ON THE WISTARIA
“YOU are sure you are feeling better?” insisted Innes.
Mrs. Parrish’s answer was careful. She _thought_ she was feeling
better! She had not had one of those bad nervous headaches for a week.
“It was a week come Sunday, no, it was more than that, it was of a
Saturday when the last bad spell came on. It was one of those hot days,
the second of the three, you remember; oh, but you were in Tucson. Did
you get to Los Angeles?” Her sigh was almost ecstatic. “Los Angeles is
nice. I haven’t been there for two years come September.”
“You surely will go out this summer?” The hectic color, the snapping
restlessness of her hostess’ black eyes disquieted the girl.
“I’ve not decided,” evaded Mrs. Parrish. “Oh, I’m all right! That last
medicine I got from Los Angeles helped me a lot. As I was saying, it
was that hot Saturday, and I had my baking to do. I can’t cook on
Sunday; Jim hates to see me working; I have to get at it when he’s
out of the way. I think the oil must have been bad; I don’t know what
Coulter was thinking of--I always insist on paying for the best; the
cheap sort will smell. Maybe, it wasn’t the oil, but by noon I could
hardly see. I sent back that can, and had them send out new wicks--it’s
a blue-flame stove I use--but of course that didn’t cure the headache.
And the cooking not done.”
Innes suggested that there were two cooks in that family! Everybody
knew that Jim Parrish had developed, through the exigency of desert
conditions and his wife’s headaches, into the most helpful of cooks.
Mrs. Parrish smiled with sad pride. “He’s had to do it too much. He’s
too good to me, Jim is.” She was wishing she had not been grinding
coffee in the lean-to when Miss Hardin came. The automobile was on
her before she had time to get away, and Miss Hardin speaking to her
through the screening. With the old purple flannelette waist on! She
had put it on that morning for “the last time.” She hoped Miss Hardin
would not notice the missing buttons. She stretched a torn and faded
apron of gingham that had once been brown across her knees. She did
not dare take it off. She had put on, too, her old blue alpaca skirt,
promising herself that she would use it for rags, tear it up before
she could ever yield to the temptation of wearing it again. She looked
like a slouch, she knew; and her hands fidgeted over the deficiencies
of her dress. The desert was excuse enough! The washing had to be
sent out of the valley, or it had to be done by one’s self, the water
boiled niggardly on a blue-flame stove. She had good things to wear,
but she could see down the road a long way, and visitors were scarce;
she could sight them a mile off, and get into clean clothes and be
sitting waiting in the tent parlor when the folk drove up. But the new
automobile of the company, seen for the first time, changed that. A
puff, a rumble, and there it was upon her, with Miss Hardin smiling at
her through the screen window!
“Washing or no washing, I’ll have to keep ready to see folks,” she
resolved. She tried to make the hand look casual that was holding the
rebellious waist together over her meager bust.
“It’s been cool since I got home,” cheered Innes.
Mrs. Parrish hoped that Miss Hardin could not see behind the rough
screen into the space that was called a bedroom. The bed was tossed
and tumbled; the night clothes lying around. And she had not washed
last week. “I’d be ashamed to have her see those clothes,” she thought.
“Take this chair, Miss Hardin,” she begged. “It’s more comfortable.”
Innes asked to be allowed to stay where she was, but she had to
surrender to the other’s nervous persistence.
Mrs. Parrish kept her hand over her gaping placket as she made the
change. “Yes, it’s been cool,” she answered, “but, oh, the wind! Ain’t
it terrible? They say as these tents won’t blow down, they are so well
put together. Do you believe it, Miss Hardin? That the ‘spider’ coming
down so low shelters it so that it couldn’t blow over?”
“Of course they won’t blow over!” chirped Innes Hardin.
Mrs. Parrish sighed. “That’s what Jim says. I wish I could believe
it. I’m not doubting you, or him, neither, Miss Hardin; I know you
mean what you say. But when the wind blows, and the tent creaks, and
strains, oh, I know then as it’s coming down; I can’t sleep those windy
nights. I just lie and plan which way I’ll jump when it goes.”
Innes tried to laugh at her, but the woman’s fear was too real.
“I’ve made myself learn to love the wind,” she urged. “Don’t you think
you could, too? Try to think of it as gay; as the air of the world on
some mad, reckless romp. It gets into your blood, then, and you want to
run, to dance. ‘Oh, the whole world is glad of the wind!’”
“The wind in Nebraska’s like that, but this! Why, it sounds like angry
devils to me, all shrieking to me to get out; that I don’t belong here.
I cover up my ears with the bedclothes, but it’s no use. I can hear
them just the same: ‘I’ll blow you away. I’ll blow you away.’ And then
the dust it brings; the dirt! There’s no use trying to be clean.” The
mouth muscles twitched unpleasantly.
“How is the neuralgia?” inquired Innes, helpless against this
determined pessimism.
“Better. That new medicine is helping that. I seemed to wear out the
good effects of those powders.”
“Have you begun to sleep out-of-doors yet?”
Mrs. Parrish shivered. “I wouldn’t sleep a wink. I’d be waiting for
Indians all night.”
“The Indians are harmless,” cried Innes. “They wouldn’t hurt any one.”
“They’re Indians!” persisted Mrs. Parrish. “I’ll never get over being
afraid of their dark faces. They’re heathens.”
Innes turned her eyes hopelessly away from the woman’s twitching face.
She looked out the wire-meshed door beyond the line of stakes which
stood for the proposed canal. She wondered when MacLean, Jr., would be
coming back for her.
“Is that a company rig?” she asked.
“I declare if it isn’t the Busby wagon!” exclaimed Mrs. Parrish,
jumping up and going to the door. Her dress threatened to leave her.
“She’s driving the roans. There’s somebody with her. It must be Mr.
Busby!”
The wretched room was then fully revealed to the guest. There was a
rent in the loud-patterned couch cover of green and red; the table
cover, a fringed imitation damask, was askew. Disorder leaped from
beneath the couch, from the boxes by the door, from the room beyond.
A graphophone perched uncertainly on the edge of the table. A pile of
_Youth’s Companions_ toppled uncertainly away over a pine box. There
were a few pictures from _Life_ tacked upon the board walls; a few were
pasted to the canvas top-walls. Innes segregated the two influences.
The graphophone, the file of _Youth’s Companions_, the pictures
from _Life_, these were the contributions of Jim Parrish toward the
elevating of their sordid life. The dirt, the disorder made up no
less a heroic subscription from the wife, who was too frail for the
sacrifice, too fond and too proud for a surrender.
“How can you see so far?” Innes asked. “I thought I could see farther
than most people, but this glare blinds me.”
“If you lived over here in Number Six, miles off from everybody, with
nobody to see, unless it’s the engineers or those black Indians, you’d
learn to know folks miles off. It’s--yes, it is Mr. Busby. He’s been
promising to bring her over here to sit with me the first time he
came to inspect the Wistaria. It’s to come right past here when it’s
finished. I’ll be seeing folks then. But I shouldn’t complain of not
having visitors. Two in one day!”
To Innes Hardin the excitement seemed all out of proportion to the
cause. Dark somber blotches were coming out on the woman’s skin. “Sit
down. It’s too warm for you by the door.”
“They might go past,” began Mrs. Parrish, when a smell of burning
food smote both their nostrils. “The rice and codfish’s burning,” she
exclaimed, and fled to the kitchen in the lean-to.
She was not back in time to greet her guest, whose vigorous entrance
struck at once the note of middle-aged, experienced authority. Innes
had met her but once before, but she recognized the species, the
woman who has the best recipe for bread, the most valuable hints for
housekeepers; handy in the sick room, indispensable at accouchements; a
kindly irresistible vulture.
Their talk was of the coming heat, the new canal; the difference it
would make to “Number Six”; the melon crop.
Mrs. Parrish came fluttering back, her brown apron changed for a clean
white one. A few pins sealed the gap in the unutterable purple waist.
She could not get another without passing through the sitting-room, and
she had a feeling of shame to emphasize her embarrassment before Miss
Hardin. Her cheeks were redder, her eyes more glittering.
She established Mrs. Busby on the wire-collapsible couch, with the
green and red flowered cover. The guest preferred a straight chair, but
Mrs. Parrish would not hear of it. She herself had a rocker. Perched on
one edge of it, she rocked back and forth violently, until her chair
kept grating against Innes’. The girl pitied the woman’s excitement,
wondering at it.
Mrs. Parrish was worked up to almost hysterical sociability. It was as
if a deep desert well had been tapped. Her rocker swaying interminably,
she told them of her life at home, of the farm they were just clearing
of the mortgage; of her love for Nebraska. She would never forget that
day when a friend, they wouldn’t know him, but it was Sam Kirkland,
anyway! when he came through on his way back East to get his family. He
told the wonderful story of the Imperial Valley--of the country below
sea-level, where even cactus would not grow. To their skeptical ears he
had unfolded a tale of rich soils, of desert redemption--of irrigation
“which made Jim Parrish just sit up, I can tell you.” The early crops,
the water scientifically applied, the hothouse heat, the millions in
sight. Was he, Sam Kirkland goin’ back? Well, sure. He was no man’s
fool. He knew opportunity when he saw it.
And then the pamphlets! When they began to come she fell to watching
her Jim uneasily. All their friends were in Nebraska; and her doctor.
“Let well enough alone,” says I. “How can I live without Doctor Pratt,
who knows all my symptoms? But Jim just would come!” She related
the weary minute details of their home-breaking; of their move from
Nebraska. Her impressions of California, deeply registered, were
passed on to her guests. Her horror of the valley. Her fear of the
Indians--her fear of the wind, of centipedes, and she knew that the
water was typhoidal--
“Typhoidal? Bosh!” interjected Maria Busby. She had something to say
about the water, but she could not get it in. The rocker grew more
agitated. “The very rocker which had been brought in on a wagon from
Old Beach! That was before the railroad came in; every one had to wagon
it from Old Beach. But that was before their time!
“I don’t sleep. That’s the trouble with me,” she jumped back to her
ailments, her nervous eyes passing from Mrs. Busby’s face to Innes
Hardin’s. “Jim calls me the desert watch-dog. I feel as I must keep an
ear and eye trained on the desert to see what it’s going to do next; or
the river; or the Indians.”
Mrs. Busby thought she saw a chance to talk of the water, and why it
was not typhoidal. But she was not swift enough. Innes was cheered to
hear the chug of the company automobile. Before another stream of talk
started on its irresistible flow, she made her escape. Through the
screen door, as she was borne away, she could see Mrs. Parrish, still
wildly rocking.