The Untempered Wind

by Joanna E. Wood

Homer was not one to put his hand to the plough and then draw back. He threw into his work all the energy of his resolute will, and backed it by the severest physical toil he was capable of. It was up-hill and disheartening work, but he toiled on. He had disappointments enough and to spare, but he wrote them all down to Her, and forgot them when he read that she was "so sorry."

He had progressive ideas which sometimes worried him sorely, for it was trying to see others availing themselves of modern appliances for cultivating, etc., while Homer felt bound to struggle on with the old implements his father possessed, which called for double the expenditure of labor and time, and even then did not yield satisfactory results.

In the spring, too, it took the heart out of him to walk the rows of his peach orchard and find a third of the trees killed, girdled by the teeth of the field-mice. Homer's heart almost failed him when he discovered this last mishap, for he was oppressed by the knowledge that he could have prevented it. It was true that he could not afford the expensive shields of metal for his trees that some of his neighbors had, but if, immediately after that heavy snowstorm of last winter, he had gone out and tramped the snow tightly round each tree, then they would not have been girdled; for the snow, if left undisturbed, never clings close to a peach tree; there is always a space between, and the mice creep round and round the tree in this space, gnawing it to the height of the snow. The peach trees next the fence, where the snow had drifted, were girdled completely up to a height of three or four feet.

Homer had visited Her in the winter. The week after the heavy snowstorm had been spent with her. His mother reminded him of this, and he flung out of the house angrily. He was fairly sick over the loss of his trees, and to have anything cold said about Her was too much. He wrote Her all about it; perhaps in his desperate longing for sympathy, loving sympathy and comprehension, he depicted the disaster as even more serious than it really was.

He waited for her letter eagerly. It came. Her frivolous, mercenary soul had taken fright. She sheltered herself behind the old excuse for disloyalty—worn thread-bare by women of all stations. She wrote that she felt she "did not love him as she should if she was to be his wife."

He had sent the little Home-boy to the Post-Office for the letter; he brought it to the field where Homer was planting out tomato-plants. Homer Wilson read his letter twice or thrice, put it carefully in its envelope, and then safely in his pocket. He went on with his task—slowly—slowly, though, with none of the tremulous haste with which he had been exhausting himself for months. He packed the roots with soil; it was some relief, the hard, resistent pressure of the earth; there was something left to battle against, if nothing left to fight for. So he continued his row, feeling a fierce wrath if one of the shaky little plants would not stand straight, and hushing the Home-boy's chatter with a terrible, pale look.

He completed his task, and went about his other work in an atmosphere of enforced calm that was torture. By some chance none of his tasks that day called for any output of physical strength. It was a day of small things, trivial tasks which maddened him by their helpless need for patience, not strength.

But the weariest hours pass, and night fell over the village as a veil. Then he wrote to Her a few straightforward, manly lines, setting her free; telling her she had acted rightly if she did not love him. Then he lay down for another night of poignant thought. He recalled Her visit to the farm, and remembered how impatient he had felt when his mother maundered on about sending back the basket the strawberries went in. He had felt a little ashamed of his mother's thrift just then.

When the morning came Homer was ready for work, but there had been a distinct decadence in him during the night that was past. He had no longer anything to live for but money; he rose to search for this only good with eager, greedy eyes. For this poor countryman had come of a long race of penurious, grasping men and women, and that mercenary craving for money and land had been latent in his nature since his birth. When he went to the business college it stirred within him vaguely, and might then have developed, but better ambitions ousted it. But these aspirations were gone, and in their place flourished—grown to its full height in a single night—the Upas Tree of Greed.

He told his people next day. His mother promptly said, "I knowed how it would be! A big-feeling, handless creature, idle and good for nothing! With her airified ways and her notions; I told you so all along, Homer," etc., etc. But Homer, ere even the second word was spoken, was out of the house and striding along with black brows to his tomatoes. The row he had planted the day before looked limp; by night they were yellow—withered—dead. In replanting them he found each stalk broken clean off below the earth; he had indulged his strength too much in packing the earth about them. Day by day the change in him went on—gradually, almost imperceptibly, but startlingly apparent, had any one contrasted the Homer of the present with the man of the past. It was very pitiful. Worst of all, he was conscious himself of the change, but could not analyze it, so could do nothing to arrest the atrophy of his soul.