Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

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




"'A scrap,' I says to myself, 'and they've only half finished. She's
threatened to quit and he, the cowardly dog, has dared her to.' Plain
enough. The waiter knew it soon as I did when he come to take their
order. Wouldn't speak to each other. Talked through him; fought it out
to something different for each one. Couldn't even agree on the same
kind of cocktail. Both slamming the waiter--before they fought the order
to a finish each had wanted to call the head waiter, only the other one
stopped it.

"So I rubbered awhile, trying to figure out why such folks want to
finish up their fights in a restaurant, and then I forgot 'em, looking
at some other persons that come in. Then the orchestra started this song
and I seen a lady was getting up in front to sing it. I admit the piece
got me. It got me good. Really, ain't it the gooey mess of heart-throbs
when you come right down to it? This lady singer was a good-looking
sad-faced contralto in a low-cut black dress--and how she did get the
tears out of them low notes! Oh, I quit looking at people while her
chest was oozing out that music. And it got others, too. I noticed lots
of 'em had stopped eating when I looked round, and there was so much
clapping she had to get up and do it all over again. And what you think?
In the middle of the second time I look over to these fighters, and
darned if they ain't holding hands across the table; and more, she's got
a kind of pitiful, crying smile on and he's crying right out--crying
into his cold asparagus, plain as day.

"What more would you want to know about the powers of this here piece of
music? They both spoke like human beings to the scared waiter when he
come back, and the lad left a five-spot on the tray when he paid his
check. Some song, yes?

"And all this flashed back on me when Nettie and I stood there watching
this cute little banjo. So I says to myself, 'Here, my morbid vestal,
is where I put you sane; here's where I hurl an asphyxiating bomb into
the trenches of the New Dawn.' Out loud I only says, 'Let's go in and
see if Wilbur has got some new records.'

"'Wilbur?' says she, and we went in. Nettie had not met Wilbur.

"I may as well tell you here and now that C. Wilbur Todd is a shrimp.
Shrimp I have said and shrimp I always will say. He talks real brightly
in his way--he will speak words like an actor or something--but for
brains! Say, he always reminds me of the dumb friend of the great
detective in the magazine stories, the one that goes along to the scene
of the crime to ask silly questions and make fool guesses about the
guilty one, and never even suspects who done the murder, till the
detective tells on the last page when they're all together in the
library.

"Sure, that's Wilbur. It would be an ideal position for him. Instead of
which he runs this here music store, sells these jitney pianos and
phonographs and truck like that. And serious! Honestly, if you seen him
coming down the street you'd say, 'There comes one of these here
musicians.' Wears long hair and a low collar and a flowing necktie and
talks about his technique. Yes, sir, about the technique of working a
machinery piano. Gives free recitals in the store every second Saturday
afternoon, and to see him set down and pump with his feet, and push
levers and pull handles, weaving himself back and forth, tossing his
long, silken locks back and looking dreamily off into the distance,
you'd think he was a Paderewski. As a matter of fact, I've seen
Paderewski play and he don't make a tenth of the fuss Wilbur does. And
after this recital I was at one Saturday he comes up to some of us
ladies, mopping his pale brow, and he says, 'It does take it out of one!
I'm always a nervous wreck after these little affairs of mine.' Would
that get you, or would it not?

"So we go in the store and Wilbur looks up from a table he's setting at
in the back end.

"'You find me studying some new manuscripts,' he says, pushing back the
raven locks from his brow. Say, it was a weary gesture he done it
with--sort of languid and world-weary. And what you reckon he meant by
studying manuscripts? Why, he had one of these rolls of paper with the
music punched into it in holes, and he was studying that line that tells
you when to play hard or soft and all like that. Honest, that was it!

"'I always study these manuscripts of the masters conscientiously before
I play them,' says he.

"Such is Wilbur. Such he will ever be. So I introduced him to Nettie and
asked if he had this here song on a phonograph record. He had. He had it
on two records. 'One by a barytone gentleman, and one by a
mezzo-soprano,' says Wilbur. I set myself back for both. He also had it
with variations on one of these punched rolls. He played that for us. It
took him three minutes to get set right at the piano and to dust his
fingers with a white silk handkerchief which he wore up his sleeve. And
he played with great expression and agony and bending exercises, ever
and anon tossing back his rebellious locks and fixing us with a look of
pained ecstasy. Of course it sounded better than the banjo, but you got
to have the voice with that song if you're meaning to do any crooked
work. Nettie was much taken with it even so, and Wilbur played it
another way. What he said was that it was another school of
interpretation. It seemed to have its points with him, though he
favoured the first school, he said, because of a certain almost rugged
fidelity. He said the other school was marked by a tendency to idealism,
and he pulled some of the handles to show how it was done. I'm merely
telling you how Wilbur talked.

"Nettie listened very serious. There was a new look in her eyes. 'That
song has got to her even on a machinery piano,' I says, 'but wait till
we get the voice, with she and Chester out in the mischievous
moonlight.' Wasn't I the wily old hound! Nettie sort of lingered to hear
Wilbur, who was going good by this time. 'One must be the soul behind
the wood and wire,' he says; 'one rather feels just that, or one remains
merely a brutal mechanic.'

"'I understand,' says Nettie. 'How you must have studied!'

"'Oh, studied!' says Wilbur, and tossed his mane back and laughed in a
lofty and suffering manner. Studied! He'd gone one year to a business
college in Seattle after he got out of high school!

"'I understand,' says Nettie, looking all reverent and buffaloed.

"'It is the price one must pay for technique,' says Wilbur. 'And to-day
you found me in the mood. I am not always in the mood.'

"'I understand,' says Nettie.

"I'm just giving you an idea, understand. Then Wilbur says, 'I will
bring these records up this evening if I may. The mezzo-soprano requires
a radically different adjustment from the barytone.' 'My God!' thinks I,
'has he got technique on the phonograph, too!' But I says he must come
by all means, thinking he could tend the machine while Nettie and
Chester is out on the porch getting wise to each other.

"'There's another teep for you,' I says to Nettie when we got out of the
place. 'He certainly is marked by tendencies,' I says. I meant it for a
nasty slam at Wilbur's painful deficiencies as a human being, but she
took it as serious as Wilbur took himself--which is some!

"'Ah, yes, the artist teep,' says she,'the most complex, the most
baffling of all.'

"That was a kind of a sickish jolt to me--the idea that something as low
in the animal kingdom as Wilbur could baffle anyone--but I thinks,
'Shucks! Wait till he lines up alongside of a regular human man like
Chet Timmins!'

"I had Chet up to supper again. He still choked on words of one
syllable if Nettie so much as glanced at him, and turned all sorts of
painful colours like a cheap rug. But I keep thinking the piece will fix
that all right.

"At eight o'clock Wilbur sifted in with his records and something else
flat and thin, done up in paper that I didn't notice much at the time.
My dear heart, how serious he was! As serious as--well, I chanced to be
present at the house of mourning when the barber come to shave old Judge
Armstead after he'd passed away--you know what I mean--kind of like him
Wilbur was, talking subdued and cat-footing round very solemn and
professional. I thought he'd never get that machine going. He cleaned
it, and he oiled it, and he had great trouble picking out the right
fibre needle, holding six or eight of 'em up to the light, doing secret
things to the machine's inwards, looking at us sharp as if we oughtn't
to be talking even then, and when she did move off I'm darned if he
didn't hang in a strained manner over that box, like he was the one that
was doing it all and it wouldn't get the notes right if he took his
attention off.

"It was a first-class record, I'll say that. It was the male
barytone--one of them pleading voices that get all into you. It wasn't
half over before I seen Nettie was strongly moved, as they say, only she
was staring at Wilbur, who by now was leading the orchestra with one
graceful arm and looking absorbed and sodden, like he done it
unconsciously. Chester just set there with his mouth open, like
something you see at one of these here aquariums.

"We moved round some when it was over, while Wilbur was picking out just
the right needle for the other record, and so I managed to cut that lump
of a Chester out of the bunch and hold him on the porch till I got
Nettie out, too. Then I said 'Sh-h-h!' so they wouldn't move when Wilbur
let the mezzo-soprano start. And they had to stay out there in the
golden moonlight with love's young dream and everything. The lady singer
was good, too. No use in talking, that song must have done a lot of
heart work right among our very best families. It had me going again so
I plumb forgot my couple outside. I even forgot Wilbur, standing by the
box showing the lady how to sing.

"It come to the last--you know how it ends--'To kiss the cross,
sweetheart, to kiss the cross!' There was a rich and silent moment and I
says, 'If that Chet Timmins hasn't shown himself to be a regular male
teep by this time--' And here come Chet's voice, choking as usual, 'Yes,
paw switched to Durhams and Herefords over ten years ago--you see
Holsteins was too light; they don't carry the meat--' Honest! I'm
telling you what I heard. And yet when they come in I could see that
Chester had had tears in his eyes from that song, so still I didn't give
in, especially as Nettie herself looked very exalted, like she wasn't at
that minute giving two whoops in the bad place for the New Dawn.

[Illustration: "CHESTER JUST SET THERE WITH HIS MOUTH OPEN, LIKE
SOMETHING YOU SEE AT ONE OF THESE HERE AQUARIUMS"]

"Nettie made for Wilbur, who was pushing back his hair with a weak but
graceful sweep of the arm--it had got down before his face like a
portiere--and I took Chet into a corner and tried to get some of the
just wrath of God into his heart; but, my lands! You'd have said he
didn't know there was such a thing as a girl in the whole Kulanche
Valley. He didn't seem to hear me. He talked other matters.

"'Paw thinks,' he says, 'that he might manage to take them hundred and
fifty bull calves off your hands.' 'Oh, indeed!' I says. 'And does he
think of buying 'em--as is often done in the cattle business--or is he
merely aiming to do me a favour?' I was that mad at the poor worm, but
he never knew. 'Why, now, paw says "You tell Maw Pettengill I might be
willing to take 'em off her hands at fifty dollars a head,"' he says. 'I
should think he might be,' I says, 'but they ain't bothering my hands
the least little mite. I like to have 'em on my hands at anything less
than sixty a head,' I says. 'Your pa,' I went on, 'is the man that
started this here safety-first cry. Others may claim the honour, but it
belongs solely to him.' 'He never said anything about that,' says poor
Chester. 'He just said you was going to be short of range this summer.'
'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 nobly. '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 noble
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.

"'Hush!' 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-class 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 bass 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 Chink 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 glasses 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-glass 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 hells, and
no wonder! Decent, God-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 shirtwaists 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 passage 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
bass--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
shifted 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
scraping, 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-fashioned, 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.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.