Страница:
away. How the wind blew! Our father was a carpenter and he built strong
houses for other people but our own house he did not build very
strong!" He shook his head sorrowfully. "My sister the actress has got
into trouble. Our house is not built very strongly," he said as I went
away along the path.
* * * * *
For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered
every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a
murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for
the deed. The tale runs something like this--
The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged,
worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman and lived with his
wife and his wife's mother in an apartment in Thirty-second Street. He
loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was
employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the
city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy
stolid looking man with grey eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman
in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a
sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop had a
desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out sheets containing
the record of the work done by each man in his department. When he
looked up he could see the girl sitting at work at her desk. The notion
got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely. He did not think of
trying to draw close to her or of winning her love. He looked at her as
one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in October
when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold. "She is a
pure, virginal thing," he thought vaguely. "What can she be thinking
about as she sits there by the window at work."
In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his
apartment in Thirty-second Street and into the presence of his wife and
his mother-in-law. All day in the shop and during the evening at home
he carried her figure about with him in his mind. As he stood by a
window in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central
railroad tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there
beside him. Down below women walked in the street and in every woman he
saw there was something of the Iowa girl. One woman walked as she did,
another made a gesture with her hand that reminded of her. All the
women he saw except his wife and his mother-in-law were like the girl
he had taken inside himself.
The two women in his own house puzzled and confused him. They became
suddenly unlovely and commonplace. His wife in particular was like some
strange unlovely growth that had attached itself to his body.
In the evening after the day at the factory he went home to his own
place and had dinner. He had always been a silent man and when he did
not talk no one minded. After dinner he with his wife went to a picture
show. There were two children and his wife expected another. They came
into the apartment and sat down. The climb up two flights of stairs had
wearied his wife. She sat in a chair beside her mother groaning with
weariness.
The mother-in-law was the soul of goodness. She took the place of a
servant in the home and got no pay. When her daughter wanted to go to a
picture show she waved her hand and smiled. "Go on," she said. "I don't
want to go. I'd rather sit here." She got a book and sat reading. The
little boy of nine awoke and cried. He wanted to sit on the po-po. The
mother-in-law attended to that.
After the man and his wife came home the three people sat in silence
for an hour or two before bed time. The man pretended to read a
newspaper. He looked at his hands. Although he had washed them
carefully grease from the bicycle frames left dark stains under the
nails. He thought of the Iowa girl and of her white quick hands playing
over the keys of a typewriter. He felt dirty and uncomfortable.
The girl at the factory knew the foreman had fallen in love with her
and the thought excited her a little. Since her aunt's death she had
gone to live in a rooming house and had nothing to do in the evening.
Although the foreman meant nothing to her she could in a way use him.
To her he became a symbol. Sometimes he came into the office and stood
for a moment by the door. His large hands were covered with black
grease. She looked at him without seeing. In his place in her
imagination stood a tall slender young man. Of the foreman she saw only
the grey eyes that began to burn with a strange fire. The eyes
expressed eagerness, a humble and devout eagerness. In the presence of
a man with such eyes she felt she need not be afraid.
She wanted a lover who would come to her with such a look in his eyes.
Occasionally, perhaps once in two weeks, she stayed a little late at
the office, pretending to have work that must be finished. Through the
window she could see the foreman waiting. When everyone had gone she
closed her desk and went into the street. At the same moment the
foreman came out at the factory door.
They walked together along the street a half dozen blocks to where she
got aboard her car. The factory was in a place called South Chicago and
as they went along evening was coming on. The streets were lined with
small unpainted frame houses and dirty faced children ran screaming in
the dusty roadway. They crossed over a bridge. Two abandoned coal
barges lay rotting in the stream.
He went by her side walking heavily and striving to conceal his hands.
He had scrubbed them carefully before leaving the factory but they
seemed to him like heavy dirty pieces of waste matter hanging at his
side. Their walking together happened but a few times and during one
summer. "It's hot," he said. He never spoke to her of anything but the
weather. "It's hot," he said. "I think it may rain."
She dreamed of the lover who would some time come, a tall fair young
man, a rich man owning houses and lands. The workingman who walked
beside her had nothing to do with her conception of love. She walked
with him, stayed at the office until the others had gone to walk
unobserved with him because of his eyes, because of the eager thing in
his eyes that was at the same time humble, that bowed down to her. In
his presence there was no danger, could be no danger. He would never
attempt to approach too closely, to touch her with his hands. She was
safe with him.
In his apartment in the evening the man sat under the electric light
with his wife and his mother-in-law. In the next room his two children
were asleep. In a short time his wife would have another child. He had
been with her to a picture show and in a short time they would get into
bed together.
He would lie awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of
a bed where, in another room, his mother-in-law was crawling between
the sheets. Life was too intimate. He would lie awake eager, expectant
--expecting, what?
Nothing. Presently one of the children would cry. It wanted to get out
of bed and sit on the po-po. Nothing strange or unusual or lovely would
or could happen. Life was too close, intimate. Nothing that could
happen in the apartment could in any way stir him; the things his wife
might say, her occasional half-hearted outbursts of passion, the
goodness of his mother-in-law who did the work of a servant without
pay--
He sat in the apartment under the electric light pretending to read a
newspaper--thinking. He looked at his hands. They were large,
shapeless, a working-man's hands.
The figure of the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he
went out of the apartment and walked in silence through miles of
streets. It was not necessary to say words. He walked with her by a
sea, along the crest of a mountain. The night was clear and silent and
the stars shone. She also was a star. It was not necessary to say
words.
Her eyes were like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out
of dim, star lit plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off like the
stars," he thought. "She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the
stars she breathes, she lives, like myself she has being."
One evening, some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the
bicycle factory killed his wife and he is now in the courts being tried
for murder. Every day the newspapers are filled with the story. On the
evening of the murder he had taken his wife as usual to a picture show
and they started home at nine. In Thirty-second Street, at a corner
near their apartment building, the figure of a man darted suddenly out
of an alleyway and then darted back again. The incident may have put
the idea of killing his wife into the man's head.
They got to the entrance to the apartment building and stepped into a
dark hallway. Then quite suddenly and apparently without thought the
man took a knife out of his pocket. "Suppose that man who darted into
the alleyway had intended to kill us," he thought. Opening the knife he
whirled about and struck at his wife. He struck twice, a dozen times--
madly. There was a scream and his wife's body fell.
The janitor had neglected to light the gas in the lower hallway.
Afterwards, the foreman, decided, that was the reason he did it, that
and the fact that the dark slinking figure of a man darted out of an
alleyway and then darted back again. "Surely," he told himself, "I
could never have done it had the gas been lighted."
He stood in the hallway thinking. His wife was dead and with her had
died her unborn child. There was a sound of doors opening in the
apartments above. For several minutes nothing happened. His wife and
her unborn child were dead--that was all.
He ran upstairs thinking quickly. In the darkness on the lower stairway
he had put the knife back into his pocket and, as it turned out later,
there was no blood on his hands or on his clothes. The knife he later
washed carefully in the bathroom, when the excitement had died down a
little. He told everyone the same story. "There has been a holdup," he
explained. "A man came slinking out of an alleyway and followed me and
my wife home. He followed us into the hallway of the building and there
was no light. The janitor has neglected to light the gas." Well--there
had been a struggle and in the darkness his wife had been killed. He
could not tell how it had happened. "There was no light. The janitor
has neglected to light the gas," he kept saying.
For a day or two they did not question him specially and he had time to
get rid of the knife. He took a long walk and threw it away into the
river in South Chicago where the two abandoned coal barges lay rotting
under the bridge, the bridge he had crossed when on the summer evenings
he walked to the street car with the girl who was virginal and pure,
who was far off and unattainable, like a star and yet not like a star.
And then he was arrested and right away he confessed--told everything.
He said he did not know why he killed his wife and was careful to say
nothing of the girl at the office. The newspapers tried to discover the
motive for the crime. They are still trying. Someone had seen him on
the few evenings when he walked with the girl and she was dragged into
the affair and had her picture printed in the papers. That has been
annoying for her as of course she has been able to prove she had
nothing to do with the man.
* * * * *
Yesterday morning a heavy fog lay over our village here at the edge of
the city and I went for a long walk in the early morning. As I returned
out of the lowlands into our hill country I met the old man whose
family has so many and such strange ramifications. For a time he walked
beside me holding the little dog in his arms. It was cold and the dog
whined and shivered. In the fog the old man's face was indistinct. It
moved slowly back and forth with the fog banks of the upper air and
with the tops of trees. He spoke of the man who has killed his wife and
whose name is being shouted in the pages of the city newspapers that
come to our village each morning. As he walked beside me he launched
into a long tale concerning a life he and his brother, who has now
become a murderer, once lived together. "He is my brother," he said
over and over, shaking his head. He seemed afraid I would not believe.
There was a fact that must be established. "We were boys together that
man and I," he began again. "You see we played together in a barn back
of our father's house. Our father went away to sea in a ship. That is
the way our names became confused. You understand that. We have
different names, but we are brothers. We had the same father. We played
together in a barn back of our father's house. For hours we lay
together in the hay in the barn and it was warm there."
In the fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled
tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth
like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe
the story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything
concerning the relationship of men and women became confused, a muddle.
The spirit of the man who had killed his wife came into the body of the
little old man there by the roadside.
It was striving to tell me the story it would never be able to tell in
the court room in the city, in the presence of the judge. The whole
story of mankind's loneliness, of the effort to reach out to
unattainable beauty tried to get itself expressed from the lips of a
mumbling old man, crazed with loneliness, who stood by the side of a
country road on a foggy morning holding a little dog in his arms.
The arms of the old man held the dog so closely that it began to whine
with pain. A sort of convulsion shook his body. The soul seemed
striving to wrench itself out of the body, to fly away through the fog,
down across the plain to the city, to the singer, the politician, the
millionaire, the murderer, to its brothers, cousins, sisters, down in
the city. The intensity of the old man's desire was terrible and in
sympathy my body began to tremble. His arms tightened about the body of
the little dog so that it cried with pain. I stepped forward and tore
the arms away and the dog fell to the ground and lay whining. No doubt
it had been injured. Perhaps ribs had been crushed. The old man stared
at the dog lying at his feet as in the hallway of the apartment
building the worker from the bicycle factory had stared at his dead
wife. "We are brothers," he said again. "We have different names but we
are brothers. Our father you understand went off to sea."
* * * * *
I am sitting in my house in the country and it rains. Before my eyes
the hills fall suddenly away and there are the flat plains and beyond
the plains the city. An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest
went past my door and the little dog was not with him. It may be that
as we talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion. It
may be that the dog like the workman's wife and her unborn child is now
dead. The leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are
falling like rain--the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight
down, heavily. The rain beat them brutally down. They are denied a last
golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be carried away,
out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.
Winifred Walker understood some things clearly enough. She understood
that when a man is put behind iron bars he is in prison. Marriage was
marriage to her.
It was that to her husband Hugh Walker, too, as he found out. Still he
didn't understand. It might have been better had he understood, then he
might at least have found himself. He didn't. After his marriage five
or six years passed like shadows of wind blown trees playing on a wall.
He was in a drugged, silent state. In the morning and evening every day
he saw his wife. Occasionally something happened within him and he
kissed her. Three children were born. He taught mathematics in the
little college at Union Valley, Illinois, and waited.
For what? He began to ask himself that question. It came to him at
first faintly like an echo. Then it became an insistent question. "I
want answering," the question seemed to say. "Stop fooling along. Give
your attention to me."
Hugh walked through the streets of the Illinois town. "Well, I'm
married. I have children," he muttered.
He went home to his own house. He did not have to live within his
income from the little college, and so the house was rather large and
comfortably furnished. There was a negro woman who took care of the
children and another who cooked and did the housework. One of the women
was in the habit of crooning low soft negro songs. Sometimes Hugh
stopped at the house door and listened. He could see through the glass
in the door into the room where his family was gathered. Two children
played with blocks on the floor. His wife sat sewing. The old negress
sat in a rocking chair with his youngest child, a baby, in her arms.
The whole room seemed under the spell of the crooning voice. Hugh fell
under the spell. He waited in silence. The voice carried him far away
somewhere, into forests, along the edges of swamps. There was nothing
very definite about his thinking. He would have given a good deal to be
able to be definite.
He went inside the house. "Well, here I am," his mind seemed to say,
"here I am. This is my house, these are my children."
He looked at his wife Winifred. She had grown a little plump since
their marriage. "Perhaps it is the mother in her coming out, she has
had three children," he thought.
The crooning old negro woman went away, taking the youngest child with
her. He and Winifred held a fragmentary conversation. "Have you been
well to-day, dear?" she asked. "Yes," he answered.
If the two older children were intent on their play his chain of
thought was not broken. His wife never broke it as the children did
when they came running to pull and tear at him. Throughout the early
evening, after the children went to bed, the surface of the shell of
him was not broken at all. A brother college professor and his wife
came in or he and Winifred went to a neighbor's house. There was talk.
Even when he and Winifred were alone together in the house there was
talk. "The shutters are becoming loose," she said. The house was an old
one and had green shutters. They were continually coming loose and at
night blew back and forth on their hinges making a loud banging noise.
Hugh made some remark. He said he would see a carpenter about the
shutters. Then his mind began playing away, out of his wife's presence,
out of the house, in another sphere. "I am a house and my shutters are
loose," his mind said. He thought of himself as a living thing inside a
shell, trying to break out. To avoid distracting conversation he got a
book and pretended to read. When his wife had also begun to read he
watched her closely, intently. Her nose was so and so and her eyes so
and so. She had a little habit with her hands. When she became lost in
the pages of a book the hand crept up to her cheek, touched it and then
was put down again. Her hair was not in very good order. Since her
marriage and the coming of the children she had not taken good care of
her body. When she read her body slumped down in the chair. It became
bag-like. She was one whose race had been run.
Hugh's mind played all about the figure of his wife but did not really
approach the woman who sat before him. It was so with his children.
Sometimes, just for a moment, they were living things to him, things as
alive as his own body. Then for long periods they seemed to go far away
like the crooning voice of the negress.
It was odd that the negress was always real enough. He felt an
understanding existed between himself and the negress. She was outside
his life. He could look at her as at a tree. Sometimes in the evening
when she had been putting the children to bed in the upper part of the
house and when he sat with a book in his hand pretending to read, the
old black woman came softly through the room, going toward the kitchen.
She did not look at Winifred, but at Hugh. He thought there was a
strange, soft light in her old eyes. "I understand you, my son," her
eyes seemed to say.
Hugh was determined to get his life cleaned up if he could manage it.
"All right, then," he said, as though speaking to a third person in the
room. He was quite sure there was a third person there and that the
third person was within himself, inside his body. He addressed the
third person.
"Well, there is this woman, this person I married, she has the air of
something accomplished," he said, as though speaking aloud. Sometimes
it almost seemed to him he had spoken aloud and he looked quickly and
sharply at his wife. She continued reading, lost in her book. "That may
be it," he went on. "She has had these children. They are accomplished
facts to her. They came out of her body, not out of mine. Her body has
done something. Now it rests. If she is becoming a little bag-like,
that's all right."
He got up and making some trivial excuse got out of the room and out of
the house. In his youth and young manhood the long periods of walking
straight ahead through the country, that had come upon him like
visitations of some recurring disease, had helped. Walking solved
nothing. It only tired his body, but when his body was tired he could
sleep. After many days of walking and sleeping something occurred. The
reality of life was in some queer way re-established in his mind. Some
little thing happened. A man walking in the road before him threw a
stone at a dog that ran barking out of a farm-house. It was evening
perhaps, and he walked in a country of low hills. Suddenly he came out
upon the top of one of the hills. Before him the road dipped down into
darkness but to the west, across fields, there was a farm-house. The
sun had gone down, but a faint glow lit the western horizon. A. woman
came out of the farmhouse and went toward a barn. He could not see her
figure distinctly. She seemed to be carrying something, no doubt a milk
pail; she was going to a barn to milk a cow.
The man in the road who had thrown the stone at the farm dog had turned
and seen Hugh in the road behind him. He was a little ashamed of having
been afraid of the dog. For a moment he seemed about to wait and speak
to Hugh, and then was overcome with confusion and hurried away. He was
a middle-aged man, but quite suddenly and unexpectedly he looked like a
boy.
As for the farm woman, dimly seen going toward a distant barn, she also
stopped and looked toward him. It was impossible she should have seen
him. She was dressed in white and he could see her but dimly against
the blackish green of the trees of an orchard behind her. Still she
stood looking and seemed to look directly into his eyes. He had a queer
sensation of her having been lifted by an unseen hand and brought to
him. It seemed to him he knew all about her life, all about the life of
the man who had thrown the stone at the dog.
In his youth, when life had stepped out of his grasp, Hugh had walked
and walked until several such things had occurred and then suddenly he
was all right again and could again work and live among men.
After his marriage and after such an evening at home he started walking
rapidly as soon as he left the house. As quickly as possible he got out
of town and struck out along a road that led over the rolling prairie.
"Well, I can't walk for days and days as I did once," he thought.
"There are certain facts in life and I must face facts. Winifred, my
wife, is a fact, and my children are facts. I must get my fingers on
facts. I must live by them and with them. It's the way lives are
lived."
Hugh got out of town and on to a road that ran between cornfields. He
was an athletic looking man and wore loose fitting clothes. He went
along distraught and puzzled. In a way he felt like a man capable of
taking a man's place in life and in another way he didn't at all.
The country spread out, wide, in all directions. It was always night
when he walked thus and he could not see, but the realization of
distances was always with him. "Everything goes on and on but I stand
still," he thought. He had been a professor in the little college for
six years. Young men and women had come into a room and he had taught
them. It was nothing. Words and figures had been played with. An effort
had been made to arouse minds.
For what?
There was the old question, always coming back, always wanting
answering as a little animal wants food. Hugh gave up trying to answer.
He walked rapidly, trying to grow physically tired. He made his mind
attend to little things in the effort to forget distances. One night he
got out of the road and walked completely around a cornfield. He
counted the stalks in each hill of corn and computed the number of
stalks in a whole field. "It should yield twelve hundred bushels of
corn, that field," he said to himself dumbly, as though it mattered to
him. He pulled a little handful of cornsilk out of the top of an ear of
corn and played with it. He tried to fashion himself a yellow
moustache. "I'd be quite a fellow with a trim yellow moustache," he
thought.
One day in his class-room Hugh suddenly began to look with new interest
at his pupils. A young girl attracted his attention. She sat beside the
son of a Union Valley merchant and the young man was writing something
on the back of a book. She looked at it and then turned her head away.
The young man waited.
It was winter and the merchant's son had asked the girl to go with him
to a skating party. Hugh, however, did not know that. He felt suddenly
old. When he asked the girl a question she was confused. Her voice
trembled.
When the class was dismissed an amazing thing happened. He asked the
merchant's son to stay for a moment and, when the two were alone
together in the room, he grew suddenly and furiously angry. His voice
was, however, cold and steady. "Young man," he said, "you do not come
into this room to write on the back of a book and waste your time. If I
see anything of the kind again I'll do something you don't expect. I'll
throw you out through a window, that's what I'll do."
Hugh made a gesture and the young man went away, white and silent. Hugh
felt miserable. For several days he thought about the girl who had
quite accidentally attracted his attention. "I'll get acquainted with
her. I'll find out about her," he thought.
It was not an unusual thing for professors in the college at Union
Valley to take students home to their houses. Hugh decided he would
take the girl to his home. He thought about it several days and late
one afternoon saw her going down the college hill ahead of him.
The girl's name was Mary Cochran and she had come to the school but a
few months before from a place called Huntersburg, Illinois, no doubt
just such another place as Union Valley. He knew nothing of her except
that her father was dead, her mother too, perhaps. He walked rapidly
down the hill to overtake her. "Miss Cochran," he called, and was
surprised to find that his voice trembled a little. "What am I so eager
about?" he asked himself. A new life began in Hugh Walker's house. It
was good for the man to have some one there who did not belong to him,
and Winifred Walker and the children accepted the presence of the girl.
Winifred urged her to come again. She did come several times a week.
To Mary Cochran it was comforting to be in the presence of a family of
children. On winter afternoons she took Hugh's two sons and a sled and
went to a small hill near the house. Shouts arose. Mary Cochran pulled
the sled up the hill and the children followed. Then they all came
tearing down together.
The girl, developing rapidly into womanhood, looked upon Hugh Walker as
something that stood completely outside her own life. She and the man
who had become suddenly and intensely interested in her had little to
say to each other and Winifred seemed to have accepted her without
question as an addition to the household. Often in the afternoon when
the two negro women were busy she went away leaving the two older
children in Mary's charge.
It was late afternoon and perhaps Hugh had walked home with Mary from
the college. In the spring he worked in the neglected garden. It had
been plowed and planted, but he took a hoe and rake and puttered about.
The children played about the house with the college girl. Hugh did not
look at them but at her. "She is one of the world of people with whom I
live and with whom I am supposed to work here," he thought. "Unlike
Winifred and these children she does not belong to me. I could go to
her now, touch her fingers, look at her and then go away and never see
her again."
That thought was a comfort to the distraught man. In the evening when
he went out to walk the sense of distance that lay all about him did
not tempt him to walk and walk, going half insanely forward for hours,
trying to break through an intangible wall.
He thought about Mary Cochran. She was a girl from a country town. She
must be like millions of American girls. He wondered what went on in
her mind as she sat in his class-room, as she walked beside him along
the streets of Union Valley, as she played with the children in the
yard beside his house.
In the winter, when in the growing darkness of a late afternoon Mary
and the children built a snow man in the yard, he went upstairs and
stood in the darkness to look out a window. The tall straight figure of
the girl, dimly seen, moved quickly about. "Well, nothing has happened
to her. She may be anything or nothing. Her figure is like a young tree
that has not borne fruit," he thought. He went away to his own room and
sat for a long time in the darkness. That night when he left the house
for his evening's walk he did not stay long but hurried home and went
to his own room. He locked the door. Unconsciously he did not want
Winifred to come to the door and disturb his thoughts. Sometimes she
did that.
All the time she read novels. She read the novels of Robert Louis
Stevenson. When she had read them all she began again.
Sometimes she came upstairs and stood talking by his door. She told
some tale, repeated some wise saying that had fallen unexpectedly from
the lips of the children. Occasionally she came into the room and
turned out the light. There was a couch by a window. She went to sit on
the edge of the couch. Something happened. It was as it had been before
their marriage. New life came into her figure. He also went to sit on
the couch and she put up her hand and touched his face.
Hugh did not want that to happen now. He stood within the room for a
moment and then unlocked the door and went to the head of the stairs.
"Be quiet when you come up, Winifred. I have a headache and am going to
try to sleep," he lied.
When he had gone back to his own room and locked the door again he felt
safe. He did not undress but threw himself on the couch and turned out
the light.
He thought about Mary Cochran, the school girl, but was sure he thought
about her in a quite impersonal way. She was like the woman going to
milk cows he had seen across hills when he was a young fellow and
walked far and wide over the country to cure the restlessness in
himself. In his life she was like the man who threw the stone at dog.
"Well, she is unformed; she is like a young tree," he told himself
again. "People are like that. They just grow up suddenly out of
childhood. It will happen to my own children. My little Winifred that
cannot yet say words will suddenly be like this girl. I have not
selected her to think about for any particular reason. For some reason
I have drawn away from life and she has brought me back. It might have
happened when I saw a child playing in the street or an old man going
up a stairway into a house. She does not belong to me. She will go away
out of my sight. Winifred and the children will stay on and on here and
I will stay on and on. We are imprisoned by the fact that we belong to
each other. This Mary Cochran is free, or at least she is free as far
as this prison is concerned. No doubt she will, after a while make a
prison of her own and live in it, but I will have nothing to do with
the matter."
By the time Mary Cochran was in her third year in the college at Union
Valley she had become almost a fixture in the Walker household. Still
she did not know Hugh. She knew the children better than he did,
perhaps better than their mother. In the fall she and the two boys went
to the woods to gather nuts. In the winter they went skating on a
little pond near the house.
Winifred accepted her as she accepted everything, the service of the
two negroes, the coming of the children, the habitual silence of her
husband.
And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly Hugh's silence, that had
lasted all through his married life, was broken up. He walked homeward
with a German who had the chair of modern languages in the school and
got into a violent quarrel. He stopped to speak to men on the street.
When he went to putter about in the garden he whistled and sang.
One afternoon in the fall he came home and found the whole family
assembled in the living room of the house. The children were playing on
the floor and the negress sat in the chair by the window with his
youngest child in her arms, crooning one of the negro songs. Mary
Cochran was there. She sat reading a book.
Hugh walked directly toward her and looked over her shoulder. At that
moment Winifred came into the room. He reached forward and snatched the
book out of the girl's hands. She looked up startled. With an oath he
threw it into the fire that burned in an open grate at the side of the
room. A flood of words ran from him. He cursed books and people and
schools. "Damn it all," he said. "What makes you want to read about
life? What makes people want to think about life? Why don't they live?
Why don't they leave books and thoughts and schools alone?"
He turned to look at his wife who had grown pale and stared at him with
a queer fixed uncertain stare. The old negro woman got up and went
quickly away. The two older children began to cry. Hugh was miserable.
He looked at the startled girl in the chair who also had tears in her
eyes, and at his wife. His fingers pulled nervously at his coat. To the
two women he looked like a boy who had been caught stealing food in a
pantry. "I am having one of my silly irritable spells," he said,
looking at his wife but in reality addressing the girl. "You see I am
more serious than I pretend to be. I was not irritated by your book but
by something else. I see so much that can be done in life and I do so
little."
He went upstairs to his own room wondering why he had lied to the two
women, why he continually lied to himself.
Did he lie to himself? He tried to answer the question but couldn't. He
was like one who walks in the darkness of the hallway of a house and
comes to a blank wall. The old desire to run away from life, to wear
himself out physically, came back upon him like a madness.
For a long time he stood in the darkness inside his own room. The
children stopped crying and the house became quiet again. He could hear
his wife's voice speaking softly and presently the back door of the
house banged and he knew the schoolgirl had gone away.
Life in the house began again. Nothing happened. Hugh ate his dinner in
silence and went for a long walk. For two weeks Mary Cochran did not
come to his house and then one day he saw her on the college grounds.
She was no longer one of his pupils. "Please do not desert us because
of my rudeness," he said. The girl blushed and said nothing. When he
got home that evening she was in the yard beside the house playing with
the children. He went at once to his own room. A hard smile came and
went on his face. "She isn't like a young tree any more. She is almost
like Winifred. She is almost like a person who belongs here, who
belongs to me and my life," he thought.
* * * * *
Mary Cochran's visits to the Walker household came to an end very
abruptly. One evening when Hugh was in his room she came up the
stairway with the two boys. She had dined with the family and was
putting the two boys into their beds. It was a privilege she claimed
when she dined with the Walkers.
Hugh had hurried upstairs immediately after dining. He knew where his
wife was. She was downstairs, sitting under a lamp, reading one of the
books of Robert Louis Stevenson.
For a long time Hugh could hear the voices of his children on the floor
above. Then the thing happened.
Mary Cochran came down the stairway that led past the door of his room.
She stopped, turned back and climbed the stairs again to the room
above. Hugh arose and stepped into the hallway. The schoolgirl had
returned to the children's room because she had been suddenly overtaken
with a hunger to kiss Hugh's oldest boy, now a lad of nine. She crept
into the room and stood for a long time looking at the two boys, who
unaware of her presence had gone to sleep. Then she stole forward and
kissed the boy lightly. When she went out of the room Hugh stood in the
darkness waiting for her. He took hold of her hand and led her down the
stairs to his own room.
She was terribly afraid and her fright in an odd way pleased him.
"Well," he whispered, "you can't understand now what's going to happen
here but some day you will. I'm going to kiss you and then I'm going to
ask you to go out of this house and never come back."
He held the girl against his body and kissed her upon the cheeks and
lips. When he led her to the door she was so weak with fright and with
new, strange, trembling desires that she could with difficulty make her
way down the stair and into his wife's presence. "She will lie now," he
thought, and heard her voice coming up the stairs like an echo to his
thoughts. "I have a terrible headache. I must hurry home," he heard her
voice saying. The voice was dull and heavy. It was not the voice of a
young girl.
"She is no longer like a young tree," he thought. He was glad and proud
of what he had done. When he heard the door at the back of the house
close softly his heart jumped. A strange quivering light came into his
eyes. "She will be imprisoned but I will have nothing to do with it.
She will never belong to me. My hands will never build a prison for
her," he thought with grim pleasure.
Her name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father's
farm in Vermont. For several generations the Leanders had all lived on
the same farm and had all married thin women, and so she was thin. The
farm lay in the shadow of a mountain and the soil was not very rich.
From the beginning and for several generations there had been a great
many sons and few daughters in the family. The sons had gone west or to
New York City and the daughters had stayed at home and thought such
thoughts as come to New England women who see the sons of their
fathers' neighbors slipping away, one by one, into the West.
Her father's house was a small white frame affair and when you went out
at the back door, past a small barn and chicken house, you got into a
path that ran up the side of a hill and into an orchard. The trees were
all old and gnarled. At the back of the orchard the hill dropped away
and bare rocks showed.
Inside the fence a large grey rock stuck high up out of the ground. As
Elsie sat with her back to the rock, with a mangled hillside at her
feet, she could see several large mountains, apparently but a short
distance away, and between herself and the mountains lay many tiny
fields surrounded by neatly built stone walls. Everywhere rocks
appeared. Large ones, too heavy to be moved, stuck out of the ground in
the centre of the fields. The fields were like cups filled with a green
liquid that turned grey in the fall and white in the winter. The
mountains, far off but apparently near at hand, were like giants ready
at any moment to reach out their hands and take the cups one by one and
drink off the green liquid. The large rocks in the fields were like the
thumbs of the giants.
Elsie had three brothers, born before her, but they had all gone away.
Two of them had gone to live with her uncle in the West and her oldest
brother had gone to New York City where he had married and prospered.
All through his youth and manhood her father had worked hard and had
lived a hard life, but his son in New York City had begun to send money
home, and after that things went better. He still worked every day
about the barn or in the fields but he did not worry about the future.
Elsie's mother did house work in the mornings and in the afternoons sat
in a rocking chair in her tiny living room and thought of her sons
while she crocheted table covers and tidies for the backs of chairs.
She was a silent woman, very thin and with very thin bony hands. She
did not ease herself into a rocking chair but sat down and got up
suddenly, and when she crocheted her back was as straight as the back
of a drill sergeant.
The mother rarely spoke to the daughter. Sometimes in the afternoons as
the younger woman went up the hillside to her place by the rock at the
back of the orchard, her father came out of the barn and stopped her.
He put a hand on her shoulder and asked her where she was going. "To
the rock," she said and her father laughed. His laughter was like the
creaking of a rusty barn door hinge and the hand he had laid on her
shoulders was thin like her own hands and like her mother's hands. The
father went into the barn shaking his head. "She's like her mother. She
is herself like a rock," he thought. At the head of the path that led
from the house to the orchard there was a great cluster of bayberry
bushes. The New England farmer came out of his barn to watch his
daughter go along the path, but she had disappeared behind the bushes.
He looked away past his house to the fields and to the mountains in the
distance. He also saw the green cup-like fields and the grim mountains.
There was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of his half
worn-out old body. For a long time he stood in silence and then,
knowing from long experience the danger of having thoughts, he went
back into the barn and busied himself with the mending of an
agricultural tool that had been mended many times before.
The son of the Leanders who went to live in New York City was the
father of one son, a thin sensitive boy who looked like Elsie. The son
died when he was twenty-three years old and some years later the father
died and left his money to the old people on the New England farm. The
two Leanders who had gone west had lived there with their father's
brother, a farmer, until they grew into manhood. Then Will, the
younger, got a job on a railroad. He was killed one winter morning. It
was a cold snowy day and when the freight train he was in charge of as
conductor left the city of Des Moines, he started to run over the tops
of the cars. His feet slipped and he shot down into space. That was the
end of him.
Of the new generation there was only Elsie and her brother Tom, whom
she had never seen, left alive. Her father and mother talked of going
west to Tom for two years before they came to a decision. Then it took
another year to dispose of the farm and make preparations. During the
whole time Elsie did not think much about the change about to take
place in her life.
The trip west on the railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself. In
spite of her detached attitude toward life she became excited. Her
mother sat up very straight and stiff in the seat in the sleeping car
and her father walked up and down in the aisle. After a night when the
younger of the two women did not sleep but lay awake with red burning
cheeks and with her thin fingers incessantly picking at the bed clothes
in her berth while the train went through towns and cities, crawled up
the sides of hills and fell down into forest-clad valleys, she got up
and dressed to sit all day looking at a new kind of land. The train ran
for a day and through another sleepless night in a flat land where
every field was as large as a farm in her own country. Towns appeared
and disappeared in a continual procession. The whole land was so unlike
anything she had ever known that she began to feel unlike herself. In
the valley where she had been born and where she had lived all her days
everything had an air of finality. Nothing could be changed. The tiny
fields were chained to the earth. They were fixed in their places and
surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the mountains that
looked down at them were as unchangeable as the passing days. She had a
feeling they had always been so, would always be so.
Elsie sat like her mother, upright in the car seat and with a back like
the back of a drill sergeant. The train ran swiftly along through Ohio
and Indiana. Her thin hands like her mother's hands were crossed and
locked. One passing casually through the car might have thought both
women prisoners handcuffed and bound to their seats. Night came on and
she again got into her berth. Again she lay awake and her thin cheeks
became flushed, but she thought new thoughts. Her hands were no longer
gripped together and she did not pick at the bed clothes. Twice during
the night she stretched herself and yawned, a thing she had never in
her life done before. The train stopped at a town on the prairies, and
as there was something the matter with one of the wheels of the car in
which she lay the trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it.
There was a great pounding and shouting. When the train went on its way
she wanted to get out of her berth and run up and down in the aisle of
houses for other people but our own house he did not build very
strong!" He shook his head sorrowfully. "My sister the actress has got
into trouble. Our house is not built very strongly," he said as I went
away along the path.
* * * * *
For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered
every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a
murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for
the deed. The tale runs something like this--
The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged,
worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman and lived with his
wife and his wife's mother in an apartment in Thirty-second Street. He
loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was
employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the
city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy
stolid looking man with grey eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman
in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a
sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop had a
desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out sheets containing
the record of the work done by each man in his department. When he
looked up he could see the girl sitting at work at her desk. The notion
got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely. He did not think of
trying to draw close to her or of winning her love. He looked at her as
one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in October
when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold. "She is a
pure, virginal thing," he thought vaguely. "What can she be thinking
about as she sits there by the window at work."
In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his
apartment in Thirty-second Street and into the presence of his wife and
his mother-in-law. All day in the shop and during the evening at home
he carried her figure about with him in his mind. As he stood by a
window in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central
railroad tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there
beside him. Down below women walked in the street and in every woman he
saw there was something of the Iowa girl. One woman walked as she did,
another made a gesture with her hand that reminded of her. All the
women he saw except his wife and his mother-in-law were like the girl
he had taken inside himself.
The two women in his own house puzzled and confused him. They became
suddenly unlovely and commonplace. His wife in particular was like some
strange unlovely growth that had attached itself to his body.
In the evening after the day at the factory he went home to his own
place and had dinner. He had always been a silent man and when he did
not talk no one minded. After dinner he with his wife went to a picture
show. There were two children and his wife expected another. They came
into the apartment and sat down. The climb up two flights of stairs had
wearied his wife. She sat in a chair beside her mother groaning with
weariness.
The mother-in-law was the soul of goodness. She took the place of a
servant in the home and got no pay. When her daughter wanted to go to a
picture show she waved her hand and smiled. "Go on," she said. "I don't
want to go. I'd rather sit here." She got a book and sat reading. The
little boy of nine awoke and cried. He wanted to sit on the po-po. The
mother-in-law attended to that.
After the man and his wife came home the three people sat in silence
for an hour or two before bed time. The man pretended to read a
newspaper. He looked at his hands. Although he had washed them
carefully grease from the bicycle frames left dark stains under the
nails. He thought of the Iowa girl and of her white quick hands playing
over the keys of a typewriter. He felt dirty and uncomfortable.
The girl at the factory knew the foreman had fallen in love with her
and the thought excited her a little. Since her aunt's death she had
gone to live in a rooming house and had nothing to do in the evening.
Although the foreman meant nothing to her she could in a way use him.
To her he became a symbol. Sometimes he came into the office and stood
for a moment by the door. His large hands were covered with black
grease. She looked at him without seeing. In his place in her
imagination stood a tall slender young man. Of the foreman she saw only
the grey eyes that began to burn with a strange fire. The eyes
expressed eagerness, a humble and devout eagerness. In the presence of
a man with such eyes she felt she need not be afraid.
She wanted a lover who would come to her with such a look in his eyes.
Occasionally, perhaps once in two weeks, she stayed a little late at
the office, pretending to have work that must be finished. Through the
window she could see the foreman waiting. When everyone had gone she
closed her desk and went into the street. At the same moment the
foreman came out at the factory door.
They walked together along the street a half dozen blocks to where she
got aboard her car. The factory was in a place called South Chicago and
as they went along evening was coming on. The streets were lined with
small unpainted frame houses and dirty faced children ran screaming in
the dusty roadway. They crossed over a bridge. Two abandoned coal
barges lay rotting in the stream.
He went by her side walking heavily and striving to conceal his hands.
He had scrubbed them carefully before leaving the factory but they
seemed to him like heavy dirty pieces of waste matter hanging at his
side. Their walking together happened but a few times and during one
summer. "It's hot," he said. He never spoke to her of anything but the
weather. "It's hot," he said. "I think it may rain."
She dreamed of the lover who would some time come, a tall fair young
man, a rich man owning houses and lands. The workingman who walked
beside her had nothing to do with her conception of love. She walked
with him, stayed at the office until the others had gone to walk
unobserved with him because of his eyes, because of the eager thing in
his eyes that was at the same time humble, that bowed down to her. In
his presence there was no danger, could be no danger. He would never
attempt to approach too closely, to touch her with his hands. She was
safe with him.
In his apartment in the evening the man sat under the electric light
with his wife and his mother-in-law. In the next room his two children
were asleep. In a short time his wife would have another child. He had
been with her to a picture show and in a short time they would get into
bed together.
He would lie awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of
a bed where, in another room, his mother-in-law was crawling between
the sheets. Life was too intimate. He would lie awake eager, expectant
--expecting, what?
Nothing. Presently one of the children would cry. It wanted to get out
of bed and sit on the po-po. Nothing strange or unusual or lovely would
or could happen. Life was too close, intimate. Nothing that could
happen in the apartment could in any way stir him; the things his wife
might say, her occasional half-hearted outbursts of passion, the
goodness of his mother-in-law who did the work of a servant without
pay--
He sat in the apartment under the electric light pretending to read a
newspaper--thinking. He looked at his hands. They were large,
shapeless, a working-man's hands.
The figure of the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he
went out of the apartment and walked in silence through miles of
streets. It was not necessary to say words. He walked with her by a
sea, along the crest of a mountain. The night was clear and silent and
the stars shone. She also was a star. It was not necessary to say
words.
Her eyes were like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out
of dim, star lit plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off like the
stars," he thought. "She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the
stars she breathes, she lives, like myself she has being."
One evening, some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the
bicycle factory killed his wife and he is now in the courts being tried
for murder. Every day the newspapers are filled with the story. On the
evening of the murder he had taken his wife as usual to a picture show
and they started home at nine. In Thirty-second Street, at a corner
near their apartment building, the figure of a man darted suddenly out
of an alleyway and then darted back again. The incident may have put
the idea of killing his wife into the man's head.
They got to the entrance to the apartment building and stepped into a
dark hallway. Then quite suddenly and apparently without thought the
man took a knife out of his pocket. "Suppose that man who darted into
the alleyway had intended to kill us," he thought. Opening the knife he
whirled about and struck at his wife. He struck twice, a dozen times--
madly. There was a scream and his wife's body fell.
The janitor had neglected to light the gas in the lower hallway.
Afterwards, the foreman, decided, that was the reason he did it, that
and the fact that the dark slinking figure of a man darted out of an
alleyway and then darted back again. "Surely," he told himself, "I
could never have done it had the gas been lighted."
He stood in the hallway thinking. His wife was dead and with her had
died her unborn child. There was a sound of doors opening in the
apartments above. For several minutes nothing happened. His wife and
her unborn child were dead--that was all.
He ran upstairs thinking quickly. In the darkness on the lower stairway
he had put the knife back into his pocket and, as it turned out later,
there was no blood on his hands or on his clothes. The knife he later
washed carefully in the bathroom, when the excitement had died down a
little. He told everyone the same story. "There has been a holdup," he
explained. "A man came slinking out of an alleyway and followed me and
my wife home. He followed us into the hallway of the building and there
was no light. The janitor has neglected to light the gas." Well--there
had been a struggle and in the darkness his wife had been killed. He
could not tell how it had happened. "There was no light. The janitor
has neglected to light the gas," he kept saying.
For a day or two they did not question him specially and he had time to
get rid of the knife. He took a long walk and threw it away into the
river in South Chicago where the two abandoned coal barges lay rotting
under the bridge, the bridge he had crossed when on the summer evenings
he walked to the street car with the girl who was virginal and pure,
who was far off and unattainable, like a star and yet not like a star.
And then he was arrested and right away he confessed--told everything.
He said he did not know why he killed his wife and was careful to say
nothing of the girl at the office. The newspapers tried to discover the
motive for the crime. They are still trying. Someone had seen him on
the few evenings when he walked with the girl and she was dragged into
the affair and had her picture printed in the papers. That has been
annoying for her as of course she has been able to prove she had
nothing to do with the man.
* * * * *
Yesterday morning a heavy fog lay over our village here at the edge of
the city and I went for a long walk in the early morning. As I returned
out of the lowlands into our hill country I met the old man whose
family has so many and such strange ramifications. For a time he walked
beside me holding the little dog in his arms. It was cold and the dog
whined and shivered. In the fog the old man's face was indistinct. It
moved slowly back and forth with the fog banks of the upper air and
with the tops of trees. He spoke of the man who has killed his wife and
whose name is being shouted in the pages of the city newspapers that
come to our village each morning. As he walked beside me he launched
into a long tale concerning a life he and his brother, who has now
become a murderer, once lived together. "He is my brother," he said
over and over, shaking his head. He seemed afraid I would not believe.
There was a fact that must be established. "We were boys together that
man and I," he began again. "You see we played together in a barn back
of our father's house. Our father went away to sea in a ship. That is
the way our names became confused. You understand that. We have
different names, but we are brothers. We had the same father. We played
together in a barn back of our father's house. For hours we lay
together in the hay in the barn and it was warm there."
In the fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled
tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth
like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe
the story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything
concerning the relationship of men and women became confused, a muddle.
The spirit of the man who had killed his wife came into the body of the
little old man there by the roadside.
It was striving to tell me the story it would never be able to tell in
the court room in the city, in the presence of the judge. The whole
story of mankind's loneliness, of the effort to reach out to
unattainable beauty tried to get itself expressed from the lips of a
mumbling old man, crazed with loneliness, who stood by the side of a
country road on a foggy morning holding a little dog in his arms.
The arms of the old man held the dog so closely that it began to whine
with pain. A sort of convulsion shook his body. The soul seemed
striving to wrench itself out of the body, to fly away through the fog,
down across the plain to the city, to the singer, the politician, the
millionaire, the murderer, to its brothers, cousins, sisters, down in
the city. The intensity of the old man's desire was terrible and in
sympathy my body began to tremble. His arms tightened about the body of
the little dog so that it cried with pain. I stepped forward and tore
the arms away and the dog fell to the ground and lay whining. No doubt
it had been injured. Perhaps ribs had been crushed. The old man stared
at the dog lying at his feet as in the hallway of the apartment
building the worker from the bicycle factory had stared at his dead
wife. "We are brothers," he said again. "We have different names but we
are brothers. Our father you understand went off to sea."
* * * * *
I am sitting in my house in the country and it rains. Before my eyes
the hills fall suddenly away and there are the flat plains and beyond
the plains the city. An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest
went past my door and the little dog was not with him. It may be that
as we talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion. It
may be that the dog like the workman's wife and her unborn child is now
dead. The leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are
falling like rain--the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight
down, heavily. The rain beat them brutally down. They are denied a last
golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be carried away,
out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.
Winifred Walker understood some things clearly enough. She understood
that when a man is put behind iron bars he is in prison. Marriage was
marriage to her.
It was that to her husband Hugh Walker, too, as he found out. Still he
didn't understand. It might have been better had he understood, then he
might at least have found himself. He didn't. After his marriage five
or six years passed like shadows of wind blown trees playing on a wall.
He was in a drugged, silent state. In the morning and evening every day
he saw his wife. Occasionally something happened within him and he
kissed her. Three children were born. He taught mathematics in the
little college at Union Valley, Illinois, and waited.
For what? He began to ask himself that question. It came to him at
first faintly like an echo. Then it became an insistent question. "I
want answering," the question seemed to say. "Stop fooling along. Give
your attention to me."
Hugh walked through the streets of the Illinois town. "Well, I'm
married. I have children," he muttered.
He went home to his own house. He did not have to live within his
income from the little college, and so the house was rather large and
comfortably furnished. There was a negro woman who took care of the
children and another who cooked and did the housework. One of the women
was in the habit of crooning low soft negro songs. Sometimes Hugh
stopped at the house door and listened. He could see through the glass
in the door into the room where his family was gathered. Two children
played with blocks on the floor. His wife sat sewing. The old negress
sat in a rocking chair with his youngest child, a baby, in her arms.
The whole room seemed under the spell of the crooning voice. Hugh fell
under the spell. He waited in silence. The voice carried him far away
somewhere, into forests, along the edges of swamps. There was nothing
very definite about his thinking. He would have given a good deal to be
able to be definite.
He went inside the house. "Well, here I am," his mind seemed to say,
"here I am. This is my house, these are my children."
He looked at his wife Winifred. She had grown a little plump since
their marriage. "Perhaps it is the mother in her coming out, she has
had three children," he thought.
The crooning old negro woman went away, taking the youngest child with
her. He and Winifred held a fragmentary conversation. "Have you been
well to-day, dear?" she asked. "Yes," he answered.
If the two older children were intent on their play his chain of
thought was not broken. His wife never broke it as the children did
when they came running to pull and tear at him. Throughout the early
evening, after the children went to bed, the surface of the shell of
him was not broken at all. A brother college professor and his wife
came in or he and Winifred went to a neighbor's house. There was talk.
Even when he and Winifred were alone together in the house there was
talk. "The shutters are becoming loose," she said. The house was an old
one and had green shutters. They were continually coming loose and at
night blew back and forth on their hinges making a loud banging noise.
Hugh made some remark. He said he would see a carpenter about the
shutters. Then his mind began playing away, out of his wife's presence,
out of the house, in another sphere. "I am a house and my shutters are
loose," his mind said. He thought of himself as a living thing inside a
shell, trying to break out. To avoid distracting conversation he got a
book and pretended to read. When his wife had also begun to read he
watched her closely, intently. Her nose was so and so and her eyes so
and so. She had a little habit with her hands. When she became lost in
the pages of a book the hand crept up to her cheek, touched it and then
was put down again. Her hair was not in very good order. Since her
marriage and the coming of the children she had not taken good care of
her body. When she read her body slumped down in the chair. It became
bag-like. She was one whose race had been run.
Hugh's mind played all about the figure of his wife but did not really
approach the woman who sat before him. It was so with his children.
Sometimes, just for a moment, they were living things to him, things as
alive as his own body. Then for long periods they seemed to go far away
like the crooning voice of the negress.
It was odd that the negress was always real enough. He felt an
understanding existed between himself and the negress. She was outside
his life. He could look at her as at a tree. Sometimes in the evening
when she had been putting the children to bed in the upper part of the
house and when he sat with a book in his hand pretending to read, the
old black woman came softly through the room, going toward the kitchen.
She did not look at Winifred, but at Hugh. He thought there was a
strange, soft light in her old eyes. "I understand you, my son," her
eyes seemed to say.
Hugh was determined to get his life cleaned up if he could manage it.
"All right, then," he said, as though speaking to a third person in the
room. He was quite sure there was a third person there and that the
third person was within himself, inside his body. He addressed the
third person.
"Well, there is this woman, this person I married, she has the air of
something accomplished," he said, as though speaking aloud. Sometimes
it almost seemed to him he had spoken aloud and he looked quickly and
sharply at his wife. She continued reading, lost in her book. "That may
be it," he went on. "She has had these children. They are accomplished
facts to her. They came out of her body, not out of mine. Her body has
done something. Now it rests. If she is becoming a little bag-like,
that's all right."
He got up and making some trivial excuse got out of the room and out of
the house. In his youth and young manhood the long periods of walking
straight ahead through the country, that had come upon him like
visitations of some recurring disease, had helped. Walking solved
nothing. It only tired his body, but when his body was tired he could
sleep. After many days of walking and sleeping something occurred. The
reality of life was in some queer way re-established in his mind. Some
little thing happened. A man walking in the road before him threw a
stone at a dog that ran barking out of a farm-house. It was evening
perhaps, and he walked in a country of low hills. Suddenly he came out
upon the top of one of the hills. Before him the road dipped down into
darkness but to the west, across fields, there was a farm-house. The
sun had gone down, but a faint glow lit the western horizon. A. woman
came out of the farmhouse and went toward a barn. He could not see her
figure distinctly. She seemed to be carrying something, no doubt a milk
pail; she was going to a barn to milk a cow.
The man in the road who had thrown the stone at the farm dog had turned
and seen Hugh in the road behind him. He was a little ashamed of having
been afraid of the dog. For a moment he seemed about to wait and speak
to Hugh, and then was overcome with confusion and hurried away. He was
a middle-aged man, but quite suddenly and unexpectedly he looked like a
boy.
As for the farm woman, dimly seen going toward a distant barn, she also
stopped and looked toward him. It was impossible she should have seen
him. She was dressed in white and he could see her but dimly against
the blackish green of the trees of an orchard behind her. Still she
stood looking and seemed to look directly into his eyes. He had a queer
sensation of her having been lifted by an unseen hand and brought to
him. It seemed to him he knew all about her life, all about the life of
the man who had thrown the stone at the dog.
In his youth, when life had stepped out of his grasp, Hugh had walked
and walked until several such things had occurred and then suddenly he
was all right again and could again work and live among men.
After his marriage and after such an evening at home he started walking
rapidly as soon as he left the house. As quickly as possible he got out
of town and struck out along a road that led over the rolling prairie.
"Well, I can't walk for days and days as I did once," he thought.
"There are certain facts in life and I must face facts. Winifred, my
wife, is a fact, and my children are facts. I must get my fingers on
facts. I must live by them and with them. It's the way lives are
lived."
Hugh got out of town and on to a road that ran between cornfields. He
was an athletic looking man and wore loose fitting clothes. He went
along distraught and puzzled. In a way he felt like a man capable of
taking a man's place in life and in another way he didn't at all.
The country spread out, wide, in all directions. It was always night
when he walked thus and he could not see, but the realization of
distances was always with him. "Everything goes on and on but I stand
still," he thought. He had been a professor in the little college for
six years. Young men and women had come into a room and he had taught
them. It was nothing. Words and figures had been played with. An effort
had been made to arouse minds.
For what?
There was the old question, always coming back, always wanting
answering as a little animal wants food. Hugh gave up trying to answer.
He walked rapidly, trying to grow physically tired. He made his mind
attend to little things in the effort to forget distances. One night he
got out of the road and walked completely around a cornfield. He
counted the stalks in each hill of corn and computed the number of
stalks in a whole field. "It should yield twelve hundred bushels of
corn, that field," he said to himself dumbly, as though it mattered to
him. He pulled a little handful of cornsilk out of the top of an ear of
corn and played with it. He tried to fashion himself a yellow
moustache. "I'd be quite a fellow with a trim yellow moustache," he
thought.
One day in his class-room Hugh suddenly began to look with new interest
at his pupils. A young girl attracted his attention. She sat beside the
son of a Union Valley merchant and the young man was writing something
on the back of a book. She looked at it and then turned her head away.
The young man waited.
It was winter and the merchant's son had asked the girl to go with him
to a skating party. Hugh, however, did not know that. He felt suddenly
old. When he asked the girl a question she was confused. Her voice
trembled.
When the class was dismissed an amazing thing happened. He asked the
merchant's son to stay for a moment and, when the two were alone
together in the room, he grew suddenly and furiously angry. His voice
was, however, cold and steady. "Young man," he said, "you do not come
into this room to write on the back of a book and waste your time. If I
see anything of the kind again I'll do something you don't expect. I'll
throw you out through a window, that's what I'll do."
Hugh made a gesture and the young man went away, white and silent. Hugh
felt miserable. For several days he thought about the girl who had
quite accidentally attracted his attention. "I'll get acquainted with
her. I'll find out about her," he thought.
It was not an unusual thing for professors in the college at Union
Valley to take students home to their houses. Hugh decided he would
take the girl to his home. He thought about it several days and late
one afternoon saw her going down the college hill ahead of him.
The girl's name was Mary Cochran and she had come to the school but a
few months before from a place called Huntersburg, Illinois, no doubt
just such another place as Union Valley. He knew nothing of her except
that her father was dead, her mother too, perhaps. He walked rapidly
down the hill to overtake her. "Miss Cochran," he called, and was
surprised to find that his voice trembled a little. "What am I so eager
about?" he asked himself. A new life began in Hugh Walker's house. It
was good for the man to have some one there who did not belong to him,
and Winifred Walker and the children accepted the presence of the girl.
Winifred urged her to come again. She did come several times a week.
To Mary Cochran it was comforting to be in the presence of a family of
children. On winter afternoons she took Hugh's two sons and a sled and
went to a small hill near the house. Shouts arose. Mary Cochran pulled
the sled up the hill and the children followed. Then they all came
tearing down together.
The girl, developing rapidly into womanhood, looked upon Hugh Walker as
something that stood completely outside her own life. She and the man
who had become suddenly and intensely interested in her had little to
say to each other and Winifred seemed to have accepted her without
question as an addition to the household. Often in the afternoon when
the two negro women were busy she went away leaving the two older
children in Mary's charge.
It was late afternoon and perhaps Hugh had walked home with Mary from
the college. In the spring he worked in the neglected garden. It had
been plowed and planted, but he took a hoe and rake and puttered about.
The children played about the house with the college girl. Hugh did not
look at them but at her. "She is one of the world of people with whom I
live and with whom I am supposed to work here," he thought. "Unlike
Winifred and these children she does not belong to me. I could go to
her now, touch her fingers, look at her and then go away and never see
her again."
That thought was a comfort to the distraught man. In the evening when
he went out to walk the sense of distance that lay all about him did
not tempt him to walk and walk, going half insanely forward for hours,
trying to break through an intangible wall.
He thought about Mary Cochran. She was a girl from a country town. She
must be like millions of American girls. He wondered what went on in
her mind as she sat in his class-room, as she walked beside him along
the streets of Union Valley, as she played with the children in the
yard beside his house.
In the winter, when in the growing darkness of a late afternoon Mary
and the children built a snow man in the yard, he went upstairs and
stood in the darkness to look out a window. The tall straight figure of
the girl, dimly seen, moved quickly about. "Well, nothing has happened
to her. She may be anything or nothing. Her figure is like a young tree
that has not borne fruit," he thought. He went away to his own room and
sat for a long time in the darkness. That night when he left the house
for his evening's walk he did not stay long but hurried home and went
to his own room. He locked the door. Unconsciously he did not want
Winifred to come to the door and disturb his thoughts. Sometimes she
did that.
All the time she read novels. She read the novels of Robert Louis
Stevenson. When she had read them all she began again.
Sometimes she came upstairs and stood talking by his door. She told
some tale, repeated some wise saying that had fallen unexpectedly from
the lips of the children. Occasionally she came into the room and
turned out the light. There was a couch by a window. She went to sit on
the edge of the couch. Something happened. It was as it had been before
their marriage. New life came into her figure. He also went to sit on
the couch and she put up her hand and touched his face.
Hugh did not want that to happen now. He stood within the room for a
moment and then unlocked the door and went to the head of the stairs.
"Be quiet when you come up, Winifred. I have a headache and am going to
try to sleep," he lied.
When he had gone back to his own room and locked the door again he felt
safe. He did not undress but threw himself on the couch and turned out
the light.
He thought about Mary Cochran, the school girl, but was sure he thought
about her in a quite impersonal way. She was like the woman going to
milk cows he had seen across hills when he was a young fellow and
walked far and wide over the country to cure the restlessness in
himself. In his life she was like the man who threw the stone at dog.
"Well, she is unformed; she is like a young tree," he told himself
again. "People are like that. They just grow up suddenly out of
childhood. It will happen to my own children. My little Winifred that
cannot yet say words will suddenly be like this girl. I have not
selected her to think about for any particular reason. For some reason
I have drawn away from life and she has brought me back. It might have
happened when I saw a child playing in the street or an old man going
up a stairway into a house. She does not belong to me. She will go away
out of my sight. Winifred and the children will stay on and on here and
I will stay on and on. We are imprisoned by the fact that we belong to
each other. This Mary Cochran is free, or at least she is free as far
as this prison is concerned. No doubt she will, after a while make a
prison of her own and live in it, but I will have nothing to do with
the matter."
By the time Mary Cochran was in her third year in the college at Union
Valley she had become almost a fixture in the Walker household. Still
she did not know Hugh. She knew the children better than he did,
perhaps better than their mother. In the fall she and the two boys went
to the woods to gather nuts. In the winter they went skating on a
little pond near the house.
Winifred accepted her as she accepted everything, the service of the
two negroes, the coming of the children, the habitual silence of her
husband.
And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly Hugh's silence, that had
lasted all through his married life, was broken up. He walked homeward
with a German who had the chair of modern languages in the school and
got into a violent quarrel. He stopped to speak to men on the street.
When he went to putter about in the garden he whistled and sang.
One afternoon in the fall he came home and found the whole family
assembled in the living room of the house. The children were playing on
the floor and the negress sat in the chair by the window with his
youngest child in her arms, crooning one of the negro songs. Mary
Cochran was there. She sat reading a book.
Hugh walked directly toward her and looked over her shoulder. At that
moment Winifred came into the room. He reached forward and snatched the
book out of the girl's hands. She looked up startled. With an oath he
threw it into the fire that burned in an open grate at the side of the
room. A flood of words ran from him. He cursed books and people and
schools. "Damn it all," he said. "What makes you want to read about
life? What makes people want to think about life? Why don't they live?
Why don't they leave books and thoughts and schools alone?"
He turned to look at his wife who had grown pale and stared at him with
a queer fixed uncertain stare. The old negro woman got up and went
quickly away. The two older children began to cry. Hugh was miserable.
He looked at the startled girl in the chair who also had tears in her
eyes, and at his wife. His fingers pulled nervously at his coat. To the
two women he looked like a boy who had been caught stealing food in a
pantry. "I am having one of my silly irritable spells," he said,
looking at his wife but in reality addressing the girl. "You see I am
more serious than I pretend to be. I was not irritated by your book but
by something else. I see so much that can be done in life and I do so
little."
He went upstairs to his own room wondering why he had lied to the two
women, why he continually lied to himself.
Did he lie to himself? He tried to answer the question but couldn't. He
was like one who walks in the darkness of the hallway of a house and
comes to a blank wall. The old desire to run away from life, to wear
himself out physically, came back upon him like a madness.
For a long time he stood in the darkness inside his own room. The
children stopped crying and the house became quiet again. He could hear
his wife's voice speaking softly and presently the back door of the
house banged and he knew the schoolgirl had gone away.
Life in the house began again. Nothing happened. Hugh ate his dinner in
silence and went for a long walk. For two weeks Mary Cochran did not
come to his house and then one day he saw her on the college grounds.
She was no longer one of his pupils. "Please do not desert us because
of my rudeness," he said. The girl blushed and said nothing. When he
got home that evening she was in the yard beside the house playing with
the children. He went at once to his own room. A hard smile came and
went on his face. "She isn't like a young tree any more. She is almost
like Winifred. She is almost like a person who belongs here, who
belongs to me and my life," he thought.
* * * * *
Mary Cochran's visits to the Walker household came to an end very
abruptly. One evening when Hugh was in his room she came up the
stairway with the two boys. She had dined with the family and was
putting the two boys into their beds. It was a privilege she claimed
when she dined with the Walkers.
Hugh had hurried upstairs immediately after dining. He knew where his
wife was. She was downstairs, sitting under a lamp, reading one of the
books of Robert Louis Stevenson.
For a long time Hugh could hear the voices of his children on the floor
above. Then the thing happened.
Mary Cochran came down the stairway that led past the door of his room.
She stopped, turned back and climbed the stairs again to the room
above. Hugh arose and stepped into the hallway. The schoolgirl had
returned to the children's room because she had been suddenly overtaken
with a hunger to kiss Hugh's oldest boy, now a lad of nine. She crept
into the room and stood for a long time looking at the two boys, who
unaware of her presence had gone to sleep. Then she stole forward and
kissed the boy lightly. When she went out of the room Hugh stood in the
darkness waiting for her. He took hold of her hand and led her down the
stairs to his own room.
She was terribly afraid and her fright in an odd way pleased him.
"Well," he whispered, "you can't understand now what's going to happen
here but some day you will. I'm going to kiss you and then I'm going to
ask you to go out of this house and never come back."
He held the girl against his body and kissed her upon the cheeks and
lips. When he led her to the door she was so weak with fright and with
new, strange, trembling desires that she could with difficulty make her
way down the stair and into his wife's presence. "She will lie now," he
thought, and heard her voice coming up the stairs like an echo to his
thoughts. "I have a terrible headache. I must hurry home," he heard her
voice saying. The voice was dull and heavy. It was not the voice of a
young girl.
"She is no longer like a young tree," he thought. He was glad and proud
of what he had done. When he heard the door at the back of the house
close softly his heart jumped. A strange quivering light came into his
eyes. "She will be imprisoned but I will have nothing to do with it.
She will never belong to me. My hands will never build a prison for
her," he thought with grim pleasure.
Her name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father's
farm in Vermont. For several generations the Leanders had all lived on
the same farm and had all married thin women, and so she was thin. The
farm lay in the shadow of a mountain and the soil was not very rich.
From the beginning and for several generations there had been a great
many sons and few daughters in the family. The sons had gone west or to
New York City and the daughters had stayed at home and thought such
thoughts as come to New England women who see the sons of their
fathers' neighbors slipping away, one by one, into the West.
Her father's house was a small white frame affair and when you went out
at the back door, past a small barn and chicken house, you got into a
path that ran up the side of a hill and into an orchard. The trees were
all old and gnarled. At the back of the orchard the hill dropped away
and bare rocks showed.
Inside the fence a large grey rock stuck high up out of the ground. As
Elsie sat with her back to the rock, with a mangled hillside at her
feet, she could see several large mountains, apparently but a short
distance away, and between herself and the mountains lay many tiny
fields surrounded by neatly built stone walls. Everywhere rocks
appeared. Large ones, too heavy to be moved, stuck out of the ground in
the centre of the fields. The fields were like cups filled with a green
liquid that turned grey in the fall and white in the winter. The
mountains, far off but apparently near at hand, were like giants ready
at any moment to reach out their hands and take the cups one by one and
drink off the green liquid. The large rocks in the fields were like the
thumbs of the giants.
Elsie had three brothers, born before her, but they had all gone away.
Two of them had gone to live with her uncle in the West and her oldest
brother had gone to New York City where he had married and prospered.
All through his youth and manhood her father had worked hard and had
lived a hard life, but his son in New York City had begun to send money
home, and after that things went better. He still worked every day
about the barn or in the fields but he did not worry about the future.
Elsie's mother did house work in the mornings and in the afternoons sat
in a rocking chair in her tiny living room and thought of her sons
while she crocheted table covers and tidies for the backs of chairs.
She was a silent woman, very thin and with very thin bony hands. She
did not ease herself into a rocking chair but sat down and got up
suddenly, and when she crocheted her back was as straight as the back
of a drill sergeant.
The mother rarely spoke to the daughter. Sometimes in the afternoons as
the younger woman went up the hillside to her place by the rock at the
back of the orchard, her father came out of the barn and stopped her.
He put a hand on her shoulder and asked her where she was going. "To
the rock," she said and her father laughed. His laughter was like the
creaking of a rusty barn door hinge and the hand he had laid on her
shoulders was thin like her own hands and like her mother's hands. The
father went into the barn shaking his head. "She's like her mother. She
is herself like a rock," he thought. At the head of the path that led
from the house to the orchard there was a great cluster of bayberry
bushes. The New England farmer came out of his barn to watch his
daughter go along the path, but she had disappeared behind the bushes.
He looked away past his house to the fields and to the mountains in the
distance. He also saw the green cup-like fields and the grim mountains.
There was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of his half
worn-out old body. For a long time he stood in silence and then,
knowing from long experience the danger of having thoughts, he went
back into the barn and busied himself with the mending of an
agricultural tool that had been mended many times before.
The son of the Leanders who went to live in New York City was the
father of one son, a thin sensitive boy who looked like Elsie. The son
died when he was twenty-three years old and some years later the father
died and left his money to the old people on the New England farm. The
two Leanders who had gone west had lived there with their father's
brother, a farmer, until they grew into manhood. Then Will, the
younger, got a job on a railroad. He was killed one winter morning. It
was a cold snowy day and when the freight train he was in charge of as
conductor left the city of Des Moines, he started to run over the tops
of the cars. His feet slipped and he shot down into space. That was the
end of him.
Of the new generation there was only Elsie and her brother Tom, whom
she had never seen, left alive. Her father and mother talked of going
west to Tom for two years before they came to a decision. Then it took
another year to dispose of the farm and make preparations. During the
whole time Elsie did not think much about the change about to take
place in her life.
The trip west on the railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself. In
spite of her detached attitude toward life she became excited. Her
mother sat up very straight and stiff in the seat in the sleeping car
and her father walked up and down in the aisle. After a night when the
younger of the two women did not sleep but lay awake with red burning
cheeks and with her thin fingers incessantly picking at the bed clothes
in her berth while the train went through towns and cities, crawled up
the sides of hills and fell down into forest-clad valleys, she got up
and dressed to sit all day looking at a new kind of land. The train ran
for a day and through another sleepless night in a flat land where
every field was as large as a farm in her own country. Towns appeared
and disappeared in a continual procession. The whole land was so unlike
anything she had ever known that she began to feel unlike herself. In
the valley where she had been born and where she had lived all her days
everything had an air of finality. Nothing could be changed. The tiny
fields were chained to the earth. They were fixed in their places and
surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the mountains that
looked down at them were as unchangeable as the passing days. She had a
feeling they had always been so, would always be so.
Elsie sat like her mother, upright in the car seat and with a back like
the back of a drill sergeant. The train ran swiftly along through Ohio
and Indiana. Her thin hands like her mother's hands were crossed and
locked. One passing casually through the car might have thought both
women prisoners handcuffed and bound to their seats. Night came on and
she again got into her berth. Again she lay awake and her thin cheeks
became flushed, but she thought new thoughts. Her hands were no longer
gripped together and she did not pick at the bed clothes. Twice during
the night she stretched herself and yawned, a thing she had never in
her life done before. The train stopped at a town on the prairies, and
as there was something the matter with one of the wheels of the car in
which she lay the trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it.
There was a great pounding and shouting. When the train went on its way
she wanted to get out of her berth and run up and down in the aisle of