Chapter X: Part 10

The small, naked flames in the hearth began to clothe themselves in ashes. He sought in his memory for a clear picture of her face, and found it--at once the face of a flower and a shopkeeper. How it had had its way with him--and it was not done with him yet. At that moment there was more premonition than passion in his heart; there would not always be. Passion would be born again and again, but it would be weakened like this by each rebirth; and the day would surely come when he would wonder why he had given himself up. He was glad that it had begun only in fact, for it had been as if, bending over a rose, he had been prevented from taking a deep breath. Could one ever take a full breath, and have enough of love?

He was infinitely tired. Sitting in the antique shop where love had begun, he seemed to look back even upon its future, knowing what he would have to give in return for what Susanne had given or would give, the reparation that would be required of him for what he would take or had taken, as if it were by force: responsibility, secrecy, half-hearted hard work, fatigue....

Hitherto apparently lazy, he had “worked harder to keep from working than anyone else ever worked,” as his mother would say. Apparently a coward, he had run away from several kinds of tyranny; but now, it seemed, he had chosen to play the tyrant to himself. He went on enumerating the differences between the past and the future. He had evaded common responsibilities--little good it had done him; for now he would have to keep to the letter all these fantastic rules which life (or perhaps he himself) was making up as he went along. For example, he would have to learn never to hide his face, so that no one should discover that he had anything to hide. To obtain forgiveness for his youth, of which, like a fool, he had hoped to make others envious as he grew older. To give no one cause to be ashamed of him again, but to be ashamed of himself, in order to be able to be discreet mechanically. To make more friends than he wanted, and not to like any of the sort of people who resembled him, lest he should have to live down their disgraces as well as his own. To fulfill every expectation, to promise too much and keep his word. To condemn the man he would have liked to be to increasing obscurity, and make a self he did not like more and more prominent. To strip his genuine character little by little of its reality, and turn a disguise into an actual man....

This meant the total disappearance of Evan Tower, that happy, unhappy boy who had done as he liked, and the rise of John Craig, an Englishman married to a French wife, neither happy nor unhappy, but growing rich in America. So with the passage of time, the soul of a man loses itself in his life.

His life in disguise; and when he died, only the disguise would lie quiet on the deathbed and be buried; he himself would have been dead a long time. No--not dead, merely condemned to death.

For he would always be a deserter. A boy hiding inside a man, an outlaw hiding inside a man who at last, at least, would abide by the law. If he liked, a homeless, lonely man in a foreign land might wear his disgrace as if it were nothing more than a shirt or a coat out of fashion. A lonely man surrounded by friends and family, a naturally homeless man at home, an expatriate resident in his own country, would have to wear it next the skin, like a tattooed rose, or star, or Marbury’s blue heart in a circle. That was all....

The fire sank. His excitement kept him warm, but his hopelessness was putting him to sleep.

More than ever a deserter, then.... The exile was returning home, which was inexcusable; the outlaw was going to avoid punishment--that is, break the law again. He was skeptical (his uncle had taught him that); but his own impulses were speaking to him as an angel speaks to a madman, a mother to a child; and when that angel spoke (with its limited vocabulary of passion, fatigue, homesickness, fear), he had no ears for his skepticism or for other men.

So he regarded himself with admiration and disdain, comparing the past with the present--for he seemed to have been young a moment ago--and comparing himself with other people and other things. The wooden saints in the shop, covered with flakes of gilt, sick with gold sores; the gaping showcases (for Gabrielle had not forgotten to lock up the jewels); the crystal ball in which he had never seen anything but a flaw shaped like Susanne’s mouth; that dark-red, disastrous mouth itself--they had lost most of their charm. They were old things; he wanted new. Shining, unsatisfying, they belonged to his youth and were like it; and he was tired of being young. His uncle’s warnings also belonged to it; all he would have to do with them from now on would be to prove that they had been mistaken; and it occurred to him that his uncle had come to be an old man without ever having grown up. He felt a great hunger for the evasions, the hypocrisies, the calculated movements, the disappointments, of middle age.

And there was the London dawn, strong and soiled as a man’s middle age, crawling over the window sills, pushing between the plush curtains. He would not have time to go to bed. Before he crept upstairs he took off his shoes, unwilling that anyone should know that he had sat up all night, determined that no one should ever discover the madness of his thought.

The rest of his life was very much as he had expected it to be. He and Susanne were married at the end of the summer. Gabrielle took the invalid father to a small villa outside Genoa. The young couple went to Mexico City, and during the winter crossed into the United States without difficulty, and bought a ranch near Taos, New Mexico.

He wrote to his mother and received a long letter in reply, full of embarrassment and eagerness to be proud of him in one way or another, proud of his courage at least. In it, with later family news, she told how Leander had died on his way west. She added, “He did not live to hear of your trouble in the army”; evidently she was glad.... Leander might not have minded that particular disgrace, but now, if this new adventure ended still more shamefully, as it might, the old bachelor would not be alive to be embittered by it; and Evan said to himself, It is just as well. But the new adventure was not to end badly.

Susanne gave birth to a son who was christened Leander Orfeo Craig. The desert and the mountains were little more than a place of exile for her--exile less from Europe, which she did not love, than from the brilliant life she had looked forward to; but she recognized the danger of residence in a more law-abiding part of the country. She grew strangely devout and wanted her son to become a priest; but Orfeo adored his father, who grimly and patiently counteracted her influence. In 1906 the antiquarian G. Orfeo died in Genoa, and Gabrielle came to live with her sister, bringing the rest of her father’s fortune. Friends of a bishop and a sinister old ex-governor, the two women came to be powerful figures in the public life of the State, and more and more independently, at one end of the great adobe house, led the life of wealthy Mexican devotees.

John Craig lived in the other wing, near the goats and horses, among the cowboys, the firearms which were less and less useful as time passed, the carved saddles and faded saddle blankets, the star-shaped spurs. He saw his wife only a few minutes a day, but never loved another woman even for a night. His life was that of the chief of a band of hard men--his cowboys--all of whom, like himself, had secrets, vices, great strength, and skill, whether with animals or enemies; and among whom he enjoyed the lonesome prestige of an officer or a criminal--like soldiers or accomplices, they did not believe him but believed in him. Many of his neighbors as well were suspicious of his past, but it seemed as natural in the Far West for a man to be followed by an unpleasant story as by a shadow. He kept out of politics, and made those who did not wish him well fear him, stopping their mouths at first by well-chosen threats, and then good-naturedly letting them forget why they did not gossip about him any more. Gradually he became an influential citizen, with whom even his wife’s powerful friends had to reckon. The years went by, as much alike as cattle marked with the same brand, his brand--a heart inside a circle. He did not make so much money as Susanne wished nor even as he had expected, but was able to put aside slowly a certain small fortune for Orfeo.

The boy looked somewhat like his mother, very little like an American. Thinking of him, his father thought of his own boyhood: thus Orfeo seemed not merely precious as a son, but of unique importance, as to a weary regent, the sole heir to great wealth or a throne. For he was the only living relative, John Craig thought, of the boy who had died (at least seemed to die) within himself; and thus entitled to everything in manhood which he imagined that boy might have enjoyed. So John Craig watched Orfeo with a certain fear--fear of his evident mortality, of his lack of discontent which was like indifference; a royally lovely child because of whose gentleness an illusory kingdom (of irresponsibility, candor, and truancy) might get out of control or, by someone, be taken away.

The child carried messages back and forth across the patio between his parents; and because he resembled his mother as a girl, it seemed to his father that he also bridged another distance--that between his own heartbreaking youth and the rather heartbroken satisfaction of the later years. His imagination followed the tiny boy’s solitary, symbolical footsteps back and forth in his life and across it, and wished that the years would bring him back where he had begun. Smiling mechanically, he wished that, as soon as he had saved enough money to insure his son’s independence, John Craig, the rancher, might die, and his soul pass into Orfeo’s life, and Evan Tower, the deserter, be disguised by nothing more than that fearless childhood, and begin all over again....

And because he thought idly of beginning his life again, he thought how it actually had begun, and wanted to see Wisconsin, his parents, his brothers and sister, once more. They must have forgiven him by this time; one or another of them might understand him at last.

It would be a long journey--and then explanations, embarrassment, a certain amount of scandal, irreparable resentments that he had had the luck to have forgotten about.... A grown man had no business to seek to be understood. He was a fool, mysteriously a fool, he told himself--without caring in the least. He might as well set out; he always had, once he had thought of a place to go. In the court Orfeo was playing with a jet of water which balanced over a stone tub, balanced as it were in the very center of Taos Valley, that huge, hollow stone--balanced, lost its balance, straightened again, but could never be quite still, like a human life in the great hollow of a lifetime.... His life had lost its balance again, that was all.

So he went back to Hope’s Corner. Wisconsin was less pretty than he had thought. His father, as he might have remembered, never forgave anything, and would not see him. His mother told him about all the relatives; he found little to tell her, for she was not even interested in his treason, his hardships, his marriage, his good and bad luck; it was as if she had brought him into the world to be a deserter--he had been one, and there was nothing more to be said. His presence seemed merely to remind Ralph of his resentment at having been deserted by both his brothers, left behind with their old father and the unprofitable farm and no opportunities. He did not have the courage to stop in Chicago to visit his luckier brother, the minister; and he told himself afterward that for lack of courage he had not stayed with his people long enough to accomplish what he had come for, whatever that was....

So a few years later he went home again, and found himself no less a stranger than before. He could not share his mother’s almost formal enthusiasm for the early days. He did not understand his brother’s sensual, virtuous life. His sister-in-law Marianne, wistfully opinionated and brilliant like a saint, intimidated him. Flora, his little sister, laughed, wept, and liked everyone absent-mindedly, tremulously afraid to do wrong, but less like a saint than a nun. John Craig felt as if he had wandered backward (or forward) into an epoch peopled by wise children, troubled or at peace--even their trouble was a kind of peace--and he did not understand the games that, with touching solemnity, such children played.

But what had he expected? What could his family have meant to him then? His uncle Leander, who more than anyone had encouraged him to be the stranger that he was, had been dead so many years, and was not even buried there. Was Evan Tower dead as well? Certainly he spoke of him to his mother as one speaks of a boy who has not lived to grow up; and if he was, his tomb was not in Wisconsin, except when and because he, John Craig, was there--in whose heart he was buried, dead or alive.

Leander and Evan, those two were his real family, and their souls had passed into his life--that is, John Craig’s life. He had thought that he was tired of it; but he was a strong man, and had no other to live. So in Wisconsin he realized how precious it was--perhaps that was what he had come for. The spirits of his uncle and his boyhood having passed into it, he ought to be content with their dwelling place.

Having passed into his life; perhaps into Orfeo’s after him.... There was also Ralph’s eldest boy, Alwyn, a colorless youngster with raised eyebrows who was going to resemble Leander when he grew up. He seemed, childishly, to be trying to think his way into everything that came to his attention--John Craig imagined a key trying to fit every lock--and thus to hurt himself and keep himself in a slight but almost continual bad temper. It appeared, furthermore, that he and his father did not understand each other. So John Craig said to Alwyn, “You and my boy will be friends. You must come out and live with us for a while, before long. I’ll raise up a colt or two for you to ride.”

It was on the last day of that second visit that, intending to ask his aunt a question as an excuse, Alwyn slipped into his grandmother’s sitting room in order to look at his uncle for the first time after his mother had told him who and what he was. They were looking out of the window, his grandmother with her large arms folded, his uncle, the stranger, resting one hand on his aunt Flora’s shoulder. His grandfather had refused to come to the house while his son was there. Every night his grandmother reproached him, but he did not even trouble to answer; every afternoon they hoped he would change his mind. Alwyn tiptoed to the window, and no one spoke to him.

They could see his grandfather coming down the lane, coming toward the house at his usual stubborn pace. His head was thrown back; over his shoulder he carried a long thistle-hoe. He was coming toward the house; he had changed his mind at last....

But just as he put out his hand to open the garden gate, he turned around and slowly, stubbornly, went back, out of sight.

The tears came to Flora’s vague, affectionate eyes, and Alwyn’s grandmother clapped her hands together. “I declare,” she cried, “he does beat all! Evan, your father is a hard man.”

“I guess, mother,” John Craig said, “hardness runs in the family. At any rate, it ought to--we need it, the way we live.” And as he spoke he smiled, but only about his mouth, rather lifelessly.

13. His Aunt Flora

Two locks of red hair falling upon her forehead like red shadows, Alwyn’s aunt Flora, when she sang, bent her head timidly or looked straight up toward the ceiling as if it were a sky--and a sky full of beings which other people could not see. The sound of her voice rose and fell, often strained by emotions for which her thin throat was too slender a channel, often failing altogether when its sweetness made her sad.

Alwyn thought that she was beautiful like an idol, vaguely thinking of the bright-colored statues in Catholic churches as idols: her good-natured, dismayed face; her hair like rusted iron in a burdensome crown, broken into large curls at the nape of her neck; her hands blue-white, with perfectly twisted veins. To amuse him when he was a child, she drew sails upon little round lakes, rigid fountains, butterflies, and nosegays of forget-me-nots, coloring them from a watercolor box. When an adolescent, he always stood as near her as he dared, charmed by the perfume of attar-of-roses which drifted from her dress, the odor of orris root in her hair, and the atmosphere, like a delicate scent itself, of the life of a girl nearly thirty years old, gradually losing the freshness of girlhood without growing old, almost without growing older.

He knew that his company gave her pleasure as well; even with her brothers, his uncles, she was less at ease. Perhaps his love was the only love she had received which did not threaten to make itself felt with startling energy, threaten to possess and coerce her--and then fail to do so. They were of the same blood, which meant, she thought, that they shared moral principles and a religious faith; he was a mere child and her nephew. So their relationship afforded her a holiday from having to choose between one man and another, from the alarms and embarrassments of being an unmarried woman.

For two men had troubled five years of her life, less with emotions than with what she called “problems.” The first had been Richard Wallace, the son of a wealthy farmer, a grown-up adolescent, wise in the policies and graces of his age; not clever, but with pride to take the place of vivacity. He had bright gray eyes, and drove the most violent and shining horses in the country. He had tired of many girls who loved him. Olive Templeton, a girl named Valentine, and Flora’s cousin Edith, if they happened to be where he was, followed him with angry, intimate glances without ever speaking. Their grievances were only those of wounded vanity, for he had never profited by their self-abandonment. He had had a rendezvous almost every night for a number of years, and waited impatiently for nightfall as if it were a ceremony and a feast; but by day he had the look of a victim of his own love-making and his self-control.

Flora was pleased when her turn came to be the object of his fickle attentions. Her life as a woman would begin with an encouraging conquest, for, with perfect confidence in herself, she intended to be the first to enjoy his wooing and resist his charm. Dreaming vaguely of more serious love, she became his favorite, half conscious of her bravado and her disdain of him and of what he was doing; the disdain was ignorant as well as innocent.

She soon lost her ignorance; a great many serious new sensations made her humble. Each fought, against the other’s magic, to keep his will power and above all his will to be good, intact; and a closer companionship developed in their common fear of companionship’s magic. In solitude, in a buggy, behind excited mares which jerked the reins, there was his shoulder against her shoulder; his arm stealing behind her and patiently put away; the scent of his wiry hair and his tobacco; the hard pressure of his knees under the lap robe. Picnics and parties were only a truce; and after, once more, his breath on her cheek in the starlight.

His love whispering was meaningless but terribly comprehensible: never all of a sentence, often not all of a word.... He did not ask for privileges or favors, as if he neither wanted her to know his intentions nor wanted to know them himself; but continued to reach out his hand obstinately, dreamily: desire fast asleep, in a sleep of self-control. He rarely spoke of marriage. Flora could not believe that he loved her. Because of her vigilance to protect herself from seduction, she could not study her heart to learn whether or not she loved him.

She was frightened by the temptation of love, though she wanted to regard it as superficial. It never touched her so poignantly as in the Presbyterian church in Aaronsville where on Sunday mornings she sang of the Shepherd and his wild flock, of mansions with pillars, of being reborn, of death without a sting. She kept morality constantly in mind, as one carries an amulet; she came to love the amulet for itself, imagining dangers where there were none, in order to hold it in the palm of her hand. She prayed that Richard be preserved from evil and she herself from his charm. Kneeling by her bed, the linen and the indoor night spread out before her half-closed eyes, she realized without warning that her lips were parched and pressed on the air as if in a kiss, that Richard’s kiss probably would not satisfy that yearning; and she wept. But she could not quite make up her mind to refuse him, if he should ask her to be his wife.

The neighbors watched them with a curiosity scarcely kind, scarcely Christian; her mother and sister-in-law observed that she had lost weight; no one discovered her trouble. When she happened to think of her original intention--to punish him for his frivolity and pride--she was contented for a few days. But the thought of Olive Templeton and the Valentine girl and Edith began to be intolerable; she feared to lose him as they had lost him, and determined never to surrender, less and less in order to triumph over him, but so that he would never tire of her. She clung to his love as those who are not unwilling to die cling to life--because it gives them an occupation in the meantime. She laughed as well as cried, but her laughter began to have a frightened sound.

Her only confidante was her sister-in-law Marianne, in whose romance there had been obstacles and misunderstandings, but never any ignorance of her own wishes--or so it seemed by that time. The two episodes had a certain similarity, at least in so far as all relations between young men and virgin girls, with the monotony of naturalness, are alike; and Marianne told her story because the emotions in it were unmistakable, and the end encouraging. The two women, equally anxious to be perfect, also resembled each other up to a certain point. But Marianne had chosen her own ideals; they were at one with her wishes; and her renunciation had concerned only things which she would not have wanted in any case. Flora’s desires, on the other hand, were so shadowy that she could not tell what was contrary to them, what to sacrifice to them. Able to be faultless in any way already determined by another’s imagination, by such an imagination as her sister-in-law’s, it was individual responsibility which weighed upon her. But Marianne, for reasons of conscience, was unwilling to relieve her of any part of that burden.

She tried instead to strengthen every germ of decision which seemed to begin to form in Flora’s mind, praising Ralph, the girl’s favorite brother, as her principal comment on Richard. “It is hard for a boy of Richard’s disposition to be good,” she would say. “Are you sure that he is a Christian?”

As far as she could see, there was little true love amid their emotions, their tumult of innumerable hesitations; but she would advise nothing but prayer, which brought Flora no nearer a solution--in fact, carried her thought, as if on the waves of a deep, invisible river, away from the problem itself. And afterward it had to be met with again; her bewilderment merely increased by having asked God to show her the way; so that the last time there was question of marriage, like the first, she was unprepared to give an answer.

That evening she and Richard were sitting on the lawn on a great rock shaped like the Ark of the Covenant. The moon shining in their faces as if it were a spotlight; night birds and sleepless birds in a radiance so bright that those whose eyes were made for the darkness could not hunt; and a splash of moonlight running down Richard’s cheek, the tired cheek of a young man who has seemed to have been young for a long time.... “This can’t go on,” he whispered.

The moment had come: a promise or good-by.

“Will you marry me?” he asked, as if he were asking, not for delight--merely for relief from pain.

Flora felt that someone was watching them: not God perhaps, but a great Spirit less a stranger to the earth, which enjoyed her confusion--the moon was its hard eye. Through a thousand lilac leaves, the lamps of the house signaling to her: a vague audience of those who loved her, before whom she had to do the right thing. Through the maple leaves overhead, the stars, like lamps of another house.

“I think not, Richard,” she said, wishing for a word as definite as yes or no, but meaning neither. She bent forward and clasped her hands.

He stood up. “You know I love you,” he said. She had not known. “Tell me why you won’t.”

Her body drooped still more loosely on the great stone, but she threw back her head in order to see him, tall and silvered over by the rays of moonlight. What could she answer? That his morals did not satisfy her? That he would not make a good husband? She did not understand these things; she did not care; others cared--all their eyes were upon her from the windows full of lamps, from the sky full of stars; she would have to do as they thought best. Furthermore, she felt as if she had made other engagements long ago, when she was a little child, perhaps, and had forgotten for the moment what they were.

She did not know what she whispered in reply to Richard. “I can’t hear you,” he said. “I don’t understand.” He shivered in the light that was like that of day, clear and embarrassing.

The moment had passed--promise or good-by; it was good-by. Where were they? In the corner of the lawn of her own home; she wished they were far away, so he would have to go with her a certain distance (even the distance of the rest of her life, without yes or no) in which at last the moon’s blinding, bright eye which confused her might close--for perhaps it was to blame. But the distance of the rest of a lifetime, like that from the corner of the lawn to the house door, seemed short; it was not worth while asking anyone to accompany her that far--she could go alone.

“Good-by, then,” he said. A man moving over the damp lawn, moving quickly, so that the time she would have to call him back would be short, too short.... His feet, mechanically steady, made a sound of mowing down the well-illuminated grass.

Flora went first to the north wing where her brother and sister-in-law lived, and wept in Marianne’s arms. “Be strong. I believe it is for the best,” Marianne said.

She dried her eyes, and opened the door of her mother’s part of the house. Her mother, who through the thin walls had heard her crying, was waiting in the center of the room under the hanging lamp. “What’s happened?” She opened her large arms like those of a man. “Don’t you cry,” she said. “The one you want isn’t always the best husband.” She was ready to tell her own story.

“But I don’t want him, mother,” Flora whispered, moving toward her bedroom door.

A look of dismay on her broad, benevolent face, her mother stared after her, loving her more because she seemed too young to understand, trying to decide which member of the family she took after, and failing to do so. For in fact Flora resembled them all, beginning with her father (his fastidious, idealistic melancholy), and her mother (her lack of cunning, her willingness to wait and give in); preventing herself from doing things, just as they had prevented one another.

Sleepless, pacing barefoot on the rug of her room, night after night Flora watched the moon shrink. She began to believe that the unkind Spirit (not God, perhaps, but arrayed in moonbeams) had won--she had been fooled. Afraid to pray for the reverse of her other prayers, she closed her eyes and murmured softly, “Richard, come back, ask again,” thinking she knew her answer now.

But nature took its course toward midsummer; he did come back. He was seen with a girl named Anne MacNeill, the pride of a poor Irish family. Everyone praised Flora’s wisdom in having no more to do with him; but when she was alone she wrung her hands until the blood went out of them. Olive Templeton, Mary Valentine, her disappointed cousin.... She had not lost him as they had--she had found a way of her own; and she envied them the comfort of having been badly used.

She wandered down the lane with her apron full of green apples for the colt named Oboe. Over the meadow his cry of love and hunger as he trotted toward the gate.... A cloud of pleasure in his damp eyes, he took the apples one by one between his teeth, and broke them with a faint, crisp sound, their juice dripping from his mouth. Flora feared and adored him; and as she stared at his tough body, she saw in its place another creature, dark and dappled by the moon. Clinging to the gate, “Richard,” she whispered, “I love you. Listen to me. I’ll never love anybody else. I’m so lonely.” It was like making love to a little dappled angel. Could she have said these things, she wondered, if she had been in Richard’s all too human presence? The two apples which were left slipped out of her hand. Oboe rolled one out of the grass with his lips, and with his hoof, which looked like a gray porcelain cup, pawed the sod under the gate for the other, which had fallen out of reach.

Before autumn came, the family worried about her health and complained of her mournful retirement; so she accompanied her brother and Marianne to a large house-warming. She was ashamed of not having a sweetheart, and regretted the fact that she was young. From the corners of the new house came furtive glances of young couples holding hands, embarrassed by the presence of their mothers and the brightness of large oil lamps. Women with aprons over their best dresses bustled around tables of famous jellies and chicken pies, beaming at her supposedly broken but supposedly healed heart. Flora felt that her youth was mutilated, but men and women gazed at it mildly without seeing one scar.

A stranger was introduced: Herbert Ruhl, the new doctor, a brown, wiry man in his thirties. Someone played a blistered piano in which two or three bad strings tingled. Dr. Ruhl asked Flora to dance, but the girls of the Presbyterian church did not waltz. His eyes, under weather-beaten eyelids, hardened when he looked at her. Someone whispered, “He’s a Catholic.” Then he asked if he might take her home; but she was drawn into a Virginia reel before she could say yes or no, which pleased her.

Marianne said, “Dr. Ruhl asked to take you home, didn’t he? Then cousin Edith can come home with us--she is alone.” Flora realized that a girl ought not to be alone; she would have to keep her fidelity to Richard a secret. She thanked the doctor.

From the beginning he seemed to have serious intentions. Flora found that she thought of him continually; but he was not young or handsome, so she felt safe from love. He became the family doctor, and they grew fond of him.

Only Flora’s old father said, “I shan’t be doctored by any man who takes orders from a priest.” He seemed to divine the reason for Herbert Ruhl’s frequent presence in the house, of which no one ever spoke to him; and three days before his death, when Flora was sitting beside him, holding one of his hands, smaller than her own, he said, “Don’t ever marry a Catholic.”

Marianne hoped, in the beginning, that contact with a good Protestant family would change the doctor’s faith.

He would stop at the farm when he made his round of calls in the country, ask her to drive with him, and bring her home before dusk on his way back to Aaronsville. On these occasions he offered his love with patient candor. Meaning to marry her, he did not oblige her to give him an answer, but in spite of her requests asked again and again.

Flora would wait while he visited his patients, calling to mind pathetically the face of her other lover; but the day came when she realized that she did so by an effort of her will. She tried to want her hopelessness back, and envied Richard’s other sweethearts their disconsolate ways of living. Her relation to him lost its romantic dignity--she had been so proud of her broken heart. But finally his troubled, light-gray eyes haunted her no more, and the years over which he had ruled so lightly, so uncertainly, shrank in her memory to a few unsatisfying moments.

Then, under Herbert’s different appearance, she discovered a force which she had thought peculiar to Richard. The same breath on her cheek, the same fear of constrained movements in the dark, behind other less fiery horses; the misunderstandings, the paroxysms of timidity, the agreeable weakness, the slight nausea of disappointments.... But because Herbert was a man, not a boy, the pressure of his wooing had a definite and different purpose. He wanted to be repulsed, as if to test her fidelity as a wife, and was enjoying in advance a lifetime of peace. His confidence in her increased; she shrank from the liberties he took, by which it was revealed, but her resistance grew automatic; after years of having been loved, her senses could not have been taken by surprise.

She was profoundly tired. Her girlhood was lasting too long. She envied married women and old maids. She came into possession of the sort of knowledge one would like to be without. The key to her heart was so simple--the world might forge many; she averted her eyes from the young men she knew, lest they discover her weakness. The world itself was simple, and when she thought of her confusion in the face of it, she was ashamed and wanted another mind and another soul.

Herbert’s hard glance opened her heart as if it were a key--more exactly, it turned in the lock as if made for it; but the lock seemed to have been set in a wall in which no doorway had been cut. There was a part of herself which would always be closed, until the very wall of life was destroyed. The faith of her family was a part of this wall.

Herbert was a devout Catholic. The time came when they talked of religion as it might concern their future lives; these discussions were in effect proposals of marriage, rejected proposals. If he had presented his religion theoretically, she might have ceased for a moment, in the pleasure of being able to understand, to be aware of her family’s disapproval and her own lack of conviction. It was its human poetry which frightened her, each word with a vague, dangerous, earthly meaning--pope, purgatory, confession, absolution.... A sort of Italian king; veiled nuns (unveiled by a newspaper called _The Menace_ to which her father subscribed); a pit full of souls covered with human transgressions, having lived on earth too long; whispering, whispering guilt through the barred windows of the confessional; all evil forgiven--and she did not even want to know what evil was.

The Church was so perfect in Herbert’s eyes that she could not think of asking him to leave it. He talked of his boyhood by the hour: a priest who could forgive, without tolerating, any young sin; the same old man transfigured by embroideries and linen; his name carved on a wooden bench where he had knelt; the small bells of the parochial school. Flora realized that these were his dreams for their children, unable to imagine herself having children; and feared that if she began to yield, she might lose sight of herself and her obscure destiny, whatever it actually was, in the pleasure of yielding.

Then her brother John Craig came again, and she happened to hear him say to Marianne, “If Flora likes this young man, I don’t see why religion should keep her from marrying him. She ought to be a Catholic, anyway. She is as pure as the snow, and hates having to decide things for herself. If she had to live with her other sister-in-law--I mean my wife, and I’m glad she doesn’t--there’d be another story to tell. Indeed, I shouldn’t be surprised if Susanne would make a nun out of her. She has the proper spirit for it.”

“John,” Marianne replied, “you are wicked to make fun of us all.”

But after his departure, she was more severe about the unsuitability of the marriage, and seemed frightened. The community also had much that was well meant and a little that was malicious to say about a Tower turning Catholic.

Flora saw her love, what there was of it, sink into a quicksand of impossibility. If it had been greater, she might have been comforted by a sense of her sacrifice, though so little deliberate. As it was, she merely let herself be forced by the convictions of others into being afraid that it would escape from the quicksand. It did not.

One day at dusk she and Herbert were sitting on a stone wall among strands of bitter-sweet, between trees thinly covered with brown foliage and dark brown fields. He said again, “Will you marry me?”

She felt her braids, like the silky hand of a spirit, slipping down the nape of her neck. She answered, “Dear, I believe that I love you. But I cannot marry a Catholic. We would not be happy.”

He whispered, “You will love me more.”

Flora understood bitterly that this was not an end, not a promise, not good-by--because Herbert was a strong man who could wait as long as she lived. She sighed, one sigh as small in proportion to her whole weariness as one prolonged breath to the breaths of a lifetime.

A sunset like a great, sumptuous couch. Flora imagined that she lay in it, safe from human intrusion as if it were a deathbed, and remembered her monotonous life, moment by moment--the moments of the past mingling with those of that very twilight, and resembling all those there would be in the future. She stared idly at the lights dying upon cloud after cloud, upon empty ether. Life no less could be transfigured but not transformed; life no less was a sky full of colors, whose future was to fade....

She continued to sing bravely throughout the last years of her life. Alwyn listened, and envied all those who had taken part in her secret experience, not caring (because he was an adolescent boy) how much of it was misery, how much love, and how much the homesickness of a spirit which had not felt at home anywhere. He thought of a scarlet tanager he had seen fluttering in the fringe of a shower; for her voice was also a warning so sweet that one could not give heed. A bird’s voice in a sugar-maple bough--both voice and transparent bough darkening slowly, and seeming most distinct in the moment before they cease altogether to be heard and seen....

In her twenty-ninth year she fell ill. When Herbert first entered her room with his doctor’s leather case, she cried: “I am not going to get well. I knew it all the time, I knew it. That was why I couldn’t decide.”

Thereafter she wept whenever he came, so pitifully at last that another doctor had to take his place. There was a week of hope, a week of losing it. Finally at midnight, in a shower which blew down with a mournful abundance on the garden, the tree tops, the mossy shingles of the house--in which for hour after hour no one exhaled a normal breath, and all their mouths were pressed into their hands, and tears ran down over their knuckles--the second doctor learned that he could not save her life.

Flora’s mother left the room. They could hear her heavy tread up and down the porch. When she came in she stumbled over the threshold, and it was clear to everyone that she would never be strong again, that she would not thereafter be of much importance in life, and that, for her, life would have no importance at all.

Sunrise. Flora’s face, tired and still confused, lay on the pillow between the two great ropes of red hair. The body of the sunlight floated through the window and lit on the flowered wool rug. Then she opened her eyes, and seemed to know that the light which stood like a curly-headed angel beside her bed was perfectly good, and it believed what she believed (though she may not have remembered clearly what that was), and it had come for her. She lifted her hands and placed them in one large, gilt hand of the sunshine.

14. His Maternal Grandparents, Ira and Ursula Duff

After his aunt Flora’s funeral, Alwyn went back to school in Aaronsville. He lived with his mother’s parents, who had rented their farm and bought a little property in the town: a house, a fine lawn bounded by hedges, a vegetable garden, and a stable.

His grandmother Duff never lit the lamps until the shades were drawn, remarking that it was “indecent to be seen by Tom, Dick and Harry, as if you were an actor in plays.” Stiff and delicate, she would stand in the bay window every evening as long as the dusk lasted. The large flowers of the lace curtains (as if roses and lilies had been burned and kept their shape in the ashes) stood out clearly against the partial darkness--through which bicycles swung, leaving prostrate columns of dust, and girls with strong arms interlaced loitered along the walks, and workmen went home. It was the normal small-town twilight which lay there, but the old woman stood before it momentously still, as if she were watching an enemy from a stronghold; and often, as if to pass the time of her vigilance, she sang, in an old, sweet voice:

_“Dark is the night
And cold the wind is--blow-ing!
Hide me, my Saviour, till the storm is o’er....”_

If her husband entered the room, she would shrug her round shoulders and continue:

_“For the waves around me roll.
Hide me, hide me for my soul ...”_

Or she would sing other hymns, substituting for the verses she had forgotten the mystifying notes of the Italian scale.

She had been lovely in her girlhood, and still moved with a peculiar grace; her skirts and petticoats touching the floor, her small shoes going and coming among them. If she had ever been happy she would have been vain, and said, “My sisters were always in the fashion, whatever it was.”

She betrayed a lifelong envy by wanting everyone to admire these sisters. One had married, for love, a man who was too easy-going and often drifted into financial straits, though they wanted for nothing. The other lived in St. Paul in circumstances of wealth and prominence, and rarely visited her poor sister. Both were haughty and beautiful women.

It was they who had induced her to marry Ira Duff. He had then been untidily handsome and a heavy drinker, keeping company with lazy, profane men and the women of bars and shanties. The Raeburn girls had been away to finishing school and were noted for style and vivacity, and he had been impartially in love with them, in spite of his other connections. But Anne and Arabella had had ambitious dreams and discouraged the unpromising lover, saying that it was not right for either of them to marry before their elder sister, and had accordingly brought pressure to bear upon Ursula. “Pa can’t support three well-brought-up daughters.” Their father had been losing his money in various ways. “One of us must marry,” they had insisted.

So Ursula had accepted Ira Duff and set about to reform him. Her loveliness, the novelty of marriage, her superior birth and education, had undermined his former habits. He had signed the pledge against liquor and tobacco; the low ties had been broken, one by one; he had been converted and had begun to be influential in the church. It had been as if she exerted, to the glory of God and the foundation of a respectable life, all the influence she was ever to have over him. The reform had been accomplished in four years.

As an old woman she took her grandson’s hand and pressed it against her tight collar, through which he could feel a round lump in her throat. “After four years of married life,” she said, “I was standing by the garden gate, and I found that growth had begun. I knew that the cause was crying too much every day. So I made up my mind then and there never to cry again, whatever your grandpa did or said. And I haven’t.”

On another occasion she said, “Blessedly, there weren’t many deaths in our family. My twins, Ferris and Forrest, died.”

With his mother, Alwyn had often put flowers on their graves, under a mountain ash at Hope’s Corner. There were two headstones of soft Middle Western marble, joined by a thin slab like the arm of one little boy laid on the other’s shoulder: OUR TWINS ... BORN TO IRA DUFF AND HIS WIFE URSULA NÉE RAEBURN ... DEPARTED THIS LIFE ... HEAVEN WAS THEIR DESTINATION.

“As a young woman I had a magnificent head of hair. It was so heavy I could scarcely hold up my head, proud as I was; and I could sit down on it like a dress. Now when I gave birth to twins I looked at myself in the looking-glass, and looked at the babies, and I cut it off with a pair of shears. It was laughable to see your grandpa’s face when he came in--he looked as if I had given away something that belonged to him.

“They died of a sickness that they caught because their father took them to a cattle market in a snow storm; they were as pretty as pictures, and he wanted to show them off among the men--he was always one to make a great display.” She made this accusation, and others like it, in a tone of perfect composure. “Well, they did not grow up to take sides with their pa against me as the others did. But after that, not one of our family died, and I thank the Lord.”

She took no account of the recent death of one of her two other sons. He had had lung trouble; his wife and daughters were Christian Scientists, for whom it would have been dangerous and impious to acknowledge his disease by taking him West; but for some reason their transcendent faith had not availed. At the church funeral his mother had sat in the family pew in her ruffled black silk and veils, holding her grandson Alwyn’s hand, with a look of mystic satisfaction. When the widow had cried out and flung herself on the coffin among the cut flowers, the aged woman had looked on without dismay, as if it were a natural occurrence; and when the mixed quartet had sung, “Beyond the smiling and the weeping, I shall be soon,” the glance of her bright eyes amid their wrinkles had seemed to leap gayly up to heaven. Perhaps she had not realized that the dead man was her son; for her mind had begun to fail.

At first her sense of time grew morbid; she would forget the events of the previous day or the previous hour, and remember instead things which had been forgotten for fifty or sixty years.

Then she began to hide things. Having little to do now but conserve the souvenirs of what they had done in the past, both she and her husband took pride in orderly drawers, boxes, cupboards, and cubbyholes. Ugly ornaments and mementoes, which no longer reminded them of anything, were spread out about the house like the weapons and garments of savage tribes in a museum. Nothing was owned in common: her pin cushion stood beside his box of letters from their sons, on her cabinet organ; and each waited for the other to neglect or mislay one of these things.

Now the old woman began to permit herself to be put in the wrong; her strategy of many years broke down. As wanton as a magpie in her black bodice and white apron, she slipped his spectacle case into a closed umbrella, carried a paper-covered song book out to the privy, explaining that these were Unitarian hymns and she was a Presbyterian, and put an almanac on the organ in its place, opening it at a page on which the signs of the zodiac sat in a circle around a disemboweled man. She hid a valuable ring of freshwater pearls so well that it was never found; and her husband expressed his disgust in pompous phrases, which she remembered.

Her modesty became a sort of madness. The human body exposed below the chin offended her as cobwebs had done when she had been a housewife, and like them aroused her industry. She made lacy curls with a pencil all over a nude photograph of one of her grand-daughters, two years of age. The man of the almanac wore a bathing suit of ink. There was a history of the conquest of America with innumerable illustrations, in which the savages offered their daughters to the discoverers in dresses which she drew, and even the slain lay beneath shrouds as fanciful as valentines--the work of many weeks. If Alwyn left his collar unbuttoned, she would steal up behind him and wrap a handkerchief about his neck, murmuring, “I can’t abide nakedness.”

Alwyn learned from his mother that she had always kept everything of an improper nature out of sight. She had had no roosters in her flock of hens, and bought eggs for hatching from her neighbors. She had persuaded her husband to plant a great hedge of cedars far from the house, behind which the cows and bulls together had been led. She had never allowed her babies to be seen until they were a month old.

Perhaps she wore, thus ostentatiously, the scar of some amorous violence done by her husband in her youth. Perhaps she was trying to rid herself of memories of sweetness and abandon which made a discord in the pure concert of their hatred of each other.