XXI—CUPID AND CORN-MEAL
"THIS," said Philip, as he returned one morning from the post-office to the store, with an open letter in his hand, "is about the twelfth letter I've had from old acquaintances in New York, and all are as like unto one another as if written by the same hand. The writers imagine that the West is bursting with opportunities for men whose wits are abler than their hands. What a chance I would have to avenge myself on mine enemy—if I had one!"
"And this," Grace said, after opening a letter addressed to herself that Philip had given her, "is from Mary Truett. I wonder if she has caught the Western fever from Caleb? Oh—I declare!"
"Your slave awaits the declaration."
"She, too, wants to know if there isn't a place here for a clever young man—her brother; it seems he is a civil engineer and landscape architect."
"Imagine it! A landscape architect—at Claybanks! Ask her if he can live on air, and sleep on the ground with a tree-top for roof. Doesn't she say anything about Caleb?"
"I'm skipping her brother and looking for it, as fast as I can. Yes; here it is. There! Didn't I tell you how sensible she always was? She thanks me for introducing Caleb, and says he's the most interesting and genial man she has met in a long time, though, she says, she wonders whose grammar was in vogue when Caleb went to school. And—dear me!—this is becoming serious!"
"My dear girl," said Philip, "there are different ways of reading a letter aloud. Won't you choose a new one or let me have the letter itself, when you've read it, provided it contains no secrets?"
"Do wait a moment, Phil! You're as curious as women are said to be. It seems that Caleb has persuaded her to accompany him to a prayer-meeting; and as she has also been to a theatre with him, I'm afraid the persuading, or a hint to that effect, must have been on her part. She says he has completely changed in appearance—and by what means, do you suppose?"
"I can't imagine."
"His beard has gone, and his hair has been cut Eastern fashion, and his mustache turned up at the ends, and he dresses well,—Mary says so,—and that the contrast is startling. Oh, Phil! What if he should—"
"Should what? Fall in love with your paragon of women? Well, I suppose men are never too old to make fools of themselves, and Caleb is only forty, but I beg that you'll at once remind Miss Truett that Caleb is too good a man to be hurt at heart for a woman's amusement. Why are you looking at nothing in that vague manner?"
"I'm trying to imagine Caleb's new appearance."
"Spare yourself the effort. I'll telegraph him for a photograph."
"But I want to know—at once, to see whether he's really impressed Mary more seriously than she admits."
"Oh, you women! You can start a possible romance on less basis than would serve for a dream. Do go backward in that letter, to the lady's brother, if only to suppress your imagination."
"I suppose I must," sighed Grace, "for I've reached the end. The brother, it seems, can secure a railroad pass to visit this country, if there is any possible business opening for him here."
"I wish there were, I'm sure, for I don't know of a place more in need of services such as a landscape architect could render, but you know that he couldn't earn a dollar."
"But it seems that he knows something of road-making and grading."
"Which also are accomplishments that might be put to good use here, if there were any one to pay for the work."
"I have it!" Grace said. "The very thing! Don't you dare laugh at me until I tell it all. You know—or I do—that Doctor Taggess thinks Claybanks would be far less malarious if the swamp lands could be drained. He says the malarious exhalation, whatever it is, seems to be heavier than the air, and is therefore comparatively local in its effects, for he has known certain towns and other small localities to be entirely free from it, though the surrounding country was full of it. Now, if some surveyor and engineer—say Mary Truett's brother—could find out how to drain our Claybanks swamps, it might make this a healthy town. Is that a very silly notion?"
"Silly? Not a bit of it! But, my dear girl, do you know what such an enterprise would cost?"
"No, but I do know what I suffered on the day of my awful malarial attack and that I shall never forget the spectacle of a poor, dear, little, helpless, innocent baby shaking with a chill!"
"Poor girl! Poor baby! But don't you suppose that our swamp lands have been studied for years by the men most interested in them—the farmers and other owners?—studied and worked at?"
"Perhaps they have, but Doctor Taggess says farmers always do things in the hardest way; they've not time and money to try any other. Besides, since I began to think of it I've often recalled a case somewhat similar. In our town in western New York the railway station was very inconvenient; it was on a bridge crossing the track, and everything and everybody had to go up and down stairs or up and down hill to get to or from it. It was talked of at town meetings and the post-office and other places, and public-spirited citizens roamed the line from one end of town to the other, looking for a spot where the station could be placed near the level of the track.
"At last they subscribed money to pay for a new site, if the company would move its station to the level, and one day a surveyor and his men came up, and he looked about with an instrument, and a few days afterward a little cutting at one place and a little filling just back of it did the business, and all the village wiseacres called themselves names for not thinking of the same thing, but Grandpa said, 'It takes a shoemaker to make shoes.' You know the swamps are almost dry now, because of the hot weather; don't you suppose a surveyor and engineer, or even a sensible man who's studied physical geography in school, might be able to go over the ground and learn where and what retains the water? Now laugh, if you like."
"Grace, you ought to have been a man!"
"No, thank you—not unless you had been a woman. But you really think my plan isn't foolish?"
"As one of the owners of swamp land, I am so impressed with your wisdom that I suggest that we invite Miss Truett's brother to visit us; tell him the outlook is bad, but say we'll guarantee him—well, a hundred-dollar fee to look into a matter in which we personally are interested. If your plan is practicable, I'll recover the money easily. I'll write him this afternoon—or you may do it, through his sister. Let us see what else is in the mail. Why, I didn't suspect it, the address being typewritten!—Ah, young woman, now for my revenge, for here's a letter from Caleb, and if 'tis anything like the last—yes, here it is—Miss Truett, Miss Truett, Miss Truett."
"Oh, Phil!"
"I'll be merciful, and read every word, without stopping to sentimentalize:—
"'Dear Philip: I'm in it, as Jonah thought when the whale shut his mouth. When I say "it" I mean all of New York that I can pervade while waiting for the corn-meal to come. I've been to a New York prayer-meeting and I can't say that it was any better than the Claybanks kind, except that Miss Truett went with me and joined in all the hymns as natural as if brought up on them. You ought to hear her voice. 'Tain't as loud as some, but it goes right to the heart of a hymn. Next day I went to a museum in a big park and saw more things than I can ever get straightened out in my head: I wish I could have had your wife's camera for company.
"'I went to a theatre, too. I had no more idea of doing it than you have of selling liquor, but I got into a sort of argument with Miss Truett, without meaning to, about the great amount of that kind of sin that was going on; and when she said that she didn't think it was always sinful, I felt like the man that cussed somebody in the dark for stepping on his toes, and then found it was the preacher that done the stepping. She said she really thought that some kinds of theatre would do a sight of good to a hard-working man like me, and that she'd like to see me under the influence of a good comedy for a spell; so I told her there was one way of doing it, and that was to name the comedy and then go along with me, so as to give her observing powers a fair chance. She did it, and I ain't sorry I went; though if you don't mind keeping it to yourself, there won't be some Claybanks prayers wasted on me that might be more useful if kept nearer home.
"'Who should I run against on Broadway one day but an old chum of mine in the army? He'd got a commission, after the war, in the regulars, and got retired for a bad wound he got in the Indian country, yet, for all that, he didn't look any older than he used to. He took me visiting to his post of the Grand Army of the Republic one night, and there I saw a lot of vets that looked as spruce and chipper as if they was beaus just going to see their sweethearts. "What's the matter with you fellows here, that you don't grow old?" says I to my old chum. He didn't understand me at first, but when he saw what I was driving at, he said many of the members of the post were older than I, but 'twasn't thought good sense in New York for a fellow to look older than he was, and he didn't see why 'twas good sense anywhere. I felt sort of riled, and he nagged me awhile, good-natured like, about trying to pass for my own grandfather, till I said: "Look here, Jim, if you've got any fountain of youth around New York, I'm the man that ain't afraid to take a dip." "Good boy!" says he. "I'd like the job of reconstructing you, for old times' sake." "No fooling?" says I; for in old times Jim wouldn't let anything stand in the way of a joke. "Honor bright, Cale," said he, "for I want you to look like yourself, and you can do it." Remembering some advertisements I've seen in newspapers, I says, "What do you do it with—pills or powders?" Jim coughed up a laugh from the bottom of his boots, and says he: "Neither. Come along!"
"'Well, I was skittisher than I've been since Gettysburg, not knowing what new-fangled treatment he had in his mind, and how it would agree with me; but he took me into a barber shop where he appeared to know a man, and he did some whispering, and,—well, when that barber got through, first giving me a hair-cut and then a shave, and fussing over my mustache for a spell, and I got a sight of my face in the glass, I thought 'twas somebody else I was looking at, and somebody that I'd seen before, a long time ago, and it wasn't until I tried to brush a fly off my nose that I found 'twas I. Maybe you think I was a fool, but I was so tickled that I yelled, "Whoop—ee!" right out in meeting. "There!" says Jim, when we got outside. "Don't you ever wear long hair and a beard again—not while I'm around."
"'Then he took me to a tailor shop about forty times as big as your store, and picked out a suit of clothes for me, and a hat and shirt, and the whole business. 'Twas the Hawk Howlaway business over again, with Jim instead of Jethro, only there was more of it, for he stuck a flower in the buttonhole of my new coat. I couldn't kick, for he was wearing one too, but I just tell you that if I'd met any Claybanks neighbor about then, I'd have slid down a side street like running to a fire. After that he took me to the hotel where he lived, and up in his room, and looked me over, as if I was a horse, and says he, "There's one thing more. You need a setting-up." "Not for me, Jim," says I "I keep regular hours, though I don't mind swapping yarns with you till I get sleepy to-night!" Then he let off another big laugh, and says he, "That isn't what I mean. It's something we do in the regulars, and ought to have done in the volunteers." So he made me stand up, and lift my shoulders, and hold my head high, and breathe full, at the same time making me look at myself in the glass. "There!" says he, after a spell, "you do that a few times a day, till it comes natural to you, and you'll feel better for it, all your life."
"'Well, Philip, I don't mind owning up to you that I was so stuck up for the next few hours that at night I thought it necessary to put up a special prayer against sinful vanity. Next morning I went down to your wife's old store to ask Miss Truett something, and she didn't know me. No, sir, she didn't, till I spoke to her. She didn't say anything about it, but she looked like your wife sometimes does when she's mighty pleased about something, and I needn't tell you that looks like them are mighty pleasant to take.
"'Well, I suppose all this sounds like fool-talk, for of course I can't get my birthdays back, but, coming at a time when the malaria appears to be loosening its grip, this looking like I used to before I got broke up is doing me a mighty sight of good.
"'When is that corn-meal coming?
"'Yours always,
"'Caleb Wright.'"
"Phil," exclaimed Grace, "'twould be a sin to hurry that meal East, until—until we hear further from Caleb."
"And from Miss Truett?" said Philip, with a quizzical grin. "Fortunately for both of them, the meal probably reached New York soon after the date of this letter, which was written four days ago, and Caleb is probably now on the ocean, or about to sail."
"I think 'tis real cruel," Grace sighed, "just as—"
"Just as two mature people began daydreaming about each other? I think 'tis the best that could befall them, for it will put their sentiment to a practical test. Cupid has struck greater obstacles than the Atlantic Ocean and barrelled corn-meal without breaking his wings."
"Phil, you talk as coldly as if—oh, as if you weren't my husband."
"'Tis because I am your husband, dear girl, and realize what miserable wretches we would be if we weren't, above all else, hearty lovers. What else have I to live for, out here, but you? Suppose any other woman were my wife, brought from everything she was accustomed to, and out to this place where she could find absolutely nothing as a substitute for the past!"
"Or suppose I had married some other man—ugh!—and come here!"
"You would have done just as you have done—seen your duty, done it, and smiled even if you were dying of loneliness. But not all women are like you."
"Because not all men are like you, bless you!—and always ready and eager to make love first and foremost."
"How can I help it, when I've you to love? But tell me now,—frankly,—don't you ever long for the past? Don't you get absolutely, savagely, heart-hungry for it?"
"No—no—!" Grace exclaimed. "Besides, I'm easier pleased and interested than you think. I've learned to like some of our people very much, since I've ceased judging them by their clothes and manner of speech. There are some real jewels among the women, old and young."
"H'm! I'm glad to hear you say so, for I've wanted to confess, for some time, that I am fast becoming countrified, and without any sense of shame, either. I'm becoming so deeply interested in human nature that I've little thought for anything else, aside from business. When I first arrived, I imagined myself a superior being, from another sphere; now that I know much about the people and their burdens and struggles, there are some men and women to whom I mentally raise my hat. At first I wondered why Taggess, who really is head and shoulders above every one else here, didn't procure a substitute and abandon the town; now I can believe that nothing could drag him away. I can't learn that he ever wrote verses or made pictures or preached sermons, nevertheless he's artist, poet, and prophet all in one. I should like to become his equal, or Caleb's equal—I may as well say both, while I'm wishing; still, I don't like to lose what I used to have and be."
"You're not losing it, you dear boy, nor am I really losing anything. The truth is, that in New York both of us, hard though we worked, were longing for an entirely luxurious, self-indulgent future, and your uncle's will was all that saved us from ourselves. You always were perfection, to my eyes, but I wish you could see for yourself what improvements half a year of this new life have made for you."
"Allow me to return the compliment, though no one could imagine a more adorable woman than you were when I married you. So long as I am you and you are me—" Then words became inadequate to further estimate and appreciation of the changes wrought by half a year of life at "the fag-end of nowhere—the jumping-off place of the world," as Philip had called Claybanks the first time he saw it by daylight.
