Читать книгу A White Bird Flying - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 7

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Miraculously, to Allen's way of thinking, he was pledged Pi Tau and the aristocratic house with the cathedral-like pillars became his home. But Fate, that old woman of the loom, snapped the bright colored thread of her weaving in the spring after his initiation. For Allen's father died suddenly, and Allen went back to the square white house at the end of the lane of walnut trees to take complete charge of the work.

But something had happened to Allen. He was not satisfied,--not with himself, not with the old-fashioned methods of his father, with the machinery on the farm, nor with his limited knowledge of the management of the business side of it. To his surprise and deep mystification he was not even satisfied with Verna Conden. He lived only for the day when he could go back to school,--could tie together the broken strands of the weaving and see the whole of the design.

Herman Rinemiller's death had done something to Old Christine, too. She spent most of her time over at the square white house talking of Herman, handling things that had been Herman's, recalling childish anecdotes about him. "A calf . . . he vas sick once . . . my leetle Herman t'ought he vas todt . . . dead. Und he took off his coat and put it over him . . . and ven ve looked out, leetle Herman's coat vas all around de yard runnin'." She told it gently in pride and sorrow. It had come to her out of a harsh past, from the life of her little son whose boyish playtime had been given to work,--a sacrifice on the altar of greed. Poor Christine! She had long ago spent the days of her young motherhood in the marketplace, and now that they were all squandered, she had so few pleasant things left to remember. So she crouched low over the dull embers of a few half-memories in order to warm her old heart.

Lucy, Allen's mother, was always kind to her old mother-in-law, as hard as it was to do anything for her. "You can come here and live with Allen and me now, Grandma. You know you're as welcome here as though Herman was alive."

Old Christine's pale blue eyes filled with unaccustomed tears. Two or three dropped down on her leathery red-brown cheeks with immodest abandon. "A good girl you are," she said suddenly, and wiped the miscreant water away with the back of a red hand as hard as wood.

Allen, always tenderhearted when it came to old people and children, seeing her unusual distress, added his own brisk: "Sure, Grandma, I'll set you up a little stove in the east room and make you a wood-box so you can have your own heat and not depend on ours."

After which, old Christine tied a veil over her head, took her basket of eggs, and in her blue calico dress trudged over to town, went into John Deal's office and gave Allen two eighties of land via a will to which so many codicils had been added that, with more amendments than body, it looked much like the Constitution of the United States. She signed her name with a cross, saw it witnessed, and trudged stolidly back to the farm in her blue calico dress gathered full at the waistline.

High School to Laura Deal proved to be what High School is to any young person in the Cedartowns of the country,--a period of youthful ups and downs, illusions and disillusions, of long-lived friendships and short-lived enmities, of study so interspersed with play that youth does not always understand where the one leaves off and the other begins.

Laura's achievements in those four years were of extremely varied results. She was the shining star member of all English classes and the dumbest integral portion of all mathematical ones. Composition? Although verbally as noncommunicative as her father, she wrote reams on any and all topics with girlish abandon. Algebra? Eloise, varying her home instruction with scolding, sarcasm, and plaintive encouragement, managed to assist in pulling her daughter through it. American Literature? Laura had read and absorbed most of the assignments before they were assigned. Physics? Her father, beginning with extreme patience to try to augment the teacher's instructions, admitted toward the middle of the term an inglorious defeat, and quite frankly worked out the rest of the problems for her. Shakespeare? She read all the plays demanded in the curriculum, and all the others not so nominated in the bond. Plane Geometry? John and Eloise together in combined effort, dragged, tugged, and pushed their offspring through part of that science which treats also of the magnitude of space and its relations, to a passing grade. Advanced composition? Laura dashed off essays, poems, parodies, stories and biographies, both for herself and for such of her girl friends as stood in dire need of material assistance. Solid Geometry? Instructor and parents, for once in peaceful united decision, gave up with calm resignation and allowed her to substitute something which, like that portion of her mathematical head, was not so solid.

Laura was prettier now in her Senior year than she had ever been. Her clear olive complexion with its warm underlying pink, her brown eyes, the softness of her well kept dark hair, the suppleness of her body, all helped to make an attractive whole. But Laura herself was odd. Every one said so. For one thing, in an age when High School dating was the most important of the extra curricular events, Laura did not enter into the pastime with any degree of pleasure. She did not care for boys. Dating, perforce, meant boys. And because things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other, it followed that Laura did not care for dating. Q.E.D. As skating companions, tennis partners, and members at large of any other form of out-door sport, she not only tolerated them, she liked them. But when it came to rear-seat riding, semi-gloomy-corner sitting, and all similar modes of entertainment, Laura was just not among those present. More likely, she was curled up in some cushioned corner reading or dreaming dreams of her own. She was used to hearing people say she was odd. But for the most part she did not even care.

"When Laura gets her nose in a book, she's just dead to the world," was Eloise's complaint. "She's not wide awake about housework, either. She does her work mechanically as though she didn't have the slightest interest in practical things. At times I think she's lazy."

"Oh, I don't know," John returned, "she's young. She isn't lazy about things she likes to do. Maybe we don't understand her. Mother always seemed to understand her so well."

Immediately he saw that he had said the wrong thing. Eloise's firm lips gave an example of one of the few theorems which had been comprehensible to Laura,--that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. "I'm sure, John, that no one can understand a child so well as the mother who gave it birth."

To which conclusive biological statement John made no reply. He had long ago learned that it was less trying not to argue. And for that matter, he did not understand Laura himself. He loved her devotedly in his busy way, but he did not understand her. But Eloise would not let the subject lie. She had to dig it up again and worry it around as a dog digs up the bone he has buried and stands barking foolishly at it.

"I'm as fond of books as Laura. She takes that from me as much as the Deals. But I don't moon over them. I go in for knowledge and data and not the emotion to be obtained from them."

Eloise took a keen delight in her club assignments. For days before the club meetings, she would work on her paper surrounded by an array of text books and encyclopedias. She would write and rewrite, hitching a sentence from one text book onto a sentence from another in an intricate form of rearrangement, and read over the result with deepest pride.

"When I go into a subject, I go thoroughly," she would say, "I marshal all the facts to be obtained."

"Facts--facts . . . what good are just facts?" Laura would say to herself, for to her a new phrase of lovely words was infinitely more alluring than all the facts of her Mother's cherished club work. "Mother never wrote an original thing in her life," she would admit to herself. And then in a sudden feeling of revulsion at the disloyalty of the thought, would throw her arms around Eloise, who stiff as a ramrod, would submit to the hasty caress with: "There, there, Laura, let mother get at something practical now."

Eloise's life seemed not rounded out. One may work at trivial uninteresting tasks and be neither small nor tiresome. But Eloise chose to dwell on the fact that she was doomed to a life of trivialities. She gave the impression that Providence, through some oversight, had neglected to place her in the way of a larger life, whatever that was. One inferred that having been formed of more artistic, less dusty dust, as it were, than the Deal family into which she had married, by some great voluntary loss of potential possibilities, she had made herself more practical than they.

She dilated long and enviously upon the fact that her Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn Wentworth had a great deal of money, lived in the East, traveled long distances frequently, and that by comparison, her own life in Cedartown was a constant sacrifice, but cheerfully borne. A card from the Wentworths mailed at Havana or Miami or San Diego always set her off. "Just think of it, some folks have all the luck. At least they have plenty of money which amounts to the same thing these days. Where will Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn go next? They've been everywhere--just everywhere. Japan . . . Philippine Islands. Imagine just packing up and going places like that. I haven't seen them for years. I do wish we could all see them." To be sure, Eloise had other uncles and aunts but only these two possessed the golden aura so necessary to peace and comfort.

In the former years she had harbored a secret ambition to get her Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn interested in her oldest son, Wentworth, inasmuch as he carried the family name, but for some reason Uncle Harry never seemed to warm to the subject of Wentworth via letter, inquired more often about Laura, when he saw fit to write at all. And now that Wentworth was in the South these years, married there and settled down, Eloise had given up the thought of connecting him in any way with the affluent uncle.

Laura, however, she urged to take time and pains to write to Uncle Harry. "How can I correspond with some one when I don't know what they're like?" Laura would insist.

"You seem able to write everything else," Eloise would point out. "Why not to as important a man as your Uncle?"

"Because I have to know the kind of person any one is, and then I can be like them. I can feel just like anybody," she explained. "I can feel like an old lonely person, or a happy young one, or any kind, and then when I get into the feeling of it, it is easy to write it."

Eloise often grew out of patience with her, and because she could not understand her little daughter, there were many trying scenes. And because there were many trying scenes, Laura retired more constantly into the privacy of her own thoughts and dreams. "I like to talk to people that nobody understands or likes," she confided to Katherine one day, "and make discoveries about them. It interests me just as it interests some people to dig for Indian curios along the Platte and the Missouri."

"You're the oddest creature, Lolly. Well, what do you find when you dig into Old Uncle Lutz,--buffalo bones and chunks of sod houses and skeletons of those grasshoppers that 'et all the crops in 1874'?"

Laura laughed as she always did at Kathie's light and airy chatter and her imitation of old Oscar Lutz's high cracked voice.

Katherine was laughing a great deal these days, too, and almost entirely at herself. To hear Kathie's comments on the subject one would have thought that the process of reproduction was the joker in life's deck of cards.

For in the tag end of the winter, with almost as much pomp and ceremony as royalty demands, Katherine's daughter was ushered into the world. She was christened Patricia and arrived home from Omaha a month later with the highest priced carriage in Nebraska and a nurse whose services, as well as those of the smart vehicle, were presented to the little Buchanan family by that unfailing source of all luxuries,--Mackenzie Deal. Kathie having given life to her child, proceeded to call the obligation square and to take up her countless social duties exactly where she left off.

It was spring again, with Laura seventeen now, ready to graduate, and old man Lutz home.

From March until the last of October the community would see him: dreamy old man Lutz sitting on the porch in the sunshine watching Cedartown go by, rugged old man Lutz walking over the paved streets, his cane thump-thumping on the walks that lay over the prairie where the oxen had traveled, grizzled old man Lutz laboriously climbing Cottonwood Hill to stand with his hand on the gnarled old trunk of the cotton-wood tree he had planted over a half century before, wistful old man Lutz thump-thumping along the graveled walks of the cemetery where all the old friends lived in their little narrow houses.

He lived next door to the John Deal family so that Laura saw him often.

His house was as old-fashioned as he himself. Many years before, the Cedartown newspaper had carried the item that "Our distinguished citizen, Henry Lutz, is moving into the beautiful mansion which he has just completed. This is now the finest house in Cedartown," and other descriptive matter in small town hyperbole.

One year later, the same paper carried an item so similar that it might have been the identical one with the name changed,--"Our distinguished citizen, Oscar Lutz, is moving into the beautiful mansion which he has just completed. This is now the finest house in Cedartown." If any sinister motive of brotherly competition lay under these items, no one of Cedartown's citizens was bold enough to mention the possibility, for Oscar and Henry Lutz had been unusually close companions. If, perchance, there flowed any competitive corpuscles of blood through the veins of Martha and Sarah Lutz, the brothers' wives, no one felt equal to the task of mentioning that, either. And, in any event, Oscar and his Martha held the advantage over Henry and Sarah, for they waited until the latter had expressed themselves in a cupola and fancy cornices and gingerbread rosettes, and then put on two cupolas, made the cornices more fantastic, and spiced up the gingerbread with what was supposed to be an Egyptian lotus effect, but which proved, when Asy Drumm, the local architect-and-carpenter, had finished the job, to look more like the heads of wild cows which needed dehorning.

Laura in her pretty white sport dress was sitting on one of these gingerbread railings of the old man's porch now. He was in his element to have an audience.

"When Marthy and me moved to Nebraska, we built a little pine and cottonwood house over there on the hill north of what's the cemetery now. Nothin' to be seen but the prairie grass a wavin' and a scraggly fringe o' trees along Stove Creek. Henry and me built together,--that is, we all lived in our wagons while we was gettin' his house ready; as soon as his was done we all moved in it and worked on one for Marthy and me. Hauled the lumber from Weeping Water by oxen,--it was only ten miles but it took all day to get down and another day to come back."

Laura let the old man ramble on with no comment from her.

"Lots of wind those years. Just had a little thin layer of ship-lap between us and the wind. Nebraska and wind used to mean the same thing. Died down now all these last decades. No more wind here than anywhere else. That's what trees does for you. You can thank J. Sterling Morton and a whole lot of others of us for that,--your grandfather Deal and Henry and me set out hundreds through this part of the county and got a lot more to take time to set 'em out. But in them days the wind just blew across the country most of the time with the tumble-weeds comin' along for company. Marthy's and my home was pretty thin, I'm tellin' you. Used to lay and listen to the wind. Told Marthy once, it seemed like we was in a great holler drum with the Lord a tappin' and rappin' on the drum."

Laura, listening, said, "Why, that's quite a clever thought, Uncle Oscar." And immediately she was thinking out a poem:

"The little house was like a drum . . ."

That was the way Grandmother Deal used to be,--sort of poetical. She wondered,--did living close to the prairie soil the way they had done, give them some inner consciousness of the beautiful?

She liked to remember how she and Grandma Deal held the same liking for lovely things in literature. It was queer that an old woman like Grandma with very little education would like the things she did. There had never been any one since who could fill her place,--to whom she could talk so readily. But she could not have held converse with Grandma Deal ten minutes without deep interest. They would have touched upon some topic attractive to both, laughed at some anecdote toward which they displayed the same sense of humor, winked back a tear over some happening about which they felt the same sympathy. Yes, there had been some deep and definite understanding of life in Grandmother Deal to which she herself held the key. She did not know what it was, could not define it, found it impossible to put into words. She only knew that in this kinship, mortal or spiritual, there had been a unity of thought and expression, a oneness of dreams and desires. And because she could not describe the unusual relationship between them, which had seemed so much more important than the mere relationship of blood, she made no attempt to tell any one about it. And because, even to herself, she could not put into the limitation of exacting words the vague yearning for something beautiful which life was to give to her, she thought of it always as a white bird flying. It seemed in some indefinable way to connect itself with the dreams and desires of her Grandmother. It was like a legacy from her, a benediction. She would say to herself:

"Pain has been and grief enough and bitterness and crying,

Sharp ways and stony ways I think it was she trod,

But all there is to see now is a white bird flying,--

Whose blood-stained wings go circling high,--circling up to God."

She knew that in some vague, undetermined way she was always to follow with wistful eyes this far-off sheen of silver wings, that by some unexplainable magic she was always to see from the window of her heart, a white bird flying.