The Voice of the People Part 21

"Yes," he replied indifferently. "He does a very good business."

His stepmother put the dish of potatoes back upon the table and took up the pitcher of b.u.t.termilk. Her hand was trembling nervously. There was a slight gasp in her voice when she spoke.

"I don't know but what it's as big a thing to be in a fine store like that as 'tis to be a lawyer," she said.

For a moment Nicholas did not answer. His eyes grew darker as she stood before him, and a shadow closed upon his face. As in a frame, he saw the outline of her figure defined against the square of falling rain between the window sashes. Her shoulders, bent slightly forward as if crushed by the bearing of heavy burdens, reminded him of a domestic animal, full of years and labour.

His face softened and he smiled into her eyes.

"Yes, I don't know but what it is just as well," he responded cheerfully. The next day he went into Jerry Pollard's store and began his winter's work. He measured off unbleached cotton cloth for a servant girl; sold a pair of shoes to a farmer, a cravat to a young fellow from the grocery shop next door, and a set of garden tools to an elderly lady who lived in the street facing the asylum and had a greenhouse. At odd times he looked over Jerry Pollard's books, and after dark he dunned several debtors for unpaid bills. He did it quietly and thoroughly, neither shirking nor overelaborating the minutest detail. There are men who have an immense capacity for taking pains that is rarer than genius, and he was one of them. Whether he made a success or a failure of life, he would do it with a conscientious use of opportunities, good or bad.

An eye that is trained to detect the values of circ.u.mstances, and a hand that is quick to adjust them, have produced the mental forces that make or unmake the race.

When the day was over he went home and ascended to his room in silence.

The work had left him with a curious irritating sense of its distastefulness. The second day was as the first--the week was as the month. There were no variations, no difficulties, no advancement. With the round of monotony his irritation sharpened. When Jerry Pollard spoke he responded in monosyllables; when Jerry Pollard's pretty daughter, Bessie, smiled in from the doorway, he kept his eyes on the counter. At home he was even less responsive. The impulse which had prompted him to return a cheering falsehood to his stepmother pa.s.sed quickly. He sacrificed himself to the family interests, but he sacrificed himself begrudgingly. His face a.s.sumed lines of sullen repression; the tones of his voice were full of subdued resentment. He found satisfaction in meeting their overtures with irony, their constraint with callousness.

Since he had given the one thing they required and he valued, he justified himself in a series of petty tyrannies. He met his stepmother with avoidance, his father with aversion. The children he swore at or ignored. Amos Burr, gathering his slow wits together, regarded him with a chuckle of self-congratulation. His sensibilities were not susceptible to slight friction, and his son's att.i.tude seemed to him of small significance. He had got what he wanted, and that was sufficient unto the hour.

After the first two months, Nicholas underwent a dogged and indifferent adaptation. He ceased to think of the judge, of Juliet, of Eugenia. He laughed at Jerry Pollard's jokes and he winked at Jerry Pollard's daughter. His horizon narrowed to the four walls of the shop; he told himself that he had a roof above his head and fuel for his stomach--that Bessie Pollard had skin that was fairer than Eugenia's and lips as red.

What did it matter, after all?

Sometimes Mrs. Webb entered the store, sweeping him, as she swept the counter, with her clear, cold glance, and once Sally Burwell ran in to do an errand for her mother and nodded with distant pleasantness as she met his eyes. At such times he flushed and ground his teeth, but after Mrs. Webb came farmer Turner, who shook his hand and said:

"Wall, I'm proud of you, Nick Burr."

And after Sally Burwell pretty Bessie Pollard threw him a kiss from the doorway. It was not that he was ashamed of his work. He knew that at the close of the war better men than he sought and accepted gratefully such a livelihood as he disdained--that women in whose veins ran good old English blood left their wasted homes to teach in public schools, or turned their delicate hands to the needle for support. He was ashamed of his past ambition--of his vaunted aspiration--and he was ashamed of Jerry Pollard and his service.

The winter wore gradually to spring. A brilliant April melted into a watery May. Nicholas, coming to Kingsborough in the early mornings, would feel the long spring rains in his face as he splashed through the puddles in the road. In the wood the white blossoms of dogwood showed through interlacing branches like stars in a network of closely wrought iron. On their hardy shrubs the pale pink cl.u.s.ters of mountain laurel were beaten into shapeless colour-ma.s.ses by the wind-blown rains.

Sometimes, up above, where the fiery points of redbud trees shot skyward, a thrush sang or a blue jay scolded--and the bird-notes were laden, like the air, with the primal ripeness of spring.

Underfoot the earth was fecundating in dampness. Chill blue violets emerged from beneath the spread of rotting leaves, and where the washed-out sunlight had last shone it had left rays of wandering dandelions straying from the open roadside to the edges of the wood.

And the spring pa.s.sed into Nicholas also. The wonderful renewal of surrounding life thrilled through the repression of his nature. With the flowing of the sap the blood flowed more freely in his veins. New possibilities were revealed to him; new emotions urged him into fresh endeavours. All his powerful, unspent youth spurred on to manhood.

IV

At last the rains were over. The sun came out again, and with it the growth of the season burst into abundance. There were bird-notes on the air, fragrance in the stillness, bloom on the trees. In the thicket dogwood ma.s.sed itself in clouds of dead-white stars, like an errant trail from the Milky Way, lighting the wooded twilight. Wild azalea, so deeply rose that the hue seemed of the blood, wafted its sharp, unearthly scent across the underbrush to the road. The woods were vocal with the mating songs of their winged inhabitants. The music of the thrush welled from the sheer forceful joy of living. "It is good--good--good to be a lover!" he sang again and again with amorous repet.i.tion and a full-throated flourish of improvisation. In the pauses of the thrush sounded the cheery whistle of the redbird, the crying of the catbird, the liquid tones of the song sparrow, and the giddy exclamations of the pewee. Sometimes an oriole darted overhead in a royal flash of black and yellow, a robin stood in the road and delivered a hearty invitation, or a hawk flew past, pursued by martins.

With the spring planting came a chance of outdoor work, and Nicholas would sometimes rise at dawn and do a piece of ploughing before breakfast. He had driven the team out one morning across the brown, bare earth, which the plough had ripped open in a jagged track, when something in the silence and the scents of nature smote him suddenly as with a vital force. Dropping the reins to the ground, he threw back his head and breathed a keen, quick sense of exaltation. A warm mist, sweet and fresh as the breath of a cow, overhung hill and field, road and meadow. In a black-browed cedar tree a mocking-bird was singing.

With a sudden shout Nicholas voiced the glorification of toil--of honest work well done. He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionise the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted--and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone. The beasts before him did not shirk their labour because it was clay and not gold dust that trailed behind the plough; why should he? And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature? For what was better than these things--the clear air of sunrise, the keen, sweet smell of the fertile earth, the relaxation of tired muscles? Why should he, who had been born to the soil, struggle forth to alien ends as a sightless earthworm to the harrow's teeth?

On his way in from the fields he stopped an instant at the gate of the barnyard to look at the red-and-white cow that was licking her little, tottering calf. Some rollicking lambs were skipping near a dignified group of ewes, that looked on with half-fearful, half-disapproving faces.

At the pump he saw his stepmother filling a water bucket, and he took it from her hands.

"I reckon it is too heavy for you to carry," he said timidly.

"'Tain't much to tote," returned Marthy Burr opposingly. "If I'd never had nothin' more'n that to bear I'd have as straight a back as yo' pa's got. 'Tain't the water buckets as bends a woman, nohow; it's the things as the Lord lays on extry."

She relinquished the bucket and followed Nicholas resentfully to the house.

"I never did care 'bout havin' folks come 'round interferin' with my burdens," she murmured half-aggrievedly. "I ain't done for yet, an' when I is I reckon I'll know it as soon as anybody--lessen it's yo' pa, who's got powerful sharp eyes at seein' the failin's of other people--an'

powerful dull ones when it comes to recognisin' his own."

Then she set about preparing breakfast, and Nicholas flung himself into a chair on the porch. Nannie, a pretty, auburn-haired girl, was grinding coffee in a small mill, and he looked at her thoughtfully; then Jubal came out, whittling a stick, and he turned his gaze inquiringly upon him.

"What would you like to do in the world, Jubal?" he asked, "best of all?"

Jubal looked up in perplexity, his fat forehead wrinkling.

"You ain't countin' in eatin', I s'pose?" he replied doubtfully.

Nicholas shook his head.

"No, leave out eating," he said.

"An' the splittin' open of that durn livered Spike Turner?"

"Yes, that too."

Jubal whittled slowly, his forehead wrinkling more deeply.

"Then I don't know whether it's to give ma a rest or to own Billy Flinders's c.o.o.n dog, Boss," he said.

Nicholas laughed for an instant, but the laugh softened into a smile.

At the table he asked his stepmother and Sairy Jane about the spring chickens, and they answered with surprised eagerness.

"I am going to mark the lambs to-morrow," he said. "They're a nice lot."

And he added: "Some day I'll take the farm and make it pay."

"I don't see what you want to go steppin' in yo' pa's shoes for," put in Marthy Burr. "When toes have got p'inted down-hill they ain't goin' no other way. Don't you come back to raisin' things on this land. I ain't never seen nothin' thrive on it yet, cep'n weeds, an' the Lord knows they warn't planted."

Nicholas shook his head.

"Why, look at Turner," he said. "His land is as poor as this, and he makes an easy living."

"A Turner ain't a Burr," returned his stepmother with uncompromising logic, "an' a Burr ain't a Turner. Whar the blood runs the man follows, an' yours ain't runnin' towards the farm. Jeb Turner can fling a handful of corn in poor groun', an' thar'll come up a cornfield, an' yo' pa may plant with the sweat of his brow an' the groanin' of his spirit, an' the crows git it. A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it."

"That's so," admitted Amos Burr, laying down his knife and meeting his wife's eyes. "That's so. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough, noways you turn it."

"Perhaps I'll try some day," said Nicholas with a laugh; and he rose and went out of the house.

When he had reached the little gate he heard a voice behind him, and turned to find his half-sister Nannie, her cheeks flushed like a damp, wild rose above her faded dress.

"I want you to bring me something from the store, Nick," she stammered.