Zona Gale

“ She ran to the house. Mrs. West followed her, talking. Simon saw how the terrible air of the men gave place to curiosity and amazement not the less physical. Simon felt repelled; he felt ill; he was distressed that Andrea should be witness to this sordid and hideous moment, that they should both in a measure be parties to the occasion. Was it the same world down which he had wandered only an hour ago in a gracious companionship, in a beauty that was like fine flowing substance? And Eva in secret communication with that thief! ”

“ For these Orwoods and he and Andrea had all been shamed by the crude literal child and by Mrs. West herself.
"God help me!" said Simon, and lay down on the tall, dry grass. Life pressed upon him like a weight, as if life were but a mode of death. ”

“ From the oak opening on the east slope a man came running. He was tall and white, and his unshaven face was strange above his neat clothes. He ran badly. His hands were flung grotesquely out, like the hands of one unused to running. When he saw the three, he veered and came toward them, tripping in the long grass.
"Hide me, for God's sake!" he said.
Andrea looked at Simon. Simon stood frowning. Eva abruptly turned and ran a little away from them down the path. It was strange to Simon that Eva should run away, she who seemed so doughty, so valiant. ”

“ And Andrea and he had merely been in the way.
He looked down at the brook, flowing from what hidden source to what destiny; his eye ran to the opposite slope, damascened with sun. Then he looked about him in slow bewilderment. For now everything bore its ancient accustomed aspect, as all had looked before his new sense of life had come upon him. The rollicking brook, the rocks, the tamaracks, they were cold, metallic. Their color lay upon the outside. The light was merely reflected, was decorative, did not drench and permeate. He covered his eyes. ”

“ But Andrea murmured, "That shade of magenta is the true crime." At every point little Eva acted her part of the homespun, Andrea hers of the evolved. And Simon watched them both, himself in the deadly sin of the consciousness that this level of understanding to which he had somehow attained lay above Andrea, as she was above Eva.
"This experience of yours, whatever it has been," Andrea found place to say, "is over you like a garment, Simon. You are more wonderful than ever." ”

“ He knew that sin will so separate the heart from its kindredship with nature. He was now to perceive that a spirit may be so sensitized that any slight failure will flaw its cadences. He thought of his failure as his inefficiency before Eva's thief. When he was tortured by the thought of Andrea, he felt no failure, but a kind of spiritual frenzy of renunciation. ”

“ They went to the Orwood studio, the little stone building that those strange Orwoods had built with their own hands to house their simple treasures. The small ground floor, with its stuffed birds and little animals of the region, always filled Eva with pity for the bright creatures, so pert and vivid in death; but Andrea spoke of the fine untutored skill of the Orwood lad who had prepared them. ”

“ She had seen the Orwoods, she told you of them: the artist brother whose portraits of the family hung in the studio down the slope; the younger brother who had tasted a wild herb in the woods and had died there, the little sister who had loved a faun and a peacock here in the Wisconsin wilderness. Mrs. West talked of them now to the neglect of her thief, and returned, still talking, to her cottage.
Simon had watched Andrea as she listened. Andrea's silences came like lovely shadows. Her thought or the thought of another would take her visibly as smoke will cloud a mirror. ”

“ It was a distinct dilation of his consciousness, a catching up into some higher norm of perception, of existence. It was literally the creative mood descending upon him not for creative work, but for creative understanding of reality.
He sprang up, and something else ran with his thought: the man down there in the cottage, he must get back to him.
He found Mrs. West nodding beside her sleeping patient, and Simon took her place. As he sat beside the man Simon was planning. When the man awoke, Eva would ask him about his wife, and they would take help to her. ”

“ He tried to phrase it.
"I think," said Simon, "that some day men and women will look back on 'romantic love' as we look back on chivalry. We do not even suspect what love is, this tremendous mystery of duality in nature. Everything traceable to sex, yes; but what is that? Perhaps only one of countless creative powers which we shall claim—the only one which so far lets us guess at our godhood. Except—"
If he could tell her of his strange new sense which released him, even as love releases, to new areas of living; light beside which love's color of rose is a dimness ”

“ But all these give only the signs, the little miracles. I am speaking now not only of one who has the vision for creative art, but of the one who has creative vision toward life, toward pure being. He lives it; he is it. ”

“ Pettle," she said quietly.
"Well," shouted Mr. Pettle, aggressively, "we got no time to lose."
"What's the man done?" asked Simon.
There was about Simon something so tranquil, so gentle, that the high key of the others was instantly lowered.
"Stole fifty dollars off'n me," said the man Pettle. "Took it out'n the till. I happen to be the sheriff; I 'll show 'im!"
"Fifty dollars!" Eva cried.
"You 're sure you 're after the right man?" Simon persisted.
"Said his wife was sick, the liar," cried Pettle, and jerked stupidly at his horse's bridle.
"Sick?" said Eva. Her face changed, lighted. ”