Chapter 7

There was a pair of eyes staring unabashed at every front window in the neighborhood when Mrs. Symes stood on Mrs. Jackson's "stoop" and removed a piece of baling wire from the lace frill of her petticoat before she wrapped her handkerchief around her hand to protect her white kid knuckles and knocked with lady-like gentleness upon Mrs. Jackson's door.

Mrs. Jackson, who had been peering through the foliage of a potted geranium on the window-sill, was pinning frantically at her scolding locks, but retained sufficient presence of mind to let a proper length of time elapse before opening the door. When she did, it was with an elaborate bow from the waistline and a surprised--

"Why, how do you do, Mis' Symes!"

Mrs. Symes smiled in prim sweetness, and noting that Mrs. Jackson's hands looked reasonably clean, extended one of the first two white kid gloves in Crowheart which Mrs. Jackson shook with heartiness before bouncing back and inquiring--

"Won't you come in, Mis' Symes?"

"Thanks." Mrs. Symes took a pinch of the front breadth of her skirt between her thumb and finger and stepped daintily over the door-sill.

"Set down," urged Mrs. Jackson making a dash at a blue plush rocking-chair which she rolled into the centre of the room with great energy.

When the chair tipped and sent Mrs. Symes's feet into the air Mrs. Jackson's burst of laughter was heard distinctly by Mrs. Tutts across the street.

"Trash!" exclaimed that person in unfathomable contempt.

Mrs. Jackson had two missing front teeth which she had lost upon an occasion to which she no longer referred, also a voice strained and husky from the many midnight choruses in which she had joined before she sold her goodwill and fixtures. She now rested her outspread fingers upon each knee and wildly ransacked her brain for something light and airy in the way of conversation.

Mrs. Symes, sitting bolt upright on the edge of the plush rocking-chair with her long, flat feet pressed tightly together, tweaked at the only veil in Crowheart and cleared her throat with subdued and lady-like restraint before she inquired--

"Isn't it a lovely day?"

"Oh, lovely!" Mrs. Jackson answered with husky vivacity. "Perfeckly lovely!"

Another silence followed and something of Mrs. Jackson's mental state could be read in her dilated pupils and excited, restless eyes. Finally she said in a desperate voice--

"It's a grand climate anyhow."

"If it wasn't for the wind; it's one drawback."

Another burst of laughter from Mrs. Jackson who covered her mouth with her hand after the manner of those who have been unfortunate in the matter of front teeth.

"Cats!" hissed Mrs. Tutts across the street. "I'll bet they are laffin' at me!"

"We had charming weather while we were gone," continued Mrs. Symes easily. The word was new to her vocabulary and its elegance did not escape Mrs. Jackson.

"That's good."

"The change was so beneficial to me. One so soon exhausts a small town, don't you think so, Mrs. Jackson?"

Mrs. Jackson could not truthfully say that she ever had felt that she had exhausted Crowheart, but she agreed weakly--

"Uh-huh."

"I had so many new and delightful experiences, too." Mrs. Symes smiled a sweetly reminiscent smile.

"You musta had."

"Going out in the train we had cantelope with cracked ice in it. You must try it sometimes, Mrs. Jackson--it's delicious."

"I can't say when I've et a cantelope but, Oh Lord, I has a hankerin' for eggs! I tell Jackson the next time he ships he's gotta take me along, for I want to git out where I can git my mitt on a pair of eggs."

"We became quite surfeited with eggs, Phidias and I," observed Mrs. Symes with an air of ennui.

Mrs. Jackson blinked.

"I can't go 'em onless they're plumb fresh," she replied non-committally.

"I've had _such_ a pleasant call." Mrs. Symes rose.

"Run in agin." Mrs. Jackson's eyes were glued upon the leather card-case from which Mrs. Symes was endeavoring to extract a card with fingers which she was unable to bend.

"Thanks. I've been so busy getting settled and all but now I mean to keep a servant and shall have more time."

Mrs. Jackson had read of ladies who kept servants but never had hoped to know one.

"Where you goin' to git--it? From Omyhaw or K. C.?"

"Grandmother has promised to come to me," said Mrs. Symes languidly.

Mrs. Jackson's jaw dropped.

"Gramma Kunkel ain't a servant, is she? she's 'help.'"

"'Help' are servants," explained Mrs. Symes with gentle patience as she laid her printed visiting card upon the centre table.

"Gosh! that strikes me funny." Mrs. Jackson was natural at last.

"Not at all," replied Mrs. Symes with hauteur. "She must work, so why not for me? She's strong and very, very capable."

"Oh, she's capable all right, but," persisted Mrs. Jackson unconvinced, "it strikes me funny. Say, is Essie Tisdale a servant, too?"

Mrs. Symes smiled ever so slightly as she fumbled with her visiting card and laid it in a more conspicuous place.

"Certainly."

"Was that why she wasn't ast to the banquet?"

Again Mrs. Symes smiled the slow, deprecating smile which she was assiduously cultivating.

"Society must draw the line somewhere, Mrs. Jackson."

Mrs. Jackson gulped with a clicking sound, and at the door shook hands with Mrs. Symes, wearing the dazed expression of one who has bumped his head on a shelf corner. Through the potted geranium she watched Mrs. Symes picking her way across another vacant lot to the dwelling of the Sylvanus Starr's.

Mrs. Abe Tutts with her blue flannel yachting cap set at an aggressive angle over one eye paddled across the street and was upon Mrs. Jackson before that person was aware of her presence.

"Has that guttersnipe gone?" A quite superfluous question, as Mrs. Jackson was well aware.

"Of who are you speakin'?" inquired Mrs. Jackson coldly.

"Who would I be speakin' of but Gus Kunkel?" demanded Mrs. Tutts belligerently.

"Look here, Mis' Tutts, I don't want to have no words with you, but----"

"What's that?" interrupted Mrs. Tutts eyeing the visiting card which Mrs. Jackson had been studying intently. "Is she leavin' tickets for somethin'?"

"Oh, no," replied. Mrs. Jackson in a blasé tone, "this is merely her callin' card."

"Callin' card! You was to home, wasn't you?"

"It's the new style to leave your callin' card whether they're to home or not," explained Mrs. Jackson, hazarding a guess.

Mrs. Jackson's air of familiarity with social mysteries was most exasperating to Mrs. Tutts.

"What's the sense of that? Lemme see it."

Mrs. Tutts read laboriously and with unmitigated scorn:

MRS. ANDREW PHIDIAS SYMES At Home Thursday 2-4

She sank cautiously into the blue rocking-chair and removed a hatpin which skewered her yachting cap to a knob of hair.

"That beats _me_! 'Mrs. Andrew Phidias Symes!'" Mrs. Tutts saw no reason to slight the letter p and pronounced it distinctly. "At home Thursdays between two and four! What of it? Ain't we all generally home Thursdays between two and four?"

"Gussie has improved wonderful," replied Mrs. Jackson pacifically.

"_Improved!_ If you call goin' around passin' of them up that she's knowed well 'improved' why then she has improved wonderful. Snip!"

"I don't think she really aimed to pass you up."

"I wasn't thinkin' of myself," replied Mrs. Tutts hotly, "I was thinking of Essie Tisdale. I hope Mis' Symes don't come around to call on me--I'm kind of perticular who I entertain."

Mrs. Jackson's hard blue eyes began to shine, but Mrs. Jackson had been something of a warrior herself in her day and knew a warrior when she saw one. She had no desire to engage in a hand to hand conflict with Mrs. Tutts, whose fierceness she was well aware was more than surface deep, and she read in that person's alert pose a disconcerting readiness for action. It was a critical moment, one which required tact, for a single injudicious word would precipitate a fray of which Mrs. Jackson could not be altogether sure of the result. Besides, poised as she was like a winged Mercury on the threshold of Society, she could not afford any low scene with Mrs. Tutts. Conquering her resentment, Mrs. Jackson said conciliatingly--

"Yes, of course, now we 're married it's different--we _have_ to be perticular who we entertain. As Mis' Symes says--'Society must draw the line somewhere!'"

Mrs. Tutts searched her face in quick suspicion.

"Who'd she say it about?"

"Promise me that this won't go no further--hope to die?--but to tell the truth we was speakin' of Essie Tisdale."

Mrs. Tutts looked mystified.

"What's she done?"

In unconscious imitation of Mrs. Symes, Mrs. Jackson curled her little finger and smiled a slow, deprecating smile--

"You see she works _out_--she's really a servant."

Mrs. Tutts nodded in entire comprehension.

"I know; back East in Dakoty we always looked down on them more or less as was out'n out hired girls. But out here I've aimed to treat everybody the same."

"I'll say that for you, Mis' Tutts," declared Mrs. Jackson generously, "you've never showed no diffrunce to nobody."

"I'm glad you think so," said Mrs. Tutts modestly, "and I don't mean to pass Essie Tisdale up altogether."

"Ner me," declared Mrs. Jackson, "she's a perfeckly good girl so far as I know."

"Where do you suppose Mis' Symes got them cards printed?" inquired Mrs. Tutts. "I gotta git Tutts to git to work and git me some."

"Over to the _Courier_ office I should think," Mrs. Jackson added. "It's lucky I got some in the house since they've started in usin' em."

There was a moment's silence in which Mrs. Tutts eyed Mrs. Jackson with unfriendly eyes. It seemed very plain to her that her neighbor was trying to "put it over her." The temptation against which she struggled was too strong and she inquired pointedly while she discreetly arose to go--

"Business cards, Mis' Jackson--some you had left over?"

Diplomacy was scattered to the four winds.

"No; not business cards, Mis' Tutts! Callin' cards. I'll show you one since I've no notion you ever saw one back there in that beer garden where you cracked your voice singin'!"

Mrs. Tutts put on her yachting cap and pulling it down on her head until her hair was well covered, advanced menacingly.

"You gotta eat them words, Mis' Jackson," she said with ominous calm.

Mrs. Jackson retreated until the marble-topped centre table formed a protecting barrier.

"Don't you start no rough-house here, Mis' Tutts."

Mrs. Tutts continued to advance and her lips had contracted as though an invisible gathering string had been jerked violently.

"You gotta eat them words, Mis' Jackson." Unwavering purpose was in her voice.

"I'll have the law on you if you begin a ruckus here." Mrs. Jackson moved to the opposite side of the table.

"The law's nothin' to me." Mrs. Tutts went around the table.

"I haven't forgot I'm a lady!" Mrs. Jackson quickened her gait.

"Everybody else has." Mrs. Tutts also accelerated her pace.

"Don't you dast lay hands on me!" Mrs. Jackson broke into a trot.

"Not if I can stomp on you," declared Mrs. Tutts as the back fulness of Mrs. Jackson's skirt slipped through her fingers.

"What's the use of this? I don't want to fight, Mis' Tutts." Mrs. Jackson was galloping and slightly dizzy.

"You will onct you git into it," encouraged Mrs. Tutts, grimly measuring the distance between them with her eye.

"You ought to have your brains beat out for this!" On the thirteenth lap around the table Mrs. Jackson was panting audibly.

"Couldn't reach yours th'out cuttin' your feet off!" responded Mrs. Tutts, in whose eyes gleamed what sporting writers describe as "the joy of battle."

The strength of the hunted hostess was waning visibly.

"I've got heart trouble, Mis' Tutts," she gasped in desperation, "and I'm liable to drop dead any jump!"

"No such luck." Mrs. Tutts made a pass at her across the table.

"This is perfeckly ridic'lous; do you at all realize what you're doin'?"

"I won't," Mrs. Tutts spoke with full knowledge of the deadly insult; "I won't until I git a few handfuls of your _red_ hair!"

Mrs. Jackson stopped in her tracks and fear fell from her. Her roving eye searched the room for a weapon and her glance fell upon the potted geranium. Mrs. Tutts already had possessed herself of the scissors.

"My hair may be red, Mis' Tutts," her shrill voice whistled through the space 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 hell 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 attitude 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?" Amusement 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 class 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 institution and certainly one or all of them are necessary for any great social success."

Van Lennop watched her troubled face and waited.

"Then that's why old Edouard Dubois was asked, though he never speaks, and Alva Jackson, who is uncouth and ignorant? They represent money."

Van Lennop smiled.

"Undoubtedly."

"And the Starrs are brains."

He laughed outright now.

"The power of the press! Correct, Miss Tisdale."

"And Andy P. Symes----" Van Lennop supplied dryly--"is family. He had a great-grandfather, I believe."

Van Lennop returned the persistent, pleading stare of Alphonse and Gaston while Essie pondered this bewildering subject.

"But out here it's mostly money that counts, or rather will count in the future."

"Yes, with a man of Symes's type it would be nearly the only qualification necessary. If you had been the 'rich Miss Tisdale' you undoubtedly would have been the guest of honor."

"Then," she said chokingly, "my good times are over, for I'm--nobody knows who--just Essie Tisdale--a biscuit-shooter whose friendship counts for nothing."

With feminine intuition she grasped Crowheart's new point of view, and Van Lennop, because he knew human nature, could not contradict her, but in the security of his own position he could not fully understand how much it all meant to her in her small world.

"You mustn't take this to heart," he said gently, conscious of a strong desire to comfort her. "If the cost of an invitation were a single tear it would be too high a price to pay. In explaining to you what the world recognizes in a general way as 'Society,' I had no thought of Crowheart in my mind. There can be no 'Society' in Crowheart with its present material. What it is obvious this man Symes means to attempt, is only an absurd imitation of something he can never hope to attain. The effort resembles the attempts of a group of amateurs to present a Boucicault comedy, while 'in front' the world laughs at them, not with them. It is a dangerous experiment to pretend to be anything other than what you are. It means loss of dignity, for you are merely absurd when you attempt to play a part which by birth and training and temperament you are nowise fitted to play. You become a target for the people whom you care most to impress.

"When one begins to imitate he loses his individuality and his individuality is the westerner's chief charm. Be yourself, Essie Tisdale, be simple, sincere, and you can never be absurd.