Until the Great War turned the world upside down, Whitewater Farms made
money after Odell married Ed Lister’s daughter.
Shortage of labour during the war cut into profits; taxes wiped them
out; the ugly, Bolshevik attitude of labour after the war caused a
deficit.
It was the sullen inertia of the mob, conscious of power. Men did not
care whether they worked at all. If they chose to work, mills and
factories would pay them enough in three days to permit them to remain
idle the remainder of the week. No farmer could pay the swollen wages
demanded for field labour, and survive financially.
Every village was full of idle louts who sneered at offered employment.
Fruit rotted in orchards, grain remained uncut, cattle stood neglected.
The great American loafer leered at the situation. The very name of
Labour stank. It stinks still. The Great American Ass has made the term
a stench in the nostrils of civilisation.
* * * * *
The next year mills and factories began to lay off labour. Odell and
Lister scraped together a few sulky field hands, mainly incompetents,
men who had spent all their wages. Fields were sullenly tilled, crops
gathered, cattle cared for.
Except for profiteers, reaction had set in. War profligacy, asinine
finance, crushing taxes already were doing their work.
Rather than pay for feed, farmers sold their stock. The demand for
pork started everybody hog-raising. Prices fell; loss followed. Then
stagnation. It was the bitter aftermath of war--the deluge. Dead water.
Only one star of hope glimmered over the waste,--the New Administration.
* * * * *
Spring was a month early that year. Odell, at sixty, unimpaired by pie
and the great American frying pan, his gaitered legs planted sturdily
in the new grass, looked out over his domain and chewed a clover stem.
“I ain’t afraid,” he said to Lister. “I’m going the hull hog. Every
acre.”
“Where’s your help?” remonstrated Lister.
“I got ’em.”
“Some on ’em is quitters. They’ll lay down on yeh, Elmer.”
Odell spat out the clover stem: “Every acre, Ed!” he repeated. “And six
cows on test.”
“We ain’t got the help----”
“Six cows,” growled Odell; “White Lady, Snow Queen, Silver Maid,
Thistledown, Milkweed Lass, and Whitewater Lily.... I gotta make money.
I’m aimin’ to and I’m a-going to. I got four sons. And that’s that!”
“Elmer----”
“Awright. I know all what you gonna say, Ed. But where does it get
you to go around with a face a foot long? How’s things to start
unless somebody starts ’em? Awright, prices is bad. You can’t sell
a pure-breed caaf in this dinged country. There isn’t no market for
a fancy heifer. Everybody’s breedin’ Holsteins ’n’sloshin’ around
after grades. Awright; nobody wants Guernsey quality; everybody wants
Holstein bulk ’n’watery milk ’n’everything. I know. And my answer is,
_every acre_, Ed; and six cows on test; and higher prices on every
danged caaf that’s dropped.
“If I sell a heifer it’s a favour to be paid for through the nose. And
I feed every bull-caaf and no vealin’ this year. Enough hogs to turn
out till October; not another danged snout! If the Bank don’t see me
through I’ll blow it up. Now, g’wan and make your plans.”
He went into the creamery where his wife stood beside the separator,
watching a cat lap up some spilled cream.
“Your pa’s timid, Mazie,” he said. “I tell him I cal’late t’start under
full steam. What do you say?”
She laughed: “Pa’s got notions. He allus was a mite slow. I guess you
know best, Elmer.”
“We all gotta work,” he said. “That means Eris, too.”
“She allus helps me,” remarked Mazie, simply.
“I dunno what she does,” grunted Odell; “--sets a hen or two, fools
around the incubators, digs up a spoonful of scratch-feed--what does
she do, anyhow?”
“The child mends and irons----”
“When she ain’t readin’ or tendin’ her flowers or moonin’ ’round the
woods ’n’fields,” retorted Odell. “Eris reckons she’s too fine a lady
for farm folk, I guess. I want her to keep busy. And that’s that.”
“Somebody’s got to tend the flowers,” remonstrated Mazie. “You don’t
want we should have no posy bed, Elmer--like poor folks down to the
Holler, do you?”
“I can git along ’n’eat dinner without posies. Why don’t Erie read the
_Grange Journal_? Oh, no; it’s fancy novels and highfalutin’ books she
studies onto. And she’s allus cuttin’ out these here fashions into
these here magazines with coloured pitchers outside. Did you ever see
Eris studyin’ into a cook-book? Or a seed catalogue? Or the _Guernsey
Cattle Magazine_? Or the _Breeder’s Guide_----”
“You let her be,” said Mazie, good-naturedly. “The housework’s done and
that’s all you need to know. She can cook and make a bed if she’s a
mind to.”
“Mind,” growled Odell, “--what’s a girl want of a mind? All she uses it
for is to plan how to play-act on the stage or gallivant into moving
pitchers. All she thinks about is how to git to New York to hunt up
some fancy job so she can paint her face and dance in bare legs----”
“Now, Elmer, Eris is too smart to act foolish; and she’s educated real
well. You liked to see her act in school, and you thought she danced
nicely. She’s only a child yet----”
“She’s twenty!”
“She’s no more’n sixteen in her way of thinking, Elmer. She’s a good
girl.”
“I didn’t say she’s bad. But she’s twenty, and she ought to be more
help to us. And she ought to quit readin’ and moonin’ and dreamin’ and
lazin’----”
“You quit _your_ lazin’, too,” laughed Mazie, setting a pan of cream
in the ice chest. “Why don’t you go down to the barn and ring that new
herd-bull? You can’t get him into the paddock without a staff any more.
And if you don’t watch out Whitewater Chieftain will hurt somebody....
’N’I’ll be a widow.”
As Odell went out the dairy door, preoccupied with the ticklish job
before him, he met Eris with her arms full of new kittens.
“Mitzi’s,” she explained, “aren’t they too cunning, daddy? I hope
they’re not to be drowned.”
“I ain’t runnin’ a cat-farm,” remarked Odell. “Did you mend my canvas
jacket?”
“Yes; it’s on your bed.”
“Did you coop them broody hens? I bet you didn’t.”
“Yes. There are seventeen in three coops.”
“Housework done?”
“Yes.”
“Awright. Why don’t you get the cook-book and set in the hammock a
spell?”
The girl laughed: “Don’t you like mother’s cooking?”
“S’all right for _me_. But I don’t cal’late your mother’s going to cook
for the fella you hitch up with.”
Eris turned up her nose: “Don’t worry. I shan’t ever marry. Not any boy
in _this_ town, anyway. Probably I’ll never marry.... I’ll not have
time,” she added, half to herself.
Odell, who was going, stopped.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“An actress ought not to marry. She ought to give every moment to her
art,” explained the girl naïvely.
“Is--that--so? Well, you can chase that idea outa your head, my girl,
because you ain’t never going to be no actress. And that’s _that_!”
“Some day,” said Eris, with a flushed smile, “I shall follow my own
judgment and give myself to art.... And that’s _that_!”
As they stood there, father and daughter, confronting each other in the
pale April sunshine, the great herd-bull bellowed from the cattle-barn,
shaking the still air with his thunderous reverberations. He was to be
shot that evening.
Eris sighed: “He misses his companions,” she said, “and he tells us
so.... Poor White Lightning.... And I, also, miss the companionship
of all I have never known.... Some day I shall tell you so.... I hope
you’ll understand.”
“You talk like a piece in a magazine,” said Odell; “you better quit
reading them danged love stories and movin’ pitcher magazines and study
into the _Farm Journal_.”
“You’d be very proud of me if I became a great actress,” she said
seriously.
“I’d be a danged sight prouder if you was a great cook,” he grunted.
And he went toward the cattle-barn, spinning the patent self-piercing
nose ring on his horny forefinger.
Eris called after him: “Have you _got_ to shoot Lightning?”
“Yes, I gotta beef him. He’s no good any more.”
* * * * *
So the great herd-bull, like all “Former Things,” was doomed to “pass
away.”
As the Dionysia became the Mithraic Rites, so was taurian glory doomed
to pass.... A bullet where Aldebaran shows the way. The way of all
bulls.
Neither Odell nor Eris had ever heard of Aldebaran. And the tombs of
the Magi were no more tightly sealed than the mind of the father. But
the child’s mind hid a little lamp unlighted. A whisper might reveal to
her Aldebaran shining in the midnight heavens. Or the Keys of Life and
Death hanging on the Rosy Cross....
* * * * *
The bull died at the appointed hour. Eris stood in her bed-room closing
both ears with trembling palms.
She did not hear the shot. Mazie found her there; laughed at her
good-naturedly.
Eris’ lips formed the words: “Is he dead?”
“My dear, he’s Polack beef by now.”
Gloria tauri--gloria mundi. But whatever ends always begins again.
* * * * *
What was the Dionysia is now Rosicrucian ... and shall again be
something else ... and always the same.
As for the Bull of Mithra--and Mithra, too--bull-calves are born every
day. And there are a million million suns in the making.
It’s only the Old Order that changes, not what orders it.