A Mouse Nest
Linda Dearest:
I am delighted that you had such a wonderful birthday. I would take
a shot in air that anything you don’t understand about it you might
with reasonable safety charge to Katherine O’Donovan. I think it
was great of her to have a suitable and a becoming dress waiting
for you and a congenial man like Peter Morrison to dine with you.
He appealed to me as being a rare character, highly original, and,
I should think, to those who know him well he must be entertaining
and lovable in the extreme. I never shall be worried about you so
long as I know that he is taking care of you.
I should not be surprised if some day I meet Eileen somewhere,
because Dana and I are going about more than you would believe
possible. I heartily join with you in wishing her every good that
life can bring her. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I can’t
help feeling, Linda, that she is taking a poor way to win the
best, and I gravely doubt whether she finds it in the spending of
unlimited quantities of the money of a coarse man who stumbled
upon his riches accidentally, as has many a man of California and
Colorado.
I intended, when I sat down to write, the very first thing I said,
to thank you for your wonderful invitation, seconded so loyally and
cordially by Katy, to make my home with you until the time comes—if
it ever does come—when I shall have a home of my own again. And
just as simply and whole-heartedly as you made the offer, I accept
it. I am enclosing the address and the receipt for my furniture
in storage, and a few lines ordering it delivered at your house
and the bill sent to me. I only kept a few heirlooms and things of
Mother’s and Father’s that are very precious to me. Whenever Eileen
takes her things you can order mine in and let me know, and I’ll
take a day or two off and run down for a short visit.
Mentioning Eileen makes me think of John. I think of him more
frequently than I intend or wish that I did, but I feel my ninth
life is now permanently extinguished concerning him. I thought I
detected in your letter, Linda dear, a hint of fear that he might
come back to me and that I might welcome him. If you have any such
feeling in your heart, abandon it, child, because, while I try
not to talk about myself, I do want to say that I rejoice in a
family inheritance of legitimate pride. I couldn’t give the finest
loyalty and comradeship I had to give to a man, have it returned
disdainfully, and then furbish up the pieces and present it over
again. If I can patch those same pieces and so polish and refine
them that I can make them, in the old phrase, “as good as new,”
possibly in time——
But, Linda, one thing is certain as the hills of morning. Never
in my life will any man make any headway with me again with vague
suggestions and innuendoes and hints. If ever any man wants to
be anything in my life, he will speak plainly and say what he
wants and thinks and hopes and intends and feels in not more than
two-syllable English. I learned my lesson about the futility of
building your house of dreams on a foundation of sand. Next time
I erect a dream house, it is going to have a proper foundation
of solid granite. And that may seem a queer thing for me to say
when you know that I am getting the joy in my life, that I do not
hesitate to admit I am, from letters written by a man whose name I
don’t know. It may be that I don’t _know_ the man, but I certainly
am very well acquainted with him, and in some way he seems to me
to be taking on more definite form. I should not be surprised if I
were to recognize him the first time I met him face to face.
Linda looked through the skylight and cried out to the stars: “Good
heavens! Have I copied Peter too closely?”
She sat thinking a minute and then she decided she had not.
And in this connection you will want to know how I am progressing
in my friendship with the junior partner, and what kind of motorist
I am making. I am still driving twice a week, and lately on Sundays
in a larger car, taking Dana and a newspaper friend of hers along.
I think I have driven every hazard that this part of California
affords except the mountains; Mr. Snow is still merciful about them.
Linda dear, I know what you’re dying to know. You want to know
whether Mr. Snow is in the same depths of mourning as when
our acquaintance first began. This, my dear child, is very
reprehensible of you. Young girls with braids down their backs—and
by the way, Linda, you did not tell me what happened “after the
ball was over.” Did you go to school the next morning with braids
down your back, or wearing your coronet? Because on that depends
what I have to say to you now; if you went with braids, you’re
still my little girl chum, the cleanest, finest kid I have ever
known; but if you wore your coronet, then you’re a woman and my
equal and my dearest friend, far dearer than Dana even; and I tell
you this, Linda, because I want you always to understand that you
come first.
I have tried and tried to visualize you, and can’t satisfy my mind
as to whether the braids are up or down. Going on the assumption
that they are up, and that life may in the near future begin to
hold some interesting experiences for you, I will tell you this,
beloved child: I don’t think Mr. Snow _is_ mourning quite so deeply
as he was. I have not been asked, the last four or five trips we
have been on, to carry an armload of exquisite flowers to the
shrine of a departed love. I have been privileged to take them home
and arrange them in my room and Dana’s. And I haven’t heard so much
talk about loneliness, and I haven’t seen such tired, sad eyes. It
seems to me that a familiar pair of shoulders are squaring up to
the world again, and a very kind pair of eyes are brighter with
interest. I don’t know how you feel about this; I don’t know how I
feel about it myself. I am sure that Eugene Snow is a man who, in
the years to come, would line up beside your father and mine, and
I like him immensely. It is merely a case of not liking him less,
but of liking my unknown man more. I couldn’t quite commit the
sacrilege, Linda dear, of sending you a sample of the letters I am
receiving, but they are too fanciful and charming for any words of
mine to describe adequately. I don’t know who this man is, or what
he has to offer, or whether he intends to offer anything, but it
is a ridiculous fact, Linda, that I would rather sit with him in
a chimney corner of field boulders, on a pine floor, with a palm
roof and an Ocotillo candle, than to glow in the parchment-shielded
electric light of the halls of a rich man. In a recent letter,
Linda, there was a reference to a woman who wore “a diadem of
crystallized light.” It was a beautiful thing and I could not help
taking it personally. It was his way of telling me that he knew me,
and knew my tragedy; and, as I said before, I am beginning to feel
that I have him rather definitely located; and I can understand the
fine strain in him that prompted his anonymity, and his reasons for
it. Of course I am not sufficiently confident yet to say anything
definite, but my heart is beginning to say things that I sincerely
hope my lips never will be forced to deny.
Linda laid down the letter, folded her hands across it, and once more
looked at the stars.
“Good gracious!” she said. “I am tincturing those letters with too
much Peter. I’ll have to tone down a bit. Next thing I know she will
be losing her chance with that wonderful Snow man for a dream. In
my efforts to comfort her I must have gone too far. It is all right
to write a gushy love letter and stuff it full of Peter’s whimsical
nonsense, but, in the language of the poet, how am I going to ‘deliver
the goods’? Of course that talk about Louise Whiting was all well
enough. Equally, of course, I outlined and planted the brook and
designed the bridge for Marian, whether she knows it or Peter knows
it, or not. If they don’t know it, it’s about time they were finding
it out. I think it’s my job to visit Peter more frequently and see if
I can’t invent some way to make him see the light. I will give Katy
a hint in the morning. To-morrow evening I’ll go up and have supper
with him and see if he has another article in the stewpan. I like
this work with Peter. I like having him make me dream dreams and see
pictures. I like the punch and the virility he puts into my drawings.
It’s all right reproducing monkey flowers and lilies for pastime, but
for serious business, for real life work, I would rather do Peter’s
brainstorming, heart-thrilling pictures than my merely pretty ones. On
the subject of Peter, I must remember in the morning to take those old
books he gave me to Donald. I believe that from one of them he is going
to get the very material he needs to down the Jap in philosophy. And
they are not text books, which proves that Peter must have been digging
into the subject and hunted them up in some second-hand store, or even
sent away an order for them.”
In the hall the next morning Linda stopped Donald and gave him the
books. In the early stages of their friendship she had looked at him
under half-closed lids and waited to see whether he intended stopping
to say a word with her when they passed each other or came down the
halls together. She knew that their acquaintance would be noted and
commented upon, and she knew how ready the other girls would be to
say that she was bold and forward, so she was careful to let Donald
make the advances, until he had called to her so often, and had dug
flowers and left his friends waiting at her door while he delivered
them, that she felt free to address him as she chose. He had shown
any interested person in the High School that he was her friend, that
he was speaking to her exactly as he did to girls he had known from
childhood. He was very popular among the boys and girls of his class
and the whole school. His friendship, coming at the time of Linda’s
rebellion on the subject of clothes, had developed a tendency to bring
her other friendships. Boys who never had known she was in existence
followed Donald’s example in stopping her to say a word now and then.
Girls who had politely ignored her now found things to say; and several
invitations she had not had leisure to accept had been sent to her for
afternoon and evening entertainments among the young people. Linda had
laid out for herself something of a task in deciding to be the mental
leader of her class. There were good brains in plenty among the other
pupils. It was only by work, concentration, and purpose, only by having
a mind keenly alert, by independent investigation and introducing new
points of view that she could hold her prestige. Up to the receipt
of her letter containing the offer to publish her book she had been
able rigorously to exclude from her mind the personality and the
undertakings of Jane Meredith. She was Linda Strong in the High School
and for an hour or two at her studies. She was Jane Meredith over the
desert, through the canyons, beside the sea, in her Multiflores kitchen
or in Katherine O’Donovan’s. But this book offer opened a new train
of thought, a new series of plans. She could see her way—thanks to
her father she had the material in her mind and the art in her finger
tips—to materialize what she felt would be even more attractive in
book form than anything her editor had been able to visualize from
her material. She knew herself, she knew her territory so minutely.
Frequently she smiled when she read statements in her botanies as to
where plants and vegetables could be found. She knew the high home of
the rare and precious snow plant. She knew the northern limit of the
strawberry cactus. She knew where the white sea swallow nested. She
knew where the Monarch butterfly went on his winter migration. She knew
where the trap-door spider, with cunning past the cunning of any other
architect of Nature, built his small, round, silken-lined tower and
hinged his trap door so cleverly that only he could open it from the
outside. She had even sat immovable and watched him erect his house,
and she would have given much to see him weave its silver lining.
Linda was fast coming to the place where she felt herself to be one in
an interested group of fellow workers. She no longer gave a thought
to what kind of shoes she wore. Other girls were beginning to wear
the same kind. The legislatures of half a dozen states were passing
laws regulating the height of heel which might be worn within their
boundaries. Manufacturers were promising for the coming season that
suitable shoes would be built for street wear and mountain climbing,
for the sands of the sea and the sands of the desert, and the sheer
face of canyons. The extremely long, dirt-sweeping skirts were coming
up; the extremely short, immodest skirts were coming down. A sane
and sensible wave seemed to be sweeping the whole country. Under the
impetus of Donald Whiting’s struggles to lead his classes and those
of other pupils to lead theirs, a higher grade of scholarship was
beginning to be developed throughout the High School. Pupils were
thinking less of what they wore and how much amusement they could crowd
in, and more about making grades that would pass them with credit from
year to year. The horrors of the war and the disorders following it
had begun to impress upon the young brains growing into maturity the
idea that soon it would be their task to take over the problems that
were now vexing the world’s greatest statesmen and its wisest and most
courageous women. A tendency was manifesting itself among young people
to equip themselves to take a worthy part in the struggles yet to come.
Classmates who had looked with toleration upon Linda’s common-sense
shoes and plain dresses because she was her father’s daughter, now
looked upon her with respect and appreciation because she started so
many interesting subjects for discussion, because she was so rapidly
developing into a creature well worth looking at. Always she would
be unusual because of her extreme height, her narrow eyes, her vivid
colouring. But a greater maturity, a fuller figure, had come to be a
part of the vision with which one looked at Linda. In these days no one
saw her as she was. Even her schoolmates had fallen into the habit of
seeing her as she would be in the years to come.
Thus far she had been able to keep her identities apart without any
difficulty; but the book proposition was so unexpected, it was such
a big thing to result from her modest beginning, that Linda realized
that she must proceed very carefully, she must concentrate with all
her might, else her school work would begin to suffer in favour of the
book. Recently so many things had arisen to distract her attention.
Many days she had not been able to keep Eileen’s face off her geometry
papers; and again she saw Gilman’s, anxious and pain-filled. Sometimes
she found herself lifting her eyes from tasks upon which she was
concentrating with all her might, and with no previous thought whatever
she was searching for Donald Whiting, and when she saw him, coming into
muscular and healthful manhood, she returned to her work with more
strength, deeper vision, a quiet, assured feeling around her heart.
Sometimes, over the edge of Literature and Ancient History, Peter
Morrison looked down at her with gravely questioning eyes and dancing
imps twisting his mouth muscles, and Linda paused a second to figure
upon what had become an old problem with her. Why did her wild-flower
garden make Peter Morrison think of a graveyard? What was buried there
besides the feet of her rare flowers? She had not as yet found the
answer.
This day her thoughts were on Peter frequently because she intended to
see him that night. She was going to share with him a supper of baked
ham and beans and bread and butter and pickled onions and little nut
cakes, still warm from Katy’s oven. She was going to take Katy with her
in order that she might see Peter Morrison’s location and the house for
his dream lady, growing at the foot of the mountain like a gay orchid
homing on a forest tree. To Linda it was almost a miracle, the rapidity
with which a house could be erected in California. In a few weeks’ time
she had seen a big cellar scooped out of the plateau, had seen it lined
and rising to foundation height above the surface in solid concrete,
faced outside with cracked boulders. She had seen a framework erected,
a rooftree set, and joists and rafters and beams swinging into place.
Fretworks of lead and iron pipe were running everywhere, and wires for
electricity. Soon shingles and flooring would be going into place, and
Peter said that when he had finished acrobatic performances on beams
and girders and really stepped out on solid floors where he might tread
without fear of breaking any of his legs, he would perform a Peacock
Dance all by himself.
“Peter, you sound like a centipede,” said Linda.
“Dear child,” said Peter, “when I enter my front door and get to the
back on two-inch footing, I positively feel that I have numerous legs,
and I ache almost as badly in the fear that I shall break the two I
have, as I should if they were really broken.”
And then he added a few words on a subject of which he had not before
spoken to Linda.
“It was like that in France. When we really got into the heat of things
and the work was actually being done, we were not afraid: we were too
busy; we were ‘supermen.’ The time when we were all legs and arms and
head, and all of them were being blown away wholesale was when the
shells whined over while we had a rest hour and were trying to sleep,
or in the cold, dim dawn when we stumbled out stiff, hungry, and
sleepy. It’s not the _real thing_ when it’s really occurring that gets
one. It’s the devils of imagination tormenting the soul. There is only
one thing in this world can happen to me that is really going to be as
bad as the things I dream.”
Linda looked down Lilac Valley, her eyes absently focusing on Katy
busily setting supper on a store box in front of the garage. Then she
looked at Peter.
“Mind telling?” she inquired lightly.
Peter looked at her speculatively.
“And would a man be telling his heart’s best secret to a kid like you?”
he asked.
“Now, I call that downright mean,” said Linda. “Haven’t you noticed
that my braids are up? Don’t you see a maturity and a dignity and a
general matronliness apparent all over me to-day?”
“Matronliness” was too much for Peter. You could have heard his laugh
far down the blue valley.
“That’s good!” he cried.
“It is,” agreed Linda. “It means that my braids are up to stay, so
hereafter I’m a real woman.”
She lingered over the word an instant, glancing whimsically at Peter,
a trace of a smile on her lips, then she made her way down a slant
declivity and presently returned with an entire flower plant, new to
Peter and of unusual beauty.
“And because I am a woman I shall set my seal upon you,” she said.
In the buttonhole of his light linen coat she placed a flower of satin
face of purest gold, the five petals rounded, but sharply tipped, a
heavy mass of silk stamens, pollen dusted in the heart. She pushed back
the left side of his coat and taking one of the rough, hairy leaves of
the plant she located it over Peter’s heart, her slim, deft fingers
patting down the leaf and flattening it out until it lay pasted smooth
and tight. As she worked, she smiled at him challengingly. Peter knew
he was experiencing a ceremony of some kind, the significance of which
he must learn. It was the first time Linda had voluntarily touched him.
He breathed lightly and held steady, lest he startle her.
“Lovely enough,” he said, “to have come from the hills of the stars.
Don’t make me wait, Linda; help me to the interpretation.”
“_Buena Mujer_,” suggested Linda.
“Good woman,” translated Peter.
Linda nodded, running a finger down the leaf over his heart.
“Because she sticks close to you,” she explained. Then startled by the
look in Peter’s eyes, she cried in swift change: “Now we are all going
to work for a minute. Katy’s spreading the lunch. You take this pail
and go to the spring for water, and I shall tidy your quarters for you.”
With the eye of experience Linda glanced over the garage deciding that
she must ask for clean sheets for the cot and that the Salvation Army
would like the heap of papers. Studying the writing table she heard a
faint sound that untrained ears would have missed.
“Ah, ha, Ma wood mouse,” said Linda, “nibbling Peter’s drygoods are
you?”
Her cry a minute later answered the question. She came from the garage
upon Katherine O’Donovan rushing to meet her, holding a man’s coat at
the length of her far-reaching arm.
“I wish you’d look at that pocket. I don’t know how long this coat has
been hanging there, but there is a nest of field mice in it,” she said.
Katy promptly retreated to the improvised dining table, seated herself
upon an end of it, and raised both feet straight into the air.
“Small help I’ll be getting from you,” said Linda laughingly.
She went to the edge of the declivity that cut back to the garage and
with a quick movement reversed the coat catching it by the skirts and
shaking it vigorously.