Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 2

Summer was one continuous and busy play-spell for her in those days before her lessons became a serious thing, for as she sat in school she was experimenting in the same way. She chewed paper into b.a.l.l.s and snapped them like the boys. She carried slips of elm bark to chew also, and slate pencils she crunched daily. She gnawed the corners of her slate, tasted her ink and munched the cedar of her pencil.

And through it all she grew tall and straight and brown. She could run like a partridge and fight like a wild-cat, at need. Her brown-black eyes shone in her dark warm skin with an eager light, and her calloused little claws of hands reached and took hold of all realities.

The boys respected her as a girl who wasn't afraid of bugs, and who could run, and throw a ball. Above all she was strong and well.

CHAPTER III

DANGEROUS DAYS

A farmer's daughter is exposed to sights and sounds which the city girl knows nothing of. Mysterious processes of generation and birth go on before the eyes of the farm child, which only come as obscure whisperings to the city child of the same middle condition. And these happenings have a terrifying power to stir and develop pa.s.sions prematurely.

Rose heard occasionally obscene words among the hands. She listened unperceived to the vulgar cackling of old women during afternoon calls.

Before her eyes from the time of her toddling youth had proceeded the drama of animal life. She had seen it all; courts.h.i.+p, birth, death.

Nothing escaped her keen, searching, inquisitive eyes. She asked her father about these dramatic and furious episodes of the barnyard, but he put her off, and she finally ceased to ask about them. She began to perceive they were considered of that obscure and unmentionable world of sin, with which men alone had proper right to deal.

When the girls of her age in the grasp of some gale of pa.s.sion, danced about her shouting foul words in the unknowing way children have, she could not take part by word of mouth, though she felt the same savage, frenzied delight in it.

She learned early the hideous signs which pa.s.s in the country to describe the unnamable and the covert things of human life. She saw them scrawled on the fences, on school-house doors, and written on the dust of the road. There was no escaping them. The apparently shameful fact of s.e.x faced her everywhere.

And yet through it all she lived a glad, free, wholesome life. Her blood was sweet and clean and kept off contagion. Her brown skin flushed with its unhindered current. She dipped into this obscure questionable world only momentarily, and came back to her father wholesome and happy, except occasionally when some outrageous gesture or word had stricken her into weeping.

Then her father told her not to mind; just be good and sweet herself, and it would help the others to be good too. He blundered sometimes and struggled for words, and talked in grotesque riddles, but she understood his meaning some way and was comforted.

She did not go to her aunt. She had heard her say coa.r.s.e words and she did not care to go and tell her of these strange things. Her father was her hero and guide. She went to him as naturally as to a mother. It was a great thing for him to achieve, but he did not know it. He did not seek it. It was indeed thrust upon him. He would gladly have escaped from it, but Rose refused to listen to anyone else, so the puzzled and disturbed father continued to be her timorous guide as a matter of need.

He could not understand her quick perception--something seemed to rise in the child to help him explain. Germs of latent perception seemed to spring up like a conjuror's magic seed, here a kernel, there a tree. One by one obscure ideas rose from the deep like bubbles, and burst into thought in her conscious self. A hint organized in her brain long trains of sequential conceptions, which she had inherited with her s.e.x. She did not require teaching on the most fundamental problems of her nature.

Rose began to work early, but her work, like her playing, was not that of other girls. As she never played with dolls, caring more for hobby-horses, so she early learned to do work in the barn. From taking care of make-believe stick horses she came easily to take care of real horses.

When a toddling babe she had moved about under the huge plow-horses in their stalls, and put straw about them, and patted their columnar limbs with her little pads of palms, talking to them in soft indefinite gurgle of love and command.

She knew how much hay and oats they needed, and she learned early to curry them, though they resented her first trials with the comb. She cared less for the cows and pigs, but before she was ten she could milk the "easy" cows. She liked the chickens, and it was part of her daily duty to feed the hens and gather the eggs.

She could use a fork in the barn deftly as a boy by the time she was twelve, and in stacking times she handed bundles across the stack to her father. It was the variety of work, perhaps, which prevented her from acquiring that pathetic and lamentable stoop (or crook) in the shoulders and back which many country girls have in varying degree.

All things tended to make her powerful, lithe and erect. The naked facts of nature were hers to command. She touched undisguised and unrefined nature at all points. Her feet met not merely soil, but mud. Her hands smelled of the barn yard as well as of the flowers of the wild places of wood and meadow.

Meanwhile her comrades.h.i.+p was sweet to John Dutcher. He hardly knew his loss of a son so completely was he companioned by Rose. He had put far away the time when she should wear shoes and long dresses and become a "young lady."

"Let her be, as long as you can," he said to his sister. "She's a mighty comfort to me now, and she's happy; don't disturb her; time to wear long dresses and corsets'll come soon enough without hurryin' things."

CHAPTER IV

AN OPENING CLOVER-BLOOM

There are times in a child's life when it leaps suddenly into larger growth as the imprisoned bud blooms larger than its promise, when the green fist of its straining calyx loosens in the warm glow of a May morning. Knowledge comes to the child, especially all the subtler knowledge of time, of s.p.a.ce, of love, in a vague, indefinite, unconscious way, developing out of the child's organic self precisely as the flower blooms.

This knowledge comes to definite knowledge for an instant only and then returns to the subconscious, waiting the next day of warm sun, s.h.i.+ning water and smell of spring. Each time it stays longer, till at last the child can contemplate its own thought and finally express it. These times form our real life epochs.

One day in June, a party of the school children, with flas.h.i.+ng tin pails and willow baskets, went up into the woods after the wild-wood strawberries. It was late June and the strawberries of the meadows and uplands were nearly gone. The roads were dusty, the pastures close-clipped.

Merry, bare-footed little creatures! They started forth in the early morning while the dew still flamed on the clover-leaves, and around each corn-hill the ground was still moist. The girls romped and picked wild flowers, the boys threw stones at the chipmunks on the fence, and tossed their tin pails in the air, performing feats of deftness in imitation of the circus-men, whom they had lately seen on the green at Tyre.

They entered the forest and kept on up the wood-road until it seemed as if they were explorers. They had the delicious, tremulous feeling of having penetrated into the primeval, where nothing but the birds and animals lived. On past cool deeps of poplar, where the mandrake grew, and the sweet fern spread its magnificent leaves. On until the strawberries appeared, growing in clumps on long swaying stems, pale scarlet globes of delicious tartness.

They fell to work mostly in pairs. Curly-haired Carl kept with Rose, and his sharp eyes and knowledge of the patch enabled them to fill their pails first; then they went about helping the others, whose voices babbled on like streams.

Everywhere the pink sun-bonnets and ragged straw hats bobbed up and down. Everywhere fresh voices. The sunlight fell in vivid yellow patches through the cool odorous gloom. Everywhere the faint odor of ferns and mandrakes and berries, and the faint rustle of leaves, as if the shadows of the clouds trampled the tree-tops.

There was something sweet and wild and primeval in the scene, and the children were carried out of their usual selves. Rose herself danced and romped, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng with delight. Under her direction they all came together on a little slope, where the trees were less thick, and near a brook which gurgled through moss-covered stones.

"O, let's have our picnic here!"

"All right, let's!"

They made short work of the lunch they had. Their b.u.t.tered biscuits were spread with berries and mixed with water from the brook, which the girls drank like the boys, that is, by lying down on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and drinking as the hunter drinks. Their hunger eased they fell to games.

Games centuries old. Games which the Skandinavians played in the edges of their pine forests. Games the English lads and la.s.sies played in the oak-openings of middle-age England.

The little ones were ruled out after awhile and the five or six elder children (the oldest only fourteen), went on with their games, which told of love. They joined hands and circled about Carl, they sang:

"King William was King James' son, And from the royal race he run, Upon his breast he wore a star, Which points away to a conquest far.

Go choose you east, go choose you west, Go choose the one that you love best."

Carl selected Rose, as they all knew he would. They stood together now, holding hands.

"Down on this carpet you must kneel,"

(they knelt)

"As sure as the gra.s.s grows in the field.

Salute your bride with a kiss so sweet,"

(Carl kissed her gravely)

"Now you rise upon your feet."

Again they circled, and again a little bride and bridegroom knelt. The fresh young voices rang under the s.p.a.ces of the trees, silencing the joy of the thrush. The flecking sunlight fell on their towsled hair and their flushed faces. They had forgotten home and kindred, and were living a strange new-old life, old as history, wild and free once more, and in their hearts something bloomed like a flower, something sweet shook them all, something unutterable and nameless, something magnificent to attain and sorrowful to lose.

When they tired of "King William," they all flung themselves down on the gra.s.s and grew quiet. Some of the girls made wreaths of flowers strung on gra.s.s stems, while the boys studied the insects under the chips and stumps, or came slyly behind the girls and stuck spears of fox-tail down their necks. Some of them rolled down the bank. Carl, when he was tired of this, came and lay down by Rose, and put his head in her lap. Other bridegrooms did the same with their brides. Some of the boys matched violets, by seeing which would hook the other's head off.