Читать книгу: «The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891», страница 9

“My sakes, Lucreeshy! You mustn’t talk that way.”

“But I will,” said the woman, as she supported herself on one palm and raised the other. “I’ve got to talk that way.” She was ripe for an explosion like this. She seized upon it with eagerness. “They aint no use o’ livin’ this way, anyway. I’d take poison if it want f’r the young ones.”

“Lucreeshy Burns!”

“Oh, I mean it.”

“Land sakes alive, I b’leeve you’re goin’ crazy!”

“I shouldn’t wonder if I was. I’ve had enough t’ drive an Indian crazy. Now you jest go off an’ leave me ‘lone. I aint in mind to visit—they aint no way out of it, an’ I’m tired o’ tryin’ to find a way. Go off an’ let me be.”

Her tone was so bitterly hopeless that the great jolly face of Mrs. Council stiffened into a look of horror such as she had not worn for years. The children, in two separate groups, could be heard rioting. Bees were humming around the clover in the grass, and the kingbird chattered ceaselessly from the Lombardy poplar-tip. Both women felt all this peace and beauty of the morning, dimly, and it disturbed Mrs. Council because the other was so impassive under it all. At last, after a long and thoughtful pause, Mrs. Council asked a question whose answer she knew would decide it all,—asked it very kindly and softly,—

“Creeshy, are you comin’ in?”

“No,” was the short and sullenly decisive answer. Mrs. Council knew that was the end, and so rose with a sigh and went away.

“Wal, good by,” she said simply.

Looking back she saw Lucretia lying at length with closed eyes and hollow cheeks. She seemed to be sleeping, half-buried in the grass. She did not look up nor reply to her sister-in-law. Her life also was one of toil and trouble, but not so hard and hapless as Lucretia’s. By contrast with most of her neighbors she seemed comfortable.

“Sim Burns, what you ben doin’ to that woman?” she burst out as she waddled up to where the two men were sitting under a cotton-wood tree, talking and whittling after the manner of farmers.

“Nawthin’ ‘s fur ‘s I know,” answered Burns, not quite honestly, and looking uneasy.

“You needn’t try t’ git out of it like that, Sim Burns,” replied his sister. “That woman never got into that fit f’r nawthin’.”

“Wal, if you know more about it than I do, whadgy ask me fur,” he replied angrily.

“Tut, tut!” put in Council, always a peacemaker, “hold y’r horses! Don’t git on y’r ear, childern! Keep cool, and don’t spile y’r shirts. Most likely yer all t’ blame. Keep cool an’ swear less.”

“Wal, I’ll bet Sim’s more to blame than she is. Why they aint a harder-workin’ woman in the hull State of Ioway than she is—”

“Except Marm Council.”

“Except nobody. Look at her, jest skin and bones.”

Council chuckled in his vast way. “That’s so, mother, measured in that way she leads over you. You git fat on it.”

She smiled a little, her indignation oozing away; she never “could stay mad,” her children were accustomed to tell her. Burns refused to talk any more about the matter, and the visitors gave it up, and got out their team and started for home, Mrs. Council firing this parting shot:—

“The best thing you can do to-day is t’ let her alone. Mebbe the childern ‘ll bring her round again. If she does come round, you see ‘t you treat her a little more ‘s y’ did when you was a-courtin’ her.”

“This way,” roared Council, putting his arm around his wife’s waist. She boxed his ears while he guffawed and clucked at his team.

Burns took a measure of salt and went out into the pasture to salt the cows. On the sunlit slope of the field, where the cattle came running and bawling to meet him, he threw down the salt in handfuls, and then lay down to watch them as they eagerly licked it up, even gnawing a bare spot in the sod in their eagerness to get it all.

Burns was not a drinking man; was hard-working, frugal, in fact, he had no extravagances except his tobacco. His clothes he wore until they all but dropped from him; and he worked in rain and mud, as well as dust and sun. It was this suffering and toiling all to no purpose that made him sour and irritable. He didn’t see why he should have so little after so much hard work.

He was puzzled to account for it all. His mind (the average mind) was weary with trying to solve an insoluble problem. His neighbors, who had got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and suggestion as to the cause of his persistent poverty.

Old man Bacon, the hardest-working man in the county, laid it to Burns’ lack of management. Jim Butler, who owned a dozen farms (which he had taken on mortgages), and who had got rich by buying land at government price and holding for a rise, laid all such cases as Burns to “lack of enterprise, foresight.”

But the larger number feeling themselves “in the same boat” with Burns, said:—

“I’d know. Seems as if things got worse an’ worse. Corn an’ wheat gittin’ cheaper ‘n’ cheaper. Machinery eatin’ up profits—got to have machinery to harvest the cheap grain, an’ then the machinery eats up profits. Taxes goin’ up. Devil to pay all round; I’d know what ‘n thunder is the matter.”

The democrats said protection was killing the farmers, the republicans said no. The grangers growled about the middle-men, the green-backers said there wasn’t circulating medium enough, and in the midst of it all, hard-working discouraged farmers, like Simeon Burns, worked on, unable to find out what really was the matter.

And there on this beautiful Sabbath morning, Sim sat and thought and thought, till he rose with an oath, and gave it up.

III

It was hot and brilliant again the next morning as Douglass Radbourn drove up the road with Lily Graham, the teacher of the school in the little white schoolhouse. It was blazing hot, even though not yet nine o’clock, and the young farmers plowing beside the fence looked longingly and somewhat bitterly at Radbourn seated in a fine top-buggy beside a beautiful creature in lace and cambric.

Very beautiful the town-bred “schoolma’am” looked to those grimy, sweaty fellows, superb fellows physically, too, with bare red arms and leather-colored faces. She was as if builded of the pink and white clouds soaring far up there in the morning sky. So cool, and sweet, and dainty.

As she came in sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of some time in the far future “standing a chance” of having an introduction to her, caused them to wipe them on their trousers’ leg stealthily.

Lycurgus Banks, “Ly” Banks, swore when he saw Radbourn. “That cuss thinks he’s ol’ hell this morning. He don’t earn his living. But he’s jest the kind of cuss to get holt of all the purty girls.”

Others gazed with simple, sad wistfulness upon the slender figure, pale, sweet face, and dark eyes of the young girl, feeling that to have talk with such a fairy-like creature was a happiness too great to ever be their lot. And when she had passed they went back to work with a sigh and feeling of loss.

As for Lily, she felt a pang of pity for these people. She looked at this peculiar form of poverty and hardship much as the fragile, tender girl of the city looks upon the men laying a gas-main in the streets. She felt (sympathetically) the heat and grime, and though but the faintest idea of what it meant to wear such clothing came to her, she shuddered. Her eyes had been opened to these things by Radbourn, who was a well-known radical,—a law student in Rock River.

“Poor fellows!” sighed Lily, almost unconsciously. “I hate to see them working there in the dirt and hot sun. It seems a hopeless sort of life, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, but this is the most beautiful part of the year,” said Radbourn. “Think of them in the mud, in the sleet; think of them husking corn in the snow, a bitter wind blowing; think of them a month later in the harvest; think of them imprisoned here in winter!”

“Yes, it’s dreadful! But I never felt it so keenly before. You have opened my eyes to it.”

“Writers and orators have lied so long about ‘the idyllic’ in farm life, and said so much about the ‘independent American farmer’ that he himself has remained blind to the fact that he’s one of the hardest-working and poorest-paid men in America. See the houses they live in,—hovels.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said Lily; a look of deeper pain swept over her face. “And the fate of the poor women, oh, the fate of the women!”

“Yes, it’s a matter of statistics,” went on Radbourn, pitilessly, “that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there’s Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless future. No, they have a future, if they knew it, and we must tell them.”

“I know Mrs. Burns; she sends several children to my school. Poor, pathetic little things, half-clad and wistful-eyed. They make my heart ache; they are so hungry for love, and so quick to learn.”

As they passed the Burns farm, they looked for the wife but she was not to be seen. The children had evidently gone up to the little white schoolhouse at the head of the lane. Radbourn let the reins fall slack as he talked on. He did not look at the girl, his eyebrows were drawn into a look of gloomy pain.

“It aint so much the grime that I abhor, nor the labor that crooks their backs and makes their hands bludgeons. It’s the horrible waste of life involved in it all. I don’t believe God intended a man to be bent to plow-handles like that, but that aint the worst of it. The worst of it is, these people live lives approaching automata. They become machines to serve others more lucky or more unscrupulous than themselves. What is the world of art, of music, of literature, to these poor devils—to Sim Burns and his wife there, for example? Or even to the best of these farmers?”

The girl looked away over the shimmering lake of yellow-green corn, a choking came into her throat. Her gloved hand trembled.

“What is such a life worth? It’s all very comfortable for us to say, ‘they don’t feel it.’ How do we know what they feel? What do we know of their capacity for enjoyment of art and music? They never have leisure or opportunity. The master is very glad to be taught by preacher, and lawyer, and novelist, that his slaves are contented and never feel any longings for a higher life. These people live lives but little higher than their cattle,—are forced to live so. Their hopes and aspirations are crushed out, their souls are twisted and deformed just as toil twists and deforms their bodies. They are on the same level as the city laborer. It makes me wild to think of it. The very religion they hear is a soporific. They are taught to be content here that they may be happy hereafter. Suppose there isn’t any hereafter?”

“Oh, don’t say that, please!” Lily cried.

“But I don’t know that there is,” looking up at her pitilessly, “and I do know that these people are being robbed of something more than money, of all that makes life worth living. The promise of milk and honey in Canaan is all very well, but I prefer to have mine here, then I’m sure of it.”

“What can we do?” murmured the girl.

“Do? Rouse these people for one thing; preach discontent, a noble discontent.”

“It will only make them unhappy.”

“No, it won’t, not if you show them the way out. If it does, it’s better to be unhappy striving for higher things, like a man, than to be content in a wallow like swine.”

“But what is the way out?”

This was sufficient to set Radbourn upon his hobby-horse. He outlined his plan of action, the abolition of all indirect taxes. The State control of all privileges, the private ownership of which interfered with the equal rights of all. He would utterly destroy speculative holdings of the earth. He would have land everywhere brought to its best use, by appropriating all ground rents to the use of the State, etc., etc., to which the girl listened with eager interest but with only partial comprehension.

As they neared the little schoolhouse, a swarm of midgets in pink dresses, pink sun-bonnets, and brown legs, came rushing to meet their teacher, with that peculiar devotion the children in the country develop for a refined teacher.

Radbourn helped Lily out into the midst of the eager little scholars, who swarmed upon her like bees on a lump of sugar, till even Radbourn’s gravity gave way, and he smiled into her lifted eyes—an unusual smile, that strangely enough stopped the smile on her own lips, filling her face with a wistful shadow, and her breath came hard for a moment and she trembled.

She loved that cold, stern face, oh, so much! and to have him smile was a pleasure that made her heart leap till she suffered a smothering pain. She turned to him to say:—

“I am very thankful, Mr. Radbourn, for another pleasant ride,” adding in a lower tone, “It was a very great pleasure; you always give me so much. I feel stronger and more hopeful.”

“I’m glad you feel so. I was afraid I was prosy with my land-doctrine.”

“Oh no! Indeed no! You have given me a new hope; I am exalted with the thought; I shall try to think it all out and apply it.”

And so they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile but the bare little hive had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone and hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the blazing sun.

“America’s pitiful boast!” said the young radical looking back at it. “Only a miserable hint of what it might be.”

All that forenoon as Lily faced her little group of barefoot children, she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy for these poor supine farmers, hopeless, and in some cases content in their narrow lives. The children almost worshipped the beautiful girl who came to them as a revelation of exquisite neatness and taste,—whose very voice and intonation awed them.

They noted (unconsciously, of course,) every detail. Snowy linen, touches of soft color, graceful lines of bust and side—the slender fingers that could almost speak, so beautifully flexile were they. Lily herself sometimes, when she shook the calloused, knotted, stiffened hands of the women, shuddered with sympathetic pain, to think that the crowning wonder and beauty of God’s world should be so maimed and distorted from its true purpose.

Even in the children before her she could see the inherited results of fruitless labor—and more pitiful yet in the bent shoulders of the older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon be permanent. And as these things came to her, she clasped the poor wondering things to her side with a convulsive wish to make life a little brighter for them.

“How is your mother, Sadie?” she asked of Sadie Burns, as she was eating her luncheon on the drab-colored table near the open window.

“Purty well,” said Sadie in a hesitating way.

Lily was looking out, and listening to the gophers whistling as they raced to and fro. She could see Bob Burns lying at length on the grass in the pasture over the fence, his heels waving in the air, his hands holding a string which formed a snare. Bob was “death on gophers.” It was like fishing to young Izaak Walton.

It was very still and hot and the cheep and trill of the gophers, and the chatter of the kingbirds alone broke the silence. A cloud of butterflies were fluttering about a pool near, a couple of big flies buzzed and mumbled on the pane.

“What ails your mother?” Lily asked, recovering herself and looking at Sadie who was distinctly ill at ease.

“Oh, I dunno,” Sadie replied, putting one bare foot across the other.

Lily insisted.

“She ‘n’ pa’s had an awful row—”

“Sadie!” said the teacher warningly, “what language!”

“I mean they quarrelled, an’ she don’t speak to him any more.”

“Why, how dreadful!”

“An’ pa he’s awful cross,—and she won’t eat when he does, an’ I haf to wait on table.”

“I believe I’ll go down and see her this noon,” said Lily to herself, as she divined a little of the state of affairs in the Burns family.

Sim was mending the pasture fence as Lily came down the road toward him. He had delayed going to dinner to finish his task and was just about ready to go when Lily spoke to him.

“Good-morning, Mr. Burns. I am just going down to see Mrs. Burns. It must be time to go to dinner—aren’t you ready to go? I want to talk with you.”

Ordinarily he would have been delighted with the idea of walking down the road with the schoolma’am, but there was something in her look which seemed to tell him that she knew all about his trouble, and beside he was not in good humor.

“Yes, in a minnit,—soon’s I fix up this hole. Them shoats, I b’leeve, would go through a keyhole, if they could once git their snoots in.”

He expanded on this idea as he nailed away, anxious to gain time. He foresaw trouble for himself. He couldn’t be rude to this sweet and fragile girl. If a man had dared to attack him on his domestic shortcomings, he could have fought. The girl stood waiting for him, her large, steady eyes full of thought, gazing down at him from the shadow of her broad-brimmed hat.

“The world is so full of misery anyway, that we ought to do the best we can to make it less,” she said at last in a musing tone, as if her thoughts had unconsciously taken on speech. She had always appealed to him strongly, and never more so than in this softly uttered abstraction,—that it was an abstraction added to its power with him.

He could find no words for reply, but picked up his hammer and nail-box, and slouched along the road by her side, listening without a word to her talk.

“Christ was patient, and bore with his enemies, surely we ought to bear with our—friends.” She went on adapting her steps to his. He took off his torn straw hat and wiped his face on his sleeve, being much embarrassed and ashamed. Not knowing how to meet such argument, he kept silent.

“How is Mrs. Burns?” said Lily at length, determined to make him speak. The delicate meaning in the emphasis laid on is did not escape him.

“Oh, she’s all right,—I mean she’s done her work jest the same as ever. I don’t see her much—”

“I didn’t know—I was afraid she was sick. Sadie said she was acting strangely.”

“No, she’s well enough—but,—”

“But what is the trouble? Won’t you let me help you, won’t you?”

“Can’t anybody help us. We’ve got ‘o fight it out, I s’pose,” he replied, a gloomy note of resentment creeping into his voice. “She’s ben in a devil of a temper f’r a week.”

“Haven’t you been in the same kind of a temper too?” demanded Lily, firmly, but kindly. “I think most troubles of this kind come from bad temper on both sides. Don’t you? Have you done your share at being kind and patient?”

They had reached the gate now, and she laid her hand on his arm to stop him. He looked down at the slender gloved hand on his arm feeling as if a giant had grasped him, then he raised his eyes to her face, flushing a purplish red as he remembered his grossness. It seemed monstrous in the presence of this girl-advocate. Her face was like silver, her eyes seemed pools of tears.

“I don’t s’pose I have,” he said at last pushing by her. He couldn’t have stood her glance another moment. His whole air conveyed the impression of destructive admission. Lily did not comprehend the extent of her advantage or she would have pursued it further. As it was she felt a little hurt as she entered the house. The table was set, but Mrs. Burns was nowhere to be seen. Calling her softly, the young girl passed through the shabby little living room to the oven-like bedroom which opened off it, but no one was about. She stood for a moment shuddering at the wretchedness of the room.

Going back to the kitchen she found Sim about beginning on his dinner; little Pet was with him, the rest of the children were at the schoolhouse.

“Where is she?”

“I d’ know. Out in the garden I expect. She don’t eat with me now. I never see her. She don’t come near me. I aint seen her since Saturday.”

Lily was shocked inexpressibly and began to see clearer the magnitude of the task she had set herself to do. But it must be done; she felt that a tragedy was not far off. It must be averted.

“Mr. Burns, what have you done? What have you done?” she asked in terror and horror.

“Don’t lay it all to me! She hain’t done nawthin’ but complain f’r ten years. I couldn’t do nothin’ to suit her. She was always naggin’ me.”

“I don’t think Lucretia Burns would nag anybody. I don’t say you’re all to blame, but I’m afraid you haven’t acknowledged you were any to blame. I’m afraid you’ve not been patient with her. I’m going out to bring her in. If she comes will you say you were part to blame? You needn’t beg her pardon, just say you’ll try to be better. Will you do it? Think how much she has done for you! Will you?”

He remained silent, and looked discouragingly rude. His sweaty, dirty shirt was open at the neck, his arms were bare, his scraggly teeth were yellow with tobacco, and his uncombed hair lay tumbled about on his high, narrow head. His clumsy, unsteady hands played with the dishes on the table. His pride was struggling with his sense of justice; he knew he ought to consent, and yet it was so hard to acknowledge himself to blame. The girl went on in a voice piercingly sweet, trembling with pity and pleading.

“What word can I carry to her from you? I’m going to go and see her. If I could take a word from you, I know she would come back to the table. Shall I tell her you feel to blame?”

The answer was a long time coming; at last the man nodded an assent, the sweat pouring from his purple face. She had set him thinking, her victory was sure.

Lily almost ran out into the garden and to the strawberry patch, where she found Lucretia in her familiar, colorless, shapeless dress, picking berries in the hot sun, the mosquitoes biting her neck and hands.

“Poor, pathetic, dumb sufferer,” the girl thought as she ran up to her.

She dropped her dish as she heard Lily coming, and gazed up into the tender, pitying face. Not a word was spoken, but something she saw there made her eyes fill with tears, and her throat swell. It was pure sympathy. She put her arms around the girl’s neck and sobbed for the first time since Friday night. Then they sat down on the grass under the hedge and she told her story, interspersed with Lily’s horrified comments.

When it was all told the girl still sat listening. She heard Radbourn’s calm, slow voice again. It helped her not to hate Burns; it helped her to pity and understand him.

“You must remember that such toil brutalizes a man; it makes him callous, selfish, unfeeling necessarily. A fine nature must either adapt itself to its hard surroundings or die. Men who toil terribly in filthy garments day after day and year after year cannot easily keep gentle; the frost and grime, the heat and cold will sooner or later enter into their souls. The case is not all in favor of the suffering wives, and against the brutal husbands. If the farmer’s wife is dulled and crazed by her routine, the farmer himself is degraded and brutalized. They are both products of a social system, victims of a land system, which produces tenement houses in the city, and pushes the farmer into a semi-solitude—victims of land laws that are relics of feudalism, made in the interest of the man who holds a special privilege in the earth. Free America has set up on its soil the systems of land-owning which produces the lord and the tenant; that glorifies speculation in the earth, and gives the priceless riches of the hills and forests into a few hands. But this will not continue—it can’t continue. The awakening understanding of America cries out against it.”

As well as she could Lily explained all this to the woman who lay with her face buried in the girl’s lap. Lily’s arms were about her thin shoulders in an agony of pity.

“It’s hard, Lucretia, I know, more than you can bear, but you mustn’t forget what Sim endures, too. He goes out in the storms and in the heat and dust. His boots are hard, and see how his hands are all bruised and broken by his work! He was tired and hungry when he said that—he didn’t really mean it.”

The wife remained silent.

“Mr. Radbourn says work as things go now does degrade a man in spite of himself. He says men get coarse and violent in spite of themselves just as women do when everything goes wrong in the house,—when the flies are thick, and the fire won’t burn, and the irons stick to the clothes. You see, you both suffer. Don’t lay up this fit of temper against Sim—will you?”

The wife lifted her head and looked away. Her face was full of hopeless weariness.

“It aint this once. It aint that ‘t all. It’s having no let up. Just goin’ the same thing right over ‘n’ over—no hope of anything better.”

“If you had a hope of another world—”

“Don’t talk that—that’s rich man’s doctrine. I don’t want that kind o’ comfert. I want a decent chance here. I want ‘o rest an’ be happy now—then I’m sure of it.”

Lily’s big eyes were streaming with tears. What should she say to the desperate woman?

“What’s the use? We might jest as well die—all of us.”

The woman’s livid face appalled the beautiful girl. She was gaunt, heavy-eyed, nerveless. Her faded dress settled down over her limbs showing the swollen knees and thin calves, her hands with distorted joints protruded painfully from her sleeves. And all about was the ever-recurring wealth and cheer of nature that knows no fear or favor. The bees and flies buzzing in the sun, the jay and kingbird in the poplars, the smell of strawberries, the motion of lush grass, the shimmer of corn blades tossed gayly as banners in a conquering army.

Like a flash of keener light a sentence shot across the girl’s mind. “Nature knows no title-deed. The bounty of her mighty hands falls as the sunlight falls, copious, impartial; her seas carry all ships, her air is for all lips, her lands for all feet.”

“Poverty and suffering such as yours will not last.” There was something in the girl’s voice that roused the woman. She turned her dull eyes upon her face.

Lily took her hand in both hers as if by a caress she could impart her own faith.

“Look up, dear. When Nature is so good and generous, man must come to be better, surely. Come, go in the house again. Sim is there, he expects you, he told me to tell you he was sorry.” Lucretia’s face twitched a little at that, but her head was bent. “Come, you can’t live this way. There isn’t any other place to go to.”

No, that was the bitterest truth. Where on this wide earth with its forth-shooting fruits and grains, its fragrant lands and shining seas, could this dwarfed, bent, broken, middle-aged woman go? Nobody wanted her, nobody cared for her. But the wind kissed her drawn lips as readily as those of the girl, and the blooms of clover nodded to her as if to a queen.

Lily had said all she could. Her heart ached with unspeakable pity and a sort of terror.

“Don’t give up, Lucretia. This may be the worst hour of your life. Live and bear with it all for Christ’s sake—for your children’s sake. Sim told me to tell you he was to blame. If you will only see that you are both to blame and yet neither to blame, then you can rise above it. Try, dear!”

The wife pulled herself together, rose silently, and started toward the house. Her face was rigid but no longer sullen. Lily followed her slowly, wonderingly.

As she neared the kitchen door, she saw Sim still sitting at the table; his face was unusually grave and soft. She saw him start and shove back his chair,—saw Lucretia go to the stove and lift the tea-pot, and heard her say, as she took her seat beside the baby,—

“Want some more tea?”

She had become a wife and mother again, but in what spirit the puzzled girl could not say.