A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  “ ‘Sweeping’ is the word, Sarah!” Abbie said when the applause had faded away into the grove. “I wish I had a dollar for every broom I’ve worn out.”

  Sarah Lutz’s little black eyes twinkled.

  “How about it, Abbie, do you feel like a poem?”

  “No, Sarah, I was always too busy filling up the youngsters and getting the patches on the overalls to notice that I was part of an epic.”

  It was after the speech that Abbie first saw Oscar Lutz, who, at eighty-four, a little bent but as hardy as any old hickory, had come from California to be present at the reunion. Of the four old neighbors, Will Deal, Henry and Oscar Lutz and Gus Reinmueller, Oscar was now the only one living. He was well-to-do with his bonds and mortgages, his land and his California home.

  “How are you, Oscar?”

  “How are you, Abbie? It’s mighty nice to be back . . . mighty nice.”

  “We’re glad to have you, Oscar . . .”

  “Went down to Plattsmouth yestidy and found the post where the boats tied up fifty-eight years ago.”

  “My! My! Oscar! Is the post still there?”

  “Still there, Abbie. Gettin’ old like us . . . a little rotten . . . but still there . . . and a good mile and a quarter away from water. River bed’s changed that much.”

  “I can scarcely believe it.”

  “Everything changes, Abbie . . . folks and rivers. I kicked the old post when I found it.”

  “What for, Oscar?”

  “Don’t know, exactly, Abbie. Kind of a ceremony, I guess.” He had a far-away look in his eyes. “Remember how I told you I kicked it when Henry and I was waitin’ for the boat to come bringin’ Martha ’n’ Sarah ’n’ Grandpa?”

  “Yes, I remember, Oscar, . . . you said you was so impatient waitin’ for Martha you had to take it out on something.”

  “Well. . . .” He was silent so long that Abbie thought he had finished with the subject. “. . . Martha’s been gone twenty-two years . . .” The old man fussed with his watch. “Twenty-two years! Went down to Plattsmouth yestidy ’n’ kicked the post again . . . like I was waitin’ for somethin’ . . . a boat to come in . . . or somethin’. . . . Foolish, wasn’t it? Kind of a ceremony, I guess.”

  After the old settlers’ reunion, Abbie spent a few days with Margaret Baker in Lincoln. John Deal took his mother up in the big sedan. On the same road that Abbie had driven her team over thirty years before, stopping at Stevens Creek to eat her lunch, John took his mother now over the hard packed gravel in forty minutes. He growled a good deal at the county commissioners over a mile stretch in which he had to slow down a little.

  The Bakers had one of the lovely new homes of the city, artistic in every point, from the dwarf evergreens in front to the Russian olives in the rear of the garden. Margaret had overseen every detail to the last door knob. Dr. Baker was a specialist now. “Which side of the heart is your particular line?” Abbie asked him in mock seriousness. “Dear, dear, you doctors have got our anatomy so divided up and pigeon-holed that nobody knows where to go if he just happens to feel bad all over. You’re not as smart as our old Dr. Hornby. When he first came to Nebraska, he practiced medicine and surgery, fitted glasses and pulled teeth, was a notary public and sold sewing-machines.”

  Margaret Deal Baker was fifty-four now, gray-haired, calm-eyed, level-headed, one of the substantial women of the city, her name a part of every artistic and civic endeavor. “ ‘Poise’ is Aunt Margaret’s middle name,” Katherine Deal, who was sixteen and given to expressing herself freely, would say. Democratic to the finger-tips, Margaret Baker, with her lovely home and her prominent position, refused to forget her humble beginnings. “When I was a girl . . .” she would say, and go off into a hearty peal of laughter over the memory of some funny episode out on the prairie when the state was new.

  “Yes, I go to the beauty parlor every week,” she would say frankly to a group of well-groomed women. “I have a shampoo and hot-oil massage and wave. And when I was a girl, I was thankful to wash my hair myself once in a while with water from a rain-barrel with drowned gnats in it.”

  Grace, lacking humor, was sometimes disturbed by her sister’s attitude. “There’s no use parading the fact that you once lived on beans and cornmeal,” she would say.

  “But plenty of use in parading the fact that it was your ancestor who hung the light in old North tower,” Margaret would get back, with her mother’s twinkle in her gray eyes. The Revolutionary ancestors on her father’s side were a source of great pride and solace to Grace Deal.

  “At least Aunt Grace believes in the D.A.R. part of the Darwin theory,” was another of Katherine Deal’s airy quips.

  On this visit of Abbie’s to Margaret, she found the latter just finishing a canvas with final loving touches.

  “What do you think, Mother?” Margaret, in her studio smock, stood back to watch her mother’s face.

  Abbie came a step nearer to get the best vision. For some time she stood and looked at the unframed scene standing on the easel. When she turned, her wrinkled face was aglow. “You’ve got it, Margaret. It’s there at last, . . . the light lying in little pools on the prairie. You’ve caught it . . . just as you said you wanted to.”

  “Yes, I believe I’ve caught it. But think, Mother, I’ve been trying for thirty years to get it as I wanted it. What was the matter with me before?”

  “I don’t know, dear. I guess it’s always that way. There’s no short-cut to anything. The Master demands full time of us before we are paid.”

  For some reason little Laura Deal continued to be Abbie’s favorite grandchild. The little girl answered Abbie’s deep love for her with an affection equally sincere,—or perhaps, it was the other way. Perhaps the fact that Laura held such admiration for her grandmother enkindled its answer in Abbie’s heart. From the time Laura was five she had brought her grandmother little stories of her own composition. Abbie had them all in safe keeping, just as she had everything else which had ever come into her possession.

  One of the first of these literary achievements, laboriously printed, was:

  “A man once on a time had a poket-buk ful of munny he lost the munny and too this day he has to worck.”

  “Laura has the right idea,” Abbie told the relatives in high glee. “She has the whole philosophy of life summed up in a short story. She’ll be a writer some day.”

  At eight, she had brought her grandmother more lengthy compositions, running largely to an atmosphere of delectable foods, and over which the whole clan surreptitiously laughed: “ ‘Oh, no,’ said the young lady, as she nibbled daintily at a piece of chocolate pie with whipped cream on it and a cherry on top of that and a nut on top of that.”

  At eleven, Laura had discovered what romance meant, and her writing leaned conspicuously toward that direction. Abbie was sitting on a bench under the cedars on a mild spring afternoon when Laura came out of the house bearing the inevitable pencil and notebook.

  “Listen here, Grandma. Here’s my new one. It’s called ‘My Dream of Imagination.’:

  “I was once a princess, a captive in castle grim

  And a dragon wanted to drag me to come and live with him.

  Now I had violet eyes and long yellow gleaming hair

  And people said I was beautiful with my pure white skin so fair.”

  Abbie listened with undiminished interest to the twenty-six verses of dramatic, not to say gory, suspense, through:

  “’Twas a terrible sight to see prince after prince fall dead

  But the dragon only laughed with glee and said he’d have me to wed,”

  to the happy ending of:

  “I gazed out of my turret,—it was my wedding day

  When suddenly I saw some one riding who was not far away

  I watched the shine of his armour glitter in the sun’s bright ray

  Then nimbly and quickly I saw him dismount. He had stopped to pray.

  Then slowly arising I saw him make the sign of the cross


  While grasping his sword in his right hand, he mounted upon his hoss.

  “You know, Grandma, that worries me, to have to say ‘hoss.’ It isn’t just right but neither is ‘horse’ with ‘cross’.”

  And so they discussed it seriously, Abbie who knew that one may laugh with a child but not at him, and Laura, who knew that Grandma was one unfailing source of sympathy and understanding in a world which was beginning to be critical.

  “Now, tell me about when you were young, Grandma . . . some of the things you’ve never told me.”

  “Well, there is something I never told one of my children . . . but now I’ll tell it to you. Before I married your grandfather, another young man wanted to marry me. He was quite the catch of the community.”

  “Why didn’t you, Grandma . . . why didn’t you marry him?”

  “I had a very pretty voice and he wanted me to marry him and go to New York to study music while he took some medical work. I was anxious to cultivate my voice and the whole thing was a very wonderful opportunity for me so I very nearly married the young man. But something happened that made me realize it was just the thought of the New York opportunity that was influencing my decision, rather than love for the young man himself.”

  “What happened, Grandma?”

  “I saw Will Deal coming down the lane.”

  “Just coming down the lane, Grandma? Was that all?”

  “Just coming down the lane.”

  “What became of the young man, Grandma?”

  “He became a big New York surgeon . . . so . . . if I had married him . . . my life would have been very different. I guess women have done that from time immemorial. A young man walks down a lane . . . and a whole life changes.”

  “And you had to tell the other young man you wouldn’t marry him, Grandma?”

  “Yes, . . . I told him.”

  “Was he sad?”

  “A little sad . . . and a little angry . . . and terribly surprised.”

  “Why was he so surprised, Grandma?”

  Abbie Deal smiled reminiscently. “I think it had never occurred to him that any girl would refuse him.”

  “And what did he say?”

  Abbie Deal pondered a moment. “That I cannot tell you.”

  “Because it was too romantic, Grandma?”

  “No . . .” said Abbie Deal. And by this, quite suddenly she knew that she was an old woman. “No . . . because I have forgotten.”

  CHAPTER XXX

  You will remember that Basil Mackenzie, an aristocratic young Scotchman, of Aberdeen, riding to the hares and hounds, wooed and won Maggie O’Conner from the whins and silver hazels of Ballyporeen. But what you do not know is that several generations later, the good Saints, up in high heaven’s court, gave that couple three chances each to mold the life of a descendant . . . a baby girl . . . just born upon earth. Basil Mackenzie first crowned her with hair like the mist around the mountains of Glencoe when the sun shines through,—and immediately Maggie O’Conner gave her eyes the color of the blue-black waters at Kilkee. Then the man, remembering sensibly that the outward appearance is not all, endowed her with a keen Scotch mind,—but the woman smiled and slipped an Irish heart into her. For a long time Basil pondered cannily, wondering how he might use his last chance and finally gave her the sturdiest of Scotch chins,—but Maggie O’Conner laughed and pressed a roguish V-shaped cleft into the center of it.

  Practical folks there are, who will not believe this; but here, nineteen years later, was Katherine Deal with her misty Glencoe hair and her blue-black Kilkenny eyes and her gay great-granny’s dimple in the middle of her daur great-grandfaither’s chin. Sure, and what more proof could a-body be needin’? Here she was,—Katherine, the only daughter of Mackenzie Deal,—this warm summer afternoon, stretched out in her Grandmother Deal’s hammock on the screened-in sitting-room porch of the farmhouse, her slim lithe body in its blue and white sport suit curved comfortably in the hammock’s old meshes, one slim silken foot rhythmically tapping the floor.

  “As free and irresponsible as any colt in a pasture,” old Abbie Deal thought, as she looked out at her granddaughter, “and just about as untamed too.”

  Across the lane road, under the Lombardys, Abbie could see the latest model of sport roadster, blue and white, a special order of Mack’s. Whether Katherine’s dress had been ordered to match the car, or the car to match the dress, Abbie did not know.

  Old Abbie Deal and her granddaughter did not have a great many interests in common. They did not seem able to get along comfortably for any length of time. Katherine had not the slightest atom of her cousin Laura’s interest in either the grandmother’s opinions or reminiscences. With her usual blunt frankness, she had more than once announced before a group of the relatives, including the object of her remarks: “Granny Deal. . . .” (Incidentally, she was the only one of the seven grandchildren who called her “Granny.”) “Granny Deal and I don’t hit it off any too well.” She said it with the air of one who modestly announces an accomplishment.

  But for some reason, she had driven in alone from Omaha several times recently. The dashing new roadster had bitten off the graveled miles between Omaha and Cedartown frequently this summer of Abbie Deal’s seventy-ninth year. Rather strangely, for her usual active self, the girl seemed to like to sit quietly under the cedars or swing idly in the hammock on the screen porch. This afternoon she had a book into which she occasionally dived, and as often dropped back in her lap.

  Abbie pulled her chintz-covered rocker up closer to the screen door.

  “What are you reading, Kathie?” she called.

  “Michael Arlen . . . nothing but. He’s delicious. Everything he says sounds silky. Listen to this, Granny:

  ‘. . . love is like a hammer . . .’

  ‘Oh, not a hammer!’

  ‘A hammer, darling. It beats and beats inside him and presently it doesn’t beat so regularly, and presently it doesn’t beat at all. . . .’

  “Doesn’t that just melt in your mouth?”

  “The words are very clever. But not all clever words are true.”

  “You said a bookful, Granny. And inversely most things that are true are not clever.”

  She seemed to have everything, thought old Abbie Deal, studying her attractive granddaughter. She had the Irish wit of the O’Conners, the Scotch canniness of the Mackenzies, the German self-interest of the Lutzes, the Yankee determination of the Deals. She carried everything before her. People did whatever she wished. She breezed in and out of every setting with self-assurance. She dominated every situation with poise. She told her parents what she thought of them and handed out indiscriminate advice to any of her relatives. And through it all she looked as lovely as a picture.

  And now, Abbie, thinking of what the girl had just read, to her, returned thoughtfully, “You can’t describe love, Kathie and you can’t define it. Only it goes with you all your life. I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty . . . and maybe after that sorrow. You wouldn’t think that sorrow could be a light would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes. . . . I think that is what love is to a woman . . . a lantern in her hand.”

  “Prosaic. . . . Granny, prosaic and uninteresting, albeit the romance chapter has possibilities. I choose to think of Mike’s variety that ‘beats and beats.’ It’s more thrilling.”

  “You’ll see, Kathie, when it comes.”

  “Heavens,—the little grandmother speaks in the future tense,—and to me, Katherine Elaine Deal, wot has had several distinct and separate love affairs.”

  “Oh, Kathie, how can you speak so? . . . I doubt if one of those ‘affairs,’ as you call them, was love.”

  “Oh, but they were, cher ami . . . or cher amie . . . whichever you are. They were deep, thrilling, luscious love affairs while they lasted. While they lasted. . . !” She went off into a little ri
ppling laugh.

  Abbie Deal did not argue. She did not answer. She only sat and looked out at her granddaughter, flippant, sophistitated, wise, irresponsible, lovely. Because she had a deep-rooted clannish love for all her own people, Abbie Deal loved the girl,—but she did not understand her. They lived in two worlds. No, Granny Deal and Katherine did not hit it off any too well.

  It was only a week later that Sarah Lutz came out to spend a few days with Abbie. Her seventy-seven years sat lightly upon Sarah. Her white hair, dressed rather elaborately, held a gayly colored, green jeweled comb in its coils and she had little emerald earrings in her small colorless ears. The natural pink in her cheeks of the early days had been replaced by natural pink from a box, and her small merry eyes behind their shell-rimmed glasses were still bright and twinkling. Her dress was of modern cut, and her dainty high-heeled slippers, by the side of Abbie’s broad and altogether serviceable kids, looked, as they walked through the yard, like gay little yachts towing broad barges into harbor.

  The two had just reached the sitting-room when they both jumped at the sharp sound of an auto-horn and looked out to see Katherine in the brilliant roadster turning into the lane road under the Lombardys.

  “Honk . . . honk . . . the lark at heaven’s gate sings,” she called out breezily and slipped out of the car to run up to the house, her lithe young body aglow with health and energy.

  “No?” she said in mock agitation at the sight of both grandmothers. “Not two old noble ancestors?” Katherine’s reverence for old age was on a precise equality with her general timidity.

  She gave them each a hasty peck and took immediate possession of the conversation. “I haven’t seen very much of you lately, Sarah. But Abbie, here, . . . I have been cultivating her acquaintance this summer with malice. And the queer part, Sarah,—is that the little old dear doesn’t have the slightest idea why I have been dropping in so solicitously.”