Chapter VII: Part 7

Then Marianne got up and ran down through the woods. He did not see her in time, and she reached the fence before he did. When she untied her horse, its panic told her what to do: she struck it across its nose with the reins; it galloped away. Then she mounted Paul’s horse fearlessly, shamelessly as well--having to sit astride because of the saddle, her skirts pulled up almost to her knee. He tried to follow her a little way on foot; she left him behind. At the edge of the town she tied the horse to another fence. No one who knew her saw her come home.

She lay across the bed with her feet and one hand hanging toward the floor; a sort of sick paralysis held her there. When Paul Fairchild had tried to hold her on the hilltop, she had said to herself, “This kiss will not hurt me as much as the other did.” She had been mistaken; she was going to be ill.

Her landlady came up to her room. “I am not well,” she explained. “I felt bad; I fainted away.”

“Shall I send for the doctor?”

“No. I feel better. I got too tired riding. It will be over in a few minutes. Ask Evangeline Gay to come.”

Evangeline Gay stood at the foot of the bed. The girl’s eyes and mouth were empty of emotion--they told her anxious friend nothing; but her nervous hands, along the ruffle of the pillow and up and down the pleats of her riding habit, like those of a deaf mute, spelled out an extreme distress. She had a slight fever and a greatly accelerated pulse.

“You poor child,” Evangeline said, “whatever is the matter, it has gone on long enough. You’re going to give up your school. I’m going to take you home. If you’re not strong enough to talk me out of it, you’re weak enough to do as I think best.”

Marianne obeyed orders in order not to have to talk. Furthermore, she was ill and would not dare to get well in Sheboygan, for Paul Fairchild would be there at the foot of the bed as soon as she could be seen. He came the next morning, but Evangeline had instructed the people of the house to send him away. At noon they set out together for Marianne’s home.

Mrs. Duff met them with a horse and buggy at the Aaronsville station. As they passed the Hope’s Corner schoolhouse, Marianne slipped out of the seat and hid her drawn face in Evangeline’s lap. The mother, who was driving, scarcely glanced at her, but stared fiercely over the playground, among the monuments and trees of the cemetery, and across the withered cornfields, as if to discover there who or what it was that had made her daughter ill.

It was a false illness, a mere excuse for her distress of which she could give no other explanation. So except for that moment under the honey locusts which leaned out from the school grounds, Marianne was able to control it until they reached home. But when at last she lay in her own bed, a fever declared itself with great force. It seemed to be a breathing, solid body like that of a human being; it curled up beside her on the same pillow, and slipped over and rested on her breast. She slept under its weight, and there, weeping softly even in her sleep, she was as happy as she expected ever to be again.

Evangeline was introduced to the father, a handsome man with curls in his beard and large eyes that resembled lumps of some kind of blue stone. “I hope our girl hasn’t been led into temptation off there away from her folks and home influences,” he said. “People’s tongues will be wagging--”

“You would do well,” his wife interrupted, “not to speak evil of her yourself.”

The two women waited for him to leave them alone. Then the mother cried, “What ever has happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it the fault of that man she means to marry?”

“She said nothing against him.” There was a pause, neither knowing what the other expected of her. “I must go back to Sheboygan in the morning,” Evangeline added. “She will be all right. She needed rest.”

The proud woman begged her to stay. “Marianne enjoys perfect health--it is one of the few things I am proud of. There is some mystery about this. And I am afraid that she will never tell me what the matter is. She had grounds for believing that I would disapprove of any man she meant to marry. You see, my own marriage, though my husband and I are God-fearing and resigned, is not all that it should be.” She made this confession without a sign of embarrassment. “But Marianne will not be afraid to tell you her romantic notions, because you have never been married.”

Ira Duff came into the room. “You understand,” he said mournfully, “my wife is fittingly upset, for it was she who encouraged Marianne to leave home against my will, and hid from me this engagement to the bishop’s son as long as she could.”

His wife laughed softly. “As long as I could wasn’t very long, for you’re as good as any pickpocket to ferret out my letters, and better than a town crier to make our secrets the talk of the whole country.”

Evangeline was afraid to leave her friend alone in such a house.

The village doctor came, failed to identify an actual illness or to find a satisfactory explanation of the symptoms there were, and prescribed rest and one or two innocuous remedies, glancing meanwhile with dull suspicion at Mrs. Duff, as if she were the cause of it all.

Evangeline established herself in the bedroom to watch. Marianne slept and pretended to sleep. Often her face was languid and haughty--the face of a middle-aged woman strong enough to die of an exceptional weakness, without explanations, mutely. Evangeline said to Mrs. Duff: “It is a sickness. I am not a doctor. She has nothing to tell. I had better go back to Sheboygan and ask no questions.”

But Marianne smiled half-heartedly one morning, and asked to have some flowers and one of her mother’s potted plants brought up to her room. She said that she was hungry, though she scarcely touched the tray when it came.

The next day was the Sabbath. The Free Will Baptists of Hope’s Corner had united with the Presbyterians of Aaronsville, and the minister had another congregation to preach to in the morning; so services were held at three o’clock. Marianne’s cousin, Clara Peters, a grim woman who had married beneath her, came to spend the afternoon, and Evangeline went to church with Mr. and Mrs. Duff. They got home just before supper and found Marianne alone. “Poor Clara discouraged me,” she explained, “and I sent her off to her mean husband.”

After the evening meal she asked for the Bible with the largest print, and held it up resolutely toward the lamp until her mother left the room. Then she said to her friend, “You were late coming back from church. Whom did you see? Where did you go?”

“We went home with the Towers. Your mother wanted to visit that old bachelor who has been sick, Mr. Leander. He was all wrapped up in crazy quilts. He said--”

But Marianne had turned pale; it was as if a heavy white net had been thrown suddenly over her face, in which her bright eyes seemed to have been caught and lay burning, lay very still; in which her mouth struggled and finally lay still.

And her friend remembered how, in the uncomfortable pew, Mrs. Duff had lifted the cape of her coat and whispered behind it: “Do you see the young man sitting with his folks in the first row by the window? They are the Towers, the finest people in the country. I thought a few years back that Marianne had lost her heart to that young Ralph, the one of their sons who is here. Nothing came of it, of course, and anyway I guess the Towers wouldn’t care to be connected by marriage with my husband....”

Now, at the mention of them, Marianne’s face turned white and lay still as if it had been caught in a net. A net of misery, excitement, and hopelessness and hope interwoven.... The spinster put out her hand quickly as if to catch hold of a thread by which it might be undone, and said at once, conscious of her cruelty: “Marianne, I must go back home. And you know, I shall have to see Paul Fairchild. What shall I tell him?”

The girl lifted her head from the pillow. “I have nothing to say to him. I shall not see him again.”

“What did he do to you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care what he does. I never cared what he did. I’m sorry,” the girl whispered.

The older woman whispered as well: “Then there is another--some other--then that other one is ... The one you do love.”

Marianne turned scarlet. “No, I--haven’t any right.... How do you.... He--”

Then for a few minutes there was nothing for her friend to do but watch a pitiful spectacle: the girl tossing on the bed in a sort of infant agony, and stuffing the bedclothes in her mouth, and beating the pillows.

Evangeline heard Mrs. Duff come swiftly up the staircase. But she stopped in the corridor, where she must have been able to hear the girl’s stifled weeping. She stood still outside the door, and then tiptoed downstairs again, intelligently obliging Evangeline to be a mother to her child--because she was a spinster and did not know too much about marriage.

The girl grew quiet. Evangeline bathed her flushed face and said: “You’d better talk to me. Now, before you stop crying. Before you get mysterious and desperate again.”

Then she stopped crying. Suddenly she sat up in bed, and in a monotonous tone of voice, slowly but without faltering, as if she were remembering not the facts, but words and phrases with which she had often told it before--to herself alone--recited, painstakingly recited, the story of her disappointment. The sentences began with “Even when I was a child, when we were in school together, though I didn’t know,” or “Mother brought me up so innocently, I thought,” or “I was ashamed,” or “It broke my heart....” They ended with “It was too late,” or “He didn’t care and I had no right to think he did,” or “He didn’t mean anything by it--it was all in my imagination.”

Evangeline muttered to herself: “It wasn’t. It won’t be. Not if--” She was astonished; for suddenly there had come together in her mind all Ralph Tower’s gestures, phrases, and expressions, that afternoon. She examined them and compared them with what she was being told; at last she had no doubt about their meaning. Inquiries about her happiness, her health, her marriage; a resentful silence for several minutes after every answer; the sound, when he did speak, of a lump in his throat; embarrassed glances at his parents to be sure they were not listening; his eyebrows contracted, half hiding his small eyes. Anxiety, wounded vanity, jealousy....

Meanwhile, as if she were merely telling a story, a story which had to be told to the end, its bitter end, Marianne went on from her brief, humiliating encounter with one lover to her humiliating relations with the other. “I wrote my mother about Paul Fairchild, and she let my father think I had promised to marry him, and he told everybody.”

“She didn’t, by the way,” Evangeline said. “Your father got the letter out of her pocket--she told me.”

“Oh,” the girl cried, and was silent for a moment, and seemed to be staring back at her girlhood compromised, her broken heart rebroken, her strength worn out--six miserable months which might have been avoided. Then, less with the patience of a desperate girl than with that of a story teller, she tried to go on where she had been interrupted. “You see, Paul Fairchild--”

“Don’t tell me about Paul Fairchild,” Evangeline interrupted again. “He doesn’t matter--you said so yourself.”

The girl said no more and lay staring humbly at nothing.

Her friend went over to the window. It was late at night. There were some cattle moving in the dark in the orchard. A great, aged moon was coming up over the country with a great quantity of amber. The turkeys in the apple trees were awake.

Evangeline made up her mind what ought to be done for Marianne, what she could do. Perhaps she was merely going to make a fool of herself, not even for herself, and accomplish no more. She shed a few tears and wiped them away.

Then she sat down again, and told Marianne exactly what Ralph Tower had said, and how he had looked when he said it, and what she thought about it. At last she used the word love.

Marianne, shivering, held her breath.

“You two need a go-between. Your mother will be of no use. After I’m gone there won’t be anybody to manage things for you but God, and whether He will or not is a question. You don’t know what this young man’s intentions are. So I’m going to see him and find out. Your mother ought to have done so. According to her, it was your father’s fault that she couldn’t, because her own marriage is unhappy. I am an old maid,” she added dryly, “and I believe in love. So to-morrow, bright and early, I’m going to have another word or two with this young man.”

Marianne clung to her like a child and begged her not to. Evangeline paid little attention, thinking of the task she had set herself, and how she had better go about it. At last Marianne whispered, “Don’t tell mother, if you are going.”

Evangeline slipped out of the house the next morning soon after sunrise, and an hour and a half later came back, tired, grim, and satisfied. Mrs. Duff was waiting in the garden. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I saw you start out, but I thought best not to bother you.”

“I’ve been to the Towers’,” Evangeline said. “It is all right. Will you drive me to the station this afternoon? For I’m not needed here any more.”

“So that is it. The Lord preserve us,” the mother said solemnly. “There is not a human being on this earth I have ever loved but my daughter. And I have no faith--miserable woman that I am.”

Then Evangeline wept, and turned aside among the currant bushes. Mrs. Duff hurried indoors, calling, “I-ra! I-ra!”

A little later, going through the hall to the staircase, Evangeline heard Ira Duff’s resonant, false voice rising and falling in a heavy rhythm, and saw them, the sharp-tongued wife and her hated husband, kneeling side by side in front of the sitting-room sofa, their backs very straight, their eyes closed, like a bride and groom before an invisible pastor.

“You’ve been crying,” Marianne said, and tears which, according to what her friend had to say, would be those of joy or of sorrow, came to her eyes.

“You cry yourself, to your heart’s content,” Evangeline replied. “You might as well cry now, for if God is good you’ll have no cause to for many a day.” She spoke with a blunt, mechanical joyousness. “I waited by the side of the road until he came along on his way to the cheese factory, and then I waited for him under a tree until he got back and came there.”

Marianne’s tears ran down across her face, without expression, still patient; she did not succeed in speaking.

Evangeline went on hurriedly but with difficulty, trying not to emphasize her words: “I have one question to ask you. Tell me. In so many words. That man--I mean Paul Fairchild--he never took, he didn’t take--I don’t want to know, it’s the man you’re going to marry. Nothing wrong happened? That’s not why you’re so miserable, is it? That’s not why you’re sick--”

“Stop,” the girl cried huskily. She had lifted herself in the bed upon her elbows. Her eyes were fixed; her voice was hard, hurt, and full of joy. “I am a good girl. He kissed me once. They, they both--did, once.”

Evangeline was ashamed of herself, of Ralph Tower, of men; so she went on with the cruel monologue which had begun as a question. “Men always ask that--good men, Christians. They are hard, hard. I guess it’s their right and duty. Don’t blame him. I’ll have to see him again and tell him, before he asks--”

“Stop, Evangeline,” the girl repeated. “I don’t blame him. I deserve it, because.... Don’t ever speak of it again.” She closed her eyes and whispered, “But why didn’t he tell me--all this time? Oh, why, then ...”

Therefore, dutifully, Evangeline gave a circumstantial account of the meeting. “You know,” she had begun by saying, “you have broken that girl’s heart.” Because she was a spinster, she had tried to put him in the wrong. She had failed, because he had always been in love, and because of Marianne’s engagement to the bishop’s son who had a bad reputation, and the suspicions it had aroused.

The slight, strong man had spoken laboriously, like a giant for whom human speech is petty and difficult. He had made up his mind when a little boy to marry Marianne. He had been ashamed of having kissed her. They had been too young to marry then. He had been afraid of himself, of his own nature; self-control had always been hard for him. So he had avoided her, until the time when, safely and honorably, he could ask her to be his wife. Then she had gone away; he had believed that she had forgotten or had never cared. Then she had become engaged.

In his small hazel eyes there had been a look of instinctive suspicion, the suspicion of ultimate unhappiness which was natural to him. He had torn up leaves by the handful with his calloused hands, and at last had blushed under his dull sunburn. Then he had spoken soberly of his other suspicion and had asked the question which Evangeline had not dared to answer on her own responsibility. Then he had stood up, turned his back on her, swung round, asked her pardon, and muttered: “Good-by. I must get back to work.”

Evangeline, having nothing more to tell, smoothed Marianne’s forehead with her finger tips. “You had better stop crying now,” she concluded. “God is good. You will be happy.”

The girl leaped out of bed and fell to her knees. Evangeline left her alone. When she returned with the mother they found her half dressed, and with great difficulty persuaded her to go back to bed. After the noonday meal Evangeline said good-by.

Marianne was glad that her friend was going away. She herself had to go on to a rendezvous which no friend could keep with her, in a gleaming, uniform solitude, a sort of wilderness--that of being loved. Innocent and not ignorant, she trembled a little at the prospect. Not knowing why, she kept remembering that Ralph was the best hunter in that part of Wisconsin. She felt a jealousy of no one and a nostalgia for no particular place. She kept remembering the kiss which had now been justified. These things embarrassed her in Evangeline’s presence; it was a blessing, she thought, that her mother did not believe in love and therefore would not pay any unusual attention to her. She scarcely paid attention to Evangeline saying good-by.

Mrs. Duff took Evangeline to the station by the road which went past the Tower farm, and when they saw Ralph plowing in the stubble field, the spinster got out and trudged across the furrows until she met him. “I’m going home,” she said. “Go to see her. She is waiting. It is all right. She is as pure as the snow. What fools we were ... Good-by.”

The young man’s body, like that of a giant, though small, sagged against the plow handles. He hid his great hands behind his back as if he ought to be ashamed of them. He said: “Thank you. Good-by.”

“Glory be to God, that’s all right!” Evangeline said as she climbed back into the buggy.

“The glory of God is made of our troubles,” the older woman answered resolutely.

Late that afternoon Ralph came to see Marianne. He sat by the bed and could say nothing; his dark mouth covered with dust quivered instead. He kissed her hands and hurried away.

There was no courtship. Another man had wooed her for him. God had wooed her with His errors, His intoxicating tenderness, His intrigue. Evangeline, who would never have a chance to speak for herself, had spoken for her; the spirit of God, Marianne thought, in the person of an old maid....

She grew strong quickly, realizing that she had not actually been ill. She saw Ralph every day or two, and made friends with his father, who, to his mother’s astonishment, was pleasant and communicative in her company. With genuine enthusiasm Mrs. Tower accepted Marianne as her son’s future wife and the mother of her grandchildren to be born; but they never knew how to be intimate friends. Marianne’s own mother, in her pride in the alliance, was happier than she had been for years. When the tragic news of Leander’s death in Oklahoma came, she said regretfully, “Now he will never know about the marriage....”

Marianne herself was not impatient for it to take place. Having tasted the bitterness of man’s passion (its contagious unrest, its deliberate neglect, its suspicion) before the sweet, she was glad to wait until she stopped fearing vaguely that it might be altogether bitter. The passage of time would obliterate the humiliation of her other engagement and hush the gossip about it. Meanwhile a separate home was being prepared for them at one end of the Tower house, where Leander had lived. So the wedding was postponed until the following September.

Evangeline Gay and James Tower were their witnesses. Ralph’s face--brilliant with intelligence of an unintelligible emotion, tragic to his elders who were present, humble and sunburned--was like that of a young wild animal being baptized. They stood up in one corner of the parlor before a mass of asters and autumn leaves. In the midst of the ceremony Marianne remembered her baptism in the Anne River, thinking that the arms of the man who was at that moment becoming her husband, those arms close beside her, very tight in the broadcloth sleeves, were even stronger than the minister’s had been; that the flood in which she was to be submerged this time was not cold, and would be scented with straw of the stacks outside the window, with sheepfolds, linen, and candle wax.

Unlike that of Cana, water was not changed into wine for this marriage. There was but a frugal supper and little festivity. And swiftly the wine of passion itself changed for her into the pure water of Christian married life.

11. His Father. His Uncle Jim’s Later Life. The Religious Faith of the Family

Alwyn’s father always loved to hunt. When he could afford it and the farm work was not too pressing, he went north in the autumn during the deer season. Then his brother Jim, the minister, came from Chicago with a little armory of guns and cases of expensive fishing tackle; and the two went off together, to forget, in a tent under the hemlocks, that one had sacrificed his future to the other, that one was happy and the other unhappy (though they might not have agreed which was which), and that an abyss of prosperity and college education lay between them.

After they came back, the farmhouse smelled of hides, and for months little meat was eaten but venison, which made Alwyn sick. His uncle Jim’s handsome face glowed with the conventional poetry of recaptured boyhood, with delight in the photographs which he tinted artistically with transparent water colors, with pride in the analogies which had been suggested to him in the north and which would serve him in many private conversations if not in sermons.

Alwyn’s father, on the other hand, talked by the hour of exaggerated dangers and mystifying sensations of danger where there was none; of men who lost their compasses and strayed in circles and were found half dead; of timber wolves baying up and down the darkness; of stags marching slowly into clearings to keep a rendezvous with him; and he spoke very shyly of killing things, as if to kill were a love gesture. Then there was upon his face a shining expression of tenderness without pity and violence without fault, which was the equivalent of beauty--though he was what is called a homely man, with his very long nose, his low forehead, his delicate, outstanding ears, and small eyes.

When he was first married fox hunts were still held in the county--cutters and teams of young horses racing around the snowy fields and marshes, and waiting here and there for the hounds to bring the fox across the road. Now most of the hunters he knew went to the woods merely to get drunk together away from their wives. And the immigrants who were steadily buying up the land were not sportsmen; they hunted out of season, only for food, and exterminated the game fish with nets. One year he held the office of game warden, was menaced and even stoned by loafers along the mill races in little saloon towns, and arrested many lawbreakers. It was good sport, but very lonely; indeed, all the sport which was left in that part of the world was lonely.

So he took his little son with him along woodland paths where partridges walked, moving their fine throats and crowned heads, uttering a sort of girlish, insane cry. Or before dawn they drove many miles--the boy wrapped up in strong-smelling blankets, the horse’s hoofs ringing under the mist--to small, hidden lakes not yet emptied of bass and pickerel. Alwyn held his breath as in wet boats they ventured out from the piers as if on a pane of glass, and shuddered automatically when a gun was fired or a bleeding bird or animal was found in the bushes. But the company of the timorous, overwatchful boy did not satisfy his father, then (as he grew up and his character crystallized) embarrassed, and finally displeased him. Alwyn was disappointed when he ceased to be taken along; for the heartbreaking landscapes, the blue herons like dwarf angels, the stateliness of other birds and animals just before they were disfigured by their own blood, his father’s silent, primitive enjoyment, even his own distaste and fright, had enchanted him.

During the winter months his father earned money as a taxidermist, having taken lessons from a man who had spent a vacation at Hope’s Corner when he was a boy, and later having studied it from a book. He was remarkably skillful, and many sportsmen brought him their dead trophies to mount, so they might hang permanently in the lodges of secret societies, in dining rooms and dens. Alwyn invariably felt sick when he went into the room at one end of the house which was his workshop. Bodies of birds and small animals bleeding slowly on newspapers, while his father imitated them with wire, tow, string, and wet clay; the pelts drying on wooden forms and the bird skins turned inside out, and dusted with cornmeal and arsenic; scraping-knives in the skulls of deer; the odor of stale meat and green bone; the rank odor of water birds’ flesh, almost black with oil....

There one winter he built a life-sized stallion on a frame of slats and heavy wire, modeling every tendon and vein from photographs of a dead race horse. It was so large that an opening had to be cut in the wall to take it out. He said, “I often wonder if what they call sculpture isn’t a lot like my work.” With the light of the desire to be proud of himself in his eyes, he reminded one more sharply than most mature men are able to do, of the waste, wreckage, or abandonment of gifts amid which youth is turned into maturity.

When at last the birds balanced on curious crotches which he sought in the woods, he put in black-headed pins, bound their feathers into place with thread, and painted their beaks, eye sockets, and feet; and when the raccoons, squirrels, foxes, or lynxes stood on varnished pedestals which a cabinet maker prepared for him, he caressed and bent their limbs, to give them back, falsely, what he and his like had taken away--life, its grace and its agitated peace. He worked as patiently as if he were bringing them to birth or at least bringing about a resurrection (though he was only making their death resemble life a little); and he tried to make Alwyn see the charm of what he was doing.

He tried in vain; the boy stared at him unhappily. There are things which require not sensibility but the lack of it to be felt, and he was still too imaginative to understand them. Not until he grew to manhood was he to be able to bear the thought of his father’s intimacy with so much agony and death.

Even then he was to remember with dismay a large snow owl caught in a trap and brought uninjured to his father, who poured chloroform on a handkerchief and placed it in between the bars of the cage. The immense bird’s plumage, oyster-white and sand-white, was like velvet embroidered with a sort of alphabet. It snapped its brutal beak and stretched its wings as if they were lame with fatigue. It grew drowsy, straightened its sagging neck with a royal movement, and nodded again. At last Alwyn’s father dared to reach inside and cover its nostrils with the cloth; and in the shadow of his large brown hand the milky eyelids fell finally. For months thereafter Alwyn woke panic-stricken in the middle of the night, having felt that hand passing gently over his own face.

His father loved the lives of animals as well as their death; and in his movements and the tone of his voice there was a charm to which, like strong slaves, they responded humbly. Old sows let him handle their litters, and he could make nervous ewes--who will not usually give suck even to one of twin lambs if, having fallen unnoticed in a corner of the fold, it does not smell like the other--accept the lambs he offered them as their own. When the neighbors’ heifers were brought to the barn door, his great bulls walked forth mildly as if to play their parts in a ceremony which he had arranged.

The farmers within a radius of fifteen or twenty miles paid him to break vicious colts. He could tell which ones had been abused; he petted these and fed them apples and turnips; he whipped others who had no fear. Then he would hitch one of them to a low, light cart from which he could fall without risk, and attach to its legs a complicated set of ropes. It would begin to kick; he would bring it to its knees, or even throw it deftly on the ground, muttering phrases which seemed to be hypnotic; for its ears would shiver, its wild, bloodshot eyes roll, and convulsive sighs go in and out of its nostrils. He would repeat these exercises with infinite patience, with obvious delight; and at last one bad young horse would be broken and ready for work, and another would take its place.

For minor animal diseases and in cases of emergency, he was often called upon to serve his neighbors as a veterinary surgeon. He could puncture the bellies of horses and cattle swollen by colic, and knew how to make delirious stallions take bitter drenches from a bottle. With his sleeves rolled up over his heavy upper arms, he would go into the dark stable to deliver a young heifer’s calf by force. Alwyn wanted to follow him on these occasions; but his father recognizing his excessive sensibility by the fact that he felt as modest or even ashamed in his presence as in a woman’s, he was never allowed to watch either birth or breeding. On the other hand, he was allowed to hold the legs of young boars and bull calves while his father castrated them, working so deftly that they did not even scream before the last stroke.

Alwyn’s father himself believed that this was his principal talent. “If I could have gone away to a veterinary college--” he said again and again; the sentence never had an end. “It was fate,” he would add, “and my father had no patience with me.” Fate personified by a small, dyspeptic man (Alwyn’s grandfather) who had never forgiven anything, never seemed to remember anything, and who had never changed his mind.... Alwyn’s father would go on talking about it in a muffled and dreamy tone of voice, but never blamed his brother. “Jim had his chance; it was right that he should. But there was only one chance in our family....” Then, seeking his wife’s eyes and gazing around at his mysterious children, he would conclude, “Jim has had good luck--but I guess I wouldn’t change places with him.”

Three or four times every year Alwyn’s uncle, the Rev. James A. Tower, came lonesomely, complacently, back to his birthplace; and at first Alwyn could not decide whether even he was satisfied with his lot. He seemed to return from another world, with his suits of English material, his thick ties made of scarcely worn ball dresses, his golf hose, cameras, and watch fobs, his strong sentiment for nature, his loneliness and optimism; and at first glance seemed to resemble his poor relatives only by accident, without actual kinship....

His mother, half forgetting that he was her son, never bullied him or forced him to take her into his confidence, and, in spite of his cultivated imagination, never tried to explain to him her conception of life as a great county fair, or her cult of the new moon. His little nieces adored him because he looked happy and could afford to be generous. Because he still loved hunting, fishing, and country food, his brother defended him from the accusation of having changed. His sister-in-law, Marianne, was genuinely fond of him, but, for reasons which were obscure at first, did not approve of the life he led.

The minister brooded lovingly upon their lives, the labor, the poverty, the narrowness of outlook, which were still established where he had been born, comparing these things with the conditions of his later life and calling the contrast progress. There he still saw himself as young and marked by good fortune for the future, as in a certain mirror of all those in the world, and in it alone, one catches a glimpse of a face one can be proud of. There he would have denied the least of his disappointments, and there he counted his blessings, thinking that he saw life in proportion.

One afternoon Alwyn sat beside his uncle on a hilltop. Spread out below them lay the farm: the poor house with its wooden coronet around the chimney, the desperately weeded crops, the faded washing floating between the trees, the dung heaps steaming with ammonia, the pigpens and rusty farm machinery. The elder of its two eldest sons (Alwyn born in the house, his uncle in what was now the woodshed) gazed down upon it and shook his head. “I am a fortunate man,” Alwyn heard him whisper to himself.

Three years after the marriage of Alwyn’s parents he had been ordained, and thereafter had occupied the pulpit of a fashionable church outside Chicago. He had preached a cheerful, modern faith, and had been remarkably successful with young people. His resonant voice, his fine presence, his warm but discreet social relations, had made the deacons of his church proud, those of other churches envious. Bishops and devout philanthropists having begun to speak of him, his ambition had been excited anew by the ministry as a career, and he had forgotten music and the hopes he had once founded on it.

But meanwhile he had also forgotten Irene Geiger, and had married a wealthy girl named Caroline Fielding. Her mother and her two sisters did not relinquish their claims upon her, especially when one of them was ill; and she herself had always suffered from periodical nervous pain. So the large house in Chicago and a sick room, otherwise their nuptial chamber, in which she would crouch alone day after day and night after night, began at once to divide her time exactly between them. The young minister might as well have been a bachelor. At last it seemed wise for him to retire from the active ministry for the present, in order to live in Chicago with his delicate wife, who was also so conscientious a sister and daughter.

His family scarcely saw her for years. At last the summer came when she felt strong enough to be taken to the farm. There, in spite of her sober elegance, she looked like a young actress in the common daylight: her beauty already hardened by anxiety and authority, her youth hampered by a quantity of parasols, smoked glasses, gloves, flowered hats, and dark blue veils to protect her skin from the dust. With a certain timid arrogance she seemed to welcome her new relatives on the threshold of their own home.

She brought a quantity of missionary magazines containing pictures of laughing, muscular savages; and the country people might have felt that they had no place in her world, being neither prominent representatives of Christian wealth and culture like those among whom it was her privilege to live, nor heathens to whom it might have been her privilege to have been sent. Alwyn and even his father wanted to talk to her about their ambitions, but she listened with disapproval to any expression of discontent. Her mother-in-law wanted to tell her about the old days, but she believed that the important history of the West was that of the development of churches, seminaries, and wealthy families in Chicago. Everyone waited on her while she stayed. She took pains not to reveal by too much gratitude how uncomfortable she was in the farmhouse, and ignored its poverty, feeling that they were duty bound to be satisfied with their station in life, as she was with hers, and not wanting to remind them of the difference between the two.

She never remodeled her rich, draped, braided frocks no matter how the fashions of inferior women changed; and later, when Alwyn visited her home, he saw the kinship between them and its upholstery, its alcoves of taffeta and plush, and the rigid brocade with which its windows were symmetrically draped to keep out the light.

That house was a veritable museum of Middle Western luxuries. In the bathrooms the mahogany closets, wash-bowls, and tubs were lined with flowered porcelain; and the faucets were the heads of a number of dogs--dead family pets, copied from the life--out of whose bronze mouths the water trickled. Rug lay upon rug; brass lamps stood beside music boxes, under decrepit chandeliers. A tall, stringless harp was wrapped up like a mummy in the music room, and there was a bust of Music with Chicago soot on its nose. The ceilings had been decorated by an Italian professor with a mass of birds, curlicues, butterflies, and flower beds upside down. Tiers of paintings and steel engravings portrayed snow scenes, kittens playing with balls of yarn, missionary dispensaries in foreign lands, and bouquets the color of moss and dried blood. From a life-sized portrait in oils of the father of the family, the late merchant prince Cromwell Fielding, one hard, idealistic eye, over the wavy beard which fell to the middle of his chest, appeared to govern the ranks of tasseled armchairs and sofas. In the dining room great services of French china waited to be used; but in these degenerate days there were not many people worthy of an invitation: a few doctors of divinity, a few heroic missionaries upon furlough, a family of cousins in the East, one of whom had been first lady of the land, a poor cousin who had lost his money by foolish investments and worked in a clothing store....

There, surrounded by her mother, her sisters, and these infrequent guests, the retired minister studied, and in general failed to understand, his wife’s extraordinary character. In it, as in the house itself, an elaborate worldliness served as a setting for puritan austerities; and her vanity merely emphasized her virtue. Her opinions, varying in expression no more than if they had been memorized speeches, her delicately self-conscious observance of the proprieties, her chaste beauty, her air of playing a noble rôle before a chosen public, inspired him with the awe of a child ushered for the first time into a theater and told that the great actress is a member of his family.

Alwyn Tower, another country boy, equally sensitive to the theater and whatever resembled it--though without the bias of his uncle’s early ambitions and romance--was equally impressed by his aunt’s character; but he felt an obscure fear of it as well.

Having no children of their own, they extended their hospitality to Alwyn and thought that they were ready to make all the necessary sacrifices for his future. His aunt’s sisters watched over him excitably; her mother was suspicious, but found no dignified way of expressing her displeasure at his presence; his aunt loved him sternly, his uncle with a childless man’s embarrassment. Then from the streets of the great city, criminally alive, draped with dirt and gas, full of bleached and bitten faces, scented with slaughter houses, he came and went over the threshold of the ugly palace (one of those in which progress and millionaire civilization had been born) and watched the events which took place inside it.

They were like the episodes of a long symbolic play at which part of the audience may laugh, while the rest shudders at the secret meaning. On Friday afternoon the ladies went with their own carriage and coachman to the symphony concert, occupying the same seats as long as they lived. A pet dog sometimes ate one of the new kid gloves which were laid on each of their beds every Friday before lunch. On one occasion it caught one of the canaries during its bath; one of the sisters fainted away, and an old sewing woman sprinkled her face with lavender water, dropped the bottle, and bandaged the bird with cotton batting and thread. Finally this dog escaped from the house, was run over, died, and was buried beside seven others; and the old mother, pitifully frightened, denounced automobiles. Every Sunday morning she sought an excuse not to go to church, usually found it, and usually obliged one of her daughters to stay at home, lest she be lonely. She was but superficially devout; the church was a great mansion like her own, and she would have undertaken the menial tasks of God’s house, as of her own, only if there had been no one to do them for her. Fortunately her daughters felt their sacred obligation to make her happy, by comparison with which even divine service was a sort of self-indulgence.

Caroline Tower genuinely loved her husband, and love often produced a vague tumult in her emotions; but logically conservative in spite of it, she dealt with her duties in the order of time--her mother came before her husband. She wanted him to be a clergyman: God’s house and work came before everything in the world--except her mother’s house, which was a sacred establishment as well, a sort of sumptuous private chapel to the glory of motherhood, which is the source of the glory of God.

So her husband was ignored whenever his desires conflicted with the rulings of her conscience as a daughter. He still hoped vaguely to bring about a change in their way of life, to rouse in her heart, even by accident, a passion which would set aside her other obligations, or to profit by some interference of Providence, as for example the death, in God’s good time, of his mother-in-law, to whom he was devoted, nevertheless. Meanwhile he believed that his family on the farm must be satisfied with him, now that he was not merely working for God’s kingdom of virtue, prosperity, and enlightenment, but was a part of it himself; and though scarcely a minister of the gospel and almost a bachelor, he was content with the exceptional dignity of his deprivations, in a world of poorly dressed, impious, uneducated men.

Then suddenly Caroline died. Dying was just like one of her headaches; therefore she did not realize what was happening until it was too late to do more than think of her soul and its metamorphosis. She gazed at her mother, her sisters, and the opulent room, as if in truth she were leaving them behind forever and were willing to do so; but gazed at her husband with the still sharper anguish of a mere separation. Then her face assumed the first look of humility which he or even her sisters had seen upon it; it became the childish face of one maddened by regret--regret for everything believed, everything done, everything left undone. And before the end she whispered, “In my Father’s house are many mansions, many ...”

The family sorrow produced such a pandemonium in the house that the horror and momentary despair of James Tower, in fact not quite a member of the family, were scarcely observed. He hid in corners of the drawing-rooms and the long, dim corridors when he was not needed; he went up to Hope’s Corner and tried to hide among the flocks, trees, and furrows of his boyhood--hiding from the storm of sorrow and waiting for it to pass, determined to go then and take up his ministry where he had put it down.

For a time sorrow added a certain sensuality to the abstract, liberal doctrines which he had been taught in the seminary and sent forth to teach; and he felt his vocation more strongly than at any other period in his life, either before or after. He would idealize his bereavement and make it public; it would be a consolation to others. He would direct their eyes upward to the ideal place where--trailing restlessly up and down, cloud folded about her distinguished head like one of her veils--she intimidated him by her dead perfection, by the distance between them, scarcely greater now than it had always been, and by the gaze upon which her eyes had finally closed. Every day for almost a year he told himself that presently he would look for a vacant parish in which to begin the great work which everyone had expected of him--even she, though she had previously had other things for him to do.

He had been her humble servant from the first. On her deathbed she had rewarded him with a look which meant, he believed, that no one would ever love him as she had loved him then, and that she regretted leaving nothing and no one but himself. This gave him a sort of pride for which his good fortune in other respects had not prepared him; looking back upon that moment, making the most of that pride, he was to be even less impatient than before with abnegation, home life, and servility. And as the sheer pain of his loss came to an end, her presence in the vague paradise of his memory grew less and less sufficient. He began to remember her qualities as if he were in danger of forgetting them, and therefore drew nearer to her mother and sisters, in whom, even during her lifetime, her character had been reflected, shadowy aspect by aspect.

The younger of the surviving Misses Fielding, Anne, was physically the image of her dead sister; but her beauty had somehow vanished, though she was still a young woman. Her strength of character, mournful and reserved--as it were a throbbing of the atmosphere wherever she was--resembled Caroline’s as much as one note of a great bell resembles the next.

Miss Ada Fielding was uncannily successful with flowers, birds, and animals, charmed little children, cheered and influenced missionaries, invalids, and servants. But there her power ended; for the rest of the world (in ignorance and compassion, in fear and trembling) she could only pray. She and Caroline had saintliness in common.

For the ghostly presence of his wife’s loveliness, Jim was dependent upon her mother, in whom--less ephemeral than the old woman’s youth and the young woman’s very life--much of it had survived. Mrs. Cromwell Fielding was a delicate personage in watered silk, satin, and kid, feathers and chains, baroque pearls and enamel. Like beauty itself, she feared nothing but death, and would not permit a funeral or a will to be mentioned in her presence. She loved her possessions, especially those that she could see and touch, as a naturalist loves his dead butterflies, an alchemist the liquids in which immortality may be in solution; and spent her time in self-sacrificing labor among them--seeming to her son-in-law the personification of beauty, which picks up and puts down, loses and finds, counts, multiplies, and mixes, the base materials without which it is never seen.

Naturally these three women were opposed to his leaving them to occupy a pulpit. For Ada he was a surviving part of her dead sister’s life, and she wept at the mere thought of his being taken away as well, by God. Anne suggested briefly that it was mere human vanity which made him impatient to resume the vocation, for which, furthermore, others were better fitted than he. Mrs. Fielding maintained that charity and idealism began at home, which therefore was the proper place to exercise them and serve God; it ought to be service enough for him to serve her; and when she spoke of it, her flashing old eyes, like those of a young temptress, made him look the other way.

There was also wealth. It was an aspect of Caroline’s character--not merely something she had possessed--because she had always possessed it and because she had never forgotten it for a moment without ever having to give it a moment’s thought. In Jim’s imagination it adorned her departed spirit as a saint’s image in a reliquary is adorned. It hung heavily; it sparkled; it doubled and faded--bewildering to a poor farmer’s son--in every room of the house where, like a ghost, she seemed to stay because it was. So if he had had to leave its sacred precincts, he would have lost her a second time; her ghost would have died, in the great deathbed of his memory.

There was also a theological dilemma. By temperament and training he was inclined to a very liberal interpretation of Protestantism. Only the most arbitrary orthodoxy was suited to the strong souls of his relatives by marriage. But if he applied that orthodoxy to their lives as frankly and earnestly as in other quarters he was accustomed, indeed was expected, to apply the laws of a looser belief, he would be obliged to condemn them altogether. In his heart he could not blame them; but he did not know how, theologically, to justify them. How, for example, would he go about it to preach a funeral oration for one of them? At one moment, thinking of their doctrines and listening to their criticism of others, he would accuse them, in spite of himself, of hypocrisy, vanity, selfishness, materialism; a moment later, he would be idealizing them with all the force of his imagination. At last, to his great relief, the gentleness of his nature triumphed thoroughly over his unkind judgments.

So for this family’s sake he abandoned his ordained ambitions, as for his own he had abandoned others. Having a talent for obedience, naturally endowed with the patience and politeness which family life requires, he then bent all his efforts to being a perfect son-in-law and a widower.