"What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?" insisted Carol.
Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher--his own teacher--had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried to deny it.
"Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the impudence to say to me, "What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk?" That"s just what she called him--pup. "I"ll have no such nasty language in my house," I says, "and you pretending and pulling the wool over people"s eyes and making them think you"re educated and fit to be a teacher and look out for young people"s morals--you"re worse "n any street-walker!" I says. I let her have it good. I wa"n"t going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. "Purpose?" I says, "Purpose? I"ll tell you what purpose you had! Ain"t I seen you making up to everything in pants that"d waste time and pay attention to your impert"nence? Ain"t I seen you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the street?""
Carol was very sick at this version of Fern"s eager youth, but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her power of l.u.s.tful imagination the woman suggested dark country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, "Oh, for G.o.d"s sake quit it! You haven"t any idea what happened. You haven"t given us a single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster."
"I haven"t, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and I says to her, "Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?" and she says, "I think I did take one sip--Cy made me," she said. She owned up to that much, so you can imagine----"
"Does that prove her a prost.i.tute?" asked Carol.
"Carrie! Don"t you never use a word like that again!" wailed the outraged Puritan.
"Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of whisky? I"ve done it myself!"
"That"s different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the Scriptures tell us? "Strong drink is a mocker"! But that"s entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils."
"Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter of fact she"s only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many years younger in experience of vice."
"That"s--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him!
"The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!"
Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He"s a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right. Some thinks he"s terrible wild, but that"s because he"s young. And he"s so brave and truthful--why, he was one of the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn"t want him to get into no bad influences round these camps--and then," Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, "then I go and bring into my own house a woman that"s worse, when all"s said and done, than any bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she"s too young and inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t"other, you can"t have your cake and eat it! So it don"t make no difference which reason they fire her for, and that"s practically almost what I said to the school-board."
"Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?"
"I certainly have! Every one of "em! And their wives I says to them, "Tain"t my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your teachers," I says, "and I ain"t presuming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just want to know," I says, "whether you"re going to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn"t lay tongue to but you know what I mean," I says, "and if so, I"ll just see to it that the town learns about it." And that"s what I told Professor Mott, too, being superintendent--and he"s a righteous man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself."
II
Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone.
Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, "Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?"
"I"m sure it"s a lie."
"Oh, probably is." Maud"s manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.
Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: "You can"t tell ME she ain"t a gay bird; I"m wise!"
And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their "rough chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? What are these unheard-of sins you condemn so much--and like so well?"
No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor Champ Perry.
Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest.
She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her interest in Erik had with this affair. Wasn"t it because they had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own trail that they were howling at Fern?
III
Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man"s voice: "Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed "Who is it? Go away!"
Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door.
Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping.
"I didn"t! I didn"t!" was all she would say at first, and she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead.
She rested then, while Carol looked about the room--the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott"s friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor.
She did not try to draw out Fern"s story; Fern insisted on telling it.
She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart"s flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy "promised to be good." He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it"s just a joke; I"m going to give it back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn"t return the bottle.
"I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," moaned Fern.
She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever take a drink?"
"I have. A few. I"d love to have one right now! This contact with righteousness has about done me up!"
Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don"t suppose I"ve had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son----Well, I didn"t really touch that bottle--horrible raw whisky--though I"d have loved some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene--the high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And I"d been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose G.o.d is punishing me for even wanting wine?"
"My dear, Mrs. Bogart"s G.o.d may be--Main Street"s G.o.d. But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him ... though he slay us."
Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course.
Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward her--taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door... . "And to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at a dance!"... She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and tried to make love to her.
"I"m almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn"t feel like a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches that I took from Cy"s coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me, and----I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying----But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up... .
"You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking to me--and Cy was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking, "I"ve still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be awake?" But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable, and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me, dreadful things, and rattling the k.n.o.b. And all the while I could hear Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don"t think I"ll ever marry any man.
And then today----
"She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn"t listen to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he"s over his headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he"s going around town boasting about his "conquest." You understand--oh, DON"T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don"t see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for bringing up boys in, but----I can"t believe this is me, lying here and saying this. I don"t BELIEVE what happened last night.
"Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night--it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and----No matter. But my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is, I don"t know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when I was fighting him off."
IV
Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern"s story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, "Oh, isn"t that too bad." Carol was interrupted only when Mrs.
Clark begged, "Dear, don"t speak so bitter about "pious" people. There"s lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ Perrys."
"Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the churches to keep them going."
When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl; I don"t doubt her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him."