THE LAND OF BILLOWING CLOUDS
Never a tawny-beached ocean has the sweetness of the prairie slew.
Rippling and blue, with long grass up to its edge, a spot of dancing
light set in the miles of rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an
afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring
morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley
or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the
occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on
the treeless Great Plains.
She had learned to call the slews "pugholes," and to watch for ducks at
twilight. She had learned that about the pugholes flutter choirs of
crimson-winged blackbirds; that the ugly brown birds squatting on
fence-rails were the divine-voiced meadow larks; that among the humble
cowbird citizens of the pastures sometimes flaunted a scarlet tanager or
an oriole; and that no rose garden has the quaint and hardy beauty of
the Indian paint brushes and rag babies and orange milkweed in the
prickly, burnt-over grass between roadside and railway line.
She had learned that what had seemed rudeness in garage men and hotel
clerks was often a resentful reflection of her own Eastern attitude
that she was necessarily superior to a race she had been trained to call
"common people." If she spoke up frankly, they made her one of their
own, and gave her companionable aid.
For two days of sunshine and drying mud she followed a road flung
straight across flat wheatlands, then curving among low hills. Often
there were no fences; she was so intimately in among the grain that the
fenders of the car brushed wheat stalks, and she became no stranger, but
a part of all this vast-horizoned land. She forgot that she was driving,
as she let the car creep on, while she was transported by Armadas of
clouds, prairie clouds, wisps of vapor like a ribbed beach, or mounts of
cumulus swelling to gold-washed snowy peaks.
The friendliness of the bearing earth gave her a calm that took no heed
of passing hours. Even her father, the abstracted man of affairs, nodded
to dusty people along the road; to a jolly old man whose bulk rolled and
shook in a tiny, rhythmically creaking buggy, to women in the small
abrupt towns with their huge red elevators and their long, flat-roofed
stores.
Claire had discovered America, and she felt stronger, and all her days
were colored with the sun.
She had discovered, too, that she could adventure. No longer was she
haunted by the apprehension that had whispered to her as she had left
Minneapolis. She knew a thrill when she hailed--as though it were a
passing ship--an Illinois car across whose dust-caked back was a banner
"Chicago to the Yellowstone." She experienced a new sensation of common
humanness when, on a railway paralleling the wagon road for miles, the
engineer of a freight waved his hand to her, and tooted the whistle in
greeting.
Her father was easily tired, but he drowsed through the early afternoons
when a none-too-digestible small-town lunch was as lead within him.
Despite the beauty of the land and the joy of pushing on, they both had
things to endure.
After lunch, it was sometimes an agony to Claire to keep awake. Her eyes
felt greasy from the food, or smarted with the sun-glare. In the still
air, after the morning breeze had been burnt out, the heat from the
engine was a torment about her feet; and if there was another car ahead,
the trail of dust sifted into her throat. Unless there was traffic to
keep her awake, she nodded at the wheel; she was merely a part of a
machine that ran on without seeming to make any impression on the
prairie's endlessness.
Over and over there were the same manipulations: slow for down hill,
careful of sand at the bottom, letting her out on a smooth stretch,
waving to a lonely farmwife in her small, baked dooryard, slow to pass a
hay-wagon, gas for up the next hill, and repeat the round all over
again. But she was joyous till noon; and with mid-afternoon a new
strength came which, as rose crept above the golden haze of dust,
deepened into serene meditation.
And she was finding the one secret of long-distance driving--namely,
driving; keeping on, thinking by fifty-mile units, not by the ten-mile
stretches of Long Island runs; and not fretting over anything whatever.
She seemed charmed; if she had a puncture--why, she put on the spare. If
she ran out of gas--why, any passing driver would lend her a gallon.
Nothing, it seemed, could halt her level flight across the giant land.
She rarely lost her way. She was guided by the friendly trail
signs--those big red R's and L's on fence post and telephone pole,
magically telling the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
Her father's occasional musing talk kept her from loneliness. He was a
good touring companion. Motoring is not the best occasion for epigrams,
satire, and the Good One You Got Off at the Lambs' Club last night. Such
verbiage on motor trips invariably results in the mysterious finding of
the corpse of a strange man, well dressed, hidden beside the road.
Claire and her father mumbled, "Good farmhouse--brick," or "Nice view,"
and smiled, and were for miles as silent as the companionable sky.
She thought of the people she knew, especially of Jeff Saxton. But she
could not clearly remember his lean earnest face. Between her and Jeff
were sweeping sunny leagues. But she was not lonely. Certainly she was
not lonely for a young man with a raincoat, a cat, and an interest in
Japan.
No singer after a first concert has felt more triumphant than Claire
when she crossed her first state-line; rumbled over the bridge across
the Red River into North Dakota. To see Dakota car licenses everywhere,
instead of Minnesota, was like the sensation of street signs in a new
language. And when she found a good hotel in Fargo and had a real bath,
she felt that by her own efforts she had earned the right to enjoy it.
Mr. Boltwood caught her enthusiasm. Dinner was a festival, and in iced
tea the peaceful conquistadores drank the toast of the new Spanish Main;
and afterward, arm in arm, went chattering to the movies.
In front of the Royal Palace, Pictures, 4 Great Acts Vaudeville 4, was
browsing a small, beetle-like, tin-covered car.
"Dad! Look! I'm sure--yes, of course, there's his suitcase--that's the
car of that nice boy--don't you remember?--the one that pulled us out of
the mud at--I don't remember the name of the place. Apparently he's
keeping going. I remember; he's headed for Seattle, too. We'll look for
him in the theater. Oh, the darling, there's his cat! What was the funny
name he gave her--the Marchioness Montmorency or something?"
Lady Vere de Vere, afraid of Fargo and movie crowds, but trusting in her
itinerant castle, the bug, was curled in Milt Daggett's ulster, in the
bottom of the car. She twinkled her whiskers at Claire, and purred to a
stroking hand.
With the excitement of one trying to find the address of a friend in a
strange land Claire looked over the audience when the lights came on
before the vaudeville. In the second row she saw Milt's stiffish,
rope-colored hair--surprisingly smooth above an astoundingly clean new
tan shirt of mercerized silk.
He laughed furiously at the dialogue between Pete-Rosenheim &
Larose-Bettina, though it contained the cheese joke, the mother-in-law
joke, and the joke about the wife rifling her husband's pockets.
"Our young friend seems to have enviable youthful spirits," commented
Mr. Boltwood.
"Now, no superiority! He's probably never seen a real vaudeville show.
Wouldn't it be fun to take him to the Winter Garden or the Follies for
the first time!... Instead of being taken by Jeff Saxton, and having the
humor, oh! so articulately explained!"
The pictures were resumed; the film which, under ten or twelve different
titles, Claire had already seen, even though Brooklyn Heights does not
devote Saturday evening to the movies. The badman, the sheriff--an aged
party with whiskers and boots--the holdup, the sad eyes of the sheriff's
daughter--also an aged party, but with a sunbonnet and the most
expensive rouge--the crook's reformation, and his violent adherence to
law and order; this libel upon the portions of these United States lying
west of longitude 101 deg. Claire had seen too often. She dragged her father
back to the hotel, sent him to bed, and entered her room--to find a
telegram upon the bureau.
She had sent her friends a list of the places at which she would be
likely to stop. The message was from Jeff Saxton, in Brooklyn. It
brought to her mind the steady shine of his glasses--the most expensive
glasses, with the very best curved lenses--as it demanded:
"Received letter about trip surprised anxious will tire you out
fatigue prairie roads bad for your father mountain roads dangerous
strongly advise go only part way then take train. GEOFFREY."
She held the telegram, flipping her fingers against one end of it as she
debated. She remembered how the wide world had flowed toward her over
the hood of the Gomez all day. She wrote in answer:
"Awful perils of road, two punctures, split infinitive, eggs at
lunch questionable, but struggle on."
Before she sent it she held council with her father. She sat on the foot
of his bed and tried to sound dutiful. "I don't want to do anything
that's bad for you, daddy. But isn't it taking your mind away from
business?"
"Ye-es, I think it is. Anyway, we'll try it a few days more."
"I fancy we can stand up under the strain and perils. I think we can
persuade some of these big farmers to come to the rescue if we encounter
any walruses or crocodiles among the wheat. And I have a feeling that if
we ever get stuck, our friend of the Teal bug will help us."
"Probably never see him again. He'll skip on ahead of us."
"Of course. We haven't laid an eye on him, along the road. He must have
gotten into Fargo long before we did. Now tomorrow I think----"