Suddenly she looked up, and there was her father. Now he would know, and now her mother, too, would know

The Debt

A woman bears a child. What is then the debt of child to mother, beyond affection? To whom then does the child’s first love belong, and to whom her honor?

Helen R. Hull

Illustrations: Nicholas Riley

Good Housekeeping, vol. 116. Part 1: Feb. 1943, pp. 18-19, 137-151. Part 2: Mar. 1943, pp. 44-45, 132-145.

“Remorse” is a harsh word, a “gnawing-back upon the heart.” It is a harsh emotion, one that belongs primarily to middle age. Youth does not know it, except in brief, wild moments caused by trivial, quickly forgotten incidents. Regret that one has failed a friend, remorse that one has lied, or stolen, or quarreled with a brother. Temporary, because amends can be made, the quarrel patched up, the lie confessed. These brief moments might be a warning of a deeper, inconsolable grief; they are of the same nature, for all their brevity; but youth heeds no warning. In a way, this is essential to growth. For remorse is black and negative, it is gyves and fetters, ball and chain, it looks only backward, it impedes all progress, and too early knowledge of its dreadful gnawing would hold the youth incapable of motion. In youth nothing seems irrevocable, everything moves ahead, tomorrow and tomorrow are the days toward which one runs. And age, fortunately or it would know no peace, is all passion spent, even the passion of remorse.

But at some time in the middle years each man comes upon a regret that is inescapable, a remorse for which there is no alleviation. The friend whom he has failed is dead, his grave is heaped, the wreaths wither, amends are nothing but a crying in the night. The quarrel between the generations—the old quarrel, in which the youth must contend with the elders in order to be free—is ended with the mother’s death. There are left the trunks in which—oh, sentimentally, if you like—she had kept the baby shoes and little packets of baby hair, the diary in which she set down modestly her aspirations for you before your birth. You had meant someday to make her proud of you, to please her; it is too late now.

She has closed her eyes against the disappointing spectacle of your humdrum middle age; she has closed her lips upon her protests at your wilful, headlong mistakes; she has surrendered up her loneliness and her grief. There was a debt you should have paid, and now it is too late. Did you think you would escape payment, that there would be a moratorium on this debt, that time and death would outlaw it? You will learn that you will pay it in full, not to the past but to the future. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a grief for a grief.

When you have learned this, you bear your own grief, your own disappointment, more proudly, knowing that thus you quiet the gnawing upon your heart.

* * *

The high point of Winifred Page’s life was that fall of 1920 when she moved her family—husband, two daughters, and son—from the isolated village on one of the long fingers of land Maine thrusts out into the ocean, to one of the inland cities, so far inland that the tide came up the river only with a following wind. Winifred had worked for a long time to effect this change. Generations of her own people, the Hills, and of her husband’s people, the Pages, had lived and died on the narrow peninsula and on the islands, raising sheep in rocky pastures, sailing their own vessels, lumbering, raking blueberries with a bloom like that worn by the distant hills, or seining herring as silver-flashing as the sea. But as Winifred had begun to say soon after her marriage to John Page, and as she had repeated persistently for more than twenty years, those days were gone, there was no chance for a man to get ahead, there were no opportunities for the children.

John Page was more easily satisfied than Winifred. He was a friendly, easy-tempered man, who let Winifred talk without contradiction and went his own leisurely way. He was agent for the steamship company, a post that had been important in the early years of the century, with the boat stopping twice a day, with freight moving in and away, with passengers through the summer season. Early in his marriage he had found that if Winifred was inclined to be censorious—“refined,” was the word he used in his thoughts about her—other women were less exigent, other lips were warm. He never had been sure how much Winnie knew about his sidestepping. At times Winnie even embarrassed him by her boasts in public about how kind and good a husband he was. The summer before the move, however, she pulled everything down around his ears at once. For one thing, his work, which had decreased so gradually that he had not foreseen the end, his indolence increasing to match his idleness, was terminated by a letter announcing that after Labor Day the steamship line along the coast would be discontinued. He would have been content even then to have stayed as they were, farming a little, selling wood to the mill, staking some of the younger men to a weir.

Winifred said it was the hand of God, the way everything worked out. The house in which they lived was hers, left her by her father: the old Hill homestead—a square white house, the paint weatherbeaten now, with old fireplaces, a beautiful doorway, a ship’s walk on the roof, and a double row of tall, thick cedars in a double curve like a ship’s prow from the corners of the yard to the front door. Summer people often stopped to admire the trees and the house. Two of them, a man and his wife, who had come for several seasons to the boardinghouse in the village, had been more designing in their admiration than others. They were from Ohio; the man had invented something—Winifred was a little vague—that had to do with the automobiles appearing more often on the dusty roads; he had money enough to buy a place of his own for the summer, and he wanted the Hill house.

John Page was as shocked as if Winifred had suggested selling one of the children. “It’s mine,” said Winifred. “They’ll pay enough to set you up in business. We can get the children away from this backwoods-backwater life. It isn’t too late, but in another year or two it would be. Elly can take up music. If she has something like that to do, she’ll forget this good-for-nothing Andrew. And Nan. She’s only sixteen, John! Chasing out after supper every night with that Stillwell girl, and the boys waiting down the road for them! I can’t keep her locked up, but I’m frightened to death about her. There’d be nice boys and girls in a city high school, the kind she ought to know. And Tom.” Winifred’s face sharpened. Tom, the oldest, the only son. “You know yourself how he’s run with Kitty all summer! I’ve warned him. Here he has only one more year at the university, and then he can get a fine position somewhere and find some nice girl who’ll help him. You know yourself Kitty is no better than she should be!”

“Well, who is?” John had asked, and had added incautiously, “She’s a kind of cute little gal.”

* * *

That had brought down around John the worst domestic storm he ever had to weather. Winifred began by saying that she at least had nothing to be ashamed of and that no doubt John knew more than she did about Kitty Saunders, to say nothing of Kitty’s mother! From that she moved into a comprehensive survey of John’s ladies. She gave him credit for several with whom he never had disappeared down any wood road, and even as he mopped his discomfited face, he had time for a quick, speculative thought of one or two of those. “That’s why you want to stay here,” Winnie cried, “and it’s why we’re going away! My poor mother didn’t want me to marry you, and I wouldn’t listen to her. But I’m going to give my children a chance! In spite of the example you set.”

John looked at her sheepishly; he felt too large for his clothes, too uncomfortably warm. But with his guilt he had also a curious resentment that she had known of his trifling infidelities, that she had saved them up to use as a club, instead of flaring out in honest, open jealousy and anger. She had been glad to be rid of him, he had thought, and suddenly the tie between them seemed so baffling and meaningless that he was indifferent to her plans. Sell the house if she liked, move them all away, what difference did it make? He had for a moment the bewildered despair that a man might feel, coming home from work, looking up at the windows of his house, dreading to enter, thinking: “How have I been trapped thus, what has happened to what I meant my life to be, why not turn back and never come this way again? Run, escape, break the cobwebs that bind me!” And then the neighbors would cluck, “How could he leave such a wife?” But John was not given to reflection; he was too kind and too indolent for rebellion.

“It’s a dreadful thing to sell the house,” Winifred was saying. “But you can’t even keep it in repair. If it’s sold, we won’t have any place to come back to, and you’ll have to make a living for us.”

* * *

By the end of September the move had been made. John had gone around the land with surveyors, helping lay the chain, tracing the lines along decaying split-rail fences and stone walls overgrown with weeds, verifying corners with the neighbors on either side, and his feet, stumbling through underbrush, were heavy with a feeling of betrayal. Winifred drove them all briskly through the preparations for departure, directing packing, the burning of rubbish discarded from attic and barn loft, the auction sale of farm equipment they would no longer need and household goods she meant to replace with nice new things. The odds and ends left after the sale, and a few pieces Winifred had chosen to keep—the bed in which she had been born, an apple-wood desk, a few chairs—were stored in a wooden building on the shore. That building, in which John’s father once had built small boats, and the small piece of land around it were John’s, and they were all he owned. Winifred complained that whenever she wanted Elly to do something, she couldn’t find the girl. Nan was underfoot, enjoying the excitement of the uprooting. Tom seemed glum as he helped pack china in a barrel. He, too, had a way of vanishing.

Winifred put part of her proceeds into a down payment on the house she had selected carefully: a yellow frame house with half an acre of land, on a side street near enough the center of town so that John could come home for a hot dinner at noon. With the rest of the money she bought a share in a small hardware store; one of the partners had died, and his widow wished to settle the business.

Tom went back to the university for his last year; Elly was registered at the Conservatory of Music, voice and piano; Nan entered high school; John shut himself for long hours among counters of kitchenware, racks of guns, shelves of paint and varnish; and Winifred, having settled the house (running water, plumbing in the bathroom, electric lights, and a furnace) with overstuffed davenport and chairs in mulberry cut-velvet, began to look around for the new friends who were to make the proper life for her and her children.

At that time Winifred Page was as happy as she ever had been since her childhood, happier than she was likely ever to be again. She had had her own way; she had no doubt that she would continue to work it out. She was one of those women who never recognize the essential quality of life, its vast impersonality, its indifference to the individual, its scope, its inevitable suffering. A spoiled, petted, pretty little girl, she had grown into a woman who continued to expect everything in life to treat her as her adoring parents had done, who met disaster with slightly hysterical crying, suffering with intense and amazed resentment that such things could happen to her. For all her soft and feminine ways, her charm, her apparent helplessness, she was inflexible, incapable of change. Her courtship by John Page had been thrilling; it was flattering to see the way the big, handsome fellow actually changed color, the way his heart pounded when she let him touch her hand or kiss her. But to Winifred marriage was a troublesome necessity for a woman. No one wanted to be an old maid, of course, but once you were married.... She wanted children; but she had a bad time when Nan was born, so that anyone, even John, could see she must run no more risks. She was through with what she called “all that.” Marriage was pleasanter without it. To Winifred sex was in the same category as diseases of childhood, measles, chicken pox. You had them, you got over them, you were thenceafter immune. The babyhood of each of her children had been a delightful time. Winifred was a devoted mother, not too anxious; she loved their dependence upon her, their helplessness. She liked to say, “Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.” She had fought a war she did not yet know she had lost against the change of each of them into a separate, self-willed individual. Tom, she always said, was all Hill; but she had not admitted that the girls might be part Page. Now that she had transplanted them from the undesirable influences of Jed’s Point, they would grow into charming young ladies.

* * *

When Winifred was a girl, there still had been some of the good families on the Point. But the elders had died; the younger people, the boys and girls she had known, had gone away—at least, those who amounted to anything had gone; several of the best houses had burned, others had fallen into the accelerated decay that besets houses in which no one lives. Winifred herself might have gone away if she had heeded her mother. That was one reason Winifred was determined her daughters should meet “promising young men.” She didn’t want them repeating her mistake.

Not that Winifred ever had complained to her mother; but her mother had eyes to see how different her daughter’s life was from the bright future dreamed for her. Of course, after John got the position as steamship agent, she did have a hired girl to help; but in the early years she worked her fingers to the bone, washing, cooking, caring for the children. At home her mother and her father, too, always had said, “Winnie is too delicate for heavy work.” Winifred’s mother had been ailing for a year before she died. It was the year Nan was born, and Winifred had been too wretched to drag herself and two babies from the little house on the Point, where she and John lived, over the long road to the Hill homestead. She hadn’t known how ill her mother was; she always remembered the way she heard the hoofbeats of the black mare the morning Seth, her father’s hired man, came down the road, the sulky rocking, in the terrible haste of a messenger of death. She always said that the moment she heard the horse, she knew. When Seth told her, stuttering, “Your m-m-mo-th—”, she had screamed, no, it wasn’t true, she wouldn’t believe it, and they’d had to send for the doctor to quiet her, and the milk curdled in her breasts, so that she never could nurse Nan after that. Later, between fits of sobbing, she reproached her father. “Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t know—”

“She didn’t want to worry you,” her father said. “She was talking about you that night—before she went to sleep. She said you and John could move in here. The place is yours after I go.”

Winifred knew that her mother had died of a broken heart, and John understood he was to blame for that.

“If Nan hadn’t been on the way, or if I’d had someone to help me with the work and look out for the children, I could have gone to sit with her afternoons. I didn’t want her to see me all dragged out and wretched! Now it’s too late. Oh, my poor mother! And I was her only child.”

“Don’t feel so bad,” said John awkwardly. “You saw her real often. She couldn’t expect you to spend all your time with her.”

“I always meant to make it up to her someday.” Winifred mourned for her mother, the clouds of bereavement in which she moved precipitating frequent tears. Dreaming of her mother, Winifred was always a child, standing against her mother’s knee while her mother’s fingers unwound the rag curlers and brushed her long brown hair into shining spirals, hearing her mother say, “My pretty, Mamma’s baby,” or turning slowly before the mirror of the bureau in her mother’s bedroom, the glass tipped back and wedged with a hairbrush to catch her reflection; her mother on her knees pinning up the hem of the red velvet dress Winifred would wear when she recited at the school Christmas program; Miss Betts, the village seamstress, her hard black bosom like a porcupine with ready pins, pursing her mouth admiringly, saying, “See how that throws the color in her cheeks,” and slyly, “She’s filling out a little, isn’t she?” Dream after dream, for Winifred had lost the person who would have kept her forever young and sheltered and beloved, the person who agreed most closely with Winifred about what she deserved.

* * *

She had a different feeling about her father. He had called her, “Our ewe lamb”; he had liked to have people point her out as Tom Hill’s pretty girl; he had given her everything she wanted. But somehow, after her marriage, he had changed. He liked to talk with John; after Sunday dinners the two men would stroll off together on some pretext like looking at a new litter of pigs or estimating the pine in the upper wood lot, the masculine rumble of their voices sounding bold, released, and yet secretive. Winifred didn’t like it. Her father seemed, obscurely, to have aligned himself with John against her. She knew their talk was not of her; but she felt a threat in their companionship, a sex-solidarity that lessened her power over each of them. “I should think Papa would want to see me when I come home,” she said to her mother.

“Of course he does,” her mother replied comfortably. “You know how men are—they like to get off together. I’m glad to have them out from underfoot.”

After her mother’s death, Winifred wasn’t sure she wished to move into the homestead with her father. Of course he was lonely, and the children would be company for him; he said little Elly looked just like Winnie at her age, and he liked to have Tom trotting busily at his heels. The house was more comfortable than the mean little place where they were living. She didn’t know that she was reluctant to expose her marriage to close inspection, that she didn’t want John to have an ally. She said she didn’t know that she was strong enough to take charge of a large house, even if there would be a woman in the kitchen and a hired man. There was an expression around her father’s eyes and mouth sometimes, when she caught him looking at her, that had in it, if not disapproval, at least a kind of speculative surprise. She certainly was doing everything a wife could! Anyway, she couldn’t make any move until she had recovered a little from the ordeal of Nan’s birth and from the shock of her mother’s death.

Before she had to face a decision, her father, too, had died. John had said: “You know, he sort of forgets what he started out to do. I told him he ought to take things easy for a while.”

“There isn’t a lazy bone in his body,” said Winifred, implying that John wouldn’t understand that.

* * *

The village said it was awful hard on Winnie, losing her father and mother so close together. Winifred agreed; no one ever had a better father and mother! She was disappointed when her father’s estate was settled. He always had seemed so well fixed, and yet, except for the property and a few hundred dollars in the bank—not much more than enough to settle for the funeral and the granite tombstone—there was nothing. The old deeds for the land were in a black tin box in the kitchen cupboard, and for a long time Winifred was sure that somewhere, if she only could lay her hands on it, there must be another box, with stocks and bonds and gold pieces. Sometimes she woke up in the night and thought of another place to look. John said: “He made a good living from the place; he left it free and clear. What makes you think he had anything more?”

“He always said, ‘Whatever happens, my girls won’t have a worry in the world. I’ll see to that.’”

Winifred gave the place a good going-over after they moved in that fall. Not that house-cleaning was necessary. Her mother always had done it spring and autumn; she’d always said that she had nothing of the squirrel in her, she wasn’t going to hoard things for someone else to paw over after she had gone. Winifred cried as she packed away the contents of her mother’s bureau and closet, neatly folded cambric corset covers and drawers with ruffles of eyelet embroidery and long-sleeved nightgowns, scented with little cheesecloth bags in which lavender flowers crumbled.

All that had been long ago. Now Nan was sixteen, the house, the farm, the woodland all were sold. For if Winifred’s father had made a good living from the place, John hadn’t. Times had changed, perhaps; no one seemed very prosperous. John Page wasn’t the manager her father had been. Lambs, born too early, chilled and died. Late spring rains washed out the seeds and rotted the potatoes. No one bought hay—no one had stock these days. As long as John had his steamship job, there was a little money, and John had a reason for some of his failures. Seth had grown too old for heavy work. He had been the Hill hired man for so long that no one, not even Winifred, least of all Seth, thought of his leaving the place until, as Seth said, he was carried off, feet first. He never had had initiative; Tom Hill had called him as good as a crew of ordinary men, but Tom had done all the planning.

John Page, working all day in the steamship office, didn’t have time for seeing to things at the right time. It was a great joke in the village how he walked the ten miles with the cow to the Poundridges to have her served, only to walk her back again because he was a week or more too late and Bossy’s humor had changed. John laughed as heartily as anyone. Sunday was the only day he had, and that was the first Sunday it hadn’t rained. He couldn’t get a man to do the plowing, and the garden was planted so late the frost got the tomatoes and corn. He didn’t get to haul the firewood before the spring thaws came. John would say he had to be on hand when the boats came in, didn’t he? He’d do whatever else he could in odd hours. But after the office shut down, John still seemed to be a day or a week or perhaps a whole season too late. The inevitability of the succession of tasks connected with the farm sometimes made him feel nervous, but constitutionally he never accepted it. He slid away from the time-compulsion that drove his farming neighbors; he was always surprised when he found it too late. Perhaps he did not wish to admit to himself how swiftly the earth swings in its orbit around the sun, perhaps he dreaded the tramping feet of God’s black oxen. He was unconsciously protecting himself against the bitter knowledge that it was already too late for him to reshape his life.

* * *

Winifred said he was just too easygoing to work for himself, he had to have a regular position, and now, in the hardware store, he had it. John meant to do well, and that first winter in town Winifred’s move seemed to prove its wisdom. Winifred, satisfied, was much easier to live with. She plumped up a little; she looked quite pretty in the new winter coat, brown with a beaver collar; she no longer complained of headaches. On Sundays they all went to church. Elly hadn’t wanted to go, at first; but Winifred managed to have the minister ask Elly to sing in the choir. So twice a week Elly went to choir practice, coming home late with the dark young man who played the organ. Winifred always sat up for her. She made inquiries about the young man, Roger Smith: everyone liked him, he clerked in the drugstore, he wanted to study music—that seemed a funny thing for a man to care about, didn’t it? But he had a mother to support. “I wouldn’t go around with him too much,” Winifred warned her daughter.

“Oh, my goodness!” cried Elly. “I’m not going around with him! He just drops me off on the way home to his mamma. We all go to his store after practice, and he mixes ice-cream sodas for us, and then he’s the only one who comes this way.”

“Why don’t you ask your brother to bring some of his friends home for over Sunday?”

“Oh, Mamma! For heaven’s sake! First you don’t want me to go with somebody, and then you do!”

“I just want you to have the right friends,” said Winifred.

John thought Elly seemed a little edgy, but Winifred said: “I’m sure she’s not interested in this Roger Smith. He just says good-night out on the sidewalk; he never even comes to the steps with her. But you can see that all she needed was to get away from the Point. She hasn’t a thought for Andrew.”

John, watching his daughter on Sunday in the choir loft behind the pulpit, felt a helpless tenderness for her. Her piquant face, usually so lively, so mood-mobile, was demure and sweet, a trifle pale under the brilliance of the saints’ robes in the stained-glass window. She did look a little as Winnie used to, although her features were less regular than her mother’s, the eyes farther apart under the low, broad brow, the small nose more impertinent, the short upper lip full and sweetly curved. Not so pretty as Winnie had been, but more zip to her. Then the members of the choir stood up, with rustles and experimental throat clearings, and John listened for the clear, true notes of Elly’s voice. He could hear them distinctly among the other tones. “Oh, come, all ye faithful....”

* * *

When it was over, he could doze a little, until Winnie nudged him. He couldn’t keep his mind on the sermon. He tried to keep awake by thinking over the days at the store. One advantage about his present job was that it took him away from the house all day and sometimes evenings, too, if there was new stock to be unpacked. Winnie didn’t have to keep asking where he’d been or what he’d been doing. He wondered whether Elly and Nan felt the same way. They were gone from the house all day, too—at least Elly was, and Nan had most of her day at school. On the other hand, it was sort of monotonous, staying inside all day. Weighing out eight- and ten-penny nails, wrapping up packages. He wasn’t very clever at that. Of course, the hunting season was coming on, and that was interesting, talking with the fellows when they came in to stock up on cartridges or red plaid coats. Made him itch to try his luck. Maybe some Sunday—Winifred poked him, and he stood up beside her in the pew, holding one corner of the hymnal. He didn’t care much about the shooting; he was a little slow on the trigger to be good. But those mornings in the fall! The cold mist white over the marshy river at the head of the lake, the silken sound of reeds and grass as the punt slid through, a good nip of bootleg rum warming you, voices muted, faces intent, mist-drenched, the subtle changes of light, almost in pulse beats, as the dawn came on. Like the first morning of creation. And then the tearing shock of excitement as the wild ducks rose, their wings papery-loud. Winifred pulled impatiently at the hymnal; he had let his corner drop. “The farthest away a man gets from women,” thought John, and heard Winnie: “There is a fountain filled with blood, draw—en from—” Winnie always flatted a little.

When they sat down again, John had a glimpse of Nan, beyond Winnie, as she leaned forward to replace the hymnbook in the rack. Still sulky. She hadn’t wanted to go to church this morning. Just overnight, it seemed, she’d changed from a tomboy riding the farm horses bareback, falling out of apple trees, always in hot water with her mother and with Elly, too, because, as Elly said, she was simply disgraceful! She was in hot water often enough now, but for different reasons. She wanted to do everything Elly did, like staying out at night and having beaux; she wanted to dress like Elly. You’d never know she was three years younger. She was fairer than Elly, and her blue eyes, for all their wide, innocent gaze, were quick to measure her effect. She had what John Page would have recognized with pleasure in anyone except his own daughter—a provocative figure and a charming flaunt to her walk. But in his thoughts about his girls he kept a strict reticence, pooh-poohing Winnie’s worry about them and going no farther than to feel at times that they weren’t much like their mother.

After church, John waited in the vestibule while Winifred shook hands with the minister and talked with the minister’s wife about the supper the Ladies’ Aid Society was planning. It was queer to see so many folks he didn’t know, and to have the few whom he had met call him “Mr. Page” instead of “John.” Like wearing store clothes and a collar and tie all the time. No use in admitting homesickness; there was no going back. Winifred liked it. She was smiling, her cheeks flushed, as the minister, having sped his flock, turned to John with, “Your good wife is a great addition to our parish, a great addition.” When he added that he hoped to see John at the midweek prayer meeting, John muttered hastily that he was pretty busy through the week, learning a new business took a lot of time. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” asked the minister, and John ran one finger along the edge of his collar, not seeing any answer to that.

* * *

After church they walked home along the pleasant street with old elms arching overhead, and Winifred said: “That’s where the president of the bank lives, in that brick house. I didn’t see him in church today, but his wife is one of the officers in the Ladies’ Aid. She told me she was going to call on me. Someday I’d like to live on this street. We could rent our house and buy out here. Everyone says the town is booming. You can’t help but do well.”

“Let’s not move right off,” said John. “We just got settled.”

“Someone has to look ahead,” said Winifred. “If I hadn’t, we never would have had anything.” She walked faster, her head well up, her neat, small feet clicking along in quick, short steps toward her bright future.

John always stopped at the corner drugstore, open for an hour on Sunday, to pick up the Boston paper. Roger Smith was there, buttoning his white jacket over his Sunday suit, having hurried out the back door of the church the minute his hands had released the final chord of the processional. He would thrust his dark head forward, peering past John to the street, where sometimes Elly lingered, elaborately ignoring Roger’s searching eyes, picture of pretty daughter waiting for her father. Sometimes Elly wasn’t there; she and Nan would have disappeared by the time Winifred was ready to start home, although Winifred thought it looked nicer if they all walked home together. “Nice anthem today,” John would say, as Roger tried to make change without looking away from the door.

“I think they ought to give Elly the solo part,” said Roger. “Just because Mrs. Parker’s sung in the choir twenty-five years! She’s jealous.”

“He’s smitten with Elly, all right,” thought John. “He’s not half the man she needs.” But even when Elly waited, pretending to be absorbed in the window display of shaving lotion and soap, John said nothing to her.

After dinner had been cleared away, John sat in the dining room with his paper. Winifred didn’t like it littering the living room, in case someone dropped in. He drowsed between paragraphs, thinking he heard the tide lapping at the old piles of the docks, the soft, sighing lift and fall of golden seaweed on the rocks. If the rest of them liked it here, he’d have to make the best of it.

* * *

He was, however, increasingly doubtful that his best was going to be good enough. John didn’t dislike men, as a rule, and he’d tried to get over his feeling about Race Bronson, his partner in the store, since he was tied up with him for the rest of his life, as far as he could see. Race was a sandy, tall man, so thin he had to keep hitching up his pants, with freckles on his bald forehead and in the sandy fuzz on the backs of his scrawny hands—homely enough, certainly, to be honest. When he talked, which was a great deal, he blinked his sandy lashes and twisted his long mouth around his words. He had been cordial in his reception of John. He had explained the stock in detail. They’d have to cull out some of it: Henry Scott, the dead partner, had been set in his ideas, they hadn’t always seen eye to eye, all those gadgets were a total loss. He, Race, knew what the people in this town would and wouldn’t buy; he hoped John would trust his judgment. He’d had a hard time, Scott had been ailing for a year before he died, all the work had fallen on Race, by rights a good share of the money John had paid Scott’s widow should have come to him. If he had a fault, it was that he’d work himself to the bone for a friend and never say a word.

By the end of the first month John decided that Scott had died from worry, overwork, and being talked to death. Race explained that he’d been tied down so close he had a good many matters to see to, and now that John knew where to lay his hands on most of the stock, he wouldn’t mind if Race stepped out for an hour or so, would he? And the quickest way to learn was to do it alone. They were supposed, each of them, to have a small drawing account, and at the end of the month to reckon profits, settle bills, and split the difference. Race had a way of borrowing from the till. He always left a memorandum, usually on a bit of wrapping paper, his initials in large loops, “R. B.,” and the amount. The odd thing was that he seemed to regard the memoranda as equivalent to money in the drawer. “We’ll even that off next month,” he would say. The drummers who appeared on their fall trips were taken hastily into the office, on a landing halfway up the stairs to the attic storeroom, after Race had said: “Meet Mr. Page, John Page, now in business with me. You tend the store, John, and I’ll tend to the ordering, since I’ve had the experience.” That seemed reasonable to John. How could he tell how many double boilers or garbage cans or mousetraps they ought to have? But even to John, Race seemed in a devil of a rush to get the salesmen shut behind the office door, and he knew Winnie would think that since her money was in the store, her husband ought to know what went on. He found out, the day they rehung the sign above the door, with “Page” in brighter letters than “Bronson,” painted over Scott’s name. It was nine in the morning, Race hadn’t come in yet, and John stood on the sidewalk watching the sign pulled into place.

“I thought you just worked here,” said a voice, and there was a drummer who had been closeted with Race the day before, on his way to the train, briefcase and suitcase in his hands. “Do you own here?” He walked into the store with John, and after five minutes John knew that his suspicions were well founded. The amount had dragged along for years, with Race paying just enough so the drummer’s firm extended him a little more credit. For two years now Bronson hadn’t paid a cent; he’d tried to shift his buying to another firm; if he didn’t come across now, he’d be sued. Then the drummer, an energetic young fellow, had to run to catch his train.

When John asked Race about it, Race was voluble and almost patronizing. That was the way you did business. John didn’t understand. That company was on its last legs and so was trying to squeeze every penny out of old accounts. Race would send them a check, enough to silence them. He’d had a bit of luck yesterday, a private deal.

John’s mind moved cumbersomely among these revelations. They were as confusing to him as the litter of old stock, uncrated pumps, broken cartons of paint, the cans rusty, dusty and cobweb-draped coils of rope that filled the attic and basement. He knew he ought to take some stand; but he felt as helpless when he tried to think things out as he did when he stood at the foot of the cellar stairs, one unshaded light bulb on a beam dazzling his eyes and throwing queer shadows over the disorder. He should have said something to Winifred, of course; but he didn’t like to upset her good humor. She’d cry and take on. She’d say, “Why don’t you do something?” Until he made up his mind what he could do, he didn’t see much good in telling her.

* * *

Tom didn’t get home from the university for Sunday as often as Winifred had planned. She had fixed up one of the three bedrooms for him, putting the two girls together in the east room, although Elly had begged for a room of her own. “Tom won’t be home much,” Elly had said, “and Nan just drives me crazy! She’s into all my things, and she’s so untidy! Tom could sleep on the divan.”

“Why should you want to shut yourself up alone?” asked Winifred sharply. “You girls have always roomed together. You might help train Nan. Anyway, my boy must know there’s a place here that belongs to him.”

“This awful house! It’s a sardine tin!”

“I could have bought a better house, Miss, if I hadn’t saved out money to send you to the Conservatory!”

“That was your idea,” said Elly mutinously, “not mine.”

John knew how Elly felt about the house. At the farm there had been room to spread out, plenty of places where a man could get out from underfoot, places where he could have his own things to tinker with, outbuildings and acres of land, livestock and woods and the shore. But this little box, sitting on a few square rods of shaved grass, with other little boxes up and down the street—where was there any getting away? Except to work. He didn’t blame Elly for her outburst, but he could see how Winnie felt. She didn’t want her son pushed out of the nest; she wanted to make herself believe he still belonged to her.

After Winifred had his room ready, the boy didn’t get home until Thanksgiving. He said they worked ’em too hard senior year; if he was going to make the grade, he had to stay at school and bone. He rattled off the names of his courses, and John thought those would be fine things for a man to know. He’d left school pretty young himself. Tom was a good-looking young fellow, as tall as his father but not so heavy, quick-moving and impatient. Nan adored him, Elly and he didn’t get on so well, they were too near of an age, and Elly didn’t like the older-brother-patronizing air Tom put on. But they didn’t do much sparring. Tom was too busy tucking away the good dinner Winifred served. “Oh, boy, if ever I find a girl that can roast a turkey like this, I’ll grab her right away!”

Elly sniffed, and Nan said, “Have you got a girl, Tom?”

“Dozens of ’em.” Tom winked at his mother and accepted another helping of turkey. “Fellow has to watch his step around college,” he said between bites. “Two kinds of dame there, the homely ones with buck teeth and spectacles—they’re going to be schoolma’ams—and the ones who are out to catch a man.”

“I should think girls could think about something else if they’re in the university,” said Winifred.

“Now, Ma, you ought to know what girls think about—till they give up hope.”

“Oh, my goodness, did you ever hear such conceit!” This from Elly.

“You ought to try a year there. Better picking than out at Jed’s Point.”

“You ought to know!” Elly and Tom were like a pair of chickens, feathers all abristle, eyes clashing.

“They’ve got something on each other,” thought John, and spoke up quickly: “How about filling that empty gravy boat, Elly? Got any more hot gravy?”

Elly flounced out to the kitchen, and by the time she came back, Tom was telling Winifred about the dormitory meals and Winifred was clucking a sympathetic accompaniment.

* * *

Tom could stay only a day even that time. He had some laboratory work he had to do before Monday. He’d be home for Christmas, unless he got a job. Some of the fellows were talking about going into the woods to chop for two weeks. Winifred thought that was too hard work for him, he was too thin as it was, he might hurt himself. If he needed extra money, they could spare some. John didn’t see how much she gave him.

Early in December, on a gray day that John had been thinking smelled like snow, Jathro Steele showed up at the hardware store, corduroy trousers buttoned into high leather boots, plaid mackinaw flapping as he pumped John’s hand. He had worked with John as deckhand; he was the first Jed’s Pointer John had seen since they’d moved. Jathro had come to town with his woman to have some teeth pulled—hers, not his. So he’d dropped in. John showed him around the store, hoping Race Bronson wouldn’t come in—Jathro was smart enough to size him up in a smack. Jathro thought things looked real good. He hung over the case of hunting knives, admiring their blades, their neat cases, and when John wanted to give him one, a present on the store, he demurred. Wouldn’t be lucky. John, genially warmed by the visit, insisted, and finally Jathro fished a quarter out of a pocket, blew tobacco crumbs off it, and laid it on the counter. “That’d make it all right.” He stood in the doorway, looking back at the store. “Kinda cooped up, ain’t it? Well, come out and see the old place someday. I told Tom when I see him, I said, ‘Tom, you tell John he oughta come out before we forget him.’”

“Did you see Tom?” asked John slowly.

“Not this last time, I didn’t. Two-three weeks back.” Jathro grinned. “He ain’t caught Kitty two-timing him yet. Still and all, there’s quite a gap between visits, the best Tom can do. You take a girl like Kitty, isn’t much else for her to do.”

John nodded. Jathro was giving him a warning; he knew damned well the boy wasn’t supposed to be chasing out to Jed’s Point every week or so. And Jathro, after a moment of friendly silence, said: “Well, I got to be going. My woman said come back in about an hour. You take a day off and come out. Ed Willy’s made him some of the keenest applejack ever you tasted. Got a wallop like a dogfish.”

* * *

John turned back heavily into the store. He had Jathro’s quarter in his hand; he looked at it before he slipped it into a vest pocket. Jathro was a good friend, not a mean streak in him. John missed him. Winnie would be wild if she found out about Tom. Lying about how he had to go back on account of school, and all the time.... “I’ll have to have it out with him, next time he’s home,” thought John. “I’ll tell him a thing or two,” and he blew out his lips, blustering to himself against his own knowledge of the futility of words against the fever in a man’s blood a girl like Kitty could set burning. Winnie was wrong about her. She wasn’t a bad girl—not yet, anyway. If she got married soon enough, she might settle down into a fine wife. Winnie was wrong about Kitty’s mother, too; all the women were. Maybe she was loud-spoken, sort of rough in her ways, with a deep, hearty laugh, going around in overalls. But she did a man’s work on her small farm, had ever since she came home to take care of her father when he slipped and hurt his spine so he never walked again. She’d run away from home because he worked her so hard after her mother died; but she saw the piece in the paper about him and came right back, baby and all. Nobody ever found out who was Kitty’s father, and Lib Saunders never pretended she’d got married or anything. Just pitched in, ran the farm, waited on that bedridden old son-of-a-gun, and saw to it Kitty was clean and had plenty to eat. Maybe she was sort of free and easy in those days. John didn’t know; it was too soon after his own marriage. When her father died, she got the farm, mortgage and all, and stayed on. She was a wonderful hand with animals, and a good many of the farmers got so they’d send for her instead of into town for the regular vet. John grinned, remembering some of the stories told of Lib and the remarks she got off. Didn’t care what she said. Of course, that proved to the women that she was as bad as they thought—coarse, tchk, tchk! Lib was a fine, warm-blooded, deep-bosomed woman, and her laugh made you feel good all over. Kitty was something like Lib, on a smaller, more delicate scale, smaller framed, pretty where Lib had been handsome, gay where Lib was hearty, feminine where Lib was human. Lib never let her help around the place. She didn’t worry over her or spoil her; she treated her a good deal as she treated the other young animals she had around. One of the best things about Kitty was the loyalty she felt toward Lib, even after she grew old enough to know that women like—well, like Winnie, for instance—wouldn’t let their girls play with her.

* * *

John was relieved when the door of the store opened and the chill wind blew in with a customer. He decided he would say nothing to Winnie. Kitty would take up with some boy who was handier; Tom would have a dozen other girls before he was fixed to get married. Winnie thought she had them all transplanted, dug up and moved away from Jed’s Point; he wouldn’t worry her. But he’d give Tom a talking to.

Jathro’s visit had set him thinking too much about the old place; it had quickened his loneliness and his uneasiness. He’d made a vague kind of resolution to watch his step after Winnie had blown him up about what she called his women. But as he cleared a place on the counter to spread out a sheet of wrapping paper and as he folded the paper over the purchase, he suddenly thought that it might be different in a town as large as this, where so few people knew who he was, where he could walk up one street and down another without some neighbor speculating as to why John Page went thither at that time. His eyelids crinkled softly, and he looked from his customer’s work-distorted hands, with which she counted out the coins, up to her face, heavy, age-raddled, and felt an impatient pity for her. She didn’t so much as see him; she was imbedded in years and anxieties and toil and clumsy flesh, sensitive now to heat or cold or hunger or pain, but no longer—He dropped the money in the cash drawer and banged it shut, the clatter of the bell like a warning signal. What ailed him? He said, “Good-day,” and: “If you aren’t pleased, just come back. We want our customers to come back.” Then he watched her move toward the door, shaped like a bell under the greenish-black coat. Funny how he liked to notice hands. You could tell a lot about a woman by her hands. Take Winnie. No matter how plump she got, her hands stayed thin; you could see the bones and the cords, and the bump of the wristbone stuck up, and she always kept her short thumbs curled under the fingers. He checked himself again, halfway into a fancy that someday a woman might stand here at the counter, her hands right there under his eyes, and when he looked up, he’d see—“Oh, God, you fool!” The door blew open again, and this time it was Race, who burst in with his usual spurt of energy.

All the rest of the day John felt a mild elation, a lightness he had not known for months, not since Winnie had told him off and he had accepted as inevitable the move to town. Maybe he’d get the hang of things and make a go of the store after all. Maybe Race wasn’t so much of a fourflusher as he’d thought. Maybe he’d get so he liked living in town.

When he woke the next morning, he wondered why he felt so good. Nothing had happened. But something might happen! If he kept his eyes open—He’d been like a man imprisoned, and imagination had slipped him a file to saw through the bars. He stretched himself awake, with a sense of well-being that was far more natural to him than the uneasy, caged depression of the past months. Fully awake, he jeered at himself for a fool. But he whistled as he shaved. He didn’t have to do anything, just wait. He knew.

* * *

He set off for the store at a lively clip. The streets were wet, where the light snow falling through the night had melted; flakes drifted uncertainly through the gray air, too light to fall. “May turn to rain,” he thought. The clock at the bank corner showed him early by quarter of an hour, and that, of course, was how he came to see Elly. She always left before he did, crying back at Winnie that she didn’t want any more cereal, she didn’t need her rubbers, she’d be late for her practice hours. There Elly was, on the steps of the red brick post office, her portfolio under her arm, head bent over something, a letter, which she read and turned to read the other side, and then turned to read again. Even so, John might have thought nothing except how pretty she was, how slender and neat the waist, clipped in snugly with the belt of the polo coat she’d been so pleased with. But she lifted her head and saw her father and gave such a terrible start, trembling an instant and then freezing erect, trying to slip the letter out of sight into a pocket her hand could not find. Then she gave a nervous little giggle, and the color rushed into her face.

“My goodness!” she said. “You scared me! I just stopped to buy a stamp.” Her long lashes did not hide the anxious inquiry under them: What did you see, what do you think? “’Bye, I have to run!” She dashed down the steps and past John before he spoke. But before she had gone halfway along the block, she stopped abruptly and waited for her father. “Listen,” she said, and her face was white again. “Did Mamma tell you to follow me? Did she—” She swung slightly, her desire for flight and need for knowing at war in her muscles.

“Why, no,” said John. “No, Winnie didn’t tell me anything.”

“You’re early,” Elly accused him.

“What of it?” John wanted to touch her, to tell her not to be so frightened; and at the same time he felt Winnie behind him. There was something up; he had some responsibility, hadn’t he?

“Oh, nothing.” Elly tossed her head; she caught her breath quickly. “Don’t say anything, will you? I mean—”

“Isn’t much of anything to say, that I can see,” said John. It was a kind of promise, and he saw Elly seize upon it.

“No, of course not! That’s what I mean!” Her quick smile before she hurried away was her puckish child smile, accepting complicity, like the time she’d fallen off the dock and John had fished her out, stripped off her wet clothes, wrapped her in an old gray sweater, and hidden her behind his desk until her dress and panties were dry. He could see her tousled dark head bobbing up when he came in, and that same smile. But if Winnie had ever found out, she wouldn’t have let Elly play around the dock. And other times.

This was different. This might not be a child’s prank. Because John had some practice in duplicity himself, he knew that Elly’s confusion had a direct ratio to the importance of whatever she was up to. As he went about the morning task of opening the store, his mind moved reluctantly to conclusions. Here in town postmen made the rounds, dropping letters into boxes beside front doors. Elly’s letter hadn’t come that way. She’d got it herself at the post office. If they let a child like Elly have a private box, they ought to be strung up! But if he rushed over to ask about it, he might get Elly into trouble. Just some foolish little thing she didn’t want her folks to know about; like the time he’d sent a quarter to have his fortune read, he’d waited for the stage down the road out of sight of the house for a week, to get the mail before Winnie looked it over. “A dark woman is coming into your life.” John chuckled to himself. That had come true, all right. Then he thought: “Winnie sort of drives you into acting that way. She won’t leave you any leeway. Elly’s growing up.” He swept down the aisle with slow, indifferent strokes and came finally to what he had known the minute he had laid eyes on Elly. Andrew, of course. When a girl curved her head over a letter that way, held it thus in her two hands, what else was it but a love letter? First Tom, and now Elly. John liked Andrew better than that organ player; but he could see why Winnie was against him.

* * *

Andrew Blake didn’t own a thing in the world except his old lobster boat; he didn’t have the kind of ambition Winnie admired, to go away and make something of himself. Andrew liked Jed’s Point; he liked working around the water, tarring the heads for his lobster traps in the spring, setting off the traps in deep water, hauling them, waiting down the bay for the lobster smack to collect his catch. What they said in the village was that no Blake ever could work for another man, he was too independent and too cussed. It would be a hard life for a woman, with no more at the end than at the beginning. As Winnie said, you just had to look at Andrew’s folks to see. Andrew was just like his father, except that the old man built a fish weir every spring and seined herring. Eliza Blake, his mother, said the only real restful times she ever had were when her children were being born. But Elly, just before they left the Point, hadn’t been able to look beyond Andrew himself, bronzed, wiry, quick tongued, quick tempered, demanding. Well, thought John, Andrew wouldn’t be much of a letter writer; maybe Elly would shake him off. She seemed real interested in her music. Maybe he ought to say something to Winnie; but he’d as much as promised Elly he wouldn’t. Winnie had done about all she could; she’d said plenty, and she’d got Elly settled at the Conservatory. John’s sanguine mood had reasserted itself. He ended by deciding that a girl as pretty as Elly was bound to have a lot of fellows chasing after her; he guessed her mother’d keep a close enough eye on her to see she picked the right one when the time came.

Elly, hurrying along the street, ducking around the first corner, thought that if one more thing happened, she’d just be sick. Her stomach was a tight knot, and her knees still quivered. Here she hadn’t had a word from Andrew for more than two weeks; she’d asked at the general-delivery window every day; the bald, fat-faced clerk had smirked at her when he handed out the envelope this morning, and before she had finished reading the letter, there was her father, spying on her! Oh, accidentally, perhaps. He wouldn’t say anything. But now she’d be nervous every time she slipped into the post office. She’d had a bad enough time trying to explain to Andrew why he couldn’t write to her at the house. He’d gone into one of his white rages—he was terribly proud. “So I’m not good enough for you, is that it? Got to find yourself some fancy city fellow with his pants pressed? By God, a Blake’s as good as a Page any day in the week, and better than a Hill! If you think I’m going to sneak around—” Elly had cried, said she didn’t want to go away from Jed’s Point, only what could a girl do when her family just moved right out? “It isn’t you, Andrew. It’s just that they’re spending quite a lot of money on my lessons at the Conservatory. They don’t want me to get married right away.”

“I’ve seen your mother looking at me as if I was so much rotten herring bait,” said Andrew. Then he’d kissed her wet eyelids and her throat, taut with crying, and said, “You’re my girl, aren’t you, Elly?”

“It’s just for a year,” Elly had said. “Maybe you could save up enough to start buying us a place.”

“We could move right in with the folks. That’s the way my father did. We could have our rooms separate from theirs—why, there’s even a place for a sink and a stove in the east bedroom.”

Elly thought she’d rather have her own house; but she didn’t dare say so, not right then when Andrew was just coming out of his mad. She just kissed him again, the touch of his hard, lean body wildfire in her blood.

* * *

She stopped now, in the quiet morning street, glancing behind to be sure she was out of sight, and smoothed out the crumpled letter.

The period at the end of each sentence was large and black. Elly could see Andrew hunched over the kitchen table, the lamp pushed back where his elbow wouldn’t hit it, the bottle of ink uncorked, and Andrew drawing in those periods slowly, while he hunted for the next sentence. He never would ship on a freighter; that was just to torment her! He’d never leave his house, his own coves and islands and tide rips, his boat. The letter trembled as she folded it into the envelope. The snowflakes were like petals of old tears on her face, flushed with a kind of desperate exasperation. Nothing of Andrew in his letter; she could not hear his voice. The longing for him was like a great thirst, so that as she went quickly along the street, her lips parted, the full, short upper lip curling back, and she drew quick breaths of the damp air; it was like hunger, like a huge, harsh hand shutting around her waist and wringing her sides together. Perhaps Andrew didn’t love her any more. How could she know, unless she could see him? Perhaps already he had another girl. The separation between them was intolerable; it was like the window against which the imprisoned bird dashes its body, not understanding the nature of glass, crashing against it until, sometimes, it dies. Elly could feel herself open the kitchen door, the warmth and the yellow light and Andrew at the table; she could see him lift his head, hear his shout, “Elly, Elly, Elly!”

* * *

Her mother had said: “It’s just that you’re young and silly, and Andrew happened to be the boy on hand. You’ll see, you take my word, a year from now you’ll have other ideas about what you want.” She had gone on, insistently. All Elly had to do was to take a good look at Eliza Blake, Andrew’s mother, to see what would happen to any girl unfortunate enough to tie up with a Blake. Elly didn’t need to look at her, she’d seen her often enough—a woman with scolding locks always tumbling down from the tight knot of gray hair, with bright blue eyes and a way of buttoning down her upper lip when she laughed, to hide the gaps in her teeth (when she’d lost a few more, she’d get a plate, she said), her body thickened by childbearing so her skirts always rocked up shorter in front than in back, a woman who scolded at her menfolks and fed them prodigiously, who poulticed their sore throats and festered fingers, whose kitchen always had a sick lamb or an ailing gosling in a box behind the stove, along with drying boots or a slicker just reoiled, who took prizes at the county fair for pickles or quilts. Why, Andrew’s mother was an old woman, thought Elly. Andrew’s father was real old, too. It was as impossible for Elly to imagine that she ever would be like Eliza Blake, that Andrew’s tall body would droop like a sickle and he would groan when he got up from a chair, as for her to imagine what death felt like. What had anything about old people to do with her and Andrew? Elly wasn’t very comfortable with Andrew’s mother; the bright blue eyes sort of picked her to pieces: “What kind of girl are you for my Andrew?”

But because Andrew was so proud and independent and hot tempered, it was all the more wonderful that he loved her. If he still did! Her fingers touched the corner of his letter; but she hurried on, not wanting to read it again. Too like holding an empty flask to parched lips. She ran up the steps of the square white building that housed the Conservatory, scarcely hearing the scales and trills, which, early as it was, already made a wavering dissonance out of the earnest separate efforts in the practice cubicles. In the hall she met and passed quickly one of the assistants in the piano department, a little man with a pointed beard and full, moist red lips. She didn’t like him; his breath was too hot on her neck, and his hands, for all their muscular development, had thick, soft pads under the fingertips when he laid them on hers to show her how to place her fingers. Shut safely in her own little cell, her music on the rack, she sat down on the piano bench. But her hands dropped to her lap and curled into each other, her head drooped, the dark hair, heavy with snow-damp, swung against her cheeks and throat. She’d tried to like it here, hadn’t she? Singing in church, with people looking up at her, practising hours and hours, first piano, then voice; going to choir practice with that awful Mrs. Parker and Miss Withers, who sang what she thought was contralto, and those men, what was his name, the grocer who got so sweaty when he took low notes, and Roger Smith. She hadn’t told anybody the way the town girls made her feel, clubbing together and acting as if they were so smart, really sniffing at her when some of the young men students stopped to joke with her. Oh, she’d tried! She’d looked to see if there was anyone like Andrew, if her mother could be right, and Andrew had seemed so—well, wonderful—just because she didn’t know very many boys. She’d let Roger Smith walk home with her; she’d played a little at flirting with him; she’d pretended to be interested in his dull stories about the pieces he was studying for the organ and everything; she’d known just when he began to stammer and to pretend he’d touched her accidentally; she’d thought cruelly: “Maybe I could love him. I’ve got to know,” and all the time she’d felt a strange contempt for his shyness, his stumbling, his hesitancy. But last night when she’d let him kiss her and he’d tried to pick her up in his thin, uncertain grasp, she’d broken away from him in a storm of weeping that had bewildered her and frightened him.

* * *

Suddenly she flung back her head, lifted her hands to the keys, wrists held just right; her fingers moved with frenzied precision and force. If she stayed here, she’d lose Andrew. She knew what she would do! As she played, she planned, ruthless, bright, unwavering. “I’m coming, Andrew, Andrew, my love, I’m coming home!” She stopped the arpeggios abruptly, then struck strong, dominant chords. That was Andrew, and this—little semitones running under the chords—this was Elly! She tried it again, transposing it into another key. She’d write it down for her exercise in harmony. She’d liked that best of the work, taking a sheet of the barred paper, waiting for anything—telephone wires shining in the sun, and swallows in rows lighting on them—and catching there some of the music that sounded in her ears. She’d play it for Andrew. He’d get a piano for her, she could go on with her music, she’d play him the one about the tide coming in under the moon, not a breath of wind, just the water swinging, swinging, slipping back, swinging higher, just the heavy water swinging over the round earth, like that last night at the Point when she had stolen out of the house to meet Andrew, to say goodbye; she’d play him the other one, the bay feather-white, the fear in the woman’s heart, and then the little boat coming into sight, Andrew standing in it, braced, as it leaped and plunged, Andrew laughing and the gulls shrieking overhead. “Andrew, I’m coming home!”

* * *

Winifred had a terrible time over Elly’s elopement. Elly had schemed so cleverly that she had a good two days’ start. She had asked her mother if she could spend the night with a new friend, one of the girls at the Conservatory. They were going to play duets; it was way over at the other side of town, a lovely house; Arline’s father was a lawyer; didn’t Winifred want her to have any friends or any good times at all? Winifred finally had given a reluctant consent. She didn’t like the idea; but if Arline was such a nice girl—Elly must have packed a suitcase the afternoon her mother was at the Ladies’ Aid meeting. Thursday Elly didn’t come home, and at suppertime Winnie began to worry. She sent John to the Smiths’ to see whether there was late choir practice. Roger came to the door. He hadn’t seen Elly all day; he’d meant to come over; he was afraid she was sick. Winifred had flown up to the room Elly shared with her sister. John had listened to the frantic sounds of her search—dresser drawers jerked open, closet door banged—and had gone to the dining room and seated himself heavily, not looking at Nan. Winifred had caught her heel as she flung herself down the stairs. She had sat on the bottom step holding her ankle, shrilling at them, accusing them of conspiring with Elly. Her best clothes were gone. Nan must have known. Where had she gone, what had she done? Why didn’t John do something instead of standing there with that guilty look on his face? What did he know? They were all against her! Then she’d pressed her hands against her heart and moaned. John had got her onto the couch, and Nan had run down the block to the doctor’s house. The telegram had come that evening from Boston: “Married yesterday. Having wonderful time. Love, Elly and Andrew.”

Winifred had a heart attack—false angina, the doctor called it. She was in bed for several days. She wouldn’t speak to John or Nan. They sent for Tom, and she clung to his hand, crying weakly, begging him to promise that he’d never break her heart that way. Tom stormed about Elly, and John surmised that his proprietary anger was a release for his own uneasiness. If Winnie found out about Kitty now! Then Winifred said John should go after Elly, bring her back, have the marriage annulled. John was gentle with Winifred, but firm. “Mother, you can’t wipe out being married. Folks like us don’t do that sort of thing. Elly’s older than you were when you and I—”

“Oh, my poor mother!” cried Winifred, and for a moment she was silent, struggling with a faint comprehension that here was a pattern repeating itself, that here was an old debt being collected. Only for a moment, and then she was freshly aware of her own injury. Elly was selfish, cruel, ruining her life after all her mother had tried to do for her. It was John’s fault—he hadn’t wanted to leave the Point, he’d kept them there too long. “I can never forgive her. She’s made her bed. She can lie in it.”

John wrote to Elly—her mother was pretty upset, but she was getting better; he hoped Elly would be happy; if she wanted anything, let him know; best wishes to her and Andrew. He had a letter in return:

John handed the letter to Winifred, and Nan, who had been subdued and unusually docile—coming straight home from school, not rebelling at the tightened string Winifred kept on her—leaned over her mother’s shoulder to read it. She gave a rapturous sigh and hugged her arms over her firm young breasts, rocking a little, her eyes bright with the excitement of her sister’s romance.

Winifred crumpled the letter in her hand and stared at Nan. “Not even a roof of her own,” she said bitterly. “Just a corner with Andrew’s people. What is there nice about that?”

“She likes it!” cried Nan.

“She’d say so. And you could have told me and helped me prevent it. You could have warned me.”

“I didn’t know what she was going to do.”

“I saw her bangle bracelet under your handkerchief pile. She bribed you to help deceive me.”

“But I didn’t know—” Nan was crying, frightened, and John saw in Winifred’s determined face both the confirmation of suspicion and the will to shape Nan’s future.

When Winifred was well enough to go out to church, John was surprised at the brave face she put on. “You know how romantic young people are. This was a childhood sweetheart. Of course we wanted Elly to wait, she is so young.” Roger Smith stared at them solemnly; but he pretended to be so busy he didn’t see John when, on the way home, John stopped at the drugstore for the paper. John watched the young man’s narrow shoulders, stooping a little under the white jacket, laid his money quietly on the counter, and went out.

* * *

Having taken that stand about Elly, Winifred stopped talking about her. She refused to read the occasional notes Elly sent her father; but John was pretty sure that when he left them on the sideboard, Winnie read them, all right. Tom had been very good to his mother as she recovered from the shock; he spent his vacations right there at the house, Christmas and Easter, even managed an occasional weekend. John never knew quite what happened between the boy and Kitty. Maybe they quarreled because Tom went less often to the Point. Certainly Kitty wouldn’t see why Elly’s marrying a good-looker like Andrew should make Tom’s mother so sick he had to stay home with her. In the spring Elly wrote that Kitty had gone to Portland to take up nursing. “She’d been running around with a cousin of Andrew’s, and everybody was some surprised when she suddenly left.”

“Well,” thought John, “Winnie fixed that.” He didn’t know whether he was sorry or glad. Privately he thought Kitty had more life to her than Tom’s new girl, Laura Bissett, whose father, J. R. Bissett, was President of the Citizens’ Commercial Bank on Main Street. Winifred had met Mrs. Bissett at the Women’s Club—meetings fortnightly, covering in succession politics, current events, gardening, literature, social reform, dietetics, art.

“She has the loveliest house,” said Winifred, coming home from a committee meeting at Mrs. Bissett’s. “Everything is perfect—the way she had the tea served, a little white apron on the maid, and sandwiches all cut in different shapes. Her daughter came in just as the ladies were leaving, such a charming girl. She’s had every advantage, finishing school in Massachusetts, travel—they went way out to Estes Park—but her mother says she’s not at all like some of these modern girls, she’s just devoted to her home.” There was a little gleam in Winnie’s eye, a speculative pucker around her mouth. “It would be nice,” she said, “if Mr. Bissett could make a place for Tom in his business. Tom doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do, and it would be nice clean work, not too hard, and if you could see the Bissett house, you’d realize it would be a wonderful opportunity. Now if you were like some fathers, you’d get in with Mr. Bissett and help your son.”

“I don’t even know him,” protested John.

“That’s just it!” cried Winnie.

Winifred’s scheme included more than Tom’s business future. She invited Mrs. Bissett and her daughter for tea, although she said she was embarrassed because she couldn’t do anything the way Mrs. Bissett did. It was the Saturday Tom’s Easter holidays started, and of course Winifred knew the boy would come in from the five-o’clock train.

At supper Winifred asked Tom how he liked Laura.

“She’s all right, I guess,” said Tom carelessly. “Not much on looks.”

Winifred nibbled at her lip, and withheld the remonstrance her eyes spoke. The next afternoon John had a glimpse of the girl. She came to the door with a book her mother had promised Winifred. She had a nervous, high laugh, which she used for no reason whatever. Oh, no, she wouldn’t come in, she had been simply amazed when she saw how late they had stayed yesterday. Winifred had persuaded her to come in, had called Tom. John, gathering up the scattered sheets of his paper, had managed a glimpse of the girl before he retreated to the kitchen. She was laughing and waving her hands in kittenish gestures, which didn’t fit her rather thin, tall figure. John thought: “She’s older than Tom. Easy to see why she’s devoted to her home—who’d want to pick her out of it?” She had large light-hazel eyes, which she was rolling at Tom. She looked well taken care of. But she hadn’t enough chin under her long mouth. She had no color—dun hair, pale, softish skin. John shook his head.

* * *

Later he thought that having no chin certainly couldn’t be a sign of lack of determination. If ever he saw a girl go after a fellow! Tom walked home with her that Sunday, and stayed for supper. He told Winnie they sure knew how to feed at that house. Later that week he took Laura to a performance at the new Rialto—Mary Pickford in Daddy Long Legs.

The next weekend there was Laura at the door again, this time with a box of pansies, from their small hothouse, her mother had sent. She squealed when she saw Tom. “I never dreamed you were here! I thought you were way off at your college.”

John thought, as spring wore on, that Tom didn’t look very happy, and a few times he had a mind to try to talk to him. But he couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound disloyal to Winifred. Not even to himself did he admit that what troubled him about Laura Bissett was a certain likeness to Winnie. Cut off the same bolt of cloth, without the pretty trimmings Winnie had had as a girl. “Nasty-nice,” he thought. Furthermore, an instinctive caution warned John against opening a discussion with his son on certain subjects like—well, like women. Funny a man never thought of his household as composed of potential spies and judges of his conduct—they were just children, and he was their father, until suddenly they were full-fledged human beings. He didn’t exactly think Winnie would talk him over with the boy. But Tom, except for the spell when he’d been crazy about Kitty, always had been his mother’s boy.

Well, maybe Tom really liked Laura. She sure was crazy about him, the way she chased him. She never paid much attention to John, and he thought that she took her cue from Winnie. When it came time for Tom’s Commencement, Winnie invited her to go with them, and along she went, dressed to the gills in rose-colored silk. John listened to the fine words of the Commencement speaker, about the wonderful opportunities for these young people to give back to their country what they had been receiving and how Commencement was the true name for this period of their lives. He watched Tom, second from the end in the front row. A little fidgety, nibbling at his lip as his mother had a habit of doing.

The next week Tom started work in the office of J. R. Bissett, with his own desk and sharing a secretary. In the fall he was married—a church wedding, with Winnie crying tears of pure delight; with Nan the prettiest of the bridesmaids; with Mr. Bissett giving away his daughter, the profile of his thin, deeply wrinkled face very much like Laura’s, except for the stiff brush of gray mustache under the sharp nose and above the receding chin; with Laura sweeping down the aisle a little too fast for the music, like a runner who is trying to cross the tape. John had held out for an invitation for Elly and Andrew. “Unless you ask them, I won’t move one foot.” Winnie saw he meant it. But Elly wrote she was going to have a baby, and she wasn’t going anywhere right now. Tom and Laura didn’t go away for a honeymoon; they settled right into the new bungalow on the west side of town, a gift from the bride’s parents. Laura said it seemed foolish to spend all that money on a trip, she’d rather buy things for the house. Tom didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Laura had a maid, a middle-aged woman who had worked for Mrs. Bissett, so she knew just how Laura liked things.

Laura swept down the aisle just a little too fast for the music, like a runner trying to cross the tape

* * *

John went to see Elly one day in October. He told Race Bronson he was going to be away—Race could take care of the store or shut it up, he didn’t know as it made much difference which. Race had said: “What you talking that way for? Things are going to break fine before long. Just yesterday I was talking to this man who knows just where to put a little money in the market. If I can lay my hands on some, it’ll be a big thing.” John just shrugged, and that night he took two ten-dollar bills from the cash drawer, putting in a slip with his initials. First time he’d done that, but he wanted a little something for Elly. He’d asked Winnie to go, and she had said: “How could I stay with all those Blakes? Elly never asked me.”

“She couldn’t very well ask you,” said John.

“You can tell Elly if she wants to come home to have her baby, I’ll be glad to do all I can for her.”

“She wouldn’t want to come away from her husband, would she?” asked John, and when he saw Elly, he didn’t even tell her what Winnie had said. He just made up some messages about hoping she was well.

He had a good day at the Point. Elly was different, quieter. She carried her heavy body with pride. She had one of Andrew’s old gray sweaters buttoned around her, and thought it was a good joke that all her own clothes were too small. “Andrew’s sure it’s twins,” she said. Her eyes were clear and peaceful. She showed her father her kitchen, with the table set in the end of the room where the enclosed stairs went up to the bedroom. There was a pump in the sink under a window that had a view of the bay. “I can see Andrew’s boat come around the Head,” she said, “and then I start getting dinner. Upstairs is just our bedroom, and here’s the living room.” A sofa, a Morris chair, a phonograph on a stand, a slender-spindled Windsor rocker, a round stove with shining nickel, the kind you burn chunk wood in. John remembered one like that in his mother’s sitting room. “Andrew set up the stove just this week. The evenings are getting chilly. Next year we’re going to have a piano. This year we have a baby—or twins.” She went back to the kitchen window, nothing light or graceful now in her walk. “There’s Andrew’s boat now! He’s early.” Her laugh had a kind of richness in it. “He doesn’t half pull his traps, he just comes hurrying back, the old silly! As if anything could happen to me!”

And Andrew, when he padded into the kitchen stocking-footed, boots in one hand, stared at John in defensive surprise. He got right over that, when he saw how glad Elly was to have her father there. He talked and joked at a great rate. But John saw the way he looked at Elly once in a while, the way his lean, sun-darkened face took on a grave maturity, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners with tenderness, and thought, “It’s the real thing with these two!”

* * *

After dinner Elly lay down on the couch, and Andrew tucked her up with an old red-and-brown afghan. “I feel silly, lying down in the daytime,” said Elly; but Andrew was firm about what the doctor had told her. He went back after he and John had stepped outdoors, to see if she was warm enough. They walked around the house to the main kitchen door. “I fastened up the inside doors between the rooms,” explained Andrew, “so it would seem more like our own separate house.”

Eliza Blake shooed a tabby cat out of the way, and greeted John with some truculence. He was quite a stranger; it’d taken him long enough to pay Elly a visit. John said mildly that the store tied him down pretty close, he was glad to see Elly so contented, and Eliza replied caustically: “Yes, she’s awful pleased with herself. You’d think the way she and Andrew took on nobody’s ever had a baby before.” Andrew said, “Well, now, Ma, we never did before!” That made them all laugh. Then Andrew went out for an armful of birch sticks for the woodbox. His father was late today, it had been low tide at noon, and that was when he drew up his seine to empty it.

“Elly’s done real good,” said Eliza. “She’s been real company for me. Of course she’s got a lot to learn yet. It’s hard on Andrew, young as he is, starting a family so quick.”

“I should think it’s harder on my girl,” said John.

“Women have to manage. It just comes natural.”

Andrew came back, clattering wood into the box, brushing off his hands. “You look in on Elly in about an hour if we aren’t back.”

Eliza laughed and gave him a shove toward the door. “You run along. Nothing’ll happen to your Elly.” John, following Andrew outdoors again, felt grateful to her. Something indomitable about her as she stood in the doorway looking after them, her hands crossed over her thickened waist, bulging under the blue-and-white checked apron. Something full of experience, narrow perhaps, but deep as birth and growth and death, in the glance of her bright-blue eyes.

John wanted to look at his building on the shore, where he had stored the few things left after the auction. It was a long building, with the windows boarded over and slits of light coming through cracks in the wide doors. John remembered how they had always stood wide open upon the water of the bay when his own father had worked in the shop. A good building, sturdily built; the roof was tight.

“You know,” said John, “it wouldn’t be hard to make this over into a house of sorts.” He grew a little excited, planning it, pacing off in the cobwebby dimness possible rooms, partitions, a hall. “I might fix it up for you and Elly.”

Andrew was waiting at the door, impatient at these vagaries of an elderly father-in-law. “We like where we are,” he said stiffly. You haven’t done much for us to date, he meant, you and Elly’s mother. “I can keep an eye on the old folks. Pa isn’t what he used to be. Some days his hands are so knotted up I have to tend the weir for him. The sea takes it out of a man early.”

John didn’t pay much attention to him. He paced off the length and width and made a note of the figures. He’d draw up some plans. Three windows along each side, and skylights; in a corner the rusty old stove and steamer his father had used to shape the planking for boats. “Yes, I’m coming,” he said, and snapped the padlock on the small door. “A building like that would cost quite a lot these days. Solid as a nut.”

* * *

They walked along the shore to the steamship dock, the piles heaved every which way by the winter ice, most of the flooring ripped up, a chain across the entrance, even the road that led down the hill had been gullied out by rains. “We need a town landing,” said Andrew. “There’s been some talk about putting this back in shape. I don’t know as anything’ll come of it.” Then he asked if John wanted to see the old place, calling it the old Hill house. “They’ve done a lot to it.” John didn’t know as he did, and Andrew, with alacrity, started back to his own share of the Blake house and Elly. John offered to help him with his chores, but Andrew said he was too dressed up, he’d better just sit and talk with Elly. She’d like that better, it had been a long time since she’d seen any of her folks. Before John knew it, it was time to leave for the three-mile walk to the junction where the evening train stopped. He slipped the two ten-dollar bills into Elly’s hand. “Get something you want for your twins,” he said. “I’d like to send you some more to pay the doctor.”

“Oh, no,” said Elly. “Andrew can pay for his baby! Give my love to everybody. I suppose Nan’s so busy in school she couldn’t come down. I’d love to see her.”

“She flies around a lot,” said John, weighed down with inadequacy. It was Winnie that Elly meant. “I’ll tell your mother how well and happy I found you.”

“Yes,” said Elly. “I can’t be sorry, can I?” Her lashes were wet when she kissed John, but she didn’t really cry.

Winnie listened to John’s report, her mouth buttoned tight. “Did she ask how I am?”

“Oh, yes, yes. She asked all sorts of questions about you and Tom and what kind of girl he married and how Nan was getting on.”

“If she needed me, I’d go to her at once. Oh, poor Elly, when I think of all she might have had!”

It was Nan who asked repeatedly about his day. How did Elly look, did she really like being married and everything, hadn’t John seen any of Nan’s friends, Alice Stillwell or Benny? Goodness, what had he done all day? Winifred finally said: “I wish you’d stop talking about the Point! We don’t live there any more. You’d better get at your homework, the marks you’ve been getting, young lady!”

* * *

During the next few years, John thought on the whole he was doing pretty well, once the tussle about Nan was over. That was bad while it lasted, but the fact that John was making more money, so that Winnie could move into a new house in the part of town she called the right part, and have more of the things she wanted, seemed to help Winnie pull out of her protesting anger about Nan and Phil Stillwell. John thought sometimes the prosperity of the hardware store was probably temporary, but it was good while it lasted. Race actually had had some luck on the market. He paid off the old debts, let John use his own judgment in buying fresh stock, and there was a boom in building that helped.

Nan hadn’t run away, as Elly had, but she would have if John hadn’t stood up to Winnie. Elly’s baby, a nine-pound boy, had been born in November, and Winnie had reluctantly allowed Nan to spend a few days with her sister at Christmas. Nan had come back in a state of elation. The baby was a darling, he smiled at you already. Elly was so sweet to her. It had snowed hard while she was there, and the Point was simply heavenly beautiful. “And what else?” thought John, watching the girl. All lit up. He found out soon enough. Phil Stillwell turned up at the store late one afternoon, very trig in his blue uniform as mate on a big pleasure yacht that sailed out of Long Island Sound in the summer. Laid up for the winter now, but the boy had worn the uniform to impress John. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered fellow, with clipped Maine speech and quick dark eyes. He and Nan wanted to get married. She wanted to run off, but he didn’t like that way. He wanted to come right out and ask what objection anybody had to him! Two hundred a month the year round, and he’d had this job three seasons now. He could make a down payment on a little house on Jed’s Point. Did John remember the Reuter place? He’d be away summers, but Nan would have her home and her sister Elly nearby.

It was all Nan wanted—Phil, and babies as nice as Elly’s. She hated school, she’d die before she’d study to be a secretary or any of the things her mother talked about. If they wouldn’t let her, she’d find a way to do it, only Phil didn’t like sneaking off.

Winnie said Nan was too young, she must finish school first, perhaps they could all go on a nice trip next summer, Papa was going to buy their first automobile in the spring. “And risk losing Phil?” Nan was horrified. “All the girls are chasing him. I’m not going to wait for anything.” It was what Nan said finally about Tom that changed Winnie so that she threw up her hands, exclaiming: “I’ve tried my best. If all you want is your selfish, blind way! Someday you will be sorry.” Even John, an uncomfortable auditor of the scene, had been shocked at Nan’s cold bitterness, there was something precocious, unyouthful in it. “Look at Tom!” she had said. “You managed things the way you wanted for him, didn’t you? You got a fine wife for him, that—that codfish! That’s what she is, a pasty, clammy codfish, only she’s mean, too! No wonder Tom’s—”

“Tom’s what?” asked Winnie shrilly.

“Oh, nothing. You’ll find out.”

Then Winnie had not so much yielded as withdrawn herself from the conflict. She made no protest when Nan said she didn’t want a church wedding, she’d rather get married right there in the living room, wearing her going-away suit. Phil hated fuss. Winnie was patient and helpful about the preparations, shopping for the girl, decorating the house, ordering the cake. Nan was like thistledown in sunlit wind—ebullient, gay, flighty. The day of the wedding a heavy snow blocked the single track up from Jed’s Point, so that none of the Stillwells got to the wedding. Laura was ailing, and Tom came alone. When Nan and Phil had been driven off in a taxi after a last-minute call to the station to make sure the train for Boston would run, Winnie decided she would walk home with Tom. But Tom said he wasn’t going right home, he had some work at the bank he hadn’t finished.

“But if poor Laura’s sick—” protested Winnie.

“Oh, her mother’s there.” Tom drew his mouth down in a wry grimace, and shrugged himself into his overcoat.

* * *

When Tom had gone, Winnie cried a little. Weddings were almost as bad as funerals, the way they left the house upset and flowers all around. John helped her set things in order, and after she had gone upstairs to lie down, he sat for a long time with paper and pencil, working out plans for remodeling the boat shed. Maybe he could get down to the Point for a few weeks in the summer and do some of the work himself. Race took enough time away from the store to let John off for a while.

The only trace John saw of any effect on Winnie of Nan’s outburst about her brother was that every time Winnie came back from a visit to Laura’s bungalow, which was almost every day, she quoted something Laura had said that proved her devotion to Tom. “She wants me to tell her everything he likes to eat,” said Winnie. “She has the appetite of a bird herself, and she doesn’t even like to think about food, but she wants to please him.” John didn’t say anything. He’d stopped at the bank one day for his statement. Tom wasn’t at his window, and when John had gone along quietly to the window at the rear where they handed out statements, he’d heard a scuffle and the kind of female giggle, protest and delight, that made his ears tingle reminiscently. The girl who showed up at the window bore signs of pleasant disturbance in flushed cheeks and a visible flutter in the soft white throat above the V of her blouse. Behind her was Tom, so intent on a ledger that he didn’t look up to see his father. John walked slowly back to his store, thought with a sheepish mixture of regret and tolerance that the boy was bound to want some fun. Codfish was right. Only right there in the bank, with old J. R. at his desk! What a nerve!

In the spring they moved into the new house, and Winnie had her hands full. Then John bought a car, three hundred dollars down, the balance in monthly payments, and with some difficulty learned to drive. At first he’d dream and wake up in a cold sweat because he’d forgotten where the brake was and couldn’t stop the blasted thing this side of destruction. Fortunately the Bissetts had a new car, too, and Winnie went for drives with them, so John didn’t always have her screaming when he did something wrong.

He liked best to drive along the country roads, and he found, as soon as he had temerity enough to set out and keep driving, that the car made Jed’s Point not a remote and longed-for place, but a place he could visit every time he found a day for himself. He could see Elly and the baby and Nan. Alice Stillwell was staying with her for the summer while Phil was off on the yacht, and the two girls were like kids playing at housekeeping. He ordered the lumber for the remodeling of the boat shed, got Dice, the carpenter, to work with him. Winnie disapproved of that, but John said vaguely it was an investment, he’d rent it or something.

* * *

Altogether that year and the next were not unpleasant. Elly was going to have another baby, and she wasn’t so well this time. She looked peaked, she snapped at young Jacky, who had the dexterity of a monkey and who was safe and quiet only when he was sound asleep. Once in a while Winnie would drive out there with John, but only when he urged. She would sigh as they came in sight of Nan’s house, a story-and-a-half Cape Codder, the white paint a trifle thin on the old clapboards. Phil had given it one coat to hold the wood, later he’d do more. Nan was quieter than when John went alone, exhibiting her possessions or her prowess as a cook, waiting for Winnie to approve. Winnie was careful what she said. John would hand her that. Sometimes Elly came over, bringing her lusty son; but although Winnie admired the baby, she and Elly hadn’t really made things up. Always, on the way back to town, Winnie would say, “When I think of what I wanted them to have!”

By the time the work on the boathouse was finished—and it had come out even better than John had planned—and driving the car had ceased to be a perilous adventure, John was restless. That was the winter Laura’s mother, Mrs. Bissett, died, and after several weeks of trying to get Laura back on her feet after the shock, the doctor had said she must have a change, and how about a little trip south? Laura couldn’t go alone, but Winnie, as Laura said, her face wrinkling into fresh tears, was really like a second mother, if she would go with her. So Winifred had gone. She didn’t really want to, she said. She hated to leave John. She made lists and pinned them on the bureau, on the dining-room table, and gave them to the maid who came in by the day.

John, alone for the first time since his marriage, stretched himself, looked at his forehead, higher, more deeply wrinkled than it used to be, at his waistline, a trifle paunchy now, and walked out of his house more briskly than usual.

Not that day or the next, but sometime toward the end of the first week of Winifred’s absence, on a dull March afternoon of sleet, rain, wind, no customers, he heard at his desk in the rear of the store a little whir that signaled the opening of the front door. He went slowly forward, snapping on a wall light, and at first paid no special heed to the woman across the counter. She was bareheaded, and the lights caught on drops of sleet in her thick chestnut hair as she bent her head over the parcel she was undoing. “I brought this in,” she was saying with earnestness, and John looked at her hands, deft, white, dimpled at the knuckles, “to see if you could possibly mend it for me.” She had it out of the paper—an electric cord with the plug at the end all adrift. “It went off with an awful bang and blew out a fuse.” She lifted her head, laughing, and John thought, “Her eyes are the color of one of our brooks when it comes out of the woods onto the shore—dark brown in the shadow, but gold in the sun.”

* * *

“Needs a new plug,” he said. “We can fix that.”

“It’s my own fault.” Her wide mouth was humorous. “I knew it was used up, but I’ve been so busy. Easter’s early this year.”

Clear, thin skin, like a redhead’s. In her thirties, maybe. “If you’ll give me your name and address,” said John, “I’ll send it around.” It wouldn’t take him three minutes to repair the cord, but she didn’t know that!

“Oh, but I need it! That is, I may need it any minute. I never know.”

“As soon as it’s done, I’ll send it.”

“Mrs. Margy Ford. I’m the owner of the Bon Ton Hat Shop on the next block. Aren’t you Mr. Page? I made that black hat for your wife, the one she wore when she went on her trip. I wanted to put a dash of red on it, but she thought with young Mrs. Page’s mother just gone—”

“Oh, yes,” said John. “Yes, I’ve seen your shop.”

“Of course it’s small, but I do have a nice trade. I must run back. I left the shop all alone. I thought an afternoon like this no one would even think of a spring hat! You think that won’t take long?”

“I’ll see you have it soon.” John watched her quick step out of the store. Small, neatly turned. “She’s like a partridge,” he thought. “That’s just what she’s like.”

He selected the best heavy-duty plug in stock. His hands trembled a little as he adjusted the small screws. Mrs. Margy Ford. She hadn’t said anything about a husband. He waited impatiently for Race to show up, told him he had a couple of errands to do, and went out to the next block and the window with “Bon Ton Hat Shop” in gold letters on the glass. “I’m all ready,” thought John, as he pushed open the door.

At first John made excuses for his visits to the shop. He was tall enough to see over the back of the show window, and if there were customers, he walked briskly past. After six was the best time. The shop would be empty, and Margy somewhere in the two rooms at the rear, where she lived. She would come running out at his knock, and he would say: “I wondered if you couldn’t use this bracket. Drape some of your trimming stuff over it. It came in today.” Before long he dropped such pretexts. He thought he’d never known a woman like Margy. Friendly, talkative, guileless. She was lonesome, she hadn’t been in town very long. John found out about her husband. He had died two years ago in a sanitarium. Margy had kept him there three years, working in the Boston wholesale house where she’d learned her trade until she had paid off the last bill and saved enough to start this venture. She had courage, humor, and a tremendous zest for everything—her work, the short evening drives John persuaded her to take, and the suppers in her back room, which, presently, she allowed John to share. She said: “I suppose this is bad of me. When your wife comes back, you can’t do this, but my goodness, don’t I enjoy having a man eat what I cook!”

John wouldn’t look beyond the lovely, homely happiness he had found. He was in no hurry to make love to her; he didn’t want to frighten her. But he thought: “I am in love with her. I haven’t ever felt like this!” This was the way he wanted to feel about a woman. He woke up in the night and lay not knowing which of the images drifting through him were dream and which were waking illusion—images of life with Margy in the little house on the shore at Jed’s Point.

* * *

Then it was time for Winnie to come home again. One night John stopped at the drugstore for a quart of ice cream, and went along the alley to the back entrance of Margy’s place. He liked to watch Margy eat ice cream, her pointed tongue burrowing into the spoon, her gold-lit eyes lifting like a child’s. Tonight he had to talk to her. He explained about Winnie. She didn’t want him, but she didn’t want not to have a husband around. Then the children. Tom just beginning his career. And the business. Margy listened, the mound of ice cream softening, flattening to the very rim of the plate. “I ought to have stopped earlier,” she said. “I knew how we’d feel! Maybe I’m bad. Am I, John?”

“It doesn’t seem fair to you,” said John.

“I can’t see as it could do anybody any harm,” said Margy, and she went to him and kissed him. “There,” she sighed, her wide mouth turning up at the corners, “it’s been a long time!”

So for the next years John Page had spells of deep contentment. He felt younger, surer of himself. Margy thought he was pretty fine, didn’t she? Sometimes, humbly, he thought his feeling toward her must be what marriage was supposed to be. He didn’t mind Winnie half so much, and she seemed to keep herself rather querulously busy with her clubs and Laura’s too-frequent ailments. If she had any suspicions as to why John was placid and hard to ruffle, she didn’t let on. Margy moved into a little house on the river road, and bought a car. That made it easier for John to see her. Sometimes several weeks would go by when he couldn’t get out there, but there always were the holidays when Winnie and Laura went off together, summer now as well as winter.

John liked to tell Margy about the children and show her snapshots of them. Elly had three now—Jack, smart as a whip, and two girls. She’d had a hard time. Andrew worked hard, but luck wasn’t on his side. Elly herself worked in the summer, going out to cook. She even worked one summer at the old Hill place. Winnie took that hard. Nan had an easier time, although Phil spent his money faster than he got it. Nan had two children, younger than Elly’s, a boy and a girl. Elly was all tied up in Jack. She was trying to save money for his education. She said she wasn’t going to have him spending his life in the mud flats of Jed’s Point. Why, if Andrew had ever had a chance!

* * *

It may have been John’s contentment with Margy, or the attention he had to give to maneuvering his life so that he could see her. Or it may have been only his lack of business sense that made too late his discovery of how far along the skids Race had taken them. The years of prosperity had seemed to continue for the town and for the store. Town and store rocked with the nation in the financial earthquake of 1929, and even the money from the sale of the house did not cover their obligations. Winnie, hysterical, didn’t know how John could have signed away everything! He didn’t know himself, except that once Race had asked him to sign a note, and it hadn’t seemed much to do for a partner who had for years let John have his own way.

There was nothing left except the remodeled boat shed at the Point, unoccupied all these years. Winnie, after the wild incredulity of the first news, had pulled herself together, her pale, creased face bewildered. This was so much worse than anything she ever had imagined that she was incapable of adequate protest. Tom could do nothing to help. The other bank in town already had closed its doors, the Citizens’ Commercial had weathered one run. But as J. R. and Tom said, they weren’t in the banking business now, they ought to put out a real-estate sign. All they had were foreclosures. “You’re lucky to have a roof over your heads,” said Tom. He was short-tempered those days, his color wasn’t good, he had fits of indigestion. John thought, “If he loses his money, too, what’s going to happen to him?” But John had his hands full, moving about in a clumsy, apologetic effort to see to everything. Winnie, her skin like crumpled tissue paper, her eyes reddened but tearless, didn’t seem to care what they took with them to the Point. They couldn’t take much, the place was so much smaller. By the time John had dickered with the secondhand furniture dealer and had the van packed for the trip to the Point, he felt better. It wouldn’t be so bad. Something inside his bulky, slow-moving body was expanding, stretching, sniffing long hours in sunlight, days when a man did what he wished, each day different from the others. No more monotonous routine, eight to six, cooped up with gimcracks. He could farm a little, fish a little. They’d make out.

He hadn’t seen Margy during that fortnight. He hadn’t gone down to the store after the sheriff’s notice was pasted on the door, and he’d been trying to make up to Winnie by taking care of things. It was a domestic embroilment, in which Margy just had no part. The night before their departure for the Point, he drove out to Margy’s house. He knew something was wrong, because she didn’t come running to the door to meet him. He found her ironing, starched ruffled curtains all over chairs, table, ironing board. One of her working sprees. He’d told her once that where a man went off and got drunk, she worked.

“Oh!” she said. “It’s you! Don’t knock that curtain on the floor.” The iron flew back and forth. “I wonder you bothered to come at all!”

Margy like this? She’d never blamed him when he couldn’t get out. “I—I’ve been busy,” he said.

“Well, I’m busy now. You’d better hurry right back.”

“What’s the matter, Margy?”

“Is anything the matter? I’m sure I’d never know from your telling me!” She set the iron down on its stand, and shook the curtain into long folds. “For all I knew, you might have jumped in the river.” Suddenly she flung the curtain to the floor and rushed at him, pummeling his chest, color rising under her thin skin. “Oh, you big dummy! That dreadful sign on your door, me not knowing what you would do, how you were!”

* * *

After a moment they went into the living room and sat on the couch. John, his hands hanging over his knees, his shoulders hunched forward, told her about the business, about the move to Jed’s Point.

“That’s the little house on the shore you showed me once?”

He nodded.

“You don’t really mind going back there, do you?”

“Some ways, no.”

“What about us?”

“I don’t know,” said John. “I haven’t had much chance to plan things out. I could get away sometimes, I should think.” A long trip up from the Point. What would he offer for excuse? How could he explain to Margy how dazed and helpless Winnie was? “Not as often as I’d want to.”

“I guess we’re through.” Margy got up and walked across the room. She’d grown a little plumper. He remembered how he’d thought her like a partridge that first day he saw her. “There’s something about being married. You never even thought of staying in town. You could have found a job. You didn’t even talk it over with me.”

“There didn’t seem anything else I could do,” said John.

“No, I see that.” Her mouth pushed up in its generous smile, the lines in the corners sharper now in the fine skin. “Maybe I’ll go away, too. Business is awful poor. There was a traveling man here the other day, feathers and fancies, who spoke of an opening in a firm in Worcester.”

John got to his feet heavily. He didn’t know how he’d get on without Margy; but she was right. What kind of life would it be for her, when he couldn’t get back from the Point except once in a long time? Far under the surface, like the creak of a joint admitting age, was a faint, sad recognition that it would be a relief not to have to try to manage such trips. Margy was right, there was something about marriage. It was Winnie he had to look out for. As he climbed into his car, he heard Margy call from the door, “Take care of yourself, John!”

John knew that Margy was right. There was something about marriage, and now he’d have to give her up and take care of Winifred, his wife

“Sure,” he said gruffly, and had to swallow hard. “You—you do the same.”

Winifred’s health wasn’t very good after the move back to Jed’s Point. She faced life there with a kind of determined patience, making no complaint about such things as lack of plumbing or wood stoves in the winter. But she seemed to have one ailment after the other, almost as if, having been deprived of all her little outside interests, she turned inward upon her own anatomy. The second year she had to go to the hospital in town for an appendicitis operation, for which Tom paid. John was making a living for them, he had a garden, he cut wood on shares, he odd-jobbed around; but he hadn’t any extra. After Winnie came out of the ether, he walked along Main Street. The Bon Ton Hat Shop was a jeweler’s shop now; the hardware store offered automobile accessories. John had had one post card from Margy, from Pittsburgh. “Working in department store here and like it. Your friend,” it had said.

It took Winnie a while to recover, and then she had neuralgia, so that John learned to do household chores. Elly was too busy to help her mother even if she’d wanted to, and Nan had sort of careless ways. But the years weren’t bad for John. He got away from the house for long hours, he had cronies to chat with, he liked Andrew, and he had more pleasant, simple tasks than ever he caught up with. He knew that Winnie depended on him. She wasn’t any fonder of him than she ever had been; but her weakness needed his strength, her maladies needed his health, his presence was necessary. Elly liked to have him drop in, the grandchildren were fond of him in the careless, heedless way of children, and his feeling for Winnie had changed into a kind of sturdy tenderness, now that she no longer expected any more of him than he could give, now that what he could give her was so indispensable.

* * *

The years moved along like the turning of a wheel, season into season, with few changes. John didn’t think of himself as growing old, although he complained that too many of the people he knew seemed to be dropping off. Andrew’s father and then his mother; Lib Saunders was found dead in bed. Her daughter Kitty came home for the funeral, looking smart and citified, and stayed just long enough to dispose of the stock. She said she was married to a doctor, and Winnie, sniffing, hoped she was married to him. Jathro Steele, helping fight a fire that burned over fifty acres of woodlot, got lost in the woods, and after he crawled out, twenty-four hours later, came down with pneumonia and died. Smoke and exposure. He wasn’t old enough to go, thought John. Funny, though. You all march along together for years, and then suddenly the ranks begin to thin out.

Elly and Andrew unlocked the doors between their rooms and the main house, although Elly went on using her own kitchen. She’d been used to it too long to change, she said. It was nice to have a good front room, although goodness knows she never had time to sit in it. She’d had her way about sending Jack to college. Andrew had stood out against it, probably the only thing they’d ever had a serious quarrel about. Of course Andrew hadn’t liked Elly’s going out to work for other people, but she’d laughed him out of that. Andrew and his son never got along too well. Andrew thought the boy was lazy—nose always in a book, chores neglected. Elly did her best to stand between them, warning Jack when she saw Andrew coming, trying to make Andrew proud of the boy’s record in school. The boy was taller than Andrew by the time he was sixteen. He was all hands and feet, with a shy, homely face. He exasperated Andrew because he was slow-motioned, awkward in his ways, as if his mind and body hadn’t fitted together yet. Andrew said a son should be a man’s right hand—where did Jack get these high-falutin’ notions about college? That was for sons of rich men. He, Andrew, needed his son in his work. Elly had said passionately: “You were your father’s right hand, weren’t you? Is that all you can wish for your son?”

* * *

It was hard on Andrew, and Elly knew it. He had to look at himself and admit that he’d never have any more or do any more than he had and did right that day, that the expectation that belongs to youth was gone, that he would go on in the same way until, like his father, he began to run down. All he’d meant to do for Elly! He flailed around with the bitterest words he could find. So things weren’t good enough for Elly, she’d been dissatisfied all these years, her marriage had been a mistake, on and on. Elly, loving him, knew that he cried out because of torment and pain—and perhaps, too, hidden jealousy of the love she had for her son. She got him quiet at last, his head on her deep bosom, her face bent over him, a face a little worn and colorless, the piquancy all gone, a grave, sweet dignity on the wide, low brow, the firm mouth. She’d had what she wanted, she said. She’d had Andrew.

Well, Andrew gave in, after that. He grumbled, but when the paper had a paragraph about the scholarship Jack won the second year as one of five highest in his class, it was Andrew who carried the clipping in the pocket of his worn windbreaker until it was all ragged. The boy was smart, all right. He could have done well in almost anything, but he settled finally on bacteriology. He talked to Elly about going into medicine, but that took too many years of training. In science he could get some kind of laboratory job and then go on studying. He worked in the summers, coming home for a few days—the same, quiet, shy, slow fellow he’d always been. The spring that Hitler marched through the Low Countries and into France Elly scarcely listened to the radio that Andrew turned on the minute he got into the house. She was deeply contented about Jack. He was only nineteen, too young for an army. He was graduating in June, already had a position assured.

Nan’s husband was laid off. The owners weren’t going to launch their boat, and he had to get some kind of job. Suddenly he’d moved his family down to Bath, where work was opening up in shipyards and iron works. The women began to have classes in First Aid and Home Nursing. Winnie perked up a little and went with Elly to some of the meetings. Jack wrote that his work was fine. It was under one of the big men at Medical Center, it was as good as being a doctor, the experiments they were conducting. Later he wrote that Elly needn’t worry about the draft. The man he worked with was connected with the government, and the work they were doing was pretty important. Dr. Cutliffe said he couldn’t get on without Jack, he was a good assistant, and he’d be deferred. His work was more useful than anything else he could do. John knew by the way Elly came running in with the letter just how deep her anxiety had been. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she had cried. “He’s safe, and yet he’s helping, too! If he’d stayed here—”

The village seemed to empty out. John thought it was the way a row of pea vines suddenly shrank and withered, leaving only a few yellow pods. Old people. Some middle-aged couples, not many children around. The younger married folks had moved to Rockland or Portland, drawn by tales of high wages paid in defense work. John went slowly about his small tasks, wondering at times whether he would live long enough to see the end of the incomprehensible, constantly widening struggle. Jed’s Point seemed the only pinhead of peace left in the whole mad world. Even there, when the wind was right, they might hear an inexplicable mutter coming up from the south over the Atlantic. Target practice, said Andrew, that’s all. And even at Jed’s Point, bombers flew over.

* * *

In the spring of 1942 Andrew gave up lobstering and built, with what help John could give him, a new weir. Lobsters were a luxury, he said, and herring were food. John could row the big dory and help scoop the shining fish out of the black nets. Sometimes when the smack came in to buy the fish for the factory down the coast, the men had tales of blotches of oil on the water, out beyond the islands. John and Andrew didn’t talk much about the war. Andrew got too excited, he’d fling his arms around and start yelling. “Don’t argue with him,” Elly said. “He feels bad because he’s too old to get in it. So he has to fight it out in words.” So John would say mildly, “Yes, looks bad,” and let it go at that. The village had several practice blackouts, usually waking up folks who already had put out all their lights and gone to bed.

One day in early May Andrew and John stayed on shore to get their gardens in. The herring hadn’t been running well. Andrew said a day or two’s not hauling wouldn’t hurt. John worked all day by himself, liking the feel of the good loam between his fingers, the warm sun on his neck and shoulders, not thinking much. He liked this time of year, when the leaves were small and you could see the shape of the land through the trees. The old earth had a way of going on about its business, no matter what foolish things men did. Late in the afternoon he stood leaning on his hoe, admiring his neat rows. He’d save the beans until there’d been a few more days of sun. Then he saw Elly coming along the road—walking fast, a blind, set look on her face. John started to sing out to her to look at his garden, but she went straight past him to the house.

Elly hadn’t seen her father. She was running the dark gauntlet of shock and anguish. Andrew had failed her, someone must help her. Her suffering had stripped her of maturity, had sent her hurrying in search of her mother. “Mamma!” she cried, as she pushed open the door. “Oh, Mamma!”

“Why, Elly, whatever—” Winifred set down the bread knife and hurried from the kitchen.

“Read it,” said Elly, thrusting a letter toward her. She wound her arms tight over her aching breast and moved her head sidewise, as if she might shake off acceptance. It was from Jack—just a page, the script as flowing and unhurried as always, the note as terse. He had enlisted with a unit of medical men, he hoped his mother wouldn’t mind, he’d thought it over carefully, he didn’t feel right unless he got right into things. He was sorry not to get home, but maybe it was just as well. He thought it best to do it this way, and save all the talk about it.

“You sit down,” said Winifred, “and I’ll get you a cup of tea.”

“Andrew says he’s proud of him,” whispered Elly. “Oh, how could he do this to me? After all I’ve done for him, hoped for him—”

Winifred pushed her gently toward a chair. “Sit down,” she insisted. “You look terrible. I don’t want you keeling over.” She brought a cup of hot tea, and stood over Elly until Elly, in a sort of daze, drank it. “It’s done,” she said, “you have to stand it.”

“But if he’d only told me—”

Winifred touched Elly’s shoulder, stroking it. Elly hadn’t turned to her for a long time. Vaguely she tried to gather up some comfort, some wisdom for her. “That’s the way they do it,” she said. “Why, Elly, you even said the same thing. You said you ran off to save all that talk.” Winifred looked down at Elly’s head, the dark hair dulled now with threading gray. “That’s the way it goes. You weren’t sorry. You had to go your way. Now your son goes his.”

* * *

Elly jerked away from her mother’s hand, feeling a great irritation that she should think of anything as long past as the remote beginning of her life with Andrew. “That was different,” she said. “Jack’s whole future—”

“And I myself did about the same thing,” said Winifred. “Why, it all evens up in the long run.”

“Ever since he was a little boy,” said Elly, “I’ve planned—”

“When you were a little girl,” said Winifred, “I wanted you to—”

Elly stood up then, facing her mother, tears burning her lids. “But you didn’t feel like this! Jack’s going no one knows where! This terrible war!”

“Well, I thought I did.” A frown puckered Winifred’s worn face. “You’d run off with a poor man—It was a long time ago.”

Elly caught her breath. Her throat ached. But her mother’s words had plucked her out of her personal grief. They had made her part of a long procession. “I didn’t know I’d made you feel so bad,” she said slowly. “You don’t think, when you’re young—” She could taste tears on her dry lips. “It’s like a debt you have to pay.” She touched her mother’s hand, almost shyly. “Jack had to do what he thought was right.” Up came her head now, the wracking torment lessened. Now she could bear this with dignity. “I’m proud of him, too,” she said.

“Here comes your father,” said Winifred. “You want to tell him?”

“Yes,” said Elly. “Show him Jack’s letter.”

The End