Читать книгу Spring Came on Forever - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 3

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In the telling of a story the narrator takes a bit from life as definitely and completely as one would cut out a paper doll, trimming away all of the flimsy sheet excepting the figure. A section of real life is not so detached and finished, for the causes and consequences of it reach backward and forward and across the world. For that reason no mere story can ever be complete, no family history contain a beginning or an end.

This is the story of two midwestern families and the strange way in which their paths crossed. It begins in Illinois in the year 1866, and ends in Nebraska in the present one, severed from all that went before and all that will continue beyond--a thing of incompleteness.

Matthias Meier was twenty-one in that year of 1866, tall and stalwart of form, with only a healed red furrow across his upper left arm to show for the last day's fighting of his Illinois regiment.

We find him, now, sitting on a high stool before a sloping desk in the office of his uncle. Office, it may have been called, but the word was something of a misnomer, for it was no separate room, merely the end of a dingy salesroom in connection with the foundry of which his relative was sole owner.

The whole place gave an impression of scowling blackness. Iron coffee-pots, flat-irons, long-legged frying-pans and short-handled spiders occupied several shelves; and the larger utensils, huge kettles and boilers, stood on the floor in disarray, with plowshares shouldering them, as well as rough kegs containing nails of various sizes. At the opposite side of the long room, through an opening, one could see into the blacksmith shop with its anvil and multitudinous horseshoes hanging about on spikes as though this were the luckiest place in all Illinois. Iron was everywhere. Iron was king. One felt there was no other metal or substance in the world.

Matthias, now, was going over an old ledger in which accounts had been kept for a dozen years, and not very accurately either, he was deciding. A master-hand at the molding, his uncle was less punctilious about records of purchases and sales than his more mathematical-minded nephew.

Late morning sunshine filtering through a spattered and cobwebby window fell across the yellow pages of the book.

It was March, and apparently it was going to be an advanced one. The maples were feeling the push of the sap against the dark of their bodies. The hickory and oaks of the virgin timber-land not far away were vaguely responding to the stir of life. In the pulpiness of the bog the trailing arbutus would soon be showing its mauve-colored face,--on the hillside a thousand lavender crocuses spring forth to the call of the sun.

If Matthias Meier, too, vaguely felt the call and the push of the springtime, he was quite unaware of it, and merely checked and figured in the thumb-blackened and well-worn pages of the yellow book.

Up to this time, the room had been quiet save for the bumbling of a single advance guard of bottle-green flies and the sound of some one cutting timber far away. But into the stillness now came the creaking sound of wheels in the yard, the pull of horses' feet from the stickiness of mud and the lusty "whoa" of an unseen driver.

Matthias uncoiled his long legs from their crowded posture under the high table and swung himself off the stool. He even walked over to the opened door, although it went through his mind at the time that it was rather an undignified procedure to hurry out as though customers were so few and far between that they needed a committee of welcome.

A large and sandy-bearded man was swinging himself over the lumber-wagon's wheel preparatory to entering. But it was not at the man Matthias looked. For who, indeed, would look elsewhere with such a flower-like face before one as that of the girl in the green silk bonnet? Her full lips were rosy pink, and in their velvet blueness her wide eyes were like cornflowers. The braid of her soft hair, wound round her head and showing just at the edge of the bonnet, was the color of cornsilk before the summer sun has seared it.

Not that Matthias had time or inclination for any poetic rhapsodies. He merely took in the composite whole with a sensing of the girl's dainty perfection, and the fleeting thought that here was a little Dresden shepherdess.

The girl, in turn, may have been not unpleased at the appearance of the young foundryman, for Matthias was strong-featured and very good to look upon. But so intent was he just now upon the loveliness of the girl that he found himself staring a little stupidly at the man coming toward him.

"Good-morning to you, sir."

"Guten Morgen."

When he heard the German tongue, Matthias, too, turned to the language of his ancestors for, although English schooled, he could speak it readily. So in the German he asked politely: "What can I do for you?"

"I'm Wilhelm Stoltz," the man answered much more loudly than the short distance between the two demanded. "I want to look at the large kettles."

"Certainly. I'll be glad to show you." Matthias hesitated, and looked toward the pretty occupant of the wagon sitting rather like a little queen on her high and homely throne. "Perhaps the young lady would like to come and see them, too."

She smiled. "I can give help, Father,"--this, too, in the German tongue,--and began gathering her voluminous skirts in a little mittened hand.

"Nein," the father said brusquely. "It does not take two."

Matthias winced at the domineering tone and felt an embarrassment for the girl who in spite of her youth was apparently no child. So it was with relief and perhaps something more which he had not then analyzed that he heard the man call back over a huge shoulder: "Come, then, if you must." But even so, the father stomped his way on down a path toward the first of the pits, leaving the girl to climb over the high wheel as best she might.

At once Matthias sprang to the wagon and gave her his hand. So daintily small was she that a heady feeling of the strength of his masculinity surged over him as he assisted her to alight in a billowing of skirts.

"It is a nice day," he said a bit inanely in the German.

She nodded gayly: "Meadow larks are singing, and I smell spring."

Quite true. He noticed it for the first time. Meadow-larks were singing. You could smell spring.

He walked behind her into the dingy room, noting the pretty way she carried her shoulders and held her head. A patrician-looking little thing, not solid and big-boned like so many of the German girls thereabout.

Inside, the two customers moved among the pots and kettles, the nails and plowshares, the man stomping about noisily as though he would tell the business world that no one could pull wool over his eyes, the girl daintily holding back the dark cloth of her skirts and the wide fringe of her flowing shawl.

Each time the man asked the prices in the German tongue and was answered in kind by Matthias, he blustered: "Too much," or "The price . . . it is crazy," until Matthias heartily disliked him, so that if it had not been for the girl he would no doubt have lost a sale by some ill-advised retort.

He could read in the girl's heightened color her embarrassment, and so did his best to make her feel at ease. Once while the blustering parent was squeaking in his cowhide boots at the end of the long room, Matthias pointed out to her a special kettle. "This one I made myself," he said to her very low. "Mostly my uncle does the kettle molding."

The kettle was huge and faultless in its rounded symmetry. Matthias had been painstaking to make the wooden pattern absolutely right,--the inside mold called the core and the outside one called the jacket,--had poured molten metal carefully between them and covered the whole thoroughly with sand to keep every particle of air from it while it cooled.

"It is perfect." She glanced up shyly.

Vollkommen, was it? Matthias, looking down on her daintiness, thought she, too, was perfect. "I wish then, that this should be the one you choose. A perfect kettle for . . ." He wanted to say "a perfect little lady," but that would have been too bold, so he finished "for you." But, after all, he knew the words were synonymous.

She looked up again through long lashes. But this time a little twinkle invaded the blueness that lay behind them and a smile just faintly curled at the edge of her lips: "Do not, then, say to him that this is the one to buy," she suggested demurely.

And Matthias, sharing her little secret of filial disloyalty, grinned sympathetically and said: "That I will not."

"How much is this one? . . . and this? . . . and this?" Wilhelm Stoltz was asking.

And then Matthias Meier did a foolish and unaccountable thing. He priced the kettle which was of his own molding at a lower figure than his uncle had put upon it.

Stoltz looked them all over again, craftily, suspiciously, thumping their sides for the answering sound of the metal, and then said suddenly and loudly, as though Matthias might discover his mistake: "This one I take."

Matthias looked quickly at the girl and she gave him the ghost of a swiftly mischievous and understanding smile, so that he felt the same headiness of spirit and body which he had experienced before. For with no words she was saying: "I am glad it is your kettle." And Matthias was saying: "I made it for you before I had ever seen you." The messages were as plain as spoken language. No one knows how it can be transmitted,--this Esperanto of Youth. It just is so.

Wilhelm Stoltz took out a leather pouch, counted out the money into the palm of Matthias' hand, lifted the huge iron kettle as though he must get away with his bargain before any attempt to rectify a possible mistake had been made, and said loudly: "Come now, Amalia, we must go." He pronounced it A-moll-ea in the German way.

Coughing and wheezing and blustering, he stalked ahead of the two young people out to the wagon. And Matthias, heady and bold, was saying: "Your name, then, is Amalia?" He, too, pronounced it Amollea, letting his voice linger over the liquid syllables.

"Yes."

"It's . . . like . . . like a bit of music."

And when she smiled up at that, he asked quickly while there was time: "Where do you live?"

"Over the Plum Creek road way . . . on the far side of the Big Woods. But . . ."

But what, Amalia? Say it now before you have taken away with you that which you should not accept. Or have left behind you that which you should not give.

But Amalia did not say it. And when Matthias turned back into the dullness of the room magic gifts had been exchanged.

And so--such is life--had Wilhelm Stoltz driven up to Peter McClure's hardware store, or sent to Chicago, or even to Springfield for an iron kettle, or, for that matter, had Amalia but finished her sentence, the history of future lives and of a state might have been different. Some call it Providence, others Fate. But, Providence or Fate, "life is a loom weaving illusion."

As it was, Matthias stood looking a little bewildered now at the remaining kettles and the plowshares and the spiders, as ugly as ever, but somehow different. How queer that into so gloomy a place should have come something so shining-winged! He set himself again to the task of the book-work and, although the same sand-colored pages of a half-hour before confronted him, they were now strangely illustrated with shadowy half-pictures of blue eyes and rosy lips and hair the color of cornsilks before the summer sun has seared it.

After a time his uncle came in, a quick-moving little man with a bushy graying beard. "Any one here?"

"The Stoltzes . . . a man and daughter." Matthias realized that he was making the simple statement with a certain degree of consciousness.

"Hm! Wilhelm Stoltz, that would be! Up the Plum Creek way . . . one of the several Lutheran families scattered about."

Even now "up Plum Creek way," Amalia and her father in the high wagon were lumbering along toward their farm which was the first one just out of the Big Woods on the timber road.

The journey had taken much of the afternoon, for it lay over prairie and creek-beds, through muddy roads and timber-land, and the horses which they drove were heavy brood mares, their legs large and clumsy and shaggy with hair.

The two said little as they rode. Sometimes the father made a gruff comment on the stickiness of the mud, the amount of the last rainfall, or the slowness of the horses. Always it pertained to the material world and especially that part of it which lay close at hand. And always when he spoke Amalia agreed with him. For adverse opinions from his daughter or any other human were not welcomed. So, riding beside the bulky form of her father, Amalia lived in her own world, not always the material one and most definitely not that part of it which was close at hand.

Once she volunteered: "The young man . . . he was pleasant."

Her father grunted and said gruffly: "You will do well not to let your thoughts linger on strange young men." Immediately after which he turned toward her so abruptly that she jumped from the sheer fright that, having done this very thing, her thoughts were betraying her.

"You are not doing so?"

"Nein," Amalia said demurely.

But thoughts are acrobats, agile and quite often untrustworthy. So now, with impish disregard of the command, they hopped about quite easily. They asked Amalia innocently why the nice young man wanted to know where she lived. They suggested with subtle art the possibility that he would try to find out. And then when the gruff person at her side questioned their activities they urged her quickly to answer "Nein."

It was only in the late afternoon when the heavy horses turned into the barnyard of the Stoltz farm, that the exigency of a quick change of dress, the gathering of the eggs, and the planning of the supper brought all the vagrant thoughts into subjection and made them subservient to matters more practical, that Amalia ceased dwelling on the day's experience.

The Stoltz farm-house was modest but as neat and shining as white paint and green blinds could make it. There were no pigs or chickens boldly running about as there were at many of the neighbors'. Pigs were in their pens and chickens in their yards, both conditions of which were made possible by fences formed of small hickory posts for the pigs and of tall willow saplings set close together for the chickens. That the fence of the chicken yard was now putting forth faint green shoots did not detract from its utility. On a sloping cellar door, scrubbed like a bake-board, sat the milk crocks sweetening in the sunshine. Currant bushes and gooseberry bushes nearby, looking ready to burst their tightly closed buds, held countless freshly washed dish-towels. Lilac bushes which were beginning to feel the stir of sap were near the front door, and a rose vine, brown yet from the winter's sleep, trailed over the doorway.

Amalia coming into the kitchen door now, sighed that there were to be changes so soon. Inside the house, thinking of those changes, she looked about her as with the eye of a stranger. She saw the shining blackness of the cook-stove (the neighbor Kratzes still cooked on an open fire), the scrubbed table with its checkered cloth, the tin brush-and-comb holder on the wall with the mirror above, the clean wooden pail of water with its gourd dipper on the shelf, the rag rugs--Oh, it was a pleasant house. The cellar still held many Schinken from the butchering, stone jars of Äpfelbutter and Pflaumenbutter. No old housewife--not even Mrs. Kratz or Mrs. Rhodenbach--had put by more food last fall than she.

There was soon supper. She and her father and her brother Fritz, fifteen years old, sat down together to the Metwurst and the Kartoffel Pfannkuchen. They were Fritz's favorites,--those pork-sausages and potato-pancakes.

Wilhelm Stoltz spoke very little while attending to the primary object of eating. When he did it was about the stock, the shoeing of a horse, and the assignment of Fritz's work for the morrow. The purchase of the iron kettle, too, came in for some explanation to Fritz,--the bargain he had made and the fact that the young man must have made a mistake in the price.

This set all the little acrobatic thoughts somersaulting again in Amalia's pretty head. And, later, if they mischievously put on their tumbling act several times during the ensuing week, who was there to say the performance in that year of 1866 could not be transmitted through Youth's own particular short waves down through the damp, dark timber road and across the prairie?

For on Sunday, Matthias Meier, with clean-shaven face and in his best suit, mounted his uncle's saddle-horse, Trixie, and turned her head toward Plum Creek and the Big Woods.