Chapter 17

Raven turned abruptly, walked to a window and stood there looking into the dark. The challenge of her face was impossible to bear. Suppose she asked him again if he believed it? Did he believe in a God made man? By no means. He believed in one God, benevolent, he had once assumed, but in these latter years too well hidden behind His cloud for man to say. Did the old story of a miraculous birth and an atonement move him even to a desire to believe? It repelled him rather? What, to his honest apprehension, was the God made man? An exemplar, a light upon the path of duty, as others also had been. Had the world gone wrong, escaped from its mysterious Maker, and did it need to be redeemed by any such dramatic remedy? No, his God, the God who made, could not botch a job and be disconcerted at the continuing bad results of His handiwork. The only doubt about his God was whether He was in any degree benevolent. When he reflected that He had made a world full to the brim of its cup of bitterness, he sometimes, nowadays, thought not. All this swept through his mind in a race of thoughts that had run on that course before, and again he heard her and knew she was pulling him back to the actual issue as it touched herself.

"You tell me," she was calling him. Her voice insisted. He did not turn, but he knew her face insisted even more commandingly. "You know. There's nothin' you don't know. Is it true?"

Nothing he didn't know! The irony of that was so innocently piercing that he almost broke into a laugh. Nan was right then. Tira did regard him, if not as an archangel, as something scarcely less authoritative. He turned and went back to the fire, threw on an armful of sticks, and stood looking into the blaze.

"What makes you say that?" he asked her. "What makes you think I know?"

"Why," said she, in a patent surprise, "'course you know. I've always heard about you, writin' books an' all. An' that's the kind you be, too. You're"--she paused to marshal her few words and ended in an awed tone--"you're that way, too. When folks are in trouble, you're so sorry it 'most kills you."

This was a blow staggering enough to hit his actual heart and stop it for a beat. What if he should say to her: "Yes, I do care. I care when you are hurt. I don't know about the God made man, but isn't my caring enough for you?"

Then bitter certainties cut in and told him it wouldn't do. She had learned her world lesson too terribly well. It would be only another case of man's pursuing, promising--what had they promised in the past? And after all, he thought recklessly, what did the private honor of his testifying yes or no amount to anyway? What moral conceit! To save his own impeccable soul by denying a woman the one consolation that would save her reason.

"Yes, Tira," he said quietly, and did not know he had used her name, "it's all true."

She gave a little sound, half sob, half ecstatic breath, and he saw she had not been sure he would yield her the bright jewel she had begged of him.

"True!" she said, in the low tone of an almost somnolently brooding calm. "All of it! Everywhere!"

"Yes," said Raven steadily, "everywhere."

"Over there where He was born, here!" That seemed to amaze her to a glory of belief. "Why, if He's everywhere, He's here, too."

"Yes," said Raven. He loved his task now. He was putting her sorrows to sleep. "He's here, too."

At that moment, incredibly, it seemed to him that a difference pervaded the place, or at least that his eyes had been opened to a something unsuspected, dwelling in all things. Did he, his unchanged mind asked him, actually believe what he had not believed before? No, the inner core of him signaled back to his mind. His belief had not changed. Yet indubitably something had happened and happened blessedly, for it brought her peace. Tira gave a little laugh, a child's laugh of surprised content. He glanced at her. She was looking into the fire and the haggardness of her face had softened. It was even, under the warmth of the flames and her own inner delight, absorbed and dreamy. And Raven knew he must wake her, and, he hoped, without flawing the dream, to present action.

"Now," he said, "I want you to come with me down to Nan's"--still he dared not put her off a step from the intimacy of neighborly relations by presenting Nan more formally--"and spend the night there. In the morning, you'll go back to Boston with her. I shall enter a complaint against your husband."

It wasn't so hard to give Tenney the intimacy of that name, now she looked so sweetly calm. She started from her dream, glanced up at him and, to his renewed discomfort, broke into a little laugh. It was sheer amusement, loving raillery too, of him who could give her the priceless gift of a God made man and then ask her to forsake the arena where the beasts were harmless now because she no longer feared them.

"Why, bless your heart," she said, in a homespun fashion of address that might have been Charlotte's, "I wouldn't no more run away! An' if you should have him before the judge, I'd no more say a word ag'inst him! I wouldn't git you into any trouble either," she explained, in an anxious loyalty. "I'd say you was mistaken, that's all."

Something seemed to break in him.

"What do you mean?" he asked roughly. "What do you think you mean? I suppose you're in love with him?"

Tira looked at him patiently. She yielded to a little sigh.

"Why," she said, "that's where I belong. I don't," she continued hesitatingly, in her child's manner of explaining herself from her inadequate vocabulary, "I guess I don't think about them things much, not same as men-folks think. But there's one or two things I've got to look out for." Here she gave that quick significant glance at the little mound on the couch. "An' there ain't no way to do it less'n I stay right there in my tracks."

Raven, his hand gripping the mantel, rested his forehead on it and dark thoughts came upon him. They quickened his breath and brought the blood to his face and his aching eyes. It was all trouble, it seemed to him, trouble from the first minute of his finding her in the woods. She might draw some temporary comfort from his silent championship, in the momentary safety of this refuge he had given her. But he could by no means cut her knot of difficulty. She was as far from him as she had been the moment before he saw her. She was speaking.

"It ain't," she said, in a low voice, "it ain't that I don't keep in mind what you've done for me, what you're doin' all the time. But I guess you don't see what you've done this night's the most of all. Now you've told me you know it's true"--here she was shy before the talk of god-head--"why, I know it's so, too. An' I sha'n't ever be afraid any more. I sha'n't ever feel alone."

"But Tira," he felt himself saying to her weakly, "I feel alone."

Did he actually say it, he wondered. No, for he lifted his face from his shielding hand and turned miserable eyes upon her, and her eyes met him clearly. Yet they were deeper, softer, moved by a sad compassion. There was something patiently maternal in them, as if she had found herself again before the old sad question of man's uncomprehended desires. She spoke, strangely he thought then, and afterward he wondered if she actually had said the thing at all.

"There's nothin' in the world I wouldn't do for you, not if 'twas anyways right. But----" and again she gave that fleeting glance of allegiance to the child.

He tried impatiently to pull himself together. She must see there was something hideous in his inability to make her safe, something stupid, also.

"Tira," he said, "you don't understand. Sometimes I think you don't realize what might happen to you. And it's silly to let it happen, foolish, ignorant. If some one told you there was a man outside your door and he wanted to kill you, you'd lock the door. Now there's a man inside your house, inside your room, that wants to kill you. Yes, he does," he insisted, answering the denial in her face, "when he's got one of his brain storms. Is there anything to pride yourself on in staying to be killed?"

She answered first with a smile, the sweet reassurance of a confident look.

"He won't," she said, "he won't try to kill me, or kill him"--she made a movement of the hand toward the couch--"no, not ever. You know why? I'm goin' to remind him Who's in the room."

"Why didn't you remind him this time?" Raven queried, pushed to the cynical logic of it. "You could have turned his own words against him. It wasn't an hour since he'd said it himself."

"Because," she answered, in a perfect good faith, "then I didn't know 'twas so."

"Didn't know 'twas so? Why didn't you?"

Her eyes were large with wonder.

"Because," she said, "then you hadn't told me."

Raven stared at her a full minute, realizing to the full the exact measure of his lie coming back to him.

"Tira," said he, "I believe you're not quite bright."

"No," said she simply, with no apparent feeling, "I guess I ain't. 'Most everybody's told me so, first or last."

It sobered him.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I didn't mean that. I'm off my head a little. I'm so worried, you see. I want to know you're safe. You're not safe. It isn't easy to accept that--to lie down under it."

Usually he had spoken to her in the homespun phrasing he instinctively used with his country neighbors, but the last words were subtly different to her, they were more distant, and she accepted them with a grave humility.

"Yes, sir," she said, and Raven awoke to the irritating knowledge that she was calling him "sir." He smiled at her and she realized that, as mysteriously as she had been pushed away, now she was taken back.

"So," he said, "you won't go down to Nan's and spend the night?"

She shook her head, watching him. Little as she meant to do what he told her, she wanted less to offend him.

"Then," said Raven, "you'll stay here. I'll bring in some more blankets, and you lie on the couch. You'll have to keep an eye on the fire. Don't let it go down entirely. It can get pretty cold."

He got up, lighted a candle and went into the bedroom for the blankets. Tira followed him and silently took the pair he gave her, came back to the couch and spread them carefully, not to waken the child. He followed with more and, while she finished arranging her couch, piled wood on the fire. For a moment he had an idea of announcing that he would stay and keep the fire up while she slept. But even if she submitted to that, she would be uneasy. And she was a hardy woman. It would not hurt her to come awake, as he knew she could, with the house-guarding instinct of the woman trained to serve.

"There," he said, beating the wood-dust from his hands, "now lock me out. Remember, you're not to go back there to-night. You owe that to me. You've given me bother enough."

But his eyes, when hers sought them timidly, were smiling at her. She laughed a little, happily. It was all right, then.

"You ain't mad," she said, half in shy assertion, following him to the door.

"No," he said gravely. "I'm not mad. I couldn't be, with you. I never shall be. Good night."

He opened the door, went out and waited an instant to hear the key click behind him and ran plunging down the snowy road. Once on the way he looked up at the mysterious stars visible in the line of sky above the track he followed. Deeper and deeper it was, the mystery. He had given her a God to adore and keep her protecting company. He who did not believe had wrought her faith out of his unbelief. When he turned into the road, he thought he saw someone under the porch of his house and hurried, his mind alive to the chance of meeting Tenney, searching for her. The figure did not move and as he went up to the house a voice called to him. It was Amelia's.

"O John, is that you? I can't see how you can leave the house alone to go wandering off in the woods and never saying a word."

There she was in her fur coat, not so much frightened, he thought, as hurt. She was querulous with agitation.

"All right, Milly," he said, and put an arm through hers, "here I am. And the house isn't alone. Don't get so nervous. Next thing you know, you'll have to see a specialist."

"And Charlotte's gone," she lamented sharply, allowing him to march her in and turning, in the warm hall, to confront him. "Here I've been all alone."

"Where's Jerry?"

Raven had thrown off his hat and coat and frankly owned himself tired.

"In the kitchen. But he won't tell where Charlotte is. He says she's gone up along."

"Well, so she has, to a neighbor's. Come into the library and get 'het' through before you go to bed."

"And," she lamented, letting him give her a kindly push toward the door, "I've got to pack, myself, if Charlotte doesn't come."

"Pack?" He stared at her. "You're not leaving?"

"Yes, John." She said it portentously, as bidding him remember he might be sorry when she was no more. "I'm going. Dick has telegraphed."

"Anything the matter?"

"That's it. I don't know. If I did, I could decide. He orders me, simply orders me, to take the early train. What do you make of it?"

Raven considered. Actually, he thought, Dick was carrying out his benevolent plan of getting her back, by hook or crook.

"I don't believe I'd worry, Milly," he said, gravely, "but I think you'd better go."

"Yes," she said, "that's it. I don't dare not to. Something may be the matter. I've tried to telephone, but he doesn't answer. I must go."

XXII

Raven always remembered that as the night of his life, up to this present moment, the mountain peak standing above the waters of his discontent. The top of the mountain, that was what lifted itself in an island inexpressibly green and fair above those sullen depths, and on this, the island of deliverance, he was to stand. After he had reasoned Amelia into her room and persuaded her to leave her packing till the morning, he went up to his own chamber, mentally spent and yet keyed to an exhausting pitch. He was excited yet tired, tied up into nervous knots without the will to loose them. What sense in going to bed, when he could not sleep? What need of reviewing the last chapter of his knowledge of the woman who was so compelling in her helplessness and her childlike faith? He would read: something silly, if he had it at hand. The large matters of the mind and soul were not for this unwilling vigil; and at this intruding thought of the soul he smiled, remembering how glibly he had bartered the integrity of his own to add his fragment to the rising temple of Tira's faith. He had strengthened her at the expense of his own bitter certainties. It was done deliberately and it was not to be regretted, but it did open a window upon his private rectitude. Was his state of mind to be taken so very seriously, even by himself? Not after that! Lounging before his book-shelves in search of a soporific, suddenly he remembered the mottled book. It flashed into his mind as if a hand had hurled it there. He would read Old Crow's journal.

Settled in bed, the light beside him and the mottled book in his hand, he paused a thoughtful minute before opening it. Poor old devil! Was this the jangled record of an unsound mind, or was it the apologia for an eccentricity probably not so uncommon, after all? Foolish, he thought, to leave a record of any sort, unless you were a heaven-accredited genius, entrusted with the leaves of life. Better to recognize your own atomic insignificance, and sink willingly into the predestined sea. He opened it and took a comprehensive glance over the first page: an oblong of small neat handwriting. Many English hands were like that. He was accustomed to call it a literary hand. Over the first date he paused, to refer it back to his own years. How big was he when Old Crow had begun the diary? Seven, that was all. He was a boy of seven years, listening with an angry yet fascinated attention to the other boys talking about Old Crow, who was, they said, luny, love-cracked. He never could hear enough about the terrifying figure choosing to live up there in the woods alone, and who yet seemed so gentle and so like other folk when you met him and who gave you checker-berry lozenges. Still he was furious when the boys hooted him and then ran, because, after all, Old Crow was his own family. And with the first words, his mind started to an alert attention. The words were to him.

"I am going to write some things down for the boy," Old Crow began, in the neat-handed script. "He is a good little boy. He looks like me at his age. I had a kind of innocence. He has it, too. If he should grow up anything like me, I want him to have this letter"--the last word was crossed out and a more formal one substituted--"statement. If he thinks about things anyways different from what the neighbors do, they will begin to laugh at him, and try to make him believe he is not in his right mind."

Over and over, through the first pages of the book, there were grammatical lapses when Old Crow, apparently from earnestness of feeling, fell into colloquial speech. This was always when he got so absorbed in his subject that he lacked the patience to go back and rewrite according to rules he certainly knew but which had ceased to govern his daily intercourse.

"He must remember he may be in his right mind, for all that. If one man thinks a thing, it might be true if forty thousand men think different. The first man that thought the earth was round, when everybody else thought it was flat, was one man. The boy will be told I was crazy. He will be told I was love-cracked. I did want Selina James. She was a sweet, pretty girl and high-headed, and the things some folks thought of her were not so. But she was the kind that takes the world as it was made and asks no questions, and when I couldn't take it so and tried to explain to her how I felt about it, she didn't know any way but to laugh. Perhaps she was afraid. And she did get sick of me and turned me off. She married and went away. I was glad she went away, because it is very hard to keep seeing anybody you thought liked you and find they didn't, after all. It keeps reminding you. It was after that time I built me the hut and came up here to live.

"Now the boy will hear it was on account of Selina James that I came up here, but it is not so, though it well might have been. It was about that time I began to understand what a hard time 'most everybody is having--except for a little while when they are young, and sometimes then--and I couldn't stand it. And I thought how it might not be so if everybody would turn to and help everybody else, and that might be the kingdom of heaven, the same as we read about it. And then one day I went out--I was always going round the fields and woods, kind of still, because I liked to come on little animals living their own lives in their own way--and I came to the open spot up above the hut where there are the old apple trees left from the first house the Ravens lived in, on the back road, before the other road went through. And on one of the lower limbs of the apple tree was a robin and she was making that noise a robin makes when she is scared 'most to pieces, and on another limb there was a red squirrel, and he was chattering so I knew he was scared, too. And down under the tree there was a snake pointed right at a little toad, and I stamped my foot and hollered to scare him away; and that same minute he struck and the toad fell over, whether poisoned to death or scared to death I didn't know. And the snake slipped away, because he was afraid of me, just as the toad was afraid of him. And the bird smoothed down her feathers and flew away, and the squirrel run along where he was going. They had got off that time, and I suppose the next minute they forgot all about it. But I never forgot. It was just as if something had painted a picture to show me what the world was. It was full of fear. Everything was made to hunt down and kill everything else, except the innocent things that eat grass and roots, and innocent as they be--as they are--they are killed, too. And who made it so? God. So what peace could I have--what peace could anybody ever have--in a world where, from morning till night, it is war and murder and the fear of death? And what good is there in trying to bring the kingdom of heaven down to men? You can't bring it to the animals. What if you could die for men? A good many have done that besides Jesus Christ. But who is going to die for the animals? And the animals in captivity--I saw a bear once, in a cage, walking up and down, up and down, and moaning. I saw a polar bear once trying to cool himself on a cake of ice. I saw an eagle with his wings clipped. An eagle ought to be up in the air. And all that could be done away with, by law, if men would see to it. But even then (and this is the strangest part of it, the part that won't bear thinking about) it is not only that men are unmerciful to the animals, but the animals, when they are hungry, are unmerciful to one another. I shall come back to this.

"Now about Jesus Christ. I hate to write this because, if the boy does not see things as I do, maybe it will be bad for him to read it, and he may think I am blaspheming holy things. I pray him to remember I write in earnestness and love, love for him, for the earth and for the animals. I want to tell him things look very black to me. When I think how I felt over losing Selina James it seems to me as nothing compared with the way I feel about the way the world is made. For it is all uncertainty and 'most all pain. It seems to me it is not possible for anything to be blacker than the earth is to me. I wake in the morning with a cloud over me, and when I go to bed at night the cloud is there. It settles down on me like--I don't know how to say what it is like--and I call out, up here alone in the woods. I call to God. I remember how He made the earth and I ask Him why He had to do it so. Over and over I ask Him. He does not answer. He can't. I suppose that is what it is to be God. You have to make a thing a certain way, and after it is done they have to take it, the men and the animals, and do the best they can with it. And one night when I was calling to God, there was a scream of an animal--a little animal--just outside, and I knew an owl had got him. And I covered my ears, for it seemed as if that was God's answer to me, and I didn't want to hear any more. I even thought--and I tell the boy this so that if he has thoughts that frighten him he will have the comfort of knowing somebody has thought them before--I thought that scream was God's answer. It was a good many months before I could pray again, even to ask God why.