And there is Benjamin D. O'Cleave of New York—with a flourish under it on the register. He and his wife take it out in diamonds. You would never see one of the O'Cleave family at a roadside camp fire such as that where Maw fries the trout and Rowena toasts the bread on a fork. The original O'Cleave came over in the Mayflower, as I am informed—but, without question in my mind, came steerage. You will find Mr. O'Cleave in the swellest hotel, in the highest-priced room. He is first in war, first in peace, and first in the dining room.
Mr. O'Cleave pays a plenty a head for all his family, for rooms with bath and meals. The hotel company would gladly charge him more, and Mr. O'Cleave gladly would pay more. He confides to the hotel clerk—who is a Y. M. C. A. secretary back East—that he should not care if it was even fifty dollars a day, he could pay it. But, if so, he would already want for his money more service, which he waits five hours and not enough cars to get him over to see the Giantess Geyser play, which the Giantess maybe didn't play again for eight days, and should a business man and taxpayer wait eight days because of not cars enough by a hotel, which is the only place a man has to go with his family? Is it reasonable?
Maw in War Paint
The highly specialized hotel clerk admits that it is not reasonable, that nothing is reasonable, that he has spoken to the Giantess a dozen times about her irregular habits; but what can he do? “I would gladly charge you one hundred dollars a day, Mr. O'Cleave, if I had the consent of the Interior Department. It isn't my fault.”
I wish I had a movie of the Y. M. C. A. hotel clerk when he is off duty at the desk. I wonder if his faith upholds him when he recalls the threat of Benjamin D. O'Cleave to go to Europe next year. Ah, well, even if he does, Maw will remain.
I know that next year I shall again see Maw leaning against a big pine, as she sits upon the ground drinking real handmade coffee of her own from a tin cup with the handle cut so it will nest down in the box. Maw's meals do not cost her four bits a throw, because they brought things along. Paw catches a trout sometimes on the cane pole that hangs alongside the car; not always, but sometimes, he catches one. And Maw, once she had conquered the notion that you ought to skin a trout the way you do a bullhead back in Ioway, took to cooking trout naturally; and her trout, with pancakes and sirup, to my notion beat anything the hotel chef in the best hotel can do. Maw does not worry about a room with bath, though sometimes when the rain comes through the old wall tent she gets both. The pink and green war paint which you sometimes see beneath Maw's specs when you meet her on the road represents only the mark of the bedquilts, where the colors were not too proud to run.
Maw finds it wonderful in these mountains. I know she does, because she has never yet told me so. Maw throws no fits. But many a time I have seen her sitting, in the late afternoon, her hands, in the first idleness they have known in all her life, lying in her ample lap, her faded eyes quietly gazing through her steel-bowed far-lookers at the vast pictures across some valley she has found. It is her first valley of dreams, her first valley of rest and peace and quiet. The lights on these hills are such as she did not see in Ioway, or even in Nebraska, when she went there once, time Mary's baby was born. The clouds are so strange to Maw, their upturned edges so very white against the black body of their over-color. And the rains that come, with hail—but here you don't need worry, for there are no crops for the hail to spoil. And sometimes in the afternoon, never during the splendor of the mellow morning such as Maw never before has seen, comes the lightning and rips the counterpane of clouds to let the sun shine through.
I know Maw loves it all, because she never has told me so. She is very shy about her new world in this new day. She wouldn't like to talk about it. We never do like to talk about it, once we really have looked out across our valley of dreams.
You can't fail to like Hattie and Rowena and Cynthy. Often I walk with Cynthy and her Vassarrority on the Angel Terrace, when the moon is up, when it is all white, and Cynthy is almost the only angel left there. Such a moon as the Interior Department does provide for the summer here! I defy any Secretary of any other Department—War, Navy, Commerce, Labor or anything—to produce any such moon as this at six dollars and fifty cents a day with bath; or four dollars and fifty cents a day with two towels; or four bits a day at Maw's camp on the Madison. So though I know Cynthy would prefer the young park ranger—who really is the son of a leading banker in Indianapolis—to explain the algae and the Algys, I do the best I can at my age of life with Cynthy.