_Yellow Gentians and Blue_
_By ZONA GALE_
YELLOW GENTIANS AND BLUE
PREFACE TO A LIFE—A NOVEL
MISTER PITT—A PLAY
FAINT PERFUME—A NOVEL
MISS LULU BETT—A NOVEL
MISS LULU BETT—A PLAY
_Yellow Gentians
and
Blue_
BY
ZONA GALE
[Illustration]
New York and London
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMXXVII
COPYRIGHT 1927 BY
D. APPLETON & COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Copyright, 1920, by The Curtis Publishing Company; 1923, by The
Nation, Inc.; 1924, 1925, by The Century Company; 1925, by
George H. Doran Company; 1925, 1926, by The Crowell Publishing
Company; 1927, by The International Magazine Company; 1927, by
The Pictorial Review Company.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I
YELLOW GENTIANS
THE CHARIVARI 3
AUTOBIOGRAPHY 10
BELNAP 15
BILL 20
LAST NIGHT 26
BELLA 35
CHERRIES 41
THE PIECE 46
THE SPIDER 52
VOICES 58
THE BLUE VELVET GOWN 64
TOMMY TAYLOR 74
ERNIE MENDENHALL 88
THE BIOGRAPHY OF BLADE 101
IN THE LOBBY 112
II
—AND BLUE
THE FOURTH GENERATION 135
THE QUESTION 140
THE VOICE 147
THE WOMAN 152
A FAR CRY 158
THE TWO SOULS 174
I
_Yellow Gentians_
... The yellow gentian which has a very bitter taste.
NOAH WEBSTER
THE CHARIVARI
In one of the smallest farms in the Caledonia hills lived Obald Bronson,
alone, and known down the countryside as the strange man who walked to
the town to spare his one horse and who slept with no pillow. The people
smiled at Obald when they met him walking to town. And he was so awkward
and timid that they scorned him. Seven years before he had come among
them from Norway, and that was all about him that they knew.
One day as a young Scotch farmer of the hills, Edward Muir, was driving
a load of grain by Obald’s house, he saw a little smoke curling from
a window and when he ran in, calling and shouting, fire was eating at
a wall and Obald was not there. It was a wood-box fire, no more, and
Edward was able to put it out. He had never been in Obald’s house and few
of the Caledonia farmers had been there. He saw the room bare, neat,
painted; food on the shelf, corn drying on a sunny board. Edward walked
to the door of the inner room, wishing, or so he said to himself, to be
sure that all was safe, and saw the bedroom, neat and tended and with
no pillow, as they said. But it was the look of the third room which
held him. For Obald, it seemed, had made for himself a parlor. He had a
willow table, a willow chair, two painted chairs, a book, a china vase,
and a new mahogany clock, ticking away. And under the window was a chest,
whose walnut had been painted in wide orange bands so that, in the sun’s
reflection from the white wall, the stripes shone like gold. On the lid
there was rudely painted a bird, blue and pale blue, and a large blue
letter C.
Edward stood staring at this chest when Obald entered the kitchen.
“Neighbor,” said Edward, “a little matter of fire brought me in here, but
now I am staying because of this chest.”
As Obald listened to an account of the fire he said, “That was probably
caused by my corncob pipe which must have fallen into my wood box.” And
then he grew greatly excited and cried: “But for you my chest might have
been burned! What can I do for you that have saved my chest?”
So Edward Muir, who was young enough to have boy’s curiosity and not old
enough to be hypocritical, answered:
“You must not now talk of payment, but you can show me, if you like, what
is in the chest.”
At this Obald Bronson’s face changed, he looked frightened, and on his
forehead a red scar stood out which did not often show. Edward, seeing
him so, cried: “But some other time, for my horses will not stand,” and
ran back to his grain, but not before he had seen the relief on Obald’s
face.
Edward told about the chest. He told his father, who thought that it must
hold mementos; and his neighbors, who guessed papers or currency; and one
wit who guessed bones. This man meeting Obald on the road, walking to
save his old horse, cried out to him: “Obald! What is in your chest?”
Obald halted in his tracks and said: “What is that to you?” This
tormentor made his look knowing and drove on.
Obald, who trusted every one, now had his door fitted with a lock, and
set nails on his three windows. Now he went seldom to town, and when he
went he rode the old horse, and rode him hard. One morning the animal was
dead in the pasture. After that Obald was seldom seen on the road.
Because of this, and hearing from the locksmith about the new locks, the
people talked the more, saying: “Either Obald is a miser or else ...” and
shook their heads over him. Now, if they saw him, more than one cried:
“Obald! We are coming to your house one night and find out a thing or
two.”
Such words he never answered. Only his face grew red and his scar showed.
Then they said: “Who knows how he came by that scar?” Some asked him
this question, and laughed. They liked Obald, too, but he was so timid
and awkward.
Some boys of the neighborhood, having heard the tales, came boldly one
night and rapped at the glass, crying. “Give us some money. You’ve got
lots of money!” Obald, whom no man had heard in anger, shouted at them to
be gone, and so terrible was his voice that the boys were charmed. It was
then that they said to one another:
“Let’s cha’vari Obald.”
This custom of the countryside offered to the newly married was the
highest form of romance, next to love. So they prepared the bones, combs,
tin pans, the cowbell, and the horse fiddle. And one midnight, gathered
about Obald’s old house, they broke into such wild turbulence and clangor
that for miles about the farmers heard the scraping, the groaning and the
shrieks.
But apparently Obald did not hear. He did not come to the door or to a
window. This angered the boys, who had wanted no more than to torment
him into giving them money for a drink, so they pounded on his door
shouting: “Obald! Give us two dollars from your chest!” But still he made
no sign.
For two days there was about the house no look of life. On the third day
Edward Muir came with his neighbors, and they broke down the door. Obald
was lying dressed on his bed, but not these men and not the coroner could
tell how he had come to his death.
In his mail box a quarter of a mile down the road they found a letter,
which had been there for three days. It was from Finmarken and they read:
When this comes to you, I shall be on the ocean. I will come
straight to your town and you can meet me because I will send
you a telegram. Oh, Obald—we have waited for seven years, and
now the time that is so short seems so long. My love is the
same—it is more, Obald.
CHRISTOPHA.
Then they knew the meaning of the things that they had found in the
chest: the fan, the mirror, the silver chain, the linen, the cloth for a
woman’s dress.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“A swing under a fruit tree that seemed always in full bloom, some little
dishes of pottery and a wooden doll—these gave me a happy childhood,
at the hands of my parents, who were anxious but kind. I had a little
schooling, not much, and then I worked in the mills and waited for the
time to marry. That time came when I was nineteen and he was twenty-two,
and we walked on the dike when the moon was big, and went to the fair
with the others. We lived with my father and mother in the house where I
was born, with the chard and melons of the garden meeting the creepers
that grew over our front doorway.
“We should never have left the old country for we had it fine there. He
was a ticket-taker in the Broadstone station, a good job he had, but his
brother kept writing to him that America was the place to be and to make
money. I says to him, ‘You go then, and if you like it, I’ll follow.’ He
was two years in America before he let on whether he liked it and then he
didn’t let on either, but he wrote to me to come over. It nearly killed
me leaving my father and mother—for years I could see them as they looked
when they said good-by—standing together on the flat stone, my father
stiff and straight and my mother thinking the creepers covered up her
crying.
“We had but the one little girl and she just big enough to run to meet
me. She had eyes that never stopped their smiling, and yellow hair and
a way that made strangers remember. That little thing and I, we came
away together. But the big vessel was like a prison and the little one
was frightened of the rolling and the pitching and she couldn’t taste
the food. The fifth day out she sickened—we’d a doctor on board, too,
but he didn’t know what that sickness was, made as it was three parts of
fear and homesickness. The seventh day she died. That night they let
me sit up beside her and the next day they came to take her away and I
couldn’t go up to see—I couldn’t watch that thing they’d have to do. Then
came a man of the ship who begged them to wait and he went down in the
hold of the vessel and made a boatlike box, very small, and in that he
laid my little one. Tender he was, like a woman. And he sealed her in,
with narrow strips of the wood, and he made a sail of the sailcloth and
fastened it on that strange boat. And when they’d let it down on to the
water, they took me up to the deck. A little way off from the vessel it
was by then—the tiny boat—rolling on the big waves, and it was sunset, so
that the sail showed very white as the wind took it. So fast it went off
over the water, so fast and so gay in the slanting sunlight. I watched
it till the sun went, till the dark came and the little white dot went
out. Then I Went below. All the night in my closed eyes I saw her in the
sealed boat, on the big water, her that I had tended and watched, and
I kept remembering how frightened she’d been of the rolling and the
pitching that was all the tending she had now. I couldn’t stay in my
berth and her out there, so I crept back up on deck again. And now the
moon had come, and when I looked where I had left her, there was a sail
in the far light—I know it was that sail I saw, and I watched till it
died away again. Then I waited, looking toward where I knew it was, till
the dawn came. When the dawn came there was only the gray water, empty.
“He met me at the boat, and I was alone, and then I had to tell him. But
while I told him I saw he had something to tell me. He looked like a
tramp—I had always seen him dressed as a ticket-taker or in his Sunday
clothes. Now he was working as a day laborer at the wharf. He said: ‘God
forgive me for bringing you over, but I couldn’t face it any longer
alone.’ I looked at him; I thought of my baby, dead of the voyage, and of
my father and mother—so far away. But I looked at him, and I says, ‘Where
do we live, my dear?’ He took me to two high rooms with no light. I sat
there with a stone in my throat. But I didn’t let on.
“I kept the two rooms tidy. I did all I could. The winters were hard, the
summers were hard. In the fifteen years the four children came. In the
fifty years since I’ve been in this country, they’ve grown to be men and
women with homes to look after, and now they have grandchildren.
“Sometimes, sitting here in the Home where my four children pay out money
to keep me comfortable, I think about them in their homes, where of
course they can’t bother with me. I think of him, that worked himself to
death long ago; and of my father and mother that I never saw again. And
of her in the little sealed boat with the sail.
“Life is like that for some of us—and yet we want to live, just like
other folks.”
BELNAP
From the moment that Alla went to work in the clubhouse, Belnap pursued
her. She did all that she could to avoid him, but he would call her to
his table and she dared not refuse the command of the head waiter. The
head waiter was a woman of forty, a little lame, extremely capable, and
kind to the girls. But when Alla explained to her why she wished to
change from Belnap’s table, this woman said to her, “You are a fool,” and
made no change.
Between Belnap’s orders of expensive dishes, he would tell her how much
he loved her and how instead of serving him she might now be sitting
beside him at some other table, ordering filet mignon and parfait. Under
her voice she would answer him sharply:
“Save your breath, Mr. Belnap.” And aloud: “Shall your filet be brown or
rare?”
“Rare. And Alla! I love you. I’ve a little house in the country waiting
for you....”
“And it’ll fall to pieces waiting for me. French dressing or mayonnaise,
Mr. Belnap?”
“French. You little thing, I have never loved any one as I love you.
I shall never love any one again as I love you. Alla, don’t you
understand....”
By then she would have taken his order down and would turn her back.
Twice Alla gave up the place, but both times they sent for her to come
back and as her father was ill and in want, she returned to the club
where the wages were enough to pay for their two rooms, and the tips
provided the food for her father and herself. No one was more generous
with tips than Belnap and often she dreamed of all that she could do
for her father if Belnap’s purse were poured upon her, as he promised
that it would be if only she would go with him to his little house in
the country, among the apple trees. Also, he was an agreeable creature,
and on the day when, between his order for a salad of pears stuffed
with cheese, and his direction that there should be plenty of Bar-le-Duc
he said: “Alla! I will give you a thousand dollars ...” on that day she
hesitated for one instant and looked at him. She saw the deep furrows
between his eyes, his cleft chin, his even teeth, and his look already
triumphant. “At what hour do you finish here?” he breathed, but Alla
cried quite loudly: “I finish before you’ve finished, Mr. Belnap,” so
that he looked about him in annoyance. Alla was balancing on the table’s
edge a tray of empty dishes which she let crash to the floor crying: “Now
they will not call me back here!”
On the death of her father she married a clerk, and she lived for thirty
odd years in meager comfort. Her husband was by turns kind and irritable,
she was by turns patient and complaining, and their two children were
by turns impish and angelic. The days were a routine of cleaning and
preparing for something which seemed never to come about. Outside her
house she knew that there were assemblages, disaster and stars, but these
seldom concerned her, in the face of the needs of her children and her
husband. All the days were the same.
At fifty, when her beauty was still marked, she heard from her doctor
that the rich Mr. Belnap, now seventy, was living at a great hospital in
the neighborhood. Her heart was kind and her life was humdrum, and so
after brooding on the matter for days in the luxury of secrecy, she went
secretly to the hospital and asked to see him.
Reading by a window in his brown bath gown, he looked handsome and ill.
She saw the deep furrows between his eyes, his cleft chin, and his look,
perpetually triumphant. Alla, the pleasant-faced dimpled woman, sat down
before him and said: “Mr. Belnap, I want you to know that I have always
thought of you kindly, for your tips brought my father many comforts.
I am Alla, who waited on you at the City Club. Perhaps you do not
remember....”
His face lighted, he took her hand, he cried: “Indeed I remember. And you
are still beautiful.”
“But for you,” she continued, “many necessities even would have been
denied my father.”
He lifted his hand. “But tell me,” he said, “have you sometimes thought
of me?”
“Yes—and only with gratitude.”
He leaned toward her.
“And of the night when you first went with me into the country....”
She searched his face. His eyes were dreaming beyond her. He said with
a sigh: “I have never forgotten those weeks in my little house with the
apple trees.”
She sprang to her feet and cried: “Mr. Belnap, I am Alla—your old
waitress at the City Club.”
“Yes,” he said gently, “you are Alla. Can you doubt that I remember?”
BILL
Bill was thirty when his wife died, and little Minna was four. Bill’s
carpenter shop was in the yard of his house, so he thought that he could
keep up his home for Minna and himself. All day while he worked at his
bench, she played in the yard, and when he was obliged to be absent for
a few hours, the woman next door looked after her. Bill could cook a
little, coffee and bacon and fried potatoes and flap jacks, and he found
bananas and sardines and crackers useful. When the woman next door said
this was not the diet for four-year-olds, he asked her to teach him to
cook oatmeal and vegetables, and though he always burned the dishes in
which he cooked these things, he cooked them every day. He swept, all but
the corners, and he dusted, dabbing at every object; and he complained
that after he had cleaned the windows he could not see out as well as he
could before. He washed and patched Minna’s little garments and mended
her doll. He found a kitten for her so that she wouldn’t be lonely. At
night he heard her say her prayer, kneeling in the middle of the floor
with her hands folded, and speaking like lightning. If he forgot the
prayer, he either woke her up, or else he made her say it the first thing
next morning. He himself used to try to pray: “Lord, make me do right by
her if you see me doing wrong.” On Sundays he took her to church and sat
listening with his head on one side, trying to understand, and giving
Minna peppermints when she rustled. He stopped work for a day and took
her to the Sunday school picnic. “Her mother would of,” he explained.
When Minna was old enough to go to kindergarten, Bill used to take her
morning or afternoon, and he would call for her. Once he dressed himself
in his best clothes and went to visit the school. “I think her mother
would of,” he told the teacher, diffidently. But he could make little
of the colored paper and the designs and the games, and he did not go
again. “There’s some things I can’t be any help to her with,” he thought.
Minna was six when Bill fell ill. On a May afternoon he went to a doctor.
When he came home he sat in his shop for a long time and did nothing. The
sun was beaming through the window in bright squares. He was not going
to get well. It might be that he had six months.... He could hear Minna
singing to her doll.
When she came to kiss him that night, he made an excuse, for he must
never kiss her now. He held her at arm’s length, looked in her eyes,
said: “Minna’s a big girl now. She doesn’t want papa to kiss her.” But
her lip curled and she turned away sorrowful, so the next day Bill went
to another doctor to make sure. The other doctor made him sure.
He tried to think what to do. He had a sister in Nebraska, but she was
a tired woman. His wife had a brother in the city, but he was a man of
many words. And little Minna ... there were things known to her which he
himself did not know—matters of fairies and the words of songs. He wished
that he could hear of somebody who would understand her. And he had only
six months....
Then the woman next door told him bluntly that he ought not to have the
child there, and him coughing as he was; and he knew that his decision
was already upon him.
One whole night he thought. Then he advertised in a city paper:
A man with a few months more to live would like nice people
to adopt his little girl, six, blue eyes, curls. References
required.
They came in a limousine, as he had hoped that they would come. Their
clothes were as he had hoped. They had with them a little girl who cried:
“Is this my little sister?” On which the woman in the smart frock said
sharply:
“Now then, you do as mama tells you and keep out of this or we’ll leave
you here and take this darling little girl away with us.”
So Bill looked at this woman and said steadily that he had now other
plans for his little girl. He watched the great blue car roll away. “For
the land sake!” said the woman next door when she heard. “You done her
out of a fortune. You hadn’t the right—a man in your health.” And when
other cars came, and he let them go, this woman told her husband that
Bill ought to be reported to the authorities.
The man and woman who walked into Bill’s shop one morning were still
mourning their own little girl. The woman was not sad—only sorrowful,
and the man, who was tender of her, was a carpenter. In a blooming of
his hope and his dread, Bill said to them: “You’re the ones.” When they
asked: “How long before we can have her?” Bill said: “One day more.”
That day he spent in the shop. It was summer and Minna was playing in the
yard. He could hear the words of her songs. He cooked their supper and
while she ate, he watched. When he had tucked her in her bed, he stood in
the dark hearing her breathing. “I’m a little girl to-night—kiss me,” she
had said, but he shook his head. “A big girl, a big girl,” he told her.
When they came for her the next morning, he had her ready and her little
garments were ready, washed and mended, and he had mended her doll.
“Minna’s never been for a visit!” he told her buoyantly. And when she ran
toward him, “A big girl, a big girl,” he reminded her.
He stood and watched the man and woman walking down the street with Minna
between them. They had brought her a little blue parasol in case the
parting should be hard. This parasol Minna held bobbing above her head,
and she was so absorbed in looking up at the blue silk that she did not
remember to turn and wave her hand.
LAST NIGHT
In the scale house at the Junction it was dark and safe. It was quiet,
save for the lowing of cattle in the yard. He swung down his peddler’s
pack and sat on that. From his pocket he drew the parcel that the
tollgate woman had given him. He had not looked inside and here it was
too dark to see what she had put into the sack. His fingers and tongue
touched the soft substance—meat, cheese, he knew the tastes. Bread—and
when he had finished, eating wolfishly as he did, he remembered that some
of the bread had tasted sweetish. That must have been cake. He hadn’t
noticed.
He sat in the darkness. All day his body had felt heavy and dead, but he
had pushed it about, with his one leg. This, now, was rest. This was a
kind of home. Not like men’s homes, but better than he had ever known,
for he had known none. First he had been a bound boy, then a hired man.
He had had a room over kitchens. For a summer or two he had tramped it,
and slept in groves or in straw piles or on the hay in barns. But this
place here, with no one about, was the same as his own.
He had marked it one morning, crossing the tracks near the stockyards,
with his pack of needles and pencils. The door had yawned, open and
friendly, and that night he had come back, had watched, had slipped
inside. In the dry darkness he had slept, undisturbed by the shifting
trains. He had slept here for many nights undisturbed, even lulled by the
lowing cattle in the little local stockyard.
He lay down with his head on his pack. He shifted his wooden leg so that
it did not hurt his knee. The lamps of the yard fell in a white square on
the wall and he looked, feeling pleasure. Now, even if it rained, he was
safe. The place smelled of cattle, but his clothes smelled horribly too,
and he did not notice either smell.
The tollgate woman’s house had been clean. She had just finished giving
her baby a bath. He supposed some one had washed him when he was a baby.
Maybe not. He knew nothing about his life until he began himself to
remember happenings—cuffs from the farmer, and the sharp voice of his
wife. Except for swimming, he had washed but seldom in his life. The
smell of cattle in the scale house did not bother him. And he liked to
hear their lowing in the yard. He thought: “Company.”
He had made forty cents that day. In his pockets were three dollars. Once
he had had three hundred dollars, all at one time. He had paid it down on
a fortieth of the farm owned by the man for whom he worked. The girl who
had worked there had promised to marry him. She had laughed a great deal,
but she had promised. He remembered that time the most often of all. But
when the farmer’s mortgage was foreclosed, they told him that he had no
claim, and the girl had married a farm machinery agent. Emma. She had
been thick and pretty, like the tollgate woman.
The tollgate woman had asked him three times whether he had erasers. He
had been feeling heavy and dead and he couldn’t think. She had looked
at him as if he didn’t know anything. He didn’t know much. Two winters,
wasn’t it, at country school? He could write his name, but no one had
asked him to write it since he could remember. He thought he could still
make it—he thought how the letters went, imagined them in the square of
light on the wall: Wm. Leeds. Curious that Wm. spelled William. Sometimes
he had wondered who named him, but not any more. The tollgate woman had
asked him his name and that at any rate he had answered quickly. “She
smiled nice,” he thought, and slept.
He lay inert, breathing. His body was as complex as that of any man. If
he dreamed, he dreamed of the same things as another.
In the night he woke. A long freight train had rolled into the Junction
and was drawing noisily to a stop. Now rain was falling, streaming from
the eaves of the little building. He heard, dozed, felt warm and safe and
shut in. He wondered if this was what men felt like at home. He thought:
“At home.”
He came wide awake at the sound of cries and clatter. A gate grated, the
door of the scale house was shoved open, a car door slid, a man spoke
angrily, there was the groping muffled fall of many feet. Cattle were
being driven into the scale house. Outside a snarling voice protested
that somebody was a fool, and the answer was that the yard was full.
Cattle came blundering in.
Out there it was raining. He had no place to go. Here it was warm and
dry. He edged to the little space back of the scales, held his pack
before his knees, waited. From the doorway a lantern swung light over the
crowding dusky backs. They came in, as many as the place could hold. The
soft sides were pressed close to the scales, the feet trampled his wooden
leg thrust stiffly out. The snarling voice swore because no more could
be crowded in there. The door slid and slammed.
The place was filled with the odor of the cattle—their untended flanks
and their sweet breath. They moved and shouldered, lowed like lost
creatures, tossing their heads. The place was full of the odor and
movement and breathing of beasts. There was not room enough for them to
lie down. They stood, restless, trampling, bewildered.
Wm. Leeds sat behind the scales and thought about the cattle. To-morrow
they would have their throats cut. But they had some place to go, some
one had sent them there, some one had paid for them and had taken money
for them, some one was expecting them somewhere. His mind clung to that.
Some one was expecting them somewhere. And if they had their throats cut,
that was what they had been raised for. What had he been raised for? He
had wondered about that. Here it was again. Even the cattle....
Now, with the restlessness of the animals, he was unable to sleep. He
heard them breathing, breathed with them, dozed, seemed to rise and fall
on that strong breathing. They and he, safe and dry and shut in from the
rain. But to-morrow they would do what was expected of them, while he....
Forty cents to-day. But what to-morrow? If it rained they didn’t like you
to track up the steps of their homes.
After daylight they came for the cattle, came crowding in, driving out
those nearest the door—two men, harsh and sleepy. When they saw Wm.
Leeds they swore. “The lock-up for you,” said one. Wm. Leeds stood up
stiffly—red, black, gray, brown, dirty.
“Look here,” he said, “ship me on with the critters. Weigh me and ship me
on.”
The men, heavy, unshaven youths, stared at him. One, a wing of black hair
in his eyes, jabbed at a cow with his elbow, struck it on a flank and
said:
“Like to be butchered—eh?”
“Something,” said Wm. Leeds.
The two men laughed loudly. “Go to the devil your own way,” they told him
magnanimously, and when the cattle were gone, they went away.
Now the scale house was foul and close. The man did not move from behind
the scales. He felt heavy and dead. Down the yard he could see the cattle
moving, leisurely, and with direction. They would be fed, watered,
shipped on, butchered. Some one was expecting them. He dozed, feeling
heavy and dead.
Toward night when some one came to clean out the scale house, there he
was, grim and ugly to look at, heavy and dead. The yard man swore at the
extra trouble. He was paid to take care of cattle.
The newspaper of the town whose name Wm. Leeds hardly knew, announced:
“The dead body of an unknown man was found in the scale house at the
stockyards, where he had been making his home while he peddled needles
and pencils about the town. He was apparently about seventy years of age
and had lost one leg.”
He was buried by the town the next morning, not far from the time of
the arrival of the cattle train at the Chicago stockyards. And the beef
quotations were showing an active market.
BELLA
The Leels were the first family of Oderhill. For example, Mr. Leel might
have consented to be pallbearer to any one in the town, but only the very
few could have been invited to be pallbearer to Mr. Leel.
His monument was high, obelisk shaped and white. He was laid beside his
wife, and there would be nobody else in the lot save Bella. If Bella
married as of course, with her fortune, she would, then that smooth green
of clover would never be disturbed.
But Bella was secretly known in Oderhill as queer. She was small,
blue and white. She said strange things. If she were to come to some
outrageous end, the town would say that it had always known she would;
but if on the contrary she proved a person of distinction, then all would
remember that they had discerned distinction in her. Oderhill could not
understand her, but the family was so rich that every one took her for
granted.
However, when Mr. Leel’s estate was settled, Oderhill was shaken. Nothing
remained, save only his square brick house with the cupola and its
old-fashioned furnishings.
Bella, who was now twenty-six, lived in the house and rented rooms to
teachers. And the town, which had secretly found her queer, now saw her
without the veil of the Leel wealth, and knew that she was queer.
Since she “entertained” no more, she was not entertained. She worked very
hard and had time for few contacts. It became evident that Bella’s life
was to consist of renting rooms to teachers.
But she knew nothing about her occupation. She often thought that like
boarding-house keepers and mothers, she was utterly untaught in her
profession. From the first it was difficult for her to make her expenses.
Shortly she was in debt.
A real estate man named Emmons Decker had opened an office in Oderhill,
and one day he came to see Bella. He had wondered if her house was for
sale. She repudiated the idea with something of the grand manner of her
mother. But this man was excessively polite, treated her with great
consideration, said her name many times in direct address, and Bella
felt that she was being treated as he had probably never treated any one
before. So when he asked her to consider the matter and to let him confer
with her again “on the proposition,” she assented. He returned to confer,
and more than once.
But about the sale she was obdurate. She told him, often, who her
mother and father were and how well they were connected. She showed him
the silhouettes, the cameos, the seed pearls and the Paisley. And the
site was desirable. In time Emmons Decker, with his manner of great
consideration, asked her to marry him and she agreed. At the time she
wondered why, but as she made up the teachers’ four rooms the next day,
she knew why. And when the month’s bills came in, she realized that she
could not have done better.
Before they were married tax time came, and Bella confided to her fiancé
that she had not the money to meet her taxes. Decker now said that
frequently in their business they paid the taxes of others. It was a
business arrangement, he said, when she permitted him to pay hers. Now
he seemed in no haste to be married, business took him to the west, he
returned toward tax time of the next year and again she permitted him to
pay. Three times he did this during the engagement; and then he broke the
engagement, invoked the state law in tax titles, took possession of the
Leel house, and sold it.
Bella rented a room over a store. She was now thirty-three or four and
without training for anything. The man who kept the store had no home,
managed a makeshift home in the rear of his store. Bella’s room was neat
and comfortable, it had the Leel parlor curtains and a Leel lamp, and
once when she cooked something savory from a can, she shared the meal
with her landlord, who was lonely himself. He could not afford to marry.
In a little while Oderhill was scandalized.
It now seemed incredible that she could be Bella Leel—her clothes, her
furtive walk, her hair. All those who had felt her to be queer were
triumphantly justified, and those who had thought that she was so queer
that she might amount to something, now thought that there must have been
bad blood in Mrs. Leel. When the man left her, Bella sold little things
at the doors—dust cloths and soap. In ten years Bella was the lost soul
of the town.
At fifty-five she was taken to the county house and at sixty she died.
And as they were about to bury her in the county cemetery, Emmons
Decker, now a first citizen of Oderhill, remembered the Leel lot and the
monument. There was no doubt that Bella Leel had the right to be buried
beside her parents.
Decker and other first citizens conferred concerning a funeral. No church
could receive that clay. No home in Oderhill offered it harbor. The
little town had no funeral chapel. But there chanced to be an empty store
in the main street, and they chose this. They seated it, spread down a
rug, and brought in a victrola. At the hour of the service several who
recalled the Leels were present, a retired minister preached about the
woman at the well, and the victrola played “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.”
On the Leel lot, near the monument, obelisk shaped and white, the smooth
green of the clover was disturbed to make her grave. There they laid
Bella, at sixty, the lost soul of the town, beside the dust of her mother
and father, of the first family of Oderhill. But Bella’s grave has no
headstone. They decided merely to carve her name on the obelisk.
CHERRIES
The moon being very bright, Angus Sharp asked Nellie to drive to Wild
Rose. It was already eight o’clock and she said that a bushel of cherries
had just been delivered for canning, and her mother and she were to pit
them that evening; but the next morning she could go. So Angus stayed
and helped with the cherries. They all ate of the fruit, which was
exceedingly ripe and red, though Angus said that Nellie’s lips were
redder and sweeter. It was not yet a fortnight since Nellie had promised
to marry him.
The next day Albert Jolly drove down the street late in the afternoon,
with his new trap, dark blue and shining. And Nellie was on the front
lawn. So Albert stopped at the curb and leaped down, himself dark
blue and shining, and asked Nellie to drive to Partridge for dinner.
Partridge was only ten miles away, Nellie was tired from her day with
the cherries, there was in the house nothing good for dinner, Albert was
an old friend, and Nellie said that, providing she could be back by eight
o’clock, she would go.
The drive to Partridge was pleasant, but there were detours, the dinner
was delayed, they met some friends, and when she reached home the moon
had risen, Angus had already called for her, and had gone.
“I told him that you drove to Partridge with Albert,” said her mother.
“Wasn’t that all right?”
Nellie sent for Angus the next morning and tried to explain. She said:
“You know that there is nobody but you ...” and such things. But Angus
was literal and he said that there was Albert, too. She told about the
years down which she and Albert had been pals, no more;—and Angus was not
comforted. And of how she had longed to take the air after the fatigues
of the cherry-canning, and Angus said that he would have taken her for
the air. And of how proud Albert was of his new trap—but as the buggy in
which Angus took Nellie about was years old, Angus was unimpressed. He
said, and more than once, that they were engaged. At last Nellie became
annoyed, answered that to be engaged was not to be deceased, and so fell
into silence. Before the evening was finished their engagement was broken.
If in that consummation Nellie had no sense of finality, this did not
appear in her voice or in her face or in her farewell. The moon was
shining brightly on the porch when Angus went away forever. Nellie
expected him to call her the next morning, to arrive the next evening.
Because of her expectation she even refused an invitation to a picnic in
Partridge. But Angus did not return.
He went straight to May Clinton. May was large, pink and gentle. In his
passionate desire to show Nellie his indifference, Angus asked May to
marry him, and she consented. The third moon from the time of cherries
shone down indifferently on May and Angus for their honeymoon.
Angus and May lived in a frame house for twenty years. He had never
loved her, and she had married him for a home. Her placidity soon enraged
Angus and he enjoyed trying to make her jealous. He succeeded very well.
He would make a show of having received letters of whose contents he
would tell her nothing, he returned from journeys and pretended to make
mysterious allusions; and at last he even talked sadly of Nellie and
openly called her his lost love. May’s gentleness grew stale, then acid,
her face sharpened and flattened and became quilted with wrinkles and
trails of tears. Angus smiled at her, two rows of white teeth gleaming
through a black beard, and called her “darling” and “treasure” in a tone
of unspeakable rancor. When their five children were still in school, he
fell from the roof of his barn, where he was trying to rescue some young
birds from a hawk, and was instantly killed.
He left little property, May had none, and the five children were
taken out of school and put to work. In a few years Elmer had become
a carpenter, Floyd a grocery clerk, Lucy a dressmaker, Amy had died
of tuberculosis there in the village and Eloise had “run away” with a
handsome man who sold swings.
May, the mother, grew sullen and bitter, remained indoors, closed the
frame house against all visitors, took out her telephone, and lived on
for twelve years like that. Before she died, Elmer, Floyd and Lucy were
struggling to raise their own families of some size—Arthur and Annie,
Jessie and Cora, little Angus, little May, little Elmer and the like.
Lucy and her brood were under the roof of the frame house—“not large
enough, really, for three generations,” as Lucy said.
As for Nellie, at whose home the bushel of cherries had been delivered,
she used to speculate on how it might have been if Eph, the express boy,
had not brought that bushel basket to her mother until the next morning.
But this she soon forgot for she married the chief banker of the town,
had a beautiful home and an idiot son.
THE PIECE
Bilger came home from town and turned into the narrow cement walk leading
to his house. His daughter May was practicing at the piano, and the air
which she played came to him through the open window. Over this window a
grapevine grew on a little lattice, and beneath were lilacs. On a porch
post there was a vine whose name he did not know and the vine had many
flowers. Bilger stood for a few minutes looking at his house, listening
to his daughter’s music; and his heart filled with happiness.
The air which she played was not one which he had known, but he liked
it. He beat time to it with his foot and his head. May was seventeen,
but she was just beginning to “take,” as the village denominated musical
instruction, and Bilger had bought her a grand piano. He entered the
house and listened by the hall door. She did not like to be disturbed.
“What was that piece you were playing?” he asked her at dinner.
“What piece?” she inquired and added proudly: “I play several.”
“It went—_you_ know—ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, up and down, kind of sad,” Bilger
explained.
She said: “Papa, don’t be ridiculous.”
But after dinner, when he asked her to play to him, and she played all
the six pieces that she knew, she came inevitably to the one that he
liked. At his insistence she played it over and over.
But he could not remember its name. And next time he asked her for it,
calling it “that slow one that I liked—_you_ know,” May said: “Oh papa, I
have so many pieces. And here is a new one.”
Bilger and his wife and May were so comfortable in their little home, and
Bilger was so proud of them and of his grand piano, that death seemed
irrelevant. And when May fell ill and in ten days died, Bilger could
not believe in his loss. His comfortable elderly wife was immediately
convinced—for twenty years she had looked for disaster and when it
overtook them she went about with an air of resigned familiarity. But
Bilger was thunderstruck. He! And May! But above all, _he_!
In the first day or two of her illness, when she was still about the
house, he had asked May to play the piece. And she had done so, with
queer complaisance not in the least like May. Every time that she played
it she told him the foreign name, which he said over—with his own vowel
values—and instantly forgot.
Before May’s funeral he said to her mother: “Couldn’t we have them
at—_you_ know—the funeral—play that piece May used to play—I guess you
know the one.”
She turned on him her solid-colored face, with its flat mats of shadow
beneath the eyes, and said:
“I don’t know what one you mean, but I’m almost sure it wouldn’t be
suitable for the funeral.”
He said no more.
He missed May extravagantly. He had been to her a sealed father and she
to him had been a sealed daughter; but he missed her.
It was not her virtues that he missed, nor her meanings, for the first he
had but assumed and of the second he had no idea. However he missed her
bobbed hair when she shook her head, and her whistle to the parrot, and
her way of laughing with her eyes closed. And he missed the piece that he
liked.
It seemed to him that if he could hear that piece played on the piano,
he would have comfort, he would almost have May again. He turned all her
music, but he himself knew not one note from another and to him all those
sheets were dumb. He tried to make her mother know, but she said: “You
remember I am not musical.” He asked one of May’s friends to play May’s
pieces for him, but none sounded like the one that he sought. This young
woman said: “You’d have to sing it better than that. It doesn’t sound
like anything, Mr. Bilger.” Then he went to her music teacher. To this
distinguished organist Bilger observed earnestly:
“It went—_you_ know—ta-ta, ta-ta-ta—kind of sad, but not all sad. It had
one glad part. And it went up and down.”
“My dear Mr. Bilger ...” said the organist.
“It went like this,” said Bilger, and sang it, he thought.
“It must have been something that she taught herself,” her teacher
suggested.
Then one day Bilger heard it on a street piano. He could not be
mistaken—there it was, up and down, sad part, glad part. He demanded of
the street piano man the name of that piece. The man hunched eloquent
shoulders, but for a quarter he played it over and over again. Bilger
stood on the curb and whistled it, rushed home through the streets
whistling it, and appeared whistling before his wife, and then shouted
passionately: “That’s it—_you_ know—that’s the one.”
But she said: “That doesn’t sound like a tune.”
“I’ll have that piano fellow up here,” cried Bilger, and rushed back to
the spot where he had listened.
The street piano man, however, was gone. Bilger stood on the curb and
tried to hear him on some other street, but he heard nothing. And when
Bilger turned home again, comforted that now at least he could whistle
that air, the air had left him. But he thought: “Sometime I’ll get it
back and whistle it to some of these symphony fellows. _They’ll_ know
what it is.”
THE SPIDER
The little town is called Sunland and it lies in the mountains of the
western United States. The circulars which came to the Iowa town said
that Sunland was located on the richest soil of the warm areas of the
Sierra foothills; that all fruits and vegetables would grow at a touch;
that the climate was made by God and behaved as if it knew it; and that
the land was cheap beyond dream—and within thirty days would be advanced
in price to more than double the present cost. It was, the circulars
concluded, an opportunity such as all America had never before afforded,
and only a few localities were permitted to share in the prize. Would the
reader of the circulars apply at once?
Matthew Pendleton read every word to his wife Liza. For years they had
dreamed of California. Now they were sixty-four and sixty and if they
were to make a change it must be made soon. Bill Miller had gone out
alone and had grown rich on his lands. They themselves were childless,
they had only themselves to risk, but the eighty acres in the Iowa corn
had been their home for forty years. They had made grow with their
own hands the shed, the bay-window, the porch. In the garden were
strawberries and asparagus and zinnias; there were an orchard and a
grapevine which yielded them their preserves and jelly. Liza thought of
these things and said:
“We might go for only a little while and see how we liked it.”
“We must have the farm money to put in the land, if we buy,” said Matthew.
“We might go without buying first....”
“The offer is for thirty days!”
She was silent. She looked at his hard hands. “Do as you think best,
Matthew,” she said at last.
It was early spring and the crop was not yet planted. There was no
difficulty in selling the eighty acres, though Bart Mellon had tried
this long time to sell his farm and could not do so. Their furniture was
old and they sold that too. Only Liza kept certain things and packed
them in her trunk—her meat chopper, her cherry pitter, her aluminum
kettle, and her two glass pie plates. And just before the men came for
the auction, she suddenly wheeled to the side porch the plush couch and
the plush chair and put with them the large colored Beatrice Cenci,
whose name she did not know. Then she ran down the road to Bart Mellon’s
and asked their boy to come with his cart and set these things in his
father’s barn.
“We were fixed nice, Matthew,” she said, as the last of the belongings
were taken away by their new owners.
“Yes,” said Matthew, “but think of how nice we’re going to have it.”
“Maybe,” said Liza.
The tourist train was to them luxury. The journey was even better than
motion pictures, Matthew thought. They ate from their basket, listened
to every one, hardly spoke all the way across the desert, and looked
everywhere with shining eyes.
“See, Liza, how nice we have it,” Matthew sometimes said.
“Maybe,” said Liza.
They reached Sunland at noon in the blazing blue and yellow of the
western spring. They went down the street, slowly, for they could not
breathe easily any more when they walked. Under the ferny acacias they
made their way to the land office. There a spidery man with curved legs
and a stiff neck called to a lounging boy to take them to their land.
The lounging boy, with a manner of indifference amounting almost to
unconsciousness took them in a neat car.
Under the acacias and the pepper trees, by the live oaks and the
eucalyptus they drove at such speed that they were terrified and saw
nothing.
“Here’s the land,” said the boy, when he stopped the car.
He waved his hand to ten acres lying up, up the steep green foothills.
It was perpendicular land.
“I don’t understand,” said Matthew. “They said rich land....”
“None richer,” said the boy, and tried to yawn, but missed it.
The man with the curved legs and the stiff neck later pointed out to them
that all the statements of the circular were true. And they were true,
literally true.
All night Matthew and Liza talked. “We can put up a cabin on the strip by
the road,” Matthew said, “and spend the summer. We got our pride.”
“We can go back and buy Bart Mellon’s farm,” said Liza.
In the sudden Sierra dawn he looked at her, lips parted, and said nothing.
As they drove from the station to Bart Mellon’s farm a fortnight later,
Matthew said:
“Now we begin all over, where we were, forty years ago.”
“No, Matthew,” said Liza. “We got a plush couch, a plush chair, a
picture, my meat chopper, my cherry pitter....”
“We’ll have it quite nice again,” said Matthew.
“Yes!” cried Liza.
The man with the curved legs and the stiff neck bought offices in other
towns and continued to do a brisk business.
VOICES