Wayside Courtships

H >> Hamlin Garland >> Wayside Courtships

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II.

When he entered the office next day, however, the Major merely nodded to
him over the railing and said:

"Good morning. Take a seat, please."

He seemed deeply engaged with a tall young man of about thirty-five
years of age, with a rugged, smooth-shaven face. The young man spoke
with a marked English accent, and there was a quality in his manner of
speech which appealed very strongly to Arthur.

"Confeound the fellow," the young Englishman was saying, "I've
discharged him. I cawn't re-engage him, ye kneow! We cawn't have a man
abeout who gets drunk, y' kneow--it's too bloody proveoking, Majah."

"But the poor fellow's family, Saulisbury."

"Oh, hang the fellow's family," laughed Saulisbury. "We are not a
poorhouse, y' kneow--or a house for inebriates. I confess I deon't mind
these things as you do, old man. I'm a Britisher, y' kneow, and I
haven't got intristed in your bloody radicalism, y' kneow. I'm in for
Sam Saulisbury 'from the word go,' as you fellows say."

"And you don't get along any better--I mean in a money way."

"I kneow, and that's too deuced queeah. Your blawsted sentimentality
seems note to do you any harm. Still I put it in this way, y' kneow--if
he weren't so deadly sentimental, what couldn't the fellow do, y'
kneow?"

The Major laughed.

"Well, I can't turn Jackson off, even for you."

"Well, deon't do it then--only if he gets drunk agine and drops a match
into the milk can, fancy! and blows us all up, deon't come back on me,
that's all."

They both laughed at this, and the Major said:

"This is the young man I told you about, Mr.--a----"

"Ramsey is my name," said Arthur, rising.

"Mr. Ramsey, this is my partner, Mr. Saulisbury."

"Haow de do," said Saulisbury, with a nod and a glance, which made
Arthur hot with wrath, coming as it did after the talk he had heard.
Saulisbury did not take the trouble to rise. He merely swung round on
his swivel chair and eyed the young stranger.

Arthur was not thick-skinned, and he had been struck for the first time
by the lash of caste, and it raised a welt.

He choked with his rage and stood silent, while Saulisbury looked him
over, and passed upon his good points, as if he were a horse. There was
something in the lazy lift of his eyebrows which maddened Arthur.

"He looks a decent young fellow enough; I suppeose he'll do to try,"
Saulisbury said at last, with cool indifference. "I'll use him, Majah."

"By Heaven, you won't!" Arthur burst out. "I wouldn't work for you at
any price."

He turned on his heel and rushed out.

He heard the Major calling to him as he went down the stairs, but
refused to turn back. The tears of impotent rage filled his eyes, his
fists strained together, and the curses pushed slowly from his lips. He
wished he had leaped upon his insulter where he sat--the smooth, smiling
hound!

He was dizzy with rage. For the first time in his life he had been
trampled upon, and could not, at least he had not, struck his assailant.

As he stood on the street-corner thinking of these things and waiting
for the mist of rage to pass from his eyes, he felt a hand on his arm,
and turned to Major Thayer, standing by his side.

"Look here, Ramsey, you mustn't mind Sam. He's an infernal Englishman,
and can't understand our way of meeting men. He didn't mean to hurt your
feelings."

Arthur looked down at him silently, and there was a look in his eyes
which went straight to the Major's heart.

"Come, Ramsey, I want to give you a place. Never mind this. You will
really be working for me, anyhow."

Saulisbury himself came down the stairs and approached them, putting on
his gloves, and Arthur perceived for the first time that his eyes were
blue and very good-natured. Saulisbury cared nothing for the youth, but
felt something was due his partner.

"I hope I haven't done anything unpardonable," he began, with his
absurd, rising inflection.

Arthur flared up again.

"I wouldn't work for a man like you if I starved. I'm not a dog. You'll
find an American citizen won't knuckle down to you the way your English
peasants do. If you think you can come out here in the West and treat
men like dogs, you'll find yourself mighty mistaken, that's all!"

The men exchanged glances. This volcanic outburst amazed Saulisbury, but
the Major enjoyed it. It was excellent schooling for his English friend.

"Well, work for me, Mr. Ramsey. Sam knuckles down to me on most
questions. I hope I know how to treat my men. I'm trying to live up to
traditions, anyway."

"You'll admit it is a tradition," said Saulisbury, glad of a chance to
sidle away.

The Major dismissed Saulisbury with a move of the hand.

"Now get into my cart, Mr. Ramsey, and we'll go out to the farm and look
things over," he said; and Arthur clambered in.

"I can't blame you very much," the Major continued, after they were well
settled. "I've been trying lately to get into harmonious relations with
my employees, and I think I'm succeeding. I have a father and
grandfather in shirt sleeves to start from and to refer back to, but
Saulisbury hasn't. He means well, but he can't always hold himself in.
He means to be democratic, but his blood betrays him."

Arthur soon lost the keen edge of his grievance under the kindly chat of
the Major.

The farm lay on either side of a small stream which ran among the buttes
and green mesas of the foothills. Out to the left, the kingly peak
looked benignantly across the lesser heights that thrust their ambitious
heads in the light. Cattle were feeding among the smooth, straw-colored
or sage-green hills. A cluster of farm buildings stood against an
abrupt, cedar-splotched bluff, out of which a stream flowed and shortly
fell into a large basin.

The irrigation ditch pleased and interested Arthur, for it was the
finest piece of work he had yet seen. It ran around the edge of the
valley, discharging at its gates streams of water like veins, which
meshed the land, whereon men were working among young plants.

"I'll put you in charge of a team, I think," the Major said, after
talking with the foreman, a big, red-haired man, who looked at Arthur
with his head thrown back and one eye shut.

"Well, now you're safe," said the Major, as he got into his buggy, "so
I'll leave you. Richards will see you have a bed."

Arthur knew and liked the foreman's family at once. They were familiar
types. At supper he told them of his plans, and how he came to be out
there; and they came to feel a certain proprietorship in him at once.

"Well, I'm glad you've come," said Mrs. Richards, after their
acquaintanceship had mellowed a day or two. "You're like our own folks
back in Illinois, and I can't make these foreigners seem neighbors
nohow. Not but what they're good enough, but, land sakes! they don't
jibe in someway."

Arthur winced a little at being classed in with her folks, and changed
the subject.

One Sunday, a couple of weeks later, just as he was putting on his old
clothes to go out to do his evening's chores, the Major and a merry
party of visitors came driving into the yard. Arthur came out to the
carriage, a little annoyed that these city people should not have come
when he had on his Sunday clothes. The Major greeted him pleasantly.

"Good evening, Ramsey. Just hitch the horses, will you? I want to show
the ladies about a little."

Arthur tied the horses to a post and came back toward the Major,
expecting him to introduce the ladies; but the Major did not, and Mrs.
Thayer did not wait for an introduction, but said, with a peculiar,
well-worn inflection:

"Ramsey, I wish you'd stand between me and the horses. I'm as afraid as
death of horses and cows."

The rest laughed in musical uproar, but Arthur flushed hotly. It was the
manner in which English people, in plays and stories, addressed their
butler or coachman.

He helped her down, however, in sullen silence, for his rebellious
heart seemed to fill his throat.

The party moved ahead in a cloud of laughter. The ladies were dainty as
spring flowers in their light, outdoor dresses, and they seemed to light
up the whole barnyard.

One of them made the most powerful impression upon Arthur. She was so
dainty and so birdlike. Her dress was quaint, with puffed sleeves, and
bands and edges of light green, like an April flower. Her narrow face
was as swift as light in its volatile changes, and her little chin
dipped occasionally into the fluff of her ruffled bodice like a swallow
into the water. Every movement she made was strange and sweet to see.

She cried out in admiration of everything, and clapped her slender hands
like a wondering child. Her elders laughed every time they looked at
her, she was so entirely carried away by the wonders of the farm.

She admired the cows and the colts very much, but shivered prettily when
the bull thrust his yellow and black muzzle through the little window of
his cell.

"The horrid thing! Isn't he savage?"

"Not at all. He wants some meal, that's all," said the Major, as they
moved on.

The young girl skipped and danced and shook her perfumed dress as a
swallow her wings, without appearing vain--it was natural in her to do
graceful things.

Arthur looked at her with deep admiration and delight, even while Mrs.
Saulisbury was talking to him.

He liked Mrs. Saulisbury at once, though naturally prejudiced against
her. She had evidently been a very handsome woman, but some concealed
pain had made her face thin and drawn, and one corner of her mouth was
set in a slight fold as if by a touch of paralysis. Her profile was
still very beautiful, and her voice was that of a highly cultivated
American.

She seemed to be interested in Arthur, and asked him a great many
questions, and all her questions were intelligent.

Saulisbury amused himself by joking the dainty girl, whom he called
Edith.

"This is the cow that gives the cream, ye know; and this one is the
buttermilk cow," he said, as they stood looking in at the barn door.

Edith tipped her eager little face up at him:

"Really?"

The rest laughed again.

"Which is the ice-cream cow?" the young girl asked, to let them know
that she was not to be fooled with.

Saulisbury appealed to the Major.

"Majah, what have you done with our ice-cream cow?"

"She went dry during the winter," said the Major; "no demand on her.
'Supply regulated by the demand,' you know."

They drifted on into the horse barn.

"We're in Ramsey's domain now," said the Major, looking at Arthur, who
stood with his hand on the hip of one of the big gray horses.

Edith turned and perceived Arthur for the first time. A slight shock
went through her sensitive nature, as if some faint prophecy of great
storms came to her in the widening gaze of his dark eyes.

"Oh, do you drive the horses?" she asked quickly.

"Yes, for the present; I am the plowman," he said, in the wish to let
her know he was not a common hand. "I hope to be promoted."

Her eyes rested a moment longer on his sturdy figure and his beautifully
bronzed skin, then she turned to her companions.

After they had driven away, Arthur finished his work in silence; he
could hardly bring himself to speak to the people at the supper table,
his mind was in such tumult.

He went up into his little room, drew a chair to the window facing the
glorious mountains, and sat there until the ingulfing gloom of rising
night climbed to the glittering crown of white soaring a mile above the
lights of the city; but he did not really see the mountains; his eyes
only turned toward them as a cat faces the light of a hearth. It helped
him to think, somehow.

He was naturally keen, sensitive, and impressionable; his mind worked
quickly, for he had read a great deal and held his reading at command.

His thought concerned itself first of all with the attitude these people
assumed toward him. It was perfectly evident that they regarded him as a
creature of inferior sort. He was their servant.

It made him turn hot to think how terribly this contrasted with the
flamboyant phraseology of his graduating oration. If the boys knew that
he was a common hand on a ranch, and treated like a butler!

He came back for relief to the face of the girl, the girl who looked at
him differently somehow.

The impression she made on him was one of daintiness and light; her
eager face and her sweet voice, almost childish in its thin quality,
appealed to him with singular force.

She was strange to him, in accent and life; she was good and sweet, he
felt sure of that, but she seemed so far away in her manner of thought.
He wished he had been dressed a little better; his old hat troubled him
especially.

The girls he had known, even the daintiest of them, could drive horses
and were not afraid of cows. Their way of talking was generally direct
and candid, or had those familiar inflections which were comprehensible
to him. She was alien.

Was she a girl? Sometimes she seemed a woman--when her face sobered a
moment--then again she seemed a child. It was this change of expression
that bewildered and fascinated him.

Then her lips were so scarlet and her level brown eyebrows wavered about
so beautifully! Sometimes one had arched while the other remained quiet;
this gave a winsome look of brightness and roguishness to her face.

He came at last to the strangest thing of all: she had looked at him,
every time he spoke, as if she were surprised at finding herself able to
understand his way of speech.

He worked it all out at last. They all looked upon him as belonging to
the American peasantry; he belonged to a lower world--a world of
service. He was brick, they were china.

Saulisbury and Mrs. Thayer were perfectly frank about it; they spoke
from the English standpoint. The Major and Mrs. Saulisbury had been
touched by the Western spirit and were trying to be just to him, with
more or less unconscious patronization.

As his thoughts ran on, his fury came back, and he hammered and groaned
and cursed as he tossed to and fro on his bed, determined to go back
where the American ideas still held--back to the democracy of Lodi and
Cresco.

III.

These spring days were days of growth to the young man. He grew older
and more thoughtful, and seldom joked with the other men.

There came to the surface moods which he had not known before. There
came times when his teeth set together like the clutch of a wolf, as
some elemental passion rose from the depths of his inherited self.

His father had been a rather morose man, jealous of his rights, quick to
anger, but just in his impulses. Arthur had inherited these stronger
traits, but they had been covered and concealed thus far by the smiling
exterior of youth.

Edith came up nearly every day with the Major in order to enjoy the air
and beauty of the sunshine, and when she did not come near enough to nod
to Arthur, life was a weary treadmill for the rest of the day, and the
mountains became mere gloomy stacks of _debris_.

Sometimes she sat on the porch with the children, while Mrs. Richards,
the foreman's wife, a hearty, talkative woman, plied her with milk and
cookies.

"It must be heaven to live here and feed the chickens and cows," the
young girl said one day when Arthur was passing by--quite accidentally.

Mrs. Richards took a seat, wiping her face on her apron.

"Wal, I don't know about that, when it comes to waiting and tendin' on a
mess of 'em; it don't edgicate a feller much. Does it, Art?"

"We don't do it for play, exactly," he replied, taking a seat on the
porch steps and smiling up at Edith. "I can't stand cows; I like horses,
though. Of course, if I were foreman of the dairy, that would be another
thing."

The flowerlike girl looked down at him with a strange glance. Something
rose in her heart which sobered her. She studied the clear brown of his
face and the white of his forehead, where his hat shielded it from the
sun and the wind. The spread of his strong neck, where it rose from his
shoulders, and the clutch of his brown hands attracted her.

"How strong you look!" she said musingly.

He laughed up at her in frank delight.

"Well, I'm not out here for my health exactly, although when I came here
I was pretty tender. I was just out of college, in fact," he said, glad
of the chance to let her know that he was not an ignorant workingman.

She looked surprised and pleased.

"Oh, you're a college man! I have two brothers at Yale. One of them
plays half-back or short-stop, or something. Of course you played?"

"Baseball? Yes, I was pitcher for '88." He heaved a sigh. He could not
think of those blessed days without sorrow.

"Oh, I didn't mean baseball. I meant football."

"We don't play that much in the West. We go in more for baseball. More
science."

"Oh, I like football best, it's so lively. I like to see them when they
get all bunched up, they look so funny, and then when some fellow gets
the ball under his arms and goes shooting around, with the rest all
jumping at him. Oh, oh, it's exciting!"

She smiled, and her teeth shone from her scarlet lips with a more
familiar expression than he had seen on her face before. Some wall of
reserve had melted away, and they chatted on with growing freedom.

"Well, Edith, are you ready?" asked the Major, coming up.

Arthur sprang up as if he suddenly remembered that he was a workingman.

Edith rose also.

"Yes, all ready, uncle."

"Well, we'll be going in a minute.--Mr. Ramsey, do you think that millet
has got water enough?"

"For the present, yes. The ground is not so dry as it looks."

As they talked on about the farm, Mrs. Richards brought out a glass of
milk for the Major.

Arthur, with nice calculation, unhitched the horse and brought it around
while the Major was detained.

"May I help you in, Miss Newell?"

She gave him her hand with a frank gesture, and the Major reached the
cart just as she was taking the lines from Arthur.

"Are you coming?" she gayly cried. "If not, I'll drive home by myself."

"You mean you'll hold the lines."

"No, sir. I can drive if I have a chance."

"That's what the American girl is saying these days. She wants to hold
the lines."

"Well, I'm going to begin right now and drive all the way home."

As they drove off she flashed a roguish glance back at Arthur--a smile
which shadowed swiftly into a look which had a certain appeal in it. He
was very handsome in his working dress.

All the rest of the day that look was with him. He could not understand
it, though her mood while seated upon the porch was perfectly
comprehensible to him.

The following Sunday morning he saddled up one of the horses and went
down to church. He reasoned Edith would attend the Episcopal service,
and he had the pleasure of seeing her pass up the aisle most exquisitely
dressed.

This feeling of pleasure was turned to sadness by sober second thought.
Added to the prostration before his ideal was the feeling that she
belonged to another world--a world of pleasure and wealth, a world
without work or worry. This feeling was strengthened by the atmosphere
of the beautiful little church, fragrant with flowers, delicately
shadowed, tremulous with music.

He rode home in deep meditation. It was curious how subjective he was
becoming. She had not seen him there, and his trip lacked so much of
being a success. Life seemed hardly worth living as he took off his best
suit and went out to feed the horses.

The men soon observed the regularity of these Sunday excursions, and the
word was passed around that Arthur went down to see his girl, and they
set themselves to find out who she was. They did not suspect that he
sought the Major's niece.

It was a keen delight to see her, even at that distance. To get one look
from her, or to see her eyelashes fall over her brown eyes, paid him for
all his trouble, and yet it left him hungrier at heart than before.

Sometimes he got seated in such wise that he could see the fine line of
her cheek and chin. He noticed also her growing color. The free life she
lived in the face of the mountain winds was doing her good.

Sometimes he went at night to the song service, and his rides home alone
on the plain, with the shadowy mountains over there massed in the
starlit sky, were most wonderful experiences.

As he rose and fell on his broncho's steady gallop, he took off his hat
to let the wind stir his hair. Riding thus, exalted thus, one night he
shaped a desperate resolution. He determined to call on her just as he
used to visit the girls at Viroqua with whom he was on the same intimacy
of footing.

He was as good as any class. He was not as good as she was, for he
lacked her sweetness and purity of heart, but merely the fact that she
lived in a great house and wore beautiful garments, did not exclude him
from calling upon her.

IV.

But week after week went by without his daring to make his resolution
good. He determined many times to ask permission to call, but somehow he
never did.

He seemed to see her rather less than at first; and, on her part, there
was a change. She seemed to have lost her first eager and frank
curiosity about him, and did not always smile now when she met him.

Then, again, he could not in working dress ask to call; it would seem so
incongruous to stand before her to make such a request covered with
perspiration and dust. It was hard to be dignified under such
circumstances; he must be washed and dressed properly.

In the meantime, the men had discovered how matters stood, and some of
them made very free with the whole situation. Two of them especially
hated him.

These two men had drifted to the farm from the mines somewhere, and were
rough, hard characters. They would have come to blows with him, only
they knew something of the power lying coiled in his long arms.

One day he overheard one of the men speaking of Edith, and his tone
stopped the blood in Arthur's heart. When he walked among the group of
men his face was white and set.

"You take that back!" he said in a low voice. "You take that back, or
I'll kill you right where you stand!"

"Do him up, Tim!" shouted the other ruffian; but Tim hesitated. "I'll do
him, then," said the other man. "I owe him one myself."

He caught up a strip of board which was lying on the ground near, but
one of the Norwegian workmen put his foot on it, and before he could
command his weapon, Arthur brought a pail which he held in his right
hand down upon his opponent's head.

The man fell as if dead, and the pail shattered into its original
staves. Arthur turned then to face Tim, his hands doubled into mauls;
but the other men interfered, and the encounter was over.

Arthur waited to see if the fallen man could rise, and then turned away
reeling and breathless. For an hour afterward his hands shook so badly
that he could not go on with his work.

At first he determined to go to Richards, the foreman, and demand the
discharge of the two tramps, but as he thought of the explanation
necessary, he gave it up as impossible.

He almost wept with shame and despair at the thought of her name having
been mixed in the tumult. He had meant to kill when he struck, and the
nervous prostration which followed showed him how far he had gone. He
had not had a fight since he was thirteen years of age, and now
everything seemed lost in the light of his murderous rage. It would all
come out sooner or later, and she would despise him.

He went to see the man just before going to supper, and found him in his
barracks, sitting near a pail of cold water from which he was splashing
his head at intervals.

He looked up as Arthur entered, but went on with his ministrations;
after a pause he said:

"That was a terrible lick you give me, young feller--brought the blood
out of my ears."

"I meant to kill you," was Arthur's grim reply.

"I know you did. If that darned Norse hadn't put his foot on that board
_you'd_ be doing this." He lifted a handful of water to his swollen and
aching head.

"What did you go to that board for? Why didn't you stand up like a man?"

"Because you were swinging that bucket."

"Oh, bosh! You were a coward as well as a blackguard."

The man looked up with a gleam in his eye.

"See here, young feller--if this head----"

Arthur's face darkened, and the man stopped short.

"Now listen, Dan Williams, I want to tell you something. I'm not going
to report this. I'm going to let you stay here till you're well, and
then I want this thing settled with Richards looking on; when I get
through with you, then, you'll want a cot in some hospital."

The man's eyes sullenly fell, and Arthur turned toward the door. At the
doorway he turned and a terrible look came into his face.

"And, more than that, if you say another word about--her, I'll brain
you, sick or well!"

As he talked, the old, wild fury returned, and he came back and faced
the wounded man.

"Now, what do you propose to do?" he demanded, his hands clinching.

The other man looked at him, with a curious frown upon his face.

"Think I'm a damned fool!" he curtly answered, and sopped his
handkerchief in the water again.

The rage went out of Arthur's eyes, and he almost smiled, so much did
that familiar phrase convey, with its subtle inflections. It was cunning
and candid and chivalrous all at once. It acknowledged defeat and guilt
and embodied a certain pride in the victor.

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