Hugh’s train was due in Bidwell at ten, but did not arrive until half after eleven. He walked from the station through the town toward the Butterworth farm.

At the end of their first year of marriage a daughter had been born to Clara, and some time before his trip to Pittsburgh she had told him she was again pregnant. “She may be sitting up. I must get home,” he thought, but when he got to the bridge near the farmhouse, the bridge on which he had stood beside Clara that first time they were together, he got out of the road and went to sit on a fallen log at the edge of a grove of trees.

“How quiet and peaceful the night!” he thought and leaning forward held his long, troubled face in his hands. He wondered why peace and quiet would not come to him, why life would not let him alone. “After all, I’ve lived a simple life and have done good work,” he thought. “Some of the things they’ve said about me are true enough. I’ve invented machines that save useless labor, I’ve lightened men’s labor.”

Hugh tried to cling to that thought, but it would not stay in his mind. All the thoughts that gave his mind peace and quiet flew away like birds seen on a distant horizon at evening. It had been so ever since that night when he was suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by the crazed harness maker in the motor. Before that his mind had often been unsettled, but he knew what he wanted. He wanted men and women and close association with men and women. Often his problem was yet more simple. He wanted a woman, one who would love him and lie close to him at night. He wanted the respect of his fellows in the town where he had come to live his life. He wanted to succeed at the particular task to which he had set his hand.

The attack made upon him by the insane harness maker had at first seemed to settle all his problems. At the moment when the frightened and desperate man sank his teeth and fingers into Hugh’s neck, something had happened to Clara. It was Clara who, with a strength and quickness quite amazing, had torn the insane man away. All through that evening she had been hating her husband and father, and then suddenly she loved Hugh. The seeds of a child were already alive in her, and when the body of her man was furiously attacked, he became also her child. Swiftly, like the passing of a shadow over the surface of a river on a windy day, the change in her attitude toward her husband took place. All that evening she had been hating the new age she had thought so perfectly personified in the two men, who talked of the making of machines while the beauty of the night was whirled away into the darkness with the cloud of dust thrown into the air by the flying motor. She had been hating Hugh and sympathizing with the dead past he and other men like him were destroying, the past that was represented by the figure of the old harness maker who wanted to do his work by hand in the old way, by the man who had aroused the scorn and derision of her father.

And then the past rose up to strike. It struck with claws and teeth, and the claws and teeth sank into Hugh’s flesh, into the flesh of the man whose seed was already alive within her.

At that moment the woman who had been a thinker stopped thinking. Within her arose the mother, fierce, indomitable, strong with the strength of the roots of a tree. To her then and forever after Hugh was no hero, remaking the world, but a perplexed boy hurt by life. He never again escaped out of boyhood in her consciousness of him. With the strength of a tigress she tore the crazed harness maker away from Hugh, and with something of the surface brutality of another Ed Hall, threw him to the floor of the car. When Ed and the policeman, assisted by several bystanders, came running forward, she waited almost indifferently while they forced the screaming and kicking man through the crowd and in at the door of the police station.

For Clara the thing for which she had hungered had, she thought, happened. In quick, sharp tones she ordered her father to drive the car to a doctor’s house and later stood by while the torn and lacerated flesh of Hugh’s cheek and neck was bandaged. The thing for which Joe Wainsworth stood and that she had thought was so precious to herself no longer existed in her consciousness, and if later she was for some weeks nervous and half ill, it was not because of any thought given to the fate of the old harness maker.

The sudden attack out of the town’s past had brought Hugh to Clara, had made him a living if not quite satisfying companion to her, but it had brought something quite different to Hugh. The bite of the man’s teeth and the torn places on his cheeks left by the tense fingers had mended, leaving but a slight scar; but a virus had got into his veins. The disease of thinking had upset the harness maker’s mind and the germ of that disease had got into Hugh’s blood. It had worked up into his eyes and ears. Words men dropped thoughtlessly and that in the past had been blown past his ears, as chaff is blown from wheat in the harvest, now stayed to echo and re-echo in his mind. In the past he had seen towns and factories grow and had accepted without question men’s word that growth was invariably good. Now his eyes looked at the towns, at Bidwell, Akron, Youngstown, and all the great, new towns scattered up and down mid-western America as on the train and in the station at Pittsburgh he had looked at the colored stones held in his hand. He looked at the towns and wanted light and color to play over them as they played over the stones, and when that did not happen, his mind, filled with strange new hungers engendered by the disease of thinking, made up words over which lights played. “The gods have scattered towns over the flat lands,” his mind had said, as he sat in the smoking car of the train, and the phrase came back to him later, as he sat in the darkness on the log with his head held in his hands. It was a good phrase and lights could play over it as they played over the colored stones, but it would in no way answer the problem of how to “get around” the Iowa’s man patent on the hay loading device.

Hugh did not get to the Butterworth farmhouse until two o’clock in the morning, but when he got there his wife was awake and waiting for him. She heard his heavy, dragging footsteps in the road as he turned in at the farm gate, and getting quickly out of bed, threw a cloak over her shoulders and came out to the porch facing the barns. A late moon had come up and the barnyard was washed with moonlight. From the barns came the low, sweet sound of contented animals nibbling at the hay in the mangers before them, from a row of sheds back of one of the barns came the soft bleating of sheep and in a far away field a calf bellowed loudly and was answered by its mother.

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Poor White

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