Also Bess and I woke to find ourselves heroines. Matthew came to breakfast
after he had seen the lamps in his mock hens burning brightly, and brought
Polly with him to congratulate us on the rescue of our infant industry.
Polly had told him of our brilliant coup against old Jack Frost, and he was
all enthusiasm, as was also Uncle Cradd, while father beamed because he was
hearing me praised and thought of something else at the same time. Later
Owen Murray came out for Bess in his car, and insisted on buying six more
of the eggs, because, he said, they had now become a sporting proposition
and interested him. Bess agreed to board them to maturity in her
conservatory for him at fifty cents a day per head and let him visit them
at any time. He gave me a check immediately. He offered to buy six of
Polly's chicks at the same price, but Matthew refused to let her sell them
at all, and also Bess refused to have any mixing of breeds in her
conservatory. Polly didn't know enough to resent losing the hundred and
twenty dollars, because she had never had more than fifty cents in her
life, and Matthew didn't realize what it would have meant to her to have
that much money, because he had more than he needed all his life, so they
were all happy and laughed through one of Rufus' worst hog effusions in the
way of a meal for lunchers, but--but I had in a month learned to understand
what a dollar might mean to a man or woman, and at the thought of that two
hundred and forty dollars Mr. G. Bird and family had earned for me in their
second month of my ownership my courage arose and girded up its loins for
the long road ahead. I knew enough to know that these returns were a kind
of isolated nugget in the poultry business, and yet why not?
"We'll sell Mr. Evan Baldwin a five-hundred-dollar gold egg yet, Mr. G.
Bird," I said to myself.
After luncheon they all departed and left me to my afternoon's work.
Matthew lingered behind the others and helped me feed the old red ally and
Mrs. Ewe and Peckerwood Pup.
"I was talking to Evan Baldwin at the club after his first lecture the
other night and, Ann, I believe I'll be recruited for the plow as well as
for the machine-gun. I'm going to buy some land out there back of the
Beesleys' and raise sheep on it. He says Harpeth is losing millions a year
by not raising sheep. I'm going to live at Riverfield a lot of the time and
motor back and forth to business. Truly, Ann, the land bug has bit me
and--and it isn't just--just to come up on your blind side. But, dear, now
don't you think that it would be nice for me to live over here with you as
a perfectly sympathetic agricultural husband?"
"I needed a husband so much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the
rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's
proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid
monotony in the wit of my answers.
"I'm never in time to do a single thing on this place, and I don't see how
everything gets done for you without my help. Who helps you?"
"Everybody," I answered. I had never had the courage to break Adam to
Matthew in the long weeks I had been seeing them both every day, and of
course Pan had never come out of the woods when Matthew or any of the rest
were there. "I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said, with a sudden
inspiration about getting rid of him, for the red-headed Peckerwood had
promised to come and put some kind of hoodoo earth around the peonies and
irises and pinks in my garden, also to bud some kind of a new rose on one
of the old blush ones, and I wanted the place quiet so he would venture
out of his lair. "You can go on to town and look after Polly carefully. She
is going in with Bess for the first time since their infatuation, and I
want her eyes to open gradually on the world out over Paradise Ridge."
"Ann, ought they ever to open?" asked Matthew, suddenly, with the color
coming up to the roots of his hair and burning in his ears like it still
does in Bud Corn-tassel's when he comes over to see or help me or to bring
me something from Aunt Mary, his mother. "Bess is one of the best of
friends I've got in the world, but I just--just couldn't see Corn-tassel
dancing in some man's arms in the mere hint of an evening gown that Bess
occupied while fox-trotting with Evan Baldwin at the club the other night."
"Who was the belle of the ball, Matt?" I asked him, with a flame in my
cheeks, for the pink and lavender chiffon gown Bess had worn was one of
the Voudaine creations that I had brought from Paris and sold her after the
crash.
"Oh, Bess always is when you are not there and, Ann, don't for a moment
think that I--I--" Poor Matthew was stuttering while I rubbed the tip of my
nose against his sleeve in the way of a caress, as I had a feed-bucket in
one hand and a water-pan in the other.
"Do go and shop with Polly and Bess as a force for protection. I must have
a quiet afternoon to commune with my garden," I commanded.
"Sometimes you make me so mad, Ann Craddock, that--that--" Matthew was
stuttering when Uncle Cradd appeared at the back door to chat with him, and
I made my escape through the barn and out into the woods. I had thought
that I saw a glint of Peckerwood red pass through the pasture that way, and
I was determined that Pan shouldn't give me and the garden the slip as he
always did when he saw anybody around.
As I ran rapidly through the old pasture, which was overgrown with
buckbushes and sassafras sprouts, which were turning into great pink and
green fern clumps in the warm April sunshine, I gave the two or three
Saint-Saëns Delilah notes which had been robbed of any of their wicked
Delilah flavor for me by having heard Mr. G. Bird sing them so beautifully
on the stage of the Metropolitan in that first dream night in Elmnest. But
I called and then called in vain until at last I came out to the huge old
rock that juts out from the edge of the rugged little knoll at the far end
of the pasture. Here I paused and looked down on Elmnest in the afternoon
sunshine with what seemed to be suddenly newly opened eyes. I had been in
and out of Elmnest to such an extent for the last six weeks that I hadn't
had a chance to get off and look at it from an outsider's standpoint, and
now suddenly I was taking that view of it. The old rose and green brick
house, covered in by its wide, gray shingle roof, the gables and windows
of which were beginning to be wreathed in feathery and pink young vines,
which were given darker notes here and there in their masses by the sturdy
green of the honey-suckles, hovered down on a small plateau rear-guarded by
the barn and sheds, flanked by the garden and the gnarled old orchard, and
from its front door the long avenue of elms led far down to the group of
Riverfield houses that huddled at the other end. All villages in the State
of Harpeth have been so built around the old "great houses" of the colonial
landowners, and between their generations has been developed a communistic
life that I somehow feel is to bridge from the pioneer life of this country
to the great new life of the greater commune that is coming to us. Down
there in Riverfield I knew that there was sin and sorrow and birth and
death, but there was no starvation, and for every tragedy there was a
neighbor to reach out a helping hand, and for every joy there were hearty
and friendly rejoicings.
"Oh, and I'm one of them--I belong," I said to myself as I noted each
cottage into which I went and came at will, as friend and beloved neighbor.
Even at that distance I could see a small figure, which I knew to be Luella
Spain, running up the long avenue, and in its hand I detected something
that, I was sure, was a covered plate or dish. "And I'm making Elmnest
fulfil its destiny into the future--into the future that the great Evan
Baldwin is preaching about in town, instead of practicing out in the
fields. I wonder if he really knows a single thing about farming."
"He does," came an answer from right at my shoulder in Pan's flutiest
voice, and I turned to find him standing just behind me on the very edge of
the old tilting rock.
"How do you know?" I demanded of him as I took the clean white cloth tied
up at four corners, gypsy-fashion, which he offered me and which, I could
see, was fairly bursting with green leaves of a kind I had never seen
before.
"I was with him at the Metropolitan the night I saw Ann Craddock in Gale
Beacon's box, you know,--the night that Mr. G. Bird sang 'Delilah,' and
also I've slept on the bare ground with him in his woods in Michigan and on
his red clay in Georgia."
"Well, I hate him all the same for the insult of his offer to buy Elmnest,
though I doubt if he has any family pride or any family either, so, of
course, he wouldn't understand that it _is_ an insult to offer to buy one's
colonial home with holes in the door to shoot Indians through," I answered
with the temper that always came at the mention of the name of a man I had
chosen to consider a foe without any consent on his part at all.
"You'd think he was born and raised in a hollow log if you should ever
interview him, and he hasn't any family, but from some of the motions he is
making, I think he intends to have," answered Pan, with one of his most
fluty jeers, and he shook his head until the crests ruffled still lower
over the tips of his ears.
"Are you--you one of his agents--that is, _spies_, and was it you that
insulted me by wanting to buy Elmnest just because it was poor and old?" I
demanded, with the color in my cheeks.
"I am not his spy or his agent, and do you want to come down to the
spring-house and cook these wild-mustard shoots for our dinner, or shall I
go at our old garden with the prospect of an empty stomach at sunset?"
"Why won't you come in to dinner with me?" I asked, with a mollified laugh,
though I knew I was bringing down upon myself about my hundredth refusal of
proffered hospitality.
"Two reasons--first, because I won't eat with my neighbors at the 'great
house' when I can't eat with them in the cottage, and I just can't eat the
grease that a lot of the poorer villagers deluge their food with. I'm Pan,
and I live in the woods on roots and herbs. Second--because about six weeks
ago I found a farm woman who would come out at my wooing to cook and eat
the herbs and roots with me and I could have her to myself all alone. Now,
will you come on down to the spring?" And without waiting for my reply,
Adam started down the hill, crosswise from the path by which I had
ascended, padding ahead in his weird leather sandals and breaking a path
for me through the undergrowth as I followed close at his shoulder, an
order of rough travel to which I had become accustomed in the weeks that
had passed and that now seemed to me--well, I might say racial.
In the riot of an April growing day, in which we could hear life fairly
teem and buzz at our feet, on right, and left, and overhead, Adam and I
worked shoulder to shoulder in the old garden of Elmnest. Every now and
then I ran down to the spring to put a green fagot under the pot of herbs,
which needed to simmer for hours to be as delicious as was possible for
them. From the library came a rattle and bang of literary musketry from the
blessed parental twins, who were for the time being with Julius Cæsar in
"all Gaul," and oblivious to anything in the twentieth century, even a
spring-intoxicated niece and daughter down in her grandmother's garden with
a Pan from the woods; occasionally Rufus rattled a pot or a pan; but save
for these few echoes of civilization, Adam and I delved and spaded and
clipped and pruned and planted in the old garden just as if it had been the
plot of ground without the walls of Eden in which our first parents were
forced to get busy.
"Great work, Farmwoman," said Adam as we sat down on the side steps to eat,
bite-about, the huge red apple he had taken from the bundle of emigrant
appearance which he always carried over his shoulder on the end of a long
hickory stick and which I had by investigation at different times found to
contain everything from clean linen to Sanskrit poetry for father. To-day I
found the manuscript score of a new opera by no less a person than Hurter
himself, which he insisted on having me hum through with him while we ate
the apple.
"I told Hurter I thought that fourth movement wouldn't do, and now I know
it after hearing you try it through an apple," said Pan as he rose from
beside me, tied the manuscript up in the bandana bundle, and picked up his
long pruning-knife. "Now, Woman, we'll put a curb on the rambling of every
last rambler in this garden and then we can lay out the rows for Bud to
plant with the snap beans to-morrow." Adam, from the first day he had met
me, had addressed me simply with my generic class name, and I had found it
a good one to which to make answer. Also Adam had shown me the profit and
beauty of planting all needful vegetables mixed up with the flowers in the
rich and loamy old garden, and had adjusted a cropping arrangement between
the Corn-tassel Bud and me that was to be profitable to us both, Bud only
doing in odd hours the work I couldn't do, and getting a share of the
profits.
"Don't work me to death to-day," I pleaded, and told him about the rescue
of the babies Bird with so much dramatic force that his laughter rang out
with such volume that old Rufus came to the kitchen window to look out and
shake his head, and I knew he was muttering about "Peckerwoods," "devils,"
and the sixth day of the week. "Will the chicks live all right, do you
think?" I asked anxiously.
"They're safe if they never got cold to the touch and you didn't joggle 'em
too much. Do either you or Miss Rutherford happen to er--er--kick in your
sleep?"
"We do not!" I answered with dignity, as I snipped away a dead branch of
ivy from across the path.
"I just thought Miss Rutherford might from--"
"You don't know Bess; she's so executive that--"
"That she wouldn't kick eggs for anything," finished Pan, mockingly. "She
does pretty well in the Russian ballet, doesn't she?"
"Oh, I wish you could just see her in the 'Cloud Wisp'!" I exclaimed, with
the greatest pride, for Bess Rutherford has nothing to envy Pavlova about.
"I have--er--have a great desire to so behold her at some future time,"
answered Pan, with one of his eery laughs, and I could almost see hoofs
through the raw hide of his shoes. I would have ruffled the red crests off
of the tips of his ears to see if they really were pointed if he had not
stood just out of reach of my hand, where it would have been impossible to
catch him if I tried.
"You won't eat with me in civilization, you won't meet any of my friends,
and I don't believe you ever want to please me," I said as I turned away
from his provocation and began again with the scissors.
"I don't like world girls," he said with the fluty coo in his voice that
always calms the Ladies Leghorn when they are ruffled. "I only love farm
women. The moon is beginning to get a rise out of the setting sun, and
let's go away from these haunts of men to our own woods home. Come along!"
As he spoke Pan pocketed his long knife, picked up his stick and bundle,
and began to pad away through the trees down towards the spring, with me at
his shoulder, and for the first time he held my hand in his as I followed
in my usual squaw style.
In all the long dreary weeks that followed I was glad that I had had that
dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that
was away from all the world. All during the days that never seemed to end,
as I went upon my round of duties, I put the ache of the memories of it
from me, but in the night I took the agony into my heart and cherished it.
"And it's the Romney hand ye have with the herb-pot, Woman dear," said Adam
as he squatted down beside our simmering pot and stirred it with the clean
hickory stick I had barked for that purpose when, very shortly after high
noon, I had put the greens, with the two wild onion sprigs and the handful
of inevitable black-walnut kernels, into the iron pot set on the two rocks
with their smoldering green fire between. "You know you'd rather be eating
this dinner of sprouts and black bread with your poor Adam than--than
dancing that 'Cloud Drift' in town with Matthew Berry--or Baldwin the
enemy."
"Yes," I answered, as I knelt beside him and thrust in another slim stick
and tasted the juice of the pot off the end. "But it would be hard to make
Matthew believe it. I forgot to tell you that Matt is really going in for
farming, thanks to the evil influence of your friend Evan Baldwin, who
wouldn't know a farm if he met one on the road, a real farm, I mean. Poor
Matt little knows the life of toil he is plotting for himself."
"Is he coming to live at Elmnest?" asked Adam, in a voice of entire
unconcern, as he took the black loaf from his gypsy pack and began to cut
it up into hunks and lay it on the clean rock beside the pot.
"He is not," I answered with an indignation that I could see no reason
for.
"Sooner or later, Woman, you'll have to take a mate," was the primitive
statement that confronted me as I lifted the pot with the skirt of my
blouse and poured the greens into two brown crockery bowls that Adam kept
secreted with the pot on a ledge of the old spring-house.
"Well, a husky young farmer is the only kind of a man who need apply. I
mean a born rustic. I couldn't risk an amateur with the farm after all
you've taught me," I answered as we seated ourselves on the warm earth side
by side and began to dip the hunks of black bread into our bowls and lift
the delicious wilted leaves to our mouths with it, a mode of consumption it
had taken Pan several attempts to teach me. Pan never talks when he eats,
and he seems to browse food in a way that each time tempts me more and more
to reach out my hand and lift one of the red crests to see about the points
of his ears.
"Do you want to hear my invocation to my ultimate woman?" he asked as he
set his bowl down after polishing it out with his last chunk of bread some
minutes after I had so finished up mine.
"Is it more imperative than the one you give me under my window before I
have had less than a good half-night's sleep every morning?" I asked as I
crushed a blade of meadow fern in my hands and inhaled its queer tang.
"I await my beloved in
Grain fields.
Come, woman!
In thy eyes is truth.
Thy body must give food with
Sweat of labor, and thy lips
Hold drink for love thirst.
I am thy child.
I am thy mate.
Come!"
Pan took my hand in his as he chanted, and held my fingers to his lips, and
ended his chant with several weird, eery, crooning notes blown across his
lips and through my fingers out into the moonlit shadows.
"I feel about you just as I do about one of Mrs. Ewe's lambkins," I
whispered, with a queer answering laugh in my voice, which held and
repeated the croon in his.
"I am thy child.
I am thy mate.
Oh, come!"
again chanted Pan, and it surely wasn't imagination that made me think that
the red crests ruffled in the wind. The light in his eyes was unlike
anything I had ever seen; it smouldered and flamed like the embers under
the pot beside the rock. It drew me until the sleeve of my smock brushed
his sleeve of gray flannel. His arms hovered, but didn't quite enclose me.
"And the way I am going to feel about all the little chickens out of the
incubator," I added slowly as if the admission was being drawn out of me.
Still the arms hovered, the crests ruffled, and the eyes searched down
into the depths of me, which had so lately been plowed and harrowed and
sown with a new and productive flower.
"And the old twin fathers," I added almost begrudgingly, as I cast him my
last treasure.
Then with a laugh that I know was a line-reproduction descended from the
one that Adam gave when he first recognized Eve, Pan folded me into his
arms, laid his red head on my breast, and held up his lips to mine with a
"love-thirst" that it took me more than a long minute to slack to the point
of words.
"I knew there was one earth woman due to develop at the first decade of
this century, and I've found her," Pan fluted softly as he in turn took me
on his breast and pressed his russet cheek against the tan of mine. "I'm
going to take her off into the woods and then in a generation salvation for
the nation will come forth from the forest."
"My word is given to the Golden Bird to see his progeny safe into the
world, and I must do that before--" but my words ended in a laugh as I
slipped out of Pan's arms and sprang to my feet and away from him.
"We'll keep that faith with Mr. Bird to-night, and then I can take you with
me before daylight," said Pan as he collected his Romney bundle with his
left hand and me with his right and began to pad up the path from the
spring-house towards the barn under a shower of the white locust-blossoms,
which were giving forth their last breath of perfume in a gorgeous volume.
"To-night?" I asked from the hollow between his breast and his arm where I
was fitted and held steadily so that my steps seemed to be his steps and
the breath of my lungs to come from his.
"Yes; most of the eggs were pipped when I went in the barn to put away the
tools," answered Adam, with very much less excitement than the occasion
called for.
"Oh, why--why didn't you tell me?" I demanded as I came out of the first
half of a kiss and before I retired into the last half.
"Too hungry--had to be fed before they got to eating at your heart,"
answered Pan in a way that made me know that he meant me and not the
dandelion greens and brown bread.
"You are joking me; they are not due until day after to-morrow," I said as
I took my lips away and began to hurry us both towards the barn.
"All April hatches are from two to three days early," was Adam's prosaic
and instructive answer that cut the last kiss short as we entered the
barn-door.