Old Crow Part 66

"Seems good to set," she said. "I ain't hardly set down to-day except----" She had it in mind to say except when she was in the car, carrying the baby over to Mountain Brook, but it seemed too hard a thing to say.

"If you'd just lie down," said Nan, "I'd sit here."

"No," said Tira, "I can't do that. I'm goin' over to Mountain Brook."

"Not again? Not to-day?"

"Yes, right off. I'm goin' to carry them daffies. He didn't have no flowers, the baby didn't. I never thought on't--then. But he never had none. He played with a daffy, 'most the last thing. I've got to git 'em over there."

"Not to-day, Tira," urged Nan. "You wouldn't get back till after dark."

"I shouldn't come back to-night," said Tira. "The Donnyhills were real good to me. They come to the grave. They'd admire to have me pa.s.s the night."

"Then," said Nan, "you wait till I go home and wash my hands, and I'll ask Mr. Raven for his car and you and I'll go over. Just we two."

"No," said Tira. "'Twouldn't do me no good to ride. When I've got anything on my mind I can't do better'n walk it off. You let me be!"

The last was a sharp, sudden cry, like the recoil from an unlooked-for hurt.

"I see," said Nan. "Yes, you must walk. I should want to, myself. But in the morning, Tira--mayn't I come over after you?"

Tira considered, her eyes on Nan's hand and her own clasped, lying on Nan's knee.

"Yes," she said, "you better. You come to the Donnyhills'. Yes, you come."

Then she considered again, and began one of her slow, difficult meanderings, where the quickness of her heart and brain ran ahead of her tongue's art to interpret them.

"Seems if you knew," she said, "'most everything that's gone on."

"Yes," said Nan, at a venture, and yet truthfully. "I think I've known."

"An' now it's come to an end," said Tira. "Or if it ain't, it's on the way to it. An' seems if you ought to know the whole. You're tough enough to stan' up to 't."

"Yes," said Nan simply, "I'm very tough. Nothing's going to hurt me."

"I bring," said Tira, still with difficulty, "bad luck. Some folks do.

Folks set by me a spell. Then they stop. They think I'm goin' to be suthin' they'd do 'most anything for, an' then they seem to feel as if I wa'n't. An' there's no"--she sought for a word here and came out blunderingly--"no peace nor rest. Nor for me, neither. I ain't had peace nor rest. Except"--here she paused again and ended gravely, and not this time inadequately--"in him."

Nan understood. She was grave in her answer.

"Mr. Raven," she said. "I know."

The color flowed into Tira's face and she looked at Nan, with her jewel-like eyes.

"I'm goin' to tell you," she said, "the whole story. He's like--my G.o.d.

Anything I could do for him--'twould be nothin'. Anything he asked of me----"

Here the light faded out from her face and the flesh of it had that curious look of curdling, as if with muscular horror.

"But," she said, "here 'tis. S'pose it come on him, that--that"--she threw back her head in despair over her poverty of words--"s'pose it made him like----Oh, I tell you there's suthin' queer about me, there's suthin' wrong. It ain't that I look different from other folks. I ain't ever meant to act different. I swear to my G.o.d I've acted like a decent woman--an' a decent girl--an' when I was little I never even had a thought! You tell me. You'd know."

Nan felt the hand on hers tighten. She put her other hand over it, and thought. What could she tell her? These matters were too deep in the causes of things for man to have caught a glimpse of them, except now and then darkly through some poet's mind. There was one word that, to a poet's mind only, might have illumined the darkness if only for an instant: beauty, that was the word. Mankind could not look on beauty such as this and not desire, for a moment at least, to possess it utterly. But these things belonged to the dark places where brute nature wrought her spells. And there were other beauties, other enchantments, and of these, what could Tira, her mind moulded by the brutal influences of her life, see, except as dreams of her own, not as having wholesome correspondences in the mind of man? Could she guess what the appeal of her loveliness would meet in Raven? Fastidious standards, pride of honor, pride of race. The jungle, in itself, was as hateful to him as it could be to her, who had been dragged through its fetid undergrowth with a violence that had cut indelible marks into her. But for him, Raven--as Nan believed she knew him and as Tira, her striving mind obscured by the veil of her remembered past, could never know--hadn't the jungle something for him beyond choking savors and fierce destructive poisons?

Didn't he know that even that miasma nourished wholesome virtues, strength, abstinence, infinite compa.s.sion, if you crossed the horrible expanse to the clear air beyond? Tira, fair as her mind was in its untouched integrity, hated the jungle, but it was a part of the wrong life had done her that she could not, highly as she worshiped Raven, keep herself from seeing his kinship to the natural earth as Martin's kinship with it, Tenney's--all the beasts who had desired her. How to tell her that? How to tell her that although it was most loving of her to save Raven from the curse she believed to be upon all men, he would save himself?

"They think," Tira continued, in a voice rough enough to hurt the ear, "there's suthin' about me--different. An' they feel as if, if they owned me body an' soul they'd be--I dunno what they'd be."

"They think they'd be G.o.ds," Nan's mind supplied. "You are beauty, Tira.

You are the cup. They think if they could drink of you they would never thirst again."

"An' now," said Tira, "s'pose a man like--like him--s'pose it looked to him some minute he never'd so much as expected--s'pose it looked to him as if he'd be made if he owned me body an' soul. Well! That's easy, you say. If I love him, what's my body an' what's my soul? Offer 'em to him, quick. An' wouldn't I, if that was all? Wouldn't I?"

She called it sharply, in an angry challenge.

"Yes," said Nan quietly, "I know you would."

"Well," said Tira, "what then? It wouldn't be any more"--her eyes, glancing here and there in troubled search for help in her impossible task of speech--"like them daffies over there. 'Twould be--mud."

This, though it did not satisfy her, carried an ineffable loathing, the loathing that had its seed in the pathway of her difficult life.

"Now," she said, "you set by him, don't you?"

"Yes," said Nan.

"If 'twas your body an' soul, they'd be nothin' to you if he needed 'em."

"Nothing."

"An' you're goin' to stan' by him, an' if you marry away from him----"

"Never mind that," said Nan. "What do you want me to do?"

"I want you," said Tira, "to see what I mean. An' I want you to tell it or not to tell it, as it seems best. An' if ever the time comes, when it'll do him good to know I run away from him because he was my life an'

my soul an' my G.o.d, you tell him. An' if it ain't best for him to know, you let it rest betwixt you an' me."

"But, Tira," said Nan, "you're coming back?"

Tira considered.

"You see," she answered finally, "I've got my walkin' papers, as you might say. The baby's gone. 'Twas the baby that made trouble betwixt his father an' me. An' now there won't be no reason for my hidin' in the shack up there or even pa.s.sin' the time o' day with you, either of you.

An' that's a kind of a runnin' away, ain't it? Shouldn't you call it runnin' away?"

She smiled dimly, and Nan said:

"Yes. But I shall come over to the Donnyhills' to-morrow."

"Yes," said Tira, "so do. Now I'd better go."

They got up and Nan put her hands on Tira's shoulders--and one hand was numb from that iron clasp--and stood looking at her. Nan was not a kissing woman, but she considered whether she should kiss her, to show she loved her. She thought not. Tira's body had so revolted against life, the life of the earth that had grown up into a jungle, that it would be kinder to leave it inviolate even by a touch.