THE WOOING OF “HOLY CALM”

BY MARION HAMILTON CARTER

MISS ASHBELL’S first name was Matilda, but everybody at her boarding-house called her “Miss Mittie” by way of friendliness to a stranger; nor did they express much wonder as to what had brought her from Philadelphia to Laramie, because to a Wyomingite it is the most natural thing in the world that anybody should forsake every other place in the world for Wyoming, the only wonder being that millions more did not do it all the time. Possibly these dwellers on the altitudes would have thought her being in Laramie still more natural had they seen the house of her birth and rearing, one of those three-hundred-and-forty-seven-thousand-all-just-alike homes for which Philadelphia is famous, each with its bath-room, each bath-room with its cake of Cashmere bouquet soap, each parlor with its onyx-topped table between the two lace-curtained windows; and outside, white marble steps, and white, solid wood shutters to keep the Indians out at night. That is, they were to keep the Indians out, but as the Indians went faster than Philadelphia, the shutters are there yet. And Miss Mittie missed them dreadfully in Laramie; it didn’t seem like home if you couldn’t barricade at night, and scrub white marble steps in the morning.

But at Mrs. Ingersoll’s store, where Miss Mittie “had the ribbons,” they called her “Holy Calm,” pronouncing it “ca’m.” Coming from peaceful nights behind white, solid shutters, calm was to be expected, though perhaps not so much of it as Miss Mittie had. Her calm was of the peculiarly Quaker variety that exasperated you to the depths: instantly your desire was to ruffle it, to tear it open, and find out what was underneath, and if it were calm all through, and holy, or just put on for effect. And you felt somehow that the Lord made her on Sunday, after He had rested from His labors in the meetings attended by her father and mother; and by the same token, you felt that the Lord made Roddy McQueed on Monday, as a preliminary to getting the creative hand in on original chaos. It is beyond me to determine why these two should have been each other’s particular fate, yet such was the case.

My one experience with Miss Mittie showed me what she was. It was in the days when they were wearing yard-long hat-pins as articles of warfare. I went into the store to buy two short ones, and Holy Calm showed me a cushionful of rapiers, and told me “those were all they had now.”

There was just something in the way she said it that “got” me. I retorted that she didn’t know her stock—that I had bought proper hat-pins there three months before on my way up to the ranch, and there were a million of ’em still in a box.

“Oh, only two sold,” said she, taking it for truth, though never till that instant had she set eyes on me. “Then they must all be here except those two,” and with that, she drew out a box marked “ruching” in black letters six inches long. It contained ruching.

Miss Mittie only murmured apologetically to the box, “Not here, I see,” and drew forth another marked “stocks” containing stocks, and then one marked “gloves” containing gloves, and a fourth marked “ties” containing ties.

At this point my wickedness took me, and I showed her a box marked “corsets” containing corsets, a box marked “baby ribbon” containing baby ribbon, a box marked “embroidery cotton” containing embroidery cotton; after which I swept a commanding gesture over a table where silk hose were displayed and said artfully, “You’d better look under those stockings.”

She thanked me for the kind suggestion and conscientiously turned over every pair, soberly telling me, when she was through, she “didn’t see any hat-pins.” Neither did she see the glitter in my eye nor hear the derision in my voice; she positively never suspected that I was “doing her” in a way that would have reduced a New York “saleslady” either to rage or a red-faced pulp. I’d have kept it up for an hour until I forced her to show some sign of human feeling, but time was pressing, and I couldn’t sacrifice my sleeping-car berth east for the fine sport of baiting her Holy Calm. I stepped behind the counter and took a box, in full sight all the time, marked “hat-pins—short,” opened it, and put it in her hand.

No written words can convey the manner in which she said, “Oh, yes—two of those. Ten cents,” and wrote her slip.

I went off feeling defeated—the calm had never quivered; I had mentally made no more impression on her than if she’d been a waxwork.

But it had been borne in upon me that Miss Mittie’s soul needed saving to a world of human endeavor—that she was in bondage to some intangible inner force; and I was still thinking of her as a psychological phenomenon, wondering how a person so devoid of perception and imagination could contrive to earn her daily bread even in Wyoming, where the stress of commercial conditions is much easier than in the East, when the porter took my suitcase from Roddy’s hand and he cheered me off.

Roddy had driven me down from the ranch,—an all-day trip across the plains, with a sandwich lunch in the middle,—and he had made use of the opportunity to tell me the whole, true story of his life. He was emphatic on the truth of it, and said that I ought to write it up for the New York papers; and with this in view he went into details that would have made me faint away if they had been true. But knowing Roddy after three summers of him, I took his recitation quietly. My vague “Did you’s?” annoyed him but stimulated him to larger invention; and when at last we reached Laramie, he was in fine fettle for an adventure that would eclipse all the rest.

In this mood he strolled up the street after leaving me, and almost trampled Mrs. Ingersoll under foot as she dashed out of her store. She, too, had just received defeat at the hands of Holy Calm, and felt she had to save a soul alive.

Mrs. Ingersoll and Roddy were friends, after a sort. Everybody in the country was friends with him in the same fashion, as you’ve got to be with a next-to-nature man who has a reputation for originality in sin and has been in the papers no less than five times for it. So when Roddy and she collided and he said: “Why, hello, Mis’ Ingersoll! I didn’t go fer to smash ye,” and held out his big paw, she, with fine courtesy, gave him her hand and told him, smiling as though she liked to be smashed by careless cow-boys, “You’re just the one I want to see.”

Roddy was flattered. He knew, of course, that he was “just the one” any lady would want to see,—why not?—but somehow Mrs. Ingersoll was a little bit different from the rest. She did things, too, and her name was in the papers almost any time, attached to real news. Didn’t she organize the Laramie brass band that beat the Cheyenne band all to pieces?

So it really meant something to be wanted to be seen by her, and Roddy, hastily reviewing the situation, returned a handsome, “Well, you’re jest the one I wanta see. Now, ain’t that two of a kind?” and felt he had scored himself.

This paved the way for confidences. They were both smarting from too much Holy Calm. Mrs. Ingersoll blurted out her own experience, and asked Roddy how did he account for a girl like that?

Roddy pushed his hat back on his head to let out the thought that Miss Mittie seemed to lack a sense of humor and ought to be shown a thing or two; Mrs. Ingersoll, however, inclined to the belief that the trouble was “Holy Calm was too good for use,” or at least too good for any use in a millinery establishment. Roddy suggested that “something might be done fer her if ye went about it right,” but Mrs. Ingersoll averred despairingly that you’d never get an idea into Miss Mittie’s head short of cutting it open with an ax. However, after sifting the situation back and forth between them, the upshot was a soul-saving plot: Mrs. Ingersoll was to slip out just before closing time, leaving Miss Mittie to shut up shop alone; then Roddy, with a gang of cow-boys, was to “jump the store” and hold her up for a couple of hundred yards of ribbon, which they were to carry up to Mrs. Ingersoll’s house afterward.

All started off according to program. Holy Calm, softly humming to herself, was putting the store to bed as snug as anything, and thinking of her well-earned rest, when five young, seemingly desperate rascals, Roddy leading, fired their guns in the air and landed with a bounce inside, two of the boys blocking the door so she couldn’t get away.

Miss Mittie never quivered an eyelash.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” she asked, fixing her gaze and a smile on Roddy, whom she had met, and admired tremendously for the tales told of him.

Roddy was just a trifle dashed by her politeness, for he’d “allowed she’d screech, er something, like a woman always does,” and when anybody screeched his rule was, “Give ’em some more o’ the same medicine.” But under her serene, uncomprehending stare Roddy forgot what he’d come for.

Beany Johnson nudged him in the ribs as a reminder, and then, seeing a hesitancy, kicked him with his spur. Thus pushed to his duty, Roddy blurted out:

“I want some ribbon—pink ribbon—fer a church-fest’val decorations.” He slipped his gun into its holster, gave a hitch to his chaps and a jerk to the red handkerchief about his neck, picked up a roll from the counter, and told her in an offhand way: “This here will do. Gimme forty yards offen it,” and began carelessly unwinding it on the counter.

“There aren’t forty yards in that piece,” said she, taking the roll from his hand with her holiest calm and a smile at him, and at the same time noting the number on the roll. “There’s only eight and a quarter.”

“Well, gimme what they is—an’ then some more,” he commanded.

She measured off the eight and a quarter, then ten from another roll, said she was sorry she couldn’t match that pink exactly, but it was “special-sale goods,” and wouldn’t something else do, since it was for a church and not for a dress? The quality would be absolutely the same; the store didn’t carry any but the best.

Roddy, who had somewhat found himself by this time, amiably explained that “It didn’t matter about the match; it was only fer a church, anyways,” and handed her a roll of bright green.

She measured it demurely without looking at him. Still, it wouldn’t have helped her if she had; she wouldn’t have perceived the glitter of his eye.

With the green on the counter his self-confidence entirely returned. At the same time Beany Johnson and Hank Homans began to clamor, their arms overflowing with ribbons, that she measure some for them; and presently upon that counter lay a haystack of silk of all colors of the rainbow, and every roll that the boys could lay hands on had been unwound.

“Thirty-seven dollars and five cents,” said Miss Mittie. “But I’ll throw in the remnant and call it an even thirty-seven, since you took so much.” She had done the sum all in her head while she was measuring off!

“Charge it,” said Roddy, loftily. “This here gent—” He presented Hank, who bowed acknowledgment—“is Mr. Andy Carnegie. I guess you heard of him often enough, and know you can trust him all right; an’ this here one with the mustache is Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I am John D. Rockyfelly.” That being the preconcerted cue for them to go on with their parts, they began gathering the ribbons into their arms as fast as they could, meaning to cut and run with them.

“Excuse me, but this is a cash-down store,” informed Miss Mittie, laying her hand on the ribbons nearest her. “I can’t charge anything. I’m sorry not to oblige,—” She turned a little pale at the thought of it,—“but you see how it is; I’m not allowed, so I can’t. Thirty-seven dollars, please.”

“Well, I guess you won’t refuse us,” said Roddy, ingratiatingly, pulling surreptitiously at the ribbons while Hank added this sweet touch, “it’s fer a strawb’ry fest’val—real strawb’ries, real cream, you know.” (The season was late October.)

The words gave Roddy an idea. “Perhaps you’d like to go—with me.” The wretch beamed at her, thinking here was the best chance yet to “do her one” and send the shivers over her in a way she’d never forget.

A faint tinge of color suffused her cheeks. How kind of him, the great Roddy, to want her! She spoke, however, with her calm:

“I’d like to go with you ever so much. Yes, I’m sure I can go to-night; I haven’t anything else. I’ll go,” she accepted, making what she felt a momentous decision. Never yet had she been anywhere with a real live cow-boy, and it had been the dream of her life—the dream now at last come true! What a story to write home to Philadelphia! She smiled happily at Roddy, then, suddenly remembering her duty, said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please,” but very sweetly, and as though she hated to ask him for it after that invitation, and felt it not quite ladylike.

“Charge it, please,” he gave back, with a sweetness imitating her own, while a flush was beginning to be felt on his cheeks also. He hadn’t expected her to take him up so quickly. He was prepared to wheedle and urge, and it made him feel just a bit mean to see her so eager to go with him to a fictitious festival; and after his first stab of self-pride came the thought, was he “the first fella ever ast her to go somewheres in the evening? Didn’t she git no amusement at all? Why, the poor kid!”

He questioned, hesitating:

“You—ain’t been out much—in Laramie—sence you come?”

She shook her head.

“I haven’t been to one thing,” she replied, giving him a wistful look, and adding with a brighter one and a sigh, “until to-night.”

Meanwhile the two guards at the door had become so entranced with the scene at the ribbon counter that they’d cast aside their duty: they acknowledged the duty, however, by tiptoeing to the region of the ribbons, flattering themselves that, if they were not heard, they would not be seen.

Miss Mittie swept a glance at the five young men ranged before her and then at the clock. It was ten minutes past closing-time, and the street door stood wide open! Dreadful! In her shy delight at the prospect of a strawberry festival, she’d forgotten her sacred trust in putting the store to bed. What would Mrs. Ingersoll say when she found it out?

With a quick, “Excuse me,” she slipped along behind the counter, those five cow-boys standing like gawks and watching her do it, and locked the door and put the key in her pocket. She took the key, naturally, so she could get in the next morning, and she was intending to let the young men out by a certain back way in order that nobody should know how remiss she’d been. Returning hurriedly, she said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please,” and stuck her pencil in her hair.

The young men had been exchanging disconcerted glances. Roddy dropped his ribbon on the counter. Figuratively speaking, he threw up the sponge then; but it was Hank Homans who first found a usable tongue.

“I guess we don’t want it, after all,” said he, depositing his armful beside Roddy’s.

She smiled at him a smile that nothing but calm that is calm all through can produce on earth, and said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please.”

“No—I guess we don’t want it,” corroborated Roddy, trying to appear self-confident while he bunched his ribbons together with decisive gestures that eschewed ribbons from his life forever.

For the fraction of a second she appeared to believe it; then she repeated, “Thirty-seven dollars,” and thrust the slip across the pile at him.

He turned red.

“I say—we don’t want it,” he stammered.

She took this for a pleasantry, and held out her hand for the money. At the same moment he felt a spur dig into his boot; the situation was become exceedingly unpleasant to his fellow-missioners. What was the girl up to, anyway? And what in thunder did she mean by locking them in? Beany Johnson came to the rescue.

“I say, why, this here was—a—er—kinder joke,” he explained sheepishly, and feeling dreadfully uncomfortable.

She looked at him, puzzled.

“I don’t see it,” she remarked. Literally she didn’t. “What is the joke?”

“Why—er—all this here—” He waved his hand over the pile of ribbons—“this here pink ribbon hold-up—why, it was all a—er—kinder joke, without meanin’ any offense,” he trailed off, blushing.

“But I don’t see it,” she repeated, still with her puzzled look.

“Well, it is, anyway,” he assured her, desperately. “It’s what it is all right—a joke.”

For a moment after this brutal confession they thought comprehension dawned in her eyes; then she murmured, looking critically at the ribbon: “But I’m sure I measured it all right; I never make mistakes on ribbons. Mrs. Ingersoll will tell you that. I was very particular as I went along. And I know I counted it right—thirty-seven dollars, and the remnant, five cents; but I threw that off; I didn’t charge it on the slip.” She glanced at the slip to make sure on that point.

“Oh, you’re all right,” Hank chipped in courageously. “We ain’t kickin’ on yer measurin’. An’ the thirty-seven—it’s all right, too; but—why—er—”

“I gave you all-silk ribbon, no cotton-back,” she interrupted. “I looked at every piece before I undid it. There’s some cotton-back in the store for cheap trimmings and flower ties, but I was very particular to give you the same as you started out with—that pink Mr. McQueed took first.” She began rummaging the pile for the original sample.

“Oh, that’s all right; we ain’t kickin’ on the quality,” Hank rumbled on, despite the pucker on her brow feeling he was making progress—that by a process of elimination of false scents he was gradually getting her on the track of a true apprehension. He motioned with his hand to include the others. “We ain’t kickin’ on that part of it, fer it’s all right; but—”

“Then I don’t see what isn’t all right,” she sighed helplessly, glancing at the sale-slip to make sure the joke wasn’t there. “Yes, thirty-seven.” With that a light dawned on her face, and she handed the slip to him. “Oh, I see,” she cried, “I’ve been asking the wrong gentleman to pay!”

Beany only shook his head and pushed the bill aside. He was beginning to perspire, and the others, coming to his rescue in a chorus, protested:

“But it was all a joke—this here. Don’t you see?” hoping she’d see and make the best of it by opening the door and telling them to get out for a mean lot of—, well, anything you like and can imagine as coming from her chaste lips. Getting out was now all they were capable of thinking of in the present predicament; they wouldn’t have cared what she called them. Hank added firmly, and as a sort of inspiration, “You see, we don’t want it now.”

She looked from one to the other of them, repeating, “Don’t want it now, did you say?” Then with another of her comprehending smiles, “But you ain’t the kind of gentlemen that orders things you don’t want, and then don’t pay up for ’em, and you wouldn’t disappoint a church. Besides—” Here she presented them with a smile apiece—“I know you wouldn’t leave a lady to roll up ’most two hundred yards of ribbon just for a matter of thirty-seven dollars.”

“It wouldn’t be kinder jes right,” Hank admitted, seeing a chance here to slide out on excuses. “Sure it wouldn’t; but we didn’t none of us fellas think o’ that—”

She broke in on him with a quick, “I see it now!” and they waited breathless while she looked at the price-tags on several rolls. “You think I made a mistake in the different prices, carrying the different widths in my head, and you’re all too nice to tell me for fear you’ll get me in trouble with Mrs. Ingersoll. Well, maybe I did. Nobody’s perfect; no matter how careful you are, you’re liable to a slip-up once in a while. But I’ll measure it again and count it over just to satisfy you.”

She took a long ribbon in her hand. Inwardly they groaned, and Roddy felt spurs digging at his legs and elbows at his ribs that said, “You got us into this fix; now get us out, and be quick about it, too.”

But Roddy seemed to have been struck with paralysis. The truth is, Miss Mittie had those young missioners cowed. They didn’t dare tell her to her face how they’d planned and played a mean joke on her confiding innocence when she’d never done anything to harm or annoy them in the whole of her blameless life. To leave her to roll up that pile of ribbon was, as Roddy afterward confessed when he told me the story, “sich a dirty, ornery trick to play on a lady as only a coyote would think of.” And, then, they didn’t dare to give Mrs. Ingersoll away. Yet if they didn’t make a clean breast of it and show Miss Mittie just how low-down cussed they’d been, how were they to get the key? They couldn’t take it from her by force; at least things hadn’t reached the point where they felt they could “do anything that was reely ungentlemanly,” as Roddy said. And then this thought came to all of them: suppose they did make her understand, and “she struck it hoppin’ mad an’ kep’ ’em there all night to pay ’em fer it an’ git even!” By this time they felt her capable of anything through sheer lack of imagination.

Drawn by Fletcher C. Ransom

Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merritt

“‘THIRTY-SEVEN DOLLARS, PLEASE’”

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“One—two—three—four—five—” She measured swiftly, counting aloud as she went that they might be sure she was making no mistake. Under cover of her voice Hank hissed in Roddy’s ear:

“It’s yer turn to play. Say something, can’t yer? An’ git us outa this here hold-up.”

“Hold-up! I should say yes!” snorted Beany in Roddy’s other ear, suddenly appreciating the real essence of the joke; and then snorted again as he heard “Seventeen—eighteen—nineteen,” accompanied by the rapid swish of silk along the counter.

But all Roddy, now very red of face, could contribute toward a graceful retreat for himself and friends from the scene of disaster was, “We don’t want it,” while pushing the ribbons weakly in her direction.

Before he could think of anything else, she raised her unsuspicious eyes questioningly to his, acknowledging him the leader and his word her law. That was the glance that shot him through the heart—that, and the way she’d beaten them at their own game and never turned a hair. Roddy was enough the man and the sport to appreciate the laugh on himself.

“Fellas, the drinks are on us,” he informed them, grimly. “The little girl gits the jackpot. It’s up to us to shell out an’ be P. D. Q. about it, too.”

Miss Mittie stopped her measuring, since he was satisfied to take the ribbon as it was, and put the slip into his hand with a smile that said, “Now I’ll be ready to go with you to our entertainment.”

They made up the amount with difficulty,—it took every cent Roddy had and most of the spare cash in the party,—and when he had given it to her, he leaned over the counter, almost to kissing distance, and said:

“Little girl, y’ can buy me fer a nickel.”

She drew a shabby purse and took out of it a shabby nickel.

“It’s all I have,” she told him, soberly, offering it.

All she had, and she was giving it to him in earnest! In one swift flash it came to him why she hadn’t seen through the mean joke they were playing on her: she had trusted him too much; or, as he more picturesquely put it, “She knowed I was too much of a gentleman to do a girl dirt.” Her lack of comprehension of the true inwardness of the whole affair was precisely her measure of the high estimate she placed on his chivalry; she saw him as his own deepest ideals painted him, and he knew she saw him thus; and in the shine of the heavenly revelation he saw her as lovely calm womanhood confiding in his nobility. Something broke loose in him; his better nature, his affection, his generosity, his instinct for fair play, rose to its occasion, and in one instant he ceased to be a lawless young rapscallion—his heart truly and in the scriptural sense turned from its wickedness and the error of its ways.

“Little girl, if I take this here nickel offen ye, it’s a bargain between us,” he told her, dizzily. “You an’ me’ll belong to each other fer keeps. I mean it, honest.”

She hesitated, blushing from throat to forehead under the gaping stare of the other young fellows; then she said bravely, “I mean it honest, too,” and laid the nickel in his hand.

I fear I’ve told this so jocosely I’ve belittled their miracle, which was very real. I met her on the street in Laramie last summer, five years after the episode, and speaking of her marriage she confided to me that she and Roddy had been “made for each other.”

TIMOTHY COLE’S
WOOD ENGRAVINGS
OF
MASTERPIECES
IN
AMERICAN GALLERIES

LADY MILDMAY

BY

HOPPNER

Owned by Mr. P. A. Valentine

LADY MILDMAY. BY HOPPNER

(TIMOTHY COLE’S WOOD ENGRAVINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN AMERICAN GALLERIES)

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