hand embroidered, and it would of been a good chance for Red Gap to get
acquainted with a young society girl of the right sort, but with this
scandal tearing up the town it looks like the visit will be a failure
for all parties.
I tell Cora on the contrary it looks like a good chance to recall the
town to its better self. If this here Dulcie is all that is claimed for
her she can very probably demolish the Latin Quarter and have us all
leading correct society lives in no time, because the public is fickle
and ever ready for new stuff, and as a matter of fact I suspect the Latin
Quarter is in a bad way because of everything in town of an illegal
character having been drunk up by the comrades. Me? I was trying to get
some new life into the fight, understand, being afraid it would die
natural and leave us to a dull winter.
Cora's eyes lighted up with a great hope and she beat it off to the
Recorder office to have a piece put in the paper about Dulcie's coming.
It was a grand piece, what with Cora giving the points and Edgar
Tomlinson writing it. It said one of Gotham's fair daughters would winter
in our midst, and how she was a prominent society leader and an ornament
of the fast hunting set, noted for her wit and beauty and dazzling
costumes, and how a series of brilliant affairs was being planned in her
honour by her hostess and aunt, Mrs. Leonard Wales, Red Gap's prominent
society matron and representative of all that was best in our community,
who would entertain extensively at her new and attractive home in Price's
Addition. And so forth.
I'm bound to say it created a flurry of interest among the younger
dancing set, and more than one begun to consider whether they would
remain loyal to Bohemia or plunge back into society once more, where
stockings are commonly wore, and smoking if done at all is hurriedly
sneaked through out on the porch or up in the bathroom.
From Cora's description I was all prepared to find Dulcie a tall,
stately creature of twenty-eight, kind of blase and haggard from her
wearing social duties in New York. But not so. Not so at all. Cora had
invitations out for a tea the day after Dulcie come; invitations, that
is, to the non-Bohemians and such as had reformed or give good signs of
it. I don't know which head I got in under. And this Dulcie niece was
nothing but a short, fat, blond kid of seventeen or eighteen that had
never led any society whatever. You could tell that right quick.
She was rapidly eating cream-cheese sandwiches when I was presented to
her. I knew in one look that society had never bothered Dulcie any.
Victuals was her curse. In the cattle business it ain't riding
disrespectful horses that gets you the big money; it's being able to
guess weights. And if Dulcie pulled a pound less than one hundred and
eighty then all my years of training has gone for naught. She was
certainly big-framed stock and going into the winter strong. Between
bites of sandwich, with a marshmallow now and then, she was saying that
she was simply crazy about the war, having the dandiest young French
soldier for a godson and sending him packages of food and cigarettes
constantly, and all the girls of her set had one, and wasn't it the
darlingest idea.
And her soldier was only twenty-two, though his beard made him look more
mature, and he wrote such dandy letters, but she didn't suppose there
would ever be anything between them because papa was too busy with his
coal yard to take her over there.
As the girl chattered on it didn't seem to me that our Latin Quarter was
in the slightest danger from her. Still, some of the girls that was there
seemed quite impressed or buffaloed by her manner. One idea she give out
now was new in Red Gap. She had all her rings named after meals. She had
a breakfast ring and a dinner ring and a supper ring and a banquet ring,
and Daisy Estelle Maybury admired the necklace she had on, and Dulcie
said that was a mere travelling necklace; and how did they like this cute
little restaurant frock she was wearing? A little dressmaker over on
Amsterdam Avenue had turned it out. All the parties she dealt with,
apparently, was little. She had a little dressmaker and a little hair
woman and a little manicure and a little florist, and so forth. She'd
et five cream-cheese sandwiches by this time, in spite of its being quite
painful for her to pick up a dropped napkin. Dulcie didn't fold over
good. You could tell here was a girl that had never tried to get away
from it all. She wanted to be right where it was.
Pretty soon one of the girls said something about the Bohemians of the
Latin Quarter, probably aiming to show this New York chatterbox that Red
Gap wasn't so far west as it looked. But Dulcie gave 'em the laugh. She
said oh, dear, New York society had simply quit taking up Bohemians, it
not being considered smart any longer, and did we really take them up
here? The girls backed up at this. And Dulcie went on being superior. She
said of course society people now and then made up a party and went down
to Washington Square to look them over, but as for taking them up, oh,
dear, no! It was more like a slumming party. One could stare at them,
but one simply didn't know them.
And perhaps, if she could get Aunt Cora to chaperon them, they might make
up one of these slumming parties some evening and go down to Red Gap's
Latin Quarter; it might be amusing. Cora Wales glistened at this. She
said she guessed people could now see how such goings-on were regarded by
society in the true sense of the word. And it did give the girls a chill,
calling the Bigler home a slum. But I still didn't see any stuff in
Dulcie to vanquish Vernabelle.
And I didn't see it a minute later when Dulcie wolfed her tenth
marshmallow and broke out about winter sports. She first said what
perfectly darling snow we had here. This caused some astonishment, no
one present having ever regarded snow as darling but merely as something
to shovel or wade through. So Dulcie pronged off a piece of sticky
chocolate cake and talked on. She said that everyone in New York was
outdooring, and why didn't we outdoor. It was a shame if we didn't go
in for it, with all this perfectly dandy snow. New York people had to
go out of town for their winter sports, owing to the snow not being good
for sport after it fell there; but here it was right at hand, and did we
mean to say we hadn't organized a winter-sports club.
No one spoke, for no one could guess what you did to outdoor properly.
About all they could think of was hustling out after another chunk for
the fireplace or bringing a scuttle of coal up from the cellar. But they
soon got the idea. Dulcie said right from this window she could see a
corking hill for a toboggan slide, and it would be perfectly darling to
be out there with plenty of hot coffee and sandwiches; and there must be
some peachy trips for snowshoe parties with sandwiches and coffee at the
end; or skating in the moonlight with a big bonfire and coffee and
sandwiches.
She suggested other things with coffee and sandwiches and finally got
up some real enthusiasm when she said she had brought some of the dearest
sport toggery with her. The girls was excited enough when they found out
you had to dress especial for it. They was willing to listen to anything
like that if New York society was really mad about it, even if it
conflicted with lifelong habits--no one in Red Gap but small boys
having ever slid downhill.
And still I didn't suspect Dulcie was going to groundsluice Vernabelle.
It looked like the Latin Quarter would still have the best of it, at
least during a cold winter. Which goes to show that you can't tell what
society will go mad about, even in Red Gap, when you can dress for it.
The girls had got a line on Dulcie and was properly impressed by her, and
then with an evening affair at the Wales home the dancing men had their
chance. Even some of the Bohemians was let to come, just to have 'em see
that there was indeed a better life; and reports of Dulcie was such that
all took advantage of it. The male sex was strong for the girl at once.
She didn't know that life is anything but selective, or that all the arts
round out one's appreciation of the beautiful, or that anything was "by
way of being" something. But all the food she took didn't make her
torpid; she giggled easily and had eyes like hothouse grapes, and in
spite of her fat there was something about her, like Cousin Egbert said
of Vernabelle. Anyway, she prevailed. Oswald Cummings, the pagan, for
one, quickly side-stepped his destiny of splendid sins, and Hugo Jennings
told Dulcie he had merely gone to this Latin Quarter as he would go to an
animal show, never having meant for one moment to take Bohemians up, any
more than New York society would.
First thing I hear, the winter-sports club has been organized, snowshoes
sent for and a couple of toboggans, and a toboggan slide half a mile
long made out in Price's Addition, starting at the top of the highest
hill, where Lon's big board sign with the painted bungalow made a fine
windshield, and running across some very choice building lots to the
foot of the grade, where it stopped on the proposed site of the Carnegie
Library. Lon was very keen about the sport himself after meeting Dulcie,
and let a fire be built near his sign that burned it down one night, but
he said it was all good advertising, more than he'd ever got out of being
a Bohemian.
Of course there was a great deal of fuss about the proper sport toggery,
but everyone got rigged out by the time the toboggans got there. Dulcie
was a great help in this and was downtown every day advising one or
another about the proper sweaters or blanket coats or peaked caps with
tassels, or these here big-eyed boots. You'd meet her in a store with
Stella Ballard, eating from a sack of potato chips; and half an hour
later she'd be in another store with Daisy Estelle Maybury, munching from
a box of ginger wafers; with always a final stop at the Bon Ton Kandy
Kitchen for a sack of something to keep life in her on the way home.
There really got to be so much excitement about winter sports that you
hardly heard any more talk about the Latin Quarter. People got to
speaking to each other again.
By the opening day of the sports club you wouldn't of thought any one in
town had ever tried to get away from it all. Even them that thought it
crazy came and stood round and said so. Cousin Egbert Floud said this
Dulcie was some sparrow, but nutty--going out in the cold that way when
nothing drove her out. Dulcie made a great hit with the club this first
day, having the correct Canadian toggery and being entirely fearless in
the presence of a toboggan. She'd zip to the bottom, come tramping back,
shooting on all six, grab a sandwich--for not a morsel of food had passed
her lips since she went down the time before--and do it all over again.
And every last ex-Bohemian, even Edgar Tomlinson, fighting for the chance
to save her from death by starvation! Dulcie played no favourites, being
entranced with 'em all. She said they was the dearest gentleman friends
she'd ever had. The way they was fighting for her favours she could of
called 'em her gentleman frenzy. Ain't I the heinous old madcap, thinking
of jokes like that?
Next day there was a snowshoe trip up to Stender's spring and back by way
of the tie camp. Dulcie hadn't ever snowshoed and it wasn't any light
matter when her shoes threw her down--requiring about three of the
huskiest boys to up-end her--but she was game and the boys was game and
she was soon teaching snowshoeing shoes how to take a joke. And from that
on winter sports ruled in Red Gap. The chamber of commerce even talked of
building an ice palace next year and having a carnival and getting the
town's name in the papers. Oh, there certainly must of been a surprised
lot of snow round there that winter. Nothing like this had ever happened
to it before.
And all being done on nothing stronger than coffee, with hardly a
cigarette and never anything that was by way of being a punk stick in a
closed room. It was certainly a lot healthier than a Latin Quarter for
these young people, and for the old ones, too. Dulcie had sure put one
large crimp into Bohemia, even if she could not be justly called an
intellectual giantess.
And Vernabelle knew who to blame, too, when the little group quit coming
round to get away from it all. She knew it was Dulcie. She said that
Dulcie seemed to be a pampered society butterfly that devoted all her
thoughts to dress. This was repeated to Dulcie by an ex-Bohemian, but she
found no poison in it. She said of course she devoted all her thoughts to
dress; that a young girl with her figure had to if she ever expected to
get anywhere in the world.
Even ex-comrade Lon Price would now shut his office at four o'clock every
day and go up on the hill and outdoor a bit, instead of getting away from
it all in a smoky Bohemian way. Besides he'd had a difference of opinion
with Vernabelle about the poster she was doing for him, the same being
more like an advertisement for some good bath soap, he said, than for
choice villa sites.
"I don't know anything about art," says Lon, "but I know what my wife
likes." Which left Vernabelle with another design on her hands and
brought Comrade Price out of Bohemia.
Even if Dulcie's winter sports hadn't done the trick I guess it would of
been done easy by her report that Bohemians was no longer thought to be
smart in New York, Red Gap being keenly sensitive in such matters. Metta
Bigler's mother firmly turned out the half-lights in Bohemia when she
heard of this talk of Dulcie's. I don't blame her. She didn't one bit
relish having her neat home referred to as a slum, say nothing of having
her only child using a lip stick and acting like an abandoned woman with
cigarettes and the wine cup.
She said just that to me, Metta's mother did. She said she had heard that
New York was all broken up into social sets, the same way Red Gap is, and
if Bohemians wasn't being took up by the better element in New York, then
they shouldn't be took up by the better element of Red Gap--at least not
in any home of which the deed was still in her name. She said of course
she couldn't keep Metta's guest from being a Bohemian, but she would have
to be it alone. She wasn't going to have a whole mob coming round every
day and being Bohemians all over the place, it being not only messy but
repugnant alike to sound morality and Christian enlightenment. And that
settled it. Our town was safe for one more winter. Of course God only
knows what someone may start next winter. We are far off from things,
but by no means safe.
Cousin Egbert was kind of sorry for Vernabelle. He said if she'd just
stuck to plain glass blowing she might of got by with it. He's a wonder,
that man--as teachable as a granite bowlder.
My Godfrey! Ten-thirty, and me having to start the spring sport of ditch
cleaning to-morrow morning at seven! Won't I ever learn!
IV
VENDETTA
By the evening lamp in the Arrowhead living room I did my bit, for the
moment, by holding a hank of gray wool for Ma Pettengill to wind. While
this minor war measure went forward the day's mail came. From a canvas
sack Lew Wee spilled letters and papers on the table. Whereupon the yarn
was laid by while Ma Pettengill eagerly shuffled the letters. She thought
fit to extenuate this eagerness. She said if people lived forever they
would still get foolishly excited over their mail; whereas everyone
knew well enough that nothing important ever came in it. To prove this
she sketched a rapid and entirely unexciting summary of the six unopened
letters she held.
One of them, she conceded, might be worth reading; and this she laid
aside. Of the remaining five she correctly guessed the contents of four.
Of the fifth she remarked that it would be from a poor feckless dub with
a large family who had owed her three hundred dollars for nine years. She
said it would tell a new hard-luck tale for non-payment of a note now due
for the eighth time. Here she was wrong. The letter inclosed a perfectly
new note for four hundred and fifty dollars; and would Mrs. Pettengill
send on the extra one hundred and fifty dollars that would enable the
debtor to get on his feet and pay all his debts, as there was a good
season of hog buying ahead of him!
"I guessed wrong," admitted the lady. "I certainly did that little man an
injustice, not suspecting he could think up something novel after nine
years." Grimly she scanned the new note. "As good as a treaty with
Germany!" she murmured and threw it aside, though I knew that the old
note and the new hundred and fifty would go forward on the morrow; for
she had spoken again of the debtor's large family. She said it was
wonderful what good breeders the shiftless are.
"Ain't I right, though, about the foolish way people fly at their mail?"
she demanded. "You might think they'd get wise after years and years
of being fooled; but--no, sir! Take me day after to-morrow, when the
next mail comes. I'll fall on it like I fell on this, with all my old
delusions uninjured. There sure does seem to be a lot of human nature
in most of us."
Then she opened the possibly interesting letter that had been put aside.
The envelope, at least, was interesting, bearing as it did the stamp of
a military censor for the American Expedition to France.
"You remember Squat Tyler, that long cow-puncher working for me when you
were here last time?"
I remembered Squat, who was indeed a long cow-puncher--long enough to be
known, also, to his intimates as Timberline.
"Well, Squat is over there in the trenches helping to make the world a
pleasant place to live in. He's a good shot, too."
The lady read the letter hurriedly to herself; then regaled me with bits
of it.
"The life here is very," she read. "That's all he says, at first--'The
life here is very.' I should judge it might be that from what I read in
the papers. Or mebbe he couldn't just think of the word. Let's see!
What else? Oh, yes--about digging. He says he didn't take to digging at
first, not having gone there for any common purpose, but one day he was
told to dig, and while he was thinking up something to say a million guns
began to go off; so he dug without saying a word. Hard and fast he says
he dug. He says: 'If a badger would of been there he would of been in my
way.' I'll bet! Squat wouldn't like to be shot at in all seriousness.
What next? Here he says I wouldn't dream what a big outfit this here U.S.
outfit is; he says it's the biggest outfit he ever worked for--not even
excepting Miller & Lux. What next? Oh, yes; here he tells about getting
one.
"'Last night I captured a big fat enemy; you know--a Heinie. It was as
dark as a cave, but I heard one snooping close. I says to my pardner I
keep hearing one snoop close; and he says forget it, because my hive is
swarming or something; and I says no; I will go out there and molest that
German. So I sneaked over the bank and through our barbed-wire fence that
everyone puts up here, and out a little ways to where I had heard one
snoop; and, sure enough--what do you think? He seen me first and knocked
my gun out of my hands with the butt of his. It got me mad, because it is
a new gun and I am taking fine care of it; so I clanched him'--that's
what Squat says, clanched. 'And, first, he run his finger into my right
eye, clear up to the knuckle it felt like; so I didn't say a word, but
hauled off quick and landed a hard right on the side of his jaw and
dropped him just like that. It was one peach I handed him and he slumped
down like a sack of mush. I am here to tell you it was just one punch,
though a dandy; but he had tried to start a fight, so it was his own
fault. So I took all his weapons away and when he come alive I kicked him
a few times and made him go into the U.S. trenches. He didn't turn out to
be much--only a piano tuner from Milwaukee; and I wish it had of been a
general I caught snooping. I certainly did molest him a-plenty, all
right. Just one punch and I brought him down out of control. Ha! Ha! The
life here is very different.'
"There; that must of been what he tried to say at the beginning--'The
life here is very different.' I should think he'd find it so, seeing the
only danger that boy was ever in here was the sleeping sickness."
Hereupon the lady removed the wrapper from a trade journal and scanned
certain market quotations. They pleased her little. She said it was
darned queer that the war should send every price in the world up but the
price of beef, beef quotations being just where the war had found them.
Not that she wanted to rob any one! Still and all, why give everyone a
chance but cattle raisers? She muttered hugely of this discrimination
and a moment later seemed to be knitting her remarks into a gray sock.
The mutterings had gradually achieved the coherence of remarks. And I
presently became aware that the uninflated price of beef was no longer
their burden.
They now concerned the singular reticence of all losers of fist fights.
Take Squat's German. Squat would be telling for the rest of his life how
he put that Wisconsin alien out with one punch. But if I guessed the
German would be telling it as often as Squat told it I was plumb foolish.
He wouldn't tell it at all. Losers never do. Any one might think that
parties getting licked lost their powers of speech. Not so with the
winners of fights; not so at all!
At this very minute, while we sat there in that room at a quarter past
eight, all over the wide world modest-seeming men were telling how they
had licked the other man with one punch, or two or three at the most. It
was being told in Kulanche County, Washington, and in Patagonia and
Philadelphia and Africa and China, and them places; in clubs and lumber
camps and Pullman cars and ships and saloons--in states that remained
free of the hydrant-headed monster, Prohibition--in tents and palaces; in
burning deserts and icy wastes. At that very second, in an ice hut up by
the North Pole, a modest Eskimo was telling and showing his admiring wife
and relatives just how he had put out another Eskimo that had come round
and tried to start something. Which was another mystery, the man winning
the fight being always put upon and invariably in the right. In every one
of these world-wide encounters justice always prevailed and only the
winner talked about it afterward.
"And lots of times," continued the lady, "this talkative winner has been
set upon by as many as three others. But he licks 'em all. Sometimes he
admits he had a little luck with the third man; but he gets two of the
cowards easy. Why, down in Red Gap only the other night I saw a kind of a
slight young man in a full-dress suit lick three big huskies that set on
him. He put two out with a punch apiece and got the third after about one
round of sparring. There he stood winner over all three, and hardly his
hair mussed; and you wouldn't of thought in the beginning that he could
lick one of the bunch. It was a good picture, all right, with this fight
coming in the first reel to start things off lively. But what I want to
know is why, out of these million fights that come off, you never hear a
word out of a loser! I'll bet all my Liberty Bonds right now that you
never yet heard a man tell about how he was licked in a fair fight."
I had to decline the wager. The most I could submit was that I had heard
some plausible excuses. The lady waved her entire knitting in
deprecation.