Having finished, he turned to the dining-room. “Well, let's have dinner first!” He meant his tone to be humorous; but the word “first” had the effect that neither Ruth nor Jim made more than a pretence at eating. Abe ate slowly with relish, a still more disconcerting fact. But at last he pushed his chair back.
“Well,” he said, “what's your story?”
“I didn't get my recommendation.”
“That I know. But why did you leave school to-day when your mother wished you to continue?”
The mother sat motionless; Jim was playing with a fork.
Abe waited. At last, again in that disquieting, half humorous tone, “Out with it now! What is your story?”
Jim collected himself. “Well, they'd been hinting at schoolâ”
“Who's they?”
“The teachers.”
“Been hinting at what?”
“That I'd better stay at home.”
“My own opinion. But what business is it of theirs? I am paying toward that school and the salaries.”
“They say I am holding the whole class back.”
“How?”
Jim, not understanding his father, was on the point of becoming defiant. He shrugged his shoulders.
“What I want to know is why you left school to-day. Why not yesterday or to-morrow? What has happened to-day?”
“The board met last night.”
“What's the board got to do with it?”
Jim braced himself. “They told me the board had resolvedâ”
“Out with it!â¦I'll tell you. They've expelled you. Right?”
“It amounts to that,” Jim said with a shrug. Only shrugs could express his full meaning.
“What for?”
“Oh, I don't know.”
Unreasonable anger surged in Abe, not against the boy but against the school system which they had set up to defy him. “You don't know? I'll have to go to town then, to find out. I have no objection to your leaving school. I don't want a boy of mine to press the school bench, advertising the fact that he has no brains. But they can't expel him without reasons. Unless their reasons are mighty good, back you go.”
The boy looked doubtfully at his father, realizing at last that he was an ally. “Their reasons are good enough,” he said,
ready at last to explain. “I've goaded them into doing what they have done. I want to go to work. I didn't want to leave the way Marion tried to.”
“Leave? If you quit school, you'll help on the farm, I suppose.”
“No, father. I don't like the dust and the dirt. I'm a mechanic.”
“You like the grease and the dirt better than the dust and the dirt, do you?”
Jim disregarded his father's sarcasm. “You said you don't want me to advertise the fact that I have no brains. It isn't a question of brains. All decent boys leave school. Only the sheiks stick it out.”
“What's a sheik?”
Jim laughed. “A boy that runs after girls and thinks more of the way his necktie is tied than of what he wants to do in the world.”
“Go on,” Abe said.
“If I'd applied myself, I could have done as well as the next one. I don't want to learn silly verses by heart and French phrases. I don't want to be a writer chap. I want to do a man's work. Work in which brains count. Not turn furrows.”
“They've taught you to despise what your father's doing, eh?”
“That's what they say,” Jim defended himself. “He's got no brains, they say; he'll never make anything but a farmer.”
“They say that, do they?” Abe's tone required no answer. “And so you want to leave father and mother?”
Ruth redoubled her sobbing.
“I've had a job waiting for me for two years. Since I left Somerville.” Jim spoke as an equal now, confiding what was in his heart. “I've given this school game a try-out. It hasn't
advanced me an inch. And now I want to quit.” With a laugh, he added, “I've given the teachers a run for their money anyway.”
“And they've expelled you,” Abe said evenly. “Nothing to boast of. What did you do, by the way?”
But Jim was serious again. “Unless they had expelled me, mother would never have let me quit.”
“And you don't want the farm?” Abe rose as if to leave the room. But he turned in the door. “All we can do on earth is to make our living, directly or in a roundabout way. I don't mean to hold you. But I've built this house and these barns to keep my children on the farm. If you go, my work is for nothing. I have no pleasure in it myself any longer. If you stay, half the farm is yours. To-day if you want it. Think it over. Then let me know.” With that he went out.
About four o'clock Abe heard the hum of Jim's car in the yard. When he reached the southern edge of the field, he waited.
“You've come to say good-bye?” he asked when Jim arrived.
“Yes, I am going to town.” Jim hesitated. “I want to say one more thing, father. If I cared for a farm, I'd take up a homestead myself, to build a place of my own.”
Abe looked at Jim. That was the way he had felt himselfâ¦.
A week later, rain having stopped the work again, Abe went to Somerville, made inquiries about a certain Mr. Cope, saw him, and entered into an agreement with him whereby he, Abe, became a sleeping partner in the new firm of Spalding, Spalding, and Cope. He invested five thousand dollars in the venture.
DISTRESS
A
lthough Abe co-operated in the matter of his son's establishment, he became very taciturn when Jim had left.
This reacted on his relations to the rest of the district where, during the summer of 1921, as a consequence of the economic situation, he might have re-established his former prestige; for many of those even who were hostile to him began to realize that a leader was needed. The peculiarity of the situation consisted in this: that, while prices of farm products continued to decline, such commodities as the farmer had to buy were reaching their peak. What with the failure of the farmers to complete their seeding operations, things worked up to a climax which only Abe could remedy. But matters of actual fact were not the only ones to enter as factors into the situation. The war had unsettled men's minds. There was a tremendous new urge towards immediacy of results; there was general dissatisfaction. Irrespective of their economic ability, people craved things which they had never craved before. Democracy was interpreted as the right of everybody to everything that the stimulated inventive power of mankind in the
mass could furnish in the way of conveniences and luxuries. Amusements became a necessity of daily life. A tendency to spend recklessly and to use credit on a scale hitherto unknown was linked with a pronounced weakening of the moral fibre. In the homes of the Hartleys, McCraes, Wheeldons, Topps, gramophones and similar knick-knacks made their appearance; young men wore flashy clothes, paying or owing from forty to a hundred dollars for a suit. Girls wore silk stockings, silk underwear, silk dresses; and nothing destroys modesty and sexual morality in a girl more quickly than the consciousness that suddenly she wears attractive
dessous.
This orgy of spending had been enormously stimulated by the easy money of the flax boom; and the rate of expenditure was hardly retarded by the subsequent disaster of the slump. A standard of expenditure once arrived at is not so easily abandoned as established.
So far, the district had been a grain district. Only Abe had, to any extent, raised cattle. In that disastrous spring land could not be worked; credit was at once cut off. Instead of being able to go to the bank and borrow, the settlers were molested by collectors trying to squeeze water out of a stone; their mail consisted of dunning letters. Against the holdings of not a few legal judgments were secured, among them McCrae. As Abe was seeding, people came humbly and asked, “How are the chances for a job?” He looked at them and replied laconically, “Not a chance on earth, now.”
And haying permits could not be had on credit. To make this situation doubly ironic, hay was the only thing of which there was an abundance and which, nevertheless, stubbornly held to its price.
This seemed puzzling; but as, with the advancing season, the truly dramatic condition unfolded itself, it found its natural explanation. The abundance of grass proceeded from
the very circumstance which prevented its being harvested. And this was general, brought about by an excess of rain. In the rolling parts of the country, the rains had neither delayed seeding nor prevented the growth of the grain. But on the flat prairie the ground never dried out; and so it could not absorb the rains which began with the early summer. What grain had been seeded was drowned. But through the natural selection which had been going on for centuries and millennia, the prairie grasses had adjusted themselves to excessive moisture; they grew knee-high, hip-high in places. In the rolling parts of the country only such areas as, by reason of their low, sloughy character, had never been tilled were left to the native growth; and consequently, what applied to the hay of the plain applied to the hay of the hills as well: hay land remained inaccessible to horses and heavy machinery; where the soil was not covered with water, it was so soft that a harvest of the grass was out of the question. In places, stacks of last year's hay rotted in the meadows because they could not be taken out. In Spalding District meadows were bottomless; the roads, with ruts filled and ditches overflowing, were mires of mud; in going to town, farmers used four horses and wagons.
The rains continued through the whole of June. Two, three sunny days were at once followed by devastating thunderstorms which spared no corner. The traditional haying season went by with nothing done.
To make matters worse, this combination of a surplus of the growing grass with a scarcity of the marketable product began to cut with a double edge. Few settlers had hay left from the previous year. When their stock began to sufferâthey could not even turn the beasts out without danger of seeing them engulfedâthose who had money or credit shipped in hay from across the border or from Ontario. Farmers
were bidding against each other and against city buyers; the price of hay rose and rose. End of May it had been twelve dollars a ton; by the end of June when, before the war, wild hay had been three dollars, it sold at twenty. Timothy and clover went as high as thirty-two.
One dry day in June Abe went into his field to look at the ruin of his wheat. He saw Wheeldon and Nawosad on the section west of his farm, cutting by hand. Hip-boots on their legs, they stood in water; when they swung their scythes, jets of spray flew over their heads. There was no way of getting the fodder they needed except by such antiquated methods. They gathered their cuttings in bundles secured by ropes and carried them on their backs to a point north of the Hudson's Bay section where a hayrack stood, hitched with eight horses. That hayrack stood aslant, on the point of toppling over. When, late in the day, the men tried to draw their load away, they broke a wheel and went home on horseback. Even that green feed turned black with decay.
When Wheeldon had secured the west section as it was commonly called he had disregarded Abe's prescriptive claim. Some had rejoiced at his boldness in doing so; others said now, “It served Wheeldon right.” That section, in dry years, yielded the best and most abundant fodder; it was low, with a subsoil of impermeable clay. In any other year, Wheeldon might simply have looked elsewhere for hay; but every single spot which was not irreclaimable swamp had been pre-empted by a permit. Permit holders objected to any encroachment on their rights. Wheeldon did cut a strip north of his farm where in a dry year there would have been only a scab of turf. Horanski promptly presented him with a claim for damages amounting to fifty dollars. Threatened with legal proceedings, Wheeldon paid by a note without securing the hay. Not only the settlers
of the district watched jealously over their rights; people living at a distance paid local men for looking after their interests, such as Anderson, the hardware dealer, or Elliot or Baker.
Just how dramatic the situation had become was brought home to Abe when, around the middle of July, a dairy man from near the city, having looked the land over, offered him five hundred dollars for a sub-permit valid for one quarter-section. Abe declined. Incidentally he bought on a falling market steers and heifers wherever he could. He held the purse-strings; and though he occasionally paid more than was asked, many looked at his deals with the green eye of jealousy.
Wheeldon could not cut; Horanski might have cut but could not reach his meadow; Abe alone might have taken hundreds of tons of green feed off his land; to reach it, he had the dam formed by the soil taken from the ditch; but he held off; he could not have cured the grass.
The district was awed. Even Wheeldon's treachery turned to Spalding's profit. There was no hurry about cutting; the grass did not mature; like any other crop it needed dry weather to ripen. Dry weather would come. The longer it was delayed, the more pronounced would Spalding's advantage be over the rest of the district. Wealth untold would be his. “A marvellous man!” most settlers said. Others asked, “How does he do it?” And a small minority exclaimed, “What the devilââ”
Towards the middle of July a dry spell came, lasting five days. For three days Abe waited anxiously. On the fourth he took a trench plough and eight horses and made the trip around Nicoll's Corner and over the dam to his meadow. Working with a four-horse team and changing horses every two hours, he cross-ditched the section from north to south. It was not a neat job; but that did not matter. For two days he worked
with dogged determination, ploughing and reploughing a fourteen-foot furrow till he reached the gravel underneath.
He had barely finished when a three-day rain of unheard-of violence started, with sheet-lightning and rolling thunder all around. This rain produced a situation with which it seemed impossible to cope.
South of Nicoll's farm, beyond the ditch, a lake was produced resembling the spring flood, a mile and a half long from north to south, and half a mile wide, covering the Topp holdings. It was ten inches deep, with soft mud underneath. The water massed itself on the west side of the road to town which acted as a dam, most of the flood coming from the drainage shed by Abe's meadow; and slowly the lake backed towards that meadow. The Topp buildings stood in water, their cellars drowned; but neither Slim nor Henry minded it so long as the flood backed into Abe's hay land. Spalding was, after all, not going to get away with his devil's luck or whatever it was, be it only his confounded shrewdness or initiative; all his ditching and cross-ditching was not going to help him.