Fruits of the Earth (6 page)

What was the matter with Ruth? Much was the matter.

Immediately after dinner Abe rose from table and returned to the yard, where Nicoll joined him. Nicoll never got tired of admiring that barn of Abe's; but he did so with his
peculiar smile which seemed on the point of turning from admiration into irony.

“I've often wondered,” he said, making futile attempts at using a straw by way of a toothpick, “whether this sort of thing pays.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Buying more and more land. Working with hired help.”

“Does it pay to farm? Seems to me that is the question.”

“I don't think it is. While you do your own work, farming is bound to pay. It has paid since the world began. You make better wages for your labour than anywhere else and remain your own master.”

“I'm hanged,” Abe said, “if I'll work for a dollar a day. That's all I pay you. There must be some profit over.”

“You pay more than the wages. You need two ploughs instead of one; or three or four. You feed two or three teams instead of one. You pay more in taxes. And–Oh, well, it's all right when you hire a neighbour with time to spare. But when it comes to what you call a hired man! He won't work so hard; he won't work so well. There's more wear and tear on your implements, and on your horses. Right now, I believe, the greater your acreage, the less your yield per acre.”

This argument told; for already, within five years, Abe had to contend against a decreasing yield. Yet he defended himself. “The soil gets poorer. You'll be up against the same thing.”

“Perhaps.” Nicoll shrugged his shoulders and pushed out his lips. “I don't say. But the moment I gave up moving from place to place, my yield increased…. And it gets harder to find help.”

“Machines,” Abe said, struck by the coincidence of Nicoll's arguments with those of his brother-in-law.

“That's so,” Nicoll said pensively. They were squatting in the narrow strip of shade along the east wall of the barn. “When you hitch an engine to your plough, you know it won't slack. But the thing's got to be built. You get your hired man one degree removed. He's going to get the better of you. And then…I've been watching these threshing outfits. Do a lot of work. But…just for the fun of it, I threshed a strawstack over last year, in winter time, with the fanning mill.”

“And what did you find? I've often wondered.”

“I fanned a hundred and three bushels of wheat out of that stack.”

“That a fact? I'll be hanged!”

And with that Abe rose, more disquieted than ever….

In the fall of the year Shilloe moved out to his claim; but not before section crews were dismissed for the winter. He proved to be a pleasant, round-faced, clean-shaven man of thirty-odd, good-looking in his way, though unmistakably Slavic. As for his wife, neither Abe nor Nicoll ever saw her; and whenever either of them passed the place, a flock of children scampered for house or stable to hide.

HUSBAND AND WIFE

A
be had been married for nearly six years; and in rapid succession four children had arrived. Then, there was a cessation of births.

Just what had happened between Abe and Ruth? Neither of them knew; they had simply drifted. There had been a time when both had foreseen the coming estrangement and dreaded its approach. Both had tried to forestall it. Abe had asked Ruth to accompany him on necessary drives: calls here and there, rounds of inspection when planning operations for the following season. Ruth had again sought his company in the long summer evenings. Gradually such attempts had been abandoned till, in occasional retrospection, both were often struck by the fact that a day, a week, a month had gone by without their having spoken more than such few words as were demanded by the routine of life.

Physical attraction had died in satiety, renewing itself in ever-lengthening intervals; on Abe's part because he immersed himself more and more in his work: he came home exhausted and overtired; on Ruth's part because, unperceived, a revolt flamed in her against she hardly knew what: the rural life, the
isolation, the deadly routine of daily tasks. She had become used to exhausting her emotional powers on the children. These children had been born as the natural fruit of marriage, not anticipated with any great fervour of expectancy; yet they had come to absorb her life; for Abe, engrossed in other things, had left them to her. When, occasionally, she had told him of their progress in growth or development, he had listened absently, had treated her enthusiasm with an ironic coolness which made her close up in her shell. In his presence she had ceased to let herself go in her intercourse with them. When she was playing with them, and he entered, a mask fell over her face. Gradually, she ceased to play with them.

A peculiar development was the consequence. The children, always thrown with her, began to take her for granted; Abe was the extraordinary, romantic element in their lives; mostly he was away, driving or working in the fields; he did not encourage their familiarity; he tolerated them as an adjunct to his life; but he was also the dispenser of such rare glories as a ride on horseback, in buggy or wagon. When they begged for such favours and he briefly declined to comply with their wishes, they accepted his verdict as that of a higher power; but they soon learned that their mother's “no” need not be accepted.

Both Ruth and Abe were aware of these things. Ruth resented them; Abe, noticing that she did, took them with a humorous good nature which had often an ironical point. Suppose the children were noisy and Ruth tried vainly to quiet them. Abe waited till she had worked herself into a state of nervous excitement, the worse for his observant eye; then suddenly he would “settle them” by a word of command. His instant success had an effect as though he had said, “I'll show you how to deal with them.” Ruth felt that it was easy for him
to retain his power over them, but that he made no attempt of exerting it in her name or to her advantage. Although he corroborated her own demands, he did it in such a way as to damage her authority rather than to confirm it.

On the rare occasions when Abe gave these things a definite thought, he realized his own lack of consideration; but somehow he seemed unable to remedy it. His regret was always retrospective; he could not foresee it. His material struggle absorbed him to the point where he had no energy left to ponder nice questions of conduct and to lay down rules to govern his intercourse with wife and children. When, in a flash of insight, this became clear to him, he postponed the difficulty. The “kids” were still small; he would take them in hand later; let him build up that farm first, an empire ever growing in his plans.

There was another point of friction between him and Ruth: the house. Ruth did not forgive him the fact that the hired man of whom she disapproved had a better place to live in than herself. When Abe said that this was provisional, that one day he would build her a house which was to be the envy of everybody, she could not summon any enthusiasm; she wanted comfort, not splendour; convenience, not luxury. That was the reason, too, why she adopted an attitude hostile to the Nicolls; she envied them their house: but the Nicolls were mere peasants; she could not rid herself of the conceit of the city-born.

She was city-born! In this she was handicapped.

Abe had never expected Ruth to do any farm work, not even to carry water or fuel into the house. Winter or summer, he rose at four in the morning and started the fires. He milked the cows and fed the horses before he called her. But that call in the morning! In the first year of their marriage Abe had
entered the bedroom and sat down on the edge of her bed, awakening her with a caress. Now he knocked at her door.

She was aware that he had begun to look critically at her. She had caught herself wishing that she could make herself invisible; she was getting stout. Not that Abe said a word about it; but she knew he disliked stout women. Abe was heavy himself; he weighed two hundred and fifty pounds; but, being so tall, he did not look it. Ruth had been slender at the time of their marriage; as she began to put on weight, she had become shapeless as she called it. She suffered from it herself but resented Abe's disapproval. Perhaps he never meant to convey such a disapproval. It was true that the bed which they had so far shared was becoming uncomfortable; but when Abe, in the fourth year, jestingly referred to the fact, his very jest offended her, the more so since, ostentatiously, he spoke only of his own increase in girth. “By golly! he said. “Work agrees with me. It's about time we bought another bedstead so I can turn around without bumping you.” A week later he brought that new bedstead home; and henceforth they slept apart. Ruth cried.

Nor was she unaware of her own shortcomings; she was getting less and less careful with regard to the common amenities of life. At first, she had omitted the white tablecloth only when Abe was absent from a meal. Why go to unnecessary trouble? It was hard enough to keep a house tidy which, with four children in it, was much too small. There was a kitchen cabinet; she had a good dinner-set; but, when pieces were broken, she replaced them with heavy white crockery, saving her better dishes for social occasions which never came. When Abe saw these substitutes for the first time, he lifted a cup in his hand and weighed it; but he never said a word. Next, to save steps, she took to washing the dishes in the dining and
living room, leaving them on the table for the next meal. Then she left the white table-cloth out altogether, preferring oilcloth. The room took on a dingy appearance.

In her dress, too, she became careless. Her house-frocks were ready-made, “out-size” garments bought from a catalogue. Feeling “driven,” she ceased changing her aprons at meal-time.

Abe noticed all this. The more lordly his own domain grew to be, the less in keeping was his house. For weeks he never said a word, till his distaste reached an explosive pressure. He knew that it was dangerous to let a grievance rest till it has become impossible to discuss it in a pleasant way. But time and energy were lacking; he closed his eyes while he could. When calling on his sister at Morley, he scanned everything and compared the way in which Mary, with the help of a servant, ran her house. Mary rarely mentioned her husband; the doctor rarely mentioned his wife; but when they did so, they spoke of each other with a great considerateness; not exactly tenderly, but with an unvarying mutual respect which showed that they were at one on every question of importance. The great secret in the doctor's life, the reason why he had given up his flourishing practice, lay between them as something jealously guarded from others' eyes. Abe, presuming on his twinship, had one day half asked Mary about it; she had at once withdrawn. Abe wondered whether Ruth would be as reticent, as loyal as Mary. He himself never even hinted to Mary of his criticism of Ruth.

Every now and then he tried to get Ruth to call on his sister. Mary had been at the farm; the doctor kept pony and buggy for her. But between the two women yawned an abyss. Neither could utter a word which found the other's approval. Abe had hoped that Ruth would enter into neighbourly relations with Mrs. Nicoll, a huge, talkative, and pathetic woman
who made him laugh. But Ruth was consciously isolating herself, making that a point of pride which had been a grievance. Abe mentioned it to her as a duty that she must call on the new-comer. “That woman and I have nothing in common,” she said. And this led to a “scene” between husband and wife.

“Listen here,” Abe said. “You blame me for your isolation–”

“Who says I do?”

“Nobody needs to tell me. I feel it. You make me feel it.”

“How, if you please?”

Abe stood helpless, uncomfortably aware that Charlie's eyes were on him from a corner of the dusky room. He paced up and down on the far side of the dining-table, Ruth standing in the door of the kitchen. Things pent up in his breast cried to be let out. He knew that this was the moment to shut them away in the depth of his heart; but he was consumed by the desire to revel in his misfortune. He also knew that, if he went over to Ruth and kissed her or patted her cheek, making her feel that she was something to him, he might easily win her co-operation in the endeavour to remove what was keeping them apart. He could not do so. “Oh!” he exclaimed, shrugging his powerful shoulders and raising his hands, “by a thousand little things, insignificant in themselves, that I can't lay my hand on. You know.”

“Perhaps I do,” she said, a white line around her lips. “But how about you? Don't you show me every hour, every minute we spend together that you disapprove of me, of all I am?”

Abe veered to face her, stung to the quick. What if she was right? He must conciliate her, or an abyss would open and swallow them. “Listen here,” he said, shaken, and his voice betrayed him.

She sank into a chair by the door, covering her face with
an apron. “Listen here,” he repeated, steadied. “I have my work. It takes every ounce of my strength; it takes every thought I am capable of.”

She looked up, her eyes dry and red. “What is it all for?”

He looked puzzled. “What is what all for?”

“That work.
I
don't know. To me it seems senseless, useless, a mere waste. Work, work, work! What for?”

He was thunderstruck.
She
disapproved of
him,
of all he was. But his voice was even. “Don't you know?”

“I don't. I had my misgivings. Farming! There are farms all over the country, down east. But I never dreamt of anything like this. It's like being in prison, cast off by the world. Don't hold Mary up to me. She despises me and thinks you a sort of half-god or hero. She looks at this shack and wonders how I can exist in it. She is right. I wonder myself. What can
I
do about it? This isn't a country fit to live in.”

“Exactly,” Abe said with rising anger. “I am making it into a country fit to live in. That is my task. The task of a pioneer. Can't you see that I need time, time, time? In six years I've built a farm which produces wealth. Give me another six years, and I'll double it. Then I'll build you a house such as you've never dreamt of calling your own.”