The Desert and the Sown | Page 8

down these steps." He improved the formation
slightly in respect to the wind.
"Listen!" said Moya. "Isn't that your mother walking on the porch?
Father, I know, is writing. She will be lonely."
"She is never lonely, more or less. It is always the same loneliness--of a

woman widowed for years."
"How very much she must have cared for him!" Moya sighed
incredulously. What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler
vocations Paul's father should have been just a plain "hired man."
Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's man, even enlisted man, though that were
bad enough--any of these he might have been in an accidental way, that
at least would have been picturesque; but it is only the possession of
land, by whatsoever means or title, that can dignify an habitual
personal contact with it in the form of soil. That is one of the accepted
prejudices which one does not meddle with at nineteen. "Youth is
conservative because it is afraid." Moya, for all her fighting blood, was
traditionally and in social ways much more in bonds than Paul, who
had inherited his father's dreamy speculative habit of thought, with
something of the farm-hand's distrust of society and its forms and
shibboleth.
Paul's voice took a narrative tone, and Moya gave herself up to
listening--to him rather more, perhaps, than to his story.
Few young men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of
heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that
he did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at
Stone Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it
sprang the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up
in a houseful of brothers and sisters, governed by her mother instead of
an old ignorant servant, in all likelihood she would have married
differently--more wisely but not perhaps so well, her son would loyally
have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been
her suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor
and coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that
earlier generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony
farms, but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their
blood required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great
corruption later, in the state politics of their time.

IV
A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT
In the kitchen court called the "Airy" at Abraham Van Elten's, there
was one of those old family wells which our ancestors used to locate so

artlessly. And when it tapped the kitchen drain, and typhoid took the
elder children, and the mother followed the children, it was called the
will of God. A gloomy distinction rested on the house. Abraham felt
the importance attaching to any supreme experience in a community
where life runs on in the middle key.
A young doctor who had been called in at the close of the last case
went prying about the premises, asking foolish questions that angered
Abraham. It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the
farmer had ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed
with something stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own
crass ignorance. He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for
typhoid. But he prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with
the full weight and breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick;
Abraham's build was that of his maternal grandmother, Hillotje
Broderick.
On the Ridge, which later developed into a valuable slate quarry, there
was a spring of water, cold and perpetual, flowing out of the
trap-formation. Abraham had piped this water down to his barns and
cattle-sheds; it furnished power for the farm-work. But to bring it to the
house, in obedience to the doctor's meddlesome advice, would be an
acknowledgment of fatal mistakes in the past; would raise talk and
blame among the neighbors, and do away with the honor of a special
visitation; would cost no trifle of money; would justify the doctor's
interference, and insult the old well of his father and his father's father,
the fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness
cease in the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred
years was an act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid
way loved the very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments
that had taken hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his
obstinacy and clung as fast as his distrust of new opinions and new men.
The question of water supply was closed in his house;