Green Valley | Page 8

just as the 6:10 pulls in, you will see pouring joyously out of it
the Green Valley men, those who every day go to the great city to work
and every night come thankfully back to their little home town to live.
They hurry along in twos and threes, waving newspaper and hand
greetings to the home folks and the store proprietors who stand in their
doorways to watch them go by.
There is a fragrant smell of supper in the air and a slight feel of coming
rain. Here and there a mother calls a belated child. Doors slam, dogs
bark and a baby frets loudly somewhere. In somebody's chicken coop a
frightened, dozing hen gargles its throat and then goes to sleep again.
The frogs along Silver Creek and in Wimple's pond are going full blast,
and in her fragrant herb garden stands Grandma Wentworth. She is
looking at the gold-smudged western sky and watching the sweet,
spring night sift softly down on Green Valley.
She stands there a long time sensing the great tide of new life that is
flushing the world into a new, tingling beauty. She sees the lacy
loveliness of the birches, the budding green glory of her garden. Then
she smiles as she tells herself:
"It won't be long now till the lilacs bloom again. Nanny will be here
soon now. And who knows! Cynthia's boy may come back to live in his
mother's old home."
CHAPTER III
THE LAST OF THE CHURCHILLS
Even in beautiful Los Angeles days can be rainy and full of gnawing

cold and gloom.
On such a day Joshua Churchill lay dying. He could have died days
before had he cared to let himself do so. But he was holding on grimly
to the life he no longer valued and held off as grimly the death he really
craved. He was waiting for the coming of the boy who was so soon to
be the last of the Churchills.
He meant, this grim old man, to live long enough to greet the boy
whom he remembered first as a baby, then as a little chap of ten, and
later as a shy boy of seventeen.
Joshua Churchill had been to India several times. But he had never
stayed long. He said that no man who had spent the greater part of his
life in Green Valley could ever be happy or feel at home anywhere else.
Joshua Churchill went to India to see his daughter and grandson; but
mostly to coax that daughter's wonderful husband to give up his
fanatically zealous work among the heathen of the Orient and come and
live in peace and plenty in a little Yankee town where there was a drug
store and a post office and a mossy gray old stone church with a
mellow bell in its steeple.
The wonderful and big son-in-law always listened respectfully to his
big Yankee father-in-law. Then he would smile and point to the little
brown babies lying sick in their mothers' arms.
"Somebody," he would say gently, "must help and heal and neighbor
with these people."
As there was no answer that could be made to this the Yankee
father-in-law said nothing. But the very last time he was in India he
looked sharply at his daughter and then said wearily and bitterly:
"Sinner and saint--we men are all alike. We each in our own way kill
the women we love. Cynthia is dying for a sight of Green Valley and
Green Valley folks."

At that Cynthia's husband cried out. But Joshua Churchill did not stay
to argue. He went away and never came back. He wanted of course to
go back to Green Valley. But he could not bear to live alone in the big
house where he had once been so happy. So he went instead into exile.
And now he was dying in California.
As for Cynthia's husband, he discovered when it was too late to do any
good that while he had been saving the souls and the children of alien
women and men he had let the woman who was dearer to him than life
die slowly and unnoticed. Saints have always done that and they always
will.
Joshua Churchill meant to stay alive long enough to explain the
shortcomings of both saints and sinners to the boy who was the last of
the Churchills. He had half a mind to exact a promise from the boy. He
meant too to tell him a long and a rather strange story and implore him
to beware of a number of things.
But when Cynthia's son,--tall, bronzed and serene, smiled down on the
old man who even in death had the look of a master, the warnings, the
bitterness melted away and Joshua Churchill