_Mrs. Darrow seeks further for gentility, and her daughter has her hair
pulled and doesn’t mind it._
EFFIE DARROW died when Glen was twelve years old, quite suddenly and
excitingly after long and uneventful years of invalidism.
She became, so patently that even the child could sense, if she could
not understand it, a person of importance once more in the eyes of her
husband. For seven tense and high-keyed days and nights she interested
him intensely, though he had never expected her to interest him again.
If he could not summon a handsome grief at will, at least he could and
did produce an earnest solicitude which satisfied her amply as long as
she was conscious.
His eyes blurred for an instant when he heard the dismal dropping of
clay upon the coffin, but they brightened again at the thought that his
child was now his indeed.
Driving back from the cemetery in a soft, warm rain, he fired his first
gun. “Glen, how’d you like to leave Miss Josephine’s and go to public
school?”
“I don’t care,” the girl answered, heavy-eyed.
“All right, then--tell her you’re quitting. Suits me fine. Never
did like that namby-pamby, cambric tea outfit up there!” He scowled
savagely. “Go where you’re good as any and better than most--and they
know it,--that’s my idea!”
“I don’t care,” said the child again, her voice sodden with grief.
She started in at public school the following Monday morning, but she
did not react to it with especial pleasure, so far as her disappointed
father could see. She grew normally cheerful again, however. It was
a fact that once her sound young nerves had recovered from the shock
of death and burial, life in the ugly house went on more briskly and
comfortably without Effie’s pathetic presence. Yellow Emma-_leen_
stayed on, having an even freer hand, carrying a brazen basket home
every night, and the doctor and his daughter were well fed, if slackly
swept and dusted.
Glen spent all her free time with her father, driving him capably over
the deeply rutted country roads, waiting for him in the mud-splashed
buggy while he made his calls, her head bent over her lessons. He
liked having her with him, but he fretted because she made no young
intimacies.
Her one real friend was a curious choice--a fragile spinster who taught
English and History, Miss Ada Tenafee, impoverished connection of the
ancient and honorable Tenafee clan, in whose thinly fleshed veins the
blue blood ran fiercely. The singularly vivid child made an instant
appeal to “Miz-_za_da,” as her hectoring pupils called her, while Glen
felt for her something of the chivalrous pity she had given her mother.
Her devotion deepened with perspective: Effie’s foolish, futile ways
grew dim and dimmer in her memory.
It was the opposite with her father. “Whyn’t you bring young ones home
to supper?” he would demand. “Whyn’t you go play with ’em?” He was
secretly dashed. Was his system failing as utterly as his wife’s had
done? Then it was her fault--because she had spoiled the child in her
formative years. He criticized and resented Effie more in her grave
than ever when she was moving about his house at her hesitating gait,
soft eyes and soft chin tremulous.
Once, tripping over the Persian rug, his temper flared. “Oh, damn that
thing anyway! Always did detest it! Get rid of it! Give it to the
darky!”
Glen, looking up from her Ancient History, stared at him. She could
not know that his sore heart harked back to a honeymoon day, with
a blue-eyed bride kneeling and worshiping, setting up her delicate
standards to belittle his, but she did remember the incident of the
fairy tale.
“_For nine long years I’ve been looking at it and wishing for things I
knew I could never have!_”
The girl left her chair, walked to the rug and smoothed it into place
again, looking gravely down at its old rose and mauve, its fawns and
deep blues. “No, I won’t ever give it away,” she said, very quietly.
“_She_ liked it, and I like it.”
Then the doctor stamped out of the room, swearing, banging the door
behind him, ashamed of himself, and furious for being ashamed, and his
child looked after him consideringly.
His practice narrowed down to the mill hands and the mountaineers. It
was the work which interested him most, and he put heart into it as
well as head. They needed him; they were grateful, after their fashion,
and though he raged at them for failing to follow his instructions
for sanitation and hygiene, he continued to tend them faithfully. The
mill workers were a sallow and bloodless lot, in the main, spiritless
and indifferent, but the mountaineers gave him the keenest possible
pleasure.
“Best stock in the country,” he stated often to Glen. “Just give ’em
roads and schooling, and watch ’em come on!”
He took a shameless delight in their blood feuds; it was exactly his
own idea of settling disputes, for he grew more testy and truculent
with the years. Evenings, when he was not called out, Glen read aloud
to him from radical books and certain weeklies of daring and rather
destructive opinions, and he got a satisfactory reaction for his
vicarious rebellions. Actually, his radicalism was less than skin deep;
he was, at heart, rather well content with his government’s behavior,
and swarthy soap-box orators (there had been an influx of South
European labor to the mills) roused him to heated combat, though the
speakers might be voicing, more violently, the very same views as the
weeklies.
But to the girl, her bright head bent over the pages, the burning
words she read to him became the law and the gospel. The lonesomeness
of a snubbed childhood and a proudly detached girlhood fed by these
doctrines, grew into a curious creed which was one part Effie Darrow’s
blighted dreams and two parts Glenwood Darrow’s determined scorn for
things unattainable.
To the neighbors and the townspeople she was an accustomed sight--the
doctor’s daughter, that red-headed Darrow girl who carried a chip on
her shoulder and flocked alone, but strangers always stared at her as
they had done since her babyhood.
At fourteen she was a startling figure, tall, thin with a healthy
and proper young thinness, square-chinned, steady-eyed. Her skin was
remarkable. It had set out to be the delicate, very thin sort which
goes, ordinarily, with red hair--the blue-whiteness of thriftily
skimmed milk, prone to burn and peel and freckle unpleasantly, but her
early removal to the warmer climate had darkened and thickened it. It
was now a sort of golden olive which deeped at certain times and in
certain lights to a positive amber. There was no further color in her
cheeks and her mouth was red, straight, and unsmiling, but it was her
hair which caught and held the eye.
Once, on a Saturday, she drove her father higher into the hills than
they had ever gone before to see a very old woman who had sent for him.
She was a witch-like crone, clay colored, shriveled and twisted, and
her hot little eyes burned still with a horde of mountain loves and
hates.
“Hit’s not that I were ailing,” she explained to the doctor. “I’m right
peart, and aiming to live two, three year yet, but I have kindly heard
of you from all my tribe and kinnery, and I was wishful to name hit to
you consarning my boy Luke.”
Darrow sat down beside her, companionably. “Well, what about your son?”
“Hit’s not my son,” she cackled mirthfully, “nor neither yet, my son’s
son! Hit’s my son’s _son’s_ son! His maw died a-borning him, and I have
kindly raised him up myself. But now hit purely stands to reason I must
leave him, hit’s ontelling when, and I do shorely hone to have him
fotched on, for he is one young-un with a headpiece!”
Good roads and schooling would come too late for Ailsa Manders, but she
had glimpsed the vision for lack of which her people were perishing.
The doctor knew the Manders; a hard and reckless lot; killers. The old
woman had the look of a ruthless tribal priestess. She caught sight of
Glen and beckoned to her to come nearer.
“Howdy, Sis? Red h’ar is my delight!” She ran her gnarled fingers
through it, making little mouthing sounds of pleasure. “Hit purely
warms a bordy! Air you wedded yet?”
“Lord, no,” the doctor exploded. “She’s a youngster in school--will be,
for years!”
The old creature wagged a disapproving head. “When I were her size I
had two--one on the floor and one at suck! I had fo’teen, which is a
right fam’ly, but a pusson is obliged to start early, and wimmin now
days----”
“But how about this boy, Luke?” he brought her back to her main theme.
The lad had learned to read and write and figure--he was smart as a
steel trap at figures--at the evening school down on the Branch, but
his ancient kinswoman wanted real learning for him, a chance to work
for his board in a town family, advanced schooling.
“But, sir, I’m pine-blank skeered he won’t go! Wild as a hawk, he is!
Hit’s even ontelling if he’ll see you!” She lifted a gourd horn and
blew a surprisingly lusty blast.
After a perceptible pause, long enough to indicate indifference, brief
enough to preclude all possibility of fear, a tall youth lounged into
the room. There were no windows in the tiny shack, but between the two
doors, front and back, was a shaft of golden sunlight, a concentrated
radiance in which the boy stood. He was gypsy-dark, richly tinted,
bold-fearless, and free, and the modeling of his arms and legs, his
lean young torso, was magnificent.
“Well, my lad,” the physician’s eye roved delightedly over the
perfection of the splendid young animal, “so you want to come to town
and get an education?”
“No!” snarled Luke Manders, shooting a malevolent glance at his
great-grandmother.
“Why, I thought----”
“I aim to stay here, where my paw stayed, and live the way he lived!
Hit’s _my_ way!” His brown grip tightened on the barrel of the rifle he
was carrying.
“But, honey-lamb-chile,” the old woman quavered, “hit’ll pine-blank
break my heart to have you stay here and do so fashion!” Her gaze
rested on the weapon. “Live and die in battle and bloodshed! You air
the smartest of ary Manders heard tell of, and if you was to be
fotched on--” She was trembling with eagerness.
Dr. Darrow patted her arm. “Now, don’t you worry, Granny Manders, he’ll
come, all right! He’s just a little shy and timid, but----”
The boy wheeled to face him. Who was afraid?--Afraid of the
chicken-livered mill hands? He was Luke Manders and his father’d been
Luke Manders before him, and his Grandpappy Luke Manders before _that_!
Ask anybody in these mountains if ever a Manders was scared of anything
or anybody that walked the earth!
A furious outpouring, vigorous, incoherent, picturesque and profane.
Boyish bombast, but something more than that: a seething hatred
incompatible with fresh youth.
Glen Darrow, looking and listening with breathless interest, saw with
amazement that her father was keeping his temper--the temper which
boiled up and over so promptly for less cause than this.
“Well, by George, boy,” he stated with amusement and approval, “I
believe your grandma’s right about you! I believe you’ll go pretty far,
once you get something under your skull beside fancy cuss words, and
learn to do something smarter than aim a pop gun behind berry bushes!”
The pacific speech further enraged the young savage. “I don’t want to
know anything but what my pap knew!” he shouted. “I don’t aim to do
anything but what my pap did!”
“All right, son, all right! All _right_!” The choleric doctor was
entirely good-humored, immensely entertained. “You just run and play
Injun till you’re fed up on it, and then you come to me!”
Luke Manders flung himself out of the cabin, cursing and snarling, and
the old crone began to weep the slow and difficult tears of age, bright
drops trickling grudgingly from her hot little eyes.
“Don’t you fret yourself, Granny Manders!” Dr. Darrow took her leathery
old claws in a warm and reassuring grip. “That’s a great boy, and he’ll
come out all right--you mark my words!”
The great-gandmother hung her head. “I am purely shamed of my kin, for
unmannerly orneryness! Shamed to my marrow bones.”
“Kid stuff, that’s all! Never you mind,” he insisted cordially. “Just
crazy, hot-headed kid stuff! Showing off! I glory in his spunk!”
“I am beholden to you, sir,” the old woman said brokenly. “Hit is
shorely mighty kind and mannerly. Good-by, Sis, and you coax your pappy
to fotch you again! Red h’ar is purely my delight!” She reverted to her
mortification. “That ary kin of mine should act so pizen mean----”
“Now, now, don’t you bother your head about that! Come along, Glen!”
Chuckling, he waved his daughter toward the door. “I glory in his
spunk! I do, for a fact, glory in his spunk!”
They went out of the frowsy little cabin, into the frowsy dooryard, but
before they had traversed the brief distance to their waiting vehicle
the young savage had plunged out of a thicket and come after them.
Swooping down upon Glen, he caught up a handful of her glowing mane,
halting her sharply and painfully.
“Hi, Sis,” he drawled, “run duck your head in the Branch! Didn’t you
know your h’ar was a-fire?”