Yellow Gentians and Blue

[ii]

By ZONA GALE

[iii]

Yellow Gentians and Blue

By ZONA GALE

New York and London D. APPLETON AND COMPANY MCMXXVII

[iv]

COPYRIGHT 1927 BY D. APPLETON & COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1920, by The Curtis Publishing Company; 1923, by The Nation, Inc.; 1924, 1925, by The Century Company; 1925, by George H. Doran Company; 1925, 1926, by The Crowell Publishing Company; 1927, by The International Magazine Company; 1927, by The Pictorial Review Company.

[v]

I Yellow Gentians

... The yellow gentian which has a very bitter taste.

NOAH WEBSTER

[2]

[3]

THE CHARIVARI

In one of the smallest farms in the Caledonia hills lived Obald Bronson, alone, and known down the countryside as the strange man who walked to the town to spare his one horse and who slept with no pillow. The people smiled at Obald when they met him walking to town. And he was so awkward and timid that they scorned him. Seven years before he had come among them from Norway, and that was all about him that they knew.

One day as a young Scotch farmer of the hills, Edward Muir, was driving a load of grain by Obald’s house, he saw a little smoke curling from a window and when he ran in, calling and shouting, fire was eating at a wall and Obald was not there. It was a wood-box fire, no more, and Edward was able to put it out. He had never been in Obald’s house and few of the Caledonia [4]farmers had been there. He saw the room bare, neat, painted; food on the shelf, corn drying on a sunny board. Edward walked to the door of the inner room, wishing, or so he said to himself, to be sure that all was safe, and saw the bedroom, neat and tended and with no pillow, as they said. But it was the look of the third room which held him. For Obald, it seemed, had made for himself a parlor. He had a willow table, a willow chair, two painted chairs, a book, a china vase, and a new mahogany clock, ticking away. And under the window was a chest, whose walnut had been painted in wide orange bands so that, in the sun’s reflection from the white wall, the stripes shone like gold. On the lid

there was rudely painted a bird, blue and pale blue, and a large blue letter C.

Edward stood staring at this chest when Obald entered the kitchen.

“Neighbor,” said Edward, “a little matter of fire brought me in here, but now I am staying because of this chest.”

As Obald listened to an account of the fire [5]he said, “That was probably caused by my corncob pipe which must have fallen into my wood box.” And then he grew greatly excited and cried: “But for you my chest might have been burned! What can I do for you that have saved my chest?”

So Edward Muir, who was young enough to have boy’s curiosity and not old enough to be hypocritical, answered:

“You must not now talk of payment, but you can show me, if you like, what is in the chest.”

At this Obald Bronson’s face changed, he looked frightened, and on his forehead a red scar stood out which did not often show. Edward, seeing him so, cried: “But some other time, for my horses will not stand,” and ran back to his grain, but not before he had seen the relief on Obald’s face.

Edward told about the chest. He told his father, who thought that it must hold mementos; and his neighbors, who guessed papers or currency; and one wit who guessed [6]bones. This man meeting Obald on the road, walking to save his old horse, cried out to him: “Obald! What is in your chest?”

Obald halted in his tracks and said: “What is that to you?” This tormentor made his look knowing and drove on.

Obald, who trusted every one, now had his door fitted with a lock, and set nails on his three windows. Now he went seldom to town, and when he went he rode the old horse, and rode him hard. One morning the animal was dead in the pasture. After that Obald was seldom seen on the road.

Because of this, and hearing from the locksmith about the new locks, the people talked the more, saying: “Either Obald is a miser or else ...” and shook their heads over him. Now, if they saw him, more than one cried: “Obald! We are coming to your house one night and find out a thing or two.”

Such words he never answered. Only his face grew red and his scar showed. Then [7]they said: “Who knows how he came by that scar?” Some asked him this question, and laughed. They liked Obald, too, but he was so timid and awkward.

Some boys of the neighborhood, having heard the tales, came boldly one night and rapped at the glass, crying. “Give us some money. You’ve got lots of money!” Obald, whom no man had heard in anger, shouted at them to be gone, and so terrible was his voice that the boys were charmed. It was then that they said to one another:

“Let’s cha’vari Obald.”

This custom of the countryside offered to the newly married was the highest form of romance, next to love. So they prepared the bones, combs, tin pans, the cowbell, and the horse fiddle. And one midnight, gathered about Obald’s old house, they broke into such wild turbulence and clangor that for miles about the farmers heard the scraping, the groaning and the shrieks.

But apparently Obald did not hear. He did not come to the door or to a window. [8]This angered the boys, who had wanted no more than to torment him into giving them money for a drink, so they pounded on his door shouting: “Obald! Give us two dollars from your chest!” But still he made no sign.

For two days there was about the house no look of life. On the third day Edward Muir came with his neighbors, and they broke down the door. Obald was lying dressed on his bed, but not these men and not the coroner could tell how he had come to his death.

In his mail box a quarter of a mile down the road they found a letter, which had been there for three days. It was from Finmarken and they read:

When this comes to you, I shall be on the ocean. I will come straight to your town and you can meet me because I will send you a telegram. Oh, Obald—we have waited for seven years, and now the time that is so short seems so long. My love is the same—it is more, Obald. Christopha.

[9]

Then they knew the meaning of the things that they had found in the chest: the fan, the mirror, the silver chain, the linen, the cloth for a woman’s dress.

[10]

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“A swing under a fruit tree that seemed always in full bloom, some little dishes of pottery and a wooden doll—these gave me a happy childhood, at the hands of my parents, who were anxious but kind. I had a little schooling, not much, and then I worked in the mills and waited for the time to marry. That time came when I was nineteen and he was twenty-two, and we walked on the dike when the moon was big, and went to the fair with the others. We lived with my father and mother in the house where I was born, with the chard and melons of the garden meeting the creepers that grew over our front doorway.

“We should never have left the old country for we had it fine there. He was a ticket-taker in the Broadstone station, a good job he had, but his brother kept writing to him that America was the place to be and [11]to make money. I says to him, ‘You go then, and if you like it, I’ll follow.’ He was two years in America before he let on whether he liked it and then he didn’t let on either, but he wrote to me to come over. It nearly killed me leaving my father and mother—for years I could see them as they looked when they said good-by—standing together on the flat stone, my father stiff and straight and my mother thinking the creepers covered up her crying.

“We had but the one little girl and she just big enough to run to meet me. She had eyes that never stopped their smiling, and yellow hair and a way that made strangers remember. That little thing and I, we came away together. But the big vessel was like a prison and the little one was frightened of the rolling and the pitching and she couldn’t taste the food. The fifth day out she sickened—we’d a doctor on board, too, but he didn’t know what that sickness was, made as it was three parts of fear and homesickness. The seventh day she died. That night they [12]let me sit up beside her and the next day they came to take her away and I couldn’t go up to see—I couldn’t watch that thing they’d have to do. Then came a man of the ship who begged them to wait and he went down in the hold of the vessel and made a boatlike box, very small, and in that he laid my little one. Tender he was, like a woman. And he sealed her in, with narrow strips of the wood, and he made a sail of the sailcloth and fastened it on that strange boat. And

when they’d let it down on to the water, they took me up to the deck. A little way off from the vessel it was by then—the tiny boat—rolling on the big waves, and it was sunset, so that the sail showed very white as the wind took it. So fast it went off over the water, so fast and so gay in the slanting sunlight. I watched it till the sun went, till the dark came and the little white dot went out. Then I Went below. All the night in my closed eyes I saw her in the sealed boat, on the big water, her that I had tended and watched, and I kept remembering how frightened [13]she’d been of the rolling and the pitching that was all the tending she had now. I couldn’t stay in my berth and her out there, so I crept back up on deck again. And now the moon had come, and when I looked where I had left her, there was a sail in the far light—I know it was that sail I saw, and I watched till it died away again. Then I waited, looking toward where I knew it was, till the dawn came. When the dawn came there was only the gray water, empty.

“He met me at the boat, and I was alone, and then I had to tell him. But while I told him I saw he had something to tell me. He looked like a tramp—I had always seen him dressed as a ticket-taker or in his Sunday clothes. Now he was working as a day laborer at the wharf. He said: ‘God forgive me for bringing you over, but I couldn’t face it any longer alone.’ I looked at him; I thought of my baby, dead of the voyage, and of my father and mother—so far away. But I looked at him, and I says, ‘Where do we live, my dear?’ He took me [14]to two high rooms with no light. I sat there with a stone in my throat. But I didn’t let on.

“I kept the two rooms tidy. I did all I could. The winters were hard, the summers were hard. In the fifteen years the four children came. In the fifty years since I’ve been in this country, they’ve grown to be men and women with homes to look after, and now they have grandchildren.

“Sometimes, sitting here in the Home where my four children pay out money to keep me comfortable, I think about them in their homes, where of course they can’t bother with me. I think of him, that worked himself to death long ago; and of my father and mother that I never saw again. And of her in the little sealed boat with the sail.

“Life is like that for some of us—and yet we want to live, just like other folks.”

[15]

BELNAP

From the moment that Alla went to work in the clubhouse, Belnap pursued her. She did all that she could to avoid him, but he would call her to his table and she dared not refuse the command of the head waiter. The head waiter was a woman of forty, a little lame, extremely capable, and kind to the girls. But when Alla explained to her why she wished to change from Belnap’s table, this woman said to her, “You are a fool,” and made no change.

Between Belnap’s orders of expensive dishes, he would tell her how much he loved her and how instead of serving him she might now be sitting beside him at some other table, ordering filet mignon and parfait. Under her voice she would answer him sharply:

“Save your breath, Mr. Belnap.” And aloud: “Shall your filet be brown or rare?”

“Rare. And Alla! I love you. I’ve a [16]little house in the country waiting for you....”

“And it’ll fall to pieces waiting for me. French dressing or mayonnaise, Mr. Belnap?”

“French. You little thing, I have never loved any one as I love you. I shall never love any one again as I love you. Alla, don’t you understand....”

By then she would have taken his order down and would turn her back.

Twice Alla gave up the place, but both times they sent for her to come back and as her father was ill and in want, she returned to the club where the wages were enough to pay for their two rooms, and the tips provided the food for her father and herself. No one was more generous with tips than Belnap and often she dreamed of all that she could do for her father if Belnap’s purse were poured upon her, as he promised that it would be if only she would go with him to his little house in the country, among the apple trees. Also, he was an agreeable creature, [17]and on the day when, between his order for a salad of pears stuffed with cheese, and his direction that there should be plenty of Bar-le-Duc he said: “Alla! I will give you a thousand dollars ...” on that day she hesitated for one instant and looked at him. She saw the deep furrows between his eyes, his cleft chin, his even teeth, and his look already triumphant. “At what hour do you finish here?” he breathed, but Alla cried quite loudly: “I finish before you’ve finished, Mr.

Belnap,” so that he looked about him in annoyance. Alla was balancing on the table’s edge a tray of empty dishes which she let crash to the floor crying: “Now they will not call me back here!”

On the death of her father she married a clerk, and she lived for thirty odd years in meager comfort. Her husband was by turns kind and irritable, she was by turns patient and complaining, and their two children were by turns impish and angelic. The days were a routine of cleaning and preparing for something which seemed never to come about. [18]Outside her house she knew that there were assemblages, disaster and stars, but these seldom concerned her, in the face of the needs of her children and her husband. All the days were the same.

At fifty, when her beauty was still marked, she heard from her doctor that the rich Mr. Belnap, now seventy, was living at a great hospital in the neighborhood. Her heart was kind and her life was humdrum, and so after brooding on the matter for days in the luxury of secrecy, she went secretly to the hospital and asked to see him.

Reading by a window in his brown bath gown, he looked handsome and ill. She saw the deep furrows between his eyes, his cleft chin, and his look, perpetually triumphant. Alla, the pleasant-faced dimpled woman, sat down before him and said: “Mr. Belnap, I want you to know that I have always thought of you kindly, for your tips brought my father many comforts. I am Alla, who waited on you at the City Club. Perhaps you do not remember....”

[19]

His face lighted, he took her hand, he cried: “Indeed I remember. And you are still beautiful.”

“But for you,” she continued, “many necessities even would have been denied my father.”

He lifted his hand. “But tell me,” he said, “have you sometimes thought of me?”

“Yes—and only with gratitude.”

He leaned toward her.

“And of the night when you first went with me into the country....”

She searched his face. His eyes were dreaming beyond her. He said with a sigh: “I have never forgotten those weeks in my little house with the apple trees.”

She sprang to her feet and cried: “Mr. Belnap, I am Alla—your old waitress at the City Club.”

“Yes,” he said gently, “you are Alla. Can you doubt that I remember?”

[20]

BILL

Bill was thirty when his wife died, and little Minna was four. Bill’s carpenter shop was in the yard of his house, so he thought that he could keep up his home for Minna and himself. All day while he worked at his bench, she played in the yard, and when he was obliged to be absent for a few hours, the woman next door looked after her. Bill could cook a little, coffee and bacon and fried potatoes and flap jacks, and he found bananas and sardines and crackers useful. When the woman next door said this was not the diet for four-year-olds, he asked her to teach him to cook oatmeal and vegetables, and though he always burned the dishes in which he cooked these things, he cooked them every day. He swept, all but the corners, and he dusted, dabbing at every object; and he complained that after he had cleaned the windows he could not see out as well as he could [21]before. He washed and patched Minna’s little garments and mended her doll. He found a kitten for her so that she wouldn’t be lonely. At night he heard her say her prayer, kneeling in the middle of the floor

with her hands folded, and speaking like lightning. If he forgot the prayer, he either woke her up, or else he made her say it the first thing next morning. He himself used to try to pray: “Lord, make me do right by her if you see me doing wrong.” On Sundays he took her to church and sat listening with his head on one side, trying to understand, and giving Minna peppermints when she rustled. He stopped work for a day and took her to the Sunday school picnic. “Her mother would of,” he explained. When Minna was old enough to go to kindergarten, Bill used to take her morning or afternoon, and he would call for her. Once he dressed himself in his best clothes and went to visit the school. “I think her mother would of,” he told the teacher, diffidently. But he could make little of the colored paper and the [22]designs and the games, and he did not go again. “There’s some things I can’t be any help to her with,” he thought.

Minna was six when Bill fell ill. On a May afternoon he went to a doctor. When he came home he sat in his shop for a long time and did nothing. The sun was beaming through the window in bright squares. He was not going to get well. It might be that he had six months.... He could hear Minna singing to her doll.

When she came to kiss him that night, he made an excuse, for he must never kiss her now. He held her at arm’s length, looked in her eyes, said: “Minna’s a big girl now. She doesn’t want papa to kiss her.” But her lip curled and she turned away sorrowful, so the next day Bill went to another doctor to make sure. The other doctor made him sure.

He tried to think what to do. He had a sister in Nebraska, but she was a tired woman. His wife had a brother in the city, but he was a man of many words. And little [23]Minna ... there were things known to her which he himself did not know—matters of fairies and the words of songs. He wished that he could hear of somebody who would understand her. And he had only six months....

Then the woman next door told him bluntly that he ought not to have the child there, and him coughing as he was; and he knew that his decision was already upon him.

One whole night he thought. Then he advertised in a city paper:

A man with a few months more to live would like nice people to adopt his little girl, six, blue eyes, curls. References required.

They came in a limousine, as he had hoped that they would come. Their clothes were as he had hoped. They had with them a little girl who cried: “Is this my little sister?” On which the woman in the smart frock said sharply:

“Now then, you do as mama tells you and [24]keep out of this or we’ll leave you here and take this darling little girl away with us.”

So Bill looked at this woman and said steadily that he had now other plans for his little girl. He watched the great blue car roll away. “For the land sake!” said the woman next door when she heard. “You done her out of a fortune. You hadn’t the right—a man in your health.” And when other cars came, and he let them go, this woman told her husband that Bill ought to be reported to the authorities.