THE doleful bride remained in bed all the next day, prostrate under the
continuing heat;—in fact, it was not until a week had passed that she
felt herself able to make the excursion projected by the hopeful
bridegroom; and when they finally did set forth, in Dan’s light
runabout, she began to suffer before they reached the gates of the
carriage driveway.
“Oh, dear!” she said. “Is it going to be bumpy like this all the way? It
hurts my back.”
Dan apologized. “I’m sorry I didn’t have those holes in the drive filled
up; I’ll do it myself this evening. But here on the avenue,” he said, as
they turned north from the gates, “we’ll have this fine cedar-block
pavement for quite a good way.”
“Oh, dear!” she complained. “It’s worse on the cedar-block pavement than
it was in your driveway.”
“It _is_ a little teeny bit jolty,” Dan admitted. “You see this
pavement’s been down over five years now, but it’s held out mighty well
when you consider the traffic that’s been over it—mighty well! It’s
been one of the finest pavements I ever saw in any town.”
She gave a little moan. “You talk as if what it _has_ been were a great
help to us now. It _does_ hurt my back, Dan.”
“Oh, it isn’t goin’ to keep on like this,” he assured her comfortingly.
“The contracts are already signed for a new pavement. Six months from
now this’ll all be as smooth as a billiard table.”
“But we have to go over it to-_day_!”
“That’s why I thought the runabout would be pleasanter for you,” he
said. “Our old family carriage is more comfortable in some ways, but it
hasn’t got rubber tires. I hardly notice the bumps myself with these
tires.”
“_I_ do!”
“Think what a great invention it is, though,” he said cheerfully. “Why,
before long I shouldn’t wonder if you’d see almost everything that rolls
usin’ rubber tires, and a good many such light traps as this with
inflated ones like bicycles. If horseless carriages ever amount to
anything, they’ll get to usin’ inflated rubber tires, too, most likely.”
“Oh, dear me!” Lena sighed. “Doesn’t this heat ever relent a _little_?”
He assured her that it did; that the hot spell would soon be over, and
that she wouldn’t mind it when they reached the Addition, which was on
higher ground. “It’s always cool out at Ornaby,” he said proudly. “The
mean level’s twenty-eight feet higher than it is in this part of the
city; and I never saw the day when you couldn’t find a breeze out
there.”
“Then hurry and get there! It must be a terribly long way. I don’t see
any higher ground ahead of us—nothing but this eternal flatness and
flatness and flatness! I don’t see how you people stand it. I should
think somebody would _build_ a hill!”
He laughed and told her that Ornaby was almost a hill. “Practically, it
is,” he said. “Anyhow it’s a sort of plateau—practically. You see the
mean level——”
“Oh, dear!” she sighed; and for a time they jogged on in silence.
He drove with one hand, holding over her with the other a green silk
parasol, a performance not lacking in gallantry, nor altogether without
difficulty, for his young horse was lively, in spite of the weather; yet
it is doubtful if strangers, seeing the runabout pass, would have
guessed the occupants a bride and groom.
Beneath the broad white rim of Lena’s straw hat the pretty little face
was contorted with discontent; while her companion’s expression showed a
puzzled discouragement not customarily associated with the expressions
of bridegrooms. True, the discouragement passed before long, but it came
back again after a little more conversation. Then it disappeared again,
but returned when signs of capricious weather were seen in the sky. For
it is new knowledge to nobody that the weather has an uneducated humour
and will as soon play the baboon with a bride and groom, or with a kind
cripple on an errand of mercy, as it will with the hardiest ruffian. But
at first Dan welcomed the hints of change in the southwest.
“By George!” he said, nodding across the vast flat cornfields upon their
left, for the runabout had now come into the open country. “_There’s_
good news, Lena.”
“What is?”
“Look over yonder. We’re goin’ to get rain, and Heaven knows we need it!
Look.”
Along the southwest horizon of cornfields and distant groves they saw a
thickening nucleus of dark haze. Out of it, clouds of robust sculpture
were slowly rising, muttering faintly as they rose, as if another planet
approached and its giants grumbled, being roused from sleep to begin the
assault.
“By George, that’s great!” Dan exclaimed in high delight. “That’s worth
millions of dollars to the farmers, Lena.”
But Lena was as far as possible from sharing his enthusiasm. “I believe
it’s going to be a thunderstorm. Turn back. I hate thunderstorms. I’m
afraid of them.”
“Why, they won’t hurt you, Lena.”
“They frighten me and they do kill people. Please turn back.”
“But we’re almost there, dear. I think the rain’ll hold off, probably,
but if it doesn’t we’d be more likely to get wet goin’ all the way back
home than if we went ahead. I’ve got a tool shed out there we could wait
under.”
“A tool shed? With all the tools _in_ it? That’s just where the
lightning would strike first!”
Dan laughed and tried to reassure her, but although they drove on in the
bright sunshine for a time, she became more and more nervous. “It almost
seems to me you don’t _want_ to do things I want you to. We should have
turned back when I first spoke of it.”
“Look, dear,” he said. “Just ahead of us there’s something you’re goin’
to be mighty proud of some day. It’s Ornaby Addition, Lena!”
Before them the dirt road, grown with long grass between the ruts, had
been widened to the dimensions of a city street as it passed between old
forest groves of beech and elm, through which other wide rough roads had
recently been cut. Beyond the woods were some open fields, where lines
of stakes were driven in the ground to outline—apparently in a mood of
over-optimistic prophecy—some scores of building lots and various broad
avenues. But so far as could be seen from the runabout, felled trees and
wooden stakes were all that proved Ornaby to be an Addition and not a
farm, though a few negroes were burning the remnants of a rail fence in
a field not far from the road. And what made the whole prospect rather
desolate was the malicious caprice of the weather;—the very moment when
Dan stopped the runabout and waved his hand in a proud semicircle of
display, the first of the robust clouds passed over the sun and Ornaby
lay threatened in a monstrous shadow.
“Look, Lena!” the exultant proprietor cried. “This is Ornaby!”
“Is it?” she said desolately. “I do wish you’d turned round when I said.
It’s going to thunder and lighten horribly, and I know I’m going to be
frightened to death.”
Then, as a louder rumble sounded in the sky, she shivered, clutching
Dan’s arm. “I _know_ that struck somewhere!”
“It might have struck somewhere in the next county,” he laughed.
“What! Why, look at the sky right over us. I never saw anything so
awful.”
Dan laughed again and patted her small, clutching hand soothingly. “It’s
just a pleasant little summer thundershower, Lena.”
“Little!” she cried. “Do you call storms like this ‘little’ out here?”
For, in truth, Dan’s reassuring word was not well supported by the
aspect of the sky. Above them hung what appeared to be a field of
inverted gray haystacks, while from westward ragged, vast draperies
advanced through a saffron light that suddenly lay upon all the land. A
snort of wind tore at the road, carrying dust high aloft; then there was
a curious silence throughout all the great space of the saffron light,
and some large raindrops fell in a casual way, then stopped.
“You see?” said the cheery Dan. “That’s all we’ll get, likely enough. I
shouldn’t be surprised it’d clear up now.”
“‘Clear up!’” Lena cried incredulously. “I do believe you’re crazy! Oh,
_heavens_!”
And the heavens she thus adjured appeared heartily inclined to warrant
her outcry. Satan fell from the sky in a demoniac swoop of lightning,
carrying darkness with him; wind and water struck the runabout together;
and Dan was fain to drive into the woods beside the road, while Lena
clung to him and wailed. He tied the trembling horse to a tree, and got
the bride and her wrecked parasol under the inadequate shelter of the
tool house he had mentioned, but found little happiness there. A hinge
had broken; the negroes had carried the door away to repair it; the roof
leaked everywhere and was sonorous with the hail that fell presently
with the heavy rain. At every bedazzlement of the lightning Lena gasped,
then shrieked throughout the ensuing uproar, and before long whimpered
that she was freezing. In fact, her wet clothes, little more than gauze,
appeared to be dissolving upon her, while the air grew cold with the
hail.
Dan put his soggy coat about her, petted her, and piled wet sticks
together, saying that he would make a fire for her if he could.
Whereupon she wept and uttered a pathetic laughter. “Burn up with the
heat one minute,” she said, through chattering teeth, “and the next
freeze to death if you can’t make a fire! What a place!”
Of course Dan defended his climate, but his argument was of as little
avail as were his attempts to build a fire with sodden wood and drenched
matches. Lena suffered from the cold as expressively as she had from the
heat, and forgetting that these changes in temperature had not been
unknown to her in her own native habitat and elsewhere, she convinced
herself perfectly that all of her troubles were put upon her by “the
West.” Yet in this she was not so unreasonable as might appear;—our
sufferings from interior disturbances are adept in disguising themselves
as inflictions from outside.
These troubles of hers were not alleviated by two unfortunate remarks
made by her young husband in the course of his efforts to hearten her.
After one of the numerous electrical outrages, appalling in brilliancy
and uproar, he said he was sorry he couldn’t have taken her to the old
Ornaby farmhouse for shelter; and when Lena reproached him for not
having thought of this sooner, he explained too hastily that the house
had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground during a
thunderstorm earlier in the summer. After that, as she became almost
hysterical, he straightway went on to his second blunder. “But nobody
was hurt,” he said. “Nobody at all, Lena. There wasn’t anybody in the
house; and anyhow I don’t believe the lightning’s really struck right
near us during this whole shower. Why, it’s nothin’ at all; I’ve seen
storms a thousand times worse than this. Only last summer I got caught
out on a little lake, north of here, in a canoe, and pretty near a real
tornado came up, with thunder and lightning that would make this little
racket to-day look like something you’d get from a baby’s toy. We didn’t
mind it; we just——”
“‘We?’ Who?”
“Martha Shelby was with me,” the incautious Dan replied. “Why, you ought
to’ve seen how she behaved, Lena! _She_ didn’t mind it; she just laughed
and kept on paddlin’ like a soldier. I honestly think she enjoyed it.
Now, why can’t you——”
“You hush!” Lena cried.
“But I only——”
“Haven’t I enough to bear? Be quiet!”
He obeyed, gazing out upon the tumultuous landscape, and wondering sadly
what made her so angry with him. Then, all at once, beyond and through
the mazes of tossing rain he seemed to see, however vaguely, the new
Martha he had recognized in that queer night after his homecoming; and
the recollection of their strange moment together brought him another
not unlike it now. Something mystic operated here; he felt again that
same enrichment, charged with an indefinite regret; and though the
moment was no more than a moment, passing quickly, it comforted him a
little. “There! Don’t worry!” Martha seemed to say to him gently. So he
said it to himself and felt in better spirits.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Lena wept, huddling in a corner of the shed. “How this
horrible old world _does_ make us pay for not knowing what to do!” And
when he turned to try again to soothe her, she shrank but farther away
from him and bade him let her alone.
“But it’ll be all cleared up, half an hour from now,” he said. “You’ll
be warm as toast as soon as the sun comes out again, and then we’ll go
over the whole Addition and see what’s what, Lena!”
The first half of this prediction was amply fulfilled; Lena was indeed
warm soon after the sun reappeared; but they did not inspect the
Addition further. They went home, and a few days later Lena wrote an
account of the expedition in a letter to her brother George. Not
altogether happy when she wrote, she was unable to refrain from a little
natural exaggeration.
You said to me once you’d like to come here to live. Read Martin
Chuzzlewit again before you do. “_Eden!_” That’s what the famous
Ornaby Addition looks like! It isn’t swampy, but that’s all the
difference I could see. We drove miles in the heat and choking
dust and there wasn’t anything to see when we got there! Just
absolutely nothing! People had been digging around in spots and
cutting a lot of trees down and after a cyclone and cloudburst
that came up while we were there he pointed out a post sticking
out of the ground and showed the greatest pride because it had
“47th St.” painted on it! This was when we were driving out of
the woods. He wanted to poke all over the dreary place, looking
at other posts and stumps of trees, but I couldn’t stand any
more of it.
We had the most horrible storm I was ever out in, and it hailed
so that after being ill in bed for a week with the ghastly heat,
it got so cold I almost died, and then as soon as the cyclone
was over it got hot again—it isn’t like ordinary heat; it gets
hot with a sticky heaviness I can’t express and the thermometer
must stay up over 100 even at night—and as soon as we got home
I had to go to bed where I’ve been ever since—hence this
pencil—and I’ve just escaped pneumonia! And during the cyclone
when I was really ill with the nervous anguish lightning always
causes me, he began telling me how wonderfully a former
sweetheart of his behaved in a storm on a lake! It was his idea
of how to make me not mind it. Of course he only meant to cheer
me up—but _really_!
His father and mother aren’t bad, I must say. They’re quite like
him, good-looking and full of kindness; his mother is really
sweet and I like them both, though I’ll _never_ get used to
hearing people talk with this terrible Western accent. To a
sensitive ear, it’s actual pain. The brother looks rather like
Dan, too; but he’s pompous in a dry way and affected. Reads
heavy things and seems to me a cold-hearted sort of prig, though
he’s always polite. The father and mother read, too. Their idea
is Carlyle and Emerson and Thoreau—_you_ know the type of
mind—and Harlan (the brother) talks about that Englishman,
Shaw, who writes the queer plays. They say they have two
theatres open in winter, but of course there’s no music here
except something they brag about called the “April Festival,”
when there’s a week of imported orchestra and some singing.
Pleasant for _me_!—one week in the year!—though I suppose
_you’ll_ think it’s all I should have.
They meant to be kind, but they gave me the most fearful
“reception.” I never endured such a ghastly ordeal. The weather
was over 100 in the shade—and in crowded rooms, well, imagine
it! The people were dressed well enough—some of them were
rather queer, but so are some at home—but I wish you could have
seen the vehicles they drive in and their coachmen! Slouchy
darkies in old straw hats with long-tailed horses that get the
reins under their tails—and fringed surreys and family
carryalls, something like what you’d see out in the country
towns in Connecticut. They have phaetons and runabouts and a few
respectable traps, but I’ve seen just one good-looking victoria
since I came here. They don’t _like_ smartness really. I believe
they think it’s effeminate!
The real head of the Oliphant family is an outrageous old hag,
Dan’s grandmother, who behaved terribly to me at my only meeting
with her—it will remain our only meeting! They’re all afraid of
her, and she has a lot of money. Queer—I understand he’s tried
to raise money for his Eden all over the town, but never asked
the terrible grandmother. She doesn’t believe in it, and I must
say she’s right about _that_! Rather!
How strange that any girl should do what I’ve done—and with my
eyes wide open! I did it, and yet I knew he didn’t understand
me. I ought to have known that he can _never_ understand me,
that we don’t speak the same language and never will. I ought to
have realized what it means to know that I must live days,
weeks, months, _years_ with a person who will never understand
anything whatever of my real self!
Yet I still care for him, and he is good. He does a thousand
little kind things for me that do not help me at all, and the
truth is most of them only irritate me. How odd it is that I
write to you about not being understood—you who are seldom kind
to me and often most unjust! Yet in a way I have always felt
that you do understand me a little—perhaps
unsympathetically—but at least you give me the luxury of being
_partly_ understood.
Yes, I still care for him, but when I think of his awful Ornaby
thing I sometimes believe I have married a madman. It is nothing
_as I said_—hopeless—a devastated farm—and yet when he speaks
of it his eye lights up and he begins to walk about and gesture
and talk as if he actually saw houses and streets—and
shops—and thousands of people living there! If this isn’t
hallucination, I don’t know what hallucination means.
But since our excursion to the place I’ve almost cured him of
talking about it to _me_! I just can’t _stand_ it! And what is
pleasant, I think he probably goes to talk about it to another
woman. Already! A perfectly enormous girl seven or eight feet
tall that he’d picked out to be my most intimate friend! Because
she’s been _his_ most intimate friend, of course. But I suppose
all men are like _that_.
The heat did relax for a day or two—but it’s back again.
Sometimes I can’t believe I am actually in this
place—apparently for life—and I begin to hope that I’ll wake
up. I think even you would pity me sometimes, George.