Main-Travelled Roads Read online

  As he went on, his argument rose to the level of Browning's philosophy.

  "We can make this experience count for us yet. But we mustn't let a mistake ruin us-it should teach us. What right has anyone to keep you in a hole? God don't expect a toad to stay in a stump and starve if it can get out. He don't ask the snakes to suffer as you do."

  She had lost the threads of right and wrong out of her hands. She was lost in a maze. She was not moved by passion. Flesh had ceased to stir her; but there was vast power in the new and thrilling words her deliverer spoke. He seemed to open a door for her, and through it turrets shone and great ships crossed on dim blue seas.

  "You can't live here, Aggie. You'll die in less than five years. It would kill me to see you die here. Come! It's suicide."

  She did not move, save the convulsive motion of her breath and the nervous action of her fingers. She stared down at a spot in the carpet; she couldn't face him.

  He grew insistent, a sterner note creeping into his voice.

  "If I leave this time, of course you know I never come back."

  Her hoarse breathing, growing quicker each moment, was her only reply.

  "I'm done," he said with a note of angry disappointment. He did not give her up, however. "I've told you what I'd do for you. Now if you think-"

  "Oh, give me time to think, Will!" she cried out, lifting her face.

  He shook his head. "No. You might as well decide now. It won't be any easier tomorrow. Come, one minute more and I go out o' that door-unless-" He crossed the room slowly, doubtful himself of his desperate last measure. "My hand is on the knob. Shall I open it?"

  She stopped breathing; her fingers closed convulsively on the chair. As he opened the door she sprang up.

  "Don't go, Will! Don't go, please don't! I need you here-I-"

  "That ain't the question. Are you going with me, Agnes?"

  "Yes, yes! I tried to speak before. I trust you, Will; you'r-"

  He flung the door open wide. "See the sunlight out there shining on that field o' wheat? That's where I'll take you-out into the sunshine. You shall see it shining on the Bay of Naples. Come, get on your hat; don't take anything more'n you actually need. Leave the past behind you."

  The woman turned wildly and darted into the little bedroom. The man listened. He whistled in surprise almost comical. He had forgotten the baby. He could hear the mother talking, cooing.

  "Mommie's 'ittle pet. She wasn't goin' to leave her 'ittle man-no, she wasn't! There, there, don't 'e cry. Mommie ain't goin' away and leave him-wicked Mommie ain't-'ittle treasure!"

  She was confused again; and when she reappeared at the door, with the child in her arms, there was a wandering look on her face pititul to see. She tried to speak, tried to say, ''Please go, Will,"

  He designedly failed to understand her whisper. He stepped forward. "The baby! Sure enough. Why, certainly! to the mother belongs the child. Blue eyes, thank heaven!"

  He put his arm about them both. She obeyed silently. There was something irresistible in his frank, clear eyes, his sunny smile, his strong brown hand. He slammed the door behind them.

  "That closes the door on your sufferings," he said' smiling down at her. "Goodbye to it all."

  The baby laughed and stretched out its hands toward the light.

  "Boo, boo!" he cried.

  "What's he talking about?"

  She smiled in perfect trust and fearlessness, seeing her child's face beside his own. "He says it's beautiful."

  "Oh, he does? I can't follow his French accent."

  She smiled again, in spite of herself. Will shuddered with a thrill of fear, she was so weak and worn. But the sun shone on the dazzling, rustling wheat, the fathomless sky blue, as a sea, bent above them-and the world lay before them.

  UP THE COULEE

  A STORY OF WISCONSIN

  "Keep the main-travelled road up the coulee-it's the second house after crossin' the crick."

  THE ride from Milwaukee to the Mississippi is a fine ride at any time, superb in summer. To lean back in a reclining chair and whirl away in a breezy July day, past lakes, groves of oak, past fields of barley being reaped, past hayfields, where the heavy grass is toppling before the swift sickle, is a panorama of delight, a road full of delicious surprises, where down a sudden vista lakes open, or a distant wooded hill looms darkly blue, or swift streams, foaming deep down the solid rock, send whiffs of cool breezes in at the window.

  It has majesty, breadth. The farming has nothing apparently petty about it. All seems vigorous, youthful, and prosperous. Mr. Howard McLane in his chair let his newspaper fall on his lap and gazed out upon it with dreaming eyes. It had a certain mysterious glamour to him; the lakes were cooler and brighter to his eye, the greens fresher, and the grain more golden than to anyone else, for he was coming back to it all after an absence of ten years. It was, besides, his West. He still took pride in being a Western man.

  His mind all day flew ahead of the train to the little town far on toward the Mississippi, where he had spent his boyhood and youth. As the train passed the Wisconsin River, with its curiously carved cliffs, its cold, dark, swift-swirling water eating slowly under cedar-clothed banks, Howard began to feel curious little movements of the heart, like a lover as he nears his sweetheart.

  The hills changed in character, growing more intimately recognizable. They rose higher as the train left the ridge and passed down into the Black River valley, and specifically into the La Crosse valley. They ceased to have any hint of upheavals of rock, and became simply parts of the ancient level left standing after the water had practically given up its postglacial, scooping action.

  It was about six o'clock as he caught sight of the dear broken line of hills on which his baby eyes had looked thirty-five years ago. A few minutes later and the train drew up at the grimy little station set in at the hillside, and, giving him just time to leap off, plunged on again toward the West. Howard felt a ridiculous weakness in his legs as he stepped out upon the broiling hot splintery planks of the station and faced the few idlers lounging about. He simply stood and gazed with the same intensity and absorption one of the idlers might show standing before the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The town caught and held his eyes first. How poor and dull and sleepy and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved street, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings, with the inevitable battlements-the same, only worse, was the town.

  The same, only more beautiful still, was the majestic amphitheater of green wooded hills that circled the horizon, and toward which he lifted his eyes. He thrilled at the sight.

  "Glorious!" he cried involuntarily.

  Accustomed to the White Mountains, to the Allghenies, he had wondered if these hills would retain their old-time charm. They did. He took off his hat to them as he stood there. Richly wooded, with gently sloping green sides, rising to massive square or rounded tops with dim vistas, they glowed down upon the squalid town, gracious, lofty in their greeting, immortal in their vivid and delicate beauty.

  He was a goodly figure of a man as he stood there beside his valise. Portly, erect, handsomely dressed, and with something unusually winning in his brown mustache and blue eyes, something scholarly suggested by the pinch-nose glasses, something strong in the repose of the head. He smiled as he saw how unchanged was the grouping of the old loafers on the salt barrels and nail kegs. He recognized most of them-a little dirtier, a little more bent, and a little grayer.

  They sat in the same attitudes, spat tobacco with the same calm delight, and joked each other, breaking into short and sudden fits of laughter, and pounded each other on the back, just as when he was a student at the La Crosse Seminary and going to and fro daily on the train.

  They ruminated on him as he passed, speculating in a perfectly audible way upon his business.

  "Looks like a drummer." />
  "No, he ain't no drummer. See them Boston glasses?"

  "That's so. Guess he's a teacher."

  "Looks like a moneyed cuss."

  "Bos'n, I guess."

  He knew the one who spoke last-Freeme Cole, a man who was the fighting wonder of Howard's boyhood, now degenerated into a stoop-shouldered, faded, garrulous, and quarrelsome old man. Yet there was something epic in the old man's stories, something enthralling in the dramatic power of recital.

  Over by the blacksmith shop the usual game of quaits" was in progress, and the drug clerk on the corner was chasing a crony with the squirt pump, with which he was about to wash the windows. A few teams stood ankle-deep in the mud, tied to the fantastically gnawed pine pillars of the wooden awnings. A man on a load of hay was "jawing" with the attendant of the platform scales, who stood below, pad and pencil in hand.

  "Hit 'im! hit 'im! Jump off and knock 'im!" suggested a bystander, jovially.

  Howard knew the voice.

  "Talk's cheap. Takes money t' buy whiskey," he said when the man on the load repeated his threat of getting off and whipping the scalesman.

  "You're William McTurg," Howard said, coming up to him.

  "I am, sir," replied the soft-voiced giant turning and looking down on the stranger with an amused twinkle in his deep brown eyes. He stood as erect as an Indian, though his hair and beard were white.

  "I'm Howard McLane."

  "Ye begin t' look it," said McTurg, removing his right hand from his pocket. "How are yeh?"

  "I'm first-rate. How's Mother and Grant?"

  "Saw 'im plowing corn as I came down. Guess he's all right. Want a boost?"

  "Well, yes. Are you down with a team?"

  "Yep. 'Bout goin' home. Climb right in. That's my rig, right there," nodding at a sleek bay colt hitched in a covered buggy. "Heave y'r grip under the seat."

  They climbed into the seat after William had lowered the buggy top and unhitched the horse from the post. The loafers were mildly curious. Guessed Bill had got hooked onto by a lightnin'-rod peddler, or somethin' o' that kind.

  "Want to go by river, or 'round by the hills?"

  "Hills, I guess."

  The whole matter began to seem trivial, as if he had only been away for a month or two.

  William McTurg was a man little given to talk. Even the coming back of a nephew did not cause any flow of questions or reminiscences. They rode in silence. He sat a little bent forward, the lines held carelessly in his hands, his great leonine head swaying to and fro with the movement of the buggy.

  As they passed familiar spots, the younger man broke the silence with a question.

  "That's old man McElvaine's place, ain't it?"

  "Old man living?"

  "I guess he is. Husk more corn 'n any man he c'n hire."

  On the edge of the village they passed an open lot on the left, marked with circus rings of different eras.

  "There's the old ball ground. Do they have circuses on it just the same as ever?"

  "Just the same."

  "What fun that field calls up! The games of ball we used to have!

  Do you play yet?"

  "Sometimes. Can't stoop so well as I used to." He smiled a little.

  "Too much fat."

  It all swept back upon Howard in a flood of names and faces and sights and sounds; something sweet and stirring somehow, though it had little of esthetic charm at the time. They were passing along lanes now, between superb fields of corn, wherein plowmen were at work. Kingbirds flew from post to post ahead of them; the insects called from the grass. The valley slowly outspread below them. The workmen in the fields were "turning out" for the night; they all had a word of chaff with McTurg.

  Over the western wall of the circling amphitheater the sun was setting. A few scattering clouds were drifting on the west wind, their shadows sliding down the green and purple slopes. The dazzling sunlight flamed along the luscious velvety grass, and shot amid the rounded, distant purple peaks, and streamed in bars of gold and crimson across the blue mist of the narrower upper coulee.

  The heart of the young man swelled' with pleasure almost like pain, and the eyes of the silent older man took on a far-off, dreaming look, as he gazed at the scene which had repeated itself a thousand times in his life, but of whose beauty he never spoke.

  Far down to the left was the break in the wall through which the river ran on its way to join the Mississippi. As they climbed slowly among the hills, the valley they had left grew still more beautiful, as the squalor of the little town was hid by the dusk of distance. Both men were silent for a long time. Howard knew the peculiarities of his companion too well to make any remarks or ask any questions, and besides it was a genuine pleasure to ride with one who could feel that silence was the only speech amid such splendors.

  Once they passed a little brook singing in a mourn-fully sweet way its eternal song over its pebbles. It called back to Howard the days when he and Grant, his younger brother, had fished in this little brook for trout, with trousers rolled above the knee and wrecks of hats upon their heads.

  "Any trout left?" he asked.

  "Not many. Little fellers." Finding the silence broken, William asked the first question since he met Howard. "Le's see: you're a show feller now? B'long to a troupe?"

  "Yes, yes; I'm an actor."

  "Pay much?"

  "Pretty well."

  That seemed to end William's curiosity about the matter.

  "Ah, there's our old house, ain't it?" Howard broke out, pointing to one of the houses farther up the coulee. "It'll be a surprise to them, won't it?"

  "Yep; only they don't live there."

  "What! They don't!"

  "Who does?"

  "Dutchman."

  Howard was silent for some moments. "Who lives on the Dunlap place?"

  "'Nother Dutchman."

  "Where's Grant living, anyhow?"

  "Farther up the conlee."

  "Well, then I'd better get out here, hadn't I?"

  "Oh, I'll drive yeh up."

  "No, I'd rather walk."

  The sun had set, and the coulee was getting dusk when Howard got out of McTurg's carriage and set off up the winding lane toward his brother's house. He walked slowly to absorb the coolness and fragrance and color of the hour. The katydids sang a rhythmic song of welcome to him. Fireflies were in the grass. A whippoorwill in the deep of the wood was calling weirdly, and an occasional night hawk, flying high, gave his grating shriek, or hollow boom, suggestive and resounding.

  He had been wonderfully successful, and yet had carried into his success as a dramatic author as well as actor a certain puritanism that made him a paradox to his fellows. He was one of those actors who are always in luck, and the best of it was he kept and made use of his luck. Jovial as he appeared, he was inflexible as granite against drink and tobacco. He retained through it all a certain freshness of enjoyment that made him one of the best companions in the profession; and now as he walked on, the hour and the place appealed to him with great power. It seemed to sweep away the life that came between.

  How close it all was to him, after all! In his restless life, surrounded by the giare of electric lights, painted canvas, hot colors, creak of machinery, mock trees, stones, and brooks, he had not lost but gained appreciation for the coolness, quiet and low tones, the shyness of the wood and field.

  In the farmhouse ahead of him a light was shining as he peered ahead, and his heart gave another painful movement. His brother was awaiting him there, and his mother, whom he had not seen for ten years and who had grown unable to write. And when Grant wrote, which had been more and more seldom of late, his letters had been cold and curt.

  He began to feel that in the pleasure and excitement of his life he had grown away from his mother and brother. Each summer he had said, "Well, now I'll go home this year sure." But a new play to be produced, or a yachting trip, or a tour of Europe, had put the homecoming off; and now it was with a distinct consciousness of neglect of duty t
hat he walked up to the fence and looked into the yard, where William had told him his brother lived.

  It was humble enough-a small white house, story-and-a-half structure, with a wing, set in the midst of a few locust trees; a small drab-colored barn, with a sagging ridge pole; a barnyard full of mud, in which a few cows were standing, fighting the flies and waiting to be milked. An old man was pumping water at the well; the pigs were squealing from a pen nearby; a child was crying.

  Instantly the beautiful, peaceful valley was forgotten. A sickening chill struck into Howard's soul as he looked at it all. In the dim light he could see a figure milking a cow. Leaving his valise at the gate, he entered and walked up to the old man, who had finished pumping and was about to go to feed the hogs.

  "Good evening," Howard began. "Does Mr. Grant McLane live here?"

  "Yes, sir, he does. He's right over there milkin'."

  "I'll go over there an-"

  "Don't b'lieve I would. It's darn muddy over there. It's been turrible rainy. He'll be done in a minute, any-way."

  "Very well; I'll wait."

  As he waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the homecoming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by the pump.

  "Good evening," said Howard out of the dusk.

  Grant stared a moment. "Good. evening."

  Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more sullen. "Don't you know me, Grant? I am Howard.

  The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. "You are?" after a pause. "Well, I'm glad to see yeh, but I can't shake hands. That damned cow had laid down in the mud."