Part 7

Elmer Dasher was shaken, said, “But my God, Katy”; and Katy, turning her head fretfully from him, was caught by the aspect of the Bohemian woman, and cried out. The Bohemian woman was sitting erect and trying terribly for breath. No nurse was there, the passages were quiet. The Dashers, always lax, uncentered, were thrown into distraction. Elmer ran and rang and called. It was Mrs. Dasher who reached the woman and, in some deep impulse to physical contact, held her as she died. Mrs. Dasher kept saying: “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand this.”

Jerry caught up the terrified little boy, ran by the nurse who was moving upon the room, crouched in the tonneau, and hugged the child. He wept, was stilled, and later roused to faint interests. She was stirred by his quiet, then by his motion. While they waited, she sought for ways to give him protection. Passers glanced at them and it flashed to her: They think he’s mine. She adjusted his collar and said in an admirably imitated abstraction: “Yes, darling.”

At last her father and mother came crossing the street. To Jerry they seemed detached and of a familiarity strange and passionate, such as she felt in saying over her own name.

“I don’t understand that,” Mrs. Dasher was still saying weakly. In the seat beside her husband she wept and seemed rapt, unaware of anything save that which had just happened. Elmer Dasher was silent, but wholly in the body, as was clear when he cursed in a traffic crisis.

This crisis he assumed to have been imagined: He heard a car, with a strange siren, a faint melodious siren; a car seeking, he thought, to pass him, and nearly succeeding. Dasher could hear the silver alternation, a cadence such as three pipes might give, softly blown. When had a man ever devised a siren like that? “Some music hound,” thought Dasher. And when a tight place narrowed in before him and the light cry of insistence followed close, he drew far to the right to let the fellow pass. The fellow did not pass. Amazed, as he looked back, Dasher saw the street momentarily empty. “Must have been the fire whistle,” Dasher thought, swore, and slid back into the channel.

They drew into the country, into the tender vacant air of fields. Now emerged the sky, which in town they had forgotten. The sky was void of stars. To the southwest were thrusts of lightning, incessant, at innocent play, unconcerned with any fruit of death. A faint huskiness came deepening, of thunder.

“What’s that?” the child asked and, grown shyly accustomed, questioned of fireflies, of miasma, of the smell of honey and hay. These questions gave Jerry rapture. His breath and his brushing eyelash gave her rapture. The child fell asleep, and in dear discomfort Jerry held him; for mile upon mile she held him and dreaded the ride’s end.

She felt a lift of pleasure when the car was stalled. At the foot of a sharp slope up to a roadbed the car stopped. Elmer Dasher, who could not so much as set a hinge on a door, was helpless. He lifted the hood, produced tools, said names of parts; but it was plain that he was helpless. No farmstead light was near and they set themselves to wait for passers. It was a road little frequented. And now the high black clouds were shot with flame.

They faced a meadow made limitless by night. The life of the dark was there, the dark peopled by rustle, breath, odor. In the stillness these influences came confidently to the car. The night breathed, and along its vast invisible veins coursed some faint fluid, tincturing the darkness, flowing through the little bodies of men.

Suddenly Elmer Dasher felt a frightful nostalgia. Home, home! He wanted to be at home. But when he thought of his house, his porch with red chairs, it was not these that he wanted. Home. Some core of the world seemed to emerge and demand him. Where did he want to go?

Far away, as if from another meadow under another night, there came a call, of no remembered bird. A bird call which fused with the rising wind, threaded the thunder, haunted the ear, and died. It voiced his nostalgia, it was pure and pleading. It bore an echo of unbearable sweetness. Or was it a bird call? He thought now that it might have been a wavering engine whistle.... Far down the curve of the railroad across the distant swamp, a yellow eye outrayed in the first rain.

“The ’way freight,” said Elmer Dasher. “It’s none too good for us. We’ll signal them, and if they row we’ll report them to the directors!”

The highway was level with the fields. To the fields’ edge they rolled their car, an ancient servant, and left it locked in darkness; with its lamps they lighted their way and flagged the freight train. In magnificent languor, like a train of the Orient, the thundering thing rolled indolently down and stopped. A blown torch brushed out a little pool of light. A Patch Grove voice hailed them, exclaimed, bade them climb aboard. Received into the warm cave of the cab, these four blinked at the red throat of the firebox and felt the rich reprieve of some convalescence.

The enormous night held the little train. The enormous sky held the little storm. Standing in the gangway Elmer Dasher threw back his head and took the hour. Motion, roar, electricity blue on the metal, thunder of wheel and of cloud, and he in their midst. He felt in flight over farther spaces. They swept by a steel plant, saw the belch and glare, made out men and mounds of slag. One of the sheds stood drenched in the red beauty of the pouring, and naked figures flowered from wild color. In that flash were the tumult of farther industry, roar of innumerable trains, glitter of all the cities, their veins flowing with men and women in sin, joy, anguish. He was feeling all that there was to feel! He could have cried a challenge as the engine went challenging the lit blackness.

But why did the engineer blow the whistle, running through open country? Or _did_ he blow the whistle? He was sitting quietly on the seat, his attention on the track. One hand lay on his knee and one on the windowsill. The engine whistle was not blown! That insistent call that seemed like the voice of their flight, it came toward them from some horizon. What horizon? Who was calling? Calling whom? Beauty and anguish flowed together in Elmer Dasher. He felt drunkenness, incredibly enhanced.

“The glory of the Lord—eh, old girl?” he shouted. No one heard him.

On the fireman’s seat Mrs. Dasher, cowering with covered eyes, looked round at him. She had not heard what he said, had not seen what he saw, had felt nothing that he felt, had been puzzled by no cry; but her face held its own emotion, wore now as much experience as her hands.

“Elmer,” she cried, “I don’t understand what happened to her and I don’t believe I ever shall.”

But this he did not hear. “The glory of the Lord, by the great horn spoon!” he bellowed, and looked about.

Neither death nor the fury of the hour occupied Jerry. In the thunder of the engine and of the storm, she had found that the child clutched at her.

Before midnight they were dry in their rooms and the little boy was sleeping. Elmer Dasher’s exaltation, his wife’s pity and terror, Jerry’s brief motherhood, all boxed dry in their rooms.

The storm cleared and left the air sultry, intolerable. Dasher could not sleep. He went downstairs and sat in the swing. Ludlow was moving about the lawn, barefooted in the drenched grass. He came to the Dasher’s verandah rail.

“Been up in town, have you?” he said. “I tell you, if there’s a reason why Patch Grove should collapse and slide into the valley, Pearl City ought to drop into the ground with no warning. Ought to disappear from the human eye.”

Something shook Elmer Dasher. He seemed to remember that this destiny of man he had recently been stirred to resist. But automatically he replied:

“You won’t find a better city anywhere than Pearl.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Ludlow, and went home.

Faintly, a far horn which would wake few, Elmer Dasher heard the cry again. In it was the nostalgia of the night, of the world, of some hidden being striving to be heard. But of this cry he could not divine direction or meaning. It might have been a signal or a challenge. To whom? And from where? Boys could not be playing ball on the school grounds now....

He moved nervously in his swing and the frame dissented leniently. He felt an instant and acute relief and comfortably concluded that this faint squeak was all that he had noted.

Hearing this squeak, his wife descended, quavered. “That you, Elmer?” and came to her rocking chair on its creaking board. The moon in its third quarter, a trinket of silver gilt, was tilted above the elm, but the Dashers did not observe. Nor did they note the clean new anger of the second storm cutting its low way along the west.

Beneath the hall burner Jerry passed, came to the threshold, and when her mother said “Better sit down,” emerged and obeyed.

“I don’t understand it and I never shall,” said Mrs. Dasher heavily.

“Don’t say that again!” Elmer Dasher cried. “There isn’t a woman in the world that’ll keep on saying the same thing over and over the way you will.”

“I won’t be here long to say anything. I’m sick of the whole thing.”

Jerry interposed: “It’s hot again, isn’t it?” She heard: “Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time.” And: “Can anybody see whether I hung up the ice card?”

THE TWO SOULS

Marthella brought to the kitchen table a five-pound jar of butter and six butter pats, white bread, devil’s food, filled cookies. In the woodshed Malcolm had already ranged the boxes of potatoes, tomatoes, grapes, the two squashes, the tray of “mixed” vegetables. All their entries were ready for the County Fair.

Malcolm came in, stamping. On the other end of the kitchen table Marthella had ready their two plates, coffee cups, soup bowls. She carried steaming soup to his plate. Then she sat down in the high-backed rocking chair near the red hearth. She had spent a difficult day. The last straw had been that Millie, her little maid, had asked to go home for the rest of the week. Marthella thought angrily that she shouldn’t go home.

“Have you eaten?” Malcolm inquired, then noted the unused dishes at her plate. “Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

He almost never called her Marthella any more, nor did she call him Malcolm.

“I’m so tired,” she said, “I can’t eat.”

“So am I,” he said testily, “but I’ve got sense enough to eat, anyway.”

“Some folks are all sense ... one kind,” she retorted tartly.

“I’d have more of the other kind if you were as saving as some,” he returned.

At this Marthella fell to quiet weeping.

He took his soup in silence and presently remarked:

“I’ll bet Sims gets first on his mixed vegetables. My ’bagies aren’t up to his. Sims is an old snide,” he added, his face hardening and sharpening. “He can’t farm for sour grapes. But he can bluff.”

Still weeping, she said:

“If any of my stuff gets first, you keep the money. I couldn’t touch it. It’d burn me.”

She knew that she could “touch” it, and he knew that he would not take her first-premium money. But he replied indifferently:

“All right. It can go toward the milking machine.”

Marthella ceased weeping. Two red spots burned on her cheeks. “I was going to use it toward the parlor carpet,” she said. “But I don’t care how the parlor carpet looks. Nobody sees it.”

“No,” he assented. “Nobody. Nobody but you.”

“Yes. I’m nobody,” she contributed.

He said nothing.

“I’m going to paint the kitchen floor,” he announced after an interval. “I think I’ll paint it brown.”

“Because brown’s hard to take care of?” she inquired. “And yellow’s easy?”

He burst into laughter. “I did that to try you,” he told her. “Last time I said ‘yellow,’ and you said yellow was calf color and you wanted brown. Just plain cantankerous, you are.”

Stung by the injustice of this, her voice rose shrilly:

“I didn’t know brown was hard to take care of then, did I? Well, I know now, because I’ve had it. And I say I want yellow.”

He continued to laugh, rose, pushed his chair under the table, then leaned upon it.

“We’ll start,” he said, “before six in the morning. I want to get a good place for my stuff.”

“You can start when you like,” she replied. “I’m not going.”

And this she heard herself say exactly as if some one else had said it, with whom she had no traffic. The words amazed her. She had not meant to say that. She had meant to go to the Fair. She had not missed a Fair in thirty years. She had spoken without her own will, and now she knew that she must live up to her declaration.

“I may not be able to spare a team to go in again this week,” he reminded her.

“I shall not go in again this week,” she said with deliberation. “I shall not go to the Fair at all.”

At least she enjoyed the sensation that she was making. He knew that she was not given to speaking lightly. Having said that she should not go, Marthella, as he had come to know her, would not be going.

“Suit yourself,” he said only, and went to the barn.

Marthella sat in a web of silence—an abrupt accusing silence. What had she done? She had taken away her chief pleasure of the year, when she met friends not seen year-long. Also she had forgone her premium money, which came to her every year, and was her only money to spend as she liked. Why had she done this? To satisfy something which even now was taking satisfaction, as a beast of prey, over some bleeding victim.

Who was that bleeding victim?

She was hungry, but she sat without eating, as if this were a part of that same savage satisfaction. She looked at the red coals of the hearth. How very bright they were! How very bright they were!

The door opened and her husband came in. He sat opposite to her, before the hearth, and stretched his feet to the fire. He, too, stared at the red coals on the hearth. She looked at him. He was very bright and shining.

There he was, Malcolm, as she knew him, but shot through with some incalculable cast of radiance. His face was serene and beautiful—not as she remembered it in his youth, not as she might imagine it in death, but all compounded of both, and majestic beyond the faces of men.

He spoke to her in the voice that she knew, but keyed now to something gentle.

“Have you got any salve?” he asked. “I seem to have hurt myself.”

She rose and went to the cupboard. As she returned she saw herself in the mirror above the wash bench: her tired face, her smooth hair, her open collar. And she was as luminous as he.

There was no time to think of this. She went to him with the salve, stooped to him. He lifted his hand, with a gesture like that of a little child. She touched him.

And from her to him, and from him to her, went some flow of power which filled the room. Not power which shook them. But something which seemed to have been there for a very long time.

She went back to her chair and they talked. And all the time she looked breathlessly at this being. Was it Malcolm? Had he died, and had this one come instead? But what of her? She glanced down at her blue dress. It seemed clean and soft, and its fabric was like silk. Her hands, too, were smooth and lay unwontedly disclosed. And all was shining....

He had his head on the chair back in a way that she knew.

“We ought to get the kitchen papered,” he was saying.

“I wish we could,” she answered. “Some of the pretty, cheap paper—plain, maybe.”

“Yes, cheap,” he assented. “I don’t know as I always fancy plain paper—might show the dirt more. Would it?”

“Perhaps it would,” she said. “We could tell when we came to pick it out.”

He agreed. “I guess we better see about that when we get a chance. We’ll go to Sims’ for it.”

“Sims’ is the best place,” she assented. “Sims hasn’t been out here in quite a while,” she added.

“I wish’t he’d come,” Malcolm said heartily. “There’s nobody does me more good than Sims. But then, he’s always doing somebody a good turn. As he did Elder.”

“The one he found sleeping in the hay,” she recalled.

He nodded. “The ex-convict,” he said. “Gosh, think of it! College and all that, and not a friend when he came out. He’s been a son to Sims.”

Some exquisite current of feeling ran through Marthella. It made her both faint and divinely strong. Her eyes were on Malcolm; and now, as she saw him smiling with his joy in Sims, and expressing that joy, his body was pulsing with more light, like a soft sun. She looked down at herself. Was she, too, brighter?

She wondered what would happen next. She felt a sense of perfect happiness, as at the onset of some gentle force, which entered and held her and would not let her go. She must try to speak it.

“Millie wants to go home for the rest of the week,” was what she said. “Her sister is there. I’m going to let her go. I can get along.”

And at this she was aware that her own being was bathed in a fairer shining.

He assented. “Millie’s a nice little thing,” he added. “I wish’t we could do something for her.”

She leaned forward eagerly.

“Oh, Malcolm!” she said. “I’ve got some things I could fix up for her, if—do you s’pose we could send her to school? Some little place?”

Until that moment she had never thought of this, but the plan seemed to rise within her, full-formed.

“If that’s what we’d rather do,” he answered. “I’ve been thinking—we ought to pick out some few things like that and then go to work and do them.”

He spoke with a manner of hesitation, almost of surprise ... as if, say, he were trying to remember when he had thought of this.

“Oh, let’s!” she cried. “And Millie’ll be one of ’em. I’d put the premium money in.”

She tried to remember what had been said, of late, about that premium money. Something that hurt her, somewhere. But she had forgotten. In any case the money should go to Millie.

Malcolm rose, and the brightness which was he moved as he moved, and she looked up at him with wonder.

He crossed to the clock and wound it. She could see the turn of his arm and his huge hand, could hear the regular scrape o£ the weights as they rose to his touch. And yet he was as lucent as an angel: the old blue coat, the rough hair, the worn shoes—all.

She looked about on the objects of the room. Everything stood in some exquisite change. The clock shelf, the mirror, the wash bench—what homely graciousness, what dignity! As if their delicate offices of telling the time, reflecting, cleansing, were upon them like visible garments.

The cupboard, with one door ajar—she knew those dishes within so that a crack, a nick, was an event. Yet there they stood, in some delicate difference, vessels of still further ceremonial.

And this was true of the window, looking on the mystery and the splendor of the night. And of the hearth, red with fire, mystic and very bright. And on the table waited the work of her hand, to be taken on the morrow to the County Fair. There they were, the elements of the body, in their mantle of perfection, ready to be blessed, as for some secret sacrament.

All this was to her but a current of feeling, deep, glad. She thought about the Fair, that assembling of the people, people whom she had known from her girlhood; greeting, laughter, music, hands....

She thought about the County Fair ground, and it seemed to be swimming in this brightness which enveloped Malcolm and her.

He closed the clock door, and turned.

“Come, Marthella,” he said. “We must get a pretty good start in the morning.”

Had some one, sometime, laid upon her that she was not to go to the Fair? She hardly thought of this. She was smiling, because he had called her by her name.

What a wonderful thing a name was, within! Marthella! It seemed to her new, like another name. A name which was in itself a woman. She rose to be that woman. All this was to her merely as gladness.

“Yes, Malcolm,” she said.

He fastened the door, blew out the lamp, and there were the coals on the hearth, very, very bright....

Together they groped to the stair door, and that homely way received them, as if abruptly it came forward to perform its authentically appointed service. And there in the stairway that brightness followed. It was in their chamber, mingling with the moonlight. The white curtains, patterned with the moving leaves without, the familiar objects of gloom and light—all there stood in some robing, some dignity of their simple offices.

And when had there been in the house this indeterminate perfume....

They undressed without a lamp—there was no lamp in the chamber. They lay down in that tender, engulfing tide. Sleep came, and as it came there beat about them the sense of some besetting sweetness, but strong with the strength of that force which had seized upon them at birth and had caused them to live.

In the morning, as they drove away from their door, the first sun came slanting along the road to meet them. Their humble highway ran parallel with the equator, and the great sun was there to make it known.

“Marthella,” said Malcolm, “that was the best talk we had last night that we’ve had in a dog’s age. But I’ll be jumped-up if I know what we talked about. Except Millie, and all.”

“It was so,” she said only. “And I dunno’s I know, either, what it was we talked about last night—except Millie and all.”

She looked up at him.

That other brightness was gone this morning. But in his face was the look of the morning, of his manhood, of his energy to create.

She glanced down at her black Henrietta-cloth skirt, at her brown cotton gloves. No, she was not shining now.

They were driving toward that blaze of beauty on the road. It shone on the leaves, on the smooth backs of the willing horses, on Malcolm’s other suit.

She glanced back at the wagon box, filled with what they two had called from the living earth.

That other shining had gone. But here was the ancient shining of the sun. Here was the blessing of the earth. And in the air a tide, besieging, possessing.

THE END

_PLAYS BY ZONA GALE_

MISS LULU BETT

(_The Pulitzer Prize Play of 1921_)

_With Foreword by Robert Benchley and Thomas Dickinson_

A comedy of American life whose every speech brings delighted recognition of its human, everyday truth. The story of the play is woven around Lulu, a colorless household drudge, living in the home of her sister and brother-in-law. Dialogue so commonplace and ugly that it is highly effective and clever character delineation accompany the working out of the plot to the end where Lulu finds a lover and happiness and so brings satisfaction to the sympathetic audience. 2 or 3 acts. Cast: 4m. 5w. “A milestone in American drama.”—_Thomas Dickinson._ Price $1.75.

MISTER PITT

A play of American small town life. Its central character is a traveling pickle salesman, and in him Miss Gale, with marvelous artistry, has achieved a masterpiece of characterization. The life of this generous, good-hearted man, whose native fine qualities are shrouded by a lack of self-confidence and by odd manners and ways of speech, forms the plot of the play. 3 acts, 11 scenes. Cast: 5m. 13w. Price $2.00.

_Send for Complete Dramatic Catalogue._

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York London