Books: Main Travelled Roads
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Hamlin Garland >> Main Travelled Roads
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"Now ain't there something more I can-"
"Good heavens! No!" he cried in dismay. "I'm likely to die of
dyspepsia now. This honey and milk, and these delicious hot
biscuits-"
"I'm afraid it ain't much like the breakfasts you have in the city."
"Well, no, it ain't," he confessed. "But this is the kind a man needs
when he lives in the open air."
She sat down opposite him, with her elbows on the table, her chin
in her palm, her eyes full of shadows.
"I'd like to go to a city once. I never saw a town bigger'n
Lumberville. I've never seen a play, but I've read of 'em in the
magazines. It must be wonderful; they say they have wharves and
real ships coming up to the wharf, and people getting off and on.
How do they do it?"
"Oh, that's too long a story to tell. It's a lot of machinery and paint
and canvas. If I told you how it was done, you wouldn't enjoy it so
well when you come on and see it."
"Do you ever expect to see me in New York?"
"Why, yes. Why not? I expect Grant to come On and bring you all
some day, especially Tonikins here. Tonikins, you hear, sir? I
expect you to come on you' for birfday, sure." He tried thus to stop
the woman's gloomy confidence.
'I hate farm life," she went on with a bitter inflection. "It's nothing
but fret, fret and work the whole time, never going any place,
never seeing anybody but a lot of neighbors just as big fools as you
are. I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and
churning. I'm sick of it all."
Howard was silent. What could he say to such an indictment? The
ceiling swarmed with flies which the cold rain had driven to seek
the warmth of the kitchen. The gray rain was falling with a dreary
sound outside, and down the kitchen stovepipe an occasional drop
fell on the stove with a hissing, angry sound.
The young wife went on with a deeper note:
"I lived in Lumberville two years, going to school, and I know a
little something of what city life is. If I was a man, I bet I wouldn't
wear my life out on a farm, as Grant does. I'd get away and I'd do
something. I wouldn't care what, but I'd get away."
There was a certain volcanic energy back of all the woman said
that made Howard feel she'd make the attempt. She didn't know
that the struggle for a. place to stand on this planet was eating the
heart and soul out of men and women in the city, just as in the
country. But he could say nothing. If be had said in conventional
phrase, sitting there in his soft clothing, "We must make the best of
it all," the woman could justly have thrown the dishcloth in his
face. He could say nothing.
"I was a fool for ever marrying," she went on, while the baby
pushed a chair across the room. "I made a decent living teaching, I
was free to come and go, my money was my own. Now I'm fled
right down to a churn or a dishpan, I never have a cent of my own.
He's growlin' round half the time, and there's no chance of his ever
being different."
She stopped with a bitter sob in her throat. She forgot she was
talking to her husband's brother. She was conscious only of his
sympathy.
As if a great black cloud had settled down upon him, Howard felt
it all-the horror, hopelessness, immanent tragedy of it all. The
glory of nature, the bounty and splendor of the sky, only made it
the more benumbing. He thought of a sentence Millet once wrote:
I see very well the aureole of the dandelions, and the sun also, far
down there behind the hills, flinging his glory upon the clouds. But
not alone that-I see in the
plains the smoke of the tired horses at the plough, or, on a
stony-hearted spot of ground, a back-broken man trying to raise
himself upright for a moment to breathe.
The tragedy is surrounded by glories-that is no invention of mine.
Howard arose abruptly and went back to his little bedroom, where
he walked up and down the floor till he was calm enough to write,
and then he sat down and poured it all out to "Dearest Margaret,"
and his first sentence was this:
"If it were not for you (just to let you know the mood I'm in)-if it
were not for you, and I had the world in my hands, I'd crush it like
a puffball; evil so predominates, suffering is so universal and
persistent, happiness so fleeting and so infrequent."
He wrote on for two hours, and by the time he had sealed and
directed several letters he felt calmer, but still terribly depressed.
The rain was still falling, sweeping down from the half-seen hills,
wreathing the wooded peaks with a gray garment of mist and
filling the valley with a whitish cloud.
It fell around the house drearily. It ran down into the tubs placed to
catch it, dripped from the mossy pump, and drummed on the
upturned milk pails, and upon the brown and yellow beehives
under the maple trees. The chickens seemed depressed, but the
irrepressible bluejay screamed amid it all, with the same insolent
spirit, his plumage untarnished by the wet. The barnyard showed a
horrible mixture of mud and mire, through which Howard caught
glimpses of the men, slumping to and fro without more additional
protection than a ragged coat and a shapeless felt hat.
In the sitting room where his mother sat sewing there was not an
ornament, save the etching he had brought. The clock stood on a
small shell, its dial so much defaced that one could not tell the
time of day; and when it struck, it was with noticeably
disproportionate deliberation, as if it wished to correct any mistake
into which the family might have fallen by reason of its illegible
dial.
The paper on the walls showed the first concession of the Puritans
to the Spirit of Beauty, and was made up of a heterogeneous
mixture of flowers of unheard-of shapes and colors, arranged in
four different ways along the wall. There were no books, no music,
and only a few newspapers in sight-a bare, blank, cold, drab-
colored shelter from the rain, not a home. Nothing cozy, nothing
heartwarming; a grim and horrible shed.
"What are they doing? It can't be they're at work such a day as
this," Howard said, standing at the window.
"They find plenty to do, even on rainy days," answered his mother.
"Grant always has some job to set the men at. It's the only way to
live."
"I'll go out and see them." He turned suddenly. "Mother, why
should Grant treat me so? Have I deserved it?"
Mrs. McLane sighed in pathetic hopelessness. "I don't know,
Howard. I'm worried about Grant. He gets more an' more
downhearted an' gloomy every day. Seem's if he'd go crazy. He
don't care how he looks any more, won't dress up on Sunday. Days
an' days he'll go aroun' not sayin' a word. I was in hopes you could
help him, Howard."
"My coming seems to have had an opposite effect. He hasn't
spoken a word to me, except when he had to, since I came.
Mother, what do you say to going home with me to New York?"
"Oh, I couldn't do that!" she cried in terror. "I couldn't live in a big
city-never!"
"There speaks the truly rural mind," smiled Howard at his mother,
who was looking up at him through her glasses with a pathetic
forlornness which sobered him again. "Why, Mother, you could
live in Orange, New Jersey, or out in Connecticut, and be just as
lonesome as you are here. You wouldn't need to live in the city. I
could see you then every day or two."
"Well, I couldn't leave Grant an' the baby, anyway," she replied,
not realizing how one could live in New Jersey and do business
daily in New York.
"Well, then, how would you like to go back into the old house?" he
said, facing her.
The patient hands fell to the lap, the dim eyes fixed in searching
glance on his face. There was a wistful cry in the voice.
"Oh, Howard! Do you mean-"
Up The Coulee
93
He came and sat down by her, and put his arm about her and
hugged her hard. "I mean, you dear, good, patient, work-wear~ old
Mother, I'm going to buy back the old farm and put you in it."
There was no refuge for her now except in tears, and she put up
her thin, trembling old hands about his neck and cried in that easy,
placid, restful way age has.
Howard could not speak. His throat ached with remorse and pity.
He saw his forgetfulness of them all once more without relief-the
black thing it was!
"There, there, Mother, don't cry!" he said, torn with anguish by her
tears. Measured by man's tearlessness, her weeping seemed terrible
to him. "I didn't realize how things were going here. It was all my
fault-or, at least, most of it. Grant's letter didn't reach me. I thought
you were still on the old farm. But no matter; it's all over now.
Come, don't cry any more, Mother dear. I'm going to take care of
you now."
It had been years since the poor, lonely woman had felt such
warmth of love. Her sons had been like her husband, chary of
expressing their affection; and like most Puritan families, there
was little of caressing among them. Sitting there with the rain on
the roof and driving through the trees, they planned getting back
into the old house. Howard's plan seemed to her full of splendor
and audacity. She began to understand his power and wealth now,
as he put it into concrete form before her.
"I wish I could eat Thanksgiving dinner there with you," he said at
last, "but it can't be thought of. However, I'll have you all in there
before I go home. I'm going out now and tell Grant. Now don't
worry any more; I'm going to fix it all up with him, sure." He gave
her a parting hug.
Laura advised him not to attempt to get to the barn; but as he
persisted in going, she hunted up an old rubber coat for him.
"You'll mire down and spoil your shoes," she said, glancing at his
neat calf gaiters.
"Darn the difference!" he laughed in his old way. "Besides, I've got
rubbers."
"Better go round by the fence," she advised as he stepped out into
the pouring rain.
How wretchedly familiar it all was! The miry cow yard, with the
hollow trampled out around the horse trough, the disconsolate hens
standing under the wagons and sheds, a pig wallowing across its
sty, and for atmosphere the desolate, falling rain. It was so familiar
he felt a pang of the old rebellious despair which seized him on
such days in his boyhood.
Catching up courage, he stepped out on the grass, opened the gate,
and entered the barnyard. A narrow ribbon of turf ran around the
fence, on which he could walk by clinging with one hand to the
rough boards. In this way he slowly made his way around the
periphery, and came at last to the open barn door without much
harm.
It was a desolate interior. In the open floorway Grant, seated upon
a half-bushel, was mending a harness. The old man was holding
the trace in his hard brown hands; the boy was lying on a wisp of
hay. It was a small barn, and poor at that. There was a bad smell,
as of dead rats, about it, and the rain fell through the shingles here
and there. To the right, and below, the horses stood, looking up
with their calm and beautiful eyes, in which the whole scene was
idealized.
Grant looked up an instant and then went on with his work.
"Did yeh wade through?" grinned Lewis, exposing his broken
teeth.
"No, I kinder circumambiated the pond." He sat down on the little
toolbox near Grant. "Your barn is good deal like that in 'The
Arkansas Traveller.' Needs a new roof, Grant." His voice had a
pleasant sound, full of the tenderness of the scene through which
he had just been. "In fact, you need a new barn."
"I need a good many things more'n I'll ever get," Grant replied
shortly.
"How long did you say you'd been on this farm?"
"Three years this fall."
"I don't s'pose you've been able to think of buying-Now hold on,
Grant," he cried, as Grant threw his head back. "For God's sake,
don't get mad again! Wait till you see what I'm driving at."
"I don't see what you're drivin' at, and I don't care.
All I want you to do is to let us alone. That ought to be easy
enough for you."
"I tell you, I didn't get your letter. I didn't know you'd lost the old
farm." Howard was determined not to quarrel. "I didn't suppose-"
"You might 'a' come to see."
"Well, I'll admit that. All I can say in excuse is that since I got to
managing plays I've kept looking ahead to making a big hit and
getting a barrel of money-just as the old miners used to hope and
watch. Besides, you don't understand how much pressure there is
on me. A hundred different people pulling and hauling to have me
go here or go there, or do this or do that. When it isn't yachting, it's
canoeing, or
He stopped. His heart gave a painful throb, and a shiver ran
through him. Again he saw his life, so rich, so bright, so free, set
over against the routine life in the little low kitchen, the barren
sitting room, and this still more horrible barn. Why should his
brother sit there in wet and grimy clothing mending a broken trace,
while he enjoyed all the light and civilization of the age?
He looked at Grant's fine figure, his great strong face; recalled his
deep, stern, masterful voice. "Am I so much superior to him? Have
not circumstances made me and destroyed him?"
"Grant, for God's sake, don't sit there like that! I'll admit I've been
negligent and careless. I can't understand it all myself. But let me
do something for you now. I've sent to New York for five thousand
dollars. I've got terms on the old farm. Let me see you all back
there once more before I return."
"I don't want any of your charity."
"It ain't charity. It's only justice to you." He rose. "Come now, let's
get at an understanding, Grant. I can't go on this way. I can't go
back to New York and leave you here like this."
Grant rose, too. "I tell you, I don't ask your help. You can't fix this
thing up with money. If you've got more brains 'n I have, why it's
all right. I ain't got any right to take anything that I don't earn."
"But you don't get what you do earn. It ain't your fault. I begin te
see it now. Being the oldest, I had the best chance. I was going to
town to school while you were plowing and husking corn. Of
course I thought you'd be going soon, yourself. I had three years
the start of you. If you'd been in my place, you might have met a
man like Cooke, you might have gone to New York and have been
where I am'.
"Well, it can't be helped now. So drop it."
"But it must be!" Howard said, pacing about, his hands in his coat
pockets. Grant had stopped work, and was gloomily looking out of
the door at a pig nosing in the mud for stray grains of wheat at the
granary door:
"Good God! I see it all now," Howard burst out in an impassioned
tone. "I went ahead with my education, got my start in life, then
Father died, and you took up his burdens. Circumstances made me
and crushed you. That's all there is about that. Luck made me and
cheated you. It ain't right."
His voice faltered. Both men were now oblivious of their
companions and of the scene. Both were thinking of the days when
they both planned great things in the way of an education, two
ambitious, dreamful boys.
"I used to think of you, Grant, when I pulled out Monday morning
in my best suit-cost fifteen dollars in those days." He smiled a little
at the recollection. "While you in overalls and an old 'wammus'
was going out into the field to plow, or husk corn in the mud. It
made me feel uneasy, but, as I said, I kept saying to myself, 'His
turn'll come in a year or two.' But it didn't."
His voice choked. He walked to the door, stood a moment, came
back. His eyes were full of tears.
"I tell you, old man, many a time in my boardinghouse down to
the city, when I thought of the jolly times I was having, my heart
hurt me. But I said: 'It's no use to cry. Better go on and do the best
you can, and then help them afterward. There'll only be one more
miserable member of the family if you stay at home.' Besides, it
seemed right to me to have first chance. But I never thought you'd
be shut off, Grant. If I had, I never would have gone on. Come, old
man, I want you to believe that." His voice was very tender now
and almost humble.
"I don't know as I blame yeh for that, How," said Grant slowly. It
was the first time he had called Howard by his boyish nickname.
His voice was softer, too, and higher in key. But he looked steadily
away.
"I went to New York. People liked my work. I was very successful,
Grant; more successful than you realize. I could have helped you at
any time. There's no use lying about it. And I ought to have done
it; but some way-it's no excuse, I don't mean it for an excuse, only
an explanation-some way I got in with the boys. I don't mean I was
a drinker and all that. But I bought pictures and kept a horse and a
yacht, and of course I had to pay my share of all expeditions,
and~oh, what's the use!"
He broke off, turned, and threw his open palms out toward his
brother, as if throwing aside the last attempt at an excuse.
"I did neglect you, and it's a damned shame! and I ask your
forgiveness. Come, old man!"
He held out his hand, and Grant slowly approached and took it.
There was a little silence. Then Howard went on, his voice
trembling, the tears on his face.
"I want you to let me help you, old man. That's the way to forgive
me. Will you?"
"Yes, if you can help me."
Howard squeezed his hand. "That's right, old man. Now you make
me a boy again. Course I can help you. I've got ten-"
"I don't mean that, How." Grant's voice was very grave. "Money
can't give me a chance now."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean life ain't worth very much to me. I'm too old to take a new
start. I'm a dead failure. I've come to the conclusion that life's a
failure for ninety-nine per cent of us. You can't help me now. It's
too late."
The two men stood there, face to face, hands clasped, the one
fair-skinned, full-lipped, handsome in his neat sult; the other
tragic, somber in his softened mood, his large, long, rugged Scotch
face bronzed with sun and scarred with wrinkles that had histories,
like saber cuts on a veteran, the record of his battles.
AMONG THE CORN ROWS
I
"But the road sometimes passes a rich meadow, where the songs o/
larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled."
ROB held up his hands, from which the dough depended in ragged
strings.
"Biscuits," he said with an elaborate working of his jaws, intended
to convey the idea that they were going to be specially delicious.
Seagraves laughed, but did not enter the shanty door. "How do you
like baching it?"
"Oh, don't mention it!" entreated Rob, mauling the dough again.
"Come in an' sit down. Why in thunder y' standin' out there for?"
"Oh, I'd rather be where I can see the prairie. Great weather!"
"Im-mense!"
"How goes breaking?"
"Tip-top! A leette dry now; but the bulls pull the plow through two
acres a day. How's things in Boomtown?"
"Oh, same old grind."
"Judge still lyin'?"
"Still at it."
"Major Mullens still swearin' to it?"
"You hit it like a mallet. Railroad schemes are thicker'n prairie
chickens. You've got grit, Rob. I don't have anything but crackers
and sardines over to my shanty, and here you are making soda
biscuit."
"I have t' do it. Couldn't break if I didn't. You editors c'n take
things easy, lay around on the prairie, and watch the plovers and
medderlarks; but we settlers have got to work."
Leaving Rob to sputter over his cooking, Seagraves took his slow
way off down toward the oxen grazing in a little hollow. The scene
was characteristically, wonderfully beautiful. It was about five
o'clock in a day in late June, and the level plain was green and
yellow, and infinite in reach as a sea; the lowering sun was casting
over its distant swells a faint impalpable mist, through which the
breaking teams on the neighboring claims plowed noiselessly, as
figures in a dream. The whistle of gophers, the faint, wailing,
fluttering cry of the falling plover, the whir of the swift-winged
prairie pigeon, or the quack of a lonely duck, came through the
shimmering air. The lark's infrequent whistle, piercingly sweet,
broke from the longer grass m the swales nearby. No other climate,
sky, plain, could produce the same unnamable weird charm. No
tree to wave, no grass to rustle; scarcely a sound of domestic life;
only the faint melancholy soughing of the wind in the short grass,
and the voices of the wild things of the prairie.
Seagraves, an impressionable young man (junior editor of the
Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat
rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the
second year of Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet
grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played
saucily. Teams were moving here and there across the sod, with a
peculiar noiseless, effortless motion that made them seem as calm,
lazy, and unsubstantial as the mist through which they made their
way; even the sound of passing wagons was a sort of low, well-fed,
self-satisfied chuckle.
Seagraves, "holding down a claim" near Rob, had come to see his
neighboring "bach" because of feeling the need of company; but
now that he was near enough to hear him prancing about getting
supper, he was content to lie alone on a slope of the green sod.
The silence of the prairie at night was well-nigh terrible. Many a
night, as Seagraves lay in his bunk against the side of his cabin, he
would strain his ear to hear the slightest sound, and he listening
thus sometimes for minutes before the squeak of a mouse or the
step of a passing fox came as a relief to the aching sense. In the
daytime, however, and especially on a morning, the prairie was
another thing. The pigeons, the larks; the cranes, the multitudinous
voices of the ground birds and snipes and insects, made the air
pulsate with sound-a chorus that died away into an infinite murmur
of music.
"Hello, Seagraves!" yelled Rob from the door. "The biscuit are
'most done."
Seagraves did not speak, only nodded his head and slowly rose.
The faint clouds in the west were getting a superb flame color
above and a misty purple below, and the sun had shot them with
lances of yellow light. As the air grew denser with moisture, the
sounds of neighboring life began to reach the ear. Children
screamed and laughed, and afar off a woman was singing a lullaby.
The rattle of wagons and voices of men speaking to their teams
multiplied. Ducks in a neighboring lowland were quacking. The
whole scene took hold upon Seagraves with irresistible power.
"It is American," he exclaimed. 'No other land or time can match
this mellow air, this wealth of color, much less the strange social
conditions of life on this sunlit Dakota prairie."
Rob, though visibly affected by the scene also, couldn't let his
biscuit spoil or go without proper attention.
"Say, ain't y' comin' t' grub?" he asked impatiently.
"Th a minute," replied his friend, taking a last wistful look at the
scene. "I want one more look at the landscape."
"Landscape be blessed! If you'd been breakin' all day-Come, take
that stool an' draw up."
"No; I'll take the candle box."
"Not much. I know what manners are, if I am a bull driver."
Seagraves took the three-legged and rather precarious-looking
stool and drew up to the table, which was a flat broad box nailed
up against the side of the wall, with two strips of board nailed at
the outer corners for legs.
"How's that f'r a layout?" Rob inquired proudly.
"Well, you have spread yourself! Biscuit and canned peaches and
sardines and cheese. why, this is-is- prodigal."
"It ain't nothin' else."
Rob was from one of the finest counties of Wisconsin, over toward
Milwaukee. He was of German parentage, a middle-sized, cheery,
wide-awake, good-looking young fellow-a typical claimholder. He
was always confident, jovial, and full of plans for the future. He
had dug his own well, built his own shanty, washed and mended
his own clothing. He could do anything, and do it well. He had a
fine field of wheat, and was finishing the plowing of his entire
quarter section.
"This is what I call settin' under a feller's own vine an' fig
tree"-after Seagraves's compliments-"an' I like it. I'm my own boss.
No man can say 'come here' 'n' 'go there' to me. I get up when I'm a
min' to, an' go t' bed when I'm a min' t'."
"Some drawbacks, I s'pose?"
"Yes. Mice, f'r instance, give me a devilish lot o' trouble. They get
into my flour barrel, eat up my cheese, an' fall into my well. But it
ain't no use t' swear."
"The rats and the mlce they made such a strife
He had to go to London to buy him a wife,"
quoted Seagraves. "Don't blush. I've probed your secret thought."
"Well, to tell the honest truth," said Rob a little sheepishly, leaning
across the table, "I ain't satisfied with my style o' cookin'. It's good,
but a little too plain, y' know. I'd like a change. It ain't much fun to
break all day and then go to work an' cook y'r own supper."
"No, I should say not."
"This fall I'm going back to Wisconsin. Girls are thick as
huckleberries back there, and I'm goin' t' bring one back, now you
hear me."
"Good! That's the plan," laughed Seagraves, amused at a certain
timid and apprehensive look in his companion's eye. "Just think
what a woman 'd do to put this shanty in shape; and think how nice
it would be to take her arm and saunter out after supper, and look
at the farm, and plan and lay out gardens and paths, and tend the
chickens!"
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