Every seat in the primitive town hall was occupied, and a somber
frieze of Dakota plainsmen and their sad-faced wives decorated the
rough, unpainted sides of the building. On boxes in the narrow aisles,
between long rows of pine boards on which were seated the early
arrivals, late-comers squatted discontentedly, among them a dozen
women carrying fretful babies, to whom from time to time they
addressed a comforting murmur as they swung them, cradle-fashion, in
their tired arms.
The exercises of the evening had not yet begun, but almost every eye
in the big, silent, patient assemblage was fixed on a woman, short and
stout, with snow-white hair and a young and vivid face, who had just
taken her place on the platform, escorted by a self-conscious official
of the little town. Every one in that gathering had heard of Dr. Anna
Harland; few had yet heard her speak, but all knew what she
represented: "new-fangled notions about women"--women's rights, woman
suffrage, feminism, unsettling ideas which threatened to disturb the
peace of minds accustomed to run in well-worn grooves. Many of the
men and women in her audience had driven twenty, thirty, or forty
miles across the plains to hear her, but there was no unanimity in the
expressions with which they studied her now as she sat before them. In
the men's regard were curiosity, prejudice, good-humored tolerance, or
a blend of all three. The women's faces held a different meaning:
pride, affectionate interest, admiration tinged with hope; and here
and there a hint of something deeper, a wireless message that passed
from soul to soul.
At a melodeon on the left of the platform a pale local belle, who had
volunteered her services, awaited the signal to play the opening
chords of the song that was to precede the speaker's address. In
brackets high on the rough walls a few kerosene lamps vaguely
illumined the scene, while from the open night outside came the voices
of cowboys noisily greeting late arrivals and urging them to "go on in
an' git a change of heart!"
The musician received her signal--a nod from the chairman of the
evening--and the next moment the voices of a relieved and relaxed
audience were heartily swelling the familiar strains of "The Battle
Hymn of the Republic." As the men and women before her sang on, Dr.
Harland watched them, the gaze of the brilliant dark eyes under her
straight black brows keen and intent. Even yet she had not decided
what she meant to say to these people. Something in the music,
something in the atmosphere, would surely give her a cue, she felt,
before she began to speak.
Sitting near her on the platform, I studied both her and her audience.
The Far West and its people were new to me; so was this great leader
of the woman's cause. But it behooved me to know her and to know her
well, for I had accompanied her on this Western campaign for the sole
purpose of writing a series of articles on her life and work, to be
published in the magazine of which I had recently been appointed
assistant editor. During our long railroad journeys and drives over
hills and plains she had talked to me of the past. Now, I knew, I was
to see her again perform the miracle at which I had not yet ceased to
marvel--the transformation of hundreds of indifferent or merely
casually interested persons into a mass of shouting enthusiasts, ready
to enlist under her yellow banner and follow wherever she led.
To-night, as she rose and for a moment stood silent before her
audience, I could see her, as usual, gathering them up, drawing them
to her by sheer force of magnetism, before she spoke a word.
"My friends," she began, in the beautiful voice whose vibrating
contralto notes reached every person in the great hall, "last Monday,
at Medora, I was asked by a missionary who is going to India to send a
message to the women of that land. I said to him, 'Tell them the world
was made for women, too.' To-night I am here to give you the same
message. The world is women's, too. The West is women's, too. You have
helped to make it, you splendid, pioneer women, who have borne with
your husbands the heat and burden of the long working-days. You have
held down your claims through the endless months of Western winters,
while your men were away; you have toiled with them in the fields; you
have endured with them the tragedies of cyclones, of droughts, of
sickness, of starvation. If woman's work is in the home alone, as our
opponents say it is, you have been most unwomanly. For you have
remained in the home only long enough to bear your children, to care
for them, to feed them and your husbands. The rest of the time you
have done a man's work in the West. The toil has been yours as well as
man's; the reward of such toil should be shared by you. The West is
yours, too. Now it holds work for you even greater than that you have
done in the past, and I am here to beg you to begin that work."
The address went on. In the dim light of the ill-smelling lamps I
could see the audience leaning forward, intent, fascinated. Even among
the men easy tolerance was giving place to eager response; on row
after row of the rough benches the spectators were already clay in the
hands of the speaker, to be molded, for the moment at least, into the
form she chose to give them. My eyes momentarily touched, then
fastened intently on a face in the third row on the left. It was the
face of a woman--a little, middle-aged woman of the primitive Western
type--her graying hair combed straight back from a high, narrow
forehead, her thin lips slightly parted, the flat chest under her
gingham dress rising and falling with emotion. But my interest was
held by her eyes--brown eyes, blazing eyes, almost the eyes of a
fanatic. Unswervingly they rested on the speaker's face, while the
strained attention, the parted lips, the attitude of the woman's
quivering little body betrayed almost uncontrollable excitement. At
that instant I should not have been surprised to see her spring to her
feet and shout, "_Alleluia!_"
A moment later I realized that Dr. Harland had seen her, too; that she
was, indeed, intensely conscious of her, and was directing many of her
best points to this absorbed listener. Here was the perfect type she
was describing to her audience--the true woman pioneer, who not only
worked and prayed, but who read and thought and aspired. The men and
women under the flickering lights were by this time as responsive to
the speaker's words as a child to its mother's voice. They laughed,
they wept, they nodded, they sighed. When the usual collection was
taken up they showed true Western generosity, and when the lecture was
over they crowded forward to shake hands with the woman leader, and to
exhaust their limited vocabulary in shy tributes to her eloquence. Far
on the outskirts of the wide circle that had formed around her I saw
the little woman with the blazing eyes, vainly endeavoring to force
her way toward us through the crowd. Dr. Harland observed her at the
same time and motioned to me.
"Will you ask her to wait, Miss Iverson?" she asked. "I would like to
talk to her before she slips away." And she added, with her
characteristic twinkle, "That woman would make a perfect 'Exhibit A'
for my lecture."
I skirted the throng and touched the arm of the little woman just as
she had given up hope of reaching the speaker, and was moving toward
the door. She started and stared at me, almost as if the touch of my
fingers had awakened her from a dream.
"Dr. Harland asks if you will wait a few moments till the others
leave," I told her. "She is anxious to meet you."
The brown-eyed woman drew in a deep breath.
"Tha's whut I want," she exclaimed, ecstatically, "but it looked like
I couldn't git near her."
We sat down on an empty bench half-way down the hall, and watched the
human stream flow toward and engulf the lecturer. "Ain't she jest
wonderful?" breathed my companion. "She knows us women better 'n we
know ourselves. She knows all we done an' how we feel about it. I felt
like she was tellin' them people all my secrets, but I didn't mind."
She hesitated, then added dreamily, "It's high time men was told whut
their women are thinkin' an' can't say fer themselves."
In the excited group around the speaker a baby, held high in its
mother's arms to avoid being injured in the crush, shrieked out a
sudden protest. My new acquaintance regarded it with sympathetic eyes.
"I've raised six of 'em," she told me. "My oldest is a girl nineteen.
My youngest is a boy of twelve. My big girl she's lookin' after the
house an' the fam'ly while I'm gone. I druv sixty miles 'cross the
plains to hear Dr. Harland. It took me two days, an' it's jest about
wore out my horse--but this is worth it. I ain't had sech a night
sence I was a girl."
She looked at me, her brown eyes lighting up again with their queer,
excited fires.
"My Jim he 'most fell dead when I told him I was comin'," she went on.
"But I says to him, 'I ain't been away from this place one minute in
twenty years,' I says. 'Now I guess you folks can git 'long without me
fer a few days. For, Jim,' I says, 'ef I don't git away, ef I don't go
somewhere an' have some change, somethin's goin' to snap, an' I guess
it'll be me!'"
"You mean," I exclaimed, in surprise, "that you've never left your
ranch in twenty years?"
She nodded.
"Not once," she corroborated. "Not fer a minute. You know whut the
summers are--work, work from daylight to dark; an' in the winters I
had t' hol' down the claim while Jim he went to the city an' worked.
Sometimes he'd only git home once or twice the hull winter. Then when
we begin to git on, seemed like 'twas harder than ever. Jim he kept
addin' more land an' more stock to whut we had, an' there was more
hands to be waited on, an' the babies come pretty fast. Lately Jim
he's gone to Chicago every year to sell his cattle, but I ain't bin
able to git away till now."
During her eager talk--a talk that gushed forth like a long-repressed
stream finding a sudden outlet--she had been leaning toward me with
her arm on the back of the bench and her shining eyes on mine. Now, as
if remembering her "company manners," she sat back stiffly, folded her
work-roughened hands primly in her lap, and sighed with supreme
content.
"My!" she whispered, happily, "I feel like I was in a diff'rent world.
It don't seem possible that only sixty miles out on the plains that
ranch is right there, an' everything is goin' on without me. An' here
I be, hearin' the music, an' all the folks singin' together, an' that
wonderful woman talkin' like she did! I feel"--she hesitated for a
comparison, and then went on, with the laugh of a happy girl--"I feel
like I was up in a balloon an' on my way to heaven!"
I forgot the heat of the crowded hall, the smell of the smoking lamps,
the shuffle of hobnailed shoes on the pine floors, the wails of
fretful babies. I almost felt that I, too, was floating off with this
ecstatic stranger in the balloon of her imagination.
"I see," I murmured. "You're tired of drudgery. You haven't played
enough in all these years."
She swung round again until she faced me, her sallow cheeks flushed,
her eager, brilliant eyes on mine.
"I ain't played none at all," she said. "I dunno what play is. An'
work ain't the only thing I'm tired of. I'm tired of everything. I'm
tired of everything--except this."
Her voice lingered on the last two words. Her eyes left my face for an
instant and followed the lecturer, of whose white head we obtained a
glimpse from time to time as the crowd opened around her. Still gazing
toward her, but now as if unseeingly, the plainswoman went on, her
voice dropping to a lower, more confidential note.
"I'm sick of everything," she repeated. "Most of all, I'm sick of the
plains and the sky--stretching on and on and on and on, like they do,
as if they was no end to 'em. Sometimes when I'm alone I stand at my
door an' look at 'em an' shake my fists an' shriek. I begun to think
they wasn't anything but them nowhere. It seemed 's if the little town
back East where I come from was jest a place I dreamed of--it couldn't
really be. Nothin' _could_ be 'cept those plains an' the cattle an'
the sky. Then, this spring--"
She turned again to face me.
"I dunno why I'm tellin' you all this," she broke off, suddenly.
"Guess it's because I ain't had no one to talk to confidential fer so
long, an' you look like you understand."
"I do understand," I told her.
She nodded.
"Well, this spring," she went on, "I begun to hate everything, same as
I hated the plains. I couldn't exactly hate my children; but it seemed
to me they never did nothin' right, an' I jest had to keep tellin'
myself they was mine, an' they was young an' didn't understand how
they worried me by things they done. Then the hands drove me 'most
crazy. They was one man--why, jes' to have that man pass the door made
me feel sick, an' yet I hadn't nothin' again' him, really. An'
finally, last of all, Jim--even Jim--"
Her voice broke. Sudden tears filled her eyes, quenching for the
moment the sparks that burned there.
"Jim's a good man," she continued, steadily, after a moment's pause.
"He's a good, hard-workin' man. He's good to me in his way, an' he's
good to the children. But of course he ain't got much time for us. He
never was a talker. He's a worker, Jim is, an' when night comes he's
so tired he falls asleep over the fire. But everything he done always
seemed pretty near right to me--till this spring."
Her voice flattened and died on the last three words. For a moment she
sat silent, brooding, a strange puzzled look in her brown eyes. The
crowd around Dr. Harland was thinning out, and people were leaving
the hall. We could easily have reached her now, but I sat still,
afraid to dam the verbal freshet that was following so many frozen
winters.
"This spring," she went on, at last, "it jest seems like I can't bear
to have even Jim around." She checked herself and touched my arm
timidly, almost apologetically. "It's a terrible thing to say, ain't
it?" she almost whispered, and added slowly, "It's a terrible thing to
_feel_. I can't bear to see him come into the room. I can't bear the
way he eats, or the way he smokes, or the way he sets down, or the way
he gits up, or the way he breathes. He does 'em all jest like he
always has. They ain't nothin' wrong with 'em. But I can't bear 'em no
more." She beat her hands together softly, with a queer, frantic
gesture. Her voice took on a note of rising excitement. "I can't," she
gasped. "I can't, _I can't_!"