She didn't look at him. "I know now. By this time I know what my life expects of me," she said softly. "Now I know what I have always suspected. And I have the strength to endure, Doctor. Don't you worry about me."
VI
Junius Maltby was a small young man of good and cultured family and decent education. When his father died bankrupt, Junius got himself inextricably entangled in a clerkship, against which he feebly struggled for ten years.
After work Junius retired to his furnished room, patted the cushions of his morris chair and spent the evening reading. Stevenson's essays he thought nearly the finest things in English; he read Travels with a Donkey many times.
One evening soon after his thirty-fifth birthday, Junius fainted on the steps of his boarding house. When he recovered consciousness, he noticed for the first time that his breathing was difficult and unsatisfactory. He wondered how long it had been that way. The doctor whom he consulted was kind and even hopeful.
"You're by no means too far gone to get well," he said. "But you really must take those lungs out of San Francisco. If you stay here in the fog, you won't live a year. Move to a warm, dry climate."
The accident to his health filled Junius with pleasure, for it cut the strings he had been unable to sever for himself. He had five hundred dollars, not that he ever saved any money; he had simply forgotten to spend it. "With that much," he said, "I'll either recover and make a clean, new start, or else I'll die and be through with the whole business."
A man in his office told him of the warm, protected valley, the Pastures of Heaven, and Junius went there immediately. The name pleased him. "It's either an omen that I'm not going to live," he thought, "or else it's a nice symbolic substitute for death." He felt that the name meant something personal to him, and he was very glad, because for ten years nothing in the world had been personal to him.
There were, in the Pastures of Heaven, several families who wanted to take boarders. Junius inspected each one, and finally went to live on the farm of the widow Quaker. She needed the money, and besides, he could sleep in a shed separated from the farmhouse. Mrs. Quaker had two small boys and kept a hired man to work the farm.
The warm climate worked tenderly with Junius' lungs. Within the year his color was good and he had gained in weight. He was quiet and happy on the farm, and what pleased him more, he had thrown out the ten years of the office and had grown superbly lazy. Junius' thin blond hair went uncombed; he wore his glasses far down on his square nose, for his eyes were getting stronger and only the habit of feeling spectacles caused him to wear them. Throughout the day he had always some small stick protruding from his mouth, a habit only the laziest and most ruminative of men acquire. This convalescence took place in 1910.
In 1911, Mrs. Quaker began to worry about what the neighbors were saying. When she considered the implication of having a single man in her house, she became upset and nervous. As soon as Junius' recovery seemed sure beyond doubt, the widow confessed her trepidations. He married her, immediately and gladly. Now he had a home and a golden future, for the new Mrs. Maltby owned two hundred acres of grassy hillside and five acres of orchard and vegetable bottom. Junius sent for his books, his morris chair with the adjustable back, and his good copy of Velasquez' Cardinal. The future was a pleasant and sunshiny afternoon to him.
Mrs. Maltby promptly discharged the hired man and tried to put her husband to work; but in this she encountered a resistance the more bewildering because it presented no hard front to strike at. During his convalescence, Junius had grown to love laziness. He liked the valley and the farm, but he liked them as they were; he didn't want to plant new things, nor to tear out old. When Mrs. Maltby put a hoe in his hand and set him to work in the vegetable garden, she found him, likely enough, hours later, dangling his feet in the meadow stream and reading his pocket copy of Kidnapped. He was sorry; he didn't know how it had happened. And that was the truth.
At first she nagged him a great deal about his laziness and his sloppiness of dress, but he soon developed a faculty for never listening to her. It would be impolite, he considered, to notice her when she was not being a lady. It would be like staring at a cripple. And Mrs. Maltby, after she had battered at his resistance of fog for a time, took to sniveling and neglecting her hair.
Between 1911 and 1917, the Maltbys grew very poor. Junius simply would not take care of the farm. They even sold a few acres of pasture land to get money for food and clothing, and even then there was never enough to eat. Poverty sat cross-legged on the farm, and the Maltbys were ragged. They had never any new clothes at all, but Junius had discovered the essays of David Grayson. He wore overalls and sat under the sycamores that lined the meadow stream. Sometimes he read Adventures in Contentment to his wife and two sons.
Early in 1917, Mrs. Maltby found that she was going to have a baby, and late in the same year the wartime influenza epidemic struck the family with a dry viciousness. Perhaps because they were undernourished, the two boys were stricken simultaneously. For three days the house seemed filled to overflowing with flushed, feverish children whose nervous fingers strove to cling to life by the threads of their bed-clothes. For three days they struggled weakly, and on the fourth, both of the boys died. Their mother didn't know it, for she was confined, and the neighbors who came to help in the house hadn't the courage nor the cruelty to tell her. The black fever came upon her while she was in labor and killed her before she ever saw her child.
The neighbor women who helped at the birth told the story throughout the valley that Junius Maltby read books by the stream while his wife and children died. But this was only partly true. On the day of their seizure, he dangled his feet in the stream, because he didn't know they were ill, but thereafter he wandered vaguely from one to the other of the dying children, and talked nonsense to them. He told the eldest boy how diamonds are made. At the bedside of the other, he explained the beauty, the antiquity and the symbolism of the swastika. One life went out while he read aloud the second chapter of Treasure Island, and he didn't even know it had happened until he finished the chapter and looked up. During those days he was bewildered. He brought out the only things he had and offered them, but they had no potency with death. He knew in advance they wouldn't have, and that made it all the more terrible to him.
When the bodies were all gone, Junius went back to the stream and read a few pages of Travels with a Donkey. He chuckled uncertainly over the obstinacy of Modestine. Who but Stevenson could have named a donkey "Modestine"?
One of the neighbor women called him in and cursed him so violently that he was embarrassed and didn't listen. She put her hands on her hips and glared at him with contempt. And then she brought his child, a son, and laid it in his arms. When she looked back at him from the gate, he was standing with the howling little brute in his arms. He couldn't see any place to put it down, so he held it for a long time.
The people of the valley told many stories about Junius. Sometimes they hated him with the loathing busy people have for lazy ones, and sometimes they envied his laziness; but often they pitied him because he blundered so. No one in the valley ever realized that he was happy.
They told how, on a doctor's advice, Junius bought a goat to milk for the baby. He didn't inquire into the sex of his purchase nor give his reason for wanting a goat. When it arrived he looked under it, and very seriously asked, "Is this a normal goat?"
"Sure," said the owner.
"But shouldn't there be a bag or something immediately between the hind legs?--for the milk, I mean."
The people of the valley roared about that. Later, when a new and better goat was provided, Junius fiddled with it for two days and could not draw a drop of milk. He wanted to return this goat as defective until the owner showed him how to milk it. Some people claimed that he held the baby under the goat and let it suck its own milk, but this was untrue. The people of the valley declared they didn't know how he ever reared the child.
One day Junius went into Monterey and h
ired an old German to help him on the farm. He gave his new servant five dollars on account, and never paid him again. Within two weeks the hired man was so entangled in laziness that he did no more work than his employer. The two of them sat around the place together discussing things which interested and puzzled them--how color comes to flowers--whether there is a symbology in nature--where Atlantis lay--how the Incas interred their dead.
In the spring they planted potatoes, always too late, and without a covering of ashes to keep the bugs out. They sowed beans and corn and peas, watched them for a time, and then forgot them. The weeds covered everything from sight. It was no unusual thing to see Junius burrow into a perfect thicket of mallow weeds and emerge carrying a pale cucumber. He had stopped wearing shoes because he liked the feeling of the warm earth on his feet, and because he had no shoes.
In the afternoon Junius talked to Jakob Stutz a great deal. "You know," he said, "when the children died, I thought I had reached a peculiar high peak of horror. Then, almost while I thought it, the horror turned to sorrow and the sorrow dwindled to sadness. I didn't know my wife nor the children very well, I guess. Perhaps they were too near to me. It's a strange thing, this knowing. It is nothing but an awareness of details. There are long-visioned minds and short-visioned. I've never been able to see things that are close to me. For instance, I am much more aware of the Parthenon than of my own house over there." Suddenly Junius' face seemed to quiver with feeling, and his eyes brightened with enthusiasm. "Jakob," he said, "have you ever seen a picture of the frieze of the Parthenon?"
"Yes, and it is good, too," said Jakob.
Junius laid a hand on his hired man's knee. "Those horses," he said. "Those lovely horses--bound for a celestial pasture. Those eager and yet dignified young men setting out for an incredible fiesta that's being celebrated just around the cornice. I wonder how a man can know what a horse feels like when it is very happy; and that sculptor must have known or he couldn't have carved them so."
That was the way it went. Junius could not stay on a subject. Often the men went hungry because they failed to find a hen's nest in the grass when it came suppertime.
The son of Junius was named Robert Louis. Junius called him that when he thought of it, but Jakob Stutz rebelled at what he considered a kind of literary preciousness. "Boys must be named like dogs," he maintained. "One sound is sufficient for the name. Even Robert is too long. He should be called 'Bob.' " Jakob nearly got his way.
"I'll compromise with you," said Junius. "We'll call him Robbie. Robbie is really shorter than Robert, don't you think?"
He often gave way before Jakob, for Jakob continually struggled a little against the webs that were being spun about him. Now and then, with a kind of virtuous fury, he cleaned the house.
Robbie grew up gravely. He followed the men about, listening to their discussions. Junius never treated him like a little boy, because he didn't know how little boys should be treated. If Robbie made an observation the two men listened courteously and included the remark in their conversation, or even used it as the germ of an investigation. They tracked down many things in the course of an afternoon. Every day there were several raids on Junius' Encyclopedia.
A huge sycamore put out a horizontal limb over the meadow stream, and on it the three sat, the men hanging their feet into the water and moving pebbles with their toes while Robbie tried extravagantly to imitate them. Reaching the water was one of his criteria of manhood. Jakob had by this time given up shoes; Robbie had never worn any in his life.
The discussions were erudite. Robbie couldn't use childish talk, for he had never heard any. They didn't make conversation ; rather they let a seedling of thought sprout by itself, and then watched with wonder while it sent out branching limbs. They were surprised at the strange fruit their conversation bore, for they didn't direct their thinking, nor trellis nor trim it the way so many people do.
There on the limb the three sat. Their clothes were rags and their hair was only hacked off to keep it out of their eyes. The men wore long, untrimmed beards. They watched the water-skaters on the surface of the pool below them, a pool which had been deepened by idling toes. The giant tree above them whisked softly in the wind, and occasionally dropped a leaf like a brown handkerchief. Robbie was five years old.
"I think sycamore trees are good," he observed when a leaf fell in his lap. Jakob picked up the leaf and stripped the parchment from its ribs.
"Yes," he agreed, "they grow by water. Good things love water. Bad things always been dry."
"Sycamores are big and good," said Junius. "It seems to me that a good thing or a kind thing must be very large to survive. Little good things are always destroyed by evil little things. Rarely is a big thing poisonous or treacherous. For this reason, in human thinking, bigness is an attribute of good and littleness of evil. Do you see that, Robbie?"
"Yes," said Robbie. "I see that. Like elephants."
"Elephants are often evil, but when we think of them, they seem gentle and good."
"But water," Jakob broke in. "Do you see about water too?"
"No, not about water."
"But I see," said Junius. "You mean that water is the seed of life. Of the three elements water is the sperm, earth the womb and sunshine the mold of growth."
Thus they taught him nonsense.
The people of the Pastures of Heaven recoiled from Junius Maltby after the death of his wife and his two boys. Stories of his callousness during the epidemic grew to such proportions that eventually they fell down of their own weight and were nearly forgotten. But although his neighbors forgot that Junius had read while his children died, they could not forget the problem he was becoming. Here in the fertile valley he lived in fearful poverty. While other families built small fortunes, bought Fords and radios, put in electricity and went twice a week to the moving pictures in Monterey or Salinas, Junius degenerated and became a ragged savage. The men of the valley resented his good bottom land, all overgrown with weeds, his untrimmed fruit trees and his fallen fences. The women thought with loathing of his unclean house with its littered dooryard and dirty windows. Both men and women hated his idleness and his complete lack of pride. For a while they went to visit him, hoping by their near examples to drag him from his sloth-fulness. But he received them naturally and with the friendliness of equality. He wasn't a bit ashamed of his poverty nor of his rags. Gradually his neighbors came to think of Junius as an outcast. No one drove up the private road to his house any more. They outlawed him from decent society and resolved never to receive him should he visit them.
Junius knew nothing about the dislike of his neighbors. He was still gloriously happy. His life was as unreal, as romantic and as unimportant as his thinking. He was content to sit in the sun and to dangle his feet in the stream. If he had no good clothes, at least he had no place to go which required good clothes.
Although the people almost hated Junius, they had only pity for the little boy Robbie. The women told one another how horrible it was to let the child grow up in such squalor. But, because they were mostly good people, they felt a strong reluctance for interfering with Junius' affairs.
"Wait until he's school age," Mrs. Banks said to a group of ladies in her own parlor. "We couldn't do anything now if we wanted to. He belongs to that father of his. But just as soon as the child is six, the county'll have something to say, let me tell you."
Mrs. Allen nodded and closed her eyes earnestly. "We keep forgetting that he's Mamie Quaker's child as much as Maltby's. I think we should have stepped in long ago. But when he goes to school we'll give the poor little fellow a few things he never had."
"The least we can do is to see that he has enough clothes to cover him," another of the women agreed.
It seemed that the valley lay crouched in waiting for the time when Robbie should go to school. When, at term opening, after his sixth birthday, he did not appear, John Whiteside, the clerk of the school board, wrote a letter to Junius Maltby.
"I hadn't tho
ught of it," Junius said when he read it. "I guess you'll have to go to school."
"I don't want to go," said Robbie.
"I know. I don't much want you to go, either. But we have laws. The law has a self-protective appendage called penalty. We have to balance the pleasure of breaking the law against the punishment. The Carthaginians punished even misfortune. If a general lost a battle through bad luck, he was executed. At present we punish people for accidents of birth and circumstance in much the same manner."
In the ensuing discussion they forgot all about the letter. John Whiteside wrote a very curt note.
"Well, Robbie, I guess you'll have to go," said Junius, when he received it. "Of course they'll teach you a great many useful things."
"Why don't you teach me?" Robbie pleaded.
"Oh, I can't. You see I've forgotten the things they teach."
"I don't want to go at all. I don't want to learn things."
"I know you don't, but I can't see any other way out."
And so one morning Robbie trudged to school. He was clad in an ancient pair of overalls, out at the knees and seat, a blue shirt from which the collar was gone, and nothing else. His long hair hung over his grey eyes like the forelock of a range pony.
The children made a circle around him in the school yard and stared at him in silence. They had all heard of the poverty of the Maltbys and of Junius' laziness. The boys looked forward to this moment when they could torture Robbie. Here was the time come; he stood in their circle, and they only stared at him. No one said, "Where'd you get them clothes," or, "Look at his hair," the way they had intended to. The children were puzzled by their failure to torment Robbie.
As for Robbie, he regarded the circle with serious eyes. He was not in the least frightened. "Don't you play games?" he asked. "My father said you'd play games."
And then the circle broke up with howls. "He doesn't know any games."--"Let's teach him pewee."--"No, nigger-baby." "Listen! Listen! Prisoner's base first."--"He doesn't know any games."
The Pastures of Heaven Page 10
