White Narcissus (6 page)

The young man wandered for a time with the sense of well-being and careless optimism tempering more individual feeling, even curious recognition of old landmarks. And the fields were remarkably little changed. Toward the river the banks, the dredged ditches leading into it, the hedges of underbrush, preserved the old contours, and new fencing was in evidence more usually in the fields nearer the fronts of the farms and along the road. The lanes were the same as those down which he had wandered in earliest times to the bush for wild-flowers in spring and nuts in autumn. Richard Milne sat curiously aimless on a weathered, grey rail fence, looking at a rusty disc harrow with a homemade log tongue, to which bark still adhered. A huge, battered, old leather shoe had been nailed to the tongue for a tool-box.

He was impressed anew with the true reasonableness of farm practice. There was that about it which might appear
elsewhere inertia and shiftlessness. If an appliance served its appointed purpose it was allowed to do so. There was no fever for the spick and span, and even glittering new-painted machinery soon took on protective colouring and comfortable, crude patchings. This was part of the nature of farming, and when it was overruled it was at the sacrifice of practical utility. He recalled visiting the farm of two graduates of an agricultural college, and how his expectations of a stricter formalization had been disappointed. Luckily farming did not lend itself to the simplifications of hospital wards, scientific laboratories, prisons. His experience with other departments of the modernized world led him to thank God for it.

At the end of a field of oats, so sparse and short that he skirted the patch as though in fear of injuring it, he came on a long, grey, fine-clodded field divided into narrow rows formed by the packed pattern of broad wheels. They belonged to a tobacco-planter, he guessed, because the tiny plants were in evidence, withered almost to nothing. And there was a man not far from the other end of the field, stooping over a row. Picking his way, Richard Milne advanced toward the figure. It strode to meet him, carrying a basket and a pail a few steps, then stooping, piercing a hole in the dry earth with a blunt stick, pouring water into the hole from the pail, and taking a plant from the basket, planted it. By the time he could follow this procedure he could see the man distinctly, his gaunt angular movements of stooping, planting, his swift strides forward, while the eyes were busy with the ground before him, seeking unplanted spaces and withered plants which must be replaced. In the gait and these gestures there was something familiar, and he lingered, trying to remember before he should have passed. He was on the old home place, on Bill Burnstile’s farm. That was it!

But Bill was not going to let him pass. Lit by the sun under a drooping straw hat as tanned as itself, his face was leanly smiling.

“Well, here’s the Stranger!” he exclaimed, stretching forth his hand. “My boys told me you were here yesterday. I couldn’t hardly believe it.”

Their hands held. “Fine family, Bill. I was certainly surprised too. When did you come back from the West?”

“Oh, we came back about a year ago. Well, a year last winter. Time certainly flies. You’re looking well, though I can’t say I’d have known you in a crowd. Pretty pale,” he chuckled, “like a city fellow. Oh, well, the sun out here, the open air, you’ll soon get brightened up.” He looked at Richard Milne with jovial compunction, as though he were semi-invalid. That was the way, Richard knew, in which he regarded all city men, categorically.

“Yes. Healthful weather just now. How are your crops, Bill? Clover seems to have a pretty good stand around here. What happened to everybody’s oats?”

Bill Burnstile’s lantern jaws opened in a vast “Haw, haw!” and he bent back. “You certainly ain’t forgot all about farming, I can tell you that much.”

Richard Milne could not imagine anyone else of the locality making such distinctions. Of course, impervious stolidity might have its compensations. … In rural people it was often a part of instinctive caution.

It had been impossible, Bill was explaining, to put in the oats at the proper time. The ground was too wet, and even so lots of men had had to dub them in, any way to get them in, hopeless of good weather, and determined to have a few for their horses at least. Altogether it had not been a very good season. Now there was this drought. The bad weather was not
ended yet, or he was mistaken. Still, there couldn’t be a failure in everything – like in the West, where grain constituted the main asset. There a crop failure meant something.

“It was our West, of course,” mused Richard. “When a Canadian ‘goes West,’ it usually means the Canadian West.”

“Yes. … Have you been out yet?” The loose-jointed fellow seemed to take root in the ground, as though to stay there indefinitely talking.

“No. I’m sorry to say it, but I’ve never been there yet, not explored much of the world at all.”

“Oh, I understood you had become a regular Yankee by this time. I was wondering whether we’d ever have you back with us at all or not. That’s how it turns out, you know, when they get away once.”

“On the contrary, this place has scarcely been out of my mind. Naturally, when one’s been raised. … Do you find it changed at all since your return?”

“Well, no, can’t say I do. Of course, they grow more tobacco than they ever did. That began in the War, of course. Then there were a couple of years there they had to give away what they had. Over-production, I guess, or some warfare between the companies. That was just about the time I got back, and it looked kind of silly to me. But some way I got around to thinking it may be all right to put a few acres in. I see the other fellows doing it, anyway. Of course, I got enough of putting all my eggs in the one basket out West. When there’s rust, frost, or anything, hail, you just naturally lose your year’s work.”

The lank, brown, musing face was wrinkled. Richard saw a spear or two of white in his yellow temples. The man was changed and unchanged. The West, its gambling hazards, even a roving life had seemed more fitting to him than his
present situation. He had been the dare-devil hail-fellow to innumerable scrapes in his youth in this circumscribed place. But then, he had met a woman, acquired a wife, the Waterloo of that character.

It was a fate, Richard Milne thought he saw, which had completely humanized the harum-scarum; or, if not completely, so well that he was now to be counted upon for half-conscious, humorous understanding: in effect, since a descent to the practical was inevitable, for support. Having seen the world and touched the commonplace of romance, he would rightly estimate the commonplace, and see its quartz-glitter in the dust of his hands.

No, he would not be suspecting these things in himself, and that would make half his value in a self-conscious world such as Richard Milne had come to know. A true man, which is something different from a nice fellow, his tough, lean body, his brown, lean face told something about him; he was as old now as he had looked ten years ago, as he would be in ten years’ time. For his hearer the remarkable thing, so frequently invoked in print, was that here was a gentleman who had never read a book.

Meanwhile he, too, was stirred by the meeting, while the talk went on of crops. Only when such matters had been dealt with very thoroughly was it that Richard, about to leave, spoke again of the family.

“Yes, you’ve got to see the wife and our boys and girls while you’re here. We’re a regular tribe now. When I look at you, only a couple of years, ain’t it, younger, it seems hard to believe.”

“Well, we’ve both been away a long time. Time enough to have acquired a wife, you know.” His tone was somewhat grim, though he tried to veil it with a smile.

“Well,” declared the other in his turn, “my luck changed just as soon as we got married. And now, with a family, I’ve got to keep pegging away, so it doesn’t seem to have a chance to change.” He laughed.

“That’s good. Why, here they come now!”

A sound echoing from the trees at the end of the field made them turn. A boy and a girl were running toward them, halfway across, while two little boys were climbing the fence. As they ran barefoot over the soft, even, warm ground, with cries back and forward to each other, light-hearted, breathless, light-footed, Richard Milne stood transfixed for a second, permeated with a sense of his own childhood. Intently looking at the stranger, and their father, expecting who knew what cryptic spoken index of the mysterious world of which they guessed only that it was wonderful, they came forward.

“Well, you’re puffing, Bill.” The older Bill put his hand on the boy’s bristling yellow head, half shoving playfully. “This is Alice,” he added of the girl, whom Richard had seen on the road the day before. “This gentleman used to live here when he was as little as you.”

“This farm, this very farm?” Bill wanted to know.

“Right here,” the man assented, smiling. “But I used to be everywhere, when I could get away.”

“A great rover you used to be, Dick. Remember when we used to go for hickory nuts to old Broadus’s place? Nobody else’s was as good, because he didn’t want us.”

“Now, here come Johnnie and Tom,” laughed Alice. “They couldn’t stay away.”

The two raced up in silence, even more nearly breathless than the others. “He’s going to let me plant ’em,” gasped a seven-year-old chubby, dark boy, not stopping to pant, but
seizing the basket in his father’s hand. He looked up, his long, silky lashes glistening, his dark skin shining. He was like a sleek baby animal, and somehow different from the others. They eyed his manoeuvre with misgiving, and knew better than to try to take the basket from him. The third boy, who had run with him, was evidently the oldest, thin, tall, stooped, with open mouth and light eyes.

“Now we’ve lots of help,” mused Bill Burnstile. “I’m kind of juberous about letting you go at it; but maybe, if your sister looked after you, you could do a good job. Suppose Bill carries the basket, and Tom takes the plant out of it, while Johnnie here punches the hole with the stick. Alice can walk along behind and see that you keep straight in line with the row. And don’t waste the plants, and don’t miss any out. Give Bill the basket now, Johnnie.” The dark eyes were hurt, but Johnnie took his assigned part.

“This drought makes it bad,” Burnstile explained, once more turning to his visitor. “I kept working the ground up to keep the moisture in, and waiting for a rain. Got her in finally, day before yesterday, but no rain yet to help much.”

“It makes a lot of work, when you’ve got to go over the whole field this way and transplant.” Richard laughed, looking at the group of children hurrying down the row, stopping in a bunch, then running on. “Seems funny to see these infants planting tobacco. One thinks of nobody but men having been near that. Carson Hymerson was telling me this morning he doesn’t approve of growing it.”

“Carson’s funny. Of course, it’s hard on the land. But that isn’t why he doesn’t grow it.”

“A more personal objection?” Richard raised his eyebrows.

“Seems like it. Arvin, he’s grown to be quite a sensible fellow, though. And that’s a wonder. He’s sure working under disadvantages. Why, the boy can’t open his mouth, can’t say it’s a fine day, but what the old man wants to argue. He’ll argue black’s white just to make out the boy’s a liar. Doesn’t matter to Carson that he’s got to seem one himself. Perhaps he wants to provoke the boy to calling him one. What he does want I don’t know, nor I guess he don’t neither. It’s a wonder Arvin doesn’t give him such a back-hander! With me he wouldn’t live long, or I wouldn’t. Oh, he’s a tartar.”

“I seemed to see some change in the man. Something’s wrong. Something seems to be troubling him.”

“Well,” said Bill Burnstile consideringly, “I’ve been among gangs of men, and I know just about how long he’d keep a whole skin if he acted that way….”

“He seems,” Milne insisted on the word, “to have worries about the line fence between himself and Lethen. He was telling me a good deal about that.”

“He would. You’ll find out what an awful man poor old man Lethen is. Haw, haw! Carson, he hasn’t bothered me much yet, and I suppose he’s got to size me up. I don’t think he will, either.”

“Does Mr. Lethen farm all of his own land himself?” Richard cared little that he was exaggerating the casual tone of his query.

“No; this tobacco’s been a good thing for him. He fits up a few acres, and lets it on shares, and makes a little money that way. The rest of the farm he pastures, and grows some stuff on. Of course, he can’t keep a hired man,” said Bill Burnstile, looking him in the eyes. “Never has for years and years, they tell me. You’d know all about that, of course, as well as me. A fellow’s got to feel sorry for him.”

“It seems that nothing has changed….” Richard’s voice was tinged by a fleeting memory of those very words between himself and Ada Lethen.

“Naw.” The gaunt man spat. “Of course, there’s something there you and me can’t make out. I guess old lady Lethen is all right, from what I’ve always gathered. It just seems funny these days. I’ve heard my father talk about people who never spoke to each other, but I never come across but those two. … Makes it hard for the girl. Now she’s smart, right sensible. If they would let her alone she’d fix things up, run the farm – there must be a mortgage – in no time, just like nothing; good head on her. But them – why they don’t seem livin’.”

“Strange existence,” mused the young man, wondering at the interest generated, and impelling the man’s words.

“You understand me, they don’t seem alive,” continued Bill argumentatively. “Now when I’d go over there to borrow a tool or something, and get to the door, the old lady would be so polite, just as nice as pie, ask about the family, tell me where she thought I might find the old man, and all that. But if he wasn’t home, no use leaving any message with her. Might as well save your breath. She’d never tell him anything if it was going to save you from the grave. Makes it unhandy that way for the neighbours.”

Richard Milne roused himself from the reverie which he knew might divert the interest of his companion, and, without replying to the reference to Ada Lethen, took leave, after promising to visit the family some day soon.