White Narcissus (17 page)

Whether the evening were coming early because of the overcast and threatening sky, or whether they had lingered in the ravine more nearly insensible to the passing of time than they knew, it seemed that the end of the day had come. Clouds covered the western sky, but as they walked, in silence, a jagged fissure brightened and widened above the horizon, emitting gold rays as it were indirectly, whether from above it or below did not appear.

The wind had died to a faint flaw of warm breeze here and there in the spaces of the bush and the trees, and as they walked they saw great drops hanging from wild-apple twigs, maple leaves, from drooping sumach, and knew that it must have rained more than they knew in their sheltered oblivion.

“Ada,” Richard spoke, “I think you love your parents
with a great love. Perhaps it is that capacity in you which has led me to think of you all these years. I’m not particularly a faithful sort, at bottom.”

She took his hand and held it over her heart, with a tremulous laugh. “Oh, my love! You’re – you’re –”

“I’m what?” he asked, smiling in turn, as though a burden were slipping from him.

“You’re so – seeing – feeling.”

“Well, perhaps I was wanting you simply to Say It Again.” His smile was sudden, boyish, naïve.

She pressed the hand as she let it fall gently. “I love you. I’ll never forget that.”

They descended into a hollow in the path, over which hung tall sumachs, presenting an unbroken front of screen, a spot familiar to Richard’s wanderings. Parting the younger shoots, he drew her by the hand within.

There was space here, colonnades of the tall bare sumach stalks twenty feet high, and an impenetrable roof above. After groping for a few feet over the thick crinkled footing of faded sumach leaves and stems, they came to a knoll above a further ravine again shaded with sumach. The extent of the place was indeterminate, perhaps acres, but only faint and indirect emanations of light spotted its complete shelter.

Breathless, they sat down. “You can tell me better here. Sheltered place …” Richard muttered. Ada Lethen said not a word, but seemed to have lost volition and tensity in the completeness of their embrace, the frenzied haste and abandon of clinging. And interlocked wholly, it was as though that still muffled soft nook were a temple revealing a mystery even there too plangent and too overwhelming in colour, in the wild clash and fusion of the senses through an ecstasy which they created only to find it again in the whole pressure of a
suddenly cognizant universe – lost again in rapt, in overwhelming confusion and merging with an element greater than all their minds groping, their dreams mounting, their hearts seeking, had ever foreknown….

Sobs made him raise his head from her breast. Ada Lethen’s face was covered by tears through which her eyes looked with strangeness, and her fingers moved in his hair as he sank back.

“… so – happy.” It could scarcely be heard.

“Mine! Mine!”

Y
et it was complete content that embraced his mind as he lay in his room that night, and the thought which came to him, whether then or through the hours of sleep, was that nothing mattered, that nothing became worth worrying about until one was starved. … He knew that he loved Ada Lethen more than he had ever loved her, but his old desperation was a thing of the past. He never had known that life was so simple, that thinking was unnecessary, and happiness sure. His slumber was deep, complete and satisfying rest, and when he rose the mirror told him he was smiling.

But the day brought uncertainties, and from the natural wish to go directly to the Lethen place he allowed himself to be diverted by the normal routine of the day. All the children were down for breakfast, unusually lively, so that their mother and even Bill had to chide them. Bright sunlight entered the dim kitchen and rested upon the breakfast table. The storm had missed them, and the ground would be in better condition. He knew that Bill expected him to continue helping with the oats. Of course a few words of explanation would straighten that out.

But again, would not Ada think that he was attempting to take advantage of her? And that might prove fatal. Or would she expect him … be hurt if he did not come? Shouldn’t he think, in any case, get the matter straightened out in his mind, devise a certain and summary means of settling everything, finally and felicitously?

In brief, his gingerly mind in the first hour of the morning allowed itself to be abetted by outer circumstances, and he went to the field to resume shocking.

In high spirits, yet with a certain anticipatory fervour, he trudged to the field. The boys chattered around him, ran ahead with the barking dog, or lagged behind. He was breathing the freshness of the morning air, the new warmth after the heavy rains. Already the mud of the lane, still soft, was drier under foot, no longer slippery. He lifted his head to the sky, blue with thronging white clouds.

But as the day passed, and he attacked row after row of sheaves, he learned that he had reckoned without the change which had taken place, without himself. Perhaps he had unknowingly counted upon seeing Ada Lethen again in the woods. But she did not appear. Feverishly he worked through the hours, and it seemed by a most intense concentration of will only that he was enabled to continue work and not, in or out of sight of Burnstile, to climb the fence and go in search of her to her home.

It seemed to be an endless day, and when the end of it came in sight he was the first to leave the field. After changing his clothes, he came down for supper before Burnstile and the boys had come into the house. Not going to the kitchen where the evening meal was waiting, simmering aromatically, he went to the front veranda and sat down. He would not wait long for supper, hungry as he was, but would go soon to the Lethen home.

There was a summer-evening yellow cast to the air, though the sun was still high. It would set rapidly, and more summarily with the days of approaching autumn. But now Richard Milne saw a fulfilment with the guise of significance in the passing of the summer, and even in his preoccupation he looked out with interest and tenderness at the fields and woods he was so soon to leave. At the roadside, half-way between the lawn gate and the farm gate before the barn, lay a patch of smelling white-pink phlox. The boys were coming past it to supper, with their father trudging behind them, instead of using the path on their own land, parallel with the road. An automobile passed the house, slowed as it met them, and stopped beside the man. Supper, Richard noted with impatience, would be postponed by the length of one of those indefinite rural conversations.

While he was considering going away, for to demand supper on such notice without waiting for the others would be an affront, Alice came around the house, preceded by the cat, after which she ran with stiff back and arms, wide-spread fingers, like some silhouetted figure against a stage curtain: evidently in high spirits. Rustling after came her mother. As they chased each other Mrs. Burnstile laughed.

“I’ll lay you right down on the ground and take off your shoes and stockings. I will! Mind you – You just wait till you want to wear my shoes and stockings again.”

Alice dodged about the lawn and behind the snowball bush. She was taller than her mother, but slender and quicker. Mrs. Burnstile rustled swiftly about, her arms sloping like wings.

There was the sound of the starting car, and they paused to watch its departure.

“Hurry on, Dad; and rescue me!” cried Alice, breathless, in her halting tones. The boys rushed onto the lawn
screaming something about Hymerson. Gaunt Bill followed with a wry smile. The younger girls appeared. Richard Milne stepped down from the veranda, momentarily surprising the women.

“Well, what do you think’s happened now?” the farmer demanded of him. “Young Eldon going along now, he tells me Carson Hymerson’s gone and kicked over the traces.”

“How – what – what’d he do?” everyone wanted to know.

“Well, the story is likely to be different with everyone, and you’ll hear all sorts of things. But what
he
says is that Carson had a stroke or something, and they took him away. To the asylum he says, but he could easy have got mixed.”

“He’s crazy, he’s loony! Asylum!” shrilled the boys.

“Children, go in and get washed for supper,” commanded Burnstile. Offhand as he had seemed, it was evident that he had not heard the news without being impressed.

“I guess there’s some truth about it,” he answered Milne’s silent look of inquiry. “Well, I can’t say I’m altogether surprised at him breaking up. He’s not been right. But I can’t quite see the reason.”

“There is one, we may be sure,” Milne replied, turning away. “Was Arvin involved in this?”

“Didn’t say. Eldon said he flew into a rage about something, and finally they got the police, and it took a bunch of them. … It appears he got vi’lent. He kept hollering something about everybody being in a conspiracy against him.”

“That seemed to be his delusion when I was there,” remarked Milne.

“Yes, he hollers that old Lethen is a ‘stumbling block.’ ‘Stumbling block to his fellow man!’ he yells. And Arvin was an ungrateful cub. And you, you was something, what was it
now, a meddler. But Arvin, he was the ungrateful cub you couldn’t do anything for.”

Throughout supper these statements were repeated and amended. Richard scarcely paid them heed, though he registered them in his mind, and put questions. But after a momentary excitement the boys forgot the whole matter, and they were outside before Richard had taken his hat and gone from the house. They were playing at the roadside, about the patch of odorous phlox. In the first tincture of dusk tobacco moths rose from it, and as they rose the boys swatted them with their caps.

“I’ll pull his head off and he’ll fly in the air,” Bill shrieked, looking after the man.

A
t the Lethen house Ada was sitting on the veranda as she had been another night. For a moment, the difference, the change, was all he felt. Then, curiously, his thought turned and again he knew that he was once more uncertain, fearful of defeat. What could happen? His heart began to shake within him. The feeling of one fractional instant that nothing could be the same, was at once controverted by the certainty that everything was as before.

She heard his step and looked up, startled, rose, half-turned as if actually to re-enter the house. He moved swiftly. Her name on his lips, her hands in his brought the old slow wistful smile, and they sat down together.

“Well, have you made or prepared any good-byes?” An awkward lightness came into his tone, and he felt that in pure anxiety he was smiling foolishly. In his heart he was fearful, uncertain, even as he laughed. Was foreboding an inevitable portion of success? “Happiness maketh all men fools,” he said.

“Yes.” Her hand pressed his. “Yes,” she said, “we are happy.” Yet there was a reservation more terrible than matter-of-factness in her tone, so that he restrained himself violently
from urging her to his purpose. And before he knew, he was doing that very thing.

“Did you hear about Carson Hymerson?” he asked.

“Yes. Very sad. They say he believed that his son and Mrs. Hymerson were leagued against him.”

“Oh, Ada, it’s sad, very true, but surely that’s not the first thing you see in it. Now your father will be in no danger of losing his place, and you and I are free.”

“I wonder.” She saw the sad and desperate look on his face as she pronounced the words; she drew near. “Oh, don’t think that anything can be the same again. I do love you, Richard. But tell me honestly what you think it means.”

“I dare say everything about this accursed place means something I’ve never guessed or suspected,” he said coldly. “There’ll never be an end to mysteries, and Carson Hymerson probably has a great deal to do with you and me of which I at least am quite unaware.”

“Richard, don’t talk like that. He had nothing to do with us.”

“He seems to have had, to judge by the way you greeted the news. An absurd old man, embittered by a tortured self-importance and nameless pathological disturbances, goes crazy. Sad! Of course it’s sad. The world is full of sadness, if you like. We’re not likely to forget that too long. But we’ve got to forget it sometime, if we’re not intending to join the other sad people in cells or underground.”

“Dear, if you really want to know the reason I was thinking of it at all, it’s only that – well – why should I have to tell you this? People say that Mr. Hymerson wanted Arvin to ‘go with’ me, in hopes of making a match, they say. It may not be true at all. But they say he always has been teasing Arvin about me.”

“Not in my presence.”

“Not before you, of course, since he knew of your interest. … Arvin and I have always been good friends. We see each other two or three times a year.”

Richard Milne was confused with astonishment. “What? How’s that? Carson wanted you to marry Arvin?”

“People say he did.”

“Well, that explains his attitude, partly. He began to lose hope for that scheme, I suppose, and then he thought he’d try to take your father’s farm from him.”

“It seems so. Your coming probably disturbed him.”

“Not so much as it would have done if I had known,” Richard returned grimly.

“Don’t you think Arvin was wise?” she asked, smiling.

“I don’t doubt his sense of the fitness of things. He saw it was a hopeless match, and did not try to do the impossible.” Richard was in better humour now.

She was silent, looking as of old across the familiar country. He lit a cigarette, with something approaching equanimity.

“But tell me, honestly, do you think I can leave here?”

“Yes!” he exclaimed impetuously, as though for the first time, without allowing himself space to divide his mind.

“Ada, it’s the very thing you must do, the only thing to be done. You’ve known too much of thinking first of others, of long tragic thoughts, of unselfishness.” His discourse seemed commonplace and stale, but he kept on.

“Look here. I see you in exquisite gowns, radiant, differently beautiful, flattered by the lights of famous restaurants, of ballrooms I know. That’s where we’re going, for a little time. Do I think you can go? I think there’s nothing else you can do, in sanity and health.”