After the success of his corn cutting machine and the apparatus for
unloading coal cars that brought him a hundred thousand dollars in cash,
Hugh could not remain the isolated figure he had been all through the
first several years of his life in the Ohio community. From all sides
men reached out their hands to him: and more than one woman thought she
would like to be his wife. All men lead their lives behind a wall of
misunderstanding they themselves have built, and most men die in silence
and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his
fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing
something that is impersonal, useful, and beautiful. Word of his
activities is carried over the walls. His name is shouted and is carried
by the wind into the tiny inclosure in which other men live and in which
they are for the most part absorbed in doing some petty task for the
furtherance of their own comfort. Men and women stop their complaining
about the unfairness and inequality of life and wonder about the man
whose name they have heard.
From Bidwell, Ohio, to farms all over the Middle West, Hugh McVey's
name had been carried. His machine for cutting corn was called the McVey
Corn-Cutter. The name was printed in white letters against a background
of red on the side of the machine. Farmer boys in the States of Indiana,
Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and all the great corn-growing States
saw it and in idle moments wondered what kind of man had invented the
machine they operated. A Cleveland newspaper man came to Bidwell and
went to Pickleville to see Hugh. He wrote a story telling of Hugh's
early poverty and his efforts to become an inventor. When the reporter
talked to Hugh he found the inventor so embarrassed and uncommunicative
that he gave up trying to get a story. Then he went to Steve Hunter who
talked to him for an hour. The story made Hugh a strikingly romantic
figure. His people, the story said, came out of the mountains of
Tennessee, but they were not poor whites. It was suggested that they
were of the best English stock. There was a tale of Hugh's having in
his boyhood contrived some kind of an engine that carried water from a
valley to a mountain community; another of his having seen a clock in
a store in a Missouri town and of his having later made a clock of wood
for his parents; and a tale of his having gone into the forest with his
father's gun, shot a wild hog and carried it down the mountain side on
his shoulder in order to get money to buy school books. After the tale
was printed the advertising manager of the corn-cutter factory got Hugh
to go with him one day to Tom Butterworth's farm. Many bushels of corn
were brought out of the corn cribs and a great mountain of corn was
built on the ground at the edge of a field. Back of the mountain of corn
was a corn field just coming into tassel. Hugh was told to climb up on
the mountain and sit there. Then his picture was taken. It was sent to
newspapers all over the West with copies of the biography cut from the
Cleveland paper. Later both the picture and the biography were used in
the catalogue that described the McVey Corn-Cutter.
The cutting of corn and putting it in shocks against the time of the
husking is heavy work. In recent times it has come about that much of
the corn grown on mid-American prairie lands is not cut. The corn is
left standing in the fields, and men go through it in the late fall to
pick the yellow ears. The workers throw the corn over their shoulders
into a wagon driven by a boy, who follows them in their slow progress,
and it is then hauled away to the cribs. When a field has been picked,
the cattle are turned in and all winter they nibble at the dry corn
blades and tramp the stalks into the ground. All day long on the wide
western prairies when the gray fall days have come, you may see the men
and the horses working their way slowly through the fields. Like tiny
insects they crawl across the immense landscapes. After them in the late
fall and in the winter when the prairies are covered with snow, come the
cattle. They are brought from the far West in cattle cars and after they
have nibbled the corn blades all day, are taken to barns and stuffed
to bursting with corn. When they are fat they are sent to the great
killing-pens in Chicago, the giant city of the prairies. In the still
fall nights, as you stand on prairie roads or in the barnyard back of
one of the farm houses, you may hear the rustling of the dry corn blades
and then the crash of the heavy bodies of the beasts going forward as
they nibble and trample the corn.
In earlier days the method of corn harvesting was different. There was
poetry in the operation then as there is now, but it was set to another
rhythm. When the corn was ripe men went into the fields with heavy corn
knives and cut the stalks of corn close to the ground. The stalks were
cut with the right hand swinging the corn knife and carried on the left
arm. All day a man carried a heavy load of the stalks from which yellow
ears hung down. When the load became unbearably heavy it was carried to
the shock, and when all the corn was cut in a certain area, the shock
was made secure by binding it with tarred rope or with a tough stalk
twisted to take the place of the rope. When the cutting was done the
long rows of stalks stood up in the fields like sentinels, and the men
crawled off to the farmhouses and to bed, utterly weary.
Hugh's machine took all of the heavier part of the work away. It cut
the corn near the ground and bound it into bundles that fell upon a
platform. Two men followed the machine, one to drive the horses and the
other to place the bundles of stalks against the shocks and to bind the
completed shocks. The men went along smoking their pipes and talking.
The horses stopped and the driver stared out over the prairies. His arms
did not ache with weariness and he had time to think. The wonder and
mystery of the wide open places got a little into his blood. At night
when the work was done and the cattle fed and made comfortable in the
barns, he did not go at once to bed but sometimes went out of his house
and stood for a moment under the stars.
This thing the brain of the son of a mountain man, the poor white of
the river town, had done for the people of the plains. The dreams he had
tried so hard to put away from him and that the New England woman
Sarah Shepard had told him would lead to his destruction had come to
something. The car-dumping apparatus, that had sold for two hundred
thousand dollars, had given Steve Hunter money to buy the plant-setting
machine factory, and with Tom Butterworth to start manufacturing the
corn-cutters, had affected the lives of fewer people, but it had carried
the Missourian's name into other places and had also made a new kind of
poetry in railroad yards and along rivers at the back of cities where
ships are loaded. On city nights as you lie in your houses you may hear
suddenly a long reverberating roar. It is a giant that has cleared his
throat of a carload of coal. Hugh McVey helped to free the giant. He
is still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he is still at it, making new
inventions, cutting the bands that have bound the giant. He is one man
who had not been swept aside from his purpose by the complexity of life.
That, however, came near happening. After the coming of his success,
a thousand little voices began calling to him. The soft hands of women
reached out of the masses of people about him, out of the old dwellers
and new dwellers in the city that was growing up about the factories
where his machines were being made in ever increasing numbers. New
houses were constantly being built along Turner's Pike that led down
to his workshop at Pickleville. Beside Allie Mulberry a dozen mechanics
were now employed in his experimental shop. They helped Hugh with a new
invention, a hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work, and also
made special tools for use in the corn-cutter factory and the new
bicycle factory. A dozen new houses had been built in Pickleville
itself. The wives of the mechanics lived in the houses and occasionally
one of them came to see her husband at Hugh's shop. He found it less and
less difficult to talk to people. The workmen, themselves not given to
the use of many words, did not think his habitual silence peculiar. They
were more skilled than Hugh in the use of tools and thought it rather an
accident that he had done what they had not done. As he had grown rich
by that road they also tried their hand at inventions. One of them made
a patent door hinge that Steve sold for ten thousand dollars, keeping
half the money for his services, as he had done in the case of Hugh's
car-dumping apparatus. At the noon hour the men hurried to their houses
to eat and then came back to loaf before the factory and smoke their
noonday pipes. They talked of money-making, of the price of food stuffs,
of the advisability of a man's buying a house on the partial payment
plan. Sometimes they talked of women and of their adventures with women.
Hugh sat by himself inside the door of the shop and listened. At night
after he had gone to bed he thought of what they had said. He lived in
a house belonging to a Mrs. McCoy, the widow of a railroad section hand
killed in a railroad accident, who had a daughter. The daughter, Rose
McCoy, taught a country school and most of the year was away from home
from Monday morning until late on Friday afternoon. Hugh lay in bed
thinking of what his workmen had said of women and heard the old
housekeeper moving about down stairs. Sometimes he got out of bed to sit
by an open window. Because she was the woman whose life touched his
most closely, he thought often of the school teacher. The McCoy house, a
small frame affair with a picket fence separating it from Turner's Pike,
stood with its back door facing the Wheeling Railroad. The section hands
on the railroad remembered their former fellow workman, Mike McCoy,
and wanted to be good to his widow. They sometimes dumped half decayed
railroad ties over the fence into a potato patch back of the house. At
night, when heavily loaded coal trains rumbled past, the brakemen heaved
large chunks of coal over the fence. The widow awoke whenever a train
passed. When one of the brakemen threw a chunk of coal he shouted and
his voice could be heard above the rumble of the coal cars. “That's for
Mike,” he cried. Sometimes one of the chunks knocked a picket out of the
fence and the next day Hugh put it back again. When the train had passed
the widow got out of bed and brought the coal into the house. “I don't
want to give the boys away by leaving it lying around in the daylight,”
she explained to Hugh. On Sunday mornings Hugh took a crosscut saw and
cut the railroad ties into lengths that would go into the kitchen stove.
Slowly his place in the McCoy household had become fixed, and when he
received the hundred thousand dollars and everybody, even the mother
and daughter, expected him to move, he did not do so. He tried
unsuccessfully to get the widow to take more money for his board and
when that effort failed, life in the McCoy household went as it had when
he was a telegraph operator receiving forty dollars a month.
In the spring or fall, as he sat by his window at night, and when the
moon came up and the dust in Turner's Pike was silvery white, Hugh
thought of Rose McCoy, sleeping in some farmer's house. It did not occur
to him that she might also be awake and thinking. He imagined her lying
very still in bed. The section hand's daughter was a slender woman of
thirty with tired blue eyes and red hair. Her skin had been heavily
freckled in her youth and her nose was still freckled. Although Hugh did
not know it, she had once been in love with George Pike, the Wheeling
station agent, and a day had been set for the marriage. Then a
difficulty arose in regard to religious beliefs and George Pike married
another woman. It was then she became a school teacher. She was a woman
of few words and she and Hugh had never been alone together, but as
Hugh sat by the window on fall evenings, she lay awake in a room in the
farmer's house, where she was boarding during the school season, and
thought of him. She thought that had Hugh remained a telegraph operator
at forty dollars a month something might have happened between them.
Then she had other thoughts, or rather, sensations that had little to do
with thoughts. The room in which she lay was very still and a streak of
moonlight came in through the window. In the barn back of the farmhouse
she could hear the cattle stirring about. A pig grunted and in the
stillness that followed she could hear the farmer, who lay in the next
room with his wife, snoring gently. Rose was not very strong and the
physical did not rule in her nature, but she was very lonely and thought
that, like the farmer's wife, she would like to have a man to lie with
her. Warmth crept over her body and her lips became dry so that she
moistened them with her tongue. Had you been able to creep unobserved
into the room, you might have thought her much like a kitten lying by
a stove. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to dreams. In her
conscious mind she dreamed of being the wife of the bachelor Hugh McVey,
but deep within her there was another dream, a dream having its basis
in the memory of her one physical contact with a man. When they were
engaged to be married George had often kissed her. On one evening in the
spring they had gone to sit together on the grassy bank beside the creek
in the shadow of the pickle factory, then deserted and silent, and had
come near to going beyond kissing. Why nothing else had happened Rose
did not exactly know. She had protested, but her protest had been feeble
and had not expressed what she felt. George Pike had desisted in his
effort to press love upon her because they were to be married, and he
did not think it right to do what he thought of as taking advantage of a
girl.
At any rate he did desist and long afterward, as she lay in the
farmhouse consciously thinking of her mother's bachelor boarder, her
thoughts became less and less distinct and when she had slipped off into
sleep, George Pike came back to her. She stirred uneasily in bed and
muttered words. Rough but gentle hands touched her cheeks and played in
her hair. As the night wore on and the position of the moon shifted, the
streak of moonlight lighted her face. One of her hands reached up and
seemed to be caressing the moonbeams. The weariness had all gone out of
her face. “Yes, George, I love you, I belong to you,” she whispered.
Had Hugh been able to creep like the moonbeam into the presence of the
sleeping school teacher, he must inevitably have loved her. Also he
would perhaps have understood that it is best to approach human beings
directly and boldly as he had approached the mechanical problems by
which his days were filled. Instead he sat by his window in the presence
of the moonlit night and thought of women as beings utterly unlike
himself. Words dropped by Sarah Shepard to the awakening boy came
creeping back to his mind. He thought women were for other men but not
for him, and told himself he did not want a woman.
And then in Turner's Pike something happened. A farmer boy, who had been
to town and who had the daughter of a neighbor in his buggy, stopped in
front of the house. A long freight train, grinding its way slowly past
the station, barred the passage along the road. He held the reins in one
hand and put the other about the waist of his companion. The two heads
sought each other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moon
that shed its light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted the
open place where the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had to
close his eyes and fight to put down an almost overpowering physical
hunger in himself. His mind still protested that women were not for him.
When his fancy made for him a picture of the school teacher Rose
McCoy sleeping in a bed, he saw her only as a chaste white thing to be
worshiped from afar and not to be approached, at least not by himself.
Again he opened his eyes and looked at the lovers whose lips still clung
together. His long slouching body stiffened and he sat up very straight
in his chair. Then he closed his eyes again. A gruff voice broke the
silence. “That's for Mike,” it shouted and a great chunk of coal thrown
from the train bounded across the potato patch and struck against the
back of the house. Downstairs he could hear old Mrs. McCoy getting out
of bed to secure the prize. The train passed and the lovers in the
buggy sank away from each other. In the silent night Hugh could hear the
regular beat of the hoofs of the farmer boy's horse as it carried him
and his woman away into the darkness.
The two people, living in the house with the old woman who had almost
finished her life, and themselves trying feebly to reach out to life,
never got to anything very definite in relation to each other. One
Saturday evening in the late fall the Governor of the State came to
Bidwell. There was a parade to be followed by a political meeting and
the Governor, who was a candidate for re-election, was to address the
people from the steps of the town hall. Prominent citizens were to stand
on the steps beside the Governor. Steve and Tom were to be there, and
they had asked Hugh to come, but he had refused. He asked Rose McCoy
to go to the meeting with him, and they set out from the house at eight
o'clock and walked to town. Then they stood at the edge of the crowd
in the shadow of a store building and listened to the speech. To Hugh's
amazement his name was mentioned. The Governor spoke of the prosperity
of the town, indirectly hinting that it was due to the political
sagacity of the party of which he was a representative, and then
mentioned several individuals also partly responsible. “The whole
country is sweeping forward to new triumphs under our banner,” he
declared, “but not every community is so fortunate as I find you here.
Labor is employed at good wages. Life here is fruitful and happy. You
are fortunate here in having among you such business men as Steven
Hunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in the inventor Hugh McVey you have
one of the greatest intellects and the most useful men that ever lived
to help lift the burden off the shoulder of labor. What his brain is
doing for labor, our party is doing in another way. The protective
tariff is really the father of modern prosperity.”
The speaker paused and a cheer arose from the crowd. Hugh took hold
of the school teacher's arm and drew her away down a side street. They
walked home in silence, but when they got to the house and were about
to go in, the school teacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walk
about in the darkness with her but did not have the courage of her
desires. As they stood at the gate and as the tall man with the long
serious face looked down at her, she remembered the speaker's words.
“How could he care for me? How could a man like him care anything for a
homely little school teacher like me?” she asked herself. Aloud she said
something quite different. As they had come along Turner's Pike she had
made up her mind she would boldly suggest a walk under the trees along
Turner's Pike beyond the bridge, and had told herself that she would
later lead him to the place beside the stream and in the shadow of the
old pickle factory where she and George Pike had come so near being
lovers. Instead she hesitated for a moment by the gate and then laughed
awkwardly and passed in. “You should be proud. I would be proud if I
could be spoken of like that. I don't see why you keep living here in a
cheap little house like ours,” she said.
On a warm spring Sunday night during the year in which Clara Butterworth
came back to Bidwell to live, Hugh made what was for him an almost
desperate effort to approach the school teacher. It had been a rainy
afternoon and Hugh had spent a part of it in the house. He came over
from his shop at noon and went to his room. When she was at home the
school teacher occupied a room next his own. The mother who seldom left
the house had on that day gone to the country to visit a brother. The
daughter got dinner for herself and Hugh and he tried to help her wash
the dishes. A plate fell out of his hands and its breaking seemed to
break the silent, embarrassed mood that had possession of them. For a
few minutes they were children and acted like children. Hugh picked
up another plate and the school teacher told him to put it down. He
refused. “You're as awkward as a puppy. How you ever manage to do
anything over at that shop of yours is more than I know.”
Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried to
snatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheeks
were flushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse he
had never had before came to him. He wanted to shout at the top of his
lungs, throw the plate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off the
table and hear them crash on the floor, play like some huge animal
loose in a tiny world. He looked at Rose and his hands trembled from the
strength of the strange impulse. As he stood staring she took the plate
out of his hand and went into the kitchen. Not knowing what else to do
he put on his hat and went for a walk. Later he went to the shop and
tried to work, but his hand trembled when he tried to hold a tool and
the hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work seemed suddenly a very
trivial and unimportant thing.
At four o'clock Hugh got back to the house and found it apparently
empty, although the door leading to Turner's Pike was open. The rain
had stopped falling and the sun struggled to work its way through the
clouds. He went upstairs to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed.
The conviction that the daughter of the house was in her room next door
came to him, and although the thought violated all the beliefs he had
ever held regarding women in relation to himself, he decided that she
had gone to her room to be near him when he came in. For some reason he
knew that if he went to her door and knocked she would not be surprised
and would not refuse him admission. He took off his shoes and set
them gently on the floor. Then he went on tiptoes out into the little
hallway. The ceiling was so low that he had to stoop to avoid knocking
his head against it. He raised his hand intending to knock on the door,
and then lost courage. Several times he went into the hallway with the
same intent, and each time returned noiselessly to his own room. He sat
in the chair by the window and waited. An hour passed. He heard a noise
that indicated that the school teacher had been lying on her bed. Then
he heard footsteps on the stairs, and presently saw her go out of the
house and go along Turner's Pike. She did not go toward town but over
the bridge past his shop and into the country. Hugh drew himself back
out of sight. He wondered where she could be going. “The roads are
muddy. Why does she go out? Is she afraid of me?” he asked himself. When
he saw her turn at the bridge and look back toward the house, his hands
trembled again. “She wants me to follow. She wants me to go with her,”
he thought.
Hugh did presently go out of the house and along the road but did not
meet the school teacher. She had in fact crossed the bridge and had gone
along the bank of the creek on the farther side. Then she crossed
over again on a fallen log and went to stand by the wall of the pickle
factory. A lilac bush grew beside the wall and she stood out of sight
behind it. When she saw Hugh in the road her heart beat so heavily that
she had difficulty in breathing. He went along the road and presently
passed out of sight, and a great weakness took possession of her.
Although the grass was wet she sat on the ground against the wall of the
building and closed her eyes. Later she put her face in her hands and
wept.
The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house until
late that night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had not
knocked on the door of Rose McCoy's room. He had decided during the walk
that the whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his own
brain. “She's a nice woman,” he had said to himself over and over during
the walk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had swept
away all possibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he got
home and went at once to bed. The old woman came home from the country
and her brother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, who
came out of her room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two women
carry something heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. The
farmer brother had given Mrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought of
the mother and daughter standing together downstairs and was unspeakably
glad he had not given way to his impulse toward boldness. “She would be
telling her now. She is a good woman and would be telling her now,” he
thought.
At two o'clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of the
conviction that women were not for him, he had found himself unable to
sleep. Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when she
struggled with him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to him
and he got up and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of the
sky and the night was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy.
She was dressed in a night gown and was looking away along Turner's Pike
to the place where George Pike the station master lived with his wife.
Without giving himself time to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and with
his long arm reached across the space between the two windows. His
fingers had almost touched the back of the woman's head and ached to
play in the mass of red hair that fell down over her shoulders, when
again self-consciousness overcame him. He drew his arm quickly back and
stood upright in the room. His head banged against the ceiling and he
heard the window of the room next door go softly down. With a conscious
effort he took himself in hand. “She's a good woman. Remember, she's a
good woman,” he whispered to himself, and when he got again into his bed
he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of the school teacher,
but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he still had to face
before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. “You tend to your
business and don't be going off on that road any more,” he said, as
though speaking to another person. “Remember she's a good woman and you
haven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven't the
right,” he added with a ring of command in his voice.