Kitabı oku: «The Reclaimers», sayfa 9
IX
IF A WOMAN WENT RIGHT WITH HERSELF
And thus it happened that Jerry Swaim was alone this evening behind the honeysuckle-vines, with leaf shadow and moonbeams falling caressingly on her filmy white gown and golden hair. For a long time she sat still. Once she said, half aloud, unconscious that she was speaking at all:
"So Eugene Wellington has given up his art for an easy berth in the Darby bank. He hadn't the courage to resist the temptation, though it made him a tool instead of a master of tools. And we promised each other we would each make our own way, independent of Aunt Jerry's money. Maybe if I had been there things would have been different."
She gripped her hands in her quick, nervous way, as a homesick longing swept her soul. She was searching a way out for Eugene, a cause for putting all the blame on Aunt Jerry.
"I wish I had gone with the Macphersons. I could have forgotten, for a while at least."
A light step inside the house caught her ear.
"Maybe Laura has come home," she thought, too absorbed in herself to ask why Laura should have chosen the side door when she knew that Jerry was alone on the front porch.
Again she heard a movement just inside the open door; then a step on the threshold; and then a tall, thin woman walked out of the house and half-way across the wide porch before she caught sight of Jerry in an easy-chair behind the honeysuckle-vines. The intruder paused a second, staring at the corner where the girl sat motionless. From her childhood Jerry had possessed unusual physical courage. To-night it was curiosity, rather than fright, that prompted her to keep still while the strange woman's eyes were upon her. Evidently the intruder was more surprised than herself, and Jerry let her make the first move in the game. The woman was angular, with swift but ungraceful motion. For a long time, as such seconds go, she stared at the white figure hidden by the shadows of the vines. Then with a quick stride she thrust herself before the girl and dropped into a chair.
"Well, well! This is Miss Swim, ain't it?"
"As well that as anything. I can't land anywhere," Jerry thought.
"I'm Mrs. Stellar Bahrr, a good friend of Laury Macpherson as she's got in this town, unless it's you. I seen you in York's office this afternoon. I was sorry I intruded on you two when you come purpose to see him in his private office. When girls wants to see him that way they don't want nobody, 'specially women, around."
Mrs. Bahrr paused to giggle and to give Jerry time to parry her thrust, meanwhile pinning her through with the sharp points of her eyes that fairly gleamed in the shadow-checkered moonlight of the porch. Jerry was not accustomed to being accountable to anybody for what she chose to do, nor did she know that every man in New Eden, except York Macpherson and Junius Brutus Ponk – and every woman, without exception – really feared Stella Bahrr, knowing that she would hesitate at no kind of warfare to accomplish her purpose. It is generally easier to be decent than to be courageous, and peace at any price may be more desired than nasty word battles. Not knowing Stella for the woman she was, Jerry had no mind to consider her at all, so she waited for her caller to proceed or to leave her.
"You must excuse me if I seem to be interfering in your affairs. You are a stranger here except to York and that man Ponk – " Stella began, thrusting her hooks more viciously into her catch.
"Oh, you didn't interfere," Jerry interrupted her indifferently, and then paused.
Mrs. Bahrr caught her breath. The girl was sinfully pretty and attractive, her beauty and grace in themselves alone railing out at the older woman's ugly spirit of envy. And she should be tender, with feeling to be lacerated for these gifts of nature. Instead, she was firm and hard, with no vulnerable spot for a poisoned shaft.
"I'm sure you had a right to go into a man's private office. It's everybody's right, of course," she began, with that faint sneering tone of hers that carried a threat of what might follow.
"Yes, but a little discourteous in me to drive you out. That was Mr. Macpherson's fault, not mine," Jerry broke in, easily.
"Maybe that's her grievance. I'll be decent about it," the girl was thinking.
"I'm awfully bored right now." The wind shifted quickly. "I run up to see Laury a minute. Just slipped in the side-stoop way to save troublin' you an' York out here. I knowed Laury wouldn't be here, an', would you believe it? I clar forgot they was gone out, an' I seen you all leavin', too – I mean them, of course."
The threatening tone could not be reproduced. It carried, however, a most uncomfortable force like a cruel undertow beneath the seemingly safe crest of a wave.
"It's a joke on me bein' so stupid, but you won't give me away to 'em, will you?"
"I'm awfully bored, too," Jerry thought.
"You say you won't tell 'em at all that I come?" Mrs. Bahrr insisted.
"Not if you say so," Jerry replied, with a smile.
"I'm an awfully good friend of Laury's. She's a poor cripple, dependent on her brother for everything, an' if he marries, as he's bound to do, I'd hate to see her turned out of here. This house is just Laury through and through. Don't you think so? 'Course, though, if York marries again – " Stellar Bahrr stopped meditatively. "All the women in the Sage Brush Valley's just crazy about York. He's some flirt, but everybody thought he'd settled his mind once sure. But I guess he flared up again, from what they say. She's too fur away from town a'most. Them that's furtherest away don't have a chance like them that's nearest him. But it may be all just gossip. There was a lot of talk about him an' a girl down the river that's got a crippled brother – Paul Ekblad's his name; hers is Thelmy – an' some considerable about one of the Poser girls where he was up the Sage Brush to this week. The married one now, I think, an' a bouncin' big baby, but what do you care for all that?"
"Nothing," Jerry replied, innocently.
The steel hooks turned slowly to lacerate deeper.
"Well, I must be goin'. You give me your word you wouldn't cheep about my forgettin' an' runnin' in here. York's such a torment, I'd never hear the last of it. I know you are a honorable one with your promises, an' I like that kind. I'm glad I met you. An' I'll not say a word, neither, 'bout your goin' to see York in his private office. It's a bargain 'tween us two. Laury's an awfully good friend of yours an' she'll keep you here a good long while, she's that hospitable."
The steel hooks tore their way out, and the woman rose and strode quickly away. In a minute she had literally dropped from view in the shaded slope beyond the driveway.
"I might as well punch a stick in water or stick a pin in old Granddad Poser's tombstone out in the cimetery, an' expect to find a hole left, as to do anything with that pink-an'-white-an'-gold critter!" she exclaimed, viciously, as she disappeared in the shadows. "I'm afraider of her than I would be of a real mad-cat, but she can't scare me!"
Out on the lawn the moon just then seemed to cast a weird gleam of light, and to veil rather than reveal the long street beyond it. For a minute after the passing of her uninvited caller Jerry Swaim was filled with an unaccountable fright. Then her pulse beat calmly again and she smiled at herself.
"I don't seem to fear these Kansas men – Mr. Ponk, for example, nor that Teddy-bear creature down by the deep hole in the Sage Brush. But these Kansas women, except Laura – anybody would except Laura – are so impossible. That dairy-maid type of a Thelma, and that woman-and-baby combination, for example; and some of the women really scare me. That aborigine down in the brush by the river, in her shabby clothes and sunbonnet eclipse; and now this 'Stellar' comes catfooting out of the house and lands over yonder in the shadows. She needn't have been bored because she didn't find the folks at home, and she needn't frighten me so. I never was afraid of Aunt Jerry. I ought to be proof against anybody else. And yet maybe I am in the way here, even if they drive the very idea away from me. Laura is good to me and her friendliness is genuine. Little as I know, I know that much. And York – oh, that was a village gossip's tale! And she gets me scared – I, whom even Jerusha Darby never cowed."
The poison was working, after all, and Stellar Bahrr's sting had not been against marble, nor into water. With the memory of Jerusha Darby, too, the burden came again to her niece's mind, only to be lifted again, however, in a few minutes. Her memory had run back to her day down the river and the oak-grove and the sand, and the young man whose name was Joe Thomson – Jerry did not remember the name – and the crushing weight of surprise and disappointment. The struggle to decide on a course for herself immediately was rising again within her, when she saw a young man turn from the street and come up the walk toward the porch.
"I can't have leisure to settle anything by myself, it seems, even with the lord and lady of the castle leaving me in full seclusion here. One caller goes and another comes. I wonder what excuse this one has for intruding. He is another type – one I haven't met before."
In the time required for this caller to reach the porch there flashed through Jerry's mind all the types she had seen in the West. Ponk and Thelma and fuzzy Teddy, the woman-and-baby, Laura and York, and that pin-eyed gossip – and the young country fellow whose land lay next to hers. None of them concerned her, really, except these hospitable friends who were sheltering her, and, in a way, in an upright, legal, Jim Swaim kind of way, the young man down the Sage Brush, losing in the game like herself and helpless like herself.
It was no wonder that Jerry did not recognize in this caller the ranchman of the blowout. There was nothing of the clodhopper in this well-dressed young fellow, although he was not exactly a model for advertising high-grade tailoring.
"Is this Miss Swaim?" he asked, lifting his hat. "I am Joe Thomson. You may remember that we met down in the blowout two weeks ago."
"I could hardly forget meeting you. Will you sit down?" Jerry offered Joe a chair with a courtesy very unlike the blunt manner of her first words to him a fortnight before.
But in the far recesses of her consciousness all the while the haunting, ever-recurring picture of a handsome face and a faultlessly clad form, even the face and form of a Philadelphia bank clerk, né artist, made the reality of Joe Thomson's presence very commonplace and uninteresting at that moment, and her courtesy was of a perfunctory sort.
"I hope I don't intrude. Were you busy?" Joe asked, something of the embarrassment of the first meeting coming back with the question.
"Yes, I was very busy," Jerry replied, with a smile. "Pick-up work, though. I was just thinking. Lost in thought, maybe."
The moonlight can do so much for a pretty woman, but with Jerry Swaim one could not say whether sunlight, moonlight, starlight, or dull gray clouds did the most. For two weeks the memory of her fair face, as he recalled it in the oak shade down beside the blowout, had not been absent from the young ranchman's mind. And to-night this dainty girl out of the East seemed entrancing.
"You were lost in thought when I saw you before. I had an idea that city girls didn't do much thinking. Is it your settled occupation?" Joe inquired, with a smile in his eyes.
"It is my only visible means of support right now; about as profitable, too, as farming a blowout," Jerry returned.
"Which reminds me of my purpose in thrusting this call upon you," Joe declared. "I didn't realize the situation the other day – and – well, to be plain, I came to beg your pardon for my rudeness in what I said about your claim. I had no idea who you were, you know, but that hardly excuses me for what I said."
"It is very rude to speak so slightingly of land that behaves as beautifully as mine does," Jerry said, with a smile that atoned for the trace of sarcasm in her voice.
"It is very rude to speak as slightingly as I did of the former owner. But you see I have watched that brainless blowout thing creep along, season after season, eating up my acres – my sole inheritance, too."
"And you said you didn't go mad," Jerry interposed.
"Yes, but I didn't say I didn't get mad. I have worn out enough profanity on that blowout to stock the whole Sage Brush Valley."
"But you aren't to the last resort, for you do go mad here then, you told me. I wonder you aren't all madmen and women when I think of this country and remember how different I had imagined it would be."
"When we come to the very last ditch, we really have two alternatives – to go mad and to go back East. Most folks prefer the former. But I say again, it's always a long way to the last ditch out on the Sage Brush, so we seldom do either."
"What should I do now? Won't you tell me? I'm really near my last ditch."
Jerry sat with clasped hands, looking earnestly into Joe's face, as she said this. Oh, fair was she, this exquisite white-blossom style of girl, facing her first life-problem, the big problem of living. Joe Thomson made no reply to her question. What could this dainty, untrained creature do with the best of claims? The frank sincerity of his silence made an appeal to her that the wisest advice could not have made just then.
York Macpherson was right when he said that Jim Swaim's child was a type of her own. If Jerry, through her mother's nature, was impulsive and imaginative, from her father she had inherited balance and clear vision. Her young years had heretofore made no call upon her to exercise these qualities. What might have been turned to the frivolous and romantic in one parent, and the hard-headed and grasping in the other, now became saving qualities for the child of these two. In an instant Jerry read the young ranchman's character clearly and foresaw in him a friend and helper. But there was neither romance nor selfishness in that vision.
"Mr. Thomson," the girl began, seriously, "you need not apologize for what you could not help feeling about the condition of my estate and the wrong that has been done to you. I know you do not hold me responsible for it. Let's forget that you thought you had said anything unpleasant to me, for I want to ask your advice."
"Mine!" Joe Thomson exclaimed.
This sweet-faced, soft-voiced girl was walking straight into another heart in the Sage Brush Valley. Nature had given her that heritage, wherever she might go.
"Yes, your advice, please." Jerry went on. "You have watched that sand spreading northward over your claim. You have had days, months, years, maybe, to see the blowout doing its work. I awakened suddenly one morning from a beautiful day-dream. My only heritage left of all the fortune I had been brought to expect to be mine, the inheritance I had idealized with all the romantic beauty and prosperity possible to rural life, in a minute all this turned to a desert before my eyes. You belong to the West. Tell me, won't you, what is next for me?"
"What could I tell you, Miss Swaim?" Joe asked.
"Tell me what to do, I mean," Jerry exclaimed. "Tell me quickly, for I am right against the bread-line now."
For a moment Joe stared at the girl in amazement. Her earnestness left no room to misunderstand her. But his senses came back quickly, as one whose life habit it had been to meet and answer hard questions suddenly.
"Why not go back East?" he asked.
"One of your two last resorts; the other one is madness. I won't do it," Jerry said, stubbornly. "Shall I tell you why?"
It was a delicious surprise to the young ranchman to be taken into the confidence of this charming, gracious girl. The honeysuckle leaves, stirred by the soft night breeze that came purring across the open plain, gave the moonbeams leave to play with the rippling gold of her hair, and to flutter ever so faintly the soft white draperies of her gown. Her big dark eyes, her fair white throat and shoulders, the faint pink hue of her cheeks, the shapely white arms below the elbow-frilled sleeves, her soft voice, her frank trust in his judgment and integrity, made that appeal that rarely comes to a young man's heart oftener than once in a lifetime.
"My father lived a rich man and died a poor man, leaving me – for mother went first – to the care of his wealthy sister. A half-forgotten claim on the Sage Brush is my only possession after two years of litigation and all that sort of thing." Jerry paused.
"Well?" Joe queried.
"I was offered one of two alternatives: I might be dependent on my aunt's bounty or I could come out West and live on my claim. I chose the West. Now what can I do?"
The pathos of the young face was touching. The question of maintenance is hard enough for the resourceful and experienced to meet; how doubly hard it must be to the young, untried, and untrained!
Joe Thomson looked out to where the open prairie, swathed in silvery mist, seemed to flow up to the indefinite bounds of the town. All the earth was beautiful in the stillness of the June night.
"I don't know how to advise you," he said, at length. "If you were one of us – a real Western girl – it would be different."
To Jerry this sincerity outweighed any suggestion he could have offered. From the point of romance this young man was impossible to Lesa Swaim's child. Yet truly nobody before, not even York Macpherson, had ever seemed like such a real friend to her, and the chance acquaintance was reaching by leaps and bounds toward a genuine comradeship.
"Why do you stay here? You weren't born here, were you? Tell me about yourself," Jerry demanded.
"There's a big difference between our cases," Joe replied, wondering how this girl could care anything for his life-story. "I was the oldest child of our family. My father came out here on account of his health, but he came too late, and died, leaving me the claim on the Sage Brush and my pledge on his death-bed never to leave the West, for fear I, too, would become an invalid as he had been. There seems to be little danger of that, and I like the West too well to leave it now. And then, besides, I'm like a lot of other fellows who claim to love the Sage Brush. I haven't the means to get away and start life anywhere else, anyhow. You see, we are as frank out here about our conditions as you Philadelphians are."
He smiled and looked down at his strong hands and sturdy arms. It would be difficult to think of Joe Thomson as an invalid.
"I inherited, besides my claim and my promise, the provision for two younger sisters, housed with relatives in the East, but supported by contributions from this same Sage Brush claim on which I have had to wrestle with the heat and drought that sear the prairies. And now, when both my sisters, who married young, are provided for and settled in homes of their own, and I can begin to live my own life a little, comes my enemy, the blowout – "
"Oh, I never want to think of that awful thing!" Jerry cried. "I shall give the Macpherson Mortgage Company control of the entire sand-pile. I'll never play there again, never!"
In the silence that followed something in the beauty of the midsummer night seemed to fall like a benediction on this man and this woman, each facing big realities. And, however different their equipment for their struggles had been in previous years, they were not so far apart now as their differing circumstances of life would indicate.
"I must be going now. I did not mean to take so much of your time. I came only to assure you that I am not always so rude as the mood you found me in the other day would indicate." Joe rose to go with the words.
Jerry's mind had run back again, dreamily, to Gene Wellington, of Philadelphia, the Gene as she knew and remembered him. It was not until afterward that she recalled her surprise that this ranchman of the Western prairies should have such a simple and easy manner whose home life had evidently been so unlike her own.
"You haven't stayed too long," she said, frankly. "And you haven't yet suggested what an undertrained Philadelphia girl can do to keep the coyote from her dugout portal."
If only she had been a little less bewitchingly pretty, a little less sure that the distance of planet from planet lay between them, a strange sense of sorrow, and a strange new purpose would not have found a place in Joe Thomson's heart then. With a perception much keener than her own, he read Jerry's mind that night as she had never tried to read it herself.
"I'm better up on soils and farm products than on civic problems and social economy and such. Dry farming, clerking, sewing, household economics in somebody's cook-shack, teaching school, giving music lessons, canvassing for magazines – the Sage Brush girls do things like these. I wish I could name a calling more suitable for you, but this is the only line I can offer," Joe said, thinking how impossible it would be for the girl beside him to fit into the workaday world of the Sage Brush Valley. On the next ranch to his own up the river a fair-haired, sun-browned girl was working in the harvest-field this season to save the price of a hired hand, toward going to college that fall. Jolly, strong-handed, strong-hearted Thelma Ekblad, whose name was yet to adorn an alumni record of the big university proud to call her its product. Jerry Swaim would never thrive in the same soil with this stout Norwegian.
They were standing on the porch steps now, and the white moonbeams glorified Jerry's beauty, for the young ranchman, as she looked up at him with a smile on her lips and eyes full of light, a sudden decision giving new character to her countenance. The suddenness of it, that was her mother's child. The purpose, that was the reflection of Jim Swaim's mind.
"I'm on the other side of my Rubicon. I'm going to teach mathematics in the New Eden high-school. Will you help me to keep across the river? There's an inspiration for me in the things that you can do?"
"You! Teach mathematics! They always have a man to teach that!" Joe exclaimed, wondering behind his words if he only dreamed that she had asked him to help to keep her across her Rubicon, or if she had really said such a beautiful thing to him, Joe Thomson, sand-fighter and general loser, who wouldn't be downed.
"Oh, I don't wonder you are surprised! I always jump quickly when I do move. You think I couldn't teach A, B, C, the known quantities, let alone x, y, z, the unknown quantities, don't you?" Jerry said, gaily. "When I went to school I was a flunker in languages and sciences. I was weak in boarding-school embroidery, too, because I never cared for those things, nor was I ever made to study anything unless I chose to do it. But I was sure in trigonometry and calculus, which I might have dodged and didn't. I reveled in them. My mother was scandalized, and Gene Wellington, an artist, who, by the way, has just given up his career for a good bank clerkship in Philadelphia, a sort of cousin of mine, was positively shocked. It seemed so unrefined and strong-minded. But my father said I was just his own flesh and blood in that line. Yes, I'll teach school. Mr. Ponk is going to offer me the position, and it's a whole lot better than the poor-house, or madness, or the East, maybe," she added, softly, with a luminous glow in her beautiful eyes.
The old Sage Brush world seemed to slip out from under Joe Thomson's feet just then.
"Is your friend related to John Wellington, who once lived in Philadelphia?" he asked, after a pause, his mind far away from his query.
"Why, he's John Wellington's son! John Wellington was a sort of partner of my father's once," Jerry said. Even in the soft light Joe saw the pink flush deepen on the girl's cheek. "Good night." She offered him her hand. "I hope I may see you often. Oh, I hate that blowout, and you ought to hate me on account of it."
"It is a brainless, hateful thing," Joe Thomson declared, as he took her proffered hand. "All my streams seem to be Rubicons, even to the crooked old Sage Brush. I can't be an inspiration to anybody. It is you who can give me courage. If you can teach mathematics in New Eden, I believe I can kill that blowout."
The strength of a new-born purpose was in the man's voice.
"Oh, no, you can't, for it's mostly on my land yet!" Jerry replied.
"Well, what of it? You say you won't play in that old sand-pile any more. What do you care who else plays there? Good night."
"Good night, Mr. Thomson. Why, what is that?" Jerry's eyes were on a short, squat figure standing in the middle of the gateway to the Macpherson grounds.
"That's 'Fishing Teddy,' an old character who lives a hermit kind of life down the Sage Brush. He comes to town about four times a year; usually walks both ways; but I promised to take him out with me to-night. He's harmless and gentle. Everybody likes him – I mean of our sort. You wouldn't be interested in him. His real name is Hans Theodore, but, of course, nobody calls him Mr. Theodore. Everybody calls him 'Fishing Teddy.' Good night, Miss Swaim."
Joe Thomson lifted his hat and walked away.
Jerry saw the old man shuffle out and join him, and the two went down the street together, one, big and muscular, with head erect and an easy, fearless stride; the other, humped down, frowsy, shambling, a sort of half-product of humanity, whose companion was the river, whose days were solitary, who had no part in the moonlight, the perfume of honeysuckle blossoms, the pleasure of companionship, the easy comfort that wealth can bring. His to bear the heat and the cinders on the rear platforms of jerky freight-trains, his to serve his best food to imperious young city girls lost in an impetuous passion of disappointment in a new and bewildering land. And yet his mind was serene. Knowing the river would bring him his food in the morning and his commodity of commerce for his needs, he was vastly more contented with his lot to-night than was the stalwart young man who stalked beside him, grimly resolving to go out and do things.
Jerry watched the two until they turned into a side-street and disappeared. The moonlight was wondrously bright and the air was like crystal. A faint, sweet odor from hay-fields came up the valley now and then, and all the world was serenely silent under the spell of night. The net seemed torn away from about the girl's feet, the cloud lifted from her brain, the blinding, blurring mists from before her eyes.
"I have crossed my Rubicon," she murmured, standing still in the doorway of the porch trellis, breathing deeply of the pure evening air. "I'm glad he came. I am free again, and I'm really happy. I suppose I am queer. If anybody should put me in a novel, the critics would say 'such a girl never came to Kansas.' But then if Gene should paint that blowout, the critics would say 'there never was such a landscape in Kansas.' These critics know so much. Only Gene will never paint any more pictures – not masterpieces, anyhow. But I'm going to live my life my own way. I won't go back to idleness and a life of sand at 'Eden.' I'll win out here – I will, I will! 'If a woman goes right with herself.' Oh, Uncle Cornie, I am starting. Whether I hold out depends on the way – and myself."
When Laura Macpherson peeped into Jerry's room late that night she saw her guest sleeping as serenely as if her mind had never a puzzling question, her sunny day never a storm-cloud. So far Jerry had gone right with herself.
