Home from the Hill

by William Humphrey

  She would kill herself. That was what well-bred, gentle girls in her case did in all the ballads.

  Now Mr. Halstead did not care who might see him; he ran.

  Mr. Halstead threw open the door of his house and left it open. “Libby!” he shouted. “Libby!”

  She appeared from the living room.

  “Thank God!” he exclaimed. “You’re all right.”

  For a moment she was simply puzzled; then she realized a little of what must have been passing in his mind, and she was a trifle shamed to think how far she had been beneath the tragic sentiments he feared. “Where did you go?” she said. Now, she had had fears for him. She had hardly dared think what she might have driven him to. She had been on the point of going out to search for him. At one moment during his absence her worries had given way to suspicions: had he gone to call on Theron and make a scene?

  He was more ashamed than ever of his errand. It was as if he had tried to set a price, and, though fraudulent at that, a cheap price, upon her suffering. “Oh, nowhere. Just for a stroll. Just to think,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. She could not face him once silence fell.

  She closed the door and then returned. He drew near to her. He wanted to tell her that he forgave her, that he loved her, that he would stand by her. He wanted to beg her forgiveness. But he was a man: awkward with emotions, undemonstrative, reduced to those inexpressive, clumsy male fumblings with the hands. She felt the touch of his fingers upon her arm and she quailed. She took this poor dumbshow of love for disappointment and dumbstruck grief, and it shamed her as no words of reprehension ever could, robbed her of any remaining spirit.

  “You’re all right,” he said musingly.

  “Oh, don’t!” she cried.

  “Promise me you won’t—I know you won’t—but promise me, honey, you won’t do anything … silly. Don’t worry too much about … about … what your mother may be thinking. You know your mother loves you, no matter what she may feel called on to say. That’s just what she thinks she ought to say. She loves you, you know that. That’s what a mother is for, isn’t it?” he demanded, as though someone had tried to dispute him. “I mean, to stand by a child when she’s needed. If not, I’d like to know what! So don’t you go thinking silly things now. Like she’s just dying of shame and such nonsense out of songs and moving pictures. I mean, I know you wouldn’t do anything like that, but … Well, you understand. Eh?”

  He turned from her to hide his emotion, and he pretended to be taking survey of the hall and of the rooms on either side. He summoned all his strength to simulate ease and even jollity in his tone. “Isn’t it a lucky thing now I bought such a good big house when I was buying. We can make over the guest room into a—Nobody,” he said, forcing a laugh, “ever used it anyhow,” (and nobody ever will now, he saw that she had added). “It’ll make a fine—right next to the bath—” At this point the urgency of the message he had been trying to conceal in all this overcame him. “What I mean to say, honey, is, don’t think of—” he turned his head away and his voice sank—“of going to one of those doctors.”

  When he succeeded at last in getting it out, he turned anxiously back for a look at her. He did not know quite what he expected, but what he found on her face was nothing like it; nor could he read the meaning of her strange expression.

  His love for her, which had been a source of self-reproach, now became a source of terror. He was trying to be all to her. What had he discovered to make him feel that he would have to be?

  46

  Everywhere Theron went, Opal, with the baby, on her hip or in Theron’s baby cradle, which, to his mother’s dismay he had brought down from the attic, followed. Both were idle, for Melba had made no effort to find anything for Opal to do.

  She had fastened upon Theron for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most instinctive of which was that he was her own age. Also, he was idle. But at once she had deeper reasons. She was afraid of Captain Hunnicutt. She ought to have known she would be. Her father’s landlord and boss all her life, he had always been an awesome figure to her. Besides, from the first moment she felt queer with him, backward, blushing, guilty, because of Verne’s crazy suspicions. Captain Hunnicutt seemed to have suspicions of his own, much similar to Verne’s. He had a look that went right through a girl. She was glad now that it was not the Captain who had met her when she arrived. She remembered practicing upon him in advance, remembered saying to her reflection in the window, “I knowed you’d help us, Captain, sir.” Lucky for her it was the Mizzus who had come to the door!

  But before her first week in the house was out she had turned from the Mizzus to Theron. For she learned quickly to dread Mrs. Hannah worse than the Captain. Not that the Mizzus was sharp with her. On the contrary. But Opal had the exacerbated sensitivity of her caste, and soon felt that Mrs. Hannah handled her with tongs. When she looked at little Brucie, Opal wanted to grab him to her and run.

  She turned to Theron, and he spurned her worst of all. No cruel words were spoken; he hardly spoke at all. He was polite, and yet he made her feel like dirt. Her pride stung, she drew into herself, and for a week kept strictly out of his sight. The change came one morning when, having put the baby out to sun, she finished the wash she was doing and went to hang it out and to see that the baby was all right, and through the window saw Theron playing with him on his lap.

  He had tried to despise her, to hate the child. At first, without trying, he did. He had hated the child as he bent over the crib to look at it that morning, to examine its features for likeness to his father’s features, to his own. It almost seemed as if the child had felt his hatred. For it was asleep, but woke as if disturbed by his gaze, looked at him, and cried. Then, as suddenly it stopped and looked at him quietly, curiously. Did it instinctively sense a brother in him?

  After that it was hard to hate the child.

  It was hard too to despise Opal. Enough people despised Opal already. He remember Verne’s knocking her to the floor, and her pregnant, and his father’s doing nothing to protect her. He could see his father’s hatred of her now. Even Melba despised her. Certainly his mother had not invited her to stay out of the goodness of her heart. He could feel the chill of her patronage, and could see that Opal felt it too.

  He was not really kind to her, only tolerant; but to Opal, out of her element, homesick, scared, it was enough soon to inspire a puppy-like devotion. And Opal loved her child, loved it more because she could not quite account for its paternity, so that it seemed all the more her own, loved it more because her daddy did not want her back with it, had turned to it for company and comfort when Verne left her alone in the house, loved it for the animal and repugnant duties she had rendered it. Theron’s kindness to the baby was something more than tolerance, and to Opal this was kindness to her.

  Opal had made the den her sitting room. She sensed that here she was more out of the way of either Mrs. Hannah or Melba. She felt comfortable there because guns and men’s boots and outdoors jackets and a dog or two underfoot were the furnishings to which she was accustomed. It was a room which Theron had come to avoid, and at first Opal’s presence there was painful to him. In time, however, he had grown used to it.

  He came downstairs this morning and went at once to the den. Opal was reading the comics in the morning newspaper and laughing aloud to herself. The baby lay in the cradle beneath the window staring up with that intense, placid fixity that fascinated Theron.

  This morning the baby did not respond to him as it had begun to. It stared steadily at the ceiling. Theron looked up. Opal, who he had thought was paying no attention, said, “He likes that bright spot up there.” A bright round dot of reflection from something outside was dancing on the ceiling. A memory stirred in Theron, then a hot rush of recollection.

  She had known that if she wrote and told him of her condition, he would come to her. But she had wanted him, as soon as he heard she was back, to come on his own, because he loved her, not because of her condition.
Viewed in one way, outwardly—the wrong way, of course—her situation was like that of bad girls, girls of the kind that she both pitied and despised. She did not want to make herself more like them by running at once and whining to the boy to make him feel obligated. She had not been so frightened then but what she could still have her pride. The prospect of life as an unwed mother, the moments she had allowed herself to view it, was gloomy and frightening; but it was unreal, and she had said to herself, knowing how little it applied to her, that to be married to a resentful husband was not a much better life.

  Last night had changed all that. Her father’s solicitude, so uncharacteristic of him, had robbed her of all that calm assurance. The possibility presented itself that Theron might learn of her condition through someone else. Already dressed, she had waited only until she heard her father leave the house to sneak out past her mother.

  She was full of the news she had for him and of the difficulty of breaking it. If only he would guess! Guess, and then take her in his arms, kiss her, hold her tight, let her cry a little, say he was glad, say he loved her and was glad and that she had nothing to fear.

  But he did not take her in his arms, did not kiss her, did not even touch her, hardly even looked at her. And he did not guess. What he said was not that he loved her or even that he was glad to see her, but, “Libby! What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come back,” she said, trying to smile. “Come back to stay. I’ve quit school.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. Then he touched her—but only to grasp her elbow and draw her out of sight into the arbor—just as he had done that first time she came here.

  Her news was so big that she could not conceive he might have news for her, news that he found hard to break. She barely understood him. School? It seemed so long ago, so unreal. “I couldn’t stay,” she said, trying to smile at what she knew and he did not yet know, but bewildered and vaguely frightened by his coolness. “I had to come. Aren’t you … glad to see me?”

  He wanted to keep her from talking, especially to keep her from saying she had quit school and come home for his sake. Better to be blunt, if necessary brutal. “I think we ought not to see each other anymore, Libby,” he said. “I’ve changed.”

  He had ceased to believe in their love, to believe that love existed. There had been moments, even, when in despair and cynicism he had told himself that if she did it with him she would do it with another. He had relished the vileness of his mind in suspecting that he was not the only one to have had her. To think otherwise was less to be decent to her than to flatter his own self-conceit. Other girls since had given what she had given in love, and though he knew there was a difference, he wished to deny that there was, and in the end their gifts had cheapened hers in his mind. The same words they had spoken together he had since exchanged with other girls, exchanged as convention demanded, vows of passion spoken to conceal the ugliness of it all, the car-seat casualness, the tourist-cabin sordidness, spoken so they could give themselves with a little less loss of self-respect and, so they might think, of his respect for them.

  Now he saw her head shake, more a shudder than a shake, and saw on her face a look of pained disbelief, saw tears well in her eyes. It amazed him, shamed him, touched him, almost brought tears to his own. “I’m no good, Libby,” he said. “If I ever was, I’m not now. Don’t cry. Oh, don’t cry! I’m not worth it. I haven’t been true to you. I’ve done things. With other girls. I—”

  He had meant to be brusque, thinking that clean wounds heal quickest. Their love, he thought, was dead. He had expected her to have still a tender spot in her heart which she would think was for him, but which in reality was for what she had done for him. But those tears were for him, tears of love, of grief for their love. She did not hate him. She had loved him. Could she still? Could she forgive him, forgive it all, the worst, teach him self-forgiveness? She opened her mouth and could not speak. She was too full of feeling—for him. Then she spoke his name.

  “Oh, Libby, forgive me,” he murmured huskily. “Forgive me!”

  His eyes filled with tears and her figure swam. But it was as if he had been blind to her till then. All liquid and shimmering, she seemed to float before him, a vision come in answer to his prayers.

  Then his sight cleared and he saw that she was looking not at him but past him, and not looking but staring, wide-eyed, aghast.

  “Oh,” said Opal, shifting the baby to her other hip. “Excuse me!” He realized then that it was she, not Libby, who had spoken his name. She turned and flounced back into the house, the picture of slighted woman.

  He heard a sound, a kind of delicate crash, and turned. At his feet, in splinters, sparkling as if still trembling from the shock of breakage, lay the compact mirror with which today and that first day she had beckoned him out to her. He looked up and faced the pale accusing fullness of her eyes. It took him a moment to comprehend their stunned surmise.

  She was not easily convinced. She had once loved him too well to accept, even now, what would have been evidence enough for anyone else. Still hopeful against hope, she searched his eyes, pleading for denial. It was that indestructible trust which now accused him. He remembered that first time she had come here and the difference between then and now. He was guilty of so much, it seemed he had no right to protest being thought guilty of this one thing of which he was not. Under that pale, pure, injured gaze, he faltered, looked down, saw again the glinting splinters of silver, and so let the moment pass when he might have claimed her. He heard her release her breath. When he looked up, she was halfway across the lawn, running.

  47

  Absorbed in her thoughts, she did not see the car pass. She did not become aware of it until, a few yards beyond, it screeched to a stop.

  “Well, as I live and breathe! Libby Halstead! What are you doing home?”

  The bright face, though familiar, seemed to materialize out of her distant past. Yet it was just six months since Fred Shumway had sat beside her at commencement and at the baccalaureate sermon, she groaning over, he quite absorbed in, the preacher’s old words, which echoed ironically in her memory now: “You young men and women standing on the threshold of life …”

  “Oh, Fred. Hello!” she cried. He was the first “outside” person she had seen since coming home. Being a classmate, he had a certain kind of reality for her that others did not have, for it is his contemporaries one has in mind when he worries over what “people” will think. In a fluster of fear and embarrassment she looked down to see if her condition showed. The senselessness of her alarm then further disconcerted her.

  “How’ve you been?” Fred Shumway said. “How you liking school?”

  “Oh, very well,” she said. It did not sound very convincing, she feared. “Fine!” she said. At once she regretted her false enthusiasm. She ought to begin with the first person she met spreading her story. “No, that’s not so. The truth is, I didn’t like it a bit,” she said, and she thought, that was the truth. “I’ve quit,” she said. “Come home. To stay.” That was the truth, too, she thought. Yes, she had come to stay.

  “Found out you were just a home girl after all, did you? Missed the old place, huh?”

  She smiled weakly and nodded.

  “I thought of leaving,” said Fred. “But it’s like the old song says, ‘Be it ever so humble …’” Then in a tone which set out to be boastful, or at least complacent, but into which crept a note of challenge, defiance, he said, “Well, I’m not sorry I stayed.”

  “What are you doing now, Fred?” she asked; she could see that he wanted her to.

  “Drummer,” he said. “Bought this car,” he added defiantly.

  “Oh, it’s a very nice car, Fred. I always knew you’d do well.”

  Her words caused an expression of shame for his boastfulness and truculence to flicker across his face. “Well, to tell you the truth, it’s not all paid for, Libby,” he said. This admission made him feel better. He smiled broadly and said, �
�But it will be. Can I take you somewhere? Drop you off at your house?”

  “Oh, no, thank you, Fred, I—”

  “Going right past there anyhow, Libby,” he said. He was not, of course. But he would be disappointed if she did not have a ride in his new car.

  “Well, it’s very nice of you. If you’re quite sure I won’t be taking you out of your way.”

  “So you didn’t like it up there at college,” he repeated after getting through the gears. Apparently the thought pleased him, confirmed him in some feeling of his own, perhaps reassured him that he had not made a mistake in choosing not to go—or rather, comforted him not having had any choice, Libby thought. She did not find his self-complacency offensive. She did not envy him his lack of troubles, but was grateful for the company of someone who had none. His freckled face, which seemed to radiate pleasure in what he had and determination to go after and get what he did not, helped take her mind from her troubles.

  The car began to slow, and looking down the street, she saw that they were nearing her house.

  “Oh, I don’t want to go home!” she cried. It was involuntary, heartfelt.

  He turned a startled and puzzled face to her.

  She tried to make it seem a gay whimsey. “How can you spend such a day indoors! Drive on past, Fred. I’ll get out down the way and go for a walk.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said. And then, “Hey! If you haven’t got anything better to do why don’t you come with me? I’m just going a little ways out in the country to make a few calls. Be back by afternoon. Be a nice ride for you and company for me. What say?”