Outland
9781465640338
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The trail begins at the Broken Tree with the hawk’s nest. As often as we have talked of it since, Herman and I, and that is as often as the ceanothus blooms untimely for a sign of rains delayed, or there is a low moon and a following star, or a wind out of the south with the smell of wild honey in it, we have agreed together that the trail begins at Broken Tree. There were some other landmarks I was quite as sure of at the time, but the creek makes so many turns here I could never find them again, and the second time of Herman’s going in, he had altogether other things to think about. So as often as we have occasion to talk of it, we end by saying that it begins at Broken Tree. I remember very well how Fairshore looked that day as we stood gazing back at it from the edge of the plowed lands; the pines sketched blackly against the smudgy, fawn-colored slope, the sea as blue as lazuli, and the leaning surf. I had another reason for remembering it, since it was the last time of Herman’s asking and of my refusing to marry him. I don’t know why Herman’s being a professor of sociology should have led him to suppose that our liking the same sort of books and much the same people, and having between us an income fairly adequate to the exigencies of comfortable living, should have been reason enough for my marrying him, but he had spent a great deal of time that summer trying to convince me that it was. I recall being rather short with him that afternoon. For, in the first place, if I had meant to marry Herman I should not have put all I had into a house at Fairshore, and in the next place, though I had not got to the point of admitting it, the house was proving rather a failure. For a long time I had believed that it needed but a little space of collected quietness for the vague presages of my spirit to burst freely into power. Somewhere within myself I was aware of a vast, undiscovered country full of wandering lights and crying voices, from whence the springs of great undertakings should issue. But now that the house was accomplished and my position in the English Department definitely resigned, all that I had got by it was an insuperable dryness of heart and a great deal of time which hung rather heavily upon my hands. I had done no work at Fairshore that I was willing to confess to in print. I know I should not, until I could escape from this inward desertness into that quarter from whence still, at times, I could feel a wind blowing that trumpeted up all the lagging forces of my soul. And just when I was wanting most to know passion and great freedom of feeling, Herman’s offer of a reasonable marriage, of which the particular recommendation was that no feeling went to it, took on the complexion of a personal affront. The more so since there was no very definite way in which I could make clear to Herman just what offended me. He was going on that afternoon to explain to me how, in a marriage free from the disturbances of passion incidental to temperamental matings, I should be at ease to give myself wholly to the business of book-making. With all his understanding, Herman was fully possessed of that Academic notion that literature can be produced by taking pains instead of having them. He was very patient with me through it all, crediting my indifference to overwork and to nerves, as a man does with a woman when he is at a loss to know what is the matter with her. The truth was, if I was tired of anything, it was of being the very things Herman most admired in me. I was growing every moment more exasperated. By the time he had got to the point of wanting to know what more there was that he could say, I had reached the pitch of replying that there could be nothing more unless he wished to say the usual thing.
