Chapter 3

She had been thinking just that herself with a sense of injury and imposition; and she was used all her life to having people see everything as she saw it, from her side only. But Guy had just turned over to his few creditors the hole in the ground into which so far most of his work had gone. “Bibi dear, what a sorry end to all my plans!” was what she expected him to say. And what he did say and what he didn't, met surprised in her mind and surveyed each other.

“Oh, Guy!” she deprecated, suddenly ashamed. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder why this had been sent on _him_. With a rush of remorseful sympathy and appreciation, she slipped down beside his chair. “My poor old boy!”

He clung to her like a drowning man--Guy, who, after the first single cry at the blow, had been so self-contained (or self-repressed?) through it all!

She remembered that she had omitted a good many things lately.

“You're tired to-day,” he said.

“Yes, I am.” She caught at it hurriedly with apologetic self-defence. “I'm pretty constantly tired lately. And this morning Mrs. Grey was so trying. She doesn't understand her machine, and she doesn't understand business, and she was _too_ silly and stupid. I don't wonder you men laugh at us and don't want us in _your_ affairs!”

“It's all hard on you, Bibi.” There was a lump in his voice. It was the first time he had been able to speak of it.

“Yes;” her own throat was so strained that for a moment she could not go on. “But,” it struck her again, “I don't suppose an unbiased observer would think it exactly festive for you.”

And, to be sure, when one came to think of it, how, pray, was he to blame?

From that day there began to be more than necessity to her work, and more than work to carry her out of herself.

In the present of commercial femininity we have two types--one, the business man; the other, an individual without gender, impersonal, capable. She never does anything ill-bred, certainly, but one no more thinks of specifying that she is a lady than that her hair is black; it isn't the point.

Mrs. Osbourne, however, was always first of all a lady. With her, men kept their hats off and their coats on, and had an inclination to soften business with bows, and bargains with figures of speech. She was at once so patrician and so gracious that women felt it a kind of social function to deal with her. The drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection was only gently plaintive. The pretty way was winning, and rather pathetic in her position; it drifted about her an aroma of story, and that had its own appeal. The unvarying black of dress and bonnet, with touches of white at neck and wrist, was refined, and made her rosy plumpness look sweeter. It was all an uninventoried part of her stock in trade. And she came to take the same satisfaction in returns in success and cash that she had taken as a girl in results in valentines and cotillion favors.

Mrs. Osbourne had all the traditions of her class and generation. She let her distaste of the situation be known. If it had been possible, she would have concealed it like a scandal. As it was, with very proud apology, she made the necessity of her case understood: her object was bread and butter, not any of these new Woman's Rights--unwomanly, bourgeoise!

Nevertheless, it was not only true that it suited her to be doing something with some point and result, but that the life of action and influence among people suited her. The work came to interest her for itself as well as for its object; that interest was a factor in her success; and the success again both stimulated and further equipped her.

As she got into training and over the first sore muscles of mind and body, work began to strengthen her. The nerves and small ailments grew secondary, were overlooked, actually lessened. There need be nothing esoteric in saying that a vital interest in life is as essential to health as to happiness. One need consider only the practical and physical effects of interest and self-forgetfulness, serenity and self-resource.

Sometimes her increasing trade took her away for two or three days, as far as Louisville or Cincinnati. The thought of Guy followed her, a sweet pain. She found herself hurrying back to her bright prisoner, and because of both conditions the marvel of that brightness grew on her, together with certain embarrassed comparisons. More than anything else, she admired his strength where she had been weak.

His brightness seemed to her the most pathetic thing about him; it was so sorry. It was indeed the epitome of his tragedy. To be as unobtrusive as possible, and, when necessarily in evidence, as pleasant as possible, was the role he had assigned himself. It was the one thing he could do, the only thing he could do for her.

Doubtless the very controlling of the nervousness helped it. Moreover, his revolting organization was gradually adapting itself somewhat to the new conditions. Sensitive and uncertain tendrils of vitality began to creep out from the roots of a blighted vigor.

Bessie, increasingly perceptive, began to suspect that what she saw was the brightness after the storm. She wondered what his long solitary hours were like when she was away. What must they be, with him helpless, disappointed, lonely, liable to maddening attacks of nerves? But he assured her that he was perfectly comfortable; Mammy Dinah was faithful and competent; and he was really making headway with the German and French that he had taken up because he could put them down as need was, and because--they might come in, in some way, some time. “In heaven?” Bessie wondered secretly, but, enlightened by her own experience, saw the advantage of his being entertained.

“You're too much alone,” she said, feeling for the trouble. “And so am I,” she added, thoughtfully. She should have noticed his eyes at that last. He had developed a sort of controlled voracity for endearment, but he never asked for it. In the old days he had taken his own masterfully, with no doubts. Now he waited. He did not starve. She cajoled him and coaxed his appetite and patted the pillows, and made pretty, laughing eyes at him and fate quite in her habitual manner. Her touch and tone of affection had never been so free. But in that very fact he found another sting.

“The better I do on the road, the more they keep me out,” she was saying. “We can't go on this way. I've been thinking lately--Could you bear to go North, Guy, and to live in a city, among strangers? Perhaps at headquarters there might be an opening for me that would let me settle down.”

“What! Cincinnati! Is there any such chance?”

“You'd _like_ it? Why on earth--Are you so bored here?”

“Oh, Bibi, have you never thought of it? In a city there'd be some chance of something I could do!”

“You? Oh, Guy!” After she had accepted the care of him, and that so pleasantly, he wasn't satisfied! “Is there anything you lack here?” She was hurt.

It was replaying the old parts reversed. Once _he_ had grieved that he could not give her enough to content her.

“A--h--” He turned his head away and flung an arm up over his eyes.

She understood only that he was suffering. “But, Guy, there's nothing you could do, possibly. It's not to be expected. Have I complained?” She fell back on the kindly imbecility of the nurse. “Now you're not to worry about that, at least until you're better--”

“Better?” He forgot the lines in which he had schooled himself. The man overrode the amateur actor. “That's not the thing to hope for. Why couldn't it have killed me--that first fall?” (“My dear, my dear!” she stammered.) “There would have been some satisfaction in getting out of the way, and that in decent fashion; like a charge of powder, not like a rubbish-heap. I can't accept it of you, Bibi. I'm enraged for you. I can't be grateful. I'm ashamed.”

She understood now.

What could she say? A dozen things, and she did; things about as satisfying as theology at the grave. He did not answer nor respond. When he relaxed at last it was simply to her arms around him, his head on her bosom, her wordless notes of tenderness and consolation.

He was suffering, and chiefly for her, and what a fighter he was! Who but he would ever have thought of _his_ doing anything?

So there might be cases in which it was really more helpful and generous not to do things for people, but to let them do for themselves. She couldn't fancy his doing enough to amount to anything. He oughtn't to! But if it would make him any happier he should have his make-believe--yes, and without knowing it was make-believe. Doing things that were of no value to any one was so disheartening. She knew. Like perfunctory exercise for your health.

Her own business in Cincinnati proved so brief as to take her breath. His was more difficult. The plough was still mightier than either sword or pen. Few markets were open to an inactive man whose hours must be short and irregular, and whose chief qualifications seemed to be a valiant spirit and a store of reminiscences, in a time when reminiscences were as easy to get as advice.

She was delayed in her return, growing more and more anxious at the thought of his anxiety. When she boarded the south-bound train, she went down the aisle, looking for a seat, with her short steps hurried as if it would get her home sooner.

Mrs. Grey leaned over and motioned her, and as she sat down, looked critically at the bright eyes and pink cheeks. “You certainly do look well nowadays, Bessie.”

Doubtless Bessie's color was partly excitement and rush.

“Oh, I'm well,” absently.

“Funny kind of dyspepsia, wasn't it, to be cured by eating around, the way you have to do.”

“Oh, dyspepsia!” The nettles brought back her attention. People needn't belittle her troubles! “I still have that dyspepsia. But if you had to be as busy as I, Mrs. Grey, you'd know that there are times when nothing but sudden death can interfere.” Even Mrs. Grey's prickings, however, were washed over to-day by Balm of Gilead. “Still, it has come to something. The company has given me Cincinnati for my territory.”

“Really?” Not that Mrs. Grey doubted her veracity. “Well, you always did succeed at anything you put your hand to. It has been the most surprising thing! You know, I tell everybody, Bessie, that you deserve all the credit in the world for the way you have taken hold.” Bessie stiffened; neither need they sympathize too much! “A girl brought up as you were, who always had the best of everything.” _The best of everything!_ The familiar phrase was like a bell, sending wave after wave of memory singing through Bessie's mind. “And still I never saw any one to whom the wind has been so tempered as to you: when you were sick you could afford it, and now that it's inconvenient--Things always did seem to work smoother with you, and come out better, than with any of the rest of us.”

Bessie sat looking at her, and, in the speech, saw her own petulance of a moment before--any number of her own speeches, in fact, inverted, as things are in a glass. Indeed, Mrs. Grey had held up a reflector. Bessie had met herself. And she saw herself, as in a mirror-maze, from all angles, down diminishing perspectives, from the woman she was to the girl she had been.

She had been quite unconscious of the slow transformation in her habits of thought. It is so in life. One toils up the thickly wooded hillside, intent only on the footing, and comes suddenly on a high clearing, overlooking valley and path, defining a new horizon.

“I never had the best of everything, Mrs. Grey,” she said. “Nobody has. Every life and every situation in life has its bad conditions--and its good ones. I haven't had any more happiness--nor trouble than most people. It strikes me things are pretty equally divided. We only think they aren't when we don't know all about it. We see the surface of other people's lives, not their private drawbacks or compensations. There are always both. But other people's troubles are so much easier to bear than our own, their good luck so much less deserved and qualified! With all I had as a girl I didn't have contentment. And now, with all I lack, I don't know any one with whom I'd change places.”

What was the use with Mrs. Grey?

But alone, the thought kept widening ring after ring: How little choice there was of conditions in life; how fortune tends to seek its level; how one man has the meat and another the appetite; and another, without either, can find in the fact the flavor of a joke or chew the cud of reflection over it. Of the three, Bessie thought she would rather be the one with the disposition. But that could be cultivated. Look at hers! Circumstances had started it in a sort of aside, but she would take the hint.

The cure for dissatisfaction was to recognize one's balance of good.

Guy was watching for her at the window. She was half conscious that he looked unusually haggard, but there were so many other thoughts at sight of him that they washed over the first.

She swung her reticule. “It's all right!” and she ran up the walk, a most feminine swirl of progress. She got to him breathless. “I've found a house that will give you its German correspondence to translate and write, and it won't be so much but that you can do it as you're able, within reason. Now, sir!”

For a minute it seemed as if Guy's whole body was alive. The weak and shaken invalid still had something of unconquerable boyishness in the lift of his head and the light of his eyes. “Good! That will do for a start.” The old spirit, to which hers always answered. If she didn't believe he would actually do something worth while in the end! Then promptly, of old habit, he thought of her. “Bibi! You took your time for that.”

“Not all of it, in good sooth, fair lord.” She spread out her skirts, lady-come-to-see fashion, and strutted across the room. “Mrs. Osbourne has a new 'job' and a 'raise.'” (Incidentally Mrs. Osbourne had never before been so advanced in her language.)

“Bully for you!” he shouted, so genuinely that she ran back to him and shook and hugged his shoulders. How she _liked_ him!

“What a thorough girl you are, Bibi!”

“Oh, and to-day I've been laughing at myself; as silly as I used to be, counting so much on a mere change of circumstances. Of course something unpleasant will develop there too. But at least the harness will rub in a different place. On the whole, it will be better. Guy, do you know, I have just gotten rid of envy and discontent, and that without endangering ambition. I'll give you the charm; it's a sort of cabalistic _spell_--the four P's--Occu_p_ation, Res_p_onsibility, _P_urpose, and _P_hilosophy.”

“Yes,” he said, “the most worth-while thing in life is to feel you are accomplishing something--doing your work well and getting proportionate returns.”

The tone touched her. “Poor old Guy!” so generously congratulatory of her flaunted advantages. How stupid she was! Poor Guy! her pretty creed scattered at a breath like a dead dandelion-ball. Envy she had disposed of, but what about pity? What had he to make up? “The idea of my talking of happiness, with you caged here!”

“Perhaps that was the point of it all,” he said, “to give you your chance.”

“That would be a beautifully humble thing for me to think, now wouldn't it?” Yet she had once complained that the point of it all was to interfere with her. “And so sweetly generous. Your chance being--?”

“To serve as a means of grace to you?” He smiled. “I am glad to be of some use--and honored to be of that one!” he hurried to add, elaborately humorous.

But what she was noticing was the flagging effort of his vivacity. Her half-submerged first impression of him was coming to the surface: he did look unusually haggard. “You haven't been good while I was away. Now don't tell stories. Don't I know you? No more storms, Guy!” she warned.

His eye evaded hers. “I am seriously questioning whether you ought to make this change. All your friends are here.”

“Oh, as to that! There might be advantages in working among strangers. Mrs. Grey fairly puts herself out to let me understand that she is a friend in need!” She reined herself up, recollecting, but too late. “Oh, Guy, don't mind so for me. Why, the South is full of women doing what I am, only so many of them are doing it--without--the Guys who never came back!”

“Lucky dogs!” subterraneously. Then, seeing her apprehensive of a second flare-up of that volcanic fire: “So gentlemanly of them, too, Bibi. How can those few years of love be worth a life of this to you?”

“Those few years? why, Guy! of love? Is that how _you_ feel?” Her eyes filled; her whole face quivered. “Oh, Guy--be willing for my sake. I never knew what love could mean until lately.”

His grasp hurt her knuckles. “Yes, dear, I have seen. It's very sweet. It's the mother in you, Bibi, and my helplessness. Of course! What could a woman _love_ in a dependent, half-corpse of a no-man?”

For a moment she was too surprised to speak. She stared at him. “What a notion! and it isn't true! You never were any more a man than you've been through these two dreadful years.” She sounded fairly indignant. “And for my part, I never appreciated what you were half as much.”

“Love doesn't begin with a _P_,” he remarked to the opposite wall.

“But what do you suppose the _purpose_ was?”

“Love?”

“More. _You_.”

“You never told me.” That strange voice and averted face!

“How should I fancy you wouldn't know? I had never thought it out myself until just now. It has simply been going on from day to day, as natural and quiet as growing--” A bewildering illumination was spreading in her mind. “Look here, young man”--she forced his face around to see it,--“what goblins have you been hatching in the night-watches?” The raillery broke. “Dear, is that what has been troubling you? Is there anything else?”

He looked at her now. “Anything else trouble me, if I really have you, and a chance to do a little something for you?”

It was their apotheosis. They had never known a moment equal to it before; could never know just another such again. In a very deep way it was the first kiss of love for them both.

Bessie came back to herself with that sense of arriving, of having been infinitely away, with which one drops from abstraction.

Where had they been in that state of absent mind?

It was as if they had met out of time, space, matter.... And as she thought of his words, in the light of his eyes, pity too was qualified, and that without endangering helpfulness. He, too, had his balance of good. Yes, things squared in the end.

Her creed was quick. The scattered dandelion seed sprouted all around her.

Pap Overholt

BY ALICE MACGOWAN

Up and down the long corn rows Pap Overholt guided the old mule and the small, rickety, inefficient plough, whose low handles bowed his tall, broad shoulders beneath the mild heat of a mountain June sun. As he went--ever with a furtive eye upon the cabin--he muttered to himself, shaking his head:

“Say I sha'n' do hit. Say he don't want me a-ploughin' his co'n. My law! Whut you gwine do? Thar's them chillen--thar's Huldy. They got to be fed--they 'bleeged to have meat and bread. Ef I don't--”

Again he lifted his apprehensive glance toward the cabin; and this time it encountered a figure stepping from the low doorway--a young fellow with an olive face, delicately cut features, black curling hair, the sleep still lingering in his dark eyes. He approached the fence--the sorry, broken fence,--put his hands upon it, and called sharply, “Pap!”

The old man released the plough-handles and came toward the youth, shrinking like a truant schoolboy called up for discipline.

“Pap, this is the way you do me all the time--come an' plough in my co'n when I don't know nothin' about hit--when I don't want hit done,--tryin' to make everybody think I'm lazy and no 'count. Huldy tellin' me I ought to be ashamed of myse'f, in bed while my po' old pappy--'at hain't ploughed a row of his own for years--is a-gittin' my co'n outen the weeds.”

The father stood, a chidden culprit. The boy had worked himself up to the desired point.

“You jest do hit to put a shame on me. Now, Pap, you take that mule--”

“W'y, Sammy,--w'y, Sammy honey, you know Pappy don't do it fer nair sech a reason. Hit don't look no sech a thing--like you was shif'less an' lazy. Hit jes look like Pappy got nothin' to do, an' love to come and give you a turn with yo' co'n; an', Sammy honey,”--the good farmer for the moment getting the better of the timid, soft-hearted parent,--“hit is might'ly in the weeds, boy. Don't you reckon I better jes--”

The other began, “I tell you--”

“There, there! Ne'mine, Sammy. Ef you don't want Pappy to plough no mo', Pappy jes gwine to take the plough right outen the furrow and put old Beck up. Pappy gwine--”

The boy turned away, his point made, and strolled back to the cabin. The old man, murmuring a mixture of apologies, assurances, and expostulations, went pathetically about the putting up of the mule, the setting away of the plough.

Nobody knew when Pap Overholt began to be so called, nor when his wife had received the affectionate title of Aunt Cornelia. It was a naming that grew of itself. Forty years ago the pair had been married--John, a sturdy, sunny-tempered young fellow of twenty-one, six feet in his stockings, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, and with a name and a nature clean of all tarnish; Cornelia Blackshears, a typical mountain girl of the best sort.

When, at the end of the first year, old Dr. Pastergood, who had ushered Cornelia herself into this world, turned to them with her first child in his arms, the young father stood by, controlling his great rush of primal joy, his boyish desire to do something noisy and violent; the mother looked first at her husband, then into the old doctor's face, with eyes of passionate delight and appeal. He was speechless a moment, for pity. Then he said, gently:

“Hit's gone, befo' hit ever come to us, Cornely. Hit never breathed a breath of this werrisome world.”

A man who had practised medicine in the Turkey Tracks for twenty-five years --a doctor among these mountain people, where poverty is the rule, hardship a condition of life, and tragedy a fairly familiar element, would have had his fibre well stiffened. The brave old campaigner, who had sat beside so many death-beds and so many birth-beds, and had seen so many come and so many go, at the exits and entrances of life, met the matter stoutly and without flinching. His stoic air, his words of passive acceptance, laid a calm upon the first outburst of bitter grief from the two young creatures. Later, when John had gone to do the chores, the old doctor still sat by Cornelia's bed. He took the girl's hand in his--an unusual demonstration of feeling for a mountaineer--and said to her, gently,

“Cornely, there won't never be no mo'--there'll be nair another baby to you, honey.”

The stricken girl fastened her eyes upon his in dumb pain and protest. She said nothing, the wound was too deep; only her lips quivered pitifully and the tears ran down upon the pillow.

“Now, now, honey, don't ye go to fret that-a-way. W'y, Cornely, ye was made for a mother; the Lord made ye for such--an' do ye 'low 'at He don't know what He's a-gwine to do with the work of His hands? 'For mo' air the children of the desolate'--don't ye know Scripter says?--than of them that has many. Lord love ye, honey, girl, you'll be mother to a minny and a minny. They air a-comin'; the Lord's a-sendin' 'em. W'y, honey,--you and John will have children gathered around you--”