A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  She saw them drive down the lane road, saw them turn at the big gate, through which they had so often come to play, and wave their khaki hats gayly. The wind was blowing from the east and the cedars bent before it,—blowing from the east like the breath of the war god. And Fred and Stanley were waving their hats gayly back to her, while the cedars bent and the wind blew from the east. They were like her own boys marching off to war. Children of her children, she loved them as she had loved their parents. Did a woman never get over loving? Deep love brought relatively deep heartaches. Why could not a woman of her age, whose family was raised, relinquish the hold upon her emotions? Why could she not have a peaceful old age, wherein there entered neither great affection nor its comrade, great sorrow? She had seen old women who seemed not to care as she was caring, whose emotions seemed to have died with their youth. Could she not be one of them? For a long time she stood in the window and looked at the cedars twisting before the east wind, like so many helpless women writhing under the call from the east.

  All during those following strenuous months she felt almost as though the very outcome of the struggle depended upon her individual efforts. So she knit at home and at the G.A.R. hall, bought a liberty bond whenever she could, and conserving everything, ate frugally. And prayed,—prayed that right would prevail.

  Fate willed that Fred Baker, Jr., and Stanley Deal should come back to their people from overseas. Young Dr. Fred went into partnership with his father, immediately; and Stanley, after a three-month’s period of recuperation, took back his old job in the bank.

  Grace was teaching now in Wesleyan University. Life was still real and life was still earnest to Grace, splitting an infinitive one of its cardinal sins.

  At thirty she received her second proposal of marriage from one of the younger college professors,—and refused him. Abbie was deeply concerned about it.

  “Are you certain, Grace, you don’t love him?”

  “Quite certain, Mother.” Grace was airily sure of herself.

  “But Grace, . . . you’re thirty . . . even if you don’t look it.”

  “Yes, I’m thirty, Mother. And thank you for the implied compliment.”

  “Of course . . . if you don’t love him. . . . But he is such a nice man . . . and your being thirty. . . .” Abbie’s voice trailed off uncertainly.

  Grace laughed. “Can’t you conceive of a woman being happy, Mother, without a man at her heels?”

  “But, Grace, it’s so natural, . . . so . . . normal.”

  “Well, that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “ ‘That sort of thing!’ Why, Grace, it’s the finest thing in the world when it’s the right man.”

  Grace was impatient. “See here, Mother, I have my life all mapped out, and a man doesn’t figure in it. I want to be free and independent. I want to do more research work in the East. And I’m perfectly satisfied with my lot. I have at present one hundred and twenty students in my classes, a large number of whom are fitting themselves to be teachers. If two-thirds of them go out to teach, that will be eighty new instructors. They, in time, will teach an average of forty students each and the result is, I have directly and indirectly influenced three thousand two hundred students.”

  “Goodness sakes, Grace,” Abbie said in exasperation, “you sound like government statistics.”

  And so Grace was not to be married and the pearls would still lie in the velvet box waiting for a Mackenzie bride.

  But if there were no romance in the world for Grace, the little winged god was not without its victims in the Deal clan, for Stanley Deal and Dr. Fred Baker, Jr., were both married the same year, Stanley to an Omaha girl,—“popular in the younger set,” as the papers unanimously agreed, and young Dr. Fred to a red-headed nurse with whom he had worked during the days in camp before going overseas.

  The year that John was elected to the legislature, Mack was made a vice-president of his bank. John was forty-eight, tall, straight, his black hair showing two silver patches above the ear, his whole physique always reminding Abbie of his father.

  Mack was fifty-three, and a bird’s-eye view of him standing east and west, if the spectator chanced to be looking north, would resemble nothing in the world so much as one of the portly pigeons around his mother’s old hay loft. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, went in for golf and Rotary and the Commercial Club, freely paid his church and associated charity subscriptions, thought a great deal of his first wife, who was also his last, and altogether was so decent and clean and so respected in the rather nervous business world, that he would have made an ideal target for the shots of any of the most weightily important and wordily devastating of the critics of our social structure.

  Abbie took Lincoln, Omaha and Chicago papers, and with the same scissors that had cut out their homemade clothes, carefully cut out every item concerning her now rather well-known children. Sometimes she would run across one which gave her a few moments of almost wicked glee. One such was:

  “Perhaps more through the influence of Mackenzie Deal than any other single person, this series of Shakespearean plays is being brought to Omaha, . . .”

  For a few moments Abbie saw, in retrospect, a freckle-faced boy in a sod-house, hunching over a thick volume of plays and saying, “Aw, what’s the sense in this?”

  “Dear, dear,” she said to herself, “ ‘There is a divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.’ ”

  After a year, Dr. Fred Baker, Jr., and his wife were parents of a sturdy son. Dr. Fred, Sr., and Margaret were grandparents. Abbie was a great-grandmother. Where had the time gone? Blown by the winds she could not stop,—ticked off by the clock hands she could not stay.

  Tourists were flocking back now into war-torn Europe and one spring Grace began making plans to go abroad in the summer. She was thirty-three now. “Only four years younger than my mother was when we made the journey from Illinois,” Abbie thought. “And Mother looked old enough to be her mother, if not her grandmother.” What was the secret of it, she wondered.

  One Friday night with the April buds bursting into pink froth on the peach trees, and the April moon caught in the top of a Lombardy poplar, Grace arrived home unexpectedly.

  “Well . . . well . . . it’s my baby.” Abbie was as delighted as she was surprised. Life was full of nice things.

  Grace, too, was happy to see her mother. “And why do you think I came?” She was sparkling, vivacious.

  “You’ve got a beau,” Abbie guessed right away. “You’re not . . . oh, Grace, . . . you’re not going to be married?”

  “Oh, Mother.” Grace laughed light-heartedly. “You’re incorrigibly romantic, aren’t you? Heavens, no! How you would enjoy tying me down for life. No . . . it’s something about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes.” She seemed fairly exuding mystery and excitement.

  “I never could guess, Grace.”

  “You’re going abroad with me.”

  “Oh, no.” Abbie was incredulous. “I don’t think I could, Grace. You don’t think I could, do you?”

  “I certainly do. You know, Mother, I got to thinking about it in school and you are going, too. We’ll take it very slowly. You’re pretty well, you know, for a woman of your age. It just came to me as suddenly as a flash, . . . why couldn’t Mother go, too? I didn’t write it because I was too anxious to talk it over with you. You will have to decide right away on account of reservations.”

  “My! My! Grace.” Abbie could not quite face the reality of the plan.

  “Listen, Mother. How would you like to see the ‘green coast of Ireland’?”

  “My! . . . My! . . .” In moments of great emotion Abbie’s words were few.

  “And London Tower?”

  Quite suddenly, to Abbie Deal, from somewhere out of the past there came a haunting melody. Its lilting notes wove in and out of the magical things Grace was saying. She could not quite catch its refrain, and the words, too, evaded her. In and out of her mind it danced
with elfish glee, a little half-memory. Something about “having gold and having land.”

  “And go to Scotland and look up the old Mackenzie estate?”

  “My! . . . My! . . .” That old refrain,—what was it? It seemed to come to her out of the night.

  “And Stratford-on-Avon with Ann Hathaway’s cottage? . . .”

  “My! . . . My! . . .” Little half-memory, singing tantalizingly near her,—something that was “dreaming visions longingly.” It flickered ahead of her, a will-o’-the-wisp from out of the past, beckoning her to come and do this thing. She could not place it, could not catch it. Whether song or poem, story or scene, she was not sure. She only knew it was something that was mostly joyous, but a little sad.

  Bewildered, incredulous, undecided, she went to bed.

  “Will, what do you think?”

  I think it would be fine.

  All night she turned and tossed with the excitement and the responsibility of the decision. Once she got up and rubbed liniment on her knees. Toward morning she slept, but fitfully.

  When she made her kitchen fire and cooked breakfast, all the high enthusiasm of the evening before had vanished. She hated to meet Grace and break the news, dreaded to see the eager interest fade from her face.

  As soon as Grace came down the old enclosed stairway, Abbie told her. “Grace, I can’t go.”

  “Why, Mother! I thought last night you would.”

  “No, I can’t, Grace. But you don’t know how I appreciate your thinking of it, and wanting me. Don’t I realize how much easier it would be for you to get around without me? Well, that makes me appreciate it all the more. It’s one of the nicest, if not the very nicest thing you ever did for me,—to come home to talk it over. But I can’t go.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake. Mother. I’m quite sure you could get through the trip all right.”

  “No, Grace. I’m more disappointed than you can ever realize. I’m so disappointed that I almost wish you hadn’t put it into my head. Isn’t that childish? Last night I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. I was that excited . . . but when I woke up this morning from a little nap I had, I knew I couldn’t go. I have pains in my knees sometimes until the tears come. And my spells of asthma are coming a little closer. I’m tied to a whole row of little bottles on the top pantry shelf. You wouldn’t want me to have a spell of asthma in front of the Louvre or have to sit down on the Bridge of Sighs because I was all out of breath. It wouldn’t be appropriate somehow. All the time my heart tells me to go, my mind says not. Desire says one thing and good sense another.”

  “I thought you would love it so.”

  “Oh, Grace, I would . . . when I was younger, how I would! Things just don’t connect sometimes. When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be responsible about urging you against your judgment, of course. But I’m certainly sorry. I said to myself, ‘I’ll get half of my enjoyment from seeing Mother’s enthusiasm.’ ”

  “Thank you, dearie, for the thought, but I’ll stay home and read about the trip. You write me from all the places you stop. And I’ll just stay in my chair and travel with you. And if anybody could take a trip that way I know I can, for I’ve always thrilled over reading travels.”

  Grace was loath to accept the decision. “As I said, I’m sorry. You owe it to yourself, if you possibly can go. Your life has been so narrow, Mother . . . just here, all the time. You ought to get out now and see things.”

  Unwittingly, as so often she did, Grace had hurt her Mother’s feelings. For a moment Abbie nursed her little hurt, and then she said quietly, “You know, Grace, it’s queer, but I don’t feel narrow. I feel broad. How can I explain it to you, so you would understand? I’ve seen everything . . . and I’ve hardly been away from this yard. I’ve seen cathedrals in the snow on the Lombardy poplars. I’ve seen the sun set behind the Alps over there when the clouds have been piled up on the edge of the prairie. I’ve seen the ocean billows in the rise and the fall of the prairie grass. I’ve seen history in the making . . . three ugly wars flare up and die down. I’ve sent a lover and two brothers to one, a son and son-in-law to another, and two grandsons to the other. I’ve seen the feeble beginnings of a raw state and the civilization that developed there, and I’ve been part of the beginning and part of the growth. I’ve married . . . and borne children and looked into the face of death. Is childbirth narrow, Grace? Or marriage? Or death? When you’ve experienced all those things, Grace, the spirit has traveled although the body has been confined. I think travel is a rare privilege and I’m glad you can have it. But not every one who stays at home is narrow and not every one who travels is broad. I think if you can understand humanity . . . can sympathize with every creature . . . can put yourself into the personality of every one . . . you’re not narrow . . . you’re broad.”

  Rather strangely, Grace was neither antagonistic nor argumentative. “You know, Mother . . . there’s something to that thought. And another thing, Mother,—do you know, there’s something about you at times that is sort of majestic and poetical. I believe if you had ever done anything with it, you might have written.”

  “No, . . .” Abbie Deal said wistfully, “no . . . I was only meant to appreciate it,—not do it.”

  At the close of the day Abbie went contentedly to bed. Her head was heavy. Her limbs ached. It seemed a little hard to breathe. But a warm feeling of comfort was upon her that she was to stay in the quiet backwater of her own home.

  “I’m not going, Will.”

  That’s too bad, Abbie. It would have been wonderful.

  “I know it would have, Will. But you understand how it is.”

  I understand, Abbie-girl.

  “I knew you would. Whenever I tell you things, Will, I always know you’ll understand.”

  CHAPTER XXIX

  At seventy-eight, Abbie had shriveled as the hazel-nuts near the old Iowa schoolhouse shrivel when the frost comes on. Her O’Conner body was shaped like her mother’s had been,—a pudding-bag tied in the middle. Her shoulders were rounded. Her hair was drawn back into a small white knot at the nape of her neck. The girls were always trying to fix her up. They brought her dresses and shoes and gloves. But the feet that had carried her through nearly eight decades of activities had not kept their neat shape. The long Mackenzie fingers were as gnarled as they were tapered. Two of them twisted together grotesquely.

  “Let me be,” she said. “You can’t make me over now . . . it’s too late. I’ll just keep on using plenty of soap and water. I like to see you girls look so nice. But there are too many things to do, to fuss with myself so much.”

  That summer the old settlers held a big picnic down on the Chautauqua grounds near Stove Creek. It was a gala occasion. Youth must be served,—but not on the day of an old settlers’ reunion. Every one knew every one else. On all sides one heard the same type of comment: “Well . . . well . . . if it ain’t Mamie Balderman. I’d never have known you. Heavier, ain’t you?”

  “That’s Anne Jorden. I declare I believe she’s carrying the same brown parasol.”

  “Yes, that parasol’s as old as the schoolhouse.”

  “Your daughter, Lizzie? No . . . not granddaughter . . . you don’t mean it? Why, it seems only a few years ago I was at your wedding.”

  Most of the old folks, who were there, had come into the country as young married people. Some of them were bent and gnarled and weather-beaten. Others looked sturdy and clear-eyed. Many of the babies who had been wrapped in old shawls in covered wagons or born later in the soddies were there,—-now farmers and attorneys, doctors, preachers and bankers. By some peculiar thrust of Fate, that wag who plays jokes on us all, it seemed that those who had been poorest in the early days, were now the wealthiest,—those who had been of least importance, now the most prominent. Some call it the law of compensation—others, luck. It is, of course, neither one.

  Standing about in twos or
knots, they were all talking in reminiscent mood. One heard snatches of life stories on all sides,—a whole drama in every detached phrase:

  “Yes, sir, when I got into Omaha, . . . I had ten cents. Two men had just been drowned in the old Missouri, and I made the coffins, . . . got ten dollars for them.”

  “When the Mormon train went by, women and children were pulling carts. A child was crying . . . its foot painin’ from a loose laced shoe. Ma said she used to have a kind of nightmare afterwards . . . ’n’ in her sleep she would always be tryin’ to find that child cryin’ . . . in a long train of ox-carts that kept goin’ by ’n’ goin’ by.”

  “Shucks, we made our syrup by boilin’ down watermelon juice. . . . Sure, it took an awful lot!”

  “Yes, Uncle Zim’s gone. He and Aunt Mandy used to say if they ever saved a thousand dollars, they’d take it and get back East as fast as they could go. Finally they made it, but thought it would be lots nicer to have two thousand, so they saved and accumulated and then set the amount to four thousand. Never went back at all. Died four years ago, a few months apart. Left several large farms and bank stock besides ten thousand dollars to each of their seven grandchildren.”

  All of the groups were not of a peaceful character. Some were having heated arguments over the trivial details of episodes a half century forgotten.

  “No . . . you’re wrong, Sam, . . . it was eighteen seventy-one.”

  “No, . . . Joe, ’seventy-two. I remember because it was the year the pie-plant froze.”

  Or, “I remember you coming just as well that day because I saw your wagons . . .”

  “I don’t know why you say ‘wagons,’ Celia. There was no plural number, when all we had was a bed and two chairs and a bob-tailed cow.”

  And then it was time for the speech of the day. The young county attorney made it, from the airy heights of the band stand, at his side a glass of water on Abbie Deal’s marble-topped table.

  It was a good speech. It flapped its wings and soared over the oaks and elms, and eventually came home to roost with: “You . . . you were the intrepid people! You, my friends, were the sturdy ones. Your days have been magnificent poems of labor. Your years have been as heroic stories as the sagas. Your lives have been dauntless, courageous, sweeping epics.”