And so I planted my corn; and in the evening I felt the dumb weariness of physical toil. Many times in older days I have known the wakeful nerve-weariness of cities. This was not it. It was the weariness which, after supper, seizes upon one"s limbs with half-aching numbness. I sat down on my porch with a nameless content. I looked off across the countryside. I saw the evening shadows fall, and the moon come up. And I wanted nothing I had not. And finally sleep swept in resistless waves upon me and I stumbled up to bed--and sank into dreamless slumber.
V
THE STORY OF ANNA
It is the prime secret of the Open Road (but I may here tell it aloud) that you are to pa.s.s nothing, reject nothing, despise nothing upon this earth. As you travel, many things both great and small will come to your attention; you are to regard all with open eyes and a heart of simplicity. Believe that everything belongs somewhere; each thing has its fitting and luminous place within this mosaic of human life. The True Road is not open to those who withdraw the skirts of intolerance or lift the chin of pride. Rejecting the least of those who are called common or unclean, it is (curiously) you yourself that you reject. If you despise that which is ugly you do not know that which is beautiful.
For what is beauty but completeness? The roadside beggar belongs here, too; and the idiot boy who wanders idly in the open fields; and the girl who withholds (secretly) the name of the father of her child.
I remember as distinctly as though it happened yesterday the particular evening three years ago when I saw the Scotch Preacher come hurrying up the road toward my house. It was June. I had come out after supper to sit on my porch and look out upon the quiet fields. I remember the grateful cool of the evening air, and the scents rising all about me from garden and roadway and orchard. I was tired after the work of the day and sat with a sort of complete comfort and contentment which comes only to those who work long in the quiet of outdoor places. I remember the thought came to me, as it has come in various forms so many times, that in such a big and beautiful world there should be no room for the fever of unhappiness or discontent.
And then I saw McAlway coming up the road. I knew instantly that something was wrong. His step, usually so deliberate, was rapid; there was agitation in every line of his countenance. I walked down through the garden to the gate and met him there. Being somewhat out of breath he did not speak at once. So I said:
"It is not, after all, as bad as you antic.i.p.ate."
"David," he said, and I think I never heard him speak more seriously, "it is bad enough."
He laid his hand on my arm.
"Can you hitch up your horse and come with me--right away?"
McAlway helped with the buckles and said not a word. In ten minutes, certainly not more, we were driving together down the lane.
"Do you know a family named Williams living on the north road beyond the three corners?" asked the Scotch Preacher.
Instantly a vision of a somewhat dilapidated house, standing not unpicturesquely among ill-kept fields, leaped to my mind.
"Yes," I said; "but I can"t remember any of the family except a gingham girl with yellow hair. I used to see her on her way to school,""
"A girl!" he said, with a curious note in his voice; "but a woman now."
He paused a moment; then he continued sadly:
"As I grow older it seems a shorter and shorter step between child and child. David, she has a child of her own,""
"But I didn"t know--she isn"t--"
"A woods child," said the Scotch Preacher.
I could not find a word to say. I remember the hush of the evening there in the country road, the soft light fading in the fields. I heard a whippoorwill calling from the distant woods.
"They made it hard for her," said the Scotch Preacher, "especially her older brother. About four o"clock this afternoon she ran away, taking her baby with her. They found a note saying they would never again see her alive. Her mother says she went toward the river."
I touched up the mare. For a few minutes the Scotch Preacher sat silent, thinking. Then he said, with a peculiar tone of kindness in his voice.
"She was a child, just a child. When I talked with her yesterday she was perfectly docile and apparently contented. I cannot imagine her driven to such a deed of desperation. I asked her: "Why did you do it, Anna?" She answered, "I don"t know: I--I don"t know!" Her reply was not defiant or remorseful: it was merely explanatory."
He remained silent again for a long time.
"David," he said finally, "I sometimes think we don"t know half as much about human nature as we--we preach. If we did, I think we"d be more careful in our judgments."
He said it slowly, tentatively: I knew it came straight from his heart.
It was this spirit, more than the t.i.tle he bore, far more than the sermons he preached, that made him in reality the minister of our community. He went about thinking that, after all, he didn"t know much, and that therefore he must be kind.
As I drove up to the bridge, the Scotch Preacher put one hand on the reins. I stopped the horse on the embankment and we both stepped out.
"She would undoubtedly have come down this road to the river," McAlway said in a low voice.
It was growing dark. When I walked out on the bridge my legs were strangely unsteady; a weight seemed pressing on my breast so that my breath came hard. We looked down into the shallow, placid water: the calm of the evening was upon it; the middle of the stream was like a rumpled gla.s.sy ribbon, but the edges, deep-shaded by overhanging trees, were of a mysterious darkness. In all my life I think I never experienced such a degree of silence--of breathless, oppressive silence.
It seemed as if, at any instant, it must burst into some fearful excess of sound.
Suddenly we heard a voice--in half-articulate exclamation. I turned, every nerve strained to the uttermost. A figure, seemingly materialized out of darkness and silence, was moving on the bridge.
"Oh!--McAlway," a voice said.
Then I heard the Scotch Preacher in low tones.
"Have you seen Anna Williams?"
"She is at the house," answered the voice.
"Get your horse," said the Scotch Preacher.
I ran back and led the mare across the bridge (how I remember, in that silence, the thunder of her hoofs on the loose boards!) Just at the top of the little hill leading up from the bridge the two men turned in at a gate. I followed quickly and the three of us entered the house together.
I remember the musty, warm, shut-in odour of the front room. I heard the faint cry of a child. The room was dim, with a single kerosene lamp, but I saw three women huddled by the stove, in which a new fire was blazing.
Two looked up as we entered, with feminine instinct moving aside to hide the form of the third.
"She"s all right, as soon as she gets dry," one of them said.
The other woman turned to us half complainingly:
"She ain"t said a single word since we got her in here, and she won"t let go of the baby for a minute."
"She don"t cry," said the other, "but just sits there like a statue."
McAlway stepped forward and said:
"Well--Anna?"
The girl looked up for the first time. The light shone full in her face: a look I shall never forget. Yes, it was the girl I had seen so often, and yet not the girl. It was the same childish face, but all marked upon with inexplicable wan lines of a certain mysterious womanhood. It was childish, but bearing upon it an inexpressible look of half-sad dignity, that stirred a man"s heart to its profoundest depths. And there was in it, too, as I have thought since, a something I have seen in the faces of old, wise men: a light (how shall I explain it?) as of experience--of boundless experience. Her hair hung in wavy dishevelment about her head and shoulders, and she clung pa.s.sionately to the child in her arms.
The Scotch Preacher had said, "Well--Anna?" She looked up and replied:
"They were going to take my baby away."