THERE is something in the air of June that stirs even insentient things
with a longing to blossom. Staid old universities blaze out with the
gala colours of commencement week, when the month of roses is ushered
in, and on every college campus the social life of the student year
comes to flower in the crowning exercises of class-day.
One wonders sometimes if the roots, burrowing underground in order to
fill the bush overhead with myriads of roses, have any share in the
thrill of success at having produced such a wealth of sweetness and
beauty. But there need be no surmise about college florescence.
Faculties may beam with complacency on their yearly cluster of
full-blown graduates, the very walls of the gray old universities may
thrill as they echo the applause of admiring audiences, but the greatest
pride is not felt within the college town itself where the student life
centres. It is back in the roots that have made college life possible.
Back in some parental existence that daily sinks itself farther into the
commonplace in order that some son or daughter may blossom into the
culture of arts and belles-lettres. The Jacqueminot that flaunts its
glory over the garden wall may not sweeten life for the fibres that lift
it, but the valedictorian who flaunts his diploma and degree in the
classic halls of some sea-board college may be glorifying the air of
some little backwoods village a thousand miles inland. Even the
Cross-Roads are bound with a network of such far-reaching roots to the
commencements of Harvard and Yale.
It was Cy Akers's boy who came home this June, a little lifted up,
perhaps, by the honours he had won; thoroughly impressed with the
magnitude of his own knowledge and the meagreness of other peoples', but
honestly glad at first to get back to the old home and neighbours.
The family pride in him was colossal. Old Cy encouraged his visits to
the Cross-Roads store, inventing excuses for going which he considered
the acme of subtle diplomacy. But his motives were as transparent as a
child's. Illiterate himself, he wanted his neighbours to see what
college had done for his boy in the way of raising him head and
shoulders above them all. And the boy was good-naturedly compliant. He
was as willing to show off mentally as he had been to lend a hand in the
wheat harvest, and demonstrate what football training had done for him
in the way of developing muscle.
Like Perkins's oldest, his education had begun with the primer of the
Cross-Roads. He could remember the time when he, too, had ignorantly
believed this to be the only store in the universe, and wondered if
there were enough people living to consume all its contents. Now he
smiled to himself when he looked around the stuffy little room and saw
the same old butter firkins crowding the--apparently--same old calico
and crockery, and looked up at the half-dozen hams still swinging
sociably from the low rafters.
Time had been, too, when he thought the men who gossiped around its
rusty stove on Saturday afternoons knew everything. Like Perkins's
oldest, he had unquestioningly formulated the creed of his boyhood from
their conversations, and he smiled again when he recalled how he had
been warped in those early days by their prejudices and short-sighted
opinions.
The smile extended outwardly when he walked into their midst to find
them repeating the same old saws about the weather, and the way the
country was going to the dogs. Yet in his salad days these time-honoured
prognostications had seemed to him the wisdom of seers and sages.
Probably it was the thought that he had travelled far beyond the
narrow confines of the Cross-Roads that gave his conversation a
patronising tone. But the Cross-Roads refused to be patronised. He
learned that on the day of his arrival. It was the first lesson of a
valuable post-graduate course. That a man away from home may be Mister
Robert Harrison Hamilton Akers, with all the A. B.'s and LL. D.'s after
his name that an educational institution can bestow; but as soon as he
sets foot again on his native heath, where he has gone through the
vicissitudes of boyhood, he is shorn of titles and degrees as completely
as Samson was shorn of his locks, and his strength straightway falls
from him. He is nobody but Bobby Akers, and everybody remembers when he
robbed birds' nests, and stole grapes, and played hooky, and was a
little freckle-faced, snub-nosed neighbourhood terror. A man cannot
maintain his importance long in the face of such reminiscences. No
amount of university culture is going to lay the ghost of youthful
indiscretions, and he might as well put his patronising proclivities in
his pocket. They will not be tolerated by those who have patted him on
the head when he wore roundabouts.
* * * * *
It was Saturday afternoon, but it was also the and of the wheat-harvest,
and the men were afield who usually gathered on the Cross-Roads porch to
round up the week over their pipes and plugs of chewing tobacco. Only
three chairs were tilted back against the wall, and on these, with their
heels caught over the front rungs, sat Bowser, the old miller, and
Robert Akers.
The whirr of reaping machines came faintly up from the fields and near
by, where several acres of waving yellow grain still stood uncut, a
bob-white whistled cheerily. No one was talking. "Knee-deep in June"
would have voiced the thoughts of the trio, for they were "Jes' a sort
o' lazein' there," with their hats pulled over their eyes, enjoying to
the utmost the perfect afternoon. Every breeze was redolent with red
clover and wild honeysuckle, and vibrant with soothing country sounds.
"Who is that coming up the road?" asked the miller, as a team and wagon
appeared over the brow of the hill.
"They wabble along like Duncan Smith's horses," answered the
storekeeper, squinting his eyes for a better view. "Yes, that's who it
is. That's Dunk on the top of the load. Moving again, bless Pete!"
As the wagon creaked slowly nearer, a feather bed came into view,
surmounting a motley collection of household goods, and perched upon it,
high above the jangle of her jolting tins and crockery, sat Mrs. Duncan
Smith. A clock and a looking-glass lay in her lap, and, like a wise
virgin, in her hands she carefully bore the family lamp. From frequent
and anxious turnings of her black sunbonnet, it was evident that she was
keeping her weather eye upon the chicken-coop, which was bound to the
tail-board of the wagon by an ancient clothes-line.
A flop-eared dog trotted along under the wagon. Squeezed in between a
bureau and the feather bed, two shock-headed children sat on a flour
barrel, clutching each other at every lurch of the crowded van to keep
from losing their balance.
"Howdy, Dunk!" called the storekeeper, as the dusty pilgrims halted in
front of the porch. "Where are you bound now?"
"Over to the old Neal place," answered the man, handing the reins to
his wife, and climbing stiffly down over the wheel. Going around to the
back of the wagon, he unstrapped a kerosene can which swung from the
pole underneath.
"Gimme a gallon of coal-ile, Jim," he said. "I don't want to be left in
the dark the first night, anyway. It takes awhile to git your bearings
in a strange place, and it's mighty confusing to butt agin a half-open
door where you've always been used to a plain wall, and it hurts like
fire to bark your shins on a rocking-chair when you're steering straight
for bed, and hain't no idee it's in the road. This time it'll be a
little more so than usual," he added, handing over the can. "The house
backs up agin a graveyard, you know. Sort o' spooky till you git used to
it."
"What on earth did you move there for?" asked Bowser. "They say the
place is ha'nted."
"To my mind the dead make better neighbours than the living," came the
tart reply from the depths of the black sunbonnet. "At any rate, they
mind their own business."
"Oh, come now, Mrs. Smith," began Bowser, good-naturedly. "Maybe you've
been unfortunate in your choice of neighbours."
"I've had a dozen different kinds," came the emphatic answer. "This'll
make the twelfth move in eight years, so you can't say that I'm speaking
from hearsay."
"Twelve moves in eight years!" exclaimed Bowser, as the wagon went
lurching and creaking on through the dust. "There's gipsy blood in that
Dunk Smith, sure as you live. Seems like that family can't be satisfied
anywhere; always thinking they can better themselves by changing, and
always getting out of the frying-pan into the fire. There wa'n't no well
in the place where they settled when they was first married, and they
had to carry water from a spring. The muscle put into packing that water
up-hill those six months would have dug a cistern, but they were too
short-sighted to see that. They jest played Jack and Jill as long as
they could stand it, and then moved to a place where there was a cistern
already dug. But there wa'n't any fruit on that place. If they'd have
set out trees right away they'd have been eating from orchards of their
own planting by this time. But they thought it was easier to move to
where one was already set out.
"Then when they got to a place where they had both fruit and water, it
was low, and needed draining. The water settled around the house, and
they all had typhoid that summer. Oh, they've spent enough energy
packing up and moving on and settling down again in new places to have
fixed the first one up to a queen's taste. They seem to be running a
perpetual Home-seeker's Excursion. Well, such a life might suit some
people, but it would never do for me."
"But such a life has some things in its favour," put in Rob Akers,
always ready to debate any question that offered, for the mere pleasure
of arguing. "It keeps a man from getting into a rut, and develops his
ability to adapt himself to any circumstance. A man who hangs his hat on
the same peg for fifty or sixty years gets to be so dependent on that
peg that he would be uncomfortable if it were suddenly denied him. Now
Dunk Smith can never become such a slave to habit. Then, too, moving
tends to leave a man more unhampered. He gradually gets rid of
everything in his possessions but the essentials. He hasn't a garret
full of old claptraps, as most people have who never move from under
their ancestral roof-trees. You saw for yourself, one wagon holds all
his household goods and gods.
"It is the same way with a man mentally. If he stays in the spot where
his forefathers lived, in the same social conditions, he is apt to let
his upper story accumulate a lot of worn-out theories that he has no
earthly use for; all their old dusty dogmas and cob-webbed beliefs. He
will hang on to them as on to the old furniture, because he happened to
inherit them. If he would move once in awhile, keep up with the times,
you know, he'd get rid of a lot of rubbish. It is especially true in
regard to his religion. All those old superstitions, for instance, about
Jonah and the whale, and Noah's ark and the like.
"He hangs on to them, not because he cares for them himself, but
because they were his father's beliefs, and he doesn't like to throw out
anything the old man had a sentiment for. Now, as I say, if he'd move
once in awhile--do some scientific thinking and investigating on his own
account--he'd throw out over half of what he holds on to now. He'd cut
the most of Genesis out of his Bible, and let Job slide as a myth. One
of the finest bits of literature, to be sure, that can be found
anywhere, but undoubtedly fiction. The sooner a man moves on
untrammelled, I say, by those old heirlooms of opinion, the better
progress he will make."
"Toward what?" asked the old miller, laconically. "Dunk's moving next
door to the graveyard." There was a twinkle in his eye, and the young
collegian, who flattered himself that his speech was making a profound
impression, paused with the embarrassing consciousness that he was
affording amusement instead.
"The last time I went East to visit my grandson," said the old man,
meditatively, "his wife showed me a mahogany table in her dining-room
which she said was making all her friends break the tenth commandment.
It was a handsome piece of furniture, worth a small fortune. It was
polished till you could see your face in it, and I thought it was the
newest thing out in tables till she told me she'd rummaged it out of her
great-grandmother's attic, and had it 'done over' as she called it. It
had been hidden away in the dust and cobwebs for a lifetime because it
had been pronounced too time-worn and battered and scratched for longer
use; yet there it stood, just as beautiful and useful for this
generation to spread its feasts on as it was the day it was made. Every
whit as substantial, and aside from any question of sentiment, a
thousand times more valuable than the one that Dunk Smith drove past
with just now. His table is modern, to be sure, but it's of cheap pine,
too rickety to serve even Dunk through his one short lifetime of
movings.
"I heard several lectures while I was there, too. One was by a man who
has made a name for himself on both sides of the water as a scientist
and a liberal thinker. He took up Genesis, all scratched and battered as
it is by critics, and showed us how it had been misunderstood and
misconstrued. And by the time he'd polished up the meaning here and
there, so that we could see the original grain of the wood, what it was
first intended to be, it seemed like a new book, and fitted in with all
the modern scientific ideas as if it had been made only yesterday.
"There it stood, like the mahogany table that had been restored after
people thought they had stowed it away in the attic to stay. Just as
firm on its legs, and as substantial for this generation to put its
faith on, as it was in the days of the Judges.
"Take an old man's word for it, Robert, who has lived a long time and
seen many a restless Dunk Smith fling out his father's old heirlooms, in
his fever to move on to something new. Solid mahogany, with all its dust
and scratches, is better than the modern flimsy stuff, either in faith
or furniture, that he is apt to pick up in its stead."