Asa Holmes: or, At the Cross-Roads

"Miss Polly," he began, as if unconsciously taking her into his confidence, "old times never come back again. Seems as if the bottom had dropped out of everything. I've done my best to resurrect them, but I can't do it. I thought if I could once get back to the old place I could rest as I've not been able to rest for twenty years – that I'd have a month of perfect enjoyment. But something's the matter.

"Many a time when I've been off at some fashionable resort I've thought I'd give a fortune to be able to drop my hook in your grandfather's mill-stream, and feel the old thrill that I used to feel when I was a boy. I tried it the day I came – caught a little speckled trout, the kind that used to make me tingle to my finger ends, but somehow it didn't bring back the old sensation. I just looked at it a minute and put it back in the water, and threw my pole away.

"Even the swimming-hole down by the mill didn't measure up to the way I had remembered it. I've fairly ached for a dip into it sometimes, in the years I've been gone. Seemed as if I could just get into it once, I could wash myself clear of all the cares and worries of business that pester a man so. That was a disappointment, too. The change is in me, I guess, but nothing seems the same."

Polly knew the reason. He had tried so long to mould his habits to fit his wife's exacting tastes, that he had succeeded better than he realised. He could not analyse his feelings enough to know that it was the absence of long accustomed comforts that made him vaguely dissatisfied with his surroundings; his luxuriously appointed bathroom, for instance; the perfect service of his carefully trained footmen. Mrs. Powers's noisy table, where with great clatter she urged every one "to fall to and help himself," jarred on him, although he was unconscious of what caused the irritation. As for the rank tobacco Bowser furnished him when he had exhausted his own special brand of cigars with which he had stocked his satchel, it was more than flesh and blood could endure. That is, flesh and blood that had acquired the pampered taste of a millionaire whose wife is fastidious, and only allows first-class aromas in the way of the weed.

But Polly knew another reason that his vacation had been a failure. She divined it as the little Yale pin, stuck jauntily into the front of her white dress, met the touch of her caressing fingers. The girl in the pink cotton gown was long dead, and the woman who had grown up in her stead had no part in the old scenes that he still fondly clung to, with a sentiment she ridiculed because she could not understand. There must always be two when you turn back searching for your lost Eldorado, and even the two cannot find it, unless they go hand in hand.

Next day Bowser had another piece of news to impart. "Mr. Maxwell went home this morning. He told Mrs. Powers it was like taking a vacation in a graveyard, and he'd had enough. He'd have to get back to work again. So he paid her for the full month, and took the first train back to the city."

"Well, I'll be switched!" was Bud Hines's comment. "If I had as much money as he's got, I'd never bother my head about work. I'd sit down and take it easy all the rest of my born days."

"I don't know," answered Bowser, meditatively. "I reckon a man who's worked the way Mr. Maxwell has, gets such a big momentum on to himself that he can't stop, no matter how bad he wants a vacation."

"He's a fool for coming back here for it," said Bud Hines, looking out across the fields that stretched away on every side in unbroken monotony.

But miles away, in his city office, the busy millionaire was still haunted by an unsatisfied longing for those same level meadows. Glimpses of the old mill-stream and the willows still rose before him in tantalising freshness, and whenever he closed his tired eyes, down twilight paths, where tinkling cowbells called, there came again the glimmer of a little pink gown, to wait for him as it had waited through all the years, beside the pasture bars.

Chapter XI

THE seat was an empty starch-box on the Cross-Roads porch, its occupant a barefoot boy with a torn straw hat pulled far down over his eyes. To the casual observer one of the most ordinary of sights, but to one possessed of sympathetic powers of penetration into a boy's inner consciousness there was a suggestion of the tragic. Perkins's oldest had that afternoon in school been told to write a composition on September. It was to be handed in next morning. It was the hopelessness of accomplishing the fact even in æons, not to mention the limited time of a dozen short hours, that had bound him, a little Prometheus, to the starch-box, with the vulture of absolute despair tearing at his vitals.

Two other boys had been assigned the same subject, and the three had kicked the dust up wrathfully all the way from the schoolhouse, echoing an old cry that had gone up ages before from the sons of Jacob, under the lash of the Egyptian, "How can we make bricks without straw?"

"Ain't nothin' to say 'bout September," declared Riley Hines, gloomily, "and I'll be dogged if I say it. I'm goin' to get my sister to write mine fer me. She'll do it ef I tease long enough, and give her something to boot."

"I'll ask paw what to say," declared Tommy Bowser. "He won't write it for me, but he'll sort o' boost me along. Then if it ain't what she wants, I won't be to blame. I'll tell her paw said 'twas all right."

This shifting of responsibility to paternal shoulders restored the habitual expression of cheerfulness to Tommy's smudgy face, but there was no corresponding smile on Sammy's. There was no help to be had in the household of Perkins.

That was why he was waiting on the starch-box while Tommy was sent on an errand. It was in the vain hope that Tommy would return and apply for his "boost" and share it with him before darkness fell. He was a practical child, not given to whimsical reflections, but as he sat there in desperate silence, he began wondering what the different customers would have to say if they were suddenly called upon, as he had been that afternoon, to write about September.

Mrs. Powers, for instance, in her big crape bonnet, with its long wispy veil trailing down her back. He was almost startled, when, as if in answer to his thought, she uttered the word that was at the bottom of his present trouble, the subject assigned him for composition.

"Yes, Mr. Bowser, September is a month that I'm never sorry to say good-bye to. What with the onion pickle and peach preserves and the house-cleaning to tend to, I'm nearly broke down when it's over. There's so many odds and ends to see to on a farm this time of year, first in doors and then out. I tell Jane it's like piecing a crazy quilt. You can't never count on what a day's going to bring forth in September. You may get a carpet up and beat, and have your stove settin' out waiting to be put up, and your furniture in a heap in the yard, and the hired man will have to go off and leave it all while he takes the cider-mill to be mended. And you in a stew all day long for fear it'll rain before he gets things under shelter.

"Then it's a sad time to me, too," she exclaimed with a mournful shake of the head in the black bonnet. "It was in September I lost my first and third husbands, two of the best that ever had tombstones raised to their memory, if I do say it as oughtn't. One died on the sixteenth, and his funeral was preached on the eighteenth, and the other died fifteen years later on the twenty-third, and we kept him three days, on account of waiting till his brother could get here from Missouri. So you see that makes nearly a week altogether of mournful anniversaries for me every September."

Another breath and she had reached the three tombstones, and talking volubly on her favourite subject, she completed her purchases and went out. But her conversation had not lightened the woes of the little Prometheus on the starch-box. Despair still gnawed on. House-cleaning worries and onion pickle, and reminiscences of two out of three departed husbands, might furnish material for Mrs. Powers's composition, should the fates compel her to write one, but there was no straw of a suggestion for Sammy Perkins, and again he cried out inwardly as bitterly as the oppressed of old had cried out against Pharaoh.

A man in a long, sagging linen duster was the next comer. He squeaked back and forth in front of the counter in new high-heeled boots, and talked incessantly while he made his purchases, with a clumsy attempt at facetiousness.

"Put in a cake of shaving-soap, too, Jim," he called, passing his hand over the black stubble on his chin. "County court begins to-morrer. Reckon the lawyers will shave everything in sight when it comes to their bills, but I want to be as slick as them. I'll be settin' on the jury all week. Did you ever think of it, Jim, that's a mighty interesting way to earn your salt? Jest set back and be entertained with the history of all the old feuds and fusses in the county, and collect your two bucks a day without ever turning your hand over. Good as a show, and dead easy.

"Only one thing, it sort o' spiles your faith in human nature. The court stenographer said last year that in the shorthand he writes, the same mark that stands for lawyer stands for liar, too. He! he! he! isn't that a good one? You can only tell which one is meant by what comes before it, and this fellow said he'd come to believe that one always fit in the sentence as good as the other. Either word was generally appropriate. You miss a lot of fun, Jim, by not getting on the jury. I always look forrard to fall on that account."

No help for Perkins's oldest in that conversation. He waited awhile longer. Presently an old gentleman in a long-tailed, quaintly cut black coat, stepped up on the porch. He had a gold-headed cane under his arm, and the eyes behind the square-bowed spectacles beamed kindly on the little fellow. He stopped beside the starch-box a moment with a friendly question about school and the health of the Perkins household. The boy's heart gave a jump up into his throat. The old minister knew everything. The minister could even tell him what to write in his composition if he dared but ask him. He opened his mouth to form the question, but his tongue seemed glued in its place, and the head under the torn hat drooped lower in embarrassed silence. His troubled face flushed to the roots of his tow hair, and he let the Angel of Opportunity pass him by unchallenged.

"Will you kindly give me one of those advertising almanacs, Mr. Bowser?" inquired the parson, when his packages of tea and sugar had been secured. "I've misplaced mine, and I want to ascertain at what hour to-morrow the moon changes."

"Certainly, certainly!" responded the storekeeper with obliging alacrity, rubbing his hands together, and stepping up on a chair to reach the pile on a shelf overhead. "Help yourself, sir. I must answer the telephone."

The parson, slowly studying the moon's phases as he stepped out of the store, did not notice that he had taken two almanacs until one fell at his feet. The boy sprang up to return it, but he waved it aside with a courtly sweep of his hand.

"No, my son, I intended to take but one. Keep it. They are for general distribution. You will find it full of useful information. Have you ever learned anything about the signs of the Zodiac? Here is Leo. I always take an especial interest in this sign, because I happened to be born under it. I'm the seventh son of a seventh son, born in the seventh month, and I always take it as a good omen, seven being the perfect number. You know the ancients believed a man's star largely affected his destiny. You will find some interesting historical events enumerated under each month. A good almanac is almost as interesting to study as a good dictionary, my boy. I would advise you to form a habit of referring to both of them frequently."

With one of his rare, childlike smiles the good man passed on, and Perkins's oldest was left with the almanac in his hands. For awhile he studied the signs of the Zodiac, in puzzled awe, trying to establish a relationship between them and the man they surrounded, whose vital organs were obligingly laid open to public inspection, regardless of any personal inconvenience the display might cause him.

Then he turned to the historical events. There was one for each day in the month. On Sunday, the first, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, had occurred the Japanese typhoon. Friday, the sixth, sixteen hundred and twenty, the Mayflower had sailed. Mahomet's birth had set apart the eleventh in five hundred and seventy. The founding of Mormonism, Washington's Farewell, and the battle of Marathon were further down the list, but it was all Greek to Perkins's oldest. Any one of these items would have been straw for the parson. Out of the Mayflower, Mahomet, Mormonism, or Marathon, each one of them the outgrowth of some September, he could have pressed enough literary brick to build a fair sky-scraping structure that would have been the wonder of all who gazed upon it. This time the boy looked his Angel of Opportunity in the face and did not recognise it as such.

The gate clicked across the road and he turned his head. Miss Anastasia Dill was going up the path, her arms full of goldenrod and white and purple asters. September was a poem to Miss Anastasia, but the boy looked upon goldenrod and the starry asters simply as meadow weeds. The armful of bloom brought no suggestion to him. On the morrow Riley Hines would hand in two pages of allusions to them, beginning with a quotation from Whittier's "Autumn Thoughts," and ending with a couplet from Pope, carefully copied by Maria Hines from the "Exercises for Parsing" in the back of her grammar.

Somebody's supper-horn blew in the distance, and, grown desperate by Tommy's long absence and the lateness of the hour, he took his little cracked slate from the strap of books on the floor beside him, and laid it across his knees. Then with a stubby pencil that squeaked dismally in its passage across the slate, he began copying bodily from the almanac the list of historical events enumerated therein, just as they stood, beginning with the Japanese typhoon on the first, and ending "Volunteer beat Thistle" on the thirtieth, eighteen hundred and eighty-seven.

Then he began to copy a few agricultural notes, inserted as side remarks for those who relied on their almanacs as guide-posts to gardening. "Gather winter squashes now. They keep better when stored in a warm dry place. Harvest sugar beets when the leaves turn yellowish green, etc."

He was bending painfully over this task when a shadow fell across his slate, and, looking up, he saw the old miller looking over his shoulder.

"Doing your sums?" he asked, with a friendly smile. "Let's see if you do them the way I was taught when I was a lad." He held out his hand for the slate. There had been a bond of sympathy between the two ever since Christmas eve, when a certain pair of skates had changed owners, and now, although the boy's voice trembled almost out of his control, he managed to stammer out the reply that he was trying to write a composition.

The old man looked from the straggling lines on the slate, then at the open almanac, then down at the boy's troubled face, and understood. Drawing a chair across the porch he sat down beside him, and, catching the furtive, scared side-glance cast in his direction, he plunged at once into a story.

It was about a shepherd boy who went out to fight a giant, and the king insisted on lending him his armour. But he couldn't fight in the heavy helmet and the coat of mail. The shield was in his way, and the spear more than he could lift. So he threw it aside, and going down to a little brook, chose five small pebbles, worn smooth by the running water. And with these in his hand, and only the simple sling he was accustomed to use every day, he went out against the Philistine giant, and slew him in the first round.

Perkins's oldest wondered what the story had to do with his composition. He wasn't looking for a personal application. He had not been brought up at Sunday schools and kindergartens. But all of a sudden he realised that the miller meant him; that his depending on Tommy, or the customers, or the almanac, to furnish him ideas, was like going out in Saul's armour, and that he could only come to failure in that, because it wouldn't fit him; that he could hit the mark the little schoolmistress had in mind for him, only with the familiar sling-shot of his own common every-day personal experiences.

Maybe the old miller recognised that it was a crisis in the little fellow's life, for he stayed beside him with helpful hints and questions, until the slate was full. When he carried it home in the gloaming it no longer bore the items from the almanac. There were other remarks straggling across it, not so well expressed, perhaps, but plainly original. They were to the effect that September is the month you've got to go back to school when you don't want to, 'cos it's the nicest time of all to stay out-doors, neither too hot nor too cold. There's lots of apples then, and it's the minister's birthday. He's the seventh son of a seventh son, and Dick Wiggins says if you're that you can pick Wahoo berries in the dark of the moon and make med'cine out of them, that will cure the bone-break fever every time, when nothing else in the world will. Then followed several items of information that he had discovered for himself, in his prowls through the September woods, about snakes and tree-toads, as to their habits at that season of the year. It closed with a suggestive allusion to the delights of sucking cider from the bung of a barrel through a straw.

Next day the little schoolmistress shook her head over the composition that Riley Hines handed in, and laid it aside with a hopeless sigh. She recognised too plainly the hand of Maria in its construction. The sentiments expressed therein were as foreign to Riley's nature as they would have been to a woodchuck's. She took up Tommy Bowser's. Alas, four-syllabled words were not in Tommy's daily vocabulary, nor were the elegant sentences under his name within the power of his composition. Plainly it was the work of a plagiarist.

She went through the pile slowly, and then wrote on the blackboard as she had promised, the names of the ten whose work was the best and most original. It was then that Perkins's oldest had the surprise of his life, for lo! his name, like Abou-ben-Adhem's, "led all the rest."

Again the Cross-Roads had taught him more than the school, – to depend on the resources to which nature had adapted him, and never again to attempt to sally forth in borrowed armour, even though it be a king's.

Chapter XII

IT was Cy Akers who carried the news to the schoolhouse, galloping his old sorrel up to the open door just before the bell tapped for afternoon dismissal. He did not dismount, but drawing rein, leaned forward in his saddle, waiting for the little schoolmistress to step down from the desk to the doorstep. The rows of waiting children craned their necks anxiously, but only those nearest the door heard his message.

"Mr. Asa Holmes died this morning," he said. "The funeral is set for to-morrow afternoon at four, and you can announce to the children that there won't be any school. The trustees thought it would be only proper to close out of respect for him, as he was on the school board over thirty years, and has done so much for the community. He's one of the old landmarks, you might say, about the last of the old pioneers, and everybody will want to go."

Before she could recover from the suddenness of the announcement the rider was gone, and she was left looking out across the October fields with a lonely sense of personal loss, although her acquaintance with the old miller had extended over only two short school terms.

A few minutes later the measured tramp of feet over the worn door-sill began, and forty children passed out into the mellow sunshine of the late autumn afternoon. They went quietly at first, awed by the tender, reverent words in which the little schoolmistress had given them the message to carry home. But once outside, the pent-up enthusiasm over their unexpected holiday, and the mere joy of being alive and free on such a day sent them rushing down the road pell-mell, shouting and swinging their dinner-pails as they ran.

A shade of annoyance crossed the teacher's face as she stood watching from the doorstep. She wished she had cautioned them not to be so noisy, for she knew that their shouts could be plainly heard in the old house whose gables she could see through a clump of cedars, farther down the road. It was standing with closed blinds now, and she had a feeling that the laughing voices floating across to it must strike harshly across its profound silence.

But presently her face brightened as she watched the children running on in the sunshine, in the joy of their emancipation. Part of a poem she had read that morning came to her. She had thought when she read it that it was a beautiful way to look upon death, and now it bore a new significance, and she whispered it to herself:

"'Why should it be a wrench to leave this wooden bench?Why not with happy shout, run home when school is out?'

"That's the way the old miller has gone," she said, softly. "His lessons all learned and his tasks all done – so well done, too, that he has nothing to regret. I'm glad that I didn't stop the children. I am sure that's the way he would want them to go. Dear old man! He was always a boy at heart."

She turned the key in the door behind her presently, and started down the road to Mrs. Powers's, where she boarded. In every fence corner the sumachs flamed blood-red, and across the fields, where purple shadows trailed their royal lengths behind every shock of corn, the autumn woodlands massed their gold and crimson against the sunset sky. She walked slowly, loath to reach the place where she must go indoors.

The Perkins home lay in her way, and as she passed, Mrs. Perkins with a baby on her hip, and a child clinging to her skirts, leaned over the gate to speak to her.

"Isn't it sad," the woman exclaimed, grasping eagerly at this chance to discuss every incident of the death and illness, with that love for detail always to be found in country districts where happenings are few and interests are strong.

"They sent for the family Tuesday when he had the stroke, but he couldn't speak to them when they got here. They said he seemed to recognise Miss Polly, and smiled when she took his hand. She seemed to be his favourite, and they say she's taking it mighty hard – harder than any of the rest. It's a pity he couldn't have left 'em all some last message. I think it's always a comfort to remember one's dying words when as good a person as Mr. Holmes goes. And it's always so nice when they happen to be appropriate, so's they can be put on the tombstone afterward. I remember my Aunt Maria worked my grandfather's last words into a sampler, with an urn and weeping-willow-tree. She had it framed in black and hung in the parlour, and everybody who came to the house admired it. It's a pity that the miller couldn't have left some last word to each of 'em."

"I don't think it was necessary," said the girl, turning away with a choke in her voice, as the eloquent face of the old man seemed to rise up before her. "His whole life speaks for him."

Mrs. Perkins looked after the retreating figure regretfully, as the jaunty sailor hat disappeared behind a tall hedge. "I wish she hadn't been in such a hurry," she sighed, shifting the baby to the other hip. "I would have liked to ask her if she's heard who the pall-bearers are to be."

At the turn in the road the little schoolmistress looked up to see Miss Anastasia Dill leaning over her gate. She had just heard the news, and there were tears in her pale blue eyes.

"And Polly's wedding cards were to have been sent out this next week!" she exclaimed after their first words of greeting. "The poor child told me so herself when she was here in August on a visit. 'Miss Anastasia,' she said to me, 'I'm not going abroad for my honeymoon, as all my family want me to do. I'm going to bring Jack back here to the old homestead where grandfather's married life began. Somehow it was so ideal, so nearly perfect, that I have a feeling that maybe the mantle of that old romance will fall on our shoulders. Besides, Jack has never seen grandfather, and I tell him it's as much of an education to know such a grand old man as it is to go through Yale. So we're coming in October. The woods will have on all their gala colours then, and I'll be the happiest bride the sun ever shone on, unless it was my grandmother Polly.' And now to think," added Miss Anastasia, tearfully, "none of those plans can come to pass. It's bad luck to put off a wedding. Oh, I feel so sorry for her!"