White Narcissus (12 page)

“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.

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.”