Читать книгу Fruits of the Earth - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 5

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A year had gone by. Again Abe Spalding was in town, driving a team of rangy bronchos hitched to a topless buggy. He had taken a can of cream to the station, to be shipped to the city. Every motion of his betrayed hurry. Having dispatched the can, he drove to the Vanbruik store and, among the many other teams that were slanting back into the road, tied his horses to the rail of steel piping which ran along the sidewalk in front of the windows.

As he entered the swing-door, clad in a dark-coloured suit of combination overalls--jacket and trousers in one--and began to make his way through the crowd--for the store was flourishing and attracted custom by special Saturday sales, one of which was in progress--the manager of the establishment espied him from his vantage-point on the mezzanine landing of the flight of stairs leading to the upper story where furniture, rugs, and similar goods were displayed.

This manager, Mr. Diamond, was a smart young man of good build and appearance, well dressed, with a dash of metropolitan refinement, his blue-serge trousers being sharply creased, his linen spotless, his face freshly shaved to the quick. That he went about in shirt-sleeves seemed done, not to spare his coat or to make him comfortable, but to put himself on a level with the crowd. He was a shrewd business man, willing to give liberal discounts for the sake of a quick turnover; yet hard to deal with when a note given in payment was not redeemed in time or when a long-term credit was asked for. To such pleas the doctor was less inaccessible; he had been known to take over a debt owing to the store, accepting a personal note and allowing it to be forgotten. Mr. Diamond's motto was "Cash and Carry"; though with such as worried more over their debts than their bills receivable he urged the convenience of a charge-account. To travelling salesmen he said, "We discount our bills." He would not have been out of place in a large city store; but this rural establishment he might own one day.

As he caught sight of Abe, he came running down the stairs. That Abe was singled out for personal attention may have been due to the fact that he was the owner's brother-in-law; but it was sufficiently explained by the consideration that he had one of the largest and most reliable monthly accounts, which he settled with "cream cheques."

Mr. Diamond flashed a gold-filled smile. "Anything for you. Abe?"

"Yes," Abe replied and produced a slip of paper on which Ruth had written out a list of her needs. "Have these put into my buggy. The bronchos, right at the door." The better customers' horses were known to the clerks as well as the customers themselves.

"I'll have it attended to at once." And Mr. Diamond held up a finger to one of the white-frocked clerks.

"The doctor at the store?" Abe asked.

"I don't think so. He'll be at the house."

But the manager led the way to look about, for the store was too large to be swept by a glance. Abe's physical superiority reduced the other man to a mere satellite. He himself looked like a fact of nature.

They made the round without finding the doctor. Abe stood irresolute. In the course of the year he had learned not to resent his brother-in-law's ways any longer. But now he half blamed his sister for the fact that she and Ruth did not pull together.

"I am going to the post office," he said at last. "I won't be back. I am in a hurry." He always was.

"No need." Mr. Diamond nodded. "You'll find your things in the box."

Abe passed through a door and went briskly along the sidewalk fronting a second, much smaller store conducted by a tiny, square-bodied Jew. Crossing the second street, the far corner of which was occupied by a hardware store, he reached, a few hundred yards beyond, a white frame building in which the post office was housed.

Like every place accessible to the Saturday crowd, the public room was filled with people who stood about conversing, the weekly trip to town being made quite as much for the sake of the social intercourse it afforded as for the purpose of trading. All these men came from south of "the Line." It would have been easy for Abe to strike up acquaintances and to have himself admitted to the general conversation about the weather, the prospects of the crops, and provincial or municipal politics. But he merely nodded; and, under a general cessation of the buzzing talk, a few of those present silently and casually returned his nod. As if to expedite matters, they stepped aside and opened a lane for him to pass on to the wicket.

The reason for this reception was that Abe had not only made no advances but had even met such advances as were made to him with an attitude of reserve. He was considered proud; and he did look down on people satisfied with a success which secured a mere living. His goal was farther removed than theirs, and the very fact that he had so far realized few of his ambitions made him the more reticent; he was not going to allow himself to be judged by what he had done rather than by what he intended to do.

Having received from the aged postmaster that bundle of circulars which constituted his weekly mail, he left as briskly as he had entered.

He went to his sister's house, where Mary met him at the door.

"You'll stay for a while? I'll make a cup of tea?"

"I just want to see Charles for a moment."

"He's in the study." Mary looked queerly at her brother. When she had so much wished to have him in the district, he kept aloof!

The study was a small room opposite the dining-room. In contrast to the rest of the house its floor was bare; the general impression it made was that of an untidy litter. Its walls were lined with unstained bookshelves made by a local carpenter; the furniture consisted of a table strewn with papers, a roll-top desk, and two Morris chairs in one of which the doctor was sitting, a book in his hand; the seat of the other was encumbered with pamphlets and letters.

As Abe entered, Dr. Vanbruik looked at him over his glasses, dropped the hand holding the book, bent forward to sweep the encumbrances of the other chair to the floor, and said unsmilingly: "Sit down, Abe."

If the doctor's whole physique was small, his face was diminutive. It looked contracted, as if its owner lived in a perpetual concentration of thought. His dark clothes, though old, still bore traces of having been well tailored; but the creases at shoulders, elbows, and knees were worn in beyond the possibility of being removed by pressing. He had his right foot drawn up on his left knee and, with his free hand, was nursing its ankle.

As Abe sat down, there was a moment's silence.

"Hall's ready to sell," Abe said at last. "He's entitled to prove up if he gets the buildings he needs."

The doctor nodded. "You know my views. The farmer who isn't satisfied to be a farmer makes a mistake. You want to be a landowner on a large scale. You'll find you can't get the help you will need. At least you won't be able to hold it."

Abe gave a short laugh. "Machines."

"Well, we might thresh it all out again. It would lead nowhere."

"What I want to know is this," Abe said. "I could put up the buildings for Hall; or I could buy them and haul them out. But it's illegal for him to pledge the place before he has his patent. You have known him in a business way. Is he going to do what he promises when I can't force him?"

"No. You want his farm. If he owes you money when he proves up, he will sell to the man who offers cash, if he can find him."

"I offer him eight hundred dollars."

"Don't pay a cent till he turns his title over."

"He must have that house, worth three hundred dollars. And meanwhile he must live."

"Get more work out of him."

"That's your advice, is it?"

"If you must have more land, that's the way to go about it. As for Hall, I wouldn't trust him across the road."

Abe rose. "That's what I wanted to know. I must be going."

As he passed through the living-room, Mary stopped her brother. "You won't stay? Not for half an hour?"

"I can't. Work's waiting."

"It's Saturday. Other farmers have time."

"They!"

"How's the baby?"

"All right as far as I know."

"Ruth?"

"The same."

Mary stood and looked at him. Abe laughed, patted her back, bent down to kiss her, and turned to the door.

As he backed out of the row of vehicles in front of the store he looked at his watch. He had acquired the trick of timing himself on his drives. When the trail was dry, he tried to beat his own record, cutting off seconds from the time required.

He was sitting bolt upright and held his lines tight; the wheels bounded over the road. It took him twenty-four minutes to cover the four miles to the turn west. Having made the turn, he used the whip, just flicking the horses' rumps.

As he approached his claim he looked about. What he had achieved in a year might justify pride. There was a two-roomed shack, built like a shed. East of it lay a pile of poplar boles, hauled from the river, a distance of twenty-five miles, in winter; there was a year's fuel left, well-seasoned now. Along the west edge of the yard stood a frame stable large enough to house six horses and four cows, but too small right now. The yard was fenced with woven wire; and a strip thirty-two feet wide, inside the fence, was ploughed and kept black, to be planted with four rows of trees next spring. South of the stable loomed two large haystacks, cut of the wild prairie grass west of Hall's. North of the barn there was a huge water pool, forty by a hundred feet, fifteen feet deep. The whole south line, too, was fenced; with barbed wire only, it was true; but the posts were of imported cedar; and along the other lines posts and coils of wire were laid out, the posts all pointed, ready to be driven into the ground with a wooden maul after the next soaking rain. North of the yard lay the field, forty acres of good wheat. The remaining hundred-odd acres were all broken; black as velvet they stretched away as far as one could see. That being so, Abe needed more land; with more land he would need help; a good thing that so far he had a thriftless neighbour willing to work for wages rather than to attend to his own claim.

Abe had lived through one spring flood. For three weeks in April Ruth had never left the square plot about the shack where he had piled the earth dug from the pool, thus securing the house from being invaded by water and doing away with the eyesore of the raw clay at the same time; he himself had had to don rubber hip-boots to cross his yard. But the flood had run out in time for seeding. One trouble was that the water had spread the seeds of foul weeds all over his land. Where the prairie remained unbroken, the grass had held its own, apart from small patches where skunk-tail had gained a foothold. But on the breaking where his crop was seeded, a damnable mixture of charlock, thistle, and tumbling mustard had sprung up with the wheat. These pests the water had brought from the older settlements to the west, in the famous Torquay district, south-east of Grand Pré Plains where, so they said, farming was already becoming a problem.

One other change Abe noted as he drove into his yard. South-west, seven miles away as the crow flies, a new grain elevator was being constructed, at a flag station called Bays, after the oldest settler south of the Somerville Line. That building, with glistening planks still unpainted, was a reminder that the country was being settled; land was going to rise in value; it was time to secure one's share of the prairie; no longer did a half section seem such a bountiful slice of the universe to build a mansion on.

As he drove to the house, Abe looked again at his watch. He had made the trip in thirty-three minutes and thirty-five seconds, cutting twenty-five seconds off his last record.

Ruth, in a long, dark print dress, was standing in the door, a smile on her pretty face and a child a few months old in her arms. She was not exactly small; but she was getting plump; and the plumper she grew the less tall she seemed.

Abe answered her smile by a nod, alighted, and at once carried the box with her groceries and empty cream can into the house. Then, from old habit, he glanced at the sun; and without a word, he took the baby, helped the young woman to a seat in the buggy, and, returning the child to her keeping, reached for the lines to drive to the stable.

In front of the open slide-doors he unhitched, allowing the horses to go to the huge trough of corrugated iron which reached through the yard-fence into the field beyond. Between trough and pool stood the pump, which he worked vigorously for five minutes. When the bronchos had drunk their fill, he entered the stable and stuffed their mangers with hay; having tied them, he slipped the harness off their backs. Next, he filled the mangers and feed-boxes of the remaining stalls and finally went to the door where he stood for several minutes, one hand raised to its frame, shouting at the top of his voice, "Come on--come on--come on!"

This was the signal for the work-horses and the cows to return to the stable; and since they were always fed a measure of oats and a handful of shorts, a scarcely visible cluster of animals began at once to move from the open prairie towards the farmstead. As soon as Abe saw that they were on their way, he ceased calling, turned back into the stable and turned the drivers out into the yard. There being no room for all his stock in the barn, he had to feed in relays. Then he went to the gate and waited for the rest of the horses to come. Even his waiting he seemed to do briskly, calling again for the horses when they lingered to snatch another bite of good grass. At last they started their nightly comedy of a struggle between their love of freedom and their love of oats. Invariably the desire of the belly conquered; and, leaving the more deliberate cows behind, they entered the yard in a galloping rush, tossing their heads, and raising their tails. The cows followed at a walk, breaking into a short run only as they passed the master who impatiently closed the gate behind them.

All this while Ruth had been sitting in the buggy and looking on. A somewhat empty smile never left her lips. Was this routine of the farm still new enough to her to retain its charm? Or was she so intensely in love with her vigorous and swift-moving husband that she was unwilling to lose a minute of his company?

Abe was occasionally conscious of a twinge of impatience with her--or was it with himself? He would have liked to say something; what was there to say? He had tried to speak of his plans; the topic, endlessly repeated, had exhausted itself. Sometimes she looked as though she were waiting; for what? He was doing his best.

The milking next, for evening was coming fast. Meanwhile, in the house, supper was waiting; and Abe was conscious of being hungry.

Ruth descended from the buggy and stood in the door, looking on. A year ago she had tried her hand at the traditional woman's task, with poor success. Laughing at herself, she had given it up; and Abe preferred to do all outside work himself.

Together they went to the house, Abe carrying the brimming pails. At the table, nothing was being said, either, beyond such brief words as were called for by the task in hand. Abe was thinking of his coming negotiations with Hall; Ruth--of what?

Supper over, Abe separated the cream while Ruth cleared the table and washed the dishes. It was seven o'clock; but the sun was still high. Abe carried the skimmed milk to the pig-pen beyond the pool.

When he returned, he stopped in the centre of the yard. "Coming out?" he called to Ruth who was still in the shack.

She came to the door. "Might as well."

Might as well! Yet every bit of work was Abe's.

They went to the field where the wheat stood knee-high, being in the shot-blade; and for two hours they went about pulling weeds; bright-yellow charlock and paler tumbling mustard. As always, Abe worked like a whirlwind; Ruth languidly, she being pregnant. Abe kept slapping neck and hands, for mosquitoes were bad. Ruth laughed, immune.

Suddenly Abe straightened and listened. "By jingo!" he exclaimed.

"What is it?" Ruth asked; for she, too, had caught a faint pulsation in the air.

"The ditchers," Abe said. "Come on!" And, turning, he ran for the yard, leaving Ruth behind.

The sun was almost setting; and as they passed through the gate where Abe had waited, they saw, straight west, little puffs of steam and smoke rising into the clear evening air.

"It is the ditching machine," Abe said. "They'll get past here after all this summer. I'll hitch up to-morrow; we'll have a look at them."

He took Ruth's arm and, bending down to kiss her, led her back to the field where they rogued for another hour till it was too dark to distinguish weeds from grain. The weeds Abe piled in the margin, at right angles to a rope which he had brought and by the help of which he swung the huge bundle on his back. Thus, through the dusk, they returned to the yard where Abe kindled a fire with chips from the wood pile, smothering the flames with the green weeds till they disengaged a dense, acrid smoke which dispelled the increasingly troublesome mosquitoes. Ruth brought two chairs from the shack; and they sat down in the smudge, Abe in the thickest of it, Ruth near the margin.

They had been sitting there for half an hour, Abe yawning with that abandon which comes from overwhelming drowsiness, when, from the trail beyond the fence, a voice sounded across: "Seen the ditchers?"

Abe and Ruth gave a start. "Yes," Abe said. "Heard and seen them."

"Both?"

"What do you mean?"

"They're working on both lines," said Hall's voice. "They're nearer on the south line."

"Come," Abe said to Ruth; and again he took her arm.

"Do you mean to say they work at night?" Abe asked at the gate.

Hall laughed and spat. "They had better. They've contracted to finish the work before freeze-up."

The bright glare of a headlight was visible against the dark sky from which the pallor of the sunset had vanished; and farther south a second similar light pointed eastward, less brightly, for these three humans were not in the line of its focus.

"That there machine," Hall said, pointing ineffectively with a chewed-off pipe-stem, "is two miles south. It's the bigger one; they work three steam-shovels there; that's why they've overtaken this here devil. They've shipped in two carloads of forriners, Ukarainians, dodgast them. I was thinking of asking fer a job my own self. But the white man don't stand a chancet in this country any longer."

"That reminds me," Abe said. "I'm going to build a granary. You can get a job right here."

"All right, bo'. What about that there house you were talking of?"

"I'll get you the house. Trouble is, I'll have to owe you the money it costs. You have to sign under oath that the house is yours."

Hall chuckled. "So long as I gets my money when I pull out."

"You don't need to pull out till you've got it."

"That's so. It's all right then. I'm danged if I stays on this prairie a day longer than I've got to."

Three, four miles to the west, lights shifted, crossing the pointed finger of the headlight. The night seemed to intensify into a more palpable blackness; and the pulse of the engine ceased. Startlingly, two or three of the movable lights were reversed, pointing converging beams backward, against the face of the machine that was straddling the ditch it excavated. Magically, it seemed drawn nearer.

"Something wrong," Hall said, spitting. "Lighting up for repairs."

They stood and stared but could not, of course, see what was going on. The second outfit was visibly forging ahead. Whenever Abe looked away for a second, he noticed the progress made in the interval.

"That there outfit," Hall said, "lifts three yards of dirt at a bite; the ditch is forty feet wide and thirty deep; but that there monster digs it at the rate of two rods an hour. Twenty rods in a ten-hour day; that's two miles a month. They're speeding her up now to five miles a month, what with night work and more help. They've got to finish her, or they lose their deposit."

"That so? How do you know?" Abe felt Ruth pressing against him.

Hall, however, did not take the slightest notice of her. Again he spat. "I've been down. Foreman told me."

"Well," Abe said, turning away, "I was thinking of hitching up and driving down myself to-morrow, it being Sunday."

"No work on Sundays," Hall said. "Stop at midnight. Wait till Monday."

Abe was fingering the gate. "No time on weekdays."

"You're in a blasted hurry. Learn better by-m-by. When do I start on that there granary of yours?"

"Report on Monday. We'll haul the lumber . . . Good night."

And once more husband and wife sat in silence within the smudge till the excitement of the trip to the road had worn off and drowsiness reconquered body and mind.