“Well, you will. It’s all here.”
Her face was so grave! She looked like one of the three fates, so old, so wrinkled, so distant.
I thought nothing of her at the time, but only of myself. How beautiful would be that outside world! And I would be going to it soon! Walking up and down in it! Oh, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
When we were traveling toward Warsaw it had been my idea that we would visit Silver Lake and if I could find nothing more I could at least look at that body of water and the fields that surrounded it and the streets with which I had been fairly familiar. The lake had seemed such a glorious thing to me in those days. It was so sylvan and silent. A high growth of trees surrounded it like a wall. Its waters reflected in turn blue, grey, green, black. It was so still within its wall of trees that our voices echoed hollowly. A fish leaping out of the water could be heard, and the echo of the splash. Often I sat here gazing at the blue sky and the trees, and waiting for a small red and green cork on my line to bob.
But my aunt and my uncle were long since dead, I knew. The children had gone—where? There was probably no least trace of them anywhere here, and I was in no mood to hunt them down. Still, in coming West, I had the desire to come here, to look, to stand in some one of these old places and recover if I might a boyhood mood.
Now, as we were leaving Warsaw, however, I was too physically tired and too spiritually distrait to be very much interested. My old home town had done for me completely—the shadows of older days. For one thing, I had a splitting headache, which I was carefully concealing, and a fine young heartache into the bargain. I was dreadfully depressed and gloomy.
But it was a fine warm night, with a splendid half moon in the sky and delicious wood and field fragrances about. Such odors! Is there anything more moving than the odors, the suspirings of the good earth, in summer?
As we neared Silver Lake (as I thought) we ran down into a valley where a small rivulet made its way and under the darkling trees we encountered a homing woman, coming from a milking shed which was close to the stream. Five children were with her, the oldest boy packing the youngest, an infant of two or three years. It reminded me of all the country families I had known in my time—a typical mid-Western and American procession. The mother, a not unprepossessing woman of forty, was clothed in a shapeless grey calico print with a sunbonnet to match, and without shoes. The children were all barefooted and ragged but as brown and healthy and fresh looking as young animals should be. It so chanced that Speed had to do something here—look after the light or supply the motor with a cooling draught—and so we paused, and the children gathered around us, intensely curious.
CENTRAL INDIANA
A Farm and Silo