WORK AND DREAMS
By early afternoon Jeanne’s old cheerful smile was back again. And why
not? Was she not seated between two friends, Jensie and Tom, studying the
dialogue of this altogether absorbing movie that hour by hour took on a
more vivid picture of reality?
They were having a gay time there in Lorena LeMar’s living room. From
time to time peals of laughter came drifting out through the open window.
Jensie was the critic. And a very expert critic she turned out to be.
“No. He would never say that, your old Jud who lives at the foot of Big
Black Mountain. He would not say, ‘Those horses are fast travelers.’ He’d
say, ‘Them’s the travelin’est hosses I ever most seed.’ He wouldn’t say,
‘It’s done.’ He’d say, ‘I done done it.’”
“But Jensie,” Jeanne protested, “if we change all this, how are the
people going to know what it’s all about? Might as well have him talk
German.”
“W-e-l-l, you asked me.” Jensie puckered her fair brow. “That’s the way
we talk down there. We don’t say ‘rifle,’ but ‘rifle-gun.’ We say
‘we-uns’ and ‘you-all.’”
“Well,” said Tom after a moment’s thought, “a great deal of that is easy
enough to understand. It does make the whole thing seem a lot more real.
And if we find old Jud talking too much, why, we’ll just shut him up and
make him talk with his hands and his feet.”
“And his pistol-gun,” Jensie added. “Pistol-guns talk a heap down there
in the mountings.”
They all had a good laugh, and once more the work moved on smoothly.
“To-morrow,” Jeanne said to Jensie before bidding her good-bye,
“to-morrow morning we will go out to that so beautiful college you have
been telling me about. What do you say?”
“That,” Jensie laughed joyfully, “that’s a right smart clever idea.”
“Then we shall go.” Jeanne gave her hand a squeeze. “I am tired. There
are trees, you say, and grass, very much grass. Good! We shall sit upon
the grass beneath those spreading elms and forget this noisy city.”
They went. The electric car whirled them away to the country. It seemed
that but a moment had passed when they found themselves walking up a path
shaded by two rows of ancient elms.
“So green the grass!” Jeanne murmured. “So graceful the trees and so
strong! And that fine old building of limestone. It is like France, my so
beautiful France!
“But listen!”
She paused. From a smaller building with very high windows there floated
the words of a song.
“Singing? It is Chapel! Come!” Jeanne seized Jensie by the hand. “Come
quick! We will slip into a back seat. It has been so long, oh, so long
since I heard such singing.”
As they entered the door all heads were bowed in prayer. Deeply
religious, as all the best of her race are, Jeanne bowed her head
reverently.
The prayer at an end, six hundred young voices burst into song.
“And how they sing it!” There were tears in Jeanne’s eyes. “They sing
what they believe. How very, very wonderful!”
Hidden away in a high-backed seat, they listened to the simple, sincere
message of a white-haired professor as he talked to this silent audience
of young people about God and His relation to their lives.
Jeanne was strangely silent as she left the place. Perhaps in her mind
was a picture of the little stone church in her own land where she had so
often knelt in prayer.
“It is good,” she murmured at last. “Tomorrow as I try to tell to the
world in pictures the story of simple, kindly folks who live in the
mountains, I shall do it better because of having been here.”
For a long time they sat on the grass beneath the elms. A gray squirrel
came down a tree to chatter at them. A robin, whose nest was in a nearby
lilac bush, sang them a song. A cricket chirped. From far away came a
dog’s bark. A cobweb went floating high overhead.
“Come!” Jeanne whispered reluctantly. “We must go back.”
That night as she sat looking out into the half darkness of the night,
Jeanne saw again in her mind’s eye the girl in a nile-green dress and
golden slippers. And as before, the green changed its shade and became a
sloping hill where broad elms sighed in the breeze.
“There will be no nile-green dress and golden slippers,” she whispered.
“Instead, if success is ours, Jensie shall go to that so beautiful
college where they sing that which they believe and ask such wonderful
prayers.”
And down in her heart of hearts she knew that she would strive harder for
success than ever before, because she was working for another’s happiness
and not entirely for her own.