VII
When Frank Shabata got home that night,
he found Emil's mare in his stable. Such an
impertinence amazed him. Like everybody
else, Frank had had an exciting day. Since
noon he had been drinking too much, and he
was in a bad temper. He talked bitterly to him-
self while he put his own horse away, and as he
went up the path and saw that the house was
dark he felt an added sense of injury. He ap-
proached quietly and listened on the doorstep.
Hearing nothing, he opened the kitchen door
and went softly from one room to another.
Then he went through the house again, up-
stairs and down, with no better result. He sat
down on the bottom step of the box stairway
and tried to get his wits together. In that un-
natural quiet there was no sound but his own
heavy breathing. Suddenly an owl began to
hoot out in the fields. Frank lifted his head.
An idea flashed into his mind, and his sense
of injury and outrage grew. He went into his
bedroom and took his murderous 405 Winches-
ter from the closet.
When Frank took up his gun and walked out
of the house, he had not the faintest purpose of
doing anything with it. He did not believe that
he had any real grievance. But it gratified him
to feel like a desperate man. He had got into
the habit of seeing himself always in desperate
straits. His unhappy temperament was like a
cage; he could never get out of it; and he felt
that other people, his wife in particular, must
have put him there. It had never more than
dimly occurred to Frank that he made his own
unhappiness. Though he took up his gun with
dark projects in his mind, he would have been
paralyzed with fright had he known that there
was the slightest probability of his ever carry-
ing any of them out.
Frank went slowly down to the orchard gate,
stopped and stood for a moment lost in
thought. He retraced his steps and looked
through the barn and the hayloft. Then he
went out to the road, where he took the foot-
path along the outside of the orchard hedge.
The hedge was twice as tall as Frank himself,
and so dense that one could see through it only
by peering closely between the leaves. He
could see the empty path a long way in the
moonlight. His mind traveled ahead to the
stile, which he always thought of as haunted
by Emil Bergson. But why had he left his
horse?
At the wheatfield corner, where the orchard
hedge ended and the path led across the pasture
to the Bergsons', Frank stopped. In the warm,
breathless night air he heard a murmuring
sound, perfectly inarticulate, as low as the
sound of water coming from a spring, where
there is no fall, and where there are no stones to
fret it. Frank strained his ears. It ceased. He
held his breath and began to tremble. Resting
the butt of his gun on the ground, he parted the
mulberry leaves softly with his fingers and
peered through the hedge at the dark figures on
the grass, in the shadow of the mulberry tree.
It seemed to him that they must feel his eyes,
that they must hear him breathing. But they
did not. Frank, who had always wanted to see
things blacker than they were, for once wanted
to believe less than he saw. The woman lying
in the shadow might so easily be one of the
Bergsons' farm-girls. . . . Again the murmur,
like water welling out of the ground. This time
he heard it more distinctly, and his blood was
quicker than his brain. He began to act, just as
a man who falls into the fire begins to act. The
gun sprang to his shoulder, he sighted mechani-
cally and fired three times without stopping,
stopped without knowing why. Either he shut
his eyes or he had vertigo. He did not see any-
thing while he was firing. He thought he heard
a cry simultaneous with the second report, but
he was not sure. He peered again through the
hedge, at the two dark figures under the tree.
They had fallen a little apart from each other,
and were perfectly still-- No, not quite; in
a white patch of light, where the moon shone
through the branches, a man's hand was pluck-
ing spasmodically at the grass.
Suddenly the woman stirred and uttered a
cry, then another, and another. She was living!
She was dragging herself toward the hedge!
Frank dropped his gun and ran back along the
path, shaking, stumbling, gasping. He had
never imagined such horror. The cries fol-
lowed him. They grew fainter and thicker, as
if she were choking. He dropped on his knees
beside the hedge and crouched like a rabbit,
listening; fainter, fainter; a sound like a whine;
again--a moan--another--silence. Frank
scrambled to his feet and ran on, groaning and
praying. From habit he went toward the house,
where he was used to being soothed when he had
worked himself into a frenzy, but at the sight
of the black, open door, he started back. He
knew that he had murdered somebody, that a
woman was bleeding and moaning in the or-
chard, but he had not realized before that it
was his wife. The gate stared him in the face.
He threw his hands over his head. Which way
to turn? He lifted his tormented face and
looked at the sky. "Holy Mother of God, not to
suffer! She was a good girl--not to suffer!"
Frank had been wont to see himself in dra-
matic situations; but now, when he stood by the
windmill, in the bright space between the barn
and the house, facing his own black doorway, he
did not see himself at all. He stood like the
hare when the dogs are approaching from all
sides. And he ran like a hare, back and forth
about that moonlit space, before he could make
up his mind to go into the dark stable for a
horse. The thought of going into a doorway
was terrible to him. He caught Emil's horse
by the bit and led it out. He could not have
buckled a bridle on his own. After two or
three attempts, he lifted himself into the sad-
dle and started for Hanover. If he could catch
the one o'clock train, he had money enough to
get as far as Omaha.
While he was thinking dully of this in some
less sensitized part of his brain, his acuter
faculties were going over and over the cries he
had heard in the orchard. Terror was the only
thing that kept him from going back to her,
terror that she might still be she, that she might
still be suffering. A woman, mutilated and
bleeding in his orchard--it was because it was
a woman that he was so afraid. It was incon-
ceivable that he should have hurt a woman. He
would rather be eaten by wild beasts than see
her move on the ground as she had moved in
the orchard. Why had she been so careless?
She knew he was like a crazy man when he was
angry. She had more than once taken that gun
away from him and held it, when he was angry
with other people. Once it had gone off while
they were struggling over it. She was never
afraid. But, when she knew him, why hadn't
she been more careful? Didn't she have all
summer before her to love Emil Bergson in,
without taking such chances? Probably she had
met the Smirka boy, too, down there in the
orchard. He didn't care. She could have met
all the men on the Divide there, and welcome, if
only she hadn't brought this horror on him.
There was a wrench in Frank's mind. He did
not honestly believe that of her. He knew that
he was doing her wrong. He stopped his horse
to admit this to himself the more directly, to
think it out the more clearly. He knew that
he was to blame. For three years he had been
trying to break her spirit. She had a way of
making the best of things that seemed to him a
sentimental affectation. He wanted his wife to
resent that he was wasting his best years among
these stupid and unappreciative people; but she
had seemed to find the people quite good
enough. If he ever got rich he meant to buy
her pretty clothes and take her to California in
a Pullman car, and treat her like a lady; but in
the mean time he wanted her to feel that life
was as ugly and as unjust as he felt it. He had
tried to make her life ugly. He had refused to
share any of the little pleasures she was so
plucky about making for herself. She could be
gay about the least thing in the world; but she
must be gay! When she first came to him, her
faith in him, her adoration-- Frank struck the
mare with his fist. Why had Marie made him
do this thing; why had she brought this upon
him? He was overwhelmed by sickening mis-
fortune. All at once he heard her cries again--
he had forgotten for a moment. "Maria," he
sobbed aloud, "Maria!"
When Frank was halfway to Hanover, the motion of his horse brought on a violent attack of nausea. After it had passed, he rode on again, but he could think of nothing except his physical weakness and his desire to be com- forted by his wife. He wanted to get into his own bed. Had his wife been at home, he would have turned and gone back to her meekly enough.
