Out of the Air

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

Exploring Lutetia’s domain gave results only second in satisfaction to exploring Lutetia’s mind. It was obvious at his first inspection that the garden had once stretched contrasting glories of color and perfume. A careful study from the windows was even more productive than a close survey. There, definitely, he could trace the remains of flower-plots; pleached paths; low hedges and lichened rocks. Resurrecting that garden would be an integral part of the joy of resurrecting Lutetia. By this time also, he had explored the barn. There, a big roomy lower floor sustained only part of a broken stairway. The equally roomy upper floor seemed, from such glimpses as he could get below, to be piled with rubbish. Some day, he promised himself, he would clean it out. Beyond, and to the right of the barn, bounded by the stone wall, scrambled a miniature wilderness. That wilderness evaded every effort of exploration. Only an axe could clear a trail there. Another day he would tackle the wilderness. But in the meantime he would devote himself to garden and lawn; in the meantime also loaf and invite his soul. After all, that was his main reason for coming to Quinanog. Whenever he thought of this, he took immediately to the Gloucester hammock.

Every morning he walked briskly over the long mile of road, shaded with wine-glass elms, slashed with vistas of pasture, pond, and brook which lay between Blue Meadows and the Quinanog post-office. When he had inquired for his mail—usually he had none—he strolled over to the general store and made his few simple purchases. He had followed this routine for ten days before it occurred to him that he had not seen a newspaper since he settled himself at Blue Meadows. “I’ll let it go that way, I guess,” he said to himself. He noticed at first with a little embarrassment and then with amusement that the groups in the post-office waiting for mail, the customers at the general store, were all quietly watching him. And one morning this floated to him from behind a pile of cracker boxes:

“He’s the nut that’s taken the Murray place. Lives all alone—batching it. Some sort of highbrow.”

Gradually, however, he made acquaintance. Silas Turner, who owned the next farm to Blue Meadows, offered him a ride one morning on the road. Out of a vague conversation on the weather and real estate, Mr. Turner dropped one interesting fact. He had known Lutetia Murray. This revelation kept Lindsay chatting for half an hour while Mr. Turner spilled a mass of uncorrelated details. Such as Miss Murray’s neighborliness; the time her cow ran away and Art Curtis brought it back; how Miss Murray admired Mis’ Turner’s beach plum jelly so much that Mis’ Turner always made some extra just for her. As they parted he let fall dispassionately: “She was a mighty handsome woman. Fine figure!” He added, still dispassionately but with an effect somehow of enthusiastic conviction, “She kept her looks to the last day of her life.”

Useless, all this, for a biography, Lindsay reflected; but it gave him an idea. He bought that day a second-hand bicycle at the Quinanog garage; and thereafter, when the devil of restlessness stirred in his young muscles, he trundled about the countryside in search of those families mentioned in Lutetia’s letters. Some were utterly gone from Quinanog, some were not affording, and some added useful detail; as when old Mrs. Apperson produced a dozen letters written from Europe during Lutetia’s first trip abroad. “I’d have admired to go to Europe, but it never came so’s I could,” said Mrs. Apperson. “When Miss Murray went, she wrote me from every city, telling me all about it. I read ’em over a lot—makes me feel as though I’d been there too. And every Decoration Day,” she added inconsequently, “I put a bunch of heliotrope on her grave. She just loved the smell of heliotrope.”

Somehow, Lindsay had never even thought of Lutetia’s grave. The next day he made that pilgrimage. The graveyard lay near the town center, overtopped by the pine-covered hill which bore three austere white buildings—church, town-hall, and grange. The grave itself was in a patch of modern tombstones, surrounded by the flaking slabs of two centuries ago. The stone was featureless, ill-proportioned; the inscription recorded nothing but her name and the dates of her birth and death.

The note which most often came out of these wayside gossipings was a high one—of the gaiety and the brilliancy of the Blue Meadows hospitality. Apparently people were coming and going all the time; some distinguished; some undiscovered: but all with personality. When Lindsay returned from such a talk, the old house glowed like an opal—so full did it seem of the colors of those vivacious days.

But he was not quite content to be long away from his own fireside. The friendly atmosphere of the Murray house continued to exercise its enchanting sway. He always felt that one room became occupied the instant he left it, that the one he was about to enter was already occupied—and this feeling grew day by day, augmented. It brought him back to the house always with a sense of expectancy. “Lutetia’s house is my hotel-lobby, my movie, my theater, my grand opera, my cabaret,” he wrote Spink. “There’s a strange fascination about it—a fascination with an element of eternal promise.”

At times, when he entered the trellised doorway, he found himself expecting someone to come forward to greet him. It kept occurring to him that a neighbor had stopped to call, was waiting inside for him. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would drift slowly out of a delicious sleep to a sense, equally delicious, of being most gently and lovingly companioned in the room; sometimes in the morning he would wake up with a snap, as though the house were full of company. For a moment the whole place would seem brilliant and gay, and then—it was as though a bubble burst in the air—he was alone. “It’s almost as good,” he wrote Spink, “as though you were here yourself, you goggle-eyed hick, you!” Once or twice he caught himself talking aloud; addressing the empty air. He stifled this impulse, however. “People always have a tendency to get bughouse,” he explained to Spink, “when they live alone. I used to do that in your rooms. I’m going to try to keep sane as long as possible.”