Men without women
“Don’t you think it,” Joe said. “You better watch out to keep Prudie,
Nick.”
His wife whispered to him and Joe laughed.
“What you laughing at?” asked Frank.
“Don’t you say it, Garner,” his wife warned. Joe laughed again.
“Nickie can have Prudence,” Joe Garner said. “I got a good girl.”
“That’s the way to talk,” Mrs. Garner said.
The horses were pulling heavily in the sand. Joe reached out in the dark
with the whip.
“Come on, pull into it. You’ll have to pull harder than this to-morrow.”
They trotted down the long hill, the wagon jolting. At the farmhouse
everybody got down. Mrs. Garner unlocked the door, went inside, and came
out with a lamp in her hand. Carl and Nick unloaded the things from the
back of the wagon. Frank sat on the front seat to drive to the barn and
put up the horses. Nick went up the steps and opened the kitchen door.
Mrs. Garner was building a fire in the stove. She turned from pouring
kerosene on the wood.
“Good-by, Mrs. Garner,” Nick said. “Thanks for taking me.”
“Oh shucks, Nickie.”
“I had a wonderful time.”
“We like to have you. Won’t you stay and eat some supper?”
“I better go. I think Dad probably waited for me.”
“Well, get along then. Send Carl up to the house, will you?”
“All right.”
“Good-night, Nickie.”
“Good-night, Mrs. Garner.”
Nick went out the farmyard and down to the barn. Joe and Frank were
milking.
“Good-night,” Nick said. “I had a swell time.”
“Good-night, Nick,” Joe Garner called. “Aren’t you going to stay and
eat?”
“No, I can’t. Will you tell Carl his mother wants him?”
“All right. Good-night, Nickie.”
Nick walked barefoot along the path through the meadow below the barn.
The path was smooth and the dew was cool on his bare feet. He climbed a
fence at the end of the meadow, went down through a ravine, his feet wet
in the swamp mud, and then climbed up through the dry beech woods until
he saw the lights of the cottage. He climbed over the fence and walked
around to the front porch. Through the window he saw his father sitting
by the table, reading in the light from the big lamp. Nick opened the
door and went in.
“Well, Nickie,” his father said, “was it a good day?”
“I had a swell time, Dad. It was a swell Fourth of July.”
“Are you hungry?”
“You bet.”
“What did you do with your shoes?”
“I left them in the wagon at Garner’s.”
“Come on out to the kitchen.”
Nick’s father went ahead with the lamp. He stopped and lifted the lid of
the ice-box. Nick went on into the kitchen. His father brought in a
piece of cold chicken on a plate and a pitcher of milk and put them on
the table before Nick. He put down the lamp.
“There’s some pie too,” he said. “Will that hold you?”
“It’s grand.”
His father sat down in a chair beside the oilcloth-covered table. He
made a big shadow on the kitchen wall.
“Who won the ball game?”
“Petoskey. Five to three.”
His father sat watching him eat and filled his glass from the
milk-pitcher. Nick drank and wiped his mouth on his napkin. His father
reached over to the shelf for the pie. He cut Nick a big piece. It was
huckleberry pie.
“What did you do, Dad?”
“I went out fishing in the morning.”
“What did you get?”
“Only perch.”
His father sat watching Nick eat the pie.
“What did you do this afternoon?” Nick asked.
“I went for a walk up by the Indian camp.”
“Did you see anybody?”
“The Indians were all in town getting drunk.”
“Didn’t you see anybody at all?”
“I saw your friend, Prudie.”
“Where was she?”
“She was in the woods with Frank Washburn. I ran onto them. They were
having quite a time.”
His father was not looking at him.
“What were they doing?”
“I didn’t stay to find out.”
“Tell me what they were doing.”
“I don’t know,” his father said. “I just heard them threshing around.”
“How did you know it was them?”
“I saw them.”
“I thought you said you didn’t see them.”
“Oh, yes, I saw them.”
“Who was it with her?” Nick asked.
“Frank Washburn.”
“Were they—were they——”
“Were they what?”
“Were they happy?”
“I guess so.”
His father got up from the table and went out the kitchen screen door.
When he came back Nick was looking at his plate. He had been crying.
“Have some more?” His father picked up the knife to cut the pie.
“No,” said Nick.
“You better have another piece.”
“No, I don’t want any.”
His father cleared off the table.
“Where were they in the woods?” Nick asked.
“Up back of the camp.” Nick looked at his plate. His father said, “You
better go to bed, Nick.”
“All right.”
Nick went into his room, undressed, and got into bed. He heard his
father moving around in the living-room. Nick lay in the bed with his
face in the pillow.
“My heart’s broken,” he thought. “If I feel this way my heart must be
broken.”
After a while he heard his father blow out the lamp and go into his own
room. He heard a wind come up in the trees outside and felt it come in
cool through the screen. He lay for a long time with his face in the
pillow, and after a while he forgot to think about Prudence and finally
he went to sleep. When he awoke in the night he heard the wind in the
hemlock trees outside the cottage and the waves of the lake coming in on
the shore, and he went back to sleep. In the morning there was a big
wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was
awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.
A CANARY FOR ONE
THE train passed very quickly a long, red stone house with a garden and
four thick palm-trees with tables under them in the shade. On the other
side was the sea. Then there was a cutting through red stone and clay,
and the sea was only occasionally and far below against rocks.
“I bought him in Palermo,” the American lady said. “We only had an hour
ashore and it was Sunday morning. The man wanted to be paid in dollars
and I gave him a dollar and a half. He really sings very beautifully.”
It was very hot in the train and it was very hot in the _lit salon_
compartment. There was no breeze came through the open window. The
American lady pulled the window-blind down and there was no more sea,
even occasionally. On the other side there was glass, then the corridor,
then an open window, and outside the window were dusty trees and an
oiled road and flat fields of grapes, with gray-stone hills behind them.
There was smoke from many tall chimneys—coming into Marseilles, and the
train slowed down and followed one track through many others into the
station. The train stayed twenty-five minutes in the station at
Marseilles and the American lady bought a copy of _The Daily Mail_ and a
half-bottle of Evian water. She walked a little way along the station
platform, but she stayed near the steps of the car because at Cannes,
where it stopped for twelve minutes, the train had left with no signal
of departure and she had only gotten on just in time. The American lady
was a little deaf and she was afraid that perhaps signals of departure
were given and that she did not hear them.
The train left the station in Marseilles and there was not only the
switch-yards and the factory smoke but, looking back, the town of
Marseilles and the harbor with stone hills behind it and the last of the
sun on the water. As it was getting dark the train passed a farmhouse
burning in a field. Motor-cars were stopped along the road and bedding
and things from inside the farmhouse were spread in the field. Many
people were watching the house burn. After it was dark the train was in
Avignon. People got on and off. At the news-stand Frenchmen, returning
to Paris, bought that day’s French papers. On the station platform were
negro soldiers. They wore brown uniforms and were tall and their faces
shone, close under the electric light. Their faces were very black and
they were too tall to stare. The train left Avignon station with the
negroes standing there. A short white sergeant was with them.
Inside the _lit salon_ compartment the porter had pulled down the three
beds from inside the wall and prepared them for sleeping. In the night
the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a _rapide_
and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night. The
American lady’s bed was the one next to the window. The canary from
Palermo, a cloth spread over his cage, was out of the draft in the
corridor that went into the compartment wash-room. There was a blue
light outside the compartment, and all night the train went very fast
and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck.
In the morning the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had
come out from the wash-room, looking very wholesome and middle-aged and
American in spite of not having slept, and had taken the cloth off the
birdcage and hung the cage in the sun, she went back to the
restaurant-car for breakfast. When she came back to the _lit salon_
compartment again, the beds had been pushed back into the wall and made
into seats, the canary was shaking his feathers in the sunlight that
came through the open window, and the train was much nearer Paris.
“He loves the sun,” the American lady said. “He’ll sing now in a little
while.”
The canary shook his feathers and pecked into them. “I’ve always loved
birds,” the American lady said. “I’m taking him home to my little girl.
There—he’s singing now.”
The canary chirped and the feathers on his throat stood out, then he
dropped his bill and pecked into his feathers again. The train crossed a
river and passed through a very carefully tended forest. The train
passed through many outside of Paris towns. There were tram-cars in the
towns and big advertisements for the Belle Jardinière and Dubonnet and
Pernod on the walls toward the train. All that the train passed through
looked as though it were before breakfast. For several minutes I had not
listened to the American lady, who was talking to my wife.
“Is your husband American too?” asked the lady.
“Yes,” said my wife. “We’re both Americans.”
“I thought you were English.”
“Oh, no.”
“Perhaps that was because I wore braces,” I said. I had started to say
suspenders and changed it to braces in the mouth, to keep my English
character. The American lady did not hear. She was really quite deaf;
she read lips, and I had not looked toward her. I had looked out of the
window. She went on talking to my wife.
“I’m so glad you’re Americans. American men make the best husbands,” the
American lady was saying. “That was why we left the Continent, you know.
My daughter fell in love with a man in Vevey.” She stopped. “They were
simply madly in love.” She stopped again. “I took her away, of course.”
“Did she get over it?” asked my wife.
“I don’t think so,” said the American lady. “She wouldn’t eat anything
and she wouldn’t sleep at all. I’ve tried so very hard, but she doesn’t
seem to take an interest in anything. She doesn’t care about things. I
couldn’t have her marrying a foreigner.” She paused. “Some one, a very
good friend, told me once, ‘No foreigner can make an American girl a
good husband.’”
“No,” said my wife, “I suppose not.”
The American lady admired my wife’s travelling-coat, and it turned out
that the American lady had bought her own clothes for twenty years now
from the same maison de couturier in the Rue Saint Honoré. They had her
measurements, and a vendeuse who knew her and her tastes picked the
dresses out for her and they were sent to America. They came to the
post-office near where she lived up-town in New York, and the duty was
never exorbitant because they opened the dresses there in the
post-office to appraise them and they were always very simple-looking