MRS. TOOMEY'S FRIENDSHIP IS TESTED
Momentarily flustered, flattered, and not a little curious, Mrs. Toomey
opened the door one afternoon and admitted Mrs. Abram Pantin, who
announced vivaciously that she had run in informally for a few minutes
and brought her shadow embroidery.
Since Mrs. Pantin never ran in informally anywhere, and she was wearing
the sunburst and rings which Mrs. Toomey had noted were in evidence when
she wished particularly to have her position appreciated, the hostess,
while expressing her pleasure, sought for the real purpose of the visit.
Ostensibly admiring Mrs. Pantin's new coiffure, she thought, bridling,
"Perhaps she's come to find out how we're managing since Mr. Pantin
refused us."
Yet Mrs. Toomey had to acknowledge that this did not seem like her
visitor, either, for ordinarily she was too self-centered to be very
curious about others.
As the afternoon passed and Mrs. Pantin twittered brightly on impersonal
subjects, introducing topics which evidenced clearly that her mentality
was of a higher order than that of the women about her, whose
conversation consisted chiefly of gossip and trivial happenings, Mrs.
Toomey came to think that she was mistaken and that this friendly visit
was a rare compliment.
While Mrs. Pantin's bejewelled and rather clawlike fingers flew in and
out of the embroidery hoop as she plied her needle, and while Mrs.
Toomey adroitly selected the stockings which needed the least darning
from her basket of mending, the latter came nearer really liking
Priscilla Pantin than she had since she had known her.
Mrs. Pantin exhibited a completed spray for Mrs. Toomey's approval and
commented upon the swiftness with which time sped in congenial company.
A delightful afternoon was especially appreciated in a community where
there were so few with whom one could really unbend and talk freely--to
all of which Mrs. Toomey agreed thoroughly, understanding, as she did,
what Mrs. Pantin meant exactly.
"Even in a small community one must keep up the social bars and preserve
the traditions of one's up-bringing, mustn't one?"
"One is apt to become lax, too democratic--it's the tendency of this
western country," Mrs. Toomey assented. She felt very exclusive and
elegant at the moment.
Mrs. Pantin's eyes had been upon her work, now she raised them and
looked at Mrs. Toomey squarely.
"Have you seen--a--Miss Prentice lately?"
Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of her heart flopping over. That
was it, then! She had the feeling of having been trapped--hopelessly
cornered. In a mental panic she answered:
"Not lately."
"Are you expecting to see much of her?"
There was something portentous in the sweetness with which Mrs. Pantin
asked the question.
It was a crisis--not only the test of her promised friendship and
loyalty to Kate but to her own character and courage. Was she strong
enough to meet it?
It was one of Mrs. Toomey's misfortunes to be not only self-analytical,
but honest. She had no hallucinations whatever regarding her own
weaknesses and shortcomings. As she called a spade a spade, so she knew
herself to be by instinct and early training a toady. Of the same type,
in appearance and characteristics, in this trait, lay the main
difference in the two women: while Mrs. Pantin with her better
intelligence was intensely selfish, Mrs. Toomey's dominant trait was a
moral cowardice that made her a natural sycophant.
No quaking soldier ever exerted more will power to go into battle than
did Mrs. Toomey to answer:
"I hope so."
Mrs. Pantin's bright blue eyes sharpened. "Ah-h, they must have money!"
she reflected. Aloud she said:
"Really?"
"Certainly."
This was mutiny. Mrs. Pantin lifted a sparse eyebrow--the one which the
application of a burnt match improved wonderfully.
"Do you think that's--wise?"
Mrs. Toomey had a notion that if she attempted to stand her legs would
behave like two sticks of wet macaroni, yet she questioned defiantly:
"Why not?"
Undoubtedly they had made a raise somewhere!
"Why--my dear--her reputation!"
"She doesn't know any more about that murder than we do," bluntly.
"I wasn't referring to the murder--her morals."
"I don't question them, either."
"You are very charitable, Delia. She lived alone with Mormon Joe, didn't
she?"
A frost seemed suddenly to have touched the perfect friendship between
these kindred spirits.
"I'm merely just," Mrs. Toomey retorted, though her heart was beating
furiously. "All we know is hearsay."
With the restraint and sweetness of one who knows her power, Mrs. Pantin
replied:
"I'm sure it's lovely of you to defend her."
"Not at all--I like her personally," Mrs. Toomey answered stoutly.
It was time to lay on the lash; Mrs. Pantin saw that clearly.
"Nevertheless, as a friend I wouldn't advise you to take her
up--to--er--hobnob with her." Mrs. Pantin did not like the word, but the
occasion required vigorous language.
"I'm the best judge of that, Prissy." Her hands were icy.
"When you came to town a stranger I tried to guide you in social
matters," Mrs. Pantin reminded her. "I told you whose call to return and
whose not to--you found my judgment good, didn't you?"
"You've been more than kind," Mrs. Toomey murmured miserably, and added,
"I'm so sorry for her."
"We all are that, Delia, but nevertheless I think you will do well to
follow my suggestion in this matter."
Mrs. Toomey recognized the veiled threat instantly. It conveyed to her
social ostracism--not being asked to serve on church committees--omitted
when invitations for teas were being issued--cold-shouldered out of the
Y.A.K. Society, which met monthly for purposes of mutual improvement--of
being blackballed, perhaps, when she would become a Maccabee! She
repressed a shudder; her work swam before her downcast eyes and she drew
up the darn on the stocking she was repairing until it looked like a
wen. The ordeal was worse than she had imagined it.
And how she hated Priscilla Pantin!
Always Mrs. Toomey had had a quaint conceit that if she listened
attentively she would be able to hear Priscilla's heart jingling in her
body--rattling like a bit of ice in a tin bucket. Now the woman's mean,
chaste little soul laid bare before her filled Delia Toomey with a dumb
fury.
Mrs. Pantin waited patiently for her answer, though the experience was a
new one. Usually she had only to reach for the whip when her satellites
mutinied; almost never was it necessary to crack it.
While Mrs. Toomey hesitated Mrs. Pantin folded her work--this, too, was
significant.
Mrs. Toomey replied, finally, in desperation:
"I'll think over what you've said, Priscilla. I appreciate your
intentions, thoroughly, believe me."
There was a cowed note in her voice which Mrs. Pantin detected. She
smiled faintly.
"I don't know when I've spent such a delightful afternoon," and kissed
her.
Mrs. Toomey curbed an impulse to bite her friend as she returned the
parting salute.
"And I've so enjoyed having you," she murmured.
* * * * *
Mrs. Toomey turned pale when she looked through the front window and saw
Kate, a few days after Mrs. Pantin's visit, dismount and tie her horse
to the cottonwood sapling, for the threat, which held for her all the
import of a Ku-Klux warning, had been hanging over her like the sword of
Damocles.
It had haunted her by day, and at night she could not sleep for thinking
of it, and yet she was no nearer reaching a decision than when the
struggle between her conscience and her cowardice had started.
Quite instinctively she glanced again to see if the neighbors were
looking. There were interested faces at several windows. Mrs. Toomey had
a sudden feeling of irritation, not with the sentinels doing picket duty
but with Kate for tying her horse in front so conspicuously. Mrs. Toomey
shrank from the staring eyes as though she had found herself walking
down the middle of the road in her underclothing.
The feeling vanished when Kate came up the walk slowly and she saw how
white and haggard the girl's face was.
Mrs. Toomey opened the door and asked her in nervously.
Kate looked at her wistfully as though she yearned for some display of
affection beyond the conventional greeting, but since Mrs. Toomey did
not offer to kiss her she sank into a chair with a suggestion of
weariness.
"I hope you're not busy--that I'm not bothering?"
"Oh, no--not at all."
"I couldn't help coming, somehow--I just couldn't go back without seeing
you. I wanted to see a friendly face--to hear a friendly voice." She
clasped her fingers tightly together: "Oh, you don't know how much you
mean to me! I feel so alone--adrift--and I long so for some one to lean
on, just for a little, until I get my bearings. It seems as though every
atom of courage and confidence had oozed out of me. I don't believe that
ever again in all my life I'll long for sympathy as I do this minute."
She spoke slowly with breaths between, as though the heaviness of her
heart made talking an effort.
"I presume you miss your--uncle." There was a constraint in Mrs.
Toomey's voice and manner which Kate was too engrossed and wretched to
notice.
She put her hand to her throat as though to lessen the ache there.
"I can't tell you how much. And remorse--it's like a knife turning,
turning--his eyes with the pain and astonishment in them when I struck
at him so viciously in my temper; they haunt me. It's terrible."
Mrs. Toomey fidgeted.
Kate went on as though she found relief in talking. Her voice sounded
thick, somehow, and lifeless with suffering.
"I have such a feeling of heaviness, of oppression"--she laid her hand
upon her heart--"I can't describe it. If I were superstitious I'd say it
was a premonition."
"Of what, for instance?" Mrs. Toomey looked frightened.
Kate shook her head.
"I don't know. The thought keeps coming that, bad as things have been,
there are worse ahead of me--unhappiness--more unhappiness--like a
preparation for something."
Distinctly impressed, Mrs. Toomey exclaimed inanely:
"Oh, my! Do you think so?" Was _she_ going to get "mixed up" in
something, she wondered.
"I have a dread of the future--a shrinking such as a blind person might
have from a danger he feels but cannot see. Your friendship is the only
bright spot in the blackness--it's a peak, with the sun shining on it!"
Kate's eyes filled with quick tears. They were swimming as she raised
them and looked at Mrs. Toomey.
"I'm glad you feel that way," Mrs. Toomey murmured.
Something in the tone arrested Kate's attention, an unconvincing,
insincere note in it. She fixed her eyes upon her face searchingly,
then she crossed the room swiftly and dropped upon her knees beside her.
Taking one of her thin hands between both of hers she said, pleadingly:
"You will be my friend, won't you? You won't go back on me, will you?"
She could scarcely have begged for her life with more earnestness.
"I am very fond of you," Mrs. Toomey evaded. She did not look at her.
Kate regarded her steadily. Laying down the hand she had taken she asked
quietly:
"Will you tell me something truthfully, Mrs. Toomey?"
Mrs. Toomey's mind, ratlike, scuttled hither and thither, wondering what
was coming.
"If I can," uneasily.
Kate laid her hand upon the older woman's shoulder and searched her
face:
"Is my friendship an embarrassment to you?"
Mrs. Toomey squirmed.
"Tell me! The truth! You owe that to me!" Kate cried fiercely, her grip
tightening on the woman's shoulder.
As Mrs. Toomey was a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her
first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself
by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate's voice and manner
were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of falsifying or
even evading further. Then, too, she had a wild panicky feeling that she
might as well tell the truth and have it over--though it was the last
thing in the world she had contemplated doing.
"It is--rather."
"Why?" Her voice sounded guttural.
Like a hypnotic subject Mrs. Toomey heard herself whimpering:
"People will talk about it--Mrs. Pantin has warned me--and I'll--I'll
get left out of everything, and--and when Jap gets into something it
will hurt us in our business."
Kate got up from her knees; involuntarily Mrs. Toomey did likewise.
The girl did not speak but folded her arms and looked at her "friend."
Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of shrivelling: as though she
were standing naked before the withering heat of a blast furnace.
In the silence that seemed interminable, Kate's eyes moved from her head
to her shabby shoes and back again, slowly, as though she wished to
impress her appearance upon her memory, to the minutest detail.
As by divination, Mrs. Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of
the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a
scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a
body--not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be
dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny,
without a womanly charm save the fragility that incited pity; to Kate
who had idealized her she now seemed a stranger.
Kate completed her scrutiny, and searched her mind for the word which
best expressed the result of it. Her lip curled unconsciously when she
found it. She said with deliberate scathing emphasis:
"You--Judas Iscariot!"
Then she walked out, feeling that the very earth had given way beneath
her.
Nothing was definite, nothing tangible or certain; there was not anybody
or anything in the world, apparently, that one could count on. She had
a feeling of nausea along with a curious calm that was like the calm of
desperation. Yet her mind was alert, active, and she understood Mrs.
Toomey with an uncanny clearness. She believed her when she had said
that she liked her, just as she knew that she had lied when she had said
that she was glad to see her. She understood now that Mrs. Toomey had
accepted the loan hoping to carry water on both shoulders, and finding
herself unable to do so, had eased herself of the burden which required
the least courage. The perspicacity of years of experience seemed to
come to Kate in a few minutes, so surely did she follow Mrs. Toomey's
motives and reasoning.
Was this human nature when one understood it? Was this what the world
was like if one were out in it? Wasn't there anybody sincere or kind or
disinterested? She asked herself these questions despairingly as she
untied her horse and swung slowly into the saddle.
"Poverty makes most people sordid, selfish, cowardly." She fancied she
heard Mormon Joe saying it, and herself expressing her disbelief in the
statement. "There are few persons strong enough to stand the gaff of
public opinion." She had contradicted him, she remembered.
She recalled--word for word, almost--a philosophical dissertation
apropos of Prouty as he sat on the wagon tongue one evening smoking his
pipe in the moonlight.
"People who live without change in a small community grow to attach an
exaggerated importance to the opinions of others. They come to live and
breathe with a view to what their neighbors think of them. When life
resolves itself into a struggle for a bare existence, it makes for
cowardice and selfishness. In time the strongest characters deteriorate
with inferior associates and only small interests to occupy their
minds. Wills weaken, standards lower unconsciously, ideals grow misty or
vanish. Youth, enthusiasm, hope, die together. Ambition turns to
bitterness or stolid resignation. Suspicion, meanness, cruelty, are the
natural offspring of small intelligences and narrow environment--and
they flourish in a town like Prouty."
"I don't believe it!" she had cried, shocked by his cynicism. He had
shrugged a shoulder and replied solemnly:
"I hope to God you'll never know how true it is, Katie. I hope no
combination of circumstances will ever place you at their mercy. It is
to make any such condition impossible that I am bending all my energies
to get on my feet again."
In this moment it seemed to Kate that his cynicism had the sweetness of
honey compared to her own bitterness.
Since the murder, curiosity had changed to unfriendliness, and
unfriendliness in some instances to actual hostility. Her slightest
advance was met by a barrier of coldness that froze her, and she quickly
had come to wince under each fresh evidence of enmity as from a blow in
the face. Thoughts of Mrs. Toomey's friendship and the belief that this
antagonism was only temporary and would disappear when the local
authorities had brought out the truth concerning the murder, had
sustained and comforted her. The last time she had questioned Lingle,
the deputy had told her with much elation in his manner that "the trail
was getting warmer."
Now, crushed, heartsick, staggering fairly under the brutal blow that
Mrs. Toomey's weak hand had dealt her, it was an ordeal to ride back to
Main Street and run the gauntlet.
All that was left to her was the hope that Lingle might soon clear her,
and she felt in her despair that she could not return to the ranch until
he had given her some reassurance. She checked her horse at the corner
and looked each way for him, but he was nowhere visible. Then, while she
hesitated she saw him emerge from a doorway where a steep stairway led
to the office of the mayor on the second floor of Prouty's only
two-story building.
Kate received the swift impression that the deputy was agitated, and a
closer view confirmed it. His face was pale, and the light that shone in
his eyes was unmistakably due to anger. He walked to the edge of the
sidewalk and stood there, too engrossed in thought to see Kate until she
had ridden close to him.
"Will you tell me what progress you're making? It's so hard, this
waiting and not knowing."
The deputy's eyes blazed anew when he recognized the girl, and under
stress of feeling he blurted out harshly:
"I'm called off, Miss Prentice!"
"Called off!" she gasped. "You mean--"
"Stopped!" fiercely. "I've been blocked at every turn by the authorities
and others, and now it's come straight from 'Tinhorn' himself--the
mayor."
Speechless, Kate's trembling hand sought the saddle horn and gripped it.
"But why?" finally.
Ineffable scorn was in the deputy's answer:
"It might hurt the town to have this murder stirred up and the story
sent broadcast--make prospective settlers hesitate to invest in such a
dangerous community--that's what was given me, along with my
instructions to quit. But another reason is that the man implicated
belongs to one of them secret orders."
"I can't believe it!" she cried piteously.
"I couldn't either, until I had to. But I've got sense enough to know
that I'm done, with nobody to back up my hand. After all, I'm only a
deputy," he said savagely. "I'm all broke up, I can tell you!"
"But aside from the way in which it leaves me it seems such a--such an
insult to Uncle Joe--as though nobody cared--as though--" she could not
finish.
"I know--I know," he nodded gravely.
"I'm going up to see the mayor--to beg him to keep on--to tell him what
it means to me!" she declared passionately.
"I wouldn't, Miss Prentice," Lingle advised.
"I must! It can't stop like this! He shall understand what it means to
me--this suspicion--this disgrace that is nearly killing me!"
He saw that she was determined, so he did not protest further, but his
reluctant gaze followed her as she disappeared up the narrow dirty
stairway.
The mayor attended to the official business of Prouty at a flat-top desk
in a large front room where he also wrote an occasional life insurance
policy. As the insurance business was a rise from a disreputable saloon
and gambling joint, so the saloon and gambling joint had been a step
upward from his former means of livelihood as a dance-hall tout in a
neighboring state.
With his election to an office which nobody else wanted, an incipient
ambition began to stir. Already his mind was busy with plans for
advancement, and each move that he made was with an eye to the future.
But one thing was certain, and it was that wherever his Star of Destiny
led him he would remain, underneath any veneer of polish which
experience might give him, the barroom bully, the mental and moral
tinhorn that Nature had made him.
Enveloped in a cloud of the malodorous smoke of a cheap cigar and
tilted on the hind legs of his chair with his heels hooked in the rungs,
he was resting his head against the wall where a row of smudges from his
oily black hair bore evidence to the fact that it was a favorite
position.
Hearing a woman's light step and catching a glimpse of a woman's skirt
as Kate came down the corridor, he removed his cigar and unhooked his
heels preparatory to rising.
She was in the doorway before he recognized her; where she paused during
a moment's look of mutual inquiry. Then, with all the deliberation of an
intentional insult he retilted his chair, returned his heels to the
rungs and replaced his cigar while he surveyed her with a quite
indescribable insolence.
"Tinhorn" had no special reason for the act and it served no purpose; it
was merely the instinctive act of the bully who strikes in wanton
cruelty at something or somebody he knows cannot retaliate. His Honor
found a satisfaction now in watching the blood rise flaming to the roots
of Kate's hair and it gave him a feeling of power knowing that she must
accept the humiliation or leave with her errand unstated, though he
guessed the nature of her visit.
It pleased him, however, to feign ignorance when, gripping the frame of
the doorway, she said in a voice that trembled noticeably in spite of
her obvious effort to steady it:
"I came to ask you if it's true--that you mean to stop work--on
the--case?"
He rolled the chewed end of his cigar between his yellow snags of teeth
and asked insolently:
"What case you talkin' about?"
"There's only one that interests me," she replied, with a touch of
dignity.
"What do you want, anyhow?"
Kate's labored breathing was audible.
"Is it so that you are not going to do any more about the murder of my
uncle?"
"Your uncle!" he snorted, necked the ashes from the end of his cigar,
rolled it back into place with his tongue and reiterated: "Your uncle!"
Then: "What's it to you? You got off, didn't you?"
She came into the room a step or two.
"It's everything to me or I wouldn't be here. Can't you understand what
it means to me--going through life with people thinking--"
"You got the money, didn't you?" he interrupted.
"What you throwing a bluff like this for, anyhow? I guess what people
think ain't worryin' you."
Kate's fingers clenched, but she said quietly:
"You haven't answered my question."
He resented the rebuke, but chiefly her self-control. The bully in him
wanted to see tears, to see her overawed and humble; she had too much
assurance for a social cipher. If she did not realize that fact yet, it
was for him to let her know it.
He brought the front legs of his chair down with a thump and thundered:
"Yes--it's closed, and it won't be opened, neither! You'd better not
start in tryin' to stir up somethin', or you'll be sorry--as it is,
you're a detriment to the community!"
He mistook her white-faced silence, and added with less violence:
"Why don't you fade away, anyhow--sell out and get into something in
your line in some good town or city?"
She was shivering as with a chill as she walked closer and asked in a
hoarse whisper:
"What would you suggest--exactly?"
Ah, this was more like it! There was something even beneficent in his
relaxed features as he answered:
"You could open a first-class place with your stake. It's quick and big
money, if you can get the right kind of a stand-in with the police. No
cheap joint, but a high-toned dance hall in some burg where you can get
a liquor license. That's my advice to you."
"It's what I thought you meant, but I wanted to be sure of it!" Her
voice came between her teeth, guttural, and the face into which his
startled eyes looked was the face of Jezebel of the Sand Coulee. "I'd
kill you if I had anything to do it with, but, so help me God, you
shan't say that to me and get away with it!"
The girl struck him full across the face with such force that he
recoiled under it, while the prints of her fingers stood out like scars
on his sallow cheek for a full minute. She was gone before he recovered,
but curses followed her as she ran panting in her blind rage down the
narrow stairway.
Kate felt as though liquid fire were racing through her veins, like some
one rushing from a house with his clothes on fire, as she tore open the
knot of the bridle reins and swung into the saddle. She did not need to
hear the words to know that the guffaw which reached her from a group on
the sidewalk was inspired by some coarse witticism concerning her.
There was not a single friendly pair of eyes, or one pair that was even
neutral, among the many that looked at her and after her as she gave her
horse its head and let it clatter at a gallop that was all but a run
down the main street and over the road that led out of Prouty.
It was a crisis, and intuitively she recognized it--one of those
emotional climaxes that sear and burn and leave their scars forever.
The powerful horse bounded up the steep grade without slackening, but at
the top she checked it, and from the edge of the bench stood looking
down upon the crude town sprawling on the flat beneath her. It
represented one antagonistic personality to her, and as such she
addressed it aloud, with deliberately chosen words, as one throwing down
the gauntlet to an enemy.
"You've hurt me! You've never done anything else but hurt me, and I've
forgiven and forgotten and tried to make myself believe you didn't mean
it. Now I know better.
"You still have it in your power to hurt me, to anger me, sometimes to
defeat me. I am one and you are many, but you can't crush me, you can't
break my heart or spirit; you can't keep me down! I'll succeed! I may be
years in doing it, but I'll win out over you. I'll be remembered when
you're rotten in your graves, and if I can live long enough I'll pay
back every blow you've ever given me, one by one, and collectively--no
matter what it costs me!"