her garden, and cherished it as she did her own children; the leaf from
Genesis is now in the family Bible, where the record is writ of her own
entry into The Garden. Mother would never let the Tree of Life be
grafted, for grafting was a thing that Johnny Appleseed discountenanced,
and many good varieties came from his seedlings; as it grew, two
branches of equal vigour started half a dozen feet above the ground; yet
when it came to bloom, one main branch bore white flowers, and the other
rose, while the apples of the white flowers were yellow with rosy
cheeks, and the fruit of the pink flowers golden russets.
“‘See, Adam,’ said my mother, the year that the tree blossomed (she had
christened me Adam because I was her first man child), ‘I will call one
branch Anice and the other John. What does it signify? That they are
united in the Tree of Life.’
“Not many years after, we heard that John Appleseed had come to plant at
the house that had once been ours, and after talking cheerfully at
supper, spoke of an unusual light that lingered after sunset, and the
clouds that were like a door opening in the heavens. After his evening
reading, he went to sleep as usual on the floor, leaving the door open,
for the night was mild. In the morning they came upon him, the rising
sunlight shining on his smiling face, for Anice had been allowed to open
the garden door at dawn.”
* * * * *
The bees hummed, and the petals of the apple blossoms fell upon us until
Father Adam broke the spell by saying, “It is turning four, and little
children should not stay out after dark, for the babes in the wood must
have had a cold, damp bed in spite of the robins.”
So we thanked him, wishing to ask many questions that we could not, and
pulling the faded blossoms from the chaise, took the flower branches
from the Tree of Life that he gave us together with a jar of honey, and
turning the way he pointed, up past the house, to the high-road, the
grays, old as they were, trotted gaily home.
Then I told father. “Yes,” he answered, “I know where you have been, to
Adam Kelby’s farm. A Methodist preacher of power, also a farmer and
raiser of fine stock, called Father by the hill people, because that’s
what he is to them one and all, never straying far from home. He was
born out in Ohio, and believes strange things about apple trees, and
holds them sacred, as the Druids did the oaks, some people say. Well, so
do I!” As for Johnny Appleseed, he was an actual being who lived and
toiled much as Adam has said.
* * * * *
We could not stay indoors that night, but sat on the back steps and
supped with the dogs, eating buttered bread in great slabs, with honey
to boot. Feasting slowly and dreamily, as pleases children who have been
out all day, and between whose mouthfuls the Sandman is beckoning.
As I finished my last bit, assisted by Lark, who has a sweet tooth, I
said half to myself, “We’ve certainly been a-Maying, but I wonder did we
play _make believe_, or are we really children who have found the Tree
of Life.” Evan echoed, “I wonder,” and straightway spread more honey on
his bread.
VI
WIND IN THE GRASS
=JUNE=—THE MOON OF STRAWBERRIES
“The Boy will go back to his mother’s people of course, and then at
last, Ernest, you will be free to carry out our plans,” said Eileen’s
clear voice, in which there was an unconscious note of uncertainty
mingled with expectancy. As she spoke, she gave her slender fishing rod
an unnecessary jerk that meshed line and hook in the tendrils of an
overhanging grape-vine.
Without speaking, her companion secured his own pole in a crotched tree,
and swinging out over the stream that rushed noisily past, quickly
disentangled the line; then, taking the rod from Eileen, he reeled up
the line and cast the fly deftly into the quiet pool below. Twice he
framed his lips to answer her question, but those two innocent words,
_our plans_, seemed to stop his voice; at his third essay, his line
played out swiftly while the reel sang the tune that the fisherman
loves. Then, after a short, exciting bit of play, a splendid brook
trout, more than a pound in weight, lay upon the moss beside Eileen.
“There is a King trout for you,” Ernest said; “could anything more
beautiful come out of the water?” and he made a fresh cast still farther
down the pool.
Eileen’s first glance of admiration changed as she watched the trout
quiver. “Put it back, please,” she cried; “now it’s a fairy thing, and
more beautiful than any jewels I ever saw; but as soon as the water
dries away it will only be a dead fish to be cooked and eaten. I love to
catch fish, it’s so exciting, but not to keep them.”
“Yes; but Eileen, after all, to be eaten, that is what it was made for,”
answered Ernest, in quiet, practical tones, yet smiling indulgently.
“The unkind thing would be to put it back and let it have its fight all
over again when some other fellow played it and it had learned fear.
Besides, have you forgotten that this is the last day of the fishing and
that we came out to get some trout for your father, who is sick and
needs tempting, that being your excuse for my leaving work?”
Then they glanced at one another, laughing; the trout went into the
creel, and the soft wind came down with the stream, laden with fragrance
of grape flowers and the courting ecstasies of birds, then escaped from
the trees, and was spread over the low meadows to the eastward, making
low music in the long grass, fit accompaniment to the bobolinks that
soared from it, singing.
Two more trout were caught in quick succession, then luck and the
morning turning together, the pair came out into the open fields under
the shade of a group of old willows, to free themselves of the weight of
rubber boots, and allow Eileen to rest a few moments after the rough
tramp down stream that had been half climbing and half wading.
May was withdrawing her veil, woven of apple blossoms in a green mist of
unfolding leaves, to reveal June’s young splendour, and for the two
sitting under the willows it was also early June; they were the children
of neighbours, and though their parents were of widely different
fortunes, they had been friends since Eileen had caught her first
sunfish on a pin and string arrangement, rigged by Ernest, and he, for
inattention to his lessons, had been forced to wear her pink shirred
sunbonnet at school.
Her father was a promoter and politician; his, a farmer and wagon-maker,
who, following an oft-repeated story, died just as his son had begun to
work his way through college. How often Eileen and he had planned what
he would do and be when this was accomplished, and she had done once and
for all with the city boarding school to which her mother’s, rather than
her father’s, ambition had consigned her. Now she had accomplished in a
way and returned, but for family reasons Ernest Wray, a born book-lover,
was still plodding in the old paths of his father, the wagon-maker.
“You hear the wind in the grass when you do not hear what I say,” said
Eileen, presently, in a tone half laughing, half pettish, as Ernest,
placing the creel in the water to keep the trout fresh, secured it from
floating away with a stone.
“Come and sit where you must look _at_ me and not beyond or through me,
and answer the question I asked you half an hour ago. When does the Boy
go to his mother’s people, so that you can carry out your plans?”
“Did you ask me that before?” said Ernest.
“Perhaps not in the same words, but the meaning was the same.”
“Then I did not hear you, for I thought you said _our plans_, Eileen.”
To the man, the girl stood for everything that beckoned him into the
future; to the girl, the man at this time was an indispensable comrade
when she was at home, upon whom she was eager to practise certain
school-taught theories. Her influence over him fed a growing vanity,
standing in the place of love, of which, as yet, she had really no
comprehension.
“Put it any way you choose, only tell me when you are going to send the
Boy to his relations,” she said, this time in a voice of assurance. “I
suppose it is too late now to rent the farm and sell the business before
autumn. Of course you are four years too late for college, but you might
still manage the law school. Father thinks that the trolley line through
the upper road into Bridgeton is an assured thing, and that before long
your farm could be turned into money for house lots; that is what we
mean to do with our land.”
“There is one unsurmountable objection to my doing all this, Eileen,”
said Ernest, speaking slowly, that his voice might not tremble; “I am
not going to send the Boy to his mother’s people, and I hope to sell
neither the farm nor the wagon shop for many years to come.”
Eileen stared at him in speechless amazement for a moment, when a new
idea came to her.
“Then your father left more money than was supposed, so that you can
send the Boy to school and keep the place while you study, though I
don’t see why you should bother with either him or it,” she said, half
angrily. “Surely, after being tied, all your life, to this hill country,
where nothing ever happens, you must long to get away as much as I do.”
“And you wish to get away? Of course you will like to travel, but not to
go away for good? Would you like to see your homestead cut up and the
brook turned into a drain for a new village?” he asked, quickly drawing
his eyes from hers to follow the stream.
“Of course it’s a lovely old place, and I’ve had lots of good times
there, but I’ve never expected to live in Oaklands all my life. Yes, I’m
even willing to go for good and all, I think, quite for the sake of
going. You know you were to come, too, and do fine things that should
get in the newspapers. Oh, Ernest, have you forgotten all the plans we
made before they built the sawmill dam, and we used to canoe from the
Ridge falls quite down to Moosatuck?”
The momentary warmth in her voice made him flush, even as he took a new
hold on himself to keep back the words that struggled for speech.
“No, Eileen, there is no more money than people thought, nor even as
much. The farm must be worked, and the wagon shop also, to give us a
living.”
“But why should you support the Boy,” she interrupted, growing
incoherent through her disappointment, “just because your father, when
he was past sixty, chose to marry a young woman from nobody knows where,
and then both died and left the Boy, only seven years old, who has no
claim on you, to drag you down? For father told me last night what I
never knew before, that house, land, and business all came from your
mother’s people.”
The man tingled hotly to know that his neighbour had been discussing the
intricacies of his family affairs with Eileen, but in another light it
gave him comfort. Her hardness toward the Boy was undoubtedly caught
from her father, not born of her own feelings. But she, lashing herself
more and more, persisted in her question: “Why should you support the
Boy? Why do you not send him to his mother’s people, if she had any?”
“Because I love him, Eileen, and he loves me and needs me. Young as he
is, he stifles his loneliness lest it should trouble me, or his mother
‘hear and be too sorry,’ as he puts it.” Ernest spoke quietly, all the
uncertainty that had swayed him ending. “His mother’s people live in a
crowded city. The Boy has an active mind in a frail body; he needs fresh
air and a quiet life if he is to live to manhood, Dr. Russell says;
shall I refuse him the chance?”
“And lose your own?”
“Possibly; if only one of us can have it, why not he as well as I?”
“What do you mean to do if you stay here? How can you keep house?”
“Turn the farm largely to fruit, and with helpers enlarge the wagon
shop; in spite of cheap Western makers, there is a good demand for
hand-made work wagons. As to the house, Aunt Louisa Taylor will care for
it, and between us, God willing, we will make the Boy into a man and let
him go to college for me. Do you know, Eileen, that a good many of the
world’s best soldiers have gone to the fight as substitutes for those
who could not, and the work was better done than it would have been by
those who grieved because they could not go?”
“Have you lost all your ambition, Ernest? Can you be content with such
an empty life? If any tongue but yours had told me of this absurd
sacrifice, I would not have believed it.”
“Not _all_ my ambition; I still have my books, and I can buy others. I
have my rod and my gun, and all outdoors, besides the Boy, and—memories
of what, until to-day, I thought might be. I believed that you cared for
me, Eileen, that you liked our old hills and their life; I thought that
you, too, loved the bird on the wing and the sound of the wind in the
grass. I knew that you would go away to travel for a long while,
perhaps, but I thought you would want to return.”
“I do care, Ernest, that is, in a way; but there must be something else
to do in my life besides merely caring. Father is going to take mother
and me abroad this summer. I was keeping it a secret to tell you to-day,
for I thought that you might join us; I’m so disappointed;” and the
golden head buried itself in the slender arms that were clasped about
the mossy stump of a fast-vanishing willow, and tears washed away the
steely look that sometimes crept into Eileen’s gray eyes.
As she crouched thus, a change seemed to come over the perfect June
morning; ragged clouds edged with rain came out of the west and darkened
the sun; the singing wind turned to a gale that beat a path before it
through the ox-eye daisies, and the ripening wild strawberries looked
like blood drops in the grass.
The change came and passed rapidly, and with it Eileen’s emotion, and in
a moment more they were strolling uphill toward her house as though
nothing had happened. True it was she could not picture Oaklands without
Ernest; that is, Ernest the man in the open, clad in his loose brown
suit, carrying rod and creel, a figure that her imagination turned into
a hero of romance. But the other Ernest, the man of the wagon shop,
sweat drops on his forehead and uprolled sleeves, superintending some
manipulation that he would not leave to the judgment of his workmen,
repelled her forcibly. It was this second man that she wished to conceal
from her friends of school and city. Many other women in country towns
have felt this way at twenty-two. That individual work of the hands has
fallen into disrepute is the fault of a feminine point of view as well
as the encroachment of machinery.
* * * * *
“When are you going away?” Ernest asked, as he paused at the kitchen
door and transferred the trout, wet moss and all, from the creel to the
dish that Eileen brought. It was an old-fashioned blue and white platter
with cut-off corners; in the centre was the picture of a ruined castle,
while the border was wrought in a shell pattern. Ernest had doubtless
seen it many times before, yet in the brief moment while he laid the
trout upon it every unimportant detail was fixed in his memory, together
with the outline of the ten pointed, flexible fingers, tanned with the
morning’s fishing, that held the dish.
“Won’t you come in and see father?” Eileen said, without looking up. “He
frets so at having to keep upstairs; only indigestion and overwork with
his head, the doctor says. This was the beginning of the idea of the
trip abroad, and at first, father wouldn’t go, but when he found that he
could combine business with the journey, he changed his mind.”
“Not to-day, Eileen, it’s nearly noon.” He might have added that the
great work wagon made for Mrs. Jenks-Smith of the Bluffs was to be sent
out that afternoon, and that he must go over every bolt and screw, after
his father’s habit, before it was delivered; but he refrained, as well
as from saying that the Boy would be waiting for him to come home to
dinner.
* * * * *
“Why didn’t Wray come in to dinner, and where is Eileen?” asked her
father of her mother, as an hour later he finished the second of the
delicately broiled trout with a relish that belied the symptoms of
indigestion.
“He was busy and couldn’t, and she’s downstairs writing letters, to see
if she can’t get one of her classmates to join our trip and make a
fourth; she thinks it makes pleasanter travelling.”
“Then she couldn’t coax Wray to go. Well, I’m glad; I thought he’d too
much sense to loaf about all summer, as I must. I hope they haven’t
quarrelled and she’s turned him down.”
“I thought that and put the question to her, but from what she says, I
guess he didn’t give her the chance. I think she’s vexed because he
intends to stick to the farm and wagon shop and keep his stepbrother
here, and I don’t blame her; a girl with her schooling and a father like
you can look higher than a man who works with his hands, even if he has
got a whole room full of books and goes down to read Shakespeare and
nose out county history that had much better be forgotten with Martin
Cortright. Eileen’s handsome, and she’s got a tongue in her head;
there’s no knowing what may happen or who she may meet in travelling, or
visiting some of her friends that are scattered all over the country.”
“Nonsense; I know very well what I _don’t_ wish to have happen. Wray is
worth ten of the pretty boys that lounge about nowadays, and haven’t
enough grip either of body or brain to stick to anything.”
Mrs. March, however, did not argue; she had no capacity for it, having
had pretty much her own way through life by the mere force of inertia.
She had cherished romantic ideals in her youth, but not to the extent of
marrying one of them. In fact, she had named her only daughter for the
heroine of a novel over which she had shed many comfortable tears, and
fortunately, Eileen, of a slimness and fairness hitherto unknown on
either side of the family, had grown into the name. Mrs. March was the
typical American woman of a country town who has means enough to go to
New York at intervals, who after forty regards Europe, indefinite and at
large, as the one aim and end of life and needed rest, but who, owing to
a limited intelligence, returns from _the_ tour sadder, much wearier,
but in no way wiser than when she left, in spite of a miscellaneous
collection of photographs and guide books.
* * * * *
Ernest Wray walked slowly uphill, his house being on the main road above
the Marches’, while the acres belonging to it climbed one above the
other, over the Ridge and down the other side. This road was the highway
between Banbury and Bridgeton, and there was a cheerful amount of
passing on it. As he pushed open the front gate, he looked about the
yard for the Boy, but saw no signs of him. A pair of setter pups came
from the porch to meet him, stumbling over their own great soft paws,
and fastening their sharp first teeth in his trouser hems, pulling him
backward at the same time that their shrill barks welcomed him.
Aunt Louisa Taylor (so called because she had ushered Ernest, as well as
most of the younger portion of the community, into the world) was
setting the dinner table in the little room out of the summer kitchen,
whose windows disclosed a view of both ranges of hills and the valley
between.
No, she had not seen the Boy; he had gone to look for wild strawberries
with Jeptha Lewis’s children a couple of hours before, Jeptha being the
head workman in the wagon shop. As she spoke, Ernest heard footsteps in
the room overhead, which was his own; and so he hastened upstairs,
calling the Boy’s name, which was Asa, after his father, though when
people spoke of him among themselves, they usually said the Boy, because
it seemed to distinguish this child of an old man from all other boys of
the neighbourhood.
No answer came, so going to the Boy’s room, the great south chamber that
had been the child’s mother’s, and finding it empty, Ernest went on to
his own, where in a heap on the floor, his head buried in the
white-knitted quilt, half crouched, half knelt the Boy. At first Ernest
was startled, thinking the child was ill, or had perhaps picked and
eaten something poisonous. But as he turned his face up to his
half-brother, the expression was of misery of mind, not body.
Sitting in the low rush-bottomed rocker, Ernest drew the Boy to him
tenderly, so that the pale, downcast face rested against his shoulder.
Raising it gently in his hands, he said, “What is it, Asa? tell big
brother.”
“I can’t, oh, I can’t say it,” sobbed the child, yet without shedding a
tear. “It’s the Brown boys that told me, and their mother _knows_ it’s
true.”
(As the widow Brown had made desperate but unsuccessful efforts to
become his housekeeper instead of Aunt Louisa, and annex her unruly
brood to his household, Ernest quickly conjectured the report that had
reached the Boy.)
“Very well, then, if little brother cannot say it, big brother must try;
only look up and say Yes and No, so that he may know that he is guessing
right. They said, perhaps, that I am going away and that you are going
to live far off with strangers?”
“Yes.”
“They said that everything here belongs to me and nothing to you?”
“Yes.”
“They told you that one day I would marry some one who was very
beautiful, like a princess in a fairy tale, and that I should not care
for you any more?”
“Yes, oh, yes, that was the worst of all!”
“I have also heard all this, but it is not true.”
“Not even a word, brother?”
“Not even a word.”
“And you want me for always?” said the child, now standing before him
and searching the man’s very soul with his solemn brown eyes.
“Only God and your mother know how much.”
“Can I bring my bed right in here close to yours, and put my story-books
in the little shelves by yours, and just keep that big lonely room to
play in when it’s wet? Yes?”
Then, clasping his arms tight around the man’s neck in an ecstasy of
relief, he whispered, “Can I have one more wish, just one more?”
“What is it, Boy? You must name it first, in fair play, you know.”
“May I call you daddy? Boys can have lots of brothers, but a daddy’s
very special, and there’s never only one of him, just like you.”
Ernest waited a moment before he answered, for something swayed him that
was stronger than his will, impelling him to cry out, “No, not that!”
And then he whispered back, “Yes, Boy, from now on;” and clasping the
child in a way that almost hurt, he kissed him on the forehead.
Thus was the compact sealed.
The tension over, the Boy, who could not realize what the other’s
promise meant, speedily became a child again, and freeing himself,
cried, “Now I shall be here to see the Thrashers hatch out; there’s four
eggs in the nest in last year’s pea brush down by the fence; do let us
go over and see them, Daddy; if we don’t poke them, they won’t mind.”
Then, as they looked across the fields, the Boy laid his cheek against
the man’s, and nestling, murmured in a voice of deep content: “Isn’t it
a lovely, lovely day, and everything is so happy. Listen: now I can hear
the wind talking in the grass, just as you say it talks to you.”
* * * * *
The summer hurried on and slipped away, as it has a way of doing after
the rose and strawberry have held their garden carnival, where each
crowns the other.
In July the Marches went abroad. Ernest had not broken his habit of
dropping in at his neighbour’s house, but he had seen less and less of
Eileen, who, very naturally, was absorbed in her preparations and the
visit of the young woman who was to be her companion. Before leaving,
Eileen had sent Ernest a photograph of herself taken in the filmy summer
gown she had last worn. Why she did it, she herself could not have told;
neither could Ernest have fathomed her motive if he had tried.
He was about to slip the card into a drawer, then hesitated, and taking
from his mantel-shelf in the living-room a picture of Eileen at sixteen,
plump, wide-eyed, and serene, for which, at the time, he had carved a
somewhat clumsy frame of tulip wood, he substituted the new picture of
the lovely, graceful woman with birdlike poise of head and expression,
for the old, placing it on his desk.
The Boy, coming in, spied the photograph, and always alert for new
impressions, climbed on a chair to look at it, crying, “Oh, Daddy, isn’t
this Eileen pretty? She looks up at me just like Pandora peeping up from
the box, or a wood-thrush when it’s going to sing. She’s prettier than
the Sleeping Beauty in my book. I want to take her up to live on our
bureau and be our fairy Princess; may I?”
And the man, wishing to say No, as in many other things the boy asked,
answered, “Yes.”
* * * * *