living debutante. I learned afterward that the great aim of science
is classification. I had these two classified in no time, like I'd
been pottering away at science all my life. Why, say, this Oswald
person even carried a patent cigar lighter that worked! You must of seen
hundreds of them nickel things that men pay money for. They work fine in
the store where you buy 'em. But did you ever see one work after the man
got it outside, where he needed it? The owner of one always takes it out,
looking strained and nervous, and presses the spring; and nothing happens
except that he swears and borrows a match. But Oswald's worked every
time. It was uncanny! Only a boy scout could of done it.
So they got settled and the field work begun next day. The two men would
ride off early to a place about five miles north of here that used to be
an ancient lake--so I was told. I don't know whether it did or not. It's
dry enough now. It certainly can't be considered any part of our present
water supply. They would take spades and hammers and magnifying glasses
and fountain pens, and Oswald's cigar lighter and some lunch, and come
back at night with a fine mess of these here trilobites and vertebrae;
and ganoids and petrified horseflies, and I don't know what all; mebbe
oyster shells, or the footprints of a bird left in solid rock, or the
outlines of starfish, or a shrimp that was fifty-two million years old
and perfectly useless.
They seemed to have a good time. And Oswald would set up late writing
remarks about the petrified game they had brought in.
I didn't used to see much of 'em, except at night when we'd gather for
the evening meal. But their talk at those times did wonders for me. All
about the aims of science and how we got here and what of it. The Prof
was a bulky old boy, with long gray hair and long black eyebrows, and
the habit of prevailing in argument. Him and Oswald never did agree on
anything in my hearing, except the Chink's corn muffins; and they looked
kind of mad at each other when they had to agree on them.
Take the age of this earth on which we make our living. They never got
within a couple of hundred million years of each other. Oswald was strong
for the earth's being exactly fifty-seven million years old. Trust him to
have it down fine! And the old man hung out for four hundred million.
They used to get all fussed up about this.
They quoted authorities. One scientist had figured close and found it was
fifty-six million years. And another, who seemed to be a headliner in the
world of science, said it was between twenty million and four hundred
million, with a probability of its being ninety-eight million. I kind of
liked that scientist. He seemed so human, like a woman in a bean-guessing
contest at the county fair. But still another scientist had horned in
with a guess of five hundred million years, which was at least easy to
remember.
Of course I never did much but listen, even when they argued this thing
that I knew all about; for back in Fredonia, New York, where I went to
Sunday-school, it was settled over fifty years ago. Our dear old pastor
told us the earth was exactly six thousand years old. But I let the poor
things talk on, not wanting to spoil their fun. When one of 'em said the
world was made at least fifty-seven million years ago I merely said it
didn't look anywhere near as old as that, and let it go.
We had some merry little meals for about a month. If it wasn't the age
of God's footstool it would be about what we are descended from, the
best bet in sight being that it's from fishes that had lungs and breathed
under water as easy as anything, which at least put dimmers on that old
monkey scandal in our ancestry. Or, after we moved outside on the porch,
which we had to do on account of Oswald smoking the very worst cigars he
was able to find in all the world, they would get gabby about all things
in the world being simply nothing, which is known to us scientists as
metaphysics.
Metaphysics is silly-simple--like one, two, three. It consists of subject
and object. I only think I'm knitting this here sock. There ain't any
sock here and there ain't any me. We're illusions. The sound of that
Chink washing dishes out in the kitchen is a mere sensation inside my
head. So's the check for eighty dollars I will have to hand him on the
first of the month--though the fool bank down in Red Gap will look on
it with uneducated eyes and think it's real. Philosophers have dug into
these matters and made 'em simple for us. It took thousands of books to
do it; but it's done at last. Everything is nothing. Ask any scientist;
he'll make it just as clear to you as a mist in a fog.
And even nothing itself ain't real. They go to that extreme. Not even
empty space is real. And the human mind can't comprehend infinite space.
I got kind of hot when one of 'em said that. I asked 'em right off
whether the human mind could comprehend space that had an end to it. Of
course it can't comprehend anything else but infinite space. I had 'em,
all right; they had to change the subject. So they switched over to free
will. None of us has it.
That made me hot again. I told 'em to try for even five minutes and see
if they could act as if they didn't have the power of choice. Of course
I had 'em again. Mebbe there ain't free will, but we can't act as if
there wasn't. Those two would certainly make the game of poker impossible
if folks believed 'em.
I nearly broke up the party that night. I said it was a shame young men
was being taught such stuff when they could just as well go to some good
agricultural college and learn about soils and crops and what to do in
case of a sick bull. Furthermore, I wanted to know what they would do to
earn their daily bread when they'd got everything dug up and labelled.
Pretty soon they'd have every last organic remains put into a catalogue,
the whole set complete and unbroken--and then what? They'd be out of a
job.
The Prof laughed and said let the future take care of itself. He said we
couldn't tell what might happen, because, as yet, we was nothing really
but supermonkeys. That's what he called our noble race--supermonkeys!
So I said yes; and these here philosophers that talked about subject and
object and the nothingness of nothing reminded me of monkeys that get
hold of a looking-glass and hold it up and look into it, and then sneak
one paw round behind the glass to catch the other monkey. So he laughed
again and said "Not bad, that!"
You could kid the Prof, which is more than I can say for Oswald. Oswald
always took a joke as if you'd made it beside the casket holding all that
was mortal of his dear mother. In the presence of lightsome talk poor
Oswald was just a chill. He was an eater of spoon-meat, and finicking.
He could talk like Half Hours With the World's Best Authors, and yet had
nothing to say but words.
Still, I enjoyed them evenings. I learned to be interested in vital
questions and to keep up with the world's best thought, in company
with these gents that was a few laps ahead of it. But not so with the
motherless chit. This here Lydia made no effort whatever to keep up with
the world's best thought. She didn't seem to care if she never perfected
her intellect. It would of been plain to any eye that she was spreading
a golden mesh for the Oswald party; yet she never made the least clumsy
effort to pander to his high ideals.
She was a wonder, that girl! All day she would set round the house,
with her hair down, fixing over a lace waist or making fudge, and not
appearing to care much about life. Come night, when the party was due to
return, she would spry up, trick herself out in something squashy, with
the fashionable streamlike effect and a pretty pair of hammock stockings
with white slippers, and become an animated porch wren. That seemed to
be the limit of her science.
Most motherless chits would of pretended a feverish interest in the
day's hunt for fossil cockroaches, and would even of gone out to chip
off rocks with a hammer; but not Lydia. She would never pretend to the
least infatuation for organic remains, and would, like as not, strike up
something frivolous on her ukulele while Oswald was right in the middle
of telling all about the secret of life. She was confident all the time,
though, like she already had him stuffed and mounted. She reminded me of
that girl in the play What Every Woman Thinks She Knows.
Lydia had great ideas of cooking, which is an art to ensnare males. She
said she was a dandy cook and could make Saratoga chips that was all to
the Kenosha--whatever that meant. Think of it--Saratoga chips! Over eight
hundred ways to cook potatoes, and all good but one; and, of course,
she'd have to hit on this only possible way to absolutely ruin potatoes.
She could cook other things, too--fudge and stuffed eggs and cheese
straws, the latter being less than no food at all. It gives you a line
on her.
I suppose it was all you could expect from a born debutante that had been
brought up to be nice to college boys on a moonlit porch, allowing them
to put another sofa pillow back of her, and wearing their class pins, and
so forth. And here she was come to thirty, with fudge and cheese straws
and the ukulele still bounding her mental horizon, yet looking far above
her station to one of Oswald's serious magnitude.
I never have made out what she saw in him. But then we never do. She
used to kid about him--and kid him, for that matter. She'd say to me:
"He does care frightfully about himself, doesn't he?" And she said to
me and said to him that he had mice in his wainscoting. Mice or rats,
I forget which. Any wise bookmaker would of posted her up in this race
as a hundred-to-one shot. She had plenty of blandishment for Oswald, but
not his kind. She'd try to lure him with furtive femininity and plaintive
melodies when she ought to have been putting on a feverish interest in
organic fauna. Oswald generally looked through or past her. He give a
whole lot more worry to whether his fountain pen would clog up on him.
They was both set in their ways, and they was different ways; it looked
to me like they never could meet. They was like a couple of trained seals
that have learned two different lines of tricks.
Of course Oswald was sunk at last, sunk by a chance shot; and there
was no doubt about his being destroyed, quantities of oil marking the
surface where he went down. But it seemed like pure chance. Yet, if you
believe Oswald and scientific diagnosis, he'd been up against it since
the world was first started, twenty million or five hundred million years
ago--I don't really know how many; but what's a few million years between
scientists? I don't know that I really care. It's never kept me wakeful
a night yet. I'd sooner know how to get eighty-five per cent. of calves.
Anyway, it was Oswald's grand new wardrobe trunk that had been
predestined from the world's beginning to set him talkative about his
little flower with bones and a voice; this same new wardrobe trunk that
was the pride of his barren life and his one real worry because he
might sometime lose the keys to it.
It's an affecting tale. It begun the night Oswald wanted the extra table
put in his room. They'd come in that day with a good haul of the oldest
inhabitants round here that had passed to their long rest three million
years ago--petrified fishworms and potato bugs, and so forth, and rocks
with bird tracks on 'em. Oswald was as near human as I'd seen him, on
account of having found a stone caterpillar or something--I know it had
a name longer than it was; it seemed to be one like no one else had, and
would therefore get him talked about, even if it had passed away three
million years before the Oregon Short Line was built.
And Oswald went on to ask if he could have this extra table in his room,
because these specimens of the disturbed dead was piling up on him and he
wanted to keep 'em in order. He had lighted one of his terrible cigars;
so I said I would quickly go and see about a table. I said that with his
venomous cigar going I would quickly have to go and see about something
or else have my olfactory nerve resected, which was a grand scientific
phrase I had brightly picked out and could play with one finger. It means
having something done so you can't smell any more.
The Prof laughed heartily, but Oswald only said he hadn't supposed I
would feel that way, considering the kind of tobacco my own cigarettes
was made of, though he was sorry and would hereafter smoke out of doors.
He took a joke like a child taking castor oil. Anyway, I went out and
found a spare table in the storeroom, and the Chink took it to Oswald's
room.
The fateful moment was at hand for which Nature had been conspiring all
these ages. The Chink held the table up against him, with the legs
sticking out, and Oswald went ahead to show him where to put it. Close
by the door, inside his room, was the lovely, yawning new trunk. Oswald
must of been afraid one of the table legs would spear it and mar its fair
varnish. He raised one hand to halt the table, then closed the trunk
tenderly, snapped the lock, and moved it over into the corner, beyond
chance of desecration.
Then he give careful directions for placing the table, which had to be
carried round the foot of the bed and past another table, which held
marine fossils and other fishbones. It was placed between this table
and still another, which held Oswald's compass and microscope and his
kill-kare kamp stove and his first-aid kit and his sportsman's belt
safe--all neatly arranged in line. I had followed to see if there was
anything more he needed, and he said no, thank you. So I come out here
to look over my mail that had just come.
Ten minutes later I felt the presence of a human being and looked up to
see that Oswald, the oldest living boy scout, was dying on his feet in
the doorway there. His face looked like he had been in jail three years.
I thought he had seen a ghost or had a heart shock. He looked as if he
was going to keel over. He had me scared. Finally he dragged himself over
to the table here and says faintly:
"I believe I should like a severe drink of whisky!"
I didn't ask any questions. I saw it must be some private grief; so I got
the whisky. It happened I had just one bottle in the house, and that was
some perfectly terrible whisky that had been sent me by mistake. It was
liquid barbed wire. Even a little drink of it would of been severe. Two
drinks would make you climb a tree like a monkey. But the stricken Oswald
seemed able to outfight it. He poured out half a tumblerful, drunk it
neat and refused water. He strangled some, for he was only human after
all. Then he sagged down on the couch and looked up at me with a feeble
and pathetic grin and says:
"I'm afraid I've done something. I'm really afraid I have."
He had me in a fine state by this time. The only thing I could think of
was that he had killed the Prof by accident. I waited for the horrible
details, being too scared to ask questions.
"I'm afraid," he says, "that I've locked the keys of my new trunk inside
of it. I'm afraid I really have! And what does one do in such a case?"
I nearly broke down then. I was in grave danger of fatal hysterics.
I suffered from the reaction. I couldn't trust myself; so I got over
to the door, where my face wouldn't show, and called to the Prof and
Lydia. I now heard them out on the porch. Then I edged outside the
door, where people wouldn't be quite so scared if I lost control of
myself and yelled.
Then these two went in and listened to Oswald's solemn words. The Prof
helped me out a lot. He yelled good. He yelled his head off; and under
cover of his tumult I managed to get in a few whoops of my own, so that
I could once more act something like a lady when I went in.
Lydia, the porch wren, was the only one to take Oswald's bereavement at
all decent. The chit was sucking a stick of candy she had shoved down
into a lemon. Having run out of town candy, one of the boys had fetched
her some of the old-fashioned stick kind, with pink stripes; she would
ram one of these down to the bottom of a lemon and suck up the juice
through the candy. She looked entirely useless while she was doing this,
and yet she was the only one to show any human sympathy.
She asked the stricken man how it happened, and he told the whole
horrible story--how he always kept the keys hanging on this little
brass hook inside the trunk so he would know where they was, and how he
had shut the trunk in a hurry to get it out of the way of the table legs,
and the spring lock had snapped. And what did one do now--if anything?
"Why, it's perfectly simple! You open it some other way," says Lydia.
"Ah, but how?" says Oswald. "Those trunks are superbly built. How can
one?"
"Oh, it must be easy," says Lydia, still clinging to her candy sour.
"I'll open it for you to-morrow if you will remind me."
"Remind you?" says Oswald in low, tragic tones. You could see he was
never going to think of anything else the rest of his life.
By this time the Prof and I had controlled our heartless merriment; so we
all traipsed in to the scene of this here calamity and looked at the shut
trunk. It was shut good; no doubt about that. There was also no doubt
about the keys being inside.
"You can hear them rattle!" says the awed Oswald, teetering the trunk on
one corner. So each one of us took a turn and teetered the trunk back and
forth and heard the imprisoned keys jingle against the side where they
was hung.
"But what's to be done?" says Oswald. "Of course something must be done."
That seemed to be about where Oswald got off.
"Why, simply open it some other way," says Lydia, which seemed to be
about where she got off, too.
"But how?" moans the despairing man. And she again says:
"Oh, it must be too simple!"
At that she was sounding the only note of hope Oswald could hear; and
right then I believe he looked at her fair and square for the first time
in his life. He was finding a woman his only comforter in his darkest
hour.
The Prof took it lightly indeed. He teetered the trunk jauntily and says:
"Your device was admirable; you will always know where those keys are."
Then he teetered it again and says, like he was lecturing on a platform:
"This is an ideal problem for the metaphysical mind. Here, veritably,
is life itself. We pick it up, we shake it, and we hear the tantalizing
key to existence rattle plainly just inside. We know the key to be there;
we hear it in every manifestation of life. Our problem is to think it
out. It is simple, as my child has again and again pointed out. Sit there
before your trunk and think effectively, with precision. You will then
think the key out. I would take it in hand myself, but I have had a hard
day."
Then Lydia releases her candy long enough to say how about finding
some other trunk keys that will unlock it. Oswald is both hurt and made
hopeful by this. He don't like to think his beautiful trunk could respond
to any but its rightful key; it would seem kind of a slur against its
integrity. Still, he says it may be tried. Lydia says try it, of course;
and if no other key unlocks it she will pick the lock with a hairpin.
Oswald is again bruised by this suggestion; but he bears up like a man.
And so we dig up all the trunk keys and other small keys we can find and
try to fool that trunk. And nothing doing!
"I was confident of it," says Oswald; he's really disappointed, yet proud
as Punch because his trunk refuses coldly to recognize these strange
keys.
Then Lydia brings a bunch of hairpins and starts to be a burglar. She
says in clear tones that it is perfectly simple; and she keeps on saying
exactly this after she's bent the whole pack out of shape and not won a
trick. Yet she cheered Oswald a lot, in spite of her failures. She never
for one instant give in that it wasn't simple to open a trunk without the
key.
But it was getting pretty late for one night, so Oswald and Lydia knocked
off and set out on the porch a while. Oswald seemed to be awakening
to her true woman's character, which comes out clad in glory at times
when things happen. She told him she would sure have that trunk opened
to-morrow with some more hairpins--or something.
But in the morning she rushed to Oswald and said they would have the
blacksmith up to open it. He would be sure to open it in one minute with
a few tools; and how stupid of her not to of thought of it before! I
liked that way she left Oswald out of any brain work that had to be done.
So they sent out to Abner to do the job, telling him what was wanted.
Abner is a simple soul. He come over with a hammer and a cold chisel to
cut the lock off. He said there wasn't any other way. Oswald listened
with horror to this cold-blooded plan of murder and sent Abner sternly
away. Lydia was indignant, too, at the painful suggestion. She said Abner
was a shocking old bounder.
Then Oswald had to go out to his field work; but his heart couldn't
of been in it that day. I'll bet he could of found the carcass of a
petrified zebra with seven legs and not been elated by it. He had
only the sweet encouragement of Lydia to brace him. He was depending
pathetically on that young woman.
He got back that night to find that Lydia had used up another pack of
hairpins and a number of the tools from my sewing machine. All had been
black failure, but she still said it was perfectly simple. She never lost
the note of hope out of her voice. Oswald was distressed, but he had to
regard her more and more like an object of human interest.
She now said it was a simple matter of more keys. So the next day I sent
one of the boys down to Red Gap; and he rode a good horse to its finish
and come back with about five dozen nice little trunk keys with sawed
edges. They looked cheerful and adequate, and we spent a long, jolly
evening trying 'em out. Not one come anywhere near getting results.
Oswald's trunk was still haughty, in spite of all these overtures. Oswald
was again puffed up with pride, it having been shown that his trunk was
no common trunk. He said right out that probably the only two keys in all
the world that would open that lock was the two hanging inside. He never
passed the trunk without rocking it to hear their sad tinkle.
Lydia again said, nonsense! It was perfectly simple to open a trunk
without the right key. Oswald didn't believe her, and yet he couldn't
help taking comfort from her. I guess that was this girl's particular
genius--not giving up when everyone else could see that she was talking
half-witted. Anyway, she was as certain as ever, and I guess Oswald
believed her in spite of himself. His ponderous scientific brain told
him one thing in plain terms, and yet he was leaning on the words of a
chit that wouldn't know a carboniferous vertebra from an Upper Silurian
gerumpsus.
The keys had gone back, hairpins was proved to be no good, and scientific
analysis had fell down flat. There was the trunk and there was the keys
inside; and Oswald was taking on a year in age every day of his life. He
was pretty soon going to be as old as the world if something didn't
happen. He'd got so that every time he rocked the trunk to hear the keys
rattle he'd shake his head like the doctor shakes it at a moving-picture
deathbed to show that all is over. He was in a pitch-black cavern miles
underground, with one tiny candle beam from a possible rescuer faintly
showing from afar, which was the childish certainty of this oldest living
débutante that it was perfectly simple for a woman to do something
impossible. She was just blue-eyed confidence.
After the men left one morning on their hunt for long-defunct wood ticks
and such, Lydia confided to me that she was really going to open that
trunk. She was going to put her mind on it. She hadn't done this yet,
it seemed, but to-day she would.
"The poor boy has been rudely jarred in his academic serenity," says she.
"He can't bear up much longer; he has rats in his wainscoting right now.
It makes me perfectly furious to see a man so helpless without a woman.
Today I'll open his silly old trunk for him."
"It will be the best day's work you ever done," I says, and she nearly
blushed.
"I'm not thinking of that," she says.
The little liar! As if she hadn't seen as well as I had how Oswald was
regarding her with new eyes. So I wished her good luck and started out
myself, having some field work of my own to do that day in measuring
a lot of haystacks down at the lower end of the ranch.