Three men sat around the fat-bellied stove, contemplating its corrugations with rapt abstraction. They made room for Pat to draw up a chair. None of the men looked at him, because a man in mourning deserves the same social immunities a cripple does. Pat settled himself in his chair and gazed at the stove. “Remind me to get some flour before I go,” he said.
All of the men knew that he meant. They knew he didn’t need flour, but each one of them, under similar circumstances, would have made some such excuse. T. B. Allen opened the stove door and looked in and then spat on the coals. “A house like that is pretty lonely at first,” he observed. Pat felt grateful to him although his words constituted a social blunder.
“I’ll need some tobacco and some shot gun shells, too, Mr. Allen,” he said by way of payment.
Pat changed his habits of living after that. Determinedly he sought groups of men. During the daytime he worked on his farm, but at night he was invariably to be found where two or three people were gathered. When a dance or a party was given at the schoolhouse, Pat arrived early and stayed until the last man was gone. He sat at the house of John Whiteside; he arrived first at fires. On election days he stayed at the polls until they closed. Wherever a group of people gathered, Pat was sure to show up. From constant stalking of company he came to have almost an instinct for discovering excitements which would draw crowds.
Pat was a homely man, gangling, big-nosed and heavy-jawed. He looked very much like Lincoln as a young man. His figure was as unfitted for clothes as Lincoln’s was. His nostrils and ears were large and full of hair. They looked as though furry little animals were hiding in them. Pat had no conversation; he knew he added little to the gatherings he frequented, and he tried to make up for his lack by working, by doing favors, by arranging things. He liked to be appointed to committees for arranging school dances, for then he could call on the other committeemen to discuss plans; he could spend evenings decorating the school or running about the valley borrowing chairs from one family and dishes from another. If on any evening he could find no gathering to join, he drove his Ford truck to Salinas and sat through two moving picture shows. After those first two nights of fearful loneliness, he never spent another evening in his closed-up house. The memory of the Bible, of the waiting chairs, or the years-old smells were terrifying to him.
For ten years Pat Humbert drove about the valley in search of company. He had himself elected to the school board; he joined the Masons and the Odd Fellows in Salinas and was never known to miss a meeting.
In spite of his craving for company, Pat never became a part of any group he joined. Rather he hung on the fringes, never speaking unless he was addressed. The people of the valley considered his presence inevitable. They used him unmercifully and hardly knew that he wished nothing better.
When the gatherings were over, when Pat was finally forced home, he drove his Ford into the barn and then rushed to bed. He tried with little success to forget the terrible rooms on the other side of the door. The picture of them edged into his mind sometimes. The dust would be thick now, and the cobwebs would be strung in all the corners and on all the furniture. When the vision invaded and destroyed his defenses before he could go to sleep, Pat shivered in his bed and tried every little soporific formula he knew.
Since he so hated his house, Pat took no care of it. The old building lay moldering with neglect. A white Banksia rose, which for years had been a stubby little bush, came suddenly to life and climbed up the front of the house. It covered the porch, hung festoons over the closed windows and dropped long streamers from the eaves. Within the ten years the house looked like a huge mound of roses. People passing by on the county road paused to marvel at its size and beauty. Pat hardly knew about the rose. He refused to think about the house when he could refuse.
The Humbert farm was a good one. Pat kept it well and made money from it, and, since his expenses were small, he had quite a few thousand dollars in the bank. He loved the farm for itself, but he also loved it because it kept him from fear in the daytime. When he was working, the terror of being solitary, the freezing loneliness, could not attack him. He raised good fruit, but his berries were his chief interest. The lines of supported vines paralleled the county road. Every year he was able to market his berries earlier than anyone in the valley.
Pat was forty years old when the Munroes came into the valley. He welcomed them as his neighbors. Here was another house to which he might go to pass an evening. And since Bert Munroe was a friendly man, he liked to have Pat drop in to visit. Pat was a good farmer. Bert often asked his advice. Pat did not take very careful notice of Mae Munroe except to see, and to forget, that she was a pretty girl. He did not often think of people as individuals, but rather as antidotes for the poison of his loneliness, as escapes from the imprisoned ghosts.
One afternoon when the summer was dawning, Pat worked among his berry vines. He kneeled between the rows of vines and dug among the berry roots with a hoe. The berries were fast forming now, and the leaves were pale green and lovely. Pat worked slowly down the row. He was contented with the work, and he did not dread the coming night for he was to have supper at the Munroe house. As he worked he heard voices from the road. Although he was concealed among the vines, he knew from the tones that Mrs. Munroe and her daughter Mae were strolling by his house. Suddenly he heard Mae exclaim with pleasure.
“Mama, look at that!” Pat ceased his work to listen. “Did you ever see such a beautiful rose in your life, Mama?”
“It’s pretty, all right,” Mrs. Munroe said.
“I’ve just thought what it reminds me of,” Mae continued. “Do you remember the post card of that lovely house in Vermont? Uncle Keller sent it. This house, with the rose over it, looks just like that house in the picture. I’d like to see the inside of it.”
“Well, there isn’t much chance of that. Mrs. Allen says no one in the valley has been in that house since Pat’s father and mother died, and that’s ten years ago. She didn’t say whether it was pretty.”
“With a rose like that on the outside, the inside must be pretty. I wonder if Mr. Humbert will let me see it sometime.” The two women walked on out of hearing.
When they were gone, Pat stood up and looked at the great rose. He had never seen how beautiful it was—a haystack of green leaves and nearly covered with white roses. “It is pretty,” he said. “And it’s like a nice house in Vermont. It’s like a Vermont house, and—well, it is pretty, a pretty bush.” Then, as though he had seen through bush and through the wall, a vision of the parlor came to him. He went quickly back to his work among the berries, struggling to put the house out of his mind. But Mae’s words came back to him over and over again, “It must be pretty inside.” Pat wondered what a Vermont house looked like inside. John Whiteside’s solid and grand house he knew, and, with the rest of the valley, he had admired the plush comfort of Bert Munroe’s house, but a pretty house he had never seen, that is, a house he could really call pretty. In his mind he went over all the houses he knew and not one of them was what Mae must have meant. He remembered a picture in a magazine, a room with a polished floor and white woodwork and a staircase; it might have been Mt. Vernon. That picture had impressed him. Perhaps that was what Mae meant.
He wished he could see the post card of the Vermont house, but if he asked to see it, they would know he had been listening. As he thought of it, Pat became obsessed with a desire to see a pretty house that looked like his. He put his hoe away and walked in front of his house. Truly the rose was marvelous. It dropped a canopy over the porch, hung awnings of white stars over the closed windows. Pat wondered why he had never noticed it before.