by Willa Cather
“Madame, it is you who have been good! Always giving and giving to a poor girl like me with no voice at all. You know that I would not leave you for anything in the world but this.”
“Are you sure you can be happy so? Think what it means! No more music, no more great personages, no more plunges from winter to summer in a single night, no more Russia, no more Paris, no more Italy. Just a little house somewhere in a strange country with a man who may have faults of his own, and perhaps little children growing up about you to be cared for always. You have been used to changes and money and excitement, and those habits of life are hard to change, my girl.”
“Madame, you know how it is. One sees much and stops at the best hotels, and goes to the best milliners—and yet one is not happy, but a stranger always. That is, I mean”—
“Yes, I know too well what you mean. Don’t spoil it now you have said it. And yet one is not happy! You will not be lonely, you think, all alone in this big strange city, so far from our world?”
“Alone! Why, Madame, Arturo is here!”
Tradutorri looked wistfully at her shining face.
“How strange that this should come to you, Nanette. Be very happy in it, dear. Let nothing come between you and it; no desire, no ambition. It is not given to every one. There are women who wear crowns who would give them for an hour of it.”
“O, Madame, if I could but see you happy before I leave you!”
“Hush, we will not speak of that. When the flowers thrown me in my youth shall live again, or when the dead crater of my own mountain shall be red once more—then, perhaps. Now go and tell your lover that the dragon has renounced her prey.”
“Madame, I rebel against this loveless life of yours! You should be happy. Surely with so much else you should at least have that.”
Tradutorri pulled up from her dressing case the score of the last great opera written in Europe which had been sent her to originate the title role.
“You see this, Nanette? When I began life, between me and this lay everything dear in life—every love, every human hope. I have had to bury what lay between. It is the same thing florists do when they cut away all the buds that one flower may blossom with the strength of all God is a very merciless artist, and when he works out his purposes in the flesh his chisel does not falter. But no more of this, my child. Go find your lover. I shall undress alone tonight. I must get used to it. Good night, my dear. You are the last of them all, the last of all who have brought warmth into my life. You must let me kiss you tonight. No, not that way—on the lips. Such a happy face tonight, Nanette! May it be so always!”
After Nanette was gone Madame put her head down on her dressing case and wept, those lonely tears of utter wretchedness that a homesick girl sheds at school. And yet upon her brow shone the coronet that the nations had given her when they called her queen.
THE WAY OF THE WORLD.
O! The world was full of the summer time,
And the year was always June,
When we two played together
In the days that were done too soon.
O! every hand was an honest hand,
And every heart was true.
When you were the king of the corn-lands
And I was a queen with you.
When I could believe in the fairies still,
And our elf in the cottonwood tree,
And the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end
And you could believe in me.
Speckle Burnham sat on Mary Eliza’s front porch waiting until she finished her practicing. Apparently he was not in a hurry for her to do so. He shuffled his bare feet uneasily over the splintery boards when the dragging, hopeless thumping within quickened in tempo to a rapid, hurried volley of sounds, telling that Mary Eliza’s “hour” was nearly over and that she was prodding the lagging moments with fiery impatience.
Indeed, cares of state were weighing heavily upon Speckle, and he had some excuse for gravity, for Speckle was a prince in his own right and a ruler of men.
In Speckle Burnham’s back yard were half-a-dozen store boxes of large dimensions, placed evenly in a row against the side of the barn, and there was Speckle’s empire. It had long been a cherished project of the boys on Speckle’s street to collect their scattered lemonade stands and sidewalk booths and organize a community; but without Speckle’s wonderful executive ability the thing would never have been possible.
In the first place, Speckle had the most disreputable back yard in the community. It would have been quite out of the question to have littered up any other yard on the street with half-a-dozen store boxes and the assorted chattels of their respective occupants. But Speckle’s folks had been farming people, and regarded their back yard as the natural repository for such encumbrances as were in the way in the house; and Speckle was among them. Speckle had offered his yard as a possible site for a flourishing town, and the other boys brought their store boxes and called the town Speckleville in honor of the founder.
Now it must not be thought that Speckleville was a transient town, such as boys often found in the morning and destroy in the evening. Speckle’s especial point was organization. No boy was allowed to change his business or his place of business without due permission from the assembled council of Speckleville. Jimmy Templeton kept a grocery stocked with cinnamon barks, soda crackers, ginger snaps and “Texas Mixed”—a species of cheap candy which came in big wooden buckets;—these he pilfered from his father’s store. Tommy Sanders was proprietor of a hardware store, stocked with bows and arrows, sling shots, pea shooters and ammunition for the same. “Shorty” Thompson kept a pool room with a table covered with one of his mother’s comforters. Dick Hutchinson ran the dime museum where he fearlessly handled live bull snakes for the sum of a few pins and exhibited snapping turtles, pocket gophers, bullets from Chattanooga, rusty firearms, and a piece of the rope with which a horse thief had been lynched. Reinholt Birkner was the son of the village undertaker and was a youth of a dolorous turn of mind and insisted upon keeping a marble shop, where he made little tombstones and neat caskets for the boys’ deceased woodpeckers and prairie dogs, and for such of the museum specimens as sought early and honored graves.
Speckle, by reason of inventive genius and real estate monopoly, held all the important offices in the town. He was mayor and postmaster, and he conducted a bank, wherein he compelled the citizens to deposit their pins, charging them heavily for that privilege and lending out their own funds to them at a ruinous usury, taking mortgages on the stock and business houses of such unfortunates as failed to meet their obligations promptly. His father was a chattel broker in the days when money changed hands quickly in the country beyond the Missouri, and from his tenderest years Speckle had been initiated into the nefarious arts of the business. But although his threats many a time caused poor delinquents to tremble, I never heard of him actually foreclosing on any one, and I can assert on good authority that when Dick Hutchinson’s father failed in business, causing great consternation throughout the village, Speckle went to Dick privately and offered to lend him a few hundred pins gratis to tide him over any present difficulties.
But certainly Speckle had a right to be autocratic, for it was Speckle’s fecund fancy more than his back yard that was the real site of that town, and his imagination was the coin current of the realm, and made those store boxes seem temples of trade to more eyes than his own. A really creative imagination was Speckle’s—one that could invent occupations for half-a-dozen boys, metamorphize an express wagon into a street car line, a rubber hose into city water works, devise feast days and circuses and public rejoicings, railway accidents and universal disasters, even invent a Fourth of July in the middle of June and cause the hearts of his fellow townsmen to beat high with patriotism. For Speckle, by a species of innocent hypnotism, colored the mental visions of his fellow townsmen unt
il his fancies seemed weighty realities to them, just as a clever play actor makes you tremble and catch your breath when he draws his harmless rapier. And, like the play actors, Speckle was the willing victim of his own conceit. What matter if he had to peddle milk to the neighbor women at night? What matter even if he were chastised because he had lost the hatchet or forgotten to dig around the trees on his father’s lots? Tomorrow he was the founder of a city and a king of men!
So the inhabitants of Speckleville had dwelt together in all peace and concord until Mary Eliza Jenkins had peered at them through the morning-glory vines on her back porch and had envied these six male beings their happiness; for although Mary Eliza was the tomboy of the street, the instincts of her sex were strong in her, and that six male beings should dwell together in ease and happiness seemed to her an unnatural and a monstrous thing. Furthermore, she and Speckle had played together ever since the days when he had been father to all her dolls and had rocked them to sleep, and until the founding of Speckleville he had openly preferred her to any boy on the street, and she bitterly resented his desertion.
Once, in a moment of rashness, the boys invited her over to a circus in Speckle’s barn, and after that Speckle knew no peace of his life. Night and day Mary Eliza importuned him for admittance to his town. She hung around his back porch as soon as she was through practicing in the morning; she nudged him and whispered to him as she sat next to him at Sunday school; she waylaid him while he was taking his cow out to pasture and sprang upon him from ambush when he was taking his milk in the evening, even offering to accompany him and carry one of the pails. Taking his milk was the prime curse of Speckle’s life and he weakly accepted her company, especially to the house of the old woman who kept the big dog. When Speckle went there alone he usually played he was a burglar.
Now Speckle himself had really no objection to granting Mary Eliza naturalization papers and full rights of citizenship, but the other boys would not hear of it.
“She’ll try to boss us all just like she bosses you,” objected Tommy Sanders.
“Anyhow, she’s a girl and this ain’t a girl’s play. I suppose she’d keep a dressmaking shop and dress our dolls for us,” snorted Dick Hutchinson contemptuously.
“Put it any way you like, she’ll spoil the town,” said Jimmy Templeton.
“You began it all yourself, Temp. You asked her to the circus, you know you did,” retorted Speckle.
Poor Speckle! He had never heard of that old mud-walled town in Latium that was also founded by a boy, and where so many good fellows dwelt together in jovial comradeship until they invited some ladies from the Sabine hills to a party, with such disastrous results.
On this particular morning Speckle had come over to, if possible, persuade Mary Eliza to desist from her appeals, and he sat in the sunshine gloomily awaiting the interview. Presently a triumphant “one, two, three, FOUR,” and a triumphant bang announced that her hour of penal servitude was over for the day, and she dashed out on the porch.
“Well, have you made them?” she demanded.
Speckle braced himself and came directly to the point.
“I can’t make them, Mary ’Liza, and they say you’d get tired and spoil the town.”
“O stuff! What makes them say that?”
“Well, it’s ’cause you’re a girl, I guess,” said Speckle reflectively, wrinkling the big yellow freckle on his nose that was accountable for his nickname.
“Girl nothin’! I’d play I was a man, and that’s all you do. M. E. Jenkins—that’s what I’ll have over my store. I’ve got the signs already made. ‘Delmonico Resteraunt, M. E. Jenkins, Prop.’ Come, Speckle, you know I can skin a cat as well as you can and I can beat Hutch running, can’t I now?”
“Course you can. I’d like to have you in, Mary ’Liza,” remonstrated Speckle.
“O well, I don’t care so much about getting in your old town anyhow, only my father keeps the bakery and I could have cookies and cream puffs and candy to sell in my store, chocolates and things, none of your old Texas Mixed, and I thought I could be a good deal of use in your town.”
“Say, Mary ’Liza, do you mean that? I guess I’d better tell them. I guess I’ll tell them tonight,” said Speckle, with a new interest.
“O do, Speckle, and do get me in!” cried Mary Eliza, as she hopped gleefully about on one foot. “You know you can if you want to ’cause it’s in your yard. And we can have Strawberry for a ring horse when we have circuses. His tail isn’t all rubbed off like your Billy’s and he can be a pony in the side show, too.”
Speckle did not reply at once. He was wondering whether Mary Eliza could meet the large demands on the imagination requisite to citizenship in Speckleville. He was not wholly certain as to the enduring qualities of feminine imagination, but he did not know exactly how to express his doubts, so he remained silent.
“What are you thinking about now?” demanded Mary Eliza.
“O nothing. I’ll see them about it tonight.”
“And if they don’t let me in I’ll know it’s all your fault,” called Mary Eliza threateningly, as she dashed into the house.
That evening after Speckle had taken his milk he hung the empty pails on the fence and went around to interview each of the boys privately. He suspected that by seeing them separately he could best appeal to their individual weaknesses. He bribed Dick Hutchinson with a dozen of his rarest tin tobacco tags, all with euphuistic names such as “Rose Leaf” and “Lily of the Valley,” which his uncle had sent him from Florida. He won Reinhold Birkner with promises of many a solemn funeral cortege for Mary Eliza’s deceased pets, and charmed “Shorty” Thompson’s ears with stories of the cream puffs from old Jenkin’s bakery. Over Jimmy Templeton he had no hold, Jimmy being of that peculiarly odious species of humanity that is thoroughly upright and without secret weakness. So he merely told him of the consent of the other boys and used his personal influence for all it was worth.
“All right, if you fellows say so,” Temp replied gravely. He was soaking cat tails in the kerosene can preparatory to a torchlight procession of the Speckleville Republican Club. “I won’t be the man to kick, but you mark my word, Speckle, she’ll spoil the town. Girls always spoil everything a boy’s got if you give ’em a chance.”
That night after Speckle’s mother had annointed his sunburned face with cold cream and he had climbed into bed and was reposing peacefully on his stomach, enjoying the only real comfort he had had that day, he heard a violent “tictac” at the window at the head of his bed.
“Hello, Temp, is that you?” he called.
“No, Speckle, it’s me. Did you make them?” whispered Mary Eliza.
“Yes, I made them,” replied Speckle, rather wearily.
“O, Speckle, you are a dandy! I just love you, Speckle!” and Mary Eliza pounded and scratched joyfully at the screen as she departed.
The next day Speckle vacated his piano box, the largest and most commodious structure in his town, and fitted it up for Mary Eliza with a lavishness which astonished his comrades. In the afternoon Mary Eliza made her triumphant entry into Speckleville with an oldfashioned carpet sack in one hand and a Japanese umbrella in the other.
She was all smiles and sweetmeats and showed neither resentment nor embarassment at her chilling reception. She set forth her cream puffs and chocolates and in half an hour the Delmonico restaurant was the center of interest and commercial activity.
I shall not attempt to rehearse all the arts and wiles by which Mary Eliza deposed Speckle and made herself sole imperatrix of Speckleville. She made it her business to appeal to every masculine instinct in the boys, beginning with their stomachs. When first a woman tempted a man she said unto him, “Eat.” The cream puffs alone would have assured her victory, but she did not stop there. She possessed cunning of hand and could make wonderful neckties of colored tissue
paper, and stiff hats of pasteboard covered with black paper and polished with white of egg, which she disposed of for a number of pins. She became the star of the circus ring, and it was considered a great sight to behold Mary Eliza attired in blue cambric tights with an abundance of blonde locks, made by unraveling a few feet of new heavy rope, flowing about her shoulders, executing feats of marvelous dexterity upon the flying trapeze.
Indeed, Mary Eliza possessed certain talents which peculiarly fitted her to dwell and rule in a boy’s town. Otherwise she could never have brought disaster and ruin upon the town of Speckleville. For all boys will admit that there are some girls who would make the best boys in the world—if they were not girls.
It soon befell that Mary Eliza’s word, her lightest wish, was law in Speckleville. Half the letters that went through Speckle’s postoffice were for her, and even the phlegmatic Reinholt Birkner made her a beautiful little tombstone with a rose carved on it as an ornament for her center table.