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Read Ebook: The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine September 1913 Vol. LXXXVI No. 5 by Various
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Ebook has 1451 lines and 103619 words, and 30 pages
PAGE
VERSE
LOVE BY LIGHTNING
BY MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS
WITH PICTURES BY F. R. GRUGER
Love is the d?but of a woman's soul from the darkness under Adam's left ribs into the sunshine of the Garden of Eden and his presence. It is heavenly, but very much like a major operation attended by convulsions, and I am going to write you the whole truth about it, my dear Evelyn, and not present to you an unadorned feminine version. It is going to be hard, for I've only been practising concise veracity for a little over a month, and if I am crude in places, you must forgive me.
What did it?
Aunt Grace, my unfilial virago of a disposition, and the will of God.
Please don't let it make you uncomfortable to have me speak of Him in this friendly fashion, for He is in the story, and I can't help it. Besides, that is part of what I want to tell you about.
The first of May, mother came home from a visit to Aunt Grace in Louisville with the most peculiar little man led by a halter for me. He has a title, genuine brand. Elizabeth Gentry is going to marry him now, and she'll write you all about it. Aunt Grace had selected him in Rome at Easter, and told him the round numbers of the fortune Grandmother Wickliffe left me. She had instructed mother minutely as to my joyous and appreciative course of action toward him, and you know how my maternal parent is about Aunt Grace. I want to record it of father that he received the duke with a recoil, and went to New Orleans the next morning for an indefinite stay.
Of course the little man is a human being, but I consider the United States as fortunate that it is not now in complications with Italy over the murder of one of her scions by an enraged Tennessee woman. Two days after his arrival, and only several hours after the first time he tried to possess his funny little paws of my very garden-burned hand, I packed a few of my belongings in three trunks and a steamer-bag and departed to find Dudley. He is such a perfectly satisfactory brother that, since my earliest youth, I have always felt it best to flee to him when I feel a tantrum coming on. They don't disturb the even tenor of his life in the least.
"Oh, Nell!" was all mother had the courage to say, when so far away from Aunt Grace, at the announcement of my intention.
That was the feminine version of a line in Dudley's last letter, saying he had caught a heavy cold sleeping out without his blanket while with one of his gangs marking lumber on Old Harpeth. But I did take his grace to call on Elizabeth before I departed. I will say that much for myself.
With it all I had left home in such a whirl of hurry and rage that I hadn't had time really to realize myself until I sat in my seat and watched the train begin to wind around and around the foot-hills that lead up from the valley. And I must say that realization of myself was not much in the way of amusement. Why should I have left mother in a huff just because she is Aunt Grace's obedient sister? Isn't she also my browbeaten parent? And why rudely abandon the little nobleman, who was my guest, for trying to kiss my hand, which has been used for any old purpose, from digging worms for Dudley to fish with to supplying a surface to be pressed by Bobby Gentry's adolescent bristles, even unto the mustache he at present flourishes? And others, too! No, I couldn't honestly approve of myself, as hard as I tried.
And, to make it worse, the very day itself was a balmy, pliant, feminine thing, with not a bluster in its disposition to harmonize with mine. There was a soft bridal veil of spring mist all over the Harpeth Valley, behind which the orchards were blushing pink and white, while by noon, as we began to go up the hills, I caught a whiff of that indescribable, lilting honeysuckle note that comes in the June rhapsody in the Alleghanies. You remember it, don't you, deary, even if you do live in an enchanted Breton garden with a husband who sings? I'm going to remember it in heaven.
No, I wasn't very well pleased with myself, and I got more and more serious on the subject the higher the train crawled up toward the crown of Old Harpeth. If a naturally conscientious person has such a bad disposition that she finds it impossible to accept any form of criticism from other people, then she is ethically obliged to chastise her own self, which is the refinement of psychical cruelty.
Of course I knew that Dudley's letters all went to Crow Point, and the ticket-man had told me that we got there at five-fifty. That hour was not dark--quite, I knew, and I decided that I would have plenty of time to drive across the ridge to his camp at Pigeon Creek.
Isn't it a good thing for women that they can't take peeps into what is going to happen to them next? Men could digest their disclosed futures complacently, but on account of pure excitement, women never in the world could even sufficiently masticate theirs to swallow them.
"Is it far from Crow Point to Pigeon Creek?" I asked the conductor, by way of amusing myself.
"About one horse-pull," he answered lucidly, as he went to help a woman and eleven children off at Hitch It.
I'm glad now he was no more explicit.
Crow Point was just a little farther along the road than Hitch It, and we got there before I had time to ask him any more questions. Purple dusk was just hovering over the mountain-top, as if uncertain about settling down upon it for the night, when the train stopped. He called Crow Point, and I jumped off--the universe.
I stood for a few minutes, with my mind tottering.
"Looking for anybody, little gal?" came a drawl from out the twilight just in time to keep me from running after the train to try and tell them that I didn't want to be left alone in the mountains at dark. A man sat all hunched up on the tree-trunk that supported one end of the huge log which represented the station platform of Crow Point, whittling a small stick.
"Is this Crow Point?" I gasped from the depths of both consternation and amazement as I looked from him to the three trunks stacked on the ground by the rustic platform.
"Sure am," was the answer, as the small red slivers of wood flew.
"Is this--this all of it?" I asked, this time less from consternation than astonishment.
"Well, they is a few more of us," he answered. "Was you a-looking for any of us in particular?"
"Mr. Dudley Gaines," I answered in a manner that bordered on the lofty, as if I felt that the status of my family must be much the same commanding one at Crow Point that it was down in Hillsboro.
"I reckon you'll have to holler that loud enough to reach about twenty-five miles acrost to Pigeon Creek, gal, if you want to git him," was the unimpressed answer.
"Twenty-five miles!" I spoke less haughtily this time. "Can't I get there to-night?"
"You could ef you had started this time last night," was the practical reply.
Suddenly the fact that I was planted down in the wilderness of gigantic mountains, alone except for one aborigine of the masculine gender, overpowered me so that I sank down on the log and became much meeker in manner and spirit.
"What'll I do?" I asked, and this time my words were nothing more than a subdued and respectful peep.
"Wall, I reckon Stivers and missus will have to take you in for the night," answered the native, with a condescending drawl. "They might not, but you mentioned young Gaines's name. We 'most shot him for a revenue when he first came, but he's brought a sight of good work amongst us, and lives like he was fellow-man with all. Be you his sister or his woman?"
"Sister," I answered, taking a grain of courage at thus hearing Dudley's name mentioned as that of a prominent citizen of the fastnesses.
"Yes, Stivers had a cross on his gun for Dud, and he mighty nigh got a bloodstain to smear on it 'fore he found out that he were just a logger. But Stivers'll take you in, I reckon, now he knows you belong to his tribe, though his cabin is so small you couldn't cuss a cat without getting hair in your teeth."
"Where do Mr. and Mrs. Stivers live?" I ventured, with a shudder at the taste of cat-hair in my mouth.
"Round behind that crag and woodland there," he answered as he turned the stick and looked at it critically in the fading light. "You can go on by yourself, or, if you want to wait until I whittle this little end slimmer, I can take you along with me. They is going to be a ruckus kind of a meetin' of the gang there to-night, but they won't nothing but dark draw the boys outen the bushes."
"I'll wait," I answered trustfully, preferring to appear at the hostelry under the care of a strange man than risk the woods alone. Necessity is the stepmother of many conventions.
And there I sat on a companionable log beside a perfectly strange outlaw who had been talking about notches on guns and blood-splotches, waiting for him to whittle down the end of a stick exactly to satisfy his artistic tastes before accompanying me through a dark strip of woodland to the hospitable roof of a moonshiner, in hopes I would be taken in to spend the night thereunder.
And I must proudly and truthfully record it of myself that I bore the situation in dignified and complacent terror, sitting humbly still while the moonshiner slowly peeled tiny pink shavings off the end of the stick for what seemed like centuries to me. My interior was a small Vesuvius of disposition, frozen over temporarily, and I even had the strength to marvel at my own control of it.
Finally he held his work of art close to his eyes to see the point in the dusk, which had deepened by the moment, tested it on his finger carefully several times, peered at it again, and then nonchalantly threw it away in the grass.
"Come on and follow," he said in commanding and indifferent mien as I rose to accompany him.
And follow him I did, in true squaw fashion, about ten paces behind. I was surprised he didn't ask me to carry his gun, a long, heavy ante-bellum weapon that rested carelessly in the hollow of his arm. I'd have done it with the greatest graciousness if he had handed it to me. A frightened woman easily lapses into savagery, and is willing to accept impedimenta in the rear of man in times of danger.
And, as we walked, the shadows got blacker and blacker, and the tree-tops lowered lower and lower in their thick gloom. Every few minutes something furry, like the hallucination of a gigantic mouse, would scurry across our path, or a great creaky croak would be hurled at our heads from the groaning branches above. And, with every fresh horror, I got closer to the heels of the human animal in front of me, until I was in danger of having my nose skinned by the barrel of the gun, or stepping on the protruding heels of his heavy boots, into which his faded overalls were stuffed. My knees may have trembled, but I assure you I kept pace with grim determination through what seemed endless miles of that haunted woodland.
And as we tramped along in silence, my mood of self-depreciation, which had seized me on the train, again asserted itself, and my alarmed mentality was saying sternly that it had warned my proud spirit that such catastrophes would be the result of my headlong course of wilfulness, when we came out of the darkness into a clearing where a cabin stood, from which a dim light shone.
"Stivers'," remarked my guide, fluently. "So long," he added tersely, and disappeared again into the woods by another path. At the time I wondered if he could be troubled by the conventions. I did him an injustice; I know now it was a horse hitched on the other side of the clearing.
For more than a few long minutes I stood and pondered with panicky indecision over just what to do, the wood with its nightmares on the one hand, and the unknown on the other. I chose the unknown, and plunged in as I faltered up to the open door of the small two-room hut.
Suddenly two doors were shut hurriedly in the darkness, and I heard the scuffling of heavy feet as a man appeared in the flare of the dim candle in the front room and peered at me cautiously.
"What do you want?" was the hospitable greeting that issued from the cavern of his huge chest.
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