Somewhere in Red Gap Part 4

"Yes, sir, I says to her, 'Woman's place is the home.' And what you think she come back with? That she was going to be a leader of the New Dawn. Yes, sir, just like that. Five feet one, a hundred and eight pounds in her winter clothes, a confirmed pickle eater--pretty enough, even if she is kind of peaked and spiritual looking--and going to lead the New Dawn.

"Where'd she catch it? My fault, of course, sending her back East to school and letting her visit the W.B. Hemingways, Mrs. H. being the well-known clubwoman like the newspapers always print under her photo in evening dress. That's how she caught it all right.

"I hadn't realized it when she first got back, except she was pale and far-away in the eyes and et pickles heavily at every meal--oh, mustard, dill, sour, sweet, anything that was pickles--and not enough meat and regular victuals. Gaunted she was, but I didn't suspect her mind was contaminated none till I sprung Chester Timmins on her as a good marrying bet. You know Chet, son of old Dave that has the Lazy Eight Ranch over on Pipe Stone--a good, clean boy that'll have the ranch to himself as soon as old Dave dies of meanness, and that can't be long now. It was then she come out delirious about not being the pampered toy of any male--_male_, mind you! It seems when these hussies want to knock man nowadays they call him a male. And she rippled on about the freedom of her soul and her downtrod sisters and this here New Dawn.

"Well, sir, a baby could have pushed me flat with one finger. At first I didn' know no better'n to argue with her, I was that affrighted. 'Why, Nettie Hosford,' I says, 'to think I've lived to hear my only sister's only child talking in shrieks like that! To think I should have to tell one of my own kin that women's place is the home. Look at me,' I says--we was down in Red Gap at the time--'pretty soon I'll go up to the ranch and what'll I do there?" I says.

"'Well, listen,' I says, 'to a few of the things I'll be doing: I'll be marking, branding, and vaccinating the calves, I'll be cla.s.sing and turning out the strong cattle on the range. I'll be having the colts rid, breaking mules for haying, oiling and mending the team harness, cutting and hauling posts, tattooing the ears and registering the thoroughbred calves, putting in dams, cleaning ditches, irrigating the flats, setting out the vegetable garden, building fence, swinging new gates, overhauling the haying tools, receiving, marking, and branding the new two--year--old bulls, plowing and seeding grain for our work stock and hogs, breaking in new cooks and blacksmiths'--I was so mad I went on till I was winded. 'And that ain't half of it,' I says. 'Women's work is never done; her place is in the home and she finds so much to do right there that she ain't getting any time to lead a New Dawn. I'll start you easy,' I says; 'learn you to bake a batch of bread or do a tub of washing--something simple--and there's Chet Timmins, waiting to give you a glorious future as wife and mother and helpmeet.'

"She just give me one look as cold as all arctics and says, 'It's repellent'--that's all, just 'repellent.' I see I was up against it. No good talking. Sometimes it comes over me like a flash when not to talk.

It does to some women. So I affected a light manner and pretended to laugh it off, just as if I didn't see scandal threatening--think of having it talked about that a niece of my own raising was a leader of the New Dawn!

"'All right,' I says, 'only, of course, Chet Timmins is a good friend and neighbour of mine, even if he is a male, so I hope you won't mind his dropping in now and again from time to time, just to say howdy and eat a meal.' And she fl.u.s.ters me again with her coolness.

"'No,' she says, 'I won't mind, but I know what you're counting on, and it won't do either of you any good. I'm above the appeal of a man's mere presence,' she says, 'for I've thrown off the age--long subjection; but I won't mind his coming. I shall delight to study him. They're all alike, and one specimen is as good as another for that. But neither of you need expect anything,' she says, 'for the wrongs of my sisters have armoured me against the grossness of mere s.e.x appeal.' Excuse me for getting off such things, but I'm telling you how she talked.

"'Oh, shucks!' I says to myself profanely, for all at once I saw she wasn't talking her own real thoughts but stuff she'd picked up from the well-known lady friends of Mrs. W.B. Hemingway. I was mad all right; but the minute I get plumb sure mad I get wily. 'I was just trying you out,'

I says. 'Of course you are right!' 'Of course I am,' says she, 'though I hardly expected you to see it, you being so hardened a product of the ancient ideal of slave marriage.'

"At them words it was pretty hard for me to keep on being wily, but I kept all right. I kept beautifully. I just laughed and said we'd have Chet Timmins up for supper, and she laughed and said it would be amusing.

"And it was, or it would have been if it hadn't been so sad and disgusting. Chet, you see, had plumb crumpled the first time he ever set eyes on her, and he's never been able to uncrumple. He always choked up the minute she'd come into the room, and that night he choked worse'n ever because the little devil started in to lead him on--aiming to show me how she could study a male, I reckon. He couldn't even ask for some more of the creamed potatoes without choking up--with her all the time using her eyes on him, and telling him how a great rough man like him scared 'poor little me.' Chet's tan bleaches out a mite by the end of winter, but she kept his face exactly the shade of that new mahogany sideboard I got, and she told him several times that he ought to go see a throat specialist right off about that choking of his.

"And after supper I'm darned if she didn't lure him out onto the porch in the moonlight, and stand there sad looking and helpless, simply egging him on, mind you, her in one of them little squashy white dresses that she managed to brush against him--all in the way of cold study, mind you. Say, ain't we the lovely tame rattlesnakes when we want to be!

And this big husky lummox of a Chester Timmins--him she'd called a male--what does he do but stand safely at a distance of four feet in the grand romantic light of the full moon, and tell her vivaciously all about the new saddle he's having made in Spokane. And even then he not only chokes but he giggles. They do say a strong man in tears is a terrible sight. But a husky man giggling is worse--take it from one who has suffered. And all the time I knew his heart was furnishing enough actual power to run a feed chopper. So did she!

"'The creature is so typical,' she says when the poor cuss had finally stumbled down the front steps. 'He's a real type.' Only she called it 'teep,' having studied the French language among other things. 'He is a teep indeed!' she says.

"I had to admit myself that Chester wasn't any self-starter. I saw he'd have to be cranked by an outsider if he was going to win a place of his own in the New Dawn. And I kept thinking wily, and the next P.M. when Nettie and I was downtown I got my hunch. You know that music store on Fourth Street across from the Boston Cash Emporium. It's kept by C.

Wilbur Todd, and out in front in a gla.s.s case he had a mechanical banjo that was playing 'The Rosary' with variations when we come by. We stopped a minute to watch the machinery picking the strings and in a flash I says to myself, 'I got it! Eureka, California!' I says, 'it's come to me!'

"Of course that piece don't sound so awful tender when it's done on a banjo with variations, but I'd heard it done right and swell one time and so I says, 'There's the song of songs to bring foolish males and females to their just mating sense.'"

The speaker paused to drain her cup and to fashion another cigarette, her eyes dreaming upon far vistas.

"Ain't it fierce what music does to persons," she resumed. "Right off I remembered the first time I'd heard that piece--in New York City four years ago, in a restaurant after the theatre one night, where I'd gone with Mrs. W.B. Hemingway and her husband. A grand, gay place it was, with an orchestra. I picked at some untimely food and sipped a highball--they wouldn't let a lady smoke there--and what interested me was the folks that come in. Folks always do interest me something amazing. Strange ones like that, I mean, where you set and try to figure out all about 'em, what kind of homes they got, and how they act when they ain't in a swell restaurant, and everything. Pretty soon comes a couple to the table next us and, say, they was just plain Mr. and Mrs.

Mad. Both of 'em stall-fed. He was a large, shiny lad, with pink jowls barbered to death and wicked looking, like a well-known clubman or villain. The lady was spectacular and cynical, with a cold, thin nose and eyes like a couple of gla.s.s marbles. Her hair was several shades off a legal yellow and she was dressed! She would have made handsome loot, believe me--aigrette, bracelets, rings, dog collar, gold-mesh bag, vanity case--Oh, you could see at a glance that she was one of them Broadway social favourites you read about. And both grouchy, like I said. He scowled till you knew he'd just love to beat a crippled step-child to death, and she--well, her work wasn't so coa.r.s.e; she kept her mad down better. She set there as nice and sweet as a pet scorpion.

"'A sc.r.a.p,' I says to myself, 'and they've only half finished. She's threatened to quit and he, the cowardly dog, has dared her to.' Plain enough. The waiter knew it soon as I did when he come to take their order. Wouldn't speak to each other. Talked through him; fought it out to something different for each one. Couldn't even agree on the same kind of c.o.c.ktail. Both slamming the waiter--before they fought the order to a finish each had wanted to call the head waiter, only the other one stopped it.

"So I rubbered awhile, trying to figure out why such folks want to finish up their fights in a restaurant, and then I forgot 'em, looking at some other persons that come in. Then the orchestra started this song and I seen a lady was getting up in front to sing it. I admit the piece got me. It got me good. Really, ain't it the gooey mess of heart-throbs when you come right down to it? This lady singer was a good-looking sad-faced contralto in a low-cut black dress--and how she did get the tears out of them low notes! Oh, I quit looking at people while her chest was oozing out that music. And it got others, too. I noticed lots of 'em had stopped eating when I looked round, and there was so much clapping she had to get up and do it all over again. And what you think?

In the middle of the second time I look over to these fighters, and darned if they ain't holding hands across the table; and more, she's got a kind of pitiful, crying smile on and he's crying right out--crying into his cold asparagus, plain as day.

"What more would you want to know about the powers of this here piece of music? They both spoke like human beings to the scared waiter when he come back, and the lad left a five-spot on the tray when he paid his check. Some song, yes?

"And all this flashed back on me when Nettie and I stood there watching this cute little banjo. So I says to myself, 'Here, my morbid vestal, is where I put you sane; here's where I hurl an asphyxiating bomb into the trenches of the New Dawn.' Out loud I only says, 'Let's go in and see if Wilbur has got some new records.'

"'Wilbur?' says she, and we went in. Nettie had not met Wilbur.

"I may as well tell you here and now that C. Wilbur Todd is a shrimp.

Shrimp I have said and shrimp I always will say. He talks real brightly in his way--he will speak words like an actor or something--but for brains! Say, he always reminds me of the dumb friend of the great detective in the magazine stories, the one that goes along to the scene of the crime to ask silly questions and make fool guesses about the guilty one, and never even suspects who done the murder, till the detective tells on the last page when they're all together in the library.

"Sure, that's Wilbur. It would be an ideal position for him. Instead of which he runs this here music store, sells these jitney pianos and phonographs and truck like that. And serious! Honestly, if you seen him coming down the street you'd say, 'There comes one of these here musicians.' Wears long hair and a low collar and a flowing necktie and talks about his technique. Yes, sir, about the technique of working a machinery piano. Gives free recitals in the store every second Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and to see him set down and pump with his feet, and push levers and pull handles, weaving himself back and forth, tossing his long, silken locks back and looking dreamily off into the distance, you'd think he was a Paderewski. As a matter of fact, I've seen Paderewski play and he don't make a tenth of the fuss Wilbur does. And after this recital I was at one Sat.u.r.day he comes up to some of us ladies, mopping his pale brow, and he says, 'It does take it out of one!

I'm always a nervous wreck after these little affairs of mine.' Would that get you, or would it not?

"So we go in the store and Wilbur looks up from a table he's setting at in the back end.

"'You find me studying some new ma.n.u.scripts,' he says, pushing back the raven locks from his brow. Say, it was a weary gesture he done it with--sort of languid and world-weary. And what you reckon he meant by studying ma.n.u.scripts? Why, he had one of these rolls of paper with the music punched into it in holes, and he was studying that line that tells you when to play hard or soft and all like that. Honest, that was it!

"'I always study these ma.n.u.scripts of the masters conscientiously before I play them,' says he.

"Such is Wilbur. Such he will ever be. So I introduced him to Nettie and asked if he had this here song on a phonograph record. He had. He had it on two records. 'One by a barytone gentleman, and one by a mezzo-soprano,' says Wilbur. I set myself back for both. He also had it with variations on one of these punched rolls. He played that for us. It took him three minutes to get set right at the piano and to dust his fingers with a white silk handkerchief which he wore up his sleeve. And he played with great expression and agony and bending exercises, ever and anon tossing back his rebellious locks and fixing us with a look of pained ecstasy. Of course it sounded better than the banjo, but you got to have the voice with that song if you're meaning to do any crooked work. Nettie was much taken with it even so, and Wilbur played it another way. What he said was that it was another school of interpretation. It seemed to have its points with him, though he favoured the first school, he said, because of a certain almost rugged fidelity. He said the other school was marked by a tendency to idealism, and he pulled some of the handles to show how it was done. I'm merely telling you how Wilbur talked.

"Nettie listened very serious. There was a new look in her eyes. 'That song has got to her even on a machinery piano,' I says, 'but wait till we get the voice, with she and Chester out in the mischievous moonlight.' Wasn't I the wily old hound! Nettie sort of lingered to hear Wilbur, who was going good by this time. 'One must be the soul behind the wood and wire,' he says; 'one rather feels just that, or one remains merely a brutal mechanic.'

"'I understand,' says Nettie. 'How you must have studied!'

"'Oh, studied!' says Wilbur, and tossed his mane back and laughed in a lofty and suffering manner. Studied! He'd gone one year to a business college in Seattle after he got out of high school!

"'I understand,' says Nettie, looking all reverent and buffaloed.

"'It is the price one must pay for technique,' says Wilbur. 'And to-day you found me in the mood. I am not always in the mood.'

"'I understand,' says Nettie.

"I'm just giving you an idea, understand. Then Wilbur says, 'I will bring these records up this evening if I may. The mezzo-soprano requires a radically different adjustment from the barytone.' 'My G.o.d!' thinks I, 'has he got technique on the phonograph, too!' But I says he must come by all means, thinking he could tend the machine while Nettie and Chester is out on the porch getting wise to each other.

"'There's another teep for you,' I says to Nettie when we got out of the place. 'He certainly is marked by tendencies,' I says. I meant it for a nasty slam at Wilbur's painful deficiencies as a human being, but she took it as serious as Wilbur took himself--which is some!

"'Ah, yes, the artist teep,' says she,'the most complex, the most baffling of all.'

"That was a kind of a sickish jolt to me--the idea that something as low in the animal kingdom as Wilbur could baffle anyone--but I thinks, 'Shucks! Wait till he lines up alongside of a regular human man like Chet Timmins!'

"I had Chet up to supper again. He still choked on words of one syllable if Nettie so much as glanced at him, and turned all sorts of painful colours like a cheap rug. But I keep thinking the piece will fix that all right.

"At eight o'clock Wilbur sifted in with his records and something else flat and thin, done up in paper that I didn't notice much at the time.

My dear heart, how serious he was! As serious as--well, I chanced to be present at the house of mourning when the barber come to shave old Judge Armstead after he'd pa.s.sed away--you know what I mean--kind of like him Wilbur was, talking subdued and cat-footing round very solemn and professional. I thought he'd never get that machine going. He cleaned it, and he oiled it, and he had great trouble picking out the right fibre needle, holding six or eight of 'em up to the light, doing secret things to the machine's inwards, looking at us sharp as if we oughtn't to be talking even then, and when she did move off I'm darned if he didn't hang in a strained manner over that box, like he was the one that was doing it all and it wouldn't get the notes right if he took his attention off.

"It was a first-cla.s.s record, I'll say that. It was the male barytone--one of them pleading voices that get all into you. It wasn't half over before I seen Nettie was strongly moved, as they say, only she was staring at Wilbur, who by now was leading the orchestra with one graceful arm and looking absorbed and sodden, like he done it unconsciously. Chester just set there with his mouth open, like something you see at one of these here aquariums.

"We moved round some when it was over, while Wilbur was picking out just the right needle for the other record, and so I managed to cut that lump of a Chester out of the bunch and hold him on the porch till I got Nettie out, too. Then I said 'Sh-h-h!' so they wouldn't move when Wilbur let the mezzo-soprano start. And they had to stay out there in the golden moonlight with love's young dream and everything. The lady singer was good, too. No use in talking, that song must have done a lot of heart work right among our very best families. It had me going again so I plumb forgot my couple outside. I even forgot Wilbur, standing by the box showing the lady how to sing.

"It come to the last--you know how it ends--'To kiss the cross, sweetheart, to kiss the cross!' There was a rich and silent moment and I says, 'If that Chet Timmins hasn't shown himself to be a regular male teep by this time--' And here come Chet's voice, choking as usual, 'Yes, paw switched to Durhams and Herefords over ten years ago--you see Holsteins was too light; they don't carry the meat--' Honest! I'm telling you what I heard. And yet when they come in I could see that Chester had had tears in his eyes from that song, so still I didn't give in, especially as Nettie herself looked very exalted, like she wasn't at that minute giving two whoops in the bad place for the New Dawn.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CHESTER JUST SET THERE WITH HIS MOUTH OPEN, LIKE SOMETHING YOU SEE AT ONE OF THESE HERE AQUARIUMS"]

"Nettie made for Wilbur, who was pushing back his hair with a weak but graceful sweep of the arm--it had got down before his face like a portiere--and I took Chet into a corner and tried to get some of the just wrath of G.o.d into his heart; but, my lands! You'd have said he didn't know there was such a thing as a girl in the whole Kulanche Valley. He didn't seem to hear me. He talked other matters.

"'Paw thinks,' he says, 'that he might manage to take them hundred and fifty bull calves off your hands.' 'Oh, indeed!' I says. 'And does he think of buying 'em--as is often done in the cattle business--or is he merely aiming to do me a favour?' I was that mad at the poor worm, but he never knew. 'Why, now, paw says "You tell Maw Pettengill I might be willing to take 'em off her hands at fifty dollars a head,"' he says. 'I should think he might be,' I says, 'but they ain't bothering my hands the least little mite. I like to have 'em on my hands at anything less than sixty a head,' I says. 'Your pa,' I went on, 'is the man that started this here safety-first cry. Others may claim the honour, but it belongs solely to him.' 'He never said anything about that,' says poor Chester. 'He just said you was going to be short of range this summer.'