The two hired men on Barly's farm rose in the dark and crept
downstairs. By sun-up, Farmer Barly was after them, in his brown
overalls; he came clumping into the barn, dusty with last year's hay,
and peered about him in the yellow light. He opened the harness room,
and took out harness for the farm wagons; he went to ask if the horses
had been watered.
The cows were in pasture; in the wagon shed the two men, before a tin
basin, plunged their arms into water, flung it on their faces, and
puffed and sighed. The shed was cold, and redolent of earth. Outside,
the odor of coffee, drifting from the house, mingled in the early
morning air with clover and hay, cut in the fields, but not yet stored.
Anna Barly, from her room, heard her mother moving in the kitchen, and
sat up in bed. The patch-work quilt was fallen on the floor, where it
lay as sleepy as its mistress. She tossed her hair back from her face;
it spread broad and gold across her shoulders, and the wide sleeves of
her nightdress, falling down her arms, bared her round, brown elbows as
she caught it up again.
In the kitchen, the two hired men, their faces wet and clean, poured
sugar over their lettuce, and talked with their mouths full.
"I hear tell of a borer, like an ear-worm, spoiling the corn. . . .
But there's none in our corn, so far as I can see."
"Never been so much rain since I was born."
"A bad year."
"Well," said Mrs. Barly, "that's no wonder, either, with prices what
they are, and you two eating your heads off, for all the work you do."
"Now, then," said her husband hastily, "that's all right, too, mother."
Anna stood at the sink, and washed the dishes. Her hands floated
through the warm, soapy water like lazy fish, curled around plates,
swam out of pots; while her thoughts, drowsy, sunny in her head,
passed, like her hands, from what was hardly seen to what was hardly
felt.
"Look after the milk, Anna," said her mother, "while I go for some
kindlings." She went out, thin, stooped, her long, lean fingers
fumbling with her apron; and she came back more bent than before. She
put the wood down with a sigh. "A body's never done," she said.
Anna looked after the milk, all in a gentle phlegm. Her mother cooked,
cleaned, scrubbed, carried water, fetched wood, set the house to
rights; in order to keep Anna fresh and plump until she was married.
Anna, plump and wealthy, was a good match for any one: old Mr. Frye
used to smile when he saw her. "Smooth and sweet," he used to say:
"molasses . . . hm . . ."
Now she stood dreaming by the stove, until her mother, climbing from
the cellar, woke her with a clatter of coal. "Why, you big, awkward
girl," cried Mrs. Barly, "whatever are you dreaming about?"
Anna thought to herself: "I was dreaming of a thousand things. But
when I went to look at them . . . there was nothing left."
"Nothing," she said aloud.
"Then," said her mother doubtfully, "you might help me shell peas."
The two women sat down together, a wooden bowl between them. The pods
split under their fingers, click, cluck; the peas fell into the bowl
like shot at first, dull as the bowl grew full. Click, cluck, click,
cluck . . . Anna began to dream again. "Oh, do wake up," said her
mother; "one would think . . ."
Anna's hands went startled into the peas. "I must be in love," she
said with half a smile.
Mrs. Barly sighed. "Ak," she said.
Anna began to laugh. After a while she asked, "Do you think I'm in
love?"
"Like as not," said her mother.
"Well, then," Anna cried, "I'm not in love at all--not now."
Mrs. Barly let her fingers rest idly along the rim of the bowl. "When
I was a girl . . ." she began. Then it was Anna's turn to sigh.
"It seems like yesterday," remarked Mrs. Barly, who wanted to say, "I
am still a young woman."
Anna split pods gravely, her eyes bent on her task. The tone of her
mother's voice, tart and dry, filled her mind with the sulky thoughts
of youth. "There's fewer alive to-day," she said, "than when you were
a girl."
Mrs. Barly knew very well what her daughter meant. "Be glad there's
any left," she replied, as she turned again to her shelling.
Anna's round, brown finger moved in circles through the peas. "I'm too
young to marry," she said, at last.
"No younger than what I was."
But it seemed to Anna as though life had changed since those days. For
every one was reaching for more. And Anna, too, wanted more . . . more
than her mother had had. "If I wait," she said in a low voice,
"to . . . see a bit of life . . . what's the harm?"
The pod in Mrs. Barly's hand cracked with a pop, and trembled in the
air, split open like the covers of a book. "I declare," she exclaimed,
"I don't know what to think . . . well . . . wait . . . I suppose you
want to be like Mrs. Wicket?"
"No, I don't," said Anna.
"Yes," said Mrs. Barly, in a shaking voice, "yes . . . wait . . .
you'll see a bit of something . . . a taste of the broom,
perhaps. . . ."
While the two women looked after the house, the hired men worked in the
fields, under the hot sun, their wet, cotton shirts open at the neck,
their faces shaded with wide straw hats. Farmer Barly leaned against
one side of a tumbled-down wooden fence, and old Mr. Crabbe against the
other.
"This year," said Farmer Barly, "I'm going to put up a silo in my barn.
And instead of straw to cover it, I'm going to plant oats on top."
"Go along," said Mr. Crabbe.
"Well, it's a fact," said Mr. Barly. "I'm building now, back of the
cows."
"Digging, you might say," corrected Mr. Crabbe.
"Building, by God," said Mr. Barly.
Mr. Crabbe tilted back his head and cast a look of wonder at the sky.
"A hole is a hole," he said finally.
"So it is," agreed Mr. Barly, "so it is. It takes a Republican to find
that out." And, greatly amused at his own wit, Mr. Barly, who was a
Democrat, slapped his knee and burst out laughing.
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Crabbe solemnly, with pious joy, "I'm a
Republican . . . a good Republican, Mr. Barly, like my father before
me." He smote his fist into his open palm. "I'll vote the Democrats
blue in the face. If a man can't vote for his own advantage, what's
the ballot for? I say let's mind our own business. And let me get my
hands on what I want."
"Get what you can," said Mr. Barly.
"And the devil take the hindmost."
"It's all the same to me," quoth Mr. Barly, "folks being mostly alike
as two peas."
Mr. Crabbe spat into the stubble. "The way I look at it," he said,
"it's like this: first, there's me; and then there's you. That's the
way I look at it, Mr. B."
And he went home to repeat to his wife what he had said to Farmer
Barly. "I gave it to him," he declared.
In another field, Abner and John Henry, who had been to war, also
discussed politics. They agreed that the pay they received for their
work was inadequate. It seemed to them to be the fault of the
government, which was run for the benefit of others besides themselves.
That afternoon, Mr. Jeminy, with Boethius under his arm, came into
Frye's General Store, to buy a box of matches for Mrs. Grumble. As he
paid for them, he said to Thomas Frye, who had been his pupil in
school: "These little sticks of wood need only a good scratch to
confuse me, for a moment, with the God of Genesis. But they also
encourage Mrs. Grumble to burn, before I come down in the morning, the
bits of paper on which I like to scribble my notes."
At that moment, old Mrs. Ploughman entered the store to buy a paper of
pins. "Well," she cried, "don't keep me waiting all day." But when Mr.
Jeminy was gone, she said to Thomas Frye, "I guess I don't want any
pins. What was it I wanted?"
Presently she went home again, without having bought anything. "It's
all the fault of that old man," she said to herself; "he mixes a body
up so."
On his way home Mr. Jeminy passed, at the edge of the village, the
little cottage where the widow Wicket lived with her daughter. Seeing
Mrs. Wicket in the garden, he stopped to wave his hand. Under her
bonnet, the young woman looked up at him, her plain, thin face flushed
with her efforts in the garden patch. "I've never seen such weeds,"
she cried. "You'd think . . . I don't know what you'd think. They
grow and grow . . ."
Mr. Jeminy went up the hill toward his house, carrying the box of
matches. As he walked, the little white butterflies, which danced
above the road, kept him company; and all about him, in the meadows,
among the daisies, the beetles, wasps, bees, and crickets, with fifes,
flutes, drums, and triangles, were singing joyously together the
Canticle of the Sun:
"Praised be the Lord God with all his creatures, but especially our
brother, the sun . . . fair he is, and shines, with a very great
splendor . . .
"Praised be the Lord for our sister, the moon, and for the stars, which
he has set clear and lovely in heaven.
". . . (and) for our brother, the wind, and for air and cloud, calm and
all weather . . .
". . . (and) for our mother, the earth, which does sustain us and keep
us . . .
"Praised be the Lord for all those who pardon one another . . . and who
endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who peaceably shall
endure . . ."
Slowly, to the tonkle of herds in pasture, the crowing of cocks, and
the thin, clear clang of the smithy, the full sun sank in the west.
For a time all was quiet, as night, the shadow of the earth, crept
between man and God.
After supper Thomas Frye, in his father's wagon, went to call on Anna
Barly.
From her porch where she sat hidden by vines which gave forth an odor
sweeter than honey, the night was visible, pale and full of shadows.
To the boy beside her, timid and ardent, the silence of her parents
seemed, like the night, to be full of opinions.
"Well . . . shall we go for a ride?"