Main-Travelled Roads Part 17

"Married, I s'pose," said Mrs. McIlvaine abruptly.

"No, not yet."

"Good land! Why, y' Inns' be thirty-five, How. Must a dis'p'inted y'r mam not to have a young 'un to call 'er granny."

The men came clumping in, talking about haying and horses.

Some of the older ones Howard knew and greeted, but the younger ones were mainly too much changed. They were all very ill at ease.

Most of them were in compromise dress-something lying between working "rig" and Sunday dress. Most of them had on clean s.h.i.+rts and paper collars, and wore their Sunday coats (thick woolen garments) over rough trousers. All of them crossed their legs at once, and most of them sought the wall and leaned back perilously~upon the hind legs of their chairs, eyeing Howard slowly.

For the first few minutes the presents were the subjects of conversation. The women especially spent a good deal of talk upon them.

Howard found himself forced to taking the initiative, so he inquired about the crops and about the farms.

"I see you don't plow the hills as we used to. And reap'. What a job it ust to be. It makes the hills more beautiful to have them covered with smooth gra.s.s and cattle."

There was only dead silence to this touching upon the idea of beauty.

"I s'pose it pays reasonably."

"Not enough to kill," said one of the younger men. "You c'n see that by the houses we live in-that is, most of us. A few that came in early an' got land cheap, like McIlvaine, here-he got a lift that the rest of us can't get."

"I'm a free trader, myself," said one young fellow, blus.h.i.+ng and looking away as Howard turned and said cheerily:

"So'm I."

The rest semed to feel that this was a tabooed subject--a subject to be talked out of doors, where one could prance about and yell and do justice to it.

Grant sat silently in the kitchen doorway, not saying a word, not looking at his. brother.

"Well, I don't never use hot vinegar for mine," Mrs. McIlvaine was heard to say. "I jest use hot water, an' I rinse 'em out good, and set 'em bottom-side up in the sun. I do' know but what hot vinegar would be more cleansin'."

Rose had the younger folks in a giggle with a droll telling of a joke on herself.

"How'd y' stop 'em from laffin'?"

"I let 'em laugh. Oh, my school is a disgrace-so one director says.

But I like to see children laugh. It broadens their cheeks."

"Yes, that's all handwork." Laura was showing the baby's Sunday clothes.

"Goodness Peter! How do you find time to do so much?"

"I take time."

Howard, being the lion of the evening, tried his best to be agreeable. He kept near his mother, because it afforded her so much pride and satisfaction, and because he was obliged to keep away from Grant, who had begun to talk to the men. Howard tall~ed mainly about their affairs, but still was forced more and more into talking of life in the city. As he told of the theater and the concerts, a sudden change fell upon them; they grew sober, and he felt deep down in the hearts of these people a melancholy which was expressed only elusively with little tones or sighs. Their gaiety was fitful.

They were hungry for the world, for art-these young people.

Discontented and yet hardly daring to acknowledge it; indeed, few of them could have made definite statement of their dissatisfaction. The older people felt it less. They practically said, with a sigh of pathetic resignation:

"Well, I don't expect ever to see these things now.."

A casual observer would have said, "What a pleasant bucolic-this little surprise party of welcome!" But Howard with his native ear and eye had no such pleasing illusion. He knew too well these suggestions of despair and bitterness. He knew that, like the smile of the slave, this cheerfulness was self-defense; deep down was another self.

Seeing Grant talking with a group of men over by the kitchen door, he crossed over slowly and stood listening. Wesley Cosgrove-a tall, rawboned young fellow with a grave, almost tragic face-was saying:

"Of course I ain't. Who is? A man that's satisfied to live as we do is a fool."

"The worst of it is," said Grant without seeing Howard, a man can't get out of it during his lifetime, and l don't know that he'll have any chance in the next-the speculator'll be there ahead of us."

The rest laughed, but Grant went on grily:

"Ten years ago Wes, here, could have got land in Dakota pretty easy, but now it's about all a feller's life's worth to try it. I tell you things seem shuttin' down on us fellers."

"Plenty o' land to rent?" suggested someone.

"Yes, in terms that skin a man alive. More than that, farmin' ain't so free a life as it used to be. This cattle-raisin' and b.u.t.ter-makin'

makes a n.i.g.g.e.r of a man. Binds him right down to the grindstone, and he gets nothin' out of it-that's what rubs it in. He simply wallers around in the manure for somebody else. I'd like to know what a man's life is worth who lives as we do? How much higher is it than the lives the n.i.g.g.e.rs used to live?"

These brutally bald words made Howard thrill witb emotion like some great tragic poem. A silence fell on the group.

"That's the G.o.d's truth, Grant," said young Cosgrove after a pause.

"A man like me is helpless," Grant was saying. "Just like a fly in a pan of mola.s.ses. There ain't any escape for him. The more he tears around, the more liable he is to rip his legs off."

"What can he do?"

The men listened in silence.

"Oh, come, don't talk politics all night!" cried Rose, breaking in.

"Come, let's have a dance. Where's that fiddle?"

"Fiddle!" cried Howard, glad of a chance to laugh. "Well, now!

Bring out that fiddle. Is it William's?"

"Yes, Pap's old fiddle."

"Oh, gos.h.!.+ he don't want to hear me play," pr~ tested William.

"He's heard s' many fiddlers."

"Fiddlers! I've heard a thousand violinists, but not fiddlers. Come, give us 'Honest John.'"

William took the fiddle in his work-calloused and crooked hands and began tuning it. The group at the kitchen door turned to listen, their faces lighting up a little. Rose tried to get a set on the floor.

"Oh, good land!" said some. "We're all tuckered out. What makes you so anxious?"

"She wants a chance to dance with the New Yorker."

"That's it exactly," Rose admitted.