The Common Lot and Other Stories

by Emma Bell Miles

  “I would do the very best I could for you, sister; you know that. But she’ll think it’s not good enough . . . It’s not good enough; but—”

  Beyond the word there stood something too vague for expression, something great enough to face all opposing considerations with perfect calm. He wrinkled his big brows. “People have to put up with things sometimes,” he brought out finally.

  . . .

  “And I couldn’t see this coming,” moaned Georgia’s mother, as the two sat on the porch at twilight. “I could not see. I was afraid, too, for you to keep that dulcimore he made you; but music seemed to be your happiness—and your father wouldn’t let you have the organ. Oh, I ought to have guarded you. But I never dreamed that such a man could have any attraction for a girl reared and taught as you have been. Why, Georgia, it can’t be more than a passing fancy. Don’t, don’t think of it longer than you can help, dear, and it’ll go by. You can’t mean to ruin your life!” And fear stood in her eyes.

  To her, Return was little more than the freckled urchin with ready grin and a missing front tooth who had used to thank her for cookies. Georgia saw him transfigured by a light of dreams into something finer than he would ever appear to his fellows. He was still the barefoot playmate, but he was also in some way the Sungod. Which were the truer estimate, let him say who has dwelt longest in that unearthly radiance. Into the mother’s mind flashed two conflicting urgencies—the need for prompt action if she would save her daughter, and the fear that one ill-considered word might fumble her slipping hold. Already she felt her grasp loosening, moment by moment, as Georgia before her eyes became a woman.

  Her little girl!

  Afraid to leave the subject where it had fallen, she hurried on: “Georgia, dear, you shall go down into the Valley—to the Academy—and have some music lessons. You’ve always wanted to; now you shall, honey; I’ll manage it somehow. And time you come home I’ll make your father buy you an organ. I can. I’ve never asked much of him; but I can make him do that.”

  “Music lessons—an organ!” echoed Georgia, piteously, “Why, that couldn’t make any difference, mother—though I’d love to have them, to play for—him.”

  Her face expressed only wonder and pity. Poor mother! Did she believe the whole world of music would count for a minute against Return? There was no hesitation, no complexity, in the girl’s mental processes. She had given herself to love—to her lover—she was wondering now how best to comfort her mother. It was as simple as a plant’s attitude toward the sun.

  The mother, leaning forward, clutched the slim wrists of the girl with both her dingy, toil-maimed hands. In her extremity she sought for help whence help had never come to her.

  “Has he asked your father for you, then?” she inquired, huskily. “And you never spoke one word to me about it! Georgia, my poor child, this is worse than ever I thought. Oh, put it out of your mind. If you are too young to realize what is due to yourself, try to think, dear, is nothing due to me, your mother? I was nursing you and slaving for you when Return Ritchie was riding stick horses!”

  “Yes, he asked father,” the girl said, gently. “He says poppa told him I could do as I pleased. Poppa likes him.” A little wistfully: “I’m sorry Return spoke to him before I named it to you.”

  “You’re blinded,” spoke Selina, heavily. “You can’t see now; but when you wake up and find yourself dragged down to the level of his people, it will break your heart.”

  Looking into the young face, its roseate velvet all atremble with new emotions, the mother felt as though striving in a nightmare with bending, splintering weapons. She had reason to know that she was impotently dashing herself upon no human adversary, but one of those laws that seemed always arrayed against her, always defeating her heart’s hopes, always crushing her pitilessly. Had she not fought this same losing fight once before? She had never forgotten the days and weeks before her own marriage; the struggling, resisting, calling to her aid all habit and tradition, all maidenly reserve and family pride—in vain. She had suffered in withstanding; she had suffered in yielding; and her suffering had not mattered in the least, would not matter now. Oh, the big blind forces, the dark brute powers! Why was it allowed, this stupendous cruelty? Who allowed it? She was near to arraigning the great laws of the universe.

  Yet she gathered herself for the battle. Before, it had been to save herself from she knew not what; now, with experience behind her, she would fight to save her daughter from a fate all too bitterly certain. She would appeal to Return also, to the rude and genuine good heart of him. There, if nowhere else, might be a chance. . . .

  “Oh, listen to reason, Georgia, before it’s too late. You don’t know—” Her tongue ran into wild and futile repetitions. She became conscious of them and caught herself up. “Dear, you can’t see what is ahead of you, or you would not think for a moment of doing this thing. Only let me tell you what it has been like with me. I never would let you know—I hoped I should never have to tell you. Just listen to me . . .”

  She poured it all forth now, the story of the bitter years. . . . “And they don’t care,” she whispered. “They don’t know. Nobody knows but your own self. You never saw your uncles. My brothers wouldn’t visit us. When things were at their worst they wrote and wrote, urging me to come back, to leave him; offering a home, offering work, offering to educate the children—anything, if I only would. Seemed like they couldn’t give me up to lead such a life. They don’t write any more now, of course—but then . . . One baby after another. Yet the babies were all that kept me alive. It’s a miracle any of you got through; we hadn’t any decent—arrangements. Oh, I suppose I was all that kept them alive, too—my body held between you-all and death. You look as though you thought that was something glorious! I tell you there’s nothing romantic about cooking three meals a day with a teething baby on one arm and your face tied up with neuralgia. Nothing heroic about washing overalls, or following your man to the barn with a lantern at two o’clock on a February night to tend to young lambs, either. And look at me!” She stood up, a scarred and darkened ruin. “Look at me! It’s what you’ll be; it’s the best you can hope to be. You that I slaved for—you that I nursed—the only one that is mine! Georgia, daughter, tell me you won’t do it!”

  “I won’t, mother!” cried the girl, the heart wrung out of her by grief and compassion. “I’ll stay with you. Return will understand. I’ll take care of you—”

  “No! I won’t have you sacrifice your life for me any more than for him. Oh, you don’t know. . . . It would be easy enough to die for a man; it’s hard to live for him—to give him all your life just when you want it most yourself. And when you think you have given the last that is in you, comes a new demand. You can’t back out; you’ve got to meet it. Why, I’ve done things I can’t talk about even now—things any woman will tell you she can’t do. I had to! Take care of me? Why, I’m easy now; I’ve reached the best life holds for me so far as rest and plenty are concerned. The hard work is over, and the long pain, and the cold. And the worry. But the disappointment will never be over.”

  She was striving for self-control now, overcoming by main strength an impulse toward the hysteric crying of despair.

  “And it’s no use! I see by your face that it’s no use talking. Was it for this I have stood between you and the work and the hardships—have I carried the burden for years on my own shoulders only to see you take it up at last? Oh, I’ve waited and watched, praying for a chance to send you away—to lift you out of such a life. I want you to have a chance. . . .”

  Poor woman! she had meant to be all in all to her child, at least until the coming of larger opportunity. And now here lay her treasure on the quicksands!

  “But—Love?” whispered the girl, blushing exquisitely. “It was you, mother, taught me what love means. I—I used to wonder how you could bear—poppa’s ways, until I came to see that you accepted them as parts of him, like his voice and hair; and you accepted him twenty years ago. People think the
ir children don’t notice; but—it’s beautiful, beautiful, mother.”

  There was a wonderful light in the eyes she raised timidly, pleadingly, to the elder woman in the soft dusk.

  “I taught you?” Selina’s voice was hard. “Well, then, I can teach you the better, maybe, that this feeling you have now—won’t last. It can’t last. You believe it will, but it can’t. Do you suppose I didn’t have it? Ah! you think it lasted—for me?” She laughed bitterly. “Georgia, if you throw yourself away, I have lost all that made life bearable.” Her face fell into lines of gloomy reverie as she looked away.

  “She is remembering,” thought the girl. “She had love once; she was young; she hardly knew what trouble was or pain. Now there is only heartache.” She called up in her own memory as much as she had known or guessed of her mother’s trials, and her eyes filled with tears. Yet it detracted nothing from the mysterious splendor of her own fate that its terror must be set over against its beauty. The glamour which invested her lover’s figure would be no less bright if her crown promised to be one of thorns.

  “Love,” the woman’s voice touched the word as though it were something hot which burned. The eyes of her spirit seemed to glance at it as though its brightness seared. “Love—Oh, Georgia, you don’t know.” Her tones sank, her head drooped forward; but she spoke again. “When I first came here, to teach the little school in the cove, I was as full of dreams as you are. I had money saved to finish my education; I wanted to be somebody. But I waked up and found myself married . . .”

  The girl cried: “But you don’t have to live so! What makes you?” Swift indignation at the man who had claimed all this possessed her. Less wise than her mother, she did not see past him to the eternal law, the Way of Things, of which he was but an expression.

  “What makes me?” A dull interrogation showed through the blank and beaten face.

  “Why don’t you go to your people?” pursued Georgia. “Why haven’t you gone long ago? Back to your own life!”

  Selina stared for a second, and then threw out both hands with a motion as of casting something from her.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she wailed. “Georgia, what would become of him?”

  The girl’s eyes, already wonder-filled, widened and widened as the full significance of these words went home.

  “You see!” she breathed.

  “See what?” queried the elder, tonelessly, detecting a low note of something akin to triumph in the cry.

  “Mother!” She clasped her warm young arms round the bent and quaking shoulders. “Mother! Don’t you see, now—” The rest was a whisper. “Now you have showed me—what love is, what it means to us women.”

  Selina sobbed on uncomforted for a time. At last she became quiet, and leaning her head on her hands, sighed wearily.

  Dusk had deepened almost to night about them, sparkling with fireflies and throbbing to wilder songs than are heard by day. From the turn of the lane, where all the sweetness of the blossoming earth was being evoked by the dew, came suddenly the cooing of strings beneath a bow’s caress. The girl’s eyes lighted softly.

  “I don’t know,” said Selina, without raising her head. “He’s not fit for you. But . . . he will always be a good man. And”—nervelessly—“it’s the only way to live, I suppose. Maybe—by and by—I can be reconciled. But—My poor daughter!”

  The strings sounded again, nearer, and as though at the touch of the unseen wapentake the girl rose. She looked long down the shadowy vista with that light upon her face that can shine but once in a lifetime; then turning, she reached from its shelf within the house door the little dulcimore that held all of music her life would ever attain.

  seven

  The Breaks of Caney

  From The Red Book Magazine 14 (March 1910): 824–34; illustrated by Hermann C. Wall

  “The Breaks of Caney” offers a glimpse into the complexity of family relationships as young adult siblings take on the role of looking after one another and their ailing widowed father. The plot revolves around a personable moonshiner’s wooing of Orphy, an older sister who spurns him, while Zaraldie, a younger sister, secretly pines for him. Prentice Roark’s choice of occupation is but one of the factors that complicate his relationship with the Farris family. The community doctor and extended family members who have moved to “the West” become important players in the working out of the drama of familial responsibility and romance.

  . . .

  The house smelt like a tar-kiln from the billet of pitch-pine that blazed on a rack of two iron strips driven into the wall. The log next above was half charred away from having many times caught fire. The whole bare wall was richly darkened with smoke; goblin tags of soot depended from a ridgepole inaccessible to the sedge-grass broom. A freezing rain drummed on the cabin roof: the sword-song of the wind over the chimney was mocked by the joyous roar of the fire. Drops falling made little explosions in the embers and tinkled on the lid of the bubbling pot.

  Dad Farris, for once perfectly sober, was basking in the warmth and radiance, and Orphy turned to him her steady eyes and good brown face all alight with eagerness. She had chosen this evening to discuss with him and Zaraldie and Man her project of seeking work in town.

  The younger sister was seated on an oaken block directly in the rich light, a creature small and lovely like a bird, with dark curls falling on the rose-velvet of oval cheeks. Orphy, coming to stand behind the block, drew Zaraldie’s hands back and held them so in a half-unconscious clasp.

  “Looks to me,” she said, “hit’s the only way. We’ve tried our best to all stay together and at home, but ever’ year gits harder.”

  “Hit’s a long ways to the Settlemint,” objected Man, from the shadowed corner where he had curled himself on a sheepskin. He was entering his teens, but was still “Little Man,” having been christened “Jesse Edward” too late to oust his milk-name.

  “Hit is so,” agreed Orphy, swinging gently the hands she held. “But when there’s only one thing to be done, why, there aint but one thing toe be done, and no multiplyin’ words—”

  “Why, howdy!”

  They turned as the door swung wide, letting in a great gust of chill and storm. It was only Bud, the elder brother, come home for over Sunday; the plashing of the eaves had covered his approach. He walked in without greeting, threw a sack of provisions into a corner, and spread his hands to the blaze. When he became warm he drew a plug of tobacco from his pocket.

  “Here, dad—and there’s shorts and potaters, and a middlin’ o’ meat, in the sack. But that’ll hafto do you’ns, now, until next week,” he warned them, glancing round.

  “’Taint nigh as easy livin’ somehow as hit used to be here,” complained the old man.

  “That’s why I feel obleeged to make a new shift,” Orphy reopened the subject for Bud’s benefit. “We got to look furder away for a livin’.”

  “I don’t see how us folks’ll git on without ye here, Orphy—let alone Prentice Roark,” said Bud, covering a deal of affection with a jest.

  For the first time a quick shade of impatience crossed the face of the older girl.

  “I don’t care for you-all knowin’ here and now, “she cried, “that Prentice Roark’s one main reason why I aim to leave here the first day I can git ready to go.”

  They looked at her, standing proud and sweet in her warm youth and womanhood, daring the known and the unknown together, and they turned their gaze to the fire again, helplessly.

  Orphy began to set the table for supper.

  “Hit’s strange she never has liked Prent Roark like the rest of us do,” said Zaraldie, a week from that evening, after all farewells were said and their sister had adventured forth. “But ne’er a one of our folks ever wanted to leave home, either, did they, Dad?”

  “Your Uncle Ed,” the old man reminded her. “He’s West som’er’s.”

  “Prent he jist bothers her; he’s bound’-determinated for her to have him,” explained Bud. “Well, hit a-goin�
�� to be hard a-gittin’ along without her, but I don’t believe she’ll stay no longer’n the water gits hot.”

  He took the trail to the valley farm, where he worked for a weekly portion of provisions and his board, and Zaraldie bravely assumed her sister’s duties at home.

  After a few days of it she cried to her father, sitting futile though sympathetic in his place:

  “Well, dad, if Orphy had sech a time as this—”

  “She did; ye nee’n’to think otherwise,” he replied. “You know, she had you two chaps besides, at first; your mother left Jess’-Ed’ard a baby in arms.”

  He bent forward, trying to assist in the rescue of the dinner, which the pot had turned out on the hearth.

  “Why, here comes Prentice to fill up ol’ Tiger!”

  Old Tiger sat in state on the fireboard, a sleek and shining presence, and young Roark was wont to see to his plenishing. Prentice’s clear and merry gray eyes recommended him to the lads, and this week he won a welcome by saying, as he helped to set up the pot:

  “Well, I seed Orphy when I was in the Settlement yesterday. She’s workin’ for Dr. Lewis’ wife—housework and cookin’. She hoped you-uns was well, and aims to come out and see ye whenever she can git away.”

  Zaraldie took the apparent message at face value, though she might have guessed that whatever Orphy had to send them of help or cheer would come through the far off mountain postoffice. But it was quite true that Prentice had not permitted the girl of his choice to escape him by merely going to town.

  “I’ve got business thar pretty frequently,” said he.

  His confidence in the discretion of these friends was such that he did not mind their unavoidable suspicion that his business was in the interests of a still concealed under the breaks of Caney.

  He continued a frequent visitor at the cabin, but what with bad weather, manifold duties, and the heavy winter roads, it was near New Year before her household saw Orphy again.

  She came to them at last like a mother bird, bringing in a basket the substance of a holiday feast.