Chapter 3

"My father's. We try to do a little livening up for the old people every July and August. They got acquainted there; they took to it like ducks to water. That's where Bond got his idea for his cow masterpiece,--he may have spoken to you about it."

"Humph!" said Abner. Why heed such insignificant poachings as these on his own preserves?

"We're going out home week after next for the holidays," continued Giles. "Better go with us."

"So you're a farmer's boy?" pondered Abner. He looked again at the camellias, then at Giles's loose Parisian tie, and lastly at his finger-nails,--all too exquisite by half.

"Certainly. Brought up on burdock and smart-weed. That's why I'm so fond of this,"--with a wave toward one of his panels.

"Well, what do you say? Will you go? We should like first-rate to have you."

Abner considered. The invitation was as hearty and informal as he could have wished, and it would take him within thirty miles of Flatfield itself.

"Is your sister going along?"

"Surely. She will run the whole thing."

"Well," said Abner slowly, "I don't know but that I might find it interesting." This, Giles understood, was his rustic manner of accepting.

IX

Abner spent Christmas at the Giles farm, as Stephen had understood him to promise; and Medora, as her brother had engaged, "went along" too, and "ran the whole thing" from start to finish. Abner, with a secret interest compounded half of attraction, half of repulsion, promised himself a careful study of this "new type"--a type so bizarre, so artificial, and in all probability so thoroughly reprehensible.

Medora made up the rest of the party to suit herself. She had heard of Adrian Bond's struggles toward the indigenous, the simplified, and she was willing enough to give him a chance to see the cows in their winter quarters. Clytie Summers had begged very prettily for her glimpse too of the country at this time of year. "It's rather soon, I know, for that spring barn-yard; but I should so enjoy the ennui of some village Main Street in the early winter."

"Come along, then," said Medora. "We'll do part of our Christmas shopping there."

Giles accepted these two new recruits gladly. "Good thing for both of them," he declared to Joyce. "They'll make more progress on our farm in a week than they could in six months of studio teas."

This remark admitted of but one interpretation.

"Why!" said Abner; "do you want her to marry _him_?"--him, a fellow so slight, frivolous, invertebrate!

"Oh, he's a very decent little chap," returned Giles. "He'll be kind to her--he'll see she's taken good care of."

"But do you want him to marry _her_?"--her, so bold, so improper, so prone to seek entertainment in the woes of others!

"Oh, well, she's a very fair little chick," replied Giles patiently. "She'll get past her notions pretty soon and be just as good a wife as anybody could ask."

One of those quiescent, featureless Decembers was on the land--a November prolonged. The brown country-side, swept and garnished, was still awaiting the touch of winter's hand. The air was crisp yet passive, and abundant sunshine flooded alike the heights and hollows of the rolling uplands that spread through various shades of subdued umber and meditative blue toward the confines of a wavering, indeterminate horizon. The Giles homestead stood high on a bluff; and above the last of the islands that cluttered the river beneath it the spires of the village appeared, a mile or two down-stream.

"Now for the barn-yard!" cried Clytie, after the first roundabout view from the front of the bluff. "Adrian mustn't lose any time with his cows."

Giles led the way to a trim inclosure.

"Why, it's as dry as a bone!" she declared.

"Would you want us water-logged the whole year through?" asked Abner pungently.

"And as for ennui," she pursued, "I'm sure it isn't going to be found here--no more in winter than in summer. However"--with a wave of the hand toward the spires--"there is always the town."

No, the parents of Giles had taken strong measures to keep boredom at bay. They had their books and magazines; they had a pair of good trotters and a capacious carryall, with other like aids to locomotion in reserve; they had a telephone; they had a pianola, with a change of rolls once a month; they had neighbours of their own sort and were indomitable in keeping up neighbourly relations.

"I think you'll be able to stand it for a week," said Medora serenely.

"We've done it once before," said Bond.

"Don't be anxious about _us_!" added Clytie.

Medora Giles took Abner in her own special care. She knew pretty nearly what he thought of her, and she was inclined to amuse herself--though at the same time making no considerable concession--by placing herself before him in a more favourable light. In her dress, her manner, her bearing there was a certain half-alien delicacy, finesse, aloofness. She would not lay this altogether aside, even at home, even in the informal country; but she would provide a homely medium, suited to Abner's rustic vision, through which her exotic airs and graces might be more tolerantly perceived.

The illness of one of the servants came just here to assist her. She descended upon the kitchen, taking full charge and carrying Abner with her. She initiated him at the chopping-block, she conferred the second degree at the pump-handle, and by the time he was beating up eggs in a big yellow bowl beside the kitchen stove his eyes had come to be focused on her in quite a different fashion. Surely no one could be more deft, light-handed, practical. Was this the same young woman who had sat in the midst of that absurd outfit and had juggled rather affectedly and self-consciously with tea-urn and sugar-tongs and had palavered in empty nothings with a troop of overdressed and overmannered feather-heads? She was still graceful, still fluent, still endowed with that baffling little air of distinction; but she knew where things were--down to the last strainer or nutmeg-grater--and she knew how to use them. She was completely at home. And so--by this time--was he.

To deepen the impression, Medora asked Abner to help her lay the table. There were no studio gimcracks, mercifully, to put into place; but the tableware was as far removed, on the other hand, from the ugly, heavy, time-scarred things at Flatfield and from the careless crudities of his own boarding-house. Abner had had a tolerance, even a liking, for his landlady's indifference toward finicky table-furnishings; but now there came a sudden vision of her dining-room, and the spots on the table-cloth, the nicks in the crockery, the shabbiness of the lambrequin drooping from the mantel-piece, and the slovenliness of the sole handmaiden had never been so vivid.

"Shall I be able to go back there?" he asked himself.

Finally, to seal the matter completely, Medora led Abner to the place of honour and bade him eat the meal she had prepared. Abner ate and was hers. Even a good boarding-house, he now felt, was a mistake; the best, but a makeshift.

During the day the telephone had made common property of the news of Abner's arrival, and the next morning, an hour or so after breakfast, the front yard resounded with the loud cry of, "What ho, neighbours!" and Leverett Whyland was revealed in a trig cart drawn by a handsome cob.

"Why, what's that man doing here?" Abner asked Giles, as they stood by the living-room window.

"He has a place three or four miles down the river," replied Giles, casting about for his hat. Clytie, meanwhile, had drubbed a glad welcome upon the adjoining window and then rushed out bareheaded to give greeting.

"He always comes out here with his family for Christmas," said Stephen.

"His family? Is he married? Has he a wife and children?"

"Yes."

"Yet he goes slam-banging around with a lot of young girls into all sorts of doubtful places?"

"Oh, I've heard something about that," said Giles. "Well, you wouldn't have them in charge of a bachelor, would you?"

"What's he farming for?" asked Abner, left behind with Medora.

"Sentiment," she replied. "He was born down there, and has never wanted to let the old place go. Do you think any the worse of him for that?"

Whyland had come to fetch the men and to show them his model farm. They spent the forenoon in going over this expensive place. Bond gave vent to all the "oh's" and "ah's" that indicate the perfect visitor. Abner took their host's various amateurish doings in glum silence. It was all very well to indulge in these costly contraptions as a pastime, but if the man had to get his actual living from the soil where would he be? Almost anybody could stand on two legs. How many on one?

"Do you make it pay?" Abner asked bluntly.

"Pay? I'm a by-word all over the county. Half the town lives on my lack of 'gumption.'"

"H'm," said Abner darkly. He was as far as ever from hitting it off with this smiling, dapper product of artificial city conditions.

"I came across some of your Readjusters the other day," observed Whyland, at the door of his hen-house--a prodigal place with a dozen wired-in "runs" for a dozen different varieties of poultry: "Leghorns, Plymouth Rocks, Jerseys, Angoras, Hambletonians and what not," as Bond irresponsibly remarked. "They say they haven't been seeing much of you lately."

Abner frowned. Whyland, he felt, was trying to put him at a disadvantage. But, in truth, it could not be denied that he had practically left one circle for another,--was showing himself much more disposed to favour the skylights of the studios than the footlights of the rostrum.

"I am still for the cause," he said. "But it can be helped from one side as well as from another. My next book----"

"I didn't dispute your idea; only its application. I should be glad if you _could_ make it go. Anything would be better than the present horrible mess. We have 'equality,' and to spare, in the Declaration and the Constitution, but whether or not we shall ever get it in our taxing----"

"I am glad to hear you speaking a word for the country people----" began Abner.

"The country people?" interrupted Whyland quickly, with a stare. Never more than when among his cattle and poultry was he moved to draw contrasts between the security of his possessions in the country and the insecurity of his possessions in town. "What I am thinking of is the city tax-payer. Urban democracy, working on a large scale, has declared itself finally, and what we have is the organization of the careless, the ignorant, the envious, brought about by the criminal and the semi-criminal, for the spoliation of the well-to-do."

Abner began to be ruffled by these cross-references to the city--they were out of place in the uncontaminated country. "I believe in the people," he declared, with his thoughts on the rustic portion of the population.

"So do I--within a certain range, and up to a certain point. But I do not believe in the populace," declared Whyland, with his thoughts on the urban portion.

"All the difference between potatoes and potato-parings," said Bond, catching at a passing feather.

"Soon it will be simply dog eat dog," said Whyland. "No course will be left, even for the best-disposed of us, but to fight the devil with fire. From the assessor and all his works----"

"Good Lord deliver us," intoned Bond, who fully shared Whyland's ideas.

Abner frowned. His religious sensibilities were affronted by this response.

"And from all his followers," added Whyland. "They threaten me in my own office--it comes to that. Well, what shall a man do? Shall he fight or shall he submit? Shall I go into court or shall I compromise with them?"

"It comes to one thing in the end," said Bond, "if you value your peace of mind. But even then you can put the best face on it."

Whyland sighed. "You mean that there is some choice between my bribing them and their blackmailing me? Well, I expect I may slip down several pegs this coming year--morally."

Abner drew away. He was absolutely without any intimacy with the intricacies of civic finances. He merely saw a man--his host--who seemed cynically to be avowing his own corruption and shame,--or at least his willingness to lean in that direction.

"Reform," he announced grandly, "will come only from the disinterested efforts of those who bring to the task pure motives and unimpeachable practices."

Whyland sighed again. He thought of his realty interests in town, as they lay exposed to spoliation, to confiscation. "I am afraid I shall not be a reformer," he said, in discouragement.

Abner shook a condemnatory head in full corroboration. And Whyland, who may have been looking for a prop to wavering principles, shook his own head too.

X

"Don't work so hard at it," said Medora, laying her violin on top of the pianola. "You shake the house. A minute more and you'll have that lamp toppling over. And you'll tire yourself out."

Abner wiped his damp brow and felt of his wilted collar. He never put less than his whole self into anything he attempted. "Tire myself? I'm strong enough, I guess."

"Well, use your strength to better advantage. Let me show you."

Medora slipped into his place, reset the roll, pulled a stop or two, and trod out a dozen ringing measures with no particular effort. "Like that."

"Very well," said Abner, resuming his seat docilely. The rest wondered; he seldom welcomed suggestions or accepted correction.

"Now let's try it once more," said Medora.

An evening devoted to literature was ending with a bit of music. Abner and Bond had both read unpublished manuscripts with the fierce joy that authors feel on such occasions, and the others had listened with patience if not with pleasure. Abner gave two or three of the newest chapters of _Regeneration_, and Bond read a few pages to show what progress an alien romanticist was making in homely fields nearer at hand. He had hoped for Abner's encouragement and approval in this new venture of his, but he got neither.

"The way to write about cows in a pasture," commented Abner, "is just to write about them--in a simple, straightforward style without any slant toward history or mythology, and without any cross-references to remote scenes of foreign travel. For instance, you speak of a Ranz----"

"Ranz des Vaches," said Medora: "a sort of thing the Alpine what's-his-name sings."

"It's for atmosphere," said Bond, on the defensive.

"Let the pasture furnish its own atmosphere. And you had something about a certain breed of cattle near Rome--Rome, was it?"

"Roman Campagna. Travel reminiscences."

"Travel is a mistake," declared Abner.

"So it is," broke in Clytie. "Squat on your own door-step, as Emerson says."

"Does he?--I think not," interposed Giles the elder. "What he does say is----"

"We all know," interrupted Stephen, "and ignore the counsel."

Abner did not know, but he would not stoop to ask. "And there was a quotation from one of those old authors,--Theocritus?"

"Theocritus, yes. Historical perspective."

"Leave the past alone. Live in the present. The past,--bury it, forget it."

"So hard. Heir of the ages, you know. Good deal harder to forget than never to have learned at all. _That's_ easy," jibed Bond, with a touch of temper.

"Oh, now!" cried Medora, fearful that another temper might respond.

"If you must bring in those old Greeks," Abner proceeded, "take their method and let the rest drop. All they knew, as I understand it, they learned from men and things close round them and from the nature in whose midst they lived. They didn't quote; they didn't range the world; they didn't go for sanction outside of themselves and their own environment."

"The Greeks didn't know so much," interjected Clytie.

"Oh, didn't they, though!" cried Adrian, sending a glance of thanks to counteract his contradiction. "They _finished_ things. The temple wasn't complete till they had swept all the marble chips off the back stoop, and had kind of curry-combed down the front yard, and had----"

"'Sh,'sh!" said Medora. Abner looked about, more puzzled than offended. "Let's have some music, before our breasts get too savage," said the girl, starting up.

Bond followed with the rest. "I'll stick to my regular field," he said to Clytie, as he thrust his crumpled-up manuscript into his pocket. "Griffins, gorgons, hydras, chimeras dire,--but no more cows. I was never meant for a veritist."

"Samson is pulling down the temple," observed Clytie. "Crash goes the first pillar. Who will be next?"

"He'll be caught in the wreck," said Bond, in a shattered voice. "Just watch and see."

XI

Medora, long before Abner had learned to work the pedals of the pianola and to wrench any expression from its stops, had banished most of her "rolls" from sight. "Siegfried's Funeral March" was unintelligible to him; the tawdry, meretricious Italian overtures filled him with disgust. In the end the two confined themselves to patriotic airs and old-time domestic ditties. Medora accompanied on her second-best violin (which was kept at the farm) and Abner enjoyed a heart-warming sense of doing his full share in "Tenting Tonight" or "Lily Dale." The girl's parents had advanced far beyond this stage, but willingly relapsed into it now and then for Auld Lang Syne.

The final roll wound up with a quick snap.

"Well, you haven't told me what you thought of that last chapter," said Abner, putting the roll back in its box. He made no demand on Medora's interest to the exclusion of that of the others, however. His general glance around invited comment from any quarter. He had merely looked at her first.

"M--no," said Medora.

The girl, a few weeks before, had looked over _The Rod of the Oppressor_. _The Rod's_ force had made itself felt most largely on economics; but in its blossoming it had put forth a few secondary sprigs, and one of these curled over in the direction of domestic life, of marital relation. Abner's chivalry--a chivalry totally guiltless of gallantry--had gone out to the suffering wife doomed to a lifelong yoking with a cruel, coarse-natured husband: must such a yoking _be_ lifelong? he asked earnestly. Was it not right and just and reasonable that she should fly (with or without companion)--nor be too particular over the formalities of her departure? Medora had smiled and shaken her head; but now the question somehow seemed less remote than before. She paused over this bird-like irresponsibility and rather wondered that it should have the power to detain her.

The new chapters of _Regeneration_ had taken up the same matter and had displayed it in a somewhat different light. Abner had got hold of the idea of limited partnership and had sought to apply it, in roundabout fashion, to the matrimonial relation. His treatment, far from suggesting an academic aloofness, was as concrete as characterization and conversation could make it; no one would have supposed, at first glance, that what chiefly moved him was a chaste abstract Platonic regard for the whole gentler sex. In short, people--such seemed to be his thesis--might very advantageously separate, and most informally too, as soon as they discovered they were incompatible.

"M--no," said Medora.

"Wouldn't that be rather upsetting?" asked her mother. Mrs. Giles was an easy-going old soul, from whom art, as personified by her own children, got slight consideration, and to whom literature, as embodied in a stranger, was little less than a joke. "Wouldn't it result in a good deal of a mix-up? What would have happened to you youngsters if your father and I had all at once taken it into our heads to----"

"Mother!" said Medora.

"Oh, well," began Mrs. Giles, with the idea of making a gradual descent after her sudden aerial flight. "But, then," she resumed, "you must see that----"

"Mother!" said Medora again. Abner, eager to defend his thesis, looked round in surprise.

"I agree with Mrs. Giles completely," spoke up Clytie, with much promptitude. "When I get married I want to get married for good. Most of the people I know are married in that way, and I believe it's the most satisfactory way in the long run----"

"But----" began Abner polemically.

Clytie shook her head. "No, it won't do. You've offered us the ballot, and we don't want it. And you've offered us--this, and we don't want that either. Consider it declined."

Abner stared at Clytie's brazen little face and disliked her more than ever.

"But don't _you_ think----" began Abner, turning to Bond.

Bond shook his head slowly and made no comment.

Abner looked round at Medora. She was ranging the music-roll boxes in an orderly row. Nobody could have been more intent upon her work.

"Well, it stands, all the same," said Abner defiantly.

XII

The clear, placid weather had been waiting several days for Sunday to come and possess it, and now Sunday was here. The young people stood bareheaded on the porch and looked down toward the village.

"Do I hear the church bells?" asked Abner. He was a punctilious observer of Sabbath ordinances and always reached a state of subdued inner bustle shortly after the finish of the Sunday breakfast.

"We sometimes make them out," replied Stephen Giles, "when the wind happens to blow right."

"We are all going down this morning, I suppose?" observed Abner, confidently taking the initiative.

"I expect so," replied Giles.

"Count me out," said Clytie.

"You do not go to church?" asked Abner.

"Not often."

"You have no religion?"

"Yes, I have," replied Clytie, with much pomp: "the religion of humanity."

"You run and get your things on," said Medora. "You'll find as much humanity at the First Church as you will anywhere else."

The party set out in two vehicles. Old Mr. Giles drove one and the "hired man" the other. Clytie, despite her best endeavours to go in company with Bond, found herself associated with Abner, and a spirit of unchristian perversity took complete possession of her.

She cast her eye about, viewing the prosperous country-side, the well-kept farms, the modest comfort symbolized in her host's equipage itself.

"You're a great sufferer, Mr. Giles," she said suddenly; "aren't you?"

The old gentleman let the lines fall slackly on the fat backs of his sleek horses. "How? What's that?"

"I say you're a great sufferer. You're a downtrodden slave."

"Why, am I? How do you make that out?"

"Well, if you don't know without having it explained to you! The world is against you--it's making a doormat of you."

Medora looked askant. What was the child up to now?

"Poor father," she said. "If he hasn't found it out yet, don't tell him."

"No wonder he hasn't found it out," returned Clytie, making a sudden veer. "Is he suffering for lack of fresh air and pure water? And does he have to pay an extra price for sunlight? And must he herd in a filthy slum full of awful plumbing and crowded by more awful neighbours? Does he have to put up with municipal neglect and corruption, and worry along on make-believe milk and doctored bread and adulterated medicines, and endure long hours in unsanitary places under a tyrannical foreman and in constant dread of fines----?"

Abner was beginning to shift uneasily upon his seat. "Clytie, please!" said Medora, laying her hand upon the other's.

"Well, they're realities!" declared Clytie stoutly.

"They're not _my_ realities," growled Abner, without turning round.

"Can we pick and choose our realities?" asked Clytie sharply. "Well, if you are at liberty to pick yours, I am at liberty to pick mine. Yes, sir, I'll go to that settlement right after New-Year's, and I'll have a class in basket-making and hammock-weaving before I'm a month older."

"It will take more than basket-making to set the world right," said Abner.

"Basket-making is enough to teach boys the use of their hands and to keep them off the street at night," sputtered Clytie.

"Clytie, please!" said Medora once more.