Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

A little girl wrapped in a shawl was watching cattle in the field; a dog sat near, his back to the misty drizzle. Rose saw it and put herself in the place of that child, chilled and blue of hand, with unfallen tears upon her cheeks.

A crow flying by with ringing, rough cry made her blood leap. Some cattle streamed up a lane and over a hill; their legs moving invisibly gave them a gliding motion like a vast centipede. Some mysterious charm seemed imparted to everything she saw, and, as the familiar lines of the hills began to loom against the sky, she became intolerably eager to see her father and the farm. She hoped it would be a sunny day, but it was raining heavily when she got out at the station.

He was there, the dear, sweet, old face smiling, almost tearful. He had an umbrella and couldn't return her hug; but he put his arm about her and hurried her to the carriage, and in a few moments they were spattering up the familiar road.

Instantly it seemed as if she had never been away. She was a little girl again; the horses shook their heads, impatient at the rain; the pools in the road were green as liquid emerald, and were dimpled by the pelting drops. The wheels flung segments of mud into the air, but the horses drove ahead sullenly, almost desperately, unmindful of the splash and splatter of mud and water.

Rose took keen delight in it all. She had been shut away from nature so long, it seemed good to get back into even the stern mood of a May storm. The great, reeling masses of gray cloud delighted her, and the ringing cry of frogs seemed delicious orchestration. Everything was fresh, clean, almost harsh. How arid and artificial the city life seemed in the freshness of green fields!

It was a pleasure to return to the barnyard, to get back into the kitchen where her aunt was phlegmatically working away at supper-getting. She wiped her hands on her apron, and said "How-de-do!" as if Rose were a neighbor just dropping in for a call.

The life all seemed heroically dull, but the coolness, repose and sanity of nature was elemental, as if she had risen into the rainy sky or sunk into the waters of the ocean. It was deathly still at times. And dark, dark and illimitable and freshly sweet the night shut down over the valley.

She went to sleep with the soft roar of the falling rain near her window; and the faint puffing in of the breeze brought to her the delicious smell of the rain-washed leaves, the acrid, pungent odor of poplars, the sweet smell of maples, the fragrance of rich loam – she knew them all.

By force of contrast she thought of Mason and his life in the city. The roar of traffic; the thunder of great presses; the nights at the opera or the theater, all had enormous weight and value to her, but how remote it all was! In the country the city seemed unreal; in the city the country seemed impossible.

She awoke at the cry of a jay in the maples, and then as she listened she heard a mourning-dove sob from the distance. Robins were laughing merrily, an oriole whistled once and flew away, and hark! yes, a thrush was singing, sitting high in some tree-top, she knew.

The rain was over; the valley was flooded with sunshine. O, so beautiful! – flooded with light like the love of God. She sprang up with joyous energy. Life's problem was not without solution if she could live – both city and country, too.

She felt her joy of the country doubled by her winter in the city – this day was made marvelous by that storm on the lake.

Rhymes grew in her mind upon subjects hitherto untouched by her literary perception. Things she had known all her life, familiar plants, flowers, trees, etc., seemed touched all at once by supernatural radiance.

The clouds on the hills, the buzz of bees in the clover, the sabre swing of poplar trees against the sky, moved her to song, and she wrote daily with marvelous ease. She flung herself prone on the bank by the spring, and strove to mix and be one with the wind and the trees. She thought of her childish crooning over Carl that day his head lay in her lap, and its significance came to her and voiced itself in music.

She traced out every path where her feet had trod as a child, and the infinite significance and terror and high beauty of life and death came upon her. She seemed to summon up and analyze all her past, as if she were about to end one life and begin another. These wonderful moods and memories in some unaccountable way co-ordinated themselves in lines of verse, and the restless, vigorous heart of the girl felt the splendid peace which comes when the artist finds at last that art which is verily his.

The body of her verse grew, and she longed for Mason's opinion upon it, and yet she feared to send it, it seemed so different from other verse. At times she felt its passionate and imaginative quality, and made up selections to send him, but ended always by putting them away again.

She had his picture in her room, and sometimes she sat down to write with his sadly inscrutable face before her. She could see in it (as she studied it here in her home) the lines of varied and restless thought which make up the face of a man who largely comprehends American civilization in the light of experience.

That face represented to her the highest type of manhood, and something more. It was refined and infinitely subtle compared with the simple, almost ox-like faces of the men about her. It was sad, too, as her father's face in repose was sad, but the sadness was different. There was patient, resigned sadness in her father's eyes and lips; in Mason's, bitter, rebellious, perhaps despairing sadness, and something else, too – youth taking hold on the hopelessness of the whole world.

And yet she knew how sweetly those lips could smile, and she had felt the gentleness and purity hid in those eyes. He looked at her as no other man looked, without boldness, without uncertainty, clean, manly and just; and still there were those cynical lines about the lips; not deep, but still perceptible.

She thought less of his fine, erect bearing, and yet she liked to see him walking down the street. He had physical power and dignity, but his face and eyes were etched in minutest detail upon her brain. The life companionship of such a man came to seem more and more impossible for her to attain to. The common little details of her life seemed to lower her. She fell back into inelegant habits and careless speech, and every time she realized it, it put Mason far off and far above her. Her verse lost its brilliancy, its buoyancy, and became dark and bitter at times.

Every night she wondered if she might not hear from him. He had promised to write, and he had hinted at something very important. She knew that she had no definite claim upon him, and yet her last letter had contained one question, not of any importance only as it gave him a chance to reply if he felt like it.

Then the question came: "What of my winter in the city? What has it done for me? Is not life as insoluble as ever – success as far away as ever?"

Could she live here in the country any easier because of her stay there; did it not, in fact, make life harder?

It was in thinking about these things and Mason's letter, which did not come, that her new-found rapture in nature began to cool down. She began to spend more time in her room, thinking of him, and wondering what his attitude toward her really was.

She had moments at last when his face seemed cynically smiling at her. What did he care for an awkward country girl like her? He pitied her, that was all. He wanted to help her, and had tried, and finding her dull, had given her up and forgotten her. He knew scores of beautiful women, actresses, artists, millionaires' daughters; it was absurd to suppose that a girl from the coolly could be of any special interest to him; and to win his love, that was impossible.

She had not the personal vanity which makes so many pretty and brainless women think themselves irresistible to any man, and a fair return for any man's name and fame. Her flesh she made little of in the question.

She hoped each week for a reply, and in her letters to Isabel asked for news about "all friends," meaning one especially.

Isabel wrote, saying they had invited Mr. Mason up to stay a few days at their cottage, and that Elbert Harvey had asked after her, and couldn't she come down?

By the middle of July she had begun to pass days without writing at all.

When the letter from Mason came her father brought it to her with a smile: "Guess this is a love-letter; it's a big one!"

She took it in her hand, feeling a keen, swift premonition of its importance. It was indeed a heavy letter – almost a packet.

She went to her room with it and took a seat by the window, quite deliberately, but her hands shook as she opened the envelope. Her senses seemed some way to acquire unnatural keenness, like a scared animal's. She heard every voice about the barnyard, and she felt the wind on her cheek like a live thing beating its slow wings. The letter began simply:

"Dear Miss Dutcher:

"I must begin by asking pardon for not writing before, but as a matter of fact I have not found this letter easy to compose. It represents a turning point in my life, and contains an important decision, and I have never been less sure of my judgment than now.

"This letter may be considered an offer of marriage. It is well to say that now, and then all the things which come after, will be given their proper weight. Let me state the debit side of the account first, and if you feel that it is too heavy you can put the letter down and write me a very short answer, and the matter will be ended.

"First, I say to you: whoso weds me weds sorrow. I do not promise to make you happy, though I hope my influence will not be always untoward. I cannot promise any of the things husbands are supposed to bring. I cannot promise a home. My own living is precarious, dependent upon my daily grind of newspaper work. For though I hope to achieve a success with my novel, great successes with novels do not mean much money. I do not feel either that I shall ever be free from money cares; luxury and I are to continue strangers.

"I cannot promise to conform to your ways, nor to bend to your wishes, though I will try to do so. I cannot promise to assume cordial relations with your relatives, nor accept your friendships as binding upon me.

"I cannot promise to be faithful to you until death, but I shall be faithful so long as I fill the relation of husband to you. I shall not lead a double life, or conceal from you any change in my regard toward you. If at any time I find a woman whom I feel I should live with, rather than with you, I shall tell you of her with perfect frankness. I think I shall find you all-sufficient, but I do not know. Men and women change, grow weary of things, of bonds, of duties. It may be that I shall become and continue the most devoted of husbands, but I cannot promise it. Long years of association develop intolerable traits in men and women very often.

"On the other hand, let me say I exact nothing from you. I do not require you to cook for me, nor keep house for me. You are mistress of yourself; to come and go as you please, without question and without accounting to me. You are at liberty to cease your association with me at any time, and consider yourself perfectly free to leave me whenever any other man comes with power to make you happier than I.

"I want you as comrade and lover, not as subject or servant, or unwilling wife. I do not claim any rights over you at all. You can bear me children or not, just as you please. You are a human soul like myself, and I shall expect you to be as free and as sovereign as I, to follow any profession or to do any work which pleases you. It is but just to say that I have never been a man of loose habits. No woman has any claim upon me for deed or word. I have thought at various times that I could marry this woman or that woman, but I have never before made a proposition of marriage to any woman.

"I have written you in good, set terms what you may expect of me. I am not a demonstrative man by nature, and my training from childhood has made me saving of words of endearment. My love for you must be taken largely for granted after it is once stated, for I regard the word 'love' as a jewel not to be carelessly tossed from hand to hand.

"Doubtlessly I shall make a dull companion – that I cannot judge for myself."

The letter concluded with this characteristic touch; she seemed to hear his voice as she read it:

"I have written frankly because I believed it would prejudice you in my favor. Had I believed otherwise, doubtless I should have written in terms of flattery and deceit, for of such is man when seeking woman in marriage.

"If you return the affirmative answer I shall be very happy to come up and spend the rest of my vacation at your father's home – provided it is agreeable to you."

Rose sat rigidly still in her chair, her hands in her lap, holding the letter.

It had come again, this question of marriage, and this time it appealed to her whole nature – to her intellectual part as well as to her material self; uttered this time by a voice which had no tremor in it.

How strange it all was! How different from the other proposals she had received; apparently cold and legal, yet under the lines she felt something deep and manly and passionate, because she was only a coulé girl, and he was a man of the great intellectual world; a man who "molded public opinion" by the power of his editorial pen. He was greater than that. In his presence you felt him to be a man of national reputation living quietly under an assumed name.

There rose a great pride in her heart. He had selected her from among the women of the world! He loved her so much he had written her this strange letter, which plead for her under its rigid order of words. She held the letter to her lips as if to get its secret meaning so and then she dropped it as if it were a husk. No matter what it said, she felt the spirit of the man.

She wrote a few lines and sealed them quickly. Then she fell into thought upon the terms of his letter. She hardly comprehended the significance of the minor statements, so filled was she with the one great fact, he wished her to be his wife! She was poor, unknown, and yet he had chosen her!

There was something sad in the letter, too – like his face it was inscrutable, intricate, but (she believed) noble in intention. The freedom of action which he claimed for himself did not trouble her, for she felt his love beneath it. His word "comrade" pleased her, too. It seemed to be wholesome and sweet, and promised intellectual companionship never before possible to her.

O, to be the wife of such a man! to have his daily help and presence; it was wonderful, it could not be true! Yet there lay the letter in her lap, and there the firm, calm, even signature. She rose to her feet and her heart dilated with pride, and her head was that of a newly crowned princess. Oh, the great splendid world out there!

She took up her letter suddenly and went downstairs and out into the yard in search of her father. He was sitting by the bees, with dreamy eyes. He spent a great deal of his time there.

"Father, I want you to hitch Kitty to the buggy for me."

"Why, of course. Where are you goin', Rose?"

"I'm going to the Siding to post a letter. O, pappa John!" she cried suddenly, putting her arms round him, "I'm going to be married."

John did not instantly comprehend her passion; he was slower to move, but he said:

"Why, Rosie! When? Who to?"

"To a man in Chicago, Mr. Warren Mason, a great editor. I'm just writing to him to come."

John began to feel the solemnity of the thought.

"Does he live in Chicago?"

"Yes." She understood his thought. "But we'll come and see you, summers, just the same, pappa John."

"Well, I'll take the letter down."

"No, I must take it myself," she said, smilingly, holding the letter behind her like a child.

There was something fine in carrying the letter to the office herself. It seemed to hasten it. The horse was spirited and carried her at a steady swift trot up hill and down, and the railway track was soon in sight.

Suddenly an idea seized her; why not telegraph her answer. They might suspect him to be her lover, but what did she care now? She penned this message:

"Come up tomorrow if you can, please. Rose."

But afterward, as she approached the office, she shrank from handing it in. It seemed to her too plainly a love message. She mailed her letter and fell to calculating when it would reach him. He could not possibly come till the second day, whereas if she telegraphed he might arrive in the morning. This thought strengthened her resolution; going over to the window she placed the message firmly before the operator, who knew her and admired her deeply.

"Please send that at once, Mr. Bingham."

The operator smiled and bowed, and when he read the message he looked up at her keenly, but did not smile.

"Any answer?" he asked.

"No, probably not," she replied. "Will it go right out?"

"Immediately."

As she turned away to ride home her soul took wing. A marvelous elevation and peace came upon her. It was done. Life held more than promise now, it contained certainties. Her chosen one of Israel was coming!

CHAPTER XXVI

MASON AS A LOVER

The telegram came to Mason as he sat on the porch of the Herrick cottage. He read it, and his eyes smiled, but his feeling was not one of amusement. The significance of that impulsive message struck deep, and his blood responded to it as if it were an embrace.

It settled all doubt in his mind concerning her. She was as free and self-reliant as he thought her, and the severe terms of his proposal had not repelled her, and yet that she loved him in a right human and very passionate way did not seem to him possible.

He had, also, other misgivings. He wished he had delineated more fully in his letter the negative side of his character. "She is young and beautiful," he thought, "and will want to see life. She will value social affairs – I am done with them. She will want words of tender protestation, flattery perhaps, which I cannot give.

"My habits are fixed. I like my silent pipe at night after dinner. I shall undoubtedly get more and more disinclined to social duties as time goes on.

"In ten years I shall be forty-eight years old, an old man, when she is just in her splendid June season. She will find the difference between our ages wider than now. She will be a wife. I can free her when she asks it, but I cannot give her back her sweet, superb girlhood. I can give her perception and comprehension of the world and of life, but I cannot make her young again. I may die after a few years, leaving her a mother with a hazardous future. Then she will be doubly cursed.

"Again, this marriage may ruin and interrupt her career. With some women marriage, especially maternity, seems to take away their power as artists, and to turn them into cooks and nurses; meritorious vocations of course, but – "

All night long he alternately mused and dozed upon the problem. He roused up at early daylight with a feeling of doom upon him. He had made a mistake. He was not fitted to be a husband – he was a poor thing, at best, who had not had energy enough to get out of a groove nor to demand adequate pay for grinding in his groove. He lacked "push," and had dreamed away the best years of his life, at least such parts of the years as he had saved from the merciless drive of his paper. He was pulp, squeezed dry.

He groaned, and a curse came upon his lips, and his forehead knit into a tangle of deep lines. His paper had used him. It had sucked the blood of his heart. The creative energy of his brain had gone into the impersonal columns of the editorial page – to what end? To the end that the Evening Star Publishing Company should be rated high in Bradstreet. Had any human being been made better by anything he had written in those columns? Politics? Good God! he had sold his soul, his blood, the grace of his limbs, the suppleness of his joints, the bloom of his enthusiasms, to put this or that damned party into power.

And now, when a beautiful young woman, singing her way to fame, had sent for him, he must go to her, cynical, thin-haired, stiff in joints, bent in shoulders and reeking with the smell of office life and, worst of all, worked out, his novel not yet written, and his enthusiasm turned to indifference and despair.

The problem of the age that morning made him savage. He looked out of the window at the farmhouses gleaming in the early light, at the smoke curling up into the still air, at the men going to milk the cows —

"The damn fools!" he said in his heart. "They don't know enough to vegetate any more than I had sense to know I was becoming a machine. Rot and rot! So we go like leaves to the muck-heap." The porter rushed in and shook him.

"Almos' to Bluff Siding, sah."

This put a little resolution into his blood, and he dressed rapidly, with little thought on anything else. Once or twice he looked out at the misty blue hills, cool and fresh with recent rains. As the porter came to get his grip a few minutes later, Mason wondered how he should meet her, with a hand-shake or a kiss? How would she meet him?

As the train slowed down he saw her at the platform. She sat in a carriage waiting for him. He had one flashing thought: "There sits my wife!" It startled him. The tremendous significance of that phrase made his brain dizzy for a moment.

She was dressed trimly, he noticed, as he came toward her, and she held her horse firmly – he liked her for that, it showed self-mastery. As for him, he felt more uncertainty of footing than ever before in his life, and tried to throw off the stoop in his shoulders.

As he came forward, she flushed, but her steady eyes met his unwaveringly. He looked into their clear obscurity of depth, wherein were purity and unworldly womanly ways.

She held out her hand, firm and strong, and he took it in his. Outwardly it was merely a friendly greeting, yet something subtler than light came from her to him. He did not speak for an instant, then he said:

"This is good of you! I did not expect this great pleasure."

Her voice trembled as she said:

"I wanted to be the first to greet you, and besides, papa wouldn't know you."

He smiled for the first time.

"That's true. But it's very early – quite in the small hours."

"Oh, that's nothing; I'm a farmer's girl, you know. But put your valise in, we must be off."

How strong and supple she looked! and how becoming her silk waist and straw hat! She could drive, too. Some way she seemed quite another sort of person here in her own land and in her own carriage. She was so much more composed. "She has imagination," he repeated to himself.

They turned into the road before he spoke again.

"So this is your 'coolly'?"

"No, this is our valley. The coolly is over there where you see that cloud shadow sliding down."

He looked about slowly at the hills and fields.

"It's very fine; much finer than Oconomowoc and Geneva."

"We like it … papa and I."

They were both talking around the bush, as the saying goes, but he finally said:

"I was very glad to receive your telegram. Am I to take it as an affirmative answer?"

She said with effort:

"I wanted you to see how poor and humble we all are before – before I – "

He studied her profile. Her lips quivered, and a tear glistened through the veil.

"On my part," he said, "I regretted that I did not further set forth my general cussedness and undesirability. – How well you drive!" he said, by way of relieving the stress of the moment.

He took command now, and there were no more tender allusions. He sniffed the smell of the grass and the way-side trees, and remarked upon the cattle, and inquired the names of several birds whose notes reached across the field.

"Do you know, I'm no wild lover of the country, and I don't admire the country people unreservedly. There are exceptions, of course – but my experience with them has not been such as to make them heroic sufferers, as the new school of fiction sets 'em forth. They are squalid enough and poor enough, heaven knows, but it is the squalor of piracy – they do as well as I should under the same circumstances, no doubt."