IT is a long lane that has no turning, either for cattle or for men.
When Fanny died Odell was forty. Two months later he married the strapping daughter of Ed Lister. And came to the turn in the long, long lane he had travelled for twenty years.
For, as Whitewater Queen was a breeder of heifer-calves, Mazie Lister proved to be a breeder of men.
Every year, for the first four years, she gave Odell a son.
There was no fuss made about these events. Mazie Lister was the kind of girl who could eat cabbage for breakfast, wad it down with pie, drive it deeper with a quart of buttermilk.
Once, to prove she could do it, she ate a whole roast sucking pig, five boiled potatoes, six ears of corn, a dish of cranberry sauce, and an entire apple pie; and washed it down with three quarts of new cider.
Her feed never fattened her; it seemed to make her skin pinker, teeth whiter, long, slanting black eyes more brilliant.
No cares worried her. She laughed a great deal. She was busy from dawn to dark. Unfatigued but sleepy, she yawned frightfully toward nine o’clock. It was her time to roost.
Mazie’s instincts concerning progeny were simple. She nursed each arrival as long as necessary, then weaned it. Then the youngster had to learn to shift for himself—wash and dress, turn up at meal hours, turn in with the chickens, rise with the crows.
It was a little different, however, with Eris, whom Mazie had inherited. Eris, of course, was bottle-fed. Whitewater Queen’s heifer-calf, White Princess, had no better care. Whatever was advisable was completely and thoroughly done in both cases.
White Princess grew to beautiful Guernsey symmetry, with every promise of conformation to classic type; and was duly registered. Little Eris, small boned, with delicately fashioned limbs, looked out on the world from a pair of crystal-blue, baby eyes, which ultimately became a deep, limpid grey.
Unlike White Princess, Eris did not promise to conform to the Odell type. There seemed to be little of that breed about her. Fanny had been bony and shiny-skinned, with a high-bridged, pinkish nose, watery eyes—a wisp of a woman with a rodent’s teeth and every articulation apparent as a ridge under a dry, tightly stretched epidermis.
Odell, with his even, white teeth, coarse, highly-coloured skin and brown eyes, was a compact, stocky, heavy-handed, broad-footed product of Scotch-Irish pioneer stock. But Fanny’s grandmother, a Louisiana Creole, had run away from school to go on the stage, and had married a handsome but dissolute Southern planter who died of drink.
Sundays Fanny used to wear her grandmother’s portrait painted in miniature on ivory, as a breast-pin.
“Hand-painted,” she used to explain. And always added: “Creoles are all white.” Which was true. But, when quarrelling with his wife, Odell pretended to believe otherwise.
Rummaging through Fanny’s effects a day or two after her marriage, Mazie discovered a painted fan, a mother-of-pearl card-case, and this breast-pin. She carried the miniature to Odell.
“Looks like baby,” she explained, with her care-free laugh.
“She’ll be lucky if she favours that pitcher,” said Odell. “But like as not she’ll take after Fanny.” He was wrong in his guess.
When Eris was five her resemblance to the miniature had become marked. And Mazie’s boys looked like their mother and father.
On Saturday nights, after immersing her own unwilling brunette brats in the weekly bath, Mazie found the slim white body of little Eris an ever-increasing amusement and a pique to her curiosity. The child’s frail yet healthy symmetry, the fine skin, delicate, perfect limbs, lovely little hands and feet, remained perennial sources of mirth and surprise to this robust young woman who was equally healthy, but built on a big, colourful, vigorous plan.
Solid and large of limb and haunch, deep-bosomed, ruddy-skinned, the young stepmother always bred true to type. Her sons were sons of the soil from birth. There could be no doubt about her offspring. What wasn’t Lister was Odell. They belonged to the land.
But when Mazie looked at her husband and looked at the child, Eris—and when she remembered Fanny—then she wondered and was inclined to smile. And she was content that her sons’ thick, sturdy bodies and slanting, black eyes so plainly advertised the stock they came from. Utility. Health. Strength.
Fanny had had a pink nose. Even a Guernsey ought to have one. But the nose of Eris was snow white. To what stock did this child throw back?
When Eris was seven she was sent to the village school, leading her eldest stepbrother thither by the hand. Both were scared and tearful. Nobody went with little Eris to mitigate the ordeal; and she was a most sensitive child.
Hers had been a deathless curiosity since she was old enough to ask her first question. An unquenchable desire for information seemed to possess her. Her eternal, “Will you tell me why?” became a nuisance.
“Dang it, send her to school!” shouted Odell at last. And that was how.
At her small desk, rigid, bewildered, terribly intent on the first teacher in human form she had ever gazed upon, she found herself on the verge of tears. But, before she could dissolve, her brother forestalled her, bursting into vigorous yells, bawling like a calf; and would not be comforted. Which allowed Eris no time for private grief while wiping his eyes with her pinafore.
Noonday recess and lunch baskets and the wildly gyrating horde of children let loose on a sandy playground ended the first encounter between Eris Odell and the great god Education in His Local Temple at White Hills Village.
Eris learned little in school. There is little to learn in American schools. No nation is more illiterate. And in the sort of school she went to the ignorant are taught by the half educated.
None of her teachers could speak English as it should be spoken. In their limited vocabulary there was no room for choice of words. Perhaps that was why negatives were doubled now and then.
As for the rest, she was stuffed with falsified history and unessential geographical items; she was taught to read after a fashion, and to spell, and to juggle figures. There was a nature class, too, full of misinformation. And once an owlish, elderly man lectured on physiology; and told them in a low and solemn voice that “there is two sects in the phenonemy of natur, and little boys are made diffrunt to little girls.”
That ended the lecture, leaving every little boy and little girl mad with unsatisfied curiosity, and some of the older children slightly uncomfortable.
But The Great American Ass dominates this splendid land of ours. He knows. He’ll tell the world. And that’s that—as Odell was accustomed to say. And early in her career little Eris caught the cant phrase of finality from her father, and incorporated it with her increasing lingual equipment.
When one of the boys tried to kiss her, she kicked his shins. “And that’s that!” she added breathlessly, smoothing out her rumpled pinafore.
In Mazie she had a stepmother who made no difference between Eris and her own progeny. She kissed them all alike at bedtime; dosed them when necessary, comforted their sorrows with stock reassurances from a limited vocabulary, darned, sewed, mended, washed for all alike.
Mazie gave her children and her husband all she had time to give—all she had the capacity to give—the kindly, cheerful offices and understanding of a healthy female.
Whitewater Queen was as good a mother. Both lacked imagination. But Whitewater Queen didn’t need any.
For a time, however, the knowledge imbibed at school nourished Eris, although there were few vitamines in the feed.
When she was thirteen her brothers—twelve, eleven, ten and nine—alternately bullied her, deferred to her, or ran bawling to her with their troubles.
When she was fourteen the world met its own weird at Armageddon. The old order of things began to change. A new earth and a newly interpreted Heaven replaced the “former things” which had “passed away.”
At eighteen Eris looked out over the smoking débris of “former things”—gazed out of limpid grey eyes upon “a new Heaven and a new Earth”; and saw the cloudy, gigantic spectre of all-that-had-once-been receding, dissolving, vanishing from the world where it had reigned so tyrannically and so long.
About that time she dreamed, for the first time, that dream which so often re-occurred in after years—that she stood at her open window, naked, winged, restless for flight to some tremendous height where dwelt the aged god of Wisdom all alone, cutting open a human heart that was still faintly pulsating.
At eighteen—the year the world war was ended—Eris “graduated.”
She wrote a little act for herself, designed her own costume, made it, acted, sang, and danced the part. It was the story of a poor girl who prays for two things—a pair of wings so that she may fly to the moon, and a new hat for the journey. Suddenly she discovers a new hat in her hands. The next instant two beautiful little wings sprout on her shoulders. Instantly she takes scissors and snips off the wings and trims her new hat with them. Ready for her journey, suddenly she realises that now she cannot fly. She tears the wings from the hat. Too late. She can’t fasten them to her shoulders again. They flutter to her feet. She falls on her knees in a passion of tears. The moon rises, grinning.
It was a vast success—this little act of Eris Odell—and while its subtler intent was quite lost on the honest folk of White Hills Village, the story itself was so obvious and Eris did it so prettily that even her father grunted approval.
That evening he promised her the next heifer-calf for her own. If it proved a good one the sale of it should provide a nice nest-egg for Eris when she married.
The next heifer-calf promised well. Eris named her White Iris and she was so registered.
In the yearling pure-breeds she was first at the Comity Fair. But Eris refused to sell. At the State Fair White Iris beat every Guernsey and every other heifer, pure-breed and grade.
Brookvale Manor offered her three thousand dollars. Odell made her take it, and put the money into the local bank. So, with tears blinding her grey eyes, Eris sold White Iris out of the county. And would not be comforted even by the brand new cheque-book sent to her by the cashier of the White Hills Bank.
The account, however, was in her father’s name.
Now, the horizon of Eris Odell had narrowed as her sphere of activity dwindled after graduation.
Whitewater Farms became her world. Within its confines lay her duties and diversions, both clearly defined.
They were her heritage. No loop-holes offered escape—excepting marriage. And that way out was merely the way in to another and similar prison the boundary of which was a barbed wire fence, and its mathematical centre a manure pit.
She continued to dream of wings. An immense, indefinable longing possessed her in waking hours. But she was only one of the youthful, excited millions, waking after æons to the first instincts that had ruled the human race.
It was the restlessness of the world’s youth that stirred her—Modern Youth opening millions of clear young eyes to gaze upon the wonders of a new Heaven and a new earth, and mad to explore it all from zenith to depths—sky, sea, land, and the waters under the earth. Youth, suddenly crazed by an overwhelming desire for Truth, after æons and æons of lies.
Explore, venture, achieve, live—demand Truth, exact it, face it, and know!—the mighty, voiceless cry of the World’s Youth—claiming freedom to seek, liberty to live, fearless, untrammelled, triumphant. A terrible indictment of Age, and of those age-governed æons which forever have passed away.
Already the older, duller generation caught the vast vibration of young hearts beating to arms, young voices swelling the tremulous, universal cry of insurgence, a clear, ceaseless, sea-like sound of laughter proclaiming the death of Sham—ringing an endless, silvery requiem.
Odell shoved up his spectacles and lowered the newspaper to glance at Eris.
“What say?” he repeated fretfully.
“I’d like to study dancing.”
“Can’t you dance? You go to enough socials and showers ’n’one thing ’n’other.”
“I mean—stage dancing.”
“Stage!” he thundered. “Be you crazy?”
“Why, Eris, how you talk!” said her stepmother, too astounded to laugh.
“I could go to New York and work in a store by day; and take stage-dancing lessons evenings,” murmured the girl. “I want to be somebody.”
“You stay here and do your chores and try to act as if you ain’t a little loonatic!” shouted Odell. “I’m sicka hearing about the capers and kickups of young folks nowaday. Them gallivantins don’t go in my house. I’m sicka reading about ’em, too. And that’s that!”
“After all,” said Eris, “why do I have to do what I don’t care to do?”
“Dang it,” retorted her father, “didn’t you never hear of dooty? What d’they teach you in school?”
“Nothing much,” she replied listlessly. “Did you always want to be a farmer, daddy?”
“Hey?”
“Are you a farmer because you wanted to be? Or did you want to be something else?”
“What dinged trash you talk,” he said, disgusted. “I didn’t wanta be a blacksmith or I’da been one.”
“Why can’t I be what I’d like to be? Will you tell me why?”
Odell, speechless, resumed his newspaper. It was nearly nine o’clock and he hadn’t read half the local news and none of the column devoted to the Grange.
Eris looked wistfully at him, loitering still in the doorway, slim, grey-eyed, undeveloped.
Her stepmother laughed at her: “Notions,” she said. “Don’t you know you’d go to rack and rooin that way? You go to bed, Eris.... There’s fresh ginger snaps in the pantry.”