Neighbours.

by Robert Stead.

CHAPTER I.

My earliest recollection links back to a grey stone house by a road entering a little Ontario town. Across the road was a mill-pond, and across the mill-pond was a mill; an old-fashioned woolen mill which was the occasion and support of the little town. Beside the mill was a water-wheel; not a modern turbine, but a wooden wheel which, on sunshiny days, sprayed a mist of jewels into the river beneath with the prodigality of a fairy prince.

My father worked in the mill, as did most of the men and many of the women of the town. That was before Unionism had succeeded in any general introduction of the eight-hour day; my father started work at seven in the morning and worked until six at night. His days were full of the labor of the mill, but his evenings and the early, sun-bright summer mornings belonged to his tiny farm at the border of the town. We had two cows, a pig or two, some apple and cherry trees, and little fields of corn and clover.

The mill-pond was held in check by a stone dam which crossed from the road almost in front of our door to a point on the mill itself. The stone crest of this dam rose about two feet above the level of the water in the mill-pond, and was about two feet wide. Along this crest my father walked on his way to and from the mill, but I had strict orders not to attempt the feat, with the promise that I would be thrashed "within an inch of my life" if I did.

And now I must introduce Jean Lane, daughter of our nearest neighbour, Mr. Peter Lane. Jean is to travel with us through most of the chapters of this somewhat intimate account, and you may as well meet her at four, bare-footed and golden-haired and blue-eyed, with a wisp of white cotton dress and a gleam of white teeth set between lips of rose-leaf. Demurely down the road she came to where I lay sprawled on the river bank contemplating the leisured precision of the water-wheel beyond. When she reached me she paused, sat down, and buried her feet in the soft sand of the bank.

"I want to go to the mill," she said, when her little toes were well out of sight.

"But you can't go to the mill," I said, with the mature authority of six. "You'd fall in."

"I wouldn't, neither,"--she glanced at me elfishly from under her yellow locks--"not if you helped me."

It was a difficult situation. Here was I, a young man of six, honored by a commission of great responsibility from a young woman of four. My native gallantry, as well as a pleasant feeling of competence, urged that I immediately lead her across that two foot strip of masonry. But the parental veto, and the promise of being thrashed within an inch of my life, sorely, and, as it seemed to me, unfairly, curbed my chivalry.

"I'd like to take you over, Jean," I conceded, "but my father won't let me."

"Did you' father say you mustn't take _me_ over?" With almost uncanny intuition she thrust at the vulnerable spot in the armor of my good behavior.

"No; he didn't say anything about you."

"Then you can take me?"

I dug my toes into the sand beside hers, but did not answer.

"If my big bruvver John was here he'd take me over, _quick_," she continued, with a quivering lip.

John Lane was six, like me, and no bigger. The allusion to him as her big brother, who would take her over _quick_, and the quivering lip, were too much.

I scrambled to my feet. "Come," I said, with masculine recklessness, starting for the dam, and she followed joyously.

We were about half way over when something happened--I never knew what--but I plumped into deep water like a stone thrown from the sh.o.r.e.

I took a great mouthful and came up spluttering, choking, frantic. The slippery wall gave no grip for my hands, and in a moment I must have gone down again, but Jean's head came out over the ledge and her little arms were reached down to mine. I grasped them and hung on--hung in water to my neck, while Jean and I both shouted l.u.s.tily.

Help came quickly in the person of my father, who had seen the accident from one of the upper windows of the mill, and had come rushing out at a pace which had quite upset the operatives on his route. I was dragged up on the dam in a moment, and I can remember Jean standing beside my father, crying a little, and saying, "Please don' scold him, Mr. Hall. I made him do it."

I expected my father to scold her, but he took her up in his arms and held her to his breast.

"You're a brave little girl, Jean; you're a wonderful little girl," I heard him say, and he kissed her on the face, which he hardly ever did to me. Then homeward he led me, wet and miserable, and speculating silently on what it may mean to be thrashed within an inch of one's life.

But it proved to be a day of surprises. I was not thrashed within an inch of my life, nor at all; I was undressed, and rubbed with a warm towel, and put in bed, and given a large tumblerful of hot choke-cherry wine, because it was still early in the season and the water was cold.

And my little sister Marjorie came and looked at me with large, dark, comprehending eyes, and said, "I know why you didn't get thrashed?"

"Why didn't I get thrashed?" I ventured.

"Because you were so _awful_ wicked. When you're awful bad you don't get thrashed; its only when you're a little bad," she explained.

I had to stay in bed for the remainder of the day, which I think was more a punishment than a precaution, so I had opportunity to think on Marjorie's philosophy. It was evident that she was right; I had the proof in my own experience; I had been very wicked, and had escaped punishment. My ideas of wickedness were well defined. Wickedness consisted of telling lies, using bad words, disobeying one's parents, getting drunk, and cutting wood on Sunday. All our religion was negative; it consisted entirely of Thou Shalt Nots. It was utterly selfish. To my father, my mother, my little sister and myself the purpose of religion was to keep us from going to h.e.l.l, and, incidentally, to cause us to go to Heaven, although the hope element never weighed as much in our minds as did the fear element.

I have said that our religion was entirely a matter of Thou Shalt Nots, but I should make one exception. There was one Thou Shalt. Thou Shalt go to church every Sunday. Accordingly each Sunday morning I was crowded into a pair of boots and stockings and a suit with an uncomfortable white collar, and the four of us walked in great solemnity to the church of our faith. There were other churches in town, but I had already learned that it was almost as bad to go to them as not to go at all; in fact, our minister was suspected of believing that it was even worse. In any case we took no chances, and when, as happened on one or two occasions, our minister was unable to preach and no subst.i.tute had been found, we stayed religiously at home.

In the church we sat in a stiff, high-backed seat, where I was required to be very still through a tedious discourse of which I comprehended nothing whatever. In summer I usually contrived to enliven the time by a surrept.i.tious killing of beetles, with which the church was infested.

The building was small, but the preacher shouted at the top of his voice, as though in compet.i.tion with the rival preacher two blocks down the street, which I verily believe he was. When the sermon was over the plate was pa.s.sed and I deposited a copper--the only coin I ever handled until I was ten or twelve years old. Then we filed solemnly home again.

My consciousness of evil-doing, however, rested lightly upon me. I had escaped the strap which hung behind the kitchen door, and which was a much more immediate menace than any possible torments of the after-world. I spent the remaining hours of the day in imagining situations in which I would save Jean from all kinds of disasters.

Next morning found me none the worse for my experience; indeed my dip over the dam already seemed a more or less vague recollection. After breakfast I made a journey to the big pine which grew at the very end of our little farm--a surviving monarch of the forest that in some way had escaped the locust-cloud of axe-men which had swarmed through the country twenty years before. All the good pine had been cut out then, but the hardwoods, being heavier and more difficult to market, had been left, and with them my father had wrestled many a sundown hour, and into the night until he could no longer see. But this lone pine had remained standing, a proud and melancholy reminder of the greatness of the forest and of the insane destructiveness of the maggots of men who had over-run it, sweeping away in a season that which the centuries had borne but which the centuries will not return.

I took my way in the warm morning sun past the cow-stables--the "byre"

it was in those days--through the vegetable garden, and down a path between rows of sprouting corn which led to the uncleared land at the back of the farm. Here was a wooden fence to keep the cattle off the corn field. I slipped easily between the bars and followed the path, now a cow-path winding sinuously about the trunks of st.u.r.dy maples, until it brought me under the shadow of the great, green arms. Far aloft the old tree towered in majestic symmetry, and the morning breeze pa.s.sed through its branches with a sound as of a mighty wind. I threw myself on the gra.s.s at its feet, and there, lying on my back, with my eyes partly shaded by my hand, I watched the fleecy clouds far, far above as they trailed their gossamer laces across the blue portals of heaven, and dreamed of a day when I should do something great and be a hero in the eyes of Jean.

Perhaps it was as I lay under the great pine on that sunny summer morning and watched the filmy clouds float gently overhead that I caught my first glimpse, shyly, wonderingly, through the golden gates of romance. It was a vision of Jean; a vision which has remained with me through the years, growing, thrilling in my moments of happiness, fading in my hours of darkness, but at no time quite obscure. Perhaps it was my first glimpse of that vision which brought me on that morning to my feet where the great pine's swaying lacework of sun and shadow patterned the green gra.s.s and set my heart lilting with the joy of being alive.

I was about to shape my lips for a whistle when I became conscious of a presence. It was Jean, her golden locks held together by a midget sunbonnet, save for some vagrant curls which nestled against the peach-pink bloom of her cheeks; her chubby bare feet seeking cover in the gra.s.s.

"I saw you going to the big tree", she explained, "so I comed too."

"Uh-huh," I commented cautiously, being gripped with a sudden sense that this young woman had led me into difficulties only a day ago. Men cannot be too careful.

She sidled toward me. "Do you know what you have to do for yesterday?"

she queried.

"No," I said, with some misgiving, thinking that possibly my behavior had been reported to the Lanes to my disadvantage.

"Gwandma says when a young la-dy saves a young gen-tle-man, he-has-to-mawwy-her," she said, speaking very slowly at first, but finishing her sentence with a little run. "So you have to mawwy me."

She was beside me now, and her face was radiant with the excitement of her secret.

"But I can't marry you! Only grown-ups do that!" I protested.

"Won't we be gwown-ups some day?"

"I guess so," I admitted. And then with a sudden burst of resolution I added, "And then I'll marry you."

She held her face up to me and I leaned over and kissed it shyly. Then, hand in hand, we retraced our way down the cow-path, along the rows of sprouting corn, by the stables and past our house. Jean led me to her own home, which was next to ours, down the road.

"You have to ask Mama," she said, as our little figures dropped their shadows across Mrs. Lane's kitchen floor.

This was more than I had bargained for. I was beginning to discover that Miss Jean was a young woman of action as well as decision. But I was game.