bad. The cats catches one most every day, too.”
“I guess they come up from the barn. I’ve got a nice wide board
down at the garage for your shelf.” The cellar was cemented, cool
and dry, with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and
groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a dark-room full of
photographer’s apparatus. Claude took his place at the
carpenter’s bench under one of the square windows. Mysterious
objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries,
old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The
mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as
those he had got tired of, were stored away here. If they were
left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes,
when they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments.
Claude had begged his mother to let him pile this lumber into a
wagon and dump it into some washout hole along the creek; but
Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a thing; it would
hurt Ralph’s feelings. Nearly every time Claude went into the
cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some
day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would
have put a boy through college decently.
While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from
the joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him.
She made some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated
herself upon a cracker box; close at hand there was a plush
“spring-rocker” with one arm gone, but it wouldn’t have been her
idea of good manners to sit there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy
contentment in them as she followed Claude’s motions. She watched
him as if he were a baby playing. Her hands lay comfortably in
her lap.
“Mr. Ernest ain’t been over for a long time. He ain’t mad about
nothin’, is he?”
“Oh, no! He’s awful busy this summer. I saw him in town
yesterday. We went to the circus together.”
Mahailey smiled and nodded. “That’s nice. I’m glad for you two
boys to have a good time. Mr. Ernest’s a nice boy; I always liked
him first rate. He’s a little feller, though. He ain’t big like
you, is he? I guess he ain’t as tall as Mr. Ralph, even.”
“Not quite,” said Claude between strokes. “He’s strong, though,
and gets through a lot of work.”
“Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them
foreigners works hard, don’t they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked
the circus. Maybe they don’t have circuses like our’n, over where
he come from.”
Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained
dogs, and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish
smile; there was something wise and far-seeing about her smile,
too.
Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few
months old. She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia
family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of
pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was
nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.
Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no
one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.
Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a
savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for
her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside
an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for “him” to
bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too
often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair
of brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have
to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be
sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes. Mahailey was one
of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or
half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended
their lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could
not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to
teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had
forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time of day
by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and
of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee
packages. “That’s a big A.” she would murmur, “and that there’s a
little a.”
Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought
her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all
the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in
the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to
lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all her little
difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she
knew he would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle
off her rolling pin, he put on another, and he fitted a haft to
her favourite butcher-knife after every one else said it must be
thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended, acquired
a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When
Claude helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided
touching her, this she felt deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a
little ashamed of her, and would prefer to have some brisk young
thing about the kitchen.
On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey
liked to talk to Claude about the things they did together when
he was little; the Sundays when they used to wander along the
creek, hunting for wild grapes and watching the red squirrels; or
trailed across the high pastures to a wild-plum thicket at the
north end of the Wheeler farm. Claude could remember warm spring
days when the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used
to lie down under them and sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy
sweetness made her drowsy; songs without words, for the most
part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over and
over, “And they laid Jesse James in his grave.”
IV
The time was approaching for Claude to go back to the struggling
denominational college on the outskirts of the state capital,
where he had already spent two dreary and unprofitable winters.
“Mother,” he said one morning when he had an opportunity to speak
to her alone, “I wish you would let me quit the Temple, and go to
the State University.”
She looked up from the mass of dough she was kneading.
“But why, Claude?”
“Well, I could learn more, for one thing. The professors at the
Temple aren’t much good. Most of them are just preachers who
couldn’t make a living at preaching.”
The look of pain that always disarmed Claude came instantly into
his mother’s face. “Son, don’t say such things. I can’t believe
but teachers are more interested in their students when t
hey are
concerned for their spiritual development, as well as the mental.
Brother Weldon said many of the professors at the State
University are not Christian men; they even boast of it, in some
cases.”
“Oh, I guess most of them are good men, all right; at any rate
they know their subjects. These little pin-headed preachers like
Weldon do a lot of harm, running about the country talking. He’s
sent around to pull in students for his own school. If he didn’t
get them he’d lose his job. I wish he’d never got me. Most of the
fellows who flunk out at the State come to us, just as he did.”
“But how can there be any serious study where they give so much
time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a
larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses
are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I’ve heard that
dreadful things go on in them sometimes. Besides, it would take
more money, and you couldn’t live as cheaply as you do at the
Chapins’.”
Claude made no reply. He stood before her frowning and pulling at
a calloused spot on the inside of his palm. Mrs. Wheeler looked
at him wistfully. “I’m sure you must be able to study better in a
quiet, serious atmosphere,” she said.
He sighed and turned away. If his mother had been the least bit
unctuous, like Brother Weldon, he could have told her many
enlightening facts. But she was so trusting and childlike, so
faithful by nature and so ignorant of life as he knew it, that it
was hopeless to argue with her. He could shock her and make her
fear the world even more than she did, but he could never make
her understand.
His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and
card-playing dangerous pastimes—only rough people did such
things when she was a girl in Vermont—and “worldliness” only
another word for wickedness. According to her conception of
education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must
not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one,
was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before.
The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept
of history.
Nat Wheeler didn’t care where his son went to school, but he,
too, took it for granted that the religious institution was
cheaper than the State University; and that because the students
there looked shabbier they were less likely to become too
knowing, and to be offensively intelligent at home. However, he
referred the matter to Bayliss one day when he was in town.
“Claude’s got some notion he wants to go to the State University
this winter.”
Bayliss at once assumed that wise,
better-be-prepared-for-the-worst expression which had made him
seem shrewd and seasoned from boyhood. “I don’t see any point in
changing unless he’s got good reasons.”
“Well, he thinks that bunch of parsons at the Temple don’t make
first-rate teachers.”
“I expect they can teach Claude quite a bit yet. If he gets in
with that fast football crowd at the State, there’ll be no
holding him.” For some reason Bayliss detested football. “This
athletic business is a good deal over-done. If Claude wants
exercise, he might put in the fall wheat.”
That night Mr. Wheeler brought the subject up at supper,
questioned Claude, and tried to get at the cause of his
discontent. His manner was jocular, as usual, and Claude hated
any public discussion of his personal affairs. He was afraid of
his father’s humour when it got too near him.
Claude might have enjoyed the large and somewhat gross cartoons
with which Mr. Wheeler enlivened daily life, had they been of any
other authorship. But he unreasonably wanted his father to be the
most dignified, as he was certainly the handsomest and most
intelligent, man in the community. Moreover, Claude couldn’t bear
ridicule very well. He squirmed before he was hit; saw it coming,
invited it. Mr. Wheeler had observed this trait in him when he
was a little chap, called it false pride, and often purposely
outraged his feelings to harden him, as he had hardened Claude’s
mother, who was afraid of everything but schoolbooks and
prayer-meetings when he first married her. She was still more or
less bewildered, but she had long ago got over any fear of him
and any dread of living with him. She accepted everything about
her husband as part of his rugged masculinity, and of that she
was proud, in her quiet way.
Claude had never quite forgiven his father for some of his
practical jokes. One warm spring day, when he was a boisterous
little boy of five, playing in and out of the house, he heard his
mother entreating Mr. Wheeler to go down to the orchard and pick
the cherries from a tree that hung loaded. Claude remembered that
she persisted rather complainingly, saying that the cherries were
too high for her to reach, and that even if she had a ladder it
would hurt her back. Mr. Wheeler was always annoyed if his wife
referred to any physical weakness, especially if she complained
about her back. He got up and went out. After a while he
returned. “All right now, Evangeline,” he called cheerily as he
passed through the kitchen. “Cherries won’t give you any trouble.
You and Claude can run along and pick ‘em as easy as can be.”
Mrs. Wheeler trustfully put on her sunbonnet, gave Claude a
pasture hill to the orchard, fenced in on the low land by the
creek. The ground had been ploughed that spring to make it hold
moisture, and Claude was running happily along in one of the
furrows, when he looked up and beheld a sight he could never
forget. The beautiful, round-topped cherry tree, full of green
leaves and red fruit,—his father had sawed it through! It lay on
the ground beside its bleeding stump. With one scream Claude
became a little demon. He threw away his tin pail, jumped about
howling and kicking the loose earth with his copper-toed shoes,
until his mother was much more concerned for him than for the
tree.
“Son, son,” she cried, “it’s your father’s tree. He has a perfect
right to cut it down if he wants to. He’s often said the trees
were too thick in here. Maybe it will be better for the others.”
“‘Tain’t so! He’s a damn fool, damn fool!” Claude bellowed, still
hopping and kicking, almost choking with rage and hate.
His mother dropped on her knees beside him. “Claude, stop! I’d
rather have the whole orchard cut down than hear you say such
things.”
After she got him quieted they picked the cherries and went back
to the house. Claude had promised her that he would say nothing,
but his father must have noticed the little boy’s angry eyes
fixed upon him all through dinner, and his expression of scorn.
Even then his flexible lips were only too well adapted to
hold
the picture of that feeling. For days afterward Claude went down
to the orchard and watched the tree grow sicker, wilt and wither
away. God would surely punish a man who could do that, he
thought.
A violent temper and physical restlessness were the most
conspicuous things about Claude when he was a little boy. Ralph
was docile, and had a precocious sagacity for keeping out of
trouble. Quiet in manner, he was fertile in devising mischief,
and easily persuaded his older brother, who was always looking
for something to do, to execute his plans. It was usually Claude
who was caught red-handed. Sitting mild and contemplative on his
quilt on the floor, Ralph would whisper to Claude that it might
be amusing to climb up and take the clock from the shelf, or to
operate the sewing-machine. When they were older, and played out
of doors, he had only to insinuate that Claude was afraid, to
make him try a frosted axe with his tongue, or jump from the shed
roof.
The usual hardships of country boyhood were not enough for
Claude; he imposed physical tests and penances upon himself.
Whenever he burned his finger, he followed Mahailey’s advice and
held his hand close to the stove to “draw out the fire.” One year
he went to school all winter in his jacket, to make himself
tough. His mother would button him up in his overcoat and put his
dinner-pail in his hand and start him off. As soon as he got out
of sight of the house, he pulled off his coat, rolled it under
his arm, and scudded along the edge of the frozen fields,
arriving at the frame schoolhouse panting and shivering, but very
well pleased with himself.
V
Claude waited for his elders to change their mind about where he
should go to school; but no one seemed much concerned, not even
his mother.
Two years ago, the young man whom Mrs. Wheeler called “Brother
Weldon” had come out from Lincoln, preaching in little towns and
country churches, and recruiting students for the institution at
which he taught in the winter. He had convinced Mrs. Wheeler that
his college was the safest possible place for a boy who was
leaving home for the first time.
Claude’s mother was not discriminating about preachers. She
believed them all chosen and sanctified, and was never happier
than when she had one in the house to cook for and wait upon. She