"No," I conceded, "she isn't, and neither am I. But you know even the
Bible admits that of ten virgins five were wise!"
Her face, somber now, showed no reflection of my amusement. She seemed
to be considering our claims to wisdom, turning over in her mind the
possibility of help from either of us, and experiencing a depressing
doubt.
"Well, you're women, anyway," she murmured, at last, a pathetic note
of uncertainty lingering in her voice.
"Will you tell me your name?" I asked, "so that I may introduce you
properly to Dr. Harland?"
"Tildy Mears," she answered, promptly; then added, with stiff
formality, "Mrs. James Mears of the X. X. M. Ranch."
We were already facing Dr. Harland, and I presented Mrs. Mears without
further delay. The leader met her with the brilliant smile, the close
hand-clasp, the warm, human sympathy which rarely failed to thrill the
man or woman she was greeting. Under their influence Mrs. Mears
expanded like a thirsty plant in a gentle shower. Within five minutes
the two women were friends.
"You're at the hotel, of course," Dr. Harland asked, when she heard of
the sixty-mile drive across the country. "Then you must have supper
with Miss Iverson and me. We always want something after these long
evenings, and I will have it sent up to our sitting-room, so that we
can have a comfortable talk."
Half an hour later we were grouped around the table in the little
room, and over the cold meat, canned peaches, lemonade, and biscuits
which formed our collation Tildy Mears retold her story, adding
innumerable details and intimate touches under the stimulus of the
doctor's interest. At the end of it Dr. Harland sat for a long moment
in silent thought. Then, from the briskness with which she began to
speak, I knew that she had found some solution of the human problem
before us.
"Mrs. Mears," she said, abruptly, and without any comment on the
other's recital, "I wish you would travel around with us for a
fortnight. We're going to remain in this part of the state, and you
would find our meetings extremely interesting. On the other hand, you
could give me a great deal of help and information, and, though I
cannot offer you a salary, I will gladly pay your expenses."
This was a plan very characteristic of Dr. Harland, to whom half-way
measures of any kind made no appeal. I looked at Tildy Mears. For an
instant, under the surprise of the leader's unexpected words, she had
sat still, stunned; in the next, her eyes had flashed to us one of
their ecstatic messages, as if she had grasped all the other woman's
proposition held of change, of interest, of growth. Then abruptly the
light faded, went out.
"I'd love to," she said, dully, "I'd jest _love_ to! But of course it
ain't possible. Why, I got to start home to-morrer. Jim," she gulped,
bringing out the name with an obvious effort, "Jim expecks me back
Sat'day night."
"Listen to me, Mrs. Mears"--Dr. Harland leaned forward, her compelling
eyes deep in those of the Western woman--"I'm going to speak to you
very frankly--as if we were old friends; as if we were sisters, as,
indeed, we are."
Tildy Mears nodded. Her eyes, dull and tired now, looked trustfully
back at the other woman.
"I feel like we are," she agreed. And she added, "You kin say anything
you've a mind to."
"Then I want to say this."
I had never seen Dr. Harland more interested, more impressive. Into
what she was saying to the forlorn little creature before her she
threw all she had of persuasiveness, of magnetism, and of power.
"If you don't have a change," she continued, "and a very radical
change, you will surely have a bad nervous breakdown. That is what I
want to save you from. I cannot imagine anything that would do it more
effectively than to campaign with us for a time, and have the whole
current of your thoughts turned in a new direction. Why, don't you
understand"--her deep voice was full of feeling; for the moment at
least she was more interested in one human soul than in hundreds of
human votes--"it isn't that you have ceased to care for your home and
your family. It's only that your tortured nerves are crying out
against the horrible monotony of your life. Give them the change they
are demanding and everything else will come right. Go back and put
them through the old strain, and--well, I'm afraid everything will go
wrong."
As if something in the other's words had galvanized her into sudden
action Mrs. Mears sprang to her feet. Like a wild thing she circled
the room, beating her hands together.
"I can't go back!" she cried. "I can't go back! Whut'll I do? Oh,
whut'll I do?"
"Do what I am advising you to do."
Dr. Harland's quiet voice steadied the hysterical woman. Under its
calming influence I could see her pull herself together.
"Write Mr. Mears that you are coming with us, and give him our advance
route, so that he will know exactly where you are all the time. If
your daughter can manage your home for five days she can manage it for
two weeks. And your little jaunt need not cost your husband one
penny."
"I brought twenty dollars with me," quavered Tildy Mears.
"Keep it," advised the temporarily reckless leader of the woman's
cause. "When we reach Bismarck you can buy yourself a new dress and
get some little presents to take home to the children."
Tildy Mears stopped her reckless pacing of the room and stood for a
moment very still, her eyes fixed on a worn spot in the rug at her
feet.
"I reckon I will," she then said, slowly. "Sence you ask me, I jest
reckon I'll stay."
The next evening, during her remarks to the gathering she was then
addressing, Dr. Harland abruptly checked herself.
"But there is some one here who knows more about that than I do," she
said, casually, referring to a point she was covering. "Mrs. Mears,
who is on the platform with me to-night, is one of you. She knows from
twenty years of actual experience what I am learning from study and
observation. She can tell you better than I can how many buckets of
water a plainsman's wife carries into an unpiped ranch during the day.
Will you tell us, Mrs. Mears?"
She asked a few questions, and hesitatingly, stammeringly at first,
the panic-stricken plainswoman answered her. Then a woman in the
audience spoke up timidly to compare notes, and in five minutes more
Dr. Harland was sitting quietly in the background while Tildy Mears,
her brown eyes blazing with interest and excitement, talked to her
fellow plainswomen about the problems she and they were meeting
together.
Seeing the success of Dr. Harland's experiment, I felt an increased
respect for that remarkable woman. She had known that this would
happen; she had realized, as I had not, that Tildy Mears could talk to
others as simply and as pregnantly as to us, and that her human appeal
to her sister workers would be far greater than any even Anna Harland
herself could make. One night she described a stampede in words that
made a slow chill run the length of my spine. Half an hour later she
was discussing "hired hands," with a shrewd philosophy and a quaint
humor that drew good-natured guffaws from "hired hands" themselves as
well as from their employers in the audience.
Within the next few days Tildy Mears became a strong feature of our
campaign. Evening after evening, in primitive Dakota towns, her
self-consciousness now wholly gone, she supplemented Dr. Harland's
lectures by a talk to her sister women, so simple, so homely, so
crudely eloquent that its message reached every heart. During the days
she studied the suffrage question, reading and rereading the books we
had brought with us, and asking as many questions as an eager and
precocious child. Openly and unabashedly Dr. Harland gloried in her.
"Why, she's a born orator," she told me one day, almost breathlessly.
"She's a feminine Lincoln. There's no limit to her possibilities. I'd
like to take her East. I'd like to educate her--train her. Then she
could come back here and go through the West like a whirlwind."
The iridescent bubble was floating so beautifully that it seemed a
pity to prick it; but I did, with a callous reminder.
"How about her home?" I suggested--"and her children? and her
husband?"
Dr. Harland frowned and bit her lip.
"Humph!" she muttered, her voice taking on the flat notes of
disappointment and chagrin. "Humph! I'd forgotten them."
For a moment she stood reflecting, readjusting her plans to a scale
which embraced the husband, the home, and the children of her
protégée. Then her brow cleared, her irresistible twinkle broke over
her face; she smiled like a mischievous child.
"I had forgotten them," she repeated. "Maybe"--this with irrepressible
hopefulness--"maybe Tildy will, too!"
That Tildy did nothing of the kind was proved to us all too soon. Six
days had passed, and the growing fame of Mrs. Mears as a suffrage
speaker was attracting the attention of editors in the towns we
visited. It reached its climax at a mass-meeting in Sedalia, where for
an hour the little woman talked to an audience of several hundred,
making all Dr. Harland's favorite points in her own simpler, homelier
words, while the famous leader of the cause beamed on her proudly from
the side of the stage. After the doctor's speech the two women held an
informal reception, which the Mayor graced, and to which the Board of
Aldermen also lent the light of their presence. These high dignitaries
gave most of their attention to our leader; she could answer any
question they wished to ask, as well as many others they were
extremely careful not to bring up. But the women in the audience, the
babies, the growing boys and girls--all these turned to Tildy Mears.
From the closing words of her speech until she disappeared within the
hotel she was followed by an admiring throng. As I caught the final
flash of her brown eyes before her bedroom engulfed her it seemed to
me that she looked pale and tired. She had explained that she wanted
no supper, but before I went to bed, hearing her still moving around
her room, I rapped at her door.
"Wouldn't you like a sandwich?" I asked, when she had opened it. "And
a glass of lemonade?"
She hesitated. Then, seeing that I had brought these modest
refreshments on a tray, she stepped back and allowed me to pass in.
There was an unusual self-consciousness in her manner, an unusual
bareness in the effect of the room. The nails on the wall had been
stripped of her garments. On the floor lay an open suit-case closely
packed.
"Why!" I gasped. "Why are you packing? We're going to stay here over
to-morrow, you know."
For an instant she stood silent before me, looking like a child caught
in some act of disobedience by a relentless parent. Then her head went
up.
"Yes," she said, quietly. "I'm packed. I'm goin' home!"
"Going home!" I repeated, stupidly. It seemed to me that all I could
do was to echo her words. "When?" I finally brought out.
"To-morrer mornin'." She spoke almost defiantly. "I wanted to go
to-night," she added, "but there wasn't no train. I got to go back an'
start from Dickinson, where I left my horse."
"But why?" I persisted. "_Why?_ I thought you were going to be with us
another week at least?"
"Well"--she drew out the word consideringly. Then, on a sudden
resolve, she gave her explanation. "They was a man in the fourth row
to-night that looked like Jim."
"Yes?" I said, and waited. "Was he Mr. Mears?" I asked, at last.
"No."
She knelt, and closed and locked the suit-case.
"He looked like Jim," she repeated, as if that ended the discussion.
For an instant the situation was too complicated for me. Then, in a
flash of understanding, I remembered that only the week before I had
been made suddenly homesick for New York by one fleeting glimpse of a
man whose profile was like that of Godfrey Morris. Without another
word I sought Dr. Harland and broke the news to her in two pregnant
sentences.
"Mrs. Mears is going home to-morrow morning. She saw a man at the
meeting to-night who looked like her husband."
Dr. Harland, who was preparing for bed, laid down the hair-brush she
was using, slipped a wrapper over her nightgown, and started for Mrs.
Mears's room. I followed. Characteristically, our leader disdained
preliminaries.
"But, my dear woman," she exclaimed, "you can't leave us in the lurch
like this. You're announced to speak in Sweetbriar and Mendan and
Bismarck within the coming week."
"He looked jest like Jim," murmured Tildy Mears, in simple but full
rebuttal. She was standing with her back to the door, and she did not
turn as we entered. Her eyes were set toward the north, where her home
was, and her children and Jim. Her manner dismissed Sweetbriar,
Mendan, and Bismarck as if they were the flowers of last year.
Suddenly she wheeled, crossed the room, and caught Dr. Harland by the
shoulders.
"Woman," she cried, "I'm homesick. Can't ye understand that, even ef
you ain't got a home an' a husband ye been neglectin' fer days, like I
have? I'm homesick." Patiently she brought out her refrain again. "The
man looked jest like Jim," she ended.
She turned away, and with feverish haste put her case on a chair, and
her jacket and hat on the case, topping the collection with an old
pair of driving-gloves. The completeness of this preparation seemed to
give her some satisfaction. She continued with more animation.
"I'm startin' early," she explained. "I told the hotel man soon's I
come in to have me called at five o'clock. So I'll say good-by now.
An' thank ye both fer all yer kindness," she ended, primly.
Dr. Harland laughed. Then, impulsively, she took both the woman's
toil-hardened hands in hers.
"Good-by, then, and God bless you," she said. "My cure has worked.
I'll comfort myself with that knowledge."
For a moment the eyes of Tildy Mears fell.
"You ben mighty good," she said. "You both ben good. Don't think I
ain't grateful." She hesitated, then went on in halting explanation.
"'S long's you ain't married," she said, "an' ain't got nothin' else
to do, it's fine to travel round an' talk to folks. But someway sence
I see that man to-night, settin' there lookin' like Jim, I realize
things is different with us married women."
She drew her small figure erect, her voice taking on an odd suggestion
of its ringing platform note.
"Talkin' is one thing," she said, tersely, "livin' is another thing.
P'rhaps you ain't never thought of that. But I see the truth now, an'
I see it clear."
Her peroration filled the little room, and like a swelling organ tone
rolled through the open door and down the stairs, where it reached the
far recesses of the hall below. Her lean right arm shot upward in her
one characteristic gesture, as if she called on high Heaven itself to
bear witness to the wisdom of her words in this, her last official
utterance.
"Woman's place," ended Tildy Mears, "is in the home!"
X