spots (I forgot you don't see any significance in that, but Tenney did) and he stopped short and said: 'God A'mighty! I was in hopes I never should set eyes on a woman's apron again.'
"I went up to have a bath (my staying at the hut was a kind of emergency business, you see) and he disappeared, and Charlotte and Jerry didn't get on to it that he was really gone, and later on he was seen wading into the water over at Mountain Brook, there by the stepping stones. The Donnyhills saw him, and at first they thought he knew what he was about, but kept on watching him. He stooped and dipped himself, and they had an idea it was some kind of a self-conducted baptism. I believe it was. Nan often has to remind me that 'he's a very religious man.' But they watched, and presently he went under, and they knew then he was making way with himself, and the Donnyhill boy, that calm young giant, fished him out, Tenney fighting him furiously. And it began to look to me as if he ought to be under a mild supervision (it wasn't for nothing you and your mother let fly at me with your psychiatry! I escaped myself, but I learned the formula). And now Tenney, agreeing to it like a lamb, is at that little sanitarium Miss Anne Hamilton started 'up state,' and very well contented. Nan goes to see him, and so do I. He is as mild—you can't think! Reads his Bible every minute of the day when he isn't doing the work they give him or converting the staff.
"You'll say he's insane. I don't know whether he is or not. I don't know whether they'll say so, the psychopathic experts they've let loose on him. I simply think he found the difficulties of his way too much for him and he revolted. He tried to right the balance of some of the most mysteriously devilish inequalities a poorly equipped chap ever found himself up against (strange forces that struck at him in the dark) and being ignorant and at the same time moved by more volts of energy than even the experts will be able to compute, he took the only path he saw, slam-bang into the thick of the fight. As to his spouting his Bible like a geyser—well, if he believes in it as the actual word of God, a word addressed to him, why shouldn't he spout it? And if it tells him that, after certain formulae of repentance, his sins shall be whiter than snow, why shouldn't he believe that and say so with the simplicity he does? All the same, I don't think he's exactly the person to wander at large, and I've no idea what will happen when his good conduct and general mildness come it over the psychiatrists. I grin over it sometimes, all by myself, for I remember Old Crow and Billy Jones and I wonder if the logic of inherited events is going to herd Tenney and me together into the hut to live out our destiny together. But I don't think so, chiefly because I want to keep my finger in this pie of the French Fund and because it would distress Nan. Distress you, too, I guess! And me!
"Now, as to Nan. You gave it to me straight from the shoulder, and I've got to give you one back. I agree with you. There's no hope for you. She's enormously fond of you, but it's notthat kind. And Nan's old-fashioned enough to insist on that or nothing. I was so meddlesome as to bring it up with her before you went away. She put me in my place, told me practically it was nobody's business but hers—and yours—and that she'd already talked it out with you and that you're a 'dear' and you 'saw.' So, old man, as you say, that's that.Finis.But when, after I've butted in, you butt in and accuse me of not 'seeing,' so far as I myself am concerned, of holding her off, of being unfair to her, all the rest of it (very intemperate letter, you must own) I've got to give you your quietus as Nan gave me mine. First place, you say, with a cheek that makes my backbone crawl, that Nan 'loves' me. (Do you really want to be as Victorian as that, you slang-slinging young modern? But I know! You think I mightn't catch on to your shibboleths and you borrow what you judge to be mine, give me the choice of weapons, as it were.) And you're a trump, Dick! Don't think I don't know that, and if I poke fun at you it's to keep from slopping all over you with the Victorian lavishness you'd expect. What did we ever fight for about your youth and my age? Or wasn't it about that, after all? Was it really about—Nan?
"Well, when it comes to 'love', I do love Nan. There you have it, good old-fashioned direct address. She is as immediate to me as my own skin and veins. She always has been. She began to grow into me when she was little, and she kept on growing. There are fibers and rootlets of Nan all through me, and the funny part of it is I love to feel them there. I can't remember being dominated by anybody without resenting it, wanting to get away—escape! escape!—but I never for an instant have felt that about Nan. She's the better part of me. Good Lord! she's the only part of me I take any particular pleasure in or that I can conceive of as existing after I join Old Crow. (Not that I'm allowed to take much pleasure in her now. She sees me when I call, answers when I consult her about the Fund—and she's been tremendously sympathetic and valuable there—but she seems to feel and, I've no doubt, for very good reasons, that we're better apart. She has, I believe, a theory about it; but we needn't go into that. And I don't quarrel with it.)
"The queer part of it is that I feel Nan herself couldn't break the bond between us, couldn't if she tried. It's as deep as nature, as actual as Old Crow. I can give you a curious proof of it. I might be almost swamped by somebody—yes, I mean Tira. I might as well say so as hear you saying it over this letter—somebody that is beauty and mystery and a thousand potencies that take hold on nature itself. But that doesn't push Nan away by an inch. If I'm swamped, Nan's swamped with me. If I mourn the beauty and the piteousness withdrawn, Nan mourns, too. It's Nan and I against the world. But it isn't Nan and I with the world. The world is against us. Do you see? For I'm a year older than when I saw you last. And though many of the things you felt about the years weren't true, a lot of 'em were, and they're a little truer now. And one of them is that I've got to give Nan a fighting chance to mate with youth and—oh, exactly what you've got. I wish you had her—no, I'm damned if I do. I may not be young enough for jealousy, but I am unregenerate enough. I probably mean I wish I wished it. For in spite of my revolt against the earth, I'd like to give Nan the cup, not of earth sorceries but earth loveliness, and let her swig it to the bottom. And then, if Old Crow's right and this is only a symbol and we've got to live by symbols till we get the real thing, why, then I'm sentimental enough—Victorian! yes, say it, and be hanged!—to want to believe Nan and I shall some time—some time——Anyhow, I'm not going to ask her to spend her middle years—just think! 'figure to yourself!'—when Nan's forty, what will your revered uncle be?
"Now I've told you. This is the whole story, the outline of it. And why do I tell you instead of merely inviting you to shut up as Nan did me? Because if you retain in your dear meddlesome head any idea that Nan, as you say, 'loves' me, you're to remember also that Nan is not in any sense an Ariadne on a French clock, her arm over her head, deserted and forlorn. You are to remember I adore her and, if I thought we could both in a dozen years or so perish by shipwreck or Tenney's axe (poor Tenney!) I should get down on my knees to her and beg her (can't you hear our Nan laugh?) to let me marry her. (Probably she wouldn't, old man—marry me, I mean. We're seldom as clever as we think, even you. So there's that.) But, in spite of my erratic leanings toward Old Crow-ism and sundry alarming dissatisfactions with the universe, I still retain the common sense to see Nan, at forty, worrying over my advancing arteriosclerosis and the general damned breaking up of my corporeal frame. Not on your life. Now—shut up!
"Yes, your mother continues to be dissatisfied over your being there. She thinks it's all too desultory, but is consoled at your being mentioned in the same breath with 'two such distinguished Frenchmen.' I tell her you can't stop for a degree, and maybe if you follow out your destiny you'll get one anyway, and that, if you still want to write books, this will give you something to write about. But she doesn't mind so much since she's gone into politics, hammer and tongs."
Now this letter reached Richard Powell in the dingy office in Paris, where he happened to be in consultation with his two advisers who were, with an untiring genius of patience and foresight, interpreting to him daily the soul of France. He went over the first part of the letter with them, article by article, point by point, very proud, under his composure, of their uniform agreement with the admirable Monsieur Raven. And after their business session was concluded and the two Frenchmen had gone, Dick addressed himself to the last part of the letter, given in these pages. He bent himself to it with the concentration that turns a young face, even though but for the moment, into a prophetic hint of its far-off middle age. If he had kept enough of his shy self-consciousness to glance at himself in the glass, he would have been able to smile at the old fear of what the years might do to him. No heaviness there, such as he remembered in his father's face: only trouble, pain, and their mysteriously refining tracery. But the heaviness was in his heart. He had to understand the letter absolutely, not only what it said but all it implied. If it actually meant what he believed it to mean at first reading, it drew a heavy line across his own life. Nan had drawn the line before, but this broadened it, reënforced it with a band of black absolutely impossible to cross. And it did mean it, and, having seen that, without a possibility of doubt, he enclosed the letter in an envelope, addressed it to Nan, and leaned back in his chair, never, he believed, to think it over again, never so long as he and Nan lived. There was no residuum of sentiment in his mind as there was in Raven's that, after Nan had finished with this life, according to her own ideas, there might be hope of another Nan bloomed out of this one somewhere else and another Dick, risen out of his ashes, to try his luck again. No, the line across the page was the line across their lives, and, said Dick: "That's that." But he caught his breath, as he said it, and was glad there was no one by to hear. Anybody who heard would have said it was a sob. He was, he concluded, rather fagged with the day. These confounded Frenchmen, with their wits you couldn't keep up with, they took it out of you.
This was why Raven, in Wake Hill, on the morning the letter came to Nan in Boston, got a telegram from her, saying: "Come back." He had gone there to stay over a night, after a few hours' visit with Tenney, who was eagerly glad to see him, and again begging to be confirmed in his condition of spiritual whiteness. Raven had just got to his house when the message was telephoned up from the station, and its urgency made him horribly anxious. He had been especially aware of Nan all day. Little threads of feeling between them had been thrilling to messages he couldn't quite get, as if they were whispers purposely mysterious, to scare a man. He was on edge with them. They quickened the apprehension the message brought upon him overwhelmingly. She never would have summoned him like that if she hadn't needed him, not a word by telephone, but his actual presence. He had Jerry take him back again to the station, and in the late afternoon he walked in on Nan waiting for him in one of the rooms Anne Hamilton had kept faithful to the traditions of bygone Hamiltons, but that now knew her no more. It was Nan the room knew, Nan in her dull blue dress against the background of pink roses she made for herself and the room, Nan white with the pallor of extreme emotion, bright anxiety in her eyes and a tremor about her mouth. She went to him at once, not as the schoolgirl had run, the last time she offered her child lips to him, but as if the moment were a strange moment, a dazzling peak of a moment to be approached—how should she know the way to her heart's desire?
"What is it, dear?" asked Raven, not putting her off, as he had the schoolgirl, but only unspeakably thankful for the bare fact of having found her safe. "What's happened?"
"I had to tell you straight off," said Nan, "or I couldn't do it at all. He sent me your letter—Dick. The one about me."
Raven was conscious of thinking clearly of two things at once. He was, in the first place, aware of the live atoms which were the letter, arranging themselves in his mind, telling him what they had told Nan. He was also absently aware that Nan's face was so near his eyes it was nothing but a blur of white, and that when he bent to it, the white ran, in a rush, into a blur of pink.
"So Dick sent it to you," he said. "Well, God bless him for it. Kiss me, my Nan."
The PrisonerMy Love and IOne Act PlaysThe Black DropVanishing PointsRobin Hood's BarnChildren of EarthHomespun and GoldThe Flying TeutonThe Road To CastalyLouise Imogen GuineyBromley NeighborhoodThe Secret of the ClanThe Wind Between the Worlds
The PrisonerMy Love and IOne Act PlaysThe Black DropVanishing PointsRobin Hood's BarnChildren of EarthHomespun and GoldThe Flying TeutonThe Road To CastalyLouise Imogen GuineyBromley NeighborhoodThe Secret of the ClanThe Wind Between the Worlds