“It would be a place to run to, away from pain or sorrow disappointment or fear,” he thought. “But I have no such need now. I have none of these things to run from. I must remember this place, though. If ever there’s need to lose some plaguing thing, that will be the place to go.” And he remembered how the tall trunks grew up and how peacefulness was almost a touchable thing in the glade. “I must look inside the cave some time to see where the spring is,” he thought.
Juanito spent the whole next day working on the harness, the two bay driving-horses and the buckboard. He washed and polished, curried and brushed. And then, fearing he had missed some potential brightness, he went through the whole process again. The brass knob on the pole glittered fiercely; every buckle was silver; the harness shone like patent-leather. A bow of red ribbon fluttered from the middle of the whip.
Before noon on the great day he had the equipage out, to listen for squeaks in the newly-greased wagon. At length he slipped the bridle and tied the horses in the shade before he went in to lunch with Joseph. Neither of them ate very much, a slice or two of bread torn in pieces and dropped in milk. They finished, nodded at each other and rose from the table. In the buckboard, patiently waiting for them was Benjy. Joseph grew angry. “You shouldn’t go, Benjy. You’ve been sick.”
“I’m well again,” said Benjy.
“I’m taking Juanito. There won’t be room for you.”
Benjy smiled disarmingly. “I’ll sit in the box,” he said, and he climbed over the seat and half reclined on the boards.
They started off over the rough wheel-tracks, and their spirits were a little damped by Benjy’s presence. Joseph leaned back over the seat. “You mustn’t drink anything, Benjy. You’ve been sick.”
“Oh no, I’m going in to get a new clock.”
“Remember what I say, Benjy. I don’t want you to drink.”
“I wouldn’t swallow a drop, Joe, not even if it was in my mouth.”
Joseph gave him up. He knew that Benjy would be drunk within an hour of his arrival, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
The sycamores along the creek were beginning to drop their leaves on the ground. The road was deep in the crisp brown fragments. Joseph lifted the lines and the horses broke into a trot, and their hoofs crashed softly in the leaves.
Elizabeth heard Joseph’s voice on the porch and hurried upstairs so she could come down again. She was afraid of Joseph Wayne. Since his last visit she had thought of him nearly all the time. How could she refuse to marry him even though she hated him? Some terrible thing might happen if she should refuse—he might die; or perhaps he might strike her with his fist. In her room, before she went down to the parlor, she brought out all her knowledge to protect her—her algebra and when Caesar landed in England and the Nicene council and the verb être. Joseph didn’t know things like that. Probably the only date he knew was 1776. An ignorant man, really. Her mouth pinched at the corners with contempt. Her eyes grew stern. She would put him in his place as she would a smart-alec boy in school. Elizabeth ran her fingers around her waist, inside her skirt, to make sure that her shirt-waist was tucked in. She patted her hair, rubbed her lips harshly with her knuckles to bring the blood to the surface, and last, blew out the lamp. She came majestically into the parlor where Joseph stood.
“Good evening,” she said. “I was reading when they told me you were here. Pippa Passes, Browning. Do you like Browning, Mr. Wayne?’
He raked a nervous hand through his hair and destroyed the careful part. “Have you decided yet?” he demanded.
“I must ask you that first. I don’t know who Browning is.” He was staring at her with eyes so hungry, so beseeching, that her superiority dropped away from her and her facts crawled back into their cells.
Her hands made a helpless gesture. “I—I don’t know,” she said.
“I’ll go away again. You aren’t ready now. That is, unless you’d like to talk about Browning. Or maybe you might like to go for a drive. I came in the buckboard.”
Elizabeth stared downward at the green carpet with its brown footpath where the pile had been worn through, and her eyes moved to Joseph’s boots, glittering with daubed polish which was not black but iridescent, green and blue and purple. Elizabeth’s mind fastened on the shoes and felt safe for a moment. “The polish was old,” she thought. “He probably had the bottle for a long time and left the cork out. That always makes the colors in it. Black ink does the same thing when it’s left open. He doesn’t know that, I guess, and I won’t tell him. If I told him, I wouldn’t have any privacy any more.” And she wondered why he didn’t move his feet.
“We could drive down by the river,” Joseph said. “The river is fine, but it’s very dangerous to cross on foot. The stones are slippery, you see. You must not cross on foot. But we could drive down there.” He wanted to tell her how the wheels would sound, crushing the crisp leaves, and how a long blue spark with a head like a serpent’s tongue, would leap from the crash of iron and stone now and then. He wanted to say how the sky was low this night, so low that one bathed one’s head in it. There seemed no way to say such things. “I’d like you to go,” he said. He took a short step toward her, and destroyed the safety her mind had found.
Elizabeth had a quick impulse to be gay. She put her hand timidly on his arm and then patted his sleeve. “I’ll go,” she said, hearing an unnecessary loudness in her voice. “I think I’ll like to go. Teaching is a strain. I need to be out in the air.” She ran upstairs for her coat, humming under her breath, and at the top of the stairs she pointed her toe twice, as little girls do in a Maypole dance. “Now I am committing myself,” she thought. “People will see us driving alone at night, and that will mean we are engaged.”
Joseph stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked upward, waiting for her to reappear. He felt a desire to open his body for her inspection, so that she could see all the hidden things in him, even the things he did not know were there.
“That would be right,” he thought. “Then she would know the kind of man I am; and if she knew that she would be a part of me.”
She paused on the landing and smiled down on him. Over her shoulders she wore a long blue cape, and some of her hair was loose from its puff and caught in the nap of the blue wool. A rush of tenderness came over Joseph for the loose hairs. He laughed sharply. “Come quickly before the horses fade,” he said, “or the moment goes. Oh, of course I mean the polish Juanito put on the harness.”
He opened the door for her, and when they reached the buckboard he helped her to the rear seat before he untied the horses and fastened the ivory loops of their check reins. The horses danced a little, and Joseph was glad of that.
“Are you warm?” he asked.
“Yes, warm.”
The horses broke into a trot. Joseph saw how he could make a gesture with his arms and hands, that would sweep in and indicate and symbolize the ripe stars and the whole cup of the sky, the land, eddied with black trees, and the crested waves that were the mountains, an earth storm, frozen in the peak of its rushing, or stone breakers moving eastward with infinite slowness. Joseph wondered whether there were any words to say these things.
He said, “I like the night. It’s more strong than day.”
From the first moment of her association with him, Elizabeth had been tensed to repel his attack upon her boundaried and fortified self, but now a strange and sudden thing had happened. Perhaps the tone, the rhythm, perhaps some personal implication in his words had done it, had swept her walls cleanly away. She touched his arm with her fingertips, and trembled with delight and drew away. Her throat tightened above her breathing. She thought, “He will hear me panting, like a horse. This is disgraceful,” and she laughed nervously under her breath, knowing she didn’t care. Those thoughts she had kept weak and pale and hidden in the recesses of her brain, just out of thinking vision, came out into the open, and she saw that they were not foul and loathsome like slugs, as she had always believed, but somehow light and gay and holy. “If he should put his lips upon my breast I would be glad,” she thought. “The pressure of gladness in me would be more than I could stand. I would hold my breast to his lips with both hands.” She saw herself doing it and she knew how she would feel, pouring the hot fluid of herself toward his lips.