Jewel Weed. Alice Ames Winter
does not presume to criticize flowers.”
Mr. Davison changed his method of attack.
“Oh, of course I’m up against it,” he said, “with you three fresh from the academic halls. But I can tell you you’ll feel pretty lonely out here. The street-car conductors don’t talk Sanskrit in the West. They talk Swede.”
“Oh, this—this is home!” cried Madeline, springing up as if to shake off the conversation. “You don’t know how I love it! It’s fresh and vigorous and its face is forward.” She flung out her arms and smiled radiantly down on the three young men, as though she were an embodiment of the ozone of the Northwest.
“Sing to us, please, Madeline,” said Dick.
“Very well, I will,” she said. “I’ll sing you a song I made myself yesterday, when I was happy because I was at home again. Perhaps it will tell you how I feel, for it’s a song of Minnesota.” She turned and nodded to Mr. Davison, and then slipped through the doors to the room where the piano stood.
The long shadows of afternoon lay across the lawn, and the grass, more green than ever in the level light, clasped the dazzling blue of the quiet waters. The three men stretched themselves in their easy chairs, as a stroked kitten stretches itself, with a lounging abandon which is forbidden to their sisters, as Madeline’s voice rose fresh and true and touched with the joy of youth.
“Ho, west wind off the prairie;
Ho, north wind off the pine;
Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped,
Like cups of living wine;
Ho, mighty river rolling;
Ho, fallow, field and fen;
By a thousand voices nature calls,
To fire the hearts of men.
”Ho, fragrance of the wheat-fields;
Ho, garnered hoards of flax;
Ho, whirling millwheel, ’neath the falls;
Ho, woodman’s ringing ax.
Man blends his voice with nature’s,
And the great chorus swells.
He adds the notes of home and love
To the tale the forest tells.
“Oh, young blood of the nation;
Oh, hope in a world of need;
The traditions of the fathers
Still be our vital seed.
Thy newer daughters of the West,
Columbia, mother mine,
Still hold to the simple virtues
Of field and stream and pine.”
The song stopped abruptly, and Dick sprang to his feet.
“Good, Madeline!” he exclaimed. “You make me feel how great it is to be part of it.”
“Do I?” she said. “I thought of you when I wrote it. Oh, here come father and mother back from their drive.”
Mr. Davison rose hastily.
“I’d no idea it was so late,” he said. “I must be going. Miss Elton, I didn’t mean a word of all that about your being so clever. You’re all right.”
“Thanks for the tribute,” Madeline smiled as he disappeared down the drive. “Dick, I wish you’d always be on hand when he comes. He makes my brain feel like a woolly dog.”
“Rummy chap,” said Norris.
The older people came in to greet the boy they had known all his life, to ask the innumerable usual questions, to say the inevitable things through dinner.
Afterwards, when the last fragments of sunset burned through and across the water, they gathered on the piazza. It was that dreamy hour when women find it easy to be silent and men to talk. Madeline and her mother sat close, with hands restfully clasped in their joy at being together. Mr. Elton eyed the two young men from his vantage of years of shrewd wisdom. Both the boys were clean-shaven, after the manner of the day, a fashion that seems to become clean manliness, vigorous and self-controlled. Both were good to look at; but here the resemblance ended, for Dick’s long slender face and body lithe with its athletic training, was alive and restless, as though he found it difficult to keep back his passion for activity; Ellery, big but loosely joined, had the dogged look of one that held some of his energy in reserve. A good pair, Mr. Elton concluded, and felt a sudden spasm of longing for a son—not that he would have exchanged Madeline for any trousered biped that walked, but it would be a great thing to own one such well of young masculine vigor as these.
“It’s going to be great fun for us old fellows to sit back and watch you young ones,” the elder man ejaculated. “There are several good-sized jobs waiting for you.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Dick. “When there’s nothing to do, nobody’ll do it.”
“And it will be a tame sort of a world, eh? Well, thank the Lord, it’s none of our responsibility any longer. You’ve got to tackle it. The new phases of things are too much for me, with a brain solidified by years.”
“You might at least help us by stating the problem,” said Norris.
“You see, it’s like this. Until a few years ago every census map of the United States was seamed by a long line marked ‘frontier.’ That line is gone. That’s the situation in a nutshell. Our work, the subjugation of the land, is about done, and the question is now up to you; what are you going to do with it? You know the old story of the man who said he had a horse who could run a mile in two-forty. And the other fellow asked, ‘What are you going to do when you get there?’ We’ve done the running and our children are there. Now what? You must develop a whole set of new talents—not trotting talents, but staying talents.”
“I suppose,” said Norris slowly, for Dick was silent, “circumstances bring out abilities. That’s the law that operated in the case of the older generation, and we’ll have to trust to it in ours.”
“That’s true. But I sometimes wonder if, after all, we are helping you to the best preparation. We send you back to get the old education. The tendency of old communities is to rehash the traditions until they become authority. New communities have to face problems for themselves and solve them by new ways. The first kind of training makes scholars. The second brings out genius. The old makes men think over the thoughts of others. Heaven knows we need men who will think for themselves!”
“Well, ‘old and young are fellows’,” said Dick. “To-day grows out of yesterday.”
“Yes, if it grows. The growing is the point. It mustn’t molder on yesterday. You must have enough books to get your thinkers going, but not more. You must not feast on libraries until you get intellectual gout and have to tickle your palate with dainties. A good deal of stuff that’s written nowadays seems to me like literary cocktails—something to stir a jaded appetite. That’s my friend Early’s specialty—to serve literary cocktails. But the appetite you bolster up isn’t the equivalent of a good healthy hunger after a day out-of-doors.”
“When nature wants a genius, I suppose she has to use fresh seed,” said Dick.
“And genius is creative,” Mr. Elton went on. “So far, the genius this country has developed is that which takes the raw material of forest and river and creates civilization. And let me tell you that’s a very different job from heaping up population.”
Silence fell on the little group and they became suddenly aware of lapping waters and the sleepy twitter of birds, and even of a long slender thread of pale light that struck across the lake from a low-lying star. Madeline gave a little sigh and pressed her mother’s hand.
Dick flushed and hesitated in the darkness, with youth’s confidence in its own