The road down the slope was scarcely clogged at all. The firs, waving now and interlocking their branches in that vague joy or trouble of the winter wind, were keeping off the powdery drift. When he got to his house he saw Jerry on the way to the barn, but he did not hail him. Possibly Jerry had paid Tenney for his week, and although Raven's own diplomacy would stick at nothing, he preferred to act in good faith, possibly so that he might act the better. He smiled a little at that and wondered, in passing, if he were never to be allowed any arrogance of perfect behavior, if he had always got to be so sorry for the floating wisps of humanity that seemed to blow his way as to go darting about, out of his own straight course, to pluck them back to safety. There were serious disadvantages, he concluded, as he often had before, in owning a feminine vein of temperament. He went in at the front door and up the stairs, took a roll of money from his desk and ran down again. Charlotte had not seen him. She was singing in the kitchen in a fragmentary way she had when life went well with her, and the sound filled Raven with an unreasoning anger. Why should any woman, even so dear and all deserving as Charlotte, live and thrive in the warmth and light while that other creature, of as simply human cravings, battled her way along from cliff to cliff, with the sea of doom below, beating against the land that was so arid to her and waiting only to engulf her? That, he thought, was another count in his indictment against the way things were made.
The Tenney house, when he approached it, was cold in the darkness of the storm. The windows were inhospitably blank, and his heart fell with disappointment. He went up to the side door looking out on the pile of wood that was the monument to Tenney's rages, and knocked sharply. No one came. He knocked again, and suddenly there was a clatter within, as if some one had overturned a chair, and steps came stumbling to the door. A voice came with them, Tenney's voice.
"That you?" he called.
He called it three times. Then he flung open the door and leaned out and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against the step, with an implication of being snow-clogged and cold.
"How are you?" he said. "Let me come in, won't you? It's going to be an awful night."
Tenney stepped back, let him enter, and closed the door behind him. They stood together in the darkness of the entry. Raven concluded he was not to be told which way to go.
"Smells warm in here," he said, taking a step to the doorway at the left. "This the kitchen?"
Tenney recovered herself.
"Walk in," he said. "I'll light up."
Raven, standing in the spacious kitchen, all a uniform darkness, it was so black outside, could hear the man breathe in great rasping gulps, as if he were recovering from past emotion or were still in its grasp. He had taken a lamp down from the high mantel and set it on the table. Now he was lighting it, and his hand shook. The lamp burning and bringing not only light but a multitude of shadows into the kitchen, he turned upon Raven.