I

DEEP CHANNELI

DEEP CHANNEL

Whereshall we pick up the thread of Julie Rose’s life? It runs, a hidden strand, back and back into the past, crossed and recrossed by the threads of other lives,—all weaving a pattern of humanity on an unseen loom,—deflected sometimes by the pull of natures stronger than her own, widened here and narrowed there by circumstance, winding itself for the most part along the muddy streets of Hart’s Run, to the shops on errands for her mother, to the schoolhouse, and on Sundays to the Methodist church; sometimes, more rarely, running out of the village by the main street, which so quickly turns itself into a rutty highway, up the sides of the surrounding mountains on excursions for chestnuts in the autumn, or for bloodroot and anemone blossoms in the spring.

Following the thread, one may see Julie Rose as a little girl—such a meagre, anxious, and correctlittle girl!—out on the streets in hood and little shawl in winter or in a checked wash-dress in summer, weaving her pattern of life through the village. An uncertain pattern, deflected as it is by the constant necessity for sudden crossings of the street to avoid encounters which frighten her, yet at the same time to give the impression that she changed her course for other reasons. Here she crosses, one might suppose, to speak to old Mrs. Brewster; in reality it is to escape a group of rough boys who would be sure to taunt her, or even give her hair a jerk, did she dare to pass them. There she recrosses, apparently to peep at a bed of zinnias but really to avoid a cow, which, blocking the sidewalk, might swoop its horns at her were she to face it. Always there is the fear and always the compulsion of concealment, for worse even than being afraid is to have one’s fear uncovered by the laughter of people. But though a little nervous pulse flutters in her neck, and her eyes darken constantly with apprehension, yet her whole face can light up amazingly whenever life is gracious to her: when some one gives her a red apple, for instance, or when her teacher is kind.

One sees her conscientiously hopping over the mud puddles on the way to school to avoid soiling her shoes and stockings, because that would worry her mother; yet one may also see that a paper doll, whose pink cheeks and blue eyes fill her with a maternal delight, is snuggled under her shawl. Alas! at this point, following her thread of life, one sees very distinctly the look in her eyes the day that Edward Black snatched that paper doll away from her, and there before the whole school at playtime wrenched its head off, and flung its decapitated body into a snow-bank. That was a gray winter day with dirty yellowed snow upon the ground and fresh flakes drifting down from a heavily close and sullen sky. Julie is paralyzed when that big bully snatches her doll, powerless to move or cry out; she can only stand and look, her eyes wide and stricken, her hands clutched together. Not so Henr’etta Wilkins, Julie’s deskmate. She flew at Edward Black, and slapped him full and stingingly upon the face with her competent hand. It was Henr’etta’s dramatic act which precipitated a general scuffle and free fight among the children. They fought back and forth through the snowand over the tattered remnants of the paper doll. Julie took no part in the conflict, but under its cover her tension of horror relaxed sufficiently for her to creep over and collect the torn bits that had been her doll. The other children knocked her about as she did so, and when she picked up the last bit, one of the big boys stepped square upon her hand. But Julie hardly noticed that. In a daze, she turned out of the school-yard and made for home, slipping and stumbling through the snow, the fragments of the doll pressed tight against her breast, and the forbidding sky hanging low upon her.

At home she could only hold out the torn pieces dumbly to her mother.

“What’s the matter, honey?” her mother cried, nervously. “Oh, what did they do to its doll baby?”

Then at last Julie could speak. “Edward Black did it!” she gasped. “He—he tore her head right off and flung it in the snow. I couldn’t stop him—I couldn’t doanything. I—couldn’t—” her voice squeaked out impotently in a flood of tears.

“Never mind! never mind! It shall have anotherdoll baby,” her mother comforted her.

But a question struggled convulsively to the surface through Julie’s sobs. “What—what made Ed act so mean? I wasn’t doing a thing. I was—I was just standing there.”

“I don’t know,” her mother shook her head with a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. Folks do that way—I reckon it’s all you can expect in this world.”

“All you can expect in this world,” Julie repeated with a broken gasp.

Afterward her mother bathed her face and hands, tied up her bruised fingers, and giving her a cookie fresh and warm from the oven, made her go back to school, for “What’ll folks think if you stay home?” she said. “All the children will laugh at you.”

So Julie went back, the cookie, fragrant and comforting, in her hand, but a poignant disillusioned throb still in her heart, driven in so deep that it was beyond the relief of tears; and the two phrases her mother had used, “That’s all you can expect in this world,” and “What’ll folks think?” turned themselves over and over, burrowing down into her mind and intrenchingthemselves there. She took a little tentative nibble of the cookie to comfort herself. It was good, very good.

Good? What did that remind Julie of? Oh, yes! Last Sunday’s Golden Text: “Overcome evil with good.” Ed Black was certainly evil in Julie’s eyes—then ought she to do good to him? A sudden idea jumped in her mind, choking her and making her clutch her cookie fast. It was an awful idea. She could not possibly do it. It would be a dreadful thing to do. How all the children would laugh! But just because it was so awful, and would bring public opinion so down on her, a stern compulsion to do it seized her.

A tyrant within rose up and challenged her: “You don’t dare to do it,” the tyrant taunted. “All the children will laugh at you—you don’t dare—” “I do dare! I do!” Julie cried back at the tyrant, a cold perspiration breaking out.

The bell was ringing for the afternoon session when she reached the schoolhouse, and the children were flocking up the steps to the door. Edward Black, big and untidy, stood on the top step. His hair was tousled, his coat torn; his hands were chapped and grimy with dirt. Through theparti-colored surge of children Julie pressed up to him, and held out her cookie.

“What’s that?” he demanded, bringing his scornful eyes down upon her.

“A cookie,” Julie wavered. “It’s—it’s good.”

“A cookie?” He snatched it from her. “Well, if you ain’t thebiggestlittle fool! Look a’ here!” he shouted. “Look what Julie Rose give me. A cookie! Haw! Haw! Haw!” He waved the gift for all to see, and his hoarse mirth ran down the line of children, in surprise, contemptuous laughter, and ejaculation. And only Julie’s shrinking and inadequate little body stood between her soul and the stabs of the other children’s derision. “Here—I don’t want anything fromyou!” Edward cried, and flung the cookie in her face. It struck her cheek and bounded from thence down to the dirty steps, where the oncoming children kicked at it, deriding it and trampling it into a pulp with the mud and snow on their shoes, while Edward Black went haw-hawing loudly into school.

“Julie! You are the biggest little idiot!” Henr’etta whispered, sharply, when they wereseated at their desks, and the school was quieting down. “What in the name of common sense made you go and give your cookie to that hateful piece when he’d been so mean to you?”

“It—it was the text,” Julie stammered.

“The text? What text? Quit shaking so, Julie! What text?”

“Last Sunday’s,” Julie gasped.

Henr’etta considered a moment. “Oh, that!” she said. “Well, you cer’nly are a goody-goody.”

“I’m not! I’m not!” Julie panted. “It wasn’t that—I—I had to do it.”

“Why? Why did you have to? Quit shaking, I tell you!”

“I had to because I was scared to,” Julie confessed miserably.

But this was beyond Henr’etta’s comprehension. It was really beyond Julie’s own. She did not know that she was already beginning to feel herself caught in the terrifying net of her own fears, and had made a futile leap for freedom. She only knew that something had made her do a dreadful thing at which all the children had laughed, just as she had known they would.

“Oh here, don’t cry, Julie!” Henr’etta whisperedhastily. “For the mercy sakes! Don’t go and cry now, right before the whole school. Here, look at the geography lesson—here, listen: ‘Principal rivers in West Virginia’—Oh, for goodness sake!”

For, despite the principal rivers, Julie had dropped her head upon the desk in front of her, bursting into a flood of tears; and again the eyes of all the school stabbed straight through her body, and down into her soul.

One may also see this fragile thread of life running back into Julie’s babyhood, mothered by her delicate and shrinking mother, and fathered by her big blustering father. Those were the days when Mr. Rose kept a small shop in the village, and when Julie’s earliest baby recollections were concerned with the many-colored things in the shop, and the mingled smell of raisins, tobacco, and peppermint candy, together with the dreadful tradition that a witch lived in the ginger-cake barrel, ready to snap out at a little girl who even so much as thought of helping herself in passing. That appeared to be the reason for their being called ginger-snaps.

But big and boastful as her father was, he was not a success at storekeeping, and by the time little Julie was five or six, her mother was taking table boarders “to help out.” She had been a school-teacher from one of the smaller cities in Virginia, and had trained herself to a rather prim mode of speech. Julie usually spoke as she did, but in moments of stress she was apt to break away to the mountain phraseology of her father’s people.

Julie’s father boasted largely of the things he meant to do in the business way, but always as the table boarders increased, the customers in the shop decreased, until finally, when Julie was ten or eleven, the shop was closed altogether, and her father had gone across the State line into West Virginia, to work in the lumber camps. There he made good money, for people said that Emmet Rose was a mighty fine hand in the woods; and he himself bragged that he could drop a tree within a foot of any spot he named. Thereafter, with the money coming regularly from the lumber camp, Mrs. Rose gave up most of the table boarders, and so had leisure to do fancy sewing, and to make pretty, sober littleclothes for Julie. The stitches in them were exquisite and sincere, but she never dressed Julie in bright colors. “No, I don’t like bright colors,” she was wont to say.

“But why, mother? Why?” Julie questioned.

“They’re so gay—” her mother hesitated; “I—I don’t know, but someway I don’t think they’re respectful to the Lord.”

Thereafter Julie went in fear of a jealous surveillance from on high. God became somewhat confused in her child mind with a chicken hawk. “Grandmaw Rose,” who had a little farm on the top of Slatty Mountain, said she didn’t hold with white chickens: they was too easy a mark for the hawk. This seemed to accord with her mother’s fear of bright colors. Apparently, up there in the wide stretches of the deep sky that Julie had always liked, there lurked a terrifying Power that might pounce dreadfully at any moment. Evidently the safest way to get through life was to slip by as unnoticed as possible, clad, if one were a chicken, in speckled gray feathers that faded easily from sight in the grass; or; if one were a little girl, ordering one’s self in the same humble and unobtrusive manner.

Julie felt worried about her father, there was so little of the discreet coloration about him. His necktie, when he wore one, could be seen half a mile, an easy mark for hawk or deity. His friends described him as a great big two-fisted Jim-bruiser of a man. He was boastful and loud, and would come roaring down the river with the log drives in spring, boisterous, gay, and apparently unafraid. During the summer months, when he was in Hart’s Run, their reserved little house rocked with his Homeric laughter, accompanying great stories of “Tony Beaver” who lives up “Eel River,”—where all the impossible things of the West Virginia lumber camps happen,—who is blood brother to “Paul Bunyan” of the Northern woods and who owns a yoke of oxen so big it takes a crow a week to wing the distance between the horns of one of them. But just because of his recklessness and daring laughter, Julie adored her father. Those were good days on the whole—her mother and herself snug and well provided for in the village, building up a gentle home-life, with the lumber-jack’s big personality off in the woods to roof it over securely.

But when Julie was sixteen, this period came to an abrupt end on a day in the woods, when a tree which Emmet Rose was felling failed to drop on the spot he had named, but fell instead upon him. They brought him home, out of the woods, to Hart’s Run—a painful journey—by way of tram cars and rough frozen roads with ice and skifts of snow in the ruts, with Sam Fletcher, who drove, feeling in his own body every dreadful jolt of the wagon; for, as he confided to his intimates, if there was one thing he did naturallydespise, it was haulin’ a crippled hand out of the woods.

Julie and her mother were dazed by the shock. Their scared faces fell into a mould of horror that did not lighten or relax when they spoke or even when they tried to smile. Their little hands shook, but they went on and did things efficiently and bravely. Emmet Rose watched them sadly out of his big face that was gaunt and curiously stretched with pain to a wider apprehension. Once when her mother was out of the room, he put out his uninjured hand to Julie and spoke darkly.

“It’s got me. I allus knew it would.”

Julie’s heart jumped violently. “What’s got you, pappy, honey?” she questioned, putting her hand in his.

“Life,” he answered. “It’s got me down at last. I allus knew it would. It gits every feller in the end. I stood up aginst it an’ fought it like a two-fisted man, but it’s got me, an’ now I’ll jist have to lay down on you women-folks. Don’t tell mammy—she’s scary enough anyhow.”

This admission was the climax of terror to Julie. She had always sheltered in her father’s loud confidence. To have him broken in body was frightful enough; to see his broken spirit laid bare, to know that always that sinister dread had lurked in the back of his mind, and that all his big bluster was just a cloak for it, seemed to take the roof from over her head, leaving her uncovered in a bleak world. Her heart beat so fearfully that the thin material of her blouse fluttered up and down. Nevertheless, she put her other hand, cold as it was, steadfastly over her father’s. “Never mind, pappy, honey!” she said. “Never mind. We’ll manage someway.”

He looked dimly at her white face with the big eyes, and felt the tremor of her fingers.

“Poor Julie,” he said. “Poor little Julie. I kind of hate to have life git a-hold of you.”

But after all Emmet Rose did not have to “lay down” long on his women-folks. A broken rib had pierced one lung, pneumonia set in, and five days after they brought him out of the woods his great body was stiff and tenantless, and Julie and her mother, two terrified little people, were left alone. Yet, for all their fear, with a dogged pertinacity they rebuilt their lives and struggled on, like a chess-player, who having lost his best piece still fights on with what the game has left to him.

Later on, when death swooped again and her mother was gone, Julie, frightened and alone, nevertheless rebuilt her life once more, and went on spinning her web of existence, supported by dressmaking and millinery which she had established in her father’s old shop, and protected from being quite alone by Aunt Sadie Johnson who rented one half of the house, and who was not Julie’s aunt at all, but was so old a friend of her mother’s that Julie had always called her so.

This is the thread of Julie Rose’s life, running on narrow and timorous lines back into the pastto her birth in Hart’s Run, and forward into the future, at the command of existence; and all along its pathway of the past and future one may see her small figure faring forth, as she weaves her strand in the pattern of humanity. All of it is of interest and of value in that pattern, but for the sake of winding some of the thread into a ball of narrative, one must pick it up definitely at one point and break off at another; therefore, to begin, let us pick it up on a June night in the summer of 1918, the year that Julie was thirty-two.

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