Chapter 8

"You say your husband is religious. Does he go to church?"

"Yes," she answered soberly, and also with a kind of wonder at a man's accomplishing so dull an observance. "We go twice every Sunday, an' Sunday school an' evenin' meetin' besides."

"Do you like it?"

"No," she said, looking rueful, as if trusting he might forgive her. "I git sleepy."

At this Raven laughed and she glanced at him mildly, as if wandering what he had found to please him. He had been thinking.

"Now," he said, "we must plan what you're going to do. You won't let me send you and the baby away to stay awhile?"

She shook her head.

"Then what are we going to do? Can't you let me go to him and tell him, man to man, what an infernal fool he is?"

A wild alarm flew into her face.

"No! no!" she said.

"What is going to happen? You can't go home."

"Oh, yes, I can," said she. "I always do. It works off. Maybe it's worked off now. He gits all wore out actin' the way he does, an' then he's terrible scared for fear I've made way with myself, an' he's all bowed down."

"Oh!" said Raven. "And you've got him where you want him. And you settle down and wait for another spell. How long do you generally stay away?"

"Long's I can," she answered simply. "Till I'm afraid baby'll git cold. I keep his little things where I can ketch 'em up an' run. But sometimes he 'most gits a chill."

The yearning of anxiety in her voice was intense enough, he thought, to balance the grief of all the mothers bereft by Herod.

"I don't see," he said, "how you get up here anyway. You must come by the road? Why doesn't he follow you?"

The slow red surged into her face. She was hesitating. There was evidently worse to come.

"He gits so mad," she said, with frequent pauses between the words, "he don't stay in the house after he's had a spell. I guess he don't dare to. He's afraid of what he'll do. He goes out an' smashes away at the woodpile or suthin.' An' it's then I ketch up the baby an' run. I go out the side door an' up the road a piece an' into the back road. Then I come down the loggin' road the back way an' end up here. It's God's mercy," she said passionately, "they've broke out that loggin' road or there wouldn't be any path an' he'd see my tracks in the snow."

"Then," said Raven, "if he has sense enough to go and work it off on the woodpile, perhaps you aren't in any real danger, after all."

She looked at him piteously. Her eyes narrowed with a frowning return to a scene of terror past and persistently avoided in retrospect.

"'Most always," she said, in a low tone, "it comes on him ag'in, an' then, 'fore you know it, he's back in the house. Once he brought the axe with him. Baby was in the cradle. The cradle head's split right square acrost."

"Good God!" said Raven. "And you won't let me send you away from here?"

"Why, Mr. Raven," said she, and her voice was only less exquisite in its tenderness than when she spoke of the baby, "ain't I married to him?"

They sat looking at each other, and the suffused beauty of her face was so moving to him that he got up and went to the window and stared out at the tree branches in their winter calm. He made himself stand there looking at them and thinking persistently of them, not of her. She would not bear thinking of, this thing of beauty and need and, at the same time, inexorability of endurance. Unless she would let him help her, he was only driving the hot ploughshare of her misery through his own heart for nothing. So he stood there, mechanically studying the trees and remembering how they would wake from this frozen calm on a night when the north wind got at them and made them thrash at one another in the fury of their destiny. Her voice recalled him.

"I don't mean," she said, "to make you feel bad. I hadn't ought to put it on anybody else's shoulders, anyway."

Then Raven realized that the tenderness in her voice was for him. He turned and came back to his place by the fire. But he did not sit. He stood looking at her as she looked anxiously up at him.

"I'll tell you what we'll do," he said, "for the present, anyway. I'm going now, and you're to stay here as long as you think best. When you go, lock the door and put the key under the flat stone out by the step. I often leave the key there. I'll make sure the stone isn't frozen down. Now, you understand, don't you? You're to come up here whenever you like. If there isn't a fire, you're to build one. Nobody will disturb you. Jerry won't be cutting up here. I'll send him down into the lower woods."

"But," she said, in evident concern, "I can't do that. You come up here to write your books. Mr. Tenney said so, when he was tellin' me who all the neighbors were. He said you had the shack repaired so's to write your books."

Raven smiled. Books seemed far removed from this naked face of life.

"I'm not writing books now," he said. "I'm just hanging round. I may go over and see your husband, ask him to do some work for me."

The quick look of alarm ran into her face.

"Oh," she breathed, "you won't----"

"No," he answered steadily, "I won't say a word about you. Of course I sha'n't. And I won't to anybody."

"An'," she broke in tumultuously, "if you should see me--oh, it's an awful thing to say, after what you've done for me this day--but you won't act as if you ever see me before?"

That was the only wisdom, Raven saw, but a band seemed to tighten about his heart. Deny her before men, she whom he had not yet untangled from the rapt vision of their meeting?

"No," he said, "I won't even look at you. Now I'm going. I'll loosen up the stone."

She rose to her imposing height and came to him where he stood, his hand on the latch. Her eyes brimmed. In the one glance he had of her, he thought such extremity of gratitude might, in another instant, break in a flood of words.

"Go back," he said, "where nobody can see you when I open the door. Jerry may have taken a notion to come up."

She turned obediently and he did not look at her again. He opened the door and stepped out. The stone was there beside the larger one below the sill. He bent and wrenched it up from the ground where the frost was holding it, and with such unregarding force that the edges hurt his hands. He smiled a little at the savage satisfaction of the act, wondering if this was how Tenney felt when he smashed away at the wood. Then he remembered that the key was inside, tapped on the door, opened it and spoke to her:

"You'd better lock the door. Keep it locked till you go."

She was sitting before the fire, her head bent almost to her knee, her face in her hands. He closed the door and waited until he heard her step and the turning of the key. Then he strode out into the logging road and down the slope. One certainty surged and trembled in him: that he had never been so sorry for anybody in his life.

X

Raven, determinedly shedding his emotion, plunged fast down the hill and into the house where Charlotte was busy in a steam of fragrances from stove and cooking table and Jerry sat smoothing an axe helve.

"See here," said Raven, pulling off his gloves and advancing to the stove, where Jerry, looking mildly up, made room for him, "are you thinning out up on the ridge?"

Jerry nodded.

"That's what you wrote," said he.

"I've changed my mind," said Raven. "It looks mighty well up there as it is, for the present, anyway. Didn't you say there was a lot of gray birch that needed to go down in the river pasture?"

Again Jerry nodded, and Charlotte, evidently not finding this definite enough, put in:

"Why, yes, Jerry, seems to me you said so. 'Twas in that letter you had me write."

"Well," said Raven, "I want you to get at the river woods. I want 'em cleaned up. Couldn't you get somebody to help you? That man Tenney, how about him?"

Jerry, confronted by haste and emergency, two flying visitants he never could encounter adequately, opened his mouth and looked at Charlotte.

"Why, yes," said she. "He's a great hand to work. You said so yourself, Jerry, only last week."

"Then what if we should hire him?" said Raven. "What if I should go up and ask him now?"

Jerry was slowly coming to.

"He's been by here to-day," said he, "axe in his hand. Went as if he's sent for. Then he went back."

"Well, that was an hour or more ago," said Charlotte. "You says to me, 'Where's he be'n?' says you. Yes, he's got home long 'fore this. You'll find him some'r's round home."

"All right," said Raven. "Don't go up on the ridge again, Jerry. I want it left as it is."

He hurried out through the shed and Charlotte and Jerry exchanged glances, his entirely bemused and she sympathetically tender.

"'Course he don't want you cuttin' on the ridge," she said. "He's goin' up there to write his books. I should think you could see that."

For Charlotte, when no third person was by to observe Jerry's sloth at the uptake, had methods of her own to keep him mentally alive. If he did lag a pace behind, it was his secret and hers, and sometimes, between themselves, it was wholesome to recognize it.

Raven walked at top speed. He could not, at his utmost, get to Tenney soon enough. It was true, he was under vow not to assault or accuse him, but it seemed to him the woman would not be even intermittently safe unless the man were under his eye. As the picture of her flashed again to his mind, sitting by his hearth, her head bowed in grief unspeakable, he wondered what he should call her. Surely not, in his rage against Tenney, by Tenney's name. She was "the woman," she was the pitiful type of all suffering womanhood.

There was the house, rather narrow in build, but painted white, with green blinds. The narrowness gave it a look of unwelcoming meagerness, this although it was of a good size. Raven wondered why some minds ran to pointed roofs, inhospitable to the eye. This looked to him like Tenney, his idea of him. The barn was spacious, and beautiful in silver gray, and the woodpile, Raven decided ironically, a marvel of artistic skill. He had never seen such a big woodpile, so accurately trimmed at the corners, so perfect in the face of an extended length. It must, he judged, represent a good many hours of jealous madness, if it was entirely the product of those outbreaks when Tenney went out to smash wood. And there, round one corner of the pile, was Tenney himself. Raven realized that he had not expected to find him. Actually he had believed the man was raging over snowy hillsides somewhere about, armed with his axe and uttering those catamount cries. Tenney was not at work. He was standing perfectly still, looking up the road.

"Hullo!" called Raven, turning into the yard, and the man jerked back a step and then stopped and awaited him.

It was not a step actually. His feet did not leave the ground. He merely, his whole body, seemed thrown out of position, to recover instantly. Raven, watching him as he traversed the few steps between them, decided that he was uncontrollably nervous, frightened, too, perhaps, at what his apprehensive mind pictured: and that was good for him. What was Tenney, according to his look? Raven, scrutinizing him as he approached, determined to know something more than he had caught from those preoccupied minutes in the woods. How, if he had his pen in hand, would he describe Israel Tenney for one of the folk tales Anne had so persistently urged him to? A thin, tall man with narrow shoulders and yet somehow giving an impression of great wiry strength. He had a boldly drawn line of profile, hair black and glossy and, as Raven saw with distaste, rather long under his hat, vertical lines marking his cheeks, lines deeper than seemed justified by his age, and, as he had noted before, his eyes were also black with a spark in them. What was the spark? It was, Raven concluded again, in this quick scrutiny, like that in the eyes of inventors and visionaries. He wore clothes so threadbare that it seemed as if he must have been cold. But they were patched with a scrupulous nicety that made some revulsion in Raven rise up and dramatically spur him to a new resentment. She had patched them. Her faithful needle had spent its art on this murderer of her peace. He had reached the woodpile now and Tenney came a step forward.

"Great woodpile you've got here," said Raven.

Tenney put out his hand and rested it on one of the sticks. He might have been caressing a pet dog.

"Stove wood length," he said briefly. Then he seemed to feel some curiosity over being sought out after their meeting on the rise and asked: "D'you find your knife?"

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Didn't you see me hold it up to you?"

Tenney nodded, frowning. He seemed to conclude he was giving himself away, showing more interest in the stranger than the stranger had in any way earned. But he asked another question. It leaped from him. He had to ask it.

"D'you see anybody up round there after I come down?"

Raven shook his head, looking, he hoped, vague.

"I came down myself," he said. "I had to talk with Jerry about his thinning out."

The eagerness faded from Tenney's face.

"I didn't see Jerry up there this mornin'," he volunteered, in an indifferent contribution toward the talk.

"No," said Raven. "You won't see him up there at all after this--for a spell, that is. I write, you know, books. I like to go up to the hut to work. Not so likely to be interrupted there. I don't want chopping going on."

Tenney, with a quick lift of the head, looked at him questioningly. Raven saw anger also in the look, at last anger ready to spring. Both men had the same thought. Tenney wondered if the owner of the wood was going to taunt him again with yelling like a catamount, and Raven did actually put aside an impulse toward it.

"D'you come over here to forbid my goin' up in your woods?" Tenney inquired.

"No," said Raven. "I came to ask you if you could help Jerry do some thinning out in the river pasture. I'm rather in a hurry about that."

"Why, yes," Tenney began. Then he added breathlessly, as if another part of his mind (the suffering, uncontrolled part) broke in on his speech: "Not yet, though. I can't do anything yet, not till I see how things turn."

Raven thought he understood. Tenney could settle to nothing until he knew when his wife was coming back or whether she was coming at all. Now that the vision of her had entered on their stage, he was conscious of answering coldly:

"All right. You can make up your mind and go over and see Jerry. He'll arrange it with you."

On these words, he was about turning away, when he found Tenney suddenly oblivious of him. The man's thin face was quivering into a pathetic disorder, flushed, quite beyond his control. He neither heard Raven nor saw him, though he did speak brokenly:

"There!" he said. "There she is now."

Raven, turning, followed his gaze, directed up the road, not the way he had come. There she was, walking toward them with swift, long steps, the child held with the firmness that still seemed a careless buoyancy, as he had seen her in the woods. She had come home, as she went, the back way. Raven could have stood there through the long minute, motionless, waiting for her to come to him, for it seemed as if it were to him she came, not Tenney. But he recalled himself with a brusqueness so rough and sudden that it was as if he gave himself a blow. That last glance had shown him she had nothing more to fear from Tenney, for this time at least. The man had been horribly frightened at her going. Now he was under her heel. Raven did not give her another look. He turned homeward, and called back to Tenney loudly enough for her to overhear him and be under no apprehension as to what had passed:

"Make up your mind, then come and talk it over with Jerry. It's chopping, you understand, gray birches down in the river pasture."

Tenney did not answer, and Raven, striding along the road, listened with all possible intentness to hear whether husband and wife spoke together. He thought not, but he did hear the closing of a door.

XI

Thyatira--this was her name, and she was called Tira--passed her husband apparently without a glance. Nevertheless she had, in approaching, become adequately aware of his disordered look, and the fact of it calmed her to a perfect self-possession. She could always, even from one of these fleeting glimpses, guess at the stage his madman's progress had reached, and the present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The "spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too, to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in, she was sitting in his great chair by the fire, taking off the baby's coat, and, with the capable, anxious mother motion, feeling the little hands. Tenney came up to her and the child, turning at his step, looking up at him solemnly. Tira's heart seemed to contract within her. This was the very glance, "lookin' up kinder droll," that had brought on the storm. But for Tenney it evidently meant something now that fitted his mood of passionate anxiety to get back into the warm security of domestic peace.

"You lemme take him," he said, "whilst you git off your things. You'll ketch your death o' cold, carryin' on so."

The last he had to add. She was, his defensive inner mind told him, all wrong in flying out of the house "like a crazed creatur'" when she might have stayed and told him, just told him, whether she was the kind of woman he, at these unheralded mad moments, thought she was. That was the undercurrent always in his mind: if she wouldn't be so still and hateful, if she would only tell him. She might have some pity on a man, that defensive inner mind advised him, when she saw him all worked up. But the minute he warned her the devil of doubt was again tempting him, she began to freeze up and wouldn't speak to him at all. No wonder, with that devil inside whispering to him and hounding him on--no wonder he said things and--he trembled here and dared not follow out that thought--and was afraid he might do things. But she shook her head, at his offer of taking the child.

"You might go an' cut a slice o' ham," she said wearily. "It's 'most dinner time. We might's well have that as anything."

But the baby reached out and closed his little fingers about Tenney's thumb. Tenney stood there, his heart swelling within him at the contrast between the child's forgivingness and her cruelty. Now she had the child's outer things off, and she rose with them in one hand, carrying the child on the other arm, and it was her movement that dragged the little fingers away and broke that significant clasp on Tenney's thumb. How hateful she could be, he thought, his heart swelling more and more. He stood where she left him, and she went to the low couch and set the baby down there, and put into his hand a formless doll she wanted him to love. He never really noticed it, but she felt he would sometime love the doll. Then she glanced, with the air of being recalled to a wearisome routine, at the table in the middle of the floor; it meant ham and eggs. It seemed also to occur to her that she had not taken off her cloak, and she hung it on its nail behind the door. Soon, as Tenney, still motionless there by the stove, seemed mutely accusing her, mutely imploring her not to be cruel, she did turn and look at him. The thought of Raven was uppermost in her mind. It had been there every minute since she had gone into his house in the woods, but now it roused compellingly, stronger than even her present apprehension. Most of all, she was penetrated by a wonder almost greater than any emotion she had ever felt, at having laid before him at once and without persuasion, the story of her life. Why should she have told him? She would have said no decent woman could betray her husband to another man. It was entirely mysterious, and she gave it up. But there was, behind the wonder, a dazzling sense that he was different. As he had told her that strange thing she hardly dared think of now, because it seemed as if she must have misunderstood him--the thing about her looking so good and wonderful when he came upon her--so he, in his kindness and compassion, his implication of assuming a mysterious responsibility for her, seemed unbelievably good, not a citizen of this bleak neighborhood--or even the world (her mind, though stumblingly, ran as far as that) and, more astounding still, the real miracle was that he had been sent for this: to save her. And at that moment of dazed reflection, it all meant the passionate necessity of obeying him. He had bade her show her husband how she loved him. Seeing the man was jealous, he had pitied him. Perhaps she had not thought, since these last apprehensive days with Tenney, whether she loved him or not. He had simply, at the times of recurrent tragedy, been the terror within the house, and she had lived a life of breathless consecration to the one task of saving the child. Did she love him? Raven had assumed she did, and in her devotion to him she must, in some form, obey. Almost it seemed to her there would be shame in not loving her husband, if Raven expected it of her. None of these things were formulated in her mind. They were only shadowy impulses, like the forces of nature, persuading, impelling her. She had no words; she had scarcely, as to the abstractions she dimly felt and never saw, any reasoned thought. But she did have an unrecognized life of the emotions, and this was surging in her now.

She stood for a second looking at Tenney, the distended beauty of her eyes like a question, a challenge. She seemed, though this neither of them could know, to be beseeching him to tell her what treatment he deserved of her, or what would make their case whole. They were simple people, these two, but she had leaped, without knowing it herself, to a new plane of life. She was still with Raven in the hut, trying to speak his language, follow out his thought for her. She gave a little quick rush across the room and, to Tenney's overwhelming surprise, her hands were on his shoulders, her face so close to his that her sweet breath fanned him. He had never seen her so. She had to be pursued, coaxed, tired out with persuasion before she would even accept the warmth he too often had for her.

"Isr'el," she said, "Isr'el Tenney! if you ever ag'in, so long as you live, think wrong o' that baby there, you'll be the wickedest man on God's earth."

His arms closed about her and she stood passive. Yet she wanted to free herself. Did she love him? The question Raven had seemed to illuminate kept beating on in her tired head. Did she love him? And as Tenney's arms clung closer and his lips were on hers, she threw back her head and cried violently:

"No, I don't."

"Don't what?" he asked, releasing her slightly, and she drew away from him and, still obeying Raven, made one disordered effort at assurance.

"If you think"--here she stopped. She could not go on. It had always seemed to her a wrong to the baby to put the vile suspicion into words. "If you think," she tried again, "what you said this mornin'--O Isr'el, I've been as true to you as you are to your God."

He was religious, she often told herself, chiefly in her puzzled musings after a "spell" was over, and this was the strongest vow she could imagine. But it disconcerted him.

"There! there!" he said. "Don't say such things."