doughnuts for a guy? Who do you suppose worked better than anybody?
Gave us all pointers on how to manage a fire. He says this is just a
little fire compared with the ones he has up home. He says he’s seen a
forest fire twenty miles wide, sweeping over the mountains.”
“Who do you mean, Tommy?” asked Jean. “For gosh sakes, quit elaborating
and come to the point.”
“Who do you suppose I mean?” asked Tommy reproachfully. “Buzzy
Hancock’s cousin, your Ralph McRae from Saskatoon.”
Jean blushed prettily, as she always did when Ralph’s name was
mentioned. She hadn’t spent as much time with Ralph since his arrival
as she had wanted to owing to Billie’s illness. Still, oddly enough,
even Tommy’s high praise of him made her feel shyly happy.
The fire burned fitfully for three days, breaking out unexpectedly in
new spots and keeping everyone excited and busy. The old Ames barn went
up in smoke, and Mr. Rudemeir’s sawmill caught fire three times.
“Whew!” he said, jubilantly, “I guess I sat out on that roof all night
long, slapping sparks with a wet mop, but it didn’t get ahead of me.”
Lucy Peckham and Kit ran a sort of pony express, riding horseback from
house to house, carrying food and coffee over to the men who were
scattered nearly four miles around the fire-swept area. Ralph and Sally
ran their own rescue work at the north end of town. Buzzy had been put
on the mail truck with Mr. Rickett’s eldest boy, while the former gave
his services on the volunteer fire corps. The end of the third day
Jean was driving back from Nantic after a load of groceries when she
noticed Ralph turning on to the main road ahead of her. She stopped the
car beside him and asked him to get in.
“The fire’s all out,” he said. “We have left some of the boys on guard
yet, in case it may be smouldering in the underbrush. I have just been
telling Rudemeir and the other men, if they’d learn to pile their brush
the way we do up home, they would be able to control these little fires
in no time. You girls must be awfully tired out. You did splendid work.”
“Kit and Lucy did, you mean,” answered Jean. “All I did was to help
cook.” She laughed. “I never dreamed that men and boys could eat so
many doughnuts and cupcakes. Becky says she sent over twenty-two loaves
of gingerbread, not counting all the other stuff. Was anyone hurt, at
all?”
“You mean eating too much?” asked Ralph teasingly. Then more seriously,
he added, “A few of the men were burnt a little bit, but nothing to
speak of. How beautiful your springtime is down here in New England. It
makes me want to take off my coat and go to work right here, reclaiming
some of these old worked-out acres, and making them show the good that
still lies in them if they are plowed deep enough.”
Jean sighed quickly. “Do you really think one could ever make any money
here?” she asked. “Sometimes I get awfully discouraged, Ralph. Of
course, we didn’t come up here with the idea of being farmers. It was
Dad’s health that brought us, but once we were here, we couldn’t help
but see the chance of making Woodhow pay our way a little. Becky has
told us we’re in awfully good luck to even get our vegetables and fruit
out of it this last year, and it isn’t the past year I’m thinking of.
It’s the next year, and the next one and the next. One of the most
appalling things about Elmhurst is, that you get absolutely contented
up here, and you go around singing blissfully. Old Pop Higgins who
taught our art class down in New York always said that contentment was
fatal to progress, and I believe it. Dad is really a brilliant man, and
he’s getting his full strength back. And while I have a full sense of
gratitude toward the healing powers of these old green hills, still I
have a horror of Dad stagnating here.”
Ralph turned his head to watch her face. “Has he said anything himself
about wanting to go back to his work?” he asked.
“Not yet. I suppose that is what we really must wait for. His own
confidence returning. You see, what I’m afraid of is this. Dad was born
and brought up right here, and the granite of these old hills is in his
system. He loves every square foot of land around here. Just supposing
he should be contented to settle down, like old Judge Ellis, and turn
into a sort of Connecticut country squire.”
“There are worse things than that in the world,” Ralph replied. “Too
many of our best men forget the land that gave them birth, and pour the
full strength of their powers and capabilities into the city market.
You speak of Judge Ellis. Look at what that old man’s mind has done for
his home community. He has literally brought modern improvements into
Elmhurst. He has represented her up at Hartford off and on for years,
when he was not sitting in judgment here.”
“You mean, that you think Dad ought not to go back?” asked Jean, almost
resentfully. “That just because he happened to have been born here, he
owes it to Elmhurst to stay here now, and give it the best he has?”
Ralph laughed good-naturedly. “We’re getting into rather deep water,
Jeannie,” he answered. “I can see that you don’t like the country,
and I do. I love it down east here where all of my family came from
originally, and I’m very fond of the West.”
“Oh, I’m sure I’d like that too,” broke in Jean eagerly. “Mother’s
from the West, California, and I’d love to go out there. I would love
the scope and freedom. What bothers me here are all those rock walls,
for instance.” She pointed at the old one along the road, uneven, half
tumbling down, and overgrown with gray moss--the standing symbol of the
infinite patience and labor of a bygone generation. “Just think of all
the people who spent their lives carrying those stones, and cutting up
all this beautiful land into these little shut-in pastures.”
“Yes, but those rocks represent the clearing of fields for tillage. If
they hadn’t dug them out of the ground, they wouldn’t have had any
cause for Thanksgiving dinners. I’m extremely proud of my New England
blood, and I want to tell you right now, if it wasn’t for the New
England blood that went out to conquer the West, where would the West
be today?”
“That’s OK,” said Jean, a little crossly, “but if they had pioneered a
little bit right around here, there wouldn’t be so many run-down farms.
What I would like to do, now that Dad is getting well, is make Woodhow
our playground in summertime, and go back home in the winter.”
“Home,” he repeated, curiously.
“Yes, we were all born down in New York,” answered Jean, looking
south over the country landscape as though she could see Manhattan’s
panoramic skyline rising like a mirage of beckoning promises. “I’m
afraid that is home to me.”
Ralph was quiet while Jean was lost in her memories of her wonderful
visit with Beth in New York. Suddenly she turned to Ralph.
“I’m very confused,” she said. “I really don’t know what I want. The
only thing I am sure of is that I like you better than any boy I’ve
ever met.” Jean hesitated a little over this admission. “When I’m here
I long to be in New York, and when I was in New York I missed everybody
and everything in the country very much.”
“You’re still very young, Jean, but with your level head I’m sure
you’ll be able to make a decision soon. I, for one, am willing to
wait,” said Ralph.
16. Future Plans
“It always seems to me,” said Becky, the first time she drove down with
Billie to spend the day, “as if Maytime is a sort of fulfilled promise
to us, after the winter and spring. When I was a girl, spring up here
behaved itself. It was sweet and balmy and gentle, and now it’s turned
into an uncertain young tomboy. The weather doesn’t really begin to
settle until the middle of May, but when it does--” She drew in a deep
breath and smiled. “Just look around you at the beauty it gives us.”
She sat out on the tree seat in the garden that sloped from the south
side of the house. The terraces were a riot of spring bloom; tall gold
and purple flags grew side by side with dainty columbine and narcissus.
Along the stone walls white and purple lilacs flung their delicious
perfume to every passing breeze. The old apple trees that straggled
in uneven rows up through the hill pasture behind the barn had been
transformed into gorgeous splashy masses of pink bloom against the
tender green of young foliage.
“What’s Jean doing over there in the orchard?” Kit rose from her knees,
her fingers grimy with the soil, her face flushed and warm from her
labors, and answered her own question. “Why, she’s painting.”
Jean was out of their hearing. Frowning slightly, with compressed
lips, she bent over her work. She was sitting on the ground, her knees
supporting her drawing board. The week before she had sent off five
studies to Beth, and two of her very best ones down to Mr. Higgins.
Answers had come back from both, full of criticism, but with plenty
of encouragement, too. Mrs. Craig had read the two letters and given
her eldest the quick impulsive embrace which ever since her childhood
had been to Jean her highest reward of merit. But it was from her
father, perhaps, that she derived the greatest happiness. He laid one
arm around her shoulders, smiling at her with a certain whimsical
speculation in his keen eyes.
“Well, my dear, if you will persist in developing such talent, we
can’t afford to hide this light under a bushel. You should have more
training.”
“But when?” interrupted Jean. “It isn’t that I want to know for my own
pleasure, but you don’t know how fearfully precious these last years
in my teens seem to me. There’s such a terrible lot of things to learn
before I can really say I’ve finished.”
“And one of the first things you have to learn is just that you never
stop learning. That you never really start to learn until you know your
own limitations. Somewhere over there lies New York,” he said, looking
down the valley. “Often through the past year, I have stood looking in
that direction. I’ve got a job back there waiting--”
Jean interrupted, her face alight with gladness. “Oh, Dad, Dad, you do
want to go back. You don’t know how afraid I’ve been that you’d take
root up here and stay forever. I know it’s perfectly splendid, and it
has been a place of refuge for us all, but now that you are getting to
be just like your old self--”
Her father’s hand checked her.
“Steady there,” he warned. “Not quite so fast. I am still a little bit
uncertain when I try to speed up. We’ve got to be patient a little
while longer.”
Jean pressed his hand in hers and understood. If it had been hard for
them to be patient, it had been doubly so for him, groping his way back
slowly, the past year, on the upgrade to health.
Jean was thinking of their talk as she sat out in the orchard today,
trying to catch some of the fleeting beauty of its blossom-laden trees.
“How are you getting along, dear?” asked a well-known voice behind her.
“I don’t know, Dad,” said Jean, leaning back with her head on one side,
looking for all the world like a meditative brown thrush. “I can’t seem
to get that queer silver-gray effect. You take a day like this, just
before a rain, and it seems to underlie everything. I’ve tried dark
green and gray and sienna, and it doesn’t do a bit of good.”
“Mix a little Chinese black with every color you use,” said her father,
closing one eye to look at her painting. “It’s the old master’s trick.
You’ll find it in the Flemish school, and the Veronese. It gives you
the atmospheric gray quality in everything. Here come Ralph and Sally.”
Sally waved her hand, but joined Kit, Doris and Billie in the lower
garden at their grubbing for cutworms.
“If you put plenty of salt in the water when you sprinkle those, it’ll
help a lot,” she told them.
“Oh, we’ve salted them. We each took a bag of salt and went out
sprinkling one night, and then it rained, and I honestly believe it was
a tonic to the cutworm colony. The only thing to do, is go after them
and annihilate them.”
Ralph nodded to the group on the terrace, but went on up to the
orchard. Kit watched him with speculative eyes and spoke in her usual
impulsive fashion.
“Do you suppose he’s come here with the idea of taking Jean away?
Because if he has any such notions at all, I’d like to tell him she’s
not for him. If he thinks for one moment he’s going to throw her across
his saddle and carry her off to Saskatoon, he’s very much mistaken.”
Sally glanced up at the figures in the orchard, before she answered in
her slow, deliberate fashion. “I’m sure I don’t know, but Ralph said he
was coming back here every spring, so he can’t expect to take her away
this year.”
Ralph threw himself down in the grass beside Jean. She smiled at him,
then bent over her board, absently touching in some shadows on the
trunks of the trees. Her thoughts had wandered from the old orchard, as
they did so often these days. It was the future that seemed more real
to her, with its hopes and ambitions, than the present.
“Oh, Jean,” called Kit, “Becky’s going now.”
Ralph rose and caught her hand as she started to leave. “I hope your
ambitions carry you far, Jean,” he said earnestly. “Sally, Buzzy, Mrs.
Hancock and I are leaving for Saskatoon Monday morning and I’ll hardly
get over again since Buzzy and I are doing all the packing and crating,
but you’ll see me again next spring, won’t you?”
Jean looked up at him startled.
“Why, I didn’t know you were going so soon. Of course, I’ll see you
when you come back,” she said with a heavy heart. Heavier than she
would have wanted Ralph to see.
“I’ll come,” Ralph promised, and he stood where she left him, under the
blossoming apple trees, watching her as she joined her family circle.
Ralph had deliberately planned this abrupt goodbye. With his usual
thoughtfulness he did not want to influence Jean’s thinking.
As Jean walked back across the path to the lower terrace, her thoughts
were sad. Perhaps she would never see him again, perhaps she would
decide never to marry and to continue her art career, yet if she could
have known, many changes would take place in the next year that are
told in _Jean Craig Finds Romance_.
She shook off these unhappy thoughts and came up to the others smiling
and saying to Becky, “You’ll be over again to see us soon, won’t you?”
Becky gave her an understanding smile that seemed to say, “I’m always
here and you belong here too.”
Transcriber’s Note:
Punctuation has been standardised. Hyphenation has been retained as it
appears in the original publication. The following change was made:
Page 112
it still so bleak _changed to_
is still so bleak