It was Ellen’s night off and after the dispatching of the horse, she
stayed with Mrs. Dietz to cheer her up and help put the two youngest
children to bed. She had been so long a constant visitor and benefactor
that they had ceased to regard her as an emissary from the big house
and talked of their troubles freely before her.
The five of them sat about the lamp in the comfortless but warm living
room of the farmhouse, listening to a monologue by Hermann Dietz on the
virtues of the dead horse. Although he had been born within a hundred
feet of that spot, and his father had come to America as a boy, Dietz’
accent, like many of his kind bred to the farms thereabouts, still bore
traces of the German. They were a squatter-like tribe, never prosperous.
“Poor old Molly, she was not so old, yet, but it seemed like we had had
her always, Mrs. Williams. She did her share, Molly.”
“What did Mr. Robert do to Molly?” asked the boy, plaintively. “Did he
shoot her? Can I go see?”
“No, no, you wait until morning. Don’t you mind about Molly. She was
sufferin’ terrible, and she’s better where she is. But we’ll miss her.
Yes, Johnnie, when you was a little bit of a feller, two, three years
old, Poppa used to put you on Molly’s back and hold you, and you’d
laugh and holler and she’d walk so easy just as if she knew you was a
baby.”
“Things was different in them days,” piped his wife. “Them automobile
horns, now. We didn’t never used to hear them. But nowadays it’s half
the night, Mrs. Williams. I can’t get used to ’em. They keep me awake
so.”
“Ah, they wouldn’t be so bad,” put in the girl Lilly, “if we could ride
in ’em now an’ then, the way others do. Johann Hunker’s got a m’chine.”
“Ach, you are always bellerin’ about a m’chine,” her father burst out.
“When you got one you got a hole to throw money in. Listen to them rich
people even, talkin’ about how much they cost. What have I got to do
with a m’chine? An’ whose goin’ to run it, your Momma? I ain’t goin’
to take no risks with ’em, not since I got that sunstroke last August
anyways. I git so dizzy sometimes I think I can’t get home to the
house.”
“I could run it,” grumbled Lilly.
“You now, Lilly! You’ve got plenty to do without that. You don’t tend
to your work the way it is.”
“She’s gettin’ so lazy she’s got no head to remember anything,” put in
her mother. “I don’t dare leave the children with her.”
“M’chine!” Dietz quavered on, “I ain’t got no money for ’em if I wanted
one.”
“You’ve got the money, I guess,” said Mrs. Dietz querulously, “the same
as Johann Hunker, if you wanted to spend it.”
“Now, Momma, I told you twenty times already I’m takin’ care of your
money. Who’s goin’ to keep it safe for a rainy day, if it ain’t me?”
“Well, we don’t see anything of it, Hermann, not since you got hold of
it ... sellin’ off the farms, an’ leavin’ us with hardly a place to put
foot to the ground.”
“Yes, Momma,” rejoined her husband earnestly. “I did sell off the
farms. But you know what Mr. McNutt said. He said if I didn’t want
to take that two hundred dollars an acre Mr. Blaydon offered, they’d
all go somewheres else an’ build, and our land never would git a high
price. You couldn’t git a hundred for it in them days.”
“There’s some of them waited longer an’ got more. Johann Hunker did.”
“Johann Hunker may be a slick feller, but if I hadn’t sold when I did
they mightn’t have come here at all, an’ then where would Johann Hunker
be? Never you mind about that money. It’s a-drawin’ good interest.”
Dietz lifted his tall, bent form from his chair and shuffled over to
the stove to dump his pipe. Then he turned again to his wife, a sudden
grin spreading over his cheeks.
“Well, Momma, what about a little wine? Seeing Mrs. Williams is here,
eh? A little home-made wine and coffee cake. We’ll give the childern
some wine to-night, eh? Lilly, bring up the chairs to the table.”
The girl rose languidly to obey and Mrs. Dietz departed for the
bedroom, returning a moment later with a long bottle. Lilly brought
glasses and placed them on the red-figured table cover.
“Get the coffee cake, Lilly,” her mother ordered.
Dietz toyed affectionately with the stem of his glass filled with
bright red liquid.
“Ach, the home-made wine--that is good! Well, it is like old times,
Momma--when the older children, Lena and Fred was here, and Lilly was a
little girl about Johnnie’s size. Yes, it was fine then. None of these
rich people with big houses and all that. We was the bosses then.”
“We had all the land,” put in Mrs. Dietz gloomily. “We could get enough
off of it to sell a good crop every year and plenty of vegetables to
the commission men, and you always had money, if you needed it for
anything, like Molly dying. Now it’s in the bank and we can’t spend
nothing. No, the land was better than the money.”
“Mr. Blaydon, he gives me sixty dollars a month, and all the feed for
the stock, and half the money from the truck. That is something, sixty
dollars sure every month.”
“But you’ve got to work for Mr. Blaydon, and I do, and even the
childern. It ain’t the same as when we worked for ourselves.”
“Poppa,” broke in Lilly, as she cut the long flat sections of coffee
cake, “Mary Hunker was selling some of Johann’s wine over at Corey’s
last week. She got a big price, enough to buy a new dress. Can I sell
some of Momma’s wine? We can’t ever drink up what we got every year.”
“Ach Himmel!” Dietz cried, bringing his glass down with a rattle upon
the table. “There is that girl. We have the land and sell that. We have
the wine and we got to sell that too. Ain’t there nothing we can call
our own? No, Lilly, you let the wine be.”
“I never get clothes at all like the Hunker girls,” she replied
sullenly. “I saw a green dress, a pretty one, over at town that was
only thirteen dollars and fifty cents.”
“But, Lilly, your sister Lena never bought no dresses for thirteen
dollars and fifty cents. And Lena always looked nice. She married a
man with a fine bakery business on Oak Street. He took Lena already
because she was a neat, sensible girl and wouldn’t throw away his money
for him. I don’t know what to think of you, Lilly. A honest, Christian
girl, the way you’ve been brought up. You ain’t like your sister, is
she, Momma?”
“You wouldn’t expect all girls would be alike, Hermann,” said her
mother. “Lilly is a good girl, but times have changed since Lena was
her age. You give me the money, now, and I’ll go with her to look at
the dress.”
“Well, well, I guess so,” replied Hermann, mollified by his wife’s
firmness. “That is a lot of money, but Lilly is a pretty girl, eh? I’ll
give you the money to-morrow and maybe you can buy the dress before
Sunday. Then them Hunker girls won’t be so fresh up at church.”
“Pour some more wine for Mrs. Williams, Lilly,” said Mrs. Dietz.
“No,” said Ellen, “I must be going.”
“Yes, a night cap, Mrs. Williams,” said Dietz, in his best manner. “A
little more wine for all of us, and then we’ll go to bed. I got to get
Meyer, if I can, or Ed Becker, to help me bury poor Molly to-morrow.
You got to dig a big hole for a horse.”
As Ellen left the cottage and started homeward she did not know
whether to laugh or cry. It was always the same story, poverty and
hard work, and the vanity of the young girl tempted as she had been
most of her life by the strange, glamorous panorama of the rich at her
very doorstep. And she had not the sense of pride the older folks had
enjoyed, the knowledge of having been masters of the neighbourhood.
Mrs. Dietz’ remark haunted her mind. “The land was better than the
money.” For such as these people, it was. It had given them all they
had, all they could possibly have, to live for.
The shortest path up the hill to the Blaydon house was rocky and steep,
and a third the way up Ellen stopped for breath and regretted she had
not walked around the longer way. It was dark under the trees and hard
to stick to the path. She sat down to remove a pebble from her low
shoe. As she stood up again facing the foot of the hill, she could see
a broad patch of Dietz’ field through an opening in the branches. At
that moment a figure stepped out from the trees into the open space and
came to a stop as if waiting. It was a man undoubtedly, she thought,
but she was curious to make sure. So few prowlers ever disturbed the
peace of the place. She crept down the path, holding on to the shrubs
and tree-trunks and making as little noise as possible. She decided
she would wait until the man moved on and go around by the road after
all. Reaching the bottom she found herself within a few yards of Rob
Blaydon. A moment later, nearer the already dark and silent Dietz
house, she saw another figure stirring. What could Rob be up to and who
was his confederate? Then swiftly, Lilly darted from the shadow of the
house and joined him. The two disappeared, exchanging whispers, around
the side of the hill.
Ellen started impulsively, as though she would stop them, but she did
not go far. What could she do? She knew Rob Blaydon too well to think
that he would take any interference from her or from any inferior. He
was not a mean boy, but he was headstrong. He would tell her that he
thought her a busybody and a nuisance. And supposing she went to Lilly?
Lilly would be frightened and cowed for the moment. But Ellen realized,
far more sharply than the girl’s family, how deep her rebellion lay. In
the end she would throw advice to the winds.
There was left the alternative of warning Mathilda or Sterling Blaydon.
If she did so what could she prove? Rob was bold enough to make the
thing appear in any light he desired, some boyish escapade in which he
had inveigled the girl to join. To excite the Dietz family about the
girl’s danger was as useless. They could not control her in any case,
and it might fire her to desperate measures. Ellen could do nothing
that would result in any good, nothing except create a scandal.
She sat down and wondered if she cared. She certainly cared about the
child’s welfare, but now that she felt it was impossible to prevent
what was happening, she could reason about it calmly. Life was a
dreadfully sad thing any way you took it. But could this love affair do
the girl more harm than she was sure to meet with in any event--perhaps
at the hands of worse men? Might it not come to mean something to
her she would cherish despite its cost? Ellen’s only answer to these
questions was her own experience. Perhaps it had been worth while. Her
daughter was happy, with an unclouded future, and she was contented.
Knowledge of herself had suddenly shaken her faith in the creed that
one must inevitably suffer pain because of sin.