by Kate Chopin
“Who are these men, Mrs. Kraummer, that work for you? Where do you pick them up?”
“Oh, ve picks ‘em up everyvere. Some is neighbors, some is tramps, and so.”
“And that broad-shouldered young fellow — is he a neighbor? The one who handed me my paper the other day — you remember?”
“Gott, no! You might yust as well say he vas a tramp. Aber he vorks like a steam ingine.”
“Well, he’s an extremely disagreeable-looking man. I should think you’d be afraid to have him about, not knowing him.”
“Vat you vant to be ‘fraid for?” laughed the little woman. “He don’t talk no more un ven he vas deef und dumb. I didn’t t’ought you vas sooch a baby.”
“But, Mrs. Kraummer, I don’t want you to think I’m a baby, as you say — a coward, as you mean. Ask the man if he will drive me to church to-morrow. You see, I’m not so very much afraid of him,” she added with a smile.
The answer which this unmannerly farmhand returned to Mildred’s request was simply a refusal. He could not drive her to church because he was going fishing.
“Aber,” offered good Mrs. Kraummer, “Hans Platzfeldt will drive you to church, oder vereever you vants. He vas a goot boy vat you can trust, dat Hans.”
“Oh, thank him very much. But I find I have so many letters to write to-morrow, and it promises to be hot, too. I shan’t care to go to church after all.”
She could have cried for vexation. Snubbed by a farmhand! a tramp, perhaps. She, Mildred Orme, who ought really to have been with the rest of the family at Narragansett — who had come to seek in this retired spot the repose that would enable her to follow exalted lines of thought. She marvelled at the problematic nature of farmhands.
After sending her the uncivil message already recorded, and as he passed beneath the porch where she sat, he did look at her finally, in a way to make her positively gasp at the sudden effrontery of the man.
But the inexplicable look stayed with her. She could not banish it.
II
It was not so very hot after all, the next day, when Mildred walked down the long narrow footpath that led through the bending wheat to the river. High above her waist reached the yellow grain. Mildred’s brown eyes filled with a reflected golden light as they caught the glint of it, as she heard the trill that it answered to the gentle breeze. Anyone who has walked through the wheat in midsummer-time knows that sound.
In the woods it was sweet and solemn and cool. And there beside the river was the wretch who had annoyed her, first, with his indifference, then with the sudden boldness of his glance.
“Are you fishing?” she asked politely and with kindly dignity, which she supposed would define her position toward him. The inquiry lacked not pertinence, seeing that he sat motionless, with a pole in his hand and his eyes fixed on a cork that bobbed aimlessly on the water.
“Yes, madam,” was his brief reply.
“It won’t disturb you if I stand here a moment, to see what success you will have?”
“No, madam.”
She stood very still, holding tight to the book she had brought with her. Her straw hat had slipped disreputably to one side, over the wavy bronze-brown bang that half covered her forehead. Her cheeks were ripe with color that the sun had coaxed there; so were her lips.
All the other farmhands had gone forth in Sunday attire. Perhaps this one had none better than these working clothes that he wore. A feminine commiseration swept her at the thought. He spoke never a word. She wondered how many hours he could sit there, so patiently waiting for fish to come to his hook. For her part, the situation began to pall, and she wanted to change it at last.
“Let me try a moment, please? I have an idea— “
“Yes, madam.”
“The man is surely an idiot, with his monosyllables,” she commented inwardly. But she remembered that monosyllables belong to a boor’s equipment.
She laid her book carefully down and took the pole gingerly that he came to place in her hands. Then it was his turn to stand back and look respectfully and silently on at the absorbing performance.
“Oh!” cried the girl, suddenly, seized with excitement upon seeing the line dragged deep in the water.
“Wait, wait! Not yet.”
He sprang to her side. With his eyes eagerly fastened on the tense line, he grasped the pole to prevent her drawing it, as her intention seemed to be. That is, he meant to grasp the pole, but instead, his brown hand came down upon Mildred’s white one.
He started violently at finding himself so close to a bronze-brown tangle that almost swept his chin — to a hot cheek only a few inches away from his shoulder, to a pair of young, dark eyes that gleamed for an instant unconscious things into his own.
Then, why ever it happened, or how ever it happened, his arms were holding Mildred and he kissed her lips. She did not know if it was ten times or only once.
She looked around — her face milk-white — to see him disappear with rapid strides through the path that had brought her there. Then she was alone.
Only the birds had seen, and she could count on their discretion. She was not wildly indignant, as many would have been. Shame stunned her. But through it she gropingly wondered if she should tell the Kraummers that her chaste lips had been rifled of their innocence. Publish her own confusion? No! Once in her room she would give calm thought to the situation, and determine then how to act. The secret must remain her own: a hateful burden to bear alone until she could forget it.
III
And because she feared not to forget it, Mildred wept that night. All day long a hideous truth had been thrusting itself upon her that made her ask herself if she could be mad. She feared it. Else why was that kiss the most delicious thing she had known in her twenty years of life? The sting of it had never left her lips since it was pressed into them. The sweet trouble of it banished sleep from her pillow.
But Mildred would not bend the outward conditions of her life to serve any shameful whim that chanced to visit her soul, like an ugly dream. She would avoid nothing. She would go and come as always.
In the morning she found in her chair upon the porch the book she had left by the river. A fresh indignity! But she came and went as she intended to, and sat as usual upon the porch amid her familiar surroundings. When the Offender passed her by she knew it, though her eyes were never lifted. Are there only sight and sound to tell such things? She discerned it by a wave that swept her with confusion and she knew not what besides.
She watched him furtively, one day, when he talked with Farmer Kraummer out in the open. When he walked away she remained like one who has drunk much wine. Then unhesitatingly she turned and began her preparations to leave the Kraummer farmhouse.
When the afternoon was far spent they brought letters to her. One of them read like this:
“My Mildred, deary! I am only now at Narragansett, and so broke up not to find you. So you are down at that Kraummer farm, on the Iron Mountain. Well! What do you think of that delicious crank, Fred Evelyn? For a man must be a crank who does such things. Only fancy! Last year he chose to drive an engine back and forth across the plains. This year he tills the soil with laborers. Next year it will be something else as insane — because he likes to live more lives than one kind, and other Quixotic reasons. We are great chums. He writes me he’s grown as strong as an ox. But he hasn’t mentioned that you are there. I know you don’t get on with him, for he isn’t a bit intellectual — detests Ibsen and abuses Tolstoi. He doesn’t read ‘in books’ — says they are spectacles for the short-sighted to look at life through. Don’t snub him, dear, or be too hard on him; he has a heart of gold, if he is the first crank in America.”
Mildred tried to think — to feel that the intelligence which this letter brought to her would take somewhat of the sting from the shame that tortured her. But it did not. She knew that it could not.
In the gathering twilight she walked again through the wheat that was heavy and fragrant with dew. The pa
th was very long and very narrow. When she was midway she saw the Offender coming toward her. What could she do? Turn and run, as a little child might? Spring into the wheat, as some frightened four-footed creature would? There was nothing but to pass him with the dignity which the occasion clearly demanded.
But he did not let her pass. He stood squarely in the pathway before her, hat in hand, a perturbed look upon his face.
“Miss Orme,” he said, “I have wanted to say to you, every hour of the past week, that I am the most consummate hound that walks the earth.”
She made no protest. Her whole bearing seemed to indicate that her opinion coincided with his own.
“If you have a father, or brother, or any one, in short, to whom you may say such things— “
“I think you aggravate the offense, sir, by speaking of it. I shall ask you never to mention it again. I want to forget that it ever happened. Will you kindly let me by.”
“Oh,” he ventured eagerly, “you want to forget it! Then, maybe, since you are willing to forget, you will be generous enough to forgive the offender some day?”
“Some day,” she repeated, almost inaudibly, looking seemingly through him, but not at him— “some day — perhaps; when I shall have forgiven myself.”
He stood motionless, watching her slim, straight figure lessening by degrees as she walked slowly away from him. He was wondering what she meant. Then a sudden, quick wave came beating into his brown throat and staining it crimson, when he guessed what it might be.
A HARBINGER
Bruno did very nice work in black and white; sometimes in green and yellow and red. But he never did anything quite so clever as during that summer he spent in the hills.
The spring-time freshness had stayed, some way. And then there was the gentle Diantha, with hair the color of ripe wheat, who posed for him when he wanted. She was as beautiful as a flower, crisp with morning dew. Her violet eyes were baby-eyes — when he first came. When he went away he kissed her, and she turned red and white and trembled. As quick as thought the baby look went out of her eyes and another flashed into them.
Bruno sighed a good deal over his work that winter. The women he painted were all like mountain-flowers. The big city seemed too desolate for endurance often. He tried not to think of sweet-eyed Diantha. But there was nothing to keep him from remembering the hills; the whirr of the summer breeze through delicate-leafed maples; the bird-notes that used to break clear and sharp into the stillness when he and Diantha were together on the wooded hillside.
So when summer came again, Bruno gathered his bags, his brushes and colors and things. He whistled soft low tunes as he did so. He sang even, when he was not lost in wondering if the sunlight would fall just as it did last June, aslant the green slopes; and if — and if Diantha would quiver red and white again when he called her his sweet own Diantha, as he meant to.
Bruno had made his way through a tangle of underbrush; but before he came quite to the wood’s edge, he halted: for there about the little church that gleamed white in the sun, people were gathered — old and young. He thought Diantha might be among them, and strained his eyes to see if she were. But she was not. He did see her though — when the doors of the rustic temple swung open — like a white-robed lily now.
There was a man beside her — it mattered not who; enough that it was one who had gathered this wild flower for his own, while Bruno was dreaming. Foolish Bruno! to have been only love’s harbinger after all! He turned away. With hurried strides he descended the hill again, to wait by the big water-tank for a train to come along.
DOCTOR CHEVALIER’S LIE
The quick report of a pistol rang through the quiet autumn night. It was no unusual sound in the unsavory quarter where Dr. Chevalier had his office. Screams commonly went with it. This time there had been none.
Midnight had already rung in the old cathedral tower.
The doctor closed the book over which he had lingered so late, and awaited the summons that was almost sure to come.
As he entered the house to which he had been called he could not but note the ghastly sameness of detail that accompanied these oft-recurring events. The same scurrying; the same groups of tawdry, frightened women bending over banisters — hysterical, some of them; morbidly curious, others; and not a few shedding womanly tears; with a dead girl stretched somewhere, as this one was.
And yet it was not the same. Certainly she was dead: there was the hole in the temple where she had sent the bullet through. Yet it was different. Other such faces had been unfamiliar to him, except so far as they bore the common stamp of death. This one was not.
Like a flash he saw it again amid other surroundings. The time was little more than a year ago. The place, a homely cabin down in Arkansas, in which he and a friend had found shelter and hospitality during a hunting expedition.
There were others beside. A little sister or two; a father and mother — coarse, and bent with toil, but proud as archangels of their handsome girl, who was too clever to stay in an Arkansas cabin, and who was going away to seek her fortune in the big city.
“The girl is dead,” said Doctor Chevalier. “I knew her well, and charge myself with her remains and decent burial.”
The following day he wrote a letter. One, doubtless, to carry sorrow, but no shame to the cabin down there in the forest.
It told that the girl had sickened and died. A lock of hair was sent and other trifles with it. Tender last words were even invented.
Of course it was noised about that Doctor Chevalier had cared for the remains of a woman of doubtful repute.
Shoulders were shrugged. Society thought of cutting him. Society did not, for some reason or other, so the affair blew over.
AN EMBARRASSING POSITION
COMEDY IN ONE ACT
CHARACTERS
MISS EVA ARTLESS - Brought up on unconventional and startling lines by her eccentric father, a retired army officer.
MR. WILLIS PARKHAM - Wealthy young bachelor. Candidate for a public office.
MR. COOL LATELY - Reporter for the Paul Pry.
CATO - Respectable old negro servitor.
SCENE - Snuggery in Willis Parkham’s suburban residence.
TIME: 11.30 P. M.
Parkham stands with back to open fire lighting cigar. Cato busily engaged removing evidences of a jovial bachelor gathering.
PARKHAM: Never mind, Cato; leave all that till morning.
CATO: Marse Will’s, you ten’ to yo’ business; I g’ine ten’ to mine. Dat away to save trouble.
PARKHAM: (Laughs good naturedly.) It never occurs to you to take liberties, does it Cato?
CATO: I never takes nuttin’ w’at don’ b’long to me, Marse Will’s. But what I despises hits to come in heah of a mornin’ an’ find de bottles an’ glasses scatter roun’ like nine pins; de kiards an’ poker chips layin’ ‘bout loose. An’ dis heah w’at you all calls a p’litical meetin’!
PARKHAM: (Seats himself in easy chair and picks up book from table.) One name’ll do as well as another for a poker game, Cato. Now see that everything is well closed. It’s turning cold and seems to be blowing a blizzard outside.
CATO: Yas, suh, de groun’ all done kiver up wid snow; an’ hits fallin’ like fedders outen a busted fedder bed. (Exit with tray, glasses, etc., limping painfully aud affectedly.)
PARKHAM: (Settles back in easy chair for a quiet read.) Talk of being ruled with an iron rod! (Door bell rings.) At this hour! a caller! who in perdition can it be! (Hurries to open the door himself and ushers in a handsome, sprightly young girl holding, with difficulty, a dripping umbrella, hand-bag, cat and small dog — one under each arm. Wears a feathered hat tied under chin, and long costly circular.)
PARKHAM: (Excitedly.) Eva Artless!
EVA: Yes, I knew you’d be astonished. I just knew you would — at this time of night. Here, take my umbrella and bag, please. (Parkham takes them. Closes umbrella and sets it to one side.)
PARKHAM: You’re right, I’m perfec
tly amazed.
EVA: I knew you’d be delighted, too.
PARKHAM: (Uncertainly.) Oh, I am; charmed. But has anything happened? The Major’ll be along presently, I suppose, in a few moments?
EVA: The Major! Do you think I’d have come if the Major were home? Take that telegram from my belt. I can’t with Zizi and Booboo. Do you see it, the end sticking up, there?
PARKHAM: This is it? (Draws paper gingerly from Eva’s belt.)
EVA: That’s it. Read it. Read it aloud and see.
PARKHAM: (Reads telegram.) “Dearest Eva.”
EVA: Just like a letter, “Dearest Eva.” Poor, sweet papa; the first telegram I ever had from him. Go on.
PARKHAM: “Dearest Eva” —
EVA: You read that.
PARKHAM: So I did. “Accident and obstruction on tracks below. Shall be detained here till noon tomorrow. Am in despair at thought of you remaining alone till then. May heaven have you in keeping till return of your distracted father.”
EVA: “Distracted father.” Heigh-ho. Put it back in my belt, please, Willis. (Parkham replaces the telegram awkwardly and with difficulty.) So when I got it, naturally, I was distracted, too.
PARKHAM: When did it come?
EVA: About an hour ago. Untie my hat and circular, will you? (Parkham does as she bids, and places things on chair.) Thanks. (Caresses dog and cat alternately.) My poor Zizi; my sweet Booboo; ‘oo was jus’ as s’eep’y as ‘oo tould be, so ‘oo was. Won’t you kindly give them a little corner for the night, Willis? You know I couldn’t leave them behind.
PARKHAM: Let me have them? (Takes pets by back of the neck — one in each hand, and proceeds towards room to right. Pushes door open and deposits Booboo and Zizi within, closes door and rejoins Eva, who has seated herself.) May I learn now, Eva, to what I owe the distinction of this unexpected visit?
EVA: Why, as I said before, you owe it to papa’s unavoidable absence. Finding that I was destined, for the first time in my life, to spend a night apart from him, and knowing him to be distracted about it, as you read yourself, I naturally sat down to do a little thinking on my own account.