Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress

I

“Tirra-lirra, tirra-loo, tirra-lirra, tirra-lee—”

“That doesn’t make sense, daddy.”

“Neither it does. But what does it matter? What’s the difference between a loo and a lee? And now then, young woman, how about getting out of that there bath. It’s late! Look how late it is! It’s autumn! The leaves are falling off the trees! It’s going to be cold, you’ll catch your death of cold!”

“Oh, but it’s so nice in here. Can I do just one handsquirt, just one?”

“Just one. And the leaves came tumbling down—”

“Why do the leaves come off the trees, daddy?”

“Now out you get. Up—!”

He loved to feel the firm small wet body, the compact little chest, between his hands, the legs wriggling and thrusting for the bathmat as he put her down: it was as good as eating, as good as drinking. As good as singing, as good as autumn. The round face, the blue eyes, emerged from the rapid towel to say:

“But why do the leaves tumble off the trees!”

“Listen to them scuttling like mice in the pathway, listen to them blowing!”

“But why, but why!”

“I’ll tell you what it is, Buzzer, it’s a mystery.”

“A mystery!”

They gazed together, turning, out of the little groundfloor window of the bathroom, watched the poplar leaves floating down, streaming on air, wafts and drifts and chains of them, golden and endless — like a kind of music, he thought, as inexhaustible and without origin as music.

“But of course you wouldn’t know what a mystery is, would you?”

“A mystery, a mystery, a mystery—”

“It’s a nice word, and a very important one. It’s one of those words as big as a barn door, as big as a circus tent, as big as a railway station, as big as a hollowed-out mountain, so that you can drive anything you like into it — herds of sheep, flocks of cattle, horses, trucks, armies, wagons, cannons, ideas, stars, worlds, moons — in fact, anything you like. See?”

“Now my hands!”

“Did I forget those hands—? Foo! But you see, my pet, it’s like this. Once a year the trees all get very tired, and very sleepy, and they want to go to bed.”

“To bed! Ho ho, how silly, as if a tree could go to bed! Ho ho!”

“Yes, sir, to bed. They want to go to sleep, and so what do they do? They do just exactly what you do, they take off their clothes.”

“And the leaves are their clothes! But we don’t have leaves for clothes, daddy!”

“Ah, that’s just where you’re wrong. Didn’t you ever hear tell of Mother Eve?”

“Of course! Eve and Adam were the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. Anybody knows that. Now my toes!”

She lifted one foot, waggled the toes at him.

“Quite right. And you see, Eve wore a fig leaf, that’s what she did—”

“And took it off in the autumn, when she wanted to go to sleep?”

“Well, I daresay. Anyway, that’s what they say she wore — you’d think it must have been a little bit chilly, wouldn’t you! Tirra-lirra, tirra-loo—”

“And then do the trees go to sleep?”

She put her hands on the window sill, to look again at the falling of the leaves, automatically raised them as he lowered the little nightgown over the curled head, and worked them skilfully through the sleeves, the face with primmed mouth once more emerging in triumph, like a seal from a wave.

“The trees, bless their hearts, go to sleep. All winter they just dream and rest, exactly, for all the world, as if they were in their beds. After all, you have flower beds, you know!”

“Ho ho — and who’d like to sleep in a flower bed! Not me!”

He turned her around, opened the door, smacked her small bottom, guided her toward the hall with a firm finger planted in the middle of her back.

“Well, off to your own, then, if you like that better. Quick! March!”

Ahead of him, she scrambled barefoot up the painted stairs, straddling a little to do so, and he followed smiling. Wind-borne and uneven, he heard the church clock striking seven, and listened, as always, for the queer quavering stammer of the final stroke. The Unitarian Church, the village, the main street, the post office, the evening mail — already the loquacious line would be forming in the shabby little post office, the townsfolk would be there for the evening inspection of each other, the evening spying into each other’s affairs. And there might be a letter — his heart began to beat more quickly — he mustn’t think of that. And yet, why not? It ought to seem particularly naughty — just now, just here — with Buzzer reaching up to trip the latch of the dusk-filled bedroom — but it didn’t. No morals in nature, none!

“Tirra-lee!” he said, “and into bed with you.”

“Why did you give me my bath? Why didn’t mummy give me my bath?”

“Because mummy was very tired, see?”

“Well, then, you must tell me a story.”

“I’ll tell you a story about John McGlory—”

“Not that one!”

“I’ll tell you another about his brother—”

“No, no, no, no, no!”

“There isn’t time tonight, my pet. The world’s coming to an end any minute now, and daddy must be there to see it. In with you!”

He threatened her comically, with raised hand, and, pretending alarm, she skipped into the little cot, whipping the pink feet under the blue counterpane, with its embroidered birds.

“Ho ho,” she said, “you can’t fool me! It isn’t coming to an end! Good night.”

“Good night.”

He stooped to kiss the still damp cheek; the blue eyes looked abstractedly past him, she was already dismissing him, she had already begun to sing her night-song. Good lord — he thought — how quickly they do it, how quickly they swoop from one world into another! If it was only as easy as that! Patting her knee idly, and straightening up, he looked through the screened window into the little garden, saw Chattahoochee, the cat, in the act of sitting down demurely under the poor bare-armed little plum tree — if ever a tree had committed suicide, that one had — and beyond it, beyond the low white fence, Mrs. Purington moving about in her kitchen next door. A motor boat was chugging in the river, probably Mr. Riley, the fisherman, back from scalloping, the dirty blue boat, foul with fish scales, approaching the Town Landing — maybe it would be a good idea to go and see. On his way to the post office? Afterward? In case there should be a letter—? He frowned as he turned away and closed the white door behind him, frowned as he hesitated at the top of the stairs. But there was Enid, there was Endor, there was Ee — he could hear her in the kitchen now, the clink of a saucepan on the stove, or the sink — and resentment was unmistakable in the sound, it had been piling up all day. Odd, how one knows — just as one knows a storm is approaching, feels it in the air — the distant mutter even while the sky is still hot and cloudless, the first little sinister breeze turning the silver seams of the poplar trees, a chill draft from the southwest, and then the mounting purple of the clouds, and the Unitarian church steeple turning — suddenly — a livid tombstone white. He took out the watch from the pocket of his khaki trousers — how ridiculous, he knew perfectly well what time it was — and replaced it without looking at it. And now, on top of everything else, this unfortunate business of Jim Connor—

He rattled down the steps, to let Enid know that he was coming — and coming cheerfully — paused at the entrance to the cluttered little studio living room, looked in. The last of the autumn sunlight slanted across the unfinished picture which stood on the easel — the colors jumped out awry, glowed, he felt himself flowing into that shape of ruin, that shape of an old barn on a tangled hill, amongst wild grass, wild lilacs, wild apple trees — but at once the current reversed itself, flowed back on itself, for once more it was unmistakably a failure — a dud, a flop. Impotence, impotence — the hand powerless to shape the actual, the vision powerless to purify its own shafts of light — what was the trouble, what the devil was it? Deep and perhaps inoperable as a cancer, the fine roots untraceably spread and wound in the unconscious, in his whole life — it was perhaps the life itself which was all wrong, wrongly rooted — what was needed was a giant sponge, a new start. But where? Not here. Not with this hall stove which must soon be laid and lit, the coals fetched in from the woodshed in the garden, the ashes dumped on the rain-gutted road that led down to the Town Landing — and yet, why not? Why not indeed! This was rich, real, rank — as rank as the snarled nasturtiums on the river wall at the foot of the garden, as rank as marsh and seaweed, the crawling mudflats at low tide, or the winter, which would presently howl its snows and bitter stars about the small wooden houses of the village, freezing the pipes, sending icy drafts up through the cracks between bare floorboards, chilling the rooms with white light through frosted windows. Real enough, Christ, yes! And as real too as the sound of running water which now came from the kitchen sink.

In the dining room, two silver candlesticks on the table, which had not been set, and Buzzer’s porringer on her own little white table under the window — he picked it up, for it would be an ambassador for him, and went down the two steps into the kitchen lean-to.

“Here’s these,” he said.

“Well, put them down!”

Dark curls turning on the pink smock, the small stubborn head half turning, the liquid green eyes — lovely! — flashing toward and past him, but on a level lower than his own, not meeting his, lowering again to the bright collander in which she was shaking potatoes. The potatoes were very important; she was humming to herself, preoccupied, a cloud of steam rose softly from the kettle on the stove.

“All bathed and abed,” he said, “and went like a lamb.”

“Did you give her a quilt? It’s going to be cold.”

“No, I didn’t think of it.”

“Never mind, then, I’ll do it myself.”

“I thought I’d go for the mail.”

“It couldn’t possibly wait till after supper, I suppose.”

“My dear Ee, you know it would be closed.”

“And is there any such important mail that it can’t wait till morning?”

“Just the same, I think I’ll go, if you don’t mind.…”

She made no answer as he let himself out through the garden door. The screen clacked behind him, he walked slowly around the back of the house, and looked down over the sloping lawn towards the river and the Town Landing. Mr. Riley, on the cabin roof of the blue motorboat, was in the act of stepping across, rubber-booted, to the rotten piles of the wharf — tomorrow there would be scallops — and a car could be heard kicking up the loose boards of the bridge, rumbling and rattling as it came, then accelerating swiftly as it shot up the sandy road past the Bank, scattering dead leaves lavishly to left and right.

Leaves everywhere — the road that led to the Town Landing was ankle-deep with them, they lay in loose golden drifts on the field where Mr. Riley’s nets were spread out to dry, from the tall poplars even now they floated down in lazy parallel chains and curves, they clung about the fading stalks of the chicory, whose last blue flowers glowed like pale stars. Another night, another frost, and the trees would be bare — summer was over. Tirra-loo-tirra-lee! “Shadows rising on you and me”—shadows rising was good, one could imagine the shadows rising like water, like a tide, like these full-moon tides. Coming up about one’s feet, climbing, deepening — but it was no joke, it was all too true! No letter from Nora, not a word in two weeks, and this on top of her refusal — unwillingness? inability? — to see him last time, and the time before that the unfortunate meeting at the hotel in Boston, and now, as if that wasn’t enough, this damned Jim Connor business, and Enid—

Mr. Murphy, getting out of his Ford, just back from the evening train with the mails, waved from his yard, and on the piazza of the Murphy boarding house the old loony was sitting, Miss Schermerhorn, rocking herself intently in a rocking chair, her eyes fixed brightly on the road. She beckoned to him, leaned forward, said mysteriously:

“Did you hear anything, mister?”

“No?”

“It’s the water running, the water running in the cellar, they forgot to turn it off!”

“Oh!”

“Yes, they’d ought to be told, they went away and left it running!”

“Very well, I’ll tell them.”

She looked unconvinced, but also as if it didn’t much matter, and resumed her rocking. What a village! Every other person cracked or feeble-minded — gone to seed. Dear old Mrs. Chandler, the seamstress, stopping everybody in the streets — of course, it was the only trace of anything wrong with her, otherwise she was perfectly normal — to talk about underclothes, and apropos of absolutely nothing. The weather, the news, the children, the yacht races, the taxes, the church supper — and then suddenly the vital, the burning, question, toward which she had been cunningly working all the time, the dark and precious secret. Yes, I like silk, I like silk, but then don’t you think there is something really nicer, really cleaner, about linen? I change sometimes nine or ten times a day! And Mrs. Kimpton, the washerwoman, with her obscure passion for corsets! Always poking about in the town dump for new specimens — no matter in what state of dilapidation — going there day after day — and then putting them up all round her living-room, as one might put flowers, or pictures! What the devil was that all about? A mystery, as Buzzer had said, a mystery, a mystery! But no stranger, perhaps, than wanting to paint.

Two men were standing outside the post-office door, talking, and when he went into the post office, now empty, and peered into Box 67 in the slant light, that too was empty. Nothing. Not a word, not a scrap — nothing. He turned, walked out slowly, paused on the little triangular corner of gravel outside, looked unseeing to left and right.

“When was that, that it became that amount?”

“Just before I went into the hospital.”

“And what did you do, did you tell her about it before you went into the hospital?”

“Sure I did. What do you take me for!”

“Well, I don’t understand it, and that’s a fact.”

He crossed the street, took the long way around the block, scuffed the dead leaves with dusty shoes. Empty again. Empty! But it was himself who felt empty: a slow and hollow pang, a queer mixture of guilt and suffering. But why feel guilty now, if — as it appeared — she had decided to end the affair, to drop him? It didn’t make sense. Understandable enough that he should feel ashamed when he got a letter, to read it and carry it about in secret, or burn it slyly in the fireplace — but why now, when perhaps the whole delicious exciting thing might be over, and his integrity (willy-nilly) restored? Of course, he had seen it coming — it had begun when he moved to the country, and couldn’t see her so often, or thought he couldn’t. She hadn’t reproached him, but just the same you couldn’t blame her! Thought he couldn’t! Ah! of course! The truth was that he could have seen her, and even oftener, if he had then really wanted to; but that he himself had definitely not felt like it. Yes. He had been a little bored, a little depressed, by the continuous necessity for secrecy and furtiveness, had simply wanted a rest. And Nora had seen through it.

Oh, well, maybe it was all for the best. It would certainly simplify things, makes things easier with Enid?… The slow pang hollowed itself out in his breast again — dear delightful humorous Nora! — but he quenched it, looked away from it, looked down through the Puringtons’ garden at the river and the dismasted hulks which lay on their sides on the farther shore — rotting, like so many other things in this sleepy little town — and then, with quicker steps, and a clear sense of relief — or no, not quite that, not quite, but at any rate a sharper sense of detachment and singleness with which to face Enid — he entered his own garden. He walked past the house, toward the back. Terence’s blue wagon stood there, looking very large in the twilight, the horse pawing at the grass, and Enid and Terence were talking at the kitchen door.

“It’s the lilacs,” Enid said. Her arms were folded across her breast, across the pink smock, and she addressed the remark rather to the wagon than to himself.

“Guess you got plenty of ’em, too, Mr. Kane, judging by the looks of those boxes!” Terence took out his clay pipe, grinned, spat.

“A hundred, Terence — ninety-seven plain, and three fancy! What are we going to do with them?”

Enid turned and opened the kitchen door.

“And when you’ve finished—” she looked down toward the river—“there’s some one in the sitting room, the studio, waiting to see you.”

The door clacked shut behind her — why the devil couldn’t she say who it was!

“Well, Mr. Kane, guess we’d better get ’em in tonight. ’Twon’t do ’em no good to lay around here in the frost!”

“You think there’s going to be a frost?”

“A good one. I’ll come over after supper and bring a shovel.”

“Okay, Terence. Let me know and I’ll give you a hand.”

“They sure packed ’em up good. Quite a weight, too. I thought I’d bust a gut!”

The three boxes lay like great coffins on the grass, the torn grass, the sand showing where the box corners had gouged through the thin topsoil, and Terence kicked one of them affectionately with the toe of a heavy boot.

“And where did you have it in mind to put them?”

Together they looked along the sloping garden, now growing dark, the bare little garden which led down to the river. The river gleamed almost unnaturally in the queer light — bat-light, he thought, betwixt-light, the hour of the mosquito — but later, of course, there would be the full moon.

“Wants two nights for the full moon,” Terence added. “Guess we can make out to see, all right!”

“All along both sides, Terence — right from the street on that side and from the back of the kitchen on this. And then a few across the middle there, halfway down, leaving just a sort of gateway through to the lower terrace. Where you built the wall.”

“Never will I forget those fleas!”

“Yes, that was funny.”

“It was all them rats. Yes, sir, it was from them rats they come; foh, I never saw such filth in all my life, no, sir! Why, there was millions of them, that soil and muck and seaweed was full of them, and I begun scratching, and old Bill he begun scratching, we didn’t know what it was. But we found out, all right! Gorry! When I got home, I stood up on the middle of a blanket, without nary a stitch on, and a bucket of water beside me, and hoo didn’t the little buggers hop! It was all right for me, but poor old Bill, he was half blind, he couldn’t see much, and they sure did make him miserable! He was in a torment.”

“I remember those rats; they lived in the cellar-hole, and down in the corner where the pigsty used to be.…”

Terence chuckled, they both chuckled, then Terence took the reins of the horse, and began backing and turning the wagon.

“I’ll be in later, then,” he said.

“All right. Give me a shout. Sure you don’t mind, Terence?”

“Glad to do it. No good putting dead lilacs into the ground, is there?”

“No!”

The reflector lamp had been lit in the kitchen, on the shelf behind the coal stove, and in the dining room the candle flames rose pale and tall on the table, where Enid sat witchlike, her elbows on the polished walnut, her cheeks on her fists. The yellow light narrowed and brightened the green gleam of her eyes, but he couldn’t be sure whether they quite looked at him. She was waiting, visibly waiting, and at once it was as if some obscure current had stiffened and frozen between them.

“Who is it?” he said.

“George.”

“Why couldn’t you have said so!”

“Was there any necessity? He’s got something of considerable interest, you’ll find, to say about your friend Jim Connor.”

“Oh, he has!”

“Yes. And might I remind you that dinner is ready? I think he could have chosen a better time to call. He knows perfectly well what time we have dinner.”

“Very well, you needn’t wait for me.”

“Thank you, I’ll wait!”

“I don’t think you’d better.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, nothing. But it might take some time!”

He made this remark as if humorously, over his shoulder, looking back from the doorway. She still sat unmoving, but now the green eyes were subtly lifted and turned towards him, with an expression, however, which he hadn’t time to fathom. Good lord, he thought quickly, how lovely she is, it isn’t fair! Not fair to man or beast. Nobody has a right to be as beautiful as that, or if they have, they shouldn’t be allowed to sit in candle light.

The studio was half dark, and George stood tall and white as a ghost by the fireplace, his striped palmbeach suit immaculate as always, the Panama hat in his hand. He was on his dignity, a little formidable and formal, the man of property come to uphold his rights.

“Hello, didn’t Enid give you a light?”

“Ah, I’m afraid I’ve come at an inconvenient moment, Tip, but I thought as you’d be going up to town tomorrow I mightn’t catch you—”

“Not till the day after. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays!”

The bright blue eyes twinkled mischievously behind the black-corded glasses, the magisterial headmasterly head, with its close gray curls, inclined just perceptibly forward in the ghost of a bow. He slapped his hat, as if irritatedly, against his knee, turning slowly towards the struck match, the lighted candle on the mantel, the piled pine logs and pine cones in the wide fireplace.

“Forgive me, old fellow — how stupid of me. Of course.”

“Sit down. What’s on your mind?”

“Didn’t Enid tell you?”

“Well, she murmured something about Jim Connor—”

George motioned with his hat towards the picture on the easel, as he sat down.

“Looks kind of familiar,” he said. “Charming, my boy! Weir Village, isn’t it?”

“Large as life.”

“And twice as natural!”

He crossed his long legs, first carefully pulling up the exquisitely creased white trousers.

“Well, what about Jim Connor?”

“That’s what I want to know. What we all want to know.”

“Who is ‘all’?”

“I won’t mention any names, if you don’t mind, but I’ve talked it over with several people—”

“The town fathers, I suppose?”

“No, not yet. Of course not, Tip. I wanted first to see you.”

“Very kind of you.”

“Not at all. And you needn’t be sarcastic!”

“All right, go ahead.”

“Perhaps you could tell me something about him. I think we have a right to know a little more — unless, of course, you want to be responsible for him, which personally I wouldn’t recommend! There is such a thing as being an accessory before the fact, you know — you’d be conniving!”

“How so? I don’t know a thing.”

“You know he’s a thief! And we hear that he’s going to continue being a thief while he’s living here.”

“You know more than I do then!”

“I judge merely from what Enid said.”

“Enid’s only source of information, as far as I am aware, is myself.”

“Well, my dear fellow, you must realize what we feel about it. We can’t allow thieves around, you know — there is such a thing as law, after all! Just the same, I don’t want to be unreasonable, and as he’s a friend of yours, I thought it only fair to give you and him warning.”

“Warning?”

“Exactly. It will be my duty as a citizen to notify the police.”

(Damn! So that was what they were up to—! And Enid too.)

“Now look here, George—”

He broke off, gave an angry little laugh. It was funny — it was really too funny. The upright but misguided Jim — and yet, was he misguided? — causing all this fuss. And the idea of notifying poor old bewildered Uncle Cy William, the Town Constable, who had never made an arrest in his life! But George was leaning back in his chair, smiling cynically, his curled leonine head outlined against the open window — he was going to be difficult, he was going to be truculent. The defender of the faith — confound his impertinence! And the worst of it was that, within his limits, he was perfectly right.

George was saying, twirling the Panama hat round a raised forefinger:

“How long exactly have you known him, by the way, Tip? It isn’t as if he was really an old friend of yours, is it?”

“I think I told you. He came up to town with my friend Karl Roth, the painter — that was last spring. I liked him. He struck me at once as one of the few honest people I ever met.”

“Honest!”

“Yes. I mean it. The stealing is only an idea, a protest — he’s an anarchist and unlike most anarchists he practices what he preaches — doesn’t believe in trade for profit or in property being used for profit by barter. And so he steals merely in order to redistribute goods which he thinks are unjustly divided — he doesn’t make anything out of it himself — not a cent — gives it all away to the poor and deserving. With a special weakness for helping starving painters and poets.”

“And you believe that!”

“Of course I do. He’s perfectly candid about it — he even notifies the police himself, sometimes in advance, when he’s planning a haul, so as to get himself arrested and air his views in court. Sends the district attorney a picture postcard! They’re tired of him. They’d much rather look the other way, I can assure you! And he’s actually done a lot of good — he’s helped some of the poor creatures a great deal.”

“The whole thing’s a fake, my dear Tip, and I’m surprised you don’t see through it, I really am! Why, those dingy little poets and painters are nothing but parasites, it’s just a dishonest and easy living for the whole lot of them. Mind you, I don’t care what he does in New York or Greenwich Village — let him do it all he likes down there! But, by gosh, it’s another thing when he comes up here, and takes the most expensive cottage in town with his ill-gotten gains, and proposes to use this as his center of operations! That’s too much, yes, sir, that’s a bit too much.”

“You’re quite safe. He doesn’t rob houses, and you won’t miss any of your silver. You can reassure Mabel!”

“It doesn’t make any difference, as far as I can see, what he steals.”

“Only department stores. He specializes in robbing big department stores. I think it’s kind of nice, at that!”

“You’ve got a right to your own opinion, but, my dear boy, I beg you to consider your position very carefully. I don’t want to see you get into any trouble.”

“Who’s likely to make trouble?”

“I am! And you can tell him that from me. And you can tell him he’d better keep out of my way. I don’t want to meet him. Nor his houseful of very peculiar-looking friends.”

“There’ll be no occasion, I assure you.”

“They all look like crooks to me!”

“They’re quite harmless, they’re just a little crazy.”

“Every man to his own taste, said the farmer, as he kissed the pig! Anyway, you tell your friend Connor that I’ve warned him, and that I reserve the right to inform the police without further notice. I trust that’s quite clear?”

“Quite, my dear George. I’ll take Connor your tender message. Not that he’s really a friend of mine — I hardly know him!”

“If you’ve got any sense, you’ll drop him. But I must be going.”

“I’ll walk down to the bridge with you.”

Good old George — so well-meaning, but such a righteous idiot! Hopeless to expect anything else of him, of course — one had only to look at the beautiful suit, the hat, the suède shoes, the neat black spectacle cord — but how damned exasperating. And what had he been saying to Enid? Or she to him? The thick was plottening, and with a vengeance, it looked like being a first-class mess. The property instinct — this was what came of owning a colonial mansion and a Pierce-Arrow car, by god! You couldn’t blame him, but all the same he was somehow less pleasant to consider than poor honest Connor, for all his crack-brained confusions and inconsistencies. Connor was at least generous.

They walked down the Town Landing lane in the dark. The big moon was just rising over the pine woods across the river, the crickets were chirping like mad, faster and faster, doubtless in a last passionate effort to keep themselves warm. Already the night smelt of frost. He turned his head, saw the dim light between the dining-room curtains — a shadow moved briefly across them, Enid must have decided to begin without him. But no — she was playing the piano; the little Brahms Op. 39 waltz came plaintively into the night, across the rustling of the trodden leaves and the iterated zeek-zeek-zeek of the doomed crickets — it was, of course, a protest. He smiled, and said:

“A pity you won’t meet them, though — Roth would amuse you. And those gals are a scream. Gosh, what a night!”

“Jove, yes! My dear fellow, of course there’s nothing personal in it, and I’m thinking as much of your good, yours and Enid’s and even Buzzer’s, as mine. A fine sort of scandal to get your family mixed up in! But never mind.… I hear your lilacs have come.”

“Yes. Terence is coming over to put them in before the frost.”

“You’ll have to get a move on. They’ll look well, all along that wall — you know, I often think of that little plum tree — wasn’t that the strangest thing you ever saw? Covered with blossom, not an inch of branch that wasn’t covered with blossom, and then dead so soon after — a week, was it?”

“One week. A suicide, if there ever was one. Why the devil should it want to commit suicide?”

“Oh, well, my dear boy, there are more things in heaven and earth — a good way to die, though.”

A little smug, a little suave — but sincere, too, it was old George’s attempt at amends, and had better be accepted as such. A car was rattling over the loose boards of the bridge, the headlights shot up the sandy rise of the road, throwing the heaped leaves into brilliant relief. Yes, the little plum tree — how beautiful it had been and how touching — he remembered just exactly how it had looked, remembered it with a pang, for now it must be uprooted, thrown away. Poor little thing.

“Well, good night, I must turn back. Ee will be waiting.”

“Good night, old man, and don’t take it too unkindly of me.”

“Of course not. I’ll be seeing you!”

“Good night.”

The tall white figure was gone, swerving quickly round the corner of the tumble down tollhouse, the thicket of rusty sumacs growing from the cellar holes, the clutter of rotting boards and shingles — he would be walking across the moonlit bridge, looking down at the dark swift water where the red sponges grew on barnacled rock, walking importantly in the moonlight, swinging the beautiful Panama hat, his errand accomplished. Smiling to himself a little too, no doubt, as he prepared the phrases for Mabel and turned up Chicken-coop Lane towards the pine woods and the cranberry bog and the cluster of houses on the Point. Snob’s Village, the natives called it — and with some justice, by god. They wanted everything their own way. Even to choosing the tenants for empty houses.

Tirra-loo — tirra-lee! Mr. Riley’s fishing nets lay like a mist on the grass and leaves, a ghostly blue, a milky blue, chicory-color, blue reticulated with silver, semined with silver, and he walked carefully round them, admiring the cork floats. Leaves on them, too, a fine catch of yellow leaves for breakfast, which at daybreak Mr. Riley would shake out in the frost. And Chattahoochee would be there, hoping for fish.

At the edge of the lane he paused, stood still on the bouldered wall, listened. The piano had stopped; except for the crickets, everything was silent. How small the house looked under the moon-charmed poplar trees — like something at the bottom of the sea, he thought, a sunken ship, something lost and forgotten. But Enid was somewhere there inside it, like a mermaid, and Buzzer asleep under the silver-gray shingled roof, and through a chink in the dining-room curtains he could see the warm glow of the candlelight, the gleaming corner of the piano. A strange and different reality it had, something safe and solid and enclosed, and yet wasn’t it actually less real, less permanent, than the unfathomable sea of moonlight in which it lay, the appalling emptiness of night and space? The terror of space would endure; but some day the house would be gone, and Buzzer, and Ee and himself — the bare earth turning frozen under the stars.… He shivered, smiled, jumped down into the road, where the gray ashes lay in the half-filled ruts, and ran up the wooden stairs into the kitchen.

“I do think,” Enid said levelly across the dinner table, as he sat down, her eyes and brow barely raised between the paired candles, “you might have been a little more considerate!”

“My dear Ee, how can I help it? If old George must come bumbling in just at dinner time — as you yourself pointed out—”

“That’s all very well. But you needn’t have gone out with him, knowing as you did that dinner was on the table, and everything getting cold. I should have thought—”

“I’m sorry, darling.”

“You’d better eat your eggs, they’re quite cold as it is! Besides, I should have thought that you’d have wanted to discuss it with George of your own accord, beforehand, and gone to see him.”

The half-smile she gave him was a little nettled, a little firm and cryptic, a slight frown went with it, and the grave eyes, barely touching his own glance for a moment, wavered sidelong, gazed preoccupiedly into the corner behind him. Her elbows on the table, in the pink-smocked sleeves, she was eating a biscuit in very small quick bites, the silver butter knife held lightly in her other hand. He noticed that her chair was drawn crookedly to the table, which gave her the effect of not quite facing him. Or of being poised for departure.

“Discuss what, dear.”

“Oh, come, Timothy!”

She was looking straight at him — for the first time, it seemed to him, in hours — and in a sense this was a relief. A challenging look, the beautiful eyes brilliant under dark eyebrows faintly lowered, the wide white forehead smooth in the soft light. And the richly modeled Botticelli mouth, so firm and lovely — what a disadvantage a man is at, he thought, in having, even at moments like this, to pause and pay tribute! Poor devil, he has to face treason in his own citadel.

He smiled and said:

“Well, I suppose you mean Jim Connor — especially as it appears you’ve been having quite a heart-to-heart with George on the subject yourself.”

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“Is there any reason why you should?”

“Well, why not?”

“It seems to me it’s my affair. It’s to do with my friends, isn’t it?”

“Friends!”

“I should have thought you could have left it to me.”

“I don’t agree with you. It seems to me to concern me and Buzzer quite as much as it concerns you. But, of course, you wouldn’t think of that. You never do. Any more than it occurred to you to consider George.”

“Why the devil should I have considered George! What business was it of his!”

“He’s your oldest friend here, isn’t he? I should have thought it would be only natural.”

“Natural, my foot! It’s none of George’s business. For that matter, it’s really none of my business either. If Jim Connor takes a fancy to this place, and wants to have a holiday here, and give some poor half-starved devils of Greenwich Village poets and painters a rest and change, who the devil is George, or who the devil am I, that we should take it upon ourselves to kick him out! Have a heart, Ee — and don’t live all your life on County Street, New Bedford, or Beacon Street, Boston! Besides, I didn’t ask Jim Connor to come here, remember, and if I like Jim, and he likes me, that’s a mere accident. And in many ways a very fortunate one.”

“I don’t think the sneer at County Street becomes you.”

“Sorry, Endor!”

“And say what you will, respectability has its uses. It’s all very well for adolescents to want to live in slums—”

“Adolescents!”

“But when it comes to bringing up children, I draw the line.”

“So we’re bringing up Buzzer in a slum! Really, Ee, you’re losing your sense of humor a little. I haven’t noticed any slums around. Go out and look at the moonlight, my gal, and those lilacs waiting to be planted, and tell me it’s a slum! It’s lovely, and you know it.”

“No, Tip, I know all that. But it isn’t only this, it isn’t only Jim Connor, who is after all nothing but a jailbird, and those very nondescript young women he’s brought with him—”

“Nondescript! Ho, what an adjective.”

“Will you let me finish? Please? It’s the whole tendency, I mean, it’s your whole leaning towards this kind of thing. It simply isn’t fair to me.”

“I see. So you took it upon yourself to talk it all over with old George. Discussing my affairs with him behind my back.”

“Not at all! George brought it up himself.”

“Even going so far as to tell him — what you don’t know to be true — that Jim is going to continue stealing while he’s living here. May I ask how you knew that?”

“I thought it was assumed.”

“Nothing of the sort. You don’t know anything more about it than I do, and I know nothing. As far as I’m aware, Jim himself is still undecided. It seems to me a little reckless of you, not to say mischievous, to make statements which have no basis in fact, and to George of all people! I think you might have asked me about it first, at least, and taken the trouble to corroborate it.”

“Your usual tactics, I see, of putting me in the wrong. On a minor point!”

She rose before he could reply, began piling the dishes, very carefully, very precisely, her small hands white under the candlelight, the proud head turning quickly and angrily. Imperious, imperial — yes, even the full throat, which showed through the V-shaped opening of the smock, was imperial and intimidating, for all its mature splendor, and the dark curls, as she turned away and went toward the kitchen steps, themselves turned on the pink collar with a sparkling arrogance which seemed to sum up all vitality. He pushed back his chair, reached a hand to the piano, and struck a note, softly, with one finger. Her voice came to him again, from the door — she had paused, with her cheek half turned, as if she were looking out into the garden towards the little dead plum tree.

“The water, by the way,” she said, “is very low.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew.”

“Of course not! I suppose it was Buzzer’s bath—”

“And don’t forget, either, that I did a whole morning’s washing! The cesspool was flooded again.”

“The devil it was!”

“Yes. I called up Binney. He’s coming in the morning. He says we’ll probably need to have an extra one put in.”

He struck the one note again, listened to it idly, wondered for a moment if the candle flames could feel the vibration — but no, they were perfectly still, rose motionless in the quiet room, as steady and beautiful as peacock’s eyes, and the room around them as attentive — with its chairs arranged demurely against the walls of white wood, the lustrous mahogany lowboy, the Chinese embroidery of birds and dragons — as if it existed for them alone. Peace — peace — peace—the crickets were singing in the moonlight outside — the rhythmic incantatory sound was everywhere, came into everything, saturated everything, like a mist. Another night like this, poor devils, and they’d be singing a different tune. Was it love? Was it defiance? Or just a sort of mesmerism, a subtle electric response — or spiritual, even — to the earth itself? Exactly like himself and Enid. A mere sidereal response.

In the kitchen, under the luminous whitewashed rafters, Enid had turned on the tap, was rinsing the dishes, shaking the water off her hand. He pulled the screen door towards him, caught it against his foot, and said:

“Well, for goodness’ sake, why so secretive, Ee? Why not tell a fellow!”

“Your door was shut, so I assumed you were painting.”

“Damn. And just as I’ve finally got some grass to grow.”

He stepped into the bright sea of moonlight, feeling for all the world as if positively it might lift him off his feet, float him up over the roof top, over the trees, and went slowly to the white-shingled pump house behind the kitchen. The old w.c. A good idea, that had been, moving it from the back of the yard, and turning it into a pump house — one more example of the unwearying adaptability of nature. After all, too, the function was roughly the same, if a shade more refined. And those squashes that he had grown on the former site, the former unsavory site — those man-eating squashes — by god, would anybody ever forget them? They hadn’t been squashes at all, they had been saber-toothed tigers. And leaves the size of howdahs, or palanquins, or something.… In the cool dark, he stooped toward the compact little engine, fitted the crank handle to it, spun it, spun it again. It caught, coughed, wheezed, then gave three barks in rapid succession and was off.

“Like a lamb,” he said. “Like a lamb!”

The pump shaft groaned musically in the bricked well below him, he heard the first chuckle of flowing water from underground, the indicator over the kitchen sink would be beginning to fidget and dance; but averting his eyes from the thought of the new cesspool, as from the three ghostly boxes of lilacs which lay like coffins on the lawn, he averted his attention from all this as well. Damn. And doing a whole morning’s washing. And not bothering to tell him about it, just ordering Binney herself. And George. And Nora. And Jim Connor. And the bills — the next thing would, of course, be the bills. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. It was all becoming a colossal, an overwhelming joke, a sort of decuman wave of joke, which was piling up to sweep away everything — himself, Enid, Buzzer, the house — everything. In fact, it was ceasing rapidly to be a joke at all. Peace — peace — peace—sang the crickets. Peace? The hell you say, he thought. We ask for peace and they give us a stone. If indeed even a stone. They give us nothing.

“I suppose you couldn’t bear,” Enid said as he opened the door, “to lend me a hand with these few dishes.”

“I don’t know whether I can bear it, if you choose to put it like that, but I will.”

The challenge again — her eyes flashed handsomely at him, with something that was almost like admiration, and returned to the steaming dishpan, the Himalaya of soft suds in which she was waggling the dish mop. She was humming a little, under her breath, as she always did when she was preoccupied, or tired, or annoyed — tonelessly, tunelessly — a charming and pathetic sing-song which always tickled him, and endeared her to him. No ear for music at all — or was it that she was practicing the Chinese whole-tone scale? Very modern and polychromatic, he had often told her, and written, as it were, without signature. The indicator danced in its dial over the sink, from the pipes came the regular half-musical joog — joog — joog of the pumped water pressing its way everywhere, to every corner of that elaborate arterial artifice of pipes, to every tap, and into the cold heart of the great tank buried underground. But no, of course not, it was the engine that was the heart.

“And is that all?”

“That’s all. I’ll be in in a minute. And thank you.”

“Don’t mention.”

Her pink sleeves rolled back to the elbows, she reached bare-armed to toss a checkered cloth over the clothesline which stretched across the kitchen, and almost simultaneously, as he entered the dining room, he heard something thump heavily on the floor overhead, in Buzzer’s room. He stood still and listened.

“Something must have fallen, upstairs,” he said.

“Probably the doll.”

“She didn’t have a doll.”

“Well, why don’t you go and see! For heaven’s sake, Tip, why do you have to be so helpless!”

“Helpless!”

Helpless.… He lifted a candle from the dinner table, shielded it with one hand, and went quietly up the narrow stairs to the second floor. The upper hall was ablaze with moonlight. A great splash of it lay on the rugless floor and halfway up the wall, it poured through the low window — and to stand there, with his embarrassed candle, was exactly like being inside a camera during a time exposure. Must be what a film feels like, he thought, when you open the shutter: a sensation of flooding. Every cranny indecently exposed: or is it the world that’s exposed—? Helpless! He said it aloud as he opened Buzzer’s door; and there was Buzzer, standing bolt upright in the middle of the floor beside her bed, her eyes closed, her hands still crumpled against her cheek in the attitude of sleep. Yes, how extraordinary, she was fast asleep. She swayed a little, gropingly, as if trying to find something to relax against — how lovely, like something growing at the bottom of a stream, rooted among pebbles, wavering but tethered! He put the candle on the chair.

“Well, of all the nerve,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing, floating round in the moonlight like this! Aren’t you ashamed?”

“Mmm,” she said.

“I should think so. I suppose you fell out, eh?”

“Mmm,” she said.

“And had the sense not to wake up.”

“Mmm.”

“Well, I congratulate you. Now just stay asleep, and I’ll put you back, and you’ll never know the difference, see?”

She murmured against his neck, his cheek, as he lifted her back into bed, but she was already receding, she was already gone, and the firm little face, on the pillow, instantly averted itself into its chosen dream. What shape did she make of it? What shape was her world? What shape did she make of himself, his hands that touched her, the night sounds, the moon-maddened crickets? Ah, they were all there, in her dream, as a wonderful and forever-sustaining music, an unfailing love — it was the world as it should be, but as it so seldom, or so briefly, remains. Or were there terrors as well—? Yes, even here there were terrors. But fleeting, already dissipated, gone. Peace — peace — peace—sang the crickets, and here, at any rate, they were quite right. But downstairs—!

He heard Enid crossing the dining room — perhaps she was going to play the piano again? That melancholy and tender little waltz, with its series of murmured unanswerable questions. But no, she had gone on, had crossed the hall, he heard the two-toned squeak of the studio door, she was in the studio. Lighting the fire, perhaps, drawing the brown curtains, settling herself with her knitting; but, whatever she did, studiously ignoring the latest picture on the easel. Adolescent, of course! It was the old cry, the old war cry. Why don’t you grow up, Tip? Why not, indeed! Damn.

The doors to his own and Enid’s rooms were open, and he went into Enid’s to look for a moment from the north window toward the lagoons at the head of the river — he knew in advance how they would be sheeted with moonlight, as in winter they would be sheeted with ice. A single green light twinkled at the Point — somebody must be in Paul’s boathouse, probably Paul himself going out in his canoe. A tiny ticking sound reached his ear — it was Enid’s wrist watch, lying forgotten on her pillow, the small radium dial glowing faintly and hopefully in the dark. Why should there be something so moving, so touching in that — why, suddenly, did it make him think of death? Ridiculous. He straightened up, glanced through the open door beyond, which led into his own adjoining room, then returned into the hall, blew out the candle, and went slowly down the stairs.

In the studio, Enid was already sitting before the fire, her knees crossed, her back to the easel. The firelight flickered rosily on her face, her throat, her hands, flashed along the moving steel needles, twinkled in the buckles of her sandals. The bare white walls danced with light, the whole room seemed to be breathing flame. He went around her, turned the easel away, towards the bookcase, then approached the hearth and pushed back a log with the toe of his shoe.

“Besides, what I don’t see is,” she spoke without looking up, frowning prettily, the green flame-washed eyes lowered to the narrow strip of jersey which dangled from her needles, “what you can possibly get out of it.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Enid—!”

“What I don’t see is what possible good it can do you. I could understand your sacrificing yourself, and even me and Buzzer—”

“Sacrifice!”

“—if there were any real use in it. If they were useful connections, I mean. You won’t live in New Bedford or Boston, where you might pick up portrait commissions, or steady teaching—”

“I don’t want to do portraits.”

“—you throw away chances like that, and the connections I could have given you, for which I should have supposed some sacrifices might have been justified, and then live in this dreary little village where there’s no life at all for me—”

“It’s the first time I’d heard of that!”

“Well, it’s high time you did hear of it, for it’s true, and if you’d had any consideration you’d have thought of it yourself. And then, as if all that wasn’t enough, Tip, you make life more difficult still by associating with these really shabby and dreadful people. What earthly use can Roth be to you — or those dirty little females—”

“Really, Ee—!”

“Yes, dirty!”

“Roth’s a little cheap, and I know it, but he’s a good painter. Or interesting, anyway — by gosh, he’s at least alive, which is more than you can say for those Boston mummies! What’s more, it seems to me this is a question for me to decide. Not you. I must take what’s good where I can find it, that’s all. I’m afraid I don’t find it in the pure waters of County Street — give me the adulterous Greenwich Village sewers any day! And as for picking out my friends merely because they might be useful, good god, Ee, I never heard anything so revoltingly cynical and selfish and utilitarian in my life! You ought to be ashamed.”

“I suppose it’s selfish of me to ask you to consider the futures of Buzzer and myself! Is that it?”

“It isn’t as simple as that.”

“Oh, yes, it is. That’s exactly what it is. There are limits to what you can expect a wife to give up. This notion of living like your noble pioneer ancestors, without help, without maids, doing all our own work, is all very well, but you ask any of your friends what they think of it! Ask Paul, ask George, ask Mabel! I happen to know!”

“I see. So you’ve been crying on the public bosom.”

“I haven’t. They’ve made their feelings only too abundantly clear. And I can assure you it’s very humiliating.”

“Ah. So they’ve been crying on your bosom.”

“Not at all. They’ve merely been rather tactlessly sympathetic. And I assure you I haven’t enjoyed it in the least. It’s not exactly pleasant to have Mabel heavily hinting that you don’t properly provide for us—”

“Mabel! Well, of all the damned impertinence! And do you mean to say you listened to her?”

“Why not?”

“You ought to have turned your back. It’s none of her damned business. That spoiled, empty-headed, card-playing, prattling sybarite! Well, for the love of mud! Really, Enid, there are times when I have to blush for you. And this is certainly one of them.”

“I think you might do a little blushing for yourself.”

“No, thank you!”

She was silent, except for the steady clicking of the needles, her face had hardened (he noticed), with a sort of hard serenity, and he felt that his own face had hardened too, as if in answer. He sat down for a moment on the stool by the fire, but jumped up again, thrust his hands into the pockets of his khaki trousers, went abruptly to one of the front windows. Drawing the curtain a little aside, he looked out across the moonlit street, at the white picket fence of the Rileys’ house. The Riley garden, beyond, was drowned in a sort of milky penumbra, lay entranced in the great cone of pure space-light, the elm trees still and ghostly; and beyond these again, farther off, the white steeple of the Unitarian Church was achieving a lunar brilliance of architecture that made it seem positively to soar. A white night, with a vengeance! Nuit blanche. A light winked on, in an upstairs room of the Riley house, showing a square of yellow curtain, then winked out again. Behind him, from the distant kitchen, he heard the final click, the sighing moan, with which the pump had shut itself off. Enough water till morning. It would serve as an excuse!

He turned back to the room and said:

“I just want to look at the dial. I want to see what the pressure is. If you don’t mind.”

“I thought it was always the same?”

“It’s taken to varying. And sometimes gets too high.”

“Then perhaps you’d better tell Binney about it in the morning.”

“I’ll see!”

“And you might have a look for the cat while you’re there.”

“Oh, he won’t be back all night — it’s the wrong season. He’s away — as Paul so felicitously puts it—ramming!”

There — that would hold her! He couldn’t help chuckling to himself, as he crossed the dark dining room, guided by the path of light from the reflector lamp in the kitchen — dear innocent Ee, how Paul’s quaint vulgarisms always annoyed her! But possibly it wasn’t the best moment he could have chosen for it.… The indicator on the dial was still quivering a little, steadying itself down — thirty-four. Two points too high, there must be something wrong with the shut-off. What next! Temperament in everything, even in pumps, by god! He watched the needle until it finally came to rest, smiled, then turned on the water in the sink. Yes, it gushed too hard, the pressure was obviously too high — another job for Ratio Binney, and another bill. As if a new cesspool wasn’t enough.

Returning, he began to whistle, then stopped, touched one note on the piano as he passed — perhaps that would mollify her. But no. She had laid her knitting aside, was sitting forward with her elbows on her knees, her flushed cheeks on her fists.

“Two points too high,” he said.

She made no answer for a moment, then leaned slowly back in the wicker chair, clasped her hands behind her head, and raised her eyes, now full and searching, to his. Her lips were slightly parted, but she was not smiling, though almost — he felt that she was looking, as it were, from one to the other of his eyes, and he waited, smiling a little himself.

“Don’t you think,” she said at last very deliberately, “you ought to come to some decision about it?”

“Good gracious, Endor dear, what is this! A decision about what.”

“I assume George told you he would refuse to meet Jim Connor, or to have anything to do with him?”

“Yes, he did.”

“It seems to me you might find that worth considering?”

“George doesn’t know Jim, and I do. It doesn’t affect George one way or the other — which makes all the difference.”

“Does it?”

“Of course, it does.”

“I’m afraid I fail to see it.”

He leaned over her, leaned his face close to hers, took the point of her elbow in his hand, and wagged it affectionately.

“Please, Ee, let’s be sensible about this — Jim Connor is really a very nice fellow.”

She withdrew her elbow from his clasp, lowered her hands into her lap. It was a deliberate separation, a rebuke, and he straightened up.

“What you mean is, that you won’t consider me at all. And in that case—” she smiled very brightly up at him, her head tipped a little to one side, the whole attitude charmingly defiant—“I shall of course have to consider what I shall do myself. Not only about this, about everything. It’s bad enough having Buzzer bullied in the streets by these little village toughs, knocked down and hurt, and learning to speak in the awful way they speak here—”

“What are you talking about, Ee — come to your senses!”

“Oh, no. I mean every word I say. I’m afraid, Timothy, you’d better think it over.”

“I see. It’s a threat.”

“It isn’t a threat. I’m just suggesting that for a change you think of our interests a little.”

“I’ve never done anything else! But if you think I’m going to throw over Jim Connor just because of this silly business you’re very much mistaken.… That’s Terence at the door — I’ll have to go.”

“Very well. If that’s more important—”

She had spoken the word “important” with a curious and disturbing emphasis, a subtle but somehow pervasive air of finality, and in the silence that followed, broken only by the spurt of a resinous flame, a shrill jet from the imprisoned gas in a pine log, and farther off the sound of Terence’s hammering at the boxes in the garden, he suddenly found himself remembering — how absurd! — the random phrase he had used when putting Buzzer to bed, the bantering remark that the end of the world was at hand, and that he must be there to see it. Why the devil should he think of that? Or why, too, as if it were a no less sinister part of the same thing, did he think again of Enid’s watch, lying alone on her pillow, ticking and glowing in the dark solitude of her empty room? It had made him conscious, for some obscure reason, of death; just as the falling of the leaves, the sound and sight and chill smell of them, the feeling of hurry and departure, had produced suddenly, from his unconscious, his feeble little joke about the end of the world. “Ho ho—” Buzzer had said—“you can’t fool me! It isn’t coming to an end!” But wasn’t it—? Or what then had been in his mind, when, from the top of the wall by the lane, looking at the forlorn little house in the moonlight, he had had again a precise vision of precisely that, the end of everything that was precious to him? All this was subjective, no doubt — but it was easy enough just to say that, it was the old fallacy of trying to dispose of things simply by naming them, giving them pretty names — it really got one nowhere, explained nothing. The garment without a seam — good lord, yes, one’s conscious life was like that, there were no joins anywhere, everything flowed into everything else, flowed out of everything else, and the end must be — there seemed to be no escape from it whatever — either in admiration or despair. But not despair — no, not despair, not that, not that! Admiration certainly — wonder — even idolatry; or something, for example, like Buzzer’s pure astonishment. There was plenty of room for death, in this — plenty. Yes indeed. But did it really make finalities any more acceptable? He felt a little breathless, the familiar feeling of confused helplessness with which he always began a new painting — always, always — the panic of impotence! The world was always thus getting away from him, going too fast, whizzing off before he had time to shape it, or even — damn the luck — time to see it. It was always as if he were trying desperately to get hold of it before it was too late.

“Endor, darling, listen—”

“You’d better run along, Terence will be waiting for you.”

“Will you listen? No lilacs in the world, not a hundred, not a hundred million, are as important, you know that. They can go to hell, the whole damned galaxy and parade of them, and all of them with frozen feet, from here to kingdom come. Don’t you know that?”

“You made it quite obvious—”

“Nothing of the sort, Ee. It’s simply that they’ve got to be done—”

“Very well, why not run along and do them.”

“They can wait.”

“So can I, Tip — I’m quite used to it.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little bit difficult about this?”

“You mean mulish, I suppose? Why not say it?”

“I didn’t mean that at all. It won’t help matters to put words into each other’s mouths—”

“I’ve told you what I think—”

“Why don’t you listen to what I think—”

“—and you’ve apparently refused to consider it. That seems to me final.”

“I didn’t mean it to be as final as all that. Damnation, Ee, you can’t split up the world into blacks and whites as easily as all that! Try to see it, please — I’m in a very difficult position, painful on all sides, and I really want to do what is best.”

“Yes, Tip, you find it very hard to give up anything, don’t you? Even for me, or Buzzer!”

“I don’t think that’s deserved.”

“Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then that’s all I’ve got to say. Except to repeat what I said before, that I shall of course have to consider what I shall do. I suppose I’ve got a right to do that!”

“Of course, darling.”

“Run along then and attend to your lilacs. I suppose you’ll be late — I shall probably be in bed. And would you mind trying not to disturb me—? I’m very tired.”

The green eyes flashed up at him, a cold and lovely dismissal, flashed up and away; for the barest perceptible instant their eyes met; but no, they hadn’t really met at all, it was rather as if her own glance had slid through his own, through and inward, striking it aside — he felt exposed, he felt plumbed! Beautiful, yes, but he was dismissed.

“Very well,” he said. “But I may not be as late as all that — sorry you’re tired!”

Damn — her bedroom door would be closed — that was what she probably meant — the pressure was to be maintained overnight, she was going to be implacable. Admirable, too, when she was like this — that was the unfairest part of it; for anger so extraordinarily suited her particular sort of beauty, the fierce, small, pseudo-witchlike thing which he so loved. Green flame, cold flame, flame-in-ice — the narrow hard intensity of the sibyl — but with something disarmingly childlike as well. What a demon of a little girl she must have been, and how beautiful! Like Buzzer. But with less sense of humor — she was always a prey to his sense of humor; and he couldn’t resist, as he passed through the dining room, touching the one note of the piano once more, for final comic comment: it would infuriate her. And he allowed the kitchen door to clack behind him with unnecessary violence.…

Terrence, in blue overalls, grinning among the dismantled boxes, the disheveled clusters of lilacs, looked like a part of the moonlight himself. It was a scene from a ballet, blue-lighted, mysterious — nymphs, or naiads, or dryads, would materialize at any moment, and dance to an orchestra of blue-coated, man-sized crickets. The shouting of the crickets was positively outrageous. And the moon, the all-but-round moon, over the Puringtons’ shed, looked down at Terence as if it were about to make some very special and secret use of him.

“Gorry,” Terence said, holding up leafless lilac bushes in either hand, “there’s thousands of ’em. All labeled, too — pinks, whites, and purples. Not so much root as you might think, either — won’t be much trouble. Don’t have to dig the holes so deep! How you going to mix these colors, Mister Kane?”

“Not many pinks and whites, Terence — only a sprinkling — so just stick them in where they come. It will be all right. Have you got a shovel?”

“Oh, sure, I got the old faithful. I’ll begin up by the road there. Put ’em about a yard apart, I reckon—”

“All right — I’ll start behind the kitchen. No use trying to keep the topsoil, I suppose—!”

“No, you can’t help it. A little fertilizer will put that right. A little prime horse manure. I’ll fetch you over a nice wagon load, come Monday — what’s the good of feedin’ a horse, if she don’t give you manure? Yes, sir, I’ll dig it in around ’em so you’d never know the difference, the sand won’t hardly show at all!”

“Will they want water?”

“No, they won’t want no water. Dry as a bone is the best, and stomp ’em in firm with your foot, that’s all.”

“Okay, Terence! I’ll be seeing you!”

Terence struck a match, lit his clay pipe, the humorous face wrinkling in the intermittently sucked flare, the brown eyes shrewd, warm, and earthy, then stooped for his shovel and an armload of lilacs. The polished shovel blade burned blue as he turned it.

“Yes, sir, and they say plantin’ in moonlight is always lucky.”

“The better the night the better the deed!”

The Unitarian Church clock began striking — ten o’clock. Or could it be eleven? or nine?… But time, in such moonlight as this, obviously ceased to exist, became, by any ordinary human standards, incommensurable. It poured, it flowed, it was all at one level, like a sea — it was simply space, and to be measured, if at all, only by distances, as wave from wave, hand from hand, face from face. A moon, moons, half a moon — one elm-tree tip to another, frosted with pure light — the creeping diagonal of dense shadow, like enchantment, along a white picket fence — the slow tide of silver mounting up the still slope of a shingled roof, and then pouring soundlessly away over the rooftree to leave it again in primordial darkness — good god, when you stopped to think about it what a terrifying and unearthly business it was. It was enough to give you the shivers. And when you thought of the whole world, or half of it, revolving in space through this lethal and ethereal light, itself looking dead and frozen, with its cold barnacles of houses — what must it look like, seen from the moon? Dreadful no doubt; like a vast skull; or worse still, like an exposed and frozen brain. And that mackerel sky, up there, those shoals of silver fish swimming softly away over the moon, momentarily touching and dimming it, but not obscuring it, themselves brightening or darkening in serried and evanescent rows, yet so orderly and precise — and the bare dark trees reaching upward towards them — yes, the whole thing, he thought, was exactly like a quick cold shiver over the very top of the brain — frost on the eardrums, frost on the eyeballs, frost on the nerve ends! It was a taste, in advance, of the marrowy and foul bitterness of death.…

His shovel rose and fell; cutting the soft topsoil, cutting the gritty sand, hacking through the stretched vital roots of the poplars. As fast as he dug the holes, the moonlight filled them; exactly as the holes scooped on a beach fill with the sea. Cold roots, cold soil, cold sand — his hands, pressing down the lilac roots, disentangling and spreading the living radicles, clawing the mixed sand and loam over them, became themselves cold and earthlike, harshly imbrued in the stuff they worked in; they took on something of the coarse violence of earth; so that it was unpleasant, even unnatural, to touch his clothing with them. A time, times, half a time — the upright lilacs began to look like a hedge along the wall above the lane, it was beginning at last to be impressive, and he jumped down into the lane, among the dead leaves, to admire his handiwork. Yes, already the garden had changed, was changing. It had suddenly become organized. A slum! What on earth had made her think of that. Really, the extraordinary things Ee managed to think of! With a river like that, and a house and garden like this, and a moon like the end of the world! A lunar slum, a slum all compact of mercurial magic, a shape of silver vapor — the sheer impudence of it! Typical of the sort of thing one says when angry — the straws clutched at by the madman, clutched at in his own hair. Good old Enid. Or was she perhaps partially right? It was so difficult, sometimes, to distinguish between the simple and the shabby, between the plain and the merely dreary. But a slum!

A purple, a white, a purple again, a pink. Who ever heard of a pink lilac? Must be a façon de parler. By god, what a sight they would be when they all blossomed! The House of a Hundred Lilacs, they could call it, with engraved purple notepaper. Then, at any rate, Enid would like it—that, at any rate, she would like! Or would there be no “then”? Of course — how ridiculous. She hadn’t meant it as seriously as all that, it was because she was tired, a good night’s sleep would put everything to rights again, everything would be all right in the morning. A whole morning’s washing. The cesspool flooded. Old George butting in and messing up the Jim Connor business, as if it wasn’t already bad enough. Poor Ee, no wonder her nerves had been on edge. But in the morning, with the sunlight bursting in through the kitchen window, shining into the kitchen sink, silvering the tall upright cylinder of the boiler, and Buzzer singing upstairs, and himself rumbling the carpet sweeper over the dining room rug, and the kettle squealing on the stove — yes, it would probably be all right; this blasted moonlight, with its uncanny unreality, would be gone; and all these obscure pressures and shadows with it. She was probably already asleep, and lying, as she always did, with one hand reversed above her head, her elbow on the pillow, the neat small face, closed and serene, turned a little to one side. But suppose she was awake! And suppose she was still awake, when he himself went up to bed, lying awake there, but with her door closed—? Ah, that stretched and conscious silence, the taut and agonized silence as of eyes staring in the darkness, the silence as of carefully withheld breathing! And would you mind trying not to disturb me? Damn.…

“Yield to me, lilacs,” he said aloud bitterly, “and ye shall bear!”

He straightened up, for his back was beginning to be tired, heard an upper window rattling open in the Purington house, behind him, and then voices.

“Gladys?”

It was Mrs. Purington’s voice, remote, sing-song, whining.

“Yes, mother.”

“Have you got enough bedclothes? It’s going to be cold.”

“Yes, mother, enough clothes to sink a ship!”

“That’s good.”

Cold: it was going to be cold. In fact, it was cold already. And it must be late. But they were nearly finished, thank goodness, he turned and saw that Terence had reached the bottom of the garden and come back, had begun putting in the few that were to stand along the terrace wall. A dozen more, or a dozen and a half, at most. He thrust his shovel into the dark pine-smelling woodshed, closed the door.

“I’m knocking off, Terence,” he said, standing at the top of the terrace wall. “I’m going to walk down the road a bit. Do you mind finishing it by yourself?”

“Won’t take me about another ten minutes, not that.”

“By gosh, if I stooped just once more, my backbone would snap right out of me! Like a spring. How do you do it.”

“Guess it’s all in being used to it! I was born with a shovel in my hands. But it’s work, at that.”

“It is. Thanks a lot, Terence. How do you think it looks.”

“Looks fine. Yes, sir, in about two years it’ll make a fine show. Not much blossom next spring—”

“No?”

“No, they’ll want about a year’s growth of wood first, and to make some roots too — but then, by gorry, they’ll give you blaze enough — it ought to be a pretty sight. Got ’em in just in time, too — I can feel the frost in my sciatics already!”

They looked together along the row of lilacs by the Purington fence, as orderly as if they had been there forever. A patch of white sand glowed dimly at the foot of each, like a little circle of phosphorescence, and the dangling labels, too, shone white in the moonlight. Terence shook his head.

“A hundred!” he said.

“Felt more like a thousand!.. Well, good night, Terence, and I’ll see you Monday.”

“Yes, I’ll be over Monday with a nice load of manure, and put ’em to bed good.… Good night!”

“Good night.”

He heard the shovel strokes resume behind him, heard them still as he turned to the left to pass the Purington house, and then, as he stepped into the moonlight-stenciled street, he was engulfed abruptly in an astonishing silence. The crickets, all but a few, were still, now — their slower zeek — zeek — zeek — zeek was merely the moonlight made audible, the thin threnody of the moonlight itself. Peace be with you—pax vobiscum! Lucky little devils, just to crawl into a hole in the ground, freeze quietly into sleep, and forget everything until another year, another summer! Another summer, another love. He walked quickly, the leaves rustling under his feet, retracing the steps that he had taken only a few hours before, when he had come back empty-handed — empty-hearted? — from the post office. Nora, silent, was a different, an unknown Nora, it wasn’t like her to be silent, it could mean only one thing. Perhaps she had finally decided to marry that architect chap from Clark College and settle down — perhaps he never would see her again. Would he mind? It had been good, it had been merry: a comic genius — the muse of comedy — had presided over the affair from the very outset: never, in all their clandestine meetings, had they had an unhappy moment — not even when she had been so sick that time under the ailanthus tree in the moonlit back yard. Another summer, another love! Had they been in love? Was he in love with her now? Not as he was in love with Ee — odd, too, how they had never once called each other by their Christian names, or even by any nicknames — nothing but “you,” “you.” On the telephone always—“Hello? Is that ‘you’?” “Yes, it’s ‘me’—is that ‘you’? And who is ‘you’?” ‘“ME!’”… And then her delicious giggle, muffled and averted as she turned her face away from the telephone, the so characteristic half-checked giggle, as if it were all so dreadfully naughty, the whole thing — so dreadfully and delightfully naughty, but so dreadfully nice too, and himself and herself the naughtiest of all naughty people in a naughty but enchanting world! Enchanting, yes — the word was like a pang.… But had he really been in love? For the oddest thing of all was the way in which the first few months of the affair, so gay and light-hearted, had actually given him back something precious and lost in his relationship with Enid. The something that had been lost, or overlaid, after the birth of Buzzer; as if some kind of bloom, or illusion, had vanished, or been obscured, on the sudden intrusion of that so different reality. Yes, childbirth — who could have foreseen the effect of childbirth? That butcher-shop and meaty reality — as Paul so brutally put it, and quite right too! — was something for which love’s young dream hadn’t at all been prepared. A loss of belief! And Nora — dear delightful humorous Nora! — had somehow magically restored it. How the devil did such things happen? And why the devil weren’t they admitted! Shams everywhere, shams in love, shams in hate, shams in marriage or divorce, shams deeply bedded even in the secret self. The eye loving before the heart or hand admits, the heart hating when the hand delights. It was all a mess.…

BAKER STREET: TOWN LANDING.

He turned under the silver-gray signpost, proceeded down the sloping sand road towards Jim Connor’s house, which stood high and dark at the river’s edge. One light in an upstairs window, one light downstairs — somebody must still be about. A figure detached itself from the shadows of the porch, came uncertainly down the wooden steps into the moonlight — it was Jim, wearing the perpetual cap, pulled down over his eyes, a cigar tip glowing under the sharp visor. The cap that was never off, even indoors.

The half-shadowed prison-blanched face was smiling, the effect was oddly as of a secret smile existing by itself — only when one came nearer could one see the kind eyes in the shadow of the cap-visor. Typical, too — the watchful kindliness always a little in retreat, a little on guard. He remembered, suddenly, the time when Jim had come down from Taunton to spend the night, and when, trying to wake him in the morning, he had had to touch his shoulder — the poor devil had jumped half out of bed, terrified.

“Hello, Jim?”

“Hi, Timothy, old kid. What are you doing round here so late? Pretty late for you domestic fowls, isn’t it?”

Old kid — that absurd favorite phrase of his.

“Domestic — what about yourself!”

“Oh, no, not me! I guess I was feeling a little depressed by it. I thought I’d just get a breath of this nice sea air before I turned in.”

The voice sounded a shade sad, a shade tired, the gray-sweatered figure turned slowly, they walked down past the house to the beached canoe — it looked like Paul’s — at the water’s edge. In the shadow of the house, they stood still, the water lapping softly, sibilantly, on the sand, quarreling against the stone piers which supported the moonlit verandah above them.

“Yes, the sea air smells good after all this sheer domesticity.”

“Anything wrong?”

“Well, I guess the girls don’t like it much. I have a feeling they don’t like it much. You’d think they’d at least know a little something about cooking, wouldn’t you, or be willing to try? We haven’t had a decent meal in two days. You get tired of sardines! And Kitty picking on Karl, and neither Kitty nor Lorna wanting to do any of the housework — yeah, this sea air smells good!”

He smiled again under the visor, but the smile was melancholy and explanatory, he looked tired.

“Maybe they’ll get used to it. Sometimes I think you expect too much of human nature, Jim—”

“Do I? Maybe I do. I hadn’t thought of it. Lorna has a lot of talent, you know, she ought to be practicing, this is her chance to practice, with a good piano — if only Kitty would just try to take hold of things — but she’s not much like your Enid. No, old kid, you’ve sure got a jewel there!”

“I’m glad you like her.”

“A wonderful girl, a real woman — and beautiful, too. I’m sorry she doesn’t like me—”

“So am I, Jim; but you know how women are.”

“Sure. Don’t I just?… Did you have anything on your mind, Timothy? I haven’t seen you much.”

“Yes, I know. And I can only stay a minute now. But there is something I thought you ought to hear, and I hoped I’d catch you by yourself. I thought it wouldn’t do any good to let Karl and the girls in on it.”

“Yeah?”

“May be nothing serious, either; but old George Pierce, across the river, has heard about you, mostly I’m afraid, from Enid, and got on his high horse, and of course he might make trouble.”

“I get you — the civic spirit.”

“I’m afraid so. Incidentally, I don’t want to know what you don’t want to tell me, but have you got any plans yet?”

“No. I haven’t. But don’t worry, kid — don’t you worry. I’ll be all right.”

“I just thought I’d better tip you off, anyway.”

“Sure. Thanks. And I appreciate it, Timothy. But I’ll be all right.… By god, isn’t it a wonderful night? Doesn’t this make you want to paint? If I were only a poet, now, with a lot of succulent polysyllables — what’s the word, sesquipedalian? I have a fondness for long words, you know — it’s supposed to be a symptom for something — that’s what Paul says!”

He dropped his cigar into the dark water, where it went out with a faint pssst, stared downward in amused silence for a moment, then added:

“But it was left out of me, I guess — the best I can do is help the ones that have got it. You know, I’d like to give you a hand, Tip — you oughtn’t to be sweating at teaching, you ought to go abroad.”

“Abroad! Don’t make me laugh. Damned nice of you, Jim, but as a matter of fact I’m a lot better off than most.”

“Well, artists ought be supported by the state—”

“In Utopia, yes!”

“In Utopia. Look at those shells there, on that rock — what are those, kid?”

“Those? Mussels.”

“Are they good to eat?”

“Sure they are — delicious, you steam them like clams.”

“We’ll have to try them. If those girls could even learn to build a fire — this morning they damned near smoked the house out!”

He gave a bitter little laugh as they turned, they were both silent till they had reached the steps to the front porch of the house, emerging once more into the moonlight. The short grim smile under the sharp visor again, the detached smile under the hooded but kindly eyes — he was putting out his hand.

“Well, thanks for coming over, kid — you’re honest, the way I like people to be honest. Will I be seeing you tomorrow?”

“I’ll try to drop in, in the afternoon.”

“I wish you would. It might help me out. You never know.”

“Okay, Jim, I’ll try.… Good night.”

“Good night, Timothy.… This Pierce guy, is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes. He’s a good fellow, too, you know.”

“Yes, I guess I know. Good night!”

“Good night.”

He watched the tired figure go slowly up the stairs, disappear into the heavy shadow of the porch, heard the door shut behind him — he had gone back into his Utopia, his singular dream of Utopia. Gone back to Karl, to Kitty, to Lorna — to the cynical Karl, who used him and sponged on him, to Kitty who hated him, to Lorna who perhaps loved him, perhaps didn’t, perhaps only used him too — Christ, what a tragic joke it all was, what a hell of a Utopia that was! He stood still, listening, for a moment — he thought he had heard a sound as of angry voices from one of the open windows upstairs, a sound of quarreling, two voices, male and female, in brief sharp interchange — but if so, everything was again silent. Utopia, by god—! It was more like a crucifixion.

And this gaunt blazing-eyed woman, Lorna — where the devil had she suddenly come from, how the devil had she got hold of him — with two children, according to Karl (who thought it was all a wonderful joke), and a tubercular husband in the New York Customs House — and she planning to be a concert pianist!

It was cold, he walked quickly — looking up, he saw that the moon was now almost directly overhead, swimming rapidly, dizzily, like a spun silver coin, through a shoal of silver mackerel. It gave to the whole night a sense of ominous hurry, a sense of finality, of falling, of impending end. The downward-going vortical swirl of everything, of all nature, the swirling and inward funneling death, like those marvelous late Van Goghs, where all shapes seemed to be centrifugally or centripetally self-consuming — trees burning spirally on whirling and burning hillsides, burning their own doomed intensity, the hillsides themselves an exhausted flame of grass and bushes, the very rocks exhaling fiercely away in the final ecstatic “Ahhhh—!” of creative death. If one could only get hold of that — strip one’s vision nakedly down to that—

The familiar feeling of breathlessness again, of defeat, of closing one’s eyes, lest one see too clearly the very limitedness of one’s own vision, the trembling ineffectiveness of one’s own hand, the fumbling quick makeshift which, at the last moment always, and in a panic, one had to substitute for the real thing! He entered by the front door — the lilacs could wait till morning, to be a surprise — and stood still by Enid’s empty chair in the disordered studio. The three half-burned pine logs, glowing and hissing, to be up-ended against the sooty sides of the brick fireplace — the lamp on the bookcase to be blown out, with its little cold after-smell of kerosene — the two-toned squeak of the hall door — his hands to be scrubbed in the small bathroom, with the nailbrush, to get the grit and sand from under his fingernails — the everlasting toothbrush, the everlasting voracious w.c. — and then the quick climbing of the stairs, taking his candle, the quiet undressing, lest he wake Ee — or was she still awake, lying awake? — and the noiseless getting into bed in the small moon-flooded room …

Ee’s door was closed.

The house was silent.