The Brimming Cup Part 10

... How sweet it was, Mr. Welles thought to himself, how awfully sweet to be walking in such pine-woods, on the early morning, preceded by such a wildly happy little dog, with a little boy whose treble voice ran on and on, whose strong little hand clasped yours so tightly, and who turned up to you eyes of such clear trust! Was he the same man who for such endless years had been a part of the flotsam cast out every morning into the muddy, brawling flood of the city street and swept along to work which had always made him uneasy and suspicious of it?

"There's the whistle," said Paul, holding up a finger. "Father has the first one blown at half-past six, so's the men can have time to get their things ready and start; and not have to hurry."

At this a faint stirring of interest in what the child was saying broke through the golden haze of the day-dream in which Mr. Welles was walking. "Where do they come from anyhow, the men who work in your father's mill?" he asked. "Where do they live? There are so few homes at Crittenden's."

"Oh, they live mostly over the hill in the village, in Ashley. There are lots of old houses there, and once in a while now they even have to build a new one, since the old ones are all filled up. Mr. Bayweather says that before Father and Mother came here to live and really run the mill, that Ashley Street was all full of empty houses, without a light in them, that the old folks had died out of. But now the men have bought them up and live in them. It's just as bright, nights! With windows lighted up all over. Father's had the electric current run over there from the mill, now, and that doesn't cost anything except ..."

Mr. Welles' curiosity satisfied, he fell back into his old s.h.i.+mmer of content and walked along, hearing Paul's voice only as one of the morning sounds of the newly awakened world.

Presently he was summoned out of this day-dream by a tug at his hand.

Paul gave out the word of command, "We turn here, so's to get into the men's short-cut."

This proved to be a hard-trodden path, lying like a loosely thrown-down string, over the hill pasture-land which cut Ashley village off from Crittenden's mill. It was to get around this rough tract that the road had to make so long a detour.

"Oh, I see," said Mr. Welles. "I'd been thinking that it must bother them a lot to come the two miles along the road from the village."

"Sure," said Paul. "Only the ones that have got Fords come that way.

This is ever so much shorter. Those that step along fast can make it easy in twelve or fifteen minutes. There they come now, the first of them." He nodded backward along the path where a distant dark line of men came treading swiftly and steadily forward, tin pails glistening in their hands.

"Some of those in that first bunch are really choppers by rights," Paul diagnosed them with a practised eye, "but of course n.o.body does much chopping come warmer weather. But Father never lays off any men unless they want to be. He fixes some jobs for them in the lumber-yard or in the mill, so they live here all the year around, same's the regular hands."

The two stood still now, watching the men as their long, powerful strides brought them rapidly nearer. Back of them the sun rose up splendid in the sparkling, dustless mountain air. The pasture gra.s.s on either side of the sinuous path lay s.h.i.+ning in the dew. Before them the path led through a grove of slim, white birches, tremulous in a pale cloud of light green.

"Well, they've got a pretty good way to get to their work, all right,"

commented Mr. Welles.

"Yep, pretty good," agreed Paul. "It's got tramped down so it's quite smooth."

A detachment of the file of tall, strongly built, roughly dressed men had now reached them, and with friendly, careless nods and greetings to Paul, they swung by, smoking, whistling, calling out random remarks and jokes back and forth along the line.

"h.e.l.lo, Frank. h.e.l.lo, Mike. h.e.l.lo, Harry. h.e.l.lo, Jom-bastiste. h.e.l.lo, Jim." Paul made answer to their repeated, familiar, "h.e.l.lo, Paul."

Mr. Welles drew back humbly from out their path. These were men, useful to the world, strong for labor. He must needs stand back with the child.

With entire unexpectedness, he felt a wistful envy of those men, still valid, still fit for something. For a moment it did not seem as sweet as he had thought it would always be, to feel himself old, old and useless.

II

April 12.

He was impatient to be at the real work of gardening and one morning applied seriously to Mrs. Crittenden to be set at work. Surely this must be late enough, even in this "suburb of the North Pole," as Vincent called Vermont. Well, yes, Mrs. Crittenden conceded to him, stopping her rapid manipulation of an oiled mop on the floor of her living-room, if he was in such a hurry, he could start getting the ground ready for the sweet peas. It wouldn't do any harm to plant them now, though it might not do any good either; and he mustn't be surprised to find occasional chunks of earth still frozen. She would be over in a little while to show him about it. Let him get his pick-mattock, spade, and rake ready, up by the corner of his stone wall.

He was waiting there, ten minutes later, the new implements (bought at Mrs. Crittenden's direction days and days ago) leaning against the wall.

The sun was strong and sweet on his bared white head, the cool earth alive under his feet, freed from the tension of frost which had held it like stone when he had first trod his garden. He leaned against the stone wall, laid a century ago by who knew what other gardener, and looked down respectfully at the strip of ground along the stones. There it lay, blank and brown, shabby with the litter of broken, sodden stems of last year's weeds, and unsightly with half-rotten lumps of manure.

And that would feed and nourish ...

For an instant there stood there before his flower-loving eyes the joyful tangle of fresh green vines, the pearly many-colored flesh of the petals, their cunning, involved symmetry of form--all sprung from a handful of wrinkled yellow seeds and that ugly mixture of powdered stone and rotten decay.

It was a wonderful business, he thought.

Mrs. Crittenden emerged from her house now, in a short skirt, rough heavy shoes, and old flannel s.h.i.+rt. She looked, he thought, ever so trig and energetic and nice; but suddenly aware that Vincent was gazing idly out of an upper window at them, he guessed that the other man would not admire the costume. Vincent was so terribly particular about how ladies dressed, he thought to himself, as he moved forward, mattock in hand.

"I'm ashamed to show you how dumb I am about the use of these tools," he told her, laughing shamefacedly. "I don't suppose you'll believe me, but honestly I never had a pick-mattock in my hand till I went down to the store to buy one. I might as well go the whole hog and confess I'd never even heard of one till you told me to get it. Is this the way you use it?" He jabbed ineffectually at the earth with the mattock, using a short tight blow with a half-arm movement. The tool jarred itself half an inch into the ground and was almost twisted out of his hand.

"No, not quite," she said, taking the heavy tool out of his hand. If she were aware of the idle figure at the upper window, she gave no sign of it. She laid her strong, long, flexible hands on the handle, saying, "So, you hold it this way. Then you swing it up, back of your head.

There's a sort of knack to that. You'll soon catch it. And then, if the ground isn't very hard, you don't need to use any strength at all on the downward stroke. Let Old Mother Gravity do the work. If you aim it right, its own weight is enough for ordinary garden soil, that's not in sod. Now watch."

She swung the heavy tool up, s.h.i.+ning in the bright air, all her tall, supple body drawn up by the swing of her arms, cried out, "See, now I relax and just let it fall," and bending with the downward rush of the blade, drove it deep into the brown earth. A forward thrust of the long handle ("See, you use it like a lever," she explained), a small earthquake in the soil, and the tool was free for another stroke.

At her feet was a pool of freshly stirred fragments of earth, loose, friable, and moist, from which there rose in a gust of the spring breeze, an odor unknown to the old man and thrilling.

He stooped down, thrust his hand into the open breast of earth, and took up a handful of the soil which had lain locked in frost for half a year and was now free for life again. Over it his eyes met those of the beautiful woman beside him.

She nodded. "Yes, there's nothing like it, the smell of the first earth stirred every spring."

He told her, wistfully, "It's the very first stirred in all my life."

They had both lowered their voices instinctively, seeing Vincent emerge from the house-door and saunter towards them immaculate in a gray suit.

Mr. Welles was not at all glad to see him at this moment. "Here, let me have the mattock," he said, taking it out of Mrs. Crittenden's hands, "I want to try it myself."

He felt an antic.i.p.atory impatience of Vincent's everlasting talk, to which Mrs. Crittenden always had, of course, to give a polite attention; and imitating as well as he could, the free, upward swing of his neighbor, he began working off his impatience on the unresisting earth.

But he could not help hearing that, just as he expected, Vincent plunged at once into his queer, abrupt talk. He always seemed to think he was going right on with something that had been said before, but really, for the most part, as far as Mr. Welles could see, what he said had nothing to do with anything. Mrs. Crittenden must really be a very smart woman, he reflected, to seem to know what he meant, and always to have an answer ready.

Vincent, shaking his head, and looking hard at Mrs. Crittenden's rough clothes and the handful of earth in her fingers, said with an air of enforced patience with obvious unreasonableness, "You're on the wrong track, you know. You're just all off. Of course with you it can't be pose as it looks when other people do it. It must be simply muddle-headed thinking."

He added, very seriously, "You infuriate me."

Mr. Welles, pecking feebly at the ground, the heavy mattock apparently invested with a malicious life of its own, twisting perversely, heavily lop-sided in his hands, thought that this did not sound like a polite thing to say to a lady. And yet the way Vincent said it made it sound like a compliment, somehow. No, not that; but as though it were awfully important to him what Mrs. Crittenden did. Perhaps that counted as a compliment.

He caught only a part of Mrs. Crittenden's answer, which she gave, lightly laughing, as though she did not wish to admit that Vincent could be so serious as he sounded. The only part he really heard was when she ended, "... oh, if we are ever going to succeed in forcing order on the natural disorder of the world, it's going to take everybody's shoulder to the wheel. Women can't stay ornamental and leisurely, and elegant, nor even always nice to look at."

Mr. Welles, amazed at the straining effort he needed to put forth to manage that swing which Mrs. Crittenden did so easily, took less than his usual small interest in the line of talk which Vincent was so fond of springing on their neighbor. He heard him say, with his air of always stating a foregone conclusion, something so admitted that it needed no emphasis, "It's Haroldbellwrightism, pure and simple, to imagine that anything you can ever do, that anybody can ever do, will help bring about the kind of order _you're_ talking about, order for everybody. The only kind of order there ever will be, is what you get when you grab a little of what you want out of the chaos, for your own self, while there's still time, and hold on to it. That's the only way to get anywhere for yourself. And as for doing something for other people, the only satisfaction you can give anybody is in beauty."

Mr. Welles swam out of the breakers into clear water. Suddenly he caught the knack of the upward swing, and had the immense satisfaction of bringing the mattock down squarely, buried to the head in the earth.

"There!" he said proudly to Mrs. Crittenden, "how's that for fine?"

He looked up at her, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He wondered for an instant if she really looked troubled, or if he only imagined it.

There was no doubt about how Vincent looked, as though he thought Mr.

Welles, exulting over a blow with a mattock, an old imbecile in his dotage.

Mr. Welles never cared very much whether he seemed to Vincent like an old imbecile or not, and certainly less than nothing about it today, intoxicated as he was with the air, the sun, and his new mastery over the soil. He set his hands lovingly to the tool and again and again swung it high over his head, while Vincent and Mrs. Crittenden strolled away, still talking... . "Doesn't it depend on what you mean by 'beauty'?" Mrs. Crittenden was saying.