The two, Abbie and Grace, met the newly-married couple with the surrey. Abbie was fifty-five now, her once glorious reddish-brown hair colorless where it was not gray, her shoulders drooping, her body rather shapeless.
Eloise was pleasant,—a nice looking young woman with firm lips. She had on an Alice-blue skirt made the new way with all the gathers in the back, and dragging a little on the station platform. A tight silk waist of the same shade with a cream-colored lace fichu, and a blue hat fitting firmly to her coils of light hair in the back but protruding fashionably to the front far over the large roll of a high pompadour, completed her most up-to-date costume. She met Abbie half-way with cordiality. She fitted herself into the family, firmly, as though she had arrived with the preconceived idea that she was going to make the most of John’s mother. Grace took a liking to her immediately. The two discussed school affairs earnestly, with Grace hanging on her new sister’s every firm word. Abbie, cleaning up the table and listening to them, said to herself, “For all the world, I believe she and Grace are two of a kind.”
“Mother,” Eloise said firmly, after supper when John had gone over to the office, “I’m going to call you ‘Mother’ right on the start and then it won’t be hard.”
“I hope,” said Abbie gently, “it won’t be hard to call me ‘Mother.’ ”
“Oh, no,” Eloise said firmly. “I’m not going to let it be hard. That’s why I’m beginning at once. Mother, John’s and my marriage is to be different from other marriages.”
“How, Eloise?”
“Because I’m going at it in a businesslike, systematic way.”
“Yes,” said Abbie, “that’s a good way.”
“I’m going to make our home a well-organized place of rest and peace for John.”
“That will be nice.”
“You see mistakes on all sides and I’m not going to make any.”
“No,” said Abbie, “of course you won’t.”
“I’ve been reading everything on the subject and I know that I’m well prepared.”
“Yes,” said Abbie meekly, “I think you are.”
“She has everything, Will,” Abbie said to the spirit who was comrade and confidante, “education, looks, high ideals, efficiency,—everything but a sense of humor. And oh, Will, how John will miss it.”
He admires her, Abbie.
“And loves her, Will, and love covers many things.”
The next year Abbie sold the rest of the acreage to Gus Reinmueller, retaining the five acres which contained the house and out-buildings, the orchard and one pasture. Gus paid twelve thousand dollars for it, giving four thousand in cash and an interest-bearing note. “Now we can plan for Grace to go to the University,” Abbie said. “Grace wants to be a teacher and now I can help her.”
Now that the land was sold, Abbie did not have to think of the responsibility of the crops, but her hands were still busy with chickens, and pigs and the cow. She drove a sorrel mare now back and forth, attending everything that went on in Cedartown, which she felt would benefit her mentally, and she did not miss a church service or Ladies’ Aid. One of the attractions that summer, which she and Grace patronized, was an entertainment in the opera house, purporting to be a sort of magic-lantern show in which the people in the picture would move about as they were thrown on the sheet.
“It may be true,” Abbie admitted, but added with frank suspicion that there was probably a catch in it somewhere.
The program opened with a piece by the Cedartown orchestra. Probably the Boston Symphony could have done as well, but old Charlie Beadle, who was leader and drummer, would not have admitted it. A male quartet next sang, “Out on the Deep When the Sun Is Low.” One gathered the rather disquieting impression from their forlorn and hopeless tones that there was small prospect of ever seeing the center of the solar system again. Miss Happy Joy Hansen then spoke “The Raggedy Man, He Works for Paw,” with so much childish lisping and so much coy twisting of an imaginary apron, that one never in the world could have guessed her age, unless he had known, as all Cedartown did, that, neither happily nor joyously, would she ever, ever again see thirty-two.
And then, the picture. The male quartet, having apparently recovered from the sad effects of the setting sun, launched forth into a spirited presentation of: “When Kate and I Were Coming Through the Rye.” A field of grain was plainly visible on the cloth, and, incredulous as it seemed, it waved and jerked and twitched. Kate came into sight, and, unbelievable as it was, Kate also waved and jerked and twitched. A young man close behind her, with every indication of St. Vitus’ Dance, also waved and jerked and twitched. But they moved. The advertisement had not lied. Across the sheet the people moved. “Dear, dear,” Abbie said on the way home. “What next can they do? There’s just nothing now left to be invented, Grace.”
Late that fall, Abbie helped organize a Woman’s Club. “I don’t know that we will do a great deal of good, but we won’t do any harm, and much of life is an experiment, anyway.”
Christine was disgusted when Abbie told her. “A club! Ach! for what? To hit mit?”
On the very day in which Abbie drove home with the office of second vice president of the Cedartown Woman’s Club upon her shoulders, a touch of the old raw prairie days presented itself like a bit of the past. She met Oscar Lutz with a wild deer which he had shot and killed in the timber a mile east of Stove Creek,—a young buck that, quivering and at bay, seemed the last survivor of his comrades that had once roamed the east-Nebraska country.
Grace graduated from High School when Abbie was fifty-eight. She gave the valedictory for her class, an earnest if youthful dissertation on “Heaven Is Not Reached by a Single Bound.”
The Sunday after the exercises, all of the children, but Isabelle, were home for dinner. At the table Mack said: “Mother, you ought to offer the place for sale right away to get a buyer by fall. It will make some farmer who wants to retire, a mighty good place,—a nice little five-acre tract with the orchard and a pasture and all.”
“I would have before this,” Abbie admitted, “but I haven’t been real sure in my mind that I’d leave at all.”
They all voiced the same sentiment, “Oh, yes, Mother, you ought to move to Lincoln with Grace.”
“There’s no real use for your staying.”
“With Grace gone, just think how lonesome you’ll be.”
Dr. Baker and Margaret were willing to have Grace and her mother live with them just as Isabelle had done for those two years. The Bakers had been married fifteen years now. Dr. Baker’s firm was a leading one, Dr. Baker himself prominent in his profession. They had a nice comfortable home. Lincoln was a city.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to do that,” Abbie said. “Not both of us. That would be one too many, anyway. If I go, Grace and I will have a little place of our own.”
That set them off on another tangent. There were nice cottages going up everywhere, several attractive ones of the new type called bungalows.
Before they left, they went over all the arguments for selling. “The place is too big for you, Mother. What do you need of a yard this size? Or a house with this many rooms? Or a barn?” Their talk was sensible. All the arguments seemed on their side. “And above all the reasons, is the one that it’s going to be lonesome for you here.” They were unanimous in that opinion of their mother’s coming loneliness.
Abbie thought about it a great deal that summer before it was time for Grace to go. At times she decided that she was foolish to stay in the old place. The children were right. It was only old-fashioned, narrow people who never made a change. She believed she would go up to Lincoln and look at cottages. In the city there would be a larger life for her, new contacts, opportunities to see and hear better things. Just as she had half reconciled herself to the plan, she would walk down the path between the cedars, which she and Will had set out, look at her hollyhocks and delphinium, blood-red and sea-blue against the White pickets, stand for a time and gaze over toward the heavy fri
nge of willows and oaks and elms along Stove Creek. Everything looked familiar,—friendly. There would never be another real home for her. Home was something besides so much lumber and plaster. You built your thoughts into the frame work. You planted a little of your heart with the trees and the shrubbery.
It was the only old home the children had ever known. There ought to be a home for children to come to,—and their children,—a central place, to which they could always bring their joys and sorrows,—an old familiar place for them to return to on Sundays and Christmases. An old home ought always to stand like a mother with open arms. It ought to be here waiting for the children to come to it,—like homing pigeons.
On the next Sunday Abbie was ready with her decision. “No, I’ve decided. I’m going to stay here. This is my home.”
They went over all the arguments again. “The place is too big for you, Mother. What do you need of a house this size? Or a barn? And above all, with Grace gone, it will be too lonely for you here. . . .”
Abbie looked beyond the poplars, stared for a moment beyond the Lombardy poplars into the deepening prairie twilight.
“No,” she said quietly, “you wouldn’t understand. It won’t be lonely here.”
CHAPTER XXVI
That fall after Grace went away to school, John’s and Eloise’s first child was born.
“You’ll want me to come, won’t you?” Abbie had asked Eloise with her usual desire to be helpful.
“Oh, no,” Eloise had said hastily,—a little too hastily. “John wants me to have a trained nurse,—the very best.”
Little hurts! Little pleasures! How they made up the whole of Abbie Deal’s life.
Eloise named the boy Wentworth, and proceeded to bring him up by the ritual of a red volume in which she held implicit and humorless faith.
“It would make a dog laugh, Will,” Abbie said at home to that invisible comrade who was only spirit and memory. “He was crying and she ran and got the little red book and looked up something in the index. I went over and picked him up and it was nothing but a safety-pin sticking him.”
That was the fall, too, in which Cedartown was astonished and entertained by the spectacle of Mack Deal and Emma with the two boys coming to town in one of the new automobiles. The noisy approach was borne in upon the ears of the residenters some time before the machine’s actual appearance, so that a welcoming committee, in the form of a large delegation of the citizens, was on hand to greet the proud owners.
Mack and the ten-year-old Stanley were on the front seat. Mack at the wheel, eyes bulging and elbows out at right angles, looked neither to the right nor the left as he piloted the popping, sputtering land craft through the choppy seas of a rough road. Emma, in the back seat with the four-year-old Donald, was in a state of perpetual motion, caused by dividing her frantic clutches between her youthful offspring and her large flapping hat, wound round with many yards of veiling. Through town and to his mother’s house, Mack and his new possession were followed by a cavalcade of interested, not to say envious spectators. The crowd surrounded him when he pulled up in front of the small gate, Mack having decided that he would not try to navigate the lane road, with the eventual possibility of his inability to turn around or back out.
The machine, as red as Oscar Lutz’s thrasher, was almost immodest in the exposure of its many complicated internal workings. There were wicker baskets along the side, which Mack explained to inquirers were for picnic lunches. There were a hundred other questions he was required to answer. Yes, he had bought the windshield and the lights extra. Thought he might just as well get everything while he was about it. Only thing he hadn’t bought was a top. They cost a lot more and anyway it was so much harder to run the things with one on. You could get them put on later any time you wanted to. Yes, he had come the forty-six miles in three and one-half hours. At which almost incredible statement, there was a shaking of heads and murmured, “Gosh, . . . almost fifteen miles an hour.”
All of the boys and most of the men in Cedartown visited the exhibit during the day, and a large aggregation was on hand to see the departure at four in the afternoon, the time Mack had set for leaving, so that they could get back to Omaha before they would have to light the carbon lamps in front.
The next year Abbie had five grandchildren, instead of four, for Mack and Emma were the parents of a girl, whom they called Katherine. There was considerable rejoicing in all branches of the family, for this was the first girl among the five small cousins.
Emma was back at her social activities soon after the baby’s advent, much to Abbie’s uneasiness. “Emma certainly takes her duties lightly,” Abbie would say to Margaret, who was her confidant in all the daughter-in-law gossip. “She and Eloise ought to be shaken up in a hat. Emma is too easy about it all for any use, and Eloise makes such hard work of it, that it’s painful to see her.”
Near the close of her University course, Grace came home one Friday evening, ate supper with her mother and wiped the dishes for her, remarking quite casually, “Mother, Wilber Johnson, the engineering student I told you about, asked me to marry him.”
Abbie, who was cutting bacon in readiness for breakfast, nearly cut a finger in her surprise and excitement.
“Why, Grace . . . and you’ve kept it from Mother two hours . . . you rascal! Well, he’s a nice boy, I’m sure. I knew his father and mother years ago and better people never lived. She came as a bride to the half-section across the creek from us . . . where Fritz Reinmueller lives now. She could hardly help but have a fine son. Well . . . well . . . my baby! I can’t think, Grace, that you’re twenty and old enough to know your own mind. How soon the years go by. . . . It’s the right way, though, and the natural one. . . . I’ll be glad to see you. . . .”
“Goodness, Mother, stop and listen. . . . I’m not going to marry him.”
“You’re not?”
“Why, of course not. I didn’t say so. I just said he asked me to. I wouldn’t think of it.”
“Then you don’t love him?”
“Of course not.”
“That is a joke on me . . . going on that way. He’s such a nice boy and his folks are so nice and well fixed. I guess I never gave it a thought but that you meant you wanted to marry him.”
“Well, I don’t. I don’t feel a bit like it.”
“That’s all right, dearie. I know just how you feel. He isn’t the one, is he? But you just wait. There will be some one,—and then you can wear the pearls I’ve been keeping all this time for one of my girls to wear. I’m glad you know your own mind. Lots of girls don’t. They just marry the first man that asks them. But you’re a strong character, Grace, and I’m glad of it. One of these days the right one will come along. I’ve got a little poem in my scrap book that says:
“Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.
The stars come nightly to the skies.
The tidal wave unto the sea,
Nor time, nor space, nor deep nor high
Can keep my own away from me.
You just think of it that way and one of these days you’ll meet the right man.”
Grace seemed a little impatient. “Oh, Mother, I don’t know that I want to.”
“Want to what, Grace?”
“Ever marry.”
“Oh, yes, you do. Just now after this little affair you don’t think so. But you will, Grace, you just wait.”
In 1909 Grace graduated from the University with Phi Beta Kappa honors, secured a good high school position farther out in the state, and was not home until the annual Christmas reunion. When she came home she seemed to have developed a maternal attitude toward her mother which was paradoxically pleasing and irritating to Abbie. She was pleased that Grace was thoughtful and considerate of her, irritated that she began to think of her as old.
“Mother, you ought to take a nap every aft
ernoon,” Grace would say didactically. To which Abbie would retort, “I’m not exactly feeble yet, Grace.” Or, “Mother, there’s a splendid new book on avoiding old age. You ought to read it.”
“I’m only sixty-two, Grace, and I don’t see any signs of senility. You can’t avoid old age, but you don’t need to think about it.”
A week after she came home at the close of her spring term, Grace went away to summer school. There was not a lazy bone in Grace’s body, Abbie often said. She was energetic, efficient. Sometimes, watching her or thinking about her in the way Abbie was always watching or thinking about the children, she wondered if Grace was not just a bit hard, just a trifle unsympathetic. She seemed to have no patience with inefficiency, no time for any one who was not succeeding.
Abbie was ashamed of herself that she did not get more comfort and companionship out of Grace. She loved her with her whole being, but they seemed to antagonize each other at times. She sometimes admitted reluctantly to herself that Grace was not the daughter which she had dreamed she would be,—a daughter to sit and talk, a companion with whom to hold long discussions. She was too energetic to sit quietly anywhere, and whenever the two held any discussions they usually ended in Abbie having her feelings hurt.
Grace was always impatient with the old order of things, always so sure of herself, so certain that one could accomplish in this world whatever task he set himself to do. Her conversation was always dotted with the words “progress,” “efficiency,” “ideals.” She spoke of everything in generalities: Citizenship, economics, causes, rights. Abbie was all for the individual. “Yes, but old Mrs. Newsome, Grace. How about her?” She could not think of people in masses. A great sympathy would surge up in her heart for the one whom life had used harshly. But when she would express herself, she would be met with a flood of information from Grace, a flat statement of statistics, before which she would be compelled to retire ignominiously.
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