Title:      Obscure Destinies
Author:     Willa Cather
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Obscure Destinies
Author:     Willa Cather






CONTENTS

1.  Neighbour Rosicky

2.  Old Mrs. Harris

3.  Two Friends




NEIGHBOUR ROSICKY


I


When Doctor Burleigh told neighbour Rosicky he had a bad heart,
Rosicky protested.

"So?  No, I guess my heart was always pretty good.  I got a little
asthma, maybe.  Just a awful short breath when I was pitchin' hay
last summer, dat's all."

"Well now, Rosicky, if you know more about it than I do, what did
you come to me for?  It's your heart that makes you short of
breath, I tell you.  You're sixty-five years old, and you've always
worked hard, and your heart's tired.  You've got to be careful from
now on, and you can't do heavy work any more.  You've got five boys
at home to do it for you."

The old farmer looked up at the Doctor with a gleam of amusement in
his queer triangular-shaped eyes.  His eyes were large and lively,
but the lids were caught up in the middle in a curious way, so that
they formed a triangle.  He did not look like a sick man.  His
brown face was creased but not wrinkled, he had a ruddy colour in
his smooth-shaven cheeks and in his lips, under his long brown
moustache.  His hair was thin and ragged around his ears, but very
little grey.  His forehead, naturally high and crossed by deep
parallel lines, now ran all the way up to his pointed crown.
Rosicky's face had the habit of looking interested,--suggested a
contented disposition and a reflective quality that was gay rather
than grave.  This gave him a certain detachment, the easy manner of
an onlooker and observer.

"Well, I guess you ain't got no pills fur a bad heart, Doctor Ed.
I guess the only thing is fur me to git me a new one."

Doctor Burleigh swung round in his desk-chair and frowned at the
old farmer.  "I think if I were you I'd take a little care of the
old one, Rosicky."

Rosicky shrugged.  "Maybe I don't know how.  I expect you mean fur
me not to drink my coffee no more."

"I wouldn't, in your place.  But you'll do as you choose about
that.  I've never yet been able to separate a Bohemian from his
coffee or his pipe.  I've quit trying.  But the sure thing is
you've got to cut out farm work.  You can feed the stock and do
chores about the barn, but you can't do anything in the fields that
makes you short of breath."

"How about shelling corn?"

"Of course not!"

Rosicky considered with puckered brows.

"I can't make my heart go no longer'n it wants to, can I, Doctor
Ed?"

"I think it's good for five or six years yet, maybe more, if you'll
take the strain off it.  Sit around the house and help Mary.  If I
had a good wife like yours, I'd want to stay around the house."

His patient chuckled.  "It ain't no place fur a man.  I don't like
no old man hanging round the kitchen too much.  An' my wife, she's
a awful hard worker her own self."

"That's it; you can help her a little.  My Lord, Rosicky, you are
one of the few men I know who has a family he can get some comfort
out of; happy dispositions, never quarrel among themselves, and
they treat you right.  I want to see you live a few years and enjoy
them."

"Oh, they're good kids, all right," Rosicky assented.

The Doctor wrote him a prescription and asked him how his oldest
son, Rudolph, who had married in the spring, was getting on.
Rudolph had struck out for himself, on rented land.  "And how's
Polly?  I was afraid Mary mightn't like an American daughter-in-
law, but it seems to be working out all right."

"Yes, she's a fine girl.  Dat widder woman bring her daughters up
very nice.  Polly got lots of spunk, an' she got some style, too.
Da's nice, for young folks to have some style."  Rosicky inclined
his head gallantly.  His voice and his twinkly smile were an
affectionate compliment to his daughter-in-law.

"It looks like a storm, and you'd better be getting home before it
comes.  In town in the car?"  Doctor Burleigh rose.

"No, I'm in de wagon.  When you got five boys, you ain't got much
chance to ride round in de Ford.  I ain't much for cars, noway."

"Well, it's a good road out to your place; but I don't want you
bumping around in a wagon much.  And never again on a hay-rake,
remember!"

Rosicky placed the Doctor's fee delicately behind the desk-
telephone, looking the other way, as if this were an absent-minded
gesture.  He put on his plush cap and his corduroy jacket with a
sheepskin collar, and went out.

The Doctor picked up his stethoscope and frowned at it as if he
were seriously annoyed with the instrument.  He wished it had been
telling tales about some other man's heart, some old man who didn't
look the Doctor in the eye so knowingly, or hold out such a warm
brown hand when he said good-bye.  Doctor Burleigh had been a poor
boy in the country before he went away to medical school; he had
known Rosicky almost ever since he could remember, and he had a
deep affection for Mrs. Rosicky.

Only last winter he had had such a good breakfast at Rosicky's, and
that when he needed it.  He had been out all night on a long, hard
confinement case at Tom Marshall's,--a big rich farm where there
was plenty of stock and plenty of feed and a great deal of
expensive farm machinery of the newest model, and no comfort
whatever.  The woman had too many children and too much work, and
she was no manager.  When the baby was born at last, and handed
over to the assisting neighbour woman, and the mother was properly
attended to, Burleigh refused any breakfast in that slovenly house,
and drove his buggy--the snow was too deep for a car--eight miles
to Anton Rosicky's place.  He didn't know another farm-house where
a man could get such a warm welcome, and such good strong coffee
with rich cream.  No wonder the old chap didn't want to give up his
coffee!

He had driven in just when the boys had come back from the barn and
were washing up for breakfast.  The long table, covered with a
bright oilcloth, was set out with dishes waiting for them, and the
warm kitchen was full of the smell of coffee and hot biscuit and
sausage.  Five big handsome boys, running from twenty to twelve,
all with what Burleigh called natural good manners,--they hadn't a
bit of the painful self-consciousness he himself had to struggle
with when he was a lad.  One ran to put his horse away, another
helped him off with his fur coat and hung it up, and Josephine, the
youngest child and the only daughter, quickly set another place
under her mother's direction.

With Mary, to feed creatures was the natural expression of
affection,--her chickens, the calves, her big hungry boys.  It was
a rare pleasure to feed a young man whom she seldom saw and of whom
she was as proud as if he belonged to her.  Some country
housekeepers would have stopped to spread a white cloth over the
oilcloth, to change the thick cups and plates for their best china,
and the wooden-handled knives for plated ones.  But not Mary.

"You must take us as you find us, Doctor Ed.  I'd be glad to put
out my good things for you if you was expected, but I'm glad to get
you any way at all."

He knew she was glad,--she threw back her head and spoke out as if
she were announcing him to the whole prairie.  Rosicky hadn't said
anything at all; he merely smiled his twinkling smile, put some
more coal on the fire, and went into his own room to pour the
Doctor a little drink in a medicine glass.  When they were all
seated, he watched his wife's face from his end of the table and
spoke to her in Czech.  Then, with the instinct of politeness which
seldom failed him, he turned to the Doctor and said slyly; "I was
just tellin' her not to ask you no questions about Mrs. Marshall
till you eat some breakfast.  My wife, she's terrible fur to ask
questions."

The boys laughed, and so did Mary.  She watched the Doctor devour
her biscuit and sausage, too much excited to eat anything herself.
She drank her coffee and sat taking in everything about her
visitor.  She had known him when he was a poor country boy, and was
boastfully proud of his success, always saying:  "What do people go
to Omaha for, to see a doctor, when we got the best one in the
State right here?"  If Mary liked people at all, she felt physical
pleasure in the sight of them, personal exultation in any good
fortune that came to them.  Burleigh didn't know many women like
that, but he knew she was like that.

When his hunger was satisfied, he did, of course, have to tell them
about Mrs. Marshall, and he noticed what a friendly interest the
boys took in the matter.

Rudolph, the oldest one (he was still living at home then), said:
"The last time I was over there, she was lifting them big heavy
milk-cans, and I knew she oughtn't to be doing it."

"Yes, Rudolph told me about that when he come home, and I said it
wasn't right," Mary put in warmly.  "It was all right for me to do
them things up to the last, for I was terrible strong, but that
woman's weakly.  And do you think she'll be able to nurse it, Ed?"
She sometimes forgot to give him the title she was so proud of.
"And to think of your being up all night and then not able to get a
decent breakfast!  I don't know what's the matter with such
people."

"Why, Mother," said one of the boys, "if Doctor Ed had got
breakfast there, we wouldn't have him here.  So you ought to be
glad."

"He knows I'm glad to have him, John, any time.  But I'm sorry for
that poor woman, how bad she'll feel the Doctor had to go away in
the cold without his breakfast."

"I wish I'd been in practice when these were getting born."  The
doctor looked down the row of close-clipped heads.  "I missed some
good breakfasts by not being."

The boys began to laugh at their mother because she flushed so red,
but she stood her ground and threw up her head.  "I don't care, you
wouldn't have got away from this house without breakfast.  No
doctor ever did.  I'd have had something ready fixed that Anton
could warm up for you."

The boys laughed harder than ever, and exclaimed at her:  "I'll bet
you would!"  "She would, that!"

"Father, did you get breakfast for the doctor when we were born?"

"Yes, and he used to bring me my breakfast, too, mighty nice.  I
was always awful hungry!" Mary admitted with a guilty laugh.

While the boys were getting the Doctor's horse, he went to the
window to examine the house plants.  "What do you do to your
geraniums to keep them blooming all winter, Mary?  I never pass
this house that from the road I don't see your windows full of
flowers."

She snapped off a dark red one, and a ruffled new green leaf, and
put them in his buttonhole.  "There, that looks better.  You look
too solemn for a young man, Ed.  Why don't you git married?  I'm
worried about you.  Settin' at breakfast, I looked at you real
hard, and I seen you've got some grey hairs already."

"Oh, yes!  They're coming.  Maybe they'd come faster if I married."

"Don't talk so.  You'll ruin your health eating at the hotel.  I
could send your wife a nice loaf of nut bread, if you only had one.
I don't like to see a young man getting grey.  I'll tell you
something, Ed; you make some strong black tea and keep it handy in
a bowl, and every morning just brush it into your hair, an' it'll
keep the grey from showin' much.  That's the way I do!"



Sometimes the Doctor heard the gossipers in the drug-store
wondering why Rosicky didn't get on faster.  He was industrious,
and so were his boys, but they were rather free and easy, weren't
pushers, and they didn't always show good judgment.  They were
comfortable, they were out of debt, but they didn't get much ahead.
Maybe, Doctor Burleigh reflected, people as generous and warm-
hearted and affectionate as the Rosickys never got ahead much;
maybe you couldn't enjoy your life and put it into the bank, too.


II


When Rosicky left Doctor Burleigh's office he went into the farm-
implement store to light his pipe and put on his glasses and read
over the list Mary had given him.  Then he went into the general
merchandise place next door and stood about until the pretty girl
with the plucked eyebrows, who always waited on him, was free.
Those eyebrows, two thin India-ink strokes, amused him, because he
remembered how they used to be.  Rosicky always prolonged his
shopping by a little joking; the girl knew the old fellow admired
her, and she liked to chaff with him.

"Seems to me about every other week you buy ticking, Mr. Rosicky,
and always the best quality," she remarked as she measured off the
heavy bolt with red stripes.

"You see, my wife is always makin' goose-fedder pillows, an' de
thin stuff don't hold in dem little down-fedders."

"You must have lots of pillows at your house."

"Sure.  She makes quilts of dem, too.  We sleeps easy.  Now she's
makin' a fedder quilt for my son's wife.  You know Polly, that
married my Rudolph.  How much my bill, Miss Pearl?"

"Eight eighty-five."

"Chust make it nine, and put in some candy fur de women."

"As usual.  I never did see a man buy so much candy for his wife.
First thing you know, she'll be getting too fat."

"I'd like dat.  I ain't much fur all dem slim women like what de
style is now."

"That's one for me, I suppose, Mr. Bohunk!"  Pearl sniffed and
elevated her India-ink strokes.

When Rosicky went out to his wagon, it was beginning to snow,--the
first snow of the season, and he was glad to see it.  He rattled
out of town and along the highway through a wonderfully rich
stretch of country, the finest farms in the county.  He admired
this High Prairie, as it was called, and always liked to drive
through it.  His own place lay in a rougher territory, where there
was some clay in the soil and it was not so productive.  When he
bought his land, he hadn't the money to buy on High Prairie; so he
told his boys, when they grumbled, that if their land hadn't some
clay in it, they wouldn't own it at all.  All the same, he enjoyed
looking at these fine farms, as he enjoyed looking at a prize bull.

After he had gone eight miles, he came to the graveyard, which lay
just at the edge of his own hay-land.  There he stopped his horses
and sat still on his wagon seat, looking about at the snowfall.
Over yonder on the hill he could see his own house, crouching low,
with the clump of orchard behind and the windmill before, and all
down the gentle hill-slope the rows of pale gold cornstalks stood
out against the white field.  The snow was falling over the
cornfield and the pasture and the hay-land, steadily, with very
little wind,--a nice dry snow.  The graveyard had only a light wire
fence about it and was all overgrown with long red grass.  The fine
snow, settling into this red grass and upon the few little
evergreens and the headstones, looked very pretty.

It was a nice graveyard, Rosicky reflected, sort of snug and
homelike, not cramped or mournful,--a big sweep all round it.  A
man could lie down in the long grass and see the complete arch of
the sky over him, hear the wagons go by; in summer the mowing-
machine rattled right up to the wire fence.  And it was so near
home.  Over there across the cornstalks his own roof and windmill
looked so good to him that he promised himself to mind the Doctor
and take care of himself.  He was awful fond of his place, he
admitted.  He wasn't anxious to leave it.  And it was a comfort to
think that he would never have to go farther than the edge of his
own hayfield.  The snow, falling over his barnyard and the
graveyard, seemed to draw things together like.  And they were all
old neighbours in the graveyard, most of them friends; there was
nothing to feel awkward or embarrassed about.  Embarrassment was
the most disagreeable feeling Rosicky knew.  He didn't often have
it,--only with certain people whom he didn't understand at all.

Well, it was a nice snowstorm; a fine sight to see the snow falling
so quietly and graciously over so much open country.  On his cap
and shoulders, on the horses' backs and manes, light, delicate,
mysterious it fell; and with it a dry cool fragrance was released
into the air.  It meant rest for vegetation and men and beasts, for
the ground itself; a season of long nights for sleep, leisurely
breakfasts, peace by the fire.  This and much more went through
Rosicky's mind, but he merely told himself that winter was coming,
clucked to his horses, and drove on.

When he reached home, John, the youngest boy, ran out to put away
his team for him, and he met Mary coming up from the outside cellar
with her apron full of carrots.  They went into the house together.
On the table, covered with oilcloth figured with clusters of blue
grapes, a place was set, and he smelled hot coffee-cake of some
kind.  Anton never lunched in town; he thought that extravagant,
and anyhow he didn't like the food.  So Mary always had something
ready for him when he got home.

After he was settled in his chair, stirring his coffee in a big
cup, Mary took out of the oven a pan of kolache stuffed with
apricots, examined them anxiously to see whether they had got too
dry, put them beside his plate, and then sat down opposite him.

Rosicky asked her in Czech if she wasn't going to have any coffee.

She replied in English, as being somehow the right language for
transacting business:  "Now what did Doctor Ed say, Anton?  You
tell me just what."

"He said I was to tell you some compliments, but I forgot 'em."
Rosicky's eyes twinkled.

"About you, I mean.  What did he say about your asthma?"

"He says I ain't got no asthma."  Rosicky took one of the little
rolls in his broad brown fingers.  The thickened nail of his right
thumb told the story of his past.

"Well, what is the matter?  And don't try to put me off."

"He don't say nothing much, only I'm a little older, and my heart
ain't so good like it used to be."

Mary started and brushed her hair back from her temples with both
hands as if she were a little out of her mind.  From the way she
glared, she might have been in a rage with him.

"He says there's something the matter with your heart?  Doctor Ed
says so?"

"Now don't yell at me like I was a hog in de garden, Mary.  You
know I always did like to hear a woman talk soft.  He didn't say
anything de matter wid my heart, only it ain't so young like it
used to be, an' he tell me not to pitch hay or run de corn-
sheller."

Mary wanted to jump up, but she sat still.  She admired the way he
never under any circumstances raised his voice or spoke roughly.
He was city-bred, and she was country-bred; she often said she
wanted her boys to have their papa's nice ways.

"You never have no pain there, do you?  It's your breathing and
your stomach that's been wrong.  I wouldn't believe nobody but
Doctor Ed about it.  I guess I'll go see him myself.  Didn't he
give you no advice?"

"Chust to take it easy like, an' stay round de house dis winter.  I
guess you got some carpenter work for me to do.  I kin make some
new shelves for you, and I want dis long time to build a closet in
de boys' room and make dem two little fellers keep dere clo'es hung
up."

Rosicky drank his coffee from time to time, while he considered.
His moustache was of the soft long variety and came down over his
mouth like the teeth of a buggy-rake over a bundle of hay.  Each
time he put down his cup, he ran his blue handkerchief over his
lips.  When he took a drink of water, he managed very neatly with
the back of his hand.

Mary sat watching him intently, trying to find any change in his
face.  It is hard to see anyone who has become like your own body
to you.  Yes, his hair had got thin, and his high forehead had deep
lines running from left to right.  But his neck, always clean
shaved except in the busiest seasons, was not loose or baggy.  It
was burned a dark reddish brown, and there were deep creases in it,
but it looked firm and full of blood.  His cheeks had a good
colour.  On either side of his mouth there was a half-moon down the
length of his cheek, not wrinkles, but two lines that had come
there from his habitual expression.  He was shorter and broader
than when she married him; his back had grown broad and curved, a
good deal like the shell of an old turtle, and his arms and legs
were short.

He was fifteen years older than Mary, but she had hardly ever
thought about it before.  He was her man, and the kind of man she
liked.  She was rough, and he was gentle,--city-bred, as she always
said.  They had been shipmates on a rough voyage and had stood by
each other in trying times.  Life had gone well with them because,
at bottom, they had the same ideas about life.  They agreed,
without discussion, as to what was most important and what was
secondary.  They didn't often exchange opinions, even in Czech,--it
was as if they had thought the same thought together.  A good deal
had to be sacrificed and thrown overboard in a hard life like
theirs, and they had never disagreed as to the things that could
go.  It had been a hard life, and a soft life, too.  There wasn't
anything brutal in the short, broad-backed man with the three-
cornered eyes and the forehead that went on to the top of his
skull.  He was a city man, a gentle man, and though he had married
a rough farm girl, he had never touched her without gentleness.

They had been at one accord not to hurry through life, not to be
always skimping and saving.  They saw their neighbours buy more
land and feed more stock than they did, without discontent.  Once
when the creamery agent came to the Rosickys to persuade them to
sell him their cream, he told them how much money the Fasslers,
their nearest neighbours, had made on their cream last year.

"Yes," said Mary, "and look at them Fassler children!  Pale,
pinched little things, they look like skimmed milk.  I'd rather put
some colour into my children's faces than put money into the bank."

The agent shrugged and turned to Anton.

"I guess we'll do like she says," said Rosicky.


III


Mary very soon got into town to see Doctor Ed, and then she had a
talk with her boys and set a guard over Rosicky.  Even John, the
youngest, had his father on his mind.  If Rosicky went to throw hay
down from the loft, one of the boys ran up the ladder and took the
fork from him.  He sometimes complained that though he was getting
to be an old man, he wasn't an old woman yet.

That winter he stayed in the house in the afternoons and
carpentered, or sat in the chair between the window full of plants
and the wooden bench where the two pails of drinking-water stood.
This spot was called "Father's corner," though it was not a corner
at all.  He had a shelf there, where he kept his Bohemian papers
and his pipes and tobacco, and his shears and needles and thread
and tailor's thimble.  Having been a tailor in his youth, he
couldn't bear to see a woman patching at his clothes, or at the
boys'.  He liked tailoring, and always patched all the overalls and
jackets and work shirts.  Occasionally he made over a pair of pants
one of the older boys had outgrown, for the little fellow.

While he sewed, he let his mind run back over his life.  He had a
good deal to remember, really; life in three countries.  The only
part of his youth he didn't like to remember was the two years he
had spent in London, in Cheapside, working for a German tailor who
was wretchedly poor.  Those days, when he was nearly always hungry,
when his clothes were dropping off him for dirt, and the sound of a
strange language kept him in continual bewilderment, had left a
sore spot in his mind that wouldn't bear touching.

He was twenty when he landed at Castle Garden in New York, and he
had a protector who got him work in a tailor shop in Vesey Street,
down near the Washington Market.  He looked upon that part of his
life as very happy.  He became a good workman, he was industrious,
and his wages were increased from time to time.  He minded his own
business and envied nobody's good fortune.  He went to night school
and learned to read English.  He often did overtime work and was
well paid for it, but somehow he never saved anything.  He couldn't
refuse a loan to a friend, and he was self-indulgent.  He liked a
good dinner, and a little went for beer, a little for tobacco; a
good deal went to the girls.  He often stood through an opera on
Saturday nights; he could get standing-room for a dollar.  Those
were the great days of opera in New York, and it gave a fellow
something to think about for the rest of the week.  Rosicky had a
quick ear, and a childish love of all the stage splendour; the
scenery, the costumes, the ballet.  He usually went with a chum,
and after the performance they had beer and maybe some oysters
somewhere.  It was a fine life; for the first five years or so it
satisfied him completely.  He was never hungry or cold or dirty,
and everything amused him: a fire, a dog fight, a parade, a storm,
a ferry ride.  He thought New York the finest, richest, friendliest
city in the world.

Moreover, he had what he called a happy home life.  Very near the
tailor shop was a small furniture-factory, where an old Austrian,
Loeffler, employed a few skilled men and made unusual furniture,
most of it to order, for the rich German housewives up-town.  The
top floor of Loeffler's five-storey factory was a loft, where he
kept his choice lumber and stored the odd pieces of furniture left
on his hands.  One of the young workmen he employed was a Czech,
and he and Rosicky became fast friends.  They persuaded Loeffler to
let them have a sleeping-room in one corner of the loft.  They
bought good beds and bedding and had their pick of the furniture
kept up there.  The loft was low-pitched, but light and airy, full
of windows, and good-smelling by reason of the fine lumber put up
there to season.  Old Loeffler used to go down to the docks and buy
wood from South America and the East from the sea captains.  The
young men were as foolish about their house as a bridal pair.
Zichec, the young cabinet-maker, devised every sort of convenience,
and Rosicky kept their clothes in order.  At night and on Sundays,
when the quiver of machinery underneath was still, it was the
quietest place in the world, and on summer nights all the sea winds
blew in.  Zichec often practised on his flute in the evening.  They
were both fond of music and went to the opera together.  Rosicky
thought he wanted to live like that for ever.

But as the years passed, all alike, he began to get a little
restless.  When spring came round, he would begin to feel fretted,
and he got to drinking.  He was likely to drink too much of a
Saturday night.  On Sunday he was languid and heavy, getting over
his spree.  On Monday he plunged into work again.  So he never had
time to figure out what ailed him, though he knew something did.
When the grass turned green in Park Place, and the lilac hedge at
the back of Trinity churchyard put out its blossoms, he was
tormented by a longing to run away.  That was why he drank too
much; to get a temporary illusion of freedom and wide horizons.

Rosicky, the old Rosicky, could remember as if it were yesterday
the day when the young Rosicky found out what was the matter with
him.  It was on a Fourth of July afternoon, and he was sitting in
Park Place in the sun.  The lower part of New York was empty.  Wall
Street, Liberty Street, Broadway, all empty.  So much stone and
asphalt with nothing going on, so many empty windows.  The
emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when
the machinery stops and the belts and bands cease running.  It was
too great a change, it took all the strength out of one.  Those
blank buildings, without the stream of life pouring through them,
were like empty jails.  It struck young Rosicky that this was the
trouble with big cities; they built you in from the earth itself,
cemented you away from any contact with the ground.  You lived in
an unnatural world, like the fish in an aquarium, who were probably
much more comfortable than they ever were in the sea.

On that very day he began to think seriously about the articles he
had read in the Bohemian papers, describing prosperous Czech
farming communities in the West.  He believed he would like to go
out there as a farm hand; it was hardly possible that he could ever
have land of his own.  His people had always been workmen; his
father and grandfather had worked in shops.  His mother's parents
had lived in the country, but they rented their farm and had a hard
time to get along.  Nobody in his family had ever owned any land,--
that belonged to a different station of life altogether.  Anton's
mother died when he was little, and he was sent into the country to
her parents.  He stayed with them until he was twelve, and formed
those ties with the earth and the farm animals and growing things
which are never made at all unless they are made early.  After his
grandfather died, he went back to live with his father and
stepmother, but she was very hard on him, and his father helped him
to get passage to London.

After that Fourth of July day in Park Place, the desire to return
to the country never left him.  To work on another man's farm would
be all he asked; to see the sun rise and set and to plant things
and watch them grow.  He was a very simple man.  He was like a tree
that has not many roots, but one tap-root that goes down deep.  He
subscribed for a Bohemian paper printed in Chicago, then for one
printed in Omaha.  His mind got farther and farther west.  He began
to save a little money to buy his liberty.  When he was thirty-
five, there was a great meeting in New York of Bohemian athletic
societies, and Rosicky left the tailor shop and went home with the
Omaha delegates to try his fortune in another part of the world.


IV


Perhaps the fact that his own youth was well over before he began
to have a family was one reason why Rosicky was so fond of his
boys.  He had almost a grandfather's indulgence for them.  He had
never had to worry about any of them--except, just now, a little
about Rudolph.

On Saturday night the boys always piled into the Ford, took little
Josephine, and went to town to the moving-picture show.  One
Saturday morning they were talking at the breakfast table about
starting early that evening, so that they would have an hour or so
to see the Christmas things in the stores before the show began.
Rosicky looked down the table.

"I hope you boys ain't disappointed, but I want you to let me have
de car tonight.  Maybe some of you can go in with de neighbours."

Their faces fell.  They worked hard all week, and they were still
like children.  A new jack-knife or a box of candy pleased the
older ones as much as the little fellow.

"If you and Mother are going to town," Frank said, "maybe you could
take a couple of us along with you, anyway."

"No, I want to take de car down to Rudolph's, and let him an' Polly
go in to de show.  She don't git into town enough, an' I'm afraid
she's gettin' lonesome, an' he can't afford no car yet."

That settled it.  The boys were a good deal dashed.  Their father
took another piece of apple-cake and went on:  "Maybe next Saturday
night de two little fellers can go along wid dem."

"Oh, is Rudolph going to have the car every Saturday night?"

Rosicky did not reply at once; then he began to speak seriously:
"Listen, boys; Polly ain't lookin' so good.  I don't like to see
nobody lookin' sad.  It comes hard fur a town girl to be a farmer's
wife.  I don't want no trouble to start in Rudolph's family.  When
it starts, it ain't so easy to stop.  An American girl don't git
used to our ways all at once.  I like to tell Polly she and Rudolph
can have the car every Saturday night till after New Year's, if
it's all right with you boys."

"Sure it's all right, Papa," Mary cut in.  "And it's good you
thought about that.  Town girls is used to more than country girls.
I lay awake nights, scared she'll make Rudolph discontented with
the farm."

The boys put as good a face on it as they could.  They surely
looked forward to their Saturday nights in town.  That evening
Rosicky drove the car the half-mile down to Rudolph's new, bare
little house.

Polly was in a short-sleeved gingham dress, clearing away the
supper dishes.  She was a trim, slim little thing, with blue eyes
and shingled yellow hair, and her eyebrows were reduced to a mere
brush-stroke, like Miss Pearl's.

"Good evening, Mr. Rosicky.  Rudolph's at the barn, I guess."  She
never called him father, or Mary mother.  She was sensitive about
having married a foreigner.  She never in the world would have done
it if Rudolph hadn't been such a handsome, persuasive fellow and
such a gallant lover.  He had graduated in her class in the high
school in town, and their friendship began in the ninth grade.

Rosicky went in, though he wasn't exactly asked.  "My boys ain't
goin' to town tonight, an' I brought de car over fur you two to go
in to de picture show."

Polly, carrying dishes to the sink, looked over her shoulder at
him.  "Thank you.  But I'm late with my work tonight, and pretty
tired.  Maybe Rudolph would like to go in with you."

"Oh, I don't go to de shows!  I'm too old-fashioned.  You won't
feel so tired after you ride in de air a ways.  It's a nice clear
night, an' it ain't cold.  You go an' fix yourself up, Polly, an'
I'll wash de dishes an' leave everything nice fur you."

Polly blushed and tossed her bob.  "I couldn't let you do that, Mr.
Rosicky.  I wouldn't think of it."

Rosicky said nothing.  He found a bib apron on a nail behind the
kitchen door.  He slipped it over his head and then took Polly by
her two elbows and pushed her gently toward the door of her own
room.  "I washed up de kitchen many times for my wife, when de
babies was sick or somethin'.  You go an' make yourself look nice.
I like you to look prettier'n any of dem town girls when you go in.
De young folks must have some fun, an' I'm goin' to look out fur
you, Polly."

That kind, reassuring grip on her elbows, the old man's funny
bright eyes, made Polly want to drop her head on his shoulder for a
second.  She restrained herself, but she lingered in his grasp at
the door of her room, murmuring tearfully:  "You always lived in
the city when you were young, didn't you?  Don't you ever get
lonesome out here?"

As she turned round to him, her hand fell naturally into his, and
he stood holding it and smiling into her face with his peculiar,
knowing, indulgent smile without a shadow of reproach in it.  "Dem
big cities is all right fur de rich, but dey is terrible hard fur
de poor."

"I don't know.  Sometimes I think I'd like to take a chance.  You
lived in New York, didn't you?"

"An' London.  Da's bigger still.  I learned my trade dere.  Here's
Rudolph comin', you better hurry."

"Will you tell me about London some time?"

"Maybe.  Only I ain't no talker, Polly.  Run an' dress yourself
up."

The bedroom door closed behind her, and Rudolph came in from the
outside, looking anxious.  He had seen the car and was sorry any of
his family should come just then.  Supper hadn't been a very
pleasant occasion.  Halting in the doorway, he saw his father in a
kitchen apron, carrying dishes to the sink.  He flushed crimson and
something flashed in his eye.  Rosicky held up a warning finger.

"I brought de car over fur you an' Polly to go to de picture show,
an' I made her let me finish here so you won't be late.  You go put
on a clean shirt, quick!"

"But don't the boys want the car, Father?"

"Not tonight dey don't."  Rosicky fumbled under his apron and found
his pants pocket.  He took out a silver dollar and said in a
hurried whisper:  "You go an' buy dat girl some ice cream an' candy
tonight, like you was courtin'.  She's awful good friends wid me."

Rudolph was very short of cash, but he took the money as if it hurt
him.  There had been a crop failure all over the county.  He had
more than once been sorry he'd married this year.

In a few minutes the young people came out, looking clean and a
little stiff.  Rosicky hurried them off, and then he took his own
time with the dishes.  He scoured the pots and pans and put away
the milk and swept the kitchen.  He put some coal in the stove and
shut off the draughts, so the place would be warm for them when
they got home late at night.  Then he sat down and had a pipe and
listened to the clock tick.

Generally speaking, marrying an American girl was certainly a risk.
A Czech should marry a Czech.  It was lucky that Polly was the
daughter of a poor widow woman; Rudolph was proud, and if she had a
prosperous family to throw up at him, they could never make it go.
Polly was one of four sisters, and they all worked; one was book-
keeper in the bank, one taught music, and Polly and her younger
sister had been clerks, like Miss Pearl.  All four of them were
musical, had pretty voices, and sang in the Methodist choir, which
the eldest sister directed.

Polly missed the sociability of a store position.  She missed the
choir, and the company of her sisters.  She didn't dislike
housework, but she disliked so much of it.  Rosicky was a little
anxious about this pair.  He was afraid Polly would grow so
discontented that Rudy would quit the farm and take a factory job
in Omaha.  He had worked for a winter up there, two years ago, to
get money to marry on.  He had done very well, and they would
always take him back at the stockyards.  But to Rosicky that meant
the end of everything for his son.  To be a landless man was to be
a wage-earner, a slave, all your life; to have nothing, to be
nothing.

Rosicky thought he would come over and do a little carpentering for
Polly after the New Year.  He guessed she needed jollying.  Rudolph
was a serious sort of chap, serious in love and serious about his
work.

Rosicky shook out his pipe and walked home across the fields.
Ahead of him the lamplight shone from his kitchen windows.  Suppose
he were still in a tailor shop on Vesey Street, with a bunch of
pale, narrow-chested sons working on machines, all coming home
tired and sullen to eat supper in a kitchen that was a parlour
also; with another crowded, angry family quarrelling just across
the dumb-waiter shaft, and squeaking pulleys at the windows where
dirty washings hung on dirty lines above a court full of old brooms
and mops and ash-cans. . . .

He stopped by the windmill to look up at the frosty winter stars
and draw a long breath before he went inside.  That kitchen with
the shining windows was dear to him; but the sleeping fields and
bright stars and the noble darkness were dearer still.


V


On the day before Christmas the weather set in very cold; no snow,
but a bitter, biting wind that whistled and sang over the flat land
and lashed one's face like fine wires.  There was baking going on
in the Rosicky kitchen all day, and Rosicky sat inside, making over
a coat that Albert had outgrown into an overcoat for John.  Mary
had a big red geranium in bloom for Christmas, and a row of
Jerusalem cherry trees, full of berries.  It was the first year she
had ever grown these; Doctor Ed brought her the seeds from Omaha
when he went to some medical convention.  They reminded Rosicky of
plants he had seen in England; and all afternoon, as he stitched,
he sat thinking about those two years in London, which his mind
usually shrank from even after all this while.

He was a lad of eighteen when he dropped down into London, with no
money and no connexions except the address of a cousin who was
supposed to be working at a confectioner's.  When he went to the
pastry shop, however, he found that the cousin had gone to America.
Anton tramped the streets for several days, sleeping in doorways
and on the Embankment, until he was in utter despair.  He knew no
English, and the sound of the strange language all about him
confused him.  By chance he met a poor German tailor who had
learned his trade in Vienna, and could speak a little Czech.  This
tailor, Lifschnitz, kept a repair shop in a Cheapside basement,
underneath a cobbler.  He didn't much need an apprentice, but he
was sorry for the boy and took him in for no wages but his keep and
what he could pick up.  The pickings were supposed to be coppers
given you when you took work home to a customer.  But most of the
customers called for their clothes themselves, and the coppers that
came Anton's way were very few.  He had, however, a place to sleep.
The tailor's family lived upstairs in three rooms; a kitchen, a
bedroom, where Lifschnitz and his wife and five children slept, and
a living-room.  Two corners of this living-room were curtained off
for lodgers; in one Rosicky slept on an old horsehair sofa, with a
feather quilt to wrap himself in.  The other corner was rented to a
wretched, dirty boy, who was studying the violin.  He actually
practised there.  Rosicky was dirty, too.  There was no way to be
anything else.  Mrs. Lifschnitz got the water she cooked and washed
with from a pump in a brick court, four flights down.  There were
bugs in the place, and multitudes of fleas, though the poor woman
did the best she could.  Rosicky knew she often went empty to give
another potato or a spoonful of dripping to the two hungry, sad-
eyed boys who lodged with her.  He used to think he would never get
out of there, never get a clean shirt to his back again.  What
would he do, he wondered, when his clothes actually dropped to
pieces and the worn cloth wouldn't hold patches any longer?



It was still early when the old farmer put aside his sewing and his
recollections.  The sky had been a dark grey all day, with not a
gleam of sun, and the light failed at four o'clock.  He went to
shave and change his shirt while the turkey was roasting.  Rudolph
and Polly were coming over for supper.

After supper they sat round in the kitchen, and the younger boys
were saying how sorry they were it hadn't snowed.  Everybody was
sorry.  They wanted a deep snow that would lie long and keep the
wheat warm, and leave the ground soaked when it melted.

"Yes, sir!" Rudolph broke out fiercely; "if we have another dry
year like last year, there's going to be hard times in this
country."

Rosicky filled his pipe.  "You boys don't know what hard times is.
You don't owe nobody, you got plenty to eat an' keep warm, an'
plenty water to keep clean.  When you got them, you can't have it
very hard."

Rudolph frowned, opened and shut his big right hand, and dropped it
clenched upon his knee.  "I've got to have a good deal more than
that, Father, or I'll quit this farming gamble.  I can always make
good wages railroading, or at the packing house, and be sure of my
money."

"Maybe so," his father answered dryly.

Mary, who had just come in from the pantry and was wiping her hands
on the roller towel, thought Rudy and his father were getting too
serious.  She brought her darning-basket and sat down in the middle
of the group.

"I ain't much afraid of hard times, Rudy," she said heartily.
"We've had a plenty, but we've always come through.  Your father
wouldn't never take nothing very hard, not even hard times.  I got
a mind to tell you a story on him.  Maybe you boys can't hardly
remember the year we had that terrible hot wind, that burned
everything up on the Fourth of July?  All the corn an' the gardens.
An' that was in the days when we didn't have alfalfa yet,--I guess
it wasn't invented.

"Well, that very day your father was out cultivatin' corn, and I
was here in the kitchen makin' plum preserves.  We had bushels of
plums that year.  I noticed it was terrible hot, but it's always
hot in the kitchen when you're preservin', an' I was too busy with
my plums to mind.  Anton come in from the field about three
o'clock, an' I asked him what was the matter.

"'Nothin',' he says, 'but it's pretty hot, an' I think I won't work
no more today.'  He stood round for a few minutes, an' then he
says:  'Ain't you near through?  I want you should git up a nice
supper for us tonight.  It's Fourth of July.'

"I told him to git along, that I was right in the middle of
preservin', but the plums would taste good on hot biscuit.  'I'm
goin' to have fried chicken, too,' he says, and he went off an'
killed a couple.  You three oldest boys was little fellers, playin'
round outside, real hot an' sweaty, an' your father took you to the
horse tank down by the windmill an' took off your clothes an' put
you in.  Them two box-elder trees was little then, but they made
shade over the tank.  Then he took off all his own clothes, an' got
in with you.  While he was playin' in the water with you, the
Methodist preacher drove into our place to say how all the
neighbours was goin' to meet at the schoolhouse that night, to pray
for rain.  He drove right to the windmill, of course, and there was
your father and you three with no clothes on.  I was in the kitchen
door, an' I had to laugh, for the preacher acted like he ain't
never seen a naked man before.  He surely was embarrassed, an' your
father couldn't git to his clothes; they was all hangin' up on the
windmill to let the sweat dry out of 'em.  So he laid in the tank
where he was, an' put one of you boys on top of him to cover him up
a little, an' talked to the preacher.

"When you got through playin' in the water, he put clean clothes on
you and a clean shirt on himself, an' by that time I'd begun to get
supper.  He says:  'It's too hot in here to eat comfortable.  Let's
have a picnic in the orchard.  We'll eat our supper behind the
mulberry hedge, under them linden trees.'

"So he carried our supper down, an' a bottle of my wild-grape wine,
an' everything tasted good, I can tell you.  The wind got cooler as
the sun was goin' down, and it turned out pleasant, only I noticed
how the leaves was curled up on the linden trees.  That made me
think, an' I asked your father if that hot wind all day hadn't been
terrible hard on the gardens an' the corn.

"'Corn,' he says, 'there ain't no corn.'

"'What you talkin' about?' I said.  'Ain't we got forty acres?'

"'We ain't got an ear,' he says, 'nor nobody else ain't got none.
All the corn in this country was cooked by three o'clock today,
like you'd roasted it in an oven.'

"'You mean you won't get no crop at all?' I asked him.  I couldn't
believe it, after he'd worked so hard.

"'No crop this year,' he says.  'That's why we're havin' a picnic.
We might as well enjoy what we got.'

"An' that's how your father behaved, when all the neighbours was so
discouraged they couldn't look you in the face.  An' we enjoyed
ourselves that year, poor as we was, an' our neighbours wasn't a
bit better off for bein' miserable.  Some of 'em grieved till they
got poor digestions and couldn't relish what they did have."

The younger boys said they thought their father had the best of it.
But Rudolf was thinking that, all the same, the neighbours had
managed to get ahead more, in the fifteen years since that time.
There must be something wrong about his father's way of doing
things.  He wished he knew what was going on in the back of Polly's
mind.  He knew she liked his father, but he knew, too, that she was
afraid of something.  When his mother sent over coffee-cake or
prune tarts or a loaf of fresh bread, Polly seemed to regard them
with a certain suspicion.  When she observed to him that his
brothers had nice manners, her tone implied that it was remarkable
they should have.  With his mother she was stiff and on her guard.
Mary's hearty frankness and gusts of good humour irritated her.
Polly was afraid of being unusual or conspicuous in any way, of
being "ordinary," as she said!

When Mary had finished her story, Rosicky laid aside his pipe.

"You boys like me to tell you about some of dem hard times I been
through in London?  Warmly encouraged, he sat rubbing his forehead
along the deep creases.  It was bothersome to tell a long story in
English (he nearly always talked to the boys in Czech), but he
wanted Polly to hear this one.

"Well, you know about dat tailor shop I worked in in London?  I had
one Christmas dere I ain't never forgot.  Times was awful bad
before Christmas; de boss ain't got much work, an' have it awful
hard to pay his rent.  It ain't so much fun, bein' poor in a big
city like London, I'll say!  All de windows is full of good t'ings
to eat, an' all de pushcarts in de streets is full, an' you smell
'em all de time, an' you ain't got no money,--not a damn bit.  I
didn't mind de cold so much, though I didn't have no overcoat,
chust a short jacket I'd outgrowed so it wouldn't meet on me, an'
my hands was chapped raw.  But I always had a good appetite, like
you all know, an' de sight of dem pork pies in de windows was awful
fur me!

"Day before Christmas was terrible foggy dat year, an' dat fog gits
into your bones and makes you all damp like.  Mrs. Lifschnitz
didn't give us nothin' but a little bread an' drippin' for supper,
because she was savin' to try for to give us a good dinner on
Christmas Day.  After supper de boss say I can go an' enjoy myself,
so I went into de streets to listen to de Christmas singers.  Dey
sing old songs an' make very nice music, an' I run round after dem
a good ways, till I got awful hungry.  I t'ink maybe if I go home,
I can sleep till morning an' forgit my belly.

"I went into my corner real quiet, and roll up in my fedder quilt.
But I ain't got my head down, till I smell somet'ing good.  Seem
like it git stronger an' stronger, an' I can't git to sleep noway.
I can't understand dat smell.  Dere was a gas light in a hall
across de court, dat always shine in at my window a little.  I got
up an' look round.  I got a little wooden box in my corner fur a
stool, 'cause I ain't got no chair.  I picks up dat box, and under
it dere is a roast goose on a platter!  I can't believe my eyes.  I
carry it to de window where de light comes in, an' touch it and
smell it to find out, an' den I taste it to be sure.  I say, I will
eat chust one little bite of dat goose, so I can go to sleep, and
tomorrow I won't eat none at all.  But I tell you, boys, when I
stop, one half of dat goose was gone!"

The narrator bowed his head, and the boys shouted.  But little
Josephine slipped behind his chair and kissed him on the neck
beneath his ear.

"Poor little Papa, I don't want him to be hungry!"

"Da's long ago, child.  I ain't never been hungry since I had your
mudder to cook fur me."

"Go on and tell us the rest, please," said Polly.

"Well, when I come to realize what I done, of course, I felt
terrible.  I felt better in de stomach, but very bad in de heart.
I set on my bed wid dat platter on my knees, an' it all come to me;
how hard dat poor woman save to buy dat goose, and how she get some
neighbour to cook it dat got more fire, an' how she put it in my
corner to keep it away from dem hungry children.  Dey was a old
carpet hung up to shut my corner off, an' de children wasn't
allowed to go in dere.  An' I know she put it in my corner because
she trust me more'n she did de violin boy.  I can't stand it to
face her after I spoil de Christmas.  So I put on my shoes and go
out into de city.  I tell myself I better throw myself in de river;
but I guess I ain't dat kind of a boy.

"It was after twelve o'clock, an' terrible cold, an' I start out to
walk about London all night.  I walk along de river awhile, but dey
was lots of drunks all along; men, and women too.  I chust move
along to keep away from de police.  I git onto de Strand, an' den
over to New Oxford Street, where dere was a big German restaurant
on de ground floor, wid big windows all fixed up fine, an' I could
see de people havin' parties inside.  While I was lookin' in, two
men and two ladies come out, laughin' and talkin' and feelin' happy
about all dey been eatin' an' drinkin', and dey was speakin'
Czech,--not like de Austrians, but like de home folks talk it.

"I guess I went crazy, an' I done what I ain't never done before
nor since.  I went right up to dem gay people an' begun to beg dem:
'Fellow-countrymen, for God's sake give me money enough to buy a
goose!'

"Dey laugh, of course, but de ladies speak awful kind to me, an'
dey take me back into de restaurant and give me hot coffee and
cakes, an' make me tell all about how I happened to come to London,
an' what I was doin' dere.  Dey take my name and where I work down
on paper, an' both of dem ladies give me ten shillings.

"De big market at Covent Garden ain't very far away, an' by dat
time it was open.  I go dere an' buy a big goose an' some pork
pies, an' potatoes and onions, an' cakes an' oranges fur de
children,--all I could carry!  When I git home, everybody is still
asleep.  I pile all I bought on de kitchen table, an' go in an' lay
down on my bed, an' I ain't waken up till I hear dat woman scream
when she come out into her kitchen.  My goodness, but she was
surprise!  She laugh an' cry at de same time, an' hug me and waken
all de children.  She ain't stop fur no breakfast; she git de
Christmas dinner ready dat morning, and we all sit down an' eat all
we can hold.  I ain't never seen dat violin boy have all he can
hold before.

"Two three days after dat, de two men come to hunt me up, an' dey
ask my boss, and he give me a good report an' tell dem I was a
steady boy all right.  One of dem Bohemians was very smart an' run
a Bohemian newspaper in New York, an' de odder was a rich man, in
de importing business, an' dey been travelling togedder.  Dey told
me how t'ings was easier in New York, an' offered to pay my passage
when dey was goin' home soon on a boat.  My boss say to me:  'You
go.  You ain't got no chance here, an' I like to see you git ahead,
fur you always been a good boy to my woman, and fur dat fine
Christmas dinner you give us all.'  An' da's how I got to New
York."

That night when Rudolph and Polly, arm in arm, were running home
across the fields with the bitter wind at their backs, his heart
leaped for joy when she said she thought they might have his family
come over for supper on New Year's Eve.  "Let's get up a nice
supper, and not let your mother help at all; make her be company
for once."

"That would be lovely of you, Polly," he said humbly.  He was a
very simple, modest boy, and he, too, felt vaguely that Polly and
her sisters were more experienced and worldly than his people.


VI


The winter turned out badly for farmers.  It was bitterly cold, and
after the first light snows before Christmas there was no snow at
all,--and no rain.  March was as bitter as February.  On those days
when the wind fairly punished the country, Rosicky sat by his
window.  In the fall he and the boys had put in a big wheat
planting, and now the seed had frozen in the ground.  All that land
would have to be ploughed up and planted over again, planted in
corn.  It had happened before, but he was younger then, and he
never worried about what had to be.  He was sure of himself and of
Mary; he knew they could bear what they had to bear, that they
would always pull through somehow.  But he was not so sure about
the young ones, and he felt troubled because Rudolph and Polly were
having such a hard start.

Sitting beside his flowering window while the panes rattled and the
wind blew in under the door, Rosicky gave himself to reflection as
he had not done since those Sundays in the loft of the furniture-
factory in New York, long ago.  Then he was trying to find what he
wanted in life for himself; now he was trying to find what he
wanted for his boys, and why it was he so hungered to feel sure
they would be here, working this very land, after he was gone.

They would have to work hard on the farm, and probably they would
never do much more than make a living.  But if he could think of
them as staying here on the land, he wouldn't have to fear any
great unkindness for them.  Hardships, certainly; it was a hardship
to have the wheat freeze in the ground when seed was so high; and
to have to sell your stock because you had no feed.  But there
would be other years when everything came along right, and you
caught up.  And what you had was your own.  You didn't have to
choose between bosses and strikers, and go wrong either way.  You
didn't have to do with dishonest and cruel people.  They were the
only things in his experience he had found terrifying and horrible;
the look in the eyes of a dishonest and crafty man, of a scheming
and rapacious woman.

In the country, if you had a mean neighbour, you could keep off his
land and make him keep off yours.  But in the city, all the
foulness and misery and brutality of your neighbours was part of
your life.  The worst things he had come upon in his journey
through the world were human,--depraved and poisonous specimens of
man.  To this day he could recall certain terrible faces in the
London streets.  There were mean people everywhere, to be sure,
even in their own country town here.  But they weren't tempered,
hardened, sharpened, like the treacherous people in cities who live
by grinding or cheating or poisoning their fellow-men.  He had
helped to bury two of his fellow-workmen in the tailoring trade,
and he was distrustful of the organized industries that see one out
of the world in big cities.  Here, if you were sick, you had Doctor
Ed to look after you; and if you died, fat Mr. Haycock, the kindest
man in the world, buried you.

It seemed to Rosicky that for good, honest boys like his, the worst
they could do on the farm was better than the best they would be
likely to do in the city.  If he'd had a mean boy, now, one who was
crooked and sharp and tried to put anything over on his brothers,
then town would be the place for him.  But he had no such boy.  As
for Rudolph, the discontented one, he would give the shirt off his
back to anyone who touched his heart.  What Rosicky really hoped
for his boys was that they could get through the world without ever
knowing much about the cruelty of human beings.  "Their mother and
me ain't prepared them for that," he sometimes said to himself.

These thoughts brought him back to a grateful consideration of his
own case.  What an escape he had had, to be sure!  He, too, in his
time, had had to take money for repair work from the hand of a
hungry child who let it go so wistfully; because it was money due
his boss.  And now, in all these years, he had never had to take a
cent from anyone in bitter need,--never had to look at the face of
a woman become like a wolf's from struggle and famine.  When he
thought of these things, Rosicky would put on his cap and jacket
and slip down to the barn and give his work-horses a little extra
oats, letting them eat it out of his hand in their slobbery
fashion.  It was his way of expressing what he felt, and made him
chuckle with pleasure.

The spring came warm, with blue skies,--but dry, dry as a bone.
The boys began ploughing up the wheat-fields to plant them over in
corn.  Rosicky would stand at the fence corner and watch them, and
the earth was so dry it blew up in clouds of brown dust that hid
the horses and the sulky plough and the driver.  It was a bad
outlook.

The big alfalfa-field that lay between the home place and Rudolph's
came up green, but Rosicky was worried because during that open
windy winter a great many Russian thistle plants had blown in there
and lodged.  He kept asking the boys to rake them out; he was
afraid their seed would root and "take the alfalfa."  Rudolph said
that was nonsense.  The boys were working so hard planting corn,
their father felt he couldn't insist about the thistles, but he set
great store by that big alfalfa field.  It was a feed you could
depend on,--and there was some deeper reason, vague, but strong.
The peculiar green of that clover woke early memories in old
Rosicky, went back to something in his childhood in the old world.
When he was a little boy, he had played in fields of that strong
blue-green colour.

One morning, when Rudolph had gone to town in the car, leaving a
work-team idle in his barn, Rosicky went over to his son's place,
put the horses to the buggy-rake, and set about quietly raking up
those thistles.  He behaved with guilty caution, and rather enjoyed
stealing a march on Doctor Ed, who was just then taking his first
vacation in seven years of practice and was attending a clinic in
Chicago.  Rosicky got the thistles raked up, but did not stop to
burn them.  That would take some time, and his breath was pretty
short, so he thought he had better get the horses back to the barn.

He got them into the barn and to their stalls, but the pain had
come on so sharp in his chest that he didn't try to take the
harness off.  He started for the house, bending lower with every
step.  The cramp in his chest was shutting him up like a jack-
knife.  When he reached the windmill, he swayed and caught at the
ladder.  He saw Polly coming down the hill, running with the
swiftness of a slim greyhound.  In a flash she had her shoulder
under his armpit.

"Lean on me, Father, hard!  Don't be afraid.  We can get to the
house all right."

Somehow they did, though Rosicky became blind with pain; he could
keep on his legs, but he couldn't steer his course.  The next thing
he was conscious of was lying on Polly's bed, and Polly bending
over him wringing out bath towels in hot water and putting them on
his chest.  She stopped only to throw coal into the stove, and she
kept the tea-kettle and the black pot going.  She put these hot
applications on him for nearly an hour, she told him afterwards,
and all that time he was drawn up stiff and blue, with the sweat
pouring off him.

As the pain gradually loosed its grip, the stiffness went out of
his jaws, the black circles round his eyes disappeared, and a
little of his natural colour came back.  When his daughter-in-law
buttoned his shirt over his chest at last, he sighed.

"Da's fine, de way I feel now, Polly.  It was a awful bad spell,
an' I was so sorry it all come on you like it did."

Polly was flushed and excited.  "Is the pain really gone?  Can I
leave you long enough to telephone over to your place?"

Rosicky's eyelids fluttered.  "Don't telephone, Polly.  It ain't no
use to scare my wife.  It's nice and quiet here, an' if I ain't too
much trouble to you, just let me lay still till I feel like myself.
I ain't got no pain now.  It's nice here."

Polly bent over him and wiped the moisture from his face.  "Oh, I'm
so glad it's over!" she broke out impulsively.  "It just broke my
heart to see you suffer so, Father."

Rosicky motioned her to sit down on the chair where the tea-kettle
had been, and looked up at her with that lively affectionate gleam
in his eyes.  "You was awful good to me, I won't never forgit dat.
I hate it to be sick on you like dis.  Down at de barn I say to
myself, dat young girl ain't had much experience in sickness, I
don't want to scare her, an' maybe she's got a baby comin' or
somet'ing."

Polly took his hand.  He was looking at her so intently and
affectionately and confidingly; his eyes seemed to caress her face,
to regard it with pleasure.  She frowned with her funny streaks of
eyebrows, and then smiled back at him.

"I guess maybe there is something of that kind going to happen.
But I haven't told anyone yet, not my mother or Rudolph.  You'll be
the first to know."

His hand pressed hers.  She noticed that it was warm again.  The
twinkle in his yellow-brown eyes seemed to come nearer.

"I like mighty well to see dat little child, Polly," was all he
said.  Then he closed his eyes and lay half-smiling.  But Polly sat
still, thinking hard.  She had a sudden feeling that nobody in the
world, not her mother, not Rudolph, or anyone, really loved her as
much as old Rosicky did.  It perplexed her.  She sat frowning and
trying to puzzle it out.  It was as if Rosicky had a special gift
for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an
eye for colour.  It was quiet, unobtrusive; it was merely there.
You saw it in his eyes,--perhaps that was why they were merry.
You felt it in his hands, too.  After he dropped off to sleep,
she sat holding his warm, broad, flexible brown hand.  She had
never seen another in the least like it.  She wondered if it wasn't
a kind of gypsy hand, it was so alive and quick and light in its
communications,--very strange in a farmer.  Nearly all the farmers
she knew had huge lumps of fists, like mauls, or they were knotty
and bony and uncomfortable-looking, with stiff fingers.  But
Rosicky's was like quicksilver, flexible, muscular, about the
colour of a pale cigar, with deep, deep creases across the palm.
It wasn't nervous, it wasn't a stupid lump; it was a warm brown
human hand, with some cleverness in it, a great deal of generosity,
and something else which Polly could only call "gypsy-like,"--
something nimble and lively and sure, in the way that animals are.

Polly remembered that hour long afterwards; it had been like an
awakening to her.  It seemed to her that she had never learned so
much about life from anything as from old Rosicky's hand.  It
brought her to herself; it communicated some direct and
untranslatable message.

When she heard Rudolph coming in the car, she ran out to meet him.

"Oh, Rudy, your father's been awful sick!  He raked up those
thistles he's been worrying about, and afterwards he could hardly
get to the house.  He suffered so I was afraid he was going to
die."

Rudolph jumped to the ground.  "Where is he now?"

"On the bed.  He's asleep.  I was terribly scared, because, you
know, I'm so fond of your father."  She slipped her arm through his
and they went into the house.  That afternoon they took Rosicky
home and put him to bed, though he protested that he was quite well
again.

The next morning he got up and dressed and sat down to breakfast
with his family.  He told Mary that his coffee tasted better than
usual to him, and he warned the boys not to bear any tales to
Doctor Ed when he got home.  After breakfast he sat down by his
window to do some patching and asked Mary to thread several needles
for him before she went to feed her chickens,--her eyes were better
than his, and her hands steadier.  He lit his pipe and took up
John's overalls.  Mary had been watching him anxiously all morning,
and as she went out of the door with her bucket of scraps, she saw
that he was smiling.  He was thinking, indeed, about Polly, and how
he might never have known what a tender heart she had if he hadn't
got sick over there.  Girls nowadays didn't wear their heart on
their sleeve.  But now he knew Polly would make a fine woman after
the foolishness wore off.  Either a woman had that sweetness at her
heart or she hadn't.  You couldn't always tell by the look of them;
but if they had that, everything came out right in the end.

After he had taken a few stitches, the cramp began in his chest,
like yesterday.  He put his pipe cautiously down on the window-sill
and bent over to ease the pull.  No use,--he had better try to get
to his bed if he could.  He rose and groped his way across the
familiar floor, which was rising and falling like the deck of a
ship.  At the door he fell.  When Mary came in, she found him lying
there, and the moment she touched him she knew that he was gone.



Doctor Ed was away when Rosicky died, and for the first few weeks
after he got home he was hard driven.  Every day he said to himself
that he must get out to see that family that had lost their father.
One soft, warm moonlight night in early summer he started for the
farm.  His mind was on other things, and not until his road ran by
the graveyard did he realize that Rosicky wasn't over there on the
hill where the red lamplight shone, but here, in the moonlight.  He
stopped his car, shut off the engine, and sat there for a while.

A sudden hush had fallen on his soul.  Everything here seemed
strangely moving and significant, though signifying what, he did
not know.  Close by the wire fence stood Rosicky's mowing-machine,
where one of the boys had been cutting hay that afternoon; his own
workhorses had been going up and down there.  The new-cut hay
perfumed all the night air.  The moonlight silvered the long,
billowy grass that grew over the graves and hid the fence; the few
little evergreens stood out black in it, like shadows in a pool.
The sky was very blue and soft, the stars rather faint because the
moon was full.

For the first time it struck Doctor Ed that this was really a
beautiful graveyard.  He thought of city cemeteries; acres of
shrubbery and heavy stone, so arranged and lonely and unlike
anything in the living world.  Cities of the dead, indeed; cities
of the forgotten, of the "put away."  But this was open and free,
this little square of long grass which the wind for ever stirred.
Nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-coloured fields running
on until they met that sky.  The horses worked here in summer; the
neighbours passed on their way to town; and over yonder, in the
cornfield, Rosicky's own cattle would be eating fodder as winter
came on.  Nothing could be more un-deathlike than this place;
nothing could be more right for a man who had helped to do the work
of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had
got to it at last.  Rosicky's life seemed to him complete and
beautiful.


New York, 1928




OLD MRS. HARRIS


I


Mrs. David Rosen, cross-stitch in hand, sat looking out of the
window across her own green lawn to the ragged, sunburned back yard
of her neighbours on the right.  Occasionally she glanced anxiously
over her shoulder toward her shining kitchen, with a black and
white linoleum floor in big squares, like a marble pavement.

"Will dat woman never go?" she muttered impatiently, just under her
breath.  She spoke with a slight accent--it affected only her th's,
and, occasionally, the letter v.  But people in Skyline thought
this unfortunate, in a woman whose superiority they recognized.

Mrs. Rosen ran out to move the sprinkler to another spot on the
lawn, and in doing so she saw what she had been waiting to see.
From the house next door a tall, handsome woman emerged, dressed in
white broadcloth and a hat with white lilacs; she carried a
sunshade and walked with a free, energetic step, as if she were
going out on a pleasant errand.

Mrs. Rosen darted quickly back into the house, lest her neighbour
should hail her and stop to talk.  She herself was in her kitchen
housework dress, a crisp blue chambray which fitted smoothly over
her tightly corseted figure, and her lustrous black hair was done
in two smooth braids, wound flat at the back of her head, like a
braided rug.  She did not stop for a hat--her dark, ruddy, salmon-
tinted skin had little to fear from the sun.  She opened the half-
closed oven door and took out a symmetrically plaited coffee-cake,
beautifully browned, delicately peppered over with poppy seeds,
with sugary margins about the twists.  On the kitchen table a tray
stood ready with cups and saucers.  She wrapped the cake in a
napkin, snatched up a little French coffee-pot with a black wooden
handle, and ran across her green lawn, through the alley-way and
the sandy, unkept yard next door, and entered her neighbour's house
by the kitchen.

The kitchen was hot and empty, full of the untempered afternoon
sun.  A door stood open into the next room; a cluttered, hideous
room, yet somehow homely.  There, beside a goods-box covered with
figured oilcloth, stood an old woman in a brown calico dress,
washing her hot face and neck at a tin basin.  She stood with her
feet wide apart, in an attitude of profound weariness.  She started
guiltily as the visitor entered.

"Don't let me disturb you, Grandma," called Mrs. Rosen.  "I always
have my coffee at dis hour in the afternoon.  I was just about to
sit down to it when I thought:  'I will run over and see if Grandma
Harris won't take a cup with me.'  I hate to drink my coffee
alone."

Grandma looked troubled,--at a loss.  She folded her towel and
concealed it behind a curtain hung across the corner of the room to
make a poor sort of closet.  The old lady was always composed in
manner, but it was clear that she felt embarrassment.

"Thank you, Mrs. Rosen.  What a pity Victoria just this minute went
down town!"

"But dis time I came to see you yourself, Grandma.  Don't let me
disturb you.  Sit down there in your own rocker, and I will put my
tray on this little chair between us, so!"

Mrs. Harris sat down in her black wooden rocking-chair with curved
arms and a faded cretonne pillow on the wooden seat.  It stood in
the corner beside a narrow spindle-frame lounge.  She looked on
silently while Mrs. Rosen uncovered the cake and delicately broke
it with her plump, smooth, dusky-red hands.  The old lady did not
seem pleased,--seemed uncertain and apprehensive, indeed.  But she
was not fussy or fidgety.  She had the kind of quiet, intensely
quiet, dignity that comes from complete resignation to the chances
of life.  She watched Mrs. Rosen's deft hands out of grave, steady
brown eyes.

"Dis is Mr. Rosen's favourite coffee-cake, Grandma, and I want you
to try it.  You are such a good cook yourself, I would like your
opinion of my cake."

"It's very nice, ma'am," said Mrs. Harris politely, but without
enthusiasm.

"And you aren't drinking your coffee; do you like more cream in
it?"

"No, thank you.  I'm letting it cool a little.  I generally drink
it that way."

"Of course she does," thought Mrs. Rosen, "since she never has her
coffee until all the family are done breakfast!"

Mrs. Rosen had brought Grandma Harris coffee-cake time and again,
but she knew that Grandma merely tasted it and saved it for her
daughter Victoria, who was as fond of sweets as her own children,
and jealous about them, moreover,--couldn't bear that special
dainties should come into the house for anyone but herself.  Mrs.
Rosen, vexed at her failures, had determined that just once she
would take a cake to "de old lady Harris," and with her own eyes
see her eat it.  The result was not all she had hoped.  Receiving a
visitor alone, unsupervised by her daughter, having cake and coffee
that should properly be saved for Victoria, was all so irregular
that Mrs. Harris could not enjoy it.  Mrs. Rosen doubted if she
tasted the cake as she swallowed it,--certainly she ate it without
relish, as a hollow form.  But Mrs. Rosen enjoyed her own cake, at
any rate, and she was glad of an opportunity to sit quietly and
look at Grandmother, who was more interesting to her than the
handsome Victoria.

It was a queer place to be having coffee, when Mrs. Rosen liked
order and comeliness so much: a hideous, cluttered room, furnished
with a rocking-horse, a sewing-machine, an empty baby-buggy.  A
walnut table stood against a blind window, piled high with old
magazines and tattered books, and children's caps and coats.  There
was a wash-stand (two wash-stands, if you counted the oilcloth-
covered box as one).  A corner of the room was curtained off with
some black-and-red-striped cotton goods, for a clothes closet.  In
another corner was the wooden lounge with a thin mattress and a red
calico spread which was Grandma's bed.  Beside it was her wooden
rocking-chair, and the little splint-bottom chair with the legs
sawed short on which her darning-basket usually stood, but which
Mrs. Rosen was now using for a tea-table.

The old lady was always impressive, Mrs. Rosen was thinking,--one
could not say why.  Perhaps it was the way she held her head,--so
simply, unprotesting and unprotected; or the gravity of her large,
deep-set brown eyes, a warm, reddish brown, though their look,
always direct, seemed to ask nothing and hope for nothing.  They
were not cold, but inscrutable, with no kindling gleam of
intercourse in them.  There was the kind of nobility about her head
that there is about an old lion's: an absence of self-consciousness,
vanity, preoccupation--something absolute.  Her grey hair was parted
in the middle, wound in two little horns over her ears, and done in
a little flat knot behind.  Her mouth was large and composed,--
resigned, the corners drooping.  Mrs. Rosen had very seldom heard
her laugh (and then it was a gentle, polite laugh which meant only
politeness).  But she had observed that whenever Mrs. Harris's
grandchildren were about, tumbling all over her, asking for cookies,
teasing her to read to them, the old lady looked happy.

As she drank her coffee, Mrs. Rosen tried one subject after another
to engage Mrs. Harris's attention.

"Do you feel this hot weather, Grandma?  I am afraid you are over
the stove too much.  Let those naughty children have a cold lunch
occasionally."

"No'm, I don't mind the heat.  It's apt to come on like this for a
spell in May.  I don't feel the stove.  I'm accustomed to it."

"Oh, so am I!  But I get very impatient with my cooking in hot
weather.  Do you miss your old home in Tennessee very much,
Grandma?"

"No'm, I can't say I do.  Mr. Templeton thought Colorado was a
better place to bring up the children."

"But you had things much more comfortable down there, I'm sure.
These little wooden houses are too hot in summer."

"Yes'm, we were more comfortable.  We had more room."

"And a flower-garden, and beautiful old trees, Mrs. Templeton told
me."

"Yes'm, we had a great deal of shade."

Mrs. Rosen felt that she was not getting anywhere.  She almost
believed that Grandma thought she had come on an equivocal errand,
to spy out something in Victoria's absence.  Well, perhaps she had!
Just for once she would like to get past the others to the real
grandmother,--and the real grandmother was on her guard, as always.
At this moment she heard a faint miaow.  Mrs. Harris rose, lifting
herself by the wooden arms of her chair, said:  "Excuse me," went
into the kitchen, and opened the screen door.

In walked a large, handsome, thickly furred Maltese cat, with long
whiskers and yellow eyes and a white star on his breast.  He
preceded Grandmother, waited until she sat down.  Then he sprang up
into her lap and settled himself comfortably in the folds of her
full-gathered calico skirt.  He rested his chin in his deep bluish
fur and regarded Mrs. Rosen.  It struck her that he held his head
in just the way Grandmother held hers.  And Grandmother now became
more alive, as if some missing part of herself were restored.

"This is Blue Boy," she said, stroking him.  "In winter, when the
screen door ain't on, he lets himself in.  He stands up on his hind
legs and presses the thumb-latch with his paw, and just walks in
like anybody."

"He's your cat, isn't he, Grandma?"  Mrs. Rosen couldn't help
prying just a little; if she could find but a single thing that was
Grandma's own!

"He's our cat," replied Mrs. Harris.  "We're all very fond of him.
I expect he's Vickie's more'n anybody's."

"Of course!" groaned Mrs. Rosen to herself.  "Dat Vickie is her
mother over again."

Here Mrs. Harris made her first unsolicited remark.  "If you was to
be troubled with mice at any time, Mrs. Rosen, ask one of the boys
to bring Blue Boy over to you, and he'll clear them out.  He's a
master mouser."  She scratched the thick blue fur at the back of
his neck, and he began a deep purring.  Mrs. Harris smiled.  "We
call that spinning, back with us.  Our children still say:  'Listen
to Blue Boy spin,' though none of 'em is ever heard a spinning-
wheel--except maybe Vickie remembers."

"Did you have a spinning-wheel in your own house, Grandma Harris?"

"Yes'm.  Miss Sadie Crummer used to come and spin for us.  She was
left with no home of her own, and it was to give her something to
do, as much as anything, that we had her.  I spun a good deal
myself, in my young days."  Grandmother stopped and put her hands
on the arms of her chair, as if to rise.  "Did you hear a door
open?  It might be Victoria."

"No, it was the wind shaking the screen door.  Mrs. Templeton won't
be home yet.  She is probably in my husband's store this minute,
ordering him about.  All the merchants down town will take anything
from your daughter.  She is very popular wid de gentlemen,
Grandma."

Mrs. Harris smiled complacently.  "Yes'm.  Victoria was always much
admired."

At this moment a chorus of laughter broke in upon the warm silence,
and a host of children, as it seemed to Mrs. Rosen, ran through the
yard.  The hand-pump on the back porch, outside the kitchen door,
began to scrape and gurgle.

"It's the children, back from school," said Grandma.  "They are
getting a cool drink."

"But where is the baby, Grandma?"

"Vickie took Hughie in his cart over to Mr. Holliday's yard, where
she studies.  She's right good about minding him."

Mrs. Rosen was glad to hear that Vickie was good for something.

Three little boys came running in through the kitchen; the twins,
aged ten, and Ronald, aged six, who went to kindergarten.  They
snatched off their caps and threw their jackets and school bags on
the table, the sewing-machine, the rocking-horse.

"Howdy do, Mrs. Rosen."  They spoke to her nicely.  They had nice
voices, nice faces, and were always courteous, like their father.
"We are going to play in our back yard with some of the boys,
Gram'ma," said one of the twins respectfully, and they ran out to
join a troop of schoolmates who were already shouting and racing
over that poor trampled back yard, strewn with velocipedes and
croquet mallets and toy wagons, which was such an eyesore to Mrs.
Rosen.

Mrs. Rosen got up and took her tray.

"Can't you stay a little, ma'am?  Victoria will be here any
minute."

But her tone let Mrs. Rosen know that Grandma really wished her to
leave before Victoria returned.

A few moments after Mrs. Rosen had put the tray down in her own
kitchen, Victoria Templeton came up the wooden sidewalk, attended
by Mr. Rosen, who had quitted his store half an hour earlier than
usual for the pleasure of walking home with her.  Mrs. Templeton
stopped by the picket fence to smile at the children playing in the
back yard,--and it was a real smile, she was glad to see them.

She called Ronald over to the fence to give him a kiss.  He was hot
and sticky.

"Was your teacher nice today?  Now run in and ask Grandma to wash
your face and put a clean waist on you."


II


That night Mrs. Harris got supper with an effort--had to drive
herself harder than usual.  Mandy, the bound girl they had brought
with them from the South, noticed that the old lady was uncertain
and short of breath.  The hours from two to four, when Mrs. Harris
usually rested, had not been at all restful this afternoon.  There
was an understood rule that Grandmother was not to receive visitors
alone.  Mrs. Rosen's call, and her cake and coffee, were too much
out of the accepted order.  Nervousness had prevented the old lady
from getting any repose during her visit.

After the rest of the family had left the supper table, she went
into the dining-room and took her place, but she ate very little.
She put away the food that was left, and then, while Mandy washed
the dishes, Grandma sat down in her rocking-chair in the dark and
dozed.

The three little boys came in from playing under the electric light
(arc lights had been but lately installed in Skyline) and began
begging Mrs. Harris to read Tom Sawyer to them.  Grandmother loved
to read, anything at all, the Bible or the continued story in the
Chicago weekly paper.  She roused herself, lit her brass "safety
lamp," and pulled her black rocker out of its corner to the wash-
stand (the table was too far away from her corner, and anyhow it
was completely covered with coats and school satchels).  She put on
her old-fashioned silver-rimmed spectacles and began to read.
Ronald lay down on Grandmother's lounge bed, and the twins, Albert
and Adelbert, called Bert and Del, sat down against the wall, one
on a low box covered with felt, and the other on the little sawed-
off chair upon which Mrs. Rosen had served coffee.  They looked
intently at Mrs. Harris, and she looked intently at the book.

Presently Vickie, the oldest grandchild, came in.  She was fifteen.
Her mother was entertaining callers in the parlour, callers who
didn't interest Vickie, so she was on her way up to her own room by
the kitchen stairway.

Mrs. Harris looked up over her glasses.  "Vickie, maybe you'd take
the book awhile, and I can do my darning."

"All right," said Vickie.  Reading aloud was one of the things she
would always do toward the general comfort.  She sat down by the
wash-stand and went on with the story.  Grandmother got her
darning-basket and began to drive her needle across great knee-
holes in the boys' stockings.  Sometimes she nodded for a moment,
and her hands fell into her lap.  After a while the little boy on
the lounge went to sleep.  But the twins sat upright, their hands
on their knees, their round brown eyes fastened upon Vickie, and
when there was anything funny, they giggled.  They were chubby,
dark-skinned little boys, with round jolly faces, white teeth, and
yellow-brown eyes that were always bubbling with fun unless they
were sad,--even then their eyes never got red or weepy.  Their
tears sparkled and fell; left no trace but a streak on the cheeks,
perhaps.

Presently old Mrs. Harris gave out a long snore of utter defeat.
She had been overcome at last.  Vickie put down the book.  "That's
enough for tonight.  Grandmother's sleepy, and Ronald's fast
asleep.  What'll we do with him?"

"Bert and me'll get him undressed," said Adelbert.  The twins
roused the sleepy little boy and prodded him up the back stairway
to the bare room without window blinds, where he was put into his
cot beside their double bed.  Vickie's room was across the narrow
hallway; not much bigger than a closet, but, anyway, it was her
own.  She had a chair and an old dresser, and beside her bed was a
high stool which she used as a lamp-table,--she always read in bed.

After Vickie went upstairs, the house was quiet.  Hughie, the baby,
was asleep in his mother's room, and Victoria herself, who still
treated her husband as if he were her "beau," had persuaded him to
take her down town to the ice-cream parlour.  Grandmother's room,
between the kitchen and the dining-room, was rather like a passage-
way; but now that the children were upstairs and Victoria was off
enjoying herself somewhere, Mrs. Harris could be sure of enough
privacy to undress.  She took off the calico cover from her lounge
bed and folded it up, put on her nightgown and white nightcap.

Mandy, the bound girl, appeared at the kitchen door.

"Miz' Harris," she said in a guarded tone, ducking her head, "you
want me to rub your feet for you?"

For the first time in the long day the old woman's low composure
broke a little.  "Oh, Mandy, I would take it kindly of you!" she
breathed gratefully.

That had to be done in the kitchen; Victoria didn't like anybody
slopping about.  Mrs. Harris put an old checked shawl round her
shoulders and followed Mandy.  Beside the kitchen stove Mandy had a
little wooden tub full of warm water.  She knelt down and untied
Mrs. Harris's garter strings and took off her flat cloth slippers
and stockings.

"Oh, Miz' Harris, your feet an' legs is swelled turrible tonight!"

"I expect they air, Mandy.  They feel like it."

"Pore soul!" murmured Mandy.  She put Grandma's feet in the tub
and, crouching beside it, slowly, slowly rubbed her swollen legs.
Mandy was tired, too.  Mrs. Harris sat in her nightcap and shawl,
her hands crossed in her lap.  She never asked for this greatest
solace of the day; it was something that Mandy gave, who had
nothing else to give.  If there could be a comparison in absolutes,
Mandy was the needier of the two,--but she was younger.  The
kitchen was quiet and full of shadow, with only the light from an
old lantern.  Neither spoke.  Mrs. Harris dozed from comfort, and
Mandy herself was half asleep as she performed one of the oldest
rites of compassion.

Although Mrs. Harris's lounge had no springs, only a thin cotton
mattress between her and the wooden slats, she usually went to
sleep as soon as she was in bed.  To be off her feet, to lie flat,
to say over the psalm beginning:  "The Lord is my shepherd" was
comfort enough.  About four o'clock in the morning, however, she
would begin to feel the hard slats under her, and the heaviness of
the old home-made quilts, with weight but little warmth, on top of
her.  Then she would reach under her pillow for her little
comforter (she called it that to herself) that Mrs. Rosen had given
her.  It was a tan sweater of very soft brushed wool, with one
sleeve torn and ragged.  A young nephew from Chicago had spent a
fortnight with Mrs. Rosen last summer and had left this behind him.
One morning, when Mrs. Harris went out to the stable at the back of
the yard to pat Buttercup, the cow, Mrs. Rosen ran across the
alley-way.

"Grandma Harris," she said, coming into the shelter of the stable,
"I wonder if you could make any use of this sweater Sammy left?
The yarn might be good for your darning."

Mrs. Harris felt of the article gravely.  Mrs. Rosen thought her
face brightened.  "Yes'm, indeed I could use it.  I thank you
kindly."

She slipped it under her apron, carried it into the house with her,
and concealed it under her mattress.  There she had kept it ever
since.  She knew Mrs. Rosen understood how it was; that Victoria
couldn't bear to have anything come into the house that was not for
her to dispose of.

On winter nights, and even on summer nights after the cocks began
to crow, Mrs. Harris often felt cold and lonely about the chest.
Sometimes her cat, Blue Boy, would creep in beside her and warm
that aching spot.  But on spring and summer nights he was likely to
be abroad skylarking, and this little sweater had become the
dearest of Grandmother's few possessions.  It was kinder to her,
she used to think, as she wrapped it about her middle, than any of
her own children had been.  She had married at eighteen and had had
eight children; but some died, and some were, as she said,
scattered.

After she was warm in that tender spot under the ribs, the old
woman could lie patiently on the slats, waiting for daybreak;
thinking about the comfortable rambling old house in Tennessee, its
feather beds and hand-woven rag carpets and splint-bottom chairs,
the mahogany sideboard, and the marble-top parlour table; all that
she had left behind to follow Victoria's fortunes.

She did not regret her decision; indeed, there had been no
decision.  Victoria had never once thought it possible that Ma
should not go wherever she and the children went, and Mrs. Harris
had never thought it possible.  Of course she regretted Tennessee,
though she would never admit it to Mrs. Rosen:--the old neighbours,
the yard and garden she had worked in all her life, the apple trees
she had planted, the lilac arbour, tall enough to walk in, which
she had clipped and shaped so many years.  Especially she missed
her lemon tree, in a tub on the front porch, which bore little
lemons almost every summer, and folks would come for miles to see
it.

But the road had led westward, and Mrs. Harris didn't believe that
women, especially old women, could say when or where they would
stop.  They were tied to the chariot of young life, and had to go
where it went, because they were needed.  Mrs. Harris had gathered
from Mrs. Rosen's manner, and from comments she occasionally
dropped, that the Jewish people had an altogether different
attitude toward their old folks; therefore her friendship with this
kind neighbour was almost as disturbing as it was pleasant.  She
didn't want Mrs. Rosen to think that she was "put upon," that there
was anything unusual or pitiful in her lot.  To be pitied was the
deepest hurt anybody could know.  And if Victoria once suspected
Mrs. Rosen's indignation, it would be all over.  She would freeze
her neighbour out, and that friendly voice, that quick pleasant
chatter with the little foreign twist, would thenceforth be heard
only at a distance, in the alley-way or across the fence.  Victoria
had a good heart, but she was terribly proud and could not bear the
least criticism.

As soon as the grey light began to steal into the room, Mrs. Harris
would get up softly and wash at the basin on the oilcloth-covered
box.  She would wet her hair above her forehead, comb it with a
little bone comb set in a tin rim, do it up in two smooth little
horns over her ears, wipe the comb dry, and put it away in the
pocket of her full-gathered calico skirt.  She left nothing lying
about.  As soon as she was dressed, she made her bed, folding her
nightgown and nightcap under the pillow, the sweater under the
mattress.  She smoothed the heavy quilts, and drew the red calico
spread neatly over all.  Her towel was hung on its special nail
behind the curtain.  Her soap she kept in a tin tobacco-box; the
children's soap was in a crockery saucer.  If her soap or towel got
mixed up with the children's, Victoria was always sharp about it.
The little rented house was much too small for the family, and Mrs.
Harris and her "things" were almost required to be invisible.  Two
clean calico dresses hung in the curtained corner; another was on
her back, and a fourth was in the wash.  Behind the curtain there
was always a good supply of aprons; Victoria bought them at church
fairs, and it was a great satisfaction to Mrs. Harris to put on a
clean one whenever she liked.  Upstairs, in Mandy's attic room over
the kitchen, hung a black cashmere dress and a black bonnet with a
long crêpe veil, for the rare occasions when Mr. Templeton hired a
double buggy and horses and drove his family to a picnic or to
Decoration Day exercises.  Mrs. Harris rather dreaded these drives,
for Victoria was usually cross afterwards.

When Mrs. Harris went out into the kitchen to get breakfast, Mandy
always had the fire started and the water boiling.  They enjoyed a
quiet half-hour before the little boys came running down the
stairs, always in a good humour.  In winter the boys had their
breakfast in the kitchen, with Vickie.  Mrs. Harris made Mandy eat
the cakes and fried ham the children left, so that she would not
fast so long.  Mr. and Mrs. Templeton breakfasted rather late, in
the dining-room, and they always had fruit and thick cream,--a
small pitcher of the very thickest was for Mrs. Templeton.  The
children were never fussy about their food.  As Grandmother often
said feelingly to Mrs. Rosen, they were as little trouble as
children could possibly be.  They sometimes tore their clothes, of
course, or got sick.  But even when Albert had an abscess in his
ear and was in such pain, he would lie for hours on Grandmother's
lounge with his cheek on a bag of hot salt, if only she or Vickie
would read aloud to him.

"It's true, too, what de old lady says," remarked Mrs. Rosen to her
husband one night at supper, "dey are nice children.  No one ever
taught them anything, but they have good instincts, even dat
Vickie.  And think, if you please, of all the self-sacrificing
mothers we know,--Fannie and Esther, to come near home; how they
have planned for those children from infancy and given them every
advantage.  And now ingratitude and coldness is what dey meet
with."

Mr. Rosen smiled his teasing smile.  "Evidently your sister and
mine have the wrong method.  The way to make your children
unselfish is to be comfortably selfish yourself."

"But dat woman takes no more responsibility for her children than a
cat takes for her kittens.  Nor does poor young Mr. Templeton, for
dat matter.  How can he expect to get so many children started in
life, I ask you?  It is not at all fair!"

Mr. Rosen sometimes had to hear altogether too much about the
Templetons, but he was patient, because it was a bitter sorrow to
Mrs. Rosen that she had no children.  There was nothing else in the
world she wanted so much.


III


Mrs. Rosen in one of her blue working dresses, the indigo blue that
became a dark skin and dusky red cheeks with a tone of salmon
colour, was in her shining kitchen, washing her beautiful dishes--
her neighbours often wondered why she used her best china and linen
every day--when Vickie Templeton came in with a book under her arm.

"Good day, Mrs. Rosen.  Can I have the second volume?"

"Certainly.  You know where the books are."  She spoke coolly, for
it always annoyed her that Vickie never suggested wiping the dishes
or helping with such household work as happened to be going on when
she dropped in.  She hated the girl's bringing-up so much that
sometimes she almost hated the girl.

Vickie strolled carelessly through the dining-room into the parlour
and opened the doors of one of the big bookcases.  Mr. Rosen had a
large library, and a great many unusual books.  There was a
complete set of the Waverley Novels in German, for example; thick,
dumpy little volumes bound in tooled leather, with very black type
and dramatic engravings printed on wrinkled, yellowing pages.
There were many French books, and some of the German classics done
into English, such as Coleridge's translation of Schiller's
Wallenstein.

Of course no other house in Skyline was in the least like Mrs.
Rosen's; it was the nearest thing to an art gallery and a museum
that the Templetons had ever seen.  All the rooms were carpeted
alike (that was very unusual), with a soft velvet carpet, little
blue and rose flowers scattered on a rose-grey ground.  The deep
chairs were upholstered in dark blue velvet.  The walls were hung
with engravings in pale gold frames: some of Raphael's "Hours," a
large soft engraving of a castle on the Rhine, and another of
cypress trees about a Roman ruin, under a full moon.  There were a
number of water-colour sketches, made in Italy by Mr. Rosen himself
when he was a boy.  A rich uncle had taken him abroad as his
secretary.  Mr. Rosen was a reflective, unambitious man, who didn't
mind keeping a clothing-store in a little Western town, so long as
he had a great deal of time to read philosophy.  He was the only
unsuccessful member of a large, rich Jewish family.

Last August, when the heat was terrible in Skyline, and the crops
were burned up on all the farms to the north, and the wind from the
pink and yellow sand-hills to the south blew so hot that it singed
the few green lawns in the town, Vickie had taken to dropping in
upon Mrs. Rosen at the very hottest part of the afternoon.  Mrs.
Rosen knew, of course, that it was probably because the girl had no
other cool and quiet place to go--her room at home under the roof
would be hot enough!  Now, Mrs. Rosen liked to undress and take a
nap from three to five,--if only to get out of her tight corsets,
for she would have an hourglass figure at any cost.  She told
Vickie firmly that she was welcome to come if she would read in the
parlour with the blind up only a little way, and would be as still
as a mouse.  Vickie came, meekly enough, but she seldom read.  She
would take a sofa pillow and lie down on the soft carpet and look
up at the pictures in the dusky room, and feel a happy, pleasant
excitement from the heat and glare outside and the deep shadow and
quiet within.  Curiously enough, Mrs. Rosen's house never made her
dissatisfied with her own; she thought that very nice, too.

Mrs. Rosen, leaving her kitchen in a state of such perfection as
the Templetons were unable to sense or to admire, came into the
parlour and found her visitor sitting cross-legged on the floor
before one of the bookcases.

"Well, Vickie, and how did you get along with Wilhelm Meister?"

"I like it," said Vickie.

Mrs. Rosen shrugged.  The Templetons always said that; quite as if
a book or a cake were lucky to win their approbation.

"Well, WHAT did you like?"

"I guess I liked all that about the theatre and Shakspere best."

"It's rather celebrated," remarked Mrs. Rosen dryly.  "And are you
studying every day?  Do you think you will be able to win that
scholarship?"

"I don't know.  I'm going to try awful hard."

Mrs. Rosen wondered whether any Templeton knew how to try very
hard.  She reached for her work-basket and began to do cross-
stitch.  It made her nervous to sit with folded hands.

Vickie was looking at a German book in her lap, an illustrated
edition of Faust.  She had stopped at a very German picture of
Gretchen entering the church, with Faustus gazing at her from
behind a rose tree, Mephisto at his shoulder.

"I wish I could read this," she said, frowning at the black Gothic
text.  "It's splendid, isn't it?"

Mrs. Rosen rolled her eyes upward and sighed.  "Oh, my dear, one of
de world's masterpieces!"

That meant little to Vickie.  She had not been taught to respect
masterpieces, she had no scale of that sort in her mind.  She cared
about a book only because it took hold of her.

She kept turning over the pages.  Between the first and second
parts, in this edition, there was inserted the Dies Iræ hymn in
full.  She stopped and puzzled over it for a long while.

"Here is something I can read," she said, showing the page to Mrs.
Rosen.

Mrs. Rosen looked up from her cross-stitch.  "There you have the
advantage of me.  I do not read Latin.  You might translate it for
me."

Vickie began:


     "Day of wrath, upon that day
      The world to ashes melts away,
      As David and the Sibyl say.


"But that don't give you the rhyme; every line ought to end in two
syllables."

"Never mind if it doesn't give the metre," corrected Mrs. Rosen
kindly; "go on, if you can."

Vickie went on stumbling through the Latin verses, and Mrs. Rosen
sat watching her.  You couldn't tell about Vickie.  She wasn't
pretty, yet Mrs. Rosen found her attractive.  She liked her sturdy
build, and the steady vitality that glowed in her rosy skin and
dark blue eyes,--even gave a springy quality to her curly reddish-
brown hair, which she still wore in a single braid down her back.
Mrs. Rosen liked to have Vickie about because she was never
listless or dreamy or apathetic.  A half-smile nearly always played
about her lips and eyes, and it was there because she was pleased
with something, not because she wanted to be agreeable.  Even a
half-smile made her cheeks dimple.  She had what her mother called
"a happy disposition."

When she finished the verses, Mrs. Rosen nodded approvingly.
"Thank you, Vickie.  The very next time I go to Chicago, I will try
to get an English translation of Faust for you."

"But I want to read this one."  Vickie's open smile darkened.
"What I want is to pick up any of these books and just read them,
like you and Mr. Rosen do."

The dusky red of Mrs. Rosen's cheeks grew a trifle deeper.  Vickie
never paid compliments, absolutely never; but if she really admired
anyone, something in her voice betrayed it so convincingly that one
felt flattered.  When she dropped a remark of this kind, she added
another link to the chain of responsibility which Mrs. Rosen
unwillingly bore and tried to shake off--the irritating sense of
being somehow responsible for Vickie, since, God knew, no one else
felt responsible.

Once or twice, when she happened to meet pleasant young Mr.
Templeton alone, she had tried to talk to him seriously about his
daughter's future.  "She has finished de school here, and she
should be getting training of some sort; she is growing up," she
told him severely.

He laughed and said in his way that was so honest, and so
disarmingly sweet and frank:  "Oh, don't remind me, Mrs. Rosen!
I just pretend to myself she isn't.  I want to keep my little
daughter as long as I can."  And there it ended.

Sometimes Vickie Templeton seemed so dense, so utterly
unperceptive, that Mrs. Rosen was ready to wash her hands of her.
Then some queer streak of sensibility in the child would make her
change her mind.  Last winter, when Mrs. Rosen came home from a
visit to her sister in Chicago, she brought with her a new cloak of
the sleeveless dolman type, black velvet, lined with grey and white
squirrel skins, a grey skin next a white.  Vickie, so indifferent
to clothes, fell in love with that cloak.  Her eyes followed it
with delight whenever Mrs. Rosen wore it.  She found it picturesque,
romantic.  Mrs. Rosen had been captivated by the same thing in the
cloak, and had bought it with a shrug, knowing it would be quite out
of place in Skyline; and Mr. Rosen, when she first produced it from
her trunk, had laughed and said:  "Where did you get that?--out of
Rigoletto?"  It looked like that--but how could Vickie know?

Vickie's whole family puzzled Mrs. Rosen; their feelings were so
much finer than their way of living.  She bought milk from the
Templetons because they kept a cow--which Mandy milked,--and every
night one of the twins brought the milk to her in a tin pail.
Whichever boy brought it, she always called him Albert--she thought
Adelbert a silly, Southern name.

One night when she was fitting the lid on an empty pail, she said
severely:

"Now, Albert, I have put some cookies for Grandma in this pail,
wrapped in a napkin.  And they are for Grandma, remember, not for
your mother or Vickie."

"Yes'm."

When she turned to him to give him the pail, she saw two full
crystal globes in the little boy's eyes, just ready to break.  She
watched him go softly down the path and dash those tears away with
the back of his hand.  She was sorry.  She hadn't thought the
little boys realized that their household was somehow a queer one.

Queer or not, Mrs. Rosen liked to go there better than to most
houses in the town.  There was something easy, cordial, and
carefree in the parlour that never smelled of being shut up, and
the ugly furniture looked hospitable.  One felt a pleasantness in
the human relationships.  These people didn't seem to know there
were such things as struggle or exactness or competition in the
world.  They were always genuinely glad to see you, had time to see
you, and were usually gay in mood--all but Grandmother, who had the
kind of gravity that people who take thought of human destiny must
have.  But even she liked light-heartedness in others; she drudged,
indeed, to keep it going.

There were houses that were better kept, certainly, but the
housekeepers had no charm, no gentleness of manner, were like hard
little machines, most of them; and some were grasping and narrow.
The Templetons were not selfish or scheming.  Anyone could take
advantage of them, and many people did.  Victoria might eat all the
cookies her neighbour sent in, but she would give away anything she
had.  She was always ready to lend her dresses and hats and bits of
jewellery for the school theatricals, and she never worked people
for favours.

As for Mr. Templeton (people usually called him "young Mr.
Templeton"), he was too delicate to collect his just debts.  His
boyish, eager-to-please manner, his fair complexion and blue eyes
and young face, made him seem very soft to some of the hard old
money-grubbers on Main Street, and the fact that he always said
"Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to men older than himself furnished a
good deal of amusement to by-standers.



Two years ago, when this Templeton family came to Skyline and moved
into the house next door, Mrs. Rosen was inconsolable.  The new
neighbours had a lot of children, who would always be making a
racket.  They put a cow and a horse into the empty barn, which
would mean dirt and flies.  They strewed their back yard with
packing-cases and did not pick them up.

She first met Mrs. Templeton at an afternoon card party, in a house
at the extreme north end of the town, fully half a mile away, and
she had to admit that her new neighbour was an attractive woman,
and that there was something warm and genuine about her.  She
wasn't in the least willowy or languishing, as Mrs. Rosen had
usually found Southern ladies to be.  She was high-spirited and
direct; a trifle imperious, but with a shade of diffidence, too, as
if she were trying to adjust herself to a new group of people and
to do the right thing.

While they were at the party, a blinding snowstorm came on, with a
hard wind.  Since they lived next door to each other, Mrs. Rosen
and Mrs. Templeton struggled homeward together through the
blizzard.  Mrs. Templeton seemed delighted with the rough weather;
she laughed like a big country girl whenever she made a mis-step
off the obliterated sidewalk and sank up to her knees in a snow-
drift.

"Take care, Mrs. Rosen," she kept calling, "keep to the right!
Don't spoil your nice coat.  My, ain't this real winter?  We never
had it like this back with us."

When they reached the Templeton's gate, Victoria wouldn't hear of
Mrs. Rosen's going farther.  "No, indeed, Mrs. Rosen, you come
right in with me and get dry, and Ma'll make you a hot toddy while
I take the baby."

By this time Mrs. Rosen had begun to like her neighbour, so she
went in.  To her surprise, the parlour was neat and comfortable--
the children did not strew things about there, apparently.  The
hard-coal burner threw out a warm red glow.  A faded, respectable
Brussels carpet covered the floor, an old-fashioned wooden clock
ticked on the walnut bookcase.  There were a few easy chairs, and
no hideous ornaments about.  She rather liked the old oil-chromos
on the wall:  "Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness," and "The Light
of the World."  While Mrs. Rosen dried her feet on the nickel base
of the stove, Mrs. Templeton excused herself and withdrew to the
next room,--her bedroom,--took off her silk dress and corsets, and
put on a white challis négligée.  She reappeared with the baby, who
was not crying, exactly, but making eager, passionate, gasping
entreaties,--faster and faster, tenser and tenser, as he felt his
dinner nearer and nearer and yet not his.

Mrs. Templeton sat down in a low rocker by the stove and began to
nurse him, holding him snugly but carelessly, still talking to Mrs.
Rosen about the card party, and laughing about their wade home
through the snow.  Hughie, the baby, fell to work so fiercely that
beads of sweat came out all over his flushed forehead.  Mrs. Rosen
could not help admiring him and his mother.  They were so
comfortable and complete.  When he was changed to the other side,
Hughie resented the interruption a little; but after a time he
became soft and bland, as smooth as oil, indeed; began looking
about him as he drew in his milk.  He finally dropped the nipple
from his lips altogether, turned on his mother's arm, and looked
inquiringly at Mrs. Rosen.

"What a beautiful baby!" she exclaimed from her heart.  And he was.
A sort of golden baby.  His hair was like sunshine, and his long
lashes were gold over such gay blue eyes.  There seemed to be a
gold glow in his soft pink skin, and he had the smile of a cherub.

"We think he's a pretty boy," said Mrs. Templeton.  "He's the
prettiest of my babies.  Though the twins were mighty cunning
little fellows.  I hated the idea of twins, but the minute I saw
them, I couldn't resist them."

Just then old Mrs. Harris came in, walking widely in her full-
gathered skirt and felt-soled shoes, bearing a tray with two
smoking goblets upon it.

"This is my mother, Mrs. Harris, Mrs. Rosen," said Mrs. Templeton.

"I'm glad to know you, ma'am," said Mrs. Harris.  "Victoria, let me
take the baby, while you two ladies have your toddy."

"Oh, don't take him away, Mrs. Harris, please!" cried Mrs. Rosen.

The old lady smiled.  "I won't.  I'll set right here.  He never
frets with his grandma."

When Mrs. Rosen had finished her excellent drink, she asked if she
might hold the baby, and Mrs. Harris placed him on her lap.  He
made a few rapid boxing motions with his two fists, then braced
himself on his heels and the back of his head, and lifted himself
up in an arc.  When he dropped back, he looked up at Mrs. Rosen
with his most intimate smile.  "See what a smart boy I am!"

When Mrs. Rosen walked home, feeling her way through the snow by
following the fence, she knew she could never stay away from a
house where there was a baby like that one.


IV


Vickie did her studying in a hammock hung between two tall
cottonwood trees over in the Headmaster's green yard.  The
Headmaster had the finest yard in Skyline, on the edge of the town,
just where the sandy plain and the sage-brush began.  His family
went back to Ohio every summer, and Bert and Del Templeton were
paid to take care of his lawn, to turn the sprinkler on at the
right hours and to cut the grass.  They were really too little to
run the heavy lawn-mower very well, but they were able to manage
because they were twins.  Each took one end of the handle-bar, and
they pushed together like a pair of fat Shetland ponies.  They were
very proud of being able to keep the lawn so nice, and worked hard
on it.  They cut Mrs. Rosen's grass once a week, too, and did it so
well that she wondered why in the world they never did anything
about their own yard.  They didn't have city water, to be sure (it
was expensive), but she thought they might pick up a few
velocipedes and iron hoops, and dig up the messy "flower-bed," that
was even uglier than the naked gravel spots.  She was particularly
offended by a deep ragged ditch, a miniature arroyo, which ran
across the back yard, serving no purpose and looking very dreary.

One morning she said craftily to the twins, when she was paying
them for cutting her grass:

"And, boys, why don't you just shovel the sand-pile by your fence
into dat ditch, and make your back yard smooth?"

"Oh, no, ma'am," said Adelbert with feeling.  "We like to have the
ditch to build bridges over!"

Ever since vacation began, the twins had been busy getting the
Headmaster's yard ready for the Methodist lawn party.  When Mrs.
Holliday, the Headmaster's wife, went away for the summer, she
always left a key with the Ladies' Aid Society and invited them to
give their ice-cream social at her place.

This year the date set for the party was June fifteenth.  The day
was a particularly fine one, and as Mr. Holliday himself had been
called to Cheyenne on railroad business, the twins felt personally
responsible for everything.  They got out to the Holliday place
early in the morning, and stayed on guard all day.  Before noon the
drayman brought a wagon-load of card-tables and folding chairs,
which the boys placed in chosen spots under the cottonwood trees.
In the afternoon the Methodist ladies arrived and opened up the
kitchen to receive the freezers of home-made ice-cream, and the
cakes which the congregation donated.  Indeed, all the good cake-
bakers in town were expected to send a cake.  Grandma Harris baked
a white cake, thickly iced and covered with freshly grated coconut,
and Vickie took it over in the afternoon.

Mr. and Mrs. Rosen, because they belonged to no church, contributed
to the support of all, and usually went to the church suppers in
winter and the socials in summer.  On this warm June evening they
set out early, in order to take a walk first.  They strolled along
the hard gravelled road that led out through the sage toward the
sand-hills; tonight it led toward the moon, just rising over the
sweep of dunes.  The sky was almost as blue as at midday, and had
that look of being very near and very soft which it has in desert
countries.  The moon, too, looked very near, soft and bland and
innocent.  Mrs. Rosen admitted that in the Adirondacks, for which
she was always secretly homesick in summer, the moon had a much
colder brilliance, seemed farther off and made of a harder metal.
This moon gave the sage-brush plain and the drifted sand-hills the
softness of velvet.  All countries were beautiful to Mr. Rosen.  He
carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it
like a tent in any wilderness.

When they at last turned back toward the town, they saw groups of
people, women in white dresses, walking toward the dark spot where
the paper lanterns made a yellow light underneath the cottonwoods.
High above, the rustling tree-tops stirred free in the flood of
moonlight.

The lighted yard was surrounded by a low board fence, painted the
dark red Burlington colour, and as the Rosens drew near, they
noticed four children standing close together in the shadow of some
tall elder bushes just outside the fence.  They were the poor Maude
children; their mother was the washwoman, the Rosens' laundress and
the Templetons'.  People said that every one of those children had
a different father.  But good laundresses were few, and even the
members of the Ladies' Aid were glad to get Mrs. Maude's services
at a dollar a day, though they didn't like their children to play
with hers.  Just as the Rosens approached, Mrs. Templeton came out
from the lighted square, leaned over the fence, and addressed the
little Maudes.

"I expect you children forgot your dimes, now didn't you?  Never
mind, here's a dime for each of you, so come along and have your
ice-cream."

The Maudes put out small hands and said:  "Thank you," but not one
of them moved.

"Come along, Francie" (the oldest girl was named Frances).  "Climb
right over the fence."  Mrs. Templeton reached over and gave her a
hand, and the little boys quickly scrambled after their sister.
Mrs. Templeton took them to a table which Vickie and the twins had
just selected as being especially private--they liked to do things
together.

"Here, Vickie, let the Maudes sit at your table, and take care they
get plenty of cake."

The Rosens had followed close behind Mrs. Templeton, and Mr. Rosen
now overtook her and said in his most courteous and friendly
manner:  "Good evening, Mrs. Templeton.  Will you have ice-cream
with us?"  He always used the local idioms, though his voice and
enunciation made them sound altogether different from Skyline
speech.

"Indeed I will, Mr. Rosen.  Mr. Templeton will be late.  He went
out to his farm yesterday, and I don't know just when to expect
him."

Vickie and the twins were disappointed at not having their table to
themselves, when they had come early and found a nice one; but they
knew it was right to look out for the dreary little Maudes, so they
moved close together and made room for them.  The Maudes didn't
cramp them long.  When the three boys had eaten the last crumb of
cake and licked their spoons, Francie got up and led them to a
green slope by the fence, just outside the lighted circle.  "Now
set down, and watch and see how folks do," she told them.  The boys
looked to Francie for commands and support.  She was really Amos
Maude's child, born before he ran away to the Klondike, and it had
been rubbed into them that this made a difference.  The Templeton
children made their ice-cream linger out, and sat watching the
crowd.  They were glad to see their mother go to Mr. Rosen's table,
and noticed how nicely he placed a chair for her and insisted upon
putting a scarf about her shoulders.  Their mother was wearing her
new dotted Swiss, with many ruffles, all edged with black ribbon,
and wide ruffly sleeves.  As the twins watched her over their
spoons, they thought how much prettier their mother was than any of
the other women, and how becoming her new dress was.  The children
got as much satisfaction as Mrs. Harris out of Victoria's good
looks.

Mr. Rosen was well pleased with Mrs. Templeton and her new dress,
and with her kindness to the little Maudes.  He thought her manner
with them just right,--warm, spontaneous, without anything
patronizing.  He always admired her way with her own children,
though Mrs. Rosen thought it too casual.  Being a good mother, he
believed, was much more a matter of physical poise and richness
than of sentimentalizing and reading doctor-books.  Tonight he was
more talkative than usual, and in his quiet way made Mrs. Templeton
feel his real friendliness and admiration.  Unfortunately, he made
other people feel it, too.

Mrs. Jackson, a neighbour who didn't like the Templetons, had been
keeping an eye on Mr. Rosen's table.  She was a stout square woman
of imperturbable calm, effective in regulating the affairs of the
community because she never lost her temper, and could say the most
cutting things in calm, even kindly, tones.  Her face was smooth
and placid as a mask, rather good-humoured, and the fact that one
eye had a cast and looked askance made it the more difficult to see
through her intentions.  When she had been lingering about the
Rosens' table for some time, studying Mr. Rosen's pleasant
attentions to Mrs. Templeton, she brought up a trayful of cake.

"You folks are about ready for another helping," she remarked
affably.

Mrs. Rosen spoke.  "I want some of Grandma Harris's cake.  It's a
white coconut, Mrs. Jackson."

"How about you, Mrs. Templeton, would you like some of your own
cake?"

"Indeed I would," said Mrs. Templeton heartily.  "Ma said she had
good luck with it.  I didn't see it.  Vickie brought it over."

Mrs. Jackson deliberately separated the slices on her tray with two
forks.  "Well," she remarked with a chuckle that really sounded
amiable, "I don't know but I'd like my cakes, if I kept somebody in
the kitchen to bake them for me."

Mr. Rosen for once spoke quickly.  "If I had a cook like Grandma
Harris in my kitchen, I'd live in it!" he declared.

Mrs. Jackson smiled.  "I don't know as we feel like that, Mrs.
Templeton?  I tell Mr. Jackson that my idea of coming up in the
world would be to forget I had a cook-stove, like Mrs. Templeton.
But we can't all be lucky."

Mr. Rosen could not tell how much was malice and how much was
stupidity.  What he chiefly detected was self-satisfaction; the
craftiness of the coarse-fibred country girl putting catch
questions to the teacher.  Yes, he decided, the woman was merely
showing off,--she regarded it as an accomplishment to make people
uncomfortable.

Mrs. Templeton didn't at once take it in.  Her training was all to
the end that you must give a guest everything you have, even if he
happens to be your worst enemy, and that to cause anyone
embarrassment is a frightful and humiliating blunder.  She felt
hurt without knowing just why, but all evening it kept growing
clearer to her that this was another of those thrusts from the
outside which she couldn't understand.  The neighbours were sure to
take sides against her, apparently, if they came often to see her
mother.

Mr. Rosen tried to distract Mrs. Templeton, but he could feel the
poison working.  On the way home the children knew something had
displeased or hurt their mother.  When they went into the house,
she told them to go up-stairs at once, as she had a headache.  She
was severe and distant.  When Mrs. Harris suggested making her some
peppermint tea, Victoria threw up her chin.

"I don't want anybody waiting on me.  I just want to be let alone."
And she withdrew without saying good-night, or "Are you all right,
Ma?" as she usually did.

Left alone, Mrs. Harris sighed and began to turn down her bed.  She
knew, as well as if she had been at the social, what kind of thing
had happened.  Some of those prying ladies of the Woman's Relief
Corps, or the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, had been
intimating to Victoria that her mother was "put upon."  Nothing
ever made Victoria cross but criticism.  She was jealous of small
attentions paid to Mrs. Harris, because she felt they were paid
"behind her back" or "over her head," in a way that implied
reproach to her.  Victoria had been a belle in their own town in
Tennessee, but here she was not very popular, no matter how many
pretty dresses she wore, and she couldn't bear it.  She felt as if
her mother and Mr. Templeton must be somehow to blame; at least
they ought to protect her from whatever was disagreeable--they
always had!


V


Mrs. Harris wakened at about four o'clock, as usual, before the
house was stirring, and lay thinking about their position in this
new town.  She didn't know why the neighbours acted so; she was as
much in the dark as Victoria.  At home, back in Tennessee, her
place in the family was not exceptional, but perfectly regular.
Mrs. Harris had replied to Mrs. Rosen, when that lady asked why in
the world she didn't break Vickie in to help her in the kitchen:
"We are only young once, and trouble comes soon enough."  Young
girls, in the South, were supposed to be carefree and foolish; the
fault Grandmother found in Vickie was that she wasn't foolish
enough.  When the foolish girl married and began to have children,
everything else must give way to that.  She must be humoured and
given the best of everything, because having children was hard on a
woman, and it was the most important thing in the world.  In
Tennessee every young married woman in good circumstances had an
older woman in the house, a mother or mother-in-law or an old aunt,
who managed the household economies and directed the help.

That was the great difference; in Tennessee there had been plenty
of helpers.  There was old Miss Sadie Crummer, who came to the
house to spin and sew and mend; old Mrs. Smith, who always arrived
to help at butchering- and preserving-time; Lizzie, the coloured
girl, who did the washing and who ran in every day to help Mandy.
There were plenty more, who came whenever one of Lizzie's barefoot
boys ran to fetch them.  The hills were full of solitary old women,
or women but slightly attached to some household, who were glad to
come to Miz' Harris's for good food and a warm bed, and the little
present that either Mrs. Harris or Victoria slipped into their
carpet-sack when they went away.

To be sure, Mrs. Harris, and the other women of her age who managed
their daughter's house, kept in the background; but it was their
own background, and they ruled it jealously.  They left the front
porch and the parlour to the young married couple and their young
friends; the old women spent most of their lives in the kitchen and
pantries and back dining-room.  But there they ordered life to
their own taste, entertained their friends, dispensed charity, and
heard the troubles of the poor.  Moreover, back there it was
Grandmother's own house they lived in.  Mr. Templeton came of a
superior family and had what Grandmother called "blood," but no
property.  He never so much as mended one of the steps to the front
porch without consulting Mrs. Harris.  Even "back home," in the
aristocracy, there were old women who went on living like young
ones,--gave parties and drove out in their carriage and "went
North" in the summer.  But among the middle-class people and the
country-folk, when a woman was a widow and had married daughters,
she considered herself an old woman and wore full-gathered black
dresses and a black bonnet and became a housekeeper.  She accepted
this estate unprotestingly, almost gratefully.

The