UNTIL the Great War turned the world upside down, Whitewater Farms made money after Odell married Ed Lister’s daughter.
Shortage of labour during the war cut into profits; taxes wiped them out; the ugly, Bolshevik attitude of labour after the war caused a deficit.
It was the sullen inertia of the mob, conscious of power. Men did not care whether they worked at all. If they chose to work, mills and factories would pay them enough in three days to permit them to remain idle the remainder of the week. No farmer could pay the swollen wages demanded for field labour, and survive financially.
Every village was full of idle louts who sneered at offered employment.
Fruit rotted in orchards, grain remained uncut, cattle stood neglected. The great American loafer leered at the situation. The very name of Labour stank. It stinks still. The Great American Ass has made the term a stench in the nostrils of civilisation.
The next year mills and factories began to lay off labour. Odell and Lister scraped together a few sulky field hands, mainly incompetents, men who had spent all their wages. Fields were sullenly tilled, crops gathered, cattle cared for.
Except for profiteers, reaction had set in. War profligacy, asinine finance, crushing taxes already were doing their work.
Rather than pay for feed, farmers sold their stock. The demand for pork started everybody hog-raising. Prices fell; loss followed. Then stagnation. It was the bitter aftermath of war—the deluge. Dead water.
Only one star of hope glimmered over the waste,—the New Administration.
Spring was a month early that year. Odell, at sixty, unimpaired by pie and the great American frying pan, his gaitered legs planted sturdily in the new grass, looked out over his domain and chewed a clover stem.
“I ain’t afraid,” he said to Lister. “I’m going the hull hog. Every acre.”
“Where’s your help?” remonstrated Lister.
“I got ’em.”
“Some on ’em is quitters. They’ll lay down on yeh, Elmer.”
Odell spat out the clover stem: “Every acre, Ed!” he repeated. “And six cows on test.”
“We ain’t got the help——”
“Six cows,” growled Odell; “White Lady, Snow Queen, Silver Maid, Thistledown, Milkweed Lass, and Whitewater Lily.... I gotta make money. I’m aimin’ to and I’m a-going to. I got four sons. And that’s that!”
“Elmer——”
“Awright. I know all what you gonna say, Ed. But where does it get you to go around with a face a foot long? How’s things to start unless somebody starts ’em? Awright, prices is bad. You can’t sell a pure-breed caaf in this dinged country. There isn’t no market for a fancy heifer. Everybody’s breedin’ Holsteins ’n’sloshin’ around after grades. Awright; nobody wants Guernsey quality; everybody wants Holstein bulk ’n’watery milk ’n’everything. I know. And my answer is, every acre, Ed; and six cows on test; and higher prices on every danged caaf that’s dropped.
“If I sell a heifer it’s a favour to be paid for through the nose. And I feed every bull-caaf and no vealin’ this year. Enough hogs to turn out till October; not another danged snout! If the Bank don’t see me through I’ll blow it up. Now, g’wan and make your plans.”
He went into the creamery where his wife stood beside the separator, watching a cat lap up some spilled cream.
“Your pa’s timid, Mazie,” he said. “I tell him I cal’late t’start under full steam. What do you say?”
She laughed: “Pa’s got notions. He allus was a mite slow. I guess you know best, Elmer.”
“We all gotta work,” he said. “That means Eris, too.”
“She allus helps me,” remarked Mazie, simply.
“I dunno what she does,” grunted Odell; “—sets a hen or two, fools around the incubators, digs up a spoonful of scratch-feed—what does she do, anyhow?”
“The child mends and irons——”
“When she ain’t readin’ or tendin’ her flowers or moonin’ ’round the woods ’n’fields,” retorted Odell. “Eris reckons she’s too fine a lady for farm folk, I guess. I want her to keep busy. And that’s that.”
“Somebody’s got to tend the flowers,” remonstrated Mazie. “You don’t want we should have no posy bed, Elmer—like poor folks down to the Holler, do you?”
“I can git along ’n’eat dinner without posies. Why don’t Erie read the Grange Journal? Oh, no; it’s fancy novels and highfalutin’ books she studies onto. And she’s allus cuttin’ out these here fashions into these here magazines with coloured pitchers outside. Did you ever see Eris studyin’ into a cook-book? Or a seed catalogue? Or the Guernsey Cattle Magazine? Or the Breeder’s Guide——”
“You let her be,” said Mazie, good-naturedly. “The housework’s done and that’s all you need to know. She can cook and make a bed if she’s a mind to.”
“Mind,” growled Odell, “—what’s a girl want of a mind? All she uses it for is to plan how to play-act on the stage or gallivant into moving pitchers. All she thinks about is how to git to New York to hunt up some fancy job so she can paint her face and dance in bare legs——”
“Now, Elmer, Eris is too smart to act foolish; and she’s educated real well. You liked to see her act in school, and you thought she danced nicely. She’s only a child yet——”
“She’s twenty!”
“She’s no more’n sixteen in her way of thinking, Elmer. She’s a good girl.”
“I didn’t say she’s bad. But she’s twenty, and she ought to be more help to us. And she ought to quit readin’ and moonin’ and dreamin’ and lazin’——”
“You quit your lazin’, too,” laughed Mazie, setting a pan of cream in the ice chest. “Why don’t you go down to the barn and ring that new herd-bull? You can’t get him into the paddock without a staff any more. And if you don’t watch out Whitewater Chieftain will hurt somebody.... ’N’I’ll be a widow.”
As Odell went out the dairy door, preoccupied with the ticklish job before him, he met Eris with her arms full of new kittens.
“Mitzi’s,” she explained, “aren’t they too cunning, daddy? I hope they’re not to be drowned.”
“I ain’t runnin’ a cat-farm,” remarked Odell. “Did you mend my canvas jacket?”
“Yes; it’s on your bed.”
“Did you coop them broody hens? I bet you didn’t.”
“Yes. There are seventeen in three coops.”
“Housework done?”
“Yes.”
“Awright. Why don’t you get the cook-book and set in the hammock a spell?”
The girl laughed: “Don’t you like mother’s cooking?”
“S’all right for me. But I don’t cal’late your mother’s going to cook for the fella you hitch up with.”
Eris turned up her nose: “Don’t worry. I shan’t ever marry. Not any boy in this town, anyway. Probably I’ll never marry.... I’ll not have time,” she added, half to herself.
Odell, who was going, stopped.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“An actress ought not to marry. She ought to give every moment to her art,” explained the girl naïvely.
“Is—that—so? Well, you can chase that idea outa your head, my girl, because you ain’t never going to be no actress. And that’s that!”
“Some day,” said Eris, with a flushed smile, “I shall follow my own judgment and give myself to art.... And that’s that!”
As they stood there, father and daughter, confronting each other in the pale April sunshine, the great herd-bull bellowed from the cattle-barn, shaking the still air with his thunderous reverberations. He was to be shot that evening.
Eris sighed: “He misses his companions,” she said, “and he tells us so.... Poor White Lightning.... And I, also, miss the companionship of all I have never known.... Some day I shall tell you so.... I hope you’ll understand.”
“You talk like a piece in a magazine,” said Odell; “you better quit reading them danged love stories and movin’ pitcher magazines and study into the Farm Journal.”
“You’d be very proud of me if I became a great actress,” she said seriously.
“I’d be a danged sight prouder if you was a great cook,” he grunted. And he went toward the cattle-barn, spinning the patent self-piercing nose ring on his horny forefinger.
Eris called after him: “Have you got to shoot Lightning?”
“Yes, I gotta beef him. He’s no good any more.”
So the great herd-bull, like all “Former Things,” was doomed to “pass away.”
As the Dionysia became the Mithraic Rites, so was taurian glory doomed to pass.... A bullet where Aldebaran shows the way. The way of all bulls.
Neither Odell nor Eris had ever heard of Aldebaran. And the tombs of the Magi were no more tightly sealed than the mind of the father. But the child’s mind hid a little lamp unlighted. A whisper might reveal to her Aldebaran shining in the midnight heavens. Or the Keys of Life and Death hanging on the Rosy Cross....
The bull died at the appointed hour. Eris stood in her bed-room closing both ears with trembling palms.
She did not hear the shot. Mazie found her there; laughed at her good-naturedly.
Eris’ lips formed the words: “Is he dead?”
“My dear, he’s Polack beef by now.”
Gloria tauri—gloria mundi. But whatever ends always begins again.
What was the Dionysia is now Rosicrucian ... and shall again be something else ... and always the same.
As for the Bull of Mithra—and Mithra, too—bull-calves are born every day. And there are a million million suns in the making.
It’s only the Old Order that changes, not what orders it.