Alice Brown

“ Only, as he spoke, he knew in his inner mind the best place was Nan. Suddenly she seemed to be in the room with them. What was it but her cool fragrant presence? And she understood. Tira might not. She might feel these turbid waves of his response to he knew not what: the beauty and mystery of the world, the urge of tyrant life, all bound up in the presence of this one woman. She was woman, hunted and oppressed. He was man, created, according to the mandate of his will, to save or to undo her. But the world and the demands of it, clean or unclean, could not be taken at a gulp. ”

“ Eternal life was the soporific distilled by man, in his pathetic cunning, to dull the anguish of anticipated death. Standing there in the silence, he felt the waves of loneliness going over him, and thought of Nan in her chamber across the hall, angelic in her compassion, her arms ready for him as a mother is ready for her child. The moonlight made arabesques on the walls, and he walked to the window with an instinctive craving for the open. He stood gripping the casing with both hands and looking up over the hillside where also the light lay revealingly. ”

“ No man could make her happiness completer, hanging about her steps, staring her down with bold, impudent eyes. She even thought, in a formless way (for she had no orderly inner life of wonder and conclusion) whether she should have taken refuge with the light-haired man who was now driving Tenney to madness, if he had not had that drollery of looking at you, like a boy really, who cared only for a boy's fitful fun. But he was not kind. The kindness had been only to lure her into trusting him, just as Tenney's had turned into a rage of abusive jealousy. Raven's kindness was different. ”

“ They come to the grave. They'd admire to have me pass the night."
"Then," said Nan, "you wait till I go home and wash my hands, and I'll ask Mr. Raven for his car and you and I'll go over. Just we two."
"No," said Tira. "'Twouldn't do me no good to ride. When I've got anything on my mind I can't do better'n walk it off. You let me be!"
The last was a sharp, sudden cry, like the recoil from an unlooked-for hurt.
"I see," said Nan. "Yes, you must walk. I should want to, myself. But in the morning, Tira—mayn't I come over after you?" ”

“ The woman may be dutiful and sound, and then she suffers bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her womanhood—here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch—he did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth because it was the maternal that spoke in her, and all the forces of nature must guard the maternal, that its purpose may be fulfilled. ”

“ Really she had lived for it, ever since she entered the hut and found the strange woman. The night at Raven's house had been as still as this, but there were invisible disturbances in the air; they riddled her chamber through and pierced her brain: what Amelia thought, what Dick thought. Here there was only the calm island of Charlotte's beneficence, and even that lay stiller than ever under the blanket of a tranquil sleep. She felt alone in a world that wasn't troubling itself about her, because it never troubled itself about anything. ”

“ He stepped into the sleigh and, drawing the robe about him, drove off, the horse answering buoyantly. Tira sat, the stillest thing out of a wood where stalking danger lurks, her eyes on her sewing. Tenney was staring at her; she knew it, and could not raise her lids. Often she failed to meet his glance because she so shrank, not from his conviction of her guilt, but the fear of seeing what she must remember in blank night watches, to shudder over. For things were different at night, things you could bear quite well by day. Now he spoke, with a restrained certainty she trembled at. ”

“ And while he implied it was freedom from the tyranny of the bequest, she knew it implied, too, a continued freedom from Aunt Anne. Would he ever have set his face so fixedly toward that if he had not found Tira? And what was Tira's silent call to him? Was it of the blood only, because she was one of those women nature has manacled with the heaviness of the earth's demands? Strangely, she knew, nature acts, sometimes sending a woman child into the world with the seeds of life shut in her baby hand, a wafer for men to taste, a perfume to draw them across mountain and plain. ”

“ They went on and left her to her chosen loneliness. For an instant she would be unreasonably hurt, and then smile at herself, knowing it was she who had denied them.
It was an April morning when the spring so got into her blood that she began to wish for things. They were simple things she wished for: chiefly to feel herself active in the air and sun. She wanted to go away, to tire herself out with motion, and she made up her mind that, if Tenney went to the long pasture fencing, she would shut the house and run off with the baby into the woods. ”

“ She was singing in the kitchen in a fragmentary way she had when life went well with her, and the sound filled Raven with an unreasoning anger. Why should any woman, even so dear and all deserving as Charlotte, live and thrive in the warmth and light while that other creature, of as simply human cravings, battled her way along from cliff to cliff, with the sea of doom below, beating against the land that was so arid to her and waiting only to engulf her? ”

“ Raven was silent. He was thinking what a fool he had been to unpack his heart with words, and that if he told Milly so he should simply be unpacking it some more. He looked at the clear winter day occupying itself out there without him, and wondered why the deuce he couldn't put on snowshoes and tramp off his discontent leaving her to fight her boredom by the fire. She'd brought it on herself, hadn't she? Nobody wanted her to come. Was there some hidden force in women, their apparent vulnerability to the harsh world conditions that were bound to crush out even them in the end? ”

“ But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a preconceived task of breaking something to him.
"Yes, she's done something beautiful, and done it for you."
Raven's heart had shrunk so now that he wondered it could weigh so heavily. How could a woman, his rebellious intelligence asked him, manage to pursue a man with her benefits even from the grave? All his grown-up life he had fought them, but still they hung about him him like shackles. ”

“ Not for himself: he was never troubled by any hampering sense of personal dignity, but for Tira, who stood in silence watching them. She had advanced a few steps into the snowy path and waited, immovable, the light breeze lifting her rings of hair. To Raven, in the one glance he gave her, she was like a Fate, choosing neither good nor ill, but watching the even course of time. If Martin saw Tenney, he was not going to linger for any problematic issue. He stepped into the sleigh and, without drawing the fur robe over his knees, took up the reins. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dick, looking down upon Nan, had that congealed aspect she alone had the present power of freezing him into. She knew all the possibilities of that face. There was the angry look: that had reigned of late when she flouted or denied him. There was the sulky frown, index of his jealousy of Rookie, and there had been, what seemed a long time ago, before they went through this disintegrating turmoil of war, the look of a boy's devotion. ”

“ Then there was the question of a college course and of European travel: those were among the colossal gifts Anne Hamilton had sought to lavish on him. But again he had saved himself, accepting one thing only, a benefit that must have hurt her heart like a stone, she was so bent on his beautiful, bright aptitude at writing taking its place as soon as possible, and with no dimming from a prosaic drudgery, in the world as she knew it: the Boston world, the New England world, the court of judgment that sits across the Atlantic. ”

“ Anne was dignity itself. She kept her own counsel. She took her stately course without the least recognition that there were peculiarities in the pace she kept or the road she chose. She had the unconscious arrogance of her class, a class perhaps, except as surviving in individuals, almost extinct. She never accounted for herself, because it could not have forced its way into her mind, from birth to death, that there was anything in her conduct save the inevitable best, as ordered as the stars. So, Raven knew, she had probably never talked over his nebulous relation with her to Nan ”

“ The house itself had become a converging point for all medical science could do for a man hit in a vital spot and having little chance of recovery. But what Raven knew to be the common sense of the measures he brought to pass, Milly, in her wildness of anxiety, looked upon as the miracles of genius. She even conciliated him, as the poor human conciliates his god. She brought him the burnt offering of her expressed belief, her humility of admiration. And whenever one of the family was allowed to supplement the nurses, by day or night, she effaced herself in favor of Raven or Nan. ”

“ Nan, known to her larger world as Annette Hamilton, was a tall, slim, yet muscular girl, graced with as many physical contradictions as you are likely to imagine. While she stood for an instant before, puppy-like, precipitating herself upon Raven, her eyes crinkled up like Mary Seraskier's, and she showed a line of milk-white teeth. Altogether nature—for she had only the most inconsiderable help from art—had done her exceedingly well. ”

“ Raven, in despair, sat looking at him. He ought, he felt, to be able to laugh it all away, but he was too bewildered and too sorry.
"Dick," said he finally, "I shall have to say it again. You're an awful fool. Nan and I were always the best of friends. I rather think I have known her in a way none of the rest of you have. But—hypnotized her! Look at me, Dick. Remember me plodding along while you grew up; think what sort of a chap I am. You won't find anything spectacular about me. Never has been, never will be. And Nan, of all people! little Nan!" ”

“ I hadn't realized that."
"Oh, Mum's no such fool," said Dick. "She may be an aggravation and a curse—I'll own that—but she's up to date. Why, Jack, anybody that ever knew you'd know you're not yourself."
"No," thought Raven, "few of us are ourselves. We've been through the War, my son. So have you; but you didn't have such a brittle old world inside you to try to put together again after it was smashed. Your inner world was in the making. Whatever you might feel in its collision with the runaway planet of the mad human mind, it could right itself; its atoms might cohere." ”

“ There was one word that, to a poet's mind only, might have illumined the darkness if only for an instant: beauty, that was the word. Mankind could not look on beauty such as this and not desire, for a moment at least, to possess it utterly. But these things belonged to the dark places where brute nature wrought her spells. And there were other beauties, other enchantments, and of these, what could Tira, her mind moulded by the brutal influences of her life, see, except as dreams of her own, not as having wholesome correspondences in the mind of man? ”

“ But Milly, leaning forward to the fire, her trembling hands over the blaze, was talking with amazing intensity, but still quietly, not to disturb the stillness of the expectant house. For the house, suddenly changed, seemed itself to be waiting, as houses do in time of trouble. Was it for Dick to die or to take on life again? Houses are seldom kind at such times, even in their outward tranquillity. They are sinister.
And when Milly began to speak, Raven found he had to deal with a woman surprisingly different from the one who had striven to heal him through her borrowed aphorisms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By this Raven understood that he did not mean to go into the house. Perhaps he was afraid of it. Men are afraid of houses that have grown sinister because of knowing too much.
That day was a curious medley of watchfulness over Tenney: for Raven felt the necessity of following him about to see he did himself no harm. He called him in to breakfast, but Tenney did not even seem to hear, and stood brooding in the yard, looking curiously down at his lame foot and lifting it as if to judge how far it would serve him. ”

“ Raven broke in, "you and I don't want to preach war."
"No," said Nan, "but we can't let Aunt Anne preach peace: not her brand, as we've seen it. O Rookie! what's the use of taking the world as it isn't? Why don't we see if we can't make something of the old thing as it is and has been? and blest if I don't believe as it always will be?"
Raven looked at her in a maze of interrogation. ”

“ Still, on the whole, she was coming alive, and no one knew better than she that life, to be life, must be also a matter of pain. Tenney was leaving her to a great extent free. He was off now, doing his fencing, and he would even, returning at noon or night, forget to fall into the exaggerated limp he kept in reserve to remind her of his grievance. She had not seen Raven for a long time now, except as he and Nan went by, always looking at the house, once or twice halting a moment in the road, as if debating whether they should call. ”

“ They got up and Nan put her hands on Tira's shoulders—and one hand was numb from that iron clasp—and stood looking at her. Nan was not a kissing woman, but she considered whether she should kiss her, to show she loved her. She thought not. Tira's body had so revolted against life, the life of the earth that had grown up into a jungle, that it would be kinder to leave it inviolate even by a touch. ”

“ If she had assaulted him with the reproaches of an unfed passion, there would have been some savage response of rebuttal in him, to save them both from this meager sort of shame. But what could heal in a man's mind the vision of a woman's murdered pride, as deep as the pride of queens, in the days when the world itself bowed its neck for queens to set their feet on? Nan was looking at him curiously. He became aware of it, and returned to himself with a start. He must, he judged, have been acting queerly. ”