“It certainly is.”
“Then will you grind it into him, clean to the marrer, and will you send these letters on to Ruthie?”
“Most certainly I will,” said the doctor emphatically. Granny opened the door and walked out.
“I’m so relieved, David,” she said. “He thinks they won’t be no manner o’ need to knife me. Likely he can fix up a few pills and send them out by mail so’s that I’ll be as good as new again. Now we must get right out of here and not take valuable time. What do I owe you, Doc?”
“Not a cent,” said Doctor Carey. “Thank you very much for coming to me. You’ll soon be all right again.”
“I was some worried. Much obliged I am sure. Come on!”
“One minute,” said the doctor. “David, I am making up a list of friends to whom I am going to send programmes of the medical meeting, and I thought your wife might like to see you among the speakers, and your subject. What is her address?”
A slow red flushed the Harvester’s cheeks. He opened his lips and hesitated. At last he said, “I think perhaps her people prefer that she receive mail under her maiden name while with them. Miss Ruth Jameson, care of Alexander Herron, 5770 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, will reach her.”
The doctor wrote the address, as if it were the most usual thing in the world, and asked the Harvester if he was ready to make the trip east.
“I think we had best start to-night,” he said. “We want a day to grow accustomed to our clothes and new surroundings before we run up squarely against serious business.”
“I will be ready,” promised the Harvester.
He took Granny home, set his house in order, installed the man he was leaving in charge, touched a match to the heap in the fireplace, and donning the new travelling suit, he went to Doctor Carey’s.
Mrs. Carey added a few touches, warned him to remember about the forks and spoons, and not to forget to shave often, and saw them off. At the station Carey said to him, “You know, David, we can change at Wayne and go through Buffalo, or we can take the Pittsburg and go and come through Philadelphia.”
“I am contemplating a trip to Philadelphia,” said the Harvester, “but I believe I will not be ready for, say a month yet. I have a theory and it dies hard. If it does not work out the coming month, I will go, perhaps, but not now. Let us see how many kinds of a fool I make of myself in New York before I attempt the Quakers.”
Almost to the city, the doctor smiled at the Harvester.
“David, where did you get your infernal assurance?” he asked.
“In the woods,” answered the Harvester placidly. “In doing clean work. With my fingers in the muck, and life literally teeming and boiling in sound and action, around, above, and beneath me, a right estimate of my place and province in life comes naturally in daily handling stores on which humanity depends, I go even deeper than you surgeons and physicians. You are powerless unless I reinforce your work with drugs on which you can rely. I do clean, honest work. I know its proper place and value to the world. That is why I called what I have to say, ‘The Man in the Background.’ There is no reason why I should shiver and shrink at meeting and explaining my work to my fellows. Every man has his vocation, and some of you in the limelight would cut a sorry figure if the man in the background should fail you at the critical moment. Don’t worry about me, Doc. I am all serene. You won’t find I possess either nerves or fear. ‘Be sure you are right, and then go ahead,’ is my law.”
“Well I’ll be confounded!” said the doctor.
In a large hall, peopled with thousands of medical men, the name of the Harvester was called the following day and his subject was announced. He arose in his place and began to talk.
“Take the platform,” came in a roar from a hundred throats.
The Harvester hesitated.
“You must, David,” whispered Carey.
The Harvester made his way forward and was guided through a side door, and a second later calmly walked down the big stage to the front, and stood at ease looking over his audience, as if to gauge its size and the pitch to which he should raise his voice. His lean frame loomed every inch of his six feet, his broad shoulders were square, his clean shaven face alert and afire. He wore a spring suit of light gray of good quality and cut, and he was perfect as to details.
“This scarcely seems compatible with my subject,” he remarked casually. “I certainly appear very much in the foreground just at present, but perhaps that is quite as well. It may be time that I assert myself. I doubt if there is a man among you who has not handled my products more or less; you may enjoy learning where and how they are prepared, and understanding the manner in which my work merges with yours. I think perhaps the first thing is to paint you as good a word picture as I can of my geographical location.”
Then the Harvester named latitude and longitude and degrees of temperature. He described the lake, the marsh, the wooded hill, the swale, and open sunny fields. He spoke of water, soil, shade, and geographical conditions. “Here I was born,” he said, “on land owned by my father and grandfather before me, and previous to them, by the Indians. My male ancestors, so far as I can trace them, were men of the woods, hunters, trappers, herb gatherers. My mother was from the country, educated for a teacher. She had the most inexorable will power of any woman I ever have known. From my father I inherited my love for muck on my boots, resin in my nostrils, the long trail, the camp fire, forest sounds and silences in my soul. From my mother I learned to read good books, to study subjects that puzzled me, to tell the truth, to keep my soul and body clean, and to pursue with courage the thing to which I set my hand.
“There was not money enough to educate me as she would; together we learned to find it in the forest. In early days we sold ferns and wild flowers to city people, harvested the sap of the maples in spring, and the nut crop of the fall. Later, as we wanted more, we trapped for skins, and collected herbs for the drug stores. This opened to me a field I was peculiarly fitted to enter. I knew woodcraft instinctively, I had the location of every herb, root, bark, and seed that will endure my climate; I had the determination to stick to my job, the right books to assist me, and my mother’s invincible will power to uphold me where I wavered.
“As I look into your faces, men, I am struck with the astounding thought that some woman bore the cold sweat and pain of labour to give life to each of you. I hope few of you prolonged that agony as I did. It was in the heart of my mother to make me physically clean, and to that end she sent me daily into the lake, so long as it was not ice covered, and put me at exercises intended to bring full strength to every sinew and fibre of my body. It was in her heart to make me morally clean, so she took me to nature and drilled me in its forces and its methods of reproducing life according to the law. Her work was good to a point that all men will recognize. From there on, for a few years, she held me, not because I was man enough to stand, but because she was woman enough to support me. Without her no doubt I would have broken the oath I took; with her I won the victory and reached years of manhood and self-control as she would have had me. The struggle wore her out at half a lifetime, but as a tribute to her memory I cannot face a body of men having your opportunities without telling you that what was possible to her and to me is possible to all mothers and men. If she is above and hears me perhaps it will recompense some of her shortened years if she knows I am pleading with you, as men having the greatest influence of any living, to tell and to teach the young that a clean life is possible to them. The next time any of you are called upon to address a body of men tell them to learn for themselves and to teach their sons, and to hold them at the critical hour, even by sweat and blood, to a clean life; for in this way only can feeble-minded homes, almshouses, and the scarlet woman be abolished. In this way only can men arise to full physical and mental force, and become the fathers of a race to whom the struggle for clean manhood will not be the battle it is with us.
“By the distorted faces, by the misshapen bodies, by mark
s of degeneracy, recognizable to your practised eyes everywhere on the streets, by the agony of the mother who bore you, and later wept over you, I conjure you men to live up to your high and holy privilege, and tell all men that they can be clean, if they will. This in memory of the mother who shortened her days to make me a moral man. And if any among you is the craven to plead immorality as a safeguard to health, I ask, what about the health of the women you sacrifice to shield your precious bodies, and I offer my own as the best possible refutation of that cowardly lie. I never have been ill a moment in all my life, and strength never has failed me for work to which I set my hand.
“The rapidly decreasing supply of drugs and the adulterated importations early taught me that the day was coming when it would be an absolute necessity to raise our home supplies. So, while yet in my teens, I began collecting from the fields and woods for miles around such medicinal stuff as grew in my father’s fields, marsh, and woods, and planting more wherever I found anything growing naturally in its prime. I merely enlarged nature’s beds and preserved their natural condition. As the plants spread and the harvest increased, I built a dry-house on scientific principles, a large store-room, and later a laboratory in which I have been learning to prepare some of my crude material for the market, combining ideas of my own in remedies, and at last producing one your president just has indicated that I come to submit to you as a final resort in certain conditions.
“My operations now have spread to close six hundred acres of almost solid medicinal growth, including a little lake, around the shores of which flourish a quadruple setting of water-loving herbs.”
Occasionally he shifted his position or easily walked across the platform and faced his audience from a different direction. His voice was strong, deep, and rang clearly and earnestly. His audience sat on the front edge of their chairs, and listened to something new, with mouths half agape. A few times Carey turned from the speaker to face the audience. He agonized in his heart that it was a closed session, and that his wife was not there to hear, and that the Girl was missing it.
By the bent backs and flying fingers of the reporters at their table in front he could see that to-morrow the world would read the Harvester’s speech; and if it were true that the little mother had shortened her days to produce him, she had done earth a service for which many generations would call her blessed. For the doctor could look ahead, and he knew that this man would not escape. The call for him and his unimpeachable truth would come from everywhere, and his utterances would carry as far as newspapers and magazines were circulated. The good he would do would be past estimation.
The Harvester continued. He was describing the most delicate and difficult of herbs to secure. He was telling how they could be raised, prepared, kept, and compounded. He was discussing diseases that did not readily yield to treatment, pointing out what drugs were customarily employed and offering, if any of them had such cases, and would send to him, to forward samples of unadulterated stuff sufficient for a test comparison with what they were using. He was walking serenely and surely into the heart of every man before him.
Just at the point where it was the psychological time to close, he stopped and stood a long instant facing them, and then he asked softly, “Did any man among you ever see the woman to whom he had given a strong man’s first passion of love, slowly dying before him?”
One breathless instant he waited and then continued, “Gentlemen, I recently saw this in my own case. For days it was coming, so at night I shut myself in my laboratory, and from the very essence of the purest of my self-compounded drugs I distilled a stimulant into which I put a touch of heart remedy, a brace for weakening nerves, a vitalization of sluggish blood. As I worked, I thought in that thought which embodied the essence of prayer, and when my day and my hour came, and a man who has been the president of your honourable body, and is known to all of you, said it was death, I took this combination that I now present to you, and with the help of the Almighty and a woman above the price of rubies, I kept breath in the girl I love, and to-day she is at full tide of womanhood. As a thank offering, the formula is yours. Test it as you will. Use it if you find it good. Gentlemen, I thank you!”
Carey sank in his chair and watched the Harvester cross the stage. As he disappeared the tumult began, and it lasted until the president arose and brought him back to make another bow, and then they rioted until they wore themselves out. In an immaculate dress suit the Harvester sat that night on the right of the gray-haired president and responded to the toast, “The Harvester of the Woods.” Then the reporters carried him away to be photographed, and to show him the gay sights of New York.
In the train the next day, steadily speeding west, he said to Doctor Carey: “I feel as the old woman of Mother Goose who said, ‘Lawk-a-mercy on us, can this be really I?’”
“You just bet it is!” cried the doctor. “And you have cut out work for yourself in good shape.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this is a beginning. You will be called upon to speak again and again.”
“The point is, do you honestly think I helped any?”
“You did inestimable good. It only can help men to hear plain truth that is personal experience. As for that dope of yours, it will come closer raising the dead than anything I ever saw. Next case I see slipping, after I’ve done my best, I’m going to try it out for myself.”
“All right! ’Phone me and I’ll bring some fresh and help you.”
At Buffalo the doctor left the car and bought a paper. As he had expected the portrait and speech of the Harvester were featured. The reporters had been gracious. They had done all that was just to a great event, and allowed themselves some latitude. He immediately mailed the paper to the Girl, and at Cleveland bought another for himself. When he showed it to the Harvester, as he glanced at it he observed, “Do I appear like that?” Then he went on talking with a man he had met who interested him.
Chapter 21
The Coming of the Bluebird
The Harvester stopped at the mail box on his way home and among the mass of matter it contained was something from the Girl. It was a scrap as long as his least finger and three times as wide, and by the postmark it had lain four days in the box. On opening it, he found only her card with a line written across it, but the man went up the hill and into the cabin as if a cyclone were driving him, for he read, “Has your bluebird come?”
He threw his travelling bag on the floor, ran to the telephone, and called the station. “Take this message,” he said. “Mrs. David Langston, care of Alexander Herron, 5770 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. Found note after four days’ absence. Bluebird long past due. The fairies have told it that my fate hereafter lies in your hands.
“As always. David.”
The Harvester turned from the instrument and bent to embrace Belshazzar, leaping in ecstasy beside him.
“Understand that, Bel?” he asked. “I don’t know but it means something. Maybe it doesn’t—not a thing! And again, there is a chance—only the merest possibility—that it does. We’ll risk it, Bel, and to begin on I have nailed it as hard as I knew how. Next, we will clean the house—until it shines, and then we will fill the cupboard, and if anything does happen we won’t be caught napping. Yes, boy, we will take the chance! We can’t be any worse disappointed than we have been before and survived it. Come along!”
He picked up the bag and arranged its contents, carefully brushed and folded on his shelves and in his closet. Then he removed the travelling suit, donned the old brown clothes and went to the barn to see that his creatures had been cared for properly. Early the next morning he awoke and after feeding and breakfasting instead of going to harvest spice brush and alder he stretched a line and hung the bedding from room after room to air and sun. He swept, dusted, and washed windows, made beds, and lastly polished the floors throughout the cabin. He set everything in order, and as a finishing touch, filled vases, pitchers, and bowls with the bloom of red bud and silky wil
low catkins. He searched the south bank, but there was not a violet, even in the most exposed places. By night he was tired and a little of the keen edge of his ardour was dulled. The next day he worked scrubbing the porches, straightening the lawn and hedges, even sweeping the driveway to the bridge clear of wind-whirled leaves and straw. He scouted around the dry-house and laboratory, and spent several extra hours on the barn so that when evening came everything was in perfect order. Then he dressed, ate his supper and drove to the city.
He stopped at the mail box, but there was nothing from the Girl. The Harvester did not know whether he was sorry or glad. A letter might have said the same thing. Nothing meant a delightful possibility, and between the two he preferred the latter. He whistled and sang as he drove to Onabasha, and Belshazzar looked at him with mystified eyes, for this was not the master he had known of late. He did not recognize the dress or the manner, but his dog heart was sympathetic to the man’s every mood, and he remembered times when a drive down the levee always had been like this, for to-night the Harvester’s tongue was loosened and he talked in the old way.
“Just four words, Bel,” he said. “And, as I remarked before, they may mean the most wonderful thing on earth, and possibly nothing at all. But it is in the heart of man to hope, Bel, and so we are going to live royally for a week or two, just on hope, old boy. If anything should happen, we are ready, rooms shining, beds fresh, fireplaces filled and waiting a match, ice chest cool, and when we get back it will be stored. Also a secret, Bel; we are going to a florist and a fruit store. While we are at it, we will do the thing right; but we will stay away from Doc, until we are sure of something. He means well, but we don’t like to be pitied, do we, Bel? Our friends don’t manage their eyes and voices very well these days. Never mind! Our time will come yet. The bluebird will not fail us, but never before has it been so late.”
The Best of Gene Stratton-Porter Page 100