Читать книгу The Dark Dawn - Martha Ostenso - Страница 4

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The real story of Lucian Dorrit is not that of his boyish worship and sorrow for the mighty and ineffectual William Dorrit, his father, nor is it that of the passion and tragedy and beauty of his mature life. It has to do rather with two weeks in the autumn of his twenty-first year when he traveled on foot through the sprawling prairie towns and past the rich new farms of that very new northern land which the great William Dorrit had chosen for his own. Indian summer had begun early that year and had lain like a phantasy of gold upon the earth. The warmth and beauty and light of things entered the youth’s soul there, so that there were moments of rapture almost insupportable. Of all the illusory phenomena of earth there is none so treacherous as Indian summer!

It was a mere boy’s whim that had sent Lucian Dorrit afoot through those prairies in the golden autumn. There was money in his pockets. There was a railroad all the way from Gary, where he had taken the road, to Loyola, whither he was bound. Besides, he was eager enough to be home again with his father and his mother, his two younger brothers, and his little sister, Leona. Great things had happened to him since he had left home six weeks ago to become a harvester in the fields of strangers. There would be stories to tell, scores of them, and endless eager questionings that would last for days and days. Ah, those rollicking brothers of his! Little they knew of what six weeks in the harvest fields could do for a man. Nor could they guess what thumpings were in store for them!

Something else, however, had taken hold of Lucian Dorrit’s heart, a kind of mighty hunger for things invisible that somehow softened his yearning to be back home again. Try as he might, he could not have named it. Once upon the open road, he knew that he was feeding it. He knew there was joy in placing his feet upon the dusty, whitish way that spilled itself into countless eccentric deviations where his eyes followed it, onward and beyond, to the very rim of the earth. He even delighted in the ragged fence that ran beside it, gray and broken from the extremes of weather in those exposed, shallow valleys. His senses quickened to the low hum that hung about him in the golden day. It is curious, that warm hum in the air of Indian summer, after all insect life is stilled. No bird makes it, and no tree; and the wind makes a lapsing sound distinct from it. It is as though the tiny, fervid souls of dead grass-creatures are still hovering in that blue false air reproachful for having been cheated of this last moment of delight.

Here and there the bright, dry leaves of a sumac bush lay dabbled in the pale dust of the road. Nettle, rust-colored and ineffectual now, stood in the ditches tangled with the blackened, limp leaves of the pigweed. Wild morning-glories that had traced their loveliness about the old fence clung like dry, colorless scum, like strings of spittle, on the posts. Rarely, a bird flitted from the underbrush with subdued song and soared, unreal, into the irreality of the sky. Life has no authority in this charmed region of Indian summer. Nothing has authority here except inanimate earth and heaven.

Lucian Dorrit walked in the pleasant haze, scarcely conscious of his own being. Half-bodied visions drifted, vague and pleasurable, through his mind, but left no lasting thought. He was drugged, spirited away on the mellifluent air of that Indian summer to a place in which, it seemed, he had wandered long ago, and to a time that was like a faintly echoing song or like a golden mist seen through the dark glass of memory....

It was thus the great William Dorrit himself might have walked along some forgotten road of his younger years!

Even in those days and in that country where dress was not seriously reckoned with, Lucian Dorrit, swinging along the prairie road, was an extraordinarily assorted figure. His trousers, bought for him two years ago, had failed utterly to keep pace with the demands of the passing months. It was not enough that they had shrunken until the boy’s ankles had been left quite exposed. The shrinking had continued relentlessly upward until the trousers had relinquished all hope of giving their wearer even rudimentary comfort. His heavy white socks, knitted by his mother, sagged below the tops of his shoes and pouched about his ankles. The vest he wore had belonged to his father, was of greenish black broadcloth, and billowed emptily across Lucian’s stomach. His coat was a perfect temperamental mate to his trousers, and to secure a little comfort Lucian had been obliged to leave it unbuttoned. The pockets were nearer to his elbows than to his hands and he had laughed heartily at his own expense when it had occurred to him that reaching for anything in one of those pockets was not unlike a dog’s leg scratching for an unattainable flea. He had donned a white shirt with a soft collar which he had left unbuttoned at the throat. His hat was a soft felt of nondescript gray, much battered about the crown, its well-worn brim slouching limply about his ears. On his square shoulders he bore the lumpy pack that held his rougher work clothes, a black overcoat, and the half-dozen necessaries of his toilet.

But what are clothes to a man when he is alone on the sunlit stretches of a country road! The days had attained that borrowed warmth of late October, a warmth that seems to come from the final giving up into the air of some of the fire of the oak leaves, and some of the last burning light of the blue meadows. The mornings were domed by a sky as blue as the bluest gentian that ever grew. The noons were mellow and soft, obscuring the landscape in a smoky, sensuous gossamer. The nights were starlit and eerie with the glow of distant ghost-fires dancing where the straw-piles burned yellow against the horizon.

Under the dream of those days on the northern prairies Lucian Dorrit felt himself growing, felt desires and comprehensions and beauties that had never before defined themselves clearly within him. In that twilight of the sensibilities during which the soul of the boy passes and the soul of the man is informed, Lucian’s life flamed suddenly with new purpose. It was as if he had all at once become extraordinary among men. Beyond the inhospitable confines of the little world in which he had always lived lay another world, a greater world, where the precious thing that was within him would take its destined form. What that form would be at last he did not know. He only knew that he would force life to yield him what it had never yielded to the great and ineffectual man who was his father. He knew he would go down into the cities of the world, his heart singing the mighty rhythm of the vast country in which he had been bred. He would shape the saga of that savage, tender, shining land, and the sorrows and humors of its people.

Now and then, as he swung along the road, a town would rise like an island on that sea of prairie, its grain elevators struck straight and bare and red against the smooth blue of the sky. They were bold, harsh little towns, these, strung like new and gaudy beads along the railway with its shining steel. Midway between two such towns the road led Lucian to a railway siding where a freight train with wheat from North Dakota barred the way while the engine took on water. Lucian’s feet were smarting from the unnatural heat of the hard road he had been following since mid-forenoon. He seated himself on a pile of ties where the road crossed the track, rather glad for an excuse to wait for the train to move away. He swung his pack down from his shoulders and bared his head to the faint breeze that had sprung up earlier in the day.

As it happened he had not long to wait. He had been sitting on the pile of ties for less than five minutes when there came a rumble of shunting cars and a resolute coughing from the laboring engine. As the whole train started to move slowly along the track, the thought came to Lucian that he might easily clamber up between two of the cars and ride as far as the next town. Somewhere in the direction toward which the train was moving was the little town of Lost River, where his father’s sister lived on the meager profits of a boarding-house. It was almost a year now since he had seen his hard-working aunt. He would like to surprise her.

He had all but made up his mind when the caboose came rattling by, its green flags flapping, a couple of begrimed trainmen standing on the rear platform and cackling profanely as the train gathered speed. Lucian was at a loss to understand their derisive laughter and their suggestive gestures until he discovered, standing less than ten yards from him on the opposite side of the railway, quite the most dilapidated human being he had ever seen at close range. The man himself, however, appeared in no way concerned over his condition. He was waving a broken derby and laughing heartily with his eyes upon the departing train.

All at once he became aware of Lucian seated on the pile of ties. He greeted him with a smile that made Lucian chuckle in spite of himself.

“The joke’s on us, stranger!” the tramp called across the tracks, and shook his shaggy head as he laughed once more.

“What joke?” Lucian asked.

“Isn’t it a joke to be kicked off in the middle of nowhere just when you think you’ve got your passage booked through to the Windy City?”

Lucian understood. “That lets me out, friend,” he replied. “They got away before I had a chance to climb up.”

“Which way are you heading?”

“Going down to Nenuphar.”

“Nenuphar?”

“Next town,” Lucian told him. “From there—to Lost River—and Loyola.”

“All one to me,” the tramp declared.

And together the two set off along the open road. For a half-mile or so neither spoke more than a casual word. The tramp seemed busy with his own thoughts. Lucian stole furtive glances at the man’s face. It was a face neither old nor young, but set into lines of perpetual smiling. It was not long, however, before Lucian’s strange companion roused himself with a shake of his shaggy head and began to talk in a voice so mellow that its charm was irresistible.

“What a world this would be, my friend, if men were reasonable,” he observed, “if they were content to think instead of getting sentimental and rushing into action before they know what they are doing. All life might be like this, if we were reasonable—walking along a quiet road on a sunny afternoon.”

Lucian smiled. “And who would do things?” he asked.

“Do things, my friend? There is too much doing—too little being! When we begin to get strenuous, life begins to grow intolerable. You must have thought of that. Living is tolerable and even amusing if you look at it with a clear eye. Yonder it goes,” he said, his eyes lifted to where a cloud of black smoke smeared the horizon behind which the train had passed from sight, “yonder it goes—this mad life we lead—a lot of black smoke and a lot of clatter and a shriek or two of a whistle. Half an hour from now even the smoke will be gone.”

With something of a shock it came to Lucian then that the tramp’s words fitted all too readily into the design his own thinking had taken during his days spent along the road. This intellectual tramp accepted without question the negation of life which was just beginning, with stealthy, agonizing tread, to haunt the most remote chambers of Lucian’s mind. Almost fearfully, with a profound sense of disloyalty to his own soul, he listened while his companion went on.

“What complicates it for us is that people look at life with a lot of fuzz on their eyeballs—fuzz like laws and dogma and honor that has nothing whatever to do with honor. Now and then a man is born who dares to think he can take the world as it is and make it half-way decent for a human soul to exist in it. That’s what the idealist always thinks. The trouble with him is that he becomes strenuous, too, and starts bringing things to pass. Then one day he wakes up. Just when he’s settled down to a nice long ride in the half comfort he has agreed to accept as a compromise, someone finds him and kicks him out and he’s got to hoof it the rest of the way by himself. Then they go by and give you the laugh. And why not? The joke is on you, isn’t it!”

His voice was booming now, his words coming in great resonant bursts of sound that carried some magnetic power quite new to Lucian.

“Look at me, my friend! I’m a tramp, an outcast. But there are times when I am convinced that I do the world a favor to go on living in it. I am one of the few really rational persons in it. I am one of the very few who give it any dignity at all. The world can’t laugh at me now, because I’ve got my laugh in first. It can’t laugh at me, because I don’t exist. I’m not even a name in somebody’s Bible.”

The afternoon wore along, Lucian listening to his strange companion booming away like some actor in a highly emotional rôle. Then, as they came to a little village beside the railway, the tramp took his leave as abruptly as he had entered Lucian’s world a few hours before.

“So long, my friend,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m going to wait here for the next through freight. It’s more pleasant to walk, but it’s also more tiring and I’ve lost the swing of it somehow. Good luck!”

“I’d go with you,” Lucian said, “but I’ve never got used to riding a bumper.”

“My friend,” the tramp responded, “who doesn’t ride a bumper, eh?”

His bellowing laugh broke forth as he seized Lucian’s hand and shook it warmly. Lucian’s eyes fell to the hand that grasped his. On one of the fingers a plain, broad silver ring glinted in the light of the late afternoon. Lucian would have asked him about that silver band had shyness not restrained him. Suddenly the man turned and was gone across the network of tracks, his shabby figure haloed about by the ruddy glow of the late sun. Watching him go, Lucian experienced an exhilaration that was altogether new, and a deep regret that he was not to meet him again. Nor did that regret vanish wholly when he later rebuked himself for having spent the afternoon in the company of a brazen heretic.

Strange things befell Luce Dorrit in the town of Nenuphar.

He came to the town early in the afternoon of the following day, which was Saturday, the gray dust of many miles of road filling the cracks of his shoes and making dark stripes of the knitted grooves in his socks.

Even from afar he had been aware of a certain stir about the place that was altogether unusual in those prairie towns. At the limits of the town he found a fall fair in full progress. Here a high wire fence enclosed a few acres of land, and below an archway on which was printed in large letters, “Fair Grounds,” there was a turnstile and a small booth. Outside the grounds stood the visitors’ vehicles, the horses hitched so that they were able to nibble at the long, drying grass of the open field. Within the enclosure, directly before the main entrance, ran a wide avenue of tents and booths and hastily erected platforms, and beyond, a group of sheds and low-roofed buildings of a more durable kind.

The avenue presented a gay picture with its moving crowds, its fluttering flags, its many colored banners, its jigging balloons, its bunting-covered platforms on which strangely exotic figures cavorted comically to attract the eyes of loiterers. Here and there across the passageways golden cobs of corn were strung in long festoons and sheaves of ripened wheat were woven into garlands. Under the shrill cacophony of whistles and horns sounded the pleasant tintinnabulation of the pop-corn vender’s bell.

When he had stood for some time before the main entrance, taking in the colorful picture from a distance, Lucian paid the small price of admission and went in. For a half-hour or so he sauntered up one aisle of stalls and down another, and squandered a little silver here and there in attempts to toss wooden rings about the gaudy prizes displayed in the concessions, shooting the miniature ducks that traveled on their wire at the end of a long gallery—missing the flickering taper’s flame—ringing the bell in the swinging target. More than one pair of eyes followed him as he made his large way, with the slight and unconscious swagger of his broad shoulders, through the crowd. Nor was it unnatural if here and there a ruddy-cheeked country girl should nudge her companion, her eyes grown suddenly very round and bright as the stranger passed.

Lucian had been wandering for nearly an hour when he came to a tent before which a small crowd of men and boys had gathered. Above the entrance to the tent a canvas streamer, painted in flaming colors, bore the legend: “Jake La Rue, Wrestling Champion of Ten Counties.” At one side of the entrance a large placard bearing the champion’s photograph announced that the doughty Mr. La Rue was prepared to forfeit the sum of fifty dollars to any man he could not toss fairly within three minutes. Neither weight nor age was any barrier, it seemed, the fastidious champion reserving the right, however, to draw the color line.

Lucian elbowed his way through the crowd to where the ticket seller stood on a box that had been draped with red bunting.

“Can anybody try for that?” he asked the man and pointed to the placard.

“Anybody that’s free, white, and twenty-one!” he was told.

Lucian grinned mildly, bought a ticket, and passed into the tent. Within, he ran his eyes quickly over the crowd that had already entered. There were farmers and country boys there with weathered faces and clear eyes that somehow placed Lucian at his ease in spite of the loafers and nondescripts who made up the greater part of the group. There were no seats in the place, the spectators standing about a small arena that had been roped off in the middle of the enclosure. Within the roped square, dressed in trunks of brilliant purple, stood the redoubtable champion, turning pompously about and about on the balls of his feet, his eyes half closed, his shaggy chest expanded, his arms flexed and tensed so as to make the biceps stand out.

Lucian, standing a head above the men in the crowd, looked once closely at the man and smiled to himself. Nor did his smile fade when the champion’s wrestling partner stepped through the ropes and came to friendly grips with the waiting hero. To Lucian’s mind, at least, there was no doubt that the exhibition had been carefully rehearsed many times, nor could he escape a feeling of embarrassment at the ease with which the partner’s shoulders were pinned, neatly and with little loss of time, to the sawdust-sprinkled ground.

The second encounter had been even more carefully rehearsed. For fully a minute the contest progressed at a furious pace, at the end of which time the partner had evidently succeeded in gaining a decided advantage over the champion. In a moment more, it seemed inevitable, Jake La Rue’s shoulders would be in the sawdust. The crowd became mildly excited at the prospect of the champion’s being thrown. The exhibition had been planned, however, with quite another end in view. When the excitement was at its highest the champion made a lightning movement, the partner’s feet left the ground suddenly, and his shoulders descended with a thud on the exact spot where his feet had stood a fraction of a second before.

In the dead silence that followed, Lucian’s laugh broke forth boisterously and the eyes of the crowd turned to him as he pressed forward and leaned across the taut rope at the edge of the square.

“Maybe you could teach me to do that,” he said, smiling into the champion’s face.

The wrestler strode from his place and stood before his challenger. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Luce Dorrit, a farmer from down Loyola way,” Luce informed him. “And I know a man who could break your back for you if he was here to do it!”

The champion grinned. “I’ve been looking for a man just like that,” he replied. “What’s his name?”

“Big William Dorrit—my father!” Lucian told him.

The announcement seemed to amuse the wrestler. He laughed aloud and looked about him at the faces of the men who stood close to the square.

“Why don’t you send for him?” he asked Lucian.

“He’s got work to do,” Lucian replied, “but I’m old enough—and free enough—and if I’m white enough, I’d like to tackle it myself!”

The taunt went home. The wrestler scowled angrily.

“Don’t waste time talkin’ about it out there!” he growled.

“I won’t,” Lucian replied as he handed his pack to a farmer standing beside him and began at once to remove his coat and vest. When he had rolled up his sleeves he hitched his belt in about his waist and vaulted over the rope.

The story of that bout never ceased to be a favorite among the townsmen of Nenuphar. For months, it seemed, they preferred to talk about nothing else. They would tell of how the young farmer from down Loyola way stepped into the square with Jake La Rue, strode boldly up and seized the champion about the waist, crushed his resistance with one mighty heave of his arms and shoulders, lifted him as a man might lift a bag of wheat, turned him over and dropped him on his flat head as if he were chucking a fence post into a hole. Above all, they loved to tell how Lucian Dorrit left the champion’s tent then without waiting to claim the fifty dollars that was his due and how the champion was heard of no more around Nenuphar after that day.

To Lucian, however, the event was of no more than passing importance. His only thought, when he had left the tent, was to shake himself free of the men and boys who followed him to the very end of the midway and might have gone with him out of the grounds had they been able to return without forfeiting an additional admission fee.

When he was alone again, Lucian made his way along a straggling roadway that led to the end of a street at the edge of the town. A few minutes later he halted before a low building with a large window on which the words, “Quick Hot Lunch” had been painstakingly painted in a brilliant yellow. Through the window he could see the row of upright stools that ran down the length of the high counter. The place was deserted save for a girl dressed in white who had just entered through a door at the back, a pile of clean white dishes in her arms. Opening the door, Lucian went in and seated himself on one of the stools.

The next moment he seemed to have forgotten just why he had come in. He was frankly staring across the counter into the sweetest, most sympathetic face he had ever seen. As she returned his gaze, an altogether unaccountable warmth swept over him. He had never known that eyes could be so liquid blue or lashes so unbelievably long and dark.

Lucian gulped. “Coffee and a ham sandwich—please,” he said finally and the girl disappeared suddenly through the door that led to the kitchen at the back.

She was out again before Lucian had time to swallow the lump of excitement that had risen in his throat. In a mood of desperation he plunged into the only subject he could bring clearly to mind.

“Say,” he began, turning his cup around nervously so that the coffee slopped over into his saucer, “do you know a fellow up at the fair grounds by the name of Jake La Rue? He’s a—a wrestler.”

The girl made a grimace. “Yes—he’s been in here,” she informed him. “Are you lookin’ for him?”

Lucian laughed aloud and felt more like himself.

“Looking for him? I turned him on his head up there at the grounds just now,” he told her.

“Yes?” she observed doubtfully.

“Before the whole crowd,” Lucian said in a manner so ingenuous that the girl’s doubts were dissipated at once.

She looked him over appraisingly. “You look awful strong,” she ventured, her dark lashes fluttering as she ran her eyes quickly over his broad shoulders.

The blood tingled in Lucian’s cheeks.

“Do you work here all the time?” he asked her.

“I’m on days—till the fair is over,” she told him. “I get off at supper-time.”

Even had he sought it Lucian could have found no graceful means of retreat. The inevitable question trembled on his lips. Never before had he been so flagrantly bold.

“I don’t know anybody in town.” He cleared his throat huskily. “Maybe you’d go for a walk with me to-night?”

He had put the matter bluntly and in the only words he could think of just then.

“For a stranger,” she said, with another flutter of her dark lashes, “you don’t lose much time.”

“I haven’t much time to lose,” he retorted. “I’m going away again in the morning.”

She smiled at him. “Better let me give you another cup of coffee,” she suggested. “You’ve let it get cold.”

In the early evening she met him at the door with her hat and coat on, her manner showing no more embarrassment than if their meeting had been a nightly occurrence for weeks. Down the wide street they walked until they came to where the lumberyard lay near the outskirts of the town. It was quiet there with the sweet, penetrating smell of pine and spruce in the cool air. There they took the railway track where it stretched westward over the long miles of unrelieved prairie. Before them the sun was going down in an immense ball of flame just where the two gleaming ribbons of steel faded at the horizon’s edge. The sun cast no rays, scarcely colored the sky around it, simply hung there on the earth’s rim like the burning heart of creation.

Lucian was profoundly moved by the sight.

“Did you ever see anything like that!” he exclaimed involuntarily.

“Yes,” she replied, blinking into the light, “we always have pretty sunsets here.”

Pretty! Some hint of misgiving entered Lucian’s soul. Were there people in the world incapable of wonder?

“But the sun doesn’t often roll right off the track into space like that—does it?” he asked her.

She looked up at him doubtfully, but did not reply.

They walked then for a mile or so in almost complete silence. A certain rapture bore Lucian along, a certain unrelated exultation.

Suddenly he broke forth again. “Just think of the first pioneer who saw the sun going down here after his first day on this land! Can you picture that? No trees, no mountains, no lakes! Just land! Can’t you sometimes just feel yourself being whirled through space when you look out over these prairies? Can’t you?”

She looked up at him again, mildly curious, mildly uneasy. Lucian could not understand that look. Why did she not say something? He wanted to tell her how he felt there before all the glory of radiant sky and endless prairie, how it made a man yearn for the unattainable in life, how it set him upon the heights above the kingdoms of the world and made him dream unheard-of things.

“I’ve been on my feet all day,” she told him presently. “Let’s go down here and rest for a while.”

They had come to a small trestle with an abutment at either end. Lucian, saying nothing, helped her down, then got down beside her. The girl curled up in a corner made by two upright timbers. Luce sat with his long legs dangling over the edge of a square beam. He stared for a while into the purple, fuliginous water of the slough that lay under the bridge, then looked up suddenly at his companion. He found her gazing at him curiously. Her tender, pale face appealed to him as being very lovely in the soft light. He leaned toward her slightly, remembering that she was probably very tired after her day’s work. She moved toward him with a sigh and rested her head against his shoulder. For some time they sat thus without speaking. Presently Lucian felt an arm move up about his shoulders and, a moment later, cool fingers slip under his collar. He turned to her gravely and kissed her.

A vague uneasiness swept Lucian suddenly, a sense of having done an unworthy, an impious thing. Irrelevantly enough, he recalled words which the great William Dorrit, a man of few precepts, had pronounced with characteristic hesitancy on the day that Lucian had left Loyola for the harvest fields of the north. “Shun the very appearance of evil!” he had said, and Lucian had felt the words burn themselves into his memory.

He got to his feet abruptly. “I think we’d better go back now,” he said quietly. “You’ll be getting cold sitting here.”

He gave her his hand and pulled her to her feet. For a moment she stood close to him, her fingers clasping his hands impulsively, her blue eyes smoldering under their long lashes. When he did not move, she turned from him suddenly and climbed back to the track without his help.

As they walked back to town, the two or three attempts at conversation which Lucian made fell hopelessly flat. The girl’s replies were short and almost disdainful. It had become dark when they finally halted before the house where the girl lived. Lucian lingered a moment at the gate, searching his mind for some word of apology to make before he left her.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” he told her awkwardly. “Didn’t you want me to kiss you?”

The girl tossed her head. “You’re just a fool!” she flung at him over her shoulder as she hurried up the narrow pathway that led to the door.

She did not look back, although Lucian lingered for some time hoping that she might turn and speak before she reached the door. He saw her go into the house, heard her close the door behind her. Presently he saw a light go on in an upper window and a shade hurriedly drawn. Behind it a shadow moved, grew large, grotesque, sprawled and grew small and slender again. A dull warmth stole over Lucian, closed suffocatingly about his heart. He turned and almost ran down the street. The gas-lights in the streets of Nenuphar blinked at him with sickly knowledge as he darted past them. And before the end of another half-hour he was swinging along the dusty road in the darkness, his mind upon Lost River, where lived the sister of William Dorrit.

Three days later he strode down the main street of the town and halted before a house that had been set well back and was almost surrounded by yellowing box alder trees. A tide of yellow leaves had ebbed up against the picket fence along the wooden walk. The lawn in front of the house was closely cropped and was still a lively green, with here and there a yellow leaf settling gently down upon it out of the sunlight. Closer to the house great, dusky-hearted dahlias grew, asters, marigold and all the sturdy flowers of the waning year, with ribbon grass, severe and orderly, growing in between. Lucian felt a kindling of warmth within him as he swung open the gate and let his eyes rove over the house.

Aunt Ella Blake herself opened the door to him.

“It’s you, Luce!” she cried, throwing her plump arms heartily about his shoulders. “Well, well! Who’d have thought to see you! Come on into the kitchen. Can’t leave my cookin’ for even a minute. Throw your bundle behind the door. There! Now come with me. You can wash your hands at the sink. My, my, but it’s good to see you!”

Lucian followed her solid, square figure with the large bow of her apron flapping generously across her broad back. The kitchen into which he stepped smelled temptingly of roasting beef and a sizzling noise from the oven was sweet to hear. Aunt Ella set a wash basin for him, whipped a clean towel from a drawer, and then bustled about her work as she continued to talk, hurling one question after another at Lucian while he did his best to answer them, at the same time scrubbing vigorously to remove some of the dust he had picked up along the miles of prairie road.

“And where all have you been since you left home? It must have been an experience for you, I must say. Did they work you hard and did they pay you well—or have you spent all you made and have to walk home and wear out good shoe-leather on the way? Dave’ll not be in till supper time, but he’ll be glad to see you. And my, but how you’ve grown! You’ll be as big as William yet if you keep it up. And have you had any word from home lately? But you do the talkin’ or they’ll be in for supper before I’m more’n half ready for them.”

For nearly an hour Lucian talked to her of his experiences in the wheat fields of Dakota and of what had befallen him along the way since he had left the town of Gary. Then he sat apart or wandered about the house while Aunt Ella served supper to her hungry boarders. Uncle Dave did not come in until the regular supper hour was past. With his return, Lucian was given a glimpse of the irony that controls all life. The dapper little husband of Aunt Ella was all excitement over news that had come to town that afternoon and had set the place agog.

It appeared that a tramp had been burned to death in a box car on a siding about ten miles east of Lost River. The charred body had been found among the smoking ruins of the car early that day and had been brought up to Lost River in the hope that it might be identified. Clues to the man’s identity were wanting, however, save for a broad silver ring that had been found on one of the fingers of the right hand. A sick tremor shook Lucian as he heard his uncle discuss the tragedy. It was some minutes before he could bring himself to tell them of his meeting with the tramp and of their talk along the way.

In the excitement of the moment Uncle Dave had all but forgotten to tell Lucian that he had that afternoon received a brief letter from Loyola informing him that William Dorrit had fallen suddenly ill and was confined to his bed. All at once it was as if a great light had gone out in Lucian’s world. It had never come to him before that anything could happen to the great William Dorrit.

“I’ll have to take the train out of here in the morning,” he said as the three of them sat down to their late supper.

Aunt Ella was no optimist. In times of trouble she had recourse to a kind of sentimental fatalism through which the future became very dark indeed.

“I might have known it,” she said in a shaking voice. “I’ve been lookin’ for it this five years back. It’s a wonder to me he didn’t break years ago, that’s all.”

“Ella!” Uncle Dave remonstrated mildly.

“What’s the use of talkin’, Dave Blake!” she retorted, her voice rising as she spoke. “You know as well as I do that William Dorrit was cheated out of life itself the day he married Agatha Sherwood. What’s more, Luce Dorrit knows it, too, even if she is his mother. William Dorrit was meant for something in the world and he’d ‘a’ been something, too, if he hadn’t gone and married a woman who had him scared to death from the day she got him.”

Little pin-points of moisture came out on Lucian’s brow as he listened to his aunt. He had heard her express herself before concerning his mother, but never quite so bitterly. His aunt’s resentment, in fact, had always been something of a problem to Lucian. He had thought it might be because the Blakes had lived childless for the thirty-odd years of their married life while Agatha Dorrit had been blessed with three healthy boys and a girl. And yet, there were times when Lucian himself had almost admitted the reasonableness of Ella Blake’s hatred of the woman William Dorrit had married. He had seen his father actually cower before the fierce anger that seemed absolutely to control his mother at times, had seen him come to utter confusion in his work as if his mind had suddenly lost its grip of things, had seen him walk bewildered out of the house to spend the day in aimless wandering about the fields. He had wept for his father at such times and had railed secretly against his unfeeling mother.

A vague sense of family loyalty, however, moved him to speak in defense of his mother now.

“Ma has done a lot for us, Aunt Ella,” he said quietly, not venturing to raise his eyes from his plate.

“Yes, Luce Dorrit—she has! She has worked hard for you. I know that. Though she hasn’t worked any harder than any decent mother would work for her children. And I’ll say this for her—and I’ve always said it—Agatha Dorrit never let a child of hers go for the want of washin’ and a clean stitch to put on them when they needed it. I’ll say that for her. But she’s made cowards of you, just the same, Luce Dorrit. She’s done with you as she’s done with brother William. She’s goin’ to do it more with you than with the others because you’re more like William than any of the others, unless Leona. If you weren’t your father all over again I wouldn’t worry about you. But you’re goin’ like him, sure as light. And it’s Agatha Dorrit that’s doin’ it. You’re a man now, full grown you might say, but I’ll bet you don’t dare to call your soul your own this minute. I guess I know. I’ve watched brother William breakin’ under her for the last twenty years and more.”

“I think, Ella,” Uncle Dave protested mildly once more, “I think I’d like to hear Luce tell about his trip up north.”

Aunt Ella offered no word in reply. In fact, she had reached the point she invariably reached after giving rein to her opinions, at which her feelings could no longer find expression in mere words. She wept silently, brushing away her tears with the back of her work-hardened hand, while Lucian and his Uncle Dave talked of harvest fields and wages and of whole farms that had yielded forty bushels of good wheat to the acre.

After a troubled night with very little sleep, Lucian rose early to catch the train for Loyola. When he left his aunt’s house he took with him a substantial luncheon which her busy hands had prepared for him in spite of her multitudinous duties. After all, she loved William Dorrit’s son as though he had been her own. She stood in the doorway and watched him go through the gate and down the street. When she could see him no more, she blew her nose energetically and said aloud to herself, “Just like William—with that loose-legged, easy walk of his. And some darn woman’ll get him, too—same as one got William!”

It was mid-forenoon when Lucian reached the town of Loyola. If a railway siding, a station-house, a pool room, a general store and a post-office, brought together in humble company with a church, a school and an “opera-house” can be called a town, then to Loyola belonged the title with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. There was Melham’s general store with its hot-air register in the floor where Lucian had often warmed his feet on the way home from school in the bitter winter days of his boyhood. There was Castle’s Livery Stable, subsequently become a country garage, whose wizened, mottled-faced owner spent his Saturday nights in poker games with country lads who met in the room at the back of the pool hall. There was the public school where the rather ineffectual Mr. Tingley bore with patience the unconscious affronts to his dignity and received visitors with a smile. There was the Presbyterian church where weekly meetings of the Christian Endeavor were attended by shy young lovers who held hands furtively during a prayer and became boisterous at sociables. There was the pool room where the town youth smoked cigarettes and listened to the lurid stories that traveling salesmen told. There was also a doctor’s office, to be sure, and an old Doctor Muller whose chief occupation during the day seemed to be solitaire and whose chief delight at night was said to be the bottle, but whose healing hand and shrewd mind had made him nevertheless a kind of god among his people.

Lucian did not want to see the town that day. He had but one thought and that was to set his feet in the familiar way that led north out of Loyola to the Dorrit place that lay a scant mile from the railway station.

On the edge of the town he passed the house of one Nan Miracle. The good people of Loyola affected to despise Nan Miracle, whose coming to the town had never been fully explained and whose secret life was spoken of in whispers among the women of the district. Lucian Dorrit looked cautiously from the corners of his eyes as he passed Nan Miracle’s house. Although he did not retard his step in the slightest, he saw the green picket fence that ran around the small, ivy-covered house, and the tiny patch of lawn in front where lay a bed of drying poppies and another of nasturtiums, sharp flowers.

Nan Miracle wove rugs on a loom, the materials for which were sent her by some tradesman in the city who paid her well, it was said, for the finished product. It was not only because of her secret and whispered life, however, down there so close to the section house and the railway tracks, that Nan Miracle’s presence in Loyola was resented. She had a way with her when she spoke to the men of the town that was wholly out of place in a community as small as Loyola, nor was she ever known to seek the friendship of any of the women.

In the roadway beyond lay perfect stillness and deep warmth, the white dust starting occasionally before a freakish waltz of wind from the yellow stubble fields. Once, as he hurried along, Lucian stopped abruptly as the shock of distant blasting shook the air with violent reverberations.

“They’re getting out stone in the Murker quarry,” he thought to himself and started off along the road once more.

That sound of blasting had startled Lucian from his boyish day-dream years ago. The stone quarry on the Murker place, that great colored mass of glacial rock, had been a soaring mountain then, in Lucian’s eyes. The very thought of it had frightened him and cost him many an uneasy night. When he had grown to sturdy boyhood he had set out one day resolved to lay the fear that had risen before him with every thought of the Murker quarry. It had seemed, even then, an enormous distance from his home to the mountain, and once there, it was an enormous distance again to the top. But somehow he had reached that top, had seen a frightened rabbit break from cover and go darting madly down the farther side, and had found himself alone and miraculously unafraid with the wild wind sweeping by. Thereafter, when the mood was on him, he used to go there in the warm afternoons, lie on his back on the summit of the highest rock knoll, where tremendous winds and clouds incalculably white and large would catch him up, and he would ride in the sails of danger to the world’s end....

All that had been years ago. Old man Murker had died since then and Hattie Murker, his only daughter, had taken the place and done her father’s memory credit in its management. It was Hattie Murker’s quarry now where men were blasting stone. And suddenly it came to Lucian Dorrit that the years had made a man of him.