CHAPTER VI
A CHILD’S WORLD
Hilda sat on the floor in the hall, Burchie beside her. She was still a thin little thing; and though she had now come into the growing age—that period so called out of all the years it takes us to reach our full bulk and stature, eight-year-old Hilda had as yet not accomplished much of its work. She perched there with her slim legs drawn up so far that the pointed chin almost rested upon her knees. The gaze of the big, unwinking eyes was on the open doorway of the parlor.
A child’s world is a strange place, not by any means the world of the adults about it. To the infant—viewing all matters from another point—a table is a serious and interesting piece of furniture, with things upon its top that you cannot see; a chair, a somewhat less doubtful structure, which you sometimes climb, if you can, thereafter to sit upon it with your insufficient legs dangling. To it—even to a child of Hilda’s age—that which immediately surrounds it is life—is the world; the persons of its household and its social circle make up humanity; the laws it there meets seem to its feebleness fixed as those of the Medes and Persians. Thus or so say the customs or decide the grown-ups—the infallible ones; it is well or grievous, but you cannot help it; you have no influence, much less real power, to change or to defy.
To Hilda, sitting quietly there on the floor, the world was a great level plain, inhabited not so much by mankind as by cattle. The capital of this realm was Home—not merely the Three Sorrows ranchhouse as it had been in her father’s time, but the kind of home that Uncle Hank meant when he promised that dying father that the children should always have one. There are persons who spread around them this atmosphere of security against the jars and offenses of life, of safe comfort amid its loneliness or hostility; rich, selfless natures that dispel, as a flower its perfume, the sense of home. Hank, tall, bearded, deep-voiced, so much man in all his attributes, yet carried it with him. He served it at the tail of a chuck wagon or in the one-night cow camp. One could even imagine him bringing it into the cold and unhopeful air of a palace.
“Yes, we’ve got debts to pay and obligations to meet, and it’s goin’ to be close work for a spell,” he had said to Miss Valeria, when he talked matters over with the helpless, dismayed woman. “But there’s one thing sure, we’re a-goin’ to have a home for these children here in the meantime.”
His first move was to build the long-delayed messhouse for the boys; his next to send away for a good Chinese cook. Thus came to them Sam Kee, elderly, silent, with all the best traits of his race; Sam Kee who made a garden and raised such vegetables as had never been dreamed of on the ranch, who would lay aside his usual reserve and scold shrilly to get the right cows kept in the right pasture for the making of butter and cottage cheese. Sam Kee had become the corner stone of domestic comfort at the Sorrows, where now the little family ate alone, Uncle Hank at the foot of the table, Miss Valeria at the head, while the boys had a cook of their own.
To be sure there sat enthroned, away in Chicago or Kansas City, a vague power known as The Price of Beef. Inexorable, unapproachable, arbitrary, it ruled this mortal life. To it all questions of improvement in one’s material well-being were referred. By it all earthly hopes, all ambitions and vanities, stood or fell. You needed shoes or stockings? You longed for piano lessons, or you had set your fancy upon a pink sash or a certain picture book? Well, if beef were “up” you probably got—upon proper representation—the object of your desire. But if beef were “down”—then, in the matter of piano lessons, pink sash, or picture book, you did without; and so far as shoes and stockings were concerned, you just continued along with those you had. For Uncle Hank had made it plain to Hilda that the mark of all moral and mental inferiority—I had almost said degradation—was to sell beef when it was “down.”
When Henry T. Pearsall was appointed guardian for the children of Charles Van Brunt, deceased, the administrator of their estate, when he entered upon the familiar task of making one dollar do the work of two, eking out money for the interest on mortgages, keeping things running until, as he phrased it, “he could sorter get his feet under him,” this Price of Beef ruled him too.
But Miss Valeria Van Brunt had the strength of the weak, and Hilda heard with only a passing sort of surprise that Uncle Hank would, if necessary, even sell beef when it was down to send her and Burchie to Fort Worth. It seemed the crime was justifiable when something was the matter with your ears.
For after Charley was gone, the monotony and the crudeness of ranch life seemed finally to become unbearable to Miss Val. She came to Pearsall almost in tears, declaring that Burch had some sort of ailment which affected his hearing and that he ought to have a specialist’s care and treatment at a sanitarium. Uncle Hank was bewildered.