stupidity. What he chiefly detected was self-satisfaction; the
craftiness of the coarse-fibred country girl putting catch
questions to the teacher. Yes, he decided, the woman was merely
showing off,--she regarded it as an accomplishment to make people
uncomfortable.
Mrs. Templeton didn't at once take it in. Her training was all to
the end that you must give a guest everything you have, even if he
happens to be your worst enemy, and that to cause anyone
embarrassment is a frightful and humiliating blunder. She felt
hurt without knowing just why, but all evening it kept growing
clearer to her that this was another of those thrusts from the
outside which she couldn't understand. The neighbours were sure to
take sides against her, apparently, if they came often to see her
mother.
Mr. Rosen tried to distract Mrs. Templeton, but he could feel the
poison working. On the way home the children knew something had
displeased or hurt their mother. When they went into the house,
she told them to go up-stairs at once, as she had a headache. She
was severe and distant. When Mrs. Harris suggested making her some
peppermint tea, Victoria threw up her chin.
"I don't want anybody waiting on me. I just want to be let alone."
And she withdrew without saying good-night, or "Are you all right,
Ma?" as she usually did.
Left alone, Mrs. Harris sighed and began to turn down her bed. She
knew, as well as if she had been at the social, what kind of thing
had happened. Some of those prying ladies of the Woman's Relief
Corps, or the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, had been
intimating to Victoria that her mother was "put upon." Nothing
ever made Victoria cross but criticism. She was jealous of small
attentions paid to Mrs. Harris, because she felt they were paid
"behind her back" or "over her head," in a way that implied
reproach to her. Victoria had been a belle in their own town in
Tennessee, but here she was not very popular, no matter how many
pretty dresses she wore, and she couldn't bear it. She felt as if
her mother and Mr. Templeton must be somehow to blame; at least
they ought to protect her from whatever was disagreeable--they
always had!
V
Mrs. Harris wakened at about four o'clock, as usual, before the
house was stirring, and lay thinking about their position in this
new town. She didn't know why the neighbours acted so; she was as
much in the dark as Victoria. At home, back in Tennessee, her
place in the family was not exceptional, but perfectly regular.
Mrs. Harris had replied to Mrs. Rosen, when that lady asked why in
the world she didn't break Vickie in to help her in the kitchen:
"We are only young once, and trouble comes soon enough." Young
girls, in the South, were supposed to be carefree and foolish; the
fault Grandmother found in Vickie was that she wasn't foolish
enough. When the foolish girl married and began to have children,
everything else must give way to that. She must be humoured and
given the best of everything, because having children was hard on a
woman, and it was the most important thing in the world. In
Tennessee every young married woman in good circumstances had an
older woman in the house, a mother or mother-in-law or an old aunt,
who managed the household economies and directed the help.
That was the great difference; in Tennessee there had been plenty
of helpers. There was old Miss Sadie Crummer, who came to the
house to spin and sew and mend; old Mrs. Smith, who always arrived
to help at butchering- and preserving-time; Lizzie, the coloured
girl, who did the washing and who ran in every day to help Mandy.
There were plenty more, who came whenever one of Lizzie's barefoot
boys ran to fetch them. The hills were full of solitary old women,
or women but slightly attached to some household, who were glad to
come to Miz' Harris's for good food and a warm bed, and the little
present that either Mrs. Harris or Victoria slipped into their
carpet-sack when they went away.
To be sure, Mrs. Harris, and the other women of her age who managed
their daughter's house, kept in the background; but it was their
own background, and they ruled it jealously. They left the front
porch and the parlour to the young married couple and their young
friends; the old women spent most of their lives in the kitchen and
pantries and back dining-room. But there they ordered life to
their own taste, entertained their friends, dispensed charity, and
heard the troubles of the poor. Moreover, back there it was
Grandmother's own house they lived in. Mr. Templeton came of a
superior family and had what Grandmother called "blood," but no
property. He never so much as mended one of the steps to the front
porch without consulting Mrs. Harris. Even "back home," in the
aristocracy, there were old women who went on living like young
ones,--gave parties and drove out in their carriage and "went
North" in the summer. But among the middle-class people and the
country-folk, when a woman was a widow and had married daughters,
she considered herself an old woman and wore full-gathered black
dresses and a black bonnet and became a housekeeper. She accepted
this estate unprotestingly, almost gratefully.
The Templetons' troubles began when Mr. Templeton's aunt died and
left him a few thousand dollars, and he got the idea of bettering
himself. The twins were little then, and he told Mrs. Harris his
boys would have a better chance in Colorado--everybody was going
West. He went alone first, and got a good position with a mining
company in the mountains of southern Colorado. He had been book-
keeper in the bank in his home town, had "grown up in the bank," as
they said. He was industrious and honourable, and the managers of
the mining company liked him, even if they laughed at his polite,
soft-spoken manners. He could have held his position indefinitely,
and maybe got a promotion. But the altitude of that mountain town
was too high for his family. All the children were sick there;
Mrs. Templeton was ill most of the time and nearly died when Ronald
was born. Hillary Templeton lost his courage and came north to the
flat, sunny, semi-arid country between Wray and Cheyenne, to work
for an irrigation project. So far, things had not gone well with
him. The pinch told on everyone, but most on Grandmother. Here,
in Skyline, she had all her accustomed responsibilities, and no
helper but Mandy. Mrs. Harris was no longer living in a feudal
society, where there were plenty of landless people glad to render
service to the more fortunate, but in a snappy little Western
democracy, where every man was as good as his neighbour and out to
prove it.
Neither Mrs. Harris nor Mrs. Templeton understood just what was the
matter; they were hurt and dazed, merely. Victoria knew that here
she was censured and criticized, she who had always been so admired
and envied! Grandmother knew tha
t these meddlesome "Northerners"
said things that made Victoria suspicious and unlike herself; made
her unwilling that Mrs. Harris should receive visitors alone, or
accept marks of attention that seemed offered in compassion for her
state.
These women who belonged to clubs and Relief Corps lived
differently, Mrs. Harris knew, but she herself didn't like the way
they lived. She believed that somebody ought to be in the parlour,
and somebody in the kitchen. She wouldn't for the world have had
Victoria go about every morning in a short gingham dress, with bare
arms, and a dust-cap on her head to hide the curling-kids, as these
brisk housekeepers did. To Mrs. Harris that would have meant real
poverty, coming down in the world so far that one could no longer
keep up appearances. Her life was hard now, to be sure, since the
family went on increasing and Mr. Templeton's means went on
decreasing; but she certainly valued respectability above personal
comfort, and she could go on a good way yet if they always had a
cool pleasant parlour, with Victoria properly dressed to receive
visitors. To keep Victoria different from these "ordinary" women
meant everything to Mrs. Harris. She realized that Mrs. Rosen
managed to be mistress of any situation, either in kitchen or
parlour, but that was because she was "foreign." Grandmother
perfectly understood that their neighbour had a superior
cultivation which made everything she did an exercise of skill.
She knew well enough that their own ways of cooking and cleaning
were primitive beside Mrs. Rosen's.
If only Mr. Templeton's business affairs would look up, they could
rent a larger house, and everything would be better. They might
even get a German girl to come in and help,--but now there was no
place to put her. Grandmother's own lot could improve only with
the family fortunes--any comfort for herself, aside from that of
the family, was inconceivable to her; and on the other hand she
could have no real unhappiness while the children were well, and
good, and fond of her and their mother. That was why it was worth
while to get up early in the morning and make her bed neat and draw
the red spread smooth. The little boys loved to lie on her lounge
and her pillows when they were tired. When they were sick, Ronald
and Hughie wanted to be in her lap. They had no physical shrinking
from her because she was old. And Victoria was never jealous of
the children's wanting to be with her so much; that was a mercy!
Sometimes, in the morning, if her feet ached more than usual, Mrs.
Harris felt a little low. (Nobody did anything about broken arches
in those days, and the common endurance test of old age was to keep
going after every step cost something.) She would hang up her
towel with a sigh and go into the kitchen, feeling that it was hard
to make a start. But the moment she heard the children running
down the uncarpeted back stairs, she forgot to be low. Indeed, she
ceased to be an individual, an old woman with aching feet; she
became part of a group, became a relationship. She was drunk up
into their freshness when they burst in upon her, telling her about
their dreams, explaining their troubles with buttons and shoe-laces
and underwear shrunk too small. The tired, solitary old woman
Grandmother had been at daybreak vanished; suddenly the morning
seemed as important to her as it did to the children, and the
mornings ahead stretched out sunshiny, important.
VI
The day after the Methodist social, Blue Boy didn't come for his
morning milk; he always had it in a clean saucer on the covered
back porch, under the long bench where the tin wash-tubs stood
ready for Mrs. Maude. After the children had finished breakfast,
Mrs. Harris sent Mandy out to look for the cat.
The girl came back in a minute, her eyes big.
"Law me, Miz' Harris, he's awful sick. He's a-layin' in the straw
in the barn. He's swallered a bone, or havin' a fit or somethin'."
Grandmother threw an apron over her head and went out to see for
herself. The children went with her. Blue Boy was retching and
choking, and his yellow eyes were filled up with rhume.
"Oh, Gram'ma, what's the matter?" the boys cried.
"It's the distemper. How could he have got it?" Her voice was so
harsh that Ronald began to cry. "Take Ronald back to the house,
Del. He might get bit. I wish I'd kept my word and never had a
cat again!"
"Why, Gram'ma!" Albert looked at her. "Won't Blue Boy get well?"
''Not from the distemper, he won't."
"But Gram'ma, can't I run for the veter'nary?"
"You gether up an armful of hay. We'll take him into the coal-
house, where I can watch him."
Mrs. Harris waited until the spasm was over, then picked up the
limp cat and carried him to the coal-shed that opened off the back
porch. Albert piled the hay in one corner--the coal was low, since
it was summer--and they spread a piece of old carpet on the hay and
made a bed for Blue Boy. "Now you run along with Adelbert.
There'll be a lot of work to do on Mr. Holliday's yard, cleaning up
after the sociable. Mandy an' me'll watch Blue Boy. I expect
he'll sleep for a while."
Albert went away regretfully, but the drayman and some of the
Methodist ladies were in Mr. Holliday's yard, packing chairs and
tables and ice-cream freezers into the wagon, and the twins forgot
the sick cat in their excitement. By noon they had picked up the
last paper napkin, raked over the gravel walks where the salt from
the freezers had left white patches, and hung the hammock in which
Vickie did her studying back in its place. Mr. Holliday paid the
boys a dollar a week for keeping up the yard, and they gave the
money to their mother--it didn't come amiss in a family where
actual cash was so short. She let them keep half the sum Mrs.
Rosen paid for her milk every Saturday, and that was more spending
money than most boys had. They often made a few extra quarters by
cutting grass for other people, or by distributing handbills. Even
the disagreeable Mrs. Jackson next door had remarked over the fence
to Mrs. Harris: "I do believe Bert and Del are going to be
industrious. They must have got it from you, Grandma."
The day came on very hot, and when the twins got back from the
Roadmaster's yard, they both lay down on Grandmother's lounge and
went to sleep. After dinner they had a rare opportunity; the
Roadmaster himself appeared at the front door and invited them to
go up to the next town with him on his railroad velocipede. That
was great fun: the velocipede always whizzed along so fast on the
bright rails, the gasoline engine puffing; and grasshoppers jumped
up out of the sagebrush and hit you in the face like sling-shot
bullets. Sometimes the wheels cut in two a lazy snake who was
sunning himself on the track, and the twins always hoped it was a
rattler and felt they had done a good work.
The boys got back fr
om their trip with Mr. Holliday late in the
afternoon. The house was cool and quiet. Their mother had taken
Ronald and Hughie down town with her, and Vickie was off somewhere.
Grandmother was not in her room, and the kitchen was empty. The
boys went out to the back porch to pump a drink. The coal-shed
door was open, and inside, on a low stool, sat Mrs. Harris beside
her cat. Bert and Del didn't stop to get a drink; they felt
ashamed that they had gone off for a gay ride and forgotten Blue
Boy. They sat down on a big lump of coal beside Mrs. Harris. They
would never have known that this miserable rumpled animal was their
proud tom. Presently he went off into a spasm and began to froth
at the mouth.
"Oh, Gram'ma, can't you do anything?" cried Albert, struggling with
his tears. "Blue Boy was such a good cat,--why has he got to
suffer?"
"Everything that's alive has got to suffer," said Mrs. Harris.
Albert put out his hand and caught her skirt, looking up at her
beseechingly, as if to make her unsay that saying, which he only
half understood. She patted his hand. She had forgot she was
speaking to a little boy.
"Where's Vickie?" Adelbert asked aggrievedly. "Why don't she do
something? He's part her cat."
Mrs. Harris sighed. "Vickie's got her head full of things lately;
that makes people kind of heartless."
The boys resolved they would never put anything into their heads,
then!
Blue Boy's fit passed, and the three sat watching their pet that no
longer knew them. The twins had not seen much suffering;
Grandmother had seen a great deal. Back in Tennessee, in her own
neighbourhood, she was accounted a famous nurse. When any of the
poor mountain people were in great distress, they always sent for
Miz' Harris. Many a time she had gone into a house where five or
six children were all down with scarlet fever or diphtheria, and
done what she could. Many a child and many a woman she had laid
out and got ready for the grave. In her primitive community the
undertaker made the coffin,--he did nothing more. She had seen so
much misery that she wondered herself why it hurt so to see her
tom-cat die. She had taken her leave of him, and she got up from
her stool. She didn't want the boys to be too much distressed.
"Now you boys must wash and put on clean shirts. Your mother will
be home pretty soon. We'll leave Blue Boy; he'll likely be easier
in the morning." She knew the cat would die at sundown.
After supper, when Bert looked into the coal-shed and found the cat
dead, all the family were sad. Ronald cried miserably, and Hughie
cried because Ronald did. Mrs. Templeton herself went out and
looked into the shed, and she was sorry, too. Though she didn't
like cats, she had been fond of this one.
"Hillary," she hold her husband, "when you go down town tonight,
tell the Mexican to come and get that cat early in the morning,
before the children are up."
The Mexican had a cart and two mules, and he hauled away tin cans
and refuse to a gully out in the sage-brush.
Mrs. Harris gave Victoria an indignant glance when she heard this,
and turned back to the kitchen. All evening she was gloomy and
silent. She refused to read aloud, and the twins took Ronald and
went mournfully out to play under the electric light. Later, when
they had said good-night to their parents in the parlour and were
on their way upstairs, Mrs. Harris followed them into the kitchen,
shut the door behind her, and said indignantly:
"Air you two boys going to let that Mexican take Blue Boy and throw
him onto some trash-pile?"
The sleepy boys were frightened at the anger and bitterness in her
tone. They stood still and looked up at her, while she went on:
"You git up early in the morning, and I'll put him in a sack, and
one of you take a spade and go to that crooked old willer tree that