Chapter II

For Tar Moorehead life began with a procession of houses. They were at first very dim in his mind. They marched. Even when he grew to be a man the houses went across the walls of his fancy like soldiers in a dusty road. As when soldiers marched some few were sharply remembered.

Houses were like people. An empty house was like an empty man or woman. There were houses cheaply built, thrown together. Others were carefully built and carefully lived in, having careful loving attention.

When you went into an empty house the experience was sometimes terrifying. Voices kept calling. They must have been the voices of people who had lived there. Once, when Tar was a boy and had gone out of town alone to pick wild berries in the fields, he saw a small empty house, standing in a field of corn.

Something induced him to go in. The doors were open and many panes had been broken in the windows. There was gray dust on the floor.

A small bird, a swallow, had flown into the house and could not get out. In its terror it flew directly at Tar, at the doors, at the windows. Its body struck the window sash and its terror began to get into Tar’s blood. The terror had something to do with empty houses. Why should houses be empty? He ran away and at the edge of the field looked back and saw the swallow make its escape. It flew gladly, joyously, circling about over the fields. Tar was half beside himself with desire to leave the ground and fly away through the air.

To a mind like Tar’s--the truth always washed by the colors being brushed on by his fancy--houses in which he lived as a child could not be definitely placed. There was one house he had never lived in that was very clearly remembered. The house was low and long and a grocer with a large family lived in it. Back of the house, its roof almost touching the kitchen door, was a long low barn. Tar’s own family must have lived near this house and no doubt he wanted to live under its roof. A child is always wanting to try the experiment of living in some house other than his own.

There was always laughter in the grocer’s house. In the evening songs were being sung. One of the grocer’s daughters thumped on a piano and the others danced. Also there was an abundance of food. Tar’s sharp little nose could smell it being cooked and served. Did not a grocer deal in foods? Why not an abundance of food in such a house? At night he lay in bed in his own house dreaming he had become the son of the grocer. The grocer was a strong-looking man with red cheeks and a white beard and when he laughed the sides of his house seemed to shake. In desperation Tar told himself that he did live in the house, that he was the grocer’s son. What he dreamed became, in fancy at least, a fact. It had happened that all of the grocer’s children were daughters. Why not a trade that would make every one happy? Tar selected the grocer’s daughter who was to come and live in his house while he went to her house as a son. She was small and rather quiet. Perhaps she would not protest so much as the others. She did not look like a protester.

What a glorious dream! As the only son of the grocer Tar would be given the first choice of the food on the table, he would ride the grocer’s horse, sing songs, dance, be treated as a kind of prince. Already he had read or heard fairy tales in which such a prince as he wanted to be lived in such a place. The grocer’s house was his castle. So much laughter, so much song and food. What more could a boy want?

Tar was the third child of a family of seven, five of whom were boys. From the beginning the family of Dick Moorehead, the ex-soldier, was on the march and no two were born in the same house.

And what does not the house mean to the child? There should be a garden with flowers, vegetables and trees. Also there should be a barn with horses standing in stalls and back of the barn a vacant lot in which tall rank weeds grow. For older children in the house it is all very well, no doubt, to have an automobile but for the small child nothing will take the place of an old gentle black or gray horse. If the later and grown Tar Moorehead were to be born again surely he would have selected as parent a grocer with a fat jolly wife and he would not have wanted him to own a delivery truck. He would have wanted him to make his grocery deliveries with horses and in the morning Tar would have wanted older boys to come to the house and drive them away.

Then Tar could run out of the house and touch each horse on the nose. The boys would give him presents, apples or bananas, things they had got at the store, and after that he would breakfast in state and go through the empty barn to play in the tall weeds. The weeds would grow high above his head and he could hide among them. There he could be a robber, a man making his fearless way through dark forests--anything he pleased.

Other houses than the ones in which Tar’s family lived during his early childhood, houses often on the same street, had all of these things while his house always seemed to sit on a small grassless lot. In the barn back of the neighbor’s house there was a horse, often two horses and a cow.

In the morning sounds from the neighboring houses and from the barns. Some of the neighbors kept pigs and chickens that lived in pens in the back yard and were fed from the table scraps.

In the mornings the pigs grunted, the cocks crowed, the hens made soft clucking sounds, the horses neighed, the cows bawled. Calves were born--strange fascinating creatures with long ungainly legs on which they, at once and in a funny uncertain manner, began to walk, following the mother cow about the barnyard.

In Tar’s mind later a dim memory of early mornings in bed, his older brother and sister at a window. Already, in the Moorehead house of the moment, another baby had been born, perhaps two babies since Tar’s turn. Babies did not get up and walk about like calves and colts. They lay on their backs in bed sleeping like puppies or kittens and then they awoke to make dreadful noises.

Children, just coming into consciousness of life, as Tar was at that time, do not fancy younger children about. Kittens are something and puppies something else. They lie in a basket back of the kitchen stove. It is nice to put the hand into the warm nest in which they lie sleeping but other babies of one’s own family about the house are a nuisance.

How much better a dog or a kitten. Cows and horses are for rich people but a dog or a cat the Mooreheads might have had. How gladly would Tar have traded a baby for a dog and as for a horse--it was well he was not tempted. If the horse were gentle and would let him ride on its back or if he could sit alone in a cart and hold the reins over a horse’s back, as did an older neighbor boy in one of the towns in which he lived, he might have traded off the whole Moorehead family.

In the Moorehead house they had a saying. “The baby has put your nose out of joint.” What a terrible saying! The new baby cried and Tar’s mother went to take it into her arms. There was some strange connection between the mother and the baby that Tar, who had begun walking about the floor, had already lost.

He was four, his older sister seven and the first-born son of the household nine. Now, in some odd way that was not understandable, he belonged to the world of his older brother and sister, to the world of neighbor children, to the front and back yard into which other children came to play with his brother and sister, to a tiny section of the great world in which he would presently have to try to live, not really to his mother at all. His mother was already a dark strange being, a little far off. He might still cry and she would call to him and he might run and put his head in her lap while she stroked his hair but there was always that later child, the baby, far up there in her arms. His nose was indeed out of joint. What would set it straight?

To cry and win favor that way was already a shameful trick in the eyes of his older brother and sister.

Surely Tar did not want to remain always a baby. What did he want?

How huge the world. How strange and terrible it was. His older brother and sister, out in the yard at play, were so impossibly old. If they would only stand still, stop growing, stop getting older for two or three years. They wouldn’t. Something told him that would not happen.

And now his tears had stopped, already he had forgotten what made him cry as though he were still a babe. “Run now and play with the others,” his mother said.

But how difficult the others! If they would only stand still until he caught up.

* * * * *

A spring morning in the house on a street in a Mid-American town. The Moorehead family changed towns as they did houses, slipping them on and off as one slips on and off a nightdress. Between them and the others in the town a kind of separateness. The ex-soldier, Dick Moorehead, had never got himself settled after the war. Marriage had perhaps upset him. Now was the time to become a solid citizen and he was not made to be a solid citizen. Towns and the years slipped away together. A procession of little houses in grassless lots that had no barns, a procession of streets, of towns too. Tar’s mother was always busy. There were so many children and they came so fast.

Dick Moorehead had not married a rich woman, as perhaps he might have done. He married the daughter of an Italian working woman but she had beauty. It was a strange kind of dark beauty to be found in the Ohio town where he had met her after the war and it fascinated him. It always fascinated Dick and his children.

Now, however, while children were coming so fast, no one had time to breathe, to look out. Tenderness between people grows slowly.

* * * * *

A spring morning in a house on a street in a Mid-American town. Tar, now a grown man and a writer, was staying at the house of a friend. His friend’s life had been utterly unlike his own. The house was surrounded by a low garden wall and Tar’s friend was born in it and had lived in it all his life. He, like Tar, was a writer but what a difference in the two lives. Tar’s friend has written many books--all histories of men who lived in another age--books of men at war, great generals, politicians, explorers.

All the man’s life had been lived in books, while Tar’s life had been lived in the world of men.

Now the friend had a wife, a gentle soft-voiced woman Tar could hear moving about in a room upstairs in the house.

Tar’s friend was in his workroom reading. He was always reading, while Tar seldom read. His children played in the garden. There were two boys and a girl and an old negro woman looked out for them.

Tar sat in a corner of the porch at the back of the house under rosebushes thinking.

On the day before he and his friend had a talk. The friend spoke of some of Tar’s books, raising his eyebrows. “I like you,” he said, “but some of the people you write about! I never saw any of the people. Where are they? Such thoughts, such terrible people.”

What Tar’s friend had said of his books others had said. He thought of the years his friend had spent over books, of the life the man had lived behind the garden wall while Tar had knocked about. Even then, as a grown man, he had no house of his own. He was an American, had always lived in America and America was vast, but not a square foot of it had ever belonged to him. His father had never owned a square foot of it. Gypsies, eh? Worthless kind of people in an age of prosperity. If you want to be something in this world own lands, own goods.

When he had written books about people the books had often been condemned, as they were condemned by his friend, because the people in the books were of the common sort, because they often did mean commonplace things.

“But I am myself a commonplace man,” Tar said to himself. “It is true my father wanted to be a man of distinction and he was also a teller of tales, but the tales he told would never hold water.”

“Dick Moorehead’s tales went well enough with the farmers and the farm hands who used to come into his harness shops when he was a young man but suppose he had been compelled to write them out for people--like the man in whose house I am now visiting,” Tar thought.

And then his mind leaped back to his own childhood. “Surely childhood is always distinguished,” he said to himself. “It is only when we grow up that we become common and vulgar. Has there ever been such a thing as a vulgar child? Could there be such a thing?”

As a grown man Tar thought much on the subject of childhood and houses. He sat in one of the little rented rooms in which he as a man was always living and his pen slipped over the paper. It was early spring and he thought the room nice enough. There was a fire.

He had begun again, as he was always beginning, on the theme of houses, places in which people live, into which they come at night and when it is cold and stormy outside the house--houses with rooms in which people sleep, in which children sleep and dream.

The later Tar was a little cracked on the subject. The room in which he sat, he told himself, contained his body but it contained also his thoughts. Thoughts were as important as bodies. How many people tried to make their thoughts color the rooms in which they slept or ate, how many tried to make the rooms a part of themselves. At night when Tar was in bed and when there was a moon, shadows played on the walls and his fancies also played. “Do not befoul the house in which the child must live and remember that you are also a child, will always be a child,” he whispered to himself.

In the East when a guest came to a house his feet were washed. “Before I invite the reader into the house of my fancy I should see that the floors are clean, that the doorsills have been washed.”

Houses were like people standing silently and at attention, along a street.

“If you honor and respect me and come into my house, come softly. For the moment think gentle thoughts, leave quarrels and the ugliness of your life outside my house.”

* * * * *

There is the house and to the child the world outside the house. What is the world like? What are people like? Older people, neighbor men and women, men and women who walked along the sidewalk before the Moorehead house when Tar was a small child went straight on about their affairs.

A woman named Mrs. Welliver was going toward that mysteriously exciting place known as “uptown” with a market basket on her arm. Tar, the child, had never been beyond the nearest corner.

A day came. What an event! A neighbor woman, who must have been rich as she had two horses in the barn back of her house, had come to take Tar and his sister--three years older--for a ride in a buggy. They were to go into the country.

They were to go far out into a strange world, through Main Street. In the early morning they were told and Tar’s older brother, who was not to go, was angry, while Tar was made happy by his brother’s misfortune. There were so many things the older brother already had. He wore pants while Tar still wore skirts. There was something to be gained then by being small and helpless. How Tar had wanted to come to the time of pants. Willingly enough, he thought, would he have traded the trip into the country for his brother’s additional five years and the pants but why should the brother expect all of the good things of his life? The older brother wanted to cry because he was not going but how many times had Tar wanted to cry because of things the brothers had that Tar could not have.

They set out and Tar was excited and happy. What a huge strange world. The little Ohio town was to Tar’s eyes a vast city. Now they had come into Main Street and there was an engine attached to a train, a great terrifying thing. The horse half ran across the tracks in front of the nose of the engine, a bell clanged. Tar had heard that sound before--at night in the room where he slept--the clanging of an engine bell in the distance, the scream of a whistle, the crashing rumble sound of a train rushing through town, out in the darkness and silence, outside the house, outside the windows and the wall of the room where he lay.

In what way was the sound different from the sounds that came from horses, from cows, sheep, pigs and chickens? Warm friendly sounds, the others. Tar himself cried, he screamed when he was angry. Cows, horses and pigs also made sounds. The animal sound belonged to a world of warmth, of nearness, while the other sound was strange, romantic and terrible. When Tar heard the sound of the engine at night he crept close to his sister and said nothing. If she awoke, if his older brother awoke, they would laugh at him. “It’s only a train,” they said, their voices filled with contempt. It had seemed to Tar that something gigantic and terrible was about to crash through walls into the room.

On the day of his first great voyage out into the world and when the horse, a creature of flesh and blood like himself, frightened by the breathing of the great iron horse, had carried the buggy rushing past, he turned to stare. There was smoke issuing from the engine’s long up-thrust nose and the dreadful metallic clang of a bell rang in his ears. A man put his head out of the cab window and waved his hand. He spoke to another man standing on the ground beside the engine.

The neighbor woman was pulling at the lines and striving to quiet the excited horse that had infected Tar with its fright, and his sister, filled with her three additional years of worldly knowledge and a little contemptuous of him, put her arm about his shoulders.

And now the horse was trotting sedately along and they all turned to look back. The engine had begun to move slowly, majestically pulling its train of cars. How fortunate that it did not choose to follow along the road they had taken. It had crossed the road and was going away, past a row of small houses toward distant fields. Tar’s fright passed. In the future and when he was awakened by the sound of a passing train at night he would not be afraid. When his brother, two years younger, grew a year or two older and became frightened at night he could speak to him with contempt in his voice. “It’s only a train,” he could say, scorning his younger brother’s childishness.

They drove on, over a hill and across a bridge. At the top of a hill they stopped and Tar’s sister pointed to the train moving across a valley below. Far off there in the distance, going away, the train seemed beautiful and Tar clapped his hands with delight.

As it was to the child so it was to be to the man. Trains moving across distant valleys, the rivers of automobiles that flowed through modern city streets, squadrons of aeroplanes in the sky, all of the wonders of the modern mechanical age, when seen from a distance, filled the later Tar with wonder and awe but when he drew near to them he was afraid. Power, hidden away, deep down in the belly of an engine, made him tremble. Where did it come from? The words fire, water, oil were old words signifying old things but the combining of these things within iron walls from which, at the touch of a button or a lever, power sprang, seemed the work of a devil--or a God. He did not pretend to understand devils or gods. Men and women were difficult enough.

Was he an old man in a new world? Words and colors might be combined. In the world his imagination could sometimes penetrate, blue did something strange when combined with red. Words might be thrown together and sentences made and the sentences had uncanny power. With a sentence one might destroy a friendship, win a woman, make a war. The later Tar walked unafraid among words but what happened within the narrow walls of steel was never understandable to him.

But now he was still a child and was being driven out into the vast world and was already a little frightened and homesick. His mother, who was already too much separated from him by another child, was nevertheless the rock on which he was trying to build the house of his life. Now he was on shifting sands. The neighbor woman looked strange and forbidding. She was occupied in driving the horse. The houses along the road were far apart. There were wide open spaces, fields, great red barns, orchards. What a world!

The woman who had taken Tar and his sister for the ride must have been very rich. She had a house in town, with two horses in the barn, and also owned a farm in the country where there were a house, two large barns, and horses, sheep, cows and pigs without number. They turned into a driveway with an apple orchard on one side and a cornfield on the other and went into a farm yard. Home seemed to Tar thousands of miles away. Would he know his mother when he returned? Could they ever find their way back? His sister was laughing and clapping her hands. A wobbly-legged calf was tied to a rope on the lawn before the house and she pointed at it. “Look, Tar,” she cried, and he did look with serious thoughtful eyes. Already he was beginning to realize something of the utter frivolity of woman.

They were in a barn yard, facing a large red barn, and a woman came out at the back door of the house and two men emerged from the barn. The farm woman looked not unlike Tar’s mother. She was tall and her fingers were long and roughened by toil like his mother’s fingers. Two children clung to her skirt as she stood by the door.

There was talk. Women were always talking. What a little chatterbox his sister already was. One of the men from the barn, no doubt the husband of the farm woman and the father of the strange children, came forward but had little to say. The people from town had got out of the buggy and the man, after mumbling some few words, went away again to the barn accompanied by one of the two children and while the women continued talking he emerged from the barn door, a child, a boy like Tar but two or three years older, astride a great farm horse the father was leading.

Tar was left with the women, his sister and the other farm child, also a girl.

What a come-down for him! The two women having gone into the farm house he was left with the two girls. In this new world it was as at home in his own yard. At home his father was gone all day at his shop and his older brother had little use for him. The older brother thought of him as a babe but Tar was no longer a babe. Was there not another child in his mother’s arms? His sister took care of him. Women run everything. “You take him and the little girl to play with you,” the farm woman said to her daughter, pointing to Tar. The woman touched his hair with her fingers and smiled. How far everything seemed. At the door one of the women stopped to give other instructions. “Remember he is only a babe. Do not let him get hurt.” What an idea!

The boy of the farm sat astride the farm horse and a second man, no doubt a hired man, came out at the barn door leading another horse but did not offer to take Tar aboard. The men and the farm boy went off along a lane beside the barn and toward distant fields, the boy on the horse turning to look back, not however at Tar but at the two girls.

The girls with whom Tar had been left looked at each other and laughed. Then they led the way to the barn. Well, Tar’s sister was up to her tricks. Did he not know her? She wanted to hold his hand, pretend she was his mother, but he would not let her. It was a thing girls did. They pretended they were taking care of you when they were only showing off. Tar marched sturdily along wanting to cry because he had been dropped suddenly in a strange place but not wanting to give his sister, but three years older than himself, the satisfaction of showing off before the strange girl by mothering him. If women would but do their mothering in secret how much better it would be.

Tar was now so altogether alone in the midst of such vast strange beautiful and at the same time terrifying surroundings. How warmly the sun shone. Long, long afterward, oh, how many times afterward, he was to dream over the scene, use it as a background for tales, use it all his life as a background for some great dream he was always having of some day owning his own farm, a place of great barns with unpainted timber beams, grown steely gray with age, of the rich smell of hay and animals, of sun-washed and snow-covered hills and fields and smoke going up out of the chimney of a farmhouse into wintry skies.

These for Tar the dreams of another and much later time. The child going toward the great yawning doors of the barn, his sister clinging to his hand, the while she joined in a stream of talk she and the farm girl were to keep up until they drove Tar half mad with loneliness, had no such thoughts. In him there is no consciousness of barns and their smell, of tall corn growing in fields, of wheat shocks standing like sentinels on distant hills. There was just a little animal in short skirts and with bare legs and feet, the son of a harness maker in an Ohio village, who felt himself neglected and alone in the world.

The two girls went into the barn through wide swinging doors and Tar’s sister pointed to a box near the door. It was a small box and an idea had come to her. She would get rid of him for a time. Pointing to the box and assuming, as nearly as she could, his mother’s tone when she gave a command, the sister told him to sit down. “You stay right there until I come back and don’t you dare go away,” she said, shaking her finger at him. Huh! Indeed! what a little woman she thought herself! She had black curls and wore shoes and Tar’s mother had let her wear her Sunday dress while the farm girl and Tar were both barefooted. She was being a grand lady now. If she only knew how much Tar resented her tone. If he had been a bit older he might have told her, but had he tried to speak just at that moment, tears would surely have come.

The two girls began climbing a ladder to a hay loft above, the farm girl leading the way. Tar’s sister was afraid and trembled as she climbed and would have liked being a town girl and timid but having assumed the rôle of grown woman with the child had to play it out. They disappeared through a dark hole above and for a time rolled and tumbled about on the hay in the loft, laughing and screaming as girls do at such times. Then silence settled down over the barn. Now the girls had hidden themselves away in the loft and were no doubt talking of women’s affairs. What do women talk of when they are alone together? Tar always wanted to know. Grown women in the farm house talking, girls in the loft talking. Occasionally he could hear them laughing. Why all the laughing and talking?

Women were always coming to the door of the house in town to talk to his mother. Left alone she might have remained always sensibly silent but they would not let her alone. Women could not let each other alone as men did. They are not so sensible and brave. If women and younger babes had but stayed away from his mother Tar might have had more of her for himself.

He sat on the box near the door of the barn. Was he glad to be alone? One of those odd things happened that were always happening later when he was grown. A particular scene, a country road climbing over a hill, the yard of a railroad seen from a bridge in a city at night, a grass-grown road leading into a wood, the garden of a deserted tumble-down house--some scene that, outwardly at least, had no more meaning than a thousand other scenes swept by his eye, perhaps on the same day, printed itself with the most minutely worked out details on the walls of his mind. The house of his mind had many rooms and each room was a mood. On the walls pictures were hung. He had hung them there. Why? Some inner sense of selection had perhaps been at work.

There was the open barn door making a frame for his picture. Back of him, in the shed-like entrance to the barn, was, on the one side the blank barn wall up which the ladder climbed to the loft above and up which the girls had gone. On the wall were wooden pegs on which hung work-harnesses, horse collars, a row of iron horseshoes and a saddle and on the opposite wall were openings through which horses, standing in their stalls, could thrust their heads.

A rat came from some unknown place and ran quickly across the earthen floor to disappear under a farm wagon at the back of the shed and an old gray horse, her head thrust through one of the openings, looked at Tar with sad impersonal eyes.

And so there he was, for the first time thrust out alone into the world. How isolated he felt! His sister, in the face of all her grown-up mother-manner, had renigged on her job. She had been told to remember he was a babe and had not remembered.

Well, he was no longer a babe and was resolved he would not cry. He sat stoically staring out through the open barn doors at the scene before him.

What a strange scene. It was thus that later hero of Tar’s Robinson Crusoe, must have felt when he found himself alone on his isle. What a vast world this into which he had been thrust. So many trees, hills, fields. Suppose he were to arise from his box and begin to walk. At one corner of the frame opening through which he looked was a small section of the white farm house into which the women had gone. Tar could not hear their voices. Now he could not hear the voices of the two girls in the loft. They had disappeared through a dark hole over his head. Occasionally there was a buzzing whisper and then girlish laughter. It was really giggling. Perhaps every one in the world had gone away into some strange dark hole leaving him sitting there in the midst of a vast empty space. Terror had begun to take hold of him. In the far distance, as he looked out through the barn doors, were hills and as he sat gazing a tiny black dot appeared in the sky. The dot grew slowly larger and larger. What seemed to him a long time passed and the dot grew into a great bird, a hawk wheeling and circling in the vast sky over his head.

Tar sat staring at the hawk moving slowly, in great circles, up in the sky. In the barn at his back the head of the old horse was withdrawn and then appeared again. Now the horse had taken a mouthful of hay and was eating. The rat, that had run into some dark hole under the wagon at the back of the shed, came forth and began creeping toward him. What shining little eyes! Tar was about to cry out but now the rat had found what he wanted. An ear of corn lay on the barn floor and he began gnawing at it. His sharp little teeth made a soft grinding sound.

Time passed slowly, oh, so slowly. What a trick Tar’s sister has played on him. Why were she and the farm girl, named Elsa, so silent now? Had they gone away? In another part of the barn, somewhere in the darkness back of the horse, something began to stir about making a rustling sound in the straw on the barn floor. The old barn was full of rats.

Tar got off his box and went softly out through the barn doors into the warm sunlight and toward the house. In a meadow near the house some sheep were pastured and one of them raised its head to look at him.

Now all of the sheep were looking, were staring. In an orchard beyond the barns and the house there was a red cow that also raised her head to stare. What strange impersonal eyes.

Tar hurried across the farm yard and to the door through which the two women had gone but it was closed. Inside the house also there was silence. He had been left alone for perhaps five minutes. It seemed to him hours.

He pounded at the back door with his fists but there was no answer. The women had only gone upstairs in the house but it seemed to him they must have gone far away--that his sister and the farm girl had gone far away.

Everything had gone far away. Looking up into the sky he could see the hawk circling now far above. The circles grew larger and larger and then suddenly the hawk flew straight away into the blue. When Tar had seen him first he was a tiny dot, no larger than a fly, and now he was becoming like that again. As he looked the black dot grew smaller and smaller. It wavered and danced before his eyes and then disappeared.

He was alone in the farmyard. Now the sheep and the cow were no longer looking at him but were eating grass. He went to the fence and stood looking at the sheep. How contented and happy they seemed. The grass they ate must be delicious to the taste. For each sheep plenty of other sheep, for the cow the warm barn at night and the company of other cows. The two women in the house had each other, his sister Margaret had the farm girl Elsa, the boy of the farm had his father, a hired man, the work horses and the dog he had seen trotting at the horses’ heels.

Only Tar was alone in the world. Why was he not born a sheep to be with other sheep and eat grass? Now he was not afraid, only lonely and sad.

He went slowly across the barn yard and along the green lane the men, the boys and the horses had followed. He cried a little, softly, as he went. The grass in the lane was soft and cool under his bare feet and in the distance he could see blue hills and beyond the hills a blue cloudless sky.

The lane which seemed so long to him that day was very short. There was a small woodlot through which it passed to the fields beyond--fields lying in a long flat valley through which a creek ran--and in the woods the trees threw blue shadows on the grass-covered roadway.

How cool and quiet in the woods. A passion Tar had in him all his life may have begun on that day. In the woods he stopped and for what seemed to him a long time sat on the ground beneath a tree. Ants were running here and there and then disappearing into holes in the ground, birds flew about in the branches of the trees and two spiders, who at his approach had hidden themselves away, came out again and worked at the business of spinning webs.

If Tar had been crying when he came into the woods he had stopped now. His mother was very, very far away. He might never find her again but if he did not it was her own fault. She had put him out of her arms to take up another and younger member of the family. The neighbor woman, who was she? She had shoved him off on his sister who had, after issuing an absurd command about sitting on a box, promptly forgotten him. There was the world of boys but at the moment boys meant his older brother John, who more than once had shown his scorn of Tar’s society, and such people as the farm boy who had ridden away on a horse without bothering to speak to him or even to give him a parting look.

“Very well,” Tar thought, filled with bitter resentment, “if I am shut out from one world there is another.”

The ants at his feet were happy enough. What a fascinating world that in which they lived. The ants were darting up into the light out of a hole in the ground and were building a little mountain of grains of sand. Other ants went on voyages out into the world and returned bearing burdens. An ant was dragging a dead fly along the ground. There was a stick in his way and now the wings of the fly had caught against the stick and he could not move it. He ran crazily about, pulling now at the stick, now at the fly. A bird flew down off a nearby tree and lighting on a fallen log looked at Tar and far off in the woods through an opening between trees, a squirrel came down the trunk of a tree and began running on the ground.

The bird was looking at Tar, the squirrel stopped running and sat up straight to look and the ant that could not move the fly made frantic signs with his tiny hair-like feelers.

Had Tar been received into the world of nature? Vast plans had begun to form in his head. He had noticed that the sheep in the field by the farm house ate grass eagerly. Why should he not eat grass? Ants lived warm and snug in a hole in the ground. There were many ants, all apparently of one age and size in one family and, after Tar had found his own hole and had eaten much grass so that he had become big like a sheep--or even like a horse or cow--he would find others of his kind.

There was, he had no doubt, a language of sheep, of squirrels, of ants. Now the squirrel had begun to chatter and the bird on the log called and was answered by another bird away somewhere in the woods.

The bird flew away. The squirrel disappeared. They had gone to join their comrades. Tar alone had no comrades.

Leaning over he lifted the stick so that his tiny brother the ant could go on about his affairs and then, getting down on all fours, he put his ear near the ant hill to see if he could hear the talk.

He could hear nothing. Well, he was too large. Far away from others of his own kind he seemed to himself big and strong. Along the lane he went, walking now on all fours like a sheep, and got to the log where but a moment before the bird had been sitting.

The log was hollow at one end and it was obvious that with a little effort he could crawl into it. He would have a place into which to go at night. Of a sudden it seemed to him that he had got into a world in which he could move freely about, in which he could live freely and happily.

He decided it was time for him to go and eat grass. Walking along the roadway through the wood he came to a lane that led down into a valley. In a distant field the two men, driving the two horses, each hitched to a cultivator, were plowing corn. The corn came up to the horses’ knees. The farm boy was riding one of the horses. At the heels of the other horse the farm dog trotted. From the distance, it seemed to Tar that the horses looked no larger than the sheep he had seen in the field by the house.

He stood by a fence looking at the men and horses in the field and at the boy on the horse. Well, the farm boy was grown up--he moved in a world of men while Tar was left to the women. But he had renounced the woman’s world, he would go at once into a warm comfortable world--the world of animal life.

Getting down on all fours again he began crawling on the soft grass that grew near the fence beside the lane. White clover grew among the grass and first of all he bit off one of the clover blossoms. It did not taste badly and he ate another and another. How many would he have to eat, how much grass would he have to consume before he grew big like a horse or even like a sheep. He kept crawling about, biting at the grass, but the edges of the grass blades were sharp and hurt his lips. When he had chewed a mouthful of the grass it was strange and bitter to the taste.

He persisted but something within kept warning him that what he was doing was ridiculous and that if his sister or his brother John knew he would be laughed at and so from time to time he arose and looked back along the road through the woods to be sure no one was coming. Then getting again to his hands and knees he crawled over the grass. As it was difficult to tear the grass with his teeth he used his hands. The grass had to be chewed until it was soft before it could be swallowed and how nasty it tasted.

How hard to grow up! Tar’s dream of growing suddenly big by eating grass was fading and he closed his eyes. With his eyes closed he could do a trick he sometimes did in his bed at night. He could in fancy recreate his own body, make his legs and arms long, his shoulders broad. With his eyes closed he could be anything he pleased, be a horse trotting through the streets, a tall man walking in a road. He could be a bear in the dense forest, a prince living in a castle with slaves to bring his food, could be the son of a grocer and rule over a household of women.

He sat on the grass with his eyes closed, pulling grass and trying to eat it. The green juice of the grass had discolored his lips and chin. Now surely he had begun growing larger. Already he had eaten two, three, half a dozen mouthfuls of the grass. After two or three more he would open his eyes and see what he had accomplished. Perhaps he would already have the legs of a horse. The thought frightened him a little but he put out his hand and tearing loose more of the grass put it in his mouth.

Something dreadful happened. Jumping quickly to his feet Tar ran two or three steps and then sat quickly down. In reaching for the last handful of grass he had captured a bee, sucking honey out of one of the clover blossoms, and had carried it to his lips. The bee stung him on the lip and then a convulsive moment of his hand had half crushed the insect and it had been thrown aside. He could see it lying on the grass struggling to arise and fly away. Its broken wings beat the air madly and it made a loud buzzing sound.

The most terrible pain had come to Tar. He put his hand to his lip and rolling over on his back closed his eyes and screamed. As the pain grew in intensity his screams grew louder and louder.

Why had he come away from his mother? The sky into which he now looked, when he dared open his eyes, was empty and he had wandered away from all things human into an empty world. The world of crawling and flying things, the world of animals that went on all fours, he had thought so warm and safe, had now become dark and threatening. The little struggling winged beast on the grass nearby was but one of a vast army of winged things surrounding him on all sides. He wanted to get to his feet and run back through the wood and toward the women in the farmhouse but did not dare move.

There was nothing to do but this humiliating business of screaming and so, lying on his back in the lane and keeping his eyes closed, Tar continued screaming for what seemed to him hours. Now his lip was burning and was becoming large. He could feel it throbbing and pulsating with growth under his fingers. Growth then was a thing of terror and pain. What a fearful world, this into which he had been born.

Tar did not want to grow big like a horse or a man. He wanted some one to come. The world of growth was too empty and lonely. Now his screams were broken by sobs. Would no one ever come?

There was the sound of running feet in the lane. Two men, accompanied by the dog and the boy, had come from the field, the women had come from the house and the girls from the barn. All were running and calling to Tar but he did not dare look. When the farm woman reached him and had taken him into her arms he still kept his eyes closed and presently stopped screaming although his sobs came harder than ever.

There was a hurried consultation, many voices talking at once and then one of the men stepped forward and lifting his head from the woman’s shoulder forced Tar’s hand away from his face.

“Why, look,” he said, “the little rabbit has been eating grass and has been stung by a bee.”

The farmer laughed, the hired man and the farm boy laughed and Tar’s sister and the farm girl shrieked with delight.

Tar kept his eyes closed and it seemed to him that the sobs that now shook his body went deeper and deeper. There was a place, far down inside, where the sobs started and it hurt more than his swollen lip. If the grass he had so painfully swallowed were now making something inside him grow and burn as his lip had grown, how terrible that would be.

He buried his face on the farm woman’s shoulder and refused to look at the world. The farm boy had found the injured bee and was showing it to the girls. “He tried to eat it. He was eating grass,” he whispered and the girls shrieked again.

These terrible women!

Now his sister would go back to town and tell John. She would tell neighbor children who came to play in the Moorehead yard. The place inside Tar was hurting harder than ever.

* * * * *

The little party went along the lane through the woods and to the house. The great voyage alone that was to have utterly separated Tar from mankind, from the world that had no understanding, was retraced in but a few minutes. The two farm men and the boy had gone back to the field and the horse that had brought Tar out from town was hitched to the buggy and was standing tied to a post at the side of the house.

Tar would have his face washed and would be put into the buggy and taken back to town. The farm men and the boy he would not have to see again. The farm woman who had him in her arms had made his sister and the farm girl stop laughing but would his sister stop when she had got back to town and to his brother?

Alas, she was a woman and Tar had no faith. If women could only be more like men. The farm woman had taken him into the house, had washed the grass stains from his face and had applied a soothing lotion to his swollen lip but the thing inside kept on swelling and swelling.

In fancy he could hear his sister, his brother and the neighbor children whispering and giggling in the yard at home. Shut out from his mother by the presence of the younger babe in her arms and from the yard by malicious voices saying over and over, “The little rabbit tried to eat grass; he was stung by a bee,” where could he turn?

Tar did not know and could not think. He kept his face buried in the farm woman’s bosom and continued sobbing broken-heartedly.

Growing up, in any way he could conceive of at the moment, seemed a terrible if not impossible task. For the moment he was glad enough to be a babe in the arms of the strange woman and in a place where there was no other babe waiting to push him aside.