Somewhere in Red Gap Part 5

'Be that all too true, as it may be,' I says, 'but I still got my business faculties--' And I was going on some more, but just then I seen Nettie and Wilbur was awful thick over something he'd unwrapped from the other package he'd brought. It was neither more nor less than a big photo of C. Wilbur Todd. Yes, sir, he'd brought her one.

"'I think the artist has caught a bit of the real just there, if you know what I mean,' says Wilbur, laying a pale thumb across the upper part of the horrible thing.

"'I understand,' says Nettie, 'the real you was expressing itself.'

"'Perhaps,' concedes Wilbur kind of n.o.bly. 'I dare say he caught me in one of my rarer moods. You don't think it too idealized?'

"'Don't jest,' says she, very pretty and severe. And they both gazed spellbound.

"'Chester,' I says in low but venomous tones, 'you been hanging round that girl worse than Grant hung round Richmond, but you got to remember that Grant was more than a hanger. He made moves, Chester, moves! Do you get me?'

"'About them calves,' says Chester, 'pa told me it's his honest opinion--'

"Well, that was enough for once. I busted up that party sudden and firm.

"'It has meant much to me,' says Wilbur at parting.

"'I understand,' says Nettie.

"'When you come up to the ranch, Miss Nettie,' says Chester, 'you want to ride over to the Lazy Eight, and see that there tame coyote I got. It licks your hand like a dog.'

"But what could I do, more than what I had done? Nettie was looking at the photograph when I shut the door on 'em. 'The soul behind the wood and wire,' she murmurs. I looked closer then and what do you reckon it was? Just as true as I set here, it was Wilbur, leaning forward all negligent and patronizing on a twelve-hundred-dollar grand piano, his hair well forward and his eyes masterful, like that there n.o.ble instrument was his bond slave. But wait! And underneath he'd writ a bar of music with notes running up and down, and signed his name to it--not plain, mind you, though he can write a good business hand if he wants to, but all scrawly like some one important, so you couldn't tell if it was meant for Dutch or English. Could you beat that for nerve--in a day, in a million years?

"'What's Wilbur writing that kind of music for?' I asks in a cold voice.

'He don't know that kind. What he had ought to of written is a bunch of them hollow slats and squares like they punch in the only kind of music he plays,' I says.

"'Hus.h.!.+' says Nettie. 'It's that last divine phrase, "To kiss the cross!"'

"I choked up myself then. And I went to bed and thought. And this is what I thought: When you think you got the winning hand, keep on raising. To call is to admit you got no faith in your judgment. Better lay down than call. So I resolve not to say another word to the girl about Chester, but simply to press the song in on her. Already it had made her act like a human person. Of course I didn't worry none about Wilbur. The wisdom of the ages couldn't have done that. But I seen I had got to have a real first-cla.s.s human voice in that song, like the one I had heard in New York City. They'll just have to clench, I think, when they hear a good A-number-one voice in it.

"Next day I look in on Wilbur and say, 'What about this concert and musical entertainment the North Side set is talking about giving for the starving Belgians?'

"'The plans are maturing,' he says, 'but I'm getting up a Brahms concerto that I have promised to play--you know how terrifically difficult Brahms is--so the date hasn't been set yet.'

"'Well, set it and let's get to work,' I says. 'There'll be you, and the North Side Ladies' String Quartet, and Ed Bughalter with a ba.s.s solo, and Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale with the "Jewel Song" from Faust, and I been thinking,' I says, 'that we had ought to get a good professional lady concert singer down from Spokane.'

"'I'm afraid the expenses would go over our receipts,' says Wilbur, and I can see him figuring that this concert will cost the Belgians money instead of helping 'em; so right off I says, 'If you can get a good-looking, sad-faced contralto, with a low-cut black dress, that can sing "The Rosary" like it had ought to be sung, why, you can touch me for that part of the evening's entertainment.'

"Wilbur says I'm too good, not suspicioning I'm just being wily, so he says he'll write up and fix it. And a couple days later he says the lady professional is engaged, and it'll cost me fifty, and he shows me her picture and the dress is all right, and she had a sad, powerful face, and the date is set and everything.

"Meantime, I keep them two records het up for the benefit of my reluctant couple: daytime for Nettie--she standing dreamy-eyed while it was doing, showing she was coming more and more human, understand--and evenings for both of 'em, when Chester Timmins would call. And Chet himself about the third night begins to get a new look in his eyes, kind of absent and desperate, so I thinks this here lady professional will simply goad him to a frenzy. Oh, we had some sad musical week before that concert! That was when this crazy c.h.i.n.k of mine got took by the song. He don't know yet what it means, but it took him all right; he got regular besotted with it, keeping the kitchen door open all the time, so he wouldn't miss a single turn. It took his mind off his work, too. Talk about the Yellow Peril! He got so locoed with that song one day, what does he do but peel and cook up twelve dollars' worth of the Piedmont Queen dahlia bulbs I'd ordered for the front yard. Sure! Served 'em with cream sauce, and we et 'em, thinking they was some kind of a Chinese vegetable.

"But I was saying about this new look in Chester's eyes, kind of far-off and criminal, when that song was playing. And then something give me a pause, as they say. Chet showed up one evening with his nails all manicured; yes, sir, polished till you needed smoked gla.s.ses to look at 'em. I knew all right where he'd been. I may as well tell you that Henry Lehman was giving Red Gap a flash of form with his new barber shop--tiled floor, plate-gla.s.s front, exposed plumbing, and a manicure girl from Seattle; yes, sir, just like in the great wicked cities. It had already turned some of our very best homes into domestic h.e.l.ls, and no wonder! Decent, G.o.d-fearing men, who'd led regular lives and had whiskers and grown children, setting down to a little spindle-legged table with this creature, dipping their clumsy old hands into a pink saucedish of suds and then going brazenly back to their innocent families with their nails glittering like piano keys. Oh, that young dame was bound to be a social pet among the ladies of the town, yes--no?

She was pretty and neat figured, with very careful hair, though its colour had been tampered with unsuccessfully, and she wore little, blue-striped s.h.i.+rtwaists that fitted very close--you know--with low collars. It was said that she was a good conversationalist and would talk in low, eager tones to them whose fingers she tooled.

"Still, I didn't think anything of Chester resorting to that sanitary den of vice. All I think is that he's trying to pretty himself up for Nettie and maybe show her he can be a man-about-town, like them she has known in Spokane and in Yonkers, New York, at the select home of Mrs.

W.B. Hemingway and her husband. How little we think when we had ought to be thinking our darndest! Me? I just went on playing them two records, the male barytone and the lady mezzo, and trying to curse that Chinaman into keeping the kitchen door shut on his cooking, with Wilbur dropping in now and then so him and Nettie could look at his photo, which was propped up against a book on the centre table--one of them large three-dollar books that you get stuck with by an agent and never read--and Nettie dropping into his store now and then to hear him practise over difficult bits from his piece that he was going to render at the musical entertainment for the Belgians, with him asking her if she thought he shaded the staccato pa.s.sage a mite too heavy, or some guff like that.

"So here come the concert, with every seat sold and the hall draped pretty with flags and cut flowers. Some of the boys was down from the ranch, and you bet I made 'em all come across for tickets, and old Safety First--Chet's father--I stuck him for a dollar one, though he had an evil look in his eyes. That's how the boys got so crazy about this here song. They brought that record back with 'em. And Buck Devine, that I met on the street that very day of the concert, he give me another kind of a little jolt. He'd been gossiping round town, the vicious way men do, and he says to me:

"'That Chester lad is taking awful chances for a man that needs his two hands at his work. Of course if he was a foot-racer or something like that, where he didn't need hands--' 'What's all this?' I asks. 'Why,'

says Buck, 'he's had his nails rasped down to the quick till he almost screams if they touch anything, and he goes back for more every single day. It's a wonder they ain't mortified on him already; and say, it costs him six bits a throw and, of course, he don't take no change from a dollar--he leaves the extra two bits for a tip. Gee! A dollar a day for keeping your nails tuned up--and I ain't sure he don't have 'em done twice on Sundays. Mine ain't never had a file teched to 'em yet,' he says. 'I see that,' I says. 'If any foul-minded person ever accuses you of it, you got abundant proofs of your innocence right there with you.

As for Chester,' I says, 'he has an object.' 'He has,' says Buck. 'Not what you think,' I says. 'Very different from that. It's true,' I concedes, 'that he ought to take that money and go to some good osteopath and have his head treated, but he's all right at that. Don't you set up nights worrying about it.' And I sent Buck slinking off shamefaced but unconvinced, I could see. But I wasn't a bit scared.

"Chet et supper with us the night of the concert and took Nettie and I to the hall, and you bet I wedged them two close in next each other when we got to our seats. This was my star play. If they didn't fall for each other now--Shucks! They had to. And I noticed they was more confidential already, with Nettie looking at him sometimes almost respectfully.

"Well, the concert went fine, with the hired lady professional singer giving us some operatic gems in various foreign languages in the first part, and Ed Bughalter singing "A King of the Desert Am I, Ha, Ha!" very ba.s.s--Ed always sounds to me like moving heavy furniture round that ain't got any casters under it--and Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale with the "Jewel Song" from Faust, that she learned in a musical conservatory at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and "Coming Through the Rye"

for an encore--holding the music rolled up in her hands, though the Lord knows she knew every word and note of it by heart--and the North Side Ladies' String Quartet, and Wilbur Todd, of course, putting on more airs than as if he was the only son of old man Piano himself, while he s.h.i.+fted the gears and pumped, and Nettie whispering that he always slept two hours before performing in public and took no nourishment but one cup of warm milk--just a bundle of nerves that way--and she sent him up a bunch of lilies tied with lavender ribbon while he was bowing and sc.r.a.ping, but I didn't pay no attention to that, for now it was coming.

"Yes, sir, the last thing was this here lady professional, getting up stern and kind of sweetish sad in her low-cut black dress to sing the song of songs. I was awful excited for a party of my age, and I see they was, too. Nettie nudged Chet and whispered, 'Don't you just love it?'

And Chet actually says, 'I love it,' so no wonder I felt sure, when up to that time he'd hardly been able to say a word except about his pa being willing to take them calves for almost nothing. Then I seen his eyes glaze and point off across the hall, and darned if there wasn't this manicure party in a cheek little hat and tailored gown, setting with Mrs. Henry Lehman and her husband. But still I felt all right, because him and Nettie was nudging each other intimately again when Professor Gluckstein started in on the accompaniment--I bet Wilbur thinks the prof is awful old-fas.h.i.+oned, playing with his fingers that way; I know they don't speak on the street.

"So this lady just floated into that piece with all the heart stops pulled out, and after one line I didn't begrudge her a cent of my fifty.

I just set there and thrilled. I could feel Nettie and Chet thrilling, too, and I says, 'There's nothing to it--not from now on.'

"The applause didn't bust loose till almost a minute after she'd kissed the cross in that rich brown voice of hers, and even then my couple didn't join in. Nettie set still, all frozen and star-eyed, and Chester was choking and sniffling awful emotionally. 'I've sure nailed the young fools,' I thinks. And, of course, this lady had to sing it again, and not half through was she when, sure enough, I glanced down sideways and Chet's right hand and her left hand is squirming together till they look like a bunch of eels. 'All over but the rice,' I says, and at that I felt so good and thrilled! I was thinking back to my own time when I was just husband-high, though that wasn't so little, Lysander John being a scant six foot three--and our wedding tour to the Centennial and the trip to Niagara Falls--just soaking in old memories that bless and bind that this lady singer was calling up--well, you could have had anything from me right then when she kissed that cross a second time, just pouring her torn heart out. 'Worth every cent of that fifty,' I says.

"Then everybody was standing up and moving out--wiping their eyes a lot of 'em was--so I push on ahead quick, aiming to be more wily than ever and leave my couple alone. They don't miss me, either. When I look back, darned if they ain't kind of shaking hands right there in the hall.

'Quick work!' I says. 'You got to hand it to that song.' Even then I noticed Nettie was looking back to where Wilbur was tripping down from the platform, and Chester had his eyes glazed over on this manicure party. Still, they was gripping each other's hands right there before folks, and I think they're just a bit embarra.s.sed. My old heart went right on echoing that song as I pushed forward--not looking back again, I was that certain.

"And to show you the mushy state I was in, here is old Safety First himself leering at me down by the door, with a clean shave and his other clothes on, and he says all about how it was a grand evening's musical entertainment and how much will the Belgians get in cold cash, anyway, and how about them hundred and fifty head of bull calves that he was willing to take off my hands, and me, all mushed up by that song as I am telling you, saying to him in a hearty manner, 'They're yours, Dave!

Take 'em at your own price, old friend.' Honest, I said it just that way, so you can see. 'Oh, I'll be stuck on 'em at fifty a head,' says Dave, 'but I knew you'd listen to reason, we being such old neighbours.'

'I ain't heard reason since that last song,' I says. I'm listening to my heart, and it's a grand pity yours never learned to talk.' 'Fifty a head,' says the old robber.

"So, thus throwing away at least fifteen hundred dollars like it was a mere bagatelle or something, I walk out into the romantic night and beat it for home, wanting to be in before my happy couple reached there, so they'd feel free to linger over their parting. My, but I did feel responsible and dangerous, directing human destinies so brashly the way I had."

There was a pause, eloquent with unworded emotions.

Then "Human destinies, h.e.l.l!" the lady at length intoned.

Hereupon I amazingly saw that she believed her tale to be done. I permitted the silence to go a minute, perhaps, while she fingered the cigarette paper and loose tobacco.

"And of course, then," I hinted, as the twin jets of smoke were rather viciously expelled.

"I should say so--'of course, then'--you got it. But I didn't get it for near an hour yet. I set up to my bedroom window in the dark, waiting excitedly, and pretty soon they slowly floated up to the front gate, talking in hushed tones and gurgles. 'Male and female created He them,'

I says, flushed with triumph. The moon wasn't up yet, but you hadn't any trouble making out they was such. He was acting outrageously like a male and she was suffering it with the splendid courage which has long distinguished our helpless s.e.x. And there I set, warming my old heart in it and expanding like one of them little squeezed-up sponges you see in the drug-store window which swells up so astonis.h.i.+ng when you put it in water. I wasn't impatient for them to quit, oh, no! They seemed to clench and unclench and clench again, as if they had all the time in the world--with me doing nothing but applaud silently.

"After spending about twenty years out there they loitered softly up the walk and round to the side door where I'd left the light burning, and I slipped over to the side window, which was also open, and looked down on the dim fond pair, and she finally opened the door softly and the light shone out."

Again Ma Pettengill paused, her elbows on the arms of her chair, her shoulders forward, her gray old head low between them. She drew a long breath and rumbled fiercely:

"And the mushy fool me, forcing that herd of calves on old Dave at that scandalous price--after all, that's what really gaffed me the worst! My stars! If I could have seen that degenerate old crook again that night--but of course a trade's a trade, and I'd said it. Ain't I the old silly!"

"The door opened and the light shone out--"

I gently prompted.

She erected herself in the chair, threw back her shoulders, and her wide mouth curved and lifted at the corners with the humour that never long deserts this woman.