Champney Googe was beginning to realize, as he stood on the porch with
his mother and waved to his old neighbors, the Caukinses, the changed
conditions he was about to face. He was also realizing that he must
change to meet these conditions. On his way up from the train Saturday
evening, he noted the power house at The Corners and the substantial
line of comfortable cottages that extended for a mile along the highroad
to the entrance of the village. He found Main Street brilliant with
electric lights and lined nearly its entire length with shops, large and
small, which were thronged with week-end purchasers. An Italian fruit
store near The Greenbush bore the proprietor's name, Luigi Poggi; as he
drove past he saw an old Italian woman bargaining with smiles and lively
gestures over the open counter. Farther on, from an improvised wooden
booth, the raucous voice of the phonograph was jarring the night air and
entertaining a motley group gathered in front of it. Across the street a
flaunting poster announced "Moving Picture Show for a Nickel." Vehicles
of all descriptions, from a Maine "jigger" to a "top buggy," were
stationary along the village thoroughfare, their various steeds hitched
to every available stone post. In front of the rectory some Italian
children were dancing to the jingle of a tambourine.
On nearing The Bow the confusion ceased; the polyglot sounds were
distinguishable only as a murmur. In passing Champ-au-Haut, he looked
up at the house; here and there a light shone behind drawn shades. Six
years had passed since he was last there; six years--and time had not
dulled the sensation of that white pepper in his nostrils! He smiled to
himself. He must see Aileen before he left, for from time to time he had
heard good reports of her from his mother with whom she had become a
favorite. He thought she must be mighty plucky to stand Aunt Meda all
this time! He gathered from various sources that Mrs. Champney was
growing peculiar as she approached three score and ten. Her rare letters
to him, however, were kind enough. But he was sure Aileen's anomalous
place in the household at Champ-au-Haut--neither servant nor child of
the house, never adopted, but only maintained--could have been no
sinecure. Anyway, he knew she had kept the devotion of her two admirers,
Romanzo Caukins and Octavius Buzzby. From a hint in his aunt's last
letter, he drew the conclusion that Aileen and Romanzo would make a
match of it before long, when Romanzo should be established. At any
rate, Aileen had wit enough, he was sure, to know on which side her
bread was buttered, and from all he heard by the way of letters, Romanzo
Caukins was not to be sneezed at as a prospective husband--a
steady-going, solid sort of a chap who, he was told, had a chance now
like himself in the quarry business. He must credit Aunt Meda with this
one bit of generosity, at least; Mr. Van Ostend told him she had applied
to him for some working position for Romanzo in the Flamsted office, and
not in vain; he was about to be put in as pay-master.
As he drove slowly up the highroad towards The Gore, he saw the
stone-cutters' sheds stretching dim and gray in the moonlight along the
farther shore. A standing train of loaded flat-cars gleamed in the
electric light like a long high-piled drift of new-fallen snow. Here and
there, on approaching The Gore, an arc-light darkened the hills round
about and sent its blinding glare into the traveller's eyes. At last,
his home was in sight--his home!--he wondered that he did not experience
a greater thrill of home-coming--and behind and above it the many
electric lights in and around the quarries produced hazy white
reflections concentrated in luminous spots on the clear sky.
His mother met him on the porch. Her greeting was such that it caused
him to feel, and for the first time, that where she was, there,
henceforth, his true home must ever be.
* * * * *
"It will be hard work adjusting myself at first, mother," he said,
turning to her after watching the wagonload of Caukinses out of sight,
"harder than I had any idea of. A foreign business training may broaden
a man in some ways, but it leaves his muscles flabby for real home work
here in America. You make your fight over there with gloves, and here
only bare knuckles are of any use; but I'm ready for it!" He smiled and
squared his shoulders as to an imaginary load.
"You don't regret it, do you, Champney?"
"Yes and no, mother. I don't regret it because I have gained a certain
knowledge of men and things available only to one who has lived over
there; but I do regret that, because of the time so spent, I am, at
twenty-seven, still hugging the shore--just as I was when I left
college. After all these years I'm not 'in it' yet; but I shall be
soon," he added; the hard determined ring of steadfast purpose was in
his voice. He sat down on the lower step: his mother brought forward
her chair.
"Champney," she spoke half hesitatingly; she did not find it easy to
question the man before her as she used to question the youth of
twenty-one, "would you mind telling me if there ever was any truth in
the rumor that somehow got afloat over here three years ago that you
were going to marry Ruth Van Ostend? Of course, I denied it when I got
home, for I knew you would have told me if there had been anything to
it."
Champney clasped his hands about his knee and nursed it, smiling to
himself, before he answered:
"I suppose I may as well make a clean breast of the whole affair, which
is little enough, mother, even if I didn't cover myself with glory and
come out with colors flying. You see I was young and, for all my four
years in college, pretty green when it came to the real life of those
people--"
"You mean the Van Ostends?"
"Yes, their kind. It's one thing to accept their favors, and it's quite
another to make them think you are doing them one. So I sailed in to
make Ruth Van Ostend interested in me as far as possible, circumstances
permitting--and you'll admit that a yachting trip is about as favorable
as they make it. You know she's three years older than I, and I think it
flattered and amused her to accept my devotion for a while, but then--"
"But, Champney, did you love her?"
"Well, to be honest, mother, I hadn't got that far myself--don't know
that I ever should have; any way, I wanted to get her to the point
before I went through any self-catechism on that score."
"But, Champney!" She spoke with whole-hearted protest.
He nodded up at her understandingly. "I know the 'but', mother; but
that's how it stood with me. You know they were in Paris the next spring
and, of course, I saw a good deal of them--and of many others who were
dancing attendance on the heiress to the same tune that I was. But I
caught on soon, and saw all the innings were with one special man; and,
well--I didn't make a fool of myself, that's all. As you know, she was
married the autumn after your return, three years ago."
"You're sure you really didn't mind, Champney?"
He laughed out at that. "Mind! Well, rather! You see it knocked one of
my little plans higher than a kite--a plan I made the very day I decided
to accept Mr. Van Ostend's offer. Of course I minded."
"What plan?"
"Wonder if I'd better tell you, mother? I'd like to stand well in your
good graces--"
"Oh, Champney!"
"Fact, I would. Well, here goes then: I decided--I was lying up under
the pines, you know that day I didn't want to accept his offer?"--she
nodded confirmatorily--"that if I couldn't have an opportunity to get
rich quick in one way, I would in another; and, in accepting the offer,
I made up my mind to try for the sister and her millions; if successful,
I intended to take by that means a short cut to matrimony and fortune."
"Oh, Champney!"
"Young and fresh and--hardened, wasn't it, mother?"
"You were so young, so ignorant, so unused to that sort of living; you
had no realization of the difficulties of life--of love--."
She began speaking as if in apology for his weakness, but ended with the
murmured words "life--love", in a voice so tense with pain that it
sounded as if the major dominant of youth and ignorance suddenly
suffered transcription into a haunting minor.
Her son looked up at her in surprise.
"Why, mother, don't take it so hard; I assure you I didn't. It brought
me down to bed rock, for I was making a conceited ass of myself that's
all, in thinking I could have roses for fodder instead of thistles--and
just for the asking! It did me no end of good. I shall never rush in
again where even angels fear to tread except softly--I mean the male
wingless kind--worth a couple of millions; she has seven in her own
right.--But we're the best of friends."
He spoke without bitterness. His mother felt, however, at the moment,
that she would have preferred to hear a note of keen disappointment in
his explanation rather than this tone of lightest persiflage.
"I don't see how--" she began, but checked herself. A slight flush
mounted in her cheeks.
"See how what, mother? Please don't leave me dangling; I'm willing to
take all you can give. I deserve it."
"I wasn't going to blame you, Champney. I'm the last one to do
that--Life teaches each in her own way. I was only thinking I didn't see
how any girl _could_ resist loving you, dear."
"Oh, ho! Don't you, mother mine! Well, commend me to a doting--"
"I'm _not_ doting, Champney," she protested, laughing; "I know your
faults better than you know them yourself."
"A doting mother, I say, to brace up a man fallen through his pride. Do
you mean to say"--, he sprang to his feet, faced her, his hands thrust
deep in his pockets, his face alive with the fun of the moment,--"do you
mean to say that if you were a girl I should prove irresistible to you?
Come now, mother, tell me, honor bright."
She raised her eyes to his. The flush faded suddenly in her cheeks,
leaving them unnaturally white; her eyes filled with tears.
"I should worship you," she said under her breath, and dropped her head
into her hands. He sprang up the steps to her side.
"Why, mother, mother, don't speak so. I'm not worthy of it--it shames
me. Here, look up," he took her bowed head tenderly between his hands
and raised it, "look into my face; read it well--interpret, and you will
cease to idealize, mother."
She wiped her eyes, half-smiling through her tears. "I'm not idealizing,
Champney, and I didn't know I could be so weak; I think--I think the
telegram and your coming so unexpectedly--"
"I know, mother," he spoke soothingly, "it was too much; you've been too
long alone. I'm glad I'm at home at last and can run up here almost any
time." He patted her shoulder softly, and whistled for Rag. "Come, put
on your shade hat and we'll go up to the quarries. I want to see them;
do you realize they are the largest in the country? It's wonderful what
a change they've made here! After all, it takes America to forge ahead,
for we've got the opportunities and the money to back them--and what
more is needed to make us great?" He spoke lightly, expecting no
answer.
She brought her hat and the two went up the side road under the elms to
the quarry.
Ay, what more is needed to make us great? That is the question. There
comes a time when a man, whose ears are not wholly deafened by the roar
of a trafficking commercialism, asks this question of himself in the
hope that some answer may be vouchsafed to him. If it come at all, it
comes like the "still small voice" _after the whirlwind_; and the man
who asks that question in the expectation of a response, must first have
suffered, repented, struggled, fought, at times succumbed to fateful
overwhelming circumstance, before his soul can be attuned so finely that
the "still small voice" becomes audible. Youth and that question are not
synchronous.
* * * * *
"I've not been so much alone as you imagine, Champney," said his mother.
They were picking their way over the granite slopes and around to Father
Honore's house. "Aileen and Father Honore and all the Caukinses and,
during this last year, those sweet women of the sisterhood have brought
so much life into my life up here among these old sheep pastures that
I've not had the chance to feel the loneliness I otherwise should. And
then there is that never-to-be-forgotten summer with you over the
ocean--I feed constantly on the remembrance of all that delight."
"I'm glad you had it, mother."
"Besides, this great industry is so many-sided that it keeps me
interested in every new development in spite of myself."
"By the way, mother, you wrote me that you had invested most of that
twenty thousand from the quarry lands in bank stock, didn't you?"
"Yes; Mr. Emlie is president now; he is considered safe. The deposits
have quadrupled these last two years, and the dividends have been
satisfactory."
"Yes, I know Emlie's safe enough, but you don't want to tie up your
money so that you can't convert it at once into cash if advisable. You
know I shall be on the inside track now and in a position to use a
little of it at a time judiciously in order to increase it for you. I'd
like to double it for you as Aunt Meda has doubled her inheritance from
grandfather--Who's that?"
He stopped short and, shading his eyes with his hat, nodded in the
direction of the sisterhood house that stood perhaps an eighth of a mile
beyond the pines. His mother, following his look, saw the figure of a
girl dodge around the corner of the house. Before she could answer, Rag,
the Irish terrier, who had been nosing disconsolately about on the
barren rock, suddenly lost his head. With one short suppressed yelp, he
laid his heels low to the slippery granite shelves and scuttled,
scurried, scrambled, tore across the intervening quarry hollow like a
bundle of brown tow driven before a hurricane.
Mrs. Googe laughed. "No need to ask 'who' when you see Rag go mad like
that! It's Aileen; Rag has been devoted to her ever since you've been
gone. I wonder why she isn't at church?"
The girl disappeared in the house. Again and again Champney whistled for
his dog but Rag failed to put in an appearance.
"He'll need to be re-trained. It isn't well, even for a dog, to be under
such petticoat government as that; it spoils him. Only I'm afraid I
sha'n't be at home long enough to make him hear to reason."
"Aileen has him in good training. She knows the dog adores her and makes
the most of it. Oh, I forgot to tell you I sent word to Father Honore
this morning to come over to tea to-night. I knew you would like to see
him, and he has been anticipating your return."
"Has he? What for I wonder. By the way, where did he take his meals
after he left you?"
"Over in the boarding-house with the men. He stayed with me only three
months, until his house was built. He has an old French Canadian for
housekeeper now."
"He's greatly beloved, I hear."
"The Gore wouldn't be The Gore without him," Mrs. Googe spoke earnestly.
"The Colonel"--she laughed as she always did when about to quote her
rhetorical neighbor--"speaks of him to everyone as 'the heart of the
quarry that responds to the throb of the universal human,' and so far as
I know no one has ever taken exception to it, for it's true."
"I remember--he was an all round fine man. I shall be glad to see him
again. He must find some pretty tough customers up here to deal with,
and the Colonel's office is no longer the soft snap it was for fifteen
years, I'll bet."
"No, that's true; but, on the whole, there is less trouble than you
would expect among so many nationalities. Isn't it queer?--Father Honore
says that most of the serious trouble comes from disputes between the
Hungarians and Poles about religious questions. They are apt to settle
it with fists or something worse. But he and the Colonel have managed
well between them; they have settled matters with very few arrests."
"I can't imagine the Colonel in that role." Champney laughed. "What does
he do with all his rhetorical trumpery at such times? I've never seen
him under fire--in fact, he never had been when I left."
"I know he doesn't like it. He told me he shouldn't fill the office
after another year. You know he was obliged to do it to make both ends
meet; but since the opening of the quarries he has really prospered and
has a market right here in town for all the mutton he can raise. I'm so
glad Romanzo's got a chance."
They rambled on, crossing the apex of The Gore and getting a good view
of the great extent of the opened quarries. Their talk drifted from one
thing to another, Champney questioning about this one and that, until,
as they turned homewards, he declared he had picked up the many dropped
stitches so fast, that he should feel no longer a stranger in his native
place when he should make his first appearance in the town the next day.
He wanted to renew acquaintance with all the people at Champ-au-Haut and
the old habitues of The Greenbush.