Chapter 8

Then came this here cycle-of-dance portrayals. The first one wasn't much dance; it was mostly slow, snaky motions with the arms and other things, and it was to portray a mother cobra mourning her first-born. At least that's the way I understood it. Another one was called "The Striving Soul," to which the prof played something livelier. Vernabelle went round and round, lifting her feet high. It looked to me like she was climbing a spiral staircase that wasn't there. Then she was a hunted fawn in a dark forest and was finally shot through the heart by a cruel hunter--who was probably nearsighted. And in the last one she was a Russian peasant that has got stewed on vodka at the Russian county fair. This was the best one. You couldn't see her so well when she moved quick.

Of course there was hearty applause when it was all over, and pretty soon Vernabelle come out again in her kimono. Panting like a tuckered hound she was when the comrades gathered to tell her how wonderful she had been.

"That music tears me," says Vernabelle, putting her hands to her chest to show where it tore. "That last maddening Russian bit--it leaves me like a limp lily!" So she was led to the punch bowl by Comrades Price and Tuttle, with the others pushing after and lighting cigarettes for her.

It was agreed that the evening had been a triumph for Vernabelle's art. Almost every Bohemian present, it seemed, had either been tore or maddened by that last Russian bit.

Vernabelle was soon saying that if she had one message for us it was the sacred message of beauty. Jeff Tuttle says, "You've certainly delivered it, little woman!" Vernabelle says, oh, perhaps, in her poor, weak way--she was being a limp lily against the piano then--but art is a terrible master to serve, demanding one's all. Comrade Price says what more could she give than she has to-night. And then, first thing I know, they're all talking about an intimate theatre.

This was another part of Vernabelle's message. It seems intimate theatres is all the rage in New York, and the Bigler barn is just the place to have one in. Vernabelle says they will use the big part where the hay used to be and paint their own scenery and act their own plays and thus find a splendid means of self-expression the way people of the real sort are doing in large cities.

Everyone is wild about this in a minute, and says how quaint and jolly Bohemian it will be. The Bigler barn is just the place, with no horse there since Metta bought one of the best-selling cars that ever came out of Michigan, and Vernabelle says she has written a couple of stunning little one-act pieces, too powerful for the big theatres because they go right to the throbbing raw of life, and it will be an inspiration and uplift to the community, of which all present can be proud. Lon Price says he will furnish a good drop curtain free, painted with a choice nine-room villa with just a line mentioning Price's Addition to Red Gap, Big Lots, Little Payments. And he's quite hurt when Vernabelle tells him no, that they must keep entirely out of the slime of commercialism. I don't think Lon ever again felt the same toward Vernabelle--calling his business slime, that way.

However, the party broke up full of plans for the new intimate theatre, leaving an empty punch bowl and a million cigarette ends.

And right here was where the Philistine opposition braided feathers in its hair and done a war dance. Members of the little group that did things spoke freely the next day of Vernabelle's art in the dance and her early Greek costume, taking a mean enjoyment in the horror they inspired among pillars of the church and the civic purity league. It is probable that in their artistic relish they endowed Vernabelle with even fewer clothes than she had wore. At any rate, they left a whole lot to be inferred, and it promptly was inferred.

The opposition now said this was no job for a chamber of commerce; it had become a simple matter for the police. The civic purity league had a special meeting at which the rind was peeled off Vernabelle's moral character, and the following Sabbath one of the ministers gave a hot sermon in which the fate of Babylon and a few other undesirable residence centres mentioned in the Bible was pointed out. He said that so-called Bohemia was the gateway to hell. He never minced his words, not once.

And the Latin Quarter come in for some more shock assaults when the talk about an intimate theatre in the Bigler barn got out. The regular theatre was bad enough, said the civic purity league; in fact, they had started a campaign against that the month before, right after a one-night engagement of the Jolly Paris Divorcees Burlesque Company, which, I gathered, had not upheld the very highest standards of dramatic art. And if the town was going to stand for anything more intimate than this show had provided, why, it was time for drastic action if any wholesome family life was to be saved from the wreck.

Feeling ran high, I want to tell you, and a few of the younger set fell out of the ranks of good old Bohemia--or was yanked out. Luella Stultz's father, who is old-fashioned, it was said, had give Luella a good licking for smoking cigarettes, and old Jesse Himebaugh had threatened his daughter Gussie with the reform school if she didn't stop trying to get away from it all. Even Beryl Mae's aunt put her foot down. Beryl Mae met me in the post office one day and says auntie won't let her be a Bohemian any more, having threatened to take her new ukulele away from her if she goes to that Latin Quarter another single time; and poor Beryl Mae having hoped to do a Hawaiian dance in native costume for the intimate theatre, where it wouldn't be misunderstood!

Things was just in this shape, with bitterness on every side and old friends not speaking, and the opposition passing the Bohemians on the street with the frown of moral disgust, and no one knowing how it would all end, when I hear that Cora Wales has a niece coming from New York to visit her--a Miss Smith. I says to myself, "My lands! Here's another Miss Smith from New York when it looks to me like the one we got is giving us a plenty of the big league stuff." But I meet Cora Wales and learn that this one's first name is Dulcie, which again seemed to make a difference.

Cora says this Dulcie niece is one of New York's society leaders and she's sorry she invited her, because what kind of a town is it in which to introduce a pure young girl that never smoked or drank in her life and whose people belong to one of the very most exclusive churches in the city. She had hoped to give Dulcie a good time, but how can she sully herself with any of our young people that have took up Bohemianism? She being fresh from her social triumphs in New York, where her folks live in one of the very most fashionable apartment houses on Columbus Avenue, right in the centre of things and next to the elevated railway, will be horrified at coming to a town where society seems to be mostly a little group of people who do things they hadn't ought to.

Dulcie is a dear girl and very refined, everything she wears being hand embroidered, and it would of been a good chance for Red Gap to get acquainted with a young society girl of the right sort, but with this scandal tearing up the town it looks like the visit will be a failure for all parties.

I tell Cora on the contrary it looks like a good chance to recall the town to its better self. If this here Dulcie is all that is claimed for her she can very probably demolish the Latin Quarter and have us all leading correct society lives in no time, because the public is fickle and ever ready for new stuff, and as a matter of fact I suspect the Latin Quarter is in a bad way because of everything in town of an illegal character having been drunk up by the comrades. Me? I was trying to get some new life into the fight, understand, being afraid it would die natural and leave us to a dull winter.

Cora's eyes lighted up with a great hope and she beat it off to the Recorder office to have a piece put in the paper about Dulcie's coming. It was a grand piece, what with Cora giving the points and Edgar Tomlinson writing it. It said one of Gotham's fair daughters would winter in our midst, and how she was a prominent society leader and an ornament of the fast hunting set, noted for her wit and beauty and dazzling costumes, and how a series of brilliant affairs was being planned in her honour by her hostess and aunt, Mrs. Leonard Wales, Red Gap's prominent society matron and representative of all that was best in our community, who would entertain extensively at her new and attractive home in Price's Addition. And so forth.

I'm bound to say it created a flurry of interest among the younger dancing set, and more than one begun to consider whether they would remain loyal to Bohemia or plunge back into society once more, where stockings are commonly wore, and smoking if done at all is hurriedly sneaked through out on the porch or up in the bathroom.

From Cora's description I was all prepared to find Dulcie a tall, stately creature of twenty-eight, kind of blase and haggard from her wearing social duties in New York. But not so. Not so at all. Cora had invitations out for a tea the day after Dulcie come; invitations, that is, to the non-Bohemians and such as had reformed or give good signs of it. I don't know which head I got in under. And this Dulcie niece was nothing but a short, fat, blond kid of seventeen or eighteen that had never led any society whatever. You could tell that right quick.

She was rapidly eating cream-cheese sandwiches when I was presented to her. I knew in one look that society had never bothered Dulcie any. Victuals was her curse. In the cattle business it ain't riding disrespectful horses that gets you the big money; it's being able to guess weights. And if Dulcie pulled a pound less than one hundred and eighty then all my years of training has gone for naught. She was certainly big-framed stock and going into the winter strong. Between bites of sandwich, with a marshmallow now and then, she was saying that she was simply crazy about the war, having the dandiest young French soldier for a godson and sending him packages of food and cigarettes constantly, and all the girls of her set had one, and wasn't it the darlingest idea.

And her soldier was only twenty-two, though his beard made him look more mature, and he wrote such dandy letters, but she didn't suppose there would ever be anything between them because papa was too busy with his coal yard to take her over there.

As the girl chattered on it didn't seem to me that our Latin Quarter was in the slightest danger from her. Still, some of the girls that was there seemed quite impressed or buffaloed by her manner. One idea she give out now was new in Red Gap. She had all her rings named after meals. She had a breakfast ring and a dinner ring and a supper ring and a banquet ring, and Daisy Estelle Maybury admired the necklace she had on, and Dulcie said that was a mere travelling necklace; and how did they like this cute little restaurant frock she was wearing? A little dressmaker over on Amsterdam Avenue had turned it out. All the parties she dealt with, apparently, was little. She had a little dressmaker and a little hair woman and a little manicure and a little florist, and so forth. She'd et five cream-cheese sandwiches by this time, in spite of its being quite painful for her to pick up a dropped napkin. Dulcie didn't fold over good. You could tell here was a girl that had never tried to get away from it all. She wanted to be right where it was.

Pretty soon one of the girls said something about the Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, probably aiming to show this New York chatterbox that Red Gap wasn't so far west as it looked. But Dulcie gave 'em the laugh. She said oh, dear, New York society had simply quit taking up Bohemians, it not being considered smart any longer, and did we really take them up here? The girls backed up at this. And Dulcie went on being superior. She said of course society people now and then made up a party and went down to Washington Square to look them over, but as for taking them up, oh, dear, no! It was more like a slumming party. One could stare at them, but one simply didn't know them.

And perhaps, if she could get Aunt Cora to chaperon them, they might make up one of these slumming parties some evening and go down to Red Gap's Latin Quarter; it might be amusing. Cora Wales glistened at this. She said she guessed people could now see how such goings-on were regarded by society in the true sense of the word. And it did give the girls a chill, calling the Bigler home a slum. But I still didn't see any stuff in Dulcie to vanquish Vernabelle.

And I didn't see it a minute later when Dulcie wolfed her tenth marshmallow and broke out about winter sports. She first said what perfectly darling snow we had here. This caused some astonishment, no one present having ever regarded snow as darling but merely as something to shovel or wade through. So Dulcie pronged off a piece of sticky chocolate cake and talked on. She said that everyone in New York was outdooring, and why didn't we outdoor. It was a shame if we didn't go in for it, with all this perfectly dandy snow. New York people had to go out of town for their winter sports, owing to the snow not being good for sport after it fell there; but here it was right at hand, and did we mean to say we hadn't organized a winter-sports club.

No one spoke, for no one could guess what you did to outdoor properly. About all they could think of was hustling out after another chunk for the fireplace or bringing a scuttle of coal up from the cellar. But they soon got the idea. Dulcie said right from this window she could see a corking hill for a toboggan slide, and it would be perfectly darling to be out there with plenty of hot coffee and sandwiches; and there must be some peachy trips for snowshoe parties with sandwiches and coffee at the end; or skating in the moonlight with a big bonfire and coffee and sandwiches.

She suggested other things with coffee and sandwiches and finally got up some real enthusiasm when she said she had brought some of the dearest sport toggery with her. The girls was excited enough when they found out you had to dress especial for it. They was willing to listen to anything like that if New York society was really mad about it, even if it conflicted with lifelong habits--no one in Red Gap but small boys having ever slid downhill.

And still I didn't suspect Dulcie was going to groundsluice Vernabelle. It looked like the Latin Quarter would still have the best of it, at least during a cold winter. Which goes to show that you can't tell what society will go mad about, even in Red Gap, when you can dress for it.

The girls had got a line on Dulcie and was properly impressed by her, and then with an evening affair at the Wales home the dancing men had their chance. Even some of the Bohemians was let to come, just to have 'em see that there was indeed a better life; and reports of Dulcie was such that all took advantage of it. The male sex was strong for the girl at once. She didn't know that life is anything but selective, or that all the arts round out one's appreciation of the beautiful, or that anything was "by way of being" something. But all the food she took didn't make her torpid; she giggled easily and had eyes like hothouse grapes, and in spite of her fat there was something about her, like Cousin Egbert said of Vernabelle. Anyway, she prevailed. Oswald Cummings, the pagan, for one, quickly side-stepped his destiny of splendid sins, and Hugo Jennings told Dulcie he had merely gone to this Latin Quarter as he would go to an animal show, never having meant for one moment to take Bohemians up, any more than New York society would.

First thing I hear, the winter-sports club has been organized, snowshoes sent for and a couple of toboggans, and a toboggan slide half a mile long made out in Price's Addition, starting at the top of the highest hill, where Lon's big board sign with the painted bungalow made a fine windshield, and running across some very choice building lots to the foot of the grade, where it stopped on the proposed site of the Carnegie Library. Lon was very keen about the sport himself after meeting Dulcie, and let a fire be built near his sign that burned it down one night, but he said it was all good advertising, more than he'd ever got out of being a Bohemian.

Of course there was a great deal of fuss about the proper sport toggery, but everyone got rigged out by the time the toboggans got there. Dulcie was a great help in this and was downtown every day advising one or another about the proper sweaters or blanket coats or peaked caps with tassels, or these here big-eyed boots. You'd meet her in a store with Stella Ballard, eating from a sack of potato chips; and half an hour later she'd be in another store with Daisy Estelle Maybury, munching from a box of ginger wafers; with always a final stop at the Bon Ton Kandy Kitchen for a sack of something to keep life in her on the way home. There really got to be so much excitement about winter sports that you hardly heard any more talk about the Latin Quarter. People got to speaking to each other again.

By the opening day of the sports club you wouldn't of thought any one in town had ever tried to get away from it all. Even them that thought it crazy came and stood round and said so. Cousin Egbert Floud said this Dulcie was some sparrow, but nutty--going out in the cold that way when nothing drove her out. Dulcie made a great hit with the club this first day, having the correct Canadian toggery and being entirely fearless in the presence of a toboggan. She'd zip to the bottom, come tramping back, shooting on all six, grab a sandwich--for not a morsel of food had passed her lips since she went down the time before--and do it all over again. And every last ex-Bohemian, even Edgar Tomlinson, fighting for the chance to save her from death by starvation! Dulcie played no favourites, being entranced with 'em all. She said they was the dearest gentleman friends she'd ever had. The way they was fighting for her favours she could of called 'em her gentleman frenzy. Ain't I the heinous old madcap, thinking of jokes like that?

Next day there was a snowshoe trip up to Stender's spring and back by way of the tie camp. Dulcie hadn't ever snowshoed and it wasn't any light matter when her shoes threw her down--requiring about three of the huskiest boys to up-end her--but she was game and the boys was game and she was soon teaching snowshoeing shoes how to take a joke. And from that on winter sports ruled in Red Gap. The chamber of commerce even talked of building an ice palace next year and having a carnival and getting the town's name in the papers. Oh, there certainly must of been a surprised lot of snow round there that winter. Nothing like this had ever happened to it before.

And all being done on nothing stronger than coffee, with hardly a cigarette and never anything that was by way of being a punk stick in a closed room. It was certainly a lot healthier than a Latin Quarter for these young people, and for the old ones, too. Dulcie had sure put one large crimp into Bohemia, even if she could not be justly called an intellectual giantess.

And Vernabelle knew who to blame, too, when the little group quit coming round to get away from it all. She knew it was Dulcie. She said that Dulcie seemed to be a pampered society butterfly that devoted all her thoughts to dress. This was repeated to Dulcie by an ex-Bohemian, but she found no poison in it. She said of course she devoted all her thoughts to dress; that a young girl with her figure had to if she ever expected to get anywhere in the world.

Even ex-comrade Lon Price would now shut his office at four o'clock every day and go up on the hill and outdoor a bit, instead of getting away from it all in a smoky Bohemian way. Besides he'd had a difference of opinion with Vernabelle about the poster she was doing for him, the same being more like an advertisement for some good bath soap, he said, than for choice villa sites.

"I don't know anything about art," says Lon, "but I know what my wife likes." Which left Vernabelle with another design on her hands and brought Comrade Price out of Bohemia.

Even if Dulcie's winter sports hadn't done the trick I guess it would of been done easy by her report that Bohemians was no longer thought to be smart in New York, Red Gap being keenly sensitive in such matters. Metta Bigler's mother firmly turned out the half-lights in Bohemia when she heard of this talk of Dulcie's. I don't blame her. She didn't one bit relish having her neat home referred to as a slum, say nothing of having her only child using a lip stick and acting like an abandoned woman with cigarettes and the wine cup.

She said just that to me, Metta's mother did. She said she had heard that New York was all broken up into social sets, the same way Red Gap is, and if Bohemians wasn't being took up by the better element in New York, then they shouldn't be took up by the better element of Red Gap--at least not in any home of which the deed was still in her name. She said of course she couldn't keep Metta's guest from being a Bohemian, but she would have to be it alone. She wasn't going to have a whole mob coming round every day and being Bohemians all over the place, it being not only messy but repugnant alike to sound morality and Christian enlightenment. And that settled it. Our town was safe for one more winter. Of course God only knows what someone may start next winter. We are far off from things, but by no means safe.

Cousin Egbert was kind of sorry for Vernabelle. He said if she'd just stuck to plain glass blowing she might of got by with it. He's a wonder, that man--as teachable as a granite bowlder.

My Godfrey! Ten-thirty, and me having to start the spring sport of ditch cleaning to-morrow morning at seven! Won't I ever learn!

IV

VENDETTA

By the evening lamp in the Arrowhead living room I did my bit, for the moment, by holding a hank of gray wool for Ma Pettengill to wind. While this minor war measure went forward the day's mail came. From a canvas sack Lew Wee spilled letters and papers on the table. Whereupon the yarn was laid by while Ma Pettengill eagerly shuffled the letters. She thought fit to extenuate this eagerness. She said if people lived forever they would still get foolishly excited over their mail; whereas everyone knew well enough that nothing important ever came in it. To prove this she sketched a rapid and entirely unexciting summary of the six unopened letters she held.

One of them, she conceded, might be worth reading; and this she laid aside. Of the remaining five she correctly guessed the contents of four. Of the fifth she remarked that it would be from a poor feckless dub with a large family who had owed her three hundred dollars for nine years. She said it would tell a new hard-luck tale for non-payment of a note now due for the eighth time. Here she was wrong. The letter inclosed a perfectly new note for four hundred and fifty dollars; and would Mrs. Pettengill send on the extra one hundred and fifty dollars that would enable the debtor to get on his feet and pay all his debts, as there was a good season of hog buying ahead of him!

"I guessed wrong," admitted the lady. "I certainly did that little man an injustice, not suspecting he could think up something novel after nine years." Grimly she scanned the new note. "As good as a treaty with Germany!" she murmured and threw it aside, though I knew that the old note and the new hundred and fifty would go forward on the morrow; for she had spoken again of the debtor's large family. She said it was wonderful what good breeders the shiftless are.