To The Market Place

PART ONE

THE CITY OF THE BEAUTIFUL TOWERS

And Esau said, Behold I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?

CHAPTER ONE

1

Autumn,—trailing out through the early Kentucky sunlight as if drawn up from the ripened fields, drifting over the damp green rolls of Clarence Menifee’s Elkhorn Farm like wood smoke, clinging to the emptied land, harvest time and the melancholy of fulfillment, of passion spent, the indefinable dove-note of fall. It was only the twenty-eighth of August and most of the tobacco was still uncut, but the dew was heavy that morning and in the wet shadows of the tobacco barns, black and striped with the yellow bands of the ventilators, a cool draught seemed to be rising from the bluegrass. You could hear a rain crow now and then moaning rhythmically over the cornfield by Elkhorn Creek and the brown mares with their foals beside them left the shade trees to graze in the sun.

A wagon loaded high with tobacco stalks, the fading leaves already beginning to shrivel, creaked into Barn Number 6 and stopped under the web of unpainted rafters from which the stalks would hang to dry. George Griggs, Clarence Menifee’s manager, stood inside the broad door with the backs of his sunburnt hands against his belt, his head tilted back over his frayed shirt collar, and watched the Negro on the highest rafter, almost invisible in the semi-darkness of the roof like a chameleon the color of his leaf, reach down for the end of the stick with the tobacco stalks hanging from it, straighten up, and lay it between the beams.

Watch yourself, Ike.

Yassa.

It’s a long way from there to the ground.

Yassa, Ike laughed melodiously. Yassa.

A young Negro unloading from the truck beneath said, Lemme know ’fo’ you start down, Mister Ike.

I let you know. I don’ reckon the ground’s no harder’n yo’ head.

George Griggs went out in the sun.

He ducked into an old coupé and drove off over the matted bluegrass toward the gate in the black fence and the field of half-cut tobacco beyond it. The Negroes were working at the south side, slicing through the tough stalks close to the ground with the oblique ends of their spade-like knives, piercing half a dozen stalks on to a pointed stick driven in the ground and piling the bunches on the bed of a wagon.

Pete, the head farmer, a mulatto, lurched across the furrows to George Griggs’s car and put a foot confidentially on the runningboard.

Well, Pete, we got a good day.

They talked for a few minutes, then George Griggs said, Sleepy brought you your other knives yet?

No, sir. I reckon he ain’t done sharpenin’ ’em yet.

I’m going by the shop, I’ll tell him to bring on over what he’s got done.

He backed round over the stubs and drove through the gate, heading straight across the smooth pasture for the road.

He stopped beside a gasoline pump in front of the white machine-shop where, when he cut off his motor, the whine of an emery wheel filled the silence. He went inside and stood across from a Negro with goggles over his slow-moving eyes, sharpening the knives, the fine shower of bright specks of metal dancing off the blade when it touched the wheel; they sprayed off in a long fan and sometimes a red spark would follow the wheel on a complete circuit.

How you coming, Sleepy? he said, putting the backs of his hands against his belt; he had got that habit after he was married from often having his fingers dirty and not wanting to soil the waist of his khaki trousers his new wife had just washed for him.

Sleepy stopped the current and the noise died out. Coming all right, Mr. George. He pulled the goggles out from his face and lifted them up to his forehead shiny with sweat.

George Griggs picked up one of the knives and examined the fresh blue edge. Don’t bear down on ’em too much, Sleepy; you’ll take all the temper out of ’em.—Here, lemme show you something.

Sleepy moved apologetically round to the other side of the wheel, willing to learn.

George Griggs stepped up to the machine and pushed his faded imitation Panama back from his forehead. He was wondering just what he ought to do about the glasses; if they had been hanging there from their hook he would have put them on, no matter how many niggers had been wearing them. Or if he had been going to work at the wheel for more than a minute he would have taken them off Sleepy’s wet head anyway; but this would take only a few seconds, and he could imagine so well the clammy damp of the leather where the goggles had been sticking against the Negro’s skin—

Want the glasses, Mr. George?

No. This won’t take a minute; I just want to show you something.

He reached behind him on the wall, glancing through the open window as he turned at the rolling green of the meadows and the sorrel mare Shoo Fly and her filly with their noses in the deep grass, and threw in the switch. The wheel jerked into motion with a rising hum.

2

Clarence Menifee looked out of his bathroom window, rubbing his fingers absent-mindedly over his unshaved cheeks. Beyond the roof of the garage he could see the hands in the west field, black midges against the rich green wall of the tobacco. It was good tobacco, top-price tobacco; and it looked like they might get it all in without a rain. Good field; too bad this was the second year of tobacco on it. Next year he would have to put it in clover and the next year in bluegrass; he wouldn’t see any tobacco growing from his bathroom for—eight years. Not until 1935! The next time he could stand in front of that window and look out at his tobacco he would be—good Lord!—fifty-seven years old. Julia would be twenty-six. Carolyn would be thirty. Carolyn would be thirty-two. It was funny how he could never remember immediately how old Carolyn was; no trouble remembering Julia’s age. Even Carolyn’s age was difficult; he grinned, thumping himself lightly on the chest with both fists. She didn’t get that from his people; she got it from her mother’s people. Theresa had been a little—that way. Even her mother, even Lucy herself, now and then—but that was different. Poor Lucy. He was glad the children didn’t know about it. Or maybe Carolyn did; you couldn’t quite tell what Carolyn knew.

He lifted his eyes for a moment from his razor strop to watch the little black square that was George Griggs’s car, back round on the cleared corner of the tobacco field and roll off behind the heavy foliage of the locust trees beside the garage. George Griggs was a good man. He probably had a better manager in George Griggs than if he had had a son as manager; too bad not to have a boy to grow up and take George Griggs’s place, but—he ought to have those locust trees cut down sometime; the niggers said locust trees drew lightning—

He turned on the cold shower, tossed his pajamas on a corner of the blue tile floor, and felt the water, leaning over not to let it splash on his bare legs.

He was in his bedroom tucking the tail of a clean white shirt into his trousers when one of the telephones on his bedside table began to ring. It was the buzzing ring of the farm phone and it kept buzzing. He looked at it; they didn’t usually call him before breakfast like this. Why didn’t they ask George Griggs? He held up his trousers with one hand and staggered across to the bed.

All right, he said carelessly.

Then his voice changed. All right, Sleepy.—Mr. George!—God damnit, I told nobody to use that wheel without glasses!—All right, all right; never mind that. Now here’s what you do. You got a car there?—All right, put him in his car. You know where Saint James Hospital is.—Yes, that’s right. Now take him right on in there and don’t waste any time about it. He liable to lose his eye.—No, don’t wait for me. I’ll follow y’all in soon as I get my clothes on. Go ahead.

He swished over the pages of the telephone book. God damn it to hell, what does he think I put goggles down there for! Limestone 8500, and hurry it. Suppose this boy loses his eye, who’ll I get to manage the farm then! Joe? Ben Knight? Ben don’t know—Hello. Is Dr. Featherston there?—All right, Miss, just get him on the phone. This Clarence Menifee talking. He fingered a corner of the bed sheet for a moment, waiting; then a man’s voice said, What’s the matter, Cla’ence? Hello, doc, he said. One of my men just got a steel splinter in his eye, George Griggs, you know him. One of the boys is on the way in there with him now; he’ll be there in five minutes.—Do everything in the world you can for him, doc. I’ll take care of the bill.—Yes, get everything ready. I’ll be there myself soon as I get my clothes on.

He opened the door into the upstairs hall, still holding up his trousers with one hand, and yelled for his butler: Charlie! Then he saw his elder daughter standing at the top of the stairs. Oh, Carolyn, honey, run down there and tell Charlie to fix me a cup of coffee right now. Just put it on the table. I got to go to town in a hurry.

Don’t you want anything else—

No, just do what I tell you, that’s all I—

3

She heard her father’s voice die away as he turned from the door and disappeared back into the room across from her mother’s. The boss. And he really was the boss, too; there she was instinctively going down the stairs at a run. Her sister would have laughed at her; Julia didn’t jump when the boss spoke. Or when anybody else spoke, either. But her mother jumped,—most of the time.

She skirted a sharp corner of the table in the dining room, noticing as she pushed through the swinging door into the pantry that Charlie hadn’t yet begun to set the table for breakfast.

Charlie was standing in a long white apron beside an electric orange-juice squeezer, the strings of his bowtie hanging loose from his open collar. Mornin’, Miss Car’lyn. He smiled and pressed the half of an orange on the spinning cone.

Charlie, father wants a cup of coffee right away. You get the coffee; I’ll set a place at the table. He’s in a hurry.

Charlie clicked off the machine, ran some water over his hands, and started for the kitchen with long strides, drying his hands on his apron and reaching for his collar.

She went back into the dining room, took a mat out of the shallow drawer in the inlaid front of the sideboard, and twisted it round on the glassy table with her palm until it was straight. She laid out some silver on it, put down a plate and a napkin, and returned to the pantry and poured him a glass of orange juice out of the pitcher. She liked the way her muscles moved in doing all this, straight out to what she wanted, never faltering, sure, no steps wasted. Steps! She was wasting her life; another year like this last one and—

I do that, Miss Car’lyn.

You get the cream and sugar. She wanted to do something, even this little something.

She set the orange juice on the plate as her father came in from the hall stuffing a clean handkerchief into his coat pocket. Hello, honey, he said. Where’s the coffee?

She thought he looked as if something were bothering him but she doubted if he was going to tell her what it was. And she doubted if she was going to ask him; he didn’t think much of women’s minds, did he? She had a good mind, a damned good mind, a damned good mind to ask him what the hell was going on—

Here it is, she said. Charlie, in a white coat with his black tie in place, came in through the swinging door with a silver coffee pot. She watched Charlie set the pot lovingly on a glass coaster.

Clarence Menifee drank the orange juice, stopping in the middle to say, Good morning, Charlie, then finishing it. He sat down on the edge of his chair and dug the broad spoon into the sugar; he held the spoon in mid air while he turned his head slightly and said, Charlie, tell somebody out there to bring up my car, then he dumped it into the empty cup.

She picked up the pot and poured a black rod of coffee, soft through its bent length with the steam. Are you coming back this morning?

Don’t know yet, he said with finality. He stirred the coffee solidly, the handle of the spoon between his first two fingers.

She didn’t want to smoke but she thought she couldn’t ask him any more without a cigarette and she wanted to ask him; she took a cigarette out of a silver cylinder. Anything the matter? she said, holding a match up casually to the end.

There was a silence while he took a sip of the coffee, then he held the cup before him, looking into it, and said briefly, Had a little accident this morning out in the machine shop.

Somebody hurt?

Um-humh.

Who?

George Griggs.

She glanced at him quickly. Bad?

George Griggs got a splinter in his eye, honey, he said impatiently.

She watched him sipping the coffee, looking over the cup rim out into the hall; she thought if she made an exclamation he wouldn’t tell her any more. She swallowed and said, You think he may lose his eye?

Now, honey, how do I know? Don’t ask me any more about it; I just don’t know. He put the cup down and stood up. And don’t bother your mother about it. I’m going in to the hospital now.

Almost before she thought, she said, I’ll go down to the office and keep an eye on things until you get back.

He frowned at her, hesitating. Then he said, All right.

She followed him out into the hall.

He stopped in the front door with a straw hat on his head. If anybody wants George or me, just say we not there. Don’t go into—

I understand.

He was gone. She heard the door of his car bang, heard the starter grind angrily a second, heard him rush away. She stood there in the shade of the door, looking down the long straight driveway to the open pull-gate on the pike. In a minute his car was through it and she watched the top shooting along the crest of the gray stone wall, gone,—they were probably giving George Griggs ether now. She blinked her eyes with a sort of shudder and turned into the dining room.

Her father had given her a funny look when she spoke of going down to the office, a quick flash of a look as if for a brief second he saw her as another person, as if for a moment she ceased being for him one of the women of the house with their ignorance of the farm and indifference to it, became for him an individual. Then, as if his reason had instantly reassured him, the look was gone. But she wondered if the same picture had shot across his mind as across hers, a picture of George Griggs, blind, incapacitated, and a girl of twenty-four moving precisely about the office, driving purposefully over the farm—

She put her bare elbows on the table and stared out the window through the shade of the porch at the pastures and the black fences dipping up and down the slopes between the bordering cherry trees. There were cherry trees along every old fence line; the birds perched on the fence and dropped the seeds. If you needed to change the shape of a field you pulled up the fence and built it somewhere else; but the line of cherry trees stayed there and it never looked as though you had changed the field at all. Her father didn’t pull up his fences; they pierced the hem of cherry trees, just as they had in her grandfather’s day. What she was thinking of was changing a fence line; no woman had ever had anything to do with running Elkhorn Farm.

Charlie passed her a plate of toast, set it down in front of her, and stood back hesitating, pressing the serving napkin between his pink palms; Mr. George bad off, Miss Car’lyn?

She answered him vaguely, liking his concern but not knowing any more about it than he did. He put a bell within reach of her hand and went out.

She remembered how, during the past year’s emptiness, she had sometimes wondered idly whether she could learn to do his job, learn to take a real hand in the management of the farm; she needed something like that. She had been away from the farm for a long time, but she could learn; she was used to learning. She could learn anything he had learned. It might take two or three years, but—she could learn to do for the farm things George Griggs probably couldn’t have learned. If she couldn’t, what was the use of school? School, school, school, ever since you were six years old; for what? To cultivate your sense of emptiness? Your ability to sense yourself drying up, twisting, withering, like a young tree in a drought? They fed you for fifteen years and then one fine spring day they said to you, All right, you are full; next please. Unless you could use it, it was a curse. Life wasn’t a void for Julia. Julia didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know anything—

Charlie opened the pantry door and asked her if she wanted some hot toast; she knew he had really looked in to see if she had gone. She stood up, wondering if she had been there a long time.

She took a cigarette and lit it walking out of the dining room. She heard a bell ring as she laid her hand firmly on the knob of the screen door to the back porch; she paused, almost more mentally than physically, then she realized it was one of the upstairs bells; it was Julia ringing for Millie to bring her breakfast.

She burst on through the door and let it swing shut behind her, a little sorry about that gadget at the top that would shut it without a sound. She would have liked to bang it. She must be jealous of Julia. Why should she care whether Julia had breakfast in bed? Jealous of Julia’s popularity—

Nonsense. Of course Julia was popular; Julia was obvious, pretty in a perfectly obvious way, even had a lackadaisical sort of provincial smartness. She herself had something else; she knew she had. She could tell by the men who looked at her twice. Of course it didn’t quite work here in Ashland where everybody knew you, where men recognized you but didn’t perceive you; but she had noticed it in Northampton, on the trains going and coming, in New York even, though she had never stayed there more than a day or two. She smiled: her clientele! No; she wasn’t jealous of anybody. She was quite happy, now,—thanks to George Griggs’s misfortune! It wasn’t his misfortune; it was—it was this chance to fasten on to something bigger than yourself, this chance of a job, of something to put your mind to, your hands to. Another year like the last and—

The brick path wound ahead of her down the slope, curving respectfully round the base of the oak tree; you had to know what you were doing to make grass grow under a tree like that. But she could learn; George Griggs hadn’t been born with the ability to make grass grow under trees. She remembered the sound of the mower moving through that grass, a different sound from the mowers cutting the Massachusetts grass beyond the classroom windows in the spring; a deeper tone, a heavy soft whir, the machinery noise muffled in the resilient density of the grass.—She had probably thought of that seeing the big mowing machine clattering in the meadow beyond the cherry trees, dropping to a slow sharp ticking now and then as it turned.

That sound also made her think of herself as a tall skinny creature of fourteen with stiff dark hair that curled a little, more some days than others, and eyes that had a slightly hesitant warmth, with the brown of one of her father’s bay mares. In fact, she thought she must have looked a good deal like a filly, with her legs too long and the nervous shyness in her eyes. Her father had sometimes laughed at her, patting her on the head, as if saying to himself that her legs were too long but that he loved her just the same.

Her legs weren’t too long now,—and he didn’t like her so well, either. He didn’t know that; he didn’t examine such questions. But she knew. It had nothing to do with her legs, but it had a good deal to do with her mind. Education again; it had made her grow up, grow away from him, and away from her mother too. She had too many thoughts that would not readily flow over the dam of speech. That sort of thing was apparent; and she thought it must have seemed strange to him, strange that it should exist in his child.

All of them probably felt that way. She had once seen her mother glance at her and say to him sotto voce, Theresa. Theresa was her mother’s younger sister who had died when Carolyn was a child. She wondered whether her mother was thinking she looked like Theresa or suggested Theresa in something she did. She came across an old photograph of her aunt one day and studied it; she couldn’t see that she had any resemblance to this tall dark young woman, somber almost, a warm unquiet something burning in her face. She never knew just what her mother had meant. She used to ask her sometimes about Theresa, but she never learned very much. Her mother told her Theresa took after their great-grandmother who had come into Kentucky from North Carolina with Boone on his second visit in 1775. Nobody in the family seemed to know much about this great-grandmother (her great-great-grandmother), but they knew that her name was Pringle, which wasn’t a North Carolina name as much as a low-country name, Charleston, Savannah, Augusta. She remembered, when she was a child, liking to think of herself as different from her friends in having this long tenuous root winding off over Cumberland Gap and down the mountains into an unknown land, but it didn’t really shed any light on what she and Theresa had in common. If she had a thread of the Deep South in her character, if she were even, through Theresa, a modern reproduction of her great-great-grandmother, she couldn’t see that it made any difference. She didn’t feel in the least like a synthesis of ancestors; she was herself; it was a new combination; it had never been tried before. There were some books in her mother’s room that had belonged to Theresa, three or four plays of Shakespeare, Othello and Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, an ornamented volume of Keats’s poetry, two or three little books stamped in faded gold, Miss Austen’s Tales. She remembered also another little book, The Analysis of Raphael’s Cartoons; she had never read it, but she remembered that she was nineteen and a Sophomore in college before she knew what it was referring to. She thought she was probably the only person today on Elkhorn Farm who knew.—But Theresa had known. She might be a little like Theresa after all—

She leaped up the two steps to the porch of the office and put her hand unfamiliarly on the knob of the glass-paneled door. She didn’t often come there; she thought she had never been there alone, certainly never when she was alone and had a right to be there. It would be good to belong there; you needed to belong somewhere. She would know all about this room, what the files contained, and the safe in the closet, how the keys of the adding machine felt on the balls of your fingers; she could really help. She didn’t know shorthand but she could type as well as George Griggs even now when she was out of practice. She had seen him; he jabbed down on the keys with one finger of each strong hand. The paragraphs he turned out looked as if they were shouting at you.

She sat down in a deep leather armchair and stretched her feet out experimentally toward the brass andirons. There were trophies all across the white mantelpiece and on top of the book cases, silver cups and urns and punch bowls, a small gold statue of a horse with his head turned slightly into the room. There was a painting over the fireplace of a spotted dog with soft ears and beautiful eyes, one paw lifted out of the brush, his tail straight out behind him.

She walked round the room looking at the backs of the books in the tall shelves: The Sportsman’s Annual, Feeds and Feeding, American Thoroughbreds, The Anatomy of the Horse,—she laughed, thinking of how startled her eye would have been if it had suddenly met The Tempest or Miss Austen’s Tales! But she could read these books in her spare time and learn about horses and dogs and tobacco and clover and grass; she liked to learn.

And she knew a few things already; she knew, for instance, that that was a compound microscope on the table by the window, and she knew that you squinted through it and examined the sperm of the stallions. And she didn’t blanch when she thought of it, either; she wasn’t born yesterday—

She heard a step on the porch. Hello, Perk.

He took off his hat. Good mornin’, Miss Car’lyn. I got the mail.

I’ll take it. She opened the screen door.

He came inside and handed it to her, standing there for a minute. Had any news of Mr. George, Miss?

No, not yet.

Yes’m.

Mr. Menifee’ll be back any time now; he’ll know what the doctor says.

Yes’m. I hope Mr. George gonna be all right.

Yes, I hope so too. She wondered if she did.

She looked at him standing there and thought of the day she had seen George Griggs in the office talking to Pete, the head farmer; Pete neither stood up in the office like the workmen nor sat in a chair like a friend; he sat on a corner of the radiator, which she thought expressed his position neatly and completely.

When Perk went away she sat down at the desk and sorted the mail. She opened two letters that were obviously bills and put them under a paperweight. She slipped the folder off a farm magazine and laid it on her father’s desk in the corner with a letter addressed to him personally. She opened two or three circulars and threw them in the waste basket. Then she pulled out several drawers of the desk until she found the big flat checkbook; she hesitated on the point of tearing out two checks and filling them in on the typewriter in payment of the bills, putting them on her father’s desk for his signature. Maybe she oughtn’t to do that; if the bills were wrong she would have to change the stubs in the checkbook.

She heard somebody spring up to the porch from the silent grass. She looked up as Julia flung open the screen door. She and this girl used to play hide-and-seek together, used to hide in the old iron kettle in the yard that they said some Menifee had brought with him over the mountains from Maryland, used to run across the fields to the racetrack and pull each other up and down the straightaway in the light sulky—

Hello, she said to Julia casually; she felt a little guilty, having Julia find her there, which annoyed her with herself and made her blush. She had every right to be there; her father had told her to look after things until he got back.

Is George in a bad way?

He got a splinter in his eye—

Yes, I know; Charlie told me. But is he in a bad way? Is he going to be blind?

We don’t know yet.

She lifted an eyebrow at Carolyn, smiling. We!

"Well, I."

Carol, you sound like a member of the firm. She flopped down in the chair and tossed her legs over the leather arm. Got a cigarette?

Carolyn pitched a package at her, which she caught expertly in one hand; she glanced at it. Oh, dear, Carol, haven’t you got any Camels? She stood up. There must be some Camels round here somewhere. George Griggs always smoked Camels.

Carolyn watched her saunter over to the typewriter desk and begin pulling out the drawers. She knew it was nothing Julia wouldn’t have done with just as much abandon with her father sitting there watching her, but she wanted to stop her, wanted to say to her, You keep out of our desks. It was a curious feeling of proprietorship as if she had already unconsciously decided she was a member of the firm. She was glad when Julia found a package.

Julia lit the cigarette gazing at Carolyn speculatively through the smoke; then she waved the match out, exhaled, and said to Carolyn as if speaking to her for the first time: "What are you doing here, Carol? Then she smiled, half teasing, Are you taking George Griggs’s place?"

Carolyn told her with unnecessary petulance that George Griggs was going to keep his own place.

She picked up a pencil and pressed the eraser against her teeth. There was a silence. In a minute she said boldly, As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind making myself useful round here.

In managing the farm!

Carolyn looked at her steadily, moved a corner of her lips, and forced a smile: Certainly. Why not? I could learn.

Why not!

"Why not?"

Father wouldn’t hear of it,—for one good reason.

I’m not so sure.

"But, Carol, you don’t know anything about farming. You’ve hardly even seen a farm for ten years."

I’ve been seeing one for the last two. She wanted to add, And it seems like ten.

"Why do you always have to do something, Carol?"

Carolyn looked out of the window; I don’t know why.

Why can’t you just live?

Carolyn answered her with a half-defiant patience; It just doesn’t satisfy me, that’s all.

Don’t be so serious, Julia laughed. Just relax, darling.

She wasn’t serious! She wasn’t serious at all. But they had labeled her serious and nothing could change it.—She was glad to hear a horn squawking distantly in the direction of the house.

Julia bounced up. There’s Freddie. She leaned out of the door: Com—ing! The horn squawked twice in answer.

She took a quick look at herself in the lavatory mirror and came back into the office. Well,—be good! She started away then ran back and picked up George Griggs’s cigarettes, glanced at Carolyn with a laugh at her theft, and bounded out.

She sat there, her eyes on the door but not seeing it.

She felt old. And serious. Maybe she was serious. Maybe she was wrong in thinking that her salvation lay in finding something she had to do; maybe what she needed was simply to be perceived, not to be so eternally recognized. She remembered Dewey’s words: In recognition we fall back, upon some previously formed scheme. In a small place, where so little was new, where so much did fit into some previously formed scheme, could be recognized, they lost the habit of perceiving; and that was stifling to someone not stereotyped, someone young, with youth’s strong wish for individuality. Maybe what she needed was a person to whom she could be simply Carolyn Menifee, not serious, not intelligent, just conscious, just acutely conscious and bewildered. There was no such person! The whole world was filled with Ted Hunters and Freddies. Oh, if her father would let her take George Griggs’s place, just try her out, as his father had tried him out, as he would have tried out a son if he had had one! She would wear heavy shoes and an old felt hat; she would look like the devil and it would be fun. She would belong.

But if he wouldn’t—why had she said anything to Julia! Julia would tell Freddie. It was really too good not to tell: Carol thinks she’s a farmer. More likely, Carol has decided to offer the brain to father. It would be all over town. They laughed at her intelligence the way Hottentots would laugh at somebody for wearing shoes. She had a body too, a good strong body; they didn’t seem to realize that. But now, if she failed at the job, if George Griggs got all right, or if her father hired somebody else, it would be much worse than before; not only the old idleness, but they would tease her.

She heard a car in front of the office and looked up to see her father. There was an unusual deliberateness about the way he got out of the car.

George Griggs had lost his sight; she knew it. She felt something happening in the skin at the sides of her neck.

She glanced away as he came in and fumbled with some things on the desk.

He sat down in his chair. Well, he said in a minute, slowly, George Griggs is going to lose his eye. Featherston says he hasn’t got a chance.

She sat there in silence not knowing what to say, what to feel.

After a while he said, It may affect the other one too.

She appreciated this taking her into his confidence. We’ll manage it, she said.

Any telephone calls for me? with a change to matter-of-factness.

She told him nobody had called. Then he said, returning abruptly to what was on his mind, I don’t want the men on the farm to know that yet. She nodded. Just say the doctor don’t know yet. And he doesn’t know; he may be wrong.

Do you want me to go talk to Mrs. Griggs?

He looked at her for a second then turned away. She’s in at the hospital now.

She felt a relief that she didn’t have to do that. But she wanted to do something, just to show him that she could, just to take the initial step. One thing would lead to another. If she gradually assumed little tasks—

I put a letter on your desk, she said.

All right, honey.

She didn’t like the shadow of dismissal in the way he said honey. She went on: There were two bills. I thought I would make out the checks for them.

It fell like a weight. You run along up to the house now.

She swallowed. I haven’t anything to do. I—I’d like to help out—

There’s no hurry about those bills. I’ll ’tend to them first of the month.

She was silent for a moment, then she said, I thought when you got back I’d go up to the barn and see how they’re coming with getting in the tobacco.

His voice had a slightly gruff quality. You keep away from those tobacco barns. I don’t want you hanging round up there in the way.

He seemed to think she suggested going up there just for amusement.

Some other time, honey, he gave her a mitigating pat on the shoulder; after we get straightened out a little bit. You run along now. He picked up the farm telephone and called the big stable.

She moved away from him to the window opposite the door; she wasn’t going to be pushed out as easily as that.

Ben over there? he said into the phone. Well, get hold of him for me, Perk. Send him over to the office.

She heard all this as just one word: Ben. He had been thinking it over all morning. He was going to train up Ben. Ben Knight! Ben Knight had probably had two years in high school—

She put her back to the window. You going to train up Ben for the job?

Thinking of it, honey, he said with some asperity. Then he added, Ben’s a pretty good boy. He may turn out all right.

Don’t you need somebody with a little more education?

Education!

She came toward the middle of the room boldly and heard herself saying in an unnatural voice, Listen, father.

He looked at her in surprise and she hesitated. Then she called back her courage and went on, How about me?

"What about you?"

How about giving me a try at that job?

Why, honey! he exclaimed.

I mean it. I— She was about to say something else, but his smile stopped her.

You don’t know what you’re saying, honey. He took her arm in a kindly grip and led her to the door. This is a man’s job. He patted her on the shoulder again. You run along up to the house now, I want to put my mind on what I’m going to say to Ben Knight.

She walked away hurriedly up the brick path. She could feel the tears running down her face but she was afraid that if she raised her hand to wipe them away he might be watching her and think she was crying. What was she going to do about her life now?

4

Through the still west window of her bedroom the soft iron clatter of the mowing machine, louder and louder up the slope, expanding, then silence and a bony ticking like an X-ray picture of the skeleton of silence, then down the slope diminuendo, the grass behind it in neat rows prostrate, rows of yesterdays stretched in unvaried bands to dry, banded into rhythmic weeks and months,—from there to Massachusetts, to the Chemistry Building on Boylston Street with the wide halls and the worn floors that creaked and the deep shadows, gas-light shadows, somehow, as if its modernization hadn’t been complete, and each shadow seeming to be impregnated with its own distinctive odor, and entering the building that first day behind a girl who later became Louisa and seeing her stop and turn her lifted nose, sniffing in amazement at the collection of smells, some listless and somnolent, hiding in corners, some piercingly fresh, impudently racing up and down the corridors, and in a minute glancing back at her and laughing, My God, this must be education that smells so bad! her soft fair cheeks dancing. But she might never have known Louisa if their names hadn’t begun with the same letter: Meade, Menifee. They worked at the same table in the Physics Laboratory upstairs, Louisa’s trim legs hooked unhappily over the rungs of the high stool, seeming not to belong there, seeming to need to get out of that dingy shade and swim in the sunlight and dance; the specific heat of lead shot was something deadly to them. Louisa would curse with a half-despairing humor. She used to help her, out of the side of her mouth, when things seemed on the point of going all to pieces.

In the spring they took a course together in a subject neither of them had ever heard of before called Paleontology; it had been highly recommended to them as a snap. It was, but largely, she thought now, because the instructor was so much more interested in the subject than in the students; he aimed his questions at significant things rather than at things the class might have overlooked. The only thing she could remember about it now was sitting at a long table drawing a picture of a fossilized brachiopod, a large part of her consciousness wandering away with ridiculous ideas. She remembered one afternoon thinking about legs, not her own as much as other girls’, thinking if only you could understand them, they must be very expressive of something. It was as if they were conscious and you ought to be able to interpret from them how interested they were in college, how interested they were or might be in men; she remembered even coming to the conclusion that the more beautiful the legs, the uglier the grades.

Louisa, anyway, bore out her conclusion. She didn’t like books, not any kind of books; her attitude toward them, Carolyn thought, was something like the attitude of most women toward stocks and bonds: she knew there were such things, but she confessed her unfamiliarity readily, even with a laugh, and she no more thought of voluntarily going into the great white library than most women would think of visiting the stock exchange. She came from Roanoke, Virginia, but that was not the whole explanation; her body seemed to articulate so perfectly she had never considered pushing on beyond that. Not that she was sensual, but that her faults and virtues were largely those of a well-brought-up child. Carolyn thought affectionately that Louisa might have got along very well with the savages in Typee. She was simple and kind and good-humored, rather tall, with a well-controlled tendency to be stout.—The next year they roomed together in a house on Plympton Street and sat on the roof of the porch outside their window on spring nights to keep the cigarette smoke away from the vigilant nose of Mrs. Beam, the house-mother.

She thought they got along well because of their very differences; so often what she was afraid of was simple to Louisa, and the other way round. It was satisfying to have such a trustworthy communication with the unknown; she repaid Louisa for making her go to dances at Amherst and New Haven by helping her to find the specific gravity of a column of mercury.

Then that summer before her Senior year, Louisa traveling in Europe with her mother, and she sitting there by that same window, at just this time of year too, reading that momentous letter in which Mrs. Meade had told Louisa, with that blithe disdain of schooling that occasionally flowered so beautifully in the South, that she need not come back to college until January.

And reading on, with an increasing odd sort of loneliness, of Louisa and her mother two weeks in San Rafael in the villa of a young American painter they had met in Paris, and connecting this at once, bitterly, with Louisa’s not coming back. He reminds me of—who? You would never guess in the world. It’s really quite ridiculous. He reminds me of you, darling! Oh, I don’t suppose you all are really alike, but I knew before I said a dozen words to him that he would like your kind of weather, your kind of books. He’s been over here two years, painting—well, Carolyn, the God-damnedest-looking things. There’s one— rushing on over the rest of the letter, resenting this man, this Owen Woodruff. Owen! She hated people named Owen, anyway. Wondering for a few minutes, standing there, if she would go back to college either. What was the use of college without Louisa? Then looking out of the window and being glad that Ted Hunter was coming in an hour or two.

Mr. Hunter had bought his farm, across the Boonesborough Pike, from her father, paid him seven hundred and fifty dollars an acre for it. Price was nothing to Mr. Hunter; he had started out, people said, as a soda-water clerk and now owned a chain of drug stores that covered the country; they said too that he had bought the farm because his wife hoped to ride into Society on the back of thoroughbred horses. Anyway, she had the head gardener hoist an American flag to the peak of the pole on the terrace when the family was in residence.

But Ted wasn’t so bad, dumb but nice enough. In fact she had thought she was in love with Ted Hunter, might marry him when she got through college. And all that gone now without a trace. Even at the time it hadn’t meant very much. A week before she returned to Northampton he went to California and, six months later, he was married, and she remembered now being surprised at how little it mattered to her. She thought there must have been hardly anything personal in her loving him; she was twenty-one and on a holiday; he could dance well and his father had given him a long sky-blue automobile for having finally graduated from Princeton.—She went back to college, perhaps a little depressed by his going away, but much more by the thought that Louisa wasn’t coming back until January.

But she didn’t see Louisa for almost a year, not until the following summer, that long first summer after graduation, to all appearances the same as others, but something missing in it, an end, a boundary, and Louisa’s telephone cutting through that interminable August like the solid reassurance of her laugh. They had just got back; she wanted Carolyn to come to Roanoke.

It’s embarrassing to tell you how quick I’m coming.

Two weeks in Roanoke, then three, then four, hating to go home, Louisa the same peculiarly forthright direct lovable creature as before, though swathed now in Europe like a new coat, full of travel, the personal side of it, the people she had met, what they had said and done, but a little reticent, Carolyn thought, about Owen Woodruff. It was a week before Louisa slid a photograph from beneath a box in her dressing table and spun it carelessly across the glass to Carolyn, not saying anything when Carolyn looked at her but holding back a smile. I made him shave that off, referring to the full black mustache which Carolyn was beginning to think a little ridiculous in somebody Owen’s age. He didn’t look like an artist; he was muscular, even heavy, and his eyes, though they might be sensitive, seemed too practical, too aware of reality; he didn’t seem like a person who would overlook having his hair cut or forget what day of the week it was, as an artist should. But the more she thought about him the more she wondered if her failure to be particularly pleased with him was not owing to the same sort of instinctive distrust that a parent would feel; she didn’t like him for doing this to Louisa, something she hadn’t been able to do. She rather hoped the whole thing might blow over; he wasn’t coming back for a year and she thought there was a good chance that it might.

Then back to Ashland and Elkhorn Farm, feeling better in a way from seeing Louisa, worse in another way from Louisa’s having Owen. During the winter the second gradually merged with her other loneliness. She remembered now how her identity had seemed somehow to be threatened, threatened in the midst of the very people who knew her identity best, threatened by inertia, by folded hands. It seemed to be dying. There had been lots of little things to do, lots of things to cling to, but they all seemed to pull out when she tried to lift herself by them. She remembered the few pages of a journal that had grown out of her idleness, over there now locked in that drawer, beyond the clattering of the mowing machine.

She went to the desk and took out the little book: Some people say you never really feel at home in a landscape shaped differently from the one you were born in. But I’m not interested in feeling at home. Home is something for the early years and the late years, not for the middle ones. It isn’t enough to be recognized, like an animal, by the pointedness of my nose or the length of my ears or the white spot over my eye.… These broad quiet slopes, these green pastures, this endless placid loveliness! It reminds me of nothing so much as that red desert in Spain Aunt Eunice and I drove through one spring,—as if being beautiful instead of hideous didn’t matter at all, was just phrasing the same thing differently. But I suppose any emotion unbroken for very long will cry for relief.… You are a product of your country, they say. I don’t think that is the whole story, though it is probably something. If I could be seen in terms of countryside I suppose I should seem more like Kentucky than any other place. And yet there is another note too, the somber one, the ‘Theresa motif,’ the one out of the far South. I remember reading of the streams in that country, black creeks running through almost impenetrable swamps, not through open meadows like ours, not bordered with sharp banks like ours, but running on in a deep sort of jungle, shady, the trees hanging over them, unapproachable. I have felt that way—

She closed the book. It was pathetic. And everything today was just as it had been then.—No, there was a difference. She was going to do something about this. What? She didn’t know; she was first going to write Louisa. How she turned to Louisa! Write Louisa to come visit her; they would figure out something, plan something together.…

When she got a letter from Louisa in the next morning’s mail she knew it was a mere coincidence, but it seemed like more than that, like the Fates picking up her thread again after apparently discarding it:

CAROL, DEAR,—

I’m off on the big adventure and you are going to join me! We, you and I, are going to New York! We are going to take a little apartment on Tenth Street (or maybe Eleventh) and we are going to get jobs and support ourselves. We can stay for a few days with Emma Fisher while we find an apartment,—if Emma will go on and have her baby (imagine having a baby in New York!). But if we can’t stay with her we can stay at the Smith Club; or I know two girls, do you remember Clara and Evelyn? They have been up there four or five years—

5

Carolyn looked off down the ponderous wall of black armor of the train, almost ashamed of the exhilaration in her heart. Her mother’s lips moved in tense abstracted smiles and she knew that her eyes were wet without looking at them; her mother was feeling a little sorry for herself again, being coolly deserted by one of her ungrateful daughters. Trouble tomorrow, she thought; she wondered if Julia knew. Coolly deserted by ungrateful youth was what it was, Carolyn’s youth, her own youth—

Telegraph us when you get there, her father said.

She smiled. I will. He always said that when she left, as if she were starting out on some perilous voyage over undiscovered seas,—and maybe she was. He was kind; they were all kind. She tried not to look at them; she might weep out of sympathy.

But she knew that even if she did weep, weep quite honest tears too, it wouldn’t affect at all this deep elation inside her. She was going out into the sunlight; she wasn’t leaving home, she was going home, going back to herself, her real self that nobody here knew.

She had a check in her pocketbook for the money she had saved since she had been there; she had spent hardly anything for a year and a half. It amounted now to a little over twelve hundred dollars. She could live on that for—well, she didn’t know how long, things were expensive in New York, but long enough to find a job. After that she would be free. You’ll get tired of it, they said, or implied. Tired of freedom! When you’re ready to come home, her father said, just wire me and I’ll send you your ticket. It had simply never occurred to him she might have made enough money to buy her own ticket. Your room will be waiting for you. They didn’t know what this meant; they couldn’t see that to have work, to be worth money to somebody—she wasn’t coming back. Not ever.

’Board!

Her mother gave her a delirious hug. Let us know where to write you, honey.

I will.

Guard your virtue, Carol dear.

Julia! her mother cried.

But, mother, Julia whined, don’t you think she should?

That’ll do!

All right, Carol, mother says to shoot the works.

She laughed at them and waved as they began to glide past her. Good-by, she thought; good-by to all your varied patronage, sweet and kind and bitter. Good-by to being molded against your will; good-by to recognition. And good-by, too, to the nice things, to pointless talk, to being loved as a matter of course. She looked out at the tobacco warehouses rattling along beyond the glass of the door blurred by inexplicable tears. Then the warehouses ended with a snap of quiet; she went inside.

There below the window was the Boonesborough Pike that led out to the farm. She had sat there in a car many a day waiting for the train to cross, the bell on the pole tinkling. She knew just how this train looked from the road, with the engineer turning his blue-striped cap that seemed blown into a peak by the wind, to gaze down on her as he passed and shake his wrist in that slow sort of joggle peculiar to railroads, and the Negro fireman moving across the opening in the cab. She remembered how she used to think that when the fireman threw a shovel of coal into the furnace she could see the engine spring forward like a horse under a jockey’s whip. And now it was all reversed, mirrored, and there was somebody else in a car by the tinkling bell waiting for the train to pass, somebody going home to lunch wrapped in his warm and comfortable habits, somebody she was leaving behind. Good-by, she murmured; good-by to you, to habits! She waved at him impulsively through the black window screen.

Her exhilaration returned. She looked out of the window at the meadows, the low knolls and valleys, rising and falling with the ground-swell of some vivid green sea, at the dark bouquets of trees like olives sitting on end, at the grazing horses near and far, at the white fences with the horizontal rails spaced wider at the top; and she knew it was home and she knew it was beautiful, and she didn’t care if she never saw it again. She wasn’t sure whether she was running away from something or running to meet something, but she was running.

Then the details that she knew dropped behind and behind, until she knew only general things, the way the land felt under your feet, the way the houses were shaped inside, the way the crops were gathered.

Then this faded out too and there was a curve and a tunnel and strange mountains began to droop down upon her; it was as if she had been watching from the back platform someone she knew waving a handkerchief to her and now lost it at last and walked away into the train. When she saw a black hillside and a black framework for dumping coal she turned her eyes back into the car: home had disappeared, her voyage had begun.