At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern

“It’s not at all likely,” answered Dorothy, biting her lip, “that such a thing will happen.” She was swayed by two contradictory impulses – one to scream with laughter, the other to throw something at Mrs. Smithers.

“’E’s been at peace now six months come Tuesday,” continued Mrs. Smithers, “and on account of ’is ’avin’ broke the tea set, I don’t feel no call to wear mourning for ’im more ’n a year, though folks thinks as ’ow it brands me as ’eartless for takin’ it off inside of two. Sakes alive, wot’s that?” she cried, drawing her sable skirts more closely about her as a dark shadow darted across the kitchen.

“It’s only the cat,” answered Dorothy, reassuringly. “Come here, Claudius.”

Mrs. Smithers repressed an exclamation of horror as Claudius, purring pleasantly, came out into the sunlight, brandishing his plumed tail, and sat down on the edge of Dorothy’s skirt, blinking his green eyes at the intruder.

“’E’s the very cat,” said Mrs. Smithers, hoarsely, “wot your uncle killed the week afore ’e died!”

“Before who died?” asked Dorothy, a chill creeping into her blood.

“Your uncle,” whispered Mrs. Smithers, her eyes still fixed upon Claudius Tiberius. “’E killed that very cat, ’e did, ’cause ’e couldn’t never abide ’im, and now ’e’s come back!”

“Nonsense!” cried Dorothy, trying to be severe. “If he killed the cat, it couldn’t come back – you must know that.”

“I don’t know w’y not, Miss. Anyhow, ’e killed the cat, that’s wot ’e did, and I saw ’is dead body, and even buried ’im, on account of your uncle not bein’ able to abide cats, and ’ere ’e is. Somebody ’s dug ’im up, and ’e ’s come to life again, thinkin’ to ’aunt your uncle, and your uncle ’as follered ’im, that’s wot ’e ’as, and there bein’ nobody ’ere to ’aunt but us, ’e’s a ’auntin’ us and a-doin’ it ’ard.”

“Mrs. Smithers,” said Dorothy, rising, “I desire to hear no more of this nonsense. The cat happens to be somewhat similar to the dead one, that’s all.”

“Begging your parding, Miss, for askin’, but did you bring that there cat with you from the city?”

Affecting not to hear, Dorothy went out, followed by Claudius Tiberius, who appeared anything but ghostly.

“I knowed it,” muttered Mrs. Smithers, gloomily, to herself. “’E was ’ere w’en ’er come, and ’e’s the same cat. ’E’s come back to ’aunt us, that’s wot ’e ’as!”

“Harlan,” said Dorothy, half-way between smiles and tears, “she’s come.”

Harlan dropped his saw and took up his hammer. “Who’s come?” he asked. “From your tone, it might be Mrs. Satan, or somebody else from the infernal regions.”

“You’re not far out of the way,” rejoined Dorothy. “It’s Sa – Mrs. Smithers.”

“Oh, our maid of all work?”

“I don’t know what she’s made of,” giggled Dorothy, hysterically. “She looks like a tombstone dressed in deep mourning, and carries with her the atmosphere of a graveyard. We have to call her ‘Mrs. Smithers,’ if we don’t want her to call us by our first names, and she has two dollars a week. She says Claudius is a cat that uncle killed the week before he died, and she thinks you hit me and gave me this bruise on my cheek.”

“The old lizard,” said Harlan, indignantly. “She sha’n’t stay!”

“Now don’t be cross,” interrupted Dorothy. “It’s all in the family, for your uncle hit me, as you well know. Besides, we can’t expect all the virtues for two dollars a week and I’m tired almost to death from trying to do the housework in this big house and take care of the chickens, too. We’ll get on with her as best we can until we see a chance to do better.”

“Wise little woman,” responded Harlan, admiringly. “Can she milk the cow?”

“I don’t know – I’ll go in and ask her.”

“Excuse me, Miss,” began Mrs. Smithers, before Dorothy had a chance to speak, “but am I to ’ave my old rooms?”

“Which rooms were they?”

“These ’ere, back of the kitchen. My own settin’ room and bedroom and kitchen and pantry and my own private door outside. Your uncle was allers a great hand for bein’ private and insistin’ on other folks keepin’ private, that ’s wot ’e was, but God rest ’is soul, it didn’t do the poor old gent much good.”

“Certainly,” said Dorothy, “take your old rooms. And can you milk a cow?”

Mrs. Smithers sighed. “I ain’t never ’ad it put on me, Miss,” she said, with the air of a martyr trying to make himself comfortable up against the stake, “not as a regler thing, I ain’t, but wotever I’m asked to do in the line of duty whiles I’m dwellin’ in this sufferin’ and dyin’ world, I aims to do the best wot I can, w’ether it’s milkin’ a cow, drownin’ kittens, or buryin’ a cat wot can’t stay buried.”

“We have breakfast about half-past seven,” went on Dorothy, quickly; “luncheon at noon and dinner at six.”

“Wot at six?” demanded Mrs. Smithers, pricking up her ears.

“Dinner! Dinner at six.”

“Lord preserve us,” said Mrs. Smithers, half to herself. “Your uncle allers ’ad ’is dinner at one o’clock, sharp, and ’e wouldn’t like it to ’ave such scandalous goin’s on in ’is own ’ouse.”

“You’re working for me,” Dorothy reminded her sharply, “and not for my uncle.”

There was a long silence, during which Mrs. Smithers peered curiously at her young mistress over her steel-bowed spectacles. “I’m not so sure as you,” she said. “On account of the cat ’avin come back from ’is grave, it wouldn’t surprise me none to see your uncle settin’ ’ere at any time in ’is shroud, and a-askin’ to ’ave mush and milk for ’is supper, the which ’e was so powerful fond of that I was more ’n ’alf minded at the last minute to put some of it in ’s coffin.”

“Mrs. Smithers,” said Dorothy, severely, “I do not want to hear any more about dead people, or resurrected cats, or anything of that nature. What’s gone is gone, and there’s no use in continually referring to it.”

At this significant moment, Claudius Tiberius paraded somewhat ostentatiously through the kitchen and went outdoors.

“You see, Miss?” asked Mrs. Smithers, with ill-concealed satisfaction. “Wot’s gone ain’t always gone for long, that’s wot it ain’t.”

Dorothy retreated, followed by a sepulchral laugh which grated on her nerves. “Upon my word, dear,” she said to Harlan, “I don’t know how we’re going to stand having that woman in the house. She makes me feel as if I were an undertaker, a grave digger, and a cemetery, all rolled into one.”

“You’re too imaginative,” said Harlan, tenderly, stroking her soft cheek. He had not yet seen Mrs. Smithers.

“Perhaps,” Dorothy admitted, “when she gets that pyramid of crape off her head, she’ll seem more nearly human. Do you suppose she expects to wear it in the house all the time?”

“Miss Carr!”

The gaunt black shadow appeared in the doorway of the kitchen and the high, harsh voice shrilled imperiously across the yard.

“I’m coming,” answered Dorothy, submissively, for in the tone there was that which instinctively impels obedience. “What is it?” she asked, when she entered the kitchen.

“Nothink. I only wants to know wot it is you’re layin’ out to ’ave for your – luncheon, if that’s wot you call it.”

“Poached eggs on toast, last night’s cold potatoes warmed over, hot biscuits, jam, and tea.”

Mrs. Smithers’s articulate response resembled a cluck more closely than anything else.

“You can make biscuits, can’t you?” went on Dorothy, hastily.

“I ’ave,” responded Mrs. Smithers, dryly. “Begging your parding, Miss, but is that there feller sawin’ wood out by the chicken coop your ’usband?”

“The gentleman in the yard,” said Dorothy, icily, “is Mr. Carr.”

“Be n’t you married to ’im?” cried Mrs. Smithers, dropping a fork. “I understood as ’ow you was, else I wouldn’t ’ave come. I was never one to – ”

“I most assuredly am married to him,” answered Dorothy, with due emphasis on the verb.

“Oh! ’E’s the build of my youngest sister’s poor dead ’usband; the one wot broke the tea set wot I give ’er over ’er poor ’ed. ’E can ’it powerful ’ard, can’t ’e?”

Quite beyond speech, Dorothy went outdoors again, her head held high and a dangerous light in her eyes. To-morrow, or next week at the latest, should witness the forced departure of Mrs. Smithers. Mrs. Carr realised that the woman did not intend to be impertinent, and that the social forms of Judson Centre were not those of New York. Still, some things were unbearable.

The luncheon that was set before them, however, went far toward atonement. With the best intentions in the world, Dorothy’s cooking nearly always went wide of the mark, and Harlan welcomed the change with unmistakable pleasure.

“I say, Dorothy,” he whispered, as they rose from the table; “get on with her if you can. Anybody who can make such biscuits as these will go out of the house only over my dead body.”

The latter part of the speech was unfortunate. “My surroundings are so extremely cheerful,” remarked Dorothy, “that I’ve decided to spend the afternoon in the library reading Poe. I’ve always wanted to do it and I don’t believe I’ll ever feel any creepier than I do this blessed minute.”

In spite of his laughing protest, she went into the library, locked the door, and curled up in Uncle Ebeneezer’s easy chair with a well-thumbed volume of Poe, finding a two-dollar bill used in one place as a book mark. She read for some time, then took down another book, which opened of itself at “The Gold Bug.”

The pages were thickly strewn with marginal comments in the fine, small, shaky hand she had learned to associate with Uncle Ebeneezer. The paragraph about the skull, in the tree above the treasure, had evidently filled the last reader with unprecedented admiration, for on the margin was written twice, in ink: “A very, very pretty idea.”

She laughed aloud, for her thoughts since morning had been persistently directed toward things not of this world. “I’m glad I’m not superstitious,” she thought, then jumped almost out of her chair at the sound of an ominous crash in the kitchen.

“I won’t go,” she thought, settling back into her place. “I’ll let that old monument alone just as much as I can.”

Upon the whole, it was just as well, for the “old monument” was on her bony knees, with her head and shoulders quite lost in the secret depths of the kitchen range. “I wonder,” she was muttering, “where ’e could ’ave put it. It would ’ave been just like that old skinflint to ’ave ’id it in the stove!”

VI

The Coming of Elaine

There is no state of mental wretchedness akin to that which precedes the writing of a book. Harlan was moody and despairing, chiefly because he could not understand what it all meant. Something hung over him like a black cloud, completely obscuring his usual sunny cheerfulness.

He burned with the desire to achieve, yet from the depths of his soul came only emptiness. Vague, purposeless aspirations, like disembodied spirits, haunted him by night and by day. Before his inner vision came unfamiliar scenes, detached fragments of conversation, the atmosphere, the feeling of an old romance, then, by a swift change, darkness from which there seemed no possible escape.

A woman with golden hair, mounted upon a white horse, gay with scarlet and silver trappings – surely her name was Elaine? And the company of gallant knights who followed her as she set forth upon her quest – who were they, and from whence did they hail? The fool of the court, with his bauble and his cracked, meaningless laughter, danced in and out of the picture with impish glee. Behind it all was the sunset, such a sunset as was never seen on land or sea. Ribbons of splendid colour streamed from the horizon to the zenith and set the shields of the knights aglow with shimmering flame. Clashing cymbals sounded from afar, then, clear and high, a bugle call, the winding silvery notes growing fainter and fainter till they were lost in the purple silence of the hills. Elaine turned, smiling – was not her name Elaine? And then —

Darkness fell and the picture was utterly wiped out. Harlan turned away with a sigh.

To take the dead, dry bones of words, the tiny black things that march in set spaces across the page; to set each where it inevitably belongs – truly, it seems simple enough. But from the vast range of our written speech to select those which fittingly clothe the thought is quite another matter, and presupposes the thought. Even then, by necessity, the outcome is uncertain.

Within the mind of the writer, the Book lives and breathes; a child of the brain, yearning for birth. At a white heat, after long waiting, the words come – merely a commentary, an index, a marginal note of that within. Reading afterward the written words, the fine invisible links, the colour and the music, are treacherously supplied by the imagination, which is at once the best friend and the worst enemy. How is one to know that only a small part of it has been written, that the best of it, far past writing, lingers still unborn?

Long afterward, when the original picture has faded as though it had never been, one may read his printed work, and wonder, in abject self-abasement, by what miracle it was ever printed. He has trusted to some unknown psychology which strongly savours of the Black Art to reproduce in the minds of his readers the picture which was in his, and from which these fragmentary, marginal notes were traced. Only the words, the dead, meaningless words, stripped of all the fancy which once made them fair, to make for the thousands the wild, delirious bliss that the writer knew! To write with the tears falling upon the page, and afterward to read, in some particularly poignant and searching review, that “the book fails to convince!” Happy is he whose written pages reproduce but faintly the glow from whence they came. For “whoso with blood and tears would dig Art out of his soul, may lavish his golden prime in pursuit of emptiness, or, striking treasure, find only fairy gold, so that when his eyes are purged of the spell of morning, he sees his hands are full of withered leaves.”

A meadow-lark, rising from a distant field, dropped golden notes into the still, sunlit air, then vanished into the blue spaces beyond. A bough of apple bloom, its starry petals anchored only by invisible cobwebs, softly shook white fragrance into the grass. Then, like a vision straight from the golden city with the walls of pearl, came Elaine, the beautiful, her blue eyes laughing, and her scarlet lips parted in a smile.

Harlan’s heart sang within him. His trembling hands grasped feverishly at the sheaf of copy-paper which had waited for this, week in and week out. The pencil was ready to his hand, and the words fairly wrote themselves:

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