People of the Whirlpool by Mabel Osgood Wright

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From this point the great stacks of lumber that made the giant bonfire
could be seen at the two points, from land and water side, where the
fire-boats were shooting streams from their well-aimed nozzles.

As usual, after running the steam-pumping engines as close as desirable
to the flames, the horses were detached, blanketed, and tied up safe from
harm, and we found a group of three great intelligent iron-gray beauties
close behind us, who accepted the contents of the dish-towel with almost
human appreciation, while a queer, wise, brown dog, an engine mascot, who
was perched on the back of the middle horse, shared the petting with a
politely matter-of-fact air.

"It is wonderful! I only wish I could see a little better," murmured Miss
Lavinia, who was short, and buried in the crowd.

"Why not stand on this barrel?" suggested Bradford, holding out his
hand.

"It's full of garbage and ashes," she objected.

"Never mind that, they are frozen hard," replied Bradford, poking the
mass practically.

Three pairs of hands tugged and boosted, and lo! Miss Lavinia was safely
perched; and as there were more barrels Sylvia and I quickly followed
suit, and we soon all became spellbound at the dramatic contrasts, for
every now and again a fresh pile of Georgia pine would be devoured by the
flames, the sudden flare coming like a noiseless explosion, making the
air fragrantly resinous, while at the same time the outer boundaries of
the doomed lumber yard were being draped with a fantastic ice fabric from
the water that froze as it fell.

As to the firemen! don't talk to me of the bygone bravery of the
crusaders and the lords of feudal times, who spent their lives in the
sport of encamping outside of fortresses, at whose walls they
occasionally butted with rams, lances, and strong language, leaving their
wives and children in badly drained and draughty castles. If any one
wishes to see brave men and true, simply come to a fire with Evan and me
in our New York.

We might have stood there on our garbage pedestals half the night if
Horace Bradford had not remembered that he must catch the midnight
express, glanced at his watch, found that it was already nearly half-past
ten, and realized that he had left his grip at Miss Lavinia's.
Consequently we dismounted and pushed our way home.

As we were half groping our way up ill-lighted West Tenth Street Martin
Cortright paused suddenly and, after looking about, remarked: "This is
certainly a most interesting locality. That building opposite, which has
long been a brewery, was once, in part at least, the first city or
State's Prison. How often criminals must have traversed this very route
we are following, on their way to Washington Square to be hanged. For you
know that place, of later years esteemed so select, was once not only the
site of Potter's Field, but of the city gallows as well!"

No one, however, joined more heartily than he in the merriment that his
inapropos reminiscence caused, and we reached home in a good humour that
effectually kept off the cold.

"Did you succeed in buying the gown?" Horace Bradford asked Miss Lavinia,
as he stood in the hall making his farewells.

"Oh, yes, I had almost forgotten. Here is the package only waiting for
your approval to be tied," and she led the way to the library.

Bradford touched the articles with his big fingers, as lovingly as if he
were smoothing his mother's hair, or her hand.

"They are exactly right," he said heartily, turning and grasping Miss
Lavinia's hand, as he looked straight into her eyes with an expression of
mingled gratitude and satisfaction. "She will thank you herself, when we
all meet next summer," and with a happy look at Sylvia, who had come to
the library to see the gifts, and was leaning on the table, he grasped
bag and parcel, shook hands all round, and hurried away.

"What do you think?" I asked Evan, as we closed our bedroom door.

"Of what?" he answered, with the occasional obtuseness that will overtake
the best of men.

"Of Sylvia and Bradford, of course. Are they in love, do you think?"

"I rather think that _he_ is," Evan answered, slowly, as if bringing
his mind from afar, "but that he doesn't know it, and I hope he may
stay in ignorance, for it will do him no good, for I am sure that she
is not, at least with Bradford. She is drifting about in the Whirlpool
now. She has not 'found herself' in any way, as yet. She seems a
charming girl, but I warn you, Barbara, don't think you scent romance,
and try to put a finger in this pie! Your knowledge of complex human
nature isn't nearly as big as your heart, and the Latham set are wholly
beyond your ken and comprehension." Then Evan, declining to argue the
matter, went promptly to sleep.

Not so Sylvia. When Miss Lavinia went to her room to see if the girl was
comfortable and have a little go-to-bed chat by the fire, she found her
stretched upon the bed; her head hidden between the pillows, in a vain
effort to stifle her passionate sobbing.

"What is it, my child?" she asked, truly distressed. "Are you tired, or
have you taken cold, or what?"

"No, nothing like that," she whispered, keeping her face hidden and
jerking out disjointed sentences, "but I can't do anything for anybody.
No one really depends on me for anything. Helen Baker must leave college,
because they need her _at home_,--just think, _need her_! Isn't that
happiness? And Mr. Bradford is so joyful over his new salary, thinks it
is a fortune, and with being able to buy those things for his
mother,--father has sent me more money during the four months I've been
back, so I may feel independent, he says, than the Professor will earn in
a year. Independent? deserted is a better word! I hardly know my own
parents, I find, and they expect nothing from me, even my companionship.

"Before I went away to school, if mamma was ill, I used to carry up her
breakfast, and brush her hair; now she treats me almost like a
stranger,--dislikes my going to her room at odd times. I hardly ever see
her, she is always so busy, and if I beg to be with her, as I did once,
she says I do not understand her duty to society.

"People should not have children and then send them away to school until
they feel like strangers, and their homes drift so far away that they do
not know them when they come back,--and there's poor Carthy out west all
alone, after the plans we made to be together. It is all so different
from what I expected. Why does not father come home, or mother seem to
mind that he stays away? What is the matter, Aunt Lavinia? Is mamma
hiding something, or is the fault all mine?"

Miss Lavinia closed the door, and soothed the excited girl, talking to
her for an hour, and in fact slept on the lounge, and did not return to
her own room until morning. She was surprised at the storm in a clear
sky, but not at the cause. Miss Lavinia was keenly observant, and from
two years' daily intercourse, she knew Sylvia's nature thoroughly. For
some reasons, she wished with all her heart that Sylvia was in love with
Horace Bradford, and at the same time feared for it; but before the poor
girl fell asleep, she was convinced that such was not the case, and that
the trouble that was already rising well up from her horizon was
something far more complicated.

VIII

THE SWEATING OF THE CORN

_April_ 14. Every one who has led, even in a partial degree, the life
outdoors, must recognize his kinship with the soil. It was the first
recorded fact of race history embodied in the Old Testament allegory of
the creation, and it would seem from the beginning that nations have been
strong or weak, as they acknowledged or sought to suppress it.

I read a deeper meaning in my garden book as the boys' human calendar
runs parallel with it, and I can see month by month and day by day that
it is truly the touch of Nature that makes kindred of us all--the throb
of the human heart and not the touch of learning or the arts.

Everything grows restless as spring comes on--animate, and what is called
inanimate, nature. March is the trying month of indecision, the
tug-of-war between winter and spring, pulling us first one way and then
the other, the victory often being, until the final moment, on the side
of winter. Then comes a languid period of inaction, and a swift recovery.
When the world finally throws off frost bondage, sun and the earth call,
while humanity, indoors and out, in city tenement as well as in
farmhouse, hears the voice, even though its words are meaningless, and
grows restless.

Lavinia Dorman writes that she is feeling tired and low-spirited, the
doctor has advised a tonic, and she misses the change of planting her
back-yard garden. Down in the streets the tenement children are swarming
in the sunny spots, and dancing to the hand-organs. I saw them early last
week when I was in town for a few hours.

In one of the downtown parks the youngsters were fairly rolling in the
dirt, and rubbing their cheeks on the scanty grass as they furtively
scooped up handfuls of cement-like soil to make mud pies, in spite of the
big policeman, who, I like to think, was sympathetically blind.

The same impulse stirs my boys, even though they have all outdoors around
them. They have suddenly left their house toys and outdoor games alike to
fairly burrow in the soil. The heap of beach sand and pebbles that was
carted from the shore and left under an old shed for their amusement, has
lost its charm. They go across the road and claw the fresh earth from an
exposed bank, using fingers instead of their little rakes and spades,
and decorate the moist brown "pies" they make with dandelion ornaments.

A few days ago the Vanderveer boy came down to play with them,
accompanied by an English head nurse of tyrannical mien, and an
assortment of coats and wraps. The poor little chap had been ailing half
the winter, it seems, with indigestion and various aches, until the
doctor told his mother that she must take him to the country and try a
change, as he feared the trouble was chronic appendicitis; so the entire
establishment has arrived to stay until the Newport season, and the boy's
every movement is watched, weighed, and discussed.

The nurse, having tucked him up in a big chair in the sun on the porch,
with the boys for company, and in charge of father, who was looking at
him with a pitying and critical medical eye, said she would leave him for
half an hour while she went up the lane to see Martha Corkle. A few
moments after, as I glanced across the road, I saw my boys burrowing away
at their dirt bank, and their guest with them. I flew downstairs to call
him in, fearing for the consequences, but father, who was watching the
proceedings from the porch, laid a detaining hand upon me, saying: "His
mother has consulted me about the child, and really sent him down here
that I may look him over, and I am doing it, in my own fashion. I've no
idea the trouble is appendicitis, though it might be driven that way. I
read it as a plain case of suppressed boyhood.

"He doesn't know how to play, or run naturally without falling; he's
afraid to sit down in the dirt--no wonder with those starched linen
clothes; and he keeps looking about for the nurse, first over one
shoulder and then over the other, like a hunted thing. Evidently they
have weighed his food, measured his exercise, and bought his amusements;
his only free will and vent is to get in a temper. They give him no
chance to sweat off his irritation, only to fume; while that shaking,
snorting teakettle of an automobile they bowl him about in, puts the
final touch to his nervousness."

Then I sat down by father and watched the three boys together, while
Richard was preventing his guest from pounding a toad with a stone
because it preferred to hop away instead of being made into a dirt pie,
and I saw the truth of what he said. The seven-year-old child who went to
riding school, dancing school, and a military drill, did not know how to
express his emotions in play, and frozen snowballs and other cruelty was
his distorted idea of amusement. Poor rich boy, sad little only son, he
was not allowed the freedom to respond to the voice of nature even as the
tenement children that dance in the streets to the hand-organs or stir
the mud in the gutter with their bare toes. It is not the tenement
children of New York who are to be pitied; it is those that are being
fitted to keep the places, in the unstable and frail crafts of the
Whirlpool, that their parents are either striving to seize or struggling
to reserve for them.

At the end of half an hour the boys came back to the porch, all three
delightfully and completely dirty, and clamouring that they were hungry.
The English tyrant not appearing, I took them into the house and, after a
washing of hands and faces, gave the boys the usual eleven o'clock lunch
of milk and simple cookies to take out in the sun to eat. As they were
thus engaged the tyrant appeared on the horizon, horror written in every
feature, and a volley of correction evidently taking shape on her lips,
while an ugly look of cowed defiance spread itself over the child's face
as he caught sight of her.

There was no scene, however. Father said in the most offhand way, as if
being obeyed was a matter of course, "Go back and tell your mistress that
I am carrying out her request, and that after luncheon I will send the
boy safely home, with a written message."

"But his medicines, his hour's rest alone in the dark, his special
food,--the medical man in New York said--" protested the woman,
completely taken aback.

"You heard my message?" said father, cheerfully, and that was all.

"What are you going to advise?" I asked, as in the middle of the
afternoon father came from his office, where he had given the lad a
thorough inspection.

"Simply to turn him loose in light woollen clothes, give him companions
of his age, and let him alone."

"Can't you word it differently?" I asked.

"Why, is not that fairly direct?" he replied, looking surprised; "and
surely the direct method is almost always the best."

"I think this is the one case where it is not, dear old Daddy. In fact,
if you are destined, as I see that you are, to pick up and tie the
threads of ravelled health in the Bluff Colony, you will have to become
more complicated, at least in speech, accustomed as they are to a series
of specialists, and having importance attached to the very key in which a
sneeze is pitched.

"Those few words would savour to the Whirlpoolers of lack of proper
respect and consideration. You must give a name to both ailment and cure
if you expect to be obeyed. Call the case a 'serious one of physical
suppression,' and the remedy the 'fresh earth cure,' to be taken only in
light woollen clothes, tell them to report progress to you every other
day, and you gain the boy his liberty."

Father laughed heartily, and his nose twitched in a curious way it has
when he is secretly amused and convinced against his will; but I think he
took my advice, at least in part, for the next morning Papa Vanderveer
drove down in the brake, announcing in a shout that "De Peyster slept all
night without waking up and crying, for the first time in months,"
adding, "And, Dr. Russell, if you've got anything further in this liberty
line to suggest, even to getting rid of the Duchess, now's your time.
'The Duchess?' Ah, she is that confounded head nurse woman that Maria
will keep so that things may be done properly, until the poor kid's
nearly been done for, I say. The Ponsonbys are crazy to get the woman to
break in their youngest girl and keep her down and from growing up until
they marry the others off; so Maria could part with her in the light of a
favour to them, don't you see, without spilling blood. Peysey'll have to
have some sort of a chaser, though, or Maria'll not hear of it."

Mr. Vanderveer glowed all over with delight when father condemned the
automobile as a nerve racker, and suggested that a young man of the
companionable tutor order, who could either play games, fish, and drive
with the boy and his chums, or at times leave him wholly alone, according
to need, would be a good substitute for a woman who viewed life as a
school of don'ts, and had either wholly outlived her youth, or else had
most unpleasant recollections of it.

"I've got my innings at last," he said. "You're the first doctor I've had
who hasn't sided with Maria and shut me out until pay day."

"I wonder why spring is such a restless season," I said half to myself
and half to father, as I sat on the porch half an hour later, trying to
focus my mind on writing to Lavinia Dorman, while father, lounging on the
steps opposite, was busy reading his mail.

"One would think we might be content merely to throw off winter and look
and enjoy, but no, every one is restless,--birds, fourfoots, and humans.
Lavinia Dorman writes that Sylvia Latham has just started for California
to see her brother, and she expects to bring her father back with her.
The boys disappeared mysteriously in the direction of Martha Corkle's
immediately after breakfast, Evan went reluctantly to the train,
declaring that it seemed impossible to sit still long enough to reach the
city, you are twisting about and shuffling your feet, looking far oftener
at the river woods than at your letters, and as for myself, it seems as
if I must go over yonder and seize Bertel's spade and show him how to dig
those seed beds more rapidly, so that I can begin to plant and kneel down
and get close to the ground. Yesterday when the boys came in with very
earthy faces, and I questioned them, I found that they had stuck their
precious noses in their mud pies, essaying to play mole and burrow
literally."

"It is the same mystery as the sweating of the corn," replied father,
gathering his letters in a heap and tossing them into a chair with a
gesture of impatience; "none of us may escape, even though we do not
understand it.

"It was years ago that I first heard the legend from an old farmer of the
corn belt, who, longing for a sight of salt water, had drifted eastward
into one of the little hill farms beyond the charcoal camp. He had been
bedridden nearly all winter, but uncomplainingly, his wife and
daughter-in-law caring for him, and it was not until the early part of
May, when all the world was growing green, that he began to mend and at
the same time groan at his confinement.

"I tried to cheer him up, telling him that the worst was over, and that
he soon would be about again, and he replied: ''Tain't me that's doin' of
it, Doctor, hit's the sweatin' of the corn. You know everywhere in May
folks be plantin' corn, the time bein' the sign that frost is over and
done with.' I nodded assent, and he continued: 'Now naterally there's
lots of corn in ear and shelled and ground to meal that isn't planted,
and along as when the kernels in the ground begins to swell and sprout,
this other corn knows it and begins to heave and sweat, and if it isn't
handled careful-like, and taken in the air and cooled, it'll take on all
sorts of moulds and musts, and like as not turn useless. I holds it's
just the same with folks,--when springtime comes they fetch up restless
and need the air and turning out to sweeten in the sun until they settle
down again, else their naturs turn sour, pisen'us, and unwholesome,
breedin' worms like sweated corn!'

"Since then I've heard it here and there in other words, but always the
same motive, the old miller holding it all fact and no legend at all,
saying that if he can keep his surplus corn from sweating and well aired
through May and June, he never fears for it in the damper, more potent
August heat. One thing is certain, that in my practice in countryside,
village, and town, if strange doings break out and restless
discontentment arises, it is never in winter, when I should expect
partial torpidity to breed unrest, but in the pushing season of renewal,
and, as the old man terms it, 'corn sweating.'"

* * * * *

A little later I was going toward the garden when father called after me
to say that he was soon starting for a long trip, quite up to Pine Ridge,
and that if I cared to go, taking a lunch for both, it might give me a
chance to "turn and sweeten" in the sun and cure my restlessness with
natural motion.

Go? Of course my heart leaped at the very thought, because, in spite of
the boys, those long drives with father have grown more precious as they
grow more rare. But where were the twins? They had disappeared under my
very eyes; of a surety they must be at Martha's, but my conscience smote
me when, on glancing at the clock, I saw that it was two hours since they
left the breakfast table in their brand-new sailor suits, with the
intention of showing them to her.

No, they were not at Martha's, and she came hurrying back with me, a very
clucking hen of alarm. Timothy Saunders, who had by that time brought
round the horses in the stanhope, ventured the opinion that they might be
below, paddling in the duck pond, as all the village children gathered
there at the first warm weather, "jest fer all the world like gnats the
sun's drawd oot."

They were not there! Father had disappeared to make some preparations
for the drive, and so I asked Timothy to drive with me along the
highway toward the village. I did not feel exactly worried, but then
one never knows.

We had gone half a mile perhaps, vainly questioning every one, when I
spied two small figures coming across a field from the east, where the
ground fell lower and lower for a mile or so until it reached salt water.

"There be the lads!" shouted Timothy Saunders, as if I had been a
hundred yards away, and deaf at that; but the noise meant joy, so it was
welcome. "My, but they're fagged and tattered well to boot!" And so they
were; but they struggled along, hand in hand, waving cheerfully when
they caught sight of me, and finally crept through the pasture bars by
which I was waiting, and enveloped me with faint, weary hugs. Then I
noticed that they wore no hats, their fresh suits were grimy with a gray
dust like cement, the knees of their stockings and underwear were worn
completely through to red, scratched skin, and the tips entirely scraped
from their shoes.

I gathered them into the gig, and sought the explanation as we drove
homeward, Timothy hurried by the vision of tearful Martha, whom he had
seen with the tail of his eye dodge into the kitchen, her apron over her
head, as he turned out the gate.

"We've been playing we was moles," said Ian, in answer to the first
question as to where they had been. "Yesterday we tried to do it wif
our own noses, but we couldn't, 'cause it hurt, and we wanted to go
ever so far."

"So we went down to where those big round stone pipes are in the long
hole," said Richard, picking up the story as Ian paused. (Workmen had
been laying large cement sewer pipes from the foot of the Bluffs, a third
of a mile toward the marshes, but were not working that day, owing to
lack of material.) "They made nice mole holes, so I crawled right in, and
for a little it was bully fun."

"Oh Richard, Richard, what made you?" I cried, holding him so tight that
he squirmed away. "Suppose the other end had been closed, and you had
smothered in there, and mother had never found you?" for the ghastly
possibility made my knees quake.

"Oh no, mother," he pleaded, taking my face between his grimy hands and
looking straight in my eyes, "it wasn't a dark hole. I could see it light
out 'way at the other end, and it didn't look so vely far as it was to
crawl it. And after a little I'd have liked to back out, only--only,
well, you see, I couldn't."

"Why not?" I asked, and, as he did not answer, I again saw a vision of
two little forms wedged in the pipes.

"That _why_ was 'cause _I_ was in behind, and I _wouldn't_ back, and so
Dick couldn't," said Ian. "You see, Barbara, I really, truly had to be a
mole and get very far away, not to stay, only just for fun, you know," he
added, as he saw signs of tears in his brother's eyes, and began to feel
the smarting in his own bruised knees.

One blessed thing about Ian, even though he is sometimes passionate and
stubborn, and will probably have lots of trouble with himself by and by,
there isn't a drop of sneaky cur blood in him, which is the only trait
that need make a mother tremble.

What should I do, punish, or act as I longed to, coddle the boys and
comfort the poor knees? True, I had not forbidden them to crawl through
the sewer pipes, because the idea of their doing it had never occurred to
me, so they could not be said to have exactly disobeyed; but, on the
other hand, there was an unwritten law that they must not go off the
place without my permission, and the torn stockings furnished a hint.

"Mother is going away for all day with grandfather," I said slowly, as I
examined their knees. "Even though I never told you not to do it, if you
had stopped to think, you would have known it was wrong to crawl through
the pipes."

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