Kitabı oku: «Rose of Dutcher's Coolly», sayfa 9
CHAPTER XIV
AGAIN THE QUESTION OF HOME-LEAVING
But the day came at last when Josie must say good-bye, and then Rose's essential loneliness swept back upon her in a bitter flood. That night she walked her room in her naked feet, with her handkerchief stifling her sobs, so that John might not hear. She fought it out there (she supposed) and ended at last by determining to sacrifice herself to her father.
He could not be deserted, he needed her so, now that he was growing old and a little weaker. She must put away her vague, ambitious dreams of success, and apply herself to making him happy.
And yet to what end was all her study, she thought, during these later years? Could it be applied to doing him good? Her indifferent talent as a musician seemed the only talent which gave him joy. He cared nothing – knew nothing, of the things she loved and thought about!
Was her life, like his, to come down to the raising of cattle and the breeding of sheep? Was not his office served in educating her? Should not the old be sacrificed to the young?
All these devilish questions came into her mind like flashes of lurid light, but they all paled and faded before this one unchangeable radiance; he was her father, tender, loving, simple, laborious and old.
She fell asleep after hours of writhing agony, worn out, yet triumphant – she imagined.
But she was not. Day followed day, each one seemingly more hopeless than the other. This consideration beat like a knell into her brain, love could never come to her. Marriage with these young men was no longer possible. Love was out there, somewhere in the great world, in the city among artists and music-lovers, and men of great thought and great deeds. Her powerful physical, mental and emotional womanhood rebelled at this thought of lovelessness; like the prisoner of old bound in a sunless cavern where the drip-drop of icy water fell upon his brain, she writhed and seemed like to go mad.
This was the age of cities. The world's thought went on in the great cities. The life in these valleys was mere stagnant water, the great stream of life swept by far out and down there, where men and women met in millions. To live here was to be a cow, a tad-pole! Grass grew here, yes – but she could not live on grass. The birds sang here, yes – but there were Patti, and Duse, and Bernhardt out there in the world.
Here you could arise at five o'clock to cook breakfast and wash dishes, and get dinner, and sweep and mend, and get supper, and so on, till you rotted, like a post stuck in the mud. Your soul would rot. She felt change going on all the time. She was slipping back into shiftlessness, into minute untidiness – into actual slovenliness. There was no stimulus in these surroundings, she told herself; everything was against her higher self.
Once she had read a sentence from Lowell which flamed upon her mind now each time she mused upon her lot.
"The wilderness is all right for a vacation, but all wrong for a life-time."
She considered the coulé a wilderness. It had nothing for her but nature, and nature palls upon a girl of twenty, with red blood in her veins, and splendid dreams in her heart.
Out there was her ideal. "Out there is the man who is to fill out my life," she uttered to herself softly, so that only her inner ear heard.
So she argued, fought, wept, surrendered, and went to battle again. While all about her, John and his sister, moved tranquilly to their daily duties, calm as the cattle in the meadows. To the discerning eye it was a wonderful sight to see that dark, gloomy, restless girl seated opposite those serene, almost stolid faces, to whom "the world" was a breeze blowing in the tree-tops. She had the bearing of a rebellious royal captive – a duchess in exile. Mrs. Diehl and the hired man were the peasants who waited upon her, but ate with her – and her father was the secure free-holder, to whom kings were obscure, world-distant diseases.
Then the equinoctial storms came on, and days of dull, cold, unremitting rain confined her to the house. The birds fell silent, the landscape, blurred with gray mist, looked grim and threatening, and there was prophecy of winter in the air. The season seemed to have rushed into darkness, cold and decay, in one enormous bound. The hills no longer lifted buoyant crests to heaven; they grew cheerless and dank as prison walls.
One night Rose spoke. She had always been chary of caresses; even when a child she sat erect upon her father's knee, with a sober little face, and when she grew sleepy she seldom put hands to his neck, but merely laid her head on his breast and went to sleep. John understood her in all this, for was he not of the same feeling? Love that babbled spent itself, his had no expression.
His heart was big with pride and affection when his splendid girl came over and put her arms about his neck, and put her forehead down on his shoulder.
"O pappa John, you're so good to me – I'm ashamed – I don't deserve this new house!"
"O yes y' do, daughter." His voice when he said "daughter" always made her cry, it was deep and tender like the music of water. It stood for him in the place of "dear" and "darling," and he very, very seldom spoke it. All this made it harder for her to go on.
"No, I don't, father – O, father, I can't stay here – I can't bear to stay here now!"
"Why not, Rosie?"
"O because it's so lonesome for me. There is nobody for me to talk to" (she had to use phrases he could understand) "and I want to go on with my studies."
John considered a moment.
"But, Rosie, seems to me you've got enough; you're graduated."
Rose saw the hopelessness of making him understand that, so she went back.
"It's so lonesome for me here, pappa John!"
He considered again. "I 'spose it is. Well, you can go to the Siding every day if you want to. Hitch up old Doll every day – "
"I don't care for the Siding; it's just as lonesome there for me. I want to go to Chicago."
John grew rigid. "Chicago! What you want to do there?"
"I want to study, pappa. I want to go on with my work. I'll come home summers just the same. I'll come home Christmas if you want me to. It won't cost much, I'll live just as cheap as I can – "
"'Tain't that, 'tain't that, Rose," he said. Then he lifted his head and looked around.
She read his thought and the tears came to her eyes in blinding rush.
"I know, pappa. It's terrible to go now, when you've built this nice home for me, but what can I do? It's so lonesome here! I thought maybe I'd get used to it, but it gets worse. I can't stay here this winter. You must let me go. I'll go crazy if I stay here all winter. I must go out into the world. I want to be an artist. I want to see great people. I can't stay here, pappa John!"
The terrible earnestness of every sentence stabbed John Dutcher's heart like a poniard thrust. He put her away and rose stiffly.
"Well, well, Rosie, if you want to go – "
He did not finish, but turned tremblingly and walked out. She remained on the floor near his chair and watched him go, her soul sick with wretchedness.
Why was the world so ordered? Why must she torture that beautiful, simple soul? Why was it that all her high thoughts, her dreams, her ambitions, her longings, seemed to carry her farther away from him?
She could have beaten her head against the wall in her suffering. She rose at last and crawled slowly to her room, and abandoned herself to black, rayless hopelessness.
John Dutcher went out to the hedgerow and sat down on a stool. Around him bees were humming in the wet clover. The calves thrust their inquiring noses through the fence and called to him. The rain-clouds were breaking up, and the sun was striking under the flying canopy at the West.
It was the bitterest moment of his life, since his wife's death. His eyes were opened to his fate; he saw what he had done; he had educated his daughter out of his world. Never again would she be content in the coolly beside him. He saw how foolish he had been all these years, to suppose he could educate and keep her. For a moment he flamed with resentment and said to himself:
"I wish she had never seen a book."
Then he grew tender. He saw her again in her little blue apron with its pockets full of wheat – he saw her blowing hair, her sunny face; he heard again the wind-tossed chatter of her cunning lips. He ran swiftly over her development – how tall she grew and how splendid she was now, the handsomest girl in the coolly, and he softened. She was right. Who was there of the young farmers or even in Tyre good enough for her?
So he rose to a conception which had never come to him before, and even now it was formlessly vast; he felt the power of the outside world, and reached to a divination of the fatality of it all. It had to be, for it was a part of progress. He was old and bent and dull. She was young, gloriously young. The old must give way to the young, while she was the one to be bowed down to. She was queen and he was subject.
With these conceptions in his mind he went back and looked for her. He called her softly, but she did not hear, she was sobbing deep into her pillow. He came up the stairs and saw her lying face downward on her bed. His heart rose in his throat, because it was a terrible thing to see his imperious girl weep.
"Rosie, old pappa John surrenders. You're right and he's an old dummy."
She turned her face upon him.
"No, you're right. We won't be separated."
"But we ain't going to be." He came over and sat down on the edge of the bed.
"You'll come home summers, and maybe I'll go to Chicago winters."
Her face flashed into a smile. She flung her arms about him again.
"O will you, pappa John?"
"Course I will. Wait till you see me in a spike-tail coat and a boiled shirt. I'll astonish the city dudes."
Rose laughed a little wildly, and tightened her clasp about his neck.
"You're my dear old pappa John."
She went at once to her desk and wrote a letter to Mary Compton, an old schoolmate who had gone to Chicago and whose guidance to bed and board now seemed valuable.
That night John Dutcher did not go to sleep at once, as he usually did on entering his room. He went to his bureau – the old bureau he had bought for his wife thirty years before. In it he kept his pictures. There were several tin-types of Rose, in awkward, scared poses, and there too was the last picture of his wife which had been taken with Rose as a babe in her arms.
Dutcher sat for a long time looking at it, and the tears ran down his face unheeded, pitiful to see.
When he got up at last he moved stiffly as if he had suddenly grown ten years older, and in his sleep his sister heard him groan and talk. In the morning he said he had a touch of rheumatism, but it would most probably pass off as the sun came out.
CHAPTER XV
CHICAGO
Almost 6 o'clock, and the train due in Chicago at 6:30! The city grew more formidable to Rose as she approached it. She wondered how it would first appear on the plain. There was little sign of it yet.
As she looked out of the car window she saw men stacking grain, and plowing. It was supper time at home, and John was just rising from the table. The calves were bleating for their pails of milk; the guinea-hens were clacking, and the little turkeys crying in the grass, the bees were homing, heavy with honey, and here she sat, rushing toward that appalling and unimaginable presence – Chicago.
Somewhere just ahead it sat, this mighty hive of a million and a half of people. The thought of it made her heart beat quick, and her throat filled. She was going there; the lake was there; art was there, and music and the drama – and love! Always under each emotion, always behind every success, was the understanding that love was to be the woman's reward and recompense. It was not articulate nor feverish, this thought; it was a deep, pure emotion, streaming always toward the unknown.
She dreamed as the train rumbled on. She would succeed, she must succeed. She gripped the seat-rail with her broad, strong hands, and braced herself like one entering a flood.
It was this wonderful thing again, a fresh, young and powerful soul rushing to a great city, a shining atom of steel obeying the magnet, a clear rivulet from the hills hurrying to the sea. On every train at that same hour, from every direction, others, like her, were entering on the same search to the same end.
"See that cloud?" some one said; "that's Chicago."
Rose looked – far to the south-east a gigantic smoke-cloud soared above the low horizon line, in shape like an eagle, whose hovering wings extended from south to east, trailing mysterious shadows upon the earth. The sun lighted its mighty crest with crimson light, and its gloom and glow became each moment more sharply contrasted. Towards this portentous presence the train rushed, uttering an occasional shrill neigh, like a stallion's defiance.
The brazen bell upon the engine began to clang and clang; small towns of scattered wooden houses came into view and were left behind. Huge, misshapen buildings appeared in flat spaces, amid hundreds of cars. Webs of railway tracks spread out dangerously in acres of marvelous intricacy, amid which men moved, sooty, grimy, sullen and sickly.
Terrors thickened. Smells assaulted her sensitive nostrils, incomprehensible and horrible odors. Everywhere men delved in dirt and murk, and all unloveliness. Streets began to stretch away on either side, interminable, squalid, filled with scowling, squaw-like women and elfish children. The darkness grew, making the tangle and tumult a deadly struggle.
Was this the city of her dreams? This the magnificent, the home of education and art.
The engine's bell seemed to call back "Good cheer! Good cheer!" The buildings grew mightier but not less gloomy; the freight cars grew fewer, and the coaches more numerous. It was an illimitable jungle filled with unrecognizable forms, over which night was falling.
The man with a hoop of clinking checks came through. He was a handsome, clean and manly fellow, and his calm, kindly voice helped Rose to choke down her dread.
"Baggage checked! – Baggage – Baggage checked to any part of the city – Baggage!"
In him she saw the native denizen to whom all these horrors were commonplace sensations, and it helped her. It couldn't be so bad as it looked to her.
"Chicago, She-caw-go!" called the brakeman, and her heart for a moment stood still, and a smothering sensation came upon her. She was at the gate of the city, and life with all its terrors and triumphs seemed just before her.
At that moment the most beautiful thing in the world was the smooth pasture by the spring, where the sheep were feeding in the fading light, and if she could, she would have turned back, but she was afloat, and retreat was impossible. She pressed on with the rest, wondering what she could do if Mary did not meet her.
Mary had hardly been more than an acquaintance at school, but now she seemed a staff to lean upon. Rose looked to her as a guide to a refuge, a hiding-place from all these terrors.
Out under the prodigious arching roof she stepped, into the tumult of clanging bells, of screeching, hissing steam and of grinding wheels. The shouts of men echoed here and there in the vaulted roof, mysteriously as in a cavern. Up the long walk, streams of people moved, each one laden, like herself, with a valise. Electric lamps sputtered overhead. She hurried on, with sensitive ears tortured by the appalling tumult, her eyes wide and apprehensive.
Her friend was not to be seen, and she moved on mechanically with the rest, keeping step beside an old man who seemed to be familiar with the station, and who kept off (without knowing it), the attentions of two human vultures, in wait for such as Rose.
They moved up the steps into the waitingroom before Rose gave up hope of her friend. So far she had gone securely, but could she find the house which was to be her home, alone?
She sat down for an instant on the long seat by the wall, and listened to the obscure thunder of the street outside. It was terrifying, confusing. Shrill screams and hoarse shouts rose above a hissing, scraping sound, the clang of gongs and the click of shoe-heels.
Every voice was pitched to an unnatural key, like that of men in a mill. The noise seemed hot, some way, like smitten iron and brass. No sound was familiar to her, nothing cool and reposeful. Her head throbbed and her tongue was dry. She had eaten little since early morning and she felt weak.
She looked far more composed and self-reliant than she was, and when her friend came swinging up to her she cried out: "O, Mary!" and her friend realized a little of her relief and gratitude.
"O, here you are! I got delayed – forgive me. I'm all out o' breath." (Here she kissed her.) "How well you look! Your complexion is magnificent. Give me your valise. We'll send for your trunk. Save twenty-five cents by having it done up town. This way – I'm glad to see you. How is Wisconsin?"
Mary Compton was tall, red-haired and strong. Her eyes were keen and laughing, and the tip of her chip hat and the swing of her skirts let everybody know how able she was to take care of herself – thank you! She had been the smart girl of a small town near Madison, and had come to the city, as her brother Dan had gone to Idaho, for the adventure of it. It was quite like hunting bears.
"Shall we take the grip?"
Rose didn't know what she meant, but she said:
"Just as you like."
"I like to take the grip; it gives a fellow a little fresh air, if there is any at all."
A train of cable-cars came nosing along like vicious boars, with snouts close to the ground. Mary helped Rose upon the open forward car, which had seats facing outward. A young man lifted his hat and made room for them.
"Hello, John!" said Mary, "aren't you a little early tonight? Rose, my friend Mr. Hardy. Mr. Hardy, Miss Dutcher."
The young fellow raised his hat again and bowed. He was a pleasant-faced young man in round straw hat and short coat. Mary paid no further attention to him.
"I've got you a room right next to mine," she said to Rose, who was holding to the seat with one hand and clinging to her hat with the other. The car stopped and started with vicious suddenness.
"You'd better hang on; the gripman is mad tonight," Mary explained. "We're most to our street, anyway."
To Rose it was all a wild ride. The noise, the leaping motion of the cars and the perilous passage of drays made it as pleasant to her as a ride behind a running team on a corduroy road.
They came at last to quieter spaces, and alighted finally at a cross street.
"I'm pretty far up," said Mary, "but I want it decently quiet where I live. I have noise enough at the office."
Rose thought it indecently noisy. Peddlers were crying out strange sing-song cries; children romped, screaming in high-pitched furious voices; laundry wagons and vegetable wagons clattered about. There was a curious pungent odor in the air.
On the steps of the houses groups of young people, like Mary and John, sat on strips of carpet, and laughed and commented on the passers-by. Mary turned upon one fool who called a smart word at her:
"Left your manners in Squashville, didn't you, little man?"
They came at last to an imposing block of houses, situated at the corner. They entered the door and climbed a gas-lit stairway, which went round and round a sort of square well. They came at last to a door which closed all passage, and Mary got out her key and opened it.
"Here we are!" she said cheerily.
The main hall was carpeted and ran past several doors, which were open. In one room a young man in his shirt sleeves was shaving before a glass. In another a girl was reading.
"Hello!" called Mary.
"Hello!" said the girl, without looking up.
"Here's my room, and this's yours." Mary pushed open a door at the end of the hall. It was a small room, papered in light buff and blue. It had an oak dresser and mirror, a couple of chairs and a mantel bed. It looked cheerful and clean, but very small. Mary put down her valise.
"I guess you'll find everything all right, water and towels. Wash up right off – dinner'll be ready soon."
Rose removed her hat and sat down, her head throbbing with the heat and noise. She heard the man at the glass whistling, and Mary was thumping about in her vigorous way.
The dash of cold water cleared her brain, but did not remove her headache. Her face was still flushed and her eyes expanded.
Mary coming back, looked at her a moment and then rushed upon her and hugged her.
"O what a beauty you are! I wish I had half what you've got."
Rose smiled faintly; she didn't care just that moment whether she looked well or ill.
"The boys will all be dead in love with you before dinner is over. Let me tell you about them." She softened her reed-like voice down and glanced at the transom furtively: "Never forget the transom when you're talking secrets," she explained.
"First, there's Mr. Taylor; he's from Colorado somewhere. He's a lawyer. He's a fine fellow too – you'll like him. Then there's Mr. Simons; he's a Jew, but he's not too much of a Jew. There's Alice Fletcher; she's queer and grumpy, but she reads a lot and she can talk when she wants to, and there's you and myself."
"I don't feel like meeting them tonight," Rose said; "if I had a cup of tea I'd stay in my room."
"All right! I'll bring it."
The bell rang and then the movement of feet and the banging of doors told of the rush to dinner.
Mary came back with a cup of tea and a biscuit and some pudding.
"Have more, if you wish," she said.
"This will do nicely. You're very kind, Mary Compton. I don't deserve it."
"You deserve the world," cried the adoring girl. "If I had your figure and complexion I'd make the universe wait on me."
In spite of all this fervor of praise Rose felt herself to be a very dejected and spiritless beauty. She was irritated and angry with the nagging of strange sights and sounds and smells. The air seemed laden with disease and filth. It was all so far from the coolly with its purple hills looming against the sapphire sunset sky.
But this she came for – to see the city; to plunge into its life. She roused herself therefore with a blush of shame at her weakness. She had appeared to be a child before this girl who had always been her inferior at school.
It was a very dignified young woman who arose to greet Mrs. Wilcox, the landlady, whom Mary brought back. This dignity was not needed. Mrs. Wilcox was a sweet-voiced, smiling woman of fifty – being of those toilers who smile when they are tired enough to drop. She was flushed with fatigue and moved languidly, but her kind, patient, pathetic smile touched Rose almost to tears.
"I'm glad to have you come here," the landlady said. "We're all nice people here, aren't we, Miss Compton?" Her eyes twinkled with humorous self-analysis.
"Every one of us," corroborated Mary.
"I hope you'll rest well. If there's anything we can do for you, my dear, let me know." Such was the spirit in which the over-worked woman served her boarders. They all called her "mother." She had no children of her own, and her husband was "not at all well," yet nothing could sour her sweet kindliness, which included all the world. She was a familiar type, and Rose loved her at once.
Miss Fletcher came in and was introduced. She was a teacher in a school near by.
"What anybody should come to this town for I can't understand. I stay here because I'm obliged to. I'm just back from the country to my work."
"The country is all right for a vacation," quoted Rose.
Mary broke in, "That's what I say. I lived on a farm and I lived in Castle Rock. When I lived on the farm I wanted to get to Castle Rock. When I got to Castle Rock I wanted to get to Madison. Madison made me hone for Chicago, and when I had a chance to come, I just dropped my work at the University and put for the city, and here I am and glad of it."
"I can't understand such folly," murmured Miss Fletcher.
"You could if you'd stayed on the farm the year round, with nobody to talk to and mighty little to read. It's all right for you to go up for a couple of months and lie about in a hammock, but you take a place like Castle Rock all the year round! It's worse than the farm. Gossip! They talk every rag of news to smithereens, don't they, Rose?"
Rose nodded.
"And then the people! They're the cullin's. All the bright boys and girls go to Madison and Chicago or Dakota, and then the rest marry and intermarry, and have idiot boys and freckle-faced girls!"
They all laughed. Mary was always extreme, no matter what her subject.
Miss Fletcher sighed resignedly.
"Well, it's fate. Here this big city sits and swallows you bright people like a great dragon, and the old folks are left alone in these dull places you talk about."
Rose felt her eyes filling with tears. The figure of her lonely old father came before her. She saw him sitting beside the kitchen table, his head on his palm, and all the new house empty and dark.
Mary jumped up. "Here now, stop that talk, we must leave Rose alone and let her go to sleep."
They left her alone, but sleep was impossible. The tramp of feet, the sound of pianos, the slam of doors, the singing, laughing of the other boarders made sleep impossible. The cars jangled by, the click-clack of horses' hoofs and the swift rattle of wagons kept up long after the house was silent. Between midnight and four o'clock she got a little sleep, out of which she awoke while a booming, clattering wagon thundered by. Other wagons clattered viciously along up the alleys, and then some early riser below began to sing, and Rose wearily dressed and sat down by the window to listen.
Far to the south a low, intermittent, yet ever deepening, crescendo bass note began to sound. It was Chicago waking from the three hours' doze, which is its only sleep. It grew to a raucous, hot roar; and then to the north she heard the clear musical cry of a fruit vendor, – then another: "Black-berries! Fine fresh black-berries!"
The cars thickened, the sun grew hot and lay in squares of blinding light across her carpet. That curious pungent smell came in with the wind. Newsboys cried their morning papers. Children fought and played in the street. Distant whistles began to sound, and her first morning in Chicago came to Rose, hot, brazen, unnatural, and found her blinded, bruised, discouraged, abased, homesick.
