The Way of the Wind
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| While this book is full of dialect and very odd spelling, |
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THE WAY OF THE WIND
by
ZOE ANDERSON NORRIS
Drawings by Oberhardt
[Illustration: ZOE ANDERSON NORRIS]
New York
Published by the Author
1911
Copyright, 1911, by
Zoe Anderson Norris
Printed in the
United States of America
Published in October, 1911.
By Zoe Anderson Norris.
Office of the East Side Magazine,
338 East 15th St., New York
PROLOGUE
And as the sturdy Pilgrim Fathers cut their perilous way through the
dense and dangerous depths of the Forest Primeval for the setting up
of their hearthstones, so the courageous pioneers of the desolate and
treeless West were forced to fight the fury of the winds.
The graves of them lie mounded here and there in the uncultivated
corners of the fields, though more often one wanders across the level
country, looking for them in the places where they should be and are
not, because of the tall and waving corn that covers the length and
breadth of the land.
And yet the dead are not without memorial. Each steady stalk is a
plumed standard of pioneer conquest, and through its palmy leaves the
chastened wind remorsefully sighs requiems, chanting, whispering,
moaning and sighing from balmy springtime on through the heat of the
long summer days, until in the frost the farmers cutting the stalks
and stacking them evenly about in the semblance of long departed
tepees, leave no dangling blades to sigh through, nor tassels to
flout.
THE AUTHOR.
The Way of the Wind
CHAPTER I.
[Illustration]
Looking back upon it, the little Kentucky town seemed to blossom for
Celia like the rose, one broad expanse of sloping lawns bordered with
flower beds and shaded by quiet trees, elms and maples, brightly green
with young leaflets and dark with cedars and pines, as it was on the
day when she stood on the vine-covered veranda of her mother's home,
surrounded by friends come to say good-by.
Jane Whitcomb kissed her cheek as she tied the strings of her big poke
bonnet under her chin.
"I hope you will be happy out theah, Celia," she said; "but if it was
me and I had to go, I wouldn't. You couldn't get me to take such
risks. Wild horses couldn't. All them whut wants to go West to grow
up with the country can go, but the South is plenty good enough fo'
me."
"Fo' me, too," sighed Celia, homesickness full upon her with the
parting hour. "It's Seth makes me go. Accordin' to him, the West is
the futuah country. He has found a place wheah they ah goin' to build
a Magic City, he says. He's goin' to maik a fortune fo' me out theah,
he says, in the West."
"Growin' up with the country," interrupted Sarah Simpson, tying a
bouquet of flowers she had brought for Celia with a narrow ribbon of
delicate blue.
"Yes," admitted Celia, "growing up with the country."
Sarah handed her the flowers.
"It's my opinion," concluded she, "that it's the fools, beggin' youah
pahdon, whut's goin' out theah to grow up with the country, and the
wise peepul whut's stayin' at home and advisin' of 'em to go."
Celia shuddered.
"I'm ha'f afraid to go," she said. "They say the wind blows all the
time out theah. They say it nevah quits blowin'."
"'Taint laik as if you wus goin' to be alone out theah," comforted
Mansy Storm, who was busy putting away a little cake she had made
with her own hands for Celia's lunch basket. "Youah husband will be
out theah."
She closed the lid down and raised her head brightly.
"Whut diffunce does it maik?" she asked, "how ha'd the wind blows if
you've got youah husband?"
Lucy Brown flipped a speck of dust from the hem of Celia's travelling
dress.
"Yes," said she, "and such a husband!"
Celia looked wistfully out over the calm and quiet street, basking in
the sunlight, peacefully minus a ripple of breeze to break the beauty
of it, her large eyes sad.
"I'm afraid of the wind," she complained. "Sto'ms scah me."
And she reiterated:
"I'm afraid of the wind!"
Sarah suddenly ran down the walk on either side of which blossomed old
fashioned flowers, Marsh Marigolds, Johnny-Jump-Ups and Brown-Eyed
Susans. She stood at the front gate, which swung on its hinges,
leaning over it, looking down the road.
"I thoat I heahd the stage," she called back. "Yes. Suah enuf. Heah it
is, comin'."
At that Celia's mother, hurrying fearfully out the door, threw her
arms around her.
Celia fell to sobbing.
"It's so fah away," she stammered brokenly, between her sobs. "I'm
afraid ... to ... go.... It's so fah ... away!"
"Theah! theah!" comforted her mother, lifting up her face and kissing
it. "It's not so fah but you can come back again. The same road comes
that goes, deah one. Theah! Theah!"
"Miss Celia," cried a reproachful voice from the door. "Is you gwine
away, chile, widout tellin' youah black Mammy good-by?"
Celia unclasped her mother's arms, fell upon the bosom of her black
Mammy and wept anew.
"De Lawd be wid you, chile," cooed the voice of the negress, musical
with tenderness, "an' bring you back home safe an' soun' in His own
time."
The stage rolled up with clash and clatter and flap of curtain.
It stopped at the gate. There ensued the rush of departure, the
driver, after hoisting the baggage of his one passenger thereto,
looking stolidly down on the heartbreak from the height of his perch,
his long whip poised in midair.
Celia's friends swarmed about her. They kissed her. They essayed to
comfort her. They thrust upon her gifts of fruit and flowers and
dainties for her lunch.
They bore her wraps out to the cumbersome vehicle which was to convey
her to Lexington, the nearest town which at that time boasted of a
railroad. They placed her comfortably, turning again and again to give
her another kiss and to bid her good-by and God-speed.
It was as if her heartstrings wrenched asunder at the jerk of the
wheels that started the huge stage onward.
"Good-by, good-by!" she cried out, her pale face at the window.
"Good-by," they answered, and Mansy Storm, running alongside, said to
her:
"You give my love to Seth, Celia. Don't you fo'get."
Then breathlessly as the stage moved faster:
"If evah the Good Lawd made a man a mighty little lowah than the
angels," she added, "that man's Seth."
The old stage rumbled along the broad white Lexington pike, past
houses of other friends, who stood at gates to wave her farewell.
It rumbled past little front yards abloom with flowers, back of which
white cottages blinked sleepily, one eye of a shuttered window open,
one shut, past big stone gates which gave upon mansions of more
grandeur, past smaller farms, until at length it drew up at the
tollgate.
Here a girl with hair of sunshine, coming out, untied the pole and
raised it slowly.
"You goin' away, Miss Celia?" she asked in her soft Southern brogue,
tuneful as the ripple of water. "I heah sumbody say you was goin'
away."
Celia smothered a sob.
"Yes," she answered, "I am goin' away."
"It's a long, long way out theah to the West," commented the girl
wistfully as she counted out the change for the driver, "a long, long
way!"
As if the way had not seemed long enough!
Celia sobbed outright.
"Yes," she assented, "it is a long, long way!"
"I am sawy you ah goin', Miss Celia," said the girl. "Good-by. Good
luck to you!" And the stage moved on, Celia staring back at her with
wide sad eyes. The girl leaned forward, let the pole carefully down
and fastened it. As she did so a ray of sunshine made a halo of her
hair.
Celia flung herself back into the dimness of the corner and wept out
her heart. It seemed to her that, with the letting down of that pole,
she had been shut out of heaven.
CHAPTER II.
[Illustration]
In all her life Celia had not travelled further from her native town
than Lexington, which was thirty miles away. It was not necessary. She
lived in the garden spot of the world, an Eden with all things
sufficient for a simple life.
As she stood at the station, waiting for her train, an old negro
shuffled by. He hummed the refrain of "Old Kentucky Home," "Fare you
well, my lady!" It seemed meant for her. The longing was strong within
her to fly back to the old town she loved so well; but the train,
roaring in just then, intimidated her by its unaccustomed turmoil and
she allowed herself to be hauled on board by the brakeman and placed
in the car.
Passing into the open country, the speed of the train increased. The
smoke and cinders poured into the open window. Timid because of her
strange surroundings, she silently accepted the infliction, cowering
into her seat without attempting to put the window down. When a man in
the opposite seat leaned forward and pulled it down for her, she was
too abashed to thank him, but retained her crouching position and
began silently to weep.
A terrible night of travel began. It was a day car. Celia crouched
into her seat, trying to sleep, afraid of everything, of the staring
eyes of the porter, of the strange faces about her, of the jet black
of the night that gloomed portentously through the window.
Then came the dawn and with it the long gray bridge spanning the drab
and sullen Mississippi, then St. Louis, with its bustle and rush and
more and more strange faces, a sea of strange faces through which she
must pass.
After another weary day of travel through which she dozed, too tired
to think, too tired to move, at twilight she reached Kansas City, a
little town on the edge of the desert. Here, worn out mentally and
physically, she was forced to stop and rest a night and sleep in a
bed.
And the next day the wind!
A little way out from the town she could see it beginning, bending
the pliant prairie grasses to earth, flinging them fiercely upward,
crushing them flat again and pressing them there, whistling,
whistling, whistling!
The car moved fairly fast for a car of that day, but the wind moved
faster. It shook the windows with terrific force. It blew small grains
of sand under the sill to sting Celia, moaning, moaning, moaning in
its mad and unimpeded march across the country straight to the skies.
She looked out in dismay.
Back of her, on either side of her and beyond, stretched this vast
prairie country, desolate of shrub, undergrowth, or tree, a barren
waste, different from the beautiful, still, green garden spot that she
called home, a spot redolent of flowers, sweet with the odor of
new-mown grass, and pungent with whiff of pine and cedar, different as
night is from day.
Her heart sank within her as she looked.
It was late in the afternoon when she came to her station, a
collection of frame shanties dignified by that name, and Seth, tall,
tanned and radiant, clasped her in his arms, and man though he was,
shed tears of pure rapture.
His joy served to thrill her momentarily to the extent of forgetting
the wind, but with his departure for the vehicle which was to convey
her to their home, the discomfort of it returned to her.
The madness of it! The fury of it! Its fiendish joy! It tore at her
skirts. It wrapped them about her. It snatched them away again,
flapping them flaglike.
It was with difficulty that she kept her hat on her head. She held it
with both hands.
The wind seemed to make sport of her, to laugh at her. It treated her
as it would a tenderfoot. It tried to frighten her. It blew the
shutters of the shanties open and slammed them to with a noise like
guns. It shrieked maniacally as if rejoicing in her discomfort. At
times it seemed to hoot at her.
Added to this, when Seth returned for her with the vehicle, it proved
to be a common two-wheeled cart drawn by a mule, a tall, ungainly cart
of dull and faded blue.
She kept back the tears as Seth helped her in.
Then she sat silently by him throughout their jolting journey over the
prairie country into what seemed to her to be the Nowhere, listening
to the wind chant, now requiems, now dirges, listening to its shriek
and whistle, listening to it cry aloud and moan, die down to a
whisper, then rise once more and wail like a living thing in
unendurable pain.
Seth, too, by and by fell into silence, but from a different cause.
The wind failed to distress him. He had become accustomed to it in the
months spent in preparing her home. It was like an old friend that
sometimes whispered in his tired ears words of infinite sweetness. He
forgave the wanton shrieks of it because of this sweetness, the
sweetness of a capricious woman, all the more sweet because of her
capriciousness.
He was silent from pure happiness at having Celia there beside him,
going over the same road with him in the old blue cart.
From time to time he glanced at her timidly as if half afraid if he
looked too hard the wind might blow her away.
And, indeed, there did appear to be some danger; for the wind that had
loved Seth from the first was apparently jealous of Celia. It tore at
her as though to toss her to unreachable distances in the way it
ripped the tumbleweeds from their small brittle stems and tossed them
away.
Seth looked at her profile, white from the fatigue of the journey, but
beautiful as alabaster; at the blue of her eyes; at the delicate taper
of her small white hands that from her birth had done only the
daintiest of service; at the small feet that had never once walked the
rough and sordid pathway of toil.
Beautiful! Beautiful!
His eyes caressed her. Except that he must hold the reins both arms
would have encircled her. As it was, she rested in the strong and
tender half-circle of one.
All at once the wind became frantic. It blew and blew!
Finding it impossible to tear Celia from the tender circling of that
arm, it wreaked its vengeance upon the tumbleweeds, broke them
fiercely from their stems, and sent them pell-mell over the prairie
before the tall blue cart, about it, at the sides of it, a fantastic
cortege, airily tumbling, tumbling, tumbling!
Yes. The wind was jealous of Celia.
Strong as it was, it failed of accomplishing its will, which would
have been to snatch her from the cart and toss her to the horizon in
company with the tumbleweeds. It shrieked its despair, the despair of
a jealous woman balked of her vengeance, tumultuously wild.
At last at about twilight, at the time of day when the prairie skies
are mellow with tints fit for a Turner and the prairie winds sough
with the tenderness of lullabies, resting for a period, in order to
prepare for the fury of the night, they came upon the forks of the two
rivers, sparsely sheltered by a few straggling and wind-blown trees.
Seth reined in the animal, sprang down over the high wheel of the cart
and helped Celia out.
"Darling," he said, "let me welcome you home!"
"Home," she repeated. "Where is it?"
For she saw before her only a slight elevation in the earth's surface,
a mound enlarged.
Going down a few steps, Seth opened wide the door of their dugout,
looking gladly up at her, standing stilly there, a picture daintily
silhouetted by the pearl pink of the twilit sky.
"Heah!" he smiled.
Celia stared down into the darkness of it as into a grave.
"A hole in the ground," she cried.
Then, as the beflowered home she had left rose mirage-like in the
window of her memory, she sobbingly re-stammered the words:
"A ... hole ... in ... the ... ground!"
CHAPTER III.
[Illustration]
It was not yet June, but the winds blow cold on the prairie later than
June at nightfall. The moment the sun goes down, up come the chill
winds.
Sick at heart, Seth coaxed the shuddering Celia down the steps into
the cellar-like habitation dimly lighted by a single half window dug
out mansard fashion at the side.
He was silent, hurt in every fibre of his being. His manner was one of
profound apology. She was right. It was only a hole in the ground; but
he, accustomed to dugouts during the months he had spent on the
prairie preparing for the joy of her coming, had overlooked its
deficiencies and learned to think of it as home.
There were two chairs. He was glad of that. For a long time there had
been only one.
He placed her in the new one, bought in honor of her coming, seating
her deferentially as if she had been a Queen, and went hurriedly
about, building a fire of little dry twigs he had torn from shrubs
along the river that the gay crackle of them might cheer her.
As she sat looking on, she saw in this humble service not his
devotion, but his humiliation, not his great love for her which
glorified all service humble or exalted, but the fact that he had so
descended in the scale of life as to put his hand to work that she had
been used to see done only by negroes.
Her pride, her only inheritance from haughty slave-holding ancestors,
was wounded. Not all Seth's devotion, not all his labor in her behalf
could salve that wound.
As he knelt before the blazing twigs, apparently doing their best to
aid him in his effort to cheer her, something of this feeling
penetrated to his inner consciousness.
Nevertheless, he piled on twig after twig until the refreshing flames
brilliantly illumined the dugout.
From dirt floor to dirt roof they filled it with light.
The poor little twigs, eagerly flashing into flame to help him!
Better far if, wet and soggy, they had burned dimly or not at all; for
their blaze only served to exhibit every deficiency Seth should have
endeavored to hide. The thatch of the roof, the sod, the carpetless
floor, the lack of furniture, the plain wooden bedstead in the corner
with its mattress of straw, the crazy window fashioned by his own rude
carpentry, the shapeless door which was like a slap in the face with
its raw and unpainted color of new wood.
After the first wild glance about her, Celia buried her face in her
hands, resolutely shutting out the view for fear of bursting into
uncontrollable tears.
Seth, seeing this, rose from his knees slowly, lamely, as if suddenly
very tired, and went about his preparations for their evening meal.
Men with less courage than it required to perform this simple duty
have stood up to be shot at.
Knowing full well that with each act of humble servitude he sank lower
and lower in the estimation of the one living creature in whose
estimation he wished to stand high, he once more knelt on the hearth,
placed potatoes in the ashes, raked a little pile of coals together
and set the coffee pot on them.
He drew the small deal table out and put upon it two cups and saucers,
plates and forks for two. There was but one knife. That was for Celia.
A pocket knife was to serve for himself.
It had been his pleasure throughout his lonely days of waiting to
picture this first meal which Celia and he should eat together.
Never once had he dreamed that the realization could come so near
breaking a strong man's heart,--that things seemingly of small import
could stab with a thrust so knife-like.
He felt the color leave his cheek at the thought that he had failed to
provide a cloth for the table, not even a napkin. He fumbled at his
bandana, then hopelessly replaced it in his pocket. He grew cold at
the realization that every luxury to which she had been accustomed,
almost every necessity, was absent from that plain board.
He had counted on her love to overlook much.
It had overlooked nothing.
When all was in readiness he drew up a chair and begged her to be
seated.
He took the opposite chair and the meal proceeded in silence, broken
only by the wail of the wind and the crackle of the little dry twigs
that burned on the hearth.
"I am afraid of it," sighed Celia.
"Of what, sweet?" he asked, and she answered:
"I am afraid of the wind."
"There is nothing to be afraid of," he explained quickly. "It is only
the ordinary wind of the prairies. It ain't a cyclone. Cyclones nevah
come this way, neah to the forks of two rivers wheah we ah," and
waxing eloquent on this, his hobby, he began telling her of the great
and beautiful and prosperous city which was sometime to be built on
this spot; perhaps the very dugout in which they sat would form its
center. He talked enthusiastically of the tall steepled temples that
would be erected, of the schools and colleges, of the gay people
beautifully dressed who would drive about in their carriages under the
shade of tall trees that would line the avenues, of the smiling men
and women and children whose home the Magic City would be, and how he
was confident they would build it here because, in the land of
terrible winds, when people commenced to erect their metropolis, they
must put it where no deadly breath of cyclone or tornado could tear at
it or overturn it.
With that he went on to describe the destructive power of the
cyclones, telling how one in a neighboring country had licked up a
stream that lay in its course, showering the water and mud down fifty
miles away.
"But no cyclone will ever come here," he added and explained why.
Because it was the place of the forks of two rivers, the Big Arkansas
and the Little Arkansas. A cyclone will go out of its way, he told
her, rather than tackle the forks of two rivers. The Indians knew
that. They had pitched their tents here before they had been driven
into the Territory and that was what they had said. And they were very
wise about some things, those red men, though not about many.
But Celia could not help putting silent questions to herself. Why
should a cyclone that could snatch up a river and toss it to the
clouds, fight shy of the forks of two?
Looking fearfully around at the shadows, she interrupted him:
"I am afraid," she whispered. "I am afraid!"
Seth left his place at the table and took her in his arms.
"Po' little gurl," he said. "Afraid, and tiahd, too. Travelin' so fah.
Of cose, she's tiahd!"
And with loving hands, tender as a mother's, he helped her undress and
laid her on the rough bed of straw, covered with sheets of the
coarsest, wishing it might be a bed of down covered with silks,
wishing they were back in the days of enchantment that he might change
it into a couch fit for a Princess by the wave of a wand.
Then he left her a moment, and walking out under the wind-blown stars
he looked up at them reverently and said aloud:
(For in the dreary deserts of loneliness one often learns to talk
aloud very openly and confidentially to God, since people are so
scarce and far away:)
"Tempah the wind to this po' shiverin' lam, deah Fathah!"
Then with a fanatic devotion, he added:
"And build the Magic City!"
CHAPTER IV.
[Illustration]
Upon each trip to the station for provision or grain Seth met with
tail ends of cyclones, or heard of rumors of those that had just
passed through, or were in process of passing, strange enough stories
of capers cut by the fantastic winds.
He told these tales to Celia with a vein of humor meant to cheer her,
but which had an opposite effect. Love blinded, he failed to see that
the nervous laughs with which she greeted them were a sign of terror
rather than amusement.
One night, he related, after a day whose sultriness had been almost
unendurable, a girl had stood at the door to her dugout, bidding her
sweetheart good night. She opened the door, he stepped outside, and a
cyclone happening to pass that way, facetiously caught him into the
atmosphere and carried him away somewhere, she never knew where.
Strewn in the path of that cyclone were window-sashes, doors,
shingles, hair mattresses, remnants of chimneys, old iron, bones,
rags, rice, old shoes and dead bodies; but not the body of her
blue-eyed sweetheart.
For many months she grieved for him, dismally garbed in crape, which
was extremely foolish of her, some said, for all she knew he might
still be in the land of the living. Possibly the cyclone had only
dropped him into another county where, likely as not, he was by this
time making love to another girl.
But though she mourned and mourned and waited and waited for the wild
winds to bring him back, or another in his place, none came.
"They've got to tie strings to their sweethearts in this part of the
country," the old gray-haired man at the corner grocery had said, "if
they want to keep them."