IV

Ernest Havel was cultivating his bright, glistening young

cornfield one summer morning, whistling to himself an old German

song which was somehow connected with a picture that rose in his

memory. It was a picture of the earliest ploughing he could

remember.

He saw a half-circle of green hills, with snow still lingering in

the clefts of the higher ridges; behind the hills rose a wall of

sharp mountains, covered with dark pine forests. In the meadows

at the foot of that sweep of hills there was a winding creek,

with polled willows in their first yellow-green, and brown

fields. He himself was a little boy, playing by the creek and

watching his father and mother plough with two great oxen, that

had rope traces fastened to their heads and their long horns. His

mother walked barefoot beside the oxen and led them; his father

walked behind, guiding the plough. His father always looked down.

His mother's face was almost as brown and furrowed as the fields,

and her eyes were pale blue, like the skies of early spring. The

two would go up and down thus all morning without speaking,

except to the oxen. Ernest was the last of a long family, and as

he played by the creek he used to wonder why his parents looked

so old.

Leonard Dawson drove his car up to the fence and shouted, waking

Ernest from his revery. He told his team to stand, and ran out to

the edge of the field.

"Hello, Ernest," Leonard called. "Have you heard Claude Wheeler

got hurt day before yesterday?"

"You don't say so! It can't be anything bad, or they'd let me

know."

"Oh, it's nothing very bad, I guess, but he got his face

scratched up in the wire quite a little. It was the queerest

thing I ever saw. He was out with the team of mules and a heavy

plough, working the road in that deep cut between their place and

mine. The gasoline motor-truck came along, making more noise than

usual, maybe. But those mules know a motor truck, and what they

did was pure cussedness. They begun to rear and plunge in that

deep cut. I was working my corn over in the field and shouted to

the gasoline man to stop, but he didn't hear me. Claude jumped

for the critters' heads and got 'em by the bits, but by that time

he was all tangled up in the lines. Those damned mules lifted him

off his feet and started to run. Down the draw and up the bank

and across the fields they went, with that big plough-blade

jumping three or four feet in the air every clip. I was sure it

would cut one of the mules open, or go clean through Claude. It

would have got him, too, if he hadn't kept his hold on the bits.

They carried him right along, swinging in the air, and finally

ran him into the barb-wire fence and cut his face and neck up."

"My goodness! Did he get cut bad?"

"No, not very, but yesterday morning he was out cultivating corn,

all stuck up with court plaster. I knew that was a fool thing to

do; a wire cut's nasty if you get overheated out in the dust. But

you can't tell a Wheeler anything. Now they say his face has

swelled and is hurting him terrible, and he's gone to town to see

the doctor. You'd better go over there tonight, and see if you

can make him take care of himself."

Leonard drove on, and Ernest went back to his team. "It's queer

about that boy," he was thinking. "He's big and strong, and he's

got an education and all that fine land, but he don't seem to fit

in right." Sometimes Ernest thought his friend was unlucky. When

that idea occurred to him, he sighed and shook it off. For Ernest

believed there was no help for that; it was something rationalism

did not explain.

The next afternoon Enid Royce's coupe drove up to the Wheeler

farmyard. Mrs. Wheeler saw Enid get out of her car and came down

the hill to meet her, breathless and distressed. "Oh, Enid!

You've heard of Claude's accident? He wouldn't take care of

himself, and now he's got erysipelas. He's in such pain, poor

boy!"

Enid took her arm, and they started up the hill toward the house.

"Can I see Claude, Mrs. Wheeler? I want to give him these

flowers."

Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "I don't know if he will let you come in,

dear. I had hard work persuading him to see Ernest for a few

moments last night. He seems so low-spirited, and he's sensitive

about the way he's bandaged up. I'll go to his room and ask him."

"No, just let me go up with you, please. If I walk in with you,

he won't have time to fret about it. I won't stay if he doesn't

wish it, but I want to see him."

Mrs. Wheeler was alarmed at this suggestion, but Enid ignored her

uncertainty. They went up to the third floor together, and Enid

herself tapped at the door.

"It's I, Claude. May I come in for a moment?"

A muffled, reluctant voice answered. "No. They say this is

catching, Enid. And anyhow, I'd rather you didn't see me like

this."

Without waiting she pushed open the door. The dark blinds were

down, and the room was full of a strong, bitter odor. Claude lay

flat in bed, his head and face so smothered in surgical cotton

that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible. The

brown paste with which his features were smeared oozed out at the

edges of the gauze and made his dressings look untidy. Enid took

in these details at a glance.

"Does the light hurt your eyes? Let me put up one of the blinds

for a moment, because I want you to see these flowers. I've

brought you my first sweet peas."

Claude blinked at the bunch of bright colours she held out before

him. She put them up to his face and asked him if he could smell

them through his medicines. In a moment he ceased to feel

embarrassed. His mother brought a glass bowl, and Enid arranged

the flowers on the little table beside him.

"Now, do you want me to darken the room again?"

"Not yet. Sit down for a minute and talk to me. I can't say much

because my face is stiff."

"I should think it would be! I met Leonard Dawson on the road

yesterday, and he told me how you worked in the field after you

were cut. I would like to scold you hard, Claude."

"Do. It might make me feel better." He took her hand and kept her

beside him a moment. "Are those the sweet peas you were planting

that day when I came back from the West?"

"Yes. Haven't they done well to blossom so early?"

"Less than two months. That's strange," he sighed.

"Strange? What?"

"Oh, that a handful of seeds can make anything so pretty in a few

weeks, and it takes a man so long to do anything and then it's

not much account."

"That's not the way to look at things," she said reprovingly.

Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed. Her

flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had

brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow. She began

to tell Claude about her father's several attacks of erysipelas.

He listened but absently. He would never have believed that Enid,

with her severe notions of decorum, would come into his room and

sit with him like this. He noticed that his mother was quite as

much astonished as he. She hovered about the visitor for a few

moments, and then, seeing that Enid was quite at her ease, went

downstairs to her work. Claude wished that Enid would not talk at

all, but would sit there and let him look at her. The sunshine

she had let into the room, and her tranquil, fragrant presence,

soothed him. Presently he realized that she was asking him

something.

"What is it, Enid? The medicine they give me makes me stupid. I

don't catch things."

"I was asking whether you play chess."

"Very badly."

"Father says I play passably well. When you are better you must

let me bring up my ivory chessmen that Carrie sent me from China.

They are beautifully carved. And now it's time for me to go."

She rose and patted his hand, telling him he must not be foolish

about seeing people. "I didn't know you were so vain. Bandages

are as becoming to you as they are to anybody. Shall I pull the

dark blind again for you?"

"Yes, please. There won't be anything to look at now."

"Why, Claude, you are getting to be quite a ladies' man!"

Something in the way Enid said this made him wince a little. He

felt his burning face grow a shade warmer. Even after she went

downstairs he kept wishing she had not said that.

His mother came to give him his medicine. She stood beside him

while he swallowed it. "Enid Royce is a real sensible girl--" she

said as she took the glass. Her upward inflection expressed not

conviction but bewilderment.

Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her

visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that

happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his

poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself; when

he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt

unclean and abject. At night, when his fever ran high, and the

pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a

distressing pitch of excitement. He fought with it as one bulldog

fights with another. His mind prowled about among dark legends of

torture,--everything he had ever read about the Inquisition, the

rack and the wheel.

When Enid entered his room, cool and fresh in her pretty summer

clothes, his mind leaped to meet her. He could not talk much, but

he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment. After

awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer

chair and play chess with her.

One afternoon they were by the west window in the sitting-room

with the chess board between them, and Claude had to admit that

he was beaten again.

"It must be dull for you, playing with me," he murmured, brushing

the beads of sweat from his forehead. His face was clean now, so

white that even his freckles had disappeared, and his hands were

the soft, languid hands of a sick man.

"You will play better when you are stronger and can fix your mind

on it," Enid assured him. She was puzzled because Claude, who had

a good head for some things, had none at all for chess, and it

was clear that he would never play well.

"Yes," he sighed, dropping back into his chair, "my wits do

wander. Look at my wheatfield, over there on the skyline. Isn't

it lovely? And now I won't be able to harvest it. Sometimes I

wonder whether I'll ever finish anything I begin."

Enid put the chessmen back into their box. "Now that you are

better, you must stop feeling blue. Father says that with your

trouble people are always depressed."

Claude shook his head slowly, as it lay against the back of the

chair. "No, it's not that. It's having so much time to think that

makes me blue. You see, Enid, I've never yet done anything that

gave me any satisfaction. I must be good for something. When I

lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening

to me or to somebody else. It doesn't seem to have much

connection with me. I haven't made much of a start."

"But you are not twenty-two yet. You have plenty of time to

start. Is that what you are thinking about all the time!" She

shook her finger at him.

"I think about two things all the time. That is one of them."

Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude's four o'clock milk; it was his

first day downstairs.

When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen

the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would

always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted

to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a

bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that

some day he must reckon with it again.

Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and

she had come on that afternoon when she entered his drug-smelling

room and let in the sunlight. She would have done that for nobody

but him. She was not a girl who would depart lightly from

conventions that she recognized as authoritative. He remembered

her as she used to march up to the platform for Children's Day

exercises with the other little girls of the infant class; in her

stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her

stocking, keeping her little comrades in order by the acquiescent

gravity of her face, which seemed to say, "How pleasant it is to

do thus and to do Right!"

Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,--a good man who had

been much tossed about by a stormy and temperamental wife--and his

eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in

her the promise of "virtuous and comely Christian womanhood," to

use one of his own phrases. Claude, in the boys' class across the

aisle, used to tease her and try to distract her, but he

respected her seriousness.

When they played together she was fair-minded, didn't whine if

she got hurt, and never claimed a girl's exemption from anything

unpleasant. She was calm, even on the day when she fell into the

mill-dam and he fished her out; as soon as she stopped choking

and coughing up muddy water, she wiped her face with her little

drenched petticoats, and sat shivering and saying over and over,

"Oh, Claude, Claude!" Incidents like that one now seemed to him

significant and fateful.

When Claude's strength began to return to him, it came

overwhelmingly. His blood seemed to grow strong while his body

was still weak, so that the in-rush of vitality shook him. The

desire to live again sang in his veins while his frame was

unsteady. Waves of youth swept over him and left him exhausted.

When Enid was with him these feelings were never so strong; her

actual presence restored his equilibrium--almost. This fact did

not perplex him; he fondly attributed it to something beautiful

in the girl's nature,--a quality so lovely and subtle that there

is no name for it.

During the first days of his recovery he did nothing but enjoy

the creeping stir of life. Respiration was a soft physical

pleasure. In the nights, so long he could not sleep them through,

it was delightful to lie upon a cloud that floated lazily down

the sky. In the depths of this lassitude the thought of Enid

would start up like a sweet, burning pain, and he would drift out

into the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor

control. So long as he could plough, pitch hay, or break his back

in the wheatfield, he had been master; but now he was overtaken

by himself. Enid was meant for him and she had come for him; he

would never let her go. She should never know how much he longed

for her. She would be slow to feel even a little of what he was

feeling; he knew that. It would take a long while. But he would

be infinitely patient, infinitely tender of her. It should be he

who suffered, not she. Even in his dreams he never wakened her,

but loved her while she was still and unconscious like a statue.

He would shed love upon her until she warmed and changed without

knowing why.

Sometimes when Enid sat unsuspecting beside him, a quick blush

swept across his face and he felt guilty toward her, meek and

humble, as if he must beg her forgiveness for something. Often he

was glad when she went away and left him alone to think about

her. Her presence brought him sanity, and for that he ought to be

grateful. When he was with her, he thought how she was to be the

one who would put him right with the world and make him fit into

the life about him. He had troubled his mother and disappointed

his father, His marriage would be the first natural, dutiful,

expected thing he had ever done. It would be the beginning of

usefulness and content; as his mother's oft-repeated Psalm said,

it would restore his soul. Enid's willingness to listen to him he

could scarcely doubt. Her devotion to him during his illness was

probably regarded by her friends as equivalent to an engagement.

V

Claude's first trip to Frankfort was to get his hair cut. After

leaving the barber-shop he presented himself, glistening with

bayrum, at Jason Royce's office. Mr. Royce, in the act of closing

his safe, turned and took the young man by the hand.

"Hello, Claude, glad to see you around again! Sickness can't do

much to a husky young farmer like you. With old fellows, it's

another story. I'm just starting off to have a look at my

alfalfa, south of the river. Get in and go along with me."

They went out to the open car that stood by the sidewalk, and

when they were spinning along between fields of ripening grain

Claude broke the silence. "I expect you know what I want to see

you about, Mr. Royce?"

The older man shook his head. He had been preoccupied and grim

ever since they started.

"Well," Claude went on modestly, "it oughtn't to surprise you to

hear that I've set my heart on Enid. I haven't said anything to

her yet, but if you're not against me, I'm going to try to

persuade her to marry me."

"Marriage is a final sort of thing, Claude," said Mr. Royce. He

sat slumping in his seat, watching the road ahead of him with

intense abstraction, looking more gloomy and grizzled than usual.

"Enid is a vegetarian, you know," he remarked unexpectedly.

Claude smiled. "That could hardly make any difference to me, Mr.

Royce."

The other nodded slightly. "I know. At your age you think it

doesn't. Such things do make a difference, however." His lips

closed over his half-dead cigar, and for some time he did not

open them.

"Enid is a good girl," he said at last. "Strictly speaking, she

has more brains than a girl needs. If Mrs. Royce had another

daughter at home, I'd take Enid into my office. She has good

judgment. I don't know but she'd run a business better than a

house." Having got this out, Mr. Royce relaxed his frown, took

his cigar from his mouth, looked at it, and put it back between

his teeth without relighting it.

Claude was watching him with surprise. "There's no question about

Enid, Mr. Royce. I didn't come to ask you about her," he

exclaimed. "I came to ask if you'd be willing to have me for a

son-in-law. I know, and you know, that Enid could do a great deal

better than to marry me. I surely haven't made much of a showing,

so far."

"Here we are," announced Mr. Royce. "I'll leave the car under

this elm, and we'll go up to the north end of the field and have

a look."

They crawled under the wire fence and started across the rough

ground through a field of purple blossoms. Clouds of yellow

butterflies darted up before them. They walked jerkily, breaking

through the sun-baked crust into the soft soil beneath. Mr. Royce

lit a fresh cigar, and as he threw away the match let his hand

drop on the young man's shoulder. "I always envied your father.

You took my fancy when you were a little shaver, and I used to

let you in to see the water-wheel. When I gave up water power and

put in an engine, I said to myself: 'There's just one fellow in

the country will be sorry to see the old wheel go, and that's

Claude Wheeler.'"

"I hope you don't think I'm too young to marry," Claude said as

they tramped on.

"No, it's right and proper a young man should marry. I don't say

anything against marriage," Mr. Royce protested doggedly. "You

may find some opposition in Enid's missionary motives. I don't

know how she feels about that now. I don't enquire. I'd be

pleased to see her get rid of such notions. They don't do a woman

any good."

"I want to help her get rid of them. If it's all right with you,

I hope I can persuade Enid to marry me this fall."

Jason Royce turned his head quickly toward his companion, studied

his artless, hopeful countenance for a moment, and then looked

away with a frown.

The alfalfa field sloped upward at one corner, lay like a bright

green-and-purple handkerchief thrown down on the hillside. At the

uppermost angle grew a slender young cottonwood, with leaves as

light and agitated as the swarms of little butterflies that

hovered above the clover. Mr. Royce made for this tree, took off

his black coat, rolled it up, and sat down on it in the

flickering shade. His shirt showed big blotches of moisture, and

the sweat was rolling in clear drops along the creases in his

brown neck. He sat with his hands clasped over his knees, his

heels braced in the soft soil, and looked blankly off across the

field. He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast

body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in

his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak

struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself

understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do

was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his

young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain

heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The

dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the

young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his

secret, was to live. His strong yellow teeth closed tighter and

tighter on the cigar, which had gone out like the first. He did

not look at Claude, but while he watched the wind plough soft,

flowery roads in the field, the boy's face was clearly before

him, with its expression of reticent pride melting into the

desire to please, and the slight stiffness of his shoulders, set

in a kind of stubborn loyalty. Claude lay on the sod beside him,

rather tired after his walk in the sun, a little melancholy,

though he did not know why.

After a long while Mr. Royce unclasped his broad, thick-fingered

miller's hands, and for a moment took out the macerated cigar.

"Well, Claude," he said with determined cheerfulness, "we'll

always be better friends than is common between father and

son-in-law. You'll find out that pretty nearly everything you

believe about life--about marriage, especially--is lies. I don't

know why people prefer to live in that sort of a world, but they

do."