The Unpossessed (6 page)

“She's ready, professor,” said Mr. Harrison. “Now if you'll just listen to me a minute, sir, I'll explain the workings.” He stepped back, rather dapper, and surveyed his life-work; portentous and pathetic, it topped him by a head. “She's a pip all right, professor,” Mr. Harrison said; and swallowing humbly he produced his four-star smile.

“IT GOT COOLER, just as I expected,” called the janitor's wife. They turned and nodded in assent. “You ought to have dressed warmer, Missis Flinders,” she called after them down the street; “feels like snow in the air,” she urged upon them. They turned and waved; and Mrs. Salvemini in her window could be seen drawing her shawl around her shoulders to demonstrate her point. They edged away.

Evening was lowered all around them; and Miles felt that the street they paced together ran like an armistice before them. With sober step—how they had caught each other's tread!—they made it; past the tea-room closing for the day and the speakeasy opening for the night, to the corner where some hours earlier he had wavered, indecisive (Mr. Pidgeon's message in his brain), not feeling where he had to go. Habit—and a vision of Margaret who would eagerly round the turn, impatient to be home—had brought him home; something else, perhaps the indecision undefined, had brought him to the edge of quarrel; when Margaret stepped in (with her wisdom? with her cowardly longing for peace?) and pulled him back, held him safely to a truce. Some day they would face it out—or was it something, he asked himself perplexedly, that was all within himself, that he must fight out alone, without her?

“Fall—I used to go away to school then,” Margaret said, holding his arm tightly as if to share it with him.

“Sometimes I think your childhood,” he answered slowly, “is the realest thing about you. It gives you a root, Maggie, a funny kind of peaceful super-basis. I never had it,” he said suddenly; and they walked a little faster, past the store where he bought his pipe-tobacco because the tobacconist sold communist papers on his stand. “My own was stony,” he said with pride; and thought of the difficult New England soil where he had grown. “Not bleak, as I thought before you taught me better,” he responded to the instant pressure of her arm, “but stony—like my Connecticut earth.”

They walked quietly with the evening. “I wonder,” she said thoughtfully, “whether one can ever be successfully transplanted. But of course!” she cried, rushing to tear down the doubt she herself had placed, “why the whole history of the human race—migrations and settlements, your Plymouth Rock and my own Peter Stuyvesant . . .” She finished vaguely. He found it charming, her nebulous feeling for what she could never document, never put correctly into facts. She had a touch, a feel, he thought, glancing at her calm yet eager profile, for what he could only arrive at through laborious mental process—and then it was doubtful if they came out at the same place.

For they were after such different things, he and she (he felt it keenly, through the truce she had involved him in). She wanted to be
happy
(his Uncle Daniel used to say his
pigs
were “happy”); and he wanted—oh God knows! Margaret was fine; but if there was no more simplicity in her mind than his, there
was
simplicity in her nature. There were no gloomy, unlit corners in her. When he exposed his own she brought forth her eager lamps, and, in lighting them, destroyed. What she destroyed, or what he felt she threatened to destroy, he was not sure; whether it might be good for him in the end, he did not know. But he felt a compulsion to
fight
, and she (all gentle fairness, mild intelligence) brushed away his grounds. Yet it seemed, as they walked the familiar streets (past the play-house now, the Greek's tiny flower window), so soberly arm in arm, while evening deepened about them, a good and possible thing—a peace he almost thought he could endure. But in his soul he knew it was not possible.

“The history of the human race,” he spoke gently as one might to a child, “at least each new step, each new transplanting, is always a stony thing, it takes more than a generation to recover from it.”

He thought of the hard summers, when each day had been packed for even a boy with units and chores, each one another hurdle, another set of stones, and of the meager harvest that resulted in the fall. He saw his Uncle Daniel fighting his yearly losing fight, struggling with blight in the tobacco fields. He saw his lean aunts, spreading the butter more thinly week by week; his mother, fading as it were deliberately, to pay the penalty for her sinful beauty; and his father sneaking off, because there was an evil strain in him that wanted pleasure, that could not meet the look in Uncle Daniel's eyes.

“My own New England,” he said, “my own ancestors, are a good example. Pioneers and zealots—they never should have landed where they did. The thing about them is, they
aren't
farmers; they aren't peasants. They're people with hard brains who
hate
the soil; they stayed, they put up with it, only because it challenged them. And of course, for economic reasons,” he added hastily, as if to cancel his own sentimentality; but let it go, he knew there was more at the bottom of it than his new god, economics. “The soil's so bad it's a hand-to-hand fight for existence—a personal struggle between each farmer and his own particular plot of dirt. The profoundest individualists,” he threw in, again in the tone of self-discipline, to assuage his intellectual conscience; and let it go, abandoning himself to memory. “My Uncle Daniel was almost insane with personal struggle. . . .”

“I love to hear you talk about it,” said Margaret warmly. But he sensed her turning from him to the sight which momently drew her eyes: Mr. Papenmeyer's meat-and-grocery emporium; he felt the link existing between a woman and her market. “Look dear—now prices are going up again,” she said absently. “You make it,” she came loyally back to him, “as fascinating—both as real and unreal—as O'Neill does in his plays.”

“O'Neill,” Miles said, piling up on him the lack he felt in Margaret, “didn't get my people straight. He made them far too Irish, almost quaint; and too explicit. My Uncle Daniel would have sneered at ‘Beyond the Horizon'; even my father would have walked out on it—staggered out, to the nearest saloon.” The thing was, he thought—and did not bother saying, for he knew that Margaret, and perhaps anyone of urban birth, could never understand—that they at once despised the soil for giving them a living and respected it for making that living a hard one. They couldn't stand rich, easy earth; they
needed
the stones in their fields—but how could he ever make that clear to Margaret who would gladly spend her life on her hands and knees plucking the stones up out of his path!

But she saw his background, and would never see it otherwise, as picturesque—O'Neill; a little Freud; a little Yeats dragged in from somewhere; and the whole made a curious travel book to her. She pieced it together and it looked very neat; he admired Margaret's ingenious puzzle-map. But the blood was left out of her picture. For to call Uncle Daniel, as Margaret blandly did, “pathological,” did not materially affect his uncle's ghost. To talk of the “incest pattern” that had kept his three aunts from marriage, that had driven Aunt Fan cuckoo till she lived like a leper up over the barn. . . . He had accomplished all that, for himself, in his mind; but like rationally dismissing God—it didn't cover the ground.

“Shall we go the long way round, Maggie?” he said—and was not sure whether he thus postponed her meeting with Jeffrey, or whether, because he had got back in his mind to home and himself, he would find it unbearable to break the thread. “Or do you think, since they expect us—” He inquired of himself: no, the thought of Margaret meeting Jeffrey was perfectly endurable, meaningless now in fact, since he had worked his way back to where his present life meant nothing.

“Of course, dear—it's such a lovely evening. Norah won't mind our being late; and I wonder about Mrs. Salvemini's snow, it's possible.” He smiled; he felt she avoided the use of Jeffrey's name to spare him pain; and he guided her easily toward the openness of Washington Square, which at the moment did not exist for him except in its faint resemblance, from the distance of one block, to the square in Galloway opposite Town Hall.

He wondered for a minute if his struggle must not end where it began, on that New England farm; if he could ever go back; if it were not implacably too late—now that God, like Uncle Daniel, was so rationally buried. His Uncle Daniel, whose approval he had struggled for and never won (whose approval even now he desired and could never win) had died because of him; that thoroughly irrational fear, laid many times by Miles in cold and adult thought, remained, emotionally, a fact. He lay ill, and the people in his house crept guiltily from stair to stair with frightened faces. The little boy had cried to God in his attic Please let him die! In the morning they broke it to him gently—as though they did not
know
that he had killed him. The look on his own father's face haunted him still; obscurely he had known that his father too had helped to kill, had wished his strong and righteous brother dead; a shame existed between father and son from that morning until the father died. Did not some sort of justice point . . .

Margaret had wondered if one could ever be transplanted; it struck him now that he had never been—that his roots had stayed behind in the stony soil, and that what of him had come on down (to live with Margaret in New York, to work for Mr. Pidgeon in an office) was an aberration, a part of himself that was scarcely valid, which must flounder and die unless he traced back his course to his roots and his home again. Was it possible, he thought with a crazy hope, a longing that touched him to life as nothing these days was able to, to go back some day? (but he was no farmer!) and could that life still hold the meaning this one lacked, in spite of God and Uncle Daniel being gone?

For those early days—and all his later life he failed to make it clear—had held something (which he now supposed was God) that made living, if terribly painful, meaningful. Something was there, in black and white. One was damned or one was saved; and in between there were no finer shadings. There was always the rough soil to be struggled with; and in the fall there was either enough food or less than enough. One faced the problems daily; there was no drugging oneself from the final issues, either of the earth or of heaven—one lived, as one's neighbors did, by some guiding rote combined of practical and spiritual.

They reached the Square. One certain memory caught him by the throat, a memory that contained, he thought, the essence of his childhood, half understood and never to be outgrown. He slowed his pace, drawing Margaret back beside him; he addressed her politely, as though she were the stranger she had suddenly become.

“Do you mind? I feel like walking slowly. . . .”

“Of course, darling! It's such a grand old night! It's so exhilarating—fall always is to me. It makes me look ahead so eagerly. . . .” But with that seventh sense she had acquired, born of marriage, that seemed to tell her what was wanted of her, her words trailed into grateful silence.

She could look ahead, he thought, because she was finished with what was past, and grew without transplanting out of childhood; but Miles must go back and go back because he had been torn out, leaving his roots behind. . . .

Walking slowly beside her, he abandoned himself utterly to that nostalgic memory.

The air, rain-sodden that memorable summer's day, added its weight to the burden of guilt already borne by a little boy of seven. Looking back he felt that even before the thing took place the air had told some hint of it. So many days dawned in his childhood with the pregnant horror of Judgment Day; but afterward he saw so clearly all their faces, heard on the air the ring of their prophetic voices . . . yes, surely the morning air had known something of what the afternoon would bring.

They were picking berries, the little boy and the Limb of Satan, his mother, condemned by Uncle Daniel and convicted in her own and her son's eyes for her sin of being pretty; Aunt Mart was with them. They set out accompanied by Uncle Daniel's dog; but King grew tired quickly and deserted; they thought perhaps he'd run back home. The little boy was ashamed of the woman's occupation of berrying forced on him because he was young, not yet a man. But unlike King, he was not free to desert. The Flinders women and the Flinders child wandered into Brown's Lane, not far from home.

Brown's Lane was named for Old Man Brown who held what was left of him from the Civil War on a porch austerely facing back. The “Italians” had already begun to invade the Lane. The “Italians” were always referred to in a special voice, as though the word implied description, not mere nation; one said “Italians” as one said “the boogey men.” And a piece down the Lane from Brown lived the Picketts, frowned on by all around as trash; they fraternized, one said, with the “Italians.”

Brown's Lane lay buried in a valley; farm-land sloped down to it, Old Man Brown's tobacco fields hid from the potatoes of the “Italians” by stony fences. The Flinders place was a quarter of a mile above, just out of sight.

The berrying took them to the end of the Lane, right by the Picketts' barn. All at once Aunt Mart shrieked: “The chickens—look!” then covered her mouth in fright, for Uncle Daniel's dog had been suspected once before. They looked. The ground before the Picketts' barn was strewn: a dozen strangled chickens lay there.

“Let's say we never saw!” Miles's mother, limp, held weak hands before her pretty, sinful face.

The little boy felt sick at sight of the chickens, although he had witnessed killings of fowl that left him cold. But this was different; something unnatural, blasphemous, in the way these chickens sprawled.