Chapter II: And Blue

... Flowers, pushing through from some inner plane of being, and with such energy that they are visible to man. Especially the blue gentian.

THE NEW BOTANY

THE FOURTH GENERATION

When she was eighty-seven years old, Grandma Imlay’s children said that she must not live alone in the winters but must stay with them. Her children were in the sixties, and they spoke with such authority that she obeyed. She stayed for one winter in Bertha’s house, and liked it very little, and said so. When spring came she went back with groans and thanksgiving to her little house on the pond, and all that summer she swept the bricks, polished the windows on the inside and fed the birds on the platform of her clothes reel. But when autumn came they had her go to live with another daughter—Emmy. At this compulsion Grandma Imlay made, in her weak way, a furious row, but her row made no difference. They took her away, describing to her how nice and warm she would be. Moreover, Emmy’s daughter had just been married, and she and her husband might as well live in Grandma’s house that winter.

These young people had no wish to begin housekeeping with Grandma Imlay’s furniture, so they stored it in a room of her little house, and bought new oak. Into her little linoleum-covered dining room they moved a huge sideboard and an extension table; and they took out of her parlor her center table and her ingrain carpet, and bought instead a Wilton rug and an overstuffed rocker and divan. Her yellow bedroom furniture they moved to the bedroom off the kitchen and said that Grandma must come and stay with them whenever she liked.

When Grandma Imlay first came in town, in April, and went to call at her old home, she trembled with delight to be there again, where she had lived for sixty-five years. Here her seven children had been born, and one had died, here her husband had lived and died; and she had baked much food and washed many clothes, had seen her daughters courted and married, and some of their children born. There had been little animals that she had loved, long-ago meetings of her society, boat rides on the pond, and merry times of house-cleaning and of holiday. She loved the smell of the linoleum and the bare washed boards and the dining-room table oilcloth.

She entered now upon that oak sideboard and extension table, the Wilton rug and the overstuffed rocker and divan. “It’s not the same, no more,” said Grandma Imlay.

She went back to her daughter Emmy’s. At first she had been dazed, but when later she talked of it, her eyes flashed. “I gave them my house. They took—I don’t know what. No stuff—no. But somethings. It’s not the same, no more.”

The young people invited her to come back and eat with them. She asked, “On _that_ table?” and said no more. But when they invited her to come for her birthday, she went. Some of her old neighbors were there, young and old. She moved for a time about the rooms, then went to the door, crying: “Let’s go out!” They all sat about on the platform of the clothes reel and on the wash bench and on an overturned tub. She made them bring out there the ice cream and the sunshine cake.

On a day in May they told her that Emmy’s grandchild would be born that night, they thought. She said capably: “I will go down there and see what’s to be done.” When they tried to dissuade her, she said so much that they were obliged to take her there. She went in, and began doing in the old way, and when the nurse and the doctor put her aside, she went out to the platform of the clothes reel and sat there for a long time, not replying. It grew late, and they tried to take her home, but she crept into her kitchen where things were not much changed; and there she waited in the darkness. After a long time she heard the cry of the child. When they brought the baby to the kitchen she sat quiet, and when they showed him to her, she said with no show of feeling: “Has he got all his arms and legs?” “Yes, Grandma,” they said. “And he’s your first great grandchild.” At that she stared up at them. They left her, counting something on her fingers.

When they were ready to go home she was not in the kitchen. Emmy thought of the pond and began to cry: “She’s jumped in the water—she feels she’s not needed and she’s jumped in the water!” But then she opened the door of the bedroom off the kitchen. There on her old yellow bedstead Grandma Imlay was lying asleep. “I believe,” said Emmy, “she’s going to stay here now. What on earth changed her?”

THE QUESTION

Becoming aware that he had no idea what his life was about, Baldy Michelson thought that he must end it. How could he go on with his little grocery and his cement house on Cottage Grove Avenue, his small car and his wife? If he had a radio or a piano player or a child, life might be interesting, or if he could afford to go anywhere for his two weeks’ vacation. As it was, he went for a few days to the Dunes, then sat at home with his wife or went to the picture show; and dug in his languid garden. In the beveled mirror too large for the bedroom, he saw a man with dead eyes, expressionless face which did not change when he spoke. In all his day there was nothing that he liked to do. Sometimes he looked at his wife and wondered what she made of it. But she was a shadow with a sharp tone.

One day he said to her: “Ella, I can’t stand twenty years more of this.”

She replied: “Neither can I.” It was the first time that they had agreed in years.

He looked at her with new sympathy, saying: “What can we do?”

She said: “Let’s sell the house and the business and go abroad.”

He cried: “What would we do when our money was all gone?”

She replied: “I don’t know, but it would be more interesting than to turn on the gas and leave the money to Alex.”

Baldy did not like his nephew Alex either. They sold house, furniture, and business. From the time the hatrack was carried out of the hall, Baldy began to revive.

They bought new clothes, sailed away, saw three capitals, visited the seat of the Michelsons—it was _probably_ the same family—and one night were walking in Chelsea when Baldy said:

“How’d it be to buy a nice villa over here and settle down? I was talking with the greengrocer yesterday. He needs a partner....”

They bought the villa in Chelsea, a small car, and hoped to have a radio or a piano player, but not yet. When vacation came they went for three days to Brighton. When they returned Baldy dug in a languid garden, went to the cinema and sat at home with his wife. In five years he looked in their beveled mirror and saw himself with dead eyes and unchanging face; and in a voice which did not change either he said to his wife: “Ella, how would you like to go back to the States?”

She replied with emotion: “Let’s go, let’s go!”

They sold the villa and the greengrocery partnership, and when they arrived in Chicago, Baldy found that his former partner was getting on and wished for some help. So they rented a house on Cottage Grove Avenue, and Baldy went back to that grocery.

“This is something like!” cried Baldy, and his wife thought so too.

Five years later he saw in the mirror an aging man, with dead eyes, who spoke in a dead voice. His partner was old, his wife was an icy shadow; and if only they could go somewhere for a vacation or could afford a radio or a piano player....

“We had it nice in Chelsea,” said his wife.

“We did,” he agreed, thought of the greengrocery, Brighton Beach and the cinema, and said: “Ella, I can’t stand ten years more of this.”

They were sitting on the side porch and Baldy stood up and shook his fist at the evening sky.

“What’s it _for_?” he shouted. “That’s what I don’t sense. It ain’t in the game to give a man a brain and then not tell him what it’s _for_.” He looked at his wife, his dead eyes unchanging, and said in his flat voice: “Ain’t there _anything_ that could tell a person what it’s for?” But she had no answer.

That evening Alex unexpectedly arrived. Baldy never had liked Alex, a little man, with an eager manner and no great respect for business.

“I dropped in,” said Alex, “to take you both over to my camp for Sunday. Can you go?”

“_Your_ camp?” said Baldy, and felt a new respect for Alex. Had he struck a good thing?

They drove to a corner of the forest reserve where were lines of gray ghostly tents and a living eye of fire in the midst. Around the fire were fifty boys, one boy standing before them. Alex and Baldy Michelson and Ella Michelson sat on the edge of the company and listened:

“We’ve all had the week here, fellows,” came the hesitant voice, “and we could have another one. But there’s fifty that ain’t going to get to camp at all, ’count not money enough. What do you say we start going back and give the other fifty their chanst?”

There came groans and hisses. But they took the vote, counted hands, and the vote was to let the other fifty come out.

“Nice kids,” said Alex to Baldy. “Never had a thing, either. But they’ve got the gang sense—the whole gang, I mean. They never saw one of these fifty boys they’re giving up their week for, you understand.”

“The whole gang,” Baldy repeated. “What’s that?”

Sitting among them on the Sunday, their last day in the camp, Baldy said to his wife: “Ella, they’re got hold of something or other. So has Alex....”

She returned vaguely: “Do you think so?”

That night, as they were falling asleep, Baldy said: “Ella! I’ll bet Alex staged that, thinking I’d put up for the extra two weeks of camp for those boys. I never thought of that....”

She said sleepily: “Oh, surely not, Baldy. Alex isn’t crazy.”

“All the same, he’s got hold of something or other,” Baldy muttered.

He went to his grocery. Mrs. Michelson tidied the house. At night they went to a picture show. In time they bought a piano player and a radio. They often sat on the side porch at evening and Baldy would shake his head and say: “What’s it all for? That’s what I don’t sense.”

But when he died, he left his money to Alex. “Because,” Baldy explained to his lawyer, “I think he seems to have got hold of something....”

THE VOICE

Basset had engaged passage on the _Titanic_, for her first crossing. Any one sailing at that time would have done the same, providing he could still get passage. Basset was delighted at the promise of the swift luxurious voyage, and he said to his friends:

“I’m off—on the _Titanic_—yes. Better come along.”

He cabled his fiancée and his firm, said his farewells and did his final shopping.

He was walking in Regent Street when he first became aware of a faint impulse within him, less than a force, more than a fragrance; an impulse to cancel his passage. At first he did not notice, and when his urge did break through to his consciousness, he understood that it had been beating at him for a long time. As soon as it was definitely noticed, it became a clear and clamorous command.

He argued the matter with this inner disturber. Cancellation was impossible. His arrangements were all made, invitations had been refused, his cables had been sent, and Marie would be counting the days. There was now no earlier boat and he was averse to all postponements. In reply to all this came three distinct words:

“Cancel your passage.”

Now Basset was accustomed to obey this inner impulse. He hadn’t an idea what it was, and in general he thought if you classified a thing you had disposed of it. But though he called this voice the subconscious, he continued to obey it, secretly and blindly, but pretty consistently. And the more often he obeyed it the more pressing it became, until, as now, having listened, he could not dismiss it.

So he canceled his passage, sent off two more cables, and tucked himself into the cabin of an old liner sailing a day later. He was on the deck of this old liner when he was told of the message from the _Carpathia_, crying the _Titanic’s_ fate.

Shaken by the disaster, he was yet kindled by the memory of what had occurred. He had been saved—but how? Unquestionably he could not be the only one to whom this saving voice had spoken. There must be people on this very boat....

He went among the passengers and asked them, nakedly, if they had had a like experience. From a passenger list of seventy, he found six who had taken passage and given it up for a similar reason and eleven who had thus been prevented from taking passage at all.

“Then why,” he shouted to a woman who had held her _Titanic_ passage for a month, “why were _they_ not given this impulse—the people who sailed?”

“Perhaps they were,” said this woman, “and they didn’t listen.”

When his boat had docked and he kissed Marie, exceedingly smart and very tender, she cried: “Oh, my darling—thank God you changed your passage. How did you come to do that?”

Basset told her, reluctantly, feeling a sense of exposure. At once upon her arrival at home she repeated the story to her family, in his presence. At dinner that night she made him tell it again. The newspapers came and interviewed him on it, and then his firm associates questioned him minutely—“No, but, just exactly how did the voice sound?”—and at his club they made him tell it again and again, and there they began to joke to him about it.

A woman’s association asked him to come and speak informally on his wonderful, wonderful metaphysical experience, and he was drawn into an acceptance; and goaded too far by their awe, he informed them that this was the most usual thing in the world; that he had been obeying this inner voice for years, and that they could all do the same if they were not too battered by—“by tea and cakes,” he told them rudely.

“But what _is_ it?” they wanted to know.

“It’s conscience,” he said bluntly, “working as it was intended to work. Also, it’s electricity. If we could raise our consciousness high enough, we’d always have this kind of thing....”

Now the scientists attacked him and demanded to know what on earth he meant by electricity, and the psychologists what on earth he meant by higher consciousness and universal substance, and the theologists what on earth he meant by dragging conscience into the routine of the market place? The weekly reviews and the daily headlines took up and tossed about Basset and his inner voice. He thought: “I shall lose my power. It is not that they have cut my hair. All the same, they have shorn me.”

He fled to a mountain camp and one day went out alone in a canoe on a mountain lake. As he pushed off, he distinctly divined an agonized command not to step into the canoe. It upset, in the green and glossy water. A guide heard his cries and came running and shouting as the waters closed over Basset’s head.

THE WOMAN

Walking one day in a suburb, Bellard, wearing clothes in the extreme of the fashion, was torn by the look of a house on whose mean little porch near the street sat a shabby man of sixty, without a coat, and reading a newspaper. The man’s fate seemed terrible: the unpainted house, the disordered hall, the glimpse of a woman in an apron. But the man looked up, and smiled at Bellard as brightly as if he himself had been young.

Bellard meant to be a financier. Instead, he shortly endured his father’s bankruptcy, left college, found uncongenial employment, observed the trick of a girl’s eyes, married her and lived in a little flat.

But this girl had the quality of a flower. Bellard could not explain it, but she was silent and fragrant, and hopeful like a flower. Once in April when he saw a pot of lilies of the valley blooming on the pavement, he thought: “They’re like Lucile. They’re all doing their utmost.” In her presence it was impossible to be discouraged. He would go home from work hating his office, his routine, his fellows, his street; but as soon as he entered the flat, there would be some breath of that air for which he saw other men dying. Her welcome, her abstraction, her silence, her confidences were all really heavenly. Bellard wondered at her, did not comprehend her, adored her. He worked hard, and went home on the subway with a sense of happiness.

He longed to give her beautiful things, but she said: “How did people get like that, my dear—to want expensive things and to have people look up to them? Isn’t it foolish?” He wondered how she knew that, and he wished that he knew it himself.

Their two children were like all agreeable children, and Bellard and Lucile went through the reverence, anxiety and joy of their upbringing. And whether the moment yielded a torn frock or a hurt knee, croup or a moral crisis, Lucile seemed to put the event in its place and not to be overwhelmed by it. “She has a genius for being alive,” Bellard thought.

As she grew older, she was not so beautiful, and he saw many women both beautiful and young. But when they chattered, pouted and coquetted, when they were cynical, bored, critical, or hilarious, he thought about Lucile and her silences, her fragrance, her hope. Hope of what? She knew that they would in all probability never have any more than they had now. When he asked her wistfully what kept her so happy she replied with an air of wonder: “You.”

One day he overheard her talking about him with a friend. Lucile was saying: “Other men live in things and events and emotions and the future. But he seems to know that living is something else....” “What else?” this friend interrupted curiously. And he heard Lucile say: “Well, of course every one knows, really. But he lives it too.” “I’m not good enough for her,” Bellard thought, and tried his best to prove that he was.

They went on like this for years; the children grew up, married, came home and patronized them. Then Bellard, who had established a little business, failed. His son tried to straighten things out, found it impossible, and assumed control, frankly berating his father. His daughter came home with her three children, and filled the flat with clamor and turbulence. This woman said: “Mother, sometimes I think it’s your fault. You’re so _patient_ with him.” “I’m glad he’s out of that business,” said Lucile absently. “He never liked it.” Her exasperated daughter cried: “But what are you going to live on?” Bellard heard her say: “Your father was responsible for three of us for a quarter of a century you know, dear.” At this Bellard rose on strong wings and felt himself still able to breast the morning and the night.

Lucile and Bellard moved to a suburb. There they rented a little house and Bellard went into a real estate office. All day he showed land and houses to men who wanted something better for less money. At night he went home and there was Lucile—less like a flower, but still silent, fragrant, hopeful. He said to her: “You’ll never have anything more than you have now, Lucile, do you realize that?” She replied: “I don’t want anything more to dust and take care of!” Once he said: “When you were a girl you dreamed that you’d have things different, didn’t you, Lucile?” She said: “My dear, all that poor girl knew how to dream was just about having things!” He cried: “What do you want most of anything in this world?” She considered and answered: “I want you to be as happy as I am.”

He thought of his own early dream of being a great financier, and said: “I’m the happy one, you know.” He thought: “This is what the world is dying for.”

One day, when he was sixty, he was sitting on his mean little porch near the street. The house was small and unpainted, the hall was disordered with house cleaning, Lucile in an apron was in the doorway. Bellard, without a coat and reading a newspaper, lifted his eyes, and saw walking by the house, and wearing clothes in the extreme of the fashion, a youth who looked up at him with an excess of visible compassion.

On this youth Bellard looked down and smiled, a luminous smile, a smile as bright as if he himself had been young.

A FAR CRY

Among the red porch chairs Elmer Dasher sat in a denim swing which leniently dissented. He did not seem like a man who would sit and swing; such a molested-looking man.

Hands parted the curtains of a window behind him and hung there a pink card on which was printed “Ice.” It was evening, but to-morrow morning’s slumber must not be flawed by this task. Immediately the hands appeared upon the porch. Mrs. Dasher’s hands wore all the expression that she had. They seemed to have done so much. Her face had experienced so little.

“Hot,” said she.

“Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time,” said Elmer Dasher.

He tilted the swing, and the spirited disclaimer of the frame did not annoy them. She rocked and they did not hear the creaking board. Near the cement pavement the sprinkler fizzed and spurted; they did not observe that in order to avoid it, passers were obliged to make a detour under the maples.

Elmer Dasher took his watch and held it. The last bright cloud hung on Patch Hill and stained the air. Shadow floated and fell. For five minutes while airy dissolution ran upon the light, Mr. Dasher eyed the dial. Then he descended the steps and turned off the city water. Unconscious that it was a triumph of social evolution for a community to be organized like that, and without a casual glance at the elemental glory of the sunset, he returned to his swing.

Ludlow, his neighbor, crossed the connecting lawns and desired to know how everything was. Ludlow had a woman’s eyes. Elmer Dasher held him in subconscious contempt, for he made disconcerting observations, such as he made now to Dasher’s inevitable reply that everything was complete, complete:

“Sometimes I wonder why Patch Grove doesn’t collapse and slide down Patch Hill and pile up in the valley.”

Dasher inquired why on earth it should do that. He knew his town; “hard-boiled business, hard-boiled recreation, hard-boiled family life,” he had once summed it up; but he could not imagine why business blocks, houses, garages, and folk should ever give way, of their own futility, and slide down to the valley of the Patch, the brown river. Ludlow’s long harangue only confused him.

“You won’t find any better place to live,” he indignantly defended. “I’m afraid not,” said Ludlow, sighed, mentioned the thunder heads in the west, and went home.

“Queer duck,” Elmer Dasher thought.

Abruptly, distinctly, he heard a cry. He could not divine its direction nor tell whether it was the voice of man or woman. It might have been a signal, very clear, though from a distance. He looked at his wife but she, with moving lips, was counting something and had heard nothing. He thought that the boys must be playing ball on the school grounds, and he tilted the swing again.

The hall gas flared up. Over her who had lighted it the warm tide surged, showed her pointed face, her thin arms—Geraldine Dasher, a name to which her faint self of forty bore no relation. She emerged, announced a destination, was met by “Why not ever sit down here at home with us?” and pregnable, without resentment, sank to the top step.

Within the houses, behind the dying brilliance of the brick walls, girls were dressing. In Patch Grove no one dressed before dinner. The virginity of the toilette was preserved for its main purpose. On the porches sat those who did not dress for the evening any more. In many of these the desire to give life had changed to a dynamic hostility to those already alive. As with the Dashers:

“Hot.” “Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time.” “That isn’t funny.” “My dear, nothing is funny to you.” “My clothes are—they’re so funny I don’t like to go to church.” “The churches have gone to the dogs. Best keep out of them.” “You would insult my religion!” And so on to: “I’m rather sick of this whole thing.” Whereon Geraldine cried abruptly: “How do you think I feel about that?” and laughed harshly, so that a silence fell.

In their silence a telegram was given over the telephone in the hall. Dasher took the message, came back, his face sagging with concern, and said:

“Mamma, Katy’s sick. She wants us to go to the city and bring the boy home with us.”

Mrs. Dasher asked for details which had not been given, made and rejected fractions of plans, objected. Dasher said: “Nonsense. Katy’s the only niece I’ve got in the world. Going, too, Jerry? Don’t keep us waiting.”

The enormous night received the little car. Ten miles of dusky cornland, warm with the breath of the day; eight miles of city streets, sleepy with heat, nervous with light, washed by a thin black stream of beings, Pearl City traffic formed the veins of some vast undivined body. That body seemed to have a voice, raucous, unresting. The powers of that body were evident—to give death, to give life, to sin, to rejoice, to agonize. Was there no more to that unknown being? Could it only bellow with its body while its veins flowed with the traffic?

Katy was at a hospital and with her the little boy, wondering, frail. The ward was shared with a woman, a Bohemian, red and black. Katy was a yellow shadow on a pillow. Old in cell and in spirit she said: “Don’t bother to stay. He’ll be here. But he can’t work and see to the boy, too. Me? I don’t know and I don’t care.” She lay like a little animal left too long in a trap to be watching any more.

Elmer Dasher was shaken, said, “But my God, Katy”; and Katy, turning her head fretfully from him, was caught by the aspect of the Bohemian woman, and cried out. The Bohemian woman was sitting erect and trying terribly for breath. No nurse was there, the passages were quiet. The Dashers, always lax, uncentered, were thrown into distraction. Elmer ran and rang and called. It was Mrs. Dasher who reached the woman and, in some deep impulse to physical contact, held her as she died. Mrs. Dasher kept saying: “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand this.”

Jerry caught up the terrified little boy, ran by the nurse who was moving upon the room, crouched in the tonneau, and hugged the child. He wept, was stilled, and later roused to faint interests. She was stirred by his quiet, then by his motion. While they waited, she sought for ways to give him protection. Passers glanced at them and it flashed to her: They think he’s mine. She adjusted his collar and said in an admirably imitated abstraction: “Yes, darling.”

At last her father and mother came crossing the street. To Jerry they seemed detached and of a familiarity strange and passionate, such as she felt in saying over her own name.

“I don’t understand that,” Mrs. Dasher was still saying weakly. In the seat beside her husband she wept and seemed rapt, unaware of anything save that which had just happened. Elmer Dasher was silent, but wholly in the body, as was clear when he cursed in a traffic crisis.

This crisis he assumed to have been imagined: He heard a car, with a strange siren, a faint melodious siren; a car seeking, he thought, to pass him, and nearly succeeding. Dasher could hear the silver alternation, a cadence such as three pipes might give, softly blown. When had a man ever devised a siren like that? “Some music hound,” thought Dasher. And when a tight place narrowed in before him and the light cry of insistence followed close, he drew far to the right to let the fellow pass. The fellow did not pass. Amazed, as he looked back, Dasher saw the street momentarily empty. “Must have been the fire whistle,” Dasher thought, swore, and slid back into the channel.

They drew into the country, into the tender vacant air of fields. Now emerged the sky, which in town they had forgotten. The sky was void of stars. To the southwest were thrusts of lightning, incessant, at innocent play, unconcerned with any fruit of death. A faint huskiness came deepening, of thunder.

“What’s that?” the child asked and, grown shyly accustomed, questioned of fireflies, of miasma, of the smell of honey and hay. These questions gave Jerry rapture. His breath and his brushing eyelash gave her rapture. The child fell asleep, and in dear discomfort Jerry held him; for mile upon mile she held him and dreaded the ride’s end.

She felt a lift of pleasure when the car was stalled. At the foot of a sharp slope up to a roadbed the car stopped. Elmer Dasher, who could not so much as set a hinge on a door, was helpless. He lifted the hood, produced tools, said names of parts; but it was plain that he was helpless. No farmstead light was near and they set themselves to wait for passers. It was a road little frequented. And now the high black clouds were shot with flame.

They faced a meadow made limitless by night. The life of the dark was there, the dark peopled by rustle, breath, odor. In the stillness these influences came confidently to the car. The night breathed, and along its vast invisible veins coursed some faint fluid, tincturing the darkness, flowing through the little bodies of men.

Suddenly Elmer Dasher felt a frightful nostalgia. Home, home! He wanted to be at home. But when he thought of his house, his porch with red chairs, it was not these that he wanted. Home. Some core of the world seemed to emerge and demand him. Where did he want to go?

Far away, as if from another meadow under another night, there came a call, of no remembered bird. A bird call which fused with the rising wind, threaded the thunder, haunted the ear, and died. It voiced his nostalgia, it was pure and pleading. It bore an echo of unbearable sweetness. Or was it a bird call? He thought now that it might have been a wavering engine whistle.... Far down the curve of the railroad across the distant swamp, a yellow eye outrayed in the first rain.

“The ’way freight,” said Elmer Dasher. “It’s none too good for us. We’ll signal them, and if they row we’ll report them to the directors!”

The highway was level with the fields. To the fields’ edge they rolled their car, an ancient servant, and left it locked in darkness; with its lamps they lighted their way and flagged the freight train. In magnificent languor, like a train of the Orient, the thundering thing rolled indolently down and stopped. A blown torch brushed out a little pool of light. A Patch Grove voice hailed them, exclaimed, bade them climb aboard. Received into the warm cave of the cab, these four blinked at the red throat of the firebox and felt the rich reprieve of some convalescence.

The enormous night held the little train. The enormous sky held the little storm. Standing in the gangway Elmer Dasher threw back his head and took the hour. Motion, roar, electricity blue on the metal, thunder of wheel and of cloud, and he in their midst. He felt in flight over farther spaces. They swept by a steel plant, saw the belch and glare, made out men and mounds of slag. One of the sheds stood drenched in the red beauty of the pouring, and naked figures flowered from wild color. In that flash were the tumult of farther industry, roar of innumerable trains, glitter of all the cities, their veins flowing with men and women in sin, joy, anguish. He was feeling all that there was to feel! He could have cried a challenge as the engine went challenging the lit blackness.

But why did the engineer blow the whistle, running through open country? Or _did_ he blow the whistle? He was sitting quietly on the seat, his attention on the track. One hand lay on his knee and one on the windowsill. The engine whistle was not blown! That insistent call that seemed like the voice of their flight, it came toward them from some horizon. What horizon? Who was calling? Calling whom? Beauty and anguish flowed together in Elmer Dasher. He felt drunkenness, incredibly enhanced.

“The glory of the Lord—eh, old girl?” he shouted. No one heard him.

On the fireman’s seat Mrs. Dasher, cowering with covered eyes, looked round at him. She had not heard what he said, had not seen what he saw, had felt nothing that he felt, had been puzzled by no cry; but her face held its own emotion, wore now as much experience as her hands.

“Elmer,” she cried, “I don’t understand what happened to her and I don’t believe I ever shall.”

But this he did not hear. “The glory of the Lord, by the great horn spoon!” he bellowed, and looked about.

Neither death nor the fury of the hour occupied Jerry. In the thunder of the engine and of the storm, she had found that the child clutched at her.

Before midnight they were dry in their rooms and the little boy was sleeping. Elmer Dasher’s exaltation, his wife’s pity and terror, Jerry’s brief motherhood, all boxed dry in their rooms.

The storm cleared and left the air sultry, intolerable. Dasher could not sleep. He went downstairs and sat in the swing. Ludlow was moving about the lawn, barefooted in the drenched grass. He came to the Dasher’s verandah rail.

“Been up in town, have you?” he said. “I tell you, if there’s a reason why Patch Grove should collapse and slide into the valley, Pearl City ought to drop into the ground with no warning. Ought to disappear from the human eye.”

Something shook Elmer Dasher. He seemed to remember that this destiny of man he had recently been stirred to resist. But automatically he replied:

“You won’t find a better city anywhere than Pearl.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Ludlow, and went home.

Faintly, a far horn which would wake few, Elmer Dasher heard the cry again. In it was the nostalgia of the night, of the world, of some hidden being striving to be heard. But of this cry he could not divine direction or meaning. It might have been a signal or a challenge. To whom? And from where? Boys could not be playing ball on the school grounds now....

He moved nervously in his swing and the frame dissented leniently. He felt an instant and acute relief and comfortably concluded that this faint squeak was all that he had noted.

Hearing this squeak, his wife descended, quavered. “That you, Elmer?” and came to her rocking chair on its creaking board. The moon in its third quarter, a trinket of silver gilt, was tilted above the elm, but the Dashers did not observe. Nor did they note the clean new anger of the second storm cutting its low way along the west.

Beneath the hall burner Jerry passed, came to the threshold, and when her mother said “Better sit down,” emerged and obeyed.

“I don’t understand it and I never shall,” said Mrs. Dasher heavily.

“Don’t say that again!” Elmer Dasher cried. “There isn’t a woman in the world that’ll keep on saying the same thing over and over the way you will.”

“I won’t be here long to say anything. I’m sick of the whole thing.”

Jerry interposed: “It’s hot again, isn’t it?” She heard: “Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time.” And: “Can anybody see whether I hung up the ice card?”

THE TWO SOULS

Marthella brought to the kitchen table a five-pound jar of butter and six butter pats, white bread, devil’s food, filled cookies. In the woodshed Malcolm had already ranged the boxes of potatoes, tomatoes, grapes, the two squashes, the tray of “mixed” vegetables. All their entries were ready for the County Fair.

Malcolm came in, stamping. On the other end of the kitchen table Marthella had ready their two plates, coffee cups, soup bowls. She carried steaming soup to his plate. Then she sat down in the high-backed rocking chair near the red hearth. She had spent a difficult day. The last straw had been that Millie, her little maid, had asked to go home for the rest of the week. Marthella thought angrily that she shouldn’t go home.

“Have you eaten?” Malcolm inquired, then noted the unused dishes at her plate. “Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

He almost never called her Marthella any more, nor did she call him Malcolm.

“I’m so tired,” she said, “I can’t eat.”

“So am I,” he said testily, “but I’ve got sense enough to eat, anyway.”

“Some folks are all sense ... one kind,” she retorted tartly.

“I’d have more of the other kind if you were as saving as some,” he returned.

At this Marthella fell to quiet weeping.

He took his soup in silence and presently remarked:

“I’ll bet Sims gets first on his mixed vegetables. My ’bagies aren’t up to his. Sims is an old snide,” he added, his face hardening and sharpening. “He can’t farm for sour grapes. But he can bluff.”

Still weeping, she said:

“If any of my stuff gets first, you keep the money. I couldn’t touch it. It’d burn me.”

She knew that she could “touch” it, and he knew that he would not take her first-premium money. But he replied indifferently:

“All right. It can go toward the milking machine.”

Marthella ceased weeping. Two red spots burned on her cheeks. “I was going to use it toward the parlor carpet,” she said. “But I don’t care how the parlor carpet looks. Nobody sees it.”

“No,” he assented. “Nobody. Nobody but you.”

“Yes. I’m nobody,” she contributed.

He said nothing.

“I’m going to paint the kitchen floor,” he announced after an interval. “I think I’ll paint it brown.”

“Because brown’s hard to take care of?” she inquired. “And yellow’s easy?”

He burst into laughter. “I did that to try you,” he told her. “Last time I said ‘yellow,’ and you said yellow was calf color and you wanted brown. Just plain cantankerous, you are.”

Stung by the injustice of this, her voice rose shrilly:

“I didn’t know brown was hard to take care of then, did I? Well, I know now, because I’ve had it. And I say I want yellow.”

He continued to laugh, rose, pushed his chair under the table, then leaned upon it.

“We’ll start,” he said, “before six in the morning. I want to get a good place for my stuff.”

“You can start when you like,” she replied. “I’m not going.”

And this she heard herself say exactly as if some one else had said it, with whom she had no traffic. The words amazed her. She had not meant to say that. She had meant to go to the Fair. She had not missed a Fair in thirty years. She had spoken without her own will, and now she knew that she must live up to her declaration.

“I may not be able to spare a team to go in again this week,” he reminded her.

“I shall not go in again this week,” she said with deliberation. “I shall not go to the Fair at all.”

At least she enjoyed the sensation that she was making. He knew that she was not given to speaking lightly. Having said that she should not go, Marthella, as he had come to know her, would not be going.

“Suit yourself,” he said only, and went to the barn.

Marthella sat in a web of silence—an abrupt accusing silence. What had she done? She had taken away her chief pleasure of the year, when she met friends not seen year-long. Also she had forgone her premium money, which came to her every year, and was her only money to spend as she liked. Why had she done this? To satisfy something which even now was taking satisfaction, as a beast of prey, over some bleeding victim.

Who was that bleeding victim?

She was hungry, but she sat without eating, as if this were a part of that same savage satisfaction. She looked at the red coals of the hearth. How very bright they were! How very bright they were!

The door opened and her husband came in. He sat opposite to her, before the hearth, and stretched his feet to the fire. He, too, stared at the red coals on the hearth. She looked at him. He was very bright and shining.

There he was, Malcolm, as she knew him, but shot through with some incalculable cast of radiance. His face was serene and beautiful—not as she remembered it in his youth, not as she might imagine it in death, but all compounded of both, and majestic beyond the faces of men.

He spoke to her in the voice that she knew, but keyed now to something gentle.

“Have you got any salve?” he asked. “I seem to have hurt myself.”

She rose and went to the cupboard. As she returned she saw herself in the mirror above the wash bench: her tired face, her smooth hair, her open collar. And she was as luminous as he.

There was no time to think of this. She went to him with the salve, stooped to him. He lifted his hand, with a gesture like that of a little child. She touched him.

And from her to him, and from him to her, went some flow of power which filled the room. Not power which shook them. But something which seemed to have been there for a very long time.

She went back to her chair and they talked. And all the time she looked breathlessly at this being. Was it Malcolm? Had he died, and had this one come instead? But what of her? She glanced down at her blue dress. It seemed clean and soft, and its fabric was like silk. Her hands, too, were smooth and lay unwontedly disclosed. And all was shining....

He had his head on the chair back in a way that she knew.

“We ought to get the kitchen papered,” he was saying.

“I wish we could,” she answered. “Some of the pretty, cheap paper—plain, maybe.”

“Yes, cheap,” he assented. “I don’t know as I always fancy plain paper—might show the dirt more. Would it?”

“Perhaps it would,” she said. “We could tell when we came to pick it out.”

He agreed. “I guess we better see about that when we get a chance. We’ll go to Sims’ for it.”

“Sims’ is the best place,” she assented. “Sims hasn’t been out here in quite a while,” she added.

“I wish’t he’d come,” Malcolm said heartily. “There’s nobody does me more good than Sims. But then, he’s always doing somebody a good turn. As he did Elder.”

“The one he found sleeping in the hay,” she recalled.

He nodded. “The ex-convict,” he said. “Gosh, think of it! College and all that, and not a friend when he came out. He’s been a son to Sims.”

Some exquisite current of feeling ran through Marthella. It made her both faint and divinely strong. Her eyes were on Malcolm; and now, as she saw him smiling with his joy in Sims, and expressing that joy, his body was pulsing with more light, like a soft sun. She looked down at herself. Was she, too, brighter?

She wondered what would happen next. She felt a sense of perfect happiness, as at the onset of some gentle force, which entered and held her and would not let her go. She must try to speak it.

“Millie wants to go home for the rest of the week,” was what she said. “Her sister is there. I’m going to let her go. I can get along.”

And at this she was aware that her own being was bathed in a fairer shining.

He assented. “Millie’s a nice little thing,” he added. “I wish’t we could do something for her.”

She leaned forward eagerly.

“Oh, Malcolm!” she said. “I’ve got some things I could fix up for her, if—do you s’pose we could send her to school? Some little place?”

Until that moment she had never thought of this, but the plan seemed to rise within her, full-formed.

“If that’s what we’d rather do,” he answered. “I’ve been thinking—we ought to pick out some few things like that and then go to work and do them.”

He spoke with a manner of hesitation, almost of surprise ... as if, say, he were trying to remember when he had thought of this.

“Oh, let’s!” she cried. “And Millie’ll be one of ’em. I’d put the premium money in.”

She tried to remember what had been said, of late, about that premium money. Something that hurt her, somewhere. But she had forgotten. In any case the money should go to Millie.

Malcolm rose, and the brightness which was he moved as he moved, and she looked up at him with wonder.

He crossed to the clock and wound it. She could see the turn of his arm and his huge hand, could hear the regular scrape o£ the weights as they rose to his touch. And yet he was as lucent as an angel: the old blue coat, the rough hair, the worn shoes—all.

She looked about on the objects of the room. Everything stood in some exquisite change. The clock shelf, the mirror, the wash bench—what homely graciousness, what dignity! As if their delicate offices of telling the time, reflecting, cleansing, were upon them like visible garments.

The cupboard, with one door ajar—she knew those dishes within so that a crack, a nick, was an event. Yet there they stood, in some delicate difference, vessels of still further ceremonial.

And this was true of the window, looking on the mystery and the splendor of the night. And of the hearth, red with fire, mystic and very bright. And on the table waited the work of her hand, to be taken on the morrow to the County Fair. There they were, the elements of the body, in their mantle of perfection, ready to be blessed, as for some secret sacrament.

All this was to her but a current of feeling, deep, glad. She thought about the Fair, that assembling of the people, people whom she had known from her girlhood; greeting, laughter, music, hands....

She thought about the County Fair ground, and it seemed to be swimming in this brightness which enveloped Malcolm and her.

He closed the clock door, and turned.

“Come, Marthella,” he said. “We must get a pretty good start in the morning.”

Had some one, sometime, laid upon her that she was not to go to the Fair? She hardly thought of this. She was smiling, because he had called her by her name.

What a wonderful thing a name was, within! Marthella! It seemed to her new, like another name. A name which was in itself a woman. She rose to be that woman. All this was to her merely as gladness.

“Yes, Malcolm,” she said.

He fastened the door, blew out the lamp, and there were the coals on the hearth, very, very bright....

Together they groped to the stair door, and that homely way received them, as if abruptly it came forward to perform its authentically appointed service. And there in the stairway that brightness followed. It was in their chamber, mingling with the moonlight. The white curtains, patterned with the moving leaves without, the familiar objects of gloom and light—all there stood in some robing, some dignity of their simple offices.

And when had there been in the house this indeterminate perfume....

They undressed without a lamp—there was no lamp in the chamber. They lay down in that tender, engulfing tide. Sleep came, and as it came there beat about them the sense of some besetting sweetness, but strong with the strength of that force which had seized upon them at birth and had caused them to live.

In the morning, as they drove away from their door, the first sun came slanting along the road to meet them. Their humble highway ran parallel with the equator, and the great sun was there to make it known.

“Marthella,” said Malcolm, “that was the best talk we had last night that we’ve had in a dog’s age. But I’ll be jumped-up if I know what we talked about. Except Millie, and all.”

“It was so,” she said only. “And I dunno’s I know, either, what it was we talked about last night—except Millie and all.”

She looked up at him.

That other brightness was gone this morning. But in his face was the look of the morning, of his manhood, of his energy to create.

She glanced down at her black Henrietta-cloth skirt, at her brown cotton gloves. No, she was not shining now.

They were driving toward that blaze of beauty on the road. It shone on the leaves, on the smooth backs of the willing horses, on Malcolm’s other suit.

She glanced back at the wagon box, filled with what they two had called from the living earth.

That other shining had gone. But here was the ancient shining of the sun. Here was the blessing of the earth. And in the air a tide, besieging, possessing.

THE END

_PLAYS BY ZONA GALE_

MISS LULU BETT

(_The Pulitzer Prize Play of 1921_)

_With Foreword by Robert Benchley and Thomas Dickinson_

A comedy of American life whose every speech brings delighted recognition of its human, everyday truth. The story of the play is woven around Lulu, a colorless household drudge, living in the home of her sister and brother-in-law. Dialogue so commonplace and ugly that it is highly effective and clever character delineation accompany the working out of the plot to the end where Lulu finds a lover and happiness and so brings satisfaction to the sympathetic audience. 2 or 3 acts. Cast: 4m. 5w. “A milestone in American drama.”—_Thomas Dickinson._ Price $1.75.

MISTER PITT

A play of American small town life. Its central character is a traveling pickle salesman, and in him Miss Gale, with marvelous artistry, has achieved a masterpiece of characterization. The life of this generous, good-hearted man, whose native fine qualities are shrouded by a lack of self-confidence and by odd manners and ways of speech, forms the plot of the play. 3 acts, 11 scenes. Cast: 5m. 13w. Price $2.00.

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