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SUMMER

by Edith Wharton


1917




I


A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street
of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.

It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky
shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the
pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the
round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows
across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street
when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the
open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England
villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the
Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only
roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at
the other end of the village, the road rises above the church and skirts
the black hemlock wall enclosing the cemetery.

The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful
fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught the straw hat of a young man
just passing under them, and spun it clean across the road into the
duck-pond.

As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's doorstep noticed
that he was a stranger, that he wore city clothes, and that he was
laughing with all his teeth, as the young and careless laugh at such
mishaps.

Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that sometimes came
over her when she saw people with holiday faces made her draw back into
the house and pretend to look for the key that she knew she had already
put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror with a gilt eagle over it
hung on the passage wall, and she looked critically at her reflection,
wished for the thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel
Balch, the girl who sometimes came from Springfield to spend a week with
old Miss Hatchard, straightened the sunburnt hat over her small swarthy
face, and turned out again into the sunshine.

"How I hate everything!" she murmured.

The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, and she had the
street to herself. North Dormer is at all times an empty place, and at
three o'clock on a June afternoon its few able-bodied men are off in
the fields or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languid household
drudgery.

The girl walked along, swinging her key on a finger, and looking about
her with the heightened attention produced by the presence of a stranger
in a familiar place. What, she wondered, did North Dormer look like to
people from other parts of the world? She herself had lived there
since the age of five, and had long supposed it to be a place of some
importance. But about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopal
clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other Sunday--when the roads
were not ploughed up by hauling--to hold a service in the North Dormer
church, had proposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take the young
people down to Nettleton to hear an illustrated lecture on the Holy
Land; and the dozen girls and boys who represented the future of North
Dormer had been piled into a farm-waggon, driven over the hills to
Hepburn, put into a way-train and carried to Nettleton.

In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall had, for the first
and only time, experienced railway-travel, looked into shops with
plate-glass fronts, tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened
to a gentleman saying unintelligible things before pictures that she
would have enjoyed looking at if his explanations had not prevented her
from understanding them. This initiation had shown her that North Dormer
was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that
her position as custodian of the village library had previously failed
to excite. For a month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly
into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial Library; then the
impression of Nettleton began to fade, and she found it easier to take
North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading.

The sight of the stranger once more revived memories of Nettleton, and
North Dormer shrank to its real size. As she looked up and down it, from
lawyer Royall's faded red house at one end to the white church at the
other, she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, a weather-beaten
sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway,
trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern
communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no "business
block"; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state
of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been
bought for twenty years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed on
the damp shelves. Yet Charity Royall had always been told that she ought
to consider it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North Dormer.
She knew that, compared to the place she had come from, North Dormer
represented all the blessings of the most refined civilization. Everyone
in the village had told her so ever since she had been brought there as
a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said to her, on a terrible occasion
in her life: "My child, you must never cease to remember that it was Mr.
Royall who brought you down from the Mountain."

She had been "brought down from the Mountain"; from the scarred cliff
that lifted its sullen wall above the lesser slopes of Eagle Range,
making a perpetual background of gloom to the lonely valley. The
Mountain was a good fifteen miles away, but it rose so abruptly from the
lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its shadow over North Dormer.
And it was like a great magnet drawing the clouds and scattering them
in storm across the valley. If ever, in the purest summer sky, there
trailed a thread of vapour over North Dormer, it drifted to the Mountain
as a ship drifts to a whirlpool, and was caught among the rocks, torn up
and multiplied, to sweep back over the village in rain and darkness.

Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she knew it was a bad
place, and a shame to have come from, and that, whatever befell her
in North Dormer, she ought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded her, to
remember that she had been brought down from there, and hold her tongue
and be thankful. She looked up at the Mountain, thinking of these
things, and tried as usual to be thankful. But the sight of the young
man turning in at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the vision of
the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she felt ashamed of her old
sun-hat, and sick of North Dormer, and jealously aware of Annabel Balch
of Springfield, opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on glories
greater than the glories of Nettleton.

"How I hate everything!" she said again.

Half way down the street she stopped at a weak-hinged gate. Passing
through it, she walked down a brick path to a queer little brick temple
with white wooden columns supporting a pediment on which was inscribed
in tarnished gold letters: "The Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library,
1832."

Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she
would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her
only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For
Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had
enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of
the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked
literary gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle
Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene
Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy.
Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a
link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity
Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a
freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt
any deader in his grave than she did in his library.

Entering her prison-house with a listless step she took off her hat,
hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva, opened the shutters, leaned out
to see if there were any eggs in the swallow's nest above one of the
windows, and finally, seating herself behind the desk, drew out a
roll of cotton lace and a steel crochet hook. She was not an expert
workwoman, and it had taken her many weeks to make the half-yard
of narrow lace which she kept wound about the buckram back of a
disintegrated copy of "The Lamplighter." But there was no other way of
getting any lace to trim her summer blouse, and since Ally Hawes, the
poorest girl in the village, had shown herself in church with enviable
transparencies about the shoulders, Charity's hook had travelled faster.
She unrolled the lace, dug the hook into a loop, and bent to the task
with furrowed brows.

Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised her eyes she knew
that the young man she had seen going in at the Hatchard gate had
entered the library.

Without taking any notice of her he began to move slowly about the
long vault-like room, his hands behind his back, his short-sighted eyes
peering up and down the rows of rusty bindings. At length he reached the
desk and stood before her.

"Have you a card-catalogue?" he asked in a pleasant abrupt voice; and
the oddness of the question caused her to drop her work.

"A WHAT?"

"Why, you know----" He broke off, and she became conscious that he was
looking at her for the first time, having apparently, on his entrance,
included her in his general short-sighted survey as part of the
furniture of the library.

The fact that, in discovering her, he lost the thread of his remark,
did not escape her attention, and she looked down and smiled. He smiled
also.

"No, I don't suppose you do know," he corrected himself. "In fact, it
would be almost a pity----"

She thought she detected a slight condescension in his tone, and asked
sharply: "Why?"

"Because it's so much pleasanter, in a small library like this, to poke
about by one's self--with the help of the librarian."

He added the last phrase so respectfully that she was mollified, and
rejoined with a sigh: "I'm afraid I can't help you much."

"Why?" he questioned in his turn; and she replied that there weren't
many books anyhow, and that she'd hardly read any of them. "The worms
are getting at them," she added gloomily.

"Are they? That's a pity, for I see there are some good ones." He seemed
to have lost interest in their conversation, and strolled away again,
apparently forgetting her. His indifference nettled her, and she picked
up her work, resolved not to offer him the least assistance. Apparently
he did not need it, for he spent a long time with his back to her,
lifting down, one after another, the tall cob-webby volumes from a
distant shelf.

"Oh, I say!" he exclaimed; and looking up she saw that he had drawn out
his handkerchief and was carefully wiping the edges of the book in his
hand. The action struck her as an unwarranted criticism on her care of
the books, and she said irritably: "It's not my fault if they're dirty."

He turned around and looked at her with reviving interest. "Ah--then
you're not the librarian?"

"Of course I am; but I can't dust all these books. Besides, nobody ever
looks at them, now Miss Hatchard's too lame to come round."

"No, I suppose not." He laid down the book he had been wiping, and stood
considering her in silence. She wondered if Miss Hatchard had sent
him round to pry into the way the library was looked after, and the
suspicion increased her resentment. "I saw you going into her house just
now, didn't I?" she asked, with the New England avoidance of the proper
name. She was determined to find out why he was poking about among her
books.

"Miss Hatchard's house? Yes--she's my cousin and I'm staying there," the
young man answered; adding, as if to disarm a visible distrust: "My name
is Harney--Lucius Harney. She may have spoken of me."

"No, she hasn't," said Charity, wishing she could have said: "Yes, she
has."

"Oh, well----" said Miss Hatchard's cousin with a laugh; and after
another pause, during which it occurred to Charity that her answer
had not been encouraging, he remarked: "You don't seem strong on
architecture."

Her bewilderment was complete: the more she wished to appear to
understand him the more unintelligible his remarks became. He reminded
her of the gentleman who had "explained" the pictures at Nettleton, and
the weight of her ignorance settled down on her again like a pall.

"I mean, I can't see that you have any books on the old houses about
here. I suppose, for that matter, this part of the country hasn't been
much explored. They all go on doing Plymouth and Salem. So stupid. My
cousin's house, now, is remarkable. This place must have had a past--it
must have been more of a place once." He stopped short, with the blush
of a shy man who overhears himself, and fears he has been voluble. "I'm
an architect, you see, and I'm hunting up old houses in these parts."

She stared. "Old houses? Everything's old in North Dormer, isn't it? The
folks are, anyhow."

He laughed, and wandered away again.

"Haven't you any kind of a history of the place? I think there was one
written about 1840: a book or pamphlet about its first settlement," he
presently said from the farther end of the room.

She pressed her crochet hook against her lip and pondered. There was
such a work, she knew: "North Dormer and the Early Townships of Eagle
County." She had a special grudge against it because it was a limp
weakly book that was always either falling off the shelf or slipping
back and disappearing if one squeezed it in between sustaining volumes.
She remembered, the last time she had picked it up, wondering how anyone
could have taken the trouble to write a book about North Dormer and its
neighbours: Dormer, Hamblin, Creston and Creston River. She knew them
all, mere lost clusters of houses in the folds of the desolate ridges:
Dormer, where North Dormer went for its apples; Creston River, where
there used to be a paper-mill, and its grey walls stood decaying by the
stream; and Hamblin, where the first snow always fell. Such were their
titles to fame.

She got up and began to move about vaguely before the shelves. But she
had no idea where she had last put the book, and something told her that
it was going to play her its usual trick and remain invisible. It was
not one of her lucky days.

"I guess it's somewhere," she said, to prove her zeal; but she spoke
without conviction, and felt that her words conveyed none.

"Oh, well----" he said again. She knew he was going, and wished more
than ever to find the book.

"It will be for next time," he added; and picking up the volume he had
laid on the desk he handed it to her. "By the way, a little air and sun
would do this good; it's rather valuable."

He gave her a nod and smile, and passed out.




II


The hours of the Hatchard Memorial librarian were from three to five;
and Charity Royall's sense of duty usually kept her at her desk until
nearly half-past four.

But she had never perceived that any practical advantage thereby
accrued either to North Dormer or to herself; and she had no scruple
in decreeing, when it suited her, that the library should close an hour
earlier. A few minutes after Mr. Harney's departure she formed this
decision, put away her lace, fastened the shutters, and turned the key
in the door of the temple of knowledge.

The street upon which she emerged was still empty: and after glancing up
and down it she began to walk toward her house. But instead of entering
she passed on, turned into a field-path and mounted to a pasture on the
hillside. She let down the bars of the gate, followed a trail along the
crumbling wall of the pasture, and walked on till she reached a knoll
where a clump of larches shook out their fresh tassels to the wind.
There she lay down on the slope, tossed off her hat and hid her face in
the grass.

She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to
all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in
her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under
her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the
fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the
creak of the larches as they swayed to it.

She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure
of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. Generally
at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an
inarticulate well-being. Today the sense of well-being was intensified
by her joy at escaping from the library. She liked well enough to have a
friend drop in and talk to her when she was on duty, but she hated to be
bothered about books. How could she remember where they were, when they
were so seldom asked for? Orma Fry occasionally took out a novel, and
her brother Ben was fond of what he called "jography," and of books
relating to trade and bookkeeping; but no one else asked for anything
except, at intervals, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or "Opening of a Chestnut
Burr," or Longfellow. She had these under her hand, and could have
found them in the dark; but unexpected demands came so rarely that they
exasperated her like an injustice....

She had liked the young man's looks, and his short-sighted eyes, and his
odd way of speaking, that was abrupt yet soft, just as his hands were
sun-burnt and sinewy, yet with smooth nails like a woman's. His hair was
sunburnt-looking too, or rather the colour of bracken after frost; his
eyes grey, with the appealing look of the shortsighted, his smile shy
yet confident, as if he knew lots of things she had never dreamed of,
and yet wouldn't for the world have had her feel his superiority. But
she did feel it, and liked the feeling; for it was new to her. Poor and
ignorant as she was, and knew herself to be--humblest of the humble
even in North Dormer, where to come from the Mountain was the worst
disgrace--yet in her narrow world she had always ruled. It was partly,
of course, owing to the fact that lawyer Royall was "the biggest man
in North Dormer"; so much too big for it, in fact, that outsiders,
who didn't know, always wondered how it held him. In spite of
everything--and in spite even of Miss Hatchard--lawyer Royall ruled in
North Dormer; and Charity ruled in lawyer Royall's house. She had never
put it to herself in those terms; but she knew her power, knew what it
was made of, and hated it. Confusedly, the young man in the library
had made her feel for the first time what might be the sweetness of
dependence.

She sat up, brushed the bits of grass from her hair, and looked down on
the house where she held sway. It stood just below her, cheerless and
untended, its faded red front divided from the road by a "yard" with
a path bordered by gooseberry bushes, a stone well overgrown with
traveller's joy, and a sickly Crimson Rambler tied to a fan-shaped
support, which Mr. Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please
her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung
across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of
corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining
wilderness of rock and fern.

Charity could not recall her first sight of the house. She had been told
that she was ill of a fever when she was brought down from the Mountain;
and she could only remember waking one day in a cot at the foot of Mrs.
Royall's bed, and opening her eyes on the cold neatness of the room that
was afterward to be hers.

Mrs. Royall died seven or eight years later; and by that time Charity
had taken the measure of most things about her. She knew that Mrs.
Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was harsh
and violent, and still weaker. She knew that she had been christened
Charity (in the white church at the other end of the village) to
commemorate Mr. Royall's disinterestedness in "bringing her down," and
to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew that
Mr. Royall was her guardian, but that he had not legally adopted her,
though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew why he had
come back to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at Nettleton,
where he had begun his legal career.

After Mrs. Royall's death there was some talk of sending her to a
boarding-school. Miss Hatchard suggested it, and had a long conference
with Mr. Royall, who, in pursuance of her plan, departed one day for
Starkfield to visit the institution she recommended. He came back the
next night with a black face; worse, Charity observed, than she had ever
seen him; and by that time she had had some experience.

When she asked him how soon she was to start he answered shortly, "You
ain't going," and shut himself up in the room he called his office;
and the next day the lady who kept the school at Starkfield wrote that
"under the circumstances" she was afraid she could not make room just
then for another pupil.

Charity was disappointed; but she understood. It wasn't the temptations
of Starkfield that had been Mr. Royall's undoing; it was the thought of
losing her. He was a dreadfully "lonesome" man; she had made that out
because she was so "lonesome" herself. He and she, face to face in that
sad house, had sounded the depths of isolation; and though she felt
no particular affection for him, and not the slightest gratitude, she
pitied him because she was conscious that he was superior to the people
about him, and that she was the only being between him and solitude.
Therefore, when Miss Hatchard sent for her a day or two later, to talk
of a school at Nettleton, and to say that this time a friend of hers
would "make the necessary arrangements," Charity cut her short with the
announcement that she had decided not to leave North Dormer.

Miss Hatchard reasoned with her kindly, but to no purpose; she simply
repeated: "I guess Mr. Royall's too lonesome."

Miss Hatchard blinked perplexedly behind her eye-glasses. Her long frail
face was full of puzzled wrinkles, and she leant forward, resting her
hands on the arms of her mahogany armchair, with the evident desire to
say something that ought to be said.

"The feeling does you credit, my dear."

She looked about the pale walls of her sitting-room, seeking counsel of
ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic samplers; but they seemed to make
utterance more difficult.

"The fact is, it's not only--not only because of the advantages. There
are other reasons. You're too young to understand----"

"Oh, no, I ain't," said Charity harshly; and Miss Hatchard blushed to
the roots of her blonde cap. But she must have felt a vague relief at
having her explanation cut short, for she concluded, again invoking the
daguerreotypes: "Of course I shall always do what I can for you; and in
case... in case... you know you can always come to me...."

Lawyer Royall was waiting for Charity in the porch when she returned
from this visit. He had shaved, and brushed his black coat, and looked a
magnificent monument of a man; at such moments she really admired him.

"Well," he said, "is it settled?"

"Yes, it's settled. I ain't going."

"Not to the Nettleton school?"

"Not anywhere."

He cleared his throat and asked sternly: "Why?"

"I'd rather not," she said, swinging past him on her way to her room.
It was the following week that he brought her up the Crimson Rambler and
its fan from Hepburn. He had never given her anything before.

The next outstanding incident of her life had happened two years later,
when she was seventeen. Lawyer Royall, who hated to go to Nettleton,
had been called there in connection with a case. He still exercised
his profession, though litigation languished in North Dormer and its
outlying hamlets; and for once he had had an opportunity that he could
not afford to refuse. He spent three days in Nettleton, won his case,
and came back in high good-humour. It was a rare mood with him, and
manifested itself on this occasion by his talking impressively at the
supper-table of the "rousing welcome" his old friends had given him. He
wound up confidentially: "I was a damn fool ever to leave Nettleton. It
was Mrs. Royall that made me do it."

Charity immediately perceived that something bitter had happened to him,
and that he was trying to talk down the recollection. She went up to bed
early, leaving him seated in moody thought, his elbows propped on the
worn oilcloth of the supper table. On the way up she had extracted from
his overcoat pocket the key of the cupboard where the bottle of whiskey
was kept.

She was awakened by a rattling at her door and jumped out of bed. She
heard Mr. Royall's voice, low and peremptory, and opened the door,
fearing an accident. No other thought had occurred to her; but when
she saw him in the doorway, a ray from the autumn moon falling on his
discomposed face, she understood.