Snow-Blind

CHAPTER IV

To Hugh Garth the girl told her story at last. She seemed to realize only dimly that there were two other living beings in this house, to her a house of darkness peopled only by voices—Pete’s modest, rare boy speeches, Bella’s brief, smothered statements. The great music of Hugh’s utterance must indeed have filled her narrowed world. So it was to him she turned—he was always near her, sitting on the pelt beside the chair to which, after a day and night in Bella’s bed, she was helped.

She had a charming fashion of speech, rather slow motions of her lips, which had some difficulty with “r” and “s,” a difficulty which she evidently struggled against conscientiously, and as she talked, she gesticulated with her slim little hands. She was a touching thing sitting there in Hugh’s carved throne—he an abdicated monarch at her feet, knee in hand, grizzled head tilted back, hazel eyes raised to her and filled with adoration.

“I am called Sylvie Doone,” she said with that quaint struggle over the “S.” “I was always miserable at home.” She gave the quick sigh of a child. “You see, my father died when I was very little, and then my mother married again. We lived in the grimmest little town, hardly more than a dozen houses, beside a stream, up in Massachusetts—farming country, but poor farming, hard farming, the kind that twists the men with rheumatism, and makes the women all pinched and worn. Mother was like that. She died when I was thirteen. You see—there I was, so queerly fixed. I had to live with Mr. Pynche—there was no other home for me anywhere. And he kind of resented it. He had enough money not to need me for work—a sister of his did the housework better than I could—and yet he was poor enough to hate having to feed me and pay for my clothes. I was always feeling in the way, and a burden. There was nothing I could do.

“Then I saw something about the movies in a magazine, and pictures of girls, not much better-looking than me, making lots of money. I borrowed some money from a drug-store clerk who wanted to keep company with me—I’ve paid it back—and I went to New York. I did get a job. But I’m not a good actress.”

She faltered over the rest—a commonplace story of engagements, of failures, until she found herself touring the West with a wretched theatrical troupe. “We were booked for a little town off there beyond your woods, and the train was stalled in a snowstorm. We got on a stage-coach, but it got stuck in a drift on one of those dreadful roads. I was freezing cold, and I thought I’d make a short cut through the woods. The road was running along the edge of a big forest of pines. I cut off while they were all working to dig out the horses.

“Mr. Snaring said, ‘Look out for the bears!’ and I laughed and ran up what looked like a snow-buried trail. There was a hard crust. The woods were all glittering and so beautiful. I ran into them, laughing. I was so glad to get away by myself from those people into the woods where it was so silent and sort of solemn—like being in a church again. I can’t think how I got so lost. I meant to come round back to the road, but before I knew it, I didn’t know which way the road was. The pines were so dense, so all alike, they looked almost as if they kept sort of shifting about me. I tried to follow back on my footprints, but in some places snow had shaken down from the branches. And there were so many—so dreadfully many other tracks—of animals—” She put her hands over her face and shrank down in her chair.

“Forget about them, Sylvie,” Hugh admonished gently. “Even if there had been bears about, they wouldn’t likely have bothered you any.”

“I can’t bring myself to tell you about that time—I can’t!”

“Don’t, then—only, how did you live through the night, my dear?”

“I don’t know—except that I never stayed still. I got out from the trees because I was afraid of bears, and I lost my hat. The sun was like fire shining up from underneath and down from up above. My eyes began to hurt almost at once, and by the time night came, it was agony. The darkness didn’t seem to help me any either; the glare still seemed to come in under my lids. I couldn’t sleep for the pain. I knew I’d freeze if I stood still, so I kept moving all night, trampling round in circles, I suppose. Next morning the terrible glare began again. Then everything went red. I was nearly crazy when you found me, Mr. Garth.”

“Please call me Hugh,” he murmured, taking her hand in his. “I feel in a way that you belong to me now—I saved you from dying alone there in the cold and brought you back to my home. I’ve got jettison rights, Sylvie.” She let him hold her hand, and flushed.

“You’ll never know what it felt like to hear your voice call to me, to feel you pulling me up. I’d only just dropped a few minutes before, but I’d never have struggled up. It would have been the end.” She trembled in the memory, and he patted her hand. “I don’t know why a man like you lives off here in this wild place, but thank God, you do live here! Though,” she added with wistfulness, twisting her soft mouth, “though I can’t ever quite see why God should care much for a Sylvie Doone.” She touched the lids of her closed eyes. “I wonder why it doesn’t worry me more not to be able to see. Now that the pain’s gone, I don’t seem to care much.”

“Thank God. Perhaps, though,” he added half-grudgingly, “in a few days you’ll see again.”

She smiled. “I’d just love to see you. You must be wonderful!”

“What makes you think that?” he asked, his warped face glowing.

“You’re so strong and young, such thick hair, such finely shaped hands and such a voice.” Sylvie’s associates had been of a profession that deals perpetually in personalities. “If I’d been blind a long time, I suppose I could just run my hand over your face, and I’d know what you look like. But I can’t tell a thing.” She felt for his face and brushed it eagerly with her fingers, laughing at herself. “I just know that you have thick eyelashes and are clean-shaven. Is Bella your wife? And that big little boy your son?”

He started. “No, she’s a faithful thing, the boy’s nurse. And the kid’s my young brother—a great gawk of a boy for his age, a regular bean-pole.”

“It’s so hard to tell anything about people if you can’t see them. I wouldn’t have thought he was so big. Is he about fourteen or fifteen? He speaks so low and gently; he might be any age.”

“And a man’s height—pretty near too big to lick, though he needs it.”

“And Bella, what’s she like?”

“A dried-up mummy of a woman.”

The kitchen door creaked. Hugh started and shot a look over his shoulder. Bella stood on the kitchen threshold with an expressionless face and lowered eyelids.

“Why did you jump?” asked Sylvie nervously.

Hugh wet his lips with his tongue. “Nothing. The door creaked. Go on. Tell me more, child,” he urged.

“No. I want to hear about you now. Tell me your story.”

Hugh clenched his hands and flushed darkly. He glanced over his shoulder with a furtive look, but Bella had gone.

“No one else rightly knows my story, Sylvie. Will you promise me never to speak of it, to Bella, to Pete, to any one?”

“Of course, I promise.” Her face beamed with the pride of a child entrusted with a secret.

Then, lowering his voice and moving closer to her chair, he began a fictitious history, a history of persecuted and heroic innocence, of reckless adventure, of daring self-sacrifice. The girl listened with parted lips. Her cheeks glowed. And behind the door, Bella too listened, straining her ears.

The murmur of Hugh’s recital, rising now and then to some melodramatic climax, then dropping cautiously, rippled on, broken now and again by Sylvie’s ejaculations. Behind the door Bella stood like a wooden block, colorless and stolid as though she understood not a syllable of what she heard. But after a rigid hour she faltered away, stumbled across the kitchen and out into the snow.

There, in the broad light of the setting sun, Pete rhythmically bent and straightened over his saw. The tool sang with a hissing, ringing rhythm, and the young man drove it with a lithe, long swing of body, forward and back, forward and back, in alternate postures of untiring grace. The air was not cold. There was the cloudy softness premonitory of a spring storm; the sun glowed like a dying fire through a long, narrow rift in the shrouded west. Pete had thrown aside his coat and drawn in his belt. The collar of his flannel shirt was open and turned back; his head was bare. The bright gold of his short hair, the scarlet of his cheeks, the vivid blue of his brooding eyes, made shocks of color against the prevailing whiteness. Even the indigo of his overalls and the dark gray of his shirt stood out with a curious value of tint and texture. His bare hands and forearms glowed. He was whistling with a boy’s vigor and a bird’s sweetness.

Bella caught Pete’s arm as it bent for one of the strong forward sweeps. He stopped, let go of his saw, and turned to her, smiling.

Then—the smile gone: “What’s wrong?”

Her eyes flamed in her pale, tense face. “We’ve got to stop it, Pete,” she said. “It’s horrible!”

“What? Don’t stand out here with those bare arms, Bella.” He was pulling his own shirt-sleeves down over his glistening bronze forearms as he spoke.

“We can’t talk in the house,” she said, “and I’ve got to talk. I—Do you know what Hugh’s doing—what he’s telling that girl? What he’s letting her believe?”

Pete shook his head, but at the same time turned his blue eyes away from her toward the glowing west.

“Lies,” said Bella. She laughed a short, explosive laugh. “He’s got his ideal audience at last—a blind one. She thinks he’s young and handsome and heroic. Pete, she thinks he’s a hero. She thinks he’s buried himself out here for the sake of somebody else. Oh, it’s a regular romance, and it’s been going on for hours—it’s still going on. By now he believes it all himself. He’s putting in the details. And Sylvie: ‘Oh!’ she’s saying, and ‘Ah, Mr. Garth, how you must have suffered! How wonderful you are!’ And—look at me Pete—do you want to know what we are—according to him—you and I?”

He did not turn his eyes from the west, even when she shook his arm.

“I’m a dried-up mummy of a woman—faithful?—yes, I’m faithful—an old servant. And you’re a child, an overgrown bean-pole of a boy, fourteen or fifteen years old.”

The young man stood tall and still—a statue of golden youth in the golden light—the woman clutching at his arm, her face twisted, her eyes afire, all the colorlessness of her body and the suppressed flame of her spirit pitilessly apparent.

“Look at me, Pete.”

“Well,” he sighed gently, “what of it?” He looked down at her and smiled. “It’s the first good time he’s had for fifteen years. You know we don’t make him happy. I don’t grudge him his joy, Bella, do you? It can’t last long, anyway. Fairy tales can’t hurt her—Hugh believes—almost—in his own inventions. She’ll be going back—her friends will be hunting for her. I’ll let her think I’m a bean-pole of a boy if it makes him any happier to have me one. And why do you care?”

She drew in her breath. “Oh, I don’t suppose I care—so much,” she said haltingly. “But—think of the girl.”

His eyes widened a little and fell. “The girl?”

“She’s falling in love with him!”

Pete threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Oh, Bella, you know, that’s funny!”

“It’s not. It’s tragic. It’s horrible. You’ll see. Watch her face.”

“I have watched it.” He spoke dreamily. “It’s a very pretty and sweet face.”

“Pete, Hugh’s robbing you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you’re young. You’re ready for loving. This child—God sent her to you, to get you out of this desolation, to lead you back to loving and living, to give you what you ought to have—Life.”

It was as though she had struck him. He started and drew himself away. “Shut up, Bella,” he said with boyish roughness and limped past her into the house.