Some days our lives seem so difficult and hard that we can't imagine being able to do one more thing.
We don't see the beauty in the everyday and feel defeated by all that is required of us that we fail ourselves in being open to all God has in store for us.
When I feel like this I am encouraged and uplifted by the overcoming of difficulty and the choosing of the opportunity to see and find beauty in even the most trivial and minor circumstances as in the story below.
When Queens Ride By Agnes Sligh Turnbull
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
off 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
or 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. Hedaviess 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!"
Blessings to you and your homes,
