Читать книгу The Wall Between - Sara Ware Bassett - Страница 6

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Within the confines of his own home Martin Howe, as Ellen Webster asserted, was a czar. Born with the genius to rule, he would probably have fought his way to supremacy had struggle been necessary. As it was, however, no effort was demanded of him, for by the common consent of an adoring family, he had been voluntarily elevated to throne and scepter. He was the only boy, the coveted gift long denied parents blessed with three daughters and in despair of ever possessing a son.

What rejoicings heralded his advent! Had half the treasures an eager father and mother prayed Heaven to grant been bestowed upon the child, he would unquestionably have become an abnormality of health, wealth, and wisdom. But Destiny was too farseeing a goddess to allow her neophyte to be spoiled by prosperity. Both his parents died while 21 Martin was still a pupil at the district school, and the lad, instead of going to the city and pursuing a profession, as had been his ambition, found himself hurried, all unequipped, uneducated and unprepared, into the responsibilities of managing the family household.

Farming was not the calling he would have chosen. He neither liked it, nor was he endowed with that intuitive sixth sense on which so many farmers rely for guidance amid the mazes of plowing and planting. By nature, he was a student. The help he had sporadically given his father had always been given rebelliously and been accompanied by the mental resolve that the first moment escape was possible, he would leave the country and its nagging round of drudgery and take up a broader and more satisfying career.

To quote Martin’s own vernacular, farming was hard work—damned hard work. It was not, however, the amount of toil it involved that daunted him, but its quality. He had always felt a hearty and only thinly veiled contempt for manual labor; moreover, he considered life in a small village an extremely provincial one.

It was just when he was balancing in his mind the relative advantages of becoming a 22 doctor or a lawyer, and speculating as to which of these professions appealed the more keenly to his fancy, that Fate intervened and relieved him of the onerousness of choosing between them.

Martin could have viewed almost any other vocation than that of farmer through a mist of romance, for he was young, and for him, behind the tantalizingly veiled future, there still moved the shadowy forms of knights, dragons, and fair ladies; but with the grim eye of a realist, he saw farming as it was, stripped of every shred of poetry. Blossoming orchards and thriving crops he knew to be the ephemeral phantasms of the dreamer. Farming as he had experienced it was an eternal combat against adverse conditions; a battle against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome of muscle-racking labor.

The farmer stopped work at twilight only 23 because his strength was spent and daylight was gone. The aching back, the tired muscles, could do no more, and merciful darkness drew a curtain over the day, thereby cutting off further opportunity for toil until the rising of another sun.

But although night carried with it temporary relief from exertion, it brought with it little peace. As one sat at the fireside in the gathering dusk, it was only to see in imagination a sinister procession of specters file past. They were the things that had been left undone. On they swept, one unperformed task treading upon the heel of its predecessor. There still remained potatoes to spade, weeds to pull, corn to hoe. A menacing company of ghosts to harass a weary man as his eyes closed at night and confront him when he opened them in the morning!

And even when, with the zest the new day brought, he contrived to mow down the vanguard of the parade, other recruits were constantly reënforcing its rear ranks and swelling the foes arraigned against the baffled farmer. Struggle as he would, the line was sometimes longer at evening than it had been at dawn. What wonder that a conscientious fellow like 24 Martin Howe felt farming less a business to be accomplished than a choice of alternatives? What rest was there in sleep, if all the time one’s eyes were closed a man was subconsciously aware that cutworms were devouring his lettuce and that weeds were every instant gaining headway? Even the rhythm of the rain was a reminder that the pea vines were being battered down and that the barn roof was leaking.

Yet to flee from this uncongenial future and seek one more to his liking did not occur to Martin Howe. He had been born with an uncompromising sense of duty, and once convinced of an obligation, he would have scorned to shirk it. The death of his parents left him no choice but to take up his cross with New England Spartanism and bear it like a true disciple. All the Howe capital was invested in land, in stock, and in agricultural implements. To sell out, even were he so fortunate as to find a purchaser, would mean shrinkage. And the farm once disposed of, what then? Had he been alone in the world, he would not have paused to ask the question. But there were Mary, Eliza, and Jane—three sisters older than himself with no resources for earning 25 a living. Even he himself was unskilled, and should he migrate to the city, he would be forced to subsist more or less by his wits; and to add to his uncertain fortunes the burden of three dependent women would be madness. No, the management of the family homestead was his inevitable lot. That he recognized.

What the abandonment of his “Castles in Spain” cost Martin only those who knew him best appreciated; and they but dimly surmised. Resolutely he kept his face set before him, allowing himself no backward glances into the dolce-far-niente land left behind. As it was characteristic of him to approach any problem from the scholar’s standpoint, he attacked his agricultural puzzles from a far more scientific angle than his father had done, bringing to them an intelligence that often compensated for experience and opened before him vistas of surprising interest. He subscribed to garden magazines; studied into crop rotation and the grafting of trees and vines; spent a few months at college experimenting with soils and chemicals. He investigated in up-to-date farming machinery and bought some of the devices he felt would economize labor.

Gradually the problem of wresting a living 26 from the soil broadened and deepened until it assumed alluring proportions. Farming became a conundrum worthy of the best brain, and one at which the supercilious could ill afford to scoff. Martin found himself giving to it the full strength both of his body and mind.

By the end of the first year he had become resigned to his new career; by the end of the second interested in it; by the end of the third enthusiastic.

In the meantime, as season succeeded season, the soil he had so patiently tended began to give him thanks, returning ever increasing harvests. The trees in the old orchard bent under their weight of apples; the grapevines were lush with fruit. The Howe farm acquired fame in the neighborhood.

The boy was proud of his success and justly so. Not alone did it represent man’s triumph over Nature, but it also meant the mastery of Martin’s own will over his inclinations. And all the while that he was achieving this dual victory he was developing from a thin, over-grown lad into a muscular young giant—keen-eyed, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-armed. He was lithe as an Indian and almost as unwearying. If through the cross rifts of 27 his daily routine there filtered occasional shadows of loneliness, he only vaguely acknowledged their existence, attributing his groping longing for sympathy to the lack of male companionship and the uncongeniality that existed between himself and his sisters.

He had, to be sure, a few masculine acquaintances in the village, but most of them were older and less progressive than he, and they offered him little aid in his difficulties. Having farmed all their lives and been content with the meager results they had obtained, they shrugged their shoulders at Martin’s experiments with irrigation and fertilizer, regarding his attempts as the impractical theories of a fanatic. Of youth, Sefton Falls contained only a scattering, the more enterprising young men having gone either to the city or to the War.

Thus bereft of friends of his own sex, and turned back from a professional or a soldier’s career by Duty’s flaming sword, Martin reverted to his own home for comradeship. But here, alas, he was again disappointed.

Mary, Eliza, and Jane were not of a type to fill the void in his life that he sought to have filled. It would be unfair to say he had not 28 a warm regard for his sisters, for he was a person of inherent loyalty, and ties of blood meant much to him. Had he not sacrificed his own dreams that his family might retain their old home? Nevertheless one may have a deep-rooted affection for one’s kin and yet not find them congenial; and Martin was compelled to acknowledge that Mary, Eliza and Jane—estimable women as they were—had many fundamental characteristics that were quite out of harmony with his ideals of life. It was possible their faults were peculiar to the entire feminine race. He was not prepared to say, since his knowledge of the sex had never extended beyond the sill of his own doorway. But whether general or particular, the truth remained that the mental horizon of his sisters, bounded as it was by the four walls of the kitchen and such portion of the outside world as could be seen from its windows, was pitiably narrow.

Beyond the round of their daily duties none of the three women had an interest in life. Over and over again they performed their humdrum tasks in the same humdrum fashion, arguing over each petty detail of the time-worn theme until he marveled they could 29 retain a particle of zest for routine they never varied from year to year.

Reading and experimenting brought a freshness to his work that stimulated detours into untraveled paths. But Mary, Eliza, and Jane never sought out the uncharted way. Evidently monotony suited their stolid temperaments; or if it did not, they never rebelled against it or tried to shake off its fetters. Matter-of-fact, timid, faithful, capable, middle-aged—they were born to be plodders rather than explorers.

Martin admitted that to their undeviating system he owed a great measure of the comfort and tranquillity of his well-ordered house, and hence he struggled earnestly not to complain at the bondage that resulted from their cast-iron methods. Long since he had despaired of expecting adaptability from them. They must cling to their rut or all was lost. Once out of their customary channel, and they were like tossing ships, rudderless and without an anchor.

Their solicitude for him was another source of exasperation. There were days when the brute in him rose and clamored to strike Mary for tagging at his heels with coats and 30 medicines, and Eliza for her lynxlike observation of every mouthful he ate. But he curbed the impulse, shamefacedly confessing himself to be ungrateful.

Had his tolerance been reënforced by insight, he would have understood that the very qualities which so exasperated him sprang from his sister’s laudable desire to voice a gratitude they could not put into words by neglecting no act which would promote his welfare; but Martin, alas, was not a psychologist, and therefore was unable to translate his annoyances in these interpretative terms.

In truth, what Mary, Eliza, and Jane were as individuals concerned him very little. He always thought of them as a composite personality, a sort of female trinity.

Nevertheless Mary, Eliza, and Jane Howe were not a trinity. They were three very distinct beings.

Mary had had spinsterhood thrust upon her. At heart she was a mother, a woman created to nurse and comfort. Her greatest happiness was derived from fluttering about those she loved and waiting upon them. Had she dared, she would have babied Martin to an even greater extent than she did. As it was, when 31 she was not at his elbow with warmer socks, heavier shoes, or a cup of hot coffee, she was worrying about Mary and Eliza, brewing tonics for them, or putting burning soapstones in their beds. It was a pity Life had cheated her of having a dozen babies to pilot through the mazes of measles and whooping cough, for then Mary would have been in her element. Yet nature is a thing of inconsistencies, and through some strange, unaccountable caprice, Mary’s marital instincts stopped with this fostering instinct. In every other respect she was an old maid. Men she abhorred. Like Jennie Wren, she knew their tricks and their manners—or thought she did—which for all practical purposes amounted to the same thing. Had it been necessary for her to prove some of the theorems she advanced concerning the male sex, she would have been at a loss to do so, since the scope of her experience was very limited. Nevertheless, with genuine Howe tenacity, she clung to her tenets even though she was without data to back them up.

Eliza, on the other hand, had in her girlhood been the recipient of certain vague attentions from an up-State farmer, and these had bared to her virgin imagination a new world. True, 32 the inconstant swain had betaken himself to the next county and there wed another. But although the affair had come to this ignominious end and its radiance had been dimmed by the realities of a quarter of a century of prosaic life, Eliza had never allowed time to obscure entirely the beauty of that early dream, nor the door thus opened into the fairy realms of romance to be wholly closed. Though she knew herself to be old, silver-haired, and worn, yet within the fastnesses of her soul she was still young and waited the coming of her lover. The illusion was only an illusion—a foolish, empty fantasy. However, it helped her to be content with the present and harmed no one. That Eliza had never quite “quit struggling” was borne out by the ripples into which she coaxed her hair and by the knot of bright ribbon she never failed to fasten beneath her ample chin.

Of the trio, Jane was the best balanced. Although the youngest of the sisters, it was to her judgment they were wont to appeal in times of stress. She was more fearless, more outspoken; and any mission she undertook was more certain of success. Therefore, when it became necessary to present some cause to 33 Martin, it always fell to Jane’s lot to act as spokesman. Once when a controversy concerning Ellen Webster had arisen, Jane had actually had the temerity to denounce her brother’s attitude to his face, declaring that should the old woman fall ill she would certainly go and take care of her. Martin had met her defiance with rage. The Websters and all their kindred might die before he would cross their threshold or allow any of his family to do so. Before the violence of his wrath, Mary and Eliza, who within their souls agreed with Jane, quailed in terror; but Jane was undaunted.

This lack of what Martin termed proper pride in his sisters was a source of great disgust to him. He was quite conscious that although they did not openly combat his opinions, they did not agree with him, and not only regretted being at odds with their neighbors but also condemned his perpetuation of the old feud as unchristian. Hence it was a cause for much rejoicing to his mind to reflect that one male Howe at least survived to bolster up a spineless, spiritless, and decadent generation. To love one’s enemies was a weak creed. Martin neither loved them nor pretended to. 34 Never, never, would he forgive the insults the Websters had heaped upon his family. He wished no positive harm to Ellen Webster; but he certainly wished her no good.

Mary, Eliza, and Jane had too much timidity and too great a craving for peace not to conform outwardly at least to their brother’s wishes. Accordingly they bent their necks to his will; for did not Martin rule the house?

Had you inquired of any of the sisters the Howes’ breakfast hour, you would have been told that breakfast was served when Martin pleased. It was the sound of his step upon the stair that set preparations for the morning meal in motion. So it was with every other detail of the home. When he appeared in the doorway his handmaidens sprang to serve him, and so long as he lingered beneath the roof they stayed their impatient hands from any task that would create noise or confusion, and disturb his tranquillity. It was not until the ban of his presence was removed that they ventured to resume the mopping, dusting, or cooking in which they had been engaged before his entrance.

It would have been interesting to know how 35 Martin explained to himself the lack of machinery in his household, and how he reconciled the spotlessness of his home with the apparent idleness of his sisters. His hearth was always swept; the dishes noiselessly washed; the beds made as if by magic; and the cleaning done without shadow of inconvenience to him. So long as these processes were not forced upon his consciousness and were faultlessly performed, he accepted the results without comment. But let one cog of the wheel slip, setting the mechanism of his comfort awry, and he was sure to mention it.

Possibly it was because he himself performed his out-of-door duties well that he demanded, and felt he had the right to demand a similar perfection within doors. In fact, he drew the lines of demarkation between the masculine and feminine spheres of service so sharply that his sisters would have died before they would have asked his aid in any domestic difficulty. Faithfully he met every obligation he considered to be within a man’s province—bringing wood, coal, and kindlings with the courtesy of a courtier; but the fowl browning in the oven might have burned to ebony before Martin would have lifted a finger to rescue it. To 36 oversee the cooking was not his duty. No autocrat ever reigned with more absolute power than did Martin Howe; and no monarch ever maintained a more sincere faith in his divine right to rule. He simply set the crown of sovereignty upon his own brows because he believed it to belong there. And had his faith in his destiny wavered, there were always his slaves Mary, Eliza, and Jane to bow their foreheads in the dust at his feet and murmur with true Oriental submissiveness:

Oh, King, Live Forever!

His lordship being thus acknowledged, was it any wonder that Martin cast about himself a mantle of aloofness and dignity and rated as trivial the household routine and petty gossip of his sisters? When he listened to their chatter at all it was with the tolerance of a superior being toward a less intelligent rabble.

Hence when he returned from the field one night and was greeted by the breathless announcement that a strange young woman with her trunk had just arrived at the Websters’, it was characteristic of him to quiet the excited 37 outburst of his sisters with the chilling and stately reply:

“What does it matter to us who she is, or what she’s come for? Ellen Webster’s visitors are no concern of ours.”