Maria Thompson Daviess

“ But if the five miles of Providence Road had been a delight, as Redwheels and I ran along it, the dirt lane that led to The Briers was an intoxicating joy. The wet earth, the drenched cedars, the oak buds, the spongy moss, the reddening blackberry-bushes, and the sprouting grain, all mingled in a queer creation odor that went right through the pores of my skin into my vitals and made me feel as strong as an ox, or rather, as Sam's new mule. ”

“ Most eighteen-year-old men would have resented having a motherless little brother and a long-legged girl neighbor eternally at their heels, but Sam never had; or, if he did, he gently kicked the Byrd and me out of the way, and we never knew that was what he was doing. We even loved him for the kicks. Then as the tears misted across my eyes a woman with a baby in her arms came out and called in two children who were playing under the old willow-tree over by the side gate—the willow that had belonged to Sam and me—and my eyes dried themselves with indignant astonishment. ”

“ After I had turned her into the south meadow gate, opposite the cedar-pole entrance to The Briers, I went up the hill at a lightning pace because the nearer I got to the fledgling and my garden the more anxious I was for a reunion with them both. I met the garden first, as I rounded up in front of the old hovering, red-roofed house that looked more like home to me than any building I had ever seen in my short and eventful life.
There is no love in the world that reciprocates like that of a garden. ”

“ I caught a glimpse of that mule through a vista before I came out of the lane, plodding along before Sam and the plow with a great splendid lurch of a gait that threw the black dirt as high as Sam's knees as he plunged along at the plow-handles. I stopped the car at the cedar-pole gate of Eden and stood up and shouted at the top of my lungs, but Sam plowed on heroically, with never a glance in my direction, and I just stood and looked at him and the mule. Seeing a man plow cuts right down to the bottom of a woman's nature, because I suppose it looks so—so fundamental. ”

“ It was almost like a maxixe, but I finally got headed toward Providence Road, down which, five miles away, Hayesboro is firmly planted in a beautiful, dreamy, vine-covered rustication.
"Oh, I wonder if it could be a devil that is possessing Sam?" I asked myself, stemming with my tongue a large tear that was taking a meandering course down my cheek because I was afraid to take either hand off the steering-gear for fear I would run into a slow, old farm horse, with a bronzed overalled driver and wagon piled high with all sorts of uninteresting crates and bales and unspeakable pigs and chickens. ”

“ Some people have a way of pruning a friend's spirit in a manner that makes it bush out more hardily than ever. That is the way Sam does me, and I intend to worship him delightfully if I want to and he continues to deserve it. It is so much better for a woman to worship a man than love him; it puts a strong barrier between them to keep him from hurting her, which loving him doesn't seem to, at least not with Edith and Tolly; and I am always worried over Peter; but for long intervals I can forget Sam comfortably and find him right there when I need him. ”

“ Then for a second Sam's kind eyes sank down deep into mine and smoldered there. I know he was praying for Peter as the rest cheered. Then he bent and called out:
"Next. Up—up, boys! Steady!"
My eyes misted for a second, and Peter's pale face rose before them in the mist. Peter is a man of dreams, for whom was being harnessed all this sinew and brawn of reality. And men must plow and plant and reap and hew and lift for their vision-bringers, and women must do it also. It is only right. I am willing. ”

“ It was full time—maybe past time—for thinning out my sugar-beets and resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched, ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloof expression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratch across the top of its nose. The scratch was inflicted, he told me, when he held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased by Sam for lice under her wings. ”

“ Getting back into some people's atmosphere is like recovering the use of a lung a person had temporarily lost; breathing improves. I've always breathed easily in Sam's friendship. That was why I could dance with him as I did even up to the last bar of the music. Then he swung me out through one of the long windows on to the porch under the dusky spring starlight.
"I hate to tell you, Betty, though I have walked a five-mile blister on my left heel in these dancing-shoes just to break the news to you," Sam answered my repeated demand to be told his "worse." ”

“ To help him Peter had written in a wonderful girl with a great deal of brains for one so young. Just the sort of woman that men like Sam and the hero deserve to have. She was so lovely that I caught my breath and—and suffered. But what made everybody in that theater laugh themselves happy was the essence of Hayesboro that Peter had distilled and poured into his characters. Everybody was so mixed up with everybody else that nobody could feel sensitive or fail to enjoy every character. ”

“ In Indian file we were led by Sam around the hill, up a steep path that was bordered by coral-strung buck-bushes and rasping blackberry brush, and to his little farm-house perched on a plateau almost up to the top of the hill. It was long and low, with a wide red roof that seemed to hover in the whitewashed walls and green shutters; while white smoke from an old gray-rock, mud-daubed chimney melted away among the tree-tops into the lavender of the coming day. ”

“ And as I came nearer the hedge I saw that a wagon and mule were drawn up in the shadow behind a man. "It's fine for you to come in, after all, Sam. Peter will be so happy."
"Overalls are not invited," answered Sam, as he gave my hair the usual rough with his big horny hand while I reached up and grasped his sleeve, too glad to see him to remonstrate. "I came in for Pete's things, and I brought a load of new peas and ten dozen eggs at the same time, so I couldn't dress for the dance, or have time to dance if I did. Six seventy-five a barrel, and five barrels; how's that for wealth, Bettykin?" ”

“ I didn't think then that I liked it and I also felt that I wished I had stayed by Sam at that wobbling period of his career; but, on the other hand, it was plainly my duty to go to Europe with Mabel and Peter Vandyne and Miss Greenough. The inclination to do two things at once is a sword that slices you in two, as the man in the Bible wanted to do to the baby to make enough of him for the two mothers; and that is the way I felt about Peter and Sam as I whirled along the road. I am afraid Sam is going to be the hardest to manage. He is harder than Peter by nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That I had made up my mind to marry Peter just as soon as he wanted me to, which I knew would not be until after the play was finished down in Sam's wilderness. I had two reasons for my intention. Nobody in the world ever loved and depended on me as Peter has always done since he read me the winning poem that he sent in for his Junior Prize. Peter needs me, and nobody else in the world does. What could love be but giving and cherishing the beloved? ”

“ Oh, Sam, Peter isn't ill, is he?" And I reached out and clutched Sam's arm frantically. It takes alarm to test the depths of one's affection for a friend. I found mine for Peter deeper than I knew. If anything had happened, Sam would know it first. "Don't be cruel to me, Sam." And I shook his arm.
"Forgive me, Betty," said Sam, quickly. "Pete's all right and he'll be here to demonstrate it to you just as soon as I can get a stall built for him out at The Briers." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Slated myself for Belgian widowhood, perhaps, as a kinder fate, or stayed right there in New York to help Peter on "The Emergence." I wonder if Peter ever saw a dear, big-eyed, trustful old Jersey cow have medicine poured down her throat. It is called "drenching." I wish he could see it before he finishes that play. The sight produces a peculiar kind of emotion that might be worth recording in an all-comprehensive drama of American life. In fact, I know that what I felt at the end was worth recording in any kind of literature, by any kind of a poet—if we were equal to it. ”

“ Then with a cry of agonized joy she fell at Sam's feet, and I drew down on my knees beside her, while the other women crowded around, kneeling, too, as their leader bowed her tear-drenched eyes in Sam's big, warm hands. One woman thrust a tiny baby into my arms as she kissed my sleeve and leaned forward to clasp Sam's knees, while the old man who had been praying all the time spread out his hands in a joyful benediction. The men's sullen faces lightened, and they bent to take up their pitiful old bundles and baskets. ”

“ These treasures happened to be young rabbits, and Sam said he would charge daddy with the damages.
"Good old Sam," said Peter, as we stood at the gate by the old lilac, who was beginning to beplume himself more richly than any of his compatriots in Hayesboro—in honor of Peter, I felt sure—and watched Sam and the Byrd jog away in the wagon down Providence Road. "He'll make his mark on his generation yet, Betty. This is just a temporary eclipse of the effulgence of a young planet that will shine with the warm light of humanity when the time comes. There is no man like him. ”

“ I knew that now was the time for me to marshal up my defense and demand to be put on the same footing in life with those peasant women sleeping below us beside the covered camp-fires.
"What right has any man to say that a woman shall not plow and sow and reap and dig if she wants to, and especially if it is so much in her blood that she can't keep away from it?" I was just getting ready to demand. Then suddenly Sam sobbed, choked, sobbed again, and reached out his arms to fold me in against the sobs so closely that I could feel them rising out of his very heart. ”

“ When Peter had gone out and buried himself in the shack on the hillside of The Briers, that looked out over the Harpeth Valley, he had unconsciously buried that frozen hero in "The Emergence" and had gone to work and resurrected him in a kind of Samuel Foster Crittenden. Instead of being a complicated, heroic, erratic genius he was just a big, simple, strong young man who was doing his part in the corner of the world's vineyard where he had been sent to work. ”

“ The Briers is like a great, big, beautiful dog that lies there begging you to come and plow it and scratch it and hoe it and rake it, while it licks out green curly vegetable tongues for more. At first Sam seemed slightly overwhelmed by all the offers of help that came with me in Redwheels, dressed in business-like corduroys that had been made like mine, in a hurry, and with hoes and seed-baskets, or that Pink or Tolly drove out in their cars ”