When a whistle blew at five o'clock the hired men on the Quidmore place
stopped working. As a son of the house, Tom Quidmore paid to the signal
only enough attention to pile his carrots into a wheelbarrow and convey
them to the spot where they would help to furnish the market lorry in
the morning. In fulfillment of his promise to his adopted mother, he
then went in search of Geraldine.
Of all the tasks that he liked at Bere he liked most going to the
pasture. It was not his regular work. As regular work it belonged to
old Diggory; but old Diggory was as willing to be relieved of it as
Mrs. Quidmore of the milking. Brushing himself down, and washing his
hands at the tap in the garage after a fashion that didn't clean them,
he marched off, whistling. He whistled because his heart was light. His
heart was light because his mother having been in the kitchen, he had
escaped the necessity for giving her the medicine as to which he felt
his odd reluctance.
Leaving the garage behind him, he threaded a tiny path running through
the beet-field. The turnip-field came next, after which he entered
a strip of fine old timber, coming out from that on the main road
to Bere. Along this road, for some five hundred yards, he tramped
merrily, kicking up the dust. He liked this road. Not only was it
open, free, and straight, but along its old stone walls raspberries
and blackberries grew ripe in a tangle of wild spirea, meadow-rue,
jewel weed, and Queen Anne's lace. He loved this luxuriance, this
summer sense of abundance. To the boy who had never known anything but
poverty, Nature at least, in this lush Connecticut countryside, seemed
generous.
The pasture was on the edge of a scrubby woodland in which the twenty
acres of the Quidmore property trailed away into the unkempt. Eighty or
a hundred years earlier, it had been the center of a farm now cut up
into small holdings, chiefly among market gardeners. In the traces of
the old farmhouse, the old garden, the old orchard, the boy found his
imagination touched by the pathos of a vanished human past.
The land sloped from the hillside, till in the bottom of the hollow
it became a little brambly wood such as in England would be called a
spinney. Through the spinney trickled a stream which somewhere fell
into Horseneck Brook, which somewhere fell into one of those shallow
inlets that the Sound thrusts in on the coastline. Halfway between
the road and the streamlet, was the old home-place, deserted so long
ago that the cellar was choked with blackberry vines, and the brick
of the foundation bulging out of plumb. A clump of lilac which had
once snuggled lovingly against a south wall was now a big solitary
bush. What used to be a bed of pansies had reverted to a scattering of
cheery little heartsease faces, brightening the grass. The low-growing,
pale-rose mallow of old gardens still kept up its vigor of bloom,
throwing out a musky scent. There was something wistful in the spot,
especially now that the sun was westering, and the birds skimmed low,
making for their nests.
In going for Geraldine Tom always stole a few minutes to linger among
these memories of old joys and sorrows, old labors and rewards, of
which nothing now remained but these few flowers, a few wind-beaten
apple trees, and this dint in the ground which served best as a shelter
for chipmunks. It was the part of the property farthest from the house.
It was far, too, from any other habitation, securing him the privilege
of solitude. The privilege was new to him. At Harfrey he had never
known it. About the gardens, even at Bere, there were always the owner,
the hired men, the customers, the neighbors who came and went. But in
Geraldine's pasture he found only herself, the crows, the robins, the
thrushes singing in the spinney, and the small wild life darting from
one covert to another, or along the crumbling stone wall hung with its
loopings of wild grape.
He was not lonely on these excursions. Companionship had never in the
Harfrey schools been such a pleasure that he missed anything in having
to do without it. Rather, he enjoyed the freedom to be himself, to wear
no mask, to have no part to play. It was only when alone like this that
he understood how much of his thought and effort was spent in dancing
to other people's tunes. In the Tollivant home he could never, like the
other children, speak or act without a second thought. As a State ward
it was his duty to commend himself. To commend himself he was obliged
to think twice even before venturing on trifles. He had formed a habit
of thinking twice, of rarely being spontaneous. By himself in this
homey pasture he felt the relief of one who has been balancing on a
tight rope at walking on the ground.
When he had climbed the bars Geraldine, who was down the hill and near
the spinney, had lifted her head and swung her tail in recognition.
Not being impatient, she went on with her browsing, leaving him a few
minutes' liberty. Among the heartsease and the mallows he flung himself
down, partly because he was tired and partly that he might think. With
so much to think about thought came without sequence. It centered soon
on what he was to be.
Of one thing he was certain; he didn't want to be a market gardener.
Not but that he enjoyed the open-air life and the novelty of closeness
to the soil. Like the whole Quidmore connection, it was good enough
for the time. All the same, it was only for the time, and one day he
would break away from it. How, he didn't ask. He merely knew by his
intuitions that it would be so.
He was going to be something big. That, too, was intuitive conviction.
What he meant by big he was unable to define, beyond the fact that
knowledge and money would enter into it. He was interested in money,
not so much for what it gave you as for what it was. It was a queer
thing when you came to think of it. A dollar bill in itself had no more
value than any other scrap of paper; and yet it would buy a dollar's
worth of anything. He turned that over in his mind till he worked
out the reason why. He worked out the principle of payment by check,
which at first was as blank a mystery as marital relations. When
newspapers came his way he studied the reports of the stock exchange,
much as a savage who cannot read scans the unmeaning hieroglyphs which
to wiser people are words. He did make out that railways and other
great utilities must be owned by a lot of people who combined to put
their money into them; but daily fluctuations in value he couldn't
understand. When he asked his adopted father he was told that he
couldn't understand it, though he knew he could.
Long accustomed to this answer as to the bewilderments of life, he
rarely now asked anything. If he was puzzled he waited for more data.
Even for little boys things cleared themselves up if you kept them
in your mind, and applied the explanation when it came your way. The
point, he concluded, was not to be in a hurry. There were the spiders.
He was fond of watching them. They would sit for hours as still as
metal things, their little eyes fixed like jewels in a ring. Then when
they saw what they wanted one swift dart was enough for them. So it
must be with little boys. You got one thing to-day, and another thing
to-morrow; but you got everything in time if you waited and kept alert.
By waiting and keeping alert he would find out what he was to be. He
had reached his point when he saw Geraldine pacing up the hill toward
the pasture bars. She was giving him the hint that certain acknowledged
rites were no longer to be put off.
He had lowered the bars, over which she was stepping delicately, when
he saw his father come tearing down the road, going toward Bere, with
all the speed his shuffling gait could put on. Used by this time
to erratic actions on Quidmore's part, he was hardly surprised; he
was only curious. He was more curious still when, on drawing nearer,
the man seemed in a panic. "Looks as if he was running away from
something," was the lad's first thought, though he couldn't imagine
from what.
"Is anything the matter?"
From panic the indications changed to those of surprise, though the
voice was as velvety as ever.
"Oh, so it's you! I thought it was Diggory. What did you--what did
you--do with that powder?"
The boy began putting up the bars while Geraldine plodded homeward.
"I couldn't give it to her. She was in the kitchen baking." He thought
it wise to add: "She was making silver cookies for you. You'll have
them for supper."
There followed more odd phenomena, of which the boy, waiting and
keeping alert, only got the explanation later. Quidmore threw himself
face downward on the wayside grass. With his forehead resting on his
arm, he lay as still as one of those drunken men Tom had occasionally
seen like logs beside some country road. Geraldine turned her head to
ask why she was not followed, but the boy stood waiting for a further
sign. He wondered whether all grown-up men had minutes like this, or
whether it was part of the epilepsy he had heard about.
But when Quidmore got up he was calm, the traces of panic having
disappeared. To a more experienced person the symptoms would have been
of relief; but to the lad of twelve they said nothing.
"I'll go back with you," was Quidmore's only comment, as together they
set out to follow Geraldine.
Having reached the barn where the milking was to be done, Quidmore was
proceeding to the house. In the hope of a negative, Tom asked if he
should try again to-morrow.