The following afternoon little Katie Landis came running down the road and in at the Reist gate. She greeted Amanda with, “Mom says you got to come to our place for supper.”
“To-day?”
“Yes. She’s goin’ to kill two chickens and have a big time and she wants you to come.”
“Anybody coming? Any company?”
“No, just you.”
“All right. Tell Mother I said thank you and I’ll be glad to come.”
“All right, I’ll run and tell her. I’m in a hurry, for me and Emma’s playin’ house and I got to get back to my children before they miss me and set up a howlin’.” She looked very serious as she ran off down the lane, Amanda smiling after her.
Later, as the girl went down the road to the Landis home she wondered whose birthday it might be, or what the cause of celebration. The child had been in such great haste--but what matter the significance of the festivity so long as she was asked to enjoy it!
“Here’s Amanda!” shouted several of the children gleefully, very boldly dropping the Miss they were obliged to use during school hours.
The guest found Mrs. Landis stirring up a blackberry pone, the three youngest Landis children watching the progress of it.
“Oh, hello, Amanda. I’m glad you got here early. Look at these children, all waitin’ for the dish to lick. Don’t it beat all how children like raw dough! I used to, but I wouldn’t eat it now if you paid me.”
“So did I. Millie chased me many a time.”
“Well, people’s tastes change in more than one way when they get older. I guess it’s a good thing. Here, Katie, take that doll off of that chair so Amanda can find a place to sit down. You got every chair in the house littered up with things. Ach, Amanda, I scold still about their things laying round but I guess folks that ain’t got children would sometimes be glad if they could see toys and things round the place. They get big soon enough and the dolls are put away. My, this will be an awful lonely house when the children all grow up! I’d rather see it this way, with their things scattered all around. But the boys are worse than the girls. What Charlie don’t have in his pants pocket ain’t in the ’cyclopedia. Martin was that way, too. He had an old box in the wood-shed and it was stuffed with all the twine and wire and nails he could find. But now, Amanda, ain’t it good he got that all made right at the bank so they know he ain’t a thief?
My, that was an awful sin for Mr. Mertzheimer to make our Mart out a thief! I just wonder how he could be so mean and ugly. I guess you wonder why I asked you up to-night. It ain’t nothin’ special, just a little good time because Martin got proved honest again. I just said to Mister this morning that I’m so glad for Martin I feel like makin’ something extra for supper and ask you up for you ain’t been here for a meal for long.”
“It’s grand to ask me to it.”
“Ach, we don’t mind you. You’re just like one of the family, abody might say. We won’t fix like for company, eat in the room or anything like that.”
“Well, I hope not. I’m no company. Let’s eat in the kitchen and have everything just as you do when the family’s alone.”
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Landis. “That will be more homelike.”
Mary helped to set the table in the big kitchen.
“Shall I lay the spoons on the table-cloth like we did when Isabel was here?” she asked her mother.
“Better put them in the spoon-holder,” Amanda told her. “I’m no company.”
“I’m glad you ain’t. I don’t like tony company like that girl was. She put on too much when she talked. And she had the funniest cheeks! Once she wiped her face when it was hot and pink came off on her handkerchief.”
Amanda laughed and kept smiling as she helped the child set the table for supper. Later she offered her services to Mrs. Landis. Martin, coming in from the dusty road, found her before the stove, one of his mother’s gingham aprons tied around her waist, and turning sweet potatoes in a big iron pan.
“Why, hello!” he said, pleasure written in his face. “Katie ran to meet me and said I couldn’t guess who was here for supper. Has Mother got you working? Um,” he sniffed, “smells awful much like chicken!”
“Ach,” his mother told him, “you just hold your nose shut a while! You and your pop can smell chicken off a mile. But you dare ring the supper bell, Martin, before you go up-stairs to wash, so your pop and the boys can come in now and get ready, too.”
Soon the savory, smoking dishes were all placed on the big table in the kitchen and the family with their guest gathered for the meal.
“Ain’t I dare keep my coat off, Mom?” asked Mr. Landis, his face flushed from a long hot day in the fields.
“Why, yes, if Amanda don’t care.”
“Why should I? Look at my cool dress! Take your coat off, Martin. I never could see why men should roast while we keep comfortable.”
As Martin stripped the serge coat off he thought of that other dinner when coats were kept on and dinner eaten in “the room” because of the presence of one who might take offense if she were expected to share the plain, every-day ways of the family. What a fool he had been! Their best efforts at style and convention must have looked very amateurish and incomplete to her--what a fool he had been!
“Ah, that looks good!” Mr. Landis said after he had said grace and everybody waited for the food to be passed. “Now we’ll just hand the platter around and let everybody help themselves, not so, Mom?”
“Yes, that’s all right. Start the potatoes once, Martin. Now you must eat, Amanda. Just make yourself right at home.”
“Martin, you must eat hearty, too,”, said the father. “Your mom made this supper for you.”
“For me? What’s the idea? Feeding the prodigal? Fatted calf and all that, Mother?” the boy asked, smiling,
“Calf--nothing!” exclaimed little Charlie. “It’s them two roosters Mom said long a’ready she’s goin’ to kill once and cook and here they are!”
Charlie wondered why everybody laughed at that but he soon forgot about it as his mother handed him a plate piled high with food.
Amanda scarcely knew what she was eating that day. Each mouthful had the taste of nectar and ambrosia to her. If she couldbelongto a family like that! She adored her own people and felt certain that no one could wish for a finer family than the one in which she had been placed, but it seemed, by comparison with the Landis one, a very small, quiet family. She wished she could be a part of both, make the twelfth in that charming circle in which she sat that day.
After supper Mrs. Landis turned to Amanda--"Now you stay a while and hear our new pieces on the Victrola.”
“I’ll help you with the dishes,” she offered.
“Ach, no, it ain’t necessary. Mary and I will get them done up in no time. You just go in the room and enjoy yourself.”
With little Katie leading the way and Martin following Amanda went to the sitting-room and sat down while Martin opened the Victrola.
“What do you like?” he asked. “Something lively? Or do you like soft music better?”
“I like both. What are your new pieces?”
“McCormack singing ‘Mother Machree---’”
“Oh, I like that! Play that!”
As the soft, haunting melody of “Mother Machree” sounded in the room Mrs. Landis came to the door of the sitting-room, dish towel in hand.
“Ach,” she said after the last verse, “I got that record most wore out a’ready. Ain’t it the prettiest song? When I hear that I think still that if only one of my nine children feels that way about me I’m more than paid for any bother I had with them.”
“Then, Mother,” said Martin, “you should feel more than nine times paid, for we all feel that way about you.”
“Listen, now!” The mother’s eyes were misty as she looked at her first-born. “Ach, play it again. I only hope poor Becky knows how much good her money’s doin’ us!”
Later Martin walked with Amanda up the moonlit road to her home. “I’ve had a lovely time, Martin,” she told him. “You do have the nicest, lively family! I wish we had a tableful like that!”
“You wouldn’t wish it at dish-washing time, I bet! But they are a lively bunch. I wonder sometimes how Mother escapesnerves. If she feels irritable or tired she seldom shows it. I believe six of us can ask her questions at once and she knows how to answer each in its turn. But Mother never does much useless worrying. That keeps her youthful and calm. She has often said to us, ’What’s the use of worrying? Worrying never gets you anywhere except into hot water--so what’s the use of it?’ That’s a pet philosophy of hers.”
“I remember that. I’ve heard her say it. Your mother’s wonderful!”
“She thinks the same about you, Amanda, for she said so the other day.”
“Me?” The girl turned her face from him so that the moonlight might not reveal her joy.
“You,” he said happily, laughing in boyish contentment. “We think Amanda Reist is all right.”
The girl was glad they had reached the gate of her home. She fumbled with the latch and escaped an answer to the man’s words. Then they spoke commonplace good-nights and parted.
That night as she brushed her hair she stood a long time before the mirror. “Amanda Reist,” she said to the image in the glass, “you better take care--next thing you know you’ll be falling in love!” She leaned closer to the glass. “Oh, I’ll have to keep that shine from my eyes! It’s there just because Martin walked home with me and was kind. I don’t look as though I need any boneset teanow!"
The next morning Amanda helped her mother with the Saturday baking while Millie and Uncle Amos tended market.
“This hot weather the pies get soft till Sunday if we bake them a’ready on Friday,” Mrs. Reist said to Millie, “so Amanda and I can do the bakin’ while you go to market. I guess we’ll have a lot of company again this Sunday, with church near here.”
“All right, let ’em come,” said the hired girl composedly. “I don’t care if you don’t. It’s a good thing we all like company pretty good, for I think sometimes people take this place for a regular boarding-house, the way they drop in at any time, just as like when we’re ready to set down for a meal as at any other hour. Philip said last week, when that Sallie Snyder dropped in just at dinner, that he’s goin’ to paint a sign, ‘Mad Dog,’ and hang it on the gate. But I think we might as well put one up, ‘Meals served at all hours,’ but ach, that’s Lancaster County for you!”
Mrs. Reist liked to do her baking early in the day. So it happened that when Martin Landis stopped in to see Amanda before he went to his work in the city he saw on the kitchen table a long row of pies ready for the oven and Amanda deftly rolling the edge of another.
“Whew!” he whistled. “Mrs. Reist, is that your work or Amanda’s so early in the morning?”
“Amanda’s! My granny used to say still that no girl was ready to get married till she could roll out a thin pie dough. I guess my girl is almost ready, for she got hers nice and thin this morning. Ach,” she thought in dismay as she saw the girl’s face flush, “now why did I say that? I didn’t think how it would sound. But Amanda needn’t mind Martin!”
Merry little twinkles played around Martin’s gray eyes as he answered, “I see. Looks as if Amanda’s ready for a husband--if she’s going to feed him on pies!”
“On pies--Martin Landis!” scorned the girl. “I’d have a dyspeptic on my hands after a few days of pie diet.”
“Well, you’d make a pretty good nurse, I believe.”
“Nurse--not me! The only thing I know how to nurse is hurt birds and lame bunnies and such things. You just lay them in a box and feed them, and if they get well you clap your hands, and if they die you put some leaves and flowers on them and bury them out in the woods--remember how we used to do that?”
“Do I? I should say I do! The time we had the fence hackey that Lyman Mertzheimer hurt with a stone--”
“Oh, and I nursed him and fed him, and when I let him go he bit my finger! I remember that! I was so cross at him I cried.”
“Wretch that he was,” said Martin. “But if we begin talking about those days I won’t get to work. I stopped in to ask you to go berrying with us this afternoon. I get out of the bank early. We can go up to the woods back of the schoolhouse. The youngsters are anxious to go, and Mother won’t let them go alone, since that copperhead was killed near here. I promised to take them, and we’d all like to have you come.”
“I’d love to go. I’ll be all ready. I haven’t gone for blackberries all season.”
“That’s true, we’ve been missing lots of fun.” He looked at her as though he were seeing her after a long absence. Somehow, he had missed something worth while from his life during the time his head had been turned by Isabel, and he had passed Amanda with a smile and a greeting and had no hours of companionship with her. Why, he didn’t remember that her eyes were so bright, that her red hair waved so becomingly, that--
“I’ll bring a kettle,” she said. “I’m going to pick till I fill it, too, just as we did when we were youngsters.”
“All right. We’ll meet you at the schoolhouse.”
The spur of mountains near Crow Hill was a favorite berrying range for the people of that section of Lancaster County. In July and August huckleberries, elders and blackberries grew there in fragrant luxuriance.
When Amanda, in an old dress of cool green, a wide-brimmed hat on her head, came in sight of the schoolhouse, she saw the Landis party approaching it from the other direction. She swung her tin pail in greeting.
“Oh, there’s Amanda!” the children shouted and ran to meet her, tin pails clanging and dust flying.
Martin, too, wore old clothes that would be none the worse for meeting with briars or crushed berries. A wide straw hat perched on his head made Amanda think, “He looks like a grown-up edition of Whittier’s Barefoot Boy.”
“Here we are, all ready,” said the leader, as they started off to the crude rail fence. Martin would have helped Amanda over the fence, but she ran from him, put up one foot, and was over it in a trice.
“Still a nimble-toes,” he said, laughing. “Mary, can you do as well?”
“Pooh, yes! Who can’t climb a fence?” The little girl was over it in a minute. The smaller children lay flat on the ground and squirmed through under the lower rail, while one of the boys climbed up, balanced himself on the top rail, then leaped into the grass.
“I see some berries!” cried Katie, and began to pick them.
“We’ll go in farther,” said Martin. “The bushes near the road have been almost stripped. Come on, keep on the path and watch out for snakes.”
There was a well-defined, narrow trail through the timbered land. Though the weeds had been trodden down along each side of it there were dense portions where snakes might have found an ideal home. After a long walk the little party was in the heart of the woods and blackberry bushes, dark with clusters, waited for their hands. Berries soon rattled in the tin pails, though at first many a handful was eaten and lips were stained red by the sweet juice. They wandered from bush to bush, picking busily, with many exclamations--"Oh, look what a big bunch!” “My pail’s almost full!” Little Katie and Charlie soon grew tired of the picking and wandered around the path in search of treasures. They found them--three pretty blue feathers, dropped, no doubt, by some screaming blue jay, a handful of green acorns in their little cups, a few pebbles that appealed to them, one lone, belated anemone, blooming months after its season.
The pails were almost filled and the party was moving up the woods to another patch of berries when little Mary turned to Amanda and said, “Ach, Amanda, tell us that story about the Bear Charm Song.”
“Yes, do!” seconded Charlie. “The one you told us once in school last winter.”
Amanda smiled, and as the little party walked along close together through the woods, she began:
“Once the Indians lived where we are living now---”
“Oh, did they?” interrupted Charlie. “Real Indians, with bows and arrows and all?”
“Yes, real Indians, bows and arrows and all! They owned all the land before the white man came and drove them off. But now the Indians are far away from here and they are different from the ones we read about in the history books. The Indians now are more like the poor birds people put in cages---” Her eyes gleamed and her face grew eloquent with expression as she thought of the gross injustice meted out to some of the red men in this land of the free.
“Go on, Manda, go on with the story,” cried the children. Only Martin had seen the look in her eyes, that mother-look of compassion.
“Very well, I’ll go on.”
“And, Charlie,” said Mary, “you keep quiet now and don’t break in when Manda talks.”
“Well,” the story-teller resumed, “the Indians who lived out in the woods, far from towns or cities, had to find all their own food. They caught fish, shot animals and birds, planted corn and gathered berries. Some of them they ate at once, but many of them they dried and stored away for winter use. While the older Indians did harder work, the little Indian children ran off to the woods and gathered the berries. But one thing they had to look out for--bears! Great big bears lived in the woods and they are very fond of sweet things. The bears would amble along, peel great handfuls of ripe berries from the bushes with their big clawed paws and eat them. So all good Indian mothers taught their children a Bear Charm Song to sing as they gathered berries. Whenever the bears heard the Bear Charm Song they went to some other part of the woods and left the children to pick their berries unharmed. But once there was a little Indian boy who wouldn’t mind his mother. He went to the woods one day to gather berries, but he wouldn’t sing the Bear Charm Song, not he! So he picked berries and picked berries, and all of a sudden a great big bear stood by him. Then the little Indian boy, who wouldn’t mind his mother, began to sing the Bear Charm Song. But it was too late. The great big bear put his big paws around the little boy and squeezed him, squeezed him, tighter and tighter and tighter--till the little boy who wouldn’t mind his mother was changed into a tiny black bat. Then he flew back to his mother, but she didn’t know him, and so she chased him and said, ’Go away! Little black bird of the night, go away!’ And that is where the bats first came from.”
“Ain’t that a good story?” said Charlie as Amanda ended. “Tell us another.”
“Not now. Perhaps after a while,” she promised. “Here’s another patch of berries. Shall we pick here?”
“Yes, fill the pails,” said Martin, “then we’ll be ready for the next number on the program. It seems Amanda’s the committee of one to entertain us.”
But the next number on the program was furnished by an unexpected participant. The berrying party was busy picking when a crash was heard as if some heavy body were running wild through the leaves and sticks of the woods near by.
“Oh,” cried Charlie, “I bet that’s a bear! Manda, sing a Bear Charm Song!”
“Oh,” echoed Katie in alarm, and ran to the side of Amanda, while Martin lifted his head and stood, alert, looking into the woods in the direction of the noise. The crashing drew nearer, and then the figure of a man came running wildly through the bushes, waving his hands frantically in the air, then pressing them to his face.
“It’s Lyman Mertzheimer!” Amanda exclaimed.
“With hornets after him,” added Martin.
The children, reassured, ran to the newcomer.
It was Lyman Mertzheimer, his face distorted and swollen, his necktie streaming from one shoulder, where he had torn it in a mad effort to beat off the angry hornets whose nest he had disturbed out of sheer joy in the destruction and an audacious idea that no insect could scare him away or worst him in a fight. He had underestimated the fiery temper of the hornets and their concentrated and persistent methods of defending their home. After he had run wildly through the woods for fifteen minutes and struck out repeatedly the insects left him, just as he reached the berrying party. But the hornets had wreaked their anger upon him; face, hands and neck bore evidence of the battle they had waged.
“First time hornets got me!” he said crossly as he neared the little party. “Oh, you needn’t laugh!” he cried in angry tones as Charlie snickered.
“But you look funny--all blotchy.”
The stung man allowed his anger to burst out in oaths. “Guess you think it’s funny, too,” he said to Amanda.
“No. I’m sure it hurts,” she said, though she knew he deserved no pity from her.
“We all know that it hurts,” said Martin. But there was scant sympathy in his voice.
“Smear mud on,” suggested Mary. “Once I got stung by a bumblebee when he went in a hollyhock and I held the flower shut so he couldn’t get out, and he stung me through the flower. Mom put mud on and it helped.”
“Mud!” stormed Lyman, stepping about in the bush and twisting his head in pain. “There isn’t any mud in Lancaster County now. The whole place is dry as punk!”
“If you had some of the mud you slung at me recently it would come in handy now,” Martin could not refrain from saying.
Another oath greeted his words. Then the stung young man started off down the road to find relief from his smarts, ignoring the fling.
“Well,” said Amanda, “well, of all things! For him to tackle a hornets’ nest! Just for the fun of it!”
“But he got his come-uppance for once! Got it from the hornets,” said Martin. “Serves him right.”
“But that hurts,” said Mary sympathetically. “Hornets hurt awful bad!”
“Yes,” said Martin as they turned homeward. “But he’s getting paid for all the mean tricks he’s played on other people.”
“Mebbe God made the hornets sting him if he’s a bad man,” said Charlie.
“We all get what we give out,” agreed Martin. “Lyman Mertzheimer will feel those hornet stings for a few days. While I’ve always been taught not to rejoice at the misfortunes of others I’m not sorry I saw him. I’ll call our account square now. You pitied him, didn’t you?” he asked Amanda suddenly. “I saw it in your eyes. So did Mary and Katie.”
“Of course I pitied him,” she confessed. “I’d feel sorry for anything or anybody who suffers. I know it serves him right, that he’s earned worse than that, and yet I would have relieved him if I could have done so. Nature meant that we should be decent, I suppose.”
The man was thoughtful for a moment. “Yes, I suppose so. It is a woman’s nature.”
“Would you have us different?”
“No--no--we wouldn’t have you different. Many of the best men would be mere brutes if women’s pity and tenderness and forgiveness were taken out of their lives--we wouldn’t have you different.”
The following Sunday at noon Martin passed the Reist farmhouse as he drove his mother and several of the children to Mennonite church at Landisville. After the service he passed that way again and noticed several cars stopping at Reists’. Evidently they were entertaining a number of visitors for Sunday dinner after the service, as is the custom in rural Lancaster County. The big porch was filled with people who rocked or leaned idly against the pillars, while in the big kitchen Millie, Amanda and Mrs. Reist worked near the hot stove and prepared an appetizing dinner for them.
Amanda did not shirk her portion of the necessary work, but rebellion was in her heart as she noted her mother’s flushed, tired face.
“Mother, if you’d only feel that Millie and I could get the dinner without you! It’s a shame to have you in this kitchen on a day like this!”
“Ach, I’m not so hot. I’m not better than you or Millie,” the mother insisted, and stuck to her post, while Amanda murmured, “This Sunday visiting--how I hate it! We’ve outgrown the need of it now, especially with automobiles.”
But at length the meal was placed upon the table, the guests gathered from porches and lawn and an hour later the dishes were washed and everything at peace once more in the kitchen. Then Amanda walked out to the garden at the rear of the house.
“Ooh,” she sighed in relief, “I’m glad that’s over! Visiting on such a day should be made a misdemeanor!” She pulled idly on a zinnia that lifted its globular red head in the hot August sun.
“Hey, Sis,” came Phil’s voice to her, “he wants you on the ’phone!”
“Who’s he?” she asked as the boy ran out to her in the garden.
They turned to the house, talking as they went.
“Well, Sis, you know whoheis! He’s coming round here all the time lately.”
A gentle shove from the girl rewarded the boy for his teasing, but he was not easily daunted. “Don’t you remember,” he said, “how that old Mrs. Haldeman who kept tine candy store near the market house in Lancaster used to call her husbandhe? She never called him Mister or Mr. Haldeman, justhe, and you could feel she would have written it in italics if she could.”
“Well, that was all right, there was only onehein the world so far as she was concerned. But do you remember, Phil, the time Mother took us in her store to buy candy and we talked to her canary and the old woman said, ’Ach, yes, I think still how good birds got it! I often wish I was a canary, but then he would have to be one too!’ We disgraced Mother by giggling fit to kill ourselves. But the old woman just smiled at us and gave us each a pink and white striped peppermint stick. Now run along, Phil, don’t be eavesdropping,” she said as they reached the hall and she sat down to answer the telephone.
“That you, Amanda?” came over the wire.
“Yes.”
“Got a houseful of company? It seemed like that when we drove past. Overflow meeting on the porch!”
“Oh, yes, as usual.”
“What I wanted to know is--are there any young people among the visitors, that makes it a matter of courtesy for you to stay at home all afternoon?”
“No, they are all older people to-day, and a few little children.”
“Good! Then how would you like to have a little picnic, just we two? I want to get away from Victrola music and children’s questions and four walls, and I thought you might have a similar longing.”
“Mental telepathy, Martin! That’s just what I was thinking as I was out in the garden.”
“Then I’ll call for you and we’ll go up past the sandpit to that hilltop where the breeze blows even on a day like this.”
When Martin came for her she was ready, a lunch tucked under one arm, two old pillows in the other. She had given the red hair a few pats, added several hairpins, slipped off her white dress and buttoned up a pale green chambray one with cool white collar and cuffs. She stood ready, attractive, as Martin entered the lawn.
“Say!” he whistled. “You did that in short order! I thought it took girls hours to dress.”
“Then you’re like Solomon; you can’t understand the ways of women!” She laughed as she handed him the lunch-box.
Her calm efficiency puzzled him. Lately he was discovering so many undreamed of qualities in this lively friend of his childhood. He was beginning to feel some of the wonder those people must have felt whose children played with pebbles that were one day discovered to be priceless uncut diamonds. Until that day she had found him prostrate in her moccasin woods he had thought of her as just Amanda Reist, a nice, jolly girl with a quick temper if you tried her too hard and a quick tongue to express it, but a good comrade and a pleasant companion if you treated her fairly.
Then his attitude had undergone a change. After that day of his great unhappiness he thought of her as a woman, staunch, courageous, yet gentle and feminine, one who had faith in her old friend, who could comfort a man when he was downcast and help him raise his head again. A wonderful woman she was! One who loved pretty clothes and things modern and yet appreciated the charm of the old-fashioned, and seemed to dovetail perfectly into the plain grooves of her people and his with their quaint old dress and houses and manners. A woman, too, who had an intense love for the great outdoors. Not the shallow, pretentious love that would call forth gushing rhapsodies about moonlight or sunsets or the spectacular alone in nature, but a sincere, deep-rooted love that shone in her eyes as she stooped to see more plainly the tracery of veins in a fallen leaf and moved her to gentle speech to the birds, butterflies and woodland creatures as though they could understand and answer.
As they walked down the country road he looked at her. He had a way of noticing women’s clothes and had become an observant judge of their becomingness. In her growing-up days Amanda had been frequently angered by his frank, unsolicited remarks about the colors she wore--this blue was off color for her red hair, or that golden brown was just the thing. Later she grew accustomed to his remarks and rather expected them. They still disconcerted her at times, but she had long ago ceased to grow angry about them.
“That green’s the color for you to-day,” he said, as they went along. “Do you know, I’ve often thought I’d like to see you in a black gown and a string of real jade beads around your neck.”
“Jade! Was there ever a red head who didn’t wish she had a string of jade beads?”
“You’d be great!”
“So would the price,” she told him, laughing. “A string of real jade would cost as much as a complete outfit of clothes I wear.”
“Then you should have black hair and cheap coral ones would do.”
“Why, Martin,” she said in surprise, “youarestudying color combinations, aren’t you?”
“Oh, not exactly; I’m not interested in all colors. But say, that reminds me--I saw a girl in Lancaster last winter who had hair like yours and about the same coloring. She wore a brown suit and brown hat and furs--it was great.”
“I’d like to have that.” Daughter of Eve! She liked it because he did! “But don’t speak about furs on a day like this! It’s hot--too hot, Martin, for a houseful of company, don’t you think so?”
“It is hot to stand and cook for extra people.”
“Well, perhaps it’s wicked, but I hate this Sunday visiting the people of Lancaster County indulge in! I never did like it!”
“I’m not keen about it myself. Sunday seems to me to be a day to go to church and rest and enjoy your family, sometimes to go off to the woods like this. But a houseful of buzzing visitors swarming through it-- whew! it does spoil the Sabbath.”
“I never did like to visit,” confessed the girl. “Not unless I went to people I really cared for. When we were little and Mother would take Phil and me to visit relatives or friends I merely liked I’d be there a little while and then I’d tug at Mother’s skirt and beg, ’Mom, we want to go home.’ I suppose I spoiled many a visit for her. I was self-willed even then.”
“You are a stubborn person,” he said, with so different a meaning that Amanda flushed.
“I know I am. And I have a nasty temper, too.”
“Don’t you know,” he consoled her, “that a temper controlled makes a strong personality? George Washington had one, the history books say, but he made it serve him.”
“And that’s no easy achievement.” The girl spoke from her own experience. “It’s like pulling molars to press your lips together and be quiet when you want to rear and tear and stamp your feet.”
“Well, come down to hard facts, and how many of us will have to admit that we have feelings like that at times? There is still a good share of the primitive man left in our natures. We’re not saints. Why, even the churches that believe in saints don’t canonize mortals until they have been a hundred years dead--they want to be sure they are dead and their mortal weaknesses forgotten.”
Amanda laughed. A moment later they turned from the country road and followed a narrower path that was bordered on one side by green fields and on the other by a strip of woods, an irregular arm reaching out from Amanda’s moccasin haunt. The road led up-hill at a sharp angle, so that when the traveler reached the top, panting and tired, there stretched before him in delightful panorama a view of Lancaster County that more than compensated for the discomfort and effort of the climb.
Amanda and Martin stood facing that sight. Behind them lay the cool, tree-clad hill, before them the blue August sky looked down on Lancaster County farms, whose houses and red barns seemed dropped like kindergarten toys into the midst of undulating green fields. One could sit or stand under the sheltering shade of the trees along the edge of the woods and yet look up to the sky or out upon the Garden Spot and farther off, to the blue, hazy mountain ridge that touched the sky-line and cut off the view of what lay beyond.
Martin threw the pillows on the ground and they sat down in the cool shade.
“Can anything beat this?” he asked lazily as he ruffled the dry leaves about him with his hands. “You know, Amanda, I could never understand why, with my love for outdoors, I can’t be a farmer. When I was a boy I used to consider it the natural thing for me to do as my father did. I did help him, but I never liked the work. You couldn’t coax the other boys to the city; they’d rather pitch hay or plant corn. And yet I like nothing better than to be out in the open. During the summer I’m out in the garden after I come home from the city, and that much of working the soil I like, but for a steady job--not for me!”
“It’s best to do work one likes,” said the girl. “Not every person who likes outdoors was meant to be a farmer. Be glad you like to be out in the open. But I can’t conceive of any person not liking it. I could sit and look at the sky for one whole day. It’s so encouraging. Sometimes when I walk home from school after a hard day and I look down on the road and think over the problems of handling certain trying children so as to get the best out of them and the latent best in them developed, I look up all of a sudden and the sky is so wonderful that, somehow, my troubles seem trivial. It’s just as though the sky were saying, ’Child, you’ve been looking down so long and worrying about little things that you’ve forgotten that the sky is blue and the clouds are still sailing over you.’ And, Martin, don’t you like the stars? I never get tired of looking at them. I never care to gaze at the full moon unless there are clouds sailing over her. She’s too big and brazen, too compelling. But the twinkle of the stars and the sudden flashing out of dim ones you didn’t see at first always makes me feel like singing. Ever feel that way?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t put it all into words like that.”
“Ah,” he thought, “she has the mind of a poet, the heart of a child, the soul of a woman.”
“I read somewhere,” she went on, as though certain of his understanding and sharing her mood, “that the Pagans said man was made to stand upright so that he might raise his face to heaven and his eyes to the stars. Somehow, it seems those old Pagans had a finer conception of many vital truths than some of us have in this age.”
“That’s true. We have them beaten in many ways, but when we come across a thing like that we stop to think and wonder where they got it. I always did like mythology. Pandora and her box, Clytie and her emblem of constancy, and Ulysses--what schoolboy escaped the thrills of Ulysses? I bet you pitied Orpheus!”
“I did! But aren’t we serious for a picnic? Next thing we know one of us will be saying thirdly, fourthly, or amen!”
“I don’t know--it suits me. You’re so sensible, Amanda, it’s a pleasure to talk with you. Most girls are so frothy.”
“No disparaging remarks about our sex,” she said lightly, “or I’ll retaliate.”
“Go on,” he challenged, “I dare you to! What’s the worst fault in mere man?”
She raised her hand in protest. “I wash my hands of that! But I will say that if most girls are frothy, as you say, it’s because most men seem to like them that way. Confess now, how many shallow, frothy girls grow into old maids? It’s generally the butterfly that occasions the merry chase, straw hats out to catch it. You seldom see a straw hat after a bee.”
“Oh, Amanda, that’s not fair, not like you!” But he thought ruefully of Isabel and her butterfly attractions. “I admit we follow the butterflies but sometimes we wake up and see our folly. True, men don’t chase honeybees, but they have a wholesome respect for them and build houses for them. After all, the real men generally appreciate the real women. Sometimes the appreciation comes too late for happiness, but it seldom fails to come. No matter how appearances belie it, it’s a fact, nevertheless, that in this crazy world of to-day the sincere, real girl is still appreciated. The frilly Gladys, Gwendolyns and What-nots still have to yield first place to the old-fashioned Rebeccas, Marys and Amandas.”
Her heart thumped at the words. She became flustered and said the first thing that came into her head to say, “I like that, calling me old-fashioned! But we won’t quarrel about it. Let’s eat our lunch; that will keep us from too much talking for a while.”
Martin handed her the box. He was silent as she opened it. She noted his preoccupation, his gray eyes looking off to the distant fields.
“Come back to earth!” she ordered. “What are you dreaming about?”
“I was just thinking that youareold-fashioned. I’m glad you are.”
“Well, I’m not!” she retorted. “Come on, eat. I just threw in some rolls and cold chicken and pickles and a few peaches.”
The man turned and gave his attention to the lunch and ate with evident enjoyment, but several times Amanda felt his keen eyes scrutinizing her face. “What ails him?” she thought.
“This is great, this is just the thing!” he told her several times during the time of lunch. “Let’s do this often, come up here where the air is pure.”
“All right,” she agreed readily. “It will do you good to get up in the hills. I don’t see how you stand being housed in a city in the summer! It must be like those awful days in the early spring or in the fall when I’m in the schoolroom and rebel because I want to be outdoors. I rebel every minute when the weather is nice, do it subconsciously while I’m teaching the states and capitals or hearing tables or giving out spelling words. Something just keeps saying inside of me, ’I want to be out, want to be out, be out, be out!’ It’s a wonder I don’t say it out loud sometimes.”
“If you did you’d hear a mighty echo, I bet! Every kid in the room would say it after you.”
“Yes, I’m sure of that. I feel like a slave driver when I make them study on days that were made for the open. But it’s the only way, I suppose. We have to learn to knuckle very early.”
“Yes, but it’s a great old world, just the same, don’t you think so?”
“It’s the only one I ever tried, so I’m satisfied to stay on it a while longer,” she told him.
They laughed at that as only Youth can laugh at remarks that are not clever, only interesting to each other because of the personality of the speaker.
So the afternoon passed and the two descended again to the dusty country road, each feeling refreshed and stimulated by the hours spent together.