Main-Travelled Roads Page 4

  III

  The seven years lying between 1880 and 1887 made a great change in Rock River and in The adjacent farming land. Signs changed and firms went out of business with characteristic Western ease of shift. The trees grew rapidly, dwarfing The houses beneath them, and contrasts of newness and decay thickened.

  Will found The country changed, as he walked along The dusty road from Rock River toward "The Corners." The landscape was at its fairest and liberalest, with its seas of corn deep green and moving with a mournful rustle, in sharp contrast to its flashing blades; its gleaming fields of barley, and its wheat already mottled with soft gold in The midst of its pea-green.

  The changes were in The hedges, grown higher, In The greater predominance of cornfields and cattle pastures, but especially in The destruction of homes. As he passed on Will saw The grass growing and cattle feeding on a dozen places where homes had once stood. They had given place to The large farm and The stock raiser. Still the whole scene was bountiful and very beautiful to the eye.

  It was especially grateful to Will, for he had spent nearly all his years of absence among The rocks, treeless swells, and bleak cliffs of The Southwest. The crickets rising before his dusty feet appeared to him something sweet and suggestive and The cattle feeding in The clover moved him to deep thought-they were so peaceful and slow-motioned.

  As he reached a little popple tree by The roadside, he stopped, removed his broad-brimmed hat, put his elbows on The fence, and looked hungrily upon The scene. The sky was deeply blue, with only here and there a huge, heavy, slow-moving, massive, sharply outlined cloud sailing like a berg of ice in a shoreless sea of azure.

  In the fields the men were harvesting the ripened oats and barley, and The sound of their machines clattering, now low, now loud, came to his ears. Flies buzzed near him, and a king bird clattered overhead. He noticed again, as he had many a time when a boy, that The softened sound of The far-off reaper was at times exactly like The hum of a bluebottle fly buzzing heedlessly about his ears.

  A slender and very handsome young man was shocking grain near The fence, working so desperately he did not see Will until greeted by him. He looked up, replied to The greeting, but kept on till he had finished his last stook, then he came to the shade of the tree and took off his hat.

  "Nice day to sit under a tree and fish."

  Will smiled. "I ought to know you, I suppose; I used to live here years ago."

  "Guess not; we came in three years ago."

  The young man was quick-spoken and very pleasant to look at.

  Will felt freer with him.

  "Are The Kinneys still living over there?" He nodded at a group of large buildings.

  "Tom lives there. Old man lives with Ed. Tom ousted The old man some way, nobody seems to know how, and so he lives with Ed."

  Will wanted to ask after Agnes, but hardly felt able. "I s'pose John

  Hannan is on his old farm?"

  "Yes. Got a good crop this year."

  Will looked again at The fields of rustling wheat over which The clouds rippled, and said with an air of conviction: "This lays over Arizona, dead sure."

  "You're from Arizona, then?"

  "Yes-a good ways from it"' Will replied in a way that stopped further question. "Good luck!" he added as he walked on down The road toward The creek, musing. "And the spring-I wonder if that's there yet. I'd like a drink." The sun seemed hotter than at noon, and he walked slowly. At the bridge that spanned the meadow brook, just where it widened over a sandy ford, he paused again. He hung over the rail and looked at the minnows swimming there.

  "I wonder if they're The same identical chaps that used to boil and glitter there when I was a boy-looks so. Men change from one generation to another, but The fish remain The same. The same eternal procession of types. I suppose Darwin 'ud say their environment remains The same."

  He hung for a long time over The railing, thinking of a vast number of things, mostly vague, flitting things, looking into the clear depths of the brook, and listening to the delicious liquid note of a blackbird swinging on the willow. Red lilies starred the grass with fire, and goldenrod and chicory grew everywhere; purple and orange and yellow-green the prevailing tints.

  Suddenly a water snake wriggled across the dark pool above the ford, and the minnows disappeared under the shadow of the bridge. Then Will sighed, lifted his head, and walked on. There seemed to be something prophetic in it, and he drew a long breath. That's the way his plans broke and faded away.

  Human life does not move with the regularity of a clock. In living there are gaps and silences when the soul stands still in its flight through abysses-and then there come times of trial and times of struggle when we grow old without knowing it. Body and soul change appallingly.

  Seven years of hard, busy life had made changes in Will.

  His face had grown bold, resolute, and rugged, some of its delicacy and all of its boyish quality gone. His figure was stouter, erect as of old, but less graceful. He bore himself like a man accustomed to look out for himself in all kinds of places. It was only at times that there came into his deep eyes a preoccupied, almost sad look that showed kinship with his old self.

  This look was on his face as he walked toward the clump of trees on the right of the road.

  He reached the grove of popple trees and made his way at once to the spring. When he saw it, it gave him a shock. They had let it fill up with leaves and dirt.

  Overcome by the memories of the past, he flung him-sell down on the cool and shadowy bank, and gave him-sell up to the bittersweet reveries of a man returning to his boyhood's home. He was filled somehow with a strange and powerful feeling of the passage of time; with a vague feeling of the mystery and elusiveness of human life. The leaves whispered it overhead, the birds sang it in chorus with the insects, and far above, in the measureless spaces of sky, the hawk told it in the silence and majesty of his flight from cloud to cloud.

  It was a feeling hardly to be expressed in words—one of those emotions whose springs lie far back in the brain. He lay so still, the chipmunks came curiously up to his very feet, only to scurry away when he stirred like a sleeper in pain.

  He had cut himself off entirely from the life at The Corners. He had sent money home to John, but had concealed his own address carefully. The enormity of this folly now came back to him, racking him till he groaned.

  He heard the patter of feet and the half-mumbled monologue of a running child. He roused up and faced a small boy, who started back in terror like a wild fawn. He was deeply surprised to find a man there where only boys and squirrels now came. He stuck his fist in his eye, and was backing away when Will spoke.

  "Hold on, sonny! Nobody's hit you. Come, I ain't goin' to eat yeh." He took a bit of money from his pocket. "Come here and tell me your name. I want to talk with you."

  The boy crept upon the dime.

  Will smiled. "You ought to be a Kinney. What is your name?"

  "Tomath Dickinthon Kinney. I'm thix and a half. I've got a colt," lisped the youngster breathlessly as he crept toward the money.

  "Oh, you are, eh? Well, now, are you Tom's boy or Ed's?"

  "Tomth's boy. Uncle Ed hith gal-"

  "Ed got a boy?"

  "Yeth, thir- lii baby. Aunt Agg letth me hold 'im"

  "Agg! Is that her name?"

  "That's what Uncle Ed callth her."

  The man's head fell, and it was a long time before he asked his next question.

  "How is she, anyhow?"

  "Purty well," piped the boy with a prolongation of the last words into a kind of chirp. "She'th been thick, though," he added.

  "Been sick? How long?"

  "Oh, a long time. But she ain't thick abed; she'th awuul poor, though. Gran'pa thayth she'th poor ath a rake."

  "Oh, he does, eh?"

  "Yeth, thir. Uncle Ed he jawth her, then she crieth."

  Will's anger and remorse broke out in a groaning curse. "O my God! I see it all. That great lunkin' houn' has made life a
hell fer her." Then that letter came back to his mind; he had never been able to put it out of his mind-he never would till he saw her and asked her pardon.

  "Here, my boy, I want you to tell me some more. Where does your

  Aunt Agnes live?"

  "At gran'pa'th. You know where my gran'pa livth?"

  "Well, you do. Now I want you to take this letter to her. Give it to her." He wrote a little note and folded it. "Now dust out o' here."

  The boy slipped away through the trees like a rabbit; his little brown feet hardly rustled. He was like some little wood animal. Left alone, the man went back into a reverie that lasted till the shadows fell on the thick little grove around the spring. He rose ~ last and, taking his stick in hand, walked out to the wood again and stood there, gazing at the sky. He seemed loath to go farther. The sky was full of flame-colored clouds floating in a yellow-green sea, where bars of faint pink streamed broadly away.

  As he stood there, feeling the wind lift his hair, listening to the crickets' ever-present crying, and facing the majesty of space, a strange sadness and despair came into his eyes.

  Drawing a quick breath, he leaped the fence and was about going on up the road, when he heard, at a little distance, the sound of a drove of cattle approaching, and he stood aside to allow them to pass. They snuffed and shied at the silent figure by the fence, and hurried by with snappug heels-a peculiar sound that made the man smile with pleasure.

  An old man was driving the cows, crying out:

  "St, boy, there! Go on, there. Whay, boss!"

  Will knew that hard-featured, wiry old man, now entering his second childhood and beginning to limp painfully. He had his hands full of hard clods which he threw impatiently at the lumbering animals.

  "Good evening, uncle!"

  "I ain't y'r uncle, young man."

  His dim eyes did not recognize the boy he had chased out of his plum patch years before.

  "I don't know yeh, neither."

  "Oh, you will, later on. I'm from the East. I'm a sort of a relative to

  John Hannan."

  "I wanto know if y' be!" the old man exclaimed, peering closer.

  "Yes. I'm just up from Rock River. John's harvesting, I s'pose?"

  "Where's the youngest one-Will?"

  "William? Oh! he's a bad aig-he lit out fr the West somewhere. He was a hard boy. He stole a hatful o' my plums once. He left home kind o' sudden. He! he! I s'pose he was purty well cut up jest about them days."

  "How's that?"

  The old man chuckled.

  "Well, y' see, they was both courtin' Agnes then, an' my son cut

  William out. Then William he lit out f'r the West, Arizony 'r

  California 'r somewhere out West. Never been back sence."

  "Ain't, heh?"

  "No. But they say he's makin' a terrible lot o' money," the old man said in a hushed voice. "But the way he makes it is awful scaly. I tell my wife if I had a son like that an' he'd send me home a bushel basket o' money, earnt like that, I wouldn't touch finger to it-no, sir!"

  "You wouldn't? Why?"

  "'Cause it ain't right. It ain't made right no way, you-"

  "But how is it made? What's the feller's trade?"

  "He's a gambler-that's his trade! He plays cards, and every cent is bloody. I wouldn't touch such money no how you could fix it~"

  "Wouldn't, hay?" The young man straightened up. "Well, look-a-here, old man: did you ever hear of a man foreclosing a mortgage on a widow and two boys, getting a farm f'r one quarter what it was really worth? You damned old hypocrite! I know all about you and your whole tribe-you old bloodsucker!"

  The old man's jaw fell; he began to back away.

  "Your neighbors tell some good stories about you. Now skip along after those cows or I'll tickle your old legs for you!"

  The old man, appalled and dazed at this sudden change of manner, backed away, and at last turned and racked off up the road, looking back with a wild face at which the young man laughed remorselessly.

  "The doggoned old skeesucks!" Will soliloquized as he walked up the road. "So that's the kind of a character he's been givin' me!"

  "Hullo! A whippoorwrn. Takes a man back into childhood-No, don't 'whip poor Will'; he's got all he can bear now."

  He came at last to the little farm Dingman had owned, and he stopped in sorrowful surprise. The barn had been moved away, the garden plowed up, and the house, turned into a granary, stood with boards nailed across its dusty cobwebbed windows. The tears started into the man's eyes; he stood staring at it silently.

  In the face of this house the seven years that he had last lived stretched away into a wild waste of time. It stood as a symbol of his wasted, ruined life. It was personal, intimately personal, this decay of her home.

  All that last scene came back to him: the booming roar of the threshing machine, the cheery whistle of the driver, the loud, merry shouts of the men. He remembered how warmly the lamplight streamed out of that door as he turned away tired, hungry, sullen with rage and jealousy. Oh, if he had only had the courage of a man!

  Then he thought of the boy's words. She was sick. Ed abused her. She had met her punishment. A hundred times he had been over the whole scene. A thousand times he had seen her at the pump smiling at Ed Kinney, the sun lighting her bare head; and he never thought of it without hardening.

  At this very gate he had driven up that last forenoon, to find that she had gone with Ed. He had lived that sickening, depressing moment over many times, but not times enough to keep down the bitter passion he had felt then, and felt now as he went over it in detail.

  He was so happy and confident that morning, so perfectly certain that all would be made right by a kiss and a cheery jest. And now! Here he stood sick with despair and doubt of all the world. He turned away from the desolate homestead and walked on.

  "But I'll see her-just once more. And then-" And again the mighty significance, responsibility of life fell upon him. He felt as young people seldom do the irrevocableness of living, the determinate, unalterable character of living. He determined to begin to live in some new way-just how he could not say.

  IV

  OLD man Kinney and his wife were getting their Sunday school lessons with much bickering, when Will drove up the next day to the dilapidated gate and hitched his team to a leaning post under the oaks. Will saw the old man's head at the open window, but no one else, though he looked eagerly for Agnes as he walked up the familiar path. There stood the great oak under whose shade he had grown to be a man. How close the great tree seemed to stand to his heart, some way! As the wind stirred in the leaves, it was like a rustle of greeting.

  In that low old house they had all lived, and his mother had toiled for thirty years. A sort of prison after all. There they were all born, and there his father and his little sister had died. And then it had passed into old Kinney's hands.

  Walking along up the path he felt a serious weakness in his limbs, and he made a pretense of stopping to look at a flowerbed containing nothing but weeds. After seven years of separation he was about to face once more the woman whose life came so near being a part of his- Agnes, now a wife and a mother.

  How would she look? Would her face have that oldtime peachy bloom, her mouth that peculiar beautiful curve? She was large and fair, he recalled, hair yellow and shining, eyes blue-He roused himself. This was nonsense! He was trembling. He composed himself by looking around again.

  "The old scoundrel has let the weeds choke out the flowers and surround the beehives. Old man Kinney neverbelieved in anything but a petty utility."

  Will set his teeth, and marched up to the door and struck it like a man delivering a challenge. Kinney opened the door, and started back in fear when he saw who it was.

  "How de do? How de do?" said Will, walking in' his eyes fixed on a woman seated beyond, a child in her lap.

  Agnes rose, without a word; a fawnlike, startled widening of the eyes, her breath coming quick, and her face flushing. They couldn't speak; they
only looked at each other an instant, then Will shivered, passed his hand over his eyes, and sat down.

  There was no one there but the old people, who were looking at him in bewilderment. They did not notice any confusion in Agnes's face. She recovered first.

  "I'm glad to see you back, Will," she said, rising and putting the sleeping child down in a neighboring room. As she gave him her hand, he said:

  "I'm glad to get back, Agnes. I hadn't ought to have gone." Then he turned to the old people: "I'm Will Hannan. You needn't be scared, daddy; I was jokin' last night."

  "Dew tell! I wanto know!" exclaimed granny. "Wal I never! An, you're my little Willy boy who ust 'o he in my class. Well! well! W'y, Pa, ain't he growed tall! Growed handsome tew. I ust 'o think he was a drelful humly boy; but my sakes, that mustache-"

  "Wal, he give me a tumble scare last night. My land! scared me out of a year's growth," cackled the old man.

  This gave them all a chance to laugh and the air was cleared. It gave Agnes time to recover herself and to be able to meet Will's eyes. Will himself was powerfully moved; his throat swelled and tears came to his eyes everytime he looked at her.

  $he was worn and wasted incredibly. The blue of her eyes seemed dimmed and faded by weeping, and the oldtime scariet of her lips had been washed away. The sinews of her neck showed painfully when she turned her head, and her trembling hands were worn, discolored, and lumpy at the joints.

  Poor girl! She felt that she was under scrutiny, and her eyes felt hot and restless. She wished to run away and cry, but she dared not. She stayed, while Will began to tell her of his life and to ask questions about old friends.

  The old people took it up and relieved her of any share in it; and Will, seeing that she was suffering, told some funny stories which made the old people cackle in spite of themselves.

  But it was forced merriment on Will's part. Once in a while Agnes smiled with just a little flash of the old-time sunny temper. But there was no dimple in the cheek now, and the smile had more suggestion of an invalid~r even a skeleton. He was almost ready to take her in his arms and weep, her face appealed so pitifully to him.