The Brimming Cup

THE FALL OF THE BIG PINE

When Marise reached the place on the wood-road where she had had that last talk with Vincent Marsh, she stopped, postponing for a moment the errand to the Powers which she had so eagerly undertaken. She stood there, looking up into the far green tops of the pines, seeing again that strange, angry, bewildered gesture with which he had renounced trying to make anything out of her, and had turned away.

It remained with her, constantly, as the symbol of what had happened, and she looked at it gravely and understandingly. Then, very swiftly, she saw again that passing aspect of his which had so terribly frightened her, felt again the fear that he might be really suffering, that she might really have done a hurt to another human being.

This brought her a momentary return of the agitation it had caused in her that day, and she sat down abruptly on a tree-trunk, her knees trembling, her hands cold.

That fear had come as so totally unexpected a possibility, something which his every aspect and tone and word up to then had seemed to contradict. Strange, how unmoved he had left her, till that moment! Strange the impression of him, that first time after she had known herself strong enough to stand up and be herself, not the responsive instrument played on by every passing impression. Strange, how instantly he had felt that, and how passionate had been his resentment of her standing up to be herself, her being a grown woman, a human being, and not a flower to be plucked. How he had hated it, and alas! how lamentable his hatred of it had made him appear. What a blow he had dealt to her conception of him by his instant assumption that a change in her could only mean that Neale had been bullying her. It had been hard to see him so far away and diminished as that had made him seem, so entirely outside her world. It had dealt a back-hand blow to her own self-esteem to have him seem vulgar.

How strange an experience for her altogether, to be able to stand firm against noise and urgent clamor and confusion, and to see, in spite of it, what she was looking at; to see, back of the powerful magnetic personality, the undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom in the relations between human beings; to be able to hear Vincent cry out on her with that fierce, masterful certainty of himself, that she was acting from cowed and traditional-minded motives and not to believe a word of it, because it was not true; not even to feel the scared throb of alarm at the very idea that it might be true; to have it make no impression on her save pity that Vincent should be imprisoned in a feeling of which possession was so great a part that failure to possess turned all the rest to poison and sickness.

What had happened to her, in truth, that she had this new steadfastness? She had told Vincent he could not understand it. Did she understand it herself? She leaned her chin on her two hands looking deep into the green recesses of the forest. High above her head, a wind swayed the tops of the pines and sang loudly; but down between the great brown columns of their trunks, not a breath stirred. The thick-set, myriad-leaved young maples held all their complicated delicately-edged foliage motionless in perfect calm.

It was very still in the depths of Marise's complicated mind also, although the wind stirred the surface. Yes, she knew what had happened to her. She had seen it completely happen to three other human beings, miraculously, unbelievably, certainly; had seen the babies who could not tell light from dark, heat from cold, emerge by the mere process of healthful living into keenly sensitive beings accurately alive to every minutest variation of the visible world. It must be that like them she had simply learned to tell moral light from dark, heat from cold, by the mere process of healthful living. What happened to the child who at one time could not grasp the multiplication table, and a few years later, if only he were properly fed and cared for, had somehow so wholly changed, although still the same, that he found his way lightly among geometric conceptions, and only a few years after that was probing with expert fingers at some unsolved problem of astronomy? He had grown up, that was all. By calling the miracle a familiar name we veiled the marvel of it. Insensibly to him, with no visible change from one day to the next, he had acquired a totally different conception of the universe, a totally different valuation of everything in life.

That was what had happened to her. She had grown up . . . why should not a woman grow up to other valuations of things as well as her comrade in life?

And it had happened to her as it did to the child, because someone stronger than she had protected her while she was growing . . . not protected from effort, as though one should try to protect the child from learning his lessons. . . . Back there, such ages ago in Italy, in her ignorant . . . how ignorant! . . . and frightened girlhood, she had begged Neale, without knowing what she did, to help her grow up, to help her save what was worth saving in her, to help her untangle from the many-colored confusion of her nature what was best worth keeping. And Neale had done it, had clung steadily to his divination of what was strong in her, in spite of her clamor to him to let it go.

But Vincent had not grown up, was back there still in confusion, holding desperately with all that terrific strength of his to what could not be held, to what was impermanent and passing in its nature. Why should he do that? Neale knew better than that. Then she saw why: it was because Vincent conceived of nothing but emptiness if he let it go, and horribly feared that imaginary emptiness. Out of the incalculable richness of her kingdom she wondered again at his blindness. . . . And made a pitying guess at the reason for it . . . perhaps for him it was not imaginary. Perhaps one of the terms of the bargain he had made with life was that there should be nothing later but emptiness for him. Yes, she saw that. She would have made that bargain, too, if it had not been for Neale. She would have been holding terrified to what was not to be held; with nothing but that between her and the abyss. Who was she to blame Vincent for his blindness?

That, perhaps, had been the meaning of that singular last moment of their talk together, which had frightened her so, with its sudden plunge below the surface, into the real depths, when, changed wholly into someone else, he had run back to her, his hands outstretched, his eyes frightened, his lips trembling . . . perhaps he had felt the abyss there just before him. For an instant there, he had made her think of Paul, made her remember that Vincent himself had, so short a time ago, been a little boy too. She had been so shocked and racked by pity and remorse, that she would have been capable of any folly to comfort him. Perhaps she had seen there for an instant the man Vincent might have been, and had seen that she could have loved that man.

But how instantly it had passed! He had not suffered that instant of true feeling to have space to live, but had burned it up with the return of his pride, his resentment that anyone save himself should try to stand upright, with the return of the devouring desire-for-possession of the man who had always possessed everything he had coveted. There was something sad in being able to see the littleness of life which underlay the power and might of personality in a man like Vincent. He could have been something else.

She wondered why there should slide into her mood, just now, a faint tinge of regret. . . . Why should there be anything there but the bright gladness of thanksgiving for the liberation from the chains which her own nature might have forged about her? She had at last stepped outside the narrow circle of personal desire, and found all the world open to her. And yet there was room in her heart for a shade of wistful wonder if perhaps all this did not mean that she might be sliding from the ranks of those who feel and do, into the ranks of those who only understand.

But one glance at the life that lay before her scattered this hanging mist-cloud . . . good heavens! what feeling and doing lay there before her!

Had she thought that Neale was nothing to her because he had become all in all to her so that he penetrated all her life, so that she did not live an instant alone? Had she thought the loss of the amusing trinket of physical newness could stand against the gain of an affection ill massy gold? Would she, to buy moments of excitement, lose an instant of the precious certainty of sympathy and trust and understanding which she and Neale had bought and paid for, hour by hour, year by year of honest life-in-common? Where was real life for her? Had she not known? Where were the real depths, where the real food for the whole woman she had grown to be? Neale had opened the door so that she could go away from him if that was what she needed, or go back to stand by his side; and through the open door had come the flood of daylight which had shown her that she could not go back to stand by his side because she had been there all the time, had never left it, never could leave it, any more than she could leave half of her body in one place, and go on to another.

There was other feeling and doing now, too, before her, this instant, which she had forgotten, idling here in her much-loved forest, as much a part of her home as her piano or her own roof-tree. She had been trying to understand what had been happening that summer. Let her try first of all to understand what she must do in that perfectly definite and concrete dilemma in which she had been placed by that strange sight of 'Gene Powers, fleeing back from the Eagle Rocks. She must look squarely at what she supposed was the legal obligation . . . she instantly felt a woman's impatience of the word legal as against human, and could not entertain the thought of the obligations of the situation. She must see, and think and try to understand, with Neale to help her. She had not yet had time to tell Neale.

But not today. Today she was only the bearer of the good tidings to Nelly and 'Gene, tidings which would wipe out for her the recollection of a day which was shameful to her, the day when she had conceived the possibility of believing some thing base against Neale. It was not that she had believed it,—no, she had stood it off till Neale came back. But there was shame for her in those recurrent spasms of horror when she had conceived the possibility that she might believe it. There had been proof of it, of course, Eugenia's positive statement . . . strange how Eugenia could have so entirely misunderstood the affair! . . . But what was mere proof against human certainty? No, she had been attacked suddenly and for an instant had failed to rise to defend what was hers to defend. It was a failure to live down.

She stood up and moved forward along the path, changing the thick envelope in one hand to the other. She had already lost time. She ought to have been by this time through the forest and out in the edge of the Powers pasture.

She became aware that for some time she had heard a distant sound, a faint toc-toc-toc, like the sound of chopping. This being associated in her mind with snow and winter woods, she had not thought it could be the sound of the axe which it seemed to be. Nobody could be felling trees in the height of the farming season, and on this day of swooning heat. But as she came to the edge of the woods and turned into the path along the brook, she heard it more plainly, unmistakable this time, not far now, the ringing blows delivered with the power and rhythmic stroke of the trained chopper. It came not from the woods at all, she now perceived, but from the open farming land, from the other side of the pasture, beyond the Powers house.

But there were no woods there, only the Powers' big pine which towered up, darkly glorious, into the shimmering summer haze.

As she looked at it wondering, it came into her mind had somebody told her, or had she overheard it somewhere? . . . that 'Gene had promised Nelly at last to cut down the big pine he and his fathers had so cherished.

Could it be that? What a sacrifice! And to a foolish whim of Nelly's. There had been no musty smell in the house till Nelly came there to keep the shutters closed so that the sun would not fade the carpets. The old pine was one of the most splendid things of beauty in the valley. And it was something vital in 'Gene's strange, choked, inarticulate life. She stopped to listen a moment, feeling a chill of apprehension and foreboding. It was dreadful to have 'Gene do that. It was as though he were cutting at his own strength, cutting off one of his own members to please his wife. Poor 'Gene! He would do that too, now, if Nelly asked him.

The resonant winter note rang out loud, strange in that sultry summer air. She looked from afar at the tree, holding its mighty crest high above the tiny house, high above the tiny human beings who had doomed it. So many winters, so many summers, so many suns and moons and rains and snows had gone to make it what it was. Like the men who had planted it and lived beneath its shade, it had drawn silently from the depths of the earth and the airy treasures of the sky food to grow strong and live its life. And now to be killed in an hour, in attempted expiation of a deed for which it bore no guilt!

Marise was coming closer now. The axe-strokes stopped for a moment as though the chopper drew breath. The silence was heavy over the breathless summer field.

But by the time she had arrived at the back door of the house, the axe-blows were renewed, loud, immediate, shocking palpably on her ear. She knocked, but knew that the ringing clamor of the axe drowned out the sound. Through the screen-door she saw old Mrs. Powers, standing by the table, ironing, and stepped in. The three children were in the pantry, beyond, Ralph spreading some bread and butter for his little brother and sister. Ralph was always good to the younger children, although he was so queer and un-childlike! Nelly was not there. Mrs. Powers looked up at Marise, and nodded. She looked disturbed and absent. "We're at it, you see," she said, jerking her head back towards the front of the house. "I told you 'bout 'Gene's sayin' he'd gi'n in to Nelly about the big pine."

Marise made a gesture of dismay at this confirmation. The old woman went on, "Funny thing . . . I ain't a Powers by birth, Lord knows, and I never thought I set no store by their old pine tree. It always sort o' riled me, how much 'Gene's father thought of it, and 'Gene after him . . . sort of silly, seems like. But just now when we was all out there, and 'Gene heaved up his axe and hit the first whack at it . . . well, I can't tell you . . . it give me a turn most as if he'd chopped right into me somewhere. I got up and come into the house, and I set to ironin', as fast as I could clip it, to keep my mind off'n it. I made the children come in too, because it ain't no place for kids around, when a tree that size comes down."

Marise demurred, "'Gene is such a fine chopper, he knows to a hair where he'll lay it, of course."

"Well, even so, who knows what notion a kid will take into his head? They was playin' right there on a pile of pole-wood 'Gene's brought in from the woods and ain't got sawed up into stove-lengths yet. I didn't want to take no chances; maybe they wouldn't ha' moved quick enough when their papa yelled to them. No, ma'am, I made 'em come in, and here they'll stay. Nelly, she's out there, walkin' round and round watchin' 'Gene. She's awfully set up havin' it come down. 'Gene he's told her he'll give her the money from the lumber in it. There'll be a sight of boards, too. It's the biggest pine in the valley."

Marise went to the window and looked at the scene, penetrated by the strangeness of the difference between its outer and inner aspect: 'Gene, his faded blue overalls tucked into his plowman's heavy cow-hide boots, his shirt open over his great throat and chest, his long corded arms rising and falling with the steady effortless rhythm of the master woodsman. Nelly, in one of her immaculate blue ginghams, a white apron over it, a white frilled shade-hat on her head, her smartly shod small feet, treading the ground with that inimitable light step of hers, circling slowly about, looking at 'Gene as he worked, looking up at the crown of the tree, high, so insolently high above her head, soon to be brought low by a wish from her heart, soon to be turned into money for her to spend.

"I came over to talk to 'Gene and Nelly about some business," Marise said, over her shoulder, to Mrs. Powers, not able to take her eyes from the trio in the drama out there, "but I'd better wait till the tree is down before I speak to them."

"'Twon't be long now. 'Gene's been at it quite a while, and he's stavin' away like all possessed. Seems as if, now he's started in, he couldn't get it over with quick enough to suit him. He acted awful queer about it, I thought."

She left her ironing and, looking over her shoulder at the children, came closer to where Marise stood. Then she stepped back and shut the door to the pantry. "Mis' Crittenden," she said in an anxious troubled voice, "'Gene ain't right these days. He acts to me like he's comin' down with a sick spell, or something. He ain't right. Today Nelly told me she woke up in the night last night and 'Gene wasn't there. She hollered to him, and he didn't answer. It scared her like everything, and she scrambled out of bed and lighted the lamp, and she said she 'most fainted away, when she see 'Gene, rolled up in a blanket, lying on the floor, over against the wall, his eyes wide open looking at her. She said she let out a yell . . . it scairt the life out of her . . . and 'Gene he got right up. She says to him, 'For the Lord's sake, 'Gene, what ails you?' And what do you suppose he says to her, he says, 'I didn't know whether you wanted me there or not, Nelly.' What do you think of that? She says back, 'For goodness' sake, 'Gene Powers, where would you be nights, except in your own bed!' He got back and for all Nelly knows slept all right the rest of the night. She says she guesses he must have had some sort of funny dream, and not been really all waked up yet. But it must ha' gi'n her a turn, for all she ain't one of the nervous kind."

Marise turned sick with shocked pity. The two women looked at each other, silently with shadowed eyes of foreboding. Mrs. Powers shook her head, and turned back into the pantry, shutting the door behind her. Marise heard her speaking to the children, in the cheerful, bantering, affectionate, grandmother tone she had always had for them. She was brave, old Mrs. Powers, she always said she could "stand up to things." She was the sort of woman who can always be depended on to keep life going, no matter what happens; who never gives up, who can always go on taking care of the children.

Marise herself did not feel at all brave. She sat down heavily in a chair by the window looking out at the man who for his wife's sake was killing something vital and alive. He had done that before, 'Gene had. He went at it now with a furious haste which had something dreadful in it.

Nelly, who had sat down to rest on the pile of brush and poles, seemed a carved and painted statuette of ivory and gold.

She took off her ruffled pretty hat, and laid it down on the white-birch poles, so that she could tip her head far back and see the very top of the tree. Her braids shone molten in the sunshine. Her beautiful face was impassive, secreting behind a screen all that Marise was sure she must have been feeling.

'Gene, catching sight of her now, in a side-glance, stopped abruptly in the middle of a swing, and shouted to her to "get off that brush-pile. That's jus' where I'm lottin' on layin' the tree."

Somewhat startled, Nelly sprang up and moved around to the other side, back of him, although she called protestingly, "Gracious, you're not near through yet!"

'Gene made no answer, returning to the fury of his assault on what he so much loved. The great trunk now had a gaping raw gash in its side. Nelly idled back of him, looking up at the tree, down at him. What was she thinking about?

Marise wondered if someone with second-sight could have seen Frank Warner, there between the husband and wife? 'Gene's face was still gray in spite of the heat and his fierce exertion. Glistening streams of perspiration ran down his cheeks.

What did the future hold for 'Gene? What possible escape was there from the tragic net he had wrapped stranglingly around himself?

Very distantly, like something dreamed, it came to Marise that once for an instant the simple, violent solution had seemed the right one to her. Could she have thought that?

What a haunted house was the human heart, with phantoms from the long-dead past intruding their uninvited ghastly death's-heads among the living.

The axe-strokes stopped; so suddenly that the ear went on hearing them, ghost-like, in the intense silence. 'Gene stood upright, lifting his wet, gray face. "She's coming now," he said.

Marise looked out, astonished. To her eyes the tree stood as massively firm as she had ever seen it. But 'Gene's attitude was of strained, expectant certainty: he stood near Nelly and as she looked up at the tree, he looked at her. At that look Marise felt the cold perspiration on her own temples.

Nelly stepped sideways a little, tipping her head to see, and cried out, "Yes, I see it beginning to slant. How slow it goes!

"It'll go fast enough in a minute," said 'Gene.

Of what followed, not an instant ever had for Marise the quality of reality. It always remained for her a superb and hideous dream, something symbolical, glorious, and horrible which had taken place in her brain, not in the lives of human beings.

Nelly, . . . looking down suddenly to see where the tree would fall, crying out, "Oh, I left my hat where it'll . . ." and darting, light as a feather, towards it.

'Gene, making a great futile gesture to stop her, as she passed him, shouting at her, with a horrified glance up at the slowly leaning tree, "Come back! Come back!"

Nelly on the brush-pile, her hat in her hand, whirling to return, supple and swift, suddenly caught by the heel and flung headlong . . . up again in an instant, and falling again, to her knees this time. Up once more with a desperate haste, writhing and pulling at her shoe, held by its high heel, deep between the knotty poles.

'Gene, bounding from his place of safety, there at her feet, tearing in a frenzy at the poles, at her shoe. . . .

Above them the great tree bearing down on them the solemn vengeful shadow of its fall.

Someone was screaming. It was Nelly. She was screaming, "'Gene! 'Gene! 'Gene!" her face shrunken in terror, her white lips open.

And then, that last gesture of 'Gene's when he took Nelly into his great arms, closely, hiding her face on his shoulder, as the huge tree, roaring downward, bore them both to the earth, forever.

TWO GOOD-BYES

Marise welcomed the bother about the details of Eugenia's departure and Mr. Welles', and flung herself into them with a frightened desire for something that would drown out the roaring wind of tragedy which filled her ears in every pause of the day's activities, and woke her up at night out of the soundest sleep. Night after night, she found herself sitting up in bed, her night-gown and hair damp with perspiration, Nelly's scream ringing knife-like in her ears. Then, rigid and wide-eyed she saw it all again, what had happened in those thirty seconds which had summed up and ended the lives of 'Gene and Nelly.

But one night as she sat thus in her bed, hammered upon beyond endurance, she saw as though she had not seen it before what 'Gene had finally done, his disregard of possible safety for himself, his abandon of his futile, desperate effort to free Nelly from the tangle where her childish vanity had cast her, the grandeur and completeness of his gesture when he had taken Nelly into his strong arms, to die with her. Marise found herself crying as she had not cried for years. The picture, burned into her memory, stood there endlessly in the black night till she understood it. The tears came raining down her face, and with them went the strained, wild horror of the memory.

But the shadow and darkness hung about her like a cloud, through which she only dimly saw the neat, unhurried grace of Eugenia's preparations for departure and far travels, and felt only a dimmed, vague echo of the emotion she had thought to feel at the disappearance of Mr. Welles, poor, weary, futile old crusader on his Rosinante.

On that last morning of their stay she drove with them to the station, still giving only a half-attention to the small episodes of their departure. She did see and smile at the characteristic quality of an instinctive gesture of Eugenia's as they stepped up on the platform of the station. Two oddly-shaped pieces of metal stood there, obviously parts of a large machine. Paul stumbled over them as he climbed out of the car, and held tight to Mr. Welles' hand to save himself from a fall. Eugenia saw them instantly from afar as an element in life which threatened the spotlessness of her gray traveling cloak, and as she passed them she drew the thick folds of velvet-like wool about her closely. Marise thought to herself, "That's Eugenia's gesture as she goes through the world."

Neale turned off his switch, listened a moment to see if the Ford were boiling from the long climb up the hill to the station, and now made one long-legged step to the platform. He started towards Eugenia with the evident intention of making some casual pleasant remarks, such as are demanded by decency for a departing guest, but in his turn his eyes caught the curiously shaped pieces of metal. He stopped short, his face lighted up with pleasure and surprise. All consciousness of anyone else on the platform disappeared from his expression. "Hello!" he said to himself, "those mandrels here." He picked up one in his strong hands on which the metal left a gray dust, and inspected it. He might have been entirely alone in his shop at the mill.

Marise noted with envy how he gave all of himself to that momentary examination, entirely escaped from any awareness of that tyrannical self which in her own heart always clamored like a spoiled child for attention. The impersonal concentration of his look as he turned the metal about between those strong dusty hands, gave to his face the calm, freed expression not to be bought for any less price than a greater interest in one's work than in one's self. "They'll do," pronounced Neale. This was evidently a thought spoken aloud, for it did not occur to him to make any pretense of including the two women in his interest. He set down the casting he held, and went off into the freight-house, calling loudly, "Charlie! Charlie! Those mandrels have come. I wish you'd . . ." his voice died away as he walked further into the dusky freight-shed.

Marise happening to glance at Eugenia now, caught on her face an expression which she took to be annoyance at a breach of manners. She reflected, "Eugenia must find Neale's abrupt American ways perfectly barbaric." And she was surprised to feel for the first time a rather scornful indifference to all that was involved in Eugenia's finding them barbaric. Heavens! What did it matter? In a world so filled with awful and portentous and glorious human possibilities, how could you bother about such things?

There was a silence. Mr. Welles and Paul had been standing near, aimlessly, but now, evidently taking the silence for the inevitable flatness of the flat period of waiting for a train, Mr. Welles drew the little boy away. They walked down the cinder-covered side-tracks, towards where the single baggage truck stood, loaded with elegant, leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, marked "E. Mills. S.S. Savoie. Compagnie Générale Transatlantique." Among them, out of place and drab, stood one banal department-store trunk labeled, "Welles. 320 Maple Avenue. Macon, Georgia."

The departure of the old man and the little boy left the two women alone. Eugenia stepped closer to Marise and took her hand in her own gloved fingers. She looked at it intently, with the expression of one who is trying to find words for a complicated feeling. Marise made an effort to put herself in the receptive mood which would make the saying of it easier, but failed. The fall of the big pine roared too loudly in her ears. She looked without sympathy or admiration at Eugenia's perfection of aspect. "To look like that, she must care for looks more than anything else. What can she know about any real human feeling?" Marise asked herself, with an intolerance she could not mitigate.

And yet as she continued to peer at Eugenia through that dark cloud of tragedy, it seemed to her that Eugenia showed signs of some real human emotion. As she gazed at her in the crude brilliance of the gaudy morning sun, she saw for the first time signs of years in Eugenia's exquisite small face. There was not a line visible, nor a faltering of the firmness of the well-cared-for flesh, but over it all was a faint, hardly discernible flaccid fatigue of texture.

But perhaps she imagined it, for even as she looked, and felt her heart soften to think what this would mean to Eugenia, an inner wave of resolution reached the surface of the other woman's face, and there was Eugenia as she always had been, something of loveliness immutable.

She said impulsively, "Eugenia, it's a stupidly conventional thing to say, but it's a pity you never married."

As Eugenia only looked at her, quietly, she ventured further, "You might really be happier, you know. There is a great deal of happiness in the right marriage." She had never said so much to Eugenia.

Eugenia let Marise's hand drop and with it, evidently, whatever intention she might have had of saying something difficult to express. Instead, she advanced with her fastidious, delicate note of irony, "I don't deny the happiness, if that sort of happiness is what one is after. But I think my appetite for it . . . that sort . . . is perhaps not quite robust enough to relish it."

Marise roused herself to try to put a light note of cheerfulness into this last conversation. "You mean that it seems to you like the coarsely heaped-up goodies set before a farmhand in a country kitchen . . . chicken and butter and honey and fruit and coffee, all good but so profuse and jumbled that they make you turn away?"

"I didn't give that definition of domestic life," corrected Eugenia, with a faint smile, "that's one of your fantasies."

"Well, it's true that you get life served up to you rather pell-mell, lots of it, take-it-as-it-comes," admitted Marise, "but for a gross nature like mine, once you've had that, you're lost. You know you'd starve to death on the delicate slice of toasted bread served on old china. You give up and fairly enjoy wallowing in the trough."

She had been struck by that unwonted look of fatigue on Eugenia's face, had tried to make her laugh, and now, with an effort, laughed with her. She had forgotten her passing notion that Eugenia had something special to say. What could she have? They had gone over that astonishing misconception of hers about the Powers woodlot, and she had quite made Marise understand how hopelessly incapable she was of distinguishing one business detail from another. There could be nothing else that Eugenia could wish to say.

"How in the world shall I get through the winter?" Eugenia now wondered aloud. "Biskra and the Sahara perhaps . . . if I could only get away from the hideous band of tourists. They say there are swarms of war-profiteers from Italy now, everywhere, low-class people with money for the first time." She added with a greater accent of wonder, "How in the world are you going to get through the winter?"

Marise was struck into momentary silence by the oddness of the idea. There were phrases in Eugenia's language which were literally non-translatable into hers, representing as they did ideas that did not exist there. "Oh, we never have to consider that," she answered, not finding a more accurate phrase. "There won't be time enough to do all we'll try to do, all we'll have to do. There's living. That takes a lot of time and energy. And I'll have the chorus as usual. I'm going to try some Mendelssohn this year. The young people who have been singing for five or six years are quite capable of the 'Elijah.' And then any of the valley children who really want to, come to me for lessons, you know. The people in North Ashley have asked me to start a chorus there this year, too. And in the mill, Neale has a plan to try to get the men to work out for themselves some standards of what concerns them especially, what a day's work really is, at any given job, don't you know."

What an imbecile she was, she thought, to try to talk about such things to Eugenia, who could not, in the nature of things, understand what she was driving at. But apparently Eugenia had found something understandable there, for she now said sharply, startled, "Won't that mean less income for you?"

She did not say, "Even less," but it was implied in the energy of her accent.

Marise hesitated, brought up short by the solidity of the intangible barrier between their two languages. There were phrases in her own tongue which could not be translated into Eugenia's, because they represented ideas not existing there. She finally said vaguely, "Oh perhaps not."

Her pause had been enough for Eugenia to drop back into her own world. She said thoughtfully, "I've half a notion to try going straight on beyond Biskra, to the south, if I could find a caravan that would take me. That would be something new. Biskra is so commonplace now that it has been discovered and exploited." She went on, with a deep, wistful note of plaintiveness in her voice, "But everything's so commonplace now!" and added, "There's Java. I've never been to Java."

It came over Marise with a shock of strangeness that this was the end of Eugenia in her life. Somehow she knew, as though Eugenia had told her, that she was never coming back again. As they stood there, so close together, in the attitude of friends, they were so far apart that each could scarcely recognize who the other was. Their paths which in youth had lain so close to each other as to seem identical, how widely they had been separated by a slight divergence of aim! Marise was struck by her sudden perception of this. It had been going on for years, she could understand that now. Why should she only see it in this quiet, silent, neutral moment?

An impalpable emanation of feeling reached her from the other woman. She had a divination that it was pain. Perhaps Eugenia was also suddenly realizing that she had grown irrevocably apart from an old friend.

The old tenderness felt for the girl Eugenia had been, by the girl Marise had been, looked wistfully down the years at the end.

Marise opened her arms wide and took Eugenia into them for a close, deeply moved embrace.

"Good-bye, Eugenia," she said, with sadness.

"Good-bye, Marise," said Eugenia, looking at her strangely.

Neale came back now, frankly consulting his watch with Neale's bluntness in such matters. "Train's due in a minute or two," he said. "Where's Mr. Welles?"

Marise said, "Over there, with Paul. I'll go tell them."

She found them both, hand in hand, sitting on the edge of the truck which carried the leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, bound for Biskra or beyond, or Java; and the square department-store trunk bound for Maple Avenue, Macon, Georgia.

"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles has promised me that he'll come up and visit us summers."

"There's no house in the world where you'll be more welcome," said Marise with all her heart, holding out her hand.

Mr. Welles shook it hard, and held it in both his. As the train whistled screamingly at the crossing, he looked earnestly into her face and tried to tell her something, but the words would not come.

As she read in his pale old face and steady eyes what he would have said, Marise cried out to herself that there do not exist in the world any things more halting and futile than words. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. "Good-bye, dear Mr. Welles," was all she said, but in the clinging of his old arms about her, and in the quivering, shining face he showed as they moved down the platform together, she knew that he too had not needed words.

Paul clung to his hand till the last moment, gazing up at him constantly, silently. Marise looked down on the little boy's tanned, freckled, sober face and strained, rapidly winking eyes, and had the intuition, "This is one of the moments Paul will never forget. He will always be able to shut his eyes and see this old Don Quixote setting forth." With a rush of her old, jealous, possessive mother-love, she longed to share this with him and to have him know that she shared it; to put her arms around him and make him let her in. But she knew better now. She yearned over him silently, and did not touch him.

"Well, good-bye, Paul," said Mr. Welles, shaking hands with him.

"Well, good-bye," said Paul dryly, setting his jaw hard.

"Oh, this is the day-coach!" cried Eugenia. "Where is the drawing-room car?"

"At the far end," said the conductor with the sweeping gesture of a man used to talking with his arms.

"Good-bye, Mr. Welles," said Eugenia, giving him for an instant a small, pearl-gray hand. "Boa voyage! Good luck!"

"Same to you," said the old gentleman, scrambling up the unswept, cinder-covered steps into the day-coach.

At the front end of the train, the baggage man was tumbling into the express car the fine, leather-covered boxes and the one square trunk.

Neale carried Eugenia's two small bags down to the drawing-room car and now handed them to the porter.

The two women kissed each other on both cheeks, hurriedly, as someone cried, "All aboard!"

Eugenia took Neale's outstretched hand. "Good-bye, Neale," she said.

With the porter's aid, she mounted the rubber-covered steps into the mahogany and upholstery of the drawing-room car.

"Good luck, Eugenia! Bon voyage!" called Neale after her.

She did not turn around or look back.

Marise noted that characteristically Eugenia had forgotten Paul. But Paul had forgotten her, too, and was now back near the day-coach searching one window after another.

The conductor signaled widely, the whistle shrieked, the wheels groaned. Neale drew Marise a little back out of the whirl of dust and stood holding her arm for an instant.

It seemed to Marise as they stood thus, Neale holding her arm, that she caught a last glimpse of Eugenia behind plate-glass, looking at them gravely, steadily.

Paul suddenly caught sight of Mr. Welles' face at a window, snatched off his cap, and waved it frantically, over and over, long after the train was only an echoing roar from down the tracks.

Then the mountain-silence settled down about them calmly, and they could hear their own hearts beat, and knew the thoughts in their minds.

As they went back to their battered Ford, Marise said thoughtfully, "Somehow I believe that it will be a long time before we see Eugenia again."

Neale permitted himself no comment on this, nor showed the alteration of a line in his face as he stepped into the car and turned on the switch, but Marise cried out to him accusingly, "You might as well say it right out, that you can support life if it is."

Neale laughed a little and put his foot on the starter. "Get in the back seat, Paul," was all he said, as the little boy came up silently from the other side of the station.

He added as they started up the hill road, "First time in my life I was ever sort of sorry for Eugenia. It seemed to me this morning that she was beginning to show her age."

Marise hid the fact that she had had the same idea and opposed, "Eugenia would laugh at that from you, the husband of such a frankly middle-aged thing as I."

Neale was silent for a moment, and then, "You'll always look younger than she. No, not younger, that's not it, at all. It's living, you look. I tell you what, she's a cut flower in a vase, that's beginning to wilt, and you're a living plant."

"Why, Neale!" said Marise, astonished and touched.

"Yes, quite a flight of fancy for me, wasn't it?" commented Neale casually, leaning forward to change the carburetor adjustment.

Marise felt Paul lean over her shoulder from the back of the car. "Say, Mother," he said in her ear, "would you just as soon get in back with me for a while?"

Neale stopped the care. Marise stepped out and in, and seated herself beside Paul. He had apparently nothing to say, after all, looking fixedly down at his bare brown feet.

But presently he moved nearer to his mother and leaned his head against her breast. This time she put her arm around him and held him close to her, the tears in her eyes.

VIGNETTES FROM HOME LIFE