Ma Pettengill Part 15

We neared the Arrowhead gate. Presently its bell would peal a sweet message to those who laboured. Ma Pettengill turned in her saddle to scan the western horizon.

"A red sun has water in his eye," said she. "Well, a good soak won't hurt us."

And a moment later:

"Curious thing about reformers: They don't seem to get a lot of pleasure out of their labours unless the ones they reform resist and suffer, and show a proper sense of their degradation. I bet a lot of reformers would quit to-morrow if they knew their work wasn't going to bother people any."

VI

THE PORCH WREN

So it befell, in a s.h.i.+ning and memorable interlude that there was talk of the oldest living boy scout, who was said to have rats in his wainscoting; of the oldest living debutante, who was also a porch wren; and of the body s.n.a.t.c.her. Little of the talk was mine; a query now and again. It was Ma Pettengill's talk, and I put it here for what it may be worth, hoping I may close-knit and harmonize its themes, so diverse as that of the wardrobe trunk, the age of the earth, what every woman thinks she knows, and the Upper Silurian trilobites.

It might be well to start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most ba.n.a.l of all snapshots--a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing was a weakish white blob.

I need not say that there must be millions of these pathetic revealments burdening our mails day by day. I myself must have looked coldly upon over a thousand.

"Well, what of it?" I demanded shortly.

"I bet you can't guess what's in that bundle!" said my hostess in a large playful manner.

I said what I could see of it looked like a half portion of plain boiled cauliflower, but that in all probability the object was an infant, a human infant--or, to use a common expression, a baby. Whereupon the lady drew herself up and remarked in the clipped accent of a parrot:

"No, sir; it's a carboniferous trilobite of the Upper Silurian."

This, indeed, piqued me. It made a difference. I said was it possible?

Mrs. Pettengill said it was worse than possible; it was inevitable. She seemed about to rest there; so I accused her of ill-natured jesting and took up the previous day's issue of the Red Gap _Recorder_, meaning to appear bored. It worked.

"Well, if Professor Oswald Pennypacker don't call his infant that, you can bet your new trout rod he calls it something just as good. Mebbe I better read what the proud mother says."

"It would be the kind thing before you spread evil reports," I murmured in a tone of gentle rebuke.

So the woman polished her nose gla.s.ses and read a double sheet of long up-and-down calligraphy--that is, she read until she exploded in triumphant retort:

"Ha! There now! Don't I know a thing or two? Listen: 'Oswald is so enraptured with the mite; you would never guess what he calls it--"My little flower with bones and a voice!"' Now! Don't tell me I didn't have Oswald's number. I knew he wouldn't be satisfied to call it a baby; he'd be bound to name it something animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ain't it the truth? 'Little flower with bones and a voice!' What do you know about that? That's a scientist trying to be poetic.

"And here--get this: She says that one hour after the thing was born the happy father was caught by the doctor and nurse seeing if it could hold its own weight up on a broomstick, like a monkey. She says he was acutely distressed when these authorities deprived him of the custody of his child. Wouldn't that fade you? Trying to see if a baby one hour old could chin itself! Quite all you would wish to know about Oswald."

I hastily said no; it was not nearly all I wanted to know about Oswald.

I wanted to know much more. Almost any one would. The lady once more studied the hairy face with its bone-rimmed gla.s.ses.

"Shucks!" said she. "He don't look near as proud in this as he does in that one he sent me himself--here, where is that thing?"

From the far end of the big table she brought under the lamp a basket of Indian weave and excavated from its trove of playing cards, tobacco sacks, cigarette papers, letters, and odd photographs another snapshot of Oswald. It was a far different scene. Here Oswald stood erect beside the mounted skeleton of some prehistoric giant reptile that dwarfed yet left him somehow in kingly triumph.

"There now!" observed the lady. "Don't he look a heap more egregious by that mess of bones than he does by his own flesh and blood? Talk about pride!"

And I saw that it was so. Here Oswald looked the whole world in the face, proud indeed! One hand rested upon the beast's kneecap in a proprietary caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born.

If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in a fossil bed somewhere.

"That's where the man's heart really lies," said his stern critic, "even if he does drivel about his little flower with bones and a voice!

Probably by now he's wis.h.i.+ng the voice had been left out of his little flower." Impressively she planted a rigid forefinger on the print of the mounted skeleton.

"That there," she glibly rattled off, "is the organic remains of a three-toed woolly bronsolumphicus of the carboniferous limestone, or Upper Silurian trilobite period. I believe I have the name correct.

It was dug up out of a dry lake in Wyoming that years ago got to be mere loblolly, so that this unfortunate critter bogged down in it. The poor thing pa.s.sed on about six million or four hundred million years ago--somewhere along there. Oswald and his new father-in-law dug it from its quiet resting place in the old cemetery. Such is their thrilling work in life.

"This father-in-law is just an old body s.n.a.t.c.her that snoops round robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum at the university. No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest.

He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of b.u.t.tery sad, like a first-cla.s.s undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past, and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister with his new air gun.

"Bones in his weakness--and periods of geology. He likes period bones the way some folks like period furniture; and rocks and geography and Lower Tria.s.sics, and so forth. He knows how old the earth is within a few hundred million years; how the scantling and joists for it was put together, and all the different kinds of teeth that wild animals have.

He's a scientist. Oswald is a scientist. I was a scientist myself two summers ago when they was up here.

"By the time they left I could talk a lot of attractive words. I could speak whole sentences so good that I could hardly understand myself. Of course after they left I didn't keep up my science. I let myself get rusty in it. I probably don't know so much more about it now than you would. Oh, perhaps a little more. It would all come back to me if I took it up again."

So I said that I had nothing to do for an hour or so, and if she would not try to be scientific, but talk in her own homely words, I might consent to listen; in this event she might tell the whole thing, omitting nothing, however trifling it might seem to her, because she was no proper judge of values. I said it was true I might be overtaken by sleep, since my day had been a hard one, reaching clear to the trout pool under the big falls and involving the transportation back to seventeen rainbow trout weighing well over seventeen pounds, more or less, though feeling much like more. And what about Oswald and the primeval ooze, and so forth. And would it be important if true? The lady said--well, yes, and no; but, however--

He's Professor Marwich up at the university--this confirmed old coroner I'm telling you about. Has a train of capital letters streaming along after he's all through with his name. I don't know what they mean--doctor of dental surgery, I guess, or zoology or fractions or geography, or whatever has to do with rocks and animals and vertebraes. He ain't a bad old scout out of business hours. He pirooted round here one autumn about a dozen years ago and always threatened to come back and hold some more of these here inquests on the long departed; but I heard nothing until two summers ago. He wrote that he wanted to come up to do field work.

That's the innocent name he calls his foul trade by. And he wanted to bring his a.s.sistant, Professor Pennypacker; and could I put them up?

I said if they would wait till haying was over I could and would. He answered they would wait till my hay was garnered--that's the pretty word he used--and could he also bring his mouthless chit with him? I didn't quite make him. He writes a hand that would never get by in a business college. I thought it might be something tame he carried in a cage, and would stay quiet all day while he was out pursuing his repulsive practices. It didn't sound troublesome.

I never made a worse guess. It was his daughter he talked about that way. She was all right enough, though astounding when you had expected something highly zoological and mouthless instead of motherless. She was a tall roan girl with the fas.h.i.+onable streamline body, devoted to the ukulele and ladies' wearing apparel. But not so young as that sounds. Her general manner of conduct was infantile enough, but she had tired eyes and a million little lines coming round 'em, and if you got her in a strong light you saw she was old enough to have a serious aim in life.

She did use ma.s.sage cream and beauty lotions with a deep seriousness you wouldn't suspect her of when she sat out in the hammock in the moonlight and scratched this ukulele and acted the part of a mere porch wren. That was really the girl's trade; all she'd ever learned. Mebbe she had misspent her early youth, or mebbe she wasn't meant for anything else--just a b.u.t.terfly with some of the gold powder brushed off and the wings a little mite crumpled.

Gee! How times have changed since I took my own hair out of a braid!

In them fond old days when a girl didn't seem attractive enough for marriage she took up a career--school-teaching probably--and was looked at sidewise by her family. It's different now. In this advanced day a girl seems to start for the career first and take up marriage only when all other avenues is closed. She's the one that is now regarded by her brainy sisters as a failure. I consider it an evil state for the world to be in--but no matter; I can't do anything about it from up here, with haytime coming on.

Anyway, this Lydia girl had not been constructed for any career requiring the serious use of the head; and yet so far she had failed in the other one. She was on the way to being an outcast if she didn't pull something desperate pretty soon. She was looking down on thirty, and I bet her manner hadn't changed a bit since she was looking up to twenty.

Of course she'd learned things about her game. Living round a college she must of tried her wiles on at least ten graduating cla.s.ses of young men.

Naturally she'd learned technique and feminine knavery. She was still flirty enough. She had a little short upper lip that she could lift with great pathos. And the party hadn't more than landed here when I saw that at last she did have a serious aim in life.

It was this here a.s.sistant to her father, who was named Professor Oswald Pennypacker; and he was a difficult aim in life, because he didn't need a wife any more than the little d.i.c.ky birds need wrist watches. You seen his picture there. About thirty-five he was and had devoted all his years to finding out the names of wild animals, which is said to be one of our best sciences. He hadn't got round to women yet. A good snappy skeleton of one might of entertained him if he could of dug it up himself and called it a sedimentary limestone; but he had never trifled with one that was still in commission and ornamented with flesh and clothes.

And fussy! I wish you could of seen that man's room after he had carefully unpacked! A place for everything, and he had everything, too--everything in the world. And if someone switched his soap over to where his tooth paste belonged it upset his whole day. The c.h.i.n.k never dared to go into his room after the first morning. Oswald even made his own bed. Easy to call him an old maid, but I never saw any woman suffer as much agony in her neatness.

His shoes had to be in a row, and his clothes and hats and caps had to be in a row, and there was only one hook in the room his pyjamas could lawfully hang on, and his talc.u.m powder had to stand exactly between the mosquito dope and the bay rum, which had to be flanked precisely by his manicure tools and succeeded by something he put on his hair, which was going the way of all flesh. If some marauder had entered his room in the night and moved his compa.s.s over to where his fountain pen belonged he would of woke up instantly and screamed.

And then his new wardrobe trunk! This was a great and holy joy that had come into his bleak life; all new and s.h.i.+ny and complicated, with a beautiful bra.s.s lock, one side for clothes on correct hangers and the other side full of drawers and compartments and secret recesses, where he could hide things from himself. It was like a furnished flat, that trunk. And this was his first adventure out in the great cruel world with it. He cherished it as a man had ought to cherish his bride.

He had me in to gaze upon it that first afternoon. You'd of thought he was trying to sell it to me, the way he showed it off. It stood on end, having a bulge like a watermelon in the top, so no vandal could stand it up wrong; and it was wide open to show the two insides. He opened up every room in it, so I could marvel at 'em. He fawned on that trunk. And at the last he showed me a little bra.s.s hook he had screwed into the side where the clothes hangers was. It was a very important hook. He hung the keys of the trunk on it; two keys, strung on a cord, and the cord neatly on the hook. This, he told me, was so the keys would never get lost.

"I always have a dread I may lose those keys," says he. "That would be a catastrophe indeed, would it not? So I plan to keep them on that hook; then I shall always know where they are."