Old Crow Part 8

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

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

"How did he look?"

d.i.c.k was catching at things, Raven saw, the slightest clue to Old Crow's withdrawn personality.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

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

Charlotte told me once she'd seen him and he was neat as a new pin."

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

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

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

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

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

"What I want to know is," said d.i.c.k, "what he thought he was going off there for? Didn't anybody know?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What sort of books?"

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

But d.i.c.k was not to be curbed or reasoned with.

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

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

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

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

Maybe you would though, now. Sometimes I forget the world's moved on a peg."

"But what did they say?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

In less than a week Raven, hurried beyond any design of his own by d.i.c.k's anxious attentions, had actually gone. Once in the train on the way into the uplands where Wake Hill lies, he reflected, with a smile, that d.i.c.k had really helped him inconceivably in this matter of haste.

He might have loitered along, dallying with the wisdom of going, and possibly ended by not going at all. But d.i.c.k's insistence on formulating the situation, his neatness and energy in getting all the emotions of the case into their proper pigeon holes, had so hara.s.sed and then bored him that he had worked like a beaver, he told himself, to get off and escape them altogether. And not a word from Amelia, either to his telegram or d.i.c.k's letter. Things were looking up. It might be Amelia had been elected to some new and absorbing organization for putting the social edifice still more irretrievably into the disorder it seemed bent for, in which case she might forget the inner wobblings of such an inconspicuous nomad as a brother in metaphysical pangs. He became recklessly optimistic, as the train climbed higher into the hills, and luxuriated in it, conscious all the time that it was alt.i.tude that was intoxicating him, not any real hope of hoodwinking Amelia. You couldn't do that so easily.

The first glimpse of a far-away mountain brought the surprising tears to his eyes. It was an inconsiderable ridge with an outline of no distinction, but it had the old charm, the power of clutching at his heart and dragging it up from the glories and sorrows of the sea. Raven always insisted that he loved the sea best, with its terrors and mult.i.tudinous activities; but the mountains did pull him up somewhere into a region he did not inhabit all the time. He had an idea that this was simply a plane of physical exhilaration; but it didn't matter. It was an eas.e.m.e.nt of a sort, if only the difference of change. When he stepped out of the train at Wake Hill he was in a tranquil frame of mind, and the more the minute he saw Jerry Slate there in the pung, enveloped in the buffalo coat he had worn through the winter months ever since he attained his present height. Jerry was a typical man of Wake Hill. He was ten years, at least, older than Raven and had lived here, man and boy, all his life, and his wife, Charlotte, was the presiding benevolence of the Raven home. Seeing his pa.s.senger, he lifted his whip-stock in salute and stepped out of the pung to meet him. Jerry was yellow and freckled and blue-eyed, with a face, Raven always thought, like a baked apple. It had still a rosy bloom, but the puckers overspread it, precisely like an apple's after fervent heat. They shook hands, Jerry having extracted a gnarled member from his mitten.

"You take a look an' see 'f your trunk's come," he recommended, restoring his hand to its beautifully knit sheath. "You're better acquainted with the looks on't than I be. There 'tis now. Anyways it's the only one there."

It was Raven's own, and he and Jerry lifted it into the back of the pung, and were presently jogging temperately homeward. Jerry never had horses with any go in them. In the old days, when Raven used to come to the farm with his mother, he would write Jerry to see that he had a horse.

"Get me a horse," he would write, "a horse, a horse, with four feet and a mane and tail. Not a wooden freak out of Noah's ark, whittled out with a jack-knife, such as I had last year. Get me a horse."

And he would arrive to find some aged specimen, raw-boned and indifferent, waiting for him in the stable. And Jerry would slap the creature's haunches with a fict.i.tious jollity and prophesy, the while he kept an anxious eye on Raven, "I guess he'll suit ye all right."

He never did suit. He had to be swapped off or, as it happened once or twice, given away, and yet Raven was obtuse to the real reason until Charlotte enlightened him. She took him aside, one day in the autumn, when he and his mother were going back to town.

"I guess if you want any horses next spring," she said, with one eye on the door where Jerry might appear, "you better fetch 'em along with you."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "of course I can. Only I had an idea Jerry liked to do the buying for the place."

"Not horses," said Charlotte firmly. "Jerry's a peculiar sort of man.

They know it an' they kinder take advantage of him. I dunno why."

Then Raven realized that Charlotte herself was responsible for his faith in Jerry's bargaining prowess. She had hypnotized him into considering Jerry a great fellow at a trade as at everything else manly and invincible. She was watching him now with a doubtful and anxious eye.

"No," she repeated, "I dunno why."

"No," said Raven, "I don't know why either. But I'll look out for it."

At that instant he understood her way with Jerry and loved her for it.

She was tall and heavy-browed and dark, with warm, brown tints of eyes and skin, and seven times the man Jerry was, but it was her pa.s.sionate intent to hold him supreme at home and market.