As he stood alone in the barnyard, excited at the thought of the adventure on which Clara and Hugh had set out, Jim Priest remembered Tom Butterworth. For more than thirty years Jim had worked for Tom and they had one strong impulse that bound them together—their common love of fine horses. More than once the two men had spent an afternoon together in the grand stand at the fall trotting meeting at Cleveland. In the late morning of such a day Tom found Jim wandering from stall to stall, looking at the horses being rubbed down and prepared for the afternoon's races. In a generous mood he bought his employee's lunch and took him to a seat in the grand stand. All afternoon the two men watched the races, smoked and quarreled. Tom contended that Bud Doble, the debonair, the dramatic, the handsome, was the greatest of all race horse drivers, and Jim Priest held Bud Doble in contempt. For him there was but one man of all the drivers he whole-heartedly admired, Pop Geers, the shrewd and silent. “That Geers of yours doesn't drive at all. He just sits up there like a stick,” Tom grumbled. “If a horse can win all right, he'll ride behind him all right. What I like to see is a driver. Now you look at that Doble. You watch him bring a horse through the stretch.”
Jim looked at his employer with something like pity in his eyes. “Huh,” he exclaimed. “If you haven't got eyes you can't see.”
The farm hand had two strong loves in his life, his employer's daughter and the race horse driver, Geers. “Geers,” he declared, “was a man born old and wise.” Often he had seen Geers at the tracks on a morning before some important race. The driver sat on an upturned box in the sun before one of the horse stalls. All about him there was the bantering talk of horsemen and grooms. Bets were made and challenges given. On the tracks nearby horses, not entered in the races for that day, were being exercised. Their hoofbeats made a kind of music that made Jim's blood tingle. Negroes laughed and horses put their heads out at stall doors. The stallions neighed loudly and the heels of some impatient steed rattled against the sides of a stall.
Every one about the stalls talked of the events of the afternoon and Jim leaned against the front of one of the stalls and listened, filled with happiness. He wished the fates had made him a racing man. Then he looked at Pop Geers, the silent one, who sat for hours dumb and uncommunicative on a feed box, tapping lightly on the ground with his racing whip and chewing straw. Jim's imagination was aroused. He had once seen that other silent American, General Grant, and had been filled with admiration for him.
That was on a great day in Jim's life, the day on which he had seen Grant going to receive Lee's surrender at Appomattox. There had been a battle with the Union men pursuing the fleeing Rebs out of Richmond, and Jim, having secured a bottle of whisky, and having a chronic dislike of battles, had managed to creep away into a wood. In the distance he heard shouts and presently saw several men riding furiously down a road. It was Grant with his aides going to the place where Lee waited. They rode to the place near where Jim sat with his back against a tree and the bottle between his legs; then stopped. Then Grant decided not to take part in the ceremony. His clothes were covered with mud and his beard was ragged. He knew Lee and knew he would be dressed for the occasion. He was that kind of a man; he was one fitted for historic pictures and occasions. Grant wasn't. He told his aides to go on to the spot where Lee waited, told them what arrangements were to be made, then jumped his horse over a ditch and rode along a path under the trees toward the spot where Jim lay.
That was an event Jim never forgot. He was fascinated at the thought of what the day meant to Grant and by his apparent indifference. He sat silently by the tree and when Grant got off his horse and came near, walking now in the path where the sunlight sifted down through the trees, he closed his eyes. Grant came to where he sat and stopped, apparently thinking him dead. His hand reached down and took the bottle of whisky. For a moment they had something between them, Grant and Jim. They both understood that bottle of whisky. Jim thought Grant was about to drink, and opened his eyes a little. Then he closed them. The cork was out of the bottle and Grant clutched it in his hand tightly. From the distance there came a vast shout that was picked up and carried by voices far away. The wood seemed to rock with it. “It's done. The war's over,” Jim thought. Then Grant reached over and smashed the bottle against the trunk of the tree above Jim's head. A piece of the flying glass cut his cheek and blood came. He opened his eyes and looked directly into Grant's eyes. For a moment the two men stared at each other and the great shout again rolled over the country. Grant went hurriedly along the path to where he had left his horse, and mounting, rode away.
Standing in the race track looking at Geers, Jim thought of Grant. Then his mind came back to this other hero. “What a man!” he thought. “Here he goes from town to town and from race track to race track all through the spring, summer and fall, and he never loses his head, never gets excited. To win horse races is the same as winning battles. When I'm at home plowing corn on summer afternoons, this Geers is away somewhere at some track with all the people gathered about and waiting. To me it would be like being drunk all the time, but you see he isn't drunk. Whisky could make him stupid. It couldn't make him drunk. There he sits hunched up like a sleeping dog. He looks as though he cared about nothing on earth, and he'll sit like that through three-quarters of the hardest race, waiting, taking advantage of every little stretch of firm hard ground on the track, saving his horse, watching, watching his horse too, waiting. What a man! He works the horse into fourth place, into third, into second. The crowd in the grand stand, such fellows as Tom Butterworth, have not seen what he's doing. He sits still. By God, what a man! He waits. He looks half asleep. If he doesn't have to do it, he makes no effort. If the horse has it in him to win without help he sits still. The people are shouting and jumping up out of their seats in the grand stand, and if that Bud Doble has a horse in the race he's leaning forward in the sulky, shouting at his horse and making a holy show of himself.
“Ha, that Geers! He waits. He doesn't think of the people but of the horse he's driving. When the time comes, just the right time, that Geers, he lets the horse know. They are one at that moment, like Grant and I were over that bottle of whisky. Something happens between them. Something inside the man says, 'now,' and the message runs along the reins to the horse's brain. It flies down into his legs. There is a rush. The head of the horse has just worked its way out in front by inches—not too soon, nothing wasted. Ha, that Geers! Bud Doble, huh!”
On the night of Clara's marriage after she and Hugh had disappeared down the county seat road, Jim hurried into the barn and, bringing out a horse, sprang on his back. He was sixty-three but could mount a horse like a young man. As he rode furiously toward Bidwell he thought, not of Clara and her adventure, but of her father. To both men the right kind of marriage meant success in life for a woman. Nothing else really mattered much if that were accomplished. He thought of Tom Butterworth, who, he told himself, had fussed with Clara just as Bud Doble often fussed with a horse in a race. He had himself been like Pop Geers. All along he had known and understood the mare colt, Clara. Now she had come through; she had won the race of life.
“Ha, that old fool!” Jim whispered to himself as he rode swiftly down the dark road. When the horse ran clattering over a small wooden bridge and came to the first of the houses of the town, he felt like one coming to announce a victory, and half expected a vast shout to come out of the darkness, as it had come in the moment of Grant's victory over Lee.
Jim could not find his employer at the hotel or in Main Street, but remembered a tale he had heard whispered. Fanny Twist the milliner lived in a little frame house in Garfield Street, far out at the eastern edge of town, and he went there. He banged boldly on the door and the woman appeared. “I've got to see Tom Butterworth,” he said. “It's important. It's about his daughter. Something has happened to her.”
The door closed and presently Tom came around the corner of the house. He was furious. Jim's horse stood in the road, and he went straight to him and took hold of the bit. “What do you mean by coming here?” he asked sharply. “Who told you I was here? What business you got coming here and making a show of yourself? What's the matter of you? Are you drunk or out of your head?”
Jim got off the horse and told Tom the news. For a moment the two stood looking at each other. “Hugh McVey—Hugh McVey, by crackies, are you right, Jim?” Tom exclaimed. “No missfire, eh? She's really gone and done it? Hugh McVey, eh? By crackies!”
“They're on the way to the county seat now,” Jim said softly. “Missfire! Not on your life.” His voice lost the cool, quiet tone he had so often dreamed of maintaining in great emergencies. “I figure they'll be back by twelve or one,” he said eagerly. “We got to blow 'em out, Tom. We got to give that girl and her husband the biggest blowout ever seen in this county, and we got just about three hours to get ready for it.”
“Get off that horse and give me a boost,” Tom commanded. With a grunt of satisfaction he sprang to the horse's back. The belated impulse to philander that an hour before sent him creeping through back streets and alleyways to the door of Fanny Twist's house was all gone, and in its place had come the spirit of the man of affairs, the man who, as he himself often boasted, made things move and kept them on the move. “Now look here, Jim,” he said sharply, “there are three livery stables in this town. You engage every horse they've got for the night. Have the horses hitched to any kind of rigs you can find, buggies, surreys, spring wagons, anything. Have them get drivers off the streets, anywhere. Then have them all brought around in front of the Bidwell House and held for me. When you've done that, you go to Henry Heller's house. I guess you can find it. You found this house where I was fast enough. He lives on Campus Street just beyond the new Baptist Church. If he's gone to bed you get him up. Tell him to get his orchestra together and have him bring all the lively music he's got. Tell him to bring his men to the Bidwell House as fast as he can get them there.”
Tom rode off along the street followed by Jim Priest, running at the horse's heels. When he had gone a little way he stopped. “Don't let any one fuss with you about prices to-night, Jim,” he called. “Tell every one it's for me. Tell 'em Tom Butterworth'll pay what they ask. The sky's the limit to-night, Jim. That's the word, the sky's the limit.”
To the older citizens of Bidwell, those who lived there when every citizen's affairs were the affair of the town, that evening will be long remembered. The new men, the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, and many other strange-talking, dark-skinned men who had come with the coming of the factories, went on with their lives on that evening as on all others. They worked in the night shift at the Corn-Cutting Machine Plant, at the foundry, the bicycle factory or at the big new Tool Machine Factory that had just moved to Bidwell from Cleveland. Those who were not at work lounged in the streets or wandered aimlessly in and out of saloons. Their wives and children were housed in the hundreds of new frame houses in the streets that now crept out in all directions. In those days in Bidwell new houses seemed to spring out of the ground like mushrooms. In the morning there was a field or an orchard on Turner Pike or on any one of a dozen roads leading out of town. On the trees in the orchard green apples hung down waiting, ready to ripen. Grasshoppers sang in the long grass beneath the trees.
Then appeared Ben Peeler with a swarm of men. The trees were cut and the song of the grasshopper choked beneath piles of boards. There was a great shouting and rattling of hammers. A whole street of houses, all alike, universally ugly, had been added to the vast number of new houses already built by that energetic carpenter and his partner Gordon Hart.
To the people who lived in these houses, the excitement of Tom Butterworth and Jim Priest meant nothing. Half sullenly they worked, striving to make money enough to take them back to their native lands. In the new place they had not, as they had hoped, been received as brothers. A marriage or a death there meant nothing to them.
To the old townsmen however, those who remembered Tom when he was a simple farmer and when Steve Hunter was looked upon with contempt as a boasting young squirt, the night rocked with excitement. Men ran through the streets. Drivers lashed their horses along roads. Tom was everywhere. He was like a general in charge of the defenses of a besieged town. The cooks at all three of the town's hotels were sent back into their kitchens, waiters were found and hurried out to the Butterworth house, and Henry Heller's orchestra was instructed to get out there at once and to start playing the liveliest possible music.
Tom asked every man and woman he saw to the wedding party. The hotel keeper was invited with his wife and daughter and two or three keepers of stores who came to the hotel to bring supplies were asked, commanded to come. Then there were the men of the factories, the office men and superintendents, new men who had never seen Clara. They also, with the town bankers and other solid fellows with money in the banks, who were investors in Tom's enterprises, were invited. “Put on the best clothes you've got in the world and have your women folks do the same,” he said laughing. “Then you get out to my house as soon as you can. If you haven't any way to get there, come to the Bidwell House. I'll get you out.”
Tom did not forget that in order to have his wedding party go as he wished, he would need to serve drinks. Jim Priest went from bar to bar. “What wine you got—good wine? How much you got?” he asked at each place. Steve Hunter had in the cellar of his house six cases of champagne kept there against a time when some important guest, the Governor of the State or a Congressman, might come to town. He felt that on such occasions it was up to him to see that the town, as he said, “did itself proud.” When he heard what was going on he hurried to the Bidwell House and offered to send his entire stock of wine out to Tom's house, and his offer was accepted.
Jim Priest had an idea. When the guests were all assembled and when the farm kitchen was filled with cooks and waiters who stumbled over each other, he took his idea to Tom. There was, he explained, a short-cut through fields and along lanes to a point on the county seat road, three miles from the house. “I'll go there and hide myself,” he said. “When they come along, suspecting nothing, I'll cut out on horseback and get here a half hour before them. You make every one in the house hide and keep still when they drive into the yard. We'll put out all the lights. We'll give that pair the surprise of their lives.”
Jim had concealed a quart bottle of wine in his pocket and, as he rode away on his mission, stopped from time to time to take a hearty drink. As his horse trotted along lanes and through fields, the horse that was bringing Clara and Hugh home from their adventure cocked his ears and remembered the comfortable stall filled with hay in the Butterworth barn. The horse trotted swiftly along and Hugh in the buggy beside Clara was lost in the same dense silence that all the evening had lain over him like a cloak. In a dim way he was resentful and felt that time was running too fast. The hours and the passing events were like the waters of a river in flood time, and he was like a man in a boat without oars, being carried helplessly forward. Occasionally he thought courage had come to him and he half turned toward Clara and opened his mouth, hoping words would come to his lips, but the silence that had taken hold of him was like a disease whose grip on its victim could not be broken. He closed his mouth and wet his lips with his tongue. Clara saw him do the thing several times. He began to seem animal-like and ugly to her. “It's not true that I thought of her and asked her to be my wife only because I wanted a woman,” Hugh reassured himself. “I've been lonely, all my life I've been lonely. I want to find my way into some one's heart, and she is the one.”
Clara also remained silent. She was angry. “If he didn't want to marry me, why did he ask me? Why did he come?” she asked herself. “Well, I'm married. I've done the thing we women are always thinking about,” she told herself, her mind taking another turn. The thought frightened her and a shiver of dread ran over her body. Then her mind went to the defense of Hugh. “It isn't his fault. I shouldn't have rushed things as I have. Perhaps I'm not meant for marriage at all,” she thought.
The ride homeward dragged on indefinitely. The clouds were blown out of the sky, the moon came out and the stars looked down on the two perplexed people. To relieve the feeling of tenseness that had taken hold of her Clara's mind resorted to a trick. Her eyes sought out a tree or the lights of a farmhouse far ahead and she tried to count the hoof beats of the horse until they had come to it. She wanted to hurry homeward and at the same time looked forward with dread to the night alone in the dark farmhouse with Hugh. Not once during the homeward drive did she take the whip out of its socket or speak to the horse.
When at last the horse trotted eagerly across the crest of the hill, from which there was such a magnificent view of the country below, neither Clara nor Hugh turned to look. With bowed heads they rode, each trying to find courage to face the possibilities of the night.
In the farmhouse Tom and his guests waited in winelit suspense, and at last Jim Priest rode shouting out of a lane to the door. “They're coming—they're coming,” he shouted, and ten minutes later and after Tom had twice lost his temper and cursed the girl waitresses from the town hotels who were inclined to giggle, all was silent and dark about the house and the barnyard. When all was quiet Jim Priest crept into the kitchen, and stumbling over the legs of the guests, made his way to a front window where he placed a lighted candle. Then he went out of the house to lie on his back beneath a bush in the yard. In the house he had secured for himself a second bottle of wine, and as Clara with her husband turned in at the gate and drove into the barnyard, the only sound that broke the intense silence came from the soft gurgle of the wine finding its way down his throat.
As in most older American homes, the kitchen at the rear of the Butterworth farmhouse was large and comfortable. Much of the life of the house had been led there. Clara sat in a deep window that looked out across a little gully where in the spring a small stream ran down along the edge of the barnyard. She was then a quiet child and loved to sit for hours unobserved and undisturbed. At her back was the kitchen with the warm, rich smells and the soft, quick, persistent footsteps of her mother. Her eyes closed and she slept. Then she awoke. Before her lay a world into which her fancy could creep out. Across the stream before her eyes went a small, wooden bridge and over this in the spring horses went away to the fields or to sheds where they were hitched to milk or ice wagons. The sound of the hoofs of the horses pounding on the bridge was like thunder, harnesses rattled, voices shouted. Beyond the bridge was a path leading off to the left and along the path were three small houses where hams were smoked. Men came from the wagon sheds bearing the meat on their shoulders and went into the little houses. Fires were lighted and smoke crawled lazily up through the roofs. In a field that lay beyond the smoke houses a man came to plow. The child, curled into a little, warm ball in the window seat, was happy. When she closed her eyes fancies came like flocks of white sheep running out of a green wood. Although she was later to become a tomboy and run wild over the farm and through the barns, and although all her life she loved the soil and the sense of things growing and of food for hungry mouths being prepared, there was in her, even as a child, a hunger for the life of the spirit. In her dreams women, beautifully gowned and with rings on their hands, came to brush the wet, matted hair back from her forehead. Across the little wooden bridge before her eyes came wonderful men, women, and children. The children ran forward. They cried out to her. She thought of them as brothers and sisters who were to come to live in the farmhouse and who were to make the old house ring with laughter. The children ran toward her with outstretched hands, but never arrived at the house. The bridge extended itself. It stretched out under their feet so that they ran forward forever on the bridge.
And behind the children came men and women, sometimes together, sometimes walking alone. They did not seem like the children to belong to her. Like the women who came to touch her hot forehead, they were beautifully gowned and walked with stately dignity.
The child climbed out of the window and stood on the kitchen floor. Her mother hurried about. She was feverishly active and often did not hear when the child spoke. “I want to know about my brothers and sisters: where are they, why don't they come here?” she asked, but the mother did not hear, and if she did, had nothing to say. Sometimes she stopped to kiss the child and tears came to her eyes. Then something cooking on the kitchen stove demanded attention. “You run outside,” she said hurriedly, and turned again to her work.
From the chair where Clara sat at the wedding feast provided by the energy of her father and the enthusiasm of Jim Priest, she could see over her father's shoulder into the farm house kitchen. As when she was a child, she closed her eyes and dreamed of another kind of feast. With a growing sense of bitterness she realized that all her life, all through her girlhood and young womanhood, she had been waiting for this, her wedding night, and that now, having come, the occasion for which she had waited so long and concerning which she had dreamed so many dreams, had aborted into an occasion for the display of ugliness and vulgarity. Her father, the only other person in the room in any way related to her, sat at the other end of the long table. Her aunt had gone away on a visit, and in the crowded, noisy room there was no woman to whom she could turn for understanding. She looked past her father's shoulder and directly into the wide window seat where she had spent so many hours of her childhood. Again she wanted brothers and sisters. “The beautiful men and women of the dreams were meant to come at this time, that's what the dreams were about; but, like the unborn children that ran with outstretched hands, they cannot get over the bridge and into the house,” she thought vaguely. “I wish Mother had lived, or that Kate Chanceller were here,” she whispered to herself as, raising her eyes, she looked at her father.
Clara felt like an animal driven into a corner and surrounded by foes. Her father sat at the feast between two women, Mrs. Steve Hunter who was inclined to corpulency, and a thin woman named Bowles, the wife of an undertaker of Bidwell. They continually whispered, smiled, and nodded their heads. Hugh sat on the opposite side of the same table, and when he raised his eyes from the plate of food before him, could see past the head of a large, masculine-looking woman into the farmhouse parlor where there was another table, also filled with guests. Clara turned from looking at her father to look at her husband. He was merely a tall man with a long face, who could not raise his eyes. His long neck stuck itself out of a stiff white collar. To Clara he was, at the moment, a being without personality, one that the crowd at the table had swallowed up as it so busily swallowed food and wine. When she looked at him he seemed to be drinking a good deal. His glass was always being filled and emptied. At the suggestion of the woman who sat beside him, he performed the task of emptying it, without raising his eyes, and Steve Hunter, who sat on the other side of the table, leaned over and filled it again. Steve like her father whispered and winked. “On the night of my wedding I was piped, you bet, as piped as a hatter. It's a good thing. It gives a man nerve,” he explained to the masculine-looking woman to whom he was telling, with a good deal of attention to details, the tale of his own marriage night.
Clara did not look at Hugh again. What he did seemed no concern of hers. Bowles the Bidwell undertaker had surrendered to the influence of the wine that had been flowing freely since the guests arrived and now got to his feet and began to talk. His wife tugged at his coat and tried to force him back into his seat, but Tom Butterworth jerked her arm away. “Ah, let him alone. He's got a story to tell,” he said to the woman, who blushed and put her handkerchief over her face. “Well, it's a fact, that's how it happened,” the undertaker declared in a loud voice. “You see the sleeves of her nightgown were tied in hard knots by her rascally brothers. When I tried to unfasten them with my teeth I bit big holes in the sleeves.”
Clara gripped the arm of her chair. “If I can let the night pass without showing these people how much I hate them I'll do well enough,” she thought grimly. She looked at the dishes laden with food and wished she could break them one by one over the heads of her father's guests. As a relief to her mind, she again looked past her father's head and through a doorway into the kitchen.
In the big room three or four cooks were busily engaged in the preparation of food, and waitresses continually brought steaming dishes and put them on the tables. She thought of her mother's life, the life led in that room, married to the man who was her own father and who no doubt, but for the fact that circumstances had made him a man of wealth, would have been satisfied to see his daughter led into just such another life.
“Kate was right about men. They want something from women, but what do they care what kind of lives we lead after they get what they want?” she thought grimly.
The more to separate herself from the feasting, laughing crowd, Clara tried to think out the details of her mother's life. “It was the life of a beast,” she thought. Like herself, her mother had come to the house with her husband on the night of her marriage. There was just such another feast. The country was new then and the people for the most part desperately poor. Still there was drinking. She had heard her father and Jim Priest speak of the drinking bouts of their youth. The men came as they had come now, and with them came women, women who had been coarsened by the life they led. Pigs were killed and game brought from the forests. The men drank, shouted, fought, and played practical jokes. Clara wondered if any of the men and women in the room would dare go upstairs into her sleeping room and tie knots in her night clothes. They had done that when her mother came to the house as a bride. Then they had all gone away and her father had taken his bride upstairs. He was drunk, and her own husband Hugh was now getting drunk. Her mother had submitted. Her life had been a story of submission. Kate Chanceller had said it was so married women lived, and her mother's life had proven the truth of the statement. In the farmhouse kitchen, where now three or four cooks worked so busily, she had worked her life out alone. From the kitchen she had gone directly upstairs and to bed with her husband. Once a week on Saturday afternoons she went into town and stayed long enough to buy supplies for another week of cooking. “She must have been kept going until she dropped down dead,” Clara thought, and her mind taking another turn, added, “and many others, both men and women, must have been forced by circumstances to serve my father in the same blind way. It was all done in order that prosperity and money with which to do vulgar things might be his.”
Clara's mother had brought but one child into the world. She wondered why. Then she wondered if she would become the mother of a child. Her hands no longer gripped the arms of her chair, but lay on the table before her. She looked at them and they were strong. She was herself a strong woman. After the feast was over and the guests had gone away, Hugh, given courage by the drinks he continued to consume, would come upstairs to her. Some twist of her mind made her forget her husband, and in fancy she felt herself about to be attacked by a strange man on a dark road at the edge of a forest. The man had tried to take her into his arms and kiss her and she had managed to get her hands on his throat. Her hands lying on the table twitched convulsively.
In the big farmhouse dining-room and in the parlor where the second table of guests sat, the wedding feast went on. Afterward when she thought of it, Clara always remembered her wedding feast as a horsey affair. Something in the natures of Tom Butterworth and Jim Priest, she thought, expressed itself that night. The jokes that went up and down the table were horsey, and Clara thought the women who sat at the tables heavy and mare-like.
Jim did not come to the table to sit with the others, was in fact not invited, but all evening he kept appearing and reappearing and had the air of a master of ceremonies. Coming into the dining room he stood by the door, scratching his head. Then he went out. It was as though he had said to himself, “Well, it's all right, everything is going all right, everything is lively, you see.” All his life Jim had been a drinker of whisky and knew his limitations. His system as a drinking man had always been quite simple. On Saturday afternoons, when the work about the barns was done for the day and the other employees had gone away, he went to sit on the steps of a corncrib with the bottle in his hand. In the winter he went to sit by the kitchen fire in a little house below the apple orchard where he and the other employees slept. He took a long drink from the bottle and then holding it in his hand sat for a time thinking of the events of his life. Whisky made him somewhat sentimental. After one long drink he thought of his youth in a town in Pennsylvania. He had been one of six children, all boys, and at an early age his mother had died. Jim thought of her and then of his father. When he had himself come west into Ohio, and later when he was a soldier in the Civil War, he despised his father and reverenced the memory of his mother. In the war he had found himself physically unable to stand up before the enemy during a battle. When the report of guns was heard and the other men of his company got grimly into line and went forward, something happened to his legs and he wanted to run away. So great was the desire in him that craftiness grew in his brain. Watching his chance, he pretended to have been shot and fell to the ground, and when the others had gone on crept away and hid himself. He found it was not impossible to disappear altogether and reappear in another place. The draft went into effect and many men not liking the notion of war were willing to pay large sums to the men who would go in their places. Jim went into the business of enlisting and deserting. All about him were men talking of the necessity of saving the country, and for four years he thought only of saving his own hide. Then suddenly the war was over and he became a farm hand. As he worked all week in the fields, and in the evening sometimes, as he lay in his bed and the moon came up, he thought of his mother and of the nobility and sacrifice of her life. He wished to be such another. After having two or three drinks out of the bottle, he admired his father, who in the Pennsylvania town had borne the reputation of being a liar and a rascal. After his mother's death his father had managed to marry a widow who owned a farm. “The old man was a slick one,” he said aloud, tipping up the bottle and taking another long drink. “If I had stayed at home until I got more understanding, the old man and I together might have done something.” He finished the bottle and went away to sleep on the hay, or if it were winter, threw himself into one of the bunks in the bunk house. He dreamed of becoming one who went through life beating people out of money, living by his wits, getting the best of every one.
Until the night of Clara's wedding Jim had never tasted wine, and as it did not bring on a desire for sleep, he thought himself unaffected. “It's like sweetened water,” he said, going into the darkness of the barnyard and emptying another half bottle down his throat. “The stuff has no kick. Drinking it is like drinking sweet cider.”
Jim got into a frolicsome mood and went through the crowded kitchen and into the dining room where the guests were assembled. At the moment the rather riotous laughter and story telling had ceased and everything was quiet. He was worried. “Things aren't going well. Clara's party is becoming a frost,” he thought resentfully. He began to dance a heavy-footed jig on a little open place by the kitchen door and the guests stopped talking to watch. They shouted and clapped their hands. A thunder of applause arose. The guests who were seated in the parlor and who could not see the performance got up and crowded into the doorway that connected the two rooms. Jim became extraordinarily bold, and as one of the young women Tom had hired as waitresses at that moment went past bearing a large dish of food, he swung himself quickly about and took her into his arms. The dish flew across the floor and broke against a table leg and the young woman screamed. A farm dog that had found its way into the kitchen rushed into the room and barked loudly. Henry Heller's orchestra, concealed under a stairway that led to the upper part of the house, began to play furiously. A strange animal fervor swept over Jim. His legs flew rapidly about and his heavy feet made a great clatter on the floor. The young woman in his arms screamed and laughed. Jim closed his eyes and shouted. He felt that the wedding party had until that moment been a failure and that he was transforming it into a success. Rising to their feet the men shouted, clapped their hands and beat with their fists on the table. When the orchestra came to the end of the dance, Jim stood flushed and triumphant before the guests, holding the woman in his arms. In spite of her struggles he held her tightly against his breast and kissed her eyes, cheeks, and mouth. Then releasing her he winked and made a gesture for silence. “On a wedding night some one's got to have the nerve to do a little love-making,” he said, looking pointedly toward the place where Hugh sat with head bent and with his eyes staring at a glass of wine that sat at his elbow.
It was past two o'clock when the feast came to an end. When the guests began to depart, Clara stood for a moment alone and tried to get herself in hand. Something inside her felt cold and old. If she had often thought she wanted a man, and that life as a married woman would put an end to her problems, she did not think so at that moment. “What I want above everything else is a woman,” she thought. All the evening her mind had been trying to clutch and hold the almost forgotten figure of her mother, but it was too vague and shadowy. With her mother she had never walked and talked late at night through streets of towns when the world was asleep and when thoughts were born in herself. “After all,” she thought, “Mother may also have belonged to all this.” She looked at the people preparing to depart. Several men had gathered in a group by the door. One of them told a story at which the others laughed loudly. The women standing about had flushed and, Clara thought, coarse faces. “They have gone into marriage like cattle,” she told herself. Her mind, running out of the room, began to caress the memory of her one woman friend, Kate Chanceller. Often on late spring afternoons as she and Kate had walked together something very like love-making had happened between them. They went along quietly and evening came on. Suddenly they stopped in the street and Kate had put her arms about Clara's shoulders. For a moment they stood thus close together and a strange gentle and yet hungry look came into Kate's eyes. It only lasted a moment and when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed and taking hold of Clara's arm pulled her along the sidewalk. “Let's walk like the devil,” she said, “come on, let's get up some speed.”
Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in the room. “If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have come to a man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage,” she thought.
Jim Priest was very drunk, but insisted on hitching a team to the Butterworth carriage and driving it loaded with guests to town. Every one laughed at him, but he drove up to the farmhouse door and in a loud voice declared he knew what he was doing. Three men got into the carriage and beating the horses furiously Jim sent them galloping away.
When an opportunity offered, Clara went silently out of the hot dining-room and through a door to a porch at the back of the house. The kitchen door was open and the waitresses and cooks from town were preparing to depart. One of the young women came out into the darkness accompanied by a man, evidently one of the guests. They had both been drinking and stood for a moment in the darkness with their bodies pressed together. “I wish it were our wedding night,” the man's voice whispered, and the woman laughed. After a long kiss they went back into the kitchen.
A farm dog appeared and going up to Clara licked her hand. She went around the house and stood back of a bush in the darkness near where the carriages were being loaded. Her father with Steve Hunter and his wife came and got into a carriage. Tom was in an expansive, generous mood. “You know, Steve, I told you and several others my Clara was engaged to Alfred Buckley,” he said. “Well, I was mistaken. The whole thing was a lie. The truth is I shot off my mouth without talking to Clara. I had seen them together and now and then Buckley used to come out here to the house in the evening, although he never came except when I was here. He told me Clara had promised to marry him, and like a fool I took his word. I never even asked. That's the kind of a fool I was and I was a bigger fool to go telling the story. All the time Clara and Hugh were engaged and I never suspected. They told me about it to-night.”
Clara stood by the bush until she thought the last of the guests had gone. The lie her father had told seemed only a part of the evening's vulgarity. Near the kitchen door the waitresses, cooks and musicians were being loaded into the bus that had been driven out from the Bidwell House. She went into the dining-room. Sadness had taken the place of the anger in her, but when she saw Hugh the anger came back. Piles of dishes filled with food lay all about the room and the air was heavy with the smell of food. Hugh stood by a window looking out into the dark farmyard. He held his hat in his hand. “You might put your hat away,” she said sharply. “Have you forgotten you're married to me and that you now live here in this house?” She laughed nervously and walked to the kitchen door.
Her mind still clung to the past and to the days when she was a child and had spent so many hours in the big, silent kitchen. Something was about to happen that would take her past away—destroy it, and the thought frightened her. “I have not been very happy in this house but there have been certain moments, certain feelings I've had,” she thought. Stepping through the doorway she stood for a moment in the kitchen with her back to the wall and with her eyes closed. Through her mind went a troop of figures, the stout determined figure of Kate Chanceller who had known how to love in silence; the wavering, hurrying figure of her mother; her father as a young man coming in after a long drive to warm his hands by the kitchen fire; a strong, hard-faced woman from town who had once worked for Tom as cook and who was reported to have been the mother of two illegitimate children; and the figures of her childhood fancy walking over the bridge toward her, clad in beautiful raiment.
Back of these figures were other figures, long forgotten but now sharply remembered—farm girls who had come to work by the day; tramps who had been fed at the kitchen door; young farm hands who suddenly disappeared from the routine of the farm's life and were never seen again, a young man with a red bandana handkerchief about his neck who had thrown her a kiss as she stood with her face pressed against a window.
Once a high school girl from town had come to spend the night with Clara. After the evening meal the two girls walked into the kitchen and stood by a window, looking out. Something had happened within them. Moved by a common impulse they went outside and walked for a long way under the stars along the silent country roads. They came to a field where men were burning brush. Where there had been a forest there was now only a stump field and the figures of the men carrying armloads of the dry branches of trees and throwing them on the fire. The fire made a great splash of color in the gathering darkness and for some obscure reason both girls were deeply moved by the sight, sound, and perfume of the night. The figures of the men seemed to dance back and forth in the light. Instinctively Clara turned her face upward and looked at the stars. She was conscious of them and of their beauty and the wide sweeping beauty of night as she had never been before. A wind began to sing in the trees of a distant forest, dimly seen far away across fields. The sound was soft and insistent and crept into her soul. In the grass at her feet insects sang an accompaniment to the soft, distant music.
How vividly Clara now remembered that night! It came sharply back as she stood with closed eyes in the farm kitchen and waited for the consummation of the adventure on which she had set out. With it came other memories. “How many fleeting dreams and half visions of beauty I have had!” she thought.
Everything in life that she had thought might in some way lead toward beauty now seemed to Clara to lead to ugliness. “What a lot I've missed,” she muttered, and opening her eyes went back into the dining-room and spoke to Hugh, still standing and staring out into the darkness.
“Come,” she said sharply, and led the way up a stairway. The two went silently up the stairs, leaving the lights burning brightly in the rooms below. They came to a door leading to a bedroom, and Clara opened it. “It's time for a man and his wife to go to bed,” she said in a low, husky voice. Hugh followed her into the room. He walked to a chair by a window and sitting down, took off his shoes and sat holding them in his hand. He did not look at Clara but into the darkness outside the window. Clara let down her hair and began to unfasten her dress. She took off an outer dress and threw it over a chair. Then she went to a drawer and pulling it out looked for a night dress. She became angry and threw several garments on the floor. “Damn!” she said explosively, and went out of the room.
Hugh sprang to his feet. The wine he had drunk had not taken effect and Steve Hunter had been forced to go home disappointed. All the evening something stronger than wine had been gripping him. Now he knew what it was. All through the evening thoughts and desires had whirled through his brain. Now they were all gone. “I won't let her do it,” he muttered, and running quickly to the door closed it softly. With the shoes still held in his hand he crawled through a window. He had expected to leap into the darkness, but by chance his stocking feet alighted on the roof of the farm kitchen that extended out from the rear of the house. He ran quickly down the roof and jumped, alighting in a clump of bushes that tore long scratches on his cheeks.
For five minutes Hugh ran toward the town of Bidwell, then turned, and climbing a fence, walked across a field. The shoes were still gripped tightly in his hand and the field was stony, but he did not notice and was unconscious of pain from his bruised feet or from the torn places on his cheeks. Standing in the field he heard Jim Priest drive homeward along the road.