prepared, there was in her, even as a child, a hunger for the life of the
spirit. In her dreams women, beautifully gowned and with rings on their
hands, came to brush the wet, matted hair back from her forehead. Across
the little wooden bridge before her eyes came wonderful men, women, and
children. The children ran forward. They cried out to her. She thought of
them as brothers and sisters who were to come to live in the farmhouse and
who were to make the old house ring with laughter. The children ran toward
her with outstretched hands, but never arrived at the house. The bridge
extended itself. It stretched out under their feet so that they ran forward
forever on the bridge.
And behind the children came men and women, sometimes together, sometimes
walking alone. They did not seem like the children to belong to her. Like
the women who came to touch her hot forehead, they were beautifully gowned
and walked with stately dignity.
The child climbed out of the window and stood on the kitchen floor. Her
mother hurried about. She was feverishly active and often did not hear when
the child spoke. "I want to know about my brothers and sisters: where are
they, why don't they come here?" she asked, but the mother did not hear,
and if she did, had nothing to say. Sometimes she stopped to kiss the child
and tears came to her eyes. Then something cooking on the kitchen stove
demanded attention. "You run outside," she said hurriedly, and turned again
to her work.
* * * * *
From the chair where Clara sat at the wedding feast provided by the energy
of her father and the enthusiasm of Jim Priest, she could see over her
father's shoulder into the farm house kitchen. As when she was a child, she
closed her eyes and dreamed of another kind of feast. With a growing sense
of bitterness she realized that all her life, all through her girlhood and
young womanhood, she had been waiting for this, her wedding night, and
that now, having come, the occasion for which she had waited so long and
concerning which she had dreamed so many dreams, had aborted into an
occasion for the display of ugliness and vulgarity. Her father, the only
other person in the room in any way related to her, sat at the other end
of the long table. Her aunt had gone away on a visit, and in the crowded,
noisy room there was no woman to whom she could turn for understanding.
She looked past her father's shoulder and directly into the wide window
seat where she had spent so many hours of her childhood. Again she wanted
brothers and sisters. "The beautiful men and women of the dreams were meant
to come at this time, that's what the dreams were about; but, like the
unborn children that ran with outstretched hands, they cannot get over the
bridge and into the house," she thought vaguely. "I wish Mother had lived,
or that Kate Chanceller were here," she whispered to herself as, raising
her eyes, she looked at her father.
Clara felt like an animal driven into a corner and surrounded by foes.
Her father sat at the feast between two women, Mrs. Steve Hunter who was
inclined to corpulency, and a thin woman named Bowles, the wife of an
undertaker of Bidwell. They continually whispered, smiled, and nodded their
heads. Hugh sat on the opposite side of the same table, and when he raised
his eyes from the plate of food before him, could see past the head of a
large, masculine-looking woman into the farmhouse parlor where there was
another table, also filled with guests. Clara turned from looking at her
father to look at her husband. He was merely a tall man with a long face,
who could not raise his eyes. His long neck stuck itself out of a stiff
white collar. To Clara he was, at the moment, a being without personality,
one that the crowd at the table had swallowed up as it so busily swallowed
food and wine. When she looked at him he seemed to be drinking a good deal.
His glass was always being filled and emptied. At the suggestion of the
woman who sat beside him, he performed the task of emptying it, without
raising his eyes, and Steve Hunter, who sat on the other side of the table,
leaned over and filled it again. Steve like her father whispered and
winked. "On the night of my wedding I was piped, you bet, as piped as a
hatter. It's a good thing. It gives a man nerve," he explained to the
masculine-looking woman to whom he was telling, with a good deal of
attention to details, the tale of his own marriage night.
Clara did not look at Hugh again. What he did seemed no concern of hers.
Bowles the Bidwell undertaker had surrendered to the influence of the wine
that had been flowing freely since the guests arrived and now got to his
feet and began to talk. His wife tugged at his coat and tried to force him
back into his seat, but Tom Butterworth jerked her arm away. "Ah, let him
alone. He's got a story to tell," he said to the woman, who blushed and
put her handkerchief over her face. "Well, it's a fact, that's how it
happened," the undertaker declared in a loud voice. "You see the sleeves
of her nightgown were tied in hard knots by her rascally brothers. When I
tried to unfasten them with my teeth I bit big holes in the sleeves."
Clara gripped the arm of her chair. "If I can let the night pass without
showing these people how much I hate them I'll do well enough," she thought
grimly. She looked at the dishes laden with food and wished she could break
them one by one over the heads of her father's guests. As a relief to her
mind, she again looked past her father's head and through a doorway into
the kitchen.
In the big room three or four cooks were busily engaged in the preparation
of food, and waitresses continually brought steaming dishes and put them on
the tables. She thought of her mother's life, the life led in that room,
married to the man who was her own father and who no doubt, but for the
fact that circumstances had made him a man of wealth, would have been
satisfied to see his daughter led into just such another life.
"Kate was right about men. They want something from women, but what do they
care what kind of lives we lead after they get what they want?" she thought
grimly.
The more to separate herself from the feasting, laughing crowd, Clara
tried to think out the details of her mother's life. "It was the life of
a beast," she thought. Like herself, her mother had come to the house
with her husband on the night of her marriage. There was just such
another feast. The country was new then and the people for the most part
desperately poor. Still there was drinking. She had heard her father and
Jim Priest speak of the drinking bouts of their youth. The men came as they
had come now, and with them came women, women who had been coarsened by the
life they led. Pigs were killed and game brought from the forests. The men
drank, shouted, fought, and played practical jokes. Clara wondered if any
of the men and women in the room would dare go upstairs into her sleeping
room and tie knots in her night clothes. They had done that when her mother
came to the house as a bride. Then they had all gone away and her father
had taken his bride upstairs. He was drunk, and her own husband Hugh was
now getting drunk. Her mother had submitted. Her life had been a story of
submission. Kate Chanceller had said it was so married women lived, and
her mother's life had proven the truth of the statement. In the farmhouse
kitchen, where now three or four cooks worked so busily, she had worked her
life out alone. From the kitchen she had gone directly upstairs and to bed
with her husband. Once a week on Saturday afternoons she went into town and
stayed long enough to buy supplies for another week of cooking. "She must
have been kept going until she dropped down dead," Clara thought, and her
mind taking another turn, added, "and many others, both men and women, must
have been forced by circumstances to serve my father in the same blind way.
It was all done in order that prosperity and money with which to do vulgar
things might be his."
Clara's mother had brought but one child into the world. She wondered why.
Then she wondered if she would become the mother of a child. Her hands no
longer gripped the arms of her chair, but lay on the table before her. She
looked at them and they were strong. She was herself a strong woman. After
the feast was over and the guests had gone away, Hugh, given courage by the
drinks he continued to consume, would come upstairs to her. Some twist of
her mind made her forget her husband, and in fancy she felt herself about
to be attacked by a strange man on a dark road at the edge of a forest. The
man had tried to take her into his arms and kiss her and she had managed to
get her hands on his throat. Her hands lying on the table twitched
convulsively.
In the big farmhouse dining-room and in the parlor where the second table
of guests sat, the wedding feast went on. Afterward when she thought of it,
Clara always remembered her wedding feast as a horsey affair. Something
in the natures of Tom Butterworth and Jim Priest, she thought, expressed
itself that night. The jokes that went up and down the table were horsey,
and Clara thought the women who sat at the tables heavy and mare-like.
Jim did not come to the table to sit with the others, was in fact not
invited, but all evening he kept appearing and reappearing and had the air
of a master of ceremonies. Coming into the dining room he stood by the
door, scratching his head. Then he went out. It was as though he had
said to himself, "Well, it's all right, everything is going all right,
everything is lively, you see." All his life Jim had been a drinker of
whisky and knew his limitations. His system as a drinking man had always
been quite simple. On Saturday afternoons, when the work about the barns
was done for the day and the other employees had gone away, he went to sit
on the steps of a corncrib with the bottle in his hand. In the winter he
went to sit by the kitchen fire in a little house below the apple orchard
where he and the other employees slept. He took a long drink from the
bottle and then holding it in his hand sat for a time thinking of the
events of his life. Whisky made him somewhat sentimental. After one long
drink he thought of his youth in a town in Pennsylvania. He had been one
of six children, all boys, and at an early age his mother had died. Jim
thought of her and then of his father. When he had himself come west into
Ohio, and later when he was a soldier in the Civil War, he despised his
father and reverenced the memory of his mother. In the war he had found
himself physically unable to stand up before the enemy during a battle.
When the report of guns was heard and the other men of his company got
grimly into line and went forward, something happened to his legs and he
wanted to run away. So great was the desire in him that craftiness grew in
his brain. Watching his chance, he pretended to have been shot and fell to
the ground, and when the others had gone on crept away and hid himself. He
found it was not impossible to disappear altogether and reappear in another
place. The draft went into effect and many men not liking the notion of war
were willing to pay large sums to the men who would go in their places.
Jim went into the business of enlisting and deserting. All about him were
men talking of the necessity of saving the country, and for four years he
thought only of saving his own hide. Then suddenly the war was over and he
became a farm hand. As he worked all week in the fields, and in the evening
sometimes, as he lay in his bed and the moon came up, he thought of his
mother and of the nobility and sacrifice of her life. He wished to be such
another. After having two or three drinks out of the bottle, he admired his
father, who in the Pennsylvania town had borne the reputation of being a
liar and a rascal. After his mother's death his father had managed to marry
a widow who owned a farm. "The old man was a slick one," he said aloud,
tipping up the bottle and taking another long drink. "If I had stayed at
home until I got more understanding, the old man and I together might have
done something." He finished the bottle and went away to sleep on the hay,
or if it were winter, threw himself into one of the bunks in the bunk
house. He dreamed of becoming one who went through life beating people out
of money, living by his wits, getting the best of every one.
Until the night of Clara's wedding Jim had never tasted wine, and as it did
not bring on a desire for sleep, he thought himself unaffected. "It's like
sweetened water," he said, going into the darkness of the barnyard and
emptying another half bottle down his throat. "The stuff has no kick.
Drinking it is like drinking sweet cider."
Jim got into a frolicsome mood and went through the crowded kitchen and
into the dining room where the guests were assembled. At the moment the
rather riotous laughter and story telling had ceased and everything was
quiet. He was worried. "Things aren't going well. Clara's party is becoming
a frost," he thought resentfully. He began to dance a heavy-footed jig on
a little open place by the kitchen door and the guests stopped talking
to watch. They shouted and clapped their hands. A thunder of applause
arose. The guests who were seated in the parlor and who could not see the
performance got up and crowded into the doorway that connected the two
rooms. Jim became extraordinarily bold, and as one of the young women Tom
had hired as waitresses at that moment went past bearing a large dish of
food, he swung himself quickly about and took her into his arms. The dish
flew across the floor and broke against a table leg and the young woman
screamed. A farm dog that had found its way into the kitchen rushed into
the room and barked loudly. Henry Heller's orchestra, concealed under a
stairway that led to the upper part of the house, began to play furiously.
A strange animal fervor swept over Jim. His legs flew rapidly about and
his heavy feet made a great clatter on the floor. The young woman in his
arms screamed and laughed. Jim closed his eyes and shouted. He felt that
the wedding party had until that moment been a failure and that he was
transforming it into a success. Rising to their feet the men shouted,
clapped their hands and beat with their fists on the table. When the
orchestra came to the end of the dance, Jim stood flushed and triumphant
before the guests, holding the woman in his arms. In spite of her struggles
he held her tightly against his breast and kissed her eyes, cheeks, and
mouth. Then releasing her he winked and made a gesture for silence. "On a
wedding night some one's got to have the nerve to do a little love-making,"
he said, looking pointedly toward the place where Hugh sat with head bent
and with his eyes staring at a glass of wine that sat at his elbow.
* * * * *
It was past two o'clock when the feast came to an end. When the guests
began to depart, Clara stood for a moment alone and tried to get herself
in hand. Something inside her felt cold and old. If she had often thought
she wanted a man, and that life as a married woman would put an end to
her problems, she did not think so at that moment. "What I want above
everything else is a woman," she thought. All the evening her mind had been
trying to clutch and hold the almost forgotten figure of her mother, but it
was too vague and shadowy. With her mother she had never walked and talked
late at night through streets of towns when the world was asleep and when
thoughts were born in herself. "After all," she thought, "Mother may also
have belonged to all this." She looked at the people preparing to depart.
Several men had gathered in a group by the door. One of them told a story
at which the others laughed loudly. The women standing about had flushed
and, Clara thought, coarse faces. "They have gone into marriage like
cattle," she told herself. Her mind, running out of the room, began to
caress the memory of her one woman friend, Kate Chanceller. Often on late
spring afternoons as she and Kate had walked together something very like
love-making had happened between them. They went along quietly and evening
came on. Suddenly they stopped in the street and Kate had put her arms
about Clara's shoulders. For a moment they stood thus close together and a
strange gentle and yet hungry look came into Kate's eyes. It only lasted
a moment and when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate
laughed and taking hold of Clara's arm pulled her along the sidewalk.
"Let's walk like the devil," she said, "come on, let's get up some speed."
Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in the
room. "If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have come to a
man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage," she thought.
CHAPTER XVIII
Jim Priest was very drunk, but insisted on hitching a team to the
Butterworth carriage and driving it loaded with guests to town. Every one
laughed at him, but he drove up to the farmhouse door and in a loud voice
declared he knew what he was doing. Three men got into the carriage and
beating the horses furiously Jim sent them galloping away.
When an opportunity offered, Clara went silently out of the hot dining-room
and through a door to a porch at the back of the house. The kitchen door
was open and the waitresses and cooks from town were preparing to depart.
One of the young women came out into the darkness accompanied by a man,
evidently one of the guests. They had both been drinking and stood for a
moment in the darkness with their bodies pressed together. "I wish it were
our wedding night," the man's voice whispered, and the woman laughed. After
a long kiss they went back into the kitchen.
A farm dog appeared and going up to Clara licked her hand. She went around
the house and stood back of a bush in the darkness near where the carriages
were being loaded. Her father with Steve Hunter and his wife came and got
into a carriage. Tom was in an expansive, generous mood. "You know, Steve,
I told you and several others my Clara was engaged to Alfred Buckley," he
said. "Well, I was mistaken. The whole thing was a lie. The truth is I shot
off my mouth without talking to Clara. I had seen them together and now and
then Buckley used to come out here to the house in the evening, although he
never came except when I was here. He told me Clara had promised to marry
him, and like a fool I took his word. I never even asked. That's the kind
of a fool I was and I was a bigger fool to go telling the story. All the
time Clara and Hugh were engaged and I never suspected. They told me about
it to-night."
Clara stood by the bush until she thought the last of the guests had gone.
The lie her father had told seemed only a part of the evening's vulgarity.
Near the kitchen door the waitresses, cooks and musicians were being loaded
into the bus that had been driven out from the Bidwell House. She went into
the dining-room. Sadness had taken the place of the anger in her, but when
she saw Hugh the anger came back. Piles of dishes filled with food lay all
about the room and the air was heavy with the smell of food. Hugh stood by
a window looking out into the dark farmyard. He held his hat in his hand.
"You might put your hat away," she said sharply. "Have you forgotten you're
married to me and that you now live here in this house?" She laughed
nervously and walked to the kitchen door.
Her mind still clung to the past and to the days when she was a child and
had spent so many hours in the big, silent kitchen. Something was about
to happen that would take her past away--destroy it, and the thought
frightened her. "I have not been very happy in this house but there have
been certain moments, certain feelings I've had," she thought. Stepping
through the doorway she stood for a moment in the kitchen with her back
to the wall and with her eyes closed. Through her mind went a troop of
figures, the stout determined figure of Kate Chanceller who had known
how to love in silence; the wavering, hurrying figure of her mother; her
father as a young man coming in after a long drive to warm his hands
by the kitchen fire; a strong, hard-faced woman from town who had once
worked for Tom as cook and who was reported to have been the mother of two
illegitimate children; and the figures of her childhood fancy walking over
the bridge toward her, clad in beautiful raiment.
Back of these figures were other figures, long forgotten but now sharply
remembered--farm girls who had come to work by the day; tramps who had been
fed at the kitchen door; young farm hands who suddenly disappeared from the
routine of the farm's life and were never seen again, a young man with a
red bandana handkerchief about his neck who had thrown her a kiss as she
stood with her face pressed against a window.
Once a high school girl from town had come to spend the night with Clara.
After the evening meal the two girls walked into the kitchen and stood by a
window, looking out. Something had happened within them. Moved by a common
impulse they went outside and walked for a long way under the stars along
the silent country roads. They came to a field where men were burning
brush. Where there had been a forest there was now only a stump field and
the figures of the men carrying armloads of the dry branches of trees and
throwing them on the fire. The fire made a great splash of color in the
gathering darkness and for some obscure reason both girls were deeply moved
by the sight, sound, and perfume of the night. The figures of the men
seemed to dance back and forth in the light. Instinctively Clara turned her
face upward and looked at the stars. She was conscious of them and of their
beauty and the wide sweeping beauty of night as she had never been before.
A wind began to sing in the trees of a distant forest, dimly seen far away
across fields. The sound was soft and insistent and crept into her soul. In
the grass at her feet insects sang an accompaniment to the soft, distant
music.
How vividly Clara now remembered that night! It came sharply back as she
stood with closed eyes in the farm kitchen and waited for the consummation
of the adventure on which she had set out. With it came other memories.
"How many fleeting dreams and half visions of beauty I have had!" she
thought.
Everything in life that she had thought might in some way lead toward
beauty now seemed to Clara to lead to ugliness. "What a lot I've missed,"
she muttered, and opening her eyes went back into the dining-room and spoke
to Hugh, still standing and staring out into the darkness.
"Come," she said sharply, and led the way up a stairway. The two went
silently up the stairs, leaving the lights burning brightly in the rooms
below. They came to a door leading to a bedroom, and Clara opened it. "It's
time for a man and his wife to go to bed," she said in a low, husky voice.
Hugh followed her into the room. He walked to a chair by a window and
sitting down, took off his shoes and sat holding them in his hand. He did
not look at Clara but into the darkness outside the window. Clara let down
her hair and began to unfasten her dress. She took off an outer dress and
threw it over a chair. Then she went to a drawer and pulling it out looked
for a night dress. She became angry and threw several garments on the
floor. "Damn!" she said explosively, and went out of the room.
Hugh sprang to his feet. The wine he had drunk had not taken effect and
Steve Hunter had been forced to go home disappointed. All the evening
something stronger than wine had been gripping him. Now he knew what it
was. All through the evening thoughts and desires had whirled through his
brain. Now they were all gone. "I won't let her do it," he muttered, and
running quickly to the door closed it softly. With the shoes still held
in his hand he crawled through a window. He had expected to leap into the
darkness, but by chance his stocking feet alighted on the roof of the farm
kitchen that extended out from the rear of the house. He ran quickly down
the roof and jumped, alighting in a clump of bushes that tore long
scratches on his cheeks.
For five minutes Hugh ran toward the town of Bidwell, then turned, and
climbing a fence, walked across a field. The shoes were still gripped
tightly in his hand and the field was stony, but he did not notice and was
unconscious of pain from his bruised feet or from the torn places on his
cheeks. Standing in the field he heard Jim Priest drive homeward along the
road.
"My bonny lies over the ocean,
My bonny lies over the sea,
My bonny lies over the ocean,
O, bring back my bonny to me."
sang the farm hand.
Hugh walked across several fields, and when he came to a small stream,
sat down on the bank and put on his shoes. "I've had my chance and missed
it," he thought bitterly. Several times he repeated the words. "I've had
my chance and I've missed," he said again as he stopped by a fence that
separated the fields in which he had been walking. At the words he stopped
and put his hand to his throat. A half-stifled sob broke from him. "I've
had my chance and missed," he said again.
CHAPTER XIX
On the day after the feast managed by Tom and Jim, it was Tom who brought
Hugh back to live with his wife. The older man had come to the farmhouse on
the next morning bringing three women from town who were, as he explained
to Clara, to clear away the mess left by the guests. The daughter had been
deeply touched by what Hugh had done, and at the moment loved him deeply,
but did not choose to let her father know how she felt. "I suppose you got
him drunk, you and your friends," she said. "At any rate, he's not here."
Tom said nothing, but when Clara had told the story of Hugh's
disappearance, drove quickly away. "He'll come to the shop," he thought and
went there, leaving his horse tied to a post in front. At two o'clock his
son-in-law came slowly over the Turner's Pike bridge and approached the
shop. He was hatless and his clothes and hair were covered with dust, while
in his eyes was the look of a hunted animal. Tom met him with a smile and
asked no questions. "Come," he said, and taking Hugh by the arm led him to
the buggy. As he untied the horse he stopped to light a cigar. "I'm going
down to one of my lower farms. Clara thought you would like to go with me,"
he said blandly.
Tom drove to the McCoy house and stopped.
"You'd better clean up a little," he said without looking at Hugh. "You go
in and shave and change your clothes. I'm going up-town. I got to go to a
store."
Driving a short distance along the road, Tom stopped and shouted. "You
might pack your grip and bring it along," he called. "You'll be needing
your things. We won't be back here to-day."
The two men stayed together all that day, and in the evening Tom took Hugh
to the farmhouse and stayed for the evening meal. "He was a little drunk,"
he explained to Clara. "Don't be hard on him. He was a little drunk."
For both Clara and Hugh that evening was the hardest of their lives. After
the servants had gone, Clara sat under a lamp in the dining-room and
pretended to read a book and in desperation Hugh also tried to read.
Again the time came to go upstairs to the bedroom, and again Clara led the
way. She went to the door of the room from which Hugh had fled and opening
it stepped aside. Then she put out her hand. "Good-night," she said, and
going down a hallway went into another room and closed the door.
Hugh's experience with the school teacher was repeated on that second night
in the farmhouse. He took off his shoes and prepared for bed. Then he crept
out into the hallway and went softly to the door of Clara's room. Several
times he made the journey along the carpeted hallway, and once his hand was
on the knob of the door, but each time he lost heart and returned to his
own room. Although he did not know it Clara, like Rose McCoy on that other
occasion, expected him to come to her, and knelt on the floor just inside
the door, waiting, hoping for, and fearing the coming of the man.
Unlike the school teacher, Clara wanted to help Hugh. Marriage had perhaps
given her that impulse, but she did not follow it, and when at last Hugh,
shaken and ashamed, gave up the struggle with himself, she arose and went
to her bed where she threw herself down and wept, as Hugh had wept standing
in the darkness of the fields on the night before.
CHAPTER XX
It was a hot, dusty day, a week after Hugh's marriage to Clara, and Hugh
was at work in his shop at Bidwell. How many days, weeks, and months he
had already worked there, thinking in iron--twisted, turned, tortured to
follow the twistings and turnings of his mind--standing all day by a bench
beside other workmen--before him always the little piles of wheels, strips
of unworked iron and steel, blocks of wood, the paraphernalia of the
inventor's trade. Beside him, now that money had come to him, more and more
workmen, men who had invented nothing, who were without distinction in the
life of the community, who had married no rich man's daughter.
In the morning the other workmen, skillful fellows, who knew as Hugh had
never known, the science of their iron craft, came straggling through the
shop door into his presence. They were a little embarrassed before him. The
greatness of his name rang in their minds.
Many of the workmen were husbands, fathers of families. In the morning they
left their houses gladly but nevertheless came somewhat reluctantly to
the shop. As they came along the street, past other houses, they smoked
a morning pipe. Groups were formed. Many legs straggled along the street.
At the door of the shop each man stopped. There was a sharp tapping sound.
Pipe bowls were knocked out against the door sill. Before he came into the
shop, each man looked out across the open country that stretched away to
the north.
For a week Hugh had been married to a woman who had not yet become his
wife. She belonged, still belonged, to a world he had thought of as outside
the possibilities of his life. Was she not young, strong, straight of body?
Did she not array herself in what seemed unbelievably beautiful clothes?
The clothes she wore were a symbol of herself. For him she was
unattainable.
And yet she had consented to become his wife, had stood with him before a
man who had said words about honor and obedience.
Then there had come the two terrible evenings--when he had gone back
to the farmhouse with her to find the wedding feast set in their honor,
and that other evening when old Tom had brought him to the farmhouse a
defeated, frightened man who hoped the woman would put out her hand, would
reassure him.
Hugh was sure he had missed the great opportunity of his life. He had
married, but his marriage was not a marriage. He had got himself into a
position from which there was no possibility of escaping. "I'm a coward,"
he thought, looking at the other workmen in the shop. They, like himself,
were married men and lived in a house with a woman. At night they went
boldly into the presence of the woman. He had not done that when the
opportunity offered, and Clara could not come to him. He could understand
that. His hands had builded a wall and the passing days were huge stones
put on top of the wall. What he had not done became every day a more and
more impossible thing to do.
Tom, having taken Hugh back to Clara, was still concerned over the outcome
of their adventure. Every day he came to the shop and in the evening came
to see them at the farmhouse. He hovered about, was like a mother bird
whose offspring had been prematurely pushed out of the nest. Every morning
he came into the shop to talk with Hugh. He made jokes about married life.
Winking at a man standing nearby he put his hand familiarly on Hugh's
shoulder. "Well, how does married life go? It seems to me you're a little
pale," he said laughing.
In the evening he came to the farmhouse and sat talking of his affairs, of
the progress and growth of the town and his part in it. Without hearing his
words both Clara and Hugh sat in silence, pretending to listen, glad of his
presence.
Hugh came to the shop at eight. On other mornings, all through that long
week of waiting, Clara had driven him to his work, the two riding in
silence down Medina Road and through the crowded streets of the town; but
on that morning he had walked.
On Medina Road, near the bridge where he had once stood with Clara and
where he had seen her hot with anger, something had happened, a trivial
thing. A male bird pursued a female among the bushes beside the road. The
two feathered, living creatures, vividly colored, alive with life, pitched
and swooped through the air. They were like moving balls of light going in
and out of the dark green of foliage. There was in them a madness, a riot
of life.
Hugh had been tricked into stopping by the roadside. A tangle of things
that had filled his mind, the wheels, cogs, levers, all the intricate parts
of the hay-loading machine, the things that lived in his mind until his
hand had made them into facts, were blown away like dust. For a moment he
watched the living riotous things and then, as though jerking himself back
into a path from which his feet had wandered, hurried onward to the shop,
looking as he went not into the branches of trees, but downward at the dust
of the road.
In the shop Hugh tried all morning to refurnish the warehouse of his mind,
to put back into it the things blown so recklessly away. At ten Tom came
in, talked for a moment and then flitted away. "You are still there. My
daughter still has you. You have not run away again," he seemed to be
saying to himself.
The day grew warm and the sky, seen through the shop window by the bench
where Hugh tried to work, was overcast with clouds.
At noon the workmen went away, but Clara, who on other days had come to
drive Hugh to the farmhouse for lunch, did not appear. When all was silent
in the shop he stopped work, washed his hands and put on his coat.
He went to the shop door and then came back to the bench. Before him lay
an iron wheel on which he had been at work. It was intended to drive some
intricate part of the hay-loading machine. Hugh took it in his hand and
carried it to the back of the shop where there was an anvil. Without
consciousness and scarcely realizing what he did he laid it on the anvil
and taking a great sledge in his hand swung it over his head.
The blow struck was terrific. Into it Hugh put all of his protest against
the grotesque position into which he had been thrown by his marriage to
Clara.
The blow accomplished nothing. The sledge descended and the comparatively
delicate metal wheel was twisted, knocked out of shape. It spurted from
under the head of the sledge and shot past Hugh's head and out through a
window, breaking a pane of glass. Fragments of the broken glass fell with a
sharp little tinkling sound upon a heap of twisted pieces of iron and steel
lying beside the anvil....
Hugh did not eat lunch that day nor did he go to the farmhouse or return to
work at the shop. He walked, but this time did not walk in country roads
where male and female birds dart in and out of bushes. An intense desire to
know something intimate and personal concerning men and women and the lives
they led in their houses had taken possession of him. He walked in the
daylight up and down in the streets of Bidwell.
To the right, over the bridge leading out of Turner's Road, the main street
of Bidwell ran along a river bank. In that direction the hills out of the
country to the south came down to the river's edge and there was a high
bluff. On the bluff and back of it on a sloping hillside many of the more
pretentious new houses of the prosperous Bidwell citizens had been built.
Facing the river were the largest houses, with grounds in which trees and
shrubs had been planted and in the streets along the hill, less and less
pretentious as they receded from the river, were other houses built and
being built, long rows of houses, long streets of houses, houses in brick,
stone, and wood.
Hugh went from the river front back into this maze of streets and houses.
Some instinct led him there. It was where the men and women of Bidwell who
had prospered and had married went to live, to make themselves houses. His
father-in-law had offered to buy him a river front place and already that
meant much in Bidwell.
He wanted to see women who, like Clara, had got themselves husbands, what
they were like. "I've seen enough of men," he thought half resentfully as
he went along.
All afternoon he walked in streets, going up and down before houses in
which women lived with their men. A detached mood had possession of him.
For an hour he stood under a tree idly watching workmen engaged in building
another house. When one of the workmen spoke to him he walked away and went
into a street where men were laying a cement pavement before a completed
house.
In a furtive way he kept looking about for women, hungering to see their
faces. "What are they up to? I'd like to find out," his mind seemed to be
saying.
The women came out of the doors of the houses and passed him as he went
slowly along. Other women in carriages drove in the streets. They were
well-dressed women and seemed sure of themselves. "Things are all right
with me. For me things are settled and arranged," they seemed to say. All
the streets in which he walked seemed to be telling the story of things
settled and arranged. The houses spoke of the same things. "I am a house.
I am not built until things are settled and arranged. I mean that," they
said.
Hugh grew very tired. In the later afternoon a small bright-eyed woman--no
doubt she had been one of the guests at his wedding feast--stopped him.
"Are you planning to buy or build up our way, Mr. McVey?" she asked. He
shook his head. "I'm looking around," he said and hurried away.
Anger took the place of perplexity in him. The women he saw in the streets
and in the doors of the houses were such women as his own woman Clara. They
had married men--"no better than myself," he told himself, growing bold.
They had married men and something had happened to them. Something was
settled. They could live in streets and in houses. Their marriages had been
real marriages and he had a right to a real marriage. It was not too much
to expect out of life.
"Clara has a right to that also," he thought and his mind began to idealize
the marriages of men and women. "On every hand here I see them, the neat,
well-dressed, handsome women like Clara. How happy they are!
"Their feathers have been ruffled though," he thought angrily. "It was with
them as with that bird I saw being pursued through the trees. There has
been pursuit and a pretense of trying to escape. There has been an effort
made that was not an effort, but feathers have been ruffled here."
When his thoughts had driven him into a half desperate mood Hugh went
out of the streets of bright, ugly, freshly built, freshly painted and
furnished houses, and down into the town. Several men homeward bound at the
end of their day of work called to him. "I hope you are thinking of buying
or building up our way," they said heartily.
* * * * *
It began to rain and darkness came, but Hugh did not go home to Clara. It
did not seem to him that he could spend another night in the house with
her, lying awake, hearing the little noises of the night, waiting--for
courage. He could not sit under the lamp through another evening pretending
to read. He could not go with Clara up the stairs only to leave her with a
cold "good-night" at the top of the stairs.
Hugh went up the Medina Road almost to the house and then retraced his
steps and got into a field. There was a low swampy place in which the
water came up over his shoetops, and after he had crossed that there was
a field overgrown with a tangle of vines. The night became so dark that
he could see nothing and darkness reigned over his spirit. For hours he
walked blindly, but it did not occur to him that as he waited, hating the
waiting, Clara also waited; that for her also it was a time of trial and
uncertainty. To him it seemed her course was simple and easy. She was a
white pure thing--waiting--for what? for courage to come in to him in order
that an assault be made upon her whiteness and purity.
That was the only answer to the question Hugh could find within himself.
The destruction of what was white and pure was a necessary thing in life.
It was a thing men must do in order that life go on. As for women, they
must be white and pure--and wait.
* * * * *
Filled with inward resentment Hugh at last did go to the farmhouse. Wet
and with dragging, heavy feet he turned out of the Medina Road to find the
house dark and apparently deserted.
Then a new and puzzling situation arose. When he stepped over the threshold
and into the house he knew Clara was there.
On that day she had not driven him to work in the morning or gone for him
at noon hour because she did not want to look at him in the light of day,
did not want again to see the puzzled, frightened look in his eyes. She had
wanted him in the darkness alone, had waited for darkness. Now it was dark
in the house and she waited for him.
How simple it was! Hugh came into the living-room, stumbled forward into
the darkness, and found the hat-rack against the wall near the stairway
leading to the bedrooms above. Again he had surrendered what he would no
doubt have called the manhood in himself, and hoped only to be able to
escape the presence he felt in the room, to creep off upstairs to his bed,
to lie awake listening to noises, waiting miserably for another day to
come. But when he had put his dripping hat on one of the pegs of the rack
and had found the lower step with his foot thrust into darkness, a voice
called to him.
"Come here, Hugh," Clara said softly and firmly, and like a boy caught
doing a forbidden act he went toward her. "We have been very silly, Hugh,"
he heard her voice saying softly.
* * * * *
Hugh went to where Clara sat in a chair by a window. From him there was
no protest and no attempt to escape the love-making that followed. For a
moment he stood in silence and could see her white figure below him in the
chair. It was like something still far away, but coming swiftly as a bird
flies to him--upward to him. Her hand crept up and lay in his hand. It
seemed unbelievably large. It was not soft, but hard and firm. When her
hand had rested in his for a moment she arose and stood beside him. Then
the hand went out of his and touched, caressed his wet coat, his wet hair,
his cheeks. "My flesh must be white and cold," he thought, and then he did
not think any more.
Gladness took hold of him, a gladness that came up out of the inner parts
of himself as she had come up to him out of the chair. For days, weeks, he
had been thinking of his problem as a man's problem, his defeat had been a
man's defeat.
Now there was no defeat, no problem, no victory. In himself he did not
exist. Within himself something new had been born or another something that
had always lived with him had stirred to life. It was not awkward. It was
not afraid. It was a thing as swift and sure as the flight of the male bird
through the branches of trees and it was in pursuit of something light and
swift in her, something that would fly through light and darkness but fly
not too swiftly, something of which he need not be afraid, something that
without the need of understanding he could understand as one understands
the need of breath in a close place.
With a laugh as soft and sure as her own Hugh took Clara into his arms.
A few minutes later they went up stairs and twice Hugh stumbled on the
stairway. It did not matter. His long awkward body was a thing outside
himself. It might stumble and fall many times but the new thing he had
found, the thing inside himself that responded to the thing inside the
shell that was Clara his wife, did not stumble. It flew like a bird out of
darkness into the light. At the moment he thought the sweeping flight of
life thus begun would run on forever.
BOOK SIX
CHAPTER XXI
It was a summer night in Ohio and the wheat in the long, flat fields that
stretched away to the north from the town of Bidwell was ripe for the
cutting. Between the wheat fields lay corn and cabbage fields. In the corn
fields the green stalks stood up like young trees. Facing the fields lay
the white roads, once the silent roads, hushed and empty through the nights
and often during many hours of the day, the night silence broken only at
long intervals by the clattering hoofs of homeward bound horses and the
silence of days by creaking wagons. Along the roads on a summer evening
went the young farm hand in his buggy for which he had spent a summer's
wage, a long summer of sweaty toil in hot fields. The hoofs of his horse
beat a soft tattoo on the roads. His sweetheart sat beside him and he was
in no hurry. All day he had been at work in the harvest and on the morrow
he would work again. It did not matter. For him the night would last until
the cocks in isolated farmyards began to hail the dawn. He forgot the horse
and did not care what turning he took. All roads led to happiness for him.
Beside the long roads was an endless procession of fields broken now and
then by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon the
roads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass in fence
corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting
away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were beautiful too.
Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields? In the cabbage fields
the broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting,
spirit. In her dreams women, beautifully gowned and with rings on their
hands, came to brush the wet, matted hair back from her forehead. Across
the little wooden bridge before her eyes came wonderful men, women, and
children. The children ran forward. They cried out to her. She thought of
them as brothers and sisters who were to come to live in the farmhouse and
who were to make the old house ring with laughter. The children ran toward
her with outstretched hands, but never arrived at the house. The bridge
extended itself. It stretched out under their feet so that they ran forward
forever on the bridge.
And behind the children came men and women, sometimes together, sometimes
walking alone. They did not seem like the children to belong to her. Like
the women who came to touch her hot forehead, they were beautifully gowned
and walked with stately dignity.
The child climbed out of the window and stood on the kitchen floor. Her
mother hurried about. She was feverishly active and often did not hear when
the child spoke. "I want to know about my brothers and sisters: where are
they, why don't they come here?" she asked, but the mother did not hear,
and if she did, had nothing to say. Sometimes she stopped to kiss the child
and tears came to her eyes. Then something cooking on the kitchen stove
demanded attention. "You run outside," she said hurriedly, and turned again
to her work.
* * * * *
From the chair where Clara sat at the wedding feast provided by the energy
of her father and the enthusiasm of Jim Priest, she could see over her
father's shoulder into the farm house kitchen. As when she was a child, she
closed her eyes and dreamed of another kind of feast. With a growing sense
of bitterness she realized that all her life, all through her girlhood and
young womanhood, she had been waiting for this, her wedding night, and
that now, having come, the occasion for which she had waited so long and
concerning which she had dreamed so many dreams, had aborted into an
occasion for the display of ugliness and vulgarity. Her father, the only
other person in the room in any way related to her, sat at the other end
of the long table. Her aunt had gone away on a visit, and in the crowded,
noisy room there was no woman to whom she could turn for understanding.
She looked past her father's shoulder and directly into the wide window
seat where she had spent so many hours of her childhood. Again she wanted
brothers and sisters. "The beautiful men and women of the dreams were meant
to come at this time, that's what the dreams were about; but, like the
unborn children that ran with outstretched hands, they cannot get over the
bridge and into the house," she thought vaguely. "I wish Mother had lived,
or that Kate Chanceller were here," she whispered to herself as, raising
her eyes, she looked at her father.
Clara felt like an animal driven into a corner and surrounded by foes.
Her father sat at the feast between two women, Mrs. Steve Hunter who was
inclined to corpulency, and a thin woman named Bowles, the wife of an
undertaker of Bidwell. They continually whispered, smiled, and nodded their
heads. Hugh sat on the opposite side of the same table, and when he raised
his eyes from the plate of food before him, could see past the head of a
large, masculine-looking woman into the farmhouse parlor where there was
another table, also filled with guests. Clara turned from looking at her
father to look at her husband. He was merely a tall man with a long face,
who could not raise his eyes. His long neck stuck itself out of a stiff
white collar. To Clara he was, at the moment, a being without personality,
one that the crowd at the table had swallowed up as it so busily swallowed
food and wine. When she looked at him he seemed to be drinking a good deal.
His glass was always being filled and emptied. At the suggestion of the
woman who sat beside him, he performed the task of emptying it, without
raising his eyes, and Steve Hunter, who sat on the other side of the table,
leaned over and filled it again. Steve like her father whispered and
winked. "On the night of my wedding I was piped, you bet, as piped as a
hatter. It's a good thing. It gives a man nerve," he explained to the
masculine-looking woman to whom he was telling, with a good deal of
attention to details, the tale of his own marriage night.
Clara did not look at Hugh again. What he did seemed no concern of hers.
Bowles the Bidwell undertaker had surrendered to the influence of the wine
that had been flowing freely since the guests arrived and now got to his
feet and began to talk. His wife tugged at his coat and tried to force him
back into his seat, but Tom Butterworth jerked her arm away. "Ah, let him
alone. He's got a story to tell," he said to the woman, who blushed and
put her handkerchief over her face. "Well, it's a fact, that's how it
happened," the undertaker declared in a loud voice. "You see the sleeves
of her nightgown were tied in hard knots by her rascally brothers. When I
tried to unfasten them with my teeth I bit big holes in the sleeves."
Clara gripped the arm of her chair. "If I can let the night pass without
showing these people how much I hate them I'll do well enough," she thought
grimly. She looked at the dishes laden with food and wished she could break
them one by one over the heads of her father's guests. As a relief to her
mind, she again looked past her father's head and through a doorway into
the kitchen.
In the big room three or four cooks were busily engaged in the preparation
of food, and waitresses continually brought steaming dishes and put them on
the tables. She thought of her mother's life, the life led in that room,
married to the man who was her own father and who no doubt, but for the
fact that circumstances had made him a man of wealth, would have been
satisfied to see his daughter led into just such another life.
"Kate was right about men. They want something from women, but what do they
care what kind of lives we lead after they get what they want?" she thought
grimly.
The more to separate herself from the feasting, laughing crowd, Clara
tried to think out the details of her mother's life. "It was the life of
a beast," she thought. Like herself, her mother had come to the house
with her husband on the night of her marriage. There was just such
another feast. The country was new then and the people for the most part
desperately poor. Still there was drinking. She had heard her father and
Jim Priest speak of the drinking bouts of their youth. The men came as they
had come now, and with them came women, women who had been coarsened by the
life they led. Pigs were killed and game brought from the forests. The men
drank, shouted, fought, and played practical jokes. Clara wondered if any
of the men and women in the room would dare go upstairs into her sleeping
room and tie knots in her night clothes. They had done that when her mother
came to the house as a bride. Then they had all gone away and her father
had taken his bride upstairs. He was drunk, and her own husband Hugh was
now getting drunk. Her mother had submitted. Her life had been a story of
submission. Kate Chanceller had said it was so married women lived, and
her mother's life had proven the truth of the statement. In the farmhouse
kitchen, where now three or four cooks worked so busily, she had worked her
life out alone. From the kitchen she had gone directly upstairs and to bed
with her husband. Once a week on Saturday afternoons she went into town and
stayed long enough to buy supplies for another week of cooking. "She must
have been kept going until she dropped down dead," Clara thought, and her
mind taking another turn, added, "and many others, both men and women, must
have been forced by circumstances to serve my father in the same blind way.
It was all done in order that prosperity and money with which to do vulgar
things might be his."
Clara's mother had brought but one child into the world. She wondered why.
Then she wondered if she would become the mother of a child. Her hands no
longer gripped the arms of her chair, but lay on the table before her. She
looked at them and they were strong. She was herself a strong woman. After
the feast was over and the guests had gone away, Hugh, given courage by the
drinks he continued to consume, would come upstairs to her. Some twist of
her mind made her forget her husband, and in fancy she felt herself about
to be attacked by a strange man on a dark road at the edge of a forest. The
man had tried to take her into his arms and kiss her and she had managed to
get her hands on his throat. Her hands lying on the table twitched
convulsively.
In the big farmhouse dining-room and in the parlor where the second table
of guests sat, the wedding feast went on. Afterward when she thought of it,
Clara always remembered her wedding feast as a horsey affair. Something
in the natures of Tom Butterworth and Jim Priest, she thought, expressed
itself that night. The jokes that went up and down the table were horsey,
and Clara thought the women who sat at the tables heavy and mare-like.
Jim did not come to the table to sit with the others, was in fact not
invited, but all evening he kept appearing and reappearing and had the air
of a master of ceremonies. Coming into the dining room he stood by the
door, scratching his head. Then he went out. It was as though he had
said to himself, "Well, it's all right, everything is going all right,
everything is lively, you see." All his life Jim had been a drinker of
whisky and knew his limitations. His system as a drinking man had always
been quite simple. On Saturday afternoons, when the work about the barns
was done for the day and the other employees had gone away, he went to sit
on the steps of a corncrib with the bottle in his hand. In the winter he
went to sit by the kitchen fire in a little house below the apple orchard
where he and the other employees slept. He took a long drink from the
bottle and then holding it in his hand sat for a time thinking of the
events of his life. Whisky made him somewhat sentimental. After one long
drink he thought of his youth in a town in Pennsylvania. He had been one
of six children, all boys, and at an early age his mother had died. Jim
thought of her and then of his father. When he had himself come west into
Ohio, and later when he was a soldier in the Civil War, he despised his
father and reverenced the memory of his mother. In the war he had found
himself physically unable to stand up before the enemy during a battle.
When the report of guns was heard and the other men of his company got
grimly into line and went forward, something happened to his legs and he
wanted to run away. So great was the desire in him that craftiness grew in
his brain. Watching his chance, he pretended to have been shot and fell to
the ground, and when the others had gone on crept away and hid himself. He
found it was not impossible to disappear altogether and reappear in another
place. The draft went into effect and many men not liking the notion of war
were willing to pay large sums to the men who would go in their places.
Jim went into the business of enlisting and deserting. All about him were
men talking of the necessity of saving the country, and for four years he
thought only of saving his own hide. Then suddenly the war was over and he
became a farm hand. As he worked all week in the fields, and in the evening
sometimes, as he lay in his bed and the moon came up, he thought of his
mother and of the nobility and sacrifice of her life. He wished to be such
another. After having two or three drinks out of the bottle, he admired his
father, who in the Pennsylvania town had borne the reputation of being a
liar and a rascal. After his mother's death his father had managed to marry
a widow who owned a farm. "The old man was a slick one," he said aloud,
tipping up the bottle and taking another long drink. "If I had stayed at
home until I got more understanding, the old man and I together might have
done something." He finished the bottle and went away to sleep on the hay,
or if it were winter, threw himself into one of the bunks in the bunk
house. He dreamed of becoming one who went through life beating people out
of money, living by his wits, getting the best of every one.
Until the night of Clara's wedding Jim had never tasted wine, and as it did
not bring on a desire for sleep, he thought himself unaffected. "It's like
sweetened water," he said, going into the darkness of the barnyard and
emptying another half bottle down his throat. "The stuff has no kick.
Drinking it is like drinking sweet cider."
Jim got into a frolicsome mood and went through the crowded kitchen and
into the dining room where the guests were assembled. At the moment the
rather riotous laughter and story telling had ceased and everything was
quiet. He was worried. "Things aren't going well. Clara's party is becoming
a frost," he thought resentfully. He began to dance a heavy-footed jig on
a little open place by the kitchen door and the guests stopped talking
to watch. They shouted and clapped their hands. A thunder of applause
arose. The guests who were seated in the parlor and who could not see the
performance got up and crowded into the doorway that connected the two
rooms. Jim became extraordinarily bold, and as one of the young women Tom
had hired as waitresses at that moment went past bearing a large dish of
food, he swung himself quickly about and took her into his arms. The dish
flew across the floor and broke against a table leg and the young woman
screamed. A farm dog that had found its way into the kitchen rushed into
the room and barked loudly. Henry Heller's orchestra, concealed under a
stairway that led to the upper part of the house, began to play furiously.
A strange animal fervor swept over Jim. His legs flew rapidly about and
his heavy feet made a great clatter on the floor. The young woman in his
arms screamed and laughed. Jim closed his eyes and shouted. He felt that
the wedding party had until that moment been a failure and that he was
transforming it into a success. Rising to their feet the men shouted,
clapped their hands and beat with their fists on the table. When the
orchestra came to the end of the dance, Jim stood flushed and triumphant
before the guests, holding the woman in his arms. In spite of her struggles
he held her tightly against his breast and kissed her eyes, cheeks, and
mouth. Then releasing her he winked and made a gesture for silence. "On a
wedding night some one's got to have the nerve to do a little love-making,"
he said, looking pointedly toward the place where Hugh sat with head bent
and with his eyes staring at a glass of wine that sat at his elbow.
* * * * *
It was past two o'clock when the feast came to an end. When the guests
began to depart, Clara stood for a moment alone and tried to get herself
in hand. Something inside her felt cold and old. If she had often thought
she wanted a man, and that life as a married woman would put an end to
her problems, she did not think so at that moment. "What I want above
everything else is a woman," she thought. All the evening her mind had been
trying to clutch and hold the almost forgotten figure of her mother, but it
was too vague and shadowy. With her mother she had never walked and talked
late at night through streets of towns when the world was asleep and when
thoughts were born in herself. "After all," she thought, "Mother may also
have belonged to all this." She looked at the people preparing to depart.
Several men had gathered in a group by the door. One of them told a story
at which the others laughed loudly. The women standing about had flushed
and, Clara thought, coarse faces. "They have gone into marriage like
cattle," she told herself. Her mind, running out of the room, began to
caress the memory of her one woman friend, Kate Chanceller. Often on late
spring afternoons as she and Kate had walked together something very like
love-making had happened between them. They went along quietly and evening
came on. Suddenly they stopped in the street and Kate had put her arms
about Clara's shoulders. For a moment they stood thus close together and a
strange gentle and yet hungry look came into Kate's eyes. It only lasted
a moment and when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate
laughed and taking hold of Clara's arm pulled her along the sidewalk.
"Let's walk like the devil," she said, "come on, let's get up some speed."
Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in the
room. "If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have come to a
man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage," she thought.
CHAPTER XVIII
Jim Priest was very drunk, but insisted on hitching a team to the
Butterworth carriage and driving it loaded with guests to town. Every one
laughed at him, but he drove up to the farmhouse door and in a loud voice
declared he knew what he was doing. Three men got into the carriage and
beating the horses furiously Jim sent them galloping away.
When an opportunity offered, Clara went silently out of the hot dining-room
and through a door to a porch at the back of the house. The kitchen door
was open and the waitresses and cooks from town were preparing to depart.
One of the young women came out into the darkness accompanied by a man,
evidently one of the guests. They had both been drinking and stood for a
moment in the darkness with their bodies pressed together. "I wish it were
our wedding night," the man's voice whispered, and the woman laughed. After
a long kiss they went back into the kitchen.
A farm dog appeared and going up to Clara licked her hand. She went around
the house and stood back of a bush in the darkness near where the carriages
were being loaded. Her father with Steve Hunter and his wife came and got
into a carriage. Tom was in an expansive, generous mood. "You know, Steve,
I told you and several others my Clara was engaged to Alfred Buckley," he
said. "Well, I was mistaken. The whole thing was a lie. The truth is I shot
off my mouth without talking to Clara. I had seen them together and now and
then Buckley used to come out here to the house in the evening, although he
never came except when I was here. He told me Clara had promised to marry
him, and like a fool I took his word. I never even asked. That's the kind
of a fool I was and I was a bigger fool to go telling the story. All the
time Clara and Hugh were engaged and I never suspected. They told me about
it to-night."
Clara stood by the bush until she thought the last of the guests had gone.
The lie her father had told seemed only a part of the evening's vulgarity.
Near the kitchen door the waitresses, cooks and musicians were being loaded
into the bus that had been driven out from the Bidwell House. She went into
the dining-room. Sadness had taken the place of the anger in her, but when
she saw Hugh the anger came back. Piles of dishes filled with food lay all
about the room and the air was heavy with the smell of food. Hugh stood by
a window looking out into the dark farmyard. He held his hat in his hand.
"You might put your hat away," she said sharply. "Have you forgotten you're
married to me and that you now live here in this house?" She laughed
nervously and walked to the kitchen door.
Her mind still clung to the past and to the days when she was a child and
had spent so many hours in the big, silent kitchen. Something was about
to happen that would take her past away--destroy it, and the thought
frightened her. "I have not been very happy in this house but there have
been certain moments, certain feelings I've had," she thought. Stepping
through the doorway she stood for a moment in the kitchen with her back
to the wall and with her eyes closed. Through her mind went a troop of
figures, the stout determined figure of Kate Chanceller who had known
how to love in silence; the wavering, hurrying figure of her mother; her
father as a young man coming in after a long drive to warm his hands
by the kitchen fire; a strong, hard-faced woman from town who had once
worked for Tom as cook and who was reported to have been the mother of two
illegitimate children; and the figures of her childhood fancy walking over
the bridge toward her, clad in beautiful raiment.
Back of these figures were other figures, long forgotten but now sharply
remembered--farm girls who had come to work by the day; tramps who had been
fed at the kitchen door; young farm hands who suddenly disappeared from the
routine of the farm's life and were never seen again, a young man with a
red bandana handkerchief about his neck who had thrown her a kiss as she
stood with her face pressed against a window.
Once a high school girl from town had come to spend the night with Clara.
After the evening meal the two girls walked into the kitchen and stood by a
window, looking out. Something had happened within them. Moved by a common
impulse they went outside and walked for a long way under the stars along
the silent country roads. They came to a field where men were burning
brush. Where there had been a forest there was now only a stump field and
the figures of the men carrying armloads of the dry branches of trees and
throwing them on the fire. The fire made a great splash of color in the
gathering darkness and for some obscure reason both girls were deeply moved
by the sight, sound, and perfume of the night. The figures of the men
seemed to dance back and forth in the light. Instinctively Clara turned her
face upward and looked at the stars. She was conscious of them and of their
beauty and the wide sweeping beauty of night as she had never been before.
A wind began to sing in the trees of a distant forest, dimly seen far away
across fields. The sound was soft and insistent and crept into her soul. In
the grass at her feet insects sang an accompaniment to the soft, distant
music.
How vividly Clara now remembered that night! It came sharply back as she
stood with closed eyes in the farm kitchen and waited for the consummation
of the adventure on which she had set out. With it came other memories.
"How many fleeting dreams and half visions of beauty I have had!" she
thought.
Everything in life that she had thought might in some way lead toward
beauty now seemed to Clara to lead to ugliness. "What a lot I've missed,"
she muttered, and opening her eyes went back into the dining-room and spoke
to Hugh, still standing and staring out into the darkness.
"Come," she said sharply, and led the way up a stairway. The two went
silently up the stairs, leaving the lights burning brightly in the rooms
below. They came to a door leading to a bedroom, and Clara opened it. "It's
time for a man and his wife to go to bed," she said in a low, husky voice.
Hugh followed her into the room. He walked to a chair by a window and
sitting down, took off his shoes and sat holding them in his hand. He did
not look at Clara but into the darkness outside the window. Clara let down
her hair and began to unfasten her dress. She took off an outer dress and
threw it over a chair. Then she went to a drawer and pulling it out looked
for a night dress. She became angry and threw several garments on the
floor. "Damn!" she said explosively, and went out of the room.
Hugh sprang to his feet. The wine he had drunk had not taken effect and
Steve Hunter had been forced to go home disappointed. All the evening
something stronger than wine had been gripping him. Now he knew what it
was. All through the evening thoughts and desires had whirled through his
brain. Now they were all gone. "I won't let her do it," he muttered, and
running quickly to the door closed it softly. With the shoes still held
in his hand he crawled through a window. He had expected to leap into the
darkness, but by chance his stocking feet alighted on the roof of the farm
kitchen that extended out from the rear of the house. He ran quickly down
the roof and jumped, alighting in a clump of bushes that tore long
scratches on his cheeks.
For five minutes Hugh ran toward the town of Bidwell, then turned, and
climbing a fence, walked across a field. The shoes were still gripped
tightly in his hand and the field was stony, but he did not notice and was
unconscious of pain from his bruised feet or from the torn places on his
cheeks. Standing in the field he heard Jim Priest drive homeward along the
road.
"My bonny lies over the ocean,
My bonny lies over the sea,
My bonny lies over the ocean,
O, bring back my bonny to me."
sang the farm hand.
Hugh walked across several fields, and when he came to a small stream,
sat down on the bank and put on his shoes. "I've had my chance and missed
it," he thought bitterly. Several times he repeated the words. "I've had
my chance and I've missed," he said again as he stopped by a fence that
separated the fields in which he had been walking. At the words he stopped
and put his hand to his throat. A half-stifled sob broke from him. "I've
had my chance and missed," he said again.
CHAPTER XIX
On the day after the feast managed by Tom and Jim, it was Tom who brought
Hugh back to live with his wife. The older man had come to the farmhouse on
the next morning bringing three women from town who were, as he explained
to Clara, to clear away the mess left by the guests. The daughter had been
deeply touched by what Hugh had done, and at the moment loved him deeply,
but did not choose to let her father know how she felt. "I suppose you got
him drunk, you and your friends," she said. "At any rate, he's not here."
Tom said nothing, but when Clara had told the story of Hugh's
disappearance, drove quickly away. "He'll come to the shop," he thought and
went there, leaving his horse tied to a post in front. At two o'clock his
son-in-law came slowly over the Turner's Pike bridge and approached the
shop. He was hatless and his clothes and hair were covered with dust, while
in his eyes was the look of a hunted animal. Tom met him with a smile and
asked no questions. "Come," he said, and taking Hugh by the arm led him to
the buggy. As he untied the horse he stopped to light a cigar. "I'm going
down to one of my lower farms. Clara thought you would like to go with me,"
he said blandly.
Tom drove to the McCoy house and stopped.
"You'd better clean up a little," he said without looking at Hugh. "You go
in and shave and change your clothes. I'm going up-town. I got to go to a
store."
Driving a short distance along the road, Tom stopped and shouted. "You
might pack your grip and bring it along," he called. "You'll be needing
your things. We won't be back here to-day."
The two men stayed together all that day, and in the evening Tom took Hugh
to the farmhouse and stayed for the evening meal. "He was a little drunk,"
he explained to Clara. "Don't be hard on him. He was a little drunk."
For both Clara and Hugh that evening was the hardest of their lives. After
the servants had gone, Clara sat under a lamp in the dining-room and
pretended to read a book and in desperation Hugh also tried to read.
Again the time came to go upstairs to the bedroom, and again Clara led the
way. She went to the door of the room from which Hugh had fled and opening
it stepped aside. Then she put out her hand. "Good-night," she said, and
going down a hallway went into another room and closed the door.
Hugh's experience with the school teacher was repeated on that second night
in the farmhouse. He took off his shoes and prepared for bed. Then he crept
out into the hallway and went softly to the door of Clara's room. Several
times he made the journey along the carpeted hallway, and once his hand was
on the knob of the door, but each time he lost heart and returned to his
own room. Although he did not know it Clara, like Rose McCoy on that other
occasion, expected him to come to her, and knelt on the floor just inside
the door, waiting, hoping for, and fearing the coming of the man.
Unlike the school teacher, Clara wanted to help Hugh. Marriage had perhaps
given her that impulse, but she did not follow it, and when at last Hugh,
shaken and ashamed, gave up the struggle with himself, she arose and went
to her bed where she threw herself down and wept, as Hugh had wept standing
in the darkness of the fields on the night before.
CHAPTER XX
It was a hot, dusty day, a week after Hugh's marriage to Clara, and Hugh
was at work in his shop at Bidwell. How many days, weeks, and months he
had already worked there, thinking in iron--twisted, turned, tortured to
follow the twistings and turnings of his mind--standing all day by a bench
beside other workmen--before him always the little piles of wheels, strips
of unworked iron and steel, blocks of wood, the paraphernalia of the
inventor's trade. Beside him, now that money had come to him, more and more
workmen, men who had invented nothing, who were without distinction in the
life of the community, who had married no rich man's daughter.
In the morning the other workmen, skillful fellows, who knew as Hugh had
never known, the science of their iron craft, came straggling through the
shop door into his presence. They were a little embarrassed before him. The
greatness of his name rang in their minds.
Many of the workmen were husbands, fathers of families. In the morning they
left their houses gladly but nevertheless came somewhat reluctantly to
the shop. As they came along the street, past other houses, they smoked
a morning pipe. Groups were formed. Many legs straggled along the street.
At the door of the shop each man stopped. There was a sharp tapping sound.
Pipe bowls were knocked out against the door sill. Before he came into the
shop, each man looked out across the open country that stretched away to
the north.
For a week Hugh had been married to a woman who had not yet become his
wife. She belonged, still belonged, to a world he had thought of as outside
the possibilities of his life. Was she not young, strong, straight of body?
Did she not array herself in what seemed unbelievably beautiful clothes?
The clothes she wore were a symbol of herself. For him she was
unattainable.
And yet she had consented to become his wife, had stood with him before a
man who had said words about honor and obedience.
Then there had come the two terrible evenings--when he had gone back
to the farmhouse with her to find the wedding feast set in their honor,
and that other evening when old Tom had brought him to the farmhouse a
defeated, frightened man who hoped the woman would put out her hand, would
reassure him.
Hugh was sure he had missed the great opportunity of his life. He had
married, but his marriage was not a marriage. He had got himself into a
position from which there was no possibility of escaping. "I'm a coward,"
he thought, looking at the other workmen in the shop. They, like himself,
were married men and lived in a house with a woman. At night they went
boldly into the presence of the woman. He had not done that when the
opportunity offered, and Clara could not come to him. He could understand
that. His hands had builded a wall and the passing days were huge stones
put on top of the wall. What he had not done became every day a more and
more impossible thing to do.
Tom, having taken Hugh back to Clara, was still concerned over the outcome
of their adventure. Every day he came to the shop and in the evening came
to see them at the farmhouse. He hovered about, was like a mother bird
whose offspring had been prematurely pushed out of the nest. Every morning
he came into the shop to talk with Hugh. He made jokes about married life.
Winking at a man standing nearby he put his hand familiarly on Hugh's
shoulder. "Well, how does married life go? It seems to me you're a little
pale," he said laughing.
In the evening he came to the farmhouse and sat talking of his affairs, of
the progress and growth of the town and his part in it. Without hearing his
words both Clara and Hugh sat in silence, pretending to listen, glad of his
presence.
Hugh came to the shop at eight. On other mornings, all through that long
week of waiting, Clara had driven him to his work, the two riding in
silence down Medina Road and through the crowded streets of the town; but
on that morning he had walked.
On Medina Road, near the bridge where he had once stood with Clara and
where he had seen her hot with anger, something had happened, a trivial
thing. A male bird pursued a female among the bushes beside the road. The
two feathered, living creatures, vividly colored, alive with life, pitched
and swooped through the air. They were like moving balls of light going in
and out of the dark green of foliage. There was in them a madness, a riot
of life.
Hugh had been tricked into stopping by the roadside. A tangle of things
that had filled his mind, the wheels, cogs, levers, all the intricate parts
of the hay-loading machine, the things that lived in his mind until his
hand had made them into facts, were blown away like dust. For a moment he
watched the living riotous things and then, as though jerking himself back
into a path from which his feet had wandered, hurried onward to the shop,
looking as he went not into the branches of trees, but downward at the dust
of the road.
In the shop Hugh tried all morning to refurnish the warehouse of his mind,
to put back into it the things blown so recklessly away. At ten Tom came
in, talked for a moment and then flitted away. "You are still there. My
daughter still has you. You have not run away again," he seemed to be
saying to himself.
The day grew warm and the sky, seen through the shop window by the bench
where Hugh tried to work, was overcast with clouds.
At noon the workmen went away, but Clara, who on other days had come to
drive Hugh to the farmhouse for lunch, did not appear. When all was silent
in the shop he stopped work, washed his hands and put on his coat.
He went to the shop door and then came back to the bench. Before him lay
an iron wheel on which he had been at work. It was intended to drive some
intricate part of the hay-loading machine. Hugh took it in his hand and
carried it to the back of the shop where there was an anvil. Without
consciousness and scarcely realizing what he did he laid it on the anvil
and taking a great sledge in his hand swung it over his head.
The blow struck was terrific. Into it Hugh put all of his protest against
the grotesque position into which he had been thrown by his marriage to
Clara.
The blow accomplished nothing. The sledge descended and the comparatively
delicate metal wheel was twisted, knocked out of shape. It spurted from
under the head of the sledge and shot past Hugh's head and out through a
window, breaking a pane of glass. Fragments of the broken glass fell with a
sharp little tinkling sound upon a heap of twisted pieces of iron and steel
lying beside the anvil....
Hugh did not eat lunch that day nor did he go to the farmhouse or return to
work at the shop. He walked, but this time did not walk in country roads
where male and female birds dart in and out of bushes. An intense desire to
know something intimate and personal concerning men and women and the lives
they led in their houses had taken possession of him. He walked in the
daylight up and down in the streets of Bidwell.
To the right, over the bridge leading out of Turner's Road, the main street
of Bidwell ran along a river bank. In that direction the hills out of the
country to the south came down to the river's edge and there was a high
bluff. On the bluff and back of it on a sloping hillside many of the more
pretentious new houses of the prosperous Bidwell citizens had been built.
Facing the river were the largest houses, with grounds in which trees and
shrubs had been planted and in the streets along the hill, less and less
pretentious as they receded from the river, were other houses built and
being built, long rows of houses, long streets of houses, houses in brick,
stone, and wood.
Hugh went from the river front back into this maze of streets and houses.
Some instinct led him there. It was where the men and women of Bidwell who
had prospered and had married went to live, to make themselves houses. His
father-in-law had offered to buy him a river front place and already that
meant much in Bidwell.
He wanted to see women who, like Clara, had got themselves husbands, what
they were like. "I've seen enough of men," he thought half resentfully as
he went along.
All afternoon he walked in streets, going up and down before houses in
which women lived with their men. A detached mood had possession of him.
For an hour he stood under a tree idly watching workmen engaged in building
another house. When one of the workmen spoke to him he walked away and went
into a street where men were laying a cement pavement before a completed
house.
In a furtive way he kept looking about for women, hungering to see their
faces. "What are they up to? I'd like to find out," his mind seemed to be
saying.
The women came out of the doors of the houses and passed him as he went
slowly along. Other women in carriages drove in the streets. They were
well-dressed women and seemed sure of themselves. "Things are all right
with me. For me things are settled and arranged," they seemed to say. All
the streets in which he walked seemed to be telling the story of things
settled and arranged. The houses spoke of the same things. "I am a house.
I am not built until things are settled and arranged. I mean that," they
said.
Hugh grew very tired. In the later afternoon a small bright-eyed woman--no
doubt she had been one of the guests at his wedding feast--stopped him.
"Are you planning to buy or build up our way, Mr. McVey?" she asked. He
shook his head. "I'm looking around," he said and hurried away.
Anger took the place of perplexity in him. The women he saw in the streets
and in the doors of the houses were such women as his own woman Clara. They
had married men--"no better than myself," he told himself, growing bold.
They had married men and something had happened to them. Something was
settled. They could live in streets and in houses. Their marriages had been
real marriages and he had a right to a real marriage. It was not too much
to expect out of life.
"Clara has a right to that also," he thought and his mind began to idealize
the marriages of men and women. "On every hand here I see them, the neat,
well-dressed, handsome women like Clara. How happy they are!
"Their feathers have been ruffled though," he thought angrily. "It was with
them as with that bird I saw being pursued through the trees. There has
been pursuit and a pretense of trying to escape. There has been an effort
made that was not an effort, but feathers have been ruffled here."
When his thoughts had driven him into a half desperate mood Hugh went
out of the streets of bright, ugly, freshly built, freshly painted and
furnished houses, and down into the town. Several men homeward bound at the
end of their day of work called to him. "I hope you are thinking of buying
or building up our way," they said heartily.
* * * * *
It began to rain and darkness came, but Hugh did not go home to Clara. It
did not seem to him that he could spend another night in the house with
her, lying awake, hearing the little noises of the night, waiting--for
courage. He could not sit under the lamp through another evening pretending
to read. He could not go with Clara up the stairs only to leave her with a
cold "good-night" at the top of the stairs.
Hugh went up the Medina Road almost to the house and then retraced his
steps and got into a field. There was a low swampy place in which the
water came up over his shoetops, and after he had crossed that there was
a field overgrown with a tangle of vines. The night became so dark that
he could see nothing and darkness reigned over his spirit. For hours he
walked blindly, but it did not occur to him that as he waited, hating the
waiting, Clara also waited; that for her also it was a time of trial and
uncertainty. To him it seemed her course was simple and easy. She was a
white pure thing--waiting--for what? for courage to come in to him in order
that an assault be made upon her whiteness and purity.
That was the only answer to the question Hugh could find within himself.
The destruction of what was white and pure was a necessary thing in life.
It was a thing men must do in order that life go on. As for women, they
must be white and pure--and wait.
* * * * *
Filled with inward resentment Hugh at last did go to the farmhouse. Wet
and with dragging, heavy feet he turned out of the Medina Road to find the
house dark and apparently deserted.
Then a new and puzzling situation arose. When he stepped over the threshold
and into the house he knew Clara was there.
On that day she had not driven him to work in the morning or gone for him
at noon hour because she did not want to look at him in the light of day,
did not want again to see the puzzled, frightened look in his eyes. She had
wanted him in the darkness alone, had waited for darkness. Now it was dark
in the house and she waited for him.
How simple it was! Hugh came into the living-room, stumbled forward into
the darkness, and found the hat-rack against the wall near the stairway
leading to the bedrooms above. Again he had surrendered what he would no
doubt have called the manhood in himself, and hoped only to be able to
escape the presence he felt in the room, to creep off upstairs to his bed,
to lie awake listening to noises, waiting miserably for another day to
come. But when he had put his dripping hat on one of the pegs of the rack
and had found the lower step with his foot thrust into darkness, a voice
called to him.
"Come here, Hugh," Clara said softly and firmly, and like a boy caught
doing a forbidden act he went toward her. "We have been very silly, Hugh,"
he heard her voice saying softly.
* * * * *
Hugh went to where Clara sat in a chair by a window. From him there was
no protest and no attempt to escape the love-making that followed. For a
moment he stood in silence and could see her white figure below him in the
chair. It was like something still far away, but coming swiftly as a bird
flies to him--upward to him. Her hand crept up and lay in his hand. It
seemed unbelievably large. It was not soft, but hard and firm. When her
hand had rested in his for a moment she arose and stood beside him. Then
the hand went out of his and touched, caressed his wet coat, his wet hair,
his cheeks. "My flesh must be white and cold," he thought, and then he did
not think any more.
Gladness took hold of him, a gladness that came up out of the inner parts
of himself as she had come up to him out of the chair. For days, weeks, he
had been thinking of his problem as a man's problem, his defeat had been a
man's defeat.
Now there was no defeat, no problem, no victory. In himself he did not
exist. Within himself something new had been born or another something that
had always lived with him had stirred to life. It was not awkward. It was
not afraid. It was a thing as swift and sure as the flight of the male bird
through the branches of trees and it was in pursuit of something light and
swift in her, something that would fly through light and darkness but fly
not too swiftly, something of which he need not be afraid, something that
without the need of understanding he could understand as one understands
the need of breath in a close place.
With a laugh as soft and sure as her own Hugh took Clara into his arms.
A few minutes later they went up stairs and twice Hugh stumbled on the
stairway. It did not matter. His long awkward body was a thing outside
himself. It might stumble and fall many times but the new thing he had
found, the thing inside himself that responded to the thing inside the
shell that was Clara his wife, did not stumble. It flew like a bird out of
darkness into the light. At the moment he thought the sweeping flight of
life thus begun would run on forever.
BOOK SIX
CHAPTER XXI
It was a summer night in Ohio and the wheat in the long, flat fields that
stretched away to the north from the town of Bidwell was ripe for the
cutting. Between the wheat fields lay corn and cabbage fields. In the corn
fields the green stalks stood up like young trees. Facing the fields lay
the white roads, once the silent roads, hushed and empty through the nights
and often during many hours of the day, the night silence broken only at
long intervals by the clattering hoofs of homeward bound horses and the
silence of days by creaking wagons. Along the roads on a summer evening
went the young farm hand in his buggy for which he had spent a summer's
wage, a long summer of sweaty toil in hot fields. The hoofs of his horse
beat a soft tattoo on the roads. His sweetheart sat beside him and he was
in no hurry. All day he had been at work in the harvest and on the morrow
he would work again. It did not matter. For him the night would last until
the cocks in isolated farmyards began to hail the dawn. He forgot the horse
and did not care what turning he took. All roads led to happiness for him.
Beside the long roads was an endless procession of fields broken now and
then by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon the
roads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass in fence
corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting
away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were beautiful too.
Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields? In the cabbage fields
the broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting,