Short Fiction - Kate Chopin (animal farm read .txt) 📗

“Ah! to be sure⁠—to be sure, Papa Konrad is getting old and forgets things. I hear the mother calling. Maybe Santa Claus has come and lighted the Christmas-tree.”

One agreeable afternoon in late autumn two young men stood together on Canal Street, closing a conversation that had evidently begun within the clubhouse which they had just quitted.

“There’s big money in it, Offdean,” said the elder of the two. “I wouldn’t have you touch it if there wasn’t. Why, they tell me Patchly’s pulled a hundred thousand out of the concern a’ready.”

“That may be,” replied Offdean, who had been politely attentive to the words addressed to him, but whose face bore a look indicating that he was closed to conviction. He leaned back upon the clumsy stick which he carried, and continued: “It’s all true, I dare say, Fitch; but a decision of that sort would mean more to me than you’d believe if I were to tell you. The beggarly twenty-five thousand’s all I have, and I want to sleep with it under my pillow a couple of months at least before I drop it into a slot.”

“You’ll drop it into Harding & Offdean’s mill to grind out the pitiful two and a half percent commission racket; that’s what you’ll do in the end, old fellow⁠—see if you don’t.”

“Perhaps I shall; but it’s more than likely I shan’t. We’ll talk about it when I get back. You know I’m off to north Louisiana in the morning”⁠—

“No! What the deuce”⁠—

“Oh, business of the firm.”

“Write me from Shreveport, then; or wherever it is.”

“Not so far as that. But don’t expect to hear from me till you see me. I can’t say when that will be.”

Then they shook hands and parted. The rather portly Fitch boarded a Prytania Street car, and Mr. Wallace Offdean hurried to the bank in order to replenish his portemonnaie, which had been materially lightened at the club through the medium of unpropitious jackpots and bobtail flushes.

He was a surefooted fellow, this young Offdean, despite an occasional fall in slippery places. What he wanted, now that he had reached his twenty-sixth year and his inheritance, was to get his feet well planted on solid ground, and to keep his head cool and clear.

With his early youth he had had certain shadowy intentions of shaping his life on intellectual lines. That is, he wanted to; and he meant to use his faculties intelligently, which means more than is at once apparent. Above all, he would keep clear of the maelstroms of sordid work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man may be said alternately to exist, and which reduce him, naturally, to a rather ragged condition of soul.

Offdean had done, in a temperate way, the usual things which young men do who happen to belong to good society, and are possessed of moderate means and healthy instincts. He had gone to college, had traveled a little at home and abroad, had frequented society and the clubs, and had worked in his uncle’s commission-house; in all of which employments he had expended much time and a modicum of energy.

But he felt all through that he was simply in a preliminary stage of being, one that would develop later into something tangible and intelligent, as he liked to tell himself. With his patrimony of twenty-five thousand dollars came what he felt to be the turning-point in his life⁠—the time when it behooved him to choose a course, and to get himself into proper trim to follow it manfully and consistently.

When Messrs. Harding & Offdean determined to have someone look after what they called “a troublesome piece of land on Red River,” Wallace Offdean requested to be entrusted with that special commission of land-inspector.

A shadowy, ill-defined piece of land in an unfamiliar part of his native State, might, he hoped, prove a sort of closet into which he could retire and take counsel with his inner and better self.

What Harding & Offdean had called a piece of land on Red River was better known to the people of Natchitoches1 parish as “the old Santien place.”

In the days of Lucien Santien and his hundred slaves, it had been very splendid in the wealth of its thousand acres. But the war did its work, of course. Then Jules Santien was not the man to mend such damage as the war had left. His three sons were even less able than he had been to bear the weighty inheritance of debt that came to them with the dismantled plantation; so it was a deliverance to all when Harding & Offdean, the New Orleans creditors, relieved them of the place with the responsibility and indebtedness which its ownership had entailed.

Hector, the eldest, and Grégoire, the youngest of these Santien boys, had gone each his way. Placide alone tried to keep a desultory foothold upon the land which had been his and his forefathers’. But he too was given to wandering⁠—within a radius, however, which rarely took him so far that he could not reach the old place in an afternoon of travel, when he felt so inclined.

There were acres of open land cultivated in a slovenly fashion, but so rich that cotton and corn and weed and “cocoa-grass” grew rampant if they had only the semblance of a chance. The negro quarters were at the far end of this open stretch, and consisted of a long row of old and very crippled cabins. Directly back of these a dense wood grew, and held much mystery, and witchery of sound and shadow, and strange lights when the sun shone. Of a gin-house there was left scarcely a trace; only so much as could serve as inadequate shelter to the miserable dozen cattle that huddled within it in wintertime.

A dozen rods or more from the Red River bank stood the dwelling-house, and nowhere upon the plantation had time touched so sadly as