White Narcissus (5 page)

What is there in her face, he asked himself with a sudden frenzied access, what is there in her soul, that has made me return, time after time – made my nights a memory and my
days a double vision? Love? It was to laugh at the simplicity of the tiny word. Who had told that love was torture of the being, that love would blast life from him in a flutter of trivialities as oak-leaves are loosed upon the wind after the first frost? Who had told him that love would eat beneath his comfort in accomplishment until he knew himself in his wanderings a lost soul? Beneath everything, his most cherished activities, lay a weary impatience with them and a sense of their irrelevance in the lack of a determining motive to channel their force.

She turned to him, and it was as though she had descried a vision of beatification in the darkness; she took his hand as though she would warm it in her cold hand. But the light in her face slowly died as her low voice, with pauses, unwonted uncertainties here and there, went on. Again, as though tranced, he had nothing but to listen, given up not to her reasonings, but to her, the spirit beneath, which embraced not only them and her conduct, but the very qualities which made her to him what she was. And it was her hand which was warmed, though a gesture lifted both to her breast.

“Richard, I know. That is what makes it so hard, that I do understand. Oh, don’t think I don’t want happiness, that I am harsh. But I have found the hardest thing to do. … I see Father going about the farm as though he were lost; and his hair is white. … Like his horses, he is old; like them, he is patient, even in waiting for the end. What should I be doing to leave him? There is some other way. My mother seems daily to give her frail life to the white narcissi; and, while she is not old, she makes me fear the more. You can see how it is with me, and how I must not listen to – the outer world, even to – even as I have….” Her voice broke as if from a weight of longing which would return in days after.

Richard Milne’s impelling desperation would no longer be kept within bounds. He seemed to find her pleas unanswerable as she had his. He rose from the seat. His voice quivered. A fear that they were cutting themselves off from each other as they had done before did not suffice to temper his embittered discomfiture, which he scarcely cloaked in polite circumstantiality.

“It is late and I must not keep you, Ada. We must talk again,” he added with a perverse effort at balance. He was facing the window giving on the dark room; across it he saw the crack of light under the door, which showed that life went on in the rear portions of the house. “I hope my intrusion hasn’t kept your mother too long from her bulbs.” To this irrepressible malice in jejune and childish politeness Ada made a vague gesture and rose as he went on: “I am going to have to talk with your parents. They, too, may not be able to understand reason and common logic, but at least they shall listen. It is late now, and I shall not disturb them.”

She put out her hand. “I’m sorry, Richard.” She said it so simply and with such significance that his anger melted, and he half felt that he was defeated once more. Then his stubborn pugnacity whelmed the feeling. He grasped her extended hand.

“Give them my regards, please, and tell them that. We’ll see.”

Smiling a little at his grimness, the tall woman murmured:

“I’m sure they’ll be glad to see you again. They have so few visitors, and they remember you, of course. Father was asking why you hadn’t seen him the last time you were here.”

“I look at the whole thing differently now,” he declared
again. “I must see them both regardless of any kind interest they may have in me.”

Ada Lethen became grave. “Richard, you mustn’t look at it in that way. There’s nothing to get angry about, nothing to be done.” She looked at him with steadfast, upraised eyes.

“That remains to be seen, and will be seen. Good night, Ada.”

Smiling a little, she stood on the veranda and watched him quickly swallowed in the gloom of the night, his footsteps muffled by the grass and pine needles, by the wind roaring above him, wrapping him with huge tatters in the road.

He was gone.

H
e did not seem to have slept at all before strange noises, shoutings, silences, came and went in what he knew was dreaming. Strangely, actual seconds only made a dream of the reality from which, tossing, he had tried through the night to find surcease. They merged with dozing unbelief in his return – so ineffectual – and his presence in a place alienated which should have welcomed him. … Richard Milne rose, bumping his head upon the gable ceiling, and stepped to the open window.

Dawn had come, lifting sharp colour from the fields. In a haze of level yellow sunshine on the dusty lane below, Carson Hymerson and his son manoeuvred and spoke, the voices ringing back from the shady, cliff-like barns at the far side of the yard. The skeleton of a hayrake stood between them, and they were fitting teeth into a long horizontal bar. Richard Milne had an impulse to laugh at the oblivious and loud-voiced preoccupation. Carson bent, showing patches on the back of faded clothes, clawed the air at one side of him without turning his head, and spoke with injured tones of imperial dudgeon.

“There! You’ve let loose and they’re slipped out again. Give me that piece of wire! … Show ’em!”

Arvin, a tall, bowed young man with prominent, aquiline features, went to the wire fence of the lane and lifted from it the piece which providentially hung there. His father viciously twisted the wire about the wooden bar and the rod on which the teeth were strung. It was evident that it would be impossible to insert the teeth between them.

“Now! What you gawpin’ at me for? You’ve let the others loose, and now they’ve jumped out of the holes. If ever I see –”

Arvin, who had been contemplating his father’s mistake, said nothing, but hastily jumped to the other end of the bar and held it against the teeth. His father continued to whine, until he said abruptly:

“Well! You told me to get the wire, and now see what you’ve done.”

“You’re too smart!” shouted his father without rancour. “It’s all your fault. You just think we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves, that’s all, and you won’t help.”

The son digested this a moment, seeming about to speak, and then to think better of it.

“It’s all right for you to talk,” went on the older man, turning the teeth of the rake on the steel rod delicately until they hung loosely in a perfect row. “Yes, eh, send it to the blacksmith; don’t do anything yourself for fear of getting your hands dirty. No, I’m not farming that way just yet. … I don’t say but what if I was gone, stowed away safe enough under ground, there’ll be enough of that goes on, but not just to-day, thank you, too rich for my blood. That ain’t how the old pioneers got along. If your grandfather could see the slouchy way you do things, he’d turn over in his grave. Reach me that chisel….”

“Yeh, I bet he’d –”

“Don’t you leave go!” yelled Hymerson. “People are getting more shiftless all the time. For a certainty.”

Richard Milne stared half-awake from his window, and the argumentative, swift whine, with outbursts of shouting, the quiet, occasional remonstrance of the younger man ascended to him as though he were watching a play; until with a start he straightened and returned to bed. They even pursued him there. So he was back amid the oblivion of the farmer’s cares! It was a rousing reality. The possibility of sleep was gone for that night, and, seeing that it was nearly six o’clock according to the thin watch under his pillow, he dressed. In the kitchen he greeted Mrs. Hymerson, who was holding a slice of bread on a fork over the lidless hole of the wood stove.

“I’ve been going to get me a regular toaster,” she remarked offhandedly, “but I haven’t got around to it yet.” Richard wondered what formalities connected with the man of the house would be necessary before this could be accomplished. Meanwhile it seemed likely that smoke would contribute as much as heat to the texture of the toast. “I didn’t put your hat in the front hall,” she added, as instinctively the young man reached to the nail behind the door. “Doesn’t seem right to treat you like ordinary company so much –”

Outside the shade was chill and the air quiet, as though the trees had forgotten the struggle with the wind of the night before. The dust of the lane appeared to have been swept by it, smoothed from so much as a leaf upon the surface. The spirit of those gusty hours had belatedly entered Carson Hymerson.

“If he does stay it’ll be all right for us. He won’t know anything about it and people won’t –”

The farmer was still ejaculating and gesturing, unaware of his guest’s approach. Arvin tried to warn him of it by smiling and leaving the rake with outstretched hand to greet his early friend. “Here! What’s the idea –” Then the other saw too.

Arvin Hymerson was perhaps an inch taller than Richard Milne when he straightened, and his rather bashful smile was not belied by the freshet of reminiscent inquiry with which such meetings are accompanied. Still the interest was there, real, and Richard Milne found himself feeling that he had been away perhaps two weeks. For the first time he fully realized his return. When the weather had been canvassed Arvin said:

“We’re fixing up the old side-delivery rake. Kind of late getting around to it, but we thought we’d better do it ourselves instead of sending it to the blacksmith.”

The older man looked up from the teeth of the rake and grinned mockingly.

“Arvin here’s been buying a cow. I was just telling him he’d ought to have been making a regular study of the market before he went out. Then he’d been sure not to get beat.”

Richard smiled. “Oh, I should think that Arvin must know a good deal about cattle, Mr. Hymerson. I don’t think I’d care to have a trade with him myself.” He was not accusing Arvin of dishonesty. He found himself sympathetically taking on the attitude and locutions of a former time.

“Not ’less you wanted to get beat, eh?” The man was somewhat mollified. “Well, go and look at his cow. Just go and look at it, and see what you think of the bargain. I’ll tell you how much he gave afterwards.” A challenging malice spoke here, as though his son were not present.

The latter, Richard Milne reflected after looking at the cow, a goodly and not noteworthy Shorthorn, deserved consideration for his patience; for his industry also, since the
floors of the cow stable were as spotless as its whitewashed cement walls. As though conscious of his friend’s attitude, Arvin remarked:

“Litter-carriers. Farming’s not so bad as it used to be. Things are getting a little handier.”

They stood talking a few minutes at the doorway of the stable, which framed a green and grey landscape, and then went to breakfast. Richard Milne found himself in good spirits and inclined to play the part of the well-entertained guest. This would not hurt his cause with Mrs. Hymerson, he knew. He had decided not to go back to the city, and to let it rest with her whether he was to stay, “spend his vacation,” in that house. From Carson Hymerson, he divined, anything, or nothing, might be expected.

The farmer had changed considerably with the years, from the young man’s memory of him – a surreptitiously waggish, brisk fellow taking chop to mill, striding about the muddy streets in a yellow raincoat and rubber boots, laughing and joking with other farmers on the steps of the store. This present swiftness of speech, innuendo, and attitude of not being taken in by anybody, was perhaps the result of forces in the man which the years could not but have brought out. Richard Milne had never ceased to admire the peripety of life, its myriad fugacious shadings like lake tints which become more intricate to the sight with care in scrutinizing them.

As they came out of the house after breakfast a team of horses emerged from alders around the bend of the road, with a two-wheeled implement surmounted by a barrel. On this a boy sat as though precariously, for it was perched horizontally, and looked ready to roll off. Two low, chair-like seats under and behind the barrel almost dragged the ground between the wheels.

“Tobacco-planter,” Arvin told him.

“Yes, that’s a tobacco-planter!” added Hymerson, as though it were a grim joke.

“Dad don’t like the tobacco. Won’t grow it. I keep telling him we’re going to lose out, with tobacco the price it is….”

“I guess, eh! I wouldn’t have the dirty stuff on my place, let alone smoke it, put the dirty stuff in my mouth. Agh! They can have it, them fellows.” He went, with swinging steps and one arm held out, toward the pig-pen, a swill-pail brushing his bulky, stiffened overalls at every step. Arvin grinned, looking from him to Richard Milne.

He, too, went to the stable, and hitched a team to the rake. When he had gone creaking down the lane Richard followed the older man about while he did the chores, tended to the needs of the stock, and prepared another meal for them. Then they walked over the rolling, wooded farm together. Carson said, as they crossed a hollow along a haphazard rail fence:

“That’s how he looks after things, that old man. Won’t even keep up the line fence between neighbours. I’ve had about enough of it, never keeping the fences fixed, letting the cattle run – even hogs.”

Pausing to light a cigar, Milne asked thoughtfully, “Why don’t you make some settlement, say, have it that – if this is Lethen’s end of the line – that the fence should be fixed by him, or, if not, that you will do so at his expense? I should think that some arrangement could be made.” He was tired of the man’s complaints, and still more of his rancorous air of compunction.

“Oh, that wouldn’t hardly do. Might get to be bad friends with him, that way.” Carson glanced at him in alarm and joggled the two forks on his shoulder.

“I don’t see the point,” murmured Richard. He knew that Hymerson would talk about his injuries to any listener, and generally comport himself as though in fact a breach existed between the neighbours. At the hayfield which Arvin was raking Carson began to bunch a windrow, but Richard did not accept the hint of the extra fork – let him stand it in the ground and went away.

He walked across the fields and woods in the general direction of the village. It was a day of the perfected tranquillity which only June can match, and which even in June one feels unmatchable. The clouds in their quietude only gave surcease from warmth and brilliance to the surfeited vegetation and trees, only varied that intense blue which had not yet lost its softness of spring, and which, it seemed, could never take on the greenish bitterness of first snow, the darkness of autumn storm.