Possession

by Louis Bromfield

She spoke with the air of an experienced traveler,—Hattie who had never been outside the state. She begrudged every moment that she stayed in the Town as a moment which kept her out of the future.

Bidding her not to worry and observing that eventually the train would come as all trains did, her husband turned away and began to walk silently up and down the worn bricks of the platform—the same bricks, he remembered, that he had trod on the night he set out upon his futile pursuit of his daughter.

It was one of those moments which occur sometimes between lover and mistress, between husband and wife, between those who have loved each other for years—a moment when it is impossible for the one to tell the other what is in his heart because it is quite beyond understanding. He could not say to her that he was sad because he was leaving so much that he had loved; she, his own wife who loathed it all so deeply, would think him a little mad. He could not say that he was sad because he would never again see the pleasant farms of the county, never again talk with his cronies of the Grand Circuit and quarrel about Pop Geers and how he had driven his latest race. Never again would he have those long arguments over horses in hotel bars and parlors during racing week, never again see the sap running from the trees in maple sugar time, never again talk with old Bayliss and Judge Wilkins about their Guernseys and Shorthorns. He was leaving a world which, despite all the disappointments it had brought him, he loved. There were friends in this world which it pained him to believe that he would never meet again.

He was lonely in a way he had never known until now.

For a moment, at the far end of the platform, the gentle man halted and fell to regarding his wife and his father with a strange and distant expression, as if they were strangers to him. The one was so restless, the other so indifferent. The one had love only for her children, the other had love for nobody and nothing. No, they could not understand. It was easy for them....

Far off a whistle sounded and he saw his wife hasten for the fifth time to put all the luggage in order and pry old Gramp loose from his throne of indifference upon the baggage truck. At the sight he turned and as he moved, walking slowly toward them over the worn bricks, it occurred to him that it was Ellen whom they were all pursuing and that he was being dragged along with all the others.

He knew then what he had known before—that they would never recapture her. She was gone forever.

From his eminence on the baggage truck old Gramp had been meditating the selfishness of Julia Shane. She had left Hattie a fat sum of money, enough to escape, but she had kept it until she died, allowing Hattie to live for years on the very edge of poverty. Poor Hattie! She never saw the reason; she never understood that the old woman had kept her poor so that she might have her by her side as illness and old age claimed her. It was poverty that gave Julia Shane possession over her niece, and she had guarded the possession until the day her will was read, long after she had grown cold in her grave on the bleak hill above the Town. She was beyond help from Hattie now, and so, when she could keep her niece no longer, she had set her free.

The train screeched over the crossing, through the mills and into the station and Hattie, all agitation and worry now, jarred the old man loose from his meditation and steered him in the direction of their car.

Five minutes passed and the great locomotive with a series of demoniacal snorts pulled the train out of the station into the unknown. It carried an old man, a middle-aged woman, her mild husband and a boy. It was the last time that any of them ever saw the Town that bore the name of Hattie’s grandfather.