The First Willa Cather Megapack Page 10

  When they reached the red house behind the hill they had considerable trouble in finding the wizard, and the miller’s boy pounded on the door until his knuckles were quite blue. At last a big, jolly looking man with a red cap on his head came to the window. The Princess rode her donkey up quite close to the window and told him what she wanted. The fat wizard leaned up against the window sill and laughed until the tears came to his eyes, and the Princess again felt that her dignity was hurt.

  “So you want to be enchanted, do you, so a Prince can come and release you? Who sent you here? It was that lean rascal of a Jack, I’ll warrant, he’s always putting up jokes on me. This is a little the best yet. Has it occurred to you that when your Prince comes he will certainly kill me? That’s the way they always do, you know, they slay the cruel enchanter and then bear off the maiden.”

  The Princess looked puzzled. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “in this case, if you leave me the power of speech, I will request him not to. It’s unusual, but I should hate to have him kill you.”

  “Thank you, my dear, now I call that considerate. But there is another point. Suppose your Prince should not hear of you, and should never come?”

  “But they always do come,” objected Baladina.

  “Not always, I’ve known them to tarry a good many years. No, I positively cannot enchant you until you find your Prince.”

  Baladina turned her donkey and went slowly down to the road leaving the fat wizard still laughing in the window.

  “How disobliging these wizards seem to be, but this one seems to mean well. I believe they are afraid to undertake it with a Princess. Do you know where we can find a Prince?”

  The miller’s boy shook his head. “No, I don’t know of any at all.”

  “Then I suppose we must just hunt for one,” said Baladina.

  They asked several carters whom they met if they knew where a Prince was to be found, but they all laughed so that Baladina grew quite discouraged. She stopped one boy on horseback and asked if he were a Prince in disguise, but he indignantly denied the charge.

  So they went up the road and down a country lane that ran under the willow trees, and when they were both very tired and hungry Baladina opened her handkerchief and gave the miller’s boy a bun. He refused the raisin cake, although he looked longingly at it, for he saw there was scarcely enough for two. Baladina sat down and ate it in the shade while he pulled some grass for the donkey. After their lunch they went on again. Just at the top of a hill they met a young man riding a black horse with a pack of hounds running beside him. “I know he is a Prince out hunting. You must stop him,” whispered Baladina. So the miller’s boy ran on ahead and shouted to the horseman.

  “Are you a Prince, sir?” asked Baladina as she approached.

  “Yes, miss, I am,” he replied curtly.

  Nothing daunted Baladina told her story. The young man laughed and said impatiently.

  “You foolish child, have you stopped me all this time to tell me a fairy tale? Go home to your parents and let me follow my dogs, I have no time to be playing with silly little girls,” and rode away.

  “How unkind of him to talk so,” said the Princess, “besides, he is very little older than I.”

  “If he were here, I’d thrash him!” declared the miller’s boy stoutly, clenching his fist.

  They went on for a little while in a spiritless sort of way, but the boy hurt his toe on a stone until it bled and the Princess was hot and dusty and ached in every bone of her body. Suddenly she stopped the donkey and began to cry.

  “There, there,” said the miller’s boy kindly, “don’t do that. I’ll find a Prince for you. You go home and rest and I’ll hunt until I find one, if it takes for ever.”

  Baladina dried her tears and spoke with sudden determination.

  “You shall be my Prince yourself. I know you are one, really. You must be a changeling left at the mill by some wicked fairy who stole you from your palace.”

  The boy shook his head stubbornly. “No, I wish I were, but I am only a miller’s boy.”

  “Well, you are the only nice person I have met all day; you have walked till your feet are sore and have let me ride your donkey, and your face is all scratched by the briars and you have had no dinner, and if you are not a Prince, you ought to be one. You are Prince enough for me, anyway. But I am so tired and hungry now, we will go home to the palace tonight and I will be enchanted in the morning. Come, get on the donkey and take me in front of you.”

  In vain he protested that the donkey could not carry them both, the Princess said that a Prince could not walk.

  “I wish you had on shoes and stockings, though,” she said. “I think a Prince should always have those.”

  “I have some for Sunday,” said the miller’s boy, “if I had only known I would have brought them.”

  As they turned slowly out of the lane they met a party of horsemen who were hunting for the Princess, and the king himself was among them.

  “Ha there, you precious runaway, so here you are, and who is this you have with you?”

  “He is my Prince,” said the Princess, “and he is to have half the kingdom.”

  “Oh-h, he is, is he? Who are you, my man?”

  “Please, sir, I am only the miller’s son, but the Princess was hunting for a Prince and could’nt find one, so she asked me to be one.”

  “Hear, gentlemen, the Princess is out Prince-hunting early. Come here you little baggage.” He lifted her on the saddle in front of him.

  “He must come too, for he is my Prince!” cried the wilful Princess.

  But the king only laughed and gave the boy a gold piece, and rode away followed by his gentlemen, who were all laughing too. The miller’s boy stood by his donkey, looking wistfully after them, and the Princess Baladina wept bitterly at the dearth of Princes.

  TOMMY, THE UNSENTIMENTAL

  “Your Father says he has no business tact at all, and of course that’s dreadfully unfortunate.”

  “Business,” replied Tommy, “he’s a baby in business; he’s good for nothing on earth but to keep his hair parted straight and wear that white carnation in his buttonhole. He has ’em sent down from Hastings twice a week as regularly as the mail comes, but the drafts he cashes lie in his safe until they are lost, or somebody finds them. I go up occasionally and send a package away for him myself. He’ll answer your notes promptly enough, but his business letters—I believe he destroys them unopened to shake the responsibility of answering them.”

  “I am at a loss to see how you can have such patience with him, Tommy, in so many ways he is thoroughly reprehensible.”

  “Well, a man’s likeableness don’t depend at all on his virtues or acquirements, nor a woman’s either, unfortunately. You like them or you don’t like them, and that’s all there is to it. For the why of it you must appeal to a higher oracle than I. Jay is a likeable fellow, and that’s his only and sole acquirement, but after all it’s a rather happy one.”

  “Yes, he certainly is that,” replied Miss Jessica, as she deliberately turned off the gas jet and proceeded to arrange her toilet articles. Tommy watched her closely and then turned away with a baffled expression.

  Needless to say, Tommy was not a boy, although her keen gray eyes and wide forehead were scarcely girlish, and she had the lank figure of an active half grown lad. Her real name was Theodosia, but during Thomas Shirley’s frequent absences from the bank she had attended to his business and correspondence signing herself “T. Shirley,” until everyone in Southdown called her “Tommy.” That blunt sort of familiarity is not unfrequent in the West, and is meant well enough. People rather expect some business ability in a girl there, and they respect it immensely. That, Tommy undoubtedly had, and if she had not, things would have gone at sixes and sevens in the Southdown National. For Thomas Shirley had big
land interests in Wyoming that called him constantly away from home, and his cashier, little Jay Ellington Harper, was, in the local phrase, a weak brother in the bank. He was the son of a friend of old Shirley’s, whose papa had sent him West, because he had made a sad mess of his college career, and had spent too much money and gone at too giddy a pace down East. Conditions changed the young gentleman’s life, for it was simply impossible to live either prodigally or rapidly in Southdown, but they could not materially affect his mental habits or inclinations. He was made cashier of Shirley’s bank because his father bought in half the stock, but Tommy did his work for him.

  The relation between these two young people was peculiar; Harper was, in his way, very grateful to her for keeping him out of disgrace with her father, and showed it by a hundred little attentions which were new to her and much more agreeable than the work she did for him was irksome. Tommy knew that she was immensely fond of him, and she knew at the same time that she was thoroughly foolish for being so. As she expressed it, she was not of his sort, and never would be. She did not often take pains to think, but when she did she saw matters pretty clearly, and she was of a peculiarly unfeminine mind that could not escape meeting and acknowledging a logical conclusion. But she went on liking Jay Ellington Harper, just the same. Now Harper was the only foolish man of Tommy’s acquaintance. She knew plenty of active young business men and sturdy ranchers, such as one meets about live Western towns, and took no particular interest in them, probably just because they were practical and sensible and thoroughly of her own kind. She knew almost no women, because in those days there were few women in Southdown who were in any sense interesting, or interested in anything but babies and salads. Her best friends were her father’s old business friends, elderly men who had seen a good deal of the world, and who were very proud and fond of Tommy. They recognized a sort of squareness and honesty of spirit in the girl that Jay Ellington Harper never discovered, or, if he did, knew too little of its rareness to value highly. Those old speculators and men of business had always felt a sort of responsibility for Tom Shirley’s little girl, and had rather taken her mother’s place, and been her advisers on many points upon which men seldom feel at liberty to address a girl. She was just one of them; she played whist and billiards with them, and made their cocktails for them, not scorning to take one herself occasionally. Indeed, Tommy’s cocktails were things of fame in Southdown, and the professional compounders of drinks always bowed respectfully to her as though acknowledging a powerful rival.

  Now all these things displeased and puzzled Jay Ellington Harper, and Tommy knew it full well, but clung to her old manner of living with a stubborn pertinacity, feeling somehow that to change would be both foolish and disloyal to the Old Boys. And as things went on, the seven Old Boys made greater demands upon her time than ever, for they were shrewd men, most of them, and had not lived fifty years in this world without learning a few things and unlearning many more. And while Tommy lived on in the blissful delusion that her role of indifference was perfectly played and without a flaw, they suspected how things were going and were perplexed as to the outcome. Still, their confidence was by no means shaken, and as Joe Elsworth said to Joe Sawyer one evening at billiards, “I think we can pretty nearly depend on Tommy’s good sense.”

  They were too wise to say anything to Tommy, but they said just a word or two to Thomas Shirley, Sr., and combined to make things very unpleasant for Mr. Jay Ellington Harper.

  At length their relations with Harper became so strained that the young man felt it would be better for him to leave town, so his father started him in a little bank of his own up in Red Willow. Red Willow, however, was scarcely a safe distance, being only some twenty-five miles north, upon the Divide, and Tommy occasionally found excuse to run upon her wheel to straighten out the young man’s business for him. So when she suddenly decided to go East to school for a year, Thomas, Sr., drew a sigh of great relief. But the seven Old Boys shook their heads; they did not like to see her gravitating toward the East; it was a sign of weakening, they said, and showed an inclination to experiment with another kind of life, Jay Ellington Harper’s kind.

  But to school Tommy went, and from all reports conducted herself in a most seemly manner; made no more cocktails, played no more billiards. She took rather her own way with the curriculum, but she distinguished herself in athletics, which in Southdown counted for vastly more than erudition.

  Her evident joy on getting back to Southdown was appreciated by everyone. She went about shaking hands with everybody, her shrewd face, that was so like a clever wholesome boy’s, held high with happiness. As she said to old Joe Elsworth one morning, when they were driving behind his stud through a little thicket of cottonwood scattered along the sunparched bluffs,

  “It’s all very fine down East there, and the hills are great, but one gets mighty homesick for this sky, the old intense blue of it, you know. Down there the skies are all pale and smoky. And this wind, this hateful, dear, old everlasting wind that comes down like the sweep of cavalry and is never tamed or broken, O Joe, I used to get hungry for this wind! I couldn’t sleep in that lifeless stillness down there.”

  “How about the people, Tom?”

  “O, they are fine enough folk, but we’re not their sort, Joe, and never can be.”

  “You realize that, do you, fully?”

  “Quite fully enough, thank you, Joe.” She laughed rather dismally, and Joe cut his horse with the whip.

  The only unsatisfactory thing about Tommy’s return was that she brought with her a girl she had grown fond of at school, a dainty, white languid bit of a thing, who used violet perfumes and carried a sunshade. The Old Boys said it was a bad sign when a rebellious girl like Tommy took to being sweet and gentle to one of her own sex, the worst sign in the world.

  The new girl was no sooner in town than a new complication came about. There was no doubt of the impression she made on Jay Ellington Harper. She indisputably had all those little evidences of good breeding that were about the only things which could touch the timid, harrassed young man who was so much out of his element. It was a very plain case on his part, and the souls of the seven were troubled within them. Said Joe Elsworth to the other Joe,

  “The heart of the cad is gone out to the little muff, as is right and proper and in accordance with the eternal fitness of things. But there’s the other girl who has the blindness that may not be cured, and she gets all the rub of it. It’s no use, I can’t help her, and I am going to run down to Kansas City for awhile. I can’t stay here and see the abominable suffering of it.” He didn’t go, however.

  There was just one other person who understood the hopelessness of the situation quite as well as Joe, and that was Tommy. That is, she understood Harper’s attitude. As to Miss Jessica’s she was not quite so certain, for Miss Jessica, though pale and languid and addicted to sunshades, was a maiden most discreet. Conversations on the subject usually ended without any further information as to Miss Jessica’s feelings, and Tommy sometimes wondered if she were capable of having any at all.

  At last the calamity which Tommy had long foretold descended upon Jay Ellington Harper. One morning she received a telegram from him begging her to intercede with her father; there was a run on his bank and he must have help before noon. It was then ten thirty, and the one sleepy little train that ran up to Red Willow daily had crawled out of the station an hour before. Thomas Shirley, Sr., was not at home.

  “And it’s a good thing for Jay Ellington he’s not, he might be more stony hearted than I,” remarked Tommy, as she closed the ledger and turned to the terrified Miss Jessica. “Of course we’re his only chance, no one else would turn their hand over to help him. The train went an hour ago and he says it must be there by noon. It’s the only bank in the town, so nothing can be done by telegraph. There is nothing left but to wheel for it. I may make it, and I may not. Jess, you scamper up to the ho
use and get my wheel out, the tire may need a little attention. I will be along in a minute.”

  “O, Theodosia, can’t I go with you? I must go!”

  “You go! O, yes, of course, if you want to. You know what you are getting into, though. It’s twenty-five miles uppish grade and hilly, and only an hour and a quarter to do it in.”

  “O, Theodosia, I can do anything now!” cried Miss Jessica, as she put up her sunshade and fled precipitately. Tommy smiled as she began cramming bank notes into a canvas bag. “May be you can, my dear, and may be you can’t.”

  The road from Southdown to Red Willow is not by any means a favorite bicycle road; it is rough, hilly and climbs from the river bottoms up to the big Divide by a steady up grade, running white and hot through the scorched corn fields and grazing lands where the long-horned Texan cattle browse about in the old buffalo wallows. Miss Jessica soon found that with the pedaling that had to be done there was little time left for emotion of any sort, or little sensibility for anything but the throbbing, dazzling heat that had to be endured. Down there in the valley the distant bluffs were vibrating and dancing with the heat, the cattle, completely overcome by it, had hidden under the shelving banks of the “draws,” and the prairie dogs had fled to the bottom of their holes that are said to reach to water. The whirr of the seventeen-year locust was the only thing that spoke of animation, and that ground on as if only animated and enlivened by the sickening, destroying heat. The sun was like hot brass, and the wind that blew up from the south was hotter still. But Tommy knew that wind was their only chance. Miss Jessica began to feel that unless she could stop and get some water she was not much longer for this vale of tears. She suggested this possibility to Tommy, but Tommy only shook her head, “Take too much time,” and bent over her handle bars, never lifting her eyes from the road in front of her. It flashed upon Miss Jessica that Tommy was not only very unkind, but that she sat very badly on her wheel and looked aggressively masculine and professional when she bent her shoulders and pumped like that. But just then Miss Jessica found it harder than ever to breathe, and the bluffs across the river began doing serpentines and skirt dances, and more important and personal considerations occupied the young lady.