Mary Hallock Foote

“ Moya, always helplessly natural, and now very tired as well, when Paul described with his usual gravity this anti-climax, fell below all the dignities at once in a burst of childish giggling. Paul looked on with an embarrassed smile, like a puzzled affectionate dog at the incomprehensible mirth of humans. Paul was certainly deficient in humor and therefore in breadth. But what woman ever loved her lover the less for having discovered his limitations? Humor runs in families of the intenser cultivation. The son of the soil remains serious in the face of life's and nature's ironies. ”

“ The slope of his chest is like the roof of a house. The only time I envy Moya is when she lays her head down on it and tries to meet her arms around him as if he were a tree, and he strokes her hair as if his hand was a bough! If ever I marry a soldier he shall be a colonel with a white mustache and a burnt-sienna complexion, and a sword-belt that measures—what is the colonel's waist-measure, do you suppose?”
Mrs. Bogardus listened to this nonsense with the smile of a silent woman who has borne a child that can talk. ”

“ That forsworn identity which Adam Bogardus had submitted to be clothed in as a burial garment was now become a thing for the living to flee from. He had seen a woman in full health whiten and cower before it;—she who stood beside his bed and looked at him with dreadful eyes, eyes of his girl-wife growing old in the likeness of her father. Hard, reluctant eyes forced to own the truth which the ashen lips denied. Are we responsible for our silences? He had not spoken to her. Nay, the living must speak first, or the ghostly dead depart unquestioned. ”

“ That year which took Emmy's mother from her brought to the child her first young companion and friend. Adam Bogardus came as chore-boy to the farm,—an only child himself, and sensitive through the clashing of gentle instincts with rough and inferior surroundings; brought up in that depressed God-fearing attitude in which a widow not strong, and earning her bread, would do her duty by an only son. Not a natural fighter, she took what little combativeness he had out of him, and made his school-days miserable—a record of humiliations that sunk deep and drove him from his kind. ”

“ I gave you all I could, remembrance, faith till death.”
“Then you are my own!” said Paul, his face transformed. “God was our witness. Life of my life—for life and death!” Solemnly he took a bridegroom's kiss from her lips.
“How do you know that it is life that parts?”
“Speak so I can understand you!” Moya cried. “Ah, if I might! A man must not have secrets from his wife. Secrets are destruction, don't you think?”
Moya waited in silence. ”

“ Mrs. Bogardus spoke with earnestness. “We can't all be dreamers like Paul or privileged persons like you. There has to be one in every family to say the things no one likes to hear and do the things nobody likes to do.”
“We are the rich repiners and you are the household drudge!” Christine shouted, laughing at her own wit.
“Hush, hush!” her mother smiled. “Don't make so much noise.”
“I should like to know who's to be the drudge in Paul's privileged family. It doesn't strike me it's going to be Moya. And Paul only drudges for people he doesn't know.” ”

“ Paul, dear, it isn't nice to have convictions when one is young and going to be married. You know it isn't. It's not poetic, and it's not polite, and it's a dreadful bore!”
The altruist and lover winced at this. Allowing for exaggeration, which was the life of speech with her, he knew that Moya was giving him a bit of her true self, that changeful, changeless self which goes behind all law and “follows joy and only joy.” Her voice dropped into its sweetest tones of intimacy.
“Why need we live in a crowd? Why must we be pressed upon with all this fuss and doing? ”

“ I should be a lost man the moment I ventured out of call. Woodcraft must be a sixth sense which we lost with the rest of our Eden birthright when we strayed from innocence, when we ceased to sleep with one ear on the ground, and to spell our way by the moss on tree-trunks. In these solitudes, as we call them, ranks and clouds of witnesses rise up to prove us deaf and blind. Busy couriers are passing every moment of the day; and we do not see, nor hear, nor understand. We are the stocks and stones. Packer John is our only wood-sharp;—yet the last half of the name doesn't altogether fit him. ”

“ Confess you are glad I am a Bevier and a Broderick and a Van Elten, as well as a Bogardus.”
“I shall confess nothing of the kind. Now you do talk like a nouveau Paul, dear,” said Moya, with her caressing eyes on his—they had paused under the lamp at the top of the steps—“I think your father must have been a very good man.”
“All our fathers were,” Paul averred, smiling at her earnestness.
“Yes, but yours in particular; because you are an angel; and your mother is quite human, is she not?—almost as human as I am? ”

“ Mrs. Bogardus sat with her hands clasped in her lap. She was motionless, but the creaking of her silks could be heard as her bosom rose and fell. After a moment she said: “Paul's tray is on the table in the dining-room. Will you take it when you go up?”
Moya altered her own manner instantly. “But you?” she hesitated. “I must not crowd you out of all your mother privileges. You have handed over everything to me.”
“A mother's privilege is to see herself no longer needed. I can do nothing more for my son”—her smile was hard—“except take care of his money.”
“Paul's mother!” ”

“ Something good ought to be done with that money to redeem its history.”
“You must not be morbid, Paul.”
“That sounds like mother,” said Paul, smiling. “She is always jealous for our happiness; because she lost her own, I think, and paid so heavily for ours. She prizes pleasure and success, even worldly success, for us.”
“I don't blame her!” cried Moya.
“No; of course not. But you mustn't both be against me, and Chrissy, too. She is so, unconsciously; she does not know the pull there is on me, through knowing things she doesn't dream of, and that I can never forget.”
“No,” said Moya. ”

“ Her eyes shone dark against the fresh wind color in her cheeks. She had the straight, hard, ophidian line concealing the eyelid, which gives such a peculiar strength to the direct gaze of a pair of dark eyes. If one suspects the least touch of tenderness, possibly of pain, behind that iron fold, it lends a fascination equal to the strength. There was some excitement in Mrs. Bogardus's manner, but Cerissa did not know her well enough to perceive it. ”

“ Moya would muse. “We are as nearly two alone as any two could be.”
“If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know.”
“Snake or Seraph—I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot have you thinking things.”
“I?—what do I think?”
“You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do. And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has never been reached. ”

“ When women are shut up together in country houses for the summer, they can irritate each other in the most foolish ways. Mrs. Bogardus never got upon your nerves.
But, for Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. “She is a queen of mothers!” she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. ”

“ Moya compared it to a bit of the dead moon fallen to show us what we are coming to. They paced it soft-footed in tennis shoes lest they should crumble its talc-like whiteness. But they read no horoscopes, for they were shy of the future in speaking to each other,—and they made no plans.
One evening Moya had said to Paul: “I can understand your mother so much better now that I am a wife. I think most women have a tendency towards the state of being unmarried. And if one had—children, it would increase upon one very fast. A widow and a mother—for twenty years. How could she be a wife again?” ”

“ Occasionally she left out the spirit; but the spirit leaves out no one.
Her long dark skirts were sweeping the autumn grass at sunset as she paced back and forth under the red-gold tents of the maples. It was a row of young trees she had planted to grace a certain turf walk at the top of the low wall that divided, by a drop of a few feet, the west lawn at Stone Ridge from the meadow where the beautiful Alderneys were pastured. The maples turned purple as the light faded out of their tops and struck flat across the meadow, making the grass vivid as in spring. ”

“ Bogardus laughed.
“But I'm paying a man to do it for him. It upsets my contract with that other fellow for Paul to do his work. We have a claim on what we pay for in this world.”
“I suppose we have. But Paul thinks that nothing can pay the price of those artificial relations between man and man. I think that's the way he puts it.”
“Good Heavens! Has the boy read history? It's a relation that began when the world was made, and will last while men are in it.”
“I am not defending Paul's ideas, Colonel. I have a great sympathy with tyrants myself. You must talk to him. He will amuse you.” ”

“ The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance on the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required? The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must suffer, but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya seemed a trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which she was naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded into an evening of subtle sadness. ”

“ She was very striking with the high color and brilliant eyes that mail-time fever breeds. Christine looked at her with freshly aroused curiosity, moved by her mother's unwonted burst of praise. The faintest tinge of jealousy made her feel naughty. As Moya went down the board walk, the colonel's orderly came springing up the steps to meet her with the mail-bag. He saluted and turned off at an angle down the embankment not to present his back to the ladies.
“Did you see that! He never raised his eyes. They are like priests. You can't make them look at you.” ”

“ It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of enterprise. ”

“ Moya had often noticed how uncritical she was of Christine's “unruly member.”
“It isn't polite to speak of waist-measures to middle-aged persons like your mother and the colonel,” she said placidly. “You like it very much out here?”
“Fascinating! Never had such a good time in my whole life.”
“And you like the West altogether? Would you like to live here?”
“Oh, if it came to living, I should want to be sure there was a way out.”
“There generally is a way out of most things. But it costs something.” Mrs. Bogardus was so concise in her speech as at times to be almost oracular. ”

“ Christine followed her mother to their room, and the two faced each other a moment in pale silence.
Mrs. Bogardus spoke first. “What does this mean?”—her breath came short, perhaps from climbing the stairs. She was a large woman.
“What does what mean? I don't understand you, mother.”
“Ah, child, don't repulse me! Twice you and Moya have nearly quarreled about those men. Why were you so rude to her? Why did you behave so about her letter?”
“Paul is so intolerant! And the airs he puts on! If he is my own brother I must say he's an awful prig about other men.” ”

“ Bogardus denied it fiercely. “Who says he is ill? He is starved and frozen. He is just out of the grave. You must be good to him, Moya. Warm him, comfort him! You can give him the life he needs. Your hands are as soft as little birds. They comfort even me. Oh, don't you understand!”
“Of course I understand!” Moya answered, her face aflame. “But I cannot marry Paul. He has got to marry me.”
“What nonsense that is! People say to a girl: 'You can't be too cold before you are married or too kind after!' That does not mean you and Paul. ”

“ Moya sighed incredulously. What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler vocations Paul's father should have been just a plain “hired man.” Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's man, even enlisted man, though that were bad enough—any of these he might have been in an accidental way, that at least would have been picturesque; but it is only the possession of land, by whatsoever means or title, that can dignify an habitual personal contact with it in the form of soil. That is one of the accepted prejudices which one does not meddle with at nineteen. “Youth is conservative because it is afraid.” ”

“ With a gesture, Moya protested against this wild prophecy; but as Paul's mother left the room she rushed upon her father, crying: “Tell me the truth! What do you think of it? Did you ever hear of such a dastardly thing?”
“It was a rout,” said the colonel coolly. “They were in full flight before the enemy.”
“What enemy? They deserted a wounded comrade, and a servant at that!”
“The enemy was panic,—panic, my dear. In these woods I've seen strong men go half beside themselves with fear of something—the Lord knows what! Then, add the winter and what they had seen and heard of that. ”

“ It was I who accused them first—and then I asked him:—if there was anything he could say in their defense, to say it, for Chrissy's sake! 'I will never break bread with them again,' said he,—'either Banks or Horace. I will not eat with them, or drink with them, or speak with them again!' Think of it! How are we to live? How are they to inhabit the same city? He thinks I have been weak. I am weak! The only power I have is through—the property. Banks will never marry a poor girl. ”

“ He does what I like a man to do. I don't enjoy people who have wills and purposes. It may be very horrid of me, but I wouldn't be in Moya's place for worlds.”
“You poor child! You poor, unhappy child!”
“Why am I unhappy? Has Paul added so much to our income since he left college?”
“Paul does not make money; neither does he selfishly waste it. He has a conscience in his use of what he has.”
“I don't see what conscience has to do with it. When it is gone it's gone.”
“You will learn what conscience has to do with a man's spending if ever you try to make both ends meet with Banks Bowen. ”

“ Paul was silent.
“She must think you a deserter. And there is bigger work for you, too! Here is a great political fight on, and my husband is not in it. Every man must slay his dragon. There is a whole city of dragons!”
“Yes,” smiled Paul; “I see. You want me to put my legs under the same cloth with Banks and ask him about his golf score.”
“If you want to fight him, have it out on public grounds; fight him in politics.”
“We are on the same side!”
Moya laughed, but she looked a little dashed.
“Banks comes of gentlemen. He inherited his opinions,” said Paul. ”

“ The straight demands of justice are frequently hard to meet, but its ironies are crushing. Mrs. Bogardus had fallen back on the line of a mother's duty since that moment of personal accountability. She read the unspoken reverence in the eyes of all around her, but she put in no disclaimer. Her past was not her own. She could not sin alone. Only those who have been honest are privileged under all conditions to remain so.
On his arrival with the doctor, Paul endeavored first to see his mother alone. ”

“ Mothers and sons are rarely very personal in their intimacy after the son has taken to himself a wife. Apart from certain moments not appropriate to piazza teas, Paul and his mother were perhaps as comfortable together as the relation averages. It was much that they never talked emotionally. Private judgments which we have refrained from putting into words may die unfruitful and many a bitter crop be spared.
“This is Paul's apology for being happy in spite of himself—and of us!” Moya teased, as she admired the beautifully drawn plans for the quarrymen's club-house. ”