Part 15 (1/2)

In the shop Hugh tried all morning to refurnish the warehouse of his mind, to put back into it the things blown so recklessly away. At ten Tom came in, talked for a moment and then flitted away. ”You are still there. My daughter still has you. You have not run away again,” he seemed to be saying to himself.

The day grew warm and the sky, seen through the shop window by the bench where Hugh tried to work, was overcast with clouds.

At noon the workmen went away, but Clara, who on other days had come to drive Hugh to the farmhouse for lunch, did not appear. When all was silent in the shop he stopped work, washed his hands and put on his coat.

He went to the shop door and then came back to the bench. Before him lay an iron wheel on which he had been at work. It was intended to drive some intricate part of the hay-loading machine. Hugh took it in his hand and carried it to the back of the shop where there was an anvil. Without consciousness and scarcely realizing what he did he laid it on the anvil and taking a great sledge in his hand swung it over his head.

The blow struck was terrific. Into it Hugh put all of his protest against the grotesque position into which he had been thrown by his marriage to Clara.

The blow accomplished nothing. The sledge descended and the comparatively delicate metal wheel was twisted, knocked out of shape. It spurted from under the head of the sledge and shot past Hugh's head and out through a window, breaking a pane of gla.s.s. Fragments of the broken gla.s.s fell with a sharp little tinkling sound upon a heap of twisted pieces of iron and steel lying beside the anvil....

Hugh did not eat lunch that day nor did he go to the farmhouse or return to work at the shop. He walked, but this time did not walk in country roads where male and female birds dart in and out of bushes. An intense desire to know something intimate and personal concerning men and women and the lives they led in their houses had taken possession of him. He walked in the daylight up and down in the streets of Bidwell.

To the right, over the bridge leading out of Turner's Road, the main street of Bidwell ran along a river bank. In that direction the hills out of the country to the south came down to the river's edge and there was a high bluff. On the bluff and back of it on a sloping hillside many of the more pretentious new houses of the prosperous Bidwell citizens had been built.

Facing the river were the largest houses, with grounds in which trees and shrubs had been planted and in the streets along the hill, less and less pretentious as they receded from the river, were other houses built and being built, long rows of houses, long streets of houses, houses in brick, stone, and wood.

Hugh went from the river front back into this maze of streets and houses.

Some instinct led him there. It was where the men and women of Bidwell who had prospered and had married went to live, to make themselves houses. His father-in-law had offered to buy him a river front place and already that meant much in Bidwell.

He wanted to see women who, like Clara, had got themselves husbands, what they were like. ”I've seen enough of men,” he thought half resentfully as he went along.

All afternoon he walked in streets, going up and down before houses in which women lived with their men. A detached mood had possession of him.

For an hour he stood under a tree idly watching workmen engaged in building another house. When one of the workmen spoke to him he walked away and went into a street where men were laying a cement pavement before a completed house.

In a furtive way he kept looking about for women, hungering to see their faces. ”What are they up to? I'd like to find out,” his mind seemed to be saying.

The women came out of the doors of the houses and pa.s.sed him as he went slowly along. Other women in carriages drove in the streets. They were well-dressed women and seemed sure of themselves. ”Things are all right with me. For me things are settled and arranged,” they seemed to say. All the streets in which he walked seemed to be telling the story of things settled and arranged. The houses spoke of the same things. ”I am a house.

I am not built until things are settled and arranged. I mean that,” they said.

Hugh grew very tired. In the later afternoon a small bright-eyed woman--no doubt she had been one of the guests at his wedding feast--stopped him.

”Are you planning to buy or build up our way, Mr. McVey?” she asked. He shook his head. ”I'm looking around,” he said and hurried away.

Anger took the place of perplexity in him. The women he saw in the streets and in the doors of the houses were such women as his own woman Clara. They had married men--”no better than myself,” he told himself, growing bold.

They had married men and something had happened to them. Something was settled. They could live in streets and in houses. Their marriages had been real marriages and he had a right to a real marriage. It was not too much to expect out of life.

”Clara has a right to that also,” he thought and his mind began to idealize the marriages of men and women. ”On every hand here I see them, the neat, well-dressed, handsome women like Clara. How happy they are!

”Their feathers have been ruffled though,” he thought angrily. ”It was with them as with that bird I saw being pursued through the trees. There has been pursuit and a pretense of trying to escape. There has been an effort made that was not an effort, but feathers have been ruffled here.”

When his thoughts had driven him into a half desperate mood Hugh went out of the streets of bright, ugly, freshly built, freshly painted and furnished houses, and down into the town. Several men homeward bound at the end of their day of work called to him. ”I hope you are thinking of buying or building up our way,” they said heartily.

It began to rain and darkness came, but Hugh did not go home to Clara. It did not seem to him that he could spend another night in the house with her, lying awake, hearing the little noises of the night, waiting--for courage. He could not sit under the lamp through another evening pretending to read. He could not go with Clara up the stairs only to leave her with a cold ”good-night” at the top of the stairs.