I
Where shall we pick up the thread of Julie Rose’s life? It runs, a
hidden strand, back and back into the past, crossed and recrossed by
the threads of other lives,--all weaving a pattern of humanity on an
unseen loom,--deflected sometimes by the pull of natures stronger than
her own, widened here and narrowed there by circumstance, winding
itself for the most part along the muddy streets of Hart’s Run, to the
shops on errands for her mother, to the schoolhouse, and on Sundays
to the Methodist church; sometimes, more rarely, running out of the
village by the main street, which so quickly turns itself into a rutty
highway, up the sides of the surrounding mountains on excursions for
chestnuts in the autumn, or for bloodroot and anemone blossoms in the
spring.
Following the thread, one may see Julie Rose as a little girl--such
a meagre, anxious, and correct little girl!--out on the streets in
hood and little shawl in winter or in a checked wash-dress in summer,
weaving her pattern of life through the village. An uncertain pattern,
deflected as it is by the constant necessity for sudden crossings of
the street to avoid encounters which frighten her, yet at the same time
to give the impression that she changed her course for other reasons.
Here she crosses, one might suppose, to speak to old Mrs. Brewster;
in reality it is to escape a group of rough boys who would be sure to
taunt her, or even give her hair a jerk, did she dare to pass them.
There she recrosses, apparently to peep at a bed of zinnias but really
to avoid a cow, which, blocking the sidewalk, might swoop its horns
at her were she to face it. Always there is the fear and always the
compulsion of concealment, for worse even than being afraid is to have
one’s fear uncovered by the laughter of people. But though a little
nervous pulse flutters in her neck, and her eyes darken constantly with
apprehension, yet her whole face can light up amazingly whenever life
is gracious to her: when some one gives her a red apple, for instance,
or when her teacher is kind.
One sees her conscientiously hopping over the mud puddles on the way
to school to avoid soiling her shoes and stockings, because that would
worry her mother; yet one may also see that a paper doll, whose pink
cheeks and blue eyes fill her with a maternal delight, is snuggled
under her shawl. Alas! at this point, following her thread of life, one
sees very distinctly the look in her eyes the day that Edward Black
snatched that paper doll away from her, and there before the whole
school at playtime wrenched its head off, and flung its decapitated
body into a snow-bank. That was a gray winter day with dirty yellowed
snow upon the ground and fresh flakes drifting down from a heavily
close and sullen sky. Julie is paralyzed when that big bully snatches
her doll, powerless to move or cry out; she can only stand and look,
her eyes wide and stricken, her hands clutched together. Not so
Henr’etta Wilkins, Julie’s deskmate. She flew at Edward Black, and
slapped him full and stingingly upon the face with her competent hand.
It was Henr’etta’s dramatic act which precipitated a general scuffle
and free fight among the children. They fought back and forth through
the snow and over the tattered remnants of the paper doll. Julie took
no part in the conflict, but under its cover her tension of horror
relaxed sufficiently for her to creep over and collect the torn bits
that had been her doll. The other children knocked her about as she did
so, and when she picked up the last bit, one of the big boys stepped
square upon her hand. But Julie hardly noticed that. In a daze, she
turned out of the school-yard and made for home, slipping and stumbling
through the snow, the fragments of the doll pressed tight against her
breast, and the forbidding sky hanging low upon her.
At home she could only hold out the torn pieces dumbly to her mother.
“What’s the matter, honey?” her mother cried, nervously. “Oh, what did
they do to its doll baby?”
Then at last Julie could speak. “Edward Black did it!” she gasped.
“He--he tore her head right off and flung it in the snow. I couldn’t
stop him--I couldn’t do _anything_. I--couldn’t--” her voice squeaked
out impotently in a flood of tears.
“Never mind! never mind! It shall have another doll baby,” her mother
comforted her.
But a question struggled convulsively to the surface through Julie’s
sobs. “What--what made Ed act so mean? I wasn’t doing a thing. I was--I
was just standing there.”
“I don’t know,” her mother shook her head with a helpless gesture. “I
don’t know. Folks do that way--I reckon it’s all you can expect in this
world.”
“All you can expect in this world,” Julie repeated with a broken gasp.
Afterward her mother bathed her face and hands, tied up her bruised
fingers, and giving her a cookie fresh and warm from the oven, made
her go back to school, for “What’ll folks think if you stay home?” she
said. “All the children will laugh at you.”
So Julie went back, the cookie, fragrant and comforting, in her hand,
but a poignant disillusioned throb still in her heart, driven in so
deep that it was beyond the relief of tears; and the two phrases
her mother had used, “That’s all you can expect in this world,” and
“What’ll folks think?” turned themselves over and over, burrowing down
into her mind and intrenching themselves there. She took a little
tentative nibble of the cookie to comfort herself. It was good, very
good.
Good? What did that remind Julie of? Oh, yes! Last Sunday’s Golden
Text: “Overcome evil with good.” Ed Black was certainly evil in Julie’s
eyes--then ought she to do good to him? A sudden idea jumped in her
mind, choking her and making her clutch her cookie fast. It was an
awful idea. She could not possibly do it. It would be a dreadful
thing to do. How all the children would laugh! But just because it
was so awful, and would bring public opinion so down on her, a stern
compulsion to do it seized her.
A tyrant within rose up and challenged her: “You don’t dare to do it,”
the tyrant taunted. “All the children will laugh at you--you don’t
dare--” “I do dare! I do!” Julie cried back at the tyrant, a cold
perspiration breaking out.
The bell was ringing for the afternoon session when she reached the
schoolhouse, and the children were flocking up the steps to the door.
Edward Black, big and untidy, stood on the top step. His hair was
tousled, his coat torn; his hands were chapped and grimy with dirt.
Through the parti-colored surge of children Julie pressed up to him,
and held out her cookie.
“What’s that?” he demanded, bringing his scornful eyes down upon her.
“A cookie,” Julie wavered. “It’s--it’s good.”
“A cookie?” He snatched it from her. “Well, if you ain’t the _biggest_
little fool! Look a’ here!” he shouted. “Look what Julie Rose give
me. A cookie! Haw! Haw! Haw!” He waved the gift for all to see,
and his hoarse mirth ran down the line of children, in surprise,
contemptuous laughter, and ejaculation. And only Julie’s shrinking and
inadequate little body stood between her soul and the stabs of the
other children’s derision. “Here--I don’t want anything from _you_!”
Edward cried, and flung the cookie in her face. It struck her cheek
and bounded from thence down to the dirty steps, where the oncoming
children kicked at it, deriding it and trampling it into a pulp with
the mud and snow on their shoes, while Edward Black went haw-hawing
loudly into school.
“Julie! You are the biggest little idiot!” Henr’etta whispered,
sharply, when they were seated at their desks, and the school was
quieting down. “What in the name of common sense made you go and give
your cookie to that hateful piece when he’d been so mean to you?”
“It--it was the text,” Julie stammered.
“The text? What text? Quit shaking so, Julie! What text?”
“Last Sunday’s,” Julie gasped.
Henr’etta considered a moment. “Oh, that!” she said. “Well, you cer’nly
are a goody-goody.”
“I’m not! I’m not!” Julie panted. “It wasn’t that--I--I had to do it.”
“Why? Why did you have to? Quit shaking, I tell you!”
“I had to because I was scared to,” Julie confessed miserably.
But this was beyond Henr’etta’s comprehension. It was really beyond
Julie’s own. She did not know that she was already beginning to feel
herself caught in the terrifying net of her own fears, and had made a
futile leap for freedom. She only knew that something had made her do a
dreadful thing at which all the children had laughed, just as she had
known they would.
“Oh here, don’t cry, Julie!” Henr’etta whispered hastily. “For the
mercy sakes! Don’t go and cry now, right before the whole school. Here,
look at the geography lesson--here, listen: ‘Principal rivers in West
Virginia’--Oh, for goodness sake!”
For, despite the principal rivers, Julie had dropped her head upon the
desk in front of her, bursting into a flood of tears; and again the
eyes of all the school stabbed straight through her body, and down into
her soul.
* * * * *
One may also see this fragile thread of life running back into Julie’s
babyhood, mothered by her delicate and shrinking mother, and fathered
by her big blustering father. Those were the days when Mr. Rose kept a
small shop in the village, and when Julie’s earliest baby recollections
were concerned with the many-colored things in the shop, and the
mingled smell of raisins, tobacco, and peppermint candy, together with
the dreadful tradition that a witch lived in the ginger-cake barrel,
ready to snap out at a little girl who even so much as thought of
helping herself in passing. That appeared to be the reason for their
being called ginger-snaps.
But big and boastful as her father was, he was not a success at
storekeeping, and by the time little Julie was five or six, her mother
was taking table boarders “to help out.” She had been a school-teacher
from one of the smaller cities in Virginia, and had trained herself to
a rather prim mode of speech. Julie usually spoke as she did, but in
moments of stress she was apt to break away to the mountain phraseology
of her father’s people.
Julie’s father boasted largely of the things he meant to do in the
business way, but always as the table boarders increased, the customers
in the shop decreased, until finally, when Julie was ten or eleven, the
shop was closed altogether, and her father had gone across the State
line into West Virginia, to work in the lumber camps. There he made
good money, for people said that Emmet Rose was a mighty fine hand in
the woods; and he himself bragged that he could drop a tree within a
foot of any spot he named. Thereafter, with the money coming regularly
from the lumber camp, Mrs. Rose gave up most of the table boarders, and
so had leisure to do fancy sewing, and to make pretty, sober little
clothes for Julie. The stitches in them were exquisite and sincere,
but she never dressed Julie in bright colors. “No, I don’t like bright
colors,” she was wont to say.
“But why, mother? Why?” Julie questioned.
“They’re so gay--” her mother hesitated; “I--I don’t know, but someway
I don’t think they’re respectful to the Lord.”
Thereafter Julie went in fear of a jealous surveillance from on high.
God became somewhat confused in her child mind with a chicken hawk.
“Grandmaw Rose,” who had a little farm on the top of Slatty Mountain,
said she didn’t hold with white chickens: they was too easy a mark
for the hawk. This seemed to accord with her mother’s fear of bright
colors. Apparently, up there in the wide stretches of the deep sky
that Julie had always liked, there lurked a terrifying Power that
might pounce dreadfully at any moment. Evidently the safest way to get
through life was to slip by as unnoticed as possible, clad, if one were
a chicken, in speckled gray feathers that faded easily from sight in
the grass; or; if one were a little girl, ordering one’s self in the
same humble and unobtrusive manner.
Julie felt worried about her father, there was so little of the
discreet coloration about him. His necktie, when he wore one, could be
seen half a mile, an easy mark for hawk or deity. His friends described
him as a great big two-fisted Jim-bruiser of a man. He was boastful
and loud, and would come roaring down the river with the log drives in
spring, boisterous, gay, and apparently unafraid. During the summer
months, when he was in Hart’s Run, their reserved little house rocked
with his Homeric laughter, accompanying great stories of “Tony Beaver”
who lives up “Eel River,”--where all the impossible things of the West
Virginia lumber camps happen,--who is blood brother to “Paul Bunyan”
of the Northern woods and who owns a yoke of oxen so big it takes a
crow a week to wing the distance between the horns of one of them. But
just because of his recklessness and daring laughter, Julie adored her
father. Those were good days on the whole--her mother and herself snug
and well provided for in the village, building up a gentle home-life,
with the lumber-jack’s big personality off in the woods to roof it over
securely.
But when Julie was sixteen, this period came to an abrupt end on a
day in the woods, when a tree which Emmet Rose was felling failed to
drop on the spot he had named, but fell instead upon him. They brought
him home, out of the woods, to Hart’s Run--a painful journey--by way
of tram cars and rough frozen roads with ice and skifts of snow in
the ruts, with Sam Fletcher, who drove, feeling in his own body every
dreadful jolt of the wagon; for, as he confided to his intimates,
if there was one thing he did naturally _de_spise, it was haulin’ a
crippled hand out of the woods.
Julie and her mother were dazed by the shock. Their scared faces fell
into a mould of horror that did not lighten or relax when they spoke
or even when they tried to smile. Their little hands shook, but they
went on and did things efficiently and bravely. Emmet Rose watched them
sadly out of his big face that was gaunt and curiously stretched with
pain to a wider apprehension. Once when her mother was out of the room,
he put out his uninjured hand to Julie and spoke darkly.
“It’s got me. I allus knew it would.”
Julie’s heart jumped violently. “What’s got you, pappy, honey?” she
questioned, putting her hand in his.
“Life,” he answered. “It’s got me down at last. I allus knew it would.
It gits every feller in the end. I stood up aginst it an’ fought it
like a two-fisted man, but it’s got me, an’ now I’ll jist have to lay
down on you women-folks. Don’t tell mammy--she’s scary enough anyhow.”
This admission was the climax of terror to Julie. She had always
sheltered in her father’s loud confidence. To have him broken in body
was frightful enough; to see his broken spirit laid bare, to know that
always that sinister dread had lurked in the back of his mind, and that
all his big bluster was just a cloak for it, seemed to take the roof
from over her head, leaving her uncovered in a bleak world. Her heart
beat so fearfully that the thin material of her blouse fluttered up and
down. Nevertheless, she put her other hand, cold as it was, steadfastly
over her father’s. “Never mind, pappy, honey!” she said. “Never mind.
We’ll manage someway.”
He looked dimly at her white face with the big eyes, and felt the
tremor of her fingers.
“Poor Julie,” he said. “Poor little Julie. I kind of hate to have life
git a-hold of you.”
But after all Emmet Rose did not have to “lay down” long on his
women-folks. A broken rib had pierced one lung, pneumonia set in,
and five days after they brought him out of the woods his great body
was stiff and tenantless, and Julie and her mother, two terrified
little people, were left alone. Yet, for all their fear, with a
dogged pertinacity they rebuilt their lives and struggled on, like a
chess-player, who having lost his best piece still fights on with what
the game has left to him.
Later on, when death swooped again and her mother was gone, Julie,
frightened and alone, nevertheless rebuilt her life once more, and
went on spinning her web of existence, supported by dressmaking and
millinery which she had established in her father’s old shop, and
protected from being quite alone by Aunt Sadie Johnson who rented one
half of the house, and who was not Julie’s aunt at all, but was so old
a friend of her mother’s that Julie had always called her so.
This is the thread of Julie Rose’s life, running on narrow and timorous
lines back into the past to her birth in Hart’s Run, and forward into
the future, at the command of existence; and all along its pathway of
the past and future one may see her small figure faring forth, as she
weaves her strand in the pattern of humanity. All of it is of interest
and of value in that pattern, but for the sake of winding some of the
thread into a ball of narrative, one must pick it up definitely at
one point and break off at another; therefore, to begin, let us pick
it up on a June night in the summer of 1918, the year that Julie was
thirty-two.