of the house one of the boards over a
window had been broken and a bird had flown in and become imprisoned.

The presence of the woman frightened the bird. It flew wildly about.
Its beating wings stirred up dust that danced in the air. Elsie stood
perfectly still, also frightened, not by the presence of the bird but
by the presence of life. Like the bird she was a prisoner. The thought
gripped her. She wanted to go outdoors where her niece Elizabeth walked
with the young ploughman through the corn, but was like the bird in the
room--a prisoner. She moved restlessly about. The bird flew back and
forth across the room. It alighted on the window sill near the place
where the board was broken away. She stared into the frightened eyes of
the bird that in turn stared into her eyes. Then the bird flew away,
out through the window, and Elsie turned and ran nervously downstairs
and out into the yard. She climbed over the wire fence and ran with
stooped shoulders along one of the tunnels.

Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and sweeter
life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields. After she
had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled over. Her hair
became unloosed and fell down over her shoulders. Her cheeks became
flushed and for the moment she looked like a young girl. When she
climbed over the fence she tore a great hole in the front of her dress.
For a moment her tiny breasts were exposed and then her hand clutched
and held nervously the sides of the tear. In the distance she could
hear the voices of the boys and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm
had been threatening for days and now black clouds had begun to spread
themselves over the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping to
listen and then running on again, the dry corn blades brushed against
her shoulders and a fine shower of yellow dust from the corn tassels
fell on her hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her progress.
The dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her ears.

The thought that having at last ventured into the corn she would never
escape became fixed in the mind of the running woman. Sharp pains shot
through her body. Presently she was compelled to stop and sit on the
ground. For a long time she sat with closed eyes. Her dress became
soiled. Little insects that live in the ground under the corn came out
of their holes and crawled over her legs.

Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw herself on her
back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed. It was warm and
close in the room-like tunnels. The pain in her side went away. She
opened her eyes and between the wide green corn blades could see
patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to be alarmed and
so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer gripped the tear in
her dress and her little breasts were exposed. They expanded and
contracted in spasmodic jerks. She threw her hands back over her head
and lay still.

It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and passive
under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that something was
about to happen, something that would lift her out of herself, that
would tear her away from her past and the past of her people. Her
thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as she had waited
for days and months by the rock at the back of the orchard on the
Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling noise went on in the
sky overhead but the sky and everything she had ever known seemed very
far away, no part of herself.

After a long silence, when it seemed to her that she had gone out of
herself as in a dream, Elsie heard a man's voice calling. "Aho, aho,
aho," shouted the voice and after another period of silence there arose
answering voices and then the sound of bodies crashing through the corn
and the excited chatter of children. A dog came running along the row
where she lay and stood beside her. His cold nose touched her face and
she sat up. The dog ran away. The Leander boys passed. She could see
their bare legs flashing in and out across one of the tunnels. Her
brother had become alarmed by the rapid approach of the thunder storm
and wanted to get his family to town. His voice kept calling from the
house and the voices of the children answered from the fields.

Elsie sat on the ground with her hands pressed together. An odd feeling
of disappointment had possession of her. She arose and walked slowly
along in the general direction taken by the children. She came to a
fence and crawled over, tearing her dress in a new place. One of her
stockings had become unloosed and had slipped down over her shoe top.
The long sharp weeds had scratched her leg so that it was criss-crossed
with red lines, but she was not conscious of any pain.

The distraught woman followed the children until she came within sight
of her father's house and then stopped and again sat on the ground.
There was another loud crash of thunder and Tom Leander's voice called
again, this time half angrily. The name of the girl Elizabeth was
shouted in loud masculine tones that rolled and echoed like the thunder
along the aisles under the corn.

And then Elizabeth came into sight accompanied by the young ploughman.
They stopped near Elsie and the man took the girl into his arms. At the
sound of their approach Elsie had thrown herself face downward on the
ground and had twisted herself into a position where she could see
without being seen. When their lips met her tense hands grasped one of
the corn stalks. Her lips pressed themselves into the dust. When they
had gone on their way she raised her head. A dusty powder covered her
lips.

What seemed another long period of silence fell over the fields. The
murmuring voices of unborn children, her imagination had created in the
whispering fields, became a vast shout. The wind blew harder and
harder. The corn stalks were twisted and bent. Elizabeth went
thoughtfully out of the field and climbing the fence confronted her
father. "Where you been? What you been a doing?" he asked. "Don't you
think we got to get out of here?"

When Elizabeth went toward the house Elsie followed, creeping on her
hands and knees like a little animal, and when she had come within
sight of the fence surrounding the house she sat on the ground and put
her hands over her face. Something within herself was being twisted and
whirled about as the tops of the corn stalks were now being twisted and
whirled by the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward the house
and when she opened her eyes she could again see along the long
mysterious aisles.

Her brother with his wife and children went away. By turning her head
Elsie could see them driving at a trot out of the yard back of her
father's house. With the going of the younger woman the farm house in
the midst of the cornfield rocked by the winds seemed the most desolate
place in the world.

Her mother came out at the back door of the house. She ran to the steps
where she knew her daughter was in the habit of sitting and then in
alarm began to call. It did not occur to Elsie to answer. The voice of
the older woman did not seem to have anything to do with herself. It
was a thin voice and was quickly lost in the wind and in the crashing
sound that arose out of the fields. With her head turned toward the
house Elsie stared at her mother who ran wildly around the house and
then went indoors. The back door of the house went shut with a bang.

The storm that had been threatening broke with a roar. Broad sheets of
water swept over the cornfields. Sheets of water swept over the woman's
body. The storm that had for years been gathering in her also broke.
Sobs arose out of her throat. She abandoned herself to a storm of grief
that was only partially grief. Tears ran out of her eyes and made
little furrows through the dust on her face. In the lulls that
occasionally came in the storm she raised her head and heard, through
the tangled mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound
of millions of rain-drops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the
house of the corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling to
her out of the Leander house.




        WAR


The story came to me from a woman met on a train. The car was crowded
and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing who
belonged with her--a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown
canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down
in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman's side, but I
did not know that at the time.

The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to
her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have
made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She had talked to me in very
good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man
in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days,
perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the
company of some one else.

Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the
night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had
rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the
moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in
an odd way very beautiful.

You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing up in clusters as
they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected
and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle
of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farm-houses, and occasionally
the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the
west.

The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that
stricken land with her lover by God knows what miracles of effort. She
made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I
want to tell you.

I do not remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how
the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood until the story she
told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-
window and very pregnant with meaning to me.

There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in
charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a
beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of
foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa,
or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given
to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a
fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker
philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and
he had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I
fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him,
and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that
would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which
he fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle line, but
was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed
village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.

The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train
with me, her lover and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had
been small landowners and the others in their party had worked on their
estate.

Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German
who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his
insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader
of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to
go forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her
party gathered about her. Like a stubborn horse she shook her head and
muttered Polish words. "I want to be let alone, that's what I want. All
I want in the world is to be let alone," she said, over and over; and
then the German came up and putting his hand on her back pushed her
along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant
repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They
hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and
the German.

The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream and
the German took hold of the old woman's arm and dragged her through the
stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: "I
want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone."

In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible
efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches
and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried
in his inside coat pocket. Then he got out tobacco and, sitting down on
the protruding root of a tree, smoked and stared at the refugees,
clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.

The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept
for an hour and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine
him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and
along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be
angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a
matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road as one goes
back along a road for strayed cattle.

And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman
began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone
and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other
buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.

The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and
not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that
kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her
thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man
trying to lift himself by his boot straps. The two fought and were full
of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not
very strong physically.

And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made
me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get
the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the
moving train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two
souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road.
The air was full of the struggle and the refugees gathered about and
stood shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but
also with something else. In the air everywhere about them they could
feel the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly
have given her life to have it stopped, or to have someone strike a
light, and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds
struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying
vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.

Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down
exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They
thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more
would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled
together and perhaps whimpered a little.

What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train
explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after
struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old
woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into
the body of the old woman.

After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down
by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let
alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone,
and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving
her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally
along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.

There was more of the story after that. The woman's lover, who had been
a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking
his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only
remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to
be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words
and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into
their own country.




        MOTHERHOOD


Below the hill there was a swamp in which cattails grew. The wind
rustled the dry leaves of a walnut tree that grew on top of the hill.

She went beyond the tree to where the grass was long and matted. In the
farmhouse a door bangs and in the road before the house a dog barked.

For a long time there was no sound. Then a wagon came jolting and
bumping over the frozen road. The little noises ran along the ground to
where she was lying on the grass and seemed like fingers playing over
her body. A fragrance arose from her. It took a long time for the wagon
to pass.

Then another sound broke the stillness. A young man from a neighboring
farm came stealthily across a field and climbed a fence. He also came
to the hill but for a time did not see her lying almost at his feet. He
looked toward the house and stood with hands in pockets, stamping on
the frozen ground like a horse.

Then he knew she was there. The aroma of her crept into his
consciousness.

He ran to kneel beside her silent figure. Everything was different than
it had been when they crept to the hill on the other evenings. The time
of talking and waiting was over. She was different. He grew bold and
put his hands on her face, her neck, her breasts, her hips. There was a
strange new firmness and hardness to her body. When he kissed her lips
she did not move and for a moment he was afraid. Then courage came and
he went down to lie with her.

He had been a farm boy all his life and had plowed many acres of rich
black land.

He became sure of himself.

He plowed her deeply.

He planted the seeds of a son in the warm rich quivering soil.

       *       *       *       *       *

She carried the seeds of a son within herself. On winter evenings she
went along a path at the foot of a small hill and turned up the hill to
a barn where she milked cows. She was large and strong. Her legs went
swinging along. The son within her went swinging along.

He learned the rhythm of little hills.

He learned the rhythm of flat places.

He learned the rhythm of legs walking.

He learned the rhythm of firm strong hands pulling at the teats of
cows.

       *       *       *        *       *

There was a field that was barren and filled with stones. In the spring
when the warm nights came and when she was big with him she went to the
fields. The heads of little stones stuck out of the ground like the
heads of buried children. The field, washed with moonlight, sloped
gradually downward to a murmuring brook. A few sheep went among the
stones nibbling the sparse grass.

A thousand children were buried in the barren field. They struggled to
come out of the ground. They struggled to come to her. The brook ran
over stones and its voice cried out. For a long time she stayed in the
field, shaken with sorrow.

She arose from her seat on a large stone and went to the farmhouse. The
voices of the darkness cried to her as she went along a lane and past a
silent barn.

Within herself only the one child struggled. When she got into bed his
heels beat upon the walls of his prison. She lay still and listened.
Only one small voice seemed coming to her out of the silence of the
night.




        OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING.


        I

Rosalind Wescott, a tall strong looking woman of twenty-seven, was
walking on the railroad track near the town of Willow Springs, Iowa. It
was about four in the afternoon of a day in August, and the third day
since she had come home to her native town from Chicago, where she was
employed.

At that time Willow Springs was a town of about three thousand people.
It has grown since. There was a public square with the town hall in the
centre and about the four sides of the square and facing it were the
merchandising establishments. The public square was bare and grassless,
and out of it ran streets of frame houses, long straight streets that
finally became country roads running away into the flat prairie
country.

Although she had told everyone that she had merely come home for a
short visit because she was a little homesick, and although she wanted
in particular to have a talk with her mother in regard to a certain
matter, Rosalind had been unable to talk with anyone. Indeed she had
found it difficult to stay in the house with her mother and father and
all the time, day and night, she was haunted by a desire to get out of
town. As she went along the railroad tracks in the hot afternoon
sunshine she kept scolding herself. "I've grown moody and no good. If I
want to do it why don't I just go ahead and not make a fuss," she
thought.

For two miles the railroad tracks, eastward out of Willow Springs, went
through corn fields on a flat plain. Then there was a little dip in the
land and a bridge over Willow Creek. The Creek was altogether dry now
but trees grew along the edge of the grey streak of cracked mud that in
the fall, winter and spring would be the bed of the stream. Rosalind
left the tracks and went to sit under one of the trees. Her cheeks were
flushed and her forehead wet. When she took off her hat her hair fell
down in disorder and strands of it clung to her hot wet face. She sat
in what seemed a kind of great bowl on the sides of which the corn grew
rank. Before her and following the bed of the stream there was a dusty
path along which cows came at evening from distant pastures. A great
pancake formed of cow dung lay nearby. It was covered with grey dust
and over it crawled shiny black beetles. They were rolling the dung
into balls in preparation for the germination of a new generation of
beetles.

Rosalind had come on the visit to her home town at a time of the year
when everyone wished to escape from the hot dusty place. No one had
expected her and she had not written to announce her coming. One hot
morning in Chicago she had got out of bed and had suddenly begun
packing her bag, and on that same evening there she was in Willow
Springs, in the house where she had lived until her twenty-first year,
among her own people. She had come up from the station in the hotel bus
and had walked into the Wescott house unannounced. Her father was at
the pump by the kitchen door and her mother came into the living room
to greet her wearing a soiled kitchen apron. Everything in the house
was just as it always had been. "I just thought I would come home for a
few days," she said, putting down her bag and kissing her mother.

Ma and Pa Wescott had been glad to see their daughter. On the evening
of her arrival they were excited and a special supper was prepared.
After supper Pa Wescott went up town as usual, but he stayed only a few
minutes. "I just want to run to the postoffice and get the evening
paper," he said apologetically. Rosalind's mother put on a clean dress
and they all sat in the darkness on the front porch. There was talk, of
a kind. "Is it hot in Chicago now? I'm going to do a good deal of
canning this fall. I thought later I would send you a box of canned
fruit. Do you live in the same place on the North Side? It must be nice
in the evening to be able to walk down to the park by the lake."

       *       *       *       *       *

Rosalind sat under the tree near the railroad bridge two miles from
Willow Springs and watched the tumble bugs at work. Her whole body was
hot from the walk in the sun and the thin dress she wore clung to her
legs. It was being soiled by the dust on the grass under the tree.

She had run away from town and from her mother's house. All during the
three days of her visit she had been doing that. She did not go from
house to house to visit her old schoolgirl friends, the girls who
unlike herself had stayed in Willow Springs, had got married and
settled down there. When she saw one of these women on the street in
the morning, pushing a baby carriage and perhaps followed by a small
child, she stopped. There was a few minutes of talk. "It's hot. Do you
live in the same place in Chicago? My husband and I hope to take the
children and go away for a week or two. It must be nice in Chicago
where you are so near the lake." Rosalind hurried away.

All the hours of her visit to her mother and to her home town had been
spent in an effort to hurry away.

From what? Rosalind defended herself. There was something she had come
from Chicago hoping to be able to say to her mother. Did she really
want to talk with her about things? Had she thought, by again breathing
the air of her home town, to get strength to face life and its
difficulties?

There was no point in her taking the hot uncomfortable trip from
Chicago only to spend her days walking in dusty country roads or
between rows of cornfields in the stifling heat along the railroad
tracks.

"I must have hoped. There is a hope that cannot be fulfilled," she
thought vaguely.

Willow Springs was a rather meaningless, dreary town, one of thousands
of such towns in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, but her
mind made it more dreary.

She sat under the tree by the dry bed of Willow Creek thinking of the
street in town where her mother and father lived, where she had lived
until she had become a woman. It was only because of a series of
circumstances she did not live there now. Her one brother, ten years
older than herself, had married and moved to Chicago. He had asked her
to come for a visit and after she got to the city she stayed. Her
brother was a traveling salesman and spent a good deal of time away
from home. "Why don't you stay here with Bess and learn stenography,"
he asked. "If you don't want to use it you don't have to. Dad can look
out for you all right. I just thought you might like to learn."

       *       *       *       *       *

"That was six years ago," Rosalind thought wearily. "I've been a city
woman for six years." Her mind hopped about. Thoughts came and went. In
the city, after she became a stenographer, something for a time
awakened her. She wanted to be an actress and went in the evening to a
dramatic school. In an office where she worked there was a young man, a
clerk. They went out together, to the theatre or to walk in the park in
the evening. They kissed.

Her thoughts came sharply back to her mother and father, to her home in
Willow Springs, to the street in which she had lived until her twenty-
first year.

It was but an end of a street. From the windows at the front of her
mother's house six other houses could be seen. How well she knew the
street and the people in the houses! Did she know them? From her
eighteenth and until her twenty-first year she had stayed at home,
helping her mother with the housework, waiting for something. Other
young women in town waited just as she did. They like herself had
graduated from the town high school and their parents had no intention
of sending them away to college. There was nothing to do but wait. Some
of the young women--their mothers and their mothers' friends still
spoke of them as girls--had young men friends who came to see them on
Sunday and perhaps also on Wednesday or Thursday evenings. Others
joined the church, went to prayer meetings, became active members of
some church organization. They fussed about.

Rosalind had done none of these things. All through those three trying
years in Willow Springs she had just waited. In the morning there was
the work to do in the house and then, in some way, the day wore itself
away. In the evening her father went up town and she sat with her
mother. Nothing much was said. After she had gone to bed she lay awake,
strangely nervous, eager for something to happen that never would
happen. The noises of the Wescott house cut across her thoughts. What
things went through her mind!

There was a procession of people always going away from her. Sometimes
she lay on her belly at the edge of a ravine. Well it was not a ravine.
It had two walls of marble and on the marble face of the walls strange
figures were carved. Broad steps led down--always down and away. People
walked along the steps, between the marble walls, going down and away
from her.

What people! Who were they? Where did they come from? Where were they
going? She was not asleep but wide awake. Her bedroom was dark. The
walls and ceiling of the room receded. She seemed to hang suspended in
space, above the ravine--the ravine with walls of white marble over
which strange beautiful lights played.

The people who went down the broad steps and away into infinite
distance--they were men and women. Sometime a young girl like herself
but in some way sweeter and purer than herself, passed alone. The young
girl walked with a swinging stride, going swiftly and freely like a
beautiful young animal. Her legs and arms were like the slender top
branches of trees swaying in a gentle wind. She also went down and
away.

Others followed along the marble steps. Young boys walked alone. A
dignified old man followed by a sweet faced woman passed. What a
remarkable man! One felt infinite power in his old frame. There were
deep wrinkles in his face and his eyes were sad. One felt he knew
everything about life but had kept something very precious alive in
himself. It was that precious thing that made the eyes of the woman who
followed him burn with a strange fire. They also went down along the
steps and away.

Down and away along the steps went others--how many others, men and
women, boys and girls, single old men, old women who leaned on sticks
and hobbled along.

In the bed in her father's house as she lay awake Rosalind's head grew
light. She tried to clutch at something, understand something.

She couldn't. The noises of the house cut across her waking dream. Her
father was at the pump by the kitchen door. He was pumping a pail of
water. In a moment he would bring it into the house and put it on a box
by the kitchen sink. A little of the water would slop over on the
floor. There would be a sound like a child's bare foot striking the
floor. Then her father would go to wind the clock. The day was done.
Presently there would be the sound of his heavy feet on the floor of
the bedroom above and he would get into bed to lie beside Rosalind's
mother.

The night noises of her father's house had been in some way terrible to
the girl in the years when she was becoming a woman. After chance had
taken her to the city she never wanted to think of them again. Even in
Chicago where the silence of nights was cut and slashed by a thousand
noises, by automobiles whirling through the streets, by the belated
footsteps of men homeward bound along the cement sidewalks after
midnight, by the shouts of quarreling men drunk on summer nights, even
in the great hubbub of noises there was comparative quiet. The
insistent clanging noises of the city nights were not like the homely
insistent noises of her father's house. Certain terrible truths about
life did not abide in them, they did not cling so closely to life and
did not frighten as did the noises in the one house on the quiet street
in the town of Willow Springs. How often, there in the city, in the
midst of the great noises she had fought to escape the little noises!
Her father's feet were on the steps leading into the kitchen. Now he
was putting the pail of water on the box by the kitchen sink. Upstairs
her mother's body fell heavily into bed. The visions of the great
marble-lined ravine down along which went the beautiful people flew
away. There was the little slap of water on the kitchen floor. It was
like a child's bare foot striking the floor. Rosalind wanted to cry
out. Her father closed the kitchen door. Now he was winding the clock.
In a moment his feet would be on the stairs--

There were six houses to be seen from the windows of the Wescott house.
In the winter smoke from six brick chimneys went up into the sky. There
was one house, the next one to the Wescott's place, a small frame
affair, in which lived a man who was thirty-five years old when
Rosalind became a woman of twenty-one and went away to the city. The
man was unmarried and his mother, who had been his housekeeper, had
died during the year in which Rosalind graduated from the high school.
After that the man lived alone. He took his dinner and supper at the
hotel, down town on the square, but he got his own breakfast, made his
own bed and swept out his own house. Sometimes he walked slowly along
the street past the Wescott house when Rosalind sat alone on the front
porch. He raised his hat and spoke to her. Their eyes met. He had a
long, hawk-like nose and his hair was long and uncombed.

Rosalind thought about him sometimes. It bothered her a little that he
sometimes went stealing softly, as though not to disturb her, across
her daytime fancies.

As she sat that day by the dry creek bed Rosalind thought about the
bachelor, who had now passed the age of forty and who lived on the
street where she had lived during her girlhood. His house was separated
from the Wescott house by a picket fence. Sometimes in the morning he
forgot to pull his blinds and Rosalind, busy with the housework in her
father's house, had seen him walking about in his underwear. It was--
uh, one could not think of it.

The man's name was Melville Stoner. He had a small income and did not
have to work. On some days he did not leave his house and go to the
hotel for his meals but sat all day in a chair with his nose buried in
a book.

There was a house on the street occupied by a widow who raised
chickens. Two or three of her hens were what the people who lived on
the street called 'high flyers.' They flew over the fence of the
chicken yard and escaped and almost always they came at once into the
yard of the bachelor. The neighbors laughed about it. It was
significant, they felt. When the hens had come into the yard of the
bachelor, Stoner, the widow with a stick in her hand ran after them.
Melville Stoner came out of his house and stood on a little porch in
front. The widow ran through the front gate waving her arms wildly and
the hens made a great racket and flew over the fence. They ran down the
street toward the widow's house. For a moment she stood by the Stoner
gate. In the summer time when the windows of the Wescott house were
open Rosalind could hear what the man and woman said to each other. In
Willow Springs it was not thought proper for an unmarried woman to
stand talking to an unmarried man near the door of his bachelor
establishment. The widow wanted to observe the conventions. Still she
did linger a moment, her bare arm resting on the gate post. What bright
eager little eyes she had! "If those hens of mine bother you I wish you
would catch them and kill them," she said fiercely. "I am always glad
to see them coming along the road," Melville Stoner replied, bowing.
Rosalind thought he was making fun of the widow. She liked him for
that. "I'd never see you if you did not have to come here after your
hens. Don't let anything happen to them," he said, bowing again.

For a moment the man and woman lingered looking into each other's eyes.
From one of the windows of the Wescott house Rosalind watched the
woman. Nothing more was said. There was something about the woman she
had not understood--well the widow's senses were being fed. The
developing woman in the house next door had hated her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rosalind jumped up from under the tree and climbed up the railroad
embankment. She thanked the gods she had been lifted out of the life of
the town of Willow Springs and that chance had set her down to live in
a city. "Chicago is far from beautiful. People say it is just a big
noisy dirty village and perhaps that's what it is, but there is
something alive there," she thought. In Chicago, or at least during the
last two or three years of her life there, Rosalind felt she had
learned a little something of life. She had read books for one thing,
such books as did not come to Willow Springs, books that Willow Springs
knew nothing about, she had gone to hear the Symphony Orchestra, she
had begun to understand something of the possibility of line and color,
had heard intelligent, understanding men speak of these things. In
Chicago, in the midst of the twisting squirming millions of men and
women there were voices. One occasionally saw men or at least heard of
the existence of men who, like the beautiful old man who had walked
away down the marble stairs in the vision of her girlhood nights, had
kept some precious thing alive in themselves.

And there was something else--it was the most important thing of all.
For the last two years of her life in Chicago she had spent hours, days
in the presence of a man to whom she could talk. The talks had awakened
her. She felt they had made her a woman, had matured her.

"I know what these people here in Willow Springs are like and what I
would have been like had I stayed here," she thought. She felt relieved
and almost happy. She had come home at a crisis of her own life hoping
to be able to talk a little with her mother, or if talk proved
impossible hoping to get some sense of sisterhood by being in her
presence. She had thought there was something buried away, deep within
every woman, that at a certain call would run out to other women. Now
she felt that the hope, the dream, the desire she had cherished was
altogether futile. Sitting in the great flat bowl in the midst of the
corn lands two miles from her home town where no breath of air stirred
and seeing the beetles at their work of preparing to propagate a new
generation of beetles, while she thought of the town and its people,
had settled something for her. Her visit to Willow Springs had come to
something after all.

Rosalind's figure had still much of the spring and swing of youth in
it. Her legs were strong and her shoulders broad. She went swinging
along the railroad track toward town, going westward. The sun had begun
to fall rapidly down the sky. Away over the tops of the corn in one of
the great fields she could see in the distance to where a man was
driving a motor along a dusty road. The wheels of the car kicked up
dust through which the sunlight played. The floating cloud of dust
became a shower of gold that settled down over the fields. "When a
woman most wants what is best and truest in another woman, even in her
own mother, she isn't likely to find it," she thought grimly. "There
are certain things every woman has to find out for herself, there is a
road she must travel alone. It may only lead to some more ugly and
terrible place, but if she doesn't want death to overtake her and live
within her while her body is still alive she must set out on that
road."

Rosalind walked for a mile along the railroad track and then stopped. A
freight train had gone eastward as she sat under the tree by the creek
bed and now, there beside the tracks, in the grass was the body of a
man. It lay still, the face buried in the deep burned grass. At once
she concluded the man had been struck and killed by the train. The body
had been thrown thus aside. All her thoughts went away and she turned
and started to tiptoe away, stepping carefully along the railroad ties,
making no noise. Then she stopped again. The man in the grass might not
be dead, only hurt, terribly hurt. It would not do to leave him there.
She imagined him mutilated but still struggling for life and herself
trying to help him. She crept back along the ties. The man's legs were
not twisted and beside him lay his hat. It was as though he had put it
there before lying down to sleep, but a man did not sleep with his face
buried in the grass in such a hot uncomfortable place. She drew nearer.
"O, you Mister," she called, "O, you--are you hurt?"

The man in the grass sat up and looked at her. He laughed. It was
Melville Stoner, the man of whom she had just been thinking and in
thinking of whom she had come to certain settled conclusions regarding
the futility of her visit to Willow Springs. He got to his feet and
picked up his hat. "Well, hello, Miss Rosalind Wescott," he said
heartily. He climbed a small embankment and stood beside her. "I knew
you were at home on a visit but what are you doing out here?" he asked
and then added, "What luck this is! Now I shall have the privilege of
walking home with you. You can hardly refuse to let me walk with you
after shouting at me like that."

They walked together along the tracks he with his hat in his hand.
Rosalind thought he looked like a gigantic bird, an aged wise old bird,
"perhaps a vulture" she thought. For a time he was silent and then he
began to talk, explaining his lying with his face buried in the grass.
There was a twinkle in his eyes and Rosalind wondered if he was
laughing at her as she had seen him laugh at the widow who owned the
hens.

He did not come directly to the point and Rosalind thought it strange
that they should walk and talk together. At once his words interested
her. He was so much older than herself and no doubt wiser. How vain she
had been to think herself so much more knowing than all the people of
Willow Springs. Here was this man and he was talking and his talk did
not sound like anything she had ever expected to hear from the lips of
a native of her home town. "I want to explain myself but we'll wait a
little. For years I've been wanting to get at you, to talk with you,
and this is my chance. You've been away now five or six years and have
grown into womanhood.

"You understand it's nothing specially personal, my wanting to get at
you and understand you a little," he added quickly. "I'm that way about
everyone. Perhaps that's the reason I live alone, why I've never
married or had personal friends. I'm too eager. It isn't comfortable to
others to have me about."

Rosalind was caught up by this new view point of the man. She wondered.
In the distance along the tracks the houses of the town came into
sight. Melville Stoner tried to walk on one of the iron rails but after
a few steps lost his balance and fell off. His long arms whirled about.
A strange intensity of mood and feeling had come over Rosalind. In one
moment Melville Stoner was like an old man and then he was like a boy.
Being with him made her mind, that had been racing all afternoon, race
faster than ever.

When he began to talk again he seemed to have forgotten the explanation
he had intended making. "We've lived side by side but we've hardly
spoken to each other," he said. "When I was a young man and you were a
girl I used to sit in the house thinking of you. We've really been
friends. What I mean is we've had the same thoughts."

He began to speak of life in the city where she had been living,
condemning it. "It's dull and stupid here but in the city you have your
own kind of stupidity too," he declared. "I'm glad I do not live
there."

In Chicago when she had first gone there to live a thing had sometimes
happened that had startled Rosalind. She knew no one but her brother
and his wife and was sometimes very lonely. When she could no longer
bear the eternal sameness of the talk in her brother's house she went
out to a concert or to the theatre. Once or twice when she had no money
to buy a theatre ticket she grew bold and walked alone in the streets,
going rapidly along without looking to the right or left. As she sat in
the theatre or walked in the street an odd thing sometimes happened.
Someone spoke her name, a call came to her. The thing happened at a
concert and she looked quickly about. All the faces in sight had that
peculiar, half bored, half expectant expression one grows accustomed to
seeing on the faces of people listening to music. In the entire theatre
no one seemed aware of her. On the street or in the park the call had
come when she was utterly alone. It seemed to come out of the air, from
behind a tree in the park.

And now as she walked on the railroad tracks with Melville Stoner the
call seemed to come from him. He walked along apparently absorbed with
his own thoughts, the thoughts he was trying to find words to express.
His legs were long and he walked with a queer loping gait. The idea of
some great bird, perhaps a sea-bird stranded far inland, stayed in
Rosalind's mind but the call did not come from the bird part of him.
There was something else, another personality hidden away. Rosalind
fancied the call came this time from a young boy, from such another
clear-eyed boy as she had once seen in her waking dreams at night in
her father's house, from one of the boys who walked on the marble
stairway, walked down and away. A thought came that startled her. "The
boy is hidden away in the body of this strange bird-like man," she told
herself. The thought awoke fancies within her. It explained much in the
lives of men and women. An expression, a phrase, remembered from her
childhood when she had gone to Sunday School in Willow Springs, came
back to her mind. "And God spoke to me out of a burning bush." She
almost said the words aloud.

Melville Stoner loped along, walking on the railroad ties and talking.
He seemed to have forgotten the incident of his lying with his nose
buried in the grass and was explaining his life lived alone in the
house in town. Rosalind tried to put her own thoughts aside and to
listen to his words but did not succeed very well. "I came home here
hoping to get a little closer to life, to get, for a few days, out of
the company of a man so I could think about him. I fancied I could get
what I wanted by being near mother, but that hasn't worked. It would be
strange if I got what I am looking for by this chance meeting with
another man," she thought. Her mind went on recording thoughts. She
heard the spoken words of the man beside her but her own mind went on,
also making words. Something within herself felt suddenly relaxed and
free. Ever since she had got off the train at Willow Springs three days
before there had been a great tenseness. Now it was all gone. She
looked at Melville Stoner who occasionally looked at her. There was
something in his eyes, a kind of laughter--a mocking kind of laughter.
His eyes were grey, of a cold greyness, like the eyes of a bird.

"It has come into my mind--I have been thinking--well you see you have
not married in the six years since you went to live in the city. It
would be strange and a little amusing if you are like myself, if you
cannot marry or come close to any other person," he was saying.

Again he spoke of the life he led in his house. "I sometimes sit in my
house all day, even when the weather is fine outside," he said. "You
have no doubt seen me sitting there. Sometimes I forget to eat. I read
books all day, striving to forget myself and then night comes and I
cannot sleep.

"If I could write or paint or make music, if I cared at all about
expressing what goes on in my mind it would be different. However, I
would not write as others do. I would have but little to say about what
people do. What do they do? In what way does it matter? Well you see
they build cities such as you live in and towns like Willow Springs,
they have built this railroad track on which we are walking, they marry
and raise children, commit murders, steal, do kindly acts. What does it
matter? You see we are walking here in the hot sun. In five minutes
more we will be in town and you will go to your house and I to mine.
You will eat supper with your father and mother. Then your father will
go up town and you and your mother will sit together on the front
porch. There will be little said. Your mother will speak of her
intention to can fruit. Then your father will come home and you will
all go to bed. Your father will pump a pail of water at the pump by the
kitchen door. He will carry it indoors and put it on a box by the
kitchen sink. A little of the water will be spilled. It will make a
soft little slap on the kitchen floor--"

"Ha!"

Melville Stoner turned and looked sharply at Rosalind who had grown a
little pale. Her mind raced madly, like an engine out of control. There
was a kind of power in Melville Stoner that frightened her. By the
recital of a few commonplace facts he had suddenly invaded her secret
places. It was almost as though he had come into the bedroom in her
father's house where she lay thinking. He had in fact got into her bed.
He laughed again, an unmirthful laugh. "I'll tell you what, we know
little enough here in America, either in the towns or in the cities,"
he said rapidly. "We are all on the rush. We are all for action. I sit
still and think. If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what
everyone thought. It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh?
I would tell you what you have been thinking this afternoon while you
walked here on this railroad track with me. I would tell you what your
mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would like to
say to you."

Rosalind's face had grown chalky white and her hands trembled. They got
off the railroad tracks and into the streets of Willow Springs. A
change came over Melville Stoner. Of a sudden he seemed just a man of
forty, a little embarrassed by the presence of the younger woman, a
little hesitant. "I'm going to the hotel now and I must leave you
here," he said. His feet made a shuffling sound on the sidewalk. "I
intended to tell you why you found me lying out there with my face
buried in the grass," he said. A new quality had come into his voice.
It was the voice of the boy who had called to Rosalind out of the body
of the man as they walked and talked on the tracks. "Sometimes I can't
stand my life here," he said almost fiercely and waved his long arms
about. "I'm alone too much. I grow to hate myself. I have to run out of
town."

The man did not look at Rosalind but at the ground. His big feet
continued shuffling nervously about. "Once in the winter time I thought
I was going insane," he said. "I happened to remember an orchard, five
miles from town where I had walked one day in the late fall when the
pears were ripe. A notion came into my head. It was bitter cold but I
walked the five miles and went into the orchard. The ground was frozen
and covered with snow but I brushed the snow aside. I pushed my face
into the grass. In the fall when I had walked there the ground was
covered with ripe pears. A fragrance arose from them. They were covered
with bees that crawled over them, drunk, filled with a kind of ecstacy.
I had remembered the fragrance. That's why I went there and put my face
into the frozen grass. The bees were in an ecstasy of life and I had
missed life. I have always missed life. It always goes away from me. I
always imagined people walking away. In the spring this year I walked
on the railroad track out to the bridge over Willow Creek. Violets grew
in the grass. At that time I hardly noticed them but today I
remembered. The violets were like the people who walk away from me. A
mad desire to run after them had taken possession of me. I felt like a
bird flying through space. A conviction that something had escaped me
and that I must pursue it had taken possession of me."

Melville Stoner stopped talking. His face also had grown white and his
hands also trembled. Rosalind had an almost irresistible desire to put
out her hand and touch his hand. She wanted to shout, crying--"I am
here. I am not dead. I am alive." Instead she stood in silence, staring
at him, as the widow who owned the high flying hens had stared.
Melville Stoner struggled to recover from the ecstasy into which he had
been thrown by his own words. He bowed and smiled. "I hope you are in
the habit of walking on railroad tracks," he said. "I shall in the
future know what to do with my time. When you come to town I shall camp
on the railroad tracks. No doubt, like the violets, you have left your
fragrance out there." Rosalind looked at him. He was laughing at her as
he had laughed when he talked to the widow standing at his gate. She
did not mind. When he had left her she went slowly through the streets.
The phrase that had come into her mind as they walked on the tracks
came back and she said it over and over. "And God spoke to me out of a
burning bush." She kept repeating the phrase until she got back into
the Wescott house.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rosalind sat on the front porch of the house where her girlhood had
been spent. Her father had not come home for the evening meal. He was a
dealer in coal and lumber and owned a number of unpainted sheds facing
a railroad siding west of town. There was a tiny office with a stove
and a desk in a corner by a window. The desk was piled high with
unanswered letters and with circulars from mining and lumber companies.
Over them had settled a thick layer of coal dust. All day he sat in his
office looking like an animal in a cage, but unlike a caged animal he
was apparently not discontented and did not grow restless. He was the
one coal and lumber dealer in Willow Springs. When people wanted one of
these commodities they had to come to him. There was no other place to
go. He was content. In the morning as soon as he got to his office he
read the Des Moines paper and then if no one came to disturb him he sat
all day, by the stove in winter and by an open window through the long
hot summer days, apparently unaffected by the marching change of
seasons pictured in the fields, without thought, without hope, without
regret that life was becoming an old worn out thing for him.

In the Wescott house Rosalind's mother had already begun the canning of
which she had several times spoken. She was making gooseberry jam.
Rosalind could hear the pots boiling in the kitchen. Her mother walked
heavily. With the coming of age she was beginning to grow fat.

The daughter was weary from much thinking. It had been a day of many
emotions. She took off her hat and laid it on the porch beside her.
Melville Stoner's house next door had windows that were like eyes
staring at her, accusing her. "Well now, you see, you have gone too
fast," the house declared. It sneered at her. "You thought you knew
about people. After all you knew nothing." Rosalind held her head in
her hands. It was true she had misunderstood. The man who lived in the
house was no doubt like other people in Willow Springs. He was not, as
she had smartly supposed, a dull citizen of a dreary town, one who knew
nothing of life. Had he not said words that had startled her, torn her
out of herself?

Rosalind had an experience not uncommon to tired nervous people. Her
mind, weary of thinking, did not stop thinking but went on faster than
ever. A new plane of thought was reached. Her mind was like a flying
machine that leaves the ground and leaps into the air.

It took hold upon an idea expressed or implied in something Melville
Stoner had said. "In every human being there are two voices, each
striving to make itself heard."

A new world of thought had opened itself before her. After all human
beings might be understood. It might be possible to understand her
mother and her mother's life, her father, the man she loved, herself.
There was the voice that said words. Words came forth from lips. They
conformed, fell into a certain mold. For the most part the words had no
life of their own. They had come down out of old times and many of them
were no doubt once strong living words, coming out of the depth of
people, out of the bellies of people. The words had escaped out of a
shut-in place. They had once expressed living truth. Then they had gone
on being said, over and over, by the lips of many people, endlessly,
wearily.

She thought of men and women she had seen together, that she had heard
talking together as they sat in the street cars or in apartments or
walked in a Chicago park. Her brother, the traveling salesman, and his
wife had talked half wearily through the long evenings she had spent
with them in their apartment. It was with them as with the other
people. A thing happened. The lips said certain words but the eyes of
the people said other words. Sometimes the lips expressed affection
while hatred shone out of the eyes. Sometimes it was the other way
about. What a confusion!

It was clear there was something hidden away within people that could
not get itself expressed except accidentally. One was startled or
alarmed and then the words that fell from the lips became pregnant
words, words that lived.

The vision that had sometimes visited her in her girlhood as she lay in
bed at night came back. Again she saw the people on the marble
stairway, going down and away, into infinity. Her own mind began to
make words that struggled to get themselves expressed through her lips.
She hungered for someone to whom to say the words and half arose to go
to her mother, to where her mother was making gooseberry jam in the
kitchen, and then sat down again. "They were going down into the hall
of the hidden voices," she whispered to herself. The words excited and
intoxicated her as had the words from the lips of Melville Stoner. She
thought of herself as having quite suddenly grown amazingly,
spiritually, even physically. She felt relaxed, young, wonderfully
strong. She imagined herself as walking, as had the young girl she had
seen in the vision, with swinging arms and shoulders, going down a
marble stairway--down into the hidden places in people, into the hall
of the little voices. "I shall understand after this, what shall I not
understand?" she asked herself.

Doubt came and she trembled a little. As she walked with him on the
railroad track Melville Stoner had gone down within herself. Her body
was a house, through the door of which he had walked. He had known
about the night noises in her father's house--her father at the well
by the kitchen door, the slap of the spilled water on the floor. Even
when she was a young girl and had thought herself alone in the bed in
the darkness in the room upstairs in the house before which she now
sat, she had not been alone. The strange bird-like man who lived in the
house next door had been with her, in her room, in her bed. Years later
he had remembered the terrible little noises of the house and had known
how they had terrified her.

There was something terrible in his knowledge too. He had spoken, given
forth his knowledge, but as he did so there was laughter in his eyes,
perhaps a sneer.

In the Wescott house the sounds of housekeeping went on. A man who had
been at work in a distant field, who had already begun his fall
plowing, was unhitching his horses from the plow. He was far away,
beyond the street's end, in a field that swelled a little out of the
plain. Rosalind stared. The man was hitching the horses to a wagon. She
saw him as through the large end of a telescope. He would drive the
horses away to a distant farmhouse and put them into a barn. Then he
would go into a house where there was a woman at work. Perhaps the
woman like her mother would be making gooseberry jam. He would grunt as
her father did when at evening he came home from the little hot office
by the railroad siding. "Hello," he would say, flatly, indifferently,
stupidly. Life was like that.

Rosalind became weary of thinking. The man in the distant field had got
into his wagon and was driving away. In a moment there would be nothing
left of him but a thin cloud of dust that floated in the air. In the
house the gooseberry jam had boiled long enough. Her mother was
preparing to put it into glass jars. The operation produced a new
little side current of sounds. She thought again of Melville Stoner.
For years he had been sitting, listening to sounds. There was a kind of
madness in it.

She had got herself into a half frenzied condition. "I must stop it,"
she told herself. "I am like a stringed instrument on which the strings
have been tightened too much." She put her face into her hands,
wearily.

And then a thrill ran through her body. There was a reason for Melville
Stoner's being what he had become. There was a locked gateway leading
to the marble stairway that led down and away, into infinity, into the
hall of the little voices and the key to the gateway was love. Warmth
came back into Rosalind's body. "Understanding need not lead to
weariness," she thought. Life might after all be a rich, a triumphant
thing. She would make her visit to Willow Springs count for something
significant in her life. For one thing she would really approach her
mother, she would walk into her mother's life. "It will be my first
trip down the marble stairway," she thought and tears came to her eyes.
In a moment her father would be coming home for the evening meal but
after supper he would go away. The two women would be alone together.
Together they would explore a little into the mystery of life, they
would find sisterhood. The thing she had wanted to talk about with
another understanding woman could be talked about then. There might yet
be a beautiful outcome to her visit to Willow Springs and to her
mother.


        II

The story of Rosalind's six years in Chicago is the story of thousands
of unmarried women who work in offices in the city. Necessity had not
driven her to work nor kept her at her task and she did not think of
herself as a worker, one who would always be a worker. For a time after
she came out of the stenographic school she drifted from office to
office, acquiring always more skill, but with no particular interest in
what she was doing. It was a way to put in the long days. Her father,
who in addition to the coal and lumber yards owned three farms, sent
her a hundred dollars a month. The money her work brought was spent for
clothes so that she dressed better than the women she worked with.

Of one thing she was quite sure. She did not want to return to Willow
Springs to live with her father and mother, and after a time she knew
she could not continue living with her brother and his wife. For the
first time she began seeing the city that spread itself out before her
eyes. When she walked at the noon hour along Michigan Boulevard or went
into a restaurant or in the evening went home in the street car she saw
men and women together. It was the same when on Sunday afternoons in
the summer she walked in the park or by the lake. On a street car she
saw a small round-faced woman put her hand into the hand of her male
companion. Before she did it she looked cautiously about. She wanted to
assure herself of something. To the other women in the car, to Rosalind
and the others the act said something. It was as though the woman's
voice had said aloud, "He is mine. Do not draw too close to him."

There was no doubt that Rosalind was awakening out of the Willow
Springs torpor in which she had lived out her young womanhood. The city
had at least done that for her. The city was wide. It flung itself out.
One had but to let his feet go thump, thump upon the pavements to get
into strange streets, see always new faces.

On Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday one did not work. In the
summer it was a time to go to places--to the park, to walk among the
strange colorful crowds in Halsted Street, with a half dozen young
people from the office, to spend a day on the sand dunes at the foot of
Lake Michigan. One got excited and was hungry, hungry, always hungry--
for companionship. That was it. One wanted to possess something--a man
--to take him along on jaunts, be sure of him, yes--own him.

She read books--always written by men or by manlike women. There was an
essential mistake in the viewpoint of life set forth in the books. The
mistake was always being made. In Rosalind's time it grew more
pronounced. Someone had got hold of a key with which the door to the
secret chamber of life could be unlocked. Others took the key and
rushed in. The secret chamber of life was filled with a noisy vulgar
crowd. All the books that dealt with life at all dealt with it through
the lips of the crowd that had newly come into the sacred place. The
writer had hold of the key. It was his time to be heard. "Sex," he
cried. "It is by understanding sex I will untangle the mystery."

It was all very well and sometimes interesting but one grew tired of
the subject.

She lay abed in her room at her brother's house on a Sunday night in
the summer. During the afternoon she had gone for a walk and on a
street on the Northwest Side had come upon a religious procession. The
Virgin was being carried through the streets. The houses were decorated
and women leaned out at the windows of houses. Old priests dressed in
white gowns waddled along. Strong young men carried the platform on
which the Virgin rested. The procession stopped. Someone started a
chant in a loud clear voice. Other voices took it up. Children ran
about gathering in money. All the time there was a loud hum of ordinary
conversation going on. Women shouted across the street to other women.
Young girls walked on the sidewalks and laughed softly as the young men
in white, clustered about the Virgin, turned to stare at them. On every
street corner merchants sold candies, nuts, cool drinks--

In her bed at night Rosalind put down the book she had been reading.
"The worship of the Virgin is a form of sex expression," she read.

"Well what of it? If it be true what does it matter?"

She got out of bed and took off her nightgown. She was herself a
virgin. What did that matter? She turned herself slowly about, looking
at her strong young woman's body. It was a thing in which sex lived. It
was a thing upon which sex in others might express itself. What did it
matter?

There was her brother sleeping with his wife in another room near at
hand. In Willow Springs, Iowa, her father was at just this moment
pumping a pail of water at the well by the kitchen door. In a moment he
would carry it into the kitchen to set it on the box by the kitchen
sink.

Rosalind's cheeks were flushed. She made an odd and lovely figure
standing nude before the glass in her room there in Chicago. She was so
much alive and yet not alive. Her eyes shone with excitement. She
continued to turn slowly round and round twisting her head to look at
her naked back. "Perhaps I am learning to think," she decided. There
was some sort of essential mistake in people's conception of life.
There was something she knew and it was of as much importance as the
things the wise men knew and put into books. She also had found out
something about life. Her body was still the body of what was called a
virgin. What of it? "If the sex impulse within it had been gratified in
what way would my problem be solved? I am lonely now. It is evident
that after that had happened I would still be lonely."


        III

Rosalind's life in Chicago had been like a stream that apparently turns
back toward its source. It ran forward, then stopped, turned, twisted.
At just the time when her awakening became a half realized thing she
went to work at a new place, a piano factory on the Northwest Side
facing a branch of the Chicago River. She became secretary to a man who
was treasurer of the company. He was a slender, rather small man of
thirty-eight with thin white restless hands and with gray eyes that
were clouded and troubled. For the first time she became really
interested in the work that ate up her days. Her employer was charged
with the responsibility of passing upon the credit of the firm's
customers and was unfitted for the task. He was not shrewd and within a
short time had made two costly mistakes by which the company had lost
money. "I have too much to do. My time is too much taken up with
details. I need help here," he had explained, evidently irritated, and
Rosalind had been engaged to relieve him of details.

Her new employer, named Walter Sayers, was the only son of a man who in
his time had been well known in Chicago's social and club life.
Everyone had thought him wealthy and he had tried to live up to
people's estimate of his fortune. His son Walter had wanted to be a
singer and had expected to inherit a comfortable fortune. At thirty he
had married and three years later when his father died he was already
the father of two children.

And then suddenly he had found himself quite penniless. He could sing
but his voice was not large. It wasn't an instrument with which one
could make money in any dignified way. Fortunately his wife had some
money of her own. It was her money, invested in the piano manufacturing
business, that had secured him the position as treasurer of the
company. With his wife he withdrew from social life and they went to
live in a comfortable house in a suburb.

Walter Sayers gave up music, apparently surrendered even his interest
in it. Many men and women from his suburb went to hear the orchestra on
Friday afternoons but he did not go. "What's the use of torturing
myself and thinking of a life I cannot lead?" he said to himself. To
his wife he pretended a growing interest in his work at the factory.
"It's really fascinating. It's a game, like moving men back and forth
on a chess board. I shall grow to love it," he said.

He had tried to build up interest in his work but had not been
successful. Certain things would not get into his consciousness.
Although he tried hard he could not make the fact that profit or loss
to the company depended upon his judgment seem important to himself. It
was a matter of money lost or gained and money meant nothing to him.
"It's father's fault," he thought. "While he lived money never meant
anything to me. I was brought up wrong. I am ill prepared for the
battle of life." He became too timid and lost business that should have
come to the company quite naturally. Then he became too bold in the
extension of credit and other losses followed.

His wife was quite happy and satisfied with her life. There were four
or five acres of land about the suburban house and she became absorbed
in the work of raising flowers and vegetables. For the sake of the
children she kept a cow. With a young negro gardener she puttered about
all day, digging in the earth, spreading manure about the roots of
bushes and shrubs, planting and transplanting. In the evening when he
had come home from his office in his car she took him by the arm and
led him eagerly about. The two children trotted at their heels. She
talked glowingly. They stood at a low spot at the foot of the garden
and she spoke of the necessity of putting in tile. The prospect seemed
to excite her. "It will be the best land on the place when it's
drained," she said. She stooped and with a trowel turned over the soft
black soil. An odor arose. "See! Just see how rich and black it is!"
she exclaimed eagerly. "It's a little sour now because water has stood
on it." She seemed to be apologizing as for a wayward child. "When it's
drained I shall use lime to sweeten it," she added. She was like a
mother leaning over the cradle of a sleeping babe. Her enthusiasm
irritated him.

When Rosalind came to take the position in his office the slow fires of
hatred that had been burning beneath the surface of Walter Savers' life
had already eaten away much of his vigor and energy. His body sagged in
the office chair and there were heavy sagging lines at the corners of
his mouth. Outwardly he remained always kindly and cheerful but back of
the clouded, troubled eyes the fires of hatred burned slowly,
persistently. It was as though he was trying to awaken from a troubled
dream that gripped him, a dream that frightened a little, that was
unending. He had contracted little physical habits. A sharp paper
cutter lay on his desk. As he read a letter from one of the firm's
customers he took it up and jabbed little holes in the leather cover of
his desk. When he had several letters to sign he took up his pen and
jabbed it almost viciously into the inkwell. Then before signing he
jabbed it in again. Sometimes he did the thing a dozen times in
succession.

Sometimes the things that went on beneath the surface of Walter Sayers
frightened him. In order to do what he called "putting in his Saturday
afternoons and Sundays" he had taken up photography. The camera took
him away from his own house and the sight of the garden where his wife
and the negro were busy digging, and into the fields and into stretches
of woodland at the edge of the suburban village. Also it took him away
from his wife's talk, from her eternal planning for the garden's
future. Here by the house tulip bulbs were to be put in in the fall.
Later there would be a hedge of lilac bushes shutting off the house
from the road. The men who lived in the other houses along the suburban
street spent their Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings tinkering
with motor cars. On Sunday afternoons they took their families driving,
sitting up very straight and silent at the driving wheel. They consumed
the afternoon in a swift dash over country roads. The car ate up the
hours. Monday morning and the work in the city was there, at the end of
the road. They ran madly toward it.

For a time the use of the camera made Walter Sayers almost happy. The
study of light, playing on the trunk of a tree or over the grass in a
field appealed to some instinct within. It was an uncertain delicate
business. He fixed himself a dark room upstairs in the house and spent
his evenings there. One dipped the films into the developing liquid,
held them to the light and then dipped them again. The little nerves
that controlled the eyes were aroused. One felt oneself being enriched,
a little--

One Sunday afternoon he went to walk in a strip of woodland and came
out upon the slope of a low hill. He had read somewhere that the low
hill country southwest of Chicago, in which his suburb lay, had once
been the shore of Lake Michigan. The low hills sprang out of the flat
land and were covered with forests. Beyond them the flat lands began
again. The prairies went on indefinitely, into infinity. People's lives
went on so. Life was too long. It was to be spent in the endless doing
over and over of an unsatisfactory task. He sat on the slope and looked
out across the land.

He thought of his wife. She was back there, in the suburb in the hills,
in her garden making things grow. It was a noble sort of thing to be
doing. One shouldn't be irritated.

Well he had married her expecting to have money of his own. Then he
would have worked at something else. Money would not have been involved
in the matter and success would not have been a thing one must seek. He
had expected his own life would be motivated. No matter how much or how
hard he worked he would not have been a great singer. What did that
matter? There was a way to live--a way of life in which such things did
not matter. The delicate shades of things might be sought after. Before
his eyes, there on the grass covered flat lands, the afternoon light
was playing. It was like a breath, a vapor of color blown suddenly from
between red lips out over the grey dead burned grass. Song might be
like that. The beauty might come out of himself, out of his own body.

Again he thought of his wife and the sleeping light in his eyes flared
up, it became a flame. He felt himself being mean, unfair. It didn't
matter. Where did the truth lie? Was his wife, digging in her garden,
having always a succession of small triumphs, marching forward with the
seasons--well, was she becoming a little old, lean and sharp, a little
vulgarized?

It seemed so to him. There was something smug in the way in which she
managed to fling green growing flowering things over the black land. It
was obvious the thing could be done and that there was satisfaction in
doing it. It was a little like running a business and making money by
it. There was a deep seated vulgarity involved in the whole matter. His
wife put her hands into the black ground. They felt about, caressed the
roots of the growing things. She laid hold of the slender trunk of a
young tree in a certain way--as though she possessed it.

One could not deny that the destruction of beautiful things was
involved. Weeds grew in the garden, delicate shapely things. She
plucked them out without thought. He had seen her do it.

As for himself, he also had been pulled out of something. Had he not
surrendered to the fact of a wife and growing children? Did he not
spend his days doing work he detested? The anger within him burned
bright. The fire came into his conscious self. Why should a weed that
is to be destroyed pretend to a vegetable existence? As for puttering
about with a camera--was it not a form of cheating? He did not want to
be a photographer. He had once wanted to be a singer.

He arose and walked along the hillside, still watching the shadows play
over the plains below. At night--in bed with his wife--well, was she
not sometimes with him as she was in the garden? Something was plucked
out of him and another thing grew in its place--something she wanted to
have grow. Their love making was like his puttering with a camera--to
make the weekends pass. She came at him a little too determinedly--
sure. She was plucking delicate weeds in order that things she had
determined upon--"vegetables," he exclaimed in disgust--in order that
vegetables might grow. Love was a fragrance, the shading of a tone over
the lips, out of the throat. It was like the afternoon light on the
burned grass. Keeping a garden and making flowers grow had nothing to
do with it.

Walter Sayers' fingers twitched. The camera hung by a strap over his
shoulder. He took hold of the strap and walked to a tree. He swung the
box above his head and brought it down with a thump against the tree
trunk. The sharp breaking sound--the delicate parts of the machine
being broken--was sweet to his ears. It was as though a song had come
suddenly from between his lips. Again he swung the box and again
brought it down against the tree trunk.


        IV

Rosalind at work in Walter Sayers' office was from the beginning
something different, apart from the young woman from Iowa who had been
drifting from office to office, moving from rooming house to rooming
house on Chicago's North Side, striving feebly to find out something
about life by reading books, going to the theatre and walking alone in
the streets. In the new place her life at once began to have point and
purpose, but at the same time the perplexity that was later to send her
running to Willow Springs and to the presence of her mother began to
grow in her.

Walter Sayers' office was a rather large room on the third floor of the
factory whose walls went straight up from the river's edge. In the
morning Rosalind arrived at eight and went into the office and closed
the door. In a large room across a narrow hallway and shut off from her
retreat by two thick, clouded-glass partitions was the company's
general office. It contained the desks of salesmen, several clerks, a
bookkeeper and two stenographers. Rosalind avoided becoming acquainted
with these people. She was in a mood to be alone, to spend as many
hours as possible alone with her own thoughts.

She got to the office at eight and her employer did not arrive until
nine-thirty or ten. For an hour or two in the morning and in the late
afternoon she had the place to herself. Immediately she shut the door
into the hallway and was alone she felt at home. Even in her father's
house it had never been so. She took off her wraps and walked about the
room touching things, putting things to rights. During the night a
negro woman had scrubbed the floor and wiped the dust off her
employer's desk but she got a cloth and wiped the desk again. Then she
opened the letters that had come in and after reading arranged them in
little piles. She wanted to spend a part of her wages for flowers and
imagined clusters of flowers arranged in small hanging baskets along
the grey walls. "I'll do that later, perhaps," she thought.

The walls of the room enclosed her. "What makes me so happy here?" she
asked herself. As for her employer--she felt she scarcely knew him. He
was a shy man, rather small--

She went to a window and stood looking out. Near the factory a bridge
crossed the river and over it went a stream of heavily loaded wagons
and motor trucks. The sky was grey with smoke. In the afternoon, after
her employer had gone for the day, she would stand again by the window.
As she stood thus she faced westward and in the afternoon saw the sun
fall down the sky. It was glorious to be there alone during the late
hours of the afternoon. What a tremendous thing this city in which she
had come to live! For some reason after she went to work for Walter
Sayers the city seemed, like the room in which she worked, to have
accepted her, taken her into itself. In the late afternoon the rays of
the departing sun fell across great banks of clouds. The whole city
seemed to reach upwards. It left the ground and ascended into the air.
There was an illusion produced. Stark grim factory chimneys, that all
day were stiff cold formal things sticking up into the air and belching
forth black smoke, were now slender upreaching pencils of light and
wavering color. The tall chimneys detached themselves from the
buildings and sprang into the air. The factory in which Rosalind stood
had such a chimney. It also was leaping upward. She felt herself being
lifted, an odd floating sensation was achieved. With what a stately
tread the day went away, over the city! The city, like the factory
chimneys yearned after it, hungered for it.

In the morning gulls came in from Lake Michigan to feed on the sewage
floating in the river below. The river was the color of chrysoprase.
The gulls floated above it as sometimes in the evening the whole city
seemed to float before her eyes. They were graceful, living, free
things. They were triumphant. The getting of food, even the eating of
sewage was done thus gracefully, beautifully. The gulls turned and
twisted in the air. They wheeled and floated and then fell downward to
the river in a long curve, just touching, caressing the surface of the
water and then rising again.

Rosalind raised herself on her toes. At her back beyond the two glass
partitions were other men and women, but there, in that room, she was
alone. She belonged there. What an odd feeling she had. She also
belonged to her employer, Walter Sayers. She scarcely knew the man and
yet she belonged to him. She threw her arms above her head, trying
awkwardly to imitate some movement of the birds.

Her awkwardness shamed her a little and she turned and walked about the
room. "I'm twenty-five years old and it's a little late to begin trying
to be a bird, to be graceful," she thought. She resented the slow
stupid heavy movements of her father and mother, the movements she had
imitated as a child. "Why was I not taught to be graceful and beautiful
in mind and body, why in the place I came from did no one think it
worth while to try to be graceful and beautiful?" she whispered to
herself.

How conscious of her own body Rosalind was becoming! She walked across
the room, trying to go lightly and gracefully. In the office beyond the
glass partitions someone spoke suddenly and she was startled. She
laughed foolishly. For a long time after she went to work in the office
of Walter Sayers she thought the desire in herself to be physically
more graceful and beautiful and to rise also out of the mental
stupidity and sloth of her young womanhood was due to the fact that the
factory windows faced the river and the western sky, and that in the
morning she saw the gulls feeding and in the afternoon the sun going
down through the smoke clouds in a riot of colors.


        V

On the August evening as Rosalind sat on the porch before her father's
house in Willow Springs, Walter Sayers came home from the factory by
the river and to his wife's suburban garden. When the family had dined
he came out to walk in the paths with the two children, boys, but they
soon tired of his silence and went to join their mother. The young
negro came along a path by the kitchen door and joined the party.
Walter went to sit on a garden seat that was concealed behind bushes.
He lighted a cigarette but did not smoke. The smoke curled quietly up
through his fingers as it burned itself out.

Closing his eyes Walter sat perfectly still and tried not to think. The
soft evening shadows began presently to close down and around him. For
a long time he sat thus motionless, like a carved figure placed on the
garden bench. He rested. He lived and did not live. The intense body,
usually so active and alert, had become a passive thing. It was thrown
aside, on to the bench, under the bush, to sit there, waiting to be
reinhabited.

This hanging suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness was a
thing that did not happen often. There was something to be settled
between himself and a woman and the woman had gone away. His whole plan
of life had been disturbed. Now he wanted to rest. The details of his
life were forgotten. As for the woman he did not think of her, did not
want to think of her. It was ridiculous that he needed her so much. He
wondered if he had ever felt that way about Cora, his wife. Perhaps he
had. Now she was near him, but a few yards away. It was almost dark but
she with the negro remained at work, digging in the ground--somewhere
near--caressing the soil, making things grow.

When his mind was undisturbed by thoughts and lay like a lake in the
hills on a quiet summer evening little thoughts did come. "I want you
as a lover--far away. Keep yourself far away." The words trailed
through his mind as the smoke from the cigarette trailed slowly upwards
through his fingers. Did the words refer to Rosalind Wescott? She had
been gone from him three days. Did he hope she would never come back or
did the words refer to his wife?

His wife's voice spoke sharply. One of the children in playing about,
had stepped on a plant. "If you are not careful I shall have to make
you stay out of the garden altogether." She raised her voice and
called, "Marian!" A maid came from the house and took the children
away. They went along the path toward the house protesting. Then they
ran back to kiss their mother. There was a struggle and then
acceptance. The kiss was acceptance of their fate--to obey. "O,
Walter," the mother's voice called, but the man on the bench did not
answer. Tree toads began to cry. "The kiss is acceptance. Any physical
contact with another is acceptance," he reflected.

The little voices within Walter Sayers were talking away at a great
rate. Suddenly he wanted to sing. He had been told that his voice was
small, not of much account, that he would never be a singer. It was
quite true no doubt but here, in the garden on the quiet summer night,
was a place and a time for a small voice. It would be like the voice
within himself that whispered sometimes when he was quiet, relaxed. One
evening when he had been with the woman, Rosalind, when he had taken
her into the country in his car, he had suddenly felt as he did now.
They sat together in the car that he had run into a field. For a long
time they had remained silent. Some cattle came and stood nearby, their
figures soft in the night. Suddenly he had felt like a new man in a new
world and had begun to sing. He sang one song over and over, then sat
in silence for a time and after that drove out of the field and through
a gate into the road. He took the woman back to her place in the city.

In the quiet of the garden on the summer evening he opened his lips to
sing the same song. He would sing with the tree toad hidden away in the
fork of a tree somewhere. He would lift his voice up from the earth, up
into the branches, of trees, away from the ground in which people were
digging, his wife and the young negro.

The song did not come. His wife began speaking and the sound of her
voice took away the desire to sing. Why had she not, like the other
woman, remained silent?

He began playing a game. Sometimes, when he was alone the thing
happened to him that had now happened. His body became like a tree or a
plant. Life ran through it unobstructed. He had dreamed of being a
singer but at such a moment he wanted also to be a dancer. That would
have been sweetest of all things--to sway like the tops of young trees
when a wind blew, to give himself as grey weeds in a sunburned field
gave themself to the influence of passing shadows, changing color
constantly, becoming every moment something new, to live in life and in
death too, always to live, to be unafraid of life, to let it flow
through his body, to let the blood flow through his body, not to
struggle, to offer no resistance, to dance.

Walter Sayers' children had gone into the house with the nurse girl
Marian. It had become too dark for his wife to dig in the garden. It
was August and the fruitful time of the year for farms and gardens had
come, but his wife had forgotten fruitfulness. She was making plans for
another year. She came along the garden path followed by the negro. "We
will set out strawberry plants there," she was saying. The soft voice
of the young negro murmured his assent. It was evident the young man
lived in her conception of the garden. His mind sought out her desire
and gave itself.

The children Walter Sayers had brought into life through the body of
his wife Cora had gone into the house and to bed. They bound him to
life, to his wife, to the garden where he sat, to the office by the
riverside in the city.

They were not his children. Suddenly he knew that quite clearly. His
own children were quite different things. "Men have children just as
women do. The children come out of their bodies. They play about," he
thought. It seemed to him that children, born of his fancy, were at
that very moment playing about the bench where he sat. Living things
that dwelt within him and that had at the same time the power to depart
out of him were now running along paths, swinging from the branches of
trees, dancing in the soft light.

His mind sought out the figure of Rosalind Wescott. She had gone away,
to her own people in Iowa. There had been a note at the office saying
she might be gone for several days. Between himself and Rosalind the
conventional relationship of employer and employee had long since been
swept quite away. It needed something in a man he did not possess to
maintain that relationship with either men or women.

At the moment he wanted to forget Rosalind. In her there was a struggle
going on. The two people had wanted to be lovers and he had fought
against that. They had talked about it. "Well," he said, "it will not
work out. We will bring unnecessary unhappiness upon ourselves."

He had been honest enough in fighting off the intensification of their
relationship. "If she were here now, in this garden with me, it
wouldn't matter. We could be lovers and then forget about being
lovers," he told himself.

His wife came along the path and stopped nearby. She continued talking
in a low voice, making plans for another year of gardening. The negro
stood near her, his figure making a dark wavering mass against the
foliage of a low growing bush. His wife wore a white dress. He could
see her figure quite plainly. In the uncertain light it looked girlish
and young. She put her hand up and took hold of the body of a young
tree. The hand became detached from her body. The pressure of her
leaning body made the young tree sway a little. The white hand moved
slowly back and forth in space.

Rosalind Wescott had gone home to tell her mother of her love. In her
note she had said nothing of that but Walter Sayers knew that was the
object of her visit to the Iowa town. It was on odd sort of thing to
try to do--to tell people of love, to try to explain it to others.

The night was a thing apart from Walter Sayers, the male being sitting
in silence in the garden. Only the children of his fancy understood it.
The night was a living thing. It advanced upon him, enfolded him.
"Night is the sweet little brother of Death," he thought.

His wife stood very near. Her voice was soft and low and the voice of
the negro when he answered her comments on the future of the garden was
soft and low. There was music in the negro's voice, perhaps a dance in
it. Walter remembered about him.

The young negro had been in trouble before he came to the Sayers. He
had been an ambitious young black and had listened to the voices of
people, to the voices that filled the air of America, rang through the
houses of America. He had wanted to get on in life and had tried to
educate himself. The black had wanted to be a lawyer.

How far away he had got from his own people, from the blacks of the
African forests! He had wanted to be a lawyer in a city in America.
What a notion!

Well he had got into trouble. He had managed to get through college and
had opened a law office. Then one evening he went out to walk and
chance led him into a street where a woman, a white woman, had been
murdered an hour before. The body of the woman was found and then he
was found walking in the street. Mrs. Sayers' brother, a lawyer, had
saved him from being punished as a murderer and after the trial, and
the young negro's acquittal, had induced his sister to take him as
gardener. His chances as a professional man in the city were no good.
"He has had a terrible experience and has just escaped by a fluke" the
brother had said. Cora Sayers had taken the young man. She had bound
him to herself, to her garden.

It was evident the two people were bound together. One cannot bind
another without being bound. His wife had no more to say to the negro
who went away along the path that led to the kitchen door. He had a
room in a little house at the foot of the garden. In the room he had
books and a piano. Sometimes in the evening he sang. He was going now
to his place. By educating himself he had cut himself off from his own
people.

Cora Sayers went into the house and Walter sat alone. After a time the
young negro came silently down the path. He stopped by the tree where a
moment before the white woman had stood talking to him. He put his hand
on the trunk of the young tree where her hand had been and then went
softly away. His feet made no sound on the garden path.

An hour passed. In his little house at the foot of the garden the negro
began to sing softly. He did that sometimes in the middle of the night.
What a life he had led too! He had come away from his black people,
from the warm brown girls with the golden colors playing through the
blue black of their skins and had worked his way through a Northern
college, had accepted the patronage of impertinent people who wanted to
uplift the black race, had listened to them, had bound himself to them,
had tried to follow the way of life they had suggested.

Now he was in the little house at the foot of the Sayers' garden.
Walter remembered little things his wife had told him about the man.
The experience in the court room had frightened him horribly and he did
not want to go off the Sayers' place. Education, books had done
something to him. He could not go back to his own people. In Chicago,
for the most part, the blacks lived crowded into a few streets on the
South Side. "I want to be a slave," he had said to Cora Sayers. "You
may pay me money if it makes you feel better but I shall have no use
for it. I want to be your slave. I would be happy if I knew I would
never have to go off your place."

The black sang a low voiced song. It ran like a little wind on the
surface of a pond. It had no words. He had remembered the song from his
father who had got it from his father. In the South, in Alabama and
Mississippi the blacks sang it when they rolled cotton bales onto the
steamers in the rivers. They had got it from other rollers of cotton
bales long since dead. Long before there were any cotton bales to roll
black men in boats on rivers in Africa had sung it. Young blacks in
boats floated down rivers and came to a town they intended to attack at
dawn. There was bravado in singing the song then. It was addressed to
the women in the town to be attacked and contained both a caress and a
threat. "In the morning your husbands and brothers and sweethearts we
shall kill. Then we shall come into your town to you. We shall hold you
close. We shall make you forget. With our hot love and our strength we
shall make you forget." That was the old significance of the song.

Walter Sayers remembered many things. On other nights when the negro
sang and when he lay in his room upstairs in the house, his wife came
to him. There were two beds in their room. She sat upright in her bed.
"Do you hear, Walter?" she asked. She came to sit on his bed, sometimes
she crept into his arms. In the African villages long ago when the song
floated up from the river men arose and prepared for battle. The song
was a defiance, a taunt. That was all gone now. The young negro's house
was at the foot of the garden and Walter with his wife lay upstairs in
the larger house situated on high ground. It was a sad song, filled
with race sadness. There was something in the ground that wanted to
grow, buried deep in the ground. Cora Sayers understood that. It
touched something instinctive in her. Her hand went out and touched,
caressed her husband's face, his body. The song made her want to hold
him tight, possess him.

The night was advancing and it grew a little cold in the garden. The
negro stopped singing. Walter Sayers arose and went along the path
toward the house but did not enter. Instead he went through a gate into
the road and along the suburban streets until he got into the open
country. There was no moon but the stars shone brightly. For a time he
hurried along looking back as though afraid of being followed, but when
he got out into a broad flat meadow he went more slowly. For an hour he
walked and then stopped and sat on a tuft of dry grass. For some reason
he knew he could not return to his house in the suburb that night. In
the morning he would go to the office and wait there until Rosalind
came. Then? He did not know what he would do then. "I shall have to
make up some story. In the morning I shall have to telephone Cora and
make up some silly story," he thought. It was an absurd thing that he,
a grown man, could not spend a night abroad, in the fields without the
necessity of explanations. The thought irritated him and he arose and
walked again. Under the stars in the soft night and on the wide flat
plains the irritation soon went away and he began to sing softly, but
the song he sang was not the one he had repeated over and over on that
other night when he sat with Rosalind in the car and the cattle came.
It was the song the negro sang, the river song of the young black
warriors that slavery had softened and colored with sadness. On the
lips of Walter Sayers the song had lost much of its sadness. He walked
almost gaily along and in the song that flowed from his lips there was
a taunt, a kind of challenge.


        VI

At the end of the short street on which the Wescotts lived in Willow
Springs there was a cornfield. When Rosalind was a child it was a
meadow and beyond was an orchard.

On summer afternoons the child often went there to sit alone on the
banks of a tiny stream that wandered away eastward toward Willow Creek,
draining the farmer's fields on the way. The creek had made a slight
depression in the level contour of the land and she sat with her back
against an old apple tree and with her bare feet almost touching the
water. Her mother did not permit her to run bare footed through the
streets but when she got into the orchard she took her shoes off. It
gave her a delightful naked feeling.

Overhead and through the branches the child could see the great sky.
Masses of white clouds broke into fragments and then the fragments came
together again. The sun ran in behind one of the cloud masses and grey
shadows slid silently over the face of distant fields. The world of her
child life, the Wescott household, Melville Stoner sitting in his
house, the cries of other children who lived in her street, all the
life she knew went far away. To be there in that silent place was like
lying awake in bed at night only in some way sweeter and better. There
were no dull household sounds and the air she breathed was sweeter,
cleaner. The child played a little game. All the apple trees in the
orchard were old and gnarled and she had given all the trees names.
There was one fancy that frightened her a little but was delicious too.
She fancied that at night when she had gone to bed and was asleep and
when all the town of Willow Springs had gone to sleep the trees came
out of the ground and walked about. The grasses beneath the trees, the
bushes that grew beside the fence--all came out of the ground and ran
madly here and there. They danced wildly. The old trees, like stately
old men, put their heads together and talked. As they talked their
bodies swayed slightly--back and forth, back and forth. The bushes and
flowering weeds ran in great circles among the little grasses. The
grasses hopped straight up and down.

Sometimes when she sat with her back against the tree on warm bright
afternoons the child Rosalind had played the game of dancing-life until
she grew afraid and had to give it up. Nearby in the fields men were
cultivating corn. The breasts of the horses and their wide strong
shoulders pushed the young corn aside and made a low rustling sound.
Now and then a man's voice was raised in a shout. "Hi, there you Joe!
Get in there Frank!" The widow of the hens owned a little woolly dog
that occasionally broke into a spasm of barking, apparently without
cause, senseless, eager, barking. Rosalind shut all the sounds out. She
closed her eyes and struggled, trying to get into the place beyond
human sounds. After a time her desire was accomp