Читать книгу Growth of a Man - Mazo de la Roche - Страница 8

THE next day was Sunday, blue and gold summer weather, and June having parted with only one quarter of her fairness. At four o’clock all the birds were singing. At five they were too busy feeding their young for song. The cows, with heavy udders, were crowding to the gate of the barnyard. New eggs were warm in the nests, the cock’s comb and wattles were a furious red as he strutted and scratched in the straw. At six Roger and Jane Gower were downstairs, but their children and grandson were still sprawling in their beds, relaxed for half an hour longer in Sabbath sloth.

Roger combed his beard in front of the little looking glass in the kitchen and stared into the reflection of his wide blue eyes. He mumbled to himself, as though to unloose his vocal cords for the day. Jane’s skin was as pink as a girl’s, her silvery hair twisted into a tight knob.

“I wish you’d be done with combing your beard, Pa,” she said. “Breakfast’s ready.”

He continued his toilet without response and she urged him no more. Their relations were amiable, she keeping her temper in control where he was concerned, as she had done since the early days of their marriage. Once, in those days, they had had a scene at the breakfast table and she had snatched up the teapot and thrown it at Roger’s head in a tantrum. The result had been terrifying. The stolid young husband had been transformed into a raging lion. He had risen to his feet and bellowed at her through his yellow beard. If ever again she did such a thing he would take a horsewhip to her! Yes, a horsewhip—and thrash her till his arm ached! He struck blows on the table that made the flowered dishes, which had been a wedding present, dance. And now let her clean up the mess and make fresh tea!

Jane had learned her lesson. Since then she had borne him thirteen children and grown old, but always she had steered the storm of her temper away from him. Now, over their breakfast, she talked placidly of the doings of her seven children who had left home, of Rose Ann’s expected baby, Wilfred’s advance as a bank clerk (he would be the manager of a bank some day), of Cristabel’s position as housekeeper. She had gratified a hidden craving for romance in the names she had chosen for her daughters.

Soon the sons and daughters straggled in. The girls had done the milking before they dared appear. They were heavy-eyed after their late hours and Beaty could take nothing but tea, for she had eaten something at the social that had upset her. Shaw still slept.

“Letitia,” said her mother, “go up to Shaw. You’d better pull him out; Cristabel always had to. He’s a terrible sleeper, that boy.”

“He’s as lazy as a yellow dog,” said Mark.

“He came naturally by that,” mumbled Esther, who had either inherited or imitated her father’s way of talking and might almost have had a beard. “His father had no ambition. He just laid down and died for lack of it.”

“You say that because you’re jealous,” said Letitia. “You wanted John Manifold for yourself.”

This was true, but it was unpalatable to Esther. She began to weep with a blubbering sound, not covering her face but leaving the heavy quivering mouth exposed. An embarrassed silence fell on the rest. Then their mother said in her low, gruff voice:—

“You hadn’t ought to have made that remark, Letitia. Never mind, Esther, don’t take on! Letitia, you go upstairs and wake Shaw. Tell him he’ll get no breakfast if he isn’t downstairs in ten minutes. That’ll stir him.”

Letitia, with a self-conscious smile, rose and went slowly upstairs. The Gowers never moved quickly but always with definite purpose. She opened the door of Shaw’s room and looked down on him, his head in a round knob in the twisted sheet. His clothes lay in a heap on the floor.

“Get up, you big lazybones!” she said, pulling down the sheet. “Don’t you think of anything but sleep? Ma says you’ll not get any breakfast if you’re not downstairs in five minutes.”

He looked up at her resentfully. “I don’t care! I don’t want any breakfus’. You let me alone!”

He heard her go down the stairs, the heels of her slippers flapping from step to step. He scowled and dived determinedly under the bedclothes. But his stomach began to clamor for food. It distended itself, then drew itself small. It remembered that on Sunday mornings there were buckwheat pancakes for breakfast.

He leaped out of bed. In two minutes he had pulled on his trousers and shirt. Barefoot he ran down the stairs. He was in time for the last of the pancakes. . . .

He hated going to church. He hated the long drive, sitting stiff in his Sunday clothes on the low seat of the buggy at his grandparents’ knees, the reins flapping against his head. The others had gone on before. Sometimes the mare’s long tail switched over the dashboard against his face.

On these drives he had always felt disgruntled because his mother had remained at home to get the dinner and he had wanted to stay with her. It seemed to Shaw that he had never been allowed to do what he wanted to. But he would one day! Formless thoughts toward freedom and escape began to stir in his mind. He raised his heavy eyes to the old faces above him and wondered what would happen if these thoughts of his were found out. His grandfather stared solemnly between the mare’s ears. His grandmother’s lips moved as she calculated the profits from yesterday’s market.

The little Presbyterian Church was prosperous. A new strip of carpet had lately been laid the length of the aisle. The pews had been newly varnished. The smell of the varnish filled the hot air. Shaw took a sulky pleasure in ripping himself free of the seat each time he stood up.

From where he sat he could see the minister’s two children, Ian and Elspeth Blair, sitting sedately by their mother. Elspeth had a good little round face and two plaits beneath the broad brim of her hat. She wore a red and white plaid dress and Shaw’s eyes rested on it a moment in admiration. Then he saw that Ian was staring at him and they exchanged a look of humorous understanding. Ian began to swell himself, first his body, then his face, till his cheeks were distended like balloons. Shaw watched him imperturbably, but when Ian, in addition, began to wag his ears, Shaw was forced to look away.

He was glad of the intervention of a hymn. A thin, wailing voice came from Jane Gower and, out of the depths of Roger Gower’s beard, a voice that had a note of his father’s that had rung out from the Tower of the Temple.

During the interminable prayer Shaw looked between his fingers at the Blair children. Elspeth’s hands were folded before her face, her eyes were shut, but Ian was still staring at him. Now he turned his eyes inward toward his nose and again waggled his ears. Shaw gave a snort of helpless laughter.

The minister opened his eyes, fixed them on the pew where the Gowers sat, then shook his forefinger solemnly three times at Shaw.

The drive home was a miserable one for Shaw, sitting in the little seat, wondering what would happen when they returned to the farm. Nothing could be guessed from the faces of his grandparents; neither of them uttered a word during the long drive. At the gate of the farm Roger Gower stopped the mare, but he still kept his large blue eyes fixed on a point between her ears. He did not speak.

Shaw scrambled over the wheel and ran to the gate. As it swung heavily shut he heard a chirrup issue from the beard and the mare moved in haste toward her hay. Shaw ran after the buggy.

“Grandpa!” he called in dismay. “I’ll be late! I’ll not be in time for Sunday dinner!”

His grandfather looked round the hood of the buggy. “You’re not going to have any Sunday dinner.”

His grandmother looked round the other side of the hood, her bonnet far back on her sleek silvery head. “Boys that snigger in church don’t get any dinner in my house,” she muttered.

Shaw stared after the buggy in consternation. Sunday dinner, with roast pork, with lemon pie, with everything of the best because Uncle Merton and Aunt Becky were to be there! Once a year they came to dinner. All possible show was made to offset their grandeur. And he would not be there! That pig Beaty, that pig Mark, would gobble up the last crumb of the lemon pie! He would have no dinner at all! He ground his teeth and kicked the stones out of his path. Tears filled his eyes. He began to talk to his mother as he went along the lane.

“I will have dinner, won’t I, Mamma? You’ll make them give me some dinner! I bet you will! You’ll make them give me the bigges’ piece of pie, won’t you, Mamma?”

He comforted himself in this way, so that he stopped crying and at last began to wonder what he could do to fill in the time. He remembered the pool in the woods of the neighboring farm and that he had not seen it that spring. He would go there and perhaps he would find some sort of diversion. Perhaps he would find some adventure that would be just as good as dinner.

He turned from the lane across the fields, climbing the rail fences where convolvulus put out eager tendrils and swung the pale bells of its bloom. He saw an oriole flash its way across the scented sea of a clover field. He leaped to stamp on a small green snake, but it evaded him and disappeared under the moist clover leaves.

Shaw saw no details of the beauty of the day. He only knew that it was fine and that he wanted to do something different, something free and forbidden. He took off his thick cloth cap and raised his face to the freshness of the breeze.

It was a long way to the neighboring farm, which belonged to a farmer who was not on good terms with his grandfather. He did not want to meet the farmer and was satisfied that he and his family would be eating their dinner at this hour.

There was a winding path into the wood and at its end the pool lay dark and cool, with ferns drooping about its brim and an old willow tree hanging above it. Shaw was running eagerly toward it when he saw that someone was there before him. It was a hired man that had lately come to the farm, and he was standing waist-high in the water, moving it gently with his hands and staring up into the treetops.

Shaw had a deep feeling of disappointment and would have run away, but the man called out:—

“Hey, kid! Don’t go! Come and have a swim!” As he spoke he dived into the water and struck out for the bank. He came out of the water dripping and white, one of those superbly made creatures which Nature sometimes wastefully tosses into a class where beauty is no asset. He turned a pair of slanting hazel eyes on Shaw and asked:—

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Shaw Manifold.”

“Lord, what a name!”

“It’s all right.”

“You ought to do something big with a name like that.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jack Searle. That’s not a grand mouthful like your name, but it serves me.”

Shaw didn’t like the man. He was queer. He turned away, but Searle caught him and said:—

“Come along! Have a dip! You look as hot as hell.”

Shaw was shocked by the last word, which he knew was swearing, outside of church, but now Searle began to fascinate him. He wanted to be with him. He began to undress.

They plunged into the water and, in its restricted space, swam and floated. Searle showed Shaw a new stroke. He talked in a jocular, cynical way new to Shaw, but what he said seemed strangely forceful and true.

When they were again in their clothes they lay on the sunny bank gazing indolently into the pool. They could see minnows moving like pale fingers in its depths, and the wavering shadows of water weeds. Searle smoked one cigarette after another. Shaw knew that they were ten cents a packet and he watched an entire packet disappear, with concern.

“You smoke an awful lot, don’t you?” he said.

“Only on Sundays. The food here don’t agree with me, so on Sundays I give my stomach a rest. I go without dinner and fill my system with smoke and philosophy—otherwise I couldn’t face Monday.”

“I like Monday,” said Shaw. “I like school better than home.”

“Does your old man knock you about?”

“My grandpa?”

“No, your father.”

“He’s dead.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“Gone away.” Shaw spoke gruffly. He did not want to talk of his mother to this man.

Searle looked shrewdly into his face. “Never mind. You’ll soon be on your own. Look at the brow you’ve got. Lots of room for brains there. You work hard at your books and you’ll be a professor some day.”

Shaw began to tear up the tender grass with nervous fingers. “I don’t know what I want to be,” he said. “But my mother says I’m to have all the schooling I want. She’ll pay for it—if I work hard. What would you be if you was me?”

“What was your dad?”

“A doctor, but I don’t want to be one. I want to work outdoors, but not farming. I don’t know what.”

“Take your time! You’re young! Look at me! I’m thirty and haven’t settled down yet. But then I hate work. I shall be away from this place soon—it gives me a pain to live among folk that think of nothing but farming. There’s other things in the world, believe me! Ships and queer cargoes in them and foreign countries! You ought to do things with that brow of yours and that name and a mother to pay for your schooling. By gum, I wish I’d had your chance!” But there was no regret in his face as the smoke drifted down his chiseled nostrils and his white teeth showed in a smile.

Shaw lay on his stomach watching him, drinking in all he said of foreign countries. He had never met anyone like him before, a man who was free, who was reckless, who stayed nowhere that he did not like. It was this last attribute that moved Shaw most deeply. It had always been his conception of life that you grew up, worked, married and died in your own place, near where you were born. He had liked to hear of other lands in his geography lessons. The thought of a life different from the life led by those about him had stirred him like a troubling dream. His great-grandfather’s books had opened the door of his imagination and beyond he saw rich-colored vistas, as he plodded home across the fields.

He was ravenous. By the way he felt he was sure it must be nearly tea time, and yet the sun was still high. As he neared the house he began to run. In the shelter of the shed he saw his great-uncle Merton’s glossy black democrat wagon. In the stable the two fast horses would be munching hay.

His uncles were gathered in a group about dapper Leslie Gower, their cousin. He was an only child, always dressed in an attempt at fashion, and with a taste for good horseflesh. His parents drove out with him in trepidation, for nothing less than reckless speed at a reckless clip satisfied him. He called out good-naturedly:—

“Hullo, Shaw! Getting hungry? Go on in! There’s a bag of candy waiting for you!”

Shaw’s uncles guffawed. Shaw was not taken in. He knew quite well that to bring him a bag of candy was the last thing that would enter Uncle Merton’s and Aunt Becky’s heads. With a sheepish smile he went round to the other side of the house and looked in at the kitchen window to see the time. It was half-past three.

There was still an hour and a half before tea! He remembered the dairy and the pans of cream that stood there, and the cheese. The dairy was Jane Gower’s particular concern. She alone skimmed the thick cream,—no drop of it ever appeared on the table,—she alone patted the sweet-smelling butter into shape and imprinted on each roll the design which distinguished her butter at the market—an acorn and two oak leaves. It was she who made the slightly rubberish but pungent cheese. All the profits from the dairy were in her keeping and she guarded it as an eagle its nest.

Shaw had sometimes ventured there, close by his mother’s side, and stolen crumbs of cheese from the wooden platter. Now he peered through the window, then slid through the door and closed it after him. Inside there was a delightful coolness, and a pleasant, faintly sour smell.

The cheeses had been sold at the market yesterday, all but one which would be cut for tea. He dared not put a knife into that. A large crock of thick yellow cream was full to the brim, bubbling at its edge in a rich foam. A wooden spoon lay on the shelf. Shaw dipped it into the cream and began an orgy of something between eating and drinking.

He was in for it! If he were caught, it horrified him to think what would happen. So with his mind a deliberate blank he guzzled the ambrosia till his stomach would tolerate no more. Then he licked the spoon clean, and with his palm wiped up the stray drops. He glided out undiscovered.

He felt a little squeamish, but the gnawing at his vitals had ceased. He slunk into the house, drawn by the fascination of visitors.

The two old brothers and their wives were sitting in the uncomfortable, seldom used parlor, which smelled a little musty and had a red velvet suite in it. On a centre table with fringed cover lay the Family Bible and a great sea shell from Florida. The likeness between Roger and Merton Gower was remarkable at the first glance, but on closer scrutiny it was noticeable how the contrast of their characters was manifest in their persons. In height, feature, coloring, beard, they were alike as twins, though Roger was some years the elder. Each head showed the same smooth dome of baldness. But Merton’s beard was less coarse, his skin was fairer, and his full blue eyes had the sweetness and innocence of a child’s.

There was real affection between the brothers, but Roger was contemptuous of Merton for his submissiveness under Becky’s domination; also because he had only got one child, and he a little whippersnapper.

There was no affection between the sisters-in-law, neither was there open antagonism. Neither had any obligation to the other; their meetings were infrequent. Jane would, in any case, have had no weapons against Becky’s vixen tongue, which had made the last years of Shaw Gower’s life miserable.

His farm and what money he had somehow had gone to Merton and Becky. They lived a life of ease and affluence contrasted with the other pair. Becky had had only one child to care for and, during all her married life, had kept the same browbeaten maid of all work.

Now she sat, sprightly and pleased with the contrast between her and Jane, her black silk dress shining with bead trimming, her little black eyes and small black head alert. She was the first to notice Shaw. She surveyed him disparagingly.

“Well,” she exclaimed in her nasal voice, “so here is Cristabel’s boy! Can’t you come and say how-de-do to your aunt and uncle? My goodness, Jane, the child looks dull! Do you think he’s bright in his mind?”

“He’s bright enough,” answered Jane, bridling for her daughter’s son, “but he thinks he can do as he pleases now his mother’s not here. He’ll find out he’s mistaken.”

Becky’s beady black eyes twinkled with pleasure at discovering that already Jane was having trouble with the boy. “What’s he been up to, Jane? Whatever it is, I know you’ll take it out of him.”

Shaw, discomfited, began to back out of the room.

“Don’t go!” ordered his grandmother. “You just tell your aunt and uncle what you did.”

His head drooped and he stuck out his lips.

“Hold up your head, Shaw, and tell or you’ll be sorry.”

Somehow he got out the words, “I giggled in church and Mr. Blair shook his finger.”

Becky gave a cackle of laughter. “You giggled, eh? I guess the minister thought you were laughing at his sermon. I’d not blame you, if you did. I’d laugh at ’em myself!”

Jane reddened with anger. “Mr. Blair preaches a good Presbyterian sermon and he doesn’t preach to empty pews, either.”

This was a stab for Becky and Merton. When the power of the Children of Peace had waned Merton had returned to the Church of England, of which his mother always remained a member and of which his wife’s family were aggressive supporters. It was in his religion that Merton Gower was able to feel himself superior to his brother and he never lost an opportunity of flaunting, in his own gentle way, that superiority in Roger’s face. Now his voice came out of his beard, muffled like Roger’s but without the gruffness.

“You forget, Jane, that in the Church we have two services every Sunday while you have only one.”

This appropriation of the name “Church” made Roger’s eyes bulge. He grunted scornfully, then said:—

“Our one service is worth your two put together.”

Jane gave him a look of encouragement.

“If it comes to the length of the sermon, I dare say it is,” said Merton. “I heard your minister preach once and I fell asleep before he was done with it.”

“You fell asleep,” said his brother, “because you couldn’t understand it. You’re used to the singsong stuff your minister gives you.”

Jane made faces of approval at Roger. Becky’s eyes snapped in fury.

Merton combed his beard with short, strong fingers. “It may sound singsong to you,” he said, “but our rector is an educated man. He’s got the history of the Church and its doctrines at his finger tips. He knows that he doesn’t have to talk his congregation off their hind legs to persuade them that he’s right. He knows he’s right and we know he’s right.”

“I wish you’d come and hear the Reverend Blair expound the Scriptures,” said Roger. “Then you’d find out what real learning is. And he’s humble with it all.”

“If you call it humble,” interrupted Becky, “to shake his finger at a child for making a little noise.”

“Shaw giggled out loud,” said Jane.

“I’d giggle too,” said Merton, “if I had to listen to that man’s reasoning. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, you know.”

Shaw gave a sheepish grin and slid on to the edge of a hair-cloth chair, drinking in every word of the argument that followed.

Before long the two women went out of the room to view the store of linen being prepared for Esther’s marriage. The voices of the young men and women could be heard from the yard. There was a swing on the branch of a great elm and Beaty was being swung by Cousin Leslie. As Shaw listened to the two old men he could see Beaty fly past the window, first her feet in their clumsy buttoned boots, then her buxom body and pink and white face with the mouth open. He even had a glimpse of dapper little Leslie, smiling with satisfaction at her squeals and pretended fright. Inside his clothes Shaw’s body still felt damp and cool, his inside a little strange after the cream.

He wondered if he would be allowed to come to the table, but his grandmother nodded toward a seat beside her and he sat down with relief though with little appetite. The long weeping of the night before, the long spell without food, the dawdling in the cold water of the pool, the surfeit of cream, all combined to make him drowsy. He could scarcely keep his eyelids open.

No one noticed him. All were intent on making a hearty meal except Aunt Becky, who nibbled the food gingerly, implying that it was coarser than she was accustomed to or could more than tolerate. This implication made Jane Gower nervous and she kept casting flurried glances at her swarthy little sister-in-law.

The two old men were speechless after their long argument. They devoted themselves to poking large pieces of hot tea biscuit into their mouths, which opened unexpectedly in the midst of moustache and beard like burrows under a heap of brushwood. Shaw compared the beards, fascinated. Grandpa’s collected the most crumbs, but Uncle Merton’s showed a trickle of moisture after each drink of tea.

Little was usually said at that table during mealtime. Like the cattle in the stalls they munched slowly and quietly. But, with visitors there, an effort at conversation was made and an attempt, on Jane’s part, to boast a little. She told, as though to the teapot, of the good price she had got for her maple syrup that spring, of the price her cheese had fetched in yesterday’s market. Becky listened with a superior quirk at the corner of her mouth. When the mild boasting was finished she told of what her bees had brought her in the past season. Her honey was reckoned the best in the township. It was a sum so large that it could scarcely be believed in. Jane looked toward Merton for confirmation. He bent in affirmative so profound that the top of his smooth bald head addressed her instead of his visage.

She gulped. “Hm, well, well,” she muttered, “that’s a lot of money to make out of bees.”

“It was such a lot,” said Becky, “that I just didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t as though I needed any clothes for I’d just bought this new black silk and my bonnet with the cherries. And I didn’t want to put it in the bank because Merton attends to all that, so I bought a new parlor suite, in curly walnut,—you must come over soon and see it,—and I bought a picture of the meeting of Wellington and Blücher after Waterloo for Merton, and a velvet smoking cap with a gold tassel for Leslie, now that he’s taken to smoking cigars.”

What pride there was in Roger Gower’s family was deflated after this speech. They wilted under the depression of inferiority. Their embarrassed silence was broken by Leslie, who said to Beatrice:—

“You ought to see me in the cap, Beaty. I look a regular dude, I can tell you.”

Beaty began to shake with laughter. She could not control herself. Her shoulders heaved and a rich color flooded her neck. Leslie kept a sidelong tantalizing look fixed on her.

To draw attention from his daughter’s silly behavior, Roger Gower said to Becky:—

“I’ve never had a present from Jane, no matter what she’s sold. I don’t know what a present looks like.”

His family stared at him dumbfounded. He was always so reticent, kept himself so to himself, that to hear him speak of getting a present or not getting a present seemed almost indecent. Jane felt it most deeply of all, for she had indeed once given him a present, and that out of her cheese money!

“You did so get a present,” she said gruffly. “I gave you a cup and saucer.”

He glared at her out of his sky-blue eyes.

“Me? A cup and saucer? I don’t remember.”

With her lips tight shut and holding herself together she rose and went to the china cupboard. She took out a large cup and saucer with yellow roses trailing over it and a china barrier for keeping the moustache dry, and set it sharply on the table beside him.

“There!” she said. “Do you remember it now?”

He picked up the fragile thing in his thick hand. “Well,” he grunted, “I’m not sure. I sort of recognize it but—I’m not sure.”

Merton sputtered through his beard in appreciation of his brother’s waggishness. “Do you mean to say, Roger, that you’ve never drunk out of it?”

“Never,” declared Roger. “As sure as I’m sitting here! I call that a queer kind of present, don’t you, Becky?”

“It’s not the way I give presents,” said Becky loftily. “When I give a thing, I give it!”

Jane, who had sat down again, angrily took up the cup and put sugar, milk, and tea into it, to overflowing. She pushed it toward Roger. “There,” she said, “drink your fill, for goodness’ sake, and let’s hear no more of it.”

With a roguish look over the brim he lifted the cup to his beard and absorbed the tea. “How about my moustache?” he asked of his brother. “Is it dry?”

“Dry as a bone,” said Merton. “It’s a lovely cup. I wish I’d one like it.”

Beatrice and Leslie were the only ones who had not watched this passage with interest. He continued to stare at her and she continued to laugh helplessly.

“Behave yourself, Beaty,” her mother admonished. “You are a silly girl.” But she was proud of the girl’s exuberance. She turned with condescension to Becky, who had one paltry son against her own six strong sons and seven daughters. “My family seemed to get livelier as they went on,” she said. “I can’t keep the young ones down, they’re that lively.”

Becky scented the condescension and at once quelched it. “It’s a good thing you stopped when you did,” she said, “or they’d have been regular jumping jacks. I read of one of those French-Canadian women that had twenty-four and the last was so simple that she did nothing but suck her thumb and giggle.”

At this Beaty fled from the room suffocated by laughter; Leslie followed her. This sudden devotion to his cousin disturbed Becky and spurred her on to disparage the girl. She seated herself in a rocking-chair and crossed her feet, exhibiting their extreme smallness and the neatness of her ankle. She said:—

“Beaty’s a fine girl. She’s the buxom sort that will make a good breeder. I’m glad to see Leslie so kind to her. I guess he’s sorry for her. He told me once that if anything made him sorry for a girl it was thick ankles. But I do think it’s silly for a young man to expect to find all the things in a girl that he admires in his mother, don’t you, Jane?”

Jane was speechless with anger. She moved about the room bewildered, striving dumbly for a retort, unable to find even a word. But nothing that his mother could say quenched Leslie’s new-found ardor. He persuaded Beaty to go to the stable with him while he harnessed the horses to the democrat, and there Shaw, who was skulking in the hay-scented gloom, saw him kiss her.

Beaty’s head lay on Leslie’s shoulder, all her laughter gone, a deep sigh drawn from her breast. Shaw remained hidden. He heard the good-byes, Aunt Becky’s cackling laughter, the pleasantries with which she tried to leave a last good impression. He wondered why he had not been sent to bed long ago. There was something sinister in this delay, he thought. He listened to the eager thudding of the departing hoofbeats with foreboding.

He heard his grandfather come into the stable for a last look around before going to bed. He saw the thick figure, with the beard spread fanlike on the chest, silhouetted against the rising moonshine. Then his grandmother’s voice came out of the darkness.

“You there, Shaw?”

“Yes, Grandma,” he breathed, his heart beginning to pound heavily.

“Come here.”

“Say, Grandma,”—the tightness in his throat almost strangled his voice,—“you ain’t going to whip me, are you?”

“Come here.” She peered into the corner where he lurked. He saw that she held a short length of broomstick in her hand. He drew himself together into an anguished bundle. “No, no, no, please don’t!” he blubbered, shaken by his fear. “I’ll never do it again! I’ll not laugh in church, Grandma! I won’t—I won’t! I’ll not laugh anywheres, Grandma!”

“I’ll teach you to behave yourself,” she said, and drew him across a table where pieces of broken harness lay and a tin of harness oil. The smell of them filled his nostrils, made him feel sick.

Resentment against Becky’s taunts stiffened her arm, made her inflexible. She beat him on the buttocks till she felt relief. Then she led him out of the stable, past the immovable figure of his grandfather and into the house, to the foot of the stairs.

“Now,” she said, panting a little, “you go to bed as quick as you can! And remember this is what you’ll get every time you need it.”

He scuttled up the stairs like a young rabbit to its burrow. He shut the door of his room and bolted it. For a little he stood in the middle of the room dazed. Then he doubled up, whimpering and rubbing his buttocks. Then rage seized him. He began to kick the legs of the bed. He hurled the pillow to the floor and kicked it furiously.

“You would, would you?” he growled, in his rage. “Well—that’s what you’ll get!”

The ticking was tough—his kicks did nothing to the pillow except to make it plumper. He threw himself face down on the bed, clutching the sheet in his fingers, twisting it in his misery.

“I’m alone! I’m alone!” he kept sobbing, over and over. “I’m alone! I’m alone!” He wore himself out and at last lay quiet. He looked pensively at the clear moonlight that poured into the little room. It lay in a brilliant square on the floor, with the crossbar of the window penciled black. He could hear a mouse in the room and presently it ran into the moonlight and sat there poised on its haunches, its eyes like jewels, its plump back silken and silvered.

Shaw began to go over his life, recalling its events in deep reflection, as though he were an old man. He remembered the house where he was born, the smell of his father’s surgery. He remembered how he used to run away from his mother and steal into it, so that he might inhale this strange exciting smell and pass his hands over the backs of the huge leather-bound medical books on the lowest shelf. He could even remember the pale thin young man who had been his father, how he would come suddenly into the surgery, pick him up, set him on his shoulder, and carry him back to his mother. With great distinctness he recalled his resentment at being picked up, and how the resentment had changed to pleasure at being on his father’s shoulder, and how the pleasure had grown to joy when he was placed in his mother’s arms. For a moment he had always clasped her close, rubbed his cheek against hers.

He remembered going with his mother on his father’s rounds in winter, sitting snug in her lap, with his woolen cap down to his eyes and his woolen scarf up to his eyes, so that there was nothing to him but his wide stare at the horse’s moving flanks, at the glittering fall of the snowflakes. Now he could clearly hear the jingle of the sleigh bells—the little bells along the horse’s sides and the big strong one above its shoulders. He could hear the screeching of the runners on the hard snow.

Then he remembered how his father had no longer gone out on his rounds but had always been lying on a camp bed on the verandah with a glass of milk on the table beside him and a basin under the bed. He had wanted to climb on the camp bed beside his father and had felt angry and hurt when he was pushed away by the thin white hands.

“No, no, Shaw, go away! Cristabel, come and take him! He mustn’t be here.”

Then had come a confused blank in which his father had disappeared but other people had come on the scene and said “Poor child” and given him candy. His mother had often cried in that time, which had troubled him because he had thought he was the only one who ought to cry and he did not like to see a grown-up person doing it.

In this time, too, his grandparents had come into his life and he had run and hid behind his mother from the intimidating beard. Then he and she had come to live at the farm and he suddenly found that he was no longer the centre of the house but a being of no importance—except to her.

And now she was gone! He could not go to her and press his face, for a comforting moment, against her clean print dress that smelled faintly of yeast from the bread she had been putting to rise. He could not, after a bad dream, sit up in his bed and look across at hers, where the outline of her form spelled succor and protection. She was gone! He had only himself—his own thoughts, his uncomforted fears.

The words of the hired man came into his mind. He had said that a boy with a brow like his and a name like his and a mother to pay for his schooling should get on in the world, make a name for himself.

Shaw laid his hand on his forehead. He could feel nothing singular about it except that it was very hot. He said his name over and over till it was meaningless. Boys at school had made fun of it. He did not see how it could help him. Then he remembered how his mother had said—“You must learn your lessons as well as ever you can and I’ll work as hard as ever I can to help you.”

The first gratitude he had felt in his life surged up in him. His mother was going to work for him, help him to be whatever he wanted! But stronger than gratitude surged his hatred of the farm, his burning anger against his grandmother, his fierce resentment of the chains that bound him there. But he would be free! He would not stay here a day longer than he was forced to! He would learn everything that the teacher could tell him. He would learn the school books by heart. He would pass the entrance into the high school in a year! He would learn all there was to learn and be free!

“I will—I will—I will,” he repeated over and over. “I’ll begin to-morrow—I’ll learn as fast as the teacher can teach me! I’ll get out of here! I’ll not stay! I’ll do what that man says. Don’t you think you can go on licking me, Grandma, for you can’t! I’m going away!” As by the reiteration of a prayer he was soothed and fell asleep.