One of Ours
by
Willa Cather
Part 1 out of 8
One of Ours
by Willa Cather
Book One: On Lovely Creek
I.
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and
vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half
of the same bed.
"Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car."
"What for?"
"Why, aren't we going to the circus today?"
"Car's all right. Let me alone." The boy turned over and pulled
the sheet up to his face, to shut out the light which was
beginning to come through the curtainless windows.
Claude rose and dressed,--a simple operation which took very
little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way
in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock's
comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom,
which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had
washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed
with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not
dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to
the kitchen, took Mahailey's tin basin, doused his face and head
in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.
Old Mahailey herself came in from the yard, with her apron full
of corn-cobs to start a fire in the kitchen stove. She smiled at
him in the foolish fond way she often had with him when they were
alone.
"What air you gittin' up for a-ready, boy? You goin' to the
circus before breakfast? Don't you make no noise, else you'll
have 'em all down here before I git my fire a-goin'."
"All right, Mahailey." Claude caught up his cap and ran out of
doors, down the hillside toward the barn. The sun popped up over
the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light
poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly,
timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a
sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the
south section of the big Wheeler ranch. It was a fine day to go
to the circus at Frankfort, a fine day to do anything; the sort
of day that must, somehow, turn out well.
Claude backed the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to
the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted
wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men,
Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock.
Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude
wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to
them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and
dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude had a
grievance against Jerry just now, because of his treatment of one
of the horses.
Molly was a faithful old mare, the mother of many colts; Claude
and his younger brother had learned to ride on her. This man
Jerry, taking her out to work one morning, let her step on a
board with a nail sticking up in it. He pulled the nail out of
her foot, said nothing to anybody, and drove her to the
cultivator all day. Now she had been standing in her stall for
weeks, patiently suffering, her body wretchedly thin, and her leg
swollen until it looked like an elephant's. She would have to
stand there, the veterinary said, until her hoof came off and she
grew a new one, and she would always be stiff. Jerry had not been
discharged, and he exhibited the poor animal as if she were a
credit to him.
Mahailey came out on the hilltop and rang the breakfast bell.
After the hired men went up to the house, Claude slipped into the
barn to see that Molly had got her share of oats. She was eating
quietly, her head hanging, and her scaly, dead-looking foot
lifted just a little from the ground. When he stroked her neck
and talked to her she stopped grinding and gazed at him
mournfully. She knew him, and wrinkled her nose and drew her
upper lip back from her worn teeth, to show that she liked being
petted. She let him touch her foot and examine her leg.
When Claude reached the kitchen, his mother was sitting at one
end of the breakfast table, pouring weak coffee, his brother and
Dan and Jerry were in their chairs, and Mahailey was baking
griddle cakes at the stove. A moment later Mr. Wheeler came down
the enclosed stairway and walked the length of the table to his
own place. He was a very large man, taller and broader than any
of his neighbours. He seldom wore a coat in summer, and his
rumpled shirt bulged out carelessly over the belt of his
trousers. His florid face was clean shaven, likely to be a trifle
tobacco-stained about the mouth, and it was conspicuous both for
good-nature and coarse humour, and for an imperturbable physical
composure. Nobody in the county had ever seen Nat Wheeler
flustered about anything, and nobody had ever heard him speak
with complete seriousness. He kept up his easy-going, jocular
affability even with his own family.
As soon as he was seated, Mr. Wheeler reached for the two-pint
sugar bowl and began to pour sugar into his coffee. Ralph asked
him if he were going to the circus. Mr. Wheeler winked.
"I shouldn't wonder if I happened in town sometime before the
elephants get away." He spoke very deliberately, with a
State-of-Maine drawl, and his voice was smooth and agreeable.
"You boys better start in early, though. You can take the wagon
and the mules, and load in the cowhides. The butcher has agreed
to take them."
Claude put down his knife. "Can't we have the car? I've washed it
on purpose."
"And what about Dan and Jerry? They want to see the circus just
as much as you do, and I want the hides should go in; they're
bringing a good price now. I don't mind about your washing the
car; mud preserves the paint, they say, but it'll be all right
this time, Claude."
The hired men haw-hawed and Ralph giggled. Claude's freckled face
got very red. The pancake grew stiff and heavy in his mouth and
was hard to swallow. His father knew he hated to drive the mules
to town, and knew how he hated to go anywhere with Dan and Jerry.
As for the hides, they were the skins of four steers that had
perished in the blizzard last winter through the wanton
carelessness of these same hired men, and the price they would
bring would not half pay for the time his father had spent in
stripping and curing them. They had lain in a shed loft all
summer, and the wagon had been to town a dozen times. But today,
when he wanted to go to Frankfort clean and care-free, he must
take these stinking hides and two coarse-mouthed men, and drive a
pair of mules that always brayed and balked and behaved
ridiculously in a crowd. Probably his father had looked out of
the window and seen him washing the car, and had put this up on
him while he dressed. It was like his father's idea of a joke.
Mrs. Wheeler looked at Claude sympathetically, feeling that he
was disappointed. Perhaps she, too, suspected a joke. She had
learned that humour might wear almost any guise.
When Claude started for the barn after breakfast, she came
running down the path, calling to him faintly,--hurrying always
made her short of breath. Overtaking him, she looked up with
solicitude, shading her eyes with her delicately formed hand. "If
you want I should do up your linen coat, Claude, I can iron it
while you're hitching," she said wistfully.
Claude stood kicking at a bunch of mottled feathers that had once
been a young chicken. His shoulders were drawn high, his mother
saw, and his figure suggested energy and determined self-control.
"You needn't mind, mother." He spoke rapidly, muttering his
words. "I'd better wear my old clothes if I have to take the
hides. They're greasy, and in the sun they'll smell worse than
fertilizer."
"The men can handle the hides, I should think. Wouldn't you feel
better in town to be dressed?" She was still blinking up at him.
"Don't bother about it. Put me out a clean coloured shirt, if you
want to. That's all right."
He turned toward the barn, and his mother went slowly back the
path up to the house. She was so plucky and so stooped, his dear
mother! He guessed if she could stand having these men about,
could cook and wash for them, he could drive them to town!
Half an hour after the wagon left, Nat Wheeler put on an alpaca
coat and went off in the rattling buckboard in which, though he
kept two automobiles, he still drove about the country. He said
nothing to his wife; it was her business to guess whether or not
he would be home for dinner. She and Mahailey could have a good
time scrubbing and sweeping all day, with no men around to bother
them.
There were few days in the year when Wheeler did not drive off
somewhere; to an auction sale, or a political convention, or a
meeting of the Farmers' Telephone directors;--to see how his
neighbours were getting on with their work, if there was nothing
else to look after. He preferred his buckboard to a car because
it was light, went easily over heavy or rough roads, and was so
rickety that he never felt he must suggest his wife's
accompanying him. Besides he could see the country better when he
didn't have to keep his mind on the road. He had come to this
part of Nebraska when the Indians and the buffalo were still
about, remembered the grasshopper year and the big cyclone, had
watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page
where once only the wind wrote its story. He had encouraged new
settlers to take up homesteads, urged on courtships, lent young
fellows the money to marry on, seen families grow and prosper;
until he felt a little as if all this were his own enterprise.
The changes, not only those the years made, but those the seasons
made, were interesting to him.
People recognized Nat Wheeler and his cart a mile away. He sat
massive and comfortable, weighing down one end of the slanting
seat, his driving hand lying on his knee. Even his German
neighbours, the Yoeders, who hated to stop work for a quarter of
an hour on any account, were glad to see him coming. The
merchants in the little towns about the county missed him if he
didn't drop in once a week or so. He was active in politics;
never ran for an office himself, but often took up the cause of a
friend and conducted his campaign for him.
The French saying, "Joy of the street, sorrow of the home," was
exemplified in Mr. Wheeler, though not at all in the French way.
His own affairs were of secondary importance to him. In the early
days he had homesteaded and bought and leased enough land to make
him rich. Now he had only to rent it out to good farmers who
liked to work--he didn't, and of that he made no secret. When he
was at home, he usually sat upstairs in the living room, reading
newspapers. He subscribed for a dozen or more--the list included
a weekly devoted to scandal--and he was well informed about what
was going on in the world. He had magnificent health, and illness
in himself or in other people struck him as humorous. To be sure,
he never suffered from anything more perplexing than toothache or
boils, or an occasional bilious attack.
Wheeler gave liberally to churches and charities, was always
ready to lend money or machinery to a neighbour who was short of
anything. He liked to tease and shock diffident people, and had
an inexhaustible supply of funny stories. Everybody marveled that
he got on so well with his oldest son, Bayliss Wheeler. Not that
Bayliss was exactly diffident, but he was a narrow gauge fellow,
the sort of prudent young man one wouldn't expect Nat Wheeler to
like.
Bayliss had a farm implement business in Frankfort, and though he
was still under thirty he had made a very considerable financial
success. Perhaps Wheeler was proud of his son's business acumen.
At any rate, he drove to town to see Bayliss several times a
week, went to sales and stock exhibits with him, and sat about
his store for hours at a stretch, joking with the farmers who
came in. Wheeler had been a heavy drinker in his day, and was
still a heavy feeder. Bayliss was thin and dyspeptic, and a
virulent Prohibitionist; he would have liked to regulate
everybody's diet by his own feeble constitution. Even Mrs.
Wheeler, who took the men God had apportioned her for granted,
wondered how Bayliss and his father could go off to conventions
together and have a good time, since their ideas of what made a
good time were so different.
Once every few years, Mr. Wheeler bought a new suit and a dozen
stiff shirts and went back to Maine to visit his brothers and
sisters, who were very quiet, conventional people. But he was
always glad to get home to his old clothes, his big farm, his
buckboard, and Bayliss.
Mrs. Wheeler had come out from Vermont to be Principal of the
High School, when Frankfort was a frontier town and Nat Wheeler
was a prosperous bachelor. He must have fancied her for the same
reason he liked his son Bayliss, because she was so different.
There was this to be said for Nat Wheeler, that he liked every
sort of human creature; he liked good people and honest people,
and he liked rascals and hypocrites almost to the point of loving
them. If he heard that a neighbour had played a sharp trick or
done something particularly mean, he was sure to drive over to
see the man at once, as if he hadn't hitherto appreciated him.
There was a large, loafing dignity about Claude's father. He
liked to provoke others to uncouth laughter, but he never laughed
immoderately himself. In telling stories about him, people often
tried to imitate his smooth, senatorial voice, robust but never
loud. Even when he was hilariously delighted by anything,--as
when poor Mahailey, undressing in the dark on a summer night, sat
down on the sticky fly-paper,--he was not boisterous. He was a
jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not
thin-skinned.
II
Claude and his mules rattled into Frankfort just as the calliope
went screaming down Main street at the head of the circus parade.
Getting rid of his disagreeable freight and his uncongenial
companions as soon as possible, he elbowed his way along the
crowded sidewalk, looking for some of the neighbour boys. Mr.
Wheeler was standing on the Farmer's Bank corner, towering a head
above the throng, chaffing with a little hunchback who was
setting up a shell-game. To avoid his father, Claude turned and
went in to his brother's store. The two big show windows were
full of country children, their mothers standing behind them to
watch the parade. Bayliss was seated in the little glass cage
where he did his writing and bookkeeping. He nodded at Claude
from his desk.
"Hello," said Claude, bustling in as if he were in a great hurry.
"Have you seen Ernest Havel? I thought I might find him in here."
Bayliss swung round in his swivel chair to return a plough
catalogue to the shelf. "What would he be in here for? Better
look for him in the saloon." Nobody could put meaner insinuations
into a slow, dry remark than Bayliss.
Claude's cheeks flamed with anger. As he turned away, he noticed
something unusual about his brother's face, but he wasn't going
to give him the satisfaction of asking him how he had got a black
eye. Ernest Havel was a Bohemian, and he usually drank a glass of
beer when he came to town; but he was sober and thoughtful beyond
the wont of young men. From Bayliss' drawl one might have
supposed that the boy was a drunken loafer.
At that very moment Claude saw his friend on the other side of
the street, following the wagon of trained dogs that brought up
the rear of the procession. He ran across, through a crowd of
shouting youngsters, and caught Ernest by the arm.
"Hello, where are you off to?"
"I'm going to eat my lunch before show-time. I left my wagon out
by the pumping station, on the creek. What about you?"
"I've got no program. Can I go along?"
Ernest smiled. "I expect. I've got enough lunch for two."
"Yes, I know. You always have. I'll join you later."
Claude would have liked to take Ernest to the hotel for dinner.
He had more than enough money in his pockets; and his father was
a rich farmer. In the Wheeler family a new thrasher or a new
automobile was ordered without a question, but it was considered
extravagant to go to a hotel for dinner. If his father or Bayliss
heard that he had been there-and Bayliss heard everything they
would say he was putting on airs, and would get back at him. He
tried to excuse his cowardice to himself by saying that he was
dirty and smelled of the hides; but in his heart he knew that he
did not ask Ernest to go to the hotel with him because he had
been so brought up that it would be difficult for him to do this
simple thing. He made some purchases at the fruit stand and the
cigar counter, and then hurried out along the dusty road toward
the pumping station. Ernest's wagon was standing under the shade
of some willow trees, on a little sandy bottom half enclosed by a
loop of the creek which curved like a horseshoe. Claude threw
himself on the sand beside the stream and wiped the dust from his
hot face. He felt he had now closed the door on his disagreeable
morning.
Ernest produced his lunch basket.
"I got a couple bottles of beer cooling in the creek," he said.
"I knew you wouldn't want to go in a saloon."
"Oh, forget it!" Claude muttered, ripping the cover off a jar of
pickles. He was nineteen years old, and he was afraid to go into
a saloon, and his friend knew he was afraid.
After lunch, Claude tools out a handful of good cigars he had
bought at the drugstore. Ernest, who couldn't afford cigars, was
pleased. He lit one, and as he smoked he kept looking at it with
an air of pride and turning it around between his fingers.
The horses stood with their heads over the wagon-box, munching
their oats. The stream trickled by under the willow roots with a
cool, persuasive sound. Claude and Ernest lay in the shade, their
coats under their heads, talking very little. Occasionally a
motor dashed along the road toward town, and a cloud of dust and
a smell of gasoline blew in over the creek bottom; but for the
most part the silence of the warm, lazy summer noon was
undisturbed. Claude could usually forget his own vexations and
chagrins when he was with Ernest. The Bohemian boy was never
uncertain, was not pulled in two or three ways at once. He was
simple and direct. He had a number of impersonal preoccupations;
was interested in politics and history and in new inventions.
Claude felt that his friend lived in an atmosphere of mental
liberty to which he himself could never hope to attain. After he
had talked with Ernest for awhile, the things that did not go
right on the farm seemed less important. Claude's mother was
almost as fond of Ernest as he was himself. When the two boys
were going to high school, Ernest often came over in the evening
to study with Claude, and while they worked at the long kitchen
table Mrs. Wheeler brought her darning and sat near them, helping
them with their Latin and algebra. Even old Mahailey was
enlightened by their words of wisdom.
Mrs. Wheeler said she would never forget the night Ernest arrived
from the Old Country. His brother, Joe Havel, had gone to
Frankfort to meet him, and was to stop on the way home and leave
some groceries for the Wheelers. The train from the east was
late; it was ten o'clock that night when Mrs. Wheeler, waiting in
the kitchen, heard Havel's wagon rumble across the little bridge
over Lovely Creek. She opened the outside door, and presently Joe
came in with a bucket of salt fish in one hand and a sack of
flour on his shoulder. While he took the fish down to the cellar
for her, another figure appeared in the doorway; a young boy,
short, stooped, with a flat cap on his head and a great oilcloth
valise, such as pedlars carry, strapped to his back. He had
fallen asleep in the wagon, and on waking and finding his brother
gone, he had supposed they were at home and scrambled for his
pack. He stood in the doorway, blinking his eyes at the light,
looking astonished but eager to do whatever was required of him.
What if one of her own boys, Mrs. Wheeler thought . . . . She
went up to him and put her arm around him, laughing a little and
saying in her quiet voice, just as if he could understand her,
"Why, you're only a little boy after all, aren't you?"
Ernest said afterwards that it was his first welcome to this
country, though he had travelled so far, and had been pushed and
hauled and shouted at for so many days, he had lost count of
them. That night he and Claude only shook hands and looked at
each other suspiciously, but ever since they had been good
friends.
After their picnic the two boys went to the circus in a happy
frame of mind. In the animal tent they met big Leonard Dawson,
the oldest son of one of the Wheelers' near neighbours, and the
three sat together for the performance. Leonard said he had come
to town alone in his car; wouldn't Claude ride out with him?
Claude was glad enough to turn the mules over to Ralph, who
didn't mind the hired men as much as he did.
Leonard was a strapping brown fellow of twenty-five, with big
hands and big feet, white teeth, and flashing eyes full of
energy. He and his father and two brothers not only worked their
own big farm, but rented a quarter section from Nat Wheeler. They
were master farmers. If there was a dry summer and a failure,
Leonard only laughed and stretched his long arms, and put in a
bigger crop next year. Claude was always a little reserved with
Leonard; he felt that the young man was rather contemptuous of
the hap-hazard way in which things were done on the Wheeler
place, and thought his going to college a waste of money. Leonard
had not even gone through the Frankfort High School, and he was
already a more successful man than Claude was ever likely to be.
Leonard did think these things, but he was fond of Claude, all
the same.
At sunset the car was speeding over a fine stretch of smooth road
across the level country that lay between Frankfort and the
rougher land along Lovely Creek. Leonard's attention was largely
given up to admiring the faultless behaviour of his engine.
Presently he chuckled to himself and turned to Claude.
"I wonder if you'd take it all right if I told you a joke on
Bayliss?"
"I expect I would." Claude's tone was not at all eager.
"You saw Bayliss today? Notice anything queer about him, one eye
a little off colour? Did he tell you how he got it?"
"No. I didn't ask him."
"Just as well. A lot of people did ask him, though, and he said
he was hunting around his place for something in the dark and ran
into a reaper. Well, I'm the reaper!"
Claude looked interested. "You mean to say Bayliss was in a
fight?"
Leonard laughed. "Lord, no! Don't you know Bayliss? I went in
there to pay a bill yesterday, and Susie Gray and another girl
came in to sell tickets for the firemen's dinner. An advance man
for this circus was hanging around, and he began talking a little
smart,- nothing rough, but the way such fellows will. The girls
handed it back to him, and sold him three tickets and shut him
up. I couldn't see how Susie thought so quick what to say. The
minute the girls went out Bayliss started knocking them; said all
the country girls were getting too fresh and knew more than they
ought to about managing sporty men and right there I reached out
and handed him one. I hit harder than I meant to. I meant to slap
him, not to give him a black eye. But you can't always regulate
things, and I was hot all over. I waited for him to come back at
me. I'm bigger than he is, and I wanted to give him satisfaction.
Well, sir, he never moved a muscle! He stood there getting redder
and redder, and his eyes watered. I don't say he cried, but his
eyes watered. 'All right, Bayliss,' said I. 'Slow with your
fists, if that's your principle; but slow with your tongue,
too,--especially when the parties mentioned aren't present.' "
"Bayliss will never get over that," was Claude's only comment.
"He don't have to!" Leonard threw up his head. "I'm a good
customer; he can like it or lump it, till the price of binding
twine goes down!"
For the next few minutes the driver was occupied with trying to
get up a long, rough hill on high gear. Sometimes he could
make
that hill, and sometimes he couldn't, and he was not able to
account for the difference. After he pulled the second lever with
some disgust and let the car amble on as she would, he noticed
that his companion was disconcerted.
"I'll tell you what, Leonard," Claude spoke in a strained voice,
"I think the fair thing for you to do is to get out here by the
road and give me a chance."
Leonard swung his steering wheel savagely to pass a wagon on the
down side of the hill. "What the devil are you talking about,
boy?"
"You think you've got our measure all right, but you ought to
give me a chance first."
Leonard looked down in amazement at his own big brown hands,
lying on the wheel. "You mortal fool kid, what would I be telling
you all this for, if I didn't know you were another breed of
cats? I never thought you got on too well with Bayliss yourself."
"I don't, but I won't have you thinking you can slap the men in
my family whenever you feel like it." Claude knew that his
explanation sounded foolish, and his voice, in spite of all he
could do, was weak and angry.
Young Leonard Dawson saw he had hurt the boy's feelings. "Lord,
Claude, I know you're a fighter. Bayliss never was. I went to
school with him."
The ride ended amicably, but Claude wouldn't let Leonard take him
home. He jumped out of the car with a curt goodnight, and ran
across the dusky fields toward the light that shore from the
house on the hill. At the little bridge over the creek, he
stopped to get his breath and to be sure that he was outwardly
composed before he went in to see his mother.
"Ran against a reaper in the dark!" he muttered aloud, clenching
his fist.
Listening to the deep singing of the frogs, and to the distant
barking of the dogs up at the house, he grew calmer.
Nevertheless, he wondered why it was that one had sometimes to
feel responsible for the behaviour of people whose natures were
wholly antipathetic to one's own.
III
The circus was on Saturday. The next morning Claude was standing
at his dresser, shaving. His beard was already strong, a shade
darker than his hair and not so red as his skin. His eyebrows and
long lashes were a pale corn-colour--made his blue eyes seem
lighter than they were, and, he thought, gave a look of shyness
and weakness to the upper part of his face. He was exactly the
sort of looking boy he didn't want to be. He especially hated his
head,--so big that he had trouble in buying his hats, and
uncompromisingly square in shape; a perfect block-head. His name
was another source of humiliation. Claude: it was a "chump" name,
like Elmer and Roy; a hayseed name trying to be fine. In country
schools there was always a red-headed, warty-handed, runny-nosed
little boy who was called Claude. His good physique he took for
granted; smooth, muscular arms and legs, and strong shoulders, a
farmer boy might be supposed to have. Unfortunately he had none
of his father's physical repose, and his strength often asserted
itself inharmoniously. The storms that went on in his mind
sometimes made him rise, or sit down, or lift something, more
violently than there was any apparent reason for his doing.
The household slept late on Sunday morning; even Mahailey did not
get up until seven. The general signal for breakfast was the
smell of doughnuts frying. This morning Ralph rolled out of bed
at the last minute and callously put on his clean underwear
without taking a bath. This cost him not one regret, though he
took time to polish his new ox-blood shoes tenderly with a pocket
handkerchief. He reached the table when all the others were half
through breakfast, and made his peace by genially asking his
mother if she didn't want him to drive her to church in the car.
"I'd like to go if I can get the work done in time," she said,
doubtfully glancing at the clock.
"Can't Mahailey tend to things for you this morning?"
Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "Everything but the separator, she can.
But she can't fit all the parts together. It's a good deal of
work, you know."
"Now, Mother," said Ralph good-humouredly, as he emptied the
syrup pitcher over his cakes, "you're prejudiced. Nobody ever
thinks of skimming milk now-a-days. Every up-to-date farmer uses
a separator."
Mrs. Wheeler's pale eyes twinkled. "Mahailey and I will never be
quite up-todate, Ralph. We're old-fashioned, and I don't know but
you'd better let us be. I could see the advantage of a separator
if we milked half-a-dozen cows. It's a very ingenious machine.
But it's a great deal more work to scald it and fit it together
than it was to take care of the milk in the old way."
"It won't be when you get used to it," Ralph assured her. He was
the chief mechanic of the Wheeler farm, and when the farm
implements and the automobiles did not give him enough to do, he
went to town and bought machines for the house. As soon as
Mahailey got used to a washing-machine or a churn, Ralph, to keep
up with the bristling march of invention, brought home a still
newer one. The mechanical dish-washer she had never been able to
use, and patent flat-irons and oil-stoves drove her wild.
Claude told his mother to go upstairs and dress; he would scald
the separator while Ralph got the car ready. He was still working
at it when his brother came in from the garage to wash his hands.
"You really oughtn't to load mother up with things like this,
Ralph," he exclaimed fretfully. "Did you ever try washing this
damned thing yourself ?"
"Of course I have. If Mrs. Dawson can manage it, I should think
mother could."
"Mrs. Dawson is a younger woman. Anyhow, there's no point in
trying to make machinists of Mahailey and mother."
Ralph lifted his eyebrows to excuse Claude's bluntness. "See
here," he said persuasively, "don't you go encouraging her into
thinking she can't change her ways. Mother's entitled to all the
labour-saving devices we can get her."
Claude rattled the thirty-odd graduated metal funnels which he
was trying to fit together in their proper sequence. "Well, if
this is labour-saving "
The younger boy giggled and ran upstairs for his panama hat. He
never quarrelled. Mrs. Wheeler sometimes said it was wonderful,
how much Ralph would take from Claude.
After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler
drove to see his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just
bought a blooded bull. Dan and Jerry were pitching horseshoes
down behind the barn. Claude told Mahailey he was going to the
cellar to put up the swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that
the rats couldn't get at her vegetables.
"Thank you, Mr. Claude. I don't know what does make the rats so
bad. The cats catches one most every day, too."
"I guess they come up from the barn. I've got a nice wide board
down at the garage for your shelf." The cellar was cemented, cool
and dry, with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and
groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a dark-room full of
photographer's apparatus. Claude took his place at the
carpenter's bench under one of the square windows. Mysterious
objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries,
old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The
mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as
those he had got tired of, were stored away here. If they were
left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes,
when they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments.
Claude had begged his mother to let him pile this lumber into a
wagon and dump it into some washout hole along the creek; but
Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a thing; it would
hurt Ralph's feelings. Nearly every time Claude went into the
cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some
day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would
have put a boy through college decently.
While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from
the joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him.
She made some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated
herself upon a cracker box; close at hand there was a plush
"spring-rocker" with one arm gone, but it wouldn't have been her
idea of good manners to sit there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy
contentment in them as she followed Claude's motions. She watched
him as if he were a baby playing. Her hands lay comfortably in
her lap.
"Mr. Ernest ain't been over for a long time. He ain't mad about
nothin', is he?"
"Oh, no! He's awful busy this summer. I saw him in town
yesterday. We went to the circus together."
Mahailey smiled and nodded. "That's nice. I'm glad for you two
boys to have a good time. Mr. Ernest's a nice boy; I always liked
him first rate. He's a little feller, though. He ain't big like
you, is he? I guess he ain't as tall as Mr. Ralph, even."
"Not quite," said Claude between strokes. "He's strong, though,
and gets through a lot of work."
"Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them
foreigners works hard, don't they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked
the circus. Maybe they don't have circuses like our'n, over where
he come from."
Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained
dogs, and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish
smile; there was something wise and far-seeing about her smile,
too.
Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few
months old. She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia
family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of
pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was
nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.
Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no
one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.
Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a
savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for
her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside
an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for "him" to
bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too
often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair
of brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have
to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be
sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes. Mahailey was one
of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or
half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended
their lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could
not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to
teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had
forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time of day
by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and
of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee
packages. "That's a big A." she would murmur, "and that there's a
little a."
Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought
her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all
the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in
the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to
lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all her little
difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she
knew he would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle
off her rolling pin, he put on another, and he fitted a haft to
her favourite butcher-knife after every one else said it must be
thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended, acquired
a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When
Claude helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided
touching her, this she felt deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a
little ashamed of her, and would prefer to have some brisk young
thing about the kitchen.
On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey
liked to talk to Claude about the things they did together when
he was little; the Sundays when they used to wander along the
creek, hunting for wild grapes and watching the red squirrels; or
trailed across the high pastures to a wildplum thicket at the
north end of the Wheeler farm. Claude could remember warm spring
days when the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used
to lie down under them and sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy
sweetness made her drowsy; songs without words, for the most
part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over and
over, "And they laid Jesse James in his grave."
IV
The time was approaching for Claude to go back to the struggling
denominational college on the outskirts of the state capital,
where he had already spent two dreary and unprofitable winters.
"Mother," he said one morning when he had an opportunity to speak
to her alone, "I wish you would let me quit the Temple, and go to
the State University."
She looked up from the mass of dough she was kneading.
"But why, Claude?"
"Well, I could learn more, for one thing. The professors at the
Temple aren't much good. Most of them are just preachers who
couldn't make a living at preaching."
The look of pain that always disarmed Claude came instantly into
his mother's face. "Son, don't say such things. I can't believe
but teachers are more interested in their students when they are
concerned for their spiritual development, as well as the mental.
Brother Weldon said many of the professors at the State
University are not Christian men; they even boast of it, in some
cases."
"Oh, I guess most of them are good men, all right; at any rate
they know their subjects. These little pin-headed preachers like
Weldon do a lot of harm, running about the country talking. He's
sent around to pull in students for his own school. If he didn't
get them he'd lose his job. I wish he'd never got me. Most of the
fellows who flunk out at the State come to us, just as he did."
"But how can there be any serious study where they give so much
time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a
larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses
are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I've heard that
dreadful things go on in them sometimes. Besides, it would take
more money, and you couldn't live as cheaply as you do at the
Chapins'."
Claude made no reply. He stood before her frowning and pulling at
a calloused spot on the inside of his palm. Mrs. Wheeler looked
at him wistfully. "I'm sure you must be able to study better in a
quiet, serious atmosphere," she said.
He sighed and turned away. If his mother had been the least bit
unctuous, like Brother Weldon, he could have told her many
enlightening facts. But she was so trusting and childlike, so
faithful by nature and so ignorant of life as he knew it, that it
was hopeless to argue with her. He could shock her and make her
fear the world even more than she did, but he could never make
her understand.
His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and
card-playing dangerous pastimes--only rough people did such
things when she was a girl in Vermont--and "worldliness" only
another word for wickedness. According to her conception of
education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must
not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one,
was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before.
The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept
of history.
Nat Wheeler didn't care where his son went to school, but he,
too, took it for granted that the religious institution was
cheaper than the State University; and that because the students
there looked shabbier they were less likely to become too
knowing, and to be offensively intelligent at home. However, he
referred the matter to Bayliss one day when he was in town.
"Claude's got some notion he wants to go to the State University
this winter."
Bayliss at once assumed that wise,
better-be-prepared-for-the-worst expression which had made him
seem shrewd and seasoned from boyhood. "I don't see any point in
changing unless he's got good reasons."
"Well, he thinks that bunch of parsons at the Temple don't make
first-rate teachers."
"I expect they can teach Claude quite a bit yet. If he gets in
with that fast football crowd at the State, there'll be no
holding him." For some reason Bayliss detested football. "This
athletic business is a good deal over-done. If Claude wants
exercise, he might put in the fall wheat."
That night Mr. Wheeler brought the subject up at supper,
questioned Claude, and tried to get at the cause of his
discontent. His manner was jocular, as usual, and Claude hated
any public discussion of his personal affairs. He was afraid of
his father's humour when it got too near him.
Claude might have enjoyed the large and somewhat gross cartoons
with which Mr. Wheeler enlivened daily life, had they been of any
other authorship. But he unreasonably wanted his father to be the
most dignified, as he was certainly the handsomest and most
intelligent, man in the community. Moreover, Claude couldn't bear
ridicule very well. He squirmed before he was hit; saw it coming,
invited it. Mr. Wheeler had observed this trait in him when he
was a little chap, called it false pride, and often purposely
outraged his feelings to harden him, as he had hardened Claude's
mother, who was afraid of everything but schoolbooks and
prayer-meetings when he first married her. She was still more or
less bewildered, but she had long ago got over any fear of him
and any dread of living with him. She accepted everything about
her husband as part of his rugged masculinity, and of that she
was proud, in her quiet way.
Claude had never quite forgiven his father for some of his
practical jokes. One warm spring day, when he was a boisterous
little boy of five, playing in and out of the house, he heard his
mother entreating Mr. Wheeler to go down to the orchard and pick
the cherries from a tree that hung loaded. Claude remembered that
she persisted rather complainingly, saying that the cherries were
too high for her to reach, and that even if she had a ladder it
would hurt her back. Mr. Wheeler was always annoyed if his wife
referred to any physical weakness, especially if she complained
about her back. He got up and went out. After a while he
returned. "All right now, Evangeline," he called cheerily as he
passed through the kitchen. "Cherries won't give you any trouble.
You and Claude can run along and pick 'em as easy as can be."
Mrs. Wheeler trustfully put on her sunbonnet, gave Claude a
little pail and took a big one herself, and they went down the
pasture hill to the orchard, fenced in on the low land by the
creek. The ground had been ploughed that spring to make it hold
moisture, and Claude was running happily along in one of the
furrows, when he looked up and beheld a sight he could never
forget. The beautiful, round-topped cherry tree, full of green
leaves and red fruit,--his father had sawed it through! It lay on
the ground beside its bleeding stump. With one scream Claude
became a little demon. He threw away his tin pail, jumped about
howling and kicking the loose earth with his copper-toed shoes,
until his mother was much more concerned for him than for the
tree.
"Son, son," she cried, "it's your father's tree. He has a perfect
right to cut it down if he wants to. He's often said the trees
were too thick in here. Maybe it will be better for the others."
"'Tain't so! He's a damn fool, damn fool!" Claude bellowed, still
hopping and kicking, almost choking with rage and hate.
His mother dropped on her knees beside him. "Claude, stop! I'd
rather have the whole orchard cut down than hear you say such
things."
After she got him quieted they picked the cherries and went back
to the house. Claude had promised her that he would say nothing,
but his father must have noticed the little boy's angry eyes
fixed upon him all through dinner, and his expression of scorn.
Even then his flexible lips were only too well adapted to hold
the picture of that feeling. For days afterward Claude went down
to the orchard and watched the tree grow sicker, wilt and wither
away. God would surely punish a man who could do that, he
thought.
A violent temper and physical restlessness were the most
conspicuous things about Claude when he was a little boy. Ralph
was docile, and had a precocious sagacity for keeping out of
trouble. Quiet in manner, he was fertile in devising mischief,
and easily persuaded his older brother, who was always looking
for something to do, to execute his plans. It was usually Claude
who was caught red-handed. Sitting mild and contemplative on his
quilt on the floor, Ralph would whisper to Claude that it might
be amusing to climb up and take the clock from the shelf, or to
operate the sewing-machine. When they were older, and played out
of doors, he had only to insinuate that Claude was afraid, to
make him try a frosted axe with his tongue, or jump from the shed
roof.
The usual hardships of country boyhood were not enough for
Claude; he imposed physical tests and penances upon himself.
Whenever he burned his finger, he followed Mahailey's advice and
held his hand close to the stove to "draw out the fire." One year
he went to school all winter in his jacket, to make himself
tough. His mother would button him up in his overcoat and put his
dinner-pail in his hand and start him off. As soon as he got out
of sight of the house, he pulled off his coat, rolled it under
his arm, and scudded along the edge of the frozen fields,
arriving at the frame schoolhouse panting and shivering, but very
well pleased with himself.
V
Claude waited for his elders to change their mind about where he
should go to school; but no one seemed much concerned, not even
his mother.
Two years ago, the young man whom Mrs. Wheeler called "Brother
Weldon" had come out from Lincoln, preaching in little towns and
country churches, and recruiting students for the institution at
which he taught in the winter. He had convinced Mrs. Wheeler that
his college was the safest possible place for a boy who was
leaving home for the first time.
Claude's mother was not discriminating about preachers. She
believed them all chosen and sanctified, and was never happier
than when she had one in the house to cook for and wait upon. She
made young Mr. Weldon so comfortable that he remained under her
roof for several weeks, occupying the spare room, where he spent
the mornings in study and meditation. He appeared regularly at
mealtime to ask a blessing upon the food and to sit with devout,
downcast eyes while the chicken was being dismembered. His
top-shaped head hung a little to one side, the thin hair was
parted precisely over his high forehead and brushed in little
ripples. He was soft spoken and apologetic in manner and took up
as little room as possible. His meekness amused Mr. Wheeler, who
liked to ply him with food and never failed to ask him gravely
"what part of the chicken he would prefer," in order to hear him
murmur, "A little of the white meat, if you please," while he
drew his elbows close, as if he were adroitly sliding over a
dangerous place. In the afternoon Brother Weldon usually put on
a fresh lawn necktie and a hard, glistening straw hat which left a
red streak across his forehead, tucked his Bible under his arm,
and went out to make calls. If he went far, Ralph took him in the
automobile.
Claude disliked this young man from the moment he first met him,
and could scarcely answer him civilly. Mrs. Wheeler, always
absent-minded, and now absorbed in her cherishing care of the
visitor, did not notice Claude's scornful silences until
Mahailey, whom such things never escaped, whispered to her over
the stove one day: "Mr. Claude, he don't like the preacher. He
just ain't got no use fur him, but don't you let on."
As a result of Brother Weldon's sojourn at the farm, Claude was
sent to the Temple College. Claude had come to believe that the
things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to
shape his destiny.
When the second week of September came round, he threw a few
clothes and books into his trunk and said good-bye to his mother
and Mahailey. Ralph took him into Frankfort to catch the train
for Lincoln. After settling himself in the dirty day-coach,
Claude fell to meditating upon his prospects. There was a Pullman
car on the train, but to take a Pullman for a daylight journey
was one of the things a Wheeler did not do.
Claude knew that he was going back to the wrong school, that he
was wasting both time and money. He sneered at himself for his
lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself,
he could take up his case and fight for it. He could not assert
himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough
with the rest of the world. Yet, if this were true, why did he
continue to live with the tiresome Chapins ? The Chapin household
consisted of a brother and sister. Edward Chapin was a man of
twenty-six, with an old, wasted face,--and he was still going to
school, studying for the ministry. His sister Annabelle kept
house for him; that is to say, she did whatever housework was
done. The brother supported himself and his sister by getting odd
jobs from churches and religious societies; he "supplied" the
pulpit when a minister was ill, did secretarial work for the
college and the Young Men's Christian Association. Claude's
weekly payment for room and board, though a small sum, was very
necessary to their comfort.
Chapin had been going to the Temple College for four years, and
it would probably take him two years more to complete the course.
He conned his book on trolley-cars, or while he waited by the
track on windy corners, and studied far into the night. His
natural stupidity must have been something quite out of the
ordinary; after years of reverential study, he could not read the
Greek Testament without a lexicon and grammar at his elbow. He
gave a great deal of time to the practice of elocution and
oratory. At certain hours their frail domicile--it had been
thinly built for the academic poor and sat upon concrete blocks
in lieu of a foundation-- re-echoed with his hoarse, overstrained
voice, declaiming his own orations or those of Wendell Phillips.
Annabelle Chapin was one of Claude's classmates. She was not as
dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize
the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing,
silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too
good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about
Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself
while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who
can make the finest things seem tame and flat merely by alluding
to them. Last winter she had recited the odes of Horace about the
house--it was exactly her notion of the student-like thing to
do--until Claude feared he would always associate that poet with
the heaviness of hurriedly prepared luncheons.
Mrs. Wheeler liked to feel that Claude was assisting this worthy
pair in their struggle for an education; but he had long ago
decided that since neither of the Chapins got anything out of
their efforts but a kind of messy inefficiency, the struggle
might better have been relinquished in the beginning. He took
care of his own room; kept it bare and habitable, free from
Annabelle's attentions and decorations. But the flimsy pretences
of light-housekeeping were very distasteful to him. He was born
with a love of order, just as he was born with red hair. It was a
personal attribute.
The boy felt bitterly about the way in which he had been brought
up, and about his hair and his freckles and his awkwardness. When
he went to the theatre in Lincoln, he took a seat in the gallery,
because he knew that he looked like a green country boy. His
clothes were never right. He bought collars that were too high
and neckties that were too bright, and hid them away in his
trunk. His one experiment with a tailor was unsuccessful. The
tailor saw at once that his stammering client didn't know what he
wanted, so he persuaded him that as the season was spring he
needed light checked trousers and a blue serge coat and vest.
When Claude wore his new clothes to St. Paul's church on Sunday
morning, the eyes of every one he met followed his smart legs
down the street. For the next week he observed the legs of old
men and young, and decided there wasn't another pair of checked
pants in Lincoln. He hung his new clothes up in his closet and
never put them on again, though Annabelle Chapin watched for them
wistfully. Nevertheless, Claude thought he could recognize a
well-dressed man when he saw one. He even thought he could
recognize a well-dressed woman. If an attractive woman got into
the street car when he was on his way to or from Temple Place, he
was distracted between the desire to look at her and the wish to
seem indifferent.
Claude is on his way back to Lincoln, with a fairly liberal
allowance which does not contribute much to his comfort or
pleasure. He has no friends or instructors whom he can regard
with admiration, though the need to admire is just now uppermost
in his nature. He is convinced that the people who might mean
something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is
not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap
substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who
flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring
a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy
compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.
VI
Three months later, on a grey December day, Claude was seated in
the passenger coach of an accommodation freight train, going home
for the holidays. He had a pile of books on the seat beside him
and was reading, when the train stopped with a jerk that sent the
volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at
his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or
more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car
and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of
little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office,
and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays
stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive
made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against the
grey sky.
Claude went into a restaurant across the street and ordered an
oyster stew. The proprietress, a plump little German woman with a
frizzed bang, always remembered him from trip to trip. While he
was eating his oysters she told him that she had just finished
roasting a chicken with sweet potatoes, and if he liked he could
have the first brown cut off the breast before the train-men came
in for dinner. Asking her to bring it along, he waited, sitting
on a stool, his boots on the lead-pipe foot-rest, his elbows on
the shiny brown counter, staring at a pyramid of tough looking
bun-sandwiches under a glass globe.
"I been lookin' for you every day," said Mrs. Voigt when she
brought his plate. "I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet
pertaters, ja." "Thank you. You must be popular with your
boarders."
She giggled. "Ja, all de train men is friends mit me. Sometimes
dey bring me a liddle Schweizerkase from one of dem big saloons
in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize. I ain't got no boys
mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?"
She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching
every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting
it herself. The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking
what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited
little hen, chuckling and cackling. Claude wondered whether
working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over. He
didn't believe so. He liked to think that such geniality was
common only in what he broadly called "the West." He bought a big
cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh
air until the passenger whistled in.
After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books
again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they
unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the
great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep. A
starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly
ridges between the furrows.
Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and
Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and
slow. He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and
again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick,
when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his
father was kicked by a vicious stallion. It was not a Wheeler
custom to employ a nurse; if any one in the household was ill, it
was understood that some member of the family would act in that
capacity.
Claude was reflecting upon the fact that he had never gone home
before in such good spirits. Two fortunate things had happened to
him since he went over this road three months ago.
As soon as he reached Lincoln in September, he had matriculated
at the State University for special work in European History. The
year before he had heard the head of the department lecture for
some charity, and resolved that even if he were not allowed to
change his college, he would manage to study under that man. The
course Claude selected was one upon which a student could put as
much time as he chose. It was based upon the reading of
historical sources, and the Professor was notoriously greedy for
full notebooks. Claude's were of the fullest. He worked early and
late at the University Library, often got his supper in town and
went back to read until closing hour. For the first time he was
studying a subject which seemed to him vital, which had to do
with events and ideas, instead of with lexicons and grammars. How
often he had wished for Ernest during the lectures! He could see
Ernest drinking them up, agreeing or dissenting in his
independent way. The class was very large, and the Professor
spoke without notes,--he talked rapidly, as if he were addressing
his equals, with none of the coaxing persuasiveness to which
Temple students were accustomed. His lectures were condensed like
a legal brief, but there was a kind of dry fervour in his voice,
and when he occasionally interrupted his exposition with purely
personal comment, it seemed valuable and important.
Claude usually came out from these lectures with the feeling that
the world was full of stimulating things, and that one was
fortunate to be alive and to be able to find out about them. His
reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to
him; seemed to promise him something. One of his chief
difficulties had always been that he could not make himself
believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that
were all, then life was not worth the trouble.
The second good thing that had befallen him was that he had got
to know some people he liked. This came about accidentally, after
a football game between the Temple eleven and the State
University team--merely a practice game for the latter. Claude
was playing half-back with the Temple. Toward the close of the
first quarter, he followed his interference safely around the
right end, dodged a tackle which threatened to end the play, and
broke loose for a ninety yard run down the field for a touchdown.
He brought his eleven off with a good showing. The State men
congratulated him warmly, and their coach went so far as to hint
that if he ever wanted to make a change, there would be a place
for him on the University team.
Claude had a proud moment, but even while Coach Ballinger was
talking to him, the Temple students rushed howling from the
grandstand, and Annabelle Chapin, ridiculous in a sport suit of
her own construction, bedecked with the Temple colours and
blowing a child's horn, positively threw herself upon his neck.
He disengaged himself, not very gently, and stalked grimly away
to the dressing shed . . . . What was the use, if you were always
with the wrong crowd?
Julius Erlich, who played quarter on the State team, took him
aside and said affably: "Come home to supper with me tonight,
Wheeler, and meet my mother. Come along with us and dress in the
Armory. You have your clothes in your suitcase, haven't you?"
"They're hardly clothes to go visiting in," Claude replied
doubtfully.
"Oh, that doesn't matter! We're all boys at home. Mother wouldn't
mind if you came in your track things."
Claude consented before he had time to frighten himself by
imagining difficulties. The Erlich boy often sat next him in the
history class, and they had several times talked together.
Hitherto Claude had felt that he "couldn't make Erlich out," but
this afternoon, while they dressed after their shower, they
became good friends, all in a few minutes. Claude was perhaps
less tied-up in mind and body than usual. He was so astonished at
finding himself on easy, confidential terms with Erlich that he
scarcely gave a thought to his second-day shirt and his collar
with a broken edge,--wretched economies he had been trained to
observe.
They had not walked more than two blocks from the Armory when
Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced,
terraced lawn. He led Claude around to the wing, and through a
glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides,
above the wainscoting. The room was full of boys and young men,
seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and
they were all talking at once. On one of the couches a young man
in a smoking jacket lay reading as composedly as if he were
alone.
"Five of these are my brothers," said his host, "and the rest are
friends."
The company recognized Claude and included him in their talk
about the game. When the visitors had gone, Julius introduced his
brothers. They were all nice boys, Claude thought, and had easy,
agreeable manners. The three older ones were in business, but
they too had been to the game that afternoon. Claude had never
before seen brothers who were so outspoken and frank with one
another. To him they were very cordial; the one who was lying
down came forward to shake hands, keeping the place in his book
with his finger.
On a table in the middle of the room were pipes and boxes of
tobacco, cigars in a glass jar, and a big Chinese bowl full of
cigarettes. This provisionment seemed the more remarkable to
Claude because at home he had to smoke in the cowshed. The number
of books astonished him almost as much; the wainscoting all
around the room was built up in open bookcases, stuffed with
volumes fat and thin, and they all looked interesting and
hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night
before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck
of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This
head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention
more than anything else in the room, and for some reason
instantly made him wish he lived there.
Julius brought in his mother, and when they went to supper Claude
was seated beside her at one end of the long table. Mrs. Erlich
seemed to him very young to be the head of such a family. Her
hair was still brown, and she wore it drawn over her ears and
twisted in two little horns, like the ladies in old
daguerreotypes. Her face, too, suggested a daguerreotype; there
was something old-fashioned and picturesque about it. Her skin
had the soft whiteness of white flowers that have been drenched
by rain. She talked with quick gestures, and her decided little
nod was quaint and very personal. Her hazel-coloured eyes peered
expectantly over her nose-glasses, always watching to see things
turn out wonderfully well; always looking for some good German
fairy in the cupboard or the cake-box, or in the steaming vapor
of wash-day.
The boys were discussing an engagement that had just been
announced, and Mrs. Erlich began to tell Claude a long story
about how this brilliant young man had come to Lincoln and met
this beautiful young girl, who was already engaged to a cold and
academic youth, and how after many heart-burnings the beautiful
girl had broken with the wrong man and become betrothed to the
right one, and now they were so happy, and every one, she asked
Claude to believe, was equally happy! In the middle of her
narrative Julius reminded her smilingly that since Claude didn't
know these people, he would hardly be interested in their
romance, but she merely looked at him over her nose-glasses and
said, "And is that so, Herr Julius!" One could see that she was a
match for them.
The conversation went racing from one thing to another. The
brothers began to argue hotly about a new girl who was visiting
in town; whether she was pretty, how pretty she was, whether she
was naive. To Claude this was like talk in a play. He had never
heard a living person discussed and analysed thus before. He had
never heard a family talk so much, or with anything like so much
zest. Here there was none of the poisonous reticence he had
always associated with family gatherings, nor the awkwardness of
people sitting with their hands in their lap, facing each other,
each one guarding his secret or his suspicion, while he hunted
for a safe subject to talk about. Their fertility of phrase, too,
astonished him; how could people find so much to say about one
girl? To be sure, a good deal of it sounded far-fetched to him,
but he sadly admitted that in such matters he was no judge. When
they went back to the living room Julius began to pick out airs
on his guitar, and the bearded brother sat down to read. Otto,
the youngest, seeing a group of students passing the house, ran
out on to the lawn and called them in,-- two boys, and a girl
with red cheeks and a fur stole. Claude had made for a corner,
and was perfectly content to be an on-looker, but Mrs. Erlich
soon came and seated herself beside him. When the doors into the
parlour were opened, she noticed his eyes straying to an
engraving of Napoleon which hung over the piano, and made him go
and look at it. She told him it was a rare engraving, and she
showed him a portrait of her great-grandfather, who was an
officer in Napoleon's army. To explain how this came about was a
long story.
As she talked to Claude, Mrs. Erlich discovered that his eyes
were not really pale, but only looked so because of his light
lashes. They could say a great deal when they looked squarely
into hers, and she liked what they said. She soon found out that
he was discontented; how he hated the Temple school, and why his
mother wished him to go there.
When the three who had been called in from the sidewalk took
their leave, Claude rose also. They were evidently familiars of
the house, and their careless exit, with a gay "Good-night,
everybody!" gave him no practical suggestion as to what he ought
to say or how he was to get out. Julius made things more
difficult by telling him to sit down, as it wasn't time to go
yet. But Mrs. Erlich said it was time; he would have a long ride
out to Temple Place.
It was really very easy. She walked to the door with him and gave
him his hat, patting his arm in a final way. "You will come often
to see us. We are going to be friends." Her forehead, with its
neat curtains of brown hair, came something below Claude's chin,
and she peered up at him with that quaintly hopeful expression,
as if--as if even he might turn out wonderfully well! Certainly,
nobody had ever looked at him like that before.
"It's been lovely," he murmured to her, quite without
embarrassment, and in happy unconsciousness he turned the knob
and passed out through the glass door.
While the freight train was puffing slowly across the winter
country, leaving a black trail suspended in the still air, Claude
went over that experience minutely in his mind, as if he feared
to lose something of it on approaching home. He could remember
exactly how Mrs. Erlich and the boys had looked to him on that
first night, could repeat almost word for word the conversation
which had been so novel to him. Then he had supposed the Erlichs
were rich people, but he found out afterwards that they were
poor. The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even
those who were still in school. They merely knew how to live, he
discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on
machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.
Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else
they could do. They could not make agreeable people, either. In
so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious
indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.
Since that first visit, he had gone to the Erlichs', not as often
as he wished, certainly, but as often as he dared. Some of the
University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like
it, were almost members of the family; but they were better
looking than he, and better company. To be sure, long Baumgartner
was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red
hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to
the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a great
deal about music.
Claude didn't wish to be a bore. Sometimes in the evening, when
he left the Library to smoke a cigar, he walked slowly past the
Erlichs' house, looking at the lighted windows of the
sitting-room and wondering what was going on inside. Before he
went there to call, he racked his brain for things to talk about.
If there had been a football game, or a good play at the theatre,
that helped, of course.
Almost without realizing what be was doing, he tried to think
things out and to justify his opinions to himself, so that he
would have something to say when the Erlich boys questioned him.
He had grown up with the conviction that it was beneath his
dignity to explain himself, just as it was to dress carefully, or
to be caught taking pains about anything. Ernest was the only
person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed
this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and
foreign. It wasn't American to explain yourself; you didn't have
to! On the farm you said you would or you wouldn't; that
Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy. You weren't
supposed to say more unless you were a stump speaker,- if you
tried to say more, it was because you liked to hear yourself
talk. Since you never said anything, you didn't form the habit of
thinking. If you got too much bored, you went to town and bought
something new.
But all the people he met at the Erlichs' talked. If they asked
him about a play or a book and he said it was "no good," they at
once demanded why. The Erlichs thought him a clam, but Claude
sometimes thought himself amazing. Could it really be he, who was
airing his opinions in this indelicate manner? He caught himself
using words that had never crossed his lips before, that in his
mind were associated only with the printed page. When he suddenly
realized that he was using a word for the first time, and
probably mispronouncing it, he would become as much confused as
i
f he were trying to pass a lead dollar, would blush and stammer
and let some one finish his sentence for him.
Claude couldn't resist occasionally dropping in at the Erlichs'
in the afternoon; then the boys were away, and he could have Mrs.
Erlich to himself for half-anhour. When she talked to him she
taught him so much about life. He loved to hear her sing
sentimental German sons as she worked; "Spinn, spinn, du Tochter
mein." He didn't know why, but he simply adored it! Every time he
went away from her lie felt happy and full of kindness, and
thought about beech woods and walled towns, or about Carl Schurz
and the Romantic revolution.
He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the
holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took
him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions
that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and
seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude
thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he
believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old
friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working
rhymes and songs. Surely these were fine things to put into
little cakes! After Claude left her, he did something a Wheeler
didn't do; he went down to O street and sent her a box of the
reddest roses he could find. In his pocket was the little note
she had written to thank him.
VII
It was beginning to grow dark when Claude reached the farm. While
Ralph stopped to put away the car, he walked on alone to the
house. He never came back without emotion,--try as he would to
pass lightly over these departures and returns which were all in
the day's work. When he came up the hill like this, toward the
tall house with its lighted windows, something always clutched at
his heart. He both loved and hated to come home. He was always
disappointed, and yet he always felt the rightness of returning
to his own place. Even when it broke his spirit and humbled his
pride, he felt it was right that he should be thus humbled. He
didn't question that the lowest state of mind was the truest, and
that the less a man thought of himself, the more likely he was to
be correct in his estimate.
Approaching the door, Claude stopped a moment and peered in at
the kitchen window. The table was set for supper, and Mahailey
was at the stove, stirring something in a big iron pot; cornmeal
mush, probably,--she often made it for herself now that her teeth
had begun to fail. She stood leaning over, embracing the pot with
one arm, and with the other she beat the stiff contents, nodding
her head in time to this rotary movement. Confused emotions
surged up in Claude. He went in quickly and gave her a bearish
hug.
Her face wrinkled up in the foolish grin he knew so well. "Lord,
how you scared me, Mr. Claude! A little more'n I'd 'a' had my
mush all over the floor. You lookin' fine, you nice boy, you!"
He knew Mahailey was gladder to see him come home than any one
except his mother. Hearing Mrs. Wheeler's wandering, uncertain
steps in the enclosed stairway, he opened the door and ran
halfway up to meet her, putting his arm about her with the almost
painful tenderness he always felt, but seldom was at liberty to
show. She reached up both hands and stroked his hair for a
moment, laughing as one does to a little boy, and telling him she
believed it was redder every time he came back.
"Have we got all the corn in, Mother?"
"No, Claude, we haven't. You know we're always behindhand. It's
been fine, open weather for husking, too. But at least we've got
rid of that miserable Jerry; so there's something to be thankful
for. He had one of his fits of temper in town one day, when he
was hitching up to come home, and Leonard Dawson saw him beat one
of our horses with the neck-yoke. Leonard told your father, and
spoke his mind, and your father discharged Jerry. If you or Ralph
had told him, he most likely wouldn't have done anything about
it. But I guess all fathers are the same." She chuckled
confidingly, leaning on Claude's arm as they descended the
stairs.
"I guess so. Did he hurt the horse much? Which one was it?"
"The little black, Pompey. I believe he is rather a mean horse.
The men said one of the bones over the eye was broken, but he
would probably come round all right."
"Pompey isn't mean; he's nervous. All the horses hated Jerry, and
they had good reason to." Claude jerked his shoulders to shake
off disgusting recollections of this mongrel man which flashed
back into his mind. He had seen things happen. in the barn that
he positively couldn't tell his father. Mr. Wheeler came into the
kitchen and stopped on his way upstairs long enough to say,
"Hello, Claude. You look pretty well."
"Yes, sir. I'm all right, thank you."
"Bayliss tells me you've been playing football a good deal."
"Not more than usual. We played half a dozen games; generally got
licked. The State has a fine team, though."
"I ex-pect," Mr. Wheeler drawled as he strode upstairs.
Supper went as usual. Dan kept grinning and blinking at Claude,
trying to discover whether he had already been informed of
Jerry's fate. Ralph told him the neighbourhood gossip: Gus
Yoeder, their German neighbour, was bringing suit against a
farmer who had shot his dog. Leonard Dawson was going to marry
Susie Grey. She was the girl on whose account Leonard had slapped
Bayliss, Claude remembered.
After supper Ralph and Mr. Wheeler went off in the car to a
Christmas entertainment at the country schoolhouse. Claude and
his mother sat down for a quiet talk by the hard-coal burner in
the living room upstairs. Claude liked this room, especially when
his father was not there. The old carpet, the faded chairs, the
secretary book-case, the spotty engraving with all the scenes
from Pilgrim's Progress that hung over the sofa,--these things
made him feel at home. Ralph was always proposing to re-furnish
the room in Mission oak, but so far Claude and his mother had
saved it.
Claude drew up his favourite chair and began to tell Mrs. Wheeler
about the Erlich boys and their mother. She listened, but he
could see that she was much more interested in hearing about the
Chapins, and whether Edward's throat had improved, and where he
had preached this fall. That was one of the disappointing things
about coming home; he could never interest his mother in new
things or people unless they in some way had to do with the
church. He knew, too, she was always hoping to hear that he at
last felt the need of coming closer to the church. She did not
harass him about these things, but she had told him once or twice
that nothing could happen in the world which would give her so
much pleasure as to see him reconciled to Christ. He realized, as
he talked to her about the Erlichs, that she was wondering
whether they weren't very "worldly" people, and was apprehensive
about their influence on him. The evening was rather a failure,
and he went to bed early.
Claude had gone through a painful time of doubt and fear when he
thought a great deal about religion. For several years, from
fourteen to eighteen, he believed that he would be lost if he did
not repent and undergo that mysterious change called conversion.
But there was something stubborn in him that would not let him
avail himself of the pardon offered. He felt condemned, but he
did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He
would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his
faculties free. He didn't want to be like the young men who said
in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated
their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.
In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A
funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black
coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the
dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of
escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no
way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of
lonely creatures rotting away under ground. life seemed nothing
but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had
never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And
yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;
that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself
from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he
would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay . . . . He could
not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! "What
did it mean, that verse in the Bible, "He shall not suffer His
holy one to see corruption"?
If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious
fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude
had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as
something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned
about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who
taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their
theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by
faith. "Faith," as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the
Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities
he admired. Young men went into the ministry because they were
timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because
they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his
mother.
Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians,
Claude would have said that he was a Christian. He believed in
God, and in the spirit of the four Gospels, and in the Sermon on
the Mount. He used to halt and stumble at "Blessed are the meek,"
until one day he happened to think that this verse was meant
exactly for people like Mahailey; and surely she was blessed!
VIII
0n the Sunday after Christmas Claude and Ernest were walking
along the banks of Lovely Creek. They had been as far as Mr.
Wheeler's timber claim and back. It was like an autumn afternoon,
so warm that they left their overcoats on the limb of a crooked
elm by the pasture fence. The fields and the bare tree-tops
seemed to be swimming in light. A few brown leaves still clung to
the bushy trees along the creek. In the upper pasture, more than
a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that
wound about a little dogwood and covered it with scarlet berries.
It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors.
They had just been talking about some of the books Claude had
brought home, and his history course. He was not able to tell
Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt
that this was more Ernest's fault than his own; Ernest was such a
literal-minded fellow. When they came upon the bittersweet, they
forgot their discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the
red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and its pale gold
leaves, ready to fall at a touch. The vine and the little tree it
honoured, hidden away in the cleft of a ravine, had escaped the
stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes
took a short cut home through the pasture. At its roots, the
creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of
melting ice.
When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude
again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and
reasonable mood.
"What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to
farm all your life?"
"Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I'd be at it before
now. What makes you ask that?"
"Oh, I don't know! I suppose people must think about the future
sometime. And you're so practical."
"The future, eh?" Ernest shut one eye and smiled. "That's a big
word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I'm
going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I'll marry a
nice girl and bring her back."
"Is that all?"
"That's enough, if it turns out right, isn't it?"
"Perhaps. It wouldn't be for me. I don't believe I can ever
settle down to anything. Don't you feel that at this rate there
isn't much in it?"
"In what?"
"In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it?
Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad
to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel
sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a
holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed
-
-nothing has happened."
"But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your
own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to
see my friends like this, it's enough for me."
"Is it? Well, if we've only got once to live, it seems like there
ought to be something--well, something splendid about life,
sometimes."
Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they
walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. "You
Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to
warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not
very much can happen to us, we know that,--and we learn to make
the most of little things."
"The martyrs must have found something outside themselves.
Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little
things."
"Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their
idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the
sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of
vanity to help them along, too."'
Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squinted at
a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, "The fact
is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board
and clothes and Sundays off, don't you ?"
Ernest laughed rather mournfully. "It doesn't matter much what I
think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach
down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess."
Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about
over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his mouth.
The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler
watched them from the kitchen window, seemed to be walking beside
a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving
along on the crest of the hill against the golden sky; even at
that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so
unyielding. They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was
on the wrong side.
IX
After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in
the University Library. He worked at a table next the alcove
where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art
students, all of whom were girls, read and whispered together in
this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having
to talk to them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked
him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves, and
greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the
campus, and talked to him with the easy cordiality usual between
boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls,
Miss Peachy Millmore, was different from the others,--different
from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and
was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.
Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what
might be called a "carriage," and she had altogether more manner
and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and
curly,--the short ringlets about her ears were just the colour of
a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent,
and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to
pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her cheeks to see if
they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her
"the Georgia peach." She was considered very pretty, and the
University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since
then her vogue had somewhat declined.
Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town
with Claude. However he tried to adapt his long stride to her
tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always
dropping her gloves or her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked
to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept
slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and
be so gracious to him, he thought. She even coaxed him to pose in
his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling
him that he had "a magnificent physique," a compliment which
covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.
Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if
she were not in the alcove, found it quite natural that she
should explain her absences to him,--tell him how often she
washed her hair and how long it was when she uncoiled it.
One Friday in February Julius Erlich overtook Claude on the
campus and proposed that they should try the skating tomorrow.
"Yes, I'm going out," Claude replied. "I've promised to teach
Miss Millmore to skate. Won't you come along and help me?"
Julius laughed indulgently. "Oh, no! Some other time. I don't
want to break in on that."
"Nonsense! You could teach her better than I"
"Oh, I haven't the courage!"
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean."
"No, I don't. Why do you always laugh about that girl, anyhow?"
Julius made a little grimace. "She wrote some awfully slushy
letters to Phil Bowen, and he read them aloud at the frat house
one night." "Didn't you slap him?" Claude demanded, turning red.
"Well, I would have thought I would," said Julius smiling, "but I
didn't. They were too silly to make a fuss about. I've been wary
of the Georgia peach ever since. If you touched that sort of
peach ever so lightly, it might remain in your hand."
"I don't think so," replied Claude haughtily. "She's only
kind-hearted."
"Perhaps you're right. But I'm terribly afraid of girls who are
too kindhearted," Julius confessed. He had wanted to drop Claude
a word of warning for some time.
Claude kept his engagement with Miss Millmore. He took her out to
the skating pond several times, indeed, though in the beginning
he told her he feared her ankles were too weak. Their last
excursion was made by moonlight, and after that evening Claude
avoided Miss Millmore when he could do so without being rude. She
was attractive to him no more. It was her way to subdue by
clinging contact. One could scarcely call it design; it was a
degree less subtle than that. She had already thus subdued a pale
cousin in Atlanta, and it was on this account that she had been
sent North. She had, Claude angrily admitted, no reserve,--though
when one first met her she seemed to have so much. Her eager
susceptibility presented not the slightest temptation to him. He
was a boy with strong impulses, and he detested the idea of
trifling with them. The talk of the disreputable men his father
kept about the place at home, instead of corrupting him, had
given him a sharp disgust for sensuality. He had an almost
Hippolytean pride in candour.
X
The Erlich family loved anniversaries, birthdays, occasions. That
spring Mrs. Erlich's first cousin, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz,
who sang with the Chicago Opera Company, came to Lincoln as
soloist for the May Festival. As the date of her engagement
approached, her relatives began planning to entertain her. The
Matinee Musical was to give a formal reception for the singer, so
the Erlichs decided upon a dinner. Each member of the family
invited one guest, and they had great difficulty in deciding
which of their friends would be most appreciative of the honour.
There were to be more men than women, because Mrs. Erlich
remembered that cousin Wilhelmina had never been partial to the
society of her own sex.
One evening when her sons were revising their list, Mrs. Erlich
reminded them that she had not as yet named her guest. "For me,"
she said with decision, "you may put down Claude Wheeler."
This announcement was met with groans and laughter.
"You don't mean it, Mother," the oldest son protested. "Poor old
Claude wouldn't know what it was all about,--and one stick can
spoil a dinner party."
Mrs. Erlich shook her finger at him with conviction. "You will
see; your cousin Wilhelmina will be more interested in that boy
than in any of the others!"
Julius thought if she were not too strongly opposed she might
still yield her point. "For one thing, Mother, Claude hasn't any
dinner clothes," he murmured. She nodded to him. "That has been
attended to, Herr Julius. He is having some made. When I sounded
him, he told me he could easily afford it."
The boys said if things had gone as far as that, they supposed
they would have to make the best of it, and the eldest wrote down
"Claude Wheeler" with a flourish.
If the Erlich boys were apprehensive, their anxiety was nothing
to Claude's. He was to take Mrs. Erlich to Madame
Schroeder-Schatz's recital, and on the evening of the concert,
when he appeared at the door, the boys dragged him in to look him
over. Otto turned on all the lights, and Mrs. Erlich, in her new
black lace over white satin, fluttered into the parlour to see
what figure her escort cut.
Claude pulled off his overcoat as he was bid, arid presented
himself in the sooty blackness of fresh broadcloth. Mrs. Erlich's
eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly
his square red head, affectionately inclined toward her. She
laughed and clapped her hands.
"Now all the girls will turn round in their seats to look, and
wonder where I got him!"
Claude began to bestow her belongings in his overcoat pockets;
opera glasses in one, fan in another. She put a lorgnette into
her little bag, along with her powder-box, handkerchief and
smelling salts,--there was even a little silver box of peppermint
drops, in case she might begin to cough. She drew on her long
gloves, arranged a lace scarf over her hair, and at last was
ready to have the evening cloak which Claude held wound about
her. When she reached up and took his arm, bowing to her sons,
they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air
was a frame for the gay little picture she made.
The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour,
Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than
her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an
enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great
contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a
really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as
food and drink. At dinner she sat on the right of the oldest son.
Claude, beside Mrs. Erlich at the other end of the table, watched
attentively the lady attired in green velvet and blazing
rhinestones.
After dinner, as Madame Schroeder-Schatz swept out of the dining
room, she dropped her cousin's arm and stopped before Claude, who
stood at attention behind his chair.
"If Cousin Augusta can spare you, we must have a little talk
together. We have been very far separated," she said.
She led Claude to one of the window seats in the living-room, at
once complained of a draft, and sent him to hunt for her green
scarf. He brought it and carefully put it about her shoulders;
but after a few moments, she threw it off with a slightly annoyed
air, as if she had never wanted it. Claude with solicitude
reminded her about the draft.
"Draft?" she said lifting her chin, "there is no draft here."
She asked Claude where he lived, how much land his father owned,
what crops they raised, and about their poultry and dairy. When
she was a child she had lived on a farm in Bavaria, and she
seemed to know a good deal about farming and live-stock. She was
disapproving when Claude told her they rented half their land to
other farmers. "If I were a young man, I would begin to acquire
land, and I would not stop until I had a whole county," she
declared. She said that when she met new people, she liked to
find out the way they made their living; her own way was a hard
one.
Later in the evening Madame Schroeder-Schatz graciously consented
to sing for her cousins. When she sat down to the piano, she
beckoned Claude and asked him to turn for her. He shook his head,
smiling ruefully.
"I'm sorry I'm so stupid, but I don't know one note from
another."
She tapped his sleeve. "Well, never mind. I may want the piano
moved yet; you could do that for me, eh?"
When Madame Schroeder-Schatz was in Mrs. Erlich's bedroom,
powdering her nose before she put on her wraps, she remarked,
"What a pity, Augusta, that you have not a daughter now, to marry
to Claude Melnotte. He would make you a perfect son-in-law."
"Ah, if I only had!" sighed Mrs. Erlich.
"Or," continued Madame Schroeder-Schatz, energetically pulling on
her large carriage shoes, "if you were but a few years younger,
it might not yet be too late. Oh, don't be a fool, Augusta! Such
things have happened, and will happen again. However, better a
widow than to be tied to a sick man--like a stone about my neck!
What a husband to go home to! and I a woman in full vigour. Jas
ist ein Kreuz ich trage!" She smote her bosom, on the left side.
Having put on first a velvet coat, then a fur mantle, Madame
SchroederSchatz moved like a galleon out into the living room and
kissed all her cousins, and Claude Wheeler, good-night.
XI
0ne warm afternoon in May Claude sat in his upstairs room at the
Chapins', copying his thesis, which was to take the place of an
examination in history. It was a criticism of the testimony of
Jeanne d'Arc in her nine private examinations and the trial in
ordinary. The Professor had assigned him the subject with a flash
of humour. Although this evidence had been pawed over by so many
hands since the fifteenth century, by the phlegmatic and the
fiery, by rhapsodists and cynics, he felt sure that Wheeler would
not dismiss the case lightly.
Indeed, Claude put a great deal of time and thought upon the
matter, and for the time being it seemed quite the most important
thing in his life. He worked from an English translation of the
Proces, but he kept the French text at his elbow, and some of her
replies haunted him in the language in which they were spoken. It
seemed to him that they were like the speech of her saints, of
whom Jeanne said, "the voice is beautiful, sweet and low, and it
speaks in the French tongue." Claude flattered himself that he
had kept all personal feeling out of the paper; that it was a
cold estimate of the girl's motives and character as indicated by
the consistency and inconsistency of her replies; and of the
change wrought in her by imprisonment and by "the fear of the
fire."
When he had copied the last page of his manuscript and sat
contemplating the pile of written sheets, he felt that after all
his conscientious study he really knew very little more about
the Maid of Orleans than when he first heard of her from his
mother, one day when he was a little boy. He had been shut up in
the house with a cold, he remembered, and he found a picture of
her in armour, in an old book, and took it down to the kitchen
where his mother was making apple pies. She glanced at the
picture, and while she went on rolling out the dough and fitting
it to the pans, she told him the story. He had forgotten what she
said,--it must have been very fragmentary,--but from that time on
he knew the essential facts about Joan of Arc, and she was a
living figure in his mind. She seemed to him then as clear as
now, and now as miraculous as then.
It was a curious thing, he reflected, that a character could
perpetuate itself thus; by a picture, a word, a phrase, it could
renew itself in every generation and be born over and over again
in the minds of children. At that time he had never seen a map of
France, and had a very poor opinion of any place farther away
than Chicago; yet he was perfectly prepared for the legend of
Joan of Arc, and often thought about her when he was bringing in
his cobs in the evening, or when he was sent to the windmill for
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