Fruits of the Earth (28 page)

But it snowed up on 9th October. Nobody in the district did any fall ploughing. All the work was left till spring.

Shortly, the new school was opened at Morley. It was a holiday for the neighbourhood; a deal of speech-making was to be done; and Ruth went with Jim and the girls in Jim's car. Abe stayed at home.

THE NEW SCHOOL

E
very now and then, during the summer, Abe had seen something of the great building going up just east of the town.

It was an imposing structure comprising six classrooms, laboratories, teachers' offices, and an assembly hall; the whole built in the form of the letter H. A long, shed-like stable marked the east line of the five-acre yard, large enough to accommodate six summer and six winter vans with twelve horses. The summer vans resembled such stage coaches as had been in use twenty years ago; the winter vans, mounted on bob-sleighs, had box-like canvas tops with a flue-pipe projecting from the roofs. Inside there was a driver's seat; behind it, a stove screwed to the floor; and two benches running the length of the van.

The school was administered by a board consisting of one trustee from each district, Spalding District being represented by Wheeldon. The local school remained closed. Mr. Blaine retired.

As the time approached, Ruth spoke one evening of the advantage it would be for Marion if she continued at Somerville for her last year.

Abe mused in silence. “Very well,” he said at last. “But if Jim and Frances are to go, they will go to Morley. Consolidation has been forced on me. I want to see how this thing works out.”

“I am speaking only of Marion,” Ruth replied.

Marion, accordingly, was taken back to Somerville. Abe was only too willing to make concessions.

On 1st November, the van service opened, with Henry Topp in charge of Spalding District. The route was prescribed by the board; and when his schedule was announced, Abe laughed. His was the first place at which the driver was to stop in the morning; thence he was to return to Nicoll's Corner; then to go north, to pick up Wheeldon's, Stanley's, Nawosad's children; back again to Nicoll's Corner; east to Hartley's and Shilloe's; a third time back to the corner, to admit Nicoll's children: then south. By the time the van reached the school, Abe's children had travelled fourteen miles; and the van held thirty-one children. Jim and Frances had to board the conveyance at a quarter-past seven, before daylight in winter. It was true that, correspondingly, they reached home at night so much earlier; for apart from Nicoll's children they were the first to be set down of those who lived north of the second ditch. Even so, however, they never came home before five. In 1920, the van was to start from the northernmost point; in 1921 from the point farthest east.

To this aspect of the matter Ruth had never given a thought; and she was dismayed. Often, during the winter, the children were late in getting to school; at night, it was often six and later when they got home.

Jim took things cheerfully. He was glad of the opportunity the new system afforded of meeting and associating with all the boys of his age. Few were in the same grade; for, since there had never been a high school within
reach, not many had covered the work of the first year. But that did not matter. He frankly proclaimed that he liked the system.

It was different with Frances. In spite of her plumpness she was pale and of delicate health; she suffered from headaches. Often she felt excessively tired; and that made her ill-humoured. “Oh,” she would say when Jim, his work finished, tried to entice her into a game of cards or checkers, “leave me alone. All I want is to go to bed.” On Fridays, she heaved a great sigh. “Thank the Lord! Another week gone!”

She was nearly sixteen. Physically, she developed rapidly, though she remained small. Her face assumed a new and alluring prettiness, a plump and slightly anaemic charm, with fair curls hanging down in front of her ears. Abe watched and said nothing.

Every night after supper Ruth insisted on the two children doing their homework under her eyes. Two hours were reserved for the task. Jim sat down without a protest; but he often hid a cheap novel under his books. Frances groaned.

One Friday evening, however, shortly before Christmas, Frances, too, seemed willing enough. She and her brother occupied opposite seats at the dining table, under the frosted bowl of electric bulbs. Ruth sat at the far end in one of the straight-backed chairs, sewing. Opposite her sat Abe, turning the leaves of a great tome with illustrations of ancient buildings. Behind Ruth, in one of the deep, grey chairs from the living-room, Marion reclined, stitching a silky piece of lingerie–her usual occupation when at home.

For an hour a profound silence had reigned in that solemn room when Frances ceased writing and looked up with a laugh.

“Miss Garston gave us for a composition topic, ‘Why I like Consolidation,'” she said. “Anyone want to read what I've written?”

With a deep frown on his massive face, as though recalling himself from the infinity of space, Abe held out a hand. Frances handed the sheet of paper over with another laugh; she had hardly expected her father to ask for it. As he proceeded, she nervously chewed her pencil.

“Why I like Consolidation,” Abe read. “The fact is, I don't like it at all. I have to get up at half-past five in the morning. Breakfast I have at a quarter past six. Before seven I leave the house, warmly wrapped, to walk to the corner of my father's farm. At seven I hand myself over to the jailer who takes me to school. He tries to bandy impertinent jokes with me. In the van it is hot, and I take my wraps off. For the first half-hour it is not too bad. I have at least ample room. Then we pick up a bunch of nine children from three families. Four of them smell of garlic; some of unwashed bodies and unclean clothes. After another three-quarters of an hour we pick up eleven children, nearly all of them objectionable on the score of smell. The air we breathe over and over begins to be so foul that it nauseates me. Whenever the van stops, I bend forward to get a whiff of the delicious cold draught. By this time I am sitting on my wraps; for we are crowded. I hate to do that, for I have nice clothes and like to take care of them. None of the other children will sit still.

“At twenty minutes past nine we reach school and are handed over to a new set of jailers. I am so stupefied with bad air and so tired with jolting that to study is the last thing on earth I want to do. But that is what we are sent for. I should like the work if I reached school fresh after a reasonable night's rest. As it is, I know that whatever I may still be able to do is not worth doing. All day long I watch the clock and resent
that it is so slow. The only oasis in the desert of the day is the noon recess when I go down town.

“At four o'clock, which comes as a great relief at last, I must hand myself back to the jailer of the morning, for another drive of sixty or ninety minutes in evil-smelling captivity. When I get home, I have no life left and certainly no desire to write a good composition on ‘Why I dislike Consolidation.'”

Abe sat and frowned, his eyes on infinity. As for the contents of this exercise, it confirmed his aversion to the whole system. He might have laughed at it. But over and beyond what he had read, he had received a shattering revelation of the character of the girl. That she was precocious he had known; children were precocious these days. But she was advanced in a way which he could not have defined.

It was Frances who broke the silence in which everybody looked at the father. “I don't think I'll hand that in,” she said.

“Why not?” It had been half a minute before Abe spoke.

“They'd can me.”

“‘Can you?' Can't you speak decent English?”

“Expel me, then.”

“Let them try!” Abe got heavily to his feet. “You make a clean copy and hand it in. If they object, you tell them I've read it and approved.”

Frances looked at him with an uncertain light in her eyes.

“I want this sheet,” Abe said. “Stay where you are. Write it over.”

He turned to pace the room. In that writing the girl's soul lay bared; could he allow her to show it to others? There was passion in that exercise. Had Ruth not heard, he would have retracted.

Ruth pushed her glasses back on her bulging forehead. “Let me see that, Frances.”

In a strange impulse Abe went through the swing-door into the white-tiled kitchen to reach for the sheepskin in the narrow closet by the side of the wash-basin. For an hour or longer he paced the yard; and not till the lights had flashed on upstairs did he re-enter the house.

Ruth was in the dining-room; she never went to bed before him now.

For a few minutes, Abe walking up and down, there was the silence usual between them. Then Ruth dropped her sewing.

“Abe,” she said, looking up, “what can we do about Frances?”

He stopped and pondered, weighing her. Did she see the problem?

“Can't we make an arrangement for the children to drive themselves?”

No. She did not see the problem. Then, as if awaking, “You wanted consolidation, did you not?”

“I want the high school.”

Abe stood silent. “You have a problem on your hands,” he said at last, “in that girl of yours.”

“She is yours as well as mine, Abe.”

“Is she?”

This was a cruel thrust. In years gone by Ruth had consciously tried to raise the children so that they would be more hers than his. But Abe regretted what he had said; he knew only too well that he himself had failed his children in the past.

“You have a problem on your hands in the girl,” he repeated; “and every parent in the district will have a similar problem.”

“Just what do you mean by that, Abe?”

“Unless you feel it, I cannot explain,” Abe replied.

On Christmas Day the Spaldings had dinner in town with the Vanbruiks. The weather was mild; for a week it had thawed every day; the eaves of all buildings were strung with icicles; and from the ground their drippings grew up in corresponding cones.

Dinner over, the two women withdrew upstairs; the girls went for a walk; Jim disappeared. The conversation of the men turned to the school.

“I can't say that I like what I see,” the doctor said. “Here are two hundred children coming in from the country, fifty adolescents, a few young men and women: all released from patriarchal homes into comparative freedom. The common objection to all public schools–that, in a moral sense, they level down, not up–takes on the proportions of a menace. All become unified–standardized, they call it–in a common smartness. Not to know, say, do certain things stamps a boy as a ‘sissy.' They smoke, they use objectionable language, and worse. Above all, they acquire the slang of the day–a stereotyped language capable of expressing only coarsened reactions. It is the same with the girls, of course. They are suddenly brought into contact with the conveniences of an advanced material civilization: post office, telephone, and so on. They conduct correspondences of which they keep their parents in ignorance. Over the telephone, they speak to distant friends. I have overheard such conversations. The sort of letters they write I had an opportunity to see when chance placed one in my hands. It was lost in the store. Since I know neither writer nor addressee, I am not violating any confidence in letting you see it. I kept it as a document.”

He rose slowly–he was over sixty-five–went to his desk and abstracted a paper from one of its drawers. Abe opened it and read:

“My dear Vi,–Oh boy! I'm all tipsy and raring to go. Oh kid! Ma has relented. I'm going to attend a swell dance to-morrow night where the Tip Top Orchestra is playing. My togs are ready, compact filled, hair frizzed and all. Of course, Ma doesn't know; but Jack will be there with bells on. She thinks he's at Torquay yet. But this once I am going to have a fling. Dash it, though! I was mad at Jack the other day, a week ago. You know that nifty compact he gave me last Xmas? He smashed it; and I gave him Hail Columbia. He'll bring me a new one to-morrow night; that'll be jake with me. Didn't I feel punk, though!

“Last night I met Agnes Strong on the ice. For the love of Pete! How that Jane carries on! I'd be ashamed of myself, honest to cats, I should. You know Frank Smith, the new sheik? He's sweet on me, and, of course, I encourage him. Want some fun. But Agnes is cuckooed about him since he took her to a dance last week. It makes me puke to see her. Well, so long, kiddo. Must ring off. Think of me to-morrow night, all dolled up. Frank says I'm a spiff looker. Hug me tight. See you in the funnies!–Pansy Blossom.”

“The worst of that sort of thing,” the doctor said after a while, “is not the moral degeneracy which it may or may not imply. It is the coarsening of a whole generation.”…

At night, Abe gave Ruth that letter to read; she was amazed; but, of course,
“her
girls would never condescend to a thing like that.”

A few weeks later, having thought matters over, Abe went to town. It so happened that, in the store, Mr. Diamond mentioned casually that Mrs. Vanbruik was in. Abe, following up a half-matured thought, said at once, “I'd like to see her for a moment.”

But someone else was speaking to her. While waiting,
Abe asked to see his account. When the book-keeper, an elderly man of military bearing, brought him his ledger page, Abe, amazed at the total, turned to the manager. “What are these items here, dry goods, with three amounts of thirty, twenty-five, and forty-five dollars?”

“Let me see.” Mr. Diamond, taking the paper, disappeared in the crowd. “Those,” he said, returning, “were dresses for the young ladies, ordered through a traveller on approval. Miss Frances took them out, and Mrs. Spalding signed the bills.”

Abe nodded as Mary approached, in fur coat, but without a hat on her still brown hair.

“Hello, Mary,” Abe said grimly. “Ruth would like to put Frances out to board. The drives are too much for her. Would you take the girl?”