The Major's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

“And there’s another one in front of you tomorrow.”
    â€œEndless odds and ends.”
    â€œAre you sure you won’t let me call a driver to take you back to the boardinghouse?”
    â€œI need the walk and the fresh air, Papa. I’ll be fine.”
    He kissed her cheek. She said good night to Lieutenant Peters and then made her way out of the front gate, a guard halfheartedly saluting as she passed. Then the gate closed behind her and she stood for a moment looking back inside. The river made a soft whispering sound. The moon, a half-horn moon, drifted in a troubled sky. The land smelled of spring and of the snow high up in the hills melting back to the soil.

Chapter Three
    H enry Heights, twenty-five, walked slowly toward the mill, his attention sometimes diverted by workers passing by and greeting him with a good-morning. The workers called him Mr. Heights, a tribute to his place in the ruling family of Berlin, and he was aware of the inequity posed by his age and position. He was at liberty to address the workers by their first names and did so routinely on his leisurely stroll toward the mill office, and not for the first time he felt the injustice of the situation. He had been born to privilege, they had not, and that had made all the difference. His family owned the mill; his father ran it, as his father had before him, and so on back into the earliest memories of anyone living. Henry understood his place in the equation: he was to take over the mill, to run it efficiently and well, and then pass it on to his son in the appropriate season.
    On this morning, the proposition of running the mill seemed nearly tolerable. It was a fine spring day and even the perpetual smell of pulp—an acrid, nearly sweet smell like certain tropical fruit left too long in a warm container car—could not diminish the sense of industry that surrounded him. Some of the pleasure he took in the easy morning air stemmed from his recent return from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he had graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in forestry. Absence did, in fact, make the heart grow fonder—even for his balky, rheumatic heart, the same one that had kept him out of the service, leaving him stateside like a child too weak to contest the great issues of the day. On this April morning, his first day returning to his long-anticipated career, he viewed the mill with fresh eyes. It was not a place of beauty, exactly, unless one took a utilitarian view that suggested function was beauty, but its pure energy impressed him. He mused for a moment imagining what his roommate and dearest friend, Wilbur Pace, would have said about the factory as church in the liturgy of American free enterprise and capitalism. Certainly the Brown Paper Company represented as much as any church to the people of Berlin, and in that sense he knew himself to be a young priest, charged with the community’s spiritual and economic welfare.
    He paused for a moment at the overlook to the Androscoggin River, where in bygone days men in spiked shoes rode logs through the churning spring runoff, assembling giant rafts of wood that choked the river and turned it brown. In 1938 the loggers had brought the detritus of the great New England hurricane, a gale that had done more damage in two days than loggers could enact with whipsaws in many decades, and the Department of the Interior had awarded enormous contracts to the processors. It was the high-water mark, at least in terms of industrial capacity, for the Berlin mills. Now the war was upon them, and the river drivers had given way to diesel trucks for delivery, the stink of engine exhaust mixing with the sweetness of the pulp. Henry felt the world changing, understood that it had, but he could not guess how it would come to rest.
    He still stood transfixed by the river overlook when his brother, Amos, joined him. Amos was his older brother and was, by all measures, a rougher, hardier sort, a