Collected Stories (58 page)

“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.”

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 they 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.

Mrs. Thorndike ventured that she had found the town much changed for the better.

Yes, Mrs. Ferguesson supposed it was.

Then Mrs. Thorndike began in earnest. “How wonderful it is that all your sons have turned out so well! I take the MacAlpin paper
chiefly to keep track of the Ferguesson boys. You and Mr. Ferguesson must be very proud.”

“Yes’m, we are. We are thankful.”

“Even the Denver papers have long articles about Hector and Homer and their great sheep ranches in Wyoming. And Vincent has become such a celebrated chemist, and is helping to destroy all the irreducible elements that I learned when I went to school. And Bryan is with Marshall Field!”

Mrs. Ferguesson nodded and pressed her hand, but she still kept looking down the hall toward the front door. Suddenly she turned with all herself to Mrs. Thorndike and with a storm of tears cried out from her heart: “Oh, Miss Knightly, talk to me about my Lesley! Seems so many have forgot her, but I know you haven’t.”

“No, Mrs. Ferguesson, I never forget her. Yesterday morning I took a box of roses that I brought with me from my own garden down to where she sleeps. I was glad to find a little seat there, so that I could stay for a long while and think about her.”

“Oh, I wish I could have gone with you, Miss Knightly! (I can’t call you anything else.) I wish we could have gone together. I can’t help feeling she knows.
Anyhow,
we know! And there’s nothing in all my life so precious to me to remember and think about as my Lesley. I’m no soft woman, either. The boys will tell you that. They’ll tell you they got on because I always had a firm hand over them. They’re all true to Lesley, my boys. Every time they come home they go down there. They feel it like I do, as if it had happened yesterday. Their father feels it, too, when he’s not taken up with his abstractions. Anyhow, I don’t think men feel things like women and boys. My boys have stayed boys. I do believe they feel as bad as I do about moving up here. We have four nice bedrooms upstairs to make them comfortable, should they all come home at once, and they’re polite about us and tell us how well fixed we are. But Miss Knightly, I know at the bottom of their hearts they wish they was back in the old house down by the depot, sleeping in the attic.”

Mrs. Thorndike stroked her hand. “I looked for the old house as I was coming up from the station. I made the driver stop.”

“Ain’t it dreadful, what’s been done to it? If I’d foreseen, I’d never
have let Mr. Ferguesson sell it. It was in my name. I’d have kept it to go back to and remember sometimes. Folks in middle age make a mistake when they think they can better themselves. They can’t, not if they have any heart. And the other kind don’t matter—they aren’t real people—just poor put-ons, that try to be like the advertisements. Father even took me to California one winter. I was miserable all the time. And there were plenty more like me—miserable underneath. The women lined up in cafeterias, carrying their little trays—like convicts, seemed to me—and running to beauty shops to get their poor old hands manicured. And the old men, Miss Knightly, I pitied them most of all! Old bent-backed farmers, standing round in their shirt-sleeves, in plazas and alleyways, pitching horseshoes like they used to do at home. I tell you, people are happiest where they’ve had their children and struggled along and been real folks, and not tourists. What do you think about all this running around, Miss Knightly? You’re an educated woman, I never had much schooling.”

“I don’t think schooling gives people any wisdom, Mrs. Ferguesson. I guess only life does that.”

“Well, this I know: our best years are when we’re working hardest and going right ahead when we can hardly see our way out. Times I was a good deal perplexed. But I always had one comfort. I did own our own house. I never had to worry about the rent. Don’t it seem strange to you, though, that all our boys are so practical, and their father such a dreamer?”

Mrs. Thorndike murmured that some people think boys are most likely to take after their mother.

Mrs. Ferguesson smiled absently and shook her head. Presently she came out with: “It’s a comfort to me up here, on a still night I can still hear the trains whistle in. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie and listen for them. And I can almost think I am down there, with my children up in the loft. We were very happy.” She looked up at her guest and smiled bravely. “I suppose you go away tonight?”

Mrs. Thorndike explained her plan to spend a day in the country.

“You’re going out to visit the little schools? Why, God bless you, dear! You’re still our Miss Knightly! But you’d better take a car, so you can get up to the Wild Rose school and back in one day. Do go
there! The teacher is Mandy Perkins—she was one of her little scholars. You’ll like Mandy, an’ she loved Lesley. You must get Bud Sullivan to drive you. Engage him right now—the telephone’s there in the hall, and the garage is 306. He’ll creep along for you, if you tell him. He does for me. I often go out to the Wild Rose school, and over to see dear Mrs. Robertson, who ain’t so young as she was then. I can’t go with Mr. Ferguesson. He drives so fast it’s no satisfaction. And then he’s not always mindful. He’s had some accidents. When he gets to thinking, he’s just as likely to run down a cow as not. He’s had to pay for one. You know cows will cross the road right in front of a car. Maybe their grandchildren calves will be more modern-minded.”