A Tangled Web

  She saw Murray Dark devouring Thora Dark with his eyes, satisfied if she gave him only one look in return. He would, Joscelyn knew, rather have one of those long, deep, remote looks of Thora’s than a kiss from any other woman. Well, it was no wonder he loved Thora. She was one of those women men can’t help loving—except Chris Dark, who had given up loving her six weeks after he had married her. Yet other women did not dislike Thora. Whenever she came into a room people felt happier. She lighted life like a friendly beaming candle. She had a face that was charming without being in the least beautiful. A fascinating square face with a wide space between her blue almond-shaped eyes and a sweet, crooked mouth.

  She was very nicely dressed. Her peculiarly dark auburn hair was parted on her forehead and coroneted on her crown. There were milky pearl drops in her ears. What a wife she would make for Murray if that detestable Chris would only be so obliging as to die. The winter before, he had had double pneumonia and everybody was sure he would die. But he hadn’t—owed his life, no doubt, to Thora’s faithful nursing. And Matthew Penhallow at Three Hills, whom everybody loved and who had a family that needed him, died of his pneumonia. Another proof of the contrariness of life.

  Pauline Dark wasn’t here. Was she still in love with Hugh? She had never married. What a tangled, crisscrossed thing life was, anyhow. And here they were all sitting in rows, waiting for Ambrosine Winkworth to bring down the jug about which they were all ready to tear each other in pieces. Truly a mad world. Joscelyn was unblessed with the sense of humor which was making the affair a treat to Tempest Dark, sitting behind her. Tempest had made up his mind on considered opinion to shoot himself that night. He had nearly done it the night before, but he had reflected that he might as well wait till after the levee. He wanted, as a mere matter of curiosity, to see who got the old Dark jug. Winnifred had liked that jug. He knew he had no chance of it himself. Aunt Becky had no use for a bankrupt. He was bankrupt and the wife he had adored had died a few weeks previously. He couldn’t see any sense in living on. But just at this moment he was enjoying himself.

  6

  Donna Dark and Virginia Powell sat together as usual. They were first cousins, who were born the same day and married the same day—Donna to her own second cousin, Barry Dark, and Virginia to Edmond Powell—two weeks before they had left for Valcartier. Edmond Powell had died of pneumonia in the training camp, but Barry Dark had his crowded hour of glorious life somewhere in France. Virginia and Donna were “war widows” and had made a solemn compact to remain widows forever. It was Virginia’s idea, but Donna was very ready to fall in with it. She knew she could never care for any man again. She had never said her heart was buried in any especial place—though rumor sometimes attributed Virginia’s famous utterance to her—but she felt that way about it. For ten years they had continued to wear weeds, though Virginia was always much weedier than Donna.

  Most of the clan thought Virginia, with her spiritual beauty of pale gold hair and over-large forget-me-not eyes, was the prettier of the two devoted. Donna was as dark as her name—a slight, ivory-colored thing with very black hair which she always wore brushed straight back from her forehead, as hair should be worn only by a really pretty woman or by a woman who doesn’t care whether she looks pretty or not. Donna didn’t care—or thought she didn’t—but it was her good luck to have been born with a widow’s peak and that saved her. Her best features were her eyes, like star-sapphires, and her mouth with its corners tucked up into dimples. She had bobbed her hair at last, though her father kicked up a fearful domestic hullabaloo over it and Virginia was horrified.

  “Do you think Barry would have liked it, dear?”

  “Why not?” said Donna rebelliously. “Barry wouldn’t have liked a dowdy wife. He was always up-to-date.”

  Virginia sighed and shook her head. She would never cut off her hair—never. The hair Edmond had caressed and admired.

  “He used to bury his face in it and say it was like perfumed sunshine,” she moaned gently.

  Donna had continued to live with her father, Drowned John Penhallow—so called to distinguish him from another John Penhallow who had not been drowned—and her older half-sister, Thekla, ever since Barry’s death. She had wanted to go away and train for nursing, but Drowned John had put his not inconsiderable foot down on that. Donna had yielded—it saved trouble to yield to Drowned John at the outset. He simply yelled people down. His rages were notorious in the clan. When reproached with them he said,

  “If I didn’t go into a rage now and then, life here would be so dull my females would hang themselves.”

  Drowned John was twice a widower. With his first wife, Jennie Penhallow, he had quarreled from the time they were married. When they knew their first baby was coming, they quarreled over what college they would send him to. As the baby turned out to be Thekla, there was no question—in Drowned John’s mind, at least—of college. But the rows went on and became such a scandal that the clan hinted at a separation—not divorce of course. That never entered their heads. But Drowned John did not see the sense of it. He would have to have a housekeeper.

  “Might as well be quarreling with Jennie as with any other woman,” he said.

  When Jennie died—“from sheer exhaustion,” the clan said—Drowned John married Emmy Dark, destined to be Donna’s mother. The clan thought Emmy was more than a little mad to take him, and pointed out to her what an existence she would have. But Drowned John never quarreled with Emmy. Emmy simply would not quarrel—and Drowned John had secretly thought life with her was very flat. Yet, although he always had two sets of manners and used his second best at home, Thekla and Donna were rather fond of him. When he got his own way he was quite agreeable. Hate what Drowned John hated—love what Drowned John loved—give him a bit of blarney now and again—and you couldn’t find a nicer man.

  All sorts of weird yarns were told of Drowned John’s young days, culminating in his quarrel with his father, during which Drowned John, who had a tremendous voice, shouted so loud that they heard him over at Three Hills, two miles away. After which he had run away to sea on a ship that was bound for New Zealand. He had fallen overboard on the voyage and was reported drowned. The clan held a funeral service and his father had his name chiseled on the big family monument in the graveyard. After two years young John came home, unchanged save for a huge snake tattooed around his right arm, having acquired a lavish vocabulary of profanity and an abiding distaste for sea-faring. Some thought the ship which had picked him up unnecessarily meddlesome. But John settled down on the farm, told Jennie Penhallow he was going to marry her, and refused to have his name erased from the monument. It was too good a joke. Every Sunday Drowned John went into the graveyard and guffawed over it.

  He was sitting now behind William Y. and wondering if William Y. really was presumptuous enough to imagine he should have the jug. Why, there was no manner of doubt in the world that he, John Penhallow, should have it. It would be a damned outrage if Aunt Becky gave it to anyone else and he’d tell her so, by asterisk and by asterisk. His very long face crimsoned with fury at the mere thought—a crimson that covered his ugly bald forehead, running back to his crown. His bushy white mustache bristled. His pop-eyes glared. By—more asterisks and very lurid ones—if anyone else got that jug they’d have to reckon with him.

  “I wonder what Drowned John is swearing so viciously inside himself about,” thought Uncle Pippin. Donna wanted the jug, too. She was really quite crazy about it. She felt she ought to have it. Long, long ago, when Barry was just a little boy, Aunt Becky had told him she was going to leave it to him when she died. So she, Barry’s widow, should have it now. It was such a lovely old thing, with its romantic history. Donna had always hankered after it. She did not swear internally as her father did, but she thought crossly she had never seen such a bunch of old harpies.

  7

  Outside on the railing of the veranda Peter Penhallow was sitting, swingin
g one of his long legs idly in the air. A rather contemptuous scowl was on his lean, bronzed, weary face. Peter’s face always looked bored and weary—at least in scenes of civilization. He wasn’t going in. You would not catch Peter mewed up in a room full of heirloom hunters. Indeed, to Peter any room, even a vacant one, was simply a place to get out of as soon as possible. He always averred he could not breathe with four walls around him. He had come to this confounded levee—a curse on Aunt Becky’s whims!—sorely against his will, but at least he would stay outside where there was a distant view of the jeweled harbor and a glorious wind that had never known fetters, blowing right up from the gulf—Peter loved wind—and a big tree of apple blossom that was fairer to look upon than any woman’s face had ever seemed to Peter. The clan wrote Peter down as a woman-hater, but he was nothing of the sort. The only woman he hated was Donna Dark; he was simply not interested in women and had never tried to be because he felt sure no woman would ever be willing to share the only life he could live. And as for giving up that life and adopting a settled existence, the idea simply could never have occurred to Peter. Women regretted this, for they found him very attractive. Not handsome but “so distinguished, you know.” He had gray eagle eyes, that turned black in excitement or deep feeling. Women did not like his eyes—they made them uncomfortable—but they thought his mouth very beautiful and even liked it for its strength and tenderness and humor. As Uncle Pippin said, the clan would likely have been very fond of Peter Penhallow if they had ever had any chance to get acquainted with him. As it was, he remained only a tantalizing hop-out-of-kin, out of whose goings-on they got several vicarious thrills and of whom they were proud because his explorations and discoveries had won him fame—“notoriety,” Drowned John called it—but whom they never pretended to understand and of whose satiric winks they were all a little afraid. Peter hated sham of any kind; and a clan like the Penhallows and the Darks were full of it. Had to be, or they couldn’t have carried on as a clan at all. But Peter never made any allowances for that.

  “Look at Donna Dark,” he was wont to sneer. “Pretending to be devoted to Barry’s memory when all the time she’d jump at a second husband if there was any chance of one.”

  Not that Peter ever did look at Donna. He had never seen her since she was a child of eight, sitting across from him in church on the last Sunday he had been there before he ran away on the cattle-ship. But people reported what he said to Donna and Donna had it in for him. She never expected any such good luck as a chance to get square. But one of her day-dreams was that in some mysterious and unthinkable way Peter Penhallow should fall in love with her and sue for her hand, only to be spurned with contumely. Oh, how she would spurn him! How she would show him that she was “a widow indeed.” Meanwhile she had to content herself with hating him as bitterly as Drowned John himself could hate.

  Peter, who was by trade a civil engineer and by taste an explorer, had been born in a blizzard and had nearly been the death of three people in the process—his mother, to begin with, and his father and the doctor, who were blocked and all but frozen to death on that night of storm. When they were eventually dug out and thawed out Peter was there. And never, so old Aunty But averred, had such an infant been born. When she had carried him out to the kitchen to dress him, he had lifted his head of his own power and stared all around the room with bright eager eyes. Aunty But had never seen anything like it. It seemed uncanny and gave her such a turn that she let Peter drop. Luckily he landed unhurt on a cushion of the lounge, but it was the first of many narrow shaves. Aunty But always told with awe that Peter had not cried when he came into the world, as all properly behaved babies do.

  “He seemed to like the change,” said Aunty But. “He’s a fine, healthy child but”—and Aunt But shook her head forebodingly. The Jeff Penhallows did not bother over her “buts.” She had got her nickname from them. But they lived to think that her foreboding on this occasion was justified.

  Peter continued to like change. He had been born with the soul of Balboa or Columbus. He felt to the full the lure of treading where no human foot had ever trod. He had a thirst for life that was never quenched—“Life,” he used to say, “that grand glorious adventure we share with the gods.” When he was fourteen he had earned his way around the world, starting out with ten cents and working his passage to Australia on a cattle-ship. Then he had come home—with the skin of a man-eating tiger he had killed himself for his mother’s decorous parlor floor and a collection of magnificent blue African butterflies which became a clan boast—gone back to school, toiled slavishly, and eventually graduated in civil engineering. His profession took him all over the world. When he had made enough money out of a job to keep him for a while, he stopped working and simply explored. He was always daring the unknown—the uncharted—the undiscovered. His family had resigned themselves to it. As Uncle Pippin said, Peter was “not domestic” and they knew now he would never become so. He had had many wild adventures of which his clan knew and a thousand more of which they never heard. They were always expecting him to be killed. “He’ll be clapped into a cooking-pot someday,” said Drowned John, but he did not say it to Peter, for the simple reason that he never spoke to him. There was an old feud between those two Penhallow families, dating back to the day when Jeff Penhallow had killed Drowned John’s dog and hung it up at his gate, because Drowned John’s dog had worried his sheep and Drowned John had refused to believe it or to get rid of his dog. From that day none of Drowned John’s family had had any dealings, verbal or otherwise, with any of Jeff Penhallow’s. Drowned John knocked down and otherwise maltreated in the square at Charlottetown a man who said that Jeff Penhallow’s word was as good as his bond because neither was any good. And Peter Penhallow, meeting a fellow Islander somewhere along the Congo, slapped his face because the said Islander laughed over Thekla Dark having once flavored some gingerbread with mustard. But this was clan loyalty and had nothing whatever to do with personal feeling, which continued to harden and embitter through the years. When Barry Dark, Peter’s cousin and well-beloved chum, told Peter he was going to marry Donna Dark, Peter was neither to hold nor bind. He refused to countenance the affair at all and kicked up such a rumpus that even the Jeff Penhallows thought he was going entirely too far. When the wedding came off, Peter was hunting wapiti in New Zealand, full of bitterness of soul, partly because Barry had married one of the accursed race and partly because he, Peter, being notoriously and incurably left-handed, had not been accepted for overseas service. Barry had been rather annoyed over Peter’s behavior and a slight coolness had arisen between them, which was never quite removed because Barry never came back from the front. This left a sore spot in Peter’s soul which envenomed still further his hatred of Donna Dark.

  Peter had had no intention of coming to Aunt Becky’s levee. He had fully meant to leave that afternoon en route for an exploring expedition in the upper reaches of the Amazon. He had packed and strapped and locked his trunk, whistling with sheer boyish delight in being off once more. He had had a month at home—a month too much. Thank God, no more of it. In a few weeks he would be thousands of miles away from the petty gossips and petty loves and petty hates of the Darks and Penhallows—away from a world where women bobbed their hair and you couldn’t tell who were grandmothers and who were flappers—from behind—and in a place where nobody would ever make moan, “Oh, what will people think of you, Peter, if you do—or don’t do—that?”

  “And I swear by the nine gods of Clusium that this place will not see me again for the next ten years,” said Peter Penhallow, running downstairs to his brother’s car, waiting to take him to the station.

  Just then Destiny, with an impish chuckle, tapped him on the shoulder. His half-sister Nancy was corning into the yard almost in tears. She couldn’t get to the levee if he wouldn’t take her. Her husband’s car had broken down. And she must get to the levee. She would have no chance at all of getting that darling old jug if she did not go.

/>   “Young Jeff here can take you. I’ll wait for the evening train,” said Peter obligingly.

  Young Jeff demurred. He had to hoe his turnips. He could spare half an hour to take Peter to the station, but spend a whole afternoon down at Indian Spring he would not.

  “Take her yourself,” he said. “If the evening train suits you as well, you’ve nothing else to do this afternoon.”

  Peter yielded unwillingly. It was almost the first time in his life he had done anything he really didn’t want to do. But Nancy had always been a sweet little dear—his favorite in his own family. She “Oh—Petered” him far less than any of the others. If she had set her heart on that confounded jug, he wasn’t going to spoil her chance.