‘Yes, sir: right after it. The fellow came down to Nettleton and ran amuck, the way they sometimes do. After they’ve done a wood-cutting job they come down and blow the money in; and this man ended up with manslaughter. I got him convicted, though they were scared of the Mountain even at Nettleton; and then a queer thing happened. The fellow sent for me to go and see him in gaol. I went, and this is what he says: “The fool that defended me is a chicken-livered son of a — and all the rest of it,” he says. “I’ve got a job to be done for me up on the Mountain, and you’re the only man I seen in court that looks as if he’d do it.” He told me he had a child up there – or thought he had – a little girl; and he wanted her brought down and reared like a Christian. I was sorry for the fellow, so I went up and got the child.’ He paused, and Charity listened with a throbbing heart. ‘That’s the only time I ever went up the Mountain,’ he concluded.
There was a moment’s silence; then Harney spoke. ‘And the child – had she no mother?’
‘Oh, yes: there was a mother. But she was glad enough to have her go. She’d have given her to anybody. They ain’t half human up there. I guess the mother’s dead by now, with the life she was leading. Anyhow, I’ve never heard of her from that day to this.’
‘My God, how ghastly,’ Harney murmured; and Charity, choking with humiliation, sprang to her feet and ran upstairs. She knew at last: knew that she was the child of a drunken convict and of a mother who wasn’t ‘half human’, and was glad to have her go; and she had heard this history of her origin related to the one being in whose eyes she longed to appear superior to the people about her! She had noticed that Mr Royall had not named her, had even avoided any allusion that might identify her with the child he had brought down from the Mountain; and she knew it was out of regard for her that he had kept silent. But of what use was his discretion, since only that afternoon, misled by Harney’s interest in the outlaw colony, she had boasted to him of coming from the Mountain? Now every word that had been spoken showed her how such an origin must widen the distance between them.
During his ten days’ sojourn at North Dormer Lucius Harney had not spoken a word of love to her. He had intervened in her behalf with his cousin, and had convinced Miss Hatchard of her merits as a librarian; but that was a simple act of justice, since it was by his own fault that those merits had been questioned. He had asked her to drive him about the country when he hired lawyer Royall’s buggy to go on his sketching expeditions; but that too was natural enough, since he was unfamiliar with the region. Lastly, when his cousin was called to Springfield, he had begged Mr Royall to receive him as a boarder; but where else in North Dormer could he have boarded? Not with Carrick Fry, whose wife was paralysed, and whose large family crowded his table to overflowing; not with the Targatts, who lived a mile up the road, nor with poor old Mrs Hawes, who, since her eldest daughter had deserted her, barely had the strength to cook her own meals while Ally picked up her living as a seamstress. Mr Royall’s was the only house where the young man could have been offered a decent hospitality. There had been nothing, therefore, in the outward course of events to raise in Charity’s breast the hopes with which it trembled. But beneath the visible incidents resulting from Lucius Harney’s arrival there ran an undercurrent as mysterious and potent as the influence that makes the forest break into leaf before the ice is off the pools.
The business on which Harney had come was authentic; Charity had seen the letter from a New York publisher commissioning him to make a study of the eighteenth century houses in the less familiar districts of New England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was to her, and hard as she found it to understand why he paused enchanted before certain neglected and paintless houses, while others, refurbished and ‘improved’ by the local builder, did not arrest a glance, she could not but suspect that Eagle County was less rich in architecture than he averred, and that the duration of his stay (which he had fixed at a month) was not unconnected with the look in his eyes when he had first paused before her in the library. Everything that had followed seemed to have grown out of that look: his way of speaking to her, his quickness in catching her meaning, his evident eagerness to prolong their excursions and to seize on every chance of being with her.
The signs of his liking were manifest enough; but it was hard to guess how much they meant, because his manner was so different from anything North Dormer had ever shown her. He was at once simpler and more deferential than any one she had known; and sometimes it was just when he was simplest that she most felt the distance between them. Education and opportunity had divided them by a width that no effort of hers could bridge, and even when his youth and his admiration brought him nearest, some chance word, some unconscious allusion, seemed to thrust her back across the gulf.
Never had it yawned so wide as when she fled up to her room carrying with her the echo of Mr Royall’s tale. Her first confused thought was the prayer that she might never see young Harney again. It was too bitter to picture him as the detached impartial listener to such a story. ‘I wish he’d go away: I wish he’d go tomorrow, and never come back!’ she moaned to her pillow; and far into the night she lay there, in the disordered dress she had forgotten to take off, her whole soul a tossing misery on which her hopes and dreams spun about like drowning straws.
Of all this tumult only a vague heart-soreness was left when she opened her eyes the next morning. Her first thought was of the weather, for Harney had asked her to take him to the brown house under Porcupine, and then around by Hamblin; and as the trip was a long one they were to start at nine. The sun rose without a cloud, and earlier than usual she was in the kitchen, making cheese sandwiches, decanting buttermilk into a bottle, wrapping up slices of apple pie, and accusing Verena of having given away a basket she needed, which had always hung on a hook in the passage. When she came out into the porch, in her pink calico, which had run a little in the washing, but was still bright enough to set off her dark tints, she had such a triumphant sense of being a part of the sunlight and the morning that the last trace of her misery vanished. What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins, and down the road she saw young Harney coming toward her?
Mr Royall was in the porch too. He had said nothing at breakfast, but when she came out in her pink dress, the basket in her hand, he looked at her with surprise. ‘Where you going to?’ he asked.
‘Why – Mr Harney’s starting earlier than usual today,’ she answered.
‘Mr Harney, Mr Harney? Ain’t Mr Harney learned how to drive a horse yet?’
She made no answer, and he sat tilted back in his chair, drumming on the rail of the porch. It was the first time he had ever spoken of the young man in that tone, and Charity felt a faint chill of apprehension. After a moment he stood up and walked away toward the bit of ground behind the house, where the hired man was hoeing.
The air was cool and clear, with the autumnal sparkle that a north wind brings to the hills in early summer, and the night had been so still that the dew hung on everything, not as a lingering moisture, but in separate beads that glittered like diamonds on the ferns and grasses. It was a long drive to the foot of Porcupine: first across the valley, with blue hills bounding the open slopes; then down into the beech-woods, following the course of the Creston, a brown brook leaping over velvet ledges; then out again onto the farm-lands about Creston Lake, and gradually up the ridges of the Eagle Range. At last they reached the yoke of the hills, and before them opened another valley, green and wild, and beyond it more blue heights eddying away to the sky like the waves of a receding tide.
Harney tied the horse to a tree-stump, and they unpacked their basket under an aged walnut with a riven trunk out of which bumblebees darted. The sun had grown hot, and behind them was the noonday murmur of the forest. Summer insects danced on the air, and a flock of white butterflies fanned the mobile tips of the crimson fireweed. In the valley below not a house was visible; it seemed as if Charity Royall and
young Harney were the only living beings in the great hollow of earth and sky.
Charity’s spirits flagged and disquieting thoughts stole back on her. Young Harney had grown silent, and as he lay beside her, his arms under his head, his eyes on the network of leaves above him, she wondered if he were musing on what Mr Royall had told him, and if it had really debased her in his thoughts. She wished he had not asked her to take him that day to the brown house; she did not want him to see the people she came from while the story of her birth was fresh in his mind. More than once she had been on the point of suggesting that they should follow the ridge and drive straight to Hamblin, where there was a little deserted house he wanted to see; but shyness and pride held her back. ‘He’d better know what kind of folks I belong to,’ she said to herself, with a somewhat forced defiance; for in reality it was shame that kept her silent.
Suddenly she lifted her hand and pointed to the sky. ‘There’s a storm coming up.’
He followed her glance and smiled. ‘Is it that scrap of cloud among the pines that frightens you?’
‘It’s over the Mountain; and a cloud over the Mountain always means trouble.’
‘Oh, I don’t believe half the bad things you all say of the Mountain! But anyhow, we’ll get down to the brown house before the rain comes.’
He was not far wrong, for only a few isolated drops had fallen when they turned into the road under the shaggy flank of Porcupine, and came upon the brown house. It stood alone beside a swamp bordered with alder thickets and tall bulrushes. Not another dwelling was in sight, and it was hard to guess what motive could have actuated the early settler who had made his home in so unfriendly a spot.
Charity had picked up enough of her companion’s erudition to understand what had attracted him to the house. She noticed the fan-shaped tracery of the broken light above the door, the flutings of the paintless pilasters at the corners, and the round window set in the gable; and she knew that, for reasons that still escaped her, these were things to be admired and recorded. Still, they had seen other houses far more ‘typical’ (the word was Harney’s); and as he threw the reins on the horse’s neck he said with a slight shiver of repugnance: ‘We won’t stay long.’
Against the restless alders turning their white lining to the storm the house looked singularly desolate. The paint was almost gone from the clapboards, the window-panes were broken and patched with rags, and the garden was a poisonous tangle of nettles, burdocks and tall swamp-weeds over which big blue-bottles hummed.
At the sound of wheels a child with a tow-head and pale eyes like Liff Hyatt’s peered over the fence and then slipped away behind an out-house. Harney jumped down and helped Charity out; and as he did so the rain broke on them. It came slantwise, on a furious gale, laying shrubs and young trees flat, tearing off their leaves like an autumn storm, turning the road into a river, and making hissing pools of every hollow. Thunder rolled incessantly through the roar of the rain, and a strange glitter of light ran along the ground under the increasing blackness.
‘Lucky we’re here after all,’ Harney laughed. He fastened the horse under a half-roofless shed, and wrapping Charity in his coat ran with her to the house. The boy had not reappeared, and as there was no response to their knocks Harney turned the door-handle and they went in.
There were three people in the kitchen to which the door admitted them. An old woman with a handkerchief over her head was sitting by the window. She held a sickly-looking kitten on her knees, and whenever it jumped down and tried to limp away she stooped and lifted it back without any change of her aged, unnoticing face. Another woman, the unkempt creature that Charity had once noticed in driving by, stood leaning against the window-frame and stared at them; and near the stove an unshaved man in a tattered shirt sat on a barrel asleep.
The place was bare and miserable and the air heavy with the smell of dirt and stale tobacco. Charity’s heart sank. Old derided tales of the Mountain people came back to her, and the woman’s stare was so disconcerting, and the face of the sleeping man so sodden and bestial, that her disgust was tinged with a vague dread. She was not afraid for herself, she knew the Hyatts would not be likely to trouble her; but she was not sure how they would treat a ‘city fellow’.
Lucius Harney would certainly have laughed at her fears. He glanced about the room, uttered a general ‘How are you?’ to which no one responded, and then asked the younger woman if they might take shelter till the storm was over.
She turned her eyes away from him and looked at Charity.
‘You’re the girl from Royall’s, ain’t you?’
The colour rose in Charity’s face. ‘I’m Charity Royall,’ she said, as if asserting her right to the name in the very place where it might have been most open to question.
The woman did not seem to notice. ‘You kin stay,’ she merely said; then she turned away and stooped over a dish in which she was stirring something.
Harney and Charity sat down on a bench made of a board resting on two starch boxes. They faced a door hanging on a broken hinge, and through the crack they saw the eyes of the tow-headed boy and of a pale little girl with a scar across her cheek. Charity smiled, and signed to the children to come in; but as soon as they saw they were discovered they slipped away on bare feet. It occurred to her that they were afraid of rousing the sleeping man; and probably the woman shared their fear, for she moved about as noiselessly and avoided going near the stove.
The rain continued to beat against the house, and in one or two places it sent a stream through the patched panes and ran into pools on the floor. Every now and then the kitten mewed and struggled down, and the old woman stooped and caught it, holding it tight in her bony hands; and once or twice the man on the barrel half woke, changed his position and dozed again, his head falling forward on his hairy breast. As the minutes passed, and the rain still streamed against the windows, a loathing of the place and the people came over Charity. The sight of the weak-minded old woman, of the cowed children, and the ragged man sleeping off his liquor, made the setting of her own life seem a vision of peace and plenty. She thought of the kitchen at Mr Royall’s, with its scrubbed floor and dresser full of china, and the peculiar smell of yeast and coffee and soft-soap that she had always hated, but that now seemed the very symbol of household order. She saw Mr Royall’s room, with the high-backed horsehair chair, the faded rag carpet, the row of books on a shelf, the engraving of ‘The Surrender of Burgoyne’ over the stove, and the mat with a brown and white spaniel in a moss-green border. And then her mind travelled to Miss Hatchard’s house, where all was freshness, purity and fragrance, and compared to which the red house had always seemed so poor and plain.
‘This is where I belong – this is where I belong,’ she kept repeating to herself, but the words had no meaning for her. Every instinct and habit made her a stranger among these poor swamp-people living like vermin in their lair. With all her soul she wished she had not yielded to Harney’s curiosity, and brought him there.
The rain had drenched her, and she began to shiver under the thin folds of her dress. The younger woman must have noticed it, for she went out of the room and came back with a broken teacup which she offered to Charity. It was half full of whiskey, and Charity shook her head; but Harney took the cup and put his lips to it. When he had set it down Charity saw him feel in his pocket and draw out a dollar; he hesitated a moment, and then put it back, and she guessed that he did not wish her to see him offering money to people she had spoken of as being her kin.
The sleeping man stirred, lifted his head and opened his eyes. They rested vacantly for a moment on Charity and Harney, and then closed again, and his head drooped; but a look of anxiety came into the woman’s face. She glanced out of the window and then came up to Harney. ‘I guess you better go along now,’ she said. The young man understood and got to his feet. ‘Thank you,’ he said, holding out his hand. She seemed not to notice the gesture, and turned away as they opened the door.
The rain was st
ill coming down, but they hardly noticed it: the pure air was like balm in their faces. The clouds were rising and breaking, and between their edges the light streamed down from remote blue hollows. Harney untied the horse, and they drove off through the diminishing rain, which was already beaded with sunlight.
For a while Charity was silent, and her companion did not speak. She looked timidly at his profile: it was graver than usual, as though he too were oppressed by what they had seen. Then she broke out abruptly: ‘Those people back there are the kind of folks I come from. They may be my relations, for all I know.’ She did not want him to think that she regretted having told him her story.
‘Poor creatures,’ he rejoined. ‘I wonder why they came down to that fever-hole.’
She laughed ironically. ‘To better themselves! It’s worse up on the Mountain. Bash Hyatt married the daughter of the farmer that used to own the brown house. That was him by the stove, I suppose.’
Harney seemed to find nothing to say and she went on: ‘I saw you take out a dollar to give to that poor woman. Why did you put it back?’
He reddened, and leaned forward to flick a swamp-fly from the horse’s neck. ‘I wasn’t sure—’
‘Was it because you knew they were my folks, and thought I’d be ashamed to see you give them money?’
He turned to her with eyes full of reproach. ‘Oh, Charity—’ It was the first time he had ever called her by her name. Her misery welled over.
‘I ain’t – I ain’t ashamed. They’re my people, and I ain’t ashamed of them,’ she sobbed.
‘My dear …’ he murmured, putting his arm about her; and she leaned against him and wept out her pain.
It was too late to go around to Hamblin, and all the stars were out in a clear sky when they reached the North Dormer valley and drove up to the red house.
VII
Since her reinstatement in Miss Hatchard’s favour Charity had not dared to curtail by a moment her hours of attendance at the library. She even made a point of arriving before the time, and showed a laudable indignation when the youngest Targatt girl, who had been engaged to help in the cleaning and rearranging of the books, came trailing in late and neglected her task to peer through the window at the Sollas boy. Nevertheless, ‘library days’ seemed more than ever irksome to Charity after her vivid hours of liberty; and she would have found it hard to set a good example to her subordinate if Lucius Harney had not been commissioned, before Miss Hatchard’s departure, to examine with the local carpenter the best means of ventilating the ‘Memorial’.
Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters Page 19
