“WE must get married before time to put in crops,” he wrote. “We must
make a success of the farm the first year, for luck. Could you manage
to be ready to come out West by the last of February? After March opens
there will be no let-up, and I do not see how I could get away. Make it
February, Annie dear. A few weeks more or less can make no difference to
you, but they make a good deal of difference to me.”
The woman to whom this was written read it with something like anger. “I
don't believe he's so impatient for me!” she said to herself. “What he
wants is to get the crops in on time.” But she changed the date of their
wedding, and made it February.
Their wedding journey was only from the Illinois village where she lived
to their Nebraska farm. They had never been much together, and they had
much to say to each other.
“Farming won't come hard to you,” Jim assured her. “All one needs to
farm with is brains.”
“What a success you'll make of it!” she cried saucily.
“I wish I had my farm clear,” Jim went on; “but that's more than any one
has around me. I'm no worse off than the rest. We've got to pay off the
mortgage, Annie.”
“Of course we must. We'll just do without till we get the mortgage
lifted. Hard work will do anything, I guess. And I'm not afraid to work,
Jim, though I've never had much experience.”
Jim looked out of the window a long time, at the gentle undulations of
the brown Iowa prairie. His eyes seemed to pierce beneath the sod,
to the swelling buds of the yet invisible grass. He noticed how
disdainfully the rains of the new year beat down the grasses of the
year that was gone. It opened to his mind a vision of the season's
possibilities. For a moment, even amid the smoke of the car, he seemed
to scent clover, and hear the stiff swishing of the corn and the dull
burring of the bees.
“I wish sometimes,” he said, leaning forward to look at his bride, “that
I had been born something else than a farmer. But I can no more help
farming, Annie, than a bird can help singing, or a bee making honey. I
didn't take to farming. I was simply born with a hoe in my hand.”
“I don't know a blessed thing about it,” Annie confessed. “But I made up
my mind that a farm with you was better than a town without you. That's
all there is to it, as far as I am concerned.”
Jim Lancy slid his arm softly about her waist, unseen by the other
passengers. Annie looked up apprehensively, to see if any one was
noticing. But they were eating their lunches. It was a common coach on
which they were riding. There was a Pullman attached to the train, and
Annie had secretly thought that, as it was their wedding journey, it
might be more becoming to take it. But Jim had made no suggestion about
it. What he said later explained the reason.
“I would have liked to have brought you a fine present,” he said. “It
seemed shabby to come with nothing but that little ring. But I put
everything I had on our home, you know. And yet, I'm sure you'll think
it poor enough after what you've been used to. You'll forgive me for
only bringing the ring, my dear?”
“But you brought me something better,” Annie whispered. She was a
foolish little girl. “You brought me love, you know.” Then they rode
in silence for a long time. Both of them were new to the phraseology of
love. Their simple compliments to each other were almost ludicrous. But
any one who might have chanced to overhear them would have been charmed,
for they betrayed an innocence as beautiful as an unclouded dawn.
Annie tried hard not to be depressed by the treeless stretches of the
Nebraska plains.
“This is different from Illinois,” she ventured once, gently; “it is
even different from Iowa.”
“Yes, yes,” cried Jim, enthusiastically, “it is different! It is the
finest country in the world! You never feel shut in. You can always see
off. I feel at home after I get in Nebraska. I'd choke back where you
live, with all those little gullies and the trees everywhere. It's a
mystery to me how farmers have patience to work there.”
Annie opened her eyes. There was evidently more than one way of looking
at a question. The farm-houses seemed very low and mean to her, as she
looked at them from the window. There were no fences, excepting now
and then the inhospitable barbed wire. The door-yards were bleak to her
eyes, without the ornamental shrubbery which every farmer in her part
of the country was used to tending. The cattle stood unshedded in their
corrals. The reapers and binders stood rusting in the dull drizzle.
“How shiftless!” cried Annie, indignantly. “What do these men mean by
letting their machinery lie out that way? I should think one winter of
lying out would hurt it more than three summers of using.”
“It does. But sheds are not easily had. Lumber is dear.”
“But I should think it would be economy even then.”
“Yes,” he said, “perhaps. But we all do that way out here. It takes
some money for a man to be economical with. Some of us haven't even that
much.”
There was a six-mile ride from the station. The horses were waiting,
hitched up to a serviceable light wagon, and driven by the “help.” He
was a thin young man, with red hair, and he blushed vicariously for Jim
and Annie, who were really too entertained with each other, and at the
idea of the new life opening up before them, to think anything about
blushing. At the station, a number of men insisted on shaking hands
with Jim, and being introduced to his wife. They were all bearded, as
if shaving were an unnecessary labor, and their trousers were tucked in
dusty top-boots, none of which had ever seen blacking. Annie had a sense
of these men seeming unwashed, or as if they had slept in their clothes.
But they had kind voices, and their eyes were very friendly. So she
shook hands with them all with heartiness, and asked them to drive out
and bring their womenkind.
“I am going to make up my mind not to be lonesome,” she declared; “but,
all the same, I shall want to see some women.”
Annie had got safe on the high seat of the wagon, and was balancing her
little feet on the inclined foot-rest, when a woman came running across
the street, calling aloud,--
“Mr. Lancy! Mr. Lancy! You're not going to drive away without
introducing me to your wife!”
She was a thin little woman, with movements as nervous and as graceless
as those of a grasshopper. Her dun-colored garments seemed to have all
the hue bleached out of them with wind and weather. Her face was brown
and wrinkled, and her bright eyes flashed restlessly, deep in their
sockets. Two front teeth were conspicuously missing; and her faded hair
was blown in wisps about her face. Jim performed the introduction, and
Annie held out her hand. It was a pretty hand, delicately gloved in dove
color. The woman took it in her own, and after she had shaken it, held
it for a silent moment, looking at it. Then she almost threw it from
her. The eyes which she lifted to scan the bright young face above
her had something like agony in them. Annie blushed under this fierce
scrutiny, and the woman, suddenly conscious of her demeanor, forced a
smile to her lips.
“I'll come out an' see yeh,” she said, in cordial tones. “May be, as a
new housekeeper, you'll like a little advice. You've a nice place, an' I
wish yeh luck.”
“Thank you. I'm sure I'll need advice,” cried Annie, as they drove off.
Then she said to Jim, “Who is that old woman?”
“Old woman? Why, she ain't a day over thirty, Mis' Dundy ain't.”
Annie looked at her husband blankly. But he was already talking of
something else, and she asked no more about the woman, though all the
way along the road the face seemed to follow her. It might have been
this that caused the tightening about her heart. For some way her
vivacity had gone; and the rest of the ride she asked no questions, but
sat looking straight before her at the northward stretching road, with
eyes that felt rather than saw the brown, bare undulations, rising
every now and then clean to the sky; at the side, little famished-looking
houses, unacquainted with paint, disorderly yards, and endless reaches
of furrowed ground, where in summer the corn had waved.
The horses needed no indication of the line to make them turn up a
smooth bit of road that curved away neatly 'mid the ragged grasses.
At the end of it, in a clump of puny scrub oaks, stood a square little
house, in uncorniced simplicity, with blank, uncurtained windows staring
out at Annie, and for a moment her eyes, blurred with the cold, seemed
to see in one of them the despairing face of the woman with the wisps of
faded hair blowing about her face.
“Well, what do you think of it?” Jim cried, heartily, swinging her down
from her high seat, and kissing her as he did so. “This is your home,
my girl, and you are as welcome to it as you would be to a palace, if I
could give it to you.”
Annie put up her hands to hide the trembling of her lips; and she let
Jim see there were tears in her eyes as an apology for not replying. The
young man with the red hair took away the horses, and Jim, with his arm
around his wife's waist, ran toward the house and threw open the door
for her to enter. The intense heat of two great stoves struck in
their faces; and Annie saw the big burner, erected in all its black
hideousness in the middle of the front room, like a sort of household
hoodoo, to be constantly propitiated, like the gods of Greece; and in
the kitchen, the new range, with a distracted tea-kettle leaping on it,
as if it would like to loose its fetters and race away over the prairie
after its cousin, the locomotive.
It was a house of four rooms, and a glance revealed the fact that it had
been provided with the necessaries.
“I think we can be very comfortable here,” said Jim, rather doubtfully.
Annie saw she must make some response. “I am sure we can be more than
comfortable, Jim,” she replied. “We can be happy. Show me, if you
please, where my room is. I must hang my cloak up in the right place so
that I shall feel as if I were getting settled.”
It was enough. Jim had no longer any doubts. He felt sure they were
going to be happy ever afterward.
It was Annie who got the first meal; she insisted on it, though both the
men wanted her to rest. And Jim hadn't the heart to tell her that, as
a general thing, it would not do to put two eggs in the corn-cake, and
that the beefsteak was a great luxury. When he saw her about to break an
egg for the coffee, however, he interfered.
“The shells of the ones you used for the cake will settle the coffee
just as well,” he said. “You see we have to be very careful of eggs out
here at this season.”
“Oh! Will the shells really settle it? This is what you must call
prairie lore. I suppose out here we find out what the real relations of
invention and necessity are--eh?”
Jim laughed disproportionately. He thought her wonderfully witty. And
he and the help ate so much that Annie opened her eyes. She had thought
there would be enough left for supper. But there was nothing left.
For the next two weeks Jim was able to be much with her; and they amused
themselves by decorating the house with the bright curtainings that
Annie had brought, and putting up shelves for a few pieces of china. She
had two or three pictures, also, which had come from her room in her old
home, and some of those useless dainty things with which some women like
to litter the room.
“Most folks,” Jim explained, “have to be content with one fire, and sit
in the kitchen; but I thought, as this was our honeymoon, we would put
on some lugs.”