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Updated: June 4, 2025
"Your wife?" insisted Raven. "I don't believe I know her. No, I'm sure I don't. I've been away several years. On the road, you mean? No not a soul." A swift rage passed over Tenney's face. It licked it like a flash of evil light and Raven thought he saw how dangerous he could be. "No," he said, "I don't mean on the road. I mean in the woods." "Up here?" persisted Raven. "No, certainly not.
"Well," said Raven, in a futile reassurance, "perhaps he thinks he's left it somewhere, and if he doesn't particularly need it Jerry told me only this morning the doctor said he might as well be getting used to a cane." "No," said Tira conclusively, "he don't think he's left it anywheres. He's keepin' still, that's all." Immediately Raven saw the menacing significance of Tenney's keeping still.
Tira, fair as her mind was in its untouched integrity, hated the jungle, but it was a part of the wrong life had done her that she could not, highly as she worshiped Raven, keep herself from seeing his kinship to the natural earth as Martin's kinship with it, Tenney's all the beasts who had desired her. How to tell her that?
"Nothing else will," said Nan. "Tenney's got to give his consent. We can't do any kidnaping business. That's no good." She said it with the peremptory implication of extinguishing middle-aged scruples, and Raven also felt it to be "no good." "Very well," said he. "You know best. I'll go with you." "Oh, no, you won't. There are too many men-folks in it now. I'm going alone.
The kindness had been only to lure her into trusting him, just as Tenney's had turned into a rage of abusive jealousy. Raven's kindness was different. It was not in any degree personal to her. She knew he would have been as merciful to a squirrel caught in a trap.
Once in the road she started to run, and then remembered she must not pass Tenney's running, as if the world were afire, as things were in her mind. But she did walk rapidly, and glancing up when she was opposite the house, saw the front door open as Tira had left it, and a figure in one of the back rooms outlined against the window of the front one where she and Tira had sat.
That led them past Tenney's and when they reached the house Raven said: "You wait a jiff and I'll ask how he is." Tira came, in answer to his knock. She was gravely calm, not even disturbed in her secret mind, Raven concluded, not keyed up by inner apprehension, and keeping herself firm.
Only she did have a great sense of Nan's entire harmony with the garden bed and the garden bed with her. Charlotte had other things on her mind, and she spoke without preamble: "D'you know what's happened over to Tenney's?" Nan got up from her knees, and her face was no longer the April-May face she had bent above the peonies. "No," she said. "What is it?"
Prayer-meeting at Tenney's was not, Raven concluded, regarded much more seriously than Charlotte had foreseen. The bells jingled off into the distance. The horses were bent on home. As if the sound only had torn up the night into shreds of commotion, so now the bits of silence drew together into a web and the web covered them.
I don't know whether I ever have 'to her head, as Charlotte would say, but I don't seem to feel like calling her by Tenney's name. Well, Tira's decided. She's going to give her baby to Nan." Dick's eyes enlarged to such an extent, his mouth opened so vacuously, that Raven laughed out. Evidently Dick wasn't regarding the matter from Tira's standpoint, or even Raven's now, but his own.
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