Willa Whiteside loved the valley from the beginning. Alicia had been aloof and quiet, rather a frightening person. The people of the valley seldom saw her, and when they did, she treated them gently and kindly, was generous and careful of their feelings. She made them feel like peasants calling at the castle.
Willa liked to make calls on the women of the valley. She liked to sit in their kitchens drinking harsh tea and talking of the innumerable important things that bear on housekeeping. She grew to be an extensive trader of recipes. When she went to make a call, she carried a little note book in which to write confided formulae. Her neighbors called her Willa and often came in the morning to drink tea in her kitchen. Perhaps it was partly her influence that caused John to become gregarious. He lost the power his father had held through aloofness. John liked his neighbors. On warm summer afternoons he sat in his canvas chair on the veranda and entertained such men as could get away from work. There were political caucuses on the veranda, little meetings over glasses of lemonade. The social and political structure of the whole valley was built on this porch, and always it was built amusingly. John looked at the life about him with a kind of amused irony, and due to his outlook, there ceased to exist in the valley any of the ferocious politics and violent religious opinions which usually poison rural districts. When, during the discussions among the men, some local or national climax or calamity was spoken of, John liked to bring out the three great books and to read aloud of some parallel situation in the ancient world. He had as great a love for the ancients as his father had.
There were the Sunday dinners with a neighbour couple and perhaps an itinerant minister as guests. The women helped in the kitchen until the mid-day dinner was ready. At the table the minister felt the pitiless fire of his mission slipping away in the air of gentle tolerance, until, when the dessert was brought in and the cider drunk, a fiery Baptist had been known to laugh heartily at a bit of quiet ridicule aimed at total immersion.
John enjoyed these things deeply, but his sitting room was the centre of his existence. The leather chairs, whose hollows and bumps were casts of comfortable anatomy, were pieces of him. On the wall were the pictures he had grown up with, steel engravings of deer and Swiss Alpine climbers and of mountain goats. The pictures were so closely bound up with his life that he didn’t see them any more, but the loss of an article would have been as painful as an amputation. In the evening his greatest pleasure came. A little fire was burning in the red brick fireplace. John sat in his chair caressing the big meerschaum. Now and then to oil it he stroked the polished bowl along the side of his nose. He was reading the Georgics or perhaps Varro on farming. Willa, under her own lamp, pursed her lips tightly while she embroidered doilies in floral designs as Christmas presents for eastern relatives who sent doilies to her.
John closed his book and went over to his desk. The roll top always stuck and required pampering. It gave suddenly and went clattering up. Willa unpursed her mouth. The look of intense agony she wore when she was doing a thing carefully left her face.
“What in the world are you doing?”
“Oh! Just seeing about some things.”
For an hour he worked behind the desk, then—”Listen to this, Willa.”
She relaxed again. “I thought so—poetry.”
He read his verses and waited apologetically. Willa, with tact, kept silence. The silence lengthened until it was no longer tactful. “I guess it isn’t very good.” He laughed ruefully.
“No, it. isn’t.”
He crumpled the paper and threw it into the fire. “For a few minutes I thought it was going to be good.”
“What had you been reading, John?”
“Well, I was just looking through my Virgil and I thought I’d try my hand at a verse, because I didn’t want to—oh, well, it’s almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing. No matter.” He rolled down the desk cover and picked a new book from the bookcase.
The sitting room was his home. Here he was complete, perfect and happy. Under the Rochester lamps every last scattered particle of him was gathered together into a definite, boundaried entity.
Most lives extend in a curve, There is a rise of ambition, a rounded peak of maturity, a gentle downward slope of disillusion and last a flattened grade of waiting for death. John Whiteside lived in a straight line. He was ambitionless; his farm not only made him a good living, but paid enough so he could hire men to work it for him. He wanted nothing beyond what he had or could easily procure. He was one of the few men who could savor a moment while he held it. And he knew it was a good life he was leading, an uniquely good life.
Only one need entered his existence. He had no children. The hunger for children was almost as strong in him as it had been in his father. Willa did not have children although she wanted them as badly as he did. The subject embarrassed them, and they never spoke of it.
In the eighth year of their marriage, through some accident, chemical or divine, Willa conceived, went through a painless, normal period of pregnancy and delivered a healthy child.
The accident never occurred again, but both Willa and John were thankful, almost devoutly thankful. The strong desire for self-perpetuation which had been more or less dormant in John rose up to the surface. For a few years he ripped the land with the plow, scratched it with the harrow and flogged it with the roller. Where he had been only a friend to the farm, the awakening duty to the generations changed him to a master. He plunged the seeds into the earth and waited covetously for the green crops to appear.
Willa did not change as her husband did. She took the boy William as a matter of course, called him Bill and refused to worship him. John saw his father in the boy although no one else did.
“Do you think he is bright?” John asked his wife. “You’re with him more than I am. Do you think he has any intelligence?”
“Just so-so. Just normal.”
“He seems to develop so slowly,” John said impatiently. “I want the time to come when he’ll begin to understand things.”
On Bill’s tenth birthday John opened his thick Herodotus and began to read to him. Bill sat on the floor, blankly regarding his father. Every night John read a few pages from the book. After about a week of it, he looked up from his book one evening and saw that Willa was laughing at him.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“Look under your chair.”
He leaned down and saw that Bill had constructed a house of matches. The child was so absorbed in the work that he was not aware the reading had stopped. “Hasn’t he been listening at all?”
“Not a word. He hasn’t heard a word since the first night when he lost interest in the second paragraph.”
John closed the book and put it in the bookcase. He did not want to show how badly he was wounded. “Probably he’s not old enough. I’ll wait a year and then try him again.”
“He won’t ever like it, John. He isn’t built like you nor like your father,”
“What is he interested in, then?” John asked in dismay.
“Just the things the other boys in the valley like, guns and horses and cows and dogs. He has escaped you, John, and I don’t think you can ever catch him.”
“Tell me the truth, Willa. Is he—stupid?”
“No,” she said consideringly. “No, he’s not stupid. In some ways he’s harder and brighter than you are. He isn’t your kind, John, and you might just as well know it now as later.”
John Whiteside felt his interest in the land lapsing. The land was safe. Bill would farm it some day. The house was safe, too. Bill was not stupid. From the first he seemed to have a good deal of mechanical interest and ability. He made little wagons, and, as Christmas presents, demanded toy steam engines. John noticed another difference about the boy, a side that was strange to the Whiteside family. He was not only very secretive, but sharp in a business sense. He sold his possessions to other boys, and, when they were tired of them, bought them back at a lower price. Little gifts of money multiplied in his hands in mysterious ways. It was a long time before John would admit to himself that he could not communicate with his son. When he gave Bill a heifer, and Bill immediately traded it for a litter of pigs which he raised and sold, John laughed at himself.