I"ve found a way to make Dan"l happy, M.D. I was reading to him last night, and suddenly he said in his shy, repressed way, "Was you ever to a circus?" I started to say that they bored me to the bone, even in infancy, but I happened to glance up and see his eyes. He"s been following his beloved vagabond about in his heart, you see. So I tried to create a circus for him--the round rag rug was the sawdust ring, the steaming kettle was the calliope, wheezing a strident song about a wooden leg, and out of thin air came the haughty ringmaster and the clown and the pink acrobats, and I remembered thankfully that I"d memorized Vachel Lindsey"s "Kallyope" long ago----
"Tooting joy, tooting hope, I am the Kallyope!
Hoot, toot, hoot, toot, w.i.l.l.y, w.i.l.l.y wah hoo, Sizz--fizz----"
Dan"l held his breath, his eyes starry, and his mother stopped her work, and I could see that the old man was listening slyly. Do you know it, Michael? It"s pure witchcraft of words.
"See the flags; snow-white tent; See the bear and elephant; See the monkey jump the rope; Listen to the lion roar, LISTEN TO THE LION ROAR!
Listen to the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope!"
(He must have been thinking of the Deacon"s sort:)
"I will blow the proud folk low, Humanize the dour and slow, I will shake the proud folk down----"
Dan"l went to sleep pink and happy. So did I!
J. V.
_Wednesday._
I haven"t told you about the "Low-down Wilkes," have I? They"re the pleasantest people in Three Meadows and we"re very clubby. The nice old maid on the wharf at Bath told me about them and advised me to have the woman do my washing, but warned me that I should have to come unto her delicately, like Agag. Being the poorest and most dest.i.tute family on the Island they are correspondingly proud and "techy."
Shiftlessness is a fine art with them, they"ve carried it so far.
Last winter they lived in a very good two-story house, and as it was a very bitter season and Mr. L.D.W. was "kinder run down, someway,"
he very ingeniously burnt it for fuel while they were living in it,--first the part.i.tions in the second story, then the floor, then the stairs, then the downstairs walls and doors. Wasn"t that clever of him? Now it"s just a charred sh.e.l.l, and--grace of a more opulent relative--they are camping in an unused barn. They fish a little, and pick blueberries, and wonder, vaguely, "jest how they"ll make out, come wintuh."
I wish you might have seen her when, after a long social call, I subtly introduced the subject of laundry and dilated on my helpless predicament. She weighed and considered and consulted with her spouse, and said at last, "Wall, I don"t keer if I do--but I wunt fetch"n kerry fer n.o.buddy!" Since when I have myself fetched and carried my garments, and they are rapidly taking on the tinge of prevailing Island grayness. The L.D.W."s are gentle and gay, and they love Dan"l and "Angerleek" even if she is "a furriner," and they sigh that the Deacon is "a good man, but ha"ad." His severity has driven all the older children away from home, two of them girls. (Wasn"t I right about the Erring Daughters and the Snow?)
I asked Mrs. L.D.W. if I might bestow upon her a tailored suit which has almost worn me out. She hesitated, shifted the 1920 model in Low-Down Wilkes to the other hip (babies are their only lavish luxury!) and allowed she didn"t mind, if I was a mind to fetch it down to the graveyard corner some night after dusk. Every human being in Three Meadows has seen me wear it and could describe it to the last st.i.tch and b.u.t.ton, and every one will know where she got it.
Nevertheless, in a world of foot-lickers, isn"t pride like that delicious?
I did for myself when I started that indoor circus effect; sentenced to be Scheherazade! Lady chariot drivers and spotted clowns and strange beasts swarm through the prim, gray farmhouse. Dan"l has stayed in bed for two days, and Uncle Robert"s chirp is growing husky.
Between circus performances I"m working like a riverful of beavers.
The best story I"ve ever written is almost ready to launch.
J. V.
_Tuesday._
DEAR MICHAEL DARAGH, I can"t _bear_ it about Dan"l! I don"t mean about his going,--the old doctor is right about that, but oh, that wretched rover! Dan"l makes loyal excuses for him--he must be sick again or out of work or too busy; the flame of his faith never burns dim.
This morning I went to the Deacon. "Look here," I said, "that fellow will never pay up and Dan"l is breaking his heart." He nodded.
"Well," I went on, "I mean to make up a letter and put in twenty dollars and send it to a friend of mine in New York to mail back to Dan"l."
His eagle eye grew bleak. "Falsehood and forgery!" he thundered. "I"m a plain man, sinful, Adam"s seed as we all are, but I never yet soiled my lips with a lie."
"Oh, you needn"t bother about it at all," I a.s.sured him. "I"ll do the whole thing. You see, my lips aren"t so immaculate, or so fussy!"
"I wunt act a lie, neither," he said.
I could feel myself generating temper, and it was a relief for it deadened my grief over Dan"l to be fine and mad at his father. I looked him straight in his ice-blue eye. "Just what do you mean by that, Mr. Gillespie?"
"I wunt have the boy deceived. Ain"t no peace comin" from a lie!
Land t" goodness," he regarded me mournfully, "don"t we have to strive night an" day, "thout takin" any extry sins on our souls?"
"Why, no, Deacon Gillespie," I told him sweetly, "I don"t have a bit of trouble being good. It just seems to come naturally to me!"
I know he yearned to box my ears. Instead, he roared, "We are as p.r.o.ne to evil as the sparks to fly upward!"
"_You_ may be," I said. "I shouldn"t wonder at all if you are. But as for me, I"m not a miserable sinner and I never was. I shouldn"t know an evil impulse if I met it in my mush bowl!" Then I left him, purple with scandalized rage, and found Angelique and told her my pretty plan. Oh, Michael, if you could have seen the poor thing! Her knees fairly gave way under her and she sank into a chair and put her ap.r.o.n over her head. I said, "I thought if you were willing, perhaps the Deacon--" but she cried out, "No, no! One time the oldes" boy, Lem," she still has a bit of the soft _habitant_ accent, "he do something bad, an" I tell a lie, so hees father shall not beat heem. By and by, he fin" out ..." she shut her eyes and shivered. "Heem he beat twice as hard ... me, he nevair believe again, all these years...."
Michael Daragh, I hate the Deacon. I know you consider hate the lowest form of human activity, but I hate the Deacon with a husky, hearty, healthy hate and it has a tonic effect which I"m sure must be good for me. I feed my fancy on boiling him in oil.
Gibbering with perfectly proper rage,
J. V.
The next note which came to the Irishman was only a line in length and a coolly typed line, but even so the letters seemed fairly to sing and to dance----
The story is done. It is good, Michael Daragh.
The letter which followed it went back to the human concerns about her.
_Friday._
I"m sitting on the gravestone of the four-time widower, M.D., my sweater turned up about my ears, my fingers navy blue, my nose magenta. The world is bleak and bare, indoors and out. Dan"l grows hourly weaker, but he brightens at mail time, and grins his gallant little grin at disappointment. "But he _will_," he stoutly whispers.
Gentle old Uncle Robert grows fierce. "Ef I had that varmint here, I vum I c"d wring his neck!"
I"m sorry to report that I am not getting on very well with hating the Deacon. (Of course, you"ve kept the intervening air quivering with your admonitory wirelesses!) He is suffering so hideously, and so determinedly, like a fakir. He feels he must speed the parting soul with the Scriptures and he reads terrifying things about weird beasts,--lion-mouthed leopards with feet like bears--and when he goes downstairs I try--very clumsily, M.D.--to tell Dan"l about the G.o.d you know, the one who goes with you into dark alleys and dark hearts.
I wish you were here to do it.
Dan"l"s faith is indeed the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, but I want to put a warm, tangible lie into his thin little claws before he goes.... Uncle Robert has "been an" went" since I began this letter, and again I must go up to Dan"l and tell him "Not _to-day_."
I"m a coward, M.D. I"ve never seen death so close before, and I want to run away. But I won"t.
J. V.
P.S. I called on the Low Down Wilkes this morning. Mrs. L.D.W. was wearing my suit over a wrapper of faded red calico, but there was nothing in her manner to indicate that I had ever seen it before.
_Sat.u.r.day._
Here is my story, Michael Daragh, and it is your story, too, for you shamed me into doing it. I am sending it off to the brown-gowned monthly on the stern and rock-bound coast, and this carbon to you.
Now will you write and tell me if you like it? _Honestly!_ (I know I said I didn"t want you to write me until I had landed a story there, but all this grief and grimness brings a sense of bleak loneliness, and _if_ you think I"ve won back what I"ve lost, if you think I"ve found the vision which will keep my soul from perishing, tell me so.)