The horses raised heads and ears suddenly, and the young man, looking too, saw a strange sight. The cornfield abutted on the line fence between the Hymerson and Lethen places, and over the fence was a gloom of trees, dark even now beyond a clearing minaretted by mulleins. The shadowed oaks and maples seemed darkened thickly, and even with their flourish of green, somehow old and cool, wintry. And before them, in the clearing among the slender spires of mullein, stood a human figure.
Never since beginning work in this field had Milne’s subconscious alertness given way, as though some time, among the green, he would descry the face of Ada Lethen, calling him. … Though nothing of the sort could happen; she would see him from among the bush and avoid him, unless … he were to consider himself dreaming more wildly than ever.
It was not she. The figure was strangely forlorn, as though strayed there by chance from some indefinitely remote quarter, an alien. It was hatless, with straggling grey hair, and advanced to him almost as though subjectively cringing; suggesting the same motives as a stray dog.
It was a man, who appeared to sidle around stumps and mulleins, fallen logs, a huge ant-city, without noticing such obstacles, or even Richard Milne, upon whom he was nevertheless intent as though looking through him. The face was long and grey, with cleaving perpendicular lines below, and level ones on the forehead criss-crossed by the straggling hair. The figure was not so much stooped as attenuated, slighter, so that it seemed at first as tall as in former times. Arrived at the fence, he leaned against the topmost rail as though there was no danger that his weight would displace it, and gazed earnestly with slate-grey eyes into the young man’s face.
“Good day, Mr. Lethen.” Richard Milne spoke with a recollected sort of serene severity. His hands twitched upon the levers of the cultivator. The other did not reply, but gazed at the young man with an almost entreating intentness. There was indeed something dog-like in his haggard eyes, and his shoulders seemed twistedly sagging, knobbled by heavy braces over the khaki shirt – store clothes, machine-made, as those of other farmers seldom were. His dejection, however, spoke an indifference to all details of the sort which gave him an air of natural things and weathered objects, as though he had never been beneath a roof within memory.
These matters, and the silence, gave Richard Milne an exasperation which, as he was half-conscious, transposed the natural pity following on a shock of recognition. His mood stiffened as he told himself that everything was the old fellow’s own fault, in part at least. All the pent-up bitterness of years found vent in a monosyllable, while he tugged at the lines as it were to turn the team about:
“Well?”
“You are Alma Milne’s son, aren’t you?”
The gentle plangency of the tone, the words, surprised Richard into his natural courteous consideration. He had almost forgotten that he had been an orphan from early years, and had not thought ever to be saluted in that manner again. Memories of childhood and a dark country back of that, with weeping at a black winter funeral, stirred him.
“Ada, my daughter, has told me about you,” went on the tired voice. “You’ve changed a little, or it seems so to me, since your last visit.” He meant the visit before last. They had not met, Richard recalled, at the time of his last repulse, “I understand you are to be congratulated on very creditable work. I’m glad,” he added simply, gazing about at the woods as though the scene of that work had put him forward to thank the artist in its behalf. Richard almost laughed with a mixture of incredulity, thwarted hostility, impatience, smothered pity.
“Thank you, Mr. Lethen. What can I do for you?”
The brusqueness did not cause the old man to change attitude or expression, yet he seemed to consult an inward necessity whether it would force him on in the face of this hard unconcern.
“I hardly know how to put it,” he ventured. “You are helping Carson just now, and I don’t want to be bearing tales against him like this. But it seems like there’s nothing else to be done. You must have noticed his attitude. And I was wondering whether you couldn’t do anything to straighten things out.”
“I might,” agreed Milne readily, “if I could see in what way it affected me.” His feeling of the earlier afternoon had died down, but he felt that he must play with the old man a little before descending to that store of vehemence he had at times consciously been keeping for such an opportunity as this occasion offered. Wrath distilled in verbal form, since any other was out of the question. He had long desired to tell Mr. and Mrs. Lethen his opinion of such a course as they followed.
“It means everything,” the old man was saying earnestly, “everything to me, to get this straightened out. Surely there’s a way.”
“Are you sure now that it wouldn’t be necessary to make Carson over for that, as well as, perhaps, yourself?” Richard enjoyed abominably and delicately the brightening and the fall in the old man’s look.
“Of course, to come right down to it at once, it’s us, our own fault. You can blame us both. It’s his way, and it’s my being what I am. But still there is no need of things coming to such a pass….”
“Between neighbours, eh?” The tone was ironical almost to bitterness, but the bitterness was half with Richard’s own perversity, for in that moment he recalled the way – romantic it seemed to the real of the present – in which his writing had glossed over such differences, with all the life of which they formed part.
The old man glanced at him. “Yes, between neighbours. When we’ve always got along, I may say, perfectly. When I first settled here as a young man I used to compliment myself on having such good neighbours. They were kind of backward about associating, but awfully obliging, lend you anything you asked for. My father used to say it was worthwhile living here just to have such good neighbours. Then things changed little by little, the younger fellows came along, like Carson, and somehow they seemed to see things differently. They kept away more than ever. Not shy, they weren’t. They seemed to take pride in being independent, I suppose they called it.”
“In other words, their fathers had to swallow your learning and possibly your manner and means, and the sons’ teeth are edged with an inferiority complex. But to what pass is it that things, as you say, are coming?”
“Things couldn’t go much farther between neighbours,” Mr. Lethen assured him again. “I had to go in to see my lawyer, the other day, and he says it’s nothing which should go to court.”
Milne’s impatience began to escape him. “Apparently you are sure you want trouble, or you would not go to a lawyer. If matters have gone to that stage, I’m sure I can’t see there’s anything but for you to go ahead until you both get your fill of dissension, and the costs connected with it –” He stopped abruptly. Words seemed to burn his tongue for utterance, but he would hold his peace until the man had shot his bolt. Then for an accounting, an understanding from first to last.
“But you see I had to go to see my lawyer, since Hymerson has filed a suit against me. The only thing now is to try to get it settled out of court. It puzzles me – it puzzles me still. I can’t see what he should have against me.”
“And, if you care to tell me, what is he suing you for?”
“For my land.”
The old man spoke with such simplicity, as though expecting his hearer to comprehend, that Milne wondered whether he had heard correctly.
“Your land!” he exclaimed, surprised out of his posing. “What title has Carson Hymerson to your land?”
“None that will stand in court. But that is another matter, scarcely relevant. There’s a mortgage – I’ve had one for years – against the farm. He has got hold of the mortgage, and he has always wanted the farm.”
“And your lawyer tells you that his claim won’t stand. That is most fortunate for you.” The sedate blandness of incomprehension was part of his design; the unhappy are the most cruel of people.
Mr. Lethen went on with a patience which ignored this. His brows rose into wrinkles in his hair. “No, it only postpones my difficulty. It’s not necessary for him to win. The expense if I lose will be enough to put me where I can’t wiggle – as Carson himself told me. I guess it’s true enough. After the lawsuit, even if the court doesn’t give him judgement, holding the mortgage, he’ll be able to sell me out. He could now, if he only knew. I might as well tell him that.” The voice rose in bitterness. “But after the lawsuit there won’t even be public opinion to hinder him. That goes by the board when you get into trouble. Then he can say that I’d do as much to him if I could, that I tried, and so on. People that don’t know me would believe it. He has his standing as an officer in farmers’ organizations and the like.”
“Well,” intervened Milne in strong, deliberate tones, “that is not as it may be assumed now. It would not appear safe to generalize until after the event.” He said this as gravely as though he more than half meant it.
“I tell you, Mr. Milne,” the thin-faced man cried in sudden passion, “it has got me going. I don’t know what I am going to do. There must be something, some way. I thought at first it’s not possible that such a thing could happen. But it appears to be possible all right. I guess I’ll have to admit I’ve been worrying about it….” His manner made the young man think of Ada Lethen – strangely, since never had there been this fire of instancy in the speech of the daughter. And after there came her gentle smile, in a way which appeared to expect that no one knew he had had any other cause for worry throughout his life.
Richard Milne’s hand stilled the lines upon the backs of his horses, and he plunged into reflection. It was only after a moment that he recalled the wisdom of not being hasty of belief in everything told him. There should be limits to the recognized irresponsibility of Carson. And it was strange that the old man Lethen should appeal to him, to one so far – and in such manner – from being a stranger. Perhaps it was an attempt at forestalling him. Was it merely a grotesque manner of broaching acquaintanceship on the part of this weird old man with the haunted eyes? Yes, those eyes had seen trouble enough in this life, Milne knew, more than is usually given in the lot of man. More, it occurred to him, strangely, than his own were likely to see; his own trouble seemed temporary and simple. But perhaps those eyes had learned cunning.
These things flashed through his mind without leaving an impress or meeting with question or the certainty of assent. His thoughts became impersonal, and thence he inclined to pity, to mercy, or at least the putting aside of his own quarrel with this unhappy man who obviously was speaking the truth. In hurried tones, automatically, he began reassuring him.
“No, of course, there’s no use worrying about it. Carson would make the most of that.” He only needed to speak to reveal the direction of his sympathy now. At once there was a brightening appreciation in Mr. Lethen’s manner. “Instead, everything should be done to get at the root of the trouble. … Does Arvin know about it?”
“Yes, but that was in the early part. He kind of laughed when I brought it up, and said that his father had queer notions – trying to hush it up as though it didn’t amount to anything. He said his father wouldn’t really sue when it came to the point. I think Arvin means well. … But he’s got into the way of giving way to everything his father says.”
“Yes. No matter how absurd. And what about Carson himself? Have you actually spoken to him directly about the matter recently?”
An embarrassing hesitancy seemed to shape an answer otherwise in the same tones of melancholy. “Just half an hour ago, or less. He was in his oats field pulling mustard when I went to see whether we couldn’t come to some understanding. He didn’t want to listen to me at all,” said the old man with a sheepish smile. “Finally, I told him I didn’t think it would pay to go ahead; I guessed the world hadn’t got so bad but what the public opinion would make it hot for him. Then he did get started! He said – why, he went right up in the air, and talked so fast you couldn’t hear yourself think. I’d see how much people thought of me, he said. They’d forgotten I was alive, long ago. Years ago, he said, I used to strut around like a lord. We’d see the way public opinion regarded me! Why, I didn’t deserve to own a farm, the way I go on. That’s what makes it right for him to do me out of my property. He wouldn’t let me tell him that though; he was going at such a rate that one couldn’t hear himself think. The things he didn’t think up weren’t very many! There’s no use trying to repeat them all.” Mr. Lethen winced. “And perhaps he’s right, and people are really indifferent. A new generation. … I am a back number. What he told me were private affairs which couldn’t concern him at all – personal matters, you understand. Then he wound up by telling me he’d do his worst; he’d put me on the road, bag and baggage, if I tried to stop him. Unusual logic. They’d been easy with me on the mortgage, he said, and as for that it’s true some of these hard years I’ve only been able to pay the interest. But now he wants to make that right by taking the farm away from me. He put that quite plainly, without even saying, ‘If you don’t pay me what you owe me.’ He thinks there’s no likelihood of that. He thinks I can’t, and he’ll just take it. Oh, I never saw such a man!”
The listener had been lost in thought while the voice went on, reaching him almost unwittingly. It was to him as if the ghost of some lost part of himself were speaking. An angleworm twisted in a shiny clod of the freshly-turned earth, its two halves separate. He looked up, as though coming to himself, but without words, and Mr. Lethen lifted his arms from the rail, as though about to turn away.
“Well, I’m sorry to have stopped you this way. If Carson notices it won’t make things any better. … I hope you won’t think I stop anybody like this and pour out a tale of woe. It seemed to me that I knew you, after knowing your people. Just the same it does a man good to talk about his troubles, you know….”
“Of course,” Richard Milne murmured. “It’s an easy service.”
“But not a small one. … And how have things been going with you since you left this part of the country?”
The old man obviously wanted to make conversation, as though unwillingly but inevitably impelled toward further confidences. Or perhaps to delay as long as possible going away, and abandonment to his own misgiving and despair, his solitude. He talked and made mild replies about the weather and the crops, with a look of solicitude about his dimmed green-grey eyes, his fallen face, and grey temples, stringy grey moustache. Yet it was all as though this were an old ritual with which he had many times cajoled despair, tried to warm his heart, made cold by a contact of most searching and intimate hatred. Perhaps alone with Ada Lethen he had talked thus, while she listened with a still look, gazing across the country, replying with far-off echoes of sympathy. … He was like a grey, unhappy, little boy, this withered man.
Richard made sympathetic interjections, and at length, without transition, he said, almost in spite of himself, “I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Lethen. I’m sorry more than I can tell you to see such troubles here. I’ll probably see you, or let you know what can be done. Don’t worry in the meantime. Such things as he talks about don’t very often really come to pass, fortunately. And I’m sure not this time if I can help it.” Richard fixed his dark eyes upon the other, while his firm voice with continuity deepened, the voice of one who knew his mind, and in most cases was accustomed to acting accordingly.
The old man’s eyes filled with tears. “I hope not. I’ll – hope not. You don’t know what it would mean. Well!” he cried desperately. “It simply can’t happen, that’s all. Not to me.” His desperation spoke a word which his trembling lips tried to conceal. No, he would not live. Mrs. Lethen would never know before. … He turned away and was gone, with braced steps twisting across the clearing toward the sound of cowbells.
Richard Milne turned his team about, lowered the levers of the cultivator, and took his way back along another row of corn. The trouble, he recognized, was real enough, if only a peril in the old man’s imagination. For as many years as he had dwelt in his mortifications he was inured to them, and he would not have come with this appeal to a comparative stranger unless by an actual compulsion. The security of a lifetime on one plane was upset, and, since on the side of his relation with his wife he lived in chaos, he would seem to be left with nothing to which he could hold.
Richard Milne’s mood softened to pity, passed through reasoning to a hardened resolve to get at the bottom of the affair, to have it out with Carson Hymerson.
The latter had treated him lately with an insistent deference, irritating because it was dictated by the consciousness of possessing the services of a hired man without paying him wages. In spite of the contempt beneath for one so lax, this attitude was contrasted with the indifferently veiled acrimony he accorded his son. Carson’s conscience, galvanized within him by thousands of such little calculations (he felt roughly like a big boy taking candy from a kid), made him muster contempt for people who would so willingly serve his needs.
The two young men were linked in this. He felt that he was over-reaching both. Milne recalled his speech to a neighbour, who complained of the flightiness of hired help. “My boys stay right by me!” Then Carson looked around to see whether Milne, splitting wood at the dooryard, had heard – almost hopefully.
Even his humour did not seem winning. One rainy day they hauled manure, burnt dry and acid-white. The load steamed rankly. “This’ll loosen up your colds!” Carson’s thick, short mouth had pursed.
The horses reached the rail line-fence again, the rustling through the corn ceased, and there was a cry from just before him. For a moment he could see nothing, then Ada came into view between the heads of the horses. Her face seemed blanched, with surprise reflected from his own face, he thought at first. She almost ran toward him. Haste increased her natural, long-limbed grace.
“Did you see my father?” she gasped. “Quick, tell me, did you see him?”
Dread surmise constricted him. “Why, Ada!” His voice made it seem as though he spoke to remind both himself and her that she was that Ada Lethen of his world. But her distraught, listening face turned to him made him reply.
“Yes, your father was here not half an hour ago. Surely nothing’s happened –”
“Thank God! No, perhaps not.” She was turning away, as it were automatically, on the satisfactory reply to her burning anxiety, then glanced at him again. “Oh, I was afraid!”
“But, Ada! Tell me –” He had leaped from the cultivator and was leaning over the fence.
“It would take too long – too long a story, and I must go and look for him.”
“He was here, and told me about it. Carson Hymerson says he is going to –”
“Put us on the road! Yes. He has been so subdued of late, and I wondered what it could be – as if he hadn’t enough to bear already!” Her voice broke. “And to-day he told me, and something about the way – something in his manner – I began to think about it this afternoon, and I came out to talk it over with him. I looked all over the farm and I can’t find him. You’re sure then? Which way did he go?” Uncertainty gathered on her brow again.
“Quite sure. He told me all the details, and what Carson said. It seemed to relieve his mind to a certain degree. About half an hour ago he left me, right here, going into the bush again. I promised him that I would see Carson and find out what could be done. Ada! Please believe me, there’s nothing happened, nothing can happen. I’ll see that the business is straightened out.”
“Oh, Richard! You can?” She leaned weakly against the fence. His name on her lips quickened him. “I can’t seem to get over my foolish fright!” Her slender hand pressed her heart.
With a smooth movement, as though premonitory of one on his part, she had started away almost before he knew. Her swift, limber steps went over the close-bitten grassy knolls, among the ant-hills and mulleins, into the bush. He formed his lips to call her, then stopped, looking after her vanishing form, and opened his mouth again.
“Ada!” He was on the ground, beside the cultivator. “Wait!”
She turned, and he made for the fence, forgetful of the team which might run away.
“No, no!”
So fierce an impulsion of will was in her voice, in her bearing as she looked at him, that he stopped, his mind full of their last parting. As she vanished he called again.
In a fever of haste he turned to the cultivator and the team. In the middle of the field the team shied, and a figure emerged from the rustling corn, the oldest Burnstile boy, in clothes too large, his tow head bare, his small blue eyes grave. “Hello, Mr. Milne!” he cried. Milne urged the team on automatically as he returned the salutation. “I’ve been looking for Mr. Lethen’s hat.”
“Your own hat you mean, don’t you, Tom?” Perhaps it had been a gift.
“No, Mr. Lethen’s. You know old man Lethen, don’t you? Well, I was in the bush,” the boy shouted shrilly, following in the corn row, “and I seen him and old Carson over in the field. They didn’t know I was seeing them, and they were going it hot and heavy. Fin’lly Hymerson up and hits old man Lethen –”
“What?”
“Hits him, knocks him for a row. Knocks his hat off. Pretty soon old man Lethen comes to his own bush where I was, and he tells me he’s lost his hat coming by Carson’s field, and wanted me to go look for it.”
“Here,” said Milne, never stopping the horses, pulling out a quarter. “Go and find the hat and take it to Mr. Lethen.” He trotted the outfit into the lane, and dust rose from the wheels of the cultivator as he jogged the heavy horses.
When he reached the barn, Carson Hymerson was coming out of the stable door with a sigmoid smile on his face, which vanished to reappear almost as quickly.
“Well, you’re late a little; maybe five minutes after six. Was that the reason you trotted the horses? I suppose you were trying to make up for the time you lost. I seen you talking to that old loafin’ blatherskite. You’d think he’d have more shame than to lean on the fence and talk an hour, taking up people’s time. If it was me –”
The man had been tying up the lines of the team while he poured out an easy stream of words. Now he came to their heads at the same time as Milne came from the other side. Richard looked at him steadily. He stopped, confused, but unable to avoid that intense gaze.
“Is what he said true?” The voice was like the blow of an axe-head.
“True,” grumbled the other. “How do I know what the old blatherer’s been saying?”
Lifted on a wave of fury, Richard forgot everything. He did not know the roaring sound of his own voice.
“You know very well what he was saying; you needn’t look at me in that hangdog manner. I want to know! Is it true you are going to foreclose his mortgage?”
Carson shrank away. “My own’s my own, and I’ll do what I please with it,” he mumbled.
“You’d better answer me!” Richard’s voice had risen to a bellow of pure rage which no action could ever match. “Look here. You go ahead with your doings; get the sheriff out here. Put this man off his farm if you can. I want you to understand that at the first step I’m going to get the best lawyer money can hire, and fight it to the last. You think a lawsuit will ruin Lethen. Well, we’ll see how that works on you. I’ll put everything behind this thing, if necessary. My signature is good for quite as much as you can get together, understand that. Meanwhile!”
Carson threw up an arm, but too late. Richard Milne’s right fist had knocked him, half-turning, to the ground six feet away.
“Little cur! … Foretaste….”
Richard muttered, looking at Carson’s removal almost with astonishment. His arm felt foreign to him, as he strode over the plank walk to the house.
A smell of burnt pepper on the frying eggs greeted him. Lemon spots from level sunlight on the walls, as he spoke to the farmer’s wife without looking at her.
“Mrs. Hymerson, I wish you would make out my bill. I won’t be staying with you any further. Can you have it ready when I come down?”
Upstairs in his room he packed with collected haste, astonished afresh at the meagreness of the effects with which he had spent all this time. There was a murmur of voices outside, then a shout as the man entered and found him absent.
“I won’t have the skunk in my house. You tell him his time’s come, or I will. Think I’m going to have such a –” The voice went on.
Milne took three heavy steps across his floor, which was above the kitchen, and smiled at the sudden silence.
When he came down the farmer was not in the room. There were tears in Mrs. Hymerson’s eyes and she could scarcely face him, but she half-heartedly insisted that he remain for the meal.
“I’m sorry that this had to happen, Mrs. Hymerson,” he said finally. He unfolded a yellow bill from his small roll. “I would like to thank you for your kindness in taking me in. And I think I’d better tell you that our trouble is that Mr. Hymerson has decided to foreclose the mortgage on the Lethen place. Of course, I shall not allow that to happen. I don’t say that it will not be met, but if he becomes too hasty I am sure that there will be no hesitancy in fighting the case.” He turned from the kitchen door, raising his hat.
“Good-bye, Mr. Milne. You mustn’t think too hardly of us on account of this.”
“Indeed not. It probably will blow over. But I think that under the circumstances I’d better not stay. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Arvin Hymerson confronted him in the yard. For a moment the two eyed each other, Milne still holding his club-bag. The young farmer spoke non-committally.
“I ought to lick you if what my father says is true.”
“Well,” said Milne with a drawl and a gleam, “if that is the way you look at it, I had better tell you beforehand, while I think of it, that I have nothing against you, Arvin. Later it might slip my mind. Probably what your father told you is true as far as it goes.” The other looked at him more doubtfully. “I call it mighty strange actions on the part of your father. He has been strange to all that I knew of him, ever since I came here. I can’t make him out.”
“Yes,” spoke Arvin with sorrowful quietness. “I don’t understand myself. It didn’t use to be so bad. Or perhaps I notice more. … I think he gets more like he was as a boy, though he’s not so terribly old, either. He was the youngest, and they used to pick on him, he told me….”
The young man hesitated, unwilling to go on with what might appear a justification. A flash of Milne’s never-remote literary interest came to the surface, to be quelled in brusqueness. He held out his hand, which the other grasped.
“I can see well enough what’s the matter with him. Well-known psychological type. Good-bye.”
A thrill of elation under his thoughts, Milne turned on his heel and walked down the lane to the road.
Then he recalled his parting with Ada Lethen.