Books: Main Travelled Roads
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Hamlin Garland >> Main Travelled Roads
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The dim eyes clouded with quick tears.
"Ain't you seen him?"
"Not since nine o'clock."
"Where d'you think he is?"
"I tell yeh I don't know. He'll take care of himself; don't worry."
He flung off his hat and plunged into the wash basin. His shirt was
wet with sweat and covered with dust of the hay and fragments of
leaves. He splashed his burning face with the water, paying no
further attention to his mother. She spoke again, very gently, in
reproof:
"Grant, why do you stand out against Howard so?"
"I don't stand out against him," he replied harshly, pausing with the
towel in his hands. His eyes were hard and piercing. "But if he
expects me to gush over his coming back, he's fooled, that's all.
He's left us to paddle our own canoe all this while, and, so far as
I'm concerned, he can leave us alone hereafter. He looked out for
his precious hide mighty well, and now he comes back here to play
big gun and pat us on the head. I don't propose to let him come that
over me."
Mrs. McLane knew too well the temper of her son to say any more,
but she inquired about Howard of the old hired man.
"He went off down the valley. He 'n' Grant had s'm words, and he
pulled out down toward the old farm. That's the last I see of 'im."
Laura took Howard's part at the table. "Pity you can't be decent,"
she said, brutally direct as usuaL "You treat Howard as if he was
a-a-I do' know what."
"wrn you let me alone?"
"No, I won't. If you think I'm going to set by an' agree to your
bullyraggin' him, you're mistaken. It's a shame! You're mad 'cause
he's succeeded and you ain't. He ain't to blame for his brains. If you
and I'd had any, we'd 'a' succeeded, too. It ain't our fault and it ain't
his; so what's the use?"
There was a look came into Grant's face that the wife knew. It
meant bitter and terrible silence. He ate his dinner without another
word.
It was beginning to cloud up. A thin, whitish, 'all-pervasive vapor
which meant rain was dimming the sky, and be forced his hands to
their utmost during the afternoon in order to get most of the down
hay in before the rain came. He was pitching hay up into the barn
when Howard came by just before one o'clock.
It was windless there. The sun fell through the white mist with
undiminished fury, and the fragrant hay sent up a breath that was
hot as an oven draught. Grant was a powerful man, and there was
something majestic in his action as he rolled the huge flakes of hay
through the door. The sweat poured from his face like rain, and he
was forced to draw his dripping sleeve across his face to clear
away the blinding sweat that poured into his eyes.
Howard stood and looked at him in silence, remembering how
often he had worked there in that furnace heat, his muscles
quivering, cold chills running over his flesh, red shadows dancing
before his eyes.
His mother met him at the door anxiously, but smiled as she saw
his pleasant face and cheerful eyes.
"You're a little late, m' son."
Howard spent most of the afternoon sitting with his mother on the
porch, or under the trees, lying sprawled out like a boy, resting at
times with sweet forgetfulness of the whole world, but feeling a
dull pain whenever he remembered the stern, silent man pitching
hay in the hot sun on the torrid side of the barn.
His mother did not say anything about the quarrel; she feared to
reopen it. She talked mainly of old times in a gentle monotone of
reminiscence, while he listened, looking up into her patient face.
The heat slowly lessened as the sun sank down toward the dun
clouds rising like a more distant and majestic line of mountains
beyond the western hills. The sound of cowbells came irregularly
to the ear, and the voices and sounds of the haying fields had a
jocund, thrilling effect on the ear of the city dweller.
He was very tender. Everything conspired to make him simple,
direct, and honest.
"Mother, if you'll only forgive me for staying away so long, I'll
surely come to see you every summer."
She had nothing to forgive. She was so glad to have him there at
her feet-her great, handsome, successful boy! She could only love
him and enjoy him every moment of the precious days. If Grant
would only reconcile himself to Howard! That was the great thorn
in her flesh.
Howard told her how he had succeeded.
"It was luck, Mother. First I met Cooke, and he introduced me to
Jake Saulsman of Chicago. Jake asked me to go to New York with
him, and-I don't know why-took a fancy to me some way. He
introduced me to a lot of the fellows in New York, and they all
helped me along. I did nothing to merit it. Everybody helps me.
Anybody can succeed in that way."
The doting mother thought it not at all strange that they all helped
him.
At the supper table Grant was gloomily silent, ignoring Howard
completely. Mrs. McLane sat and grieved silently, not daring to
say
a word in protest. Laura and the baby tried to amuse Howard, and
under cover of their talk the meal was eaten.
The boy fascinated Howard. He "sawed wood" with a rapidity and
uninterruptedness which gave alarm. He had the air of coaling up
for a long voyage.
"At that age," Howard thought, "I must have gripped my knife in
my right hand so, and poured my tea into my saucer so. I must
have buttered and bit into a huge slice of bread just so, and chewed
at it with a smacking sound in just that way. I must have gone to
the length of scooping up honey with my knife blade."
It was magically, mystically beautiful over all this squalor and toil
and bitterness, from five till seven-a moving hour. Again the
falling sun streamed in broad banners across the valleys; again the
blue mist lay far down the coulee over the river; the cattle called
from the hills in the moistening, sonorous air; the bells came in a
pleasant tangle of sound; the air pulsed with the deepening chorus
of katydids and other nocturnal singers.
Sweet and deep as the very springs of his life was all this to the
soul of the elder brother; but in the midst of it, the younger man, in
ill-smelling clothes and great boots that chafed his feet, went out
to milk the. cows-on whose legs the flies and mosquitoes
swarmed, bloated with blood-to sit by the hot side of the cow and
be lashed with her tall as she tried frantically to keep the savage
insects from eating her raw.
"The poet who writes of milking the cows does it from the
hammock, looking on," Howard soliloquized as he watched the old
man Lewis racing around the filthy yard after one of the young
heifers that had kicked over the pail in her agony with the flies and
was unwilling to stand still and be eaten alive.
"So, so! you beast!" roared the old man as he finally cornered the
shrinking, nearly frantic creature.
"Don't you want to look at the garden?" asked Mrs. McLane of
Howard; and they went out among the vegetables and berries.
The bees were coming home heavily laden and crawling slowly
into the hives. The level, red light streamed through the trees,
blazed along the grass, and lighted a few old-fashioned flowers
into
red ai~d gold flame. It was beautiful, and Howard looked at it
through his half-shut eyes as the painters do, and turned away with
a sigh at the sound of blows where the wet and grimy men were
assailing the frantic cows.
"There's Wesley with your trunk," Mrs. McLane said, recalling him
to himself.
Wesley helped him carry the trunk in and waved off thanks.
"Oh, that's all right," he said; and Howard knew the Western man
too well to press the matter of pay.
As he went in an hour later and stood by the trunk, the dull ache
came back into his heart. How he had failed! It seemed like a bitter
mockery now to show his gifts.
Grant had come in from his work, and with his feet released from
his chafing boots, in his wet shirt and milk-splashed overalls, sat at
the kitchen table reading a newspaper which he held close to a
small kerosene lamp. He paid no attention to anyone. His attitude,
Curiously like his father's, was perfectly definite to Howard. It
meant that from that time forward there were to be no words of
any sort between them. It meant that they were no longer brothers,
not even acquaintances. "How inexorable that face!" thought
Howard.
He turned sick with disgust and despair, and would have closed his
trunk without showing any of the presents, only for the childish
expectancy of his mother and Laura.
"Here's something for you, Mother," he said, assuming a cheerful
voice as he took a fold of fine silk from the trunk and held it up.
"All the way from Paris."
He laid it on his mother's lap and stooped and kissed her, and then
turned hastily away to hide the tears that came to his own eyes as
he saw her keen pleasure.
"And here's a parasol for Laura. I don't know how I came to have
that in here. And here's General Grant's autobiography for his
namesake," he said with an effort at carelessness, and waited to
hear Grant rise.
"Grant, won't you come in?" asked his mother quiveringly.
Grant did not reply nor move. Laura took the handsome volumes
out and laid them beside him on the table. He simply pushed them
to one side and went on with his reading.
Again that horrible anger swept hot as flame over Howard. He
could have cursed him. His hands shook as he handed out other
presents to his mother and Laura and the baby. He tried to joke.
"I didn't know how old the baby was, so she'll have to grow to
some of these things."
But the pleasure was all gone for him and for the rest. His heart
swelled almost to a feeling of pain as he looked at his mother.
There she sat with the presents in her lap. The shining silk came
too late for her. It threw into appalling relief her age, her poverty,
her work-weary frame. "My God!" he almost cried aloud, "how
little it would have taken to lighten her life!"
Upon this moment, when it seemed as if he could endure no more,
came the smooth voice of William McTurg:
"Hello, folkses!"
"Hello, Uncle Bill! Come in."
"That's what we came for," laughed a woman's voice.
"Is that you, Rose?" asked Laura.
"It's me-Rose," replied the laughing girl as she bounced into the
room and greeted everybody in a breathless sort of way.
"You don't mean little Rosy?"
"Big Rosy now," said William.
Howard looked at the handsome girl and smiled, saying in a nasal
sort of tone, "Wal, wal! Rosy, how you've growed since I saw
yeh!"
"Oh, look at all this purple and fine linen! Am I left out?"
Rose was a large girl of twenty-five or thereabouts, and was called
an old maid. She radiated good nature from every line of her
buxom self. Her black eyes were full of drollery, and she was on
the best of terms with Howard at once. She had been a teacher, but
that did not prevent her from assuming a peculiar directness of
speech. Of course they talked about old friends.
"Where's Rachel?" Howard inquired. Her smile faded away.
"Shellie married Orrin Mcllvaine. They're way out in Dakota.
Shellie's havin' a hard row of stumps."
There was a little silence.
"And Tommy?"
"Gone West. Most all the boys have gone West. That's the reason
there's so many old maids."
"You don't mean to say-"
"I don't need to say-I'm an old maid. Lots of the girls are."
"It don't pay to marry these days."
"Are you married?"
"Not yet." His eyes lighted up again in a humorous way.
"Not yet! That's good! That's the way old maids all talk."
"You don't mean to tell me that no young fellow comes prowling
around-"
"Oh, a young Dutchrnan or Norwegian once in a while. Nobody
that counts. Fact is, we're getting like Boston-four women to one
man; and when you consider that we're getting more particular
each year, the outlook is-well, it's dreadful!"
"It certainly is."
"Marriage is a failure these days for most of us. We can't live on
the farm, and can't get a living in the city, and there we are." She
laid her hand on his arm. "I declare, Howard, you're the same boy
you used to be. I ain't a bit afraid of you, for all your success."
"And you're the same girl? No, I can't say that. It seems to me
you've grown more than I have-I don't mean physically, I mean
mentally," he explained as he saw her smile in the defensive way a
fleshy girl has, alert to ward off a joke.
They were in the midst of talk, Howard telling one of his funny
stories, when a wagon clattered up to the door and merry voices
called loudly:
"Whoa, there, Sampson!"
"Hullo, the house!"
Rose looked at her father with a smile in her black eyes exactly
like his. They went to the door.
"Hullo! What's wanted?"
"Grant McLane live here?"
"Yup. Right here."
A moment later there came a laughing, chatting squad of women
to the door. Mrs. McLane and Laura stared at each other in
amazement. Grant went outdoors.
Rose stood at the door as if she were hostess.
"Come in, Nettie. Glad to see yeh-glad to see yeh! Mrs. Mcllvaine,
come right in! Take a seat. Make yerself to home, do! And Mrs.
Peavey! Wal, I never! This must be a surprise party. Well, I swan!
How many more o' ye air they?"
All was confusion, merriment, handshakings as Rose introduced
them in her roguish way.
"Folks, this is Mr. Howard McLane of New York. He's an actor,
but it hain't spoiled him a bit as I can see. How, this is Nettie
Mcllvaine-Wilson that was."
Howard shook hands with Nettie, a tall, plain girl with prominent
teeth.
"This is Ma Mcllvaine."
"She looks just the same," said. Howard, shaking her hand and
feeling how hard and work-worn it was.
And so amid bustle, chatter, and invitations "to lay off y'r things
an' stay awhile," the women got disposed about the room at last
Those that had rocking chairs rocked vigorously to and fro to hide
their embarrassment. They all talked in loud voices.
Howard felt nervous under this furtive scrutiny. He wished his
clothes didn't look so confoundedly dressy. Why didn't he have
sense enough to go and buy a fifteen-dollar suit of diagonals for
everyday wear.
Rose was the life of the party. Her tongue rattled on m the most
delightful way.
"It's all Rose an' Bill's doin's," Mrs. Mcllvaine explained. "They
told us to come over an' pick up anybody we see on the road. So
we did."
Howard winced a little at her familiarity of tone. He couldn't help
it for the life of him.
"Well, I wanted to come tonight because I'm going away next
week, and I wanted to see how he'd act at a surprise party again,"
Rose explained.
"Married, I s'pose," said Mrs. Mcllvaine abruptly.
"No, not yet."
"Good land! Why, y' Inns' be thirty-five, How. Must a dis'p'inted y'r
mam not to have a young 'un to call 'er granny."
The men came clumping in, talking about haying and horses.
Some of the older ones Howard knew and greeted, but the younger
ones were mainly too much changed. They were all very ill at ease.
Most of them were in compromise dress-something lying between
working "rig" and Sunday dress. Most of them had on clean shirts
and paper collars, and wore their Sunday coats (thick woolen
garments) over rough trousers. All of them crossed their legs at
once, and most of them sought the wall and leaned back
perilously~upon the hind legs of their chairs, eyeing Howard
slowly.
For the first few minutes the presents were the subjects of
conversation. The women especially spent a good deal of talk upon
them.
Howard found himself forced to taking the initiative, so he
inquired about the crops and about the farms.
"I see you don't plow the hills as we used to. And reap'. What a job
it ust to be. It makes the hills more beautiful to have them covered
with smooth grass and cattle."
There was only dead silence to this touching upon the idea of
beauty.
"I s'pose it pays reasonably."
"Not enough to kill," said one of the younger men. "You c'n see
that by the houses we live in-that is, most of us. A few that came in
early an' got land cheap, like Mcllvaine, here-he got a lift that the
rest of us can't get."
"I'm a free trader, myself," said one young fellow, blushing and
looking away as Howard turned and said cheerily:
"So'm I."
The rest semed to feel that this was a tabooed subject
-a subject to be talked out of doors, where one could prance about
and yell and do justice to it.
Grant sat silently in the kitchen doorway, not saying a word, not
looking at his. brother.
"Well, I don't never use hot vinegar for mine," Mrs. Mcllvaine was
heard to say. "I jest use hot water, an' I rinse 'em out good, and set
'em bottom-side up in the sun. I do' know but what hot vinegar
would be more cleansin'."
Rose had the younger folks in a giggle with a droll telling of a joke
on herself.
"How'd y' stop 'em from laffin'?"
"I let 'em laugh. Oh, my school is a disgrace-so one director says.
But I like to see children laugh. It broadens their cheeks."
"Yes, that's all handwork." Laura was showing the baby's Sunday
clothes.
"Goodness Peter! How do you find time to do so much?"
"I take time."
Howard, being the lion of the evening, tried his best to be
agreeable. He kept near his mother, because it afforded her so
much pride and satisfaction, and because he was obliged to keep
away from Grant, who had begun to talk to the men. Howard
tall~ed mainly about their affairs, but still was forced more and
more into talking of life in the city. As he told of the theater and
the concerts, a sudden change fell upon them; they grew sober, and
he felt deep down in the hearts of these people a melancholy
which was expressed only elusively with little tones or sighs. Their
gaiety was fitful.
They were hungry for the world, for art-these young people.
Discontented and yet hardly daring to acknowledge it; indeed, few
of them could have made definite statement of their
dissatisfaction. The older people felt it less. They practically said,
with a sigh of pathetic resignation:
"Well, I don't expect ever to see these things now.."
A casual observer would have said, "What a pleasant bucolic-this
little surprise party of welcome!" But Howard with his native ear
and eye had no such pleasing illusion. He knew too well these
suggestions of despair and bitterness. He knew that, like the smile
of the slave, this cheerfulness was self-defense; deep down was
another self.
Seeing Grant talking with a group of men over by the kitchen door,
he crossed over slowly and stood listening. Wesley Cosgrove-a
tall, rawboned young fellow with a grave, almost tragic face-was
saying:
"Of course I ain't. Who is? A man that's satisfied to live as we do is
a fool."
"The worst of it is," said Grant without seeing Howard, a man can't
get out of it during his lifetime, and l don't know that he'll have any
chance in the next-the speculator'll be there ahead of us."
The rest laughed, but Grant went on grily:
"Ten years ago Wes, here, could have got land in Dakota pretty
easy, but now it's about all a feller's life's worth to try it. I tell you
things seem shuttin' down on us fellers."
"Plenty o' land to rent?" suggested someone.
"Yes, in terms that skin a man alive. More than that, farmin' ain't
so free a life as it used to be. This cattle-raisin' and butter-makin'
makes a nigger of a man. Binds him right down to the grindstone,
and he gets nothin' out of it-that's what rubs it in. He simply
wallers around in the manure for somebody else. I'd like to know
what a man's life is worth who lives as we do? How much higher is
it than the lives the niggers used to live?"
These brutally bald words made Howard thrill witb emotion like
some great tragic poem. A silence fell on the group.
"That's the God's truth, Grant," said young Cosgrove after a pause.
"A man like me is helpless," Grant was saying. "Just like a fly in a
pan of molasses. There ain't any escape for him. The more he tears
around, the more liable he is to rip his legs off."
"What can he do?"
The men listened in silence.
"Oh, come, don't talk politics all night!" cried Rose, breaking in.
"Come, let's have a dance. Where's that fiddle?"
"Fiddle!" cried Howard, glad of a chance to laugh. "Well, now!
Bring out that fiddle. Is it William's?"
"Yes, Pap's old fiddle."
"Oh, gosh! he don't want to hear me play," pr~ tested William.
"He's heard s' many fiddlers."
"Fiddlers! I've heard a thousand violinists, but not fiddlers. Come,
give us 'Honest John.'"
William took the fiddle in his work-calloused and crooked hands
and began tuning it. The group at the kitchen door turned to listen,
their faces lighting up a little. Rose tried to get a set on the floor.
"Oh, good land!" said some. "We're all tuckered out. What makes
you so anxious?"
"She wants a chance to dance with the New Yorker."
"That's it exactly," Rose admitted.
"Wal, if you'd churned and mopped and cooked for hayin' hands as
I have today, you wouldn't be so full o' nonsense."
"Oh, bother! Life's short. Come quick, get Bettie out. Come, Wes,
never mind your hobbyhorse."
By incredible exertion she got a set on the floor, and William got
the fiddle in tune. Howard looked across at Wesley, and thought
the change in him splendidly dramatic. His face had lighted up into
a kind of deprecating, boyish smile. Rose could do anything with
him.
William played some of the old tunes that had a thou-sand
associated memories in Howard's brain, memories of harvest
moons, of melon feasts, and of clear, cold winter nights. As he
danced, his eyes filled with a tender, luminous light. He came
closer to them all than he had been able to do before. Grant had
gone out into the kitchen.
After two or three sets had been danced, the company took seats
and could not be stirred again. So Laura and Rose disappeared for
a few moments, and returning, served strawberries and cream,
which she "just happened to have in the house."
And then William played again. His fingers, now grown more
supple, brought out clearer, firmer tones. As he played, silence fell
on these people. The magic of music sobered every face; the
women looked older and more careworn, the men slouched
sullenly in their chairs or leaned back against the wall.
It seemed to Howard as if the spirit of tragedy had entered this
house. Music had always been William's unconscious expression
of his unsatisfied desires. He was never melancholy except when
he played. Then his eyes grew somber, his drooping face full of
shadows.
He played on slowly, softly, wailing Scotch tunes and mournful
Irish songs. He seemed to find in the songs of these people, and
especially in a wild, sweet, low-keyed Negro song, some
expression for his indefinable inner melancholy.
He played on, forgetful of everybody, his long beard sweeping the
violin, his toilworn hands marvelously obedient to his will.
At last he stopped, looked up with a faint, deprecating smile, and
said with a sigh:
"Well, folkses, time to go home."
The going was quiet. Not much laughing. Howard stood at the
door and said good night to them all, his heart very tender.
"Come and see us," they said.
"I will," he replied cordially. "I'll try and get around to see
everybody, and talk over old times, before I go back."
After the wagons had driven out of the yard, Howard turned and
put his arm about his mother's neck.
"Tired?"
"A little."
"Well, now, good night. I'm going for a little stroll." His brain was
too active to sleep. He kissed his mother good night and went out
into the road, his hat in his hand, the cool, moist wind on his hair.
It was very dark, the stars being partly hidden by a thin vapor. On
each side the hills rose, every line familiar as the face of an old
friend. A whippoorwill called occasionally from the hillside, and
the spasmodic jangle of a bell now and then told of some cow's
battle with the mosquitoes.
As he walked, he pondered upon the tragedy he had rediscovered
in these people's lives. Out here under the inexorable spaces of the
sky, a deep distaste of his own life took possession of him. He felt
like giving it all up. He thought of the infinite tragedy of these
lives which the world loves to call "peaceful and pastoral." HIS
mind went out in the aim to help them. What could he do to make
life better worth living? Nothing. They must live and die
practically as he saw them tonight.
And yet he knew this was a mood, and that in a few hours the love
and the habit of life would come back upon him and upon them;
that he would go back to the city in a few days; that these people
would live on and make the best of it.
"I'll make the best of it," he said at last, and his thought came back
to his mother and Grant.
IV
The next day was a rainy day; not a shower, but a steady rain-an
unusual thing in midsummer in the West. A cold, dismal day in the
fireless, colorless farmhouses. It came to Howard in that peculiar
reaction which surely comes during a visit of this character, when
thought is a weariness, when the visitor longs for his own familiar
walls and pictures and books, and longs to meet his friends, feeling
at the same time the tragedy of life which makes friends nearer
and more congenial than blood relations.
Howard ate his breakfast alone, save Baby and Laura, its mother,
going about the room. Baby and mother alike insisted on feeding
him to death. Already dyspeptic pangs were setting in.
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