Wayside Courtships

by Garland, Hamlin

  There came shouts, trampling, laughter, and the door burst open and they streamed in—Norwegians, French, half-breeds, dark-skinned fellows all of them save the Norwegians. They came like a flood, but they fell silent at sight of a woman, so beautiful and strange to them.

  All words ceased. They sank into place beside the table with the thump of falling sandbags. They were all in their shirt sleeves, but they were cleanly washed, and the most of them had combed their hair; but they seemed very wild and hairy to Mrs. Field. She looked at her husband and Ridgeley with a grateful pleasure; it was so restful to have them on each side of her.

  The men ate like hungry dogs. They gorged in silence. Nothing was heard but the clank of knives on tin plates, the drop of heavy plates of food, and the occasional muttered words of some one asking for the bread and the gravy.

  As they ate they furtively looked with great curiosity and admiration up at the dainty woman. Their eyes were bright and large, and gleamed out of the obscure brown of their dimly lighted faces with savage intensity—so it seemed to Mrs. Field, and she dropped her eyes upon her plate.

  Her husband and Ridgeley entered into conversation with those sitting near. Ridgeley seemed on good terms with them all, and ventured a joke or word, at which they laughed with terrific energy, and fell as suddenly silent again.

  As Mrs. Field looked up the second time she saw the dark, strange face of Williams a few places down, and opposite her. His eyes were fixed on her husband's hands with a singular intensity. Her eyes followed his, and the beauty of her husband's hands came to her again with new force. They were perfectly shaped, supple, warm-colored, and strong. Their color and deftness stood out in vivid contrast to the heavy, brown, cracked, and calloused pawlike hands of the men.

  Why should Williams study her husband's hands? If he had looked at her she would not have been surprised. The other men she could read. They expressed either frank, simple admiration or furtive desire. But this man looked at her husband, and his eyes fell often upon his own hands, which trembled with fatigue. He handled his knife clumsily, and yet she could see he, too, had a fine hand—a slender, powerful hand like that people call an artist hand—a craftsmanlike hand.

  He saw her looking at him, and he flashed one enigmatical glance into her eyes, and rose to go out.

  "How you getting on, Williams?" Ridgeley asked.

  Williams resented his question. "Oh, I'm all right," he said sullenly.

  The meal was all over in an incredibly short time. One by one, two by two, they rose heavily and lumbered out with one last wistful look at Mrs. Field. She will never know how seraphic she seemed sitting there amid those rough surroundings—the dim red light of the kerosene lamp falling across her clear pallor, out of which her dark eyes shone with liquid softness, made deeper and darker by her half-sorrowful tenderness for these homeless fellows.

  An hour later, as they were standing at the door, just ready to take to their sleigh, they heard the scraping of a fiddle.

  "Oh, some one is going to play!" Mrs. Field cried, with visions of the rollicking good times she had heard so much about and of which she had seen nothing so far. "Can't I look in?"

  Ridgeley was dubious. "I'll go and see," he said, and entered the door. "Boys, Mrs. Field wants to look in a minute. Go on with your fiddling, Sam—only I wanted to see that you weren't sitting around in dishabill."

  This seemed a good joke, and they all howled and haw-hawed gleefully.

  "So go right ahead with your evening prayers. All but—you understand!"

  "All right, captain," said Sam, the man with the fiddle.

  When Mrs. Field looked in, two men were furiously grinding axes; several were sewing on ragged garments; all were smoking; some were dressing chapped or bruised fingers. The atmosphere was horrible. The socks and shirts were steaming above the huge stove; the smoke and stench for a moment were sickening, but Ridgeley pushed them just inside the door.

  "It's better out of the draught."

  Sam jigged away on the violin. The men kept time with the cranks of the grindstone, and all hands looked up with their best smile at Mrs. Field. Most of them shrank a little from her look like shy animals.

  Ridgeley threw open the window. "In the old days," he explained to Mrs. Field, "we used a fireplace, and that kept the air better."

  As her sense of smell became deadened the air seemed a little more tolerable to Mrs. Field.

  "Oh, we must change all this," she said. "It is horrible."

  "Play us a tune," said Sam, extending the violin to Field. He did not think Field could play. It was merely a shot in the dark on his part.

  Field took it and looked at it and sounded it. On every side the men turned face in eager expectancy.

  "He can play, that feller."

  "I'll bet he can. He handles her as if he knew her."

  "You bet your life.—Tune up, Cap."

  Williams came from the obscurity somewhere, and looked over the shoulders of the men.

  "Down in front," somebody called, and the men took seats on the benches, leaving Field standing with the violin in hand. He smiled around upon them in a frank, pleased way, quite ready to show his skill. He played "Annie Laurie," and a storm of applause broke out.

  "Hoo-ray! Bully for you!"

  "Sam, you're out of it."

  "Sam, your name is Mud."

  "Give us another, Cap."

  "It ain't the same fiddle."

  He played again some simple tune, and he played it with the touch which showed the skilled amateur. As he played, Mrs. Field noticed a grave restlessness on Williams's part. He moved about uneasily. He gnawed at his finger nails. His eyes glowed with a singular fire. His hands drummed and fingered. At last he approached and said roughly:

  "Let me take that fiddle a minute."

  "Oh, cheese it, Williams!" the men cried. "Let the other man play."

  "What do you want to do with the fiddle—think it's a music box?" asked Sam, its owner.

  "Go to hell!" said Williams. As Field gave the violin over to him his hands seemed to tremble with eagerness.

  He raised his bow and struck into an imposing brilliant strain, and the men fell back in astonishment.

  "Well, I'll be damned!" gasped the owner of the violin.

  "Keep quiet, Sam."

  Mrs. Field looked at her husband. "Why, Ed, he is playing Sarasate!"

  "That's what he is," he returned slangily, too much astonished to do more than gaze. Williams played on.

  There was a faint defect in the high notes, as if his fingers did not touch the strings properly, but his bow action showed cultivation and breadth of feeling. As he struck into one of those difficult octave-leaping movements his face became savage. On the E string a squeal broke forth; he flung the violin into Sam's lap with a ferocious curse, and then extending his hands, hard, crooked to fit the axe-helve, calloused and chapped, he said to Field:

  "Look at my cursed hands. Lovely things to play with, ain't they?"

  His voice trembled with passion. He turned and went outside. As he passed Mrs. Field his head was bowed and he was uttering a groaning cry like one suffering acute physical agony.

  She went out quickly, and Field and Ridgeley followed. They were all moved—but the men made little of it, seeing how deeply touched she was.

  "That's what drink does for a man," Ridgeley said, as they watched Williams disappear down the swampers' trail.

  "That man has been a violinist," said Field. "What's he doing up here?"

  "Came up to get away from himself," Ridgeley replied.

  "I'm afraid he's failed," said Field, as he put his arm about his wife and led her to the sleigh.

  The ride home was made mainly in silence. "Oh, the splendid silence!" the woman kept saying in her heart. "Oh, the splendid moonlight, the marvelous radiance!" Everywhere a heavenly serenity—not a footstep, not a bell, not a cry, not a cracking tree—nothing but vivid light, white snow dappled and lined with shadows, and trees etched against a star
lit sky. Splendor of light and sheen and shadow. Wide wastes of snow so white the stumps stood like columns of charcoal. A night of Nature's making when she is tired of noise and blare of color.

  And in the midst of it stood the camps and the reek of obscenity, foul odors, and tobacco smoke, to which a tortured soul must return.

  V

  The following Saturday afternoon, as Ridgeley and Field entered the office, Williams rose to meet them. He looked different; finer some way, Field imagined. At any rate, he was perfectly sober. He was freshly shaven, and though his clothes were rough, he looked like a man of education. His manner was cold and distant.

  "I'd like to be paid off, Mr. Ridgeley," he said. "I guess what's left of my pay will take me out of this."

  "Where do you propose to go?" Ridgeley said kindly.

  Williams must have perceived his kindliness, for he answered: "I'm going home to my wife. I am going to try it once more."

  After Williams went out Field said, "I wonder if he'll do it?"

  "Oh, I shouldn't wonder. I've seen men brace up just as mysteriously as that and stay right by their resolutions. I thought he didn't look like a common lumber Jack when he came in."

  "Oh, how happy his wife will be!" Mrs. Field cried when she heard of Williams's resolution. "She'll save him yet."

  "Well, I don't know; depends on what kind of a woman she is."

  * * *

  THE OWNER OF THE MILL FARM.

  Beyond his necessity, a tired man is not apt to be polite. This Mrs. Miner had generalized from long experience with her husband. She knew at a distance, by the way he wore his hat when he came in out of the field, whether he was in a peculiarly savage mood, or only in his usual state of sullen indifference.

  As he came in out of the barn on this spring day, he turned to look up at the roof with a curse. Something had angered him. He did not stop to comb his hair after washing at the pump, but came into the neat kitchen and surlily took a seat at the table.

  Mrs. Miner, a slender little woman, quite ladylike in appearance, had the dinner all placed in steaming abundance upon the table, and the children, sitting side by side, watched their father in silence. There was an air of foreboding, of apprehension, over them all, as if they feared some brutal outbreak on his part.

  He placed his elbows on the table. His sleeves were rolled up, displaying his red and much sunburned arms. He wore no coat, and his face was sullen, and held, besides, a certain vicious quality, like that of a bad-tempered dog.

  He had not spoken to his wife directly for many weeks. For years it had been his almost constant habit to address her through the children, by calling her "she" or "your mother." He had done this so long that even the little ones were startled when he said, looking straight at her:

  "Say, what are you going to do about that roof?"

  Mrs. Miner turned her large gray eyes upon him in sudden confusion. "Excuse me, Tom, I didn't——"

  "I said 'What you goin' t' do with that roof?'" he repeated brutally.

  "What roof?" she asked timidly.

  "What roof?" he repeated after her. "Why, the barn, of course! It's leakin' and rottin' my oats. It's none o' my business," he went on, his voice containing an undercurrent of vicious insult. "Only I thought you'd like to know it's worse than ever. You can do as you like about it," he said again, and there was a peculiar tone in his voice, as if, by using that tone, he touched her upon naked nerves somewhere. "I guess I can cover the oats up."

  A stranger would not have known what it all meant, and yet there was something in what he said that made his wife turn white. But she answered quietly:

  "I'll send word to the carpenter this forenoon. I'm sorry," she went on, the tears coming to her eyes. She turned away and looked out of the window, while he ate on indifferently. At last she turned with a sudden impulse: "O Tom, why can't we be friends again? For the children's sake, you ought to——"

  "Oh, shut up!" he snarled. "Good God! Can't you let a thing rest? Suits me well enough. I ain't complainin'. So, just shut up."

  He rose with a slam and went out. The two children sat with hushed breath. They knew him too well to cry out.

  Mrs. Miner sat for a long time at the table without moving. At last she rose and went sighfully at work. "Morty, I want you to run down to Mr. Wilber's and ask him to come up and see me about some work." She stood at the window and watched the boy as he stepped lightly down the road. "How much he looks like his father, in spite of his sunny temper!" she thought, and it was not altogether a pleasant thing to think of, though she did not allow such a thought to take definite shape.

  The young carpenter whom Wilber sent to fill Mrs. Miner's order walked with the gay feet of youth as he passed out of the little town toward the river. When he came to the bridge, he paused and studied the scene with slow, delighted eyes. The water came down over its dam with a leap of buoyant joy, as if leaping to freedom. Over the dam it lay in a quiet pool, mirroring every bud and twig. Below, it curved away between low banks, with bushes growing to the water's edge, where the pickerel lay.

  But the young man seemed to be saddened by the view of the mill, which had burned some years before. It seemed like the charred body of a living thing, this heap of blackened and twisted shafts and pulleys, lying half buried in tangles of weeds.

  It appealed so strongly to young Morris that he uttered an unconscious sigh as he walked on across the bridge and clambered the shelving road, which was cut out of the yellow sandstone of the hillside.

  The road wound up the sandy hillside and came at length to a beautiful broad terrace of farm land that stretched back to the higher bluffs. The house toward which the young fellow turned was painted white, and had the dark-green blinds which transplanted New-Englanders carry with them wherever they go.

  Soldierly Lombardy poplar trees stood in the yard, and beds of flowers lined the walk. Mrs. Miner was at work in the beds when he came up.

  "Good day," he said cordially. "Glorious spring weather, isn't it?" He smiled pleasantly. "Is this Mrs. Miner?"

  "Yes, sir." She looked at him wonderingly.

  "I'm one of Wilber's men," he explained. "He couldn't get away, so he sent me up to see what needed doing."

  "Oh," she said, with a relieved tone. "Very well; will you go look at it?"

  They walked, side by side, out toward the barn, which had the look of great age in its unpainted decay. It was gray as granite and worn fuzzy with sleet and snow. The young fellow looked around at the grass, the dandelions, the vague and beautiful shadows flung down upon the turf by the scant foliage of the willows and apple trees, and took off his hat, as if in the presence of something holy. "What a lovely place!" he said—"all but the mill down there; it seems too bad it burnt up. I hate to see a ruin, most of all, one of a mill." She looked at him in surprise, perceiving that he was not at all an ordinary carpenter. He had a thoughtful face, and the workman's dress he wore could not entirely conceal a certain delicacy of limb. His voice had a touch of cultivation in it.

  "The work I want done is on the barn," she said at length. "Do you think it needs reshingling?"

  He looked up at it critically, his head still bare. She was studying him carefully now, and admired his handsome profile. There was something fine and powerful in the poise of his head.

  "You haven't been working for Mr. Wilber long," she said.

  He turned toward her with a smile of gratification, as if he knew she had detected something out of the ordinary in him.

  "No, I'm just out of Beloit," he said, with ready confidence. "You see that I'm one of these fellows who have to work my passage. I put in my vacations at my trade." He looked up at the roof again, as if checking himself. "Yes, I should think from here that it would have to be reshingled."

  She sighed resignedly, and he knew she was poor. "Well, I suppose you had better do it."

  She thought of him pleasantly, as he walked off down the road after the lumber and tools that were necessary. And, in his turn, he wondered whe
ther she were a widow or not. It promised to be a pleasant job. She was quite handsome, in a serious way, he decided—very womanly and dignified. Perhaps this was his romance, he thought, with the ready imagination upon this point of a youth of twenty-one.

  He returned soon with a German teamster, who helped him unload his lumber and erect his stagings. When noon came he was working away on the roof, tearing the old shingles off with a spade.

  He was a little uncertain about his dinner. It was the custom to board carpenters when they were working on a farm, but this farm was so near town, possibly Mrs. Miner would not think it necessary. He decided, however, to wait till one o'clock, to be sure. At half past twelve, a man came in out of the field with a team—a short man, with curly hair, curly chin beard, and mustache. He walked with a little swagger, and his legs were slightly bowed. Morris called him "a little feller," and catalogued him by the slant on his hat.

  "Say," called Morris suddenly, "won't you come up here and help me raise my staging?"

  The man looked up with a muttered curse of surprise. "Who the hell y' take me for? Hired man?" he asked, and then, after a moment, continued, in a tone which was an insult: "You don't want to rip off the whole broad side of that roof. Ain't y' got any sense? Come a rain, it'll raise hell with my hay."

  "It ain't going to rain," Morris replied. He wanted to give him a sharp reply, but concluded not to do so. This was evidently the husband. His romance was very short.

  "Tom, won't you call the man in?" asked Mrs. Miner, as her husband came up to the kitchen door.

  "No, call 'im yourself. You've got a gullet."

  Mrs. Miner's face clouded a little, but she composed herself. "Morty, run out and tell the carpenter to come to dinner."

  "Boss is in a temper," Morris thought, as he listened to Miner's reply. He came up to the well, where Morty brought him a clean towel, and waited to show him into the kitchen.

  Miner was just sitting down to the table when Morris entered. His sleeves were rolled up. He had his old white hat on his head. He lounged upon one elbow on the table. His whole bearing was swinish.