Андерсон Шервуд. Триумф яйца(engl)

drained I shall use lime to sweeten it," she added. She was like a
mother leaning over the cradle of a sleeping babe. Her enthusiasm
irritated him.

When Rosalind came to take the position in his office the slow fires of
hatred that had been burning beneath the surface of Walter Savers' life
had already eaten away much of his vigor and energy. His body sagged in
the office chair and there were heavy sagging lines at the corners of
his mouth. Outwardly he remained always kindly and cheerful but back of
the clouded, troubled eyes the fires of hatred burned slowly,
persistently. It was as though he was trying to awaken from a troubled
dream that gripped him, a dream that frightened a little, that was
unending. He had contracted little physical habits. A sharp paper
cutter lay on his desk. As he read a letter from one of the firm's
customers he took it up and jabbed little holes in the leather cover of
his desk. When he had several letters to sign he took up his pen and
jabbed it almost viciously into the inkwell. Then before signing he
jabbed it in again. Sometimes he did the thing a dozen times in
succession.

Sometimes the things that went on beneath the surface of Walter Sayers
frightened him. In order to do what he called "putting in his Saturday
afternoons and Sundays" he had taken up photography. The camera took
him away from his own house and the sight of the garden where his wife
and the negro were busy digging, and into the fields and into stretches
of woodland at the edge of the suburban village. Also it took him away
from his wife's talk, from her eternal planning for the garden's
future. Here by the house tulip bulbs were to be put in in the fall.
Later there would be a hedge of lilac bushes shutting off the house
from the road. The men who lived in the other houses along the suburban
street spent their Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings tinkering
with motor cars. On Sunday afternoons they took their families driving,
sitting up very straight and silent at the driving wheel. They consumed
the afternoon in a swift dash over country roads. The car ate up the
hours. Monday morning and the work in the city was there, at the end of
the road. They ran madly toward it.

For a time the use of the camera made Walter Sayers almost happy. The
study of light, playing on the trunk of a tree or over the grass in a
field appealed to some instinct within. It was an uncertain delicate
business. He fixed himself a dark room upstairs in the house and spent
his evenings there. One dipped the films into the developing liquid,
held them to the light and then dipped them again. The little nerves
that controlled the eyes were aroused. One felt oneself being enriched,
a little--

One Sunday afternoon he went to walk in a strip of woodland and came
out upon the slope of a low hill. He had read somewhere that the low
hill country southwest of Chicago, in which his suburb lay, had once
been the shore of Lake Michigan. The low hills sprang out of the flat
land and were covered with forests. Beyond them the flat lands began
again. The prairies went on indefinitely, into infinity. People's lives
went on so. Life was too long. It was to be spent in the endless doing
over and over of an unsatisfactory task. He sat on the slope and looked
out across the land.

He thought of his wife. She was back there, in the suburb in the hills,
in her garden making things grow. It was a noble sort of thing to be
doing. One shouldn't be irritated.

Well he had married her expecting to have money of his own. Then he
would have worked at something else. Money would not have been involved
in the matter and success would not have been a thing one must seek. He
had expected his own life would be motivated. No matter how much or how
hard he worked he would not have been a great singer. What did that
matter? There was a way to live--a way of life in which such things did
not matter. The delicate shades of things might be sought after. Before
his eyes, there on the grass covered flat lands, the afternoon light
was playing. It was like a breath, a vapor of color blown suddenly from
between red lips out over the grey dead burned grass. Song might be
like that. The beauty might come out of himself, out of his own body.

Again he thought of his wife and the sleeping light in his eyes flared
up, it became a flame. He felt himself being mean, unfair. It didn't
matter. Where did the truth lie? Was his wife, digging in her garden,
having always a succession of small triumphs, marching forward with the
seasons--well, was she becoming a little old, lean and sharp, a little
vulgarized?

It seemed so to him. There was something smug in the way in which she
managed to fling green growing flowering things over the black land. It
was obvious the thing could be done and that there was satisfaction in
doing it. It was a little like running a business and making money by
it. There was a deep seated vulgarity involved in the whole matter. His
wife put her hands into the black ground. They felt about, caressed the
roots of the growing things. She laid hold of the slender trunk of a
young tree in a certain way--as though she possessed it.

One could not deny that the destruction of beautiful things was
involved. Weeds grew in the garden, delicate shapely things. She
plucked them out without thought. He had seen her do it.

As for himself, he also had been pulled out of something. Had he not
surrendered to the fact of a wife and growing children? Did he not
spend his days doing work he detested? The anger within him burned
bright. The fire came into his conscious self. Why should a weed that
is to be destroyed pretend to a vegetable existence? As for puttering
about with a camera--was it not a form of cheating? He did not want to
be a photographer. He had once wanted to be a singer.

He arose and walked along the hillside, still watching the shadows play
over the plains below. At night--in bed with his wife--well, was she
not sometimes with him as she was in the garden? Something was plucked
out of him and another thing grew in its place--something she wanted to
have grow. Their love making was like his puttering with a camera--to
make the weekends pass. She came at him a little too determinedly--
sure. She was plucking delicate weeds in order that things she had
determined upon--"vegetables," he exclaimed in disgust--in order that
vegetables might grow. Love was a fragrance, the shading of a tone over
the lips, out of the throat. It was like the afternoon light on the
burned grass. Keeping a garden and making flowers grow had nothing to
do with it.

Walter Sayers' fingers twitched. The camera hung by a strap over his
shoulder. He took hold of the strap and walked to a tree. He swung the
box above his head and brought it down with a thump against the tree
trunk. The sharp breaking sound--the delicate parts of the machine
being broken--was sweet to his ears. It was as though a song had come
suddenly from between his lips. Again he swung the box and again
brought it down against the tree trunk.

IV

Rosalind at work in Walter Sayers' office was from the beginning
something different, apart from the young woman from Iowa who had been
drifting from office to office, moving from rooming house to rooming
house on Chicago's North Side, striving feebly to find out something
about life by reading books, going to the theatre and walking alone in
the streets. In the new place her life at once began to have point and
purpose, but at the same time the perplexity that was later to send her
running to Willow Springs and to the presence of her mother began to
grow in her.

Walter Sayers' office was a rather large room on the third floor of the
factory whose walls went straight up from the river's edge. In the
morning Rosalind arrived at eight and went into the office and closed
the door. In a large room across a narrow hallway and shut off from her
retreat by two thick, clouded-glass partitions was the company's
general office. It contained the desks of salesmen, several clerks, a
bookkeeper and two stenographers. Rosalind avoided becoming acquainted
with these people. She was in a mood to be alone, to spend as many
hours as possible alone with her own thoughts.

She got to the office at eight and her employer did not arrive until
nine-thirty or ten. For an hour or two in the morning and in the late
afternoon she had the place to herself. Immediately she shut the door
into the hallway and was alone she felt at home. Even in her father's
house it had never been so. She took off her wraps and walked about the
room touching things, putting things to rights. During the night a
negro woman had scrubbed the floor and wiped the dust off her
employer's desk but she got a cloth and wiped the desk again. Then she
opened the letters that had come in and after reading arranged them in
little piles. She wanted to spend a part of her wages for flowers and
imagined clusters of flowers arranged in small hanging baskets along
the grey walls. "I'll do that later, perhaps," she thought.

The walls of the room enclosed her. "What makes me so happy here?" she
asked herself. As for her employer--she felt she scarcely knew him. He
was a shy man, rather small--

She went to a window and stood looking out. Near the factory a bridge
crossed the river and over it went a stream of heavily loaded wagons
and motor trucks. The sky was grey with smoke. In the afternoon, after
her employer had gone for the day, she would stand again by the window.
As she stood thus she faced westward and in the afternoon saw the sun
fall down the sky. It was glorious to be there alone during the late
hours of the afternoon. What a tremendous thing this city in which she
had come to live! For some reason after she went to work for Walter
Sayers the city seemed, like the room in which she worked, to have
accepted her, taken her into itself. In the late afternoon the rays of
the departing sun fell across great banks of clouds. The whole city
seemed to reach upwards. It left the ground and ascended into the air.
There was an illusion produced. Stark grim factory chimneys, that all
day were stiff cold formal things sticking up into the air and belching
forth black smoke, were now slender upreaching pencils of light and
wavering color. The tall chimneys detached themselves from the
buildings and sprang into the air. The factory in which Rosalind stood
had such a chimney. It also was leaping upward. She felt herself being
lifted, an odd floating sensation was achieved. With what a stately
tread the day went away, over the city! The city, like the factory
chimneys yearned after it, hungered for it.

In the morning gulls came in from Lake Michigan to feed on the sewage
floating in the river below. The river was the color of chrysoprase.
The gulls floated above it as sometimes in the evening the whole city
seemed to float before her eyes. They were graceful, living, free
things. They were triumphant. The getting of food, even the eating of
sewage was done thus gracefully, beautifully. The gulls turned and
twisted in the air. They wheeled and floated and then fell downward to
the river in a long curve, just touching, caressing the surface of the
water and then rising again.

Rosalind raised herself on her toes. At her back beyond the two glass
partitions were other men and women, but there, in that room, she was
alone. She belonged there. What an odd feeling she had. She also
belonged to her employer, Walter Sayers. She scarcely knew the man and
yet she belonged to him. She threw her arms above her head, trying
awkwardly to imitate some movement of the birds.

Her awkwardness shamed her a little and she turned and walked about the
room. "I'm twenty-five years old and it's a little late to begin trying
to be a bird, to be graceful," she thought. She resented the slow
stupid heavy movements of her father and mother, the movements she had
imitated as a child. "Why was I not taught to be graceful and beautiful
in mind and body, why in the place I came from did no one think it
worth while to try to be graceful and beautiful?" she whispered to
herself.

How conscious of her own body Rosalind was becoming! She walked across
the room, trying to go lightly and gracefully. In the office beyond the
glass partitions someone spoke suddenly and she was startled. She
laughed foolishly. For a long time after she went to work in the office
of Walter Sayers she thought the desire in herself to be physically
more graceful and beautiful and to rise also out of the mental
stupidity and sloth of her young womanhood was due to the fact that the
factory windows faced the river and the western sky, and that in the
morning she saw the gulls feeding and in the afternoon the sun going
down through the smoke clouds in a riot of colors.

V

On the August evening as Rosalind sat on the porch before her father's
house in Willow Springs, Walter Sayers came home from the factory by
the river and to his wife's suburban garden. When the family had dined
he came out to walk in the paths with the two children, boys, but they
soon tired of his silence and went to join their mother. The young
negro came along a path by the kitchen door and joined the party.
Walter went to sit on a garden seat that was concealed behind bushes.
He lighted a cigarette but did not smoke. The smoke curled quietly up
through his fingers as it burned itself out.

Closing his eyes Walter sat perfectly still and tried not to think. The
soft evening shadows began presently to close down and around him. For
a long time he sat thus motionless, like a carved figure placed on the
garden bench. He rested. He lived and did not live. The intense body,
usually so active and alert, had become a passive thing. It was thrown
aside, on to the bench, under the bush, to sit there, waiting to be
reinhabited.

This hanging suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness was a
thing that did not happen often. There was something to be settled
between himself and a woman and the woman had gone away. His whole plan
of life had been disturbed. Now he wanted to rest. The details of his
life were forgotten. As for the woman he did not think of her, did not
want to think of her. It was ridiculous that he needed her so much. He
wondered if he had ever felt that way about Cora, his wife. Perhaps he
had. Now she was near him, but a few yards away. It was almost dark but
she with the negro remained at work, digging in the ground--somewhere
near--caressing the soil, making things grow.

When his mind was undisturbed by thoughts and lay like a lake in the
hills on a quiet summer evening little thoughts did come. "I want you
as a lover--far away. Keep yourself far away." The words trailed
through his mind as the smoke from the cigarette trailed slowly upwards
through his fingers. Did the words refer to Rosalind Wescott? She had
been gone from him three days. Did he hope she would never come back or
did the words refer to his wife?

His wife's voice spoke sharply. One of the children in playing about,
had stepped on a plant. "If you are not careful I shall have to make
you stay out of the garden altogether." She raised her voice and
called, "Marian!" A maid came from the house and took the children
away. They went along the path toward the house protesting. Then they
ran back to kiss their mother. There was a struggle and then
acceptance. The kiss was acceptance of their fate--to obey. "O,
Walter," the mother's voice called, but the man on the bench did not
answer. Tree toads began to cry. "The kiss is acceptance. Any physical
contact with another is acceptance," he reflected.

The little voices within Walter Sayers were talking away at a great
rate. Suddenly he wanted to sing. He had been told that his voice was
small, not of much account, that he would never be a singer. It was
quite true no doubt but here, in the garden on the quiet summer night,
was a place and a time for a small voice. It would be like the voice
within himself that whispered sometimes when he was quiet, relaxed. One
evening when he had been with the woman, Rosalind, when he had taken
her into the country in his car, he had suddenly felt as he did now.
They sat together in the car that he had run into a field. For a long
time they had remained silent. Some cattle came and stood nearby, their
figures soft in the night. Suddenly he had felt like a new man in a new
world and had begun to sing. He sang one song over and over, then sat
in silence for a time and after that drove out of the field and through
a gate into the road. He took the woman back to her place in the city.

In the quiet of the garden on the summer evening he opened his lips to
sing the same song. He would sing with the tree toad hidden away in the
fork of a tree somewhere. He would lift his voice up from the earth, up
into the branches, of trees, away from the ground in which people were
digging, his wife and the young negro.

The song did not come. His wife began speaking and the sound of her
voice took away the desire to sing. Why had she not, like the other
woman, remained silent?

He began playing a game. Sometimes, when he was alone the thing
happened to him that had now happened. His body became like a tree or a
plant. Life ran through it unobstructed. He had dreamed of being a
singer but at such a moment he wanted also to be a dancer. That would
have been sweetest of all things--to sway like the tops of young trees
when a wind blew, to give himself as grey weeds in a sunburned field
gave themself to the influence of passing shadows, changing color
constantly, becoming every moment something new, to live in life and in
death too, always to live, to be unafraid of life, to let it flow
through his body, to let the blood flow through his body, not to
struggle, to offer no resistance, to dance.

Walter Sayers' children had gone into the house with the nurse girl
Marian. It had become too dark for his wife to dig in the garden. It
was August and the fruitful time of the year for farms and gardens had
come, but his wife had forgotten fruitfulness. She was making plans for
another year. She came along the garden path followed by the negro. "We
will set out strawberry plants there," she was saying. The soft voice
of the young negro murmured his assent. It was evident the young man
lived in her conception of the garden. His mind sought out her desire
and gave itself.

The children Walter Sayers had brought into life through the body of
his wife Cora had gone into the house and to bed. They bound him to
life, to his wife, to the garden where he sat, to the office by the
riverside in the city.

They were not his children. Suddenly he knew that quite clearly. His
own children were quite different things. "Men have children just as
women do. The children come out of their bodies. They play about," he
thought. It seemed to him that children, born of his fancy, were at
that very moment playing about the bench where he sat. Living things
that dwelt within him and that had at the same time the power to depart
out of him were now running along paths, swinging from the branches of
trees, dancing in the soft light.

His mind sought out the figure of Rosalind Wescott. She had gone away,
to her own people in Iowa. There had been a note at the office saying
she might be gone for several days. Between himself and Rosalind the
conventional relationship of employer and employee had long since been
swept quite away. It needed something in a man he did not possess to
maintain that relationship with either men or women.

At the moment he wanted to forget Rosalind. In her there was a struggle
going on. The two people had wanted to be lovers and he had fought
against that. They had talked about it. "Well," he said, "it will not
work out. We will bring unnecessary unhappiness upon ourselves."

He had been honest enough in fighting off the intensification of their
relationship. "If she were here now, in this garden with me, it
wouldn't matter. We could be lovers and then forget about being
lovers," he told himself.

His wife came along the path and stopped nearby. She continued talking
in a low voice, making plans for another year of gardening. The negro
stood near her, his figure making a dark wavering mass against the
foliage of a low growing bush. His wife wore a white dress. He could
see her figure quite plainly. In the uncertain light it looked girlish
and young. She put her hand up and took hold of the body of a young
tree. The hand became detached from her body. The pressure of her
leaning body made the young tree sway a little. The white hand moved
slowly back and forth in space.

Rosalind Wescott had gone home to tell her mother of her love. In her
note she had said nothing of that but Walter Sayers knew that was the
object of her visit to the Iowa town. It was on odd sort of thing to
try to do--to tell people of love, to try to explain it to others.

The night was a thing apart from Walter Sayers, the male being sitting
in silence in the garden. Only the children of his fancy understood it.
The night was a living thing. It advanced upon him, enfolded him.
"Night is the sweet little brother of Death," he thought.

His wife stood very near. Her voice was soft and low and the voice of
the negro when he answered her comments on the future of the garden was
soft and low. There was music in the negro's voice, perhaps a dance in
it. Walter remembered about him.

The young negro had been in trouble before he came to the Sayers. He
had been an ambitious young black and had listened to the voices of
people, to the voices that filled the air of America, rang through the
houses of America. He had wanted to get on in life and had tried to
educate himself. The black had wanted to be a lawyer.

How far away he had got from his own people, from the blacks of the
African forests! He had wanted to be a lawyer in a city in America.
What a notion!

Well he had got into trouble. He had managed to get through college and
had opened a law office. Then one evening he went out to walk and
chance led him into a street where a woman, a white woman, had been
murdered an hour before. The body of the woman was found and then he
was found walking in the street. Mrs. Sayers' brother, a lawyer, had
saved him from being punished as a murderer and after the trial, and
the young negro's acquittal, had induced his sister to take him as
gardener. His chances as a professional man in the city were no good.
"He has had a terrible experience and has just escaped by a fluke" the
brother had said. Cora Sayers had taken the young man. She had bound
him to herself, to her garden.

It was evident the two people were bound together. One cannot bind
another without being bound. His wife had no more to say to the negro
who went away along the path that led to the kitchen door. He had a
room in a little house at the foot of the garden. In the room he had
books and a piano. Sometimes in the evening he sang. He was going now
to his place. By educating himself he had cut himself off from his own
people.

Cora Sayers went into the house and Walter sat alone. After a time the
young negro came silently down the path. He stopped by the tree where a
moment before the white woman had stood talking to him. He put his hand
on the trunk of the young tree where her hand had been and then went
softly away. His feet made no sound on the garden path.

An hour passed. In his little house at the foot of the garden the negro
began to sing softly. He did that sometimes in the middle of the night.
What a life he had led too! He had come away from his black people,
from the warm brown girls with the golden colors playing through the
blue black of their skins and had worked his way through a Northern
college, had accepted the patronage of impertinent people who wanted to
uplift the black race, had listened to them, had bound himself to them,
had tried to follow the way of life they had suggested.

Now he was in the little house at the foot of the Sayers' garden.
Walter remembered little things his wife had told him about the man.
The experience in the court room had frightened him horribly and he did
not want to go off the Sayers' place. Education, books had done
something to him. He could not go back to his own people. In Chicago,
for the most part, the blacks lived crowded into a few streets on the
South Side. "I want to be a slave," he had said to Cora Sayers. "You
may pay me money if it makes you feel better but I shall have no use
for it. I want to be your slave. I would be happy if I knew I would
never have to go off your place."

The black sang a low voiced song. It ran like a little wind on the
surface of a pond. It had no words. He had remembered the song from his
father who had got it from his father. In the South, in Alabama and
Mississippi the blacks sang it when they rolled cotton bales onto the
steamers in the rivers. They had got it from other rollers of cotton
bales long since dead. Long before there were any cotton bales to roll
black men in boats on rivers in Africa had sung it. Young blacks in
boats floated down rivers and came to a town they intended to attack at
dawn. There was bravado in singing the song then. It was addressed to
the women in the town to be attacked and contained both a caress and a
threat. "In the morning your husbands and brothers and sweethearts we
shall kill. Then we shall come into your town to you. We shall hold you
close. We shall make you forget. With our hot love and our strength we
shall make you forget." That was the old significance of the song.

Walter Sayers remembered many things. On other nights when the negro
sang and when he lay in his room upstairs in the house, his wife came
to him. There were two beds in their room. She sat upright in her bed.
"Do you hear, Walter?" she asked. She came to sit on his bed, sometimes
she crept into his arms. In the African villages long ago when the song
floated up from the river men arose and prepared for battle. The song
was a defiance, a taunt. That was all gone now. The young negro's house
was at the foot of the garden and Walter with his wife lay upstairs in
the larger house situated on high ground. It was a sad song, filled
with race sadness. There was something in the ground that wanted to
grow, buried deep in the ground. Cora Sayers understood that. It
touched something instinctive in her. Her hand went out and touched,
caressed her husband's face, his body. The song made her want to hold
him tight, possess him.

The night was advancing and it grew a little cold in the garden. The
negro stopped singing. Walter Sayers arose and went along the path
toward the house but did not enter. Instead he went through a gate into
the road and along the suburban streets until he got into the open
country. There was no moon but the stars shone brightly. For a time he
hurried along looking back as though afraid of being followed, but when
he got out into a broad flat meadow he went more slowly. For an hour he
walked and then stopped and sat on a tuft of dry grass. For some reason
he knew he could not return to his house in the suburb that night. In
the morning he would go to the office and wait there until Rosalind
came. Then? He did not know what he would do then. "I shall have to
make up some story. In the morning I shall have to telephone Cora and
make up some silly story," he thought. It was an absurd thing that he,
a grown man, could not spend a night abroad, in the fields without the
necessity of explanations. The thought irritated him and he arose and
walked again. Under the stars in the soft night and on the wide flat
plains the irritation soon went away and he began to sing softly, but
the song he sang was not the one he had repeated over and over on that
other night when he sat with Rosalind in the car and the cattle came.
It was the song the negro sang, the river song of the young black
warriors that slavery had softened and colored with sadness. On the
lips of Walter Sayers the song had lost much of its sadness. He walked
almost gaily along and in the song that flowed from his lips there was
a taunt, a kind of challenge.

VI

At the end of the short street on which the Wescotts lived in Willow
Springs there was a cornfield. When Rosalind was a child it was a
meadow and beyond was an orchard.

On summer afternoons the child often went there to sit alone on the
banks of a tiny stream that wandered away eastward toward Willow Creek,
draining the farmer's fields on the way. The creek had made a slight
depression in the level contour of the land and she sat with her back
against an old apple tree and with her bare feet almost touching the
water. Her mother did not permit her to run bare footed through the
streets but when she got into the orchard she took her shoes off. It
gave her a delightful naked feeling.

Overhead and through the branches the child could see the great sky.
Masses of white clouds broke into fragments and then the fragments came
together again. The sun ran in behind one of the cloud masses and grey
shadows slid silently over the face of distant fields. The world of her
child life, the Wescott household, Melville Stoner sitting in his
house, the cries of other children who lived in her street, all the
life she knew went far away. To be there in that silent place was like
lying awake in bed at night only in some way sweeter and better. There
were no dull household sounds and the air she breathed was sweeter,
cleaner. The child played a little game. All the apple trees in the
orchard were old and gnarled and she had given all the trees names.
There was one fancy that frightened her a little but was delicious too.
She fancied that at night when she had gone to bed and was asleep and
when all the town of Willow Springs had gone to sleep the trees came
out of the ground and walked about. The grasses beneath the trees, the
bushes that grew beside the fence--all came out of the ground and ran
madly here and there. They danced wildly. The old trees, like stately
old men, put their heads together and talked. As they talked their
bodies swayed slightly--back and forth, back and forth. The bushes and
flowering weeds ran in great circles among the little grasses. The
grasses hopped straight up and down.

Sometimes when she sat with her back against the tree on warm bright
afternoons the child Rosalind had played the game of dancing-life until
she grew afraid and had to give it up. Nearby in the fields men were
cultivating corn. The breasts of the horses and their wide strong
shoulders pushed the young corn aside and made a low rustling sound.
Now and then a man's voice was raised in a shout. "Hi, there you Joe!
Get in there Frank!" The widow of the hens owned a little woolly dog
that occasionally broke into a spasm of barking, apparently without
cause, senseless, eager, barking. Rosalind shut all the sounds out. She
closed her eyes and struggled, trying to get into the place beyond
human sounds. After a time her desire was accomplished. There was a low
sweet sound like the murmuring of voices far away. Now the thing was
happening. With a kind of tearing sound the trees came up to stand on
top of the ground. They moved with stately tread toward each other. Now
the mad bushes and the flowering weeds came running, dancing madly, now
the joyful grasses hopped. Rosalind could not stay long in her world of
fancy. It was too mad, too joyful. She opened her eyes and jumped to
her feet. Everything was all right. The trees stood solidly rooted in
the ground, the weeds and bushes had gone back to their places by the
fence, the grasses lay asleep on the ground. She felt that her father
and mother, her brother, everyone she knew would not approve of her
being there among them. The world of dancing life was a lovely but a
wicked world. She knew. Sometimes she was a little mad herself and then
she was whipped or scolded. The mad world of her fancy had to be put
away. It frightened her a little. Once after the thing appeared she
cried, went down to the fence crying. A man who was cultivating corn
came along and stopped his horses. "What's the matter?" he asked
sharply. She couldn't tell him so she told a lie. "A bee stung me," she
said. The man laughed. "It'll get well. Better put on your shoes," he
advised.

The time of the marching trees and the dancing grasses was in
Rosalind's childhood. Later when she had graduated from the Willow
Springs High School and had the three years of waiting about the
Wescott house before she went to the city she had other experiences in
the orchard. Then she had been reading novels and had talked with other
young women. She knew many things that after all she did not know. In
the attic of her mother's house there was a cradle in which she and her
brother had slept when they were babies. One day she went up there and
found it. Bedding for the cradle was packed away in a trunk and she
took it out. She arranged the cradle for the reception of a child. Then
after she did it she was ashamed. Her mother might come up the attic
stairs and see it. She put the bedding quickly back into the trunk and
went down stairs, her cheeks burning with shame.

What a confusion! One day she went to the house of a schoolgirl friend
who was about to be married. Several other girls came and they were all
taken into a bedroom where the bride's trousseau was laid out on a bed.
What soft lovely things! All the girls went forward and stood over
them, Rosalind among them. Some of the girls were shy, others bold.
There was one, a thin girl who had no breasts. Her body was flat like a
door and she had a thin sharp voice and a thin sharp face. She began to
cry out strangely. "How sweet, how sweet, how sweet," she cried over
and over. The voice was not like a human voice. It was like something
being hurt, an animal in the forest, far away somewhere by itself,
being hurt. Then the girl dropped to her knees beside the bed and began
to weep bitterly. She declared she could not bear the thought of her
schoolgirl friend being married. "Don't do it! O, Mary don't do it!"
she pleaded. The other girls laughed but Rosalind couldn't stand it.
She hurried out of the house.

That was one thing that had happened to Rosalind and there were other
things. Once she saw a young man on the street. He clerked in a store
and Rosalind did not know him. However her fancy played with the
thought that she had married him. Her own thoughts made her ashamed.

Everything shamed her. When she went into the orchard on summer
afternoons she sat with her back against the apple tree and took off
her shoes and stockings just as she had when she was a child, but the
world of her childhood fancy was gone, nothing could bring it back.

Rosalind's body was soft but all her flesh was firm and strong. She
moved away from the tree and lay on the ground. She pressed her body
down into the grass, into the firm hard ground. It seemed to her that
her mind, her fancy, all the life within her, except just her physical
life, went away. The earth pressed upwards against her body. Her body
was pressed against the earth. There was darkness. She was imprisoned.
She pressed against the walls of her prison. Everything was dark and
there was in all the earth silence. Her fingers clutched a handful of
the grasses, played in the grasses.

Then she grew very still but did not sleep. There was something that
had nothing to do with the ground beneath her or the trees or the
clouds in the sky, that seemed to want to come to her, come into her, a
kind of white wonder of life.

The thing couldn't happen. She opened her eyes and there was the sky
overhead and the trees standing silently about. She went again to sit
with her back against one of the trees. She thought with dread of the
evening coming on and the necessity of going out of the orchard and to
the Wescott house. She was weary. It was the weariness that made her
appear to others a rather dull stupid young woman. Where was the wonder
of life? It was not within herself, not in the ground. It must be in
the sky overhead. Presently it would be night and the stars would come
out. Perhaps the wonder did not really exist in life. It had something
to do with God. She wanted to ascend upwards, to go at once up into
God's house, to be there among the light strong men and women who had
died and left dullness and heaviness behind them on the earth. Thinking
of them took some of her weariness away and sometimes she went out of
the orchard in the late afternoon walking almost lightly. Something
like grace seemed to have come into her tall strong body.

* * * * *

Rosalind had gone away from the Wescott house and from Willow Springs,
Iowa, feeling that life was essentially ugly. In a way she hated life
and people. In Chicago sometimes it was unbelievable how ugly the world
had become. She tried to shake off the feeling but it clung to her. She
walked through the crowded streets and the buildings were ugly. A sea
of faces floated up to her. They were the faces of dead people. The
dull death that was in them was in her also. They too could not break
through the walls of themselves to the white wonder of life. After all
perhaps there was no such thing as the white wonder of life. It might
be just a thing of the mind. There was something essentially dirty
about life. The dirt was on her and in her. Once as she walked at
evening over the Rush Street bridge to her room on the North Side she
looked up suddenly and saw the chrysoprase river running inland from
the lake. Near at hand stood a soap factory. The men of the city had
turned the river about, made it flow inland from the lake. Someone had
erected a great soap factory there near the river's entrance to the
city, to the land of men. Rosalind stopped and stood looking along the
river toward the lake. Men and women, wagons, automobiles rushed past
her. They were dirty. She was dirty. "The water of an entire sea and
millions of cakes of soap will not wash me clean," she thought. The
dirtiness of life seemed a part of her very being and an almost
overwhelming desire to climb upon the railing of the bridge and leap
down into the chrysoprase river swept over her. Her body trembled
violently and putting down her head and staring at the flooring of the
bridge she hurried away.

* * * * *

And now Rosalind, a grown woman, was in the Wescott house at the supper
table with her father and mother. None of the three people ate. They
fussed about with the food Ma Wescott had prepared. Rosalind looked at
her mother and thought of what Melville Stoner had said.

"If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone thought.
It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I would tell what
you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this
railroad track with me. I would tell what your mother has been thinking
at the same time and what she would like to say to you."

What had Rosalind's mother been thinking all through the three days
since her daughter had so unexpectedly come home from Chicago? What did
mothers think in regard to the lives led by their daughters? Had
mothers something of importance to say to daughters and if they did
when did the time come when they were ready to say it?

She looked at her mother sharply. The older woman's face was heavy and
sagging. She had grey eyes like Rosalind's but they were dull like the
eyes of a fish lying on a slab of ice in the window of a city meat
market. The daughter was a little frightened by what she saw in her
mother's face and something caught in her throat. There was an
embarrassing moment. A strange sort of tenseness came into the air of
the room and all three people suddenly got up from the table.

Rosalind went to help her mother with the dishes and her father sat in
a chair by a window and read a paper. The daughter avoided looking
again into her mother's face. "I must gather myself together if I am to
do what I want to do," she thought. It was strange--in fancy she saw
the lean bird-like face of Melville Stoner and the eager tired face of
Walter Sayers floating above the head of her mother who leaned over the
kitchen sink, washing the dishes. Both of the men's faces sneered at
her. "You think you can but you can't. You are a young fool," the men's
lips seemed to be saying.

Rosalind's father wondered how long his daughter's visit was to last.
After the evening meal he wanted to clear out of the house, go up town,
and he had a guilty feeling that in doing so he was being discourteous
to his daughter. While the two women washed the dishes he put on his
hat and going into the back yard began chopping wood. Rosalind went to
sit on the front porch. The dishes were all washed and dried but for a
half hour her mother would putter about in the kitchen. She always did
that. She would arrange and rearrange, pick up dishes and put them down
again. She clung to the kitchen. It was as though she dreaded the hours
that must pass before she could go upstairs and to bed and asleep, to
fall into the oblivion of sleep.

When Henry Wescott came around the corner of the house and confronted
his daughter he was a little startled. He did not know what was the
matter but he felt uncomfortable. For a moment he stopped and looked at
her. Life radiated from her figure. A fire burned in her eyes, in her
grey intense eyes. Her hair was yellow like cornsilk. She was, at the
moment, a complete, a lovely daughter of the cornlands, a being to be
loved passionately, completely by some son of the cornlands--had there
been in the land a son as alive as this daughter it had thrown aside.
The father had hoped to escape from the house unnoticed. "I'm going up
town a little while," he said hesitatingly. Still he lingered a moment.
Some old sleeping thing awoke in him, was awakened in him by the
startling beauty of his daughter. A little fire flared up among the
charred rafters of the old house that was his body. "You look pretty,
girly," he said sheepishly and then turned his back to her and went
along the path to the gate and the street.

Rosalind followed her father to the gate and stood looking as he went
slowly along the short street and around a corner. The mood induced in
her by her talk with Melville Stoner had returned. Was it possible that
her father also felt as Melville Stoner sometimes did? Did loneliness
drive him to the door of insanity and did he also run through the night
seeking some lost, some hidden and half forgotten loveliness?

When her father had disappeared around the corner she went through the
gate and into the street. "I'll go sit by the tree in the orchard until
mother has finished puttering about the kitchen," she thought.

Henry Wescott went along the streets until he came to the square about
the court house and then went into Emanuel Wilson's Hardware Store. Two
or three other men presently joined him there. Every evening he sat
among these men of his town saying nothing. It was an escape from his
own house and his wife. The other men came for the same reason. A faint
perverted kind of male fellowship was achieved. One of the men of the
party, a little old man who followed the housepainters trade, was
unmarried and lived with his mother. He was himself nearing the age of
sixty but his mother was still alive. It was a thing to be wondered
about. When in the evening the house painter was a trifle late at the
rendezvous a mild flurry of speculation arose, floated in the air for a
moment and then settled like dust in an empty house. Did the old house
painter do the housework in his own house, did he wash the dishes, cook
the food, sweep and make the beds or did his feeble old mother do these
things? Emanuel Wilson told a story he had often told before. In a town
in Ohio where he had lived as a young man he had once heard a tale.
There was an old man like the house painter whose mother was also still
alive and lived with him. They were very poor and in the winter had not
enough bedclothes to keep them both warm. They crawled into a bed
together. It was an innocent enough matter, just like a mother taking
her child into her bed.

Henry Wescott sat in the store listening to the tale Emanuel Wilson
told for the twentieth time and thought about his daughter. Her beauty
made him feel a little proud, a little above the men who were his
companions. He had never before thought of his daughter as a beautiful
woman. Why had he never before noticed her beauty? Why had she come
from Chicago, there by the lake, to Willow Springs, in the hot month of
August? Had she come home from Chicago because she really wanted to see
her father and mother? For a moment he was ashamed of his own heavy
body, of his shabby clothes and his unshaven face and then the tiny
flame that had flared up within him burned itself out. The house
painter came in and the faint flavor of male companionship to which he
clung so tenaciously was reestablished.

In the orchard Rosalind sat with her back against the tree in the same
spot where her fancy had created the dancing life of her childhood and
where as a young woman graduate of the Willow Springs High School she
had come to try to break through the wall that separated her from life.
The sun had disappeared and the grey shadows of night were creeping
over the grass, lengthening the shadows cast by the trees. The orchard
had long been neglected and many of the trees were dead and without
foliage. The shadows of the dead branches were like long lean arms that
reached out, felt their way forward over the grey grass. Long lean
fingers reached and clutched. There was no wind and the night would be
dark and without a moon, a hot dark starlit night of the plains.

In a moment more it would be black night. Already the creeping shadows
on the grass were barely discernible. Rosalind felt death all about
her, in the orchard, in the town. Something Walter Sayers had once said