It was afternoon on the last day of December when Stacey arrived at the little station of Pickens, North Carolina. His face had a sunken ravaged look, and grime from the repulsively dirty train made its underlying pallor ghastly. But Stacey was not really in any such abject condition as he appeared to be. He was worn out, beaten back at every point, but something in him still hung on; his eyes were tired but alive. In the train, which was crowded, as only a branch-line train of the Southern Railway can be crowded, with commercial travellers and with slovenly mothers publicly nursing crying children much too old to be nursed either publicly or privately, he had listened with even a little amusement to talk of how much better the service would be as soon as the government turned the road back to the company; and his will to get away by himself, out of touch with men and women, was strong and intense, sustaining him. He was not repelled by the sordid ugliness of the station and the glimpse of Main Street, but felt rather an unemotional sense of home-coming, which any native of Pickens would have attributed to the fact that Stacey’s mother’s people, though now all dead or widely scattered, had been the Pickens Barclays, but which more likely arose in Stacey because the end of his quest was in sight.

Anyway here came old Elijah, grinning broadly, hat in hand, his fringe of white hair blowing about his nearly bald black head. He shook Stacey’s hand vigorously.

“I shuah almos’ thought you wasn’t on that theah train, Mistuh Stacey,” he declared. “Theah didn’ seem nothin’ but babies.” And he carried Stacey’s bag across the platform to a buggy.

“Hello!” said Stacey, “you’re driving Duke! What will Mr. Carroll say to that, Elijah?”

“Well, Mistuh Stacey, suh, I jes’ had to get you home somehow. These heah Fohds at the garage, jes’ as like as not they get stuck on the Meldrun road. I wouldn’ have drove Duke ’cept foh that. It’s been rainin’ a powehful lot.”

“Haven’t they mended that road yet?” Stacey inquired, getting into the buggy.

“No, suh, not yet. You stop that, Duke, suh!” he called to the horse, who, impatient of the shafts, was curveting sideways down the street.

Two or three people came up to the buggy and shook Stacey’s hand, and he replied to their greetings as heartily as he could; but he was eager to be rid of them, and felt relief when presently the town was left behind and the buggy was ploughing through the waste of red mud known as the Meldrun road. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat, drawing in deep breaths of the damp chilly air, and letting Elijah’s words run on unchecked and unheeded.

The landscape was a sweet and pleasant one even now in winter when the oaks and the poplars were bare of leaves. The rolling brick-colored fields, planted with corn, were interspersed with patches of woods, where hills rose, blue with spruce and dark green with white pine. Beyond were the low friendly mountains. Log cabins were scattered about here and there, with pigs, dogs and ragged children playing indiscriminately before them. All the people Stacey met or passed on the road raised their hats gravely, and Stacey raised his in return. He was enough of this country, and also sufficiently intelligent, to have no sentimental northern fancies about its romantic aristocracy. He had no more illusions about the people of Pickens than about the people of Vernon. If the latter were vulgar, the former were bigoted. There greed took on gigantic forms; here it revealed itself in petty ways. Here, as there, he thought, it was the one permanent human instinct. He did not know what labor conditions were now at the knitting mills; he knew what they had been six years ago, the last time he had been down, and he was skeptical of any change. Yet the sight of people here bothered him less than in Vernon, it seemed. That, he thought idly, was because here the inhabitants were more a part of their country, stood out less blatantly against the landscape, blended with it—or almost. Not because they and it were picturesque, but because they had belonged to their country for many generations, whereas in Vernon nobody had been molded by continuous residence into harmony with anything. And Stacey reflected that only in rural New England and the South did you get this impression of harmony between landscape and people, as though they had mutually made one another. Really they were at bottom very alike, rural New England and the South, though each would have been shocked at the idea. Each with a continuous past from which it had sprung, to which it belonged. A tight, narrow, little past, but authentic.

Stacey was roused from meditation by a sense that Elijah had been saying the same words a great many times, and that the words were a question.

“How’s that, Elijah?” he asked.

“I was jes’ sayin’, Mistuh Stacey, as how I reckoned you’d be wantin’ some colohed girl to cook foh you an’ make youah bed?”

“No,” said Stacey calmly, “I don’t want any one. You’ll do that, Elijah.”

The old man grew melancholy. “Shuah, Mistuh Stacey, if you say so,” he replied sadly. “I’ll wohk myself to the bone foh you, but I jes’ don’ know if I positively got the time to do everythin’ jes’ right. I got a powehful lot to do, Mistuh Stacey.”

“What is it, Elijah?”

“Well, I got to look afteh Duke, suh, an’ then theah’s all that big place to see to.”

“A couple of men working on it, aren’t there?”

“Yes, suh, but that’s jes’ it. They don’ wohk ’less’n I stan’s oveh them all the time.”

“They probably don’t work if you do. I don’t want a maid, Elijah. You can hire a woman to come in and clean for a couple of hours in the morning, but I don’t want to see her.”

“Yes, suh,” said the negro, in a tone of aggrieved resignation. But he got over it almost at once, with quick forgetfulness, and was presently babbling on as before.

When at last they approached the Carroll property Stacey looked about him more attentively, with a wistful sense of what was past, such as one might feel in reading over old letters, full of youthful affection, to some one all but forgotten now.

The house, three miles distant from the town, was low and rambling, with deep verandahs and numerous sleeping-porches. It sat on a knoll among ten acres of sloping lawn and perhaps ninety of oak and pine woods; and from its front verandah one looked away, west, for miles up a narrowing valley between tree-clad mountains. “Valley Ridge,” Stacey remembered, half humorously, half painfully, Julie had tried to call the place in her boarding-school days, and had come down one Christmas vacation with heavy blue stationery embossed in silver with that legend; at which their father had remarked that if she ever used any of that “Princess Alice abomination” he’d get some pink paper for himself, have “The Pig Sty” engraved for a heading, and write letters on it to the principal of Julie’s school.

It was odd, Stacey thought, that the recollection of this trivial incident should remain in his mind as something touching, more touching than the memory of really emotional events—his mother’s death, for instance. How things clung—the absurdest things! One could never get rid of them. They were like tattered cobwebs in corners.

But they had reached the end of the driveway by now, and Stacey sprang out.

After supper he sat, huddled in an overcoat, on the wide front verandah of the house. The low mountains, only a mile to the north, were hazy blue in the twilight. Later the moon rose, and soft brightness spread over everything. Straight ahead the narrow valley took on shimmering pearly tints, range after luminous range of mountains intersecting its sides, like filmy theatre-drops in a stage setting.

In the midst of this pale silence a sense of reposefulness came over Stacey. It did not spring from any achieved harmony. He had harmonized nothing. He had, as he was perfectly aware, merely bolted. And nothing that he had felt was gone. His pain at Phil’s death, his compassion for Catherine, his hatred of men, his resentment at this rag of a world,—all this and everything was still alive within him, but submerged beneath his isolation. When he thought of men he still thought of them as greedy beasts of prey; but it was possible for him now, he believed, not to see them and be one of them.

At last, when it had grown very late, he went up to the bed Elijah had made for him on a sleeping-porch, from which, too, he had the same view of the shining valley; and so fell asleep.

And now began for Stacey as solitary a life as that of any medieval hermit. Every morning he went out on Duke for a fifteen- or twenty-mile ride over mountain roads and paths, returning splashed with mud and frequently drenched through, for the season was exceptionally rainy. And after the late cold luncheon which he trained Elijah to leave spread out for him, he would set off again, on foot, for the woods.

The letters that came for him he tossed unopened into the library desk, except those from his father and Catherine. Theirs he read, but hastily, and replied to them with an effort. He did not so much mind reading or even answering Mr. Carroll’s; he did so almost mechanically. But Catherine’s were different. Matter-of-fact and never touching on general ideas, they were yet, in some cool way, intimate, and certainly without the shyness that had always hampered Catherine in talking to Stacey. It was as though in these letters she assumed that he was real, as he felt that she was. And this was painful to him, dragging him back into the world from which he had fled. Writing to her was hard, and he was aware that his letters must be dull. But Catherine did not write often—only once every two or three weeks.

Stacey also read a letter from Julie. But Julie was a poor correspondent, writing, when positively forced to, in an odd stilted manner quite uncharacteristic of her pleasant self. Only this one effort came from her; but Stacey would not have minded fifty letters as unreal. The postscript, however, did sound like Julie, and brought Stacey back for a moment to Vernon. “How did Irene know where you were when Phil was dying?” it demanded. Oh, so it was Irene who had told Julie, and Julie Catherine, that he was at Clarefield! He stared ahead of him, recalling the tragedy; then laid Julie’s letter among the others in the desk drawer.

A few people called on Stacey, and he was polite enough to them; but he never returned their visits, and soon no one troubled him further. It was a difficult matter to drive out from town through all that mud. When, rarely, he did talk with people he received an impression that they were literally very far off. Their voices seemed to reach him from a distance, or deadened as though through a barrier of fog. It was like conversation in a dream.

Sometimes on his rides he would get so far away or be caught in so terrific a storm that he would stay over night in some mountaineer’s cabin. On these occasions he was welcomed with a grave courtesy unmarred by apologies for what his hosts had to offer. The cabin invariably had but one room and a lean-to. Supper over, the women would go to bed, while the master of the house and Stacey smoked their pipes outside. Then the two of them would enter, undress in the dark, and lie down together. It did not irk Stacey to be with these people. They seemed apathetic and emotionless, and their eyes had an abstracted look.

On the other hand, if human feeling had faded in him, his long neglected fancy was waking to new life. His mind grew, like an enchanted wood, into a tangle of imaginings, that gave him sometimes a feeling of release, a lifting sense of delight. Similes flitted through it rapidly. A cloud shadow on a blue mountain was like a veil flung across the face of a goddess, heightening her loveliness. The sudden sound of a brook in the forest was like shy laughter. What was laughter? Something delicately unhuman, perhaps, an expression of the youthful buoyant relation between earth’s creatures and the earth. Biologists said that animals could not laugh. Idiotic! It was only animals and children that could laugh. A dog laughed. Even Duke could laugh. It was true that cats could not, but this was because they were not primitive animals, but civilized. Men did not laugh. They smirked or—or—ricanaient. Stacey could not think of the English word and indolently did not try to.

He noted with calm contempt this revival of fancifulness in himself, saying that he had reverted to the sentimentalism of his early life. For all along he was contemptuous of himself for his surrender. Further than this he would not look. He avoided himself as persistently as he avoided others.

Yet in his reading he did not turn to poetry and romance. He read Tolstoy, Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy. He cared, in fact, for no books that did not treat solely and squarely of men’s relations to one another. He would have nothing to do with men; he would read of nothing else.

Months passed, with Stacey scarcely aware of their smooth succession. He was like a man asleep, vaguely dreaming. But it was only a sleep, a semi-conscious state into which one sinks, however pleasantly, when tired. Even in those moments when his fancy played delightedly over some sudden glimpse of beauty he was at bottom dissatisfied—like a man struggling achingly in a dream to enfold and make real the unsubstantial vision of his mistress.

By this time April had come. The Judas trees had burned themselves out, the fresh pale green of oaks and maples shimmered against the dark green of the pines, the forests were white with dog-wood blossom, and on the lower mountain slopes masses of flame azalea made the ground beneath the trees appear on fire. Much of Stacey’s present calm came through his freedom from men; but much, too, from the silent satisfaction of his starved sense of beauty. He read less now and went on longer rides.

But his calm was insecure. Something impetuous fluttered within him, too strong for this life of fancy. Mentally he was still isolated; physically he was restless, stirred tumultuously by the spring, called to union with the warm thrilling life all about him.