He lay awake that night thinking of the coming adventure, his heart beating faster, and then it was morning, and Mother was shaking him and getting him into his clothes. A hurried breakfast on lukewarm oatmeal.
They went outside and got into a coupe standing there. Father and Mother sat on the back seat, and Neale on the little front seat you had to unfold. Then jog, jog, they went along Griffith Street down the curlycue road, the horse"s feet going clatter on the cobblestones. Then jog, jog, jog again till at last they stopped and got out. They had come to the ferry.
After they were on the ferry-boat, Father and Mother always waited so that Neale could see the deck-hand pull down the gates that closed the end of the boat and take out the iron hooks that held her fast to the dock. Then the whistle blew, and the boat started, leaving the dock looking as though a giant had bitten a half-circle out of it. Father walked with him out to the front deck, where, holding to his wide-brimmed sailor hat, Neale watched the waves and tug boats, and the gulls flapping about. Father made him look at the city ahead, and pointing out a building with a gold dome, told him that it was the World Building, and the highest in the city. Neale looked, found it of no interest and went back to his waves and gulls, which stirred something of the quiver and wonder the wharves made him feel.
When the boat got across, it went smash into the piles and slid along into the dock, where men hitched it fast with iron hooks and pulled the hooks tight by turning a wheel around. Neale always noticed just how such things were managed, and Father always gave him plenty of time to look.
Then up went the gates and off went everybody. Outside they got into a horse-car. After a while the horse-car began to run through a long, white-washed cellar, and Father explained (just as he had last year and the year before that), that _he_ could remember when the trains used to be pulled through that tunnel by horses. At the other end of the tunnel they all got out once more, and now, at last, you were really getting quite "warm," for this was the railway station.
After Father had bought the tickets and checked the baggage, they got on the train, and Father and Mother talked for a while, till Father said, with a long breath, "Well, it might as well be soon as late," and kissed Mother and she kissed him.
Until Neale was a pretty big boy, Father always stooped and kissed him too. But Neale felt that this was quite a different sort of kiss, and he noticed too, that after it, Father always kissed Mother again, and held his cheek for an instant close to hers. But after this he always walked right away, quietly, turning around once or twice to wave his hat at them, his face as composed as that of any man in the crowd coming and going beside the train.
Mother let Neale settle things in the train, making no comment as he fussed over it, putting the satchel up in the rack, and then deciding that it would be better to have it down where he could put his feet on it, arranging his coat and her golf-cape over the back of the seat and then remembering the hook between the windows. Then the train started. A smoky tunnel, a scraggly belt of half-city--and then the real country.
Neale never called anything the real country unless there were cows in the fields.
He was always astonishingly glad to see it, and stared and stared till his eyes ached, and drooped shut, and he had a nap, hunched up with his feet on the seat. When he woke up there was more real country, and finally they got there.
There was Grandfather Crittenden waiting for them, with the team and the three-seater, only the two back seats were out to make room for the big trunk. This was something like living! Grandfather Crittenden let him hold the lines. He remembered--_how_ he remembered--every step of the eight miles, every hill, every house and barn and big rock, till finally they drove into the yard, got out, were kissed, and went up to the same room as last year, with its rag-carpet and painted yellow bed. Mother washed his face very hard in the cold water from the big white pitcher, there was supper of fried ham and scrambled eggs and _soft_ rolls, and cherry pie--and that was all a tired little boy could remember that night.
Next morning vacation really began with a rush outdoors to see the mill, the saw-mill, the center of Neale"s life in the country. There it was, just as it ought to be, the big saw snarling its way through a pine log, and old Silas with the lever in his hand, standing as though he hadn"t moved since the day Neale had gone away last September. Neale ran around to the back, climbed on the carriage and rode back and forth as Silas fed the log methodically down on the saw, and raced it back to set a fresh cut. Silas only nodded without speaking. He didn"t like wasting words, and speaking was mostly wasted when the saw was screaming, the belts slapping, and down below was the pound! pound! pound! of the mill-wheel.
After a time Neale went down to the far end of the mill where the fresh sawed boards fell off from the logs. A new lad he didn"t know was "taking away." He wasn"t keeping up with the work very well, and to help him Neale picked up a slab and started to cut it into stove lengths on the cut-off saw.
"Hey there! Whacher doin"? You"ll saw your arm off, boy!" yelled the lad. But Silas, stopping the saw so that his voice could be heard, saved Neale"s face, "Let be, Nat. He won"t get hurt. He knows more about the mill now than you do, or ever will."
Neale felt his heart swell with pride. He sawed pine slabs till his back ached from lifting and his shirt and hands were black from the dried resin.
There were other things to do at Grandfather Crittenden"s, all the other things that boys do in the country, and Neale did them all. But none of them came up to the mill. Day in and day out it was around the mill that he spent his time, lying on the piles of fresh sawed boards in the sunlight, watching teamsters roll huge logs on the skidway with cant-hooks. Or he went below where you could look through the doorway at the flapping belts, and watch the sawdust raining down and making a great yellow pyramid. Even such an experienced millhand as Neale was not allowed to go into the cellar while the mill was running, under pain of all sorts of violent and disagreeable deaths. Getting your coat caught by the shafting and being whirled round and round and beaten to a pulp against the beams was one of the mildest.
But after supper, when the mill was shut down, he used to saunter out to it, in the long soft twilight, and then tip-toe down into the cellar and play uneasily in the sawdust, casting scared looks now and then at the shining semi-circle of the saw, with its wicked hooked teeth just over his head.
One day, as he played thus about the mill, his destiny came and tapped him on the shoulder, and he knew not that day from any other day.
As he was watching Silas take up the slack in a belt, a strange man, an elderly, powerful, bent, old countryman came into the mill, and asked, without salutations to any one, "Where"s Jo?"
"Gone to town for feed," said Silas. He added with a grin, "Mr. Burton, make you acquainted with a relation of yours, Dan"el"s boy." He jerked his head at Neale.
The stranger looked hard at the boy, out of sharp gray eyes, and the harder he looked the sharper grew his eyes.
"What"s he doin" here?" he asked Silas.
"Oh, he"s always hangin" round. He knows the trade as well as some folks twice his size," said Silas.
"Well, what do you think of the sawyer"s trade?" asked the old man suddenly of Neale.
Neale could not think of anything to answer except that he guessed he liked it all right.
The stranger seemed to dismiss him from his mind, fingered his gray goatee, and looked all around as if seeing the establishment for the first time. "Mebbe. Mebbe. All right for Ma.s.sachusetts pine and saft maple. But if you want to see a real mill, that"ll handle tough Vermont yellow birch and rock-maple, you come back to Ashley with me."
The stranger stayed to supper, and Neale learned that he was his great-uncle Burton Crittenden. He asked many sharp-sounding questions that made his brother, Neale"s grandfather, snort and say hotly, "Oh, we all know there ain"t any proper mill practice outside Vermont, but the Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts is managing to worry along somehow, in her shiftless fashion."
But when the old man spoke to Neale there was a gentler note in his voice. He talked of sugaring-off, and twenty-two-foot snowdrifts, and asked Neale"s mother if she wouldn"t send the boy to Ashley some time, to visit his great-uncle.
His mother agreed to do it--"some time."
_CULTURE IN THE AIR_
CHAPTER VI
April 10, 1898.
Old Jeanne Amigorena was on her way to Bayonne to complain to her niece of her rheumatism and her daughter-in-law. She detested the railroad, as she did everything new and not Basque, but at her age it was not easy to foot it along the fourteen kilometres of white road between Mida.s.soa and Bayonne. So, grimly disapproving, she hoisted her square, stalwart, black-clad body into the third-cla.s.s compartment of the slow way-train which comes shuffling up from the Spanish frontier about noon.
Even for a Basque of the oldest rock, there is one satisfaction to be had out of the forty-minute trip by rail to Bayonne. This is at the station of La Negresse where your way-train meets the down express from Paris. The chic people from the first-cla.s.s compartments are there summoned to get out and change to the little local line which jolts them the three kilometres to Biarritz. This change of cars is never announced at Paris, it is always furiously exasperating to tourists, and in consequence they afford an entertaining spectacle to any one with a low opinion of human nature. Jeanne, who had less than no regard for any human nature outside the Basque race, always enjoyed the contempt she felt for these fashionably-dressed, ineffectual French weaklings. She took advantage of the leisurely wait at La Negresse, while the luggage was noisily transferred from one train to the other, to lean her head and shoulders out of the window, and to indulge herself in a hearty bout of derision for the uncomely fashionable Parisians, city-pale and flabby. She drew a long breath of satisfaction in her own untrammeled ribs, to see their rigid bodies like badly carved pieces of wood in the steel armor of their corsets, their shoulders grotesquely widened by their high puffed sleeves. Used to stepping out for a daily ten-mile walk over mountain paths, free and rhythmic in her flexible cord-and-canvas sandals, she laughed inwardly at these fine ladies, tottering on their high-heeled leather shoes.
Some of them were dragging along tired, over-dressed, pasty-faced children. Jeanne had a pa.s.sion for children, and she now cried to herself, for the thousandth time, "What can the Blessed Virgin be thinking of, to trust babies to such creatures!" Straight as a lance, with more vigor in her body at seventy than any of them at twenty, with more glistening black hair of her own under her close black coif than any of them could afford to buy, Jeanne who never altered her costume by a hair or a line from one year"s end to another, who looked forward confidently to fifteen or twenty years of iron health, felt a cheerful glow of contempt as she watched them, running here and there, screaming nervously that one of their innumerable bags or valises was lost, their faces distorted with apprehension for some part of their superfluities.
She did not altogether approve of the hatted, conventionally dressed women she pa.s.sed half an hour later in the sunny streets of the little city on her way to the home of Anna Etchergary. Anna was concierge of one of the apartment houses on the Rue Thiers, opposite the Old Castle, and to reach it, Jeanne had to pa.s.s through the new quarter of Bayonne, the big open square where the fine shops are and the Frenchified madames walking about. Bayonne was a poor enough apology for a Basque city, thought Jeanne, but its somewhat backsliding and partly Gascon and Spanish inhabitants were at least not such grimacing monkeys as those Parisians.
She strode along with the swift, sure, poised gait of sandal-wearing people, her mind full of the grievances she wanted to pour out to Anna; the disrespect of her son"s wife, and the scandalous extravagances of her expenditures. "Consider, Anna," she rehea.r.s.ed her story beforehand.
"She uses the eggs herself, instead of sending them to market. She serves _omelettes_, as though Michel"s house were a hotel! And she will not spin! She uses Michel"s money to _buy yarn_! To think that money from the Amigorena farm should go to buy yarn, with a distaff hanging on the wall and ten idle, good-for-nothing fingers at the end of her arms."
On the terrible subject of lack of children in that house Jeanne could not trust herself to speak. It was too sore a spot that with all Jeanne"s five grown sons, she had not a grandchild to hold in her arms.
The two, Americans now, who were in the Argentine making their fortunes, were married and had families, but what were grandchildren on the other side of the globe to Jeanne? The two younger ones, who were sailors, were not married, and Michel, who had promised to be the mainstay of her life and had stayed at home to run the farm, here he had been caught by that impudent little French girl, one of the chambermaids in a Biarritz hotel, a girl who did not know how to spin, who laughed at the decent Basque ways, and who had no shame for her sterility, refusing to go to Lourdes to pray for children.
Jeanne had never had any romantic feeling for her shiftless, hard-drinking husband, whose irregular earnings as a fisher she had been forced to piece out with much domestic service in the houses of others; and now he was dead, she never thought of him. She had never been to a theater in her life, nor read a novel, for she could not read at all.
None of her native capacity for emotion had been used in her youth, nor frittered away later in the second-hand make-believes of modern life. It had all been poured out upon children; on her five sons, and on the one little dark-eyed, black-haired daughter, the little Marie--who had died at eleven, so many years ago, just after her first communion--the blessed saint Marise had looked, slim and straight in her white dress!
The Blessed Virgin had found her namesake too sweet to wait for, and had taken her at once.
And now those strong, yearning old arms were empty of young life, and Jeanne"s heart was bitter. She might scold her loudest over the waste of b.u.t.ter and eggs at the farm, she might gossip her head off about the faults of the neighbors, and shriek out maledictions on the stingy bourgeoise who wanted to buy her vegetables for nothing, she could not drown out the forlorn echo of emptiness and loneliness within.
She turned up the Rue Thiers, glanced frowningly at the Paris-like department store on the other side of the street with its gaudy plate-gla.s.s show-windows, the pride of the younger generation in Bayonne, and looked up with approval at the huge, thick, battlemented walls of the Old Castle, substantial enough that, and plain enough and old enough to please even a Basque.
As she turned in at the door of Anna"s apartment house, her mouth was open to begin her litany of grievances; but when she entered Anna"s one-room, brick-paved lodging, she found her niece with a budget of exciting news of her own, "Oh, Tante Jeanne, what do you think...." she burst out as the old woman swung lightly in; but before she would go on, she went to close the door, bearing herself so secretly, with such self-importance that Jeanne was between exasperation and greediness to hear. Like all illiterates who cannot glut on the newspapers their appet.i.te for gossip, she was insatiable for it in talk. She sat down on the front of her chair, her ear c.o.c.ked eagerly. Anna drew her own chair up close and began to speak in Basque very rapidly. "I"m so glad you"ve come, Tante Jeanne, you"ve had so much experience in working out in families, you know about things. You know about those American farm machines, that they"re beginning to use on the big farms, painted red, you know. Well, the American agent for that company, he has come here to live, here in this house, the grand second-floor apartments, the ones old Pere Lapagorry rents furnished, on _both_ sides of the landing, yes, the two of them, because his wife, a very chic madame, didn"t think one was big enough, and what can one family do with two kitchens, tell me that, and they with only one child to their name, a little girl, who doesn"t take up any more room than a flea, so to speak, and the lady has asked me to find her a cook and a maid, and listen, Tante, she says she will pay sixty francs a month _each_, and fed and lodged!"
She paused to underline this and looked triumphantly at her aunt, who for years had worked as cook in families for forty francs a month and lodged herself. Jeanne looked back at her hard, a new possibility lifting a corner of its veil in her mind.
"What are they like, these Americans?" she asked, "Spanish-Basque or French-Basque?" (To a Basque, the term "_American_" means one of his own race who has emigrated to South America, made his pile, and returned to his own country to spend it.)
"They"re not Basques at all," said Anna.
"What, French?" said Jeanne instantly incredulous of Anna"s story. There was no use trying to tell _her_ that any French family was willing to pay twice the usual wage for servants.