Main-Travelled Roads Read online

  "Oh, these don't matter. They're made for this kind of thing."

  "Oh, are they? I guess I'll dress in that kind of a rig. What did that shirt cost? I need one."

  "Six dollars a pair; but then it's old."

  "And them pants," he pursued; "they cost six dollars, too, didn't they?"

  Howard's face darkened. He saw his brother's purpose. He resented it. "They cost fifteen dollars, if you want to know, and the shoes cost six-fifty. This ring on my cravat cost sixty dollars, and the suit I had on last night cost eighty-five. My suits are made by Breckstein, on Fifth Avenue and Twentieth Street, if you want to patronize him," he ended brutally, spurred on by the sneer in his brother's eyes. "I'll introduce you."

  "Good idea," said Grant with a forced, mocking smile. "I need just such a get up for haying and corn plowing. Singular I never thought of it. Now my pants cost eighty-five cents, s'penders fifteen, hat twenty, shoes one-fifty; stockin's I don't bother about."

  He had his brother at a disadvantage, and he grew fluent and caustic as he went on, almost changing places with Howard, who took the rake out of the boy's hands and followed, raking up the scatterings.

  "Singular we fellers here are discontented and mulish, am't it? Singular we don't believe your letters when you write, sayin', 'I just about make a live of it'? Singular we think the country's goin' to hell, we fellers, in a two dollar suit, wadin' around in the mud or sweatin' around in the hayfield, while you fellers lay around New York and smoke and wear good clothes and toady to millionaires?"

  Howard threw down the rake and folded his arms. 'My God! you're enough to make a man forget the same mother bore us!"

  "I guess it wouldn't take much to make you forget that. You ain't put much thought on me nor her for ten years."

  The old man cackled, the boy grinned, and Howard, sick and weak with anger and sorrow, turned away and walked down toward the brook. He had tried once more to get near his brother and had failed. O God! how miserably, pitiably! The hot blood gushed all over him as he thought of the shame and disgrace of it.

  He, a man associating with poets, artists, sought after by brilliant women, accustomed to deference even from such people, to be sneered at, outfaced, shamed, shoved aside, by a man in a stained hickory shirt and patched overalls, and that man his brother! He lay down on the bright grass, with the sheep all around him, and writhed and groaned with the agony and despair of it.

  And worst of all, underneath it was a consciousness that Grant was right in distrusting him. He had neglected him; he had said, "I guess they're getting along all right." He had put them behind him when the invitation to spend summer on the Mediterranean or in the Adirondacks came.

  "What can I do? What can I do?" he groaned.

  The sheep nibbled the grass near him, the jays called pertly, "Shame, shame," a quail piped somewhere on the hillside, and the brook sung a soft, soothing melody that took away at last the sharp edge of his pain, and he sat up and gazed down the valley, bright with the sun and apparently filled with happy and prosperous people.

  Suddenly a thought seized him. He stood up so suddenly the sheep fled in affright. He leaped the brook, crossed the flat, and began searching in the bushes on the hillside. "Hurrah!" he said with a smile.

  He had found an old road which he used to travel when a boy-a road that skirted the edge of the valley, now grown up to brush, but still passable for footmen. As he ran lightly along down the beautiful path, under oaks and hickories, past masses of poison ivy, under hanging grapevines, through clumps of splendid hazelnut bushes loaded with great sticky, rough, green burrs, his heart threw off part of its load.

  How it all came back to him! How many days, when

  Up The Coulee

  73

  the autumn sun burned the frost off the bushes, had he gathered hazelnuts here with his boy and girl friends-Hugh and Shelley McTurg, Rome Sawyer, Orrin McIlvaine, and the rest! What had become of them all? How he had forgotten them!

  This thought stopped him again, and he fell into a deep muse, leaning against an oak tree and gazing into the vast fleckless space above. The thrilling, inscrutable mystery of life fell upon him like a blinding light. Why was he living in the crush and thunder and mental unrest of a great city, while his companions, seemingly his equal, in powers, were milking cows, making butter, and growing corn and wheat in the silence and drear monotony of the farm?

  His boyish sweethearts! Their names came back to his ear now with a dull, sweet sound as of faint bells. He saw their faces, their pink sunbonnets tipped back upon their necks, their brown ankles flying with the swift action of the scurrying partridge. His eyes softened; he took off his hat. The sound of the wind and the leaves moved him almost to tears.

  A woodpecker gave a shrill, high-keyed, sustained cry, "Ki, ki, ki!" and he started from his reverie, the dapples of sun and shade falling upon his lithe figure as he hurried on down the path.

  He came at last to a field of corn that tan to the very wall of a large weather-beaten house, the sight of which made his breathing quicker. It was the place where he was born. The mystery of his life began there. In the branches of those poplar and hickory trees he had swung and sung in the rushing breeze, fearless as a squirrel Here was the brook where, like a larger Kildee, he with Grant had waded after crawfish, or had stolen upon some wary trout, rough-cut pole in hand.

  Seeing someone in the garden, he went down along the corn row through the rustling ranks of green leaves. An old woman was picking berries, a squat and shapeless figure.

  "Good morning," he called cheerily.

  "Morgen," she said, looklng up at him with a startled and very red face. She was German in every line of her body.

  "Ich bin Herr McLane," he said after a pause.

  "So?" she replied with a questioning inflection.

  "Yah; ich bin Herr Grant's bruder."

  "Ach, So!" she said with a downward inflection. "Ich no spick

  Inglish. No spick Inglis."

  "Ich bin durstig," he said. Leaving her pans, she went with him to the house, which was what he wanted to see.

  "Ich bin hier geboren."

  "Ach, so!" She recognized the little bit of sentiment, and said some sentences in German whose general meaning was sympathy. She took him to the cool cellar where the spring had been trained to run into' a tank containing pans of cream and milk, she gave him a cool draught from a large tin cup, and then at his request they went upstairs. The house was the same, but somehow seemed cold and empty. It was clean and sweet, but it had so little evidence of being lived in. The old part, which was built of logs, was used as best room, and modeled after the best rooms of the neighboring Yankee homes, only it was emptier, without the cabinet organ and the rag carpet and the chromoes.

  The old fireplace was bricked up and plastered-the fireplace beside which in the far-off days he had lain on winter nights, to hear his uncles tell tales of hunting, or to hear them play the violin, great dreaming giants that they were.

  The old woman went out and left him sitting there, the center of a swarm of memories coming and going like so many ghostly birds and butterflies.

  A curious heartache and listlessness, a nerveless mood came on him. What was it worth, anyhow-success? Struggle, strife, trampling on someone else. His play crowding out some other poor fellow's hope. The hawk eats the partridge, the partridge eats the flies and bugs, the bugs eat each other, and the hawk, when he in his turn is shot by man. So, in the world of business, the life of one man seemed to him to be drawn from the life of another man, each success to spring from other failures.

  He was like a man from whom all motives had been withdrawn. He was sick, sick to the heart. Oh, to be a boy again! An ignorant baby, pleased with a block and string, with no knowledge and no care of the great un-known! To lay his head again on his mother's bosom and rest! To watch the flames on the hearth!

  Why not? Was not that the very thing to do? To buy back the old farm? It would cripple him a little for the next season, bu
t he could do it. Think of it! To see his mother back in the old home, with the fireplace restored, the old furniture in the sitting room around her, and fine new things in the parlor!

  His spirits rose again. Grant couldn't stand out when he brought to him a deed of the farm. Surely his debt would be canceled when he had seen them all back in the wide old kitchen. He began to plan and to dream. He went to the windows and looked out on the yard to see how much it had changed.

  He'd build a new barn and buy them a new carriage. His heart glowed again, and his lips softened into their usual feminine grace-lips a little full and falling easily into curves.

  The old German woman came in at length, bringing some cakes and a bowl of milk, smiling broadly and hospitably as she waddled forward.

  "Ach! Goot!" he said, smacking his lips over the pleasant draught.

  "Wo ist ihre goot mann?" he inquired, ready for business.

  III

  WHEN Grant came in at noon, Mrs. McLane met him at the door with a tender smile on her face.

  "Where's Howard, Grant?"

  "I don't know," he replied in a tone that implied "I don't care."

  The dim eyes clouded with quick tears.

  "Ain't you seen him?"

  "Not since nine o'clock."

  "Where d'you think he is?"

  "I tell yeh I don't know. He'll take care of himself; don't worry."

  He flung off his hat and plunged into the wash basin. His shirt was wet with sweat and covered with dust of the hay and fragments of leaves. He splashed his burning face with the water, paying no further attention to his mother. She spoke again, very gently, in reproof:

  "Grant, why do you stand out against Howard so?"

  "I don't stand out against him," he replied harshly, pausing with the towel in his hands. His eyes were hard and piercing. "But if he expects me to gush over his coming back, he's fooled, that's all. He's left us to paddle our own canoe all this while, and, so far as I'm concerned, he can leave us alone hereafter. He looked out for his precious hide mighty well, and now he comes back here to play big gun and pat us on the head. I don't propose to let him come that over me."

  Mrs. McLane knew too well the temper of her son to say any more, but she inquired about Howard of the old hired man.

  "He went off down the valley. He 'n' Grant had s'm words, and he pulled out down toward the old farm. That's the last I see of 'im."

  Laura took Howard's part at the table. "Pity you can't be decent," she said, brutally direct as usuaL "You treat Howard as if he was a-a-I do' know what."

  "wrn you let me alone?"

  "No, I won't. If you think I'm going to set by an' agree to your bullyraggin' him, you're mistaken. It's a shame! You're mad 'cause he's succeeded and you ain't. He ain't to blame for his brains. If you and I'd had any, we'd 'a' succeeded, too. It ain't our fault and it ain't his; so what's the use?"

  There was a look came into Grant's face that the wife knew. It meant bitter and terrible silence. He ate his dinner without another word.

  It was beginning to cloud up. A thin, whitish, 'all-pervasive vapor which meant rain was dimming the sky, and be forced his hands to their utmost during the afternoon in order to get most of the down hay in before the rain came. He was pitching hay up into the barn when Howard came by just before one o'clock.

  It was windless there. The sun fell through the white mist with undiminished fury, and the fragrant hay sent up a breath that was hot as an oven draught. Grant was a powerful man, and there was something majestic in his action as he rolled the huge flakes of hay through the door. The sweat poured from his face like rain, and he was forced to draw his dripping sleeve across his face to clear away the blinding sweat that poured into his eyes.

  Howard stood and looked at him in silence, remembering how often he had worked there in that furnace heat, his muscles quivering, cold chills running over his flesh, red shadows dancing before his eyes.

  His mother met him at the door anxiously, but smiled as she saw his pleasant face and cheerful eyes.

  "You're a little late, m' son."

  Howard spent most of the afternoon sitting with his mother on the porch, or under the trees, lying sprawled out like a boy, resting at times with sweet forgetfulness of the whole world, but feeling a dull pain whenever he remembered the stern, silent man pitching hay in the hot sun on the torrid side of the barn.

  His mother did not say anything about the quarrel; she feared to reopen it. She talked mainly of old times in a gentle monotone of reminiscence, while he listened, looking up into her patient face.

  The heat slowly lessened as the sun sank down toward the dun clouds rising like a more distant and majestic line of mountains beyond the western hills. The sound of cowbells came irregularly to the ear, and the voices and sounds of the haying fields had a jocund, thrilling effect on the ear of the city dweller.

  He was very tender. Everything conspired to make him simple, direct, and honest.

  "Mother, if you'll only forgive me for staying away so long, I'll surely come to see you every summer."

  She had nothing to forgive. She was so glad to have him there at her feet-her great, handsome, successful boy! She could only love him and enjoy him every moment of the precious days. If Grant would only reconcile himself to Howard! That was the great thorn in her flesh.

  Howard told her how he had succeeded.

  "It was luck, Mother. First I met Cooke, and he introduced me to Jake Saulsman of Chicago. Jake asked me to go to New York with him, and-I don't know why-took a fancy to me some way. He introduced me to a lot of the fellows in New York, and they all helped me along. I did nothing to merit it. Everybody helps me. Anybody can succeed in that way."

  The doting mother thought it not at all strange that they all helped him.

  At the supper table Grant was gloomily silent, ignoring Howard completely. Mrs. McLane sat and grieved silently, not daring to say a word in protest. Laura and the baby tried to amuse Howard, and under cover of their talk the meal was eaten.

  The boy fascinated Howard. He "sawed wood" with a rapidity and uninterruptedness which gave alarm. He had the air of coaling up for a long voyage.

  "At that age," Howard thought, "I must have gripped my knife in my right hand so, and poured my tea into my saucer so. I must have buttered and bit into a huge slice of bread just so, and chewed at it with a smacking sound in just that way. I must have gone to the length of scooping up honey with my knife blade."

  It was magically, mystically beautiful over all this squalor and toil and bitterness, from five till seven-a moving hour. Again the falling sun streamed in broad banners across the valleys; again the blue mist lay far down the coulee over the river; the cattle called from the hills in the moistening, sonorous air; the bells came in a pleasant tangle of sound; the air pulsed with the deepening chorus of katydids and other nocturnal singers.

  Sweet and deep as the very springs of his life was all this to the soul of the elder brother; but in the midst of it, the younger man, in ill-smelling clothes and great boots that chafed his feet, went out to milk the. cows-on whose legs the flies and mosquitoes swarmed, bloated with blood-to sit by the hot side of the cow and be lashed with her tall as she tried frantically to keep the savage insects from eating her raw.

  "The poet who writes of milking the cows does it from the hammock, looking on," Howard soliloquized as he watched the old man Lewis racing around the filthy yard after one of the young heifers that had kicked over the pail in her agony with the flies and was unwilling to stand still and be eaten alive.

  "So, so! you beast!" roared the old man as he finally cornered the shrinking, nearly frantic creature.

  "Don't you want to look at the garden?" asked Mrs. McLane of

  Howard; and they went out among the vegetables and berries.

  The bees were coming home heavily laden and crawling slowly into the hives. The level, red light streamed through the trees, blazed along the grass, and lighted a few old-fashioned flowers into red ai~d gold flam
e. It was beautiful, and Howard looked at it through his half-shut eyes as the painters do, and turned away with a sigh at the sound of blows where the wet and grimy men were assailing the frantic cows.

  "There's Wesley with your trunk," Mrs. McLane said, recalling him to himself.

  Wesley helped him carry the trunk in and waved off thanks.

  "Oh, that's all right," he said; and Howard knew the Western man too well to press the matter of pay.

  As he went in an hour later and stood by the trunk, the dull ache came back into his heart. How he had failed! It seemed like a bitter mockery now to show his gifts.

  Grant had come in from his work, and with his feet released from his chafing boots, in his wet shirt and milk-splashed overalls, sat at the kitchen table reading a newspaper which he held close to a small kerosene lamp. He paid no attention to anyone. His attitude, Curiously like his father's, was perfectly definite to Howard. It meant that from that time forward there were to be no words of any sort between them. It meant that they were no longer brothers, not even acquaintances. "How inexorable that face!" thought Howard.

  He turned sick with disgust and despair, and would have closed his trunk without showing any of the presents, only for the childish expectancy of his mother and Laura.

  "Here's something for you, Mother," he said, assuming a cheerful voice as he took a fold of fine silk from the trunk and held it up. "All the way from Paris."

  He laid it on his mother's lap and stooped and kissed her, and then turned hastily away to hide the tears that came to his own eyes as he saw her keen pleasure.

  "And here's a parasol for Laura. I don't know how I came to have that in here. And here's General Grant's autobiography for his namesake," he said with an effort at carelessness, and waited to hear Grant rise.

  "Grant, won't you come in?" asked his mother quiveringly.

  Grant did not reply nor move. Laura took the handsome volumes out and laid them beside him on the table. He simply pushed them to one side and went on with his reading.

  Again that horrible anger swept hot as flame over Howard. He could have cursed him. His hands shook as he handed out other presents to his mother and Laura and the baby. He tried to joke.