Now let us examine conditions not infrequent in the United States, by no means assigning wings to all English mining men, or hoofs to all Americans:
A prospector discovers mineralized rock. He locates one or more claims as controlled by the laws of the district where he is. Perhaps others also locate more ground. A little work is done, and then the claims are up for sale. A claim is perhaps sold for a few hundred to several thousand dollars; sometimes the seller receives in addition stock in the company to be formed. No attention is paid to the geology, but a company is formed ostensibly for the purpose of mining, with a capital of one million shares at one dollar par. Perhaps four hundred thousand shares are placed in the treasury to be sold for development purposes. Of course the whole thing is as yet on a wholly gambling basis. The property is still a prospect and not a mine, and hence it is not possible to put it on an investing basis. Comparatively few companies have ever used the services of a real expert, although very possibly the company furnishes a report made from a purchasable local "mining engineer," one of the cheapest commodities in any mining district, where the wide hat and the high-laced boot often take the place of a mining education and a reputable character. This is the stage at which, this is the basis on which, most of the mining "investments" of America are made.
In this state of affairs grafters find their opportunity. Prices in a boom camp are always above any sort of industrial warrant. There were literally millions of dollars poured into Goldfield and Tonopah for claims which never had any careful examination by competent men. Fortunes were made by local promoters and "operators" out of claims which could not show ten feet of actual work. Sometimes the entire capitalization was sold out, and the promoters put the money in their pockets. One operator of this kind sold $130,000 worth of stock, and omitted the precaution of putting even ten per cent. of it in the treasury. Fortunately, he got into the penitentiary. Many of his fellows never had actions brought against them except under the postal laws, which naturally are inefficient. There was one shaft of a hundred feet which cost twelve thousand dollars, charged up to the stockholders, the names of dead men being used on the pay rolls as "laborers." The mine boss and the local officers got big salaries to keep their mouths shut. The real mine was in the savings banks of America, in the pockets of non-residents. In Nevada alone, in the past four years, more than twenty million dollars have been invested in WORTHLESS properties. One engineer with a government certificate could have saved the clerks, stenographers, widows, washwomen, and orphans of America fifteen million dollars at the cost of, say, five thousand. Would that have been a good investment? What could a dozen do? What could an efficient corps do? Is there here yet one more future task for our patient and long-suffering United States Army? What police work would pay better dividends?
Even when the mine wins, the small stock-holder rarely wins. The promoters often take the cream. Suppose a company is organized for three million shares. One million is put in the treasury for sale. Of this million shares, say, two hundred thousand are offered at twenty-five cents. This raises a working capital of fifty thousand dollars. Let us be very glowing, and suppose that, with this fifty thousand dollars, we really uncover five million dollars' worth of ore. The net profit would not exceed three million dollars; so that the man who put in twenty-five cents might, after a long time, get back a dollar. In the meantime, two million dollars would have gone to promoters, in "commissions," and so forth. There are thousands of such cases, and still the people continue to bite on such bait.
Instances of actual Nipissing rises caught in time by the lamb are very rare. I rom first to last, the PUBLIC is the mine, AND THE RETURNS COME OUT OF THE SAVINGS BANKS. In some mines "high grading"—the carrying away of valuable pieces of ore by the miners themselves—is fought as sternly as the diamond stealing by the Kaffirs in a Kimberley mine. In yet other mines, far more numerous, high grading is encouraged among the miners. The report gets out that the ore is so rich that the miners steal it in their dinner pails. That booms the stock. WALL STREET MAKES THIS MONEY OUT OF THE MARKET AND NOT OUT OF THE MINE.
In spite of all warning and all examples, the average American will to a certain extent persist in gambling in mining stocks. Supposing this to be true, it is of value for the investor to learn something of the theory of mines, something enabling him to pass on the natural value of any mining stock which is offered to him. What, then, is a mine? What are some of the inevitable features in developing a mine?
In the first place, there must be prospecting. This is sheer and unavoidable risk on the face of it, and it is attended with economic waste which cannot be avoided. Of a hundred prospectors, ninety-nine die poor. The failures must be charged off to industrial waste attendant upon inherent conditions of the mining industry.
Again, in the development of a mine after it is located and proved in part, there is more unavoidable economic waste. The rock is blank and silent. It can only be explored by means of expensive drifts and drillings. In one mine at Bisbee, Arizona, a shaft was sunk which had drifts at the 600-and 900-feet levels, all without result. Later on they found a blanket of copper between those two levels, from which six million dollars were taken. Even in old established mines there is something of a chance, and there are often unwittingly false standards of values. Which is no argument for making all gamble that which originally was part gamble.
Any mine, no matter how rich, or how large, begins to be exhausted from the time the first pick is stuck into the ground and all its profits ought to be figured on the basis of diminishing deposits. When your deposit is drawn out, your bank does not honor your check. A mine is the reverse of a mortgage or a bond. The security does not remain stable nor increase in value, but, on the contrary, CONTINUALLY DECREASES in value. In a mortgage, six per cent. is wisdom; in a mining return, it is folly. A mine, instead of being figured on the basis of a mortgage, ought to be figured on the basis of a term annuity. That is to say, on the basis of a wiping out date. When the mine is done paying dividends, there is no return of the face of the principal invested. Yet the great and gullible public forgets this all-important fact, which differentiates mining from every other form of business.
There is every probability that the average investor never heard of a proper "amortization charge" in the management of a mine. Until he shall have heard of it, until he shall have learned something of the terms of life annuities, he ought never to invest a cent in any mining stock. After he actually has learned the theory of amortization, he will observe that ALMOST EVERY MINING STOCK LISTED IN PUBLIC PRINTS IS SELLING AT AN INFLATED VALUE. That is to say, even the best and most stable of mines are overrated, not to mention the purely wildcat ventures. Some mines may naturally be long-lived, others short-lived; yet, if either pays a good, stiff dividend, THE PUBLIC MAKES NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE TWO and will buy the stock of either. In this investing, the public has no protection on the part of the government, on the part of honest publicity, or on the part of its own careful education.
In the MAJORITY of cases, a mine ought to pay annually perhaps twenty per cent. of the investment, to be profitable. That is to say, the actual value of any mine is rarely over five times actual dividends paid after expenses of operation. How many mines are capitalized on any such real basis as that? The answer lies in our own ignorance, and in the shrewdness of the men who sell us mining stocks. Stocks that are the best dividend-payers often sell at TEN or TWELVE times the face of the annual dividends. Let the mine hit a brief streak of bonanza, and the stocks will climb yet higher. We buy such stocks, or worse; but even a fundamental acquaintance with the theory of mines would show us that such an investment is usually a bad one. In a mortgage we do not look to the interest to pay us back our principal; in a mine we MUST look to DIVIDENDS to pay us back our PRINCIPAL AND INTEREST also. When the mine is done, our principal is gone. But how many mining investors ever thought of that? And how many, when offered a ten per cent. "guaranteed dividend" for five years on their money, ever stop to reflect that, for instance, I could take your money and put it in a cracker box, and myself make money by paying it back to you, ten per cent. a year for nine years—and then explaining what had happened to the cracker box! Now, most of us are just such cracker-box investors. We pay out millions and millions annually, just that foolishly. And our nation, our states, allow us to do it. They even—as recent legal proceedings prove—allow the "inside" operating stockholders to borrow money to pay dividends to the "outsiders." That keeps up the "values" in the market. It does not enhance the real value in the mine.
Again, granted even a valid and a well-managed mine, how much information regarding it does the average investor in the stock secure? In a general way, he knows in advance that all mining, whether placer or quartz, is very expensive. Beyond that, he gets the annual report of the officers, which will tell perhaps the names of the men who are spending his money, the total earnings, the total output, the balance sheet, the statement of capital stock issued—and little else. All of which means nothing!
A well-regulated English company is obliged to go much farther than this. A good annual report will show the advertisement of the general meeting of stockholders, the list of directors and officers, reports of directors, giving details of the condition of property, including the development work, the tonnage of production, the values recovered from such tonnage, the costs of operation, the profits for the period covered, the balance sheet of accounts, the profit and loss statement, including a working cost estimate, the appropriation list showing what has been done with all the earnings, the reports of managers giving details of the development work, the estimated values of ores EXPOSED ON THREE SIDES, the probable values of ores not so well exposed, the working expenses, the construction account, general remarks on the physical condition of the property, and a map of the property itself.
What American promoter would trouble himself to make such a showing as that to the American sucker? Even if such detailed information existed in the records of the average American mining concern, the sucker could not get access to the books even did he have the temerity to demand it.
Professor H. S. Munroe, of the Columbia School of Mines, when asked whether such a thing as general supervision of mining investment could be possible, answered: "Yes, if some philanthropist will give us ten millions to endow such an institution, and maintain a corps of engineers in the field who will do work similar to that accomplished by J. Curle under the auspices of the London Economist. Such work should, of course, cover all incorporated mining companies, not merely a few hundred of the more prominent gold mines; and it should be continuous and not spasmodic. Such a plan is of course Utopian, but I feel that anything less would be likely to do little good. Even Curle's opinions began to lose their value within a month or two after they were written, and are of less value every year. Mining can never be put on the same basis as agriculture, for the reason that the risk of failure is infinitely greater, and that it is impossible to prove the value of any mine or mining region without spending a large amount of capital, the greater part of which will inevitably be lost in this work of initial development."
Those are the sober words of an expert who spends his life in studying the theory and practice of mining. If such words shall teach us a little wisdom, so much the less need for laws. But let us consider what the laws ought to do in order to protect you for the sake of your family, and for the sake of society, and for the sake of the savings which lie back of the prosperity of this country.
Let us agree that no government can guarantee the safety of any investment. Let us admit that digging gold can never be put on the same amortization basis with digging potatoes, for instance, because the soil remains for more potatoes, whereas the ore of a mine is exhausted and does not raise more ore. Nevertheless, although the industries of potato growing and ore digging are not the same, the principles lying back of them ought to be precisely the same; and our governments, both state and national, ought to see to it that they are kept precisely the same, and controlled on the same plane legally. If it be true that no government can watch after every mine, none the less any enlightened government can establish general conditions for engaging in mining or engaging in the sale of mining stock; and, perhaps with yet better results, it can establish a general supervision over the mining intelligence of the public, just as it does over the agricultural intelligence of that public.
The enactment of good mining laws, punishing the proved intent to commit a fraud as well as the fraud itself, and seeing to it that capital stock shall be paid up, seeing to it also that all moneys spent by a mining corporation shall be traceable from start to finish, is the natural first step toward the purification of American mining methods. Beyond that, the national government could take a hand in the game through a federal Bureau of Mines. There must be some clearing-house of intelligence and of values in this country, some place from which our intelligence may start and to which it may return. The public must have accessible reports of engineers, state or federal, of a sort entitled to confidence.
The nest of vermin in our large cities, inhabited by those who make a living out of the ignorance and eagerness of small investors, must be smoked out once and for all. In this work, state and national governments, popular education and intelligence, and the aid of the better class journalism of America, all must be enlisted. The pages of our press might well be far cleaner than they are. The publication which prints the advertisements of a fake-mining enterprise is itself a party to the fraud. A Bureau of Mines chief can sit behind the desk of every advertising manager in the counting-rooms of every newspaper and magazine in America. The press of this country, when it likes, can, by taking thought, somewhat dim the splendor of the mahogany in many an elegant suite of offices in New York, Boston, or elsewhere. It can reduce the reckless and senseless expenditure of ill-gained wealth which is making civilization a mockery in America, and branding our republican form of government as a failure.
We will have a different way of life, or another form of government. We will have a better administration of law in the United States or we will have another political party, possibly another political system. We will clear up this rotten society, or we will try how we like a different organization of society. The people of America are beginning to murmur. The burden of the murmur is that they have long enough been betrayed. Unspeakable injustice has been done the people of America under the forms of law and government. It is coming to be said that our law and government have not an even hand for all, that a few are allowed to despoil the many. When a people murmurs, let a government beware. Meantime the more that certain unspeakable things are reduced in, and eliminated from, Wall Street and the other "financial centers," the better for our schools, our taxes, our farming, our industry, our living, our CHARACTER, our country.
After all, the government of this country, as we now have it organized, depends on the CHARACTER of its average individual citizen. The end of this abuse of fake-mining enterprises begins now, here, with you and me, in OUR intelligence, in OUR love of a square game. By taking thought we can add a cubit to our OWN stature, and so add to the stature of OUR laws and of our national morality.
As for you and me, when next we see the flaming advertisement advising us that the Madre d'Oro, Montezuma's fabled Mother Vein of Gold, has once more come to the surface of the earth on Manhattan Island or near Plymouth Rock; when next we read counsel that because mining pays in Michigan it ought to pay in Nevada; when next we are advised to get into the game at once because this is our LAST CHANCE—we might at least ask to see the report of the engineer, likewise the record and antecedents of the engineer; and many, many other things. Perchance we might write and ask the mining promoter what, in his belief, is the proper amortization charge in his particular mine. At which the average mining promoter would probably fall dead.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910
HOW THE MAN CAME TO TWINKLING ISLAND {page 64-73}By MELVILLE CHATER
OUT of the great world came a man to the wooing of Susanna Crane. From the vague southwest he came, now skirting the chimneyed towns and elm-bordered village streets, now exchanging the road for the bright rails and perhaps the interior of a droning freight-car, now switching anew through the edge of odorous pine woods, yet leaving behind him always a wary, broken trail.
The man was tall and strong, with hair that gleamed red in the sun, and eyes of a reddish brown. He walked with the free swing of a world wanderer, yet always his heart strained for a glimpse of the Canadian border; for some hundreds of miles behind him lay the Vermont marble quarries whose dust still faintly blanched his clothes, and there, in a drunken flight, he had killed a man. He did not know that in fleeing from justice he was rushing into the arms of love; he did not even know that he was in the Ragged Woods, with Twinkling Island just off the coast; he only studied the tree bark and snuffed the breeze, and knew that the sea was near. At length, well satisfied with the distance he had come since dawn, he cleared a space among the pine cones, then lay down, and, lulled by the ancient whisper of the wind in the treetops, closed his eyes.
He was of the Ulysses breed, this man, a wanderer of the earth, acquainted with many cities, one whose shipwrecks and misfortunes had but whetted his love of life; and even while he slept, there came upon him, as of old Nausicaa came upon Ulysses, a woman. She, too, was straight and strong; her dark face was framed by a blue-checked sunbonnet; she carried a large basket filled with blackberries, and her lips as well as her hands were stained. She saw the man lying in a shaft of the sunset, and started back, then, tiptoeing past, bent forward slightly to examine his face. In that lingering gaze a twig cracked beneath her foot. He sat up instantly, tense, expectant; then for a silent space their eyes caught and clung. Thus the first pair might have gazed when Adam wakened to find her who was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, standing over him.
"Did I scare you, Miss?" at length asked the Man. "I thought—well, I didn't know who you might be at first." His gaze deepened into unconcealed admiration. "I wouldn't scare YOU for anything!"
"I ain't so easy scairt," the girl returned defiantly. "Ef I was," she went on in her fresh, young voice, full of queer, upward inflections, "I wouldn't be a-berryin' in Ragged Woods after sundaown."
She marched onward, her head thrown well back. Twenty steps later the Man was again at her side.
"Pardoname, little one!" he said. "But, seein' you ain't scared, an' thar bein' no blaze in these yere parts, maybe you'd put us on the trail. Guess I'd a-gone on siesterin' till midnight if you hadn't a-happened by—gracias a Dios!"
Her glance shot suspicion at him as though she scented banter in the strange, foreign phrases; then she said:
"Ef you mean you wanter git to Potuck, whar the railroad starts, you've got to walk three miles back to the Potuck Road; then it's three miles west to Potuck taown."
"An' what lies on ahead, whar you're goin'?" he asked.
"Why, nothin'," she returned with a child's surprised simplicity."Nothin' but Twinklin' Island an' father an' me."
There was silence then, but the Man watched the strong, straight lines of her face, her keen black eyes, her wealth of black hair tumbled into the back-fallen sunbonnet. At length he said quietly:
"Think I'll g'long over with you to your island, camarada. Maybe your father's got a bite o' something for a hungry man. I pay the freight, sabe? 'Twon't take me more'n a couple o' hours to make the railroad to-night."
To this she vouchsafed nothing, but swung onward, shifting her heavy basket from one hand to the other; then a strong grasp intervened, and she found herself burdenless. In the village streets of Potuck and Nogantic, shamefaced lads had offered such help a hundred times, and she had accepted it, flattered by their homage; but the quick, silent action of this big, red-haired man thrilled her with strange anger.
"I don't want no help," she said proudly, "I kin carry that."
"Not while I'm here, chiquita mia!" He smiled downward, and his body seemed to loom over her like a shield. "Say, when I woke up an' seen you, do you know what come into my head? A little Navajo squaw I knowed once. Her name was Moonlight Water, but the fellers called her Little Peachey. But she was twenty-five, and you—well, now, how old might you be?"
"Goin' on eighteen," she would have answered nonchalantly to any one else; for him there woke from the depths of her nature a fierce retort:
"Give us that basket! I ain't a-goin' to let you carry it a speck further."
"ALL right," he acquiesced with broad, kind humor, vet without relinquishing his burden. "ALL right, chiquita mia! Never you mind me, Little Peachey!"
They gained a bare tongue of land lapped by water. She stepped into a canoe, the Man following. Very quickly he took the paddle from her and put forth with strong, practiced strokes, cheering himself onward with snatches of a queer, guttural burden which he had picked up from a negro chantey-singer on some Southern cotton-wharf.
Straight ahead lay the island, breasting the Atlantic swell. Seen from the distant hills, the red sunset strikes its outpost cliffs for a moment's splendor, and so it is called Twinkling Island. The girl said not a word, nor indeed was it necessary. He found the beach without trouble, helped her ashore, and carried the canoe up the slope on his back. A hundred yards onward they encountered a low, rambling house and the vague shape, in the twilight, of an elderly man smoking his pipe on the steps.
The stranger set down the canoe and gave an account of himself. But even as the great Ulysses was wont to name a false lineage and give a feigned story to his hosts, so this man said his name was McFarlane—which it was not—and told a wily tale of having been directed to a logging camp where hands were needed, of alighting at the wrong station and losing his way in an attempted short cut through the woods. Meanwhile his listener, a man of weather-beaten face and a great shock of gray hair, observed him with shrewd attention. At length he replied:
"Thar's few strangers git to Twinkling Island; but so long as you're here, you're welcome to our plain victuals. The money's neither here nor thar. Git supper, daughter. Seems you're mighty particular to git that canoe high an' dry to-night."
The girl wheeled abruptly and strode indoors, flashing at the stranger a covert, half-defiant glance.
"Gals are queer cattle," mused old Crane, drawing off his fisherman's boots. " 'Pears to give 'em a kind o' satisfaction to set a man to work. Her mother was just the same, before her."
The guest said nothing; but the realization that the girl who had grudged his taking her basket had afterward suffered him to carry her canoe quite an unnecessary distance, seemed to yield him no unpleasant thoughts.
They sat down to supper in a low'ceiled room of smoked rafters. The stranger ate hungrily and with few words, yet always his gaze followed the girl's slim figure as she moved to and fro, waiting on the board. As the food disappeared, the talk sprang up. The girl brought in a huge pitcher of cider and left the men by the fireplace, while she passed back and forth, clearing away the dishes. Crane set out a decanter of whisky, which spirit he mixed sparingly with his cider, as did also his guest—none too sparingly.
Now was the Man's heart loosened, and he told of all he had seen and done and lived; of his spendthrift youth, passed aboard tramp freighters between Lisbon and Rio, Leith and Natal, Tokyo, Melbourne and the Golden Gate—wherever the sea ran green; of ginseng-growing in China, shellac gathering in India, cattle-grazing in Wyoming. He spoke of Alaskan totem-poles, of Indian sign language, of Aztec monoliths buried in the forest. He sang "Lather an' Shavin's," "La Golondrina," "The Cowboy's Lament," and, clicking his fingers castanet-wise, hummed little Spanish airs whose words he would by no means translate.
Crane marveled that this man should be still on the hitherward side of thirty; and as the stranger sat there, his very clothes, poor rags of civilization, seemed to bulk with heroic lines, his face to reflect man's primal freedom, while his every word rang with the sheer joy of the things he had seen and known.
At a break in the talk, the girl, who, though she had constantly busied herself about the room, had missed not a word, nodded significantly to her father, then walked from the house and out into the night. He glanced after her for a moment, then turned with a queer smile.
"We're all 'baout the same, I reckon," he said, "so far as furren countries is consarned. That's to say, a man allaways conceits thar's a heap o' promise waitin' for him, somewhar over yonder. Naow, you've seen sights enough for a hundred men. Contrariwise, thar's my gal—never been further'n the Caounty Fair. But that don't stop her; no sirree, human nature can't be stopped. Every night, fair or storm, she walks daown an' sits on the rocks, lookin' seaward, before she turns in. She's done it ever since she was SO high. Why, thar's nothin' to see but the Atlantic an' a piece o' foreland to the northwest! But her fancy is, the sea's a-bringin' her somethin'—that's what she used to say as a kid—somethin', she don't rightly know what.Isay it's just furren countries—pieces she's got outer story books, an' yarns she's heard the fishermen tell—that's what's she's hankerin' for, Mr. McFarlane. So ye see, as I say, we're all 'baout the same, that way."
"When I first seen her," began the Man tentatively, "I could ha' sworn that—See here, now! Ain't thar still the leavin's of a redskin outfit up this way?"
"Why, yes," returned the other, with some compunction. "I don't talk much 'baout it—not that it's a thing to he ashamed of; but I wouldn't give the gal a handle to think herself different from any one else hereabout. The truth is, her mother's mother was pretty near to a full-blooded Ojibway—not the kind you've seen plaitin' baskets for summer boarders, but a clean, straight-backed red woman, an' she claimed descent from one o' their big chiefs. I'm English stock myself, but the wild breed mixes slow: it's in her blood, Mr. McFarlane, and sometimes it worrits me. Thar's days she won't speak nor eat, but just goes off to the woods an' makes little trinkets out o' pine needles an' bark, and then I know the fit's on her. And proud! Thar's not a man hereabout she'd lift an eye at, and one feller that wouldn't take "no" got his head split open with an oar. Sometimes I've thought that ef she was married to a strong man—strong AND kind, d'ye see?—'twould be the best thing for her."
At this the stranger, who had missed no word, leaned quickly forward, the firelight striking his firm face. With the poise of conscious power he said quite simply:
"I'm the man!"
They eyed each other a moment, Crane measuring the Man who had come, the Man inviting measurement.
"You mean—?" asked the father. He paused as if welcoming interruption, but it was not in this man's slow, sure nature to interrupt. "Tell us what you do mean!"
"I mean," repeated the other slowly, "that I'M THE MAN! I love that little gal, I want to marry her. O' course you objeck: that's natural, that's right. I like your objectin', an' I'm going to fight it to a show-down. First you'll say, `You're verruckt—crazy.' See hyar now! I've lived life, I have, and I've seen a drove o' women, hither an' yon, but not one of 'em could hold me, no more'n an ordinary slipknot could hold stuff on a packsaddle. I'm no lightweight, an' I need the diamond hitch. But to-day, when I seen Little Peachey in the scrub over yonder, why, it was different, and I knowed it right quick. Ever broke a horse, have you? Well, before you've got your lassoo coiled, the critter's eyes'll tell you just what sort o' tea-party you're goin' to have. Thar was a man once—a hoss wrangler—an' the easier a hoss broke, the more he'd mouch around an' hang his head, real melancholy and sad-eyed. The only minutes o' slap-bang-up joy that came his way was when he corralled a bucker whose natural ability to roll on him an' kick his brains out left no percentage o' chance in the player's favor. Maybe that's what I seen in Little Peachey to-day. Just now you said the wild breed mixes slow. It does: for it sticks out, waitin' for its own kind. And by that same token, blood talks to blood—aye, even without no Indian sign-language. Maybe all these years Little Peachey, settin' out on them rocks, has been a-watchin' for more than foreign countries."
"Aye, mebbe that's all right." Crane paced the floor, and his voice rose savagely: "Don't know but what your palaver mightn't win plenty o' foolish gals. But who are ye? What's your trade? Whar's your folks? Thar's lots o' rogues afoot. Do you allow I'd let the first stranger in Ragged Woods talk marriage to my daughter? What have you said? What's between you? Out with it, or I'll have you in Rockledge Jail by to-morrow morning!"
The Man who had come nodded response with imperturbable gravity.
"I like your talk," he said. "It comes straight off the hip, an' it calls for a straight answer. What have I spoke to her? Nothin'! What's between us? Nothin' but the makin's! Next, touchin' myself: Since sixteen I've been kickin' up the dust o' the earth till my home is anywhar immediately convenient. Once I had a brother in New Orleans, another in the Northwest, and another who drank himself accidentally into the British army an' died in the Sudan. We were wanderers, the lot of us. I'm Scotch-Irish, and my old mother used to claim we harked back to the kings o' some outfit I've forgotten. But blood-facts is no more proof than specimens from an unprospected claim. Friends? I make 'em everywhar: any one on the top o' the earth who's got the makin's of a man kin call me friend. Yet right here an' now I wouldn't touch the twelve apostles for an assay on my character. 'Cause why? 'Cause I hold that, just like a man lays in his own little square o' earth, so a man stands alone on his own little piece o' reputation. Good or bad, friends or no friends, it's his'n; and the Almighty files a pretty good chart of it right on his face. I want you to size me up accordingly."
Again the father gazed deeply at the Man who had come, and again the Man gave him the full of his eyes. Crane's glance shifted suspiciously from the other's face to the decanter and back again; the Man immediately responded by lifting his glass.
"Fill that up three times raw," he said, "and I'll swaller it in three breaths, just to show you what a drink IS. No, sir, it's hot your picayune drop o' spirits that's talkin'—it's me. Acabado! Finished!" And, tossing the contents of his glass into the fire, he replaced it upside down on the table.
"Yes," said Crane wonderingly, "you're sober—and you're honest. You certainly are honest!" He paused as if to steel himself. "But what o' that? Why should you come between me and my child in one night, after these twenty years we've spent—we've spent—" Simultaneously his words failed and his shoulders drooped. "See here, now: Stay along and work for me awhile. I'll give you half shares in the boat. But just wait, wait awhile. Some day you'll speak to her about it, and then—then mebbe I'll see it different."
But the Man rose restively.
"It comes hard on you," he mused, "aye, mighty hard; but it ain't all my doin', Mr. Crane, nor yet Little Peachey's. It's something bigger'n the lot of us: it's nature. You might as well put your back up against a landslide. As to stayin' on here, 'tain't in me: I must hit the trail to-morrow morning. But to-night thar's somethin' in here"—-and he struck his breast—"that won't keep: it's got to be said. I've spoken my little piece, an' you say you size me for a man. Bien! Bein' a man, I take no favors. No sir, I ain't no empty-handed brave. Little Peachey bein' the squaw for me, an' I havin' told you so, an' smoked your tobacco an' drunk your whisky, I hereby deliver."
He drew out a roll of bills and tossed them upon the table, observing whimsically:
"Two hundred an' thirty-odd dollars, honestly come by, an' all the estate, real or otherwise, whereof I stand possessed. Money talks. Take it; it's yours. An' now I'm goin' to find Little Peachey."
He strode out into the night and toward the forelands, his ears guided by the monotonous crash and moan of the long Atlantic swell.
Standing on the cliff was a wind-fluttered figure that turned at the sound of his step, with eyes defiantly alert.
"You knew I'd come," he said simply, drawing close to her. "Peachey, little Peachey, what's them waves a-sayin' to the rocks? It's: `ME! YOU! ME! YOU!' Ain't they always been a-sayin' it? Kin you stop 'em, little Peachey? And that's the words I'm a-standin' here now fer to say to you."
"I ain't a-goin' to listen," she cried sharply, drawing back. "I don't want none o' your words. You just leave me alone, now, Mister—Mister——"
"Why, names don't count between us, chiquita," said he, with his great-hearted smile. "I'm just a man, I am, an' you're just a woman; and rightly I don't know no name for the thing that's been a-callin' between us ever since I seen you in the woods. But I kin see it in your face, Peachey, an' you kin see it in mine; it's a-lookin' at me through them eyes o' yourn——"
"Don't you look at me!" she cried, flinging an arm across her face. "I hate you, you—Man. Don't you come near me, naow! I hate you, I could kill you!"
But he only smiled down upon her kindly, understandingly.
"That's what the father said—aye, or somethin' mighty like it; but I told him, I wrastled with him till he savvied. And—makin' no secrets between us, Peachey—I paid him two hundred dollars down, to call it quits. Why, what's a few dollars? They don't cut no figure between you and me, 'cause I love you, little Peachey, an' I know right down in your heart you love me, too."
His voice quivered deeply as he drew near and laid his hands on her shoulders.
Instantly she raised her face, and their glances met in one quick flare. He felt her shiver in his grasp like some panic-stricken animal, then she turned and fled from him.
He followed, calling after her to stop; yet the lust of the chase swelled within him, and he knew he but loved this woman the more that she was not lying tamed within his arm. Breasting the house, he saw that she had swerved toward the island's long, leeward neck, from whence there was thrown a narrow pile-bridge connecting it with the mainland. His feet rang on the planks as she gained the opposite shore; and his heart laughed with joy, for he divined the instinct that had called her, not to her father's side, but to the mysterious heart of the woods.
Now he felt beneath him the soft pad of pine needles, little twigs switched his face, and warm, odorous airs breathed their welcome. Through the dimness he saw her gain the crest of a ridge, running lightly with long strides, and, as he reached the spot, from the hollow beneath there rang her voice flung back in mocking laughter. By the trail's wide curve and the shelving land he perceived that they were skirting the edge of inland waters; more than this he knew nothing save that, through vista after vista, mile by mile, her flying feet beckoned him onward, and that her heart was singing to his the last wild defiance of the almost-won.
At a sharp turn he came suddenly upon a cleared space shoring along the water's edge, lit by a blazing camp-fire. Within the circle of the glow she stood, a spent, panting figure, half supported by two men. A hunting-dog dashed forward, menacing the oncomer with stiffened back and bared teeth. The man strode into the group and said with quiet courtesy:
"Good evening, gentlemen. I am glad you rounded her up, for both consarned. Peachey, my hat's off to you an' all your tribe: you'd have run till you dropped. I see, gentlemen, that you're sizin' me up, which is natural an' gratifyin'. But things is square an' satisfactory between me and her, I do assure you."
The younger of the two—a tall, keen-faced man of city-bred appearance—turned to the girl and said with irritation:
"I don't understand. What does he mean? Are you his wife?"
She was leaning against a tree, her face averted. "No!" she panted vehemently. "No, no!"
"Tell yer it's Crane's gal," insisted the second man. "They live over yonder on the island. I pointed it aout a-comin' through the woods, the day you landed up here, Mr. Hemsley."
"Have you any claim on this girl?" demanded Hemsley, wheeling upon the stranger.
"Touchin' claims," returned the other, with sure emphasis, "I am not for filin' mine with the first party immediately convenient. The claim is filed O. K. elsewhere, and at present, as you're prospectin' on the hither side o' my line, I'll put one straight question to you: Did, or did not, Little Peachey ask you for protection?"
"Why, no," retorted Hemsley, a trifle confused, "she didn't—not in so many words." He turned to the girl. "Who is this man? Tell me everything; you needn't be afraid, Miss Crane."
"I'm not afraid!" she flashed sullenly. "He was a-layin' in Ragged Woods this afternoon, an' he carried my berry basket home an' stayed to supper. And afterward he caught hold o' me, he did, an' tried to kiss me; an' I ran away 'cause—'cause I hate him. I hate him!"
Her shrill cry ended in a passionate gesture. Wheeling, she marched down the slope to the water's edge, where she stood looking out into the night. All at once the man threw his face up to the sky and burst into a great roar of laughter.
"Right you are, Little Peachey!" he called. "Thar ain't no more to be said than that—just you an' me in the Ragged Woods at sundown. An' now—Blessed if we ain't downright stampeded! It's a reg'lar round-up, Peachey!" And he laughed again uncontrollably.
"Well," said Hemsley at length, "I don't like the looks of things, and I'm going to make it my business to take Miss Crane home to her father. I advise you not to make any trouble until you've proved who you are. Rockledge County Jail is only six miles away."
The other sobered to a statue, then turned, regarding Hemsley with mild fixity.
"Gentlemen," he said, "gentlemen both. I ain't askin' for your help, and, as far as I can see, neither is Peachey. I mean it. Gentlemen, a mule is a most onsafe critter. Even when you go to his funeral, you'll do well to sit at the head of the coffin."
Then all three turned quickly, for there had arisen from below the sound of a grating keel.
"That settles it," said Hemsley with dry satisfaction. "Miss Crane has gone home in the canoe. So much the better: I'm not looking for trouble." And he turned away.
But the Man gave one great laugh, then he was off like a shot, down the slope and into the water. At shoulder-depth he overtook the canoe and clung to its stern.
"Go up forward, Little Peachey," he cried, "an' sit mighty still till I swing in, else we'll be swimmin' in another minute. There!"
And drawing himself up over the stern, he seized the paddle, while the canoe leaped forward beneath his powerful strokes. From somewhere along the shore came the sound of voices, but the camp-fire blazed deserted. Gradually its light diminished to a twinkling spark in the blackness. For a while no word was spoken, the man bending to his task, the girl crouching with averted face in the extreme bow. Then a little new moon peered over the distant pine tops, the heavens spread their starry veil, and the hour of Susanna Crane's wooing had come.
"Me! You!" intoned the Man, to the sweep of his paddle. "Me! You! That's what the waves were sayin', that's what you kep' a-callin' to me through the woods, that's what the stars are writin' on the sky—Me! You! Big Chief, oh, you heap Big Chief, somewhar up yonder, ain't you l'arned me some things this day? Peachey, me and another man, down in the marble quarries, got fightin' in liquor, an' he drew a gun on me, an' I killed him with it. Then I got away quick and careless-like; but the Big Chief he leads me up here an' sets me in the woods, an' sends you along the trail. An' while I'm lyin' thar asleep, He tells me in a dream, `You proud man! You unbroke bucker! Maybe you kin kill a man, but I've got my own good way o' tamin' you and bringin' you home.' Blood for blood I thought He meant, but I wakes up and—Que gracia!—thar you stands. And your face it says to me, `Come on, you wicked, red-handed man. God's a-callin'.' And I says to myself real sudden, like I was at a camp meetin', `Praise God!' Then, when we ran into the camp, just now, who was thar but Hemsley, the county sheriff, whose deputies have been after me for a week! Maybe the Big Chief's savin' me to l'arn me something more. So again I says, `Praise God!'
"Will you travel with me, camarada?" he went on. "The whole big world's waitin' for us. I kin read an' write, an' my arms are strong. We'll ride the plains an' climb the hills an' swim in the rivers, and when you're tired I'll carry you on my shoulder. Then we'll take in the big, flat cities, Little Peachey, an' walk around 'em at night, lookin' on friendly. Yes, we'll drop in at all of 'em, stringin' out across the country like sideshows on the old Chicago Midway. And one o' these days, when we're gittin' real old, we'll pull up stakes an' start off to locate our last campin' ground. Thar ain't no maps nor surveys to it; it's just somewhar over yonder, and we'll know it on sight, Little Peachey. Maybe it's some picayune island chucked into the middle o' the ocean, with one high rock whar we can sit and watch the sun a-risin' an' the sun a-settin', an' the seagulls flyin'. And we'll talk over old times, Little Peachey, an' we'll just sit an' watch an' wait thar together till—till thar ain't nothin' left at all, only the rocks an' the sky an' the gulls a-screamin' at the sea.
"Peachey, a man read me some pieces out o' a book once, and I wrote 'em down an' learned 'em.
" `For springtime is here,' it says, `thou soul unloosened—the restlessness after I know not what. Oh, if we could but fly like a bird! Oh, to escape, to sail forth as on a ship!' Camarada, give me your hand. I will give you myself, more precious than money. Will you give me yourself? Will you travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"
The chant of his voice died away upon the night, and there was no sound but the soft ripple of the water under keel. In the bow sat the girl, motionless as a crouched Indian, her face fixed upon the nearing shore.
As the water shoaled, the Man stroked powerfully, landing the canoe sternforemost; then he stepped forth, drew it along the bank, and said:
"Camarada, give me your hand!"
But already the girl had risen, steadying herself with the bow paddle. With a sinuous movement she eluded his arms, and fled; then voices woke amid the pines, and the Man strode forward, to find his way blocked by two men holding the sobbing girl between them.
"I've seen enough of this," said Hemsley, facing him, "to know what you are. Miss Crane, can you find your way home alone? Jim, you and I will walk this man over to Rockledge."
"Peachey!" called the Man, retreating instantly. "Come on over here; thar's goin' to be trouble. Git behind me, Little Peachey!"
In the landing place there was driven a heavy stake. He drew this forth, then advanced, saying earnestly:
"Gentlemen both, you size me up wrong. Now, I ain't lookin' for trouble, but don't you bank too strong on takin' me anywhar with you to-night."
Hemsley's right hand drew backward, then came the level glitter of a long revolver barrel. "Drop that!" he began.
But suddenly something flashed before his face, and the keen edge of a boat-paddle bit numbingly into his extended hand; then the girl darted forward to where the revolver lay glistening among the pine needles.
"Well struck, Little Peachey," cried the Man; and he stepped protectingly in front of her, with upraised stake. But she stood from behind him and leveled the revolver full at Hemsley.
"I don't want your help," she said. The words came torn from her in sobbing whispers. "Git! Don't you come back no more. Don't you send no one lookin' for this man. I kin take care o' myself, I guess."
And the look in her eyes warned them to go. Now the Man and theWoman were alone in the black hush of the pine woods.
"I saved you," she said at length; "now go away from here. Yes, go!" And as her face lifted defiantly to his, her voice slid upward like the lonely, untamed wail of some wild creature. "Go back from whar you come! Don't you never let me see your face again, nor hear you speak; don't you never touch me no more, you Man! 'Cause I'm scairt o' you, I am; 'cause you're big an' strong, an' you'd forgit a gal like me. 'Cause I hate you, an' I hate myself!"
For an instant the man gazed at her, perplexed, irresolute; then he took her right hand and guided it until the revolver muzzle touched his forehead.
"Peachey," he whispered tenderly, "you hate me—but could you kill me; Little Peachey?" And he smiled his great, full-hearted smile.
Then her hand fell, her head sunk upon his breast, and a strong shuddering filled all her young body.
"Oh, Man, Man!" she breathed, as his arms closed about her.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910 {pages 74-83}
By Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke
Authors of "Return, A Story of the Sea Islands," etc.
"Is Ellen worse to-day?" The opening and closing of the front door brought in a swirl of red and yellow leaves from the porch outside. There came, too, a breath of sharp, sweet October air to tired little Mrs. Kendrick where she paused, foot on stair, the tray steadied in her hand, looking back at her husband.
"No. It's just that I got Mary Louise Jackson to come over and play with her. I can't ask Aunt Dicey to wait on a negro child like Ma'Lou is, and she's got to eat with Ellen; so I'm——"
"So you're waiting on her yourself," supplied Kendrick, hanging up a shabby overcoat on the hall rack.
"I'd do more than that to keep her here," his wife returned almost fiercely. "I tell you nobody knows till they've tried it what it is to have a child like Ellen, always lonesome and pining for company, and quarreling with every girl that comes about her. Sometimes I think it would be better if we moved away from Watauga. Everybody pities her—they all notice that she's backward in her studies—how can she help it, poor dear, with that hip joint the way it is?"
Kendrick came closer; he laid a kind arm along the frail, bent shoulders of his wife, and her senses were aware of the fresh outdoor air as he put his cool cheek to hers. "Don't you grieve, Fanny," he said. "Ma'Lou's a good companion for Ellen. The kid's better trained and better educated than half the white girls of her age in Watauga. If things go well, in a year or two we'll send Nellie to Baltimore and see what the big man there can do for her. You shall have a daughter that can dance like you used to, honey," and he patted her shoulder gently.
She turned with a little, gasping sigh to put up her tired face for his kiss. "You're good, Scott," she murmured, then went more cheerfully upstairs and to Ellen's room, glancing as she entered at the two girls, who were playing happily with paper dolls.
"Here's your feast," she called to them in the gay tone we use with sick children. "Come, Ellen. I'll go down and give your father his dinner, and you two can play any kind of party you want to with this."
The little girl with skin like white cotton cloth rolled her big, gray eves toward the tray and asked listlessly, "What you got for dinner, ma?" The brown-skinned one, tidily dressed from her carefully combed head with its crisp, black mass that was scarcely hair, held in place by spick-and-span hair ribbons, to the toes of her stout, handsome shoes, got up quickly and came forward to arrange the meal.
"They's molasses pie, Nell," Ma'Lou said joyously. "Oh, I'm going to bring it over there and fix it by the side of the lounge. We'll play you' a sick lady, and I'm you' trained nurse. Just wait till I fix my handkerchief into a cap like they wear."
Mrs. Kendrick turned away and left the children at their play. Mary Louise Jackson had been kept at home from school that she might come over and spend the day with Ellen. For when Ellen Kendrick was ill, her cry always was, "Oh, send for the doctor—and Mary Louise."
The old Kendrick place sat back in its grassy yard and concealed behind voluminous chinaberry trees such shabbiness as time had brought it; but on the corner, the home of Ezra Jackson perched proudly above its stone wall and added a considerable touch of elegance to the street.
It was in the early eighties, and the Queen Anne style of architecture was just coming into great popularity in the South. Jackson, who could well afford it, had let an architect have full sway in producing for him a dwelling in the new mode. Ezra Jackson, a full-blooded negro born a slave, had been a teamster on his master's Georgia plantation, and after the war that master, who still maintained friendly relations with his ex-slaves, gave him a start in life with a mule and a dray. From this the honest, industrious, and enterprising man had built up a transfer business which was the best of its sort in town. There were many teams and drivers now, and Ezra could walk in the garb of other men of means about him; yet he still wrote his name in the manner of the kings of old—he produced it as a sort of landscape effect without any idea of what the separate characters meant. He was a good citizen, a dignified man; and, except for his black skin, he would have been an acceptable neighbor to the Kendricks, and a desirable resident in their quarter of town. The young wife whom he had married rather late in life, and to whose taste the Queen Anne house catered, had a good grammar-school education, gained from those first devoted teachers that the Freedman's Bureau sent to the Southern negroes in the years immediately following the war. At first she had kept his books and made out his bills; and she always insisted on the best of schooling for their children.
Of these latter, only Mary Louise concerns this history, since she chanced to be very near the age of Ellen Kendrick and had become a necessity in the life of that peevish little invalid. The negro girl had smooth features, and her mother saw to it that she was always spotlessly dressed and that her manners were perfect. The children of her race take to good manners very readily, being usually amiable and eager for approbation. Mrs. Jackson undoubtedly took pride in the connection with her aristocratic white neighbors, and Mrs. Kendrick was forced to be glad of the chance to have the Jackson child come over and play with Ellen. A nurse she could have hired, but a child near the afflicted girl's age, a sound-natured, sweet-tempered, well-bred little girl, was not to be had for money—love was the only coin current that could pay for that.
And the two girls loved each other—of course they did. Did not Ellen need Ma'Lou and is not service the basis of all love? The flame on the altar of their affection burned always clear and strong, unshaken by the peevish gusts that extinguished many a less sturdy light of friendship for the Kendrick girl. So that existence to Ellen—the pleasant part of it, anyhow—meant a great deal of Ma'Lou, and there was scarcely an object in her room, a game or a pursuit of her days, that was not associated with the brown girl. The pair grew up in a companionship closer than that of some born sisters.
The mere fact of this intimacy was not regarded by the Kendricks with any disfavor whatever. Scott and Fanny both had played with negro children, both had been reared by negro mammies. Neither realized that conditions were changed, that the negroes with whom they had associated were no longer an enslaved people, hopeless of any equality, nor that, with the coming of freedom, and still more with the growing ferment among the blacks, such association was different from the intimacy of slavery days.
And Ezra Jackson's wife watched jealously that the preponderance of gifts and favors should be always on her child's side. If any present were given Mary Louise in the Kendrick house, her mother always retorted instantly, as one might say, with something better or handsomer. Mrs. Kendrick was a slow woman, and such a point would naturally have been obscure to her; yet she finally came to be aware of the fact, and at last it vexed her a little. She turned the question in her mind and sought for some substantial favor or patronage which she might offer to the Jacksons, to quiet once for all her offended sense of fitness.
It fell out that about this time she was passing their home on her way to her own, loaded down with bundles from the market because her cook, Aunt Dicey, was old and feeble and there had been nobody else to go this morning, when she raised her eyes and saw the Jackson back yard full of snowy wash on the line. Mrs. Jackson stood in the kitchen door, and, at the juxtaposition of the dark skin and the well-washed clothes, an idea promptly occurred to the lawyer's wife.
"Good morning," she called in a friendly tone. "I wanted to ask you something; I guess I'll come through the gate and go out your front way, if you don't mind."
Ezra Jackson's wife ran down the steps and put out a hand to help the tired woman with her packages. Mrs. Kendrick rested them on the railing of the back porch.
"Your clothes look lovely," she said meditatively. "You get them out so early. Aunt Dicey's too old to do the washing and cooking both any longer. I've been thinking for some time that I would really have to get me a washerwoman."
"It is hard to have the person who cooks wash also," said Mrs. Jackson, choosing her words carefully, and speaking in that serious tone which the new generation of colored people are apt to use toward their white neighbors. It is always as though they were on guard, or perhaps on parade is the better word, determined not to be guilty of lapses which would be excusable in those whom they address, but which are not permitted to the inferior race.
Fanny Kendrick looked at the handsome, well-kept house and its dignified, serious-faced mistress, and a feeling of irritation rose within her.
"I thought maybe you—I want a washerwoman—and seeing your clothes looked so nice made me think that maybe you——"
She came to an uncertain halt, and glanced again half impatiently at the other woman. After all, Ezra Jackson's wife was just a negro, and there was no use in feeling embarrassed or in supposing you didn't know how to deal with negroes. Good gracious! what was the world coming to if you couldn't offer work to folks without blushing? But she did not complete her sentence. The Jackson woman waited for a while that she might do so, and finally said, still in that slow, correct utterance which was in itself an offense:
"You thought I might tell you of some one? Mrs. Payson does mine. As you say she does it very nicely, and is quick about it. Her prices are high. I pay her half a dollar, and she gets done, as you see, a good deal before noon. But the work is satisfactory, and I think it pays better. I don't know whether she has a free day—but—shall I send her to you when she comes next week?"
Mrs. Kendrick blushed burning red, and took up her bundles with a jerk.
"No, thank you," she said shortly. "I couldn't any more afford that than I could fly. I didn't know Sally Payson had got to charging like that—fifty cents for less than half a day's work! I declare, prices are enough to ruin a body these days."
She went on to her own home smarting. She had called the washer woman "Sally Payson," to be sure, in correction of Eliza Jackson's "Mrs. Payson," which was a minor victory, yet it was not enough to wipe away a feeling of stinging exasperation and a curious sense of defeat. And when she told her husband about it afterward, he received her recital with a sort of humorous impatience.
"Good Lord, Fan," he broke in finally, "don't you know that every woman with a black skin isn't hungry to do your washing? It's not a question of complexion; it's money that talks. Ezra Jackson could buy me out two or three times over. I'm trying to act all his legal business. He's bringing a big suit against the railroad. If he gives it to me I shall be able to send Ellen to Baltimore this year instead of next."
"Well," said Mrs. Kendrick, submissively but acidly, "if you want me to go and apologize, I suppose I can. The South is getting to be a queer place when white gentlemen have to be under obligation to negro teamsters. I certainly don't want to interfere with your business in any way, Scott," she concluded plaintively. "We're hard up all the time; I feel it deeply that poor Ellen is such an expense to you."
Scott Kendrick's ready arm went round the weary little woman. "An apology would be worse than the offense, Fanny," he admonished gently. "It's just this. the Jacksons are in an absolutely new position, and have to be treated in a new way. You wouldn't go and ask Mrs. Ford or Mrs. Brashear to do your washing; and the Lord knows that neither Jim Brashear nor Bate Ford makes half what Ezra Jackson does. The world is changing, honey, and we have to change with it."
As they grew older, the association of the two girls, in spite of the affection between them—perhaps because of it—began to present almost daily problems and embarrassments. Ellen's health was worse, her nerves were shattered, and she clung with more and more insistence to this one healthy companion, who responded with a tireless devotion. Coming in from her wholesome outdoor life and her triumphs at school—where she always stood high—Ma'Lou brought to the sick room a very wind of comfort and cheer, which Mrs. Kendrick had not the heart to deny her pining young invalid. Once, when she spoke apprehensively of the matter to her husband, Scott Kendrick answered with astonishment:
"Why, Fanny, it's only a question of health—a little bodily improvement. We'd break it off to-morrow if Ellen was well. You'll see; there would never be any more of it if I could send her away for that operation."
But the white people had not, as they supposed, this anxiety all to themselves. The timid, conservative, colored mother regarded the friendship with growing anxiety. And before Scott Kendrick got together the money to send Ellen to Baltimore, Ezra Jackson's wife had coaxed her husband into letting Mary Louise go North to school. The Watauga public schools, with a term or two of Fiske, at Nashville, afterward, had been good enough for the other children. But the mother craved wider opportunities for this, her youngest; money was freer with them now; and Mary Louise went to a preparatory school, then to Oberlin.
Ellen Kendrick returned from the hands of the surgeons in Baltimore much improved in health. She was sent back twice afterward for treatment. Finally she walked as well as other girls, and hastily made up her arrears of education, as best she might, at a private school in Watauga. She would always be frail; the invalid habit had gotten into both mind and body; she would continue dependent, demanding; and somewhat irritable; yet there was a fragile prettiness about her, and her very childishness had its own charm.
Mary Louise Jackson passed one of two vacations at home; but, as time went on, there were opportunities for her to have trips of an educational nature, and one summer was spent at a Chautauqua taking a special course, so that after the first break in their association the two girls saw almost nothing of each other till they were women grown. There had been some letters; yet what the white girl had always demanded and received from her friend could not come through the mails, and the neglected correspondence finally died a natural death.
There was one person in Watauga, however, to whom Mary Louise wrote, and from whom she received letters regularly—Ulysses Grant Payson, the washerwoman's son, with whom she had gone to school. Grant Payson was a sober, ambitious, industrious fellow, who seemed to feel from childhood the weight of responsibility for his people. A widow's only boy, he had worked hard and studied hard. With a very fair mental endowment, he was able to get what the Watauga public schools could give him, secure a few years training at Nashville, then read law.
And, when, after her graduation, Mary Louise returned to her father's home, a very well-educated young lady indeed, wearing glasses and looking older than her years, she found Grant established in a good practice, and with some other prospects that were, for a colored man, flattering. Both families knew that Grant wanted Ma'Lou. Whether the girl would marry him and settle down in Watauga had been a matter of anxiety, often talked over between the two mothers. For they also knew of and discussed Ma'Lou's opportunity to take a position as private secretary to one of the instructors in her college. They understood that it was a situation which would pay fairly well, and give her associates who gained an added glory in the minds of these humble folk by their distance. In short, it would be a foothold in the white people's world; and Grant Payson's mother trembled for her son, while the mother of Mary Jackson feared to lose, once for all, her daughter. The two Southern-bred black women could see in such things as the girl reported only the wiping out of all race barrier, the sudden achievement of equality. Had Mary Louise been asked, no doubt she could have told them of a social ban at the North quite as definite as that in Watauga, if different; but her father's daughter kept a silence that was not without dignity over what she found irremediable, in the North as in the South.
To warm-hearted Mary Louise, Watauga meant, of course, father and mother; but directly after them—perhaps before them, in the calendar of youth—it meant Ellen Kendrick and Grant Payson. And the colored elders, looking on, felt that as these twin idols of the girl turned out, so rose or fell the chances of keeping her with them in Watauga.
Grant instituted at once a courtship as ardent and eager as it was open and avowed. His people, florid and colorful in temperament, are natural wooers, free of the language of affection and adroit in its use. Grant was very much in love with the girl, and she meant even more to him than that, since in aspiring to her his ambition stepped hand in hand with his affections.
Mary Louise received his advances with curious reservations, as though there were positions and premises she defended against him.
It was when the girl's visit was three weeks old that the fine-looking, broad-shouldered, young colored man in his well-fitting business suit—a goodly figure in the eyes of the mother watching from her own room across the hall—left the parlor where he and Mary Louise had been sitting all evening, with so doleful a countenance that the older woman had a quickly suppressed impulse to go to him and speak. She did open the subject to the girl next morning, approaching it obliquely. In her own day a very progressive person, she felt that her daughter had far outstripped her, and she offered advice but timidly to this tall, perfectly dressed young woman who seemed so competent in all the affairs of life, and who knew so much more than she did upon many subjects. But after a little profitless skirmishing she came out with:
"Looks like you must have said something hard to Grant last night—he never came in to say good-by to me. Ain't you going to have him, Ma'Lou? Don't you care anything about him?"
"I care a great deal about Grant," Mary Louise told her, in a voice of pain. "I could love him dearly—if I'd let myself. But, mother, I just can't settle down to live here in Watauga. There's nobody and nothing here for me."
The woman looked at her child, and her mind misgave her sorely that she had done wrong to send the girl away among an alien people, where she would learn to despise her own.
"You're still grievin' about Ellen Kendrick," she said finally. "If I were you I wouldn't let that go the way it has. Don't—" she hesitated, with eyes full of helpless solicitude upon her daughter's face—"honey, don't wait for any sign from Ellen, because you won't get it. You just take those postal cards that you got for her on your Canadian trip, and some morning you step over to the side door and ask for her, if you want to see her. I know she thinks a great deal of you. She's stopped me on the street more than once and asked all about you and what you were doing. I don't see why you shouldn't go to the side door and go in and have a nice little visit with her."
Mary Louise considered this suggestion at some length. She had the wider outlook which some travel gives, and, in Oberlin, she had been where the race question was relatively negligible. Her mother's way of putting it jarred on her; yet the hungry craving she felt at this time for a touch of companionship with a girl of her own age, her longing for the beloved Ellen of her childhood, overbore all shrinking. That afternoon she brought the cards down in her hand, and, full of an unwelcome timidity, made her way to the side door of the Kendrick house and rapped. Mrs. Kendrick answered and received her with a certain thin cordiality that suggested reservations. The fact was that Ellen was having a little party that evening, and the colored girl would perhaps be in the way. Among the guests bidden were two young men, upon either one of whom Mrs. Kendrick looked with a hopeful maternal eye, and nothing could be less desirable than for her daughter to seem to "even herself with negroes" in the eyes of these possible suitors.
"Shall I stop and see Ellen a minute, or may I just leave these with you, Mrs. Kendrick?" asked the tall, brown-skinned young woman finally.
"Oh, come in—come right in here to the dining room and sit down," said the mistress of the house, remembering with a twinge how much she owed to this girl. "Ellen will be crazy about these. She's got a postal card album, and she hasn't anything in it from Canada. Ellen! Come downstairs, honey; Ma'Lou Jackson has brought you something pretty."
But even as she called up the stairway, and heard the quick response from above, it crossed Mrs. Kendrick's mind that her daughter would not be willing to put these postal cards in her album, for she would be ashamed to tell from whom they came.
She was annoyed when Ellen came flying down the stairs, her thin, blond hair all about her shoulders, and caught both the newcomer's hands—the mother feared for a moment that she would kiss her old playmate.
"And then if somebody saw it through the window, and went and told young Emery Ford or Mr. Hyatt, I don't know what on earth I should do," reflected the careworn matron.
"Mamma, do come and look at these lovely postals," Ellen cried effusively a little later, as her mother, plainly ill at ease, passed through the room. "I'm going to pull out those that Cousin Rob sent me from Texas, and put these in right after the California ones. See here, mamma; isn't this one beautiful? Ma'Lou was there a week. She's put a little cross over the hotel where they stayed."
Mrs. Kendrick looked at the strong, well-developed figure of her guest, and a certain dull anger arose in her mind. Why did health and money both go to this inferior creature, when they were lacking in higher quarters? Perhaps this prompted her query; "That hotel? It's a big one, isn't it? Did they—could you——?"
She broke off, and Mary Louise supplied, innocently enough: "Oh, they didn't let us travel during school term. This was a vacation trip."
She had been long away from the South; in the protective conditions of Oberlin she had been measurably free from the wounding of race prejudice; and now she failed to realize that Mrs. Kendrick's curiosity was as to whether she had been permitted to go to a hotel with white people.
Old Dicey's place in the kitchen had long been supplied by a negress of the newer generation—"the worst gossip and tattler in town," if you might take her mistress's word for it. Mrs. Kendrick now made her way thither, ostensibly to superintend the preparation of the evening's refreshments, but in reality to try to fix up an explanation of why Ezra Jackson's daughter sat visiting in the dining room with the young lady of the house. "Because if Penny goes out and tells her friends, every darky in town'll be retailing the story to the folks that hire them, and it'll soon be all over the place."