The farm year had begun prosperously. Until July there had been no cloud on the horizon. In imagination Odell gazed across acres and acres of golden harvest; saw a beneficent and paternal Government coming to the relief of all farmers; saw every silo packed, every barn bursting; saw the steady increase of the herd balanced by profitable sales; saw ribbons and prizes awaiting his exhibits at County and State Fairs.
Yet, very often after supper, when standing on the porch chewing his quid as stolidly as his cows chewed their cuds, he was aware of a vague unease—as in Fanny’s day.
He could not comprehend the transmission of resentment from Fanny to Fanny’s child. He could much less understand the inherited resentment of a sex, now for the first time since creation making its defiance subtly felt the whole world through. Sub jugum ad astra! And now the Yoke had fallen; stars blazed beyond. Restless-winged, a Sex stood poised for flight, turning deaf ears to earthbound voices calling them back to hoods and bells and jesses.
One stifling hot night in July, after two weeks’ enervating drouth, Odell’s impotent wrath burst from the depths of bitterness long pent:
“That ding-danged slut will shame us yet if she don’t come back! I’m done with her if she ain’t in her own bed by Monday night. You write and tell her, Mazie. Tell her I’m through. Tell her I say so. And that’s that!”
The “ding-danged slut” at that moment lay asleep on the grass in a New York public park. And all around her, on the hot and trampled grass, lay half-naked, beastly, breathing human heaps—the heat-tortured hordes of the unwashed.
CHAPTER VIII
JULY began badly in New York. Ambulances became busy, hospitals overcrowded, seaside resorts thronged. Day after day a heavy atmosphere hung like a saturated and steaming blanket over the city. The daily papers recorded deaths from heat. Fountains were full of naked urchins unmolested by police. Firemen drenched the little children of the poor with heavy showers from hose and stand-pipe.