I explained to her that it wasn't so easy as all that, but that I could probably finish it in a day or two. (As a matter of fact, I completed the story in Boston but mother got her share of the "loot" just the same.)
Soon afterward, while sitting in the door looking out over the fields, I pencilled the first draft of a little poem called Color in the Wheat which I also read to her.
She received this in the same manner as before, from which it appeared that nothing I wrote could surprise her. Her belief in my powers was quite boundless. Father was inclined to ask, "What's the good of it?"
Of course all of my visit was not entirely made up of hard labor in the field. There were Sundays when we could rest or entertain the neighbors, and sometimes a shower gave us a few hours' respite, but for the most part the weeks which I spent at home were weeks of stern service in the ranks of the toilers.
There was a very good reason for my close application to the fork-handle. Father paid me an extra price as "boss stacker," and I could not afford to let a day pass without taking the fullest advantage of it. At the same time, I was careful not to convey to my pupils and friends from Boston the disgraceful fact that I was still dependent upon my skill with a pitch-fork to earn a living. I was not quite sure of their approval of the case.
At last there came the time when I must set my face toward the east.
It seemed a treachery to say good-bye to my aging parents, leaving them and my untrained sister to this barren, empty, laborious life on the plain, whilst I returned to the music, the drama, the inspiration, the glory of Boston. Opposite poles of the world could not be farther apart. Acute self-accusation took out of my return all of the exaltation and much of the pleasure which I had expected to experience as I dropped my harvester's fork and gloves and put on the garments of civilization once more.
With heart sore with grief and rebellion at "the inexorable trend of things," I entered the car, and when from its window I looked back upon my grieving mother, my throat filled with a suffocating sense of guilt. I was deserting her, recreant to my blood!—That I was re-enacting the most characteristic of all American dramas in thus pursuing an ambitious career in a far-off city I most poignantly realized and yet—I went! It seemed to me at the time that my duty lay in the way of giving up all my selfish plans in order that I might comfort my mother in her growing infirmity, and counsel and defend my sister—but I did not. I went away borne on a stream of purpose so strong that I seemed but a leak in its resistless flood.
This feeling of bitterness, of rebellion, of dissatisfaction with myself, wore gradually away, and by the time I reached Chicago I had resolved to climb high. "I will carry mother and Jessie to comfort and to some small share, at least, in the world of art," was my resolve. In this way I sought to palliate my selfish plan.
Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts—that truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the happiness of others a monstrous egotism.