Chapter 7

He had looked to college as the natural door between his world and hers; after four years at New Haven he might seek her acquaintance without audacity. To that end he had laboriously accumulated money, and had even passed his matriculation, when his father's death made him indispensable on the poor little farm. Since then he had doggedly plodded alone through the college curriculum, but without finding in it the mysterious pass-word that he had expected into the intellectual aristocracy. Some two years before, his mother's death and the growing up of younger brothers had left him free to seek his fortune in California. At twenty-seven he had lost his fresh look and boyish shyness; he looked older than he was, but he was really very youthful, and believed in all sorts of abstractions beginning with capitals. His mental furniture, being obtained from books, not people, was not quite in the style of the present decade, and he read Carlyle and Emerson more than Herbert Spencer. His creed had, therefore, quite transcendentalism enough to accommodate without incongruity his little private deification.

Once in every year or two, as opportunity took him near her home, he had called on her, and had multiplied each call mightily by thinking of it before and after. He had also kept up a stupid correspondence with a schoolmate who had lived in the same town with her, for the chance of her name being mentioned. Within a couple of years, however, she had lost her father and gone to relatives in New York, so he had lost exact knowledge even of her whereabouts.

She spoke before he had found his voice--without an instant's hesitation, indeed. "Oh, Will Strong!" she cried, stepping quickly toward him and holding out her hand. "I _hoped_ it was you!"

He took the offered hand, and said to himself that his own was consecrated by the touch to clean deeds forever. He would not have known how to address her, but he followed her leading.

"It is Winifred Northrop!" he said. "What is it? Can I do something for you?"

"You are school-committee man, are you not?" Anxiety, relief, and trust mingled in her voice.

"Trustee--yes. Why," he cried, "it isn't possible that _you_ are the lady!"

She laughed. "I suppose the lady must be I."

He did not smile. He even lost color with wrath. "Garvey has dared to play you some trick!--I did not dream--" he went on, eagerly, "Garvey kept the letters in his hands, and bungled over the name, so I did not once fairly catch it."

He turned back to his corner, and put the remaining bit of proof into his pocket. New heavens and new earth had come into existence since the last pencil mark on it.

"Jim," he said, "I'm called off on school-business. You get as much of that set up as you can before dinner, and then lock up; and I'll come down and make the corrections in the editorials before I go to bed. Now--Winifred--if I may walk home with you, we'll get to the bottom of Garvey's tricks. Villain!"

The epithet was so fervent, and so entirely without humorous intent, that Miss Northrop laughed again as they walked out into the dull, hot September afternoon sun. The board sidewalk was uneven and full of projecting nails and splinters, and she held her thin, blue-gray dress prettily aside from them; Will noted the gesture with admiration as intense as unreasonable. It seemed to him peculiarly admirable that she should draw her hat a little forward to shade her eyes, and should take just the length of step that she did; the absolutely right step for a lady was thenceforth settled; since then, he has insisted unreasonably upon a certain shade as the only right thing in gray, as if he held in his own mind some positive standard beyond the realm of variable taste.

The two or three business blocks--rows of slight frame-buildings, more of them saloons than would seem possible--were very quiet; Green's Ferry is the shipping point of a wide stock-raising district, and all its activity centres about the railroad station at stated times daily. The justly aroused fellow-townsmen were all back under the awnings--leaning against the wall by the post-office, sitting on boxes by the grocery; some indolently telling stories and chaffing; some looking sleepily before them in absolute repose; some in various stages of inert drunkenness. All stared curiously at young Strong and the strange lady, and prepared to talk them over afterward, but no one addressed him.

They turned aside soon into a broad cross street with no sidewalk, where the coarse dust was in places ankle deep. Behind them, beyond the main street, a few groups of yellowing cottonwoods on bare banks of reddish clay marked the course of the Sacramento; before them the street faded into a limitless expanse of gravel, thinly dotted in the distance with dull green oaks, and bounded by long knolls, like wrinkles in the plain, dark with oaks against the smoky sky of September--a sky dull blue above, dull gray near the horizon.

Along either side of the street the flimsy wooden houses were set back, each in its yard, and surrounded by oleanders; sometimes there would be a few parched roses, a trellis of Madeira-vine, a patch of carefully nursed grass, often a row of China trees, whose fallen black seeds stippled the dust--but always the great rosy clumps of oleanders, glorying in the heat and drought. Every evening after dinner the owners come out, and stand watering these gardens with hose and sprinkler, till all along the street there is a murmur like rain and a smell of damp earth, and here and there through the warm twilight a glimpse of the white sprays of water; while the families sit on the porches and doorstep, and gossip and laugh. At this hour, however, the little gardens and splendid oleanders lay hot and deserted in the dusty afternoon.

"I haven't till now had time to spare from being anxious to be interested," Miss Northrop said. "I was rather panic-stricken this morning, and things were awful, instead of interesting, in proportion to their newness."

This bit of pathos stiffened Will's manner with the awkwardness of over-feeling, as he asked: "Now, what can I do for you--Winifred?"

The awkwardness made him more like the school-boy Will; and then, a familiar face four thousand miles from home seems more familiar than it really is. Miss Northrop answered confidingly: "I will tell you all about it, and then you will know what to do. I wrote to Judge Garvey--some one referred me to him at Sacramento--and asked if I might teach the school. He wrote back that I might, fixed the day, and directed me to a boarding-place that he had engaged for me. So I came by yesterday evening's train, and sent word that I was here. This morning he called and told me--with most oppressive civility--that as I had not answered his last letter, the place had been given to some one else. He said 'professional etiquette' here demands an answer in such a case, and failure to answer is equivalent to a withdrawal of the application."

"He lied," said Will, parenthetically, walking along with his eyes on the ground; she, on the contrary, looked at him often, with frank directness.

"He did not impress me," she said, "as the soul of candor. I said as little as possible to him, but when he was gone I asked about the rest of the committee, and as soon as I heard your name I hoped it was you; I knew you were somewhere in California. This afternoon I received his letter written to prevent my coming. It had followed me up here by the same train that I came on." She held the letter in her hand, and Will quietly took it and kept it. "I would not raise any controversy about such a thing," she went on, "if I had any idea in the world where else to go or what to do." Her voice sharpened a little again, with a note of pathos.

Will did not know how to answer without seeming to question or comment, so there came a pause; then he said:

"This Coakley was an electioneering agent of Garvey's, and doesn't know enough to teach babies. He seems to have turned up suddenly wanting help, and the Judge is willing enough to keep him on hand and under obligations until next election."

Miss Northrop stopped short and looked at him with brows a little raised, and her bearing became impalpably more distant.

"But I cannot enter into contest with--these men for permission to teach school here," she said.

She was right, in her quick feeling that Will Strong's training could not have made work and discomfort and contact with vulgarity seem outside the sphere of women. If it had been one of his own sisters he would have said: "Oh, well, we have to take the world as we find it. Brace up, little girl; I'll put you safe through, and you'll find it's not so bad, after all."

But what he said to Winifred Northrop was: "It is outrageous! Such brutes as Garvey have no business to look at a lady! If you really prefer not to take the school," he went on, with some embarrassment, "I hope you will call on me to help you in any other way; but if you want the school you shall have it, and no annoyance with it that I can help."

Miss Northrop repented that she had repented her confidence. "I remembered that you were kind of old, Will"--and her manner was irresistibly winning when she said such a thing--"but you are so very kind now that you make me ashamed. I only meant to ask you what I must do. Yes, I must take this position if I can, for I have no alternative."

"There is nothing for you to do," he said. "It is my place, as an officer of the school, to see that its rightful teacher is not defrauded."

"So it is," she said, relieved. "But I am none the less grateful."

"It is a pleasure to me to be able to do anything for you," he said, gravely, somewhat stiffly--from his tone you would not have suspected much more truth than usual in the formula.

She only said: "You are very kind," and then he lifted his hat, and left her at Mrs. Stutt's gate.

He deliberately and literally believed, as he walked down the street--directly to Green's--that he was the happiest man in the world. For that matter, it is not impossible that he was. He was absolutely innocent of conscious hyperbole in saying, "It would be worth a life-time of trouble only to have _seen_ her; and I know her and am able to do her a service!"

He scored one advantage in having seen Miss Northrop early; he saw Green before Garvey had talked with him. The report of the quarrel had by no means failed to reach "The American Eagle," and when Strong came in Uncle Billy Green was just expressing himself with regard to Coakley:

"Of course the Judge'll provide for his man when he gets a chance. That's where he's sharp. And if Coakley is smart enough to suit Judge Garvey, he's smart enough to teach _my_ children--that's what _I_ say."

A private audience with him would have been merely postponing the hour of general discussion, so Strong made a brief exposition of his case--gently enough, but with considerable force--then and there, displaying the letter he carried by way of proof. He hardly expected to elicit anything but the usual laugh and comment on the Judge's smartness. But there was a marked seriousness of tone in the remarks when he ended.

"Well, that _is_ pretty rough."

"Yes, sir, that's going too far. The Judge ought to know where to stop. I don't stand by no man when it comes to a shabby trick on an unprotected school-marm."

"A real lady, too--I could see that when she went by with you, Strong."

Even Green said, uneasily, "No, I shouldn't think the Judge ought to do that, quite."

It was evident that Green's Ferry drew its lines as much as any other town. The moral support it offered Strong was mainly negative, however, and Green, after several alternate conversations with his two fellow trustees during this Saturday evening, went off early Sunday morning to visit his married daughter at the old Meeker place, leaving word that they must fix it between them. Judge Garvey closed the somewhat stormy conference of Saturday evening with a promise to break down Miss Northrop's school in a week, and Strong's paper in a month. "Do you flatter yourself I should not have had your contemptible sheet in powder under my feet, sir, before this, if I had thought it worth the attention?" Nevertheless, as there was nothing on which the Judge prided himself more than on his invariable civility to ladies ("the courtly Judge" was his favorite phrase in writing up a local notice of any affair at which he had been present), Strong, having possession of the school-house key, was able to put Miss Northrop into possession on Monday morning without opposition. The Judge even visited her during the day and addressed the school with extreme suavity.

He was, however, very seriously affronted, and had not passed his Sunday without diligent preparation among parents and children to make Miss Northrop's position untenable. It would have been no difficult task, either, but for an altogether unprecedented obstacle--a factor that he had not dreamed of in his calculations, and that Strong himself had underestimated. The children, who had gone to school Monday morning primed for mutiny, surrendered their hearts in a body to Miss Northrop by night; three days later, Uncle Billy Green's niece, who taught the primary school, gave in adoring allegiance; by the end of the week everybody who had seen her was her advocate. It was certainly an unprecedented thing that Judge Garvey's best exertions should come to naught, because of a woman's way of smiling and speaking; but Miss Northrop's tenure of the school was secure. It was not entirely speech and smile, however. Miss Northrop was interested in everything, and consequently had common ground with everybody; and she met each one on that ground, not so much ignoring as temporarily forgetting differences.

The year wore on from gray to gray; the parching north wind poured down the plain and darkened the air with gritty dust; the sky, though cloudless, grew murkier every day. Then the wind shifted to the south, and the sky grew darker yet with surging heaps of clouds, and at last down came the late November rain; and next morning Miss Northrop could see, like a miraculous creation of the night, up and down every east-and-west street, a range of azure mountains along either horizon, snow-crowned, clear-cut, against an exquisite blue sky. Every two or three weeks the surge of clouds would come rolling up with the south wind, and the rain would come down in torrents for days, till the Sacramento, yellow with mud, roared level with its banks; and then the storm would break away, and there would be a week or two of blue sky and brilliant air and green earth.

One Sunday in March, between the early and the latter rains, Miss Northrop and Will Strong walked out together several miles over the plain. The gravel had long disappeared under green burclover and _filaria_, thickly dotted with the little yellow clover blossoms, the lilac ones of the _filaria_, and with small blue gilias. The flocks and herds had been driven down from the mountains where they spend their summers and autumns, and the air was full of the bleating of lambs. Up and down either horizon, converging toward the north, were the long ranks of the Sierras and Coast Range, deep blue, ruggedly tipped with white peaks of all shapes--the Lassen Buttes, the Yallo Balleys, and many a lesser one. Northward, in the interval between the ranges, miles and miles away, the solitary peak of Shasta rose above the dark oak-knolls, sharp-white from base to tip, against a stainless sky. They sat down on the warm clover, beside a noisy yellow stream that ran full to its banks on its way to the Sacramento. Winifred pushed back her hat, dropped her hands in her lap, and let her senses be played upon by the delicious air, the blue and white of mountains and sky and clouds, the luminous green, the rushing of water close by, and the bleating of flocks in the distance. It gave Will a good chance to watch her face--the sweetness of the mouth; the nobility of the level brows; the frankness of the eyes; the soft wave of her hair. There was a marked sadness in her face in repose; to wonder why, was to transgress the code of loyal humility that Will set himself; he had not even considered it due chivalry to speculate, much less ask, as to the reason of so amazing a phenomenon as her presence in California at all, and the incongruity of her school-teaching. Her pose was perfect, and yet nothing could be more unconscious. Was that marvellous spontaneity, that simple dignity, the regular thing among the men and women Winifred belonged with? It made him feel left very far out to think so. How incapable of effort for admiration she was, yet how invariably admirable!

She caught him looking at her, in time. "What is it?" she said, simply.

He colored with some confusion, but confessed a piece of his thought. "I was wondering if you really do not care at all for admiration. Most people would think they got the good of their living in being praised a fraction as much as you've been. If that's impertinent I beg your pardon; you asked me."

The portion of aristocrat's pride that was in Winifred was largely concentrated in an objection to talking of herself or letting other people do it; so she looked a little annoyed. She began with some constraint:

"Yes--I care--at first--when it is the right one that praises. But there is always a reaction of self-distrust. It seems humiliating," she went on more frankly, "to have been praised for having done some common thing--solved a problem, or written a poem, or handled a piano--a little more or less cleverly, when one comes to think what education and art are. And _personal_ admiration--that always seems a contemptible sort of folly, if you think of what great things there are to do and be in the world, and the lives the great lonely souls have lived."

"Your achievement seems little to you," said Will, with some gloom, "because, I suppose, more always opens to you. To me, who have made none--"

"Why, Will," she cried, with the most genuine dissent. "You have done more than almost any one I know. Do you call it nothing to do a college curriculum alone and under all sorts of hindrances? And I know that it was done well and thoroughly."

"Oh, yes," he said, indifferently, tossing bits of clover into the stream, "I could have passed an A. B. fast enough. But you know better than I do, Winifred, that that's the least of a college course. I've seen fellows that had to work their way through and had no spare time or energy, and they always lacked a great deal of the college flavor; the education didn't permeate 'em. Then there are other things--music, art, social opportunities, capacity of expression--that are no slight things to miss; they make up more of first-class living than Greek optatives or the equation of a surface. It isn't really possible for a man, not backed by circumstances, to get himself into a position that some are born to." He let the clover be and looked up. "Oh, I'm not growling, Winifred," he said, hastily, smiling, as he saw her about to speak eagerly. "I'm only making philosophical observations, and using myself as an illustration. Why in the world should I growl to find myself stranded half way up, when there is a townful of people behind us clear down at the bottom, and no more their fault than mine? Why should I mind that I am left out from the best chances, any more than that a thousand other fellows are? 'What Act of Legislature was there that' _I_ should be cultured?"

She was leaning forward with her irresistible eyes full on his, and face and voice vivified with that sympathetic expressiveness that makes speech count for far more than the words.

"Will, that is true," she cried, "but it is only part of the truth. 'Close thy' Carlyle; 'open thy' Emerson. It's true, you have missed some things that you deserved to have and that many of your inferiors have for nothing. But your life is only begun, and your ability and pluck can do so much that you needn't waste regret on anything they may fail to do. Even if circumstances be unconquerable that stand between you and some good things, are the things you have gained instead of less value?--your courage and patience, your self-reliance and trustworthiness and helpfulness? Why, Will, _character_ is worth more than knowledge of art, or familiarity with good society; just to live bravely is worth more than all the rest. Do you suppose I would exchange your companionship for that of a dozen 'cultured' people who could talk to me about 'sincere furniture'"--this was in the last decade, remember--"and Rauss's heads, as you can't, and who never showed me one spark of genuine feeling about the great things of life, as you can?"

Will was overwhelmed. Winifred had talked of his affairs much, following them with unvarying interest, but of himself or herself, never; and it was actually a new idea to the young fellow that she could have any very high opinion of him. Moreover, it was the first time he had heard her speak with unveiled and ardent feeling.

"You do not mean"--and he formed his words with difficulty--"that I could meet on equal ground people that--such people as _your_ associates."

"No; you would meet most of them on higher ground. If they didn't know it, that would be their discredit. I should think you could see that," she added, in a quick, parenthetic averse way, "from _their_ associate. If you want to get a higher opinion of the value of your life, compare it with an ordinary, foolish, useless one--like mine." She gave him no chance to answer that, but was the next moment on her feet, suggesting that they walk on, and wishing they were not to stop short of the Lassen Buttes, whose apparent nearness, scores of miles distant as they were, was still a perpetual surprise to her eastern eyes.

When everything has been made ready for it, a few sentences may easily make or mark an era in life; and it is probable that if Miss Northrop had not in effect told young Strong he was quite good enough for her, he might have remained her contented vassal for years. Six months of being her nearest friend worked their result, to be sure; but the humility they were gnawing at was of mediævally tough fibre, and of twice six years' growth. His depreciation of himself, however, had only meant sense of distance from her; therefore, his sense of the significance of her speech was enormous. He felt his relation to her changed; he was shaken from all his moorings, and thrown into a mighty agitation that possessed him night and day, and only grew with time. For this was what it all came to: Was the distance between Winifred and himself greater than the distance between her and any other man? And when he had once thought that, the gate was open, and the besieging host marched in and took possession of every corner of him with longing and desire and a madness of tenderness.

He thought of nothing else. He wrote his editorials and set type under an unceasing sense of it, as people have done brain-work and finger-work to an accompaniment of unceasing physical pain. For there was nothing joyous about it to him; it was all a bitter pain of mad desire to be something to her--to secure her, somehow, before this great, dark future swept her away from him. And yet the latter rains came and went, the green faded from the ground, the mountains grew dimmer and duller, and at last disappeared in the summer murk, before he took in his own mind the next step--from lover to suitor, as before from vassal to lover.