A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  “Why, I’m glad she’s that way,” Abbie would say to herself. “She’s smart, Grace is. And she’s only twenty-two. When you get older, you get more sympathetic with the underdog. When you grow out of your youthful years you have more charity for folks who haven’t succeeded.” It was so characteristic of Abbie,—charity,—charity that vaunteth not itself and is kind,—that she could not see how others could ever leave it out of their make-up.

  In the last of the summer Grace was home again, having made several credits toward her master’s degree. She was energetic even in the heat, ready to help with the work, full of plans for improving the house. “Dear, dear,” Abbie said to herself, “Grace is so energetic, she is like the wind,—so active that she’s tiresome.”

  It was during these weeks of activity that Grace decided to have an afternoon party for her mother,—some friends out from Cedartown and two or three from Lincoln,—women whom Abbie had met and enjoyed at Margaret’s and at Sarah Lutz’s. Abbie was pleased with the idea. It was kind of Grace to do this for her. “I suppose I would never get around to do it,” Abbie admitted to herself. “That’s one thing about Grace, she does get things accomplished.”

  Abbie made out her list, and Grace looked it over preparatory to inviting the guests.

  “Mother, you’re not going to have Christine Reinmueller?”

  “Oh, yes, I am, Grace.” Abbie was sure of herself.

  “Not with those Lincoln women. I wouldn’t care if it were just the Cedartown people. But not with those Lincoln women and especially not with Mrs. Wentworth. Whatever would she think of Christine?”

  “I’m sure, Grace, I can’t help what Eloise’s mother would think of her!”

  “I don’t see how you can be so friendly with Christine, anyway. She’s so Dutchy and so narrow and so ignorant.”

  Abbie Deal set her mouth to keep it from trembling. Loyalty . . . it was the very fiber of her. In that swift flight of memory with which the human mind can make a non-stop journey across the years, she heard: “Hold-tight Get the ground up. You die already yet. Du narr! Ya . . . you like dat dyin’ . . . maybe.” She opened her eyes to the odor of steam, onions, hot water, flannels, to the sight of the homely red face of Christine by her bed, nodding,—jerking up,—nodding—

  “Why, Grace!” Because she was so thoroughly agitated she said it mildly. “Why, Grace, she saved our lives . . . yours and mine. . . .”

  “I realize it, Mother. I’ve heard all that a hundred times. But, heavens . . . is the debt never paid?”

  To keep herself cool and poised and her lips from trembling, Abbie rose and started into the next room. In the doorway she turned.

  “Never!” said Abbie Deal. “Never!”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  The same summer that Sarah Lutz went abroad with Emma, Abbie spent her spare time building the seat under the cedars. This was her sixty-sixth summer. She had almost finished her sawing and pounding on a warm August afternoon, when she looked up to see Sarah driving into the lane road in her electric car.

  Abbie’s gray hair was stringing over her face,—perspiration on her forehead.

  Sarah piloted the car, which she had dubbed Napoleon, up to the Lombardys, where Napoleon, with his usual caution, refused to climb a little rise in the ground. Sarah looked “dressy.” She had on a lavender summer silk, little amethysts in her ears.

  “Well, Sarah . . . you’ve been to London. And what did you do there?”

  “Abbie, I frightened a little mouse under the chair.” Sarah kissed Abbie, held her close for a moment. What good old friends they were! And how they understood each other.

  “Abbie Deal, whatever are you doing?”

  “Sarah Lutz, I do hate to start anything I can’t finish, but if old Asy Drumm was alive I’d have him here on the dog trot.”

  “But what is it?”

  “It’s a seat.”

  “For what?”

  “To sit on. I suppose you’ve grown so high-faluting in your travel, Sarah, that you think a seat ought to be a Louis-something objet d’art, as the magazines say. Well, it isn’t. It’s to sit on. I’ve been on the go for sixty-six years and now I’m going to sit down a little, and I can’t think of a place I’d rather sit than here where I can look off to the fertile fields that have come out of the old rolling prairie.”

  “It is pleasant, Abbie. There’s something about it, . . . after all my trip . . . the wide stretches of view . . . the way the rolling land meets the blue sky. . . . Well, it calls you back . . . the prairie does, just as the sea calls the fisher folk.”

  And then Christine Reinmueller turned into the driveway, trudging along in the inevitable blue calico, gathered full at the waist, her little greasy braids of hair plaited flat from ear to ear. Because she had looked so old when she was still young, Christine seemed to have changed less than the others. There was something ageless about her. As she had had no youth, she now had no age.

  “Well, girls, here we all are.”

  For a long time the three “girls” sat under the trees and visited,—Abbie Deal and Sarah Lutz and Christine Reinmueller,—Abbie, the motherly home woman,—Sarah, who loved dress and travel,—Christine, with no thought but the accumulation of the land. Three varying personalities they were,—held together by a strange tie of memory,—friends, because on a long-ago hot summer day, three covered wagons in a long straggling line lurched, over the prairie together.

  When John’s and Eloise’s son Wentworth was nine, they welcomed a daughter, whom they named Laura, and whom Eloise proceeded to bring up by the ritual of a blue book, child training fads having changed, and the old red book of Wentworth’s baby days having become a back number.

  Abbie had six grandchildren now. Mack’s sons, Stanley and Donald, were twenty and fourteen. Stanley, having graduated from an Omaha High School, was East, at Dartmouth, and Mack and Emma were talking of sending Donald to a select school for boys. “He needs culture and poise,” Emma explained to Abbie.

  “Dear, dear,” said Abbie, “culture and poise! At his age, his father needed clothing and provender.”

  Emma laughed. That was one thing about Emma,—she was like Sarah, her mother, good-natured, ready to laugh at herself as readily as at another. Abbie felt as close to her as to her own girls.

  Katherine, Mack’s little daughter was eight,—an active child, always on tiptoe like some gay sprite, too full of the joy of living to settle down.

  Fred Baker, Jr., was twenty-two, already taking a medical course, with that characteristic following of his father which a doctor’s son seems so often to possess.

  As for Abbie’s sons, themselves, they progressed. Mack, who had been in the bank twenty-seven years, was now a heavy stock-holder. John did law work for half the county.

  The old Weeping Water Academy, closed now in 1915, its usefulness over. High Schools, accredited to the University, were accessible to every boy and girl. The state owned nearly two million acres of school land, which, under the law, could not be sold. And it held first place in literacy.

  The summer Abbie was seventy was the one in which the children planned an intensive campaign against her staying longer in the old home.

  “We’ve just got to take things in our own hands,” they told each other. “Mother’s fairly well, but no woman of seventy ought to live alone like this on the edge of town.”

  “Why hadn’t she?” Abbie Deal asked. “What’s the difference . . . the edge of town or the middle of town?”

  They talked it over,—she might have a room at John’s in Cedartown. Then she would not be so far from old friends. “If she lives with me,” Eloise informed them firmly, “I shall take it upon myself to see that she gets the right balance in her meals, and the right number of hours of sleep. I’ve always thought Mother Deal ate more protein and less carbohydrates than she should, and she gets up too early for a woman of her age.”

  “So I’m to be brought up according to a green book, I expect,” Abbie Deal said grimly to hers
elf.

  “I think my home is the natural place,” Margaret told them. “I’m the oldest daughter and Mother is as interested in my oil work as I am.”

  “We’ve got such a lot of room,” Mack put in. “I don’t know what a person wants so much for, anyway. But now that we’ve got it, I wish Mother would come with us and help fill it up. What do you say, Em?”

  Good-natured Emma was willing, although she reserved certain secret doubts over the compatibility of Mother Deal and eleven-year-old Katherine.

  Isabelle’s Chicago apartment was permanently out of the competition. But there remained one other plan. Grace could give up her work and come home.

  “I’ll be willing to, Mother, if you just won’t consent to leaving. I’d come right in and take charge of everything.” Grace’s sense of organization, like a pointer, was already scenting out a dozen little hidden plans. And her forty-horse-power energy was already tiring Abbie. “I’d turn the parlor into a room for Mother and take her bedroom for mine. Then I’d be down here close to her. I’d get a tea-cart in case she needed a meal in her room. . . .”

  “And you could wheel the chickens in, on the wheelbarrow, for me to feed,” Abbie retorted. Now she ought not to have said that, she was thinking. Why, she ought to be thankful they were so kind. How many mothers could have that number of good homes at their disposal? But she did resent being planned about and talked over. After all they were her children. In spite of their years, she was still their mother. She had never let them run over her and she wasn’t going to now. When they had quite definitely decided on Margaret’s home for her, she spoke up:

  “I’ll do nothing of the kind. I’ll stay right here. And kindly let me alone. Because a woman is getting old, has she no rights?”

  Eloise was almost openly relieved. Emma knew in her heart that the possibility of certain dramatic situations between the rather high-strung Katherine and her grandmother were now permanently avoided. Grace admitted to herself that it would have been more of a sacrifice for her to give up her work than the others could dream; and Margaret, with a slight sinking sensation, pondered for a moment over the mental picture of the marble-topped stand, the blue plush album and the patent swinging-rocker, rubbing elbows with the furnishings of her artistic house.

  So they “let her alone.” But from that time on they said among themselves that mother was childish, that you had to overlook an elderly woman’s vagaries, and that they must drive in more frequently to watch her so that no harm would come to her.

  When Wentworth was thirteen, and Laura four, John’s and Eloise’s third child was born. It was a boy and they named him Millard. John telephoned the news to his mother, who was now seventy-one. Abbie hung up the receiver, put on her hat,—a new one since the demise of the rusty black with the itinerant ornament,—and walked over to Cedartown. She could not wait longer to see the baby. She had borne six children, herself, and this was her seventh grandchild, but she experienced that same excited interest over its advent she had known at all of those other times. The first thing she saw when she entered the house was a new book on child rearing lying on the table,—a brown book.

  “Mother, you shouldn’t have done this,” John was half-provoked. “I would have come out to get you.”

  “I am a little tired, I’ll admit, but as long as I’ve got two good . . . well, we used to say limbs . . . but they’re legs now, so I’ll says ‘legs,’ . . . I’m not going to lose the use of them if I can help it.”

  She held the baby (to Eloise’s discomfiture, for it said not to do so on page nineteen), turned it to the light . . . said she saw a little of Eloise about its mouth, John in the shape of its head, something of Laura, and even, by some wild stretch of imagination, a look of its great-grandfather Deal around the eyes.

  Eloise, weak and nervous, was complaining about her help. The maid was cleaning and cooking all right but she did not know how to handle Laura.

  Immediately Abbie was offering: “Let me take Laura home, Eloise. I’d like to so well. I’ll take good care of her for a week or so . . . as long as you’ll let her stay.”

  Eloise was a little dubious about the proposition and took no pains to hide it. “What do you think, John?”

  “I’m wondering if Mother ought to. She’s seventy-one, Eloise.”

  “Oh, it’s not of your mother I’m thinking.” No, it would not be of her mother-in-law that Eloise would be thinking.

  “Well, you folks decide.” Abbie slipped out into the other room. But Eloise was one of those quaint souls who think that because a woman is old she is also deaf, and her voice carried very clearly to Abbie:

  “It’s Laura, herself, I’m thinking about. You know, yourself, John, that your mother is terribly old-fashioned. And I don’t know just whether to . . . well, trust Laura with her that long. She thinks every one ought to drink sassafras tea in the spring. She would still use goose-grease on a child’s neck for colds and wrap a flannel around it.”

  Abbie heard John’s low chuckle.

  “And do you know what I heard her say?” She was earnest and serious. “She actually said, John, that a red flannel was better.”

  John laughed aloud. “Oh, Eloise, you never did quite understand Mother. That was a joke.”

  “Well, I must say I can’t always tell when she’s joking, then.”

  But, between the devil, rather mildly represented by the maid, and the deep sea, quite definitely represented by her mother-in-law’s out-of-date notions about children, Eloise chose what seemed the lesser of the two evils, and packed Laura home with her grandmother.

  Abbie and the maid and John picked out the things which the triumvirate thought Laura would need during the stay, materially assisted by the traveler, herself, who put in a few choice articles in the way of a one-eyed doll, some red beads in a bottle and a tooth of her dog which had been presented to her by the veterinarian and which had escaped the sanitary eye of her mother.

  John drove out home with them, let them out under the Lombardy poplars, and took the little bag up to the screened-in porch. And if Eloise could have known the supreme faith and confidence with which her husband was looking upon the situation she would have been attacked by the little green god of jealousy.

  Abbie led Laura by the hand up the steps of the porch. It was not possible to say which was looking forward to the visit the more,—the guest or hostess. For Abbie, with Laura’s little warm hand in hers, was happy almost to the point of excitement. No, Abbie Deal would never get over being a mother.

  “We’ll gather the eggs first,” Abbie’s voice held all the notes of interest which an anticipated journey might have brought forth. “And feed the chickens and then we’ll have a little supper.”

  “What will we have, Grandma?”

  “Oh, we’ll have . . . we’ll have . . . What would yow like . . . nice fresh eggs boiled in Grandma’s new little kettle . . . or some creamed toast . . . or baked potatoes. . . ?”

  “Mother doesn’t let me eat potatoes at night.”

  “Oh, I see. That’s all right. We’ll do as Mother wishes.”

  “What are you smiling at, Grandma?”

  “I guess I was just smiling to think how nice it is that you have so many things to choose from for your meals. You see when my children were little, it was so hard to get enough food for them, that anything agreed with them.”

  They gathered the eggs. “. . . in the very same egg pail your papa used to gather them,” Abbie told Laura. And the child gazed with awe at the antique which had been saved from an age that seemed as remote to her as the one in which Noah’s ark figured. They fed and watered the chickens. “. . . and see, . . . every time they take a drink they look up and thank God for it,” said Abbie Deal, with a fine disregard for natural science and a sublime faith in her fowls’ morale. They ate supper. “. . . and now, you’ll wipe the dishes when Grandma washes them, . . .” with Laura excited beyond measure at the unusual confidence placed upon her close associations with chinaware.r />
  Afterwards they went out on the porch and Abbie held the little girl on her lap. She cuddled her up and put her wrinkled cheek against the child’s firm one. Oh, why didn’t mothers do it more when they had the chance? What were clubs and social affairs and freedom by comparison? And what was freedom?

  “Tell a story now, Grandma.”

  “A fairy one or a real one?”

  “A real one about when you were little.”

  “Well, when I was a little girl . . .” Laura wiggled with contentment. “When I was a little girl I had a doll and you never could guess what it was made out of.”

  “No . . . what was it made out of, Grandma?”

  “A stone . . . and it had a little round stone head. . . .”

  Yes, Abbie Deal was contented,—as contented as countless mothers, in a rather topsy-turvy world, are still contented.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  And now war again,—war, spreading its fear and heartaches like the circling ripples of a wave to the most remote farms beyond the tiniest village. And in the old farmhouse behind the cedars Abbie had said good-by to young Dr. Fred Baker and Stanley Deal, her two oldest grandsons, looking big and fine in their khaki.

  “You know, Grandma, from the time Germany ran over little Belgium, . . .”

  “You wouldn’t want us to stand by and let a bully . . .” Yes, yes, the words came back,—the same words,—the same spirit. How the clock hands went around.