Chapter 6

"I guess if you want any horses next spring," she said, with one eye on the door where Jerry might appear, "you better fetch 'em along with you."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "of course I can. Only I had an idea Jerry liked to do the buying for the place."

"Not horses," said Charlotte firmly. "Jerry's a peculiar sort of man. They know it an' they kinder take advantage of him. I dunno why."

Then Raven realized that Charlotte herself was responsible for his faith in Jerry's bargaining prowess. She had hypnotized him into considering Jerry a great fellow at a trade as at everything else manly and invincible. She was watching him now with a doubtful and anxious eye.

"No," she repeated, "I dunno why."

"No," said Raven, "I don't know why either. But I'll look out for it." At that instant he understood her way with Jerry and loved her for it. She was tall and heavy-browed and dark, with warm, brown tints of eyes and skin, and seven times the man Jerry was, but it was her passionate intent to hold him supreme at home and market.

Meantime they were jingling along, with a chill clashing of bells, and Raven had heard all about the prospects of an open winter and the difficulties of ice-cutting, and he gathered that Jerry and Charlotte were extremely pleased to have him come.

"Didn't know's we should ever set eyes on ye ag'in," said Jerry, with an innocuous flick of his whiplash, hitting the dasher by intent. "That War an' all."

Raven thought he detected in his tone a general hostility to the War as a disturber even of Wake Hill, and wondered if he should have to fight it all over again with the imperfectly satisfied ideals of Jerry and Charlotte. But Jerry laid that bogey to rest.

"Not that I wouldn't ha' had ye go," he announced. "I'd ha' gone myself if I hadn't been a leetle mite over age. I dunno but I could ha' been some use as 'twas. I'm spry for my years. I never so much as thought you'd git into it. Charlotte an' I were talkin' it over last night, an' she says, 'He's forty-three, if he's a day.' How old be you?"

"Forty-five," said Raven. "I wasn't in the trenches, you know. Ambulance Corps."

"Sho!" said Jerry. "Never come nigh the fightin' line, I s'pose."

"Sometimes," said Raven, smiling a little to himself. "But the boys in the trenches, you know, they're the ones that did the business. I suppose the Hamilton house was closed all summer?"

Jerry gave him a quick look and then took off a mitten to pass his hand across his mouth. Raven knew what the look meant. It meant Anne Hamilton: how had her death affected him? would he ask about her? and the mild inquisitive neighborhood mind would go back to the old question it had probably dropped and taken up intermittently for years: why, in their curious intimacy, had he never married her?

"Yes," said Jerry, "all summer. Little Nan was over there, too, where you were, I understood."

"Yes, she was over there. She's home now."

"You knew her aunt died?" said Jerry speciously. It was foolish, he knew it was foolish, and yet he could not, in his craving for some amplification of the fact, help saying it.

"Yes," said Raven, "I knew it."

There the topic died. They were passing the last stretch of woods that fringed the road before Raven's own house. Up on that slope at the right, draped about by a dense woodland, occasional patches of pines girdled by birch and maple, was the hut where Old Crow had lived. A logging road came down from the ridge, and Raven saw with interest that it had been broken out.

"Chopping?" he asked, Jerry following his glance to the ascending road.

Jerry grinned and clucked to the horse. He looked well satisfied with himself.

"No," he said. "But the minute you wrote you was comin', I yoked up the oxen an' broke her out. Charlotte said you'd want to be goin' up there."

Raven laughed. It was funny, too grimly funny. Even Charlotte and Jerry were pushing him on up the rise to Old Crow's hut. Dick had begun it and they were adding the impulse of their kindly forethought.

"Yes," he said, "I shall. I'll go up at once." ("And have it over!" his mind cynically added.)

They were descending the last slope and the mild-mannered horse caught the idea of stables and put on a gait. Raven could see the house, delightful to him in its hospitable amplitude and starkly fitting the wintry landscape. There in the columned front porch running away at each side into wide verandas, stood a woman, tall, of proportions that looked, at this first glance, heroic. She wore a shawl about her shoulders, but her head was bare.

"There she is," said Jerry, with an evident pride in so splendid a fact. "I tell her she never can wait a minute to let anybody turn round."

It was true. Charlotte could not wait. She began to wave--no short, staccato, pump-handle wave, but a sweep indicative of breadth, like the horizon line. Raven, while they were jingling up to the house, took one more look at it, recognizing, with a surprise that was almost poignant, how much it meant to him. He might not be glad to get back to it--in his present state of disaffection he could not believe there was a spot on earth he should be glad to see--but it touched the chord of old memories and his eyes were hot with the assault of it. A square house with many additions, so that it rambled comfortably away, threaded over at advantageous points by leafless lines of woodbine and bitter-sweet and murmured over by a great grove of pines at the west: his roots of life were here, he recognized, with a renewed pang of surprise. He was not used to thinking about himself. Now that the changed bias of his mind had bred new habits, he was thinking a great deal.

They stopped at the porch and Charlotte came down to them, stepping lightly yet with deliberation. Raven knew she probably moved slowly because she was so heavy, but it gave the effect of majesty walking. She was unchanged, he thought, as he grasped her firm hand: her smooth brown hair was as thick, her healthy face unlined. When he touched Charlotte he always felt as if he touched the earth itself. Her hand was the hand of earth, ready to lead you to wholesome and satisfying things.

"Well," said she, "if I ain't pleased to see you! Jerry, you goin' to take the trunk in this way?"

Jerry gave her a quick look of inquiry. They had subtle modes of communication. Charlotte could command him by the flicker of an eyelash or a modulation of tone, so that Jerry seemed, in the resultant act, to be following only his own careless or deliberate will.

"Yep," said he, "I'll see to her."

Raven laid hold of it with him and they carried it upstairs to the great front room looking out to the eastern sky. And Raven was again moved, as he went, by another surprising discovery: Charlotte had tears in her eyes. He had at all times a moderate estimate of his own value in the world, his own appeal to it. Perhaps that was one reason, aside from the natural sex revulsion, why Anne's exaggerated fostering had roused in him that wearied perversity. But it was warming to see Charlotte glad enough to cry over him. When they had set down the trunk and the two had gone downstairs, he looked about the room and found it good. The walls were chiefly paneling, all but some expanses of a rich rose and blue paper; the hangings were of a delicious blue, and a roaring fire was making great headway. He could guess Charlotte had timed that birch log, relative to their approach, for the curling bark had not yet blackened and the fat chuckle of it was still insistent. He laughed a little at himself. He might have repudiated the scheme of creation and his own place in it, but he did love things: dear, homespun, familiar things, potent to eke out man's well-being with their own benevolence and make him temporarily content in an inhospitable world.

When he went downstairs, the smells from the kitchen were something overwhelming in their rich pervasiveness. He went directly in where Charlotte bent at the oven door for a frowning inspection and a resultant basting.

"Yes," she said, glancing up, "turkey. Terry set him aside, sort of--he was so well formed and had such nice, pretty ways. Jerry said we'd have him first time you come. He's always be'n a terrible nice turkey."

Raven had seen his place laid in the dining-room with bravery of damask and old china.

"I'm not going to eat alone," he said. "I couldn't face a whole turkey. You and Jerry come on in and back me up. You set on two more plates."

"Oh, no," said Charlotte, closing the oven door and rising. "I guess I'll give him a minute longer. No. It's real nice of you, but we couldn't. Jerry never would in the world."

"Jerry be hanged!" said Raven. He wandered into the pantry and began helping himself to the celery waiting by the cool window-pane. "Tell him it's all decided. Jerry's got to do what we say."

"If that ain't just like you," said Charlotte, with what seemed a pride in his knowing ways. "Eatin' up the celery an' all, the minute 'fore dinner, too. I wonder you don't pry into the cooky jar."

"I will, now you mention it," said Raven, bending to it where it lurked, with its secretive look, under the lower shelf. He lifted the cover with an involuntary care. He had been there so often when he wanted a handful of cookies and knew, if he clinked the cover, he might hear his father's voice from the dining-room where he sat reading his paper: "What are you doing out there?" The cookies were waiting for him, unchanged, as if there were an everlasting pattern of cookies and you couldn't get away from it: oak-leaf, discreetly specked with caraway. "Hurry up," said he, coming out to Charlotte with his clutch of oak-leaves. "Put on your plate and Jerry's or the turkey'll be done before you know it."

Charlotte glanced round at him, absently took the cookies from his hand, as if he were a child whose greed must be regulated, and laid them in a plate on the table.

"Don't you spoil your appetite," she said, still absently, for her mind was with the turkey. "Well, I'll go an' ask Jerry. I don't believe he'll feel to. Miss Anne----"

Raven was sure he heard the last two words as she made her light way out into the shed in a fictitious search for Jerry. He stood staring after her and wondering. It was inconceivable that Anne, by sheer force of a mind absolutely convinced of its own rightness, should have had such a grip on everybody she came in contact with. It had been Anne's house next door. She had spent her summers in it, and even Charlotte had imbibed through its walls the pronouncements of a social code. Anne was dead, but when Charlotte and Jerry were asked to sit down to turkey with their employer and familiar friend, it was Anne's unforgotten ideal that rose before her, the illuminated copy of the social code in its rigid hand. As he stood, he saw Jerry pulling the pung under a shed at the back of the barn. He knew Charlotte hadn't seen him, didn't intend to take the time to see him, but would presently be back with Jerry's ultimatum. That was her system. She implicitly followed Jerry's command, a command she had already put into his mouth. It was so accepted a part of the household routine that he had ceased to think of it as in the least unusual. She was back again almost at once.

"Jerry says he'd be happy to, to-day," she announced, "so long's as he ain't changed back into his barn clo'es. We'll be kinder company. But after this, he says, we'll begin as usual."

So presently they sat down together to the crackly brown turkey and Raven carved and fought off Charlotte, who rose from her place in a majestic authority which seemed the highest decorum to take the fork and pick out titbits for his plate, and they talked of countryside affairs, but never, Raven was grateful to notice, of his absence or of France. Once Jerry did begin a question relative to "them long range guns," but Charlotte bore him down before Raven could lay hold of the question, even if he had been eager for it.

"Jerry's forbid me to ask you the leastest thing about how 'twas over there," she said smoothly, without a look at Jerry, but a direct intention that was like a swift secret communication between them, a line not even to be tapped. "He says, 'We won't say one word about what Mr. Raven's been through, not if he begins to talk about it himself. He's been through enough,' says he. 'Now le's let him turn his mind to suthin' else.'"

"Yes," said Jerry boldly, "I guess that's pretty nigh what I said--what I'd say now, anyways."

Raven smiled a little inwardly, as he often did at "Mr. Raven." He and Jerry and Charlotte had been neighbors, and he, being younger, was always "young John" to them, and sometimes, in excess of friendliness or exhortation, "Jack." He wondered if it had been the social idealism of Anne that had made them attain the proper title, or if, when the crust of renewed convention broke through, they would, under the stress of common activities, flounder about as they did before he went away, in an intermittent familiarity.

"All the houses shut up," he said, "the summer houses?"

"Yes," said Charlotte, eating her wing delicately, perhaps with a thought of Anne. "City folks all gone. Went early this year, too. Wood's so high now, if they ain't cut their own they don't seem to want to lay in. Jerry says they'd ought to think further ahead."

"Yes," said Jerry, with his mechanical acquiescence, "they'd ought to think further ahead."

"Who's bought the old Frye place?" asked Raven. "Or is it empty?"

"No," said Charlotte, "it ain't empty. I dunno's you remember the Tenneys that used to live over the mountain, what they call Mountain Brook. Kind of a shif'less lot they were. Some of 'em drinked."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "I remember 'em. The boys used to do a lot of trapping. One of 'em--what was his name? Israel, yes, that's it. Israel--he seemed to be of a different stripe. Used to work out. Seemed to want to make something of himself."

"That's him," said Charlotte. "Well, he's bought the Frye place."

"Married?"

"Yes, he married a girl over there, at Mountain Brook. He'd been away years an' years, sence he was a growin' boy, an' he come back, an' seems he had money laid up, an' he bought the Frye farm an' went straight off over to Mountain Brook an' hunted her up an' married her. She used to have folks, but they've all moved away. Seems if he'd had her in mind all the time. Kind o' that way, he is, lays his fires a good while beforehand."

"Nice girl?" Raven inquired.

Charlotte hesitated. Her brown cheek flushed.

"Well," she said, "I never've heard anything ag'inst her, not anything I should be willin' to repeat. You know what they be, there over the mountain. There's the Donnyhills. Good folks, but shif'less! my soul! Though she ain't that."

"Called on her, haven't you?"

"No," said Charlotte. She wore the flush of resentful matronhood. "I was goin' to. I started, one afternoon. An' after I'd knocked, I heard him jawin'. Well! You never heard a man talk so in all your life. I never did, anyways! twittin' her with everything under the sun."

"Nice for you," said Raven, "butting in on a row."

"I didn't butt in," said Charlotte. "I turned round an' come straight home. An' the next day they rode by, as budge as you please, she with the baby in her lap. Baby had on a nice white coat. I didn't go ag'in. I didn't feel to."

Then Raven, seeing that Jerry had regretfully but inevitably laid down his knife and fork, as one who can no more, relinquished the Tenneys, and there was a period of that silence so blessed among intimates, and Charlotte brought in the pudding. And after dinner, while she washed the dishes, Raven sat in the kitchen and smoked a pipe with Jerry and thought intermittently, in the inmost cell of his most secret mind, about the blessed beauties of things. Here they were all about him, inherited treasures of memory, some of them homely and of little value, many of them far less convenient than the appliances of the present day. He even thought he recognized ancient utensils, as Charlotte washed them, the great iron spider where crullers were fried--always with a few cut in hands with straight fat fingers, to suit a boyish fancy--and the colander he had once been found utilizing as a helmet in a play of chivalry. Such smells came out of this kitchen, like no other smells in any house he knew. The outlines of things, the tints of time and use! There was the red door into the buttery, where once, when he was a little boy, he had caught for a few minutes only an enchanting glow from the setting sun. Sunrise and rubies and roses: none of them had ever equaled the western light on the old red paint. Over and over again he had tried to recall the magic, to set the door at the precise angle to catch the level rays, but in vain. It was a moment of beauty, fleeting as the sunset itself, and only to be found in the one permanence that is memory. He remembered it now with a thousand other impressions as lasting and as lost, and childhood and youth came alive in him and hurt and helped him. Yes, this was home. In a hostile universe there was one spot where he and the past could safely rest.

VIII

Raven went to sleep thinking simply about the house, while the fire flickered down on the hearth and shadows all about the room flickered with it and then went out. He always loved shadows, their beauties and grotesqueries, and he was unfeignedly glad he had no scientific understanding of them, why they played this way or that and translated the substance that made them so delicately and sometimes with such an adorable foolishness. He liked it better that way, liked to make out of them a game of surprises and pretend they were in good form and doing particularly well, or again far below their highest. And following his childishly enchanting game he began to feel rather abashed over what had brought him here. He was glad to have come. It was the only place for him, disordered as he was, with its wholesome calm, and he wondered further if the state of mind that had become habitual to him was now a state of mind at all. Was it not rather a temporary drop in mental temperature now calming to normal? Hadn't he exaggerated the complication of Anne's bequest? There was a way out of it; there must be, a sane, practical way to satisfy what she wished and what she might be supposed to wish now. He comforted himself with the pious sophistry of an Anne raised on the wind of death above early inconclusions and so, of course, agreeing with him who didn't have to pass the gates of mystery to be so raised. He knew enough, evidently, so that he didn't need to die to know more. His letter to Dick seemed of inconsiderable importance, even the disaster of its reaching Amelia. If she held him up to it, he could laugh it off. Anything could be laughed off. So, the shadows mingling with the inconsequence of his thoughts, he drifted away to sleep, catching himself back, now and then, to luxuriate in the assurance that he was in the right place, finding comfortable assuagements, and that inexplicably, because so suddenly, everything was for the best in a mysterious but probably entirely unaccountable world.

At four o'clock he woke. He had not for a moment last night expected this. Four o'clock had been for months the hour of his tryst with the powers of darkness. They hovered over him then with dull grey wings extended, from sunrise to sunset, from east to west. He never had the courage to peer up at them and see how far the wings really did reach. They covered his mortal sky, and when he refused to stare up into their leaden pinions, they stooped to him and buffeted and smothered him, until he was such a mass of bruised suffering within that he could almost believe his body also was quivering into the numbness of acquiescent misery. And here were the wings again. They were even lower, in spite of this clear air. They did not merely shut it out from his nostrils, but the filthy pinions swept his face and roused in him the uttermost revulsion of mortal man against the accident of his mortality. The trouble of earth passed before him in its unceasing panorama, a pageant of pain and death. Every atom of creation was against every other atom, because everywhere was warfare, murder and rapine, for the mere chance of living. He had won his inherited chance by sheer luck of contest through millions of years while his forebears came up from the slime and the cave. The little hunted creature, shrieking out there in the wood in the clutch of a predatory enemy was not so lucky. It was the enemy who was lucky to-night, but to-morrow night the enemy himself might go down under longer claws and be torn by fangs stronger than his own. And God had made it so. And God did not care.

Raven lay there panting under the horror of it. The sweat started on his skin. He was afraid. It was not his own well-being he feared for. Man's life was short at the most. A few years might finish him up. It was unlikely that he need live again. But he feared seeing still more of the acts of this unmindful God, who could make, and set the wheel of being to turning and then stand aside and let them grind out their immeasurable grist of woe. And when he asked himself how he knew God was standing aside, letting the days and years fulfil their sum, he believed it was because he had suddenly become aware that time was a boundless sea and that the human soul was sometimes in the trough of it and sometimes on the crest. But never would the sea cast its derelicts upon warm shores where they might build the house of life and live in peace and innocence. Ever would they find themselves tossed from low to high and fall from high to low again in the salt wash of the retreating wave. For after all, it was the mysterious sea God had a mind to, never the derelict atoms afloat on it. They would have to take sea weather to time's extremest verge, as they always had taken it. They were derelicts.

As the light came, the leaden wings lifted and he went down to the early breakfast Charlotte and Jerry intended to eat alone. Charlotte, with her good morning, gave him a quick glance. He found she had not expected him so early and knew she saw at once how harassed he was. He insisted on sitting down to breakfast with them and, after Jerry had gone out, went over the house in a mindless way, into all the rooms, to give himself something to do. Also there seemed to be a propriety in it, a fittingness in presenting himself to his own walls and accepting their silent recognition. Then, hearing Charlotte upstairs, he went back into the kitchen, as straight as if he had meant to go there all the time and had merely idled on these delaying quests, and up to the nail by the shed door where the key always hung, the key to Old Crow's hut. He took it off the nail, dropped it in his pocket, got a leather jacket from the hall and went out into the road. As he went, he heard Jerry moving about in the barn and walked the faster, not to be halted or offered friendly company. At the great maples he paused, two of them marking the entrance to the wood road, and looked about him. The world was resolutely still. The snow was not deep, but none of it had melted. It was of a uniform whiteness and luster and the shadows in it were deeply blue. There were tracks frozen into it all along the road, many of them old ones, others just broken, the story of some animal's wandering. Then he turned into the wood road and began to climb the rise, and as he went he was conscious of an unaccountable excitement. Dick was responsible for that, he told himself. Dick had waked his mind to old memories. This was, in effect, and all owing to Dick, a tryst with Old Crow.