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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
In "Eris," Robert W. Chambers delves into the realms of myth and psychological tension to weave a tapestry that is as engaging as it is disquieting. The narrative combines elements of symbolism and rich, impressionistic prose, reflecting Chambers' fascination with the occult and the enigmatic nature of human relationships. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century anxieties, the text harmoniously reflects the shifting literary context, embodying the decadent and modernist movements that question reality and consciousness while drawing on classical mythology to inform contemporary dilemmas. Chambers, an American writer known for pioneering the horror genre, often explored themes of beauty and melancholy. His extensive travels and deep interests in art and mythology significantly influenced his creations. "Eris," in particular, showcases Chambers' engagement with the philosophical complexities of conflict and desire, encapsulated through his personal experiences and observations of a world on the brink of transformation. His unique perspective illuminates the intricate dance between chaos and order, making it a significant text of its time. Readers seeking an exploration of existential themes intertwined with lyrical prose will find "Eris" a compelling and thought-provoking read. Chambers'Äô insight into human nature and the mystical elements he employs create a rich reading experience that resonates with anyone interested in the deeper questions of life and art.
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Eris
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
THE baby was born at Whitewater Farms about nine in the morning, April 19, 1900. Two pure-breed calves,—one a heifer, the other a bull,—were dropped the same day at nearly the same hour.
Odell came in toward noon, heard these farm items from his foreman, Ed Lister.
For twenty years Odell’s marriage had been childless. He had waited in vain for a son,—for several sons,—and now, after twenty sterile years of hardship, drudgery, and domestic discord, Fanny had given him a girl.
He stood in silence, chewing the bitter news.
“Awright,” he said, “that’s that! Is Queen doin’ good?”
Whitewater Queen was doing as well as could be expected and her fourth heifer-calf was a miracle of Guernsey beauty.
“Awright! Veal that danged bull-caaf. That’s White Chief’s second bull outa White Rose. I’m done. We’ll take her to Hilltop Acres next time. And that’s that!”
He dusted the fertiliser and land plaster from his patched canvas jacket:
“It blowed some,” he said. “I oughta waited. Cost me five dollars, mebbe. I thought it might rain; that’s why. It’s one dum thing after another. It allus comes like that.”
He scraped the bottom of his crusted boots against the concrete rim of the manure pit.
A bitter winter with practically no snow; dry swamps; an April drouth; a disastrous run of bull-calves with no market,—and now, after twenty years, a girl baby!
How was a man going to get ahead? How was he to break even? Twenty years Odell had waited for sons to help him. He should have had three or four at work by this time. Instead he was paying wages.
“I guess Fanny’s kinda bad,” remarked the foreman.
Odell looked up from his brooding study of the manure.
“I dunno,” continued the foreman; “another Doc is here, too. He come with a train nurse n’hour ago. Looks kinda bad to me, Elmer.”
Odell gazed stupidly at Lister.
“What other Doc?” he demanded.
“Old Doc Benson. Doc Wand sent Mazie for him.”
Odell said nothing. After a moment or two he walked slowly toward the house.
In the kitchen a neighbour, one Susan Hagan, a gross widow, was waddling around getting dinner, perspiring and garrulous. Two or three farm hands, in bantering conversation, stood washing or drying their faces at the sink.
Mazie, the big, buxom daughter of Ed Lister, moved leisurely about, setting the table. She was laughing, as usual, at the men’s repartee.
But when Odell appeared the clatter of the roller-towel ceased. So did Mazie’s laughter and the hired men’s banter.
Mrs. Hagan was the first to recover her tongue:
“Now, Elmer,” she began in unctuous tones, “you set right down here and eat a mite o’ ham——” She already had him by the sleeve of his canvas jacket. She grasped a smoking fry-pan in the other hand. The smoke from it blew into Odell’s face.
“Leggo,” he grunted, jerking his arm free.
Mrs. Hagan encountered Mazie’s slanting black eyes, narrow with derision:
“Elmer don’t want to eat; he wants to see Fanny,” said Mazie Lister. And added: “Your ham’s burning, Mrs. Hagan.”
“Where’s Doc Wand?” demanded Odell heavily.
Mrs. Hagan savagely snatched the answer from Mazie’s red lips:
“Oh, Elmer,” she burst out, “he’s went and called in old Doc Benson; and Benson he fetched a train nurse from Summit——” Smoke from the burning ham strangled her. Odell left her coughing, and strode toward the sitting room.
“Dang it!” he muttered, “what next!”
It was cool and dusky in the sitting room. He halted in the golden gloom, sullenly apprehensive, listening for any sound from the bed-room overhead.
After a little while Dr. Wand came downstairs. He was haggard and white, but when he caught sight of Odell he went to him with a smile. The village folk feared and trusted Dr. Wand. They feared his sarcasm and trusted his skill. But, with the self-assertion of inferiority, they all called him “Fred” or “Doc.”
“Well, Elmer,” he said, “the baby’s doing nicely.... I thought I’d like to have Dr. Benson look at Fanny.... A fine baby, Elmer.... Fanny asked me to think up some uncommon and pretty name for your little girl——”
“Name her anything,” said Odell thickly.... “Dang it, I waited twenty years for a boy. And now look what I get! It all comes to once. White Rose drops me a bull-caaf, too. But I can veal that!”
“Better luck next time——”
“No,” he interrupted fiercely, “I’m done!” He turned and stared at the sun-bars on the lowered shade, his tanned features working.
“It’s like the herd,” he said. “Either the cow or the herd-bull’s to blame for every dinged bull-caaf. And I can’t afford to breed ’em together more’n twice.... Twenty years I been lookin’ for a boy, Doc. No, I’m done. And that’s that!”
“You’d better go and eat,” suggested the doctor.
Odell nodded: “Fanny awright?”
“We’re watching her. Perhaps you’d better stay around this afternoon, Elmer——”
“I gotta spread manure——”
“I want you within calling distance,” repeated the doctor mildly.
Odell looked up. After a moment’s hesitation:
“Awright, Doc. I guess I can work around nearby. You must be dead-beat. Eat a snack with us?”
“Not now. I can’t leave your wife.”
“Do you mean that Fanny’s kinda bad?”
“Yes.... Your wife is very, very ill, Elmer. Dr. Benson is with her now.”
Breaking ground for a new kitchen garden that afternoon, Odell found the soil so infested with quack-root, horse-radish, and parsnip that he gave it up and told Lister that they’d fence the place as cheaply as possible and turn the hogs on it.
Lister hooked up a horse and drove away to hunt for locust posts and wire. Odell dragged his plow to the wagon shed, stabled the fat gray horse, walked slowly back toward the wood shed. There was a dead apple tree he could fell while waiting.
It was very still there in the April sunshine. All signs of rain were gone. The wind had died out. Save for the hum of bees in crocus and snow-drop, and except for the white cock’s clarion from the runs, no sound broke the blue silence of an April afternoon.
Odell looked up at the window of his wife’s bed-room. The white-capped nurse was seated there, her head turned as though intent upon something taking place within the room. She did not stir. After a while Odell picked up his spading fork and wiped the tines.
Yes, every kind of bad luck was coming at once; drouth, bull-calves, wind to waste fertiliser, doctors’ bills, expenses for a nurse, for Mrs. Hagan, for posts and wire,—and the land riddled with quack and horse-radish....
He’d about broken even, so far, during the last twenty years. All these years he’d marked time, doggedly, plugging away. Because, after all, there had been nothing else to do. He could not stop. To sell meant merely to begin again somewhere else, plug away, break about even year after year, die plugging. That was what general farming meant in White Hills when there were wages to pay. He could have made money with sons to help him.... Life was a tread-mill. What his cattle took from the land they gave back; nothing more. He was tired of the tread-mill. A squirrel in a cage travelled no further and got as far....
Odell drove his spading fork into the ground, sifted out fragments of horse-radish roots, kicked them under the fence into the dusty road beyond.
Dr. Wand’s roadster stood out there by the front gate. Behind it waited Dr. Benson’s driver in the new limousine car. Odell had not felt he could afford any kind of car,—not even a tractor. These danged doctors....
As he stood with one foot resting on his spading fork, gazing gloomily at the two cars, Dr. Benson, fat, ruddy and seventy, came out of the house with his satchel.
He nodded to Odell:
“Dr. Wand wants you,” he said. “She’s conscious.”
After the portly physician had driven away down the dusty road, Odell went into the house and ascended the stairs to the common bed-room from which now, in all probability, he was to be excluded for a while.
Dr. Wand, beside the bed, very tired, motioned Odell to draw nearer. It was the ghost of his wife he saw lying there.
“Well,” he grunted with an effort, “you don’t feel very spry, I guess. You look kinda peekid, Fan.”
All the stored resentment of twenty barren years glittered in his wife’s sunken eyes. She knew his desire for sons. She knew what he now thought of her.
She said in a distinct voice to Dr. Wand: “Tell him.”
The doctor said: “Your wife has asked me to think up some new and unusual name for the baby. I suggested ‘Eris,’” he added blandly. And, after a silence: “Your wife seems to like the name.”
Odell nodded: “Awright.”
His wife said to the doctor, in her painfully distinct voice: “I want she should have a name that no other baby’s got.... Because—that’s all I can give her.... Something no other baby’s got.... Write it, Doctor.”
Dr. Ward wrote “Eris” on the birth certificate. His expression became slightly ironical.
“Eris,” he repeated. “Do you both approve this name?”
Odell shrugged assent.
“Yes,” said the woman. “She’s mine. All I can give her is this name. I give it.”
“Eris was the name of a Greek goddess,” remarked the doctor. He did not explain that Eris was the goddess of Discord. “I’m very sure,” he added, “that no other baby is named Eris.... But plenty of ’em ought to be.... Was there anything you wanted to say to your wife, Elmer?”
“Hey?” demanded Odell, stupidly.
Suddenly something in the physician’s eyes sent a dull shock through Odell. He turned and stared at his wife as though he had never before laid eyes on her. After a while he found his voice:
“You—you’ll get better after a spell,” he stammered. “Feel like eatin’ a mite o’ sunthin’ tasty? You want I should get you a little jell ’rsunthin’—Fanny——”
Her bright, sunken gaze checked him.
“You ain’t asked to see the baby,” she said in her thin, measured voice; “I’m sorry I ever bore a child to you, Elmer.”
Odell reddened: “Where is it——?” He stumbled up from his chair, looking vaguely about him, confused by her brilliant eyes—by their measureless resentment.
For life was becoming too brief for pretence now. Fanny knew it; her husband began to realise it.
She said: “I’m glad I have no sons. I’m sorry I bore a child.... God forgive me.... Because I’ll never rest, never be quiet, now.... But I don’t mind so much ... if THEY will let me keep an eye on her somehow——” She tried to lift her head from the pillow: “I want to see her,” she said sharply.
“Yes,” said the doctor. “I want you to see her. Wait a moment——”
As he passed Odell he drew him outside. “Go downstairs,” he whispered. “I’ll call you if she asks to see you again.”
“She ain’t a-goin’ to get no better?” demanded Odell hoarsely.
“No.”
The physician passed on into the adjoining room, where the nurse sat watching a new-born baby in its brand new cradle.
Odell continued down the stairs, and seated himself in the dim sitting room....
Everything was coming at once—drouth, wind, bull-calves, girl babies—and Death.... All were coming at once.... But no sons had ever come. None would ever come now. So—wages must go on.... A woman to mind the baby.... And somebody to keep house for him.... Expense piling on expense. And no outlook—no longer any chance to break even.... Where was he to get more money? He could not carry the farm on his own shoulders all alone. The more work planned, the more men needed; and the more it all cost. Increased acreage, redoubled production, got him no further. Always it was, at best, merely an even break—every loss offsetting every gain....
One of the cats came in with a barn rat hanging from her mouth, looked furtively at Odell, then slunk out, tail twitching.
The man dropped his elbows on the centre table and took his unshaven face between both scarred fists....
The room had grown as still as death now. Which was fitting and proper.
After a long while Dr. Wand descended the stairs. Odell stood up in the semi-dusk of the sitting room.
“She didn’t ask for you again,” said the doctor.
“Is—is she—gone?”
“Yes.... Quite painlessly.”
They walked slowly to the porch. It was nearly milking time. The herd was coming up the long lane,—the sun dipping low behind,—and a delicate rosy light over everything.
“You got your milking to do,” said the doctor. “I’ll notify Wilbur Chase. I’ll see to everything, Elmer.”
Wilbur Chase was the local undertaker. The doctor went out to the road, cranked his car, got in wearily, and rolled away toward the village.
Odell stood motionless. In his ears sounded the cow-bells, tonk-a-tonk, tonk-a-tonk, as the Whitewater herd turned leisurely into the barn-yard. Ed Lister opened the sliding doors to the cow-barn. A frisky heifer or two balked; otherwise the herd went in soberly, filing away behind spotless, sweet-smelling rows of stalls, greeted thunderously by the great herd-bull from his steel bull-pen.
Odell, heavy-eyed, turned on his heel and went upstairs.
But at the door of the silent room above the nurse barred his way.
“I’ll let you know when you can see her,” she said. “She isn’t ready.”
Odell gazed at her in a bewildered way.
“The baby is in the other room,” added the nurse. “Don’t wake her. Better not touch her.”
He went, obediently, stood in the doorway, his scarred hands hanging.
Eris lay asleep in her brand new cradle, almost invisible under the white fabrics that swathed her.
The chamber of death was no stiller than this dim room where life was beginning. There was no sound, no light except a long, rosy ray from the setting sun falling athwart the cradle.
So slept Eris, daughter of discord, and so named,—an unwelcome baby born late in her parents’ lives, and opening her blind, bluish eyes like an April wind-flower in a world still numb from winter.
Odell stared at the mound of covers.
It would be a long while before this baby could be of any use at Whitewater Farms.
CHAPTER II
IT is a long lane that has no turning, either for cattle or for men.
When Fanny died Odell was forty. Two months later he married the strapping daughter of Ed Lister. And came to the turn in the long, long lane he had travelled for twenty years.
For, as Whitewater Queen was a breeder of heifer-calves, Mazie Lister proved to be a breeder of men.
Every year, for the first four years, she gave Odell a son.
There was no fuss made about these events. Mazie Lister was the kind of girl who could eat cabbage for breakfast, wad it down with pie, drive it deeper with a quart of buttermilk.
Once, to prove she could do it, she ate a whole roast sucking pig, five boiled potatoes, six ears of corn, a dish of cranberry sauce, and an entire apple pie; and washed it down with three quarts of new cider.
Her feed never fattened her; it seemed to make her skin pinker, teeth whiter, long, slanting black eyes more brilliant.
No cares worried her. She laughed a great deal. She was busy from dawn to dark. Unfatigued but sleepy, she yawned frightfully toward nine o’clock. It was her time to roost.
Mazie’s instincts concerning progeny were simple. She nursed each arrival as long as necessary, then weaned it. Then the youngster had to learn to shift for himself—wash and dress, turn up at meal hours, turn in with the chickens, rise with the crows.
It was a little different, however, with Eris, whom Mazie had inherited. Eris, of course, was bottle-fed. Whitewater Queen’s heifer-calf, White Princess, had no better care. Whatever was advisable was completely and thoroughly done in both cases.
White Princess grew to beautiful Guernsey symmetry, with every promise of conformation to classic type; and was duly registered. Little Eris, small boned, with delicately fashioned limbs, looked out on the world from a pair of crystal-blue, baby eyes, which ultimately became a deep, limpid grey.
Unlike White Princess, Eris did not promise to conform to the Odell type. There seemed to be little of that breed about her. Fanny had been bony and shiny-skinned, with a high-bridged, pinkish nose, watery eyes—a wisp of a woman with a rodent’s teeth and every articulation apparent as a ridge under a dry, tightly stretched epidermis.
Odell, with his even, white teeth, coarse, highly-coloured skin and brown eyes, was a compact, stocky, heavy-handed, broad-footed product of Scotch-Irish pioneer stock. But Fanny’s grandmother, a Louisiana Creole, had run away from school to go on the stage, and had married a handsome but dissolute Southern planter who died of drink.
Sundays Fanny used to wear her grandmother’s portrait painted in miniature on ivory, as a breast-pin.
“Hand-painted,” she used to explain. And always added: “Creoles are all white.” Which was true. But, when quarrelling with his wife, Odell pretended to believe otherwise.
Rummaging through Fanny’s effects a day or two after her marriage, Mazie discovered a painted fan, a mother-of-pearl card-case, and this breast-pin. She carried the miniature to Odell.
“Looks like baby,” she explained, with her care-free laugh.
“She’ll be lucky if she favours that pitcher,” said Odell. “But like as not she’ll take after Fanny.” He was wrong in his guess.
When Eris was five her resemblance to the miniature had become marked. And Mazie’s boys looked like their mother and father.
On Saturday nights, after immersing her own unwilling brunette brats in the weekly bath, Mazie found the slim white body of little Eris an ever-increasing amusement and a pique to her curiosity. The child’s frail yet healthy symmetry, the fine skin, delicate, perfect limbs, lovely little hands and feet, remained perennial sources of mirth and surprise to this robust young woman who was equally healthy, but built on a big, colourful, vigorous plan.
Solid and large of limb and haunch, deep-bosomed, ruddy-skinned, the young stepmother always bred true to type. Her sons were sons of the soil from birth. There could be no doubt about her offspring. What wasn’t Lister was Odell. They belonged to the land.
But when Mazie looked at her husband and looked at the child, Eris—and when she remembered Fanny—then she wondered and was inclined to smile. And she was content that her sons’ thick, sturdy bodies and slanting, black eyes so plainly advertised the stock they came from. Utility. Health. Strength.
Fanny had had a pink nose. Even a Guernsey ought to have one. But the nose of Eris was snow white. To what stock did this child throw back?
When Eris was seven she was sent to the village school, leading her eldest stepbrother thither by the hand. Both were scared and tearful. Nobody went with little Eris to mitigate the ordeal; and she was a most sensitive child.
Hers had been a deathless curiosity since she was old enough to ask her first question. An unquenchable desire for information seemed to possess her. Her eternal, “Will you tell me why?” became a nuisance.
“Dang it, send her to school!” shouted Odell at last. And that was how.
At her small desk, rigid, bewildered, terribly intent on the first teacher in human form she had ever gazed upon, she found herself on the verge of tears. But, before she could dissolve, her brother forestalled her, bursting into vigorous yells, bawling like a calf; and would not be comforted. Which allowed Eris no time for private grief while wiping his eyes with her pinafore.
Noonday recess and lunch baskets and the wildly gyrating horde of children let loose on a sandy playground ended the first encounter between Eris Odell and the great god Education in His Local Temple at White Hills Village.
Eris learned little in school. There is little to learn in American schools. No nation is more illiterate. And in the sort of school she went to the ignorant are taught by the half educated.
None of her teachers could speak English as it should be spoken. In their limited vocabulary there was no room for choice of words. Perhaps that was why negatives were doubled now and then.
As for the rest, she was stuffed with falsified history and unessential geographical items; she was taught to read after a fashion, and to spell, and to juggle figures. There was a nature class, too, full of misinformation. And once an owlish, elderly man lectured on physiology; and told them in a low and solemn voice that “there is two sects in the phenonemy of natur, and little boys are made diffrunt to little girls.”
That ended the lecture, leaving every little boy and little girl mad with unsatisfied curiosity, and some of the older children slightly uncomfortable.
But The Great American Ass dominates this splendid land of ours. He knows. He’ll tell the world. And that’s that—as Odell was accustomed to say. And early in her career little Eris caught the cant phrase of finality from her father, and incorporated it with her increasing lingual equipment.
When one of the boys tried to kiss her, she kicked his shins. “And that’s that!” she added breathlessly, smoothing out her rumpled pinafore.
In Mazie she had a stepmother who made no difference between Eris and her own progeny. She kissed them all alike at bedtime; dosed them when necessary, comforted their sorrows with stock reassurances from a limited vocabulary, darned, sewed, mended, washed for all alike.
Mazie gave her children and her husband all she had time to give—all she had the capacity to give—the kindly, cheerful offices and understanding of a healthy female.
Whitewater Queen was as good a mother. Both lacked imagination. But Whitewater Queen didn’t need any.
For a time, however, the knowledge imbibed at school nourished Eris, although there were few vitamines in the feed.
When she was thirteen her brothers—twelve, eleven, ten and nine—alternately bullied her, deferred to her, or ran bawling to her with their troubles.
When she was fourteen the world met its own weird at Armageddon. The old order of things began to change. A new earth and a newly interpreted Heaven replaced the “former things” which had “passed away.”
At eighteen Eris looked out over the smoking débris of “former things”—gazed out of limpid grey eyes upon “a new Heaven and a new Earth”; and saw the cloudy, gigantic spectre of all-that-had-once-been receding, dissolving, vanishing from the world where it had reigned so tyrannically and so long.
About that time she dreamed, for the first time, that dream which so often re-occurred in after years—that she stood at her open window, naked, winged, restless for flight to some tremendous height where dwelt the aged god of Wisdom all alone, cutting open a human heart that was still faintly pulsating.
At eighteen—the year the world war was ended—Eris “graduated.”
She wrote a little act for herself, designed her own costume, made it, acted, sang, and danced the part. It was the story of a poor girl who prays for two things—a pair of wings so that she may fly to the moon, and a new hat for the journey. Suddenly she discovers a new hat in her hands. The next instant two beautiful little wings sprout on her shoulders. Instantly she takes scissors and snips off the wings and trims her new hat with them. Ready for her journey, suddenly she realises that now she cannot fly. She tears the wings from the hat. Too late. She can’t fasten them to her shoulders again. They flutter to her feet. She falls on her knees in a passion of tears. The moon rises, grinning.
It was a vast success—this little act of Eris Odell—and while its subtler intent was quite lost on the honest folk of White Hills Village, the story itself was so obvious and Eris did it so prettily that even her father grunted approval.
That evening he promised her the next heifer-calf for her own. If it proved a good one the sale of it should provide a nice nest-egg for Eris when she married.
The next heifer-calf promised well. Eris named her White Iris and she was so registered.
In the yearling pure-breeds she was first at the Comity Fair. But Eris refused to sell. At the State Fair White Iris beat every Guernsey and every other heifer, pure-breed and grade.
Brookvale Manor offered her three thousand dollars. Odell made her take it, and put the money into the local bank. So, with tears blinding her grey eyes, Eris sold White Iris out of the county. And would not be comforted even by the brand new cheque-book sent to her by the cashier of the White Hills Bank.
The account, however, was in her father’s name.
Now, the horizon of Eris Odell had narrowed as her sphere of activity dwindled after graduation.
Whitewater Farms became her world. Within its confines lay her duties and diversions, both clearly defined.
They were her heritage. No loop-holes offered escape—excepting marriage. And that way out was merely the way in to another and similar prison the boundary of which was a barbed wire fence, and its mathematical centre a manure pit.
She continued to dream of wings. An immense, indefinable longing possessed her in waking hours. But she was only one of the youthful, excited millions, waking after æons to the first instincts that had ruled the human race.
It was the restlessness of the world’s youth that stirred her—Modern Youth opening millions of clear young eyes to gaze upon the wonders of a new Heaven and a new earth, and mad to explore it all from zenith to depths—sky, sea, land, and the waters under the earth. Youth, suddenly crazed by an overwhelming desire for Truth, after æons and æons of lies.
Explore, venture, achieve, live—demand Truth, exact it, face it, and know!—the mighty, voiceless cry of the World’s Youth—claiming freedom to seek, liberty to live, fearless, untrammelled, triumphant. A terrible indictment of Age, and of those age-governed æons which forever have passed away.
Already the older, duller generation caught the vast vibration of young hearts beating to arms, young voices swelling the tremulous, universal cry of insurgence, a clear, ceaseless, sea-like sound of laughter proclaiming the death of Sham—ringing an endless, silvery requiem.
Odell shoved up his spectacles and lowered the newspaper to glance at Eris.
“What say?” he repeated fretfully.
“I’d like to study dancing.”
“Can’t you dance? You go to enough socials and showers ’n’one thing ’n’other.”
“I mean—stage dancing.”
“Stage!” he thundered. “Be you crazy?”
“Why, Eris, how you talk!” said her stepmother, too astounded to laugh.
“I could go to New York and work in a store by day; and take stage-dancing lessons evenings,” murmured the girl. “I want to be somebody.”
“You stay here and do your chores and try to act as if you ain’t a little loonatic!” shouted Odell. “I’m sicka hearing about the capers and kickups of young folks nowaday. Them gallivantins don’t go in my house. I’m sicka reading about ’em, too. And that’s that!”
“After all,” said Eris, “why do I have to do what I don’t care to do?”
“Dang it,” retorted her father, “didn’t you never hear of dooty? What d’they teach you in school?”
“Nothing much,” she replied listlessly. “Did you always want to be a farmer, daddy?”
“Hey?”
“Are you a farmer because you wanted to be? Or did you want to be something else?”
“What dinged trash you talk,” he said, disgusted. “I didn’t wanta be a blacksmith or I’da been one.”
“Why can’t I be what I’d like to be? Will you tell me why?”
Odell, speechless, resumed his newspaper. It was nearly nine o’clock and he hadn’t read half the local news and none of the column devoted to the Grange.
Eris looked wistfully at him, loitering still in the doorway, slim, grey-eyed, undeveloped.
Her stepmother laughed at her: “Notions,” she said. “Don’t you know you’d go to rack and rooin that way? You go to bed, Eris.... There’s fresh ginger snaps in the pantry.”
CHAPTER III
UNTIL the Great War turned the world upside down, Whitewater Farms made money after Odell married Ed Lister’s daughter.
Shortage of labour during the war cut into profits; taxes wiped them out; the ugly, Bolshevik attitude of labour after the war caused a deficit.
It was the sullen inertia of the mob, conscious of power. Men did not care whether they worked at all. If they chose to work, mills and factories would pay them enough in three days to permit them to remain idle the remainder of the week. No farmer could pay the swollen wages demanded for field labour, and survive financially.
Every village was full of idle louts who sneered at offered employment.
Fruit rotted in orchards, grain remained uncut, cattle stood neglected. The great American loafer leered at the situation. The very name of Labour stank. It stinks still. The Great American Ass has made the term a stench in the nostrils of civilisation.
The next year mills and factories began to lay off labour. Odell and Lister scraped together a few sulky field hands, mainly incompetents, men who had spent all their wages. Fields were sullenly tilled, crops gathered, cattle cared for.
Except for profiteers, reaction had set in. War profligacy, asinine finance, crushing taxes already were doing their work.
Rather than pay for feed, farmers sold their stock. The demand for pork started everybody hog-raising. Prices fell; loss followed. Then stagnation. It was the bitter aftermath of war—the deluge. Dead water.
Only one star of hope glimmered over the waste,—the New Administration.
Spring was a month early that year. Odell, at sixty, unimpaired by pie and the great American frying pan, his gaitered legs planted sturdily in the new grass, looked out over his domain and chewed a clover stem.
“I ain’t afraid,” he said to Lister. “I’m going the hull hog. Every acre.”
“Where’s your help?” remonstrated Lister.
“I got ’em.”
“Some on ’em is quitters. They’ll lay down on yeh, Elmer.”
Odell spat out the clover stem: “Every acre, Ed!” he repeated. “And six cows on test.”
“We ain’t got the help——”
“Six cows,” growled Odell; “White Lady, Snow Queen, Silver Maid, Thistledown, Milkweed Lass, and Whitewater Lily.... I gotta make money. I’m aimin’ to and I’m a-going to. I got four sons. And that’s that!”
“Elmer——”
“Awright. I know all what you gonna say, Ed. But where does it get you to go around with a face a foot long? How’s things to start unless somebody starts ’em? Awright, prices is bad. You can’t sell a pure-breed caaf in this dinged country. There isn’t no market for a fancy heifer. Everybody’s breedin’ Holsteins ’n’sloshin’ around after grades. Awright; nobody wants Guernsey quality; everybody wants Holstein bulk ’n’watery milk ’n’everything. I know. And my answer is, every acre, Ed; and six cows on test; and higher prices on every danged caaf that’s dropped.
“If I sell a heifer it’s a favour to be paid for through the nose. And I feed every bull-caaf and no vealin’ this year. Enough hogs to turn out till October; not another danged snout! If the Bank don’t see me through I’ll blow it up. Now, g’wan and make your plans.”
He went into the creamery where his wife stood beside the separator, watching a cat lap up some spilled cream.
“Your pa’s timid, Mazie,” he said. “I tell him I cal’late t’start under full steam. What do you say?”
She laughed: “Pa’s got notions. He allus was a mite slow. I guess you know best, Elmer.”
“We all gotta work,” he said. “That means Eris, too.”
“She allus helps me,” remarked Mazie, simply.
“I dunno what she does,” grunted Odell; “—sets a hen or two, fools around the incubators, digs up a spoonful of scratch-feed—what does she do, anyhow?”
“The child mends and irons——”
“When she ain’t readin’ or tendin’ her flowers or moonin’ ’round the woods ’n’fields,” retorted Odell. “Eris reckons she’s too fine a lady for farm folk, I guess. I want her to keep busy. And that’s that.”
“Somebody’s got to tend the flowers,” remonstrated Mazie. “You don’t want we should have no posy bed, Elmer—like poor folks down to the Holler, do you?”
“I can git along ’n’eat dinner without posies. Why don’t Erie read the Grange Journal? Oh, no; it’s fancy novels and highfalutin’ books she studies onto. And she’s allus cuttin’ out these here fashions into these here magazines with coloured pitchers outside. Did you ever see Eris studyin’ into a cook-book? Or a seed catalogue? Or the Guernsey Cattle Magazine? Or the Breeder’s Guide——”
“You let her be,” said Mazie, good-naturedly. “The housework’s done and that’s all you need to know. She can cook and make a bed if she’s a mind to.”
“Mind,” growled Odell, “—what’s a girl want of a mind? All she uses it for is to plan how to play-act on the stage or gallivant into moving pitchers. All she thinks about is how to git to New York to hunt up some fancy job so she can paint her face and dance in bare legs——”
“Now, Elmer, Eris is too smart to act foolish; and she’s educated real well. You liked to see her act in school, and you thought she danced nicely. She’s only a child yet——”
“She’s twenty!”
“She’s no more’n sixteen in her way of thinking, Elmer. She’s a good girl.”
“I didn’t say she’s bad. But she’s twenty, and she ought to be more help to us. And she ought to quit readin’ and moonin’ and dreamin’ and lazin’——”
“You quit your lazin’, too,” laughed Mazie, setting a pan of cream in the ice chest. “Why don’t you go down to the barn and ring that new herd-bull? You can’t get him into the paddock without a staff any more. And if you don’t watch out Whitewater Chieftain will hurt somebody.... ’N’I’ll be a widow.”
As Odell went out the dairy door, preoccupied with the ticklish job before him, he met Eris with her arms full of new kittens.
“Mitzi’s,” she explained, “aren’t they too cunning, daddy? I hope they’re not to be drowned.”
“I ain’t runnin’ a cat-farm,” remarked Odell. “Did you mend my canvas jacket?”
“Yes; it’s on your bed.”
“Did you coop them broody hens? I bet you didn’t.”
“Yes. There are seventeen in three coops.”
“Housework done?”
“Yes.”
“Awright. Why don’t you get the cook-book and set in the hammock a spell?”
The girl laughed: “Don’t you like mother’s cooking?”
“S’all right for me. But I don’t cal’late your mother’s going to cook for the fella you hitch up with.”
Eris turned up her nose: “Don’t worry. I shan’t ever marry. Not any boy in this town, anyway. Probably I’ll never marry.... I’ll not have time,” she added, half to herself.
Odell, who was going, stopped.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“An actress ought not to marry. She ought to give every moment to her art,” explained the girl naïvely.
“Is—that—so? Well, you can chase that idea outa your head, my girl, because you ain’t never going to be no actress. And that’s that!”
“Some day,” said Eris, with a flushed smile, “I shall follow my own judgment and give myself to art.... And that’s that!”
As they stood there, father and daughter, confronting each other in the pale April sunshine, the great herd-bull bellowed from the cattle-barn, shaking the still air with his thunderous reverberations. He was to be shot that evening.
Eris sighed: “He misses his companions,” she said, “and he tells us so.... Poor White Lightning.... And I, also, miss the companionship of all I have never known.... Some day I shall tell you so.... I hope you’ll understand.”
“You talk like a piece in a magazine,” said Odell; “you better quit reading them danged love stories and movin’ pitcher magazines and study into the Farm Journal.”
“You’d be very proud of me if I became a great actress,” she said seriously.
“I’d be a danged sight prouder if you was a great cook,” he grunted. And he went toward the cattle-barn, spinning the patent self-piercing nose ring on his horny forefinger.
Eris called after him: “Have you got to shoot Lightning?”
“Yes, I gotta beef him. He’s no good any more.”
So the great herd-bull, like all “Former Things,” was doomed to “pass away.”
As the Dionysia became the Mithraic Rites, so was taurian glory doomed to pass.... A bullet where Aldebaran shows the way. The way of all bulls.
Neither Odell nor Eris had ever heard of Aldebaran. And the tombs of the Magi were no more tightly sealed than the mind of the father. But the child’s mind hid a little lamp unlighted. A whisper might reveal to her Aldebaran shining in the midnight heavens. Or the Keys of Life and Death hanging on the Rosy Cross....
The bull died at the appointed hour. Eris stood in her bed-room closing both ears with trembling palms.
She did not hear the shot. Mazie found her there; laughed at her good-naturedly.
Eris’ lips formed the words: “Is he dead?”
“My dear, he’s Polack beef by now.”
Gloria tauri—gloria mundi. But whatever ends always begins again.
What was the Dionysia is now Rosicrucian ... and shall again be something else ... and always the same.
As for the Bull of Mithra—and Mithra, too—bull-calves are born every day. And there are a million million suns in the making.
It’s only the Old Order that changes, not what orders it.
CHAPTER IV
BULLS die; men die; the old order dies,—slowly sometimes, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye.
The change came swiftly upon Eris; passed more swiftly still, leaving no outward trace visible. But when it had passed, the heart and mind of Eris were altered. All doubt, all hesitation fled. She understood that now the road to the stars was open, and that, one day, she would do what she had been born to do.
The World War was partly responsible for the affair. The dye situation in the United States resulted. In Whitewater Mills, both dyes and mordants remained unsatisfactory. The mill chemist could do nothing and they let him go.
Where cotton was used in shoddy combination with wool, permanency of colour scarcely mattered—the poor always getting the dirty end of everything in a nation that has always laughed at a swindle.
But before the war, Whitewater Mills had built a separate plant for fine hosiery, lisle and silk, and had specialised in mauves and blues—fast, unfading, beautiful colours, the secret of which remained in Germany.
Now, desiring to resume, and unable to import, the directors of the mill sent a delegation to New York to find out what could be done.
There the delegates discovered, dug out, and engaged a chemist named E. Stuart Graydon.
It appeared that the secrets of German dyes and mordants were known to Mr. Graydon. How they became known to him he explained very frankly and eloquently. Candour, an engaging smile, pale smooth features full of pale bluish shadows,—these and a trim figure neatly clothed made up the ensemble of Mr. Graydon.
Permanent colour was his specialty. Anyway, his long, steady fingers were permanently stained with acid and nicotine. He was employed by a photographer when they discovered him. Or, to be accurate, he discovered them at their third-class hotel on Broadway.... And never left them until he had signed a contract.
It was after church that somebody introduced E. Stuart Graydon to Eris.
He walked home with the family; and his talent for general conversation earned him an invitation to remain to midday dinner.
Quiet, convincing eloquence was his asset. There appeared to be no subject with which he was not reasonably familiar. His, also, was that terrible gift for familiarity of every description; he became a friend over night, a member of the family in a week. He was what Broadway calls “quick study,” never risking “going stale” by “letter perfect” preparation for an opening.
He took a deep interest in Guernsey breeding. But Odell did the talking. That was how Graydon acquired a reputation for an astonishing versatility;—he started the subject and kept it kindled while others did the talking. And in ten minutes he was able to converse upon the theme with a skilful and convincing fluency entirely irresistible.
After dinner Mazie showed him Fanny’s miniature on ivory.
He smilingly sketched for the family a brief history of miniature painting. It happened that he was minutely familiar with all methods and all branches of Art. Indeed, that was how the entire affair started. And Art accounted for the acid stains, also.
To Eris, Art included the drama, and all that her ardent mind desired. It took Mr. Graydon about five minutes to discover this. And of course it transpired that he knew everything connected with the drama, spoken and silent.
The next evening he came to supper. He talked cattle, ensilage, rotation of crops, sub-soils, inoculation, fertilisers, with Odell until the hypnotised farmer was loth to let him go.
He talked to Mazie about household economy, labour-saving devices, sanitary disposal plants, water systems, bleaches—with which he was dreadfully familiar—furniture polish, incubators.
With the boys he discussed guns and ammunition, traps and trapping, commercial education, the relation of labour to capital, baseball in the State League, ready-made clothing, the respective merits of pointers, setters, bull terriers and Airedales.
Hypnotised yawns protested against the bed hour in the household of Odell. Nobody desired to retire. The spell held like a trap.
As for Eris, she decided to stay in the sitting room with Mr. Graydon when the family’s yawns at last started them blinking bedward.
Odell, yawning frightfully, got into his night-shirt and then into bed; and lay opening and shutting his eyes like an owl on the pillow while Mazie, for the first time in months, did her hair in curl papers.
“A nice, polite, steady young man,” she said, nodding at Odell’s reflection in the looking glass. “My sakes alive, Elmer, what an education he’s got!”
“Stew Graydon knows a thing or two, I guess,” yawned Odell. “You gotta be mighty spry to get a holt onto that young fella.”
“I’ve a notion they pay him a lot down to the mill,” suggested Mazie.
“You can’t expec’ to hire a Noo York man like that fer nothin’,” agreed Odell. “He’s smart, he is. And there’s allus a market fer real smartness. Like as not that young fella will find himself a rich man in ten years. I guesso.”
A silence; Mazie busy with her lustrous hair,—the plump, rosy, vigorous incarnation of matronly health.
In the mirror she caught Elmer’s sleepy eye and laughed, displaying her white teeth.
“You think he kinda favours Eris?” she asked.
“Hey?”
“I don’t know why else he come to supper.”
“He come to supper to talk farmin’ with me,” said Odell gruffly.
“Maybe. Only I guess not,” laughed Mazie.
“Well, why did he come, then? He wanted I should show him the new separator and them samples of cork-brick. He’s a chemist, ain’t he? He’s int-rested in cork-brick and separators ’n’ all like that.”
Mazie twisted a curl paper around a thick brown tress.
“When he talked about the theatre and acting,” she remarked, “did you notice how Eris acted?”
“She gawked at him,” grunted Odell. “She’d better get that pitcher idee outa her fool head,—lazin’ around readin’ them pitcher magazines ’n’ novels, ’n’ moonin all over the place instid of findin’ chores to occupy her ’n’ doin’ them——”
“Oh, hush,” interrupted Mazie; “you talk and take on awful foolish, Elmer. When Eris marries some bright, steady boy, all that trash in her head will go into the slop-pail.”
Odell scowled:
“Well, why don’t she marry, then? She ain’t no help to you——”
“She is! Hush up your head. You’ll miss her, too, when she marries, and some strange man takes her away. I guess I know who aims to do it, too.”
“Well, who aims to do it? Hey? She don’t have nothin’ to say to our Whitewater boys. She allus acts proud and highmighty and uppish. Dan Burns he come sparkin’ her ’n’ she stayed in her room and wouldn’t even come down to supper. ’N’ there was Clay Wallace, ’n’ Buddy Morgan——”
“It looks like she’s willing to be sparked to-night, don’t it?” said Mazie, with an odd little laugh.
Elmer rose on one elbow: “Say, you don’t think he wants our Eris, do yeh?”
“Why not? Isn’t Eris good enough for any man?”
“Well, well, dang it all, Stew Graydon seems diff-runt.... He’s too educated ’n’ stylish for plain folks—’n’ he’s got a big position in the mill. He don’t want our Eris——”
“Why not?” repeated Mazie.
Odell shook his frowsy head: “He’ll want a rich girl. Eris hain’t got only that heifer-money. I can’t give her more’n a mite——”
“That don’t count with me, Elmer.” She flushed, “—it didn’t count with you.”
“Well, you was worth consid’ble more’n cash,” he grunted.
“So’s any girl—if a boy likes her.”
“You think a smart man like Stew Graydon——”
“How do I know?” drawled Mazie. “She’s downstairs yet with him, ain’t she? I never knew her to act that way before. Nor you, either.”
