THE REASON OF A WOMAN WHO HAD NO REASON

It was not a jest ­Nancy’s telling Aunt Bell that her reason for going to Edom was too foolish to give even to herself.  At least such reticence to self is often sincerely and plausibly asserted by the very inner woman.  Yet no sooner had her train started than her secret within a secret began to tell itself:  at first in whispers, then low like a voice overheard through leafy trees; then loud and louder until all the noise of the train did no more than confuse the words so that only she could hear them.

When the exciting time of this listening had gone and she stepped from the train into the lazy spring silence of the village, her own heart spelled the thing in quick, loud, hammering beats ­a thing which, now that she faced it, was so wildly impossible that her cheeks burned at the first second of actual realisation of its enormity; and her knees weakened in a deathly tremble, quite as if they might bend embarrassingly in either direction.

Then in the outer spaces of her mind there grew, to save her, a sense of her crass fatuity.  She was quickly in a carriage, eager to avoid any acquaintance, glad the driver was no village familiar who might amiably seek to regale her with gossip.  They went swiftly up the western road through its greening elms to where Clytie kept the big house ­her own home while she lived, and the home of the family when they chose to go there.

At last, the silent, cool house with its secretive green shutters rose above her; the wheels made their little crisping over the fine metal of the driveway.  She hastily paid the man and was at the side door that opened into the sitting-room.  As she put her hand to the knob she was conscious of Clytie passing the window to open the door.

Then they were face to face over the threshold ­Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish ­Clytie of the eyes always wise to another’s needs and beaming with that fine wisdom.

She started back from the doorway by way of being playfully dramatic ­her hands on her hips, her head to one side at an astounded angle.  Yet little more than a second did she let herself simulate this welcoming incredulity ­this stupefaction of cordiality.  There must be quick speech ­especially as to Nancy’s face ­which seemed strangely unfamiliar, set, suppressed, breathless, unaccountably young ­and there had to be the splendid announcement of another matter.

“Why, child, is it you or your ghost?”

Nancy could only nod her head.

“My suz! what ails the child?”

Here the other managed a shake of the head and a made smile.

“And of all things! ­you’ll never, never, never guess! ­”

“There ­there! ­yes, yes ­yes!  I know ­know all about it ­knew it ­knew it last night ­”

She had put out a hand toward Clytie and now reached the other from her side, easing herself to the doorpost against which she leaned and laughed, weakly, vacantly.

“Some one told you ­on the way up?”

“Yes ­I knew it, I tell you ­that’s what makes it so funny and foolish ­why I came, you know ­” She had now gained a little in coherence, and with it came a final doubt.  She steadied herself in the doorway to ask ­“When did Bernal come?”

And Clytie, somewhat relieved, became voluble.

“Night before last on the six-fifteen, and me getting home late from the Epworth meeting ­fire out ­not a stick of kindling-wood in ­only two cakes in the buttery, neither of them a layer ­not a frying-size chicken on the place ­thank goodness he didn’t have the appetite he used to ­though in another way it’s just downright heartbreaking to see a person you care for not be a ready eater ­but I had some of the plum jell he used to like, and the good half of an apple-John which I at once het up ­and I sent Mehitty Lykins down for some chops ­”

“Where is he?”

There had seemed to be a choking in the question.  Clytie regarded her curiously.

“He was lying down up in the study a while ago ­kicking one foot up in the air against the wall, with his head nearly off the sofy onto the floor, just like he used to ­there ­that’s his step ­”

“I can’t see him now!  Here ­let me go into your room till I freshen and rest a bit ­quick ­”

Once more the indecisive knees seemed about to bend either way under their burden.  With an effort of will she drew the amazed Clytie toward the open door of the latter’s bedroom, then closed it quickly, and stood facing her in the dusk of the curtained room.

“Clytie ­I’m weak ­it’s so strange ­actually weak ­I shake so ­Oh, Clytie ­I’ve got to cry!”

There was a mutual opening of arms and a head on Clytie’s shoulder, wet eyes close in a corner that had once been the good woman’s neck ­and stifling sobs that seemed one moment to contract her body rigidly from head to foot ­the next to leave it limp and falling.  From the nursing shoulder she was helped to the bed, though she could not yet relax her arms from that desperate grip of Clytie’s neck.  Long she held her so, even after the fit of weeping passed, clasping her with arms in which there was almost a savage intensity ­arms that locked themselves more fiercely at any little stirring of the prisoned one.

At last, when she had lain quiet a long time, the grasp was suddenly loosened and Clytie was privileged to ease her aching neck and cramped shoulders.  Then, even as she looked down, she heard from Nancy the measured soft breathing of sleep.  She drew a curtain to shut out one last ray of light, and went softly from the room.

Two hours later, as Clytemnestra attained ultimate perfection in the arrangement of four glass dishes of preserves and three varieties of cake upon her table ­for she still kept to the sinfully complex fare of the good old simple days ­Nancy came out.  Clytie stood erect to peer anxiously over the lamp at her.

“I’m all right ­you were a dear to let me sleep.  See how fresh I am.”

“You do look pearter, child ­but you look different from when you came.  My suz! you looked so excited and kind of young when I opened that door, it give me a start for a minute ­I thought I’d woke out of a dream and you was a Miss in short skirts again.  But now ­let me see you closer.”  She came around the table, then continued:  “Well, you look fresh and sweet and some rested, and you look old and reasonable again ­I mean as old as you had ought to look.  I never did know you to act that way before, child.  My neck ain’t got the crick out of it yet.”

“Poor old Clytie ­but you see yesterday all day I felt queer ­very queer, and wrought up, and last night I couldn’t rest, and I lay awake and excited all night ­and something seemed to give way when I saw you in the door.  Of course it was nervousness, and I shall be all right now ­”

She looked up and saw Bernal staring at her ­standing in the doorway of the big room, his face shading into the dusk back of him.  She went to him with both hands out and he kissed her.

“Is it Nance?”

“I don’t know ­but it’s really Bernal.”

“Clytie says you knew I had come.”

“Clytie must have misunderstood.  No one even intimated such a thing.  I came up to-day ­I had to come ­because ­if I had known you were here, wouldn’t I have brought Allan?”

“Of course I was going to let you know, and come down in a few days ­there was some business to do here.  Dear old Allan!  I’m aching to get a stranglehold on him!”

“Yes ­he’ll be so glad ­there’s so much to say!”

“I didn’t know whom I should find here.”

“We’ve had Clytie look after both houses ­sometimes we’ve rented mine ­and almost every summer we’ve come here.”

“You know I didn’t dream I was rich until I got here.  The lawyer says they’ve advertised, but I’ve been away from everything most of the time ­not looking out for advertisements.  I can’t understand the old gentleman, when I was such a reprobate and Allan was always such a thoroughly decent chap.”

“Oh, hardly a reprobate!”

“Worse, Nance ­an ass ­think of my talking to that dear old soul as I did ­taking twenty minutes off to win him from his lifelong faith.  I shudder when I remember it.  And yet I honestly thought he might be made to see things my way.”

Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of their last parting ­that singular moment when they blindly groped for each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling handclasp!  Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength?  For all time since ­and increasingly during the later years ­secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn.  It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled ­those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other ­faltering at last into that long moment of triumphant certainty.

Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind.  Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless above this present clasp ­the yielding, yet opposing, of those all-knowing, never-forgetting hands.  There followed one swift mutual look of bewilderment.  Then their hands fell apart and with little awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.

They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of this or that esteemed fleshpot.

Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the returned one.  And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her.  The voice and the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during the years of his absence.  Here was not the laughing boy she had known, with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in the face of destiny.  Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next, coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.

As she watched him, there were two of her:  one, the girl dreaming forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman ­listening, waiting, judging.  She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the perfect whole out of many little imperfections.

Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged.  Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness.  As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together ­with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel the groping of his.

Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home.  Before them the lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered her way to womanhood.  Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her dreaming girlhood must be to the present.  Should she enter it, she knew the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled rooms.

And out there actually before her was the stretch of lawn where she had played games of tragic pretense with the imperious, dreaming boy.  Vividly there came back that late afternoon when the monster of Bernal’s devising had frightened them for the last time ­when in a sudden flash of insight they had laughed the thing away forever and faced each other with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding.  One day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of their child’s faith in the Gratcher.  He had replied that, as an institution, the Gratcher was imperishable ­that it was brute humanity’s instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while the child’s Gratcher was not the man’s, the latter was yet of the same breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity:  that the man, like the child, must fashion some monster of horror to deter him when he hears God’s call to live.

She had not been able to understand, nor did she now.  She was looking out to the two trees where once her hammock had swung ­to the rustic chair, now falling apart from age, from which Bernal had faced her that last evening.  Then with a start she was back in the present.  Nancy of the old days must be shut fat in the old house.  There she might wander and wonder endlessly among the echoes and the half-seen faces, but never could she come forth; over the threshold there could pass only the wife of Allan Linford.

Quick upon this realisation came a sharp fear of the man beside her ­a fear born of his hand’s hold upon hers when they had met.  She shrank under the memory of it, with a sudden instinct of the hunted.  Then from her new covert of reserve she dared to peer cautiously at him, seeking to know how great was her peril ­to learn what measure of defense would best insure her safety ­recognising fearfully the traitor in her own heart.

Their first idle talk had died, and she noted with new alarm that they had been silent for many minutes.  This could not safely be ­this insidious, barrier-destroying silence.  She seemed to hear his heart beating high from his own sense of peril.  But would he help her?  Would he not rather side with that wretched traitor within her, crying out for the old days ­would he not still be the proud fool who would suffer no man’s law but his own?  She shivered at the thought of his nearness ­of his momentous silence ­of his treacherous ally.

She stirred in her chair to look in where Clytie bustled between kitchen and dining-room.  Her movement aroused him from his own abstraction.  For a breathless stretch of time she was frozen to inertness by sheer terror.  Would that old lawless spirit utter new blasphemies, giving fearful point to them now?  Would the old eager hand come again upon hers with a boy’s pleading and a man’s power?  And what of her own secret guilt?  She had cherished the memory of him and across space had responded to him through that imperious need of her heart.  Swiftly in this significant moment she for the first time saw herself with critical eyes ­saw that in her fancied security she had unwittingly enthroned the hidden traitor.  More and more poignant grew her apprehension as she felt his eyes upon her and divined that he was about to speak.  With a little steadying of the lips, with eyes that widened at him in the dim light, she waited for the sound of his voice ­waited as one waits for something “terrible and dear” ­the whirlwind that might destroy utterly, or pass ­to leave her forever exulting in a new sense of power against elemental forces.

“Would you mind if I smoked, Nance?”

She stared stupidly.  So tense had been her strain that the words were mere meaningless blows that left her quivering.  He thought she had not heard.

“Would you mind my pipe ­and this very mild mixture?”

She blessed him for the respite.

“Smoke, of course!” she managed to say.

She watched him closely, still alert, as he stuffed the tobacco into his pipe-bowl from a rubber pouch.  Then he struck the match and in that moment she suffered another shock.  The little flame danced out of the darkness, and wavering, upward shadows played over a face of utter quietness.  The relaxed shoulders drooped sideways in the chair, the body placidly sprawled, one crossed leg gently waving.  The shaded eye surveyed some large and tranquil thought ­and in that eye the soul sat remote, aloof from her as any star.

She sank back in her chair with a long, stealthy breath of relief ­a relief as cold as stone.  She had not felt before that there was a chill in the wide sweetness of the night.  Now it wrapped her round and slowly, with a soft brutality, penetrated to her heart.

The silence grew too long.  With a shrugging effort she surmounted herself and looked again toward the alien figure looming unconcerned in the gloom.  A warm, super-personal sense of friendliness came upon her.  Her intellect awoke to inquiries.  She began to question him of his days away, and soon he was talking freely enough, between pulls of his pipe.

“You know, Nance, I was a prodigal ­only when I awoke I had no father to go to.  Poor grandad!  What a brutal cub I was!  That has always stuck in my mind.  I was telling you about that cold wet night in Denver.  I had found a lodging in the police station.  There were others as forlorn ­and Nance ­did you ever realise the buoyancy of the human mind?  It’s sublime.  We rejected ones sat there, warming ourselves, chatting, and pretty soon one man found there were thirteen of us.  You would have thought that none of them could fear bad luck ­worse luck ­none of them could have been more dismally situated.  But, do you know? most of those fellows became nervous ­as apprehensive of bad luck as if they had been pampered princes in a time of revolution.  I was one of the two that volunteered to restore confidence by bringing in another man.

“We found an undersized, insignificant-looking chap toddling aimlessly along the street a few blocks away from the station.  We grappled with him and hustled him back to the crowd.  He slept with us on the floor, and no one paid any further attention to him, except to remark that he talked to himself a good bit.  He and I awoke earliest next morning.  I asked him if he was hungry and he said he was.  So I bought two fair breakfasts with the money I’d saved for one good one, and we started out of town.  This chap said he was going that way, and I had made up my mind to find a certain friend of mine ­a chap named Hoover.  The second day out I discovered that this queer man was the one who’d been turning Denver upside down for ten days, healing the halt and the blind.  He was running away because he liked a quieter life.”

He stopped, laughing softly, as if in remembrance ­until she prompted him.

“Yes, he said, ‘Father’ had commanded him to go into the wilderness to fast.  He was always talking familiarly with ‘Father,’ as we walked.  So I stayed by him longer than I meant to ­he seemed so helpless ­and I happened at that time to be looking for the true God.”

“Did you find him, Bernal?”

“Oh, yes!”

“In this strange man?”

“In myself.  It’s the same old secret, Nance, that people have been discovering for ages ­but it is a secret only until after you learn it for yourself.  The only true revelation from God is here in man ­in the human heart.  I had to be years alone to find it out, Nance ­I’d had so much of that Bible mythology stuffed into me ­but I mustn’t bore you with it.”

“Oh, but I must know, Bernal ­you don’t dream how greatly I need at this moment to believe something ­more than you ever did!”

“It’s simple, Nance.  It’s the only revelation in which the God of yesterday gives willing place to the better God of to-day ­only here does the God of to-day say, ’Thou shalt have no other God before me but the God of to-morrow who will be more Godlike than I. Only in this way can we keep our God growing always a little beyond us ­so that to-morrow we shall not find ourselves surpassing him as the first man you would meet out there on the street surpasses the Christian God even in the common virtues.  That was the fourth dimension of religion that I wanted, Nance ­faith in a God that a fearless man could worship.”

He lighted his pipe again, and as the match blazed up she saw the absent look still in his eyes.  By it she realised how far away from her he was ­realised it with a little sharp sense of desolation.  He smoked a while before speaking.

“Out there in the mountains, Nance, I thought about these things a long time ­the years went before I knew it.  At first I stayed with this healing chap, only after a while he started back to teach again and they found him dead.  He believed he had a mission to save the world, and that he would live until he accomplished it.  But there he was, dead for want of a little food.  Then I stayed a long time alone ­until I began to feel that I, too, had something for the world.  It began to burn in my bones.  I thought of him, dead and the world not caring that he hadn’t saved it ­not even knowing it was lost.  But I kept thinking ­a man can be so much more than himself when he is alone ­and it seemed to me that I saw at least two things the world needed to know ­two things that would teach men to stop being cowards and leaners.”

Her sympathy was quick and ardent.

“Oh, Bernal,” she said warmly, “you made me believe when you believed nothing ­and now, when I need it above all other times, you make me believe again!  And you’ve come back with a message!  How glorious!”

He smiled musingly.

“I started with one, Nance ­one that had grown in me all those years till it filled my life and made me put away everything.  I didn’t accept it at first.  It found me rebellious ­wanting to live on the earth.  Then there came a need to justify myself ­to show that I was not the mere vicious unbeliever poor grandad thought me.  And so I fought to give myself up ­and I won.  I found the peace of the lone places.”

His voice grew dreamy ­ceased, as if that peace were indeed too utter for words.  Then with an effort he resumed: 

“But after a while the world began to rumble in my ears.  A man can’t cut himself off from it forever.  God has well seen to that!  As the message cleared in my mind, there grew a need to give it out.  This seemed easy off there.  The little puzzles that the world makes so much of solved themselves for me.  I saw them to be puzzles of the world’s own creating ­all artificial ­all built up ­fashioned clumsily enough from man’s brute fear of the half-God, half-devil he has always made in his own image.

“But now that I’m here, Nance, I find myself already a little bewildered.  The solution of the puzzles is as simple as ever, but the puzzles themselves are more complex as I come closer to them ­so complex that my simple answer will seem only a vague absurdity.”

He paused and she felt his eyes upon her ­felt that he had turned from his abstractions to look at her more personally.

“Even since meeting you, Nance,” he went on with an odd, inward note in his voice, “I’ve been wondering if Hoover could by some chance have been right.  When I left, Hoover said I was a fool ­a certain common variety of fool.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re not ­at least, not the common kind.  I dare say that a man must be a certain kind of fool to think he can put the world forward by leaps and bounds.  I think he must be a fool to assume that the world wants truth when it wants only to be assured that it has already found the truth for itself.  The man who tells it what it already believes is never called a fool ­and perhaps he isn’t.  Indeed, I’ve come to think he is less than a fool ­that he’s a mere polite echo.  But oh, Bernal, hold to your truth!  Be the simple fool and worry the wise in the cages they have built around themselves.”

She was leaning eagerly forward, forgetful of all save that her starved need was feasting royally.

“Don’t give up; don’t parrot the commoner fool’s conceits back to him for the sake of his solemn approval.  Let those of his kind give him what he wants, while you meet those who must have more.  I’m one of them, Bernal.  At this moment I honestly don’t know whether I’m a bad woman or a good one.  And I’m frightened ­I’m so defenseless!  Some little soulless circumstance may make me decisively good or bad ­and I don’t want to be bad!  But give me what I want ­I must have that, regardless of what it makes me.”

He was silent for a time, then at last spoke: 

“I used to think you were a rebel, Nance.  Your eyes betrayed it, and the corners of your mouth went up the least little bit, as if they’d go further up before they went down ­as if you’d laugh away many solemn respectabilities.  But that’s not bad.  There are more things to laugh at than are dreamed of.  That’s Hoover’s entire creed, by the way.”

She remembered the name from that old tale of Caleb Webster’s.

“Is ­is this friend of yours ­Mr. Hoover ­in good health?”

“Fine ­weighs a hundred and eighty.  He and I have a ranch on the Wimmenuche ­only Hoover’s been doing most of the work while I thought about things.  I see that.  Hoover says one can’t do much for the world but laugh at it.  He has a theory of his own.  He maintains that God set this planet whirling, then turned away for a moment to start another universe or something.  He says that when the Creator glances back at us again, to find this poor, scrubby little earth-family divided over its clod, the strong robbing the weak in the midst of plenty for all ­enslaving them to starve and toil and fight, spending more for war than would keep the entire family in luxury; that when God looks closer, in his amazement, and finds that, next to greed, the matter of worshipping Him has made most of the war and other deviltry ­the hatred and persecution and killing among all the little brothers ­he will laugh aloud before he reflects, and this little ballful of funny, passionate insects will be blown to bits.  He says if the world comes to an end in his lifetime, he will know God has happened to look this way, and perhaps overheard a bishop say something vastly important about Apostolic succession or the validity of the Anglican Orders or Transubstantiation or ‘communion in two kinds’ or something.  He insists that a sense of humour is our only salvation ­that only those will be saved who happen to be laughing for the same reason that God laughs when He looks at us ­that the little Mohammedans and Christians and things will be burned for their blasphemy of believing God not wise and good enough to save them all, Mohammedan and Christian alike, though not thinking excessively well of either; that only those laughing at the whole gory nonsense will go into everlasting life by reason of their superior faith in God.”

“Of course that’s plausible, and yet it’s radical.  Hoover’s father was a bishop, and I think Hoover is just a bit narrow from early training.  He can’t see that lots of people who haven’t a vestige of humour are nevertheless worth saving.  I admit that saving them will be a thankless task.  God won’t be able to take very much pleasure in it, but in strict justice he will do it ­even if Hoover does regard it as a piece of extravagant sentimentality.”

A little later she went in.  She left him gazing far off into the night, filled with his message, dull to memory on the very scene that evoked in her own heart so much from the old days.  And as she went she laughed inwardly at a certain consternation the woman of her could not wholly put down; for she had blindly hurled herself against a wall ­the wall of his message.  But it was funny, and the message chained her interest.  She could, she thought, strengthen his resolution to give it out ­help him in a thousand ways.

As she fell asleep the thought of him hovered and drifted on her heart softly, as darkness rests on tired eyes.