very best dancer in the Harpeth Valley, not excepting Tom Pollard over
at Hillsboro. "But, Tolly, I must give up all thought of social
pleasures for a time." I spoke with a dignified reserve that fitted the
spirit that I ought to have when undertaking a great responsibility,
though I did want to dance. "I have some hard mental work to do."
"Well, blast old Hayesboro for a sad hole! You are going to go in for
brain athletics, Sam Crittenden for farmer heroics, and the only movie
that has peeped into town is going to be closed because it ran a Latin
Quarter film the afternoon the ladies stopped in from the United
Charities sewing circle, expecting a Cuban missionary thriller. I might
as well have my left foot amputated, it itches so for good dancing."
Tolly was so furious that I was positively sorry for him, and to comfort
and calm him I told him all about Peter's letter and the play, and the
way I had to read and criticize and help. He sniffed at the idea of
Peter, but the dramatist impressed him slightly.
"Say, that old boy is the real thing, Betty, child. He's the sure
win-out on Broadway. But how long will it take you to write that play
for your mollycoddle poet? You can get through with it before the
Country Club gets going good, can't you? We've had a new floor in the
dancing-pavilion built, and the directors ordered a foxy music machine
last night."
"Oh yes, I ought to be able to tell Peter all I know in two and a half
months," I answered, ignoring Tolly's disrespect for my poet friend.
"And a lot you don't know," Tolly added, with the candor of real
affection. "I wish Sam, the old calf, could be weaned from his cows and
take the position your dad is offering him at the Phosphate Works, so he
would be able to shake a foot occasionally. Can't you handle him a bit,
Betty? It's as if he just came out and looked at life and then dived
back in a hollow log."
"I--I don't know," I answered, doubtfully. A pang shot through me at the
thought of any one extracting Sam from that wonderful retreat in the
woods, but then also this news of the honors that were coming to Peter
made me long to have Samuel Foster Crittenden come forth and take his
place in the world beside his friends. Sam, I felt sure, was made to
shine, not to have his light hid under a farm basket. Why, even Tolly,
there beside me on the steps, was the head of the new Electric Light
Company that Hayesboro has had a little over a year. He did it all
himself, though he had failed to pass his college examinations when he
went up for them with Sam.
"I'm proud of the way you've been doing things, Tolly," I added, warmly,
putting my thoughts of Sam away where I keep them when I'm not using
them.
"Oh, I'm just an old money-grubber and nobody's genius child, but I'll
rustle the gold boys to get up to New York to see your play, Betty, and
send you a wagon-load of florist's spinnach on the first night,"
answered Tolly, beaming at my words of praise.
"Oh, Tolly, please don't think I'm going to write a play," I answered,
quickly. "I'm--well, I'm just going to tell Peter a whole lot of useful
things I find out about life. You see, Tolly, Peter's father has so many
millions of dollars that it has been almost impossible for Peter to
climb over them into real life as we have. I have to do it for him.
Please pity Peter, Tolly, and tell me what you think would be nice in
his play if you find anything."
"Well--er--well, I have right in stock at present a little love-interest
tale I could unfold to you, Betty, about--Help! There comes the gentle
child Edith up the street now. I must go. I am too coarse-grained for
association with her." And before I could stop him he was gone through
the house and out the back way. That is the way it always is with Tolly
and Edith, either they are inseparable or entirely separate. They can't
seem to be coexistent citizens, and they have been fighting this way
since they both had on rompers. I wondered what Tolly had been doing
now.
"Clyde Tolbot needn't have gone just because I came. I can endure him
when I have other people to help me," said Edith, as she kissed me and
sat down sadly. She is always sad when Tolly has been sinful.
"What has Tolly been doing now?" I asked her, as I put that fascinating
Belgian face down on the floor and ruthlessly sat upon him, for the step
was getting cold, though the sun was delicious and had drawn out a nice
old bumblebee from his winter quarters to scout about the budding
honeysuckle over our heads.
"I am so hurt that I wouldn't tell anybody about it but you, dear, but
last night as he walked home with me, after we had been dancing down at
Sue's to the new phonograph, he--he put his arm almost around me and I
think--I think he was going to kiss me if I hadn't prevented him--that
is, he did kiss my hair--I think." Edith is the pale-nun type, and I
wish she could have seen how lovely she was with the blush that even the
failure of Tolly to kiss her brought up under her deep-blue eyes. Edith
didn't get any farther north to school than Louisville, and her maiden
aunt, Miss Editha Shelby Morris Carruthers, brought her up perfectly
beautifully. I didn't know how to comfort her because I had been two
years at the Manor on the Hudson and then a year in Europe, and, though
nobody ever has directly kissed me, a girl's hand and hair don't seem to
count out in the world.
To take Edith's mind off Tolly's perfidy I told her about the play, and
she was as impressed as anybody could wish her to be, and promised to
stand by me and make people understand why I couldn't dance and picnic
like other people because of this great work I had to do for a dear
friend. I told her not to tell anybody but Sue, and she went home
completely comforted by her friendly interest in Peter and me. In fact,
she really adored the idea of helping me help Peter, and seemed to
forget her anger at Tolly with a beautiful spirit.
About that time Eph solemnly called me in to lunch. Eph is a nice,
jolly old negro until he gets a white linen jacket and apron on, and
then he turns into a black mummy. I think it is because I used to want
to talk to him at the table when I still sat in a high chair. I don't
believe he has any confidence in my discretion even now, and that is why
he seats me with such a grand and forbidding display of ceremony.
"Betty dear," said mother, after Eph had served her chicken soup and
passed her the beaten biscuits, "I found an old note-book of my mother's
that has all the wonderful things she did to the negroes and other live
stock on her farm out in Harpeth Valley. You know she ran the whole
thousand acres herself after father's death in her twenty-seventh year,
and she was a wonderful woman, though she did have three girls and only
one son. There is a section of her notes devoted to cows and their
diseases, and Sam might be interested to hear how she managed them so
that even then her cows sold for enormous sums. Suppose you look over it
and tell him about it."
"Oh, I will. Thank you, mother!" I answered, as I took three little
brown biscuits, to Eph's affectionate delight, and also as a shock to
his proprieties.
I had planned to open the bundle and begin my work for Peter right after
dinner, but I sat down and devoured whole that note-book of my maternal
ancestor's. I never was so thrilled over anything, and the chapter on
gardening really reads like a beautiful idyl of summer. It changed my
entire nature. As I read I glowed to think that I could go right to
Sam's wilderness and try it all out. I didn't own any land, and it might
take a little time to force daddy to buy me some, and the planting
season and fever were upon me. There is a wide plateau to the south of
Sam's living-room, and I had in my mind cleared it of bushes, enriched
it with all the wonderful things grandmother had directed, beginning
with beautiful dead leaves, and I was planting out the row of great
blush peonies in my mind as I intended to plant it in Sam's garden when
the tall old clock in the hall toned out four long strokes. Then I
remembered that I wanted to go down to the post-office to get my mail
and to see everybody and hear the news. So with the greatest reluctance
I tucked the garden idyl in the old desk which had been that very
Grandmother Nelson's, and heaved Peter's heavy manuscript in on top of
it.
No mass-meeting, no picnic, and no function out in the great world, even
New-Year's reception at the White House or afternoon tea at the Plaza,
could be half the fun that going to the Hayesboro post-office for the
afternoon mail is. I think the distinct flavor is imparted by the fact
that all our forefathers and foremothers have done it before us. The
Hayesboro resurrection will be held right there, I feel sure.
And if mail-time is fun usually, it is great when all the news is about
you and your friends all swarm around you with interest. Everybody had
heard about Peter and his play, though neither Edith nor Tolly thought
they had told, and that he was soon coming down to visit me, and, of
course, that meant to visit all of Hayesboro. Miss Henrietta Spain, who
teaches literature from spelling to the English poets, in the Hayesboro
Academy, had read Peter's new poem--the one the _Literary Opinion_ had
copied last month--and she was pink with excitement over the prospect of
having such a genius in our midst,
"Look out that you don't get put in the play on the other side of the
footlights, Hayes," said the mayor, slapping daddy on the back. "Be
careful how you have a poet sitting around your house."
"The South has long waited to have a genius come down and write a
fitting epic about her Homeric drama of Civil War, Elizabeth," said old
Colonel Menefee. "Let your young friend come, and I can give him
material, beginning with that Bedford Forest charge just before
Chickamauga that--"
"And just remember," interrupted Mrs. Winston Polk, "how Elizabeth's
mother, Betty's own Grandmother Nelson, rode fifty miles and back in
twenty-four hours to get Morgan to send wagons for her barnful of corn
to feed his soldiers, though she and her negroes were dependent on what
she could grow between then and frost. She never faltered, but--"
"The Nashville and Louisville papers all wrote up the way Clyde Tolbot
swam Salt River and stopped the L. & N. express from going down in the
cut during the storm last year," Edith hastened to say when Mrs. Folk's
breath had given out. Tolly's ugly good face was beautiful to see when
she spoke of him thus, though Edith didn't notice it.
When you start a Harpeth Valley town to telling how wonderful it is to
the third and fourth generation back, it is like a seething torrent and
can go on for ever. I glowed to think of all the wonderful things I
could write Peter, and we all started home from the post-office as late
as supper hour would admit.
After I got home, escorted by the reunited Edith and Tolly, as well as
by Billy Robertson, who wants to be Peter's hero, though he wasn't
directly saying so, I sat down determinedly to write to Peter at
inspiring length and make him feel how I valued his confidence in me,
also to mention the war drama. Just then I raised my eyes and that
wonderful notebook had pushed a corner of itself out of the desk from
under the manuscript. I couldn't use my mind advising between a modern
epic and a war drama while it was plowed up ready for peonies, so I
decided to wait and ask Sam's advice about advising Peter, and I read
the rest of the peony pages in comfort. Right then, too, I made up my
mind that I was going to get ground bone to plant at the roots of all
the peonies if I had to use my own skeleton to do it and would only see
them bloom with astral eyes.
I was still reading when the supper-bell rang, and was only interested
in reminiscences of Grandmother Nelson during the meal.
"No, ma'am, Miss Caroline, you got it wrong. Ole Mis' didn't divide
clover pinks 'cepting every third year 'stid of second. _Hers_ bloomed,
they did," Eph interrupted mother to say, indulging in perhaps his first
speech while waiting on the table during the long and honorable life as
a butler which that grandmother had started at his sixth year. He then
retired in the blackest consternation, and his yellow granddaughter, the
house-girl, brought in the wine-jelly.
One thing is certain--I must contrive some way to get Sam back and forth
to me from The Briers in less time than it takes him to walk five miles.
He has got just one old roan plow mare and he won't ride her after he
has worked her all day, and I am afraid it won't do for me to go after
him with Redwheels every time I want him. I can go about two-thirds of
the time, but he must be allowed some liberty about expressing his
desire for my company. Of course a tactful woman can go nine-tenths of
the way in all things to meet a man she likes, and he'll think she
hasn't even started from home; but she ought to be honorable enough not
to do it at that rate. I believe in liberty for men as well as women.
Still, I can't express the strain it was on me to wait until after eight
o'clock for Sam with Grandmother Nelson's farm-book on my knee, and I
don't want to do it ever again, especially if the Byrd or Mammy or the
cows or any of the other live stock might be sick. I felt that it must
be midnight before I got Sam seated by me on the deep old mahogany sofa
in front of one nice April blaze in behind the brass fender, and under
another from Tolly's power-house. He was pretty tired, as he had been up
since daylight, but the cows were all right and on feed again, Mammy
wasn't any stiffer than usual, and he had promised the Byrd the first
chicken that the old Dominicker hatched out to stay at home and let him
come to see me. Mammy had sent me five fresh eggs, and Sam presented
them with a queer pod of little round black seeds, and a smile that
wouldn't look me in the face.
"Hollyhocks! I climbed over the Johnson fence about two miles from town
and stole them for you," he said, as he squirmed around from me and
picked a brown burr off the leg of his trousers.
"Aren't they sweeties?" I exclaimed, not noticing his entirely
unnecessary bashfulness. "And that is just what I want to talk to you
about." With which I produced my ancestral treasure, and with our heads
close together we dove into it, didn't come up until after ten o'clock,
and then were breathless.
"Oh, Sam, can I do all these things out at your farm?" I exclaimed, and
I fairly clung against his shoulder while his strong, rough hand folded
over mine as the husk did over the hollyhock seeds I had been holding
warm and moist in my palm.
"All of them, and then some, Betty," he answered, blowing away a wisp of
my hair that he had again roughed up instead of shaking hands in
greeting, despite my reproof. "I'll plow up that southern plot for you
just after daylight to-morrow, and every minute I can take from
grubbing at the things I have to work to make the eats for all of us
I'll put in on the posy-garden for you."
"I'm much obliged to you for the plowing, but I'll be out at about nine
o'clock and I'll bring my own spade and hoe and rake and things. I think
I'll take those two young white lilacs that are crowded over by the
fence in the front yard to start the garden. Don't you think lilacs
would be a lovely corner for a garden like my grandmother's, Sam?"
"I--I think it would be nice to--plant the hollyhock seeds you have in
your hand the first thing, Betty," answered Sam, with the gridiron
smolder in his eyes which snapped up into a twinkle as he added, "Could
you help me set onions for a few hours later on?"
"Oh, I'd adore it!" I answered, enthusiastically. "Of course, I mean to
help plant all the eat things, too. I may like them best. Let's see what
grandmother says about onions." And I began to ruffle back the pages of
the book that Sam held in both his hands for me.
"Good gracious! Betty, couldn't the old lady write!" exclaimed Sam, a
half-hour later, after we had finished with onions and many other
profitable vegetables. "Why, that description of her hog's dying with
cholera and the rescue reads like a--a Greek tragedy in its simplicity."
"Oh, Sam," I exclaimed in dismay, "that reminds me, I forgot to tell you
about the play, and now you ought to go home, with all those five miles
to walk and plowing to do at daylight." "Play? What play? Won't it
keep?" asked Sam, as he rose and reached for his hat on the table.
"Let's enjoy this last ten minutes before my hike, down at the gate."
"Oh no, it won't keep, and I don't know exactly what I will do about it
and the garden. Here's Peter's letter; read it for yourself," I wailed,
as I drew the splashed letter out from the ruffle in the front of my
dress where I had stuck it for safe keeping, and handed it to Sam. If I
hadn't been so distressed by the collision of the play and the garden in
my heart I never would have been so dishonorable as to let Sam read the
last paragraph in Peter's letter, which was more affectionate than I
felt was really right for Peter to write me, even after the Astor
tea-party, and which had troubled me faintly until I had forgotten about
it in my excitement about Farrington and the play. I saw Sam's hand
shake as he read that last page, and he held it away from me and
finished it, as I remembered and gasped and reached for it.
"Good old Pete," said Sam, in a voice that shook as his hand did while
he handed me back the letter. "It is a great chance for him, and if you
can help you'll have to go to it, Betty. Pete only needs ballast, and
you are it--he seems to think."
"But how will I find time enough from making our garden to help make his
play?" I asked as I rose and clung to his sleeve as I had done in all
serious moments of my life, even when his coat-sleeve had been that of
a roundabout jacket. My heart was weak and jumpy as I asked the
question.
"Betty," said Sam, gently, lifting my hand from his arm into his for a
second and then handing it firmly back to me, "that garden was just a
dream you and I have been having this evening. It can't be. Don't you
see, dear, I am in a hard hand-to-hand struggle with my land, which is
all I possess, for--for bread for myself and the kiddie, and I--I can't
have a woman's flower-garden. It looks as if you and old Petie can do a
real literary stunt together. Just get at it, and God bless you both.
Good night now; I must sprint." And as he spoke he was through one of
the long windows and out on the front porch in the moonlight.
"Oh, wait, Sam, wait!" I gasped, as I flew after him and clung to him
determinedly.
"Well," he said, patiently, as he stood on the step below me and turned
his bronze head away from me out toward his dim hills sleeping in the
soft mystery of the moonlight.
"I will, Sam, I _will_ have that garden," I said, with the same angry
determination in my voice I had used when I had clung to him and kicked
and fought to go to places with him when he didn't want me, and when my
skirts were several inches above my bare knees and his feet were
scratched and innocent of shoes.
"Betty," said Sam, as he shook me away from him and then took my
shoulders under their thin covering of chiffon in his plow-calloused,
big, warm hands, "forget it! There are lots of dream gardens out in the
world you can play in when you have time away from the bright lights.
Everybody grows 'em without a lick of work. I have to work mine or
starve. Good night!" Then with a rough of my hair down across my eyes he
was out in the moonlit road, running away from me to his hollow log in a
way he had never done before, no matter how I had tagged him.
I ran as far as the gate to watch him out of sight, and then I put my
head down against the tall old post that had been one of Sam's perches
when he wanted to climb away from me in former years, and sobbed and
sobbed. I had never expected Sam to cast me off.
Girls' hearts are covered all over with little thin crystallizations of
affection, and men ought to be very careful not to smash any of them
with their superior strength. Sam had hurt me so that I didn't even dare
think about it. I knew he was poor, and I hadn't expected him to plow
and plant things for me while I went about in a picture-hat snipping
them with garden scissors. I had asked him to let me set onions and weed
beans and drop peas and corn for him and share his poverty and hard work
as a true friend, and he had shut his cedar-pole gate in my face and
heart. And I didn't understand why. I tried to think it was his
affection for Peter that made him thus rudely switch my mind from him
and his garden to Peter and his need of me, which Sam may have thought
was greater than the need of his onions and turnip salad; but I don't
see how Sam could have construed cruelty to me as generosity to Peter.
"Please God," I prayed out into the everlasting hills toward which Sam
was running away from me and from which I had heard intoned "cometh
help," "give me dirt to work in somewhere except in just a yard if I
can't have Sam's. Help me to get somebody to help me to raise things for
people to eat and milk, as well as to inspire a play. I'll do both
things, but I must have earth with rotted leaves in it. Amen."
Then I went to bed heartbroken for life, and my sad eyes closed on the
little glimpse which my window framed of Old Harpeth, the tallest hill
in Paradise Ridge, while my hand still folded in the moist hollyhock
seeds.
II
THE BOOK OF SHELTER
Peter's play is remarkable; it really is. He has collected all the great
and wonderful things that life in America contains and put them together
in a way that reads as if Edgar Allan Poe had helped Henry James to
construct it, though they had forgotten to ask Mark Twain to dinner and
had never heard of John Burroughs. I felt when I got through the first
act as if I had been living for a week shut into an old Gothic cathedral
aisle decorated by marble-carved inspired words, and I was both cold and
hungry. The more I read of Peter's play the more congenial I felt with
Farrington. I had enough education to see that it was a genuine literary
achievement, but I had heart enough to know that something had to be
done to rescue all his characters from the arctic region. Could I do it
single-handed even for a person I cared as much for as I did for Peter?
I decided that I could not, and that the only way I could prove my
loyalty and affection for Peter was to abase myself before Sam
Crittenden and his cruelty to me, and get his help. Only for Peter would
I have done such a thing, which in the end I didn't have to do at all.
Since the night Sam refused me the use of his farm and put me out of his
life for ever I had not seen him until by his own intention. Or maybe it
was Tolly's.
"See here, Betty, what you need is a good fox or tango and you had
better come to it up at Sue's to-night."
Tolly had broken in upon my despairing meditations over the way in which
Peter's hero talks wicked business and congested charity to the poor
little heroine in the very first act while she is full of a beautiful
affection Peter didn't seem to see, and ready to pour it forth to the
hero before he started out on a long life mission. Maybe it was
sorrowing with her at being thus suppressed by everybody that made me
write her case to Peter with such fervor. I had just finished the letter
when Tolly came to my rescue with the offer of a nice warm dance to
nourish me up.
"Don't make me kidnap you, Betty; go fluff and rose up a bit," he
commanded, as he seated himself on the front steps with a determination
which was as business-like as his management of the Electric Light
Company.
"I think I had better go to Sue's to thaw out some of my loneliness
over this play," I answered him as I looked up with desperation and a
smudge on my face. Then I went to my room and left Tolly alone with
Peter's poor little heroine. "Say, tell the poet to get the man with the
dinner-pail who is eating hunk sandwiches at lunch-time on the pavement
in front of any construction job in New York to tell him what he did and
said to his girl at the firemen's ball the night before, and then
translate it into some of this first-class poetry. That'll be a great
play," said Tolly, as I came down-stairs just as he had turned page
twenty-five of Peter's manuscript. Tolly's coarseness doesn't affect me
as it does Edith because there is always so much point to it.
"You don't quite understand Peter and his play, Tolly, dear," I said,
with dignity, though I felt exactly the same way about it and hadn't
known how to express it in human interest terms as well as Tolly.
"I sure don't," answered Tolly, cheerfully, and not at all as if I had
put him in his place in regard to his criticism of our epic. "Come on;
let's hurry. Everybody is waiting for us."