[Illustration]
It was a shock to discover that she, that most well built girl, so
discrete, so comely, so able a thing in appearance, should be so stupid.
There are things that she cannot learn. She will never finish school.
Positively stupid. Why her little brother, no bigger than Hop o' my
Thumb has caught up to her and will soon outstrip her. Her older brother
is the brightest boy in the High School. She will I suppose breed stupid
children. Plant wizards choose the best out of lots running into the
millions. Choose here there everywhere for hybrids. A ten-pound white
leghorn cockerel, hens that lay eggs big enough to spoil the career of
any actor. She might though have bright children. What a pity that one
so likely should be so stupid. Easier to work with but I should hate a
child of mine to be that way. Excuses--Try first. Argue after. Excuses.
Do not dare.
There sat the seven boys--nine years old and there-abouts--planning
dire tortures for any that should seduce or touch in any way their
sisters. Each strove to exceed the other. Tying his antagonist to a tree
Apollo took out his knife and flayed him. For sweet as the flute had
been yet no man can play the flute and sing at the same time. But the
God had first played his harp and then sung to his own accompaniment--a
thing manifestly unfair. No doubt, his sense of being in the wrong
whetted his lust for the other's hide. In any case he got what he was
after. He was the winner and that was all there was about it.
Each boy would think with a secret glow of a new torture: I would dip
his hands in boiling lead--they often melted old pieces of lead in a
plumber's pot over a field fire to make slugs for their bean
shooters--then I would tie a rope to his feet and drag him on cinders
etc.... each inventing a worse torture than that pictured before. And
all for their sisters' virtue. So there under the east wall of the
Episcopal Church they sat in a group on the grass and talked together
for an hour.
The real empire builders of our colonial period were not the statesmen,
the men of wealth, the great planters but the unknown pioneers who
fought single-handed and at once both the primeval wilderness and the
lurking savage. The hand crooked to the ploughtail was shaped to the
trigger.
The Mesa Verde cliff dwellers--a much advanced race--formed a
partnership with nature in the science of home building. Masterpieces of
architecture, the survivals of the cliff dwellings tell the story of the
ages.
On the top of a point high above the steep cliffs stood Sun Temple, so
called, scene of the great ceremonial dramas of the clan. The building
is in the form of the letter D and many of the stones which make up the
thousand-odd feet of walls are highly decorated.
The corner stone of the building contains a fossil leaf of a palm tree.
Influenced by anything which even in shape resembled the sun, the
primitive people walled in the leaf on three sides and made a shrine.
The word _bayeta_ is merely Spanish for _baize_. Great quantities of
this were made in England for the Spanish and Mexican trade, the major
part of which was of a brilliant red color. In this way English _baize_
became Spanish _bayeta_ to the Indians of the American Southwest.
Familiar with the art of weaving, these Indians unraveled the bayeta,
retwisted it into one, two or three strands, and then rewove it into
their blankets, which are now almost priceless. This old blanket was
picked up by the author in a New Mexican corral, for the purpose of
wiping his buggy axle. It was covered with filth and mud. A number of
washings revealed this glorious specimen of the weaver's art.
Accepted by a cultured and talented belle, Lincoln, according to his law
partner, had already been refused by Sarah Rickard, an obscure miss of
sixteen, of whom apparently nothing further is known.
It was twelve feet from the rock into the water. As he stood looking
down it seemed twenty. His eyes being five feet from his heels made it
seem by that much higher than it was. He had never dived from such a
height in his life. He had climbed up there to dive and he must dive or
yield. What would he yield? At least it was something he did not intend
to yield. He tried his best to imitate the others, he stood on the edge
and plunged. It seemed to him that he plunged. As a matter of fact he
dropped over the edge with his body bent almost double so that his
thighs hit the water with a stinging impact, also the lower part of his
belly, also the top of his head. He did not feel certain of himself for
a moment or two after rising to the surface. That was about enough.
Memory began to fill the blank of his mind.
There it was still, the men around Mrs. Chain's table on Locust St.:
$3.50 a week. A week? Yes, three-fifty a week. And that place in Leipzig
where they had only half cooked fresh pork. _Schwein schlacherei_! Bah.
One week was enough there. Fraulein Dachs, _pflaumen suppe_. That purple
and sweet soup. The white cakes they sold on the station platform near
Malaga, what were they called? It seemed to be some native bake peculiar
to the place. The devil fish in a black sauce in Seville. Big lumps of
dough, big as snowballs, _sauer braten_. But Mrs. Chain's prunes were
the most wonderful. Watery tidbits. It was prunes or applesauce. Her
daughter was simple I guess. Did her best to land one of the students,
kept it up for twenty years. At that table I met one of my dearest
friends. Will you have some bread? Yes. That look. It was enough. Youth
is so rich. It needs no stage setting. Out went my heart to that face.
There was something soft there, a reticence, a welcome, a loneliness
that called to me. And he, he must have seen it in me too. We looked,
two young men, and at once the tie was cemented. It was gaged accurately
at once and sealed for all time. The other faces are so many prunes.
Have you ever seen a dish of small birds all lying on their backs on the
dish and with feet in the air, all roasted stiff but brown and savory?
Rice birds I think they called them. Or snails or baked eggs?
The old man raked slowly. It took him all day to finish the small lawn.
But it was autumn and the leaves had fallen thickly. The bird bath was
full of leaves. It was a sentimental picture. But after all why? The
leaves must fall into every corner. If they fall into the bird bath that
is all there is to it. Still it calls many things to the mind that are
not evoked by the twingling of waves on a lake shore in August.
Clark had taken a job as clerk at Pocono, and she was a Quakeress. They
got to know each other very, very well. And this girl in the steamer
chair, it was the cattle men who attracted her. Let her go then, he said
tying the cord with a piece of gauze twisted into a rope. When you bathe
the baby for the first time do not put him into a tub but sponge him off
carefully before the fire with castile soap and warm water. Be careful
not to get the soap into his eyes. Is it nitrate of silver they use for
a baby's eyes?
I could not tell whether it was a baby or a doll the little girl was
coddling. The Italians' babies are often so very small. They dress them
up so grotesquely too. It must be a rigid custom with them.
Nothing at all. All at once it seemed that every ill word he had ever
heard spoken struck his ear at the same moment. What a horrible roar it
made. But there were other things, too many to record. Corners of rooms
sacred to so many deeds. Here he had said so and so, done so and so. On
that picnic he had dared to be happy. All the older women had watched
him. With one girl under each arm he had let his spirit go. They had
been closer than anything he could now imagine.