I
The professor stood at the window of his study waiting for Her to
come home. The wind outside was high and whipped her skirts close
to her magnificent body as, breasting it unconcernedly, she came
with a long, slow stride around a corner down the street. Now, as
always whenever he saw her move, he thought of the line in Virgil,
for even in her walk she showed the goddess. And Juno was her name.
He met her at the door and he did not have to stoop to kiss her. "What
is it, dear?" he said quickly, for deep in her eyes, which looked level
with his, he saw trouble.
She handed him a letter and walked to the window--looking out at the
gathering storm. The letter was from her home away down in the Kentucky
hills--from the Mission teacher in Happy Valley.
There was an epidemic of typhoid down there. It was spreading through
the school and through the hills. They were without nurses or doctors,
and they needed help.
"Too bad, too bad," he murmured, and he turned anxiously.
"I must go," she said, with a catch in her breath. "One cabin is built
above another all the way up the creeks down there. The springs are by
the stream. High water floods all of them, and the infection goes with
the tide. And the poor things don't know--they don't know. Oh, I must go!"
For a moment he was silent, and then he got up and put his arms about her.
He was smiling.
"Then, I'll go with you." She wheeled quickly.
"No, no, no! You can't leave your work, and--remember!"
He did remember how useless it had been to argue with her, and he knew it
was useless now. Moreover, if she was going at all, it was like her to go
at once--like her to go up-stairs at once to her packing and leave him in
the darkened study alone.
They had been married two years. He had seen her first entering his own
classroom, and straightway that Latin line took permanent quarters in his
brain, so that he was almost startled when he learned her Olympic name.
It was not long before he found himself irresistibly drawn to her big,
serious eyes that never wandered in a moment's inattention, found himself
expounding directly to her--a fact already discovered by every girl in
the classroom except Juno herself; and she never did discover, for no
one was intimate enough to tell her seriously, and there was that about
her that forbade the telling in badinage. With all secrecy, and shyly
almost, he set about to learn what he could about her, and that was
little indeed.
She came from the mountains of Kentucky, she had won a scholarship
in the bluegrass region of the same State, had come North, and was
living with painful economy working her way through college, he heard,
as a waitress in the dining-hall. He was rather shocked to hear of one
incident. The girl who was the head of all athletics in college had
once addressed rather sharp words to Juno, who had been persuaded to
try for the basket-ball team. The mountain girl did not respond in kind.
Instead, her big eyes narrowed to volcanic slits, she caught the champion
shot-putter by the shoulders, shook her until her hair came down, and
then, with fists doubled, had stood waiting for more trouble.
When the term closed the professor stayed on to finish some experiments
he had on hand, and at dinner in his boarding-house the next night he
nearly overturned his soup-plate, for it was the goddess who had placed
it before him. She was there for the summer--not having money to go
home--as a general helper in the household and living under the same
roof. She too was going on with her studies, and he offered to help her.
He found her a source of puzzling surprises. While she was from the
South, she was not Southern in speech, sentiments, ideas, or ideals.
Her voice was not Southern and, while she elided final consonants, her
intonation was not of the South. Indeed she would startle him every
now and then by dropping some archaic word or old form of expression
that made him think of Chaucer. Her feeling toward the negro was
precisely what his was, and once when he halted in some stricture
on the Confederacy and started to apologize she laughed.
"All my folks," she said, "fit fer the Union--as we say down there,"
she added with a smile.
So that gradually he began to realize that the Appalachian Range, while
being parts of the Southern States, was not of them at all, but was a
region _sui generis_, and that its inhabitants were the only Americans
who had never swerved in fealty to the flag.
By midsummer it was all over with him, and he shocked his own reticent
soul by blurting out one day: "I want you to marry me." The words had
been shot from him by some inner dynamic force, and at the moment he
would have given anything he had could he have taken them back. He
waited in terror and very frankly and proudly she lifted her heavy
lashes, looked straight into his eyes, and firmly said:
"No!"
He went away then, but his relief was not what he thought it would be. He
could not forget that her mouth quivered slightly, and that there seemed
to be a faint weakening in the depths of her eyes when he told her good-by.
He could climb no mountain that he did not see her striding as from Olympus
down it. He walked by no seashore that he did not see her rising from the
waves, and again he went to her, and again he asked. And this time, just
as frankly and proudly, she looked him in the eyes and said:
"Yes--on one condition."
"Name it."
"That you don't go to my home and my people for five years." He laughed.
"Why, you big, beautiful, silly young person, I know mountains
and mountaineers."
"Yes--of Europe--but not mine."
"Very well," he said, and, not knowing women, he asked:
"Why didn't you say 'Yes' the first time?"
"I don't know," she said.