So his thoughts were running in this perplexed and absent manner when suddenly a very urgent question burst through. “What of Agnes?”
She was not at home. He could think of no way to find her unassisted. He knew not where to look next and time was pressing. It was necessary to raise a wide alarm and organize a search. But he had no authority to act. It was her father’s business to take such steps. Now recalling what he had said to Enoch through the gate about Agnes he realized that it was absurdly inadequate. He had not at all communicated his fears concerning her. Therefore, though the thought of another encounter with Enoch made him shudder, he would have to go back. On this decision he came to a sudden stop and was surprised to see how far he had come unawares, and that he was not on the highway. When or how he had left it he did not remember. “I must have come fast,” he thought. He was half way back to New Damascus, not far from the mill, in a road that further on became a street running into sooty locust trees, cinder sidewalks, rows of company houses and a stale, historic smell of fried food. Turning in his tracks he was making back when his name was called from the side of the road by a voice he instantly knew.
[176]
“Thane!” he said, going toward him. “I need you. Please go—oh! I’m sorry. I thought you were alone.”
He veered off at seeing the figure of a woman behind Thane, leaning on the fence, her face averted; but Thane, coming forward, caught him by the arm, saying anxiously:
“I need your advice is why I called you.”
“Hold it, whatever it is, Thane,” John answered. “I can’t stop now. I just can’t.” He was pulling away.
“Won’t hold,” said Thane.
“It must,” said John. “I can’t stop. I’m sorry.” He liked Thane and was loath to leave him in a lurch. “Go to the hotel and wait for me there,” he said, pushing him off. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
With that he was going when the woman spoke.
“Are you looking for me?”
“Agnes!” said John to himself, as a declaration of preposterous fact. He wheeled around and stood stone still.
One instant before he had been mad with anxiety to hear her voice. Yet to the sound of it, so collected and sure, his emotional reaction was one of fierce anger. There was also a desolate world-wide sense of loss. Why he was angry or what was lost he could not have said in words. These feelings referred to her. Toward Thane there was a thought that seemed to rise behind him with purpose and power of its own; and he braced his back against it.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said, approaching her. “I found these.” He held out the[177] handkerchief and scarf. She took them. “Then I went to the mansion ... and....” There he stopped.
“Yes. What did you learn there?” she asked.
His anger kept rising. How could she be so suave and frontal about it? He had actually the impulse to set hands upon her roughly and demand to know what she had been doing, how she came to be here alone on a dark road with an iron puddler and how she could pretend to be so unembarrassed.
“Nothing,” he said. “It had just this instant occurred to me to go back and try again. I was in a beastly fume about you.”
“And seem to be still,” she said, in a way to put him in mind of the high tone he had been using.
“For reasons to which you are pleased to be oblivious,” he retorted. “It is to be imagined that I have some interest in seeing you safely home. May I take you on from here?”
“Another one,” Agnes murmured in a tone of soliloquy. “How repetitious!”
The thought touched off her feelings. They exploded in a burst of shrill, irrelevant laughter. John was scandalized. His rage was boundless. Yet at the same time his sense of responsibility increased. Abominable thoughts assailed him. He wondered if perhaps her father had not been right to keep her under restraint. He fervently wished he had never tempted her to break out. A resolve to get her home by force if necessary was forming in his mind when Thane put in.
[178]
“They ain’t no home,” he said. “That’s the trouble.”
“What do you know about it?” John asked, blazing.
“Oughten I know somewhat about it seeing as she’s my own wife?” said Thane, with dismal veracity.
John, for an instant appalled, turned fiercely on Agnes. “Now what have you done?” he asked. She was so startled by his manner that she couldn’t speak. “What have you done?” he demanded, now shaking her and with such authority that for a moment her spirit quailed. “Is it true? Are you married?”
“Yes,” she said.
“To a....” He caught the word just in time, slowly let go of her and stepped back.
“Say it,” she dared him. “To a ... to ... a what? Go on. Say it.”
John’s anger was gone. Other emotions had swallowed it up,—sorrow, pity, remorse, that devastating sense of loss again, more poignant than before in some new way, and above all a great yearning toward both of them.
“Where?” he asked, in a changed voice.
“In my father’s house,” said Agnes, derisively. “What a pity you missed it!”
“But what happened?” asked John.
She answered weirdly, improvising silly words to a silly tune:—
“What hap-pen-ed
What hap-pen-ed
What hap-pen-ed[179]
Here Mildred?
“That hap-pen-ed
That hap-pen-ed
That hap-pen-ed
Sir, she said.”
A horrified silence fell.
“Was it flat?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I know something to do. Let’s each one tell the story of his life. Shall I begin?”
She began to sing again:—
“What hap-pen-ed ...”
“Please,” said John. “Please don’t. You make my blood run cold.”
“She’s that way ever since,” said Thane, with an air of sharing his misery.
“Then you tell me,” said John.
“I carried her home,” said Thane, now weary of telling it, “from where she got hurt between me an’ the Cornishman knocking ourselves around in the path, an’ old Enoch he got a wicked notion as I don’t know what an’ sent for the preacher an’ we was married. Then he handed me the blue ticket an’ put us out of the house.”
John turned to Agnes with a question on his tongue. She anticipated him and began to sing:—
“What hap-pen-ed ...”
As he shuddered and turned away again she stopped.
“I was coming for my street clothes to where I live,” continued Thane, “being as I was all that time in my[180] puddling rig an’ we got bogged here like you see us now. Nothing I say let’s do will move her. And when I say all right, what does she want, she chanties about me, making them up out of nothing.”
“When they get like that,” said John, “you have to use force. You’ve got to pick them up.”
“Can’t work it,” said Thane.
“Why not? Does she bite?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Can’t work it,” said Thane. “Not since,” he added.
“The subject of this clinic is conscious,” said Agnes, pleasantly.
They paid no attention to her.
“You board, don’t you? You were not intending to take her there?” said John.
“Only so as to get my clothes,” said Thane.
“We can’t do anything until you get your clothes,” said John. “That’s plain. I’ll stay here with her while you go for them. But don’t be long. Then maybe we can think of something to do.”
Thane went off at once with a tremendous sigh of relief in the feeling of action. His feet made a cavernous tlump, tlump, tlump-ing on the hard dirt road. John, who stood regarding Agnes from the side of the road, was sure he saw her shudder. Then from the heedless tone with which she broke the silence he was sure he had been mistaken.
“It seems you know my husband,” she said.
[181]
He was surprised that she had no difficulty with the word, though it must have been the first time she had ever used it in the possessive sense—and in such circumstances!
“Can’t you think of anything feasible to do?” John asked.
“Do you like him?” she inquired.
“Because if you can’t,” said John, “I can. It’s too much for Thane. That isn’t fair.”
He supposed she was thinking. To his disgust she began to sing, softly, tunefully:
“Lovely maiden, tell me truly,
Is the ocean very wet?
If I meet you on the bottom,
Will you never once——”
“Stop it!” He moved as if to menace her. She stopped and looked at him soberly.
“Is there nothing I can do to entertain you? I might recite. And you haven’t answered my question.”
“You give me the horrors,” he blurted. “No, no I’m sorry. I’m unstrung, that’s all. Please do be serious. We’ve got to think of what we shall do.”
“Who are we?”
“I beg your pardon. You, then,” he amended.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Agnes, do for....”
“Mrs. Thane, please.”
“I don’t expect you to be amiable,” he said, “but please for one moment be reasonable.”
[182]
“When they are like that you can’t do anything with them,” she said. “Really you can’t. You will have to see my husband.”
She had seated herself on a grassy bench with her back to the fence, her feet in the dry ditch, and was viciously jabbing ............