SPRING had begun more than a month early. The young year promised agricultural miracles. All omens were favourable. Ed Lister predicted it would be a “hog-killin’.”
June’s magic turned Whitewater to a paradise. Crystal mornings gradually warming until sundown; gentle showers at night to freshen herbage and start a million planted seeds; blossoms, bees, buds, blue skies—all exquisitely balanced designs in June’s enchanted tapestry—and nothing so far to mar the fabric—no late and malignant frost, no early drouth, broken violently by thunderbolt and deluge; no hail; no heavy winds to dry and sear; nothing untoward in the herd,—no milk-fever, no abortion, no terrifying emergency at night.
The only things to irritate Odell were the letters from Eris. They aroused in him the dumb, familiar anger of Fanny’s time.
But after the first week in July there were no longer any letters from Eris. The girl had written two or three times during June, striving to explain herself, to make him understand her need of doing as she was doing, the necessity that some of her own money be sent her.
Her last letter arrived about the beginning of that dreadful era of unprecedented heat and drouth which ushered in July and which caused that summer to be long remembered in the Old World as well as in the New.
Odell’s refusal to send her a single penny, and his repeated summons for her return had finally silenced Eris. No more letters came. Odell’s attitude silenced Mazie, too, whose primitive sense of duty was to her man first of all.
Sometimes she ventured to hope that Eris might, somehow, be successful. Oftener a comforting belief reassured her that the girl would soon return to material comforts and female duties, which were all Mazie comprehended of earthly happiness.
Odell’s refusal to send Eris her money and her clothes worried Mazie when she had time to think. But what could she do? Man ruled Mazie’s universe. It was proper that he should. All her life she had had to submit to him,—she had to cook for him, wash, sew, mend, care for his habitation, bear his children, fed them, wean them, and, in the endless sequence again, cook, wash, iron, sew, mend for these men-children which she had borne her man. And it was proper. It was the way of the world. Of heaven, too, perhaps. God himself was masculine.... She sometimes wondered whether there really was any rest there for female angels....
Of what other women desired and did,—of aspiration, spiritual and intellectual discontent, Mazie knew nothing. For her nothing desirable existed beyond the barbed wire. And yet, without at all understanding Eris, always she had felt an odd sympathy for the girl’s irregularities—had recognized that Fanny’s child was different from herself, from her offspring—from other women’s children. But the underlying motive that had sent Eris forth was quite beyond Mazie’s ken. The resurrection of her sex came too early for her who had not yet died.
The farm year had begun prosperously. Until July there had been no cloud on the horizon. In imagination Odell gazed across acres and acres of golden harvest; saw a beneficent and paternal Government coming to the relief of all farmers; saw every silo packed, every barn bursting; saw the steady increase of the herd balanced by profitable sales; saw ribbons and prizes awaiting his exhibits at County and State Fairs.
Yet, very often after supper, when standing on the porch chewing his quid as stolidly as his cows chewed their cuds, he was aware of a vague unease—as in Fanny’s day.
He could not comprehend the transmission of resentment from Fanny to Fanny’s child. He could much less understand the inherited resentment of a sex, now for the first time since creation making its defiance subtly felt the whole world through. Sub jugum ad astra! And now the Yoke had fallen; stars blazed beyond. Restless-winged, a Sex stood poised for flight, turning deaf ears to earthbound voices calling them back to hoods and bells and jesses.
One stifling hot night in July, after two weeks’ enervating drouth, Odell’s impotent wrath burst from the depths of bitterness long pent:
“That ding-danged slut will shame us yet if she don’t come back! I’m done with her if she ain’t in her own bed by Monday night. You write and tell her, Mazie. Tell her I’m through. Tell her I say so. And that’s that!”
The “ding-danged slut” at that moment lay asleep on the grass in a New York public park. And all around her, on the hot and trampled grass, lay half-naked, beastly, breathing human heaps—the heat-tortured hordes of the unwashed.