Chapter 3

I was extremely happy and excited over the poetical way in which Peter was calling on my common sense to help him in his crisis, but I felt weighted down with the responsibility. Yes, I understood the great Farrington. He felt as I did--that Peter's genius needed to see and help old Dr. Chubb drench Buttercup with a can of condition-mixture. Now, could I supply all that, or enough of it to keep Peter from being murdered in his father's office? The inky bundle at my side began to look as if it weighed a ton, but my loyalty and affection for Peter made me know that I must put my back to the burden and raise it somehow. If it had been a simple burden, like three sick cows, it would have been easier to take upon my shoulders. Then suddenly, as I was about to be in a panic about it all, the thought of the cows reminded me of Sam, and immediately, in my mind, I shared the weight of the manuscript with him and began to breathe easier. The way Sam and Peter love each other inspires positive awe in my heart, though Mabel says it is provoking when they go off to their fraternity fishing-camp for week-ends instead of coming to her delightful over-Sunday parties out on Long Island. Judge Vandyne feels as I do about it, and he loves Sam as much as Peter does, though I don't believe that he has any deeper affection for Peter than Sam has. I've been intending to read up about David and Jonathan, but I feel sure, from dim memories, that their histories about describe Peter and Sam. I couldn't for the life of me see why any woman should resent "a love that passes the love of" her, and I am sure she wouldn't if one of them was a poet born to enlighten the world. Yes, I breathed easier at the thought of Sam's affection for Peter, and went back to the case of the giant Belgian, though I don't think the artist quite intended him to be taken that way.

Just as I had turned the front page I was interrupted by Clyde Tolbot, who came whistling down the street and broke out all over with smiles when he saw me out sunning myself.

"Gee! Betty, but it is good to see you at home!" he said.

They wore almost the exact words Sam had used, but they sounded different. The sound is about all that is different in any of the things men say to girls when they like them a lot. Tolly and I are very appreciative of each other, and always have been.

"You are going to settle down and have a royal good time, aren't you, Betty? I learned a new foxtrot up in Louisville last week I'm dying to teach you, and now that Sue Bankhead has got a great big dance machine we can fox almost every night. Will you come with me this evening?"

"I wish I could, Tolly," I said, with utter sincerity, for Tolly is the very best dancer in the Harpeth Valley, not excepting Tom Pollard over at Hillsboro. "But, Tolly, I must give up all thought of social pleasures for a time." I spoke with a dignified reserve that fitted the spirit that I ought to have when undertaking a great responsibility, though I did want to dance. "I have some hard mental work to do."

"Well, blast old Hayesboro for a sad hole! You are going to go in for brain athletics, Sam Crittenden for farmer heroics, and the only movie that has peeped into town is going to be closed because it ran a Latin Quarter film the afternoon the ladies stopped in from the United Charities sewing circle, expecting a Cuban missionary thriller. I might as well have my left foot amputated, it itches so for good dancing." Tolly was so furious that I was positively sorry for him, and to comfort and calm him I told him all about Peter's letter and the play, and the way I had to read and criticize and help. He sniffed at the idea of Peter, but the dramatist impressed him slightly.

"Say, that old boy is the real thing, Betty, child. He's the sure win-out on Broadway. But how long will it take you to write that play for your mollycoddle poet? You can get through with it before the Country Club gets going good, can't you? We've had a new floor in the dancing-pavilion built, and the directors ordered a foxy music machine last night."

"Oh yes, I ought to be able to tell Peter all I know in two and a half months," I answered, ignoring Tolly's disrespect for my poet friend.

"And a lot you don't know," Tolly added, with the candor of real affection. "I wish Sam, the old calf, could be weaned from his cows and take the position your dad is offering him at the Phosphate Works, so he would be able to shake a foot occasionally. Can't you handle him a bit, Betty? It's as if he just came out and looked at life and then dived back in a hollow log."

"I--I don't know," I answered, doubtfully. A pang shot through me at the thought of any one extracting Sam from that wonderful retreat in the woods, but then also this news of the honors that were coming to Peter made me long to have Samuel Foster Crittenden come forth and take his place in the world beside his friends. Sam, I felt sure, was made to shine, not to have his light hid under a farm basket. Why, even Tolly, there beside me on the steps, was the head of the new Electric Light Company that Hayesboro has had a little over a year. He did it all himself, though he had failed to pass his college examinations when he went up for them with Sam.

"I'm proud of the way you've been doing things, Tolly," I added, warmly, putting my thoughts of Sam away where I keep them when I'm not using them.

"Oh, I'm just an old money-grubber and nobody's genius child, but I'll rustle the gold boys to get up to New York to see your play, Betty, and send you a wagon-load of florist's spinnach on the first night," answered Tolly, beaming at my words of praise.

"Oh, Tolly, please don't think I'm going to write a play," I answered, quickly. "I'm--well, I'm just going to tell Peter a whole lot of useful things I find out about life. You see, Tolly, Peter's father has so many millions of dollars that it has been almost impossible for Peter to climb over them into real life as we have. I have to do it for him. Please pity Peter, Tolly, and tell me what you think would be nice in his play if you find anything."

"Well--er--well, I have right in stock at present a little love-interest tale I could unfold to you, Betty, about--Help! There comes the gentle child Edith up the street now. I must go. I am too coarse-grained for association with her." And before I could stop him he was gone through the house and out the back way. That is the way it always is with Tolly and Edith, either they are inseparable or entirely separate. They can't seem to be coexistent citizens, and they have been fighting this way since they both had on rompers. I wondered what Tolly had been doing now.

"Clyde Tolbot needn't have gone just because I came. I can endure him when I have other people to help me," said Edith, as she kissed me and sat down sadly. She is always sad when Tolly has been sinful.

"What has Tolly been doing now?" I asked her, as I put that fascinating Belgian face down on the floor and ruthlessly sat upon him, for the step was getting cold, though the sun was delicious and had drawn out a nice old bumblebee from his winter quarters to scout about the budding honeysuckle over our heads.

"I am so hurt that I wouldn't tell anybody about it but you, dear, but last night as he walked home with me, after we had been dancing down at Sue's to the new phonograph, he--he put his arm almost around me and I think--I think he was going to kiss me if I hadn't prevented him--that is, he did kiss my hair--I think." Edith is the pale-nun type, and I wish she could have seen how lovely she was with the blush that even the failure of Tolly to kiss her brought up under her deep-blue eyes. Edith didn't get any farther north to school than Louisville, and her maiden aunt, Miss Editha Shelby Morris Carruthers, brought her up perfectly beautifully. I didn't know how to comfort her because I had been two years at the Manor on the Hudson and then a year in Europe, and, though nobody ever has directly kissed me, a girl's hand and hair don't seem to count out in the world.

To take Edith's mind off Tolly's perfidy I told her about the play, and she was as impressed as anybody could wish her to be, and promised to stand by me and make people understand why I couldn't dance and picnic like other people because of this great work I had to do for a dear friend. I told her not to tell anybody but Sue, and she went home completely comforted by her friendly interest in Peter and me. In fact, she really adored the idea of helping me help Peter, and seemed to forget her anger at Tolly with a beautiful spirit.

About that time Eph solemnly called me in to lunch. Eph is a nice, jolly old negro until he gets a white linen jacket and apron on, and then he turns into a black mummy. I think it is because I used to want to talk to him at the table when I still sat in a high chair. I don't believe he has any confidence in my discretion even now, and that is why he seats me with such a grand and forbidding display of ceremony.

"Betty dear," said mother, after Eph had served her chicken soup and passed her the beaten biscuits, "I found an old note-book of my mother's that has all the wonderful things she did to the negroes and other live stock on her farm out in Harpeth Valley. You know she ran the whole thousand acres herself after father's death in her twenty-seventh year, and she was a wonderful woman, though she did have three girls and only one son. There is a section of her notes devoted to cows and their diseases, and Sam might be interested to hear how she managed them so that even then her cows sold for enormous sums. Suppose you look over it and tell him about it."

"Oh, I will. Thank you, mother!" I answered, as I took three little brown biscuits, to Eph's affectionate delight, and also as a shock to his proprieties.

I had planned to open the bundle and begin my work for Peter right after dinner, but I sat down and devoured whole that note-book of my maternal ancestor's. I never was so thrilled over anything, and the chapter on gardening really reads like a beautiful idyl of summer. It changed my entire nature. As I read I glowed to think that I could go right to Sam's wilderness and try it all out. I didn't own any land, and it might take a little time to force daddy to buy me some, and the planting season and fever were upon me. There is a wide plateau to the south of Sam's living-room, and I had in my mind cleared it of bushes, enriched it with all the wonderful things grandmother had directed, beginning with beautiful dead leaves, and I was planting out the row of great blush peonies in my mind as I intended to plant it in Sam's garden when the tall old clock in the hall toned out four long strokes. Then I remembered that I wanted to go down to the post-office to get my mail and to see everybody and hear the news. So with the greatest reluctance I tucked the garden idyl in the old desk which had been that very Grandmother Nelson's, and heaved Peter's heavy manuscript in on top of it.

No mass-meeting, no picnic, and no function out in the great world, even New-Year's reception at the White House or afternoon tea at the Plaza, could be half the fun that going to the Hayesboro post-office for the afternoon mail is. I think the distinct flavor is imparted by the fact that all our forefathers and foremothers have done it before us. The Hayesboro resurrection will be held right there, I feel sure.

And if mail-time is fun usually, it is great when all the news is about you and your friends all swarm around you with interest. Everybody had heard about Peter and his play, though neither Edith nor Tolly thought they had told, and that he was soon coming down to visit me, and, of course, that meant to visit all of Hayesboro. Miss Henrietta Spain, who teaches literature from spelling to the English poets, in the Hayesboro Academy, had read Peter's new poem--the one the _Literary Opinion_ had copied last month--and she was pink with excitement over the prospect of having such a genius in our midst,

"Look out that you don't get put in the play on the other side of the footlights, Hayes," said the mayor, slapping daddy on the back. "Be careful how you have a poet sitting around your house."

"The South has long waited to have a genius come down and write a fitting epic about her Homeric drama of Civil War, Elizabeth," said old Colonel Menefee. "Let your young friend come, and I can give him material, beginning with that Bedford Forest charge just before Chickamauga that--"

"And just remember," interrupted Mrs. Winston Polk, "how Elizabeth's mother, Betty's own Grandmother Nelson, rode fifty miles and back in twenty-four hours to get Morgan to send wagons for her barnful of corn to feed his soldiers, though she and her negroes were dependent on what she could grow between then and frost. She never faltered, but--"

"The Nashville and Louisville papers all wrote up the way Clyde Tolbot swam Salt River and stopped the L. & N. express from going down in the cut during the storm last year," Edith hastened to say when Mrs. Folk's breath had given out. Tolly's ugly good face was beautiful to see when she spoke of him thus, though Edith didn't notice it.

When you start a Harpeth Valley town to telling how wonderful it is to the third and fourth generation back, it is like a seething torrent and can go on for ever. I glowed to think of all the wonderful things I could write Peter, and we all started home from the post-office as late as supper hour would admit.

After I got home, escorted by the reunited Edith and Tolly, as well as by Billy Robertson, who wants to be Peter's hero, though he wasn't directly saying so, I sat down determinedly to write to Peter at inspiring length and make him feel how I valued his confidence in me, also to mention the war drama. Just then I raised my eyes and that wonderful notebook had pushed a corner of itself out of the desk from under the manuscript. I couldn't use my mind advising between a modern epic and a war drama while it was plowed up ready for peonies, so I decided to wait and ask Sam's advice about advising Peter, and I read the rest of the peony pages in comfort. Right then, too, I made up my mind that I was going to get ground bone to plant at the roots of all the peonies if I had to use my own skeleton to do it and would only see them bloom with astral eyes.

I was still reading when the supper-bell rang, and was only interested in reminiscences of Grandmother Nelson during the meal.

"No, ma'am, Miss Caroline, you got it wrong. Ole Mis' didn't divide clover pinks 'cepting every third year 'stid of second. _Hers_ bloomed, they did," Eph interrupted mother to say, indulging in perhaps his first speech while waiting on the table during the long and honorable life as a butler which that grandmother had started at his sixth year. He then retired in the blackest consternation, and his yellow granddaughter, the house-girl, brought in the wine-jelly.

One thing is certain--I must contrive some way to get Sam back and forth to me from The Briers in less time than it takes him to walk five miles. He has got just one old roan plow mare and he won't ride her after he has worked her all day, and I am afraid it won't do for me to go after him with Redwheels every time I want him. I can go about two-thirds of the time, but he must be allowed some liberty about expressing his desire for my company. Of course a tactful woman can go nine-tenths of the way in all things to meet a man she likes, and he'll think she hasn't even started from home; but she ought to be honorable enough not to do it at that rate. I believe in liberty for men as well as women.

Still, I can't express the strain it was on me to wait until after eight o'clock for Sam with Grandmother Nelson's farm-book on my knee, and I don't want to do it ever again, especially if the Byrd or Mammy or the cows or any of the other live stock might be sick. I felt that it must be midnight before I got Sam seated by me on the deep old mahogany sofa in front of one nice April blaze in behind the brass fender, and under another from Tolly's power-house. He was pretty tired, as he had been up since daylight, but the cows were all right and on feed again, Mammy wasn't any stiffer than usual, and he had promised the Byrd the first chicken that the old Dominicker hatched out to stay at home and let him come to see me. Mammy had sent me five fresh eggs, and Sam presented them with a queer pod of little round black seeds, and a smile that wouldn't look me in the face.

"Hollyhocks! I climbed over the Johnson fence about two miles from town and stole them for you," he said, as he squirmed around from me and picked a brown burr off the leg of his trousers.

"Aren't they sweeties?" I exclaimed, not noticing his entirely unnecessary bashfulness. "And that is just what I want to talk to you about." With which I produced my ancestral treasure, and with our heads close together we dove into it, didn't come up until after ten o'clock, and then were breathless.

"Oh, Sam, can I do all these things out at your farm?" I exclaimed, and I fairly clung against his shoulder while his strong, rough hand folded over mine as the husk did over the hollyhock seeds I had been holding warm and moist in my palm.

"All of them, and then some, Betty," he answered, blowing away a wisp of my hair that he had again roughed up instead of shaking hands in greeting, despite my reproof. "I'll plow up that southern plot for you just after daylight to-morrow, and every minute I can take from grubbing at the things I have to work to make the eats for all of us I'll put in on the posy-garden for you."

"I'm much obliged to you for the plowing, but I'll be out at about nine o'clock and I'll bring my own spade and hoe and rake and things. I think I'll take those two young white lilacs that are crowded over by the fence in the front yard to start the garden. Don't you think lilacs would be a lovely corner for a garden like my grandmother's, Sam?"

"I--I think it would be nice to--plant the hollyhock seeds you have in your hand the first thing, Betty," answered Sam, with the gridiron smolder in his eyes which snapped up into a twinkle as he added, "Could you help me set onions for a few hours later on?"

"Oh, I'd adore it!" I answered, enthusiastically. "Of course, I mean to help plant all the eat things, too. I may like them best. Let's see what grandmother says about onions." And I began to ruffle back the pages of the book that Sam held in both his hands for me.

"Good gracious! Betty, couldn't the old lady write!" exclaimed Sam, a half-hour later, after we had finished with onions and many other profitable vegetables. "Why, that description of her hog's dying with cholera and the rescue reads like a--a Greek tragedy in its simplicity."

"Oh, Sam," I exclaimed in dismay, "that reminds me, I forgot to tell you about the play, and now you ought to go home, with all those five miles to walk and plowing to do at daylight." "Play? What play? Won't it keep?" asked Sam, as he rose and reached for his hat on the table. "Let's enjoy this last ten minutes before my hike, down at the gate."

"Oh no, it won't keep, and I don't know exactly what I will do about it and the garden. Here's Peter's letter; read it for yourself," I wailed, as I drew the splashed letter out from the ruffle in the front of my dress where I had stuck it for safe keeping, and handed it to Sam. If I hadn't been so distressed by the collision of the play and the garden in my heart I never would have been so dishonorable as to let Sam read the last paragraph in Peter's letter, which was more affectionate than I felt was really right for Peter to write me, even after the Astor tea-party, and which had troubled me faintly until I had forgotten about it in my excitement about Farrington and the play. I saw Sam's hand shake as he read that last page, and he held it away from me and finished it, as I remembered and gasped and reached for it.

"Good old Pete," said Sam, in a voice that shook as his hand did while he handed me back the letter. "It is a great chance for him, and if you can help you'll have to go to it, Betty. Pete only needs ballast, and you are it--he seems to think."

"But how will I find time enough from making our garden to help make his play?" I asked as I rose and clung to his sleeve as I had done in all serious moments of my life, even when his coat-sleeve had been that of a roundabout jacket. My heart was weak and jumpy as I asked the question.

"Betty," said Sam, gently, lifting my hand from his arm into his for a second and then handing it firmly back to me, "that garden was just a dream you and I have been having this evening. It can't be. Don't you see, dear, I am in a hard hand-to-hand struggle with my land, which is all I possess, for--for bread for myself and the kiddie, and I--I can't have a woman's flower-garden. It looks as if you and old Petie can do a real literary stunt together. Just get at it, and God bless you both. Good night now; I must sprint." And as he spoke he was through one of the long windows and out on the front porch in the moonlight.

"Oh, wait, Sam, wait!" I gasped, as I flew after him and clung to him determinedly.

"Well," he said, patiently, as he stood on the step below me and turned his bronze head away from me out toward his dim hills sleeping in the soft mystery of the moonlight.

"I will, Sam, I _will_ have that garden," I said, with the same angry determination in my voice I had used when I had clung to him and kicked and fought to go to places with him when he didn't want me, and when my skirts were several inches above my bare knees and his feet were scratched and innocent of shoes.

"Betty," said Sam, as he shook me away from him and then took my shoulders under their thin covering of chiffon in his plow-calloused, big, warm hands, "forget it! There are lots of dream gardens out in the world you can play in when you have time away from the bright lights. Everybody grows 'em without a lick of work. I have to work mine or starve. Good night!" Then with a rough of my hair down across my eyes he was out in the moonlit road, running away from me to his hollow log in a way he had never done before, no matter how I had tagged him.

I ran as far as the gate to watch him out of sight, and then I put my head down against the tall old post that had been one of Sam's perches when he wanted to climb away from me in former years, and sobbed and sobbed. I had never expected Sam to cast me off.

Girls' hearts are covered all over with little thin crystallizations of affection, and men ought to be very careful not to smash any of them with their superior strength. Sam had hurt me so that I didn't even dare think about it. I knew he was poor, and I hadn't expected him to plow and plant things for me while I went about in a picture-hat snipping them with garden scissors. I had asked him to let me set onions and weed beans and drop peas and corn for him and share his poverty and hard work as a true friend, and he had shut his cedar-pole gate in my face and heart. And I didn't understand why. I tried to think it was his affection for Peter that made him thus rudely switch my mind from him and his garden to Peter and his need of me, which Sam may have thought was greater than the need of his onions and turnip salad; but I don't see how Sam could have construed cruelty to me as generosity to Peter.

"Please God," I prayed out into the everlasting hills toward which Sam was running away from me and from which I had heard intoned "cometh help," "give me dirt to work in somewhere except in just a yard if I can't have Sam's. Help me to get somebody to help me to raise things for people to eat and milk, as well as to inspire a play. I'll do both things, but I must have earth with rotted leaves in it. Amen."