"Why ... she's gone daft over those bogie-stories of yours ... she's
looked the list over and picked out the survivors, the widow of the man
who died of tuberculosis, and so on, and she's going to bring them back
here to share her luxurious life."
Jombatiste bounded into the air as if a bomb had exploded under him,
scattering his tools and the children, rushing past me out of the house
and toward Cousin Tryphena's. ... As he ran, he did what I have never seen
anyone do, out of a book; he tore at his bushy hair and scattered handfuls
in the air. It seemed to me that some sudden madness had struck our dull
little village, and I hastened after him to protect Cousin Tryphena.
She opened the door in answer to his battering knocks, frowned, and began
to say something to him, but was fairly swept off her feet by the torrent
of his reproaches.... "How dare you take the information I give you and
use it to betray your fellow-man! How do you _dare_ stand there, so
mealy-mouthed, and face me, when you are planning a cowardly attack on the
liberty of your country! You call yourself a nurse ... what would you
think of a mother who hid an ulcer in her child's side from the doctor
because it did not look pretty! What _else_ are you planning to do? What
would you think of a nurse who put paint and powder on her patient's face,
to cover up a filthy skin disease? What else are you planning to
do ... you with your plan to put court-plaster over one pustule in ten
million and thinking you are helping cure the patient! You are planning
simply to please yourself, you cowardly ... and you are an idiot too ..."
he beat his hands on the door-jambs, "... if you had the money of forty
millionaires, you couldn't do anything in that way ... how many people are
you thinking to help ... two, three ... maybe four! But there are hundreds
of others ... why, I could read you a thousand stories of worse--"
Cousin Tryphena's limit had been reached. She advanced upon the intruder
with a face as excited as his own. ... "Jombatiste Ramotte, if you ever
dare to read me another such story, I'll go right out and jump in the
Necronsett River!"
The mania which had haunted earlier generations of her family looked out
luridly from her eyes.
I felt the goose-flesh stand out on my arms, and even Jombatiste's hot
blood was cooled. He stood silent an instant.
Cousin Tryphena slammed the door in his face.
He turned to me with a bewilderment almost pathetic so tremendous was
it--"Did you hear that ... what sort of logic do you call--"
"Jombatiste," I counseled him, "if you take my advice you'll leave Miss
Tryphena alone after this."
Cousin Tryphena started off on her crack-brained expedition, the very next
morning, on the six-thirty train. I happened to be looking out sleepily
and saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of our
mountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashioned
lantern like a glowworm at her side. It seemed somehow symbolical of
something, I did not know what.
It was a full week before we heard from her, and we had begun really to
fear that we would never see her again, thinking that perhaps, while she
was among strangers, her unsettled mind might have taken some new fancy
which would be her destruction.
That week Jombatiste shut the door to his house. The children reported
that he would not even let them in, and that they could see him through
the window stitching away in ominous silence, muttering to himself.
Eight days after Cousin Tryphena had gone away, I had a telegram from her,
which read, "Build fires in both my stoves to-morrow afternoon."
The dark comes early in the mountains, and so, although I dare say there
was not a house in the village without a face at the pane after the late
evening train came up, none of us saw anything but our usual impenetrable
December darkness. That, too, seemed, to my perhaps overwrought
consciousness of the problem, highly suggestive of the usual course of our
lives. At least, I told myself, Cousin Tryphena had taken her absurd
little lantern and gone forth.
The next morning, soon after breakfast, I set off for the other end of the
street. Cousin Tryphena saw me coming and opened the door. She did not
smile, and she was still very pale, but I saw that she had regained her
self-control, "Come right in," she said, in rather a tense voice, and, as
I entered she added, in our rustic phrase for introduction, "Make you
'quainted with my friend, Mrs. Lindstrom. She's come up from the city to
stay with me. And this is her little boy, Sigurd, and this is the baby."
Blinking somewhat, I shook hands with a small, stoop-shouldered woman, in
a new, ready-made dress, with abundant yellow hair drawn back from the
thinnest, palest, saddest little face I had ever seen. She was holding an
immaculately clean baby, asleep, its long golden lashes lying on cheeks as
white and sunken as her own. A sturdily built boy of about six scrambled
up from where he lay on the floor, playing with the cat, and gave me a
hand shyly, hanging down his head. His mother had glanced up at me with a
quick, shrinking look of fright, the tears starting to her eyes.
Cousin Tryphena was evidently afraid that I would not take her cue and
sound the right note, for she went on hastily, "Mrs. Lindstrom has been
real sick and kind o' worried over the baby, so's she's some nervous. I
tell her Hillsboro air is thought very good for people's nerves. Lots of
city folks come here in summer time, just for that. Don't you think Sigurd
is a real big boy for only six and a half? He knows his letters too! He's
goin' to school as soon as we get settled down. I want you should bring
over those alphabet blocks that your Peggy doesn't use any more--"
The other woman was openly crying now, clinging to her benefactress' hand
and holding it against her cheek as she sobbed.
My heroic old cousin patted her hair awkwardly, but kept on talking in her
matter-of-fact manner, looking at me sternly as though defying me to show,
by look or word, any consciousness of anything unusual in the situation;
and we fell at once, she and I, into a commonplace conversation about the
incidents of the trip up.
When I came away, half an hour later, Cousin Tryphena slipped a shawl over
her head and came down the walk with me to the gate. I was much affected
by what seemed to me the dramatically fitting outcome of my old
kinswoman's Quixotism. I saw Cousin Tryphena picturesquely as the Happy
Fool of old folk-lore, the character who, through his very lack of worldly
wisdom, attains without effort all that self-seeking folks try for in
vain. The happy ending of her adventure filled me with a cheerful wonder
at the ways of Providence, which I tried to pass on to her in the
exclamation, "Why, Cousin Tryphena, it's like a story-book? You're going
to _enjoy_ having those people. The woman is as nice as she can be, and
that's the brightest little boy! He's as smart as a whip!"
I was aware that the oddness of Cousin Tryphena's manner still persisted
even now that we were alone. She sighed heavily and said, "I don't sleep
much better nights now I've done it!" Then facing me, "I hadn't ought to
have brought them up here! I just did it to please myself! Once I saw
'em ... I wanted 'em!"
This seemed to me the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinct
for self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I attempted some expostulation.
She stopped me with a look and gesture Dante might have had, "You ain't
seen what I've seen."
I was half-frightened by her expression but tried to speak coolly. "Why,
was it as bad as that paper said?" I asked.
She laid her hand on my arm, "Child, it was nothing like what the paper
said...it was so much worse!"
"Oh ..." I commented inadequately.
"I was five days looking for her...they'd moved from the address the paper
give. And, in those five days, I saw so many others..._so many others_..."
her face twitched. She put one lean old hand before her eyes. Then, quite
unexpectedly, she cast out at me an exclamation which made my notion of
the pretty picturesqueness of her adventure seem cheap and trivial and
superficial. "Jombatiste is right!" she cried to me with a bitter
fierceness: "Everything is wrong! Everything is wrong! If I can do
anything, I'd ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything up
and start over! What good does it do for me to bring up here just these
three out of all I saw ..." Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusing
quavers, "but when I saw them ...the baby was so sick ... and little
Sigurd is so cunning ... he took to me right away, came to me the first
thing ... this morning he wouldn't pick up his new rubbers off the floor
for his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off ... you ought to
have seen what he had on ... such rags ... such dirt ... and 'twan't her
fault either! She's ... why she's like anybody ... like a person's cousin
they never happened to see before ...why, they were all _folks_!" she
cried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing to
another.
"You didn't find the little boy in the asylum?" I asked.
"He was dead before I got there," she answered.
"Oh ... !" I said again, shocked, and then tentatively, "Had he ...?"
"I don't know whether he had or not," said Cousin Tryphena, "I didn't ask.
I didn't want to know. I know too much now!" She looked up fixedly at the
mountain line, high and keen against the winter sky. "Jombatiste is
right," she said again unsparingly, "I hadn't ought to be enjoying
them ... their father ought to be alive and with them. He was willing to
work all he could, and yet he ... here I've lived for fifty-five years and
never airned my salt a single day. What was I livin' on? The stuff these
folks ought to ha' had to eat ... them and the Lord only knows how many
more besides! Jombatiste is right ... what I'm doin' now is only a drop in
the bucket!"
She started from her somber reverie at the sound of a childish wail from
the house. ... "That's Sigurd ...I _knew_ that cat would scratch him!" she
told me with instant, breathless agitation, as though the skies were
falling, and darted back. After a moment's hesitation I too, went back and
watched her bind up with stiff, unaccustomed old fingers the little
scratched hand, watched the frightened little boy sob himself quiet on her
old knees that had never before known a child's soft weight saw the
expression in her eyes as she looked down at the sleeping baby and gazed
about the untidy room so full of mire, which had always been so orderly
and so empty.
She lifted the little boy up higher so that his tousled yellow hair rested
against her bosom. He put an arm around her neck and she flushed with
pleasure like a girl; but, although she held him close to her with a
sudden wistful tenderness, there was in her eyes a gloomy austerity which
forbade me to sentimentalize over the picture she made.
"But, Cousin Tryphena," I urged, "it _is_ a drop in the bucket, you know,
and that's something!"
She looked down at the child on her knee, she laid her cheek against his
bright hair, but she told me with harsh, self-accusing rigor, "Tain't
right for me to be here alive enjoying that dead man's little boy."
* * * * *
That was eighteen months ago. Mrs. Lindstrom is dead of consumption; but
the two children are rosy and hearty and not to be distinguished from the
other little Yankees of the village. They are devotedly attached to their
Aunt Tryphena and rule her despotically.
And so we live along, like a symbol of the great world, bewildered Cousin
Tryphena toiling lovingly for her adopted children, with the memory of her
descent into hell still darkening and confusing her kind eyes; Jomatiste
clothing his old body in rags and his soul in flaming indignation as he
batters hopefully at the ramparts of intrenched unrighteousness ... and
the rest of us doing nothing at all.