THE WOMAN'S PART
It was all over at last, the good-byes, the tearful embraces, the cheery
waving of hands, and Rose was off for home. There were other students on
the train, but they were young students whom she did not know. At the
moment it seemed as if she were leaving all that was worth while--five
years of the most beautiful time of her life lay behind her.
She had gone there a country girl, scared and awkward. She was now a
woman (it seemed to her) and the time for action of some sort had come.
She did not look to marriage as a safe harbor. Neither had she regarded
it as an end of all individual effort, as many of her companions
unequivocally had done.
After her experiences during those last three days, she felt as if sex
were an abomination, and she wished for freedom from love. She had
already the premonition that she was of those who seem destined to know
much persecution of men.
Her strong, forceful, full-blooded, magnetic beauty could not be hidden
so deep under sober garments but that the ever-seeking male eye quickly
discovered it. As she entered the car she felt its penetrating,
remorseless glare, and her face darkened, though she was no longer
exposed to the open insults of brakemen and drummers. There was
something in the droop of her eyelids and the curve of her mouth which
kept all men at a distance, even the most depraved. She was not a
victim--a girl to be preyed upon. She was quite evidently a proud,
strong woman, to be sued for by all flatteries and attentions.
The train whirled along over the familiar route, and the land was most
beautiful. Fresh grass everywhere, seas of green flashing foliage,
alternating with smooth slopes of meadow where cattle fed, yet she saw
little of it. With sombre eyes turned to the pane she thought and
thought.
What was to be done now? That was the question. For a year she had been
secretly writing verse and sending it to the magazines. It had all been
returned to her. It made her flush hot to think how they had come back
to her with scarcely a word of civility. Evidently she was wrong. She
was not intended for a writer after all. She thought of the stage, but
she did not know how to get upon the stage.
The train drew steadily forward, and familiar lines of hill-tops aroused
her, and as she turned her face toward home, the bent and grizzled
figure of her father came to her mind as another determining cause. He
demanded something of her now after nearly five year's absence from
home, for he had paid her way--made it possible for her to be what she
was.
There he sat holding his rearing horses and watching, waiting for her.
She had a sudden, swift realization of his being a type as he sat there,
and it made her throat fill, for it seemed to put him so far away,
seemed to take away something of her own sweet dignified personality.
There was a crowd of people on the platform. Some of them she knew, some
of them she did not. She looked very fine and lady-like to John Dutcher
as she came down the car steps, and the brakeman helped her down, with
elaborate and very respectful courtesy.
The horses pranced about, so that John could not even take her hand, and
so she climbed into the buggy alone.
"Carl will take care of your trunk," he said. "Give him the check."
She turned to Carl, whom she had not noticed. He bowed awkwardly.
"How de do, Rosie," he said, as he took the check. He wore brown denims,
and a broad hat and looked strong and clumsy.
She had no time to speak to him, for the horses whirled away up the
street. The air was heavy with the scent of clover, and the
bitter-sweet, pungent smells of Lombardy poplar trees.
They rode in silence till the village lay behind them and the horses
calmed down.
"Cap's a perfect fool about the cars," said John. "But I had to take
him; Jennie's getting too heavy, I darsent take her."
"How is the stock?"
"O, all right. We had a big crop of lambs this spring. The bees are
doing well, but the clover don't seem to attract 'em this year. The corn
looks well except down near the creek--it's been wet there in rainy
seasons, you remember." He gave other reports concerning stock.
Rose felt for the first time the unusualness of this talk. All her life
she had discussed such things with him, but on previous vacations she
had not been conscious of its startling plainness, but now it came to
her with a sudden hot flush--think of such talk being reported of her to
the Doctor and Mrs. Thatcher!
There was something strange in her father's manner, an excitement very
badly concealed, which puzzled her. He drove with almost reckless
swiftness up the winding coule road. He called her attention to the
way-side crops, and succeeded in making her ask:
"Father, what in the world is the matter with you? I never knew you to
act like this."
John laughed. "I'm a little upset getting you home again, that's all."
She caught a gleam of new shingles through the trees.
"What have you been building?"
"O, nothing much--new granary--patchin' up a little," he replied
evasively. When they whirled into the yard she was bewildered--the old
cottage was gone and a new house stood in its place.
John broke into a laugh.
"How's that for a new granary?"
"O father, did you do that _for me_?"
"For you and me together, Rosie."
They sat in the carriage and looked at it. Rose peered through
tear-blurred lids. He loved her so--this bent old father! He had torn
down the old home and built this _for her_.
Her aunt came out on the side porch: "Hello, Rosie, just in time! The
shortcake is about ready. Ain't you comin' in?"
John gave the team up to the hired hand (who stared at Rose with
wondering eyes) and then they walked upon the front porch and in the
front door. It was new--so new it glistened everywhere and was full of
the fragrance of new lumber and the odor of paint.
"I didn't get any new furniture," John said. "I thought I'd let you do
that."
Rose turned and put her arms about his neck.
"You dear old daddy, what can I do for you, you're so good to me?"
"There now, don't mind, I'm paid for it now. I just want you to enjoy
it, that's all, and if any feller comes around and you like him, why,
you can bring him right here. It's big enough now, and I'm ready to let
the farm any time."
Rose saw his purpose to the uttermost line. He had built this to keep
her at home. How little he knew her now, to think that she could marry
and bring her husband home to this place!
She kissed him and then they passed into all the rooms.
"Come here--I've got something to show you," he said mysteriously. "I
just _determined_ to have it, no matter what it cost." He pushed open a
door at the head of the stairway, calling triumphantly:
"There--how's that?--a bathroom!"
For an instant she felt like laughing. Then she looked at his kind and
simple face and she broke down again and cried.
John understood now that this was only her way of being glad, so he just
patted her shoulder and got her a chair, and waited for her to dry her
eyes.
"Yes, sir," he went on, "cost me a hundred dollars to put that in, say
nothin' of the fixin's. I had to have special set of eave-spouts made to
run the water into a cistern on top of the kitchen. I thought of
bringing the water from the spring, but that's a little hard."
They went down to supper at last, he full of talk, she very quiet. His
loquacity was painful to her, for it seemed to indicate growing age and
loneliness.
The meagreness of the furniture and tableware never struck her so
forcibly as now, lost in the big new house. Intellectual poverty was
shown also in the absence of books and newspapers, for John Dutcher read
little, even of political newspapers, and magazines were quite outside
his experimental knowledge till Rose brought a few home with her in her
later vacations.
There were no elegancies at their table--that too was borne in upon her
along with the other disturbing things. It was as if her eyes had
suddenly been opened to all the intolerable meagreness of her old-time
life.
"I didn't buy any carpets or wallpaper, Rosie; I thought you'd like to
do that yourself," John explained as she looked around the room.
But outside all was beautiful, very beautiful. Under the trees the
sinking sun could be seen hanging just above the purple-green hills to
the northwest. Robins clucked, orioles whistled, a ring-dove uttered its
never changing, sorrowful, sweet love-note. A thrush, high on a poplar,
sang to the setting sun a wonderful hymn, and the vivid green valley,
with its white houses and red barns, was flooded with orange light,
heaped and brimming full of radiance and fragrance.
And yet what was all that to a girl without love, a brain which craved
activity, not repose? Vain were sunset sky, flaming green slopes and
rows of purple hills to eyes which dreamed of cities and the movement of
masses of men. She was young, not old; ambitious, not vegetative. She
was seeking, seeking, and to wait was not her will or wish.
The old man saw nothing difficult in all this. She was educated now. He
had patiently sent her to school and now it was over; she was to be his
once more, his pride and comfort as of olden time. Without knowing it he
had forged the chains round her with great skill. Every carpet she
bought would bind her to stay. She was to select the wallpaper, and by
so doing to proclaim her intention to conform and to content herself in
the new home.
She rose the next morning feeling, in spite of disturbing thought, the
wonderful peace and beauty of the coule, while her heart responded to
the birds, rioting as never before--orioles, thrushes, bob-o-links,
robins, larks--their voices wonderful and brilliant as the sunlight
which streamed in upon her new, uncarpeted floor.
As she looked around at the large, fine new room, she thought of the
little attic in which she had slept so many years. Yes, decidedly there
would be pleasure in furnishing the house, in making her room pretty
with delicate drapery and cheerful furniture.
She began to plan, only to break off--it seemed in some way to be
deceit. No, before she did anything to it she must tell him she could
not stay here, and she went down to breakfast with that resolution
tightly clutched in her teeth, but when she saw his smiling face she
could not speak the word. He was so pathetically happy. She had never
seen him so demonstrative, and this mood showed her how deeply he had
missed her.
Now that she was home for good, he felt no need of concealing his
exceeding great joy of her daily presence with him. She remembered all
the brave words he had spoken to her in order to make her feel he did
not suffer when she was happy at school. Fortunately at breakfast he was
full of another subject.
"I s'pose you heard that Carl is to be married?" he announced rather
than asked her.
She looked up quickly--"No, is he? To whom?"
"Little Sary Wilson."
"Well, I'm very glad to hear it," she said quietly.
Some way, at that moment she seemed more alien to him than ever before,
and he looked across at her in wonder. How lady-like she was in her
tasty dress. How white her hands were! And it was wonderful to think she
could sit so at ease and hear of Carl's approaching marriage. He
remembered the time when he called them to his knee, the two young
rogues.
She was thinking of that too. It was far in the past, yet, far as it
was, it was still measurable, and a faint flush crept over her face. No
one in the world knew of that experience but Carl and her father. Would
Carl's wife ever know of it? That was the thought which caused the
flush.
The first day she spent in looking about the farm with John. Towards
evening she climbed the hills alone, and spent an hour on the familiar
slope. It helped her to look down on her plans and her daily life, and
the next day she met the question direct.
"Well, Rosie, when will you go to Tyre and do our buyin'?"
"O, not yet. I want to look around a few days first."
"All right--you're the captain! only we can't have any company till we
get some furniture."
True enough! there was the excuse for buying the furniture; even if she
were to go to the city she would be home during the summer, and she
would want to entertain her friends. The fever seized her thereupon, and
she plunged into planning and cataloguing. They had but little to spend,
and she was put to her wit's end to passably furnish the house.
This filled in the first week or two of her stay, and she suffered less
from loneliness than she expected; it came only at intervals, just
before going to sleep, or in the morning, as she made her toilet for
each new but eventless day.
As the home came to look pretty and complete, she thought of asking
Josie to come on to visit her, and finally wrote her, and when she had
promised to come, there was something to look forward to.
Meanwhile, she found something wrong between herself and her old
friends. She meant to be just the same as ever, and at first she seemed
to succeed, but she found herself not listening to them, or looking at
them with alien eyes. She heard their harsh, loud voices, not their
words, and she saw their stiff, ungraceful gestures instead of the
fancy-work and worked-over dresses which they showed her. They looked at
each other with significant nods. Other young people had gone away to
school without acquiring airs, why should she?
It was not her education in books, but in manners, which made her alien.
She was educated above them, too. Her thoughts were higher than theirs,
and she did not attempt to play the hypocrite. She was not interested in
them; for the most part they bored her. In a few cases the
misunderstanding grew to be anger and distrust.
Carl drove over once with his bride-elect, and they all sat stiffly in
the front room for one distressing hour; then they left, never to come
again.
Sarah counted the visit not all in vain, however, for she quite closely
reproduced Rose's shirt-waist the following week--that much she got out
of the call. Carl was awed and troubled a little by the failure of his
bride to get on with Rose, and Rose was bitter over it in heart. She
could not see the fun of all this, as so many story-writers had done. It
was all pitiful and bitter and barren, and to eat with the knife and
drink coffee with a loud, sipping sound were inexcusable misdemeanors to
her overwrought temper.
Josie came in like a little oriole. She fluffed down off the train like
a bunch of lilac bloom one July day.
"O, what a funny little town," she said, after kissing Rose how-de-do.
"Are we to ride in this carriage? O, I'm _so_ disappointed!"
"Why so?"
"O, I wanted to ride on a hay-cart or dray or whatever it is. Mr.
Dutcher, I'm so glad to see you." She sprang upon John and kissed him,
"like a swaller lightin' on me," he said afterward. It astonished him
but gratified him.
"Do you live far out in the country--the real country?" she asked.
"Well, you'd think so if you had to haul corn over it in the spring," he
replied.
"I'd like to haul corn over it," she replied. "May I?"
"You can do anything you want to," John said.
Josie got at the picturesque qualities of the people. They all
interested her and amused her like the cattle without horns, and the
guinea-hens which clacked like clocks, and the tadpoles in the marsh.
She had no personal relations--no responsibilities toward them such as
Rose felt were inescapably hers. Josie had no responsibilities at all,
none under heaven!
She laughed at the ill-made dresses, and winked over the heads of the
old wives when they talked in dialect, and made fun of the boys who came
courting her, and sang "Where did they get those hats?" after coming out
of the church.
Rose laughed and yet suffered, as one might whose blood relatives were
ridiculed. It was a new experience to John Dutcher to have one about who
cried out at everything as if it were the seventh wonder. The summer
visitor had never before penetrated to his farm and all the women he had
ever known could talk about cattle and drainage and wool-washing almost
like men. In his interest and desire to do the part of entertainer, he
pushed on into subjects which the girl listened to with wonder-wide eyes
and a flushed face.
He talked to her as he would with Rose, about "farrer cows" and other
commonplaces of stock-raising to which Rose would have listened
abstractedly or with a slight feeling of disgust. To Josie it was deeply
fascinating, and just a little bit like reading a forbidden book. It
affected her a little unwholesomely, just as it would have made Ed, the
hand, spasmodically guffaw to stand before the Venus de Milo--use and
custom do much.
She sometimes asked questions which she would not have dared to ask her
uncle, for John Dutcher was beyond sex; indeed, he had always been a man
of pure heart and plain speech. He was even in youth perfectly free from
any sensuality, and now in his later middle life sex was a fact like the
color of a horse or a squash, and all that pertained to it he talked of,
on the same plane. It did not occur to him that he was going beyond the
lines of propriety in explaining to this delicate little woman various
vital facts of stock-raising.
Josie sometimes went back to Rose smilingly, and told her what had taken
place.
"Why didn't you ask me--you little goose? I never thought you didn't
know those things. We farm girls know all that when we are toddlers. We
can't help it."
All this should have been tonic, thoroughly wholesome to the dainty
over-bred girl, and so it ultimately became, though it disturbed her at
the time.
The two girls went out into the meadows and upon the hills almost daily.
They sought wild strawberries in the sunny spots amid the hazel brush.
They buried themselves in the hay in the field and climbed on the huge
loads with John and rode to the barn. They drank water out of the spring
lying flat on the ground; Rose showed how it was done. They went up on
the hillsides under the edges of great ledges of water-washed sandstone
where Rose had made her playhouse in her childhood, and she drew forth
from the crevices in the rocks the queer little worn pieces of rock
which she had called horses and cows and soldiers.
Rose had not been so girlish since her first vacation from school in
Madison. She romped and laughed with the ever-joyous Josie, and together
they grew brown and strong. But there came into the lusty splendid joy
of these days hours of almost sombre silence and dreaming. It all ended
in nothing, this attempt at amusement.
Here in the riant and overflowing opulence of July, time without love's
companionship was time wasted. Of what avail these soft winds, the song
of birds, the gleam and lift and shimmer of leaves, if love were not
there to share it?
Josie frankly confessed the name of the one she wished to share it with,
but Rose looked into the sky and remained silent. Her soul was still
seeking, restless, avid, yet evermore discerning, evermore difficult to
satisfy.
They fell into long talks on marriage, and Rose confided to her some of
her deepest thoughts, though she felt each time that this little
twittering sparrow was hardly capable of understanding her.
"I want to know the men who think the great thoughts of the world," she
said once as they lay under the beeches on the hillside, far above the
haying field. "I don't want to marry--I only want to know men who can
lift me up by their great plans. I want to forget myself in work of some
kind--I don't know what kind--any kind that will make me big and grand
in my life. I can't stand these little petty things here in this valley;
these women drive me crazy with their talk of butter and eggs and
made-over bonnets."
"I think they're funny," said Josie. "They talk so loud and they get so
interested in such queer things."
Rose fell silent again. She knew Josie was of this type, only her
affairs happened to be of a different sort, not larger, only different,
pettinesses of dress and teas.
"O, for a nice man!" sighed Josie. "Why didn't you tell me there weren't
any nice men up here?"
Meanwhile the lack of men was not apparent. Hardly a day but some young
fellow from Tyre or the Siding made bold to hitch his horses to the
fence before Dutcher's place. Rose was annoyed and gave most of them
scant courtesy. Josie, however, always saw them and managed to have
great amusement out of their embarrassment.
Like summer girls in general she thought any man better than no man at
all. Rose, however, could not endure a love-glance from any of them. She
found her household duties pressing when they called, and Josie
entertained them, and afterward entertained her by mimicking their looks
and tones. It was very funny to see Josie screw her little face into
shapes to represent her suitors' bashful grins and side-glances.
They were not always bashful, it must be said. Sometimes they were
distressingly bold, and they came to the point of offensive warfare with
a readiness and assurance which scared Josie. She had never seen
anything like it.
Rose found Josie entertaining in any mood.