She disputed this, fiercely. "It is not. Living's staying in a place,
and helping it grow, and growing up with it and belonging. Belong!" It
was the cry of the rolling stone that is bruised and weary.
Sam Pardee left for Oklahoma the following week. Milly Pardee refused to
accompany him. It was the first time she had taken this stand. "If you
go there, and like it, and want to settle down there, I'll come. I know
the Bible says, 'Whither thou goest, I will go,' but I guess even
What'shername would have given up at Oklahoma."
For three years, then, Sam Pardee's letters reeked of oil: wells,
strikes, gushers, drills, shares, outfits. It was early Oklahoma in the
rough. This one was getting five hundred a day out of his well. That one
had sunk forty thousand in his and lost out.
"Five hundred what?" Maxine asked. "Forty thousand what?"
"Dollars, I guess," Milly Pardee answered. "That's the way your father
always talks. I'd rather have twenty-five a week, myself, and know it's
coming without fail."
"I wouldn't. Where's the fun in that?"
"Fun! There's more fun in twenty-five a week in a pay envelope than in
forty thousand down a dry well."
Maxine was fifteen now. "I wish we could live with Father in Oklahoma. I
think it's wrong not to."
Milly Pardee was beginning to think so, too. Especially since her
husband's letters had grown rarer as the checks they contained had grown
larger. On his occasional trips back to Chicago he said nothing of their
joining him out there. He seemed to have grown accustomed to living
alone. Liked the freedom, the lack of responsibility. In sudden fright
and resolve Milly Pardee sold the furnishings of the four-room flat,
packed the peripatetic linen and silver, and joined a surprised and
rather markedly unenthusiastic husband in Okoochee, Oklahoma. A wife and
a fifteen-year-old daughter take a good deal of explaining on the part
of one who has posed for three years as a bachelor.
The first thing Maxine said as they rode (in a taxi) to the hotel, was:
"But the streets are paved!" Then, "But it's all electric lighted with
cluster lights!" And, in final and utter disgust, "Why, there's a movie
sign that says, 'The Perils of Pauline.' That was showing at the Élite
on Forty-third Street in Chicago just the night before we left."
Milly Pardee smiled grimly. "Palestine's paved, too," she observed.
"And they're probably running that same reel there next week."
Milly Pardee and her husband had a plain talk. Next day Sam Pardee
rented the two-story frame house in which, for years, the famous Pardee
dinners were to be served. But that came later. The house was rented
with the understanding that the rent was to be considered as payment
made toward final purchase. The three lived there in comfort. Maxine
went to the new pressed-brick, many-windowed high school. Milly Pardee
was happier than she had been in all her wedded life. Sam Pardee had
made no fortune in oil, though he talked in terms of millions. In a
burst of temporary prosperity, due to a boom in some oil-stocks Sam
Pardee had purchased early in the game, they had paid five thousand
dollars down on the house and lot. That left a bare thousand to pay.
There were three good meals a day. Milly Pardee belonged to the Okoochee
Woman's Thursday Club. All the women in Okoochee seemed to have come
from St. Louis, Columbus, Omaha, Cleveland, Kansas City, and they spoke
of these as Back East. When they came calling they left cards,
punctiliously. They played bridge, observing all the newest rulings, and
speaking with great elaborateness of manner.
"Yours, I believe, Mrs. Tutwiler."
"Pardon, but didn't you notice I played the ace?"
Maxine graduated in white, with a sash. Mrs. Pardee was on the committee
to beautify the grounds around the M. K. & T. railroad station. When
relatives from Back East (meaning Nebraska, Kansas, or Missouri) visited
an Okoocheeite cards were sent out for an "At Home," and everything was
as formal as a court levee in Victoria's time. Mrs. Pardee began to talk
of buying an automobile. The town was full of them. There were the
flivvers and lower middle-class cars owned by small merchants, natives
(any one boasting twelve year's residence) and unsuccessful adventurers
of the Sam Pardee type. Then there were the big, high-powered scouting
cars driven by steely-eyed, wiry, cold-blooded young men from
Pennsylvania and New York. These young men had no women-folk with them.
Held conferences in smoke-filled rooms at the Okmulgee Hotel. The main
business street was called Broadway, and the curb on either side was
hidden by lines of cars drawn up slantwise at an angle of ninety. No
farmer wagons. A small town with all the airs of a big one; with none of
the charming informality of the old Southern small town; none of the
engaging ruggedness of the established Middle-Western town; none of the
faded gentility of the old New England town. A strident dame, this, in
red satin and diamonds, insisting that she is a lady. Interesting,
withal, and bulging with personality and possibility.
Milly Pardee loved it. She belonged. She was chairman of this committee
and secretary of that. Okoochee was always having parades, with floats,
sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Okoochee and distinguished by
schoolgirls grouped on bunting-covered motor trucks, their hair loose
and lately relieved from crimpers, three or four inches of sensible
shirt-sleeve showing below the flowing lines of their cheesecloth
Grecian robes. Maxine was often one of these. Yes, Milly Pardee was
happy.
Sam Pardee was not. He began, suddenly, to talk of Mexico. Frankly, he
was bored. For the first time in his life he owned a house--or nearly.
There was eleven hundred dollars in the bank. Roast on Sunday. Bathroom
shelf to be nailed Sunday morning. Y.M.C.A., Rotary Club, Knights of
Columbus, Kiwanis, Boy Scouts.
"Hell," said Sam Pardee, "this town's no good."
Milly Pardee took a last stand. "Sam Pardee, I'll never leave here. I'm
through traipsing up and down the world with you, like a gypsy. I want a
home. I want to be settled. I want to stay here. And I'm going to."
"You're sure you want to stay?"
"I've moved for the last time. I--I'm going to plant a Burbank clamberer
at the side of the porch, and they don't begin to flower till after the
first ten years. That's how sure I am."
There came a look into Sam Pardee's eyes. He rubbed his neat brown derby
round and round with his coat sleeve. He was just going out.
"Well, that's all right. I just wanted to know. Where's Max?"
"She stayed late. They're rehearsing for the Pageant of Progress down at
the Library."
Sam Pardee looked thoughtful--a little regretful, one might almost have
said. Then he clapped on the brown derby, paused on the top step of the
porch to light his cigar, returned the greeting of young Arnold Hatch
who was sprinkling the lawn next door, walked down the street with the
quick, nervous step that characterized him, boarded the outgoing train
for God knows where, and was never heard from again.
"Well," said the worse-than-widowed (it was her own term), "we've got
the home."
She set about keeping it. We know that she had a gift for cooking that
amounted almost to culinary inspiration. Pardee's dinners became an
institution in Okoochee. Mrs. Pardee cooked. Maxine served. And not even
the great new stucco palaces on the Edgecombe Road boasted finer silver,
more exquisite napery. As for the food--old Clem Barstow himself, who
had a chef and a butler and sent east for lobster and squabs weekly,
came to Pardee's when he wanted a real meal. From the first they charged
one dollar and fifty cents for their dinners. Okoochee, made mellow by
the steaming soup, the savoury meats, the bland sauces and rich dessert,
paid it ungrudgingly. They served only eighteen--no more, though
Okoochee could never understand why. On each dinner Mrs. Pardee made a
minimum of seventy-five cents. Eighteen times seventy-five ... naught
and carry the four ... naught ... five ... thirteen-fifty ... seven
times ... well, ninety-five dollars or thereabouts each week isn't so
bad. Out of this Mrs. Pardee managed to bank a neat sum. She figured
that at the end of ten or fifteen years....
"I hate them," said Maxine, washing dishes in the kitchen. "Greedy
pigs."
"They're nothing of the kind. They like good food, and I'm thankful they
do. If they didn't I don't know where I'd be."
"We might be anywhere--so long as it could be away from here. Dull,
stupid, stick-in-the-muds, all of them."
"Why, they're no such thing, Maxine Pardee! They're from all over the
world, pretty nearly. Why, just last Thursday they were counting there
were sixteen different states represented in the eighteen people that
sat down to dinner."
"Pooh! States! That isn't the world."
"What is, then?"
Maxine threw out her arms, sprinkling dish-water from her dripping
finger tips with the wide-flung gesture. "Cairo! Zanzibar! Brazil!
Trinidad! Seville--uh--Samar--Samarkand."
"Where's Samarkand?"
"I don't know. And I'm going to see it all some day. And the different
people. The people that travel, and know about what kind of wine with
the roast and the fish. You know--the kind in the novels that say,
'You've chilled this sauterne too much, Bemish."
"And when you do see all these places," retorted Mrs. Pardee, with the
bitterness born of long years of experience, "you'll find that in every
one of them somebody's got a boarding house called Pardee's, or
something like that, where the people flock same's they do here, for a
good meal."
"Yes, but what kind of people?"
"Same kind that comes here." Sam Pardee had once taken his wife to see a
performance of The Man From Home when that comedy was at the height of
its popularity. A line from this play flashed into Mrs. Pardee's mind
now, and she paraphrased it deftly. "There are just as many kinds of
people in Okoochee as there are in Zanzibar."
"I don't believe it."
"Well, it's so. And I'm thankful we've got the comforts of home."
At this Maxine laughed a sharp little laugh that was almost a bark.
Perhaps she was justified.
The eighteen straggled in between six and six-thirty, nightly. A mixture
of townspeople and strangers. While Maxine poured the water in the
dining room the neat little parlour became a mess. The men threw hats
and overcoats on the backs of the chairs. Their rubbers slopped under
them. They rarely troubled to take them off. While waiting avidly for
dinner to be served they struck matches and lighted cigarettes and
cigars. Sometimes they called in to Maxine, "Say, girlie, when'll supper
be ready? I'm 'bout gone."
The women trotted upstairs, chattering, and primped and fussed in
Maxine's neat and austere little bedroom. They used Maxine's powder and
dropped it about on the tidy dresser and the floor. They brushed away
only what had settled on the front of their dresses. They forgot to
switch off the electric light, leaving Maxine to do it, thriftily,
between serving courses. Every penny counted. Every penny meant release.
After dinner Maxine and her mother sat down to eat off the edge of the
kitchen table. It was often nine o'clock before the last straggling
diner, sprawling on the parlour davenport with his evening paper and
cigar, departed, leaving Maxine to pick up the scattered newspapers,
cigarette butts, ashes; straighten chairs, lock doors.
Then the dishes. The dishes!
When Arnold Hatch asked her to go to a movie she shook her head,
usually. "I'm too tired. I'm going to read, in bed."
"Read, read! That's all you do. What're you reading?"
"Oh, about Italy. La bel Napoli!" She collected travel folders and often
talked in their terms. In her mind she always said "brooding Vesuvius";
"blue Mediterranean"; "azure coasts"; "Egypt's golden sands."
Arnold Hatch ate dinner nightly at Pardee's. He lived in the house next
door, which he owned, renting it to an Okoochee family and retaining the
upstairs front bedroom for himself. A tall, thin, eye-glassed young man
who worked in the offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining Company,
believed in Okoochee, and wanted to marry Maxine. He had twice kissed
her. On both these occasions his eyeglasses had fallen off, taking the
passion, so to speak, out of the process. When Maxine giggled,
uncontrollably, he said, "Go on--laugh! But some day I'm going to kiss
you and I'll take my glasses off first. Then look out!"
You have to have a good deal of humour to stand being laughed at by a
girl you've kissed; especially a girl who emphasizes her aloofness by
wearing those high-collared white silk blouses.
"You haven't got a goitre, have you?" said Arnold Hatch, one evening,
brutally. Then, as she had flared in protest, "I know it. I love that
little creamy satin hollow at the base of your throat."
"You've never s----" The scarlet flamed up. She was human.
"I know it. But I love it just the same." Pretty good for a tall thin
young man who worked in the offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining
Company.
Sometimes he said, "I'm darned certain you like me"--bravely--"love me.
Why won't you marry me? Cut out all this slaving. I could support you.
Not in much luxury, maybe, but----"
"And settle down in Okoochee! Never see anything! Stuck in this
God-forsaken hole! This drab, dull, oil-soaked village! When there are
wonderful people, wonderful places, colour, romance, beauty! Damascus!
Mandalay! Singapore! Hongkong!... Hongkong! It sounds like a temple
bell. It thrills me."
"Over in Hongkong," said Arnold Hatch, "I expect some Chinese Maxine
Pardee would say, Okoochee! It sounds like an Indian war drum. It
thrills me.'"
Sometimes Maxine showed signs of melting. But she always congealed
again under the influence of her resolve. One evening an out-of-town
diner, on hearing her name, said, "Pardee! Hm. Probably a corruption of
Pardieu. A French name originally, I suppose."
After that there was no approaching her for a week. Maxine Pardieu.
Pardieu. "By God!" it meant. A chevalier he must have been, this
Pardieu. A musketeer! A swashbuckler, with lace falling over his slim
white hand, and his hand always ready on his sword. Red heels. Plumed
hat. Pardieu!
How she hated anew the great oil tanks that rose on the town's
outskirts, guarding it like giant sentinels. The new houses. The new
country club. Twenty-one miles of asphalt road. Population in 1900, only
467. In 1920 over 35,000. Slogan, Watch Us Grow. Seventeen hundred oil
and gas wells. Fields of corn and cotton. Skyscrapers. The Watonga
Building, twelve stories. Haynes Block, fourteen stories. Come West,
young man! Ugh!
Sometimes she made little rhymes in her mind.
There's Singapore and Zanzibar,
And Cairo and Calais.
There's Samarkand and Alcazar,
Rangoon and Mandalay.
"Yeh," said Arnold Hatch, one evening, when they were talking in the
Pardee back yard. It was nine o'clock. Dishes done. A moon. October.
Maxine had just murmured her little quatrain. They were standing by the
hedge of pampas grass that separated the Pardee yard from Hatch's next
door.
"Yeh," said Arnold Hatch. "Likewise:
"There's Seminole and Shawnee,
Apache, Agawam.
There's Agua and Pawnee,
Walonga, Waukeetom."
He knew his Oklahoma.
"Oh!" exclaimed Maxine, in a little burst of fury; and stamped her foot
down hard. Squ-ush! said something underfoot. "Oh!" said Maxine again;
in surprise this time. October was a dry month. She peered down. Her
shoe was wet. A slimy something clung to it. A scummy something shone
reflected in the moonlight. She had not lived ten years in Oklahoma for
nothing. Arnold Hatch bent down. Maxine bent down. The greasy wet patch
lay just between the two back yards. They touched it, fearfully, with
their forefingers. Then they straightened and looked at each other. Oil.
Oil!
Things happened like that in Oklahoma.
You didn't try to swing a thing like that yourself. You leased your land
for a number of years. A well cost between forty and sixty thousand
dollars. You leased to a company represented by one or two of those
cold-blooded steely-eyed young men from Pennsylvania or New York. There
was a good deal of trouble about it, too. This was a residence
district--one of the oldest in this new town. But they bought the Pardee
place and the Hatch place. And Arnold Hatch, who had learned a thing or
two in the offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining Company, drove a
hard bargain for both. The yard was overrun with drillers, lawyers,
engineers, superintendents, foremen, machinery.
Arnold came with papers to sign. "Five hundred a day," he said, "and a
percentage." He named the percentage. Maxine and her mother repeated
this after him, numbly.
Mrs. Pardee had been the book-keeper in the Pardee ménage. She tried
some mathematical gymnastics now and bumped her arithmetical nose.
"Five hundred a day. Including Sundays, Arnold?"
"Including Sundays."
Her lips began to move. "Seven times five ... thirty-five hundred a ...
fifty-two times thirty----"
She stopped, overcome. But she began again, wildly, as a thought came to
her. "Why, I could build a house. A house, up on Edgecombe. A house
like the Barstows' with lawns, and gardens, and sleeping porches, and
linen closets!... Oh, Maxine! We'll live there----"
"Not I," said Maxine, crisply. Arnold, watching her, knew what she was
going to say before she said it. "I'm going to see the world. I want to
penetrate a civilization so old that its history wanders down the
centuries and is lost in the dim mists of mythology." [See Baedeker.]
Sudden wealth had given Arnold a new masterfulness. "Marry me before you
go."
"Not at all," replied Maxine. "On the boat going over----"
"Over where?"
"Honolulu, on my way to Japan, I'll meet a tall bearded stranger,
sunburned, with the flame of the Orient in his eyes, and on his thin,
cruel, sensual mouth----"
Arnold Hatch took off his glasses. Maxine stiffened. "Don't you d----"
But she was too late.
"There," said Arnold, "he'll have to have some beard, and some flame,
and some thin, cruel, sensual mouth to make you forget that one."
Maxine started, alone, against her mother's remonstrances. After she'd
picked out her boat she changed to another because she learned, at the
last minute, that the first boat was an oil-burner. Being an
inexperienced traveller she took a good many trunks and was pretty
unpopular with the steward before he could make her understand that one
trunk to the stateroom was the rule. On the first two days out on the
way to the Hawaiian Islands she spent all her time (which was
twenty-four hours a day in her bed) hoping that Balboa was undergoing
fitting torment in punishment for his little joke about discovering the
so-called Pacific Ocean. But the swell subsided, and the wind went down,
and Maxine appeared on deck and in another twelve hours had met everyone
from the purser to the honeymoon couple, in the surprising way one does
on these voyages. She looked for the tall bearded stranger with the
sunburn of the Orient and the thin, cruel, sensual lips. But he didn't
seem to be about. Strangely enough, everyone she talked to seemed to be
from Nebraska, or Kansas, or Iowa, or Missouri. Not only that, they all
were very glib with names and places that had always seemed mythical and
glamorous.
"Oh, yes, Mr. Tannenbaum and I went to India last year, and Persia and
around. Real interesting. My, but they're dirty, those towns. We used to
kick about Des Moines, now that they use so much soft coal, and all the
manufacturing and all. But my land, it's paradise compared to those
places. And the food! Only decent meals we had in Egypt was a place in
Cairo called Pardee's, run by a woman whose husband's left her or died,
or something. Real home-loving woman she was. Such cooking.... Why,
that's so! Your name's Pardee, too, isn't it! Well, I always say to Mr.
Tannenbaum, it's a small world, after all. No relation, of course?"
"Of course not." How suddenly safe Oklahoma seemed. And Arnold Hatch.
"Where you going from Honolulu, Miss Pardee?"
"Samarkand."
"Beg pardon?"
"Samarkand."
"Oh, yeh. Samar--le' see now, where is that, exactly? I used to know,
but I'm such a hand for forgetting----"
"I don't know," said Maxine, distinctly.
"Don't--but I thought you said you were going----"
"I am. But I don't know where it is."
"Then how----"
"You just go to an office, where there are folders and a man behind the
desk, and you say you want to go to Samarkand. He shows you. You get on
a boat. That's all."
The people from Iowa, and Kansas, and Nebraska and Missouri said, Oh,
yes, and there was nothing like travel. So broadening. Maxine asked them
if they knew about the Vale of Kashmir and one of them, astoundingly
enough, did. A man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who had spent a year there
superintending the erection of a dredge. A plump man, with eyeglasses
and perpetually chewing a dead cigar.
Gold and sunlight, myrrh and incense, the tinkling of anklets. Maxine
clung to these wildly, in her mind.
But Honolulu, the Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach, reassured her. It was
her dream come true. She knew it would be so when she landed and got her
first glimpse of the dark-skinned natives on the docks, their hats and
necks laden with leis of flowers. There were palm trees. There were
flaming hibiscus hedges. Her bed was canopied with white netting, like
that of a princess (the attendant explained it was to keep out the
mosquitoes).
You ate strange fruits (they grew a little sickening, after a day or
two). You saw Duke, the Hawaiian world champion swimmer, come in on a
surf-board, standing straight and slim and naked like a god of bronze,
balancing miraculously on a plank carried in on the crest of a wave with
the velocity of a steam engine. You saw Japanese women in tight kimonos
and funny little stilted flapping footgear running to catch a street
car; and you laughed at the incongruity of it. You made the three-day
trip to the living volcano at Hilo and sat at the crater's brink
watching the molten lava lake tossing, hissing, writhing. You hung
there, between horror and fascination.
"Certainly a pretty sight, isn't it?" said her fellow travellers. "Makes
the Grand Canyon look sick, I think, don't you?"
"I've never seen it."
"Oh, really!"
On her return from Hilo she saw him. A Vandyke beard; smouldering eyes;
thin red lips; lean nervous hands; white flannel evening clothes;
sunburned a rich brown. Maxine drew a long breath as if she had been
running. It was after dinner. The broad veranda was filled with gayly
gowned women; uniformed officers from the fort; tourists in white. They
were drinking their after-dinner coffee, smoking, laughing. The Hawaiian
orchestra made ready to play for the dancing on the veranda. They began
to play. Their ukeleles throbbed and moaned. The musicians sang in their
rich, melodious voices some native song of a lost empire and a dead
king. It tore at your heart. You ached with the savage beauty of it. It
was then she saw him. He was seated alone, smoking, drinking, watching
the crowd with amused, uneager glance. She had seen him before. It was a
certainty, this feeling. She had known him--seen him--before. Perhaps
not in this life. Perhaps only in her dreams. But they had met.
She stared at him until her eye caught his. It was brazen, but she was
shameless. Nothing mattered. This was no time for false modesty. Her
eyes held his. Then, slowly, she rose, picked up her trailing scarf, and
walked deliberately past him, glancing down at him as she passed. He
half rose, half spoke. She went down the steps leading from the veranda
to the court-yard, down this walk to the pier, down the pier to the very
end, where the little roofed shelter lay out in the ocean, bathed in
moonlight, fairylike, unreal. The ocean was a thing of molten silver.
The sound of the wailing voices in song came to her on the breeze,
agonizing in its beauty. There, beyond, lay Pearl Harbour. From the
other side, faintly, you heard the music and laughter from the Yacht
Club.
Maxine seated herself. The after-dinner couples had not yet strolled
out. They were waiting for the dancing up there on the hotel veranda.
She waited. She waited. She saw the glow of his cigar as he came down
the pier, a tall, slim white figure in the moonlight. It was just like a
novel. It was a novel, come to life. He stood a moment at the pier's
edge, smoking. Then he tossed his cigar into the water and it fell with
a little s-st! He stood another moment, irresolutely. Then he came over
to her.
"Nice night."
In Okoochee you would have said, "Sir!" But not here. Not now. Not
Maxine Pardieu. "Yes, isn't it!"
The mellow moon fell full on him--bronzed, bearded, strangely familiar.