Chapter I: Yellow Gentians (1)

... The yellow gentian which has a very bitter taste.

NOAH WEBSTER

THE CHARIVARI

In one of the smallest farms in the Caledonia hills lived Obald Bronson, alone, and known down the countryside as the strange man who walked to the town to spare his one horse and who slept with no pillow. The people smiled at Obald when they met him walking to town. And he was so awkward and timid that they scorned him. Seven years before he had come among them from Norway, and that was all about him that they knew.

One day as a young Scotch farmer of the hills, Edward Muir, was driving a load of grain by Obald’s house, he saw a little smoke curling from a window and when he ran in, calling and shouting, fire was eating at a wall and Obald was not there. It was a wood-box fire, no more, and Edward was able to put it out. He had never been in Obald’s house and few of the Caledonia farmers had been there. He saw the room bare, neat, painted; food on the shelf, corn drying on a sunny board. Edward walked to the door of the inner room, wishing, or so he said to himself, to be sure that all was safe, and saw the bedroom, neat and tended and with no pillow, as they said. But it was the look of the third room which held him. For Obald, it seemed, had made for himself a parlor. He had a willow table, a willow chair, two painted chairs, a book, a china vase, and a new mahogany clock, ticking away. And under the window was a chest, whose walnut had been painted in wide orange bands so that, in the sun’s reflection from the white wall, the stripes shone like gold. On the lid there was rudely painted a bird, blue and pale blue, and a large blue letter C.

Edward stood staring at this chest when Obald entered the kitchen.

“Neighbor,” said Edward, “a little matter of fire brought me in here, but now I am staying because of this chest.”

As Obald listened to an account of the fire he said, “That was probably caused by my corncob pipe which must have fallen into my wood box.” And then he grew greatly excited and cried: “But for you my chest might have been burned! What can I do for you that have saved my chest?”

So Edward Muir, who was young enough to have boy’s curiosity and not old enough to be hypocritical, answered:

“You must not now talk of payment, but you can show me, if you like, what is in the chest.”

At this Obald Bronson’s face changed, he looked frightened, and on his forehead a red scar stood out which did not often show. Edward, seeing him so, cried: “But some other time, for my horses will not stand,” and ran back to his grain, but not before he had seen the relief on Obald’s face.

Edward told about the chest. He told his father, who thought that it must hold mementos; and his neighbors, who guessed papers or currency; and one wit who guessed bones. This man meeting Obald on the road, walking to save his old horse, cried out to him: “Obald! What is in your chest?”

Obald halted in his tracks and said: “What is that to you?” This tormentor made his look knowing and drove on.

Obald, who trusted every one, now had his door fitted with a lock, and set nails on his three windows. Now he went seldom to town, and when he went he rode the old horse, and rode him hard. One morning the animal was dead in the pasture. After that Obald was seldom seen on the road.

Because of this, and hearing from the locksmith about the new locks, the people talked the more, saying: “Either Obald is a miser or else ...” and shook their heads over him. Now, if they saw him, more than one cried: “Obald! We are coming to your house one night and find out a thing or two.”

Such words he never answered. Only his face grew red and his scar showed. Then they said: “Who knows how he came by that scar?” Some asked him this question, and laughed. They liked Obald, too, but he was so timid and awkward.

Some boys of the neighborhood, having heard the tales, came boldly one night and rapped at the glass, crying. “Give us some money. You’ve got lots of money!” Obald, whom no man had heard in anger, shouted at them to be gone, and so terrible was his voice that the boys were charmed. It was then that they said to one another:

“Let’s cha’vari Obald.”

This custom of the countryside offered to the newly married was the highest form of romance, next to love. So they prepared the bones, combs, tin pans, the cowbell, and the horse fiddle. And one midnight, gathered about Obald’s old house, they broke into such wild turbulence and clangor that for miles about the farmers heard the scraping, the groaning and the shrieks.

But apparently Obald did not hear. He did not come to the door or to a window. This angered the boys, who had wanted no more than to torment him into giving them money for a drink, so they pounded on his door shouting: “Obald! Give us two dollars from your chest!” But still he made no sign.

For two days there was about the house no look of life. On the third day Edward Muir came with his neighbors, and they broke down the door. Obald was lying dressed on his bed, but not these men and not the coroner could tell how he had come to his death.

In his mail box a quarter of a mile down the road they found a letter, which had been there for three days. It was from Finmarken and they read:

When this comes to you, I shall be on the ocean. I will come
straight to your town and you can meet me because I will send
you a telegram. Oh, Obald—we have waited for seven years, and
now the time that is so short seems so long. My love is the
same—it is more, Obald.

CHRISTOPHA.

Then they knew the meaning of the things that they had found in the chest: the fan, the mirror, the silver chain, the linen, the cloth for a woman’s dress.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“A swing under a fruit tree that seemed always in full bloom, some little dishes of pottery and a wooden doll—these gave me a happy childhood, at the hands of my parents, who were anxious but kind. I had a little schooling, not much, and then I worked in the mills and waited for the time to marry. That time came when I was nineteen and he was twenty-two, and we walked on the dike when the moon was big, and went to the fair with the others. We lived with my father and mother in the house where I was born, with the chard and melons of the garden meeting the creepers that grew over our front doorway.

“We should never have left the old country for we had it fine there. He was a ticket-taker in the Broadstone station, a good job he had, but his brother kept writing to him that America was the place to be and to make money. I says to him, ‘You go then, and if you like it, I’ll follow.’ He was two years in America before he let on whether he liked it and then he didn’t let on either, but he wrote to me to come over. It nearly killed me leaving my father and mother—for years I could see them as they looked when they said good-by—standing together on the flat stone, my father stiff and straight and my mother thinking the creepers covered up her crying.

“We had but the one little girl and she just big enough to run to meet me. She had eyes that never stopped their smiling, and yellow hair and a way that made strangers remember. That little thing and I, we came away together. But the big vessel was like a prison and the little one was frightened of the rolling and the pitching and she couldn’t taste the food. The fifth day out she sickened—we’d a doctor on board, too, but he didn’t know what that sickness was, made as it was three parts of fear and homesickness. The seventh day she died. That night they let me sit up beside her and the next day they came to take her away and I couldn’t go up to see—I couldn’t watch that thing they’d have to do. Then came a man of the ship who begged them to wait and he went down in the hold of the vessel and made a boatlike box, very small, and in that he laid my little one. Tender he was, like a woman. And he sealed her in, with narrow strips of the wood, and he made a sail of the sailcloth and fastened it on that strange boat. And when they’d let it down on to the water, they took me up to the deck. A little way off from the vessel it was by then—the tiny boat—rolling on the big waves, and it was sunset, so that the sail showed very white as the wind took it. So fast it went off over the water, so fast and so gay in the slanting sunlight. I watched it till the sun went, till the dark came and the little white dot went out. Then I Went below. All the night in my closed eyes I saw her in the sealed boat, on the big water, her that I had tended and watched, and I kept remembering how frightened she’d been of the rolling and the pitching that was all the tending she had now. I couldn’t stay in my berth and her out there, so I crept back up on deck again. And now the moon had come, and when I looked where I had left her, there was a sail in the far light—I know it was that sail I saw, and I watched till it died away again. Then I waited, looking toward where I knew it was, till the dawn came. When the dawn came there was only the gray water, empty.

“He met me at the boat, and I was alone, and then I had to tell him. But while I told him I saw he had something to tell me. He looked like a tramp—I had always seen him dressed as a ticket-taker or in his Sunday clothes. Now he was working as a day laborer at the wharf. He said: ‘God forgive me for bringing you over, but I couldn’t face it any longer alone.’ I looked at him; I thought of my baby, dead of the voyage, and of my father and mother—so far away. But I looked at him, and I says, ‘Where do we live, my dear?’ He took me to two high rooms with no light. I sat there with a stone in my throat. But I didn’t let on.

“I kept the two rooms tidy. I did all I could. The winters were hard, the summers were hard. In the fifteen years the four children came. In the fifty years since I’ve been in this country, they’ve grown to be men and women with homes to look after, and now they have grandchildren.

“Sometimes, sitting here in the Home where my four children pay out money to keep me comfortable, I think about them in their homes, where of course they can’t bother with me. I think of him, that worked himself to death long ago; and of my father and mother that I never saw again. And of her in the little sealed boat with the sail.

“Life is like that for some of us—and yet we want to live, just like other folks.”

BELNAP

From the moment that Alla went to work in the clubhouse, Belnap pursued her. She did all that she could to avoid him, but he would call her to his table and she dared not refuse the command of the head waiter. The head waiter was a woman of forty, a little lame, extremely capable, and kind to the girls. But when Alla explained to her why she wished to change from Belnap’s table, this woman said to her, “You are a fool,” and made no change.

Between Belnap’s orders of expensive dishes, he would tell her how much he loved her and how instead of serving him she might now be sitting beside him at some other table, ordering filet mignon and parfait. Under her voice she would answer him sharply:

“Save your breath, Mr. Belnap.” And aloud: “Shall your filet be brown or rare?”

“Rare. And Alla! I love you. I’ve a little house in the country waiting for you....”

“And it’ll fall to pieces waiting for me. French dressing or mayonnaise, Mr. Belnap?”

“French. You little thing, I have never loved any one as I love you. I shall never love any one again as I love you. Alla, don’t you understand....”

By then she would have taken his order down and would turn her back.

Twice Alla gave up the place, but both times they sent for her to come back and as her father was ill and in want, she returned to the club where the wages were enough to pay for their two rooms, and the tips provided the food for her father and herself. No one was more generous with tips than Belnap and often she dreamed of all that she could do for her father if Belnap’s purse were poured upon her, as he promised that it would be if only she would go with him to his little house in the country, among the apple trees. Also, he was an agreeable creature, and on the day when, between his order for a salad of pears stuffed with cheese, and his direction that there should be plenty of Bar-le-Duc he said: “Alla! I will give you a thousand dollars ...” on that day she hesitated for one instant and looked at him. She saw the deep furrows between his eyes, his cleft chin, his even teeth, and his look already triumphant. “At what hour do you finish here?” he breathed, but Alla cried quite loudly: “I finish before you’ve finished, Mr. Belnap,” so that he looked about him in annoyance. Alla was balancing on the table’s edge a tray of empty dishes which she let crash to the floor crying: “Now they will not call me back here!”

On the death of her father she married a clerk, and she lived for thirty odd years in meager comfort. Her husband was by turns kind and irritable, she was by turns patient and complaining, and their two children were by turns impish and angelic. The days were a routine of cleaning and preparing for something which seemed never to come about. Outside her house she knew that there were assemblages, disaster and stars, but these seldom concerned her, in the face of the needs of her children and her husband. All the days were the same.

At fifty, when her beauty was still marked, she heard from her doctor that the rich Mr. Belnap, now seventy, was living at a great hospital in the neighborhood. Her heart was kind and her life was humdrum, and so after brooding on the matter for days in the luxury of secrecy, she went secretly to the hospital and asked to see him.

Reading by a window in his brown bath gown, he looked handsome and ill. She saw the deep furrows between his eyes, his cleft chin, and his look, perpetually triumphant. Alla, the pleasant-faced dimpled woman, sat down before him and said: “Mr. Belnap, I want you to know that I have always thought of you kindly, for your tips brought my father many comforts. I am Alla, who waited on you at the City Club. Perhaps you do not remember....”

His face lighted, he took her hand, he cried: “Indeed I remember. And you are still beautiful.”

“But for you,” she continued, “many necessities even would have been denied my father.”

He lifted his hand. “But tell me,” he said, “have you sometimes thought of me?”

“Yes—and only with gratitude.”

He leaned toward her.

“And of the night when you first went with me into the country....”

She searched his face. His eyes were dreaming beyond her. He said with a sigh: “I have never forgotten those weeks in my little house with the apple trees.”

She sprang to her feet and cried: “Mr. Belnap, I am Alla—your old waitress at the City Club.”

“Yes,” he said gently, “you are Alla. Can you doubt that I remember?”

BILL

Bill was thirty when his wife died, and little Minna was four. Bill’s carpenter shop was in the yard of his house, so he thought that he could keep up his home for Minna and himself. All day while he worked at his bench, she played in the yard, and when he was obliged to be absent for a few hours, the woman next door looked after her. Bill could cook a little, coffee and bacon and fried potatoes and flap jacks, and he found bananas and sardines and crackers useful. When the woman next door said this was not the diet for four-year-olds, he asked her to teach him to cook oatmeal and vegetables, and though he always burned the dishes in which he cooked these things, he cooked them every day. He swept, all but the corners, and he dusted, dabbing at every object; and he complained that after he had cleaned the windows he could not see out as well as he could before. He washed and patched Minna’s little garments and mended her doll. He found a kitten for her so that she wouldn’t be lonely. At night he heard her say her prayer, kneeling in the middle of the floor with her hands folded, and speaking like lightning. If he forgot the prayer, he either woke her up, or else he made her say it the first thing next morning. He himself used to try to pray: “Lord, make me do right by her if you see me doing wrong.” On Sundays he took her to church and sat listening with his head on one side, trying to understand, and giving Minna peppermints when she rustled. He stopped work for a day and took her to the Sunday school picnic. “Her mother would of,” he explained. When Minna was old enough to go to kindergarten, Bill used to take her morning or afternoon, and he would call for her. Once he dressed himself in his best clothes and went to visit the school. “I think her mother would of,” he told the teacher, diffidently. But he could make little of the colored paper and the designs and the games, and he did not go again. “There’s some things I can’t be any help to her with,” he thought.

Minna was six when Bill fell ill. On a May afternoon he went to a doctor. When he came home he sat in his shop for a long time and did nothing. The sun was beaming through the window in bright squares. He was not going to get well. It might be that he had six months.... He could hear Minna singing to her doll.

When she came to kiss him that night, he made an excuse, for he must never kiss her now. He held her at arm’s length, looked in her eyes, said: “Minna’s a big girl now. She doesn’t want papa to kiss her.” But her lip curled and she turned away sorrowful, so the next day Bill went to another doctor to make sure. The other doctor made him sure.

He tried to think what to do. He had a sister in Nebraska, but she was a tired woman. His wife had a brother in the city, but he was a man of many words. And little Minna ... there were things known to her which he himself did not know—matters of fairies and the words of songs. He wished that he could hear of somebody who would understand her. And he had only six months....

Then the woman next door told him bluntly that he ought not to have the child there, and him coughing as he was; and he knew that his decision was already upon him.

One whole night he thought. Then he advertised in a city paper:

A man with a few months more to live would like nice people
to adopt his little girl, six, blue eyes, curls. References
required.

They came in a limousine, as he had hoped that they would come. Their clothes were as he had hoped. They had with them a little girl who cried: “Is this my little sister?” On which the woman in the smart frock said sharply:

“Now then, you do as mama tells you and keep out of this or we’ll leave you here and take this darling little girl away with us.”

So Bill looked at this woman and said steadily that he had now other plans for his little girl. He watched the great blue car roll away. “For the land sake!” said the woman next door when she heard. “You done her out of a fortune. You hadn’t the right—a man in your health.” And when other cars came, and he let them go, this woman told her husband that Bill ought to be reported to the authorities.

The man and woman who walked into Bill’s shop one morning were still mourning their own little girl. The woman was not sad—only sorrowful, and the man, who was tender of her, was a carpenter. In a blooming of his hope and his dread, Bill said to them: “You’re the ones.” When they asked: “How long before we can have her?” Bill said: “One day more.”

That day he spent in the shop. It was summer and Minna was playing in the yard. He could hear the words of her songs. He cooked their supper and while she ate, he watched. When he had tucked her in her bed, he stood in the dark hearing her breathing. “I’m a little girl to-night—kiss me,” she had said, but he shook his head. “A big girl, a big girl,” he told her.

When they came for her the next morning, he had her ready and her little garments were ready, washed and mended, and he had mended her doll. “Minna’s never been for a visit!” he told her buoyantly. And when she ran toward him, “A big girl, a big girl,” he reminded her.

He stood and watched the man and woman walking down the street with Minna between them. They had brought her a little blue parasol in case the parting should be hard. This parasol Minna held bobbing above her head, and she was so absorbed in looking up at the blue silk that she did not remember to turn and wave her hand.

LAST NIGHT

In the scale house at the Junction it was dark and safe. It was quiet, save for the lowing of cattle in the yard. He swung down his peddler’s pack and sat on that. From his pocket he drew the parcel that the tollgate woman had given him. He had not looked inside and here it was too dark to see what she had put into the sack. His fingers and tongue touched the soft substance—meat, cheese, he knew the tastes. Bread—and when he had finished, eating wolfishly as he did, he remembered that some of the bread had tasted sweetish. That must have been cake. He hadn’t noticed.

He sat in the darkness. All day his body had felt heavy and dead, but he had pushed it about, with his one leg. This, now, was rest. This was a kind of home. Not like men’s homes, but better than he had ever known, for he had known none. First he had been a bound boy, then a hired man. He had had a room over kitchens. For a summer or two he had tramped it, and slept in groves or in straw piles or on the hay in barns. But this place here, with no one about, was the same as his own.

He had marked it one morning, crossing the tracks near the stockyards, with his pack of needles and pencils. The door had yawned, open and friendly, and that night he had come back, had watched, had slipped inside. In the dry darkness he had slept, undisturbed by the shifting trains. He had slept here for many nights undisturbed, even lulled by the lowing cattle in the little local stockyard.

He lay down with his head on his pack. He shifted his wooden leg so that it did not hurt his knee. The lamps of the yard fell in a white square on the wall and he looked, feeling pleasure. Now, even if it rained, he was safe. The place smelled of cattle, but his clothes smelled horribly too, and he did not notice either smell.

The tollgate woman’s house had been clean. She had just finished giving her baby a bath. He supposed some one had washed him when he was a baby. Maybe not. He knew nothing about his life until he began himself to remember happenings—cuffs from the farmer, and the sharp voice of his wife. Except for swimming, he had washed but seldom in his life. The smell of cattle in the scale house did not bother him. And he liked to hear their lowing in the yard. He thought: “Company.”

He had made forty cents that day. In his pockets were three dollars. Once he had had three hundred dollars, all at one time. He had paid it down on a fortieth of the farm owned by the man for whom he worked. The girl who had worked there had promised to marry him. She had laughed a great deal, but she had promised. He remembered that time the most often of all. But when the farmer’s mortgage was foreclosed, they told him that he had no claim, and the girl had married a farm machinery agent. Emma. She had been thick and pretty, like the tollgate woman.

The tollgate woman had asked him three times whether he had erasers. He had been feeling heavy and dead and he couldn’t think. She had looked at him as if he didn’t know anything. He didn’t know much. Two winters, wasn’t it, at country school? He could write his name, but no one had asked him to write it since he could remember. He thought he could still make it—he thought how the letters went, imagined them in the square of light on the wall: Wm. Leeds. Curious that Wm. spelled William. Sometimes he had wondered who named him, but not any more. The tollgate woman had asked him his name and that at any rate he had answered quickly. “She smiled nice,” he thought, and slept.

He lay inert, breathing. His body was as complex as that of any man. If he dreamed, he dreamed of the same things as another.

In the night he woke. A long freight train had rolled into the Junction and was drawing noisily to a stop. Now rain was falling, streaming from the eaves of the little building. He heard, dozed, felt warm and safe and shut in. He wondered if this was what men felt like at home. He thought: “At home.”

He came wide awake at the sound of cries and clatter. A gate grated, the door of the scale house was shoved open, a car door slid, a man spoke angrily, there was the groping muffled fall of many feet. Cattle were being driven into the scale house. Outside a snarling voice protested that somebody was a fool, and the answer was that the yard was full. Cattle came blundering in.

Out there it was raining. He had no place to go. Here it was warm and dry. He edged to the little space back of the scales, held his pack before his knees, waited. From the doorway a lantern swung light over the crowding dusky backs. They came in, as many as the place could hold. The soft sides were pressed close to the scales, the feet trampled his wooden leg thrust stiffly out. The snarling voice swore because no more could be crowded in there. The door slid and slammed.

The place was filled with the odor of the cattle—their untended flanks and their sweet breath. They moved and shouldered, lowed like lost creatures, tossing their heads. The place was full of the odor and movement and breathing of beasts. There was not room enough for them to lie down. They stood, restless, trampling, bewildered.

Wm. Leeds sat behind the scales and thought about the cattle. To-morrow they would have their throats cut. But they had some place to go, some one had sent them there, some one had paid for them and had taken money for them, some one was expecting them somewhere. His mind clung to that. Some one was expecting them somewhere. And if they had their throats cut, that was what they had been raised for. What had he been raised for? He had wondered about that. Here it was again. Even the cattle....

Now, with the restlessness of the animals, he was unable to sleep. He heard them breathing, breathed with them, dozed, seemed to rise and fall on that strong breathing. They and he, safe and dry and shut in from the rain. But to-morrow they would do what was expected of them, while he.... Forty cents to-day. But what to-morrow? If it rained they didn’t like you to track up the steps of their homes.

After daylight they came for the cattle, came crowding in, driving out those nearest the door—two men, harsh and sleepy. When they saw Wm. Leeds they swore. “The lock-up for you,” said one. Wm. Leeds stood up stiffly—red, black, gray, brown, dirty.

“Look here,” he said, “ship me on with the critters. Weigh me and ship me on.”

The men, heavy, unshaven youths, stared at him. One, a wing of black hair in his eyes, jabbed at a cow with his elbow, struck it on a flank and said:

“Like to be butchered—eh?”

“Something,” said Wm. Leeds.

The two men laughed loudly. “Go to the devil your own way,” they told him magnanimously, and when the cattle were gone, they went away.

Now the scale house was foul and close. The man did not move from behind the scales. He felt heavy and dead. Down the yard he could see the cattle moving, leisurely, and with direction. They would be fed, watered, shipped on, butchered. Some one was expecting them. He dozed, feeling heavy and dead.

Toward night when some one came to clean out the scale house, there he was, grim and ugly to look at, heavy and dead. The yard man swore at the extra trouble. He was paid to take care of cattle.

The newspaper of the town whose name Wm. Leeds hardly knew, announced:

“The dead body of an unknown man was found in the scale house at the stockyards, where he had been making his home while he peddled needles and pencils about the town. He was apparently about seventy years of age and had lost one leg.”

He was buried by the town the next morning, not far from the time of the arrival of the cattle train at the Chicago stockyards. And the beef quotations were showing an active market.

BELLA

The Leels were the first family of Oderhill. For example, Mr. Leel might have consented to be pallbearer to any one in the town, but only the very few could have been invited to be pallbearer to Mr. Leel.

His monument was high, obelisk shaped and white. He was laid beside his wife, and there would be nobody else in the lot save Bella. If Bella married as of course, with her fortune, she would, then that smooth green of clover would never be disturbed.

But Bella was secretly known in Oderhill as queer. She was small, blue and white. She said strange things. If she were to come to some outrageous end, the town would say that it had always known she would; but if on the contrary she proved a person of distinction, then all would remember that they had discerned distinction in her. Oderhill could not understand her, but the family was so rich that every one took her for granted.

However, when Mr. Leel’s estate was settled, Oderhill was shaken. Nothing remained, save only his square brick house with the cupola and its old-fashioned furnishings.

Bella, who was now twenty-six, lived in the house and rented rooms to teachers. And the town, which had secretly found her queer, now saw her without the veil of the Leel wealth, and knew that she was queer.

Since she “entertained” no more, she was not entertained. She worked very hard and had time for few contacts. It became evident that Bella’s life was to consist of renting rooms to teachers.

But she knew nothing about her occupation. She often thought that like boarding-house keepers and mothers, she was utterly untaught in her profession. From the first it was difficult for her to make her expenses. Shortly she was in debt.

A real estate man named Emmons Decker had opened an office in Oderhill, and one day he came to see Bella. He had wondered if her house was for sale. She repudiated the idea with something of the grand manner of her mother. But this man was excessively polite, treated her with great consideration, said her name many times in direct address, and Bella felt that she was being treated as he had probably never treated any one before. So when he asked her to consider the matter and to let him confer with her again “on the proposition,” she assented. He returned to confer, and more than once.

But about the sale she was obdurate. She told him, often, who her mother and father were and how well they were connected. She showed him the silhouettes, the cameos, the seed pearls and the Paisley. And the site was desirable. In time Emmons Decker, with his manner of great consideration, asked her to marry him and she agreed. At the time she wondered why, but as she made up the teachers’ four rooms the next day, she knew why. And when the month’s bills came in, she realized that she could not have done better.

Before they were married tax time came, and Bella confided to her fiancé that she had not the money to meet her taxes. Decker now said that frequently in their business they paid the taxes of others. It was a business arrangement, he said, when she permitted him to pay hers. Now he seemed in no haste to be married, business took him to the west, he returned toward tax time of the next year and again she permitted him to pay. Three times he did this during the engagement; and then he broke the engagement, invoked the state law in tax titles, took possession of the Leel house, and sold it.

Bella rented a room over a store. She was now thirty-three or four and without training for anything. The man who kept the store had no home, managed a makeshift home in the rear of his store. Bella’s room was neat and comfortable, it had the Leel parlor curtains and a Leel lamp, and once when she cooked something savory from a can, she shared the meal with her landlord, who was lonely himself. He could not afford to marry. In a little while Oderhill was scandalized.

It now seemed incredible that she could be Bella Leel—her clothes, her furtive walk, her hair. All those who had felt her to be queer were triumphantly justified, and those who had thought that she was so queer that she might amount to something, now thought that there must have been bad blood in Mrs. Leel. When the man left her, Bella sold little things at the doors—dust cloths and soap. In ten years Bella was the lost soul of the town.

At fifty-five she was taken to the county house and at sixty she died. And as they were about to bury her in the county cemetery, Emmons Decker, now a first citizen of Oderhill, remembered the Leel lot and the monument. There was no doubt that Bella Leel had the right to be buried beside her parents.

Decker and other first citizens conferred concerning a funeral. No church could receive that clay. No home in Oderhill offered it harbor. The little town had no funeral chapel. But there chanced to be an empty store in the main street, and they chose this. They seated it, spread down a rug, and brought in a victrola. At the hour of the service several who recalled the Leels were present, a retired minister preached about the woman at the well, and the victrola played “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.”

On the Leel lot, near the monument, obelisk shaped and white, the smooth green of the clover was disturbed to make her grave. There they laid Bella, at sixty, the lost soul of the town, beside the dust of her mother and father, of the first family of Oderhill. But Bella’s grave has no headstone. They decided merely to carve her name on the obelisk.

CHERRIES

The moon being very bright, Angus Sharp asked Nellie to drive to Wild Rose. It was already eight o’clock and she said that a bushel of cherries had just been delivered for canning, and her mother and she were to pit them that evening; but the next morning she could go. So Angus stayed and helped with the cherries. They all ate of the fruit, which was exceedingly ripe and red, though Angus said that Nellie’s lips were redder and sweeter. It was not yet a fortnight since Nellie had promised to marry him.

The next day Albert Jolly drove down the street late in the afternoon, with his new trap, dark blue and shining. And Nellie was on the front lawn. So Albert stopped at the curb and leaped down, himself dark blue and shining, and asked Nellie to drive to Partridge for dinner. Partridge was only ten miles away, Nellie was tired from her day with the cherries, there was in the house nothing good for dinner, Albert was an old friend, and Nellie said that, providing she could be back by eight o’clock, she would go.

The drive to Partridge was pleasant, but there were detours, the dinner was delayed, they met some friends, and when she reached home the moon had risen, Angus had already called for her, and had gone.

“I told him that you drove to Partridge with Albert,” said her mother. “Wasn’t that all right?”

Nellie sent for Angus the next morning and tried to explain. She said: “You know that there is nobody but you ...” and such things. But Angus was literal and he said that there was Albert, too. She told about the years down which she and Albert had been pals, no more;—and Angus was not comforted. And of how she had longed to take the air after the fatigues of the cherry-canning, and Angus said that he would have taken her for the air. And of how proud Albert was of his new trap—but as the buggy in which Angus took Nellie about was years old, Angus was unimpressed. He said, and more than once, that they were engaged. At last Nellie became annoyed, answered that to be engaged was not to be deceased, and so fell into silence. Before the evening was finished their engagement was broken.

If in that consummation Nellie had no sense of finality, this did not appear in her voice or in her face or in her farewell. The moon was shining brightly on the porch when Angus went away forever. Nellie expected him to call her the next morning, to arrive the next evening. Because of her expectation she even refused an invitation to a picnic in Partridge. But Angus did not return.

He went straight to May Clinton. May was large, pink and gentle. In his passionate desire to show Nellie his indifference, Angus asked May to marry him, and she consented. The third moon from the time of cherries shone down indifferently on May and Angus for their honeymoon.

Angus and May lived in a frame house for twenty years. He had never loved her, and she had married him for a home. Her placidity soon enraged Angus and he enjoyed trying to make her jealous. He succeeded very well. He would make a show of having received letters of whose contents he would tell her nothing, he returned from journeys and pretended to make mysterious allusions; and at last he even talked sadly of Nellie and openly called her his lost love. May’s gentleness grew stale, then acid, her face sharpened and flattened and became quilted with wrinkles and trails of tears. Angus smiled at her, two rows of white teeth gleaming through a black beard, and called her “darling” and “treasure” in a tone of unspeakable rancor. When their five children were still in school, he fell from the roof of his barn, where he was trying to rescue some young birds from a hawk, and was instantly killed.

He left little property, May had none, and the five children were taken out of school and put to work. In a few years Elmer had become a carpenter, Floyd a grocery clerk, Lucy a dressmaker, Amy had died of tuberculosis there in the village and Eloise had “run away” with a handsome man who sold swings.

May, the mother, grew sullen and bitter, remained indoors, closed the frame house against all visitors, took out her telephone, and lived on for twelve years like that. Before she died, Elmer, Floyd and Lucy were struggling to raise their own families of some size—Arthur and Annie, Jessie and Cora, little Angus, little May, little Elmer and the like. Lucy and her brood were under the roof of the frame house—“not large enough, really, for three generations,” as Lucy said.

As for Nellie, at whose home the bushel of cherries had been delivered, she used to speculate on how it might have been if Eph, the express boy, had not brought that bushel basket to her mother until the next morning. But this she soon forgot for she married the chief banker of the town, had a beautiful home and an idiot son.

THE PIECE

Bilger came home from town and turned into the narrow cement walk leading to his house. His daughter May was practicing at the piano, and the air which she played came to him through the open window. Over this window a grapevine grew on a little lattice, and beneath were lilacs. On a porch post there was a vine whose name he did not know and the vine had many flowers. Bilger stood for a few minutes looking at his house, listening to his daughter’s music; and his heart filled with happiness.

The air which she played was not one which he had known, but he liked it. He beat time to it with his foot and his head. May was seventeen, but she was just beginning to “take,” as the village denominated musical instruction, and Bilger had bought her a grand piano. He entered the house and listened by the hall door. She did not like to be disturbed.

“What was that piece you were playing?” he asked her at dinner.

“What piece?” she inquired and added proudly: “I play several.”

“It went—_you_ know—ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, up and down, kind of sad,” Bilger explained.

She said: “Papa, don’t be ridiculous.”

But after dinner, when he asked her to play to him, and she played all the six pieces that she knew, she came inevitably to the one that he liked. At his insistence she played it over and over.

But he could not remember its name. And next time he asked her for it, calling it “that slow one that I liked—_you_ know,” May said: “Oh papa, I have so many pieces. And here is a new one.”

Bilger and his wife and May were so comfortable in their little home, and Bilger was so proud of them and of his grand piano, that death seemed irrelevant. And when May fell ill and in ten days died, Bilger could not believe in his loss. His comfortable elderly wife was immediately convinced—for twenty years she had looked for disaster and when it overtook them she went about with an air of resigned familiarity. But Bilger was thunderstruck. He! And May! But above all, _he_!

In the first day or two of her illness, when she was still about the house, he had asked May to play the piece. And she had done so, with queer complaisance not in the least like May. Every time that she played it she told him the foreign name, which he said over—with his own vowel values—and instantly forgot.

Before May’s funeral he said to her mother: “Couldn’t we have them at—_you_ know—the funeral—play that piece May used to play—I guess you know the one.”

She turned on him her solid-colored face, with its flat mats of shadow beneath the eyes, and said:

“I don’t know what one you mean, but I’m almost sure it wouldn’t be suitable for the funeral.”

He said no more.

He missed May extravagantly. He had been to her a sealed father and she to him had been a sealed daughter; but he missed her.

It was not her virtues that he missed, nor her meanings, for the first he had but assumed and of the second he had no idea. However he missed her bobbed hair when she shook her head, and her whistle to the parrot, and her way of laughing with her eyes closed. And he missed the piece that he liked.

It seemed to him that if he could hear that piece played on the piano, he would have comfort, he would almost have May again. He turned all her music, but he himself knew not one note from another and to him all those sheets were dumb. He tried to make her mother know, but she said: “You remember I am not musical.” He asked one of May’s friends to play May’s pieces for him, but none sounded like the one that he sought. This young woman said: “You’d have to sing it better than that. It doesn’t sound like anything, Mr. Bilger.” Then he went to her music teacher. To this distinguished organist Bilger observed earnestly:

“It went—_you_ know—ta-ta, ta-ta-ta—kind of sad, but not all sad. It had one glad part. And it went up and down.”

“My dear Mr. Bilger ...” said the organist.

“It went like this,” said Bilger, and sang it, he thought.

“It must have been something that she taught herself,” her teacher suggested.

Then one day Bilger heard it on a street piano. He could not be mistaken—there it was, up and down, sad part, glad part. He demanded of the street piano man the name of that piece. The man hunched eloquent shoulders, but for a quarter he played it over and over again. Bilger stood on the curb and whistled it, rushed home through the streets whistling it, and appeared whistling before his wife, and then shouted passionately: “That’s it—_you_ know—that’s the one.”

But she said: “That doesn’t sound like a tune.”

“I’ll have that piano fellow up here,” cried Bilger, and rushed back to the spot where he had listened.

The street piano man, however, was gone. Bilger stood on the curb and tried to hear him on some other street, but he heard nothing. And when Bilger turned home again, comforted that now at least he could whistle that air, the air had left him. But he thought: “Sometime I’ll get it back and whistle it to some of these symphony fellows. _They’ll_ know what it is.”

THE SPIDER

The little town is called Sunland and it lies in the mountains of the western United States. The circulars which came to the Iowa town said that Sunland was located on the richest soil of the warm areas of the Sierra foothills; that all fruits and vegetables would grow at a touch; that the climate was made by God and behaved as if it knew it; and that the land was cheap beyond dream—and within thirty days would be advanced in price to more than double the present cost. It was, the circulars concluded, an opportunity such as all America had never before afforded, and only a few localities were permitted to share in the prize. Would the reader of the circulars apply at once?

Matthew Pendleton read every word to his wife Liza. For years they had dreamed of California. Now they were sixty-four and sixty and if they were to make a change it must be made soon. Bill Miller had gone out alone and had grown rich on his lands. They themselves were childless, they had only themselves to risk, but the eighty acres in the Iowa corn had been their home for forty years. They had made grow with their own hands the shed, the bay-window, the porch. In the garden were strawberries and asparagus and zinnias; there were an orchard and a grapevine which yielded them their preserves and jelly. Liza thought of these things and said:

“We might go for only a little while and see how we liked it.”

“We must have the farm money to put in the land, if we buy,” said Matthew.

“We might go without buying first....”

“The offer is for thirty days!”

She was silent. She looked at his hard hands. “Do as you think best, Matthew,” she said at last.

It was early spring and the crop was not yet planted. There was no difficulty in selling the eighty acres, though Bart Mellon had tried this long time to sell his farm and could not do so. Their furniture was old and they sold that too. Only Liza kept certain things and packed them in her trunk—her meat chopper, her cherry pitter, her aluminum kettle, and her two glass pie plates. And just before the men came for the auction, she suddenly wheeled to the side porch the plush couch and the plush chair and put with them the large colored Beatrice Cenci, whose name she did not know. Then she ran down the road to Bart Mellon’s and asked their boy to come with his cart and set these things in his father’s barn.

“We were fixed nice, Matthew,” she said, as the last of the belongings were taken away by their new owners.

“Yes,” said Matthew, “but think of how nice we’re going to have it.”

“Maybe,” said Liza.

The tourist train was to them luxury. The journey was even better than motion pictures, Matthew thought. They ate from their basket, listened to every one, hardly spoke all the way across the desert, and looked everywhere with shining eyes.

“See, Liza, how nice we have it,” Matthew sometimes said.

“Maybe,” said Liza.

They reached Sunland at noon in the blazing blue and yellow of the western spring. They went down the street, slowly, for they could not breathe easily any more when they walked. Under the ferny acacias they made their way to the land office. There a spidery man with curved legs and a stiff neck called to a lounging boy to take them to their land. The lounging boy, with a manner of indifference amounting almost to unconsciousness took them in a neat car.

Under the acacias and the pepper trees, by the live oaks and the eucalyptus they drove at such speed that they were terrified and saw nothing.

“Here’s the land,” said the boy, when he stopped the car.

He waved his hand to ten acres lying up, up the steep green foothills. It was perpendicular land.

“I don’t understand,” said Matthew. “They said rich land....”

“None richer,” said the boy, and tried to yawn, but missed it.

The man with the curved legs and the stiff neck later pointed out to them that all the statements of the circular were true. And they were true, literally true.

All night Matthew and Liza talked. “We can put up a cabin on the strip by the road,” Matthew said, “and spend the summer. We got our pride.”

“We can go back and buy Bart Mellon’s farm,” said Liza.

In the sudden Sierra dawn he looked at her, lips parted, and said nothing.

As they drove from the station to Bart Mellon’s farm a fortnight later, Matthew said:

“Now we begin all over, where we were, forty years ago.”

“No, Matthew,” said Liza. “We got a plush couch, a plush chair, a picture, my meat chopper, my cherry pitter....”

“We’ll have it quite nice again,” said Matthew.

“Yes!” cried Liza.