WOMEN IN RED SHAWLS
The Reverend Sage, withdrawing his hallowed cloth from contact with even
baser politics, had moved over to one of the windows, and was gazing out
between the curtains across the gale-swept porch into the blackness
beyond. Through the window-light the fine snow swirled in shadowy
clouds, like an ever-moving screen beyond which lay mystery. He shivered
a little, poor chap, at the thought of going out again into the bitter,
unbelievable night—at the thought of his cold little home at the
farther end of the village where the drifts were high and the wind blew
fiercely over the treeless, unsheltered tract known as Sharp’s Field. He
was thinking, too, of the girl he had brought down with him as a bride
in the sunny days of June, when all the land was green and the air was
soft and warm and there was the tang of fresh earth and the scent of
flowers for grateful nostrils.
He was thinking of her and the mile walk she would have to take with him
into the very teeth of the buffeting gale when this visit was over. He
sighed. She had come to this wretched little town from a great city
where there were horse-cars and cable-trains and hacks without number;
where houses and flats were warm and snug; where the shrieking storms
from off the lake were defied by staunch brick walls; where the nights
were short and the days were told by hours; where there were lights and
life, restaurants and theaters, music and dancing. He thought of the
cheap but respectable boarding-house on the cross-street just off
Lincoln Park and the warm little room on the third floor where he had
lived and studied for two full years. It was in this house that he had
met Josephine Judge. She was the daughter of the kindly widow who
conducted the boarding-house—a tall, slim girl who used slang and was
gay and blithesome, and had ambitions!
Ambitions? She wanted to become an actress. She was stage-struck. It was
quite wonderful, the way she could mimic people, and “recite,” and sing
the sprightly songs from “Pinafore,” “La Mascotte,” “Fra Diavolo,”
“Fatinitza,” “The Bohemian Girl,” and could quote with real unction the
choicest lines of “Rosalind,” “Viola,” “Juliet” and other rare young
women of a flowery age. And she had made him and all the rest of the
boarders laugh when she “took off” Pat Rooney, Joe Murphy, the Kernells,
Gus Williams, “Oofty Gooft” and the immortal “Colonel Mulberry Sellers.”
He was not a theatre-going youth. He had been brought up with an
abhorrence for the stage and all its iniquities. So he devoted himself,
heart and soul, to the saving of the misguided maiden, with astonishing
results. They fell in love with each other and were married. He often
smiled—and he smiled even now as he gazed pensively out into the
night—when he recalled the alternative she proposed and continued to
defend up to within a day or two of the wedding. She wanted him to give
up the pulpit and go on the stage with her! She argued that he was so
good-looking and had such a wonderful voice, that nothing—absolutely
nothing!—could keep him from becoming one of the most popular “leading
men” in the profession. She went so far as to declare that he would make
a much better actor than a preacher anyhow—and, besides, the stage
needed clean, upright young men quite as badly as the church needed
them!
And now she was down here in this desolate little town, loyally doing
her best to be all that a country parson’s wife should be, working for
him, loving him,—and, if the truth must be told—surreptitiously
delighting him with frequent backslidings to Pat and Joe and Gus,
including occasional terpsichorean extravagances that would have got her
“churched” if any one else had witnessed them.
He was always wondering what the people of Rumley thought of her. He
knew, alas, what she thought of the people of Rumley. His heart swelled
a little as he glanced over his shoulder and saw her patting the hand of
the distracted Baxter. She was his Josephine, and she was a
warm-hearted, beautiful creature who was bound to be misunderstood by
these—He was conscious of a sudden, unchristian-like hardening of his
jaws, and was instantly ashamed of the hot little spasm of resentment
that caused it.
The political adversaries were now shouting at each other with all the
ridiculous intensity of mid-campaign lunatics, and there was a great
deal of finger-shaking and pounding of clenched fists upon open palms.
Young Mr. Sage cringed as he turned his face to the window again, and if
he had given utterance to his feelings he would have petrified the
arguers by roaring:
“Oh, shut up, you jackasses!”
He drew back with an exclamation. The light fell full upon a face close
to the window pane, a face so startling and so vivid that it did not
appear to be real. A pair of dark, gleaming eyes met his for a few
seconds; then swiftly the face was withdrawn, retreating mysteriously
into the shadowy wall beyond the circle of light. He leaned forward and
peered intently. Two indistinct figures took shape in the unrelieved
darkness at the corner of the porch—two women, he made out, huddled
close together, their faces barely discernible through the swirling veil
of snow.
He experienced a queer little sensation of alarm, a foreboding of evil.
The face—that of a person he had never seen before, some one strange to
Rumley—was swarthy and as clean-cut as if fashioned with a chisel. It
was framed in scarlet—a bright scarlet speckled with vanishing blotches
of white.
He turned quickly and spoke to Sikes.
“There are two women out on the porch, Joseph. Strangers. Perhaps you’d
better see what they want.”
“—and if Tilden _was_ elected, why in thunder did the majority of the
voters of this here United States allow the Republicans to—”
“—and what’s more, if Hayes wasn’t honestly elected, why did the people
turn in and elect a Republican, James A. Garfield, in 1880? That’s proof
enough for me—”
“—Tilden had nearly half a million more votes than—”
“—And if the niggers had been allowed to vote in the South—”
“Oh, cheese it!”
Now this undignified exclamation was not uttered by either of the
arguers; nevertheless it terminated the discussion so abruptly that for
a moment or two it seemed that all three had suffered a simultaneous
stroke of paralysis. They turned to confront and to stare open-mouthed
at the wife of the minister, who had risen and was facing them with
blazing eyes.
The horrified Mrs. Gooch, who had preserved a tremulous neutrality
throughout the windy discussion, believed—and continued to believe to
her dying day—that the brazen, overdressed young woman took the name of
the Savior in vain when she gave vent to that astonishing command. (In
witness whereof it is only necessary to record the declaration she made
to her husband, sotto voce, a little later on: “Horace, if I live to be
a thousand years old I’ll never get over the way that woman spoke the
Christian name of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was positively outrageous.”)
Young Mrs. Sage, having thus impulsively reverted to slang, proceeded to
amplify its effectiveness. She went on:
“Give us a rest, can’t you? Go chase yourselves! Where do you think you
are? In a beer saloon? If you want to shoot off your mouths about—”
“My _dear_ Josephine!” cried Mr. Sage, screwing up his face as if in
pain.
“Oh, Lord!” she breathed, staring bleakly at her husband.
A close observer might have noted the sudden quivering of her lower lip,
instantly lost, however, in the shamed and penitent smile that wiped
away every trace of the irritation aroused by the argument. “There I go
again! Backsliding almost to Grand Crossing. In another minute I would
have been in Chicago. Good thing you stopped me, Herbert. And I sha’n’t
in the least mind if you give me a good thrashing when you get me home.
It’s the only way to break me of—”
“Go for ’em—go for ’em, Mrs. Sage,” cried Mr. Baxter. “Give ’em hell!
They ain’t got any right to whoop and yell like that in this house.
They’ll wake the baby—if it ain’t dead—and—”
“They’d wake it if it _was_ dead,” said Mrs. Grimes, coming from the
kitchen at that moment with a steaming pail in her hand.
“Never mind, Josephine,” said Mr. Sage gently. “I am sure our good
friends will overlook—oh, by the by, Joseph, there are two strange
women on the porch. Perhaps you—”
“Go see who it is, Joe,” commanded Mrs. Grimes crisply. “You come
upstairs now, Oliver, and put your feet in this pail of mustard and
water. Come on, now. Say good night to—”
“But, doggone it, I don’t want to go upstairs. I don’t want to put my
feet in—”
“Do you want that boy of yours to be an orphan before he’s hardly had
his eyes open?” demanded Mrs. Grimes, severely. “Well, that’s what he’ll
be if you catch lung fever.”
“Better do what Serepty says, Ollie,” advised Mr. Link.
“That’s right, Ollie,” added Mr. Sikes. “You go on upstairs. I’ll say
good night to everybody for you.”
“You go and see who’s out there on the porch, Joe Sikes. Don’t let any
strangers in, do you hear? Oh, yes, Mr. Sage, I almost forgot. I fixed
up a nice gargle for you—salt and pepper and hot vinegar. It’s on the
kitchen table. There’s a strip of bacon laying there too. I’ll bring
down one of Mr. Baxter’s wool socks to tie around—For goodness’ sake,
Joe Sikes, shut that door before you open the front door. Do you want to
freeze us all to death?”
“Wonderful manager, ain’t she?” confided Mr. Link in an aside to the
minister.
“I see no reason why I should gargle a perfectly well throat and tie a
sock of Brother Baxter’s—”
“You’d better do it,” broke in the other hastily. “She knows what’s
best.”
“I tell you I’m not going upstairs, Serepty. I got a right to set here
and receive congratulations, and I’m going to do it. And I’m going to
set ’em up to cigars—and if anybody wants a drink of whiskey on me all
they got to do is to say so. You let me alone, Serepty. I’m all right.
You go up and see if everything’s all right with Mary and Oliver
October. I’m going to set right here and—”
“I’ll put this mustard bath in the spare room, Oliver,” interrupted Mrs.
Grimes sternly. “It will be ready for you when you come up—before
long.”
Mrs. Gooch whispered to her glowering husband: “I don’t see anything
about her to be afraid of. Why, she ain’t much bigger than a minute, is
she?”
Tall Mr. Gooch eyed little Mrs. Grimes dubiously. “I don’t know,” said
he in reply. “They say Napoleon was a little feller.”
“Did I spill the beans all over the shop, Herby dear?” murmured the
guilty Mrs. Sage, looking up at her husband much as a culprit looks up
at his judge.
“I do wish, Josephine, you would be a _little_ more careful what you
say,” said he, lowering his voice as he bent over her. “Please try to
remember your—our position here. It is—”
His mild admonition was interrupted by the abrupt return of Joseph
Sikes, who, in his excitement, neglected to close not only the
sitting-room door but the one opening on to the porch. Mrs. Gooch, as if
jumping at the opportunity, sneezed violently and transfixed him with an
accusing look.
“Say, Ollie,” burst out Mr. Sikes, “there’s a couple of women out here
from that gypsy camp. They claim to be fortune-tellers. What’ll I do
about ’em?”
“Fortune-tellers?” cried Mrs. Sage eagerly. “I adore fortune-tellers.”
“Frauds, my dear—unholy frauds,” remonstrated Mr. Sage.
“What do they want, Joe?” inquired Baxter.
“Well, one of ’em wants to tell the baby’s fortune. Says she heard about
him a couple of weeks ago and she’s been talking to the stars ever—”
“Good gracious! That proves what a liar she is,” cried Mrs. Grimes.
“Wait a minute,” exclaimed Mr. Sikes. “Hold your horses, Serepty. She
says she knowed a couple of weeks ago that he was going to be born
to-day, that’s what she says. And if that ain’t reading the future, I’d
like to know what it is. Now here’s what she says she can do. She says
she can tell exactly what an infant’s future life is going to be if she
can get at him before his first two sunrises. Guarantees it.”
“Well, I’m not going to allow any gypsy woman to go nigh that infant. I
never saw a gypsy in my life that looked as if she’d ever seen a cake of
soap. Send ’em away, Joe.”
“But, Serepty,” argued Sikes, “don’t you know what might happen if we
make ’em mad? They put a curse on you that won’t ever come off. Now, I
don’t think we ought to take a chance—”
“They sha’n’t go near that baby, so that settles it.”
“Well, I should say not,” exclaimed Mrs. Gooch loudly.
“Wait a minute,” said Sikes, struck by an idea. He hurried to the front
door. As he passed into the hall, Horace Gooch strode over and slammed
the sitting-room door after him.
“Say, Serepty,” began Mr. Baxter, a pleading note in his voice, “I’d
kind of like to know whether my son is going to be President of the
United States some day.”
“How would you like it if she was to tell you he’s going to turn out to
be a jail-bird or something like that, Oliver Baxter?”
“Oh, but they never tell you anything unpleasant, you know,” said Mrs.
Sage, nudging Mr. Baxter.
“My dear Josephine, please do not—”
Once more Mr. Sikes burst into the room—and again he left the door
open.
“She says it ain’t necessary to even see the baby. When they’re as young
as he is, it’s always her rule to tell their fortunes sight unseen.
What’s more, she says if all she says don’t come true she’ll refund the
money. Nothing could be fairer than that.”
“Nothing,” agreed Mr. Baxter enthusiastically.
“Absolutely fair,” put in Mr. Link.
“How can she tell a fortune without seeing the object of it?” demanded
Mrs. Gooch.
“Well,” began Mr. Sikes, and then was forced to scratch his head for
want of a convincing answer. “Wait a minute. I’ll see.” He hurried out
again.
“Old Bob Hawkins that used to drive the hearse for me had his fortune
told just about two weeks after he got married, and every word of it
came true,” said Mr. Link. “He always claimed if he’d had it told two or
three weeks sooner he might have had enough sense to skip out or
something.”
“It is all poppycock,” announced Mr. Sage. “The veriest poppycock.”
“I had mine told,” said his wife, “when I was nineteen. It said I was
going to marry a dark-complexioned man and go on a long journey.”
“Well, there you are,” said Mr. Baxter triumphantly. “The Reverend Sage
is a brunette and it’s considerably over a hundred miles from Chicago to
Rumley. There’s something in it, Serepty. Here’s proof that can’t be
denied.”
“It’s all as simple as falling off a log,” announced Mr. Sikes, from the
door. “She says the only reliable and genuine way to tell a baby’s
fortune is by reading its father’s hand. That’s the way it’s been done
ever since—er—astronomy was invented.”
Mr. Baxter arose. “Bring her in, Joe. Now, don’t kick, Serepty. My
mind’s made up. I’m going to have my way for once.”
“Like as not she’ll tell you bad news, Oliver,” protested his sister. “I
wish you wouldn’t.”
“Anyhow,” said Mr. Gooch surlily, “it’s a good way to get the door
closed.”