Atlantic Narratives Part 56

The lot had fallen to Jim Paine. But Jim took so unbridled a pleasure in displeasing Mrs. Horick that it was decided such a fate would be too cruel to her. The lots were drawn again. This time the lot fell to Alice Paine. But Mrs. Horick depressed Alice, sometimes for several hours after her departure. The lots were drawn again. This time the lot fell to Elsie Norris. With whoops, it was determined Elsie must remain. She would not care a fig what Mrs. Horick said or thought, would be entirely amiable with her, and, besides, had no shoes to walk to the station in.

One pair was wet. The other was too stiff to put on. After dressing Elsie in the most handsome garments the camp afforded, the others had left her, early in the afternoon, with Shep, Rabbie's collie, wandering around within call, and occasionally barking at imaginary wolves in the brush.

'Perhaps you met my cousins on your way,' said Elsie.

'No. I didn't come from that direction. I came from Gary. It ain't much of a place to live. But I got a real good airy room, with a back-porch of my own, in a carpenter's family there. Miss Brackett's my name. I'm about the only dressmaker in the place, so's I get plenty of custom, more 'n all that I can do; and well-paid, too, you can say in a way,'

she added with a sigh; 'and in a way, not; because I hate sewing. But then I walk a good deal around here. There's some fine walks through the oaks and in the dunes; just as fine as any one could wish,' she said with a look of content. 'It makes me just about homesick to see your camp. I was camping myself six years ago.'

'Were you? Here?'

'No,' said Miss Brackett, with a little hesitation. In response to Elsie's invitation, she had seated herself on a log, near the fire.

There was evidently something very stirring in their little camp to her.

For a moment she even looked as if she were going to cry. 'It was on the plains,' she said finally, with a certain pride. 'A long wagon-trip, a whole year long.'

'How fine!'

'Yes,' said Miss Brackett, looking at the dunes and the surging lake.

'It was, as you might say, a great experience. You hardly would believe me, but before that time, why, I hardly knew there was such a place as outdoors; not till I was forty-six years old; and that's a fact.'

Elsie glanced up at her inquiringly. She had heard of persons who acquired Spanish at ninety, or who experienced a pa.s.sionate personal infatuation for the first time at sixty, but never of an adult creature, devoted to an indoor existence, who suddenly felt in middle age a real response to the great inarticulate voices of the earth.

'Up to then, I lived on the West Side, in Chicago, with my married sister. My father left the place to her and to me. Most of the rest of the property went to my young half-brother Kip. But when Nettie's children were nearly grown, it seemed as though there wasn't any room left in the house for me; and yet they needed me, you see, to sew for them, right straight along. I used to sew, sew, sew till midnight and past, often, tucking on the girls' summer dresses, especially that last spring when I was at home; and I began to cough then and get so dreadful tired. That winter Nettie thought each of the girls ought to have their own room. It was no more than right, either. Nettie and me, we each had our own room when we was young girls. So I used to sleep just on two chairs with quilts in the back parlor, and couldn't seem to rest very good, and, besides, had to get up and get dressed and the room fixed, real early, so Will could come there and read his morning paper. Well, I used to keep all my things in shoe-boxes, up in the attic, so they'd be out of the way. They used to laugh, and laugh, about those boxes; and one night we was all sitting on the steps, and they were laughing, and my youngest niece, Baby, she got real mad. She 's so warm-hearted and she never wanted to take my room, and only did because it provoked Nettie so, for her not to. Babe turned real white, and she said all of a sudden, "The reason why Aunt Min hasn't anything but shoe-boxes to keep her things in is just because we've turned her out of everything," she said. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves." And she jumped up and ran into the house.

'That night my brother Kip happened to be there. He'd been West ever since he was fifteen. He's a lot younger than Nettie and me--only twenty-five, then. We thought Kip was an awful wild, queer sort of fellow, then; we didn't know him at all. I felt just like the rest. He'd run through all that was left him long ago; and he'd married an actress and was separated from her. He was a sort of a Socialist too, and even had tramped some. But he seemed to be real kind in some ways. When Babe said that, he looked at me quite hard. When he went home he says to me, "You look sick, Min," he says, and he took hold of my hand. "You've got fever. Why don't you see a doctor?"

'Well, I don't know what got into me. After they was all gone that night, I just broke down, and cried and cried. I did feel dreadful sick and feverish, and I hadn't no money of my own to see a doctor, and felt just all gone really. I managed to get up and fix the room before any of them come down. But then I had to lie on the sofa, and couldn't get to breakfast. And after breakfast--would you believe it?--a doctor come.

Kip sent him, himself. But he frightened Nettie to death. I felt dreadfully sorry for her.'

'He told your sister how ill you were,' said Elsie gravely.

'Oh, yes. But it wasn't so much that, as she was so afraid some of the children might catch my trouble. She was all right though as soon as they got me to the hospital, though she was provoked too, because it took so much of her time to come there to see me. She come twice before I went away. The doctor said that going away was my only chance. For all that I was up and around, he thought I couldn't live a year.'

Neither of them spoke for a moment, looking away at the dunes.

'Then--what do you think--Kip had an intimate friend, quite a rich young man, Will Bronson, who was sick the same way I was. That's how Kip come to notice my sickness so. The doctors wanted him kept out of doors, and he and Kip was going on this wagon-trip. But his mother was nearly crazy worrying over it, and worrying the young man and crying all day and night. She thought Kip never could take care of him. Well, those boys wanted me to go off with them on the wagon-trip. They said I could cook for them, and it would relieve the mother. And it did. They took me to see her. And she thought if a person like me could go on a wagon-trip it couldn't be so awful after all. Well, the short and the long of it was, we went to Fort Leavenworth, and the boys got a wagon and provisions and blankets and thick shoes and things for me, and they got two good mules from the government post, and we started off.'

Miss Brackett sat erect. A look of elation burned in her violet eyes.

Elsie drew a deep breath and laughed.

'Yes. I didn't like the idea at first: all the rough clothes, and our being alone on the plains, and after a while going to be right in the desert--it seemed to me terrible. But it was the only thing there was for me to do. I just kep' my mouth shut tight through all that time. And then, I don't know, more and more, oh, I just come to love it!'

After a moment Elsie said, 'And did you really have any hardships?'

'What do you call hardship? The rainy reason was bad. But I've been lots wetter longer at a time, through whole winters, when I'd lend my rubbers to the children. Sometimes it was terrible cold. But then we always had a good fire. I've been lots colder in the back parlor and on crowded street-car platforms, and lots and lots more uncomfortable. Once we got off the trail. Once we had a bad time about finding water. One night, after the mules was hobbled they jumped along so far, even hobbled, that we couldn't get them for hours. Kip and Will Bronson was gone six hours in different directions; and I was afraid they was lost. But I've had more hardship, you might say, and not that I want to complain either, in one week on the West Side at home, than in a whole year of what they called roughing it. And for hard feelings, and real mean bad ways of acting, I've seen more of them over getting out one shirt-waist in a dressmaker's shop, than in that whole time on the wagon-trip. Even though once we had a man in our camp that we heard afterwards was a criminal and fugitive from justice,' she added with a laugh.

'What sort of a man was he?'

'A very considerate, pleasant sort of man. He was a short, thick-set fellow from Missouri, with a hard sort of chin. He come riding up near the Baton Pa.s.s, and asked to stay the night and get supper and breakfast with us. Well, it so happened I had caught cold and wasn't feeling extra. The boys was worried and sort of mad,--that was the worst trouble we had,--because I would mend and cook just the same. The boys cooked terrible, and it seemed as though I couldn't have no peace of mind, unless I did it. It made me feel so as though I was no use to them and not paying my share by what I did, you know. Well, this man from Missouri was a fine cook. He stayed with us three days, and by the time he went I was all right again. He was real helpful. They never got him.

When we come to Trinidad, we was good and surprised to find he was a cattle thief that shot a sheriff that tried to arrest him.'

The lake was paler now. White clouds plumed on the horizon, and an evening glow, green and faintly flushing, was reflected delicately from the west. The dunes were browner and darker. The visitor sat thinking, evidently, of her long, free wandering days. Elsie, putting on her shoes, sat thinking of her wayfaring companion's mean and hateful life in the very midst of what is called civilization and respectability; of her struggle for existence--a struggle in which she had been all but killed by the greedinesses around her; a struggle just as sharp as any of the nail-and-claw-depredations commonly attributed exclusively to wilder-nesses. They watched the sky change, in an unspoken friendliness.

'And now, you are much better?' said Elsie quietly.

'Yes. Now I'm well, thank G.o.d! And the Bronson boy as sound as a bell.

That was the most lucky illness you can imagine for me. I couldn't go back after that to the way I lived before. I always would live different--more outdoors, and just looking after myself better. Since that time, I've been lots more use to myself and everybody else. After we got to California, I sewed here and there for the people where we boarded first, and they liked my sewing so much, and I made so much money, that when Kip got a job to Gary, engineering for the electric plant, and I come too, to keep house for him, I put up a sign and gradually I'd worked up a good trade, before he was married. Why I'm going to be able to send Babe to Va.s.sar, and plenty for me to take a trip west, too, next summer. Kip married such a nice girl.' She rose.

'I've talked you to death. But when you spoke about your cousin, it brought everything right out of my lips some way. I hope he's not so very sick.'

'No. He will be well again. He has a splendid const.i.tution.'

Miss Brackett shook hands with her. 'I wish you would come in for a minute and see me, if you ever have time some day when you're in Gary.'

'I will.'

'Good-night.'

'Good-night.'

As her visitor disappeared over the rounded ridge of the dune, Elsie heard the home-coming voices of the campers. They had brought peanut-taffy to her, and they praised her none the less highly for her intended sacrifice to the Moloch of Mrs. Horick and the dullness of the world that she had not needed to make this sacrifice.

For some reason, she could not have explained to them about her chance guest. But she was still thinking of her, as she walked from the sh.o.r.e a little later to gather firewood for supper. The sun dropped long-ribbed level beams over the russet oak-brush and buff shadows of the dunes.

Crimson rifts broke in the amber ether of the west. Rich, rich, soft, and deep, the fragrance of some far autumnal bonfire breathed in the cool air.

'Where are the songs of spring? oh, where are they? Mourn not for them, thou hast thy music, too,' rang silently in the girl's fancy as she stood looking around her. And she wondered that she never till that day had realized how deeply wild creation is the birthright of every creature, not only for the power of tooth and fang, the strength of the marauder, but for the vitality of speed and sensitiveness, ground-squirrel, deer, and cricket; and how Nature's most profound magnificence might sing, perhaps, not in her thrilling melody to April pulses, but in her proud cadence to November hearts.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND INTERPRETATIVE NOTES

THE LIE

MARY ANTIN, ever since _The Promised Land_ first appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_, has come to mark the highest standard of literary excellence and political idealism possible for the best and most gifted of our foreigners to attain. Born in Russia, educated in Boston and New York, her influence has been widely exerted by her books and by her public addresses.

One of the chief points of interest in Mary Antin's story lies in the conflict of ideas about truth. David had learned that in America a good patriotic citizen should learn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The demand for this strictness, he came to learn, was more particularly severe when a.s.sertions were recorded in writing on public doc.u.ments. The little boy understood equally well that the training which his father had received in Russia made it seem right in certain cases to swear falsely and deceive the government. David therefore saw the tragical significance of his father's false record on the American public school doc.u.ment. In David's conception Mr. Rudinsky had done no wrong in telling the lie; yet that lie nevertheless stood out as a bold contrast to George Washington's idea of truth. How could the little boy be loyal to both ideas, when the ideas were diametrically opposed to each other?

_Suggested Points for Study and Comment_

1. What are some of the differences suggested between life for the Jewish person in Russia and in America?

2. How does the author indicate her own feelings in regard to the problems that confront David and his father?

3. What does citizenship mean to Mr. Rudinsky? What are some of the more concrete forms by which he makes his ideas of freedom evident? Does his conception of Americanism coincide with that of the average American?

4. Has the literalness of David's interpretation of "America" any real connection with the time of the story? Was it necessary to give so much general detail before the question of David's age came up?

5. Why is Bennie introduced into the story? Do you find any other characters contributing to the humor or acting as foils?