A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      A White Bird Flying (1931)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954
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Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          September 2005
Date most recently updated: September 2005

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Title:      A White Bird Flying (1931)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954






Chapter 1


It was the first Tuesday in August.  The Nebraska heat rolled in
upon one like the engulfing waves of a dry sea,--a thick material
substance against which one seemed to push when moving about.  Two
women, standing by the back porch of a house in the north end of
Cedartown, commented wearily.

"Hot."

"Awful."

The one, gingerly holding between her thumb and forefinger an egg
which she had borrowed from the other, made feeble attempts to pull
herself away.

"Too hot to bake. . . ."

"I'll say."

After an interim of dull silence, she effected the threatened
withdrawal, and started down the path toward her home.  But she had
not gone a dozen feet until she stopped, turned back, and called to
the other in the low mysterious tones of the chronic tale-bearer:
"For the land sakes!  Look there.  There goes Laura Deal.  I do
believe she's goin' over to her grandmother's house the same as she
always did."

And the other, in equally semi-excited voice (it takes little to
bring on an animated conversation in the north ends of the
Cedartowns of the country):  "Yes, sir!  She is.  Did you ever!
And her grandmother just buried day before yesterday."

For a time the two stood watching the young girl pass by and down
the elm-shaded road, but when she approached the gate of the house
to the north and turned toward it, they were looking discreetly at
a petunia bed.  Their conversation, however, was not of those
funnel-shaped blossoms.

"She's turnin' in the little gate and goin' up the path between the
cedars.  Do you suppose she's goin' IN the house?"

"On my word, I believe she is.  And they ain't a soul there . . .
not a soul.  Christine Reinmueller even took the cat home with her
when she come over to feed the chickens."

"That twelve-year-old girl . . ."

". . . is the oddest."

"You'd think she'd kind of . . ."

". . . at her age."

"Just day before yesterday . . ."

". . . BURIED."

Neither one made a complete sentence nor waited for the other to
speak.  Their conversation was rather a duet, the parts similar and
in perfect rhythm.

"She's got the key . . ."

". . . all by herself."

"Well, on my soul!"

". . . kind of spooky."

Laura Deal, having unlocked the side door of the old house behind
the cedars and disappeared from view, the two loitered expectantly
for a time; but when she did not reappear, they reluctantly
returned to their labors, with special attention to the sweeping of
east porches.

Laura softly opened the side door of her dead grandmother's house,
stepped in, closed the door gently, and stood with her back to it.

The hot afternoon sunshine lay in long streaks across the floor of
the sitting-room with the cross shadows of the window-casings in
them.  There was a faint odor of flowers in the air--roses and tube-
roses and the cinnamon-like odor of carnations.  It was deathly
still.  A fly bumbling against the pane with little bumping noises
was the only sound in the house.  The clock was not even ticking.
Everything was just as Grandma Deal had left it.  The old chintz-
covered couch in one corner had Grandma's shawl folded neatly over
the back.  The rocking-chairs were in their places.  A little
square stand with a red spread on it held the church papers and
seed catalogues and an old song book, and on the mantel shelf were
the two flowered vases and the turkey-feather fan.  Not a thing
looked different.  Everything seemed just as it had the week before
when Grandma was going in and out, putting away the eggs and
washing her dishes and sorting poppy seed into paper folders.  On
Friday morning she had done all her work and called them up on the
telephone.  In the afternoon she had visited with the grocery boy
and called to Mrs. Johnson to come over and get some turnips any
time she wanted them.  Mrs. Curtis had seen her reading the
newspaper on the screened porch--and then when old Christine
Reinmueller had come over about supper time, she was gone.  GONE.
GONE WHERE?

Heaven, of course, for Grandma was the best person that ever lived.
But where was Heaven?  And how could you go?  Miss Bliss, her
Sunday School teacher, said it was beyond all the worlds.  She
couldn't comprehend that distance.  Miss Sherwin, a friend of her
mother's, said it was here and now within one.  That was still
harder to believe.  Grandma wasn't HERE, so why did they try to
tell you that?

But in one way Grandma didn't seem to have gone away at all.  That
was the queerest thing.  She could summon Grandma into her mind
just as clearly as though she were standing over there by the
table,--small, shrunken, shoulders rounded, a little white knot of
hair at the nape of her neck, wrinkled face, bright brown eyes,
slender hands, veined and trembling, with queer brown spots on
them, and long tapering fingers twisted a little with rheumatism.
Just last week Grandma had stood right by that table and laughed
about a funny thing Christine Reinmueller had said--Grandma could
laugh so heartily.  It almost seemed that if she would call her
now, Grandma would just walk in from the kitchen and--

"Grandma," she called softly, scarcely above a whisper.  Her heart
beat rapidly at the sound of her own voice in the stillness.

There was only a great silence, deep and unfathomable--the same
vast quiet that has confronted all humanity--that always will
confront it, until one by one each hears a voice in the silence.

For a few moments longer Laura stood rigidly with her back to the
door.  Then she moved quietly over to the bedroom and looked in.
This was the room where old Christine Reinmueller had found her--
over there lying across the foot of the bed.  She had been all
alone.  Every one of Grandma's children had felt so troubled that
she died alone.  They all talked about it a great deal--her own
father, and Uncle Mack, Aunt Margaret and Aunt Isabelle and Aunt
Grace.  It worried them all the time as though the being alone was
the sad thing.  That wasn't the sad part.  Why did they think so?
To die with no one else looking on at you--that was the best way.
Just doing it yourself.  You had to do it by yourself anyway.
Nobody could help you do it.  You'd RATHER do it by yourself maybe.

She went into the bedroom, looked about her a moment, then
carefully opened the wardrobe doors.  Grandpa Deal had made the
heavy old piece of furniture for Grandma years and years before.
It was walnut, and the two had planted the trees from which the
lumber was sawed.  Grandma's things were hanging limply on the
hooks,--the black silk and the second best silk and the house
dresses.  It gave her a queer feeling to see them.  The new
lavender silk wasn't there.  Grandma had it on the other day when--
when she was taken to the church and cemetery.  Aunt Emma Deal had
brought it down from Omaha two weeks before for Grandma to wear to
Cousin Katherine's wedding,--the dress and a lace cape collar from
Vienna.  Did you wear the things that people put on you right up to
Heaven?  If you did, Grandma wouldn't feel very comfortable in the
presence of God,--Grandma would have felt more like herself in the
second best with a plain white fichu.  She could scarcely remember
how Grandma looked in the strange lavender and lace, but she could
see her just as plain as day in the second best and the white fichu
with her cameo pinning it.

She was half enjoying herself in an emotional way.  There was sort
of a gruesome ecstasy in making herself sad with memories.  She
would like to write about it.  "The girl moved about from room to
room, touching the things lovingly" went through her mind.  She was
in one of those familiar moods when she looked upon life in a
detached way as though she herself were not a part of it.  She
could never talk to any one about it, but in some vague way she
felt withdrawn from the world.  She lived with people, but she was
not one of them.

There was the old sewing-machine and the little red pincushion on
it, bristling with black and white pins like a variegated
porcupine.  Queer, how things lasted longer than people.  To-morrow
the house was to be dismantled.  Tomorrow Aunt Margaret and Aunt
Isabelle and Aunt Grace were all coming to divide the things.  It
seemed a horrible plan,--to talk of separating the old things.
They ought to be left together.  She wondered if they would miss
each other after nearly sixty years of standing side by side.  How
could the sewing-machine get along without the little red
pincushion?  Or the blue flowered vases without the turkey fan?

Aunt Isabelle had said she wanted this tallow lamp.  It was a queer
old thing, with the wick hanging out like a tongue.  Grandma had
told her it once hung in HER Grandmother's house, an Irish
peasant's hut among the whins and silver hazels of Bally-poreen.
She loved the musical sound of those words, and said them over:
"the whins and silver hazels of Bally-poreen."

From under the bed she drew out a little calf-skin-covered box with
the initials M.O.C. on it in brass nail heads.  This was the one
thing she wanted,--this and Grandma's scrap-book.  To-morrow when
they divided the things, she was going to say right out at the
start that Grandma had promised those to her.  She sat down on the
floor and pulled the little trunk into her lap and thought of all
that Grandma had told her about it; how Grandma's mother, Maggie
O'Conner, an Irish peasant girl, had taken it with her to the big
estate in Scotland when she married Basil Mackenzie.  Basil's
mother, a grand lady, Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, had given her
little Irish daughter-in-law a white silk shawl and a jeweled fan
and a breastpin and a string of pearls, and she had brought them
all to America in this very box.  When she had given the things
away to her daughters, the pearls had come to Grandma.  And now
only two weeks ago, when Cousin Katherine Deal was married, Grandma
had given Kathie the pearls.  She felt no jealousy about Katherine
owning the pearls.  She did not care for jewelry and wanted only
the funny little hairy trunk.

She shoved the box back under the bed and went out to the kitchen.
It was clean and neat and very quiet out there.  The old Seth
Thomas clock stood silently there with its little brown church
painted on the glass.  She had heard them talking about it,--how
strange it was that it had happened.  Several old ladies said it
often happened.  There it was, showing fourteen minutes of six.
And Christine Reinmueller had found her about half-past six.  The
doctor said she had been dead less than an hour.  So it must be
true--CLOCKS STOPPED WHEN PEOPLE DIED.  How did they know to stop?
Grandma had brought the clock into Nebraska in the covered wagon--
sixty years before--and to-morrow the house would be dismantled,
and the clock and all the other things that had lived together so
long would be divided.  The house would be empty, for Herman
Rinemiller's hired man was going to move here.

She ought to be going now for she had been here for quite a while.
The sun was lower and it was almost supper time.  She walked over
to the door and turned back to the rooms.  She could imagine how
this would be in writing:  "The girl hesitated at the door, at a
loss to know how to proceed."  She said aloud, "Good-by, little
house."  She threw out her hands in dramatic gesture.  "Good-by to
all the days that have gone by, and all the Christmases here and
all the birthdays . . ."  She loved the sad emotion which she was
feeling.  She would write a poem about it as soon as she got home.
It would begin:

"The little house held its memories . . ."

She would enjoy doing it.  And when it was finished she would read
it to--

Why, no,--how terrible--there was no Grandma to read it to.  She
had completely forgotten for a minute and was planning to bring it
here and read it to Grandma.  Oh, no, no!  For the first time the
tears broke,--wild, uncontrollable little-girl tears.  She could
not stand it,--not to have Grandma here to talk things over with
and read things to.  Nobody else cared about her writing,--no one
in the world understood it but Grandma and herself.  She always
read everything to Grandma.  And Grandma would never listen again.
There was no one, then.  She was shaken with grief and threw
herself down on the old chintz-covered couch.  Great engulfing sobs
tore at her sturdy little body and she moaned aloud.  This was her
real self,--the real Laura Deal,--not that other queer person who
dominated her, who felt emotions play about her as a swimmer feels
the waves.  This was the first time Grandma's death seemed really
to have happened.  She had witnessed the sorrow of all the
relatives but she herself hadn't seemed to comprehend it before.
And now she did.  Grandma was gone--FOREVER.  There was no one to
take her place.  No one else to turn to.  No one else understood.

She sobbed and cried again in the loneliness she had just realized
was hers.  She wished she could talk to some one about it.  But no
one would understand.  Only Grandma herself would understand.  She
wished she could talk to Grandma herself about it.  How queer!  To
want to talk to Grandma herself about Grandma's own death.  But it
wasn't just the fact that Grandma had died that made her feel so
terrible.  She could even imagine having a good time without
Grandma.  It was something else,--something strange that only they
two knew about,--some great desire in life that just they two had,--
some vision,--some longing that none of the other Deals had,--TO
WRITE LOVELY THINGS.  Only Grandma understood it and now Grandma
was gone.  If Grandma could only come back to talk to her about it,--
Grandma always knew such comforting things to say.  Suddenly she
sat up.  She wiped her swollen eyes, and when vision was clear
again, went over to the square stand, pulled out the scrapbook,
took it back to the couch and began turning the pages.

Grandma had always cut out everything she especially liked and
pasted it in this big catalogue.  She turned the familiar pages.
The first of the old articles were brown with age, cut from
newspapers of the past.  A conglomerate collection of things they
made,--poems and obituaries, news items of the Deal clan and bits
of sermons.  Grandma had pasted them all in neatly with home-made
flour paste.  There was the death of Grandma's mother,--Mrs. Maggie
O'Conner Mackenzie, who "died far from her native land,"--patriotic
verses, letters from Laura's father when he was in Alaska and
printed at Grandma's prideful request in the local newspaper, an
account of the death of Grandma's husband with a crude water-
colored border of everlastings around it in neat cramped design,
and more verses from newspapers and magazines.  But these were not
what she wanted.  She was wondering what things Grandma had
recently pasted in the old book, so she hurried over the pages and
came immediately to the last work that had been done.  There was no
mistaking it, for the verse stood out clear and clean on a new
page, the wrinkled clipping scarcely dry from its pasting.

It said:


     Pain has been and grief enough and bitterness and crying,
     Sharp ways and stony ways I think it was she trod,
     But all there is to see now is a white bird flying.
     Whose blood-stained wings go circling high,--circling up
       to God.*


* Margaret Widdemer.


She read it through twice, her heart beating fast in response to
the attractiveness of it.  She and Grandma always liked the same
things.  Grandma had found it in a magazine, loved it, and
evidently saved it for her to read.

As always, the rhythm and exquisite loveliness of the thought
caught and held her emotions.  She thrilled to the lilting symmetry
of it and the sadness of its beauty.  Nimble in committing verse,
already she could say it without looking.  The line that captured
and held her fancy the most was the third one:


     But all there is to see is a white bird flying.


A WHITE BIRD FLYING!  That was like Grandma's death.  Nothing was
left to her now of Grandma,--nothing remained of Grandma's love and
sympathy, of the dreams and desires Grandma held for her,--nothing
but the memory.  No one else had understood her so thoroughly, had
liked the same things so well, had talked to her as Grandma had,--
not her own mother, nor her father, nor a single one of the Deal
relatives.

The subjects she and Grandma had talked about together,--the dreams
they had for her future, the desires that life would give her some
of the things Grandma had missed,--could never be talked over
again.  For Grandma was gone.  And all there was to see now was a
white bird flying.

It was as though Grandma had left her a message,--as though
Grandma, in going away, had not taken the lovely strange desire
with her.  She felt a vague sensation of relief and comfort.  Grief
no longer seemed tearing at her very soul and body.  She would
never tell any one about it,--no one would understand,--but in some
unexplainable way everything was just as it had been before Grandma
died,--all the dreams and desires were still there, all the vague
yearnings for something fine and big in life.  A WHITE BIRD FLYING.
That was what Grandma had left her.  Well, she would always see it--
always keep her eyes on the sheen of its silver wings.

She put the book back under the little stand, slipped quietly out
of the side door, locked it and put the key in her pocket.  She
walked quickly down the path between the cedars, turned west on the
grassy path toward the setting sun, averting her head when she
passed Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Curtis so they would not see her red
eyes, and came then to the paved street that led south and toward
home.

When she went into the house, her father and mother, her brothers,
Wentworth and Millard, and her visiting Aunt Grace were all getting
up from the supper table.

"Laura Deal, WHERE have you been?"  It was Eloise Deal, her mother,
exasperated and worried.  "I phoned Kathie's and two or three other
places, and even ran over to old Oscar Lutz's.  You ought to be
more thoughtful than to worry us after all we've been through with
Grandma's death.  She ought not to do a thoughtless thing like that
to worry me, had she, John?"  Eloise always picked a subject to
pieces, squeezed the parts dry and then put them together again.
"I always tried to teach you children to be considerate of me and
your father and of each other.  And it isn't considerate just to
disappear at supper time.  The worry itself of where you are is bad
enough, to say nothing of your not helping.  First, I was afraid
you were at Katherine's bothering just when she's beginning to
settle her new house, and when I found you weren't there, I hardly
knew where to think you were, now that Grandma's gone."  Having
practically exhausted the various ramifications of the subject,
Eloise fell back on the initial question:  "WHERE were you?"

John Deal stood by the chair he had just vacated, silently
regarding his young daughter.  Wentworth frowned with the critical
displeasure of twenty-one for errant twelve.  Millard grinned with
the malicious satisfied glee of eight that temporarily he was not
as other men.  Aunt Grace looked on accusingly with her most
austere expression.

Laura averted her head.  The painful flush of embarrassment flooded
her face, so that her eyes, already swollen, felt hot and bursting.

How could she tell them?  How could they understand?  How could she
explain that she had been on a long emotional journey and back
again?  How could this energetic, efficient mother without
imagination, this grim, silent father with the burdens of the whole
community on his shoulders, and this stern uncompromising teacher-
aunt, comprehend or sympathize?  How could they know that a little
girl, with a head full of fancies and a heart full of longing, had
climbed a ladder reaching from the depths of a grave to the top of
high heaven?

She turned to them all:

"I went for a long walk . . . out by Grandma's old house."

How could they see A WHITE BIRD FLYING?



Chapter 2


Grandmother Deal's old home behind the cedars was dismantled, with
every one hot and hurried and uncertain what to do with things.
Margaret Deal Baker, wife of Dr. Frederick Baker of Lincoln, and
Isabelle Deal Rhodes, the singer from Chicago, were there.  Grace
Deal, the University teacher, was there.  Eloise, Laura and Millard
went out to the house in the morning.  Mackenzie Deal, the Omaha
banker, and Emma, his wife, drove down in the late afternoon.  John
Deal, Laura's father, came when he had closed his law office.
Katherine Deal Buchanan, Mack's and Emma's daughter, a bride of two
weeks, drove over in her sport roadster, although there was
practically nothing she wanted, the old things giving no promise of
fitting in the smart new English cottage with any degree of
artistry.

In the beginning, the daughters and daughters-in-law were a bit red-
eyed and tearful.  At the first sight of her mother's clothes in
the old walnut wardrobe, Margaret Baker thought she could not go on
with her sorrowful task.  Isabelle Rhodes had a bad moment or two
as she took down the recipe books and saw her mother's cramped
handwriting.  The rather austere Grace broke down when she took the
glasses off the old Bible in the bedroom and put them in the case.
It was almost as hard for Emma and Eloise, the daughters-in-law.
Mother Deal had been good to them.  Mack and John tramped around
out doors, taking down tools that had been their father's and,
uncertain what to do, with masculine helplessness, put them all
back again.  Katherine sat on the kitchen table with the declivity
in one corner in which old Doc Matthews had rolled pills in Civil
War times, swung her chic-looking feet and, to keep the tears back,
made snappy remarks about the dismantling.  Millard ran in and out,
with Eloise calling:  "Millard Deal, do stay IN or OUT."

It was all very confusing, and very strange, with the familiar
things in a queer rearrangement, clustered together in piles on the
floor.  Laura went in and out of the rooms with something tearing a
little at her heart every time an article was taken from its old
place.  Once she took the red pincushion from a pile and placed it
back on the sewing-machine, and once she surreptitiously slipped
the turkey-feather fan into a blue flowered vase.  She could think
of nothing but that Grandma was looking on and saying:  "You'd
better let Annie Johnson have the cape.  She could make it over for
Dottie."  Or, "Tell Mrs. Curtis she can have the geraniums."  Yes,
that was just what Grandma would have said.  It seemed queer to
think she could almost hear her.  How could it be?  Because all the
Deals were there together, it seemed that Grandma was there, too.
How could some one who was dead live on and move among them just as
she had always done?

Everything seemed as natural as though nothing had happened.  After
the first few attempts to stop the tears and keep from breaking
down, the whole clan grew brisk and talkative.  In the stress of
sorting and making disposition of things the conversation became
practical and cheerful.  After awhile they even began the old
joking way of the Deals.  Katherine laughed gayly and made
extravagant statements about the old-fashioned clothes which her
mother was unearthing in bundles from a closet shelf.  Aunt
Margaret and Aunt Isabelle even staged a well-bred but intensive
argument over which one could have the old tallow lamp with the
wick hanging over the side like a dog's tongue hanging out of his
mouth.  Life always closes over the vacancy and goes on.

Christine Reinmueller, Grandma's neighbor and friend for sixty
years, came over, her blue calico dress gathered on full at the
place where her waistline should have been, her colorless hair
braided in moist flat strands and wound from ear to ear, like a
miniature braided rug that had been pinned on the back of her head.

"Ach . . . solch ein aufbrechen . . . such a splitting . . .
breaking up . . ."  She wrung her hard old hands.

They gave her countless things,--clothes and dishes and garden
seeds tied up in rags, and fruit jars.  And although she still
owned three eighties of land after giving away eight other quarter
sections to her children, she was glad to get the things; said they
would help her out through the hard winter.  Old Christine always
thought she was poverty-stricken, on the verge of entering the
county home.

While every one was sorting, warm and hurried, old Oscar Lutz came
tap-tapping with his cane around to the door.  The remarks on the
side concerning his arrival were more frank than polite:  "Good-
night! . . . old Uncle Oscar."

"Of all days!"

"He WOULD."

Old Oscar Lutz came tap-tapping smilingly into the confusion of the
dismantling.  He had string beans in an old pail with a rope for
the handle.  He had brought them as a gift for any one who wanted
them, but no one seemed overjoyed at the donation.

Old Oscar Lutz was Cedartown's oldest inhabitant.  In every town
and village west of Iowa there is still some old man who has seen
the beginning and the growth of the community, who has watched
little saplings grow to ancient trees, and the boys of three
generations slip into manhood.  Even east of the Missouri River
they are gone.  But west of the Missouri you will still find them,
a few old men who have seen everything from the beginning, who once
climbed down from covered wagons into the waving prairie grass, to
turn the first furrows in the virgin soil.  Some of them are still
active.  Some mill around like restless old buffaloes.  And some
sit on their porches watching the stream of life go by.

There are old men of the sea and old men of the mountains,--but
here in the midwest live the old men of the prairie.  The old salt
tells of the mightiness and fascination of the sea, the hillman of
the majesty and the lure of the mountains, but the old man of the
prairie lives over his days on the plains.  One recalls strong
ships scuttled on far shores, one the rockribbed fastness of the
hills, but the other remembers the wave of the grass on the
prairie.  To one there is no memory so lovely as the moonlight on
the sea, to one the dawn breaking over the mountains, but to the
old man of the prairie it is the sudden hush of the winds at
twilight.

Old Oscar Lutz was Cedartown's last old man of the prairie.  Tall,
gaunt, as gnarled as the cottonwoods he had planted, he looked akin
to the elements with which he had once wrestled.  Furrows in the
virgin soil, and furrows in the red-brown face!  Eyes the color of
the gray-blue ice on Stove Creek.  Hair and beard like tangled
wheat stalks under the snow.  Hands hard and calloused as old
buffalo hide.  He wore two buttons in the lapel of his shiny old
coat,--a G.A.R. token, and a little button with the number "68,"
the year he had settled in the state.  He was as proud of one as
the other; a war record on one, and the record of an equally harsh
war on the other,--the tussle with nature to make a home on the
prairie.

Old Oscar Lutz spent his winters in California, but about the time
that countless tiny maltese kittens scrambled over the branches of
the willows down by Stove Creek, old Oscar would arrive from the
Far West.  These were the things in Cedartown's calendar of events
which proved that spring had come: a robin or two suddenly swooping
down onto some one's leaf-covered lawn, an intermingled odor of
bonfires and subsoil from over the meadows, pussy-willows at the
creek bend, and old Oscar Lutz's cane tap-tapping on the sidewalk.

There was scarcely any one but old Christine Reinmueller left now
in the community who had been his friend of the early days.  But he
came back to his old haunts every spring, spent a day each with the
Mackenzie Deals of Omaha, the John Deals of Cedartown, the Bakers
of Lincoln, and a day with a son or two of some old companion of
his plainsman's days, regaling them with accounts of their
ancestors' uprisings and downswings and his own first early
experiences; tap-tapping through the town with his cane ("yes, sir,
whittled from a young elm branch down by the creek") to his own old
closed and musty dwelling.  Sturdy as an old hickory limb, he would
go through the house, open up doors and windows, beat some of the
ancient rugs and hang his dead Marthy's quilts out on the line.
There they would swing all day in the fresh spring wind and the
sunshine,--the Rose of Sharon and the Dutch Puzzle, the Log Cabin
and the Rising Sun.  His rather superficial house-cleaning done, he
was ready for the garden.  The bursting of the first wild plum
blossoms, and the bumbling of the first honey-bee always found him
in his garden behind the fussy old house.

There were those he bored with his constant talk of the early days.
Because time hung heavily on his hands, his greatest delight was to
have a listener.  The ratio of his happiness in declaiming his
experiences rose in proportion to his audience.  One person was a
pleasure, two a greater satisfaction, three or more standing about
listening to his tales, taking in attentively all he had to say,
lifted him to a heaven of rare delight.

And now he was here to-day, tap-tapping up the cement walk to the
side door.  And the Deals in unison groaned.

"Well, well," he tapped in smilingly, unaware of his lack of
welcome, "and so you're getting the old household things divided
up?"

"Hello, Uncle Oscar."  He was Mrs. Mackenzie Deal's uncle (she had
been Henry Lutz's daughter), but he was "Uncle" to the others in
name only.  Emma pushed forward a chair.  He lowered his gaunt
frame into it heavily.

"Well--well--the time goes by and one by one we all pass on. . . ."

"And out," Katherine whispered to Laura.  Kathie's recent honeymoon
had in no way mellowed her flippancy.

"Well--well--it seems like only yesterday.  I mind as how--"

"Old-Mind-As-How is all wound up ready to go," Katherine muttered.

". . . we all come across the prairie from Plattsmouth,--Marthy and
me and the three little tads . . . my brother Henry and Sarah, his
bride, and Will and Abbie Deal, your folks, . . . and you and Gus,
Christine.  I mind as how, Christine, you and Gus had a boat for a
wagon-box, the stern next to the oxen's hind quarters."

"Nein . . . no."  Christine spoke up.  "De bow . . . he vas next."

"No, I think it was the stern, Christine."

Christine was adamant.  "Nein . . . de bow he vas next."

"My money is on Christine," Katherine whispered.  "She'll never
give up.  She'll die saying 'De bow he vas next' if old Mind-As-How
doesn't give in."

Old Oscar went on unperturbed.  "We met at the Weeping Water and
traveled all day against the sun.  We could see a faint fringe of
trees outlinin' the horizon and we knew it was Stove Creek.  We
camped by the creek bed . . . made a campfire . . . the stars come
out . . . and the Injuns come . . ."

Every one went on about his work.  Margaret sorted clothes, Grace
packed dishes, Isabelle, books.  They all went in and out unheeding
the old man's tale.

It made Laura feel sorry for him.  People were always that way with
old Oscar.  Something about the disinterest they seemed to show
brought out her sympathy.  She wondered how it would feel to be old
and to bore people.  Of course, he didn't realize he bored them,--
that was one good thing.

"I mind as how when Henry and I first come we got a house nigh
about where Plattsmouth stands . . ."  He was going on and on with
no one giving him any special heed.  "Stayed all night with some
folks by the name of . . . wait a minute . . . name slips . . .
tell you in a minute . . . A B C D E F G . . . Gunwall . . . always
run down the alphabet if you can't locate a name . . . works every
time . . . stayed with a family by the name of . . . what's I say a
minute ago?" he asked Laura.  "Gunwall . . . that's it.  Slept on
the floor, had a latch . . . a wooden latch you run a leather thong
through to hook the door . . . like this. . . ."  With his cane and
fingers he showed definitely the form of the latch.  "Toward
daylight . . . come clear daylight, mebbe, I should say . . . saw
the leather thong on the latch keep moving . . . somebody workin'
away on the latch . . . pretty soon the leather pulled outwards,
and the door opened 'n' in come four o' the biggest Injuns y' ever
saw . . . feathers 'n' moccasins 'n' tommyhawks 'n' all.  For two
cents I'd crawled out 'n' drowned myself in the Platte.  Come to
think . . . don't know's I could a drowned . . . water was lower
'n' git out.  This man . . . what'd I say? . . . A B C D E F G . . .
Gunwall . . . this man Gunwall met 'em 'n' talked to 'em.  They
grunted 'n' stepped around over the beds on the floor . . . made
known they wanted something to eat . . . ate a handout . . .
laughed a bit.  You always think of Injuns serious I bet, don't
you?  T'ain't so . . . full of jokes . . . if you don't mind the
kind they sometimes perpetrated."

He stopped and fell into an absent-minded mood as though he were
actually seeing the scenes of which he talked so fluently.  The
Deals moved all around him, back and forth, sorting, packing.  Soon
he came to the present with "Goin' to take a flower down to lay on
Gunwall's grave some of these days; think I can locate it . . .
it'll be som'ers on the north side of a bunch of cottonwoods at the
old Prairie Home cemetery."

Out in the kitchen Isabelle Rhodes was saying:  "I could scream to
have to listen to him.  He doesn't live in the present . . . just
inhabits another world."

Eloise said stiffly:  "He's like house-cleaning and taxes and being
fooled the first of April,--you just have to have them all whether
you want to or not."

"If he starts visiting me," Katherine, the bride, made her definite
pronouncement, "I'll simply disappear when he arrives.  Great-uncle
or not, life is too short to be bored by the old pest."

It made Laura feel sorry for the old man.  "I kind of like him,"
she admitted.  "He sort of fascinates me, now that Grandma's gone.
When he's gone, too . . . did you ever stop to think, Katherine,
that when your old Uncle Oscar Lutz and old Christine Reinmueller
are gone, there won't be any one . . . not a soul left that came
here in wagons, and started the community.  Just think, we'll lose
connection forever with the pioneer days."

"You can sever the connection any time, Lolly, as far as I'm
concerned," was Katherine's rejoinder.  "Nothing bores me to a
state of coma quicker than a rehash of this native-sons-and-
daughters, heroic-lives, corn-bread-in-a-sod-house stuff."

It was getting late and the Deal clan stopped work for the day.
Old Christine took her things and waddled down the lane toward
home, her blue calico dress switching the tall grass at the
roadside.  When the Deals all left, the old man was still mulling
over his recollections, and no one had taken the string beans.

There were a half-dozen cars in the lane road.  Every one offered
to take him home.

"No," he said, "I'll walk.  Don't stop walking and you'll never get
rusty in the joints."

When the John Deal car turned out of the lane road, Laura looked
back.  The old man was leaning on his cane and looking across the
fields and meadows to the sun slipping low in the west.  A sudden
mist came to her eyes.  She wished the others liked him better.
Poor old man.  When she got home she would write about him:


     Poor old man, looking toward the sun,
     What do you remember, now that life's done?



Chapter 3


The Deal clan worked three days before they had finished
dismantling their mother's home and getting it ready for occupancy
by Herman Rinemiller's hired man.

"I never saw so many things in my life," each one insisted.  "Loads
and loads of the accumulations of years.  Every magazine, every
paper, every string and button that ever came into that house
Mother had hoarded."

And so the old things, once so precious, each one representing
sacrifice for the purchase, were scattered to the four winds,--to
children, grandchildren, neighbors, friends, church organizations,
Salvation Army, the junk pile down by Stove Creek,--like leaves
from some sturdy old oak blown hither and yon in the dead of the
year.  Margaret took the clock with the little brown church painted
on the glass, Isabelle the tallow lamp, Mack the thumbed-over
Shakespeare,--"Mother used to make me read it when I didn't know
what it was all about," he explained,--and John the blue plush
album, with Eloise deeply annoyed at his absurd choice.  Katherine
deigned to admit into the lovely new home of English architecture,
the newest looking of the pieced quilts,--of Jacob's Ladder design.
Grace, choosing the scrapbook, was surprised beyond measure when
Laura, usually quiet and shy as a little brown quail, pounced upon
it with an almost tearful ferocity:  "Oh, no, Aunt Grace, not the
scrapbook.  It's mine . . . please.  Grandma always read them all
to me . . . she SAID I could have it. . . ."

Eloise was upset beyond measure and was ready to insist upon
Laura's turning it over to her Aunt Grace with apologies, but Aunt
Margaret intervened, and Laura bore home her two possessions in
peace,--the little hairy calf-skin trunk with the nailhead initials
on it, and the thick old scrapbook with all the lovely verses.

Eloise did not understand Laura.  Mother and daughter, they seemed
not even remotely related.  Brisk, practical, efficient and
humorless, Eloise, by some strange joke of nature had given birth
to a child of emotions, of fancies and dreams.  And no barnyard hen
on the river's brink was ever more worried and exasperated over her
swimming duckling than was Eloise over Laura's disinclination to
show any characteristics of her own (the Wentworth) side of the
house.

Toward the last of that month, when all seemed normal again after
Grandma's death,--so soon does Life slip back to its regular
routine--in the privacy of her upstairs blue and white room, Laura
began writing a long story.  It took her several days, and Eloise
went many times to the stairway with:  "Laura, whatever are you
doing?  Do get at some work.  We all have to work,--people in our
circumstances, at least.  If we were better off maybe you could sit
around that way, but we might as well face facts that we never will
be wealthy and able to enjoy life."  There are those who would have
taken exception to Eloise's statement.  But that was Eloise's
philosophy: great wealth brought comfort and happiness.  And having
no great wealth, she resigned herself, perforce, to a state of no
great comfort and no deep happiness.

Laura would dutifully get up, stir things around a bit in her room
and then settle down to the absorbing story.  It was entitled "A
Love That Never Came to Pass" or "The Professor's Life Tragedy."
It involved the unrequited love of a college professor for a fellow
member of the faculty.  To be sure, no obstacle seemed to stand in
the way of a happy culmination of the affair, excepting the advice
against marriage freely given by a villainous unmarried roommate of
the wooed-but-not-won lady, the former resembling Aunt Grace so
thoroughly in Laura's mind that she felt a little guilty over the
accurate description.

On the third day of the composition period, the embryonic author
grew so upset over the tragic affair that she cried too copiously
to see the pages clearly.  It was in this state that her mother
found her.  Exasperated mother and embarrassed daughter took part
in a dialogue which got them nowhere; indeed, which only seemed to
push them farther apart in their understanding of each other.

"That child worries me so," Eloise told John that evening.

"Do you suppose anything could be"--Eloise was pale in her
earnestness--"WRONG with her?"

"Of course not.  She's a smart kid."

"But where did she get it . . . that foolish emotion?  Not from MY
side of the house, that's certain."

"Oh, we'll assume responsibility . . . the Deals."  John grinned.

"The Wentworths are all so practical.  Look at Uncle Harry
Wentworth--worth a half MILLION, if a dollar."

"I thought that money originally came from his wife."  John could
not resist.  At which Eloise closed her mouth with the unspoken
eloquence she sometimes assumed, and John went silently back to his
office.

When Laura had carried the sad life story of the professor to a
close which ended in a grave under a weeping-willow tree with the
erstwhile juggler of his happiness planting bleeding-heart bushes
on the grave, she washed the visible liquid form of her emotion
from her eyes, and went down to cousin Katherine's.

Katherine's and Jimmie Buchanan's new home was lovely and modern
and smart, just as Katherine herself was lovely and modern and
smart.  Its lawn was only beginning to emerge, pretty and green,
from the recent dirt of the excavation.  But the house itself was a
finished affair from the beveled glass of the front door to the
green and white incinerator.

Laura opened the immaculate white front door and stepped into the
hall with a little, "Hoo-hoo!"  She reveled in the sight of the
lovely rooms with the gay wedding gifts all about, the inner doors
with their sparkling glass and filmy lace, the mahogany and white
stairway winding to the upper rooms, the long lovely sitting-room
with the one end taken up by the fireplace and the open bookcases.
No one was in sight, but immediately she heard a door open, and
Katherine's head appeared around the corner of the upstairs hall to
be followed by the rest of Katherine in an orchid-colored
underslip.

"Oh, it's you, Lolly."  That was Katherine's pet name for her
cousin.  Millard, she had long ago dubbed "The Tribulation,"
shortening it later to Trib, a nickname which half the town called
him now.

"Come on in and make yourself homely, Lolly," she called down.

Laura giggled appreciatively.  Kathie was always so funny.  She
wished Kathie liked her better.  No, that was not quite the right
thing to think.  Katherine liked her, but she took no pains to
conceal the fact that she thought her odd.  "You're the queerest
little duck," she would say whenever Laura ventured one of her
mature opinions on any subject.

"I'm going out, Lolly."  Kathie looked down at her as she dropped a
lovely orchid afternoon gown over her head.  "Bridge at Mrs. A. R.
Brown's,--that's short for Ashes of Rose, I suppose."  Laura
giggled.  "My word, Laura, this little burg has as much going on as
Omaha,--that is, providing you count every church supper and every
study club and every female tea.  Jimmie wants me to toddle to
everything . . . good business, he says . . . the old diplomat in
international relations . . . so I run around to them all . . .
blue blood, red blood, Catholic, Protestant, Republican, Democrat,
wet, dry, our bank's customers, t'other bank's customers. . . ."

She was downstairs now, lovely and slim and sparkling.  Laura
thought she had never seen any one so gay and pretty.  And she
smelled like the violets at the foot of the old trees by the creek
bed.  She threw her arms around Laura now and gave her a swift
caress.  Laura was surprised and embarrassed beyond measure.  So
seldom did Katherine notice her except to tease.  "How old are you,
Lolly?  Twelve?"

"Thirteen last week."

"Imagine!  Bless your little kid heart.  Well, all I can ask for
you, Laura," she was suddenly sweet and serious, "is that seven or
eight years from now, you'll be as gloriously happy as I am."

"If you mean getting married," Laura said, with the crimson
creeping under the olive of her skin, "I'm never going to.  I'm
going to do something else."  She loved watching Jimmie and
Katherine--they were a handsome couple.  She liked the thrill it
gave her to look at them together, but she could not imagine
herself under the same circumstances.  She shrank from the thought
of placing herself in the picture--wanted only to look at others.

Katherine laughed, "You're a queer little duck."  She threw her arm
around Laura again.  "Well, I must go, honey.  There isn't anybody
here.  My butler, maid and chef have all gone.  They're all one
person, you know,--I call her my 'unholy trinity.'"

"Do you care if I stay and read?"

"Of course not.  But . . ."  Katherine paused in slipping on a
white coat.  "What makes you read so much, Lolly?  Why don't you
get out and DO more?"

There it was again,--the thing her mother always said.  "Oh, I
don't know.  I guess I like people in books better than the ones
outside," she admitted.

There was the sudden sound of tap-tapping on the cement walk
running around to the rear of the house, and Katherine looked out
to say:  "Oh, darn!  There's old man Whiskery-Whee-Come-Wheeze.
Stay here, Lolly, and don't squeak, or we'll have to march with
Sherman to the sea all afternoon."

Katherine slipped out to the back door, accepted with thanks the
beets all washed and clean, took them gingerly out of the old
bucket with a rope for the handle, kept surreptitiously closing the
door a little more while the old man was talking and finally
escaped back to Laura.

"It wasn't Sherman.  It was eatables.  'Knew some families further
out on the prairie had a worse time than us.'"  Katherine imitated
the old man's high husky voice to perfection.  "'Didn't have
nothin' to eat . . . no money . . . last resource was to go out on
the prairie 'n' gather up the bleached bones o' the buffalo, haul
'em to town and get a dollar a load.  Nature is kind under her
harsh exterior. . . .  Always leaves somethin' around . . . even if
only bones bleachin' on the prairie.'"

Laura laughed.  Katherine was so droll.  But something hurt her,
too.  It troubled her to think of the old man trying to tell that
to Kathie in her orchid-colored chiffon dress and her lovely white
coat.  It WAS true about the buffalo bones.  Grandma had said so,
too.

Then Katherine, gay and lovely, left for the bridge party.  When
Laura saw the car go out of the drive, she locked the front door
and went into the long living-room.  But she did not read.

She tiptoed down the length of the room as though even then some
one might be listening.  In front of the fireplace she stopped and
looked up at the huge portrait which filled the entire space above
the mantel.

It was the painting of a lovely lady in velvet draperies, her
reddish-brown hair curling over her shoulder and a string of pearls
at her neck.  In her slender tapering hand she held a hat with a
long drooping plume.

It was no ordinary painting,--but an heirloom that had come to
Katherine on her wedding day,--the picture of lovely Isabelle
Anders-Mackenzie, Katherine's and Laura's own great-great-
grandmother.  Standing there alone in the silent house and looking
up at the lovely lady, Laura recalled all that her Grandmother had
told her about it,--how the lady had been an aristocratic Scotch
woman; how her only son, Basil, riding to the hounds, had met and
wooed and won a little sixteen-year-old Irish peasant girl on the
Scottish moors, married her and taken her home to the great estate
near Aberdeen; how this lady of the picture had tried to make a
grand dame of the little Maggie O'Conner, but had not succeeded,
for the little bride would put on her peasant dress and shawl and
run away over the moors to her own folks.  Isabelle Anders-
Mackenzie died, and the young Basil and his Irish wife had seen all
the property slip away and revert to the crown.  They had come to
America then with their children, and Grandma herself had been born
soon after they landed.

It was only because Grandma had told about hearing of this huge
painting that used to hang on the landing of the great house in
Aberdeen that Kathie knew about it.  She had teased her father to
find it.  Uncle Mack had set agents to work and though it had cost
a great deal of money--he never would tell how much--they had found
the painting and shipped it to Katherine.  That was just like
Kathie.  Kathie always got everything she wanted.  She wondered if
Kathie cared very much for the painting, now that she had it.

For a long time Laura stood and looked up at the lovely lady.  The
lovely lady looked back at Laura.  But Laura was the first to
speak.

"Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie," she said aloud, and the sound of her
voice in the silent lovely room half startled her.  "I'm an
author."

Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie gazed back from heavy-lidded eyes, her
cupid's-bow lips smiling mysteriously as though she possessed the
concentrated wisdom of all the ages.  One could not conscientiously
say that she seemed pleased at the news and approving of it, but
neither could one justly contend that she was annoyed and
distressed.  She merely smiled that puzzling smile as though,
sphinx-like, she knew the secret of deep mysteries.

"I live in a little house all by myself," Laura told the lady
confidentially, "no one can touch me when I am there.  And no one
can come in."  She was enjoying herself, dramatizing the situation.
She could see herself, a member of the fifth generation beyond the
lady of the portrait, standing in front of the ancestor and
confiding in her.  "I hereby take a vow . . ." she went on.  All at
once it struck her that there should be some special emphasis to
such a serious statement, some rite performed which would verge on
the sacred.  She ought to do it with human blood, but she did not
quite relish the thought of puncturing her own anatomy.  She wished
she had something that would make a good imitation of blood.
Perhaps Kathie had beet juice.  She tiptoed to the icebox.  There
were potatoes and head lettuce, pickles and pie and cold meat, but
not a single red condiment.  In the medicine closet her quest
ended.  With the cork from a bottle of disinfectant she went back
to the scene of her solemn promise.  "This is a symbol," she said,
touching her forehead with the scarlet-colored drug:  "Laura
Deal . . . I hereby plight my troth to a career.  Nothing shall
keep me from it.  If love comes by, I shall spurn it."

She liked the sound of that statement so well that she repeated:
"If love comes by I shall spurn it . . . him . . ."  Of course,
love had to be a HIM.  She fell to wondering what he would look
like, providing he did come by.  In fact, it would be rather
disappointing if he did not come by to be spurned.  It made the
tears come to her eyes to think how terrible he would feel.  But
she would be obdurate.  OBDURATE.--that was her new word.  She
mustn't forget it.

The door bell ringing suddenly and harshly threw the author into
something of a panic.  She hastily drew a handkerchief from her
blouse pocket and wiped from her forehead all pharmaceutical
manifestations of the oath of allegiance to a career.  Her heart
thumping rapidly, she tiptoed to the door and peeped cautiously out
through the lace-covered glass.  It was no one at all but Allen
Rinemiller, dressed in brown corduroys and a blue shirt open at the
throat.  Allen had graduated that spring from High School and the
captaincy of the football team.  He was big and blond.  There were
three distinct waves in his close clipped hair; his eyes were
crinkling and jolly looking and his tanned skin was smooth and
firm.  She opened the door.

"Hello, Allen."

"Hello, Laura.  I went to the back door first where all decent
tramps and peddlers go, but nobody came.  You the hired girl?"

Laura laughed.  She didn't know Allen Rinemiller so very well, but
she had watched him lots of times at football games and heard the
older girls talk about him, and sometimes when she had been at
Grandma's he had plowed or used the disc or picked corn close to
Grandma's yard, for his father's land joined it.

"Cousin Kathie's gone away," she volunteered.  "What did you want?"

"_I_ didn't want anything.  SHE'S the one that wanted it.  Wood."
And Laura noticed for the first time the truck in the driveway.
"Dry elm wood for the fireplace.  I want to know where to put it,
but first I want to try a chunk in the fireplace if I can, to see
if the size is right."

Laura told him to come right in and try the chunk and she would
phone Kathie at Mrs. A. R. Brown's to see where it was to go.

So Allen Rinemiller, stepping gingerly over Kathie's oriental rugs,
brought in a huge chunk, carrying it easily on his stalwart
shoulder.  And when Laura came back with the message that the wood
was to go in the south end of the basement, he had the screen
removed and the chunk in place.

"O.K. . . . if this one goes, they all go," he said and stood up,
looking curiously about him.

"Gee . . . swell joint."  He was evidently appreciating the lovely
rooms with their soft rugs and draperies, their attractive
furniture, books and pictures and bowls of flowers.  "Gosh . . .
I'd like a house like this."  Without apology, he walked back to
the hall and looked out to the diningroom.  There were lavender
asters on the dark polished table out there and a big bowl of white
ones beyond on the bench in the green and white breakfast-nook.  He
could even catch a glimpse of the white enamel of the kitchen with
its dainty green and white curtains over leaded windows.  "Gosh,"
he reiterated ". . . just about perfect."

"I think it's nice, too.  I like to come here."  Laura was glad
Allen Rinemiller liked it so well.  She had been in his house with
her grandmother and knew that it was scrubbed to a shining neatness
but terribly plain, straight wooden chairs, shining oak table and
sideboard, coarse lace curtains ruffled and starched.

When he was going back to the fireplace for the chunk, he stopped
short.  "Who's the dame?"

Laura almost blushed in her fear that the lovely lady in the
picture might suddenly open her cupid's-bow mouth and start to tell
all she knew.

"That's Kathie's and my great-great-grandmother," she told him.
And for the first time she sensed a rather snobbish pride in the
aristocratic ancestor.  No one could say Allen's ancestors, on his
father's side at least, were aristocratic.  Old Christine
Reinmueller, his grandmother, was "Dutchier than sauerkraut" every
one admitted.  She had never even learned to talk all English, but
would mix her German words atrociously with the American ones.
They said Gus, his grandfather, who died a few years before, had
wound rags around his feet for socks.

"Her name was Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, and she lived on a big
estate in Scotland.  My Uncle Mack in Omaha had this painting sent
over from Scotland this summer when Kathie was married.  And those
pearls she has around her neck in the picture are the very pearls
Grandma Deal gave Kathie for a wedding present."

"Can you beat it?"

"It was painted lots more than a hundred years ago, about a hundred
and fifty, I guess, and the agent Uncle Mack hired had an awful
hard time finding it."  Laura was surprised at her own talkativeness.
After all, it wasn't hard to talk to any one who was really
interested in the same thing you were.  And Allen Rinemiller acted
interested.

He asked her another question or two, said "My gosh," and "Can you
beat it?" and suddenly came to the present with a cheerful:  "Well,
this'll never buy the baby a shirt," shouldered his log lightly and
started away.  At the door he paused.  "Did you know I'm going up
to the University to school?"  It was the pride of the male of the
species strutting a little before the other sex, even though the
female was a plain brown wren of a girl.

"Why, Allen, I'm glad.  Isn't that nice?"  Laura was genuinely
surprised.  Not many of the Reinmuellers had gone away to school.
But Laura was forgetting something.  Laura was forgetting that it
was the Reinmuellers who seldom went away to school.  And Allen, of
the third generation, was a RINEMILLER.

"Is Verna Conden going too?"  She asked the question teasingly.  It
still seemed slightly audacious for her to be talking to the big
High School football captain.

Allen grinned.  "No, she's looking for a job . . . clerking or
something.  Say, Laura, I'll appoint you a committee of one to keep
an eye on my girl when I'm gone."

Laura laughed at the frank retort.

They talked a few moments more about the University, and then Allen
went singing to the truck and the piling of the wood.

For a long time she could hear the chunks whacking against the
cement and a gay unmusical voice singing of a lady in a balcony in
a little Spanish town.



Chapter 4


When Allen Rinemiller left Katherine Buchanan's home, he drove
around by the Conden cottage and dated Verna to go down to Weeping
Water to a show in the evening.  Verna was pretty in a wind-blown
fashion, with fly-away hair upon which a beret was usually
perilously perched.  She was gay and noisy, conscious always of her
own vivacity.  Her eyes were hard and bright, her generous mouth
too scarlet.

"Landed a job yet?"

No, Verna had not landed a job.  She guessed she'd just have to go
in some one's kitchen.  Maybe it ought to be her own kitchen.  She
believed maybe she'd advertise for a man.  Her hard bright eyes
laughed at Allen.  Allen liked her--he liked her a lot--but
whenever she talked that provocative way it made him uncomfortable.

When he left her and started home, driving the little truck fast
over the graveled roads, he gave her no more thought.  In fact he
was thinking of the home in which he had just been.  He wished
their own house looked like the Buchanans'.  There was something
about it that you just absorbed into your system,--it was so
satisfying.  Several of the members of his old High School class
had some homes similar,--all low-shaded lights and cushions and
book-ends and rugs that were soft as Turkish towels.  He believed
he'd talk to his mother about getting some new things.

His drive on the highway was very short, only a half mile beyond
the town limits.  But there was another quarter of mile drive on
their own land, for the Rinemiller house sat back so far that one
approached it down a long private lane bordered by walnut trees.
The house itself was plain, a white box so symmetrical that, save
for the narrow porch across the front, it looked like a child's
huge cubic-shaped block set down in the exact center of the
Rinemillers' holdings.  Old Gus Reinmueller, dead these many years,
had come over sixty years before into the young state with
Christine, "his woman," driving oxen hitched to a rowboat on wheels
with a dingy cover over it.

They had been part of that great general movement in settling
Nebraska.  Bison herds, bands of Indians and wild fowl had held
complete possession of the land until the first isolated
settlements, clinging to the banks of the sluggish Missouri, made
their advent.  Indian trails then became trails for adventurers,
Mormons, gold hunters, freighters.  These were followed by the
settlers with the homing instinct of so many birds of passage.
Covered wagons jolted over the old trails and made new ones through
the prairie grass.  Many of these homesteaders were of the old
stock of corn farmers from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin.
Many more were of foreign blood.  These latter, because of their
common language and background, tended to group themselves in the
same regions.  Thus, Kearney County became predominately Danish;
Phelps County, Swedish.  The Mennonites grouped in Fairbury, the
Bohemians in Saline and Butler Counties, the Hollanders in southern
Lancaster.  All were highly efficient farming people.  But
everywhere came the Germans, equally efficient and thrifty.  Of
these were Gus and Christine Reinmueller, Allen's grandparents.
And a far cry it now seemed from old Gus and Christine to young
Allen with his finer sensitiveness, his clear-eyed modern
viewpoint, his flexibility toward all the modes of the times.

In those old days Gus and Christine had built a dugout at the end
of a ravine by digging into the low hillside, setting sturdy tree
trunks a short way from the opening and covering the top with poles
cut from the branches of the few trees growing along the creek bed,
across which they packed a solid roofing of sod.  Into this, with
only the hard dirt floor and the one opening, they had moved from
their wagon.  For several years they lived there with their babies,
like so many rabbits in a hutch.

Gus and Christine worked early and late; Christine in the field by
the side of Gus, staying away from her man's work only when her
babies were born, proud of the small number of days she took off
for those events.  They bought almost nothing.  Clothes were handed
down from child to child.  They ate what they raised.  They
suffered with the rest of the pioneers through all the long
hardships of drouth, grasshoppers, blizzards, crop failures.  They
suffered with the other early settlers, it is true, but with one
difference,--their hardships were all physical.  There was no
suffering of the spirit, like that which came to the Lutzes and the
Deals.  They were stolid, inured to poverty, cared nothing that
they were deprived of food for the mind, thought being able to
write one's name on a receipt the only necessity for schooling.
When money came in they hoarded it.  They thought only of one
thing.  Land.  Before Gus had quite finished paying for the first
eighty acres of land he was contracting to go in debt for another.
To enlarge their holdings became a fetish with them.  Two eighties
now.

"That's like paying for a dead horse," Will Deal, his neighbor, had
once told him.

"Ya--dead horse."  Gus had shrugged his shoulders.  "But purty soon
already . . . that dead mare she come to life.  Ya?"

The dugout gave place in time to a small cheap two-roomed frame
house in which they all huddled.  They were up at four o'clock in
the morning, routing out the children, too.  The little boys husked
corn with half frozen hands.  Three eighties.  Four eighties.
Later they added two more rooms.  The girls could husk now.  Five
eighties--six eighties.

They bought Abbie Deal's land.  Seven eighties.  It was across the
road on this eighty that they built the white house as it now
stood, large, cubic-shaped, as long as wide and as high as long, a
cheap narrow porch across the front, four square rooms downstairs
and four square rooms up.  They bought more land of Oscar Lutz.
Oscar was living in town now, merely holding his land for
investment.  Eight eighties.  Some of the boys could work away now,
the girls take places in town, and all bring home their wages.
Nine eighties.  There were no conveniences in the house; water was
carried from the well in buckets.  Small kerosene lamps made glow-
worm lighting in the rooms when, indeed, lighting became necessary.
It was extravagant to sit up and use kerosene.  "Get to bed, all of
you.  To-morrow yet the husking begins."

They kept the two front rooms closed.  Too much fuel to have them
open.  "Keep hustling . . . all of you.  If you're cold already yet
. . . work faster some more.  Get out at that milking."  Oscar Lutz
still owned two eighties.  Gus and Christine could not stand it to
see the black loam across their barbed-wire fence; could not bear
to see Oscar Lutz's tenant plowing up close to their own holdings.
They made Oscar an offer.  "Too much he wants.  For himself he say
he keep two eighties.  To come back from California summers and see
some of his own land yet he wants.  I no more ask him," Gus had
said.  But Christine's mind had harried her with land gluttony; her
little eyes glinted with the thought of the ownership of the mellow
soil.  "Du narr . . . Some more you ask."  She had urged Gus.  "A
little more you offer.  Go on . . . qvick."

And finally Oscar Lutz had sold.  Ten eighties.  Eleven eighties.
No one in this end of the county owned so much.  Only one boy was
left at home at that time,--the youngest, Herman.  For some unknown
reason, Gus and Christine had been a little more lenient with
Herman.  There had been a bit more leisure for Herman, not quite so
much "Get to work . . . you" for the youngest.  Herman had gone
into town almost every day to school, riding his pony and carrying
rye bread and sausage in a tin pail.  They had only required him to
stay out at husking time and for plowing.  Herman had gone clear
through the eighth grade, had even gone on into High School for one
year, but Gus and Christine had put an end to that foolishness.
"For what good you think them Latins is?" Christine wanted to know.
And Gus had laughed, "Ya, Herman . . . that Latin make you pick
more corn faster and bring you in more pigs . . . huh?"

So Herman had dropped the subject of going on through High School
and had cut alfalfa all that first day when his class entered as
sophomores.  But as time went on, there had been something in
Herman that would not prostrate itself so thoroughly before the god
of Work.  He had labored hard enough, when he was at it.  But he
had done other things too.  He had taken farm papers.  He had put a
tin bathtub in one of the empty upstairs rooms, fixed it with a
plug to let the water run out even though he had to carry the water
up to it, had "slicked up" and gone to all the town doings, left
the church of his fathers for an English-speaking one, had begun
going with gentle Lucy Steele without a drop of German blood in her
veins.  About this last procedure, Gus and Christine had made a
great many caustic comments.

"Why don't you get yourself a German girl?" Gus had wanted to know.
And "Ya!" Christine had snorted.  "A stark . . . strong one mit
some harte muskeln--muscles."

And then, while Herman was still going steadily with the pretty and
refined Lucy Steele, old Gus had suddenly died.

Death played old Gus a mean trick by slipping up on him unawares,
with no more advance notice than the scratch of a shingle nail.
Herman, looking at the red wound, had wanted his father to go right
over to town to the doctor.  But Gus and Christine had said no, the
doctors just took your money whether you needed any treatment or
not and they would put plenty of fat pork on it to draw out the
poison.  But the drawing qualities of the butchered hog had failed
to materialize, and quite suddenly old Gus was dead.  "At the
seedin' time, too," Christine had wailed.  "Mit the calves comin'
in . . . and all.  How ve get along already?  Mein Gott!"

Surprisingly, old Gus had made a will.  John Deal had drawn it up.
It had been signed by Gus and duly witnessed,--signed with a cross
and a notary public's affidavit that the cross was the signature of
one Gus Reinmueller.  The land was left to Christine to do with as
she wished.  Gus had realized that Christine was the more crafty of
the two.

And old Christine had land then.  Old Christine had her life's
desire.  Lots of land.  The boys were all on the various eighties.
Heinie here, Fritz there, Ed on another, Emil farming two quarters,
the girls' husbands on others.  All had bought more land of their
own.  All but Herman were getting toward middle age.  They were
hard working, well-to-do.  Their homes were beginning to have
conveniences, and they were sending their children on through High
School.  Christine deeded over an eighty to each of six, but gave
two, including the home eighty, to Herman.  Three adjoining ones
she kept for herself.

Then Herman married the soft-voiced Lucy who had gone through High
School and taught a year, and brought her home to the cubic-block
of a house, up the long road by the walnut trees.

Old Christine had said a great many things about it.  She had gone
over to her neighbor, Abbie Deal, many times in her grief and
distress.

"Ach . . . Gott!"  She had wrung her hard hands in distress.  "Sale
carpets on de two front rooms . . . mit green roses every t'ree or
four feet already.  Curtains by de vindows . . . mit ribbons tied
back.  Närrish . . . voolish."

"But, Christine, that's nice."  Abbie Deal had comforted her.  "You
ought to be glad.  You ought to be happy because Herman is happy
with such a nice wife and that she is fixing it up so comfortably."

But Christine could not be comforted.  She had waddled in disgust
back down the lane road at the Deals', her blue calico dress
gathered at the waistline, angrily switching the dusty jimson
weeds.  Each time she had gone over to the Deals' there was more
distressing news to convey,--the advent of a piano and a piece of
furniture in the dining room she thought they called a "boardside."
But of them all, nothing seemed to irritate her so thoroughly as
the carpet "mit de green roses every t'ree or four feet," as though
the multiplicity of flowers added insult to the general prodigal
expenditure.

Old Christine had lived with Herman and Lucy the greater part of a
year.  And then Herman, seeing that his beloved Lucy was ill and
nervous, and that Christine was making her more so, quite firmly
had moved his mother to a small tenant cottage across the road, and
had seen her comfortably settled there in the little house where
the wastefulness of fuel and the lavish squandering of money for
kerosene need not distress her.  That was the year--eighteen years
before--that Herman and Lucy's only child had been born,--Allen.

That was also the year that Emil and Fritz and Ed and Herman and
all the rest of the Reinmuellers met together and decided to drop
the superfluous letters from their name.  Their young folks were
marrying here and there, some were changing their memberships to
English churches, several going away to school.  The young folks
preferred the English spelling.

The Reinmuellers had become Rinemillers.

At home now, Allen put the truck under the shed and went into the
house, looking about him with the eye of a critic.  He saw the
shining oak chairs and sideboard, the scrubbed oilcloth, the rope
portieres hanging between the rooms, the axminster rugs which had
long since replaced the carpet that had so distressed his
grandmother.  He knew nothing was right.  You couldn't just get
something new and put in as he had planned on the way home.  It
wouldn't improve things a rat-i-tat--that was a cinch, he said to
himself.  The only way to go about it was to ditch everything out
and start new.  Even then,--and he made himself imagine the square
rooms divested of furnishings,--even then nothing was right; the
shape of the rooms, the windows, the floors, the ceiling.  Oh well,--
this was kind of a silly thought, but if he ever had a home of his
own,--it was going to be just right, like the Buchanans'.

His mother came in with her egg-basket:  "You back, Allen?"  She
was sweet faced and pleasant looking--a plump little lady with neat
light brown hair and wide humorous blue eyes.  Allen resembled her
but he had his father's physique.  "Eighty-six.  I think the White
Wyandottes are the best breed I've ever had.  Was the wood all
right?"

"Yep--and gee, Mother, you ought to see the bride's house.  Looks
like the pictures in your women's magazines."

"Yes, I can just imagine it.  I hope the Woman's Club will meet
there so I--oh, Allen," she broke off with a girlish squeal of
excitement.  "How could I forget?  Your letters!  Papa brought in
the mail when you were gone."  She picked them up from the oak
sideboard and held them out,--two square white envelopes, almost
similar in size and texture.

Allen tore into one.  "A University fraternity party card," he said
in an awe-struck voice, "--the Xi Kappas."

He tore open the other.  "Another one," his voice shook a little,
"--the Pi Taus.  The PI TAUS."  He repeated it with reverential
disbelief.

For a moment, with eyes glued to the white card, he had a fleeting
vision of driving past an aristocratic looking building up at
Lincoln the night after a basket-ball game at the University
Coliseum.  It had great cathedral-like pillars in front, and was
brightly lighted on three floors.  Cars were drawn up at the curb
and fellows in dress suits were getting in and out of them.  There
were girls in velvet evening wraps--.

He raised his head and spoke eloquently:  "Oh, my GOOD GOSH!"



Chapter 5


Miraculously, to Allen's way of thinking, he was pledged Pi Tau and
the aristocratic house with the cathedral-like pillars became his
home.  But Fate, that old woman of the loom, snapped the bright
colored thread of her weaving in the spring after his initiation.
For Allen's father died suddenly, and Allen went back to the square
white house at the end of the lane of walnut trees to take complete
charge of the work.

But something had happened to Allen.  He was not satisfied,--not
with himself, not with the old-fashioned methods of his father,
with the machinery on the farm, nor with his limited knowledge of
the management of the business side of it.  To his surprise and
deep mystification he was not even satisfied with Verna Conden.  He
lived only for the day when he could go back to school,--could tie
together the broken strands of the weaving and see the whole of the
design.

Herman Rinemiller's death had done something to Old Christine, too.
She spent most of her time over at the square white house talking
of Herman, handling things that had been Herman's, recalling
childish anecdotes about him.  "A calf . . . he vas sick once . . .
my leetle Herman t'ought he vas todt . . . dead.  Und he took off
his coat and put it over him . . . and ven ve looked out, leetle
Herman's coat vas all around de yard runnin'."  She told it gently
in pride and sorrow.  It had come to her out of a harsh past, from
the life of her little son whose boyish playtime had been given to
work,--a sacrifice on the altar of greed.  Poor Christine!  She had
long ago spent the days of her young motherhood in the marketplace,
and now that they were all squandered, she had so few pleasant
things left to remember.  So she crouched low over the dull embers
of a few half-memories in order to warm her old heart.

Lucy, Allen's mother, was always kind to her old mother-in-law, as
hard as it was to do anything for her.  "You can come here and live
with Allen and me now, Grandma.  You know you're as welcome here as
though Herman was alive."

Old Christine's pale blue eyes filled with unaccustomed tears.  Two
or three dropped down on her leathery red-brown cheeks with
immodest abandon.  "A good girl you are," she said suddenly, and
wiped the miscreant water away with the back of a red hand as hard
as wood.

Allen, always tenderhearted when it came to old people and
children, seeing her unusual distress, added his own brisk:  "Sure,
Grandma, I'll set you up a little stove in the east room and make
you a wood-box so you can have your own heat and not depend on
ours."

After which, old Christine tied a veil over her head, took her
basket of eggs, and in her blue calico dress trudged over to town,
went into John Deal's office and gave Allen two eighties of land
via a will to which so many codicils had been added that, with more
amendments than body, it looked much like the Constitution of the
United States.  She signed her name with a cross, saw it witnessed,
and trudged stolidly back to the farm in her blue calico dress
gathered full at the waistline.

High School to Laura Deal proved to be what High School is to any
young person in the Cedartowns of the country,--a period of
youthful ups and downs, illusions and disillusions, of long-lived
friendships and short-lived enmities, of study so interspersed with
play that youth does not always understand where the one leaves off
and the other begins.

Laura's achievements in those four years were of extremely varied
results.  She was the shining star member of all English classes
and the dumbest integral portion of all mathematical ones.
Composition?  Although verbally as noncommunicative as her father,
she wrote reams on any and all topics with girlish abandon.
Algebra?  Eloise, varying her home instruction with scolding,
sarcasm, and plaintive encouragement, managed to assist in pulling
her daughter through it.  American Literature?  Laura had read and
absorbed most of the assignments before they were assigned.
Physics?  Her father, beginning with extreme patience to try to
augment the teacher's instructions, admitted toward the middle of
the term an inglorious defeat, and quite frankly worked out the
rest of the problems for her.  Shakespeare?  She read all the plays
demanded in the curriculum, and all the others not so nominated in
the bond.  Plane Geometry?  John and Eloise together in combined
effort, dragged, tugged, and pushed their offspring through part of
that science which treats also of the magnitude of space and its
relations, to a passing grade.  Advanced composition?  Laura dashed
off essays, poems, parodies, stories and biographies, both for
herself and for such of her girl friends as stood in dire need of
material assistance.  Solid Geometry?  Instructor and parents, for
once in peaceful united decision, gave up with calm resignation and
allowed her to substitute something which, like that portion of her
mathematical head, was not so solid.

Laura was prettier now in her Senior year than she had ever been.
Her clear olive complexion with its warm underlying pink, her brown
eyes, the softness of her well kept dark hair, the suppleness of
her body, all helped to make an attractive whole.  But Laura
herself was odd.  Every one said so.  For one thing, in an age when
High School dating was the most important of the extra curricular
events, Laura did not enter into the pastime with any degree of
pleasure.  She did not care for boys.  Dating, perforce, meant
boys.  And because things that are equal to the same thing are
equal to each other, it followed that Laura did not care for
dating.  Q.E.D.  As skating companions, tennis partners, and
members at large of any other form of out-door sport, she not only
tolerated them, she liked them.  But when it came to rear-seat
riding, semi-gloomy-corner sitting, and all similar modes of
entertainment, Laura was just not among those present.  More
likely, she was curled up in some cushioned corner reading or
dreaming dreams of her own.  She was used to hearing people say she
was odd.  But for the most part she did not even care.

"When Laura gets her nose in a book, she's just dead to the world,"
was Eloise's complaint.  "She's not wide awake about housework,
either.  She does her work mechanically as though she didn't have
the slightest interest in practical things.  At times I think she's
lazy."

"Oh, I don't know," John returned, "she's young.  She isn't lazy
about things she likes to do.  Maybe we don't understand her.
Mother always seemed to understand her so well."

Immediately he saw that he had said the wrong thing.  Eloise's firm
lips gave an example of one of the few theorems which had been
comprehensible to Laura,--that a straight line is the shortest
distance between two points.  "I'm sure, John, that no one can
understand a child so well as the mother who gave it birth."

To which conclusive biological statement John made no reply.  He
had long ago learned that it was less trying not to argue.  And for
that matter, he did not understand Laura himself.  He loved her
devotedly in his busy way, but he did not understand her.  But
Eloise would not let the subject lie.  She had to dig it up again
and worry it around as a dog digs up the bone he has buried and
stands barking foolishly at it.

"I'm as fond of books as Laura.  She takes that from me as much as
the Deals.  But I don't moon over them.  I go in for knowledge and
data and not the emotion to be obtained from them."

Eloise took a keen delight in her club assignments.  For days
before the club meetings, she would work on her paper surrounded by
an array of text books and encyclopedias.  She would write and
rewrite, hitching a sentence from one text book onto a sentence
from another in an intricate form of rearrangement, and read over
the result with deepest pride.

"When I go into a subject, I go thoroughly," she would say, "I
marshal all the facts to be obtained."

"Facts--facts . . . what good are just facts?" Laura would say to
herself, for to her a new phrase of lovely words was infinitely
more alluring than all the facts of her Mother's cherished club
work.  "Mother never wrote an original thing in her life," she
would admit to herself.  And then in a sudden feeling of revulsion
at the disloyalty of the thought, would throw her arms around
Eloise, who stiff as a ramrod, would submit to the hasty caress
with:  "There, there, Laura, let mother get at something practical
now."

Eloise's life seemed not rounded out.  One may work at trivial
uninteresting tasks and be neither small nor tiresome.  But Eloise
chose to dwell on the fact that she was doomed to a life of
trivialities.  She gave the impression that Providence, through
some oversight, had neglected to place her in the way of a larger
life, whatever that was.  One inferred that having been formed of
more artistic, less dusty dust, as it were, than the Deal family
into which she had married, by some great voluntary loss of
potential possibilities, she had made herself more practical than
they.

She dilated long and enviously upon the fact that her Uncle Harry
and Aunt Carolyn Wentworth had a great deal of money, lived in the
East, traveled long distances frequently, and that by comparison,
her own life in Cedartown was a constant sacrifice, but cheerfully
borne.  A card from the Wentworths mailed at Havana or Miami or San
Diego always set her off.  "Just think of it, some folks have all
the luck.  At least they have plenty of money which amounts to the
same thing these days.  Where will Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn go
next?  They've been everywhere--just everywhere.  Japan . . .
Philippine Islands.  Imagine just packing up and going places like
that.  I haven't seen them for years.  I do wish we could all see
them."  To be sure, Eloise had other uncles and aunts but only
these two possessed the golden aura so necessary to peace and
comfort.

In the former years she had harbored a secret ambition to get her
Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn interested in her oldest son,
Wentworth, inasmuch as he carried the family name, but for some
reason Uncle Harry never seemed to warm to the subject of Wentworth
via letter, inquired more often about Laura, when he saw fit to
write at all.  And now that Wentworth was in the South these years,
married there and settled down, Eloise had given up the thought of
connecting him in any way with the affluent uncle.

Laura, however, she urged to take time and pains to write to Uncle
Harry.  "How can I correspond with some one when I don't know what
they're like?" Laura would insist.

"You seem able to write everything else," Eloise would point out.
"Why not to as important a man as your Uncle?"

"Because I have to know the kind of person any one is, and then I
can be like them.  I can feel just like anybody," she explained.
"I can feel like an old lonely person, or a happy young one, or ANY
kind, and then when I get into the feeling of it, it is easy to
write it."

Eloise often grew out of patience with her, and because she could
not understand her little daughter, there were many trying scenes.
And because there were many trying scenes, Laura retired more
constantly into the privacy of her own thoughts and dreams.  "I
like to talk to people that nobody understands or likes," she
confided to Katherine one day, "and make discoveries about them.
It interests me just as it interests some people to dig for Indian
curios along the Platte and the Missouri."

"You're the oddest creature, Lolly.  Well, what do you find when
you dig into Old Uncle Lutz,--buffalo bones and chunks of sod
houses and skeletons of those grasshoppers that 'et all the crops
in 1874'?"

Laura laughed as she always did at Kathie's light and airy chatter
and her imitation of old Oscar Lutz's high cracked voice.

Katherine was laughing a great deal these days, too, and almost
entirely at herself.  To hear Kathie's comments on the subject one
would have thought that the process of reproduction was the joker
in life's deck of cards.

For in the tag end of the winter, with almost as much pomp and
ceremony as royalty demands, Katherine's daughter was ushered into
the world.  She was christened Patricia and arrived home from Omaha
a month later with the highest priced carriage in Nebraska and a
nurse whose services, as well as those of the smart vehicle, were
presented to the little Buchanan family by that unfailing source of
all luxuries,--Mackenzie Deal.  Kathie having given life to her
child, proceeded to call the obligation square and to take up her
countless social duties exactly where she left off.

It was spring again, with Laura seventeen now, ready to graduate,
and old man Lutz home.

From March until the last of October the community would see him:
dreamy old man Lutz sitting on the porch in the sunshine watching
Cedartown go by, rugged old man Lutz walking over the paved
streets, his cane thump-thumping on the walks that lay over the
prairie where the oxen had traveled, grizzled old man Lutz
laboriously climbing Cottonwood Hill to stand with his hand on the
gnarled old trunk of the cotton-wood tree he had planted over a
half century before, wistful old man Lutz thump-thumping along the
graveled walks of the cemetery where all the old friends lived in
their little narrow houses.

He lived next door to the John Deal family so that Laura saw him
often.

His house was as old-fashioned as he himself.  Many years before,
the Cedartown newspaper had carried the item that "Our distinguished
citizen, Henry Lutz, is moving into the beautiful mansion which he
has just completed.  This is now the finest house in Cedartown," and
other descriptive matter in small town hyperbole.

One year later, the same paper carried an item so similar that it
might have been the identical one with the name changed,--"Our
distinguished citizen, OSCAR Lutz, is moving into the beautiful
mansion which he has just completed.  This is now the finest house
in Cedartown."  If any sinister motive of brotherly competition lay
under these items, no one of Cedartown's citizens was bold enough
to mention the possibility, for Oscar and Henry Lutz had been
unusually close companions.  If, perchance, there flowed any
competitive corpuscles of blood through the veins of Martha and
Sarah Lutz, the brothers' wives, no one felt equal to the task of
mentioning that, either.  And, in any event, Oscar and his Martha
held the advantage over Henry and Sarah, for they waited until the
latter had expressed themselves in a cupola and fancy cornices and
gingerbread rosettes, and then put on two cupolas, made the
cornices more fantastic, and spiced up the gingerbread with what
was supposed to be an Egyptian lotus effect, but which proved, when
Asy Drumm, the local architect-and-carpenter, had finished the job,
to look more like the heads of wild cows which needed dehorning.

Laura in her pretty white sport dress was sitting on one of these
gingerbread railings of the old man's porch now.  He was in his
element to have an audience.

"When Marthy and me moved to Nebraska, we built a little pine and
cottonwood house over there on the hill north of what's the
cemetery now.  Nothin' to be seen but the prairie grass a wavin'
and a scraggly fringe o' trees along Stove Creek.  Henry and me
built together,--that is, we all lived in our wagons while we was
gettin' his house ready; as soon as his was done we all moved in it
and worked on one for Marthy and me.  Hauled the lumber from
Weeping Water by oxen,--it was only ten miles but it took all day
to get down and another day to come back."

Laura let the old man ramble on with no comment from her.

"Lots of wind those years.  Just had a little thin layer of ship-
lap between us and the wind.  Nebraska and wind used to mean the
same thing.  Died down now all these last decades.  No more wind
here than anywhere else.  That's what trees does for you.  You can
thank J. Sterling Morton and a whole lot of others of us for that,--
your grandfather Deal and Henry and me set out hundreds through
this part of the county and got a lot more to take time to set 'em
out.  But in them days the wind just blew across the country most
of the time with the tumble-weeds comin' along for company.
Marthy's and my home was pretty thin, I'm tellin' you.  Used to lay
and listen to the wind.  Told Marthy once, it seemed like we was in
a great holler drum with the Lord a tappin' and rappin' on the
drum."

Laura, listening, said, "Why, that's quite a clever thought, Uncle
Oscar."  And immediately she was thinking out a poem:

"The little house was like a drum . . ."

That was the way Grandmother Deal used to be,--sort of poetical.
She wondered,--did living close to the prairie soil the way they
had done, give them some inner consciousness of the beautiful?

She liked to remember how she and Grandma Deal held the same liking
for lovely things in literature.  It was queer that an old woman
like Grandma with very little education would like the things she
did.  There had never been any one since who could fill her place,--
to whom she could talk so readily.  But she could not have held
converse with Grandma Deal ten minutes without deep interest.  They
would have touched upon some topic attractive to both, laughed at
some anecdote toward which they displayed the same sense of humor,
winked back a tear over some happening about which they felt the
same sympathy.  Yes, there had been some deep and definite
understanding of life in Grandmother Deal to which she herself held
the key.  She did not know what it was, could not define it, found
it impossible to put into words.  She only knew that in this
kinship, mortal or spiritual, there had been a unity of thought and
expression, a oneness of dreams and desires.  And because she could
not describe the unusual relationship between them, which had
seemed so much more important than the mere relationship of blood,
she made no attempt to tell any one about it.  And because, even to
herself, she could not put into the limitation of exacting words
the vague yearning for something beautiful which life was to give
to her, she thought of it always as a white bird flying.  It seemed
in some indefinable way to connect itself with the dreams and
desires of her Grandmother.  It was like a legacy from her, a
benediction.  She would say to herself:


     "Pain has been and grief enough and bitterness and crying,
     Sharp ways and stony ways I think it was she trod,
     But all there is to see now is a white bird flying,--
     Whose blood-stained wings go circling high,--circling up
       to God."


She knew that in some vague, undetermined way she was always to
follow with wistful eyes this far-off sheen of silver wings, that
by some unexplainable magic she was always to see from the window
of her heart, a white bird flying.



Chapter 6


And then, one day in the summer after Laura's graduation, with no
previous announcement of their coming, and as nonchalantly as
though they were arriving at a large hotel to which they had wired
for accommodation, Uncle Harry Wentworth and Aunt Carolyn, a
chauffeur and a maid, came into the driveway.  Cedartown is used to
good-looking cars slipping unconcernedly along the graveled
highways which cut through the town.  Indeed, Cedartown's
residents, themselves, and the owners of the surrounding farm land
close their garage doors on as many fine cars as do their city
neighbors.  But the Wentworths' car, an audaciously long affair
that sported more de luxe equipment and trimming per square foot
than the most pretentious one in the community, made all the
children stop their play to stare, and the old men on the post-
office corner temporarily cease whittling out the affairs of the
nation.

To say that Eloise was upset when Uncle Harry Wentworth and Aunt
Carolyn arrived is merely to make a trite statement such as "dogs
bark" or "the world is round."  And to look out and witness the
descent of Uncle Harry Wentworth from that leviathan of a car, was
as devastating to Eloise's poise as to have been an eye witness
through the centuries to the entire descent of man.  But not for
long was Eloise's mind a mental gyroscope.  She took hold of the
situation with heroic efficacy.  By eleven o'clock, Aunt Carolyn
was on the davenport with pillows under her shoulders and a cup of
hot tea in her plump hand.  Uncle Harry was in an overstuffed chair
with a foot-stool under his immaculate spats and a glass of iced
lemonade in his slim hand.  Watson, the chauffeur, was in the
garage rubbing down the car as though it were a thoroughbred horse.
Annette, the maid, was unpacking.  Lunch was well under way and
John was being summoned home from the office.  Laura was assigned
the task of visiting with the heretofore unknown relatives
(although she had begged to fix the salad instead) and Trib, was
turning the ice-cream freezer under the grape arbor.  Whatever
faults may have been Eloise's, she was not inefficient.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn, having come from Denver, were now
about to go up into the woods of northern Minnesota.  And so it
came about after lunch that Uncle Harry, in as matter-of-fact
manner as though he were offering to take them around the block,
suddenly decided that Eloise and Laura and Trib were going, too, as
their guests.  "We'll take them, won't we, Carolyn?"  All at once
he seemed remembering to ask his wife's opinion, although Laura had
a swift intuition that Aunt Carolyn assented to everything.

Uncle Harry was slim, debonair, pink-cheeked, his snow-white hair
and snapping brown eyes forming a striking contrast.  His hands
were long and slim, the nails as pink as his cheeks.  He was
nervous, unsettled, never still a moment when talking.  He rocked
up and down on his heels and toes when standing, fidgeted about
when sitting.  He darted his bright brown eyes here and there as
though looking for something he never saw.  His mind, too, seemed
darting about in the same agile way, seeking something it never
found.  Aunt Carolyn was a complete antithesis.  Physically fat,
shapeless, and two-chinned, her mind also seemed fat, shapeless and
two-chinned.  She answered questions slowly if at all.  Much of the
time she merely smiled in answer to Uncle Harry's rather
exaggerated statements.  Having been left behind on most of her
husband's mental flights, apparently she had now given up the
breathless pursuit and settled back in obese complacency.

Eloise was delighted with the invitation but unable to see how it
could be done.  Uncle Harry assumed all details of the plan.  The
front seat was wide,--he and Watson and Annette could all three sit
there very comfortably, Aunt Carolyn and Eloise in the back seat,
Trib and Laura on the adjustable ones.  They would start early the
next morning, get to Okoboji for lunch, Minneapolis by night, and
the second day easily reach the north woods hotel to which they
were bound.  Eloise argued that the two should make their stay
longer in Cedartown, but apparently Uncle Harry, having thought of
the new scheme, wanted to carry it out immediately.  He see-sawed
up and down on his slim immaculate shoes, waved his hands in
illustrative gesticulation, winked a roguish eye at Laura, chucked
her under the chin, sat down and tapped the chair arms, stood up
and rubbed his hands together in nervous glee.  Aunt Carolyn lay
shapelessly among the pillows of the davenport and smiled steadily
without effort.

To Uncle Harry's sudden inspiration that John go up on the train
and meet them, Laura's father only shook his head and named two or
three important reasons for not doing so,--the Blackman estate, a
guardianship case, preparation for the schoolboard suit.  Uncle
Harry looked at John Deal with something akin to curiosity.  Here
was a man who seemed irrevocably tied by a hundred chains to a
desk.  For a brief moment he might have been wondering how it would
seem not to be able to go where he wished, whenever he wished.
Then his restless mind was off again on another tangent.

When it was decided that they were really to go, Eloise rose to the
management of the preparations like a bass to the lure.  Her
efficient brain pigeon-holed every activity of the household.  Trib
was to ride on his bicycle and give certain instructions to the
woman who did cleaning for her.  Laura was to look over her own
clothes and her mother's for any missing buttons or stitch.
Eloise, herself, turned off a dozen necessary tasks.  Uncle Harry
walked nervously about the house.  Annette fanned Aunt Carolyn who
lay supinely among the pillows, the bustling activity going on
around her like so much wind around a granite monument.  Watson
groomed the flawless car.

In the midst of preparations old Oscar Lutz tap-tapped around to
the back door, a mess of spinach in the gray pail with a rope for
the handle.  Eloise was provoked.  "That old codger--whatever is
the matter with him?  SPINACH--the night before we're going away.
He KNEW we were going.  Dad told him.  I heard him out by the
morning-glories.  Now he'll have to meet Uncle Harry.  And how well
they two will mix."

Laura took the spinach.  She understood old Oscar Lutz better than
her mother.  He wanted to do something for them, so he was saying
it with spinach.  She introduced old Oscar to Uncle Harry and Aunt
Carolyn.  Uncle Oscar was pleased to meet them, both verbally and
whole-heartedly.  Here was a fresh new audience,--one to whom no
anecdote of his was old material.  He had a full life time of
experiences upon which to draw, not one of which these people had
ever heard.

His hand, as hard and calloused as untanned buffalo hide, shook
Uncle Harry's slim bony one and Aunt Carolyn's cushion-like soft
one.

It was not five minutes later until Eloise and Laura, going on with
their preparations for the journey, could hear his high cackling
laugh and his enthusiastic "I mind as how--"  It seemed to be
something about traveling in the early days, the subject introduced
no doubt by the present anticipated trip.  "I mind as how I started
out doin' all my travelin' on 'Shanks mares' over the hills, wadin'
in mud or deep snow."  They could hear snatches of the one-sided
conversation.  "Well, well, travelin' wa'n't what you'd call ideal
in them days, but we had lots o' fun . . . more 'n' they have now,
seems like.  I mind as how I made a cutter out o' good stout
lumber, lined the inside with buffalo so's to be warm and
comfortable for Marthy.  Had a soapstone we'd take along and two or
three bricks--heat 'em all in the fire, wrap 'em up good, tuck
Marthy in with her feet on the soapstone and put mebbe two buffalo
robes all around us and away we'd go, bells ringin', and happy as
larks."

There was more monologue on the subject and by the time Eloise had
returned to the living room, she found Uncle Oscar going strong on
the Easter blizzard of '73, Uncle Harry moving about with the
peevish headshakes of an irritated animal, and Aunt Carolyn frankly
asleep.

All that evening Laura was thrilled with the thought of the
unexpected trip.  Just one thing was lacking--her father.  She felt
a deep disappointment that he could not go--a sympathetic
understanding of the cares that harassed him.  He was like the old
man of the sea,--the burdens of the community the bundle on his
back.

It was a gay lark to glide along the country in Uncle Harry
Wentworth's great car.  Uncle Harry sat with Annette and the
chauffeur, a young married couple.  He had his arm on the back of
the seat and sometimes he would touch the back of Annette's white
neck with his nervous slim fingers.  Once Aunt Carolyn said,
"Annette, if you're crowded, you can come back here."  Much of the
time he was turned around talking excitedly to Laura and Trib who
sat on the smaller extra seats.  Aunt Carolyn did not talk a great
deal.  She sat quietly with the little fixed smile on her fat face.
Laura stole surreptitious glances at her sometimes and wondered
just what she was thinking.  Did she enjoy her husband's nervous
chatter?  Did she approve of his extravagant statements?  Did the
little fixed smile mean she was happy?  Or was it a mask?
Sometimes she went to sleep for a few moments, her head against the
gay cushions, and the smile vanished, so that her plump face looked
flabby and sad.  Laura, stealing a covert glance at her then, tried
to picture her in another environment, and invariably she saw her
in a washable house dress and big white apron, her plump hands,
white with flour, making cookies for hungry little grandchildren.
It was a foolish notion, Laura told herself, but it seemed the
setting in which she really belonged, rather than the present one
of traveling about the country in the palatial car with her silver-
mounted luggage and her maid.

It made Laura think how different many people would look in other
environments.  It was queer what clothes and setting did to one.
She pictured Katherine Buchanan in sleazy cheap clothes, and her
own father as a section boss in overalls, thought of Allen
Rinemiller in his collegiate-looking suits and hats since he had
been to the University.

The group of travelers stopped for a little time by the shores of
Storm Lake and again at Okojobi and Spirit Lakes.  Laura and Trib
were charmed beyond words.  Children of eastern Nebraska, they had
known intimately only the Missouri and the Platte and a small lake
or two.

There was a night in Minneapolis at a big hotel, with Uncle Harry
in his breezy way creating a stir and commotion in getting settled
when there was no need of either, and then the long trip to the
north lakes.  At the first odor of pines and the first sight of
white birches bending above blue waters, Laura felt that old
emotional uplift she always experienced when drinking in a new
atmosphere.  Immediately she was reveling in the "feel" of the
setting: picturing sleek-haired Indian maidens and their light-
footed lovers meeting here on the sloping shores.  Her palm itched
for the touch of a pencil and, because she had no means of putting
down her emotional disturbances just then, she sat for a long time
saying nothing, but mentally composing snatches of description and
bits of verse.

The two weeks spent there at the rustic hotel were by way of being
a bit of heaven both to seventeen-year-old Laura and thirteen-year-
old Trib.  The white birches drinking forever from glass-clear
waters, the tall pines massed against sapphire skies, the clear
spongy carpet of sweet-smelling needles, all filled Laura with the
poetry of living that she always experienced when everything was
"just right."  Trib's sensations were not of a poetical type.  The
motorboat at the dock, the box of lures, the rods and reels for
which Uncle Harry arranged, constituted a large part of his own
particular joy of living.

The mornings were spent in fishing, up the long lake in the
motorboats, casting for the sporty bass or trolling for the common
pike, with the hope always present of getting a wily muscallonge.
At eleven there was bathing, and again at four, when the water was
full of young people and old with water-wings and joy balls.  After
dinner, cards for the older people, dancing for the young, inside
the hotel or on the screened-in porches into which the mosquitoes
could only gaze hungrily.

Aunt Carolyn and Eloise settled themselves each night for bridge.
But Uncle Harry danced, always with the prettiest and youngest
girls.  Sometimes Aunt Carolyn, calm and placid, watching the
dancers, would send for him.  She wanted a silk shawl or would he
please go and see whether Watson had looked over the car in
preparation for the trip tomorrow.  It seemed queer to Laura.  She
could not quite sense what was wrong.  Aunt Carolyn was pleasant.
Uncle Harry punctilious in attendance.  But something was not just
right.

"Is Aunt Carolyn lots older than Uncle Harry?" she asked her mother
once.

"Goodness, no" . . . Eloise laughed, "he's anyway two years older,--
maybe three.  And you'll have to give him credit for having the
same wife all these years, Laura."

Well, why shouldn't he, Laura wondered.  Why was that any credit to
him?  She thought about it a great deal.  It worried her,--the
something which was not right,--but she could not quite put her
finger on the defect.  It was a queer marriage,--Uncle Harry, gay
and slim and debonair, sipping the tips of the blossoms of
pleasure,--Aunt Carolyn, fat and old-lady-like and settled,
drinking her tea and cuddling her hot-water bottle.

Laura thought often of her father down home, working at the desk.
She felt a great pity for him that he could not be up here, too.
She wished he could do something that would make him happy and care-
free and boyish.  Working and working for other people without a
great deal of compensation, always on the town council and the
school board, always assigned to church and civic committees, his
tasks never finished, a rest never earned.  She wished she could do
something about it, but not being able to, she did the next best
thing--she sympathized with him, writing a note every day telling
him of all their activities, never failing to add "I wish you were
here, too."  She did not know that her father put them all away in
a private drawer in his desk where they stayed for years.  John
Deal in his silent way loved his young daughter deeply.

It seemed queer to John Deal to live alone in the empty house.  He
missed the lively chatter of the children and Eloise's good
housekeeping.  He scarcely knew what to do with himself on the few
free evenings which were his.  Sometimes he read, and for one whole
evening he sat in a big chair in the living room and dozed or
looked at the group on the mantel.

Many a descendant of some old sea captain has above his fireplace a
miniature brig with sails bravely flying, to which he points with
pride as the traditional embodiment of the spirit of his
forefathers.  John Deal had a bronze covered-wagon on his mantel,
the oxen molded in the act of drawing it, well-formed and life-
like, their huge horns tipped realistically with brass knobs.

Eloise had protested the advent of the piece.  There was no covered-
wagon episode in the life of Eloise's parents, she said.  Her
people had originally come over in the Mayflower (at which John had
surreptitiously grinned and mumbled something that sounded like
"poor old over-loaded boat"),--they had always remained city people
and easterners, for that matter, until her own father came to Iowa.
She didn't think the huge clumsy bronze thing looked in place in
what she had tried to make an exceptionally dainty room.  If the
statue were something graceful, now, a deer, or even the long
sinuous lines of grayhounds; but oxen,--huge and dull-looking and
stolid,--and a wagon with every flapping piece of canvas molded in
the bronze.  She had said a great deal about the price, too.

"Bronze--why bronze is terribly expensive.  John Deal, how much did
you pay for that?  I'll wager anything, we couldn't afford it."

As a matter of fact, he shouldn't have afforded it.  Eloise was
right about that.  It had cost an even hundred dollars, the entire
fee of a client.  But he had been attracted by it as he was waiting
for Laura to make a small purchase; had stood for a long time
before the little group, coveted it with a good healthy
covetousness; had thought about it many times and finally gone back
to get it, half in hopes that it was gone, half worried for fear it
was.  He liked to look up at it as he smoked, forgetting the petty
quarrels of his country clients in remembering some of the tales
his people had told him.  Their lives seemed hard in retrospect,
but after all, there had been something free and untrammeled about
them, like the winds that blew over their prairie home.  To get
food to eat, fuel to burn and money to pay the taxes,--those seemed
the greatest problems his father had.

He remembered just how the old soddie looked,--he must have been
eight or nine when they moved from it into the frame house.  He
could close his eyes and visualize the one main living room with
the general bedroom off of it, the cookstove where they sometimes
burned corn, and the deep seats in the two windows formed by the
width of the sod strips.  He could see his cheery mother at her
endless task of mending the clothes, his big strong father coming
in with the milk pails, smell the odor of cornmeal cooking, hear
the never-ceasing wind blowing against the little soddie.  Here he
sat now in comparative comfort, complete luxury even, if likened to
the soddie; and yet his problems seemed more difficult than his
father's.

He wondered why, with all the added comforts, there had been no
lessening of worries.  Sometimes, the difficult questions
confronting him seemed more than humanity could solve.  There had
been the question of defending the guaranty law.  He had gone to
the legislature with the burdens of the depositors in the failed
banks heavy upon him.  He had the story of old Mr. and Mrs.
Kleinman losing their life savings ringing in his ears; the pitiful
tale of Amy Hall, the little seamstress, saving a dollar or two a
week for twenty years only to see it swept away; almost on his own
cheeks the tears of young Mrs. Wise who had deposited her husband's
insurance money just before the crash.  How could he have gone up
to the legislature and not fought to the finish for a fund with
which to reimburse these?  It had made Mack angry.  Mack and the
other bankers were lying down on further taxation.  Already they
had paid out several million dollars.  "Poured it in a rat hole"
Mack had said.  For the fund was insolvent.  Weak banks had been
allowed to run on when it was known they were weak.  Cracking down
on the first few would have saved the many, he had thought.

"The trouble was long before that," Mack had said.  "Anybody could
go out and start a bank where two roads crossed, if they had ten
dollars and a blank book and a pencil."  The whole thing had been
bungled.  People had been led to think the state was solidly behind
their deposits.  Then came the land slump, depression, banks
crumbling,--good bankers were required to pay for the sins of the
poor ones.  It made a vicious circle.  Mack and the others had
rebelled.  Confiscatory they called it.  Unconstitutional.  "No
state has a right to take one man's property to pay another man's
debts."  Mack had said it a hundred times.  They had argued hotly--
brother against brother.  "But you didn't call it confiscating when
you were playing it up big in your ads.  Now that it's a heavy
burden you've changed your mind."  They had grown hot in their
arguments,--had lost their former comradeship.  Civil war in the
Deal family.

Well, it wasn't a question of what might have been.  It was a
question of what to do now.  How to compromise.  How to fight to
get back old Mr. and Mrs. Kleinman's money with which to bury them,
and sickly Amy Hall's savings and young Mrs. Wise's only fund for
herself and two babies,--and at the same time keep the other banks
solvent,--keep the whole system from crashing with a far greater
catastrophe than the present one.

He would go over and over it, silent, brooding, with a deep feeling
of compassion for them all.  Life was like the old plains before
the trails were made.  It took initiative and foresight to find
one's way through it.  The old plainsmen moved through an uncharted
region with only the sun and the stars for guidance.  Their
children and their children's children moved now through just as
uncharted a wilderness.  If only the stars and the sun could guide
them, too.

Sometimes he would look up to the exquisitely done bronze on the
mantel and feel a touch of mental uplift.  It so typified the
struggles of another day, made him realize that every age has its
long tiresome journey.  Sometimes it is an endless lurching over
miles of dry grass and sunflowers, and the breaking of raw prairie
sod.  And sometimes it is an endless fighting for the peace and
comfort of fellow men.  He was glad he had bought the bronze.



Chapter 7


Laura and her mother seemed in some inexplicable way to draw closer
together in spirit there in the north so many miles from home.
Sometimes they walked together through the needle-carpeted woods.
Once they came upon the remains of a tepee set high upon the
bluffs, so that Laura was transported in fancy to the days when
Indians lived by the lake.  She was deep in an emotional
retrospection of the time, when Eloise called practically:  "No,
Laura; look here.  It's of recent date.  The poles at the top are
bound together with a patented wire.  Scouts or Hi-Y boys!  No
Indian ever put those poles together."  Laura had to admit defeat.
But why couldn't Mother have left her the fancy?

It was on one of these walks that Laura approached a subject long
on her mind.  She didn't want to go to the University--not at all.
The University seemed so huge with its six or seven thousand
students on the one campus.  It frightened her, the very thought of
it.  Couldn't she stay home and read and write?  She'd make good
use of her time.  Really, she would.

But Eloise was firm.  "It's just what you NEED, Laura.  Mother
knows best.  You need to mix with people.  This is a practical
world we live in.  You'll just have to shake yourself out of that
dreamy way of yours."

It hung over like a menacing thing; she wished she could stay
forever in her blue and white room or out in the grape arbor.  The
middle of September grew to seem as threatening as some date of
impending disaster.

"Sometimes, Laura, I think you're a nineteenth-century girl in a
twentieth-century setting," her mother said in exasperation.

But whenever it fastened its hold upon her, Laura threw off the
thought of the dread change, preferring to live in the happy
present and make the most of her pleasures.

And then, in the midst of the other excitements, as though her
experiences were not sufficient for happiness, she met Miss
Westcote,--Miss Evelyn Westcote, the writer.  Miss Westcote and a
friend had a cottage where the pines tapped on the roof and
inquisitive squirrels ran nimbly around the chimney.  To one in
Laura's state of mind concerning writing, the place seemed hallowed
ground and Miss Westcote a goddess who had lost her way between
Olympus and some Utopia.  She spent every moment near Miss Westcote
that propriety allowed.  Sometimes she walked past her cottage with
scarcely a glance in that direction, so that she might not seem to
be thrusting her presence upon the writer.  If Miss Westcote was
the first to notice and invite her in, Laura lived in a heaven of
bliss.  She could not understand, though, why Miss Westcote seldom
mentioned her writing.  How could she turn out a book like The
Chime of Bells and not talk about it?  She ventured to ask her one
day.  Miss Westcote laughed in her merry way, the lids of her eyes
crinkling.  "For the same reason that the candy manufacturer
doesn't stand and eat his own candy.  We all like to get away from
our business and forget it."

"But, Miss Westcote,--it isn't like a BUSINESS, surely."  Laura was
surprised, a little disillusioned.  "I thought it was . . . oh,
always inspirational, you know."

Miss Westcote suddenly sobered.  "I rather think it always is,--
when one is very young.  But oh, my dear," she added, "for such a
short time does one stay young."

Eloise, too, was delighted to meet Miss Westcote.  Was she not to
review one of Miss Westcote's novels in club that very fall?  She
was jubilant about the fact that they were to be thrown together
for a time.  "Imagine my meeting her here," she said to Laura.  "I
can question her all about it and get my information first hand.
The ladies will certainly sit up and take notice of that."

"But, Mother," Laura was diffident about the matter.  "She's here
on a vacation.  She's resting and playing around.  Maybe she
wouldn't relish an interview."

But Eloise knew better.  "You can't tell me," she affirmed, "I'll
wager there never was an author yet who didn't like to talk about
himself and his books.  I shall ask her beforehand of course.  This
is really an opportunity that I couldn't have dreamed would
happen."

Miss Westcote was quite gracious about the interview.  She would be
glad to tell Mrs. Deal any time about the writing of the novel.

Eloise and Laura drove over to Silver Lake Corners before the
interview to buy a notebook for the occasion.  A fat man in a straw
hat waited upon Eloise in the little general store that supplied
the tourists' needs.  People were buying fishlines, sinkers, rods,
lures, ice-cream cones, movie magazines and pop, getting their
mail, and sending postcards of pigmy-looking people nonchalantly
holding up twenty-five pound muscallonge.

From the Corners they drove straight to Miss Westcote's cottage
where they found her sitting in a long deck-chair busily engaged in
doing nothing but gazing out on the lake whose waves danced under a
golden shimmer in the afternoon sun.  She rose to meet the two,
pulled other lounging chairs forward, and slipped back comfortably
into her own.  Laura, too, made herself comfortable.  But not so
Eloise.  She sat upright on the edge of her chair, pencil poised
over the notebook, and the interview was on.

"My first question comes under the head of 'Author's Motive,'"
Eloise said pleasantly, briskly, "Miss Westcote, why did you write
The Chime of Bells?"

"Well," Miss Westcote said pleasantly, but not briskly, "you know,
Mrs. Deal, there is one motive behind writing which all authors
possess in common,--at least, after the first fine thrill of
writing to reform the world is over and they have settled down to
make a business of it.  They would like to side-step the issue, and
most of them do."

"And what is that?"  Eloise was ready to write the answer verbatim.

Miss Westcote's eyes twinkled and then closed in narrow slits, a
way they did when she was silently laughing.  "Because we can no
longer use buttons, trinkets and beads for trade and barter, and
because writers are charged practically the same for food,
clothing, tooth paste and gasoline that other people are charged;
you will figure out for yourself what was at least one motive for
writing it."

Laura laughed, but Eloise looked a little pained, so that Miss
Westcote said hastily: "But that's too sordid a motive for you to
tell your club, isn't it?  And now I'll give you a more literary
sounding reason."  And Eloise copied her words verbatim in the
little black book.

And then, "Who are your primary characters?"

That was easy, and Miss Westcote named them.

"Your secondary characters?"

Scratch--scratch in the little black book.

"Your tertiary characters?"

Miss Westcote's eyes narrowed again into quivering slits.  "My dear
Mrs. Deal, you're getting me worried.  Is there such a word as
'quartuary' for the fourth in importance?"

Eloise said she thought there was one with that meaning, although
she had her doubts about it being that particular word.  "And I
rather think the three . . . the three . . . what shall I call
them . . . ?"

"Layers," Miss Westcote suggested, her eyes crinkling.

"Sets," Eloise corrected.  "I rather think the three sets of
characters are enough to report."

"So do I," agreed the creator of those characters.

"Now for the questions," Eloise was businesslike, thorough.  A
bombardment followed:  "What do you consider your chapter of
climax?"  "What are the main crises before the climax?"  "What were
your controlling factors in plot formation?"

Miss Westcote later related the incident to the friend sharing the
cottage:  "She had me completely floored.  I could scarcely
remember the names of the characters.  If there was a climax I had
mislaid the thing.  I couldn't have sworn absolutely that I wrote
it.  In a maze of academic questions, she had destroyed my poor
little story.  It was dead,--killed on the dissecting table under
an anęsthetic.  If a story, Blanche, is worth milling over in a
meeting at all, it's worth reviewing as a thing of flesh and blood
and spirit rather than of bones and dead tissue and numerical
dimensions.  The girl was darling, sweet and understanding,--but
the mother,--one of those highly efficient women who would have
arranged the stars in symmetrical rows and dispensed with the milky
way as being too messy."

Toward the end of the second week, Uncle Harry grew restless and
irritable.  Aunt Carolyn seemed striving to be carefully tactful.
She began inquiring about a hotel in northern Wisconsin, casually
speaking of the delights to be encountered there as related to her
by some young woman who had been a guest the year before.  Uncle
Harry became interested, cheerful.  With much commotion and
questioning he collected data about it: distance, roads to take,
prices, conveniences, kind of people there.  He spent a long time
sitting on the steps leading down to the dock with the young woman
who had given Aunt Carolyn the information.

The two weeks were over, the beautiful two weeks.  Laura thought
she could not stand it, never again to see the lovely birches and
the winding roads, smell the pungent green pines and hear the
lapping of the cool blue water.  She felt sad and depressed with
that emotional thrill which always accompanied the sensations.

She went over to see Miss Westcote and to bid her good-by.

"I can't tell what it has meant to meet you, Miss Westcote."
Laura's serious brown eyes met the kindly twinkling ones of the
older woman.

"And I've loved knowing you, too," Miss Westcote was saying.  She
held Laura's hand.  "Keep up your writing.  Write the things you
know and understand . . ."  She smiled down on her, ". . . your own
prairies and your own people.  Write it in your own way . . . the
way YOU see it.  Don't imitate or copy . . . you wouldn't do that
with words . . . but don't even do so with the spirit of the thing.
Don't try to look at your own prairies and your own people as an
outsider does.  Interpret them as YOU feel about them . . . knowing
that there will be others who see and feel as you do."

Laura wanted to talk more, to ask a dozen questions, to tell this
wise woman many things that were close to her heart.  She wanted to
throw open the rooms of her mind and take the thoughts out one by
one and show them to Miss Westcote.  She wanted to repeat to her
the verses she had run across after her grandmother's death, to
tell her that no one had ever held her complete confidence since
that time, to confide in her about the wonderful magic dreams and
desires she and Grandmother used to discuss, to make her understand
that all there was to see now was a white bird flying.  But she
felt that old tight-throated sense of restraint, and only thanked
her, told her she would do the best she could, and said good-by.
When she turned away and walked down the little path where the pine
needles lay like a thick brown rug, she felt that nothing in the
world could keep her from making another Miss Westcote of herself,
that she would never let anything in life handicap her or swerve
her from the goal.

When they parted--the Deals were to go home by train at the
Wentworths' expense--Uncle Harry held Laura's hand and kissed her
twice.  "You're coming with me again.  You're coming East to stay
with me awhile," he said suddenly, as though he had just thought of
it, "isn't she, Carolyn?"

Aunt Carolyn smiled and said yes, that would be lovely.

Uncle Harry grew more enthusiastic.  He went up and down, see-saw
fashion, on his slim immaculate heels and toes.  "I'll send for
you.  Soon.  She can come, can't she, Eloise?"

Eloise was pleased and made no effort to hide it.  "It would be the
making of her."  She was earnest and grateful.

"I'll drop you a line when the time comes.  And send you a check.
I wouldn't want my little girl to be at any expense when she's
visiting me."  He shook hands again.  He sprang on to the running
board and into the car, tilting his youthful hat jauntily, winking
a bright brown eye at Laura, wagging a slim, highly polished finger
at her and saying:  "You'll hear from me, you rascal.  Probably
next summer, you'll hear from your Uncle Harry.  It'll be fun to
have you there--and a lot of your friends around."

Aunt Carolyn settled herself heavily in the big car, with Annette
fixing cushions and the footrest.  She had on a loose shapeless
dress for comfort in riding and wide flat oxfords.

The big car drove off with Uncle Harry waving his jaunty, boyish
hat.  Laura felt depressed.  There was something wrong--something
terribly wrong there--but she did not know just what it was.
Marriage ought not to be like that.



Chapter 8


When they were back in Cedartown, slipping comfortably into the old
routine, Laura realized that she was being swept along in the
stream of preparation that emptied as it were into the great gulf
of the University.  It seemed a terrible thing that she could not
stop it.  Why couldn't people do what they wished?  Sometimes she
walked past the big brick High School where she had spent so many
years, and looked longingly at the old building as one looks at the
familiar face of a friend.  She fancied it looked kind, motherly,
almost compassionate that she was to go away.  Strangely enough she
failed to remember that she once felt the same temerity upon
entering its portals that she was now feeling.

The clan all discussed her, long and openly, at Katherine's on a
Sunday afternoon in August.  The lovely little English home was
full of Deals: Aunt Margaret and Uncle "Doc" Baker and Grace Deal,
who was teaching in the University now, were there from Lincoln.
Aunt Isabelle and Uncle Harrison Rhodes were there on their annual
trip out from Chicago.  Uncle Mackenzie and Aunt Emma Deal, their
son Stanley and his wife and two children were there from Omaha.
John, Eloise, Laura and Trib were all there, as well as Jimmie,
Katherine and little Patty, six months old now and the center of
attraction.

"Going into a sorority, I suppose, Laura?"  It was Aunt Emma who
inadvertently began it.

Eloise immediately answered for her.  "Oh, yes, Laura's going into
a sorority."

"Mother," Laura was disturbed, embarrassed.  "I don't know that I
would be TAKEN."

Eloise's mouth set in a firm line.  "I think you'll be taken all
right."

Why did mother say that out before every one?  She might NOT be
pledged.

Others had something to say.  Immediately it became the topic of
conversation.  The Deals were always like that--noisy and
argumentative, each one shar