White Narcissus by Raymond Knister Page B

plangency of the tone, the words, surprised Richard into his natural courteous consideration. He had almost forgotten that he had been an orphan from early years, and had not thought ever to be saluted in that manner again. Memories of childhood and a dark country back of that, with weeping at a black winter funeral, stirred him.
    “Ada, my daughter, has told me about you,” went on the tired voice. “You’ve changed a little, or it seems so to me, since your last visit.” He meant the visit before last. They had not met, Richard recalled, at the time of his last repulse, “I understand you are to be congratulated on very creditable work. I’m glad,” he added simply, gazing about at the woods as though the scene of that work had put him forward to thank the artist in its behalf. Richard almost laughed with a mixture of incredulity, thwarted hostility, impatience, smothered pity.
    “Thank you, Mr. Lethen. What can I do for you?”
    The brusqueness did not cause the old man to change attitude or expression, yet he seemed to consult an inward necessity whether it would force him on in the face of this hard unconcern.
    “I hardly know how to put it,” he ventured. “You are helping Carson just now, and I don’t want to be bearing tales against him like this. But it seems like there’s nothing else to be done. You must have noticed his attitude. And I was wondering whether you couldn’t do anything to straighten things out.”
    “I might,” agreed Milne readily, “if I could see in what way it affected me.” His feeling of the earlier afternoon had died down, but he felt that he must play with the old man a little before descending to that store of vehemence he had at times consciously been keeping for such an opportunity as this occasion offered. Wrath distilled in verbal form, sinceany other was out of the question. He had long desired to tell Mr. and Mrs. Lethen his opinion of such a course as they followed.
    “It means everything,” the old man was saying earnestly, “everything to me, to get this straightened out. Surely there’s a way.”
    “Are you sure now that it wouldn’t be necessary to make Carson over for that, as well as, perhaps, yourself?” Richard enjoyed abominably and delicately the brightening and the fall in the old man’s look.
    “Of course, to come right down to it at once, it’s us, our own fault. You can blame us both. It’s his way, and it’s my being what I am. But still there is no need of things coming to such a pass….”
    “Between neighbours, eh?” The tone was ironical almost to bitterness, but the bitterness was half with Richard’s own perversity, for in that moment he recalled the way – romantic it seemed to the real of the present – in which his writing had glossed over such differences, with all the life of which they formed part.
    The old man glanced at him. “Yes, between neighbours. When we’ve always got along, I may say, perfectly. When I first settled here as a young man I used to compliment myself on having such good neighbours. They were kind of backward about associating, but awfully obliging, lend you anything you asked for. My father used to say it was worthwhile living here just to have such good neighbours. Then things changed little by little, the younger fellows came along, like Carson, and somehow they seemed to see things differently. They kept away more than ever. Not shy, they weren’t. They seemed to take pride in being independent, I suppose they called it.”
    “In other words, their fathers had to swallow your learning and possibly your manner and means, and the sons’ teeth are edged with an inferiority complex. But to what pass is it that things, as you say, are coming?”
    “Things couldn’t go much farther between neighbours,” Mr. Lethen assured him again. “I had to go in to see my lawyer, the other day, and he says it’s nothing which should go to court.”
    Milne’s impatience began to escape him. “Apparently