Страница:
the car. The fancy had come to her that the men tinkering with the car
wheel were new men out of the new land who with strong hammers had
broken away the doors of her prison. They had destroyed forever the
programme she had made for her life.
Elsie was filled with joy at the thought that the train was still going
on into the West. She wanted to go on forever in a straight line into
the unknown. She fancied herself no longer on a train and imagined she
had become a winged thing flying through space. Her long years of
sitting alone by the rock on the New England farm had got her into the
habit of expressing her thoughts aloud. Her thin voice broke the
silence that lay over the sleeping car and her father and mother, both
also lying awake, sat up in their berth to listen.
Tom Leander, the only living male representative of the new generation
of Leanders, was a loosely built man of forty inclined to corpulency.
At twenty he had married the daughter of a neighboring farmer, and when
his wife inherited some money she and Tom moved into the town of Apple
Junction in Iowa where Tom opened a grocery. The venture prospered as
did Tom's matrimonial venture. When his brother died in New York City
and his father, mother, and sister decided to come west Tom was already
the father of a daughter and four sons.
On the prairies north of town and in the midst of a vast level stretch
of cornfields, there was a partly completed brick house that had
belonged to a rich farmer named Russell who had begun to build the
house intending to make it the most magnificent place in the county,
but when it was almost completed he had found himself without money and
heavily in debt. The farm, consisting of several hundred acres of corn
land, had been split into three farms and sold. No one had wanted the
huge unfinished brick house. For years it had stood vacant, its windows
staring out over the fields that had been planted almost up to the
door.
In buying the Russell house Tom was moved by two motives. He had a
notion that in New England the Leanders had been rather magnificent
people. His memory of his father's place in the Vermont valley was
shadowy, but in speaking of it to his wife he became very definite. "We
had good blood in us, we Leanders," he said, straightening his
shoulders. "We lived in a big house. We were important people."
Wanting his father and mother to feel at home in the new place, Tom had
also another motive. He was not a very energetic man and, although he
had done well enough as keeper of a grocery, his success was largely
due to the boundless energy of his wife. She did not pay much attention
to her household and her children, like little animals, had to take
care of themselves, but in any matter concerning the store her word was
law.
To have his father the owner of the Russell place Tom felt would
establish him as a man of consequence in the eyes of his neighbors. "I
can tell you what, they're used to a big house," he said to his wife.
"I tell you what, my people are used to living in style."
* * * * *
The exaltation that had come over Elsie on the train wore away in the
presence of the grey empty Iowa fields, but something of the effect of
it remained with her for months. In the big brick house life went on
much as it had in the tiny New England house where she had always
lived. The Leanders installed themselves in three or four rooms on the
ground floor. After a few weeks the furniture that had been shipped by
freight arrived and was hauled out from town in one of Tom's grocery
wagons. There were three or four acres of ground covered with great
piles of boards the unsuccessful farmer had intended to use in the
building of stables. Tom sent men to haul the boards away and Elsie's
father prepared to plant a garden. They had come west in April and as
soon as they were installed in the house ploughing and planting began
in the fields nearby. The habit of a lifetime returned to the daughter
of the house. In the new place there was no gnarled orchard surrounded
by a half-ruined stone fence. All of the fences in all of the fields
that stretched away out of sight to the north, south, east, and west
were made of wire and looked like spider webs against the blackness of
the ground when it had been freshly ploughed.
There was however the house itself. It was like an island rising out of
the sea. In an odd way the house, although it was less than ten years
old, was very old. Its unnecessary bigness represented an old impulse
in men. Elsie felt that. At the east side there was a door leading to a
stairway that ran into the upper part of the house that was kept
locked. Two or three stone steps led up to it. Elsie could sit on the
top step with her back against the door and gaze into the distance
without being disturbed. Almost at her feet began the fields that
seemed to go on and on forever. The fields were like the waters of a
sea. Men came to plough and plant. Giant horses moved in a procession
across the prairies. A young man who drove six horses came directly
toward her. She was fascinated. The breasts of the horses as they came
forward with bowed heads seemed like the breasts of giants. The soft
spring air that lay over the fields was also like a sea. The horses
were giants walking on the floor of a sea. With their breasts they
pushed the waters of the sea before them. They were pushing the waters
out of the basin of the sea. The young man who drove them also was a
giant.
* * * * *
Elsie pressed her body against the closed door at the top of the steps.
In the garden back of the house she could hear her father at work. He
was raking dry masses of weeds off the ground preparatory to spading it
for a family garden. He had always worked in a tiny confined place and
would do the same thing here. In this vast open place he would work
with small tools, doing little things with infinite care, raising
little vegetables. In the house her mother would crochet little tidies.
She herself would be small. She would press her body against the door
of the house, try to get herself out of sight. Only the feeling that
sometimes took possession of her, and that did not form itself into a
thought would be large.
The six horses turned at the fence and the outside horse got entangled
in the traces. The driver swore vigorously. Then he turned and started
at the pale New Englander and with another oath pulled the heads of the
horses about and drove away into the distance. The field in which he
was ploughing contained two hundred acres. Elsie did not wait for him
to return but went into the house and sat with folded arms in a room.
The house she thought was a ship floating in a sea on the floor of
which giants went up and down.
May came and then June. In the great fields work was always going on
and Elsie became somewhat used to the sight of the young man in the
field that came down to the steps. Sometimes when he drove his horses
down to the wire fence he smiled and nodded.
* * * * *
In the month of August, when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa fields
grows until the corn stalks resemble young trees. The corn fields
become forests. The time for the cultivating of the corn has passed and
weeds grow thick between the corn rows. The men with their giant horses
have gone away. Over the immense fields silence broods.
When the time of the laying-by of the crop came that first summer after
Elsie's arrival in the West her mind, partially awakened by the
strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened again. She did not feel like
a staid thin woman with a back like the back of a drill sergeant, but
like something new and as strange as the new land into which she had
come to live. For a time she did not know what was the matter. In the
field the corn had grown so high that she could not see into the
distance. The corn was like a wall and the little bare spot of land on
which her father's house stood was like a house built behind the walls
of a prison. For a time she was depressed, thinking that she had come
west into a wide open country, only to find herself locked up more
closely than ever.
An impulse came to her. She arose and going down three or four steps
seated herself almost on a level with the ground.
Immediately she got a sense of release. She could not see over the corn
but she could see under it. The corn had long wide leaves that met over
the rows. The rows became long tunnels running away into infinity. Out
of the black ground grew weeds that made a soft carpet of green. From
above light sifted down. The corn rows were mysteriously beautiful.
They were warm passageways running out into life. She got up from the
steps and, walking timidly to the wire fence that separated her from
the field, put her hand between the wires and took hold of one of the
corn stalks. For some reason after she had touched the strong young
stalk and had held it for a moment firmly in her hand she grew afraid.
Running quickly back to the step she sat down and covered her face with
her hands. Her body trembled. She tried to imagine herself crawling
through the fence and wandering along one of the passageways. The
thought of trying the experiment fascinated but at the same time
terrified. She got quickly up and went into the house.
* * * * *
One Saturday night in August Elsie found herself unable to sleep.
Thoughts, more definite than any she had ever known before, came into
her mind. It was a quiet hot night and her bed stood near a window. Her
room was the only one the Leanders occupied on the second floor of the
house. At midnight a little breeze came up from the south and when she
sat up in bed the floor of corn tassels lying below her line of sight
looked in the moonlight like the face of a sea just stirred by a gentle
breeze.
A murmuring began in the corn and murmuring thoughts and memories awoke
in her mind. The long wide succulent leaves had begun to dry in the
intense heat of the August days and as the wind stirred the corn they
rubbed against each other. A call, far away, as of a thousand voices
arose. She imagined the voices were like the voices of children. They
were not like her brother Tom's children, noisy boisterous little
animals, but something quite different, tiny little things with large
eyes and thin sensitive hands. One after another they crept into her
arms. She became so excited over the fancy that she sat up in bed and
taking a pillow into her arms held it against her breast. The figure of
her cousin, the pale sensitive young Leander who had lived with his
father in New York City and who had died at the age of twenty-three,
came into her mind. It was as though the young man had come suddenly
into the room. She dropped the pillow and sat waiting, intense,
expectant.
Young Harry Leander had come to visit his cousin on the New England
farm during the late summer of the year before he died. He had stayed
there for a month and almost every afternoon had gone with Elsie to sit
by the rock at the back of the orchard. One afternoon when they had
both been for a long time silent he began to talk. "I want to go live
in the West," he said. "I want to go live in the West. I want to grow
strong and be a man," he repeated. Tears came into his eyes.
They got up to return to the house, Elsie walking in silence beside the
young man. The moment marked a high spot in her life. A strange
trembling eagerness for something she had not realized in her
experience of life had taken possession of her. They went in silence
through the orchard but when they came to the bayberry bush her cousin
stopped in the path and turned to face her. "I want you to kiss me," he
said eagerly, stepping toward her.
A fluttering uncertainty had taken possession of Elsie and had been
transmitted to her cousin. After he had made the sudden and unexpected
demand and had stepped so close to her that his breath could be felt on
her cheek, his own cheeks became scarlet and his hand that had taken
her hand trembled. "Well, I wish I were strong. I only wish I were
strong," he said hesitatingly and turning walked away along the path
toward the house.
And in the strange new house, set like an island in its sea of corn,
Harry Leander's voice seemed to arise again above the fancied voices of
the children that had been coming out of the fields. Elsie got out of
bed and walked up and down in the dim light coming through the window.
Her body trembled violently. "I want you to kiss me," the voice said
again and to quiet it and to quiet also the answering voice in herself
she went to kneel by the bed and taking the pillow again into her arms
pressed it against her face.
* * * * *
Tom Leander came with his wife and family to visit his father and
mother on Sundays. The family appeared at about ten o'clock in the
morning. When the wagon turned out of the road that ran past the
Russell place Tom shouted. There was a field between the house and the
road and the wagon could not be seen as it came along the narrow way
through the corn. After Tom had shouted, his daughter Elizabeth, a tall
girl of sixteen, jumped out of the wagon. All five children came
tearing toward the house through the corn. A series of wild shouts
arose on the still morning air.
The groceryman had brought food from the store. When the horse had been
unhitched and put into a shed he and his wife began to carry packages
into the house. The four Leander boys, accompanied by their sister,
disappeared into the near-by fields. Three dogs that had trotted out
from town under the wagon accompanied the children. Two or three
children and occasionally a young man from a neighboring farm had come
to join in the fun. Elsie's sister-in-law dismissed them all with a
wave of her hand. With a wave of her hand she also brushed Elsie aside.
Fires were lighted and the house reeked with the smell of cooking.
Elsie went to sit on the step at the side of the house. The corn fields
that had been so quiet rang with shouts and with the barking of dogs.
Tom Leander's oldest child, Elizabeth, was like her mother, full of
energy. She was thin and tall like the women of her father's house but
very strong and alive. In secret she wanted to be a lady but when she
tried her brothers, led by her father and mother, made fun of her.
"Don't put on airs," they said. When she got into the country with no
one but her brothers and two or three neighboring farm boys she herself
became a boy. With the boys she went tearing through the fields,
following the dogs in pursuit of rabbits. Sometimes a young man came
with the children from a near-by farm. Then she did not know what to do
with herself. She wanted to walk demurely along the rows through the
corn but was afraid her brothers would laugh and in desperation outdid
the boys in roughness and noisiness. She screamed and shouted and
running wildly tore her dress on the wire fences as she scrambled over
in pursuit of the dogs. When a rabbit was caught and killed she rushed
in and tore it out of the grasp of the dogs. The blood of the little
dying animal dripped on her clothes. She swung it over her head and
shouted.
The farm hand who had worked all summer in the field within sight of
Elsie became enamoured of the young woman from town. When the
groceryman's family appeared on Sunday mornings he also appeared but
did not come to the house. When the boys and dogs came tearing through
the fields he joined them. He also was self-conscious and did not want
the boys to know the purpose of his coming and when he and Elizabeth
found themselves alone together he became embarrassed. For a moment
they walked together in silence. In a wide circle about them, in the
forest of the corn, ran the boys and dogs. The young man had something
he wanted to say, but when he tried to find words his tongue became
thick and his lips felt hot and dry. "Well," he began, "let's you and
me--"
Words failed him and Elizabeth turned and ran after her brothers and
for the rest of the day he could not manage to get her out of their
sight. When he went to join them she became the noisiest member of the
party. A frenzy of activity took possession of her. With hair hanging
down her back, with clothes torn and with cheeks and hands scratched
and bleeding she led her brothers in the endless wild pursuit of the
rabbits.
* * * * *
The Sunday in August that followed Elsie Leander's sleepless night was
hot and cloudy. In the morning she was half ill and as soon as the
visitors from town arrived she crept away to sit on the step at the
side of the house. The children ran away into the fields. An almost
overpowering desire to run with them, shouting and playing along the
corn rows took possession of her. She arose and went to the back of the
house. Her father was at work in the garden, pulling weeds from between
rows of vegetables. Inside the house she could hear her sister-in-law
moving about. On the front porch her brother Tom was asleep with his
mother beside him. Elsie went back to the step and then arose and went
to where the corn came down to the fence. She climbed awkwardly over
and went a little way along one of the rows. Putting out her hand she
touched the firm stalks and then, becoming afraid, dropped to her knees
on the carpet of weeds that covered the ground. For a long time she
stayed thus listening to the voices of the children in the distance.
An hour slipped away. Presently it was time for dinner and her sister-
in-law came to the back door and shouted. There was an answering whoop
from the distance and the children came running through the fields.
They climbed over the fence and ran shouting across her father's
garden. Elsie also arose. She was about to attempt to climb back over
the fence unobserved when she heard a rustling in the corn. Young
Elizabeth Leander appeared. Beside her walked the ploughman who but a
few months earlier had planted the corn in the field where Elsie now
stood. She could see the two people coming slowly along the rows. An
understanding had been established between them. The man reached
through between the corn stalks and touched the hand of the girl who
laughed awkwardly and running to the fence climbed quickly over. In her
hand she held the limp body of a rabbit the dogs had killed.
The farm hand went away and when Elizabeth had gone into the house
Elsie climbed over the fence. Her niece stood just within the kitchen
door holding the dead rabbit by one leg. The other leg had been torn
away by the dogs. At sight of the New England woman, who seemed to look
at her with hard unsympathetic eyes, she was ashamed and went quickly
into the house. She threw the rabbit upon a table in the parlor and
then ran out of the room. Its blood ran out on the delicate flowers of
a white crocheted table cover that had been made by Elsie's mother.
The Sunday dinner with all the living Leanders gathered about the table
was gone through in a heavy lumbering silence. When the dinner was over
and Tom and his wife had washed the dishes they went to sit with the
older people on the front porch. Presently they were both asleep. Elsie
returned to the step at the side of the house but when the desire to go
again into the cornfields came sweeping over her she got up and went
indoors.
The woman of thirty-five tip-toed about the big house like a frightened
child. The dead rabbit that lay on the table in the parlour had become
cold and stiff. Its blood had dried on the white table cover. She went
upstairs but did not go to her own room. A spirit of adventure had hold
of her. In the upper part of the house there were many rooms and in
some of them no glass had been put into the windows. The windows had
been boarded up and narrow streaks of light crept in through the cracks
between the boards.
Elsie tip-toed up the flight of stairs past the room in which she slept
and opening doors went into other rooms. Dust lay thick on the floors.
In the silence she could hear her brother snoring as he slept in the
chair on the front porch. From what seemed a far away place there came
the shrill cries of the children. The cries became soft. They were like
the cries of unborn children that had called to her out of the fields
on the night before.
Into her mind came the intense silent figure of her mother sitting on
the porch beside her son and waiting for the day to wear itself out
into night. The thought brought a lump into her throat. She wanted
something and did not know what it was. Her own mood frightened her. In
a windowless room at the back of the house one of the boards over a
window had been broken and a bird had flown in and become imprisoned.
The presence of the woman frightened the bird. It flew wildly about.
Its beating wings stirred up dust that danced in the air. Elsie stood
perfectly still, also frightened, not by the presence of the bird but
by the presence of life. Like the bird she was a prisoner. The thought
gripped her. She wanted to go outdoors where her niece Elizabeth walked
with the young ploughman through the corn, but was like the bird in the
room--a prisoner. She moved restlessly about. The bird flew back and
forth across the room. It alighted on the window sill near the place
where the board was broken away. She stared into the frightened eyes of
the bird that in turn stared into her eyes. Then the bird flew away,
out through the window, and Elsie turned and ran nervously downstairs
and out into the yard. She climbed over the wire fence and ran with
stooped shoulders along one of the tunnels.
Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and sweeter
life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields. After she
had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled over. Her hair
became unloosed and fell down over her shoulders. Her cheeks became
flushed and for the moment she looked like a young girl. When she
climbed over the fence she tore a great hole in the front of her dress.
For a moment her tiny breasts were exposed and then her hand clutched
and held nervously the sides of the tear. In the distance she could
hear the voices of the boys and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm
had been threatening for days and now black clouds had begun to spread
themselves over the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping to
listen and then running on again, the dry corn blades brushed against
her shoulders and a fine shower of yellow dust from the corn tassels
fell on her hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her progress.
The dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her ears.
The thought that having at last ventured into the corn she would never
escape became fixed in the mind of the running woman. Sharp pains shot
through her body. Presently she was compelled to stop and sit on the
ground. For a long time she sat with closed eyes. Her dress became
soiled. Little insects that live in the ground under the corn came out
of their holes and crawled over her legs.
Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw herself on her
back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed. It was warm and
close in the room-like tunnels. The pain in her side went away. She
opened her eyes and between the wide green corn blades could see
patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to be alarmed and
so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer gripped the tear in
her dress and her little breasts were exposed. They expanded and
contracted in spasmodic jerks. She threw her hands back over her head
and lay still.
It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and passive
under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that something was
about to happen, something that would lift her out of herself, that
would tear her away from her past and the past of her people. Her
thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as she had waited
for days and months by the rock at the back of the orchard on the
Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling noise went on in the
sky overhead but the sky and everything she had ever known seemed very
far away, no part of herself.
After a long silence, when it seemed to her that she had gone out of
herself as in a dream, Elsie heard a man's voice calling. "Aho, aho,
aho," shouted the voice and after another period of silence there arose
answering voices and then the sound of bodies crashing through the corn
and the excited chatter of children. A dog came running along the row
where she lay and stood beside her. His cold nose touched her face and
she sat up. The dog ran away. The Leander boys passed. She could see
their bare legs flashing in and out across one of the tunnels. Her
brother had become alarmed by the rapid approach of the thunder storm
and wanted to get his family to town. His voice kept calling from the
house and the voices of the children answered from the fields.
Elsie sat on the ground with her hands pressed together. An odd feeling
of disappointment had possession of her. She arose and walked slowly
along in the general direction taken by the children. She came to a
fence and crawled over, tearing her dress in a new place. One of her
stockings had become unloosed and had slipped down over her shoe top.
The long sharp weeds had scratched her leg so that it was criss-crossed
with red lines, but she was not conscious of any pain.
The distraught woman followed the children until she came within sight
of her father's house and then stopped and again sat on the ground.
There was another loud crash of thunder and Tom Leander's voice called
again, this time half angrily. The name of the girl Elizabeth was
shouted in loud masculine tones that rolled and echoed like the thunder
along the aisles under the corn.
And then Elizabeth came into sight accompanied by the young ploughman.
They stopped near Elsie and the man took the girl into his arms. At the
sound of their approach Elsie had thrown herself face downward on the
ground and had twisted herself into a position where she could see
without being seen. When their lips met her tense hands grasped one of
the corn stalks. Her lips pressed themselves into the dust. When they
had gone on their way she raised her head. A dusty powder covered her
lips.
What seemed another long period of silence fell over the fields. The
murmuring voices of unborn children, her imagination had created in the
whispering fields, became a vast shout. The wind blew harder and
harder. The corn stalks were twisted and bent. Elizabeth went
thoughtfully out of the field and climbing the fence confronted her
father. "Where you been? What you been a doing?" he asked. "Don't you
think we got to get out of here?"
When Elizabeth went toward the house Elsie followed, creeping on her
hands and knees like a little animal, and when she had come within
sight of the fence surrounding the house she sat on the ground and put
her hands over her face. Something within herself was being twisted and
whirled about as the tops of the corn stalks were now being twisted and
whirled by the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward the house
and when she opened her eyes she could again see along the long
mysterious aisles.
Her brother with his wife and children went away. By turning her head
Elsie could see them driving at a trot out of the yard back of her
father's house. With the going of the younger woman the farm house in
the midst of the cornfield rocked by the winds seemed the most desolate
place in the world.
Her mother came out at the back door of the house. She ran to the steps
where she knew her daughter was in the habit of sitting and then in
alarm began to call. It did not occur to Elsie to answer. The voice of
the older woman did not seem to have anything to do with herself. It
was a thin voice and was quickly lost in the wind and in the crashing
sound that arose out of the fields. With her head turned toward the
house Elsie stared at her mother who ran wildly around the house and
then went indoors. The back door of the house went shut with a bang.
The storm that had been threatening broke with a roar. Broad sheets of
water swept over the cornfields. Sheets of water swept over the woman's
body. The storm that had for years been gathering in her also broke.
Sobs arose out of her throat. She abandoned herself to a storm of grief
that was only partially grief. Tears ran out of her eyes and made
little furrows through the dust on her face. In the lulls that
occasionally came in the storm she raised her head and heard, through
the tangled mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound
of millions of rain-drops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the
house of the corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling to
her out of the Leander house.
The story came to me from a woman met on a train. The car was crowded
and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing who
belonged with her--a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown
canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down
in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman's side, but I
did not know that at the time.
The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to
her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have
made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She had talked to me in very
good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man
in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days,
perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the
company of some one else.
Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the
night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had
rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the
moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in
an odd way very beautiful.
You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing up in clusters as
they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected
and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle
of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farm-houses, and occasionally
the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the
west.
The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that
stricken land with her lover by God knows what miracles of effort. She
made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I
want to tell you.
I do not remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how
the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood until the story she
told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-
window and very pregnant with meaning to me.
There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in
charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a
beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of
foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa,
or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given
to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a
fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker
philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and
he had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I
fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him,
and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that
would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which
he fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle line, but
was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed
village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.
The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train
with me, her lover and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had
been small landowners and the others in their party had worked on their
estate.
Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German
who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his
insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader
of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to
go forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her
party gathered about her. Like a stubborn horse she shook her head and
muttered Polish words. "I want to be let alone, that's what I want. All
I want in the world is to be let alone," she said, over and over; and
then the German came up and putting his hand on her back pushed her
along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant
repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They
hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and
the German.
The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream and
the German took hold of the old woman's arm and dragged her through the
stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: "I
want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone."
In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible
efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches
and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried
in his inside coat pocket. Then he got out tobacco and, sitting down on
the protruding root of a tree, smoked and stared at the refugees,
clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.
The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept
for an hour and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine
him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and
along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be
angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a
matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road as one goes
back along a road for strayed cattle.
And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman
began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone
and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other
buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.
The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and
not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that
kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her
thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man
trying to lift himself by his boot straps. The two fought and were full
of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not
very strong physically.
And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made
me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get
the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the
moving train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two
souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road.
The air was full of the struggle and the refugees gathered about and
stood shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but
also with something else. In the air everywhere about them they could
feel the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly
have given her life to have it stopped, or to have someone strike a
light, and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds
struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying
vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.
Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down
exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They
thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more
would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled
together and perhaps whimpered a little.
What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train
explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after
struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old
woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into
the body of the old woman.
After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down
by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let
alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone,
and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving
her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally
along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.
There was more of the story after that. The woman's lover, who had been
a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking
his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only
remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to
be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words
and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into
their own country.
Below the hill there was a swamp in which cattails grew. The wind
rustled the dry leaves of a walnut tree that grew on top of the hill.
She went beyond the tree to where the grass was long and matted. In the
farmhouse a door bangs and in the road before the house a dog barked.
For a long time there was no sound. Then a wagon came jolting and
bumping over the frozen road. The little noises ran along the ground to
where she was lying on the grass and seemed like fingers playing over
her body. A fragrance arose from her. It took a long time for the wagon
to pass.
Then another sound broke the stillness. A young man from a neighboring
farm came stealthily across a field and climbed a fence. He also came
to the hill but for a time did not see her lying almost at his feet. He
looked toward the house and stood with hands in pockets, stamping on
the frozen ground like a horse.
Then he knew she was there. The aroma of her crept into his
consciousness.
He ran to kneel beside her silent figure. Everything was different than
it had been when they crept to the hill on the other evenings. The time
of talking and waiting was over. She was different. He grew bold and
put his hands on her face, her neck, her breasts, her hips. There was a
strange new firmness and hardness to her body. When he kissed her lips
she did not move and for a moment he was afraid. Then courage came and
he went down to lie with her.
He had been a farm boy all his life and had plowed many acres of rich
black land.
He became sure of himself.
He plowed her deeply.
He planted the seeds of a son in the warm rich quivering soil.
* * * * *
She carried the seeds of a son within herself. On winter evenings she
went along a path at the foot of a small hill and turned up the hill to
a barn where she milked cows. She was large and strong. Her legs went
swinging along. The son within her went swinging along.
He learned the rhythm of little hills.
He learned the rhythm of flat places.
He learned the rhythm of legs walking.
He learned the rhythm of firm strong hands pulling at the teats of
cows.
* * * * *
There was a field that was barren and filled with stones. In the spring
when the warm nights came and when she was big with him she went to the
fields. The heads of little stones stuck out of the ground like the
heads of buried children. The field, washed with moonlight, sloped
gradually downward to a murmuring brook. A few sheep went among the
stones nibbling the sparse grass.
A thousand children were buried in the barren field. They struggled to
come out of the ground. They struggled to come to her. The brook ran
over stones and its voice cried out. For a long time she stayed in the
field, shaken with sorrow.
She arose from her seat on a large stone and went to the farmhouse. The
voices of the darkness cried to her as she went along a lane and past a
silent barn.
Within herself only the one child struggled. When she got into bed his
heels beat upon the walls of his prison. She lay still and listened.
Only one small voice seemed coming to her out of the silence of the
night.
Rosalind Wescott, a tall strong looking woman of twenty-seven, was
walking on the railroad track near the town of Willow Springs, Iowa. It
was about four in the afternoon of a day in August, and the third day
since she had come home to her native town from Chicago, where she was
employed.
At that time Willow Springs was a town of about three thousand people.
It has grown since. There was a public square with the town hall in the
centre and about the four sides of the square and facing it were the
merchandising establishments. The public square was bare and grassless,
and out of it ran streets of frame houses, long straight streets that
finally became country roads running away into the flat prairie
country.
Although she had told everyone that she had merely come home for a
short visit because she was a little homesick, and although she wanted
in particular to have a talk with her mother in regard to a certain
matter, Rosalind had been unable to talk with anyone. Indeed she had
found it difficult to stay in the house with her mother and father and
all the time, day and night, she was haunted by a desire to get out of
town. As she went along the railroad tracks in the hot afternoon
sunshine she kept scolding herself. "I've grown moody and no good. If I
want to do it why don't I just go ahead and not make a fuss," she
thought.
For two miles the railroad tracks, eastward out of Willow Springs, went
through corn fields on a flat plain. Then there was a little dip in the
land and a bridge over Willow Creek. The Creek was altogether dry now
but trees grew along the edge of the grey streak of cracked mud that in
the fall, winter and spring would be the bed of the stream. Rosalind
left the tracks and went to sit under one of the trees. Her cheeks were
flushed and her forehead wet. When she took off her hat her hair fell
down in disorder and strands of it clung to her hot wet face. She sat
in what seemed a kind of great bowl on the sides of which the corn grew
rank. Before her and following the bed of the stream there was a dusty
path along which cows came at evening from distant pastures. A great
pancake formed of cow dung lay nearby. It was covered with grey dust
and over it crawled shiny black beetles. They were rolling the dung
into balls in preparation for the germination of a new generation of
beetles.
Rosalind had come on the visit to her home town at a time of the year
when everyone wished to escape from the hot dusty place. No one had
expected her and she had not written to announce her coming. One hot
morning in Chicago she had got out of bed and had suddenly begun
packing her bag, and on that same evening there she was in Willow
Springs, in the house where she had lived until her twenty-first year,
among her own people. She had come up from the station in the hotel bus
and had walked into the Wescott house unannounced. Her father was at
the pump by the kitchen door and her mother came into the living room
to greet her wearing a soiled kitchen apron. Everything in the house
was just as it always had been. "I just thought I would come home for a
few days," she said, putting down her bag and kissing her mother.
Ma and Pa Wescott had been glad to see their daughter. On the evening
of her arrival they were excited and a special supper was prepared.
After supper Pa Wescott went up town as usual, but he stayed only a few
minutes. "I just want to run to the postoffice and get the evening
paper," he said apologetically. Rosalind's mother put on a clean dress
and they all sat in the darkness on the front porch. There was talk, of
a kind. "Is it hot in Chicago now? I'm going to do a good deal of
canning this fall. I thought later I would send you a box of canned
fruit. Do you live in the same place on the North Side? It must be nice
in the evening to be able to walk down to the park by the lake."
* * * * *
Rosalind sat under the tree near the railroad bridge two miles from
Willow Springs and watched the tumble bugs at work. Her whole body was
hot from the walk in the sun and the thin dress she wore clung to her
legs. It was being soiled by the dust on the grass under the tree.
She had run away from town and from her mother's house. All during the
three days of her visit she had been doing that. She did not go from
house to house to visit her old schoolgirl friends, the girls who
unlike herself had stayed in Willow Springs, had got married and
settled down there. When she saw one of these women on the street in
the morning, pushing a baby carriage and perhaps followed by a small
child, she stopped. There was a few minutes of talk. "It's hot. Do you
live in the same place in Chicago? My husband and I hope to take the
children and go away for a week or two. It must be nice in Chicago
where you are so near the lake." Rosalind hurried away.
All the hours of her visit to her mother and to her home town had been
spent in an effort to hurry away.
From what? Rosalind defended herself. There was something she had come
from Chicago hoping to be able to say to her mother. Did she really
want to talk with her about things? Had she thought, by again breathing
the air of her home town, to get strength to face life and its
difficulties?
There was no point in her taking the hot uncomfortable trip from
Chicago only to spend her days walking in dusty country roads or
wheel were new men out of the new land who with strong hammers had
broken away the doors of her prison. They had destroyed forever the
programme she had made for her life.
Elsie was filled with joy at the thought that the train was still going
on into the West. She wanted to go on forever in a straight line into
the unknown. She fancied herself no longer on a train and imagined she
had become a winged thing flying through space. Her long years of
sitting alone by the rock on the New England farm had got her into the
habit of expressing her thoughts aloud. Her thin voice broke the
silence that lay over the sleeping car and her father and mother, both
also lying awake, sat up in their berth to listen.
Tom Leander, the only living male representative of the new generation
of Leanders, was a loosely built man of forty inclined to corpulency.
At twenty he had married the daughter of a neighboring farmer, and when
his wife inherited some money she and Tom moved into the town of Apple
Junction in Iowa where Tom opened a grocery. The venture prospered as
did Tom's matrimonial venture. When his brother died in New York City
and his father, mother, and sister decided to come west Tom was already
the father of a daughter and four sons.
On the prairies north of town and in the midst of a vast level stretch
of cornfields, there was a partly completed brick house that had
belonged to a rich farmer named Russell who had begun to build the
house intending to make it the most magnificent place in the county,
but when it was almost completed he had found himself without money and
heavily in debt. The farm, consisting of several hundred acres of corn
land, had been split into three farms and sold. No one had wanted the
huge unfinished brick house. For years it had stood vacant, its windows
staring out over the fields that had been planted almost up to the
door.
In buying the Russell house Tom was moved by two motives. He had a
notion that in New England the Leanders had been rather magnificent
people. His memory of his father's place in the Vermont valley was
shadowy, but in speaking of it to his wife he became very definite. "We
had good blood in us, we Leanders," he said, straightening his
shoulders. "We lived in a big house. We were important people."
Wanting his father and mother to feel at home in the new place, Tom had
also another motive. He was not a very energetic man and, although he
had done well enough as keeper of a grocery, his success was largely
due to the boundless energy of his wife. She did not pay much attention
to her household and her children, like little animals, had to take
care of themselves, but in any matter concerning the store her word was
law.
To have his father the owner of the Russell place Tom felt would
establish him as a man of consequence in the eyes of his neighbors. "I
can tell you what, they're used to a big house," he said to his wife.
"I tell you what, my people are used to living in style."
* * * * *
The exaltation that had come over Elsie on the train wore away in the
presence of the grey empty Iowa fields, but something of the effect of
it remained with her for months. In the big brick house life went on
much as it had in the tiny New England house where she had always
lived. The Leanders installed themselves in three or four rooms on the
ground floor. After a few weeks the furniture that had been shipped by
freight arrived and was hauled out from town in one of Tom's grocery
wagons. There were three or four acres of ground covered with great
piles of boards the unsuccessful farmer had intended to use in the
building of stables. Tom sent men to haul the boards away and Elsie's
father prepared to plant a garden. They had come west in April and as
soon as they were installed in the house ploughing and planting began
in the fields nearby. The habit of a lifetime returned to the daughter
of the house. In the new place there was no gnarled orchard surrounded
by a half-ruined stone fence. All of the fences in all of the fields
that stretched away out of sight to the north, south, east, and west
were made of wire and looked like spider webs against the blackness of
the ground when it had been freshly ploughed.
There was however the house itself. It was like an island rising out of
the sea. In an odd way the house, although it was less than ten years
old, was very old. Its unnecessary bigness represented an old impulse
in men. Elsie felt that. At the east side there was a door leading to a
stairway that ran into the upper part of the house that was kept
locked. Two or three stone steps led up to it. Elsie could sit on the
top step with her back against the door and gaze into the distance
without being disturbed. Almost at her feet began the fields that
seemed to go on and on forever. The fields were like the waters of a
sea. Men came to plough and plant. Giant horses moved in a procession
across the prairies. A young man who drove six horses came directly
toward her. She was fascinated. The breasts of the horses as they came
forward with bowed heads seemed like the breasts of giants. The soft
spring air that lay over the fields was also like a sea. The horses
were giants walking on the floor of a sea. With their breasts they
pushed the waters of the sea before them. They were pushing the waters
out of the basin of the sea. The young man who drove them also was a
giant.
* * * * *
Elsie pressed her body against the closed door at the top of the steps.
In the garden back of the house she could hear her father at work. He
was raking dry masses of weeds off the ground preparatory to spading it
for a family garden. He had always worked in a tiny confined place and
would do the same thing here. In this vast open place he would work
with small tools, doing little things with infinite care, raising
little vegetables. In the house her mother would crochet little tidies.
She herself would be small. She would press her body against the door
of the house, try to get herself out of sight. Only the feeling that
sometimes took possession of her, and that did not form itself into a
thought would be large.
The six horses turned at the fence and the outside horse got entangled
in the traces. The driver swore vigorously. Then he turned and started
at the pale New Englander and with another oath pulled the heads of the
horses about and drove away into the distance. The field in which he
was ploughing contained two hundred acres. Elsie did not wait for him
to return but went into the house and sat with folded arms in a room.
The house she thought was a ship floating in a sea on the floor of
which giants went up and down.
May came and then June. In the great fields work was always going on
and Elsie became somewhat used to the sight of the young man in the
field that came down to the steps. Sometimes when he drove his horses
down to the wire fence he smiled and nodded.
* * * * *
In the month of August, when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa fields
grows until the corn stalks resemble young trees. The corn fields
become forests. The time for the cultivating of the corn has passed and
weeds grow thick between the corn rows. The men with their giant horses
have gone away. Over the immense fields silence broods.
When the time of the laying-by of the crop came that first summer after
Elsie's arrival in the West her mind, partially awakened by the
strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened again. She did not feel like
a staid thin woman with a back like the back of a drill sergeant, but
like something new and as strange as the new land into which she had
come to live. For a time she did not know what was the matter. In the
field the corn had grown so high that she could not see into the
distance. The corn was like a wall and the little bare spot of land on
which her father's house stood was like a house built behind the walls
of a prison. For a time she was depressed, thinking that she had come
west into a wide open country, only to find herself locked up more
closely than ever.
An impulse came to her. She arose and going down three or four steps
seated herself almost on a level with the ground.
Immediately she got a sense of release. She could not see over the corn
but she could see under it. The corn had long wide leaves that met over
the rows. The rows became long tunnels running away into infinity. Out
of the black ground grew weeds that made a soft carpet of green. From
above light sifted down. The corn rows were mysteriously beautiful.
They were warm passageways running out into life. She got up from the
steps and, walking timidly to the wire fence that separated her from
the field, put her hand between the wires and took hold of one of the
corn stalks. For some reason after she had touched the strong young
stalk and had held it for a moment firmly in her hand she grew afraid.
Running quickly back to the step she sat down and covered her face with
her hands. Her body trembled. She tried to imagine herself crawling
through the fence and wandering along one of the passageways. The
thought of trying the experiment fascinated but at the same time
terrified. She got quickly up and went into the house.
* * * * *
One Saturday night in August Elsie found herself unable to sleep.
Thoughts, more definite than any she had ever known before, came into
her mind. It was a quiet hot night and her bed stood near a window. Her
room was the only one the Leanders occupied on the second floor of the
house. At midnight a little breeze came up from the south and when she
sat up in bed the floor of corn tassels lying below her line of sight
looked in the moonlight like the face of a sea just stirred by a gentle
breeze.
A murmuring began in the corn and murmuring thoughts and memories awoke
in her mind. The long wide succulent leaves had begun to dry in the
intense heat of the August days and as the wind stirred the corn they
rubbed against each other. A call, far away, as of a thousand voices
arose. She imagined the voices were like the voices of children. They
were not like her brother Tom's children, noisy boisterous little
animals, but something quite different, tiny little things with large
eyes and thin sensitive hands. One after another they crept into her
arms. She became so excited over the fancy that she sat up in bed and
taking a pillow into her arms held it against her breast. The figure of
her cousin, the pale sensitive young Leander who had lived with his
father in New York City and who had died at the age of twenty-three,
came into her mind. It was as though the young man had come suddenly
into the room. She dropped the pillow and sat waiting, intense,
expectant.
Young Harry Leander had come to visit his cousin on the New England
farm during the late summer of the year before he died. He had stayed
there for a month and almost every afternoon had gone with Elsie to sit
by the rock at the back of the orchard. One afternoon when they had
both been for a long time silent he began to talk. "I want to go live
in the West," he said. "I want to go live in the West. I want to grow
strong and be a man," he repeated. Tears came into his eyes.
They got up to return to the house, Elsie walking in silence beside the
young man. The moment marked a high spot in her life. A strange
trembling eagerness for something she had not realized in her
experience of life had taken possession of her. They went in silence
through the orchard but when they came to the bayberry bush her cousin
stopped in the path and turned to face her. "I want you to kiss me," he
said eagerly, stepping toward her.
A fluttering uncertainty had taken possession of Elsie and had been
transmitted to her cousin. After he had made the sudden and unexpected
demand and had stepped so close to her that his breath could be felt on
her cheek, his own cheeks became scarlet and his hand that had taken
her hand trembled. "Well, I wish I were strong. I only wish I were
strong," he said hesitatingly and turning walked away along the path
toward the house.
And in the strange new house, set like an island in its sea of corn,
Harry Leander's voice seemed to arise again above the fancied voices of
the children that had been coming out of the fields. Elsie got out of
bed and walked up and down in the dim light coming through the window.
Her body trembled violently. "I want you to kiss me," the voice said
again and to quiet it and to quiet also the answering voice in herself
she went to kneel by the bed and taking the pillow again into her arms
pressed it against her face.
* * * * *
Tom Leander came with his wife and family to visit his father and
mother on Sundays. The family appeared at about ten o'clock in the
morning. When the wagon turned out of the road that ran past the
Russell place Tom shouted. There was a field between the house and the
road and the wagon could not be seen as it came along the narrow way
through the corn. After Tom had shouted, his daughter Elizabeth, a tall
girl of sixteen, jumped out of the wagon. All five children came
tearing toward the house through the corn. A series of wild shouts
arose on the still morning air.
The groceryman had brought food from the store. When the horse had been
unhitched and put into a shed he and his wife began to carry packages
into the house. The four Leander boys, accompanied by their sister,
disappeared into the near-by fields. Three dogs that had trotted out
from town under the wagon accompanied the children. Two or three
children and occasionally a young man from a neighboring farm had come
to join in the fun. Elsie's sister-in-law dismissed them all with a
wave of her hand. With a wave of her hand she also brushed Elsie aside.
Fires were lighted and the house reeked with the smell of cooking.
Elsie went to sit on the step at the side of the house. The corn fields
that had been so quiet rang with shouts and with the barking of dogs.
Tom Leander's oldest child, Elizabeth, was like her mother, full of
energy. She was thin and tall like the women of her father's house but
very strong and alive. In secret she wanted to be a lady but when she
tried her brothers, led by her father and mother, made fun of her.
"Don't put on airs," they said. When she got into the country with no
one but her brothers and two or three neighboring farm boys she herself
became a boy. With the boys she went tearing through the fields,
following the dogs in pursuit of rabbits. Sometimes a young man came
with the children from a near-by farm. Then she did not know what to do
with herself. She wanted to walk demurely along the rows through the
corn but was afraid her brothers would laugh and in desperation outdid
the boys in roughness and noisiness. She screamed and shouted and
running wildly tore her dress on the wire fences as she scrambled over
in pursuit of the dogs. When a rabbit was caught and killed she rushed
in and tore it out of the grasp of the dogs. The blood of the little
dying animal dripped on her clothes. She swung it over her head and
shouted.
The farm hand who had worked all summer in the field within sight of
Elsie became enamoured of the young woman from town. When the
groceryman's family appeared on Sunday mornings he also appeared but
did not come to the house. When the boys and dogs came tearing through
the fields he joined them. He also was self-conscious and did not want
the boys to know the purpose of his coming and when he and Elizabeth
found themselves alone together he became embarrassed. For a moment
they walked together in silence. In a wide circle about them, in the
forest of the corn, ran the boys and dogs. The young man had something
he wanted to say, but when he tried to find words his tongue became
thick and his lips felt hot and dry. "Well," he began, "let's you and
me--"
Words failed him and Elizabeth turned and ran after her brothers and
for the rest of the day he could not manage to get her out of their
sight. When he went to join them she became the noisiest member of the
party. A frenzy of activity took possession of her. With hair hanging
down her back, with clothes torn and with cheeks and hands scratched
and bleeding she led her brothers in the endless wild pursuit of the
rabbits.
* * * * *
The Sunday in August that followed Elsie Leander's sleepless night was
hot and cloudy. In the morning she was half ill and as soon as the
visitors from town arrived she crept away to sit on the step at the
side of the house. The children ran away into the fields. An almost
overpowering desire to run with them, shouting and playing along the
corn rows took possession of her. She arose and went to the back of the
house. Her father was at work in the garden, pulling weeds from between
rows of vegetables. Inside the house she could hear her sister-in-law
moving about. On the front porch her brother Tom was asleep with his
mother beside him. Elsie went back to the step and then arose and went
to where the corn came down to the fence. She climbed awkwardly over
and went a little way along one of the rows. Putting out her hand she
touched the firm stalks and then, becoming afraid, dropped to her knees
on the carpet of weeds that covered the ground. For a long time she
stayed thus listening to the voices of the children in the distance.
An hour slipped away. Presently it was time for dinner and her sister-
in-law came to the back door and shouted. There was an answering whoop
from the distance and the children came running through the fields.
They climbed over the fence and ran shouting across her father's
garden. Elsie also arose. She was about to attempt to climb back over
the fence unobserved when she heard a rustling in the corn. Young
Elizabeth Leander appeared. Beside her walked the ploughman who but a
few months earlier had planted the corn in the field where Elsie now
stood. She could see the two people coming slowly along the rows. An
understanding had been established between them. The man reached
through between the corn stalks and touched the hand of the girl who
laughed awkwardly and running to the fence climbed quickly over. In her
hand she held the limp body of a rabbit the dogs had killed.
The farm hand went away and when Elizabeth had gone into the house
Elsie climbed over the fence. Her niece stood just within the kitchen
door holding the dead rabbit by one leg. The other leg had been torn
away by the dogs. At sight of the New England woman, who seemed to look
at her with hard unsympathetic eyes, she was ashamed and went quickly
into the house. She threw the rabbit upon a table in the parlor and
then ran out of the room. Its blood ran out on the delicate flowers of
a white crocheted table cover that had been made by Elsie's mother.
The Sunday dinner with all the living Leanders gathered about the table
was gone through in a heavy lumbering silence. When the dinner was over
and Tom and his wife had washed the dishes they went to sit with the
older people on the front porch. Presently they were both asleep. Elsie
returned to the step at the side of the house but when the desire to go
again into the cornfields came sweeping over her she got up and went
indoors.
The woman of thirty-five tip-toed about the big house like a frightened
child. The dead rabbit that lay on the table in the parlour had become
cold and stiff. Its blood had dried on the white table cover. She went
upstairs but did not go to her own room. A spirit of adventure had hold
of her. In the upper part of the house there were many rooms and in
some of them no glass had been put into the windows. The windows had
been boarded up and narrow streaks of light crept in through the cracks
between the boards.
Elsie tip-toed up the flight of stairs past the room in which she slept
and opening doors went into other rooms. Dust lay thick on the floors.
In the silence she could hear her brother snoring as he slept in the
chair on the front porch. From what seemed a far away place there came
the shrill cries of the children. The cries became soft. They were like
the cries of unborn children that had called to her out of the fields
on the night before.
Into her mind came the intense silent figure of her mother sitting on
the porch beside her son and waiting for the day to wear itself out
into night. The thought brought a lump into her throat. She wanted
something and did not know what it was. Her own mood frightened her. In
a windowless room at the back of the house one of the boards over a
window had been broken and a bird had flown in and become imprisoned.
The presence of the woman frightened the bird. It flew wildly about.
Its beating wings stirred up dust that danced in the air. Elsie stood
perfectly still, also frightened, not by the presence of the bird but
by the presence of life. Like the bird she was a prisoner. The thought
gripped her. She wanted to go outdoors where her niece Elizabeth walked
with the young ploughman through the corn, but was like the bird in the
room--a prisoner. She moved restlessly about. The bird flew back and
forth across the room. It alighted on the window sill near the place
where the board was broken away. She stared into the frightened eyes of
the bird that in turn stared into her eyes. Then the bird flew away,
out through the window, and Elsie turned and ran nervously downstairs
and out into the yard. She climbed over the wire fence and ran with
stooped shoulders along one of the tunnels.
Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and sweeter
life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields. After she
had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled over. Her hair
became unloosed and fell down over her shoulders. Her cheeks became
flushed and for the moment she looked like a young girl. When she
climbed over the fence she tore a great hole in the front of her dress.
For a moment her tiny breasts were exposed and then her hand clutched
and held nervously the sides of the tear. In the distance she could
hear the voices of the boys and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm
had been threatening for days and now black clouds had begun to spread
themselves over the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping to
listen and then running on again, the dry corn blades brushed against
her shoulders and a fine shower of yellow dust from the corn tassels
fell on her hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her progress.
The dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her ears.
The thought that having at last ventured into the corn she would never
escape became fixed in the mind of the running woman. Sharp pains shot
through her body. Presently she was compelled to stop and sit on the
ground. For a long time she sat with closed eyes. Her dress became
soiled. Little insects that live in the ground under the corn came out
of their holes and crawled over her legs.
Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw herself on her
back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed. It was warm and
close in the room-like tunnels. The pain in her side went away. She
opened her eyes and between the wide green corn blades could see
patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to be alarmed and
so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer gripped the tear in
her dress and her little breasts were exposed. They expanded and
contracted in spasmodic jerks. She threw her hands back over her head
and lay still.
It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and passive
under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that something was
about to happen, something that would lift her out of herself, that
would tear her away from her past and the past of her people. Her
thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as she had waited
for days and months by the rock at the back of the orchard on the
Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling noise went on in the
sky overhead but the sky and everything she had ever known seemed very
far away, no part of herself.
After a long silence, when it seemed to her that she had gone out of
herself as in a dream, Elsie heard a man's voice calling. "Aho, aho,
aho," shouted the voice and after another period of silence there arose
answering voices and then the sound of bodies crashing through the corn
and the excited chatter of children. A dog came running along the row
where she lay and stood beside her. His cold nose touched her face and
she sat up. The dog ran away. The Leander boys passed. She could see
their bare legs flashing in and out across one of the tunnels. Her
brother had become alarmed by the rapid approach of the thunder storm
and wanted to get his family to town. His voice kept calling from the
house and the voices of the children answered from the fields.
Elsie sat on the ground with her hands pressed together. An odd feeling
of disappointment had possession of her. She arose and walked slowly
along in the general direction taken by the children. She came to a
fence and crawled over, tearing her dress in a new place. One of her
stockings had become unloosed and had slipped down over her shoe top.
The long sharp weeds had scratched her leg so that it was criss-crossed
with red lines, but she was not conscious of any pain.
The distraught woman followed the children until she came within sight
of her father's house and then stopped and again sat on the ground.
There was another loud crash of thunder and Tom Leander's voice called
again, this time half angrily. The name of the girl Elizabeth was
shouted in loud masculine tones that rolled and echoed like the thunder
along the aisles under the corn.
And then Elizabeth came into sight accompanied by the young ploughman.
They stopped near Elsie and the man took the girl into his arms. At the
sound of their approach Elsie had thrown herself face downward on the
ground and had twisted herself into a position where she could see
without being seen. When their lips met her tense hands grasped one of
the corn stalks. Her lips pressed themselves into the dust. When they
had gone on their way she raised her head. A dusty powder covered her
lips.
What seemed another long period of silence fell over the fields. The
murmuring voices of unborn children, her imagination had created in the
whispering fields, became a vast shout. The wind blew harder and
harder. The corn stalks were twisted and bent. Elizabeth went
thoughtfully out of the field and climbing the fence confronted her
father. "Where you been? What you been a doing?" he asked. "Don't you
think we got to get out of here?"
When Elizabeth went toward the house Elsie followed, creeping on her
hands and knees like a little animal, and when she had come within
sight of the fence surrounding the house she sat on the ground and put
her hands over her face. Something within herself was being twisted and
whirled about as the tops of the corn stalks were now being twisted and
whirled by the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward the house
and when she opened her eyes she could again see along the long
mysterious aisles.
Her brother with his wife and children went away. By turning her head
Elsie could see them driving at a trot out of the yard back of her
father's house. With the going of the younger woman the farm house in
the midst of the cornfield rocked by the winds seemed the most desolate
place in the world.
Her mother came out at the back door of the house. She ran to the steps
where she knew her daughter was in the habit of sitting and then in
alarm began to call. It did not occur to Elsie to answer. The voice of
the older woman did not seem to have anything to do with herself. It
was a thin voice and was quickly lost in the wind and in the crashing
sound that arose out of the fields. With her head turned toward the
house Elsie stared at her mother who ran wildly around the house and
then went indoors. The back door of the house went shut with a bang.
The storm that had been threatening broke with a roar. Broad sheets of
water swept over the cornfields. Sheets of water swept over the woman's
body. The storm that had for years been gathering in her also broke.
Sobs arose out of her throat. She abandoned herself to a storm of grief
that was only partially grief. Tears ran out of her eyes and made
little furrows through the dust on her face. In the lulls that
occasionally came in the storm she raised her head and heard, through
the tangled mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound
of millions of rain-drops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the
house of the corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling to
her out of the Leander house.
The story came to me from a woman met on a train. The car was crowded
and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing who
belonged with her--a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown
canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down
in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman's side, but I
did not know that at the time.
The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to
her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have
made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She had talked to me in very
good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man
in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days,
perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the
company of some one else.
Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the
night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had
rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the
moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in
an odd way very beautiful.
You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing up in clusters as
they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected
and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle
of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farm-houses, and occasionally
the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the
west.
The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that
stricken land with her lover by God knows what miracles of effort. She
made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I
want to tell you.
I do not remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how
the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood until the story she
told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-
window and very pregnant with meaning to me.
There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in
charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a
beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of
foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa,
or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given
to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a
fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker
philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and
he had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I
fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him,
and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that
would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which
he fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle line, but
was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed
village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.
The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train
with me, her lover and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had
been small landowners and the others in their party had worked on their
estate.
Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German
who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his
insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader
of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to
go forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her
party gathered about her. Like a stubborn horse she shook her head and
muttered Polish words. "I want to be let alone, that's what I want. All
I want in the world is to be let alone," she said, over and over; and
then the German came up and putting his hand on her back pushed her
along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant
repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They
hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and
the German.
The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream and
the German took hold of the old woman's arm and dragged her through the
stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: "I
want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone."
In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible
efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches
and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried
in his inside coat pocket. Then he got out tobacco and, sitting down on
the protruding root of a tree, smoked and stared at the refugees,
clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.
The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept
for an hour and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine
him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and
along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be
angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a
matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road as one goes
back along a road for strayed cattle.
And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman
began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone
and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other
buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.
The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and
not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that
kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her
thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man
trying to lift himself by his boot straps. The two fought and were full
of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not
very strong physically.
And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made
me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get
the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the
moving train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two
souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road.
The air was full of the struggle and the refugees gathered about and
stood shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but
also with something else. In the air everywhere about them they could
feel the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly
have given her life to have it stopped, or to have someone strike a
light, and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds
struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying
vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.
Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down
exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They
thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more
would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled
together and perhaps whimpered a little.
What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train
explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after
struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old
woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into
the body of the old woman.
After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down
by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let
alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone,
and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving
her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally
along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.
There was more of the story after that. The woman's lover, who had been
a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking
his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only
remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to
be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words
and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into
their own country.
Below the hill there was a swamp in which cattails grew. The wind
rustled the dry leaves of a walnut tree that grew on top of the hill.
She went beyond the tree to where the grass was long and matted. In the
farmhouse a door bangs and in the road before the house a dog barked.
For a long time there was no sound. Then a wagon came jolting and
bumping over the frozen road. The little noises ran along the ground to
where she was lying on the grass and seemed like fingers playing over
her body. A fragrance arose from her. It took a long time for the wagon
to pass.
Then another sound broke the stillness. A young man from a neighboring
farm came stealthily across a field and climbed a fence. He also came
to the hill but for a time did not see her lying almost at his feet. He
looked toward the house and stood with hands in pockets, stamping on
the frozen ground like a horse.
Then he knew she was there. The aroma of her crept into his
consciousness.
He ran to kneel beside her silent figure. Everything was different than
it had been when they crept to the hill on the other evenings. The time
of talking and waiting was over. She was different. He grew bold and
put his hands on her face, her neck, her breasts, her hips. There was a
strange new firmness and hardness to her body. When he kissed her lips
she did not move and for a moment he was afraid. Then courage came and
he went down to lie with her.
He had been a farm boy all his life and had plowed many acres of rich
black land.
He became sure of himself.
He plowed her deeply.
He planted the seeds of a son in the warm rich quivering soil.
* * * * *
She carried the seeds of a son within herself. On winter evenings she
went along a path at the foot of a small hill and turned up the hill to
a barn where she milked cows. She was large and strong. Her legs went
swinging along. The son within her went swinging along.
He learned the rhythm of little hills.
He learned the rhythm of flat places.
He learned the rhythm of legs walking.
He learned the rhythm of firm strong hands pulling at the teats of
cows.
* * * * *
There was a field that was barren and filled with stones. In the spring
when the warm nights came and when she was big with him she went to the
fields. The heads of little stones stuck out of the ground like the
heads of buried children. The field, washed with moonlight, sloped
gradually downward to a murmuring brook. A few sheep went among the
stones nibbling the sparse grass.
A thousand children were buried in the barren field. They struggled to
come out of the ground. They struggled to come to her. The brook ran
over stones and its voice cried out. For a long time she stayed in the
field, shaken with sorrow.
She arose from her seat on a large stone and went to the farmhouse. The
voices of the darkness cried to her as she went along a lane and past a
silent barn.
Within herself only the one child struggled. When she got into bed his
heels beat upon the walls of his prison. She lay still and listened.
Only one small voice seemed coming to her out of the silence of the
night.
Rosalind Wescott, a tall strong looking woman of twenty-seven, was
walking on the railroad track near the town of Willow Springs, Iowa. It
was about four in the afternoon of a day in August, and the third day
since she had come home to her native town from Chicago, where she was
employed.
At that time Willow Springs was a town of about three thousand people.
It has grown since. There was a public square with the town hall in the
centre and about the four sides of the square and facing it were the
merchandising establishments. The public square was bare and grassless,
and out of it ran streets of frame houses, long straight streets that
finally became country roads running away into the flat prairie
country.
Although she had told everyone that she had merely come home for a
short visit because she was a little homesick, and although she wanted
in particular to have a talk with her mother in regard to a certain
matter, Rosalind had been unable to talk with anyone. Indeed she had
found it difficult to stay in the house with her mother and father and
all the time, day and night, she was haunted by a desire to get out of
town. As she went along the railroad tracks in the hot afternoon
sunshine she kept scolding herself. "I've grown moody and no good. If I
want to do it why don't I just go ahead and not make a fuss," she
thought.
For two miles the railroad tracks, eastward out of Willow Springs, went
through corn fields on a flat plain. Then there was a little dip in the
land and a bridge over Willow Creek. The Creek was altogether dry now
but trees grew along the edge of the grey streak of cracked mud that in
the fall, winter and spring would be the bed of the stream. Rosalind
left the tracks and went to sit under one of the trees. Her cheeks were
flushed and her forehead wet. When she took off her hat her hair fell
down in disorder and strands of it clung to her hot wet face. She sat
in what seemed a kind of great bowl on the sides of which the corn grew
rank. Before her and following the bed of the stream there was a dusty
path along which cows came at evening from distant pastures. A great
pancake formed of cow dung lay nearby. It was covered with grey dust
and over it crawled shiny black beetles. They were rolling the dung
into balls in preparation for the germination of a new generation of
beetles.
Rosalind had come on the visit to her home town at a time of the year
when everyone wished to escape from the hot dusty place. No one had
expected her and she had not written to announce her coming. One hot
morning in Chicago she had got out of bed and had suddenly begun
packing her bag, and on that same evening there she was in Willow
Springs, in the house where she had lived until her twenty-first year,
among her own people. She had come up from the station in the hotel bus
and had walked into the Wescott house unannounced. Her father was at
the pump by the kitchen door and her mother came into the living room
to greet her wearing a soiled kitchen apron. Everything in the house
was just as it always had been. "I just thought I would come home for a
few days," she said, putting down her bag and kissing her mother.
Ma and Pa Wescott had been glad to see their daughter. On the evening
of her arrival they were excited and a special supper was prepared.
After supper Pa Wescott went up town as usual, but he stayed only a few
minutes. "I just want to run to the postoffice and get the evening
paper," he said apologetically. Rosalind's mother put on a clean dress
and they all sat in the darkness on the front porch. There was talk, of
a kind. "Is it hot in Chicago now? I'm going to do a good deal of
canning this fall. I thought later I would send you a box of canned
fruit. Do you live in the same place on the North Side? It must be nice
in the evening to be able to walk down to the park by the lake."
* * * * *
Rosalind sat under the tree near the railroad bridge two miles from
Willow Springs and watched the tumble bugs at work. Her whole body was
hot from the walk in the sun and the thin dress she wore clung to her
legs. It was being soiled by the dust on the grass under the tree.
She had run away from town and from her mother's house. All during the
three days of her visit she had been doing that. She did not go from
house to house to visit her old schoolgirl friends, the girls who
unlike herself had stayed in Willow Springs, had got married and
settled down there. When she saw one of these women on the street in
the morning, pushing a baby carriage and perhaps followed by a small
child, she stopped. There was a few minutes of talk. "It's hot. Do you
live in the same place in Chicago? My husband and I hope to take the
children and go away for a week or two. It must be nice in Chicago
where you are so near the lake." Rosalind hurried away.
All the hours of her visit to her mother and to her home town had been
spent in an effort to hurry away.
From what? Rosalind defended herself. There was something she had come
from Chicago hoping to be able to say to her mother. Did she really
want to talk with her about things? Had she thought, by again breathing
the air of her home town, to get strength to face life and its
difficulties?
There was no point in her taking the hot uncomfortable trip from
Chicago only to spend her days walking in dusty country roads or