White Narcissus (13 page)

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.

T
he 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.