The Homesteaders Part 7

"Now, Beulah, don't be unreasonable. You know we always have meals there Sundays. But your father likes the kitchen best when it ain't too hot. And besides, I can hardly take them into the dining-room while the ploughing's on. You know how greasy they are with the engine."

"They're ploughing over at Grant's, too, and when I dropped in there yesterday the dinner was set in the dining-room, and a clean white linen cloth on the table, and napkins set for the men, and I guess they use the same kind of grease as we do," persisted the girl. "And I noticed when they came in to dinner Mr. Grant and the boys, and the hired man too, all put their coats on--not their working coats, but coats they had hanging in a closet handy. It didn't take a minute, but it looked different."

"Now, Beulah, you know your father would never stand for putting on airs like that. He--"

"'Tisn't putting on airs. It's putting on clothes--clean clothes to eat in. Susy Grant never has to feel--I hate to say it, Mother--_ashamed_ if any of her friends drop in at mealtime. And I couldn't help thinking how fine Harry looked--"

"'Pon my word, Beulah, I'm beginning to think you must be a bit soft on Harry Grant. I had thought perhaps your weakness was toward Jim, but perhaps I'm mistaken."

"Can't a girl say a fellow's fine-looking without being soft about it?" she continued. "As for Jim--"

But at this moment the conversation was cut short by the sc.r.a.ping of heavy boots on the ploughshare nailed to the block at the door, and John Harris, followed by Allan and the hired man, Jim, walked into the kitchen. The farmer's frame was heavier than in his younger days, and his hair, too, was streaked with grey, but every muscle in his great body seemed to bulge with strength. His face was brown with the prairie sun and wind of twenty-five summers, and lines of worry and care had cut their tracings about the mouth and eyes. Beside him stood Allan, his only son, straighter and lither of figure, but almost equally powerful. The younger man was, indeed, a replica of the older, and although they had their disagreements, constant a.s.sociation had developed a fine comrades.h.i.+p, and, on the part of the son, a loyalty equal to any strain. The hired man, Jim, was lighter and finer of feature, and his white teeth gleamed against the nut-brown of his face in a quiet smile that refused to be displaced in any emergency, and at times left the beholder in considerable doubt as to the real emotions working behind.

The men all wore blue overalls, dark blue or grey s.h.i.+rts, and heavy boots. They were guiltless of coat or vest, and tossed their light straw hats on the water-bench as they pa.s.sed. There was a quick splas.h.i.+ng of greasy hands at the wash-basin, followed by a more effectual rubbing on a towel made from a worn-out grain sack. The hired man paused to change the water and wash his face, but the others proceeded at once to the table, where no time was lost in ceremony. Meat, potatoes, and boiled cabbage were supplied in generous quant.i.ties on large platters. A fine stack of white bread tiered high on a plate, and a mountainous pile of Mary Harris's famous fresh buns towered on another. All hands ate at the table together, although the hired man was usually last to sit down, owing to his perverse insistence upon was.h.i.+ng his face and combing his hair before each meal. Although his loss of time sometimes irritated Harris, he bore it in silence. There was no better farm hand in the country-side than Jim Travers, and, as Harris often remarked, employers nowadays couldn't afford to be too particular about trifles.

Harris helped himself generously to meat and vegetables and, having done so, pa.s.sed the platters to his son, and in this way they were circulated about the table. Mary poured the tea from a big granite pot at her elbow, and whenever a shortage of food threatened Beulah rose from her place and refilled plate or platter. There was no talk for the first few minutes, only the sound of knife and fork plied vigorously and interchangeably by father and son, and with some regard for convention by the other members of the family. John Harris had long ago recognized the truth that the destiny of food was the mouth, and whether conveyed on knife or fork made little difference.

Mary, too, had found a carelessness of little details both of manner and speech coming over her, as her occasional "ain't" betrayed, but since Jim had joined their table she had been on her guard. Jim seldom said anything, but always that quiet smile lay like a mask over his real emotions.

When the first insistent demands of appet.i.te had been appeased, Harris, resting both elbows on the table, with knife and fork trained on opposite corners of the ceiling, straightened himself somewhat and remarked:

"Allan an' me's goin' to town to-night; anything you want from Sempter's store, Mary?"

"That lets me in for the cows," said Beulah. "You were in town night before last, too, and it was half-past nine before I got through milking."

"Oh, well, Jim was away that night," said Allan.

"Jim has enough to do, without milking cows after hours," returned the girl. "What do you want to go to town for again to-night, anyway?"

"Got to get more coal," said Harris. "We'll take two teams, an' it'll be late when we get back."

"Try and not be too late," said the mother, quietly. "You have to be at work so early in the morning, you know."

"I think it's all nonsense, this day-an'-night work," persisted Beulah. "Is there never going to be any let-up to it?"

"Beulah, you forget yourself," said her father, "If you'd more to do you'd have less lime to fret about it. Your mother did more work in one summer than you have in all your life, an' she's doin' more yet."

"Oh, Beulah's a good help," interposed Mary. "I hope she never has to work like I did."

"I guess the work never hurt us," said Harris, helping himself to preserved strawberries. "Just the same, I'm glad to see you gettin'

it a bit easier. But this younger generation--it beats me what we're comin' to. Thinkin' about nothin' but fun and gaddin' to town every night or two. And clo'es--Beulah here's got more clo'es than there were in the whole Plainville settlement the first two or three years."

"I got more neighbours, too," interjected the girl. Then springing up, she stood behind her father's chair and put her arm around his neck.

"Don't be cross, Dad," she whispered. "Your heart's in the right place--but a long way in."

He disengaged her, gently enough. As Beulah said, his heart was all right, but a long way in. Twenty-five years of pitched battle with circ.u.mstances--sometimes in victory, sometimes in defeat, but never in despair; always with a load of expense about him, always with the problem of income and outlay to be solved--had made of Harris a man very different from the young idealist of '82. During the first years of struggle for a bare existence in some way the flame of idealism still burned, but with the dawn of the "better times" there came a gradual s.h.i.+fting of standards and a new conception of essentials. At first the settlers attached little value to their land; it was free for the taking, and excited no envy among them. The crops of the early years were unprofitable on account of the great distance to market; later, when the railway came to their doors, the crops were still unprofitable, owing to falling prices and diminis.h.i.+ng yields due to poor cultivation. Then came a decade during which those who stayed in the country stayed because they could not get out, and it became a current saying that the more land a man farmed the deeper he got in debt. Homesteads were abandoned; settlers flew by night "across the line" or to more distant districts to begin their fight over again. And yet, in some way, Harris kept his idealism amid all the adversity in which the community was steeped; reverses could neither crush his spirit nor deflect it from its ambitions.

Then came the swing of the pendulum. No one knows just what started it prosperity-wards. Some said it was that the farmers, disheartened with wheat-growing, were applying themselves to stock, and certain it is that in "mixed farming" the community eventually found its salvation; others attributed the change to improved agricultural implements, to improved methods of farming, to greater knowledge of prairie conditions, to reductions in the cost of transportation and enlarged facilities for marketing, or to increasing world demand and higher world prices for the product of the farm. But whatever the causes--and no doubt all of the above contributed--the fact gradually dawned upon the settlers that land--their land--was worth money.

It was the farmers from the United States, scouting for cheaper lands than were available in their own communities, who first drove the conviction home. They came with money in their wallets; they were actually prepared to exchange real money for land. Such a thing had never before been heard of in Plainville district. At first the settlers were sceptical. Here were two facts almost beyond the grasp of their imagination: that farmers should buy land with money, and the farmers should have money with which to buy land. True, a few of them had already bought railway lands at three or four dollars an acre, but they bought oil long terms, with a trifling investment, and they aimed to pay for the lands out of the crops or not at all.

But a few transactions took place; lands were sold at five dollars, six dollars, eight dollars an acre. The farmers began to realize that land represented wealth--that it was an a.s.set, not a liability--and there was a rush for the cheap railway lands that had so long gone a-begging. Harris was among the first to sense the change in the times, and a beautiful section of railway land that lay next to his homestead he bought at four dollars an acre. The first crop more than paid for the land, and Harris suddenly found himself on the way to riches.

The joy that came with the realization that fortune had knocked at his door and he had heard was the controlling emotion of his heart for a year or more. But gradually, like a fog blown across a moonlit night, came a sense of chill and disappointment. If only he had bought two sections! If at least he had proved up on his pre-emption, which he might have had for nothing! He saw neighbours about him adding quarter to quarter. None of them had done better than himself, but some had done as well. And in some way the old sense of oneness, the old community interest which had held the little band of pioneers together amid their privations and their poverty, began to weaken and dissolve, and in its place came an individualism and a materialism that measured progress only in dollars and cents. Harris did not know that his G.o.ds had fallen, that his ideals had been swept away; even as he sat at supper this summer evening, with his daughter's arms about his neck, he felt that he was still bravely, persistently, pressing on toward the goal, all unaware that years ago he had left that goal like a lighthouse on a rocky sh.o.r.e, and was now sweeping along with the turbulent tide of Mammonism. He still saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, "When I am worth ten thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth ten thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, "When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth twenty-five thousand he saw the glow still ahead, beckoning him on to fifty thousand. It never occurred to him to slacken his pace--to allow his mind a rest from its concentration; if he had paused and looked about he might, even yet, have recognized the distant lighthouse on the reef about the wreck of his ideals. But to stop now might mean losing sight of his goal, and John Harris held nothing in heaven or earth so great as its attainment.

So, gently enough, he disengaged his daughter's arms and finished his supper in silence. As soon as it was ended the men started for the barn, and in a few minutes two wagons rattled noisily down the trail.

Beulah helped with the supper dishes, and then came out with the milk-pails to the corral where the cows, puffing and chewing, complacently awaited her arrival. But she had not reached the gate when the hired man was at her side and had slipped one of the pails from her arm.

"Now, Jim, I don't think that's fair at all," she said; and there was a tremor in her voice that vexed her. "Here you're slaving all day with coal and water, and I think that's enough, without milking cows at night."

But Jim only smiled and stirred a cow into position.

"Yes, that's like you," she continued. "Pick Daisie first, just because you know she's tough as rubber. Say, Jim, honest goods," she demanded, pausing and facing him, milk stool in hand, "why do you let father put this kind of stuff over on you?"

"Your father doesn't put anything over on me," he answered. "I'm very fond of milking."

"Yes, you are--not," she said. "You do it on my account, because you're too big-hearted to quit before I'm through..." There was a tuneful song of the tin pails as the white streams rattled on their bottoms.

"Jim," she said, after a while, when the noise of the milking was drowned in the creamy froth, "I'm getting near the end of this kind of thing. Father's getting more and more set on money all the time.

He thinks I should slave along too to pile up more beside what he's got already, but I'm not going to do it much longer. Mother stands it--I guess she's got used to him, and she won't say anything, but if there's anything I'm not strong on it's silence. I'm not afraid of work, or hards.h.i.+p either. I'd live in a sack if I had to. I'd--"

"Would you live in a shack?" said Jim.

She shot a quick look at him. But he was quietly smiling into his milk-pail, and she decided to treat his question impersonally.

"Yes, I'd live in a shack, too, if I had to. I put in my first years in a sod-house, and there was more real happiness romping up and down the land then than there is now. In those days everybody was so poor that money didn't count...It's different now."

Jim did not pursue the subject, and the milking was completed in silence. Jim finished first, and presently the rising hum of the cream separator was heard from the kitchen.

"There he goes, winding his arm off--for me," said the girl, as she rose from the last cow. "Poor Jim--I wish I knew whether it's just human kindness makes him do it, or whether--" She stopped, colouring a little over the thought that had almost escaped into words.

When the heavy grind of the separating was finished Jim went quietly to his own room, but the girl put on a clean dress and walked out through the garden. Rows of mignonette and lobelia bordered the footpath, and sweet, earthy garden smells filled the calm evening air. The rows of currant and gooseberry bushes were heavy with green fruit; the leaves of the Manitoba maples trembled ever so little in the still air. The sun was setting, and fleecy fragments of cloud were painted ruddy gold against the silver background of the sky.

From the barnyard came the contented sighing of the cows and the anxious clucking of a hen gathering in her belated brood. The whole country seemed bathed in peace--a peace deep and unpurchasable, having no part in any of the affairs of man.

At the lower gate she stooped to pick a flower, which she held for a moment to her face; then, toying lightly with it in her fingers, she slipped the latch and continued along the path leading down into the ravine. It was dark and cool down there, with a touch of dampness in the gra.s.s, and the balm-of-Gileads across the stream sent a fine moist fragrance through the air. To the right lay the bench where the sod-house had stood, not so much as a mound now marking the spot; but the thoughts of the girl turned yearningly to it, and to the days of the lonely but not unhappy childhood which it had sheltered.

Presently she reached the water, and her quick ear caught the sound of a musk-rat slipping gently into the stream from the reeds on the opposite bank; she could see the widening wake where he ploughed his swift way across the pond. Then her own figure stood up before her, graceful and lithe as the willows on the bank. She surveyed it a minute, then flicked the flower at her face in the water, and turned slowly homeward. She was not unhappy, but a dull sense of loss oppressed her--a sense that the world was very rich and very beautiful, and that she was feasting neither on its richness nor its beauty. There was a stirring of music and poetry in her soul, but neither music nor poetry found expression. What she felt was a consciousness that great things were just beyond the horizon of her experience, things undefined and undefinable which, could she but grasp them, would deepen life and sweeten life and give a purpose to all her being. And as she walked up the path and the fragrant night air filled her nostrils, something of that wilder life seemed borne in upon her and sent a fresh spring to her ankle. And presently she discovered she was thinking about Jim Travers.

Her mother sat in the dining-room, knitting by the light of the hanging lamp. Her face seemed very pale and lovely in the soft glow.

"Don't you think you have done enough?" said the girl, slipping into a sitting posture on the floor by her mother's knee. "You work, work, work, all the time. I suppose they'll have to let you work in heaven."

"We value our work more as we grow older," said the mother..."It helps to keep us from thinking."

"There you go!" exclaimed the girl; but there was a tenderness in her voice. "Worrying again. I wish they'd stay home for a change."

The mother plied her needles in silence. "Slip away to bed, Beulah,"

she said at length. "I will wait up for a while."