Part 23

Her energy was amazing and fruitful. Once she was married and settled down, and since she had no children to stop her, she was able to be a power for good. She was a treasure for Tansy; she saved his pennies; where another in her place might have got trained help from the mainland she did with young girls to come in, carried the bulk of the house herself, and never looked the worse for it.

As she matured she rounded out amazingly; folks wouldn’t have believed it, from the slip of a girl she had been. But no matter how full her hands were, they were never too full to spare a finger where help was needed. In the church, in the Dorcases, in the “Light in Darkness,” in the Town Farm Association, at Easter, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, the word came to be: “See Elsie Snow; she’ll manage.”

There were plenty to say that her capacity for managing didn’t go for nothing in Tansy’s affairs. Certainly, once, when he wouldn’t have foreclosed on Mrs. Hemans’s store--which was going to be a valuable property as soon as the fish-freezer was built--certainly then it was his wife showed the common sense of the two, asking him plainly: “Which do you figure you owe the most to, Sarah Hemans or the men and women and children that’ve got their all in your bank?”

Yet too much may have been made of that. Tansy was honest, and honesty goes a long way. When he made a statement across his desk in the bank-block--it mattered not whether it was to the highest or the humblest--that statement held. And yet, again, in another way, where would he have been if it hadn’t been for her? People would really have forgotten that he was alive.

Tansy had turned out a silent and unsociable man. He never went to the post-office; his mail came to the bank. From there home he took the back way; that was about the only place, except church, you’d ever see him, and then half the time he wouldn’t see you, walking as he did with his eyes on the ground, studying.

A silent man is a wise one: that’s common knowledge. Tansy ought to have been Selectman. Yet he never was. It hurt Elsie. Fall after fall, as town meeting came and passed, and somehow or other Tansy’s name wasn’t mentioned, it got deeper and deeper under her skin. Of course nobody ever knew. It wasn’t anything you could say anything about. But it was bitter when she recollected the young Tansy standing at the bottom of the steps and vowing: “Some day I shall be the biggest man in this town.”

She never mentioned it directly to her husband. The nearest she came was when she would plague him: “Why _don’t_ you see more of folks? I declare, I can’t make you out. What good does it do going to church if you don’t take a hand in any of the activities? Or in town affairs? See here now, So-and-so and So-and-so are coming in after supper about the cake-sale, and I want you to put on your blacks and stay down awhile--and talk. ’Twouldn’t harm you to crack a joke, even. Be cheery!”

Tansy would change his collar and put on his blacks. He never crossed his wife; never put _his_ foot down. Never but once. That was when Elsie, perceiving at last that there was to be no one for the “children’s room,” and moved by something too vague to say, suggested they might be more comfortable in the west chamber, after all, as he himself had said. It was the first time she had ever heard him speak as he did. “We’ll stay where we are.” And they had stayed.

But so he would freshen up after supper and come down as she bade him and sit, absent of eye and mind, in a corner of the cake-sale conference. Ten minutes. Half an hour. Then presently, as things warmed up, like dew under the heightening sun, he would be found to be not there. “Studying,” his wife would have to tell them with a sigh. “What can a body do with a man whose work is never done? Up there in the dark, from now to bedtime, like as not, studying, studying. You’d never guess. But I declare if some folks were to work the amount Tansy Snow does, and take on so blessed little about it-- Well, well. And now, who’s it arranged shall get the paper for the streamers and festoons?”

So Tansy would sit there, studying. All alone in the “used chamber,” in the dark, in his shirt-sleeves, in the rocker. Studying, studying.

First, in the early days, he thought it was a sin. It seemed to him that it must be Satan himself who was putting that lamp in Donna’s garret on the Stone Fold, night after night after night, to mock him, around the very corner of the church of God, and beckon him from the very pillow where he lay beside his wife.

At first he was angry. “The cheek of her!” She knew he was married, must know it; she had been in town with her father many times; he had seen their boat. Yes, he had seen _her_--at a distance. Angry and scared. Anything to escape that ray that poisoned his thoughts, his dreams! Any room, any window, but that! Angry, scared, and _fascinated_! That was the worst. Fascinated, so that it ate a hole in the fabric of his honesty, like a moth-hole, tiny enough to escape notice, but big enough to let a lie through.

“I’ve to step upstairs and get my slippers, wife dear.”

“You’re tired, Tansy; let me go.”

“No, no, you stay by the fire and read; I’ll be but a moment, dear.”

For a while he was ashamed of himself. He ran to the stairs and started down if he heard Elsie coming. He felt he ought to make it up to her somehow, pet her, show himself ten times more fervent than it was in his nature to be. But that couldn’t last. Nothing that’s not in a man’s nature can last. What _is_ in his nature will out.

It’s in the nature of islanders to be weather-vanes. As the weather goes, so do our spirits. There’s none that hasn’t, in some one of his generations, had a ship. So, even though her husband was a confirmed shore body, Elsie never thought it anything out of the way that he should be weather-tender, and show it by fidgeting and prowling on nights when the fog came and the wind was in the east.

Through the spring and summer of their first year there was prevailing fair weather, and only rarely a night like that--a blessed one (at first) when the star on the Stone Fold was blotted out--a torment (later on) when Tansy was upstairs as much as down, stealing peeps, dreading, hoping. In September, though, there came a real spell, five days of it as thick as a hat. In the night of the fourth a lobsterman named Antony Coral claimed to have seen Mr. Snow of the bank in a dory in Chalk Ground Slough, toward the Stone Fold--was near to running into him--fact!

If a tale like that had been let go far it might have harmed a man in Snow’s position. But it didn’t go far. Before his mates at the dock had got through guying the credulous “Portugee,” he began to wonder if he hadn’t been asleep at his oars, after all, and dreaming dreams, and he never brought it up again.

One thing about that night is certain, however: Tansy wasn’t at home. Another thing is certain: it was he that was rowing the dory in Chalk Ground Slough, toward the Stone Fold. And it wasn’t above five minutes after he had avoided collision with Coral’s lobster-boat that, close aboard the island beach, he made out finally a disk of warm light the size of a penny, up in that part of the vapors where Donna’s garret window ought to be.

That settled it. That made it another thing. Had it been no more than spite, Donna wouldn’t have wasted oil and wick in weather that would smother the spark in twenty rods, and never a chance in God’s world for Tansy to see and suffer. It was something in _her_ made her do it, then; like an act in some ritual of memory. Turning his boat around, he rowed for home. What he had found out filled him with a sense of pity. No, not pity. There was solemnity, tragedy in it, but it wasn’t pity, nor sorrow.

After that he began to lose his feeling of shame when he made excuses to slip away upstairs, till he made them no more. He no longer stole peeps from the window; he sat there brazenly, “studying.” As time went by, if the good people gathered in Elsie’s parlor--if they could have seen him at the moment of his escape upstairs--they would never have known him for Tansy Snow. His face was contorted. He shook his fist. “----the lot of you, you gabbling, gossiping little parcel of busybodies, you and your holy little schemes, your little brains! The devil! What claim have you on _me_?”

But when he had reached the bedroom and found the rocker and sat down with his back to the bedpost and his sock-feet on the window-sill, little by little the lines would vanish from his face. Little by little as he watched the fallen star, or thought of it shining in secret there, he forgot to hear the busy voices below; he heard the wind running in gray grasses and the living sound of breakers on far-strewn reefs and the dry rustle of leaves in a thorn tree. And what had happened was that he was no longer surrounded by walls and gables and hemmed in by the thoughts and needs and elbows of hundreds of industrious little two-legged vegetables; the walls had melted, his horizon was the horizon of dark ocean, and he walked in space.

And a girl walked with him--no, a woman--no (as time passed), more than a woman, a kind of goddess, sea-begot, earth-born, the soil of the mother still carelessly on her, and she the stronger for it, and slow, as the tides as slow, and generous, as the earth is generous with the seeds of life, and brooding calm as the sky is, which, knowing nothing, holds within itself all the generations of them that know all. Her hair was thick and tangled, because the grass grows so; eyes heavy, because they looked at things far off; hands large, because the blood that fed them was warm; and her words little words, because only little words can stay in the wind that blows from the caverns among the stars.

“The gray ewe dropped twins in that brush-patch. That’s a good ewe.”

And Tansy could imagine his own words as simple. “Yes, a good ewe.”

“I like the feel of the wind, like tonight; there’s rain to come. I like it to blow under my hair, the same as kisses. I love kisses.”

“I love to kiss you. I love to be with you with nothing but water roundabout and nothing but stars above, and all on earth asleep, hushed up.”

“They’re awake in China, though, for the world’s round like a ball.”

“Most folks know the world’s round, yet they think it’s flat. I love that in you, Donna; you can _feel_ it, you can _see_ it being round like a ball. And you can see the stars being round like balls as big as suns, to shine hot on other worlds where there were sheep and people living and having twins and dead under the grass a million centuries before Adam and Eve--and never a thought in all their races whether it should be a thousand or twelve hundred on the Dee Nickerson house, or something useful like aprons or something tasty like doilies at the Dorcas meeting next Tuesday week. You see it. You feel it.”

“Yes, Tansy, I see it. I feel it.”

“You and I. I love you. And here we are at the tree.”

Nor could he any longer, caught in the net of fantasy, recognize the thing as sin. _There’s_ revenge for you. To have grown to be a man who didn’t know right from wrong. Tansy, whose honesty was his strength!

After all, he wasn’t a man; he was two men. It was the other that became president of the bank, director in both the new freezers, and owner of considerable property in the town. No one knew his duplicity. How was it possible? Certainly, after living with him ten years, his wife didn’t know. Donna herself, who might have guessed, might have wished, even Donna couldn’t _know_. He could assure himself there was no one. So he had forgotten what had happened that night in the wagon-shed behind the church (and almost under his window now). He had forgotten God, who never forgets.

But God moves in a mysterious way. It was a mystery to all “what it was bit Tansy” in his thirty-sixth year. There he was one week, a bit stoop-shouldered perhaps, but wiry for all that and going his way. Honest Tansy, who ought to have been Selectman--and why didn’t _some_body ever put him up? And there he was the next week, and talk of galloping consumption. Or Bright’s disease. Or what?

They couldn’t have got it out of him; he was too close of mouth. Nor dig and delve as they would they couldn’t get it out of Mrs. Snow. She didn’t know; that’s why. He sleeps poorly; that’s about all she could say. He would toss, his head as restless on the pillow as if it wore a crown of thorns. Once when he thought her asleep he got up and went into the spare chamber. From the hall where she had stolen she saw him with a candle staring at his own face in the bureau glass. The night-puffed face, the thinning hair, the stooped shoulders--in the mirrored eyes there was the look of a soul in hell, self-pity, self-hate, self-mockery.

Elsie was worried in earnest. When, without warning, a day or so later, he announced: “We’ll try the west room a spell for a change,” she was quick to humor him. Yet it came to nothing. Before she had so much as a bedsheet shifted, there he was back, bareheaded: “Let it be as ’twas.”

Here are the facts. Tansy oughtn’t to have gone near the docks. For years he had kept clear of them, by instinct more than by reason. Now the mysterious way God took was to make him careless. It was a bright and innocent morning anyway; insurance was wanted on a big yawl; it’s better to see a risk with your own eyes than to go by hearsay. (If you can see the risk.)

Alongside the yawl three single-handers were lying, the men in them sorting their last night’s catch; lusty, brawny young fellows, a pleasure to the eye with their deep color and their flashing grins (more pleasure to the eye than a banker in a night-shirt before a looking-glass). And their voices, in the clear of the morning, were gay and strong.

Five years later Tansy could have repeated every syllable of every word:

“Looks o’ that catch o’ yourn there, Eddie, you didn’t set no very likely place last night, did ye?”

“Aw, leave Eddie be, Sam. Didn’t ye hear the terrible thing? Got a good fare o’ haddock, Eddie did, only he had to heave the best part away. Turn out to be moth-millers when he come to look. Whatcha make o’ that?”

“Laugh, you fellows; I like to hear ye. But if ye really want to know who _’twas_ fishin’ the Stone Fold las’ night, don’t ask me; ask Codhead Collins; he’s the boy’ll know.”

“All right, all right, don’t jump so. All reminded me was, I was thinking I noted a new little face on the beach over there when I come by the old girl’s last week. And a new batch o’ wash on the line.”

“Godfrey! How many’s that she’s got now?”

“Don’t ask me; I ain’t the only dory in the fleet.”

It wasn’t consumption; Tansy didn’t cough. Nor Bright’s disease; it didn’t act that way. The doctor said it was just insomnia, and it came from too much work. Human flesh can’t stand studying at a desk the livelong day and then in a bedroom rocker half the night. He advised, and Elsie insisted, that Tansy ease up, go off somewhere, and take a holiday.

“No, I’ll just see it through,” was all Tansy would say.

When he said that morning: “We’ll try the west room a spell,” it was a confession of rout. Once away from that window he might forget; that’s how he figured it. He hadn’t yet got it through his head that God never forgets. At the bank, who should be waiting to see him but two of those trawlmen, Eddie and Sam. It was something about a loan; Tansy hardly knew; the business was done mechanically; the whole sudden thing _he_ saw was that he wasn’t to be let escape; that God had sent those wind-browned lusty young fellows as a sign and reminder that by no hiding of his eyes was he to be let forget. He faced it.

When the emissaries were gone he got down on his elbows on his desk and looked at his conscience, and he saw that in all those years of letting his imagination run to that island, instead of keeping it home of nights where it belonged, he had been doing a sinful thing. Now for atonement he was given a cross to bear. In the long run, unless he bore it without flinching, the failure would find him out. It was then, forgetting his hat, he ran home to Elsie with his “Let it be as ’twas.”

“As ’twas!” The irony! As though it could be any nearer to what it had been than heaven is to hell.

He tried never to flinch. Shirt-sleeves and sock-feet, “as ’twas,” he sat there whole evenings through. No longer did he stride across the wind-blown grass with Donna by his side. He ran at a crouch under cover of the brush-patches, peeping, spying. Or he lay hidden as near as he dared to the thorn tree, holding his breath and listening--to youth.

Almost as bad as the jealousy was the shame. Beginning by boasting he would be the biggest man in town, he had ended by being the least in a shady brotherhood, the scummiest of the scum of the waterfront.

Sometimes he had to flinch a little; sometimes, revoking the image of the goddess he had created, he would rail at them. And now his “_I was the first!_” was the whine of a whip, and he had to grovel:

“Lord, when I have borne enough, in Thy mercy take it away.”

There came a time when it seemed it was to be taken away. Mercy’s instrument was Austin Dow, the proprietor of the Seaside Lunch that came with the steamer, along with other changes, when the old packet-schooner gave up. More and more excursionists were coming for the day’s sail from Gillyport, with an hour ashore at noon, and Dow got to thinking he’d have a sign put on his roof, a big fellow, one you could read from the harbor coming in, with “SHORE DINNERS OUR SPECIALTY” in letters five feet high. And he wanted a license from the town.

It came up in special meeting in January, and it made a stir. There were forward-looking people who realized that times had changed, and they spoke in favor. There were just as many against it, though not quite so apt at saying why; anyway, it would be an eyesore to the worshipers coming out of Center Church, that monstrosity on a roof across the street. And then a man got up in the back of the hall and asked permission to speak.

The man was Tansy Snow. If it had been George True, the town dummy, folks wouldn’t have been struck so dead. And that was only the beginning. From the first the thing that had made it look as though Dow might get the vote was that it was the business men that were with him; it was the sentimental old ladies (male and female) that were against.

And now to hear Banker Snow, the busiest business man of them all, the dried-up human calculator, the man with no sentiment, no romance, no imagination beyond set-down-five-and-carry-two--to see him standing there like a born revivalist--and to hear him carrying on--diving back into history and coming up again--his face running sweat and his eyes as big as quarters with earnestness--reciting the beauty and dignity and grandeur of our island metropolis--recalling the impressions of his boyhood, the simple nobility of that shore-street sky-line, as great epochs had builded it slowly--and then taking the proposed sign-board as a symbol of all the ills the mainland suffers from, making bigness an idol, bustle a religion, the dollar a god to trample them in the dust--it was too much for the town meeting. When it came to a vote, there wasn’t a voice for the lunchroom: Dow was too done up even to lift his own.

No one was more amazed than Elsie Snow, or more thrilled. If Tansy didn’t fathom what he had done, or what was to follow, she did. As she took him out and home through the streets where people lingered she held him by the arm, “the biggest man in town”; you couldn’t fool Elsie Snow.

When they had undressed and she had blown out the light and gone to lift the window, she stood for a moment dreaming down at Dow’s lunchroom on the shore, bright in the moonlight in the bottom of the crevice between the Nickerson house and the corner of the church, and, “By gracious,” she mused, “it never till this instant occurred to me, but it would’ve cut off half our one and only sea-view, that monstrosity of his.”

No, there was one more amazed than Elsie.

Staring out through the moonlight, and through the darkness when the moon had set, Tansy Snow was wondering:

“Why in the name of the Eternal did I do that?”

Elsie was right about consequences. The town waked up and rubbed its eyes. Tansy Snow had pulled the wool over them for a couple of decades, but he couldn’t do it any more. From the minute he sat down after his speech in meeting there wasn’t a question in anybody’s mind but what he’d be chosen Selectman the coming autumn, in place of John Matheson, who was “getting through.” If he’d take it, that is.

What a question! As we used to say: “Will a duck swim?” And yet very presently here was Elsie Snow going around with another kind of smile and another and mysterious light in her eye. She was a wonder, Elsie was.