White Narcissus by Raymond Knister Read Free Book Online Page B

appointed purpose it was allowed to do so. There was no fever for the spick and span, and even glittering new-painted machinery soon took on protective colouring and comfortable, crude patchings. This was part of the nature of farming, and when it was overruled it was at the sacrifice of practical utility. He recalled visiting the farm of two graduates of an agricultural college, and how his expectations of a stricter formalization had been disappointed. Luckily farming did not lend itself to the simplifications of hospital wards, scientific laboratories, prisons. His experience with other departments of the modernized world led him to thank God for it.
    At the end of a field of oats, so sparse and short that he skirted the patch as though in fear of injuring it, he came on a long, grey, fine-clodded field divided into narrow rows formed by the packed pattern of broad wheels. They belonged to a tobacco-planter, he guessed, because the tiny plants were in evidence, withered almost to nothing. And there was a man not far from the other end of the field, stooping over a row. Picking his way, Richard Milne advanced toward the figure. It strode to meet him, carrying a basket and a pail a few steps, then stooping, piercing a hole in the dry earth with a blunt stick, pouring water into the hole from the pail, and taking a plant from the basket, planted it. By the time he could follow this procedure he could see the man distinctly, his gaunt angular movements of stooping, planting, his swift strides forward, while the eyes were busy with the ground before him, seeking unplanted spaces and withered plants which must be replaced. In the gait and these gestures there was something familiar, and he lingered, trying to remember before he should have passed. He was on the old home place, on Bill Burnstile’s farm. That was it!
    But Bill was not going to let him pass. Lit by the sun under a drooping straw hat as tanned as itself, his face was leanly smiling.
    “Well, here’s the Stranger!” he exclaimed, stretching forth his hand. “My boys told me you were here yesterday. I couldn’t hardly believe it.”
    Their hands held. “Fine family, Bill. I was certainly surprised too. When did you come back from the West?”
    “Oh, we came back about a year ago. Well, a year last winter. Time certainly flies. You’re looking well, though I can’t say I’d have known you in a crowd. Pretty pale,” he chuckled, “like a city fellow. Oh, well, the sun out here, the open air, you’ll soon get brightened up.” He looked at Richard Milne with jovial compunction, as though he were semi-invalid. That was the way, Richard knew, in which he regarded all city men, categorically.
    “Yes. Healthful weather just now. How are your crops, Bill? Clover seems to have a pretty good stand around here. What happened to everybody’s oats?”
    Bill Burnstile’s lantern jaws opened in a vast “Haw, haw!” and he bent back. “You certainly ain’t forgot all about farming, I can tell you that much.”
    Richard Milne could not imagine anyone else of the locality making such distinctions. Of course, impervious stolidity might have its compensations. … In rural people it was often a part of instinctive caution.
    It had been impossible, Bill was explaining, to put in the oats at the proper time. The ground was too wet, and even so lots of men had had to dub them in, any way to get them in, hopeless of good weather, and determined to have a few for their horses at least. Altogether it had not been a very good season. Now there was this drought. The bad weather was notended yet, or he was mistaken. Still, there couldn’t be a failure in everything – like in the West, where grain constituted the main asset. There a crop failure meant something.
    “It was our West, of course,” mused Richard. “When a Canadian ‘goes West,’ it usually means the Canadian West.”
    “Yes. … Have you been out yet?” The loose-jointed fellow seemed to take root in the