THE PERCEPTIONS OF MINGA
The "explosive dust" of the Trout County court-room had not yet
subsided. Two young heads had not yet bowed before the final judgments
of the law. After a week of mysterious communings, sudden hidings of
and exchanges of letters, a series of hidden glances and specially
planned conferences, Dunstan and Minga announced at the breakfast table
one morning that they would take the green car and be gone all day.
They carefully did not state where they were going and no one dreamed
the dramatic character of their plans.
The rest of the family received the news without comment, the Judge
merely remarking:
"Wash the car before you use it, and pay for your own gas."
Dunstan received these orders with benevolent understanding. "Well
said," he approved his father impudently; with lifted eyebrows he
grimaced at Sard.
"We miss our good friend Colter," he murmured. "There was a fine
literary washer of cars. I mind me of the splendid hexameters that
rolled from the amnesian lips while he applied himself to the
mud-guards." The dancing eyes questioned his sister's face. The
Judge's watchful look went also to this face, but there was no book for
the world to read.
At whatever cost to her own hunger for sympathy the girl, sitting at
the coffee urn, in Miss Aurelia's temporary absence, had the absorbed
air of the knight who prays beside armor. For Sard was devising
pathetic, youthful armors of self-control and wisdom. Her world could
not share her belief nor be with her in her ardent things, therefore
she would keep these ardent things bright and enshrined in her own
lonely heart.
Colter had said, "I will come back." Sard, her being thrilling at the
words, had dared to whisper, "Promise--promise!" She was so ashamed, so
thankful for that daring now! Want him? The silent girl there dared not
tell herself how she wanted him, could not put even into secret words
the tremulous ecstasy of this wanting. Outside of her, curious faces
like Dunstan's and Minga's and Miss Aurelia's and the Judge's looked at
her own absorbed face and disapproved or were tolerant. It was nothing.
Sard saw them as a person standing in a soft firelit, flower-bright
room sees faces passing in profile on a cold street.
Dunstan's comment was made _sotto voce_, from the Arabian nights:
"_'Fish, Fish, art thou in thy duty?' The fishes raised their heads
and said, 'If you reckon, we reckon--'_" The youth looked around the
breakfast table amiably as if he expected to be answered in kind.
Receiving no like sallies he pushed his chair and sauntered forth,
followed in a few discreet seconds by Minga. As the two fussed over
the car-washing, low voices discussed beside their own plan the whole
problem of the Man on the Place.
"It's the real thing for Con Sordino, I guess," Dunstan sighed. "Gosh,
suppose the duffer is a confidence man or a bigamist? The papers have
such every day; their kind always gets amnesia when convenient,"
the boy sighed; "sort of rotten to have your own sister go nuts on
a Wandering Willy. I wonder." The lad turning on the hose, softly
whistled. Minga giggled.
"It's so funny," she declared, "as if Sard sort of thought Colter would
turn to a prince if you only waved the right wand."
"No, it's not that; she really saw a prince or something like that
in him," the brother declared. "Sard's like that when she looks at
anybody, Minga; she doesn't see an ordinary flapper, like you; she sees
a future stateswoman, a fearless fighter for the good, the true, the
pure, the thing that might be." Dunstan was only half flippant.
"My goodness!" Minga was awed. "But say, about Colter. I went up to
that room after he left, the room over the garage, and will you believe
it, I found Sard there. She was sitting queer and still and in her hand
she had a book she'd lent him. Well, my word," said Minga violently,
"it was the awfulest old scientific flubdub, first causes, amœbas
and protoplasms, all those out-of-date things."
"Yep, all the hogwash; they still print it," said Dunstan. "That was
the old fellow's line, always chewing at those bones the old guy was;
self-made-man-stuff, y' know."
The girl groaned. "Don't I hate it! We had it at college, so of course
I'm through it all. You going to cram your two last years with that
sawdust?" inquired Minga.
The washer of automobiles ceased his sponging of the long green body.
Dunstan stood, brown-shirted sleeves rolled up, young head hot and
tumbled, eye bright and discriminating.
"No, Grandma," he turned promptly, "I am not. I cram on facts. See? I
cut out all the frills and monkey and snail lore, and I root around
just enough Latin and mathematics to look good to the old-timers. All I
want is a diploma. See, so's I can walk into any chap's office and call
him Bill and look him in his Pie Rooky Beta Kipper eye and say, 'Now
then, my young Arabian Nights Oil Pasha, I may look like the One-eyed
Calendar, but I've got the same world-series, all-American learning
you've got, and I don't propose to be kicked out of this office till I
get what I came for, see?' That," said Dunstan mopping his brow, "is my
idea of education."
Minga nodded. "You sure do need an education in business," the girl
agreed thoughtfully. "I know the Mede keeps saying that if he had
his choice he'd give up his income and keep his brains, but not me,"
said serious Minga. "What use would my brains be to me if I hadn't an
income?"
"You gotter have brains all right," said Dunstan; "and then you've
gotter forget you got 'em or that anybody else has 'em. Look at the
after-dinner speeches, you know that rot, and the political ones, all
done by famous men; don't they prove that brains are only a side-show?
You just have 'em, but when you get there you don't use 'em. That's the
idea."
The bobbed head leaning seriously by the side of the cropped one to
swab the runners considered seriously these things.
Finally Minga announced, "Say, while I'm speaking of deep things and
all, I'm going home next week. After we snitch Terry from jail I'm
done!"
Dunstan looked at her sagely. He stood up, stretched, and eyed his
friend with increasing disapproval. "Pshaw, that's a new kind of slush;
what have you got, indigestion? Go home, nothing. Why, after the Terry
rescue----"
Minga rubbed solemnly on the running-board; her friend looked alarmed.
"You have not got to go home! What do the Mede and Persian care as
long as you're where they can send you day-letters and telephones. No,
ma'am, you've got to stay here in this house of the seven sleepers and
nobody-to-wash-cars, you've got to stay here and sass the governor and
shock Aunt Reely and keep Sard from eloping with the iceman and once in
a while, for deviltry, hold my hand. That's what you've got to do."
The boyish faun-like face smiled belligerently, but Dunstan's eyes had
subtle anxiety. "You haven't really to go?" he inquired. "Aw come on,
can't you start a new sweater and say you can't go home till you've
finished it? I've seen many a girl work that dodge," remarked Dunstan.
"On account of this being the only place you can match the wool," he
nodded acutely.
Minga stood pulling down her belt. She gave the bobbed head a resolute
shake. "I'm going," she said. She stood there, a curious little picture
of untried resolution. "I don't know exactly what's come over me," the
girl confessed. "I've nothing against you, Dunce; you've been a real
sweet idiot, and I'm going to see us through the Terry rescue, but
after the Terry rescue," said Minga in a solemn tone, "home I've got
to go." She hesitated a moment adding, "Anyway, after that, you see,
Judgie will hate me and turn me out and Aunt Reely will be nervous and
Sard will be queer and gloomy and you----"
"Anyway I'll be annoying," said Dunstan obstinately, "the way I've been
right along."
There was a long silence for this talkative pair. At last:
"Anyway," said Minga, "I sort of see things different. I can't seem
to want to visit around as much as I used. I'm going home to be a
daughter, that sort of thing."
"Oh, deliver us!" groaned Dunstan. "Oh my soul! Say, what's the matter,
girl, didn't your last allowance come? Nobody's a daughter nowadays; it
isn't done. Say, Minga, this is awful! Anyway--don't go!"
Minga stood first on one foot, then on the other. In her mind, a
little dazed and haunted by recent events, still rang Shipman's summing
up of her after their various encounters, and the final night at the
dance. The lawyer had held the two tantalizing hands very tightly and
murmured, "You are a very dear little thing, a very dear little thing."
He had said it with a sort of tortured groan. Minga was beginning
to realize with a good deal of slow pain how a man might resolutely
hold a girl like her away from himself and herself, from something to
which, the girl was clever enough to know, she had half unconsciously
tried to lure him. The sentence with its tender repudiation of her had
penetrated to something honest in her heart. Then had come the morning
outside the court-house when Shipman had defined life to them. The
older man's power, his penetrating analysis, had somehow reached to
the soul that lay dormant, the little butterfly character had sleepily
stirred, the little blue egg had broken, and Minga, a scared soul,
looked forth upon a universe that had a spiritual endlessness. Some new
dim sense of men came to her, not as strong creatures that must be made
silly slaves to women or played upon by light motives, but as loyal
brothers who had enormous power of strength or suffering through women.
Watts Shipman's world of standards and honor stood out to her like a
strange austere country of mountains and looming towers as to which she
was supremely curious, but into which her feet hardly knew how to tread.
Minga looked earnestly at Dunstan's back. "You see," she worked this
out as she had once worked it out with Sard, "you see, Dunce, whether
we like it or not, we've got to get busy, us young ones. It's queer,"
said little Minga with an omniscience not to be despised, "but though
the grown-ups try all they can to discourage us when we do take hold,
they know as well as we do that we've got to take hold. We," said
Minga, with awed prophecy, "our kind, the Bunches, don't you know,
all over the world. The French Bunch, like us, the Italian Bunch, the
English Bunch, the flappers of the world. Our Bunches have got to
run the world; it's awful, it's queer, but," the little bobbed head
nodding violently, "it's true; so we ought to be preparing. The fathers
and mothers and aunts and uncles and things hate to have us take
hold before they tell us what to do. Though you can see," said Minga
solemnly, "that they don't half of them know what to do themselves.
So we have _got_ to take hold." The bobbed maiden was sober to a
terrifying degree. Dunstan stared at the little mouth that summed up,
"And I suppose for this reason we ought to sort of brace up and begin
to take notice. Now, for instance," said Minga with a sudden virtuous
decision, "I've made up my mind that love is divine; I'm not going to
fool any more. Love is divine," announced Minga.
"Wow!" said Dunstan, "don't hit me there again, as the lady said."
"Yes, it is," returned his car-washing companion determinedly.
"I--I--I've grown sick of these petting parties and all this silly
stuff. When you really don't care you--you just don't do it, so I'm
going to cut out these fake engagements just to wear different kinds
of rings--I--I--if love is really divine," said Minga, she looked half
timidly off to the mountain where the organ builder's house stood,
"why, those petting parties are kind of common; do you get me?"
"Do I get you?" ejaculated Dunstan. "Say," he straightened up, "if you
knew what I knew. Say, I could tell you things, Minga."
Minga, her resolutions almost overcoming her, sat down on an upturned
box. "I really feel different," she said solemnly. "After that night
Tawny Troop bawled me out, and--and something else happened, well,
I got a sort of different feeling. Now, for instance," said Minga,
"old people; I don't want to make fun of them any more. Isn't that
queer? I want to sort of study 'em and see what they mean. Imagine! I
really want," went on Minga in an awed voice, "to hang around and talk
seriously to Judgie, and--and queer unnatural things like that. I'm
going to be a daughter and sort of get interested; isn't it awful?"
Dunstan walked lovingly around his car, trying all its functions, and
cast an appreciative eye on his comrade. "Good stuff," he commended.
"The old birds must have some sense packed away somewhere. The
old-timers like to beat the air and say things, but they ain't so low
in the grave but what they see a few facts too.
"Well," the youth stood up straight, hands in pockets, whistling
softly, "the 'Green Bottle' is herself again, cleaned, curried and
coddled. Got that letter? I'll go in and change my duds, and then I
guess we're ready. What? You got Terry's letter all right?"
Minga produced the letter; with one eye on the distant house, the two
rereading it together, enjoying the sense of secrecy, half giggling at
the queer spelling and altogether excited over their plan. The black
round script ran thus:
"_The gang stops work at five. The guards goes first to git the truck
ready to take us bak to the pen! If you come threw about that time,
I will beat it to your car and take the chance. Go slow till I jump;
if I catch on, go like hell; go like hell anyways. There is a curve
ahead to the right, but that is what you want, as the guards got
motorcycles. So no more at present. Give the duck that brings this
fifty cents and oblige_
"YOU KNOW WHO."
As Minga read, the two young faces suffused with a thrilled fire; weeks
ago at the trial Minga and Dunce had decided to abduct Terry. The legal
aspects of the thing hardly occurred to them. This sort of thing was
done in the movies successfully, why not in actual life? Their plan was
to snatch the boy from the road-building gang sent out by the state's
prison to the stone crusher on the Western Shore where road-making was
in progress. Terry was then to be conveyed in their automobile to the
deserted Stone Oven of Revolutionary fame near Bear Mountain. Here,
where a little stream wandered through the bracken, he could be driven
to every day and supplied with food until it should be safe to convey
him to a night train and ship him to the West. Minga and Dunce had
worked out the thing with dime novel detail, with dramatic appreciation
of its flavor and dash, until the project ceased to have its original
motive of saving Terry and gradually became their own twentieth century
private automobile adventure. They had a charmed sense of thrill and
a pleasant feeling of outwitting such staid and sober folk as Watts
Shipman. It was not at all uncharacteristic of young persons, not at
all uncharacteristic of the time, not at all uncharacteristic of the
laughable enigma of human nature that at the very moment that the two
were starting out to do something entirely discreditable, inevitably
wrong, that they should be resolving with all the power and imagination
of their young souls to adjust themselves better to the world they
lived in. If it occurred to Minga and Dunce that as a first step in
their new resolutions the Terry abduction was hardly judicious, they
put the idea aside; each felt committed to the thing; neither knew how
to withdraw.
It was the early July that is still reminiscently June. Orioles
and tanagers were still flashing through the Hudson River green,
rose-breasted grosbeaks and indigo birds had only just moved on to
other mysterious leafage. The fields and hills were dusted with silver
daisies and amid slopes of feathery grass coreopsis began to toss
golden crowns. Out on the country roads the deep woods began to show,
through their mystical vistas, tall towered carillons of speckled lily
bells, and mountain laurel tossed pink shells on clumps of foam-lit
dark. The car whirled along rocky bits of road where tall plantains,
and milkweed and fireweed, things of orange and rose and scarlet plume
burned along the ditches of water-worn gravel, or by the lichened gray
of ranging stone walls. It all spelled myriad fecundities, ripe gay
plant life, a thousand dusts and washes of seed, a thousand marchers
of hidden atoms, a thousand caravans and progression of strange
mysterious pollen. The rich Chord of Summer was resolving throughout
the countryside, played by a hand that goes lovingly back each year to
the old hymn of begetting, and birth, and death! The old, old hymn of
creation that sings us all in and out of being.
A gypsy camp on a rocky hillside back of the road showed dingy tents,
and the tethered horses and empty hooded wagons stood in a sea of
wild roses and buttercups. The gypsies, rather modern, with a decided
tendency to fireless cookers and hair-nets and graphophones, were brown
and smiling in indolent gypsy leisure. Minga stared upon them with awe;
she dimly got their Pagan raison d'être, their rising to sunrise, their
sleeping in cold stars and dew; the girl looked delightedly upon the
strong bodies of little, half-naked children, and though daintily clad
herself, she got a sense of the primal poetry and rags of the vagabond
women who looked not too respectfully out to the showy car.
"Pretty lady, have your fortune told," called out one old hag. The
gleaming lawless faces said impertinent lawless things, the teeth
glittered, and the eyes were saucy. Minga was for halting the car and
climbing down for this experience, but her companion restrained her.
"Ah, don't!" begged Dunstan disgustedly. "Say, they're fresh. Don't
monkey with 'em, they have diseases, they're always horribly dirty.
Don't go near them," shuddered the boy; "they make me crawl, somehow."
The old crone sitting by a steaming kettle swung on a pole looked out
to them leeringly. That she could have heard their comments seemed
incredible to the two in the automobile, but the black gaze seemed to
read their very souls.
"Ah--Mates," the old woman called out teasingly, meaningly, with a
curious warning.
"Mates," then as the impudent curious eyes surveyed them, this woman
made a strange gesture, pagan, clairvoyant and authoritative. "Mates,"
she screamed after them, "there's a dead body between ye; it joins ye,
Mates, Mates."
This was too much for Miss Gerould. She of the pampered and sheltered
life. "Oh, my goodness," the girl gasped. The face under the pretty
hat paled. Minga, who had never before come up against the raw things
of life, grew suddenly faint. The face of his friend peered up into
Dunstan's. "Say, would you call that a curse?" inquired Minga. "It--it
sounded awful, Dunce; I believe it was a curse. It sort of scares me."
The boy laughed. He changed gears. "These people are awful queer,"
he admitted; "they do know things; they're good to keep away from, I
think."
Minga shivered. "But could she make up such wild things? 'a dead body
between ye, joining ye,' how do they know? They can't know, can they?"
Dunstan shook his head solemnly and the two young heads for a time
cast nervous glances behind them, for it was a strange happening for a
summer day; it would seem to cast a curious shadow on their adventure.
The boy driver of the "Green Bottle" was thoughtful for a long time
before he said ruminatingly, slowly, to his companion, "Just the same,
they do know things. Minga, if we slept outdoors always and found our
roads by the stars and noticed the way bushes grew, and tides, and
the moon, and stayed with just animals and just took life as it is,
you know, without the elevators and cosmetics and electric lights
and hotels and the things that keep us away from life, just took it
straight like a big drink of something powerful, why, wouldn't we
be like that? Wouldn't we look directly at big things and see them
straight, not wrapped up in tissue paper?"
Dunstan swept his free hand to the fields flowing by them. "Colter,
well, Colter told me an awful lot of funny things about life and the
great laws under it. Just being good, for instance, you have no idea,
Minga, the great natural laws that lie under just being good." Dunstan
paused. "There were a lot of old guys, priests and mystics and things
that knew these laws, but we get lost from them, getting rich and all.
The old kind of science got ahead of them and didn't believe them, but
science, nowadays, Colter says----"
Dunstan after a few moments' reflection looked around at his
companion. "Did you hear the old tent-toad call us 'Mates'?" he asked
soberly, "just 'Mates'--I think she saw something."
Minga was silent.
"Maybe we are mates," said the boy soberly; "maybe we are, Minga."
The girl at his side bit her lip and her foot tapped impatiently on
the floor. "Now," said Minga, "now I am not going to be bothered with
that stuff." Then, the vivid color flying into her face, "Dunce, oh, I
will not have it; such nonsense, from a wrinkled old gypsy." Minga was
silent a moment before she added, "I should think you'd want to forget
what she said, 'a dead body between us, uniting us,' all that."
But Dunstan was looking far ahead along the vista of the leafy road. He
said no more, only as Minga, sitting back, tried to start up some of
their old rallying songs and sallies the boy kept repeating dreamily,
"She called us mates and it seems queer, for somehow I've always
thought--you heard? She called us 'Mates,' Minga."
Perhaps it was the gypsy's prophecy making them conscious, perhaps
it was the green world surrounding them like a round egg surrounding
primal man and woman. But they grew silent and awed as though they
walked toward a large surcharged destiny, so as they halted the car
and took out their lunch basket they felt constrained; the rescue
of Terence O'Brien would not take place until nearly five o'clock;
they must pass the time alone together in this cathedral solemnity of
summer. They tried not to look at each other for fear they should
see in each other's eyes things that would snatch away their control.
They stood a little away from each other, troubled, questioning, half
afraid, yet curious.