Prairie Gold Part 3

Then came a time when John had difficulty in holding his pipe in his mouth because his "pipe tooth" was gone. He no longer ate the crusts of Martha's bread except when he dipped them in his coffee. There was a strong, young girl to do the housework but Martha still made the bread, just such beautiful, richly browned, fragrant bread as she had made in her younger days. There had never been a week without the good bread, for this was Iowa.

One day, as she was kneading the dough, she stopped suddenly and put her hand to her side, under her heart. She had to wait several minutes before she could go on with the kneading. Then she shaped the bread into loaves and put it in the pan and put the pan in the oven. She went out on the porch, where John was sitting, and talked about the weather, and then of a grandson, Horace, who was the first to enlist for the great war that was wracking the world. She mentioned the poor Belgians.

"And us so comfortable here, and all!" she said. "When I think of them not having bread enough to eat----"

"I warrant they never did have bread like yours to eat, ma," said John.

She rocked slowly, happy and proud that her man thought that, and then she went in to take the fresh loaves from the oven. They were crisp and golden brown as always, great, plump, nourishing loaves of good wheat bread. She carried the pan to the table.

"Bertha," she said, "I'll let you put the bread away. I guess I'll go up and lie down awhile; I don't feel right well."

She stopped at the foot of the stairs to tell John she was going up; that she did not feel very well.

"If I don't come down to supper," she said, "you can have Bertha cut a loaf of the fresh bread, but you'd better not eat too much of it, John; it don't always agree with you. There's plenty of the other loaf left."

She did not come down again, not Martha herself. She did not mourn because she could not come down again. She had lived her life and it had been a good life, happy, well-nourished, satisfying as her own bread had been. And so, when they came back from leaving Martha beside the brother who had died so many years before, the last loaf of her last baking was cut and eaten around the kitchen table--the youngsters biting eagerly into the thick slices, the elders tasting with thoughts not on the bread at all, and old John crumbling the bread in his fingers and thinking of long past years.

At Kamakura: 1917

_By Arthur Davison Ficke_

The world shakes with the terrible tramp of war And the foe's menace swirls through every sea.

But here the Buddha still broods ceaselessly In hush more real than our strange tumults are.

Here where the fighting hosts of long ago Once clashed and fell, here where the armored hordes Razed the great city with their flashing swords, Now only waves flash, only breezes blow.

That Iowa Town

_By Oney Fred Sweet_

According to the popular songs, we are apt to get the impression that the only section of the country where there is moonlight and a waiting sweetheart and a home worth longing for is down in Dixie. Judging from the movies, a plot to appeal must have a mountain or a desert setting of the West. Fictionists, so many of them, seem to think they must locate their heroines on Fifth Avenue and their heroes at sea. But could I write songs or direct cinema dramas or pen novels I'd get my inspiration from that Iowa town.

Did you ever drive in from an Iowa farm to a Fourth of July celebration? A few years back the land wasn't worth quite so much an acre; the sloughs hadn't been tiled yet and the country hadn't discovered what a limited section of real good corn land there was after all. But she was Iowa then! Remember how the hot sun dawned early to shimmer across the knee-high fields and blaze against the side of the big red barn, how the shadows of the willow windbreak shortened and the fan on top of the tall windmill faintly creaked? The hired man had decorated his buggy-whip with a tiny ribbon of red, white and blue.

Buggy-whip--sound queer now? Well, there were only three automobiles in the county then and they were the feature of the morning parade.

Remember how the two blocks of Main Street were draped with bunting and flags, and the courthouse lawn was dotted with white dresses? Well, anyhow you remember the girls with parasols who represented the states, and the float bearing the G.o.ddess of Liberty. And then the storm came in the middle of the afternoon. The lightning and the thunder, and the bunting with the red, white and blue somewhat streaked together but still fluttering. And just before sunset, you remember, it brightened up again, and out past the low-roofed depot and the tall grain elevator you could see the streak of blue and the play of the departing sun against the spent clouds. Nowhere else, above no other town, could clouds pile just like that.

You remember that morning, once a year, when the lilacs had just turned purple out by the front gate, and the dew was still wet on the green gra.s.s, the faint strains of band-music drifting out above the maples of the town, and flags hanging out on the porches--Decoration Day! How we used to hunt through the freshly awakened woods north of town for the rarest wildflowers! Tender petaled bloodroots there were in plenty, and cowslips down by the spring, and honeysuckles on the creek bank those late May days, but the lady's slippers and the jack in the pulpits--one had to know the hidden recesses where they grew. Withered they became before the hot sun sank, sending rays from the west that made the tombstones gleam like gold. Somehow, on those days, the sky seemed a bluer blue when the words of the speaker at the "Monument of the Unknown Dead" were carried off by the faint breeze that m.u.f.fled, too, the song of the quartet and the music of the band. But close in your ears were the chirps of the insects in the bluegra.s.s and the robins that hopped about in the branches of the evergreens.

We had our quota of civil war veterans in that Iowa town. We had our company that went down to Chickamauga in '98. And now--well, you know what to expect from the youth of that sort of a community. Prosperity can't rob a place like that of its pioneer virtues. That Iowa town is an American town and it simply wouldn't fit into the German system at all. There's nothing old world about it. The present generation may have it easier than their fathers did; they may ride in automobiles instead of lumber wagons; they may wear pinch back coats and long beak caps instead of overalls and straw hats, but they've inherited something beside material wealth. We who owned none of its surrounding acres when they were cheap and find them now so out of reach, are yet rich, fabulously rich in inheritance. The last I heard from that Iowa town its youth was donning khaki for the purpose of helping to keep the Kaiser on the other side of the sea.

But it was of the town we used to know that I was speaking. Changed? We must realize that. It was the sort that improves rather than grows. But we remember the place as it was before the blacksmith shop was turned into a garage and before the harness shop was given an electric lighted front and transformed into a movie. I guess the new generation has long since pa.s.sed up the old opera house above the drug store for the rejuvenated harness shop and the actors that come by express in canned celluloid. But at county fair time, you remember, the Cora Warner Comedy Company used to come for a week's engagement, Cora Warner, noticeably wrinkled as she walked through the park from the hotel, donning a blonde wig that enabled her to play soubrette parts of the old school. And then there were the Beach and Bowers minstrels with their band that swung breezily up Main Street to form a circle on the bank corner and lift the whole center of the town out of the commonplace by the blare of trombones and the tenderness of clarinets.

You remember how we Boy Scouts, who didn't know we were Boy Scouts, used to clamor for the front row of kitchen chairs after peddling bills for "The Octoroon" or "Nevada, and the Lost Mine"?

Oh, well, we're uninteresting old-timers now. And it used to be that I knew everyone in town--even the transient baker whose family had no garden and chickens but lived up over the furniture store, and the temporary telephone man who sat out in front of the hotel evenings with the pale-faced traveling man. That hotel--haunted with an atmosphere that was brought in from the outside world! Remember how you used to walk past it with awe, the hot sun on the plank sidewalk burning your bare feet, and your eyes wistful as you heard the bus man on the steps call a train? And the time came when we took the train ourselves. And when we came back--

When we came back, the town was still there, but the wondrous age when all life is roseate belonged to us no longer.

And yet that town, to me, will always be as it was in those days when the world was giving me its first pink-tinted impressions. And when my tussle with the world as it really is comes to a close, I want to go back there and take my last long sleep beneath one of those evergreens on the hillside where I know the robins hop along the branches. I know how each season's change comes there--the white drifts, the dew on the bluegra.s.s, the rustling of crimsoned leaves. I'll know that off on the prairies beyond, the cornfields will still wave green in summer, and that from back across the creek, over in the school yard, there will float the old hushed echo of youth at play.

But Once a Year

_By R. O'Grady_

A shabby little woman detached herself from the steadily marching throng on the avenue and paused before a shop window, from which solid rows of electric bulbs flashed brilliantly into the December twilight.

The ever-increasing current of Christmas shoppers flowed on. Now and then it rolled up, like the waters of the Jordan, while a lady with rich warm furs about her shoulders made safe pa.s.sage from her car to the tropic atmosphere of the great department store.

Warmth, and the savory smells from a bakery kitchen wafted up through the grating of a near-by pavement, modifying the nipping air. The shabby little woman, only half conscious of such gratuitous comfort, adjusted her blinking gaze to the brightness and looked hungrily at the costumes shimmering under the lights. Wax figures draped with rainbow-tinted, filmy evening gowns caught her pa.s.sing admiration, but she lingered over the street costumes, the silk-lined coats and soft, warm furs. Elbowed by others who like herself were eager to look, even though they could not buy, she held her ground until she had made her choice.

With her wistful gaze still fixed upon her favorite, she had begun to edge her way through the crowd at the window, when she felt, rather than saw, someone different from the rest, close at her side. At the same instant, she caught the scent of fresh-cut flowers and looked up into the eyes of a tall young girl in a white-plumed velvet hat, with a bunch of English violets in her brown mink fur.

As their glances met, the shabby little woman checked a start, and half-defensively dropped her lids. The smile that shone evanescently from the girl's cordial eyes had aroused in her a feeling of something unwonted, and strangely intimate. There had flashed over the mobile face beneath the velvet hat a look of personal interest--an unmistakable impulse to speak.

The thrill of response that set the woman's pulses throbbing died suddenly. The red that mottled her grayish cheeks was the red of shame.

Through the window, in a mirrored panel cruelly ablaze with light, she saw herself: her made-over turban, her short, pigeon-tailed jacket of a style long past, and her old otter cape with its queer caudal decorations and its yellowed cracks grinning through the plucked and ragged fur.

One glance at her own image was enough. The little woman pushed determinedly into the slow-moving crush, and headed toward the nearest elevated station, to be carried on irresistibly by the army of pedestrians.

She caught a last glimpse of the tall young girl, coming in her direction, still watching her with that same eager look. But what of that? She knew why women stared curiously at her. By the time her station was reached, the occurrence had a.s.sumed in her mind a painful significance which emphasized the sordidness of her evening's routine.

She made her way along a narrow, dimly lighted street, walking with the aimless gait of one who neither expects nor is expected.

But, loiter as she might, she soon reached a neighborhood where rows of narrow brick tenements brooded over dingy, cluttered bas.e.m.e.nt shops.

Here she found it necessary to accelerate her pace to make way for romping children and bareheaded women hurrying from the shops with their suppers in paper bags.

In spite of the wintry chill, the section had an air of activity all its own. Neither did it lack occasional evidences of Christmas cheer.

In the window of a little news and fruit shop, against the smeared and partly frosted gla.s.s, a holly wreath was hanging, and within stood a rack of gaudy, tinseled Christmas cards. The woman hesitated, as if about to enter the shop, then abruptly pa.s.sed on. She ascended one of the stoops that were all alike. Standing in a blur of reddish light that filtered through the broken gla.s.s above the door, she looked back the way she had come.

For an instant her pulses quickened again as they had done on the avenue down-town. At the corner, a tall girl with a white-plumed velvet hat was smilingly picking her way through the swarming element so foreign, apparently, to one of her cla.s.s. As the white plume came nearer and nearer, the tremulous little woman regained her self-control. It was but one of the coincidences of the city, she told herself, turning resolutely away. The door slammed shut behind her.

Odd, she thought, as she groped her way through the dimly lighted lower hall, and the complete darkness of the upper, that such a girl should be living in such a neighborhood. Then, with an effort, she dismissed the matter from her mind.

To find a match and light the sputtering gas required but very few steps in her tiny box of a room. When that was accomplished, she could think of nothing more to do. Her little taste of excitement had spoiled her zest for any of the homy rites which at other times formed the biggest events of her day. As she sank down upon the cot without removing her wraps, she was greeted by the usual creaking of rusty springs; her table with its meager array of dishes, its coffee pot and little alcohol burner, sat as ever in its corner, inviting the preparation of her evening meal. But to-night she did not want to eat.

She had not visited the bake-shop on her way home. She had not even bought her daily paper at the corner stand where the postcards were--those gay Christmas cards that bring you greetings from friends.

As she slowly removed her turban, her jacket and fur cape and, without getting up, tossed them across a chair against the opposite wall, the dull ache of dissatisfaction in her heart grew slowly to a sharp pain of desire. She wanted to do something, to have something happen that might break the sordid routine of her existence.

Still, habit and environment would continue to force at least a part of this routine upon her. She glanced at her fingers, stained to an oily, bluish grime by the cheap dye of the garments that furnished her daily work. Mechanically she rose to wash.