________________________________________________
_ They said good-bye at the gate. Billy betrayed awkwardness that
was sweet to Saxon. He was not one of the take-it-for-granted
young men. There was a pause, while she feigned desire to go into
the house, yet waited in secret eagerness for the words she
wanted him to say.
"When am I goin' to see you again?" he asked, holding her hand in
his.
She laughed consentingly.
"I live 'way up in East Oakland," he explained. "You know there's
where the stable is, an' most of our teaming is done in that
section, so I don't knock around down this way much. But, say--"
His hand tightened on hers. "We just gotta dance together some
more. I'll tell you, the Orindore Club has its dance Wednesday.
If you haven't a date--have you?"
"No," she said.
"Then Wednesday. What time'll I come for you?"
And when they had arranged the details, and he had agreed that
she should dance some of the dances with the other fellows, and
said good night again, his hand closed more tightly on hers and
drew her toward him. She resisted slightly, but honestly. It was
the custom, but she felt she ought not for fear he might
misunderstand. And yet she wanted to kiss him as she had never
wanted to kiss a man. When it came, her face upturned to his, she
realized that on his part it was an honest kiss. There hinted
nothing behind it. Rugged and kind as himself, it was virginal
almost, and betrayed no long practice in the art of saying
good-bye. All men were not brutes after all, was her thought.
"Good night," she murmured; the gate screeched under her hand;
and she hurried along the narrow walk that led around to the
corner of the house.
"Wednesday," he celled softly.
"Wednesday," she answered.
But in the shadow of the narrow alley between the two houses she
stood still and pleasured in the ring of his foot falls down the
cement sidewalk. Not until they had quite died away did she go
on. She crept up the back stairs and across the kitchen to her
room, registering her thanksgiving that Sarah was asleep.
She lighted the gas, and, as she removed the little velvet hat,
she felt her lips still tingling with the kiss. Yet it had meant
nothing. It was the way of the young men. They all did it. But
their good-night kisses had never tingled, while this one tingled
in her brain as wall as on her lip. What was it? What did it
mean? With a sudden impulse she looked at herself in the glass.
The eyes were happy and bright. The color that tinted her cheeks
so easily was in them and glowing. It was a pretty reflection,
and she smiled, partly in joy, partly in appreciation, and the
smile grew at sight of the even rows of strong white teeth. Why
shouldn't Billy like that face? was her unvoiced query. Other men
had liked it. Other men did like it. Even the other girls
admitted she was a good-looker. Charley Long certainly liked it
from the way he made life miserable for her.
She glanced aside to the rim of the looking-glass where his
photograph was wedged, shuddered, and made a moue of distaste.
There was cruelty in those eyes, and brutishness. He was a brute.
For a year, now, he had bullied her. Other fellows were afraid to
go with her. He warned them off. She had been forced into almost
slavery to his attentions. She remembered the young bookkeeper at
the laundry--not a workingman, but a soft-handed, soft-voiced
gentleman--whom Charley had beaten up at the corner because he
had been bold enough to come to take her to the theater. And she
had been helpless. For his own sake she had never dared accept
another invitation to go out with him.
And now, Wednesday night, she was going with Billy. Billy! Her
heart leaped. There would be trouble, but Billy would save her
from him. She'd like to see him try and beat Billy up.
With a quick movement, she jerked the photograph from its niche
and threw it face down upon the chest of drawers. It fell beside
a small square case of dark and tarnished leather. With a feeling
as of profanation she again seized the offending photograph and
flung it across the room into a corner. At the same time she
picked up the leather case. Springing it open, she gazed at the
daguerreotype of a worn little woman with steady gray eyes and a
hopeful, pathetic mouth. Opposite, on the velvet lining, done in
gold lettering, was, CARLTON FROM DAISY. She read it reverently,
for it represented the father she had never known, and the mother
she had so little known, though she could never forget that those
wise sad eyes were gray.
Despite lack of conventional religion, Saxon's nature was deeply
religious. Her thoughts of God were vague and nebulous, and there
she was frankly puzzled. She could not vision God. Here, in the
daguerreotype, was the concrete; much she had grasped from it,
and always there seemed an infinite more to grasp. She did not go
to church. This was her high altar and holy of holies. She came
to it in trouble, in loneliness, for counsel, divination, end
comfort. In so far as she found herself different from the girls
of her acquaintance, she quested here to try to identify her
characteristics in the pictured face. Her mother had been
different from other women, too. This, forsooth, meant to her
what God meant to others. To this she strove to be true, and not
to hurt nor vex. And how little she really knew of her mother,
and of how much was conjecture and surmise, she was unaware; for
it was through many years she had erected this mother-myth.
Yet was it all myth? She resented the doubt with quick jealousy,
and, opening the bottom drawer of the chest, drew forth a
battered portfolio. Out rolled manuscripts, faded and worn, and
arose a faint far scent of sweet-kept age. The writing was
delicate and curled, with the quaint fineness of half a century
before. She read a stanza to herself:
"Sweet as a wind-lute's airy strains
Your gentle muse has learned to sing,
And California's boundless plains
Prolong the soft notes echoing."
She wondered, for the thousandth time, what a windlute was; yet
much of beauty, much of beyondness, she sensed of this dimly
remembered beautiful mother of hers. She communed a while, then
unrolled a second manuscript. "To C. B.," it read. To Carlton
Brown, she knew, to her father, a love-poem from her mother.
Saxon pondered the opening lines:
"I have stolen away from the crowd in the groves,
Where the nude statues stand, and the leaves point and shiver
At ivy-crowned Bacchus, the Queen of the Loves,
Pandora and Psyche, struck voiceless forever."
This, too, was beyond her. But she breathed the beauty of it.
Bacchus, and Pandora and Psyche--talismans to conjure with! But
alas! the necromancy was her mother's. Strange, meaningless words
that meant so much! Her marvelous mother had known their meaning.
Saxon spelled the three words aloud, letter by letter, for she
did not dare their pronunciation; and in her consciousness
glimmered august connotations, profound and unthinkable. Her mind
stumbled and halted on the star-bright and dazzling boundaries of
a world beyond her world in which her mother had roamed at will.
Again and again, solemnly, she went over the four lines. They
were radiance and light to the world, haunted with phantoms of
pain and unrest, in which she had her being. There, hidden among
those cryptic singing lines, was the clue. If she could only
grasp it, all would be made clear. Of this she was sublimely
confident. She would understand Sarah's sharp tongue, her unhappy
brother, the cruelty of Charley Long, the justness of the
bookkeeper's beating, the day-long, month-long, year-long toil at
the ironing-board.
She skipped a stanza that she knew was hopelessly beyond her, and
tried again:
"The dusk of the greenhouse is luminous yet
With quivers of opal and tremors of gold;
For the sun is at rest, and the light from the west,
Like delicate wine that is mellow and old,
"Flushes faintly the brow of a naiad that stands
In the spray of a fountain, whose seed-amethysts
Tremble lightly a moment on bosom and hands,
Then dip in their basin from bosom and wrists."
"It's beautiful, just beautiful," she sighed. And then, appalled
at the length of all the poem, at the volume of the mystery, she
rolled the manuscript and put it away. Again she dipped in the
drawer, seeking the clue among the cherished fragments of her
mother's hidden soul.
This time it was a small package, wrapped in tissue paper and
tied with ribbon. She opened it carefully, with the deep gravity
and circumstance of a priest before an altar. Appeared a little
red-satin Spanish girdle, whale-boned like a tiny corset,
pointed, the pioneer finery of a frontier woman who had crossed
the plains. It was hand-made after the California-Spanish model
of forgotten days. The very whalebone had been home-shaped of the
raw material from the whaleships traded for in hides and tallow.
The black lace trimming her mother had made. The triple edging of
black velvet strips--her mother's hands had sewn the stitches.
Saxon dreamed over it in a maze of incoherent thought. This was
concrete. This she understood. This she worshiped as man-created
gods have been worshiped on less tangible evidence of their
sojourn on earth.
Twenty-two inches it measured around. She knew it out of many
verifications. She stood up and put it about her waist. This was
part of the ritual. It almost met. In places it did meet. Without
her dress it would meet everywhere as it had met on her mother.
Closest of all, this survival of old California-Ventura days
brought Saxon in touch. Hers was her mother's form. Physically,
she was like her mother. Her grit, her ability to turn off work
that was such an amazement to others, were her mother's. Just so
had her mother been an amazement to her generation--her mother,
the toy-like creature, the smallest and tha youngest of the
strapping pioneer brood, who nevertheless had mothered the brood.
Always it had been her wisdom that was sought, even by the
brothers and sisters a dozen years her senior. Daisy, it was, who
had put her tiny foot down and commanded the removal from the
fever flatlands of Colusa to the healthy mountains of Ventura;
who had backed the savage old Indian-fighter of a father into a
corner and fought the entire family that Vila might marry the man
of her choice; who had flown in the face of the family and of
community morality and demanded the divorce of Laura from her
criminally weak husband; and who on the other hand, had held the
branches of the family together when only misunderstanding and
weak humanness threatened to drive them apart.
The peacemaker and the warrior! All the old tales trooped before
Saxon's eyes. They were sharp with detail, for she had visioned
them many times, though their content was of things she had never
seen. So far as details were concerned, they were her own
creation, for she had never seen an ox, a wild Indian, nor a
prairie schooner. Yet, palpitating and real, shimmering in the
sun-flashed dust of ten thousand hoofs, she saw pass, from East
to West, across a continent, the great hegira of the land-hungry
Anglo-Saxon. It was part and fiber of her. She had been nursed on
its traditions and its facts from the lips of those who had taken
part. Clearly she saw the long wagon-train, the lean, gaunt men
who walked before, the youths goading the lowing oxen that fell
and were goaded to their feet to fall again. And through it all,
a flying shuttle, weaving the golden dazzling thread of
personality, moved the form of her little, indomitable mother,
eight years old, and nine ere the great traverse was ended, a
necromancer and a law-giver, willing her way, and the way and the
willing always good and right.
Saxon saw Punch, the little, rough-coated Skye-terrier with the
honest eyes (who had plodded for weary months), gone lame and
abandoned; she saw Daisy, the chit of a child, hide Punch in the
wagon. She saw the savage old worried father discover the added
burden of the several pounds to the dying oxen. She saw his
wrath, as he held Punch by the scruff of the neck. And she saw
Daisy, between the muzzle of the long-barreled rifle and the
little dog. And she saw Daisy thereafter, through days of alkali
and heat, walking, stumbling, in the dust of the wagons, the
little sick dog, like a baby, in her arms.
But most vivid of all, Saxon saw the fight at Little Meadow--and
Daisy, dressed as for a gala day, in white, a ribbon sash about
her waist, ribbons and a round-comb in her hair, in her hands
small water-pails, step forth into the sunshine on the
flower-grown open ground from the wagon circle, wheels
interlocked, where the wounded screamed their delirium and
babbled of flowing fountains, and go on, through the sunshine and
the wonder-inhibition of the bullet-dealing Indians, a hundred
yards to the waterhole and back again.
Saxon kissed the little, red satin Spanish girdle passionately,
and wrapped it up in haste, with dewy eyes, abandoning the
mystery and godhead of mother and all the strange enigma of
living.
In bed, she projected against her closed eyelids the few rich
scenes of her mother that her child-memory retained. It was her
favorite way of wooing sleep. She had done it all her life--sunk
into the death-blackness of sleep with her mother limned to the
last on her fading consciousness. But this mother was not the
Daisy of the plains nor of the daguerreotype. They had been
before Saxon's time. This that she saw nightly was an older
mother, broken with insomnia and brave with sorrow, who crept,
always crept, a pale, frail creature, gentle and unfaltering,
dying from lack of sleep, living by will, and by will refraining
from going mad, who, nevertheless, could not will sleep, and whom
not even the whole tribe of doctors could make sleep.
Crept--always she crept, about the house, from weary bed to weary
chair and back again through long days and weeks of torment,
never complaining, though her unfailing smile was twisted with
pain, and the wise gray eyes, still wise and gray, were grown
unutterably larger and profoundly deep.
But on this night Saxon did not win to sleep quickly; the little
creeping mother came and went; and in the intervals the face of
Billy, with the cloud-drifted, sullen, handsome eyes, burned
against her eyelids. And once again, as sleep welled up to
smother her, she put to herself the question IS THIS THE MAN? _
Read next: BOOK I: CHAPTER VII
Read previous: BOOK I: CHAPTER V
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