When David came down to his supper, all traces of the day's labor that
were removable had disappeared. He was clean; and his working clothes
had been laid aside for the cheap black-cloth suit, which he had been
used to wear on Sundays while he was a student. Grave, gentle, looking
tired but looking happy, with his big shock head of hair and a face
rugged and majestical like a youthful Beethoven. A kind mouth, most of
all, and an eye of wonderfully deep intelligence.
The narrow, uncarpeted stairway down which he had noisily twisted his
enormous figure, with some amusement, as always, had brought him to the
dining room. This was situated between the kitchen and his father's and
mother's bedroom. The door of each of these stood ajar, and some of the
warmth of the stove on one side and of the grate on the other dried and
tempered the atmosphere.
His mother sat in her place at the head of the table, quietly waiting
for him, and still holding in one hand the partially eaten biscuit As
he took his seat, she rose, and, walking listlessly to the kitchen
door, made a listless request of one of the two negro women. When the
coffee had been brought in, standing, she poured out a cup, sweetened,
stirred, and tasted it, and putting the spoon into it, placed it before
him. Then she resumed her seat (and the biscuit) and looked on,
occasionally scrutinizing his face, with an expression perhaps the most
tragic that can ever be worn by maternal eyes: the expression of a
lowly mother who has given birth to a lofty son, and who has neither
the power to understand him, nor the grace to realize her own
inferiority.
She wore, as usual, a dress of plain mourning, although she had not the
slightest occasion to mourn--at least, from the matter of death. In the
throat of this was caught a large, thin, oval-shaped breastpin,
containing a plait of her own and her husband's hair, braided together;
and through these there ran a silky strand cut from David's head when
an infant, and long before the parents discovered how unlike their
child was to themselves. This breastpin, with the hair of the three
heads of the house intertwined, was the only symbol in all the world of
their harmony or union.
Around her shoulders she had thrown, according to her wont, a home-knit
crewel shawl of black and purple. Her hair, thick and straight and
pasted down over the temples of her small head, looked like a long-used
wig. Her contracted face seemed to have accumulated the wrinkles of the
most drawn-out, careworn life. Yet she was not old; and these were not
the lines of care; for her years had been singularly uneventful
and--for her--happy. The markings were, perhaps, inherited from the
generations of her weather-beaten, toiling, plain ancestors--with the
added creases of her own personal habits. For she lived in her house
with the regularity and contentment of an insect in a dead log. And few
causes age the body faster than such wilful indolence and monotony of
mind as hers--the mind, that very principle of physical youthfulness.
Save only that it can also kill the body ere it age it; either by too
great rankness breaking down at once the framework on which it has been
reared, or afterward causing this to give way slowly under the fruitage
of thoughts, too heavy any longer to be borne.
That from so dark a receptacle as this mother there should have emerged
such a child of light, was one of those mysteries that are the
perpetual delight of Nature and the despair of Science. This did not
seem one of those instances--also a secret of the great Creatress--in
which she produces upon the stem of a common rose a bud of alien
splendor. It was as if potter's clay had conceived marble. The
explanation of David did not lie in the fact that such a mother had
produced him.
One of the truest marks of her small, cold mind was the rigid tyranny
exercised over it by its own worthless ideas. Had she not sat beside
her son while he ate, had she not denied herself the comfort of the
fireside in the adjoining room, in order that she might pour out for
him the coffee that was unfit to be drunk, she would have charged
herself with being an unfaithful, undutiful mother. But this done, she
saw no further, beheld nothing of the neglect, the carelessness, the
cruelty, of all the rest, part of which this very moment was outspread
beneath her eyes.
For at the foot of the table, where David's father had sat, were two
partly eaten dishes: one of spare-rib, one of sausage. The gravy in
each had begun to whiten into lard. Plates heaped with cornbread and
with biscuit, poorly baked and now cold, were placed on each side. In
front of him had been set a pitcher of milk; this rattled, as he poured
it, with its own bluish ice. On all that homely, neglected board one
thing only put everything else to shame. A single candle, in a low,
brass candlestick in the middle of the table, scarce threw enough light
to reveal the scene; but its flame shot deep into the golden,
crystalline depths of a jar of honey standing close beside it--honey
from the bees in the garden--a scathing but unnoticed rebuke from the
food and housekeeping of the bee to the food and housekeeping of the
woman.
Work in the hemp fields leaves a man's body calling in every tissue for
restoration of its waste. David had hardly taken his seat before his
eye swept the prospect before him with savage hope. In him was the
hunger, not of toil alone, but of youth still growing to manhood, of
absolute health. Whether he felt any mortification at his mother's
indifference is doubtful. Assuredly life-long experience had taught him
that nothing better was to be expected from her. How far he had
unconsciously grown callous to things as they were at home, there is no
telling. Ordinarily we become in such matters what we must; but it is
likewise true that the first and last proof of high personal
superiority is the native, irrepressible power of the mind to create
standards which rise above all experience and surroundings; to carry
everywhere with itself, whether it will or not, a blazing, scorching
censorship of the facts that offend it. Regarding the household
management of his mother, David at least never murmured; what he
secretly felt he alone knew, perhaps not even he, since he was no
self-examiner. As to those shortcomings of hers which he could not fail
to see, for them he unconsciously showed tenderest compassion.
She had indulged so long her sloth even in the operation of thinking,
that few ideas now rose from the inner void to disturb the apathetic
surface; and she did not hesitate to recur to any one of these any
number of times in a conversation with the same person.
"What makes you so late?"
"I wanted to finish a shock. Then there was the feeding, and the wood
to cut. And I had to warm my room up a little before I could wash."
"Is it going to snow?"
"It's hard to say. The weather looks very unsettled and threatening.
That's one reason why I wanted to finish my shock."
There was silence for a while. David was too ravenous to talk; and his
mother's habit was to utter one sentence at a time.
"I got three fresh eggs to-day; one had dropped from the roost and
frozen; it was cracked, but it will do for the coffee in the morning."
"Winter must be nearly over if the hens are beginning to lay: THEY
know. They must have some fresh nests."
"The cook wants to kill one of the old ones for soup to-morrow."
"What an evil-minded cook!"
It was with his mother only that David showed the new cheerfulness that
had begun to manifest itself in him since his return from college. She,
however, did not understand the reasons of this and viewed it
unfavorably.
"We opened a hole in the last hill of turnips to-day."
She spoke with uneasiness.
"There'll be enough to last, I reckon, mother."
"You needn't pack any more chips to the smoke-house: the last meat's
smoked enough."
"Very well, then. You shall have every basketful of them for your own
fire."
"If you can keep them from the negroes: negroes love chips."
"I'll save them while I chop. You shall have them, if I have to catch
them as they fly."
His hunger had been satisfied: his spirits began to rise.
"Mother, are you going to eat that piece of biscuit? If not, just hand
it over to me, please."
She looked dryly down at the bread in her fingers: humor was denied
her--that playfulness of purest reason.
David had commenced to collect a plateful of scraps--the most
appetizing of the morsels that he himself had not devoured. He rose and
went out into the porch to the dog.
"Now, mother," he said, reentering; and with quiet dignity he preceded
her into the room adjoining.
His father sat on one side of the fireplace, watching the open door for
the entrance of his son. He appeared slightly bent over in his chair.
Plainly the days of rough farm-work and exposure were over for him,
prematurely aged and housed. There was about him--about the shape and
carriage of the head--in the expression of the eye most of all,
perhaps,--the not wholly obliterated markings of a thoughtful and
powerful breed of men. His appearance suggested that some explanation
of David might be traceable in this quarter. For while we know nothing
of these deep things, nor ever shall, in the sense that we can supply
the proofs of what we conjecture; while Nature goes ever about her
ancient work, and we cannot declare that we have ever watched the
operations of her fingers, think on we will, and reason we must, amid
her otherwise intolerable mysteries. Though we accomplish no more in
our philosophy than the poor insect, which momentarily illumines its
wandering through the illimitable night by a flash from its own body.
Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother, there
seemed some gleams of light discernible in that between father and son.
For there are men whom nature seems to make use of to connect their own
offspring not with themselves but with earlier sires. They are like
sluggish canals running between far-separated oceans--from the deeps of
life to the deeps of life, allowing the freighted ships to pass. And no
more does the stream understand what moves across its surface than do
such commonplace agents comprehend the sons who have sprung from their
own loins. Here, too, is one of Nature's greatest cruelties to the
parent.
As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors if
brought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image of
them--the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, of
certain elements of character found of old in the stock and line. He
could not have understood how it was possible for him to transmit to
the boy a nature which he himself did not actively possess. And,
therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's mysterious
returns, after a long period of quiescence, to her suspended activities
and the perpetuation of an interrupted type, so that his son was but
another strong link of descent joined to himself, a weak one; instead
of this, he saw only with constant secret resentment that David was at
once unlike him and his superior.
These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; such
comradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again the
primeval bond of Man against Nature--the brotherhood, at least, of the
merely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat, hopes, and
disappointments, their minds had never met. The father had never felt
at home with his son; David, without knowing why--and many a sorrowful
hour it had cost him--had never accepted as father the man who had
brought him into the world. Each soon perceived that a distance
separated them which neither could cross, though vainly both should
try, and often both did try, to cross it.
As he sat in the chimney-corner to-night, his very look as he watched
the door made it clear that he dreaded the entrance of his son; and to
this feeling had lately been added deeper estrangement.
When David walked in, he took a seat in front of the fire. His mother
followed, bringing the sugar-bowl and the honey, which she locked in a
closet in the wall: the iron in her blood was parsimony. Then she
seated herself under the mantelpiece on the opposite side and looked
silently across at the face of her husband. (She was his second wife.
His offspring by his first wife had died young. David was the only
child of mature parents.) She looked across at him with the complacent
expression of the wife who feels that she and her husband are one, even
though their offspring may not be of them. The father looked at David;
David looked into the fire. There was embarrassment all round.
"How are you feeling to-night, father?" he asked affectionately, a
moment later, without lifting his eyes.
"I've been suffering a good deal. I think it's the weather."
"I'm sorry."
"Do you think it's going to snow?"
The husband had lived so long and closely with his wife, that the
mechanism of their minds moved much like the two wall-clocks in
adjoining rooms of the house; which ticked and struck, year after year,
never quite together and never far apart. When David was first with one
and then with another, he was often obliged to answer the same
questions twice--sometimes thrice, since his mother alone required two
identical responses. He replied now with his invariable and patient
courtesy--yet scarcely patient, inasmuch as this did not try him.
"What made you so late?"
David explained again.
"How much hemp did you break?"
"I didn't weigh it, father. Fifty or sixty pounds, perhaps."
"How many more shocks are there in the field?"
"Twelve or fifteen. I wish there were a hundred."
"I wish so, too," said David's mother, smiling plaintively at her
husband.
"John Bailey was here after dinner," remarked David's father. "He has
sold his crop of twenty-seven acres for four thousand dollars. Ten
dollars a hundred."
"That's fine," said David with enthusiasm, thinking regretfully of
their two or three acres.
"Good hemp lands are going to rent for twenty or twenty-five dollars an
acre in the spring," continued his father, watching the effect of his
words.
David got up, and going to the door, reached around against the wall
for two or three sticks of the wood he had piled there. He replenished
the fire, which was going down, and resumed his seat.
For a while father and son discussed in a reserved way matters
pertaining to the farm: the amount of feed in the barn and the chances
of its lasting; crops to be sown in the spring, and in what fields; the
help they should hire--a new trouble at that time. For the negroes,
recently emancipated, were wandering hither and thither over the farms,
or flocking to the towns, unused to freedom, unused to the very wages
they now demanded, and nearly everywhere seeking employment from any
one in preference to their former masters as part of the proof that
they were no longer in slavery. David's father had owned but a single
small family of slaves: the women remained, the man had sought work on
one of the far richer estates in the neighborhood.
They threshed over once more the straw of these familiar topics and
then fell into embarrassed silence. The father broke this with an
abrupt, energetic exclamation and a sharp glance:--
"If hemp keeps up to what it is now, I am going to put in more."
"Where?" asked the son, quietly. "I don't see that we have any ground
to spare."
"I'll take the woods."
"FATHER!" cried David, wheeling on him.
"I'll take the woods!" repeated his father, with a flash of anger, of
bitterness. "And if I'm not able to hire the hands to clear it, then
I'll rent it. Bailey wants it. He offered twenty-five dollars an acre.
Or I'll sell it," he continued with more anger, more bitterness. "He'd
rather buy it than rent."
"How could we do without the woods?" inquired the son, looking like one
dazed,--"without the timber and the grazing?"
"What will we do without the woods?" cried his father, catching up the
words excitedly. "What will we do without the FARM?"
"What do you mean by all this, father? What is back of it?" cried
David, suddenly aroused by vague fears.
"I mean," exclaimed the father, with a species of satisfaction in his
now plain words, "I mean that Bailey wants to buy the farm. I mean that
he urges me to sell out for my own good! tells me I must sell out! must
move! leave Kentucky! go to Missouri--like other men when they fail."
"Go to Missouri," echoed the wife with dismal resignation, smiling at
her husband.
"Have you sold it?" asked David, with flushed, angry face.
"No."
"Nor promised?"
"No!"
"Then, father, don't! Bailey is trying again to get the farm away from
you. You and mother shall never sell your home and move to Missouri on
my account."
The son sat looking into the fire, controlling his feelings. The father
sat looking at the son, making a greater effort to control his. Both of
them realized the poverty of the place and the need of money.
The hour was already past the father's early bed-time. He straightened
himself up now, and turning his back, took off his coat, hung it on the
back of his chair, and began to unbutton his waistcoat, and rub his
arms. The mother rose, and going to the high-posted bed in a corner of
the room, arranged the pillows, turned down the covers, and returning,
sat provisionally on the edge of her chair and released her breastpin.
David started up.
"Mother, give me a candle, will you?"
He went over with her to the closet, waited while she unlocked it and,
thrusting her arm deep into its disordered depths, searched till she
drew out a candle. No good-night was spoken; and David, with a look at
his father and mother which neither of them saw, opened and closed the
door of their warm room, and found himself in the darkness outside at
the foot of the cold staircase.