The Pastures of Heaven (13 page)

Helen rang for the house-boy. “Joe, exactly what did the man who came today say?”

“Say he got to see you about little girl.”

“Well what kind of a man was he?—how old?”

“Not old man, Missie, not young man. Maybe fifty years, I guess.”

Helen sighed. It was just another of the stories, the little dramas Hilda thought out and told. And they were so real to her, poor child. Helen ate slowly, and afterwards, in the big living room, she sat before the fire—idly knocking coals from the glowing logs. She turned all the lights off. The fire glinted on the eyes of the stuffed heads on the wall, and Helen's old habit reasserted itself. She found herself imagining how Hubert's hands looked, how narrow his hips were, and how straight his legs. And then she made a discovery: When her mind dropped his hands they disappeared. She was not building the figure of her husband. He was gone, completely gone. For the first time in years, Helen put her hands to her face and cried, for the peace had come back, and the bursting expectancy. She dried her eyes and walked slowly about the room, smiling up at the heads with the casual eyes of a stranger who didn't know how each animal had died. The room looked different and felt different. She fumbled with the new window bolts and threw open the wide windows to the night. And the night wind sighed in and bathed her bare shoulders with its cool peace. She leaned out of the window and listened. So many little noises came from the garden and from the hill beyond the garden. “It's just infested with life,” she thought. “It's just bursting with life.” Gradually as she listened she became aware of a rasping sound from the other side of the house. “If there were beavers, it would be a beaver cutting down a tree. Maybe it's a porcupine eating out the foundations. I've heard of that. But there aren't any porcupines here either.” There were vibrations of the rasping in the house itself. “It must be something gnawing on the logs,” she said. There came a little crash. The noise stopped. Helen started uneasily. She walked quickly down a passageway and stopped before the door of Hilda's room. With her hand on the strong outside bolt she called, “Are you all right, darling?” There was no answer. Helen slipped the bolt very quietly and entered the room. One of the oaken bars was hacked out and Hilda was gone.

For a moment Helen stood rigidly at the open window, looking wistfully into the grey night. Then her face paled and her lips set in the old line of endurance. Her movements were mechanical as she retraced her steps to the living room. She climbed up on a chair, unlocked the gun case and took down a shotgun.

 

Dr. Phillips sat beside Helen Van Deventer in the coroner's office. He had to come as the child's doctor, of course, but also he thought he could keep Helen from being afraid. She didn't look afraid. In her severe, her almost savage mourning, she looked as enduring as a sea-washed stone.

“And you expected it?” the coroner was saying. “You thought it might happen?”

Dr. Phillips looked uneasily at Helen and cleared his throat. “She had been my patient since she was born. In a case like this, she might have committed suicide or murder, depending on circumstances. Then again she might have lived on harmlessly. She could have gone all her life without making any violent move. It was impossible to say, you see.”

The coroner was signing papers. “It was a beastly way for her to do it. Of course the girl was insane, and there isn't any reason to look into her motives. Her motives might have been tiny things. But it was a horrible way to do it. She never knew that, though. Her head in the stream and the gun beside her. I'll instruct a suicide verdict. I'm sorry to have to talk this way before you, Mrs. Van Deventer. Finding her must have been a terrible shock to you.”

The doctor helped Helen down the steps of the court-house. “Don't look that way,” he cried. “You look as though you were going to an execution. It's better so, I tell you. You must not suffer so.”

She didn't look at him. “I know now. By this time I know what my life expects of me,” she said softly. “Now I know what I have always suspected. And I have the strength to endure, Doctor. Don't you worry about me.”

Junius Maltby was a small young man of good and cultured family and decent education. When his father died bankrupt, Junius got himself inextricably entangled in a clerkship, against which he feebly struggled for ten years.

After work Junius retired to his furnished room, patted the cushions of his morris chair and spent the evening reading. Stevenson's essays he thought nearly the finest things in English; he read
Travels with a Donkey
many times.

One evening soon after his thirty-fifth birthday, Junius fainted on the steps of his boarding house. When he recovered consciousness, he noticed for the first time that his breathing was difficult and unsatisfactory. He wondered how long it had been that way. The doctor whom he consulted was kind and even hopeful.

“You're by no means too far gone to get well,” he said. “But you really must take those lungs out of San Francisco. If you stay here in the fog, you won't live a year. Move to a warm, dry climate.”

The accident to his health filled Junius with pleasure, for it cut the strings he had been unable to sever for himself. He had five hundred dollars, not that he ever saved any money; he had simply forgotten to spend it. “With that much,” he said, “I'll either recover and make a clean, new start, or else I'll die and be through with the whole business.”

 

A man in his office told him of the warm, protected valley, the Pastures of Heaven, and Junius went there immediately. The name pleased him. “It's either an omen that I'm not going to live,” he thought, “or else it's a nice symbolic substitute for death.” He felt that the name meant something personal to him, and he was very glad, because for ten years nothing in the world had been personal to him.

There were, in the Pastures of Heaven, several families who wanted to take boarders. Junius inspected each one, and finally went to live on the farm of the widow Quaker. She needed the money, and besides, he could sleep in a shed separated from the farmhouse. Mrs. Quaker had two small boys and kept a hired man to work the farm.

The warm climate worked tenderly with Junius' lungs. Within the year his color was good and he had gained in weight. He was quiet and happy on the farm, and what pleased him more, he had thrown out the ten years of the office and had grown superbly lazy. Junius' thin blond hair went uncombed; he wore his glasses far down on his square nose, for his eyes were getting stronger and only the habit of feeling spectacles caused him to wear them. Throughout the day he had always some small stick protruding from his mouth, a habit only the laziest and most ruminative of men acquire. This convalescence took place in 1910.

In 1911, Mrs. Quaker began to worry about what the neighbors were saying. When she considered the implication of having a single man in her house, she became upset and nervous. As soon as Junius' recovery seemed sure beyond doubt, the widow confessed her trepidations. He married her, immediately and gladly. Now he had a home and a golden future, for the new Mrs. Maltby owned two hundred acres of grassy hillside and five acres of orchard and vegetable bottom. Junius sent for his books, his morris chair with the adjustable back, and his good copy of Velasquez'
Cardinal.
The future was a pleasant and sunshiny afternoon to him.

Mrs. Maltby promptly discharged the hired man and tried to put her husband to work; but in this she encountered a resistance the more bewildering because it presented no hard front to strike at. During his convalescence, Junius had grown to love laziness. He liked the valley and the farm, but he liked them as they were; he didn't want to plant new things, nor to tear out old. When Mrs. Maltby put a hoe in his hand and set him to work in the vegetable garden, she found him, likely enough, hours later, dangling his feet in the meadow stream and reading his pocket copy of
Kidnapped.
He was sorry; he didn't know how it had happened. And that was the truth.

At first she nagged him a great deal about his laziness and his sloppiness of dress, but he soon developed a faculty for never listening to her. It would be impolite, he considered, to notice her when she was not being a lady. It would be like staring at a cripple. And Mrs. Maltby, after she had battered at his resistance of fog for a time, took to sniveling and neglecting her hair.

Between 1911 and 1917, the Maltbys grew very poor. Junius simply would not take care of the farm. They even sold a few acres of pasture land to get money for food and clothing, and even then there was never enough to eat. Poverty sat cross-legged on the farm, and the Maltbys were ragged. They had never any new clothes at all, but Junius had discovered the essays of David Grayson. He wore overalls and sat under the sycamores that lined the meadow stream. Sometimes he read
Adventures in Contentment
to his wife and two sons.

 

Early in 1917, Mrs. Maltby found that she was going to have a baby, and late in the same year the wartime influenza epidemic struck the family with a dry viciousness. Perhaps because they were undernourished, the two boys were stricken simultaneously. For three days the house seemed filled to overflowing with flushed, feverish children whose nervous fingers strove to cling to life by the threads of their bed-clothes. For three days they struggled weakly, and on the fourth, both of the boys died. Their mother didn't know it, for she was confined, and the neighbors who came to help in the house hadn't the courage nor the cruelty to tell her. The black fever came upon her while she was in labor and killed her before she ever saw her child.

The neighbor women who helped at the birth told the story throughout the valley that Junius Maltby read books by the stream while his wife and children died. But this was only partly true. On the day of their seizure, he dangled his feet in the stream, because he didn't know they were ill, but thereafter he wandered vaguely from one to the other of the dying children, and talked nonsense to them. He told the eldest boy how diamonds are made. At the bedside of the other, he explained the beauty, the antiquity and the symbolism of the swastika. One life went out while he read aloud the second chapter of
Treasure Island,
and he didn't even know it had happened until he finished the chapter and looked up. During those days he was bewildered. He brought out the only things he had and offered them, but they had no potency with death. He knew in advance they wouldn't have, and that made it all the more terrible to him.

When the bodies were all gone, Junius went back to the stream and read a few pages of
Travels with a Donkey.
He chuckled uncertainly over the obstinacy of Modestine. Who but Stevenson could have named a donkey “Modestine”?

One of the neighbor women called him in and cursed him so violently that he was embarrassed and didn't listen. She put her hands on her hips and glared at him with contempt. And then she brought his child, a son, and laid it in his arms. When she looked back at him from the gate, he was standing with the howling little brute in his arms. He couldn't see any place to put it down, so he held it for a long time.

The people of the valley told many stories about Junius. Sometimes they hated him with the loathing busy people have for lazy ones, and sometimes they envied his laziness; but often they pitied him because he blundered so. No one in the valley ever realized that he was happy.

They told how, on a doctor's advice, Junius bought a goat to milk for the baby. He didn't inquire into the sex of his purchase nor give his reason for wanting a goat. When it arrived he looked under it, and very seriously asked, “Is this a normal goat?”

“Sure,” said the owner.

“But shouldn't there be a bag or something immediately between the hind legs?—for the milk, I mean.”

The people of the valley roared about that. Later, when a new and better goat was provided, Junius fiddled with it for two days and could not draw a drop of milk. He wanted to return this goat as defective until the owner showed him how to milk it. Some people claimed that he held the baby under the goat and let it suck its own milk, but this was untrue. The people of the valley declared they didn't know how he ever reared the child.

 

One day Junius went into Monterey and hired an old German to help him on the farm. He gave his new servant five dollars on account, and never paid him again. Within two weeks the hired man was so entangled in laziness that he did no more work than his employer. The two of them sat around the place together discussing things which interested and puzzled them—how color comes to flowers—whether there is a symbology in nature—where Atlantis lay—how the Incas interred their dead.

In the spring they planted potatoes, always too late, and without a covering of ashes to keep the bugs out. They sowed beans and corn and peas, watched them for a time, and then forgot them. The weeds covered everything from sight. It was no unusual thing to see Junius burrow into a perfect thicket of mallow weeds and emerge carrying a pale cucumber. He had stopped wearing shoes because he liked the feeling of the warm earth on his feet, and because he had no shoes.

In the afternoon Junius talked to Jakob Stutz a great deal. “You know,” he said, “when the children died, I thought I had reached a peculiar high peak of horror. Then, almost while I thought it, the horror turned to sorrow and the sorrow dwindled to sadness. I didn't know my wife nor the children very well, I guess. Perhaps they were too near to me. It's a strange thing, this
knowing.
It is nothing but an awareness of details. There are long-visioned minds and short-visioned. I've never been able to see things that are close to me. For instance, I am much more aware of the Parthenon than of my own house over there.” Suddenly Junius' face seemed to quiver with feeling, and his eyes brightened with enthusiasm. “Jakob,” he said, “have you ever seen a picture of the frieze of the Parthenon?”