Growth of a Man. Mazo de la Roche

and Leslie were the only ones who had not watched this passage with interest. He continued to stare at her and she continued to laugh helplessly.

      “Behave yourself, Beaty,” her mother admonished. “You are a silly girl.” But she was proud of the girl’s exuberance. She turned with condescension to Becky, who had one paltry son against her own six strong sons and seven daughters. “My family seemed to get livelier as they went on,” she said. “I can’t keep the young ones down, they’re that lively.”

      Becky scented the condescension and at once quelched it. “It’s a good thing you stopped when you did,” she said, “or they’d have been regular jumping jacks. I read of one of those French-Canadian women that had twenty-four and the last was so simple that she did nothing but suck her thumb and giggle.”

      At this Beaty fled from the room suffocated by laughter; Leslie followed her. This sudden devotion to his cousin disturbed Becky and spurred her on to disparage the girl. She seated herself in a rocking-chair and crossed her feet, exhibiting their extreme smallness and the neatness of her ankle. She said:—

      “Beaty’s a fine girl. She’s the buxom sort that will make a good breeder. I’m glad to see Leslie so kind to her. I guess he’s sorry for her. He told me once that if anything made him sorry for a girl it was thick ankles. But I do think it’s silly for a young man to expect to find all the things in a girl that he admires in his mother, don’t you, Jane?”

      Jane was speechless with anger. She moved about the room bewildered, striving dumbly for a retort, unable to find even a word. But nothing that his mother could say quenched Leslie’s new-found ardor. He persuaded Beaty to go to the stable with him while he harnessed the horses to the democrat, and there Shaw, who was skulking in the hay-scented gloom, saw him kiss her.

      Beaty’s head lay on Leslie’s shoulder, all her laughter gone, a deep sigh drawn from her breast. Shaw remained hidden. He heard the good-byes, Aunt Becky’s cackling laughter, the pleasantries with which she tried to leave a last good impression. He wondered why he had not been sent to bed long ago. There was something sinister in this delay, he thought. He listened to the eager thudding of the departing hoofbeats with foreboding.

      He heard his grandfather come into the stable for a last look around before going to bed. He saw the thick figure, with the beard spread fanlike on the chest, silhouetted against the rising moonshine. Then his grandmother’s voice came out of the darkness.

      “You there, Shaw?”

      “Yes, Grandma,” he breathed, his heart beginning to pound heavily.

      “Come here.”

      “Say, Grandma,”—the tightness in his throat almost strangled his voice,—“you ain’t going to whip me, are you?”

      “Come here.” She peered into the corner where he lurked. He saw that she held a short length of broomstick in her hand. He drew himself together into an anguished bundle. “No, no, no, please don’t!” he blubbered, shaken by his fear. “I’ll never do it again! I’ll not laugh in church, Grandma! I won’t—I won’t! I’ll not laugh anywheres, Grandma!”

      “I’ll teach you to behave yourself,” she said, and drew him across a table where pieces of broken harness lay and a tin of harness oil. The smell of them filled his nostrils, made him feel sick.

      Resentment against Becky’s taunts stiffened her arm, made her inflexible. She beat him on the buttocks till she felt relief. Then she led him out of the stable, past the immovable figure of his grandfather and into the house, to the foot of the stairs.

      “Now,” she said, panting a little, “you go to bed as quick as you can! And remember this is what you’ll get every time you need it.”

      He scuttled up the stairs like a young rabbit to its burrow. He shut the door of his room and bolted it. For a little he stood in the middle of the room dazed. Then he doubled up, whimpering and rubbing his buttocks. Then rage seized him. He began to kick the legs of the bed. He hurled the pillow to the floor and kicked it furiously.

      “You would, would you?” he growled, in his rage. “Well—that’s what you’ll get!”

      The ticking was tough—his kicks did nothing to the pillow except to make it plumper. He threw himself face down on the bed, clutching the sheet in his fingers, twisting it in his misery.

      “I’m alone! I’m alone!” he kept sobbing, over and over. “I’m alone! I’m alone!” He wore himself out and at last lay quiet. He looked pensively at the clear moonlight that poured into the little room. It lay in a brilliant square on the floor, with the crossbar of the window penciled black. He could hear a mouse in the room and presently it ran into the moonlight and sat there poised on its haunches, its eyes like jewels, its plump back silken and silvered.

      Shaw began to go over his life, recalling its events in deep reflection, as though he were an old man. He remembered the house where he was born, the smell of his father’s surgery. He remembered how he used to run away from his mother and steal into it, so that he might inhale this strange exciting smell and pass his hands over the backs of the huge leather-bound medical books on the lowest shelf. He could even remember the pale thin young man who had been his father, how he would come suddenly into the surgery, pick him up, set him on his shoulder, and carry him back to his mother. With great distinctness he recalled his resentment at being picked up, and how the resentment had changed to pleasure at being on his father’s shoulder, and how the pleasure had grown to joy when he was placed in his mother’s arms. For a moment he had always clasped her close, rubbed his cheek against hers.

      He remembered going with his mother on his father’s rounds in winter, sitting snug in her lap, with his woolen cap down to his eyes and his woolen scarf up to his eyes, so that there was nothing to him but his wide stare at the horse’s moving flanks, at the glittering fall of the snowflakes. Now he could clearly hear the jingle of the sleigh bells—the little bells along the horse’s sides and the big strong one above its shoulders. He could hear the screeching of the runners on the hard snow.

      Then he remembered how his father had no longer gone out on his rounds but had always been lying on a camp bed on the verandah with a glass of milk on the table beside him and a basin under the bed. He had wanted to climb on the camp bed beside his father and had felt angry and hurt when he was pushed away by the thin white hands.

      “No, no, Shaw, go away! Cristabel, come and take him! He mustn’t be here.”

      Then had come a confused blank in which his father had disappeared but other people had come on the scene and said “Poor child” and given him candy. His mother had often cried in that time, which had troubled him because he had thought he was the only one who ought to cry and he did not like to see a grown-up person doing it.

      In this time, too, his grandparents had come into his life and he had run and hid behind his mother from the intimidating beard. Then he and she had come to live at the farm and he suddenly found that he was no longer the centre of the house but a being of no importance—except to her.

      And now she was gone! He could not go to her and press his face, for a comforting moment, against her clean print dress that smelled faintly of yeast from the bread she had been putting to rise. He could not, after a bad dream, sit up in his bed and look across at hers, where the outline of her form spelled succor and protection. She was gone! He had only himself—his own thoughts, his uncomforted fears.

      The words of the hired man came into his mind. He had said that a boy with a brow like his and a name like his and a mother to pay for his schooling should get on in the world, make a name for himself.

      Shaw laid his hand on his forehead. He could feel nothing singular about it except that it was very hot. He said his name over and over till it was meaningless. Boys at school had made fun of it. He did not see how it could help him. Then he remembered how his mother had said—“You must learn your lessons as well as ever you can and I’ll work as hard as ever I can to help you.”

      The first gratitude he had felt in his life surged