________________________________________________
_ After the heavy work of harvest was over, Mrs. Wheeler often
persuaded her husband, when he was starting off in his buckboard,
to take her as far as Claude's new house. She was glad Enid
didn't keep her parlour dark, as Mrs. Royce kept hers. The doors
and windows were always open, the vines and the long petunias in
the window-boxes waved in the breeze, and the rooms were full of
sunlight and in perfect order. Enid wore white dresses about her
work, and white shoes and stockings. She managed a house easily
and systematically. On Monday morning Claude turned the washing
machine before he went to work, and by nine o'clock the clothes
were on the line. Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never before
in his life worn so many clean shirts, or worn them with such
satisfaction. She told him he need not economize in working
shirts; it was as easy to iron six as three.
Although within a few months Enid's car travelled more than two
thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said
that she neglected her house for reform. Whether she neglected
her husband depended upon one's conception of what was his due.
When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little establishment was
conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one
happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not
happy. And Claude himself wondered. If his marriage disappointed
him in some respects, he ought to be a man, he told himself, and
make the best of what was good in it. If his wife didn't love
him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another
thing to her. She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he
came in from the fields, and was solicitous for his comfort.
Everything about a man's embrace was distasteful to Enid;
something inflicted upon women, like the pain of childbirth,--
for Eve's transgression, perhaps.
This repugnance was more than physical; she disliked ardour of
any kind, even religious ardour. She had been fonder of Claude
before she married him than she was now; but she hoped for a
readjustment. Perhaps sometime she could like him again in
exactly the same way. Even Brother Weldon had hinted to her that
for the sake of their future tranquillity she must be lenient
with the boy. And she thought she had been lenient. She could not
understand his moods of desperate silence, the bitter, biting
remarks he sometimes dropped, his evident annoyance if she went
over to join him in the timber claim when he lay there idle in
the deep grass on a Sunday afternoon.
Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself,
"It's the end of everything for me." Other men than he must have
been disappointed, and he wondered how they bore it through a
lifetime. Claude had been a well behaved boy because he was an
idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in
love, and to deserving his happiness. He had never dreamed that
it might be otherwise.
Sometimes now, when he went out into the fields on a bright
summer morning, it seemed to him that Nature not only smiled, but
broadly laughed at him. He suffered in his pride, but even more
in his ideals, in his vague sense of what was beautiful. Enid
could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it. At
such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging
hospitality. He was wronging something in himself.
In her person Enid was still attractive to him. He wondered why
she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace
and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful
attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he
came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning
against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head
drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity
which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in
him? Was it, after all, his fault?
Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one
else, he noticed. Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every
day, and even took her driving in his old buckboard. Bayliss came
out from town to spend the evening occasionally. Enid's
vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him in the
Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss.
Bayliss had a social as well as a hygienic prejudice against
alcohol, and he hated it less for the harm it did than for the
pleasure it gave. Claude consistently refused to take any part in
the activities of the Anti-Saloon League, or to distribute what
Bayliss and Enid called "our literature."
In the farming towns the term "literature" was applied only to a
special kind of printed matter; there was Prohibition literature,
Sex-Hygiene literature, and, during a scourge of cattle disease,
there was Hoof-and-Mouth literature. This special application of
the word didn't bother Claude, but his mother, being an
old-fashioned school-teacher, complained about it.
Enid did not understand her husband's indifference to a burning
question, and could only attribute it to the influence of Ernest
Havel. She sometimes asked Claude to go with her to one of her
committee meetings. If it was a Sunday, he said he was tired and
wanted to read the paper. If it was a week-day, he had something
to do at the barn, or meant to clear out the timber claim. He
did, indeed, saw off a few dead limbs, and cut down a tree the
lightning had blasted. Further than that he wouldn't have let
anybody clear the timber lot; he would have died defending it.
The timber claim was his refuge. In the open, grassy spots, shut
in by the bushy walls of yellowing ash trees, he felt unmarried
and free; free to smoke as much as he liked, and to read and
dream. Some of his dreams would have frozen his young wife's
blood with horror--and some would have melted his mother's heart
with pity. To lie in the hot sun and look up at the stainless
blue of the autumn sky, to hear the dry rustle of the leaves as
they fell, and the sound of the bold squirrels leaping from
branch to branch; to lie thus and let his imagination play with
life--that was the best he could do. His thoughts, he told
himself, were his own. He was no longer a boy. He went off into
the timber claim to meet a young man more experienced and
interesting than himself, who had not tied himself up with
compromises. _
Read next: Book Three: Sunrise on the Prairie: Chapter 4
Read previous: Book Three: Sunrise on the Prairie: Chapter 2
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