The Portion of Labor

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Andrew Brewster, lying in the dewy grass under the apple-trees, giving way for almost the first time since his childhood to impulses which had hitherto, from his New England heredity, stiffened instead of relaxed his muscles of expression, felt as if he were being stung to death by ants. He was naturally a man of broad views, who felt the indignity of coping with such petty odds. “For God's sake, if I had to be done to death, why couldn't it have been for something?” he groaned, speaking with his lips close to the earth as if it were a listening ear. “Why need it all have been over so little? It's just the little fight for enough to eat and wear that's getting the better of me that was a man, and able to do a man's work in the world. Now it has come to this! Here I am runnin' away from a woman because she wants me to pay her three dollars, and I am afraid of another woman because—I've been and fooled away a few hundred dollars I had in the savings-bank. I'm afraid—yes, it has come to this. I am afraid, afraid, and I'd run away out of life if I knew where it would fetch me to. I'm afraid of things that ain't worth being afraid of, and it's all over things that's beneath me.” There came over Andrew, with his mouth to the moist earth, feeling the breath and the fragrance of it in his nostrils, a realization of the great motherhood of nature, and a contempt for himself which was scorching and scathing before it. He felt that he came from that mighty breast which should produce only sons of might, and was spending his whole life in an ignominy of fruitless climbing up mole-hills. “Why couldn't I have been more?” he asked himself. “Oh, my God, is it my fault?” He said to himself that if he had not yielded to the universal law and longing of his kind for a home and a family, it might have been better. He asked himself that question which will never be answered with a surety of correctness, whether the advancement of the individual to his furthest compass is more to the glory of life than the blind following out of the laws of existence and the bringing others into the everlasting problem of advance. Then he thought of Ellen, and a great warmth of conviction came over the loving heart of the man; all his self-contempt vanished. He had her, this child who was above pearls and rubies, he had her, and in her the furthest reach of himself and progression of himself to greater distances than he could ever have accomplished in any other way, and it was a double progress, since it was not only for him, but also for the woman he had married. A great wave of love for Fanny came over him. He seemed to see that, after all, it was a shining road by which he had come, and he saw himself upon it like a figure of light. He saw that he lived and could never die. Then, as with a remorseless hurl of a high spirit upon needle-pricks of petty cares, he thought again of the dressmaker, of the money for Ellen's watch, of the butcher's bill, and the grocer's bills, and the money which he had taken from the bank, and again he cowered beneath and loathed his ignoble burden. He dug his hot head into the grass. “Oh, my God! oh, my God!” he groaned. He fairly sobbed. Then he felt a soft wind of feminine skirts caused by the sudden stoop of some one beside him, and Ellen's voice, shrill with alarm, rang in his ears. “Father, what is the matter? Father!”

Such was the man's love for the girl that his first thought was for her alarm, and he pushed all his own troubles into the background with a lightning-like motion. He raised himself hastily, and smiled at her with his pitiful, stiff face. “It's nothing at all, Ellen, don't you worry,” he said.

But that was not enough to satisfy her. She caught hold of his arm and clung to it. “Father,” she said, in a tone which had in it, to his wonder, a firm womanliness—his own daughter seemed to speak to him as if she were his mother—“you are not telling me the truth. Something is the matter, or you wouldn't do like this.”

“No, there's nothin', nothin' at all, dear child,” said Andrew. He tried to loosen her little, clinging hand from his arm. “Come, let's go back to the house,” he said. “Don't you mind anything about it. Sometimes father gets discouraged over nothin'.”

“It isn't over nothing,” said Ellen. “What is it about, father?”

Andrew tried to laugh. “Well, if it isn't over nothin', it's over nothin' in particular,” said he; “it's over jest what's happened right along. Sometimes father feels as if he hadn't made as much as he'd ought to out of his life, and he's gettin' older, and he's feelin' kind of discouraged, that's all.”

“Over money matters?” said Ellen, looking at him steadily.

“Over nothin',” said her father. “See here, child, father's ashamed that he gave way so, and you found him. Now don't you worry one mite about it—it's nothing at all. Come, let's go back to the house,” he said.

Ellen said no more, but she walked up from the field holding tightly to her father's poor, worn hand, and her heart was in a tumult. To behold any convulsion of nature is no light experience, and when it is a storm of the spirit in one beloved the beholder is swept along with it in greater or less measure. Ellen trembled as she walked. Her father kept looking at her anxiously and remorsefully. Once he reached around his other hand and chucked her playfully under the chin. “Scared most to death, was she?” he asked, with a shamefaced blush.

“I know something is the matter, and I think it would be better for you to tell me, father,” replied Ellen, soberly.