The Lane That Had No Turning

Uncle Jim

He was no uncle of mine, but it pleased me that he let me call him Uncle

Jim.

It seems only yesterday that, for the first time, on a farm "over the

border," from the French province, I saw him standing by a log outside

the wood-house door, splitting maple knots. He was all bent by years and

hard work, with muscles of iron, hands gnarled and lumpy, but clinching

like a vise; grey head thrust forward on shoulders which had carried

forkfuls of hay and grain, and leaned to the cradle and the scythe, and

been heaped with cordwood till they were like hide and metal; white

straggling beard and red watery eyes, which, to me, were always hung with

an intangible veil of mystery--though that, maybe, was my boyish fancy.

Added to all this he was so very deaf that you had to speak clear and

loud into his ear; and many people he could not hear at all, if their

words were not sharp-cut, no matter how loud. A silent, withdrawn man he

was, living close to Mother Earth, twin-brother of Labour, to whom

Morning and Daytime were sounding-boards for his axe, scythe, saw, flail,

and milking-pail, and Night a round hollow of darkness into which he

crept, shutting the doors called Silence behind him, till the impish page

of Toil came tapping again, and he stepped awkwardly into the working

world once more. Winter and summer saw him putting the kettle on the fire

a few minutes after four o'clock, in winter issuing with lantern from the

kitchen door to the stable and barn to feed the stock; in summer sniffing

the grey dawn and looking out on his fields of rye and barley, before he

went to gather the cows for milking and take the horses to water.

For forty years he and his worn-faced wife bowed themselves beneath the

yoke, first to pay for the hundred-acre farm, and then to bring up and

educate their seven children. Something noble in them gave them ambitions

for their boys and girls which they had never had for themselves; but

when had gone the forty years, in which the little farm had twice been

mortgaged to put the eldest son through college as a doctor, they faced

the bitter fact that the farm had passed from them to Rodney, the second

son, who had come at last to keep a hotel in a town fifty miles away.

Generous-hearted people would think that these grown-up sons and

daughters should have returned the old people's long toil and care by

buying up the farm and handing it back to them, their rightful refuge in

the decline of life. But it was not so. They were tenants where they had

been owners, dependants where they had been givers, slaves where once

they were, masters. The old mother toiled without a servant, the old man

without a helper, save in harvest time.

But the great blow came when Rodney married the designing milliner who

flaunted her wares opposite his bar-room; and, somehow, from the date of

that marriage, Rodney's good fortune and the hotel declined. When he and

his wife first visited the little farm after their marriage the old

mother shrank away from the young woman's painted face, and ever

afterwards an added sadness showed in her bearing and in her patient

smile. But she took Rodney's wife through the house, showing her all

there was to show, though that was not much. There was the little parlour

with its hair-cloth chairs, rag carpet, centre table, and iron stove with

black pipes, all gaily varnished. There was the parlour bedroom off it,

with the one feather-bed of the house bountifully piled up with coarse

home-made blankets, topped by a silk patchwork quilt, the artistic labour

of the old wife's evening hours while Uncle Jim peeled apples and strung

them to dry from the rafters. There was a room, dining-room in summer,

and kitchen dining-room in winter, as clean as aged hands could scrub and

dust it, hung about with stray pictures from illustrated papers, and a

good old clock in the corner "ticking" life, and youth, and hope away.

There was the buttery off that, with its meagre china and crockery, its

window looking out on the field of rye, the little orchard of winter

apples, and the hedge of cranberry bushes. Upstairs were rooms with no

ceilings, where, lying on a corn-husk bed, you reached up and touched the

sloping roof, with windows at the end only, facing the buckwheat field,

and looking down two miles towards the main road--for the farm was on a

concession or side-road, dusty in summer, and in winter sometimes

impassable for weeks together. It was not much of a home, as any one with

the mind's eye can see, but four stalwart men and three fine women had

been born, raised, and quartered there, until, with good clothes, and

speaking decent English and tolerable French, and with money in their

pockets, hardly got by the old people, one by one they issued forth into

the world.

The old mother showed Rodney's wife what there was for eyes to see, not

forgetting the three hives of bees on the south side, beneath the parlour

window. She showed it with a kind of pride, for it all seemed good to

her, and every dish, and every chair, and every corner in the little

house had to her a glory of its own, because of those who had come and

gone--the firstlings of her flock, the roses of her little garden of

love, blooming now in a rougher air than ranged over the little house on

the hill. She had looked out upon the pine woods to the east and the

meadow-land to the north, the sweet valley between the rye-field and the

orchard, and the good honest air that had blown there for forty years,

bracing her heart and body for the battle of love and life, and she had

said through all, Behold it is very good.

But the pert milliner saw nothing of all this; she did not stand abashed

in the sacred precincts of a home where seven times the Angel of Death

had hovered over a birth-bed. She looked into the face which Time's

finger had anointed, and motherhood had etched with trouble, and said:

"'Tisn't much, is it? Only a clap-board house, and no ceilings upstairs,

and rag carpets-pshaw!"

And when she came to wash her hands for dinner, she threw aside the

unscented, common bar-soap, and, shrugging her narrow shoulders at the

coarse towel, wiped her fingers on her cambric handkerchief. Any other

kind of a woman, when she saw the old mother going about with her twisted

wrist--a doctor's bad work with a fracture--would have tucked up her

dress, and tied on an apron to help. But no, she sat and preened herself

with the tissue-paper sort of pride of a vain milliner, or nervously

shifted about, lifting up this and that, curiously supercilious, her

tongue rattling on to her husband and to his mother in a shallow, foolish

way. She couldn't say, however, that any thing was out of order or

ill-kept about the place. The old woman's rheumatic fingers made corners

clean, and wood as white as snow, the stove was polished, the tins were

bright, and her own dress, no matter what her work, neat as a girl's,

although the old graceful poise of the body had twisted out of drawing.

But the real crisis came when Rodney, having stood at the wood-house door

and blown the dinner-horn as he used to do when a boy, the sound floating

and crying away across the rye-field, the old man came--for, strange to

say, that was the one sound he could hear easily, though, as he said to

himself, it seemed as small as a pin, coming from ever so far away. He

came heavily up from the barn-yard, mopping his red face and forehead,

and now and again raising his hand to shade his eyes, concerned to see

the unknown visitors, whose horse and buggy were in the stable-yard. He

and Rodney greeted outside warmly enough, but there was some trepidation

too in Uncle Jim's face--he felt trouble brewing; and there is no trouble

like that which comes between parent and child. Silent as he was,

however, he had a large and cheerful heart, and nodding his head he

laughed the deep, quaint laugh which Rodney himself of all his sons

had--and he was fonder of Rodney than any. He washed his hands in the

little basin outside the wood-house door, combed out his white beard,

rubbed his red, watery eyes, tied a clean handkerchief round his neck,

put on a rusty but clean old coat, and a minute afterwards was shaking

hands for the first time with Rodney's wife. He had lived much apart from

his kind, but he had a mind that fastened upon a thought and worked it

down until it was an axiom. He felt how shallow was this thin, flaunting

woman of flounces and cheap rouge; he saw her sniff at the brown

sugar-she had always had white at the hotel; and he noted that she let

Rodney's mother clear away and wash the dinner things herself. He felt

the little crack of doom before it came.

It came about three o'clock. He did not return to the rye-field after

dinner, but stayed and waited to hear what Rodney had to say. Rodney did

not tell his little story well, for he foresaw trouble in the old home;

but he had to face this and all coming dilemmas as best he might. With a

kind of shamefacedness, yet with an attempt to carry the thing off

lightly, he told Uncle Jim, while, inside, his wife told the old mother,

that the business of the hotel had gone to pot (he did not say who was

the cause of that), and they were selling out to his partner and coming

to live on the farm.

"I'm tired anyway of the hotel job," said Rodney. "Farming's a better

life. Don't you think so, dad?"

"It's better for me, Rod," answered Uncle Jim, "it's better for me."

Rodney was a little uneasy. "But won't it be better for me?" he asked.

"Mebbe," was the slow answer, "mebbe, mebbe so."

"And then there's mother, she's getting too old for the work, ain't she?"

"She's done it straight along," answered the old man, "straight along

till now."

"But Millie can help her, and we'll have a hired girl, eh?"

"I dunno, I dunno," was the brooding answer; "the place ain't going to

stand it."

"We'll get more out of it," answered Rodney. "I'll stock it up, I'll put

more under barley. All the thing wants is working, dad. Put more in, get

more out. Now ain't that right?"

The other was looking off towards the rye-field, where, for forty years,

up and down the hillside, he had travelled with the cradle and the

scythe, putting all there was in him into it, and he answered, blinking

along the avenue of the past:

"Mebbe, mebbe!"

Rodney fretted under the old man's vague replies, and said: "But darn it

all, can't you tell us what you think?"

His father did not take his eyes off the rye-field. "I'm thinking," he

answered, in the same old-fashioned way, "that I've been working here

since you were born, Rod. I've blundered along, somehow, just boggling my

way through. I ain't got anything more to say. The farm ain't mine any

more, but I'll keep my scythe sharp and my axe ground just as I always

did, and I'm for workin' as I've always worked as long as I'm let to

stay."

"Good Lord, dad, don't talk that way! Things ain't going to be any

different for you and mother than they are now. Only, of course--" He

paused.

The old man pieced out the sentence: "Only, of course, there can't be two

women rulin' one house, Rod, and you know it as well as I do."

Exactly how Rodney's wife told the old mother of the great change Rodney

never knew; but when he went back to the house the grey look in his

mother's face told him more than her words ever told. Before they left

that night the pink milliner had already planned the changes which were

to celebrate her coming and her ruling.

So Rodney and his wife came, all the old man prophesied in a few brief

sentences to his wife proving true. There was no great struggle on the

mother's part; she stepped aside from governing, and became as like a

servant as could be. An insolent servant-girl came, and she and Rodney's

wife started a little drama of incompetency, which should end as the

hotel-keeping ended. Wastefulness, cheap luxury, tawdry living, took the

place of the old, frugal, simple life. But the mother went about with

that unchanging sweetness of face, and a body withering about a fretted

soul. She had no bitterness, only a miserable distress. But every slight

that was put upon her, every change, every new-fangled idea, from the

white sugar to the scented soap and the yellow buggy, rankled in the old

man's heart. He had resentment both for the old wife and himself, and he

hated the pink milliner for the humiliation that she heaped upon them

both. Rodney did not see one-fifth of it, and what he did see lost its

force, because, strangely enough, he loved the gaudy wife who wore gloves

on her bloodless hands as she did the house-work and spent numberless

afternoons in trimming her own bonnets. Her peevishness grew apace as the

newness of the experience wore off. Uncle Jim seldom spoke to her, as he

seldom spoke to anybody, but she had an inkling of the rancour in his

heart, and many a time she put blame upon his shoulders to her husband,

when some unavoidable friction came.

A year, two years, passed, which were as ten upon the shoulders of the

old people, and then, in the dead of winter, an important thing happened.

About the month of March Rodney's first child was expected. At the end of

January Rodney had to go away, expecting to return in less than a month.

But, in the middle of February, the woman's sacred trouble came before

its time. And on that day there fell such a storm as had not been seen

for many a year. The concession road was blocked before day had well set

in; no horse could go ten yards in it. The nearest doctor was miles away

at Pontiac, and for any man to face the journey was to connive with

death. The old mother came to Uncle Jim, and, as she looked out of a

little unfrosted spot on the window at the blinding storm, told him that

the pink milliner would die. There seemed to be no other end to it, for

the chances were a hundred to one against the strongest man making a

journey for the doctor, and another hundred to one against the doctor's

coming.

No one knows whether Uncle Jim could hear the cries from the

torture-chamber, but, after standing for a time mumbling to himself, he

wrapped himself in a heavy coat, tied a muffler about his face, and went

out. If they missed him they must have thought him gone to the barn, or

in the drive-shed sharpening his axe. But the day went on and the old

mother forgot all the wrongs that she had suffered, and yearned over the

trivial woman who was hurrying out into the Great Space. Her hours seemed

numbered at noon, her moments measured as it came towards sundown, but

with the passing of the sun the storm stopped, and a beautiful white

peace fell on the world of snow, and suddenly out of that peace came six

men; and the first that opened the door was the doctor. After him came

Uncle Jim, supported between two others.

Uncle Jim had made the terrible journey, falling at last in the streets

of the county town with frozen hands and feet, not a dozen rods from the

doctor's door. They brought him to, he told his story, and, with the

abating of the storm, the doctor and the villagers drove down to the

concession road, and then made their way slowly up across the fields,

carrying the old man with them, for he would not be left behind.

An hour after the doctor entered the parlour bedroom the old mother came

out to where the old man sat, bundled up beside the fire with bandaged

hands and feet.

"She's safe, Jim, and the child too," she said softly. The old man

twisted in his chair, and blinked into the fire. "Dang my soul!" he said.

The old woman stooped and kissed his grey tangled hair. She did not

speak, and she did not ask him what he meant; but there and then they

took up their lives again and lived them out.