PAGE 12
Up the Coulee
by
Seeing someone in the garden, he went down along the corn row through the rustling ranks of green leaves. An old woman was picking berries, a squat and shapeless figure.
"Good morning," he called cheerily.
"Morgen," she said, looklng up at him with a startled and very red face. She was German in every line of her body.
"Ich bin Herr McLane," he said after a pause.
"So?" she replied with a questioning inflection.
"Yah; ich bin Herr Grant’s bruder. "
"Ach, So!" she said with a downward inflection. "Ich no spick Inglish. No spick Inglis. "
"Ich bin durstig," he said. Leaving her pans, she went with him to the house, which was what he wanted to see.
"Ich bin hier geboren. "
"Ach, so!" She recognized the little bit of sentiment, and said some sentences m German whose general meaning was sympathy. She took him to the cool cellar where the spring had been trained to run into’ a tank containing pans of cream and milk, she gave him a cool draught from a large tin cup, and then at his request they went upstairs. The house was the same, but somehow seemed cold and empty. It was clean and sweet, but it had so little evidence of being lived in. The old part, which was built of logs, was used as best room, and modeled after the best rooms of the neighboring Yankee homes, only it was emptier, without the cabinet organ and the rag carpet and the chromoes.
The old fireplace was bricked up and plastered–the fireplace beside which in the far-off days he had lain on winter nights, to hear his uncles tell tales of hunting, or to hear them play the violin, great dreaming giants that they were.
The old woman went out and left him sitting there, the center of a swarm of memories coming and going like so many ghostly birds and butterflies.
A curious heartache and listlessness, a nerveless mood came on him. What was it worth, anyhow–success? Struggle, strife, trampling on someone else. His play crowding out some other poor fellow’s hope. The hawk eats the partridge, the partridge eats the flies and bugs, the bugs eat each other, and the hawk, when he in his turn is shot by man. So, in the world of business, the life of one man seemed to him to be drawn from the life of another man, each success to spring from other failures.
He was like a man from whom all motives had been withdrawn. He was sick, sick to the heart. Oh, to be a boy again! An ignorant baby, pleased with a block and string, with no knowledge and no care of the great unknown! To lay his head again on his mother’s bosom and rest! To watch the flames on the hearth!
Why not? Was not that the very thing to do? To buy back the old farm? It would cripple him a little for the next season, but he could do it. Think of it! To see his mother back in the old home, with the fireplace restored, the old furniture in the sitting room around her, and fine new things in the parlor!
His spirits rose again. Grant couldn’t stand out when he brought to him a deed of the farm. Surely his debt would be canceled when he had seen them all back in the wide old kitchen. He began to plan and to dream. He went to the windows and looked out on the yard to see how much it had changed.
He’d build a new barn and buy them a new carriage. His heart glowed again, and his lips softened into their usual feminine grace–lips a little full and falling easily into curves.