A BIT OF RAW LIFE
I don't know by what means of personal transportation my body was
carried down the street to the public square and to the pavement in
front of the courthouse, but I found myself standing there over a woman
who had raised Gregory Goodloe's head on her arm and was drawing deep,
hard sobs as she held a handkerchief to stanch a flow of blood that
showed crimson in the flash from Nickols' electric cigar lighter.
"'When men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of
evil against you falsely for my sake--'" I quoted to myself softly as I
stood and looked down on the prostrate figure of the big lithe Harpeth
Jaguar while Billy struggled with a man a little way off in the darkness
and Nickols shut off the light and went to his aid. I didn't know
exactly where the words that rose so suddenly from my heart to my lips
had come from, and I only vaguely understood them, but I seemed to be
saying them without my own volition.
"Yes, my God, yes, that's what they've done to him," sobbed Martha as
she looked up, peering at me through the darkness. "Pa is drunk, Miss
Charlotte; and the rest egged him on. This is the only friend I've got
and they've killed him."
"Not by a good deal, Martha," came in a hearty grand opera voice just as
I dropped on my knee, and in time to stop me from taking that bleeding
gold head on my own breast and--"Jacob's bullet just clipped me but its
impact was as good as his fist would have been, which I wish he had
used." And as he spoke the wounded parson sprang lithely to his feet and
left us two women kneeling before him. In an instant a thought of Mary
and the Magdalen flashed through my brain as he bent to raise me to my
feet, while Martha crouched away from us in the dark.
"Charlotte?" he questioned softly, as if not willing to believe the
witness of his hands and eyes, muffled by the starry darkness.
"Young Charlotte stones you and Jacob shoots you, and I--" I both
sobbed and laughed as I clung to his hand just as I heard Billy and
Nickols throw the cursing, panting man to the ground not ten feet away.
"Now then, Parson, we've got Jacob down and out. Nickols has got his
foot on his neck and I've got his pistol. What do you want done with
him?" Billy interrupted me pantingly to demand.
"Let him up," answered Mr. Goodloe, as he gently extricated himself from
my clinging hand and went over to the scene of the conflict. "Had
enough, Jacob?" he asked just as gently as he had unhanded himself from
me.
"I'll have had enough when I put you where you can't entice my girl
again," answered Jacob as he rose slowly to his feet. As he spoke Billy
went and stood beside the parson and Nickols stepped behind them into
the shadow in which Martha crouched.
"You know that is not true, Jacob. I helped Martha to go away to a place
of safety to earn her living and keep her honesty. Isn't that so,
Martha?" the rich voice softly asked the woman crouching in the dark.
"I told him that but he wouldn't believe me and the others don't," she
answered with a sob that was almost a shudder of fear.
"What did she come back fer then?" demanded Jacob. "Answer me that. And
didn't she go straight to your preaching and praying joint like all the
other women, fine and sluts, do?" The liquor was still burning in
Jacob's head but at those words he got a response from the impact of
Billy's fist that again laid him low.
"Oh, I dasn't say nothing. I dasn't," moaned Martha, as she clutched at
my skirts just as Nell and Hampton began to arrive on the scene of
action, followed by Harriet and Mark and the others. They were all
panting and wild with anxiety. They had taken the wrong turning at the
end of the square and had gone around the block, thus giving the little
tragedy time to enact itself before a mercifully small audience.
"Go away quickly, Martha, in the shadow," I bent and whispered to the
trembling woman, and I didn't know where the sympathy in my voice came
from as I stood between her and the rest while she slipped behind an old
horse block before the court house gate and off in the darkness towards
the Settlement before they had noticed her presence.
"Anybody hurt? What's the matter?" gasped Mark as he seized hold of the
Reverend Mr. Goodloe's arm.
"Nothing serious," answered the parson in a voice that calmed the others
like oil on choppy water. "Jacob Ensley is out on a drunk and Billy had
to knock him down to quiet him. All of you go back to dinner quickly,
for I don't see why Sergeant Rogers should get Jacob this time. Billy
will help me get him home and I'll remonstrate with him when he is
sober. I'd rather do it at the Last Chance than at the jail. Jacob is a
leading citizen and I don't want a jail smirch on him. I intend to use
him later. Now all of you go. Go!" His voice was as gently positive as
if he had been speaking to a lot of children and nobody seemed even to
think of rebelling but we all began to fade away into the starlight as
rapidly as we had assembled and more quietly.
"Thank you, and bless you," he said to me, as I went past him in the
darkness, and for just a second I suspected that his hand was laid on my
black braids but I was not sure. I knew the gratitude was for my
getting Martha off the scene of action so quietly and swiftly.
"A bit of raw life for you, Charlotte," Nickols remarked as he went with
me through the fragrant night back to Mark's and Nell's feast. "The
eternal girl, two-men melee."
"In this case it was girl--three men, the third skunking it," I answered
in words as coarse and as forcible as the scene I had just witnessed.
"I'd like to get my bare hands around the throat of the man who is
hiding behind Martha and that little child."
"That remark from you, my dear Charlotte, just goes to show that when
women get even the smell of bloodshed they become fiercer than the
male," said Nickols with a cool laugh that further infuriated me.
"Yes, I do feel like a female jaguar," I answered hotly and then
collapsed inside at the use of that name for myself in conjunction with
my secret title for the Reverend Mr. Goodloe.
"It would be better if you felt yourself in the character of a ferret if
you intend to go out on a still hunt for all unacknowledged paternity,
even in dear, simple, little old Goodloets," Nickols further jeered as
we came up the steps of the Morgan house from where the others were just
going into the dining room to resume their eating and drinking and being
merry.
"I'll find that one man," I answered as I swept into the dining room,
seated myself in my place and drained my glass of flat wine.
"Heaven help him!" laughed Nickols wickedly, and he raised Mr. Goodloe's
full glass as he slipped into his place beside me.
For a week after the shooting fray my soul sulked darkly in its tent and
meditated while I went on my usual gay rounds of self-enjoyment. The
garden was being brought to a most glorious mid-August triumph and the
inhabitants for miles around were coming to see it. All of father's old
friends, from whom he had shrunk in the last years, hung around him in
the old way. He sat with them under the old graybeard poplars around
which had been planted a plantation of slim young larches by the wizard
of White Plains. From discussions about gardening and Americanisms all
the old Solons of the local bar, and even of the towns around, gradually
led their fallen leader back into his place and were battling with him
over politics and jurisprudence as they had in past days. The day I went
into his library to ask father about employing another likely black
garden boy that Dabney had discovered, and found him, Judge Monfort from
over at Hillcrest in the third district, Mr. Cockrell and Mr. Sproul
around his table deep in huge volumes from the shelves, buried in a
cloud of tobacco smoke and argument in which Latin words flew back and
forth, I went up to my room and stood helpless before my window looking
out towards Paradise Ridge.
"I want to thank somebody and there is nobody to thank," I whispered,
with a great emptiness within me. That was the bitterest cry of need my
heart had ever given forth, and I went swiftly down to Nickols in the
garden and told him what I had seen and heard.
"It really is a remarkable come-back, sweetheart," he said, with the
most exquisite sympathy in his voice and face. "Mark Morgan told me just
an hour ago that they want to have him appointed back to his old place
on the bench and Mr. Cockrell answered the President's inquiry for a man
from this section for the Commerce Commission with the judge's name.
It'll be great to see the old boy on one of the seats of the mighty
again, thanks to the sweat of his brow and mind in this village
manifestation of American nationalism which has grown out of our little
old garden plan."
"What can a man or woman do to render gratitude if there seems to be
nobody to take it, Nickols?" I asked him, not expecting, as usual, that
he would understand me. For once he did.
"The philosophies all teach 'hand it on' in that case," he answered me.
"I'll hand it on to Martha Ensley and help her and her child to their
place under the sun," I said slowly, thus by having a reason and an
obligation back of it, ratifying the vow I had already taken.
"That is an impossibility," answered Nickols with easy coolness. "The
one 'come-back' that is impossible is the woman in that kind of a
situation."
"I'll never admit such an injustice as that," I said, and I had a queer
premonition that I would be held to that declaration.
The very next morning after my declaration of purpose to "hand on" my
father's "come-back" I went down into the Settlement to hunt for Martha
Ensley, not that I was really suffering about her, but because I felt a
kind of obligation to begin at once a thing that it appealed to my sense
of justice to accomplish.
Sometimes in mid-August there comes down a night over the hot, lush,
maturing Harpeth Valley which is like a benediction that sprinkles cool
dew on a thirsting heart. And now the morning was cool and brilliant,
with the sun evaporating the heavy dew in soft clouds of perfume from
the grain fields, the meadows and the upturned soil out where the
farmers were breaking ground after the first harvests. I felt strong and
calm and full of an electric energy, which I found I needed before I had
more than started my quest.
I put on my tennis clothes, snowy from collar to shoe tips, like the
trappings of the White Knight, and started to walk down into the
Settlement to find Martha. I intended to stop at Mother Spurlock's
"Little House Beside the Road," and some vague idea was in my mind of
having her dispatch a messenger to summons Martha to the interview I was
about to bestow upon her. That is not the way it all happened and I was
hot and dusty and sweat-drenched before I had been on my quest more than
a few hours.
Mother Elsie was not at home. The door to the Little House was wide
open, as it always is when cold or rain does not close it, and huge old
Tabby with one eye purred on the doorstep in the sun. A bird was nesting
in the wisteria vine above the door and her soft whirring bespoke an
interesting domestic event as near at hand. It did not in the least
disturb Tab, and I wondered at the harmony between traditional enemies
that I met on Mother Spurlock's very doorstep. I went in and drew myself
a drink of fresh cool water from the cistern at the back door, looked in
a tin box over the kitchen table and took three crisp tea cakes
therefrom. I picked up a half knitted sock from beside the huge split
rocker in the shade of the gnarled old apple tree, which was a rooftree
in every sense of the word, for it crowded close against the door and
hovered in the whole tiny house. Just before I left I put all the loose
change I had in my white linen skirt pocket in an old lacquered tea
canister which had a slit in it cut with a can opener, and that stood
on the shelf of the old rock chimney in the low living room. I had
never heard that canister mentioned by Mother Spurlock and I don't know
how I knew that out of it came the emergency funds for many a crisis in
the Settlement. Then last I picked a blush rose from the monthly bloomer
trailing up and over the window and laid it on the empty, worn old Bible
on the wide arm of the rocker beside a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
Then I hesitated. I had been so sure of finding Mother Spurlock at home
and having her hunt up Martha for me that I found it difficult to adjust
myself to my first complexity of plans. And while I hesitated a resolve
came into my mind with the completeness of a spoken direction.
"She lives at the Last Chance and I'll go right down there and find
her," I said to myself, as I started along the peony-bordered path to
the front gate of the Little House, over which a huge late snowball was
drooping, loaded down with snowy balls that would hold their own until
almost the time for frost. At my own decision I had a delicious little
feeling of fear, which was at least justifiable when I thought of that
huge drunken figure wrestling with Billy in the darkness and whom I
knew to be the proprietor of the resort into which I had determined to
penetrate. Also, from my early youth I had heard Jacob Ensley and the
Last Chance spoken of in tones of dread disapproval. Before I should
become really frightened I hurried down the hill, past the squalid and
tumble-down mill cottages which I had never really seen before, where it
seemed to me millions of children swarmed in and around and about, and
at last arrived at the infamous social center of the Settlement.
And my astonishment was profound to find that the Last Chance sign hung
over a very prosperous grocery with boxes and barrels of provender out
on the pavement under an awning and with huge, newly-painted screen
doors guarding the wide entrance, at which I hesitated.
"Come right in, lady, come right in," called a cheerful, booming man's
voice, and the door was swung open by a large man in a white apron, with
blue eyes that crinkled at the corners, a wide smile and white hair.
"What can we do for you to-day? We've a nice lot of late dewberries just
in from over on Paradise Ridge."
"I'm--I'm looking for the--the Last Chance Saloon," I faltered, because
I was too astonished to utter anything but the truth to the delightful
and tenderly solicitous man standing before me in his huge, clean white
apron over his blue shirt that matched his eyes.
"Well, lady," the nice Irish voice faltered a trifle, about as mine had,
though plainly with controlled astonishment tinged with amusement,
"could I get you anything to--to cool you off and bring it out here in
the grocery? It is cooler than it is back at the bar. I said to myself
jest last week, so I did, I said to myself, 'Jacob, you ought to get a
sody-water fountain for the ladies what has the same right to thirst as
a man.' And I will, too, if my bad luck just leaves me. How about a nice
cool bottle of beer sitting comfortable here before the counter?"
"Are you--_you_--Jacob--I mean--Mr. Jacob Ensley?" I further gasped.
This daylight materialization of the grewsome beast of the night was too
much for me.
"Jacob Ensley at your service, Miss," he answered with easy dignity.
"Now, will it be the bottle of beer I shall bring you? Or there's a new
drink I might mix fer you that a young gentleman friend of mine from
New York has taught me, and with a good Irish name of Thomas
Collins--the drink, not the young gentleman." Nickols had been living on
Tom Collins for the last month and I instantly knew that I recognized
the young friend from New York. Also my wits were at a branching of the
road and I didn't know just what to do or say as Jacob waited with easy
courtesy for my decision. And again I was too much perturbed for
invention and had to speak out the truth.
"I'm Charlotte Powers, Mr. Ensley, and I came down to see your daughter,
Martha," I said, looking directly into his clear friendly eyes which I
saw instantly darken with a storm as the smile left his nice mouth and
it hardened into a straight line.
"I'm sorry, Miss Powers, but my Martha ain't at home right now to you,
and I don't know when she will be. Is that all I can do for you? These
berries now, from over at Paradise Ridge?" And with the ease of a man of
the great upper world Jacob Ensley of the lower walks of life put me out
of the door of his private life into the ranks of the meddler and shut
it in my face. I acknowledged to myself that my rebuff was justifiable
and I was about to make an exit from the scene as gracefully as possible
with a box of the really delicious berries under my arm when a cry of
terror in a child's voice came from somewhere at the back of the grocery
and together the grocer and I ran to see what the matter could be. And
at the heels of the proprietor I then penetrated the blind of the
grocery and entered the Last Chance.