Part 1

THE DARK FLEECE

By Joseph Hergesheimer

New York Alfred A. Knopf

1922

Copyright, 1918, By Alfred A. Knopf

Published, April, 1918, in a volume now out of print, entitled “Gold and Iron,” and then reprinted twice.

OLIVE

|THE house in old Cottarsport in which Olive Stanes lived was set midway on the steepness of Orange Street. It was a low dwelling of weathered boards holding close to the rocky soil, resembling, like practically all the Cottarsport buildings, the salt weed clinging to the seaward rocks of the harbor; and Orange Street, narrow, without walks, and dipping into cuplike depressions, was a type of almost all the streets. The Stanes house was built with its gable to the public way; the length faced a granite shoulder thrust up through the spare earth, a tall, weedy disorder of golden glow, and the sedgy incline to the habitation above.

When Hester and Jem and then Rhoda were little they had had great joy of the boulder in the side yard: it was for them first impossible and then difficult of accomplishment; but they had rapidly grown into a complete mastery of its potentialities as a fort, a mansion impressive as that of the Canderays' on Regent Street, and a ship under the dangerous shore of the Feejees. Olive, the solitary child of Ira Stanes' first marriage, had had no such reckless pleasure from the rock----

She had been, she realized, standing in the narrow portico that commanded by two steps the uneven flagging from the street, a very careful, yes, considerate, child when measured by the gay irresponsibility of her half brother and sisters. Money had been no more plentiful in the Stanes family, nor in all Cottarsport, then than now; her dresses had been few, she had been told not to soil or tear them, and she had rigorously attended the instruction.

The second Mrs. Stanes, otherwise an admirable wife and mother, had, to Olive's young disapproval, rather encouraged a boisterous conduct in her children which overlooked a complete cleanliness or tidy array. And when she, like her predecessor, had died, and left Olive at twenty-three to assume full maternal responsibilities, that serious vicarious parent had entered into an inevitable and largely unavailing struggle against the minor damage caused mostly by the activities about the boulder.

Now Hester and Rhoda had left behind such purely imaginative games, and Jem was away fishing on the Georges Bank; her duty and worries had shifted, but not lessened; while the rock remained precisely as it had been through the children's growth, as it had appeared in her own earliest memories, as it was before ever the Stanes dwelling, now a hundred and fifty years in place, or old Cottarsport itself, had been dreamed of. Her thoughts were mixed: at once they created a vague parallel between the granite in the side yard and herself, Olive Stanes--they both seemed to have been so long in one spot, so unchanged; and they dwelt on the fact that soon--as soon as Jason Burrage got home--she must be utterly different.

Jason had written her that, if they cared to, they could build a house as large as the Canderays'. Under the circumstances she had been obliged to look on that as, perhaps, an excusable exaggeration, though she instinctively condemned the dereliction of the truth; yet, more than any other figure could possibly have done, it impressed upon her, from the boldness of the imagery, that Jason had succeeded in finding the gold for which he had gone in search nine years before. He was coming back, soon, rich.

The other important fact reiterated in his last letter, that in all his absent years of struggle he had never faltered in his purpose of coming to her with any fortune he might chance to get, she regarded with scant thought. It had not occurred to Olive that Jason Burrage would do anything else; her only concern had been that he might be killed; otherwise he had said that he loved her, and that they were to marry when he returned.

She hadn't, really, been in favor of his going. The Burrages, measured by Cottarsport standards, were comfortably situated--Mr. Burrage's packing warehouse and employment in dried fish were locally called successful--but Jason had never been satisfied with familiar values; he had always exclaimed against the narrowness of his local circumstance, and restlessly reached toward greater possessions and a wider horizon. This dissatisfaction Olive had thought wicked, in that it had seemed to criticize the omnipotent and far-seeing wisdom of the Eternal; it had caused her much unhappiness and prayer, she had talked very earnestly to Jason about his stubborn spirit, but it had persisted in him, and at last carried him west in the first madness of the discovery of gold in a California river.

Olive, at times, thought that Jason's revolt had been brought about by the visible example of the worldly pomp of the Canderays--of their great white house with the balustraded captain's walk on the gambreled roof, their chaise, and equable but slightly disconcerting courtesy. But she had been obliged to admit that, after all was said, Jason's bearing was the result of his own fretful heart.

He had always been different from the other Cottarsport youths and men: while they were commonly long and bony, and awkwardly hung together, thickly tanned by the winds and sun and spray of the sea, Jason was small, compact, with dead black hair and pale skin. Mr. Burrage, who resembled a worn and discolored piece of driftwood, was the usual Cottarsport old man; but his wife, not conspicuously out of the ordinary, still had a snap in her unfading eyes, a ruddy roundness of cheek, that showed a lingering trace of a French Acadian intermarriage a century and more ago.

Olive always regarded with something like surprise her unquestioned love for Jason. It had grown quietly, unknown to her, through a number of preliminary years in which she had felt that she must exert some influence for his good. He frightened her a little by his hot utterances and by the manner in which his soul shivered on the verge of a righteous damnation. The effort to preserve him from such destruction became intenser and more involved; until suddenly, to her later consternation, she had surrendered her lips in a single, binding kiss.

But with that consummation a great deal of her troubling had ceased; spiritual vision, she had been certain, must follow their sacred union and subsequent life. Even the gold agitation and Jason's departure for Boston and the western wild had not given her especial concern. God was the supreme Master of human fate, and if He willed for Jason to go forth, who was she, Olive Stanes, to make a to-do? She had quietly addressed herself to the task of Hester, Jem, and Rhoda, to the ordering of her father's household--he was mostly away on the sea and a solitary man at home--and the formal recurrence of the occasions of the church.

In such ways, she thought, bathed in the keen, pale red glow of a late afternoon in October, her youth had slipped imperceptibly away.

A strong salt wind dipped into the hollow, and plastered her skirt, without hoops, against her erect, thin person. With the instinct, bred by the sea, of the presence in all calculations of the weather, she mechanically dwelt on its force and direction, wrinkling her forehead and pinching her lips--she could hear the rising wind straining through the elms on the hills behind Cottarsport--and then she turned abruptly and entered the house.

There was a small dark hallway within, a narrow flight of stairs leading sharply up; the door on the right, to the formal chamber, was closed; but at the left an interior of somber scrubbed wood was visible. On the side against the hall a cavernous fireplace, with a brick hearth, blackened with shadows and the soot of ancient fires, had been left open, but held an air-tight sheet-iron stove. The windows, high on the walls, were small and long, rather than deep; and a table, perpetually spread, stood on a thick hooked rug of brilliant, primitive design.

Rhoda, in a creaking birch rocker, was singing an inarticulated song with closed eyes. Her voice, giving the impression of being subdued, filled the room with its vibrant power. She had a mature face for sixteen years, vividly colored and sensitive, a wide mouth, and heavy twists of russet hair with metallic lights. The song stopped as Olive entered. Rhoda said:

“I wish Hester would hurry home; I'm dreadful hungry.”

“Sometimes they keep her at the packing house, especially if there's a boat in late and extra work.”

“It's not very smart of her without being paid more. They'll just put anything on you they can in this stingy place. I can tell you I wouldn't do two men's work for a woman's pay. I'm awful glad Jason's coming back soon, Olive, with all that money, and I can go to Boston and study singing.”

“I've said over and over, Rhoda,” Olive replied patiently, “that you mustn't think and talk all the time about Jason's worldly success. It doesn't sound nice, but like we were all trying to get everything we could out of him before ever he's here.”

“Didn't he say in the last letter that I was to go to Boston?” Rhoda exclaimed impatiently. “Didn't he just up and tell me that? Why, with all the gold Jason's got it won't mean anything for him to send me away. It isn't as if I wouldn't pay you all back for the trouble I've been. I know I can sing, and I'll work harder than ever Hester dreamed of----”

As if materialized by the pronunciation of her name, the latter entered the room. “Gracious, Hester,” Rhoda declared distastefully, making a nose, “you smell of dead haddock right this minute.” Hester, unlike Rhoda's softly rounded proportions, was more bony than Olive, infinitely more colorless, although ten years the younger. She had a black worsted scarf over her drab head in place of a hat, its ends wrapped about her meager shoulders and bombazine waist. Without preliminary she dropped into her place at the supper table, the shawl trailing on the broad, uneven boards of the floor.

“The wind's smartening up on the bay,” she told them. “Captain Eagleston looks for half a blow. It has got cold, too. I wish the tea'd be ready when I get in from the packing house. It seems that much could be done, with Olive only sitting around and Rhoda singing to herself in the mirror on her dresser.”

“It'll draw in a minute more,” Olive said in the door from the kitchen, beyond the fireplace. Rhoda smiled cheerfully.

“I suppose,” Hester went on, in a voice without emphasis that yet contrived to be thinly bitter, “you were all talking about what would happen when Jason came home with that fortune of his. Far as I can see he's promised and provided for everybody, Jem and Rhoda and his parents and Olive, every Tom and Noddy, but me.”

“I don't like to keep on about it,” Olive protested, pained. “Yet you can't see, Hester, how independent you are. A person wouldn't like to offer you anything until you had signified. You were never very nice with Jason anyway.”

“Well, I'm not going to be nicer after he's back with gold in his pocket. I guess he'll find I'm not hanging on his shoulder for a cashmere dress or a trip to Boston.”

“Pa ought to get into Salem soon,” Rhoda observed. “He said after this he wasn't going to ship again, even along the coast, but tally fish for Mr. Burrage. Pa's getting old.”

“And Jem'll be home from the Georges, too,” Olive added, seating herself with the tea. “I do hope he won't sign for China or any of those long voyages like he threatened.”

“He won't get so far away from Jason,” Hester stated.

“I saw Honora Canderay today,” Rhoda informed them. “She wasn't in the carriage, but walking past the courthouse. She had on a small bonnet with flowers inside the brim and skimpy hoops, gallooned and scalloped.”

“Did she stop?” Olive inquired.

“Yes, and said I was as bright as a fall maple leaf. I wish I could look like Honora Canderay-----”

“Wait till Jason's back,” Hester interrupted.

“It isn't her clothes,” Rhoda went on; “they're elegant material, of course, but not the colors I'd choose; nor it isn't her looks, either, no one would say she's downright pretty; it's just--just her. Is she as old as you, Olive?”

“Let's see, I'm thirty-six, and Honora Canderay was... she's near as old, a year younger maybe.”

“She is wonderful to get close to,” said Rhoda, “no cologne and yet a lovely kind of smell----”

“Not like dead haddock.” This was Hester again.

“Do you know,” proceeded the younger, “she seemed to me kind of lonely. I wanted to give her a hug, but I wouldn't have for all the gold in California. I can't make out if she is freezing outside and nice in, or just polite and thinks nobody's good enough for her. She had an India shawl as big as a sail, with palm leaf ends, and----”

“Rhoda, I wish you wouldn't put so much on clothes and such corruption.” Olive spoke firmly, with a light of zeal in her gaze. “Can't you think on the eternities?”

“Like Jason Burrage and Honora Canderay,” explained Hester; “Honora Canderay and Jason Burrage. They're eternities if there ever were any. If it isn't one it's bound to be the other.”

*****

Olive's room had a sloping outer wall and casually placed insufficient windows; her bed, with a blue-white quilt, was supported by heavy maple posts; there were a chest of drawers, with a minute mirror stand, a utilitarian wash-pitcher and basin, a hanging for the protection of her clothes, and uncompromising chairs. A small circular table with a tatted cover held her Bible and a devotional book, “The Family Companion, by a Pastor.” It was cold when she went up to bed; with a desire to linger in her preparations, she put some resinous sticks of wood into a sheet-iron stove, and almost immediately there was a busily exploding combustion. A glass lamp on the chest of drawers shed a pale illumination that failed to reach the confines of the room; and, for a while, she moved in and out of its wan influence.

She was thinking fixedly about Jason Burrage, and the great impending change in her condition, not in its worldly implications--she thought mostly of material values in the spirit of her admonitions to Rhoda--but in its personal and inner force. At times a pale question of her aptitude for marriage disturbed her serenity; at times she saw it as a sacrifice of her being to a condition commanded of God, a species of martyrdom even. The nine years of Jason's absence had fixed certain maidenly habits of privacy; the mold of her life had taken a definite cast. Her existence had its routine, the recurrence of Sunday, its contemplations, duties, and heavenly aim. And, lately, Jason's letters had disturbed her.

They seemed filled with an almost wicked pride and a disconcerting energy; he spoke of things instinctively distressing to her; there were hints of rude, Godless force and gaiety--allusions to the Jenny Lind Theatre, the El Dorado, which she apprehended as a name of evil import, and to the excursions they would make to Boston or as far as New York.

Jason, too, she realized, must have developed; and California, she feared, might have emphasized exactly such traits as she would wish suppressed. The power of self-destruction in the human heart she believed immeasurable. All, all, must throw themselves in abject humility upward upon the Rock of Salvation. And she could find nothing humble in Jason's periods, burdened as they were with a patent satisfaction in the success of his venture.

Yet parallel with this was a gladness that he had triumphed, and that he was coming back to Cottarsport a figure of importance. She could measure that by the attitude of their town, by the number and standing of the people who cordially stopped her on the street for the purposes of congratulation and curiosity. Every one, of course, had known of their engagement; there had been a marked interest when Jason and a fellow townsman, Thomas Gast, had departed; but that would be insignificant compared to the permanent bulk Jason must now assume. Why he and the Canderays would be Cottarsport's most considerable people.

As always, at the merest thought of the Canderays, personal facts were suspended for a mental glance at that separate family. There was no sense of inferiority in Olive's mind, but an instinctive feeling of difference. This wasn't the result of their big house, nor because the Captain's wife had been a member of Boston society, but resided in the contrariness of the family itself, now centered in Honora, the only one alive.

Perhaps Honora's diversity lay in the fact that, while she seldom actually left Cottarsport, it was easy to see that she had a part in a life far beyond anything Olive, whose consciousness was strictly limited to one narrow place, knew. She always suggested a wider and more elegantly finished existence than that of local sociables and church activities. Captain Ithiel Canderay, a member of a Cottarsport family long since moved away, had, from obscure surprising promptings, returned at his successful retirement from the sea, and built his impressive dwelling in the grey community. He had always, however different the tradition of his wife's attitude, entered with a candid spirit into the interests and life of the town, where he had inspired solid confidence in a domineering but unimpeachable integrity. Such small civic honors as the locality had to bestow were his, and were discharged to the last and most exacting degree. But there had been perpetually about him the aloof air of the quarter-deck, his tones had never lost the accent of command; and, while Cottarsport bitterly guarded its personal equality and independence, it took a certain pride in a recognition of the Captain's authority.

Something of this had unquestionably descended upon Honora; her position was made and zealously guarded by the town. Yet that alone failed to hold the reason for Olive's feeling; it was at once more particular and more all-embracing, and largely feminine. She was almost contemptuous of the other's delicacy of person, of the celebrated fact that Honora Canderay never turned her hand to the cooking of a dish or the sweeping of a stair; and at the same time these very things lifted her apart from Olive's commonplace round.

Her mind turned again to herself and Jason's home-coming. He had been wonderfully generous in his written promises to Rhoda and Jem; and he would be equally thoughtful of Hester, she was certain of that. People had a way of overlooking Hester, a faithful and, for all her talk, a Christian character. Rhoda would study to be a singer; striving, Olive hoped, to put what talent she had to a sanctioned use; and Jem, a remarkably vigorous and able boy of eighteen, would command his own fishing schooner.

The sheet-iron stove glowed cherry red with the energy of its heat, and a blast of wind rushed against the windows. The wind, she recognized, had steadily grown in force; and Olive thought of her father in the barque _Emerald_ of Salem, somewhere between Richmond and the home port.... The lamplight swelled and diminished.

She got a new pleasure from the conjunction of her surrender to matrimony and the good it would bring the others; that--self-sacrifice--was excellence; such subjection of the pride of the flesh was the essence of her service. Then some mundane affairs invaded her mind: a wedding dress, the preparation of food for a small company after the ceremony, whether she should like having a servant. Jason would insist on that; and there she decided in the negative. She wouldn't be put upon in her own kitchen.

Her arrangements for the night were complete, and she set the stove door slightly open, shivering in her coarse night dress before the icy cold drifts of wind in the room, extinguished the lamp, and, after long, conscientiously deliberate prayers, got into bed. The wind boomed about the house, rattling all the sashes. Its force now seemed to be buffeting her heart until she got a measure of release from the thought of the granite boulder in the side yard, changeless and immovable.

The morning was gusty, with a coldly blue and cloudless sky. Olive, reaching the top of Orange Street, was whipped with dust, her hoops flattened grotesquely against her body. The town fell away on either hand, lying in a half moon on its harbor. The latter, as blue and bright as the sky, was formed by the rocky arm of Cottar's Neck, thrust out into the sea and bent from right to left. Most of the fishing fleet showed their bare spars at the wharves, but one, a minute fleck of white canvas, was beating her way through the Narrows. She wondered, descending, if it were Jem coming home.

Olive was going to the Burrages'; it was possible that they had had a later letter than hers from Jason. It might be he would arrive that very day. She was conscious of her heart throbbing slightly at this possibility, but from a complexity of emotions which still left her uneasy if faintly exhilarated. She crossed the courthouse square, where she saw that the green grass had become brown, apparently over night, and turned into Marlboro Street. Here the houses were more recent than the Staneses'; they were four square, with a full second story--a series of detached white blocks with flat porticoes--each set behind a wood fence in a lawn with flower borders or twisted and tree-like lilacs.

She entered the Burrage dwelling without the formality of knocking; and, familiar with the household, passed directly through a narrow, darkened hall, on which all the doors were closed, to the dining room and kitchen beyond. As she had known he would be, Hazzard Burrage was seated with his feet, in lamb's wool slippers, thrust under the stove. For the rest, but lacking his coat, he was formally and completely dressed; his corded throat was folded in a formal black stock, a watch chain and seal hung across his waistcoat. Mrs. Burrage was occupied in lining a cupboard with fresh shelf paper with a cut lace border. She was a small woman, with quick exact movements and an impatient utterance; but her husband was slow--a man who deliberately studied the world with a deep-set gaze.

“I thought you might have heard,” Olive stated directly, on the edge of a painted split-hickory chair. They hadn't, Mrs. Burrage informed her: “I expect he'll just come walking in. That's the way he always did things, and I guess California, or anywhere else, won't change him to notice it. And when he does,” she continued, “he's going to be put out with Hazzard. I told you Jason sent us three thousand dollars to get the front of the house fixed up. He said he didn't want to find his father sitting in the kitchen when he got back. Jason said we were to burn three or four stoves all at once. But he won't, and that's all there is to it. Why, he just put the money in the bank and there it lies. I read him the parable about the talents, but it didn't stir him an inch.”

“Jason always was quick acting,” Hazzard Burrage declared; “he never stopped to consider; and it's as like as not he'll need that money. It wouldn't surprise me if when he sat down and counted what he had Jason'd find it was less than he thought.”

“He wrote me,” Olive stated, “that we could build a house as big as the Canderays'.”

“Jason always was one to talk,” Mrs. Burrage replied in defense of her son.

Olive moved over to the older woman and held the dishes to be replaced in the cupboard. They commented on the force of the wind throughout the night. “The tail end of a blow at sea,” Bur-rage told them; “I wouldn't wonder but it reached right down to the West Indies.”