The Cinder Buggy (17 page)

“It is I,” he said. His voice betrayed his spirit, which was at the verge of panic. Enoch did not speak. His hold tightened. “I was trying to let myself in ta save time,” said John. “Agnes is lost. That is, I can’t find her. I was coming to tell you.”

Enoch still did not speak.

“Perhaps she is home,” said John. “Have you seen her? If you haven’t I’m afraid something has happened to her.”

The old man’s continued silence was unnatural and ominous. Slowly, purposefully, he drew John’s arm further in, to almost the elbow; it came to him unresistingly and bare, the cuffs of the coat and shirt having caught on the vine work outside. Then he began to explore it upward from the wrist, feeling through the flesh for the edges of the radius and ulna bones, passing them an inch at a time between his tumb and forefinger as if searching for something he was afraid to find. John’s arm had once been broken in a football game at school. There was a perceptible ridge in the radius bone at the point of fracture. On this ridge Enoch’s fingers stopped, lost their strength and began to tremble. At the same time the grip of his other hand around John’s wrist began to relax in a slow_involuntary manner.

“Aaron!”
he whispered, awesomely.

The next instant John’s arm was free and there was the sound of a body falling on the gravel inside the gate.

Now John scaled the wall. He stopped to make sure Enoch was breathing and to ease his form on the ground; then he ran to the mansion. His furious alarm brought a stolid, dark woman to the door, holding a small oil light over her head.

“Is Miss Gib at home?” he asked.

The woman shook her head.

“Does anyone know where she is?”

In a dull manner the woman shook her head again.

“Mr. Gib has fallen at the front gate,” said John. “Go to him at once and send someone for the doctor.”

The woman put the lamp down on the floor where she stood and started alone down the driveway, running.

“Call the servants,” said John. “You may have to carry him in.”

But she went only faster. He followed her. Before he could overtake her she met Enoch. He could see them both clearly in the light streaming from the doorway. The woman looked at Enoch anxiously and made as if to touch him, solicitously. He did not exactly ignore her; he seemed not to see her at all and walked steadily on.

John turned out of the light and passed unobserved in the darkness. Then he ran headlong off the grounds, feeling at each step that his knees would let him down. His emotional state was almost unmanageable. The episode with Enoch at the gate had been not only very mysterious but fraught with some ghastly inner meaning to which he had no clue whatever. He knew nothing of Enoch’s obsession that he, John, was Aaron reincarnated. He had never heard of that boyhood contest in which Enoch broke Aaron’s arm. Therefore he could not know what it meant in Enoch’s troubled brain to find in the arm of Aaron’s son the scar of a similar fracture at almost precisely the corresponding place. To him it
was
the same scar in the same arm. It was the last thing needed to fix his hallucination and the discovery had momentarily overwhelmed his senses.

In that instant he had called John by his father’s name,—Aaron!

What did it mean? Intuitively John knew that here was the key to the riddle. But he could not apply it. He could see that in taking Esther, his mother, away from Enoch his father had brought upon himself

Enoch’s undying hatred. He could understand how such hatred might naturally be transferred to the son. Only, in that case, how could he explain the fact that until now Enoch’s attitude toward him had been friendly or indifferent?

S
O his thoughts were running in this perplexed and absent manner when suddenly a very urgent question burst through.

“What of Agnes?”

She was not at home. He could think of no way to find her unassisted. He knew not where to look next and time was pressing. It was necessary to raise a wide alarm and organize a search. But he had no authority to act. It was her father’s business to take such steps. Now recalling what he had said to Enoch through the gate about Agnes he realized that it was absurdly inadequate. He had not at all communicated his fears concerning her. Therefore, though the thought of another encounter with Enoch made him shudder, he would have to go back. On this decision he came to a sudden stop and was surprised to see how far he had come unawares, and that he was not on the highway. When or how he had left it he did not remember. “I must have come fast,” he thought. He was half way back to New Damascus, not far from the mill, in a road that further on became a street running into sooty locust trees, cinder sidewalks, rows of company houses and a stale, historic smell of fried food. Turning in his tracks he was making back when his name was called from the side of the road by a voice he instantly knew.

“Thane!” he said, going toward him. “I need you. Please go—oh! I’m sorry. I thought you were alone.”

He veered off at seeing the figure of a woman behind Thane, leaning on the fence, her face averted; but Thane, coming forward, caught him by the arm, saying anxiously:

“I need your advice is why I called you.”

“Hold it, whatever it is, Thane,” John answered. “I can’t stop now. I just can’t.” He was pulling away.

“Won’t hold,” said Thane.

“It must,” said John. “I can’t stop. I’m sorry.” He liked Thane and was loath to leave him in a lurch. “Go to the hotel and wait for me there,” he said, pushing him off. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

With that he was going when the woman spoke.

“Are you looking for me?”

“Agnes!” said John to himself, as a declaration of preposterous fact. He wheeled around and stood stone still.

One instant before he had been mad with anxiety to hear her voice. Yet to the sound of it, so collected and sure, his emotional reaction was one of fierce anger. There was also a desolate world-wide sense of loss. Why he was angry or what was lost he could not have said in words. These feelings referred to her. Toward Thane there was a thought that seemed to rise behind him with purpose and power of its own; and he braced his back against it.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said, approaching her. “I found these.” He held out the handkerchief and scarf. She took them. “Then I went to the mansion... and...” There he stopped.

“Yes. What did you learn there?” she asked.

His anger kept rising. How could she be so suave and frontal about it? He had actually the impulse to set hands upon her roughly and demand to know what she had been doing, how she came to be here alone on a dark road with an iron puddler and how she could pretend to be so unembarrassed.

“Nothing,” he said. “It had just this instant occurred to me to go back and try again. I was in a beastly fume about you.”

“And seem to be still,” she said, in a way to put him in mind of the high tone he had been using.

“For reasons to which you are pleased to be oblivious,” he retorted. “It is to be imagined that I have some interest in seeing you safely home. May I take you on from here?”

“Another one,” Agnes murmured in a tone of soliliquy. “How repetitious!”

The thought touched off her feelings. They exploded in a burst of shrill, irrelevant laughter. John was scandalized. His rage was boundless. Yet at the same time his sense of responsibility increased. Abominable thoughts assailed him. He wondered if perhaps her father had not been right to keep her under restraint. He fervently wished he had never tempted her to break out. A resolve to get her home by force if necessary was forming in his mind when Thane put in.

“They ain’t no home,” he said. “That’s the trouble.”

“What do you know about it?” John asked, blazing.

“Oughten I know somewhat about it seeing as she’s my own wife?” said Thane, with dismal veracity.

John, for an instant appalled, turned fiercely on Agnes. “Now what have you done?” he asked. She was so startled by his manner that she couldn’t speak. “What have you done?” he demanded, now shaking her and with such authority that for a moment her spirit quailed. “Is it true? Are you married?”

“Yes,” she said.

“To a....” He caught the word just in time, slowly let go of her and stepped back.

“Say it,” she dared him. “To a... to... a what? Go on. Say it.”

John’s anger was gone. Other emotions had swallowed it up,—sorrow, pity, remorse, that devastating sense of loss again, more poignant than before in some new way, and above all a great yearning toward both of them.

“Where?” he asked, in a changed voice.

“In my father’s house,” said Agnes, derisively. “What a pity you missed it!”

“But what happened?” asked John.

She answered weirdly, improvising silly words to a silly tune:—

“What hap-pen-ed

“What hap-pen-ed

“What hap-pen-ed

“Here Mildred?

“That hap-pen-ed

“That hap-pen-ed

“That hap-pen-ed

“Sir, she said.”

A horrified silence fell.

“Was it flat?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I know something to do. Let’s each one tell the story of his life. Shall I begin?”

She began to sing again—

“What hap-pen-ed... “

“Please,” said John. “Please don’t. You make my blood run cold.”

“She’s that way ever since,” said Thane, with an air of sharing his misery.

“Then you tell me,” said John.

“I carried her home,” said Thane, now weary of telling it, “from where she got hurt between me an’ the Cornishman knocking ourselves around in the path, an’ old Enoch he got a wicked notion as I don’t know what an’ sent for the preacher an’ we was married. Then he handed me the blue ticket an’ put us out of the house.”

John turned to Agnes with a question on his tongue. She anticipated him and began to sing:—

“What hap-pen-ed...”

As he shuddered and turned away again she stopped.

“I was coming for my street clothes to where I live,” continued Thane, “being as I was all that time in my puddling rig an’ we got bogged here like you see us now. Nothing I say let’s do will move her. And when I say all right, what does she want, she chanties about me, making them up out of nothing.”

“When they get like that,” said John, “you have to use force. You’ve got to pick them up.”

“Can’t work it,” said Thane.

“Why not? Does she bite?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Can’t work it,’ said Thane. “Not since,” he added.

“The subject of this clinic is conscious.” said Agnes, pleasantly.

They paid no attention to her.

“You board, don’t you? You were not intending to take her there?” said John.

“Only so as to get my clothes,” said Thane.

“We can’t do anything until you get your clothes,” said John. “That’s plain. I’ll stay here with her while you go for them. But don’t be long. Then maybe we can think of something to do.”

Thane went off at once with a tremendous sigh of relief in the feeling of action. His feet made a cavernous
tlump, tlump, tlump-ing
on the hard dirt road. John, who stood regarding Agnes from the side of the road, was sure he saw her shudder. Then from the heedless tone with which she broke the silence he was sure he had been mistaken.

“It seems you know my husband,” she said.

He was surprised that she had no difficulty with the word, though it must have been the first time she had ever used it in the possessive sense—and in such circumstances!

“Can’t you think of anything feasible to do?” John asked.

“Do you like him?” she inquired.

“Because if you can’t,” said John, “I can. It’s too much for Thane. That isn’t fair.”

He supposed she was thinking. To his disgust she began to sing, softly, tunefully:

“Lovely maiden, tell me truly,

“Is the ocean very wet?

“If I meet you on the bottom,

“Will you never once——”

“Stop it!” He moved as if to menace her. She stopped and looked at him soberly.

“Is there nothing I can do to entertain you? I might recite. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“You give me the horrors,” he blurted. “No, no I’m sorry. I’m unstrung, that’s all. Please do be serious. We’ve got to think of what we shall do.”

“Who are we?”

“I beg your pardon. You, then,” he amended.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Agnes, do for... “

“Mrs. Thane, please.”

“I don’t expect you to be amiable,” he said, “but please for one moment be reasonable.”

“When they are like that you can’t do anything with them,” she said. “Really you can’t. You will have to see my husband.”

She had seated herself on a grassy bench with her back to the fence, her feet in the dry ditch, and was viciously jabbing the earth with a limber stick. She threw the stick from her, leaned back, folded her arms and tilted her chin at the sky, with an air of casting John out of existence. He had given up trying to talk and stood observing her in an overt manner. It was thus he saw how she looked at the moon, first vacantly without seeing it, then with a start as of recognition or recollection, and at length with an expression of such twisted mocking wistfulness that he knew one shape of her heart and turned wretchedly away, almost wishing he had not seen.

For a long time she did not move. She seemed under a kind of spell. Thane found them so, in separate states of reverie. Neither heard his footsteps approaching.

“I was thinking why should I bother you like this,” said Thane, “being though as we are friends in a way. If only it was so as I could touch something.”

“Thane,” said John, slowly, “listen to what I am thinking. The skeins of our three lives have run together in a hard knot. Mine and that of Agnes were already twisted together in a very strange history. Yours got entangled by chance, heaven knows why. Fate does it. Nobody is to blame. But I am responsible.”

“For us being married?” asked Thane.

“For that, yes. But for a great deal more. I am only beginning to see the meaning of things. By inheritance I am responsible for something my father and mother did to Enoch before I was born, for the fact that Agnes is his daughter and he is not my father, for the fact that he is mad. He has had his revenge on Aaron’s son, greater than he knows. What that means I cannot tell you. I shall never say it again. But what I want you to see is that I cannot leave you to face the consequences alone. It is not a matter of friendship. You are married to Agnes. In a foster sense I am married to both of you.”