It was afternoon on the last day of December when Stacey arrived at the little station of Pickens, North Carolina. His face had a sunken ravaged look, and grime from the repulsively dirty train made its underlying pallor ghastly. But Stacey was not really in any such abject condition as he appeared to be. He was worn out, beaten back at every point, but something in him still hung on; his eyes were tired but alive. In the train, which was crowded, as only a branch-line train of the Southern Railway can be crowded, with commercial travellers and with slovenly mothers publicly nursing crying children much too old to be nursed either publicly or privately, he had listened with even a little amusement to talk of how much better the service would be as soon as the government turned the road back to the company; and his will to get away by himself, out of touch with men and women, was strong and intense, sustaining him. He was not repelled by the sordid ugliness of the station and the glimpse of Main Street, but felt rather an unemotional sense of home-coming, which any native of Pickens would have attributed to the fact that Stacey’s mother’s people, though now all dead or widely scattered, had been the Pickens Barclays, but which more likely arose in Stacey because the end of his quest was in sight. Anyway here came old Elijah, grinning broadly, hat in hand, his fringe of white hair blowing about his nearly bald black head. He shook Stacey’s hand vigorously.
“I shuah almos’ thought you wasn’t on that theah train, Mistuh Stacey,” he declared. “Theah didn’ seem nothin’ but babies.” And he carried Stacey’s bag across the platform to a buggy.
“Hello!” said Stacey, “you’re driving Duke! What will Mr. Carroll say to that, Elijah?”
“Well, Mistuh Stacey, suh, I jes’ had to get you home somehow. These heah Fohds at the garage, jes’ as like as not they get stuck on the Meldrun road. I wouldn’ have drove Duke ’cept foh that. It’s been rainin’ a powehful lot.”
“Haven’t they mended that road yet?” Stacey inquired, getting into the buggy.
“No, suh, not yet. You stop that, Duke, suh!” he called to the horse, who, impatient of the shafts, was curveting sideways down the street.
Two or three people came up to the buggy and shook Stacey’s hand, and he replied to their greetings as heartily as he could; but he was eager to be rid of them, and felt relief when presently the town was left behind and the buggy was ploughing through the waste of red mud known as the Meldrun road. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat, drawing in deep breaths of the damp chilly air, and letting Elijah’s words run on unchecked and unheeded.
The landscape was a sweet and pleasant one even now in winter when the oaks and the poplars were bare of leaves. The rolling brick-colored fields, planted with corn, were interspersed with patches of woods, where hills rose, blue with spruce and dark green with white pine. Beyond were the low friendly mountains. Log cabins were scattered about here and there, with pigs, dogs and ragged children playing indiscriminately before them. All the people Stacey met or passed on the road raised their hats gravely, and Stacey raised his in return. He was enough of this country, and also sufficiently intelligent, to have no sentimental northern fancies about its romantic aristocracy. He had no more illusions about the people of Pickens than about the people of Vernon. If the latter were vulgar, the former were bigoted. There greed took on gigantic forms; here it revealed itself in petty ways. Here, as there, he thought, it was the one permanent human instinct. He did not know what labor conditions were now at the knitting mills; he knew what they had been six years ago, the last time he had been down, and he was skeptical of any change. Yet the sight of people here bothered him less than in Vernon, it seemed. That, he thought idly, was because here the inhabitants were more a part of their country, stood out less blatantly against the landscape, blended with it—or almost. Not because they and it were picturesque, but because they had belonged to their country for many generations, whereas in Vernon nobody had been molded by continuous residence into harmony with anything. And Stacey reflected that only in rural New England and the South did you get this impression of harmony between landscape and people, as though they had mutually made one another. Really they were at bottom very alike, rural New England and the South, though each would have been shocked at the idea. Each with a continuous past from which it had sprung, to which it belonged. A tight, narrow, little past, but authentic.
Stacey was roused from meditation by a sense that Elijah had been saying the same words a great many times, and that the words were a question.
“How’s that, Elijah?” he asked.
“I was jes’ sayin’, Mistuh Stacey, as how I reckoned you’d be wantin’ some colohed girl to cook foh you an’ make youah bed?”
“No,” said Stacey calmly, “I don’t want any one. You’ll do that, Elijah.”
The old man grew melancholy. “Shuah, Mistuh Stacey, if you say so,” he replied sadly. “I’ll wohk myself to the bone foh you, but I jes’ don’ know if I positively got the time to do everythin’ jes’ right. I got a powehful lot to do, Mistuh Stacey.”
“What is it, Elijah?”
“Well, I got to look afteh Duke, suh, an’ then theah’s all that big place to see to.”
“A couple of men working on it, aren’t there?”
“Yes, suh, but that’s jes’ it. They don’ wohk ’less’n I stan’s oveh them all the time.”
“They probably don’t work if you do. I don’t want a maid, Elijah. You can hire a woman to come in and clean for a couple of hours in the morning, but I don’t want to see her.”
“Yes, suh,” said the negro, in a tone of aggrieved resignation. But he got over it almost at once, with quick forgetfulness, and was presently babbling on as before.
When at last they approached the Carroll property Stacey looked about him more attentively, with a wistful sense of what was past, such as one might feel in reading over old letters, full of youthful affection, to some one all but forgotten now.
The house, three miles distant from the town, was low and rambling, with deep verandahs and numerous sleeping-porches. It sat on a knoll among ten acres of sloping lawn and perhaps ninety of oak and pine woods; and from its front verandah one looked away, west, for miles up a narrowing valley between tree-clad mountains. “Valley Ridge,” Stacey remembered, half humorously, half painfully, Julie had tried to call the place in her boarding-school days, and had come down one Christmas vacation with heavy blue stationery embossed in silver with that legend; at which their father had remarked that if she ever used any of that “Princess Alice abomination” he’d get some pink paper for himself, have “The Pig Sty” engraved for a heading, and write letters on it t............