by Willa Cather
Presently Claude came up the bank with two shining, dripping pails. “Now may I sit down with you for a few minutes?”
Moving to make room for him beside her, Enid noticed that his thin face was heavily beaded with perspiration. His pocket handkerchief was wet and sandy, so she gave him her own, with a proprietary air. “Why, Claude, you look quite tired! Have you been over-doing? Where were you before you came here?”
“I was out in the country with your father, looking at his alfalfa.”
“And he walked you all over the field in the hot sun, I suppose?”
Claude laughed. “He did.”
“Well, I’ll scold him tonight. You stay here and rest. I am going to drive Gladys home.”
Gladys protested, but at last consented that they should both drive her home in Claude’s car. They lingered awhile, however, listening to the soft, amiable bubbling of the spring; a wise, unobtrusive voice, murmuring night and day, continually telling the truth to people who could not understand it.
When they went back to the house Enid stopped long enough to cut a bunch of heliotrope for Mrs. Farmer,—though with the sinking of the sun its rich perfume had already vanished. They left Gladys and her flowers and cresses at the gate of the white cottage, now half hidden by gaudy trumpet vines.
Claude turned his car and went back along the dim, twilight road with Enid. “I usually like to see Gladys, but when I found her with you this afternoon, I was terribly disappointed for a minute. I’d just been talking with your father, and I wanted to come straight to you. Do you think you could marry me, Enid?”
“I don’t believe it would be for the best, Claude.” She spoke sadly.
He took her passive hand. “Why not?”
“My mind is full of other plans. Marriage is for most girls, but not for all.”
Enid had taken off her hat. In the low evening light Claude studied her pale face under her brown hair. There was something graceful and charming about the way she held her head, something that suggested both submissiveness and great firmness. “I’ve had those far-away dreams, too, Enid; but now my thoughts don’t get any further than you. If you could care ever so little for me to start on, I’d be willing to risk the rest.” She sighed. “You know I care for you. I’ve never made any secret of it. But we’re happy as we are, aren’t we?”
“No, I’m not. I’ve got to have some life of my own, or I’ll go to pieces. If you won’t have me, I’ll try South America,—and I won’t come back until I am an old man and you are an old woman.”
Enid looked at him, and they both smiled.
The mill house was black except for a light in one upstairs window. Claude sprang out of his car and lifted Enid gently to the ground. She let him kiss her soft cool mouth, and her long lashes. In the pale, dusty dusk, lit only by a few white stars, and with the chill of the creek already in the air, she seemed to Claude like a shivering little ghost come up from the rushes where the old mill-dam used to be. A terrible melancholy clutched at the boy’s heart. He hadn’t thought it would be like this. He drove home feeling weak and broken. Was there nothing in the world outside to answer to his own feelings, and was every turn to be fresh disappointment? Why was life so mysteriously hard? This country itself was sad, he thought, looking about him,-and you could no more change that than you could change the story in an unhappy human face. He wished to God he were sick again; the world was too rough a place to get about in.
There was one person in the world who felt sorry for Claude that night. Gladys Farmer sat at her bedroom window for a long while, watching the stars and thinking about what she had seen plainly enough that afternoon. She had liked Enid ever since they were little girls,—and knew all there was to know about her. Claude would become one of those dead people that moved about the streets of Frankfort; everything that was Claude would perish, and the shell of him would come and go and eat and sleep for fifty years. Gladys had taught the children of many such dead men. She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of strong convictions and confused figures. She believed that all things which might make the world beautiful—love and kindness, leisure and art—were shut up in prison, and that successful men like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys. The generous ones, who would let these things out to make people happy, were somehow weak, and could not break the bars. Even her own little life was squeezed into an unnatural shape by the domination of people like Bayliss. She had not dared, for instance, to go to Omaha that spring for the three performances of the Chicago Opera Company. Such an extravagance would have aroused a corrective spirit in all her friends, and in the schoolboard as well; they would probably have decided not to give her the little increase in salary she counted upon having next year.
There were people, even in Frankfort, who had imagination and generous impulses, but they were all, she had to admit, inefficient—failures. There was Miss Livingstone, the fiery, emotional old maid who couldn’t tell the truth; old Mr. Smith, a lawyer without clients, who read Shakespeare and Dryden all day long in his dusty office; Bobbie Jones, the effeminate drug clerk, who wrote free verse and “movie” scenarios, and tended the sodawater fountain.
Claude was her one hope. Ever since they graduated from High School, all through the four years she had been teaching, she had waited to see him emerge and prove himself. She wanted him to be more successful than Bayliss and still be Claude. She would have made any sacrifice to help him on. If a strong boy like Claude, so well endowed and so fearless, must fail, simply because he had that finer strain in his nature,—then life was not worth the chagrin it held for a passionate heart like hers.
At last Gladys threw herself upon the bed. If he married Enid, that would be the end. He would go about strong and heavy, like Mr. Royce; a big machine with the springs broken inside.
VII
Claude was well enough to go into the fields before the harvest was over. The middle of July came, and the farmers were still cutting grain. The yield of wheat and oats was so heavy that there were not machines enough to thrash it within the usual time. Men had to await their turn, letting their grain stand in shock until a belching black engine lumbered into the field. Rains would have been disastrous; but this was one of those “good years” which farmers tell about, when everything goes well. At the time they needed rain, there was plenty of it; and now the days were miracles of dry, glittering heat.
Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew, and started a quivering excitement in all living things. In great harvest seasons like that one, the heat, the intense light, and the important work in hand draw people together and make them friendly. Neighbours helped each other to cope with the burdensome abundance of man-nourishing grain; women and children and old men fell to and did what they could to save and house it. Even the horses had a more varied and sociable existence than usual, going about from one farm to another to help neighbour horses drag wagons and binders and headers. They nosed the colts of old friends, ate out of strange mangers, and drank, or refused to drink, out of strange water-troughs. Decrepit horses that lived on a pension, like the Wheelers’ stiff-legged Molly and Leonard Dawson’s Billy with the heaves—his asthmatic cough could be heard for a quarter of a mile—were pressed into service now. It was wonderful, too, how well these invalided beasts managed to keep up with the strong young mares and geldings; they bent their willing heads and pulled as if the chafing of the collar on their necks was sweet to them.
The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world. Horses and men and women grew thin, seethed all day in their own sweat. After supper they dropped over and slept anywhere at all, until the red dawn broke clear in the east again, like the fanfare of trumpets, and nerves and muscles began to quiver with the solar heat.
For several weeks Claude did not have time to read the newspapers; they lay about the
house in bundles, unopened, for Nat Wheeler was in the field now, working like a giant. Almost every evening Claude ran down to the mill to see Enid for a few minutes; he did not get out of his car, and she sat on the old stile, left over from horse-back days, while she chatted with him. She said frankly that she didn’t like men who had just come out of the harvest field, and Claude did not blame her. He didn’t like himself very well after his clothes began to dry on him. But the hour or two between supper and bed was the only time he had to see anybody. He slept like the heroes of old; sank upon his bed as the thing he desired most on earth, and for a blissful moment felt the sweetness of sleep before it overpowered him. In the morning, he seemed to hear the shriek of his alarm clock for hours before he could come up from the deep places into which he had plunged. All sorts of incongruous adventures happened to him between the first buzz of the alarm and the moment when he was enough awake to put out his hand and stop it. He dreamed, for instance, that it was evening, and he had gone to see Enid as usual. While she was coming down the path from the house, he discovered that he had no clothes on at all! Then, with wonderful agility, he jumped over the picket fence into a clump of castor beans, and stood in the dusk, trying to cover himself with the leaves, like Adam in the garden, talking commonplaces to Enid through chattering teeth, afraid lest at any moment she might discover his plight.
Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey always lost weight in thrashing time, just as the horses did; this year Nat Wheeler had six hundred acres of winter wheat that would run close upon thirty bushels to the acre. Such a harvest was as hard on the women as it was on the men. Leonard Dawson’s wife, Susie, came over to help Mrs. Wheeler, but she was expecting a baby in the fall, and the heat proved too much for her. Then one of the Yoeder daughters came; but the methodical German girl was so distracted by Mahailey’s queer ways that Mrs. Wheeler said it was easier to do the work herself than to keep explaining Mahailey’s psychology. Day after day ten ravenous men sat down at the long dinner table in the kitchen. Mrs. Wheeler baked pies and cakes and bread loaves as fast as the oven would hold them, and from morning till night the range was stoked like the fire-box of a locomotive. Mahailey wrung the necks of chickens until her wrist swelled up, as she said, “like a puff-adder.”
By the end of July the excitement quieted down. The extra leaves were taken out of the dining table, the Wheeler horses had their barn to themselves again, and the reign of terror in the henhouse was over.
One evening Mr. Wheeler came down to supper with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. “Claude, I see this war scare in Europe has hit the market. Wheat’s taken a jump. They’re paying eighty-eight cents in Chicago. We might as well get rid of a few hundred bushel before it drops again. We’d better begin hauling tomorrow. You and I can make two trips a day over to Vicount, by changing teams,—there’s no grade to speak of.”
Mrs. Wheeler, arrested in the act of pouring coffee, sat holding the coffee-pot in the air, forgetting she had it. “If this is only a newspaper scare, as we think, I don’t see why it should affect the market,” she murmured mildly. “Surely those big bankers in New York and Boston have some way of knowing rumour from fact.”
“Give me some coffee, please,” said her husband testily. “I don’t have to explain the market, I’ve only got to take advantage of it.”
“But unless there’s some reason, why are we dragging our wheat over to Vicount? Do you suppose it’s some scheme the grain men are hiding under a war rumour? Have the financiers and the press ever deceived the public like this before?”
“I don’t know a thing in the world about it, Evangeline, and I don’t suppose. I telephoned the elevator at Vicount an hour ago, and they said they’d pay me seventy cents, subject to change in the morning quotations. Claude,” with a twinkle in his eye, “you’d better not go to mill tonight. Turn in early. If we are on the road by six tomorrow, we’ll be in town before the heat of the day.”
“All right, sir. I want to look at the papers after supper. I haven’t read anything but the headlines since before thrashing. Ernest was stirred up about the murder of that Grand Duke and said the Austrians would make trouble. But I never thought there was anything in it.”
“There’s seventy cents a bushel in it, anyway,” said his father, reaching for a hot biscuit.
“If there’s that much, I’m somehow afraid there will be more,” said Mrs. Wheeler thoughtfully. She had picked up the paper fly-brush and sat waving it irregularly, as if she were trying to brush away a swarm of confusing ideas.
“You might call up Ernest, and ask him what the Bohemian papers say about it,” Mr. Wheeler suggested.
Claude went to the telephone, but was unable to get any answer from the Havels. They had probably gone to a barn dance down in the Bohemian township. He went upstairs and sat down before an armchair full of newspapers; he could make nothing reasonable out of the smeary telegrams in big type on the front page of the Omaha World Herald. The German army was entering Luxembourg; he didn’t know where Luxembourg was, whether it was a city or a country; he seemed to have some vague idea that it was a palace! His mother had gone up to “Mahailey’s library,” the attic, to hunt for a map of Europe,—a thing for which Nebraska farmers had never had much need. But that night, on many prairie homesteads, the women, American and foreign-born, were hunting for a map.
Claude was so sleepy that he did not wait for his mother’s return. He stumbled upstairs and undressed in the dark. The night was sultry, with thunder clouds in the sky and an unceasing play of sheet-lightning all along the western horizon. Mosquitoes had got into his room during the day, and after he threw himself upon the bed they began sailing over him with their high, excruciating note. He turned from side to side and tried to muffle his ears with the pillow. The disquieting sound became merged, in his sleepy brain, with the big type on the front page of the paper; those black letters seemed to be flying about his head with a soft, high, sing-song whizz.
VIII
L ate in the afternoon of the sixth of August, Claude and his empty wagon were bumping along the level road over the flat country between Vicount and the Lovely Creek valley. He had made two trips to town that day. Though he had kept his heaviest team for the hot afternoon pull, his horses were too tired to be urged off a walk. Their necks were marbled with sweat stains, and their flanks were plastered with the white dust that rose at every step. Their heads hung down, and their breathing was deep and slow. The wood of the green-painted wagon seat was blistering hot to the touch. Claude sat at one end of it, his head bared to catch the faint stir of air that sometimes dried his neck and chin and saved him the trouble of pulling out a handkerchief. On every side the wheat stubble stretched for miles and miles. Lonely straw stacks stood up yellow in the sun and cast long shadows. Claude peered anxiously along the distant locust hedges which told where the road ran. Ernest Havel had promised to meet him somewhere on the way home. He had not seen Ernest for a week: since then Time had brought prodigies to birth.
At last he recognized the Havels’ team along way off, and he stopped and waited for Ernest beside a thorny hedge, looking thoughtfully about him. The sun was already low. It hung above the stubble, all milky and rosy with the heat, like the image of a sun reflected in grey water. In the east the full moon had just risen, and its thin silver surface was flushed with pink until it looked exactly like the setting sun. Except for the place each occupied in the heavens, Claude could not have told which was which. They rested upon opposite rims of the world, two bright shields, and regarded each other, as if they, too, had met by appointment.
Claude and Ernest sprang to the ground at the same instant and shook hands, feeling that they had not seen each other for a long while.
“Well, what do you make of it, Ernest?”
The young man shook his head cautiously, but replied no further.He patted his horses and eased the collars on their necks.
“I waited in town for the Hastings paper,” Claude went on impatiently. “England declared
war last night.”
“The Germans,” said Ernest, “are at Liege. I know where that is.I sailed from Antwerp when I came over here.”
“Yes, I saw that. Can the Belgians do anything?”
“Nothing.” Ernest leaned against the wagon wheel and drawing his pipe from his pocket slowly filled it. “Nobody can do anything. The German army will go where it pleases.”
“If it’s as bad as that, why are the Belgians putting up a fight?”
“I don’t know. It’s fine, but it will come to nothing in the end.Let me tell you something about the German army, Claude.”
Pacing up and down beside the locust hedge, Ernest rehearsed the great argument; preparation, organization, concentration, inexhaustible resources, inexhaustible men. While he talked the sun disappeared, the moon contracted, solidified, and slowly climbed the pale sky. The fields were still glimmering with the bland reflection left over from daylight, and the distance grew shadowy,—not dark, but seemingly full of sleep.
“If I were at home,” Ernest concluded, “I would be in the Austrian army this minute. I guess all my cousins and nephews are fighting the Russians or the Belgians already. How would you like it yourself, to be marched into a peaceful country like this, in the middle of harvest, and begin to destroy it?”
“I wouldn’t do it, of course. I’d desert and be shot.”
“Then your family would be persecuted. Your brothers, maybe even your father, would be made orderlies to Austrian officers and be kicked in the mouth.”
“I wouldn’t bother about that. I’d let my male relatives decide for themselves how often they would be kicked.”
Ernest shrugged his shoulders. “You Americans brag like little boys; you would and you wouldn’t! I tell you, nobody’s will has anything to do with this. It is the harvest of all that has been planted. I never thought it would come in my life-time, but I knew it would come.”