Plans for the Journey East
Until late in the afternoon they rode through a land that was bleak and
barren of all grace or cheer. The dull browns and greys of the
landscape were unrelieved by any green or freshness save close by the
banks of an occasional stream. The vivid blue of a cloudless sky served
only to light up its desolation to greater disadvantage. It was a grim
unsmiling land, hard to like.
"This may be God's own country," said Percival once, looking out over a
stretch of grey sage-brush to a mass of red sandstone jutting up, high,
sharp, and ragged, in the distance--"but it looks to me as if He got
tired of it Himself and gave up before it was half finished."
"A man has to work here a few years to love it," said Uncle Peter,
shortly.
As they left the car at Montana City in the early dusk, that thriving
metropolis had never seemed so unattractive to Percival; so rough, new,
garish, and wanting so many of the softening charms of the East.
Through the wide, unpaved streets, lined with their low wooden
buildings, they drove to the Bines mansion, a landmark in the oldest
and most fashionable part of the town. For such distinctions are made
in Western towns as soon as the first two shanties are built. The Bines
house had been a monument to new wealth from the earliest days of the
town, which was a fairly decent antiquity for the region. But the house
and the town grated harshly now upon the young man. He burned with a
fever of haste to be off toward the East--over the far rim of hills,
and the farther higher mountain range, to a land that had warmed
genially under three hundred years of civilised occupancy--where people
had lived and fraternised long enough to create the atmosphere he
craved so ardently.
While Chinese Wung lighted the hall gas and busied himself with their
hats and bags, Psyche Bines came down the stairs to greet them. Never
had her youthful freshness so appealed to her brother. The black gown
she wore emphasised her blond beauty. As to give her the aspect of
mourning one might have tried as reasonably to hide the radiance of the
earth in springtime with that trifling pall.
Her brother kissed her with more than his usual warmth. Here was one to
feel what he felt, to sympathise warmly with all those new yearnings
that were to take him out of the crude West. She wanted, for his own
reasons, all that he wanted. She understood him; and she was his ally
against the aged and narrow man who would have held them to life in
that physical and social desert.
"Well, sis, here we are!" he began. "How fine you're looking! And how
is Mrs. Throckmorton? Give her my love and ask her if she can be ready
to start for the effete East in twenty minutes."
It was his habit to affect that he constantly forgot his mother's name.
He had discovered years before that he was sometimes able thus to
puzzle her momentarily.
"Why, Percival!" exclaimed this excellent lady, coming hurriedly from
the kitchen regions, "I haven't a thing packed. Twenty minutes!
Goodness! I do declare!"
It was an infirmity of Mrs. Bines that she was unable to take otherwise
than literally whatever might be said to her; an infirmity known and
played upon relentlessly by her son.
"Oh, well!" he exclaimed, with a show of irritation. "I suppose we'll
be delayed then. That's like a woman. Never ready on time. Probably we
can't start now till after dinner. Now hurry! You know that boat leaves
the dock for Tonsilitis at 8.23--I hope you won't be seasick."
"Boat--dock--" Mrs. Bines stopped to convince herself beyond a
certainty that no dock nor boat could be within many hundred miles of
her by any possible chance.
"Never mind," said Psyche; "give ma half an hour's notice and she can
start for any old place."
"Can't she though!" and Percival, seizing his astounded mother, waltzed
with her down the hall, leaving her at the far end with profusely
polite assurances that he would bring her immediately a lemon-ice, an
ice-pick, and a cold roast turkey with pink stockings on.
"Never mind, Mrs. Cartwright," he called back to her--"oh, beg
pardon--Bines? yes, yes, to be sure--well, never mind, Mrs. Brennings.
We'll give you time to put your gloves and a bottle of horse-radish and
a nail-file and hammer into that neat travelling-bag of yours.
"Now let me go up and get clean again. That lovely alkali dust has
worked clear into my bearings so I'm liable to have a hot box just as
we get the line open ninety miles ahead."
At dinner and afterwards the new West and the old aligned themselves
into hostile camps, as of yore. The young people chatted with lively
interest of the coming change, of the New York people who had visited
the mine, of the attractions and advantages of life in New York.
Uncle Peter, though he had long since recognised his cause as lost,
remained doggedly inimical to the migration. The home was being broken
up and he was depressed.
"Anyhow, you'll soon be back," he warned them. "You won't like it a
mite. I tried it myself thirty years ago. I'll jest camp here until you
do come back. My! but you'll be glad to get here again."
"Why not have Billy Brue come stay with you," suggested Mrs. Bines, who
was hurting herself with pictures of the old man's loneliness, "in case
you should want a plaster on your back or some nutmeg tea brewed, or
anything? That Wung is so trifling."
"Maybe I might," replied the old man, "but Billy Brue ain't exactly
broke to a shack like this. I know just what he'd do all his spare
time; he'd set down to that new-fangled horseless piano and play it to
death."
Uncle Peter meant the new automatic piano in the parlour. As far as the
new cabinet was from the what-not this modern bit of mechanism was from
the old cottage organ--the latter with its "Casket of Household
Melodies" and the former with its perforated paper repertoire of "The
World's Best Music," ranging without prejudice from Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony to "I Never Did Like a Nigger Nohow," by a composer who shall
be unnamed on this page.
"And Uncle Peter won't have any one to bother him when he makes a
litter with all those old plans and estimates and maps of his," said
Psyche; "you'll be able to do a lot more work, Uncle Peter, this
winter."
"Yes, only I ain't got any more work to do than I ever had, and I
always managed to do that, no matter how you did clean up after me and
mix up my papers. I'm like old Nigger Pomeroy. He was doin' a job of
whitewashin' one day, and he had an old whitewash brush with most of
the hair gone out of it. I says to him, 'Pomeroy, why don't you get you
a new brush? you could do twice as much work.' And Pomeroy says,
'That's right, Mr. Bines, but the trouble is I ain't got twice as much
work to do.' So don't you folks get out on _my_ account," he concluded,
politely.
"And you know we shall be in mourning," said Psyche to her brother.
"I've thought of that. We can't do any entertaining, except of the most
informal kind, and we can't go out, except very informally; but, then,
you know, there aren't many people that have us on their lists, and
while we're keeping quiet we shall have a chance to get acquainted a
little."
"I hear they do have dreadful times with help in New York," said Mrs.
Bines.
"Don't let that bother you, ma," her son reassured her. "We'll go to
the Hightower Hotel, first. You remember you and pa were there when it
first opened. It's twice as large now, and we'll take a suite, have our
meals served privately, our own servants provided by the hotel, and you
won't have a thing to worry you. We'll be snug there for the winter.
Then for the summer we'll go to Newport, and when we come back from
there we'll take a house. Meantime, after we've looked around a bit,
we'll build, maybe up on one of those fine corners east of the Park."
"I almost dread it," his mother rejoined. "I never _did_ see how they
kept track of all the help in that hotel, and if it's twice as
monstrous now, however _do_ they do it--and have the beds all made
every day and the meals always on time?"
"And you can _get_ meals there," said Percival.
"I've been needing a broiled lobster all summer--and now the oysters
will be due--fine fat Buzzard's Bays--and oyster crabs."
"He ain't been able to touch a morsel out here," observed Uncle Peter,
with a palpably false air of concern. "I got all worried up about him,
barely peckin' at a crumb or two."
"I never could learn to eat those oysters out of their shells," Mrs.
Bines confessed. "They taste so much better out of the can. Once we had
them raw and on two of mine were those horrid little green crabs,
actually squirming. I was going to send them back, but your pa laughed
and ate them himself--ate them alive and kicking."
"And terrapin!" exclaimed Percival, with anticipatory relish.
"That terrapin stew does taste kind of good," his mother admitted,
"but, land's sakes! it has so many little bits of bones in it I always
get nervous eating it. It makes me feel as if all my teeth was coming
out."
"You'll soon learn all those things, ma," said her daughter--"and not
to talk to the waiters, and everything like that. She always asks them
how much they earn, and if they have a family, and how many children,
and if any of them are sick, you know," she explained to Percival.
"And I s'pose you ain't much of a hand fur smokin' cigarettes, are you,
ma?" inquired Uncle Peter, casually.
"Me!" exclaimed Mrs. Bines, in horror; "I never smoked one of the nasty
little things in my life."
"Son," said the old man to Percival, reproachfully, "is that any way to
treat your own mother? Here she's had all this summer to learn
cigarette smokin', and you ain't put her at it--all that time wasted,
when you _know_ she's got to learn. Get her one now so she can light
up."
"Why, Uncle Peter Bines, how absurd!" exclaimed his granddaughter.
"Well, them ladies smoked the other day, and they was some of the
reg'ler original van Vanvans. You don't want your poor ma kep' out of
the game, do you? Goin' to let her set around and toy with the coppers,
or maybe keep cases now and then, are you? Or, you goin' to get her a
stack of every colour and let her play with you? Pish, now, havin' been
to a 'Frisco seminary--she can pick it up, prob'ly in no time; but ma
ought to have practice here at home, so she can find out what brand she
likes best. Now, Marthy, them Turkish cigarettes, in a nice silver box
with some naked ladies painted on the outside, and your own monogram
'M.B.' in gold letters on every cigarette--"
"Don't let him scare you, ma," Percival interrupted. "You'll get into
the game all right, and I'll see that you have a good time."
"Only I hope the First M.E. Church of Montana City never hears of her
outrageous cuttin's-up," said Uncle Peter, as if to himself. "They'd
have her up and church her, sure--smokin' cigarettes with her gold
monogram on, at _her_ age!" "And of course we must go to the Episcopal
church there," said Psyche. "I think those Episcopal ministers are just
the smartest looking men ever. So swell looking, and anyway it's the
only church the right sort of people go to. We must be awfully high
church, too. It's the very best way to know nice people."
"I s'pose if every day'd be Sunday by-and-bye, like the old song says,
it'd be easier fur you, wouldn't it?" asked the old man. "You and Petie
would be 401 and 402 in jest no time at all."
Uncle Peter continued to be perversely frivolous about the most
exclusive metropolitan society in the world. But Uncle Peter was a
crabbed old man, lingering past his generation, and the young people
made generous allowance for his infirmities.
"Only there's one thing," said his sister to Percival, when later they
were alone, "we must be careful about ma; she _will_ persist in making
such dreadful breaks, in spite of everything I can do. In San Francisco
last June, just before we went to Steaming Springs, there was one hot
day, and of course everybody was complaining. Mrs. Beale remarked that
it wasn't the heat that bothered us so, but the humidity. It was so
damp, you know. Ma spoke right up so everybody could hear her, and
said, 'Yes; isn't the humidity dreadful? Why, it's just running off me
from every pore!'"