CHAPTER XFEAR
MRS. Parrish’s chair continued to plunge. It rocked and pitched like a ship in a storm. Her tongue gathered excitement from the motion. Mrs. Busby looked with anxiety at the graphophone perching uncertainly on the pine box. The curved rocker was threatening it. Mrs. Parrish drew back, and the danger was once again averted. She was plowing her way now toward the wire couch covered with the red and green tapestry ordered from a circular from Howe and Wort’s, Chicago. Mrs. Busby, usually placid, caught a little of the excitement. If she had nerves she told herself, she would be turned crazy. As it was, nerveless, and poised by the support of a newly acquired philosophy, she watched, hypnotized, the menace of that desperate rocker. Two lurid spots glowed in the cheeks of her hostess. The excitement of hostess-ship was consuming her. Entertaining, in simple folk vocabulary, means talking. So Mrs. Parrish talked.
When her ailments were exhausted, she began on her neighbors’. Mrs. Busby caught her breath as the rocker jabbed the pine box carrying the talking-machine. “I wonder why she wants a talking-machine?” she asked herself with the grim humor which had won sturdy Sam Busby twenty years before when he had acquired thehabit of buying bread at the Home Bakery in a suburb of Boston where Maria Mathes served.
Mrs. Parrish was embarked now on the sea of a neighbor’s woe, the rocker working toward the couch. A newcomer into the valley, Mrs. Dowker, was the subject of another Æneid. It transpired that Mr. Dowker had been reading desert literature, too. He had heard of wonderful cures effected by desert air. He dreamed to make a fortune and recreate a sickly wife. Mrs. Dowker from a hospital bed begged to be left behind for a year. Mrs. Parrish dwelt on the Dowker pilgrimage with ghoulish realism. Mrs. Dowker was failing under the labors of desert life; the little boy was always ailing. It was hard to get bottled water “in there.” Mrs. Dowker had to boil every drop they drank.
Mrs. Busby saw her chance and grabbed it. “I don’t believe in boiled water,” she announced. Mrs. Parrish was ready to pick up her thread, but Mrs. Busby was not to be ousted.
“I don’t believe in all this fuss about bottled water, nor in boiled water, either. The water of a place is the water one should drink. You breathe the air, why shouldn’t you drink the water?” Her logic was terrifically convincing to herself. “To be consistent, why shouldn’t you bring in bottled air? The water of a place is the water that agrees with one in that place. Why, that’s as plain as poverty! Look at the Indians. They’ve been drinking this water for a hundred years, and over. Did you ever hear of an Indian dying because he drank too much water?” It was a touch of the Maria Mathes sardonic humor.
Mrs. Busby quoted Mrs. Hadley. “Didn’t every one scare her into thinking that the canal water was not fitto drink, and didn’t she boil every drop that went down a Hadley throat?”
“But that was different,” tried to interpose Mrs. Parrish, but Mrs. Busby held the rostrum.
“And that first year, wasn’t the three of them, herself and her two grown sons, down with typhoid? Where’d they get it? Out of the air? You can’t talk to me of boiled water.”
“Do you think it was the boiled water that killed Joe Hadley?” demanded Mrs. Parrish, fear reducing her black eyes to points of startled light.
“There’s the facts,” said her guest with an oracular wave of the hand. “Take ’em, or leave ’em.” And then she practised passing on her second lesson. “It was thefearof the water as killed them. That’s my belief.”
“Fear?”
“Fear,” declaimed Mrs. Busby, rising out of reach of the suspended rocker, and taking the Morris chair deserted by Innes Hardin. “Fear ispoison.” She watched the effect of her words, for a careful second. She had no intention of being entertained any more!
She answered the round question in Mrs. Parrish’s eyes.
“I’m only just beginning it—I see it as plain as prophecy, but it’s hard to explain. The fear of a thing gives you a thing itself. There is no such thing as pain.” A loud protest from Mrs. Parrish warned her into guarding her outposts. “There is no such thing as pain. It is onlyfearof the pain which gives it to you. It is so clear to me; I wish I could explain it. But I’ve some pamphlets; I’ll send them over by Sam, the next time he comes over to the Wistaria. This new canal ought to be helping you over here,” she hazarded.
“I heard as you were taking that up, the new thoughts,” Mrs. Parrish returned to the main issue. “Is that a part of it?”
“Fear? you mean. Have you never thought yourself into a toothache?”
Parrish toothache had been too recent to be imaginary. “It’s decay, usually, with me,” she faltered. “Decay, and then the nerves get exposed. Mine die easily. I just lie awake sometimes, all night, dreading as one of my nerves will die, and with no good dentist this side of Los Angeles.”
“Didn’t I tell you so?” Mrs. Busby thrilled over this unexpected ally. “Well, if you agree that you can think yourself into a pain, can’t you think yourself out of it? It must work both ways. That’s logic.”
“Not a toothache.” The black beady eyes, shut obstinately over their conviction. “That’s real. Perhaps you never had one?”
“Not since I’ve begun to study. And besides, they’re false. They’re not mine, the teeth, I mean. Didn’t you never guess it? Pretty good work, I tell Sam. They fool every one. He put in two large gold fillings in the front teeth, so as they’d look just like the ones I lost. There’s Sam coming now. I promised I’d not keep him waitin’. I’ll send you those leaflets. And I’ll come out and explain them some day. But I’m busy now, getting ready for the hot weather. Goin’ out this year?”
Mrs. Parrish thought not.
Sam Busby shouted through the door that he was in a hurry; that he had to leave her at home, and get out to Grant’s Heading. There was trouble there. A messenger had just caught him.
Mrs. Busby’s farewell to Mrs. Parrish had to be casual.She clambered up into the seat beside her short stubby master. Sam had a short blackened pipe between his teeth, obviously his own. No store or dentist would acknowledge them. His sombrero, battered and sunburned, was pulled low over his jolly blue eyes.
She opened a large black cotton umbrella.
“She’ll never grasp it,” she was thinking aloud.
“Grasp what?” the humorous eyes turned toward her.
“The new thoughts. If I could only get her to throw away that shelf of medicines.”
“Now, for the lord’s sake, don’t go proselyting, Maria.”
“How can I, when I haven’t learned to hold a thought yet, myself?”
“Hold a—what? Whatever you are talking about?”
“You hold a good thought—it’s like the Catholics crossing themselves with holy water, only it isn’t. It keeps off bad thoughts—trouble. It sounds easy, but it’s terribly hard.”
“Jew Peter!”
She mistook his exclamation. “Well, you just try it yourself. Sometime, when you’re just a-dyin’ for a smoke, just you hold the thought that you are smokin’, and see if it’s easy.”
He looked at her a few minutes reflectively before speaking. Was Maria losing all her humor? He had been noticing a tendency to dictate, a growing dogmatism. Jew Peter! Like her mother! How he had dreaded the corpulent and dogmatic Mrs. Mathes, whom he had learned to respect at a distance, a very complete distance! He had loved Maria not only for herself, but for the dissimilarity to her mother. Come to think of it, matronhood, middle-aged matronhood, brought dictatorial authoritywith the dreaded double chin. On every hand, one sees young girls and gaiety. Does the gaiety go with the girlhood? He stole a distrustful look at Mrs. Busby. He had not heard her laugh or crack a joke for a long while. He felt cheated, as though he had bought a piece of goods that did not wear well.
“Maria Busby,” he said solemnly, “when it’s time for me to take to holdin’ thoughts, it’ll be time for me to quit holdin’ anything. Now, what I’ve always liked about you was that you were not eternally meddlin’ and fussin’ like other men’s wives. You’ve minded your own business. That’s what I liked. Keep to it. I don’t care what new fad you pick up. Pick ’em all up. Only don’t force ’em down other folks’ throats. That’s what I could never understand in women. They can never do anything alone. If they find a new medicine, they’ve got to make some one else try it. They love company so much that they want to carry some one along to the other side if the drug happens to be fatal. That’s all I can make out of it.”
“Sam,” Mrs. Busby’s voice was tremulously earnest, “this is so wonderful. You aren’t willing to let me help you with it?”
“Am I needin’ help?” His sturdy rotund body deflected her missionary zeal for an instant.
“You might be sick.” She yearned to protect his unguarded body with the shining wonderful armor she had discovered. She could not be happy in this new religion with her Sam stalking alone outside in the black terrors of the night. She began to realize why religion demands its martyrs. She sighed deeply.
“What’s the matter? Feelin’ poorly?”
“Oh, no. I’m all right. It’s you.”
“Oh, I’m poorly, am I? Well, if this is feelin’ poorly, I’d be afraid to feel well. Something would bust.” He shook such a vigorous repudiation that the mares took it as a command, and several miles had flown past before he had them calmed.
“Frightened?” He threw the word over his shoulder to a disheveled Maria Busby, clinging to her bonnet. The mares were still quivering.
Through white lips, Mrs. Busby murmured that she was all right, now!
“What’s that you were tryin’ to tell me a way back?” he asked when the mares had settled down into a sober gait.
“There’s no such thing as pain,” began Mrs. Busby. She must always begin there. It was the initial letter of her creed.
“I thought you said something about not having fear?”
“Oh, I knew I couldn’t explain it to you, you’re such a mocker, Sam Busby. But I’ve got books for you to read. They’ll show you.”
“It’s not another sort of Electropoise?” grinned her spouse. “Do you remember, Maria, how you used to have me sittin’ there, one end of that infernal machine in a pail of water, the other tied around my leg, keep me sittin’ like a fool waitin’ for currents. Nary a current, or a raison Paddy would say. Holy smoke!”
She held up a solemn finger. “See that?”
“Anything the matter? Another felon?”
“I can think a pain in that finger.”
“Why should you?”
His levity threw her argument off the track. She had planned a physical, scientific proof. How by taking thought, she could gather the blood at a stated point;how congestion would inevitably follow. The sequence evaded her.
“I thought there was no such thing as pain?”
“Don’t try to trap me. Just listen. If I can think a pain there, why can’t I think it away?” The sequence came to her. “See, I think the blood to the tip of my finger. It congests. There is inflammation; a swellin’.”
“Does it hurt much?” She saw a twinkle in his eyes.
“Of course not.”
The two drove on in silence, busy with the thoughts which must divide them. Sam decided that Maria had parted with her charm, her sense of fun. And then he gave himself up to his routine. Baldwin’s alfalfa was fine this spring. If the railroad could handle it, what a crop of melons the valley would harvest that year! There was a stoppage in the canal. The water looked stagnant. He forgot Maria.
She was facing a noble lonely martyrdom. This truth which was being revealed to her, which was dawning above her sky as a wonderful shimmer of light, she must follow where it led. Sam’s obstinacy would keep him out. No, they would not bicker; she was above that. She never quarreled with any one. It must be a closed subject between them; their first barrier. She felt very righteous and holy. He stopped at their house, a square pine cottage, built by jovial Sam Busby, and bossed by Maria.
As he was driving through the pine-board gate, he pulled the gray mares on their startled haunches. Real concern was in his honest face.
“Sure nothing’s the matter with that finger, Maria?”
“Shucks!” tossed Maria Busby.