by Willa Cather
Lesley and her brothers were proud of their mother’s good looks, and that she never allowed herself to become a household drudge, as so many of her neighbours did. She “managed,” and the boys helped her to manage. For one thing, there were never any dreary tubs full of washing standing about, and there was no ironing day to make a hole in the week. They sent all the washing, even the sheets, to the town steam laundry. Hector, with his weekly wages as messenger boy, and Homer and Vincent with their stable jobs, paid for it. That simple expedient did away with the worst blight of the working man’s home.
Mrs. Ferguesson was “public-spirited,” and she was the friend of all good causes. The business men of the town agreed that she had a great deal of influence, and that her name added strength to any committee. She was generally spoken of as a very practical woman, with an emphasis which implied several things. She was a “joiner,” too! She was a Royal Neighbor, and a Neighborly Neighbor, and a P.E.O., and an Eastern Star. She had even joined the Methodist Win-a-Couple, though she warned them that she could not attend their meetings, as she liked to spend some of her evenings at home.
Promptly at six thirty Monday morning Miss Knightly’s old mare stopped in front of the Ferguessons’ house. The four boys were all on the front porch. James himself carried Lesley’s bag down and put it into the buggy. He thanked the Superintendent very courteously for her kindness and kissed his daughter good-bye.
It had been at no trifling sacrifice that Miss Knightly was able to call for Lesley at six thirty. Customarily she started on her long drives at nine o’clock. This morning she had to give an extra half-dollar to the man who came to curry and harness her mare. She herself got no proper breakfast, but a cold sandwich and a cup of coffee at the station lunch counter—the only eating-place open at six o’clock. Most serious of all, she must push Molly a little on the road, to land her passenger at the Wild Rose schoolhouse at nine o’clock. Such small inconveniences do not sum up to an imposing total, but we assume them only for persons we really care for.
V
It was Christmas Eve. The town was busy with Christmas “exercises,” and all the churches were lit up. Hector Ferguesson was going slowly up the hill which separated the depot settlement from the town proper. He walked at no messenger-boy pace tonight, crunching under his feet the snow which had fallen three days ago, melted, and then frozen hard. His hands were in the pockets of his new overcoat, which was so long that it almost touched the ground when he toiled up the steepest part of the hill. It was very heavy and not very warm. In those days there was a theory that in topcoats very little wool was necessary if they were woven tight enough and hard enough to “keep out the cold.” A barricade was the idea. Hector carried the weight and clumsiness bravely, proudly. His new overcoat was a Christmas present from his sister. She had gone to the big town in the next county to shop for it, and bought it with her own money. He was thinking how kind Lesley was, and how hard she had worked for that money, and how much she had to put up with in the rough farmhouse where she boarded, out in the country. It was usually a poor housekeeper who was willing to keep a teacher, since they paid so little. Probably the amount Lesley spent for that coat would have kept her at a comfortable house all winter. When he grew up, and made lots of money (a brakeman—maybe an engineer), he would certainly be good to his sister.
Hector was a strange boy; a blend of the soft and the hard. In action he was practical, executive, like his mother. But in his mind, in his thoughts and plans, he was extravagant, often absurd. His mother suspected that he was “dreamy.” Tonight, as he trailed up the frozen wooden sidewalk toward the town, he kept looking up at the stars, which were unusually bright, as they always seem over a stretch of snow. He was wondering if there were angels up there, watching the world on Christmas Eve. They came before, on the first Christmas Eve, he knew. Perhaps they kept the Anniversary. He thought about a beautiful coloured picture tacked up in Lesley’s bedroom; two angels with white robes and long white wings, flying toward a low hill in the early dawn before sunrise, and on that distant hill, against the soft daybreak light, were three tiny crosses. He never doubted angels looked like that. He was credulous and truthful by nature. There was that look in his blue eyes. He would get it knocked out of him, his mother knew. But she believed he would always keep some of it—enough to make him open-handed and open-hearted.
Tonight Hector had his leather satchel full of Christmas telegrams. After he had delivered them all, he would buy his presents for his mother and the children. The stores sold off their special Christmas things at a discount after eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve.
VI
Miss Knightly was in Lincoln, attending a convention of Superintendents of Public Instruction, when the long-to-be-remembered blizzard swept down over the prairie State. Travel and telephone service were discontinued. A Chicago passenger train was stalled for three days in a deep cut west of W—. There she lay, and the dining-car had much ado to feed the passengers.
Miss Knightly was snowbound in Lincoln. She tarried there after the convention was dismissed and her fellow superintendents had gone home to their respective counties. She was caught by the storm because she had stayed over to see Julia Marlowe (then young and so fair!) in The Love Chase. She was not inconsolable to be delayed for some days. Why worry? She was staying at a small but very pleasant hotel, where the food was good and the beds were comfortable. She was New England born and bred, too conscientious to stay over in the city from mere self-indulgence, but quite willing to be lost to MacAlpin and X— County by the intervention of fate. She stayed, in fact, a week, greatly enjoying such luxuries as plenty of running water, hot baths, and steam heat. At that date MacAlpin houses, and even her office in the Court House, were heated by hard-coal stoves.
At last she was jogging home on a passenger train which left Lincoln at a convenient hour (it was two hours late, travel was still disorganized), when she was pleased to see Mr. Redman in conductor’s uniform come into the car. Two of his boys had been her pupils when she taught in high school, before she was elected to a county office. Mr. Redman also seemed pleased, and after he had been through the train to punch tickets, he came back and sat down in the green plush seat opposite Miss Knightly and began to “tease.”
“I hear there was a story going up at the Court House that you’d eloped. I was hoping you hadn’t made a mistake.”
“No. I thought it over and avoided the mistake. But what about you, Mr. Redman? You belong on the run west out of MacAlpin, don’t you?”
“I don’t know where I belong, Ma’m, and nobody else does. This is Jack Kelly’s run, but he got his leg broke trying to help the train crew shovel the sleeping-car loose in that deep cut out of W—. The passengers were just freezing. This blizzard has upset everything. There’s got to be better organization from higher up. This has taught us we just can’t handle an emergency. Hard on stock, hard on people. A little neighbour of ours—why, you must know her, she was one of your teachers—Jim Ferguesson’s little girl. She got pneumonia out there in the country and died out there.”
Miss Knightly went so white that Redman without a word hurried to the end of the car and brought back a glass of water. He kept muttering that he was sorry … that he “always put his foot in it.”
She did not disappoint him. She came back quickly. “That’s all right, Mr. Redman. I’d rather hear it before I get home. Did she get lost in the storm? I don’t understand.”
Mr. Redman sat down and did the best he could to repair damages.
“No, Ma’m, little Lesley acted very sensible, didn’t lose her head. You see, the storm struck us about three o’clock in the afternoon. The whole day it had been mild and soft, like spring. Then it came down instanter, like a thousand tons of snow dumped out of the sky. My wife was out in the back yard taking in some clothes she’d hung to dry. She hadn’t even a shawl over her head. The suddenness of it confused her so (she couldn’t see three feet before her), she wandered around in our back y
ard, couldn’t find her way back to the house. Pretty soon our old dog—he’s part shepherd—came yappin’ and whinin’. She dropped the clothes and held onto his hair, and he got her to the back porch. That’s how bad it was in MacAlpin.”
“And Lesley?” Miss Knightly murmured.
“Yes, Ma’m! I’m coming to that. Her scholars tell about how the schoolroom got a little dark, and they all looked out, and there was no graveyard, and no horses that some of them had rode to school on. The boys jumped up to run out and see after the horses, but Lesley stood with her back against the door and wouldn’t let ’em go out. Told ’em it would be over in a few minutes. Well, you see it wasn’t. Over four feet of snow fell in less’n an hour. About six o’clock some of the fathers of the children that lived aways off started out on horseback, but the horses waded belly-deep, and a wind come up and it turned cold.
“Ford Robertson is the nearest neighbour, you know,—scarcely more than across the road—eighth of a mile, maybe. As soon as he come in from his corral—the Herefords had all bunched up together, over a hundred of ’em, under the lee of a big haystack, and he knew they wouldn’t freeze. As soon as he got in, the missus made him go over to the schoolhouse an’ take a rope along an’ herd ’em all over to her house, teacher an’ all, with the boys leading their horses. That night Mrs. Robertson cooked nearly everything in the house for their supper, and she sent Ford upstairs to help Lesley make shakedown beds on the floor. Mrs. Robertson remembers when the big supper was ready and the children ate like wolves, Lesley didn’t eat much—said she had a little headache. Next morning she was pretty sick. That day all the fathers came on horseback for the children. Robertson got one of them to go for old Doctor Small, and he came down on his horse. Doctor said it was pneumonia, and there wasn’t much he could do. She didn’t seem to have strength to rally. She was out of her head when he got there. She was mostly unconscious for three days, and just slipped out. The funeral is tomorrow. The roads are open now. They were to bring her home today.”
The train stopped at a station, and Mr. Redman went to attend to his duties. When he next came through the car Miss Knightly spoke to him. She had recovered herself. Her voice was steady, though very low and very soft when she asked him:
“Were any of her family out there with her when she was ill?”
“Why, yes, Mrs. Ferguesson was out there. That boy Hector got his mother through, before the roads were open. He’d stop at a farmhouse and explain the situation and borrow a team and get the farmer or one of his hands to give them a lift to the next farm, and there they’d get a lift a little further. Everybody knew about the school and the teacher by that time, and wanted to help, no matter how bad the roads were. You see, Miss Knightly, everything would have gone better if it hadn’t come on so freezing cold, and if the snow hadn’t been so darn soft when it first fell. That family are terrible broke up. We all are, down at the depot. She didn’t recognize them when they got there, I heard.”
VII
Twenty years after that historic blizzard Evangeline Knightly—now Mrs. Ralph Thorndike—alighted from the fast eastbound passenger at the MacAlpin station. No one at the station knew who she was except the station master, and he was not quite sure. She looked older, but she also looked more prosperous, more worldly. When she approached him at his office door and asked, “Isn’t this Mr. Beardsley?” he recognized her voice and speech.
“That’s who. And it’s my guess this is, or used to be, Miss Knightly. I’ve been here almost forever. No ambition. But you left us a long time ago. You’re looking fine, ma’m, if I may say so.”
She thanked him and asked him to recommend a hotel where she could stay for a day or two.
He scratched his head. “Well, the Plummer House ain’t no Waldorf-Astoria, but the travelling men give a good report of it. The Bishop always stays there when he comes to town. You like me to telephone for an otto [automobile] to take you up? Lord, when you left here there wasn’t an otto in the town!”
Mrs. Thorndike smiled. “Not many in the world, I think. And can you tell me, Mr. Beardsley, where the Ferguessons live?”
“The depot Ferguessons? Oh, they live uptown now. Ferg built right west of the Court House, right next to where the Donaldsons used to live. You’ll find lots of changes. Some’s come up, and some’s come down. We used to laugh at Ferg and tell him politics didn’t bring in the bacon. But he’s got it on us now. The Democrats are sure grand job-givers. Throw ’em round for value received. I still vote the Republican ticket. Too old to change. Anyhow, all those new jobs don’t affect the railroads much. They can’t put a college professor on to run trains. Now I’ll telephone for an otto for you.”
Miss Knightly, after going to Denver, had married a very successful young architect, from New England, like herself, and now she was on her way back to Brunswick, Maine, to revisit the scenes of her childhood. Although she had never been in MacAlpin since she left it fifteen years ago, she faithfully read the MacAlpin Messenger and knew the important changes in the town.
After she had settled her room at the hotel, and unpacked her toilet articles, she took a cardboard box she had brought with her in the sleeping-car, and went out on a personal errand. She came back to the hotel late for lunch—had a tray sent up to her room, and at four o’clock went to the office in the Court House which used to be her office. This was the autumn of the year, and she had a great desire to drive out among the country schools and see how much fifteen years had changed the land, the pupils, the teachers.
When she introduced herself to the present incumbent, she was cordially received. The young Superintendent seemed a wide-awake, breezy girl, with bobbed blond hair and crimson lips. Her name was Wanda Bliss.
Mrs. Thorndike explained that her stay would not be long enough to let her visit all the country schools, but she would like Miss Bliss’s advice as to which were the most interesting.
“Oh, I can run you around to nearly all of them in a day, in my car!”
Mrs. Thorndike thanked her warmly. She liked young people who were not in the least afraid of life or luck or responsibility. In her own youth there were very few like that. The teachers, and many of the pupils out in the country schools, were eager—but anxious. She laughed and told Miss Bliss that she meant to hire a buggy, if there was such a thing left in MacAlpin, and drive out into the country alone.
“I get you. You want to put on an old-home act. You might phone around to any farmers you used to know. Some of them still keep horses for haying.”
Mrs. Thorndike got a list of the country teachers and the districts in which they taught. A few of them had been pupils in the schools she used to visit. Those she was determined to see.
The following morning she made the call she had stopped off at MacAlpin to make. She rang the doorbell at the house pointed out to her, and through the open window heard a voice call: “Come in, come in, please. I can’t answer the bell.”
Mrs. Thorndike opened the door into a shining oak hall with a shining oak stairway.
“Come right through, please. I’m in the back parlour. I sprained my ankle and can’t walk yet.”
The visitor followed the voice and found Mrs. Ferguesson sitting in a spring rocker, her bandaged right foot resting on a low stool.
“Come in, Ma’m. I have a bad sprain, and the little girl who does for me is downtown marketing. Maybe you came to see Mr. Ferguesson, but his office is—” here she broke off and looked up sharply—intently—at her guest. When the guest smiled, she broke out: “Miss Knightly! Are you Miss Knightly? Can it be?”
“They call me Mrs. Thorndike now, but I’m Evangeline Knightly just the same.” She put out her hand, and Mrs. Ferguesson seized it with both her own.
“It’s too good to be true!” she gasped with tears in her voice, “just too good to be true. The things we dream about that way don’t happen.” She held fast to Mrs. Thorndike’s hand as if she were afraid she might vanish. “When did you come to town, and why didn’t the
y let me know!”
“I came only yesterday, Mrs. Ferguesson, and I wanted to slip in on you just like this, with no one else around.”
“Mr. Ferguesson must have known. But his mind is always off on some trail, and he never brings me any news when I’m laid up like this. Dear me! It’s a long time.” She pressed the visitor’s hand again before she released it. “Get yourself a comfortable chair, dear, and sit down by me. I do hate to be helpless like this. It wouldn’t have happened but for those slippery front stairs. Mr. Ferguesson just wouldn’t put a carpet on them, because he says folks don’t carpet hardwood stairs, and I tried to answer the doorbell in a hurry, and this is what come of it. I’m not naturally a clumsy woman on my feet.”
Mrs. Thorndike noticed an aggrieved tone in her talk which had never been there in the old days when she had so much to be aggrieved about. She brought a chair and sat down close to Mrs. Ferguesson, facing her. The good woman had not changed much, she thought. There was a little grey in her crinkly auburn hair, and there were lines about her mouth which used not to be there, but her eyes had all the old fire.
“How comfortably you are fixed here, Mrs. Ferguesson! I’m so glad to find you like this.”
“Yes, we’re comfortable—now that they’re all gone! It’s mostly his taste. He took great interest.” She spoke rather absently, and kept looking out through the polished hall toward the front door, as if she were expecting someone. It seemed a shame that anyone naturally so energetic should be enduring this foolish antiquated method of treating a sprain. The chief change in her, Mrs. Thorndike thought, was that she had grown softer. She reached for the visitor’s hand again and held it fast. Tears came to her eyes.