HICKORY HILL
Pneumonia, for all it is characterized by what is called a crisis, has no
single stride to recovery, no critical moment when one who has been in
peril passes to safety. Steinmetz and Darby were determined that Mary and
all the household should understand this fully. She had waylaid them in
the hall as they were leaving the house together--this was seventy-two
hours or so after Anthony March's call--and demanded the good news she
was sure they had for her. There was a look about them and a tone in
their voices that were perfectly new.
They would not be persuaded to say that her father was out of danger.
There was very little left of him. His heart had been over-strained and
this abnormal effect was now, in due course, transferred to the kidneys.
All sorts of deadly sequellae were lying in ambush.
But the more discouraging they were, the more she beamed upon them. She
walked along with them to the door, slipping her arm inside Doctor
Darby's as she did so. "If you only knew," she said, "what a wonderful
thing it is to have the doctors stop being encouraging and try to
frighten you, instead. Because that means you really do think he's
getting well."
"The balance of probability has swung to that side," Steinmetz admitted
in his rather affected staccato. "At all events he's out of my beat." His
beat was the respiratory tract and his treatment the last word in
vaccines and serums.
She held Darby back a little. "Must we go on feeling," she asked,
"that anything could happen any minute? Or--well, could Rush go back
to the farm? Graham Stannard has gone to New York, I think, they're
partners, you know, so he must be rather badly wanted. And this
waiting is hard for him."
Rush could go, of course, Darby assured her. "For that matter," he went
on with a quick glance at her, "why don't you go with him? Take your aunt
along, too. For a few days, at least. You couldn't do better."
She demurred to this on the ground that it didn't seem fair to Paula. If
there was a period of Arcadian retirement down on the books for anybody,
it was Paula who was entitled to it.
But Paula, as Darby pointed out, wouldn't take it in the first place,
and, surprisingly, didn't need it in the second. "She told me just now
that she'd slept eighteen hours out of the last twenty-four and was ready
for anything. She looked it, too."
He understood very well her irrepressible shrug of exasperation at that
and interrupted her attempt to explain it. "It's another breed of animal
altogether," he said. "And at that, I'd rather have had her job than
yours. You're looking first rate, anyhow. But your aunt, if she isn't to
break up badly, had better be carried off somewhere." He glanced around
toward Steinmetz who had withdrawn out of ear-shot. "There are some
toxins, you know," he added, "that are even beyond him and his
microscopes."
Mary had meant to broach this project at dinner but changed her mind and
waited until Aunt Lucile had withdrawn and she and Rush were left alone
over their coffee cups for a smoke.
"Poor Aunt Lucile! She has aged years in the last three weeks. And it
shows more, now the nightmare is over, than it did before."
"Is it over? Really?" he asked.
"Well, we don't need miracles any more for him. Just ordinary good care
and good luck. Yes, I'd say the nightmare was over."
"Leaving us free," he commented, "to go back to our own."
"You can go back to the farm, anyhow," she said. "I asked Doctor Darby,
especially, and he said so. He wants me to go along with you and take
Aunt Lucile. Just for a week or so. Is there any sort of place with a
roof over it where we could stay?"
He said, "I guess that could be managed." But his tone was so absent and
somber that she looked at him in sharp concern.
"You didn't mean that the farm was your nightmare, did you?" she asked.
"Has something gone terribly wrong out there?"
"Things have gone just the way I suppose anybody but a fool would have
known they would. Not worse than that, I guess."
He got up then and went over to the sideboard, coming back with a
decanter of old brandy and a pair of big English glasses. She declined
hers as unobtrusively as possible, just with a word and a faint shake of
the head. But it was enough to make him look at her.
"You didn't drink anything at dinner, either, did you?" he asked.
She flushed as she said, "I don't think I'm drinking, at all, just now."
"Being an example to anybody?" he asked suspiciously.
She smiled at that and patted his hand. "Oh, no, my dear. I've enough to
do to be an example to myself. I liked the way it was out at the
Corbetts'. They've gone bone-dry. And,--oh, please don't think that I'm a
prig--I am a little better without it--just now, anyway. Tell me what's
gone wrong at the farm."
"This is wonderful stuff," he said, cupping the fragile glass in his two
hands and inhaling the bouquet from the precious liquor in the bottom of
it. "It's good for nightmares, at any rate." After a sip or two, he
attempted to answer her question.
"Oh, I suppose we'll come out all right, eventually. Of course, we've got
to. But I wish Martin Whitney had done one thing or the other; either
shown a little real confidence and enthusiasm in the thing or else
stepped on it and refused to lend father the money."
"Lend?" Mary asked. "Did he have to borrow it?"
He dealt rather impatiently with that question. "You don't keep sixty or
eighty thousand dollars lying around loose in a checking account," he
said. "Of course, he had to borrow it. But he borrowed it of Whitney,
worse luck--and Whitney being an old friend, pulls a long face over it
whenever we find we need a little more than the original figures showed.
That's enough to give any one cold feet right there.
"Graham's father is rich, of course, but he's tighter than the bark on a
tree. He's gone his limit and he won't stand for anything more. He can't
see that a farm like that is nothing but a factory and that you can't run
it for any profit that's worth while without the very best possible
equipment. He wanted us to pike along with scrub stock and the old tools
and buildings that were on the place and pay for improvements out of our
profits. Of course, the answer to that was that there wouldn't be any
profits. A grade cow these days simply can't earn her keep with the price
of feed and labor what it is. We didn't figure the cost of tools and
modern buildings high enough--there _was_ such a devil of a lot of
necessary things that we didn't figure on at all--and the consequence
was that we didn't put a big enough mortgage on the place. Nowhere near
what it would stand. And now that we want to put a second one on, Mr.
Stannard howls like a wolf."
The mere sound of the word mortgage made Mary's heart sink. She looked so
woebegone that Rush went on hastily.
"Oh, that'll come out in the wash. It's nothing to worry about really,
because even on the basis of a bigger investment than we had any idea of
making when we went in, it figures a peach of a profit. There's no
getting away from that. That's not the thing about it that's driving
Graham and me to drink."
He stopped on that phrase, not liking the sound of it, and in doubt about
asking her not to take it literally. She saw all that as plainly as if
she had been looking through an open window into his mind. He took
another deliberate sip of the brandy, instead, and then went on.
"Why, it's the way things don't happen; the way we can't get
anything done."
He did not see the sympathetic hand she stretched out to him; went back
to the big brandy glass instead, for another long luxurious inhalation
and a small sip or two. "It's partly our own fault, of course," he went
on, presently. "We've made some fool mistakes. But it isn't our mistakes
that are going to beat us, it's the damned bull-headed incompetence of
the so-called labor we've got to deal with."
He ruminated over that in silence for a minute or two. "They talk about
the inefficiency of the army," he exclaimed, "but I've been four years in
two armies and I'll say that if what we've found out at Hickory Hill is a
fair sample of civilian efficiency, I'll take the army way every time.
There are days when I feel as if I'd like to quit;--go out West and get
a job roping steers for Bob Corbett, even if he is bone-dry."
She thought if he played any longer with that brandy glass she must cry
out, but he drained it this time and pushed it away. With an effort of
will she relaxed her tight muscles.
"I suppose I must have looked to you like a hopeless slacker," he said,
"or you wouldn't have asked Darby to send me back to work. No,--I didn't
mean to put it that way. I look like one to myself, that's all, when I
stop to think. Only you don't know how it has felt, this last six weeks,
to go on getting tighter and tighter in your head until you feel as if
you were going to burst. I went out and got drunk, once,--just plain,
deliberately boiled--in order to let off steam. It did me good, too, for
the time being."
She didn't look shocked at that as he had expected her to--gave him only
a rather wry smile and a comprehending nod. "We're all alike; that's the
trouble with us," she said. "But you will take us out to Hickory Hill,
won't you? Aunt Lucile and I. I'll promise we won't be in the way nor
make you any more work."
She saw he was hesitating and added, "At that, perhaps, I may be some
good. I could cook anyhow and I suppose I could be taught to milk a cow
and run a Ford."
He laughed at that, then said a little uncomfortably that this wasn't
what he had been thinking about. "I suppose you're counting on Graham's
being in New York. He isn't. At least, he telegraphed me that he'd be
back at Hickory Hill to-morrow morning. I knew you'd been rather keeping
away from him and I thought perhaps..."
"No, that's all right." She said it casually enough, but it drew a keen
look of inquiry from him, nevertheless. "Oh, nothing," she went on. "I
mean I haven't made up with him. Of course, I never quarreled with him
as far as that went. Only it's what I meant when I said just now that we
were all alike, father and you and I. We all get so ridiculously--tight
about things. Well, I've managed to let off steam myself."
He patted her hand approvingly. "That trip to Wyoming did you a lot of
good," he observed.--"Or something did."
"They're wonderfully easy people to live with, Olive and Bob," she said.
"They're immensely in love with each other I suppose, but without somehow
being offensive about it. And they have such a lot of fun. Olive has a
piebald cayuse, that she's taught all the _haute ecole_ tricks. He does
the statuesque poses and all the high action things just as seriously as
a thoroughbred and he's so short and homely and in such deadly earnest
about it that you can hardly bear it. You laugh yourself into stitches
but you want to cry too. And Bob says he's going to train a mule the same
way. If he ever does that pair will be worth a million dollars to any
circus.--Well, we'll be doing things like that out at Hickory Hill some
day. Because there is such a thing as fun left in the world."
"We'll have some of it this week," he agreed, and in this rather
light-headed spirit they arranged details.
The only building at Hickory Hill that had been designed for human
habitation was the farm-house and it was at present fully occupied and
rather more by a camp cook and his assistant, the farm manager and half
a dozen hands. The partners themselves slept in a tent. There was also a
cook tent near the house where three meals a day were prepared for
everybody, including the carpenters, masons, concrete men and well
diggers who were working on the new buildings. They drove out in Fords
from two or three near-by towns in time for breakfast and didn't go home
till after supper. The wagon shed of the old horse barn served as a
mess hall.
There were some beds, though, two or three spare ones, Rush was sure,
that had never been used. Given a day's start on his guests, he would
promise some sort of building which, if they would refrain from inquiring
too closely into its past, should serve to house them.
"A wood-shed," she suggested helpfully, "or a nicely swept-out hennery.
Even a former cow stable, at a pinch. Only not a pig-pen."
"If our new hog-house were only finished, you could be absolutely
palatial in it. But I think I can do better than any of those. You leave
that to me.--Only, how about Aunt Lucile? She's--essential to the scheme,
I suppose. Can you deliver her?"
"She'll come if it's put to her right,--as a sporting proposition.
She really is a good sport you know, the dear old thing. You leave
her to me."
"Lord, I feel a lot better than I did when I sat down to dinner," he told
her when they parted for the night, and left her reflecting on the folly
of making mountains out of mole-hills.