The Yellow Briar. Patrick Slater

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СКАЧАТЬ about the vehicle. Now I know quite a bit about motor cars myself. I was the first person in this district to own one. I bought a touring car, brand new; and, on Sunday for years, when the roads were in good condition, I drove it regularly to Mass. At other times, I hitched up the buggy. I do not drive my car now; but I have it in the barn, jacked up to save the tires. The copper on the radiator is as bright as it ever was, and there is not a scratch anywhere to be seen. And then, for years, there has been an orgy of car-buying among the neighbouring farmers, who have been busy motoring themselves out of the well-to-do class.

      But, compared with the cars hereabouts, the motor with the saffron driver was a buxom queen bee to a humble little worker.

      “Jiminy crickets!” said I to myself. “Some class!”

      I felt a stiffening in my joints in the rising. Then I walked over toward the tipsy old picket-fence.

      His nibs in the leggings hopped around to open the door, and out of the paunch of the vehicle stepped a young woman who fluttered over toward me. Not that I could say she was a young person, right off, at first. The way women dress nowadays, It is next to impossible to tell, off-hand, how old they are — unless they are over forty.

      “Are you Mr. Patrick Slater?” she inquired; and her voice was low and pleasing.

      I dislike a woman who uses her nose as a sounding-board.

      “Yes,” I said. “I am old Paddy Slater.”

      Then I found myself chatting with a very lovely young girl whose blue-grey eyes were soft and friendly. She stood as straight as a whip; and she looked me square in the face. I had seen those eyes many a time before. Her mouth was pleasant and sweet. Her clothes every day would be the same as Sunday, with the neatness of the pretty girl — so comely and smiling.

      I do not mention her name; because, as they say in the army: “No names, no pack-drill.” My young friend may happen to read this, and she might not like it.

      It seems her father is a surgeon, practicing in Baltimore or some place down there. Her mother, who died at the time of the child’s birth, had been a Canadian girl from near Estevan in southern Saskatchewan, who went south, quite young, to train as a nurse. And those Canadian girls that train for nurses? Well, you know what nurses are! Of course, they are wholesome, capable young persons; but I notice they wear nifty little affairs on their heads; and they wear them, I figure, so that they can set their caps for likely young doctors, who are starting up in good practice.

      Anyway, the big car had crossed the border at Niagara Falls en route to Montreal and points farther east. The young lady had a notion to go fifty miles north from the lake to see what sort of place it was among the hills that her mother’s family had come from. And youth nowadays must be served — even if a bit impatiently. Some person in the neighbourhood had referred to me as a historical landmark from which to take her bearings.

      Yes, I told her, I had known her mother’s family. I remembered her great-great-grandmother as a robust young woman. In fact, her people had lived in this very house — not in the weather-beaten old place as it now is, but in the days of its youth and glory. I had come to work on the farm as a little lad fresh out from Ireland; and, on and off, I have lived on the place ever since. It is the only real home I ever had.

      I took her around to see a yellow briar-bush planted many years ago by a little girl who wore hoop skirts on Sundays. The little gardener, I told her, had been her mother’s mother. As good luck had it, the season being early, the yellow rosebush was a mass of waxy blossoms and unfolding buds.

      Of course, she was tremendously interested; but the big car seemed to get a little impatient.

      “And where were these folk of mine buried?” she inquired.

      I told her she would notice the little graveyard as they drove out to the pike. It now stood, deserted-like, in the corner of a pasture field; but at one time its stones had nestled around a Methodist meeting-house.

      “But if you go in, be careful of those sheer stockings,” said I, “because we don’t take much care of these little burial places up this way.”

      She asked me if she might take some of the yellow roses. I cut off a bundle of the branches with my jack-knife, and wrapped a sheet of newspaper about the prickly stems.

      “Put them on the old woman’s grave,” I suggested, “but don’t shake them, because the petals blow and scatter. Your old kinswoman, I must warn you, was a very orderly person.”

      “Yes,” she said to me, “you seize the flower, its bloom is shed.”

      “Anyhow,” I replied, “briar blossoms never feel the ugliness of age.”

      The girl lifted up her quiet eyes to the limestone hills whence has come the strength of my farm.

      “Doesn’t that mean,” she asked me, “that they must die in the beauty of their youth?”

      “Then they are beloved of the gods,” said I.

      And we walked back toward the car.

      “And for goodness sake, don’t leave the Globe newspaper there,” I cautioned her, “because that old Irish lady of yours had no use at all — at all — for George Brown’s paper or the Reform Party.

      The big car slipped down the lane as noiselessly as the shadow of a passing cloud. I chuckled at the thought of the fit the old relative would have thrown had any young female of the connection appeared before her in the sheer, curve-showing nakedness of the well-groomed young lady of Baltimore who was taking flowers down to place on her grave. But, of course, the old body has been sleeping these many years in a peaceful twilight beneath the clover and the daisies. Not, mark you, that I think shifting customs and styles have any effect on the unchanging heart of women. A bit of rouge and plucked eyebrows seem no more artificial to me than bustles were and the swish of ladies’ skirts across the grass.

      I was startled by the visit of that strange young girl to the old Ontario farm. In the span of my lifetime, I got to thinking, I had seen the huge pocket of British territory that nestles within the arms of the Great Lakes — a fertile land larger in extent than the republic of France — cleared of its hardwood forests and turned into fruitful farm-lands. The hard-working men and women from the British Isles who did this great job were lovers of the soil and they hungered for homes of their own. From their firesides I have seen great waves of young life go out in search of fame and an easier fortune. One would travel beyond Greenland’s icy mountains and farther than India’s coral strand to find a locality in which a father has not told his son how hard “the old man” made a fellow work on the farm back in Ontario. And I have lived long enough to know that farm homes of the Scottish and Irish pioneers will pass into the hands of other races and breeds of men whose children have remained lovers of the soil.

      I have thought several times since of the quiet-spoken, hard-working women, out of whose decent lives that young girl had come; and, every time I think of them, I feel inclined to dodge around and have a look at that simple, old-fashioned, yellow rose-bush. It has stood out there, these many years, untended and unprotected in a wind-swept place; it has learned to suffer and endure – and it still endures. It keeps itself neat and tidy, because Nature mends by subtle art the ravages of time. Apparently the old bush has always been well content with its location and station in life. There is no evidence that it has ever tried to spread out or encroach upon its neighbours. It is well equipped to protect its rights and dignity, and to prevent others from encroaching upon it. At ordinary times, it is a trim, healthy sort of СКАЧАТЬ