Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

H >> Harry Leon Wilson >> Somewhere in Red Gap




"Well, I guess that was the first time Ellabelle had really let go of
herself since she was four years old or thereabouts. Talk about the
empress of stormy emotion! For ten minutes the room sounded like a
torture chamber of the dark Middle Ages. But the doctor reached there at
last in a swift car, and him and the two maids managed to get her laid
out all comfortable and moaning, though still with outbreaks about every
twenty minutes that I could hear clear over on my side of the house.

"And down below my window on the marble porch Angus, _fills_, was
walking swiftly up and down for about one hour. He made no speech like
the night before. He just walked and walked. The part that struck me was
that neither of them had ever seemed to have the slightest notion of
pleading old Angus out of his mad folly. They both seemed to know the
Scotch when it did break out.

"At seven-thirty the next morning the old boy in overalls and jumper and
a cap was driven to his job in a car as big as an apartment house. The
curtains to Ellabelle's Looey Seez boudoir remained drawn, with hourly
bulletins from the two Swiss maids that she was passing away in great
agony. Angus, Junior, was off early, too, in his snakiest car. A few
minutes later they got a telephone from him sixty miles away that he
would not be home to lunch. Old Angus had taken his own lunch with him
in a tin pail he'd bought the day before, with a little cupola on top
for the cup to put the bottle of cold coffee in.

"It was a joyous home that day, if you don't care how you talk. All it
needed was a crepe necktie on the knob of the front door. That ornery
old hound, Angus, got in from his work at six, spotty with paint and
smelling of oil and turpentine, but cheerful as a new father. He washed
up, ridding himself of at least a third of the paint smell, looked in at
Ellabelle's door to say, 'What! Not feeling well, mamma? Now, that's too
bad!' ate a hearty dinner with me, young Angus not having been heard
from further, and fell asleep in a gold armchair at ten minutes past
nine.

"He was off again next morning. Ellabelle's health was still breaking
down, but young Angus sneaked in and partook of a meagre lunch with me.
He was highly vexed with his pa. 'He's nothing but a scoundrelly old
liar,' he says to me, 'saying that he gives me but a pittance. He's
always given me a whale of an allowance. Why, actually, I've more than
once had money left over at the end of the quarter. And now his talk
about saving money! I tell you he has some other reason than money for
breaking the mater's heart.' The boy looked very shrewd as he said this.

"That night at quitting time he was strangely down at the place with his
own car to fetch his father home. 'I'll trust you this once,' says the
old man, getting in and looking more then ever like a dissolute working
man. On the way they passed this here yellow-haired daughter of the old
train-robber that there had been talk of the boy making a match with.
She was driving her own car and looked neither to right nor left.

"'Not speaking?' says old Angus.

"'She didn't see us,' says the boy.

"'She's ashamed of your father,' says the old man.

"'She's not,' says the boy.

"'You know it,' says the old scoundrel.

"'I'll show her,' says his son.

"Well, we had another cheerful evening, with Ellabelle sending word to
old Angus that she wanted me to have the necklace of brilliants with the
sapphire pendant, and the two faithful maids was to get suitable
keepsakes out of the rest of her jewels, and would her son always wear
the seal ring with her hair in it that she had given him when he was
twenty? And the old devil started in to tell how much he could have
saved by taking charge of the work in his own house, and how a union man
nowadays would do just enough to keep within the law, and so on; but he
got to yawning his head off and retired at nine, complaining that his
valet that morning had cleaned and pressed his overalls. Young Angus
looked very shrewd at me and again says: 'The old liar! He has some
other reason than money. He can't fool me.'

"I kind of gathered from both of them the truth of what happened the
next day. Young Angus himself showed up at the job about nine A.M., with
a bundle under his arm. 'Where's the old man?' his father heard him
demand of the carpenter, he usually speaking of old Angus as the
governor.

"'Here,' says he from the top of a stepladder in the entry which looked
as if a glacier had passed through it.

"'Could you put me to work?' says the boy.

"'Don't get me to shaking with laughter up here,' says the old brute.
'Can't you see I'd be in peril of falling off?'

"Young Angus undoes his bundle and reveals overalls and a jumper which
he gets into quickly. 'What do I do first?' says he.

"His father went on kalsomining and took never a look at him more. 'The
time has largely passed here,' says he, 'for men that haven't learned to
do something, but you might take some of the burnt umber there and work
it well into a big gob of that putty till it's brown enough to match the
woodwork. Should you display the least talent for that we may see later
if you've any knack with a putty knife.'

"The new hand had brought no lunch with him, but his father spared him a
few scraps from his own, and they all swigged beer from a pail of it
they sent out for. So the scandal was now complete in all its details.
The palatial dining-room that night, being a copy of a good church or
something from ancient Italy, smelled like a paint shop indeed--and
sounded like one through dinner. 'That woodwork will be fit to
second-coat first thing in the morning,' says old Angus. 'I'll have it
sandpapered in no time,' says the boy. 'Your sandpapering ain't bad,'
says the other, 'though you have next to no skill with a brush.' 'I
thought I was pretty good with that flat one though.' 'Oh, fair; just
fair! First-coating needs little finesse. There! I forgot to order more
rubbing varnish. Maybe the men will think of it.' And so on till they
both yawned themselves off to their Scotch Renaysence apartments.
Ellabelle had not yet learned the worst. It seemed to be felt that she
had a right to perish without suffering the added ignominy of knowing
her son was acting like a common wage slave.

"They was both on the job next day. Of course the disgraceful affair had
by now penetrated to the remotest outlying marble shack. Several male
millionaires this day appeared on the scene to josh Angus, _peer_, and
Angus, _fills_, as they toiled at their degrading tasks. Not much
attention was paid to 'em, it appears, not even to the old train-robber
who come to jest and remained to cross-examine Angus about how much he
was really going to clear on the job, seriously now. Anything like that
was bound to fascinate the old crook.

"And next day, close to quitting time, what happens but this here robber
chieftain's petted daughter coming in and hanging round and begging to
be let to help because it was such jolly fun. I believe she did get hold
of a square of sandpaper with which she daintily tried to remove some
fresh varnish that should have been let strictly alone; and when they
both ordered her out in a frenzy of rage, what does she do but wait for
'em with her car which she made them enter and drove them to their abode
like they belonged to the better class of people that one would care to
know. The two fools was both kind of excited about this that night.

"The next day she breezes in again and tries to get them to knock off an
hour early so she can take them to the country club for tea, but they
refuse this, so she makes little putty statues of them both and drove a
few nails where they would do no good and upset a bucket of paste and
leaned a two-hundred-dollar lace thing against a varnished wall to the
detriment of both, and fell off a stepladder. Old Angus caught her and
boxed her ears soundly. And again she drove them through the avenues of
a colony of fine old families with money a little bit older, by a few
days, and up the drive to their own door.

"Ellabelle was peeking between the plush curtains on this occasion, for
some heartless busybody during the day had told her that her son and
husband was both renegades now. And strangely enough, she begun to get
back her strength from that very moment--seeing that exclusive and
well-known young debby-tant consorting in public with the reprobates.
I'm darned if she didn't have the genius after that to treat the whole
thing as a practical joke, especially when she finds out that none of
them exclusives had had it long enough to look down on another
millionaire merely for pinching a penny now and then. Old Angus as a
matter of fact had become just a little more important than she had ever
been and could have snubbed any one he wanted to. The only single one in
the whole place that throwed him down was his own English valet. He was
found helpless drunk in a greenhouse the third day, having ruined nine
thousand dollars' worth of orchids he'd gone to sleep amongst, and he
resigned his position with bitter dignity the moment he recovered
consciousness.

"Moreover, young Angus and this girl clenched without further
opposition. Her train-robber father said the boy must have something in
him even if he didn't look it, and old Angus said he still believed the
girl to be nothing but a yellow-haired soubrette; but what should we
expect of a woman, after all?

"The night the job was finished we had the jolliest dinner of my visit,
with a whole gang of exclusive-setters at the groaning board, including
this girl and her folks, and champagne, of which Angus, _peer_, consumed
near one of the cut-glass vases full.

"I caught him with young Angus in the deserted library later, while the
rest was one-stepping in the Henry Quatter ballroom or dance hall. The
old man had his arms pretty well upon the boy's shoulders. Yes, sir, he
was almost actually hugging him. The boy fled to this gilded cafe where
the rest was, and old Angus, with his eyes shining very queer, he grabs
me by the arm and says, 'Once when he was very small--though unusually
large for his age of three, mind you--he had a way of scratching my face
something painful with his little nails, and all in laughing play, you
know. I tried to warn him, but he couldn't understand, of course; so,
not knowing how else to instruct him, I scratched back one day, laughing
myself like he was, but sinking my nails right fierce into the back of
his little fat neck. He relaxed the tension in his own fingers. He was
hurt, for the tears started, but he never cried. He just looked puzzled
and kept on laughing, being bright to see I could play the game, too.
Only he saw it wasn't so good a game as he'd thought. I wonder what
made me think of that, now! I don't know. Come--from yonder doorway we
can see him as he dances.'

"And Ellabelle was saying gently to one and all, with her merry peal of
laughter, 'Ah, yes--once a Scotchman, always--'

"My land! It's ten o'clock. Don't them little white-faced beauties make
the music! Honestly I'd like to have a cot out in the corral. We miss a
lot of it in here."




V

NON PLUSH ULTRA


Sunday and a driving rain had combined to keep Ma Pettengill within the
Arrowhead ranch house. Neither could have done this alone. The rain
would merely have added a slicker to her business costume of khaki
riding breeches, laced boots, and flannel shirt as she rode abroad;
while a clement Sabbath would have seen her "resting," as she would put
it, in and round the various outbuildings, feeding-pens, blacksmith
shop, harness-room, branding-chute, or what not, issuing orders to
attentive henchmen from time to time; diagnosing the gray mule's
barbed-wire cut; compounding a tonic for Adolph, the big milk-strain
Durham bull, who has been ailing; wishing to be told why in something
the water hadn't been turned into that south ditch; and, like a
competent general, disposing her forces and munitions for the campaign
of the coming week. But Sunday--and a wildly rainy Sunday--had housed
her utterly.

Being one who can idle with no grace whatever she was engaged in what
she called putting the place to rights. This meant taking out the
contents of bureau drawers and wardrobes and putting them back again,
massing the litter on the big table in the living-room into an involved
geometry of neat piles that would endure for all of an hour,
straightening pictures on the walls, eliminating the home-circles of
spiders long unmolested, loudly calling upon Lew Wee, the Chinaman, who
affrightedly fled farther and farther after each call, and ever and
again booming pained surmises through the house as to what fearful state
it would get to be in if she didn't fight it to a clean finish once in a
dog's age.

The woman dumped a wastebasket of varied rubbish into the open fire,
leaned a broom against the mantel, readjusted the towel that protected
her gray hair from the dust--hair on week days exposed with never a
qualm to all manner of dust--cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an
especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then
took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a
riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude. She held it up before
critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper for headlines of
significance.

"Ruined!" she murmured. Even her murmur must have reached Lew Wee, how
remote soever his isle of safety. "Worn one time and all ruined up!
That's what happens for trying to get something for nothing. You'd think
women would learn. You would if you didn't know a few. Hetty Daggett,
her that was Hetty Tipton, orders this by catalogue, No. 3456 or
something, from the mail-order house in Chicago. I was down in Red Gap
when it come. 'Isn't it simply wonderful what you can get for three
thirty-eight!' says she with gleaming eyes, laying this thing out before
me. 'I don't see how they can ever do it for the money.' She found out
the next day when she rode up here in it with me and Mr. Burchell
Daggett, her husband. Nothing but ruin! Seams all busted, sleazy cloth
wore through. But Hetty just looks it over cheerfully and says: 'Oh,
well, what can you expect for three thirty-eight?' Is that like a woman
or is it like something science has not yet discovered?

"That Hetty child is sure one woman. This skirt would never have held
together to ride back in, so she goes down as far as the narrow gauge in
the wagon with Buck Devine, wearing a charming afternoon frock of pale
blue charmeuse rather than get into a pair of my khakis and ride back
with her own lawful-wedded husband; yes, sir; married to him safe as
anything, but wouldn't forget her womanhood. Only once did she ever come
near it. I saved her then because she hadn't snared Mr. Burchell Daggett
yet, and of course a girl has to be a little careful. And she took my
counsels so much to heart she's been careful ever since. 'Why, I should
simply die of mortification if my dear mate were to witness me in
those,' says she when I'm telling her to take a chance for once and get
into these here riding pants of mine because it would be uncomfortable
going down in that wagon. 'But what is my comfort compared to dear
Burchell's peace of mind?' says she.

"Ain't we the goods, though, when we do once learn a thing? Of course
most of us don't have to learn stuff like this. Born in us. I shouldn't
wonder if they was something in the talk of this man Shaw or Shavian--I
see the name spelled both ways in the papers. I can't read his pieces
myself because he rasps me, being not only a smarty but a vegetarian. I
don't know. I might stand one or the other purebred, but the cross seems
to bring out the worst strain in both. I once got a line on his beliefs
and customs though--like it appears he don't believe anything ought to
be done for its own sake but only for some good purpose. It was one day
I got caught at a meeting of the Onward and Upward Club in Red Gap and
Mrs. Alonzo Price read a paper about his meaning. I hope she didn't
wrong him. I hope she was justified in all she said he really means in
his secret heart. No one ought to talk that way about any one if they
ain't got the goods on 'em. One thing I might have listened to with some
patience if the man et steaks and talked more like some one you'd care
to have in your own home. In fact, I listened to it anyway. Maybe he
took it from some book he read--about woman and her true nature.
According to Henrietta Templeton Price, as near as I could get her, this
Shaw or Shavian believes that women is merely a flock of men-hawks
circling above the herd till they see a nice fat little lamb of a man,
then one fell swoop and all is over but the screams of the victim dying
out horribly. They bear him off to their nest in a blasted pine and pick
the meat from his bones at leisure. Of course that ain't the way ladies
was spoken of in the Aunt Patty Little Helper Series I got out of the
Presbyterian Sabbath-school library back in Fredonia, New York, when I
was thirteen--and yet--and yet--as they say on the stage in these plays
of high or English life."

It sounded promising enough, and the dust had now settled so that I
could dimly make out the noble lines of my hostess. I begged for more.

"Well, go on--Mrs. Burchell Daggett once nearly forgot her womanhood.
Certainly, go on, if it's anything that would be told outside of a
smoking-car."

The lady grinned.

"Many of us has forgot our womanhood in the dear, dead past," she
confessed. "Me? Sure! Where's that photo album. Where did I put that
album anyway? That's the way in this house. Get things straightened up
once, you can't find a single one you want. Look where I put it now!"
She demolished an obelisk of books on the table, one she had lately
constructed with some pains, and brought the album that had been its
pedestal. "Get me there, do you?"

It was the photograph of a handsome young woman in the voluminous riding
skirt of years gone by, before the side-saddle became extinct. She held
a crop and wore an astoundingly plumed bonnet. Despite the offensive
disguise, one saw provocation for the course adopted by the late
Lysander John Pettengill at about that period.

"Very well--now get me here, after I'd been on the ranch only a month."
It was the same young woman in the not too foppish garb of a cowboy. In
wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, woolly chaps, quirt in hand, she
bestrode a horse that looked capable and daring.

"Yes, sir, I hadn't been here only a month when I forgot my womanhood
like that. Gee! How good it felt to get into 'em and banish that
sideshow tent of a skirt. I'd never known a free moment before and I
blessed Lysander John for putting me up to it. Then, proud as Punch,
what do I do but send one of these photos back to dear old Aunt
Waitstill, in Fredonia, thinking she would rejoice at the wild, free
life I was now leading in the Far West. And what do I get for it but a
tear-spotted letter of eighteen pages, with a side-kick from her pastor,
the Reverend Abner Hemingway, saying he wishes to indorse every word of
Sister Baxter's appeal to me--asking why do I parade myself shamelessly
in this garb of a fallen woman, and can nothing be said to recall me to
the true nobility that must still be in my nature but which I am
forgetting in these licentious habiliments, and so on! The picture had
been burned after giving the Reverend his own horrified flash of it, and
they would both pray daily that I might get up out of this degradation
and be once more a good, true woman that some pure little child would
not be ashamed to call the sacred name of mother.

"Such was Aunt Waitstill--what names them poor old girls had to stand
for! I had another aunt named Obedience, only she proved to be a regular
cinch-binder. Her name was never mentioned in the family after she slid
down a rainspout one night and eloped to marry a depraved scoundrel who
drove through there on a red wagon with tinware inside that he would
trade for old rags. I'm just telling you how times have changed in spite
of the best efforts of a sanctified ministry. I cried over that letter
at first. Then I showed it to Lysander John, who said 'Oh, hell!' being
a man of few words, so I felt better and went right on forgetting my
womanhood in that shameless garb of a so-and-so--though where aunty had
got her ideas of such I never could make out--and it got to be so much a
matter of course and I had so many things to think of besides my
womanhood that I plumb forgot the whole thing until this social upheaval
in Red Gap a few years ago.

"I got to tell you that the wild and lawless West, in all matters
relating to proper dress for ladies, is the most conservative and
hidebound section of our great land of the free and home of the
brave--if you can get by with it. Out here the women see by the Sunday
papers that it's being wore that way publicly in New York and no one
arrested for it, but they don't hardly believe it at that, and they
wouldn't show themselves in one, not if you begged them to on your
bended knees, and what is society coming to anyway? You might as well
dress like one of them barefooted dancers, only calling 'em barefooted
must be meant like sarcasm--and they'd die before they'd let a daughter
of theirs make a show of herself like that for odious beasts of men to
leer at, and so on--until a couple years later Mrs. Henrietta Templeton
Price gets a regular one and wears it down Main Street, and nothing
objectionable happens; so then they all hustle to get one--not quite so
extreme, of course, but after all, why not, since only the evil-minded
could criticise? Pretty soon they're all wearing it exactly like New
York did two years ago, with mebbe the limit raised a bit here and there
by some one who makes her own. But again they're saying that the latest
one New York is wearing is so bad that it must be confined to a certain
class of women, even if they do get taken from left to right at Asbury
Park and Newport and other colonies of wealth and fashion, because the
vilest dregs can go there if they have the price, which they often do.

"Red Gap is like that. With me out here on the ranch it didn't matter
what I wore because it was mostly only men that saw me; but I can well
remember the social upheaval when our smartest young matrons and
well-known society belles flung modesty to the chinook wind and took to
divided skirts for horseback riding. My, the brazen hussies! It ain't so
many years ago. Up to that time any female over the age of nine caught
riding a horse cross-saddle would have lost her character good and
quick. And these pioneers lost any of theirs that wasn't cemented good
and hard with proved respectability. I remember hearing Jeff Tuttle tell
what he'd do to any of his womenfolks that so far forgot the sacred
names of home and mother. It was startling enough, but Jeff somehow
never done it. And if he was to hear Addie or one of the girls talking
about a side-saddle to-day he'd think she was nutty or mebbe wanting one
for the state museum. So it goes with us. My hunch is that so it will
ever go.

"The years passed, and that thrill of viciousness at wearing divided
skirts in public got all rubbed off--that thrill that every last one of
us adores to feel if only it don't get her talked about--too much--by
evil-minded gossips. Then comes this here next upheaval over riding
pants for ladies--or them that set themselves up to be such. Of course
we'd long known that the things were worn in New York and even in such
modern Babylons as Spokane and Seattle; but no woman in Red Gap had ever
forgot she had a position to keep up, until summer before last, when we
saw just how low one of our sex could fall, right out on the public
street.

"She was the wife of a botanist from some Eastern college and him and
her rode a good bit and dressed just alike in khaki things. My, the
infamies that was intimated about that poor creature! She was bony and
had plainly seen forty, very severe-featured, with scraggly hair and a
sharp nose and spectacles, and looked as if she had never had a moment
of the most innocent pleasure in all her life; but them riding pants
fixed her good in the minds of our lady porch-knockers. And the men just
as bad, though they could hardly bear to look twice at her, she was that
discouraging to the eye; they agreed with their wives that she must be
one of that sort.

"But things seem to pile up all at once in our town. That very summer
the fashion magazines was handed round with pages turned down at the
more daring spots where ladies were shown in such things. It wasn't felt
that they were anything for the little ones to see. But still, after
all, wasn't it sensible, now really, when you come right down to it? and
as a matter of fact isn't a modest woman modest in anything?--it isn't
what she wears but how she conducts herself in public, or don't you
think so, Mrs. Ballard?--and you might as well be dead as out of style,
and would Lehman, the Square Tailor, be able to make up anything like
that one there?--but no, because how would he get your measure?--and
surely no modest woman could give him hers even if she did take it
herself--anyway, you'd be insulted by all the street rowdies as you rode
by, to say nothing of being ogled by men without a particle of fineness
in their natures--but there's always something to be said on both sides,
and it's time woman came into her own, anyway, if she is ever to be
anything but man's toy for his idle moments--still it would never do to
go to extremes in a narrow little town like this with every one just
looking for an excuse to talk--but it would be different if all the best
people got together and agreed to do it, only most of them would
probably back out at the last moment and that smarty on the _Recorder_
would try to be funny about it--now that one with the long coat doesn't
look so terrible, does it? or do you think so?--of course it's almost
the same as a skirt except when you climb on or something--a woman has
to think of those things--wouldn't Daisy Estelle look rather stunning in
that?--she has just the figure for it. Here's this No. 9872 with the
Norfolk jacket in this mail-order catalogue--do you think that looks too
theatrical, or don't you? Of course for some figures, but I've always
been able to wear--And so forth, for a month or so.

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