Part 25

Patricia said: “Oh, but they must have names! That’s wicked. Nobody goes up to heaven to our Lord Jesus without a name!”

The boys just barely glanced at each other. They kept their red faces straight with agony. Then Marvin went pawing and rolling through the hay over to the other side of the pile, where he buried his flushed face and snorted.

“I’m going to give every one a name,” Patricia asserted solemnly.

“What are you going to name ’em, Patricia?” Leone and Vila were impressed.

“I’m going to give them jewel names. Because the cats make me think about things like jewels. This is what I’m going to call them. I’m going to name this one Pearl because it’s white, and this bluey one Sapphire, and the other bluey one Turquoise, and this little pinky one Coral, and this one ... Jade!”

“Aren’t you going to name one Di’mond, Patricia?” Leone asked eagerly. Vila thought that, too.

“No.” Patricia was very decided. “Cats don’t look like diamonds. They look like coloured jewels.”

The boys giggled. Besides that one she had named _Pearl_--gee, they had already looked at these kittens and they knew very well that one was a he-cat! If she wasn’t funny!

Vila was looking at Patricia so intently that she trembled. Now she said, “Patricia’s eyes are jewel eyes, too. They’re--they’re----” She didn’t know how to say it, and yet she felt what she meant and wanted to say--felt it so that it hurt! The whites of Patricia’s eyes gleamed, and a little blue spread out into them from the circles of the coloured parts, and in these there were all sorts of threads of colour woven together, the way they were inside the glass of marbles--bluish and violet-coloured and gray, and a sort of golden! All just as clear.... Vila reached out and took Patricia’s wrist quickly and with shy ardour, but then she only smiled and couldn’t think of anything to say ... she would have been afraid to say it, anyway.

“Now she must see all our places!”

They went through the big barn. “Look here, Patricia!” “Patricia can’t. She’s looking at this.” She looked at everything, but when they urged her, “Touch it! Go ahead!” she wouldn’t quite do that. When they went out of the barn they all took hands and ran pounding down the long slope of heavy boards and out into the farmyard. Patricia was afraid at first and then shrieked with laughter and wanted to do it over again.

“Now we mustn’t do it any more,” Leone said after the third time. “Her little face is all red. Let go her hand, Marvin! Now, darling, stand still, and Leone’ll wipe off her little face.”

They thought it was funny the way she ran when the chickens came near her. “Oh, gee, if we had time we’d go down to the pond and show her the geese. Wouldn’t she run if that old goose got after her!” Leone said, “Marvin Sieverson! We shan’t go there.”

But the very best place was the orchard. Even the boys were not so wild and noisy there. Their feet made only soft swishing sounds when they went through the long grass. The boughs were loaded, some broken and sweeping the ground, and the sky was patterned with leaves.

“Patricia!” Marvin hinted, tempting her, holding out a little green apple.

Leone snatched it from his hand. “Why, Marvin Sieverson, shame on you! Do you want to make little Patricia sick?”

“Aw, gee!” He had just wanted to see if she would take it. He and Clyde had both been hunting through the grass for some apples that Patricia could really eat.

Only the yellow transparents were ripe. The large apples had a clear pale colour against the leaves that were only slightly darker--mellow and clear at the same time, a light pure yellow-green through which the August sunshine seemed to pass. Patricia took the big yellow apple that Marvin picked for her and carried it all around with her. “_Eat_ it, Patricia, why don’t you?” But she wanted to hold it. “Oh, thank you!” she said very earnestly for every single thing the children gave her--the red dahlia, and the tiny bunch of sweet peas, the bluebird’s feather. Whenever she saw a bird she stopped. She put her little silky hand on Leone’s wrist. “Look!” “It’s just a bird.” She stood and watched with fascinated eyes until the bird was lost in the sky and she had to turn away dazzled with blue and gold.

“Do you wish you could stay here and belong to us, Patricia?” Leone asked her wistfully. “We’d play you were my little girl, wouldn’t we?”

Patricia wished that she could stay. There were streaks of dust down the shining linen dress and on the soft little arms, a damp parting in the lovely wave of the bangs, and around her mouth there was a faint stain of red from the juicy plums the boys had brought her to suck. Oh, yes, the country, she said, was _nice_! She looked about with shining innocent eyes of wonder. She loved the animals. In the city, she told them, animals weren’t happy. There were the beautiful green birds in the shop--just the colour, almost, of these apple-tree leaves!--but her father wouldn’t buy them for her because he didn’t believe in keeping things in cages, and he wouldn’t get her the big gray dog because it wasn’t right to take dogs out on chains.

“Oh, if I lived in the country,” she cried, “do you know what I’d do? I’d just run around and run around----”

“You’d play with _me_, wouldn’t you, Patricia?” Marvin cut in jealously.

“I’d play----”

“Children!”

The grown people were calling them. Disaster showed on the children’s faces. “Oh, we don’t want Patricia to go home!” There were so many things still that they hadn’t shown her. But Mr. Lindsay came into the orchard calling out jovially:

“Well! Here she is! Ready to go home now with Uncle Dave?” He took it for granted that she was. He took her reluctant little hand, and the other children trailed after them. When they reached the farmyard, he said, “See what’s going with us!”

Patricia looked in awe and wonderment. “What is it?” she breathed.

“Don’t you know what that is?”

Mr. and Mrs. Sieverson, standing back, both laughed. The children too were grinning.

Patricia ventured, “A baby cow!”

Then they all laughed to think that she had known.

“That’s what it is, all right. But don’t you know what baby cows are called? Calf! That’s a calf! Well, sir, do you want this little calf to go with us?”

Patricia didn’t know whether or not Uncle Dave meant that for a joke. But the little calf was so sweet--she loved it so terribly the instant she saw it--that she couldn’t help risking that and begging, “Oh, yes!” Its head really was shaped like the tiny kittens’. But its eyes were very large and coloured a soft deep brown under a surface of rounded brightness, so gentle and so sad too, that it seemed to her as if the colour showed in each eye under a big tear. The calf turned its head toward her. Its frail legs bent inward, to prop it up. Its coat looked like cream spilled over with shining tar. There were curls, like the curly knots showing in freshly planed wood; and the shining ends of the hair looked as if they had curled because the whole coat had just been licked by the mother.

“Oh, yes, Uncle Dave! Is it going _with_ us?”

“It’s going to be our back-seat passenger. If the boss permits?”

It made Mr. Sieverson laugh--feel tickled--to see how the thought of riding to town with that calf pleased the little girl. But he said dutifully to Mr. Lindsay:

“Now, if that calf’s going to be any nuisance to you----”

“No, no. As long as I’ve got the old car, put it in. Tie it up.”

Patricia saw the rope then in Mr. Sieverson’s hand. She cried, “Oh, not _tie_ the little calf!”

“Sure,” Mr. Sieverson said, grinning kindly at her. “You don’t want it to jump out, do you?”

She looked at Uncle Dave for confirmation of that. He said:

“Sure! Calves won’t go riding any other way.”

The two boys laughed.

Patricia stood back close to Leone but not saying anything more. She looked frightened. Mr. Sieverson said, with some feeling of reassuring her still more:

“You don’t want to let this calf get loose or you won’t get any of it!”

She didn’t understand that.

“Get any of it to eat. This calf’s going to make veal.”

“Eat it?” she cried in horror; and she earnestly put him right. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t _eat_ it.” Mr. Sieverson was joking.

“Why, sure!” he said. “Don’t you eat good veal? You’re going to take this calf to the butcher.”

“Oh, no!” He meant that! Patricia was suddenly wild with crying. They all stood back, shocked, never expecting such a storm as this. “Oh, no! The little calf isn’t going to be killed! I won’t! I won’t! No!” She put out her hands blindly and turned from one to the other for help. Mr. Sieverson didn’t know what to do. She turned to him and beat the air with her little fists, shrieking, “Oh, you’re _wicked_!”

He couldn’t stand that. His face got red. Even if she was just a child, he demanded, “Don’t you eat veal?”

“No! No!” Patricia shrieked.

“What, then?” he demanded.

She had to look at him. Her little pink mouth was open and her bright eyes drowned. She quavered, “Other kinds of meat ... I’ll eat chicken,” and turned piteously to Uncle Dave.

Mr. Sieverson didn’t like to be called “wicked” by anyone. The injustice, when he had just been trying to be nice to this little girl, too, hurt him. His wife murmured, “Well, now, Henry----” But he insisted, “Don’t chicken have to be killed before you can eat it?”

But even Mr. Sieverson, although he was in the right of it, felt ashamed when he saw the little thing cry. Mrs. Sieverson gave him a look, stroked Patricia’s hair, and said, “They won’t take the calf.” Mr. Lindsay hastened to promise, “No, no. Of course we won’t take the calf.” They were all trying now to reassure her. Vila was crying, too. The boys were pleading, “Patricia!” although they didn’t know just what they would say to her in comfort if they got her to look at them. “No, no, it isn’t going. It won’t have to be tied up. See, he’s put away the rope.” The two men settled the thing with a look above her head. Patricia looked up at last, with piteous drowned eyes, as dark as wet violets. She broke away from all of them and, running to the calf--fearful of touching things as she was--she threw her arms in protection around its neck and stared fiercely at the shamefaced people.

“Oh, no, we couldn’t take it!” Mr. Lindsay muttered. He cleared his throat.

The children surrounded Patricia again. They were begging her not to cry. Her cheek was laid against the little calf’s silky ear, and she was telling it, in her own mind, “Don’t you care, don’t you mind, precious little calf, I’ve saved you.” She let herself be drawn away but said “No!” when Mrs. Sieverson wanted to wipe the tears from her cheeks, and held up the little wet face trustingly for Leone to do it. That pleased all the Sieversons greatly.

“So now we can go! Hm?” Mr. Lindsay asked her.

She seemed to have forgiven them. She didn’t want to look at Mr. Sieverson, but when she said good-bye to Mrs. Sieverson she touched her little skirts and made a curtsey. Clyde pinched Marvin to tell him to look. The children watched her with as great delight as they had watched the tightrope walker in the “show.” Mr. Lindsay lifted her into the car. She smiled faintly at the children, but there were stains of tears on her pearly cheeks, and her eyes were still as dark as violets.

“You children go get her something--apples or something,” Mrs. Sieverson whispered.

“We have, Mamma! We’ve got a whole lot of things for her.”

They began piling presents into her lap. “Don’t forget your little feather, Patricia!” Marvin ran off to find something else. The wilting flowers, the apple, the six rosy plums, the bluebird’s feather she carefully took again. Marvin came panting back with his new game of “Round the World by Aëroplane.” But Mr. Lindsay wouldn’t let him give her that.

“No, no, my boy! You keep your game. She’s got more things at home now than she can ever play with.”

Now she seemed happy and appeased. The children crowded close to the side of the car and pleaded, “Come out again, won’t you, Patricia?” Vila whispered in her shy voice, “I’ll take care of Pearl and Samphire and those others, Patricia.” Marvin said fiercely, “If any tomcat comes round, I’ll----” and ground and gnashed his teeth and made fiercely appropriate motions. Leone gave him a look for making her think about the tomcat! But Patricia was still smiling and happy and hadn’t understood. Now, in her relief and in the flurry of going, she was more eager and talkative than she had been all afternoon. She promised everything they asked.

“I will. I will, Leone. I will, Marvin. Thank you for all the beautiful things.”

In the midst of it Mr. Lindsay leaned over to say in a low tone to Mr. Sieverson, a little ashamed, “Well, somebody else’ll take that in for you, Henry, if you can’t go.”

“Sure. That’s all right, Mr. Lindsay.”

“Well, now, my little girl, tell them all good-bye.”

“Good-bye.” “Good-bye, Patricia!” They called and waved madly to her, all standing back together. She answered them. At the very last minute, just as the car was going out into the driveway, she leaned out with her shining hair mussed and blowing in the breeze, and cried:

“Good-bye, calf! I forgot to say good-bye to you.”

Marvin laughed in delight, and then Clyde echoed him.

* * * * *

Mr. Sieverson stood looking after the car. That “wicked” still rankled. He said, as if very much put out, “Well, now, I’ll have to find another way of getting this calf in or else take it myself before night.” Then he said, as if ashamed, “Gosh! I don’t know. I almost hate to take it. That little thing put up such a fuss.” He couldn’t help adding, “She was a pretty little kid, wasn’t she?”

Mrs. Sieverson did not answer at once. Then she said in an expressionless tone, “Well ... maybe you better take the other one, then.”

He looked at her and seemed to want to assent. Then he cried, “Oh, no! We can’t do that. This is the one we’d picked on.” He looked angry, and yet in his light-blue eyes under the shock of lightish hair there was a hurt, puzzled look. “Oh, well,” he muttered. “Folks can’t be foolish!” If ever folks were to start thinking of _such_ things....

He went forward resolutely, saying “Hi! Stand still, there!” as he took hold of the calf. His wife stood back watching him and saying nothing. The calf turned, bolted a little way, and then let him take hold of it again. It did not seem to know whether to be afraid of him or not. Its eyes looked up into his. In the large eyes of dark mute brown and the smaller eyes of light blue there was much the same reluctant bewilderment in some far depths. But the man knew what he was after, and the calf did not know what was to come.

“Come on here!” Mr. Sieverson said sharply.

He put the rope around the calf’s neck.

SHADES OF GEORGE SAND!

BY ELLEN DU POIS TAYLOR

From _Harper’s_

It was one of those April mornings when the sun lacquers yesterday’s rain puddles with gold, and the meadow larks melodiously promise a month of blue weather with violets to match it. But all this fruitful fuss did not warm one apathetic drop of Matilda Gessler’s young blood nor soften one scornful angle of her averted face.

Matilda was weighing sugar in her father’s dingy little grocery in Crittenden, South Dakota, when she should have been dozing under ancestral lace in a château somewhere in France. If Mathilde Lantier, her paternal grandmother, hadn’t lived with such unwise intensity that one moonlit hour in a certain French garden, and if old Franz Gessler hadn’t been so conveniently eager to shoulder the consequences, and if ... but then Matilda knew nothing of all this. But she knew enough. She knew what her mother’s Methodist God had done to her. He had created her under a morally tight roof in Crittenden for the good of her soul when every Latin molecule of her belonged in one of those sophisticated centres of the earth where it’s dinner in low-cut brocade at eight and philosophy before kissing.

And so Matilda, weighing sugar, sniffed at the plucky April trying to make a bright island on the muddy floor. What was the use of looking like a bayadere when it meant breaking her lithe back over flour bags, the contents of which were destined to nourish the grace of girls less graceful than she? She was doomed to make beans into bundles that others might be strengthened for flight. Only last week Hazel Amberton, the thick-ankled daughter of the jeweller, packed her gauzy traps and went forth to conquer Minneapolis.

Matilda shrugged her shoulders. It was a gesture inherited from Mathilde Lantier and worthy of Ninon de Lenclos herself, but there was no one to appreciate it except three tobacco-sodden farmers who tramped out, leaving her to resume her futile musing.

If ancestors would only stay where they belonged and live their lives in straight lines and leave the tangents to those who deserved them! Well, no good rebelling against anything as irrevocable as your grandmother’s mistakes, your father’s failures, or your mother’s God. That left one thing to rebel against ... the store.

The store was a place of odorous chiaroscuro. Smells fairly nudged one another and often knocked one another down. There was the fetidness of stale codfish, the acrid pungency of freshly ground coffee, the penetrating foulness of rancid butter, and the sickening tropical odour of decaying bananas. It wasn’t worth looking at either ... rows of tins whose faded labels betrayed the probable age of the victuals within; jars of moribund prunes and molasses-coloured horehound drops, counters piled with coarse denim garments leaking threads, bolts of grotesquely sprigged calico. Even the dusty jumble of decorated china on the top shelf didn’t look destined for anything but cooling pork fat. And, if all this wasn’t enough, they have to live over it. Four of them lived up there in the huddled stuffiness of a half-dozen rooms ... horrible, uneasy rooms tenanted by lumpy pieces of golden-oak furniture whose sharp corners and glittering hostile surfaces constantly threatened one with eviction.

But there was one member of the family before whom the whole domineering conglomeration was powerless. That was Minnie Gessler, Matilda’s fat, unimaginative mother. Every rocker dreaded her relentless dimensions. There was but one place where she looked properly engulfed and that was under the steepled bulk of the red-brick church around the corner. She waddled there regularly. Matilda often puzzled over her mother’s voluptuous devotion to something that couldn’t be poked or eaten or wasn’t her son Fred.

Matilda sighed resentfully when she thought of her brother. The dispatch with which he made his dreams come true was nothing short of indecent. He rarely came near the store except to eat and sleep over it. He made quick, successful love to the dimpled daughters of the Crittenden gentry and bragged about it afterward in Lemke’s Pool Room. He never kissed the mother who adored him, but he wheedled a Ford car out of her and went tearing up and down the long yellow road between Crittenden and a half-dozen towns, seeking other lips to conquer and getting them. Now Matilda dutifully kissed her mother every night but it had got her nothing. Minnie Gessler hadn’t even allowed her daughter to have a French name in peace. It was ’Tilda she grumbled at and not Mathilde.

Matilda’s father was shy and the only German thing about him was his name. There was a foreign gleam in his hazel eyes and the hair that fimbriated his bald head was black. He had not inherited Mathilde Lantier’s fire--that fire which had made the submitting required of her a thing almost as prismatic as the unrealizable dreams of other people. But he hated the store. Matilda was the only one who suspected this and she knew it from the gingerly manner in which he handled grubby potatoes and the delicate way he turned up his nose over a slab of ancient cheese. Once Matilda caught him trying to carve the head of a Greek goddess out of a bar of American Family Soap, and after that she had a dim kind of respect for the thin man who shuffled uncomplainingly about the murky store at all hours.

This, then, was Matilda’s family. It was no worse than the usual run of families, but Matilda thought she was uniquely cursed. The trouble was that Matilda’s frustrations blinded her to everything but her own point of view. If only her French blood were given an opportunity to riot uncensored! But no opportunity had materialized ... that is none which iridescently mattered. To be sure, she had taken a degree from the little sectarian college on the edge of Crittenden, but that experience had only enabled her to rebel against fate in terms of bad poetry.

Matilda deserted her sugar and went over and stood in the doorway. She glanced up and down the clapboarded vista of Main Street. Dora Todd, the blue-and-gold daughter of the banker, clicked by on her new red heels. Envious tears smarted Matilda’s eyelids. She did not envy Dora because the wind tossed her curls flaxenly, nor did she covet eyes made of azure china, but those heels were another matter. They typified Dora’s power to dress herself up. Matilda adored her own dark obliqueness and she would have liked to keep it in the style to which it deserved to be accustomed. Those heels now--they might have been those of her ancestress, young Mathilde Lantier, setting Paris boulevards to music! Matilda shook herself impatiently. Why couldn’t her grandmother stay out of it? She even appropriated the heels of that silly cream-coloured girl who didn’t know Balzac from buttons! And that wasn’t the worst of it. Pretty soon that other woman would take command of her resentment--that irritatingly brilliant woman who had flooded the world with printed proofs that she had lived the fullest life of her generation and who had given Mathilde Lantier such vivid advice one afternoon in her drawing room at Nohant. Sometimes Matilda wished that her grandmother had kept that memory to herself, for the bright taint of it simmered through her blood like some high and mighty poison.

* * * * *

This was what had happened.