Old Crow Part 30

"Well," said Amelia conclusively, having made her point, "then you go up attic, will you, and open the chest, take out the blank book and bring it down."

"Nonsense!" said Raven. "Charlotte's got her hands full. I'll run up by and by."

Charlotte gave him a serious, perhaps a warning look, he remembered afterward, and went out of the room.

"You recall it, don't you," Amelia continued, "how you had diphtheria after Uncle John's death, and father had it next week."

"Yes," said Raven, tasting the unchanged bitterness of an old misery.

That had been one of the points where his life turned. His father had taken the infection from him and nearly died, and the child he was then had never been able to escape a shuddering belief that he might have been guilty of his father's death. That had made him turn the more pa.s.sionately to the task of lightening his mother's burden in the wild anxiety he had caused her. Poor little boy, he thought, poor little fool! Making his life a business of compensating somebody for something, and never, until these later years, even seeing the visible path his own feet should have taken. He forgot Amelia and showed himself so absent that she got huffy and fell into silence and only when he left the room did she remind him:

"Don't forget the journal. You'd better run up and look for it now."

He did go upstairs, really with an idea it might be best to run over the journal before Amelia pounced on it and turned it, in some manner, to his own undoing. At the head of the stairs stood Charlotte, waiting. One hand was under her ap.r.o.n. She stepped silently into his room, tacitly inviting him to follow, and brought out the hand and the mottled book.

"Here," she said. "Here 'tis. You lay it away safe some'r's. Don't seem to me I'd let anybody see it, if I's you, till you've been over it yourself."

Raven, with a nod of understanding, took the book, put it into his desk drawer and turned the key, and Charlotte hurried away to her kitchen.

When he went downstairs again, he found Amelia at the open door. She was all an excitement of antic.i.p.ation.

"Law, Milly," said he, in the country phrasing he loved to use to her when she was most securely on her high horse of the cultured life, "you look as nervous as a witch."

"Where is it?" said Amelia, beating a tattoo of impatience, with one hand, on the door. "You've been up attic, haven't you?"

"Bless you, no," said Raven. "I can't go up attic now. I've got to do an errand for Charlotte." This was true. Nan's dinner had to be carried over. "You run up, there's a good girl. Give you something to do. No!

no!" She was turning toward the kitchen. "Don't you go bothering Charlotte. I won't have it. Cut along."

And Amelia did, in a dignified haste, to show him how journals were found, and later, when the moment came, Raven went with his hot hamper to Nan's.

She met him at the door, no such overflowing Nan as last night, but serenely practical and quite settled into the accustomed comforts of her house.

"I'm as hungry as a bear," said she. "Come through to the kitchen. I eat in there. The only drawback to this, Rookie, is that it takes it out of Charlotte. Still, it won't last long, and I'll give her a kiss and a blue charmeuse. That would pay anybody for anything."

They unpacked the basket together, and Nan, her plate and knife and fork ready on a napkin, began to eat. Raven sat down at the other end of the table.

"I wish you'd stay," he said, watching her in her pretty haste. "I don't mean here: over with me. Come on, Nan. Amelia's settled down for good.

She won't bother you--much. Anyhow, you can run off up to the hut."

Then he remembered what other fugitive she might find at the hut, and saw she, too, remembered. Her words came pat upon it.

"The Tenneys are going to have a prayer-meeting Wednesday night."

"A prayer-meeting!" He heard himself echoing it incredulously.

"Yes, and you're to take me, Rookie. Don't scowl. I've got to see that man when he worships his idols, and you've got to see him, too. His G.o.d must be an idol: burnt offerings, that sort of thing. Perhaps that's what he's doing it all for: offering her up, as a kind of sacrifice. His wife, I mean. What's her name, Rookie?"

"Thyatira," said Raven, and got up, his mind suddenly dense to the comfortable picture of Nan and her dinner, and went home.

XX

The next few days went by, all alike cloudless and uneventful within the house. Nan coaxed Charlotte into bringing her over meat and vegetables, and, with a plea of liking it, cooked them herself. Raven swung back and forth between the houses, but Nan found him silent and, she decided, cross. Every day he went up to the hut to see whether the fire had been lighted, and every day found the place in its chilly order. It seemed to him as if the whole tragic background against which Tira had been moving had been wiped away by some wide sweeping sponge of oblivion, as if he had dreamed the story or at least its importance in his own life, as if Nan had always been living alone in her house, and Amelia, tied up in Charlotte's ap.r.o.ns, her lips compressed in implacable resolution, always going through trunks in the attic, searching for a mottled book. He had no compunction over Amelia. Let her search, he thought, when Charlotte came to him with a worried brow and asked if he didn't think he could put it somewheres in sight, so's 't she should know 'twas no use. Do her good. If she didn't like it she could go back to her clubs and her eugenics and her Freudians. And when the evening of the prayer-meeting came he looked out at the brilliant weather, judged that the immediate region might seize upon it as an excuse for sleigh-riding, and was returning to his book for a brief minute more, when Amelia called from the window:

"Three sleighs! Where can they be going?"

"Oh," said Raven, without raising his eyes from the page, "sleighing, most likely."

But the minute she left the window, he put down his book, got his hat and coat from the hall, and went out through the kitchen where Charlotte was sponging bread.

"Going to the meeting?" he asked her.

"No," said Charlotte, absorbedly dissolving her yeast cake. "I never take much stock in----" There she paused, lest she might be uncharitably expansive, and found refuge in Jerry. "He says Isr'el Tenney ain't so much of a man, when all's said an' done, an' don't seem as if he could stan' seein' him on his knees. But there!"

Raven went on through the shed and up the road, to Nan's. She had seen him from the window and came down the path.

"Knew I'd come, did you?" he grumbled.

"Yes," said Nan. "We'd really better go."

Raven hated it all, out of his element as he was, going to spy on Tenney and hear him pray. What other reason was there? He and Nan simply wanted to search out the reactions in Tenney's spiritual insides in order to defeat him the more neatly.

The house was brightly lighted downstairs. Six or eight sleighs stood in the shelter of the long open shed at right angles to the barn. The horses had been taken in and blanketed. When Raven and Nan arrived, no one else was outside, and he was about to knock when Nan, who remembered the ways of neighborhood prayer-meetings, opened the door and stepped in. Men and women were seated in a couple of rows about the walls of the two front rooms, and Tenney stood in the square entry beside a table supplied with a hymn-book, a Bible, and a lamp. He had the unfamiliar aspect of a man reduced to discomfort of mind by the strictures of a Sunday suit. His eyes were burning and his mouth compressed. What did they mean, that pa.s.sion of the distended pupil, that line of tightened lip? Was it the excitement of leadership, the responsibility of being "in charge" of the solemn convention of prayer-meeting? It was the face, Nan thought, of one who knew the purposes of G.o.d from the first word of creation to the last, and meant to enforce them by every mastery known to man: persuasion, rage, and cruelty. She gave him a good evening and he jerked his head slightly in response. The occasion was evidently too far out of the common to admit of ordinary greetings. A man and woman just inside the doorway of the front room moved along, and signed Raven and Nan to take their vacated seats. As soon as they were settled Tenney began to "lead in prayer," and Raven, his mind straying from the words as negligible and only likely to increase his aversion to the man, sat studying the furnishings of the room, a typical one, like all the parlors of the region from the time of his boyhood to that of his father and Old Crow. There was the center table with the alb.u.m and three red volumes of Keepsakes and Garlands, a green worsted mat, hopefully designed to imitate moss, and on the depression in its center the astral lamp. On the wall opposite were pictures of Tenney's father and mother, painful enlargements from stiff photographs, and on the neighboring wall a glazed framing of wax flowers and a hair wreath. The furniture was black walnut upholstered with horsehair. Tenney was of the more prosperous line of farmers. And yet he had not begun so. All this represented the pathetic ideal of one who toiled and saved and bought after the fashion of his type.

Raven's eyes strayed to the faces about him: these were the younger set, boys and girls from sixteen to twenty. The first two or three had, by chance perhaps, dropped into this room and the rest gravitated shyly to it. There was always a line of cleavage at prayer-meeting, as at teas and "socials," between old and young. Raven was glad he had chosen the room at random. He liked the atmosphere of half-awed, half-t.i.ttering youth. They were always on the verge, always ready to find hilarity in untoward circ.u.mstance, and yet trained to a respect for meeting, doing their conventional best. What hard red cheeks there were, what great brown hands of boys, awkwardly holding hats, and yet, taken into the open, how unerringly they gripped the tasks that fell to them. All of them, boys and girls alike, were staring at him and Nan: at Nan with a frank admiration, the girls perhaps with envy. At the corner of the room corresponding to his own, two chairs had been left vacant, and when his eyes came to them he saw a blue scarf depending from the back of one; it had been dropped when the occupant of the chair had left it. It was Tira's chair, and Tira herself appeared from the door opposite, leading from the kitchen, crossed the room, took the scarf and wrapped it about her shoulders and sat down. She had been called out, perhaps in response to a cry from the child who seemed to be the center of commotion in this house, though so mysteriously inactive. Raven felt the blood mounting to his face, she was so movingly beautiful in this scene of honest but unlovely mediocrity. Even her walk across the room, unconscious of herself, yet with the rhythmic step of high processionals--how strange a part she was of this New England picture! He could not see her now, without turning, and tried to summon his mind home from her, to fix it on Tenney, who, having finished his prayer, was calling on one and another, with an unction that seemed merely a rejoicing tyranny, for testimony. It was a scene of tension. Church members were timid before the ordeal of experience or pleading, and the unconverted were strained to the verge of hysteria over a prospect of being haled into the open and prayed for. Neither Raven nor Nan knew how unpopular Tenney had become, because he could not enter the conventional limits of a prayer-meeting without turning it into something too tense, too exciting, the atmosphere of the revival. Yet, though his fellow Christians blamed him for it, they sought it like a drug. He played on their unwilling nerves and they ran to be played on. He was their opera, their jazz. Breath came faster and eyes shone. The likelihood of a hysterical giggle was imminent, and some couples, safely out of range of Tenney's gaze, were "holding hands" and mentally shuddering at their own temerity.

Now he was telling his own religious experience, with a mounting fervor ready to froth over into frenzy. Raven, turning slightly, regarded him with a cold dislike. This was the voice that had echoed through the woods that day when Tira stood, her baby in her arms, in what chill of fear Raven believed he knew. Tenney went on lashing himself into the ecstasy of his emotional debauch. His eyes glittered. He was happy, he a.s.serted, because he had found salvation. His conversion was akin to that of Saul. To his immense spiritual egotism, Raven concluded, nothing short of a story colossally dramatic would serve. He had been a sinner, perhaps not as to works but faith. He had kept the commandments, all but one. Had he loved the Lord his G.o.d with all his heart, all his soul, all his might? No: for he had not accepted the sacrifice the Lord G.o.d had prepared for him, of His only Son. That Son of G.o.d had been with him everywhere, in his down-sittings and his uprisings, as He was with every man and woman on earth. But, like other sinful men and women, he had not seen Him. He had not felt Him. But He was there. And one day he was hoeing in the field and a voice at his side asked: "Why persecutest thou me?" He looked up and saw----Here he paused dramatically, though Raven concluded it was simply because he found himself at a loss to go on. He had appropriated the story, but he was superst.i.tiously afraid to embroider it. For he (Raven gave him that credit) honestly believed in his self-evolved G.o.d.

"And then," said Tenney, in a broken voice, tears trickling down his cheeks, "the voice said to me: 'Go ye out and preach the gospel.'"

The front door opened and a little answering breeze flickered in the flame of the lamp. A girl near Nan, her nerves on edge, gave a cry. A man stepped in and closed the door behind him. He was a figure of fashion evolved from cheap models and flashy materials. Tall, quick in his movements, as if he found life a perpetual dance and self-consciously adapted himself to it, with mocking blue eyes, red hair and a long nose bent slightly to one side, he was, in every line and act, vulgar, and yet so arrogantly bent on pleasing that you unconsciously had to acknowledge his intention and refrain from turning your back on him. He looked at Tenney in a calculated good humor, nodded, had his great coat off with a quick gesture, and slung it over his arm. Then he stepped past Tenney, who stood petrified as if he saw the risen dead, and into the room. This was Eugene Martin. He seemed not to be in the least subdued to the accepted rules of prayer-meeting, but nodded and smiled impartially, and, as if he had flashed that look about for the one niche waiting for him, stepped lightly over to Tira's corner and took the chair at her side. Raven, from the tragic change in Tenney's face, knew who he was and bent forward to see what Tira's eyes would tell. She was, it seemed, frozen into endurance. Martin, in seating himself, had given her a cordial good evening. She did not answer, nor did she look at him. Her pale lips did not move. Nor did she, on the other hand, withdraw from him. The chairs had been pushed close, and, as she sat upright, scarcely moving a muscle with her breath, the blue scarf touched his shoulder. Raven withdrew his gaze, not to make the moment in any sense conspicuous, and, feeling the silence, turned to Tenney to see if his leadership could surmount this base a.s.sault. The a.s.sault was premeditated. The gay insolence of the man's manner told him that. Tenney stood there silent, flaccid, a hand on the casing of the door. Every vestige of religious excitement had left his face. His overthrow was complete, and Raven, judging how Martin must rejoice, was for the moment almost as sorry for Tenney as for his wife. The little disturbance had lasted only a moment, but now all eyes were turning on Tenney, who had ceased to "lead." In another minute the eyes would be curious, the silence would be felt. As Raven wondered what would break the evil spell, Nan's voice came out clear, untinged by the prevailing somberness, warm with the confidence of youth:

"Can't we sing one of the nice old hymns? Coronation! That's got such a swing to it."

She began it, and the young voices broke in pell-mell after her like a joyous crowd, seeing a vine-clad procession, and losing no time in joining for fear of losing step. Raven knew perfectly well the great old hymn was no matter for a pa.s.sionately remorseful, sin-laden meeting of this sort. Nan knew it, too. He was sure she had not ventured it for the protection of Tira. No one had ever told Nan about the man with the devil in him who "looked up kinder droll." But she could see the tide of human emotion had better be turned to the glorification of G.o.d than to the abas.e.m.e.nt of man. Raven, in the swell of it, put his lips to her ear and whispered:

"I'm going to ask you to change your seat."

She gave no sign of having heard, but sang on, in a delightful volume, to "Crown Him Lord of all." The moment the last note died, Raven came to his feet. He addressed Tenney:

"One minute. There's a draught here by the door."

He went over to Martin, Nan following:

"Do you mind sitting by the door?" he asked the man. "There's a good deal of a draught."

Martin, his surprised look at Nan changing to a ready gallantry, got up at once.