THE FREE WOMAN
Before breakfast, Claire darted down to the hotel yard. She beamed at
Milt, who was lacing a rawhide patch on a tire, before she remembered
that they were not on speaking terms. They both looked extremely
sheepish and young. It was Pinky Parrott who was the social lubricant.
Pinky was always on speaking terms with everybody. "Ah, here she is! The
little lady of the mutinous eyes! Our colonel of the flivver hussars!"
But he got no credit. Milt straightened up and lumbered, "Hel-lo!"
She peeped at him and whispered, "Hel-lo!"
"Say, oh please, Claire---- I didn't mean----"
"Oh, I know! Let's--let's go have breakfast."
"Was awfully afraid you'd think we were fresh, but when we came in last
night, and saw your car--didn't like the looks of the hotel much, and
thought we'd stick around."
"I'm so glad. Oh, Milt--yes, and you, Mr. Parrott--will you
whip--lick--beat up--however you want to say it--somebody for me?"
With one glad communal smile Milt and Pinky curved up their wrists and
made motions as of pulling up their sleeves.
"But not unless I say so. I want to be a Citizeness Fixit. I've been
good for so long. But now----"
"Show him to me!" and "Up, lads, and atum!" responded her squad.
"Not till after breakfast."
It was a sufficiently vile breakfast, at the Tavern. The feature was
curious cakes whose interior was raw creepy dough. A dozen skilled
workmen were at the same long table with Claire, Milt, Pinky, and Mr.
Boltwood--the last two of whom were polite and scenically descriptive to
each other, but portentously silent about gold-mines. The landlady and a
slavey waited on table; the landlord could be seen loafing in the
kitchen.
Toward the end of the meal Claire insultingly crooked her finger at the
landlady and said, "Come here, woman."
The landlady stared, then ignored her.
"Very well. Then I'll say it publicly!" Claire swept the workmen with an
affectionate smile. "Gentlemen of Pellago, I want you to know from one
of the poor tourists who have been cheated at this nasty place that we
depend on you to do something. This woman and her husband are criminals,
in the way they overcharge for hideous food and----"
The landlady had been petrified. Now she charged down. Behind her came
her husband. Milt arose. The husband stopped. But it was Pinky who faced
the landlady, tapped her shoulder, and launched into, "And what's more,
you hag, if our new friends here have any sense, they'll run you out of
town."
That was only the beginning of Pinky's paper on corrections and
charities. He enjoyed himself. Before he finished, the landlady was
crying ... she voluntarily promised to give her boarders waffles, some
morning, jus' soon as she could find the waffle-iron.
With her guard about her, at the office desk, Claire paid one dollar
apiece for the rooms, and discussion was not.
Before they started, Milt had the chance to say to her, "I'm getting so
I can handle Pinky now. Have to. Thinking of getting hold of his
gold-mine. I just give him the eye, as your friend Mr. Saxton would, and
he gets so meek----"
"But don't! Please understand me, Milt; I do admire Mr. Saxton; he is
fine and capable, and really generous; only---- He may be just a bit
snippish at times, while you--you're a playmate--father's and
mine--and---- I did face that landlady, didn't I! I'm not soft and
trivial, am I! Praise!"
* * * * *
She had driven through the panhandle of Idaho into Washington, through
Spokane, through the writhing lava deposits of Moses Coulee where fruit
trees grow on volcanic ash. Beyond Wenatchee, with its rows of apple
trees striping the climbing fields like corduroy in folds, she had come
to the famous climb of Blewett Pass. Once over that pass, and
Snoqualmie, she would romp into Seattle.
She was sorry that she hadn't come to know Milt better, but perhaps she
would see him in Seattle.
Not adventure alone was she finding, but high intellectual benefit in
studying the names of towns in the state of Washington. Not Kankakee nor
Kalamazoo nor Oshkosh can rival the picturesque fancy of Washington, and
Claire combined the town-names in a lyric so emotion-stirring that it
ought, perhaps, to be the national anthem. It ran:
Humptulips, Tum Tum, Moclips, Yelm,
Satsop, Bucoda, Omak, Enumclaw,
Tillicum, Bossburg, Chettlo, Chattaroy,
Zillah, Selah, Cowiche, Keechelus,
Bluestem, Bluelight, Onion Creek, Sockeye,
Antwine, Chopaka, Startup, Kapowsin,
Skamokawa, Sixprong, Pysht!
Klickitat, Kittitas, Spangle, Cedonia,
Pe Ell, Cle Elum, Sallal, Chimacum,
Index, Taholah, Synarep, Puyallup,
Wallula, Wawawai, Wauconda, Washougal,
Walla Walla, Washtucna, Wahluke,
Solkulk, Newaukum, Wahkiakus,
Penawawa, Ohop, Ladd!
Harrah, Olalla, Umtanum, Chuckanut,
Soap Lake, Loon Lake, Addy, Ace, Usk,
Chillowist, Moxee City, Yellepit, Cashup,
Moonax, Mabton, Tolt, Mukilteo,
Poulsbo, Toppenish, Whetstone, Inchelium,
Fishtrap, Carnation, Shine, Monte Cristo,
Conconully, Roza, Maud!
China Bend, Zumwalt, Sapolil, Riffle,
Touchet, Chesaw, Chew, Klum, Bly,
Humorist, Hammer, Nooksack, Oso,
Samamish, Dusty, Tiger, Turk, Dot,
Scenic, Tekoa, Nellita, Attalia,
Steilacoom, Tweedle, Ruff, Lisabeula,
Latah, Peola, Towal, Eltopia,
Steptoe, Pluvius, Sol Duc, Twisp!
"And then," complained Claire, "they talk about Amy Lowell! I leave it
to you, Henry B., if any union poet has ever written as gay a refrain as
'Ohop Ladd'!"
She was not merely playing mental whist. She was trying to keep from
worry. All the way she had heard of Blewett Pass; its fourteen miles of
climbing, and the last half mile of stern pitch. On this eastern side of
the pass, the new road was not open; there was a tortuous,
flint-scattered trail, too narrow, in most places, for the passing of
other cars. Claire was glad that Milt and Pinky were near her.
If so many of the race of kind advisers of tourists had not warned her
about it, doubtless she would have gone over the pass without
difficulty. But their voluntary croaking sapped her nerve, and her
father's. He kept worrying, "Do you think we better try it?" When they
stopped at a ranch house at the foot of the climb, for the night, he
seemed unusually tired. He complained of chill. He did not eat
breakfast. They started out silent, depressed.
He crouched in the corner of the seat. She looked at him and was
anxious. She stopped on the first level space on the pass, crying, "You
are perfectly miserable. I'm afraid of---- I think we ought to see a
doctor."
"Oh, I'll be all right."
But she waited till Milt came pit-pattering up the slope. "Father feels
rather sick. What shall I do? Turn round and drive to the nearest
doctor--at Cashmere, I suppose?"
"There's a magnolious medico ahead here on the pass," Pinky Parrott
interrupted. "A young thing, but they say he's a graduate of Harvard.
He's out here because he has some timber-claims. Look, Milt o' the
Daggett, why don't you drive Miss Boltwood's 'bus--make better time, and
hustle the old gent up to the doc, and I'll come on behind with your
machine."
"Why," Claire fretted, "I hate----"
A new Milt, the boss, abrupt, almost bullying, snapped out of his bug.
"Good idee. Jump in, Claire. I'll take your father up. Heh, whasat,
Pink? Yes, I get it; second turn beyond grocery. Right. On we go. Huh?
Oh, we'll think about the gold-mine later, Pink."
With the three of them wedged into the seat of the Gomez, and Pinky
recklessly skittering after them in the bug, they climbed again--and lo!
there was no climb! Unconsciously Claire had hesitated before dashing at
each sharp upsloping bend; had lost headway while she was wondering,
"Suppose the car went off this curve?" Milt never sped up, but he never
slackened. His driving was as rhythmical as music.
They were so packed in that he could scarcely reach gear lever and
hand-brake. He halted on a level, and curtly asked, "That trap-door in
the back of the car--convertible extra seat?"
"Yes, but we almost never use it, and it's stuck. Can't get it open."
"I'll open it all right! Got a big screwdriver? Want you sit back there.
Need elbow room."
"Perhaps I'd better drive with Mr. Pinky."
"Nope. Don't think better."
With one yank he opened the trap-door, revealing a folding seat, which
she meekly took. Back there, she reflected, "How strong his back looks.
Funny how the little silvery hairs grow at the back of his neck."
They came to a settlement and the red cedar bungalow of Dr. Hooker
Beach. The moment Claire saw the doctor's thin demanding face, she
trusted him. He spoke to Mr. Boltwood with assurance: "All you need is
some rest, and your digestion is a little shaky. Been eating some pork?
Might stay here a day or two. We're glad to have a glimpse of
Easterners."
Mr. Boltwood went to bed in the Beaches' guest-room. Mrs. Beach gave
Claire and Milt lunch, with thin toast and thin china, on a porch from
which an arroyo dropped down for a hundred feet. Fir trees scented the
air, and a talking machine played the same Russian music that was
popular that same moment in New York. And the Beaches knew people who
knew Claire.
Claire was thinking. These people were genuine aristocrats, while Jeff
Saxton, for all his family and his assumptions about life, was the
eternal climber. Milt, who had been uncomfortable with Jeff, was serene
and un-self-conscious with the Beaches, and the doctor gratefully took
his advice about his stationary gas engine. "He's rather like the
Beaches in his simplicity--yes, and his ability to do anything if he
considers it worth while," she decided.
After lunch, when the doctor and his wife had to trot off to a patient,
Claire proposed, "Let's walk up to that ledge of rock and see the view,
shall we, Milt?"
"Yes! And keep an eye on the road for Pinky. The poor nut, he hasn't
showed up. So reckless; hope he hasn't driven the Teal off the road."
She crouched at the edge of a rock, where she would have been
frightened, a month before, and looked across the main road to a creek
in a pine-laced gully. He sat beside her, elbows on knees.
"Those Beaches--their kin are judges and senators and college
Presidents, all over New England," she said. "This doctor must be the
grandson of the ambassador, I fancy."
"Honest? I thought they were just regular folks. Was I nice?"
"Of course you were."
"Did I--did I wash my paws and sit up and beg?"
"No, you aren't a little dog. I'm that. You're the big mastiff that
guards the house, while I run and yip." She was turned toward him,
smiling. Her hand was beside him. He touched the back of it with his
forefinger, as though he was afraid he might soil it.
There seemed to be no reason, but he was trembling as he stammered,
"I--I--I'm d-darn glad I didn't know they were anybody, or 'd have been
as bad as a flivver driver the first time he tries a t-twelve-cylinder
machine. G-gee your hand is little!"
She took it back and inspected it. "I suppose it is. And pretty
useless."
"N-no, it isn't, but your shoes are. Why don't you wear boots when
you're out like this?" A flicker of his earlier peremptoriness came into
his voice. She resented it:
"My shoes are perfectly sensible! I will not wear those horrible
vegetarian uplift sacks on my feet!"
"Your shoes may be all right for New York, but you're not going to New
York for a while. You've simply got to see some of this country while
you're out here--British Columbia and Alaska."
"Would be nice, but I've had enough roughing----"
"Chance to see the grandest mountains in the world, almost, and then you
want to go back to tea and all that junk!"
"Stop trying to bully me! You have been dictatorial ever since we
started up----"
"Have I? Didn't mean to be. Though I suppose I usually am bullying. At
least I run things. There's two kinds of people; those that give orders,
and those that naturally take them; and I belong to the first one,
and----"
"But my dear Milt, so do I, and really----"
"And mostly I'd take them from you. But hang it, Seattle is just a day
away, and you'll forget me. Wish I could kidnap you. Have half a mind
to. Take you way up into the mountains, and when you got used to
roughing it in sure-enough wilderness--say you'd helped me haul timber
for a flume--then we'd be real pals. You have the stuff in you, but you
still need toughening before----"
"Listen to me, Milton. You have been reading fiction, about this
man--sometimes he's a lumberjack, and sometimes a trapper or a miner,
but always he's frightfully hairy--and he sees a charming woman in the
city, and kidnaps her, and shuts her up in some unspeakable shanty, and
makes her eat nice cold boiled potatoes, and so naturally, she simply
adores him! A hundred men have written that story, and it's an example
of their insane masculine conceit, which I, as a woman, resent.
Shakespeare may have started it, with his silly _Taming of the Shrew_.
Shakespeare's men may have been real, but his women were dolls, designed
to please some majesty. You may not know it, but there are women today
who don't live just to please majesties' fancies. If a woman like me
were kidnapped, she would go on hating the brute, or if she did give in,
then the man would lose anyway, because she would have degenerated;
she'd have turned into a slave, and lost exactly the things he'd liked
in her. Oh, you cavemen! With your belief that you can force women to
like you! I have more courage than any of you!"
"I admit you have courage, but you'd have still more, if you bucked the
wilds."
"Nonsense! In New York I face every day a hundred complicated problems
you don't know I ever heard of!"
"Let me remind you that Brer Julius Caesar said he'd rather be mayor in a
little Spanish town than police commissioner in Rome. I'm king in
Schoenstrom, while you're just one of a couple hundred thousand bright
people in New York----"
"Really? Oh, at least a million. Thanks!"
"Oh--gee--Claire, I didn't mean to be personal, and get in a row and
all, but--can't you see--kind of desperate--Seattle so soon----"
Her face was turned from him; its thin profile was firm as silver wire.
He blundered off into silence and--they were at it again!
"I didn't mean to make you angry," he gulped.
"Well, you did! Bullying---- You and your men of granite, in mackinaws
and a much-needed shave, trying to make a well-bred woman satisfied with
a view consisting of rocks and stumps and socks on the line! Let me tell
you that compared with a street canyon, a mountain canyon is simply
dead, and yet these unlettered wild men----"
"See here! I don't know if you're firing these adjectives at me, but I
don't know that I'm so much more unlettered---- You talked about taking
French in your finishing-school. Well, they taught American in mine!"
"They would!"
Then he was angry. "Yes, and chemistry and physics and Greek and Latin
and history and mathematics and economics, and I took more or less of a
whirl at all of them, while you were fiddling with ribbons, and then I
had to buck mechanics and business methods."
"I also 'fiddled' with manners--an unfortunate omission in your
curriculum, I take it! You have been reasonably rude----"
"So have you!"
"I had to be! But I trust you begin to see that even your strong hand
couldn't control a woman's taste. Kidnapping! As intelligent a boy as
you wanting to imitate these boorish movie----"
"Not a darn bit more boorish than your smart set, with its champagne and
these orgies at country clubs----"
"You know so much about country clubs, don't you! The worst orgy I ever
saw at one was the golf champion reading the beauty department in
_Boudoir_. Would you mind backing up your statements about the vices of
myself and my friends----"
"Oh, you. Oh, I didn't mean----"
"Then why did you----"
"Now you're bullying me, and you know that if the smart set isn't
vicious, at least it's so snobbish that it can't see any----"
"Then it's wise to be snobbish, because if it did condescend----"
"I won't stand people talking about condescending----"
"Would you mind not shouting so?"
"Very well! I'll keep still!"
Silence again, while both of them looked unhappy, and tried to remember
just what they had been fighting about. They did not at first notice a
small red car larruping gaily over the road beneath the ledge, though
the driver was a pink-haired man in a green coat. He was almost gone
before Milt choked, "It's Pinky!"
"Pink! Pinky!" he bellowed.
Pinky looked back but, instead of stopping, he sped up, and kept going.