Other Main Travelled Roads

H >> Hamlin Garland >> Other Main Travelled Roads

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

As she came in sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the
poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew
distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped
and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of
some time in the far future standing a chance of having an introduction
to her, caused them to wipe their palms on their trousers' legs
stealthily.

Lycurgus Banks swore when he saw Radbourn: "That cuss thinks he's ol'
hell this morning. He don't earn his living. But he's just the kind of
cuss to get holt of all the purty girls."

Others gazed with simple, sad wistfulness upon the slender figure, pale,
sweet face, and dark eyes of the young girl, feeling that to have talk
with such a fairylike creature was a happiness too great to ever be
their lot. And when she had passed they went back to work with a sigh
and feeling of loss.

As for Lily, she felt a pang of pity for these people. She looked at
this peculiar form of poverty and hardship much as the fragile, tender
girl of the city looks upon the men laying a gas-main in the streets.
She felt, sympathetically, the heat and grime, and, though but the
faintest idea of what it meant to wear such clothing came to her, she
shuddered. Her eyes had been opened to these things by Radbourn, a
classmate at the Seminary.

The young fellow knew that Lily was in love with him, and made distinct
effort to keep the talk upon impersonal subjects. He liked her very
much, probably because she listened so well.

"Poor fellows," sighed Lily, almost unconsciously, "I hate to see them
working there in the dirt and hot sun. It seems a hopeless sort of life,
doesn't it?"

"Oh, but this is the most beautiful part of the year," said Radbourn.
"Think of them in the mud, in the sleet; think of them husking corn in
the snow, a bitter wind blowing; think of them a month later in the
harvest; think of them imprisoned here in winter!"

"Yes, it's dreadful! But I never felt it so keenly before. You have
opened my eyes to it. Of course, I've been on a farm but not to live
there."

"Writers and orators have lied so long about 'the idyllic' in farm life,
and said so much about the 'independent American farmer,' that he
himself has remained blind to the fact that he's one of the
hardest-working and poorest-paid men in America. See the houses they
live in,--hovels."

"Yes, yes, I know," said Lily; a look of deeper pain swept over her
face. "And the fate of the poor women; oh, the fate of the women!"

"Yes, it's a matter of statistics," went on Radbourn, pitilessly, "that
the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a
life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day
in a couple of small rooms--dens. Now there is Sim Burns! What a
travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works
like a fiend--so does his wife--and what is their reward? Simply a hole
to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and
a well-nigh hopeless future. No, they have a future, if they knew it,
and we must tell them."

"I know Mrs. Burns," Lily said, after a pause; "she sends several
children to my school. Poor, pathetic little things, half-clad and
wistful-eyed. They make my heart ache; they are so hungry for love, and
so quick to learn."

As they passed the Burns farm, they looked for the wife, but she was not
to be seen. The children had evidently gone up to the little white
schoolhouse at the head of the lane. Radbourn let the reins fall slack
as he talked on. He did not look at the girl; his eyebrows were drawn
into a look of gloomy pain.

"It isn't so much the grime that I abhor, nor the labor that crooks
their backs and makes their hands bludgeons. It's the horrible waste of
life involved in it all. I don't believe God intended a man to be bent
to plough-handles like that, but that isn't the worst of it. The worst
of it is, these people live lives approaching automata. They become
machines to serve others more lucky or more unscrupulous than
themselves. What is the world of art, of music, of literature, to these
poor devils,--to Sim Burns and his wife there, for example? Or even to
the best of these farmers?"

The girl looked away over the shimmering lake of yellow-green corn. A
choking came into her throat. Her gloved hand trembled.

"What is such a life worth? It's all very comfortable for us to say,
'They don't feel it.' How do we know what they feel? What do we know of
their capacity for enjoyment of art and music? They never have leisure
or opportunity. The master is very glad to be taught by preacher, and
lawyer, and novelist, that his slaves are contented and never feel any
longings for a higher life. These people live lives but little higher
than their cattle--are _forced_ to live so. Their hopes and aspirations
are crushed out, their souls are twisted and deformed just as toil
twists and deforms their bodies. They are on the same level as the city
laborer. The very religion they hear is a soporific. They are taught to
be content here that they may be happy hereafter. Suppose there isn't
any hereafter?"

"Oh, don't say that, please!" Lily cried.

"But I don't _know_ that there is," he went on remorselessly, "and I do
know that these people are being robbed of something more than money, of
all that makes life worth living. The promise of milk and honey in
Canaan is all very well, but I prefer to have mine here; then I'm sure
of it."

"What can we do?" murmured the girl.

"Do? Rouse these people for one thing; preach _discontent_, a noble
discontent."

"It will only make them unhappy."

"No, it won't; not if you show them the way out. If it does, it's better
to be unhappy striving for higher things, like a man, than to be content
in a wallow like swine."

"But what _is_ the way out?"

This was sufficient to set Radbourn upon his hobbyhorse. He outlined his
plan of action: the abolition of all indirect taxes, the State control
of all privileges the private ownership of which interfered with the
equal rights of all. He would utterly destroy speculative holdings of
the earth. He would have land everywhere brought to its best use, by
appropriating all ground rents to the use of the state, etc., etc., to
which the girl listened with eager interest, but with only partial
comprehension.

As they neared the little schoolhouse, a swarm of midgets in pink
dresses, pink sun-bonnets, and brown legs, came rushing to meet their
teacher, with that peculiar devotion the children in the country develop
for a refined teacher.

Radbourn helped Lily out into the midst of the eager little scholars,
who swarmed upon her like bees on a lump of sugar, till even Radbourn's
gravity gave way, and he smiled into her lifted eyes,--an unusual smile,
that strangely enough stopped the smile on her own lips, filling her
face with a wistful shadow, and her breath came hard for a moment, and
she trembled.

She loved that cold, stern face, oh, so much! and to have him smile was
a pleasure that made her heart leap till she suffered a smothering pain.
She turned to him to say:--

"I am very thankful, Mr. Radbourn, for another pleasant ride," adding in
a lower tone, "it was a very great pleasure; you always give me so much.
I feel stronger and more hopeful."

"I'm glad you feel so. I was afraid I was prosy with my land doctrine."

"Oh, no! Indeed no! You have given me a new hope; I am exalted with the
thought; I shall try to think it all out and apply it."

And so they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among
themselves. Radbourn looked back after a while, but the bare white hive
had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone and
hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the blazing sun.

"America's pitiful boast!" said the young radical, looking back at it.
"Only a miserable hint of what it might be."

All that forenoon, as Lily faced her noisy group of barefooted children,
she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy for these
poor, supine farmers, hopeless and in some cases content in their narrow
lives. The children almost worshipped the beautiful girl who came to
them as a revelation of exquisite neatness and taste,--whose very voice
and intonation awed them.

They noted, unconsciously of course, every detail. Snowy linen, touches
of soft color, graceful lines of bust and side, the slender fingers that
could almost speak, so beautifully flexile were they. Lily herself
sometimes, when she shook the calloused, knotted, stiffened hands of the
women, shuddered with sympathetic pain to think that the crowning wonder
and beauty of God's world should be so maimed and distorted from its
true purpose.

Even in the children before her she could see the inherited results of
fruitless labor, and, more pitiful yet, in the bent shoulders of the
older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon be
permanent; and as these thoughts came to her, she clasped the wondering
children to her side, with a convulsive wish to make life a little
brighter for them.

"How is your mother to-day?" she asked of Sadie Burns, as she was eating
her luncheon on the drab-colored table near the open window.

"Purty well," said Sadie, in a hesitating way.

Lily was looking out, and listening to the gophers whistling as they
raced to and fro. She could see Bob Burns lying at length on the grass
in the pasture over the fence, his heels waving in the air, his hands
holding a string which formed a snare. It was like fishing to young
Izaak Walton.

It was very still and hot, and the cheep and trill of the gophers and
the chatter of the kingbirds alone broke the silence. A cloud of
butterflies were fluttering about a pool near; a couple of big flies
buzzed and mumbled on the pane.

"What ails your mother?" Lily asked, recovering herself and looking at
Sadie, who was distinctly ill at ease.

"Oh, I dunno," Sadie replied, putting one bare foot across the other.

Lily insisted.

"She 'n' pa's had an awful row--"

"Sadie!" said the teacher, warningly, "what language!"

"I mean they quarrelled, an' she don't speak to him any more."

"Why, how dreadful!"

"An' pa, he's awful cross; and she won't eat when he does, an' I haf to
wait on table."

"I believe I'll go down and see her this noon," said Lily to herself, as
she divined a little of the state of affairs in the Burns family.

V

Sim was mending the pasture fence as Lily came down the road toward him.
He had delayed going to dinner to finish his task, and was just about
ready to go when Lily spoke to him.

"Good morning, Mr. Burns. I am just going down to see Mrs. Burns. It
must be time to go to dinner,--aren't you ready to go? I want to talk
with you."

Ordinarily he would have been delighted with the idea of walking down
the road with the schoolma'am, but there was something in her look which
seemed to tell him that she knew all about his trouble, and, besides, he
was not in good humor.

"Yes, in a minnit--soon's I fix up this hole. Them shotes, I b'lieve,
would go through a keyhole, if they could once get their snoots in."

He expanded on this idea as he nailed away, anxious to gain time. He
foresaw trouble for himself. He couldn't be rude to this sweet and
fragile girl. If a _man_ had dared to attack him on his domestic
shortcomings, he could have fought. The girl stood waiting for him, her
large, steady eyes full of thought, gazing down at him from the shadow
of her broad-brimmed hat.

"The world is so full of misery anyway, that we ought to do the best we
can to make it less," she said at last, in a musing tone, as if her
thoughts had unconsciously taken on speech. She had always appealed to
him strongly, and never more so than in this softly uttered
abstraction--that it was an abstraction added to its power with him.

He could find no words for reply, but picked up his hammer and nail-box,
and slouched along the road by her side, listening without a word to her
talk.

"Christ was patient, and bore with his enemies. Surely we ought to bear
with our--friends," she went on, adapting her steps to his. He took off
his torn straw hat and wiped his face on his sleeve, being much
embarrassed and ashamed. Not knowing how to meet such argument, he kept
silent.

"How _is_ Mrs. Burns!" said Lily at length, determined to make him
speak. The delicate meaning in the emphasis laid on _is_ did not escape
him.

"Oh, she's all right--I mean she's done her work jest the same as ever.
I don't see her much--"

"I didn't know--I was afraid she was sick. Sadie said she was acting
strangely."

"No, she's well enough--but--"

"But what is the trouble? Won't you let me help you, _won't_ you?" she
pleaded.

"Can't anybody help us. We've got 'o fight it out, I s'pose," he
replied, a gloomy note of resentment creeping into his voice. "She's
ben in a devil of a temper f'r a week."

"Haven't you been in the same kind of a temper too?" demanded Lily,
firmly but kindly. "I think most troubles of this kind come from bad
temper on both sides. Don't you? Have you done your share at being kind
and patient?"

They had reached the gate now, and she laid her hand on his arm to stop
him. He looked down at the slender gloved hand on his arm, feeling as if
a giant had grasped him; then he raised his eyes to her face, flushing a
purplish red as he remembered his grossness. It seemed monstrous in the
presence of this girl-advocate. Her face was like silver; her eyes
seemed pools of tears.

"I don't s'pose I have," he said at last, pushing by her. He could not
have faced her glance another moment. His whole air conveyed the
impression of destructive admission. Lily did not comprehend the extent
of her advantage or she would have pursued it further. As it was she
felt a little hurt as she entered the house. The table was set, but Mrs.
Burns was nowhere to be seen. Calling her softly, the young girl passed
through the shabby little living-room to the oven-like bedroom which
opened off it, but no one was about. She stood for a moment shuddering
at the wretchedness of the room.

Going back to the kitchen, she found Sim about beginning on his dinner.
Little Pet was with him; the rest of the children were at the
schoolhouse.

"Where is she?"

"I d' know. Out in the garden, I expect. She don't eat with me now. I
never see her. She don't come near _me_. I ain't seen her since
Saturday."

Lily was shocked inexpressibly and began to see more clearly the
magnitude of the task she had set herself to do. But it must be done;
she felt that a tragedy was not far off. It must be averted.

"Mr. Burns, what have you done? What _have_ you done?" she asked in
terror and horror.

"Don't lay it all to _me_! She hain't done nawthin' but complain f'r ten
years. I couldn't do nothin' to suit her. She was always naggin' me."

"I don't think Lucretia Burns would nag anybody. I don't say you're
_all_ to blame, but I'm afraid you haven't acknowledged you were _any_
to blame. I'm afraid you've not been patient with her. I'm going out to
bring her in. If she comes, will you _say_ you were _part_ to blame? You
needn't beg her pardon--just say you'll try to be better. Will you do
it? Think how much she has done for you! Will you?"

He remained silent, and looked discouragingly rude. His sweaty, dirty
shirt was open at the neck, his arms were bare, his scraggly teeth were
yellow with tobacco, and his uncombed hair lay tumbled about on his
high, narrow head. His clumsy, unsteady hands played with the dishes on
the table. His pride was struggling with his sense of justice; he knew
he ought to consent, and yet it was so hard to acknowledge himself to
blame. The girl went on in a voice piercingly sweet, trembling with pity
and pleading.

"What word can I carry to her from you? I'm going to go and see her. If
I could take a word from _you_, I know she would come back to the table.
Shall I tell her you feel to blame?"

The answer was a long time coming; at last the man nodded an assent, the
sweat pouring from his purple face. She had set him thinking; her
victory was sure.

Lily almost ran out into the garden and to the strawberry patch, where
she found Lucretia in her familiar, colorless, shapeless dress, picking
berries in the hot sun, the mosquitoes biting her neck and hands.

"Poor, pathetic, dumb sufferer!" the girl thought as she ran up to her.

She dropped her dish as she heard Lily coming, and gazed up into the
tender, pitying face. Not a word was spoken, but something she saw there
made her eyes fill with tears, and her throat swell. It was pure
sympathy. She put her arms around the girl's neck and sobbed for the
first time since Friday night. Then they sat down on the grass under the
hedge, and she told her story, interspersed with Lily's horrified
comments.

When it was all told, the girl still sat listening. She heard Radbourn's
calm, slow voice again. It helped her not to hate Burns; it helped her
to pity and understand him.

"You must remember that such toil brutalizes a man; it makes him
callous, selfish, unfeeling, necessarily. A fine nature must either
adapt itself to its hard surroundings or die. Men who toil terribly in
filthy garments day after day and year after year cannot easily keep
gentle; the frost and grime, the heat and cold, will soon or late enter
into their souls. The case is not all in favor of the suffering wives
and against the brutal husbands. If the farmer's wife is dulled and
crazed by her routine, the farmer himself is degraded and brutalized."

As well as she could Lily explained all this to the woman, who lay with
her face buried in the girl's lap. Lily's arms were about her thin
shoulders in an agony of pity.

"It's hard, Lucretia, I know,--more than you can bear,--but you mustn't
forget what Sim endures too. He goes out in the storms and in the heat
and dust. His boots are hard, and see how his hands are all bruised and
broken by his work! He was tired and hungry when he said that--he didn't
really mean it."

The wife remained silent.

"Mr. Radbourn says work, as things go now, _does_ degrade a man in spite
of himself. He says men get coarse and violent in spite of themselves,
just as women do when everything goes wrong in the house,--when the
flies are thick, and the fire won't burn, and the irons stick to the
clothes. You see, you both suffer. Don't lay up this fit of temper
against Sim--will you?"

The wife lifted her head and looked away. Her face was full of hopeless
weariness.

"It ain't this once. It ain't that 't all. It's having no let-up. Just
goin' the same thing right over 'n' over--no hope of anything better."

"If you had hope of another world--"

"Don't talk that. I don't want that kind o' comfert. I want a decent
chance here. I want 'o rest an' be happy _now_." Lily's big eyes were
streaming with tears. What should she say to the desperate woman?
"What's the use? We might jest as well die--all of us."

The woman's livid face appalled the girl. She was gaunt, heavy-eyed,
nerveless. Her faded dress settled down over her limbs, showing the
swollen knees and thin calves; her hands, with distorted joints,
protruded painfully from her sleeves. All about her was the ever
recurring wealth and cheer of nature that knows no favor,--the bees and
flies buzzing in the sun, the jay and the kingbird in the poplars, the
smell of strawberries, the motion of lush grass, the shimmer of
corn-blades tossed gayly as banners in a conquering army.

Like a flash of keener light, a sentence shot across the girl's mind:
"Nature knows no title-deed. The bounty of her mighty hands falls as the
sunlight falls, copious, impartial; her seas carry all ships; her air is
for all lips, her lands for all feet."

"Poverty and suffering such as yours will not last." There was something
in the girl's voice that roused the woman. She turned her dull eyes upon
the youthful face.

Lily took her hand in both hers as if by a caress she could impart her
own faith.

"Look up, dear. When nature is so good and generous, man must come to be
better, surely. Come, go in the house again. Sim is there; he expects
you; he told me to tell you he was sorry." Lucretia's face twitched a
little at that, but her head was bent. "Come; you can't live this way.
There isn't any other place to go to."

No, that was the bitterest truth. Where on this wide earth, with its
forth-shooting fruits and grains, its fragrant lands and shining seas,
could this dwarfed, bent, broken, middle-aged woman go? Nobody wanted
her, nobody cared for her. But the wind kissed her drawn lips as readily
as those of the girl, and the blooms of clover nodded to her as if to a
queen.

Lily had said all she could. Her heart ached with unspeakable pity and a
sort of terror.

"Don't give up, Lucretia. This may be the worst hour of your life. Live
and bear with it all for Christ's sake,--for your children's sake. Sim
told me to tell you he was to blame. If you will only see that you are
both to blame and yet neither to blame, then you can rise above it. Try,
dear!"

Something that was in the girl imparted itself to the wife,
electrically. She pulled herself together, rose silently, and started
toward the house. Her face was rigid, but no longer sullen. Lily
followed her slowly, wonderingly.

As she neared the kitchen door, she saw Sim still sitting at the table;
his face was unusually grave and soft. She saw him start and shove back
his chair, saw Lucretia go to the stove and lift the tea-pot, and heard
her say, as she took her seat beside the baby:--

"Want some more tea?"

She had become a wife and mother again, but in what spirit the puzzled
girl could not say.

DADDY DEERING

I

They were threshing on Farmer Jennings's place when Daddy made his very
characteristic appearance. Milton, a boy of thirteen, was gloomily
holding sacks for the measurer, and the glory of the October day was
dimmed by the suffocating dust, and poisoned by the smarting beards and
chaff which had worked their way down his neck. The bitterness of the
dreaded task was deepened also by contrast with the gambols of his
cousin Billy, who was hunting rats with Growler amid the last sheaves of
the stack bottom. The piercing shrieks of Billy, as he clapped his hands
in murderous glee, mingled now and again with the barking of the dog.

The machine seemed to fill the world with its snarling boom, which
became a deafening yell when the cylinder ran empty for a moment. It was
nearly noon, and the men were working silently, with occasional glances
toward the sun to see how near dinner-time it was. The horses, dripping
with sweat, and with patches of foam under their harness, moved round
and round steadily to the cheery whistle of the driver.

The wild, imperious song of the bell-metal cog-wheel had sung into
Milton's ears till it had become a torture, and every time he lifted his
eyes to the beautiful far-off sky, where the clouds floated like ships,
a lump of rebellious anger rose in his throat. Why should he work in
this choking dust and deafening noise while the hawks could sail and
sweep from hill to hill with nothing to do but play?

Occasionally his uncle, the feeder, smiled down upon him, his face black
as a negro, great goggles of glass and wire-cloth covering his merry
eyes. His great good-nature shone out in the flash of his white teeth,
behind his dusky beard, and he tried to encourage Milton with his smile.
He seemed tireless to the other hands. He was so big and strong. He had
always been Milton's boyish hero. So Milton crowded back the tears that
came into his eyes, and would not let his uncle see how childish he was.

A spectator riding along the road would have remarked upon the lovely
setting for this picturesque scene--the low swells of prairie, shrouded
with faint, misty light from the unclouded sky, the flaming colors of
the trees, the faint sound of cow-bells, and the cheery sound of the
machine. But to be a tourist and to be a toiler in a scene like this are
quite different things.

They were anxious to finish the setting by noon, and so the feeder was
crowding the cylinder to its limit, rolling the grain in with slow and
apparently effortless swaying from side to side, half buried in the
loose yellow straw. But about eleven o'clock the machine came to a
stand, to wait while a broken tooth was being replaced, and Milton fled
from the terrible dust beside the measuring spout, and was shaking the
chaff out of his clothing, when he heard a high, snappy, nasal voice
call down from the straw-pile. A tall man, with a face completely masked
in dust, was speaking to Mr. Jennings:--

"Say, young man, I guess you'll haf to send another man up here. It's
poorty stiff work f'r two; yes, sir, poorty stiff."

"There, there! I thought you'd cry 'cavy,'" laughed Mr. Jennings. "I
told you it wasn't the place for an old man."

"Old man," snarled the figure in the straw. "I ain't so old but I can
daown you, sir,--yessir, condemmit, yessir!"

"I'm your man," replied Jennings, smiling up at him.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18