At the Crossroads Part 21

"What you suppose has happened to keep our young feller from the--the oysters, eh?"

"I'm not accounting for folks or things these days, Peter. I'm just keeping my eyes and ears open. Jan-an makes me uneasy!" This came like a mild explosion.

"What's she up to?" Peter sniffed.

"Land! the poor soul is like the barometer you set such store by.

Everything looking clear and peaceful and then suddenlike up she gets, as she did an hour ago, and grabs her truck and sets out for Mary-Clare's like she was summoned. Just saying she had to! These are queer times, brother. I ain't easy in my mind."

"If Jan-an doesn't calm down," Peter muttered, "she may have to be put somewhere, as Larry Rivers once suggested. Larry hasn't many earmarks of his pa--but he may have a sense about human ailments."

"Think shame of yourself, Peter Heathcote, to let anything Larry Rivers says disturb your natural good feelings. Where could we send Jan-an if we wanted to?" Peter declined to reply and Aunt Polly went on: "Larry isn't living with Mary-Clare, Peter!" she added. This was a more significant explosion. Peter turned and his hair seemed to spring an inch higher around his red, puffy face.

"Where is he living?" he asked. When deeply stirred, Peter went slow and warily.

"He's hired Peneluna's old shack."

Peter digested this; but found it chaff.

"You got this from Jan-an?"

"I got it from her and from Peneluna. Peter, Peneluna looks and acts like one of them queer sort of ancient bodies what used to sit on altars or something, and make remarks that no one was expected to differ from. She just dropped in this morning and said that Larry Rivers had taken her shack; was paying for it, too."

"Has, or is going to?" Peter was giving himself time to think.

"Has!" Aunt Polly was pulling her cushions into the cavities of her tired little body.

"d.a.m.n funny!" muttered Peter and added another log. The heat was growing ferocious. Then, as he eyed his sister: "Better turn in, Polly. You look scrunched." To look "scrunched" was to look desperately exhausted. "No use wearing yourself out for--for folks,"

he added with a tenderness in his voice that always brought a peculiar smile to Polly's eyes.

"I don't see as there is anything else much, brother, to wear one's self out for."

"Why frazzle yourself for anything?"

"Why shouldn't I? What should I be keeping myself for, Peter? Surely not for my own satisfaction. No. I always hold if folks want me, then I'm particularly pleased to be had. As to frazzling, seems like we only frazzle just _so_ far, then a st.i.tch holds and we get our breath."

In this mood Polly worried Peter deeply. He could not keep from looking ahead--he avoided that usually--to a time when the little nest at the far end of the sofa would be empty; when the click of knitting needles would sound no more in the beautiful old room.

"There's me!" he whispered at length like a half-ashamed but frightened boy.

Polly drew her gla.s.ses down and gave him a long, straight look full of a deep and abiding love.

"You're the st.i.tch, Peter my man," she whispered back as if fearing someone might hear, "always the saving st.i.tch. And take this to bed with you, brother: the frazzling isn't half so dangerous as dry rot, or moth eating holes in you. Queer, but I was getting to think of myself as laid on the shelf before Brace drifted in, and when I do that I get old-acting and stiff-jointed. But I've noticed that it's the same with folks as it is with the world, when they begin to flatten down, then the good Lord drops something into them to make 'em sorter rise. No need to flatten down until you're dead. Feeling tired is healthy and proper--not feeling at all is being finished. So now, Peter, you just go along to bed. I always have felt that a man hates to be set up for, but he can overlook a woman doing it; he sets it down to her general foolishness, but Brace would just naturally get edgy if he found us both up."

Peter came clumsily across the room and stood over the small creature on the sofa. He wanted to kiss her. Instead, he said gruffly:

"See that the fire's banked, Polly. Looks as if I'd laid on a powerful lot of wood without thinking." Then he laughed and went on: "You're durned comical, Polly. What you said about the Lord putting yeast into folks and the world _is_ comical."

"I didn't say yeast, Peter Heathcote."

"Well, yer meant yeast."

"No, I didn't mean yeast. I just meant something like Brace was talking about to-day."

"What was it?" Peter stood round and solid with the firelight ruddily upon him.

"He said that the fighting overseas ain't properly a war, but a general upheaval of things that have got to come to the top and be skimmed off. We ain't ever looked at it that way." Polly resorted to familiar similes when deeply affected.

"I guess all wars is that." Peter looked serious. He rarely spoke of the trouble that seemed far, far from his quiet, detached life, but lately he had shaken his head over it in a new way. "But G.o.d ain't meaning for us to take sides, Polly. It's like family troubles. You don't understand them, and you better keep out. Just think of our good German friends and neighbours. We can't go back on them just 'cause their kin across the seas have taken to fighting. Our Germans have, so to speak, married in our family, and we must stand by 'em." Peter was voicing his unrest. Polly saw the trouble in his face.

"Of course, brother, and I only meant that lately so many things are stirring in the Forest that it seems more like the Forest wasn't a sc.r.a.p set off by itself. I seem to have lots of sc.r.a.ps floating in my mind lately--things I've heard, and all are taking on meaning now. I remember someone saying, I guess it was the Bishop, that in a drop of ocean water, there was all that went into the ocean's making, except size. That didn't mean anything until Brace set me to--to turning over in my mind, and, Peter, it seems terrible sensible now. All the big, big world is just little sc.r.a.ps of King's Forests welded all together and every King's Forest is a drop of the world."

Peter looked gravely troubled as men often do when their women take to thinking on their own lines. Usually the heedless man dismisses the matter with but small respect, but Peter was not that kind. All his life he had depended upon his sister's "vision" as he called it. He might laugh and tease her, but he never took a definite step without reaching out to her.

"A man must plant his foot solid on the path he knows," he often said, "but that don't hinder him from lifting his eyes to the sky." And it was through Aunt Polly's eyes that Peter caught his view of skies.

"I don't exactly like Brace digging down into things so much." Peter gave a troubled sigh. "Some things ain't any use when they are dug up."

"But some things _are_, brother. We must know."

"Well, by gosh!" Peter began to sway toward the door like a heavily freighted side-wheeler. "I get to feeling sometimes as if I'd kicked over a hornet's nest and wasn't certain whether it was a last year's one or this year's. In one case you can hold your ground, in the other you best take to your heels. Well, I'm going to leave you, Polly, for your date with your young man. Don't forget the fire and don't set up too long."

Left to herself, Polly neatly folded her knitting and stuck the glistening needles through it. She folded her small, shrivelled hands and a radiant smile touched her old face.

Oh! the luxury of _daring_ to sit up for a man. The excitement of the adventure! And while she waited and brooded, Polly was thinking as she had never done until recently. All her life she believed that she had thought, and to suddenly find, as she had lately, that her conclusions were either wrong or confused made her humble.

Now there was Mary-Clare! Why, from her birth, Mary-Clare had been an open book! Poor Polly shook her head. An open book? Well, if so she did not know the language in which that book was written, for Mary-Clare was troubling her now deeply.

And Larry? Larry had suddenly come into focus, and Maclin, and Northrup. They all seemed reeling around her; all united, but in deadly peril of being flung apart.

It was all too much for Aunt Polly and she unrolled her knitting and set the needles to their accustomed task. Eventually Mary-Clare would come to the inn and simply tell her story--full well Polly knew that.

It was Mary-Clare's way to keep silent until necessity for silence was past and then calmly take those she loved into her confidence. But there were disturbing things going on. Aunt Polly could not blind herself to them.

At this moment Northrup's step sounded outside. He came hastily, but making little noise.

"What's up?" he asked, starting back at the sight of Aunt Polly.

"Just me, son. Your dinner is scorched to nothing, but I wanted to tell you where the cookie jar is."

Northrup came over to the sofa and sat down.

"You deep and opaque female," he said, throwing his arm over the little bent shoulders. "Own up. It isn't cookies, it's a switch. What have I done? Out with it."

Aunt Polly laughed softly.

"It's neither cookies nor switches when you come down to it," she chuckled. "It's just waiting and not knowing why."

Northrup leaned back against the sofa and said quietly: