Читать книгу Old Crow - Alice Brown - Страница 8

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The next day Nan telephoned Raven that she was taking train for New York for perhaps a week's stay with the Seaburys. These were her nearest relatives, cousins at a remove Raven never really untangled, and of late they had been spending persuasive energy in trying to induce her to live with them. Since she had come home from France and Aunt Anne had died, they were always descending upon her for brief visits in the house where she succeeded Aunt Anne, and liking her so tumultuously, in her grown-up state, that they pelted her with arguments based on her presumable loneliness there and the silliness of carrying on the establishment really as a species of home for superannuated servants. Nan honestly liked the cousins, in a casual way, though it was as inconceivable to her that the Boston house might be given up as it would have been to Aunt Anne. There was, she felt, again in Aunt Anne's way, a certain continuity of things you didn't even think of breaking. Now she was seeking the Seaburys for reasons of her own. They had to be suitably told that Aunt Anne had left her money away from them as from her, and naturally, though ridiculously, to "that Raven she was always making a fool of herself about." They were ruthless of speech within family conclave, though any one of them would have thought more than twice about calling Aunt Anne any sort of fool, in her lifetime, even at a distance safely beyond hearing. Raven was not, if Nan could forestall the possibility, to be assaulted by mounting waves of family animosity.

Raven was glad, for once, to get rid of her, to find she was removing herself from the domestic turmoil he had created. There could not be the triangular discussions inevitable if she and Dick fell upon him at once, nor should he have to bear the warmth of her tumultous sympathy. Dick had evidently told her nothing, and he even gathered that she was going without notice to Dick. Then Raven began a systematic and rapid onslaught on his immediate affairs, to put them in order. Mr. Whitney, Anne's lawyer, who had always seemed to regard him in a disconcerting way as belonging to Anne, or her belonging in some undefined fashion to him, opened out expansively on the provisions of the will. He most sincerely congratulated Raven. Of course it was to have been expected, but——! Raven kept miserably to the proprieties of the moment. He listened with all due reserve, silent on the subject of Anne's letter. That was his affair, he thought, his and Nan's; unless, indeed, it was nobody's affair but Anne Hamilton's, and he was blindly to constitute himself the unreasoning agent of her trust. That must be thought out later. If he undertook it now, piling it on the pack of unsubstantial miseries he was carrying, he would be swamped utterly. He could only drop it into a dark pocket of his mind where an ill-assorted medley of dreads and fear lay waiting—for what? For a future less confusing than this inscrutable present? At least, they could not be even glanced at now. He wrote Charlotte and Jerry, his caretakers on the place at Wake Hill, that he was coming for an indefinite stay. He instructed his housekeeper in Boston that the house was to be kept open; possibly Mr. Richard would be there a good deal. Then he sat down to write his sister. That was the problem: what should he say to her who would presently be receiving his unfortunate screed with some inflammatory introduction from Dick and would—he knew her!—scarcely have finished it before she took steps toward flooding him with epistolary advice and comment. He could see her now at her desk, assembling data of conduct, bodily well-being, and putting it all down in that masterful hand of hers. That settled it. He mustn't write her. He must telegraph and forestall Dick. And he did telegraph her, on the moment, a message of noncommittal brevity:

"Letter Dick sent you is all poppycock. Forget it."

That might, he concluded, yet without hope, keep her from rushing her pen to the rescue, even if it did not prevent her fuming. And as he sat at the library table with a disorder of papers before him, Dick appeared at the door: good boy, full of zeal and pity. He looked so overflowing with honest affection, so eagerly ready to help that Raven exasperatedly loved him for his kind officiousness. Yet he had nothing for him but a gruff:

"Now what do you think you're here for?"

Dick was prepared for repulse, this or any other. He had armed himself against all possible whims and obstinacies, and he wore the air of a carefully adjusted patience.

"Can't I help there?" he inquired, advancing to the table and drawing up a chair. "Couldn't you let me run over those and just tell you what they are?"

"You go to thunder," said Raven, rapidly assorting, clapping into bundles and casting aside. "Yes, you can, too. Take this basket and empty it into the fireplace. Behind the log and smash it down so it won't set the chimney afire. Remember how your grandmother used to keep a scare going all the time for fear of chimneys? I guess I've inherited it. I have to use the formula."

Dick emptied the papers with a grave care foreign to him, as if even so small a service, at such a moment, bore a weightier meaning, and brought the basket back. He sat down and waited in a silence Raven felt more portentously vocal than the loudest outcry.

"Dick!" he said. He stopped work and looked at the youth, an unwilling smile twisting his mouth. He was not sure of its being well to take it humorously; yet it was funny. "Dick, if you've got anything to say, say it. If you haven't, clear out. This is my busy day."

Dick shook his head despairingly and yet obstinately. He wasn't going to leave Uncle Jack to the powers of darkness.

"Just tell me what you're winding things up for?" he ventured. "I ought to know."

"Then don't ask as if you were whispering into the ear of Buddha, or trying not to wake baby," said Raven, tearing a package of letters with a sudden savage haste. They were Anne's letters to him when he was in France, and he had meant to keep them because she would have an ideal of the sacredness they ought to bear, and exasperatingly the suggestion seemed to include a power of imposing itself on him. And if Dick hadn't come in to bait him with irrelevant questions, his perverse inner self excused itself, he might not be defying the ideal and tearing the letters up. As it was, he found them a salutary sacrifice.

"If you mean my going to Wake Hill, yes, I'm going. I've written Charlotte. Or rather I've addressed it to Jerry, she's so careful about his prerogative as a male."

"When?" asked Dick.

"The minute I get some boots and things to go logging in. This house will be open. You can come in and roost if you want to. If you marry Nan"—this was an audacity that occurred to him at the moment. It suddenly seemed to him a blessed comfort to think of Nan in his house—"you can come here and live."

Dick lost his sacrificial air and turned sulky.

"I don't know about Nan," he said. "I never know about her, not since we've come back. She was soft as—as silk over there."

"The maternal," said Raven briefly, tearing one of Anne's letters, with a crack, across the pages. "It was what you needed to keep you going. Not personal, only because you were a sojer boy."

The mortification of it all, the despite of not holding his own with her now he was not serving a cause, was plainly evident in Dick's face. He had had a bad night of it, after Nan's flouting and Uncle Jack's letter on top of that.

"She was beastly," he said, with no further elaboration.

But Raven knew he was returning to his walk home with her and some disconcerting circumstances of it. No doubt Nan had been ruthless. Her mind had been on Aunt Anne and the Palace of Peace. Little boys in love couldn't joggle her fighting arm and expect to escape irritated reproof.

"Nan's got a good deal to think of just now," he said. "Besides, you may not be man enough for her yet. Nan's very much of a woman. She'll expect things."

Dick sat glowering.

"I'm as much of a man as I was in France," he said obstinately. "More. I'm older." Then his sacrificial manner came back, and, remembering what he was there for, he resumed, all humble sweetness, like the little Dick who used to climb on Raven's knee and ask for a tell-story: "I'm going down with you. I've made all my plans."

Raven looked up at him in a new surprise.

"The deuce you are," said he. "No, you're not, boy. If I catch you down there I'll play the game as you've mapped it out for me. I'll grab Jerry's axe or pitchfork and run amuck, blest if I don't. You'll wake up and find yourself sending for the doctor."

Glancing cheerfully up, he was instantly aware, from the boy's unhappy face, that Dick believed him. Raven burst into a laugh, but he quickly sobered. What a snare they were getting themselves into, and only by an impish destiny of haphazard speech.

"Don't look so shocked, Dickie," he said flippantly. "I'm no more dotty than—Hamlet."

There he stopped again to wonder whimsically at the ill fate of it all. For Hamlet was mad; at least, Dick thought so. He couldn't have caught at anything more injurious to his cause.

"'They fool me to the top of my bent,'" he reflected ruefully.

That was what Dick was ready to do. But sister Amelia wouldn't fool him, if she got East with her emergency dressing bag and her perfectly equipped energy. She would clap him into the Psychopathic before he had time for even half as much blank verse as Hamlet had. They wouldn't allow him a first act.

"Don't look like that," he suggested again and kindly, because it was evident that, however irritating Dick might be as a prospective guardian, he was actually suffering an honest misery.

"I don't," said Dick. "I mean, I don't mean to look different. But somehow it's got me, this whole business has, and I can't get away from it. I've thought of it every minute since you told me. It isn't so much you I'm thinking about. It's him."

Raven, as a writer of English, paused to make a mental note that, in cases of extreme emotion, the nominative case, after the verb to be, is practically no good. You simply have to scrap it.

"Who?" he inquired, in the same line of natural language.

"Old Crow."

Dick uttered the name in a low and hesitating tone. He seemed to offer it unwillingly. Raven stared at him in a perfect surprise, now uncolored by any expectation he might have had of what was coming.

"Old Crow?" he repeated. "What do you know about Old Crow?"

"Well," said Dick, defensively, "I know as much as you do. That is, I suppose I do. I know as much as all Wake Hill does, anyway."

"Who told you?"

"Mother. I didn't suppose it was any secret."

"No," said Raven thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of it. That's why I never've talked about him."

"Mother did," said Dick, in a sudden expansion. It seemed to ease him up a little, this leading Raven to the source of his own apprehension. Indeed, he had felt, since Raven's letter, that they must approach the matter of his tired wits with clearness, from the scientific standpoint. The more mental facts and theories they recognized the better. "She told me once you looked just like him, that old daguerreotype."

"Had sister Amelia concluded from that," inquired Raven quietly, "that I was bound to follow Old Crow, live in the woods and go missionarying across the mountain?"

"No," said Dick, so absorbed in his line of argument that he was innocently unaware of any intended irony. "She just happened to speak of it one day when we found the daguerreotype. Uncle Jack, just what do you know about him?"

Raven considered a moment. He was scanning his memory for old impressions and also, in his mild surprise over the pertinency of reviving them, wondering whether he had better pass them on. Or would they knot another tangle in the snarl he and Dick seemed to be, almost without their volition, making?

"Old Crow," he began slowly, "was my great-uncle. His name was John Raven. He was poor, like all the rest of us of that generation and the next, and did the usual things to advance himself, the things in successful men's biographies. He studied by the kitchen fire, not by pine knots, I fancy—that probably was the formula of a time just earlier. Anyhow he fitted himself for the college of the day, for some reason never went, but did go into a lawyer's office instead, was said to have trotted round after a gypsy sort of girl the other side of the mountain, found she was no good, went up into the woods and built the old hut I got into shape in the spring of 1914. Queer! I expected to go up there to study and write. I'd got to the point, I s'pose, where I thought if I had a different place to write in I could write better. Sure sign of waning powers! Well, he lived there by himself, and folks thought he was queer and began to call him Old Crow. I saw him several times when I was a little chap, never alone. Father took me with him when he went up to the hut to carry food. Mother never approved of my going. She disapproved of it so much that father stopped taking me."

"Well, you saw him," said Dick, in a way of holding him to his narrative, so that Raven, wondering why it was of such importance, bent a frowning look on him.

"Yes, I saw him. And he was nice to me, uncommon nice. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me in a way—well, not the patronizing, grown-up way, but as if, now I come to think of it, as if he pitied me."

"How did he look?"

Dick was catching at things, Raven saw, the slightest clue to Old Crow's withdrawn personality. He seemed, on his side, to be constructing a portrait. Raven sought about in the closed chambers of his mind and produced one significant bit of remembrance after another. They were retrieved with difficulty out of the disorder of things regarded as of no importance: but here they were.

"He was tall, thin, rather hatchet-faced, something as I am. Oh, you knew that, didn't you? No beard, and I think he was the neatest person I ever saw. Father was clean shaven, you remember; but there were days when he either got lazy or was too busy to shave. I remember how exquisitely nice and peeled his face used to look on Sunday. But Old Crow was shaved all the time, judging from the way he looked the few times I saw him. I've heard father and mother speak of it, too. Charlotte told me once she'd seen him and he was neat as a new pin."

"How old was he when he went up there into the woods?"

"To live alone? I don't know. Forty, maybe. Comparatively young, anyway."

"Was it the woman? Was there a cause for it, a cause people knew?"

"There wasn't any cause I knew. He simply, so far as I ever heard, passed the place over to father—that was his nephew, you know—and went up the hill and built himself a log hut. It was well built. I only had to calk it some more and put in another flooring when I came into it."

As Raven went on, he became uncomfortably aware of the resemblance between his own proposed withdrawal and Old Crow's; but he stuck to it doggedly. It was all playing into Dick's hands and Amelia's, assuming he could predicate her mind; but he was resolved they shouldn't have it all their own way. He would give them every last straw of evidence, and it should do them no good in the end. There was a bravado about it. If Dick, in his affectionate virtue and Amelia in her energy of well-doing, wanted to challenge him to the proof, he'd give them a pretty tussle for it.

"What I want to know is," said Dick, "what he thought he was going off there for? Didn't anybody know?"

"They may have," said Raven. "I didn't know."

"And he lived his life out there, till he died?"

"Yes. And died in a very gentlemanly fashion, of pneumonia, and was found in a dignified position on his bed, hands folded, and everything in a great state of order, as if he'd known he was going and arranged things to give as little trouble as he could."

"What did he do up there all by himself? Read? Write?"

"He read a good deal, I believe. We found him reading when we went up."

"What sort of books?"

"Oh, hang it, Dick," said Raven, beginning to fidget under examination, "you're district-attorneying it a trifle too much to interest me. I'm getting bored, son. This isn't a third degree."

But Dick was not to be curbed or reasoned with.

"I think," he said, "if you don't mind, we'd better talk it out. You see I do really need to know about him, and you're the only one that can tell me. Mother's is chiefly hearsay."

"Fire away," said Raven easily, accepting the situation. He leaned back in his chair and began making patterns on the block of paper before him with a silver dagger at his hand. "What is it you want to know?"

"Everything. How the neighbors regarded him, what they said."

"The neighbors didn't regard him at all, in your sense. Don't you know the way country folks have of passing over the most eccentric things as if they're all in the day's work? They gossip like thunder, and, if they can whip up a scandal, they're made. But they never seem so awfully shocked. Perhaps it's because they're used to the plain facts of life, death, birth, madness, suicide. Maybe there's a sort of gaucherie about it. There are things you're shocked about that you wouldn't dare discuss at Cambridge or the Club. You'd be afraid it wasn't good form. Maybe you would though, now. Sometimes I forget the world's moved on a peg."

"But what did they say?"

"Can't tell you, Dick. I belong to the family, you know, and maybe they had some decency about talking over Old Crow when I was round. I don't think there was anything they could say. He was a perfectly clean, decent citizen. He kept on voting. He didn't meddle with them and they didn't with him. The only eccentricity about him was that he lived alone and that, the last ten years or so of his life, he tramped all round that region, over the mountain, too, taking care of the sick, if there were any. The last five years he went round preaching, and the very last year of all he took old Billy Jones into his hut, an awful old rip, if ever there was one, and tended him till his death—Billy's death, I mean. And if you consider that as indicating queerness—except that people don't do it—I don't. I should call any conventional disapproval of it an indictment rather, an indictment of Christianity. If it's too eccentric to fit into a so-called Christian civilization, that is."

Dick wasn't going to call it anything at the moment. He sat staring at the table, evidently reflecting, digesting and bowed down by his own gravity in a way that always amused Raven even when he loved the boy most. He fancied, when Dick looked like that, he was brooding over his nose.

"Take it easy, son," he advised him pleasantly. "You won't get anywhere with Old Crow. Guess again."

"No," said Dick, oblivious of the flippancy of this, "we sha'n't get anywhere. We haven't enough data."

"Now," said Raven, coming up from his lounging posture, "I've got to hustle. You run along and we'll go out somewhere to-night: dine, if you want to, and drop in at a show. But, for heaven's sake, don't go to digging up graveyards and expecting me to reconstruct your ancestors from as few bones as we've got of Old Crow's. You bore me sometimes, horribly, Dick. And that's the truth."

Dick did go away, though with an inarticulate remonstrance on his tongue. But Raven was good-natured and yet decided, and even went to the door with him, propelling him by a firm yet affectionate hand on his shoulder.

They did dine out that night in a manner mildly bohemian, really determined upon by Raven to show Dick he wasn't incapable yet of the accepted forms of diversion, afflictingly dull though they might prove.