“We got a good stand of winter wheat and oats. There’s the wheat. See how it ripples in the breeze? Look! You can see where it’s turning yellow. Pretty soon its jade-green dress will be as yellow as gold, and along in August I’ll cut it. That’s oats, over there”; and he pointed to a distant field of foot-high grain.
“It’s so pretty—all of it,” Sally sighed blissfully. “You wouldn’t think, just to look at a farm, that it makes people mean and cross and stingy and ugly, would you? Looks like growing things for people to eat ought to make us happy.”
“Farmers don’t see the pretty side; they’re too busy. And too worried,” David told her gravely. “I’m different. I live in the city in the winter and I can hardly wait to get to the farm in the summer. But it’s not my worry if the summer is wet and the wheat rusts. I’ll be happy to own a piece of land some day, though, even if I own all the worries, too. I’m going to be a scientific farmer, you know.”
“I’d love to live on a farm,” Sally agreed, with entire innocence. “But every evening at twilight I’d go out and look at my growing things and see how pretty a picture they made, and try to forget all the back-breaking work I’d put in to make it so pretty.”
They were walking single file now, in the soft, mealy loam of a field, David leading the way. She loved the way his tall, compact body moved—as gracefully and surely as a woman’s. She had the feeling that they were two children, who had slipped away from their elders. She had never known anyone like David, but she felt as if she had known him all her life, as if she could say anything to him and he would understand. Oh, it was delicious to have a friend!
“There’s the cornfield where I’ve been plowing,” David called back to her. “A fine crop. I’ve given it its last plowing this week. It’s what farmers call ‘laid by.’ Nothing to do now but to let nature take her course.”
It was so dark now that the corn looked like glistening black swords, curved by invisible hands for a phantom combat. And the breeze rustled through them, bringing to the beauty-drunk little girl a cargo of mingled odors of earth, ripe fruit and greenness thrusting up from the moist embrace of the ground to the kiss of the sun.
“Let’s sit here on the ground and watch the moon come up,” David suggested, his voice hushed with the wonder of the night and of the beauty that lay about them. “The earth is soft, and dry from the sun. It won’t soil your pretty dress.”
Sally obeyed, locking her slender knees with her hands and resting her chin upon them.
“Tired, Sally? They work you too hard,” David said softly, as he seated himself at a little distance from her. “I suppose you’ll be glad to get back to the—Home in the fall.”