"It is," he replied; "the same old ha'penny, only a little more
worn--worn, not polished," he added, with a smile.
She remembered him then--an Englishman, a remittance man, a "lord," they
used to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshaved
stubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man--his own worst enemy,
as the saying goes.
Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and though she had
some difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the years
of her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all.
At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the two
shanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which the
western sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowd
in the restaurant it was grateful.
Lize looked at her daughter critically. "I don't know what I'm going to do
with a girl like you.--Why, you're purty--purty as a picture. You were
skinny as a child--I'm fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have opened
out!--You're the living image of your dad.--What started you back? I told
you to stay where you was."
The girl stared at her helplessly, trying to understand herself and her
surroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in her
mother's attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be too
closely studied. "Her manner is not even affectionate--only friendly. It
is as if I were only an embarrassing visitor," the girl thought. Aloud she
said: "I had no place to go after Aunt Celia died. I had to come home."
"You wrote they was willing to keep you."
"They were, but I couldn't ask it of them. I had no right to burden them,
and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick."
"I am; but I didn't want you to come back. Lay off your things and come
out to supper. We'll talk afterward."
The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolate
shabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpets
were frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows were
littered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling from
the walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything on
which the girl's eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt's home on the
Brandywine--not because that house was large or luxurious, but because it
was exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement of
color.
She understood now the final warnings uttered by her friends. "You will
find everything changed," they had said, "because you are changed."
She regretted bitterly that she had ever left her Eastern friends. Her
mother, in truth, showed little pleasure at her coming, and almost nothing
of the illness of which a neighbor had written. It was, indeed, this
letter which had decided her to return to the West. She had come, led by a
sense of duty, not by affection, for she had never loved her mother as a
daughter should--they were in some way antipathetic--and now she found
herself an unwelcome guest.
Then, too, the West had called to her: the West of her childhood, the
romantic, chivalrous West, the West of the miner, the cattle-man, the
wolf, and the eagle. She had returned, led by a poetic sentiment, and here
now she sat realizing as if by a flash of inward light that the West she
had known as a child had passed, had suddenly grown old and
commonplace--in truth, it had never existed at all!
One of the waitresses, whose elaborately puffed and waved hair set forth
her senseless vanity, called from the door: "You can come out now, your ma
says! Your supper's ready!"
With aching head and shaking knees Virginia reentered the dining-room,
which was now nearly empty of its "guests," but was still misty with the
steam of food, and swarming with flies. These pests buzzed like bees
around the soiled places on the table-cloths, and one of her mother's
first remarks was a fretful apology regarding her trials with those
insects. "Seems like you can't keep 'em out," she said.
Lee Virginia presented the appearance of some "settlement worker," some
fair lady on a visit to the poor, as she took her seat at the table and
gingerly opened the small moist napkin which the waiter dropped before
her. Her appetite was gone. Her appetite failed at the very sight of the
fried eggs and hot and sputtering bacon, and she turned hastily to her
coffee. A fly was in that! She uttered a little choking cry, and buried
her face in her handkerchief and sobbed.
Lize turned upon the waitress and lashed her with stinging phrases. "Can't
you serve things better than this? Take that cup away! My God, you make me
tired--fumblin' around here with your eyes on the men! Pay more attention
to your work and less to your crimps, and you'll please me a whole lot
better!"
With desperate effort Lee conquered her disgust. "Never mind, I'm tired
and a little upset. I don't need any dinner."
"The slob will go, just the same. I've put up with her because help is
scarce, but here's where she gits off!"
In this moment Virginia perceived that her mother was of the same nature
with Mrs. McBride--not one whit more refined--and the gulf between them
swiftly widened. Hastily sipping her coffee, she tried hard to keep back
the tears, but failed; and no sooner did her mother turn away than she
fled to her room, there to sob unrestrainedly her despair and shame. "Oh,
I can't stand it," she called. "I can't! I can't!"
Outside, the mountains deepened in splendor, growing each moment more
mysterious and beautiful under the sunset sky, but the girl derived no
comfort from them. Her loneliness and her perplexities had closed her eyes
to their majestic drama. She felt herself alien and solitary in the land
of her birth.
Lize came in half an hour later, pathetic in her attempt at "slicking up."
She was still handsome in a large-featured way, but her gray hair was
there, and her face laid with a network of fretful lines. Her color was
bad. At the moment her cheeks were yellow and sunken.
She complained of being short of breath and lame and tired. "I'm always
tired," she explained. "'Pears like sometimes I can't scarcely drag myself
around, but I do."
A pang of comprehending pain shot through Virginia's heart. If she could
not love, she could at least pity and help; and reaching forth her hand,
she patted her mother on the knee. "Poor old mammy!" she said. "I'm going
to help you."
Lize was touched by this action of her proud daughter, and smiled sadly.
"This is no place for you. It's nothin' but a measly little old cow-town
gone to seed--and I'm gone to seed with it. I know it. But what is a
feller to do? I'm stuck here, and I've got to make a living or quit. I
can't quit. I ain't got the grit to eat a dose, and so I stagger along."
"I've come back to help you, mother. You must let me relieve you of some
of the burden."
"What can you do, child?" Lize asked, gently.
"I can teach."
"Not in this town you can't."
"Why not?"
"Well, there's a terrible prejudice against--well, against me. And,
besides, the places are all filled for the next year. The Wetherfords
ain't among the first circles any more."
This daunted the girl more than she could express, but she bravely made
advance. "But there must be other schools in the country."
"There are--a few. But I reckon you better pull out and go back, at least,
to Sulphur; they don't know so much about me there, and, besides, they're
a little more like your kind."
Lee Virginia remembered Gregg's charge against her mother. "What do you
mean by the prejudice against you?" she asked.
Lize was evasive. "Since I took to running this restaurant my old friends
kind o' fell off--but never mind that to-night. Tell me about things back
East. I don't s'pose I'll ever get as far as Omaha again; I used to go
with Ed every time I felt like it. He was good to me, your father. If ever
there was a prince of a man, Ed Wetherford was him."
The girl's thought was now turned into other half-forgotten channels. "I
wish you would tell me more about father. I don't remember where he was
buried."
"Neither do I, child--I mean I don't know exactly. You see, after that
cattle-war, he went away to Texas."
"I remember, but it's all very dim."
"Well, he never came back and never wrote, and by-and-by word came that he
had died and was buried; but I never could go down to see where his grave
was at."
"Didn't you know the name of the town?"
"Yes; but it was a new place away down in the Pan Handle, and nobody I
knew lived there. And I never knew anything more."
Lee sighed hopelessly. "I hate to think of him lying neglected down
there."
"'Pears like the whole world we lived in in them days has slipped off the
map," replied the older woman; and as the room was darkening, she rose and
lighted a dusty electric globe which dangled from the ceiling over the
small table. "Well, I must go back into the restaurant; I hain't got a
girl I can trust to count the cash."
Left alone, Lee Virginia wept no more, but her face settled into an
expression of stern sadness. It seemed as if her girlhood had died out of
her, and that she was about to begin the same struggle with work and worry
which had marked the lives of all the women she had known in her
childhood.
Out on the porch a raw youth was playing wailing tunes on a mouth-organ,
and in the "parlor" a man was uttering silly jokes to a tittering girl.
The smell of cheap cigars filled the hallway and penetrated to her
nostrils. Every sight and sound sickened her. "Can it be that the old
town, the town of my childhood, was of this character--so sordid, so
vulgar?" she asked herself. "And mother--what is the matter with her? She
is not even glad to see me!"
Weary with her perplexities, she fastened her door at last, and went to
bed, hoping to end--for a few hours, at least--the ache in her heart and
the benumbing whirl of her thought.
But this respite was denied her. Almost at once she began to fancy that a
multitudinous minute creeping and stirring was going on about her--in her
hair, over her neck, across her feet. For a time she explained this by
reference to her disordered nerves, but at last some realization of the
truth came to her, and she sprang out upon the floor in horror and
disgust. Lighting the lamp, she turned to scrutinize her couch. It swarmed
with vermin. The ceiling was spattered with them. They raced across the
walls in platoons, thin and voracious as wolves.
With a choking, angry, despairing moan she snatched her clothing from the
chair and stood at bay. It needed but this touch to complete her
disillusionment.