CHAPTER IXON THE WISTARIA
“YOU are sure you are feeling better?†insisted Innes.
Mrs. Parrish’s answer was careful. Shethoughtshe was feeling better! She had not had one of those bad nervous headaches for a week. “It was a week come Sunday, no, it was more than that, it was of a Saturday when the last bad spell came on. It was one of those hot days, the second of the three, you remember; oh, but you were in Tucson. Did you get to Los Angeles?†Her sigh was almost ecstatic. “Los Angeles is nice. I haven’t been there for two years come September.â€
“You surely will go out this summer?†The hectic color, the snapping restlessness of her hostess’ black eyes disquieted the girl.
“I’ve not decided,†evaded Mrs. Parrish. “Oh, I’m all right! That last medicine I got from Los Angeles helped me a lot. As I was saying, it was that hot Saturday, and I had my baking to do. I can’t cook on Sunday; Jim hates to see me working; I have to get at it when he’s out of the way. I think the oil must have been bad; I don’t know what Coulter was thinking of—I always insist on paying for the best; the cheap sort will smell. Maybe, it wasn’t the oil, but by noon I couldhardly see. I sent back that can, and had them send out new wicks—it’s a blue-flame stove I use—but of course that didn’t cure the headache. And the cooking not done.â€
Innes suggested that there were two cooks in that family! Everybody knew that Jim Parrish had developed, through the exigency of desert conditions and his wife’s headaches, into the most helpful of cooks.
Mrs. Parrish smiled with sad pride. “He’s had to do it too much. He’s too good to me, Jim is.†She was wishing she had not been grinding coffee in the lean-to when Miss Hardin came. The automobile was on her before she had time to get away, and Miss Hardin speaking to her through the screening. With the old purple flannelette waist on! She had put it on that morning for “the last time.†She hoped Miss Hardin would not notice the missing buttons. She stretched a torn and faded apron of gingham that had once been brown across her knees. She did not dare take it off. She had put on, too, her old blue alpaca skirt, promising herself that she would use it for rags, tear it up before she could ever yield to the temptation of wearing it again. She looked like a slouch, she knew; and her hands fidgeted over the deficiencies of her dress. The desert was excuse enough! The washing had to be sent out of the valley, or it had to be done by one’s self, the water boiled niggardly on a blue-flame stove. She had good things to wear, but she could see down the road a long way, and visitors were scarce; she could sight them a mile off, and get into clean clothes and be sitting waiting in the tent parlor when the folk drove up. But the new automobile of the company, seen for the first time, changed that. A puff, a rumble, and there it was uponher, with Miss Hardin smiling at her through the screen window!
“Washing or no washing, I’ll have to keep ready to see folks,†she resolved. She tried to make the hand look casual that was holding the rebellious waist together over her meager bust.
“It’s been cool since I got home,†cheered Innes.
Mrs. Parrish hoped that Miss Hardin could not see behind the rough screen into the space that was called a bedroom. The bed was tossed and tumbled; the night clothes lying around. And she had not washed last week. “I’d be ashamed to have her see those clothes,†she thought. “Take this chair, Miss Hardin,†she begged. “It’s more comfortable.†Innes asked to be allowed to stay where she was, but she had to surrender to the other’s nervous persistence.
Mrs. Parrish kept her hand over her gaping placket as she made the change. “Yes, it’s been cool,†she answered, “but, oh, the wind! Ain’t it terrible? They say as these tents won’t blow down, they are so well put together. Do you believe it, Miss Hardin? That the ‘spider’ coming down so low shelters it so that it couldn’t blow over?â€
“Of course they won’t blow over!†chirped Innes Hardin.
Mrs. Parrish sighed. “That’s what Jim says. I wish I could believe it. I’m not doubting you, or him, neither, Miss Hardin; I know you mean what you say. But when the wind blows, and the tent creaks, and strains, oh, I know then as it’s coming down; I can’t sleep those windy nights. I just lie and plan which way I’ll jump when it goes.â€
Innes tried to laugh at her, but the woman’s fear was too real.
“I’ve made myself learn to love the wind,†she urged. “Don’t you think you could, too? Try to think of it as gay; as the air of the world on some mad, reckless romp. It gets into your blood, then, and you want to run, to dance. ‘Oh, the whole world is glad of the wind!’â€
“The wind in Nebraska’s like that, but this! Why, it sounds like angry devils to me, all shrieking to me to get out; that I don’t belong here. I cover up my ears with the bedclothes, but it’s no use. I can hear them just the same: ‘I’ll blow you away. I’ll blow you away.’ And then the dust it brings; the dirt! There’s no use trying to be clean.†The mouth muscles twitched unpleasantly.
“How is the neuralgia?†inquired Innes, helpless against this determined pessimism.
“Better. That new medicine is helping that. I seemed to wear out the good effects of those powders.â€
“Have you begun to sleep out-of-doors yet?â€
Mrs. Parrish shivered. “I wouldn’t sleep a wink. I’d be waiting for Indians all night.â€
“The Indians are harmless,†cried Innes. “They wouldn’t hurt any one.â€
“They’re Indians!†persisted Mrs. Parrish. “I’ll never get over being afraid of their dark faces. They’re heathens.â€
Innes turned her eyes hopelessly away from the woman’s twitching face. She looked out the wire-meshed door beyond the line of stakes which stood for the proposed canal. She wondered when MacLean, Jr., would be coming back for her.
“Is that a company rig?†she asked.
“I declare if it isn’t the Busby wagon!†exclaimed Mrs.Parrish, jumping up and going to the door. Her dress threatened to leave her. “She’s driving the roans. There’s somebody with her. It must be Mr. Busby!â€
The wretched room was then fully revealed to the guest. There was a rent in the loud-patterned couch cover of green and red; the table cover, a fringed imitation damask, was askew. Disorder leaped from beneath the couch, from the boxes by the door, from the room beyond. A graphophone perched uncertainly on the edge of the table. A pile ofYouth’s Companionstoppled uncertainly away over a pine box. There were a few pictures fromLifetacked upon the board walls; a few were pasted to the canvas top-walls. Innes segregated the two influences. The graphophone, the file ofYouth’s Companions, the pictures fromLife, these were the contributions of Jim Parrish toward the elevating of their sordid life. The dirt, the disorder made up no less a heroic subscription from the wife, who was too frail for the sacrifice, too fond and too proud for a surrender.
“How can you see so far?†Innes asked. “I thought I could see farther than most people, but this glare blinds me.â€
“If you lived over here in Number Six, miles off from everybody, with nobody to see, unless it’s the engineers or those black Indians, you’d learn to know folks miles off. It’s—yes, it is Mr. Busby. He’s been promising to bring her over here to sit with me the first time he came to inspect the Wistaria. It’s to come right past here when it’s finished. I’ll be seeing folks then. But I shouldn’t complain of not having visitors. Two in one day!â€
To Innes Hardin the excitement seemed all out of proportion to the cause. Dark somber blotches were comingout on the woman’s skin. “Sit down. It’s too warm for you by the door.â€
“They might go past,†began Mrs. Parrish, when a smell of burning food smote both their nostrils. “The rice and codfish’s burning,†she exclaimed, and fled to the kitchen in the lean-to.
She was not back in time to greet her guest, whose vigorous entrance struck at once the note of middle-aged, experienced authority. Innes had met her but once before, but she recognized the species, the woman who has the best recipe for bread, the most valuable hints for housekeepers; handy in the sick room, indispensable at accouchements; a kindly irresistible vulture.
Their talk was of the coming heat, the new canal; the difference it would make to “Number Sixâ€; the melon crop.
Mrs. Parrish came fluttering back, her brown apron changed for a clean white one. A few pins sealed the gap in the unutterable purple waist. She could not get another without passing through the sitting-room, and she had a feeling of shame to emphasize her embarrassment before Miss Hardin. Her cheeks were redder, her eyes more glittering.
She established Mrs. Busby on the wire-collapsible couch, with the green and red flowered cover. The guest preferred a straight chair, but Mrs. Parrish would not hear of it. She herself had a rocker. Perched on one edge of it, she rocked back and forth violently, until her chair kept grating against Innes’. The girl pitied the woman’s excitement, wondering at it.
Mrs. Parrish was worked up to almost hysterical sociability. It was as if a deep desert well had been tapped. Her rocker swaying interminably, she told them of herlife at home, of the farm they were just clearing of the mortgage; of her love for Nebraska. She would never forget that day when a friend, they wouldn’t know him, but it was Sam Kirkland, anyway! when he came through on his way back East to get his family. He told the wonderful story of the Imperial Valley—of the country below sea-level, where even cactus would not grow. To their skeptical ears he had unfolded a tale of rich soils, of desert redemption—of irrigation “which made Jim Parrish just sit up, I can tell you.†The early crops, the water scientifically applied, the hothouse heat, the millions in sight. Was he, Sam Kirkland goin’ back? Well, sure. He was no man’s fool. He knew opportunity when he saw it.
And then the pamphlets! When they began to come she fell to watching her Jim uneasily. All their friends were in Nebraska; and her doctor. “Let well enough alone,†says I. “How can I live without Doctor Pratt, who knows all my symptoms? But Jim just would come!†She related the weary minute details of their home-breaking; of their move from Nebraska. Her impressions of California, deeply registered, were passed on to her guests. Her horror of the valley. Her fear of the Indians—her fear of the wind, of centipedes, and she knew that the water was typhoidal—
“Typhoidal? Bosh!†interjected Maria Busby. She had something to say about the water, but she could not get it in. The rocker grew more agitated. “The very rocker which had been brought in on a wagon from Old Beach! That was before the railroad came in; every one had to wagon it from Old Beach. But that was before their time!
“I don’t sleep. That’s the trouble with me,†shejumped back to her ailments, her nervous eyes passing from Mrs. Busby’s face to Innes Hardin’s. “Jim calls me the desert watch-dog. I feel as I must keep an ear and eye trained on the desert to see what it’s going to do next; or the river; or the Indians.â€
Mrs. Busby thought she saw a chance to talk of the water, and why it was not typhoidal. But she was not swift enough. Innes was cheered to hear the chug of the company automobile. Before another stream of talk started on its irresistible flow, she made her escape. Through the screen door, as she was borne away, she could see Mrs. Parrish, still wildly rocking.