By the house a late pear-tree was in blossom, and the sunshine, falling obliquely across it, awoke a white fire in its branches, as if piles of new fallen snow had warmed suddenly to a reflected flame. Beneath it Sarah Revercomb was sowing portulaca seeds in a rockery she had made over a decaying stump. Her back was strained with bending, but not once had she stopped to gaze at the glorified pear-tree overhead. All her life she had distinguished carefully between the aristocracy and the common herd of blossoms, and not all the magic gilding of the spring sunshine could delude her into regarding the useful product of a fruit-tree as a flower.
"I don't see why you want to go wearin' yo' Sunday clothes every day,
Abel," she observed as he was about to pass her.
"Why shouldn't I?" he retorted with the defiance of despair.
Something in his voice caused the woman who had borne him to raise herself from her stooping posture, and stare at him with an amazed and incredulous expression, as if she were asking herself when and where she could have given him birth. In her mental vision, which saw only one thing at a time, but saw that thing with great distinctness, the idea of love slowly presented itself as the cause of such a reversal of the natural order as a Sunday suit on week days. Her conceptions of life were derived so closely from facts, or from a logic as inexorable as facts, that she was conscious of a baffled and exasperated sensation when she was confronted by anything intangible which would not, as she put it in her own mind, "get out of her way." It was natural enough, she knew, that a material object or condition should possess the power to block one's progress or even to change the normal current of one's existence. Such things had happened a dozen times at least in her limited experience. But when a mere emotion assumed the importance and the reality of a solid body, she was seized by the indignant astonishment with which a mathematician might regard the differential calculus if it ceased suddenly to behave as he expected it to do. She had always controlled her own feeling with severity, and it was beyond the power of her imagination to conceive a possible excuse—unless it was a disordered liver—for another person's inability to do the same. Besides, as she had often asked herself, what was the use of not controlling your feelings when you came to think about it?
"Thar ain't a bit of use in yo' goin' on this way over that girl, Abel," she said presently, as an annotation to his last remark, "you'd better jest start along about yo' work, an' put her right straight out of yo' mind. I al'ays knew thar warn't a particle of sense in it."
There was sound reason in her advice, and he did not attempt to dispute it. The unfortunate part was, however, that in the very soundness of her reason lay its point of offence. Philosophy was dealing again in her high handed fashion with emotion, and emotion, in its turn, was treating philosophy with an absence of that respectful consideration to which she was entitled. Abel knew quite as well as Sarah that there wasn't "a particle of sense" in his thinking of Molly; but the possession of this knowledge did not interfere in the least with either the intensity or the persistence of his thought of her. His mind seemed to have as much control over the passion that raged in his heart as an admonishing apostle of peace has over a mob that is headed toward destruction. At the moment he felt that the last straw—the one burden more that he could not bear—was to be told to follow what he admitted to be the only clear and rational course. Turning away from her without a reply, he rushed through the open gate and across the road and the poplar log into the friendly shelter of his mill.
"What he needs is to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of quiet despair," thought Sarah as she looked after him. Then lifting her trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds in her rockery.
In the twilight of the mill, where he was hunted through the door by the scent of flowers, he went over to the shelf of books in a corner, and taking down the volumes one by one, turned their leaves with a trembling and eager hand, as though he were seeking some thought so strong, so steadying, that once having secured it, the rush of his passion would beat in vain against its impregnable barrier. But the books, like Sarah, treated life in the grand manner and with the fine detachment of philosophy. He could get no assistance from them, because they only told him that he would be happier if he acted always as a rational being, and this did not help him. They told him, also, in what seemed a burst of unanimity, that human nature would be better and happier if it were not human nature, but something else. Some of the writers believed that this result might be attained by making many laws and some of them were of the opinion that the way to it was to undo a majority of the laws that were already made. All admitted that the world was very badly off and that something must be done, and done very quickly, to relieve it—but the trouble was that each writer's remedy was different from every other writer's, and yet each writer's was the imperative, the essential one. There was a single point on which they agreed, and that was that human nature would be better and happier if it were different. But poor human nature, having known this ever since it left the tree-tops, went on, just the same, being all the time the thing that it was obliged to be.
"There's no help for me here," said Abel, and moving away from the shelf, he leaned his arms in the window, and looked out on the dripping wheel and the crooked sycamore, which was decorated with little round greenish balls of flowers. On the hot agony in his heart the languorous Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch. Beneath the throb of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his immediate suffering.
For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of its presence. Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he drifted into a local meeting in Applegate and entered into a discussion of politics. At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech was over, he told himself that at last he had found something that might take the place of love in his life. The game of politics showed itself to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion.