Part 7

“Minna Kuhn won't bring action,” Hartmann declared, with growing confidence; “she'll take him back; nothing will come out.” The other woman drank deeply, a purplish flush mantelled her full countenance. A strand of metallic hair slipped over her eyes. “Let her talk,” she asseverated; “we're bohemians.” She clasped Hartmann to her ample bosom.

Mrs. Dallam moved to the half opened door to the room beyond. “Bring in the pitcher of water, Anthony,” she directed. He followed her with the water, and she bolted the door behind them. The door to the hall was closed too. She stopped and smiled at him with narrowed, enigmatic eyes. The subtle force of her being swept tingling over him. She laid her hand, warm, palpitatingly alive, upon his.

“The swine,” she said; “how did we get into this, you and I?”

XXVII

THE patent-leather dressing case lay open on a bureau, spilling a small cascade of ivory toilet implements, a severely-plain black dinner gown lay limp, dully shimmering, over the back of a chair, and, on the bed, a soft, white heap of undergarments gave out a seductive odor of lavender. “Cigarettes in the leather box,” she indicated; “take some outside.” A screened door opened upon a boxlike balcony, cut into the angle of the roof; and Anthony, conscious of the warm weight of a guiding arm, found himself upon it. He seated himself on the railing, and lit a cigarette. He must go in a minute, he thought.

The lights had vanished from the valley, at his back the risen moon dimmed the stars, turned the leaves silver grey. A wan ray fell upon a clump of bushes below--lilacs, but the blooms had wilted, gone. The screen door opened, and Mrs. Dallam was at his side; she sank into a chair, the rosy blur of a cigarette in her fingers; she wore a loose wrap of deep green silk, open at her throat upon the white web beneath; in the obscurity her eyes were as black, as lustreless, as ebony, her mouth was a purple stain.

She smoked silently, gazing into the night. He would go now, he decided, and moved from his place on the rail. But with clinging fingers she caught his wrist, reproachfully lifting a velvety gaze. “I will not be left alone,” she declared; “I simply must have some one with me... you, or I will get despondent. You are--no, I won't say young, that would make you cross; you are like that fabulous fountain the Spaniards hunted in Florida, I want to drink deep, deep.”

Anthony's resolution wavered; it was early; it pleased him that so fine a creature should desire his presence; an unhappy note in her voice moved him to pity. She was lonely, and he was alone--here; why should they not support each other? He leaned, close to her, upon the sloping roof. She talked little; she laughed once, a low, silvery peal whose echo ran up and down his spine.

They heard a servant closing the shutters, the doors, below them, and the sound linked Anthony to Mrs. Dallam in a feeling of pervading intimacy. She rose, and stood pressed against his side, and his heart beat instantly unsteady. The night grew strangely oppressive, there was a roll of distant, muffled thunder; he turned to her with a commonplace about the heat, when her arms went about his neck, and she kissed him full, slowly, upon the lips. Unconsciously he held her supple body to him. She leaned back against his arms, her eyes shut and lips parted. A terrible and brute tyranny of desire welled up within him, sweeping away every vestige of control, of memory. The sky whirled in his vision, the substantial world vanished in a smother of flaming mists.

Then he released her so suddenly that she fell against the rail, recovering her poise with difficulty. Anthony stumbled back, drawing his hand across his brow. “What... what damned perfume's on you?” he demanded hoarsely.

“None at all,” she assured him, “I never... Why, Anthony, are you ill?”

Wave after wave of sweetness enveloped him, choking, nauseating, stinging his eyes, extinguishing the fire within him, turning the lust to ashes. He too supported himself upon the rail, and his gaze fell below, to the bushes. Was it the moonlight, or were they, where they had been bare a few minutes before, now covered with great misty masses of lilacs?

The perfume of the flowers came up to him breath on breath: he could see them clearly now.... White lilacs! An overwhelming panic swept over him, a sudden dread of his surrounding, of the silken figure of the woman before him. He must get away. He pushed her roughly aside, swung back the screen door, and clattered through the room and down the stair. He fumbled for a moment with a bolted door, and then was outside, free. Without hesitancy he fled into the night, the secretive shadows. He ran until he literally fell, with bursting lungs and shaking, powerless knees, upon a bank.

XXVIII

THE hotel was lost; the silence, the peace of nature, unbroken. A drowsy flutter of wings stilled in a hedge. The moon sailed behind a cloud that drooped low upon the earth, and great, slow drops of rain fell to a continuous and far reverberation. They struck coolly upon Anthony's face, pattered among the grass, dropped with minute explosions of dust upon the road. The shower passed, the cloud dissolved, and the crystal flood of light fell once more into the cup of the valley.

It spread like a balm over Anthony: Hartmann, Mrs. Dallam, the weeping face of Mrs. Kuhn, were like painted figures in a distasteful act upon which he had turned his back, from which he had gone forth into the supreme spectacle of the spheres, the presence of Eliza Dreen. Every atom thrilled with the thought of her. “Oh, my very dear,” he whispered to the sleeping birds, the dead, white disk of the moon: “I will come back to you... good.”

After the rain the night was like a damp, sweet veil upon his face; the few stars above him were blurred as though seen through tears; the horizon burned in a circle of flickering, ruddy light. He took up his way once more over the soft folds of the road; now, accustomed to the dark, he could distinguish the smooth pebbles by the way, separate, grey blades of grass. He walked buoyantly, tirelessly, weaving on the loom of the dim miles mingled visions of future and past, dominated by the serene presence of Eliza.

He felt in a pocket the wallet containing his ticket to California and the generous sum added by his father. There must be no more delay in arriving at his western destination! His excursion with Hartmann had been a grave error; he saw it clearly now, one of those faults--so fatally easy for him to commit--which, if his life was to spell success, if he was to come finally into his heritage of joy, he must scrupulously avoid. In the future he would drive directly, safely, toward his goal; he would become part of that orderly pattern of life plotted in streets and staid occupations: at the end of day he would return to his small, carefully-tended garden to weed and water, and sit with Eliza on his portico--a respectable, an authentic, member of society. On Sunday morning they would go to the Episcopal Church, they would join the sober, festivally-garbed procession moving toward the faint thunder of the organ. And, at dinner, he would carve the roast. Thus, quietly, they would grow old, grey, together. They would have a number of children--all girls, he decided.

Imperceptibly the morning was born about him, faint shadows grew under the hedges, the sweet, querulous note of a robin sounded from the sparkling sod. A wind stirred, as immaculate, as dewly fresh, as though it were the first breath blown upon a new world of virginal and lyric beauty. The molten gold of the sun welled out of the east and spilled over the wooded hills and meadows; the violet mists drawn over the swales and streams dissolved; Anthony met a boy driving cows to pasture.

XXIX

HE rapidly overtook a bent and doggedly tramping figure; no common wanderer, he recognized, as he drew nearer. The others decent suit was eminently presentable, his felt hat brushed, his shoes comparatively new. He turned upon Anthony a countenance as expressionless, as darkly-stained, as a chipped and rusted effigy of iron; deep lines fell back across the dingy cheeks; his lipless mouth was, apparently, another such line; and his eyes, deeply sunk in the skull, were the eyes of a dead man. Yet they were not blind; they saw.

He halted, and surveyed Anthony with a lowered, searching curiosity, clenching with a strained and surprising force the knob of a black stick. Anthony met his scrutiny with the salutation of youth and the road; but the other made no reply; his countenance was as blank as though no word had been spoken. Then a sudden flicker of hot light burned in the dull depths of his gaze, his worn face quivered with a swift malignancy, an energy of suspicion, of hatred, that touched Anthony's heart with a cold finger of fear.

“What's your name?” he demanded, his entire being strained in an agony of attention.

Anthony informed him with scrupulous exactitude.

He seemed, for a moment, to doubt Anthony's identity; then the fire died, his eyes grew blank; his grasp relaxed on the stick, and, bent, dogged, he continued on his way.

The repellent contraction of Anthony's heart expanded in a light and careless curiosity, youthful contempt mingled with the gayety of his morning mood, and he hastened his steps until he had again overtaken his inquisitor.

“That's a good cane you've got,” he observed of the stout shaft and rounded head.

Its owner grasped it by the lower end, and swung the head against his hand. “Lead,” he pronounced somberly. “It would crumble your skull like an egg.”

Again fear stirred vaguely in Anthony: the entire absence of emotion in the sanguinary, the dull, matter-of-fact voice were inhuman, tainted with madness; the total detachment of those deliberate words had been appalling.

“I thought,” he continued, “that you might have been Alfred Lukes, but you're too young.” As he pronounced that name his grasp tightened whitely about the lead knob. The conviction seized Anthony that it was fortunate he was not the individual in question.

“You want Alfred?” he asked in an attempted jocularity.

“He murdered my boy,” the other answered simply. “Him and another. They asked James into a boat to go fishing. Boys will always go fishing; he was only eleven.” He stopped in the middle of the road, and produced a small package folded in oiled silk. It proved to be a derringer, of an old-fashioned model, with two, short black barrels, one atop the other. “Loaded,” he said, “to put against his face.” Then he rewrapped the weapon and returned it to its place of concealment. “I've been looking for Alfred Lukes for nineteen years,” he recommenced his dogged progress, “in trains and saloons and stores. Nineteen years ago James was found in the river.” He was silent for a moment, then, “One eye was torn out,” he added in his weary voice. He turned his blank and terrible gaze upon Anthony, upon the sparkling morning. The derringer dragged slightly upon his coat, the stick--that stick which could crush a skull like an egg--made its trailing signature in the dust. A mingled loathing and pity took possession of Anthony; he recoiled from the corroding and secret horror of that nineteen year Odyssey of a torturing and impotent spirit of revenge, from the infinite black tide that had swept over the stooping figure at his side, the pitiless memory that had destroyed its sanity.

“It was on Sunday; James had on his nice blue suit and a new, red silk necktie... they found it knotted about his throat... as tight as a big man could make it.”

A sudden impulse overcame Anthony to run, to leave far behind him this sinister, animated speck on the sunny road, under the dusty branches burdened with ripening fruit, thrilling with the bubbling notes of birds. But, as his gaze fell again upon his companion, he saw only an old man, gaunt with suffering, hurrying toward the noon. A deep, cleansing compassion vanquished the dread, and, spontaneously, he spoke of his own lighter affairs, of California, his destination.

“I have never been west of Chicago,” the other interposed. “I hadn't the money; the walking is dreadfully hard; the sun on those plains hurt my head. Do you suppose James Lukes is in California?” he asked, pausing momentarily in his rapid shamble.

In his careless, youthful egotism, Anthony ignored the query. He wondered aloud where he could board a through train to the West.

“Have you got your ticket?”

Anthony tapped complacently upon the pocket that held the wallet. They were walking now through a wood that flowed to the rim of the road, and a turn hid either vista. A stream ran through the rank greenery of the bottom, crossed by a bridge of loosely bolted planks. Anthony paused, intent upon the brown, sliding water beneath him, the minute minnows balancing against the stream. In that closed place of broken light the cool stillness was profound. The stream fled past its weeds without a gurgle, the leaves hung motionless, as though they had been stamped from metal... he might have been, with his companion, within a charmed circle of everlasting tranquillity. Then:

“I wonder if Alfred Lukes is in California?” the latter resumed; “I've never got there, the fare... too expensive, the sun hurt my head.” Anthony lit a Dulcina, and expelled a cloud of blue smoke that rose compactly in the motionless air. “California,” he repeated, sunk in thought; “I wonder--”

“California's a big place,” Anthony hazarded.

“If he was there I'd find him.” Then, in his mechanical and dispassionate voice, he cursed Alfred Lukes with the utmost foulness. One heated word, the slightest elevation of his even tones, would have made the performance human, intelligent, but the deadly monotony, the impersonal accents, were as harrowing as though a mummy had ground out of its shrunken and embalmed interior a recital of prehistoric hatred and wrong; it resembled a phonograph record of incalculable depravity. He stood beyond the bridge, resting upon his stick, with his unmoved face turned toward Anthony. His hat cast a deep shade over his eyes; but, below, in a wanton patch of sunlight, his lipless mouth trembled greyly.

“California,” he repeated still again, then, “I must get there.” He shifted his hand lower upon the stick, and moved nearer to Anthony by a step; the patch of sunlight shifted up to his hat and fled.

“You could try the freight cars,” Anthony suggested. The stooping, neatly-brushed figure, the stony countenance, had become, in an intangible manner, menacing, obscurely dangerous. The fingers were drawn like a claw about the club. Then the arm relaxed, he seemed to shrink into hopeless resignation. Beyond the leafy arcade Anthony could now see the countryside spread out in sunny fields, fleecy, white clouds shifting in the sea of blue.... Suddenly a great flame shot up before his eyes, a stunning shock fell upon his head, and the flame went out in a whirling darkness that swept like a black sea over a continent of intolerable pain. He heard, as if from an immense distance, a thin voice pronounce the single word, “California.”

XXX

A GRIPPING wave of nausea recalled Anthony to consciousness; a deathly sickness spreading from the pit of his stomach through his entire being; his prostrate head, seeming stripped of its skull, was tortured by the dragging fronds of the ferns among which he lay. He sat up dizzily. Through the leafy opening the fleeting forms of the clouds shifted over the sunny hills. The stream slipped silently through the grass. He staggered down the slight incline, and, falling forward upon the ground, let the water flow over his throbbing head. The cool shock revived him, and he washed away a dark, clotted film from his forehead and cheek.

His wallet, with his ticket to California and store of money were gone. He started in instant, unsteady pursuit of the man who had struck him down and robbed him. But, at the edge of the wood he paused--how long had he lain among the ferns? the sun was now high over his head, the morning lapsed, the other might have had three, four hours' start. He might now be entrained, bound for California, searching for Alfred Lukes. A sudden weakness forced him to sit at the roadside; he lost consciousness again for a moment. Then, summoning his youth, his vitality, he rose, and walked unsteadily in search of assistance.

He had proceeded an intolerable mile, wiping away a thin trickle of blood that persisted in crawling into his eye, when he saw a low roof amid a tangle of greenery. He stopped with a sobbing breath of relief. He was delirious, he thought, for peering at him through the leaves he saw the countenance and beautiful, bare body of a child, as dark and tense as bronze. A cloud of black hair overhung a face vivid as a flower; her crimson lips trembled; then, with a startled cry, the figure vanished.

He made his way with difficulty over a short path, overgrown with vines and twisted branches, and came abruptly upon a low, white house and wide, opened door. An aged and shapeless woman sat on a chair without a back, cutting green beans into a bright tin basin. When she saw him she dropped the pan with a clatter, and an unfamiliar exclamation of surprise.

“I've been hurt,” Anthony explained; “knocked silly and robbed.”

“Gina!” she called excitedly; “Dio mio! _Gina!_” A young woman, large and loosely molded, with a lusty baby clasped to her bared breast, appeared in the doorway. When she saw Anthony she dropped the baby into the elder's arms. “Poverino!” she cried; “come in the house, little mister.” She caught him by the arm, almost lifting him over the doorstep into a cool, dark interior. He had a brief glimpse of drying vegetables strung from the ceiling, of a waxen image of the virgin in faded pink silk finery against the wall; then, with closed eyes, he relaxed into the charge of soothing and skilled fingers. His head rested on a maternal arm while a soft bandage was fixed about his forehead.

“Ecco!” she ejaculated, her ministration successful. She led him to a rude couch upon the floor, and gently insisted upon his lying down. He attempted to thank her, but she laid her large, capable hand over his mouth, and he sank into an exhausted, semi-conscious rest. Once she bent over him, dampening the bandage, once he saw, against the light of the door, the shape, slim and beautiful as an angel, of the child. Outside a low, liquid murmur of voices continued without a break, strange and quieting.

He slept, and woke up refreshed, strengthened. The dusk had thickened in the room, the strings of vegetables were lost in the shadows, a dim oil lamp cast a feeble glow on rude walls. He lay motionless for a few, delightful seconds, folded in absolute peace, beneficent quietude. The amazing idea struck him that, perhaps, he had died, and that this was the eternal tranquillity of the hymn books, and he started vigorously to his feet in an absurd panic. The homely figure of a man entering dispelled the illusion--he was a commonplace Italian, one of the multitude who labored in the ditches of the country, stood aside in droves from the tracks as trains whirled past.

“What hit your head?” he asked, his mobile face displaying sympathetic interest, concern.

“A leaded stick,” Anthony explained. “I was knocked out, robbed.”

“Birbanti!” he laid a heavy hand upon Anthony's shoulder. “You feel better now, gia?” The latter, confused by such open attention, shook the hand from its friendly grip. “He was crazy,” he awkwardly explained; “and looking for a man who had killed his son; he wanted to get to California and I told him I had a ticket west.”

The laborer led Anthony to a room where a rude table was spread with homely fare--a great, rough loaf of bread, a deep bowl of steaming, green soup, flakey white cheese, and a bottle of purple wine. An open door faced the western sky, and the room was filled with the warm afterglow; it hung like a shining veil over the man, the still, maternal countenance of the woman, like an aureole about the baby now sleeping against her breast, and graced the russet countenance of an aged peasant. The child that Anthony had seen first, now in a scant white slip, seemed dipped in the gold of dreams.

As he consumed the savory soup, the creamy cheese and wine, the scene impressed him as strangely significant, familiar. He dismissed an idle effort of memory in order to consider the unfortunate aspect assumed by his immediate affairs. Concerning one thing he was determined--he would ask his father to assist him no further toward his western destination. He must himself pay for the initial error, together with all its consequences, of having followed Hartmann: California was his object, he would not write to Ellerton until his westward progress was once more assured.

Two courses were open to him--he could “beat” his way, getting meals when and how he was able, riding, when possible, on freight cars, doing casual jobs on the way. That he dismissed in favor of a second, which in the end, he judged, would prove more speedy. He would make his way to the nearest city, find employment in a public or private garage as chauffeur or mechanic, and, in a month at most, have the money necessary for the continuation of his journey.

The household conversed vigorously in their native idiom, giving his thoughts full freedom. The glow in the west faded, sank from the room, but, suddenly, he recognized the familiar quality of his surroundings. It resembled a picture of the Holy Family on the wall of his mother's room; the bare interior was the same, the rugged features of Joseph the carpenter, the brooding beauty of Mary. He almost laughed aloud at the absurd comparison of the exalted scene of Christ's infancy with this commonplace but kindly group, the laborer with soiled and callous hands and winestained mouth, the material young woman with the string of cheap blue beads.

The meal at an end the chairs were pushed back and the old woman noisily assembled the dishes. Anthony's head throbbed and burned. In passing, the mother's fingers rested upon his brow. “Not too hot,” she nodded contentedly.

A consultation followed. Anthony might remain there for the night; or, if he insisted, he might drive into the city with “Nono,” who left in a few hours with a wagonload of greens for the morning market. He chose the latter, with a clumsy expression of gratitude, impatient to resume active efforts in his rehabilitation in his own mind.

“Niente!” they disclaimed in chorus.

XXXI

HE fell into an instant slumber on the hospitable heap in the corner, and was awakened while it was still dark. In the flicker of the oil lamp the old man's face swam vaguely against the night. Without the wagon was loaded, a drooping horse insecurely harnessed into patched shafts. The world was a still space of blue gloom, of indefinite forms suspended in the hush of color, sound; it seemed to be spun out of shadows like cobwebs, out of vapors, scents. A pale, hectic glow on the horizon marked the city. They ambled noiselessly, slowly, forward, under the vague foliage of trees. There was a glint of light in a passing window, the clatter of milk pails; a rooster crowed, thin and clear and triumphant; on a grassy slope by the road they saw a smoldering fire, recumbent forms.