But while he moved forward, surrendering himself to the moment, complacent and surprised that it was so easy, after all, to live by that definition of life, he grew increasingly aware of what was, apparently, a purely physical discomfort. He felt like a man who thinks himself recovered from an illness, and goes about his normal affairs to find, unexpectedly, that the sickness is still there in his bones and vitals. It is not because of it, he thought, because of what happened. His mind automatically refused the statement of what had happened; the fact itself was denied in namelessness. But the discomfort increased. The knowledge which his mind denied rose in his bowels. I’m sick, he thought, it’s just that I’m a little sick. The nausea rose in him like sediment in a disturbed vessel.

  Finally, he slipped from the saddle and vomited on the grass by the road.

  He clung to the stirrup leather, supporting himself, until his strength returned. When he came to the branch that ran across the road, under a little plank bridge, he again dismounted. Trees grew thickly there, along the water, but where he knelt the grass was soft under his knees. He sank his hands and wrists into the cool water, wetting his sleeves. From his cupped hands he supped up the water and rinsed his mouth, and then drank. Then, leaning over the surface and holding his face close, he bathed his face in the water and pressed the coldness of his hands against his eyes. Feeling the water on his face, he thought suddenly of Trevelyan’s face in the water. In the water of the quarry. The man had said, in the water. He rose quickly, clumsy with haste, and stared at the water before him. It was black under the trees. A man would lie in the water and the water would be over him and inside of him and he would become a part of the water. The water which he had just drunk so avidly felt cold and inimical within him. Again he had the impulse to vomit, but controlled himself.

  He struck his hands together violently, the fist of one into the palm of the other. ‘The fool!’ he exclaimed, ‘the God-damned fool; the poor God-damned fool!’

  He felt better then, and rode on. The whole matter almost seemed then, on the moment, like something known for a long time. He would fix his gaze, as before, upon some distant point and bend every energy upon it, so that he seemed to be drawn out of himself. And so powerfully could he distract himself in this exercise that, as he rode up the drive toward his own house and saw a faint light in one of the windows downstairs, no question crossed his mind. He saw the light, and accepted it; that was all.

  He went directly to the stable, and unsaddled the mare. Then, having the key to the front and not to the side door, he returned across the yard, under the maples. A few prematurely fallen leaves rustled beneath his tread.

  Not until he had pushed open the door and stood on the threshold, the key still in his hand, did the significance of the light, which he now saw falling faintly into the hall from the half-open door of the room at the left, really take hold upon him. He had told May that he might not come back until very late, or perhaps not at all, and that she should get Rosie to sleep up at the house. He drew the door softly shut behind him.

  ‘Perse,’ he heard his own name pronounced. It was May’s voice.

  He stood stock-still, with his hand still on the knob of the door behind him. Then she came into the hall. Her small figure was outlined against that dim light from the room behind her.

  ‘Perse,’ she repeated.

  He tried to speak to her, but the words would not come, his throat was so dry and constricted.

  ‘Perse, what’s the matter?’ she demanded, her voice rising and her gaze unwaveringly fixed upon him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he managed to say, and took a step toward her.

  ‘But Perse ——’

  Staring at her, he could think of nothing in the world to say to her.

  ‘But Perse, there is.’ She retreated before him, her eyes still fixed on his face. She pushed the door fully open behind her, not turning to look, and stepped back across the threshold into the room. He came close to her, and she took another step back, pronouncing his name and lifting one hand a little in an indeterminate gesture.

  The lamp on the table in the middle of the room was turned down so low that the flame flickered weakly along the wick and the shadows swam unsteadily, encroachingly, in the corners and over the floor. What little light there was, the woman’s blonde hair caught. It was loose over her shoulders. She was wearing a blue kimono. It seemed too large for her. When she lifted her arm, the looped and flowing sleeve emphasized its fragility and the aimlessness of the gesture.

  ‘Oh, Perse!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t stand it. What’s the matter, Perse?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered, as she stared at him.

  ‘You never tell me,’ she said weakly and lamentingly, her arm rising in that gesture and then subsiding. ‘Not anything.’

  He reached out as if to pluck at the flowing garment. But she stood too far away from him.

  ‘It’s so late; you stayed out so late.’ And then: ‘You’ve been drinking, Perse. You’ve had whisky.’

  ‘No,’ he denied.

  ‘What’s the matter? Oh, Perse!’

  ‘God damn it!’ he uttered, and stepped quickly to her and seized her by the shoulders.

  ‘You’re hurting ——’

  ‘Well,’ he said. He drew her to him, more tightly. Then he began to kiss her on the face.

  ‘Don’t, Perse, don’t! Don’t; I want to talk to you.’

  He continued to hold her. Then he began to force her back, beyond the table.

  ‘No, no!’ she exclaimed, and a tone of desperation came into her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘No. No. Not now.’

  He paid no attention to her.

  ‘No. Later, maybe later ——’ She tried to thrust him back, and mixed with the tone of desperation there was a hint of wheedling, guileful but hopeless.

  After he had forced her past the table to the divan, she struggled with him with a strength which he had never suspected. Then, suddenly, she was as passive as a dead body, although her hands remained crushed against his chest as in resistance and revulsion.

  Chapter nine

  THE first fields were cut. Men moved slowly, stoopingly, across the wide fields. They bent between the heavy plants, and lifted the heavy blade of the cutting knife and slashed off the stalk at the base, to leave the stob protruding from the hill. In the open places, where the tobacco had been cut, the wagons waited, and the mules drooped their long, bony, spatulate, patient heads.

  The fall sharpened early. The first curing fires in the loaded barns had been lighted, and the blue smoke began to settle out like haze over the bare fields in the late, level light. Everywhere there was the thin and pervasive odor of burning, which, mingled with the other, more natural odors of the season, the dry, pungent, leathery odors of earth and withering vegetation, fed the sense of recession and finality. In the afternoons great flocks of grackles, gathering in their autumnal multitudes, would wheel over the fields. When they flew low enough, their burnished blackness would glisten in the light, and the air would be full of the vigorous whisper of their wing-beats. When they settled in the trees along a lane, or in the woods bordering the fields, or in the groves about the houses, their cries would be incessant.

  Mr. Munn, ever since he had grown up, would see the great flocks of grackles, on bright days in the fall, sweeping across the blue sky, from horizon to horizon, or fountaining upward and outward from a tree or a grove where they had been disturbed, or splaying from the air wantonly over the wide expanse of a field, like bright, black seeds flung from a sower’s liberal hand; and almost always, if the press of his immediate occupation was not too strong, he would let his gaze follow their flight. He would observe the sweep of the flock on the sky, the swaying but sure convolutions of the wide-flung mass like the curved and reaching and self-fulfilling forward thrust of a breaker, or the movement of a field of grain in the wind. That spectacle always spoke to him of an inevitability, a surety, a completeness beyond his grasp or, even, definition. That perfection, that victorious indifference, filled him with a loneliness which mingled insidiously with the minute tightening of his muscles and the new tingling of the blood, like a start of hope, which the sight had provoked.

  During those years spent in Philadelphia, when he was studying law, that feeling had come to him merely as a momentary touch of homesickness. One clear afternoon, as he walked down a quiet street between the rows of dull-colored brick houses, the grackles came sweeping over the roofs, not flying very high, and settled in the trees of a little park just ahead. He stopped stock-still, one hand on the iron fence in front of a narrow dooryard. Then, slowly, he walked on down the street, toward the little park where the grackles were. In the overmastering loneliness of that moment, his whole life seemed to him nothing but vanity. His past seemed as valueless and as unstable as a puff of smoke, and his future meaningless, unless — and the thought was a flash, quickly dissipated — he might by some unnamable, single, heroic stroke discover the unifying fulfillment.

  He was on his way, that afternoon, to see a relative, a distant cousin who had once known his mother and with whom his mother had maintained for years a desultory and unreasonable correspondence. Miss Sprague — ‘your cousin Ianthe,’ his mother called her — and his mother had met only once, at a small summer resort in south-central Kentucky, Thermopolis Springs. His mother had spent several weeks there one summer when she was a young girl, and Miss Ianthe Sprague, some ten or twelve years her senior, almost old enough at that time to be considered an old maid, had come with an aunt to stay at the Thermopolis Hotel. They had spent several weeks together at Thermopolis Springs, and though they never saw each other again, they wrote letters. Mr. Munn had wondered before he went to Philadelphia, and wondered even more after he went, what events of that summer at Thermopolis Springs could have fixed the two women together in their meaningless, but apparently stable, bond. He could imagine, well enough, how their time had been spent, sipping the water from the spring, sitting together and talking on the long, shady veranda of some white, wooden hotel, watching the men play bowls, or dancing in the pavilion. But his mother had once remarked that Ianthe Sprague had always been in bad health, no better than an invalid, and had practically been confined to a chair. She must have sat in her chair to watch the dancers for a while before being carried up to bed.

  He had seen some of the letters which the two women exchanged. The letters exhibited no trace of intimacy. In their letters the women never referred to that little fragment of the past which they had shared, except, perhaps, by way of giving an account of some person whom both had known. The letters were brief and bare recitals of commonplace facts. Miss Sprague would write of the weather in Philadelphia, of the price of coal, of the repairing of a house in her block; never of anything different from those topics. But in his childhood and early adolescence, Percy Munn, even though he was well acquainted with the letters, found that the name ‘Ianthe’ raised in his mind an image of great delicacy and beauty. In one of his father’s books he read a poem with the title ‘Ianthe’:

  From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass

  Like little ripples down a sunny river;

  Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,

  Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever.

  It seemed to verify his imaginings.

  In Philadelphia he found Miss Sprague, now almost totally blind, sitting in a high-ceilinged, dingy, overheated room, in which the unmoving air held the odor of camphor. On the walls and on the tables and on the what-not, dozens of photographs hung askew or were propped at slovenly angles. The woman, who actually could not have been much more than fifty years old, looked seventy. She was lean to emaciation, and the skin hung in dry, gray folds and pouches from her neck and jawbone. Her hands shook as with perpetual cold. She leaned peeringly forward when she spoke in her outworn voice. About her shoulders a black shawl was wrapped, and on the front of her lusterless, black-silk dress there were spots which had been left, apparently, by spilled food.

  Miss Sprague lived in her own house, but on the upper floor. There, on the second floor, she would be. When the slatternly little Irish maid let him in, he could see Miss Sprague turn her head, with a careful and creaking motion, and peer toward him.

  ‘How are you feeling, Cousin Ianthe?’ he would say.

  ‘Not much worse,’ she would answer, ‘except for the weather.’ Or: ‘Maybe a little better, thank you, but I don’t know. Is it getting any colder, outside?’

  When he first began to come to see her, he tried to lead her into talking of his mother, and of herself. The sight of her, at first, stirred to a kind of painful and reproachful life those boyhood notions that had clustered about her name. He had completely forgotten those notions. Now, the sight of her revived them, and shocked them. He was like a man who puts his leg down unexpectedly and feels the twinge of an old wound, or fracture. As in a last, desperate or thrifty, automatic effort to salvage something of his own past being which was inherent in those notions, he tried to make her picture for him the self she had been, that summer a long time back, before his birth, when his mother had been a young girl. But it was no use. She could not do it. She could not, it seemed, because she had really always been as she was now. There was not even any pathos in her present condition, her increasing blindness, her increasing poverty, her illness, her loneliness; there was none of that pathos of the falling off from youth and beauty and vitality. Rather, her present being was a sort of goal toward which, confidently, she had always been moving. This present being had always been, he was sure, her real being, and now she was merely achieving it in its perfection of negativity and rejection.

  But once she did say, ‘Your mother was a beautiful young girl.’ When she said that, Percy Munn, who had never before realized, actually, that his mother once had been young, was moved so that tears came to his eyes. His mother now was not old, but she was ageless, it seemed. A widow, she ran the farm competently, and prayed much. She was taciturn and cold, except for those rare moments when, with a kind of shameless unveiling of the spirit, she tried devouringly and terrifyingly to seize upon her son’s love, or at least to establish some communication with him. At those moments, embarrassed, he could never respond, and so she would turn coldly again upon herself; and when he, in turn, would try to penetrate to her, her withdrawal would be complete. When Miss Sprague spoke, he saw his mother as she was now, and, on the instant, as she had been, surely, that summer, young and expectant, poised at the edge of the long hotel veranda, listening to music or watching the men at bowls. He felt that he, almost, could look into her eyes as she stood.

  In the thought of his mother, there was pathos; but in Miss Sprague, none. She lived, in this overheated, motionless air that reeked of camphor, as in her true medium. This was her triumph.

  After the second visit, during which the conversation waned to a slow repetition of the details of his train trip, the weather in southern Kentucky, and the furnishings of the room which he had rented, he proposed that he should bring something to read aloud to her. She said that she would be grateful. When he asked her what he should bring, she replied, ‘Anything.’ He bought a sentimental novel, feeling certain of his choice. But he had not been reading for ten minutes before he knew that her attention was wandering. She peered at this object in the room, and then at that, and breathed unevenly. He continued to read for an hour or so, and when he left she thanked him. The next week he resumed the novel. But he never finished it. She finally said that what she would like to hear was the newspaper. But when he read the newspaper to her, he discovered that her attention flagged at the long, important, consecutive pieces. What she liked was the short, flat statement that had no possible reference to her life, advertisements of merchandise which she could neither buy nor use, the notice of the death of an obscure citizen in a distant part of the city, or of the birth of a child to a couple of whom she had never heard, or of the construction of a building which she would never enter. The novel had a direction, it described lives that were moving toward fulfillments, it pretended to a meaning. Therefore she could not listen to it. She could not listen to the long, consecutive articles in the newspaper. But the fragmentary, the irrelevant, the meaningless, such things she could receive and draw her special nourishment from. Automatically, she rejected everything else; for, fixed now in her room and failing in vision, she was like some species of marine life that, lodged on the floor or on some rocky shelf, sustains itself on what the random currents bring, absorbing the appropriate matter and ejecting all else, with a delicate and punctilious, but unconscious, discrimination.

  And she did not like to talk of the past, and avoided his questions. Indeed, she had little memory of the past. That, too, she had rejected, for out of memory rises the notion of a positive and purposive future, the revision of the past. The photographs which cluttered her room and which she never looked at seemed to be, paradoxically, the very symbol of her discipline; they were the trophies of temptations overcome. But Percy Munn persisted for a while, vainly, in his questions and suggestions, even after he had begun to sense the logic of her refusal, and the magnitude of her achievement.

  All the time he was in Philadelphia he went to see her regularly. He had nothing in common with her, and he was, he knew, nothing more than a meaningless shape to her. There was no charity in his visits, for he knew that she did not desire his company. He was lonely in Philadelphia, but he did not make his visits because of that fact; he knew that she had nothing to say to him and that he had nothing to say to her. Or rather, he did not go to see her because he expected any direct alleviation of his loneliness. His communion with her was like the communion which a worshiper may hold with the cold, unhuman, blank, and unbending stone of the carved image. She, too, represented something as cold and unrelenting as fate, for she and he had, in however small a proportion, the same blood in their veins. They had a common ancestor, a man whose full name Percy Munn did not know, or had forgotten, and whose bones had lain for a long time now in an obscure crossroads graveyard somewhere in Virginia.