The Wall Between. Sara Ware Bassett

the letter, Ellen sat tapping her foot impatiently upon the floor. She was nettled, angry.

      She did not at all relish having this child turn the tables on her charity and make of it a favor. As for the girl’s sentimental nonsense about its not being satisfactory to live alone, what was she talking about? Living alone was the most satisfactory thing in the world. Did it not banish all the friction of opposing wills and make of one a monarch? No, she did not like the letter, did not like it.

      If this Lucy were sincere, she showed herself to be of that affectionate, conscientious, emotional type Ellen so cordially detested; besides, she held her head too high. If on the other hand, she were shamming, and were in 19 reality endowed with a measure of the Howe shrewdness, that was another matter.

      Her aunt laughed indulgently at the girl’s youthful attempt at subterfuge. She hoped she was humbugging. Worldly wisdom was an admirable trait. Had not the Websters always been famed for their business sagacity? She would far rather find Thomas’s daughter blessed with a head than with a heart.

      But the letter proved that the child was still a novice at the wiles of the world, dissemble as she would.

      Had she been older and more discerning, she would have realized she had not actually been promised anything, and she would not have been decoyed into journeying hundreds of miles from home to pursue the wraith of an ephemeral fortune.

       20

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

THE HOWES

       Table of Contents

      Within the confines of his own home Martin Howe, as Ellen Webster asserted, was a czar. Born with the genius to rule, he would probably have fought his way to supremacy had struggle been necessary. As it was, however, no effort was demanded of him, for by the common consent of an adoring family, he had been voluntarily elevated to throne and scepter. He was the only boy, the coveted gift long denied parents blessed with three daughters and in despair of ever possessing a son.

      What rejoicings heralded his advent! Had half the treasures an eager father and mother prayed Heaven to grant been bestowed upon the child, he would unquestionably have become an abnormality of health, wealth, and wisdom. But Destiny was too farseeing a goddess to allow her neophyte to be spoiled by prosperity. Both his parents died while 21 Martin was still a pupil at the district school, and the lad, instead of going to the city and pursuing a profession, as had been his ambition, found himself hurried, all unequipped, uneducated and unprepared, into the responsibilities of managing the family household.

      Farming was not the calling he would have chosen. He neither liked it, nor was he endowed with that intuitive sixth sense on which so many farmers rely for guidance amid the mazes of plowing and planting. By nature, he was a student. The help he had sporadically given his father had always been given rebelliously and been accompanied by the mental resolve that the first moment escape was possible, he would leave the country and its nagging round of drudgery and take up a broader and more satisfying career.

      To quote Martin’s own vernacular, farming was hard work—damned hard work. It was not, however, the amount of toil it involved that daunted him, but its quality. He had always felt a hearty and only thinly veiled contempt for manual labor; moreover, he considered life in a small village an extremely provincial one.

      It was just when he was balancing in his mind the relative advantages of becoming a 22 doctor or a lawyer, and speculating as to which of these professions appealed the more keenly to his fancy, that Fate intervened and relieved him of the onerousness of choosing between them.

      Martin could have viewed almost any other vocation than that of farmer through a mist of romance, for he was young, and for him, behind the tantalizingly veiled future, there still moved the shadowy forms of knights, dragons, and fair ladies; but with the grim eye of a realist, he saw farming as it was, stripped of every shred of poetry. Blossoming orchards and thriving crops he knew to be the ephemeral phantasms of the dreamer. Farming as he had experienced it was an eternal combat against adverse conditions; a battle against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome of muscle-racking labor.

      The farmer stopped work at twilight only 23 because his strength was spent and daylight was gone. The aching back, the tired muscles, could do no more, and merciful darkness drew a curtain over the day, thereby cutting off further opportunity for toil until the rising of another sun.

      But although night carried with it temporary relief from exertion, it brought with it little peace. As one sat at the fireside in the gathering dusk, it was only to see in imagination a sinister procession of specters file past. They were the things that had been left undone. On they swept, one unperformed task treading upon the heel of its predecessor. There still remained potatoes to spade, weeds to pull, corn to hoe. A menacing company of ghosts to harass a weary man as his eyes closed at night and confront him when he opened them in the morning!

      And even when, with the zest the new day brought, he contrived to mow down the vanguard of the parade, other recruits were constantly reënforcing its rear ranks and swelling the foes arraigned against the baffled farmer. Struggle as he would, the line was sometimes longer at evening than it had been at dawn. What wonder that a conscientious fellow like 24 Martin Howe felt farming less a business to be accomplished than a choice of alternatives? What rest was there in sleep, if all the time one’s eyes were closed a man was subconsciously aware that cutworms were devouring his lettuce and that weeds were every instant gaining headway? Even the rhythm of the rain was a reminder that the pea vines were being battered down and that the barn roof was leaking.

      Yet to flee from this uncongenial future and seek one more to his liking did not occur to Martin Howe. He had been born with an uncompromising sense of duty, and once convinced of an obligation, he would have scorned to shirk it. The death of his parents left him no choice but to take up his cross with New England Spartanism and bear it like a true disciple. All the Howe capital was invested in land, in stock, and in agricultural implements. To sell out, even were he so fortunate as to find a purchaser, would mean shrinkage. And the farm once disposed of, what then? Had he been alone in the world, he would not have paused to ask the question. But there were Mary, Eliza, and Jane—three sisters older than himself with no resources for earning 25 a living. Even he himself was unskilled, and should he migrate to the city, he would be forced to subsist more or less by his wits; and to add to his uncertain fortunes the burden of three dependent women would be madness. No, the management of the family homestead was his inevitable lot. That he recognized.

      What the abandonment of his “Castles in Spain” cost Martin only those who knew him best appreciated; and they but dimly surmised. Resolutely he kept his face set before him, allowing himself no backward glances into the dolce-far-niente land left behind. As it was characteristic of him to approach any problem from the scholar’s standpoint, he attacked his agricultural puzzles from a far more scientific angle than his father had done, bringing to them an intelligence that often compensated for experience and opened before him vistas of surprising interest. He subscribed to garden magazines; studied into crop rotation and the grafting of trees and vines; spent a few months at college experimenting with soils and chemicals. He investigated in up-to-date farming machinery and bought some of the devices he felt would economize labor.

      Gradually the problem of wresting a living 26 from the soil broadened and deepened until it assumed alluring proportions. Farming became a conundrum worthy of the best brain, and one at which the supercilious could ill afford to scoff. Martin found himself giving to it the full strength both of his body and mind.

      By