be no starting over for them. Tommy’s wife stared at him, from out the
sixteen years of weariness and waiting that lay behind her and from under
a lifetime of weariness and loss that formed on the air.
Then those sixteen years burst and blew upon the room, and scattered
their fragments of hope deferred and dead. Amy and Jane spoke with the
bitter voices of the lovers who had not asked them in marriage and with
the wail of children never born. No journey for them toward the fruits of
the Bitter Root, and no finishing of the house; but instead the chance to
leave that farm with enough of Aunt Parmenter’s money to keep them in the
town while they found their work. Their father thundered weakly: “What
is it you want there?” Jane’s lips moved soundlessly, Amy cried out:
“Some life!” And by this they now meant such work as they could do—some
sewing and pickling for other women.
So with a few hundreds in greenbacks the “girls” went away to the town.
With a share of that treasure, Lucien married Bethna and went out to make
his way. But Tommy, who was weak to the world, was iron to his wife. A
fruit ranch, he showed her, was the place to make money, and they would
build another house better than this.
Though she talked bitterly and incredulously, yet when Matthews, who held
the mortgage, took over at last the great shell of their home, Mrs. Tommy
Taylor told her neighbors: “Yes, the children have their plans, but Mr.
Taylor and I are going west. He has found such a splendid opening out
there that we just can’t afford not to take it.”
To “the children” she said: “I’ll go with him—yes. If we should separate
and I should get along and he shouldn’t, I couldn’t stand that.”
The house was finished by the new owner, whose motor car came and went
under the maples, and the nine windows and the door continued to stare
indifferently out upon Belle Prairie. Tommy Taylor loose-wristed,
prosperous-appearing, hopeful, went west, looking for a ranch.
ERNIE MENDENHALL
_Best Stories of 1926_; Edward J. O’Brien (Dodd, Mead & Co.).
Ernie Mendenhall was now forty-two years old, and still he had found no
one with whom to share his home. His home was a white house in the town
of Oderhill, and its little garden had fine hollyhocks. For four years,
since the death of his parents, he had lived there alone, and in those
four years he had bought now and then a piece of old furniture or a rug
or some small article for his house. Every time that he did this, the
neighbors would say:
“Ernie Mendenhall must be going to get married.”
But so far he had not married. He earned his living as part-time
secretary for a writer who lived on the edge of town. Every morning the
neighbors saw Ernie’s long form, swinging its right arm and holding its
left arm stiff as it hurried along, his lips moving in imagined talk.
And they said: “What can he be talking about, to himself that way? He
hasn’t any business of his own to reckon up.”
One summer week-end the writer had a house party for Alla Vintrin. On
Sunday morning she walked into the library where Ernie was working. He
saw her frail beauty in its pink linen enclosure, her delicate profile,
her heavy hair. The linen, the profile and the heavy hair attacked him
as an epidemic attacks, and he was as one who catches cold—instantly and
pervadingly.
She said: “Is the old secretary in this room—the Governor Winthrop
secretary?...”
“Here,” said Ernie with immense difficulty, and bowed, and perceived that
he had bowed not to her but to the secretary.
He managed to talk to her about that piece of old mahogany. Afterward he
wondered whether he had not perhaps said: “It has a beautiful profile,
heavy hair, and it wears pink.” And though he tried in agony to recall
her words, he could recover nothing save an assent, a murmur, a perfume.
Next he noted, from a great distance, that he was saying to her, “if she
was interested in old furniture, he had some good pieces in his house, if
she cared....” And she said alertly that she did care, and could she see
them that morning? With no more thought of the writer than of an eagle
on a far cliff, Ernie walked out of the house and down the streets of
Oderhill, and beside him she went.
She said little—he liked her for that. She walked rapidly—that he liked.
She was not so tall as he, she observed the flowers, she stopped and
spoke to a child—she was perfect.
Thanking God for an upbringing which had forced him to keep order in his
house, he opened his front door and let her in upon the hook rugs, the
cherry chairs, and the one piece of rosewood. It was before this melodeon
of rosewood that Alla Vintrin paused at last, then sat, pulled out the
stops, and pressed from the reluctant instrument its few remaining tones.
And at the sound of music, played by her, in his home, Ernie’s years of
waiting cried from his throat these words: “Could you stay? Could you
live here? Could you be my wife?” And this he did not hear himself saying
from a distance. No, for he was in the very words themselves.
She looked round the room, small, sweet and colored, and at the
hollyhocks motionless beyond the glass. “Why not?” she said.
“You could? You would?” He was not sure that he said this at all. And
all that he heard her say was “Why not?” as she moved to the door. He
walked beside her under the maples, and told her about his life. Always
he had wanted to tell somebody about his life, but when he had tried, his
confidante had looked at him. Eyes could be puzzled, amused, disdainful.
Alla did not look at him. She merely walked beside him and listened.
“Could you? Would you?” Ernie cried when he had done.
“Why not?” she said again, with immense sadness.
In the corridor at the writer’s house she gave him her hand, saying only:
“I shall see you again, Mr. Mendenhall—this afternoon, perhaps.”
But that Sunday afternoon all the house party decided to motor back to
town. Ernie, who had made his task last into the day, heard them go, saw
them go, and sat at his desk mute and blind.
Three days later he had a note from Alla.
... and I know exactly how you are feeling because you spoke
so. I have asked one or two men to marry me and wished
afterward that I hadn’t spoken. But you mustn’t mind. Those
forty-two years in Oderhill—you are likely to ask anybody,
anywhere.... I did mean to speak to you about the melodeon. I
assume that those things are for sale, and if the melodeon is
at all within my reach I would like very much to buy it....
Every day the neighbors saw Ernie’s long form as it hurried along, his
lips moving in imagined talk with some one. He was writing to Alla
Vintrin, composing his letters as he walked the streets. He was telling
her of his life, its routine, its emptiness. These letters he dared to
write out. When her bread-and-butter letter came to the writer, Ernie
copied the address, and it burned on his bureau. One night, when it
rained, he took out his letters to her, read them over, selected the
mildest, addressed it, carried it in his pocket for days. One day when he
had an influenza, he plucked the letter from his pocket and mailed it.
As soon as the letter was mailed, he fashioned her reply, many replies.
She would be kind, she would be cold, she would be cruel. All these
replies he wrote in his mind. When days passed and no reply came, he said
to himself that she had gone abroad. And when his letter reached her,
at some lonely foreign place, how touched and warmed she would be that
he had remembered. He thought that she would write: “My dear friend, you
move me greatly.” Once he had taken down that sentence, dictated by the
writer: “My dear friend, you move me greatly.” No answer came, but when
he was at home for a week with lumbago, he chose another of his letters
to her and mailed that. It required a calling-down by the writer and his
omission from an Oderhill wedding reception to bring the third and fourth
letters to the mail box. In all Ernie sent off six letters. But the
mails, he knew, were uncertain. So he continued to fashion her replies.
At last he wrote down these replies, and he would read them, at home, in
the evenings: “My dear friend, you move me greatly.” His lips moved as
he read. He remembered the phrases in her letters and in his own, and he
would go down the street, swinging his right arm and holding his left
arm stiff as he hurried along. And the neighbors said, “What can he be
talking about to himself that way?”
One night sitting alone by his stove, going over one of her replies,
it occurred to Ernie Mendenhall that he was tired of those things that
he was saying, as having come from her. What else would she say? He
could think of nothing else. Certainly these were rather tiresome—talk
about his safety, his loneliness, her coming to Oderhill. Even “My dear
friend, you move me greatly” had become tiresome by repetition. Somewhat
irritably he saluted the image of her, writing to him, saying to him the
same thing over and over. Couldn’t she think of anything else to say?
He began to be bored with her. Feeling the wind blowing in the back of
his neck, he asked her quite irritably what had made her leave the window
open at the top. Finding the fire low he said to her, in his mind, that
she could certainly put in a stick of wood when it was he who filled the
wood box. And when the clock struck a wrong hour he exclaimed aloud to
her that with all that he had to do, earning their living, he should have
thought that she might wind the clock. The next morning when he watered
a favorite plant he saw that water had dripped down on the rosewood
melodeon, and he cried reproachfully: “You who pretended to care for this
rosewood melodeon, what have you ever done to protect it?” But at that
she answered quite tartly, and he was startled and hastened out of the
house.
He found that his homecomings had acquired a new fascination. He would
come hurrying into the house and cry: “What? No fire? No supper? A great
way to treat a man who’s been slaving all day for you.” “Slaving indeed!”
would come her clear reply. “Writing a few letters for a pittance. I’ve a
good mind to sell your old rosewood melodeon and make real money for us.”
At that he would fly into a rage, and then grow sullen, and would eat
no dinner—actually did eat none; and imagined Alla Vintrin Mendenhall
cooking a steak savory with onions and eating it all alone. Occasionally
he would smile at himself awkwardly; but less and less often.
Then a child was born to the writer, and Ernie Mendenhall was extremely
shaken. Arriving one morning for work, he heard that faint wailing above
stairs. All day when the cry came he could do nothing but listen. And
when he went home at night, there was Alla Vintrin Mendenhall with a
child.
But now his imagination failed. He had no idea what he would say to her.
He could not even look at her. Suddenly she was not there any more, but
was wrapt away from him, absorbed in a wailing cry. Sometimes he could
catch an outline of her bending head, but when she turned toward him, her
face blindingly disappeared and the game stopped. He sat by the stove
and imagined her in the room above stairs. He never went there. It was
many nights before she was downstairs with him again. He sat making milk
toast when she entered. He looked at her in awe and in silence, but then
his milk boiled over on to the griddle and he said: “Is it or isn’t it a
woman’s job to keep things from boiling over, say?” And when he blackened
the toast he became fairly caustic. After that they resumed their old
quarrels. When she was unconscionably exasperating, Ernie Mendenhall
would hurry along the streets, his lips moving as he rehearsed what he
would tell her. And the neighbors would say: “Ernie Mendenhall—don’t you
s’pose he works out puzzles as he walks?”
As the holidays came near, he wandered about in the shops of the
little town, thinking of a gift for her and one for the child. But
when he touched this or that, it seemed not worthy of them. He bought
one little gift, a vase to stand on her melodeon—he thought of it as
her melodeon—and on Christmas eve he filled the vase with roses and
watched her bend above it, with the child. He thought: “Maybe they
meant something like this about Christmas. Maybe it has something to
do with somebody being born not of the flesh....” But this he dismissed
as unlikely. He prolonged the evening, became involved in dressing an
imaginary tree, very tall, and ended in disagreeing with her about having
so much tinsel stuff all over everything; found the fire out, and went to
bed annoyed by her obstinacy and her carelessness. But he woke once and
smelled the roses.
In the holiday week, he came dragging home from his work one dim
afternoon, and as he approached his house with its white-laden spruces,
he felt a sense of utter weariness at the look of it. At once he knew
this as the weariness of the end of a game. He understood that the game
had played itself out. All was over, it seemed, the funeral, all; and he
entered upon his house as it had been before ever he had seen her. He,
moved through the little empty rooms, looking at them so differently.
Desolation flowed through him. He could experience, but he could not
believe that she was gone.
In his mail box waited a letter. Before he opened it he knew her touch.
Alla Vintrin wrote: “Dear Sir: Is the rosewood melodeon still for sale? I
was married in the spring, and now that we are furnishing our house....”
He replied: “Dear Madam: the rosewood melodeon is not for sale. I wish to
keep it on account of its associations....” He went into the white night
and mailed the letter in the box where he had posted all the others,
which she must have received; and he turned back toward the house where
she had died.
He had fallen in love, experienced domesticity, been bored by it, and
was left alone with the child whom none had ever begotten. He recounted
these things to himself as he walked. And the neighbors meeting him said:
“Ernie Mendenhall, he’s always talking away about something.”
THE BIOGRAPHY OF BLADE
_Best Stories of 1924_; Edward J. O’Brien (Dodd, Mead & Co.).
“Born in Muscoda. Attended public school in Muscoda. Edited ‘The Muscoda
Republic’ for twenty-five years.” Blade had written his biography for the
county history. He walked to his home and thought: “It’s good. Not many
men in the hundred millions are much better off.”
He passed the house of Herron, his banker, and heard singing. A woman’s
voice was singing in a foreign tongue. He walked slowly and listened.
In the evening sunlight the banker’s house, his lawn, his bridal wreath
looked luminous. The air thinned and thickened as cloud and wind wove
their uneven ovals. The voice sang on. Blade felt abrupt and obscure
happiness. His complacence deepened. “Pretty good. Not many men in the
hundred millions are much better off.”
At his home, about his table, his family gathered: the woman, all her
life of Muscoda, whom he had married; their four children, contentious,
smelling of toilet soap; his mother, silent and prevalent. His wife, who
seemed to be dining only en route to real occupation, said:
“Mrs. Herron has asked you and mother and me to hear somebody sing there
to-night. I can’t go; I’m too tired.” Without looking at her, Blade
answered, “I’ll go to the Herrons’,” and his mother said that she would
go. His wife, going on with her inner routine, lapsed back into speech
with, “There isn’t a thing in the house for breakfast.”
About them countless cloudy influences surged, the melting west, the
blue dusk, heightened sounds from the open. The room was a theater of
airy action. Less than this were the steak, the apple pie, the general
argument about the pronunciation of “slough,” or, as they rose, that soft
flatulence in the throat of his mother. In the redundant din of dishes,
in the clamor of their voices, the faint unearthly splendor died to
earthly darkness.
In the night gentle, leisurely, already experimenting with darkness,
Blade and his mother went forth. The Herron lawn offered odor of sycamore
and wild grape. Blade breathed it, felt happiness, and said to his mother:
“That new county history’s coming out. Wonder if you’ll like what it says
about me.” Under the porch lights the fallen muscles of her large face
lifted.
In the Herrons’ rooms, so regular, so inevitable, the guests gathered.
The moquette, the mohair, the mahogany, received them. They were business
men and their wives, the accustomed, the dutiful, the numb. There
was a rote of jest, of retort, of innuendo. There were the thrilling
potentialities and the deathly routine of being. All were tumultuously
aware of the little fountain of life within themselves.
At their abrupt, embarrassed hush, Blade saw near the piano the Herrons’
niece. Her beautiful shoulders, her body cased in blue, her slow,
floating voice, invaded him. In her he saw and heard all youth, all that
is luminous, all that is different. Upon Blade invisible hands laid
hold. With soft violence he was claimed, carried, torn. “What’s this?”
he felt, and had never felt so much. For the first time his importance,
his newspaper, his home, his family, were outdistanced. He saw that this
woman lived in another way than his way, and it was her way that he
wanted.
At the close of her singing, he approached her. She spoke to him
casually, and he thought that there must be some mistake. Could she not
see that of all those in the room he it was to whom she had signaled? He
felt that he was crying: “Where are you? I understand. In God’s name,
throw me a rope!” Instead he was saying: “You sing like a bird, Miss
Herron. Much obliged, I’m sure. I—” When others intervened, he waited for
a long time by the piano, the stout, smiling man. At length he found his
opportunity, and said to her, “I used to play second flute myself.” But
he wondered whether, after all, he could have said this aloud, because
she only glanced and smiled, though with that information he had sent her
something vast and pleading. He did not have another chance to address
her.
Out on the street his mother said, “My dinner didn’t set well;” but
Blade, in some powerful onslaught of the unknown, made no reply and
hurried brutally.
He took a blanket and lay on the grass. There was no change in the
trees or the frogs of Muscoda. There they were, true to the past. But
they were new to Blade, and so were the stars. It was perhaps the
seventeen-thousandth night of his life, and yet it was the first. He
was feeling: “Say, music! I’ve always cottoned to it; but look what it
_is_! Look what it _does_!” Next door a second-floor window glowed. There
Edgerton, dying, lay expecting to recover. Every one knew save Edgerton.
Blade had been sorry, but now he was seized and shaken by the fact that
there was Edgerton, dying and not knowing. With this fact Blade quivered
as occasionally, toward dawn, he had quivered with remorse or worry. He
experienced Edgerton. Then he experienced delight that he himself was not
dying. The pang of Miss Herron and her singing returned and returned,
powerful, possessing, and at last excluding.
At daybreak he woke. Long, loose pulsations of light shook him. Was it
light or was it song? He sat on his blanket and looked up from the well
of his garden to the sky. He thought: “I’m going to take music lessons.
I’ll go and see Miss Herron to-day, talk with her about it.” Countless
cloudy influences surged round the lawn, where was a theater of changing
light and airy action. For the first time in his life he saw the morning.
At breakfast his passion for spiritual isolation caused suspicion. “You
act as if you’re going to risk some more money,” said his mother.
“Better not.” And his wife asked acutely, “What woman was there last
night?” so that Blade thundered, “Can’t I have quiet in my own house?”
The children discreetly tittered. With a wave of nostalgia it came to
Blade that by his words of thunder he had in some way cut himself off
from Miss Herron. In order to get back to that world of Miss Herron, he
spoke gently to his wife.
His first act at the office was to request the return of his biography
copy from the editor of the county history. Blade said, “I can liven
mine up a lot.” It had come to him that he had written a biography which
did not express his life, so rich and so potential. And now the office
routine began—routine, but yet extraordinary. A pearly shadow drenched
the bare room. Or was it that? You moved the radio a fraction of an inch,
and you had a new wave length. Blade had a new wave length. Nothing
proceeded in the old way. The men of the staff of the composing room,
he saw them with incredible intensity, Johns, Lubbock, Mayhew, Platt, in
their dirty ticking aprons, with rolled gold rings on the little fingers
of inky hands swinging from the elbow. Had Blade ever really seen them
until now? He felt in some delicious suspension; or was it balance?
Exquisitely rested, he felt, and as if everything were simple. He said to
one or two: “Do you know, music is a great thing. For a fact. Wish I’d
kept on with second flute that time.” He spoke in excitement such that,
had they known of a tragedy involving Blade later in the day, they would
have remembered. But they did not know of the tragedy.
At eleven o’clock he called the Herrons’ house. He waited at the
telephone and was rocked on the waves of expectation. A voice came: “Oh,
Miss Herron? Oh, Miss Herron left this morning for her home. Who is this
calling, please?” Blade mumbled: “‘Muscoda Republic.’ Thanks for the
item.” He groped to the door and stared up and down the street, but she
was not passing.
He went at noon to the Muscoda Marble Counter for lunch. The place was
clean, the food was good, the women who presided were perfect at their
rites. Before the oilcloth-covered counter Blade sat, and he felt the
physical nausea and the shivering of a young animal at night, homeless.
And at night he stayed so long at the office, alone, that Muscoda main
street was empty. At his own gate it came to him that he wanted his
mother. He was glad that there was a light in her room. He tapped, and
sidled toward her, intent on his nameless and infinite loss. Vast and
shapeless in her red-and-black checked bath robe, she sat among her
plants and bottles and regarded him without change of expression. She
commented: “I thought you were going to take me to the picture show
to-night.” He stood stricken, not by his failure, but by hers. He mumbled
and withdrew, and in the passage his wife met him, put her arms about
him, whispered, “Nobody loves you as I do!” This should have surprised
him, but he was not listening. His soul heard, and cried, “What of it?”
In the night he saw Edgerton’s window glowing. Blade felt sorry, an
impression now, not an emotion. He woke to the sun and said, “Another
fine day,” a formula, not a feeling. He went to his office, and the men
were pale fellows, inky, disheveled, remote. He faced the blind wall of
human loneliness. He was as one who, expecting to be born, is stillborn,
and becomes aware not of the cradle, but of eternity.
In a few days Blade appeared before Montgomery, the Muscoda band leader,
and said:
“Say, I used to play the second flute myself. And I wondered....”
When “one-night stands” come to Muscoda Opera House, Blade sits in the
orchestra and plays the second flute. His detached wife and his grown
children come to the Opera House plays, and afterward they ask him why
he will deliberately make himself ridiculous by playing in the band. He
does not know what to reply and takes refuge in irritability.
In the Muscoda County history Blade’s biography, in fine print, stands
unread in many little libraries: “Born in Muscoda. Attended public school
in Muscoda. Has edited ‘The Muscoda Republic’ for twenty-five years.” To
the editor of that history Blade had returned his biography copy without
change, and had said:
“I don’t know what it was I was going to add. Whatever the item was, it
got away from me.”
IN THE LOBBY
“This whole love thing isn’t enough,” said Bruce. “I tell you, it isn’t
enough.”