From that day there began to be more than necessity to her work, and more
than work to carry her out of herself.
In the present of commercial femininity we have two types--one, the
business man; the other, an individual without gender, impersonal, capable.
She never does anything ill-bred, certainly, but one no more thinks of
specifying that she is a lady than that her hair is black; it isn't the
point.
Mrs. Osbourne, however, was always first of all a lady. With her, men kept
their hats off and their coats on, and had an inclination to soften
business with bows, and bargains with figures of speech. She was at once so
patrician and so gracious that women felt it a kind of social function to
deal with her. The drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection was
only gently plaintive. The pretty way was winning, and rather pathetic in
her position; it drifted about her an aroma of story, and that had its own
appeal. The unvarying black of dress and bonnet, with touches of white at
neck and wrist, was refined, and made her rosy plumpness look sweeter. It
was all an uninventoried part of her stock in trade. And she came to take
the same satisfaction in returns in success and cash that she had taken as
a girl in results in valentines and cotillion favors.
Mrs. Osbourne had all the traditions of her class and generation. She let
her distaste of the situation be known. If it had been possible, she would
have concealed it like a scandal. As it was, with very proud apology, she
made the necessity of her case understood: her object was bread and butter,
not any of these new Woman's Rights--unwomanly, bourgeoise!
Nevertheless, it was not only true that it suited her to be doing something
with some point and result, but that the life of action and influence among
people suited her. The work came to interest her for itself as well as for
its object; that interest was a factor in her success; and the success
again both stimulated and further equipped her.
As she got into training and over the first sore muscles of mind and body,
work began to strengthen her. The nerves and small ailments grew secondary,
were overlooked, actually lessened. There need be nothing esoteric in
saying that a vital interest in life is as essential to health as to
happiness. One need consider only the practical and physical effects of
interest and self-forgetfulness, serenity and self-resource.
Sometimes her increasing trade took her away for two or three days, as far
as Louisville or Cincinnati. The thought of Guy followed her, a sweet pain.
She found herself hurrying back to her bright prisoner, and because of both
conditions the marvel of that brightness grew on her, together with certain
embarrassed comparisons. More than anything else, she admired his strength
where she had been weak.
His brightness seemed to her the most pathetic thing about him; it was so
sorry. It was indeed the epitome of his tragedy. To be as unobtrusive as
possible, and, when necessarily in evidence, as pleasant as possible, was
the role he had assigned himself. It was the one thing he could do, the
only thing he could do for her.
Doubtless the very controlling of the nervousness helped it. Moreover, his
revolting organization was gradually adapting itself somewhat to the new
conditions. Sensitive and uncertain tendrils of vitality began to creep out
from the roots of a blighted vigor.
Bessie, increasingly perceptive, began to suspect that what she saw was the
brightness after the storm. She wondered what his long solitary hours were
like when she was away. What must they be, with him helpless, disappointed,
lonely, liable to maddening attacks of nerves? But he assured her that he
was perfectly comfortable; Mammy Dinah was faithful and competent; and he
was really making headway with the German and French that he had taken up
because he could put them down as need was, and because--they might come
in, in some way, some time. “In heaven?” Bessie wondered secretly, but,
enlightened by her own experience, saw the advantage of his being
entertained.
“You're too much alone,” she said, feeling for the trouble. “And so am I,”
she added, thoughtfully. She should have noticed his eyes at that last. He
had developed a sort of controlled voracity for endearment, but he never
asked for it. In the old days he had taken his own masterfully, with no
doubts. Now he waited. He did not starve. She cajoled him and coaxed his
appetite and patted the pillows, and made pretty, laughing eyes at him and
fate quite in her habitual manner. Her touch and tone of affection had
never been so free. But in that very fact he found another sting.
“The better I do on the road, the more they keep me out,” she was saying.
“We can't go on this way. I've been thinking lately--Could you bear to go
North, Guy, and to live in a city, among strangers? Perhaps at headquarters
there might be an opening for me that would let me settle down.”
“What! Cincinnati! Is there any such chance?”
“You'd _like_ it? Why on earth--Are you so bored here?”
“Oh, Bibi, have you never thought of it? In a city there'd be some chance
of something I could do!”
“You? Oh, Guy!” After she had accepted the care of him, and that so
pleasantly, he wasn't satisfied! “Is there anything you lack here?” She was
hurt.
It was replaying the old parts reversed. Once _he_ had grieved that he
could not give her enough to content her.
“A--h--” He turned his head away and flung an arm up over his eyes.
She understood only that he was suffering. “But, Guy, there's nothing you
could do, possibly. It's not to be expected. Have I complained?” She fell
back on the kindly imbecility of the nurse. “Now you're not to worry about
that, at least until you're better--”
“Better?” He forgot the lines in which he had schooled himself. The man
overrode the amateur actor. “That's not the thing to hope for. Why couldn't
it have killed me--that first fall?” (“My dear, my dear!” she stammered.)
“There would have been some satisfaction in getting out of the way, and
that in decent fashion; like a charge of powder, not like a rubbish-heap. I
can't accept it of you, Bibi. I'm enraged for you. I can't be grateful. I'm
ashamed.”
She understood now.
What could she say? A dozen things, and she did; things about as satisfying
as theology at the grave. He did not answer nor respond. When he relaxed at
last it was simply to her arms around him, his head on her bosom, her
wordless notes of tenderness and consolation.
He was suffering, and chiefly for her, and what a fighter he was! Who but
he would ever have thought of _his_ doing anything?
So there might be cases in which it was really more helpful and generous
not to do things for people, but to let them do for themselves. She
couldn't fancy his doing enough to amount to anything. He oughtn't to! But
if it would make him any happier he should have his make-believe--yes, and
without knowing it was make-believe. Doing things that were of no value to
any one was so disheartening. She knew. Like perfunctory exercise for your
health.
Her own business in Cincinnati proved so brief as to take her breath. His
was more difficult. The plough was still mightier than either sword or pen.
Few markets were open to an inactive man whose hours must be short and
irregular, and whose chief qualifications seemed to be a valiant spirit and
a store of reminiscences, in a time when reminiscences were as easy to get
as advice.
She was delayed in her return, growing more and more anxious at the thought
of his anxiety. When she boarded the south-bound train, she went down the
aisle, looking for a seat, with her short steps hurried as if it would get
her home sooner.
Mrs. Grey leaned over and motioned her, and as she sat down, looked
critically at the bright eyes and pink cheeks. “You certainly do look well
nowadays, Bessie.”
Doubtless Bessie's color was partly excitement and rush.
“Oh, I'm well,” absently.
“Funny kind of dyspepsia, wasn't it, to be cured by eating around, the way
you have to do.”
“Oh, dyspepsia!” The nettles brought back her attention. People needn't
belittle her troubles! “I still have that dyspepsia. But if you had to be
as busy as I, Mrs. Grey, you'd know that there are times when nothing but
sudden death can interfere.” Even Mrs. Grey's prickings, however, were
washed over to-day by Balm of Gilead. “Still, it has come to something. The
company has given me Cincinnati for my territory.”
“Really?” Not that Mrs. Grey doubted her veracity. “Well, you always did
succeed at anything you put your hand to. It has been the most surprising
thing! You know, I tell everybody, Bessie, that you deserve all the credit
in the world for the way you have taken hold.” Bessie stiffened; neither
need they sympathize too much! “A girl brought up as you were, who always
had the best of everything.” _The best of everything!_ The familiar phrase
was like a bell, sending wave after wave of memory singing through Bessie's
mind. “And still I never saw any one to whom the wind has been so tempered
as to you: when you were sick you could afford it, and now that it's
inconvenient--Things always did seem to work smoother with you, and come
out better, than with any of the rest of us.”
Bessie sat looking at her, and, in the speech, saw her own petulance of a
moment before--any number of her own speeches, in fact, inverted, as things
are in a glass. Indeed, Mrs. Grey had held up a reflector. Bessie had met
herself. And she saw herself, as in a mirror-maze, from all angles, down
diminishing perspectives, from the woman she was to the girl she had been.
She had been quite unconscious of the slow transformation in her habits of
thought. It is so in life. One toils up the thickly wooded hillside, intent
only on the footing, and comes suddenly on a high clearing, overlooking
valley and path, defining a new horizon.
“I never had the best of everything, Mrs. Grey,” she said. “Nobody has.
Every life and every situation in life has its bad conditions--and its good
ones. I haven't had any more happiness--nor trouble than most people. It
strikes me things are pretty equally divided. We only think they aren't
when we don't know all about it. We see the surface of other people's
lives, not their private drawbacks or compensations. There are always both.
But other people's troubles are so much easier to bear than our own, their
good luck so much less deserved and qualified! With all I had as a girl I
didn't have contentment. And now, with all I lack, I don't know any one
with whom I'd change places.”
What was the use with Mrs. Grey?
But alone, the thought kept widening ring after ring: How little choice
there was of conditions in life; how fortune tends to seek its level; how
one man has the meat and another the appetite; and another, without either,
can find in the fact the flavor of a joke or chew the cud of reflection
over it. Of the three, Bessie thought she would rather be the one with the
disposition. But that could be cultivated. Look at hers! Circumstances had
started it in a sort of aside, but she would take the hint.
The cure for dissatisfaction was to recognize one's balance of good.
Guy was watching for her at the window. She was half conscious that he
looked unusually haggard, but there were so many other thoughts at sight of
him that they washed over the first.
She swung her reticule. “It's all right!” and she ran up the walk, a most
feminine swirl of progress. She got to him breathless. “I've found a house
that will give you its German correspondence to translate and write, and it
won't be so much but that you can do it as you're able, within reason. Now,
sir!”
For a minute it seemed as if Guy's whole body was alive. The weak and
shaken invalid still had something of unconquerable boyishness in the lift
of his head and the light of his eyes. “Good! That will do for a start.”
The old spirit, to which hers always answered. If she didn't believe he
would actually do something worth while in the end! Then promptly, of old
habit, he thought of her. “Bibi! You took your time for that.”
“Not all of it, in good sooth, fair lord.” She spread out her skirts,
lady-come-to-see fashion, and strutted across the room. “Mrs. Osbourne has
a new 'job' and a 'raise.'” (Incidentally Mrs. Osbourne had never before
been so advanced in her language.)
“Bully for you!” he shouted, so genuinely that she ran back to him and
shook and hugged his shoulders. How she _liked_ him!
“What a thorough girl you are, Bibi!”
“Oh, and to-day I've been laughing at myself; as silly as I used to be,
counting so much on a mere change of circumstances. Of course something
unpleasant will develop there too. But at least the harness will rub in a
different place. On the whole, it will be better. Guy, do you know, I have
just gotten rid of envy and discontent, and that without endangering
ambition. I'll give you the charm; it's a sort of cabalistic _spell_--the
four P's--Occu_p_ation, Res_p_onsibility, _P_urpose, and _P_hilosophy.”
“Yes,” he said, “the most worth-while thing in life is to feel you are
accomplishing something--doing your work well and getting proportionate
returns.”
The tone touched her. “Poor old Guy!” so generously congratulatory of her
flaunted advantages. How stupid she was! Poor Guy! her pretty creed
scattered at a breath like a dead dandelion-ball. Envy she had disposed of,
but what about pity? What had he to make up? “The idea of my talking of
happiness, with you caged here!”
“Perhaps that was the point of it all,” he said, “to give you your chance.”
“That would be a beautifully humble thing for me to think, now wouldn't
it?” Yet she had once complained that the point of it all was to interfere
with her. “And so sweetly generous. Your chance being--?”
“To serve as a means of grace to you?” He smiled. “I am glad to be of some
use--and honored to be of that one!” he hurried to add, elaborately
humorous.
But what she was noticing was the flagging effort of his vivacity. Her
half-submerged first impression of him was coming to the surface: he did
look unusually haggard. “You haven't been good while I was away. Now don't
tell stories. Don't I know you? No more storms, Guy!” she warned.
His eye evaded hers. “I am seriously questioning whether you ought to make
this change. All your friends are here.”
“Oh, as to that! There might be advantages in working among strangers. Mrs.
Grey fairly puts herself out to let me understand that she is a friend in
need!” She reined herself up, recollecting, but too late. “Oh, Guy, don't
mind so for me. Why, the South is full of women doing what I am, only so
many of them are doing it--without--the Guys who never came back!”
“Lucky dogs!” subterraneously. Then, seeing her apprehensive of a second
flare-up of that volcanic fire: “So gentlemanly of them, too, Bibi. How can
those few years of love be worth a life of this to you?”
“Those few years? why, Guy! of love? Is that how _you_ feel?” Her eyes
filled; her whole face quivered. “Oh, Guy--be willing for my sake. I never
knew what love could mean until lately.”
His grasp hurt her knuckles. “Yes, dear, I have seen. It's very sweet. It's
the mother in you, Bibi, and my helplessness. Of course! What could a woman
_love_ in a dependent, half-corpse of a no-man?”
For a moment she was too surprised to speak. She stared at him. “What a
notion! and it isn't true! You never were any more a man than you've been
through these two dreadful years.” She sounded fairly indignant. “And for
my part, I never appreciated what you were half as much.”
“Love doesn't begin with a _P_,” he remarked to the opposite wall.
“But what do you suppose the _purpose_ was?”
“Love?”
“More. _You_.”
“You never told me.” That strange voice and averted face!
“How should I fancy you wouldn't know? I had never thought it out myself
until just now. It has simply been going on from day to day, as natural and
quiet as growing--” A bewildering illumination was spreading in her mind.
“Look here, young man”--she forced his face around to see it,--“what
goblins have you been hatching in the night-watches?” The raillery broke.
“Dear, is that what has been troubling you? Is there anything else?”
He looked at her now. “Anything else trouble me, if I really have you, and
a chance to do a little something for you?”
It was their apotheosis. They had never known a moment equal to it before;
could never know just another such again. In a very deep way it was the
first kiss of love for them both.
Bessie came back to herself with that sense of arriving, of having been
infinitely away, with which one drops from abstraction.
Where had they been in that state of absent mind?
It was as if they had met out of time, space, matter.... And as she thought
of his words, in the light of his eyes, pity too was qualified, and that
without endangering helpfulness. He, too, had his balance of good. Yes,
things squared in the end.
Her creed was quick. The scattered dandelion seed sprouted all around her.
Pap Overholt
BY ALICE MACGOWAN
Up and down the long corn rows Pap Overholt guided the old mule and the
small, rickety, inefficient plough, whose low handles bowed his tall, broad
shoulders beneath the mild heat of a mountain June sun. As he went--ever
with a furtive eye upon the cabin--he muttered to himself, shaking his
head:
“Say I sha'n' do hit. Say he don't want me a-ploughin' his co'n. My law!
Whut you gwine do? Thar's them chillen--thar's Huldy. They got to be
fed--they 'bleeged to have meat and bread. Ef I don't--”
Again he lifted his apprehensive glance toward the cabin; and this time it
encountered a figure stepping from the low doorway--a young fellow with an
olive face, delicately cut features, black curling hair, the sleep still
lingering in his dark eyes. He approached the fence--the sorry, broken
fence,--put his hands upon it, and called sharply, “Pap!”
The old man released the plough-handles and came toward the youth,
shrinking like a truant schoolboy called up for discipline.
“Pap, this is the way you do me all the time--come an' plough in my co'n
when I don't know nothin' about hit--when I don't want hit done,--tryin' to
make everybody think I'm lazy and no 'count. Huldy tellin' me I ought to be
ashamed of myse'f, in bed while my po' old pappy--'at hain't ploughed a row
of his own for years--is a-gittin' my co'n outen the weeds.”
The father stood, a chidden culprit. The boy had worked himself up to the
desired point.
“You jest do hit to put a shame on me. Now, Pap, you take that mule--”
“W'y, Sammy,--w'y, Sammy honey, you know Pappy don't do it fer nair sech a
reason. Hit don't look no sech a thing--like you was shif'less an' lazy.
Hit jes look like Pappy got nothin' to do, an' love to come and give you a
turn with yo' co'n; an', Sammy honey,”--the good farmer for the moment
getting the better of the timid, soft-hearted parent,--“hit is might'ly in
the weeds, boy. Don't you reckon I better jes--”
The other began, “I tell you--”
“There, there! Ne'mine, Sammy. Ef you don't want Pappy to plough no mo',
Pappy jes gwine to take the plough right outen the furrow and put old Beck
up. Pappy gwine--”
The boy turned away, his point made, and strolled back to the cabin. The
old man, murmuring a mixture of apologies, assurances, and expostulations,
went pathetically about the putting up of the mule, the setting away of the
plough.
Nobody knew when Pap Overholt began to be so called, nor when his wife had
received the affectionate title of Aunt Cornelia. It was a naming that grew
of itself. Forty years ago the pair had been married--John, a sturdy,
sunny-tempered young fellow of twenty-one, six feet in his stockings, broad
of shoulder, deep of chest, and with a name and a nature clean of all
tarnish; Cornelia Blackshears, a typical mountain girl of the best sort.
When, at the end of the first year, old Dr. Pastergood, who had ushered
Cornelia herself into this world, turned to them with her first child in
his arms, the young father stood by, controlling his great rush of primal
joy, his boyish desire to do something noisy and violent; the mother looked
first at her husband, then into the old doctor's face, with eyes of
passionate delight and appeal. He was speechless a moment, for pity. Then
he said, gently:
“Hit's gone, befo' hit ever come to us, Cornely. Hit never breathed a
breath of this werrisome world.”
A man who had practised medicine in the Turkey Tracks for twenty-five years
--a doctor among these mountain people, where poverty is the rule, hardship
a condition of life, and tragedy a fairly familiar element, would have had
his fibre well stiffened. The brave old campaigner, who had sat beside so
many death-beds and so many birth-beds, and had seen so many come and so
many go, at the exits and entrances of life, met the matter stoutly and
without flinching. His stoic air, his words of passive acceptance, laid a
calm upon the first outburst of bitter grief from the two young creatures.
Later, when John had gone to do the chores, the old doctor still sat by
Cornelia's bed. He took the girl's hand in his--an unusual demonstration of
feeling for a mountaineer--and said to her, gently,
“Cornely, there won't never be no mo'--there'll be nair another baby to
you, honey.”
The stricken girl fastened her eyes upon his in dumb pain and protest. She
said nothing, the wound was too deep; only her lips quivered pitifully and
the tears ran down upon the pillow.
“Now, now, honey, don't ye go to fret that-a-way. W'y, Cornely, ye was made
for a mother; the Lord made ye for such--an' do ye 'low 'at He don't know
what He's a-gwine to do with the work of His hands? 'For mo' air the
children of the desolate'--don't ye know Scripter says?--than of them that
has many. Lord love ye, honey, girl, you'll be mother to a minny and a
minny. They air a-comin'; the Lord's a-sendin' 'em. W'y, honey,--you and
John will have children gathered around you--”
The one cry broke forth from Cornelia which she ever uttered through all
her long grief of childlessness: “Oh, but, Dr. Pastergood, I wanted
mine--my own--and John's! Oh, I reckon it was idolatry the way I felt in my
heart; I thought, to have a little trick-bone o' my bone, flesh o' my
flesh--look up at me with John's eyes--” A sob choked her utterance, and
never again was it resumed.
In the years that followed, the pair--already come to be called Pap
Overholt and Aunt Cornely--well fulfilled the old doctor's prophecy. The
very next year after their baby was laid away, John's older brother, Jeff,
lost his wife, and the three little children Mandy left were brought at
once to them, remaining in peace and welfare for something over a year
(Jeff was a circumspect widower), making the place blithe with their
laughter and their play. Then their father married, and they were taken to
the new home. He was an Overholt too, and shared that powerful paternal
instinct with John. Three times this thing happened. Three times Jeff
buried a wife, and the little Jeff Overholts, with recruited ranks, were
brought to Aunt Cornelia and Pap John. When Jeff married his fourth
wife--Zulena Spivey, a powerful, vital, affluent creature, of an unusual
type for the mountains,--and the children (there were nine of them by this
time) went to live with their step-mother, whose physique and disposition
promised a longer tenure than any of her predecessors, Pap and Aunt
Cornelia sat upon the lonely hearth and assured each other with tears that
never again would they take into their home and their lives, as their very
own, any children upon whom they could have no sure claim.
“Tell ye, Cornely, this thing o' windin' yer heart-strings around and
around a passel o' chaps for a year or so and then havin' 'em tore
out--well, hit takes a mighty considerable chunk o' yer heart along with
'em.” And the wife, looking at him with wet eyes, nodded an assent.
It was next May that Pap Overholt, who had been doing some hauling over as
far as Big Turkey Track, returned one evening with a little figure perched
beside him on the high wagon seat. “The Lord sent him, honey,” he said, and
handed the child down to his wife. “He ain't got a livin' soul on this
earth to lay claim to him. He is ourn as much as ef he was flesh and bone
of us. I even tuck out the papers.”