The bewitched summer was passing, to the senses imperceptibly, and generally to his dissatisfaction. It seemed to typify that rural dilatoriness which doubtless kept Carson Hymerson from taking the steps he had threatened in his lawsuit with Lethen; and it gave no hope of coming certainty, no illusion of progression or rumour of hope.
In the morning Richard Milne, after breakfast with the family and automatically meticulous care in grooming, walked alone to the front gate, along the road to the big gate before the barn on the edge of the ridge; he looked at the stock in the yard, perhaps fastened one end of the neck yoke when Bill Burnstile was hitching his team for the morning’s work in the field. The young man surveyed the crops, variegated squares, from the slope, and descended into the orchard back of the house before completion of what the children called going “round the block,” and returned to the veranda.
There were green small winter apples in the orchard, and harvest apples already becoming yellow. There were spots of deep shade. He always expected his reveries to be broken into by sight or sound of one or more of the children hiding behind the reddish trunks, which had been rubbed smooth by the grazing animals. Any of them might be lurking in the higher grass or in the thick, poorly-pruned limbs of the trees themselves. Little Mary seemed to haunt the place, not regarding the presence or absence of the others; and the child’s capabilities in climbing and hiding were part of an abiding mystery. Richard offered to lift her down from a bough above seven feet of smooth trunk, but she laughed and went on with her talking. She talked apparently as much for herself as for any hearer. It was not the usual child’s fairy stories, concerned with princes, angels, dollies, and posies, but as he heard her breathless voice in the distance, “an’ … an’ … an’ …,” he knew that she was embroidering some stupid literal circumstance or object in her little world.
Passing that way again, tired of himself and the idle depression of his mind, the man would stop and listen.
“Johnnie, he went way up in the tree and lookeded in the robins’ nest, an’ robin pecked ‘is hand, an’ ‘e comed down quick, an’ – Mr. Milne, Mr. Milne!”
“Yes.”
“You know your apple tree, under your window, and you know our cat! You know your apple tree and you know our cat!”
“Yes, yes!”
“Well, our cat climbed right up in your apple tree.” Her gold hair gleaming in the spots of sunlight, her ruddy face aglow, she laughed.
“Richard! Richard! One old hen, she died, and Billy – Billy took her babies. Billy looks after them now.” She laughed. “If Ada Lethen had apples on her trees, and the robins and the crows pecked them off, I’d be glad! If they fell on the ground Aw’d be glad! Aw’d be glad!” Without animus she laughed at her own irresistible humour, repeating her saying, concluding with an effect of rhetoric and almost evangelical beatification, “Aw’d be glad!” She laughed with an Oriental, steady uprightness of countenance.
“There was a man here, and another man, and Johnnie liked the other man, and the other man gave him a nickel, and – Do you know what I say and Ellen says when Mamma gives us supper? Fankoo. Fankoo, we says.”
Mary interrupted herself to search her mind for something more marvellous to add. “Did any of the trees in this orchard blow down in the storm? Yes, they did. Look over there at that limb blown down right to the ground.”
Stormy weather made no difference apparently to the children, who might be found in the orchard, playing in the barn, or anywhere but in the house. Sometimes, at meals or when otherwise they came under the eye of their father, he ordered them to keep in out of the rain.
There were many such days. The woods and fields became soggy and wet, the long-desired rains of spring belatedly arrived to confound summer prospects. In spite of this Richard Milne had given up taking his walk along the clean, gravelled highway, in a vain determination to avoid even physical approach to the Lethens.
The days were warm, even during the heaviest rains, the sun bright and ardent immediately after. Too bright, too warm, Bill Burnstile claimed, after the first showers. The ground would cake in the dry time to follow. But it was rain and again more rain that followed. The farmers, after short space of sun in the late afternoon, went to bed certain that another day would let them on the land, which sorely needed cultivating among the matted weeds of the corn and rank tobacco; the wheat must be cut, rain or no rain, since it would certainly be lost if it were left.
And through the night of their heavy slumbers the rain would fall, softly at first upon the low roofs, then steadily half the night, in the serene and fragrant dark, with little breezes, and the earth would drink surely to satiety. In the morning the soil would appear as it had the morning previous, but it would take two more days to dry, if another shower did not follow. … Meanwhile the crops were being smothered with weeds, the grain was beaten to the ground, in some cases left until over-ripe and then lodged and shelled by storm.
Something in this rhythmic replenishing of the fecund and steaming earth calmed Richard Milne without quite pleasing him, as he walked about the black ground of the hollows, the lighter gravel land of the tobacco ridges. Along the river there were many gullies and ditches overgrown, in which the rank vegetation smothered the raw outlines of the ground. In a swamp a forest, a pond of nettles higher than a man’s head waved acridly, wavered and bowed like long trees, fern-like, in the light breeze, some recoiling more quickly than others, jostling and bowing back and forth to each other. They had a symbolic malevolence, a blue-green sea of fire, and Richard Milne watched it for moments without thinking.
Sumach grew densely along moist ditches, rank, with stalks as thick as a man’s arm, little groves towering branchless twenty feet, at that height to spread a thick thatch of green which withstood light showers: it was like tropical vegetation. That year the elderberries grew thick and weighty on brittle stalks, changing from discs of cream frothiness to dark, pendulous spheres of fruit, purple, which almost seemed to swell with the increasing rains.
The richness of greenery and bitter yellow, blue-grey stems, purple fruit, stretched above his head, seeming to bury his consciousness as he walked about the overgrown ravines, the knolls, and hollow places. The man would stop and sit on a bank under the canopy of sumach and stare at the ground, black earth strewn with rusty stems of the sumach leaves of other years, thinking of those times and of Ada Lethen, while the rain began to patter unheeded above him. So long he had been forced into a rôle of waiting that he scarcely could believe in the singleness of his intention to escape. Did he really want her as he had been telling himself so long? Was his desire sincere? How could he know? In all else his decision, his will sufficed. In this course he showed himself a veritable Hamlet. But the mere thought of all their difficulties seemed to paralyse his faculties. Surely it was some bewitched aura of that ill-starred older pair. Perhaps, if he should take Ada Lethen, happiness would never result. It might be a violation of the natural course which would wrench them away from all seemly conduct of life and fill their lives with disaster.
“All their difficulties.” It appeared to him that they were joined in struggle with those at least, though what joined them were the instrument of their separation. As with ill-starred lovers of romance, Tristram and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, the craven bully Fate seemed to have taken a spite against them, and would never remit his rancour. He saw this aspect seldom, and indeed it might have been his acceptance of it as a commonplace which determined his bent toward romance in his creative efforts, while it made him credit literally the prohibition which walled in Ada Lethen.
But besides this he could not forget all his failures. She was so identified with them, he saw, that it was a wonder that his love could endure. Yet it did, and though at moments of desperation he was almost decided to risk any action, resolve was neutralized by the annoyance attending memory of small past absurdities, the memory which leaves a greater sting than that of our disasters and our mistakes. … So it was that he had become one with a sense of frustration and releasing melancholy which permitted him to see all things as though they were portions of a futilely past dream.
The clouds thickened. Nothing, he was sure, could hurt him more than he had been hurt; he had nothing to fear unless, at worst, returning to this city, that old hunger would envelop him, twisting him to its shapes before he could bury himself in work. There, where, his mind told him, he could see that face behind all his trouble, he would be almost at peace after a time in a struggle perpetual, and perpetually baffled even by success. Only, in the parks, theatres, on the streets, in photographs even, there would be couples, beautifully oblivious. … Ah! Their smiles, trusting eyes. Happy! He smiled grimly. Perhaps he was not a happy man; too determined. Nor was he, evidently, determined enough. What determined men did, he did not know. They did not abduct recalcitrant ladies, certainly, as he was thinking of doing. Presumably they forgot, in a sea containing better fish than ever had come out of it.
He had stopped, bemused, and he now saw that he was not alone. A short, drab-clothed figure was standing near by, looking at him fixedly through the half-mist of the dull afternoon. Richard wondered how long this person had been standing there watching him, before he recognized the bumpy, hard features of Carson Hymerson under the slouched brim of his old hat. There was nothing menacing in his attitude. Rather it was as though he were trying to decide whether Richard would permit him to approach and greet him after what had passed between them.
Richard started to move away, but Carson was approaching him with a sheepish grin.
“Funny little weather, ain’t it?” he remarked, as though they had parted an hour ago. “Great day for – for ducks.”
Richard remained silent, but he nodded noncommittally, wondering what was on the other’s mind.
“Funny way of farming, the old bird has,” Carson continued, looking about at the underbrush and the weeds and nettles in the bog before him. “The place sure needs somebody to take hold and take an interest in it. Of course, there is some waste land on it, bound to be, where that peat bog was burnt over. But when I’ve had it a couple of years and get it ploughed under, you won’t know the farm. You want to come back some time and see it, Richard. Always welcome, you know. No hard feelings.” He spoke in a tone of magnanimity, yet as though expecting that his good intentions would not be credited.
Richard had an impulse to laugh. He looked at the man steadily. “So you intend to go ahead and try to put this man off his property?”
“Well, it sounds like it, don’t it?” Carson laughed. “I – we all want what’s ours, don’t we?”
“Yes,” agreed Milne drily, “but we have different ideas about what is ours.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Carson. “That won’t hinder me any.”
The doggedness of his tone aroused a perverse streak in Milne. He would ignore the whole matter.
“How are Mrs. Hymerson and Arvin keeping?” he inquired blandly, as though he had heard nothing.
“All right,” growled Carson. “Old Lethen may think I’m going to let him off, but I ain’t. Not any more. I’m out to get what’s mine, and don’t you forget to tell him.”
“This weather is not the most favourable for the crops, is it? How is that piece of corn doing which I was cultivating? It must be getting rather weedy, is it not?”
“They been a public nuisance long enough, the Lethens. It’s time somebody got stirred up about them.”
A flush came into Richard’s cheeks, but he continued calmly.
“The quarrels and bickerings of children are very amusing, are they not? I find it so, for example, in the case of Bill Burnstile’s family. I have been stopping with them. I suppose you knew.”
Carson looked as though words would be inadequate to express his infuriation.
“You tell him from me to go to hell. I don’t care for him and all his friends with him,” he yelled, stamping his feet.
Richard looked at him in some surprise. This was not the tone of the crafty mortgage holder, nor yet of Carson as he knew him. He shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
“Tell them all to go to hell!” Carson yelled again.
It occurred to Richard that he might inform the man that he was trespassing on the property of others, but he was doing the same thing himself. … In the same bland tone he called back:
“Let us hope that there’ll be fair weather for a few days anyway.” He chuckled as he turned away.
Unheeding the rain, which was slackening, he pursued his way to the Burnstile house, there to find a flare of early lamplight brightening the steam from cookery in the warm kitchen – which was filled with the swarming children. Bill the older came in with full milk pails; he had done most of the chores before the late supper. Nothing could dull the interest of these elusively vital children, with their preoccupations of mischief and pique and jollity. And after bantering them, listening to some drawled story of Burnstile’s experience in the West, to which his wife at the other end of the table gave a lazily enigmatic smile, he went to his room and lit a lamp.
There, after looking through a haphazard pile of popular magazines, he took up The Scarlet Letter, one of the three books, along with Bunin’s stories and Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre, which he had brought with him. In a short time he blew the light out and settled for the night.
But he could not sleep. Phrases and images from The Scarlet Letter floated in his mind. He was expiating Dimmesdale’s secret sin yet, after two centuries. Love could not be free yet for men and women who had taken civilization as an armour which had changed to fetters upon them. What was his whole piacular story but that of Dimmesdale – prophetic name – a delusion no longer a delusion of sin, but of impotence and analysis which belied action and love? It was the conflict of the conscious ones of his whole generation, this confusion of outer freedom and inner doubt.
He could not sleep, and for the first and the last time he was visited by the desire to rise and walk in the night. He derided the notion for a time, and then asked, “Why not?” He went down through the intimately silent house, which he could not believe held those exuberant children, into the moon-held yard, into a baffled certainty that there could be no certainty. For a lover’s premonition, untrustworthy as them all, led him to feel that Ada Lethen was walking that road, and he would meet her. … There were only the clouds, smoky-blue over the phosphorescent moon, with a sort of feinting mockery which veiled suggestive things, only a minute later to reveal their commonplace nonentity.
He stopped before the gloom of the Lethen house, peered among its black shadows, looked to the dulled windows, the vines which were now and again carved into relief by the moonlight, and, instead of turning back, he walked past. But it was equally vain, and, coming back, he hurried past the place as though a ghost dwelt there; and, he knew not how, came to his home and slept, not knowing in sleep that there was such a thing in the world as love, as baffled fidelity, as unrelenting aspiration. And the rain beating upon the roof above him accompanied for a time his slumber.