DEEPER THAN SHOULDERS AND RIBS
There are many fundamental differences between men and women which
strike deeper than breadth of shoulders and number of ribs on the right
side.
Men deliberately unearth matters of importance and women stumble on the
same things in the dark. It is then a question of the individual as to
the complications that result. One thing can be always counted on. A
woman likes to tangle life into a large mass and then straighten out the
threads at her leisure--and the man's leisure too.
Glendale affairs interest me more every day.
This has been a remarkable afternoon and I wish Jane had been in
Glendale to witness it.
"Say, Evelina, all the folks over at our house have gone crazy, and I
wish you would come over and help Cousin James with 'em," Henrietta
demanded, as I sat on my side porch, calmly hemming a ruffle on a dress
for the Kitten. Everybody sews for the twins and, as much as I hate it,
I can't help doing it.
"Why, Henrietta, what is the matter?" I demanded, as I hurried down the
front walk and across the road at her bare little heels. By the time I
got to the front gate I could hear sounds of lamentation.
"A railroad train wants to run right through the middle of all their
dead people and Sallie started the crying. Dead's dead, and if Cousin
James wants 'em run over. I wants 'em run over too." She answered over
her shoulder as we hurried through the wide front hall.
And a scene that beggars description met my eyes, as I stood in the
living-room door. I hope this account I am going to try and write will
get petrified by some kind of new element they will suddenly discover
some day and the manuscript be dug up from the ruins of Glendale to
interest the natives of the Argon age about 2800 A. D.
Sallie sat in the large armchair in the middle of the room weeping in
the slow, regular way a woman has of starting out with tears, when she
means to let them flow for hours, maybe days, and there were just five
echoes to her grief, all done in different keys and characters.
Cousin Martha knelt beside the chair and held Sallie's head on her ample
bosom, but I must say that the expression on her face was one of
bewilderment, as well as of grief.
The three little Horton cousins sat close together in the middle of the
old hair-cloth sofa by the window and were weeping as modestly and
helplessly as they did everything else in life, while Mrs. Hargrove, in
her chair under her son's portrait, was just plainly out and out
howling.
And on the hearth-rug, before the tiny fire of oak chips that the old
ladies liked to keep burning all summer, stood the master of the house
and, for once in my life, I have seen the personification of masculine
helplessness. He was a tragedy and I flew straight to him with arms wide
open, which clasped both his shoulders as I gave him a good shake to
arouse him from his paralyzation.
"What's the matter?" I demanded, with the second shake.
"I'm a brute, Evelina," he answered, and a sudden discouragement lined
every feature of his beautiful biblical face. I couldn't stand that and
I hugged him tight to my breast for an instant and then administered
another earthquake shake.
"Tell me exactly what has happened," I demanded, looking straight into
his tragic eyes and letting my hands slip from his shoulders down his
arms until they held both of his hands tight and warm in mine.
Jane, I was glad that I had offered the cup of my eyes to him full of
this curious inter-sex elixir of life that you have induced me to seek
so blindly, for he responded to the dose immediately and the color came
back into his face as he answered me just as sensibly as he would
another man.
"The men who are surveying the new railroad from Cincinnati to the Gulf
have laid their experimental lines across the corner of Greenwood
Cemetery and they say it will have to run that way or go across the
river and parallel the lines of the other road. If they come on this
side of the river they will force the other road to come across, too,
and in that case we will get the shops. It just happens that such a line
will make necessary the removal of--of poor Henry's remains to another
lot. Sallie's is the only lot in the cemetery that is that high on the
bluff. Henry didn't like the situation when he bought it himself, and I
thought that, as there is another lot right next to her mother's for
sale, she would not--but, of course, I was brutal to mention it to her.
I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me, Sallie." And as he
spoke he extracted himself from me and walked over and laid his hand on
Sallie's head.
"It was such a shock to her--poor Henry," sobbed little Cousin Jasmine,
and the other two little sisters sniffed in chorus.
"To have railroad trains running by Greenwood at all will be disturbing
to the peace of the dead," snorted Mrs. Hargrove. "We need no railroad
in Glendale. We have never had one, and that is my last word--no!"
"Four miles to the railroad station across the river is just a pleasant
drive in good weather," said Cousin Martha, plaintively, as she cuddled
Sallie's sobs more comfortably down on her shoulder.
"I feel that Henry would doubt my faithfulness to his memory, if I
consented to such a desecration," came in smothered tones from the
pillowing shoulder.
And not one of all those six women had stopped to think for one minute
that the minor fact of the disturbing of the ashes of Henry Carruthers
would be followed by the major one of the restoration of the widow's
fortune and the lifting of a huge financial burden off the strong
shoulders they were all separately and collectively leaning upon.
I exploded, but I am glad I drew the Crag out on the porch and did it to
him alone.
"Evelina, you are refreshing if strenuous," he laughed, after I had
spent five minutes in stating my opinions of women in general and a few
in particular. "But I ought not to have hurt Sallie by telling her
about the lines until they are a certainty. It is so far only a
possibility. They may go across the river anyway."
"And as for seeing Sallie swaddled in your consideration, and fed
yourself as a sacrifice from a spoon, I am tired of it," I flamed up
again. "It's not good for her. Feed and clothe her and her progeny,--men
in general have brought just such burdens as that upon you in particular
by their attitude towards us,--but do let her begin to exert just a
small area of her brain on the subject of the survival of the fit to
live. You don't swaddle or feed me!"
"Eve," he said, softly under his breath as his wonderful gentle eyes
sank down way below the indignation and explosiveness to the quiet pool
that lies at the very bottom of my heart.
Nobody ever found it before and I didn't know it was there myself, but I
felt as if it were being drained up into Heaven.
"Eve!" He said again, and it is a wonder that I didn't answer:
"Adam!"
I don't know just what would have happened if Uncle Peter hadn't broken
in on the interview with his crustiest chips on both shoulders and so
much excitement bottled up that he had to let it fly like a double
reporter.
"Dodson is down at the Hotel looking for you, James," he began as he
hurried up the steps. "Big scheme this--got him in a corner if the C. &
G. comes along this side of Old Harpeth--make him squeal--hey?"
"Who's Dodson?" I asked with the greatest excitement. I was for the
first time getting a whiff of the schemes of the masculine mighty, but I
was squelched promptly by Uncle Peter.
"We've no time for questions, Evelina, now--go back to your
tatting--hey?" He answered me as he began to buttonhole the Crag and
lead him down the steps.
"Dodson is the man who is laying down and contracting for the line
across the river, Evelina," answered Cousin James without taking any
notice whatever of Uncle Peter's squelching of me. "If this other line
can just be secured he will have to come to our terms--and the situation
will be saved." As he spoke he took my hand in his and led me at his
side, down the front walk to the gate, talking as he went, for Uncle
Peter was chuckling on ahead like a steam tug in a hurry.
"And the shades of Henry will again assume the maintenance of his
family," I hazarded with lack of respect of the dead, impudence to
Cousin James about his own affairs, and unkindness by implication to
Sallie, who loves me better than almost anybody in the world does. And I
got my just punishment by seeing a lovely look of tender concern rise in
Cousin James's eyes as he stopped short in the middle of the walk.
"I want to go back a minute to speak to Sallie before I go on down
town," he said, quickly, and before Uncle Peter's remonstrances had
exploded, he had taken the steps two at a bound and disappeared in the
front door.
"Sooner he marries that lazy lollypop the better," fumed Uncle Peter, as
he waited at the gate. "The way for a man to quench his thirst for
woman-sweets is to marry a pot of honey like that, and then come right
on back to the bread and butter game. Here's a letter Jasper gave me to
bring along for you from town. Go on and read it and do not disturb the
workings of my brain while I wait for James--workings of a great
brain--hey?"
I took the letter and hurried across the street because I wanted anyway
to get to some place by myself and think. There was no earthly reason
for it but I felt like an animal that has been hurt and wants to go off
and lick its wounds. A womanly woman that lives a lovely appealing life
right in a man's own home has a perfect right to gain his love,
especially if she is beautifully unconscious of her appeal. Besides, why
should a man want to take an independent, explosive, impudent firebrand
with all sorts of dreadful plots in her mind to his heart? He wouldn't
and doesn't!
There is no better sedative for a woman's disturbed and wounded emotions
than a little stiff brain work. Richard's letter braced my viny drooping
of mind at once and from thinking into the Crag's affairs of sentiment,
I turned with masculine vigor to begin to mix into his affairs of
finance. However, I wish that the first big business letter I ever got
in my life hadn't had to have a strain of love interest running through
it! Still Dickie is a trump card in the man pack.
It seems that as his father is one of the most influential directors
and largest stockholders in this new branch of the Cincinnati and Gulf
railroad he has got the commission for making the plans for all the
stations along the road, and he wants to give me the commission for
drawing all the gardens for all the station-yards. It will be tremendous
for both of us so young in life, and I never dared hope for such a
thing. I had only hoped to get a few private gardens of some of my
friends to laze and pose over, but this is startling. My mind is
beginning to work on in terms of hedges and fountains already and Dickie
may be coming South any minute.
And besides the hedges and gravel paths I have a feeling that Dickie's
father and the Crag and Sallie's girl-babies are fomenting around in my
mind getting ready to pop the cork of an idea soon. The combination
feels like some kind of a hunch--I sat still for a long time and let it
seethe, while I took stock of the situation.
There is a strange, mysterious kind of peace that begins to creep across
the Harpeth Valley, just as soon as the sun sinks low enough to throw
the red glow over the head of Old Harpeth. I suppose it happens in other
hill-rimmed valleys in other parts of the Universe, but it does seem as
if God himself is looking down to brood over us, and that the valley is
the hollow of His hand into which he is gathering us to rest in the
darkness of His night. I felt buffeted and in need of Him as I sank down
under the rose-vine over the porch and looked out across my garden to
the blue and rose hills beyond.
I have been in Glendale a whole month now, and I can't see that my
influence has revolutionized the town as yet. I don't seem to be of half
the importance that I thought I was going to be. I have tried, and I
have offered that bucket of love that I thought up to everybody, but
whether they have drunk of it to profit I am sure I can't say. In fact,
my loneliness has liquefied my gaseous affection into what almost looks
like officiousness.
Still, I know Uncle Peter is happier than he ever was before, because he
has got me to come to as a refuge from Aunt Augusta, a confidante for
his views of life that he is not allowed to express at home, and also
the certainty of one of Jasper's juleps.
Sallie has grown so dependent on me that my shoulders are assuming a
masculine squareness to support her weight. I am understudying Cousin
James to such an extent over at Widegables that I feel like the heir to
his house. Cousin Martha sends for me when the chimney smokes and the
cows get sick. I have twice changed five dollars for little Cousin
Jasmine, and sternly told the man from out on their farm on Providence
Road that he must not root up the lavender bushes to plant turnip-greens
in their places. I afterwards rented the patch from him to grow the
lavender because he said he couldn't lose the price that the greens
would bring him "for crotchets."
Mrs. Hargrove has given me her will to keep for her, and the sealed
instructions for her burial. I hope when the time comes the two behests
will strike a balance, but I doubt it.
Her ideas of a proper funeral seem to coincide with those of Queen
Victoria, whom she has admired through life and mourns sincerely.
Henrietta has not been heard to indulge in profane language since I had
a long talk with her last week out in the garden, that ended in stubby
tears and the gift of a very lovely locket which I impressed upon her
was as chaste in design as I wished her speech to become.
The twins have been provided with several very lovely pieces of wearing
apparel from my rapidly skill-acquiring needle. That's on the credit
side of my balance. But that is _all_--and it doesn't sound
revolutionary, does it, Jane?
Petunia married Jasper according to his word of promise, and I have
taught her to cook about five French dishes that he couldn't concoct to
save his life, and which help her to keep him in his place. His
pomposity grows daily but he eyes me with suspicion when he sees me in
secret conclave with Petunia.
"We needs a man around this place," I heard him mutter the other day as
I left the kitchen.
I wonder!
The garden has been weeded, replanted, trained, clipped and garnished,
and my arms are as husky and strong as a boy's and my nose badly
sunburned from my strenuosity with hoe and trimming scissors.
All of which I have done and done well. But when I think of all those
five girls that are waiting for me to solve the emotional formula by
which they can work out and establish the fact that man equals woman, I
get weak in the knees.
Jane's letters are just prods.
* * * * *
Your highly cultivated artistic nature ought to be a very beautiful
revelation to the spiritual character of the young Methodist divine you
wrote me of in your last letter. Encourage him in every way with
affectionate interest in his work, especially in the Epworth League on
his country circuit. I am enclosing fifty dollars' subscription to the
work and I hope you will give as much You have not mentioned Mr. Hayes
for several letters. I fear you are prejudiced against him. Seek to know
and weigh his character before you judge him as unfit for your love.
* * * * *
The highly spiritual Mr. Haley glared at Polk for an hour out here on my
porch, when he interrupted us in one of our Epworth League talks, in
such an unspiritual manner that Polk said he felt as if he had been
introduced to the Apostle Paul while he was still Saul of Tarsus. I had
to pet the Dominie decorously for a week before he regained his benign
manner. Of course, however, it was trying to even a highly spiritual
nature like his to have Polk insist on pinning a rose in my hair right
before his eyes.
About Polk I feel that I am in the midst of one of those great calm,
oily stretches of ocean that a ship is rocked gently in for a few hours
before the storm tosses it first to Heaven and then to hell. He is so
psychic, and in a way attuned to me, that he partly understands my
purpose in declaring my love for him to put him at a disadvantage in his
love-making to me, and he hasn't let me do it yet, while his tacit suit
goes on. It is a drawn battle between us and is going to be fought to
the death. In the meantime Nell--
And while I was on the porch sitting with Richard Hall's letter in my
hand, still unread, Nell herself came down the front walk and sat down
beside me.
"Why, I thought you had gone fishing with Polk," I said as I cuddled her
up to me a second. She laid her head on my shoulder and heaved such a
sigh that it shook us both.
"I didn't quite like to go with him alone and Henrietta wouldn't go
because a bee had stung the red-headed twin, and she wanted to stay to
scold Sallie," she answered with both hesitation and depression in her
voice.
"Polk is--is strenuous for a whole day's companionship," I answered,
experimentally, for I saw the time had come to exercise some of the
biceps in Nell's femininity in preparation for just what I knew she was
to get from Polk. My heart ached for what I knew she was suffering. I
had had exactly those growing pains for months following that experience
with him on the front porch after the dance four years ago. And I had
had change of scene and occupation to help.
"I don't understand him at all," faltered Nell, and she raised her eyes
as she bared her wound to me.
"Nell," I said with trepidation, as I began on this my first disciple,
"you aren't a bit ashamed or embarrassed or humiliated in showing me
that you love me, are you?"
"You know I've adored you ever since I could toddle at your heels,
Evelina," she answered, and the love-message her great brown eyes
flashed into mine was as sweet as anything that ever happened to me.
"Then, why should you wonder and suffer and restrain and be humiliated
at your love for Polk?" I asked, firing point blank at all of Nell's
traditions. "Why not tell him about it and ask him if he loves you?"
The shot landed with such force that Nell gasped, but answered as
straight out from the shoulder as I had aimed.
"I would rather die than have Polk Hayes know how he--he affects me,"
she answered with her head held high.
"Then, what you feel for him is not worthy love, but something entirely
unworthy," I answered loftily, with a very poor imitation of Jane's
impressiveness of speech.
"I know it," she faltered into my shoulder, "if it were Mr. James Hardin
I loved, I wouldn't mind anybody's knowing it, but something must be
wrong with Polk or me or the way I feel. What is it?"
For a moment I got so stiff all over that Nell raised her head from my
shoulder in surprise. Do all women feel about the Crag as I do?
"I don't know," I answered weakly.
And I don't know! Oh, Jane, your simple experiment proposition is about
to become compound quadratics.
Then I got a still further surprise.
"I wouldn't in the least mind telling Mr. James how I like him--if you
think it is all right," Nell mused, looking pensively at the first pale
star that was rising over Old Harpeth. "I would enjoy it, because I
have always adored him, and it would be so interesting to see what he'd
say."
"Nell," I said suddenly with determination, "do it! Tell any man you
like how much you like him--and see what happens."
"I feel as if--as if"--Nell faltered and I don't blame her; I wouldn't
have said as much to her--"I feel that to tell Mr. James I love _him_
would ease the pain, the--pain--that I feel about Polk. It would be so
interesting to tell a man a thing like that."
"Do it!" I gasped, and went foot in the class in romantics.
If any jungle explorer thinks he has mapped and charted a woman's heart
he had better pack up his instruments of warfare and recorders and come
down to Glendale, Tennessee.
Nell and I must have talked further along the same lines, but I don't
remember what we said. I have recorded the high lights on the
conversation, but long after I lost her I kept my whirlwind feeling of
amazement. It was like trying to balance calmly on the lid of the
tinder-box when you didn't know whether or not you had touched off the
fuse.
Has honeysuckle-garbed Old Harpeth been seeing things like this go on
for centuries and not interrupted? I think I would have been sitting
there questioning him until now, if Lee and Caroline hadn't stopped at
the gate and called to me.
I think Lee was giving Caroline this stroll home from the post-office in
the twilight as an extra treat in her week's allowance of him, and she
was so soft and glowing and sweet and pale that I wonder the Cherokee
roses on my hedge didn't droop their heads with humility before her.
"What's a lovely lady doing sitting all by herself in the gloaming?" Lee
asked in his rich, warm voice.
I hate him!
"Come take a walk with us, Evelina, dear," Caroline begged softly,
though I knew what it would mean to her if I should intrude on this
precious hour with her near-lover.
Please, God--if I seem to be calling You into a profane situation I
can't help it; I must have help!--show me some way to assist Caroline to
make Lee into a real man and then get him for herself. She must have him
and he needs her. And show me a way quick! Amen!
Jane, I hope you will be able to pick the data out of this jumble, but I
doubt it. Anyway I'm grateful for the lock and key on this book.
As I stood at the gate and watched Lee and Caroline saunter down the
moon-flecked street a mocking bird in the tallest of the oak twins that
are my roof shelter called wooingly from one of the top boughs and got
his answer from about the same place on the same limb.
If a woman starts out to be a trained nurse to an epidemic of
love-making, she is in great danger of doing something foolish her own
self. I am even glad it is prayer-meeting night for Mr. Haley; he is
safe in performing his rituals. He might misunderstand this mood.
I wonder if I ever was really over in sunny France being wooed and
happy!
Of course, I decided the first night I was here that, as circumstances
over which I had no control had decreed that Cousin James should stand
in the position of enforced protector to me, decent, communistic
femino-masculine honor demands that I refrain from any manoeuvers in his
direction to attract his thoughts and attention to the feminine me. I
can only meet him on the ordinary grounds of fellowship. And I suppose
the glad-to-see him coming up the street was of the neuter gender, but
it was very interesting.
"What did Dodson have to say--is he coming across?" I demanded of him
before he got quite to my gate.
"Not if he can help it," he answered as he came close and leaned against
one of the tall stone posts, so that his grandly shaped head with its
ante-bellum squirls of hair was silhouetted against the white-starred
wistaria vine in a way that made me frantic for several buckets of
monochrome water-colors and a couple of brushes as big as those used for
white-washing. In about ten great splotches I could have done a
masterpiece of him that would have drawn artistic fits from the public
of gay Paris. I never see him that I don't long for a box of pastels or
get the ghost of the odor of oil-paint in my nose.
"The whole thing will be settled in a month," he continued, with a sigh
that had a hint of depression in it and an astral shape of Sallie
manifested itself hanging on his shoulder. However, I controlled myself
and listened to him. "There is to be a meeting of the directors of both
roads over in Bolivar in a few weeks and they are to come to some
understanding. The line across the river is unquestionably the cheapest
and best grade and there is no chance of getting them to run along our
bluff--unless we can show them some advantage in doing so, and I can't
see what that will be."
"What makes it of advantage for a railroad to run through any given
point in a rural community like this, Cousin James?" I asked, with a
glow of intellect mounting to my head, the like of which I hadn't felt
since I delivered my Junior thesis in Political Economy with Jane
looking on, consumed with pride.
"Towns that have good stock or grain districts around them with good
roads for hauling do what is called 'feeding' a railroad," he answered.
"Bolivar can feed both roads with the whole of the Harpeth Valley on
that side of the river. They'll get the roads, I'm thinking. Poor old
Glendale!"
"Isn't there anything to feed the monsters this side of the river?" I
demanded, indignant at the barrenness of the south side of the valley of
Old Harpeth.
"Very little unless it's the scenery along the bluff," he replied, with
the depression sounding still more clearly in his voice and his
shoulders drooped against the unsympathetic old stone post in a way that
sent a pang to my heart.
"Jamie, is all you've got tied up in the venture?" I asked softly, using
the name that a very small I had given him in a long ago when the world
was young and not full of problems.
"That's not the worst, Evelina," he answered in a voice that was
positively haggard. "But what belongs to the rest of the family is all
in the same leaky craft. Carruthers put Sallie's in himself, but I
invested the mites belonging to the others. Of course, as far as the
old folks are concerned, I can more than take care of them, and if
anything happens there's enough life insurance and to spare for them. I
don't feel exactly responsible for Sallie's situation, but I do feel the
responsibility of their helplessness. Sallie is not fitted to cope with
the world and she ought to be well provided for. I feel that more and
more every day. Her helplessness is very beautiful and tender, but in a
way tragic, don't you think?"
I wish I had dared tell him for the second time that day what I did
think on the subject but I denied myself such frankness.
Anyway, men are just stupid, faithful children--some of them faithful, I
mean.
I felt that if I stood there talking with the Crag any longer, I might
grow pedagogical and teach him a few things so I sent him home across
the road. I knew all six women would stay awake until they heard him
lock them in, come down to the lodge and lock his own door.
It is very unworthy of me to enjoy his playing a watch-dog of tradition
across the road to an emancipated woman like myself. The situation both
keeps me awake and puts me to sleep--and it is sweet, though I don't
know why.
God never made anything more wonderful than a good man,--even a stupid
one. Lights out!