Chapter I: Yellow Gentians (2)

The man with the curved legs and the stiff neck bought offices in other towns and continued to do a brisk business.

VOICES

Milly was fifteen years old when she went to work for Mrs. Pettigrew. The house was large and beautiful, and there were several servants, all highly specialized; and Milly’s job was to do all the things which they refused to do. When in the spring the chamber maid refused to bring down the wicker furniture from the storeroom because the verandah was the care of the parlor maid; and when the parlor maid said that the storeroom was on the second floor and out of her hands, then Milly brought down the wicker furniture. But the work was pleasant, for she helped them all, on three floors and in the basement, and had not the burden of deciding whether this was her job or that, for she was engaged to do anything.

One morning Mrs. Pettigrew ordered Milly to select some old garments from a certain trunk. The sharp tone of her mistress was Milly’s chief dismay; and when she would be happily at her work, and the sharp thin tone would come ordering her, Milly would tremble, and at the back of her head there would flicker a fiery pain. She longed to say, “Please, please do not speak to me so,” but she dared not, having been so highly recommended by her agency. She went now to the attic and selected the old garments, as the sharp voice bade, and brought them to the limousine waiting at the door. Seated beside her mistress in the blue velvet lined car, Milly was glad of the beauty and the bearing of Mrs. Pettigrew, of her perfumes and her gown.

They took the old clothes to the workhouse for two women who were to be released, a mother and her daughter. Mrs. Pettigrew and Milly saw them, spotted and underfed and defiant. The daughter said openly that if it had not been for her mother, she should not have been where she was; and when the older women ordered her raucously, “Shut up, Little Varmint,” the girl wept. But they both thanked Mrs. Pettigrew quite nicely for the serge suits and the hats with ornaments.

“What are they going to do now?” Milly asked, as the limousine rolled away.

“How on earth should I know?” Mrs. Pettigrew cried sharply.

“I was wondering,” said Milly.

With mounting irritability Mrs. Pettigrew said that they had not asked her what _she_ was going to do and she saw no reason why she should ask them. And her voice was so hard and sharply edged that Milly felt fear and a physical nausea.

In a little time, a matter of months, it became clear that nearly everything Milly said irritated her mistress. Milly was pink and full, like a dahlia, and pretty, too. But she spoke with so enormous a distinctness. She would say loudly and nakedly in the hearing of others: “Shall I cut off the buttons?” before an old gown was to be sent to some one; or, “Is the yesterday cake good enough for tea?” And when she had her reply she invariably added: “I was wondering....” At last everything that she said annoyed Mrs. Pettigrew, who would answer her with a strangled irritation as sad as violence. And the arrows in the tone of her mistress pierced Milly, set her to trembling, gave her the fiery pain flickering at the back of her head and a great weight on her chest.

One evening Mrs. Pettigrew said to Milly: “Take down the rose gown and give me the silver brocade slippers.”

“The old slippers?” Milly asked, with enormous distinctness.

“Certainly _not_!” cried Mrs. Pettigrew, jarred and mangled not by the words but by their pitch.

“I was wondering....” said Milly trembling.

Mrs. Pettigrew rose from her dressing table. She too was trembling. She spoke in a terrible voice:

“Milly, I cannot stand it. Your voice drives me frantic. You’ll have to go. I give you your notice. You’ll have to go!”

“Yes’m,” said Milly. “How much is my notice? A week—yes’m. I was wondering....”

Mrs. Pettigrew did not pry into Milly’s affairs. Milly had no home. Work was scarce. In six weeks she had used her savings. The demands of society faced her: shoes, a winter coat, food. A man said: “I’ll be your friend.” These words seemed beautiful to Milly until she understood. But she was ill and hungry and despised by Mrs. Pettigrew, and she had read in Mrs. Pettigrew’s books that such friendships happened. She went with him.

As the years passed, and other such friendships followed, she ran the gamut of the garden—from dahlia, ripe with summer, to frowsy autumn-flawed chrysanthemum.

At forty she was nearing the end of a sentence in the workhouse when a lady came to her cell. This lady had now a face like an eagle, but Milly knew her winter beauty, her bearing and her perfume.

“My poor woman,” said Mrs. Pettigrew kindly, so kindly, “what brought you here?”

“I lost my job,” Milly answered.

“Yes? Well? Go on....” Mrs. Pettigrew pressed her. “I meant, you know, in the first place....”

“I lost my _job_,” Milly repeated.

“But what else?” Mrs. Pettigrew encouraged her sharply.

Her tone set Milly to trembling in the old way. From out the perfect anonymity of her battered face, Milly answered:

“It was on account of my voice—my voice....”

As Mrs. Pettigrew left, she said to the attendant: “The poor thing—had she, then, been a singer?”

They were interrupted by Milly calling loudly down the corridor her forgotten thanks for the suit which Mrs. Pettigrew had brought, and the hat with an ornament.

THE BLUE VELVET GOWN

My mother and I used to walk, in the mornings, in a pleasant valley near our home, and we would stop at a cottage where lived a woman who did our laundry work and who often told my mother her story. And I remember everything she said though this was fifty years ago.

Blue velvet, she said, became her best, and it was blue velvet that she was wearing when she broke the seal of Barlo’s letter. He wrote a hard hand, biting into the paper: Might he see her for only a moment on a matter most important to himself. “I am not known to you, I take care of the harnesses in the coach house, and sometimes I have brought round the horses. But do not refuse this....” She told the messenger that she would come to the south terrace in an hour, as the letter asked.

Sitting through the long dinner with the other ladies-in-waiting to the old princess, and with the gallants of the little court, she wondered what this stranger should have to say to her, he whose writing was so savage and bit so deep into the page. She looked at the white hands of the little lord beside her, heard the fulsome praise and pretense of the others, saw the old princess doze, and she scorned them all. Of the ladies in silver and rose she thought: “Who has ever asked aught of you?” When they called her to the harpsichord, she escaped them and stepped to the south terrace as the moon was rising red, above the thin young trees. The castle lay long and dark, its hundred windows shrouded, by moving creepers, from the moon.

In a full play of the moonlight he was waiting, and he came toward her, and his voice ate its way into her as his writing had scored the page:

“I am in danger. I leave here to-night. It is because of the things that I believe make a man’s freedom. These many months when I have brought the horses round, I have read your face. I have a young sister. I would beg you sometimes to see her—to let her sometimes be with you....”

“You leave England? You go....”

“To America. Where a man may think his thoughts.”

Beyond the belief of any one he was beautiful, tall, strong, possessing. She looked up at him, saying nothing while he talked much of freedom and his hatred of courts. But his words faltered, and she being so fair, and he so near, suddenly he stooped to her hand and whispered: “God forgive me, I lied. I think that my sister is safe enough. The truth is that I wanted once to see you near—and alone. Now I can ask no more....”

He began, but not with his eyes, to take leave of her; and since this was good-by, abruptly he told her of his old passion for her, of how she had long sung in his being, how he had watched outside the hundred windows for her face. He was like no other man, he with his soft ways, his bigness, his biting eyes, and his rough clean clothes. The little philandering lords within the castle were a weariness; and before this man crying out to her but with no words, she held her bright head like a sudden banner, and she said: “Why do you not ask me to go with you ...” as a man might have spoken in those days. In that moment she was in his arms. He whispered: “If I do not escape those men who love not freedom ...” and even: “There is a price upon my head.” But she was in his arms and she answered: “You _shall_ escape them. I can answer for that.”

When he strode away in the moonlight, then returned and lingered and drove himself from her side, she said to him that for this she had lived her life.

When the two sailed on a tramp steamer, she had with her all the gowns and trappings that she had worn at the court of the old princess, together with hose and underthings, silken and pale, slippers of silver and gold, and many ornaments of French paste. He asked only that she bring the blue velvet gown that she had worn that night on the terrace. Thus she left her people—her mother, father, home.

On the ship Barlo owned to her that he had no sister. “I meant to bring you with me,” he boasted.

They lived far inland in America, where the pioneering was yet in progress, and ways were wild. Barlo made with his own hands a rude home, she did what she could to keep it neat and warm, but it was little and bare. Instead of plate and flowers there were tin and oilcloth; and there was water to fetch from the spring and wood from the pile at the clearing’s edge. She bore and raised children—six that lived, children who loved beauty and saw none but the beauty of the wilderness and the sky with its yellow wilds of light. At night Barlo would come home, cast down his ax, and stretch out by the fire; and their talk would be of grain and hides and the beasts in the shed.

Once when she told him that a stranger had come asking for him, he turned a queer solid-color, so that she cried out: “_Was_ it for the freedom of your thought that a price was on your head?” But his eyes and his voice bit into her so cruelly that she never asked again. Yet in his own overpowering fashion he loved her; and to her all nights might have been as that first night, on the south terrace.

While yet the children were little, a letter came to him, brought by a messenger riding hard, and she seeing his stress broke the seal and read. Thus from that morning she knew why indeed Barlo had been forced to leave England. She sent the messenger away with food in his wallet, resealed the letter, met her husband with her smile, asked nothing, and even turned away while he read. Nor after the reading did she let a questioning silence fall, but spoke casually of the beasts in the shed.

When now in haste he changed their dwelling place, and went driving west and camping by the way, she acquiesced with no question. When she saw him build in the new cabin a wood box of logs, and having a part where a man might lie, she seemed not to notice. She lived beside him, saying not a word of what she knew.

Now they were come among the mines, to a place rougher and wilder than before, and she would sit through the evening, watching her children at their books. For they grew and loved beauty, and they had none to see. So one day, in her husband’s absence, she took the children into her bedroom and spread before them those gowns and trappings which she had brought with her from overseas—the blue velvet and the gold and silver cloth, the colored hose and the slippers, and the ornaments of French paste. Sitting in the kitchen with its one window toward the dense wood, she told them of the house in which she had lived, whose hundred windows were shrouded, by creepers, from the moon. “And the summer palace had a window for every day in the year,” she told them proudly. The children listened, slender aristocratic things, the girls like lilies, the boys like blades. Then all the eyes in the kitchen dreamed of beauty.

Barlo too dreamed, but he muttered in his sleep, woke crying out in fear, and he began to speak to her with oaths. To forget his deep shadows, he brought strong liquors from the town. He grew afraid to venture out, he sat all day by the stove; he sent his children for the liquor. At this she remonstrated, and he snarled, and struck her.

One night when the food was eaten and there was nothing for her to cook, she put on her blue velvet gown, the silver slippers, and her ornaments on her shoulders and her arms, and she came and sat by Barlo, before the kitchen range. He looked at her and burst into weeping, rose and overturned a chair, cursed, and flung out of the house.

She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched him go. The moon shone above the thick black of the wood, and surged on the little kitchen, with its single window bare. She saw him stride away, his feet biting into the trail, his body boring into the dark. She did not see him again.

When it became clear that he would not return, she moved their few belongings nearer to the little town where she could sell her butter and eggs. But there was not enough for the seven mouths, and she began to do laundry work for the well-to-do of that place. On the wall of the General Store she advertised: “Monica St. Mount, laundry.” It was so that she contrived to send all her children through the school of the town. Then they went out, one by one—somewhere in America—to find beauty; all save the youngest, a lordly girl, who stayed to help her mother.

One morning when my mother and I had walked across our pleasant valley and stopped at her door, we found this young daughter on the door step. At once she explained without emotion: “My father has been arrested. He had gone back to England. We have just heard that he is there, in gaol.” Mechanically my mother protested his innocence, but the child said no, quite quietly; and in a voice of incredible maturity she named his crime. I remember how my mother paled, and the little girl led us to the tiny kitchen.

There, over her tubs, Monica St. Mount toiled, and at our entrance she glanced down at herself with an apology.

“You must forgive my costume,” she said, “I’ve really nothing else to wear, any more.”

She was washing her clothes, in the soap and the steam, and wearing a blue velvet gown, richly trimmed in the fashion of a bygone day.

TOMMY TAYLOR

When Aunt Parmenter Taylor was dying, she said something which nobody could distinguish, and she died with the words locked by her lips. So her favorite nephew, Tommy, who had hoped to inherit some of her property, got nothing but the cherry chest of drawers which she had always said that he must have. He now had nothing with which to finish the home that he had begun to build while Aunt Parmenter’s cancer was yet in its first stages.

From nine black windows and one black door Tommy’s cream brick house looked over Belle Prairie—a shell of a house, its two great parlors, its dining room, its library and its four “chambers” standing within their outer walls and their lath. But the kitchen was finished and two low bedrooms and a loft overhead, and for six years the family had lived there: Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, Lucien, Amy and Jane.

Every time that Tommy went to the town, he heard the people say: “Wonder when Tommy’ll get his house done.”

Every time that Mrs. Taylor went to church she heard the women whisper: “No signs of the house being finished yet, is they? Beulah Taylor, she won’t lord it over us yet awhile.”

And at dances, the young folk said boldly to Lucien and Amy and Jane: “Hurry up and get your house done, why don’t you, so you can have a housewarming.”

These gibes the Taylors took variously: Amy and Jane with secret tears but unabated hope; Lucien sullenly so that his birthmark looked purple; Tommy’s wife with a head held high in public, an appearance of cheerful expectation before her friends; and toward her husband a neutrality in peace, but an occasional piercing thrust in moments of domestic dissonance. It was Tommy himself for whom the situation was both dart and poison. For though he was gentle and hopeful, yet when his crops failed for the fourth time, when investments stood still, when he faced a fifth winter behind the nine black windows and the one black door, he became unbearable about the house, and gave his family to understand that this ill luck was in some direct way traceable to them. So his wife said placidly: “That may be—since we’ve a husband and father not like other folks.” Then they had a black hour—Amy and Jane, pink, white and golden, feeling the need of golden feathers to match; and Lucien, who said that he was sick of being the joke of Belle Prairie, and flung out of the house, his birthmark glowing.

Now Tommy pulled down the burlap which they had hung over the door of the embryo dining room, and he stalked alone through his naked rooms, large and lordly, high, and set with the hollow threats of fireplaces. Here he had dreamed of entertaining his neighbors about a freighted table; in the “study” were to have been ranged rows of bright books, and there he had meant to keep his accounts, which now he had in the back of the almanac. He tiptoed, as he always did in here, across the rough flooring awaiting its hard wood in the two vast parlors. It was twilight and from within these rooms the windows seemed like soft faces pressing from the outside upon his walls, and mocking him for his ineptitude. And his two hundred and forty acres waiting about the unfinished house which they had failed to promote, lay like dust whereon he had breathed in vain. Tommy Taylor, the gaunt brown man, with the carriage of a gentleman and a telltale looseness of wrist and indecision of gesture, stood up and beat with his fist on the top of Aunt Parmenter’s cherry chest of drawers which was indeed the only bit of furniture in the rooms on which a man could beat his hands, if he wanted to.

“I’m damned,” he said aloud, “if I can keep on like this.”

He unbolted the wooden door over the aperture which was to have been his front entrance, swung himself loosely down from the high lip o£ the threshold, and entered the night. At Belle Prairie the hotel keeper lent him a little money; he made his way to the city a hundred miles away, and from there notified his family that he was going west. “I shall make the money to finish the house, or....” he wrote, and wrote no more. And though he wrote inconclusively, and they thought that he would be back in a few days, he did not return.

Tommy Taylor stayed in the west for seven years. Meanwhile Lucien ran the farm, and made no more than would hold together the four souls and the four bodies. And this was tragedy, for there was Bethna, who waited for Lucien through those seven years, and would not come into the little kitchen to live with his family—no, not even if he finished off one of the chambers, as he hoped in time to be able to do. Amy and Jane reached their late twenties, and pink and white and golden though they were, not a boy on the prairie asked them in marriage. For none of the boys, presumably, cared to be drawn into that great cream brick web, looking so hopefully from its nine eyes for somebody to come and share the heavy burden of itself. There were Dan and Harvey, who “shone round,” Belle Prairie said, longer than the others, and at last went off to the county seat and married school teachers. And after that Amy and Jane dropped out of the dances and seldom went in town. Mrs. Taylor was rarely seen, working as she did early and late in the kitchen and the lean-to, the spring house, the smoke house and the chicken yard, littered behind the rearing walls of her potential home. If sometimes driving home in the buggy back of the old gray, she dreamed her old dream of the pair of grays which should come pacing up the maple drive to a comfortable porch, she said nothing, and merely alighted, a broad-backed shabby woman, at her kitchen door. But when she met her neighbors, she held her head high: “Good news from Mr. Taylor—yes. But he’ll not be back for another year. No, we shall do nothing about the house till he’s here.”

Seven years, Amy and Jane were thirty, Lucien thirty-two, their mother toward sixty. Now the eaves of the house were showing their lack of paint, the shingles had mangy spots, and burdock and Bouncing Bet were netted before the front door. Walking at twilight under the apple trees about the house, the women heard passers say: “Tommy Taylor’s Folly.”

Then, on a Saturday when the streets of Belle Prairie were filled, there he was back, shaking hands with every one. Tommy Taylor, gentle and pleasant and glad. And when had he looked so prosperous, so distinguished, so well-dressed, so well-shod? His hands were loose-wristed and wandering as always, but his eyes were so clear and so hopeful, his carriage so erect, and his coat so well-pressed that Belle Prairie said at its supper table: “Tommy Taylor’s come back, to finish his house.”

At his own supper table, Tommy Taylor was being served to a spring chicken perfectly fried; and he was saying quite gently:

“No, I haven’t got near enough to finish it, and I never would have had if I’d stayed there for forty years. But I’ve come to see that I’ve got a pretty good thing in this farm—no reason why I shouldn’t make it pay now and go on with the house, in a year or two. Once ...” he eyed his wife dreamily, “once I thought of investing in a fruit farm out in the Bitter Root and sending for you and the children. I could see a fortune, right there. But I guess I can make the farm go now, if we all turn in—and then, in a year or two, we’ll finish the house.”

At this Lucien, his son, began to laugh—flung back his head until his neck was long, and laughed very loudly, looking at the ceiling. After a moment of struggle, Amy and Jane joined him, and the laughter of the three, which should have been young laughter, free and wild, came from them shrill and gusty, like winds angry and not at play.

“The damned house,” said Lucien. “Damn it, damn it....”

He rose and caught the lamp and strode toward that door with its mock portière of burlap, and the girls sprang up and followed. “No, children, no, no, no....” said the mother feebly, and followed after them—her children in the thirties, laughing and laughing through the empty rooms, with the red glass lamp held high. And Tommy Taylor followed too, looking distinguished and prosperous and bewildered, his hands making wavering gestures as he went through that dining room where no neighbors came, that study in which he had no accounts to keep, and those parlors on whose walls the windows laid their faces, like something from without.

Lucien shouted: “It’s killed mother. It’s robbed the girls. It’s done for Bethna and me—and what has it brought you? You’re a hopeful old man....”

The red lamp tipped, and his mother took it from him as she would have taken a danger from a child. And Lucien, standing as he was by Aunt Parmenter’s cherry chest, his birthmark red and twisted, flung up his arm and brought it crashing down on the chest’s flat top.

Something slid and thudded, dropped so sharply to the floor that they all looked down. The bottom of the chest had fallen out, and from under the lowest drawer a shallow drawer lay tipping. It was Mrs. Taylor who drew it out and saw lying there, unwrapped, piles upon piles of neatly folded greenbacks bearing the heady yellow design of gold certificates.

“Tommy!” she said.

They squatted about the drawer and the red lamp on the floor. They lifted the piles, ran them through, estimated—twenty-two piles wide, ten rows deep, twenty twenty-dollar bills in a pile.... It was Mrs. Taylor who whispered capably:

“Eighty thousand dollars.”

“Aunt Parmenter,” said Tommy, tensely, “Aunt Parmenter. She tried to talk when she was dying....”

They squatted about this drawer which for twelve lean years had kept vigil in the cherry chest, that single waiting piece of furniture in the empty house, that lordly and empty and naked house behind whose walls the family had starved and watched.

Like a coffin they bore the drawer among them into the kitchen, and there hid their treasure under the cupboard, and threw over it pieces of old carpet. Then they sat about, still whispering.

“We’ll pay off old Matthews,” said Lucien, “And Bethna and I’ll start somewhere else.”

“We’ll finish the house,” cried his mother, a deep breath waving her voice like ripe grain. In her eyes the rooms now spread warm, lighted, filled with neighbors, and she drove up to the door of her home behind a pacing pair, caught herself at that old dream, and came in a motor car.

Tommy Taylor’s eyes were bright and deep. His loose-wristed hands he smote sharply together. “We’ll sell the house to Matthews,” said he, “and your mother and I will take this money, and go out to the Bitter Root, and get that fruit ranch, and start over again!”

For the space of a breath Amy and Jane looked at each other. There could be no starting over for them. Tommy’s wife stared at him, from out the sixteen years of weariness and waiting that lay behind her and from under a lifetime of weariness and loss that formed on the air.

Then those sixteen years burst and blew upon the room, and scattered their fragments of hope deferred and dead. Amy and Jane spoke with the bitter voices of the lovers who had not asked them in marriage and with the wail of children never born. No journey for them toward the fruits of the Bitter Root, and no finishing of the house; but instead the chance to leave that farm with enough of Aunt Parmenter’s money to keep them in the town while they found their work. Their father thundered weakly: “What is it you want there?” Jane’s lips moved soundlessly, Amy cried out: “Some life!” And by this they now meant such work as they could do—some sewing and pickling for other women.

So with a few hundreds in greenbacks the “girls” went away to the town. With a share of that treasure, Lucien married Bethna and went out to make his way. But Tommy, who was weak to the world, was iron to his wife. A fruit ranch, he showed her, was the place to make money, and they would build another house better than this.

Though she talked bitterly and incredulously, yet when Matthews, who held the mortgage, took over at last the great shell of their home, Mrs. Tommy Taylor told her neighbors: “Yes, the children have their plans, but Mr. Taylor and I are going west. He has found such a splendid opening out there that we just can’t afford not to take it.”

To “the children” she said: “I’ll go with him—yes. If we should separate and I should get along and he shouldn’t, I couldn’t stand that.”

The house was finished by the new owner, whose motor car came and went under the maples, and the nine windows and the door continued to stare indifferently out upon Belle Prairie. Tommy Taylor loose-wristed, prosperous-appearing, hopeful, went west, looking for a ranch.

ERNIE MENDENHALL

_Best Stories of 1926_; Edward J. O’Brien (Dodd, Mead & Co.).

Ernie Mendenhall was now forty-two years old, and still he had found no one with whom to share his home. His home was a white house in the town of Oderhill, and its little garden had fine hollyhocks. For four years, since the death of his parents, he had lived there alone, and in those four years he had bought now and then a piece of old furniture or a rug or some small article for his house. Every time that he did this, the neighbors would say:

“Ernie Mendenhall must be going to get married.”

But so far he had not married. He earned his living as part-time secretary for a writer who lived on the edge of town. Every morning the neighbors saw Ernie’s long form, swinging its right arm and holding its left arm stiff as it hurried along, his lips moving in imagined talk. And they said: “What can he be talking about, to himself that way? He hasn’t any business of his own to reckon up.”

One summer week-end the writer had a house party for Alla Vintrin. On Sunday morning she walked into the library where Ernie was working. He saw her frail beauty in its pink linen enclosure, her delicate profile, her heavy hair. The linen, the profile and the heavy hair attacked him as an epidemic attacks, and he was as one who catches cold—instantly and pervadingly.

She said: “Is the old secretary in this room—the Governor Winthrop secretary?...”

“Here,” said Ernie with immense difficulty, and bowed, and perceived that he had bowed not to her but to the secretary.

He managed to talk to her about that piece of old mahogany. Afterward he wondered whether he had not perhaps said: “It has a beautiful profile, heavy hair, and it wears pink.” And though he tried in agony to recall her words, he could recover nothing save an assent, a murmur, a perfume.

Next he noted, from a great distance, that he was saying to her, “if she was interested in old furniture, he had some good pieces in his house, if she cared....” And she said alertly that she did care, and could she see them that morning? With no more thought of the writer than of an eagle on a far cliff, Ernie walked out of the house and down the streets of Oderhill, and beside him she went.

She said little—he liked her for that. She walked rapidly—that he liked. She was not so tall as he, she observed the flowers, she stopped and spoke to a child—she was perfect.

Thanking God for an upbringing which had forced him to keep order in his house, he opened his front door and let her in upon the hook rugs, the cherry chairs, and the one piece of rosewood. It was before this melodeon of rosewood that Alla Vintrin paused at last, then sat, pulled out the stops, and pressed from the reluctant instrument its few remaining tones.

And at the sound of music, played by her, in his home, Ernie’s years of waiting cried from his throat these words: “Could you stay? Could you live here? Could you be my wife?” And this he did not hear himself saying from a distance. No, for he was in the very words themselves.

She looked round the room, small, sweet and colored, and at the hollyhocks motionless beyond the glass. “Why not?” she said.

“You could? You would?” He was not sure that he said this at all. And all that he heard her say was “Why not?” as she moved to the door. He walked beside her under the maples, and told her about his life. Always he had wanted to tell somebody about his life, but when he had tried, his confidante had looked at him. Eyes could be puzzled, amused, disdainful. Alla did not look at him. She merely walked beside him and listened. “Could you? Would you?” Ernie cried when he had done.

“Why not?” she said again, with immense sadness.

In the corridor at the writer’s house she gave him her hand, saying only: “I shall see you again, Mr. Mendenhall—this afternoon, perhaps.”

But that Sunday afternoon all the house party decided to motor back to town. Ernie, who had made his task last into the day, heard them go, saw them go, and sat at his desk mute and blind.

Three days later he had a note from Alla.

... and I know exactly how you are feeling because you spoke
so. I have asked one or two men to marry me and wished
afterward that I hadn’t spoken. But you mustn’t mind. Those
forty-two years in Oderhill—you are likely to ask anybody,
anywhere.... I did mean to speak to you about the melodeon. I
assume that those things are for sale, and if the melodeon is
at all within my reach I would like very much to buy it....

Every day the neighbors saw Ernie’s long form as it hurried along, his lips moving in imagined talk with some one. He was writing to Alla Vintrin, composing his letters as he walked the streets. He was telling her of his life, its routine, its emptiness. These letters he dared to write out. When her bread-and-butter letter came to the writer, Ernie copied the address, and it burned on his bureau. One night, when it rained, he took out his letters to her, read them over, selected the mildest, addressed it, carried it in his pocket for days. One day when he had an influenza, he plucked the letter from his pocket and mailed it.

As soon as the letter was mailed, he fashioned her reply, many replies. She would be kind, she would be cold, she would be cruel. All these replies he wrote in his mind. When days passed and no reply came, he said to himself that she had gone abroad. And when his letter reached her, at some lonely foreign place, how touched and warmed she would be that he had remembered. He thought that she would write: “My dear friend, you move me greatly.” Once he had taken down that sentence, dictated by the writer: “My dear friend, you move me greatly.” No answer came, but when he was at home for a week with lumbago, he chose another of his letters to her and mailed that. It required a calling-down by the writer and his omission from an Oderhill wedding reception to bring the third and fourth letters to the mail box. In all Ernie sent off six letters. But the mails, he knew, were uncertain. So he continued to fashion her replies. At last he wrote down these replies, and he would read them, at home, in the evenings: “My dear friend, you move me greatly.” His lips moved as he read. He remembered the phrases in her letters and in his own, and he would go down the street, swinging his right arm and holding his left arm stiff as he hurried along. And the neighbors said, “What can he be talking about to himself that way?”

One night sitting alone by his stove, going over one of her replies, it occurred to Ernie Mendenhall that he was tired of those things that he was saying, as having come from her. What else would she say? He could think of nothing else. Certainly these were rather tiresome—talk about his safety, his loneliness, her coming to Oderhill. Even “My dear friend, you move me greatly” had become tiresome by repetition. Somewhat irritably he saluted the image of her, writing to him, saying to him the same thing over and over. Couldn’t she think of anything else to say?

He began to be bored with her. Feeling the wind blowing in the back of his neck, he asked her quite irritably what had made her leave the window open at the top. Finding the fire low he said to her, in his mind, that she could certainly put in a stick of wood when it was he who filled the wood box. And when the clock struck a wrong hour he exclaimed aloud to her that with all that he had to do, earning their living, he should have thought that she might wind the clock. The next morning when he watered a favorite plant he saw that water had dripped down on the rosewood melodeon, and he cried reproachfully: “You who pretended to care for this rosewood melodeon, what have you ever done to protect it?” But at that she answered quite tartly, and he was startled and hastened out of the house.

He found that his homecomings had acquired a new fascination. He would come hurrying into the house and cry: “What? No fire? No supper? A great way to treat a man who’s been slaving all day for you.” “Slaving indeed!” would come her clear reply. “Writing a few letters for a pittance. I’ve a good mind to sell your old rosewood melodeon and make real money for us.” At that he would fly into a rage, and then grow sullen, and would eat no dinner—actually did eat none; and imagined Alla Vintrin Mendenhall cooking a steak savory with onions and eating it all alone. Occasionally he would smile at himself awkwardly; but less and less often.

Then a child was born to the writer, and Ernie Mendenhall was extremely shaken. Arriving one morning for work, he heard that faint wailing above stairs. All day when the cry came he could do nothing but listen. And when he went home at night, there was Alla Vintrin Mendenhall with a child.

But now his imagination failed. He had no idea what he would say to her. He could not even look at her. Suddenly she was not there any more, but was wrapt away from him, absorbed in a wailing cry. Sometimes he could catch an outline of her bending head, but when she turned toward him, her face blindingly disappeared and the game stopped. He sat by the stove and imagined her in the room above stairs. He never went there. It was many nights before she was downstairs with him again. He sat making milk toast when she entered. He looked at her in awe and in silence, but then his milk boiled over on to the griddle and he said: “Is it or isn’t it a woman’s job to keep things from boiling over, say?” And when he blackened the toast he became fairly caustic. After that they resumed their old quarrels. When she was unconscionably exasperating, Ernie Mendenhall would hurry along the streets, his lips moving as he rehearsed what he would tell her. And the neighbors would say: “Ernie Mendenhall—don’t you s’pose he works out puzzles as he walks?”

As the holidays came near, he wandered about in the shops of the little town, thinking of a gift for her and one for the child. But when he touched this or that, it seemed not worthy of them. He bought one little gift, a vase to stand on her melodeon—he thought of it as her melodeon—and on Christmas eve he filled the vase with roses and watched her bend above it, with the child. He thought: “Maybe they meant something like this about Christmas. Maybe it has something to do with somebody being born not of the flesh....” But this he dismissed as unlikely. He prolonged the evening, became involved in dressing an imaginary tree, very tall, and ended in disagreeing with her about having so much tinsel stuff all over everything; found the fire out, and went to bed annoyed by her obstinacy and her carelessness. But he woke once and smelled the roses.

In the holiday week, he came dragging home from his work one dim afternoon, and as he approached his house with its white-laden spruces, he felt a sense of utter weariness at the look of it. At once he knew this as the weariness of the end of a game. He understood that the game had played itself out. All was over, it seemed, the funeral, all; and he entered upon his house as it had been before ever he had seen her. He, moved through the little empty rooms, looking at them so differently. Desolation flowed through him. He could experience, but he could not believe that she was gone.

In his mail box waited a letter. Before he opened it he knew her touch. Alla Vintrin wrote: “Dear Sir: Is the rosewood melodeon still for sale? I was married in the spring, and now that we are furnishing our house....” He replied: “Dear Madam: the rosewood melodeon is not for sale. I wish to keep it on account of its associations....” He went into the white night and mailed the letter in the box where he had posted all the others, which she must have received; and he turned back toward the house where she had died.

He had fallen in love, experienced domesticity, been bored by it, and was left alone with the child whom none had ever begotten. He recounted these things to himself as he walked. And the neighbors meeting him said: “Ernie Mendenhall, he’s always talking away about something.”

THE BIOGRAPHY OF BLADE

_Best Stories of 1924_; Edward J. O’Brien (Dodd, Mead & Co.).

“Born in Muscoda. Attended public school in Muscoda. Edited ‘The Muscoda Republic’ for twenty-five years.” Blade had written his biography for the county history. He walked to his home and thought: “It’s good. Not many men in the hundred millions are much better off.”

He passed the house of Herron, his banker, and heard singing. A woman’s voice was singing in a foreign tongue. He walked slowly and listened. In the evening sunlight the banker’s house, his lawn, his bridal wreath looked luminous. The air thinned and thickened as cloud and wind wove their uneven ovals. The voice sang on. Blade felt abrupt and obscure happiness. His complacence deepened. “Pretty good. Not many men in the hundred millions are much better off.”

At his home, about his table, his family gathered: the woman, all her life of Muscoda, whom he had married; their four children, contentious, smelling of toilet soap; his mother, silent and prevalent. His wife, who seemed to be dining only en route to real occupation, said:

“Mrs. Herron has asked you and mother and me to hear somebody sing there to-night. I can’t go; I’m too tired.” Without looking at her, Blade answered, “I’ll go to the Herrons’,” and his mother said that she would go. His wife, going on with her inner routine, lapsed back into speech with, “There isn’t a thing in the house for breakfast.”

About them countless cloudy influences surged, the melting west, the blue dusk, heightened sounds from the open. The room was a theater of airy action. Less than this were the steak, the apple pie, the general argument about the pronunciation of “slough,” or, as they rose, that soft flatulence in the throat of his mother. In the redundant din of dishes, in the clamor of their voices, the faint unearthly splendor died to earthly darkness.

In the night gentle, leisurely, already experimenting with darkness, Blade and his mother went forth. The Herron lawn offered odor of sycamore and wild grape. Blade breathed it, felt happiness, and said to his mother:

“That new county history’s coming out. Wonder if you’ll like what it says about me.” Under the porch lights the fallen muscles of her large face lifted.

In the Herrons’ rooms, so regular, so inevitable, the guests gathered. The moquette, the mohair, the mahogany, received them. They were business men and their wives, the accustomed, the dutiful, the numb. There was a rote of jest, of retort, of innuendo. There were the thrilling potentialities and the deathly routine of being. All were tumultuously aware of the little fountain of life within themselves.

At their abrupt, embarrassed hush, Blade saw near the piano the Herrons’ niece. Her beautiful shoulders, her body cased in blue, her slow, floating voice, invaded him. In her he saw and heard all youth, all that is luminous, all that is different. Upon Blade invisible hands laid hold. With soft violence he was claimed, carried, torn. “What’s this?” he felt, and had never felt so much. For the first time his importance, his newspaper, his home, his family, were outdistanced. He saw that this woman lived in another way than his way, and it was her way that he wanted.

At the close of her singing, he approached her. She spoke to him casually, and he thought that there must be some mistake. Could she not see that of all those in the room he it was to whom she had signaled? He felt that he was crying: “Where are you? I understand. In God’s name, throw me a rope!” Instead he was saying: “You sing like a bird, Miss Herron. Much obliged, I’m sure. I—” When others intervened, he waited for a long time by the piano, the stout, smiling man. At length he found his opportunity, and said to her, “I used to play second flute myself.” But he wondered whether, after all, he could have said this aloud, because she only glanced and smiled, though with that information he had sent her something vast and pleading. He did not have another chance to address her.

Out on the street his mother said, “My dinner didn’t set well;” but Blade, in some powerful onslaught of the unknown, made no reply and hurried brutally.

He took a blanket and lay on the grass. There was no change in the trees or the frogs of Muscoda. There they were, true to the past. But they were new to Blade, and so were the stars. It was perhaps the seventeen-thousandth night of his life, and yet it was the first. He was feeling: “Say, music! I’ve always cottoned to it; but look what it _is_! Look what it _does_!” Next door a second-floor window glowed. There Edgerton, dying, lay expecting to recover. Every one knew save Edgerton. Blade had been sorry, but now he was seized and shaken by the fact that there was Edgerton, dying and not knowing. With this fact Blade quivered as occasionally, toward dawn, he had quivered with remorse or worry. He experienced Edgerton. Then he experienced delight that he himself was not dying. The pang of Miss Herron and her singing returned and returned, powerful, possessing, and at last excluding.

At daybreak he woke. Long, loose pulsations of light shook him. Was it light or was it song? He sat on his blanket and looked up from the well of his garden to the sky. He thought: “I’m going to take music lessons. I’ll go and see Miss Herron to-day, talk with her about it.” Countless cloudy influences surged round the lawn, where was a theater of changing light and airy action. For the first time in his life he saw the morning.

At breakfast his passion for spiritual isolation caused suspicion. “You act as if you’re going to risk some more money,” said his mother. “Better not.” And his wife asked acutely, “What woman was there last night?” so that Blade thundered, “Can’t I have quiet in my own house?” The children discreetly tittered. With a wave of nostalgia it came to Blade that by his words of thunder he had in some way cut himself off from Miss Herron. In order to get back to that world of Miss Herron, he spoke gently to his wife.

His first act at the office was to request the return of his biography copy from the editor of the county history. Blade said, “I can liven mine up a lot.” It had come to him that he had written a biography which did not express his life, so rich and so potential. And now the office routine began—routine, but yet extraordinary. A pearly shadow drenched the bare room. Or was it that? You moved the radio a fraction of an inch, and you had a new wave length. Blade had a new wave length. Nothing proceeded in the old way. The men of the staff of the composing room, he saw them with incredible intensity, Johns, Lubbock, Mayhew, Platt, in their dirty ticking aprons, with rolled gold rings on the little fingers of inky hands swinging from the elbow. Had Blade ever really seen them until now? He felt in some delicious suspension; or was it balance? Exquisitely rested, he felt, and as if everything were simple. He said to one or two: “Do you know, music is a great thing. For a fact. Wish I’d kept on with second flute that time.” He spoke in excitement such that, had they known of a tragedy involving Blade later in the day, they would have remembered. But they did not know of the tragedy.

At eleven o’clock he called the Herrons’ house. He waited at the telephone and was rocked on the waves of expectation. A voice came: “Oh, Miss Herron? Oh, Miss Herron left this morning for her home. Who is this calling, please?” Blade mumbled: “‘Muscoda Republic.’ Thanks for the item.” He groped to the door and stared up and down the street, but she was not passing.

He went at noon to the Muscoda Marble Counter for lunch. The place was clean, the food was good, the women who presided were perfect at their rites. Before the oilcloth-covered counter Blade sat, and he felt the physical nausea and the shivering of a young animal at night, homeless.

And at night he stayed so long at the office, alone, that Muscoda main street was empty. At his own gate it came to him that he wanted his mother. He was glad that there was a light in her room. He tapped, and sidled toward her, intent on his nameless and infinite loss. Vast and shapeless in her red-and-black checked bath robe, she sat among her plants and bottles and regarded him without change of expression. She commented: “I thought you were going to take me to the picture show to-night.” He stood stricken, not by his failure, but by hers. He mumbled and withdrew, and in the passage his wife met him, put her arms about him, whispered, “Nobody loves you as I do!” This should have surprised him, but he was not listening. His soul heard, and cried, “What of it?”

In the night he saw Edgerton’s window glowing. Blade felt sorry, an impression now, not an emotion. He woke to the sun and said, “Another fine day,” a formula, not a feeling. He went to his office, and the men were pale fellows, inky, disheveled, remote. He faced the blind wall of human loneliness. He was as one who, expecting to be born, is stillborn, and becomes aware not of the cradle, but of eternity.

In a few days Blade appeared before Montgomery, the Muscoda band leader, and said:

“Say, I used to play the second flute myself. And I wondered....”

When “one-night stands” come to Muscoda Opera House, Blade sits in the orchestra and plays the second flute. His detached wife and his grown children come to the Opera House plays, and afterward they ask him why he will deliberately make himself ridiculous by playing in the band. He does not know what to reply and takes refuge in irritability.

In the Muscoda County history Blade’s biography, in fine print, stands unread in many little libraries: “Born in Muscoda. Attended public school in Muscoda. Has edited ‘The Muscoda Republic’ for twenty-five years.” To the editor of that history Blade had returned his biography copy without change, and had said:

“I don’t know what it was I was going to add. Whatever the item was, it got away from me.”

IN THE LOBBY

“This whole love thing isn’t enough,” said Bruce. “I tell you, it isn’t enough.”