Old Crow Part 14

Raven, determinedly shedding his emotion, plunged fast down the hill and into the house where Charlotte was busy in a steam of fragrances from stove and cooking table and Jerry sat smoothing an axe helve.

"See here," said Raven, pulling off his gloves and advancing to the stove, where Jerry, looking mildly up, made room for him, "are you thinning out up on the ridge?"

Jerry nodded.

"That's what you wrote," said he.

"I've changed my mind," said Raven. "It looks mighty well up there as it is, for the present, anyway. Didn't you say there was a lot of gray birch that needed to go down in the river pasture?"

Again Jerry nodded, and Charlotte, evidently not finding this definite enough, put in:

"Why, yes, Jerry, seems to me you said so. 'Twas in that letter you had me write."

"Well," said Raven, "I want you to get at the river woods. I want 'em cleaned up. Couldn't you get somebody to help you? That man Tenney, how about him?"

Jerry, confronted by haste and emergency, two flying visitants he never could encounter adequately, opened his mouth and looked at Charlotte.

"Why, yes," said she. "He's a great hand to work. You said so yourself, Jerry, only last week."

"Then what if we should hire him?" said Raven. "What if I should go up and ask him now?"

Jerry was slowly coming to.

"He's been by here to-day," said he, "axe in his hand. Went as if he's sent for. Then he went back."

"Well, that was an hour or more ago," said Charlotte. "You says to me, 'Where's he be'n?' says you. Yes, he's got home long 'fore this. You'll find him some'r's round home."

"All right," said Raven. "Don't go up on the ridge again, Jerry. I want it left as it is."

He hurried out through the shed and Charlotte and Jerry exchanged glances, his entirely bemused and she sympathetically tender.

"'Course he don't want you cuttin' on the ridge," she said. "He's goin'

up there to write his books. I should think you could see that."

For Charlotte, when no third person was by to observe Jerry's sloth at the uptake, had methods of her own to keep him mentally alive. If he did lag a pace behind, it was his secret and hers, and sometimes, between themselves, it was wholesome to recognize it.

Raven walked at top speed. He could not, at his utmost, get to Tenney soon enough. It was true, he was under vow not to a.s.sault or accuse him, but it seemed to him the woman would not be even intermittently safe unless the man were under his eye. As the picture of her flashed again to his mind, sitting by his hearth, her head bowed in grief unspeakable, he wondered what he should call her. Surely not, in his rage against Tenney, by Tenney's name. She was "the woman," she was the pitiful type of all suffering womanhood.

There was the house, rather narrow in build, but painted white, with green blinds. The narrowness gave it a look of unwelcoming meagerness, this although it was of a good size. Raven wondered why some minds ran to pointed roofs, inhospitable to the eye. This looked to him like Tenney, his idea of him. The barn was s.p.a.cious, and beautiful in silver gray, and the woodpile, Raven decided ironically, a marvel of artistic skill. He had never seen such a big woodpile, so accurately trimmed at the corners, so perfect in the face of an extended length. It must, he judged, represent a good many hours of jealous madness, if it was entirely the product of those outbreaks when Tenney went out to smash wood. And there, round one corner of the pile, was Tenney himself. Raven realized that he had not expected to find him. Actually he had believed the man was raging over snowy hillsides somewhere about, armed with his axe and uttering those catamount cries. Tenney was not at work. He was standing perfectly still, looking up the road.

"Hullo!" called Raven, turning into the yard, and the man jerked back a step and then stopped and awaited him.

It was not a step actually. His feet did not leave the ground. He merely, his whole body, seemed thrown out of position, to recover instantly. Raven, watching him as he traversed the few steps between them, decided that he was uncontrollably nervous, frightened, too, perhaps, at what his apprehensive mind pictured: and that was good for him. What was Tenney, according to his look? Raven, scrutinizing him as he approached, determined to know something more than he had caught from those preoccupied minutes in the woods. How, if he had his pen in hand, would he describe Israel Tenney for one of the folk tales Anne had so persistently urged him to? A thin, tall man with narrow shoulders and yet somehow giving an impression of great wiry strength. He had a boldly drawn line of profile, hair black and glossy and, as Raven saw with distaste, rather long under his hat, vertical lines marking his cheeks, lines deeper than seemed justified by his age, and, as he had noted before, his eyes were also black with a spark in them. What was the spark? It was, Raven concluded again, in this quick scrutiny, like that in the eyes of inventors and visionaries. He wore clothes so threadbare that it seemed as if he must have been cold. But they were patched with a scrupulous nicety that made some revulsion in Raven rise up and dramatically spur him to a new resentment. She had patched them. Her faithful needle had spent its art on this murderer of her peace. He had reached the woodpile now and Tenney came a step forward.

"Great woodpile you've got here," said Raven.

Tenney put out his hand and rested it on one of the sticks. He might have been caressing a pet dog.

"Stove wood length," he said briefly. Then he seemed to feel some curiosity over being sought out after their meeting on the rise and asked: "D'you find your knife?"

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Didn't you see me hold it up to you?"

Tenney nodded, frowning. He seemed to conclude he was giving himself away, showing more interest in the stranger than the stranger had in any way earned. But he asked another question. It leaped from him. He had to ask it.

"D'you see anybody up round there after I come down?"

Raven shook his head, looking, he hoped, vague.

"I came down myself," he said. "I had to talk with Jerry about his thinning out."

The eagerness faded from Tenney's face.

"I didn't see Jerry up there this mornin'," he volunteered, in an indifferent contribution toward the talk.

"No," said Raven. "You won't see him up there at all after this--for a spell, that is. I write, you know, books. I like to go up to the hut to work. Not so likely to be interrupted there. I don't want chopping going on."

Tenney, with a quick lift of the head, looked at him questioningly.

Raven saw anger also in the look, at last anger ready to spring. Both men had the same thought. Tenney wondered if the owner of the wood was going to taunt him again with yelling like a catamount, and Raven did actually put aside an impulse toward it.

"D'you come over here to forbid my goin' up in your woods?" Tenney inquired.

"No," said Raven. "I came to ask you if you could help Jerry do some thinning out in the river pasture. I'm rather in a hurry about that."

"Why, yes," Tenney began. Then he added breathlessly, as if another part of his mind (the suffering, uncontrolled part) broke in on his speech: "Not yet, though. I can't do anything yet, not till I see how things turn."

Raven thought he understood. Tenney could settle to nothing until he knew when his wife was coming back or whether she was coming at all. Now that the vision of her had entered on their stage, he was conscious of answering coldly:

"All right. You can make up your mind and go over and see Jerry. He'll arrange it with you."

On these words, he was about turning away, when he found Tenney suddenly oblivious of him. The man's thin face was quivering into a pathetic disorder, flushed, quite beyond his control. He neither heard Raven nor saw him, though he did speak brokenly:

"There!" he said. "There she is now."

Raven, turning, followed his gaze, directed up the road, not the way he had come. There she was, walking toward them with swift, long steps, the child held with the firmness that still seemed a careless buoyancy, as he had seen her in the woods. She had come home, as she went, the back way. Raven could have stood there through the long minute, motionless, waiting for her to come to him, for it seemed as if it were to him she came, not Tenney. But he recalled himself with a brusqueness so rough and sudden that it was as if he gave himself a blow. That last glance had shown him she had nothing more to fear from Tenney, for this time at least. The man had been horribly frightened at her going. Now he was under her heel. Raven did not give her another look. He turned homeward, and called back to Tenney loudly enough for her to overhear him and be under no apprehension as to what had pa.s.sed:

"Make up your mind, then come and talk it over with Jerry. It's chopping, you understand, gray birches down in the river pasture."

Tenney did not answer, and Raven, striding along the road, listened with all possible intentness to hear whether husband and wife spoke together.

He thought not, but he did hear the closing of a door.

XI

Thyatira--this was her name, and she was called Tira--pa.s.sed her husband apparently without a glance. Nevertheless she had, in approaching, become adequately aware of his disordered look, and the fact of it calmed her to a perfect self-possession. She could always, even from one of these fleeting glimpses, guess at the stage his madman's progress had reached, and the present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The "spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too, to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in, she was sitting in his great chair by the fire, taking off the baby's coat, and, with the capable, anxious mother motion, feeling the little hands. Tenney came up to her and the child, turning at his step, looking up at him solemnly. Tira's heart seemed to contract within her. This was the very glance, "lookin' up kinder droll," that had brought on the storm. But for Tenney it evidently meant something now that fitted his mood of pa.s.sionate anxiety to get back into the warm security of domestic peace.