Old Crow

"Yes," said Raven, "of course he can. We"ll be down to breakfast, tell Charlotte."

Tenney offered no preference or opinion. He sat there, his key--the key Tira had lost, he did remember vaguely--on the table before him. Nan, with the air of there being no more to do, wafted d.i.c.k away with her.

And Raven and Tenney spent the night together in the hut. Raven did not sleep. He had an impression that Tenney did not, either. It seemed to him a watch with the dead.

XLV

In that darkest minute when it seems as if dawn will never come or, if it does, to bring with it a deeper chill, Raven, for the first time in weeks, found his old enemies upon him: the fear of life, the terrible distaste for continuance in a world where there is no escape, even in going on. Was this grief for Tira? Her needs had pulled him out from his own sickness of mind, and now that she would never need anything again, must he return to the dark dwelling of his mental discontent and crouch there whimpering as Tenney had whimpered when he came to him here a few hours ago? And slowly, achingly, his mind renewedly accepted the iron necessity which is living. There was no giving up. There was no escape.

He had to live because the other choice--was it the fool"s choice or the coward"s?--was not only unthinkable, but it did no good. There was no escape. And side by side with the sickness of distaste for life as he found it, was another distaste, as strong: for this malady of nostalgia itself. He could not abide it another instant. It was squalid, it was unclean, and he found his mind crying out: "Help me! for G.o.d"s sake help me!" But it was not to G.o.d he cried. It was to Old Crow. And Old Crow heard. Indubitably he heard. For there was an answer. "Yes! yes!" the answer kept beating in his mind. He would help.

And what of Tira? Was she resolved into the earth that made her? Or would she also help? He wondered why she had died. Was it because she had been unable to face the idea of the little boy who was not right taking his maimed innocence into some other state alone? No. Tira had her starkly simple faith. She had her Lord Jesus Christ. She would, as simply as she believed, have trusted the child to Him. Did she so fear to face her life with Tenney--the hurtling, blind, elemental creature with blood on his hands--that she took herself away? No. Tira was no such person. There was a wild, high courage in her that, the more terrible the challenge, responded the more valiantly. Why did she take herself away? And what was she in these walls that had been dedicated to her safety? Was she existent, like Old Crow? Was she here with Raven when his mind clamored for peace? Did she, too, answer "Yes, yes!" She had, he concluded, gone. It seemed as if she had withdrawn herself, by her own will, for some inexorable reason. He remembered threnodies that saw the beloved dead absorbed into the course of nature: the dawn, the sunset, the season"s round, the flowers that spring ever renewed to deck the laureate hea.r.s.e. And as his mind sought her in the night breeze that came in to fan him and Tenney alike, in the sky where the stars, through arboreal s.p.a.ces, never looked so piercingly bright, he did seem to be aware of an actual intelligence. But it was a.s.suredly not Tira and it was not Old Crow. It was Anne.

Whether his mind had been so occupied by these other more immediate things that she could not get the connection between her will and his, whether she now found him, bereft of Tira, free to do her unchanged bidding, he could not see. But Anne was there. At least, the knowledge of her was in his mind, insisting on being heard, and insisting as it never had in this present life. For whereas then her attack had been subtly organized, Anne herself, the directing general, behind almost invisible potencies of suggestion and finesse, now here she was in the open, plainly commanding him, as if this might be the only fight she should be able to manage, and it must be to the finish. And what she wanted was plain obedience touching the disposal of her trust. It was not his love she was asking for now. That, he concluded, though without bitterness, might not look desirable to her any more. Or perhaps she had learned how futile it was to ask it. Or, indeed, was all love futile beyond the grave? No, for he loved Tira withdrawn into her impenetrable seclusion--but that he must not think of. The fight was on, the conclusive fight with Anne. And he seemed to be battling for the integrity of his own soul, the freedom of his will. He sat up on his couch, and heard himself say aloud:

"No. I won"t do it. You can"t make me."

Was this the way to speak to Anne, to whom all the reticences and delicacies of life were native air? But she was not Anne now so much as the enemy of sane conduct here in this world and of his struggling will.

"D"you speak?" called Tenney from the next room.

"All right," said Raven, and realized he must not speak again.

Thereafter the fight with Anne went on within the arena of his mind. He poured himself forth to her. For the first time in his life, he admitted her to his inner beliefs and sympathies. He would not, he told her, devote her money to the debasing of the world. Wherever she was, she had not learned a page more than she had known when she wrote that letter to him about the things that help the world and the things that hinder. He didn"t believe, he told her, she really wanted to learn. She wanted only to be obeyed, to put her money where she had ordered it to go merely because she had ordered it.

"You can"t have it, Anne," he repeated, whenever his mind halted in argument, and she kept pressing him back, back into his old hopeless subserviency. "I"ll tell you where it"s going. It"s going to France.

There won"t be any palace, Anne. It"s going into the land. It"s going to help little French boys and French girls to grow up with time enough and strength enough to put their beautiful intelligence into saving the earth. It"s going to be that sort of a bulwark between them and the enemies of the earth. And that"s the only road to peace. Don"t you see it is, Anne? Don"t you see it? You won"t get peace by talking about it.

You wasted your money when you did it, all through war-time. You harmed and hindered. Don"t you know you did? If you don"t, what"s the use of dying? Don"t they know any more there than we do here? Anyway, I know more than you did when you made your will, and that"s what I"m going to do. Train up beautiful intelligences, Anne, the ones that are likeliest to work it all out practically: how to live, that"s what they"re going to work out, how to live, how to help the world to live. Don"t you see, Anne? For G.o.d"s sake, don"t you see?"

She didn"t see, or, if she did, she was too angry to give him the comfort of knowing she did. But suddenly, in the midst of her anger, there was a break, a stillness, though it had been still before. Perhaps it was most like a stillness of mind, and he felt himself as suddenly awake to a certainty that Anne had done with him. Once before she had seemed to leave him, but this time it was for good. She had gone, wherever the road was open to her. He had armed his will and sent it out to fight her will. She was routed, and she would never challenge him again. Perhaps, in her scorn, she had repudiated him. Perhaps the world, if it were called on to p.r.o.nounce judgment, would repudiate him for betraying a dead woman"s trust. Well, let it. The impeccability of his own soul wasn"t so very valuable, after all, weighed against what he saw as the indisputable values of mortal life. He lay back on his bed, exhausted by the fight, foolishly exhausted because, he told himself, there hadn"t been any real Anne. Only her mind, as he had known it, and his own mind had been grappling, like two sides of an argument. But while he tried to dull himself with this denial of the possibilities beyond our sense, he knew underneath that there had been Anne. And she had gone. She would not come again.

Then he must have slept, for there was a gulf of forgetfulness, and when his eyes came open, it was on Tenney standing there in the doorway.

Raven felt squalid after the night in his clothes, and Tenney looked to him in much the same case. Also Tenney was shrunken, even since he had come to the hut the day before, and then he had seemed not three-quarters of his height. He asked now, not as if he cared, but as if he wondered idly:

"D" I leave my ammunition up here?"

He had the gun in his hand.

"Let the gun alone," said Raven. He got up and took it away from him, and Tenney dumbly suffered it. "We"ll go down now and have some breakfast, and Jerry"ll do your ch.o.r.es."

"I can do my own ch.o.r.es," said Tenney. "I can go into the barn, I guess."

By this Raven understood that he did not mean to go into the house.

Perhaps he was afraid of it. Men are afraid of houses that have grown sinister because of knowing too much.

That day was a curious medley of watchfulness over Tenney: for Raven felt the necessity of following him about to see he did himself no harm.

He called him in to breakfast, but Tenney did not even seem to hear, and stood brooding in the yard, looking curiously down at his lame foot and lifting it as if to judge how far it would serve him. Then Charlotte, who had been watching from the window, went out and told him she had a bite for him in the shed, and he went in with her at once and drank coffee and ate the bread she b.u.t.tered. He didn"t, so he told her, want to touch things any more. So she broke the bread and he carried the pieces to his mouth with an air of hating them and fearing. When he went over to his house, Raven went with him, and, finding Jerry had milked and driven the cows to pasture, they stood outside, miserably loitering, because Tenney had evidently made that resolve not to go in.

"I suppose," said Raven, after a little, to recall him, "the milk is in there."

"Yes," said Tenney. "I s"pose "tis."

"It isn"t strained, you know. What do you mean to do about it?"

"Do?" said Tenney. "Let it set."

Again they loitered, back and forth, sometimes on one side of the woodpile, sometimes the other, each with a pretense of finding the woodpile itself a point of interest. Suddenly Tenney ceased his foolish walk up and down.

"Look here," said he, "should you jest as lieves go in?"

"Yes," said Raven. "Only you"d better come with me. Get it over. You"ve got to go into your own house."

"What I want," said Tenney, "is a blue ap.r.o.n, blue with white specks. I don"t believe it"s there, but if "tis I want it."

To Raven, this was not strange. It was Tira"s ap.r.o.n he wanted, something that belonged to her, to touch, perhaps to carry about with him as a reminder of the warmth and kindliness that lay in everything she owned.

Blue! that was her Madonna color. No wonder Tenney remembered it, if it was blue.

"It ain"t hangin" up," said Tenney, with a particularity that seemed to cause him an intense pain of concentration. "She never"d hang it up with t"others. It"s folded. Mebbe in her work-basket, mebbe--my G.o.d in heaven! she wouldn"t ha" kep" it. She"s burnt it up. You take off the cover o" the kitchen stove. You look there an" see if you can"t find the leastest scrid. Blue, you remember, all folded up."

Raven went into the kitchen where the pails of milk were on the table, waiting. He took off the stove cover and looked in, still an idle compliance, to quiet the man"s mind. It was like an outcome to a dream.

For there it was, a soft disorder easily indicating burned cloth, and one shred of blue, a piece perhaps an inch and a half square, hemmed on three sides: the end of an ap.r.o.n string. He took this carefully out, and stood there looking at it a tense moment, as if it could summon Tira back to tell him what it meant; look out his pocketbook, laid it in, and put the pocketbook away. Then he went back to Tenney.

"You were right," he said. "She burned it up."

Tenney stared at him for what seemed a long time.

"Oh," he said, as if it had been Raven who suggested it, "so she burnt it up. Wa"n"t there any left--not a scrid?"

"Yes," said Raven, "there was. What do you want of it?"

"Nothin"," said Tenney. "No, I don"t want it. If "twas the whole on"t I shouldn"t want it, come to think. A man couldn"t hang himself by an ap.r.o.n. Even that one you couldn"t. I guess"--he turned upon Raven so sick a gaze that Raven advanced to him and put a hand on his arm--"I guess," said Tenney, "I"m done. I"ve got to git some sleep. Should you jest as soon I"d go up to that shack o" yourn an" lay down a spell?"

Again they went up to the hut, and Tenney, throwing himself on the couch, was at once asleep. All that day Raven watched by him, and that night also they were there together: a strange day and night, Raven remembered afterward, with Charlotte coming and Nan and finally d.i.c.k, all with food or wistful companionship, and Nan"s a.s.suring him, in her way of finding nothing out of the common, that everything had been done for Tira, and she would go over to the service. Charlotte would go with her. It would be better--her eyes questioned him, and he nodded, not answering. It would be better he should not go. On the third day she appeared again, in the middle of the afternoon, and said she had just come from Mountain Brook and everything was----That she did not finish, Tenney"s somber eyes waited upon her with such a dumb expectancy. What was going to be done, she wondered. Tenney couldn"t stay in the hut, keeping Raven there with him, as Billy Jones had kept Old Crow. Yet she wasn"t sure Raven wouldn"t stay. But while she thought it, Tenney was answering her, though he didn"t seem to be speaking to either of them.

He might have been appealing to something invisible in the room.

"I"ll shave me," he said, "an" then I"ll see." Something pa.s.sed over him like a great moving wind. "Why, G.o.d A"mighty!" he cried. "I can"t stop to shave me. It"s now or never, don"t you know "tis?"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hat from the chair where he had thrown it, and went out of the hut, limping down the hill. And Raven was with him. He was with him as he hurried along the road so fast that it seemed as if the next step meant breaking into a run. He was with him when, halfway to the street, Eugene Martin pa.s.sed them, in his buggy, stopped further on and called to them: "Ride?" He was not laughing now, he was not jibing. He seemed to be constrained to ask them to ride, they were hurrying so.

Raven threw a curse at him, but Tenney broke into a limping run and jumped into the tail of the wagon and sat there, his legs dangling. And he called so piercingly to Martin to drive along, to "Hurry, for G.o.d"s sake, hurry!" that Martin did whip up, and the wagon whirled away, and Raven hurried on alone.

That night, at eight o"clock, Nan went over to ask if Raven had come home, and finding he had not, loitered back to her own gate and waited.

She could not go in. If she kept her mind on him, he might come. And presently he came. She walked to meet him and put her hand through his arm. He was walking firmly, but he looked "all in."

"Come," she said. "Supper"s waiting."

"No," said Raven, "not yet. I got a fellow to bring me back from the street. d.i.c.k said you"d been over."