Honoré Willsie

“ They pitied the boss. They considered me as a poor, well-meaning nut. Why, why, with a so-called art which, they said, some people at least liked, why jeopardize it by an act like this?
Good heavens! as if talent was so fragile a thing that a child riproaring about the house could destroy it! If my talent was of so frail an order, it was not art at all that I was cultivating, but sickly temperament, and the sooner I discovered it and changed my work, the better.
The happiest thing about life is that nothing lasts forever. How unendurable living would be if this were not so. ”

“ The next night, Kent came out to the cottage. Lydia dreaded his coming so little that she was surprised. Yet this day had been one of continual surprise to her. She had wakened to a dawn of robin songs, and had dressed with an answering song in her own heart. She was as one who had never known sorrow or anxiety. Her whole future lay before her, a clear and unobstructed pathway.
For Lydia had found herself. She was a creature to whom a great love and devotion were essential as motive forces. ”

“ Come, grandfather!"
They hastened out into the glory and tangle of the garden. The air was all aglow with the yellow of the sunshine and the flitter of dragon-fly wings, and all a-drone with honey-bees. Over in the far corner, near the locust-trees, they paused, the old man with a quavering little "Oh, Beatrice!" and the girl with a sigh of great content.
On a slender stalk, a little removed from the other plants, grew the rose, a thing of such fragile perfection that one trembled lest the butterfly which hovered above it might mar its delicacy. ”

“ Judith did not smile. "I fought and fought against it. But every year I saw you growing into a bigger, finer man than Lost Chief ever had known—a lonely sort of a man, not afraid to be laughed at even when it was about a matter of religion. I hated to see you making a fool of yourself, and yet I admired you for it. You grew so straight and self -controlled, and Doug, you are so wonderful to look at! Your father never dreamed of being as handsome as you. He's just a great animal. But no one can look into your eyes and not see how you've fought to make a man of yourself. I love you, Douglas!" ”

“ In summer the whole great State is a wonderland of color. Wide wheat lands of a delicate yellowish green sweep mile on mile till brought to pause by the black green of the woods. Mighty acres of corn land, blue-green, march on the heels of the wheat. Great pastures riotous with early goldenrod are thick dotted with milk herds. White farmhouses with red barns and little towns with gray roofs and green shaded streets dot the State like flower beds. ”

“ In the moments that followed, while the doctor inserted the silver tube, Mary Jane sat rigidly on her hands, her long legs twined in the chair rungs, waiting. Within the safe haven of the doctor's house, the full meaning of Baby Rose's peril swept into her brain and heart. If Baby Rose died! Never to hear the piping voice, never to feel the clinging hands! It was too terrible! Such a thing could not be. Nothing in the world mattered save that Baby Rose was dying. How lonely for such a little thing to die! Did nothing matter to God, anyhow? For the first time Mary Jane was facing Real Fear. ”

“ When Amos and Lydia arrived the Square was full of a laughing, chattering crowd. Well dressed men and women from the University and the lake shore, workingmen, smoking black pipes, pushing baby carriages, while their wives in Sunday best hung on their arms. Young boys and girls of Lydia's age chewed gum and giggled. Older boys and girls kept to the shadows of the elms and whispered. On the wooden platform extended from the granite steps of the Capitol, a band dispensed dance music and patriotic airs, breaking into "America" as Levine made his way to the front of the platform. ”

“ I have no regrets now for that tragedy of my childhood, though it took me many years to give up regretting. I do not think it a good or gracious thing for a human being to come through childhood without having looked upon some of the gaunt realities of life. Such glimpses tear away illusions while the mind is still plastic enough to reform to the actual, give a capacity for evaluating joy impossible to the untried child, give maturity a poise that life's worst blows can only temporarily disturb. ”

“ The infinite pain of learning that happiness and content cannot go hand in hand. World pain this, common to human thought, and Hugh was undergoing it to the uttermost. But superimposed upon this was an agony that was the very peak of suffering. Miriam! Miriam! The gay, the lovely, the fine! Miriam who urged him on to fight for the Children’s Code. Miriam, who understood him as no other human being did. Miriam, who was worth sacrificing Jessie for, who was pure and disinterested in motive Miriam, the lovely.
God in heaven, there was no such Miriam!
Love that comes with youth is ecstasy. ”

“ Like a flash Lydia saw again long aisles of pines, smelled again the odor of the needles, heard again the murmuring call of the wind.
"Good God!" cried Amos, tossing his pipe on the table, "poverty's hounded me all my life—poverty and death. The only two people who cared about me, Patience and Levine're gone. Yet here's the chance for me to be independent. Here's a chance for me to make up for the failure I've made of life. A man with a little piece of property like this and a little bank account is somebody in the community. ”

“ The same strange blue snow had obliterated their trail, and Tom, his bloody flanks deep in the drifts, leaped and slid and turned, leaving a wake, Judith said, like that of a drunken elephant.
The drifts had blown clear of the narrow ridge down which poor Buster had slid. They dared not trust the horses here, but dismounted and crept gingerly across, the animals slipping and snorting behind them. They rested after the crossing, and Douglas saw that tears were frozen on Judith's lashes. ”

“ As the evening drew to a close, and Amos went out to his chickens as usual after Lizzie had gone to bed, John turned to Lydia.
"What are you reading, these days, young Lydia?"
"Browning—'The Ring and the Book,'" replied Lydia.
John shook his head. "Really grown up, aren't you, Lydia? Do you enjoy being a young lady?"
"Yes, I do, only I miss the old days when I saw so much of you."
"Do you, my dear?" asked Levine, eagerly. "In what ways do you miss me?"
"Oh, every way! No one will ever understand me as you do."
"Oh, I don't know. There are Billy and Kent." ”

“ At the rear of the cave, ten feet above the floor, was a projecting mass of stone that the merciless red light of the sun pricked out in a horror of detail that instantly accounted for Red Wolf’s tale of fear and mystery. A gigantic bony head—the head of a horned toad magnified to the proportions of an elephant—a head with gaping, sagging lower jaw, armored with enormous teeth, with horned snout lifted as if it sniffed perpetually after an ever present enemy, with cavernous eye sockets, that glowered with horrible simulation of vision upon the scene of ancient carnage. ”

“ For clearly as though the pine had put it into words, something said to Lydia that it was not her business to decide whether or not the Indians deserved to live. It was her business to recognize that in their method of killing the Indians, the whites had been utterly dishonorable. That her refusing to take a stand could not exonerate them. History would not fail to record the black fact against her race that, a free people, the boasted vanguard of human liberty, Americans had first made a race dependent, then by fraud and faithlessness, by cruelty and debauchery, were utterly destroying it. ”

“ The coolness of the August wind touched Amos' face, "Oh! Patience, Patience—" he murmured.
Lydia sat for a moment or two with the sleeping baby in her arms, looking down on her with a curious gentle intentness. Then she rose carefully, and as carefully deposited little Patience on the bed. This done, she untied the balloon and carried it out with her to the little landing. There was a window here into which the August moon was beginning to shine. Lydia sat down with the balloon and felt of it carefully.
"Aren't balloons the most wonderful things, almost as wonderful as bubbles," she murmured. ”

“ Hugh tossed his arms above his head and groaned. Why pursue the struggle? He had nothing left to give. If he was not to know the great thing of which Jessie spoke so surely and so yearningly, he could go on without it, living as best he might from day to day, alone.
Alone. Aye, there was the point that probed deepest. Hugh knew now that he was not of the stuff that could live on alone, stripped of his profession, and of the fulfillment of that racial yearning that had been slowly rousing in him during the year’s struggle with the Children’s Code. He must have one or the other. ”

“ Hugh slipped a hackamore over the gray’s head and was fastening it to the bridge rail as the black leaped with all fours on his helpless foe. Hugh jumped aside, but not quite quickly enough to escape a flying hoof which ripped his corduroy jacket from neck to belt. The leaping black brought up against Fossil, still struggling to keep taut the lariat rope that now was beginning to twist the saddle. Fossil was in no mood to be tampered with and he promptly bit the black on the cheek with an expert incisiveness that brought the doughty warrior to a moment’s pause. ”

“ Levine," asked Lydia, "where'll the Indians go?"
John shrugged his shoulders. "Go to the devil, most of them."
"Oh, but that seems terrible!" cried Lydia.
"No more terrible than the way they live and die on the reservation. My dear child, don't develop any sentiment for the Indian. He's as doomed as the buffalo. It's fate or life or evolution working out—whatever your fancy names it. No sickly gush will stop it. As long as the Indian has a pine or a pelt, we'll exploit him. ”

“ And now for a while, Lydia was content to live absolutely in the present, as was Billy. Surely there never was such an April. And surely no April ever melted so softly into so glorious a May. Apple blossoms, lilac blooms, violets and wind flowers and through them, Lydia in her scholar's gown, hanging to Billy's arm, after the day's work was done. ”

“ Hugh raised his hand for silence and went on, “It doesn’t matter what I am. What does matter is what I can see and get you to see. All that I want to do is to make you view Wyoming as my Uncle Bookie did, here from this door-step. He saw Wyoming men and women as a breed different from other states because our plains and mountains make them so. He knew that folks born of such country as this had a chance to be bigger in mind and body than folks of lesser states. He knew that they had not only the chance but the obligation to be bigger. And he saw them failing to be so. It hurt the old man.” ”

“ And above the monster, crouched threateningly in mighty herbage, flew dragonflies, huge as the eagle in its nest in the butte side, and more horrible, more beautiful. Strange cries, strange scents, strange colors, and a loneliness more profound than savagery. Miriam suddenly glimpsed a vista of earth’s history that was mind shattering in its immensity. She knew now with appalling clarity what Hugh felt when he said that their little lives were too short! ”

“ His hat long since had rolled under the fence and his damp yellow hair gleamed in the brilliant sunlight. No one spoke. For a full five minutes the roan stood quiescent; then, agile as a cat, she lay down and rolled. She enjoyed this pastime for several moments, evidently under the impression that she was crushing John into the muck of the corral. But when she regained her feet he was in the saddle, and once more she resumed the bucking. John's face now was drawn and white under the dripping sweat. Again and again the blue roan threw herself against the fence. ”

“ I have often thought that love is more maligned than any other human gift. Great love is not blind. Great love sees with a clarity of vision that cannot be hoodwinked. Not that it was love that caused me at first to see my children's failings and to punish them with entire thoroughness.
I saw these children physically as their physician saw them, mentally and spiritually as their psychiatrist saw them. I was as much without prejudice or preconceived idea as you are when you spend a week-end with your old college chum and pass judgment on her children. ”

“ Fowler. "Douglas was right when he said that the whole world is hungry for a belief in immortality. And as long as the world exists it will have that hunger. And religion is God's answer to that hunger. Civilization without religion is the body without a soul. Religion brings a spiritual peace that man perpetually craves and that riches or women or horses or the hunt never brought and never can bring. At heart, there's not an unhappier man than you, Falkner. Why? Because you have no belief in immortality."
"Great God, Fowler, how can I believe in it when I can't?" shouted Charleton. ”

“ Lydia shook her head, though Billy's face in the moonlight after the graduation party, returned unexpectedly to her memory as she did so.
"There'll never be any one like you." Then moved by a sudden impulse she leaned toward him and said, "No matter what happens, you will always know that I love you, won't you, Mr. Levine?"
John looked at the wistful face, keenly. "Why, what could happen, young Lydia?" "Oh, lots of things! I'm grown up now and—and I have to make decisions about the rightness and the wrongness of things. But no matter what I decide, nothing can change my love for you." ”

“ He gave Homer a quick, casual glance, wheeled on his hind legs as Homer plunged his spurs into Theodore, and headed due north, his herd following helter-skelter.
It was vicious going from the very start. Now leaping a draw, now dropping into a cañon, now sliding, all fours stiff, into an unexpected wash, now flying up a narrow isthmus of land, broken stone scattering, hoofs thudding. Several brood-mares quit the race after a few moments, shying off into sheltered cañons where, trembling and panting, they watched the chase disappear into the beyond. ”

“ It is not only that I have become a member of a class that speaks the language of childhood, that can see life table-high with all its mysteries, incongruities, and joys, that my whole angle toward child training has shifted, but that there has come to me, just at what point I cannot say, a profound conviction that the little child who died so long ago has never died, can never die as long as my home shelters with the old devotion other children of another decade. ”

“ After she had told it all to Billy, and once more they were standing under the pine at the gate, she said,
"Billy, will you go up with Father and Lizzie and me to open up the three hundred and twenty acres?"
Billy answered slowly. "There's nothing I'd like better. I was born to be a farmer. But, Lydia, it looks to me as if, as a lawyer, I'd be a more useful citizen, the way things are now in the country."
Lydia shook her head. "We've got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is real love of America. ”

“ The hard, dry pellets of snow rattled on the trees. The horses, their chins hung with icicles, stood with bowed heads, motionless.
All of Doug's life passed in review before his sleepless eyes. He could not recall when he had not been shaping his days around Judith. Even when as children they had lived the snarling life of young pups, she had been the center of his universe. He wondered if love came to many men as it had come to him. ”

“ The tensity of Judith's expression did not relax. "I've told you why. I cannot bear to think of killing love by marriage. And it always works so. Always. And yet, O Douglas, I love you, love you!"
Douglas threw back his head with a sudden breath, swept Judith into his arms and kissed her, kissed her with all the ardor of years of repression. Judith clung to him as if she could not let him go. And yet, when he lifted his face from hers, she said, none the less firmly because her voice was husky:
"But, Douglas, I won't marry you!" ”

“ It is to one who was born with a love of books, to one who made books—good books—so intimate a part of her life that she made poverty a blessing, who combined books and living so deeply that she read her community aright, when others failed to do so, to one who is a scholar in the truest sense of the word—a book lover with a vision. I drink to the youngest and sweetest scholar of us all!" and he bowed to Lydia.
How she got through the congratulations and out to Billy, patiently waiting at the main campus gate, Lydia was not sure, for she was quite drunk with surprise and pleasure. ”

“ It was a heavenly night, with more than a hint of frost in the air, and the horses were as frolicsome as Prince.
"Now, will you tell me," asked Judith as she brought Buster back into the trail for the third time, "just why Charleton acted so?"
"It's just like I told you once," replied Douglas. "A man wants his own women to be straight no matter how much he does to make 'em crooked."
"Men are yellow," said Judith succinctly. "What's the use of Charleton—" She paused as if words failed her, and they rode their prancing horses in silence till John galloped up and pushed Beauty between them. ”

“ No marriage for me! No, sir!"
"But what will you do about love?" asked Douglas.
Judith's burning eyes grew soft. "Cherish it," she answered in a low voice. "Keep it forever. Never murder it by marriage. It's the most wonderful thing that comes into human life."
Douglas smiled sadly. "You talk as if you were a thousand years old, Judith, on the one hand and like a baby on the other. What will you do, marry without love? Somehow the children have got to be cared for by responsible parties."
"Responsible parties!" Jude was derisive. "Do you call Dad a responsible party?" ”

“ Douglas pulled up the panting horses, turned back to the wind and rested for a few moments, then put Tom to the climb. The snow was without crust but it was knee-deep and Tom didn't like it. He floundered and snorted, but Douglas spurred him relentlessly and they crested the shoulder without pause. Here, however, Doug decided to wait for the moon.
He moved into the shelter of a rock heap, for the wind was huge, and, beating his arms across his chest, waited with what patience he could muster. Where was she now? Could even her splendid courage stand up against the eerie loneliness. ”

“ Just tired and sweet and broken, about as well fitted to cope with her fiery daughter as with the unbroken Morgan colt which was John's pride. As for his father—! Douglas turned over with a deep breath. Let his father take heed! Judith! Judith with her glowing wistful eyes, her crimson cheeks, her dauntless courage, her vivid mind! Judith, with her loneliness, was his to guard from now on. Funny how a guy could feel so all of a sudden! Funny, if he really should love old Jude, with her fiery temper and more fiery tongue. And if this were love, love was not so comfortable a feeling, after all. ”

“ Judith drew a long breath and was silent.
"And so," said Douglas, "you are through with love and marriage. Yet no human being can be happy without both. Life is like that."
Judith sprang to her feet and Douglas rose with her. She began to walk rapidly up and down before the fire. It was so evident that a tempest was raging within her that Douglas watched her with astonishment and dismay. The sunshine flickered gloriously through the cedar branches. Wolf Cub gave cry after a coyote. It might have been a moment or a lifetime to the young rider before Judith halted in front of him. ”

“ Judith paused to take breath and Douglas asked, "Say, now listen, Jude, was Inez ever in love?"
"She says she's in love right now but she won't say who he is."
"I don't believe she knows what love is! Her ideas aren't worth anything. I've lost faith in these folks that tell you they know life. They're exactly like the rest of us under their skins. I'm getting to believe that we all get happiness in the same way and over mighty few things. Loving and having children, that's about all." ”