Читать книгу The Dark Dawn - Martha Ostenso - Страница 5

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Where he lay in his bed close under the sloping rafters, Lucian Dorrit could look out upon the October dawn, pink, sweet, ironical, margining delicately the gray field his father had plowed two weeks before. The plowing had been done on a raw day, a day of cold rain and sleet, but what was a season’s mood to the great frame of William Dorrit? Two days after Lucian’s return from the harvest fields, however, William Dorrit had died of pneumonia.

To-day he was to be buried. His body lay in the parlor below, and the palling scent of funeral flowers pervaded the entire house, reaching even to the small room where Lucian lay. For some time Lucian had lain and thought about those flowers. His mother and his sister Leona, even his two brothers, had been proud of them. They had come all the way from the city and flowers from the city were seldom seen about Loyola, even at funerals. To Lucian, however, there was something almost obscene in the very smell that came up to him there under the sloping rafters.

“Flowers for Pa!” he said aloud, and the words were a groan. “O God!”

Lucian felt only the hypocrisy of it all—and the irony of it. Hattie Murker, whose farm adjoined the Dorrit place on the north, had quarreled with William Dorrit over the sale of a dozen turkeys just a week before his illness. It was Hattie Murker who had sent to the city for the flowers. Agatha Dorrit had been praising Hattie loudly since the hour the flowers had come. They had revealed a forgiving, Christian spirit in her neighbor. As if William Dorrit, that man of mighty spirit, stood in any need of forgiveness! Tears of anger and shame for the insensibility of his family sprang into Lucian’s eyes as he thought of the thing.

He listened for some sound in the house below. There was no stir. He crawled out from beneath the patchwork covers and scrambled into his clothes. With luck, he thought, he could get downstairs and into the parlor without waking anybody, and have a last moment with his father alone.

In the narrow hallway below he passed his mother’s open door. With all his old timidity toward her, he tiptoed by, glancing in furtively as he passed. There was something very chaste about the way she lay in her bed. The coverlet was unrumpled across her breast. Her long, bony hands were exposed with the faint gray shine of dawn upon them. She still lay, from long habit, well to the right in the great oak bed. She slept, as she did all other things, with a fierce, vigorous economy, not long, but soundly. As Lucian looked at her a sudden pang of pity for her smote him, a warmth that he could not remember ever having felt before, his boyish fear of her having always shut out other emotion.

He passed on silently to the room of his two younger brothers, Arnold and Manlius. No grief of the spirit disturbed their slumber. They slept like two young bullocks, their curly red hair matting over their foreheads. Arnold, the younger of the two, slept with his mouth open and Lucian could see the gold tooth he had had inserted by a dentist once when he had run away to the city. The gold tooth had been acquired at the expense of a perfectly sound incisor of his own. He had been fifteen at the time and had coveted the gold tooth of a chum. His father had thrashed him soundly, but the boy had stubbornly refused to divulge the name of the dentist whose professional ethics had so totally forsaken him. The bold independence of Arnold and the unremitting hardness of Manlius were qualities that Lucian had never been able to understand. He was disturbed, uneasy about them, and sometimes they filled him with a sort of wistful envy.

Across the hallway from his brothers’ room slept his little sister, Leona. She was temperamentally more like Lucian. She slept with her door closed. Since her fifteenth birthday she had been in the habit of locking her door at night, a habit which had puzzled and annoyed her mother. No one in the family knew what secrets she kept behind the locked door, what anxious adolescent thoughts she cherished there.

At the foot of the stairs in the lower hallway Lucian paused, his hand on one of the great wooden knobs that topped the pillars his father had built into the stairway. On the pillar beside which Lucian stood, William Dorrit had carved with laborious care the legend:

Straight is the line of duty,

Curved is the line of beauty;

Follow the straight line, thou shalt see

The curved line ever follow thee.

When his father had first carved the precept there, Lucian had thought it beautiful and true. Now—it filled him with a vague discomfort, incertitude.

In the parlor the blinds were closely drawn, and William Dorrit’s casket, which stood on its supports in the center of the floor, was only a bulk of denser darkness in the gloom. Lucian had not yet seen his father in death. Two days before, when the body was returned from the undertaker’s in Loyola, the family had filed into the parlor and had stood for a moment about the coffin. Lucian had been unable to bring himself to join them. Because of his refusal his mother had complained bitterly, as was her wont, and had called him obstinate, unnatural, feelingless. In his misery Lucian had not spoken a word in his own defense.

The sickly smell of lilies and white carnations mingled with the mustiness peculiar to unused country parlors. Lucian went to one of the windows and jerked up the blind, but the window itself remained fast. A flood of gray light filled the room. The black box in the center of the room stood out suddenly, with a dull, large luster, seeming to crowd the little parlor beyond its capacity. Lucian stole up to the black box and looked in.

There was on the face of William Dorrit a calm, a grandeur, that had not been there in life. The dignified indifference of death had come between him and the ignoble pain of living. He had stood six feet six in his fifty-seventh year, and his teeth were the teeth of a boy just grown. His hair was white and too fine. The face was full and broad and bony, markedly Irish—William Dorrit’s mother had been Irish—and to this ruggedness the skin over the cheek-bones and above the shaggy brows was an extraordinary contrast of delicateness. In life William Dorrit had had an appraising way of looking at you, as though over the rims of spectacles, although he had never worn them. The stiffened lids had buried forever the look of those eyes, diffident, embarrassed, with the ghost of some long-remembered dream a-stalk in them. His hands were not the hands of a farmer. Wind and weather had never succeeded in making them their own. As Lucian slipped aside the glass and touched the smooth contours of those hands a wave of rebellious disbelief in his father’s death swept over him.

“Pa—listen, Pa!” he whispered.

The sound of the words startled him. A tear plashed from his cheek to the satin edge of the casket. He replaced the glass. When he had pulled down the window-blind he moved quietly through the dining-room and the kitchen and let himself out by way of the back door.

The small and important noise of existence was beginning again in the barnyard and among the outhouses. There was a clucking and a fluttering in the chicken-coop, and the milch cows lowed impatiently with their heads thrust half-way through the bars of the milking pen. Down on the duck-pond there was an excited clatter that announced the arrival of a flock of wild duck from the marshes in the north. The pallid glamour in the east had become a burst of rose and the air over the dark fields seemed to quiver with the coming light. Here and there on the ground there were great shadows, as though invisible immense wings were fleeing before the dawn.

A lump rose, hard as a knotted cord, in Lucian’s throat as he recalled how his father had loved those early, vivid dawns; how he used to stand for a moment or two on the doorstep before he descended to his round of morning chores and thump his great chest with his fist from sheer joy of living.

Presently the family would be getting up and there would be the old familiar commotion about the yard and in the house. Suddenly the thought of life going on in its usual way became unbearable to Lucian. He quickened his step almost to a run down past the barns, held down the barbed wire that fenced a field, and climbed over with his long legs. An old cowpath led straight north into ground that had never been plowed and Lucian followed it until it dwindled away into the pocks of a dried slough. In the hardened mud he could see the prints of his father’s hob-nailed boots where they had crushed down bits of greenish, slimy moss and manure into flat patterns against the black ground. The tracks would probably remain there now until the spring thaws came to obliterate them.

Beneath the misery of his thoughts Lucian had the feeling that he was running away from something. After those exalted weeks on the prairies where his heart had swelled with new hopes and he had looked forward to days of warm companionship with that great man who was his father, after those pleasant hours of dreaming along the way where he had caught glimpses of the rare beauty that covers the world, it was not an easy task to accommodate himself to the new position into which his father’s death had so suddenly thrust him. With his hands in his pockets, for the dawn air was cold, his head bare and his hair falling forward in a thick dark lock over his forehead, Lucian stretched himself to his full height and looked back at the farm buildings behind him.

The Dorrit farm looked exactly like the dozen others in the community, except that it was a little smaller, a little less well-equipped, a little shabbier than they. From where he stood in that north pasture, Lucian could see the caragana hedge his father had trained with such care on the south side of the house. The house itself was a lean, two-and-a-half-story affair from which the prairie wind had whipped most of the white paint. To Lucian it looked like a melancholy person with eyes set close together. A grove of cottonwoods partly concealed it from the main road on the west toward which its rather despondent veranda sloped. There was a small stoop at the rear with a railing across which grayish floor cloths were always drying. The barns and the sheds were drab for want of paint, the corncrib had been set askew by a July tornado; but there had been neither time nor money to spare for the necessary repairs.

Lucian stared at the buildings now gray and wan in the early light; at the flat fields surrounding them, a full section of land where the yield had never been very good. All this was his now, his land, his buildings, his heritage. A sudden trembling seized him, a panic of emotion that was neither joy nor fear but a tumult of both. A gravity came into his face as he swept the horizon with his eyes, a new look that signaled the passing of the careless dreams of a boy.

Lucian knew that he would be expected to carry on the work of tilling those stubborn acres where William Dorrit had so abruptly quit his task. His mother, in fact, would take it for granted that he should. In sudden desperation Lucian ran his fingers through his hair and shut his eyes tight on the tears of which he was ashamed. Was it thus he should take the place of the man who had been robbed of the shining destiny intended for him? Oh, great William Dorrit, what were the vain agonies of your spirit, you who were meant for achievement among men, you who dragged your yoke like a dumb brute over these mean acres?

Lucian’s eyes roved uneasily over the nearer fields where the somber plowed earth was becoming a sinister red under the dawn. His fingers tightened against his palms and the knuckles on his hands moved like white marbles under the taut, reddened skin. A handful of ground should not make a slave of him, should not break him as it had broken his father. It was not that he did not love the land, his father’s land. It filled him with great, limitless emotions, ambitions. But there was something within him that had to get out, something that was too great for these narrow fields, something that scorned Loyola and its mean environs.

As he stumbled across the field he talked in a husky whisper as if his father were there walking beside him and listening. He and his father were like trees, he said, trees that had grown out of the prairie; but they had to spread upward, toward the sky and the light and the clear air. He talked on and on, half aloud, walking blindly ahead, until he came at last to the fence that marked the beginning of Hattie Murker’s land. There he turned and looked backward over the way he had come.

Southward, past the Dorrit farm, lay the sprawling village of Loyola. That small yellow house that stood apart from the rest of the town, near the railroad track, was the house of Nan Miracle. It was at least two miles away from where Lucian stood now, but the sun striking flames from the eastern windows of the house made it seem very close. For a moment as Lucian permitted his mind to rest upon that house and the woman who lived in it his lips twisted with faint contempt and his nostrils narrowed sharply with young scorn. In the pool room in Loyola when men talked about Nan Miracle Lucian deliberately walked away or turned his back upon their unsavory jokes. Once, walking on the main street of the town with his sister Leona, he had seen Nan Miracle coming toward them and had quickly led his sister to the opposite side of the street.

To the north and slightly eastward from him stood Hattie Murker’s house, with its single tall pine beside it and the handsome barns at the rear, aloof and solitary on its low hill. A half-mile to the eastward of the buildings the stone quarry glimmered in the tender colors of the morning. Hattie had had men at work there blasting out stone, but to-day the quarry would be silent out of respect for the memory of William Dorrit. That might have been a generous gesture on the part of Hattie Murker, but Lucian knew she would take pains to let everyone know that she had done it.

Northwest, cornering Hattie Murker’s land, bare of a single tree except for the stout willows that grew near the roadway, lay the homestead of Mons Torson. Though he was older than Lucian by at least seven years, he was the only man in the whole district of Loyola—with the possible exception of Doctor Muller—to whom Lucian would have gone in time of trouble. To Muller Lucian would have gone for help. To Torson he would have gone for understanding. It was to Mons he had gone the day after his return from the north. He knew that there he would find one who, next to his own father, would understand the exalted mood he had carried with him from his journey along the prairie roads. It was to Mons he had gone when he realized at last that William Dorrit could not live. He knew that there he would find one who, more than any other, would understand the inexpressible sense of loss that was breaking his heart. Mons Torson was ostentatiously irreligious and had expressed himself bluntly when he had heard that William Dorrit’s funeral was to be held in a church.

“Hold it out on his fields—if you’ve got to have one of your damn’ funerals,” he had urged. “Don’t go and coop him up with a lot of psalm-singers and black-coats. Give him another smell of the earth with the air over it, for God’s sake!”

East of the Murker place, just a mile from Mons Torson’s, was the farm of another Norwegian, Peter Strand, a silent man with an invalid wife and a daughter of fourteen who came often to see Lucian’s sister. Karen Strand was a strange, imaginative girl whose bright, impulsive ways were always a little baffling to Leona.

A thin vapor was rising now from the plowed field alongside the pasture and Lucian turned back home. Occasionally an impudent blackbird hopped out of his path, its early search for food scarcely interrupted by his coming. The sight of the birds made Lucian’s heart even heavier than before. His father had been their great lover and many of them were very tame.

The family would be up and about by now. Lucian slipped down between the barns where he would be unobserved, and entered the tool shed. There were some things there that he had planned to take away on the day his father had died, but there had been so many other matters to attend to then. In one corner of the shed he found a padlocked chest that was half buried under a load of egg crates. With a key he carried he unlocked the chest and took from it a large bundle of papers, the corners of which were yellowed and curled. A piece of twine was tied about the bundle and on a tag attached to it was printed in red ink, “Notes on the Nipigon country trip.” Agatha Dorrit had not permitted these memoirs a place in the house. She would have about her no reminders of the time when William Dorrit had left the farm and taken a dangerous trip into the north country, facing hazards the like of which no married man, in her opinion, had any right to face.

Besides the notes, Lucian took from the chest a pair of battered binoculars, a rusted fishing reel, an old ivory-headed cane, and a glass specimen case of butterflies and insects that his father had mounted with his own hands when his wife’s vigilant eyes were not on him. All these things Lucian placed in a stout wheat sack and tied a bit of rope securely about the top of it. This done, he seated himself on the earth floor of the tool shed. He spent some time there, sitting with his long arms about his knees, his eyes staring straight before him where the half open door looked out upon the barnyard and beyond toward the house. He hated the thought of going back to the house to hear all over again the daily theme of his mother’s chiding, which even to-day would suffer no abatement. There was a cozy, earthy disorder about the tool shed that comforted him and softened, however little, the bleak, cruel fact of his father’s death.

Presently he got up with the sack in his hand and went farther down the yard where the big red barn stood, its paint peeling in gray streaks. Sloping up against it in a dejected fashion was the wagon shed, exposed on one side and revealing the vehicular possessions of the Dorrits. The ancient black democrat which was to carry the Dorrit family to the funeral at Loyola stood there, and beside it the plow which William Dorrit had last driven. Lucian tucked the sack away under the back seat of the democrat and turned toward the house.

There was a slamming of the screen door as Lucian’s brothers plunged out of the house and came toward the barn. Even to-day, Lucian thought as he watched them come down the path toward him, there was nothing quiet, nothing decorous in their attitude. But they were merry, generous boys and Luce was fond of them.

“Ma wants to know why you didn’t make a fire in the kitchen stove, you gettin’ up so early and all,” Arnold called to him in passing.

Lucian’s spirit was too heavy for protest. He saw smoke rising from the kitchen chimney and as he approached the house water from a wash-basin was flung from the doorway, making a translucent arc. Chickens came running to the spot where the water fell, looked about excitedly for scraps, and stalked off disappointed. The agonizing persistence of the familiar and homely details of living, the tenacity of inconsiderable things, made at that moment an ineradicable mark in Lucian’s mind.

The kitchen door opened and Agatha Dorrit came out, wiping her hands on her apron. As far back as he could remember, Lucian’s mother was always wiping her hands on her apron. At the sight of Lucian’s tall form striding slowly up the pathway some sentiment either of tenderness or regret—or perhaps a sentiment that was a mingling of both—brought the tears suddenly to her eyes. She threw her apron up to her face and wept with sounds that were high and shrill, like the notes from some weird instrument. When she turned and went back into the house, Lucian followed her, uncomfortable in his new feeling of pity, of tenderness toward her. He would have to be especially attentive to her to-day, show her in some little way that she alone would see, his deep sympathy and understanding.

By two o’clock the yard behind the Dorrit farm-house and the open space down below the barns were filled with rigs of all kinds hitched to trees, posts, corncrib and sheds. The women, and a few of the men, were indoors, but down by the wagon shed a number of farmers dressed in their awkward Sunday black or navy-blue squatted about on wagon tongues or leaned against the sides of the buildings. The day had become almost sultry and Manlius Dorrit had brought a bucket of lemonade and several dippers down to them. Now and then one of the men would help himself to some of the beverage and hang the dipper back by the crook of its handle on the side of the bucket. All eyes were turned, rather furtively, it seemed, in the general direction of the house.

“Wonder if Hattie Murker’ll be there?” remarked Blundell, who ran a lunch counter in Loyola.

Two or three of the men snorted. One spat eloquently and shifted his cud of tobacco from one cheek to the other, grinning as he did so.

“She’ll be there with bells on,” he said. “Hattie Murker don’t miss any funerals if she can help it—especially since Ben Torson went off the way he did.”

The tragic death of Mons Torson’s brother had been one of the major subjects of conversation for the past year. He was to have married Hattie Murker, but on the day set for the wedding he had been thrown from his horse and had died a week later.

Myers, owner of the barber shop in Loyola, had left his business to come to the funeral because of a very genuine liking he had had for William Dorrit. The town looked to Myers for most of its home-made wit.

“And she’ll be going to somebody’s funeral the day she gets married, too,” he observed. “Ben got out of it lucky, the way he did it. When I see her go by the shop I say to myself, Myers, old boy, you didn’t pick any prize beauty when you teamed up with your missus, but you can be darned glad you didn’t pick Hattie Murker!”

A subdued chuckle greeted his sally.

“It’s just about a year ago now, isn’t it, since that happened?” asked a young farmer who had lately come to the district.

“Jist about,” Blundell informed him. “And you can say what you like about it, but every time I think of it, I get to feelin’ that Ben wasn’t so dead anxious to marry her—whatever the reason was—and he jist let that horse do for him rather than——”

“Aw, get out, Joe!” Myers interrupted. “Ben wasn’t that kind of a fool. He’d probably let a woman get him, but no horse would get the better of Ben Torson if he could help it. He wouldn’t ‘a’ gone that way about it.”

“Well, there was something funny about the way it happened,” Blundell insisted.

“And she sure hates Mons Torson ever since,” observed Joe Finch, whose land lay north of the Torson place.

“That’s natural, too,” Myers urged. “She lost that prize heifer of hers in Torson’s muskeg just a week after Ben’s funeral. If Mons looked after his fences a little——”

“An’ she felt worse about the cow than she did about Ben Torson, too,” put in another.

“Well,” Blundell chuckled, “she’ll have to pay good money if she wants another heifer like the one she lost. She can get a man for nothing. And she will, too, don’t worry. She’s got all that land and she’s smart as hell—and young and handsome. I got to admit that.”

“She sure is,” Myers agreed, “but she’s old man Murker all over again.”

“They tell me he was a hard one,” remarked the young farmer who had lately come to Loyola.

“Hard? Good Lord!” Blundell exclaimed. “All you got to do is to look at young Bert Murker to know jist what that old devil would do. Bert would ‘a’ been all right to-day if the old man hadn’t knocked him off the binder in one of his fits. Bert would ‘a’ took over the farm and run it instead o’ Hattie if that hadn’t happened. Now look at him! Strong enough, but no sense left. And Hattie works him like an ox!”

“Sh-h-h!” Myers cautioned.

A heavy silence fell upon the crowd as Hattie Murker appeared suddenly where the road leading to the house passed the corner of the wagon shed. She was seated alone in a new buggy, the reins she held in her hands drawn taut over the sleek withers of a shining black mare.

“Some mare!” the farmer from sixteen miles west of Loyola whistled under his breath.

At a little after two o’clock Lucian and his brothers, assisted by three of William Dorrit’s friends, bore the closed coffin out of the house while the men stood about with bared heads, the women with downcast faces. A pause seemed to come in the very wind above that bare farmyard as the body of the great William Dorrit moved through it for the last time in the inviolable beauty and integrity of absolute death. The shabby house, graying through its ancient coat of white, the shabbier barns, the sagging picket fence that leaned against a briar patch on one side of the yard, the vegetable garden stripped now of its harvest save for the golden globes of pumpkins lighting the brown earth, bore the sorrowful, bleak and lonely color of death as it comes to the northern prairie. Here death cannot draw about its piteousness a glamour of ritual; the prairie exposes it without mercy, and only the mystical dignity inherent in it remains. Death here is like a withered stalk in the midst of desolation that still stands and takes the sun.

Agatha Dorrit, straight and stiff as a lath in her cheap black taffeta, came down the walk and took her place in the family democrat, looking neither to the left nor to the right. A moment later the family crowded in after her, Lucian taking his place in the driver’s seat.

Noon burned blue over the world on that day in late October. The hard dirt road stretched like a band of gray lead to the town of Loyola and beyond into a watery, wavering mirage against the horizon. To the east and west reached the royal, insolent prairie, flat and uncompromising as the hand of God; to the north the tawny bouquets of color that marked the beginning of the bush country; burnished stubble ashine over acre after rolling acre; thorn-apple trees cropping out in the hollows like round cushions stuck full of bright, red-headed pins; the strong, heady savor of the earth where the plow had lately been and where the cold nights had brought their dews with a threat of frost to come. This was the road that was only a grassy wheel-rut when William Dorrit took it one August day long ago when the tiger-lilies blazed over those rolling fields, before any plow had cleaved their glory and turned it under the dark furrow. O bold, inveterate blue sky, that has calmly accepted the coming and going of the northern pioneers, is there no weakness, no death in you, or in this prairie, your confederate?

The little church in Loyola was already well filled when they bore the body of William Dorrit down the wide aisle to the altar. It was not until the service was begun that Lucian, sitting beside his mother in the front row, saw that Hattie Murker had taken a seat directly across the aisle from him.

Hattie Murker had never been called “pretty” or “lovely.” She was colloquially “handsome” and to strangers “striking.” She had just passed into her twenty-sixth year, but because of a certain severity in her bearing she looked thirty. She had very black, glossy hair that waved in a trained fashion over her ears and the part down the center of it was bluish and conspicuous. She was of little more than medium height, but the erectness of her carriage and the slight tilt of her very fine chin gave her the appearance of one very much taller. Her shoulders were square almost to angularity, her hands and wrists bony, her breast and hips aggressively voluptuous. She had the dark, burning eyes of a Gipsy and the white skin of a madonna.

Lucian looked across at her once or twice during the hymns and noticed, with absent-minded irrelevance, the peculiarly grown-up, waxen convolutions of her ears. When they had gone to school together, Lucian had always thought of her as one of the older girls and she was still, to him, somewhat loftly and mysterious. As he glanced down at Hattie’s hands it occurred to him that they were not unlike his mother’s. His eyes moved sideways and he saw a tear fall from his mother’s cheek to the hymn-book that lay in her lap. Awkwardly he put out a hand and patted the dull black silk over her knee. Agatha Dorrit gave a long sigh and Lucian’s heart beat with the certainty that for once in her life she was not disapproving of him.

The service over, there followed a half-hour or more during which those who had come to the church moved down the aisle and looked for the last time on the face of William Dorrit. Hattie Murker got up from her place and after gazing for a brief moment at the still face turned and shook hands solemnly with Agatha Dorrit. At a glance from his mother, Lucian shifted a little to one side and Hattie sat down between them, whispering words of comfort to her neighbor. Lucian, his arm pressed close to Hattie’s shoulder, had a sense of contact with something violent and strange. Vaguely he remembered the heavy scent of flowers that had come up to him that morning where he lay in bed under the sloping rafters. Without looking at her now he was acutely conscious of her ears—and, beneath her hat, her black hair with its precise part, bluish and conspicuous. Before his eyes the slow procession of farmers and townspeople passed in a faint blur.

It was late afternoon when they arrived at the cemetery and the light of the low October sun threw long rays of amber into the purple of that secluded place. Lucian had taken from beneath the back seat of the democrat the wheat sack he had placed there early that morning. When it came time for the body to be lowered into the place that had been made for it, he prayed silently for courage to do what he had planned. Close beside him his mother stood, erect, resolute, immovable in that final gesture attending the passing of William Dorrit. Lucian looked at her standing there. Then, instead of dropping the bag into the grave as soon as the box had been lowered, he hid it behind him and later carried it back and placed it under the seat in the democrat.

The tears that filled his eyes then were not of grief, but of humiliation. Fierce shame and rebellion surged though him as he realized that he had permitted the presence of his mother to frustrate him in the last little expression of affection, the last little service he could ever do for the great William Dorrit.

The small and mean concerns of living returned again, smaller and meaner than ever now after the presence of death. For a few days there were visitors who came and did what they could to bring cheer to the Dorrit home. Aunt Ella Blake and her dapper little husband who had arrived from Lost River on the day of the funeral had gone back on the following day. Ella Blake had outdone herself in an effort to comfort Agatha Dorrit, but Lucian knew that she was glad to get away again. Mons Torson had come down the day after the funeral and had lingered for an hour with Lucian while he worked about the barns. Doctor Muller had spent an afternoon and an evening with the family, silent most of the time and gazing from the windows at the yellow fields and the cold skies, strangely restless and ill-at-ease. Lucian had gone with him to the stable when it was late and the two had hitched Muller’s team to his buckboard without speaking more than a half-dozen words. When he was in his seat, however, and the reins in his hands, Muller had looked down at Lucian where he stood with the lantern in his hand.

“I’ve been wondering what you’ll do now, Luce,” he said quietly, his voice betraying more concern than he would have admitted openly.

“Just—stay on, I guess,” Lucian replied. “What else?”

Muller did not reply at once. His lips drew into a tight line as he lifted his face and peered into the darkness.

“The Almighty is a rum comedian,” he observed at last, and with a shake of his reins he drove away.

And during the days that followed Lucian came to know something of what old Doctor Muller had meant. Sordid realities thrust themselves upon him faster than he could prepare himself to receive them. His mother, occupied with the petty, unlovely interests of a narrow life, her feelings blunted by poverty and hard work, turned upon him with the same fierce will that had dominated William Dorrit and filled Lucian’s waking hours with reasonless complaining. Without his knowing it, every vestige of the tenderness he had felt for his mother in the day of her grief gradually deserted him and left his heart cold toward her. Even when he sought escape, as his father had done, by spending long hours in the fields and about the barns, the withering atmosphere was about him.

Arnold and Manlius, perhaps unconsciously envious of their older brother’s sudden advance in life, spared no pains to remind him that they were working for him now and that they were bound to respect him as a land-owner and the head of a household. Much of what they said, of course, had been spoken in a bantering mood, but beneath it all there was a note of resentment that was almost incredible to Lucian. His attempts to talk to them only made it worse. When he felt he could stand it no longer, he resolved upon a visit to Mons Torson.

After a night and a day of snowfall, the first of the season, Lucian took his way north along the road on foot. The sky had cleared and the moon had turned the prairie to a glittering white. Never had the sky seemed so enormous or the full globe of the moon so near.

Lucian remembered another night like this when he had walked this same roadway from Loyola to the Dorrit place. He was twelve years old at the time. It was Christmas Eve and he had been working during a week of school holidays in Melham’s store in order that his younger brothers and his little sister should not go without gifts. His arms were loaded with parcels. The night had been white and glittering and tender with its burden of feathery snow, as it was to-night. Suddenly a small dark figure had darted into the roadway ahead of Lucian and had come running to meet him. As he remembered the eagerness of that little stout figure of his brother Arney, panting and stumbling to meet him and relieve him of some of his bundles, Lucian’s eyes filled with tears. What had become of that little pudgy, beloved brother whose eyes had shone in that cold Christmas moonlight so long ago? An imaginative excitement came upon Lucian. He could see Arney running ahead of him now, his arms hugging the parcels he had given him. Soon they would be home and Lucian would be warming his feet in the oven of the kitchen stove, and a leathery smell would rise from his wet shoes, and he would see the glittering Christmas tree through the door to the dining-room. His father would be there, as excited as the children, pinning a tattered but brave silver star to the spire of the tree.... Lucian started to run for sheer happiness.

O, swift, fierce Life, you who overtake and ride down the spirit with your chariot of beauty! O, white, white prairie, prairie of dream, prairie from the plains of the dead moon, where is the heart in you?

Mons Torson’s place was in darkness. As Lucian turned away, disappointed, he saw a light in Hattie Murker’s house where it stood up the short slope from the gate. Someone stood at the gate, a black shadow in the moonlight. Lucian moved slowly until he was close enough to see that it was Hattie herself, a dark shawl over her head and shoulders.

“Hello!” he called. “That you, Hattie?”

For a second or two there was no reply. “Yes, it’s me,” she said finally, standing immobile in the moonlight. “Oh—it’s Luce Dorrit!”

Lucian was face to face with her now. She stood still, transfixed in the glamour, as though she had been standing there for hours before he came. Almost as though she had been waiting for him!

“I came up to see Mons,” he told her.

“He’s in town,” she said.

She pushed back the shawl from her head and now Lucian could see her eyes, intensely dark and somber. They seemed without expression, except for something elemental—the smoldering economy of feeling that an animal has.

“Won’t you come in?” she invited him.

She seemed to sway toward him across the gate. Her black shawl seemed to envelop him. He wanted suddenly, cravingly, to warm his hands on her body. There would be a white, pale, indescribable moonlight heat about her. The gate swung open and Lucian went through it, his pulses quickening savagely.

They were within the door of the Murker kitchen. One of the covers of the kitchen range was red and the air above it quivered. A tall glass lamp stood on the oilcloth-covered table, its wick floating in reddish kerosene. The warmth of the room swept sensationally over Lucian. Hattie Murker was hanging her shawl on a hook beside the door. She turned to him, but remained standing near the door, her shoulders straight and angular against the white wall. Lucian could see the distinct, bluish part in her hair.

“Bert is gone to Lost River with Steve Aronson,” she told him.

The snow again. White, white net of beauty, net of dream, trapping the earth, trapping the helpless heart of life....

Lucian was at home again, in the dining-room where sat his mother, his brothers and Leona who had been his little sister. She seemed suddenly older now, that little sister, with something in her eyes that betrayed the vanishing of simplicity. Lucian looked from one to the other. They were all different. He drew himself up stubbornly. He would have to tell them somehow. His mother would be incredulous, pleased, flattered, voluble. Hattie Murker was older than he, steadier, and she had money. His brother—the bold Manlius—the pudgy little Arney who ran ahead of him there in the moonlight....

“I’m going to marry Hattie Murker on Christmas Day,” he told them.

Because they could not speak from amazement, he turned away quickly and went to his room. In the darkness he flung himself across his bed, buried his face in the blankets, gripped his head between his hands.

“Christ!” he said aloud, and the word was a prayer from out of his heart.

“Luce!”

Lucian scrambled to a sitting position on the edge of his bed to find Leona standing in the middle of the floor. She came and sat on the foot of the bed, her light hair a shadowy aureole in the moonlight. Suddenly she began to cry.

“What’s the matter with you?” Lucian demanded harshly.

“Oh—Luce—why—why did you do it?” she sobbed.

Lucian did not reply. He felt sick, unutterably tired.

Leona brushed her tears away with an impatient gesture and got to her feet defiantly.

“I’m going to tell her to leave you alone, Luce!” she declared. “I’m going to!”

Lucian sprang up fiercely. “Don’t you dare!” he warned her. “I’ve—I’ve got to go through with it. Don’t you dare!”

He pushed her out of the room and locked the door behind her.