Short Stories

On the Sunday evening Mary, having walked through Upper Main, turned into Wilmott, a street of workmens’ houses.  During that year the first sign of the march of factories westward from Chicago into the prairie towns had come to Huntersburg.  A Chicago manufacturer of furniture had built a plant in the sleepy little farming town, hoping thus to escape the labor organizations that had begun to give him trouble in the city.  At the upper end of town, in Wilmott, Swift, Harrison and Chestnut Streets and in cheap, badly-constructed frame houses, most of the factory workers lived.  On the warm summer evening they were gathered on the porches at the front of the houses and a mob of children played in the dusty streets.  Red-faced men in white shirts and without collars and coats slept in chairs or lay sprawled on strips of grass or on the hard earth before the doors of the houses.  The laborers’ wives had gathered in groups and stood gossiping by the fences that separated the yards.  Occasionally the voice of one of the women arose sharp and distinct above the steady flow of voices that ran like a murmuring river through the hot little streets.

In the roadway two children had got into a fight.  A thick-shouldered red-haired boy struck another boy who had a pale sharp-featured face, a blow on the shoulder.  Other children came running.  The mother of the red-haired boy brought the promised fight to an end.  “Stop it Johnny, I tell you to stop it.  I’ll break your neck if you don’t,” the woman screamed.

The pale boy turned and walked away from his antagonist.  As he went slinking along the sidewalk past Mary Cochran his sharp little eyes, burning with hatred, looked up at her.

Mary went quickly along.  The strange new part of her native town with the hubbub of life always stirring and asserting itself had a strong fascination for her.  There was something dark and resentful in her own nature that made her feel at home in the crowded place where life carried itself off darkly, with a blow and an oath.  The habitual silence of her father and the mystery concerning the unhappy married life of her father and mother, that had affected the attitude toward her of the people of the town, had made her own life a lonely one and had encouraged in her a rather dogged determination to in some way think her own way through the things of life she could not understand.

And back of Mary’s thinking there was an intense curiosity and a courageous determination toward adventure.  She was like a little animal of the forest that has been robbed of its mother by the gun of a sportsman and has been driven by hunger to go forth and seek food.  Twenty times during the year she had walked alone at evening in the new and fast growing factory district of her town.  She was eighteen and had begun to look like a woman, and she felt that other girls of the town of her own age would not have dared to walk in such a place alone.  The feeling made her somewhat proud and as she went along she looked boldly about.

Among the workers in Wilmott Street, men and women who had been brought to town by the furniture manufacturer, were many who spoke in foreign tongues.  Mary walked among them and liked the sound of the strange voices.  To be in the street made her feel that she had gone out of her town and on a voyage into a strange land.  In Lower Main Street or in the residence streets in the eastern part of town where lived the young men and women she had always known and where lived also the merchants, the clerks, the lawyers and the more well-to-do American workmen of Huntersburg, she felt always a secret antagonism to herself.  The antagonism was not due to anything in her own character.  She was sure of that.  She had kept so much to herself that she was in fact but little known.  “It is because I am the daughter of my mother,” she told herself and did not walk often in the part of town where other girls of her class lived.

Mary had been so often in Wilmott Street that many of the people had begun to feel acquainted with her.  “She is the daughter of some farmer and has got into the habit of walking into town,” they said.  A red-haired, broad-hipped woman who came out at the front door of one of the houses nodded to her.  On a narrow strip of grass beside another house sat a young man with his back against a tree.  He was smoking a pipe, but when he looked up and saw her he took the pipe from his mouth.  She decided he must be an Italian, his hair and eyes were so black.  “Ne bella! si fai un onore a passare di qua,” he called waving his hand and smiling.

Mary went to the end of Wilmott Street and came out upon a country road.  It seemed to her that a long time must have passed since she left her father’s presence although the walk had in fact occupied but a few minutes.  By the side of the road and on top of a small hill there was a ruined barn, and before the barn a great hole filled with the charred timbers of what had once been a farmhouse.  A pile of stones lay beside the hole and these were covered with creeping vines.  Between the site of the house and the barn there was an old orchard in which grew a mass of tangled weeds.

Pushing her way in among the weeds, many of which were covered with blossoms, Mary found herself a seat on a rock that had been rolled against the trunk of an old apple tree.  The weeds half concealed her and from the road only her head was visible.  Buried away thus in the weeds she looked like a quail that runs in the tall grass and that on hearing some unusual sound, stops, throws up its head and looks sharply about.

The doctor’s daughter had been to the decayed old orchard many times before.  At the foot of the hill on which it stood the streets of the town began, and as she sat on the rock she could hear faint shouts and cries coming out of Wilmott Street.  A hedge separated the orchard from the fields on the hillside.  Mary intended to sit by the tree until darkness came creeping over the land and to try to think out some plan regarding her future.  The notion that her father was soon to die seemed both true and untrue, but her mind was unable to take hold of the thought of him as physically dead.  For the moment death in relation to her father did not take the form of a cold inanimate body that was to be buried in the ground, instead it seemed to her that her father was not to die but to go away somewhere on a journey.  Long ago her mother had done that.  There was a strange hesitating sense of relief in the thought.  “Well,” she told herself, “when the time comes I also shall be setting out, I shall get out of here and into the world.”  On several occasions Mary had gone to spend a day with her father in Chicago and she was fascinated by the thought that soon she might be going there to live.  Before her mind’s eye floated a vision of long streets filled with thousands of people all strangers to herself.  To go into such streets and to live her life among strangers would be like coming out of a waterless desert and into a cool forest carpeted with tender young grass.

In Huntersburg she had always lived under a cloud and now she was becoming a woman and the close stuffy atmosphere she had always breathed was becoming constantly more and more oppressive.  It was true no direct question had ever been raised touching her own standing in the community life, but she felt that a kind of prejudice against her existed.  While she was still a baby there had been a scandal involving her father and mother.  The town of Huntersburg had rocked with it and when she was a child people had sometimes looked at her with mocking sympathetic eyes.  “Poor child!  It’s too bad,” they said.  Once, on a cloudy summer evening when her father had driven off to the country and she sat alone in the darkness by his office window, she heard a man and woman in the street mention her name.  The couple stumbled along in the darkness on the sidewalk below the office window.  “That daughter of Doc Cochran’s is a nice girl,” said the man.  The woman laughed.  “She’s growing up and attracting men’s attention now.  Better keep your eyes in your head.  She’ll turn out bad.  Like mother, like daughter,” the woman replied.

For ten or fifteen minutes Mary sat on the stone beneath the tree in the orchard and thought of the attitude of the town toward herself and her father.  “It should have drawn us together,” she told herself, and wondered if the approach of death would do what the cloud that had for years hung over them had not done.  It did not at the moment seem to her cruel that the figure of death was soon to visit her father.  In a way Death had become for her and for the time a lovely and gracious figure intent upon good.  The hand of death was to open the door out of her father’s house and into life.  With the cruelty of youth she thought first of the adventurous possibilities of the new life.

Mary sat very still.  In the long weeds the insects that had been disturbed in their evening song began to sing again.  A robin flew into the tree beneath which she sat and struck a clear sharp note of alarm.  The voices of people in the town’s new factory district came softly up the hillside.  They were like bells of distant cathedrals calling people to worship.  Something within the girl’s breast seemed to break and putting her head into her hands she rocked slowly back and forth.  Tears came accompanied by a warm tender impulse toward the living men and women of Huntersburg.

And then from the road came a call.  “Hello there kid,” shouted a voice, and Mary sprang quickly to her feet.  Her mellow mood passed like a puff of wind and in its place hot anger came.

In the road stood Duke Yetter who from his loafing place before the livery barn had seen her set out for the Sunday evening walk and had followed.  When she went through Upper Main Street and into the new factory district he was sure of his conquest.  “She doesn’t want to be seen walking with me,” he had told himself, “that’s all right.  She knows well enough I’ll follow but doesn’t want me to put in an appearance until she is well out of sight of her friends.  She’s a little stuck up and needs to be brought down a peg, but what do I care?  She’s gone out of her way to give me this chance and maybe she’s only afraid of her dad.”

Duke climbed the little incline out of the road and came into the orchard, but when he reached the pile of stones covered by vines he stumbled and fell.  He arose and laughed.  Mary had not waited for him to reach her but had started toward him, and when his laugh broke the silence that lay over the orchard she sprang forward and with her open hand struck him a sharp blow on the cheek.  Then she turned and as he stood with his feet tangled in the vines ran out to the road.  “If you follow or speak to me I’ll get someone to kill you,” she shouted.

Mary walked along the road and down the hill toward Wilmott Street.  Broken bits of the story concerning her mother that had for years circulated in town had reached her ears.  Her mother, it was said, had disappeared on a summer night long ago and a young town rough, who had been in the habit of loitering before Barney Smithfield’s Livery Barn, had gone away with her.  Now another young rough was trying to make up to her.  The thought made her furious.

Her mind groped about striving to lay hold of some weapon with which she could strike a more telling blow at Duke Yetter.  In desperation it lit upon the figure of her father already broken in health and now about to die.  “My father just wants the chance to kill some such fellow as you,” she shouted, turning to face the young man, who having got clear of the mass of vines in the orchard, had followed her into the road.  “My father just wants to kill someone because of the lies that have been told in this town about mother.”

Having given way to the impulse to threaten Duke Yetter Mary was instantly ashamed of her outburst and walked rapidly along, the tears running from her eyes.  With hanging head Duke walked at her heels.  “I didn’t mean no harm, Miss Cochran,” he pleaded.  “I didn’t mean no harm.  Don’t tell your father.  I was only funning with you.  I tell you I didn’t mean no harm.”

The light of the summer evening had begun to fall and the faces of the people made soft little ovals of light as they stood grouped under the dark porches or by the fences in Wilmott Street.  The voices of the children had become subdued and they also stood in groups.  They became silent as Mary passed and stood with upturned faces and staring eyes.  “The lady doesn’t live very far.  She must be almost a neighbor,” she heard a woman’s voice saying in English.  When she turned her head she saw only a crowd of dark-skinned men standing before a house.  From within the house came the sound of a woman’s voice singing a child to sleep.

The young Italian, who had called to her earlier in the evening and who was now apparently setting out of his own Sunday evening’s adventures, came along the sidewalk and walked quickly away into the darkness.  He had dressed himself in his Sunday clothes and had put on a black derby hat and a stiff white collar, set off by a red necktie.  The shining whiteness of the collar made his brown skin look almost black.  He smiled boyishly and raised his hat awkwardly but did not speak.

Mary kept looking back along the street to be sure Duke Yetter had not followed but in the dim light could see nothing of him.  Her angry excited mood went away.

She did not want to go home and decided it was too late to go to church.  From Upper Main Street there was a short street that ran eastward and fell rather sharply down a hillside to a creek and a bridge that marked the end of the town’s growth in that direction.  She went down along the street to the bridge and stood in the failing light watching two boys who were fishing in the creek.

A broad-shouldered man dressed in rough clothes came down along the street and stopping on the bridge spoke to her.  It was the first time she had ever heard a citizen of her home town speak with feeling of her father.  “You are Doctor Cochran’s daughter?” he asked hesitatingly.  “I guess you don’t know who I am but your father does.”  He pointed toward the two boys who sat with fishpoles in their hands on the weed-grown bank of the creek.  “Those are my boys and I have four other children,” he explained.  “There is another boy and I have three girls.  One of my daughters has a job in a store.  She is as old as yourself.”  The man explained his relations with Doctor Cochran.  He had been a farm laborer, he said, and had but recently moved to town to work in the furniture factory.  During the previous winter he had been ill for a long time and had no money.  While he lay in bed one of his boys fell out of a barn loft and there was a terrible cut in his head.

“Your father came every day to see us and he sewed up my Tom’s head.”  The laborer turned away from Mary and stood with his cap in his hand looking toward the boys.  “I was down and out and your father not only took care of me and the boys but he gave my old woman money to buy the things we had to have from the stores in town here, groceries and medicines.”  The man spoke in such low tones that Mary had to lean forward to hear his words.  Her face almost touched the laborer’s shoulder.  “Your father is a good man and I don’t think he is very happy,” he went on.  “The boy and I got well and I got work here in town but he wouldn’t take any money from me.  ’You know how to live with your children and with your wife.  You know how to make them happy.  Keep your money and spend it on them,’ that’s what he said to me.”

The laborer went on across the bridge and along the creek bank toward the spot where his two sons sat fishing and Mary leaned on the railing of the bridge and looked at the slow moving water.  It was almost black in the shadows under the bridge and she thought that it was thus her father’s life had been lived.  “It has been like a stream running always in shadows and never coming out into the sunlight,” she thought, and fear that her own life would run on in darkness gripped her.  A great new love for her father swept over her and in fancy she felt his arms about her.  As a child she had continually dreamed of caresses received at her father’s hands and now the dream came back.  For a long time she stood looking at the stream and she resolved that the night should not pass without an effort on her part to make the old dream come true.  When she again looked up the laborer had built a little fire of sticks at the edge of the stream.  “We catch bullheads here,” he called.  “The light of the fire draws them close to the shore.  If you want to come and try your hand at fishing the boys will lend you one of the poles.”

“O, I thank you, I won’t do it tonight,” Mary said, and then fearing she might suddenly begin weeping and that if the man spoke to her again she would find herself unable to answer, she hurried away.  “Good bye!” shouted the man and the two boys.  The words came quite spontaneously out of the three throats and created a sharp trumpet-like effect that rang like a glad cry across the heaviness of her mood.

When his daughter Mary went out for her evening walk Doctor Cochran sat for an hour alone in his office.  It began to grow dark and the men who all afternoon had been sitting on chairs and boxes before the livery barn across the street went home for the evening meal.  The noise of voices grew faint and sometimes for five or ten minutes there was silence.  Then from some distant street came a child’s cry.  Presently church bells began to ring.

The Doctor was not a very neat man and sometimes for several days he forgot to shave.  With a long lean hand he stroked his half grown beard.  His illness had struck deeper than he had admitted even to himself and his mind had an inclination to float out of his body.  Often when he sat thus his hands lay in his lap and he looked at them with a child’s absorption.  It seemed to him they must belong to someone else.  He grew philosophic.  “It’s an odd thing about my body.  Here I’ve lived in it all these years and how little use I have had of it.  Now it’s going to die and decay never having been used.  I wonder why it did not get another tenant.”  He smiled sadly over this fancy but went on with it.  “Well I’ve had thoughts enough concerning people and I’ve had the use of these lips and a tongue but I’ve let them lie idle.  When my Ellen was here living with me I let her think me cold and unfeeling while something within me was straining and straining trying to tear itself loose.”

He remembered how often, as a young man, he had sat in the evening in silence beside his wife in this same office and how his hands had ached to reach across the narrow space that separated them and touch her hands, her face, her hair.

Well, everyone in town had predicted his marriage would turn out badly!  His wife had been an actress with a company that came to Huntersburg and got stranded there.  At the same time the girl became ill and had no money to pay for her room at the hotel.  The young doctor had attended to that and when the girl was convalescent took her to ride about the country in his buggy.  Her life had been a hard one and the notion of leading a quiet existence in the little town appealed to her.

And then after the marriage and after the child was born she had suddenly found herself unable to go on living with the silent cold man.  There had been a story of her having run away with a young sport, the son of a saloon keeper who had disappeared from town at the same time, but the story was untrue.  Lester Cochran had himself taken her to Chicago where she got work with a company going into the far western states.  Then he had taken her to the door of her hotel, had put money into her hands and in silence and without even a farewell kiss had turned and walked away.

The Doctor sat in his office living over that moment and other intense moments when he had been deeply stirred and had been on the surface so cool and quiet.  He wondered if the woman had known.  How many times he had asked himself that question.  After he left her that night at the hotel door she never wrote.  “Perhaps she is dead,” he thought for the thousandth time.

A thing happened that had been happening at odd moments for more than a year.  In Doctor Cochran’s mind the remembered figure of his wife became confused with the figure of his daughter.  When at such moments he tried to separate the two figures, to make them stand out distinct from each other, he was unsuccessful.  Turning his head slightly he imagined he saw a white girlish figure coming through a door out of the rooms in which he and his daughter lived.  The door was painted white and swung slowly in a light breeze that came in at an open window.  The wind ran softly and quietly through the room and played over some papers lying on a desk in a corner.  There was a soft swishing sound as of a woman’s skirts.  The doctor arose and stood trembling.  “Which is it?  Is it you Mary or is it Ellen?” he asked huskily.

On the stairway leading up from the street there was the sound of heavy feet and the outer door opened.  The doctor’s weak heart fluttered and he dropped heavily back into his chair.

A man came into the room.  He was a farmer, one of the doctor’s patients, and coming to the centre of the room he struck a match, held it above his head and shouted.  “Hello!” he called.  When the doctor arose from his chair and answered he was so startled that the match fell from his hand and lay burning faintly at his feet.

The young farmer had sturdy legs that were like two pillars of stone supporting a heavy building, and the little flame of the match that burned and fluttered in the light breeze on the floor between his feet threw dancing shadows along the walls of the room.  The doctor’s confused mind refused to clear itself of his fancies that now began to feed upon this new situation.

He forgot the presence of the farmer and his mind raced back over his life as a married man.  The flickering light on the wall recalled another dancing light.  One afternoon in the summer during the first year after his marriage his wife Ellen had driven with him into the country.  They were then furnishing their rooms and at a farmer’s house Ellen had seen an old mirror, no longer in use, standing against a wall in a shed.  Because of something quaint in the design the mirror had taken her fancy and the farmer’s wife had given it to her.  On the drive home the young wife had told her husband of her pregnancy and the doctor had been stirred as never before.  He sat holding the mirror on his knees while his wife drove and when she announced the coming of the child she looked away across the fields.

How deeply etched, that scene in the sick man’s mind!  The sun was going down over young corn and oat fields beside the road.  The prairie land was black and occasionally the road ran through short lanes of trees that also looked black in the waning light.

The mirror on his knees caught the rays of the departing sun and sent a great ball of golden light dancing across the fields and among the branches of trees.  Now as he stood in the presence of the farmer and as the little light from the burning match on the floor recalled that other evening of dancing lights, he thought he understood the failure of his marriage and of his life.  On that evening long ago when Ellen had told him of the coming of the great adventure of their marriage he had remained silent because he had thought no words he could utter would express what he felt.  There had been a defense for himself built up.  “I told myself she should have understood without words and I’ve all my life been telling myself the same thing about Mary.  I’ve been a fool and a coward.  I’ve always been silent because I’ve been afraid of expressing myself—­like a blundering fool.  I’ve been a proud man and a coward.

“Tonight I’ll do it.  If it kills me I’ll make myself talk to the girl,” he said aloud, his mind coming back to the figure of his daughter.

“Hey!  What’s that?” asked the farmer who stood with his hat in his hand waiting to tell of his mission.

The doctor got his horse from Barney Smithfield’s livery and drove off to the country to attend the farmer’s wife who was about to give birth to her first child.  She was a slender narrow-hipped woman and the child was large, but the doctor was feverishly strong.  He worked desperately and the woman, who was frightened, groaned and struggled.  Her husband kept coming in and going out of the room and two neighbor women appeared and stood silently about waiting to be of service.  It was past ten o’clock when everything was done and the doctor was ready to depart for town.

The farmer hitched his horse and brought it to the door and the doctor drove off feeling strangely weak and at the same time strong.  How simple now seemed the thing he had yet to do.  Perhaps when he got home his daughter would have gone to bed but he would ask her to get up and come into the office.  Then he would tell the whole story of his marriage and its failure sparing himself no humiliation.  “There was something very dear and beautiful in my Ellen and I must make Mary understand that.  It will help her to be a beautiful woman,” he thought, full of confidence in the strength of his resolution.

He got to the door of the livery barn at eleven o’clock and Barney Smithfield with young Duke Yetter and two other men sat talking there.  The liveryman took his horse away into the darkness of the barn and the doctor stood for a moment leaning against the wall of the building.  The town’s night watchman stood with the group by the barn door and a quarrel broke out between him and Duke Yetter, but the doctor did not hear the hot words that flew back and forth or Duke’s loud laughter at the night watchman’s anger.  A queer hesitating mood had taken possession of him.

There was something he passionately desired to do but could not remember.  Did it have to do with his wife Ellen or Mary his daughter?  The figures of the two women were again confused in his mind and to add to the confusion there was a third figure, that of the woman he had just assisted through child birth.  Everything was confusion.  He started across the street toward the entrance of the stairway leading to his office and then stopped in the road and stared about.  Barney Smithfield having returned from putting his horse in the stall shut the door of the barn and a hanging lantern over the door swung back and forth.  It threw grotesque dancing shadows down over the faces and forms of the men standing and quarreling beside the wall of the barn.