Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 17

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But Eric did not go immediately to bed.

A leisurely inventory of his grandfather’s stock in the attic room assured him that everything was there intact. The shelves still held the yellowed almanacs on which Doctor Edvard, with robust comments, had noted the superstitions of an era, bodings which embraced every sort of catastrophe from roup in chickens to earthquakes in Siam—the sere and lonely-odored almanacs published sixty years ago by a patent medicine company which offered a cure for all known diseases, including ear-boils and the seven year itch; his letters, his clippings, but above all his own journal beginning with a time when the state was timidly feeling its way to power.

After this excursion into the hallowed and redolent dust of the past, which tomorrow’s Friday might easily blow to bits by the means of a single shell dropped on an American boat idling in foreign waters, Eric went back down to the kitchen and washed the supper dishes. It was with a glow of pleasure that he found Libby Kerr’s copper sheet with its hooks for pots and pans still on the wall beside the stove. Libby—that conscientiously disapproving Scotch woman—what had become of her, at her sister’s home in Chicago? He should have looked her up, he thought with contrition, the last time he visited that city. She had tanned his bottom for him many a time, twenty years ago, and the memory of her still roused within him a fondness not untinctured with awe. If he ever did see her again he would tell her that another woman was keeping her copper sheet as brightly polished as she herself had done.

When he went to bed at last he fell profoundly asleep with the old and well-remembered tuning of the wind under the eaves.

In the morning, Andrew Clarence had been up for two hours or more before Eric rose. A place for one had been set on the kitchen table, as neatly as though a woman had arranged it, and cereal and coffee were being kept hot at the back of the stove.

When he had eaten—with some feeling of embarrassment at having put Clarence to trouble on his behalf—Eric went out into the sunlight that cut a broad swath between the orchard and the farm buildings. At the peace and orderliness of the scene he was filled with a sense of well-being and gratitude. Back to the land, and all that! Perfervid harangues by politicians who wouldn’t recognize a cupful of top-soil if they saw it, he had thought not so long ago. But why not? Back to something that had air over it, anyhow! The very recollection of classrooms stifled him.

Andrew Clarence met him while he was on his way down to the old well. By daylight the man did not appear as strikingly miscast for his job as he had when Eric first met him. His blue overalls and rough shirt, and the sun on his strongly weathered aquiline face, were pleasantly reassuring.

“Good morning!” Clarence greeted him, with a slight bow in which there was deference but no want of dignity. “I hope you slept well?”

“Like a top!” Eric replied. “I didn’t even hear you come in. I did well by myself at breakfast, too. You shouldn’t have gone to so much bother—”

“Nothing at all! I suppose you’d like to see how things look around the place. If you’ll just come along with me—we’ve done our best, I think, to keep up appearances, as they say—although sometimes it has been hard going.”

The buildings, the farm equipment, were in respectable repair, although Clarence pointed out many desirable improvements that were wanting for lack of funds. Rigid economy, he declared, had been necessary in the conduct of the farm, but he had been fortunate enough so far to do a bit better than make ends meet. There was no smugness in his simple statement that during the good years, while other farmers were recklessly buying luxuries on credit, he had denied himself even modest comforts so that when ill times came he had had a little in the bank to see him through. He did not refer to his ambition to own Solbakken.

It was with what Eric perceived to be just pride that Clarence took him through the big blue-gray barn where his livestock was housed. These twelve glossy sleek Jerseys had been taken off pasture as soon as the grass became too dry, and they were being fed, Eric was given to understand, according to the most approved formulae. This was a dairying country and there was economy in feeding only the best. But of course everything was a gamble, and another year might prove that his ideas were not only expensive but unwise. On the other hand, he might find himself able to buy a new car, although so long as he could tinker his old one into running order it made little difference to him what it looked like.

Besides the cattle, Andrew kept sheep, some poultry, a dozen hogs and four work horses. He had had a secondhand tractor, but it had proven too expensive to run. Eric listened attentively to his talk and in a short time was convinced that Solbakken was being handled with an efficiency, conscientiousness and devotion that would have delighted those proud Stenes who thought this land of theirs of some importance. In no other way could it have been made to pay the rent and the wages and keep of two men, with anything left to support Andrew Clarence and his wife. The help, Clarence explained, did not stay on through the winter. From the first of December on there was no more work than he and his wife could manage between them.

“If I could afford it,” he said regretfully, while they made their way across to the old farm site, “I’d keep the men over the winter. As it is, I’ve had them here a deal longer than necessary. I have an arrangement with a friend of mine who runs a box factory in the city. He takes them on when they leave here—as non-union labor, of course. Times are bitter for men like Bob Gifford and Lucky Best. They are transients, they go about the country picking up a precarious living—outcasts, you might say, because they are trained in no special line, and they are both over forty. But what are you going to do with men like them?”

Eric thought of the bumptious Gifford, and of Lucky Best who was one notch above a moron. To Andrew Clarence, with his simple concern, these men were merely two out of the millions of unfortunates whom fate had treated shabbily.

“It’s hard to know what to do with them,” Eric admitted. “In the present social order—”

“The present social disorder!” Clarence laughed. “The earth will become so worthless soon that it won’t mean anything for the meek like Lucky Best and Gifford to inherit it.”

Eric was astonished. It had been men like Andrew Clarence who had fomented the great rebellions of history. Simple, peace-loving dreamers whose eloquence had flamed at the exact moment to set the world on fire.

They had come to a tangle of dried blackberry briars and nettle and plantain, beneath which there was what seemed to be a stern hummock covered with bristles of stubborn yellow grass. Eric knew what it was, and nodded without speaking.

“You see what I mean,” said Clarence. “There is your grandfather’s sod house. It looks as if a thumb had pressed it down, doesn’t it? It will take a hand to raise it up!”

Eric turned and looked at him. “Do you believe there is such a hand anywhere in this country today?”

Clarence smiled, his head thoughtfully inclined. “Yes—I do. It’s the average hand—the hand that makes mistakes, like waving a flag and applauding a name and casting a vote for a bad senator. But it is a hand to fear, nevertheless—there are strong muscles in the arm above it!”

“Is that the way you talk to your—to the people at your meeting last night, for instance?” Eric asked, his curiosity mounting rapidly. His eyes were fixed upon a mossy slab which might have been the lintel of the sod-house doorway, he couldn’t be sure now; even when he had last seen it it was falling apart.

The intensity left Andrew Clarence’s voice suddenly and he spoke deprecatingly. “I—I don’t know, really. I do the best I can, but I never seem to be able to look back and tell what effect my words have had. Very little, I’m afraid. You see, a number of our people are on relief. If I can do something to raise their spirits and keep up their self-respect, I feel it is worth-while. And I believe the Beacon Thursday nights are helping them—the singing and the talking and—” He broke off abruptly. “Perhaps you’d like to visit with us some Thursday night, Mr. Stene. We’d like to have you come and—”

“I think I might enjoy it,” Eric said, his heart warming unaccountably toward this strange man. “But let’s drop the mister between us, eh? Our first names are handier.”

Andrew nodded shyly.

They went on to the log house tucked in among the fruit trees Uncle Johannes had planted in 1910. It was in fair condition: it had been used for storage, a window and a door would have to be replaced, but the two rooms could be made habitable without much outlay of time or money.

“Andrew,” said Eric, “this is where I’d like to put up for a while. I might try working a little, if I have any work left in me.”

“I had already thought of it,” Andrew replied simply. “It’s the very place for you. Lydie has never had time to keep it in the order it deserves. We call it the ‘orchard house.’ We can move all this junk over to that shed on the other side of the silo—or you can just put it out into the yard and the boys can tote it away.”

“I think I can handle it all very easily myself,” Eric told him. “If I need any help, I’ll call on you or one of the boys.”

He spent the rest of the day transferring the contents of the “orchard house” to the shed, washing the floors and the old white-washed walls, and cementing in the loose stones of the fireplace. The flue, to his surprise and satisfaction, drew as well as it had done while Uncle Johannes had been alive. The log house had been a retreat for old Johannes, who had always looked with disfavor upon the frame building which had seemed to him a frivolous modern conceit.

The day had turned from unseasonable warmth to rain, a change of the wind chilling the air. But the dreary twilight did not dampen the exhilaration Eric had begun to feel the moment he had commenced this homely task of restoring the orchard house to habitability. If anything, it evoked only the more strongly the persistent spirit of these walls, which seemed to challenge him and his arid nihilism as well as it did the destructive forces of nature. The undiminished appeal of those courageous pioneers whose ghosts lurked here still was banal enough, he knew, and yet he found himself surrendering to that appeal with something not unlike elation. It had been so long since anything had really gripped him! What a laugh this would give Natalie Monroe, if she could see him standing, mop in hand, listening rhapsodically to autumn rain on a roof that had seen more than sixty years of disintegration in the human ideals over which it had been built!

Andrew stopped in once or twice during the day to see how he was progressing. He offered Eric a kerosene stove and suggested the installing of an inexpensive kerosene heater to keep an even warmth in the place. Tomorrow he would help Eric move whatever furniture he needed out of the big house, but he thought it better to wait until his wife returned before attempting any decorative frills like doilies or mats. Lydie had odds and ends stored away, and she had a knack of running things up on the sewing machine in the twinkling of an eye. The prideful manner in which Andrew spoke of his wife filled Eric with misgivings; the woman was no doubt one of those determined females who refused to be stumped by anything—from popovers to classical music. He could eliminate her nicely, however, from his life at Solbakken.