Part 26

The American cogitated a moment. “I don’t see that,” he affirmed presently. “Copper is copper, and brass is brass, and if you get the right material and see that it’s made right, you will have done your part of the job. You can turn out the same designs a thousand times faster, and give employment to a thousand more men. Can’t you see the difference it will make? We’ll get the railroad to run right into the town instead of three miles off--why we’ll put the place on the map!”

Martin became of a sudden very serious. “I--I’m not sure we want that. We had a hard time keeping the railroad out of here in the first place, and I’m afraid we couldn’t do with a lot of strangers. It would turn things upside down. I’ve always done my best to please the people here and I know what they like. And when I bought a bed from Sam Greene or clothes from Bartlett or medicine from Rollo Hines I knew they were giving me their best, just what _I_ wanted. We are sort of used to each other and understand each other. I don’t think we should get along so well if we had a lot of new people to deal with.” He was apologetic, diffident, eager to explain his position, but underneath, Powell felt, stubborn in his prejudices; for the first time he began to be slightly exasperated. Convinced not only of the worth of his intentions but of the soundness of the plan that had taken hold of him, feeling himself on the verge of bringing a great boon to Edginden, he was annoyed at the other’s failure to fall into step with him. He was already visualizing the miraculous, mushroom growth with which he was familiar, for which he had often been largely responsible, and the unlooked for opposition dumbfounded him. He had often had difficulty in selling an idea, in convincing people that they would get their money’s worth; he had never as yet encountered, even remotely, opposition to his underlying philosophy. It had never occurred to him that men might look otherwise on expansion. Martin, sweet of temper, and shy in manner, began to symbolise an obtuse, almost sullen unresponsiveness in the people he was so eager to serve. If only he could come to some common ground, if he could argue against objections he could understand. His hopes were being dashed to pieces on a rock so unsubstantial that he could not even see it.

“But what would the world be like if everybody--” he began, when the door opened and the proprietress of the Unicorn joined them, her parade to the back of the shop punctuated by the clatter of furniture and the toppling of metal ware. The aisle was narrow and irregular, Mrs. Unicorn very wide and quite direct in her progress. She carried in her hand a copper tea-kettle of unusual pattern, the spout coming from the top of the kettle and issuing through a large, graceful handle.

She ignored Powell and addressed Martin directly.

“Roger, that girl of mine has gone and smashed this kettle against the stove,” she said, exhibiting a gash in the fair copper surface. “Can you mend it?”

He took it from her and examined it carefully. A pathetic look of distress settled on his face. “I’ll try, Miriam,” he observed finally, “I shall let you know if I can’t.”

“Well, do it as soon as you can, and don’t let it cost too much,” she said pointedly, and took her departure.

As soon as she was out of the door Powell laughed. “Serve her right if you made her scrap this and sold her another kettle,” he remarked, “she’s tight as a vice.”

Martin did not reply for a moment. He continued to examine the kettle, real pain showing in his eyes. He put aside the vase from San Francisco, selecting some tools, lit his brazier. Finally he said to his companion, “I hope I can make this right. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever turned out of this shop.” He turned back to his work.

Powell’s smile faded. The three-coloured, full-page advertisement he had been inwardly contemplating, which was to blazon to the world “Edginden for Excellence--Martin’s Metalware is as durable and beautiful as the English village in which it was made” crumpled up and disappeared as if it had been dropped into a large fire. He pondered the other’s words a moment, noting keenly at the same time how he fondled the injured utensil. An expression of understanding crept slowly over his face, and he stole out softly without disturbing the absorbed craftsman.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Copyright, 1926, by Milton Waldman.

FIRE AND WATER[18]

By GLENWAY WESCOTT

(From _Collier’s Weekly_)

I

The sky rolled from side to side like an animal in pain, outstretched on the soft, saturated trees. Now and again there was a groan of thunder, and lightning flickered with a glitter of enormous eyes, rolling in their sockets.

I was driving back to my father’s farm from the village. The downpour beat on the buggy-top, splashing to the ground and spattering the rubber laprobe. I disliked the smell of the wet harness leather and the sweating horse, wishing to enjoy the sour fragrance of the vegetation half-floating, half-rooted, in the fields. The lantern hanging from the dashboard hollowed out a space in the darkness into which the rain poured as bright as tin.

As I crossed a small bridge the lantern-light fell for a moment on the dripping hat and red face of a man who was leaning against the cement rampart. It was a neighbor named George Stearns. Should I have stopped to give him a lift? He was less than half a mile from home; he would be drunk and troublesome, furthermore I should have had to wake his wife and daughter, while he alone would roll quietly into the hay-mow.

It was his custom to return from the village in this condition three or four nights in the week, always on foot, since his daughter Amelia would not let him take the horse. His drunkenness was proverbial, and every one who used that road had seen him stumbling through the underbrush, collapsing backwards into a ditch, or drawn up patiently out of the way of hoofs and wheels. Weather meant nothing to him; he dug his way through the drifts, lay in the mud, lurched into cold creeks, but always got home. He was well liked by his neighbors, who took a certain pleasure in pardoning a manly weakness, and praised his good nature whenever his bad habit was mentioned. One autumn, having swigged too frequently from a bottle behind a beam in the wagon-shed, he dropped his pitch-fork into the hopper of a threshing-machine, spoiling the blades which cut the twine; but after the owner had cursed and threatened, he was not even forced to pay for the damage.

As I passed the lamp rolled low, which Amelia always left in a window to guide her father, I remembered a story I had heard, how at the age of eight George had disappeared for a night and most of a day. His family had lowered a lantern into the well, and shouted in the woods around the sugar-bush, thinking of wild cats and wolves, which still came out of the deep forests from time to time to carry off lambs and ravish the chicken coops. His hysterical mother peered into the bear’s pen, half-expecting to see strips of clothing on the ground and blood on the animal’s tusks. The whole countryside was aroused. At last, after a mournful meal, his father had gone into the basement with a candle and a pitcher to bring up cider, and found the boy, drunk beside a barrel.

I thought then how one came to know people by the accumulation of glimpses; the sight of George, wet and drunk on the little bridge, a moment too fleeting even to speak to him; and after that his solitude and my solitude, in which my memory assembled other casual words and brief encounters. In that country I met my neighbors chiefly on the road. Thickets and piles of brushwood, the gravel, the puddles, the barbed-wire fences, the hitching-posts, and the piazzas, filled the corners of every picture of their lives. A one-horse vehicle brought me near them, like the field-glasses with which a naturalist detects a bird in a tree, though its plumage is the color of the tree. All my relations with George Stearns and his family, for example, were of this kind: the talk of one of them and myself in a buggy, or between one in a buggy and one standing beside the wheel or on a porch; the look of one of them in a barnyard or a field....

Thus about the nucleus of George’s face in the rainstorm, previous impressions gathered, later images and later conversations were to gather, rounding out a pointless history. Recollections of similar men’s lives served as intuition into his life, so that, as I turned in at my father’s gate, I could see him behind me in the darkness, blustering and hiccoughing, slipping down in the flooded grass, I could hear his obstinate sighs in the wind as it pulled the clouds away.

His eighty-acre farm was a miserable piece of property. Gashed with gullies, the fields of red clay sloped acutely above the house and barn, which were almost hidden in the edge of a swamp. A lake lay like an immense ditch in the center of this swamp, and into it the rains carried the topsoil from increasingly arid fields. George’s father had understood the weakness of his farm, and had kept the upper acres in sod-crops, filled the gullies with stone, planted clover to nourish the soil, rotted the grain-straw in the barnyard, and carted it with manure into the fields. But George preferred to forget these hard expedients, and the farm became, as it were, a portrait of himself. He planted only a little oats for the horse, a little corn for the cattle. The fences tottered and fell under loads of woodbine and wild grapes. In great pastures full of thistles two or three sharp-hipped cows gnawed the june-grass that grew between the stones.

George hired out by the day to his more ambitious neighbors. He was satisfied with this way of life; to move from farm to farm without responsibility, to work without haste or worry, to spend his earnings and his leisure in a saloon. The lot of his wife and daughter was not so agreeable. They lived like a pair of domestic animals in a pen: coarse trees on three sides, the tantalizing road on the other; no variety of duty or scene, no entertainment, no plans, nothing to expect. Inevitably their poverty would pinch closer and closer, and they were bound to a man who was happy and didn’t care.

At first Amelia seemed to bear it better than her mother. As a tall, wry-faced girl Mrs. Stearns, having been assured by her brothers that she need not expect to be courted for her looks, had married George to avoid becoming an old maid. George’s mother had suggested that he might settle down when he married, and she had to take the risk. The little house like a dry-goods box had seemed, in those days, a respectable home; but other people’s prosperity had built all around it, to its shame, incomparable mansions with turrets, lightning-rods, and picketting around the chimneys, incomparable hip-roofed barns with the name of the owner stencilled under crossed flags; and George’s house had deteriorated with his land and himself. Mrs. Stearns fretted less at her husband’s shortcomings than at the looks of the place.

“Everything’s goin’ to pieces,” I heard her complain one day. “It’s the worst lookin’ place in the county. Look at that broke rig with the weeds growin’ through the wheels. The tools all out gettin’ rusted. I’ll be switched if the mare don’t look mangy!”

“Oh stop it, Ma!” Amelia muttered. “I’m tired of that kind of talk!”

“Nobody goes by on the road,” her mother went on, “nothin’ to see, nothin’ to do. And me sick. Your pa gets the best of it, he gets out among folks. We women don’t get no further’n you could throw a stone.”

Amelia marched across from the sink, her round shoulders raised, shaking her dish-towel angrily. “Who’s to blame for this God-awful marsh? What’s the good of whimperin’? Who’s to blame, I ast you? Better go to bed, Ma, and rest.”

When the girl went out to do her milking, the sick woman shuffled off to bed. If it rained she tossed back and forth on her bed, kept awake by the water which gushed in all the gullies, washing the best of their land down to the lake. The temporary rivers gurgled and grew thick, without foam, and ended as suddenly as they had begun. It seemed that soon there would be nothing but rocks between the fences.

Amelia was a short, flat-chested girl with muscular arms and extremely wide hips. Her chapped and freckled skin seemed to have been drawn tightly over the bones of her face--over the long nose, the cheek-bones exactly in the center of her cheeks, the receding but stubborn chin--a face in which were combined poor health and great strength. Her eyelids fluttered so much that one could not remember the eyes, and her thin lips pouted habitually.

She did all the work, had always done it. As a child she went to school only during the winter months, and ceased altogether at fourteen when the school inspector could not force her to go. She kept the house decently clean, baked, churned butter, made her own clothes, and nursed her increasingly bed-ridden mother. Then there were the chores: she gave the cattle frozen corn-fodder to supplement the straw which they ate from the stack, milked them, and took the can to the cheese factory, and pumped from the stinking vat her share of whey for the pigs. I had seen her staggering down ditches which she had shovelled in the snow drifts, her long arms almost pulled from their sockets by the slopping pails of swill, or stooping over the smoke from a kettle-shaped stove which melted the ice in the water-trough. At butchering time she worked elbow to elbow with the men, scraping the bristles from the carcass soused in boiling water, and she alone cut up the pigs, rubbed and smoked the bacon, and ground the sausage. She watched over the old sows when they farrowed, sometimes far into the night, lest they eat their young. Her last duty was to turn down the lamp in the kitchen window where her father could see it as he stumbled up the road.

In October I was driving to the village before dawn to meet a cousin at the station. An odor, iced and musky, came out of the woods. The dewy red leaves looked swollen, and the thickets very large with mist. My horse was willing, and I enjoyed the road, pointed like a rod into distant hollows and forests or lifted up to pierce the sky, feeling an absolute solitude. But when I came near the Stearns farm I saw some one waiting for me. It was Amelia, and she waved, and when I stopped, gripped the wheel with her red hands and stared at me, her face very sharp as if whittled away.

“Gerson, won’t you stop and look at my pa. He’s sick. I’m scared--scared to wake him up.”

I followed her--not into the house, to my surprise--but into the barn, where the light fell with a feeble quiver from the two peepholes and innumerable cracks. Amelia pointed into the nearly empty hay-mow, where I saw first a pair of heavy boots, smeared with mud, the toes turned sharply outward, and beyond them George’s face, enormous, crimson, and disdainful, with hay in his hair and several stalks in his moustache.

“I’m sorry, Amelia. He’s dead.”

“Oh Lord ... I thought so.”

“Is there anything I can do? Shall I tell anybody?”

“Well you can stop and tell Mrs. Bemis. You’re goin’ to the village? Tell an undertaker to come, the cheapest one.”

“Is that all?” I repeated, shocked by her perfunctory courage.

“Yeah, that’s all.” She sighed. “I got to wake up mother and tell her.”

Four months later she married a man named Nick Richter. Her mother expressed a peevish gratification: “Amelia couldn’t stand it, bein’ alone. I ain’t much company no more.” She grew weaker, and kept her newly married daughter at her bedside all that winter, exercising a tyranny with her eyes when she could not speak, and they buried her in April.

There was a large funeral, for during the six months by which she had survived her husband, the community had decided that she was a martyr to his drunken shiftlessness. Amelia asked my father and me to bring two teams to take people from the house to the cemetery, and she herself rode in my father’s carriage with her only living uncle, his wife, and another relative. But after the service she separated herself from her family and climbed into the front seat beside me, looking very tired, her face tight and yellow, her mouth twitching as if with anger.

“I couldn’t stand those sneaky women another minute. My Aunt Cynthy and Mrs. Smart, the old hens. They think I don’t show a proper feeling. They’ll start again’s soon as we get home, but I might’s well have a rest, I guess.”

“Good idea,” I said.

“Of course I’ll miss her and she was always good to me,” she added timidly, as if to please me, and buried her pale nose in a handkerchief.

To change the subject I asked, “Are you and Nick going to stay at the farm?”

“I s’pose so.”

“I thought you might try something else. The land isn’t much good, is it?”

“No good at all. Worn out, sandy--stones and ditches. It’s gettin’ now so’s it won’t raise grass--never was manured any. And the fences are all down. God, I hate it!”

I asked why.

“Well, not just because it’s poor farmin’. I don’ know--the woods maybe, those rotten trees so close. It’s no way to live; you see ’em all day and hear ’em all night. When I was a kid I used to be scared our house would slide into the lake. Was you ever down there? It just shows you what it’s always been like. If you fell in, you’d have some chance--but if you was always in....”

Her voice weakened to a loud whisper. “You need some excitement. I never went nowhere, never saw nothin’--had to work. I guess you wouldn’t have the nerve to get out of a dead hole like that if you knew you got to come back. That’s why I never went to dances. I guess you’d jump into the lake for good--when you got home I mean.”

I felt uncomfortable. “Why don’t you sell the whole outfit and rent a house near town. Nick could make as much by the day as he does here.”

She did not seem to listen. “And it’s so awful still,” she muttered. “My God. It’s so still you can hear the slime dripping in the well.”

I renewed my encouragement. “Sell it and go to town. Nick could make two or three dollars a day. Don’t try to stick it out another year. Give yourself a chance. Have an auction,” I said.

“Oh Lord,” she cried. “Sell all that junk? It wouldn’t bring thirty cents. Spread all that rubbish round the yard for a lot of old women to pick over? I should say not.”

“Well, do something then,” I said impatiently. We were in sight of the house.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Amelia moaned. “I couldn’t go off and leave that house--everything the way it’s always been. It’d be like leaving one of them, Ma or Pa, like not burying them,” she said.

II

Nick Richter had married to improve his position. His father, a blacksmith, having speculated in Texas oil, had been forced, just before he died, to sell his house, his shop, and every hammer and horseshoe. Nick disliked his father’s trade, and drifted in a radius of ten miles around the village, working by the day, week, or month, at odd jobs. He bought a horse and buggy when he could afford to, selling them if he lost his job, and looked for a wife at every Saturday and Sunday night dance for several years. But he danced with his jaw, his neck, and his elbows, and the boisterous girls merely laughed at him, so these entertainments left him lonely and discouraged.

The lake in the swamp below the Stearns house contained pickerel and black bass, which George had been too law-abiding as well as too lazy to exterminate with nets. Since the owner was a bed-ridden widow in Milwaukee, he was its virtual proprietor, and rented his flat-bottomed rowboat two or three times a week. Nick drove up before the barn one Sunday morning, two bamboo poles wagging behind his buggy, and Amelia showed him where to tie his horse and brought the heavy oars from the shed.

He was soon recognized as her beau. George had always puttered about the sheds on Sunday, and Amelia, leaving her chores to him, claimed her first regular holiday. They went to picnics, and drove from village to village, stopping at the saloons for soda and beer, and sat very late on the back porch. Sometimes they went to the lake to fish or pretend to fish.

I saw them there one morning just before George died, as I walked through the swamp on an old corduroy road. From the tall maples leaves floated to the ground like a harvest of ghostly oranges. Through a clearing I could see the murky hills, and when I approached the lake, the water glimmered between the boughs in mother-of-pearl strips. From the tottering boat-house a muddy channel led out through the reeds to a cup-shaped harbor, separated from the deep water by a sand bar. In this quiet place a few lilies grew, the yellow thrusting their closed, hard heads above the surface, the white spreading tufts of petals like miniature swans.

Here the boat was at rest, the oars hanging from the oarlocks. I stood on the shore for several minutes, unobserved, and then turned back into the woods. Nick crouched in the bottom of the boat, half-hidden, and Amelia, sitting on the broad back seat, held his head in her lap. Upon her face there was a vague, pale look of ecstasy, an ecstasy of possession without confidence and without hope.

There followed George’s death, their hasty marriage, the mother’s illness and death. By spring Nick must have recognized the sterility of the farm, for he put in only the patch of oats and the patch of corn, ploughed up the garden for Amelia, and began to hire out to his neighbors as George had done. He was a good worker in his sour, muttering way, his shoulders bent forward like the wings of a large hawk, his gaunt wrists extended stiffly. Perhaps his marriage was a disappointment; certainly he failed to feel the security of a man of property, the serenity of a married man, of which he may have dreamed. Perhaps he had been contaminated by Amelia’s discontent. Perhaps he was afraid of her: a weak swimmer who had ventured into what looked like a stagnant pool, to find himself in the embrace of a profound, indomitable current.