BEETRUS
Time, 1881
“Beetrus Jenkins!” called the owner of the name, sending her high clear voice through the boxed space which served as post-office window.
“Yes, ’m,” responded the postmaster, with that joking freedom which adds so much spice to the life of a general-storekeeper at a South Illinois railroad station. “Three letters this time. He’s writing nearly every day.”
“It wears on you to keep track of my correspondence, don’t it?” affirmed the girl, taking her letters and rending them open with impatient forefinger. They were all addressed, in the same mercantile hand, to Miss Beatrice Jenkins, Wabash Station, Illinois. She compared the dates of the postmarks,and opened the earliest, standing by the door to read.
The smoke-dimmed interior of the store was hung with baskets, dry-goods, bacon, ready-made clothing, and boots and shoes. A skeleton flight of steps ascended across a background of wall to the proprietor’s residence, and up this flight of steps went a neighbor’s barefooted child with a coffee-pot to borrow some household necessity, while Beetrus read her mail.
She was a spot of mellow color betwixt brilliant autumn tints outside and the dim inclosure. The slim, long-fingered hands holding her letters were nicely gloved. Her white hat was covered with plumes just owning the salmon-pink tint of her small woolen shawl. Her dress was neutral and unobtrusive. Not so, however, were her black eyes and glowing cheeks, or the dark hair clustering to her ears. She was a very pretty girl, and this the station-master always mentally admitted. He came out ofhis post-office cubby with the mail-bag in his hand.
“So you’re going to clear out to-day, Bee?”
She glanced up, perceptibly starting and coloring.
“Goin’ by rail or by river?”
“Oh!” said Beetrus. “Yes, we’re going up the river. Our things are packed on the White Dove. We’d have to go so far around and pay so much freight the other way. But I don’t like to go on a freight boat, and neither does ma, though the men are just as kind and clever as they can be. We have to sit upon deck all night, too, among the machinery and grease.”
“Yes, you will. It’s a twelve hours’ run betwixt this and New Harmony against the current. The White Dove starts about three o’clock. Will you be down any during the winter?”
“I guess not. Our man and his wife can tend to everything on the farm. We neverdo run back and forth any after cold weather sets in.”
“And I suppose you’ll put the time in dancin’ and takin’ music lessons?”
“It isn’t so very lively in Harmony; but I’m going on with my music—That isn’t the train?”
“Yes, it is,” responded the station-master, swinging the mail-bag as he walked forth to keep appointment with the black and hissing locomotive sliding to its brief pause.
Beetrus flew through the store, ran down the back steps, and sheltered herself in woods which stretched away toward the Wabash. Swift as her exit was, she scarcely escaped the eye of a young man who swung himself off the train, sample case in hand. His face twinkled humorously, which it could very well do, being a pleasant mustached face in spite of the marks of dissipation it bore. His trim dress and brisk air bespoke the prosperous commercial traveler.
He went indoors and swept a business-likeglance around before the train steamed away; therefore by the time the station-master had put up the mail and served one or two customers, he had a satisfactory order written out, and professed himself ready to mount the next train, for which he would have to wait quite two hours.
“Oh, you know how to put the time in,” said the station-master, “as long as we have any pretty girls left in the neighborhood.”
The drummer smiled out of the back door at a huddle of two or three cabins and board huts, as if the capacity of such a place for producing pretty girls was too contemptible a joke for him to meddle with. He said he guessed he would go down to the landing and see if he couldn’t get a skiff a while.
“Bee Jenkins will be down that way,” suggested the station-master. “She was in here a minute ago.”
“Ran from me,” noted the drummer.
“I’d kind of advise her to, if she hadn’t,” said the station-keeper.
“What’s the objection to me?” laughed the drummer; “I’m only a good gray sinner. They’ll have to dip me several times more before I’m as black as you South Illinois Egyptians.”
“Old lady Jenkins will have a crow to pick with you, though, if she happens to drop onto all these letters and walks.”
“You undertake too much,” said the drummer, shaking his head with gentle persuasiveness. “The store and post-office and station and the neighborhood will accumulate, and be too many for you.”
Beetrus saw him sauntering on her track. The blood was buzzing in her head, and she hid herself upon a pile of steep high rocks, obeying some wild impulse of which she felt ashamed. To follow him with her eyes and be herself invisible was an impersonal rapture in which she could indulge without giving it too great advantage. Yet, when he disappeared near the river, she felt a stinging check in her heart, and a sense of having inflicted loss and robbery upon herself.
To Beetrus he was the walking essence of the world, representing not only its mighty business, but its advantages of culture and travel. She never had been from home except to Evansville and New Harmony; and he never stayed two nights in a place, and spoke with fatigue of his exciting life. What operas he had seen!—for in Beetrus’s chaotic imagination all theatrical performance was opera, and operas were the distinct possessions of the worldly.
She resented with a mixture of awe and daring the greatness of his relatives. He was a nephew of the head of his commercial house, and his grandfather had been a congressman; while her background was the pioneer’s cabin, the pecan woods, and Wabash rocks and hills.
Beetrus was the child of a shrewd though romance-soaked mother, who had dowered her with something more than a mispronounced fine name and biased imagination. It is strange to think how large a humanmass, moving this instant in grooves of practical action, is protesting with secret scorn against all its conditions. Beetrus was full of a girl’s unrests and eccentric impulses. She thought she knew exactly what she wanted for her happiness.
She pressed her cheek against the rock lichens, taking a half-inverted view of the autumn tangle, and glad in spite of herself for the pleasant breath of life. It was worth while to be a part of such woods and river vistas, and to smell all the ground’s odors. Some little living thing ran along a log not far from her; and she could hear a squirrel bark, a whish and a whisper of loosened leaves as they were sent adrift, and then the dropping of a nut. Strong as the sunlight was, she shivered upon the rocks, and then felt all her blood burn, beat, and tremble.
The commercial traveler was walking back with a brisk step from the river, and scanning every opening among the trees, asif on an eager search. He saw Beetrus rising and tightening her pink shawl on her shoulders, and halted with a jerk.
“Where have you been?” was his unceremonious exclamation.
“Up here, reading my letters and viewing the country.”
“You saw me go past, then, didn’t you?”
“Was it you?” said she, fitting her foot deftly to the steep descent.
“Let me lift you down. How pretty you look this morning!”
“Oh! don’t talk about pretty, Mr. Poundstone,” said Beetrus, dyed in color, after he had stood her upon the moss, dazed as she always was by his prevailing presence.
“You oughtn’t to have hid; I want to talk up a scheme with you right off. It popped into my head since I got off the train.”
“What scheme?” said Beetrus, hugging her shawl and looking over her shoulder to simulate complete indifference.
“You know well enough, or can guess. We mustn’t be parted, my dear girl; I can’t run up to New Harmony every time I make a trip down this way. Think of the long winter. Don’t you want to see me this winter?”
“Oh—yes,” she admitted, with a gasp.
“I want to see you. I want to have you entirely to myself, to look forward to every time I come in off the road. Let’s get married.”
Beetrus visibly expanded and contracted with a great breath.
“Get on the train and go over to Evansville with me, and we’ll have the minister tie the knot there. Then home. And a nice little private set of rooms, all quiet and to ourselves, and no relations to bother us.”
“But ma’s fixed things to go up to New Harmony for the winter,” whispered Beetrus, struggling with this vision. “And she wouldn’t change her mind so suddenly—’specially as she doesn’t know you real well.”
“It isn’t ma I want to marry,” argued Poundstone, using his winning smile. “I’ll drop my relations, and you can surely do the same.”
“Drop ma!”
The girl was stung by a covert insult.
“Leave her a little while. Let her go up to New Harmony, you know.”
“And what do you mean about dropping your relations?” demanded Beetrus, growing straighter and more self-assured, and burning more vividly in the cheeks. “That they wouldn’t want to be acquainted with ma and me? No, sir; I ain’t going to let her go up to New Harmony alone; and I never would seriously have you unless she knew all about it and was willing. She might have read your letters if she wanted to; she knows about them. I never did anything in my life that ma told me not to do.”
“I thought five minutes’ talk on this subject would bring you to reason,” remonstrated Poundstone.
“Then you didn’t calculate right.”
“So it seems.”
“I’m not the girl you took me for.”
“Do you want to break off with me entirely?” he exclaimed, with heat.
“Yes—come to that—I do!” cried Beetrus, flinging his letters at him, two fluttering uncertain, but one moulded by the grip of her hand and darting like a missile. “I believed in you, and see how you’ve treated me!”
“My darling girl!”
“Don’t you come around in my sight any more. And go marry somebody that won’t cause anydropping. I can stand it.”
“I believe you can,” he sneered.
“Yes, indeed; I can stand it. So good-by to you.”
Saying which, Beetrus turned and scudded off, through Spanish needles and boggy spots, until his first half-uttered remonstrance had been for some time changed into language of another sort.
It seemed long before Beetrus found a log on which she could draw herself, face downward, with her arms stretched beyond her head.
The White Dove moved off from Wabash Landing two hours behind her appointed time. She was a dirty little boat, carrying a miscellaneous freight, but among the barrels on the after-deck some hard-favored and much-whittled chairs had been placed for Beetrus and her mother.
The young girl herself stood by the rope which served for railing, and saw her own heartache color all those fair distances. Downy swells of remote banks and bold juts of rock were copied in the river, so ruffleless did it seem to lie even when the strong current was moving. A blue heron stood at the water edge meditating, with one foot planted on sand and the other tucked up. It slightly spread its mighty wings, shook them, and folded them again to place, without appearing to break the trance of its downward stare.
While the White Dove churned along, shadows stretched upon the Wabash. Now it was very late afternoon, and now it threatened to be evening, with a hint that by and by it would be night, when you might expect the woods to make deep black borders along the river, and the canopy of stars to look smeared by the little steamer’s smokestack.
When Beetrus was pale and tired, she turned and leaned against her mother—an ample, indulgent woman, who nevertheless had one bristling mole upon the right side of her face. She broke the tacit silence in which they had begun their journey by declaring, “Ma, I love you.”
“You don’t often put a body out telling them that,” responded Mrs. Jenkins, uttering a gratified laugh.
“I keep up a dreadful loving, though,” said Beetrus, casting sidewise at the river black eyes which swam in waters of their own.
“You’re my baby,” cooed her mother, pattingthe slim hand fondling her neck. “There’s plenty of pretty young men in the world, but there’s only one old mother.”
“I don’t care anything about the young men,” said Beetrus, with strong scorn. “I was thinking a good while in the woods to-day, coming from the post-office, and I’ve made up my mind never to get married.”
“You’ll turn around often enough before the time comes.”
“I never will,” emphasized Beetrus. “We’ll be two nice old ladies together, ma, and neither of us will get married.”
“I won’t, for a sure thing,” laughed her mother. “But you’ll only be middle-aged when I’m ready to totter.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Beetrus sadly. “And then if one would die and leave the other”—
“Now, now, don’t you fret, lovey. I’ve had consider’ble trouble and experience, and if I don’t sigh round, you needn’t. Who’s that nice-looking man that keeps looking back this way?”
Beetrus had been facing down river, with her mind completely closed to any moving figures on deck. She glanced back over her shoulder.
“Why, it’s”—she exclaimed, swallowing her breath with a gasp—“it’s Mr. Poundstone.”
“That correspondent of yours?” said Mrs. Jenkins, nodding her head, and inspecting him sincerely with such thoroughness as intervening barrels permitted.
Beetrus’s ears rang. She had, however, that instinctive western courage which sometimes takes the place of disciplined self-control; so by no other clue than the deepening fire of her cheeks and eyes did she give Mr. Poundstone any knowledge of the disturbance he brought her when he climbed a passage over impediments and placed himself in the party.
His manner was subdued, even becomingly humble and conciliatory.
“Ma, this is Mr. Poundstone,” said Beetrus,secretly triumphant in being free from the subservience which yesterday would have made her say, “Mr. Poundstone, this is my mother.”
She did not add to her unconsidered formula now, but allowed him to lift his hat and bow over her mother’s hand.
“I’m glad to meet you, Mrs. Jenkins,” said he. “I want to make friends with you, and get you to convince your daughter I’m not such a bad fellow as I look.”
“You don’t look like a bad fellow,” she responded heartily.
“I didn’t know you were going up on the boat,” said Beetrus, regarding with gentle indifference the brim of his hat, after he replaced it.
“You know I couldn’t go off on the train and leave matters in the shape they are. I never sold a bill of goods in New Harmony in my life, but I’m going to try to make a satisfactory trade for myself now, if the house turns me off for it.”
Beetrus parted her lips smiling, and this time met him in the eyes. Without formulating the fact, she knew there was sterling man under the crust of acquired coarseness. The brutal plan he had formed concerning her, and which he was now scarcely willing to acknowledge to himself, began to withdraw from betwixt them like the mist which already wavered on the hills.
“I believe it will be a clear day to-morrow,” the girl said, falling back upon good commonplace.
“Do you believe it will be a clear day to-morrow, Mrs. Jenkins?” inquired Poundstone.
“Well, it seems like it might be pretty,” responded the widow, turning up her face to see the pinkness reflected from the west.
“Then I believe it will too,” said the commercial traveler, with a devout air, which was unmoved by Beetrus’s laughing out,—
“A great deal prettier and clearer than to-day has been.”