heroine; I didn't know whether she was being murdered or separated for
life from the hero. Still, it was good to have Sam to myself for long,
quiet, hot evenings out on the front porch under the brooding doves in
the eaves above us. Sam never talks much but he listens to me, and
sometimes he tells me things from way down inside himself. And little by
little I began to understand all about the things he had been too busy
doing to tell me about.
"You see, it is this way, Bettykin," he said, one evening when the young
moon was attempting to silver the dark all around us as we sat on the
front steps, with mother away rounding off the second pair of socks for
Peter. "There wasn't one cent of money for me to take Byrd and Mammy and
make a start in New York. Even with the best sort of a backing, it is
always a ten-year pull for a youngster before he counts in the world. I
could have sold The Briers, but I couldn't make up my mind to do it, and
then while I hesitated I--I"--he paused a minute and steadied his voice,
while I took his hand and held on to it tight--"I got a call--a land
call that I had to answer. God just picked me up and planted me here on
my bit of land, and I've got to root and grow or--or dishonor Him."
"Oh, Sam, you have, you have honored Him," I said as I crept closer to
his arm.
"I've been all uprooted and pruned, Betty, and I've lost--lost--you
know! But for Him I must go on just the same and bear fruit." At the
pain in Sam's low voice something in me throbbed.
"Lost? Oh, Sam, what?" I exclaimed, as I hugged his arm against my
breast. "What's happened to you, Sam? Tell--"
But just here we were interrupted by a clatter and a clash of hoofs, a
wild shout in Peter's voice, and a cheer in the fledgling's high treble.
The biggest mule lurched up to the gate, and two figures took a flying
leap from his back to the pavement. With a rush they swept up the path
and brought up panting at the bottom of our steps.
"Peter!" I gasped, descending to be sure that neither of them was bodily
broken or demented.
"It's across! it's across!" shouted Peter as he reached out his arms and
grabbed me in a wild embrace.
"What?" Sam and I both demanded, though, of course, in a way we knew.
"The play!" exclaimed Peter, putting his head down on my shoulder and
fairly sobbing out his relief. "Farrington is going to begin rehearsals
from the first two acts I've sent him, and I am to go right on to New
York with the third that I finished an hour before the wire came over
from the cross-roads station. You'll go with me, won't you, Betty? I
can't go without you and Sam." And as he hugged me close Peter reached
out and grasped Sam's big hand that rested on his arm.
"Of course Betty will go, and I'll come as soon as I get the whole crop
in," answered Sam in his deep, kind, strong voice that steadied all our
nerves. "I knew you'd make it, Pete. I never doubted that all you needed
was a bit of brawn to punch from."
"Peter--Sam!" I gasped, trying to get my balance as I felt as if I were
being hurried through space without even being told where to. "I don't
know. I--"
"I can't do without you, Betty," Peter said again, as he held me close
and Sam withdrew from us for the distance of about two steps.
"Betty is the real thing, Pete, and she'll stand by when you need her.
She always does," Sam said, in a quiet voice that sank down into the
depths of my soul and made a cold spot.
"I--I--don't know. I--" I was just reiterating when daddy and Julia,
with a plate of something, came through the gate and up the walk. They
had to be told, and they had to congratulate, and then mother came out
to see what it was all about. They were all happy and gloriously
excited, and I was dead--dead.
Then Sam took Peter home because he had to pack and get into town for
the morning train. I begged for the fledgling to be left with me, and
Sam consented without even mentioning the string-beans to be picked or
the weeds in the parsnips. He said good night to everybody before he did
to me, and then started to go with just the farewell word, hesitated a
second, and came back and roughed my hair down over my eyes with the
greatest roughness he had ever employed in that action. It would have
broken my heart if he hadn't.
"Betty," said the Byrd, as he crouched at my side with his thin,
scantily clad little body hovered against my skirts, "you ain't going to
no New York with Pete and leave me and Sam and all the poor little ones,
is you?"
"Oh, Byrd, I'm afraid I'll have to!" I sobbed, cuddling him close.
"Well, then, damn Pete!" he exploded.
IV
THE BOOK OF LOVE
Most men are only a fraction of the greatness that the world adds them
up to be, but Farrington is a whole man and then a fraction over. I
enjoy talking to him just as much as I do to Sam or anybody else who is
doing interesting things in a perfectly simple way. When we talked about
Peter and the play he reminded me in lots of ways of old Dr. Chubb when
he gets on the subject of spavined horses or sick cows; of course I
don't mean any disrespect to Peter in that comparison. I told Mr.
Farrington the same thing, and he didn't laugh at all; his eyes shone
out from under his bushy white eyebrows like two wise old stars, and he
said he saw exactly what I meant, and that he hoped to meet Dr. Chubb
some day. And I continued to feel enthusiasm for him even after half an
hour's talk on the subject of his treatment of Peter, which Peter had
led me to believe was atrocious.
"Dear, dearest Betty," said Peter, as he met me at the train on the
first day of September, "how wonderful to have you come just when I need
you most! I am in the depths of despair." And he looked it.
"Oh, Peter, is it about the play?" I gasped as I fairly hung on to his
arm while he was languidly giving my traveling-bag to a footman. Peter
looked like a literary version of what Sam called "the last of
pea-time," which is a very vivid expression to a person who has just
seen her poor peas drop away in the August garden. "What has happened?"
"I care nothing more about the play, Betty. It is stolen from me,"
answered Peter, gloomily, as he led me through the Pennsylvania Station
and up the steps toward the limousine, where I knew Mabel would be
waiting to eat me up and be in turn devoured.
"Why, Peter, what can you mean?" I gasped.
"I'll tell you all about it when I get you to myself. Don't mention it
to Mabel--she doesn't understand," he answered from behind his teeth as
he put me into the car and into Mabel's arms, and also into Miss
Greenough's.
But for all my joy at seeing both those dear friends again I couldn't
help being depressed by every glance at Peter, sitting opposite me,
looking white and glum.
"Don't notice him--he's more impossible than ever," said Mabel, once,
when Peter leaned out to be reproachful to the chauffeur for doing his
duty and keeping us waiting for the traffic signal. "I'll tell you all
when I get you alone."
Judge Vandyne met us at the lodge gate of the great Vandyne home out on
the Island. He, too, treated Peter like a sick baby. I never was so
puzzled; and dinner would have seemed long but for the fact that they
all wanted to hear so much about Sam and The Briers and the whole
Harpeth Valley. I never more enjoyed telling anything, and even Peter's
gloom lightened when I told him about the fat little duck the Byrd had
insisted on sending him--alive in a box. Daddy was secretly expressing
it to me, on the sleeping-car porter's kindly advice, when he saw it in
my baggage.
"Well, well," said Judge Vandyne, as he came into the drawing-room with
us after dinner, "young Crittenden is really getting to goal on that
farm question. I'm glad you sent me that report--it set some big things
in motion. I'll tell you about it when I get you alone," he added, under
his breath. And that was another time that made me feel as if I were a
baby that ought to be sliced up to be divided. As it was, Peter got me
first, and I don't blame him for being in agony. That is, I didn't blame
Peter, but neither do I blame Farrington, now that I have talked to him.
This was Peter's tale of woe:
"Stolen, it is absolutely stolen from me, Betty, and I am helpless to
protect the child of my brain," he began. The judge and Mabel had at
last left us alone, probably because they hesitated to have Peter commit
patricide and fratricide, if those are the right terms for sister and
father murder.
"How, Peter?" I asked, taking his hand with deep sympathy.
"Betty, since the first three rehearsals I am not allowed even in the
theater, and Farrington is a brute. I do not know what he is doing to my
play, but I do know that he was at work on a horrible laugh in the first
part of the first act that I did not intend at all. The leading woman
is coarse, with no soul, and the star is a great hulking ass. I am wild
and nobody sympathizes with me. Father has talked to Farrington, and
that is why he wired to you. Oh, I know he wired or you wouldn't have
come up to this inferno at this time of the year. That is one kindness
he did me--it _is_ a comfort to me--oh, Betty." And Peter put his head
down on my arm that was next him and sobbed, as the Byrd does when
anything happens to one of his "little ones."
I didn't blame Peter at all, for that play was his "little one" and his
first. I just took it out in hating and vilifying Farrington, until I
got Peter much comforted, even interested in hearing about the splendid
price Sam had got for the north-field rye. Then it was time for us to go
to bed, and I suppose it was best that it was too late for Mabel to come
into my room to tell me her version of Peter's troubles. For that one
night I sympathized fully with him. The next morning I was shown another
side of the question. And I felt decidedly different about Mr.
Farrington when he talked to me for a little while, alone before dinner
the next day, and after Judge Vandyne had also had me in solitary
conversation.
"You see, my dear young lady," said Mr. Farrington, with that twin-star
smile in his eyes I have mentioned, "the very wonderful nature that
grows and flowers such an exquisite young first play as this of our
young friend's, is the undoing of the work and the producer, unless he
is a heartless old brute like the one to whom you are at present
talking."
"Oh, I don't think you are that now, not at all. I--I think you are
wonderful, and I trust you with the play even though you haven't told me
anything about what you are doing to it," I exclaimed in great
confidence and enthusiasm.
"You are a wonderful bit lass yourself, and I trust you with my poet,
even if you haven't told me just what you are going to do with him," he
answered, and looked at me with the real affection, tempered with
amusement, that daddy and Judge Vandyne and Dr. Chubb all use toward me.
I blushed and was just going to tell him that--well, I don't know just
what I was going to tell him, but I am sure I'd have opened my innermost
heart to him, for that is what he invites, when in came Peter and the
rest, and we all went in to dinner. I didn't see the great dean of the
American stage alone any more, but he whispered to me just as Mabel and
Miss Greenough and I were leaving the room:
"Keep my poet easy, and you'll see what you see."
I am glad now when I look back on it that my presence did help Peter
through the ordeal of that two weeks. Also Mabel and I had schemes
together to take his mind off his dying child, which was being operated
on by Farrington to make it a success. The best diversion, however, was
Judge Vandyne's. He asked me to make out a list of ten of Peter's
Hayesboro friends, for whom he would send a private car over one of his
railroads, to bring them up for the first night of the play. That was to
be the 20th of September, and even then the bills were up all over New
York. I could see, from the way Judge Vandyne was taking it all, that he
intended to make the best of having a poet for a son, and to put it
through with his usual energetic force.
Peter was perfectly delighted at having all his Hayesboro friends come.
He wrote them all letters, and Mabel wrote them notes. After that Peter
got uneasy and made Judge Vandyne write to everybody, and the next day
he insisted that I should write, too.
"Oh, I wish Sam could come, but I know he can't," I said, with a sudden
hurt place just where I was about to swallow my mushroomed cutlet.
"Sam not come?" said Peter, growing white about his mouth and throwing
down his napkin.
"Oh, Peter, Sam didn't want me to say anything about it, but he doesn't
think it is possible for him to get away and--and you know, Peter, Sam
has to buy the sheep he wants to put in the woods; and I told you that
another mule--"
"I can't, I can't stand it for Samboy not to be here," said Peter as he
pushed his cutlet away from him, upset his glass, and turned over a vase
that in turn knocked down the center vase of roses, besides upsetting
the composure of the butler and one footman. I saw it was going to be a
regular poetic outburst, such as Mammy would have called a tantrum in
Sam or me, and that Mabel was positively scared and Miss Greenough much
pained.
"Crittenden will be here," said Judge Vandyne in a perfectly calm and
certain voice. "Don't worry, son!"
I knew he meant that he would lend Sam the money, or I thought I knew
that, and I felt perfectly sure that Sam wouldn't come. Nobody knows
Samuel Foster Crittenden as I do; and the reason he is so congenial with
his mules is that he is so like them in "setness" of disposition. I just
raged at him in my heart, for I knew from the way I felt myself how poor
Peter wanted him; but I controlled myself and went right on talking
about how I knew the others would come and how much they would enjoy it.
"Julia has never been to New York. Won't she be delicious?" I exclaimed
as we came to her on the list. Peter had put her first.
"Delicious is the right word," said Peter, and he then launched forth in
a description of Julia that I would hardly have recognized, though I had
been born across the street from her and have loved her devotedly from
our second years. It is such a joy to have two people whom you love
appreciative of each other, and I knew that Julia fully reciprocated
Peter's interested friendship for her. She had wept on my shoulder at
parting from Peter, and had written him long and encouraging letters for
me while I was going up to Nashville to have my clothes made for the
trip to New York and trying to get a little time in my garden out at The
Briers. I have to stop; I never let myself think of that parting with
Sam and The Briers. Some things are too deep for words. Then to continue
about Julia, I wrote her how to have her dresses made, but told her to
get only one little traveling-hat and leave the rest to Mabel and me and
Fifth Avenue. I also advised Edith and Sue to do likewise, but I knew
Miss Editha would have Miss Sally Pride make her a new bonnet on the
frame of the old one, and Peter said she would not be the "wraith of an
old rose" in anything else.
It was glorious that Tolly and Pink could both come, though Billy
Robertson was not sure. I did so hope that Clyde would get a real chance
to open Edith's kitten eyes for her through some heroic accident of
travel, and I was glad that Colonel Menefee was coming, because he would
engage Miss Editha's attention away from Tolly's attentions to Edith and
give them a chance to come forward out of their backwardness. The
telephone scheme had failed, Tolly told me, because the wire chief had
made a mistake and still left them connected at Central. "Central" is
the little Pride girl, the milliner's youngest niece, and very pretty.
Just as he was ready to begin firmly with Edith she sweetly said:
"Now your connection is good, Mr. Tolbot."
When I left home poor Tolly was really becoming embittered against the
world and was absorbing himself in putting up a new telephone line over
to Spring Hill. I told Peter how he ought to appreciate Tolly for
leaving business in that state to come up for the first night of the
play; and Peter said:
"Dear old chap; we must find the shibboleth that will unleash the hooded
falcon of his soul." Isn't Peter wonderful?
If all the invited guests in Hayesboro were busy getting ready to do
justice to the first night of "The Emergence," we were in the same
state. Judge Vandyne was planning to give a dinner that night to his
most distinguished lawyer friends in honor of Farrington, and daddy had
promised to try to come. Of course, Peter was going to have a dinner of
his own, to which he was inviting a lot of delightful friends to meet
his Hayesboro friends, and they were having both dinners at the Ritz, so
Peter could go in and make a speech to Judge Vandyne's party. Most of
the friends had not come back from the lakes and the shore and their
country homes, but were running into town for that one evening. It was
all the most delicious excitement, but--oh, a place way down deep in me
behind my excited breathing was so sore about Sam! I couldn't even think
about his not being there, but I went on and danced and had a good time
in sheer desperation. Sam had to plow and hoe and reap and sow for food,
while we ate and drank it and made merry!
Then the first night came, and everybody was there looking in high
feather, and some of them wearing very low dress. Judge Vandyne had
taken all the boxes in the theater, and they were every one full to
overflowing with loving excitement about Peter. I was in the second box
on the right-hand side of the stage at the front, and Peter sat in the
shadow back of me. Julia and one of Peter's classmates were just behind
us. As the curtain went up Peter took a hard hold on my hand under my
white chiffon scarf, and I heard him mutter under his breath:
"Oh, Samboy!"
I am not going to try to describe that play of Peter's. The newspapers
used all the adjectives and things there are in the English language to
express enthusiasm with, and I haven't got any left. I will simply tell
about it.
When Peter had gone out and buried himself in the shack on the hillside
of The Briers, that looked out over the Harpeth Valley, he had
unconsciously buried that frozen hero in "The Emergence" and had gone to
work and resurrected him in a kind of Samuel Foster Crittenden. Instead
of being a complicated, heroic, erratic genius he was just a big,
simple, strong young man who was doing his part in the corner of the
world's vineyard where he had been sent to work. To help him Peter had
written in a wonderful girl with a great deal of brains for one so
young. Just the sort of woman that men like Sam and the hero deserve to
have. She was so lovely that I caught my breath and--and suffered. But
what made everybody in that theater laugh themselves happy was the
essence of Hayesboro that Peter had distilled and poured into his
characters. Everybody was so mixed up with everybody else that nobody
could feel sensitive or fail to enjoy every character. I couldn't tell
whether I was the girl that practised tango steps all the time, even
when the minister (who had manners like those of Colonel Menefee and the
Mayor of Hayesboro) came to supper, or the girl that always had a plate
of hickory-nut candy in her hand and kept saying sharp things while
giving everybody something sweet to take away the taste. Julia said she
was that girl, but Peter indignantly denied anybody's being anybody, and
then we all kept still. Just then the curtain went down on the second
act, with the whole house in an uproar; and there was a call for Peter
and Farrington.
Peter went and left me sitting there in the shadow alone, while he
stepped out on the stage all by himself--the stage of his life. And, oh,
I was so glad to be in the shadow all by myself, for I had been as happy
as I could and it was beginning to wear off. I wanted Sam--I wanted him
even if the wonderful woman in the play was going to have him in real
life, too, as I knew would have to happen some day. Also Sam deserved to
be there that night if anybody did, and he was way down in the Harpeth
Valley working, working, working, it seemed to me, that all the rest of
the world might play. I wanted him! I felt as if I couldn't stand it
when Peter stepped forward, looking like the most beautiful Keats the
world had ever known, and the whole house gasped at his beauty and kept
still to hear what a man that looked like that would have to say. I
stifled a sob and looked around to see if I could flee somewhere, when
suddenly my groping hand was taken in two big, warm, horny ones, and
Sam's deep voice said in the same old fish-hook tone:
"Steady, Bettykin, and watch old Pete take his first hurdle."
I took one look at a great big glorious Sam in all sorts of fine linen
that was purple in the mist of my eyes, and then I was perfectly quiet,
with no fish-hook at all in my arm or in my life. I heard every word of
Peter's speech, and laughed and almost cried over the one Farrington
made about the young American drama, with his arm across Peter's
shoulder. I forgot all about Sam because he was there, and just reveled
in being happier than I had been since I had adopted Peter and the play,
now that it was successfully out of our systems.
And it _was_ successfully out. Nobody who heard the thunder after the
last act could have doubted that. The _New Times_ the next day said it
was "The burgeoning of the American poetic drama," and another paper
said, "Bubbles fresh from the fount of American youth." We got the
papers and read them coming home from Peter's supper-party over at the
Astor, which his New York friends gave because they wanted to see more
of his Hayesboro friends. Everybody was there and the success of the
evening came when Pink Herriford told his mule story. Peter made him do
it, and everybody adored it. And just as they were all laughing and
exclaiming at the droll way in which he characterized those resurgent
mules, I looked down the table and happened to see that Clyde Tolbot was
holding Editha Morris Carruthers's hand in a way that anybody who
understood these matters knew from the position of their shoulders that
such was the case.
"A taxicab lost us on Broadway at ten dollars per second, and I made
connection with her wires before found," he whispered to me, as we all
rose to go, just as the night was also taking its departure from New
York. New York in the daytime is like a huge football game in which a
million or two players all fall on the ball of life at the same time and
kick and squirm and fight over it; but at night it is a dragon with
billions of flaming eyes that only blink out when it is time to crawl
away from the rising sun and get in a hole until the dark comes again.
It is the most wonderful city in the world to stay in until you are
ready to go home.
Sam hadn't been at Peter's supper-party, and neither had Judge Vandyne,
but I didn't worry about that. I never worry about Sam. I just like to
know he is somewhere near and then forget him--if I am allowed, which I
am not if Sam can think up some important work for me to do. At six
o'clock in the morning I laid down the papers with Peter's triumph in
them and rolled into bed, dead with sleep; and before seven Sam had sent
me a note that forced me to open my eyes and stagger up and on. It said:
DEAR BETTY,--Get a maid at the hotel to come with you to the
following address. I need you badly. A reliable taxi is waiting.
SAM.
Horrible thoughts of somebody's having kidnapped Sam flashed across my
brain as I threw on my clothes. How had he happened to come to New York,
anyway, and then disappear right after the play? What kind of trouble
could he be in, and how could I help? I looked in my purse and found
only ten dollars, but I felt the roll that I always carry in my stocking
and it still felt a respectable size. I never count money when I am
spending it, because you don't enjoy it so much; and I had been away
from home three weeks. Still, if I had to bribe or buy Sam out of
anything, I could get more some place. I must hurry to do as he told me,
and then he would direct me how to rescue him.
In less time than it would take most girls, as soggy with sleep as I
was, to get dressed and down to a taxi, I was on my way to Sam. I forgot
to get the maid to go with me; and, anyway, what was the use, with a
nice young white man like that taxi-car driver? He said, looking at me
so pleasantly that I was sure he didn't really mean anything, "It's
early, isn't it, miss?"
I was so hustled and so dazed, and had such trouble in making the little
new kind of hook-buttons on my gloves stay fastened, that before I knew
it we drew up at a queer kind of old warehouse down in a part of New
York where I had never been, with a line of the ocean or the bay or the
river or the harbor, I couldn't tell which, just beyond. Then I was
scared, for instead of Sam being in danger, I felt that maybe I was
being kidnapped. I hesitated at the curbing as I got out of the taxi.