White Narcissus (14 page)

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.

I
n the morning Bill Burnstile said, “Well, I kind of didn’t want to be too sure about giving up hope, but she sure does look juberous. Rains the minute you turn your back. That your doings, Richard?”

The two met in the cool morning sunlight outside the back door. Bill was coming in from the before-breakfast chores, and Richard stood on the stoop, shaven, and dressed in a grey suit and soft linen, inhaling the unflawed air.

“This’ll keep you off that oats field two more days, I suppose,” he agreed.

As the weeks had passed the wheat had been cut and shocked as best it might be, and for the greater part stood out through the rains, turned over with forks after each of them, in view of a day of vantage when it could be hauled into the barns or threshed in the open. The fields of standing oats were creamy ponds, awaiting the binder, but the ground was so soft that the horses could scarcely be expected to pull it.

“Looks as though it’ll be September before we get around to cutting the oats, all right – if any’d be left in the heads! But I’m going to tackle that late piece that’s not quite
ripe first, as soon as I can get on it at all. It won’t be lodged so much, being short, and besides if it is a little green, it doesn’t hurt oats, that part. Ripen afterward, and like as not turn out better than the good oats this year….”

“I tell you,” proposed Richard, “I’ll give you a hand shocking if it looks like rain.” A sympathetic impatience with the weather made him anxious to see things accomplished when the opportunity did occur.

“Great!” acceded Burnstile gladly. “We’ll make things hum. I was trying to round up a man or two down to the village last night. They got lots of time to talk, but none to work, unless they happen to feel like it. They’re rich as long as they got a dollar. Jess Trimble says why don’t I hire you. You had nothing to do but hang around that Lethen girl, what never was any good, but to keep her head stuck in books and get it crammed full of trash.” He laughed.

Richard flushed, but curbed his temper. He knew that Bill had not the slightest malice in repeating such a thing, that he quoted it solely to exemplify the amusing obtuseness of local character. It had not occurred to Richard that these people had their attitude toward such anomalies as Ada Lethen and himself, and that they would be talking to no uncertain purpose. What they thought or said could be of no conceivable importance, he argued, but the gossip which Bill had repeated rankled within him.

In his writing, Richard Milne had concerned himself with such people as these, typical farm characters. But while he had blinked none of their littlenesses, critics had claimed that his novels presented too roseate a picture of rural life. The reason was that he had seemed to find these temporal idiosyncrasies set off in due proportion against the elemental materials of life. But, he reflected now, that attitude was part of the
nostalgia he experienced from his own past in such scenes; and it was a form of idealism which he saw as applicable no more to this milieu than to any province of life more or less open to primal forces. He would not have idealized these in a setting of commerce or of society, and he had been wrong to blur them in a scene which his boyhood had known. Hence, he foresaw, a further development in his own art. An increasing surface hardness seemed to be an inevitable accompaniment to the progress of the significant novelists of his and an earlier day. It was curious to find himself, with his infinite sensitiveness to change in his outlook and his inner feelings, developing his relation to his work even when his whole being and all his faculties seemed to be concentrated on the image of the woman he loved.