Читать книгу God's Green Country - Ethel M. Chapman - Страница 6

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“He was a boy whose emotions were hidden under mountains of reserve; who could have stood up to be shot more easily than he could have said: ‘I love you.’. … I have wondered what might have been if some one—some understanding person had recognized his gift, or if he himself as a boy had once dared to cut free. We do not know; we do not know the tragedy of our nearest friend.”—David Grayson.

An atmosphere like this does not nurture the most outwardly genial qualities in a boy. When Billy was sixteen he had encased his real personality in a reserve which few people could penetrate. The neighbors admitted that he was civil and steady, but they generally agreed that he was sullen. The premature work and responsibility of the farm may have stiffened his body and hardened his outlook, but it had not affected his growth. In spite of everything, sixteen years found him something of a giant with splendid physical possibilities waiting development, but for the present leaving him awkward, painfully conscious of his size, ashamed of his ignorance, galling under the tyranny and hopelessness of his environment, but keeping his reflections largely to himself. His saving force was his inherited ambition. It never let him rest, but since all the experience of his life had been gleaned, like the steadily decreasing crops, from the unproductive acres of the Swamp Farm, his ambition lacked direction. On rare occasions he confided secret plans to his mother, but the plans were never practical and there was no prospect of ever working them out. A few books, good and otherwise, that had found their way into the house, were the best information he had of the world outside; but the “good” books his mother had brought from home years ago, and they dealt with problems of a different age altogether, problems solved and forgotten long since; the “other” books had mostly been left by an itinerant hired man, and they were far too new. With it all there was a growing discontent, discontent of the divine order really, but showing itself sometimes in very human guise.

An unrest, a discontent like this, is like to gnaw the heart out of a boy, leaving him a hollow reed to be played upon by any wind that blows. Out in the great open spaces of the green country, of course, we wouldn’t expect to find any insidious influence to mar a boy’s future, yet it came in one of the commonest ways.

In need of money to meet a debt to his incubator firm, it occurred to Dan that the swamp was full of cedar posts. It meant a lot of work to get the posts out and he had no fondness for the task of laying roads through a boggy stretch of woods and putting in the long hours teaming the posts to the railroad, but Billy could do one man’s work, and for the rest he could pick up a force in town. The men were an unsteady crowd. They didn’t care to work many days at a time, and invariably left when they were most needed. Then one day a man called looking for a job. He was a Hercules for strength, quick and sure at his work as a professional lumberman. At night he turned a line of handsprings across the barn floor, and did a series of acrobatic stunts over the brace rod, calculated to fill the spectators with awe and amazement. Billy watched him with more amusement than admiration in his steady brown eyes; athletics had never been given a prominent place in his interests.

The man boarded in the house, of course. He was courteous and considerate in ways the other men had never thought of. He never passed the woodpile without bringing in an armful. He refused to leave his washing to be done. He stayed out of the house as much as possible—and Billy stayed with him. From the first time she saw him, Mary begged Dan to send him away.

Even when he had gone, she wasn’t reassured. Billy seemed different. He seemed uneasy and secretive. Often under the questioning of her kind eyes he would redden painfully and look away, and knowing that a boy of sixteen is getting beyond his mother’s understanding, she never forced her inquiries further.

Then the thing she had dreaded came. One bitter February morning, while she slept, Billy came quietly downstairs. In the kitchen the lamp was turned low, and he peered across at the clock. It wasn’t quite three. He listened for a second to the two regular breathings in the little bedroom, and it seemed that one of them stopped. The thought that perhaps she suspected him made him feel like a thief, but, he reflected, when she got the note under his pillow she would know that he had meant it for the best, that he would come back, sometime. The thought of what she would have to endure in the while between almost made him give it up, but he reasoned that this was just what he had done times before. It was just “drivelling weakness,” as Lou had said. He looked around miserably, wishing he could do something to make her understand; that in some way he could soften the hurt of the discovery in the morning. Standing, shivering in the freezing kitchen, he realized that she had to endure this atmosphere for an hour or two every morning, and at the risk of being heard he lighted the fire. Then he picked up the tightly rolled grain bag that contained his worldly possessions, and went out. For a long time after, he remembered the frosty squeak of the door, the snapping of the frost, like pistols, in the trees, and the daylight peering cold and cheerless into the steely sky, as things following, watching and accusing him.

It was a short, quick run to the railroad to catch the way-freight laboring up to town, a wait of two hours or more around the sheds there, then a ride on the local express to the Junction, where Lou was to meet him. The ride on the freight and the waiting at the sheds attracted no attention, and as he slid into the end seat of the passenger coach he was glad to find that there was no one there whom he knew. The only person in the car who seemed awake was a young man who looked steadily out of the window and seemed so indifferent to everything around him that Billy felt no fear of his curiosity. When he looked up some minutes later he caught the quiet, genial, interested gaze square on his face, and the young man rose and came down the aisle towards him.

It wasn’t just that the young man wanted a diversion. He may have looked bored enough while he stared out of the window at the light breaking over the frozen fields, but that was because he was a little discouraged with his job. He had been trying to figure out approximately how many bushels of grain his formalin solution had saved for the county that year, and whether all this extension work of the Department of Agriculture was worth while. He was on his way now to begin a short course with the young men farther up the county, in the intervals of which he might be required to test the milk from a few dairy herds, secure a few hired men for the neighborhood, or talk about revenues from chickens, or strawberries to a gathering of women. It occurred to him that the boy who had just come in might be going up to join the class, and because he liked boys as individuals, and because there was something unusually promising in the keen, serious face and striking physique of this young man, he came to talk to him.

Billy had never heard of an agricultural short course. He had seen the agricultural office in town, but he had a very vague idea of what the “district representative” was doing there. He listened to the explanation of the short course with interest; then, as man to man, told candidly what he thought of farming and, naturally enough, why he was leaving it.

The Representative didn’t ask any questions, but he gathered that Billy was leaving home for the first time, to begin his independent career in a lumber-camp somewhere. He also saw that under the retiring, self-conscious exterior, was a live fuse of ambition, and an unmistakable pride.

“It won’t get you anywhere,” he said, when Billy asked what he thought of the lumber camp as a beginning, “and if you stay long enough, you won’t care whether it does or not. We’re having a course next month not so far from your place; come to that and see if you can’t find something worth while around home. Come to the office on Saturday and I’ll tell you of a dozen fellows who have made good with a worse start than you have.”