Part 8

“Though this was my forbears’ homestead, I was born out in Ohio on a little farm in the Muskingan River Valley. Seventy years ago it was hard living there as far as indoor comforts went, yet all the rich land was free for the tilling, and the corn and wheat flourished, but the thing I first remember about spring was the blooming apple trees. Everybody had them, half a dozen about the dwelling and then an orchard strip, while in almost every settlement there was a space roughly fenced in where young seedling trees were cultivated.

“Who made these apple nurseries, where the settler might get the stock of what was truly the Tree of Life to him, the fruit, food and drink that moistened his bread instead of tears? Was it the pioneers’ own providence? Was it the government? No; it was Johnny Appleseed who planted and cultivated, and the apple trees were his.

“Did you ever hear of the man? Few of your generation have, yet I remember him as I saw him when I was a lad, sixty years ago, and my mother, who was Massachusetts born, numbered him among her distant kin. She said, and she had it from her mother, that he was born in Boston in the year of Paul Revere’s ride; and that his real name was Chapman (the same as my mother’s), John Chapman. He was a studious boy, and wished to be a preacher, having a zealous streak to go overseas and teach the heathen, but what with the war and troubled times, the way was not made straight. Yet the times were fair enough for falling in love, and this he did with one Anice Chase, but while he bestirred himself for the wherewithal to marry, the white plague laid its hands on her. In those days, at the first sign, the victim was set apart as doomed, and so it was with Anice. Only a year from their betrothal, and John journeyed on foot three days out from Boston town to her father’s farm to bid her good-by.

“It was a May afternoon, and the lilacs and apples in the yard were all abloom; Anice on a couch lay under one of those trees, for she would not rest content indoors; the sight and smell of the flowers were all she thought or spoke of. Long they talked together, and then she said so feebly that he could scarcely hear, ‘Go and preach, but not to the far-off heathen. Stay in your own land, but go westward, preach Christ and the Garden of Eden, which is Home, and wherever you go plant the apple, the Tree of Life that stood in the midst of the garden, as its symbol and mine. For I shall reach the garden first and wait for you close to the door.’

“That night Anice died. John Chapman soon after fell ill of a fever, they said from exposure on his homeward journey, and when he recovered, he had strange fancies, and then totally disappeared.

“Soon after the year eighteen hundred, early in spring, and for nearly half a century following, a traveller made his way from western Pennsylvania into Ohio, journeying straight across country to the Indiana border, whether there were houses in his route or not. He was a strange-looking figure, tall, gaunt, and clad in curiously assorted garments, sometimes hatless and barefoot, sometimes wearing mismated shoes and a peaked cap of his own manufacture. Either on his back, or else in a small cart that he dragged after him, he carried a bag filled with apple seeds. Whenever he came to a likely spot, he would loosen the ground with a rude, strong hoe, plant some seeds, weave saplings into a strong enclosure to keep the cattle out, and then pass on. Wild beasts never molested him, the rattlesnakes turned from his path, and the Indians, brutal as they were at that time in their treatment of the settlers, not only never harmed him, but treated him with reverence as a messenger of the Great Spirit.

“Then, when the day was done, he would knock at the door of a cabin, and after partaking of simple food, for which he would always offer to pay, either in coin of which he managed to earn enough to supply his few needs, or else in young apple trees, he would draw close to the lamp or throw himself on the floor by the fire, and pulling a tattered Bible from his shirt, open it and proclaim as one reading a letter, ‘Behold I have planted the Tree of Life at your doors, now hearken to the news fresh from Heaven.’

“To a few of the women, from time to time, he told detached fragments of his history, and my mother being one of these, recognized him almost by intuition as her kinsman John Chapman; and either feeling the distant tie of blood, or because we children gathered about him and hung on his words, he came to our cabin more frequently than to others, for next to his beloved trees, he loved little children and all animals. For women who tried to better his attire or sympathize with him, he had no eyes. ‘I have a wife waiting for me beside the gates of Paradise,’ he would say, ‘and what has she to do but busy her fingers in making me wedding garments, and none but of her making will I wear.’ As to his name, Johnny Appleseed was the only title he was known by in that country.

“Every spring he returned to Pennsylvania for more seed, for which he bartered at the cider mills, and wherever he went his path was strewn with his kind deeds. Did he come across a sick horse left to die by pioneers, it was housed and fed at his expense. Did he meet a traveller more ragged than himself, he always found that he had a garment he could spare, until finally, a feed bag with opening for head and arms was his most common coat.

“One autumn, being lame, he tarried a long while at our cabin; it was the year that I was ten, and word came that the Connecticut home in which my father was born had fallen to him, who, being the youngest, had been obliged to strike out for himself. At first my mother cried, for she had learned to love the free life, hard as it was, and she could not bear the thought of leaving what was now _home_ to her; but in Connecticut there were better schools, and mother came of gentle stock, and had planned to make a preacher of me.

“When the day for leaving came, Johnny Appleseed, who had not left the vicinity of our cabin for weeks, appeared beside my mother in the kitchen; in one hand he held a straight young apple tree, securely packed in moss and sacking for the journey, and in the other a leaf from his Bible, the page of Genesis that tells of the Tree of Life.

“‘Take them with you, Hannah, and you will not be lonely,’ he said; ‘where the Tree of Life is there is home, and I give you fresh news of it; soon I shall enter forever into the garden where it grows;’ and before she could answer, he had disappeared among the trees.

“My mother brought the apple tree back with her, set it in the midst of her garden, and cherished it as she did her own children; the leaf from Genesis is now in the family Bible, where the record is writ of her own entry into The Garden. Mother would never let the Tree of Life be grafted, for grafting was a thing that Johnny Appleseed discountenanced, and many good varieties came from his seedlings; as it grew, two branches of equal vigour started half a dozen feet above the ground; yet when it came to bloom, one main branch bore white flowers, and the other rose, while the apples of the white flowers were yellow with rosy cheeks, and the fruit of the pink flowers golden russets.

“‘See, Adam,’ said my mother, the year that the tree blossomed (she had christened me Adam because I was her first man child), ‘I will call one branch Anice and the other John. What does it signify? That they are united in the Tree of Life.’

“Not many years after, we heard that John Appleseed had come to plant at the house that had once been ours, and after talking cheerfully at supper, spoke of an unusual light that lingered after sunset, and the clouds that were like a door opening in the heavens. After his evening reading, he went to sleep as usual on the floor, leaving the door open, for the night was mild. In the morning they came upon him, the rising sunlight shining on his smiling face, for Anice had been allowed to open the garden door at dawn.”

* * * * *

The bees hummed, and the petals of the apple blossoms fell upon us until Father Adam broke the spell by saying, “It is turning four, and little children should not stay out after dark, for the babes in the wood must have had a cold, damp bed in spite of the robins.”

So we thanked him, wishing to ask many questions that we could not, and pulling the faded blossoms from the chaise, took the flower branches from the Tree of Life that he gave us together with a jar of honey, and turning the way he pointed, up past the house, to the high-road, the grays, old as they were, trotted gaily home.

Then I told father. “Yes,” he answered, “I know where you have been, to Adam Kelby’s farm. A Methodist preacher of power, also a farmer and raiser of fine stock, called Father by the hill people, because that’s what he is to them one and all, never straying far from home. He was born out in Ohio, and believes strange things about apple trees, and holds them sacred, as the Druids did the oaks, some people say. Well, so do I!” As for Johnny Appleseed, he was an actual being who lived and toiled much as Adam has said.

* * * * *

We could not stay indoors that night, but sat on the back steps and supped with the dogs, eating buttered bread in great slabs, with honey to boot. Feasting slowly and dreamily, as pleases children who have been out all day, and between whose mouthfuls the Sandman is beckoning.

As I finished my last bit, assisted by Lark, who has a sweet tooth, I said half to myself, “We’ve certainly been a-Maying, but I wonder did we play _make believe_, or are we really children who have found the Tree of Life.” Evan echoed, “I wonder,” and straightway spread more honey on his bread.

VI WIND IN THE GRASS

=JUNE=—THE MOON OF STRAWBERRIES

“The Boy will go back to his mother’s people of course, and then at last, Ernest, you will be free to carry out our plans,” said Eileen’s clear voice, in which there was an unconscious note of uncertainty mingled with expectancy. As she spoke, she gave her slender fishing rod an unnecessary jerk that meshed line and hook in the tendrils of an overhanging grape-vine.

Without speaking, her companion secured his own pole in a crotched tree, and swinging out over the stream that rushed noisily past, quickly disentangled the line; then, taking the rod from Eileen, he reeled up the line and cast the fly deftly into the quiet pool below. Twice he framed his lips to answer her question, but those two innocent words, _our plans_, seemed to stop his voice; at his third essay, his line played out swiftly while the reel sang the tune that the fisherman loves. Then, after a short, exciting bit of play, a splendid brook trout, more than a pound in weight, lay upon the moss beside Eileen.

“There is a King trout for you,” Ernest said; “could anything more beautiful come out of the water?” and he made a fresh cast still farther down the pool.

Eileen’s first glance of admiration changed as she watched the trout quiver. “Put it back, please,” she cried; “now it’s a fairy thing, and more beautiful than any jewels I ever saw; but as soon as the water dries away it will only be a dead fish to be cooked and eaten. I love to catch fish, it’s so exciting, but not to keep them.”

“Yes; but Eileen, after all, to be eaten, that is what it was made for,” answered Ernest, in quiet, practical tones, yet smiling indulgently. “The unkind thing would be to put it back and let it have its fight all over again when some other fellow played it and it had learned fear. Besides, have you forgotten that this is the last day of the fishing and that we came out to get some trout for your father, who is sick and needs tempting, that being your excuse for my leaving work?”

Then they glanced at one another, laughing; the trout went into the creel, and the soft wind came down with the stream, laden with fragrance of grape flowers and the courting ecstasies of birds, then escaped from the trees, and was spread over the low meadows to the eastward, making low music in the long grass, fit accompaniment to the bobolinks that soared from it, singing.

Two more trout were caught in quick succession, then luck and the morning turning together, the pair came out into the open fields under the shade of a group of old willows, to free themselves of the weight of rubber boots, and allow Eileen to rest a few moments after the rough tramp down stream that had been half climbing and half wading.

May was withdrawing her veil, woven of apple blossoms in a green mist of unfolding leaves, to reveal June’s young splendour, and for the two sitting under the willows it was also early June; they were the children of neighbours, and though their parents were of widely different fortunes, they had been friends since Eileen had caught her first sunfish on a pin and string arrangement, rigged by Ernest, and he, for inattention to his lessons, had been forced to wear her pink shirred sunbonnet at school.

Her father was a promoter and politician; his, a farmer and wagon-maker, who, following an oft-repeated story, died just as his son had begun to work his way through college. How often Eileen and he had planned what he would do and be when this was accomplished, and she had done once and for all with the city boarding school to which her mother’s, rather than her father’s, ambition had consigned her. Now she had accomplished in a way and returned, but for family reasons Ernest Wray, a born book-lover, was still plodding in the old paths of his father, the wagon-maker.

“You hear the wind in the grass when you do not hear what I say,” said Eileen, presently, in a tone half laughing, half pettish, as Ernest, placing the creel in the water to keep the trout fresh, secured it from floating away with a stone.

“Come and sit where you must look _at_ me and not beyond or through me, and answer the question I asked you half an hour ago. When does the Boy go to his mother’s people, so that you can carry out your plans?”

“Did you ask me that before?” said Ernest.

“Perhaps not in the same words, but the meaning was the same.”

“Then I did not hear you, for I thought you said _our plans_, Eileen.”

To the man, the girl stood for everything that beckoned him into the future; to the girl, the man at this time was an indispensable comrade when she was at home, upon whom she was eager to practise certain school-taught theories. Her influence over him fed a growing vanity, standing in the place of love, of which, as yet, she had really no comprehension.

“Put it any way you choose, only tell me when you are going to send the Boy to his relations,” she said, this time in a voice of assurance. “I suppose it is too late now to rent the farm and sell the business before autumn. Of course you are four years too late for college, but you might still manage the law school. Father thinks that the trolley line through the upper road into Bridgeton is an assured thing, and that before long your farm could be turned into money for house lots; that is what we mean to do with our land.”

“There is one unsurmountable objection to my doing all this, Eileen,” said Ernest, speaking slowly, that his voice might not tremble; “I am not going to send the Boy to his mother’s people, and I hope to sell neither the farm nor the wagon shop for many years to come.”

Eileen stared at him in speechless amazement for a moment, when a new idea came to her.

“Then your father left more money than was supposed, so that you can send the Boy to school and keep the place while you study, though I don’t see why you should bother with either him or it,” she said, half angrily. “Surely, after being tied, all your life, to this hill country, where nothing ever happens, you must long to get away as much as I do.”

“And you wish to get away? Of course you will like to travel, but not to go away for good? Would you like to see your homestead cut up and the brook turned into a drain for a new village?” he asked, quickly drawing his eyes from hers to follow the stream.

“Of course it’s a lovely old place, and I’ve had lots of good times there, but I’ve never expected to live in Oaklands all my life. Yes, I’m even willing to go for good and all, I think, quite for the sake of going. You know you were to come, too, and do fine things that should get in the newspapers. Oh, Ernest, have you forgotten all the plans we made before they built the sawmill dam, and we used to canoe from the Ridge falls quite down to Moosatuck?”

The momentary warmth in her voice made him flush, even as he took a new hold on himself to keep back the words that struggled for speech.

“No, Eileen, there is no more money than people thought, nor even as much. The farm must be worked, and the wagon shop also, to give us a living.”

“But why should you support the Boy,” she interrupted, growing incoherent through her disappointment, “just because your father, when he was past sixty, chose to marry a young woman from nobody knows where, and then both died and left the Boy, only seven years old, who has no claim on you, to drag you down? For father told me last night what I never knew before, that house, land, and business all came from your mother’s people.”

The man tingled hotly to know that his neighbour had been discussing the intricacies of his family affairs with Eileen, but in another light it gave him comfort. Her hardness toward the Boy was undoubtedly caught from her father, not born of her own feelings. But she, lashing herself more and more, persisted in her question: “Why should you support the Boy? Why do you not send him to his mother’s people, if she had any?”

“Because I love him, Eileen, and he loves me and needs me. Young as he is, he stifles his loneliness lest it should trouble me, or his mother ‘hear and be too sorry,’ as he puts it.” Ernest spoke quietly, all the uncertainty that had swayed him ending. “His mother’s people live in a crowded city. The Boy has an active mind in a frail body; he needs fresh air and a quiet life if he is to live to manhood, Dr. Russell says; shall I refuse him the chance?”

“And lose your own?”

“Possibly; if only one of us can have it, why not he as well as I?”

“What do you mean to do if you stay here? How can you keep house?”

“Turn the farm largely to fruit, and with helpers enlarge the wagon shop; in spite of cheap Western makers, there is a good demand for hand-made work wagons. As to the house, Aunt Louisa Taylor will care for it, and between us, God willing, we will make the Boy into a man and let him go to college for me. Do you know, Eileen, that a good many of the world’s best soldiers have gone to the fight as substitutes for those who could not, and the work was better done than it would have been by those who grieved because they could not go?”

“Have you lost all your ambition, Ernest? Can you be content with such an empty life? If any tongue but yours had told me of this absurd sacrifice, I would not have believed it.”

“Not _all_ my ambition; I still have my books, and I can buy others. I have my rod and my gun, and all outdoors, besides the Boy, and—memories of what, until to-day, I thought might be. I believed that you cared for me, Eileen, that you liked our old hills and their life; I thought that you, too, loved the bird on the wing and the sound of the wind in the grass. I knew that you would go away to travel for a long while, perhaps, but I thought you would want to return.”

“I do care, Ernest, that is, in a way; but there must be something else to do in my life besides merely caring. Father is going to take mother and me abroad this summer. I was keeping it a secret to tell you to-day, for I thought that you might join us; I’m so disappointed;” and the golden head buried itself in the slender arms that were clasped about the mossy stump of a fast-vanishing willow, and tears washed away the steely look that sometimes crept into Eileen’s gray eyes.

As she crouched thus, a change seemed to come over the perfect June morning; ragged clouds edged with rain came out of the west and darkened the sun; the singing wind turned to a gale that beat a path before it through the ox-eye daisies, and the ripening wild strawberries looked like blood drops in the grass.

The change came and passed rapidly, and with it Eileen’s emotion, and in a moment more they were strolling uphill toward her house as though nothing had happened. True it was she could not picture Oaklands without Ernest; that is, Ernest the man in the open, clad in his loose brown suit, carrying rod and creel, a figure that her imagination turned into a hero of romance. But the other Ernest, the man of the wagon shop, sweat drops on his forehead and uprolled sleeves, superintending some manipulation that he would not leave to the judgment of his workmen, repelled her forcibly. It was this second man that she wished to conceal from her friends of school and city. Many other women in country towns have felt this way at twenty-two. That individual work of the hands has fallen into disrepute is the fault of a feminine point of view as well as the encroachment of machinery.

* * * * *

“When are you going away?” Ernest asked, as he paused at the kitchen door and transferred the trout, wet moss and all, from the creel to the dish that Eileen brought. It was an old-fashioned blue and white platter with cut-off corners; in the centre was the picture of a ruined castle, while the border was wrought in a shell pattern. Ernest had doubtless seen it many times before, yet in the brief moment while he laid the trout upon it every unimportant detail was fixed in his memory, together with the outline of the ten pointed, flexible fingers, tanned with the morning’s fishing, that held the dish.

“Won’t you come in and see father?” Eileen said, without looking up. “He frets so at having to keep upstairs; only indigestion and overwork with his head, the doctor says. This was the beginning of the idea of the trip abroad, and at first, father wouldn’t go, but when he found that he could combine business with the journey, he changed his mind.”

“Not to-day, Eileen, it’s nearly noon.” He might have added that the great work wagon made for Mrs. Jenks-Smith of the Bluffs was to be sent out that afternoon, and that he must go over every bolt and screw, after his father’s habit, before it was delivered; but he refrained, as well as from saying that the Boy would be waiting for him to come home to dinner.

* * * * *

“Why didn’t Wray come in to dinner, and where is Eileen?” asked her father of her mother, as an hour later he finished the second of the delicately broiled trout with a relish that belied the symptoms of indigestion.

“He was busy and couldn’t, and she’s downstairs writing letters, to see if she can’t get one of her classmates to join our trip and make a fourth; she thinks it makes pleasanter travelling.”

“Then she couldn’t coax Wray to go. Well, I’m glad; I thought he’d too much sense to loaf about all summer, as I must. I hope they haven’t quarrelled and she’s turned him down.”

“I thought that and put the question to her, but from what she says, I guess he didn’t give her the chance. I think she’s vexed because he intends to stick to the farm and wagon shop and keep his stepbrother here, and I don’t blame her; a girl with her schooling and a father like you can look higher than a man who works with his hands, even if he has got a whole room full of books and goes down to read Shakespeare and nose out county history that had much better be forgotten with Martin Cortright. Eileen’s handsome, and she’s got a tongue in her head; there’s no knowing what may happen or who she may meet in travelling, or visiting some of her friends that are scattered all over the country.”