As she entered the little village of Piping Tree, her desire to hear Abel's speech left her as suddenly as it had come, and she began to wish that she had not permitted herself to follow her impulse, or that at the last moment she had forbidden Gay to accompany her. In place of the cool determination of an hour ago, a confusing hesitancy, a baffling shyness, had taken possession of her, weakening her resolution. She felt all at once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion against which she ought to have struggled to the end. Simple as the incident of the ride had appeared to her in the morning, she saw now that it was, in reality, one of those crucial decisions, in which the will, like a spirited horse, had broken control and swerved suddenly into a diverging road in spite of the pull of the bit.
"I don't believe I'll stay, after all, Jonathan," she said weakly. "It's so hot and I don't really want to hear him."
"But we're here now, Molly, and he's already begun." Against the feminine instinct to fight the battle and then yield the victory, he opposed the male determination to exact the reward in return for the trouble. "It's over there in the picnic grounds by the court-house," he pursued. "Come on. We needn't dismount if you don't feel like it—but I've a curiosity to know what he's talking about."
Her fuss, of course, he told himself, had been foolish, but after she had made the fuss, he had no intention of returning without hearing the miller. Abel's ambition as an orator bored him a little, for in his class the generations ahead of him had depleted the racial supply of political material. The nuisance of politics had been spared him, he would have said, because the control of the State was passing from the higher to the lower classes. To his habit of intellectual cynicism, the miller's raw enthusiasm for what Gay called the practically untenable and ideally heroic doctrine of equality, offered a spectacle for honest and tolerant amusement.
"Oh, come on," he urged again after a moment, "we'll stop by the fence under that cherry-tree and nobody will see us."
As he spoke he turned his horse toward the paling fence, while Molly hesitated, hung back, regretted bitterly that she had come, and then slowly followed. In the cherry-tree, which was laden with red cherries a little over ripe, birds were quarrelling, and for a minute she could not separate the sound of Abel's voice from the confusion around her. Then his figure, standing under a stunted cedar on a small raised platform, which was used for school celebrations or out-of-door concerts, appeared to gather to itself all that was magnetic and alive in the atmosphere. Of the whole crowd, including Gay, the speaker in his blue shirt, with his head thrown back enkindled from the fire of his enthusiasm, seemed the one masculine and dominating intelligence. To Molly he represented neither orator nor reformer, but a compelling force which she felt rather than heard. What he said she was hardly aware of—for it was emotion not thought that he aroused in her.
"That's good!" said Jonathan quietly at her side, and glancing at him she realized that Gay was regarding merely a picturesque embodiment of the economic upheaval of society. Judging the scene from Gay's standpoint, she saw that it was, after all, only the ordinary political gathering of a thinly settled community. The words, she knew now, were familiar. It was the personality of the speaker which charged them with freshness, with inspiration. What was it but the old plea for social regeneration through political purity—an appeal to put the dream of the idealist into the actual working of the State, since it is only through the brain of the dreamer that a fact may be born into the world.
"He can speak all right," observed Gay carelessly, "there's no doubt about that."
"I'd like to go, if you don't mind," answered Molly, and turning she rode softly away from the picnic grounds through the scattered hamlet, too small to be called a village. An old man, killing slugs in a potato field, stared after them with his long stemmed corn-cob pipe hanging loosely between his lips. Then when they had disappeared, he shook his head twice very solemnly, spat on the ground, and went on patiently murdering slugs.
"'Tis that fly-up-the-creek miller as they've come arter," he muttered. "Things warn't so in my day, so they oughtn't to be so now. I ain't got no use for anything that ain't never been befo'."