Читать книгу Thrifty Stock, and Other Stories - Ben Ames Williams - Страница 9

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The stoic patience of the farmer, who serves a capricious master and finds his most treasured works casually destroyed by that master’s slightest whim, takes time to learn, but is a mighty armor, when it has been put on. It was Johnny Dree’s heritage; it was, in remoter line, the heritage also of Walter Moore. It bore them through that summer, and through the frost-hued glory of the fall. There is a pleasure in a task well done, regardless of reward; and when Moore surveyed his trees, he found this pleasure. Johnny Dree confirmed it. “They’re like money in the bank, Mr. Moore,” he said. “You can’t lose it, and it pays you interest right along. We’re due for a good apple year, next year.”

Moore nodded. “I’m beginning to like it here,” he assented. “It was tough, at first. But I’m no worse in debt than I was last year, and I ought to pull out when the trees begin to bear.”

“Aye,” said Johnny Dree. “You’ve got something to build on, now. It’ll go easier, from now on.”

Moore had learned many things, in these months that had gone; and so had Lucy. And so had Johnny Dree. Lucy was teaching him a thing he had never had time to learn; she was teaching him to play. When snow came, he brought her, one day, snow-shoes; and thereafter they occasionally tramped the woods together, following the meandering trails of the small creatures of the forest, marking where a partridge had left a delicate tracery of footprints in the snow, exploring the great swamp below the hill where the cedars had been stripped of browse by the moose that wintered there. He found where deer were yarded, and took her to the place, and once they caught glimpses of the startled creatures, bounding away through the cumbering snow. There was a deepening understanding between these two; when they were together she talked almost constantly, and he scarce at all; but she could read his silences, and he understood her fountain-like loquacity. Through a keener understanding, she found matters to love in these hills and woods which were his world; she was, by slow degrees, forgetting the more obvious pleasures of her life before she came to Fraternity to dwell. They were, for the most part, as much isolated as though they lived upon an island in the sea; for, save for the nightly gatherings at Will Bissell’s store, Fraternity folk are not overly social in their inclinations. Once he took her to a grange dance, and she found him surprisingly adequate in this new rôle, found an unsuspected pleasure in the rustic merry-making she would, two years before, have scorned. Johnny did not smoke, and she asked him why; he said he didn’t want to waste the money. Yet once when he went to East Harbor, he brought her a flower, in a pot; and when she asked him if that wasn’t wasting money, he smiled a little and said he did not think it was. One day, to torment him, she cried: “I’d give a lot for a cigarette. I haven’t had one for days. Will you get me some, next time you’re at the store. I don’t dare buy them there.”

Johnny merely smiled at her and replied: “I guess if you ever did smoke them, you don’t any more.”

One day her snow-shoe caught on a broken stub and threw her forward into the snow. She said: “Oh, damn!” More in jest than in anger. Lifting her to her feet, he commented:

“I shouldn’t think a girl would swear much.”

“I like to,” she insisted. “It makes me feel good when I’m mad.”

“I never could see it helped me any,” he rejoined, mildly enough. But she thereafter guarded her tongue, until the necessity for restraint had disappeared. Self discipline was one of the things she learned from Johnny.

You could hardly say they had a romance. They grew together, as naturally as stock and scion grafted by his skilful hands. They had this great community of interest in the trees which were his work, which she had come to love. Their forward looking eyes were centered on the harvest time, now a scant year away, when the fruition of their labors could be expected; and their anticipations were tranquil and serene.

They talked, sometimes, of what he meant to make of his life. “You won’t always be a farmer, will you?” she asked.

“I guess I will,” he told her.

“Slaving away here!”

He smiled a little. “There’s a man up in Winterport,” he said. “He planted some apple trees twenty years ago, and more and more since, and he’s got ten thousand trees, now. I went up there two years ago on the orchard tour the Farm Bureau runs. He cleared over twenty thousand dollars, that year, on his apples. Ten thousand trees. I’ve only got four hundred; but I’m putting in two hundred more next spring, and more when I can, and my land is better than his, and there’s more around me I can buy. It’s clean work. You can learn a lot from an apple tree, and eating apples never did anybody much harm. And you’ve time for thinking, while you work on the trees....”

She slipped her hand through his arm in understanding, as they tramped along.

In December his mother, who had suffered for half a dozen years from a mysterious weakness of the heart, was taken sick with what at first seemed a slight cold. In early January, she died. Walter Moore and his wife and Lucy were among those who followed the little cortege to the receiving tomb where—because the frost had fortified the earth against the digging of a grave—his mother’s body would lie till spring. Lucy was mysteriously moved by the pity of this; that a woman should die, and yet be kept waiting for her final sweet repose in the bosom of earth. After supper that evening, she drew on coat and heavy overshoes and muffled her head against the bitter wind that blew. “I’m going down to cheer up Johnny, mama,” she said.

Moore and his wife, when the door had closed behind her, looked at each other with deep understanding. “Well,” he said, “I guess Lucy’s gone.”

But his wife smiled through misty eyes. “She’s come back to us these last two years,” she said. “No matter what happens, she can’t really go away again.”