It is a long lane that has no turning, either for cattle or for men.
When Fanny died Odell was forty. Two months later he married the
strapping daughter of Ed Lister. And came to the turn in the long, long
lane he had travelled for twenty years.
For, as Whitewater Queen was a breeder of heifer-calves, Mazie Lister
proved to be a breeder of men.
Every year, for the first four years, she gave Odell a son.
There was no fuss made about these events. Mazie Lister was the kind of
girl who could eat cabbage for breakfast, wad it down with pie, drive
it deeper with a quart of buttermilk.
Once, to prove she could do it, she ate a whole roast sucking pig, five
boiled potatoes, six ears of corn, a dish of cranberry sauce, and an
entire apple pie; and washed it down with three quarts of new cider.
Her feed never fattened her; it seemed to make her skin pinker, teeth
whiter, long, slanting black eyes more brilliant.
No cares worried her. She laughed a great deal. She was busy from dawn
to dark. Unfatigued but sleepy, she yawned frightfully toward nine
o’clock. It was her time to roost.
Mazie’s instincts concerning progeny were simple. She nursed each
arrival as long as necessary, then weaned it. Then the youngster had to
learn to shift for himself--wash and dress, turn up at meal hours, turn
in with the chickens, rise with the crows.
It was a little different, however, with Eris, whom Mazie had
inherited. Eris, of course, was bottle-fed. Whitewater Queen’s
heifer-calf, White Princess, had no better care. Whatever was advisable
was completely and thoroughly done in both cases.
White Princess grew to beautiful Guernsey symmetry, with every promise
of conformation to classic type; and was duly registered. Little Eris,
small boned, with delicately fashioned limbs, looked out on the world
from a pair of crystal-blue, baby eyes, which ultimately became a deep,
limpid grey.
Unlike White Princess, Eris did not promise to conform to the Odell
type. There seemed to be little of that breed about her. Fanny had
been bony and shiny-skinned, with a high-bridged, pinkish nose, watery
eyes--a wisp of a woman with a rodent’s teeth and every articulation
apparent as a ridge under a dry, tightly stretched epidermis.
Odell, with his even, white teeth, coarse, highly-coloured skin and
brown eyes, was a compact, stocky, heavy-handed, broad-footed product
of Scotch-Irish pioneer stock. But Fanny’s grandmother, a Louisiana
Creole, had run away from school to go on the stage, and had married a
handsome but dissolute Southern planter who died of drink.
Sundays Fanny used to wear her grandmother’s portrait painted in
miniature on ivory, as a breast-pin.
“Hand-painted,” she used to explain. And always added: “Creoles are
all white.” Which was true. But, when quarrelling with his wife, Odell
pretended to believe otherwise.
* * * * *
Rummaging through Fanny’s effects a day or two after her marriage,
Mazie discovered a painted fan, a mother-of-pearl card-case, and this
breast-pin. She carried the miniature to Odell.
“Looks like baby,” she explained, with her care-free laugh.
“She’ll be lucky if she favours that pitcher,” said Odell. “But like
as not she’ll take after Fanny.” He was wrong in his guess.
When Eris was five her resemblance to the miniature had become marked.
And Mazie’s boys looked like their mother and father.
On Saturday nights, after immersing her own unwilling brunette brats
in the weekly bath, Mazie found the slim white body of little Eris an
ever-increasing amusement and a pique to her curiosity. The child’s
frail yet healthy symmetry, the fine skin, delicate, perfect limbs,
lovely little hands and feet, remained perennial sources of mirth and
surprise to this robust young woman who was equally healthy, but built
on a big, colourful, vigorous plan.
Solid and large of limb and haunch, deep-bosomed, ruddy-skinned, the
young stepmother always bred true to type. Her sons were sons of the
soil from birth. There could be no doubt about her offspring. What
wasn’t Lister was Odell. They belonged to the land.
But when Mazie looked at her husband and looked at the child, Eris--and
when she remembered Fanny--then she wondered and was inclined to smile.
And she was content that her sons’ thick, sturdy bodies and slanting,
black eyes so plainly advertised the stock they came from. Utility.
Health. Strength.
Fanny had had a pink nose. Even a Guernsey ought to have one. But the
nose of Eris was snow white. To what stock did this child throw back?
When Eris was seven she was sent to the village school, leading her
eldest stepbrother thither by the hand. Both were scared and tearful.
Nobody went with little Eris to mitigate the ordeal; and she was a most
sensitive child.
* * * * *
Hers had been a deathless curiosity since she was old enough to ask
her first question. An unquenchable desire for information seemed to
possess her. Her eternal, “Will you tell me why?” became a nuisance.
“Dang it, send her to school!” shouted Odell at last. And that was how.
At her small desk, rigid, bewildered, terribly intent on the first
teacher in human form she had ever gazed upon, she found herself on the
verge of tears. But, before she could dissolve, her brother forestalled
her, bursting into vigorous yells, bawling like a calf; and would not
be comforted. Which allowed Eris no time for private grief while wiping
his eyes with her pinafore.
Noonday recess and lunch baskets and the wildly gyrating horde of
children let loose on a sandy playground ended the first encounter
between Eris Odell and the great god Education in His Local Temple at
White Hills Village.
* * * * *
Eris learned little in school. There is little to learn in American
schools. No nation is more illiterate. And in the sort of school she
went to the ignorant are taught by the half educated.
None of her teachers could speak English as it should be spoken. In
their limited vocabulary there was no room for choice of words. Perhaps
that was why negatives were doubled now and then.
As for the rest, she was stuffed with falsified history and unessential
geographical items; she was taught to read after a fashion, and to
spell, and to juggle figures. There was a nature class, too, full of
misinformation. And once an owlish, elderly man lectured on physiology;
and told them in a low and solemn voice that “there is two sects in the
phenonemy of natur, and little boys are made diffrunt to little girls.”
That ended the lecture, leaving every little boy and little girl mad
with unsatisfied curiosity, and some of the older children slightly
uncomfortable.
But The Great American Ass dominates this splendid land of ours. He
_knows_. He’ll tell the world. And that’s that--as Odell was accustomed
to say. And early in her career little Eris caught the cant phrase
of finality from her father, and incorporated it with her increasing
lingual equipment.
When one of the boys tried to kiss her, she kicked his shins. “And
that’s _that_!” she added breathlessly, smoothing out her rumpled
pinafore.
* * * * *
In Mazie she had a stepmother who made no difference between Eris and
her own progeny. She kissed them all alike at bedtime; dosed them when
necessary, comforted their sorrows with stock reassurances from a
limited vocabulary, darned, sewed, mended, washed for all alike.
Mazie gave her children and her husband all she had time to give--all
she had the capacity to give--the kindly, cheerful offices and
understanding of a healthy female.
Whitewater Queen was as good a mother. Both lacked imagination. But
Whitewater Queen didn’t need any.
For a time, however, the knowledge imbibed at school nourished Eris,
although there were few vitamines in the feed.
When she was thirteen her brothers--twelve, eleven, ten and
nine--alternately bullied her, deferred to her, or ran bawling to her
with their troubles.
When she was fourteen the world met its own weird at Armageddon.
The old order of things began to change. A new earth and a newly
interpreted Heaven replaced the “former things” which had “passed away.”
At eighteen Eris looked out over the smoking débris of “former
things”--gazed out of limpid grey eyes upon “a new Heaven and a new
Earth”; and saw the cloudy, gigantic spectre of all-that-had-once-been
receding, dissolving, vanishing from the world where it had reigned so
tyrannically and so long.
* * * * *
About that time she dreamed, for the first time, that dream which so
often re-occurred in after years--that she stood at her open window,
naked, winged, restless for flight to some tremendous height where
dwelt the aged god of Wisdom all alone, cutting open a human heart that
was still faintly pulsating.
At eighteen--the year the world war was ended--Eris “graduated.”
She wrote a little act for herself, designed her own costume, made
it, acted, sang, and danced the part. It was the story of a poor girl
who prays for two things--a pair of wings so that she may fly to the
moon, and a new hat for the journey. Suddenly she discovers a new hat
in her hands. The next instant two beautiful little wings sprout on
her shoulders. Instantly she takes scissors and snips off the wings
and trims her new hat with them. Ready for her journey, suddenly she
realises that now she cannot fly. She tears the wings from the hat. Too
late. She can’t fasten them to her shoulders again. They flutter to her
feet. She falls on her knees in a passion of tears. The moon rises,
grinning.
It was a vast success--this little act of Eris Odell--and while its
subtler intent was quite lost on the honest folk of White Hills
Village, the story itself was so obvious and Eris did it so prettily
that even her father grunted approval.
That evening he promised her the next heifer-calf for her own. If it
proved a good one the sale of it should provide a nice nest-egg for
Eris when she married.
* * * * *
The next heifer-calf promised well. Eris named her White Iris and she
was so registered.
In the yearling pure-breeds she was first at the Comity Fair. But Eris
refused to sell. At the State Fair White Iris beat every Guernsey and
every other heifer, pure-breed and grade.
Brookvale Manor offered her three thousand dollars. Odell made her take
it, and put the money into the local bank. So, with tears blinding her
grey eyes, Eris sold White Iris out of the county. And would not be
comforted even by the brand new cheque-book sent to her by the cashier
of the White Hills Bank.
The account, however, was in her father’s name.
* * * * *
Now, the horizon of Eris Odell had narrowed as her sphere of activity
dwindled after graduation.
Whitewater Farms became her world. Within its confines lay her duties
and diversions, both clearly defined.
They were her heritage. No loop-holes offered escape--excepting
marriage. And that way out was merely the way in to another and
similar prison the boundary of which was a barbed wire fence, and its
mathematical centre a manure pit.
* * * * *
She continued to dream of wings. An immense, indefinable longing
possessed her in waking hours. But she was only one of the youthful,
excited millions, waking after æons to the first instincts that had
ruled the human race.
It was the restlessness of the world’s youth that stirred her--Modern
Youth opening millions of clear young eyes to gaze upon the wonders of
a new Heaven and a new earth, and mad to explore it all from zenith to
depths--sky, sea, land, and the waters under the earth. Youth, suddenly
crazed by an overwhelming desire for Truth, after æons and æons of lies.
Explore, venture, achieve, live--demand Truth, exact it, face it, and
_know_!--the mighty, voiceless cry of the World’s Youth--claiming
freedom to seek, liberty to live, fearless, untrammelled, triumphant.
A terrible indictment of Age, and of those age-governed æons which
forever have passed away.
Already the older, duller generation caught the vast vibration of young
hearts beating to arms, young voices swelling the tremulous, universal
cry of insurgence, a clear, ceaseless, sea-like sound of laughter
proclaiming the death of Sham--ringing an endless, silvery requiem.
* * * * *
Odell shoved up his spectacles and lowered the newspaper to glance at
Eris.
“What say?” he repeated fretfully.
“I’d like to study dancing.”
“Can’t you dance? You go to enough socials and showers ’n’one thing
’n’other.”
“I mean--stage dancing.”
“Stage!” he thundered. “Be you crazy?”
“Why, Eris, how you talk!” said her stepmother, too astounded to laugh.
“I could go to New York and work in a store by day; and take
stage-dancing lessons evenings,” murmured the girl. “I want to be
somebody.”
“You stay here and do your chores and try to act as if you ain’t a
little loonatic!” shouted Odell. “I’m sicka hearing about the capers
and kickups of young folks nowaday. Them gallivantins don’t go in my
house. I’m sicka reading about ’em, too. And that’s _that_!”
“After all,” said Eris, “why do I have to do what I don’t care to do?”
“Dang it,” retorted her father, “didn’t you never hear of dooty? What
d’they teach you in school?”
“Nothing much,” she replied listlessly. “Did you always want to be a
farmer, daddy?”
“Hey?”
“Are you a farmer because you wanted to be? Or did you want to be
something else?”
“What dinged trash you talk,” he said, disgusted. “I didn’t wanta be a
blacksmith or I’da been one.”
“Why can’t _I_ be what I’d like to be? Will you tell me why?”
Odell, speechless, resumed his newspaper. It was nearly nine o’clock
and he hadn’t read half the local news and none of the column devoted
to the Grange.
Eris looked wistfully at him, loitering still in the doorway, slim,
grey-eyed, undeveloped.
Her stepmother laughed at her: “Notions,” she said. “Don’t you know
you’d go to rack and rooin that way? You go to bed, Eris.... There’s
fresh ginger snaps in the pantry.”