"My hair may be red, Mis" Tutts," her shrill voice whistled through the s.p.a.ce left by her missing teeth, as she stood with the geranium poised aloft, "but it"s _my own_!"
Mrs. Tutts staggered under the crash of pottery and the thud of packed dirt upon her head. She sank to the floor, but rose again, dazed and blinking, her warlike spirit temporarily crushed.
"There"s the door, Mis" Tutts." Mrs. Jackson drew herself up with regal hauteur and pointed. "Now get the h.e.l.l out of here!"
X
ESSIE TISDALE"S ENFORCED ABNEGATION
There was one place at least where the popularity of the little belle of Crowheart showed no signs of diminution and this was in the menagerie of domestic animals which occupied quarters in the rear of the large backyard of the hotel. The phlegmatic black omnibus and dray horses neighed for sugar at her coming, the calf she had weaned from the wild range cow bawled at sight of her, while various useless dogs leaped about her in ecstasy, and a mere glimpse of her skirt through the kitchen doorway was sufficient to start such a duet from the two excessively vital and omniverous mammals whom Essie had ironically named Alphonse and Gaston that Van Lennop, who had the full benefit of this chorus, often wished the time had arrived for Alphonse and Gaston to fulfil their destiny. Yet he found diversion, too, in her efforts to instil into their minds the importance of politeness and unselfishness and frequently he laughed aloud at the fragments of conversation which reached him when he heard her laboring with them in the interest of their manners.
A loud and persistent squealing caused Van Lennop to raise his eyes from his book and look out upon the pole corral wherein the vociferous Alphonse and Gaston were confined. Essie Tisdale was perched upon the top pole, seemingly deaf to their shrill importunities; depression was in every line of her slim figure, despondency in the droop of her head.
Her att.i.tude held his attention and set him wondering, for he thought of her always as the embodiment of laughter, good-humor, and exuberant youth. Of all the women he ever had known, either well or casually, she had seemed the farthest from moods or nerves or anything even dimly suggestive of the neurasthenic.
Moved by an impulse Van Lennop laid down his book and went below.
"Air-castles, Miss Tisdale?" he asked as he sauntered toward her. He still insisted upon the whimsical formality of "Miss Tisdale," although to all Crowheart, naturally, she was "Essie."
The girl lifted her sombre eyes at the sound of his voice and the shadow in them gave them the look of deep blue velvet, Van Lennop thought.
"You only build air-castles when you are happy, don"t you? and hopeful?"
"And are you not happy and hopeful, Miss Tisdale?" Amus.e.m.e.nt glimmered in his eyes. "I thought you were quite the happiest person I know, and to be happy is to be hopeful."
"What have I to make me happy?" she demanded with an intensity which startled him. "What have I to hope for?"
"Fishing, Miss Tisdale?" He still smiled at her.
"For what? To be told that I"m pretty?"
"And young," Van Lennop supplemented. "I know women who would give a king"s ransom to be young and pretty. Isn"t that enough to make one person happy?"
"And what good will being either ever do me?" she demanded bitterly; "me, a biscuit-shooter!" Her musical voice was almost harsh in its bitterness. She turned upon him fiercely. "I"ve been happy because I was ignorant, but I"ve been enlightened; I"ve been made to see; I"ve been shown my place!"
That was it then; some one had hurt her, some one had found it in his heart to hurt Essie Tisdale whose friendliness was as impartial and as boundless as the sunshine itself. He looked at her inquiringly and she went on--
"Don"t you think I see what"s ahead of me? It"s as plain as though it had happened and there"s nothing else possible for me."
"And what is it?" he asked gently.
"There"ll come a day when I"m tired and discouraged and utterly, utterly hopeless that some cowpuncher will ask me to marry him and I"ll say yes. Then he"ll file on a homestead away off somewhere in the foothills where the range is good and there"s no sheep and it"s fifty miles to a neighbor and a two days" trip to town." She stared straight ahead as though visualizing the picture. "He"ll build a log house with a slat bunk in one end and set up a camp-stove with cracked lids in the other. There"ll be a home-made table with a red oilcloth table cover and a bench and a home-made rocking chair with a woven bottom of cowhide for me. He"ll buy a little bunch of yearlings with his savings and what he can borrow and in the spring I"ll herd them off the poison while he breaks ground to put in a little crop of alfalfa. I"ll get wrinkles at the corners of my eyes from squinting in the sun and a weather-beaten skin from riding in the wind and lines about my mouth from worrying over paying interest on our loan.
"In the winter we"ll be snowed up for weeks at a time and spend the hours looking at the pictures in a mail order catalogue and threshing the affairs of our acquaintances threadbare. Twice a year we"ll go to town in a second-hand Studebaker. I"ll be dressed in the clothes I wore before I was married and he"ll wear overalls and boots with run-over heels. A dollar will look a shade smaller than a full moon and I"ll cry for joy when I get a clothes-wringer or a washing machine for a Christmas present. That," she concluded laconically, "is my finish."
Van Lennop did not smile, instead he shook his head gravely.
"No, Essie Tisdale, I can"t just see you in any such setting as that."
"Why not? I"ve seen it happen to others."
"But," he spoke decisively, "you"re different."
"Yes," she cried with a vehemence which sent the color flying under her fair skin, "I _am_ different! If I wasn"t I wouldn"t mind. But I care for things that the girls who have married like that do not care for, and I can"t help it. They save their money to buy useful things and I spend all mine buying books. Perhaps it"s wrong, for that may be the reason of my shrinking from a life such as I"ve described since books have taught me there"s something else outside. Being different only makes it all the harder."
"And yet," said Van Lennop, "I"m somehow glad you are. But what has happened? Who has hurt you? Did something go wrong at this wonderful dinner of which you told me? Were you not after all quite the prettiest girl there?"
"I wasn"t asked!"
Van Lennop"s eyes widened.
"You were not? Why, I thought the belle of Crowheart was always asked."
"Not now; I"m a biscuit-shooter; I work--and--"Society must draw the line somewhere.""
"Who said that?" Amazement was in Van Lennop"s tone.
"Mr. Symes said it to Mrs. Symes, Mrs. Symes said it to Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Jackson said it to Mrs. Tutts, Mrs. Tutts said it to me."
"Of whom?"
"Of me."
"But what society?" Van Lennop"s face still wore a puzzled look.
"Crowheart society."
A light broke over his face; then he laughed aloud, such a shout of unadulterated glee that Alphonse and Gaston ceased to squeal and fixed their twinkling eyes upon him in momentary wonder.
"When I told you I was going I thought of course they would ask me. I thought the tardy invitation was just an oversight, but now I know"--her chin quivered suddenly like a hurt child"s--"that they never meant to ask me."
Van Lennop"s face had quickly sobered.
"You are sure he really said that--this Andy P. Symes?"
"I think there"s no mistake. It was the easiest way to rid themselves of my friendship." She told him then of the reproof Symes had administered.
An unwonted shine came into Van Lennop"s calm eyes as he listened. This put a different face upon the affair, this intentional injury to the feelings of his stanch little champion, it somehow made it a more personal matter. The "social line" amused him merely, though, in a way, it held a sociological interest for him, too. It was, he told himself, like being privileged to witness the awakening of social ambitions in a tribe of bushmen.
Van Lennop was silent, but the girl felt his unspoken sympathy, and it was balm to her sore little heart.
"This--society?" she asked after a time. "What is it? We"ve never had it before. Everybody knows everybody else out here and there are so few of us that we"ve always had our good times together and we have never left anybody out. The very last thing we wanted to do was to hurt anyone else"s feelings in that way."
"You have left those halycon days behind, I"m afraid," Van Lennop replied. "The first instinct of a certain cla.s.s of people is to hurt the feelings of others. It"s the only way they know to proclaim their superiority, a superiority of which they are not at all sure, themselves. Just what "society" is, is an old and threadbare subject and has been threshed out over and over again without greatly altering anybody"s individual point of view. Good breeding, brains and money are generally conceded to be the essentials required by that complex inst.i.tution and certainly one or all of them are necessary for any great social success."