REMEMBERED HIS OBLIGATION.
Now and then there was a blustery day, but good weather remained till
late in November. But the ground tightened with the cold, and a
snow-whirlwind came from the Northwest. Nowhere had the autumn been
fuller of color, but a hiss and a snarl had buried it all beneath the
crackly white of winter. Windmills creaked in the fierce blast, sucking
smoky water from the ground, to gush, to drip, and then to hang from the
spout a frozen beard. Black-capped milkmen, with flaps drawn down over
ears, sat upon their wagons, appearing in their garb as if the hangman
had rigged them up for a final journey. To look upon the frozen fields
and to stand in the groaning woods it did not seem possible that there
had ever been a day of lazy heat and nodding bloom. At tightening
midnight the flinty lake cracked with a running shriek. The dawn was a
gray shudder, the sunrise a shiver of pale red, and then a black cloud
blot-out and more snow. A day that promised to be good-tempered often
ended in a fury; and sometimes, when it seemed that nature could not be
more harsh, the wind would soften, a thaw come with rain, and then
another freeze with a snow-storm fiercer than before. Sometimes thunder
growled, a lost mood of summer in the upper air; sometimes a lagging
autumn bird was whirled through the freezing wind. And with it all the
Yankee man was full of spirit, almost happy, happy as the Yankee well
can be. His cool nature demanded a fight with the cold. The ears of all
his ancestors had been frozen in bleak New England. His religion had
been nurtured in a snow-drift, and unlike the breath of a freezing
rabbit, did not melt an inch of it. In the howl of a cutting wind he
heard a psalm to his vengeful Deity. And to-day the winter reminds him
that his army was victorious in the summer South. It was a fight of
Winter against Summer.
Milford had no idle time upon his hands. When not at work in the barn he
was trading among the farmers. They called him sharp, and this was a
compliment. He had beaten Steve Hardy in a trade, and this was praise.
An honest sort of a fellow is an eyesore to the genuine Yankee. He must
have other virtues--thrift. There was but one drawback in the Rollins
community: The land was too productive. It yielded a good living without
the full exercise of the Yankee quality. The Yankee is happiest when
strongly opposed. His religion was sweetest when he had to pray with one
eye open, sighting at the enemy, the dragoon sent by the king to break
up the Conventicle, or the American Indian come to burn the
meeting-house.
The winter had brought out Milford's strong points. He doubled his money
on a flock of sheep. Fathers spoke of it to their daughters. Mothers
asked their sons if they were acquainted with Mr. Milford. Mrs. Stuvic
was proud of him.
"Oh, I knowed what I was doin'," she said one night, sitting near the
hot stove in Milford's dining-room. "You can't fool me. I know lots, I
tell you. Do you know the Bunker girl? Well, she was at my house
yesterday, and she talked like she knowed you but wanted to know you
better. Now put down that newspaper and talk to me. Do you know her?"
"I think I've met her," said Milford.
"You think you have. Well, a woman has taken mighty little hold of a man
when he thinks he's met her. She'd make you a good wife; yes, you bet!"
"I don't want a wife, good or bad."
"Oh, you keep still. What the deuce are you workin' for? You know
there's a woman somewhere waitin' for you."
"And if there is, why should I want to marry the Bunker girl?"
"Now listen at him! Why, I didn't know but you'd got tired of foolin'
with the other one. Who is she? That tall critter that was out here?
Well, I don't know about her, with her art. Art the cat's foot! You'd
better marry a woman that knows how to do housework. She may be all
right for summer, but you'd better marry a woman for winter. Don't you
think so, Bob?"
"For winter and summer, I should think," said the hired man. "But I
married one for winter, and she went away along in July. But I guess I
could get her again."
"And he's just about fool enough to take her," Milford spoke up. "Why,
she'd run away again."
"I don't think that, Bill. I guess she's got more sense now."
"At any rate, she's got more sense than you," said the old woman. "She
had sense enough to run away and you didn't. But I hear that somebody
else run away, Bill. I heard that you left a wife out West."
"You heard a lie, madam," Milford replied. "But that's not hard to hear.
A man may be ever so deaf, and sometimes might hear a lie."
"That's gospel, Mrs. Stuvic," said the hired man. "I was out at the deaf
and dumb asylum one time, and they had a boy shut up for lyin' with his
fingers."
"Well, what do you come tellin' me about it for? Do you s'pose I care? I
wasn't talkin' about lyin'. I was talkin' about some folks not havin'
much sense, and you was right at the top of the pot, I'll tell you that.
You haven't got sense enough to catch a good woman."
"I might not have from your standpoint, but I have from mine. I don't
believe I'd want the woman you'd call good. She'd think it was her duty
to keep a man stirred up all the time; she'd make him work himself to
death."
"Well," she snapped, "a woman's better off every time she makes a man
work himself to death, I'll tell you that."
"Yes, from your standpoint," drawled the hired man, opening the stove
door to get a light for his pipe. "But I wouldn't kill myself for no
woman, would you, Bill?"
"I don't know that I'm called on to do it," Milford replied. "Give me
that," he added, reaching for the bit of blazing paper which the hired
man was about to put out. He lighted his pipe, threw the burning paper
on the stove, and idly looked at the cinder waving in the draft. "As
unsteadfast as Mitchell's love," he said.
"What is?" the hired man inquired. "That thing, there? No, that's a
woman's love. See, it's blowed away."
"Such nonsense!" said the old woman. "How can you keep it up so long?
I'd get sick to death of it. Woman's love, woman's love--I never was as
tired of hearing of a thing. I hear it all summer, and now you're
talkin' it. Conscience alive, how the wind blows! It makes me think of
old Lewson, the cold made him shiver so. I've knowed him to sit up at
night with his fire out and his teeth chatterin', waitin' for the
spirits to come. One night I asked him who he expected, and he said his
wife, and I told him she was a fool to come out such a night, and he
flung his spirit book at me, and the Dutch girl kindled the fire with it
the next mornin'. Poor old feller! I passed his grave the other day, all
heaped up with snow; and it made me shake so to think I'd be lyin' there
sometime, with the snow fallin' an' the cows mooin' down the road. But
I'm not gone yet, Bill. Do you understand that? I say I'm not gone yet,
and many a one of 'em 'll be hauled off before I do go. Yes, you bet!
I'll outlive all of you; the last one of you."
"I hope so, Mrs. Stuvic," said Milford.
"You do? Thank you for the compliment."
"But you've got to go sometime," Mitchell spoke up; and she frowned upon
him.
"You shut your mouth, now," she snapped. "I wan't talkin' to you. I'll
go when I get ready, and it's none of your business. But ain't it
awful," she added, speaking to Milford, "that we've got to go? And we
don't know where and don't know what'll happen to us afterwards. Lord,
Lord, such a world! If we could only be dead for a while to see what
it's like; but to think forever and ever, all the summers and all the
winters to come! Dead, all the time dead. I wake up in the night, and
think about it and wish I'd never been born. Sometimes I look at my hand
and say, 'Yes, the flesh has got to drop off.' Not long ago a doctor
stopped at my house one night with a skeleton. He was a young fool, and
had bought it somewhere. He jerked the thing around like it was a
jumpin'-jack; and I said to myself, 'You'd do me the same way, you
scoundrel.' And I told him to drive away from there as fast as he could.
And old Lewson's failin' to come back has made it worse. I wonder if he
did lie to me. I wonder if he could come back. And if he could, why
didn't he? I'd always been kind to him; took him when his own flesh and
blood turned him out. Then what made him lie to me? I don't care so much
about his not comin' back; all I want is to know that he could have
come. That would satisfy me. And why couldn't he let me know that much?
Bill, you lump of mud, don't you think about dyin'?"
"You're coming pretty close to my name, old lady. Yes, I think about
it, but death will have to take care of itself. I haven't the time to
worry with it just at present."
"Yes, and the first thing you know you can't worry about it."
"Then I'll be all right; won't need to worry."
She reached over and gripped his wrist. "Ah, that's it; that's just it.
How do you know that you won't need to worry? What proof have you got?
Tell me, if you've got any." She jerked him. "Tell me. Don't you see how
I'm sufferin'? If you know anythin', tell me. I want the truth. That's
all I want, the truth."
"I don't know anything, Mrs. Stuvic. I can only hope."
She turned loose his wrist and shoved herself back further from him.
"You can only hope. You mean that you're only a fool. That's what you
mean. What do you want to hope for? Why don't you find out? What's all
the smart men doin' that they don't find out? Talk to me about the world
gettin' wiser! Oh, they can invent their machines and all that, but why
don't they find out the truth?"
"Some of the wisest of them think they have found out long ago," Milford
replied. "Don't you see the churches? Somebody must believe that the
truth is known or there wouldn't be so many churches."
"Churches," she sneered, "yes, churches. But I don't believe in 'em, and
you don't neither. Same old thing all the time; believe, believe,
nothin' but believe. Well, I'm goin' home. I see you don't know any
more than I do. We're all a pack of fools."
Mitchell said that he was going her way, and she told him to come on. At
the door going out they met the Professor coming in. The old woman fell
back as if she had seen a ghost. She declared that for a moment he was
Old Lewson, just as he looked on the day when last he urged her to
accept his faith. She sat down to recover breath. The Professor assured
her that he meant no harm. Any resemblance that he might bear to the
living or the dead was wholly unintentional on his part. She told him to
shut up, that he was a fool. He acknowledged it with a bow, and said
that this fact also was wholly unintentional.
"You pretend to be so smart," she said. "Yes, but why don't you know the
truth?"
"I should know it, madam, were I to hear it."
"Oh, you get out! You don't know half the time what you're talkin'
about. What's to become of us all? That's what I want to know."
The Professor sat down. The hired man stood at the door. Milford leaned
back in his chair. The old woman looked at the learned man and repeated
her question. He began to say something about philosophy, and she broke
in with a contemptuous snort and the cat's foot. She did not want
philosophy; she wanted the truth. The Professor attempted to persuade
her that philosophy was the truth, and she fluttered like a hen. It was
nothing of the sort; it was ignorance put in big words. What she wanted
was the truth.
"But if you won't listen I can't give it to you," said the Professor.
"You cut me off at the beginning. Now, you say that what you want is the
truth. You demand an answer to your question of what is to become of us
all, after this life. You want me to answer it in a word, when the books
that have been written on the subject would sink the biggest ship
afloat."
"Yes, and you don't know anythin' about it. What I want to know is, can
we come back? Answer me that."
"Madam, in my opinion----"
"I don't give a snap for your opinion. Come on, Bob Mitchell, if you're
goin' with me." She bustled out of the room, leaving the Professor with
his finger-tips pressed together and his head erect. "As odd a fish as
was ever hooked," said he. "She must be afraid that she is going to
die."
"It's on her mind all the time," said Milford. "She wants to believe
something, she doesn't know exactly what."
"The pitiable case of one beyond the reach of philosophy. But in her
struggling to land herself somewhere she keeps her interest in herself
keenly alive. There is always some sort of hope as long as we are
interested in ourselves. Trite, I admit that it is trite, but it is a
fact that we should always bear in mind, endeavoring constantly to keep
alive an interest in self so that we may not fail in the obligations
which we owe to others. But well may the old woman ask what is to become
of us all. I wash my hands of the spiritual part," he said, going
through the motion of washing; "I can shift the responsibilities here,
or at least feel that I can, but--bodily, bodily, what's to become of us
bodily?"
"When such riddles are asked of me, I'm always ready to give them up,"
said Milford. "I'm not asking myself any questions."
"Ha! you don't need to," the Professor declared. "You bristle yourself
against the world, and in the fight that ensues you are not always
beaten. I am. Your nerve is sound. Mine has been broken many a time,
tied together again, and is therefore weak. Leaving age out of the
question, there is scarcely any comparison between our equipments for
the fight. You have a habit of silence that enforces respect for your
talk. I am talkative, and a talkative man utters many an unheeded truth.
At times you are almost grim, and this makes your good humor the
brighter. I am always pleasant, and as a consequence fail to hold the
interest of the company. In overalls you can assert a sort of dignity,
or rather what the thoughtless would take for dignity, but which I know
to be a gruffism--permit the expression--a gruffism toned down. But
I--even in a dress-suit I could not keep my dignity from cutting a
prejudicial caper. The trouble is that my acquaintances will not take me
seriously. I once heard a man say, 'Yes, as light as one of Dolihide's
worries.' It angers me to feel that outwardly I am a caricature of my
inner self. Not even my wife knows how serious I am, or what a tragedy
life is to me. But, my dear fellow, my oddities are crystal, and I will
not thread them off in spun glass. I came over for a different purpose.
The money with which you so generously deceived me--I have raised it; it
was a fearful scuffle, but I seized the obstacles that danced about me
and threw them down, one by one. Here is the money."
He took out a number of bank notes with a scattering of silver, and
slowly spread them on the table, carefully placing one upon the other.
"I said that I would pay you, and here's the money,--down to the forty
cents."
"I am much abliged to you, Professor. No hurry, though, you understand."
"There has been no hurry, my dear friend. No one can ever know what a
struggle it was to--to raise it at this time, this needful time." He
leaned back, and with lips tightly sealed together, and with head slowly
nodding, gazed at the pile of dirty paper. "This needful time, thou
filth," he said.
"Now, if you need it," Milford spoke up quickly, "take it. I'm not
pressed. You can pay it some other time."
"My life insurance will be due again within three days."
"Then go ahead and pay it."
The Professor continued to gaze at the bank notes. "Must I again crease
you into uncleanly folds--I am a thousand times your debtor, my dear
boy. I could spin fine, but I won't. I could pronounce a curse upon
these pieces of motley paper, but I won't. I cannot afford to. In their
mire they lie between me and my family's future misery. I don't know
what your ultimate aim is in this life, but I know that you are a
Christian. I don't know what you have done, but it is what a man does
now that makes him a Christian. Well, solemn under the weight of a
renewed obligation, I will return to my own fireside. Before touching
this money again, let me shake your hand."