People of the Whirlpool Part 11

"They are exactly right," he said heartily, turning and grasping Miss Lavinia's hand, as he looked straight into her eyes with an expression of mingled grat.i.tude and satisfaction. "She will thank you herself, when we all meet next summer," and with a happy look at Sylvia, who had come to the library to see the gifts, and was leaning on the table, he grasped bag and parcel, shook hands all round, and hurried away.

"What do you think?" I asked Evan, as we closed our bedroom door.

"Of what?" he answered, with the occasional obtuseness that will overtake the best of men.

"Of Sylvia and Bradford, of course. Are they in love, do you think?"

"I rather think that _he_ is," Evan answered, slowly, as if bringing his mind from afar, "but that he doesn't know it, and I hope he may stay in ignorance, for it will do him no good, for I am sure that she is not, at least with Bradford. She is drifting about in the Whirlpool now. She has not 'found herself' in any way, as yet. She seems a charming girl, but I warn you, Barbara, don't think you scent romance, and try to put a finger in this pie! Your knowledge of complex human nature isn't nearly as big as your heart, and the Latham set are wholly beyond your ken and comprehension." Then Evan, declining to argue the matter, went promptly to sleep.

Not so Sylvia. When Miss Lavinia went to her room to see if the girl was comfortable and have a little go-to-bed chat by the fire, she found her stretched upon the bed; her head hidden between the pillows, in a vain effort to stifle her pa.s.sionate sobbing.

"What is it, my child?" she asked, truly distressed. "Are you tired, or have you taken cold, or what?"

"No, nothing like that," she whispered, keeping her face hidden and jerking out disjointed sentences, "but I can't do anything for anybody.

No one really depends on me for anything. Helen Baker must leave college, because they need her _at home_,--just think, _need her_! Isn't that happiness? And Mr. Bradford is so joyful over his new salary, thinks it is a fortune, and with being able to buy those things for his mother,--father has sent me more money during the four months I've been back, so I may feel independent, he says, than the Professor will earn in a year. Independent? deserted is a better word! I hardly know my own parents, I find, and they expect nothing from me, even my companionship.

"Before I went away to school, if mamma was ill, I used to carry up her breakfast, and brush her hair; now she treats me almost like a stranger,--dislikes my going to her room at odd times. I hardly ever see her, she is always so busy, and if I beg to be with her, as I did once, she says I do not understand her duty to society.

"People should not have children and then send them away to school until they feel like strangers, and their homes drift so far away that they do not know them when they come back,--and there's poor Carthy out west all alone, after the plans we made to be together. It is all so different from what I expected. Why does not father come home, or mother seem to mind that he stays away? What is the matter, Aunt Lavinia? Is mamma hiding something, or is the fault all mine?"

Miss Lavinia closed the door, and soothed the excited girl, talking to her for an hour, and in fact slept on the lounge, and did not return to her own room until morning. She was surprised at the storm in a clear sky, but not at the cause. Miss Lavinia was keenly observant, and from two years' daily intercourse, she knew Sylvia's nature thoroughly. For some reasons, she wished with all her heart that Sylvia was in love with Horace Bradford, and at the same time feared for it; but before the poor girl fell asleep, she was convinced that such was not the case, and that the trouble that was already rising well up from her horizon was something far more complicated.

VIII

THE SWEATING OF THE CORN

_April_ 14. Every one who has led, even in a partial degree, the life outdoors, must recognize his kinship with the soil. It was the first recorded fact of race history embodied in the Old Testament allegory of the creation, and it would seem from the beginning that nations have been strong or weak, as they acknowledged or sought to suppress it.

I read a deeper meaning in my garden book as the boys' human calendar runs parallel with it, and I can see month by month and day by day that it is truly the touch of Nature that makes kindred of us all--the throb of the human heart and not the touch of learning or the arts.

Everything grows restless as spring comes on--animate, and what is called inanimate, nature. March is the trying month of indecision, the tug-of-war between winter and spring, pulling us first one way and then the other, the victory often being, until the final moment, on the side of winter. Then comes a languid period of inaction, and a swift recovery.

When the world finally throws off frost bondage, sun and the earth call, while humanity, indoors and out, in city tenement as well as in farmhouse, hears the voice, even though its words are meaningless, and grows restless.

Lavinia Dorman writes that she is feeling tired and low-spirited, the doctor has advised a tonic, and she misses the change of planting her back-yard garden. Down in the streets the tenement children are swarming in the sunny spots, and dancing to the hand-organs. I saw them early last week when I was in town for a few hours.

In one of the downtown parks the youngsters were fairly rolling in the dirt, and rubbing their cheeks on the scanty gra.s.s as they furtively scooped up handfuls of cement-like soil to make mud pies, in spite of the big policeman, who, I like to think, was sympathetically blind.

The same impulse stirs my boys, even though they have all outdoors around them. They have suddenly left their house toys and outdoor games alike to fairly burrow in the soil. The heap of beach sand and pebbles that was carted from the sh.o.r.e and left under an old shed for their amus.e.m.e.nt, has lost its charm. They go across the road and claw the fresh earth from an exposed bank, using fingers instead of their little rakes and spades, and decorate the moist brown "pies" they make with dandelion ornaments.

A few days ago the Vanderveer boy came down to play with them, accompanied by an English head nurse of tyrannical mien, and an a.s.sortment of coats and wraps. The poor little chap had been ailing half the winter, it seems, with indigestion and various aches, until the doctor told his mother that she must take him to the country and try a change, as he feared the trouble was chronic appendicitis; so the entire establishment has arrived to stay until the Newport season, and the boy's every movement is watched, weighed, and discussed.

The nurse, having tucked him up in a big chair in the sun on the porch, with the boys for company, and in charge of father, who was looking at him with a pitying and critical medical eye, said she would leave him for half an hour while she went up the lane to see Martha Corkle. A few moments after, as I glanced across the road, I saw my boys burrowing away at their dirt bank, and their guest with them. I flew downstairs to call him in, fearing for the consequences, but father, who was watching the proceedings from the porch, laid a detaining hand upon me, saying: "His mother has consulted me about the child, and really sent him down here that I may look him over, and I am doing it, in my own fashion. I've no idea the trouble is appendicitis, though it might be driven that way. I read it as a plain case of suppressed boyhood.

"He doesn't know how to play, or run naturally without falling; he's afraid to sit down in the dirt--no wonder with those starched linen clothes; and he keeps looking about for the nurse, first over one shoulder and then over the other, like a hunted thing. Evidently they have weighed his food, measured his exercise, and bought his amus.e.m.e.nts; his only free will and vent is to get in a temper. They give him no chance to sweat off his irritation, only to fume; while that shaking, snorting teakettle of an automobile they bowl him about in, puts the final touch to his nervousness."

Then I sat down by father and watched the three boys together, while Richard was preventing his guest from pounding a toad with a stone because it preferred to hop away instead of being made into a dirt pie, and I saw the truth of what he said. The seven-year-old child who went to riding school, dancing school, and a military drill, did not know how to express his emotions in play, and frozen s...o...b..a.l.l.s and other cruelty was his distorted idea of amus.e.m.e.nt. Poor rich boy, sad little only son, he was not allowed the freedom to respond to the voice of nature even as the tenement children that dance in the streets to the hand-organs or stir the mud in the gutter with their bare toes. It is not the tenement children of New York who are to be pitied; it is those that are being fitted to keep the places, in the unstable and frail crafts of the Whirlpool, that their parents are either striving to seize or struggling to reserve for them.

At the end of half an hour the boys came back to the porch, all three delightfully and completely dirty, and clamouring that they were hungry.

The English tyrant not appearing, I took them into the house and, after a washing of hands and faces, gave the boys the usual eleven o'clock lunch of milk and simple cookies to take out in the sun to eat. As they were thus engaged the tyrant appeared on the horizon, horror written in every feature, and a volley of correction evidently taking shape on her lips, while an ugly look of cowed defiance spread itself over the child's face as he caught sight of her.

There was no scene, however. Father said in the most offhand way, as if being obeyed was a matter of course, "Go back and tell your mistress that I am carrying out her request, and that after luncheon I will send the boy safely home, with a written message."

"But his medicines, his hour's rest alone in the dark, his special food,--the medical man in New York said--" protested the woman, completely taken aback.

"You heard my message?" said father, cheerfully, and that was all.

"What are you going to advise?" I asked, as in the middle of the afternoon father came from his office, where he had given the lad a thorough inspection.

"Simply to turn him loose in light woollen clothes, give him companions of his age, and let him alone."

"Can't you word it differently?" I asked.

"Why, is not that fairly direct?" he replied, looking surprised; "and surely the direct method is almost always the best."

"I think this is the one case where it is not, dear old Daddy. In fact, if you are destined, as I see that you are, to pick up and tie the threads of ravelled health in the Bluff Colony, you will have to become more complicated, at least in speech, accustomed as they are to a series of specialists, and having importance attached to the very key in which a sneeze is pitched.

"Those few words would savour to the Whirlpoolers of lack of proper respect and consideration. You must give a name to both ailment and cure if you expect to be obeyed. Call the case a 'serious one of physical suppression,' and the remedy the 'fresh earth cure,' to be taken only in light woollen clothes, tell them to report progress to you every other day, and you gain the boy his liberty."

Father laughed heartily, and his nose twitched in a curious way it has when he is secretly amused and convinced against his will; but I think he took my advice, at least in part, for the next morning Papa Vanderveer drove down in the brake, announcing in a shout that "De Peyster slept all night without waking up and crying, for the first time in months,"

adding, "And, Dr. Russell, if you've got anything further in this liberty line to suggest, even to getting rid of the d.u.c.h.ess, now's your time.

'The d.u.c.h.ess?' Ah, she is that confounded head nurse woman that Maria will keep so that things may be done properly, until the poor kid's nearly been done for, I say. The Ponsonbys are crazy to get the woman to break in their youngest girl and keep her down and from growing up until they marry the others off; so Maria could part with her in the light of a favour to them, don't you see, without spilling blood. Peysey'll have to have some sort of a chaser, though, or Maria'll not hear of it."

Mr. Vanderveer glowed all over with delight when father condemned the automobile as a nerve racker, and suggested that a young man of the companionable tutor order, who could either play games, fish, and drive with the boy and his chums, or at times leave him wholly alone, according to need, would be a good subst.i.tute for a woman who viewed life as a school of don'ts, and had either wholly outlived her youth, or else had most unpleasant recollections of it.

"I've got my innings at last," he said. "You're the first doctor I've had who hasn't sided with Maria and shut me out until pay day."

"I wonder why spring is such a restless season," I said half to myself and half to father, as I sat on the porch half an hour later, trying to focus my mind on writing to Lavinia Dorman, while father, lounging on the steps opposite, was busy reading his mail.

"One would think we might be content merely to throw off winter and look and enjoy, but no, every one is restless,--birds, fourfoots, and humans.

Lavinia Dorman writes that Sylvia Latham has just started for California to see her brother, and she expects to bring her father back with her.

The boys disappeared mysteriously in the direction of Martha Corkle's immediately after breakfast, Evan went reluctantly to the train, declaring that it seemed impossible to sit still long enough to reach the city, you are twisting about and shuffling your feet, looking far oftener at the river woods than at your letters, and as for myself, it seems as if I must go over yonder and seize Bertel's spade and show him how to dig those seed beds more rapidly, so that I can begin to plant and kneel down and get close to the ground. Yesterday when the boys came in with very earthy faces, and I questioned them, I found that they had stuck their precious noses in their mud pies, essaying to play mole and burrow literally."

"It is the same mystery as the sweating of the corn," replied father, gathering his letters in a heap and tossing them into a chair with a gesture of impatience; "none of us may escape, even though we do not understand it.

"It was years ago that I first heard the legend from an old farmer of the corn belt, who, longing for a sight of salt water, had drifted eastward into one of the little hill farms beyond the charcoal camp. He had been bedridden nearly all winter, but uncomplainingly, his wife and daughter-in-law caring for him, and it was not until the early part of May, when all the world was growing green, that he began to mend and at the same time groan at his confinement.

"I tried to cheer him up, telling him that the worst was over, and that he soon would be about again, and he replied: ''Tain't me that's doin' of it, Doctor, hit's the sweatin' of the corn. You know everywhere in May folks be plantin' corn, the time bein' the sign that frost is over and done with.' I nodded a.s.sent, and he continued: 'Now naterally there's lots of corn in ear and sh.e.l.led and ground to meal that isn't planted, and along as when the kernels in the ground begins to swell and sprout, this other corn knows it and begins to heave and sweat, and if it isn't handled careful-like, and taken in the air and cooled, it'll take on all sorts of moulds and musts, and like as not turn useless. I holds it's just the same with folks,--when springtime comes they fetch up restless and need the air and turning out to sweeten in the sun until they settle down again, else their naturs turn sour, pisen'us, and unwholesome, breedin' worms like sweated corn!'

"Since then I've heard it here and there in other words, but always the same motive, the old miller holding it all fact and no legend at all, saying that if he can keep his surplus corn from sweating and well aired through May and June, he never fears for it in the damper, more potent August heat. One thing is certain, that in my practice in countryside, village, and town, if strange doings break out and restless discontentment arises, it is never in winter, when I should expect partial torpidity to breed unrest, but in the pushing season of renewal, and, as the old man terms it, 'corn sweating.'"

A little later I was going toward the garden when father called after me to say that he was soon starting for a long trip, quite up to Pine Ridge, and that if I cared to go, taking a lunch for both, it might give me a chance to "turn and sweeten" in the sun and cure my restlessness with natural motion.

Go? Of course my heart leaped at the very thought, because, in spite of the boys, those long drives with father have grown more precious as they grow more rare. But where were the twins? They had disappeared under my very eyes; of a surety they must be at Martha's, but my conscience smote me when, on glancing at the clock, I saw that it was two hours since they left the breakfast table in their brand-new sailor suits, with the intention of showing them to her.