A Summer Morning

AMONG her mountain solitudes, sought only of bird and beast, netted roots send up from the shadowed mould the product of their secret forces, pale blossoms, leaf-encircled, coming forth for their brief manifestation amid the myriad life of the world ; one pure corolla after another to droop back from the summer air into the earth, but leaving a likeness of itself within the brown seed lodged in the lichened cleft of the rock. And in places scarcely less lonely are her sons and daughters, with needs beyond the flowers’, bitter and unsupplied, their poignant beauty hidden from the eyes of men ; sweet but unnourished lives, falling at last into darkness, leaving somewhere among the whirling atoms of Time the essence of their unregarded years.

Hewn logs made the walls of the low room; overhead was the framework of rafters, poles of pine, the bark still clinging to them in places, outlined against the gray shingles of the roof with their black rain marks. A partition of upright boards shut off the other half of the garret; a steep stairway of three-sided steps came up from the room below; in the western wall was a window with four small panes of glass. The furnishings of the room were as old and plain : a high, four-posted bed, painted an orange that had grown brown through the years, was covered with a woolen counterpane, handwoven in a pattern of blue and white wheels ; there was a pine table with a little black-framed looking-glass slanting above it, a washstand that matched the bed, and two trunks, a zinc one, new and cheap, the other of hide studded with round brass tacks worn thin and shiny ; a chair was set stiffly against the wall, a low white-oak rocker stood under the window. There was neither fireplace nor stove, but the December sun shone boldly into the chill atmosphere, even as the perfect cleanliness and order of the apartment triumphed over its poor belongings, light of another sort from a luminous soul.

A woman came up the twisted stairs, an elation in her face and manner, and stood for a minute at the foot of the bed as if planning the details of some task. She was less frayed than women in surroundings like hers are wont to be. Somewhere within her was a countervailing force to poverty and isolation, but it was volant rather than resistant, of the bird and not of the rock. Her hands and face showed marks of toil and weather, but her slim figure had bowed but little to either, and her cheap calico dress and the little sack of coarse brown jeans only emphasized the clearness of her features and the youthful poise of her shapely head with its crown of soft abundant hair. As she stood there in thought, glancing about the room, her blue eyes softened, their look seeming to embrace one familiar object after another with the unpremeditated tenderness of farewell.

She turned and began to remove from their nails her own and her husband’s few garments, brushing and folding them carefully. She took down with pious respect a picture of Washington in a flat wooden frame that hung above the bed, and from its shelf the pointed mahogany case of a clock which had long ceased to run. Her mother’s grandfather had brought both with him when he journeyed southward between the ranges of the Blue Ridge in search of fresh land, finding the land, but never the people who should make of solitude a society, and furnish to his descendants the incentives and surroundings necessary to progress. Nevertheless there had been transmitted to this youngest child of his blood one precious tendency; within her also was an impulse that reached forth along unexplored paths for some higher good than the visible things of her poor environment.

To this instinct, which so differentiated her from those whose humble histories were lived so close to her own, the circumstances of her married life had given a definite aim. Seven years before, she had come to this house a bride ; a few days later her husband’s father had lost his right arm in a gin. Alvin Hollis as the eldest son had remained in the home to be the provider for the family till the younger boys should grow up, and his wife became daughter and sister to his people. At first she took her share in the household tasks with not a thought beyond the happy sense of being equal to love’s demands. Then there was the slow coming of dissatisfaction and the slower shaping of discontent into desire ; and even while her feet continued willing and her hands busy, she kindled and kept alive in her husband’s duller nature the purpose to have some day a home of their own. Working constantly with him to that end, she could have told at the end of each succeeding year how every dollar of its painful savings had been made. To-day Alvin had gone to the village recently laid out on the new railroad, to pay over those few hundreds for the four-roomed cottage, with its acre or two of land, which she herself had selected two months before.

“ Hideous little cheap wooden houses with not a tree to hide their ugliness, — a thousand times more depressing than the old towns dead years ago ! ” a woman on her way back to New York had said to her companion when their train stopped at the village station. But to the seeing eye this crudeness was not without its pathos and its promise. To Dora Hollis “ a town ” represented forces that appealed to her imagination because of their vague greatness, and the white cottage day and night was before her eyes. Since visiting her sister, whose husband was getting good wages in the city, she had had a new ideal of what a home might be ; but Annie’s house had been bought ready furnished ; the things that should go into her own would be the precious acquisitions of years, each with its separate history of willing toil and sacrifice.

As she bent now over the old hair trunk, taking out and rearranging its contents, her mother-in-law came up from the room below, and drawing the rocker to Dora’s side watched her movements with serious intentness. She was a tall, spare woman, and there was a definite correspondence between her clean faded garments, unmitigated in their subserviency to merest necessity, and the knotted, sinewy frame. It was beyond imagination to recall in that furrowed brown face the possibilities of youth ; narrowing circumstance had reshaped every lineament after its own likeness. But there is something that lies too deep even for circumstance, and back of the lines on cheek and brow was the impress of the mystery of human relations, birth and death and marriage, the suffering with and because of another.

As she sat there, the thought of the change that lay ahead of her daughterin-law seemed a bright contrast to her own monotonous years. “ I reckon you ’re right glad you’re going away,” she said, but with no suggestion of complaint in her slow voice.

“ Glad, glad,” Dora’s heart repeated, but her perceptions were quick and her sympathies tender. “I am not glad to be leaving you, mother,” she answered.

There was a long silence. Mrs. Hollis’s spare form drooped forward in its faded raiment, her chin sank into the palm of her long wrinkled hand. The unusual stimulus of the occasion had sent her mind on a train of reflection, but only its closing inference found brief expression.

“ It’s not best for us to set our hearts on anything in this world,” she declared, raising her face to Dora’s.

The dictum glanced aside from the young heart, impervious in its confidence of hastening good. There was a moment of stillness. Then Dora laid a blue gingham skirt across Mrs. Hollis’s lap. “You might make this over for Ida in the spring,” she said.

The elder woman was not diverted from her thought. Ignorance limits the range but perhaps not the acuteness of moral perceptions. Conviction was as deep in the dim eyes looking out from their withered sockets as if their owner had beheld all the pomp and glory of the earth, and had measured their emptiness. She spoke with solemn concern, albeit the words at her command were few. “ I don’t want you and Alvin to set your heart on the things of this world, Dora. I’m afraid of worldly-mindedness.”

In her anxiety to make a reply of some kind, Dora confided one of her happy secrets. “ These are to plant in my front yard,” she said, taking the top from a small tin box, and holding it out for her mother to see.

“ English peas in a front yard ? ”

“They are sweet peas,” Dora said. “ Flowers.”

“ Did Annie give them to you ? ”

“ When I was there last summer.” Dora held the box as an empress might hold a case of jewels. “ Would you like to have some of them, mother? ”

Mrs. Hollis shook her head. “ I would n’t have time to work with ’em,” she answered. “ I ’ll have less time than ever, now that you are going, Dora.”

The words were the first spoken recognition of her daughter-in-law’s faithful service, and the quick blood rushed to Dora’s face. “ You’ve been good to me, mother,” she said ; “ don’t you think I ’ll ever forget it.”

But when she was alone, and the brief winter sunshine had faded out of the room, a sudden revulsion of feeling, common to timid humanity on the brink of a long deferred happiness, came over her, a dim twilight of the heart, and her mother-in-law’s exhortation returned like an indictment.

She went to the little window and looked westward to the bar of purple cloud, back of the fine tracery of the bare trees. “ Seven years without our own table, without so much as a fire to sit down before together,” she argued with her self-accusings. “ Is it wrong to be glad now ? ”

A disappointment hidden through the years, and keener than any pang of poverty, asserted itself in sudden, sharp vindication of her innocence.

“ I am not worldly-minded,” she whispered. “ I do not want the house too much ” — She looked up at the wintry sky and her eyes filled with tears. Her childlessness had been a bitter thing to her.

She was eager that night for Alvin to relate the details of the purchase. Her active mind had gone over it all, — the dingy room at the back of the store, the counting over of the six hundred dollars, Miller Boyd’s sharp eyes peering out covetously from under his shaggy eyebrows, his hard exactions, her husband’s slow remonstrance and final yielding of the points at issue, as all men yielded to Miller Boyd, the transfer of the deeds, — and yet she wanted to hear it put into speech. But for some reason Alvin would not talk. The next morning, during their slow ride in the heavily loaded wagon, her heart was too tender over the parting from the old home and its inmates for her to care for conversation, and she scarcely noticed his silence. But when they had reached the village, instead of driving to the white cottage quite at its upper end, her husband turned his team into the lane leading to the old brick house, a landmark for half a century, and occupied by Miller Boyd before the coming of the railroad had given his lands an undreamed-of value.

“ What are you driving down here for, Alvin? ” she asked in surprise.

“ Because it’s our house,” he said gruffly. “ I bought it yesterday.”

He got out of the wagon and walked by the side of his mules, and she sat white and still, like one overtaken by some calamity too sudden and terrible to be apprehended as a reality.

It was with the same cessation of feeling that she suffered him to lift her down from the wagon, and began to assist him to unload and carry in their things. At first they carried them only as far as the piazza; it was when Alvin unlocked the doors and she went inside, that the sense of what had happened came upon her. There were two large rooms on the first floor, the light coming in garishly through the blindless windows, and a half-story above. The shed rooms had been taken away, but the body of the house was firm, and it was less its decay than its squalor that affected her with a confusion of painful impressions, of which the only distinct one was that the ceiling and high chair-boarding were evenly marked with curling black spots, which some one had laboriously made by holding against their dingy white a lighted candle. The place had been rented since Miller Boyd had moved to his new house across the railroad, and the last tenants had left the floor and stairs littered with broken pieces of shabby furniture, bits of crockery, and cast-off clothing. The air was heavy with odors as old as the house.

To Dora, immaculately neat in all her being, there was the immediate necessity of attacking that which was so repugnant to sight and smell. When she had produced a semblance of cleanliness, she sat down with her husband to the dinner which she had providently brought with her, and when he had appeased his hunger, her question came: “ Why did you do it, Alvin ? ”

He was on a sorry defensive. “ Because I got this house and ten acres of land for what I would have had to pay for the cottage and one acre.”

“ There are more than ten acres in this place.”

“ There are twenty-five. I ’ve got five years to pay for the other fifteen in.”

“ With interest on your note ? ”

“ Of course,” he replied with irritation. “You didn’t expect he’d let me have ’em any other way, did you ? ”

“ The land is worn out, Alvin, nearly all of it.”

“ It’s land,” he said doggedly.

She was silent.

“ You might count that the house was just thrown in for nothing,” he argued. “ The land by itself is worth what I paid for it.”

A sick depression came over her face.

“ These two rooms are a good deal larger than any of the rooms in the other house,” he suggested.

There was nothing to be said on a point so obvious. Their few pieces of furniture seemed lost between the wide spaces of dingy floor, worn in uneven ridges by the tread of many feet. She wanted to say something, but a numbness that was not that of anger held her in its grasp.

He cast himself upon history. “ That’s the way Miller Boyd first got his start,” he said, " taking care of travelers in this very house. I’ve heard people say that sometimes there would be a dozen men here to stay all night at one time. That was in the old days when people used to wagon it from the up-country down to Athens and Augusta.”

“ Yes, this is an old house,” she answered with an effort.

“ It’s old, but it will last as long as you and me will ever have need of a home.”

The depression on her face deepened. Yes, it would last.

During the weeks that followed, rainy and cheerless for the most part, her mind turned wearily back upon itself. She had never minded hardships, but her intelligence shrank from futile labor. She wished for the simple conveniences of life, not to spare her strength, but that she might be satisfied with the reasonableness of her toil. And she craved something of grace and beauty to ennoble the sordidness of a mere keeping the body in life. The house into which they had come answered few of the requirements of a home; but worse to her than its inconvenience was its ugliness, an ugliness which she knew could not be mitigated until the land was paid for. But she felt no ill-will toward Alvin. Better than he could tell her, she guessed how little of Miller Boyd’s cunning had sufficed to entrap him in the poor trade. She could understand that to her husband land represented a good so supreme that her own preferences were as nothing in comparison. And she found no fault; even the unwonted quiet of her manner did not affect him as a reproach. For him the situation resolved itself into very simple elements. He had the land; he was going to own it, if not in five years, then in ten. That he had an incentive for his daily toil, and that his wife had been suddenly deprived of all purpose in life, he was not subtle enough to discover, much less to reason upon.

On a morning early in March, as she returned from one of the village stores, she looked over the fence into Mrs. Boyd’s vegetable garden and saw something that set her slow blood beating with its oldtime quickness. Protected by a covering of light brush were two long rows of light green leaves showing evenly above the dark soil, and the seeds of her flowering peas were still in the tin box, — so much imprisoned life which she herself might set free in the awakening world !

She hastened home and regarded with new interest the open space before her door. Semblance of flower or shrub there was none ; the bare red earth trodden almost as hard as stone. Before it could be ready for planting, the ground needed to be ploughed, but she knew Alvin would not consent to be hindered from his crop, and she determined herself to loosen the soil with the hoe. She worked at it in her spare time for a week, drawing away the heavy clods, and bringing fresh black earth from the woods a few hundred yards away ; and while she toiled with tired back and limbs, a song fluttered from her lips. Once more a heart had thrown itself on the eternal promise and was saved by hope.

The appearance of the first green tips along the even rows was the banishment of all her heaviness. She watched for every new leaf and tendril, and shut in her dingy rooms ; the consciousness of the lovely miracle just outside was vividly with her. The same miracle indeed, multiplied infinitely, was over all the land. She watched with hushed spirit — the old, old longing tenderly subdued within her — the rising tide of life spreading away from her lowly doorstep over hill and valley to the far horizon. She marked it with wordless questioning in the grass at her feet, in the springing corn and cotton, in her husband’s patient tillage, in the orchard trees, in the distant landscape, with its infinite gradations of delicate color. Then she turned from a beauty that was more than she could endure to the vines which her own hands had planted, feeling for them a bond, not of possession, but almost of kinship, as she bent over their fresh growth. Moreover, the spring had brought to her a human friendship, as unexpected as it was sweet.

On the Sabbaths when there was no preaching in the village the men would congregate in a shady spot near the post office in comfortable companionship. Alvin returned one Sunday morning from this interchange of opinion and information, alert with interest. After his thirty years in the country the opportunities he now enjoyed seemed to him the opulence of social privilege. “ Myrtis Boyd is going to marry that young man she walks with so much,” he announced.

It was like having a rude hand brush carelessly aside some treasured mystery, but Dora recognized the kindly intent and smiled.

“ Have you ever seen them together ? ” he asked.

“ Sometimes.”

“ Did n’t she stop in to see you yesterday ? ”

“Yes.”

“And one day last week ? ”

“ Yes, she comes in often.”

“ Has she ever told you she was going to marry ? ”

“ Not in words.” Dora was thinking of the light in the girl’s eyes, of her little wayward impulses to speech, ending only in a happy silence.

“ I heard all about it up town. They are going to have a fine thing of it I reckon.”

He waited a moment and then spoke with some hesitation. He was beginning to discern dimly what his wife had never put into words. “ Do you know where they are going to live ? ”

She had not heard, but his manner told her. Her disappointment, quiescent for weeks, assailed her fiercely, bitter with a sudden jealousy toward the young life which, finding some secret sympathy, had turned clingingly to her own. “ In our cottage ? ” she asked.

He nodded gloomily. And then he fell back, in his desire to comfort, upon one of the few generalizations which had come to his limited understanding, he knew not from what teacher. “ Some people can have all they want in this world,” he said, “ and some can’t have anything.”

The door was set wide to the fresh air of early summer. In the sunlight just beyond, the sweet peas lifted their first few blossoms, pink and white, above the green tendrils clasping them.

“We all have something,” Dora answered; and the shadow lifted from her face.

A week later Mrs. Boyd came down to invite them to the marriage. Social amenities were still too undeveloped in Brandon for any class distinctions to have originated on their account. Myrtis herself came soon after and took Dora back with her to see the pretty clothes spread in state in the upstairs chamber.

The girl touched a dress of fine white muslin and blushed rosily. “ You will come and see me in it to-morrow,” she said. And then she caught Dora’s worn little hand and drew it in a sudden caress to her own soft cheek. “ There is no one like him in the world,” she whispered. “ You have only just seen him; you cannot think how dear and perfect he is until you know him as I do.”

Everybody in Brandon rose earlier than usual that Tuesday in June. Myrtis Boyd’s wedding was the one point of significance in the day. Household duties lost their importance, the counters in the little stores were deserted, even the school was dismissed an hour before the time, and, for all the good that was done, need never have been assembled.

Dora’s heart awoke her an hour before the early summer dawn. She had for Myrtis a gift which no one else had thought of for her, which no one else indeed could bestow. She gave Alvin his breakfast, and then, while the dew still lay on leaf and petal, she despoiled her vines of their bloom, and bore the white clusters, glowing here and there with pure rose, like the blushes of a bride, to Miller Boyd’s house and up to his daughter’s door.

As she returned through the shining air she was unconscious of a step that she took over the moist earth. The fullness of the summer morning swept through her heart. And there entered with it a gladness unrelated to herself, — the happiness of the young bride, the charm of the cottage which was to be her home, the large promise of a wedded joy which her own mind had not before conceived of, — all the wide bliss of earth, overflowing personal ends and sorrows. She walked past the dewy hedgerows of the lane with uplifted head, and stood looking on her despoiled vines in exultation. All her past years seemed to have been gathered up in this splendid moment; the future would be only the lengthening out of this sweet present. Suddenly her husband’s voice, guiding the horse with which he was ploughing, came to her ears, and all her heart flowed out to him. Who was she to have so much, so much, and apart from him !

She turned, and walking swiftly through the damp grass waited at the rail fence until he should reach the next furrow and face her. He saw her standing there and hurried his horse a little.

“ Did you want anything, Dora ? ” he asked, leaving the plough and coming to where she stood leaning toward him. He could not understand the look in her eyes.

It is hard when the soul is called to give account of herself, as though she belonged to time and earth. The more when the body has never learned even the poor language of gracious speech and unabashed caresses. Dora’s could only look through a pair of stainless eyes, and call yearningly to another soul back of the dull, poverty-smitten face turned to her own.

A sudden tenderness rose tremulous to her husband’s eyes, like the vibrant glow in a cloud far to the north, when across the paling sky the setting sun has sent into its shadows a beam of light.

He stretched out his arms to draw her to him, bewildered at his own emotion.

“ Dora, Dora! ” he cried gently.

Mary Applewhite Bacon.