The Wild Olive: A Novel

by Basil King

He took a step or two toward the forest, and paused again, still staring upward. Where was he going? Where could he go? The question presented itself with an odd pertinence that drew his set, beardless lips into a kind of smile. When he had first made his rush outward the one thing that seemed to him essential was to be free; but now he was forced to ask himself: For what purpose? Of what use was it to be as free as wind if he was to be as homeless? It was not merely that he was homeless for the moment; that was nothing; the overwhelming reflection was that he, Norrie Ford, could never have a home at all—that there was scarcely a spot within the borders of civilized mankind where the law would not hunt him out.

This view of his situation was so apparent and yet so new that it held him stock-still, gazing into space. He was free—but free only to crawl back into the jungle and lie down in it, like a wild beast.

"But I'm not a wild beast," he protested, inwardly. "I'm a man—with human rights. By God, I'll never let them go!"

He wheeled round again, toward the lower lands and the lake. The lights glowed more brightly as the darkness deepened, each lamp shining from some little nest, where men and women were busied with the small tasks and interests that made life. This was liberty! This was what he had a claim upon! All his instincts were civilized, domestic. He would not go back to the forest, to herd with wild nature, when he had a right to lie down among his kind. He had slept in the open hundreds of times; but it had been from choice. There had been pleasure then, in waking to the smell of balsam and opening his eyes upon the stars. But to do the same thing from compulsion, because men had closed up their ranks and ejected him from their midst, was an outrage he would not accept. In the darkness his head went up, while his eyes burned with a fire more intense than that of any of the mild beacons from the towns below, as he strode back to the old root-hedge and leaped it.

He felt the imprudence, not to say the uselessness, of the movement, as he made it; and yet he kept on, finding himself in a field in which cows and horses were startled from their munching by his footstep. It was another degree nearer to the organized life in which he was entitled to a place. Shielded by a shrubbery of sleeping goldenrod, he stole down the slope, making his way to the lane along which the beasts went out to pasture and came home. Following the trail, he passed a meadow, a potato-field, and a patch of Indian corn, till the scent of flowers told him he was coming on a garden. A minute later, low, velvety domes of clipped yew rose in the foreground, and he knew himself to be in touch with the civilization that clung, like a hardy vine, to the coves and promontories of the lake, while its tendrils withered as soon as they were flung up toward the mountains. Only a few steps more, and, between the yews, he saw the light streaming from the open doors and windows of a house.

It was such a house as, during the two years he had spent up in the high timber-lands, he had caught sight of only on the rare occasions when he came within the precincts of a town—a house whose outward aspect, even at night, suggested something of taste, means, and social position for its occupants. Slipping nearer still, he saw curtains fluttering in the breeze of the August evening, and Virginia creeper dropping in heavily massed garlands from the roof of a columned veranda. A French window was open to the floor, and within, he could see vaguely, people were seated.

The scene was simple enough, but to the fugitive it had a kind of sacredness. It was like a glimpse into the heaven he has lost caught by a fallen angel. For the moment he forgot his hunger and weakness, in this feast for the heart and eyes. It was with something of the pleasure of recognizing long-absent faces that he traced the line of a sofa against the wall, and stated to himself that there was a row of prints hanging above it. There had been no such details as these to note in his cell, nor yet in the courtroom which for months had constituted his only change of outlook Insensibly to himself, he crept nearer, drawn by the sheer spell of gazing.

Finding a gate leading into the garden, he opened it softly, leaving it so, in order to secure his retreat. From the shelter of one of the rounded yew-trees he could make his observations more at ease. He perceived now that the house stood on a terrace, and turned the garden front, its more secluded aspect, in his direction. The high hedges, common in these lakeside villages, screened it from the road; while the open French window threw a shaft of brightness down the yew-tree walk, casting the rest of the garden into gloom.

To Norrie Ford, peeping furtively from behind one of the domes of clipped foliage, there was exasperation in the fact that his new position gave him no glimpse of the people in the room. His hunger to see them became for the minute more insistent than that for food. They represented that human society from which he had waked one morning to find himself cut off, as a rock is cut off by seismic convulsion from the mainland of which it has formed a part. It was in a sort of effort to span the gulf separating him from his own past that he peered now into this room, whose inmates were only passing the hours between the evening meal and bedtime. That people could sit tranquilly reading books or playing games filled him with a kind of wonder.

When he considered it safe he slipped along to what he hoped would prove a better point of view, but, finding it no more advantageous, he darted to still another. The light lured him as it might lure an insect of the night, till presently he stood on the very steps of the terrace. He knew the danger of his situation, but he could not bring himself to turn and steal away till he had fixed the picture of that cheerful interior firmly on his memory. The risk was great, but the glimpse of life was worth it.