On the fireman’s seat Mrs. Dasher, cowering with covered eyes, looked
round at him. She had not heard what he said, had not seen what he saw,
had felt nothing that he felt, had been puzzled by no cry; but her face
held its own emotion, wore now as much experience as her hands.
“Elmer,” she cried, “I don’t understand what happened to her and I don’t
believe I ever shall.”
But this he did not hear. “The glory of the Lord, by the great horn
spoon!” he bellowed, and looked about.
Neither death nor the fury of the hour occupied Jerry. In the thunder of
the engine and of the storm, she had found that the child clutched at
her.
Before midnight they were dry in their rooms and the little boy was
sleeping. Elmer Dasher’s exaltation, his wife’s pity and terror, Jerry’s
brief motherhood, all boxed dry in their rooms.
The storm cleared and left the air sultry, intolerable. Dasher could not
sleep. He went downstairs and sat in the swing. Ludlow was moving about
the lawn, barefooted in the drenched grass. He came to the Dasher’s
verandah rail.
“Been up in town, have you?” he said. “I tell you, if there’s a reason
why Patch Grove should collapse and slide into the valley, Pearl City
ought to drop into the ground with no warning. Ought to disappear from
the human eye.”
Something shook Elmer Dasher. He seemed to remember that this destiny of
man he had recently been stirred to resist. But automatically he replied:
“You won’t find a better city anywhere than Pearl.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Ludlow, and went home.
Faintly, a far horn which would wake few, Elmer Dasher heard the cry
again. In it was the nostalgia of the night, of the world, of some hidden
being striving to be heard. But of this cry he could not divine direction
or meaning. It might have been a signal or a challenge. To whom? And from
where? Boys could not be playing ball on the school grounds now....
He moved nervously in his swing and the frame dissented leniently. He
felt an instant and acute relief and comfortably concluded that this
faint squeak was all that he had noted.
Hearing this squeak, his wife descended, quavered. “That you, Elmer?” and
came to her rocking chair on its creaking board. The moon in its third
quarter, a trinket of silver gilt, was tilted above the elm, but the
Dashers did not observe. Nor did they note the clean new anger of the
second storm cutting its low way along the west.
Beneath the hall burner Jerry passed, came to the threshold, and when her
mother said “Better sit down,” emerged and obeyed.
“I don’t understand it and I never shall,” said Mrs. Dasher heavily.
“Don’t say that again!” Elmer Dasher cried. “There isn’t a woman in the
world that’ll keep on saying the same thing over and over the way you
will.”
“I won’t be here long to say anything. I’m sick of the whole thing.”
Jerry interposed: “It’s hot again, isn’t it?” She heard: “Why shouldn’t
it be? It’s summer time.” And: “Can anybody see whether I hung up the ice
card?”
THE TWO SOULS
Marthella brought to the kitchen table a five-pound jar of butter and six
butter pats, white bread, devil’s food, filled cookies. In the woodshed
Malcolm had already ranged the boxes of potatoes, tomatoes, grapes, the
two squashes, the tray of “mixed” vegetables. All their entries were
ready for the County Fair.
Malcolm came in, stamping. On the other end of the kitchen table
Marthella had ready their two plates, coffee cups, soup bowls. She
carried steaming soup to his plate. Then she sat down in the high-backed
rocking chair near the red hearth. She had spent a difficult day. The
last straw had been that Millie, her little maid, had asked to go home
for the rest of the week. Marthella thought angrily that she shouldn’t go
home.
“Have you eaten?” Malcolm inquired, then noted the unused dishes at her
plate. “Aren’t you going to eat anything?”
He almost never called her Marthella any more, nor did she call him
Malcolm.
“I’m so tired,” she said, “I can’t eat.”
“So am I,” he said testily, “but I’ve got sense enough to eat, anyway.”
“Some folks are all sense ... one kind,” she retorted tartly.
“I’d have more of the other kind if you were as saving as some,” he
returned.
At this Marthella fell to quiet weeping.
He took his soup in silence and presently remarked:
“I’ll bet Sims gets first on his mixed vegetables. My ’bagies aren’t
up to his. Sims is an old snide,” he added, his face hardening and
sharpening. “He can’t farm for sour grapes. But he can bluff.”
Still weeping, she said:
“If any of my stuff gets first, you keep the money. I couldn’t touch it.
It’d burn me.”
She knew that she could “touch” it, and he knew that he would not take
her first-premium money. But he replied indifferently:
“All right. It can go toward the milking machine.”
Marthella ceased weeping. Two red spots burned on her cheeks. “I was
going to use it toward the parlor carpet,” she said. “But I don’t care
how the parlor carpet looks. Nobody sees it.”
“No,” he assented. “Nobody. Nobody but you.”
“Yes. I’m nobody,” she contributed.
He said nothing.
“I’m going to paint the kitchen floor,” he announced after an interval.
“I think I’ll paint it brown.”
“Because brown’s hard to take care of?” she inquired. “And yellow’s easy?”
He burst into laughter. “I did that to try you,” he told her. “Last time
I said ‘yellow,’ and you said yellow was calf color and you wanted brown.
Just plain cantankerous, you are.”
Stung by the injustice of this, her voice rose shrilly:
“I didn’t know brown was hard to take care of then, did I? Well, I know
now, because I’ve had it. And I say I want yellow.”
He continued to laugh, rose, pushed his chair under the table, then
leaned upon it.
“We’ll start,” he said, “before six in the morning. I want to get a good
place for my stuff.”
“You can start when you like,” she replied. “I’m not going.”
And this she heard herself say exactly as if some one else had said it,
with whom she had no traffic. The words amazed her. She had not meant to
say that. She had meant to go to the Fair. She had not missed a Fair in
thirty years. She had spoken without her own will, and now she knew that
she must live up to her declaration.
“I may not be able to spare a team to go in again this week,” he reminded
her.
“I shall not go in again this week,” she said with deliberation. “I
shall not go to the Fair at all.”
At least she enjoyed the sensation that she was making. He knew that she
was not given to speaking lightly. Having said that she should not go,
Marthella, as he had come to know her, would not be going.
“Suit yourself,” he said only, and went to the barn.
Marthella sat in a web of silence—an abrupt accusing silence. What had
she done? She had taken away her chief pleasure of the year, when she met
friends not seen year-long. Also she had forgone her premium money, which
came to her every year, and was her only money to spend as she liked.
Why had she done this? To satisfy something which even now was taking
satisfaction, as a beast of prey, over some bleeding victim.
Who was that bleeding victim?
She was hungry, but she sat without eating, as if this were a part
of that same savage satisfaction. She looked at the red coals of the
hearth. How very bright they were! How very bright they were!
The door opened and her husband came in. He sat opposite to her, before
the hearth, and stretched his feet to the fire. He, too, stared at the
red coals on the hearth. She looked at him. He was very bright and
shining.
There he was, Malcolm, as she knew him, but shot through with some
incalculable cast of radiance. His face was serene and beautiful—not as
she remembered it in his youth, not as she might imagine it in death, but
all compounded of both, and majestic beyond the faces of men.
He spoke to her in the voice that she knew, but keyed now to something
gentle.
“Have you got any salve?” he asked. “I seem to have hurt myself.”
She rose and went to the cupboard. As she returned she saw herself in the
mirror above the wash bench: her tired face, her smooth hair, her open
collar. And she was as luminous as he.
There was no time to think of this. She went to him with the salve,
stooped to him. He lifted his hand, with a gesture like that of a little
child. She touched him.
And from her to him, and from him to her, went some flow of power which
filled the room. Not power which shook them. But something which seemed
to have been there for a very long time.
She went back to her chair and they talked. And all the time she looked
breathlessly at this being. Was it Malcolm? Had he died, and had this one
come instead? But what of her? She glanced down at her blue dress. It
seemed clean and soft, and its fabric was like silk. Her hands, too, were
smooth and lay unwontedly disclosed. And all was shining....
He had his head on the chair back in a way that she knew.
“We ought to get the kitchen papered,” he was saying.
“I wish we could,” she answered. “Some of the pretty, cheap paper—plain,
maybe.”
“Yes, cheap,” he assented. “I don’t know as I always fancy plain
paper—might show the dirt more. Would it?”
“Perhaps it would,” she said. “We could tell when we came to pick it out.”
He agreed. “I guess we better see about that when we get a chance. We’ll
go to Sims’ for it.”
“Sims’ is the best place,” she assented. “Sims hasn’t been out here in
quite a while,” she added.
“I wish’t he’d come,” Malcolm said heartily. “There’s nobody does me more
good than Sims. But then, he’s always doing somebody a good turn. As he
did Elder.”
“The one he found sleeping in the hay,” she recalled.
He nodded. “The ex-convict,” he said. “Gosh, think of it! College and all
that, and not a friend when he came out. He’s been a son to Sims.”
Some exquisite current of feeling ran through Marthella. It made her both
faint and divinely strong. Her eyes were on Malcolm; and now, as she saw
him smiling with his joy in Sims, and expressing that joy, his body was
pulsing with more light, like a soft sun. She looked down at herself. Was
she, too, brighter?
She wondered what would happen next. She felt a sense of perfect
happiness, as at the onset of some gentle force, which entered and held
her and would not let her go. She must try to speak it.
“Millie wants to go home for the rest of the week,” was what she said.
“Her sister is there. I’m going to let her go. I can get along.”
And at this she was aware that her own being was bathed in a fairer
shining.
He assented. “Millie’s a nice little thing,” he added. “I wish’t we could
do something for her.”
She leaned forward eagerly.
“Oh, Malcolm!” she said. “I’ve got some things I could fix up for her,
if—do you s’pose we could send her to school? Some little place?”
Until that moment she had never thought of this, but the plan seemed to
rise within her, full-formed.
“If that’s what we’d rather do,” he answered. “I’ve been thinking—we
ought to pick out some few things like that and then go to work and do
them.”
He spoke with a manner of hesitation, almost of surprise ... as if, say,
he were trying to remember when he had thought of this.
“Oh, let’s!” she cried. “And Millie’ll be one of ’em. I’d put the premium
money in.”
She tried to remember what had been said, of late, about that premium
money. Something that hurt her, somewhere. But she had forgotten. In any
case the money should go to Millie.
Malcolm rose, and the brightness which was he moved as he moved, and she
looked up at him with wonder.
He crossed to the clock and wound it. She could see the turn of his arm
and his huge hand, could hear the regular scrape o£ the weights as they
rose to his touch. And yet he was as lucent as an angel: the old blue
coat, the rough hair, the worn shoes—all.
She looked about on the objects of the room. Everything stood in some
exquisite change. The clock shelf, the mirror, the wash bench—what homely
graciousness, what dignity! As if their delicate offices of telling the
time, reflecting, cleansing, were upon them like visible garments.
The cupboard, with one door ajar—she knew those dishes within so that
a crack, a nick, was an event. Yet there they stood, in some delicate
difference, vessels of still further ceremonial.
And this was true of the window, looking on the mystery and the splendor
of the night. And of the hearth, red with fire, mystic and very bright.
And on the table waited the work of her hand, to be taken on the morrow
to the County Fair. There they were, the elements of the body, in their
mantle of perfection, ready to be blessed, as for some secret sacrament.
All this was to her but a current of feeling, deep, glad. She thought
about the Fair, that assembling of the people, people whom she had known
from her girlhood; greeting, laughter, music, hands....
She thought about the County Fair ground, and it seemed to be swimming in
this brightness which enveloped Malcolm and her.
He closed the clock door, and turned.
“Come, Marthella,” he said. “We must get a pretty good start in the
morning.”
Had some one, sometime, laid upon her that she was not to go to the Fair?
She hardly thought of this. She was smiling, because he had called her by
her name.
What a wonderful thing a name was, within! Marthella! It seemed to her
new, like another name. A name which was in itself a woman. She rose to
be that woman. All this was to her merely as gladness.
“Yes, Malcolm,” she said.
He fastened the door, blew out the lamp, and there were the coals on the
hearth, very, very bright....
Together they groped to the stair door, and that homely way received
them, as if abruptly it came forward to perform its authentically
appointed service. And there in the stairway that brightness followed. It
was in their chamber, mingling with the moonlight. The white curtains,
patterned with the moving leaves without, the familiar objects of gloom
and light—all there stood in some robing, some dignity of their simple
offices.
And when had there been in the house this indeterminate perfume....
They undressed without a lamp—there was no lamp in the chamber. They lay
down in that tender, engulfing tide. Sleep came, and as it came there
beat about them the sense of some besetting sweetness, but strong with
the strength of that force which had seized upon them at birth and had
caused them to live.
In the morning, as they drove away from their door, the first sun came
slanting along the road to meet them. Their humble highway ran parallel
with the equator, and the great sun was there to make it known.
“Marthella,” said Malcolm, “that was the best talk we had last night that
we’ve had in a dog’s age. But I’ll be jumped-up if I know what we talked
about. Except Millie, and all.”
“It was so,” she said only. “And I dunno’s I know, either, what it was we
talked about last night—except Millie and all.”
She looked up at him.
That other brightness was gone this morning. But in his face was the look
of the morning, of his manhood, of his energy to create.
She glanced down at her black Henrietta-cloth skirt, at her brown cotton
gloves. No, she was not shining now.
They were driving toward that blaze of beauty on the road. It shone on
the leaves, on the smooth backs of the willing horses, on Malcolm’s other
suit.
She glanced back at the wagon box, filled with what they two had called
from the living earth.
That other shining had gone. But here was the ancient shining of the sun.
Here was the blessing of the earth. And in the air a tide, besieging,
possessing.
THE END
_PLAYS BY ZONA GALE_
MISS LULU BETT
(_The Pulitzer Prize Play of 1921_)
_With Foreword by Robert Benchley and Thomas Dickinson_
A comedy of American life whose every speech brings delighted recognition
of its human, everyday truth. The story of the play is woven around
Lulu, a colorless household drudge, living in the home of her sister
and brother-in-law. Dialogue so commonplace and ugly that it is highly
effective and clever character delineation accompany the working out of
the plot to the end where Lulu finds a lover and happiness and so brings
satisfaction to the sympathetic audience. 2 or 3 acts. Cast: 4m. 5w. “A
milestone in American drama.”—_Thomas Dickinson._ Price $1.75.
MISTER PITT
A play of American small town life. Its central character is a traveling
pickle salesman, and in him Miss Gale, with marvelous artistry, has
achieved a masterpiece of characterization. The life of this generous,
good-hearted man, whose native fine qualities are shrouded by a lack of
self-confidence and by odd manners and ways of speech, forms the plot of
the play. 3 acts, 11 scenes. Cast: 5m. 13w. Price $2.00.
_Send for Complete Dramatic Catalogue._
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