There was one place at least where the popularity of the little belle of
Crowheart showed no signs of diminution and this was in the menagerie of
domestic animals which occupied quarters in the rear of the large
backyard of the hotel. The phlegmatic black omnibus and dray horses
neighed for sugar at her coming, the calf she had weaned from the wild
range cow bawled at sight of her, while various useless dogs leaped
about her in ecstasy, and a mere glimpse of her skirt through the
kitchen doorway was sufficient to start such a duet from the two
excessively vital and omniverous mammals whom Essie had ironically named
Alphonse and Gaston that Van Lennop, who had the full benefit of this
chorus, often wished the time had arrived for Alphonse and Gaston to
fulfil their destiny. Yet he found diversion, too, in her efforts to
instil into their minds the importance of politeness and unselfishness
and frequently he laughed aloud at the fragments of conversation which
reached him when he heard her laboring with them in the interest of
their manners.
A loud and persistent squealing caused Van Lennop to raise his eyes from
his book and look out upon the pole corral wherein the vociferous
Alphonse and Gaston were confined. Essie Tisdale was perched upon the
top pole, seemingly deaf to their shrill importunities; depression was
in every line of her slim figure, despondency in the droop of her head.
Her attitude held his attention and set him wondering, for he thought
of her always as the embodiment of laughter, good-humor, and exuberant
youth. Of all the women he ever had known, either well or casually, she
had seemed the farthest from moods or nerves or anything even dimly
suggestive of the neurasthenic.
Moved by an impulse Van Lennop laid down his book and went below.
"Air-castles, Miss Tisdale?" he asked as he sauntered toward her. He
still insisted upon the whimsical formality of "Miss Tisdale," although
to all Crowheart, naturally, she was "Essie."
The girl lifted her sombre eyes at the sound of his voice and the shadow
in them gave them the look of deep blue velvet, Van Lennop thought.
"You only build air-castles when you are happy, don't you? and hopeful?"
"And are you not happy and hopeful, Miss Tisdale?" Amusement glimmered
in his eyes. "I thought you were quite the happiest person I know, and
to be happy is to be hopeful."
"What have I to make me happy?" she demanded with an intensity which
startled him. "What have I to hope for?"
"Fishing, Miss Tisdale?" He still smiled at her.
"For what? To be told that I'm pretty?"
"And young," Van Lennop supplemented. "I know women who would give a
king's ransom to be young and pretty. Isn't that enough to make one
person happy?"
"And what good will being either ever do me?" she demanded bitterly;
"me, a biscuit-shooter!" Her musical voice was almost harsh in its
bitterness. She turned upon him fiercely. "I've been happy because I was
ignorant, but I've been enlightened; I've been made to see; I've been
shown my place!"
That was it then; some one had hurt her, some one had found it in his
heart to hurt Essie Tisdale whose friendliness was as impartial and as
boundless as the sunshine itself. He looked at her inquiringly and she
went on--
"Don't you think I see what's ahead of me? It's as plain as though it
had happened and there's nothing else possible for me."
"And what is it?" he asked gently.
"There'll come a day when I'm tired and discouraged and utterly,
utterly hopeless that some cowpuncher will ask me to marry him and I'll
say yes. Then he'll file on a homestead away off somewhere in the
foothills where the range is good and there's no sheep and it's fifty
miles to a neighbor and a two days' trip to town." She stared straight
ahead as though visualizing the picture. "He'll build a log house with a
slat bunk in one end and set up a camp-stove with cracked lids in the
other. There'll be a home-made table with a red oilcloth table cover and
a bench and a home-made rocking chair with a woven bottom of cowhide for
me. He'll buy a little bunch of yearlings with his savings and what he
can borrow and in the spring I'll herd them off the poison while he
breaks ground to put in a little crop of alfalfa. I'll get wrinkles at
the corners of my eyes from squinting in the sun and a weather-beaten
skin from riding in the wind and lines about my mouth from worrying over
paying interest on our loan.
"In the winter we'll be snowed up for weeks at a time and spend the
hours looking at the pictures in a mail order catalogue and threshing
the affairs of our acquaintances threadbare. Twice a year we'll go to
town in a second-hand Studebaker. I'll be dressed in the clothes I wore
before I was married and he'll wear overalls and boots with run-over
heels. A dollar will look a shade smaller than a full moon and I'll cry
for joy when I get a clothes-wringer or a washing machine for a
Christmas present. That," she concluded laconically, "is my finish."
Van Lennop did not smile, instead he shook his head gravely.
"No, Essie Tisdale, I can't just see you in any such setting as that."
"Why not? I've seen it happen to others."
"But," he spoke decisively, "you're different."
"Yes," she cried with a vehemence which sent the color flying under her
fair skin, "I _am_ different! If I wasn't I wouldn't mind. But I care
for things that the girls who have married like that do not care for,
and I can't help it. They save their money to buy useful things and I
spend all mine buying books. Perhaps it's wrong, for that may be the
reason of my shrinking from a life such as I've described since books
have taught me there's something else outside. Being different only
makes it all the harder."
"And yet," said Van Lennop, "I'm somehow glad you are. But what has
happened? Who has hurt you? Did something go wrong at this wonderful
dinner of which you told me? Were you not after all quite the prettiest
girl there?"
"I wasn't asked!"
Van Lennop's eyes widened.
"You were not? Why, I thought the belle of Crowheart was always asked."
"Not now; I'm a biscuit-shooter; I work--and--'Society must draw the
line somewhere.'"
"Who said that?" Amazement was in Van Lennop's tone.
"Mr. Symes said it to Mrs. Symes, Mrs. Symes said it to Mrs. Jackson,
Mrs. Jackson said it to Mrs. Tutts, Mrs. Tutts said it to me."
"Of whom?"
"Of me."
"But what society?" Van Lennop's face still wore a puzzled look.
"Crowheart society."
A light broke over his face; then he laughed aloud, such a shout of
unadulterated glee that Alphonse and Gaston ceased to squeal and fixed
their twinkling eyes upon him in momentary wonder.
"When I told you I was going I thought of course they would ask me. I
thought the tardy invitation was just an oversight, but now I know"--her
chin quivered suddenly like a hurt child's--"that they never meant to
ask me."
Van Lennop's face had quickly sobered.
"You are sure he really said that--this Andy P. Symes?"
"I think there's no mistake. It was the easiest way to rid themselves of
my friendship." She told him then of the reproof Symes had administered.
An unwonted shine came into Van Lennop's calm eyes as he listened. This
put a different face upon the affair, this intentional injury to the
feelings of his stanch little champion, it somehow made it a more
personal matter. The "social line" amused him merely, though, in a way,
it held a sociological interest for him, too. It was, he told himself,
like being privileged to witness the awakening of social ambitions in a
tribe of bushmen.
Van Lennop was silent, but the girl felt his unspoken sympathy, and it
was balm to her sore little heart.
"This--society?" she asked after a time. "What is it? We've never had it
before. Everybody knows everybody else out here and there are so few of
us that we've always had our good times together and we have never left
anybody out. The very last thing we wanted to do was to hurt anyone
else's feelings in that way."
"You have left those halycon days behind, I'm afraid," Van Lennop
replied. "The first instinct of a certain class of people is to hurt the
feelings of others. It's the only way they know to proclaim their
superiority, a superiority of which they are not at all sure,
themselves. Just what 'society' is, is an old and threadbare subject and
has been threshed out over and over again without greatly altering
anybody's individual point of view. Good breeding, brains and money are
generally conceded to be the essentials required by that complex
institution and certainly one or all of them are necessary for any great
social success."
Van Lennop watched her troubled face and waited.
"Then that's why old Edouard Dubois was asked, though he never speaks,
and Alva Jackson, who is uncouth and ignorant? They represent money."
Van Lennop smiled.
"Undoubtedly."
"And the Starrs are brains."
He laughed outright now.
"The power of the press! Correct, Miss Tisdale."
"And Andy P. Symes----" Van Lennop supplied dryly--"is family. He had a
great-grandfather, I believe."
Van Lennop returned the persistent, pleading stare of Alphonse and
Gaston while Essie pondered this bewildering subject.
"But out here it's mostly money that counts, or rather will count in the
future."
"Yes, with a man of Symes's type it would be nearly the only
qualification necessary. If you had been the 'rich Miss Tisdale' you
undoubtedly would have been the guest of honor."
"Then," she said chokingly, "my good times are over, for I'm--nobody
knows who--just Essie Tisdale--a biscuit-shooter whose friendship counts
for nothing."
With feminine intuition she grasped Crowheart's new point of view, and
Van Lennop, because he knew human nature, could not contradict her, but
in the security of his own position he could not fully understand how
much it all meant to her in her small world.
"You mustn't take this to heart," he said gently, conscious of a strong
desire to comfort her. "If the cost of an invitation were a single tear
it would be too high a price to pay. In explaining to you what the world
recognizes in a general way as 'Society,' I had no thought of Crowheart
in my mind. There can be no 'Society' in Crowheart with its present
material. What it is obvious this man Symes means to attempt, is only an
absurd imitation of something he can never hope to attain. The effort
resembles the attempts of a group of amateurs to present a Boucicault
comedy, while 'in front' the world laughs at them, not with them. It is
a dangerous experiment to pretend to be anything other than what you
are. It means loss of dignity, for you are merely absurd when you
attempt to play a part which by birth and training and temperament you
are nowise fitted to play. You become a target for the people whom you
care most to impress.
"When one begins to imitate he loses his individuality and his
individuality is the westerner's chief charm. Be yourself, Essie
Tisdale, be simple, sincere, and you can never be absurd.
"I am sorry for what you have told me, since, if what seems threatening
comes to pass, Crowheart will be only a middle class, commonplace town
of which it has a thousand prototypes. Its strongest attraction now is
its western flavor, the lingering atmosphere of the frontier. This must
pass with time, of course, but it seems a shame that the change should
be forced prematurely by the efforts of this man Symes. Really I feel a
distinct sense of personal injury at his innovations." Van Lennop
laughed slightly. "The old way was the best way for a long time to come,
it seems to me. That was real democracy--a Utopian condition that had of
necessity to go with the town's growth, but certainly not at this stage.
In larger communities it is natural enough that those of similar tastes
should seek each other, but, in a place like Crowheart where the
interests and the mental calibre of its inhabitants are practically the
same, the man who seeks to establish an 'aristocracy' proclaims himself
a petty-minded, silly ass. Be a philosopher, Miss Tisdale."
But Essie Tisdale was not a philosopher; the experience was still too
new and bewildering for philosophy to prove an instant remedy. She found
Van Lennop's sympathy far more comforting than his logic, but through
her heavy-heartedness there was creeping a growing appreciation of the
superiority of this stranger in worn corduroys to his surroundings, a
clearer conception of his calm mental poise.
Van Lennop himself was a living contradiction of the fallacious
statement that all men are equal, and now, moved by her unhappiness, she
caught a glimpse of that lying beneath the impregnable reserve of a
polite and agreeable exterior which made the distinction. She realized
more strongly than before that he lived upon a different plane from that
of any man she ever had known.
"Do you know who I think must have been like you?" she asked him
unexpectedly.
He shook his head smilingly.
"I can't imagine."
"Robert Louis Stevenson."
He flushed a little.
"You surely flatter me; there is no one whom I admire more." He looked
at her in something of pleased surprise. "You read Stevenson--you like
him?"
Her face lighted with enthusiasm.
"So very, very much. He seems so wise and so--human. I have all that he
has written--his published letters, everything."
He continued to look at her oddly. Yes, Essie Tisdale was "different"
and somehow he was glad. The personal conversation had shown him
unexpected phases of her character. He saw beneath her youthful
unworldliness the latent ambitions, undeveloped, immature desires and
something of the underlying strength concealed by her ordinarily
light-hearted exuberance. While the readjustment of Crowheart's social
affairs was hurting her on the raw he saw the sensitiveness of her
nature, the quick pride and perceptions which he might otherwise have
been long in discovering. Previously she had amused and interested him,
now she awakened in him a real anxiety as to her future.
"Be brave," he said, "and keep on smiling, Essie Tisdale. You must work
out your own salvation as must we all. This will pass and be forgotten;
there will be triumphs with your failures, don't forget that, and the
long years ahead of you which you so dread may hold better things than
you dare dream. In some way that I don't see now I may be able to lend
you a helping hand."
"Your friendship and your sympathy are enough," she said gratefully.
"You have them both," he answered, and on the strength of ten years'
difference in their ages he patted her slim fingers with a quite
paternal hand, in ignorance of the malevolent pair of eyes watching him
from the window at the end of the upper corridor.