I hope you enjoy this little story as much as I do. It is a simple, old story from the 1920's. I wanted to share this with you for Mother's Day as it highlights what mother's do best: Magnify their womanly strengths, and bless their families in a way that only a mother can.
I don't remember the first time I read this short story. At the time, I was afraid to admit to anyone how deeply it touched me. In a world where misconstrued feminism reigns supreme, it is hard to acknowledge that the strongest of women's traits are uniquely feminine and nurturing. And yet, through this story, I saw how not only can woman's feminine and nurturing traits be an ultimate strength, they can also be traits that must be practiced and perhaps even learned. They don't always come naturally. They can be suppressed and squelched. I believe as we work on these traits, we begin to find what power lies within each woman. True, womanly power is at its strongest when fueled by love and a desire to please our Heavenly Father, not the world.
Happy Mother's Day!
When Queens Ride By
by Agnes Sligh Turnbull, 1926
Jennie Musgrave woke at the shrill rasp of
the alarm clock as she always woke—with the shuddering start and a heavy
realization that the brief respite of the light's oblivion was over. She had only time
to glance through the dull light at the cluttered, dusty room, before John's
voice was saying sleepily as he said every morning, "All right, let's go.
It doesn't seem as if we'd been in bed at all!"
Jennie dressed quickly in the clothes,
none too clean, that, exhausted, she had flung from her the night before. She
hurried down the back stairs, her coarse shoes clattering thickly upon the bare
boards. She kindled the fire in the range and then made a hasty pretense at washing
in the basin in the sink. John strode through the kitchen and on out to the
barn. There were six cows to be milked and the great cans of milk to be taken
to the station for the morning train.
Jennie put coffee and bacon on the stove,
and then, catching up a pail from the porch, went after John. A golden red disk
broke the misty blue of the morning above the cow pasture. A sweet, fragrant
breath blew from the orchard. But Jennie neither saw nor felt the beauty about
her.
She glanced at the sun and thought, It's
going to be a hot day. She glanced at the orchard, and her brows knit. There it
hung. All that fruit. Bushels of it going to waste. Maybe she could get time
that day to make some more apple butter. But the tomatoes wouldn't wait. She
must pick them and get them to town today, or that would be a dead loss. After
all her work, well, it would only be in a piece with everything else if it did
happen so. She and John had bad luck, and they might as well make up their
minds to it.
She finished her part of the milking and
hurried back again to the overcooked bacon and strong coffee. The children were
down, clamorous, dirty, always underfoot. Jim, the eldest, was in his first
term of school. She glanced at his spotted waist. He should have a clean one.
But she couldn't help it. She couldn't get the washing done last week, and when
she was to get a day for it this week she didn't know, with all the picking and
the trips to town to make!
Breakfast was hurried and unpalatable, a
sort of grudging concession to the demands of the body. Then John left in the
milk wagon for the station, and Jennie packed little Jim's lunch basket with
bread and apple butter and pie, left the two little children to their own
devices in the backyard, and started toward the barn. There was no time to do
anything in the house. The chickens and turkeys had to be attended to, and then
she must get to the tomato patch before the sun got too hot. Behind her was the
orchard with its rows and rows of laden apple trees. Maybe this afternoon— maybe
tomorrow morning. There were the potatoes, too, to be lifted. Too hard work for
a woman. But what were you going to do? Starve? John worked till dark in the
fields.
She pushed her hair back with a quick,
boyish sweep of her arm and went on scattering the grain to the fowls. She
remembered their eager plans when they were married, when they took over the
old farm—laden with its heavy mortgage—that had been John's father's.
John had been so straight of back then and
so jolly. Only seven years, yet now he was stooped a little, and his brows were
always drawn, as though to hide a look of ashamed failure. They had planned to
have a model farm someday: blooded stock, a tractor, a new barn. And then such
a home they were to make of the old stone house! Jennie's hopes had flared
higher even than John's. A
rug for the parlor, an overstuffed set
like the one in the mail—order catalogue, linoleum for the kitchen, electric
lights!
They were young and, oh, so strong! There
was nothing they could not do if they only worked hard enough.
But that great faith had dwindled as the
first year passed. John worked later and later in the evenings. Jennie took
more and more of the heavy tasks upon her own shoulders. She often thought with
some pride that no woman in the countryside ever helped her husband as she did.
Even with the haying and riding the reaper. Hard, coarsening work, but she was
glad to do it for John's sake.
The sad riddle of it all was that at the
end of each year they were no further on. The only difference from the year
before was another window shutter hanging from one hinge and another crippled wagon
in the barnyard which John never had time to mend. They puzzled over it in a
vague distress. And meanwhile life degenerated into a straining, hopeless struggle.
Sometimes lately John had
seemed a little listless, as though
nothing mattered. A little bitter when he spoke of Henry Davis.
Henry held the mortgage and had expected a
payment on the principle this year. He had come once and looked about with something
very like a sneer on his face. If he should decide someday to foreclose—that
would be the final blow. They never would get up after that. If John couldn't
hold the old farm, he could
never try to buy a new one. It would mean
being renters all their lives. Poor renters at that!
She went to the tomato field. It had been
her own idea to do some tracking along with the regular farm crops. But, like
everything else, it had failed of her expectations. As she put the scarlet
tomatoes, just a little overripe, into the basket, she glanced with a hard tightening
of her lips toward a break in the trees a half mile away where a dark,
listening bit of road caught the sun. Across its
polished surface twinkled an endless
procession of shining, swift—moving objects. The State Highway.
Jennie hated it. In the first place, it
was so tauntingly near and yet so hopelessly far from them. If it only ran by
their door, as it did past Henry Davis's for instance, it would solve the whole
problem of marketing the fruits and vegetables. Then they could set the baskets
on the lawn, and people could stop for them. But as it was, nobody all summer
long had paid the least attention to the sign John had put up at the end of the
lane. And no wonder. Why should travelers drive their cars over the stony
country byway, when a little farther along they would find the same fruit
spread temptingly for them at the very roadside?
But there was another reason she hated
that bit of sleek road showing between the trees. She hated it because it hurt
her with its suggestions of all that passed her by in that endless procession twinkling
in the sunshine. There they kept going, day after day, those happy, carefree
women, riding in handsome limousines or in gay little roadsters. Some in plainer
cars, too, but even those were, like the others, women who could have rest,
pleasure, comfort for the asking. They were whirled along hour by hour to new
pleasures, while she was weighted to the drudgery of the farm like one of the great
rocks in the pasture field.
And—most bitter thought of all—they had
pretty homes to go back to when the happy journey was over. That seemed to be
the strange and cruel law about homes. The finer they were, the easier it was
to leave them. Now with her—if she had the rug for the parlor and the stuffed
furniture and linoleum for the kitchen, she shouldn't mind anything so much
then; she had nothing, nothing but hard slaving and bad luck. And the highway
taunted her with it. Flung its impossible pleasures mockingly in her face as
she bent over the vines or dragged the heavy baskets along the rows.
The sun grew hotter. Jennie put more
strength into her task. She knew, at last, by the scorching heat overhead that
is was nearing noon. She must have a bit of lunch ready for John when he came
in. There wasn't time to prepare much. Just reheat the coffee and set down some
bread and pie.
She started towards the house, giving a
long yodeling call for the children as she went. They appeared from the
orchard, tumbled and torn from experiments with the wire fence. Her heart
smothered her at the sight of them. Among the other dreams that the years had crushed
out were those of little rosy boys and girls in clean suits and fresh ruffled
dresses. As it was, the children had just grown like
farm weeds.
This was the part of all the drudgery that
hurt most. That she had not time to care for her children, sew for them, teach
them things that other children knew. Sometimes it seemed as if she had no real
love for them at all. She was too terribly tired as a rule to have any feeling.
The only times she used energy to talk to them was when she had to reprove them
for some dangerous misdeed. That was all wrong. It seemed wicked; but how could
she help it? With the work draining the very life out of her, strong as she
was. John came in heavily, and they ate in silence except for the children's
chatter. John hardly looked up from his plate. He gulped down great drafts of the
warmed-over coffee and then pushed his chair back hurriedly.
"I'm goin' to try to finish the
harrowin' in the south field," he said. "I'm at the tomatoes,"
Jennie answered. "I've got them' most all picked and ready for
takin'."
That was all. Work was again upon them.
It was two o'clock by the sun, and Jennie
had loaded the last heavy basket of tomatoes on the milk wagon in which she
must drive to town, when she heard shrill voices sounding along the path. The children
were flying in excitement toward her.
"Mum! Mum! Mum!" they called as
they came panting up to her with big, surprised eyes. "Mum, there's a lady
up there. At the kitchen door. All dressed up. A pretty lady. She wants to see
you." Jennie gazed down at them disbelievingly. A lady, a pretty lady at her
kitchen door? All dressed up! What that could mean! Was it possible someone had
at last braved the stony lane to buy fruit? Maybe bushels of it!
"Did she come in a car?" Jennie
asked quickly. "No, she just walked in. She's awful pretty. She smiled at
us." Jennie's hopes dropped. Of course. She might have known. Some agent
likely, selling books. She followed the children wearily back along the path
and in at the rear door of the kitchen. Across from it another door opened into
the side yard. Here stood the stranger. The two women looked at each other
across the kitchen, across the table with the remains of two meals upon it, the
strewn chairs, the littered stove—across the whole scene of unlovely disorder.
They looked at each other in startled surprise, as inhabitants of Earth and Mars
might look if they were suddenly brought face-to-face. Jennie saw a woman in a
gray tweed coat that seemed to be part of her straight, slim body. A small gray
hat with a rose quill was drawn low over the brownish hair. Her blue eyes were
clear and smiling. She was beautiful! And yet she was not young. She was in her
forties, surely. But an aura of eager youth clung to her, a clean and
exquisite freshness.
The stranger in her turn looked across at
a young woman, haggard and weary. Her yellowish hair hung in straggling wisps.
Her eyes looked hard and hunted. Her cheeks were thin and sallow. Her calico
dress was shapeless and begrimed from her work. So they looked at each other
for one long, appraising second. Then the woman in gray smiled.
"How do you do? " she began.
"We ran our car into the shade of your lane to have our lunch and rest for
a while. And I walked on up to buy a few apples, if you have them."
Jennie stood staring at the stranger.
There was an unconscious hostility in her eyes. This was one of the women from
the highway.
One of those envied ones who passed
twinkling through the summer sunshine from pleasure to pleasure while Jennie
slaved on. But the pretty lady's smile was disarming. Jennie started toward a chair
and pulled off the old coat and apron that lay on it.
"Won't you sit down?" she said
politely. "I'll go and get the apples. I'll have to pick them off the
tree. Would you prefer rambos?"
"I don't know what they are, but they
sound delicious. You must choose them for me. But mayn't I come with you? I
should love to help pick them."
Jennie considered. She felt baffled by the
friendliness of the other woman's face and utterly unable to meet it. But she
did not know how to refuse.
"Why I s'pose so. If you can get
through the dirt."
She led the way over the back porch with
its crowded baskets and pails and coal buckets, along the unkept path toward
the orchard. She had never been so acutely conscious of the disorder about her.
Now a hot shame brought a lump to her throat. In her preoccupied haste before,
she had actually not noticed that tub of overturned milk cans and rubbish heap!
She saw it all now swiftly through the
other woman's eyes. And then that new
perspective was checked by a bitter defiance. Why should she care how things
looked to this woman? She would be gone, speeding down the highway in a few minutes
as though she had never been there.
She reached the orchard and began to drag
a long ladder from the
fence to the rambo tree.
The other woman cried out in distress.
"Oh, but you can't do that! You mustn't. It's too heavy for you, or even
for both of us. Please just let me pick a few from the ground."
Jennie looked in amazement at the
stranger's concern. It was so long since she had seen anything like it.
"Heavy?" she repeated.
"This ladder? I wish I didn't ever lift anything heavier than this. After
hoistin' bushel baskets of tomatoes onto a wagon, this feels light to me."
The stranger caught her arm. "But—but
do you think it's right? Why, that's a man's work."
Jennie's eyes blazed. Something furious
and long-pent broke out from within her. "Right! Who are you to be askin'
me whether I'm right or not?" What would have become of us if I didn't do
a man's work? It takes us both, slaving away, an' then we get nowhere. A person
like you don't know what work is! You don't know—"
Jennie's voice was the high shrill of
hysteria; but the stranger's low tones somehow broke through.
"Listen," she said soothingly. "Please listen to me. I'm sorry I
annoyed you by saying that, but now, since we are talking, why can't we sit
down here and rest a minute? It's so cool and lovely here under the trees, and
if you were to tell me all about it—because I'm only a stranger—perhaps it
would help. It does sometimes, you know. A little rest would—"
"Rest! Me sit down to rest, an' the
wagon loaded to go to town? It'll hurry me now to get back before dark."
And then something strange happened. The
other women put her cool, soft hand on Jennie's grimy arm. There was a
compelling tenderness in her eyes. "Just take the time you would have
spent picking apples. I would so much rather. And perhaps somehow I could help
you. I wish I could. Won't you tell me why you have to work so hard?"
Jennie sank down on the smooth green
grass. Her hunted, unwilling eyes had yielded to some power in the clear,
serene eyes of the stranger. A sort of exhaustion came over her. A trembling
reaction from the straining effort of weeks.
"There ain't much to tell," she
said half sullenly, "only that we ain't gettin' ahead. We're clean
discouraged, both of us. Henry Davis is talking about foreclosin' on us if we
don't pay some principle. The time of the mortgage is out this year, an' mebbe
he won't renew it. He's got plenty himself, but them's the hardest kind."
She paused; then her eyes flared. "An' it ain't that I haven't done my
part. Look at
me. I'm barely thirty, an' I might be
fifty. I'm so weather-beaten. That's the way I've worked!"
"And you think that has helped your
husband?"
"Helped him?" Jennie's voice was
sharp. "Why shouldn't it help him?"
The stranger was looking away through the
green stretches of orchard. She laced her slim hands together about her knees.
She spoke slowly. "Men are such queer things, husbands especially. Sometimes
we blunder when we are trying hardest to serve them. For instance, they want us
to be economical, and yet they want us in pretty clothes. They need our work,
and yet they want us to keep our youth and our beauty. And sometimes they don't
know themselves which they really want most. So we have to choose. That's what
makes it so hard".
She paused. Jennie was watching her with
dull curiosity as though she were speaking a foreign tongue.
Then the stranger went on: I had to choose
once, long ago; just after we were married, my husband decided to have his own
business, so he started a very tiny
one. He couldn't afford a helper, and he
wanted me to stay in the office while he did the outside selling. And I
refused, even though it hurt him. Oh, it was hard! But I knew how it would be
if I did as he wished. We would both have come back each night. Tired out, to a
dark, cheerless house and a picked-up dinner. And a year if that might have
taken something away from us—something precious. I
couldn't risk it, so I refused and stuck
to it.
"And then how I worked in my house—a
flat it was then. I had so little outside of our wedding gifts; but at least I
could make it a clean, shining, happy place. I tried to give our little dinners
the grace of a feast. And as the months went on, I knew I had done right. My
husband would come home dead-tired and discouraged, ready to give up the whole
thing. But after he had eaten and sat down in our bright little living room,
and I had read to him or told him all the funny things I could invent about my
day, I could see him change. By bedtime he had his courage back, and by morning
he was at last ready to go out and fight again. And at last he won, and he won
his success alone, as a man loves to do.
Still Jennie did not speak. She only
regarded her guest with a half-resentful understanding. The woman in gray
looked off again between the trees. Her voice was very sweet. A humorous little
smile played about her lips. "There was a queen once," she went on,
"who reigned in troublous days. And every time the country was on the
brink of war and the people ready to fly into a panic, she would put on her
showiest dress and take her court with her and go hunting. And when the people
would see her riding by, apparently so gay and happy, they were sure all was
well with the Government. So she tided over many a danger. And I've tried to be
like her.
"Whenever a big crisis comes in my husband's
business—and we've had several—or when he's discouraged, I put on my prettiest
dress and get the best dinner I know how or give a party! And somehow it seems
to work. That's the woman's part, you know. To play the queen—"
A faint honk-honk came from the lane. The
stranger started to her feet. "That's my husband. I must go. Please don't
bother about the apples. I'll just take these from under the tree. We only
wanted two or three, really. And give these to the children." She slipped
two coins into Jennie's hand.
Jennie had risen, too, and was trying from
a confusion of startled thoughts to select one for speech. Instead she only
answered the other woman's bright good-bye with a stammering repetition and a
broken apology about the apples.
She watched the stranger's erect, lithe
figure hurrying away across the path that led directly to the lane. Then she
turned her back to the house, wondering dazedly if she had only dreamed that
the other woman had been there. But no, there were emotions rising hotly within
her that were new. They had had no place an hour before. They had risen at the
words of the stranger and at the sight of her smooth, soft hair, the fresh
color in her cheeks, the happy shine of her eyes.
A great wave of longing swept over Jennie,
a desire that was lost in choking despair. It was as though she had heard a
strain of music for which she had waited all her life and then felt it swept
away into silence before she had grasped its beauty. For a few brief minutes she,
Jennie Musgrave, had sat beside one of the women of the highway and caught a
breath of her life—that life which forever
twinkled in the past in bright procession,
like the happenings of a fairy tale. Then she was gone, and Jennie was left as
she had been, bound to the soil like one of the rocks of the field. The
bitterness that stormed her heart now was different from the old dull
disheartenment. For it was coupled with new knowledge. The words of the
stranger seemed more vivid to her than when she had sat listening in the
orchard. But they came back to her with the pain of agony.
"All very well for her to talk so
smooth to me about man's work and woman's work! An' what she did for her
husband's big success. Easy enough for her to sit talking about queens! What
would she do if she was here on this farm like me? What would a woman like her do?"
Jennie had reached the kitchen door and
stood there looking at the hopeless melee about her. Her words sounded strange
and hollow in the silence of the house. "Easy for her!" she burst
out. She never had the work pilin' up over her like I have. She never felt it
at her throat like a wolf, the same as John an' me does. Talk about choosin'! I
haven't got no choice. I just got to keep goin'—just keep goin', like I always
have—"
She stopped suddenly. There in the middle
of the kitchen floor, where the other woman had passed over, lay a tiny square
of white. Jennie crossed to it quickly and picked it up. A faint delicious fragrance
like the dream of a flower came from it. Jennie inhaled it eagerly. It was not
like any odor she had ever known. It made her think of sweet, strange things.
Things she had never thought about before. Of gardens in the early summer dusk,
of wide fair rooms with the moonlight shining in them. It made her somehow
think with vague wistfulness of all that.
She looked carefully at the tiny square.
The handkerchief was of fine, fairy like smoothness. In the corner a dainty
blue butterfly spread his wings. Jennie drew in another long breath. The
fragrance filled her senses again. Her first greedy draft had not exhausted it.
It would stay for a while, at least.
She laid the bit of white down cautiously
on the edge of the table and went to the sink, where she washed her hands
carefully. Then she returned and picked up the handkerchief again with
something like reverence. She sat down, still holding it, staring at it. This
bit of linen was to her an articulated voice. She understood its language. It
spoke to her of white, freshly washed clothes blowing in the sunshine, of an
iron moving smoothly, leisurely, to the accompaniment of a song over snowy
folds; it spoke to her of quiet, orderly rooms and ticking clocks and a mending
basket under the evening lamp; it spoke to her of all the peaceful routine of a
well managed household, the kind she had once dreamed of having.
But more than this, the exquisite
daintiness of it, the sweet, alluring perfume spoke to her of something else
which her heart understood, even though her speech could have found no words
for it. She could feel gropingly the delicacy, the grace, the beauty that made
up the other woman's life in all its relations.
She, Jennie, had none of that. Everything
about their lives, hers and John's, was coarsened, soiled somehow by the
dragging, endless labor or the days.
Jennie leaned forward, her arms stretched
tautly before her upon her knees, her hands clasped tightly over the fragrant
bit of white.
Suppose she were to try doing as the
stranger had said. Suppose that she spent her time on the house and let the
outside work go. What then? What would John say? Would they be much farther behind
than they were now? Could they be? And suppose, by some strange chance, the
other woman had been right! That a man could be helped more by doing of these
other things she had neglected?
She sat very still, distressed, uncertain.
Out in the barnyard waited the wagon of tomatoes, overripe now for market. No,
she could do nothing today, at least, but go on as usual.
Then her hands opened a little; the
perfume within them came up to her, bringing again that thrill of sweet,
indescribable things. She started up, half-terrified at her own resolve.
"I'm goin' to try it now. Mebbe I'm crazy, but I'm goin' to do it
anyhow!"
It was a long time since Jennie had
performed such a meticulous toilet. It was years since she had brushed her
hair. A hasty combing had been its best treatment. She put on her one clean
dress, the dark voile reserved for trips to town. She even changed from her shapeless,
heavy shoes to her best ones. Then, as she looked at herself in the dusty
mirror, she saw that she was changed. Something, at least, of the hard
haggardness was gone from her face, and her hair framed it with smooth
softness. Tomorrow she would wash it. It used to be almost yellow.
She went to the kitchen. With something of
the burning zeal of a fanatic, she attacked the confusion before her. By half
past four the room was clean: the floor swept, the stove shining, dishes and
pans washed and put in their places. From the tumbled depths of a drawer Jennie
had extracted a white tablecloth that had been bought in the early days, for
company only. With a spirit of daring recklessness she spread it on the table.
She polished the chimney of the big oil lamp and then set the fixture, clean
and shining, in the center of the white cloth.
Now the supper! And she must hurry. She
planned to have it at six o' clock and ring the big bell for John fifteen
minutes before, as she used to just after they were married. She decided upon
fried ham and browned potatoes and applesauce with hot biscuits. She hadn't
made them for so long, but her fingers
fell into their old deftness. Why, cooking
was just play if you had time to do it right! Then she thought of the tomatoes
and gave a little shudder. She thought of the long hours of backbreaking work she
had put into them and called herself a little fool to have been swayed by the
words of a stranger and the scent of a handkerchief, to neglect her rightful
work and bring more loss upon John and
herself. But she went on, making the
biscuits, turning the ham, setting the table.
It was half past five; the first pan of
flaky brown mounds had been withdrawn from the oven, the children's faces and
hands had been washed and their excited questions satisfied, when the sound of
a car came from the bend. Jennie knew that car. It belonged to Henry Davis. He
could be coming for only one thing.
The blow they had dreaded, fending off by
blind disbelief in the ultimate disaster, was about to fall. Henry was coming
to tell them he was going to foreclose. It would almost kill John. This was his
father's old farm. John had taken it over, mortgage and all, so hopefully, so
sure he could succeed where his father had failed. If he had to leave now there
would be a double disgrace to bear. And where could they go? Farms weren't so
plentiful.
Henry had driven up to the side gate. He fumbled
with some papers in his inner pocket as he started up the walk. A wild terror
filled Jennie's heart. She wanted desperately to avoid meeting Henry Davis's
keen, hard face, to flee somewhere, anywhere before she heard the words that
doomed them.
Then as she stood shaken, wondering how
she could live through what the next hours would bring, she saw in a flash the
beautiful stranger as she had sat in the orchard, looking off between the trees
and smiling to herself. "There was once a queen." Jennie heard the
words again distinctly just as Henry Davis's steps sounded sharply nearer on
the walk outside. There was only a confused picture of a queen wearing the
stranger's lovely, highbred face, riding gaily to the hunt through forests and
towns while her kingdom was tottering. Riding gallantly on, in spite of her
fears.
Jennie's heart was pounding and her hands
were suddenly cold. But something unreal and yet irresistible was sweeping her
with it. "There was once a queen."
She opened the screen door before Henry
Davis had time to knock. She extended her hand cordially. She was smiling.
"Well, how d' you do, Mr. Davis. Come right in. I'm real glad to see you.
Been quite a while since you was over."
Henry looked surprised and very much
embarrassed. "Why, no, now, I won't go in. I just stopped to see John on a
little matter of business. I'll just—"
"You'll just come right in. John will
be in from milkin' in a few minutes an' you can talk while you eat, both of
you. I've supper just ready. Now step right in, Mr. Davis!"
As Jennie moved aside, a warm, fragrant
breath of fried ham and biscuits seemed to waft itself to Henry Davis's
nostrils. There was a visible softening of his features. "Why, no, I
didn't reckon on anything like this. I 'lowed I'd just speak to John and then
be gettin' on."
"They'll see you at home when you get
there," Jennie put in quickly. "You never tasted my hot biscuits with
butter an' quince honey, or you wouldn't take so much coachin'!"
Henry Davis came in and sat in the big,
clean, warm kitchen. His eyes took in every detail of the orderly room: the
clean cloth, the shining lamp, the neat sink, the glowing stove. Jennie saw him
relax comfortably in his chair. Then above the aromas of the food about her,
she detected the strange sweetness of the bit of white linen she had tucked
away in the bosom of her dress. It rose to her as a
haunting sense of her power as a woman.
She smiled at Henry Davis. Smiled as she
would never have thought of doing a day ago. Then she would have spoken to him
with a drawn face full of subservient fear. Now, though the fear clutched her
heart, her lips smiled sweetly, moved by that unreality that seemed to possess
her. "There was once a queen."
"An' how are things goin' with you,
Mr. Davis?" she asked with a blithe upward reflection.
Henry Davis was very human. He had never
noticed before that Jennie's hair was so thick and pretty and that she had such
pleasant ways. Neither had he dreamed that she was such a good cook as the
sight and smell of the supper things would indicate. He was very comfortable
there in the big sweet-smelling kitchen.
He smiled back. It was an interesting
experiment on Henry's part, for his smiles were rare. "Oh, so-so. How are
they with you?" Jennie had been taught to speak the truth; but at this
moment there dawned in her mind a vague understanding that the high loyalties of
life are, after all, relative and not absolute.
She smiled again as she skillfully flipped
a great slice of golden brown ham over in the frying pan. "Why, just fine,
Mr. Davis. We're gettin' on just fine, John an' me. It's been hard sleddin' but
I sort of think the worst is over. I think we're goin' to come out way ahead now.
We'll just be proud to pay off that mortgage so fast, come another year, that
you'll be surprised!"
It was said. Jennie marveled that the
words had not choked her, had
not somehow smitten her dead as she spoke
them. But their effect
on Henry Davis was amazingly good.
"That so?" he asked in surprise.
"Well now, that's fine. I always
wanted to see John make a success of the
old place, but somehow—
well, you know it didn't look as if—that
is, there's been some talk
around that maybe John wasn't just gettin'
along any too—you
know. A man has to sort of watch his
investments. Well, now, I'm
glad things are pickin' up a little."
Jennie felt as though a tight hand at her
throat had relaxed. She spoke brightly of the fall weather and the crops as she
finished setting the dishes on the table and rang the big bell for John. There was
delicate work yet to be done when he came in.
Little Jim had to be sent to hasten him
before he finally appeared. He was a big man, John Musgrave, big and slow
moving and serious. He had known nothing all his life but hard physical toil. Heaviness
had pitted his great body against all the adverse forces of nature. There was a
time when he had felt that strength such as his was all any man needed to bring
him fortune. Now he was not so sure. The brightness of that faith was dimmed by
experience.
John came to the kitchen door with his
eyebrows drawn. Little Jim had told Jim that Henry Davis was there. He came
into the room as an accused man faces the jury of his peers, faces the men who,
though the same flesh and blood as he, are yet somehow curiously in a position
to save or to destroy him.
John came in, and then he stopped, staring
blankly at the scene before him. At Jennie moving about the bright table,
chatting happily with Henry Davis! At Henry himself, his sharp features softened
by an air of great satisfaction. At the sixth plate on the white cloth. Henry
staying for supper!
But the silent deeps of John's nature
served him well. He made no comment. Merely shook hands with Henry Davis and
then washed his face at the sink.
Jennie arranged the savory dishes, and they
sat down to supper. It was an entirely new experience to John to sit at the
head of his own table and serve a generously heaped plate to Henry Davis. It
sent through him a sharp thrill of ufficiency,
of equality. He realized that before he had been cringing in his soul at the
very sight of this
man.
Henry consumed eight biscuits richly
covered with quince honey, along with the heavier part of his dinner. Jennie
counted them. She recalled hearing that the Davises did not set a very
bountiful table; it was common talk that Mrs. Davis was even more
"miserly" than her husband. But, however that was, Henry now seemed
to grow more and more genial and expansive as he ate. So did John. By the time
the pie was set before them, they were laughing over a joke Henry had heard at
Grange meeting.
Jennie was bright, watchful, careful. If
the talk lagged, she made a quick remark. She moved softly between table and
stove, refilling the dishes. She saw to it that a hot biscuit was at Henry
Davis's elbow just when he was ready for it. All the while there was rising within
her a strong zest for life that she would have deemed impossible only that
morning. This meal, at least, was a perfect success, and achievements of any
sort whatever had been few. Henry Davis left soon after supper. He brought the
conversation around awkwardly to his errand as they rose from the table. Jennie
was ready.
"I told him, John, that the worst was
over now, an' we're getting' on
fine!" She laughed." I told him
we'd be swampin' him pretty soon with our payments. Ain't that right
John?"
John's mind was not analytical. At that
moment he was comfortable. He has been host at a delicious supper with his
ancient adversary, whose sharp face arvelously
softened. Jennie's eyes were shining with a new and amazing confidence. It was
a natural moment for unreasoning optimism.
"Why that's right, Mr. Davis. I
believe we can start clearin' this off now pretty soon. If you could just see
your way clear to renew the note mebbe. . . ."
It was done. The papers were back in
Davis's pocket. They had bid him a cordial good-bye from the door.
"Next time you come, I will have
biscuits for you Mr. Davis." Jennie had called daringly after him.
"Now you don't forget that Mrs.
Musgrave! They certainly ain't hard to eat."
He was gone. Jennie cleared the table and
set the shining lamp in the center of the oilcloth covering. She began to wash
the dishes. John was fumbling through the papers on a hanging shelf. He finally
sat down with and old tablet and pencil. He spoke meditatively. "I believe
I'll do a little figurin' since I've got time tonight. It just struck me that
mebbe if I used my head a little more I'd get on faster." "Well now,
you might," said Jennie. It would not be John's way to comment just yet on
their sudden deliverance. She polished two big Rambo apples and placed them on
a saucer beside him.
He looked pleased. "Now that's what I
like." He grinned. Then making a clumsy clutch at her arm, he added,
"Say, you look sort of pretty tonight."
Jennie made a brisk coquettish business of
freeing herself. "Go along with you!" she returned, smiling and
started in again upon the dishes. But a hot wave of color had swept up in her
shallow cheeks. John had looked more grateful over her setting those two apples
beside him now, than he had the day last fall when she lifted all the potatoes
herself! Men were strange, as the woman in gray had said.
Maybe even John had been needing something
else more than he needed the hard, backbreaking work she had been doing.
She tidied up the kitchen and put the
children to bed. It seemed strange to be through now, ready to sit down. All
summer they had worked outdoors till bedtime. Last night she had been slaving
over apple butter until she stopped, exhausted, and John had been working in
the barn with the lantern. Tonight seemed so peaceful, so quiet. John still sat
at the table, figuring while he munched his apples. His brows were not drawn
now. There was a new, purposeful light upon his face.
Jennie walked to the doorway and stood
looking off through the darkness and through the break in the trees at the end
of the lane. Bright and golden lights kept glittering across it, breaking dimly
through the woods, flashing out strongly for a moment, then disappearing behind
the hill. Those were the lights of the happy cars that never stopped in their
swift search for far and magic places. Those were the lights of the highway
which she had hated. But she did not hate it now. For today it had come to her
at last and left with her some of its mysterious pleasure.
Jennie wished, as she stood there, that
she could somehow tell the beautiful stranger in the gray coat that her words
had been true, that she, Jennie, insofar as she was able, was to be like her
and fulfill her woman's part.
For while she was not figuring as John was
doing, yet her mind had been planning, sketching in details, strengthening
itself against the chains of old habits, resolving on new ones; seeing with
sudden clearness where they had been blundered, where they had made mistakes
that farsighted, orderly management could have avoided.
But how could John have sat down to figure
in comfort before, in the kind of kitchen she had been keeping?
Jennie bit her lip. Even if some of the
tomatoes spoiled, if all of them spoiled, there would be a snowy washing on her
line tomorrow; there would be ironing the next day in her clean kitchen. She
could sing as she worked. She used to when she was a girl.
Even if the apples rotted on the trees,
there were certain things she knew now that she must do, regardless of what
John might say. It would pay better in the end, for she had read the real needs
of his soul from his eyes that evening. Yes, wives had to choose for their
husbands sometimes.
A thin haunting breath of sweetness rose from
the bosom of her dress where the scrap of white linen lay. Jennie smiled into
the dark. And tomorrow she would take time to wash her hair. It used to be
yellow—and she wished she could see the stranger once more, just long enough to
tell her she understood.
As matter of fact, at that very moment,
many miles along the sleek highway, a woman in a gray coat, with a soft gray
hat and a rose quill, leaned suddenly close to her husband as he shot the
highpowered car through the night. Suddenly he glanced down at her and
slackened the speed.
"Tired?" he asked. "You
haven't spoken for miles. Shall we stop at this next town?"
The woman shook her head. "I'm all
right, and I love to drive at night. It's only—you know—that poor woman at the
farm. I can't get over her wretched face and house and everything. It—it was
hopeless!"
The man smiled down at her tenderly.
"Well, I'm sorry, too, if it was all as bad as your description; but you
mustn't worry. Good gracious, darling, you're not weeping over it, I
hope!"
"No, truly, just a few little tears.
I know it's silly, but I did so want to help her, and I know now that what I
said must have sounded perfectly insane. She wouldn't know what I was talking
about. She just looked up with that blank, tired face. And it all seemed so
impossible. No, I'm not going to cry. Of course I'm not—but—lend me your
handkerchief, will you dear? I've lost mine somehow!"
This takes less than 10 minutes (That includes the time it takes to gather all of the ingredients. Honestly, probably less time than that.) and it is TRULY the BEST homemade play dough recipe.
