morning, miss," said the nice taxi-man as he touched his cap and drove
off and left me to my fate. If I had had only my own fate to consider I
would have taken to my good strong legs and fled, but Sam was also
concerned. At the thought of his needing me my courage came back, and I
went on into the long shed where queer dirty boxes and bales and barrels
and things were piled. At last I came to a turn and stepped into a low
room that was almost at the water's edge. It was still very early
morning, and a mist from the sea made things dim, but in a crowd of
queer people and bundles and voices I saw Sam standing and looking
perfectly helpless, while that Commissioner of Agriculture stood over by
the window, evidently perfectly furious and growling out expletives to
the saddest crowd of pitiful people I had ever seen.
Sam was in his dress-suit with his overcoat off and his hair in a mop;
and in a faltering jumble of several languages he was trying to tell
something to a gaunt, fierce woman in a wide ragged skirt, a shapeless,
torn man's coat, with a faded woolen scarf over her head. In her arms
she had a baby, and a woman with a baby in her arms knelt beside her;
while a dozen other women with children, ragged, pale, frightened little
children in their arms, and at their skirts, hung in a sullen group
back of her. A crowd of dejected, hungry, gaunt men stood to one side,
and one very old man had his old woolen cap off his white head, which I
could see was bowed in prayer. In a moment I knew from their Flemish
patois, which I had heard so often out in the fields of beautiful
Belgium during that happy month just before the war, that they were
refugees, and my heart went out in a rush to them as I went in a rush to
Sam and grasped his arm.
"Oh, what is it, Sam, and what do they want?" I asked.
"They are emigrants from Belgium. The Commissioner has had me appointed
to settle them in the Harpeth Valley on lands near my own, for which he
has options. I came on in response to his telegram to meet them
to-morrow, but they were landed here on the dock at one o'clock in the
night, because of a fire on the steamer. I came right down from the
theater, but they are frightened and the women have lost all confidence
in everything. They don't seem to want to go with me to the car that we
have ready to take them to Tennessee. I can't understand them, nor they
me, and I sent for you. You're a woman, Betty. See what you can do to
comfort and hearten them and make them ready to go with me when the
train leaves in less than two hours."
Oh, I know I am young and have been sheltered, and don't know what it is
to be shot at and killed, and have my children torn from my arms and to
be hungry and cold. But women do understand other suffering women, and
when I stretched out my hands to the fierce woman with her starving
child at her breast, I knew what to falter out in a mixture of her own
patois and mine.
"_Il est bon_--a good, good man. _Alle avec_--go with him," I pleaded.
"But it is a fine gentleman! No, we come to a master, to work that we do
not starve. A landowner," she said, and regarded Sam in his purple and
fine broadcloth with fierce and desperate distrust that the other women
also expressed with hissing breaths which brought surly growls of
suspicious acquiescence from the men.
"But look, look!" I exclaimed. I turned to Sam and drew one of his big,
farm-worn hands forward and held it in mine out to the fierce woman,
behind whom the others cowered. There was the broad thumb, off of which
the barrel of peas had smashed the nail. There were the deep
plow-callouses in the palms, and the plow-ropes' hard gall around the
left wrist. The fierce woman's somber eyes lighted; for the first time
she looked up past Sam's velvety white shirt-front with its pearl studs,
up into the calm eyes that were smoldering their gridiron look down at
her and the whimpering women and children.
"And here look _encore_!" I exclaimed, as I drew from my breast the
large silver "peasants' locket" I had bought in Belgium, perhaps in her
own village, and which I always wear with my street clothes, and had put
on even in the hurry of my summons. I snapped it open and let her see
what it contained. Sam saw, also! It was a picture of Sam milking old
Buttercup in the shed. Just as he turned to call me to bring an extra
bucket to feed the calf, I had snapped it. I don't know just why I had
put it in the locket, except that it is safe to have Sam around in time
of trouble.
"_Eh, le bon Dieu_--I see, I see!" she exclaimed, looking first at Sam
and then at the locket. Then suddenly she clasped my wrist and looked at
the two big, hard, live callouses in my own palm, that some kind of a
queer prophetic sentiment had warned me not to let a manicure work on.
Also, she saw the pea-thumb that still held a trace of the blister.
Intently she looked for a few seconds, first at me and then at Sam. Then
with a cry of agonized joy she fell at Sam's feet, and I drew down on my
knees beside her, while the other women crowded around, kneeling, too,
as their leader bowed her tear-drenched eyes in Sam's big, warm hands.
One woman thrust a tiny baby into my arms as she kissed my sleeve and
leaned forward to clasp Sam's knees, while the old man who had been
praying all the time spread out his hands in a joyful benediction. The
men's sullen faces lightened, and they bent to take up their pitiful old
bundles and baskets.
For a long minute there was a sobbing silence while the Commissioner
blew his nose over by the window. I clasped the little starved baby
close and pressed with the other women against Sam's knees, and Sam
stood calm over us all. I know, I _know_ he was praying down away from
the sea, across half the world, into his own everlasting hills, over
Paradise Ridge.
"Good, Bettykin!" he said as he bent and raised me and the fierce woman
to our feet. The others began to bustle and hustle the children, and
men, brushing tears from faces that had begun to smile uncertainly, as
if they had never smiled before. A big tear fell off Sam's own cheek as
he roughed my hair with his chin under the edge of my perky little hat,
and took the woman's baby from my arms, as well as her bag and bundle,
to carry them to the car. He led the way, and we all trailed after him.
It was a strenuous hour that we spent getting them all settled in the
emigrant-car the Commissioner and Judge Vandyne had ready to take them
right on from the ship to Tennessee. In the midst of packing away boxes
and bundles and seating and quieting babies and women, Sam told me in
snatches the reason of it all. One of the great Belgian landowners had
written to Judge Vandyne, who was his friend, to find some suitable
place to colonize twenty of his peasant families in America. The letter
had come at about the time my copy of the government's report on Sam's
farming had reached him. He hadn't said anything to Sam about it, but
had got hold of the Commissioner and secured options on four hundred
acres back of Sam's farm in the wilderness of the Harpeth Valley. He had
fixed it all up before he offered Sam the commission of settling and
farming these people on shares for ten years. It was a little fortune
poured into Sam's hands, but he didn't seem to think about that at all.
His mind was entirely occupied by the hungry, big-eyed babies and their
sadly smiling, clinging mothers. He had a whole bunch of ripe bananas,
with other fruit and food in proportion, packed in the train for the
long trip to Tennessee.
"Why didn't you write me all about it, Sam?" I asked as I patted a
sleeping infant over my shoulder while the mother jolted a big-eyed twin
of the same variety. Sam was undoing a strap from a large bundle for the
fierce woman, whose eyes now followed him like those of a great,
faithful dog--or my eyes.
"It was all settled less than a week ago, Bettykin, and I--I wanted to
surprise you and Pete at 'The Emergence' first night. This ship wasn't
due until to-morrow, and I was to have had a frolic. I asked the judge
not to tell you. I wanted to break it to you myself. And I did with a
brickbat, didn't I--at daylight to boot?"
"Where are you going to--to house them all, Sam?" I asked, anxiously,
thinking of the little house with the Byrd and Mammy and all the baskets
and seed and things, especially the one iron pot that only held chicken
enough for them and--
"Got a tent village out of the colonel's Menefee Rifles' tents over by
the spring. It will be fine for them until I can divide out the land and
set each man to log-rolling his shack. Dad Hayes is finishing the camp
for me, and Chubb is helping to make things all shipshape, also buying
a fine mule for each family. Oh, they'll have a great welcome, or would
have if only you were there." Sam didn't look at me, but smiled gently
at the fierce woman's thanks and turned to another strap and another
bundle. Again I went dead inside, and I turned away and hid my tears in
the back of the neck of the tiny Belgian in my arms.
"Just about five minutes before we put you off, Miss Hayes," said the
Commissioner as he came bustling up to me, smiling with the same energy
he had used in swearing so short a time ago.
Surreptitiously wiping my eyes and swallowing the sobs in my throat, I
held out the baby to its mother and began to say a halting "adieu" to
all of them.
Then an uproar arose. They had thought I was going with them, and they
clung and wept and kissed my hand and begged in broken words for me not
to leave them, though in their conduct there was not a trace of a lack
of confidence in Sam. Of course, nobody that knew Samuel Foster
Crittenden a whole hour, even in his dress clothes in the daytime, could
fail to have confidence in him for life. But those women wanted me, too,
and they wanted me badly. I had to be torn from their arms and flung off
the train. Sam did the tearing and the flinging, and he did it tenderly.
Just before the final shove, as I clung to his arm and sobbed, the big
hand went to my hair, and he said under his breath against my ear:
"God bless and keep you, darling--and Pete!" Then he swung up on the
last step of the train and left me--shoved off into a hard, cold world
full of luncheons and sight-seeing and dinner-parties and plays and
dances and suppers and lights and music and flowers and like miseries.
At the agony of the thought I staggered into the huge waiting-room at
the station and sank on one of the benches and closed my eyes to keep
the tears from dripping.
At first I just sat dumb and suffering--reviewing all the wonderful and
exciting and magnificent things I had been planning to do for and with
Peter and all the rest of my dear friends who were then in New York
having the times of their aristocratically rustic lives. I reminded
myself of the shopping excursion Mabel and I were going to make with
Edith and Julia on that very day. The responsibility of Julia's hats was
certainly mine, for I had told her to wait to get them in New York, and
she would surely need them immediately in the round of gaieties that had
been planned for them all. Then, who could help being delighted at the
thought of seeing Miss Editha and the colonel introduced to one of the
follies at the Whiter Garden? I knew that I would be needed greatly
then, and had rather dreaded it; though from Miss Editha's pink cheeks
at the supper-party the night before, as she sipped her champagne I had
rather hoped that she was making up her mind to a time of it. And then
the joy of watching united Tolly and Edith! And Peter, how he would need
me to help him to be responsible for all the wonderful things that were
going to happen to him right along, now that he was the success of the
hour. Even the papers had begun to speculate that first morning on his
"next play."
"I'm weaving the laurel wreath rapidly now to bind your tresses, am I
not, dear, dearest Betty?" he had whispered, as he told me good night at
the hotel only a few short hours ago. Yes, I was needed in life, even if
not down in a brier-patch in the Harpeth Valley, Tennessee, and I must
bear my honors and responsibilities with as beautiful a spirit as Sam
bore his burden of Belgians. I would have all I could do out in the
world, and he would have his life full in the wilderness; but we would
be a thousand miles apart.
And just here a very strange thing happened. From the weak, cowering,
sobbing girl on the bench arose a very determined, red-cheeked,
executive young woman who walked over to the nearest ticket-office and
demanded of the brisk young clerk what time the different trains left
for Tennessee. She found that by going at ten o'clock direct through
Cincinnati she could reach Hayesboro two hours ahead of that Belgian
emigrant-train that was to go around through Atlanta. Then she went into
the dressing-room and got her wad of money out of her stocking, bought a
ticket and a Pullman berth, six magazines, some oranges, and a little
traveling powder-puff for the end of her red nose, and seated herself in
the train before she woke up and found she was I.
Then I took a hand and sent Peter a telegram from Philadelphia, though
to this day I can't remember what it said; and I settled down to the day
and night and part of another day's journey with peace in my heart and
the courage to take whatever was coming to me from Sam.
When you are doing a thing you know is wholly wrong it is best to make
up your mind beforehand just what kind of a right action you are going
to claim it to be. It only took me until Pittsburg to have my course
with Sam mapped out. I was just going to ask him fairly what right he
had to go to farming with a lot of strange and untried Belgians and
refuse to take me in, when I had proved myself a good and faithful
comrade and worker for him ever since I could stand on my feet.
"I just want him to answer me that," I said to myself, and went to bed
in the berth at six-thirty and didn't wake up any more until I was at
Louisville at eleven. I had been in New York two weeks, and I needed
sleep. The interval between that time and three o'clock, which was the
hour that I stood before mother and her latest rose-crocheted mat, I
spent in strengthening and fortifying my position.
"Why, Betty!" said mother, keeping the place open in the magazine she
was crocheting from, but kissing me so tenderly that I knew she
suspected something had happened to me.
"I came home because I had to, and I'll tell you about it just as soon
as I come back from out at Sam's, where I have to go as fast as I can on
business," I said, as I hurried out to Eph for Redwheels and up to my
room for my corduroys and middy blouse. I knew Sam would get his new
family off at the station at the cross-roads. I wanted to be at The
Briers all established and at work when he got there. I have heard lots
of times that possession is nine points of the law, and I was determined
to possess all nine.
In less time than it takes to tell it Redwheels and I were spinning away
out Providence Road. I had gone out on that road in early April in
search of Sam, when I thought nothing could equal the young loveliness
of the valley; I had driven Peter out when it was in its May flowering,
and back and forth I had gone through all its midsummering, but it had
never looked to me as it did when I came down into it from a far
country, in the ripeness of its mid-September. All the leaves were still
on the trees and many of them still rich green, but there was frost in
the air, and along the edges of the early sweet-gum and sugar-maple
branches there were crimson and bronze trimmings. Most of the gorgeous,
molten-gold grain was in stacks in the fields, and everywhere for miles
and miles were stretched the wigwams of the shocked corn, seeming to
offer homes for as many homeless as could come and ask shelter.
Goldenrod stood up stiff and glorious in all the fence corners, while
gnarled vines, fairly dragged down with wild grapes, festooned
themselves from tree to tree, some of which were already heavily loaded
with their own big, round, blackening walnuts.
Along the road there was a procession of foodstuffs going to town in
heavy old farm wagons with their overalled drivers. Wheat in bales and
wheat in sacks was piled on wagon after wagon, and I counted eleven
teams hauling in loads of shucked ears of corn that looked almost two
feet long. Oh, I was glad to think that those people who had fled from a
famine-stricken land would meet that procession as soon as they got off
the train, and my eyes misted so, as I thought of the joy that must well
up in their hearts, that I came very near running over an old pig mother
who was waddling across the road in the lead of nine of the fattest
little black-and-white sucklings I have ever seen, each one with his
tail curled at exactly the same angle. Giving her a wide run I swung off
into Brier Lane. The old cardinal that had been so cross to me all
summer, when poor Redwheels's puff had disturbed his family, was
trillingly glad to see me, and flew almost across my shoulder as he
darted and whirled his welcome. And what should I meet in the middle of
the lane, evidently off playing hooky where she should not have been,
but Mrs. Buttercup and my young spotted namesake! I immediately climbed
out of the car and greeted them both so affectionately that, with my
arms around Mrs. Buttercup's neck, I persuaded her to go back the way
she had come, while I drove along behind her at a suitable snail's pace.
I had to stop every once in a while, when she turned around, to assure
her that I knew it was best for her to go home with her full udder, as
Sam would soon be there to be welcomed and with company to be fed.
After I had turned her into the south meadow gate, opposite the
cedar-pole entrance to The Briers, I went up the hill at a lightning
pace because the nearer I got to the fledgling and my garden the more
anxious I was for a reunion with them both. I met the garden first, as I
rounded up in front of the old hovering, red-roofed house that looked
more like home to me than any building I had ever seen in my short and
eventful life.
There is no love in the world that reciprocates like that of a garden.
If you work and love and plan for it, promptly it turns around and over
and gives back a hundredfold more than you put into it. All summer long
we had been digging out of, picking from, and cutting off of that little
plot of ground, and there it was reaching out with more to return to me.
Long rows of white and purple cosmos danced and fluttered round-eyed
blossoms in welcome, while some bronze xenias fairly bobbed over and
kissed my rough garden boots. Miss Editha's cock's-combs strutted in a
gorgeous row down the east walk, and what could have been a greater
surprise than that handed me by a row of jolly round squash, though I
had been sure we had picked the last languishing fluted fruit from the
vine the last week of August? But there lay long green vines completely
resuscitated by the September rains; and nestled among their draperies
of huge leaves were squash and squash, also big yellow blossoms and
small green-yellow buds, I was so perfectly delighted at the recovery of
my friends that I reached down and patted one of their head branches
with its green tendril curls. There were a lot of gorgeous nasturtiums
under the window of the living-room; but, of course, nobody expects more
of nasturtiums than for them to be faithful unto death by frost.
However, I did pick off a red one and proceed to chew it up with the
deepest appreciation of its peppery flavor. And as I chewed with
smarting tongue I cast my eyes along a row of beans that was fairly
loaded with snaps, which made my thumb smart in anticipation of their
gathering, until my gaze was suddenly arrested by something that sent me
flying down the walk to the south end of the garden.
Now, a few weeks after I had hastily planted those hollyhock seeds Sam
and I had sentimentalized over, I had found in Grandmother Nelson's book
that hollyhocks never bloom their first season, but have to root and
grow about twenty-four months before they blossom; and, somehow, that
depressed me because everything in the world seemed slow at that time.
How did I know where I would be after all that time, or that I would
ever see them bloom, though they were making great leafy heads which
both Sam and I strenuously ignored, while every time I went to dig
around their roots somebody had done it before me! There they were,
perfectly huge with their great fluted leaves, and right at the end of
the row an extra-large plant had sent up a tall, green spike on the end
of which a great, pink doll-blossom was shaking out her rosy skirts in
the afternoon sun. I stood for a minute looking at her in utter rapture.
Then I reached out my arms and gathered her in and put a kiss right in
the center of her sweet heart. After that I fled to the barn in search
of the fledgling.
I found him sheltering in his small jacket five little late chicks that
would insist in running out from under the old hen, who was busily
engaged hatching out their small brothers and sisters. He was afraid
they would get fatally chilled.
"I needed you bad, Betty, if any more of these little ones was to act
crazy like this," he said as I cautiously embraced him and his downy
babies. "Put these three in your jacket so I can catch the next one that
comes out. Old Dommie is 'most through, and then she can take them all."
His faith in old Dommie, who to my certain knowledge had hatched two
other families since spring, was not misplaced. In less than a half-hour
all egg debris of the family advent had been removed and the babies put
to bed under her breast and subjected to a sharp peck of her controlling
bill.
By this time the sun had begun to drop down over toward Old Harpeth, and
a lovely purple was stealing all over the place which mingled with a
great veil of blue smoke from over by the spring, where, I felt sure,
Dr. Chubb had lighted twenty new altar fires for the welcome of the
home-comers. I wanted to go and see the camp, but someway I felt that it
was time to go to the gate to meet Sam and his great big children, so
down the Byrd and I went.
When we got to the gate they were not in sight, and we started up Brier
Lane to meet them. In my heart there was not the least particle of doubt
that they would all be glad to see me, but I never expected it to happen
as it did. Just as we came to the bend in Brier Lane that skirts around
the first hill I heard beautiful voices raised in a weird joy-chant, and
in a moment they all came into view, all walking and singing, with their
things piled high on the wagons that followed them. In the midst of the
tumbling, frolicking children, the chattering, pointing, exclaiming
women, and the eagerly questioning men strode Sam with a small girl
pickaback across his broad shoulders and the old praying-man walking by
his side in deep conversation. I stood still to wait and let them all
see me. The result was glorious. I had never known anything like it
before. The women all laughed and cried in their excitable foreign way,
and the men's faces showed great white teeth in radiant smiles. They
kissed my hands and even the sleeves of my dress, and some of the
children danced around and around in a very ecstasy of welcome, for I
felt sure that to them I was the keeper of mammoth banana-bags. And I
laughed and sniffed and patted and hugged the women in return, and
nodded and called broken Belgian-English greeting to the men--to all but
Sam. Sam stood perfectly still in the middle of the lane in the exact
place that he had been when he caught sight of me coming out of the
sunset toward him. He let the child slip from his shoulders and never
took his eyes off me during the five minutes of the reunion rejoicings.
And I never looked at or spoke to Sam, but walked on back to The Briers
ahead of him, with the women chattering and gesticulating around me.
When we came to the gate I waited for Sam to come forward to open it. I
wanted him to lead his flock into their promised land and--and I wanted
to follow at his heels with them.
Around up the hill he led us, down the old road, past the big rock
spring-house with its nine crocks of milk that I could see the women
eagerly point out to one another, and into the little town of tents, at
whose entrance stood daddy and Dr. Chubb, with their sleeves rolled up
and energetic welcome in their eyes.