IN WHICH YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED
Some six months after Abel's parting from Molly, he might have been seen crossing the lawn at Jordan's Journey on a windy November morning, and even to a superficial observer it would have been evident that certain subtle modifications had been at work in his soul. Disappointed love had achieved this result with a thoroughness which victorious love could not have surpassed. Because he had lost Molly, he had resolved, in his returning sanity, that he would make of himself the man who might have won Molly had she known him in his completeness. And in the act of resolving, his character had begun to ripen into the mellowness of maturity.
The day was bleak, and something of this external bleakness was reflected in the look which he raised to the ivy draped dormer-windows in the hooded roof. Small greyish clouds were scudding low above the western horizon, and the sorrel waste of broomsedge was rolling high as a sea. The birds, as they skimmed over this billowy expanse, appeared blown, despite their efforts, on the wind that swept in gusts out of the west. On the lawn at Jordan's Journey the fallen leaves were dancing madly like a carnival in rough carousal. Watching them it was easy to imagine that they found some frenzied joy in this dance of death—the end to which they had moved from the young green of the bud through the opulent abundance of the summer. The air was alive with their sighing. They rustled softly under foot as Abel walked up the drive, and then, whipped by a strong gust, fled in purple and wine-coloured multitudes to the shelter of the box hedges, or, rising in flight above the naked boughs, beat against the closed shutters before they came to rest against the square brick chimneys on the roof.
Beneath the trees a solitary old negro was spreading manure over the grass, hauling it in a wheelbarrow from a pile somewhere in the barnyard. Back and forth he passed, scattering the fine manure from his spade until the wheelbarrow was empty, when he replenished it in the barnyard and returned to his sprinkling. All the while he smoked steadily a long corncob pipe, and to watch him at his task, was to receive an impression that the hauling of manure was sufficient to fill one's life with dignity and contentment. The work appeared no longer a menial employment but a sober and serious share of the great problem of production.
"That's the way I intend to go about the work of my mill," thought Abel, as he watched him. "When you do it like that it really makes very little difference what you are doing. It all comes to good." A minute before his thought had been on the new roller mill he had recently bought and was now working in his primitive little building, which he had slightly remodelled. The next thing to go, he supposed, would be the old wooden wheel, with its brilliant enamel of moss, and within five years he hoped to complete the reconstruction of his machinery on lines that were scientific rather than picturesque. His water power was good, and by the time he could afford an entire modern equipment, he would probably have all the grain at his door that he was ready to handle. Then he began to wonder, as he had often done of late, if the work of the farm and the mill might be left safely to Abner and Archie when he went up to Richmond to the General Assembly, in the event of his future election? Already he had achieved a modest local fame as a speaker—for his voice expressed the gradual political awakening of his class. Though he was in advance of his age, it was evident, even to the drowsy-eyed, that he was moving in the direction whither lagging progress was bound. In the last eighteen months he had devoured the books of the political economists, and he had sucked in theories of social philosophy as a child sucks in milk. That the business of the politician is not to reshape theories, but to readjust conditions he was ready to admit, yet impelled by a strong religious conviction, by a belief in the determining power of a practical Christianity, he was sharing the slowly expanding dream of his century—the dream of a poverty enriched by knowledge, of a social regeneration that would follow an enlightened and instructed proletariat. Ripples from the thought waves of the world had reached him in the dusty corners of his mill at Old Church. Since no man thinketh to himself, he could no more have escaped the mental impulsion of his time than he could have arrested his embryonic development from the invertebrate to the vertebrate. His mind being open, ideas had entered, and having entered, they proceeded immediately to take active possession. He was serving a distant Utopia of industrial democracy as ardently as a lover serves his mistress.
As for his actual mistress, she had become not only visionary, but enskied. Some months ago, while his wound was still fresh, he had not suffered his thoughts to dwell on her because of the violence of the pain. Pride as well as common sense, he had told himself during the first weeks of his loss, demanded that he should banish her image from his mind. Though he had never, even in his first anger, called her "a light woman," he had come perilously near the feeling that she had grazed the skirts of impropriety with a recklessness which no sober minded son of Sarah Revercomb could countenance for a minute. His very success as a miller depended upon an integrity of character which permitted no compromise with the fundamental moralities. Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds. What Abel had never divined was that Molly, like himself, might approach the angelic in one mood and fall short of the merely human in another—that she, also, was capable of moments of sublimation and of hours of recusancy. There were the ashes of a poet in her soul as in his, and to contain the ashes of a poet one must have been first the crucible for purifying flames.
But it was six months ago that he had condemned her, and since then the subtle modifications had worked in his habit of thought. As the soreness passed from his heart, he had nursed the scar much as a crusader might have cherished a wound out of the Holy Wars. From the actual conditions of life in which he had loved her, he now beheld her caught up into the zone of ideal and impossible beauty. Through the outer covering of her flesh he could see her soul shine, as the stars shone through the web of purple twilight on the marshes. From his earlier craving for possession, his love had grown, through frustration and disappointment, into a simpler passion for service.
"Well, one has to find out things," he said to himself on this November morning, while he watched the old negro at his work. Some red leaves whirled into his face, and the wind, lifting the dark hair from his forehead, showed three heavy furrows between his knitted brows. He appeared a little older, a little braver, a little wiser, yet there was about him still the look of superb physical vitality which had been the result of a youth spent in the open fields.
"Howdy, Uncle Boaz," he said to the old negro, who approached with his wheelbarrow. "Your folks have all gone away for good haven't they?"
"Hit looks dat ar way, marster, hit sutney do look dat ar way."