The next morning the larks trailed ecstasy all over the valley, the
following day cuckoos were calling in the thickets, a warm wind swept
from the south and set swollen buds bursting, while the sun shone,
causing the Harvester to rejoice. Betsy's white coat was splashed with
the mud of the valley road; the feet of Belshazzar left tracks over
lumber piles; and the Harvester removed his muck-covered shoes at the
door and wore slippers inside. The skunk cabbage appeared around the
edge of the forest, rank mullein and thistles lay over the fields in
big circles of green, and even plants of delicate growth were thrusting
their heads through mellowing earth and dead leaves, to reach light and
air.
Then the Harvester took his mattock and began to dig. His level best
fell so far short of what he felt capable of doing and desired to
accomplish that the following day he put two more men on the job. Then
the earth did fly, and so soon as the required space was excavated the
walls were lined with stone and a smooth basement floor was made of
cement. The night the new home stood, a skeleton of joists and rafters,
gleaming whitely on the banks of Loon Lake, the Harvester went to the
bridge crossing Singing Water and slowly came up the driveway to see how
the work appeared. He caught his breath as he advanced. He had intended
to stake out generous rooms, but this, compared with the cabin, seemed
like a big hotel.
“I hope I haven't made it so large it will be a burden,” he
soliloquized. “It's huge! But while I am at it I want to build big
enough, and I think I have.”
He stood on the driveway, his arms folded, and looked at the structure
as he occasionally voiced his thoughts.
“The next thing is to lay up the side walls and get the roof over. Got
to have plenty of help, for those logs are hewed to fourteen inches
square and some of them are forty feet long. That's timber! Grew with
me, too. Personally acquainted with almost every tree of it. We will bed
them in cement, use care with the roof, and if that doesn't make a cool
house in the summer, and a warm one in winter, I'll be disappointed.
It sets among the trees, and on the hillside just right. We must have a
wide porch, plenty of flowers, vines, ferns, and mosses, and when I get
everything finished and she sees it----perhaps it will please her.”
A great horned owl swept down the hill, crossed the lake, and hooted
from the forest of the opposite bank. The Harvester thought of his dream
and turned.
“Any women walking the water to-night? Come if you like,” he bantered,
“I don't mind in the least. In fact, I'd rather enjoy it. I'd be so
happy if you would come now and tell me how this appears to you,
for it's all yours. I'd have enlarged the store-room, dry-houses and
laboratory for myself, but this cabin, never! The old one suited me as
it was; but for you----I should have a better home.”
The Harvester glanced from the shining skeleton to the bridge of gold
and back again.
“Where are you to-night?” he questioned. “What are you doing? Can't you
give me a hint of where to search for you when this is ready? I don't
know but I am beginning wrong. My little brothers of the wood do
differently. They announce their intentions the first thing, flaunt
their attractions, and display their strength. They say aloud, for all
the listening world to hear, what is in their hearts. They chip, chirp,
and sing, warble, whistle, thrill, scream, and hoot it. They are strong
on self-expression, and appreciative of their appearance. They meet,
court, mate, and THEN build their home together after a mutual plan.
It's a good way, too! Lots surer of getting things satisfactory.”
The Harvester sat on a lumber pile and gazed questioningly at the
framework.
“I wish I knew if I am going at things right,” he said. “There are two
sides to consider. If she is in a good home, and lovingly cared for, it
would be proper to court her and get her promise, if I could----no I'm
blest if I'll be so modest----get her promise, as I said, and let her
wait while I build the cabin. But if she should be poor, tired, and
neglected, then I ought to have this ready when I find her, so I could
pick her up and bring her to it, with no more ceremony than the birds.”
The Harvester's clear skin flushed crimson.
“Of course, I don't mean no wedding ceremony,” he amended. “I was
thinking of a long time wasted in preliminaries when in my soul I know I
am going to marry my Dream Girl before I ever have seen her in reality.
What would be the use in spending much time in courting? She is my wife
now, by every law of God. Let me get a glimpse of her, and I'll prove
it. But I've got to make tracks, for if she were here, where would I put
her? I must hurry!”
He went to the work room and began polishing a table top. He had bought
a chest of tools and was spending every spare minute on tables,
chair seats, and legs. He had decided to make these first and carve
candlesticks later when he had more time. Two hours he worked at the
furniture, and then went to bed. The following morning he put eggs under
several hens that wanted to set, trimmed his grape-vines, examined the
precious ginseng beds, attended his stock, got breakfast for Belshazzar
and himself, and was ready for work when the first carpenter arrived.
Laying hewed logs went speedily, and before the Harvester believed it
possible the big shingles he had ordered were being nailed on the roof.
Then came the plumber and arranged for the bathroom, and the furnace
man placed the heating pipes. The Harvester had intended the cabin to
be mostly the work of his own hands, but when he saw how rapidly
skilled carpenters worked, he changed his mind and had them finish the
living-room, his room, and the upstairs, and make over the dining-room
and kitchen.
Her room he worked on alone, with a little help if he did not know how
to join the different parts. Every thing was plain and simple, after
plans of his own, but the Harvester laid floors and made window casings,
seats, and doors of wood that the big factories of Grand Rapids used in
veneering their finest furniture. When one of his carpenters pointed
out this to him, and suggested that he sell his lumber to McLean and use
pine flooring from the mills the Harvester laughed at him.
“I don't say that I could afford to buy burl maple, walnut, and cherry
for wood-work,” said the Harvester. “I could not, but since I have it,
you can stake your life I won't sell it and build my home of cheap,
rapidly decaying wood. The best I have goes into this cabin and what
remains will do to sell. I have an idea that when this is done it is
going to appear first rate. Anyway, it will be solid enough to last
a thousand years, and with every day of use natural wood grows more
beautiful. When we get some tables, couches, and chairs made from the
same timber as the casings and the floors, I think it will be fine.
I want money, but I don't want it bad enough to part with the BEST of
anything I have for it. Go carefully and neatly there; it will have to
be changed if you don't.”
So the work progressed rapidly. When the carpenters had finished the
last stroke on the big veranda they remained a day more and made flower
boxes, and a swinging couch, and then the greedy Harvester kept the best
man with him a week longer to help on the furniture.
“Ain't you going to say a word about her, Langston?” asked this man as
they put a mirror-like surface on a curly maple dressing table top.
“Her!” ejaculated the Harvester. “What do you mean?”
“I haven't seen you bathe anywhere except in the lake since I have been
here,” said the carpenter. “Do you want me to think that a porcelain
tub, this big closet, and chest of drawers are for you?”
A wave of crimson swept over the Harvester.
“No, they are not for me,” he said simply. “I don't want to be any more
different from other men than I can help, although I know that life in
the woods, the rigid training of my mother, and the reading of only the
books that would aid in my work have made me individual in many of my
thoughts and ways. I suppose most men, just now, would tell you anything
you want to know. There is only one thing I can say: The best of my soul
and brain, the best of my woods and store-house, the best I can buy with
money is not good enough for her. That's all. For myself, I am getting
ready to marry, of course. I think all normal men do and that it is a
matter of plain common-sense that they should. Life with the right woman
must be infinitely broader and better than alone. Are you married?”
“Yes. Got a wife and four children.”
“Are you sorry?”
“Sorry!” the carpenter shrilled the word. “Sorry! Well that's the best
I ever heard! Am I sorry I married Nell and got the kids? Do I look
sorry?”
“I am not expecting to be, either,” said the Harvester calmly. “I think
I have done fairly well to stick to my work and live alone until I am
twenty-six. I have thought the thing all over and made up my mind. As
soon as I get this house far enough along that I feel I can proceed
alone I am going to rush the marrying business just as fast as I can,
and let her finish the remainder to her liking.”
“Well this ought to please her.”
“That's because you find your own work good,” laughed the Harvester.
“Not altogether!” The carpenter polished the board and stood it on end
to examine the surface as he talked. “Not altogether! Nothing but good
work would suit you. I was thinking of the little creek splashing down
the hill to the lake; and that old log hewer said that in a few more
days things here would be a blaze of colour until fall.”
“Almost all the drug plants and bushes leaf beautifully and flower
brilliantly,” explained the Harvester. “I studied the location suitable
to each variety before I set the beds and planned how to grow plants
for continuity of bloom, and as much harmony of colour as possible.
Of course a landscape gardener would tear up some of it, but seen as a
whole it isn't so bad. Did you ever notice that in the open, with God's
blue overhead and His green for a background, He can place purple and
yellow, pink, magenta, red, and blue in masses or any combination you
can mention and the brighter the colour the more you like it? You
don't seem to see or feel that any grouping clashes; you revel in each
wonderful growth, and luxuriate in the brilliancy of the whole. Anyway,
this suits me.”
“I guess it will please her, too,” said the carpenter. “After all the
pains you've taken, she is a good one if it doesn't.”
“I'll always have the consolation of having done my best,” replied
the Harvester. “One can't do more! Whether she likes it or not depends
greatly on the way she has been reared.”
“You talk as if you didn't know,” commented the carpenter.
“You go on with this now,” said the Harvester hastily. “I've got to
uncover some beds and dig my year's supply of skunk cabbage, else folk
with asthma and dropsy who depend on me will be short on relief. I ought
to take my sweet flag, too, but I'm so hurried now I think I'll leave it
until fall; I do when I can, because the bloom is so pretty around the
lake and the bees simply go wild over the pollen. Sometimes I almost
think I can detect it in their honey. Do you know I've wondered often
if the honey my bees make has medicinal properties and should be kept
separate in different seasons. In early spring when the plants and
bushes that furnish the roots and barks of most of the tonics are in
bloom, and the bees gather the pollen, that honey should partake in a
degree of the same properties and be good medicine. In the summer
it should aid digestion, and in the fall cure rheumatism and blood
disorders.”
“Say you try it!” urged the carpenter. “I want a lot of the fall kind.
I'm always full of rheumatism by October. Exposure, no doubt.”
“Over eating of too much rich food, you mean,” laughed the Harvester.
“I'd like to see any man expose his body to more differing extremes of
weather than I do, and I'm never sick. It's because I am my own cook
and so I live mostly on fruits, vegetables, bread, milk, and eggs, a few
fish from the lake, a little game once in a great while or a chicken,
and no hot drinks; plenty of fresh water, air, and continuous work out
of doors. That's the prescription! I'd be ashamed to have rheumatism at
your age. There's food in the cupboard if you grow hungry. I am going
past one of the neighbours on my way to see about some work I want her
to do.”
The Harvester stopped for lunch, carried food to Belshazzar, and started
straight across country, his mattock, with a bag rolled around the
handle, on his shoulder. His feet sank in the damp earth at the foot of
the hill, and he laughed as he leaped across Singing Water.
“You noisy chatterbox!” cried the man. “The impetus of coming down the
curves of the hill keeps you talking all the way across this muck bed to
the lake. With small work I can make you a thing of beauty. A few bushes
grubbed, a little deepening where you spread too much, and some more
mallows along the banks will do the trick. I must attend to you soon.”
“Now what does the boy want?” laughed a white-haired old woman, as the
Harvester entered the door. “Mebby you think I don't know what you're
up to! I even can hear the hammering and the voices of the men when the
wind is in the south. I've been wondering how soon you'd need me. Out
with it!”
“I want you to get a woman and come over and spend a day with me.
I'll come after you and bring you back. I want you to go over mother's
bedding and have what needs it washed. All I want you to do is to
superintend, and tell me now what I will want from town for your work.”
“I put away all your mother's bedding that you were not using, clean as
a ribbon.”
“But it has been packed in moth preventives ever since and out only four
times a year to air, as you told me. It must smell musty and be yellow.
I want it fresh and clean.”
“So what I been hearing is true, David?”
“Quite true!” said the Harvester.
“Whose girl is she, and when are you going to jine hands?”
The Harvester lifted his clear eyes and hesitated.
“Doc Carey laid you in my arms when you was born, David. I tended you
'fore ever your ma did. All your life you've been my boy, and I love you
same as my own blood; it won't go no farther if you say so. I'll never
tell a living soul. But I'm old and 'til better weather comes, house
bound; and I get mighty lonely. I'd like to think about you and her, and
plan for you, and love her as I always did you folks. Who is she, David?
Do I know the family?”
“No. She is a stranger to these parts,” said the unhappy Harvester.
“David, is she a nice girl 'at your ma would have liked?”
“She's the only girl in the world that I'd marry,” said the Harvester
promptly, glad of a question he could answer heartily. “Yes. She is
gentle, very tender and----and affectionate,” he went on so rapidly that
Granny Moreland could not say a word, “and as soon as I bring her home
you shall come to spend a day and get acquainted. I know you will love
her! I'll come in the morning, then. I must hurry now. I am working
double this spring and I'm off for the skunk cabbage bed to-day.”
“You are working fit to kill, the neighbours say. Slavin' like a horse
all day, and half the night I see your lights burning.”
“Do I appear killed?” laughingly inquired the Harvester.
“You look peart as a struttin' turkey gobbler,” said the old woman. “Go
on with your work! Work don't hurt a-body. Eat a-plenty, sleep all you
ort, and you CAN'T work enough to hurt you.”
“So the neighbours say I'm working now? New story, isn't it? Usually I'm
too lazy to make a living, if I remember.”
“Only to those who don't sense your purceedings, David. I always knowed
how you grubbed and slaved an' set over them fearful books o' yours.”
“More interesting than the wildest fiction,” said the man. “I'm making
some medicine for your rheumatism, Granny. It is not fully tested yet,
but you get ready for it by cutting out all the salt you can. I haven't
time to explain this morning, but you remember what I say, leave out the
salt, and when Doc thinks it's safe I'll bring you something that will
make a new woman of you.”
He went swinging down the road, and Granny Moreland looked after him.
“While he was talkin',” she muttered, “I felt full of information as a
flock o' almanacs, but now since he's gone, 'pears to me I don't know a
thing more 'an I did to start on.”
“Close call,” the Harvester was thinking. “Why the nation did I admit
anything to her? People may talk as they please, so long as I don't
sanction it, but I have two or three times. That's a fool trick. Suppose
I can't find her? Maybe she won't look at me if I can. Then I'd have
started something I couldn't finish. And if anybody thinks I'll end
this by taking any girl I can get, if I can't find Her, why they think
wrongly. Just the girl of my golden dream or no woman at all for me.
I've lived alone long enough to know how to do it in comfort. If I can't
find and win her I have no intention of starting a boarding house.”
The Harvester began to laugh. “'I'd rather keep bachelor's hall in Hell
than go to board in Heaven!'” he quoted gaily. “That's my sentiment too.
If you can't have what you want, don't have anything. But there is no
use to become discouraged before I start. I haven't begun to hunt her
yet. Until I do, I might as well believe that she will walk across the
bridge and take possession just as soon as I get the last chair leg
polished. She might! She came in the dream, and to come actually
couldn't be any more real. I'll make a stiff hunt of it before I give
up, if I ever do. I never yet have made a complete failure of anything.
But just now I am hunting skunk cabbage. It's precisely the time to take
it.”
Across the lake, in the swampy woods, close where the screech owl sang
and the girl of the golden dream walked in the moonlight the Harvester
began operations. He unrolled the sack, went to one end of the bed and
systematically started a swath across it, lifting every other plant
by the roots. Flowering time was almost past, but the bees knew where
pollen ripened, and hummed incessantly over and inside the queer
cone-shaped growths with their hooked beaks. It almost appeared as if
the sound made inside might be to give outsiders warning not to poach
on occupied territory, for the Harvester noticed that no bee entered a
pre-empted plant.
With skilful hand each stroke brought up a root and he tossed it to one
side. The plants were vastly peculiar things. First they seemed to be a
curled leaf with no flower. In colour they shaded from yellow to almost
black mahogany, and appeared as if they were a flower with no leaf.
Closer examination proved there was a stout leaf with a heavy outside
mid-rib, the tip of which curled over in a beak effect, that wrapped
around a peculiar flower of very disagreeable odour. The handling of
these plants by the hundred so intensified this smell the Harvester
shook his head.
“I presume you are mostly mine,” he said to the busy little workers
around him. “If there is anything in my theory of honey having varying
medicinal properties at different seasons, right now mine should be
good for Granny's rheumatism and for nervous and dropsical people. I
shouldn't think honey flavoured with skunk cabbage would be fit to eat.
But, of course, it isn't all this. There is catkin pollen on the wind,
hazel and sassafras are both in bloom now, and so are several of the
earliest little flowers of the woods. You can gather enough of them
combined to temper the disagreeable odour into a racy sweetness, and all
the shrub blooms are good tonics, too, and some of the earthy ones. I'm
going to try giving some of you empty cases next spring and analyzing
the honey to learn if it isn't good medicine.”
The Harvester straightened and leaned on the mattock to fill his lungs
with fresh air and as he delightedly sniffed it he commented, “Nothing
else has much of a chance since I've stirred up the cabbage bed. I can
scent the catkins plainly, being so close, and as I came here I could
detect the hazel and sassafras all right.”
Above him a peculiar, raucous chattering for an instant hushed other
wood voices. The Harvester looked up, laughing gaily.
“So you've decided to announce it to your tribe at last, have you?”
he inquired. “You are waking the sleepers in their dens to-day? Well,
there's nothing like waiting until you have a sure thing. The bluebirds
broke the trail for the feathered folk the twenty-fourth of February.
The sap oozed from the maples about the same time for the trees. The
very first skunk cabbage was up quite a month ago to signal other plants
to come on, and now you are rousing the furred folk. I'll write this
down in my records----'When the earliest bluebird sings, when the sap
wets the maples, when the skunk cabbage flowers, and the first striped
squirrel barks, why then, it is spring!'”
He bent to his task and as he worked closer the water he noticed
sweet-flag leaves waving two inches tall beneath the surface.
“Great day!” he cried. “There you are making signs, too! And right! Of
course! Nature is always right. Just two inches high and it's harvest
for you. I can use a rake, and dried in the evaporator you bring me
ten cents a pound; to the folks needing a tonic you are worth a small
fortune. No doubt you cost that by the time you reach them; but I fear
I can't gather you just now. My head is a little preoccupied these days.
What with the cabbage, and now you, and many of the bushes and trees
making signs, with a new cabin to build and furnish, with a girl to find
and win, I'm what you might call busy. I've covered my book shelf.
I positively don't dare look Emerson or Maeterlinck in the face. One
consolation! I've got the best of Thoreau in my head, and if I read
Stickeen a few times more I'll be able to recite that. There's a man for
you, not to mention the dog! Bel, where are you? Would you stick to me
like that? I think you would. But you are a big, strong fellow. Stickeen
was only such a mite of a dog. But what a man he followed! I feel as
if I should put on high-heeled slippers and carry a fan and a lace
handkerchief when I think of him. And yet, most men wouldn't consider my
job so easy!”
The Harvester rapidly pitched the evil-smelling plants into big heaps
and as he worked he imitated the sounds around him as closely as he
could. The song sparrow laughed at him and flew away in disgust when he
tried its notes. The jay took time to consider, but was not fooled. The
nut-hatch ran head first down trees, larvae hunting, and was never a
mite deceived. But the killdeer on invisible legs, circling the lake
shore, replied instantly; so did the lark soaring above, and the dove of
the elm thicket close beside. The glittering black birds flashing over
every tree top answered the “T'check, t'chee!” of the Harvester quite as
readily as their mates.
The last time he paused to rest he had studied scents. When he
straightened again he was occupied with every voice of earth and air
around and above him, and the notes of singing hens, exultant cocks, the
scream of geese, the quack of ducks, the rasping crescendo of guineas
running wild in the woods, the imperial note of Ajax sunning on the
ridge pole and echoes from all of them on adjoining and distant farms.
“'Now I see the full meaning and beauty of that word sound!'” quoted
the Harvester. “'I thank God for sound. It always mounts and makes me
mount!'”
He breathed deeply and stood listening, a superb figure of a man, his
lean face glowing with emotion.
“If she could see and hear this, she would come,” he said softly. “She
would come and she would love it as I do. Any one who understands,
and knows how to translate, cares for this above all else earth has to
offer. They who do not, fail to read as they run!”
He shifted feet mired in swamp muck, and stood as if loath to bend again
to his task. He lifted a weighted mattock and scraped the earth from
it, sniffing it delightedly the while. A soft south wind freighted with
aromatic odours swept his warm face. The Harvester removed his hat and
shook his head that the breeze might thread his thick hair.
“I've a commission for you, South Wind,” he said whimsically. “Go find
my Dream Girl. Go carry her this message from me. Freight your breath
with spicy pollen, sun warmth, and flower nectar. Fill all her senses
with delight, and then, close to her ear, whisper it softly, 'Your lover
is coming!' Tell her that, O South Wind! Carry Araby to her nostrils,
Heaven to her ears, and then whisper and whisper it over and over until
you arouse the passion of earth in her blood. Tell her what is rioting
in my heart, and brain, and soul this morning. Repeat it until she must
awake to its meaning, 'Your lover is coming.'”