Felix cleared his throat by a husky effort habitual with him before speaking again. “We could indirectly benefit them from the beginning enough to satisfy any reasonable expectation.”
After that it might have been weeks before the enterprise took clearer shape. From time to time the children forgot it; they played through the long summer vacation; but when the first keen mornings of the autumn came, and the neighbors’ children went by with their books, they did not return to school. The privilege, with a grist-mill and sawmill on it, had been found and bought, they did not know where, any more than how, but it was ten or twelve miles from the town in another county. Their father and mother had driven out with their aunt and uncle to look at it; their uncle had taken his gun, and he brought back some squirrels in the bottom of his carriage; he said that he had almost got a shot at a wild turkey. With such facts before them Owen’s boys could not understand why their mother should be low-spirited about going to live at the mills. They heard their father talking with her after they went to bed, and she said: “But all that wildness makes my heart sink. I had enough of that when I was a girl, Owen. You know I never liked the country to live in.”
“I know, I know. But we shall soon have quite a village about us. At any rate, we shall have a chance to begin life again.”
“Oh yes. But it’s beginning so far back.”
In the morning she was cheerfuler, and their father told the children that they were to move out to the mills at once, and that he was to have charge of the property till the paper machinery could be put into the grist-mill. At the sawmill he was to get out the stuff for a new house that was to be built; but their hearts leaped when he told them that they were to live that winter in a log cabin.
It was Sunday, and the night was the last they spent at their uncle’s in the old way. It was not quite the old way, though. The piano was not opened, and the flute lay shut in its case. The brothers went over their plans, and they spoke of whom they might invite to join them after their success became apparent. It seemed that they meant to be careful, and ask only those who could take up the enterprise in an enlightened spirit. Owen Powell believed that a responsive feeling would be awakened in the neighbors when they saw that the new-comers did not wish merely to make money for themselves, but to benefit all by improvements that would increase the price of their land and give employment to their children.
Felix listened with his melancholy smile, absently rolling his cigar between his thumb and finger. “What shall we call the place?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Owen said. “Something that would imply our purpose of turning over quite a new leaf.”
They talked further of the details of their undertaking, and the children went on with their play. They were dramatizing their arrival at the mills, and one of them was shouting to a supposed inhabitant, “Is this place New Leaf Mills?”
“Hey? Hey?” their uncle called to them. “What’s that?”
“We’re just playing,” they explained.
“New Leaf — New Leaf Mills,” he repeated, musingly. “That wouldn’t be bad. What made you think of that name?” He bent a sidelong glance on the conscious group. —
The eldest of the boys ventured, “Why, father said you would turn over a new leaf at the mills, and we just called them that.”
“Yes, yes! Very good,” he said. “Do you hear that, Owen? We’ve got a name for our place. We can stencil it on our flour-barrels now, and when we get in our paper machinery we can make it our watermark.”
II
THE leaves were falling from the maples along the road, but they still hung brown and harsh on the sycamores that fringed the island between the tail-race and the river when Owen Powell and two of his boys passed the groaning and whistling mill and stopped with their wagon at the door of the old cabin. It was empty, but the door yielded to the hand that drew the leathern latch-string and lifted the rude wooden latch, and Powell made his boys note that this was a genuine log cabin, such as the pioneers of old dwelt in, and just such as he had himself lived in when a boy. He said that the string might have hung out of the cabin door of Daniel Boone; within, the ladder that climbed to the loft from a corner of the room could have led to the sleep that came from being chased by Indians; the hearth, that stretched half across the end of the cabin, was of the right backwoods dimensions; he excused the ax-hewn whitewashed walls as the sophistication of an age which had outgrown the round logs, chinked with moss and daubed with clay, of the true primitive architecture.
When he went back to the wagon to get their tools and provisions after the first moments of rejoicing, he dispersed the cows and pigs surrounding it as gently as if they had been a deputation from the neighbors who hung about the door of the mill and viewed with sardonic amusement the sole greeting offered the new-comers. They waited in silence till the Powells had gone into the cabin again, but they shouted together in laughter when the miller appeared at an upper door and launched a curse at the cabin walls. They tried to provoke him to greater bitterness as he rested his weight by one hand upon the rope that lowered the bags of flour to the backs of their horses; then one after another they mounted upon the balanced load and jogged away from the mill.
Powell was glad to find that his hand had not forgotten the cunning of one of the several crafts to which he had turned it in his early life when he came to glaze the broken panes in the small, weather-worn sashes of the four windows lighting the two rooms of the cabin; he had to replace the rotten flooring with smooth-sawn boards of poplar instead of the riven oak puncheons of pioneer times, but he was consoled to find that the floor of the garret could best be mended by throwing loose planks over its cracks and knot-holes. After their day’s work was done he strolled out with his boys to explore the region in which he hoped to found a new home. From the road that crossed the tail-race below the grist-mill and crept eastward into the woods rose an isolated hill to a height notable in that country of broad bottom-lands. It was steep on the north, next to the mill; it sloped more gently away toward the south, but on the east and west it was steep again. It was thickly wooded with broad-girthed oaks, slim maples and ashes, and a host of shag-bark hickories hanging full of the nuts that now shone white through the gaping seams of their greenish-brown husks, and dropped about the feet of the Powells as they climbed upward through the fallen leaves. A company of pigs feeding on the mast under the trees lifted their heads at the approaching steps with looks of impudent defiance; then they hooted in alarm and ran down the sides of the hill, just as they did in the passage which Powell remembered from Bloomfield’s poem of “The Farmer Boy.” A covey of quails throbbed away from a pile of brush; a squirrel clattered up the shaggy side of one of the hickories. The simple incidents touched his heart as he climbed to the top of the hill and looked out upon the peaceful landscape. Below was the huge grist-mill, gray and weather-beaten, but strong as when first built; a wall of primeval forest lowered the eastern horizon, but north and south the woods retreated and left the interval yellow with a hundred acres of standing corn, and green with broad spaces of meadow-land. The straight ribbon of the head-race stretched to the full dam of New Leaf Mills, whose smooth water spread up into the woods on the north. On the western hillsides were the openings of farms, where the blue smoke curled from the cabin chimneys. On the east a road stole out of the woods, down between the cornfields and the meadows, and lost itself in the woods upon the island framed between the mill-races and the river; another road wound round the hill and kept the course of the river southward out of sight.
The grist-mill fronted an acre of open space, with the hitching-rail for the farmers’ horses in the middle, and a few rods beyond it crouched the sawmill among piles of lumber and saw-logs. The saw, which had been hissing sharply at its work, now stopped for so long a breath that Powell knew the water-gate had been closed for the night, and the soft treble of the gristmill alone filled the nearer silence. From a distance the melancholy note of a farm boy calling his cows in the wo
ods struck upon his ear; the miller appeared in the open space with a measure of bran under his arm, and, calling “Pig, pig, pig, poo-ee!” was answered from the fence corners and wayside nooks with greedy cries, and then with shrill laments and plaintive protests against the kicks which he distributed among them with savage fairness. He held the measure in his left hand like a tambourine, and danced a goblin figure with his floury face bobbing to and fro and up and down as he leaped and kicked.
“Come, boys,” said Powell; “I see the other!New-Leafers are having their supper. It’s time for ours, too.”
They descended to their cabin and broiled their rashers of pork on the hickory coals; the tea-kettle swung from the crane above, and sang to itself; almost with the last mouthful they stretched themselves on the floor, and, with the scanty bedding they had brought under and over them, they fell asleep.
In the night one of the boys woke, and saw his father sitting up, and heard him softly groaning.
“What are you doing, father?” he asked, sitting up himself and speaking for the companionship of his own voice in the weird play of the firelight dying on the hearth.
“I was wondering,” Powell said, “whether we hadn’t laid these boards with the hard side up.”
They had a laugh together, and lay down to sleep again. Before he slept the boy fancied something at the window, a face looking in like the white-painted face of a clown with dark streaks running downward from the corners of the mouth; it vanished, and in the morning he thought he had dreamed it. He told his father, and his father said, “Very likely; one might dream anything on a bed like that.”
III
THE miller at New Leaf Mills had been there many years before that name was imagined; so many that he felt the mills a part of himself. He always meant to buy the privilege, with the farm on the shore above the dam and the island in the river. He was not afraid that the property would be sold away from him; he had been as good friends with the two old brothers who owned the mills as it was in his nature to be; and he somehow thought they shared his expectation that he should one day buy them.
He was not of the Virginian poor white stock which mostly peopled the region up and down the river; he had wandered into the place from somewhere farther north when he was a half-grown boy, and finished his growth in the family of the old miller to whom he had apprenticed himself and whom he succeeded in his house and home after marrying his daughter. He was now a man of forty, surly, solitary, and of a rude force of will and savage temper such as none of the farmers who stored their wheat with him in the deep bins of the mill would have cared to trifle with. Some of them called him Jacob and some Jake in the neighborhood familiarity, but with him they did not pass to the jokes or pranks they played among themselves. He was sometimes hospitable with his jug, but no one ventured to make free with it; and usually he was a sober man for the time and place. When he heard that the Larrabee brothers had sold the mills away from him without giving him warning, he thought first of his gun, and of going to the little town where they lived, and killing them each with a barrel of it; then he thought of his jug, perhaps because both the gun and the jug stood in the same corner. But after faltering a moment between them he only cleared the place of the farmers, who had come with their grists, and went over to the sawmill, where he presented himself in such violent pantomime that the saw-miller, Bellam, stopped his saw in the middle of a log and submissively joined him in the spree with which Overdale began to solemnize his wrong.
On the second story of the mill where the runs of stone were, with the bolting-cloths and the barreling-machine, a small space had been portioned off to serve as an office and a sleeping-room for Overdale when he ran the burrs at night. On dull days it was haunted by country loafers sodden with rain and drink; when he came in the loafers usually slunk out with the dogs that shared the buffalo robe forming his bed. He now pushed Bellam into his den and steeped his brain in whiskey raw from the still two miles away; and he drank so deep of the scathing liquor himself that Bellam drunkenly argued with him that no man ought to swill so much whiskey as that under any provocation. He pleaded tenderly with the miller, who had such longing for pity through his fury that when Bellam put out his hand with a maudlin wish to soothe him Overdale caught it and rushed him crazily through the mill, shouting out the details of the bad news with a flame of oaths. “Yes, they’ve sold the mills, and never give me a show. Sold ’em to a pack of lily-livered city folks that don’t know an elevator from a cooling-floor, and couldn’t dress a burr to save their souls from brimstone. Look at that run of stones! I’ve dressed ’em ever since they came into the mill, and there ain’t flour anywhere on the river up to the flour they turn out; I can tell their tune as far as I can hear it! Who’ll set the bolting-cloths when I’m gone? They’ll be barreling shorts, I’ll take my oath, in less than a month, and their flour won’t be worth a curse in the market. Shorts? It’ll be bran!”
Bellam ventured in a doubt of getting so far away as the end of his sentence which gave stateliness to his speech, “I thought you said it was going to be turned into a paper-mill!”
“Hell, yes! So I did. The burrs has got to come out; and they’ll be setting up a lot of milk-poultice tubs in their place, and you won’t see clean wheat in the bins any more, but rags all over the place, and the air fit to kill you with the steam and stink.” —
He plunged about among the machinery with Bellam’s rough hand in one of his and a smoky lamp held even with his forehead in the other, throwing gigantic formless shadows on the walls, and on the windows delicately laced with cobwebs and drifted with the floating flour. The two men stumbled to the basement, where the tall turbine wheels stood motionless in their tubs, with the water sullenly wasting under them, and then clambered back to the floor, where the elevator filled the cups of its long belt with wheat and followed it to the top of the mill where it discharged them into the machine which blew it clean of cockle and smut and left it ready for the hoppers. Everything was in order, and at every point Overdale poured out his boastful lamentation. He gathered, as he passed the different heaps where they lay, now a handful of wheat, now of bran, now of middlings; he stopped at the bins under the bolting-cloths and swept up a double handful of the flour, white, airy, clinging and light as April snow, and played with it, testing its smoothness with tipsy pathos; and so lapsed from his noisy grief in a dumb despair.
As the miller grew silent Bellam grew sleepy; he was dimly aware at last of being dragged back to Overdale’s den and kicked forward onto the buffalo robe with a soft and muffled kick. When he woke the machinery of the mill was rattling and whistling round him; and he could hear the mad hum of the burrs, which sent out a gunpowdery odor from the flints triturated under the empty hoppers. He tumbled tremulously down to the gates to shut off the fearful head of water rushing on the wheels, and found Overdale stretched on the wet stones beside them. The miller’s face was always white from the flour, but now it was of such a different white that Bellam thought he was dead. He dragged him within reach of the spray from the tubs, and the miller opened his eyes. He opened his mouth, too, and blasphemed so lucidly that there could be no doubt for Bellam that he was in his right mind; without bating a curse he jumped to his feet and shut off the water. Bellam took the path that led to the sawmill and started the saw where he had stopped it the evening before, and then waited in a drowse till breakfast-time. As he went home to his cabin on the island, past the grist-mill, he saw Overdale sitting in the doorway of the second story. The machinery had got back its mellow note of contented industry, and the miller was smoking a quiet pipe. He drew down his shaggy brows in his habitual frown of greeting as Bellam passed, but neither spoke, though Overdale quelled in himself a crazy impulse to ask the saw-miller about the dream which was hanging cloudily in his brain. It was as if Bellam must know about it if he had broken in upon it when he pulled Overdale from the stones beside the wheels. Overdale was not sure that he was dreaming it precisely then, but he seemed to have first be
come aware of it when he came to himself, and he was conscious of an instant effort to resist it and put it away. That would have been easier if the thing had been at once anything but a formless dread in which the sale of the mills away from him had begun to weigh like doom. As nearly as he could grasp the significance of it, with his rude mind, unused to any hold on mystery, it meant that the mills from being the daily wont of him had suddenly become a vital part, and that he could not be separated from them and live. He would not have put his vague foreboding in these words if he could have put it in any, as yet. It was there in his sense, destined to gather weight and point, and have power upon him from every superstitious vagary which he had heretofore supposed unheeded hearsay, but which he should hereafter find inexorably remembered.
He let Bellam go, but he was still smoking, irresolutely wishing he had kept him and put his shapeless trouble to the best of his knowledge, when a voice before the mill door under him called up in a high thin pipe:
“Hello, Overdale! Have you heard the news?”
The miller leaned forward and glowered down into the face of the man below. It was the young lawyer, Captain Bickler. As he sat his horse there he showed himself a spare, graceful figure in a black broadcloth coat and black cassimere pantaloons covered to the knees with green baize leggins. He wore a silk velvet waistcoat, with a gold watch-chain crossing it; the peak of a flat oilcloth cap came over his forehead to his shifty hazel eyes; his dark hair fell from the sides in locks carefully turned in at the ends. His clothes were of a cut that the neighbors understood to be fashionable; it was known that he got them at a clothing-store in the City, as the people of the region called the large town that formed its center.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 896
