Short Stories

Rosalind sat under the tree near the railroad bridge two miles from Willow Springs and watched the tumble bugs at work.  Her whole body was hot from the walk in the sun and the thin dress she wore clung to her legs.  It was being soiled by the dust on the grass under the tree.

She had run away from town and from her mother’s house.  All during the three days of her visit she had been doing that.  She did not go from house to house to visit her old schoolgirl friends, the girls who unlike herself had stayed in Willow Springs, had got married and settled down there.  When she saw one of these women on the street in the morning, pushing a baby carriage and perhaps followed by a small child, she stopped.  There was a few minutes of talk.  “It’s hot.  Do you live in the same place in Chicago?  My husband and I hope to take the children and go away for a week or two.  It must be nice in Chicago where you are so near the lake.”  Rosalind hurried away.

All the hours of her visit to her mother and to her home town had been spent in an effort to hurry away.

From what?  Rosalind defended herself.  There was something she had come from Chicago hoping to be able to say to her mother.  Did she really want to talk with her about things?  Had she thought, by again breathing the air of her home town, to get strength to face life and its difficulties?

There was no point in her taking the hot uncomfortable trip from Chicago only to spend her days walking in dusty country roads or between rows of cornfields in the stifling heat along the railroad tracks.

“I must have hoped.  There is a hope that cannot be fulfilled,” she thought vaguely.

Willow Springs was a rather meaningless, dreary town, one of thousands of such towns in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, but her mind made it more dreary.

She sat under the tree by the dry bed of Willow Creek thinking of the street in town where her mother and father lived, where she had lived until she had become a woman.  It was only because of a series of circumstances she did not live there now.  Her one brother, ten years older than herself, had married and moved to Chicago.  He had asked her to come for a visit and after she got to the city she stayed.  Her brother was a traveling salesman and spent a good deal of time away from home.  “Why don’t you stay here with Bess and learn stenography,” he asked.  “If you don’t want to use it you don’t have to.  Dad can look out for you all right.  I just thought you might like to learn.”

“That was six years ago,” Rosalind thought wearily.  “I’ve been a city woman for six years.”  Her mind hopped about.  Thoughts came and went.  In the city, after she became a stenographer, something for a time awakened her.  She wanted to be an actress and went in the evening to a dramatic school.  In an office where she worked there was a young man, a clerk.  They went out together, to the theatre or to walk in the park in the evening.  They kissed.

Her thoughts came sharply back to her mother and father, to her home in Willow Springs, to the street in which she had lived until her twenty-first year.

It was but an end of a street.  From the windows at the front of her mother’s house six other houses could be seen.  How well she knew the street and the people in the houses!  Did she know them?  From her eighteenth and until her twenty-first year she had stayed at home, helping her mother with the housework, waiting for something.  Other young women in town waited just as she did.  They like herself had graduated from the town high school and their parents had no intention of sending them away to college.  There was nothing to do but wait.  Some of the young women—­their mothers and their mothers’ friends still spoke of them as girls—­had young men friends who came to see them on Sunday and perhaps also on Wednesday or Thursday evenings.  Others joined the church, went to prayer meetings, became active members of some church organization.  They fussed about.

Rosalind had done none of these things.  All through those three trying years in Willow Springs she had just waited.  In the morning there was the work to do in the house and then, in some way, the day wore itself away.  In the evening her father went up town and she sat with her mother.  Nothing much was said.  After she had gone to bed she lay awake, strangely nervous, eager for something to happen that never would happen.  The noises of the Wescott house cut across her thoughts.  What things went through her mind!

There was a procession of people always going away from her.  Sometimes she lay on her belly at the edge of a ravine.  Well it was not a ravine.  It had two walls of marble and on the marble face of the walls strange figures were carved.  Broad steps led down—­always down and away.  People walked along the steps, between the marble walls, going down and away from her.

What people!  Who were they?  Where did they come from?  Where were they going?  She was not asleep but wide awake.  Her bedroom was dark.  The walls and ceiling of the room receded.  She seemed to hang suspended in space, above the ravine—­the ravine with walls of white marble over which strange beautiful lights played.

The people who went down the broad steps and away into infinite distance—­they were men and women.  Sometime a young girl like herself but in some way sweeter and purer than herself, passed alone.  The young girl walked with a swinging stride, going swiftly and freely like a beautiful young animal.  Her legs and arms were like the slender top branches of trees swaying in a gentle wind.  She also went down and away.

Others followed along the marble steps.  Young boys walked alone.  A dignified old man followed by a sweet faced woman passed.  What a remarkable man!  One felt infinite power in his old frame.  There were deep wrinkles in his face and his eyes were sad.  One felt he knew everything about life but had kept something very precious alive in himself.  It was that precious thing that made the eyes of the woman who followed him burn with a strange fire.  They also went down along the steps and away.

Down and away along the steps went others—­how many others, men and women, boys and girls, single old men, old women who leaned on sticks and hobbled along.

In the bed in her father’s house as she lay awake Rosalind’s head grew light.  She tried to clutch at something, understand something.

She couldn’t.  The noises of the house cut across her waking dream.  Her father was at the pump by the kitchen door.  He was pumping a pail of water.  In a moment he would bring it into the house and put it on a box by the kitchen sink.  A little of the water would slop over on the floor.  There would be a sound like a child’s bare foot striking the floor.  Then her father would go to wind the clock.  The day was done.  Presently there would be the sound of his heavy feet on the floor of the bedroom above and he would get into bed to lie beside Rosalind’s mother.

The night noises of her father’s house had been in some way terrible to the girl in the years when she was becoming a woman.  After chance had taken her to the city she never wanted to think of them again.  Even in Chicago where the silence of nights was cut and slashed by a thousand noises, by automobiles whirling through the streets, by the belated footsteps of men homeward bound along the cement sidewalks after midnight, by the shouts of quarreling men drunk on summer nights, even in the great hubbub of noises there was comparative quiet.  The insistent clanging noises of the city nights were not like the homely insistent noises of her father’s house.  Certain terrible truths about life did not abide in them, they did not cling so closely to life and did not frighten as did the noises in the one house on the quiet street in the town of Willow Springs.  How often, there in the city, in the midst of the great noises she had fought to escape the little noises!  Her father’s feet were on the steps leading into the kitchen.  Now he was putting the pail of water on the box by the kitchen sink.  Upstairs her mother’s body fell heavily into bed.  The visions of the great marble-lined ravine down along which went the beautiful people flew away.  There was the little slap of water on the kitchen floor.  It was like a child’s bare foot striking the floor.  Rosalind wanted to cry out.  Her father closed the kitchen door.  Now he was winding the clock.  In a moment his feet would be on the stairs—­

There were six houses to be seen from the windows of the Wescott house.  In the winter smoke from six brick chimneys went up into the sky.  There was one house, the next one to the Wescott’s place, a small frame affair, in which lived a man who was thirty-five years old when Rosalind became a woman of twenty-one and went away to the city.  The man was unmarried and his mother, who had been his housekeeper, had died during the year in which Rosalind graduated from the high school.  After that the man lived alone.  He took his dinner and supper at the hotel, down town on the square, but he got his own breakfast, made his own bed and swept out his own house.  Sometimes he walked slowly along the street past the Wescott house when Rosalind sat alone on the front porch.  He raised his hat and spoke to her.  Their eyes met.  He had a long, hawk-like nose and his hair was long and uncombed.

Rosalind thought about him sometimes.  It bothered her a little that he sometimes went stealing softly, as though not to disturb her, across her daytime fancies.

As she sat that day by the dry creek bed Rosalind thought about the bachelor, who had now passed the age of forty and who lived on the street where she had lived during her girlhood.  His house was separated from the Wescott house by a picket fence.  Sometimes in the morning he forgot to pull his blinds and Rosalind, busy with the housework in her father’s house, had seen him walking about in his underwear.  It was—­ uh, one could not think of it.

The man’s name was Melville Stoner.  He had a small income and did not have to work.  On some days he did not leave his house and go to the hotel for his meals but sat all day in a chair with his nose buried in a book.

There was a house on the street occupied by a widow who raised chickens.  Two or three of her hens were what the people who lived on the street called ‘high flyers.’  They flew over the fence of the chicken yard and escaped and almost always they came at once into the yard of the bachelor.  The neighbors laughed about it.  It was significant, they felt.  When the hens had come into the yard of the bachelor, Stoner, the widow with a stick in her hand ran after them.  Melville Stoner came out of his house and stood on a little porch in front.  The widow ran through the front gate waving her arms wildly and the hens made a great racket and flew over the fence.  They ran down the street toward the widow’s house.  For a moment she stood by the Stoner gate.  In the summer time when the windows of the Wescott house were open Rosalind could hear what the man and woman said to each other.  In Willow Springs it was not thought proper for an unmarried woman to stand talking to an unmarried man near the door of his bachelor establishment.  The widow wanted to observe the conventions.  Still she did linger a moment, her bare arm resting on the gate post.  What bright eager little eyes she had!  “If those hens of mine bother you I wish you would catch them and kill them,” she said fiercely.  “I am always glad to see them coming along the road,” Melville Stoner replied, bowing.  Rosalind thought he was making fun of the widow.  She liked him for that.  “I’d never see you if you did not have to come here after your hens.  Don’t let anything happen to them,” he said, bowing again.

For a moment the man and woman lingered looking into each other’s eyes.  From one of the windows of the Wescott house Rosalind watched the woman.  Nothing more was said.  There was something about the woman she had not understood—­well the widow’s senses were being fed.  The developing woman in the house next door had hated her.

Rosalind jumped up from under the tree and climbed up the railroad embankment.  She thanked the gods she had been lifted out of the life of the town of Willow Springs and that chance had set her down to live in a city.  “Chicago is far from beautiful.  People say it is just a big noisy dirty village and perhaps that’s what it is, but there is something alive there,” she thought.  In Chicago, or at least during the last two or three years of her life there, Rosalind felt she had learned a little something of life.  She had read books for one thing, such books as did not come to Willow Springs, books that Willow Springs knew nothing about, she had gone to hear the Symphony Orchestra, she had begun to understand something of the possibility of line and color, had heard intelligent, understanding men speak of these things.  In Chicago, in the midst of the twisting squirming millions of men and women there were voices.  One occasionally saw men or at least heard of the existence of men who, like the beautiful old man who had walked away down the marble stairs in the vision of her girlhood nights, had kept some precious thing alive in themselves.

And there was something else—­it was the most important thing of all.  For the last two years of her life in Chicago she had spent hours, days in the presence of a man to whom she could talk.  The talks had awakened her.  She felt they had made her a woman, had matured her.

“I know what these people here in Willow Springs are like and what I would have been like had I stayed here,” she thought.  She felt relieved and almost happy.  She had come home at a crisis of her own life hoping to be able to talk a little with her mother, or if talk proved impossible hoping to get some sense of sisterhood by being in her presence.  She had thought there was something buried away, deep within every woman, that at a certain call would run out to other women.  Now she felt that the hope, the dream, the desire she had cherished was altogether futile.  Sitting in the great flat bowl in the midst of the corn lands two miles from her home town where no breath of air stirred and seeing the beetles at their work of preparing to propagate a new generation of beetles, while she thought of the town and its people, had settled something for her.  Her visit to Willow Springs had come to something after all.

Rosalind’s figure had still much of the spring and swing of youth in it.  Her legs were strong and her shoulders broad.  She went swinging along the railroad track toward town, going westward.  The sun had begun to fall rapidly down the sky.  Away over the tops of the corn in one of the great fields she could see in the distance to where a man was driving a motor along a dusty road.  The wheels of the car kicked up dust through which the sunlight played.  The floating cloud of dust became a shower of gold that settled down over the fields.  “When a woman most wants what is best and truest in another woman, even in her own mother, she isn’t likely to find it,” she thought grimly.  “There are certain things every woman has to find out for herself, there is a road she must travel alone.  It may only lead to some more ugly and terrible place, but if she doesn’t want death to overtake her and live within her while her body is still alive she must set out on that road.”

Rosalind walked for a mile along the railroad track and then stopped.  A freight train had gone eastward as she sat under the tree by the creek bed and now, there beside the tracks, in the grass was the body of a man.  It lay still, the face buried in the deep burned grass.  At once she concluded the man had been struck and killed by the train.  The body had been thrown thus aside.  All her thoughts went away and she turned and started to tiptoe away, stepping carefully along the railroad ties, making no noise.  Then she stopped again.  The man in the grass might not be dead, only hurt, terribly hurt.  It would not do to leave him there.  She imagined him mutilated but still struggling for life and herself trying to help him.  She crept back along the ties.  The man’s legs were not twisted and beside him lay his hat.  It was as though he had put it there before lying down to sleep, but a man did not sleep with his face buried in the grass in such a hot uncomfortable place.  She drew nearer.  “O, you Mister,” she called, “O, you—­are you hurt?”

The man in the grass sat up and looked at her.  He laughed.  It was Melville Stoner, the man of whom she had just been thinking and in thinking of whom she had come to certain settled conclusions regarding the futility of her visit to Willow Springs.  He got to his feet and picked up his hat.  “Well, hello, Miss Rosalind Wescott,” he said heartily.  He climbed a small embankment and stood beside her.  “I knew you were at home on a visit but what are you doing out here?” he asked and then added, “What luck this is!  Now I shall have the privilege of walking home with you.  You can hardly refuse to let me walk with you after shouting at me like that.”

They walked together along the tracks he with his hat in his hand.  Rosalind thought he looked like a gigantic bird, an aged wise old bird, “perhaps a vulture” she thought.  For a time he was silent and then he began to talk, explaining his lying with his face buried in the grass.  There was a twinkle in his eyes and Rosalind wondered if he was laughing at her as she had seen him laugh at the widow who owned the hens.

He did not come directly to the point and Rosalind thought it strange that they should walk and talk together.  At once his words interested her.  He was so much older than herself and no doubt wiser.  How vain she had been to think herself so much more knowing than all the people of Willow Springs.  Here was this man and he was talking and his talk did not sound like anything she had ever expected to hear from the lips of a native of her home town.  “I want to explain myself but we’ll wait a little.  For years I’ve been wanting to get at you, to talk with you, and this is my chance.  You’ve been away now five or six years and have grown into womanhood.

“You understand it’s nothing specially personal, my wanting to get at you and understand you a little,” he added quickly.  “I’m that way about everyone.  Perhaps that’s the reason I live alone, why I’ve never married or had personal friends.  I’m too eager.  It isn’t comfortable to others to have me about.”

Rosalind was caught up by this new view point of the man.  She wondered.  In the distance along the tracks the houses of the town came into sight.  Melville Stoner tried to walk on one of the iron rails but after a few steps lost his balance and fell off.  His long arms whirled about.  A strange intensity of mood and feeling had come over Rosalind.  In one moment Melville Stoner was like an old man and then he was like a boy.  Being with him made her mind, that had been racing all afternoon, race faster than ever.

When he began to talk again he seemed to have forgotten the explanation he had intended making.  “We’ve lived side by side but we’ve hardly spoken to each other,” he said.  “When I was a young man and you were a girl I used to sit in the house thinking of you.  We’ve really been friends.  What I mean is we’ve had the same thoughts.”

He began to speak of life in the city where she had been living, condemning it.  “It’s dull and stupid here but in the city you have your own kind of stupidity too,” he declared.  “I’m glad I do not live there.”

In Chicago when she had first gone there to live a thing had sometimes happened that had startled Rosalind.  She knew no one but her brother and his wife and was sometimes very lonely.  When she could no longer bear the eternal sameness of the talk in her brother’s house she went out to a concert or to the theatre.  Once or twice when she had no money to buy a theatre ticket she grew bold and walked alone in the streets, going rapidly along without looking to the right or left.  As she sat in the theatre or walked in the street an odd thing sometimes happened.  Someone spoke her name, a call came to her.  The thing happened at a concert and she looked quickly about.  All the faces in sight had that peculiar, half bored, half expectant expression one grows accustomed to seeing on the faces of people listening to music.  In the entire theatre no one seemed aware of her.  On the street or in the park the call had come when she was utterly alone.  It seemed to come out of the air, from behind a tree in the park.

And now as she walked on the railroad tracks with Melville Stoner the call seemed to come from him.  He walked along apparently absorbed with his own thoughts, the thoughts he was trying to find words to express.  His legs were long and he walked with a queer loping gait.  The idea of some great bird, perhaps a sea-bird stranded far inland, stayed in Rosalind’s mind but the call did not come from the bird part of him.  There was something else, another personality hidden away.  Rosalind fancied the call came this time from a young boy, from such another clear-eyed boy as she had once seen in her waking dreams at night in her father’s house, from one of the boys who walked on the marble stairway, walked down and away.  A thought came that startled her.  “The boy is hidden away in the body of this strange bird-like man,” she told herself.  The thought awoke fancies within her.  It explained much in the lives of men and women.  An expression, a phrase, remembered from her childhood when she had gone to Sunday School in Willow Springs, came back to her mind.  “And God spoke to me out of a burning bush.”  She almost said the words aloud.

Melville Stoner loped along, walking on the railroad ties and talking.  He seemed to have forgotten the incident of his lying with his nose buried in the grass and was explaining his life lived alone in the house in town.  Rosalind tried to put her own thoughts aside and to listen to his words but did not succeed very well.  “I came home here hoping to get a little closer to life, to get, for a few days, out of the company of a man so I could think about him.  I fancied I could get what I wanted by being near mother, but that hasn’t worked.  It would be strange if I got what I am looking for by this chance meeting with another man,” she thought.  Her mind went on recording thoughts.  She heard the spoken words of the man beside her but her own mind went on, also making words.  Something within herself felt suddenly relaxed and free.  Ever since she had got off the train at Willow Springs three days before there had been a great tenseness.  Now it was all gone.  She looked at Melville Stoner who occasionally looked at her.  There was something in his eyes, a kind of laughter—­a mocking kind of laughter.  His eyes were grey, of a cold greyness, like the eyes of a bird.

“It has come into my mind—­I have been thinking—­well you see you have not married in the six years since you went to live in the city.  It would be strange and a little amusing if you are like myself, if you cannot marry or come close to any other person,” he was saying.

Again he spoke of the life he led in his house.  “I sometimes sit in my house all day, even when the weather is fine outside,” he said.  “You have no doubt seen me sitting there.  Sometimes I forget to eat.  I read books all day, striving to forget myself and then night comes and I cannot sleep.

“If I could write or paint or make music, if I cared at all about expressing what goes on in my mind it would be different.  However, I would not write as others do.  I would have but little to say about what people do.  What do they do?  In what way does it matter?  Well you see they build cities such as you live in and towns like Willow Springs, they have built this railroad track on which we are walking, they marry and raise children, commit murders, steal, do kindly acts.  What does it matter?  You see we are walking here in the hot sun.  In five minutes more we will be in town and you will go to your house and I to mine.  You will eat supper with your father and mother.  Then your father will go up town and you and your mother will sit together on the front porch.  There will be little said.  Your mother will speak of her intention to can fruit.  Then your father will come home and you will all go to bed.  Your father will pump a pail of water at the pump by the kitchen door.  He will carry it indoors and put it on a box by the kitchen sink.  A little of the water will be spilled.  It will make a soft little slap on the kitchen floor—­”

“Ha!”

Melville Stoner turned and looked sharply at Rosalind who had grown a little pale.  Her mind raced madly, like an engine out of control.  There was a kind of power in Melville Stoner that frightened her.  By the recital of a few commonplace facts he had suddenly invaded her secret places.  It was almost as though he had come into the bedroom in her father’s house where she lay thinking.  He had in fact got into her bed.  He laughed again, an unmirthful laugh.  “I’ll tell you what, we know little enough here in America, either in the towns or in the cities,” he said rapidly.  “We are all on the rush.  We are all for action.  I sit still and think.  If I wanted to write I’d do something.  I’d tell what everyone thought.  It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh?  I would tell you what you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this railroad track with me.  I would tell you what your mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would like to say to you.”

Rosalind’s face had grown chalky white and her hands trembled.  They got off the railroad tracks and into the streets of Willow Springs.  A change came over Melville Stoner.  Of a sudden he seemed just a man of forty, a little embarrassed by the presence of the younger woman, a little hesitant.  “I’m going to the hotel now and I must leave you here,” he said.  His feet made a shuffling sound on the sidewalk.  “I intended to tell you why you found me lying out there with my face buried in the grass,” he said.  A new quality had come into his voice.  It was the voice of the boy who had called to Rosalind out of the body of the man as they walked and talked on the tracks.  “Sometimes I can’t stand my life here,” he said almost fiercely and waved his long arms about.  “I’m alone too much.  I grow to hate myself.  I have to run out of town.”

The man did not look at Rosalind but at the ground.  His big feet continued shuffling nervously about.  “Once in the winter time I thought I was going insane,” he said.  “I happened to remember an orchard, five miles from town where I had walked one day in the late fall when the pears were ripe.  A notion came into my head.  It was bitter cold but I walked the five miles and went into the orchard.  The ground was frozen and covered with snow but I brushed the snow aside.  I pushed my face into the grass.  In the fall when I had walked there the ground was covered with ripe pears.  A fragrance arose from them.  They were covered with bees that crawled over them, drunk, filled with a kind of ecstacy.  I had remembered the fragrance.  That’s why I went there and put my face into the frozen grass.  The bees were in an ecstasy of life and I had missed life.  I have always missed life.  It always goes away from me.  I always imagined people walking away.  In the spring this year I walked on the railroad track out to the bridge over Willow Creek.  Violets grew in the grass.  At that time I hardly noticed them but today I remembered.  The violets were like the people who walk away from me.  A mad desire to run after them had taken possession of me.  I felt like a bird flying through space.  A conviction that something had escaped me and that I must pursue it had taken possession of me.”

Melville Stoner stopped talking.  His face also had grown white and his hands also trembled.  Rosalind had an almost irresistible desire to put out her hand and touch his hand.  She wanted to shout, crying—­“I am here.  I am not dead.  I am alive.”  Instead she stood in silence, staring at him, as the widow who owned the high flying hens had stared.  Melville Stoner struggled to recover from the ecstasy into which he had been thrown by his own words.  He bowed and smiled.  “I hope you are in the habit of walking on railroad tracks,” he said.  “I shall in the future know what to do with my time.  When you come to town I shall camp on the railroad tracks.  No doubt, like the violets, you have left your fragrance out there.”  Rosalind looked at him.  He was laughing at her as he had laughed when he talked to the widow standing at his gate.  She did not mind.  When he had left her she went slowly through the streets.  The phrase that had come into her mind as they walked on the tracks came back and she said it over and over.  “And God spoke to me out of a burning bush.”  She kept repeating the phrase until she got back into the Wescott house.