Main-Travelled Roads

by Garland, Hamlin

  "I didn't know how old the baby was, so she'll have to grow to some of these things."

  But the pleasure was all gone for him and for the rest. His heart swelled almost to a feeling of pain as he looked at his mother. There she sat with the presents in her lap. The shining silk came too late for her. It threw into appalling relief her age, her poverty, her work-weary frame. "My God!" he almost cried aloud, "how little it would have taken to lighten her life!"

  Upon this moment, when it seemed as if he could endure no more, came the smooth voice of William McTurg:

  "Hello, folkses!"

  "Hello, Uncle Bill! Come in."

  "That's what we came for," laughed a woman's voice.

  "Is that you, Rose?" asked Laura.

  "It's me-Rose," replied the laughing girl as she bounced into the room and greeted everybody in a breathless sort of way.

  "You don't mean little Rosy?"

  "Big Rosy now," said William.

  Howard looked at the handsome girl and smiled, saying in a nasal sort of tone, "Wal, wal! Rosy, how you've growed since I saw yeh!"

  "Oh, look at all this purple and fine linen! Am I left out?"

  Rose was a large girl of twenty-five or thereabouts, and was called an old maid. She radiated good nature from every line of her buxom self. Her black eyes were full of drollery, and she was on the best of terms with Howard at once. She had been a teacher, but that did not prevent her from assuming a peculiar directness of speech. Of course they talked about old friends.

  "Where's Rachel?" Howard inquired. Her smile faded away.

  "Shellie married Orrin McIlvaine. They're way out in Dakota.

  Shellie's havin' a hard row of stumps."

  There was a little silence.

  "And Tommy?"

  "Gone West. Most all the boys have gone West. That's the reason there's so many old maids."

  "You don't mean to say-"

  "I don't need to say-I'm an old maid. Lots of the girls are."

  "It don't pay to marry these days."

  "Are you married?"

  "Not yet." His eyes lighted up again in a humorous way.

  "Not yet! That's good! That's the way old maids all talk."

  "You don't mean to tell me that no young fellow comes prowling around-"

  "Oh, a young Dutchrnan or Norwegian once in a while. Nobody that counts. Fact is, we're getting like Boston-four women to one man; and when you consider that we're getting more particular each year, the outlook is-well, it's dreadful!"

  "It certainly is."

  "Marriage is a failure these days for most of us. We can't live on the farm, and can't get a living in the city, and there we are." She laid her hand on his arm. "I declare, Howard, you're the same boy you used to be. I ain't a bit afraid of you, for all your success."

  "And you're the same girl? No, I can't say that. It seems to me you've grown more than I have-I don't mean physically, I mean mentally," he explained as he saw her smile in the defensive way a fleshy girl has, alert to ward off a joke.

  They were in the midst of talk, Howard telling one of his funny stories, when a wagon clattered up to the door and merry voices called loudly:

  "Whoa, there, Sampson!"

  "Hullo, the house!"

  Rose looked at her father with a smile in her black eyes exactly like his. They went to the door.

  "Hullo! What's wanted?"

  "Grant McLane live here?"

  "Yup. Right here."

  A moment later there came a laughing, chatting squad of women to the door. Mrs. McLane and Laura stared at each other in amazement. Grant went outdoors.

  Rose stood at the door as if she were hostess.

  "Come in, Nettie. Glad to see yeh-glad to see yeh! Mrs. McIlvaine,

  come right in! Take a seat. Make yerself to home, do! And Mrs.

  Peavey! Wal, I never! This must be a surprise party. Well, I swan!

  How many more o' ye air they?"

  All was confusion, merriment, handshakings as Rose introduced them in her roguish way.

  "Folks, this is Mr. Howard McLane of New York. He's an actor, but it hain't spoiled him a bit as I can see. How, this is Nettie McIlvaine-Wilson that was."

  Howard shook hands with Nettie, a tall, plain girl with prominent teeth.

  "This is Ma McIlvaine."

  "She looks just the same," said. Howard, shaking her hand and feeling how hard and work-worn it was.

  And so amid bustle, chatter, and invitations "to lay off y'r things an' stay awhile," the women got disposed about the room at last Those that had rocking chairs rocked vigorously to and fro to hide their embarrassment. They all talked in loud voices.

  Howard felt nervous under this furtive scrutiny. He wished his clothes didn't look so confoundedly dressy. Why didn't he have sense enough to go and buy a fifteen-dollar suit of diagonals for everyday wear.

  Rose was the life of the party. Her tongue rattled on in the most delightful way.

  "It's all Rose an' Bill's doin's," Mrs. McIlvaine explained. "They told us to come over an' pick up anybody we see on the road. So we did."

  Howard winced a little at her familiarity of tone. He couldn't help it for the life of him.

  "Well, I wanted to come tonight because I'm going away next week, and I wanted to see how he'd act at a surprise party again," Rose explained.

  "Married, I s'pose," said Mrs. McIlvaine abruptly.

  "No, not yet."

  "Good land! Why, y' Inns' be thirty-five, How. Must a dis'p'inted y'r mam not to have a young 'un to call 'er granny."

  The men came clumping in, talking about haying and horses. Some of the older ones Howard knew and greeted, but the younger ones were mainly too much changed. They were all very ill at ease. Most of them were in compromise dress-something lying between working "rig" and Sunday dress. Most of them had on clean shirts and paper collars, and wore their Sunday coats (thick woolen garments) over rough trousers. All of them crossed their legs at once, and most of them sought the wall and leaned back perilously~upon the hind legs of their chairs, eyeing Howard slowly.

  For the first few minutes the presents were the subjects of conversation. The women especially spent a good deal of talk upon them.

  Howard found himself forced to taking the initiative, so he inquired about the crops and about the farms.

  "I see you don't plow the hills as we used to. And reap'. What a job it ust to be. It makes the hills more beautiful to have them covered with smooth grass and cattle."

  There was only dead silence to this touching upon the idea of beauty.

  "I s'pose it pays reasonably."

  "Not enough to kill," said one of the younger men. "You c'n see that by the houses we live in-that is, most of us. A few that came in early an' got land cheap, like McIlvaine, here-he got a lift that the rest of us can't get."

  "I'm a free trader, myself," said one young fellow, blushing and looking away as Howard turned and said cheerily:

  "So'm I."

  The rest semed to feel that this was a tabooed subject—a subject to be talked out of doors, where one could prance about and yell and do justice to it.

  Grant sat silently in the kitchen doorway, not saying a word, not looking at his. brother.

  "Well, I don't never use hot vinegar for mine," Mrs. McIlvaine was heard to say. "I jest use hot water, an' I rinse 'em out good, and set 'em bottom-side up in the sun. I do' know but what hot vinegar would be more cleansin'."

  Rose had the younger folks in a giggle with a droll telling of a joke on herself.

  "How'd y' stop 'em from laffin'?"

  "I let 'em laugh. Oh, my school is a disgrace-so one director says.

  But I like to see children laugh. It broadens their cheeks."

  "Yes, that's all handwork." Laura was showing the baby's Sunday clothes.

  "Goodness Peter! How do you find time to do so much?"

  "I take time."

  Howard, being the lion of the evening, tried his best to be agreeable. He kept near his mother,
because it afforded her so much pride and satisfaction, and because he was obliged to keep away from Grant, who had begun to talk to the men. Howard tall~ed mainly about their affairs, but still was forced more and more into talking of life in the city. As he told of the theater and the concerts, a sudden change fell upon them; they grew sober, and he felt deep down in the hearts of these people a melancholy which was expressed only elusively with little tones or sighs. Their gaiety was fitful.

  They were hungry for the world, for art-these young people. Discontented and yet hardly daring to acknowledge it; indeed, few of them could have made definite statement of their dissatisfaction. The older people felt it less. They practically said, with a sigh of pathetic resignation:

  "Well, I don't expect ever to see these things now.."

  A casual observer would have said, "What a pleasant bucolic-this little surprise party of welcome!" But Howard with his native ear and eye had no such pleasing illusion. He knew too well these suggestions of despair and bitterness. He knew that, like the smile of the slave, this cheerfulness was self-defense; deep down was another self.

  Seeing Grant talking with a group of men over by the kitchen door, he crossed over slowly and stood listening. Wesley Cosgrove-a tall, rawboned young fellow with a grave, almost tragic face-was saying:

  "Of course I ain't. Who is? A man that's satisfied to live as we do is a fool."

  "The worst of it is," said Grant without seeing Howard, a man can't get out of it during his lifetime, and l don't know that he'll have any chance in the next-the speculator'll be there ahead of us."

  The rest laughed, but Grant went on grily:

  "Ten years ago Wes, here, could have got land in Dakota pretty easy, but now it's about all a feller's life's worth to try it. I tell you things seem shuttin' down on us fellers."

  "Plenty o' land to rent?" suggested someone.

  "Yes, in terms that skin a man alive. More than that, farmin' ain't so free a life as it used to be. This cattle-raisin' and butter-makin' makes a nigger of a man. Binds him right down to the grindstone, and he gets nothin' out of it-that's what rubs it in. He simply wallers around in the manure for somebody else. I'd like to know what a man's life is worth who lives as we do? How much higher is it than the lives the niggers used to live?"

  These brutally bald words made Howard thrill witb emotion like some great tragic poem. A silence fell on the group.

  "That's the God's truth, Grant," said young Cosgrove after a pause.

  "A man like me is helpless," Grant was saying. "Just like a fly in a pan of molasses. There ain't any escape for him. The more he tears around, the more liable he is to rip his legs off."

  "What can he do?"

  The men listened in silence.

  "Oh, come, don't talk politics all night!" cried Rose, breaking in.

  "Come, let's have a dance. Where's that fiddle?"

  "Fiddle!" cried Howard, glad of a chance to laugh. "Well, now!

  Bring out that fiddle. Is it William's?"

  "Yes, Pap's old fiddle."

  "Oh, gosh! he don't want to hear me play," pr~ tested William.

  "He's heard s' many fiddlers."

  "Fiddlers! I've heard a thousand violinists, but not fiddlers. Come, give us 'Honest John.'"

  William took the fiddle in his work-calloused and crooked hands and began tuning it. The group at the kitchen door turned to listen, their faces lighting up a little. Rose tried to get a set on the floor.

  "Oh, good land!" said some. "We're all tuckered out. What makes you so anxious?"

  "She wants a chance to dance with the New Yorker."

  "That's it exactly," Rose admitted.

  "Wal, if you'd churned and mopped and cooked for hayin' hands as

  I have today, you wouldn't be so full o' nonsense."

  "Oh, bother! Life's short. Come quick, get Bettie out. Come, Wes, never mind your hobbyhorse."

  By incredible exertion she got a set on the floor, and William got the fiddle in tune. Howard looked across at Wesley, and thought the change in him splendidly dramatic. His face had lighted up into a kind of deprecating, boyish smile. Rose could do anything with him.

  William played some of the old tunes that had a thou-sand associated memories in Howard's brain, memories of harvest moons, of melon feasts, and of clear, cold winter nights. As he danced, his eyes filled with a tender, luminous light. He came closer to them all than he had been able to do before. Grant had gone out into the kitchen.

  After two or three sets had been danced, the company took seats and could not be stirred again. So Laura and Rose disappeared for a few moments, and returning, served strawberries and cream, which she "just happened to have in the house."

  And then William played again. His fingers, now grown more supple, brought out clearer, firmer tones. As he played, silence fell on these people. The magic of music sobered every face; the women looked older and more careworn, the men slouched sullenly in their chairs or leaned back against the wall.

  It seemed to Howard as if the spirit of tragedy had entered this house. Music had always been William's unconscious expression of his unsatisfied desires. He was never melancholy except when he played. Then his eyes grew somber, his drooping face full of shadows.

  He played on slowly, softly, wailing Scotch tunes and mournful Irish songs. He seemed to find in the songs of these people, and especially in a wild, sweet, low-keyed Negro song, some expression for his indefinable inner melancholy.

  He played on, forgetful of everybody, his long beard sweeping the violin, his toilworn hands marvelously obedient to his will.

  At last he stopped, looked up with a faint, deprecating smile, and said with a sigh:

  "Well, folkses, time to go home."

  The going was quiet. Not much laughing. Howard stood at the door and said good night to them all, his heart very tender.

  "Come and see us," they said.

  "I will," he replied cordially. "I'll try and get around to see everybody, and talk over old times, before I go back."

  After the wagons had driven out of the yard, Howard turned and put his arm about his mother's neck.

  "Tired?"

  "A little."

  "Well, now, good night. I'm going for a little stroll." His brain was too active to sleep. He kissed his mother good night and went out into the road, his hat in his hand, the cool, moist wind on his hair.

  It was very dark, the stars being partly hidden by a thin vapor. On each side the hills rose, every line familiar as the face of an old friend. A whippoorwill called occasionally from the hillside, and the spasmodic jangle of a bell now and then told of some cow's battle with the mosquitoes.

  As he walked, he pondered upon the tragedy he had rediscovered in these people's lives. Out here under the inexorable spaces of the sky, a deep distaste of his own life took possession of him. He felt like giving it all up. He thought of the infinite tragedy of these lives which the world loves to call "peaceful and pastoral." HIS mind went out in the aim to help them. What could he do to make life better worth living? Nothing. They must live and die practically as he saw them tonight.

  And yet he knew this was a mood, and that in a few hours the love and the habit of life would come back upon him and upon them; that he would go back to the city in a few days; that these people would live on and make the best of it.

  "I'll make the best of it," he said at last, and his thought came back to his mother and Grant.

  IV

  The next day was a rainy day; not a shower, but a steady rain-an unusual thing in midsummer in the West. A cold, dismal day in the fireless, colorless farmhouses. It came to Howard in that peculiar reaction which surely comes during a visit of this character, when thought is a weariness, when the visitor longs for his own familiar walls and pictures and books, and longs to meet his friends, feeling at the same time the tragedy of life which makes friends nearer and more congenial than blood relations.

  Howard ate his breakfast alone, save Baby and Laura, its mother, going ab
out the room. Baby and mother alike insisted on feeding him to death. Already dyspeptic pangs were setting in.

  "Now ain't there something more I can-"

  "Good heavens! No!" he cried in dismay. "I'm likely to die of dyspepsia now. This honey and milk, and these delicious hot biscuits-"

  "I'm afraid it ain't much like the breakfasts you have in the city."

  "Well, no, it ain't," he confessed. "But this is the kind a man needs when he lives in the open air."

  She sat down opposite him, with her elbows on the table, her chin in her palm, her eyes full of shadows.

  "I'd like to go to a city once. I never saw a town bigger'n Lumberville. I've never seen a play, but I've read of 'em in the magazines. It must be wonderful; they say they have wharves and real ships coming up to the wharf, and people getting off and on. How do they do it?"

  "Oh, that's too long a story to tell. It's a lot of machinery and paint and canvas. If I told you how it was done, you wouldn't enjoy it so well when you come on and see it."

  "Do you ever expect to see me in New York?"

  "Why, yes. Why not? I expect Grant to come On and bring you all some day, especially Tonikins here. Tonikins, you hear, sir? I expect you to come on you' for birfday, sure." He tried thus to stop the woman's gloomy confidence.

  'I hate farm life," she went on with a bitter inflection. "It's nothing but fret, fret and work the whole time, never going any place, never seeing anybody but a lot of neighbors just as big fools as you are. I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I'm sick of it all."

  Howard was silent. What could he say to such an indictment? The ceiling swarmed with flies which the cold rain had driven to seek the warmth of the kitchen. The gray rain was falling with a dreary sound outside, and down the kitchen stovepipe an occasional drop fell on the stove with a hissing, angry sound.

  The young wife went on with a deeper note:

  "I lived in Lumberville two years, going to school, and I know a little something of what city life is. If I was a man, I bet I wouldn't wear my life out on a farm, as Grant does. I'd get away and I'd do something. I wouldn't care what, but I'd get away."