Spring had begun more than a month early. The young year promised
agricultural miracles. All omens were favourable. Ed Lister predicted
it would be a “hog-killin’.”
June’s magic turned Whitewater to a paradise. Crystal mornings
gradually warming until sundown; gentle showers at night to freshen
herbage and start a million planted seeds; blossoms, bees, buds,
blue skies--all exquisitely balanced designs in June’s enchanted
tapestry--and nothing so far to mar the fabric--no late and malignant
frost, no early drouth, broken violently by thunderbolt and deluge; no
hail; no heavy winds to dry and sear; nothing untoward in the herd,--no
milk-fever, no abortion, no terrifying emergency at night.
The only things to irritate Odell were the letters from Eris. They
aroused in him the dumb, familiar anger of Fanny’s time.
* * * * *
But after the first week in July there were no longer any letters from
Eris. The girl had written two or three times during June, striving to
explain herself, to make him understand her need of doing as she was
doing, the necessity that some of her own money be sent her.
Her last letter arrived about the beginning of that dreadful era of
unprecedented heat and drouth which ushered in July and which caused
that summer to be long remembered in the Old World as well as in the
New.
Odell’s refusal to send her a single penny, and his repeated summons
for her return had finally silenced Eris. No more letters came. Odell’s
attitude silenced Mazie, too, whose primitive sense of duty was to her
man first of all.
Sometimes she ventured to hope that Eris might, somehow, be successful.
Oftener a comforting belief reassured her that the girl would soon
return to material comforts and female duties, which were all Mazie
comprehended of earthly happiness.
Odell’s refusal to send Eris her money and her clothes worried Mazie
when she had time to think. But what could she do? Man ruled Mazie’s
universe. It was proper that he should. All her life she had had to
submit to him,--she had to cook for him, wash, sew, mend, care for his
habitation, bear his children, fed them, wean them, and, in the endless
sequence again, cook, wash, iron, sew, mend for these men-children
which she had borne her man. And it was proper. It was the way of the
world. Of heaven, too, perhaps. God himself was masculine.... She
sometimes wondered whether there really was any rest there for female
angels....
Of what other women desired and did,--of aspiration, spiritual
and intellectual discontent, Mazie knew nothing. For her nothing
desirable existed beyond the barbed wire. And yet, without at all
understanding Eris, always she had felt an odd sympathy for the girl’s
irregularities--had recognized that Fanny’s child was different from
herself, from her offspring--from other women’s children. But the
underlying motive that had sent Eris forth was quite beyond Mazie’s
ken. The resurrection of her sex came too early for her who had not yet
died.
The farm year had begun prosperously. Until July there had been no
cloud on the horizon. In imagination Odell gazed across acres and acres
of golden harvest; saw a beneficent and paternal Government coming to
the relief of all farmers; saw every silo packed, every barn bursting;
saw the steady increase of the herd balanced by profitable sales; saw
ribbons and prizes awaiting his exhibits at County and State Fairs.
Yet, very often after supper, when standing on the porch chewing his
quid as stolidly as his cows chewed their cuds, he was aware of a vague
unease--as in Fanny’s day.
He could not comprehend the transmission of resentment from Fanny to
Fanny’s child. He could much less understand the inherited resentment
of a sex, now for the first time since creation making its defiance
subtly felt the whole world through. _Sub jugum ad astra!_ And now the
Yoke had fallen; stars blazed beyond. Restless-winged, a Sex stood
poised for flight, turning deaf ears to earthbound voices calling them
back to hoods and bells and jesses.
* * * * *
One stifling hot night in July, after two weeks’ enervating drouth,
Odell’s impotent wrath burst from the depths of bitterness long pent:
“That ding-danged slut will shame us yet if she don’t come back! I’m
done with her if she ain’t in her own bed by Monday night. You write
and tell her, Mazie. Tell her I’m through. Tell her I say so. And
that’s that!”
* * * * *
The “ding-danged slut” at that moment lay asleep on the grass in a New
York public park. And all around her, on the hot and trampled grass,
lay half-naked, beastly, breathing human heaps--the heat-tortured
hordes of the unwashed.