A clinking of dishes and cutlery told Milne that the Burnstile family was at supper when he crossed their lawn and stepped on the veranda in the mellow, mote-filled sunlight. Bill, the father, in shirt sleeves, called over the head of the girl who had come to open the screen- door.
“Just in time. Come in.” He appeared unsurprised. There were smiles on the faces of the children, as though at an old accustomed jocosity.
“Sit down. I was telling them,” Bill continued, “about Devil John Jones. Do you mind him? He used to be around – perhaps you wouldn’t see so much of him as us older fellows. Anyway, one day he came to Dad and wanted to sell him a pig. Well, the pig looked kind of runty, and my father wasn’t particular about it, but he agreed to keep it a few days anyway, since Devil John was bound to unload the brute right there and then. You see, if he didn’t buy, and sent it back, old John would be ahead that much feed.” Here Johnnie choked with laughter, and, glancing at him with enjoyment, Bill continued the drawling narrative.
“Well, they puts Mr. Pig into a pen alone, and Dad feeds him right away, puts a big tubful of swill into the trough in front of him. Old John stayed around quite a while, chewing the fat and dickering for some other head of stock, and then they went back after a while and took another look at the pig again. Every bit of that swill was gone. Pig had ate it all. Well, Dad ups and reaches into the pen, takes that pig by the ears and tail, and hoists him out of the pen and into the tub that had held the swill. And that doggone pig wouldn’t fill that tub! Well, sir, that was enough for my father. He said he didn’t want anything more to do with an animal like that, that ate more than his own size in one meal. Had your supper, Richard?”
“Well, no –”
Milne’s voice held a reserve scarcely adjusted to the scene before him. In this there was a comforting familiarity which seemed to delete the emotions of the past days and at once to bring into focus a homely reality.
“Sit in here then.”
Mrs. Burnstile, whom he had met but once, seconded the invitation, as she rose and brought extra dishes to the table. Part of the children got up and circulated about the room, while some of them remained seated. He was served with soft, warm fried potatoes and cold ham, tea, and apple sauce and cake.
After supper Richard accompanied Bill to his chores at the barn. His suitcase on the veranda reminded him of the need of explanation, and he asked whether he might spend a few weeks there. He had a sense that the other regarded this as almost unnecessary form, so casually had he been received; and he felt so fully that he had been there a long time that it seemed superfluous to mention an indefinite stay.
Bill nodded. “Fall out with Carson? I kind of thought it would come. If you think you can enjoy your vacation here amongst my tribe, you’re perfectly welcome.”
Richard explained that he might like occasionally to take some exercise in the fields, if he could be of use, but that he didn’t want any dependence to be placed upon his availability. In fact, as though he had held a thankless, altruistic purpose of service to Carson Hymerson, he was inclined to repudiate such an intention altogether now. He felt the need of asserting independence. He would pay his way and maintain strictly the aloofness of a summer boarder. But if people showed themselves congenial he was prepared to be accommodating. This feeling probably arose from his sense of some appearance of the ridiculous in his obstinacy, his sticking to this countryside, after Ada Lethen had attempted definitely to break with him, and he had been unable to get on with his host.
In truth he was more or less dazed, and the celerity and ease with which upsetting things happened seemed prophetic of still more catastrophic events in the future. He had a sense of fatality and sometimes his conjectures regarding the outcome made him determine that his resolve, or his tendency, to proceed slowly was justified. It had required only the events of the last few days to make him doubt his position and, almost, his feelings. Ada Lethen – was it in her or his engrossed dream that she had appeared to him that afternoon?
Bill agreed briefly to his proposal. Would his wife favour it? Richard solved the problem by his bearing, his interest in the children, and consciously by proffering to Mrs. Burnstile the amount of two weeks’ board in advance.
Long before those days had passed he felt that he knew the healing of change and time in that gregarious family, and the partaken freedom of young growing things about him. He was diverted, even absorbed, by the ceaseless interplay and careless activity of the children; and before long he was part of it, in the confidence the boys and girls had for him.
The kids would bother him, Bill Burnstile had prophesied, and there was not long a doubt of this, with the insistence of the boys in escorting nearly all of his daytime walks. While his mind bent over pondered thoughts his eyes would follow their antics, or he would return wholly to listen to their absurd talk.
They seemed almost to have accepted as a duty the part of entertainers, and wrestled, chased, and bantered each other remorselessly and without weariness. They were rewarded for hours if Richard Milne burst into an involuntary laugh when Bill and Tom wrestled themselves into weird shapes, or, becoming angry, fought with clods of earth from behind trees until they laughed at themselves. And they had always a marvellous tale of their immediate experience they must share.
“Mr. Milne,” the vivacious red Bill chattered. “Mr. Milne, you know that rat I had?” Richard recalled a mouse they had caught in a screen trap, nearly dead, with a hole in its side.
“Mine, it was,” claimed the older Tom, looking up from his feet, which were pawing the soft turf. Johnnie, his soft, dark eyes gleaming, looked shyly with understanding from them to the man. Bill’s tones rose.
“Yours it was not! Well, I had it. You know? I killed him and he jumped away.”
“And how did you kill him?” Richard asked.
“Jumped on him, of course. Both heels.” When Bill demonstrated, Johnnie squealed, jumping likewise. “And he jumped.” Bill adapted a wiggling motion of the hand to the word. “And jumped! And I killed him and he jumped!”
Slow-witted Tom wanted to know, literally, though he had been present at the execution, how the rat could jump after he had been killed.
“Easy.”
“Yeah, I bet you couldn’t if you was killed.”
“Oh, yes, I could. I’d jump around like a chicken without a head.”
Though the others got into most of the mischief, Johnnie seemed to enjoy the greatest zest in it, adding that of the spectator to the part he played. Their fights were transitory, fierce, and soon forgotten, but Bill was usually the aggressor. His older brother was half-afraid of him; but Johnnie, when once in a while he was fully roused, could take his own part with him or the growthy, open-mouthed Tom.
The practically complete irresponsibility of their life was like a fresh revelation to Milne, who enjoyed it for them more fully than they did. Their father seemed to allow them all freedom, but the truth was that he forgot them until some of the stock broke out and had to be herded in by “all hands,” or some chore had to be left to them when he went with his team to the field. They were impelled by projects and curiosity embracing the whole extent of farm routine and phenomena. They could find amusement in tumbling down a strawstack, hissing the gander, clinging to the tail of a gambolling calf, building what they called a “suspension bridge” over a ditch by means of ropes, dog-chains, and the stakes from a corn-planter. Or they were diverted by merely wandering about the fields and lanes.
The weather became rainy, but they were not deterred. They liked to find places, such as the road or the lane, where the fine, paste-like mud would squelch through their toes; and, bursting into shouts, they commenced a race “on a heavy track,” as Bill explained, while they slipped, fell, and rose with a mass of mud smeared over their clothes.
Their mother was a red-headed, blue-eyed Scotch woman of rapid tongue and a mind of her own, which she exercised but little except when her inclinations were crossed. Bill Burnstile had run across her in the West, and, since she seemed a capable sort of woman for a housekeeper, and a good sport, he had married her. He had liked her smartness, but now she appeared to have become somewhat lackadaisical in her attitude toward life. She paid perfunctory attention to the children, and, beyond a casual word now and then to the effect that they were not to “bother Mr. Milne,” she betrayed little interest in preventing them from conducting themselves as they pleased.
This easy-going character showed itself in her housework as well, and if she had been inclined toward rationalization, she might have held that it manifested part of her equipment for self-preservation. For if she had tried alone to take care of the house and every need of her family, she would have been run to death. And rest was one of the things to which she was normally inclined. She was healthy, usually content, and so were the children, with access to the pantry whenever they cared for “a piece,” and without inhibitions regarding manners or the care of furnishing or their clothes.
She customarily took the mornings for cooking, churning, or sweeping, care of the poultry; some afternoons for mending, and much time for an incidental and almost unconscious idleness, in which she read magazines, arranged her hair, or talked to her girls, to the neighbours by telephone, or slept.
The girls themselves were three – Alice, wistful, nervous, emphatic, fifteen, who was to start to high school in the coming autumn; Ellen, thirteen and older than any of the boys, a thin, pale, little thing with blue eyes, gentle voice, and a determined mouth; and Mary, younger than Johnnie, with deep gold hair uncommon for a child so young, blue-grey eyes, merry lips never still and usually moistened with fruit.
Richard Milne spent much of his day in wandering about the country, chatting over fences with old neighbours and new, drinking in impressions of the life he had known, or making a vague effort to impose exterior circumstances upon his attention, to let them supersede his inner conflict. But mostly he was unable to decide why he should make an effort toward anything. At first he had thought of going directly, not to Ada Lethen, but to her parents. Perhaps they could come to an understanding which would alter the whole situation. They did not realize, surely, what they were doing to Ada Lethen, what they had done. If they retained any natural affection they could be made to see. If they did not … He pictured himself standing between the ageing man and woman, impelling them to speak, to know each other. … But he could not decide whether this was a wise thing to do, and, particularly because he desired to make a scene of that sort on account of the acrimony engendered in him during the last few weeks, he was reluctant to trust himself in such a situation. Or if he could trust himself, he could not trust unforeseeable factors in the predicament. Did he not have good reason? He could not know what Ada Lethen would do, in any case.
Yet, as he had always told himself, she had common sense; she had restraint, or she should not have been where she was for the reasons for which she was there. He had told himself as an uncompromising realist that she had, she must possess, faults. Yet he could not label them. He saw excuses, reasons for the delinquencies, failings which annoyed him most, and these reasons in the sadness of her life brought him back to the important, the moving, the all-important fact which animated his whole interest: he loved her. If he had not, or loved her less, anything might have been possible, everything might have been risked.
A distrust of obvious and melodramatic courses had returned upon him, so that he marvelled at what he had already done. He had promised her father his help in a lawsuit, if it should transpire that such help was needed. He had knocked Carson Hymerson down, on the other hand, and ran the risk of being hauled before the local magistrate on the charge of assault. He should have been prepared for any developments, and should have been ready, now that the ice was broken, to adopt a course of action that would get him what he wanted. Yet he was held back. If he sought the Lethens out, with his present feelings to all three, he would probably secure the enmity of two at least, and Ada one of them. No, he would wait until he saw clearly his course.
He was capable of that, though at moments the country was a prison cell up and down which he walked. He would wait, and if nothing came of the difficulty with Hymerson, the way would seem clearer, or at least no less simple, if that were an advantage, than it had always been. If the dispute came to actual court proceedings, the matter would be complicated infinitely, and perhaps against his will he would be forced into a part which would win, and certainly would earn, the favour of the Lethens. What a subject it would be for local talk!
Again, if the case were lost and they were put off the farm, Ada would refuse to leave the old people, and her gratitude would be no more than an embarrassing burden. He shuddered. Won, still more embarrassing would be the regard of the parents, if they showed any – fortified, not shaken from their old positions. They might even recognize his right to marry Ada, give their consent, and he might find himself bound to continue assistance, remaining with Ada in this place. His old resentment against the unhappy couple returned, mingled with a perverse pride. He would not flatter them with his help; he would conquer them without their knowing it. And he would prefer that their true colours should be revealed to Ada – if she could recognize them. With all his dislike for both Mr. and Mrs. Lethen, which blurred their images directly they were removed from his presence, he could not quite assure himself that they would show just the degree of obtuse acrimony, the stupid resentment, which might be calculated to make Ada see them as they appeared to himself.
Meanwhile he was wise to stay away, in a life of the casual summer-holiday boarding type which he had always scorned. Carson, he knew, believed his threat of taking part in any proceedings, and if he did assume bravado enough to begin, could soon be brought to time. And Mr. Lethen would still not be tempted to venture into hostilities needlessly, as he might had Richard continued to reassure him. But his story might not have contained the whole truth. Perhaps, Milne’s more detached judgement told him, it would prove to be six of one and half a dozen of the other, so that right and wrong would prove indistinguishable, in the commonly wearisome and costly manner.
Divided in mind, even whilst almost obsessed, Richard found no respite. At times he was disgusted with himself. What should he have to do with such people? It seemed to him at times that he had placed himself at the mercy of the unreason of two probably inexcusable and needlessly contentious peasants. Of course, he was not compelled to have anything to do with them. No matter what happened, he could refuse to stir, and even Ada scarcely could blame him.
But he knew only too well that he would feel obliged to redeem his words, or at least do his best to discover where the rights or wrongs of the matter lay. For once having begun any enterprise, he was fatally constituted to follow it through to finality. Otherwise he should have been far away at that moment.
Richard Milne’s dissatisfaction had spread to include all things without and within him; no longer was he simply rankling with the irony of the thwarted male. Every move he made drew him further into an irrelevant maze. He wondered whether it would not be just as wise to resort to extreme measures – elope with Ada Lethen, carry her off if necessary, or take himself away for ever. Yet, as he kept telling himself, he had only to think of the woman herself to know the futility of any course which might occur to him. It seemed that the perfections with which she had been endowed in his mind made part of her inaccessibility, so that he could not “think success,” in the locution of inspired commerce.
Yet it would have been the logical outcome of his earlier mood, intensified by its own momentum, or aggravated by any mere catastrophe, to take drastic measures. The night of that very day he had come to conclusions with Carson he had felt with elation that anything was possible. But that was past. He could do nothing, really, not even think effectually – but wait, and that not patiently. He was inclined to blame his own mind and hers, intricate mechanisms constructed for purposes futile, pathetically ridiculous and grandiose.