The Tempering Part 57

Boone heard the austere beauty of the service--but he felt more poignantly the picture that his eyes looked on: the coffin draped with two flags that overlapped their folds--though once a tide of cannon-smother ran between them--the Stars and Stripes of the Nation and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.

On one hand, in a grizzled honour-guard, stood old men in the same mist grey that he had worn with a general's stars until Lee surrendered, and on the other hand was ranged an equally frosted and withered squad in Grand Army blue. Then at last a clear and flawless sweetness floated away from the lips of the militia bugler, who, in accordance with the General's wish, was sounding taps across his closing grave.

Something rose in Boone Wellver's throat, and a strange idea stole, not facetiously but with reverent sincerity, into his thoughts. He wished it might have been possible for him to stand there as the clods fell, not as he stood now in the dress of a gentleman, but in homespun and b.u.t.ternut, clasping in his tight hands the c.o.o.n-skin cap that his boyhood had known. For in this gathering, that was like a quiet pageant of pa.s.sing eras, he stood for an elder thing than any other here. He was, in effect, by birth and by beginning, the ancestor of them all, for he had been born a pioneer!

The school, which had become a home to Happy Spradling, had grown marvellously since that day when the old mountaineer wrote with his donation of rocky acres: "I have heart and cravin' that our young people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Const.i.tution of the United States stands."

It was a precarious undertaking with no endowment except its spirit, but it is not recorded that Elijah went hungry when his commissary was in the keeping of ravens--for back of the ravens was the Promise.

From year to year, dependent upon the generosity of those whom its accomplishments convinced, the school not only existed but grew, and in order that the springs which fed it might not run dry there were, several times each year, the "begging trips" of the women who "went out."

For that was the phrase they used, just as in all wilderness life it is the phrase with which men speak of journeys from the solitudes.

When Miss Shorte went east or west, she carried to the outer world a living and vivid portraiture of that folk immured behind the ridge and its elder life. Then somehow the undertakings, absurdly impractical from a material viewpoint, realized themselves, and a new school building, a tiny hospital or a needed dormitory rose among the hardwood and the pines of Marlin County.

In the fall of 1913 Miss Shorte brought east with her a younger woman also from the school, to sing for her audiences those quaint "song-ballets" that sound around smoky mountain hearths to the accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore."

Because no dollar could go out from the school's closely guarded treasury without a.s.surance that it would bring other dollars back, the experiment of increasing the traveling expenses by including this girl in the journey to New York had been discussed back of Cedar Mountain with prayerful earnestness, and the girl herself had greeted the final decision as one of the great moments of her life.

Now that girl stood beside the piano a little tremulous with stage fright as she looked out over an audience more sophisticated than any to which she had ever sung before. It was in one of the women's university clubs in the Forties and to her uninitiated eye the light fell on a confusing display of evening dress and worldly-wise faces full of self-containment.

They would listen with politeness but how could her offering interest these men and women to whom great voices were familiar? Hers was untrained and the songs were crude vehicles for folk-lore compositions, plaintive with uncultivated minors.

That elderly gentleman, sitting far back near the door, had been identified to her in a whisper. He was a music critic whose word carried the force of authority--and she wondered if he sat near the exit with thought of escape from her inflictions. Just now he was writing a series of magazine articles on folk-lore music in America, and the girl felt herself the subject of a cold experiment in mental vivisection.

The lady with the white pompadour was one whose name she had known with awe on the school's list of patronesses and even here in New York it was a great name.

The mountain singer's knees trembled a little as the accompanist struck the keys, and her first note stole out, sweetly clear and naturally fresh.

She finished her first song and retreated to her chair on the platform, wishing that there had been a trap-door through which she might have escaped that barrage of human sight.

Then her glance caught the elderly man with the great reputation in the music world. He had not yet fled. He was making notes on a sc.r.a.p of paper and his keenly alert, finely chiselled face wore the expression of unmistakable interest. The singer glanced at the white-haired lady--the great Mrs. Ariton--and she read "well-done, my child," in a smile of moist eyes.

She could not know that there was a direct simplicity of pathos and artless humour in her ballads, borne on a bird-like sweetness of voice, to the hearts of these people. She could not know that she was bringing to the touch of their sympathy phrases and forms that had seemed as remote and unreal as lines from Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Yet, because it was all so new and strange, the air seemed heavy to her with a terrifying formality, as the incense laden atmosphere of a cathedral might have been. So she looked, as she rose to sing again, for the comforting presence of some face that might rea.s.sure her with a kin-ship of human simplicity.

Then she saw slip quietly through the entrance door, and drop into a seat near the critic, a young woman who was unaccompanied and who, at first glance, seemed to carry in her fine eyes the burthen of habitual weariness.

These eyes were deeply violet and though sadness haunted them and bespoke ghosts that stirred uneasily and often back in their depths they still held the hint of fires that had flashed, once, into gay and spontaneous whimseys. The singer had a momentary sense of looking at a face made for gracious and merry expressions, but drawn into the short and desperate outlook of one who has fallen into deep and angry waters, and who can see nothing ahead beyond the struggle to keep afloat.

The newcomer was tall and slender, even thin, but there was still an intrinsic gallantry about the swing of her shoulders that made one think of invincible qualities, though the plain severity of her clothing brought into that contrasting company the undeniable a.s.sertion of poverty.

The singer finished her ballad and once again went back to her chair.

This time with a diminished diffidence. She was thinking about the other young woman at the back who looked poor and sick and who, in spite of these things, gave her an indescribable impression of distinction. The two of them, thought the mountain girl, had a bond of sympathy in that they were each set quite apart from all these others unified by the stamp of affluence.

Miss Shorte was talking now; telling the story of the school and its work; flashing before her hearers as if her words were pictures imbued with colour and form, the patriarchal conditions with which this work was surrounded. Laughter interrupted her lighter recitals, and when she spoke of graver phases there was that light clearing of throats that carries from an audience to a stage the proclamation of stirred emotion, and of tears not far from the surface.

The speaker gave a few ill.u.s.trations of the sort of manhood and womanhood that is sometimes wrought out of that crude ore when the tempering of help and education is available to refine it.

Lincoln had sprung from such stock. Even now the member in Congress from that district was a man born in a log shack of illiterate parents. He had fought feudal animosities and gone upward by a rugged ascent. Now he was recognized by his colleagues as a man of ability and breadth. So far had he outgrown the strictures of provincialism, that he was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But better than that his own people swore by him because they knew "their lives and deaths were his to him"--because in a land where men had been afraid to serve on juries and to enforce the law, they were no longer afraid.

The school sought to develop other Boone Wellvers from the same beginnings ... to help others toward a similar fulfilment.

The musical critic heard a faint gasping breath from the chair at his side. He turned quickly and was startled by the pale, emotion-drawn face of the young woman who sat there without escort. For an instant he thought that some poor creature actually pinched by want had crept in, attracted by the light and warmth for a brief interval of rest, then he looked with a more piercing apprais.e.m.e.nt at the features and discarded that idea.

"Are you ill?" he demanded in a low voice. "Can I serve you?"

The young woman shook her head and forced a smile whose graciousness must have come less from conscious effort than from life habit.

"No, thank you," she answered in a low voice that had meaning to one who knew music wherever he found it. "It was nothing ... I came late ... who is the girl who sang?"

"She was introduced as Miss Happy Spradling," said the critic.

His questioner's hands were at her sides where he did not see them tighten convulsively, but he saw the pale cheeks go a shade whiter and wondered if she was going to faint.

She did not faint, and though through the course of the evening the elderly man found time, more than once, to turn his friendly glance of solicitude her way he did not again intervene with questions. Clearly this young woman, whatever the cause, was in a condition of nerves that might mean skirting the precipitous edge of collapse. Clearly too she had that fort.i.tude which can resist and after a shock bring itself back to the poise of equilibrium. What had shocked her? He could not guess, but he knew that in the depleted condition that her pale cheeks and thinness argued, unaccountable trifles may a.s.sume the gravity of a crisis. And besides the critic found his attention and interest elsewhere engaged. That other girl who was singing claimed them both.

She was having a little triumph there on the platform beside the piano.

On her smooth, dark face was a pink flush and her deep eyes glowed with pleasure for the enthusiasm that had capped the cordiality of her reception.

When the program came to its end the audience in large part gathered about the platform and the meeting resolved itself into an informal reception. Among the first to go forward was the critic and as he rose, noticing a struggle between eagerness and hesitation in the violet eyes of his chance neighbour, he yielded to an impulse of the moment.

"Shall we go up together," he smiled, "and introduce each other? I have a question or two to ask her?"

But the girl shook her head. She had started nervously at the question as though in realization that he had read her thoughts and as if she had not wished them to be readable.

Still when he had left her she lingered in the door before she turned out to the street as if some strong magnetism sought to draw her into the group about the speaker and singer--a group in which her clothes would have been conspicuous. Finally she turned and left and went outside, where the obscurity was more merciful.

Her course took her southward and eastward and brought her at last to a building that loomed large and dark now, but which in daylight sounded to the shouts of immigrant children whose voices might have rung in the sun-yellowed bazaars of Levantine towns or about the moujik habitations of Russia. It was one of the settlement schools of the East Side where the strident grind of the elevated was never silent, and in a small and very bare room the girl took off her hat and coat. She was one of the least important of the women who conducted the affairs of this mission school. Its a.s.sembly rooms, _creches_ and diet kitchens const.i.tuted her present world.

They had said that there was nothing she could do--a society girl with a drawing room and hunting field equipment--and only the All-seeing and herself knew how near true it had proven.

All these years, she reflected with a smile of self-derision, she had harboured the thought of this mountain girl, caricatured by imagination into a bare-foot sloven, before whose vulgar charms Boone's loyalty had discreditably wavered. Now she had seen that girl and the dimensions of her own injustice loomed in exaggeration before her self-accusation.

For a long while Anne Masters sat there in her bare room. Often she had wondered whether she could go on enduring the strain of a life that had emptied out all its fulness and become pinched and aching. It seemed to her that now she stood as one having touched the depths and the fine quality of her courage was not far from disintegration.

A great and hungry impulse filled her. She wanted to talk to Happy Spradling--to talk to her under an a.s.sumed name--and to lay to the bruises about her heart the solace of hearing something of those hills she had once loved so intensely--something of the man who was now a member of the Foreign Relations Committee of Congress! The wish grew into an obsession and when, toward daylight, sleep came fitfully, it wove itself into the troubled pattern of her dreams.

There were many reasons why she should repress that desire. If Happy learned who she was, the secret of her hiding would be penetrated, and she would show herself as conquered.

Yet the next day when the time came that gave her leisure from her duties she went again, invincibly drawn, to the University Club in the Forties.

Opposite the door, and across the street, she paused, holding herself hard in hand against a tidal sweeping of emotions, and as she stood there she saw the door open and Mrs. Ariton come out, followed by Happy.

The two crossed the sidewalk to the curb and stepped into the great lady's limousine.

Anne still hesitated, then she shook her head and turned resolutely away. The car rolled forward and rounded a corner, and the one possible a.s.sociation with a part of Anne's old world was lost.