The stoic patience of the farmer, who serves a capricious master and
finds his most treasured works casually destroyed by that master’s
slightest whim, takes time to learn, but is a mighty armor, when it has
been put on. It was Johnny Dree’s heritage; it was, in remoter line, the
heritage also of Walter Moore. It bore them through that summer, and
through the frost-hued glory of the fall. There is a pleasure in a task
well done, regardless of reward; and when Moore surveyed his trees, he
found this pleasure. Johnny Dree confirmed it. “They’re like money in
the bank, Mr. Moore,” he said. “You can’t lose it, and it pays you
interest right along. We’re due for a good apple year, next year.”
Moore nodded. “I’m beginning to like it here,” he assented. “It was
tough, at first. But I’m no worse in debt than I was last year, and I
ought to pull out when the trees begin to bear.”
“Aye,” said Johnny Dree. “You’ve got something to build on, now. It’ll
go easier, from now on.”
Moore had learned many things, in these months that had gone; and so had
Lucy. And so had Johnny Dree. Lucy was teaching him a thing he had never
had time to learn; she was teaching him to play. When snow came, he
brought her, one day, snow-shoes; and thereafter they occasionally
tramped the woods together, following the meandering trails of the small
creatures of the forest, marking where a partridge had left a delicate
tracery of footprints in the snow, exploring the great swamp below the
hill where the cedars had been stripped of browse by the moose that
wintered there. He found where deer were yarded, and took her to the
place, and once they caught glimpses of the startled creatures, bounding
away through the cumbering snow. There was a deepening understanding
between these two; when they were together she talked almost constantly,
and he scarce at all; but she could read his silences, and he understood
her fountain-like loquacity. Through a keener understanding, she found
matters to love in these hills and woods which were his world; she was,
by slow degrees, forgetting the more obvious pleasures of her life
before she came to Fraternity to dwell. They were, for the most part, as
much isolated as though they lived upon an island in the sea; for, save
for the nightly gatherings at Will Bissell’s store, Fraternity folk are
not overly social in their inclinations. Once he took her to a grange
dance, and she found him surprisingly adequate in this new rôle, found
an unsuspected pleasure in the rustic merry-making she would, two years
before, have scorned. Johnny did not smoke, and she asked him why; he
said he didn’t want to waste the money. Yet once when he went to East
Harbor, he brought her a flower, in a pot; and when she asked him if
that wasn’t wasting money, he smiled a little and said he did not think
it was. One day, to torment him, she cried: “I’d give a lot for a
cigarette. I haven’t had one for days. Will you get me some, next time
you’re at the store. I don’t dare buy them there.”
Johnny merely smiled at her and replied: “I guess if you ever did smoke
them, you don’t any more.”
One day her snow-shoe caught on a broken stub and threw her forward into
the snow. She said: “Oh, damn!” More in jest than in anger. Lifting her
to her feet, he commented:
“I shouldn’t think a girl would swear much.”
“I like to,” she insisted. “It makes me feel good when I’m mad.”
“I never could see it helped me any,” he rejoined, mildly enough. But
she thereafter guarded her tongue, until the necessity for restraint
had disappeared. Self discipline was one of the things she learned from
Johnny.
You could hardly say they had a romance. They grew together, as
naturally as stock and scion grafted by his skilful hands. They had this
great community of interest in the trees which were his work, which she
had come to love. Their forward looking eyes were centered on the
harvest time, now a scant year away, when the fruition of their labors
could be expected; and their anticipations were tranquil and serene.
They talked, sometimes, of what he meant to make of his life. “You won’t
always be a farmer, will you?” she asked.
“I guess I will,” he told her.
“Slaving away here!”
He smiled a little. “There’s a man up in Winterport,” he said. “He
planted some apple trees twenty years ago, and more and more since, and
he’s got ten thousand trees, now. I went up there two years ago on the
orchard tour the Farm Bureau runs. He cleared over twenty thousand
dollars, that year, on his apples. Ten thousand trees. I’ve only got
four hundred; but I’m putting in two hundred more next spring, and more
when I can, and my land is better than his, and there’s more around me I
can buy. It’s clean work. You can learn a lot from an apple tree, and
eating apples never did anybody much harm. And you’ve time for thinking,
while you work on the trees....”
She slipped her hand through his arm in understanding, as they tramped
along.
In December his mother, who had suffered for half a dozen years from a
mysterious weakness of the heart, was taken sick with what at first
seemed a slight cold. In early January, she died. Walter Moore and his
wife and Lucy were among those who followed the little cortege to the
receiving tomb where--because the frost had fortified the earth against
the digging of a grave--his mother’s body would lie till spring. Lucy
was mysteriously moved by the pity of this; that a woman should die, and
yet be kept waiting for her final sweet repose in the bosom of earth.
After supper that evening, she drew on coat and heavy overshoes and
muffled her head against the bitter wind that blew. “I’m going down to
cheer up Johnny, mama,” she said.
Moore and his wife, when the door had closed behind her, looked at each
other with deep understanding. “Well,” he said, “I guess Lucy’s gone.”
But his wife smiled through misty eyes. “She’s come back to us these
last two years,” she said. “No matter what happens, she can’t really go
away again.”
V
Down at Johnny’s house, Lucy knocked at the kitchen door and Johnny let
her in. He was washing dishes and putting them away. “I’ve finished
supper, just finished supper,” he said awkwardly.
“I wanted to comfort you, Johnny,” Lucy told him.
He looked at her, rubbing his plate in his hands with the cloth.
“That’s--mighty nice,” he said.
“You mustn’t be unhappy. I don’t want you to be unhappy,” she
explained, still standing just within the door. She was plucking away
her wraps, laid her coat aside.
“You’re a mighty sweet girl,” Johnny told her, rubbing his plate as
though the motion of his hands had hypnotized him.
“I want to take care of you,” said Lucy.
Johnny considered, and saw that she had come a little nearer where he
stood. “I guess it would be nice if we got married,” he suggested.
“Wouldn’t it?”
Lucy suddenly smiled, tenderly amused at him. Her eyes, full of tears,
were dancing. “I think it would be nice, Johnny,” she agreed. And moved
a little nearer still. She did not have to go all the way.
The plate, unbroken by its fall, rolled across the floor toward the
stove, and tilted over there, and whirled to rest like a dying top,
oscillating to and fro on its rim with a sound faintly like the sound of
bells.