ON Monday evening at five o’clock the Whitewater herd was ready for milking.
Odell, Ed Lister, and the foreman, Gene Lyford, scrubbed their hands and faces and put on clean white canvas clothes. Clyde Storm, helper, went along the lime-freshened concrete alleys, shaking out bran and tossing in clover-hay. Everywhere in the steel stanchions beautiful Guernsey heads were turned to watch his progress. In the bull-pen the herd-bull pried and butted at the bars. The barn vibrated with his contented lowing.
Calves in their pens came crowding to the bars like herded deer, or went bucketing about, excited to playful combat by the social gathering after an all-day separation.
In the stalls sleek flanks were being wiped down until they glistened like the coats of thoroughbred horses; udders were washed with tepid water; the whole place smelled fresh and clean as a hayfield.
No mechanical apparatus was employed at Whitewater Farms.
Odell, finished with the first cow, carried the foaming pail to the steelyards, weighed it, noted the result on the bulletin with a pencil that dangled there, and stepped aside to make room for Ed Lister, who came up with a brimming pail.
There was little conversation at milking hour, scarcely a word spoken except in admonition or reassurance to some restless cow—no sounds in the barn save the herd-bull’s deep rumble of well-being, a gusty twitter of swallows from the eaves, the mellow noises of feeding cattle, clank and creak of stanchion, gush and splash of water as some thirsty cow buried her pink nose in the patent fonts.
The still air grew fragrant with the scent of milk and clover-hay.
One or two grey cats came in, hopefully, and sat on the ladder-stairs, purring, observant, receptive.
The cows on test were in the western extension, all becoming a trifle restless now that their hour was again approaching. And presently two of Odell’s sons, Si and Willis, came in, scrubbed and clothed in white, prepared to continue the exhaustive record already well initiated.
“Eris home yet?” asked Odell over his shoulder.
Si shook his head and picked up a pail.
“Well, where’n the dang-dinged town is she?” growled Odell. “If she’s staying som’mers to supper, why can’t she send word?”
Willis said: “Buddy went down street to look for her. Mommy sent him.”
The boys passed on into the extension where the comely cattle on test stood impatient.
Odell remarked to Lister: “Ever since Eris drove over to Summit to see them pitcher people makin’ movies she’s acted sulky and contrary like. Now look at her stayin’ away all day—’n’ out to supper, too, som’mers.”
“She acts like she’s sot on sunthin’,” suggested Lister, adjusting his milking stool and clasping the pail between his knees.
“She’s sot on j’ining some danged moving pitcher comp’ny,” grunted Odell. “That’s what’s in her head all the time these days.”
Lister’s pail hummed with alternate streams of milk drumming on the tin. For a while he milked in silence save for a low-voiced remonstrance to the young and temperamental Guernsey whose near hind leg threatened trouble.
As he rose with the brimming pail he said: “I guess Eris is a good girl. I guess she wouldn’t go so far as to do nothin’ rash, Elmer.”
“I dunno. You couldn’t never tell what Fanny had in her head. Fanny allus had her secret thoughts. I never knowed what she was figurin’ out. Eris acts that way; she does what she’s told but she thinks as she’s a mind to. Too much brain ain’t healthy for no woman.”
Lister weighed his pail, scratched down the record opposite the cow’s name, turned and looked back at Odell.
“Women oughta think the way their men-folks tell ’em,” he said. “That’s my idee. But the way they vote and carry on these days is a-sp’ilin’ on ’em, accordin’ to my way of figurin’.”
Odell said nothing. As he stood weighing his pail of milk, Buddy came into the barn, eating a stick of shop candy.
“Say, pa,” he called out, “mommy wants you up to the house!”
“When? Now?” demanded his father in dull surprise.
“I guess so. She said you was to come right up.”
Odell placed the empty milk pail on the floor: “Eris home yet?”
“I dunno. I guess not. Will you let me milk Snow-bird, pa?”
“No. Look at your hands! You go up and shake down some hay.... Where’s your ma?”
“She’s up in Eris’ room. She says for you to come. Can’t I wash my hands and——”
“No. G’wan up to the loft. And don’t step on the pitchfork, neither.”
He turned uncertainly toward Lister and found his father-in-law looking at him.
“Kinda queer,” he muttered, “Mazie sending for me when she knows I’m milking....”
Lister made no comment. Odell went out heavily, crossed the farm yard in the pleasant sunset glow, walked on toward the house with lagging stride.
As he set foot on the porch he became conscious of his irritation, felt the heat of it in his cheeks—the same old familiar resentment which had smouldered through the dingy, discordant years of his first marriage.
Here it was again, creeping through him after all these placid years with Mazie—the same sullen apprehension, dull unease verging on anger, invading his peace of mind, stirred this time by Fanny’s child—Eris, daughter of Discord.
“Dang Fanny’s breed,” he muttered, entering the house, “—we allus was enemies deep down, ... deep down in the flesh....”
All at once he understood his real mind. Eris had always been Fanny’s child. Never his. He remembered what Fanny had said to him at the approach of death—how, in that last desperate moment the battered mask of years had slipped from her bony visage and he had gazed into the stark face of immemorial antipathy, ... the measureless resentment of a sex.
Fanny was dead. May God find out what she wants and give it to her. But Fanny’s race persisted. She lived again in Eris. He was face to face with it again.... After twenty years of peace!...
He went to the foot of the stairs and called to his wife. Her voice answered from the floor above. He plodded on upstairs.
Mazie was standing in Eris’ room, a pile of clothing on the bed, a suitcase and a small, flat trunk open on the floor.
She turned to Odell, her handsome features flushed, and the sparkle of tears in her slanting, black eyes.
“What’s the trouble now?” he demanded, already divining it.
“She’s gone, Elmer. She called me up on the telephone from Albany to tell me. The Crystal Fillum Company offers her a contract. She wants her clothes and her money.”
A heavy colour surged through the man’s face.
“That’s the danged secret blood in her,” he said. “I knowed it. There’s allus sunthin’ hatchin’ deep down in women of her blood.... She’s allus had it in her mind to quit us.... She never was one of us.... All right, let her go. I’m done with her.”
Mazie began unsteadily: “So many children of—of our day seem to feel like our Eris——”
“Mine don’t! My boys ain’t got nothin’ secret into them! They ain’t crazy in the head ’n’ they ain’t full o’ fool notions.”
Mazie remained silent. Her sons were fuller of “notions” than their father knew. It had required all the magnetism of her affection and authority to keep them headed toward a future on Whitewater Farms. For the nearest town was already calling them; they sniffed the soft-coal smoke from afar and were restless for the iron dissonance and human bustle of paved and narrow ways.
Theirs was the gregarious excitement instinct in human animals. Beyond the dingy monochrome of life they caught a glimmer of distant brightness. The vague summons of unknown but suspected pleasures stirred them as they travelled the sodden furrow.
Youth’s physical instinct is to gather at the water-hole of this vast veldt we call the world, and wallow in the inviting mire of a thousand hoofs, and feel and hear and see the perpetual milling of the human herds that gather there.
Only in quality did Eris differ from her brothers. It was her mind—and the untasted pleasures of the mind—that drove her to the common fount.
There is a picture by Fragonard called “The Fountain of Love.” And, as eagerly as the blond and glowing girl speeds to the brimming basin where mischievous little winged Loves pour out for her the magic waters, so impetuously had Eris sped toward the fount of knowledge, hot, parched with desire to set her lips to immortal springs.
Odell’s heavy eyes, brooding anger, followed Mazie’s movements as she smoothed out the clothing and laid each garment in the trunk.
“You don’t have to do that,” he growled. “Let her come and get ’em if she wants ’em.”
“But she needs——”
“Dang it, let ’em lay. Like’s not she’ll sicken o’ them pitcher people before the week’s out. She’ll get her belly full o’ notions. Let her caper till she runs into barbed wire. That’ll sting some sense into her hide.”
“She only took her little leather bag, Elmer——”
“She’ll sicken sooner. I ain’t worryin’ none. She ain’t a loose girl; she’s just a fool heifer that goes bucketin’ over a snake-fence where it’s half down. Let her kick up and skylark. You bet she’ll hear the farm bell when it comes supper time——”
He turned away exasperated, but Mazie took him by the sleeve of his milking jacket:
“She’s got to have money, Elmer——”
“No, she hain’t! She’ll sicken the quicker——”
“Elmer, it’s her money.”
“’Tain’t. It’s mine.”
“It’s her heifer-money——”
“She shan’t have it! Not till she’s twenty-one. And that’s that!”
Mazie looked at her husband in a distressed way, her black eyes full of tears:
“Elmer, you can’t use a girl like a boy. A girl’s a tender thing. And I was afraid of this—something like this.... Because Eris is a mite different. She likes to read and study. She likes to figure out what she reads about. She likes music and statues and art-things like the hand-painted pictures we saw in Utica. There’s no harm in art, I guess.... And you know how she always did love to dress up for church plays—and how nicely she sang and danced and acted in school——”
“Dang it all!” shouted Odell, beating one tanned fist within the other palm, “let her come home and cut her capers! She can do them things when there’s a entertainment down to the church, can’t she?
“That’s enough for any girl, ain’t it? And she can go to Utica and look at them hand-painted pitchers in the store windows. And she can dance to socials and showers like sensible girls and she can sing her head off Sundays in church when she’s a mind to!
“All she’s gotta do is come home and git the best of everything. But as long as she acts crazy and stays away, I’m done with her. And that’s that!”