Dear Girls,
I first read this short story during the time when Dad and I were considering bringing me home from my job. It touched me, to say the least, and it somehow solidified in my heart what I had already started to suspect...my place is at home, pouring myself into my home and family.
For me, I think it speaks to the wonderful value of being a woman and the beauty we bring to a home and a family. I still read it from time to time when I need some encouraging.
It's an old story, but I think you'll find it applies to many issues wives and moms still face today. I want to share it with you now, as I know it will touch you too. And hopefully bring some insight as to why we made this decision.
When Queens Ride By
By Agnes Slight Turnbull, 1888
Jennie
Musgrave woke at the shrill rasp of the alarm clock as she always
woke—with the shuddering start and a heavy realization that the brief
respite of the night's oblivion was over. She had only time to glance
through the dull light at the cluttered, dusty room, before John's voice
was saying sleepily as he said every morning, "All right, let's go. It
doesn't seem as if we'd been in bed at all!"
Jennie dressed quickly
in the clothes, none too clean, that, exhausted, she had flung from her
the night before. She hurried down the back stairs, her coarse shoes
clattering thickly upon the bare boards. She kindled the fire in the
range and then made a hasty pretense at washing in the basin in the
sink.
John strode through the kitchen and on out to the barn. There
were six cows to be milked and the great cans of milk to be taken to the
station for the morning train.
Jennie put coffee and bacon on the
stove, and then, catching up a pail from the porch, went after John. A
golden red disk broke the misty blue of the morning above the cow
pasture. A sweet, fragrant breath blew from the orchard. But Jennie
neither saw nor felt the beauty about her.
She glanced at the sun and
thought, It's going to be a hot day. She glanced at the orchard, and
her brows knit. There it hung. All that fruit. Bushels of it going to
waste. Maybe she could get time that day to make some more apple butter.
But the tomatoes wouldn't wait. She must pick them and get them to town
today, or that would be a dead loss. After all her work, well, it would
only be in a piece with everything else if it did happen so. She and
John had bad luck, and they might as well make up their minds to it.
She
finished her part of the milking and hurried back again to the
overcooked bacon and strong coffee. The children were down, clamorous,
dirty, always underfoot. Jim, the eldest, was in his first term of
school. She glanced at his spotted waist. He should have a clean one.
But she couldn't help it. She couldn't get the washing done last week,
and when she was to get a day for it this week she didn't know, with all
the picking and the trips to town to make!
Breakfast was hurried and
unpalatable, a sort of grudging concession to the demands of the body.
Then John left in the milk wagon for the station, and Jennie packed
little Jim's lunch basket with bread and apple butter and pie, left the
two little children to their own devices in the backyard, and started
toward the barn. There was no time to do anything in the house. The
chickens and turkeys had to be attended to, and then she must get to the
tomato patch before the sun got too hot. Behind her was the orchard
with its rows and rows of laden apple tree. Maybe this afternoon—maybe
tomorrow morning. There were the potatoes, too, to be lifted. Too hard
work for a woman. But what were you going to do? Starve? John worked
till dark in the fields.
She pushed her hair back with a quick,
boyish sweep of her arm and went on scattering the grain to the fowls.
She remembered their eager plans when they were married, when they took
over the old farm—laden with its heavy mortgage—that had been John's
father's. John had been so straight of back then and so jolly. Only
seven years, yet now he was stooped a little, and his brows were always
drawn, as though to hide a look of ashamed failure. They had planned to
have a model farm someday: blooded stock, a tractor, a new barn. And
then such a home they were to make of the old stone house! Jennie's
hopes had flared higher even than John's. A rug for the parlor, an
overstuffed set like the one in the mail—order catalogue, linoleum for
the kitchen, electric lights!
They were young and, oh, so strong! There was nothing they could not do if they only worked hard enough.
But
that great faith had dwindled as the first year passed. John worked
later and later in the evenings. Jennie took more and more of the heavy
tasks upon her own shoulders. She often thought with some pride that no
woman in the countryside ever helped her husband as she did. Even with
the haying and riding the reaper. Hard, coarsening work, but she was
glad to do it for John's sake.
The sad riddle of it all was that at
the end of each year they were no further on. The only difference from
the year before was another window shutter hanging from one hinge and
another crippled wagon in the barnyard which John never had time to
mend. They puzzled over it in a vague distress. And meanwhile life
degenerated into a straining, hopeless struggle. Sometimes lately John
had seemed a little listless, as though nothing mattered. A little
bitter when he spoke of Henry Davis.
Henry held the mortgage and had
expected a payment on the principle this year. He had come once and
looked about with something very like a sneer on his face. If he should
decide someday to foreclose—that would be the final blow. They never
would get up after that. If John couldn't hold the old farm, he could
never try to buy a new one. It would mean being renters all their lives.
Poor renters at that!
She went to the tomato field. It had been her
own idea to do some tracking along with the regular farm crops. But,
like everything else, it had failed of her expectations. As she put the
scarlet tomatoes, just a little overripe, into the basket, she glanced
with a hard tightening of her lips toward a break in the trees a half
mile away where a dark, listening bit of road caught the sun. Across its
polished surface twinkled an endless procession of shining,
swift—moving objects. The State Highway.
Jennie hated it. In the
first place, it was so tauntingly near and yet so hopelessly far from
them. If it only ran by their door, as it did past Henry Davis's for
instance, it would solve the whole problem of marketing the fruits and
vegetables. Then they could set the baskets on the lawn, and people
could stop for them. But as it was, nobody all summer long had paid the
least attention to the sign John had put up at the end of the lane. And
no wonder. Why should travelers drive their cars over the stony country
byway, when a little farther along they would find the same fruit spread
temptingly for them at the very roadside?
But there was another
reason she hated that bit of sleek road showing between the trees. She
hated it because it hurt her with its suggestions of all that passed her
by in that endless procession twinkling in the sunshine. There they
kept going, day after day, those happy, carefree women, riding in
handsome limousines or in gay little roadsters. Some in plainer cars,
too, but even those were, like the others, women who could have rest,
pleasure, comfort for the asking. They were whirled along hour by hour
to new pleasures, while she was weighted to the drudgery of the farm
like one of the great rocks in the pasture field.
And—most bitter
thought of all—they had pretty homes to go back to when the happy
journey was over. That seemed to be the strange and cruel law about
homes. The finer they were, the easier it was to leave them. Now with
her—if she had the rug for the parlor and the stuffed furniture and
linoleum for the kitchen, she shouldn't mind anything so much then; she
had nothing, nothing but hard slaving and bad luck. And the highway
taunted her with it. Flung its impossible pleasures mockingly in her
face as she bent over the vines or dragged the heavy baskets along the
rows.
The sun grew hotter. Jennie put more strength into her task.
She knew, at last, by the scorching heat overhead that is was nearing
noon. She must have a bit of lunch ready for John when he came in. There
wasn't time to prepare much. Just reheat the coffee and set down some
bread and pie.
She started towards the house, giving a long yodeling
call for the children as she went. They appeared from the orchard,
tumbled and torn from experiments with the wire fence. Her heart
smothered her at the sight of them. Among the other dreams that the
years had crushed out were those of little rosy boys and girls in clean
suits and fresh ruffled dresses. As it was, the children had just grown
like farm weeds.
This was the part of all the drudgery that hurt
most. That she had not time to care for her children, sew for them,
teach them things that other children knew. Sometimes it seemed as if
she had no real love for them at all. She was too terribly tired as a
rule to have any feeling. The only times she used energy to talk to them
was when she had to reprove them for some dangerous misdeed. That was
all wrong. It seemed wicked; but how could she help it? With the work
draining the very life out of her, strong as she was.
John came in
heavily, and they ate in silence except for the children's chatter. John
hardly looked up form his plate. He gulped down great drafts of the
warmed-over coffee and then pushed his chair back hurriedly.
"I'm goin' to try to finish the harrowin' in the south field," he said.
"I'm at the tomatoes," Jennie answered. "I've got them' most all picked and ready for takin'."
That was all. Work was again upon them.
It
was two o'clock by the sun, and Jennie had loaded the last heavy basket
of tomatoes on the milk wagon in which she must drive to town, when she
heard shrill voices sounding along the path. The children were flying
in excitement toward her.
"Mum! Mum! Mum!" they called as they came panting up to her with big, surprised eyes. "Mum, there's a lady up there. At the kitchen door. All dressed up. A pretty lady. She wants to see you."
Jennie
gazed down at them disbelievingly. A lady, a pretty lady at her kitchen
door? All dressed up! What that could mean! Was it possible someone had
at last braved the stony lane to buy fruit? Maybe bushels of it!
"Did she come in a car?" Jennie asked quickly.
"No, she just walked in. She's awful pretty. She smiled at us."
Jennie's
hopes dropped. Of course. She might have known. Some agent likely,
selling books. She followed the children wearily back along the path and
in at the rear door of the kitchen. Across from it another door opened
into the side yard. Here stood the stranger.
The two women looked at
each other across the kitchen, across the table with the remains of two
meals upon it, the strewn chairs, the littered stove—across the whole
scene of unlovely disorder. They looked at each other in startled
surprise, as inhabitants of Earth and Mars might look if they were
suddenly brought face-to-face.
Jennie saw a woman in a gray tweed
coat that seemed to be part of her straight, slim body. A small gray hat
with a rose quill was drawn low over the brownish hair. Her blue eyes
were clear and smiling. She was beautiful! And yet she was not young.
She was in her forties, surely. But an aura of eager youth clung to her,
a clean and exquisite freshness.
The stranger in her turn looked
across at a young woman, haggard and weary. Her yellowish hair hung in
straggling wisps. Her eyes looked hard and hunted. Her cheeks were thin
and sallow. Her calico dress was shapeless and begrimed from her work.
So they looked at each other for one long, appraising second. Then the woman in gray smiled.
"How
do you do? " she began. "We ran our car into the shade of your lane to
have our lunch and rest for a while. And I walked on up to buy a few
apples, if you have them."
Jennie stood staring at the stranger.
There was an unconscious hostility in her eyes. This was one of the
women from the highway. One of those envied ones who passed twinkling
through the summer sunshine from pleasure to pleasure while Jennie
slaved on.
But the pretty lady's smile was disarming. Jennie started toward a chair and pulled off the old coat and apron that lay on it.
"Won't
you sit down?" she said politely. "I'll go and get the apples. I'll
have to pick them off the tree. Would you prefer rambos?"
"I don't
know what they are, but they sound delicious. You must choose them for
me. But mayn't I come with you? I should love to help pick them."
Jennie
considered. She felt baffled by the friendliness of the other woman's
face and utterly unable to meet it. But she did not know how to refuse.
"Why I s'pose so. If you can get through the dirt."
She
led the way over the back porch with its crowded baskets and pails and
coal buckets, along the unkept path toward the orchard. She had never
been so acutely conscious of the disorder about her. Now a hot shame
brought a lump to her throat. In her preoccupied haste before, she had
actually not noticed that tub of overturned milk cans and rubbish heap!
She saw it all now swiftly through the other woman's eyes. And then that
new perspective was checked by a bitter defiance. Why should she care
how things looked to this woman? She would be gone, speeding down the
highway in a few minutes as though she had never been there.
She reached the orchard and began to drag a long ladder from the fence to the rambo tree.
The
other woman cried out in distress. "Oh, but you can't do that! You
mustn't. It's too heavy for you, or even for both of us. Please just let
me pick a few from the ground."
Jennie looked in amazement at the stranger's concern. It was so long since she had seen anything like it.
"Heavy?"
she repeated. "This ladder? I wish I didn't ever lift anything heavier
than this. After hoistin' bushel baskets of tomatoes onto a wagon, this
feels light to me."
The stranger caught her arm. "But—but do you think it's right? Why, that's a man's work."
Jennie's
eyes blazed. Something furious and long-pent broke out from within her.
"Right! Who are you to be askin' me whether I'm right or not?" What
would have become of us if I didn't do a man's work? It takes us both,
slaving away, an' then we get nowhere. A person like you don't know what
work is! You don't know—"
Jennie's voice was the high shrill of
hysteria; but the stranger's low tones somehow broke through. "Listen,"
she said soothingly. "Please listen to me. I'm sorry I annoyed you by
saying that, but now, since we are talking, why can't we sit down here
and rest a minute? It's so cool and lovely here under the trees, and if
you were to tell me all about it—because I'm only a stranger—perhaps it
would help. It does sometimes, you know. A little rest would—"
"Rest! Me sit down to rest, an' the wagon loaded to go to town? It'll hurry me now to get back before dark."
And
then something strange happened. The other women put her cool, soft
hand on Jennie's grimy arm. There was a compelling tenderness in her
eyes. "Just take the time you would have spent picking apples. I would
so much rather. And perhaps somehow I could help you. I wish I could.
Won't you tell me why you have to work so hard?"
Jennie sank down on
the smooth green grass. Her hunted, unwilling eyes had yielded to some
power in the clear, serene eyes of the stranger. A sort of exhaustion
came over her. A trembling reaction from the straining effort of weeks.
"There
ain't much to tell," she said half sullenly, "only that we ain't
gettin' ahead. We're clean discouraged, both of us. Henry Davis is
talking about foreclosin' on us if we don't pay some principle. The time
of the mortgage is out this year, an' mebbe he won't renew it. He's got
plenty himself, but them's the hardest kind." She paused; then her eyes
flared. "An' it ain't that I haven't done my part. Look at me. I'm
barely thirty, an' I might be fifty. I'm so weather-beaten. That's the
way I've worked!"
"And you think that has helped your husband?"
"Helped him?" Jennie's voice was sharp. "Why shouldn't it help him?"
The
stranger was looking away through the green stretches of orchard. She
laced her slim hands together about her knees. She spoke slowly. "Men
are such queer things, husbands especially. Sometimes we blunder when we
are trying hardest to serve them. For instance, they want us to be
economical, and yet they want us in pretty clothes. They need our work,
and yet they want us to keep our youth and our beauty. And sometimes
they don't know themselves which they really want most. So we have to
choose. That's what makes it so hard".
She paused. Jennie was watching her with dull curiosity as though she were speaking a foreign tongue. Then the stranger went on:
I
had to choose once, long ago; just after we were married, my husband
decided to have his own business, so he started a very tiny one. He
couldn't afford a helper, and he wanted me to stay in the office while
he did the outside selling. And I refused, even though it hurt him. Oh,
it was hard! But I knew how it would be if I did as he wished. We would
both have come back each night. Tired out, to a dark, cheerless house
and a picked-up dinner. And a year if that might have taken something
away from us—something precious. I couldn't risk it, so I refused and
stuck to it.
"And then how I worked in my house—a flat it was then. I
had so little outside of our wedding gifts; but at least I could make
it a clean, shining, happy place. I tried to give our little dinners the
grace of a feast. And as the months went on, I knew I had done right.
My husband would come home dead-tired and discouraged, ready to give up
the whole thing. But after he had eaten and sat down in our bright
little living room, and I had read to him or told him all the funny
things I could invent about my day, I could see him change. By bedtime
he had his courage back, and by morning he was at last ready to go out
and fight again. And at last he won, and he won his success alone, as a
man loves to do."
Still Jennie did not speak. She only regarded her guest with a half-resentful understanding. The woman in gray looked off again between the trees. Her voice was very sweet. A humorous little smile played about her lips.
"There
was a queen once," she went on, "who reigned in troublous days. And
every time the country was on the brink of war and the people ready to
fly into a panic, she would put on her showiest dress and take her court
with her and go hunting. And when the people would see her riding by,
apparently so gay and happy, they were sure all was well with the
Government. So she tided over many a danger. And I've tried to be like
her.
"Whenever a big crisis comes in my husband's business—and we've
had several—or when he's discouraged, I put on my prettiest dress and
get the best dinner I know how or give a party! And somehow it seems to
work. That's the woman's part, you know. To play the queen—"
A faint
honk-honk came from the lane. The stranger started to her feet. "That's
my husband. I must go. Please don't bother about the apples. I'll just
take these from under the tree. We only wanted two or three, really. And
give these to the children." She slipped two coins into Jennie's hand.
Jennie
had risen, too, and was trying from a confusion of startled thoughts to
select one for speech. Instead she only answered the other woman's
bright good-bye with a stammering repetition and a broken apology about
the apples.
She watched the stranger's erect, lithe figure hurrying
away across the path that led directly to the lane. Then she turned her
back to the house, wondering dazedly if she had only dreamed that the
other woman had been there. But no, there were emotions rising hotly
within her that were new. They had had no place an hour before. They had
risen at the words of the stranger and at the sight of her smooth, soft
hair, the fresh color in her cheeks, the happy shine of her eyes.
A
great wave of longing swept over Jennie, a desire that was lost in
choking despair. It was as thought she had heard a strain of music for
which she had waited all her life and then felt it swept away into
silence before she had grasped its beauty. For a few brief minutes she,
Jennie Musgrave, had sat beside one of the women of the highway and
caught a breath of her life—that life which forever twinkled in the past
in bright procession, like the happenings of a fairy tale. Then she was
gone, and Jennie was left as she had been, bound to the soil like one
of the rocks of the field.
The bitterness that stormed her heart now
was different from the old dull disheartenment. For it was coupled with
new knowledge. The words of the stranger seemed more vivid to her than
when she had sat listening in the orchard. But they came back to her
with the pain of agony.
"All very well for her to talk so smooth to
me about man's work and woman's work! An' what she did for her husband's
big success. Easy enough for her to sit talking about queens! What
would she do if she was here on this farm like me? What would a woman
like her do?"
Jennie had reached the kitchen door and stood there
looking at the hopeless melee about her. Her words sounded strange and
hollow in the silence of the house. "Easy for her!" she burst out. She
never had the work pilin' up over her like I have. She never felt it at
her throat like a wolf, the same as John an' me does. Talk about
choosin'! I haven't got no choice. I just got to keep goin'—just keep
goin', like I always have—"
She stopped suddenly. There in the middle
of the kitchen floor, where the other woman had passed over, lay a tiny
square of white. Jennie crossed to it quickly and picked it up. A faint
delicious fragrance like the dream of a flower came from it. Jennie
inhaled it eagerly. It was not like any odor she had ever known. It made
her think of sweet, strange things. Things she had never thought about
before. Of gardens in the early summer dusk, of wide fair rooms with the
moonlight shining in them. It made her somehow think with vague
wistfulness of all that.
She looked carefully at the tiny square. The
handkerchief was of fine, fairylike smoothness. In the corner a dainty
blue butterfly spread his wings. Jennie drew in another long breath. The
fragrance filled her senses again. Her first greedy draft had not
exhausted it. It would stay for a while, at least.
She laid the bit
of white down cautiously on the edge of the table and went to the sink,
where she washed her hands carefully. The she returned and picked up the
handkerchief again with something like reverence. She sat down, still
holding it, staring at it. This bit of linen was to her an articulated
voice. She understood its language. It spoke to her of white, freshly
washed clothes blowing in the sunshine, of an iron moving smoothly,
leisurely, to the accompaniment of a song over snowy folds; it spoke to
her of quiet, orderly rooms and ticking clocks and a mending basket
under the evening lamp; it spoke to her of all the peaceful routine of a
well managed household, the kind she had once dreamed of having.
But
more than this, the exquisite daintiness of it, the sweet, alluring
perfume spoke to her of something else which her heart understood, even
though her speech could have found no words for it. She could feel
gropingly the delicacy, the grace, the beauty that made up the other
woman's life in all its relations.
She, Jennie, had none of that.
Everything about their lives, hers and John's, was coarsened, soiled
somehow by the dragging, endless labor of the days.
Jennie leaned
forward, her arms stretched tautly before her upon her knees, her hands
clasped tightly over the fragrant bit of white. Suppose she were to try
doing as the stranger had said. Suppose that she spent her time on the
house and let the outside work go. What then? What would John say? Would
they be much farther behind than they were now? Could they be? And
suppose, by some strange chance, the other woman had been right! That a
man could be helped more by doing of these other things she had
neglected?
She sat very still, distressed, uncertain. Out in the
barnyard waited the wagon of tomatoes, overripe now for market. No, she
could do nothing today, at least, but go on as usual.
Then her hands
opened a little; the perfume within them came up to her, bringing again
that thrill of sweet, indescribable things.
She started up, half-terrified at her own resolve. "I'm goin' to try it now. Mebbe I'm crazy, but I'm goin' to do it anyhow!"
It
was a long time since Jennie had performed such a meticulous toilet. It
was years since she had brushed her hair. A hasty combing had been its
best treatment. She put on her one clean dress, the dark voile reserved
for trips to town. She even changed from her shapeless, heavy shoes to
her best ones. Then, as she looked at herself in the dusty mirror, she
saw that she was changed. Something, at least, of the hard haggardness
was gone from her face, and her hair framed it with smooth softness.
Tomorrow she would wash it. It used to be almost yellow.
She went to
the kitchen. With something of the burning zeal of a fanatic, she
attacked the confusion before her. By half past four the room was clean:
the floor swept, the stove shining, dishes and pans washed and put in
their places. From the tumbled depths of a drawer Jennie had extracted a
white tablecloth that had been bought in the early days, for company
only. With a spirit of daring recklessness she spread it on the table.
She polished the chimney of the big oil lamp and then set the fixture,
clean and shining, in the center of the white cloth.
Now the supper!
And she must hurry. She planned to have it at six o' clock and ring the
big bell for John fifteen minutes before, as she used to just after they
were married.
She decided upon fried ham and browned potatoes and
applesauce with hot biscuits. She hadn't made them for so long, but her
fingers fell into their old deftness. Why, cooking was just play if you
had time to do it right! Then she thought of the tomatoes and gave a
little shudder. She thought of the long hours of backbreaking work she
had put into them and called herself a little fool to have been swayed
by the words of a strange and the scent of a handkerchief, to neglect
her rightful work and bring more loss upon John and herself. But she
went on, making the biscuits, turning the ham, setting the table.
It
was half past five; the first pan of flaky brown mounds had been
withdrawn from the oven, the children's faces and hands had been washed
and their excited questions satisfied, when the sound of a car came from
the bend. Jennie knew that car. It belonged to Henry Davis. He could be
coming for only one thing.
The blow they had dreaded, fending off by
blind disbelief in the ultimate disaster, was about to fall. Henry was
coming to tell them he was going to foreclose. It would almost kill
John. This was his father's old farm. John had taken it over, mortgage
and all, so hopefully, so sure he could succeed where his father had
failed. If he had to leave now there would be a double disgrace to bear.
And where could they go? Farms weren't so plentiful.
Henry had
driven up to the side gate. He fumbled with some papers in his inner
pocket as he started up the walk. A wild terror filled Jennie's heart.
She wanted desperately to avoid meeting Henry Davis's keen, hard face,
to flee somewhere, anywhere before she heard the words hat doomed them.
Then
as she stood shaken, wondering how she could live through what the next
hours would bring, she saw in a flash the beautiful stranger as she had
sat in the orchard, looking off between the trees and smiling to
herself. "There was once a queen."
Jennie heard the words again
distinctly just as Henry Davis's steps sounded sharply nearer on the
walk outside. There was only a confused picture of a queen wearing the
stranger's lovely, highbred face, riding gaily to the hunt through
forests and towns while her kingdom was tottering. Riding gallantly on,
in spite of her fears.
Jennie's heart was pounding and her hands were
suddenly cold. But something unreal and yet irresistible was sweeping
her with it. "There was once a queen."
She opened the screen door
before Henry Davis had time to knock. She extended her hand cordially.
She was smiling. "Well, how d' you do, Mr. Davis. Come right in. I'm
real glad to see you. Been quite a while since you was over."
Henry
looked surprised and very much embarrassed. "Why, no, now, I won't go
in. I just stopped to see John on a little matter of business. I'll
just—"
"You'll just come right in. John will be in from milkin' in a
few minutes an' you can talk while you eat, both of you. I've supper
just ready. Now step right in, Mr. Davis!"
As Jennie moved aside, a
warm, fragrant breath of fried ham and biscuits seemed to waft itself to
Henry Davis's nostrils. There was a visible softening of his features.
"Why, no, I didn't reckon on anything like this. I 'lowed I'd just speak
to John and then be gettin' on."
"They'll see you at home when you
get there," Jennie put in quickly. "You never tasted my hot biscuits
with butter an' quince honey, or you wouldn't take so much coachin'!"
Henry
Davis came in and sat in the big, clean, warm kitchen. His eyes took in
every detail of the orderly room: the clean cloth, the shining lamp,
the neat sink, the glowing stove. Jennie saw him relax comfortably in
his chair. Then above the aromas of the food about her, she detected the
strange sweetness of the bit of white linen she had tucked away in the
bosom of her dress. It rose to her as a haunting sense of her power as a
woman.
She smiled at Henry Davis. Smiled as she would never have
thought of doing a day ago. Then she would have spoken to him with a
drawn face full of subservient fear. Now, though the fear clutched her
heart, her lips smiled sweetly, moved by that unreality that seemed to
possess her. "There was once a queen."
"An' how are things goin' with you, Mr. Davis?" she asked with a blithe upward reflection.
Henry
Davis was very human. He had never noticed before that Jennie's hair
was so thick and pretty and that she had such pleasant ways. Neither had
he dreamed that she was such a good cook as the sight and smell of the
supper things would indicate. He was very comfortable there in the big
sweet-smelling kitchen.
He smiled back. It was an interesting experiment on Henry's part, for his smiles were rare. "Oh, so-so. How are they with you?"
Jennie
had been taught to speak the truth; but at this moment there dawned in
her mind a vague understanding that the high loyalties of life are,
after all, relative and not absolute.
She smiled again as she
skillfully flipped a great slice of golden brown ham over in the frying
pan. "Why, just fine, Mr. Davis. We're gettin' on just fine, John an'
me. It's been hard sleddin' but I sort of think the worst is over. I
think we're goin' to come out way ahead now. We'll just be proud to pay
off that mortgage so fast, come another year, that you'll be surprised!"
It
was said. Jennie marveled that the words had not choked her, had not
somehow smitten her dead as she spoke them. But their effect on Henry
Davis was amazingly good.
"That so?" he asked in surprise. "Well now,
that's fine. I always wanted to see John make a success of the old
place, but somehow—well, you know it didn't look as if—that is, there's
been some talk around that maybe John wasn't just gettin' along any
too—you know. A man has to sort of watch his investments. Well, now, I'm
glad things are pickin' up a little."
Jennie felt as though a tight
hand at her throat had relaxed. She spoke brightly of the fall weather
and the crops as she finished setting the dishes on the table and rang
the big bell for John. There was delicate work yet to be done when he
came in.
Little Jim had to be sent to hasten him before he finally
appeared. He was a big man, John Musgrave, big and slow moving and
serious. He had known nothing all his life but hard physical toil.
Heaviness had pitted his great body against all the adverse forces of
nature. There was a time when he had felt that strength such as his was
all any man needed to bring him fortune. Now he was not so sure. The
brightness of that faith was dimmed by experience.
John came to the
kitchen door with his eyebrows drawn. Little Jim had told Jim that Henry
Davis was there. He came into the room as an accused man faces the jury
of his peers, faces the men who, though the same flesh and blood as he,
are yet somehow curiously in a position to save or to destroy him.
John
came in, and then he stopped, staring blankly at the scene before him.
At Jennie moving about the bright table, chatting happily with Henry
Davis! At Henry himself, his sharp features softened by an air of great
satisfaction. At the sixth plate on the white cloth. Henry staying for
supper!
But the silent deeps of John's nature served him well. He
made no comment. Merely shook hands with Henry Davis and then washed his
face at the sink.
Jennie arranged the savory dishes, and they sat
down to supper. It was an entirely new experience to John to sit at the
head of his own table and serve a generously heaped plate to Henry
Davis. It sent through him a sharp thrill of sufficiency, of equality.
He realized that before he had been cringing in his soul at the very
sight of this man.
Henry consumed eight biscuits richly covered with
quince honey, along with the heavier part of his dinner. Jennie counted
them. She recalled hearing that the Davises did not set a very bountiful
table; it was common talk that Mrs. Davis was even more "miserly" than
her husband. But, however that was, Henry now seemed to grow more and
more genial and expansive as he ate. So did John. By the time the pie
was set before them, they were laughing over a joke Henry had heard at
Grange meeting.
Jennie was bright, watchful, careful. If the talk
lagged, she made a quick remark. She moved softly between table and
stove, refilling the dishes. She saw to it that a hot biscuit was at
Henry Davis's elbow just when he was ready for it. All the while there
was rising within her a strong zest for life that she would have deemed
impossible only that morning. This meal, at least, was a perfect
success, and achievements of any sort whatever had been few.
Henry
Davis left soon after supper. He brought the conversation around
awkwardly to his errand as they rose from the table. Jennie was ready.
"I
told him, John, that the worst was over now, an' we're getting' on
fine!" She laughed." I told him we'd be swampin' him pretty soon with
our payments. Ain't that right John?"
John's mind was not analytical.
At that moment he was comfortable. He has been host at a delicious
supper with his ancient adversary, whose sharp face marvelously
softened. Jennie's eyes were shining with a new and amazing confidence.
It was a natural moment for unreasoning optimism.
"Why that's right,
Mr. Davis. I believe we can start clearin' this off now pretty soon. If
you could just see your way clear to renew the note mebbe. . . ."
It was done. The papers were back in Davis's pocket. They had bid him a cordial good-bye from the door.
"Next time you come, I will have biscuits for you Mr. Davis." Jennie had called daringly after him.
"Now you don't forget that Mrs. Musgrave! They certainly ain't hard to eat."
He
was gone. Jennie cleared the table and set the shining lamp in the
center of the oilcloth covering. She began to wash the dishes. John was
fumbling through the papers on a hanging shelf. He finally sat down with
and old tablet and pencil. He spoke meditatively. "I believe I'll do a
little figurin' since I've got time tonight. It just struck me that
mebbe if I used my head a little more I'd get on faster."
"Well now,
you might," said Jennie. It would not be John's way to comment just yet
on their sudden deliverance. She polished two big Rambo apples and
placed them on a saucer beside him.
He looked pleased. "Now that's
what I like." He grinned. Then making a clumsy clutch at her arm, he
added, "Say, you look sort of pretty tonight."
Jennie made a brisk
coquettish business of freeing herself. "Go along with you!" she
returned, smiling and started in again upon the dishes. But a hot wave
of color had swept up in her shallow cheeks.
John had looked more
grateful over her setting those two apples beside him now, than he had
the day last fall when she lifted all the potatoes herself! Men were
strange, as the woman in gray had said. Maybe even John had been needing
something else more than he needed the hard, backbreaking work she had
been doing.
She tidied up the kitchen and put the children to bed. It
seemed strange to be through now, ready to sit down. All summer they
had worked outdoors till bedtime. Last night she had been slaving over
apple butter until she stopped, exhausted, and John had been working in
the barn with the lantern. Tonight seemed so peaceful, so quiet. John
still sat at the table, figuring while he munched his apples. His brows
were not drawn now. There was a new, purposeful light upon his face.
Jennie
walked to the doorway and stood looking off through the darkness and
through the break in the trees at the end of the lane. Bright and golden
lights kept glittering across it, breaking dimly through the woods,
flashing out strongly for a moment, then disappearing behind the hill.
Those were the lights of the happy cars that never stopped in their
swift search for far and magic places. Those were the lights of the
highway which she had hated. But she did not hate it now. For today it
had come to her at last and left with her some of its mysterious
pleasure.
Jennie wished, as she stood there, that she could somehow
tell the beautiful stranger in the gray coat that her words had been
true, that she, Jennie, insofar as she was able, was to be like her and
fulfill her woman's part.
For while she was not figuring as John was
doing, yet her mind had been planning, sketching in details,
strengthening itself against the chains of old habits, resolving on new
ones; seeing with sudden clearness where they had been blundered, where
they had made mistakes that farsighted, orderly management could have
avoided. But how could John have sat down to figure in comfort before,
in the kind of kitchen she had been keeping?
Jennie bit her lip. Even
if some of the tomatoes spoiled, if all of them spoiled, there would be
a snowy washing on her line tomorrow; there would be ironing the next
day in her clean kitchen. She could sing as she worked. She used to when
she was a girl. Even if the apples rotted on the trees, there were
certain things she knew now that she must do, regardless of what John
might say. It would pay better in the end, for she had read the real
needs of his soul from his eyes that evening. Yes, wives had to choose
for their husbands sometimes.
A thin haunting breath of sweetness
rose from the bosom of her dress where the scrap of white linen lay.
Jennie smiled into the dark. And tomorrow she would take time to wash
her hair. It used to be yellow—and she wished she could see the stranger
once more, just long enough to tell her she understood.
As matter of
fact, at that very moment, many miles along the sleek highway, a woman
in a gray coat, with a soft gray hat and a rose quill, leaned suddenly
close to her husband as he shot the high-powered car through the night.
Suddenly he glanced down at her and slackened the speed.
"Tired?" he asked. "You haven't spoken for miles. Shall we stop at this next town?"
The
woman shook her head. "I'm all right, and I love to drive at night.
It's only—you know—that poor woman at the farm. I can't get over her
wretched face and house and everything. It—it was hopeless!"
The man
smiled down at her tenderly. "Well, I'm sorry, too, if it was all as bad
as your description; but you mustn't worry. Good gracious, darling,
you're not weeping over it, I hope!"
"No, truly, just a few little tears.
I know it's silly, but I did so want to help her, and I know now that
what I said must have sounded perfectly insane. She wouldn't know what I
was talking about. She just looked up with that blank, tired face. And
it all seemed so impossible. No, I'm not going to cry. Of course I'm
not—but—lend me your handkerchief, will you dear? I've lost mine
somehow!"
***
Love,
