Kate Reviews the Book

The book is not finished. This book of Jesse's life and mine is not finished while she who set us asunder is allowed to live. "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord, "I will repay." We wait.

What impulse moved my man after four years to enter that tragic house? He read our book, so piteously stained, this heap of paper scrawled with rusty ink. He added parts of a chapter, which I have finished. It is all blotted with tears, this record of his life—childhood, boyhood, youth, manhood, humor, passion—veritable growth of an immortal spirit—annals of that love which lifteth us above the earth—and then!

What did the woman gain who stole our happiness? A fairy gold, changing to ashes at the glint of day, for which she lost her soul.

Caught in the leaves there is a long pine needle. So it was among the bull pines of Cathedral Grove that Jesse sought to bury this record. Then knowing that his life was not all his to bury, he sent me this dear treasure, so breaking the long, long silence.

How precious are even the littlest memories of love! Here is the muddy footprint of our kitten, and Jesse's "witness my hand." Here is a scrap of paper, inked and rinsed to reveal some secret writing of those poor outlaws. Pages of wrath from our visitors' book—and the long pine needle.

"Belay thar!" as Jesse said. "We're hunting happiness while sorrow's chasing us. Takes a keen muzzle and runaway legs to catch up happiness, while sorrow's teeth is reachin' for yo' tail."

So I must try to catch up happiness. I have notes here of dear Father Jared, made at the time when he was bringing me with Baby David home. I remember we sat in our deck chairs on the sunny side of the ship, watching a cloud race out in mid-Atlantic. We talked of home.

"You see, my dear"—I copy from my notes—"we have in our blessed isles an atmosphere lending glamour to all things, whether a woman's skin or a slum town. Why, British portraiture and landscape are respected, even by our own art critics, and they are far from lenient." I replied that I wanted air, air for King David.

"Now when we come to air, that's very serious. North of the Tweed the air produces Scotchness, across St. George's Channel it makes Irishness. Then in the principality of Wales it makes most people Welsh, to say nothing of the Yarkshire vintage, or Zummerzet, or the 'umble 'omes of the East Anglians."

"But that's not what I mean. Some places are so relaxing."

"Or bracing, or just damp, eh? Do you know, my dear, that at Frognall End mushrooms are fourpence a pound."

"That has nothing to do with it."

"Are you sure?" The delicious fairy-look came to his eyes. "Of course they prefer the Russian kind of mushrooms with red tops—warmer to sit on. That's why they love Russia, and Russian hearts stay young. And besides, they like to live where people are really and truly superstitious.

"That's what's so wrong with England. Ah, these board schools! I want to dig up all the board schools and plant red mushrooms. Then, of course, the fairies will each have an endowed mushroom, the children will be properly taught how to stay young, and we shall live happily ever afterward.

"Do you know I called on the prime minister, and, politics apart, he's not at all a bad fellow. We quite agreed, especially about drowning the Board of Education, but then the nonconformist conscience would get shocked, while as to the treasury—bigots, my dear, are getting more bigotty every day."

I was getting mixed.

"So you see, Kate, with mushrooms at fourpence a pound, it stands to reason that they're very plentiful at Frognall End, with fairies in strict proportion: one mushroom—one fairy, that is in English weather. In a dry season, of course, they can sit on the ground, although it wouldn't be quite the thing; whereas in wet weather they really require their mushrooms—and you know they're much too careless to clear up afterward. Yes, at Frognall End young David would get what modern children need so very badly—some wholesome uneducation."

This the father explained in all its branches.

1. Consider the lilies.

2. Take no thought for the morrow.

3. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the pure, the merciful, the peacemakers.

4. Suffer the little children to come unto me.

"You see," he added wistfully, "the churches have to preach a heap of doctrines piled twenty centuries high—with truth squashed flat beneath. The poor are very worrisome, too, and there's such a lot of heathen to convert. Why, all of our educated people belong to societies for reforming their neighbors, and yet—and yet—well, fairies have a nicer time than curates."

Frognall End, where my saint is curate-in-charge, is on the river near Windsor, and there I went to live with Baby David. It was there I learned that heartache is a cultivated plant not known along the hedge-rows, that peace may be found as long as the gorse blooms, that love grows lustiest where it has least soil. For the rest, please see the Reverend Jared Nisted's Fairyland which is full of most important information for all who are weary and heavy-laden. Its text is from the Logia of Christ: "Raise the stone, and thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood and I am there."

From the first my Heaven-born was interested in milk, later in a growing number of worldly things, but it was not until last winter by the fireside that we really had serious tales all about Wonderland. It's a difficult place to reach, but when you get down the cliff, and feel your neck to make quite sure it's not broken, you come to the witch who has a wooden leg. She lives in the Dust House, where the Dust Fairies want to sleep, only she will worry them with her broom. When they are worried, they dance with the Sunbeam Fairy who comes in through the window, and never breaks the glass.

There's a fairy mare called Jones, who lost her Christian name in a fit of temper, and always searches for it with her hind legs. There's a fairy bear who is not a truly grizzly, though he does live in a grizzly bear skin even when it's ever-so-hot weather. He's a great hunter, too, and likes sportsmen so much that they keep getting fewer, and fewer, and FEWER. The last sportsman was a fairy Doctor called McGee, who perched all day long in a tree, like the fowls-of-the-air, practising bird-calls, while the fairy bear sat underneath taking care of his rifle.

Wonderland is full of stories, especially about Mr. Man. When Mr. Man was stolen away by robbers, and tied up with fiddle-strings in a ferry-house, well—David flatly refused to go to bed until we'd come to the ferry across Dream River.

David's dog came of an alliance between two noble families, so his name is Whiskers Retriever-Dachshund, Esq., P.T.O. David's cat, who died expensively in a pail of cream, was Mrs. Bull Durham. Ginger was a squirrel in the garden, and the dago was a badger who lived a long way off beyond the grumpy cow. Dog, cat, squirrel and badger were all of them robbers, but David would have been quite wretched if he had caught them doing anything dishonest.

Did I mention Mr. Man? He was a hero who lived in fairyland, and didn't believe in fairies, who spoke with a slow, sweet, Texan drawl, who loved and protected all living creatures except politicians, who believed in God, in Mother England, and in Uncle Sam, and who always wrote long letters to his mother. David said his funny prayers for mother, and Whiskers, and all kind friends "and make me good like Mr. Man in Wonderland. Amen. Now, tell me some wobbers, mummie."

Although David has decided to be a tram conductor, he still takes some little interest in other walks of life. Once on the tow-path he asked an old gentleman who was fishing, what he was fishing for, and got the nice reply: "I often wonder." And it was on this path beside the Thames, that one day last November he made a big friendship. His nurse was passing a few remarks with a young man who asked the way to my house, and baby went ahead pursuing his lawful occasions. Curious to know what it felt like to be a real fish, he was stepping into the river to see about it, when the young man interfered.

"Leggo my tail," said David wrathfully, then with sudden defiance, "I got my feet wet anyway, so there!"

"That's so," the young man agreed.

"I say," David grew confident. "Mummie says it's in the paper, so it's all right."

"What's that, sonny?"

"A little boy what went in to see about some fishes, and that man what swum and swum, and I saw'd his picture in the paper. So now 'tend you look de udder way."

"Why, I can't see nothen."

"You can see. The game is for me to jump in, and you swim."

"But I can't swim. I'm a sailor."

"Oh, weally? Then what's your name?"

"It's Billy O'Flynn."

"No, but that's weally my guinea-pig, the pink one—Billy O'Flynn. You're not a fairy, Billy?"

"Why, what does you know about fairies?"

"Most truthfully, you know? I don't believe in fairies, but then it pleases mummie."

So Billy sat on his heel making friends with the heaven-born, and Patsy, the nurse, came behind him, craving with cotton-gloved hands to touch the sailor's crisp, short, golden hair, and David gravely tried on the man's peaked cap.

"Yes," Billy agreed, "fairies is rot when there's real gals about, with rosy cheeks a-blushin' an' cotton gloves."

"Lawks! 'Ow you sailors does fancy yourselves," said Patsy, her shy fingers drawn by that magnetic gold of the man's hair.

"Climb on my back and ride," said young O'Flynn to David, "I'll be a fairy horse."

"The cheek of 'im!" jeered Patsy, "fairy 'orse indeed!"

Oh, surely the fairies were very busy about them, tugging at heartstrings, while Billy and Patsy fell head over ears in love, and my pet cupid had them both for slaves. David rode Billy home, by his august command straight into my brown study, where I sat in my lazy chair.

Was it my voice telling baby to go and get dry feet? Was it my hand grasping Billy's horny paw? For I heard my roaring caÑon, saw my cliffs, my embattled sculptured cliffs, and once more seemed to walk with Jesse in Cathedral Grove. I could hear my dear man, speaking across the years, "Say, youngster, when you sawed off that table leg to make your mother's limb, what did you do with the caster?"

I laughed, I cried. Oh, yes, of course I made a fool of myself. For this dear lad came out of Wonderland, this heedless ruffian who knew of my second marriage, who had such a tale to tell of "Madame Scotson." Oh, haven't you heard? Her precious Baby David is illegitimate! Couldn't I hear my neighbor, Mrs. Pollock, telling that story at the Scandal Club? Then a discreet paragraph from Magpie in Home Truths would be libel enough to brand a public singer. My mother would suggest ever so gently that in the interests of the family, my retirement to a warmer climate—say Italy, would be so suitable. And madame's illegitimate son would be barred from decent schools. Oh, I could see it all!

With his pea-jacket thrown open, wiping his flushed face with a red handkerchief, shifting from one foot to the other in torment of uneasiness, blowing like some sea beast come up from the deeps to breathe, Billy consented not to run away from my hysterics.

Feeling ill-bred and common, I begged Billy's pardon, made him sit down, tried ever so hard to put him at his ease. Poor lad! His father condemned as a felon, his mother such a wicked old harridan, his life, to say the very least, uncouth. Yet somehow out of that rough savage face shone the eyes of a gentleman, and there was manliness in all he said, in everything he did. After that great journey for my sake, how could I let him doubt that he was welcome?

"I know I'm rough," he said humbly, "but you seem to understand. You know I'm straight. You won't mind straight talk unless you're changed, and you're not changed—at least not that way, mum."

Changed! Ah, how changed! The looking-glass had bitter things to tell me, and crying makes me such a frump. I never felt so plain. And the eyes of a young man are often brutally frank to women.

"Don't mind about me, Billy. Say what you've come to tell me."

"Been gettin' it ready to say ever since I started for England. Look here, mum, I want to go back to the beginning, to when I was a kid, an' mother kep' that hash house in Abilene. D'ye mind if I speak—I mean about this here Polly?"

I set my teeth, and hoped he would be quick.

"Well, ye see, mum, she only done it for a joke, and the way Jesse treated her—"

"I can't hear this."

"You don't mind if I say that mother and me haven't no use for Jesse?"

"I know that."

"Well, mother put her up to the idea. To get shut of him, she shammed dead. I helped. I say she done right, mum. If she'd let it go at that, I'd take her side right now."

"Billy, was that a real marriage?"

"It was that. She's Jesse's wife all right."

There was something which braced me in his callous frankness. "I hoped," I said. "Go on."

"Well, mother hated Jesse somethin' chronic. Afterward when—well, she had to run for the British possessions, and we met up with Jesse again by accident. He give us a shack and some land, but mother an' me had our pride. How would you like to take charity? Mother hated him still worse, and don't you imagine I'd go back on her. She's my mother.

"Then you married Jesse. Of course, mother and me both knew that Polly was alive. Father knew too—and father was around when no one but us ever seen him. We knew that Polly was alive, and mother would have given Jesse dead away, only we stopped her. Father said it was none of our business. Father liked Jesse, I thought the world of you, so when mother wrote to Polly, we'd burn her letters."

What an escape for us!

"Then you saved mother from burning in that shack, and afterward she hated Jesse worse, because she couldn't hit him for fear of hurting you. Oh, she was mad because she'd got fond of you.

"And you took us into your ranch. Charity again, and you sailin' under Protestant colors, both of yez. The way mother prayed for Jesse was enough to scorch his bones." Billy chuckled. "I ain't religious—I drink, and mother's professin' Catholic cuts no figure with me.

"Then there's the fightin' between father's gang and Jesse's. Dad got hung, Jesse got the dollars. Rough, common, no-account, white trash, like mother an' me, hears Jesse expounding the Scriptures. We ain't got no feelings same as you."

Poor lad! Poor savage gentleman!

"You saved me from murdering Jesse, and got me away from that ranch. Since then I've followed the sea. There's worse men there than Jesse. I seen worse grub, worse treatment, worse times in general since I quit that ranch. Five years at sea—"

There was the glamour, the greatness of the sea in this lad's eyes, just as in Jesse's eyes. Sailors may be rugged, brutal, fierce—not vulgar. Men reach out into spaces where we sheltered women can not follow.

"Suppose I've grown," said Billy. "Well, mum, I got a notion to go home. Signed as A. B. in a four-masted bark Clan Innes out o' Glasgow, for Vancouver with general cargo. I quit her at Vancouver, made Ashcroft by C. P. R., blind baggage mostly, then hit the road afoot. I thought I'd take my departure from the Fifty-Nine."

"The old bush trail?"

"Hard goin', but then I expected, of course, mother'd be there at the ranch, and you, mum, an' Jesse, of course, and—"

"Jones?"

Dreading his news, I fought for this one little respite before he came to all I feared. If Jesse lived, if he only lived! But at thought of the old ranch life, Billy lapsed to a sheepish grin with one quaint glint of mischief. Then with the utmost gravity he asked me if Patsy, my nursemaid, "was claimed".

"There's many a little craft dips her colors for one who wants me to stand by, but still—"

"Patsy is free."

"Faix! Can't help it, I backed my tawps'l."

"Proposed?"

"Save us! It's time to offer a tow when they're union down, and a danger to navigation. Um. I'm off my course."

"You must have found things changed when you got to the ranch."

"Didn't get there. I'd news at Hat Creek, and kep' the road main north. Mother wasn't at the ranch any more. She'd poisoned Jesse's bear. Oh, mum, I don't want to hurt."

"Go on, dear lad."

"Mother'd took up with Polly at Spite House."

"Spite House?"

"It's the Ninety-Nine Mile House. There's a sign-board right across the road:—

THE NINETY-NINE
MRS. JESSE SMITH
HOTEL, STORE, LIVERY.

"She did that to spite Jesse, and they call the place Spite House."

Just then the maid brought in the tea things, so, cowardly as usual, I played hostess, delaying all the news I dared not face. We gossiped of Captain Taylor's half-bred child, Wee James at school down East, of Tearful George married to that dreadful young person at Eighty Mile House who scratched herself at meals, so Jesse said. At the Hundred-and-Four, where Hundred Mile Hill casts its tremendous shadow on the lowlands northward, Pete Mathson and his wife were making new harness for the Star Pack-train. There a shadow fell on our attempt at gossip—why does the conversation always stop at twenty minutes past? Billy began to tell me about Spite House.

Spite House! How right Father Jared was. "Sword versus dragon," he told us, "is heroic: sword versus cockroach is heroics. Don't draw your sword on a cockroach."

This much I tried to explain to young O'Flynn, whose Irish blood has a fine sense of humor. But the smile he gave me was one of pity, turning my heart to ice. "Jesse," he said, "made that mistake. That's why I've come six thousand miles to warn you. Howly Mother, if I'd only the eddication to talk so I'd be understood!

"I'm going to try another course. See here, mum. You've heered tell of Cachalot whales. They runs say eighty tons for full whales—one hundred fifty horse-power, dunno how many knots, full of fight to the last drop of blood. That stands for Jesse.

"And them sperm whales is so contemptuous of the giant squid they uses her for food. She's small along of a sperm whale, but she's mean as eight python snakes with a devil in the middle. That'll do for Polly.

"Well, last voyage I seen one of them she-nightmares strangle a bull Cachalot, and the sight turned me sick as a dog. Now, d'ye understand what Polly's doing? I told you I hated Jesse. I told you straight to your face why I hated him. And now, mum, I'm only sorry for poor Jesse."

It was then, I think, that I began really to be terrified. Never in the old days at the ranch had Billy been off his guard even with me. Now he let me know his very heart. I could not help but trust him, and it was no small uneasiness which had brought the lad to England.

I had fought so hard, schooling myself to think of Jesse as of the dead, with reverent tenderness. Little by little I had filled a bleak and empty widowhood with mother duties, womanly service, my holy art of song, and harmless fairies, making the best of it while age and plainness were my destiny. But now of a sudden my poor peace was shattered, and that gift of imagination which had imagined even contentment, played traitor and made havoc. Laws, conventions, mean respectabilities, seemed only cobwebs now. Love swept them all away, and nothing mattered. Jesse! Jesse!

"Them devil-squids," he was saying, "has a habit of throwing out ink to fog the water, so you won't see what they're up to until they lash out to grapple. That's where they're so like this Polly. She's a fat, hearty, good-natured body, and it's the surest fact she's kind to men in trouble. Anybody can have a drink, a meal and a bed, no matter how broke he is; and Spite House is free hospital for the district. She'll sit up nights nursing a sick man, and, till I went an' lived there, I'd have sworn she was good as they make 'em. That's the ink.

"Then you begins to find out, and what I didn't see, mother would tell me. She'd been three years there. Besides, I seen most of what we calls sailor towns, and I'd thought I'd known the toughest there was in the way of boardin'-houses; but rough house in 'Frisco itself is holiness compared with what goes on there under the sign of Mrs. Jesse Smith. That name ain't exactly clean."

"That's enough, I think, if you don't mind. I'd rather have news about our old friends—Captain Taylor, for instance, and Iron Dale, and how is dear Doctor McGee?"

"Dear Doctor McGee, is it? Well, you see he lived within a mile of Polly. She got him drinkin', skinned him at cards, then told him he'd best shoot himself. The snow drifts through his house.

"And Iron Dale? Oh, of course, he was Jesse's friend, too. I'd forgot. She got him drunk and went through him. That money was for paying his hands at the Sky-line—wasn't his to lose, so he skipped the country. The mines closed down and there wasn't no more packing contracts for Jesse."

I began to understand what Billy meant, and it was with sick fear I asked concerning my dear man's stanchest friend, his banker, Captain Boulton Taylor.

"You'd better know, mum." There was pain in the lad's face, reluctance in his voice. "Being the nearest magistrate, he tried to down Polly for keeping a disorderly house. But then, as old man Taylor owned, he didn't know enough law to plug a rat hole. There ain't no municipality, so Spite House is outside the law. But Polly's friends proved all the good she done to men who was hurt, or sick, or broke. Then she showed up how her store and hotel was cutting into the trade of Hundred Mile House. She brung complaints before the government, so Taylor ain't magistrate now. The stage stables got moved from Hundred Mile to Spite House. The post-office had to follow. Now he's alone with only a Chinaman. He's blind as a bat, too, and there's no two ways about it—Bolt Taylor's dying."

"Is there no justice left?"

"Dunno about that. She uses a lot of law."

I dared not ask about Jesse. To sit still was impossible, to play caged tiger up and down the room would only be ridiculous. Still, Billy's poisonous tobacco excused the opening of a window, so I stood with my back turned, while a November night closed on the river and the misty fields.

How could I leave my baby? How could I possibly break with Covent Garden—where my understudy, a fearsome female, ravened for the part? The cottage would never let before our river season. "Madame Scotson has been called abroad on urgent private business."

"Of course," the lad was saying, "when Polly got to be postmistress, she handled Jesse's letters, held the envelopes in the steam of a kettle until they'd open, and gummed them when she was through—if she sent them on. She found out who he dealt with and got them warned not to trust him. There's no letters now."

"She wouldn't dare!"

"No? You remember he sent you that book you wrote together at the ranch?"

"You know that!"

"I read it at Spite House. She had a heap of fun in the barroom with Jesse's letter. Her cat eyes flamed like mad."

"There was no letter."

"She made a paper house of it, and set it alight to show how Jesse burned her home in Abilene. She was drunk, too, that night. But that's nothin'. Glad you didn't hear them yarns she put about the country. Jesse wasn't never what I'd call popular, but he ain't even spoken to now by any white man. His riders quit, his Chinamen cleared out. Then she bought Brown's ferry, had the cable took away, the scow sent adrift, and Surly Brown packed off. She'd heard that Jesse lived by his rifle, so she's cut him off from his hunting grounds. There's nothing left to hunt east of the Fraser."

"He's starving?"

"Shouldn't wonder."

"Billy!"

"Yes'm."

"How soon can I get a ship?"

"None before Saturday."

"Go on. Tell me the worst."

"The signs may read coarse weather or typhoon. I dunno which yet. She's been locatin' settlers along them old clearings in the black pine and, judging by samples I'd seen, she swept the jails."

"Why more than one?" I asked, "why all that expense when one would do?"

"Who'd blackmail Polly afterward? She's no fool. She says straight out in public she'd shoot the man who killed him. But them thugs is planted in hungry land, they see his pastures the best in the district, and you know as well as I do he's a danger to all robbers. Why, even when sportsmen and tourists comes along his old gun gets excited. He hates the sight of strangers, anyway.

"Now, all these years she's goading him to loose out and break the law. That's why she's got the constable protecting her at Spite House. Once she can get him breaking the law she has all them thugs—so many dollars a head—as witnesses. It ain't murder she wants. She says that when she went to his ranch that time Jesse sent her a message by old Mathson, 'I won't let her off with death.'

"She won't let him off with death. Twice she has put him to shame in public. She'll never rest until she gets him hanged. There's only one thing puzzles me. I see it's his silence, the waiting, which makes Polly wake up and screech at night. But I dunno myself—has Jesse lost his nerve?"

"How do you know all this?"

"She told mother everything."

"And your mother told you. Why?"

"Because—say, mum, you remember the thing your husband called Bull Durham?"

"Brooke."

"Fancy Brooke, the thing which Polly kept like a pet lap-dog. The thing which turned state's evidence to hang my poor old dad. Brooke's come to Spite House as Polly's manager. Yes, now you know why mother's got no more use for Polly—told me I'd best come to you and give you warning. That thing is at Spite House, and mother's gone."

"I see it all now. But one last question. How did you get to England?"

"Do you remember, mum, that my poor dad just thought the world of Jesse?"

"I remember, a legacy for you,—some ponies."

"Well, Jesse found out somehow that I was at Spite House. He sent me the value of them ponies, with only a receipt for me to sign. I reckon, mum, that ruined and well-nigh starving, he rode a hundred and sixty miles through the black pines, because he's honest. That's why I spent the money comin' to you. I wants to help."